The Church’s attractive power, her appeal to all men, has its source in the missionary injunction of the risen Christ: “Go ye and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. xxviii, 19). This command represents in the broadest outline the fundamental motives of our Lord’s Gospel of the Kingdom. His Kingdom of God had in it “from the start the tendency to become a universal religion” (Holtzmann). For it is a great spiritual creation, that stands above all national interests or other worldly considerations, and that is of a purely moral and religious character. Its gifts are forgiveness of sin and grace, and its requirements are those moral imperatives which apply to all men and are set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. The citizens of this Kingdom are the children of God, and they pray in the Our Father to the common Father of all men. The preachers of this Kingdom have their mission not only to the Jews, but also to the whole world, for they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Jesus Himself, in His messianic consciousness, takes His stand above all merely national aspirations. He is not merely the Son of David, but the Son of Man. He belongs to all men and not to the Jews alone. Even if He had not after His Resurrection expressly given His apostles this great missionary injunction, yet in view of the supra-national and fundamentally universal aim of His Gospel of the Kingdom, we should have to say at the very least that He displayed a potential universalism. But if we turn from His Gospel to the living Jesus Himself, if we remind ourselves of the open repugnance and strong distaste with which He criticized and rejected all the caste prejudice, narrowness, pettiness and pride of the Pharisees, if we think of the boundless generosity with which He welcomed every trace of nobility, purity and goodness which He encountered, though it were in publicans and sinners, and if finally we observe that in His parables of the prodigal son, of the Pharisee and publican, and of the marriage feast to which beggars and the lame and blind are invited, the radiance of His redeeming love penetrates to the most wretched and forsaken corners of our humanity: then we realize that it is a psychological monstrosity to say with Hamack that “the Gentile mission cannot have lain within the horizon of Jesus.[1] It is an incontrovertible fact that the mission to the Gentiles not only lay within the horizon of contemporary Judaism, where it degenerated into a dreary proselytism (cf. Matt. xxiii, 15), but that it also gave a special color to the promises of the prophets. Jesus lived and moved in the world of the prophets. Therefore their hopes—even if we ignore His messianic consciousness—could not have been unknown to Him, and their spirit must have had its effect upon His large-hearted and liberal attitude. And in fact He never avoided pagans when they came to Him. He healed the sick daughter of the Syrophenician woman (Mk. vii, 24) and the sick servant of the pagan centurion (Matt. viii, 5 ff.; Luke vii, 1 ff.). On both occasions He does what He does with a hearty goodwill and undisguisedly expresses His appreciation of their dispositions: “O woman, great is thy faith.” “Amen I say to you, I have not found so great faith in Israel. And I say to you that many shall come from the east and the west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. viii, 10-11). Our Lord here expressly confirms the promises of the prophets in their full scope. The parable of the Good Samaritan, which contains a severe rebuke to the Jews, teaches that practical charity was to be found rather among the heretical Samaritans than among the orthodox priests and levites. And we know also that Jesus frequently (Matt. viii, 28; XV, 21) entered heathen territory, and that therefore He did not shun the heathen, but rather sought contact with them. Yet if, despite this fundamental friendliness towards the Gentiles, He deliberately confined His own and His disciples’ preaching to the people of Israel, there were sound practical reasons for that course. It was important that the forces at hand for the preaching of the Gospel should not be dissipated, and the preachers had to take account of natural and religious facts. Of natural facts, in so far as their own people, with their special history and with their ethico-religious monotheism, provided the strongest natural foundation on which to build the Kingdom of God. Of religious facts, in so far as Jesus, like the prophets before Him and like Paul after Him, regarded Israel as the chosen people who, because of their covenant with Jehovah, seemed to be especially called to deepen the faith which they had carried through the centuries into faith in the Triune God. No doubt we may here trace in our Lord’s attitude a strain of nationalism. But it is far from being an exclusive nationalism. It did not exclude, but included, the conversion of the Gentiles. Israel—as the prophets conceived the matter—was to be the foundation and nucleus of the new Kingdom of God, a Kingdom which was to embrace all peoples and nations, and therefore also the Gentiles. So long as the Jewish people had not forfeited this claim, they had an historical and religious right that the Kingdom, germinally contained in the whole of their age-long development, should be fulfilled and completed in them.