by moderns.  But the central ideas are clear enough.  “How are you to escape the judgement of Gehenna?” he asks the Pharisees (Matt. 23:33; the subjunctive mood is worth study).  It is not a threat, but a question.  There yawns the chasm; with your driving, how do you think you can avoid disaster?  He warns men of a doom where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched; a man will do well to sacrifice hand, foot or eye, to save the rest of himself from that (Mark 9:43-48).  But a more striking picture, though commonly less noticed, he draws or suggests in talk at the last supper.  “Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked for you to sift you as wheat, but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou, when thou comest back, strengthen thy brethren” (Luke 22:31, 32).  The scene suggested is not unlike that at the beginning of the Book of Job, or that in the Book of Zechariah (chap. 3).  There is the throne of God, and into that Presence pushes Satan with a demand—­the verb in the Greek is a strong one, though not so strong as the Revised Version suggests.  Satan “made a push to have you.”  “But I prayed for thee.”

To any reader who has any feeling or imagination, what do these short sentences mean?  What can they mean, from the lips of a thinker so clear and so serious, and a friend so tender?  What but unspeakable peril?  The language has for us a certain strangeness; but it shows plainly enough that, to Jesus’ mind, the disciples, and Peter in particular, stood in danger, a danger so urgent that it called for the Saviour’s prayer.  So much it meant to him, and he himself tells Peter what he had realized, what he had done, in language that could not be mistaken or forgotten.  To the nature of the danger that sin involves, we shall return.  Meanwhile we may consider what Jesus means by sin before we discuss its consequences.

“The Son of Man,” says Jesus, in a sentence that is famous but still insufficiently studied, “is come to seek and to save that which is lost” (Luke 19:10).  Our rule has been to endeavour to give to the terms of Jesus the connotation he meant them to carry.  The scholar will linger over the “Son of Man”—­a difficult phrase, with a literary and linguistic history that is very complicated.  For the present purpose the significant words are at the other end of the sentence.  What does Jesus mean by “lost”?  It is a strong word, the value of which we have in some degree lost through familiarity.  And whom would he describe as “lost”?  We have once more to recall his criticism of Peter—­that Peter “thought like a man and not like God” (Mark 8:33)—­and to be on our guard lest we think too quickly and too slightly.  We may remark, too, that for Jesus sin is not, as for Paul and theologians in general, primarily an intellectual problem.  He does not use the abstraction Sin as Paul does.  But the clear, steady gaze turned on men and women misses little.

There are four outstanding classes, whom he warns of the danger of hell in one form or other.