and adequacy of the garments does not make worthless the living truth
which the garments clothe. Jesus himself lived deeply in his own time
and spoke his own language and worked through the thought terms which
were part of the life of his time. Some biblical readers have been
greatly disturbed in recent years by the discovery of the part which
so-called apocalyptic thought-forms play in the teaching of Jesus. The
fact is that these conceptions were the commonest element in all later
Jewish thinking. Jesus could not have lived when he did without making
apocalyptic terms the vehicle for his doctrines. We have come to see
that the manner of the coming of the kingdom of Jesus is not so
important as the character of that kingdom.

Not only must a prophet speak in the language of a definite time, but he
must speak to men as he finds them. This being so, we must expect that
revelations will in a sense be accommodated to the apprehension of the
day of their utterance. The minds of men are in constant movement. If
the prophet were to have before him minds altogether at a standstill, he
might well despair of accomplishing great results by his message. He
would be forced to think of the intelligence of this day as a sort of
vessel which he could fill with so much and no more. But whether the
prophets have through the ages had any theoretic understanding of human
intelligence as an organism or not, they have acted upon the assumption
that they were dealing with such organisms. So they have conceived of
their truth as a seed cast into the ground, passing through successive
stages. Jesus himself spoke of the kingdom of God as moving out of the
stage of the blade into that of the ear and finally into that of the
full corn in the ear. This illustration is our warrant for insisting
that in the enforcing of truth all manner of factors come into play and
that the truth passes through successive epochs, some of which may seem
to later believers very unpromising and unworthy. The test of the worth