It is tlie consummation of this progress, both for the individual and for the race, which is por- trayed in the vision of the prophet as the moment when ' the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together,' — not as iso- lated individuals, but as members of the great company of the saints, — ' they shall see it to-
gether : for the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken it' (Is 40^).
5. The revelation of Christ. — So far, we have been considering the idea of revelation in general — the idea of God revealing His will to man — which appears again and again in Scripture, and which has been abundantly justified by the experi- ence of the saints in every age. But nothing has yet been said which is distinctively Christian, or which touches the belief of Christians that in Christ there is a supreme and sufficient revelation of God. If the doctrine of revelation which has been here set forth exhausted the content of the idea, then there would be no place left for that which is specially characteristic of the Christian religion. What has been said about the possibility and the gradual progress of a revelation would apply to other nations as well as to the Jews, for God has never ' left himself without a witness ' (Ac 141''). And nothing has been said at all about the revelation of God in Christ, which is the centre of the Christian hope. The passages which were quoted from the NT have a general applica- tion. We have now, however, to examine pass- ages of a different character.
St. Paul urges, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, that if the message of the Christ was not understood by the Jews, it was due to their incapacity, not to its obscurity. ' If our gospel is veiled,' he says, ' it is veiled in them that are perishing' (4-''), i.e. the fault lies with the hearers, not with the giver, of the message. That is his way of expressing a great principle which we have already considered, that revelation, to be instruc- tive, presupposes a certain mental capacity, a keen- ness of spiritual vision, in those to whom it is addressed. In the previous chapter of the same letter, St. Paul had urged that the Jews had never recognized the transitory character of the Law which was their discipline ; 'a veil was upon their heart' (o^^), which prevented them from seeing that the Law was only a stage in the Divine edu- cation of Israel. But, he adds, allegorizing the old story of the veil on the face of Moses, ' if they turn to the Lord, the veil is removed ' (v.i*^), and an open vision is granted. The consummation to which they should look is that ' the light of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should dawn upon' them ' (4**). And, in like manner, he points out elsewhere that ' the law was but a tutor to lead them to Christ' (Gal 3-*). 'Christ is the end of the law' (Ro 10^), in whom it re- ceived a perfect fulfilment. This, indeed, is the burden of the Apostolic preaching, that ' God, who of old time spoke to the fathers by divers portions and in divers manners, hath in these last days spoken to us by his Son ' (He 1'). It is not need- ful to multiply quotations which illustrate this familiar Christian thought — that highly favoured as the Jewish people had been by revelations of the Divine will, yet the complete — the perfect — revelation of God is in Christ.
(1) There is a sense in which it demands no special gift of faith to discern in Christ a revela- tion such as had not dawned upon the world before. And there are passages in the NT which, taken by themselves, would not go beyond this. He was ' a prophet, like unto Moses' (Ac 3'^2), although with a clearer, a more urgent message. For the most part. He is represented in the Syn- optics as the Great Tencher, strong, wise, and merciful — whose words were powerful to move men towards holiness, and who.se teachings shed a new light upon the perplexities of conduct. 'A new teaching,' His hearers said; and they were right. The Fatherhood of God, the dignity and supreme value of the spiritual life, the significance of faith, the Catholic sympathy of love (.see
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Wendt, The Idea and the Reality of Bevelation, p. 28)— these are truths of which, indeed, there had been anticipations in the prophets, but they were expounded by Him with a lucidity and an authority which distinguished Him at once from all the great teachers of the past. And even if we could get no further than this, the claim of Jesus Christ to be the spiritual Master of mankind would be a claim which we could not lightly neglect. If the utterances of holy men in every age deserve a reverent attention, as expressing convictions born of a true spiritual experience, the words of Christ demand a deeper reverence of sub- mission, for He was — at the lowest — the greatest Master of the spiritual life.
(2) Not even yet, however, have we touched upon those claims of His which mark Him out as unique, those aspects of His life which require us to think of His teaching as differing from other teachings, not only in degree, but in kind. We have not, indeed, to read the Gospels very closely to observe that Jesus Christ claimed to be moi-e than a Teacher, and that His authority was other than that of the greatest of the prophets. He said that He was the Messiah, who was to 'declare all things' (Jn 425). jjg jg ^^e Son be- loved of the Father, to whom the Father showed all His works (5^0). He alone has ' seen the Father' (6'*'') ; and not only is this vision pecu- liarly His, but through Him it may be revealed to men : ' He that hath seen me hath seen the Father' (149). These phrases are all taken, it is true, from the Fourth Gospel ; but the view of Christ's Person which they present is not peculiar to St. John, for the common tradition of St. Matthew and St. Luke preserves the tremendous assertion, 'No man knoweth the Son, but the Father ; neither knoweth any the Father, but the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal him ' (Mt 1127 = Lk lO^^). It is clear that Christ is represented in the Gospels as more than a Teacher of Divine wisdom ; He is the Revealer of the Divine character. The matter, the content, of the revelation which He offers to mankind tran- scends the message of prophets and holy men, in this, that it has to do not merely with man's re- lation to the Supreme, with man's duty and man's destiny, but with the inmost nature of God. Not only is He an ambassador of Heaven ; but He has seen the Father. No such claim as this is made in the record of the most intimate and sacred spiritual history of the saints.