Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE EARLY MINISTRY. 10. We shall now be in a position to approach the study of the Public Ministry of our Lord in the manner indicated at the outset. We shall be able to place ourselves at the standpoint of a sympathetic spectator. We shall have some rough conception of the kind of ideas which would be in his mind, and of the kind of conditions which he would see around him. We shall thus be able to follow the course of the Public Ministry with a certain amount of intelligence. We do not as yet attempt to penetrate the whole of its secret. Broadly speaking, we suppose ourselves to see what a privileged spectator might be expected to see, and no more. We reserve until a later stage the introduction of those special details of illuminative knowledge which, as a matter of history, were not accessible to the first spectators, but were only disclosed after a time. But we hold ourselves at liberty to collect and group the facts which were not removed from the cognizance of a spectator, in any way that may be most convenient to secure clearness of presentation. It may be well to avail ourselves ot this freedom, at once, before giving an outline of the ministry, to state summarily certain conclusions which seem to arise out of the study of it. We shall hold the threads in our minds more firmly if we see to what results they are tending. The anticipated conclusions, then, are these: (i.) From the very first (i.e. from the Baptism) our Lord had the full consciousness of the Messiah, and the full determination to found the Kingdom of God upon earth. (ii.) From the very first He had also the deliberate intention of transforming the current idea of the Kingdom. (iii.) In order to make this transformation effective, it was necessary to begin with the idea of the Kingdom...
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