On our Lord's own lips and in the records of His life we find, as has
already been noticed, the phrase, 'the gospel of the kingdom'--the
good news of the establishment on earth of the rule of God in the
hearts and lives of men. The person of the King is not yet defined by
it. The diffused dawn floods the sky, and upon them that sit in
darkness the greatness of its light shines, before the sun is above
the horizon. The message of the Forerunner proclaimed, like a herald's
clarion, the coming of the Kingdom, before he could say to a more
receptive few, 'Behold the Lamb of God.' The order is first the
message of the Kingdom, then the discovery of the King. And so that
earlier phrase falls out of use, and when once Christ's life had been
lived, and His death died, the gospel is no longer the message of an
impersonal revolution in the world's attitude to God's will, but the
biography of Him who is at once first subject and monarch of the
Kingdom of Heaven, and by whom alone we are brought into it. The
standing expression comes to be 'the gospel of Christ.'

It is His, not so much because He is the author, as because He is the
subject of it. It is the good news about Christ. He is its contents
and great theme. And so we are led up at once to the great central
peculiarity of Christianity, namely that it is a record of historical
fact, and that all the world's life and blessedness lie in the story
of a human life and death. Christ is Christianity. His biography is
the good news for every child of man.

Neither a philosophy nor a morality, but a history, is the true good
news for men. The world is hungry, and when it cries for bread wise
men give it a stone, but God gives it the fare it needs in the bread
that comes down from Heaven. Though it be of small account in many
people's eyes, like the common barley cakes, the poor man's food, it