legendary elements, to extract a sound kernel of history which would harmonise well enough with our conception of the appearances of Christ. If in that instance the being filled with the Holy Spirit is accompanied by a noise from heaven and appearances of flame (Acts ii. 2 f.), we may well recognise in this an exaggerated version of the same phenomenon which has met us before in the appearances of Christ as the beholding in vision of a marvellous light, and the hearing of heavenly voices. And if, as a consequence, the men thus inspired begin to speak in strange tongues, so that many hearers suppose them to be intoxicated, while Peter finds in their conduct the fulfilment of the prediction of Joel, there is clearly here a basis of recollection that the enthusiasm of the early Christian assemblies expressed itself especially in ecstatic utterances and in prophetic predictions. It is true the writer of Acts has changed the actual "speaking with tongues ❞—which according to 1 Cor. xiv. was nothing else than an inarticulate outpouring of the overflow of ecstatic feeling into a speaking in other tongues in which the hearers thought they recognised their own several languages. This is a mythico-allegorical trait, by means of which this decisive event in the history of the Christian community is made a counterpart of the giving of the law at Sinai; at which, according to Jewish legend, the voice of God, in making known the law, divided itself into seventy languages, representing all the peoples of the earth. But that the writer, in spite of this unhistorical transformation of the "speaking with tongues," had before him a sound historical tradition, is unmistakably apparent

in the course of his narrative. When he records that some of the hearers mocked, being under the impression that the enthusiasm which inspired the speech of the disciples was drawn from "new wine," it is evident that a suspicion of this kind is not reconcilable with the foregoing account of their speaking in foreign, but genuine and intelligible, languages. On the other hand, it agrees well with the conception which we are led to form of the actual speaking with tongues-that unintelligible mouthing and stammering of ecstasy, which, as we gather from 1 Cor. xiv. 23 f. also, sometimes made the impression of madness on those standing at a distance. Further, the speech which according to Acts, Peter, on the occasion of these events, addressed to the people, makes no reference whatever to the alleged miracle of the gift of speaking in foreign languages, but explains the surprising conduct of the disciples as the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, that all men should be filled with the Holy Spirit and thereby enabled to see visions and to prophesy. Obviously, therefore, what on that occasion attracted the attention of the crowd, must have consisted in the enthusiastic state of mind and the ecstatic utterances of the disciples, in which they were able to recognise the signs of prophetic inspiration as Joel had described them; but these have no connection with a speaking in foreign languages. There can accordingly, for the attentive reader, be no doubt that two different conceptions of the character of those marvellous events are found in the description of what took place at Pentecost. (1) The unhistorical representation of a speaking in various languages, founded on an

allegorical imitation of a Jewish legend, and, accordingly, to be ascribed to the reflection of the narrator. (2) A representation answering to the analogies which we find elsewhere in historical accounts of "speaking with tongues" and prophesying, and of ecstatic and visionary appearances. The fact that the latter does not fit in with the author's individual conception of the matter (as a gift of languages) makes it the more certain that it rests on a basis of historical tradition. Accordingly we are to find the historical kernel of the Pentecost-narrative in the fact that the enthusiastic seeing and speaking, which was received as a revelation of the living Christ, and which had hitherto been confined to individuals or to the inner circle of the disciples, was now for the first time extended to a great multitude; and carried them away so irresistibly, that several hundreds were suddenly converted to believe in Christ. That this epoch-making event took place in Jerusalem at the Feast of Pentecost, not many weeks, therefore, after the death of Jesus-and that it gave the impulse to the migration of the Galilæan believers to Jerusalem and their permanent settlement there, and consequently to the real foundation of the Church at Jerusalem of these facts there can be no reasonable doubt.

If we accept this conception of the events of Pentecost, identifying it with the manifestation of Christ to five hundred brethren in 1 Cor. xv. 6, there results further confirmatory evidence of our explanation of the appearances of Christ. The stories of Easter and of Pentecost seem no doubt different enough if we look at both in the later

legendary transformation and embellishment embodied in Luke's account. But when we reduce them both to their substratum of historical fact, they fall into line, and mutually explain one another, like the different manifestations of Christ recounted by Paul in 1 Cor. xv. 5 ff. In all these instances the explanation lies in a condition of strong religious enthusiasm, rising into ecstatic visions and exclamations. What filled the consciousness might take different forms in different individuals; in all cases it was apprehended as a spiritual influence from above, in which the life of the exalted Messiah Jesus truly revealed itself in the believer, and in which therefore the commencement of the time of Messianic salvation promised by the prophets became a reality. But for all the extraordinary character of these experiences of the earliest company of the disciples, into which the Christian Spirit entered in its creative originality and overmastering power, they have nevertheless manifold analogies in all those conditions of more or less strong religious excitement, in which a congregation assembled in prayer feels itself seized by the movement of the Spirit. Something wonderful and mysterious takes place in all cases where the souls of men feel themselves raised to a higher world of inspiring truth and moved to world-renewing deeds of faith and love. The forms of consciousness may be as different as you please in different individuals, natures, and times; it is never mere human caprice or poetic imagination, but the unfathomable working of that Divine Spirit, of which it is said "It bloweth whither it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it

goeth." The revelations of the Spirit of God may take different forms in the primitive Christian community from that which they take in present-day Christians, yet it is the same Spirit of Christ, whose operation is in truth mysterious, and yet is no purely supernatural miracle.

In addition to the speaking with tongues, "prophesying," the prophetic enunciation of deeper truths, was held from the first to be an especial sign of the Christian's reception of the Spirit. That is implied not only by the Pentecost-narrative and its interpretation of the passage in Joel, but also by other passages in the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles. A prophetic insight into the future was a natural consequence of faith in the risen Jesus. In the closest connection with the certainty that He was the Messiah, exalted to the right hand of God, there went the expectation that He would soon come again upon the clouds of heaven, as Daniel had predicted of the Son of Man, to reveal Himself as the Messiah of the whole world and to establish His Kingdom upon Earth. Towards this approaching return all the hope and desire of the Christian community was, from the time of Christ's appearances, unceasingly directed. That the Lord was nigh, and with Him the great day of judgment and deliverance, of worldrenewal and the commencement of a new order of things, of the Kingdom of God instead of the Kingdom of the World: that was the constantly recurring watchword in which the whole confession of the first Christians was summed up. It was in the light of this glowing hope that they regarded and interpreted every event of the present the sufferings