which promotes the kingdom of God, lives and develops through various
stages and crises. It spreads from one upper room in Jerusalem to
Rome, the world's mightiest city. From the election of Matthias, the
new apostle, until the decision reached by the Council at Jerusalem
twenty years afterwards, and recorded in ch. xv., we behold a slow but
sure progress. The secret of this progress is dependence upon the
risen Christ. We cannot conceive how the apostles could ever have come
out of the perplexity and dismay caused by the death of their Lord, and
laboured with such enthusiasm, unless they were certain that the Lord
was indeed risen. Without the resurrection, the Church would have
collapsed at once. Knowing that it could not be possibly disproved,
the apostles appeal to it as their reason for advancing out of Judaism.
Two points with regard to the doctrine implied in chs. i.-xv. deserve
special attention.

(1) _The doctrine of Christ's Person_. The doctrine is of the simplest
kind, but the facts asserted by the apostles imply that He is divine.
He is the Messiah, anointed by God, and the Holy One, and He is in a
special sense the Holy Servant or Child of God (iii. 14; iv. 27). He
is seated at the right hand of God (v. 31), He is Prince and Saviour.
He fulfils divine functions. It is He who has poured out the Holy
Spirit (ii. 33). He is the object of man's faith, and His name or
revealed personality is declared to have just restored a lame man to
soundness (iii. 16); signs and wonders are expected to be done through
Him (iv. 30). There is "salvation" in none other (iv. 12), and He is
to be "the Judge of quick and dead" {110} (x. 42). St. Stephen in
dying prays to Him. He is perpetually called Lord, and the fact that
the same name is applied to Jehovah in the Septuagint makes it
impossible to suppose that Christ is not regarded as possessed of
divine attributes.

(2) _The doctrine of the salvation of the world_. Rationalist critics
have asserted that the first apostles had no idea that the gospel was
meant for the world, and that they limited its light to the children of
Abraham. The unfairness of this assertion is shown by the consistent
manner in which the same doctrine of the salvation of all men is
interwoven in different parts of Acts, including the early chapters,
which are generally acknowledged to be derived from an early Jewish
Christian source. The doctrine is that salvation is offered to the
Je