they had been taught so externally that they were in danger of wholly losing their faith and becoming practical apostates. They had fallen under the power of the present and visible, and were giving to appearance and shadow the value that belonged only to the eternal reality.
The aim of the writer then was to open up the true significance of Christ and His work, and thus to remove the scruples, hesitations and suspicions which haunted the mind of the Jewish Christian embarrassing his faith, lessening his enjoyment, and lowering his vitality. The Jew who accepted Jesus as the Christ had problems to solve and difficulties to overcome of which the Gentile knew nothing. A transition of equal moment and encompassed by so much obscurity men have rarely, if ever, been summoned to make. It is easy for those who look back upon it as an accomplished fact to see that there was no real breach of continuity between the old religion and the new; but that was nct readily perceived by those whose whole life and experience were marked by the turmoil and instability which accompanied the abandonment of old forms, the acceptance of new ideas, the building on other foundations. Brought up in a religion which he was persuaded was of Divine authority the Jew was now required to consider a large part of his belief and wor- ship as antiquated. Accustomed to pride himself on a _ history marked at various stages by angelic visits, Divine voices, and miracu- lous interventions, he is now invited to shift his faith from institu- tions and venerable customs to a Person, and this a Person in whom earthly glory is suggested only by its absence and in whom those apparently most qualified to judge could discover nothing but imposture which merited a malefactor’s death. Cherishing with extraordinary enthusiasm, as his exclusive heritage, the Temple with all its hallowed associations, its indwelling God, its altar, its august priesthood, its complete array of ordinances, he is yet haunted by the Christian new-born instinct that there is an essential lacking in all these arrangements and that for him they are irrelevant and obsolete. A blight has suddenly fallen on what was brightest in his religion, a blight he can neither dissipate nor perfectly justify.
For the Jewish Christian must have found it quite beyond his power to understand the relation of the old to the new. Already indeed it had become apparent that in Jesus prophecy had been ful- filled. He had been accepted as the predicted Messiah partly because it was beyond dispute that in Him a correspondence was found to the figure more or less clearly defined in the Old Testa- ment. This no doubt hinted that there was some strong and vital