viewed as 'new-born.' But in that case Nicodemus would have understood it, and answered differently, or, rather, not expressed his utter inability to understand it. It is indeed, true that a Gentile on becoming a proselyte, though not, as has been suggested, an ordinary penitent [1 This is atleast implied by Wunsche, and taken for granted by others. But ancient Jewish tradition and the Talmud do not speak of it. Comp. Yebam. 22 a, 62 a; 97 a and b; Bekhor 47 a. Proselytes are always spoken of as 'new creatures,' Ber. R. 39, ed. Warsh. p. 72 a; Bemidb. R. 11. In Vayyikra R. 30, Ps. cii. 18, 'the people that shall be created' is explained: 'For the Holy One, blessed be His Name, will create them a new creature.' In Yalkut on Judg. vi. 1 (vol. ii. p. 10 c, about the middle) this new creation is connected with the forgiveness of sins, it being maintained that whoever has a miracle done, and praises God for it, his sins are forgiven, and he is made a new creature. This is illustrated by the history of Israel at the Red Sea, by that of Deborah and Barak, and by that of David. In Shem. R. 3 (ed. Warsh. ii. p. lla) the words Ex. iv. 12, 'teach thee what thou shalt say,' are explained as equivalent to 'I will create thee a new creation.'], was
likened to a child just born, [a Yebam. 62 a.] It is also true, that personsin certain circumstances, the bridegroom on his marriage, the Chief of the Academy on his promotion, the king on his enthronement, were likened to those newly born, [b Yalkut on 1 Sam. xiii.] The expression, therefore, was not only common, but, so to speak, fluid; only, both it and what it implied must be rightly understood. In the first place, it was only a simile, and never meant to convey a real regeneration ('as a child'). So far as proselytes were concerned, it meant that, having entered into a new relation to God, they also entered into new relationship to man, just as if they had at that moment been newly born. All the old relations had ceased, a man's father, brother, mother, sister were no longer his nearest of kin: he was a new and another man. Then, secondly, [c As in Yalkut.] it implied a new state, when all a man's past was past, and his sins forgiven him as belonging to that past. It will now be perceived, how impossible it was for Nicodemus to understand the teaching of Jesus, and yet how all-important to him was that teaching. For, even if he could have imagined that Jesus pointed to repentance, as that which would give him the figurative standing of 'born from above,' or even 'born anew,' it would not have helped him. For, first, this second birth was only a simile. Secondly, according to the Jewish view, this second birth was the consequence of having taken upon oneself'the Kingdom;' not, as Jesus put it, the cause and condition of it. The proselyte had taken upon himself'the Kingdom,' and therefore he was 'born' anew, while Jesus put it that he must be born again in order to see the Kingdom of God. Lastly, it was 'a birth from above' to which reference was made. Judaism could understand a new relationship towards God and man, and even the forgiveness of sins. But it had no conception of a moral renovation, a spiritual birth, as the initial condition for reformation, far less as that for seeing the Kingdom of God. And it was because it had no idea of such 'birth from above,' of its reality or even possibility, that Judaism could not be the Kingdom of God.
Or, to take another view of it, for Divine truth is many-sided, perhaps some would say, to make 'Western' application of what was first spoken to the Jew, in one respect Nicodemus and Jesus had started from the same premiss: The Kingdom of God. But how different were their conceptions of what constituted that Kingdom, and of what was its door of entrance! What Nicodemus had seen of Jesus had not only shaken the confidence which his former views on these subjects had engendered in him, but opened dim possibilities, the very suggestion of which filled hin with uneasiness as to the past, and vague hopes as to the future. And so it ever is with us also, when, like Nicodemus, we first arrive at the conviction that Jesus is the Teacher come from God. What He teaches is so entirely different from what Nicodemus, or any of us could, from any other standpoint than that of Jesus, have learned or known concerning the Kingdom and entrance into it. The admission, however reached, of the Divine Mission of this Teacher, implies, unspoken, the grand question about the Kingdom. It is the opening of the door through which the Grand Presence will enter in. To such a man, as to us in like unspoken questioning, Jesus ever has but one thing to say: 'Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.' The Kingdom is other, the entrance to it is other, than you know or think. That which is of the flesh is flesh. Man may rise to high possibilities, mental, even moral: self-development, self-improvement, self-restraint, submission to a grand idea or a higher law, refined moral egotism, aesthetic even moral altruism. But to see the Kingdom of God: to understand what means the absolute rule of God, the one high calling of our humanity, by which a man becomes a child of God, to perceive this, not as an improvement upon our present state, but as the submission of heart, mind, and life to Him as our Divine King, an existence which is, and which means, proclaiming unto the world the Kingship of God: this can only be learned from Christ, and needs even for its perception a kinship of spirit, for
that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. To see it, needs the birth from above; to enter it, the double baptismal birth of what John's Baptism had meant, and of what Christ's Baptism was.
Accordingly, all this sounded quite strange and unintelligible to Nicodemus. He could understand how a man might become other, and so ultimately be other; but how a man could first be other in order to become other, more than that, needed to be 'born from above,' in order to 'see the Kingdom of God', passed alike his experience and his Jewish learning. Only one possibility of being occurred to him: that given him in his natural disposition, or as a Jew would have put it, in his original innocency when he first entered the world. And this, so to express ourselves, he thought aloud, [a ver. 4.] But there was another world of being than that of which Nicodemus thought. That world was the 'Kingdom of God' in its essential contrariety to the Kingdom of this world, whether in the general sense of that expression, or even in the special Judaistic sense attaching to the 'Kingdom' of the Messiah. There was only one gate by which a man could pass into that Kingdom of God, for that which was of the flesh could ever be only fleshly. Here a man might strive, as did the Jews, by outward conformity to become, but he would never attain to being. But that 'Kingdom' was spiritual, and here a man must be in order to become. How was he to attain that new being? The Baptist had pointed it out in its negative aspect of repentance and putting away the old by his Baptism of water; and as regarded its positive aspect he had pointed to Him Who was to baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. This was the gate of being through which a man must enter into the Kingdom, which was of the Messiah, because it was of God and the Messiah was of God, and in that sense 'the Teacher come from God', that is, being sent of God, He taught of God by bringing to God. This but a few who had gone to the Baptist had perceived, or indeed could perceive, because the Baptist could in his Baptism only convey the negative, not the positive, aspect of it. And it needed that positive aspect, the being born from above, in order to see the Kingdom of God. But as to the mystery of this being in order to become, hark! did he hear the sound of that wind as it swept past the Aliyah? He heard its voice; but he neither knew whence it came, nor whither it went. So was every one that was born of the Spirit. You heard the voice of the Spirit Who originated the new being, but the origination of that new being, or its further development into all that it might and would become, lay beyond man's observation.
Nicodemus now understood in some measure what entrance into the Kingdom meant; but its how seemed only involved in greater mystery. That it was such a mystery, unthought and unimagined in Jewish theology, was a terribly sad manifestation of what the teaching in Israel was. Yet it had all been told them, as of personal knowledge, by the Baptist and by Jesus; nay, if they could only have received it, by the whole Old Testament. He wanted to know the how of these things before he believed them. He believed them not, though they passed on earth, because he knew not their how. How then could he believe that how, of which the agency was unseen and in heaven? To that spring of being no one could ascend but He that had come down from heaven, [1 The clause 'Who is in heaven' is regarded, on critical grounds, as a gloss. But, even so, it seems almost a necessary gloss, in view of the Jewish notions about the ascent of Moses into heaven. Strange to say, the passage referred to forced Socinus to the curious dogma that before the commencement of His ministry Jesus had been rapt in spirit to heaven. (Comp. 'The History and Development of Socinianism,' in the North. Brit. Rev. May 1859.)] and Who, to bring to us that spring of being, had appeared as 'the Son of Man,' the Ideal Man, the embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven, and thus the only true Teacher come from God. Or did Nicodemus think of another Teacher, hitherto their only Teacher, Moses, whom Jewish tradition generally believed to have
ascended into the very heavens, in order to bring the teaching unto them? [2 This in many places. Comp., for ex., Jer. Targ. on Deut. xxx. 12, and the shocking notice in Bemid. R. 19. Another view, however, Sukk. 5 a.] Let the history of Moses, then, teach them! They thought they understood his teaching, but there was one symbol in his history before which tradition literally stood dumb. They had heard what Moses had taught them; they had seen 'the earthly things' of God in the Manna which had rained from heaven, and, in view and hearing of it all, they had not believed, but murmured and rebelled. Then came the judgment of the fiery serpents, and, in answer to repentant prayer, the symbol of new being, a life restored from death, as they looked on their no longer living but dead death lifted up before them. A symbol this, showing forth two elements: negatively, the putting away of the past in their dead death (the serpent no longer living, but a brazen serpent); and positively, in their look of faith and hope. Before this symbol, as has been said, tradition has stood dumb. It could only suggest one meaning, and draw from it one lesson. Both these were true, and yet both insufficient. The meaning which tradition attached to it was,
