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THE REV. CANON E. MCCLURE, M.A., M.R.I.A., ON 



The theory of evolution — a department of science with which 

 modern theology must be harmonized, a principle also implied 

 in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews — if applied 

 to the growth of Christianity, shows that the only survival in 

 the Church of to-day of anything like Schweitzer's cataclysmal 

 theory is the persistent belief in the Second Advent of our 

 Lord — which can be otherwise explained. 



The Apocalyptic elements in the canonical books of the Old 

 Testament lend, if they are considered without bias, little or no 

 support for the views that the coming of the Messiah would be 

 attended by an immediate and cataclysmal ending of the age. 

 The " kingdom of heaven," to all competent commentators before 

 the rise of the eschatological school, had its beginnings here on 

 earth and its consummation in the far future. It was identified 

 later with the Church of Christ. St. Augustine's City of God is 

 the exposition of this. But the eschatologists have no patience 

 with such a view. The catastrophic end of the age, which our 

 Lord in His ignorance thought to be at hand, that is the only 

 key to the Gospel and to the knowledge of Christ's Person. 

 The Church, according to the eschatologists, has persistently 

 throughout the ages presented a wrong concept of Christ's 

 mission, which was simply to warn all men to withdraw their 

 thoughts from temporal things, and to centre them on the 

 coming cataclysm, — any teaching of incidental morality being 

 merely inter imsethic. 



partly Jewish and partly Christian, and were written in the second and 

 third centuries a.d.). 



It is from these Apocalyptic documents and from certain portions of the 

 Old Testament that the Eschatologists have endeavoured to present a 

 new view of the environment of thought and feeling in which our Lord 

 moved when on earth, and a fresh conception of His Person and mission. 

 It will be seen from the dates ascribed to these documents by the critics 

 that most of them belong to the period after the destruction of Jerusalem 

 (70 a.d.). Hilgenfeld {Die judisehe Apokalyptik, Jena, 1857), who dealt 

 with this subject long before Weiss and Schweitzer, saw (p. 240) that 

 this class of literature arose from the pressure from time to time of the 

 Gentile world upon Judaism. 



At various crises in Jewish history Apocryphal writings under the 

 name of some well-known prophet appeared in order to foster hopes for 

 the ultimate triumph of Israel, and for future vengeance upon its adver- 

 saries. The destruction of Jerusalem was the last of these crises, and 

 after it five of the documents mentioned above took their origin. These 

 documents, therefore, could have had nothing to do with our Lord's 

 attitude, or that of the writers of the Synoptic Gospels, in regard to the 

 last things summed up in " the day of the Lord." The Fourth Book of 

 Esdras (n Esdras in our Apocrypha) is typical of this class. St. Jerome 

 calls it and I Esdras Apocryphorum tertii et quarti somnia. The Roman 



