(3) Christ fulfilled the law by generalizing it. — He broke down all class distinctions in morality. Heathenism divided mankind into two classes, the learned and the ignorant, and between these two it erected a high partition walL These distinctions, though discountenanced in Jewish law, were admitted in Jewish practice. " This people who knoweth not the law are cursed." Christ boldly demolished the wall of partition built high and broad between the cultured and the illiterate. He entered the granary of Divine truth, took out the golden grain, and scattered it broadcast on the face of the common earth. The truths of the favoured few He made the common property of the uncultured many. He alone of all His contemporaries or predecessors perceived the intrinsic worth and vast possibilities of the human soul.
Christ also broke down all national distinctions in morality. The intense nationalism of the Jews in the time of the Saviour is proverbial ; they surrounded sea and land to make one proselyte. Instead of trying to make Judaism commensurate with the world, they tried to make the world commensurate with Judaism. How- ever, Jewish morality here, as in every other instance, was superior to contemporaneous pagan morality. Notwithstanding its intense nationalism, Judaism always inculcated kindness to strangers. " The stranger within thy gates " — the recurrence of that phrase in the Mosaic ethics lifts them above all other ancient ethics whatever. What Moses only began, Jesus Christ beautifully perfected. He made morality absolutely human. It is no longer Greek under obligation to Greek, but man under obligation to man. What the Greek poet only momentarily conceived, Jesus Christ has converted into a powerful element in modern civiliza- tion— " I also am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me."
"[['Jesus felt Himself called of God to a lot within the chosen ] 'en j lie, because He was Himself the culmination of the revelation male to them in the past. As that revelation had been through a special nation, so it had to complete itself there. That He
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Himself lived within the limits of Judaism was not a confession that He was merely the crown of a national or racial faith, but rather the vindication of the older religion as an inherent part of a world-revelation. It was not the lowering of His message to the particularism of the Jewish religion, but the elevation of the latter into a universal significance first fully revealed in Him. The problem which Jesus had to solve was not the destruction of Judaism, but its consummation, the liberation of its spiritual content from the restrictions of its form. That He should have indicated the supersession of Jewish privilege is not at all un- likely ; but manifestly this could not be His usual or character- istic tone, if He were to implant in Jewish minds the germs of His wider faith. He had largely to put Himself in their place, and work through the forms of their thought. Primarily, therefore, His universalism had to be implicit. He did not so much give them new religious terms as fill the old terms with a new mean- ing and reference. Hence it was only after He had at least partly accomplished this in the case of a chosen circle of followers, and attached them unalterably to Himself, that He spoke openly and frequently of the larger issues of His gospel, and the in- gathering of the " nations." Jesus saw that if He were to con- serve the eternal element in the Jewish religion, He must work within its lines. He broke, indeed, with the existing authorities, but only because He maintained that they misrepresented it. The principle on which He acted, as regards both the teaching of His ministry and the subsequent development of His Church, was to sow germinal truths which could come to maturity only through the reaction of individual thought, and the enlarging of experience. Therefore, while He did not leave the dis- ciples wholly without plain announcements of the universality of His mission, He did not so emphasize this as to impair their confidence in the unity and continuity of the old and the new faiths.1
2. Christ fulfilled the prophets. — We are familiar with the idea of the " fulfilment " of prophecy, though that idea is often unduly limited. Prophecy is not " inverted history " : it was not a re- flection beforehand by which men could foreknow what was to come : it was but as the seed out of which plant and flower and fruit were to be developed. Prophecy kept men's eyes fixed upon the future ; it created a sense of need, it stirred deep and earnest longings ; it stimulated hope. And then the fulfilment gathered
1 D. W. Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, 418.
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into one unimagined reality all the various lines of thought and longing and hope, in a completeness far transcending all anticipa- tion. The fulfilment could not have been conjectured from the prophecy, but it answers to it, and shows the working of the one Divine purpose, unhasting, unresting, to its final goal of man's redemption.
The prophets' great teachings were all centred round the figure of the Deliverer of the future. There were three things concerning the person and work of this Messiah upon which they laid special emphasis.