the fatherly relation of God to men, by no means excluded from His consciousness the recognition of the holy supremacy of God over the world, which the Jews regarded as His pre-eminent attribute. In the prayer which He has given as a model to His disciples, He makes these words-" hallowed be Thy name "-follow immediately after the invocation to the Father, meaning thereby that the Divine name should be reverently acknowledged as to its sacred majesty, and as separate from all that is profane (Luke xi. 2). When His disciples address themselves to God in prayer, their use of the name of Father, by which they express their trust in the loving and gracious disposition of God, far from detracting from the idea of His supermundane majesty, and bringing Him down to a level with creation and with man, must rather be accompanied by the desire at the same time to recognise the sovereign majesty of Him who is addressed as Father. For the Jewish consciousness the name is the significant designation of the recognised nature of the thing named; the hallowing of the name of God is the reverent recognition of the majesty of the revealed character of God. But since, in the view of Jesus, the name denoting the most important side of the Divine nature is that of Father, and the idea of His fatherly character is not merely added as a secondary and more precise designation of the idea of the Holy One, but, conversely, the hallowing of the name of God refers to the prefixed name of Father, that very fact shows that for Jesus the hallowing of the name of God has another and higher sense than the hallowing of the Divine

name as it was conceived and employed by the Jews. The nature of God was regarded by the Jews as severed to the utmost from all transitory, natural qualities, and as specially opposed to certain forms. and conditions of matter; and they abstained as far as possible from using the name Jehovah, as well as the Divine names in general. But in the consciousness of Jesus the holiness of God has no longer an independent significance alongside of His ethical attributes; but it is in that purity and magnitude of His paternal love in which He has His perfection (Matt. v. 48; cf. ver. 45), that His holy exaltation above the world consists. Jesus has not, indeed, anywhere uttered this thought directly in this form, but He has virtually expressed it, by inferring as a consequence the incorrectness of all the ideas derived from the Jewish conception of the holiness of God in regard to the effect of natural influences, or, on the other hand, of rites of external purification in profaning or sanctifying men (Mark vii. 14-23).

Similarly, the thought of the almighty operation of God upon the world is not diminished in the mind of Jesus by the idea of Fatherhood, but is rather raised. into higher significance. Jesus has represented the Father as the Lord of heaven and earth (Matt. xi. 25), with whom all things are possible (Mark x. 27; xiv. 36), governing the course of the world and human life in their totality, knowing the day and the hour when the world shall come to an end (Mark xiii. 32), penetrating the inmost thoughts of men (Luke xvi. 15), fixing the limits of human life (Luke xii. 20), having the power to destroy the soul and

body of man in hell (Matt. x. 28), and capable of creating new forms of life such as man cannot now conceive (Mark xii. 24). But He had also a very vivid idea of the immediate determination of even the minutest things on earth by the will of God, and indeed by His loving fatherly will. It is the heavenly Father who sends sunshine and rain to men (Matt. v. 45), who feeds the ravens and clothes the lilies of the field, and who knows also the wants of men and provides for them (Matt. vi. 25-32); not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him, and even the hairs of our head are all numbered by Him (Matt. x. 29 f.). With the Jews in the time of Jesus, the tendency to set God at the utmost possible distance above the world, led them to regard God's active relationship the world as limited, and to seek in angelic powers the media of the connection between God and the world and men. But Jesus has been led by His view of the supreme significance of the fatherly love of God for the Divine character, to conceive of God's immediate providential operation on the world and men. He has indeed accepted the traditional Jewish view of the existence of angels, and of their activity in the service of God for the help of men; but, on account of the difference of His conception of God, the angels have a very different significance for His system of religious ideas than for that of the Jews. They appear to Him not as necessary and desirable mediators, in order to conceive of the sacred exaltation of God as undisturbed by His operation upon the finite and transient world, for they effect nothing more than what God also immediately effects.

4. From this view of God entertained by Jesus, as we find it in the Logia of Matthew and in Mark's Gospel, there is no divergence in the view of God exhibited in the discourses of the fourth Gospel. Here also the name of Father is the ordinary designation of God; and, indeed, Jesus employs this name first of all, though by no means only, in the sense of designating Him as His own Father. His Father, to whom He knew Himself bound by a mutual relationship of love (v. 17-23), is also the Father of all; and this name is used with a practical end in view, when Jesus speaks of the true way of honouring God (iv. 23), and of the certain hearing of the prayers of His disciples (xv. 16; xvi. 23, 26 f.).

His statements in regard to particular attributes or aspects of the nature of God, other than those which are implied in the name of Father, are only occasional, and are not given for the purpose of expressing something new and hitherto unknown in regard to God. When Jesus says of the Father that He is spirit, and as such requires spiritual worship (iv. 24); when He speaks of Him as living (vi. 51), as having life in Himself (v. 26), as He who quickens the dead and makes alive (v. 21); or when Jesus imputes to the Father the attribute of holy, i.e. exalted above the world (xvii. 11), and righteous, i.e. working in true consistency (xvii. 25), — He appeals only to well-known characteristics of God. His aim in these utterances is not to give direct teaching about God as such, but to point to practical inferences founded in those Divine attributes and dispositions.

It is peculiarly worthy of note, that in the passage,

xvii. II, the invocation "Holy Father" expresses the motive for the prayer addressed to God for such sanctification of the disciples as consists, not in their external withdrawal from the world, or in their being preserved from all sorts of defiling physical influences and conditions in the world, but in their being kept from the evil that is in the world, in their being maintained in rectitude (ảλý¤¤ia) through the revealed word of God (vers. 11-19). The ethical sense in which this sanctification of the disciples, that is, their being raised above the world in consecration to God, is here understood, indirectly indicates the ethical sense in which the holiness attributed to the Father is to be apprehended. We see clearly, though indirectly, that Jesus here conceives the holiness of God in another way and on a different basis than that in which the Jews apprehended it; just as we infer the same from the declaration in Mark vii. 14-23, that not what passes into a man from without, but that which arises out of his inner nature, defiles him. In His conception of the holiness of God, Jesus retains the general idea of exaltedness above the world. But, from the supreme importance of the attribute of fatherly love, for His view of God, that holy exaltation is now conceived as resting, not on some sort of relation of physical opposition to the world, but on the moral elevation and purity of the Divine will. The utterances of Jesus in His farewell prayer, preserved in the Johannine source, show the moral superiority of Jesus' view of the Divine holiness, just as we recognise it in that discourse in Mark's

Gospel.