explain a present power on men whose effects all could see. At the Pentecost season, some ten days after their Master's ascension, while the company of the apostles were together in Jerusalem, suddenly a strange new enthusiasm came upon them which quickened their faculties and gave them an insight and intensity of life like that of the ancient prophets (Acts ii, 1-4). This illumination and power, which they recognized as the presence of the Holy Spirit, they identified also as the spirit of Christ bestowed upon them in pursuance of his promise (Acts ii, 33; cf. i, 8); also as the fulfillment of a prediction made long before by the prophet Joel (Acts ii, 17-21). All this was to them the plain evidence of their Master's continued power and work on earth. He was still conducting his ministry, but on a larger scale and with more inward and vital effects.

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3. All these surprising things the return from death and the uprise of their Master, the access of illumination in them opened their minds to what they had inherited from the past. These things were the fulfillment of prophecies that had long been familiar to them but had not been duly heeded. It had been difficult for Jesus while with them to convince them that he must die. Now it was per'fectly plain to them that not only he but the prophetic literature had foreseen death and resurrection as essential elements in the career of the Messiah (see Acts ii, 23; iii, 18; `cf. Luke xxiv, 26). Thus the apostles became practical interpreters, or rather identifiers, of prophecy, notably of things which till then had been neglected or disbelieved; maintaining that the Messiah as foretold must pass through an experience essentially the same as the actual experience of Jesus of Nazareth. This of course was a necessary step in the work of getting Jesus accepted as Messiah by his own people. It identified him with men's already available fund of facts and ideas; joined the Old Testament, so to say, with the nucleus and subject matter of the New.

4. Not only had the apostles the conviction that Jesus had fulfilled all the conditions of prophecy,- they had also the assurance of a new future not yet fulfilled or shaped. This assurance took the form of a firm belief that their Lord (for so they now called him), after a temporary sojourn in the heavens, would return to earth in person, and judge the world, and organize his kingdom as a visible realm (cf. Acts i, 11; iii, 21). It seems, indeed, to have been their idea, perhaps for many years, that he had not yet actually assumed his Messiahship but that he would do so on his return to earth; and in the early years of the church the title by which he was known was not Messiah or Christ but simply Lord (see Rom. x, 9; 1 Cor. xii, 3; cf. John xiii, 13). While they were awaiting his return, which they deemed was due within that generation (cf. Matt. xxiv, 33, 34), they were to submit to his lordship, acting as his representatives and preparing men to receive him worthily. He himself had predicted that he would sometime return in visible glory (cf. Matt. xxvi, 64); of that they were sure. But he had warned them against setting the time, which, indeed, the Master himself did not 'know (Acts 1, 7; Matt. xxiv, 36), and which was not arbitrary with God but conditioned on the history of man.

This prophecy of Christ's coming, or, as it was called, his parousia, or presence, was, like all prophecies, foreshortened, and men could not realize except by actual experience the immense growth and enlargement in manhood that must intervene. It was really the prophecy of an evolution still in progress and still becoming more lucid and reasonable, which, however, to be received at all, must at first be apprehended in a concrete form corresponding to the concrete events they had seen (cf. Acts i, 11). Meanwhile, the apostles' present duty was clear. They, and all whom they could induce to believe with them, had but to wait in hope, and cultivate the spirit of Christ, and be ready (cf. I Thess. v, 1-11).

Thus in these four main topics of their new way of life the primitive Christian community, taught by apostles, were put in possession of a working message which simple and plain men could handle. It was based not on theories nor on scholarship, but on such fact as all could apprehend and on such deductions from fact as were naturally suggested by the literature in which all were schooled. And out of it, as time went on, grew the substance of the gospel story, as we read it especially in the first three, the so-called synoptic, gospels.

II. THE GROWTH OF THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

The gospel- that is, a fund of fact announced and interpreted as good news is, as it must needs be, the rock-bed of all New Testament literature. No amount of religious philosophy or speculation can dispense with that. The facts of Christ's life, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, must be made known to the world by those who personally observed them, in order to gain the world's belief and allegiance. The meaning of those facts can be left to men's growing intelligence and power to assimilate; just as growth can be awaited from the planting and germination of a seed.

NOTE. How the Apostles viewed it. The apostles insist on the distinction between fact and theory and on the literary vehicle proper to each. "The foolishness of preaching," that is, of depending on the announcement and demonstration of fact, St. Paul ironically calls the method he has found effectual for his purpose, and contrasts it, on the one hand, with doing miraculous things and, on the other, with wisdom, or philosophy, that is, the reasonings and speculations of men. This recognizes that the basis of his message was not logic but matterof-fact, or, as he puts it, "Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (see I Cor. i, 18-25). In a reminiscence of the most astonishing event of Jesus' life, namely, his transfiguration, St. Peter, in the consciousness that truth is stranger than fiction, says, "We did not follow cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and presence (parousian) of our Lord Jesus Christ " (2 Pet. i, 16).

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The Germinating Time. But the mere statement of facts gives only information, not literature; does not even tell the truth, but only furnishes materials out of which the living and ordered truth of the matter must be evolved.1 And to realize the truth of things, in its order, relations, and proportions, takes time, - more time as the truth is more farreaching and momentous. The minds alike of those who proclaim the truth and of those who receive it must grow and ripen; must from a confused mass of incidents and sayings get a just idea of the bearings and relationships of things. So it was in the years succeeding Christ's earthly ministry. While the early apostles had charge, indeed, of a unique fund of fact, both their own realization of the events of Jesus' ministry was too hazy and undigested, and the state of the infant church was too primitive, for the speedy development of a Christian literature. A literature is the result of a matured organic growth of thought and life. The men who were to teach the world such momentous things must outgrow their rudimental notions, correct their errors of realization and interpretation, discard their Jewish provincialism, and take the pace of the world's thought. And all this must be a slow, gradual process, working its results into shape in numerous communities of disciples and converts scattered through the provinces from Jerusalem to Rome, who were learning little by little what it was to be Christians.

Accordingly, for the first generation of Christians the events and words of Christ's life were too uncoördinated in memory, and perhaps too constantly in process of accumulation, to be drawn up in permanent literary form. The apostles and many others were living who had seen and heard

1 Cf. Wilson, "The Truth of the Matter," from "Mere Literature," pp. 161 f.

him, and in their preaching they referred to his ministry familiarly as to well-known recent events. Less pains were taken also, probably, to preserve the facts in writing, because during all the first generation (cf. Mark xiii, 30) the belief was prevalent that Christ's second coming was near. There was felt to be little occasion, therefore, to make the life of One only temporarily absent the subject of a formal and finished history.

As the survivors of Jesus' time began, however, to die off, and then as Jerusalem was destroyed (A.D. 70), breaking up The Changed the old order of things without a recognized Perspective Messianic order to replace it, the need was increasingly felt of a permanent record for the use of generations to come. The immediate influence of the primal announcements — resurrection, spiritual outpouring, fulfillment, parousia was somewhat dulled or, rather, diffused, and the church was settling down to a steady pace of growth and organization. For this state of things a literature more distinctive than that of the Old Testament, and more educative than these simple matters of announcement, was needed. Besides, the facts of Jesus' ministry, as they accumulated, were standing out more clearly related and proportioned, as men viewed them more at a distance of time. In a word, the times were getting ripe for the evolution of a new line of sacred literature.

NOTE. Tennyson has described how the obscurity of present experience passes into the clearness and realization due to a more distant view ("In Memoriam,” xxiv):

Or that the past will always win

A glory from its being far,

And orb into the perfect star

We saw not when we moved therein.

Browning describes the same historic consciousness more at length, applying the need of it to this very time of gospel development (A Death in the Desert, ll. 235-243):