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THE 
 
 BAMPTON LECTURES 
 
 FOR M.DCCC.LXVI 
 
RIVINGTONS 
 ARGON | ous Coc weighs cerns 3 Waterloo Place 
 OXMORD 5. Sennen veviecete 41 High Street 
 
 CAMBRIDGE .....2.-- το τις 19 Trinity Street 
 
Che Divinity of 
 Our Lord and Sabiour Jesus Christ ; 
 
 EIGHT LECTURES 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 
 
 IN THE YHAR 1866, 
 
 ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE REV. JOHN BAMPTON, M.A. ". 
 
 CANON OF SALISBURY. 
 
 BY HENRY PARRY LIDDON, M.A. 
 
 STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, PREBENDARY OF SALISBURY, 
 
 AND EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP OF SALISBURY. 
 
 RIVINGTONS 
 Kondon, Oxford, and Cambridge 
 
 1867 
 
“Wenn Christus nicht wahrer Gott ist; die mahometanische 
 Religion eine unstreitige Verbesserung der christlichen war, und 
 Mahomet selbst ein ungleich gréssrer und wiirdigerer Mann gewe- 
 
 sen ist als Christus.” 
 Lessing, Sémmtl. Schriften, Bd. 9, p. 29%. 
 
 * Simul quoque cum beatis videamus 
 Glorianter vultum Tuum, Christe Deus, 
 Gaudium quod est immensum atque probum, 
 
 Seecula per infinita seeculorum,” 
 Rhythm. Eeel. 
 
EXTRACT 
 FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT 
 
 OF THE LATE 
 
 REV. JOHN BAMPTON, 
 
 CANON OF SALISBURY. 
 
 “ T oive and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the 
 “ Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of 
 “ Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the 
 “said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and 
 “« purposes hereinafter mentioned ; that is to say, I will and 
 “ appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ox- 
 “ ford for the time being shall take and receive all the rents, 
 “issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, 
 “and necessary deductions made) that he pay all the re- 
 “ mainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture Ser- 
 “ mons, to be established for ever in the said University, and 
 “ to be performed in the manner following : 
 
 “1 direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in 
 “ Kaster Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads 
 “ of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining 
 “to the Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the 
 “ morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity 
 * Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary’s in 
 “ Oxford, between the commencement of the last month in 
 * Lent Term, and the end of the third week in Act Term. 
 
 b 
 
vil EXTRACT FROM CANON BAMPTON’S WILL. 
 
 “ Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture 
 “ Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following Sub- 
 “ jects—to coniirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to 
 “ confute all heretics and schismatics—upon the divine au- 
 “ thority of the holy Scriptures—upon the authority of the 
 “ writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and prac- 
 “ tice of the primitive Church—upon the Divinity of our Lord 
 “ and Saviour Jesus Christ—upon the Divinity of the Holy 
 “ Ghost—upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as :compre- 
 “‘ hended in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. 
 
 “ Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lec- 
 “ture Sermons shall be always printed, within two months 
 “ after they are preached ; and one copy shall be given to the 
 “ Chancellor of the University, and one copy to the Head of 
 “ every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city of 
 “ Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library ; 
 “ and the expense of printing them shall be paid out of the 
 “ yevenue of the Land or Estates given for establishing the 
 “ Divinity Lecture Sermons; and the Preacher shall not be 
 “paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are 
 “ printed. 
 
 “ Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be quali- 
 
 ‘« fied to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath 
 “ taken the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the 
 “ two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge; and that the 
 “same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Ser- 
 “ mons twice.” 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 PERHAPS an apology may be due to the University for 
 the delay which has occurred in the appearance of this 
 volume. If so, the writer would venture to plead that he 
 undertook the duties of the Bampton Lecturer at a very 
 short notice, and, it may be, without sufficiently considering 
 what they imvolved. When, however, the accomplished 
 Clergyman whom the University had chosen to fill this post 
 in the year 1866 was obliged by a serious illness to seek a 
 release from his engagement, the post was offered to the 
 present writer with a kindness and generosity which, as he 
 thought, obliged him to accept it and to meet its require- 
 ments as well as he was able. 
 
 Under such circumstances, the materials which were made 
 ready in some haste for use in the pulpit seemed to require 
 a close revision before publication. In making this revision 
 —which has been somewhat seriously interrupted by other 
 duties—the writer has not felt at liberty to introduce altera- 
 tions except in the way of phrase and illustration. He has, 
 however, availed himself of the customary licence to print at 
 length some considerable paragraphs, the sense of which, in 
 order to save time, was only summarily given when the lectures 
 were delivered. And he has subjoined the Greek text of the 
 more important passages of the New Testament to which he 
 has had occasion to refer; as experience seems to prove that 
 
 "2 
 
ὙΠ] PREFACE. 
 
 very many readers do not verify quotations from Holy Serip- 
 ture, or at least that they content themselves with examining 
 the few which are generally thought to be of most impor- 
 tance. Whereas, the force of the argument for our Lord’s 
 Divinity, as is the case with other truths of the New Testa- 
 ment, is eminently cumulative. Such an argument is to be 
 appreciated, not by studying the comparatively few texts 
 which expressly assert the doctrine, but that large number 
 of passages which indirectly, but most vividly, imply it. 
 
 It is perhaps superfluous to observe that eight lectures can 
 deal with little beyond the outskirts of a vast, or to speak 
 more accurately, of an exhaustless subject. The present 
 volume attempts only to notice, more or less directly, some of 
 those assaults upon the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity which 
 have been prominent or popular of late years, and which 
 have, unhappily, had a certain weight among persons with 
 whom the writer is acquainted. 
 
 Whatever disturbing influence the modern destructive criti- 
 cism may have exerted upon the form of the old argument 
 for the Divinity of Christ, the main features of that argu- 
 ment remain substantially unchanged. The writer will have 
 deep reason for thankfulness if any of those whose inclination 
 - or duty leads them to pursue the subject, should be guided 
 by his references to the pages of those great theologians 
 whose names, whether in our own country or in the wider 
 field of Catholic Christendom, are for ever associated with 
 the vindication of the most fundamental truth of the Faith. 
 
 In passing the sheets of this work through the press, the 
 writer has been more largely indebted than he can well say 
 to the invigorating sympathy and varied learning of the 
 Rey. W. Bright, Fellow of University College; while the 
 Index is due to the friendly interest of another Fellow of 
 that College, the Rev. P. G. Medd. 
 
PREFACE. ΙΧ 
 
 That in so vast and mysterious a subject all errors have 
 been avoided is much more than the writer dares to hope. 
 But at least he has not intentionally contravened the clear 
 sense of Holy Scripture, or any formal decision whether of the 
 Undivided Church or of the Church of England. May He 
 to the honour of Whose Person this volume is devoted, vouch- 
 safe to pardon in it all that is not calculated to promote 
 His truth and His glory! And for the rest, “ quisquis hee 
 legit, ubi pariter certus est, pergat mecum; ubi pariter 
 hesitat, querat mecum; ubi errorem suum cognoscit, redeat 
 ad me; ubi meum, revocet me. Ita ingrediamur simul chari- 
 tatis viam, tendentes ad Eum de Quo dictum est, Querite 
 
 Faciem Ejus semper *.” 
 
 CuRIst CHURCH, 
 Ascension- Day, 1867. 
 
 a §. Aug. de Trin. i. 5. 
 
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A PHBOLOGICEL A 
 
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 ὌΡΝΙΝ ΧῈ ὡς 
 
 ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES, 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 THE QUESTION BEFORE US. 
 St. Matt. xvi. 13. 
 
 The Question before us in these Lectures is proposed by our 
 Lord Himself, and is a strictly theological one 
 Its import 1. as affirming that Christ is the Son of Man 
 2. as enquiring what He is besides 
 
 I. Enduring interest of the question thus raised even for non- 
 believers . 
 
 Il. Three answers to it are possible 
 | 1. The Humanitarian 
 2. The Arian 
 3. The Catholic 
 Of these the Arian is unsubstantial, so that practically 
 there are only two 
 
 III. The Catholic Answer 
 τ. jealously guards the truth of Christ’s Manhood 
 2. secures its full force to the idea of Godhead 
 
 IV. Position taken in these Lectures stated 
 
 Objections to the necessary discussion— 
 
 a. From the ground of Historical Aistheticism 
 8. From the ground of ‘ Anti-doctrinal’ Morality 
 γι From the ground of Subjective Pietism 
 
 Anticipated course of the argument 
 
 PAGE 
 
 wo > 
 
ΧΙ ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 ANTICIPATIONS OF CHRIST'S DIVINITY IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 Gal. 111. 8. 
 PAGE 
 Principle of the Organic Unity of Scripture.—Its importance 
 in the argument. : : ; : . δ 
 
 I. Foreshadowings— 
 
 a. Indications in the Old Testament of a Plurality of 
 
 Persons within the One Divine Essence . Ἐν 
 8. The Theophanies ; their import ἢ : iS 
 y. The Divine “ Wisdom” 
 1. in the Hebrew Canon 5 ; Big 
 2. in the later Greek Sapiential Books . 2) NDR 
 3. in Philo Judeus =. ‘ : ; . 195 
 Contrast between Philo and the New Testament . : Mreg 
 Probable Providential purpose of Philo’s speculations . 106 
 
 II. Predictions and Announcements— 
 Hope in a future, a moral necessity for men and nations 109 
 
 Secured to Israel in the doctrine of an expected 
 Messiah . : : : Σ : ᾿ gy 
 
 Four stages observable in the Messianie doetrine— 
 
 a, From the Protevangelium to the death of Moses 110 
 
 8. Age of David and Solomon _. : .. apes 
 
 y. From Isaiah to Malachi . ἐπε τ 
 
 ὃ. After Malachi ., 2gs 
 Contrast between the original doctrine and the secu- 
 
 larized form of it 139 
 Christ was rejected for appealing from the debased to 
 
 the original doctrine 141 
 
 Conclusion: The foregoing argument ΠΠπδίγαϊοα--- 
 
 1. from the emphatic Monotheism of the Old 
 
 Testament 142 
 
 2. from its full description of Christ’s Manhood . 143 
 Christ’s appeal to the Old Testament . 4 - F456 
 
ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 ΧΙ 
 
 OUR LORD’S WORK IN THE WORLD A WITNESS TO HIS DIVINITY. 
 
 St. Matt. xiii. 54-56. 
 
 I. Our Lord’s ‘ Plan’ (caution as to the use of the expression) 
 
 Its substance—the formation of a world-wide spiritual 
 society, in the form of a kingdom 
 
 It is set forth in His Discourses and Parables 
 Its two leading characteristics — 
 
 a. originality 
 
 8. audacity 
 
 II. Success of our Lord’s ‘ Plan’— 
 
 Les) 
 
 . The verdict of Church history . . 
 
 . Objections from losses and difficulties, consider ed 
 3. Internal empire of Christ over souls 
 4. External results of His work observable in human 
 society 
 
 N 
 
 III. How to account for the success of our Lord’s ‘ Plan’—- 
 1. Not by reference to the growth of other Religions 
 2. Not by the ‘causes’ assigned by Gibbon . 
 3. Not by the hypothesis of a favourable crisis 
 which ignores the hostility both of Judaism . 
 and Paganism . 
 
 But only by the belief in, and truth of Christ’s Divinity 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 149 
 
 I51 
 154 
 
 161 
 ΤΙ 
 
 178 
 183 
 189 
 
 OUR LORD'S DIVINITY AS WITNESSED BY HIS CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 St. John x. 33. 
 The ‘Christ of history’ none other than the ‘Christ of 
 dogma’. 
 A. The Miracles of the Gospel History— 
 Their bearing upon the question of Christ’s Person 
 Christ’s Moral Perfection bound up with their reality 
 
ΧΙΝ ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 B. Our Lord’s Self-assertion . : : : ὙΠ 
 
 I. First stage of His Teaching chiefly Ethical . . sae 
 
 marked by a. silence as to any moral defect . . 246 
 
 8. intense authoritativeness. } >, B50 
 
 | II. Second stage: increasing Self-assertion —. , : 580 
 which is justified by dogmatic revelations of His 
 
 Divinity. : : ; : ; . 268 
 
 a. in His claim of co-equality with the Father . 270 
 
 8. in His assertion that He is essentially one 
 with the Father : : : i @78 
 
 X y. in His references to His actual Pre-existence. 281 
 Ground of Christ’s condemnation by the Jews . 288 
 
 III. Christ’s Self-assertion viewed in its bearing upon His 
 Human Character : 
 
 His τ. Sincerity. : : - 265 
 2. Unselfishness : : ; ἰ 2 Ὸ5 
 3. Humility. : ‘ : : - 265 
 all dependent upon the truth of His Divinity . 296 
 
 The argument necessarily assumes the form of a great 
 alternative . : : : : ἢ ; . ΘΟ 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST’s DIVINITY IN THE WRITINGS OF 
 ST. JOHN. 
 
 1 St. John 1. 1-3. 
 
 St. John’s Gospel ‘the battle-field’ of the New Testament . 311 
 I. Ancient and modern objections to its claims : ~ ge 
 Witness of the second century. : : : ore 
 
 Its distinctive internal features may be explained gene- 
 rally by its threefold purpose— 
 1. Supplementary } : . 328 
 2. Polemical : ; . ; ‘> 330 
 3. Dogmatic : ‘ : : ; : τ. 93» 
 
ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 II. It is a Life of the Eternal Word made flesh. 
 Doctrine of the Eternal Word in the Prologue 
 Manifestation of the Word, as possessing the Divine Per- 
 fections— 
 of τ. Life 
 2. Love : : : Σ 
 3. Light j : , : 
 The Word identical with the only-begotten Son 
 IIL. Τὸ is in doctrinal and moral unison with— 
 1. The Epistles of St. John . 
 2. The Apocalypse 
 IV. Its Christology is in essential unison with that of the 
 Synoptists. _Observe— 
 . their use of the title “Son of God” 
 . their account of Christ’s Nativity 
 their report of His Doctrine and Work, and 
 4. of His eschatological discourses 
 
 Ww Nom 
 
 Summary 
 V. It incurs the objection that a God-Man is philosophically 
 incredible : : ἶ 
 This objection misapprehends the Scriptural and Catholic 
 Doctrine 
 Mysteriousness of our composite nature illustrative of the 
 Incarnation 
 VI. St. John’s writings oppose an insurmountable barrier to 
 the Theory of a Deification by Enthusiasm 
 Significance of St. John’s witness to the Divinity of 
 Christ 
 
 XV 
 PAGE 
 
 337 
 
 343 
 344 
 345 
 
 355 
 
 394 
 
 408 
 
ΧΥῚ ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 OUR LORD’S DIVINITY AS TAUGHT BY ST. JAMES, ST. PETER, 
 
 AND ST. PAUL. 
 
 Gal. ii. 9. 
 
 St: John’s Christology not an intellectual idiosynerasy . 
 The Apostles present One Doctrine under various forms 
 I. St. James’s Epistle—- 
 I. presupposes the Christology of St. Paul 
 
 2. implies a high Christology by incidental expres- 
 sions . 
 
 II. St. Peter— 
 1. leads his hearers up to understand Christ’s true 
 dignity, in his Missionary Sermons 
 2. exhibits Christ’s Godhead more fully, in his 
 Epistles 
 III. St. Jude’s Epistle implies that Christ is God 
 IV. St. Paul— 
 
 1. form of his Christology compared with that of 
 St. John 
 
 prominent place given by him to the truths 
 a. of our Lord’s true Mediating Manhood 
 8. of the Unity of the Divine Essence 
 2. Passages from St. Paul asserting the Divinity of 
 Christ in terms 
 
 Oo 
 
 . A Divine Christ implied in the general teaching 
 
 of St. Paul’s Missionary Sermons 
 of St. Paul’s Epistles 
 
 4. And in some leading features of that teaching, as in 
 a. his doctrine of Faith 
 8. his account of Regeneration 
 y. his attitude towards the Judaizers 
 V. Contrasts between the Apostles do but enhance the 
 force of their common faith in a Divine Christ . 
 
 PAGE 
 413 
 4τό 
 
 422 
 
 430 
 
 435 
 
 440 
 451 
 
 454 
 
 454 
 460 
 
 465 
 
 485 
 489 
 
 508 
 514 
 521 
 
 524 
 
ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 THE HOMOOUSION. 
 Tits 1.0. 
 Vitality of doctrines, how tested . 
 Doctrine of Christ’s Divinity strengthened by opposition 
 
 Objections urged in modern times against the Homoousion 
 
 Real justification of the Homoousion— 
 I. The ante-Nicene Church adored Christ 
 
 Precedents for this— 
 
 1. in His earthly Life . 
 2. after His Ascension . 
 
 Adoration of Christ in Apostolic Age, 
 
 τ. not combined with any worship of creatures 
 2. really the worship due to God . 
 3. included His Manhood 
 
 Adoration of Christ, 
 
 in sub-Apostolic age 
 
 in later part of Second want 
 
 in Third Century ; 
 
 expressed in hymns and dhanlaies 
 
 and signally at Holy Communion . 
 
 assailed by Pagan sarcasms 
 
 embodied in last words of martyrs 
 
 inconsistently retained by Arians . 
 and even by early Socinians . 
 
 II. The ante-Nicene Church spoke of Christ as Divine 
 
 Value of testimony of martyrs 
 Similar testimony of theologians . 
 Their language not mere ‘ rhetoric’ 
 
 Objection from doubtful statements of some ante- 
 Nicenes . 
 
 XVli 
 
XxVill ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 PAGE 
 Answer: 1. They had not grasped all the intellectual 
 bearings of the faith : : 1,30 
 2. They were anxious to put the Unity of God 
 strongly forward . : Gag 
 3. The Church’s real mind not ἐπ ταν. . Bay 
 III. The Homoousion 
 1. not a development in the sense of an enlarge- 
 ment of the faith ; : i ; ΩΣ 
 2. necessary (1) in the Arian struggle . ᾿ + 65x 
 (2) in our own times : : . 655 
 
 LECTU Ry VU. 
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE DOCTRINE OF OUR LORD’S DIVINITY. 
 Rom. vill. 32. 
 Theology must be, within limits, ‘ inferential’ Ph; - 6589 
 
 What the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity involves. : . 663 
 
 I. Conservative force of the doctrine— 
 
 a. It protects the Idea of God in human thought, 
 
 which Deism cannot guard. : . 666 
 and which Pantheism destroys : ᾿ - 62 
 8. It secures the true dignity of Man . : - S676 
 
 τῷ II. [lluminative force of the doctrine — 
 
 a. It implies Christ’s Infallibility asa Teacher . 680 
 Objections from certain texts : : . 682 
 
 1. St. Luke ii. 52 considered. : , O84 
 
 2. St. Mark xiii. 32 considered . : . 687 
 
 A single limitation of knowledge in Christ’s 
 
 Human Soul apparently indicated . ; . 688 
 admitted by great Fathers , . 689 
 does not involve Agnoetism — : . 692 
 
 nor Nestorianism. : } , . δ 
 
ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 is consistent with the practical immensity 
 of Christ’s human knowledge 
 is distinct from, and does not imply falli- 
 bility, still less actual error 
 Application to our Lord’s sanction of the Pen- 
 tateuch 
 8. It explains the atoning virtue of Christ’s Death 
 y. It explains the supernatural power of the Sacra- 
 ments . 
 5. It irradiates the meaning of Christ’s kingly 
 office . 
 If. Ethical fruitfulness of the doctrine— 
 Objection—that a Divine Christ supplies no standard for 
 our Imitation . one 
 Answer —A. An approximate imitation of Christ secured 
 1. by the reality of His Manhood . 
 
 2. by the grace which flows from Him as 
 God and Man 
 
 B. Belief in Christ’s Godhead has propagated 
 virtues, unattainable by paganism and 
 naturalism— 
 
 a. Purity . 
 8. Humility 
 y. Charity 
 Recapitulation of the argument 
 Faith in a Divine Christ, the strength of the Church 
 under present dangers 
 
 Conclusion 
 
 XIX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 731 
 736 
 740 
 
 745 
 
 746 
 749 
 
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 Ss Apo el y+ serail 
 
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 ᾽ υ ee at 2h). APa~04 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE QUESTION BEFORE US. 
 
 When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philip, He asked 
 His disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of 
 Man am? And they said, Some say that Thou art John the 
 Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the 
 prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? 
 
 St. Mart. Xvi. 13. 
 
 THus did our Lord propose to His first followers 
 the momentous question, which for eighteen cen- 
 turies has rivetted the eye of thinking and adoring 
 Christendom. The material setting, if we may so 
 term it, of a great intellectual or moral event ever 
 attracts the interest and lives in the memory of men ; 
 and the Evangelist is careful to note that the question 
 of our Lord was asked: in the neighbourhood of 
 Ceesarea, Philippi. Jesus Christ had reached the 
 northernmost point. of His journeyings. He was 
 close to the upper source of the Jordan, and at the 
 base of the majestic mountain which forms a natural 
 barrier to the Holy Land at its northern extremity. 
 His eye rested upon a scenery in the more immediate 
 foreground, which from its richness and variety has 
 )24ὺ ὁ B 
 
2 Caesarea Philippi, the scene Lect. 
 
 been compared by travellers to the Italian Tivoli®. 
 Yet there belonged to this spot a higher interest 
 than any which the beauty of merely inanimate or 
 irrational nature can furnish; it bore visible traces 
 of the hopes, the errors, and the struggles of the 
 human soul. Around a grotto which Greek settlers 
 had assigned to the worship of the sylvan Pan, a 
 Pagan settlement had gradually formed itself. Herod 
 the Great had adorned-the spot with a temple of 
 white marble, dedicated to his patron Augustus ; and 
 more recently, the rising city, enlarged and beautified 
 by Philip the tetrarch, had recetved a new name which 
 combined the memory of the Caesar Tiberius with 
 that of the local potentate. It is probable that our 
 Lord at least had the city in view, even if He did 
 not enter it. He was standing on the geographical 
 frontier of Judaism and Heathendom. Paganism 
 was visibly before Him in each of its two most 
 typical forms of perpetual and world-wide degradation. 
 It was burying its scant but not utterly lost idea 
 of an Eternal Power and Divinity® beneath a gross 
 materialistic nature-worship ; and it was prostituting 
 the sanctities of the human conscience to the lowest 
 purposes of an unholy and tyrannical state-craft. 
 And behind and around our Lord was that peculiar 
 people, of whom, as concerning the flesh, He came 
 Himself“, and to which His first followers belonged. 
 
 ® Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, p. 397. 
 
 > Dean Stanley surmises that the rock on which was placed the 
 temple of Augustus may possibly have determined the form of our 
 Lord’s promise to St. Peter in St. Matt. xvi. 18. Sinai and Pales- 
 tine, p. 399. 
 
 ¢ Rom. i. 20. d Ibid. ix. 5. 
 
1: of our Lord’s Question. 9 
 
 Israel too was there ; alone in her memory of a past 
 history such as no other race could boast; alone in 
 her sense of a present degradation, political and 
 moral, such as no other people could feel; alone in 
 her strong expectation of a Deliverance which to 
 men who were ‘aliens from’ her sacred ‘ common- 
 wealth’ seemed but the most chimerical of delusions. 
 On such a spot does Jesus Christ raise the great 
 question which is before us in the text, and this, as 
 we may surely believe, not without a reference to 
 the several wants and hopes and efforts of mankind 
 thus visibly pictured around Him. How was the 
 human conscience to escape from that political vio- 
 lence and from that degrading sensualism which had 
 rivetted the yoke of Pagan superstition? How was 
 Israel to learn the true drift and purpose of her 
 marvellous past ? how was she to be really relieved 
 of her burden of social and moral misery 7 how were 
 her high anticipations of a brighter future to be ex- 
 plained and justified? And although that “ middle- 
 wall of partition,” which so sharply divided off her 
 inward and outward life from that of Gentile hu- 
 manity, had been built up for such high and necessary 
 ends by her great and inspired lawgiver, did not 
 such isolation also involve manifest counterbalancing 
 risks and loss? was it to be eternal? could it, might 
 it be ‘broken down ?’ These questions could only be 
 answered by some New Revelation, larger and clearer 
 than that already possessed by Israel, and absolutely 
 new to Heathendom. They demanded some nearer, 
 fuller, mere persuasive self-unveiling than any which 
 the Merciful and Almighty God had as yet vouch- 
 safed to His reasonable creatures. May not then 
 B 2 
 
4 Religion and Theology. { Lecr. 
 
 the suggestive scenery of Czesarea Philippi have been 
 chosen by our Lord, as well fitted to witness that 
 solemn enquiry in the full answer to which Jew and 
 Gentile were alike to find a rich inheritance of light, 
 peace and freedom? Jesus asked His disciples, 
 saying, “ Whom do men say that I the Son of Man 
 am 1" 
 
 Let us pause to mark the significance of the fact 
 that our Lord Himself proposes this consideration to 
 His disciples and to His Church. 
 
 It has been often maintained of late that the 
 teaching of Jesus Christ Himself differs from that 
 of His Apostles and of their successors, in that He 
 only taught religion, while they have taught dog- 
 matic theology °. 
 
 This statement appears to proceed upon ἃ pre- 
 sumption that religion and theology can be sepa- 
 rated, not merely in idea and for the moment, by 
 some process of definition, but permanently and in 
 the world of fact. What then is religion? If you 
 say that religion is essentially thought whereby man) 
 unites ἜΠῚ to the Eternal and Unchangeable 
 
 * Baur more cautiously says: “ Wenn wir mit der Lehre Jesu 
 die Lehre des Apostels Paulus zusammenhalten, so fallt sogleich der 
 grosse Unterschied in die Augen, welcher hier stattfindet zwischen 
 einer noch in der Form eines allgemeinen Princips sich aussprechen- 
 den Lehre, und einem schon zur Bestimmtheit des Dogma’s gestalte- 
 ten Lehrbegriff.” Vorlesungen iiber N. T. Theologie, p. 123. But 
 it would be difficult to shew that the ‘ Universal Principle’ does 
 not embody and involve a number of definite dogmas. Baur 
 would not admit that St. John xiv., xv., xvi. contain words really 
 spoken by Jesus Christ: but the Sermon on the Mount itself is 
 sufficiently dogmatic. Cf. St. Matt. vi. 4, 6, 14, 26, 30; vii 
 
 21, 22. 
 
1) Religion and Theology. 5 
 
 ‘Being’, it is at least plain that the object-matter of 
 such a religious activity as this is exactly identical 
 with the object-matter of theology. Nay more, it 
 would seem to follow that a religious life is simply 
 a life of theological speculation. If you make re- 
 hgion to consist in “the knowledge of our practical 
 duties considered as God’s commandments’,” your 
 definition irresistibly suggests God in His capacity of 
 Universal Legislator, and it thus carries the earnestly 
 and honestly religious man into the heart of theology. 
 If you protest that religion has nothing to do with 
 intellectual skill in projecting definitions, and that 
 it is at bottom a feeling of tranquil dependence upon 
 some Higher Power, you cannot altogether set aside 
 the capital question which arises as to the nature of 
 that Power upon which religion thus depends. If 
 even you should contend that feeling is the essential 
 element in religion, still you cannot seriously main- 
 tain that the reality of that to which such feeling 
 relates is altogether a matter of indifference, For 
 
 f So Fichte, quoted by Klee, Dogmatik, ¢. 2. With this defini- 
 tion those of Schelling and Hegel substantially concur. It is unne- 
 cessary to remark that thought is only one element of true religion. 
 
 So Kant. ibid. This definition (1) reduces religion to being 
 merely an affair of the understanding, and (2) identifies its sub- 
 stance with that of morality. 
 
 h ἐς Abhiingigkeitsgefiihl.” Schleiermacher’s account of religion 
 has been widely adopted in our own day and country. But (1) it 
 ignores the active side of true religion, (2) it loses sight of man’s 
 freedom no less than of God’s, and (3) it may imply nothing better 
 than a passive submission to the laws of the Universe, without any 
 belief whatever as to their Author. 
 
 i Dorner gives an account of this extreme theory as maintained 
 by De Wette in his Religion und Theologie, 1815. De Wette ap- 
 pears to have followed out some hints of Herder’s, while applying 
 
0 Religion and Theology. [Lecr. 
 
 the adequate satisfaction of this religious feeling lies 
 . not in itself but in its object; and therefore it is 
 impossible to represent religion as indifferent to the 
 absolute truth of that object, and in a purely zesthe- 
 tical spirit, concerned only with the beauty of the 
 idea before it, even in a case where the reflective 
 understanding may have condemned that idea as 
 logically false. Religion, to support itself, must rest 
 consciously on its Object: the intellectual apprehen- 
 sion of that Object as true is an integral element 
 of religion. In other words, religion is practically 
 inseparable from theology. The religious Mahom- 
 medan sees in Allah a being to whose absolute 
 decrees he must implicitly resign himself; a theo- 
 logical dogma then is the basis of the specific Ma- 
 hommedan form of religion. A child reads in the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount that our Heavenly Father takes 
 care of the sparrows, and of the lilies of the fieldJ, 
 and the child prays to Him accordingly. The truth 
 upon which the child rests is the dogma of the 
 Divine Providence, which encourages trust, and war- 
 rants prayer, and les at the root of the child’s 
 religion. In short, religion cannot exist without 
 some view of its Object, namely, God; but no sooner 
 do you introduce any intellectual aspect whatever 
 of God, nay, the bare idea that such a Being ex- 
 ists, than you have before you not merely a religion, 
 but at least, in some sense, a theology . 
 
 Jacobi’s doctrine of feeling, as “the immediate perception of the 
 Divine,” and the substitute for the practical reason, to theology. 
 Cf. Dorner, Person Christi, Zw. Th. p. 996, sqq. 
 
 ji St. Matt. vi. 25-30. 
 
 κ᾿ Religion includes in its complete idea the knowledge and the 
 
1η Our Lord’s Place in His own Doctrine. γι 
 
 Had our Lord revealed no one truth except the 
 Parental Character of God, while at the same time 
 He insisted upon a certain morality and posture of 
 the soul as proper to man’s reception of this revela- 
 tion, He would have been the Author of a theology 
 as well as of a religion. In point of fact, besides 
 teaching various truths concerning God, which were 
 unknown before, or at most only guessed at, He did 
 that which in a merely human teacher of high pur- 
 pose would have been morally intolerable. He drew 
 the eyes of men towards Himself. He claimed to 
 be something more than the Founder of a new reli- 
 gious spirit, or than the authoritative Promulgator 
 of a higher truth than men had yet known. Hey 
 taught true religion indeed as no man had yet taught 
 it, but He bent the religious spirit which He had 
 summoned into life to do homage to Himself, as 
 being its lawful and adequate Object. He taught 
 the highest theology, but He also placed Himself 
 at the very centre of His doctrine, and He an- 
 nounced Himself as sharing the very throne of That 
 God Whom He so clearly unveiled. If He was the 
 Organ and Author of a new and final revelation, 
 He also claimed to be the very substance and material 
 
 worship of God. (S. Aug. de Util. Cred. c. 12. n. 27.) Cicero gives 
 the limited sense which Pagan Rome attached to the word: “ Qui 
 omnia que ad cultum deorum pertinerent, diligenter retractarent et 
 tanquam relegerent, sunt dicti religiosi, ex relegendo.” (De Nat. 
 Deorum, ii. 28.) Lactantius gives the Christian form of the idea, 
 whatever may be thought of his etymology: “ Vinculo pietatis 
 obstricti Deo, et religati sumus, unde ipsa religio nomen accepit.” 
 (Inst. Div. iv. 24.) Religion is the bond between God and man’s 
 whole nature: in God the heart finds its happiness, the reason its 
 rule of truth, the will its freedom. 
 
8 Our Lord’s Place in His own Doctrine. [Lecr. 
 
 of His own message ; His most startling revelation 
 was Himself. 
 
 These are statements which will be justified, it is 
 hoped, hereafter! ; and, if some later portions of our 
 subject are for a moment anticipated, it is only that 
 we may note the true and extreme significance 
 of our Lord’s question in the text. But let us also 
 ask ourselves what would be the duty of a merely 
 human teacher of the highest moral aim, entrusted 
 with a great spiritual mission and lesson for the 
 benefit of mankind? The example of St. John Baptist 
 is an answer to this enquiry. Such a teacher would 
 represent himself as a mere “ voice” crying aloud in 
 the moral wilderness around him, and anxious, be- 
 yond aught else, to shroud his own insignificant person 
 beneath the majesty of his message. Not to do this 
 would be to proclaim his own moral degradation ; it 
 would be a public confession that he could only 
 regard a great spiritual work for others as furnishing 
 an opportunity for adding to his own social capital, 
 or to his official reputation. When then Jesus Christ 
 so urgently draws the attention of men to His Per- 
 sonal Self, He places us in a dilemma. We must 
 either say that He was unworthy of His own Words 
 in the Sermon on the Mount™, or we must confess 
 that He has some right, and is under the pressure 
 of some necessity, to do that which would be morally 
 insupportable in a merely human teacher. Now if 
 this right and necessity exist, it follows that when 
 our Lord bids us to consider His Personal Rank in 
 the hierarchy of beings, He challenges an answer. 
 
 1 See Lecture IV. 
 m Observe the principle involved in St. Matt. vi. 1-8. 
 
ΠῚ] The “ Son of Man.” 9 
 
 Remark moreover that in the popular sense of the 
 term the answer is not less a theological answer if 
 it be that of the Ebionitic heresy than if it be the 
 language of the Nicene Creed. The Christology of 
 the Church is in reality an integral part of its theo- 
 logy ; and Jesus Christ raises the central question 
 of Christian theology when He asks, “Whom do 
 men say that I the Son of Man am 4” 
 
 It may be urged that Our Lord is inviting atten- 
 tion, not to His essential Personality, but to His 
 asserted office as the Jewish Messiah ; that He 15, 
 in fact, asking for a confession of His Messiahship. 
 
 Now observe the exact form of Our Lord’s ques- 
 tion, as given in St. Matthew's Gospel ; which, as 
 Olshausen has remarked, is manifestly here the lead- 
 ing narrative: “Whom do men say that I the Son, / 
 of Man am?” This question involves an assertion, 
 namely, that the Speaker is the Son of Man. What 
 did He mean by that designation? It is important 
 to remember that with two exceptions” the title is 
 only applied to our Lord in the New Testament by 
 His Own Lips. It was His self-chosen Name: why. 
 did He choose it ? 
 
 First then it was in itself, to Jewish ears, a clear 
 assertion of Messiahship. In the vision of Daniel 
 “One like unto the Son of Man® had come with 
 the clouds of heaven, .... and there was given Him 
 dominion and glory and a kingdom.” This kingdom 
 succeeded in the prophet’s vision to four inhuman 
 kingdoms, correspondent to the four typical beasts ; 
 it was the kingdom of a prince, human indeed, and 
 yet from heaven. In consequence of this prophecy, 
 
 n Acts vil. 56; Rev. i. 13; xiv. 14. 
 ο WIN Ἴ22- ὡς vids ἀνθρώπου LXX. Dan. vii. 13 sqq. 
 
10 The © Son of Man.” [ Lect. 
 
 the “ Son of Man” became a popular and official title 
 of the Messiah. In the book of Enoch, which is 
 assigned with the highest probability by recent 
 criticism to the second century before our era?, this 
 and kindred titles are continuaily applied to Messiah. 
 Our Lord in His prophecy over Jerusalem predicted 
 that at the last day “they shall see the Son of Man 
 coming in the clouds with power and great glory 4.” 
 And ΕΝ standing at the tribunal of Caiaphas He 
 thus addressed His siiigeee : “JT say unto you, hereafter 
 shall ye see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand 
 of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven'.” In 
 these passages there is absolutely no room for doubt- 
 ing either His distinct reference to the vision in 
 Daniel, or the claim which the title Son of Man was 
 intended to assert. As habitually used by our Lord, 
 it was a constant setting forth of His Messianic 
 dignity, in the face of the people of Israel ὃ. 
 
 J Why indeed He chose this one, out of the many 
 titles of Messiah, is a further question, a brief con- 
 
 p Cf. Dillmann, Das Buch Enoch, 1853, p. 157. Dillmann 
 places the book in the time of John Hyrcanus, B.c. 130—109. 
 Dr. Pusey would assign to it a still earlier date. Cf. Daniel the 
 Prophet, p. 390, note 2, and 391, note 3 
 
 4 St. Matt. xxiv. 30. r [bid. xxvi. 64. 
 
 5. “Den Namen des vids τοῦ ἀνθρώπου gebraucht Jesus Selbst auf 
 eine so eigenthiimliche Weise von Sich, dass man nur aunehmen 
 kann, Er habe mit jenem Namen, wie man auch seine Bedeutung 
 genauer bestimmen mag, irgend eine Beziehung auf die Messiasidee 
 ausdriicken wollen.” Baur, Das Christenthum, p. 37. Cf. also the 
 same author’s Vorlesungen iiber Neutestamentliche Theologie, 
 Ρ. 76 sqq. In St. Matt. x. 23, xiii. 37—41, the official force of 
 the title is obvious. That it was a simple periphrasis for the 
 personal pronoun, without any reference to the office or Person of 
 the Speaker, is inconsistent with Acts vii. 56, and St. Matt. xvi. 13. 
 
1.] The “Son of Man.” 11 
 
 sideration of which lies in the track of the subject 
 before us. 
 
 It would not appear to be sufficient to reply 
 that the title Son of Man is the most unpresuming, 
 the least glorious of the titles of Messiah, and was 
 adopted by our Lord as such. For if such a title 
 claimed, as it did claim, Messiahship, the precise 
 etymological force of the word could not neutralize 
 its current and recognised value in the estimation 
 of the Jewish people. The claim thus advanced was 
 independent of any analysis of the exact sense of the 
 title which asserted it. The title derived its popular 
 force from the office with which it was associated. 
 To adopt the title, however humble might be its 
 strict and intrinsic meaning, was to claim the great 
 office to which in the minds of men it was indis- 
 solubly attached. 
 
 As it had been addressed to the prophet Ezekiel ¢, 
 the title Son of Man seemed to contrast the frail and 
 shortlived life of men with the boundless Strength 
 and the Eternal years of the Infinite Gop. And as 
 applied to Himself by Jesus, it doubtless expresses a 
 real Humanity, a perfect and penetrating community 
 of nature and feeling with the lot of human kind. 
 Thus, when our Lord says that authority was given 
 Him to execute judgment because He is the Son of 
 Man, it is plain that the point of the reason lies not 
 in His being Messiah, but in His being Human, in 
 His having a genuine Humanity Which could deem 
 
 t ἘΞῚΝ 3 ie. ‘mortal.’ (Cf. Gesen. in voc. IN.) Itis so used 
 eighty-nine times in Ezekiel. Compare Num. xxiii. 19, Job xxv. 
 6, xxxy. 8. In this sense it occurs frequently in the plural. In 
 Ps. viii. 4, 5 and Ixxx. 17 it refers, at least ultimately, to our 
 
 Lord. 
 
19 The © Son of Man.” [Lecr. 
 
 nothing human strange, and could be touched with 
 a feeling of the infirmities of the race which He was 
 
 /to judge". But the title Son of Man means more 
 
 than this in its application to our Lord. It does 
 not merely assert His real incorporation with our 
 kind ; it exalts Him indefinitely above us all as the 
 representative, the ideal, the pattern Man*. He is, 
 in a special sense, the Son of Mankind, the genuine 
 offspring of the race, the one Human Life Which 
 does justice to the idea of Humanity. All human 
 history tends to Him or radiates from Him; He is 
 the point in which humanity finds its unity: as 
 St. Irenzeus says, He ‘ recapitulates’ ity. He closes 
 the earlier history of our race; He inaugurates 
 its future. Nothing local, transient, individualizing, 
 national, sectarian, dwarfs the proportions of His 
 world-embracing Character: He rises above the 
 parentage, the blood, the narrow horizon which 
 bounded, as it seemed, His Human Life; He is 
 the Archetypal Man in Whose presence distinctions 
 of race, intervals of ages, types of civilisation, degrees 
 of mental culture are as nothing. This sense of the 
 title seems to be implied in such passages as that in 
 which He contrasts “ the foxes which have holes, and 
 the birds of the air which have nests,’ with “the 
 Son of Man Who hath not where to lay His Head#” 
 
 u St. John v. 27 ; Heb. iv. τε. 
 
 x “ Urbild der Menscheit.” Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, 
 Ρ. 130 sqq. Mr. Keble draws out the remedial force of the title 
 as “signifying that Jesus was the very seed of the woman, the 
 Second Adam promised to undo what the First had done.” Eu- 
 charistical Adoration, pp. 31-33. 
 
 y Ady. Haer. III. 18. τ. “ Longam hominum expositionem in Se 
 Ipso recapitulavit, in compendio nobis salutem praestans.” 
 
 2 St. Matt. vill. 20; St. Luke ix. 58. 
 
ha Real force of our Lord’s Question. 13 
 
 It is not the official Messiah, as such ; but “the fair- 
 est among the children of men,” the natural Prince 
 and Leader, the very Prime and Flower of human 
 kind, Whose lot is thus harder than that of the 
 lower creatures, and in Whose humiliation hu- 
 manity itself is humbled below the level of its 
 natural dignity. 
 
 As the Son of Man then, our Lord is the Messiah ; 
 He is a true member of our human kind, and He © 
 is moreover its Pattern and Representative ; since 
 He fulfils and exhausts that moral Ideal to which 
 man’s highest and best aspirations have ever pointed 
 onward. Of these senses of the term the first was 
 ever its popular and obvious one, the last has been 
 discerned as latent in it by the devout reflection of 
 the Church. For the disciples the term Son of Man“ 
 implied first of all the Messiahship of their Master, 
 and next, though less prominently, His true Hu- ᾿ 
 manity. When then our Lord enquires “Whom do 
 men say that I the Son of Man am?”, He is not 
 merely asking whether men admit what the title Son 
 of Man itself imports, that is to say, the truth of 
 His Humanity or the truth of His Messiahship. The 
 point of His question is this:—what is He besides 
 being the Son of Man? As the Son of Man, He is 
 Messiah ; but what is the Personality which sustains 
 the Messianic Office? As the Son of Man He 15 
 truly Human ; but what is the Higher Nature with 
 which this emphatic claim to Humanity is in tacit, 
 but manifest contrast? What is He in the seatv 
 and root of His Being? Is His Manhood a Robe 
 which He has thrown around a Higher form of pre- 
 existent Lifé, or is it His all? Has He been in 
 existence some thirty years at most, or are the 
 
14 Reply of the Disciples. [ Lecr. 
 
 august proportions of His Life only to be meted out 
 by the days of eternity? “Whom say men that I 
 the Son of Man am ?” 
 
 The disciples reply, that at that time, in the public 
 opinion of Galilee, our Lord was, at the least, a 
 preternatural personage. On this pomt there was, 
 it would seem, a general consent. The cry of a petty 
 local envy which had been raised at Nazareth, “Is 
 not this the Carpenter's Son?” did not fairly represent 
 the matured or prevalent opinion of the people. 
 The people did not suppose that Jesus was in truth 
 merely one of themselves, only endued with larger 
 powers and with a finer religious instinct. They 
 thought that His Personality reached back somehow 
 into the past of their own wonderful history. They 
 took Him for a saint of ancient days, who had been 
 re-invested with a bodily form. He was the great 
 expected miracle-working Elijah ; or He was the 
 disappointed prophet who had followed His country 
 to its grave at the captivity; or He was the recently- 
 martyred preacher and ascetic John the Baptist ; 
 or He was, at any rate, one of the order which for 
 four hundred years had been lost to Israel; He was 
 one of the Prophets. 
 
 Our Lord turns from these public misconceptions 
 to the judgment of that little Body which was 
 already the nucleus of His future Church: “ But 
 whom say ye that Iam?” St. Peter replies, in the 
 name of the other disciples*, “Thou art the Christ 
 the Son of the Living God.” In marked contrast to 
 the popular hesitation which refused to recognise 
 
 ᾿ 4 |) Se ΨΕΘΑ . κ , 
 4 St. Chrysostom, in loc., calls St. Peter τὸ στόμα τῶν ἀποστόλων͵ 
 ὁ πανταχοῦ θερμός. 
 
1] St. Peter’s Confession. 15 
 
 explicitly the justice of the claim so plainly put 
 forward by the assumption of the title ‘Son of Man, 
 the Apostle confesses, “Thou art the Christ.” But 
 St. Peter advances a step beyond this confession, and _, 
 replies to the original question of our Lord, when 
 He adds “The Son of the Living God.” In the first 
 three Evangelists as well as in St. John, this solemn 
 designation expresses something more than a merely 
 theocratic or ethical relationship to God. If St. Peter 
 had meant that Christ was the Son of God merely 
 in virtue of His membership in the old Theocracy, 
 or by reason of His consummate moral glory’, the 
 
 Ὁ See Lect. V. pp. 368 sqq. 
 
 ¢ The title of ‘sons’ is used in the Old Testament to express 
 three relations to God. (1) God has entered into the relatiomof 
 Father to all Israel (Deut. xxxii. 6; Isa. lxiii. 16), whence He en- 
 titles Israel ‘My son,’ ‘My firstborn’ (Exod. iv. 22, 23), when 
 claiming the people from Pharaoh ; and Ephraim, ‘My dear son, 
 a pleasant child’ (Jer. xxxi. 20), as an earnest of restoration to 
 Divine favour. Thus the title is used as a motive to obedience 
 (Deut. xiv. 1); or in reproach for ingratitude (Ibid. xxxii. 5; Isa. 
 i. 2; Xxx. 1,9; Jer. ili. 14); or especially of such as were God’s 
 sons, not in name only, but in truth (Ps. lxxili. 15; Prov. xiv. 26; 
 and perhaps Isa. xliii. 6). (2) The title is applied once to judges in 
 the Theocracy (Ps. lxxxii. 6), ‘Ihave said, Ye are gods, and all of 
 you are children of the Most High.’ Here the title refers to the 
 name Elohim, given to the judges as representing God in the The- 
 ocracy, and as judging in His Name and by His Authority. Accor- 
 dingly to go to them for judgment is spoken of as going to Elohim 
 (Deut. xvii. 9). (9) The exact phrase ‘sons of God’ is, with per- 
 haps one exception (Gen. vi. 2), used of superhuman beings, who 
 until the Incarnation were more nearly like God than were any of 
 the family of men (Job i. 6; ii. 1; xxxviii. 7). The singular, ‘ My Son,’ 
 ‘The Son,’ is used only in prophecy of the Messiah (Ps. ii. 7, 12; and 
 Acts xiii. 33; Heb. i. 5; v. 5), and in what is believed to have been 
 a Divine manifestation, very probably of God the Son (Dan. iii. 25). 
 The line of David being the line of the Messiah, culminating in the 
 
10 St. Peter's Confession. [ Lucr. 
 
 confession would have involved nothing distinctive 
 with respect to Jesus Christ, nothing that was not 
 in a measure true of every good Jew, and that may 
 not be truer far of every good Christian. If St. Peter 
 had intended only to repeat another and a practically 
 equivalent title of the Messiah, he would not have 
 advanced beyond the confession of a Nathanael4, or 
 even the admission of a Caiaphas*®. If we are to con- 
 strue his language thus, it is altogether impossible 
 to conceive why ‘flesh and blood’ could not have 
 ‘revealed’ to him so obvious and trivial an inference 
 from his previous knowledge, or why either the 
 Apostle or his confession should have been solemnly 
 designated as the selected Rock on which the Re- 
 deemer would build His imperishable Church. 
 
 Leaving however a fuller discussion of the in- 
 terpretation of this particular text, let us note that 
 the question raised at Czesarea Philippi is still the 
 ‘ great question before the modern world. Whom do 
 men say now that Jesus, the Son of Man, is 4 
 
 I. No serious and thoughtful man can treat such 
 a subject with indifference. JI merely do you justice, 
 my brethren, when I defy you to murmur that we 
 are entering upon a merely abstract discussion, which 
 has nothing in common with modern human inte- 
 rests, congenial as it may have been to those whom 
 
 Messiah, as in David’s One perfect Son, it was said in a lower sense 
 of each member of that line, but in its full sense only of Messiah, ‘I 
 will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me a Son’ (2 Sam. vii. 
 14; Heb. i. 5; Ps. lxxxix. 27). The application of the title to collec- 
 tive Israel in Hos. xi. 1, is connected by St. Matthew (ii. 15) with its 
 deeper force as used of Israel’s One true Heir and Representative. 
 Cf. Mill, Myth. Interp. p. 330. Compare too the mysterious intima- 
 tions of Proy. xxx. 4, Ecclus. li. 10, of a Divine Sonship internal to 
 the Being of God. d St. Johni. 49. © St. Matt, xxvi. 63. 
 
a Interest of the subject at the present day. 17 
 
 some writers have learnt to describe as the profes- 
 sional word-warriors of the fourth and fifth centuries. 
 You would not be guilty of including the question of 
 our Lord’s Divinity in your catalogue of tolerabiles 
 ineptia. There is that in the Form of the Son of 
 Man which prevails to command something more 
 than attention, even in an age so conspicuous for 
 its boisterous self-assertion as our own, and in in- 
 tellectual atmospheres as far as possible removed 
 from the mind of His believing and adoring Church. 
 Never since He ascended to His Throne was He the 
 object of a more passionate adoration than now ; 
 never did He encounter the glare of a hatred more 
 intense and more defiant: and between these, the 
 poles of a contemplation incessantly directed upon 
 His Person, there are shades and levels of thought 
 and feeling, many and graduated, here detracting 
 from the highest expressions of faith, there shrinking 
 from the most violent extremities of blasphemy. 
 An honest indifference to the real claims of Jesus 
 Christ upon the thoughts and hearts of men is 
 scarcely less proscribed by some of the erroneous 
 tendencies of our age than by its characteristic ex- 
 cellences. An age which has a genuine love of his- 
 torical truth must needs fix its eye on That august 
 Personality Which is to our European world, in point 
 of creative influence, what no other has been or can 
 be. An age which is distinguished by a keen zesthetic 
 appreciation, if not by any very earnest practical 
 culture of moral beauty, cannot but be enthusiastic 
 when it has once caught sight of That Incomparable 
 Life Which is recorded in the Gospels. But also, an 
 anti-dogmatic age is nervously anxious to attack 
 C 
 
18 Christ the centre-point of human studies. [ Lect. 
 
 dogma in its central stronghold, and to force the 
 Human Character and Work of the Saviour, though 
 at the cost of whatever violence of critical manipu- 
 lation, to detach themselves from the great belief with 
 which they are indissolubly associated in the mind of 
 
 ) Christendom. And an age, so impatient of the super- 
 natural as our own, is irritated to the highest possi- 
 ble point of disguised irritability by the spectacle of 
 a Life Which is supernatural throughout, Which posi- 
 tively bristles with the supernatural, Which begins 
 with a supernatural birth, and ends in a supernatural 
 ascent to heaven, Which is prolific of physical miracle, 
 and of Which the moral wonders are more startling 
 than the physical. Thus it is that the interest of 
 modern physical enquiries into the laws of the Cosmos 
 or into the origin of Man is immediately heightened 
 when these enquiries are suspected to have a bearing, 
 however indirect, upon Christ’s Sacred Person. Thus 
 your study of the mental sciences, aye, and of philology, 
 ministers whether it will or no to His praise or His 
 dishonour, and your ethical speculations cannot com- 
 plete themselves without raising the whole question 
 of His Authority. And such is Christ’s place in 
 History, that a line of demarcation between its civil 
 and its ecclesiastical elements seems to be practically 
 impossible ; your ecclesiastical historians are prone 
 to range over the annals of the world, while your 
 professors of secular history habitually deal with 
 the central problems and interests of theology. 
 
 * If Christ could have been ignored, He would have 
 been ignored in Protestant Germany, when Christian 
 Faith had been eaten out of the heart of that country 
 by the older Rationalism. / Yet scarcely any German 
 
1 Attitude of modern philosophers towards Him. 19 
 
 ‘ thinker’ of note can be named who has not projected 
 what is termed a Christology. The Christ of Kant 
 is the Ideal of Moral Perfection, and as such, we are 
 told, he is to be carefully distinguished from the 
 historical Jesus, since of this Ideal alone, and in a 
 transcendental sense, can the statements of the ortho- 
 dox creed be predicated®. The Christ of Jacobi is 
 a Religious Ideal, and worship addressed to the 
 historical Jesus is denounced as sheer idolatry, unless 
 beneath the recorded manifestation the Ideal itself 
 be discerned and honoured‘, According to Fichte, 
 on the contrary, the real interest of philosophy in 
 Jesus is historical-and not metaphysical ; Jesus first 
 possessed an insight into the absolute unity of the 
 being of man with that of God, and in revealing 
 this insight He communicated the highest know- 
 ledge which man can possess*. Of the later Pan- 
 theistic philosophers, Schelling proclaims that the 
 Christian theology is hopelessly in error, when it 
 teaches that at a particular moment of time God 
 became Incarnate, since God is ‘ external to’ all time, 
 and the Incarnation of God is an eternal fact. But 
 Schelling contends that the man Christ Jesus is the 
 highest point or effort of this eternal incarnation, 
 and the beginning of its real manifestation to 
 men: “none before Him after such a manner has 
 revealed to man the Infinite'.” And the Christ of 
 
 e Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. Werke, 
 Bd. x. p. 73, esp. p. 142. 
 f Schrift von den Gottl. Dingen, p. 62, sqq. 
 * Anweisung zum seligen Leben Vorl. 6. Werke, Bd. v. p. 482. 
 h Vorlesungen iiber die methode des Akad. Studien. Werke, 
 Bd, ν. p. 298, sqq. 
 C2 
 
20 Earlier Estimate of our Lord by the Negative Criticism. [1 ΒΟΥ. 
 
 Hegel is not the actual Incarnation of God in Jesus 
 of Nazareth, but the symbol of His incarnation in 
 humanity at large’. Fundamentally differing, as do 
 these conceptions, in various ways from the Creed 
 /of the Church of Christ, they nevertheless represent 
 so many efforts of non-Christian thought to do such 
 homage as is possible to its Great Object ; they are 
 so many proofs of the interest which Jesus Christ 
 necessarily provokes in the modern world, even when 
 it is least disposed to own His true supremacy. 
 
 Nor is the direction which this interest has taken 
 of late years in the sphere of unbelieving theological 
 criticism less noteworthy in its bearings on our pre- 
 
 ‘sent subject. The earlier Rationalism concerned itself 
 chiefly with the Apostolical Age. It was occupied 
 with a perpetual analysis and recombination of the 
 
 i Rel. Phil. bd. ii. p. 263. This idea is developed by Strauss. See 
 his Glaubenslehre, ii. 209, sqq.; and Leben Jesu, Auf. 2. Bd. ii. 
 Ρ. 739, sqq. “Der Schliissel der ganzen Christologie ist, das als 
 Subject der Priidikate, welche die Kirche Christo beilegt, statt 
 eines Individuums eine Idee, aber eine reale, nicht Kantisch un- 
 
 wirkliche gesetzt wird. ... Die Menscheit ist die Vereinigung der 
 beiden Naturen, der Menschgewordene Gott .... Durch den 
 
 Glauben an diesen Christus, namentlich an Seinen Tod und seine 
 Auferstehung wird der Mensch vor Gott gerecht, d.h., durch die 
 Belebung der Idee der Menscheit in sich,” ἄς. Feuerbach has 
 carried this forward into pure materialism, and he openly scorns 
 and denounces Christianity : Strauss has more recently described 
 Feuerbach as “the man who put the dot upon the i which we had 
 found,” and he too insists upon the moral necessity of rejecting 
 Christianity ; Lebens und Characterbild Marklins, pp. 124, 125, 
 sqq., quoted by Luthardt, Apolog., p. 301. Other disciples of 
 Hegel, such as Marheinecke, Rosenkranz, and Géschel, have en- 
 deavoured to give to their master’s teaching a more positive 
 (lirection. 
 
11 Recent Estimate of our Lord by the Negative Criticism. 21 
 
 various influences which were supposed to have 
 created the Catholic Church and the orthodox Creed. 
 St. Paul was the most prominent person in the long 
 series of hypotheses by which Rationalism professed 
 to account for the existence of Catholic Christianity. 
 St. Paul was said to be the ‘author’ of that idea of 
 a universal religion which was deemed to be the 
 most fundamental and creative element in the Chris- 
 tian Creed: St. Paul’s was the vivid imagination 
 which had thrown around the Life and Death of 
 the Prophet of Nazareth a halo of superhuman glory, 
 and had fired an obscure Jewish sect with the 
 ambition of founding a Spiritual Empire able to 
 control and embrace the world. St. Paul, in short, 
 was held to be the real creator of Christianity ; and 
 our Lord was thrown into the background, whether 
 from a surviving instinct of awe, or on the ground 
 of His being relatively insignificant. This studied 
 silence of active critical speculation with respect. to 
 Jesus Christ, might indeed have been the instinct 
 of reverence, but it was at least susceptible of a 
 widely different interpretation. 
 
 In our day this equivocal reserve is no longer 
 possible. The passion for reality, for fact, which is 
 so characteristic of the thought of recent years, has 
 carried critical enquiry backwards from the con- 
 sciousness of the Apostle to That on Which it reposed. 
 The interest of modern criticism centres in Him Who 
 is ever most prominently and uninterruptedly pre- 
 sent to the eye of faith. The popular controversies 
 around us tend more and more to merge in the one 
 great question respecting our Lord’s Person : that 
 question, it is felt, is bound up with the very exist- 
 ence of Christianity. And a discussion respecting 
 
22 Recent activity of the Negative Criticism. [Lecr. 
 
 Christ’s Person obliges us to consider the mode of 
 His historical manifestation ; so that His Life was 
 probably never studied before by those who practi- 
 cally or avowedly reject Him so eagerly as it is at 
 this moment. For Strauss He may be no more than 
 a leading illustration of the applicability of the 
 Hegelian philosophy to purposes of historical ana- 
 lysis ; for Schenkel He may be a sacred impersona- 
 tion of the anti-hierarchical and democratic temper, 
 which aims at revolutionizing Germany. Ewald may 
 see in Him the altogether human source of the highest 
 spiritual life of humanity ; and Renan, the purely 
 fictitious and somewhat immoral hero of an oriental 
 romance, fashioned to the taste of a modern Parisian 
 public. And what if you yourselves are even now 
 eagerly reading an anonymous writer, of altogether 
 nobler aim and finer moral insight than these, who 
 has endeavoured by a brilliant analysis of one side 
 of Christ's moral action to represent Him as em- 
 bodying and originating all that is best and most 
 hopeful in the spirit of modern philanthropy, but 
 who seems not indisposed to substitute for the Creed 
 of His Church, only the impatient and scornful ut- 
 terance of His Roman J udge. Aye, though you only 
 salute your Saviour with the pagan cry, Behold the 
 Man! at least you cannot ignore Him ; you cannot 
 resist the moral and intellectual forces which con- 
 verge in our day with an ever-increasing intensity 
 upon His Sacred Person ; you cannot turn a deaf 
 ear to the question which He asks of His followers 
 in each generation, and which He never asked more 
 solemnly than now: “Whom say men that I, the 
 Son of Man, am 2” 
 
 k On recent “Lives” of our Lord, see Appendix, Note A. 
 
1.1 Three Answers to Christ’s Question—(1) The Ebionitic ; 98 
 
 II. Now all serious Theists, who believe that God 
 is a Personal Being essentially distinct from the 
 work of His Hands, must make one of three answers, 
 whether in terms or in substance, to the question 
 of the text. 
 
 1. The Ebionite of old, and the Socinian now, 
 assert that Jesus Christ is merely man, whether 
 (as Faustus Socinus himself teaches) supernaturally 
 born of a Virgin!, or (as modern Rationalists 
 generally maintain) in all respects subject to ordi- 
 nary natural laws™, although of such remarkable 
 moral eminence, that He may, in the enthusiastic 
 language of ethical admiration, be said to be Divine. 
 And when Sabellianism would escape from the mani- 
 fold self-contradictions of Patripassianism", it too 
 becomes no less Humanitarian in its doctrine as to 
 the Person of our Lord, than Ebionitism itself. The 
 Monarchianism of Praxeas or of Noetus which denied 
 the distinct Personality of Christ ° while proclaiming 
 His Divinity in the highest terms, was practically 
 coincident in its popular result with the coarse asser- 
 
 tions of Theodotus and Artemon?. And in modern 
 
 1 Chr. Rel. Brevissima Inst. 1.654. “De Christi essentia ita statue: 
 Illum esse hominem in virginis utero, et sic sine viri ope Divini 
 Spirits vi conceptum.” m Weegscheider, Instit. ὃ 120, 566. 
 
 n Cf. Tertull. adv. Prax. ¢. 2. 
 
 © “ Hee perversitas, quee se existimat meram veritatem possidere, 
 dum unicwm Deum non aliis putat credendum quam si ipswm 
 eundemque et Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum dicat. Quasi 
 non sic quoque unus sit omnia, dum ex uno omnia, per substantio 
 scilicet wnitatem, et nihilominis custodiatur οἰκονομίας sacramentum, 
 que unitatem in trinitatem disponit, tres dirigens, Patrem et Filium, 
 et Spiritum Sanctum.” (Ibid.) 
 
 P Euseb., H. E. y. 28: ψιλὸν ἄνθρωπον γενέσθαι τὸν Σωτῆρα. Tert. de 
 Preser. Her. ¢..53. App. ; Theodoret, Her. Fab. lib. ii. init. 
 
 < 
 
24 (2) The Arian Answer ; [Lecr. 
 
 days, the phenomenon of practical Humanitarianism, 
 disguised but not proscribed by very vehement pro- 
 testations apparently condemning it, is reproduced in 
 the case of such well-known writers as Schleiermacher 
 or Ewald. They use language at times which seems 
 to do the utmost justice to the truth of Christ’s 
 Divinity : they recognise in Him the Perfect Revela- 
 tion of God, the true Head and Lord of human kind ; 
 but they deny the existence of an immanent Trinity in 
 the Godhead ; they recognise in God no pre-existent 
 Personal Form as the basis of His Self-Manifestation 
 to man ; they are really Monarchianists in the sense 
 of Praxeas ; and their keen appreciation of the 
 Ethical Glory of Christ’s Person cannot save them 
 from consequences with which it is ultimately incon- 
 sistent, but which are on other grounds logically too 
 inevitable to be permanently eluded’. A Christ who 
 is “the perfect Revelation of God,” yet who “is not 
 personally God,” does not really differ from the al- 
 together human Christ of Socinus ; and the assertion 
 of the Personal Godhead of Christ can only escape 
 from the profane absurdities of Patripassianism, 
 when it presupposes the Eternal and necessary Ex- 
 istence in God of a Threefold Personality. 
 
 2. The Arian maintains that our Lord Jesus Christ 
 existed before His Incarnation, that by Him, as by 
 an instrument, the Supreme God made the worlds, 
 and that, as being the most ancient and the highest 
 of created beings, He is to be worshipped ; that, 
 
 4 Cf. Dorner, Pers. Christi, Band ii. Ῥ. 153. Schleiermacher, 
 although agreeing with Schelling and Hegel in denying an im- 
 manent Trinity in the Godhead, did not (Dorner earnestly pleads) 
 agree in the Pantheistic basis of that denial. P. ©. ii. p. 1212. 
 Compare Ewald, Geschichte Christus, p. 447, quoted by Dorner. 
 
I.] (3) Answer of the Catholic Church. 25 
 
 / however, Christ had a beginning of existence (ἀρχὴν 
 ὑπάρξεως), that there was a time when He did not 
 exist (ἣν ὅτε οὐκ ἣν) ; that He is formed from what once 
 was not (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἔχει THY ὑπόστασιν), and can- 
 not therefore be called God in the sense in which 
 that term is applied by Theists to the Supreme 
 Being’. 
 
 3. In contrast with these two leading forms of 
 heresy stands the faith, from the first and at this 
 hour, of the whole Catholic Church of Christ: “I 
 believe in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten 
 Son of God, Begotten of His Father before all worlds, 
 God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, 
 Begotten not made, Bemg OF ONE SUBSTANCE WITH 
 the Father ; By Whom all things were made ; Who 
 for us men and for our salvation came down from 
 heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of 
 the Virgin Mary, and was made Man.” 
 
 Practically imdeed these three answers may be 
 still further reduced to two, the first and the third ; 
 for Arianism, no less than Sabellianism, is really a form 
 of the Humanitarian or naturalist reply to the ques- 
 tion. Arianism does indeed admit the existence of 
 a pre-existent being who became incarnate in Jesus, 
 but it parts company with the Catholic Belief, by F 
 asserting that this being is himself a creature, and 
 not of the very Substance of the Supreme God. 
 Thus Arianism is weighted with the intellectual 
 difficulties of a purely supernatural Christology, 
 while yet it forfeits all hold upon the Great Truth 
 
 r Socrates, i. 5. 
 5. Cf. further Waterland, Defence of Some Queries, Works (ed. 
 Van-Mildert), vol. i. pp. 402, 403. 
 
26 Arianism practically an evanescent heresy. [ Lect. 
 
 which to a Catholic believer sustains and justifies 
 the remainder of his Creed. The real question at 
 issue is not merely whether Christ is only a man ; 
 it is whether or not He is only a created being. 
 When the question is thus stated, Arianism must 
 really take its place side by side with the most 
 naked Deism ; while at the same time it suggests, 
 by its incarnation of a created Logos, the most dif- 
 ficult among the problems which meet a believer 
 in the Hypostatic Union of our Lord’s Two Natures. 
 In order to escape from this position, it practically 
 teaches the existence of two Gods, each of whom is 
 an object of worship, one of whom has been created 
 by the Other; One of whom might, if He willed, 
 annihilate the other’. Thus in Arianism reason and 
 faith are equally disappointed : the largest demands 
 are made upon faith, yet the Arian Christ after 
 all is but a fellow-creature; and reason is encou- 
 raged to assail the mysteries of the Catholic Creed 
 in behalf of a theory which admits of being irre- 
 trievably reduced to an absurdity. Arianism there- 
 
 t Waterland, Works, vol. i. p. 78. note f. Bp. Van-Mildert 
 quotes from Mr. Charles Butler’s Historical Account of Confessions 
 of Faith, chap. x. sect. 2, a remarkable report of Dr. Clarke’s 
 conference with Dr. Hawarden in the presence of Queen Caroline. 
 After Dr. Clarke had stated his system at great length and in 
 very guarded terms, Dr. Hawarden asked his permission to put one 
 simple question, and Dr. Clarke assented. ‘Then,’ said Dr. Ha- 
 warden, ‘I ask, Can God the Father annihilate the Son and the 
 Holy Ghost? Answer me Yes or No.’ Dr. Clarke continued for 
 some time in deep thought, and then said, ‘It was a question 
 which he had never considered.’ . . . On the ‘precarious’ exist- 
 ence of God the Son, according to the Arian hypothesis, see 
 Waterland’s Farther Vindication of Christ’s Divinity, sect. xix. 
 
1.7 The Answers really two, the Catholic and the Humanitarian. 27 
 
 fore is really at most a resting-point for minds which 
 are sinking from the Catholic Creed downwards to 
 pure Humanitarianism ; or which are feeling their 
 way upwards from the depths of Ebionitism, or So- 
 cinianism, towards the Church. This intermediate, 
 transient, and essentially unsubstantial character 
 of the Arian position was indeed made plain, in 
 theory, by the vigorous analysis to which the heresy 
 was subjected on its first appearance by St. Atha- 
 nasius, and again in the last century, when, at its 
 endeavour to make a home for itself in the Church 
 of England, in the person of Dr. Samuel Clarke, it 
 was crushed out, under God, mainly by the genius 
 and energy of the great Waterland. And _ history < 
 has verified the anticipations of argument. Arianism 
 at this day has a very shadowy, if any real, ex- 
 istence ; and the Church of Christ, holding in her 
 hands the Creed of Niceea, stands face to face with 
 sheer Humanitarianism, more or less disguised, ac- 
 cording to circumstances, by the varnish of an ad- 
 miration yielded to our Lord on esthetic or ethical 
 grounds. 
 
 III. At the risk of partial repetition, but for the 
 sake of clearness, let us here pause to make two 
 observations respecting that complete assertion of 
 the Divinity of our Lord for which His Church is 
 responsible at the bar of human opimion. 
 
 1. The Catholic doctrine, then, of Christ’s Divinity 
 in no degree interferes with or overshadows the 
 complemental truth of His Perfect Manhood. It is 
 perhaps natural that a greater emphasis should be 
 laid upon the higher truth which could be appre- 
 hended only by faith than on the lower one which, 
 
28 Reality of our Lord’s Humanity. [Lecr. 
 
 during the years of our Lord’s earthly Life, was 
 patent to the senses of men. And Holy Scripture 
 might antecedently be supposed to take for granted 
 the reality of Christ’s Manhood, on the ground of 
 there being no adequate occasion for full, precise, 
 and reiterated assertions of so obvious a fact. But 
 nothing is more remarkable in Scripture than its 
 provision for the moral and intellectual needs of 
 ages far removed from those which are traversed 
 by the books included in the Sacred Canon. . In the 
 present instance, by a series of incidental although 
 most significant statements, the Gospels guard us 
 with nothing less than an exhaustive precaution 
 against the fictions of a Docetic or of an Apollinarian 
 Christ. We are told that the Eternal Word capé 
 ἐγένετο", that He took human nature upon Him in 
 its reality and completeness*. The Gospel narrative, 
 after the pattern of His own Words in the text, 
 exhibits Jesus as the Son of Man, while yet it draws 
 us on by an irresistible attraction to contemplate 
 that Higher Nature Which was the seat of His 
 Eternal Personality. The superhuman character of 
 some most important details of the Gospel history 
 does not disturb the broad scope of that history as 
 being the record of a Human Life, with Its physical 
 and mental affinities to our own daily experience. 
 
 The Great Subject of the Gospel narratives has a 
 true human Body. He is conceived in the womb of 
 
 ἃ St. John 1. 14. Cf. Meyer in loc. for a refutation of Zeller’s 
 attempt to limit σάρξ in this passage to the bodily organism, as 
 exclusive of the anima rationalis. 
 
 ΣΧ St. John viii. 40 ; 1 Tim. ii. 5. 
 
7 Witness of Scripture to Chris?s Human Body. 29 
 
 a human Mother’. He is by her brought forth into 
 the world’; He is fed at her breast during in- 
 fancy*. As an Infant, He is made to undergo the 
 painful rite of circumcision’. He is a Babe in 
 swaddling-clothes lying in a manger®. He is nursed 
 in the arms of the aged Simeon’. His bodily 
 growth is traced up to His attaming the age of 
 twelve®, and from that point to Manhood!, His 
 presence at the marriage feast in Canag, at the 
 ereat entertainment in the house of Levi!, and at 
 the table of Simon the Pharisee!; the supper which 
 He shared at Bethany with the friend whom He had 
 raised from the grave‘, the Paschal festival which 
 He desired 580 earnestly to eat before He suffered}, 
 the bread and fish of which He partook before the 
 eyes of His disciples in the early dawn on the shore 
 of the Lake of Galilee, even after His Resurrection™, 
 are witnesses that He came, like one of ourselves, 
 
 Y συλλήψῃ ἐν γαστρὶ, St. Luke i. 31. mpd τοῦ συλληφθῆναι αὐτὸν ἐν 
 τῇ κοιλίᾳ, Ibid. ii. 21. εὐρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου, 
 St. Matt. 1. 18. τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ Πνεύματός ἐστιν Ἁγίου, 
 Ibid. i. 20 ; Isa. vii. 14. 
 
 2 St. Matt. i. 25; St. Luke 11. 7, 11; Gal. iv. 4. ἐξαπέστειλεν 
 ὁ Θεὸς τὸν Υἱὸν αὑτοῦ, γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικὸς. 
 
 a St. Luke xi. 27. μάστοι ods ἐθήλασας. 
 
 Ὁ St. Luke ii. 21. 
 
 © St. Luke ii. 12. Βρέφος ἐσπαργανωμένον, κειμένον ἐν τῇ φάτνῃ. 
 
 4 St. Luke ii. 28. καὶ αὐτὸς ἐδέξατο αὐτὸ εἰς τὰς ἀγκάλας αὑτοῦ. 
 
 6 St. Luke ii. go. τὸ δὲ παιδίον ηὔξανε. 
 
 f St. Luke ii. 52. Ἰησοῦς προέκοπτε..... ἡλικίᾳ. 
 
 & St. John ii. 2. 
 
 h St. Luke v. 29. δοχὴν μεγάλην. 
 
 i St. Luke vii. 36. k St. John xii. 2. 
 
 1 St. Luke xxii. 8, 15. 
 
 m §t. John xxi. 12, 13. 
 
90 Witness of Scripture to Christ's Human Body. [Τ|801.Ψ 
 
 “eating and drinking”.” When He is recorded to 
 have taken no food during the forty days of the 
 Temptation, this implies the contrast presented by 
 His ordinary habit®. Indeed, He seemed to the men 
 of His day much more dependent on the physical 
 supports of life than the great ascetic who had 
 preceded Him?. He knew, by experience, what are 
 the pangs of hunger, after the forty-days’ fast in 
 the wilderness‘, and in a lesser degree, as may be 
 supposed, when walking into Jerusalem on the 
 Monday before His Passion". The profound spiritual 
 sense of His Redemptive Cry, “I thirst,” uttered while 
 He was hanging on the Cross, 15 not obscured, when 
 its primary literal meaning, that He actually endured 
 when dying that wellnigh sharpest form of bodily 
 suffering, is explicitly recognised’. His deep sleep 
 on the Sea of Galilee in a little bark which the 
 waves threatened momentarily to engulf* and His 
 sitting down at the well of Jacob, through sheer 
 exhaustion produced by a long journey on foot from 
 Judea", prove that He was subject at times to the 
 depression of extreme fatigue. And, not to dwell 
 at length upon those particular references to the 
 several parts of His Bodily Frame which occur in 
 
 n St. Luke vii. 34. ἐλήλυθεν 6 Υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐσθίων καὶ 
 πίνων. 
 
 © St. Luke iv. 2. οὐκ ἔφαγεν οὐδὲν ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις. 
 
 P St. Luke vii. 34. ἰδοὺ, ἄνθρωπος φάγος καὶ οἰνοπότης. 
 
 4 St. Matt. iv. 2. ὕστερον ἐπείνασε. 
 
 ' St. Matt. xxi. 18. ἐπανάγων εἰς τὴν πόλιν, ἐπείνασε. 
 
 § St. John xix. 28. διψῶ. 
 
 t St. Matt. viii. 24. αὐτὸς δὲ ἐκάθευδε. 
 
 u St. John iv, 6. ὁ οὖν ᾿Ιησοῦς κεκοπιακὼς ἐκ τῆς ὁδοιπορίας ἐκαθέζετο 
 οὕτως ἐπὶ τῇ πηγῇ. 
 
1] Witness of Scripture to Chris?s Human Soul. 31 
 
 Holy Scripture*, it is obvious to note that the evan- 
 gelical account of His physical suffermgs and His 
 Death’, of His Burial?, and of the Wounds in His 
 Hands and Feet and Side after His Resurrection?, 
 are so many emphatic attestations to the fact of 
 His true and full participation in the material side 
 of our common nature. 
 
 Equally explicit and vivid is the witness which 
 Scripture affords to the true Human Soul of our 
 Blessed Lord’. Its general movements are not less 
 spontaneous, nor do Its affections flow less freely, be- 
 cause no sinful impulse finds a place in It, and each 
 pulse of Its moral and mental Life is in conscious 
 harmony with, and subjection to, an all-holy Will. 
 Jesus rejoices in spirit on hearing of the spread of the 
 kingdom of heaven among the simple and the poor®: 
 
 - X τὴν κεφαλὴν, St. Luke vii. 46; St. Matt. xxvii. 29, 30 ; St. John 
 xix. 30 ; τοὺς πόδας, St. Luke vii. 38 ; τὰς χεῖρας, St. Luke xxiv. 40 ; 
 τῷ δακτύλῳ, St. John viii. 6 ; τὰ σκέλη, St. John xix. 33 5 τὰ γόνατα, 
 St. Luke xxii. 41 ; τὴν πλευρὰν, St. John xix. 34 ; τὸ σῶμα, St. Luke 
 XXxll. 19, ὅσ. 
 
 y St. Luke xxii. 44, &c. ; xxiii. ; St. Matt. xxvi., xxvii. ; St. Mark 
 RIV. 22; deq.5° Ky: 
 
 2 St. John xix. 39, 40. ἔλαβον οὖν τὸ σῶμα τοῦ Ἰησοῦ καὶ ἔδησαν 
 αὐτὸ ὀθονίοις μετὰ τῶν ἀρωμάτων ; cf. ver. 42. 
 
 ἃ §t. John xx. 27 ; St. Luke xxiv. 39. ἴδετε τὰς χεῖράς μου καὶ 
 τοὺς πόδας μου, ὅτι αὐτὸς ἐγώ εἰμι’ ψηλαφήσατέ pe καὶ ἴδετε. ὅτι πνεῦμα 
 σάρκα καὶ ὀστέα οὐκ ἔχει καθὼς ἐμὲ θεωρεῖτε ἔχοντα. 
 
 b 1 St. Pet. 111. 18. θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκὶ, ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι 
 ἐν ᾧ καὶ τοῖς ἐν φυλακῇ πνεύμασιν πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν. The τῷ before 
 πνεύματι in the Textus Receptus being only an insertion by a 
 copyist, πνεῦμα here means our Lord’s human Soul. No other 
 passage in the New Testament places It in more vivid contrast 
 with His Body. 
 
 ¢ St. Luke x. 21. ἠγαλλιάσατο τῷ πνεύματι. 
 
32 Witness of Scripture to Christ's Human Soul. — [Lxcr. 
 
 Hee beholds the young ruler, and forthwith loves 
 him. He loves Martha and her sister and Lazarus 
 with a common yet, as seems to be implied, with 
 a discriminating affection. His Eye on one occasion 
 betrays a sudden movement of deliberate anger at 
 the hardness of heart which could steel itself against 
 truth by maintaining a dogged silence’. The scattered 
 and fainting multitude melts Him to compassion? : 
 He sheds tears of sorrow at the grave of Lazarus}, 
 and at the sight of the city which had rejected His 
 Love®. In contemplating His approaching Passion! 
 and the ingratitude of the traitor-Apostle™ His Soul 
 is shaken by a vehement agitation which He does 
 not conceal from His disciples. In the garden of 
 Gethsemane He wills to enter into an agony of 
 amazement and dejection. His mental sufferings are 
 so keen and piercing that His Bodily Frame gives 
 way beneath the trial, and He sheds His Blood before 
 they nail Him to the Cross". His Human Will con- 
 
 e St. Mark x. 21. ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἐμβλέψας αὐτῷ ἠγάπησεν αὐτὸν. 
 
 f St. John xi. 5. 
 
 5. St. Mark ili. 5. περιβλεψάμενος αὐτοὺς per’ ὀργῆς, συλλυπούμενος 
 ἐπὶ τῇ πωρώσει τῆς καρδίας αὐτῶν. 
 
 b St. Matt. ix. 36. ἐσπλαγχνίσθη περὶ αὐτῶν. 
 
 i St. John. xi. 33-5. Ἰησοῦς οὖν ὡς εἶδεν αὐτὴν κλαίουσαν καὶ τοὺς 
 συνελθόντας αὐτῇ ᾿Ιουδαίους κλαίοντας, ἐνεβριμήσατο τῷ πνεύματι, καὶ ἐτάραξεν 
 ἑαυτὸν... .. ᾿Ἔδάκρυσεν ὁ ᾿Ιησοῦς. 
 
 K St. Luke xix. 41. Ἰδὼν τὴν πόλιν, ἔκλαυσεν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῇ. 
 
 ! St. John xii. 27. νῦν ἡ ψυχή μου τετάρακται. 
 
 m St. John xiii. 21. 6 Ἰησοῦς ἐταράχθη τῷ πνεύματι καὶ ἐμαρτύ- 
 
 ρῆσε. 
 " n St. Mark xiv. 33. ἤρξατο ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι καὶ adnpoveiv, καὶ λέγει 
 αὐτοῖς, Περίλυπός ἐστιν ἣ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου. St. Luke xxii. 44. 
 γενόμενος ἐν ἀγωνίᾳ ἐκτενέστερον προσηύχετο, ἐγένετο δὲ ὁ ἱδρῶς αὐτοῦ 
 ὡσεὶ θρόμβοι αἵματος καταβαίνοντες ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν. Cf. Heb. v. 7. 
 
Τη Witness of Scripture to Chris?s Human Sout. 33 
 
 sciously submits Itself to a Higher Will®, and He 
 learns obedience by the discipline of paim?. He 
 carries His dependence still further, He is habitually 
 subject to His parents’; He recognizes the fiscal 
 regulations of a pagan state™; He places Himself 
 in the hands of His enemies’ ; He is crucified through 
 weakness’, His human Intelligence, although flooded 
 by Intellectual Light which comprehends all the 
 treasures of wisdom and knowledge’, is nevertheless 
 the scene of a gradual increase in such wisdom as 
 depends on experience*. Conformably with these 
 representations, we find Him as Man expressing 
 creaturely dependence upon God by prayer. He 
 rises up a great while before day at Capernaum, 
 and departs into a solitary place, that He may pass 
 the hours in uninterrupted devotion’. He offers to 
 Heaven strong crying with tears in Gethsemane? ; 
 He intercedes majestically for His whole Redeemed 
 Church in the Paschal supper-room*; He entreats 
 pardon for His Jewish and Gentile murderers at 
 
 ο St. Luke xxii. 42. μὴ το θέλημά pov, ἀλλὰ τὸ σὸν γενέσθω. 
 
 P Heb. ν. 8. ἔμαθεν ἀφ᾽ ὧν ἔπαθε τὴν ὑπακοήν. 
 
 4 St. Luke ii. 51. ἦν ὑποτασσόμενος αὐτοῖς. 
 
 r St. Matt. xxii. 21. For our Lord’s payment of the temple 
 tribute, ef. Ibid. xvii. 25, 27. 
 
 5. St. Matt. xvii. 22; St. John x. 18. οὐδεὶς αἴρει αὐτὴν [se. τὴν 
 ψυχήν μου] ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλ᾽ ἐγὼ τίθημι αὐτὴν ἀπ᾽ ἐμαυτοῦ. 
 
 t 2 Cor. xill. 4. ἐσταυρώθη ἐξ ἀσθενείας. 
 
 u Col. ii. 3. ἐν ᾧ εἰσι πάντες οἱ θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας καὶ τῆς γνώσεως 
 ἀπόκρυφοι. 
 
 x St. Luke ii. 40. ἐκραταιοῦτο πνεύματι : ver. 52. προέκοπτε σοφίᾳ ; 
 see Lect. VIII. y St. Mark i. 35. 
 
 2 Heb. v. 7. ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῆς σαρκὸς αὑτοῦ, δεήσεις τε καὶ ἱκετηρίας 
 νιον μετὰ κραυγῆς ἰσχυρᾶς καὶ δακρύων προσενέγκας. 
 
 @ St. John xvii, 1. ἐπῆρε τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὑτοῦ εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν, καὶ εἶπε. 
 
 D 
 
94 Special Prerogatives of Christ's Manhood [ Lect. 
 
 the very moment of His Crucifixion®; He resigns 
 His departing Spirit into His Father’s Hands°¢. 
 
 Thus, as one Apostle teaches, He took a Body of 
 Flesh", and His whole Humanity both of Soul and 
 Body shared in the sinless infirmities which belong 
 to our common nature®. ΤῸ deny this fundamental 
 truth, “that Jesus Christ is come in the Flesh,” is, 
 in the judgment of another Apostle, the mark of the 
 Deceiver, of the Antichristf. Nor do the Prero- 
 gatives of our Lord’s Manhood destroy Its perfection 
 and reality, although they do undoubtedly invest 
 It with a robe of mystery, which Faith must ac- 
 knowledge but which she cannot hope to penetrate. 
 Christ’s Manhood is not unreal because It is im- 
 personal ; because in Him the place of any created 
 individuality at the root of Thought and Feeling 
 and Will is supplied by the Person of the Eternal 
 Word, Who has wrapped around His Being a Created 
 Nature through Which, in Its unmutilated perfec- 
 tion, He acts upon human kind’. Christ's Manhood 
 
 Ὁ St. Luke xxiii. 34. πάτερ, ἄφες αὐτοῖς" οὐ yap οἴδασι τί ποιοῦσι. 
 That this prayer referred to the Jews, as well as the Roman soldiers, 
 is clear from Acts 111. 17. ο St. Luke xxiii. 46. 
 
 4 Col. i. 22. σώματι τῆς σαρκός. 
 
 © Heb, i. 1τ. 6 τε γὰρ ἀγιάζων καὶ οἱ ἀγιαζόμενοι ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντες--- 
 ver. 14. μετέσχε σαρκός καὶ αἵματος----6 Υ. 1. ὥφειλε κατὰ πάντα τοῖς 
 ἀδελφοῖς ὁμοιωθῆνα. Heb. iv. 15. πεπειρασμένον δὲ κατὰ πάντα κάθ᾽ 
 ὁμοιότητα. 
 
 ἔα St. John iv. 2. πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ ὁμολογεῖ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ 
 ἐληλυθότα, ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστι. 2 St. John 7. πολλοὶ πλάνοι εἰσῆλθον εἰς τὸν 
 κόσμον, οἱ μὴ ὁμολογοῦντες ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐρχόμενον ἐν σαρκί" οὗτος ἐστιν 
 ὁ πλάνος καὶ ὁ ᾿Αντίχριστος. 
 
 5. The ἀνυποστασία of our Lord’s Humanity is a result of the 
 Hypostatic Union. To deny it is to assert that there are Two 
 Persons in Christ, or else it is to deny that He is more than 
 
1] do not destroy Its reality. 35 
 
 is not unreal, because It is Sinless; because the entail 
 of any taint of transmitted sin is in Him cut off by a 
 supernatural birth of a Virgin Mother ; and because 
 His whole life of Thought, Feeling, Will, and Action 
 is in unfaltering harmony with the Law of Absolute 
 Truth», Nor is the reality of His Manhood impaired 
 by any exceptional beauty whether of outward form 
 or of mental endowment, such as might become One 
 “fairer than the children of meni,” and taking prece- 
 dence of them in all things*; since in Him our nature 
 does but resume its true and typical excellence as 
 the crowning glory of the visible creation of God|. 
 
 Man. Compare Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 52. 3, who appeals against 
 Nestorius to Heb. ii. 16, οὐ yap δήπου ἀγγέλων ἐπιλαμβάνεται, ἀλλὰ 
 σπέρματος Ἀβραὰμ ἐπιλαμβάνετα. At His Incarnation the Eternal 
 Word took on Him Human Nature, not a Human Personality. 
 Luther appears to have denied the Impersonality of our Lord’s 
 Manhood. But see Dorner, Person Christi, Bd. 11. p. 540. 
 
 h The Sinlessness of our Lord’s Manhood is implied in St. Luke 
 i. 35. Thus He is ὃν ὁ Πατὴρ ἡγίασε καὶ ἀπέστειλεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον, 
 St. John x. 36; and He could challenge His enemies to convict 
 Him of sin, St. John viii. 46. In St. Mark x. 18, St. Luke xviii. 
 19, He is not denying that He is good ; but He insists that none 
 should call Him so who did not believe Him to be God. St. Paul 
 describes Him as τὸν μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν, 2 Cor. v. 21; and Christ 
 is expressly said to be χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας, Heb. iv. 15 ; ὅσιος, ἄκακος, 
 ἀμίαντος, κεχωρισμένος ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν, Heb. vii. 26; ἀμνὸς ἄμωμος 
 καὶ ἄσπιλος, τ St. Pet. i. το ; ὁ ἅγιος καὶ δίκαιος, Acts iii. 14. Still 
 more emphatically we are told that ἁμαρτία ἐν αὐτῷ οὐκ ἔστι, τ St. John 
 iii. 5; while the same truth is indirectly taught, when St. Paul 
 speaks of our Lord as sent ἐν ὁμοιώματε σαρκὸς ἁμαρτίας, Rom. viii. 3. 
 Mr. F. W. Newman does justice to the significance of a Sinless 
 Manhood, although, unhappily, he disbelieves in It; Phases of 
 Faith, p. 141, sqq. 
 
 ΠΝ ΒΑ Εν. 5 ὦ; k Col. i. 18. ἐν πᾶσι πρωτεύων. 
 
 1 Psalm viii. 6-8. Compare Heb. ii. 6—10. 
 
 D2 
 
90 Witness of the Church [Lecr. 
 
 This reality and perfection of our Lord’s Manhood 
 has been not less jealously maintained by the Church 
 than it is clearly asserted in the pages of Scripture. 
 From the first the Church has taught that Jesus 
 Christ is “Perfect Man, of a reasonable Soul and 
 Human Flesh subsisting™.” It is sometimes hinted 
 that believers in our Saviour’s Godhead must neces- 
 sarily entertain a sort of pique against those pas- 
 sages of Scripture which expressly assert the truth 
 of His Manhood. It is presumed that such passages 
 must be regarded by them as so many difficulties 
 to be surmounted or evaded by a theory which is 
 supposed to be conscious of their hostility to itself. 
 Whereas, in truth, to a Catholic instinct, each de- 
 claration of Scripture, whatever be its apparent 
 bearing, is welcome as being an unveiling of the 
 Mind of God, and therefore as certainly reconcileable 
 with other sides of truth, whether or no the method 
 of such reconciliation be immediately obvious. As 
 a matter of fact, our Lord’s Humanity has been 
 insisted upon by the great Church teachers of an- 
 tiquity not less earnestly than His Godhead. They 
 habitually argue that it belonged to His essential 
 Truth to be in reality what He seemed to be. He 
 seemed to be human; therefore He was Human®. 
 
 m Ath. Creed. 
 
 n St. Irenzeus, Ady. Heer. v. τ. 2: εἰ δὲ μὴ dv ἄνθρωπος ἐφαίνετο ἄνθρω- 
 πος, οὔτε ὃ ἦν ἐπ᾽ ἀληθείας, ἔμεινε πνεῦμα Θεοῦ, ἐπεὶ ἀόρατον τὸ πνεῦμα, οὔτε 
 ἀληθεία τις ἦν ἐν αὐτῷ, οὐ γὰρ ἦν ἐκεῖνα ἅπερ ἐφαίνετο. Tert. De Carne . 
 Christi, cap. 5 : “Si caro cum passionibus ficta, et spiritus ergo cum 
 virtutibus falsus. Quid dimidias mendacio Christum? Totus Veritas 
 est. Maluit crede [non] nasci quam ex aliqua parte mentiri, et 
 quidem in Semet ipsum, ut carnem gestaret sine ossibus duram, sine 
 musculis solidam, sine sanguine cruentam, sine tunic4 vestitam, sine 
 
I.] to our Lord’s True Manhood. 37 
 
 Yet His Manhood, so they proceed to maintain, 
 would have been fictitious, if any one faculty or ele- 
 ment of human nature had been wanting to It. There- 
 fore His Reasonable Soul was as essential as His 
 Bodily Frame®. Without a Reasonable Soul His 
 Humanity would have been but an animal exist- 
 enceP; and the intellectual side of man’s nature 
 would have been unredeemed4. Nor did the Church 
 in her collective capacity ever so insist on Christ’s 
 Godhead as to lose sight of the truth of His Perfect 
 Manhood. Whether by the silent force of the belief 
 of her children, or by her representative writers on 
 behalf of the faith, or by the formal decisions of her 
 councils, she has ever resisted the disposition to 
 sacrifice the confession of Christ’s created nature to 
 that of His uncreated Godhead". She kept at bay 
 
 fame esurientem, sine dentibus edentem, sine lingua loquentem, ut 
 phantasma auribus fuit sermo ejus per imaginem vocis.” St. Aug. 
 De Div. Qu. 83. qu. 14: “Si phantasma fuit corpus Christi, fefellit 
 Christus, et si fefellit, Veritas non est. Est autem Veritas Christus. 
 Non ergo phantasma fuit Corpus Ejus.” Docetism struck at the 
 very basis of truth, by sanctioning Pyrrhonism. St. Iren. Adv. Heer. 
 ἵν: 32: 
 
 ο St. Aug. Ep. 187, ad Dardan. n. 4: “ Non est Homo Perfectus, 
 si vel anima carni, vel anime ipsi mens humana defuerit.” 
 
 p St. Aug. De Div. Qu. 83, qu. 80. n. 1. 
 
 a St. Cyr. Alex. De Inc. 6. 15. 
 
 t It may suffice to quote the language of the Council of 
 Chalcedon, A.D. 451: τέλειον ἐν Θεότητι καὶ τέλειον τὸν αὐτὸν ἐν ἀνθρω- 
 πότητι, Θεὸν ἀληθῶς καὶ ἄνθρωπον ἀληθῶς, τὸν αὐτὸν ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς καὶ 
 σώματος, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρὶ κατὰ τὴν Θεότητα καὶ ὁμοούσιον τὸν αὐτὸν 
 ἡμῖν κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα, κατὰ πάντα ὅμοιον ἡμῖν χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας. When 
 these words were spoken, the cycle of possible controversy on the 
 subject was complete, and the Church had fully sounded the depths 
 of her illuminated consciousness. The Monothelite question had 
 really been settled by anticipation. 
 
98 Bearing of this truth on the spiritual life. [ Lect. 
 
 intellectual temptations and impulses which might 
 have easily overmastered the mind of a merely 
 human society. When Ebionites were abroad, she 
 maintained against the Docetz that our Saviour’s 
 Body was not fictitious or apparitional. When the 
 mutterings of that Humanitarian movement which 
 culminated in the great scandal of Paulus of Samosata 
 were distinctly audible, she asserted the truth of our 
 Lord’s Human Soul against Beryllus of Bostra’. 
 When Arianism had not as yet ceased to be formid- 
 able, she was not tempted by Apollinaris to admit 
 that the Logos in Christ took the place of the ra- 
 tional element in man. While Nestorianism was still 
 powerful, she condemned the Monophysite formula 
 which practically made Christ an unincarnate God : 
 nor did she rest until the Monothelite echo of the 
 more signal error had been silenced by her assertion 
 of the reality of His Human Will. 
 
 Nor is the Manhood of our Saviour prized by the 
 Church only as a revealed dogma intellectually es- 
 sential to the formal integrity of the Creed. Every 
 believing Christian knows that It touches the very 
 heart of his inner life. What becomes of the one 
 Mediator between God and man, if the Manhood 
 whereby He places Himself in contact with us men is 
 but unreal and fictitious? What becomes of His 
 Human Example, of His genuine Sympathy, of His 
 agonizing and world-redeeming Death, of His plenary 
 representation of our race in heaven, of the recrea- 
 tive virtue of His Sacraments, of the ‘touch of nature’ 
 which makes Him, most holy as He is, in very deed 
 kin with us? All is forthwith uncertain, evanescent, 
 
 5. ἔμψυχον εἶναι τὸν ἐνανθρωπήσαντα. Syn. Bost. anno 244. 
 
je Jesus Christ is God in no equivocal sense. 39 
 
 unreal. If Christ be not truly Man, the chasm which 
 parted earth and heaven has not been bridged over. 
 God, as before the Incarnation, is still awful, re- 
 mote, inaccessible. Tertullian’s inference is no exag- 
 geration: “ Cum mendacium deprehenditur Christi 
 Caro,... omnia quee per Carnem Christi gesta sunt, 
 mendacio gesta sunt. .... Eversum est totum Dei 
 opus.” Or, as St. Cyril of Jerusalem presses the 
 solemn argument still more closely : εἰ φάντασμα ἣν ἡ 
 ἐνανθρώπησις, φάντασμα καὶ ἡ σωτηρίαἁ, 
 
 2. Let it be observed, on the other hand, that 
 the Nicene assertion of our Blessed Lord’s Divinity 
 does not involve any tacit mutilation or degradation 
 of the idea conveyed by the Sacred Name of God. 
 When Jesus Christ is said by His Church to be God, , 
 that word is used in its natural, its absolute, its 
 incommunicable sense. This must be constantly 
 borne in mind, if we would escape from equivoca- 
 tions which might again and again obscure the true 
 point before us. For Arianism will confess Christ’s 
 Divinity, if, when it terms Him God, it may really 
 mean that He is only a being of an inferior and 
 created nature. Socinianism will confess Christ’s 
 Divinity, if this confession involves nothing more 
 emphatic than an acknowledgment of the fact that 
 certain moral features of God’s character shone forth 
 from the Human Life of Christ with an absolutely 
 unrivalled splendour. Pantheism will confess Christ's 
 Divinity, but then it is a Divinity which He must 
 share with the universe. Christ may well be divine, 
 when all is divine, although Pantheism too may 
 admit that Christ is divine in a higher sense than 
 
 t Ady. Mare. iii. 8. u Catech. iv. 9. 
 
40 Christ is not God as being [Lect. 
 
 any other man, because He has more clearly recog- 
 nised or exhibited “the eternal oneness of the finite 
 and the Infinite, of God and humanity.” The 
 coarsest forms of unbelief will confess our Lord’s 
 Divinity, if they may proceed to add, by way of 
 ~ explanation, that such language is but the echo 
 of an apotheosis, informally decreed to the Prophet 
 of Nazareth by the fervid but uncritical enthusiasm 
 of His Church. 
 
 No: the Divinity of Jesus Christ is not to be thus 
 emptied of its most solemn and true significance. 
 It is no mere titular distinction, such as the hollow 
 or unthinking flattery of a multitude might yield 
 to a political chief, or to a distinguished philanthro- 
 pist. Indeed Jesus Christ Himself, by His own 
 teaching, had made such an apotheosis of Himself 
 morally impossible. He had, as no teacher before 
 Him, raised, expanded, spiritualized man’s idea of 
 the Life and Nature of the Great Creator. Baur 
 has remarked that this higher exhibition of the Soli- 
 tary and Incommunicable Life of God is nowhere 
 so apparent as in that very Gospel the special object 
 of which is to exhibit Christ Himself as the Eternal 
 Word made Flesh*. Indeed God was too vividly 
 felt as a Living Presence in the early Christian con- 
 sciousness, to be transformed by it upon occasion into 
 a decoration which might wreath the brow of any, 
 though it were the highest human virtue. In Hea- 
 thendom this was naturally otherwise. Yet animal 
 indulgence and intellectual scepticism must have 
 killed out the sense of primary truths which nature 
 and conscience had originally taught, before imperial 
 
 x Vorlesungen iiber N. T. Theologie, p. 354. 
 
Τὴ the subject of an Apotheosis. 41 
 
 Rome could feel no difficulty in decreeing temples 
 and altars to such samples of our race as were not 
 a few of the men who successively filled the throne 
 of the Cesars’y. The Church, with her eye upon 
 the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible’, could never 
 have raised Jesus to the full honours of Divinity, 
 had He been merely Man. And Christianity from 
 the first has proclaimed herself, not the authoress 
 of an apotheosis, but the child and the product of 
 an Incarnation. 
 
 She could not have been both. Speaking histo- 
 rically, an apotheosis belongs strictly to the Greek 
 world; while a mimicry of the Incarnation is charac- 
 teristically oriental. Speaking philosophically, the 
 god of an apotheosis is a creation of human thought or 
 of human fancy ; the God of an incarnation is presup- 
 posed as an objectively existing Being, Who manifests 
 Himself by it in the sphere of sense. Speaking 
 religiously, belief in an apotheosis must be fatal to 
 the primary movements of piety towards its object, 
 whenever men are capable of earnest and honest 
 
 y On this subject see Déllinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, 
 bk. vill. pt. 2. ὃ 2 (apotheosis). The city of Cyzicus was deprived of 
 its freedom for being unwilling to worship Augustus (Tac. Ann. iy. 
 36). Thrasea Petus was held guilty of treason for refusing to 
 believe in the deification of Poppzea (Tac. Ann. xvi. 22). Caligula 
 insisted on being worshipped as a god during his life-time (Sue- 
 tonius, Caius, 21. 22). On the number of cattle sacrificed to 
 Domitian, see Pliny, Panegyr. 11. The worship of Autinous, who 
 had lived on terms of criminal intercourse with Hadrian, was ear- 
 nestly promoted by that Emperor. Déllinger reckons fifty-three 
 apotheoses between that of Cesar and that of Diocletian, fifteen of 
 which were those of ladies belonging to the Imperial family. 
 
 z x Tim, i. 17. 
 
42 Christ is not God [ Lect. 
 
 reflection ; while it is incontestible that the doctrine 
 of an incarnation stimulates piety in a degree pre- 
 cisely proportioned to the sincerity of the faith which 
 welcomes it. Thus the ideas of an apotheosis and 
 an incarnation stand towards each other in histori- 
 cal, philosophical, and religious contrast. Need I 
 add that religiously, philosophically, and historically, 
 Christianity is linked to the one, and is simply in- 
 compatible with the other 4 
 
 No: the Divinity of Jesus is not such divinity as 
 Pantheism might ascribe to Him. In the belief of 
 the Church Jesus stands Alone among the sons of 
 men as He of Whom it can be said without impiety, 
 that He is not merely divine, but God. Such a re- 
 striction in favour of a Single Personality, contra- 
 dicts the very vital principle of Pantheistic thought. 
 Schelling appropriately contends that the Indians 
 with their many incarnations shew more intelligence 
 respecting the real relations of God and the world 
 than is implied by the doctrine of a solitary incarna- 
 tion, as taught in the Creed of Christendom. Upon 
 Pantheistic grounds, this is perfectly reasonable ; 
 although it might be added that any limited number 
 of incarnations, however considerable, would only ap- 
 proximate to the real demands of the theory which 
 teaches that God is incarnate in everything. But 
 then, such divinity as Pantheism can ascribe to 
 Christ is, in point of fact, no divinity at all. When 
 God is nature, and nature is God, everything indeed is 
 divine, but also nothing is Divine ; and Christ shares 
 this phantom-divinity with the universe, nay with 
 the agencies of moral evil itself. In truth, our 
 God does not exist in the apprehension of Pantheistic 
 
17 in the sense of Pantheism. 49 
 
 thinkers ; since, when such truths as creation and 
 personality are denied, the very idea of God is 
 fundamentally sapped, and although the prevailing 
 belief of mankind may still be humoured by a dis- 
 creet retention of its conventional language, the 
 broad practical result is in reality neither more nor 
 less than Atheism. 
 
 You may indeed remind me of an ingenious dis- 
 tinction, by which it is suggested that the idea of 
 God is not thus sacrificed m Pantheistic systems, and 
 on the ground that although God and the universe 
 are substantially identical, they are not logically so. 
 Logically speaking, then, you proceed to distinguish 
 between God and the universe. You look out upon 
 the universe, and you arrive at the idea of God by 
 a double process, by a process of abstraction, and by 
 a process of synthesis. In the visible world you 
 come into sensible contact ‘with the finite, the contin- 
 gent, the relative, the imperfect, the individual. Then, 
 by a necessary operation of your reason, you dis- 
 engage from these ideas their correlatives ; you 
 ascend to a contemplation of infinity, of necessity, of 
 the absolute, the perfect, the universal. Here your 
 abstraction has done its work, and synthesis begins. 
 By synthesis you combine the general ideas which 
 have been previously reached through abstraction. 
 These general ideas are made to converge in your 
 brain under the presidency of one central and uni- 
 fying idea, which you call God. You are careful to 
 insist that this god is not a real but an ideal being ; 
 indeed it appears that he is so ideal, that he would 
 cease to be god if he could be supposed to become 
 real. God, you say, is the ‘Idea’ of the universe ; 
 
44. Christ is not God [Lxct. 
 
 the universe is the ‘realization’ of God. The god 
 who is enthroned in your thought must have aban- 
 doned all contact with reality ; let him re-enter but 
 for a moment upon the domain of reality, and, 
 such are the exigencies of your doctrine, that he 
 must forthwith be compelled to abdicate his throne*. 
 But meanwhile, as you contend, he is logically dis- 
 tinct from the universe ; and you repel with some 
 warmth the orthodox allegation, that to identify 
 him substantially with the universe, amounts to a 
 practical denial of his existence. 
 
 Yet after all, let us ask what is really gained by 
 thus distinguishing between a logical and a sub- 
 stantial identity? What is this god, who is to be 
 thus rescued from the religious ruins which mark 
 the track of Pantheistic thought? Is he, by the 
 terms of your own distinction, anything more than 
 an ‘Idea ; and must he not vary in point of perfec- 
 tion with the accuracy and exhaustiveness of those 
 processes of abstraction and synthesis by which you 
 undertake to construct him? And if this be so, is 
 it worth our while to discuss the question whether or 
 not so precarious an ‘Idea’ was or was not incarnate 
 in Jesus Christ? Upon the terms of the theory, 
 would not an incarnation of God be fatal to His 
 ‘logical, that is to His only admitted mode of ex- 
 istence 4 or would such divinity, if we could ascribe 
 it to Jesus Christ, be anything higher than the 
 fleeting and more or less imperfect speculation of 
 a finite brain ? 
 
 Certainly Pantheism would never have attained 
 
 a Cf. M. Caro’s notice of Vacherot’s La Metaphysique et la 
 Science, Idée de Dieu, p. 265, sqq. ; especially p. 289, sqq. 
 
1: in the sense of Pantheism. 45 
 
 to so strong a position as that which it actually holds 
 in European as well as Asiatic thought, unless it 
 had embodied a great element of truth, which is too 
 often ignored by some arid Theistic systems. To that 
 element of truth we Christians do justice when we 
 confess the Omnipresence and Incomprehensibility 
 of God; and still more, when we trace the gracious 
 consequences of His actual Incarnation in Jesus 
 Christ. But we Christians know also that the Great 
 Creator is essentially distinct from the work of His 
 Hands, and that He is What He is, in utter inde- 
 pendence of the feeble thought whereby He enables 
 us to apprehend His Existence. We know that all 
 which is not Himself, is upheld in being from 
 moment to moment by the fiat of His Almighty 
 Will. We know that His Existence is, strictly and 
 in the highest sense, Personal. Could we deny these 
 truths, it would be as easy to confess the Divinity 
 of Christ, as it would be impossible to deny the 
 divinity of any created being. If we are asked to 
 believe in an impersonal God, who has no real exist- 
 ence apart from creation or from created thought, 
 in order that we may experience fewer philosophical 
 difficulties in acknowledging our Lord’s Divinity, we 
 reply that our faith cannot consent thus “ propter 
 vitam vivendi perdere causas.” We cannot thus 
 sacrifice the substance of the first truth of the Creed 
 that we may retain the phraseology of the second. 
 We dare not thus degrade, or rather annihilate, the 
 very idea of God, even for the sake of securing a 
 semblance (more it could not be) of those precious 
 consolations which the Christian heart seeks and 
 finds at the Manger of the Divine Child in Beth- 
 
40 Christ is not merely divine [Lecr. 
 
 lehem, or before the Cross of the Lord of Glory on 
 Mount Calvary. 
 
 No: the Divinity of Jesus is not divinity in the 
 sense of Socinianism. It is no mere manifestation 
 whether of the highest human goodness, or of the 
 noblest of divine gifts. It is not merely a divine 
 presence vouchsafed to the soul; it 1s not merely 
 an intercommunion of the soul and God, albeit main- 
 tained even ceaselessly —maintained in its fulness from 
 moment to moment. Such indeed was the high grace 
 of our Lord’s Smless Humanity, but that grace was 
 not itself His Divinity ; for a work. of grace, however 
 beautiful and perfect, is one thing; an Uncreated 
 Divine Essence is another. In the Socinian sense 
 of the term, you all, my Christian brethren, are, 
 or may be, divine ; you may shew forth God’s moral 
 glory, if less fully, yet not less truly, than did Jesus. 
 By adoption, you too are sons of God; and the 
 Church teaches that each of you was made a par- 
 » taker of the Divine Nature at his baptism. But 
 suppose that neither by act nor word, nor thought, 
 you have done aught to forfeit that blessed gift, do 
 I forthwith proceed to profess my belief in your 
 divinity? And why not? Is it not because I may 
 not thus risk a perilous confusion of thought, issuing 
 in a degradation of the Most Holy Name? Your 
 life of grace is as much a gift as your natural life ; 
 but however glorious may be the gift, aye, though 
 it raise you from the dust to the very steps of God’s 
 Throne, the gift is a free gift after all, and its great- 
 ness does but suggest the interval which parts the 
 
 recipient from the inexhaustible and boundless Life 
 of the Giver. 
 
Τη in the Socinian sense. “47 
 
 Most true indeed it is that the perfect holiness 
 which shone forth from our Lord’s Human Life, has 
 led thousands of souls to perceive the truth of His 
 essential Godhead. When once it is seen that His 
 Moral Greatness is really unique, it is natural to seek 
 and to accept as a basis of this greatness, His pos- 
 session of a unique Relationship to the Fountain of 
 all goodness’. Thus the Sermon on the Mount leads 
 us naturally on to those discourses in St. John’s Gospel 
 in which Christ unveils His Essential Oneness with 
 the Father. But the ethical premise is not to be 
 
 Ὁ “ Je mehr sich so dem erkennenden Glauben die Ueberzeugung 
 von der Einzigkeit der sittlichen Hoheit Christi erschliesst, desto 
 natiirlicher ja nothwendiger muss es nun auch von diesem festen 
 Punkte aus demselben Glauben werden, mit Verstiindniss Christo 
 in das Gebiet Seiner Reden zu folgen, wo Er Seiner eigenthiimlichen 
 und einzigen Beziehung zu dem Vater gedenkt. Jesu Heiligkeit 
 und Weisheit, durch die Er unter den siindigen, vielirrenden 
 Menschen einzig dasteht, weiset so, da sie nicht kann noch will als 
 rein subjectives, menschliches Produkt angesehen werden, auf einen 
 dibernatiirlichen Ursprung Seiner Person. Diese muss, um in- 
 initten der Siinderwelt begreiflich zu sein, aus einer eigenthiimlichen 
 und wunderbar schépferischen That Gottes abgeleitet, ja es muss 
 in Christus, wenn doch Gott nicht deistisch von der Welt getrennt 
 sondern in Liebe ihr nahe und wesentlich als Liebe zu denken ist, 
 von Gott aus betrachtet eine Incarnation gittlicher Liebe, a/so 
 gittlichen Wesens gesehen werden, was Ihn als den Punkt erscheinen 
 lisst, wo Gott und die Menscheit einzig und innigst geeinigt sind. 
 Freilich, man lisst sich in diesem Stiicke noch so oft durch einen 
 abstracten, subjectiven Moralismus irre machen, der die Tiefe des 
 Ethischen nicht erfasst. Aber wer tiefer blickend auf von einer 
 ontologischen und metaphysischen Bedeutung des Ethischen weiss, 
 dem muss die Einzigkeit der Heiligkeit und Liebe Christi ihren 
 Grund in einer Einzigheit auch Seines Wesens haben, diese aber 
 in Gottes Sich mittheilender, offenbarender Liebe.” (Dorner, 
 Person Christi, Bad. ii. pp. 1211, 1212.) 
 
48 Christ is not the ‘inferior God? of Arianism.  [Luct. 
 
 confused with the ontological conclusion. It is true 
 that a boundless love of man shone forth from the 
 Life of Christ ; it is true that each of the Divine 
 attributes is commensurate with the Divine Essence. 
 It is true that “he that dwelleth in love dwelleth 
 in God, and God in him.” But it is not true that 
 every moral bemg which God blesses by His Presence 
 is God. The Divine Presence, as vouchsafed to Chris- 
 tian men, is a gift superadded to and distinct from the 
 created personality to which it is accorded: there was 
 a time when it had not been given, and a time may 
 come when it will be withdrawn. Such a Presence 
 may indeed in a certain secondary sense ‘ divinize’ a 
 created person®, robing him with so much of moral 
 beauty and force of deity as a creature can bear. But 
 this blessed gift does not justify us in treating the 
 creature to whom it is vouchsafed as the Infinite and 
 Eternal God. When Socinianism deliberately names 
 God, it means equally with ourselves, not merely a 
 Perfect Moral Being, not merely Perfect Love and 
 Perfect Justice, but One Whose Knowledge and 
 Whose Power are as boundless as His Love. It 
 does not mean that Christ is God in this, the natural 
 sense of the word, when it confesses His moral 
 divinity ; yet, beyond all controversy, this full and 
 natural sense of the term is the sense of the Nicene 
 Creed. 
 
 No: Jesus Christ is not divine in the sense of Arius. 
 He is not the most eminent and ancient of the crea- 
 tures, decorated by the necessities of a theological con- 
 troversy with That Name Which a serious piety can 
 
 ‘ 5 o Uh 
 © 2 St. Peter i. 4: ta διὰ τούτων (se. ἐπαγγελμάτων] γένησθε θείας 
 κοινωνοὶ φύσεως. 
 
1.1 Christ’s Divinity implies Hypostatie Distinctions in God. 49 
 
 dare to yield to One Being alone. Ascribe to the 
 Christ of Arius an antiquity as remote as you will 
 from the age of the Incarnation, place him at a height 
 as high as any you can conceive, above the highest 
 archangel ; still what, after all, is this ancient, this 
 super-angelic being but a creature who had ἃ be- 
 ginning, and who, if the Author of his existence 
 should so will, may yet cease to be? Such a being, 
 however exalted, is parted from the Divine Essence 
 by a fathomless chasm ; whereas the Christ of Catholic 
 Christendom is internal to That Essence; He is of 
 one Substance with the Father—soxoovcaros τῷ Tarp ; 
 and in this sense, as distinct from any other, He 
 is properly and literally Divine. 
 
 This assertion of the Divinity of Jesus Christ 
 depends on a truth beyond itself. It postulates the 
 existence in God of certain real distinctions having 
 their necessary basis in the Essence of the Godhead. 
 That Three such Distinctions exist is a matter of 
 Revelation. In the common language of the Western 
 Church these distinct Forms of Being are named Per- 
 sons. Yet that term cannot be employed to denote 
 Them, without considerable intellectual caution. As 
 applied to men, Person implies the antecedent con- 
 ception of a species, which is determined for the 
 moment, and by the force of the expression, mto 
 a single incommunicable modification of being", But 
 
 d So runs the definition of Boethius: “ Persona est nature 
 rationalis individua substantia.” (De Pers. et Duabus Naturis, ¢. 3.) 
 Upon which St. Thomas observes: “Conveniens est ut hoe nomen 
 (persona) de Deo dicatur ; non tamen eodem modo quo dicitur 
 de creaturis, sed excellentiori modo.” (Sum. Th., τὰς qu. 29. a. 3.) 
 When the present use of οὐσία and ὑπόστασις had become fixed in the 
 
 E 
 
50 Christ's Divinity implies Hypostatic Distinctions im God. [Lxct. 
 
 the conception of species is utterly inapplicable to 
 That One Supreme Essence Which we name God ; 
 and, according to the terms of the Catholic doctrine, 
 the same Essence belongs to Each of the Divine 
 Persons. Not however that we are therefore to 
 suppose nothing more to be intended by the revealed 
 doctrine than three varying relations of God in His 
 dealings with the world. On the contrary, His Self- 
 Revelation has for its basis these Eternal Distinctions 
 in His Nature, which are themselves utterly anterior 
 to and independent of any relation to created life. 
 Apart from these distinctions, the Christian Revela- 
 tion of a true Incarnation of God and of a real com- 
 munication of His Spirit, is but the baseless fabric 
 
 East, St. Gregory Nazianzen tells us that in the formula ‘pia οὐσία, 
 τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις, οὐσία signifies τὴν φύσιν τῆς θειότητος, while ὑποστάσεις 
 points to τὰς τῶν τριῶν ἰδιότητας. He observes that with this sense the 
 Westerns were in perfect agreement ; but he deplores the poverty 
 of their theological language. They had no expression really equi- 
 valent to ὑπόστασις, as contrasted with οὐσία, and they were 
 therefore obliged to employ the Latin translation of πρόσωπον that 
 they might avoid the appearance of believing in three οὐσίαι. (Orat. 
 xxi. 46.) St. Augustine laments the necessity of having to say 
 “quid Tria sint, Que Tria esse fides vera pronuntiat.” (De Trin. 
 vii.n. 7.) “ Cum ergo queritur quid Tria, vel quid Tres, conferimus 
 nos ad inveniendum aliquod speciale vel generale nomen, quo com- 
 plectamur hee Tria: neque occeurrit animo, quia excedit swper- 
 eminentia Divinitatis usitati eloquii facultatem.” (Ibid.) “ Cum 
 conaretur humana inopia loquendo proferre ad hominum sensus, 
 quod in secretario mentis pro captu tenet de Domino Deo Creatore 
 suo, sive per piam fidem, sive per qualemcunque intelligentiam, 
 timuit dicere tres essentias, ne intelligeretur in Illa Summa Aquali- 
 tate ulla diversitas. Rursus non esse tria quedam non poterat 
 dicere, quod Sabellius quia dixit, in heresim lapsus est... . Que- 
 sivit quid Tria diceret, et dixit substantias sive personas, quibus 
 nominibus non diversitatem intelligi voluit, sed singularitatem 
 noluit.” (De Trin. vii, n. 9.) Cf. Serm, exvii. 7; eexv. 3; cexliv. 4. 
 
1] The present discussion will be objected to. 51 
 
 of adreame. These three ‘ Subsistences‘, then, while 
 they enable us the better to understand the mystery 
 of the Self-sufficing and Blessed Life of God before 
 He surrounded Himself with created beings, are also 
 strictly compatible with the truth of the Divine 
 Unity’. And when we say that Jesus Christ is God, 
 we mean that in the Man Christ Jesus, the Second 
 of these Persons or Subsistences, One in Essence 
 with the First and with the Third, vouchsafed to 
 become Incarnate. 
 
 IV. The position then which is before us in these 
 lectures is briefly the following: Our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, being truly and perfectly Man, is also, accor- 
 ding to His Higher Pre-existent Nature, Very and 
 Eternal God; since it was the Second Person of the 
 Ever Blessed Trinity, Who, at the Incarnation, robed 
 Himself with a Human Body and a Human Soul. 
 Such explicit language will of course encounter ob- 
 jections in more than one quarter of the modern 
 world ; and if of these objections one or two promi- 
 nent samples be rapidly noticed, it is possible that, 
 at least in the case of certain minds, the path of 
 our future discussion will be cleared of difficulties 
 which are at present more or less distinctly supposed 
 to obstruct it. 
 
 e Of. Wilberforce on the Incarnation, p. 152. 
 
 f “Subsistentiz, relationes subsistentes.” Sum. Th. 12. qu. 29. a. 2; 
 and qu. 40. ἃ. 2. 
 
 & This compatibility is expressed by the doctrine of the περιχώρησις 
 —the safeguard and witness of the Divine Unity. St. John xiv. 11; 
 1 Cor. ii rr. This doctrine, as “ protecting the Unity of God, 
 without entrenching on the perfections of the Son and the Spirit, 
 may even be called the characteristic of Catholic Trinitarianism, as 
 opposed to all counterfeits, whether philosophical, Arian, or ori-: 
 ental.” Newman’s “ Arians,” p. 190. 
 
 E 2 
 
δῷ Objection on the part of the Asthetical Historians. [Lxct. 
 
 (2) One objection to our attempt in these lectures — 
 may be expected to proceed from that graceful species 
 of literary activity which can be termed, without our 
 discrediting it, Historical Austheticism. The protest 
 will take the form of an appeal to the sense of Beauty. 
 True Beauty, it will be argued, is a creation of nature ; 
 it is not improved by being meddled with. The rocky 
 hill-side is no longer beautiful when it has been 
 quarried ; nor is the river-course, when it has been 
 straightened and deepened for purposes of navigation ; 
 nor is the forest which has been fenced and planted, 
 and made to assume the disciplined air of a symmetri- 
 cal plantation. In like manner, you urge, That Incom- 
 parable Figure Whom we meet in the pages of the 
 New Testament, has suffered in the apprehensions of 
 orthodox Christians, from the officious handling of a 
 too inquisitive Scholasticism. As cultivation robs 
 wild nature of its beauty, even so, you maintain, is 
 “definition” the enemy of the fairest creations of 
 our sacred literature. You represent “definition” as 
 ruthlessly invading regions which have been beau- 
 tified by the freshness and originality of the moral 
 sentiment, and as substituting for the indefinable 
 graces of a living movement the grim and stiff artifi- 
 clalities of a heartless logic. You wonder at the bad 
 taste of men who can bring the decisions of Niczea 
 and Chalcedon into contact with the story of the 
 Gospels. What is there in common, you ask, between 
 these dead metaphysical formule and the ever-living 
 tenderness of That Matchless Life? You protest that 
 you would as readily essay to throw the text of Homer 
 or of Milton into a series of syllogisms, that you 
 would with as little scruple scratch the paint from a 
 masterpiece of Raffaelle with the intention of sub- 
 
I.] This School ignores the solemn question at issue. 53 
 
 jecting it to a chemical analysis, as go hand in hand 
 with those Church-doctors who force Jesus of Naza- 
 reth into rude juxtaposition with a world of formal 
 thought, from which, as you conceive, He is severed 
 by the intervention of three centuries of disputation, 
 and still more by the chasm which parts the highest 
 forms of natural beauty from the awkward pedantry 
 of debased art. 
 
 Well, my brethren, if the object of the Gospel be 
 attained when it has added one more chapter to the 
 poetry of human history, when it has contributed one 
 more Figure to the gallery of historical portraits, upon 
 which a few educated persons may periodically expend 
 some spare thought and feeling ;—if this be so, you 
 are probably right. Plainly you are in pursuit of that 
 which may nourish sentiment, rather than of that 
 which can support moral vigour or permanently 
 satisfy the mstinct of truth. Certainly your senti- 
 ment of beauty may be occasionally shocked by those 
 direct questions and rude processes which are neces- 
 sary to the investigation of intellectual truth and to 
 the sustenance of moral life. You would repress these 
 processes: you would silence these questions; or at 
 least you would not explicitly state your own answer 
 to them. Whether, for instance, the stupendous 
 miracle of the Resurrection be or be not as certain 
 as any event of public interest which has taken place 
 in Kurope during the present year, is a point which 
 does not affect, as it seems, the worth or the complete- 
 ness of your Christology. Your Christ is an Epic ; 
 and you will suffer no prosaic scholiast to try his 
 hand upon its pages. Your Christ is a portrait ; and, 
 as we are all agreed, a portrait is a thing to admire, 
 and not to touch, 
 
δ4 Where and What is our Lord Now? [ Lect. 
 
 But there is a solemn question which must be 
 asked, and which, if a man is in earnest he will in- 
 evitably ask ; and that question will at once carry 
 him beyond the narrow horizon of a literary zs- 
 theticism in his treatment of the matter before us. 
 .. . My brethren, where is Jesus Christ now ? and 
 what is He? Does He only speak to us from the 
 pages which were traced by His followers eighteen 
 centuries ago? Is He no more than the first of the 
 shadows of the past, the first of memories, the first of 
 biographies, the most perfect of human ideals? Is He 
 only an Ideal, after all? Does He reign, only in vir- 
 tue of a mighty tradition of human thought and feel- 
 ing in His favour, which creates and supports His 
 imaginary Throne? Is He at this moment a really 
 living Bemg? And if living, is He a human ghost, 
 flitting we know not where in the unseen world, and 
 Himself awaiting an award at the hands of the Ever- 
 lasting ? or is He a super-angelic Intelligence, sinless 
 and invested with judicial and creative powers, but still 
 separated from the Inaccessible Life of God by that 
 fathomless interval which parts the first of creatures 
 from the everlasting Creator? Does He reign, in any 
 true sense, either on earth or in heaven? or is His 
 Regal Government in any degree independent of 
 the submission or the resistance which His subjects 
 may offer to it? Is He present personally as a living 
 Power in this our world? Has He any certain relations 
 to you? does He think of you, care for you, act upon 
 you? can He help you 2 Can He save you from your 
 sins, can He blot out “heir stains and crush their 
 power, can He deliver you in your death-agony from 
 the terrors of dissolution, and bid you live with Him 
 
iy Unpractical character of the objection. 55 
 
 in a brighter world for ever? Can you approach Him 
 now, commune with Him now, cling to Him now, be- 
 come one with Him now, not by an unsubstantial act 
 of your own imaginations, but by an actual objective 
 transaction, making you incorporate with His Life ? Or 
 is the Christian answer to these most pressing ques- 
 tions a weakly delusion, or at any rate too definite a 
 statement ; and must we content ourselves with the 
 analysis of an historical Character, while we confess 
 that the Living Personality which once created and 
 animated It may or may not be God, may or may not 
 be able to hear us‘and help us, may or may not be 
 in distinct conscious existence at this moment, may 
 or may not have been altogether annihilated some 
 eighteen hundred years ago? Do you urge that it 
 is idle to ask these questions, since we have no ade- 
 quate materials at hand for dealing with them? That 
 is a point which it is hoped may be more or less 
 cleared up during the progress of our present enquiry. 
 But if such questions are to remain unanswered, do not 
 shut your eyes to the certain consequence. A Christ 
 who is conceived of as only pictured in an ancient 
 literature may indeed furnish you with the theme 
 of a magnificent poetry, but he cannot be the present 
 object of your religious life. A religion must have for 
 its object an actually Living Person : and the purpose 
 of the definitions which you deprecate, is to exhibit 
 and assert the exact force of the revealed statements 
 respecting the Eternal Life of Christ, and so to place 
 Him as a Living Person in all His Divine Majesty 
 and all His Human Tenderness before the eye of the 
 soul which seeks Him. When you fairly commit 
 yourself to the assertion that Christ is at this moment 
 
δ0 Objection of the Anti-doctrinal Moralists. [ Lecr. 
 
 living at all, you leave the strictly historical and es- 
 thetical treatment of the Gospel record of His Life and 
 character, and you enter, whether it be in a Catholic 
 or in an heretical spirit, upon the territory of Church 
 definitions. In your little private sphere, you bow to 
 that practical necessity which obliged great Fathers 
 and Councils, often much against their will, to take 
 counsel of the Spirit Who illuminated the collective 
 Church, and to give point and strength to Christian 
 faith by authoritative elucidations of Christian doc- 
 trine. Nor are you therefore rendered insensible to 
 the beauty of the Gospel narrative, because you have 
 discovered that thus to ascertain and bear in mind, so 
 far as Revelation warrants your effort, what is the 
 exact Personal dignity and living Power of Him in 
 Whom you have believed, is in truth a matter of the 
 utmost practical importance to your religious life. 
 
 (8) But the present enquiry may be objected to, 
 on higher grounds than those of literary and sesthetic 
 taste. ‘Are there not, it will be pleaded, ‘moral -rea- 
 sons for deprecating such discussions? Surely the 
 dogmatic and theological temper is sufficiently dis- 
 tinct from the temper which aims, beyond everything 
 else, at moral improvement. Surely good men may 
 be indifferent divines, while accomplished divines may 
 be false or impure at heart. Nay more, are not mo- 
 rality and theology not merely distinct, but also more 
 or less antagonistic interests 4 Does not the enthusi- 
 astic consideration of dogmatic problems tend to di- 
 vert men’s minds from that attention which is due to 
 the practical obligations of life? Is not the dogmatic 
 temper, you ask, rightly regarded as a species of “ in- 
 tellectual ritualism” which lulls men into the belief 
 
LE] This objection well stated by Channing. 57 
 
 that they have true religion at heart, when in point 
 of fact they are merely gratifying a private taste and 
 losing sight of honesty and sober living in the intoxi- 
 cating study of the abstractions of controversy? On 
 the other hand, will not a high morality shrmk with 
 an instinctive reverence from the clamorous and posi- 
 tive assertions of the theologians? In particular, did 
 Jesus Christ Himself require at the hands of His dis- 
 ciples a dogmatic confession of belief in His Divi- 
 nityh? Was He not content if they acted upon His 
 moral teaching, if they embraced that particular aspect 
 of moral obligations which is of the highest import- 
 ance to the well-being of society, and which we have 
 lately termed the Enthusiasm of Humanity?’ This is 
 what is urged; and then it is added, ‘Shall we not 
 best succeed in doing our duty if we try better to 
 understand Christ's Human Character, while we are 
 careful to keep clear of those abstract and transcen- 
 dental questions about Him, which at any rate have 
 not promoted the cause of moral progress Τ᾽ 
 
 This language is notoriously popular in our 
 day ; but the substantial objection which it em- 
 bodies has been already stated by a writer whom 
 it is impossible to name without mingled admi- 
 ration and sorrow,—admiration for his pure and 
 lofty humanity,— sorrow for the profound errors 
 which parted him in life and in death from the 
 Church of Jesus Christ. “Love to Jesus Christ,” 
 says William Channing, “depends very little on our 
 conception of His rank in the scale of being. On 
 no other topic have Christians contended so ear- 
 nestly, and yet it is of secondary importance. To 
 
 h Eece Homo, p. 69, sqq. 
 
58 Channing not really Anti-dogmatic, but Socinian. [Lct. 
 
 know Jesus Christ is not to know the precise place 
 He occupies in the Universe ; it is something more: 
 it is to look into His mind: it is to approach His 
 soul; to comprehend His spirit, to see how He 
 thought and felt and purposed and loved. . . I am 
 persuaded,” he continues, “that controversies about 
 Christ’s Person have in one way done great injury. 
 They have turned attention from His character. 
 Suppose that, as Americans, we should employ our- 
 selves in debating the questions, where Washington 
 was born, and from what spot he came when he ap- 
 peared at the head of our armies ; and that in the 
 fervour of these contentions we should overlook the 
 character of his mind, the spirit that moved within 
 πῶ τανε how unprofitably should we be em- 
 ployed? Who is it that understands Washington ? 
 Is it he that can settle his rank in the creation, his 
 early history, his present condition ? or he to whom 
 the soul of that good man is laid open, who compre- 
 hends and sympathizes with his generous purposes!.” 
 
 Channing’s illustration of his position in this pas- 
 sage 15 important. It unconsciously but irresistibly 
 suggests that indifference to the clear statement of 
 our Lord’s Divinity is linked to a fundamental 
 assumption of its falsehood. Doubtless Washington’s 
 birthplace and present destiny is for the Americans 
 an altogether unpractical consideration when placed 
 side by side with the study of his character. But 
 the question had never been raised whether or no the 
 first of moral duties which a creature should pay 
 to the Author and End of his existence was or 
 was not due to Washington. Nobody has ever 
 
 i Works, vol. ii. p. 145. 
 
I.] Moral obligation of facing the dogmatic question. 59 
 
 asserted that mankind owes to the founder of 
 the American Republic the tribute of ἃ pros- 
 trate adoration in spirit and in truth. Had it 
 occurred to Channing’s mind as even possible that 
 Jesus Christ was more than a mere man who lived 
 and died eighteen centuries ago, he could not have 
 permitted himself to make use of such an illustration. 
 To do justice to Channing, he had much too clear 
 and fine an intellect to imagine that the fundamental 
 question of Christianity could be ignored on moral 
 grounds. Those who know anything of his works 
 are aware that his own opinion on the subject was a 
 very definite one, and that he has stated the usual 
 arguments on behalf of the Socinian heresy with 
 characteristic earnestness and precision. 
 
 My brethren, all are agreed as to the importance 
 of studying and copying the Human Character of 
 Jesus Christ. Whether it be really possible to have a 
 sincere admiration for the Character of Jesus Christ 
 without believing in His Divinity is a question 
 which 1 shall not shrink from considering hereafter J. 
 Whether a true morality does not embrace, as one 
 part of it, an honest acceptance and profession of all 
 attainable religious Truth, is a question which men 
 can decide without being theologians. As for reve- 
 rence, there is a time to keep silence, and a time to 
 speak. Reverence will assuredly speak, and that 
 plainly, when silence would dishonour its Object : the 
 reverence which is always silent as to matters of 
 Belief may be but the drapery of a profound scepti- 
 cism, which lacks the courage to unveil itself before 
 the eyes of men. Certainly our Lord did not Himself 
 
 j See Lecture IV. 
 
60 Moral significance of the question for those who {| Lxcr. 
 
 exact from His first followers as an indispensable 
 condition of discipleship any profession of belief in His 
 Godhead. But why? Simply because His requirements 
 were proportioned to the opportunities of mankind. 
 He had taught as men were able to bear His teach- 
 ingk. Although His precepts, His miracles, His cha- 
 racter, His express language, all pointed to the Truth 
 of His Godhead, the conscience of mankind was not 
 laid under a formal obligation to acknowledge It 
 until at length He had been defined! to be “the Son 
 of God with power, according to the Spirit of Holi- 
 ness, by the Resurrection from the dead.” Our present 
 moral relation then to the truth of Christ’s Divinity 
 differs altogether from that in which His first 
 disciples were placed. It is a simple matter of 
 history that Christendom has believed the doctrine 
 for eighteen centuries ; but besides this, the doctrine 
 challenges at our hands, as 1 have already intimated, 
 a moral duty as its necessary expression both in the 
 sanctuary of our own thought and before the eyes of 
 men. 
 
 Let us face this aspect of the subject in its concrete 
 and every-day form. Those whom I now see around 
 me are without exception, or almost without exception, 
 members of the Church of England. If any here 
 have not the happiness to be communicants, yet, at 
 least, my brethren, you all attend the ordinary Sun- 
 day morning service of our Church. In the course of 
 doing so, you sing the Te Deum, you repeat several 
 times the Gloria Patri; but you also kneel down, or 
 profess to kneel down, as joining before God and man 
 in the Litany. Now the second petition in the 
 
 k St. John xvi. 12. 1 Rom. i. 4. τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ Θεοῦ, 
 
1.1 join in as Public Worship of the Church of England. 61 
 & 
 
 Litany runs thus: “O God the Son, Redeemer of the 
 world, have mercy upon us miserable sinners.” What 
 do you seriously mean to do when you join in that 
 petition 1 Whom are you really addressing? What 
 is the basis and ground of your act? What is its | 
 morality? If Jesus Christ is merely a creature, is 
 He in a position to have mercy upon you? Are you 
 doing dishonour to the Most High by addressing 
 Christ in these terms at all? Channing has said that 
 the petition, “By Thine agony and bloody sweat, by 
 Thy cross and passion, Good Lord deliver us,” is 
 appalling™. On the Socinian hypothesis, Channing’s 
 language is no exaggeration: the Litany is an ‘ap- 
 palling’ prayer, as the Gloria Patri is an ‘appalling’ 
 doxology. Nor would you escape from this moral dif- 
 ficulty, if unhappily you should refuse to join in the 
 services of the Church. Your conscience cannot de- 
 cline to decide in favour of the general duty of 
 adoring Jesus Christ, or against it. And this de- 
 cision presupposes the resolution, in one sense or 
 the other, of the dogmatic question on which it de- 
 pends, Christ either is, or He is not Gop. The 
 worship which is paid to Christ either ought to be 
 paid to Him, or it ought to be, not merely withheld, 
 but denounced. It is either rigorously due from all 
 Christians to our Lord, or it is an outrage on the 
 rights of God. In any case to take part in a service 
 which, like our Litany, involves the prostrate adora- 
 tion of Jesus Christ, without explicitly recognising 
 His right to receive such adoration, is itself immoral. 
 If to be true and honest in our dealings with each 
 other is a part of mere natural virtue, surely to mean 
 
 m Unitarian Christianity, Works, vol. ii. p. 541. 
 
62 Objection from the School of Subjective Pietism. { Lxcr. 
 
 what we say when we are dealing with Heaven is 
 not less an integral part of morality. I say nothing 
 of that vast unseen world of thought and feeling 
 which in the soul of a Christian believer has our 
 Blessed Saviour for its Object, and the whole moral 
 justification of which depends upon the conception 
 which we form of Christ’s “rank in the scale of 
 bemg.” It is enough to poimt out to you that the 
 discussion in hand has a practical, present, and emi- 
 nently a moral interest, unless it be consistent with 
 morality to use in the presence of God and man, a 
 language which we do not believe, or as to the mean- 
 ing of which we are content to be indifferent. 
 
 (y) Once more. It may be urged from a widely 
 different quarter, that our enquiry is dangerous, if not 
 to literary or moral interests, yet to the spirit of sim- 
 ple Christian piety. ‘Take care, so the warning 
 may run, ‘lest, instead of preaching the Gospel, you 
 should be merely building up a theological pyramid. 
 Beware of sacrificing spiritual objects to intellectual 
 ones. Surely the great question for a sinner to con- 
 sider is whether or not he be justified before God: do 
 not then let us bury the simple Gospel beneath a 
 heap of metaphysics.’ 
 
 Now the matter to be considered is whether this 
 absolute separation between what is assumed to be the 
 ‘simple Gospel’ and what is called ‘metaphysics’ is 
 really possible. In point of fact the simple Gospel, 
 when we come to examine it, is necessarily on one side 
 metaphysical. Educated men, at least, will not be 
 scared by a term, which a scarcely pardonable igno- 
 rance may suppose to denote nothing more than the 
 trackless region of intellectual failure. If the Gospel 
 
11 ‘The Gospel’ cannot ignore metaphysical theology. 63 
 
 is real to you; if you believe it to be true, and pos- 
 sess it spiritually and intellectually ; you cannot but 
 see that it leads you on to the frontier of a world 
 of thought which you may yourselves shrink from 
 entering, but which it is not prudent to depreciate. 
 You say that the main question is to know that 
 you are justified 1 Very well; but, omitting all other 
 considerations, let me ask you one question : Who is 
 the Justifier? Can He really justify if He is only 
 Man? Does not His power to “save to the uttermost 
 those that come unto God by Him” depend upon the 
 fact that He is Himself Divine? Yet when, with 
 St. John, you confess that He is the Eternal Logos, 
 you are dealing quite as distinctly with a question 
 of ‘metaphysics,’ as if you should discuss the value 
 of οὐσία and ὑπόστασις in Primitive Christian The- 
 ology. It is true that such discussions will carry you 
 beyond the region of Scripture terminology; but, at 
 least to a sober and thoughtful mind, can it really 
 matter whether a term, such as ‘ Trinity,’ be or be not 
 in Scripture, if the area of thought which it covers 
 be identical with that contained in the Scripture 
 statements"? And to undervalue those portions of 
 truth which cannot be made rhetorically or privately 
 available to excite religious feeling is to accept a 
 principle which, in the long run, is destructive of the 
 Faith. In Germany, Spener the Pietist held no mean 
 place among the intellectual ancestors of Paulus and 
 of Strauss. In England a gifted intellect has traced 
 the “phases” of its progressive disbelief; and if in its 
 downward course it has gone so far as to deny that 
 Jesus Christ was even a morally righteous Man, its 
 starting-point was as nearly as possible that of the 
 
 n Sum. Th. 18. qu. 29. a. 3. 
 
04 Anticipated course of the Argument. [ Lect. 
 
 earnest but shortsighted piety which imagines that 
 it can dare actively to exercise thought on the 
 Christian Revelation, and withal to ignore those ripe 
 decisions which we owe to the illuminated mind of 
 Primitive Christendom. 
 
 There is no question between us, my brethren, as 
 to the supreme importance of a personal understand- 
 ing and contract between the single soul and the 
 _ Eternal Beg Who made and Who has redeemed it. 
 ᾿ But this understanding must depend upon ascertained 
 _ Truths, foremost among which is that of the Godhead 
 of Jesus Christ. And in these lectures an attempt will 
 be made to lay bare and to re-assert some few of the 
 bases upon which that Cardinal Truth itself reposes 
 in the consciousness of the Church, and to kindle 
 perchance, in some souls, a fresh sense of its unspeak- 
 able importance. It will be our object to examine 
 such anticipations of the doctrine as are found in the 
 Old Testament, to note how it is implied in the work 
 of Jesus Christ, and how inseparable it is from His 
 recorded Consciousness of His Personality and Mis- 
 sion, to trace its distinct, although varying asser- 
 tion in the writings of His great Apostles and in 
 the earliest ages of His Church, and finally to shew 
 how intimate and important are its relations to all 
 that is dearest to the heart and faith of a Christian. 
 It is no slight privilege and ground of rejoicing 
 that throughout these lectures we shall keep close 
 to the Sacred Person of our Lord Himself. If 
 indeed, none of us as yet believed in His Godhead, 
 it might be an impertinence on the part of the 
 preacher to suggest any spiritual advice which 
 takes for granted the conclusion of his argument. 
 
Τὴ Its olject, the apprehension of positive Truth. 65 
 
 But you who, thank God, are Christians by living 
 conviction as well as by baptismal privilege, must 
 already possess too strong and too clear a faith in 
 the truth before us to be in any sense dependent on 
 the success or the failure of a feeble human effort to 
 exhibit it. You at least will endeavour, as we pro- 
 ceed, to bear steadily in mind, that He of Whom we 
 speak and think is no mere tale or portrait of the 
 ancient world, no dead abstraction of modern or of 
 medizeval thought, but a living Being, Who is an 
 observant Witness alike of the words spoken in His 
 Name and of the mental and moral response which 
 they elicit. If we must needs pass in review the 
 erring thoughts and words of men, let us be sure that 
 our final object is not a criticism of error, but the 
 clearer apprehension and possession of truth. They 
 who believe, may by reason of the very loyalty and 
 fervour of their devotion, so anxiously and eagerly 
 watch the fleeting, earth-born mists which for a 
 moment have threatened to veil the Face of the 
 Sun of Righteousness, as to forget that the true 
 weal and safety of the soul is only assured while 
 her eye is persistently fixed on His Imperishable 
 Glory. They who have known the aching misery 
 of earnest doubt, may perchance be encouraged, like 
 the once sceptical Apostle, to probe the wounds with 
 which from age to age error has lacerated Christ's 
 Sacred Form, and thus to draw from a nearer con- 
 tact with the Divine Redeemer the springs of a 
 fresh and deathless faith that shall win and own in 
 Him to all Eternity the unclouded Presence of its 
 Lord and God. 
 
66 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 ANTICIPATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE IN THE 
 OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen 
 through faith, preached before the Gospel. unto Abraham, 
 saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed —Gau. m1. 8. 
 
 IF we endeavour to discover how often and by what 
 modes of statement such a doctrine as that of our 
 Lord’s Divinity is anticipated in the Old Testa- 
 ment, our conclusion will be materially affected by 
 the belief which we entertain respecting the nature 
 and the structure of Scripture itself. At first sight, 
 and judged by an ordinary literary estimate, the 
 Bible presents an appearance of being merely a 
 large collection of heterogeneous writings. Histori- 
 cal records, ranging over many centuries, biogra- 
 phies, dialogues, anecdotes, catalogues of moral 
 maxims, and accounts of social experiences, poetry, 
 the most touchingly plaintive and the most buoy- 
 antly triumphant, predictions, exhortations, warn- 
 ings, varying in style, in authorship, in date, in 
 dialect, are thrown, as it seems, somewhat arbitra- 
 rily into a single volume. No stronger tie is sup- 
 
Principle of an Organie Unity in Holy Scripture. 67 
 
 posed to have bound together materials so various 
 and so ill-assorted, than the interested or the too 
 credulous industry of some clerical caste in a dis- 
 tant antiquity, or at best than such uniformity in 
 the general type of thought and feeling as may 
 naturally be expected to characterize the literature 
 of a nation or of a race. But beneath the differences 
 of style, of language, and of method, which are un- 
 deniably prominent in the Sacred Books, and which 
 appear so entirely to absorb the attention of a 
 merely literary observer, a deeper insight will dis- 
 cover in Scripture such manifest unity of drift and 
 purpose, both moral and intellectual, as to imply 
 the continuous action of a Single Mind. To this 
 unity Scripture itself bears witness, and nowhere 
 more emphatically than in the text before us. Ob- 
 serve that St. Paul does not treat the Old Testa- 
 ment as being to him what Hesiod, for instance, 
 became to the later Greek world. He does not re- 
 gard it as a great repertorium or storehouse of quo- 
 tations which might be accidentally or fancifully 
 employed to illustrate the events or the theories of 
 a later age, and to which accordingly he had recourse 
 for purposes of literary ornamentation. On the con- 
 trary, St. Paul’s is the exact inverse of this point 
 of view. According to St. Paul, the great doctrines 
 and events of the Gospel dispensation were directly 
 anticipated in the Old Testament. If the sense of 
 the Old Testament became patent in the New, it 
 was because the New Testament was already latent 
 in the Olda. ΠΡροϊδοῦσα δὲ ἡ γραφὴ ὅτι ἐκ πίστεως 
 
 8 Κ΄. Aug. Quest. in Ex. qu. 73 : “quanquam et in Vetere Novum 
 
 lateat, et in Novo Vetus pateat.” 
 F 2 
 
68 This principle how recognised in Primitive Christendom, [Lxcr. 
 
 δικαιοῖ τὰ ἔθνη ὁ Θεὸς, προευηγγελίσατο τῷ “Αβραάμ. 
 Scripture is thus boldly identified with the Mind 
 Which inspires it ; Scripture is a living Providence. 
 The Promise to Abraham anticipates the work of 
 the Apostle; the earliest of the Books of Moses 
 determines the argument of the Epistle to the 
 Galatians. Such a position is only intelligible when 
 placed in the light of a belief in the fundamental 
 Unity of all Revelation, underlying, and strictly ἡ 
 compatible with its superficial variety. And this 
 fundamental Unity of Scripture, even when the 
 exact canonical limits of Scripture were still unfixed, 
 was a common article of belief to all Christian- an- 
 tiquity. It was common ground to the sub-apostolic 
 and to the Nicene age, to the Kast and to the West, 
 to the School of Antioch and to the School of Alex- 
 andria, to mystical interpreters like St. Ambrose, 
 and to literalists like St. Chrysostom, to cold rea- 
 soners like Theodoret, and to fervid poets like 
 Ephrem the Syrian, to those who, like. Origen, con- 
 ceded much to reason, and to those who, like St. 
 Cyril or St. Leo, claimed much for faith. Nay, this 
 belief in the organic oneness of Scripture was not 
 merely shared by schools and writers of divergent 
 tendencies within the Church; it was shared by the 
 Church herself with her most vehement heretical 
 opponents. Between St. Athanasius and the Arians 
 there was no question as to the relevancy of the re- 
 ference in the book of Proverbs” to the pre-existent 
 \ Person of our Lord, although there was a vital dif+ 
 ference between them as to the true sense and force 
 of that reference. Scripture was believed to contain 
 
 b Prov. viii. 22. 
 
11,7 Practical application of the principle. 69 
 
 an harmonious and integral body of Sacred Truth, 
 and each part of that body was treated as beg more 
 or less directly, more or less ascertaimably, in corre- 
 spondence with the rest. This belief expressed itself 
 in the world-wide practice of quoting from any one 
 book of Scripture in illustration of the mind of any 
 other book. Instead of illustrating the sense of each 
 writer only from other passages in that writer, the 
 existence of a sense common to all the Sacred 
 Writers was recognised, and each writer was accord- 
 ingly interpreted by the language of the others. To 
 a modern naturalistic critic it might seem a culpable 
 or at least an undiscriminating procedure, when a 
 Father illustrates the Apostolical Epistles by a refer- 
 ence to the Pentateuch, or even one Evangelist by 
 another, or the dogmatic sense of St. Paul by that 
 of St. John. And unquestionably in a merely human 
 literature such attempts at illustration would be mis- 
 leading. The different intellectual horizons, modes 
 of thought, shades and turns of feeling, which con- 
 stitute the peculiarities of different writers, debar 
 us from ascertaining, under ordinary circumstances, 
 the exact sense of any one writer, except from 
 himself, In an uninspired literature, such as the 
 Greek or the English, it would be absurd to appeal 
 to a primitive annalist or poet with a view to de- 
 termining the meaning of an author of some later 
 age. We do not suppose that Hesiod ‘foresaw’ the 
 political doctrines of Thucydides, or the moral specu- 
 lations of Aristotle. We do not expect to find in 
 Chaucer or in Clarendon a clue to or a forecast of 
 the true sense of Macaulay or of Tennyson. No 
 one has ever imagined that either the Greek or the 
 
70 Organic Unity of Scripture consistent with some [1Π|801. 
 
 English literature is a Whole in such sense that any 
 common purpose runs persistently throughout it, or 
 that we can presume upon the existence of a com- 
 mon responsibility to some one line of thought in the 
 several authors who have created it, or that each por- 
 tion is under any kind of obligation to be in some 
 profound moral and intellectual conformity with the 
 rest. But the Church of Christ has ever believed 
 her Bible to be throughout and so emphatically the 
 handiwork of the Eternal Spirit, that it is no absurd- 
 ity in Christians to cite Moses as foreshadowing the 
 teaching of St. Paul and of St. John. According to 
 the tenor of Christian belief, Moses, St. Paul, and 
 St. John are severally regarded as free yet docile 
 organs of One Infallible Intelligence, Who places 
 them at different points along the line of His action 
 in human history; Who through them and others, 
 as the ages pass before Him, slowly unveils His 
 Mind; Who anticipates the fullness of later Reve- 
 lations by the hints contained in His earlier dis- 
 closures ; Who in the compass of His boundless Wis- 
 dom “reacheth from one end to another mightily, 
 and sweetly ordereth all things*.” 
 
 Such a belief in the organic unity of Scripture is 
 not fatal to a recognition of those differences be- 
 tween its several portions upon which some modern 
 critics would lay an exaggerated emphasis. When 
 St. Paul recognises an organic connection between 
 the distant extremities of the records of Revelation, 
 he does not debar himself from recognising differ- 
 ences in form, in matter, in immediate purpose, which 
 part the Law of Moses from the writings of the 
 
 © Wisd. viii. 1. 
 
10 Unlikeness of its several parts to each other. 71 
 
 New Testament", The unlikeness which subsists be- 
 tween the head and the lower limbs of an animal 
 is not fatal to their common share in its nervous 
 system and in the circulation of its blood. Nay 
 more, this oneness of Scripture is a truth compatible 
 with the existence within its compass of different 
 measures and levels of Revelation. The unity of 
 consciousness in a human life is not forfeited by 
 growth of knowledge, or by difference of circum- 
 stances, or by varieties of experience. Novatian 
 compares the unfolding of the Mind of God in 
 Revelation to the gradual breaking of the dawn, 
 attempered as it is to the human eye, which after 
 long hours of darkness could not endure a sudden 
 outflash of noonday sunlight®. The Fathers trace 
 in detail the application of this principle to succes- 
 sive Revelations in Scripture, first of the absolute 
 Unity of God, and afterwards of Persons internal 
 to That Unity! The Sermon on the Mount con- 
 trasts its own higher moral level with that of the 
 earlier dispensation®. Ethically and dogmatically 
 the New Testament is an advance upon the Old, 
 yet both are within the Unity of Inspiration. 
 Different degrees of light do not imply any intrin- 
 sic contrariety. If the Epistle to the Galatians 
 
 d e.g. cf. Gal. 111. 23-25; Rom. x. 4; Heb. viii. 13, 
 
 6. Novatian, de Trin. ο. 26: “Gradatim enim et per incrementa 
 fragilitas humana nutriri debet, . . periculosa enim sunt que magna 
 sunt, si repentina sunt. Nam etiam lux solis subita post tenebras 
 splendore nimio insuetis oculis non ostendet diem, sed potius 
 faciet ceecitatem.” 
 
 f §. Epiphanius, Heres. 74. 10; 8. Gregor. Nazianzen, Orat. 
 χχχὶ. ἢ. 20. Cf. Kuhn, Dogmatik, Band ii. p. 5. 
 
 & St. Matt. v. 21, 22, 27, 28, 33, 34; comp. Ibid. xii. 5-8. 
 
72 Relation of this principle to our present subject. (Lecr. 
 
 points out the moral incapacity of the Mosaic Law, 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches us its typical 
 and unfailing significance. If Christian converts 
 from Judaism had been “called out of darkness into 
 God’s marvellous light,” yet still “whatsoever things 
 were written aforetime,” in the Jewish Scriptures, 
 “were written for the learning” of Christians!. 
 
 You will have anticipated, my brethren, the bear- 
 ing of these remarks upon the question before us. 
 There are explicit references to the doctrine of our 
 Lord’s Divinity in the Old Testament which we can 
 only deny by discrediting the historical value of 
 the documents which contain them. But there are 
 also occult references to this doctrine which we are 
 not likely to detect unless, while seeking them, we 
 are furnished with an exegetieal principle like that 
 of the organic unity of Scripture as it was under- 
 stood by the Ancient Church. The geologist can 
 inform us from surface indications where and at 
 what depths to find the coal-field or the granite ; 
 but we all of us know granite or coal when we see 
 them in the sunlight. Let us first place ourselves 
 under the guidance of the great minds of antiquity 
 with a view to discovering ‘some of those more hid- 
 den allusions to the doctrine which are found in 
 earlier portions of the Old Testament Scriptures; 
 and then let us trace, however hastily, those clearer 
 intimations of it which abound in the later Mes- 
 sianic prophecies, and which are indeed so plain, that 
 ‘he that runs may read them.’ 
 
 I. (2) At the beginning of the Book of Genesis 
 there appear to be intimations of the existence of a 
 
 i 7 Bt. Pet. ii. Ὁ. i Rom, xv. 4. 
 
II.] The Inner Life of God adumbrated in Genesis. 13 
 
 Plurality of Persons within the One Essence of Ged. 
 It is indeed somewhat remarkable that the full 
 significance of the two words/ by which Moses de- 
 scribes the primal Creative Act of God was not 
 insisted upon by the Primitive Church teachers. It 
 attracted attention in the middle ages, and it was 
 more particularly noticed after the revival of Hebrew 
 Letters. When Moses is describing this Divine 
 Action he joins a singular verb to a plural noun. 
 Language, it would seem, thus submits to a violent 
 anomaly that she may the better hint at the 
 mystery of Several Powers or Persons, Who not 
 merely act together, but Who constitute a Single 
 Agent. We are indeed told that this Name of God 
 Elohim, was borrowed from Polytheistic sources, that 
 it was retained in its plural form in order to express 
 majesty or magnificence, and that it was then united 
 to singular verbs and adjectives in order to make 
 it do the work of a Monotheistic Creed’. But on 
 the other hand, it is confessed on all sides that the 
 promulgation and protection of a belief in the Unity 
 of God was the central and dominant object of the 
 Mosaic literature and of the Mosaic legislation. 
 Surely such an object would not have been im- 
 perilled for no higher purpose than that of ampli- 
 fication, unless there had been a Truth at stake 
 which demanded the risk. The Hebrew language 
 could have described God by such singular Names 
 as El, Eloah, and no question would have been 
 
 raised as to the strictly Monotheistic force of 
 
 those words. The Hebrew language might have 
 
 J Gen. 1.1, omnds S92. 
 k Herder, Geist der Hebr. Poésie, Bd. i. p. 48. 
 
74 The Inner Life of God adumbrated in Genesis. {Liucr. 
 
 ‘amplified’ the idea of God thus conveyed by less 
 dangerous processes than the employment of a plural 
 form. Would it not have done so, unless the plural 
 form had been really necessary, in order to hint at 
 the complex mystery of God’s inner Life, until that 
 mystery should be more clearly unveiled by the 
 explicit Revelations of a later day? The analogies 
 of the language may indeed prove that the plural 
 form of the word had a majestic force; but the 
 risk of misunderstanding would surely have counter- 
 balanced this motive for using it, unless a vital need 
 had demanded its retention. Nor will the theory 
 that the plural noun is merely expressive of majesty 
 in DPN NI, avail to account for the plural verb in 
 » the words, “Let Us make man!.” In these words, 
 which precede the final act and climax of the Cre- 
 ation, the Early Fathers detected a clear intimation 
 of a Plurality of Persons in the Godhead™. The 
 supposition that in these words a Single Person is 
 in a dramatic colloquy with Himself is less reason- 
 able than the opinion that a Divine Speaker is 
 addressing a multitude of inferior bemgs, such as 
 the Angels. But apart from other considerations, 
 we may well ask, what would be the ‘likeness’ or 
 ‘image’ common to God and to the Angels, in 
 which man was to be created"? or why should 
 
 1 Gen. i. 26. 
 
 m Cf. the references in Petavius, de Trinitate, ii. 7. 6. 
 
 n “Non rard etiam veteres recentioresque interpretes, ut ods de 
 angelis intelligerent, theologicis potius quam exegeticis argumentis 
 permoti esse videnter ; cf... . Gen. i. 26, 27, ex quo Samaritani 
 cum Abenezra hominem ad angelorum, non ad Dei, similitudinem 
 creatum esse probant.” Gesenius, Thesaur. in voc. DN, 2. 
 
171 The Inner Life of God adumbrated in Genesis. 75 
 
 created essences such as the Angels be invited to 
 take part in a Creative Act at all? Each of the fore- 
 gomg explanations is really weighted with greater 
 difficulties than the Patristic doctrine, to the effect 
 that the verb, “ Let Us make,” points to a Plurality 
 of Persons within the Unity of the One Agent, 
 while the ‘ Likeness,’ common to All These Persons 
 and itself One, suggests very pointedly Their par- 
 ticipation in an Undivided Nature. And in such 
 sayings as “ Behold the man is become like One of 
 Us?,” used with reference to the Fall, or “Go to; 
 let Us go down and there confound their lan- 
 guage?P,” uttered on the eve of the dispersion of 
 Babel, it is clear that an equality of rank is dis- 
 tinctly assumed between the Speaker and Those 
 Whom He is addressing. The only adequate alter- 
 native to that interpretation of these texts which 
 is furnished by the Trinitarian Doctrine, and which 
 sees in them a preparation for the disclosures of a 
 later age, is the violent supposition of some kind of 
 pre-Mosaic Olympus, the many deities of which are 
 upon a level of strict equality with each other® 
 But if this supposition be admitted, how are we to 
 account for the presence of such language in the 
 Pentateuch at all? How can a people, confessedly 
 religious and intelligent, such as were the Hebrews, 
 have thus stultified their whole religious history 
 and literature, by welcoming or retaining, in a docu- 
 ment of the highest possible authority, a nomen- 
 
 ο Gen. 111. 22. 19 THND. LXX. ὥς εἷς ἐξ ἡμῶν. 
 
 P Gen. xi. 7. 
 
 4 Klose, De polytheismi vestigiis apud Hebraeos ante Mosen, 
 Gotting. 1830, referred to by Kuhn, Dogmatik, Bd. 11, p. ro. 
 
76 A Threefold Personality in God suggested [Lucr. 
 
 clature which contained so explicit a denial of the 
 first Article of the Hebrew Faith ? 
 
 The true sense of the comparatively indeterminate 
 language which occurs at the beginning of Genesis, 
 is more fully explained by the Priestly Blessing 
 which we find to be prescribed for ritual usage in 
 the Book of Numbers". This blessmg is spoken of 
 as a putting the Name of God’, that is to say, of a 
 symbol unveiling His Nature‘, upon the children of 
 _ Israel. Here then we discover a distinct limit to 
 the number of the Persons Who are hinted at in 
 Genesis, as bemg internal to the Unity of God. The 
 Priest is to repeat the Most Holy Name Three 
 times. The Hebrew accentuation, whatever be its 
 date, shews that the Jews themselves saw in this 
 repetition the declaration of a mystery in the 
 Divine Nature. Unless such a repetition had been 
 designed to secure the assertion of some important 
 truth, a single mention of the Sacred Name would 
 have been more natural in a system, the object of 
 which was to impress belief in the Divine Unity 
 upon an entire people. This significant repetition, 
 suggesting without unveiling a Trinity in the Beme 
 of God, did its work in Israel. It is impossible not 
 to be struck with the recurrence of the Threefold 
 
 r Num. vi. 23-26. 8 Tbid.-ver. 27. 
 
 Ὁ “ Nach der biblischen Anschauung und inbesondere des A. T. 
 ist tiberhaupt der Zusammenhang zwischen Name und Sache ein 
 sehr enger, und ein ganz anderer als im modernen Bewusstein, 
 wo sich der Name meist zu einem bloss conventionellen Zeichen 
 abgeschwicht hat; der Name ist die Sache selbst, sofern diese 
 in die Erscheinung tritt und erkannt wird, der ins Wort gefasste 
 Ausdruck des Wesens.” Kénig, Theologie der Psalmen, p. 266. 
 
11. by the Priestly Blessing, and by the Vision of Isaiah. ὙΠ 
 
 rhythm of prayer or praise again and again, in the 
 Psalter". Again and again the poetical parallelism is 
 sacrificed to the practical and theological object of 
 making the sacred songs of Israel contain an exact 
 acknowledement of that imner law of God’s Nature 
 which had been shadowed out in the Pentateuch. 
 And to omit traces of this influence of the priestly 
 blessing which are discoverable in Jeremiah and Eze- 
 kiel*, let us observe the crowning significance of the 
 vision of Isaiah’. In that adoration of the Most Holy 
 Three, Who yet are One’, by the veiled and mys- 
 terious Seraphim ; in that deep self-abasement and 
 misery of the Prophet, who, though a man of un- 
 clean lips, had yet seen with his eyes the King, the 
 Lord of Hosts* ; in that last enquiry on the part of 
 the Divine Speaker, the very terms of which reveal 
 Him as One and yet more than One,—what a flood 
 of almost Gospel light® is poured upon the intelli- 
 gence of the elder Church! If we cannot altogether 
 assert with the opponents of the Lutheran Calixtus, 
 that the doctrine of the Trinity is so clearly con- 
 tained in the Old Testament as to admit of being 
 deduced from it without the aid of the Apostles 
 and Evangelists; enough at least has been said 
 _ to shew that the Old Testament presents us with 
 a doctrine of the Divine Unity which is very far 
 removed from the hard and sterile Monotheism of 
 the Koran. Within the Uncreated and Unapproach- 
 
 a Cf. Ps. xxix: 4,5, and-7,8; xcvi. 1,2, and 7,8; exv. 9, 10, 11; 
 exvili. 2-4, and 10-12, and 15, 16. 
 
 x On this subject see Dr. Pusey’s Letter to the Bishop of London, 
 p- 131. ¥ Isaiah vi. 2-8. z Jbid. ver. 3. 
 
 a Ibid. ver.5. ὃ Ibid. ver. 8. ἃ Heb.i. 1. 
 
78 The Theophanies. {Lecr. 
 
 able Essence, Israel could plainly distinguish the 
 shadows of a Truth which we Christians fully ex- 
 press at this hour, when we “acknowledge the glory 
 of the Eternal Trinity, and in the power of the 
 Divine Majesty worship the Unity.” 
 
 (8) From these adumbrations of Personal Dis- 
 tinctions within the Being of God we pass naturally 
 to consider that series of remarkable apparitions 
 which are commonly known as the Theophanies, 
 and which form so prominent a feature in the early 
 history of the Old Testament Scriptures. When we 
 are told that God spoke to our fallen parents in 
 Paradise?, and appeared to Abram in his ninety- 
 ninth yeare, there is no distinct intimation of the 
 mode of the Divine Manifestation. But when 
 “Jehovah appeared” to the Great Patriarch “in the 
 plains of Mamre',” Abraham “lift up his eyes 
 and looked, and lo, Three Men stood by hims.” 
 Abraham bows himself to the ground; he offers 
 hospitality; he waits by his Visitors under the 
 tree, and they eath. One of the Three is the 
 Spokesman ; he appears to bear the Sacred Name 
 Jehovahi; he is seemingly distinguished from the 
 ‘two angels’ who went first to SodomJ; he pro- 
 mises that the aged Sarah shall have a son, and 
 that ‘all the nations of the earth shall be blessed 
 
 d Gen. iii. 8: “They heard the voice of the Lord God walking 
 in the garden in the cool of the day.” 
 
 © Ibid. xvii. 1-3: “The Lord appeared to Abram, and _ said 
 unto him, I am the Almighty God. . . And Abram fell on his face : 
 and God talked with him.” f Tbid. xviii. 1. 
 
 5. Tbid. ver. 2. h Thid. ver. 8. i Ibid. ver. 17. 
 
 i Compare Gen. xviii. 22 and xix. 1. LXX. ἦλθον δὲ οἱ δύο ἄγγελοι. 
 
II.) The Theophanies. 79 
 
 in Abraham, With him Abraham intercedes for 
 Sodom!; by him judgment is afterwards executed, 
 upon the guilty city. When we are told that 
 “Jehovah rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brim- 
 stone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven™,’ a sharp, 
 distinction is established between a visible and an 
 Invisible Person, each bearing the Most Holy Name. 
 This distinction introduces us to the Mosaic and\ 
 later representations of that very exalted and mys- 
 terious being, the mm) ἽΝ or Angel of the Lord. 
 The Angel of the Lord is certainly distinguished from 
 Jehovah; yet the names by which he is called, 
 the powers which he assumes to wield, the honour 
 which is paid to him, shew that in him there was 
 at least a special Presence of God. He seems to 
 speak sometimes in his own name, and sometimes 
 as if he were not a created personality but only 
 a veil or organ of the Higher Nature That spoke 
 and acted through him. Thus he assures Hagar, as 
 if speaking in the character of an Ambassador from 
 God, that ‘the Lord had heard her affliction®’ 
 Yet he promises her, “I will multiply thy seed 
 exceedingly®,” and she in return “called the Name 
 of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest 
 me?.” He arrests Abraham’s arm, when the Patri- 
 arch is on the point of carrying out God’s bidding 
 by offering Isaac as a sacrifice1; yet he associates 
 himself with Him from Whom ‘ Abraham had not 
 withheld his son, his only son. He accepts for 
 himself Abraham’s obedience as rendered to God, 
 
 k Gen. xviii. 10,18. 1 Thid. vers. 23-33. m Jbid. xix. 24. 
 n bid. xvi. v1. © Tbid. ver. ro. P Ibid. ver. 13. 
 TP, I bids Σ Σιν 11.1.2. 
 
80 The Theophanies. [ Lect. 
 
 and he subsequently at a second appearance adds 
 the promise, “In thy seed shall all the nations of 
 the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed My 
 voice’.” He appears to Jacob in a dream, he an- 
 nounces himself as “the God of Bethel, where thou 
 anointedst the pillar, and where thou vowedst a 
 vow unto Me’.” Thus he was ‘the Lord’ whov 
 in Jacob’s vision at Bethel had stood above the 
 ladder and said, “I am the Lord God of Abraham 
 thy father, and the God of Isaact.”. He was, as it 
 seems, the Chief of that angel-host whom Jacob 
 met at Mahanaim"; with him Jacob wrestled for 
 a blessmg at Peniel; of him Jacob says “I have 
 seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” 
 When blessing the sons of Joseph, the dying 
 Patriarch invokes not only “the God Which fed 
 me all my life long unto this day,” but also “the 
 Angel which redeemed me from all evil*.” In the 
 desert of Midian, the Angel of the Lord appears 
 to Moses “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a 
 bush.” The bush remains miraculously unconsumed’. 
 “Jehovah” sees that Moses turns aside to see, and 
 “ Elohim” calls to Moses out of the midst of the 
 bush’, The very ground on which Moses stands 
 is holy; and the Lawgiver hides his face, “for he 
 was afraid to look upon God*.” The Speaker from 
 the midst of the bush announces Himself as the 
 God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God 
 of Jacob*. His are the Mercy, the Wisdom, the 
 Providence, the Power, the Authority of the Most 
 
 τ Gen, xxii. 18. 5. Ibid! xxxil 14, 19,4) sib ἘΣΎ 15. 
 ἃ Tbid. xxxii. 1. x Thid. xlviii τὸ; 06. ὙΕΙ͂ ΟΙ in 1: 2. 
 * Tbid. ver. 4. a Ibid. ver. 6. 
 
Da The Theophanies. 81 
 
 High»; nay, all the Divine attributes’. When the 
 children of Israel are making their escape from 
 Egypt, the Angel of the Lord leads them ; in the 
 hour of danger he places himself between the camp 
 of Israel and the host of Pharaoh*. How deeply 
 Israel felt the value of his protecting care, we 
 may learn from the terms of the message to the 
 King of Edom* God promises that the Angel 
 shall keep Israel in the way, and bring the people 
 to Canaan‘; his presence is a guarantee that the 
 Amorites and other idolatrous races shall be cut 
 offs. Israel is to obey this Angel, and to provoke 
 him not; for the Holy “Name is in him}.” Even 
 after the sin of the Golden Calf the promised 
 Guardianship of the Angel is not forfeited, but a 
 distinction is clearly drawn between the Angel and 
 Jehovah Himselfi, Yet the Angel is expressly 
 called the Angel of God’s Presence*; he fully 
 represents God. God must in some way have been 
 present in Him. No merely created being, speaking 
 and acting in his own right, could have spoken to 
 men, or have allowed men to act towards himself, 
 as did the Angel of the Lord. Thus he withstands 
 Balaam, on his faithless errand, and bids him go 
 with the messengers of Balak; but adds, “Only 
 the word that I shall speak unto thee, that thou 
 shalt speak.” As “Captain of the host of the 
 
 b Exod. iii. 7-14. ο Ibid. vers. 14-16. d Exod. xiv. 19. 
 © Num. xx. 16, f Exod. xxiii. 20 ; compare xxxii. 34. 
 
 & Ibid. xxiii. 23; οὗ Joshua v. 13-15. 
 
 h Exod. xxiii, 21, ἹΠΊΡΗΙ ‘ow "5. 
 
 i Tbid. xxxiii. 2,3: “I will send an angel before thee . . . for I 
 will not go up in the midst of thee; for thou art a stiff-necked 
 people.” k ΤΟΙ. ver. 14 ; compare Isaiah Ixili. 9. 
 
 G 
 
89 The Theophanies. [ Lecr. 
 
 Lord” he appears to Joshua in the plain of Jeri- 
 cho ; Joshua worships God in him!; and the Angel 
 asks of the conqueror of Canaan the same tokens 
 of reverence as had been exacted from Moses™, 
 Besides the reference in the Song of Deborah® to 
 the curse pronounced against Meroz by the Angel 
 of the Lord, the Book of Judges contains accounts 
 of three appearances, in each of which we are 
 scarcely sensible of the action of a created person- 
 ality, so completely is the language and bearing 
 that of the Higher Nature present in the Angel. 
 At Bochim he expostulates with the assembled 
 people for their breach of the covenant in failing to 
 exterminate the Canaanites. God speaks by him as 
 in His own Name; He refers to the covenant which 
 He had made with Israel, and to His bringing 
 the people out of Egypt; He declares that, on 
 account of their disobedience He will not drive 
 the heathen nations out of the land*’. In the 
 account of his appearance to Gideon the Angel is 
 called sometimes the Angel of the Lord, sometimes 
 the Lord, or Jehovah. He bids Gideon attack the 
 Midianite oppressors of Israel, and adds the pro- 
 mise, “I will be with thee.” Gideon places an 
 offering before the Angel, that he may, if he wills, 
 manifest his character by some sign. The Angel 
 touches the offering with the end of his staff, 
 whereupon fire rises up out of the rock and con- 
 sumes the offering. The Angel disappears, and 
 
 1 Τὴ Josh. vi. 2 the captain of the Lord’s Host (ef. ch. ν. 14) 
 appears to be called Jehovah. But ef. Mill, Myth. Int. p. 354. 
 
 m Josh. v. 13-15; Exod. iii. 5 ; compare Exod. xxiii. 23. 
 
 n Judges v. 23. ὁ Ibid, ii. 1-5. See Keil, Comm. in loc, 
 
II.] Who was the Angel of the Lord ? 83 
 
 Gideon fears that he will die because he has seen 
 “the Angel of the Lord face to face?” When the 
 wife of Manoah is reporting the Angel’s first 
 appearance to herself, she says that “A man of 
 God came” to her, “and his countenance was like the 
 countenanee of the Angel of God, very terrible.” 
 She thus speaks of the Angel as of a Being already 
 known to Israel. At his second appearance the 
 Angel bids Manoah, who “knew not that he was an 
 Angel of the Lord” and offered him common food, 
 to offer sacrifice unto the Lord. The Angel refuses 
 to disclose his Name, which is ‘ wonderful4.” When 
 Manoah offers a kid with a meat-offermg upon a 
 rock unto the Lord, the Angel mounts visibly up 
 to heaven in the flame of the sacrifice. Like 
 Gideon, Manoah fears death after such near contact 
 with so exalted a Being of the other world. “We 
 shall surely die,” he exclaims to his wife, “ because 
 we have seen God".” 
 
 But you ask, Who was this Angel? The Jewish 
 Interpreters vary in their explanations‘. The 
 earliest Fathers answer with general unanimity 
 that he was the Word or Son of God Him- 
 self. For example, in the Dialogue with Trypho, 
 St. Justin proves against his Jewish opponent, 
 that God did not appear to Abraham in the plains 
 of Mamre, before the appearance of the ‘three 
 
 P Judg. vi. 11-22. Keil, Comm. in loc. See Hengstenberg, Chris- 
 tol. O. Test., vol. iv. append. 111. p. 292. a NDB, cf. Is, ix. 6. 
 r Judges xiii. 6-22. Cf. Keil, Comm. in loc. Hengst. ubi supra. 
 Vitringa de Angelo Sacerdote, obs. vi. 14. 
 5. Cf. the authorities quoted by Drach, Lettres d'un Rabbin Con- 
 verti, Lettre ii. p. 169. On the other side, Abenezra, in Exod. iii. 2. 
 Ge2 
 
84 General Opinion of the Earlier Fathers. [ Lecr. 
 
 men, but that He was One of the Three. Trypho 
 admits this, but he objects that this did not shew 
 that there was any God besides Him Who had 
 appeared to the Patriarchs. Justin replies that a 
 Divine Being, personally although not substantially 
 distinct from the supreme God, is clearly implied 
 in the statement that “the Lord rammed upon 
 Sodom and upon Gomorrah, brimstone and _ fire 
 from the Lord out of heaven".” Trypho yields the 
 point. Here it is plain that St. Justin did not 
 suppose that a created being was called God on 
 account of his mission; St. Justin believes that 
 One Who was of the substance of God appeared 
 to Abraham*. Again, the Fathers of the First 
 Synod at Antioch, in the letter which was sent to 
 Paulus of Samosata before his deposition, state that 
 the “Angel of the Father bemg Himself Lord and 
 God, μεγάλης βουλῆς ἄγγελος, appeared to Abraham, 
 
 t With St. Justin’s belief that the Son and two Angels appeared 
 to Abraham, cf. Tertullian. adv. Mare. ii. 27, iii. 9; S. Hil. de Trin. 
 iv. 27. That three created Angels appeared to Abraham was the 
 opinion of St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, x. 8, xvi. 29). St. Ambrose 
 sees in the “three men” an adumbration of the Blessed Trinity : 
 “Tres vidit et unum Dominum appellavit.” De Abraham,i. ο. 5; Pru- 
 dent. Apotheosis, 28. This seems to be the sense of the English 
 Church. See First Lesson for Evensong on Trinity Sunday. 
 
 u Gen. xix. 24. 
 
 * Dial. cum Tryph. ὃ 56, sqq. On the appearance in the burning 
 bush, ef. Tbid, § 59-61; ef. too ch. 127. Comp.St. Justin, Apol. i. ¢. 63. 
 
 * This gloss of the LXX. in Is. ix. 6 was a main ground of the 
 early Patristic application of the title of the Angel to God the Son. 
 “ Although Malachi foretells our Lord’s coming in the Flesh under 
 the titles of ‘the Lord, ‘the Angel,’ or ‘Messenger of the Cove- 
 nant,’ (chap. iii. 1) there is no proof that He is anywhere spoken 
 of absolutely as ‘the Angel,’ or that His Divine Nature is so 
 entitled.” Dr. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, p. 516, note 1. 
 
ἽΠ Judgment of St. Augustine. 85 
 
 and to Jacob, and to Moses in the burning bush?.” 
 It is unnecessary to multiply quotations in proof 
 of a fact which is beyond dispute’. 
 
 The Arian controversy led to a modification of 
 that estimate of the Theophanies which had _ pre- 
 vailed in the earlier Church. The earlier Church 
 teachers had clearly distinguished, as Scripture dis- 
 tinguishes, between the Angel of the Lord, Himself, 
 as they believed, Divine, and the Father. But the 
 Arians endeavoured to widen this personal dis- 
 tinctness into a deeper difference, a difference of 
 Natures. Appealing to the often-assigned ground? 
 of the belief respecting the Theophanies which had 
 prevailed in the ante-Nicene Church, the Arians 
 argued that the Son had been seen by the Patri- 
 archs, while the Father had not been seen, and 
 that an Invisible Nature was distinct from and 
 higher than a nature which was cognizable by the 
 senses®. St. Augustine boldly faced this difficulty, 
 and his great work on the Trinity gave the chief 
 impulse to another current of interpretation in the 
 Church. St. Augustine strenuously insists upon the 
 
 2. Mansi, Cone. i. p. 1035. 
 
 a Compare however 8. Irenzeus adv. Her. iv. 7. ὃ 4; Clem. 
 Alex. Peed. i. 7 ; Theophilus ad Autol. ii. 31; Constit. Apostol. v. 
 20; Tertullian. adv. Prax. cap. 13, 14, and 15; S. Cyprian. adv. 
 Judeeos, ii. ¢. 5, 6; 8. Cyr. Hieros. Catech. 10; S. Hil. de 
 Trin. lib. 4 and 5; 8S. Chrysost. Hom. in Genes. 42, 48; Theo- 
 doret, Interr. v. in Exod. (Op. i. p. 121), on Exod. iii. 2. Cf. some 
 additional authorities given by P. Vandenbroeck, De Theophaniis, 
 sub Vet. Testamento, p. 17, sqq ; Bull, Def. Fid. Nie. lib. i. 6. 1. 
 
 Ὁ eg. cf. Tertullian. adv. Mare. ii. ὁ. 27. 
 
 ¢ §. Aug. Serm. vii.n. 4. The Arian criticism ran thus: “ Filusi 
 visus est patribus, Pater non est visus : invisibilis autem et visibilis 
 diversa natura est.” 
 
86 Judgment of St. Augustine. [ Lect. 
 
 Scriptural truth of the Invisibility of God as Gods. 
 The Son, therefore, as being truly God, was by 
 nature as invisible as the Father. If the Son 
 appeared to the Patriarchs, He appeared through 
 the intermediate agency of a created bemg, who 
 represented Him, and through whom He spoke and 
 actedf, If the Angel who represented Him spoke 
 and acted with a Divine authority, and received 
 Divine honours, Augustine points to the force of 
 the law whereby, in things earthly and heavenly, an 
 ambassador is temporarily put in the place of the 
 
 ἃ St. John i. 18, ὅσ. 
 
 e “Tpsa enim natura vel substantia vel essentia, vel quolibet alio 
 nomine appellandum est id ipsum, quod Deus est, quidquid illud est 
 corporaliter videri non potest.” De Trin. 11. ¢. 18, n. 35. The Scotists, 
 who opposed the general Thomist doctrine to the effect that a 
 created angel was the instrument of the Theophanies, carefully 
 guarded against the ideas that the substance of God could be seen 
 by man in the body, or that the bodily form which they believed 
 to have been assumed was personally united to the Eternal Word, 
 since this was peculiar to the Divine Incarnation. (Scotus in lib. ii. 
 sent. dist. 8.) Scotus explains that the being who asswmes a 
 bodily form, need only be “intrinsecus motor corporis ; nam tune 
 assumit, id est ad se sumit, quia ad operationes proprias_ 510] 
 explendas utitur illo sicut instrumento.” (Ibid. Scholion i.) 
 
 f “ Proinde illa omnia, que Patribus visa sunt, cum Deus illis 
 secundum suam dispensationem temporibus congruam presenta- 
 retur, per creaturam facta esse, manifestum est... .. Sed jam satis 
 quantum existimo ... demonstratum est, . . . quod antiquis patribus 
 nostris ante Incarnationem Salvatoris, cum Deus apparere dicebatur, 
 voces ill ac species corporales per angelos facte sunt, sive ipsis 
 loquentibus vel agentibus aliquid ex persona Dei, sicut etiam pro- 
 phetas solere ostendimus, sive asswmentibus ex creatwrd quod ipsi 
 non essent, ubi Deus figuraté demonstraretur hominibus ; quod genus 
 significationum nec Prophetas omisisse, multis exemplis docet 
 Scriptura.” De Trin. iii. 11, ἢ. 22. 
 
ΠῚ] Judgment of St. Augustine and others. 87 
 
 Master who accredits himg. But Augustine further 
 warns us against attempting to say positively Which 
 of the Divine Persons manifested Himself, in this 
 or that instance, to Patriarchs or Prophets, except 
 where some remarkable indications determine our 
 conclusion very decisively». The general doctrine 
 of this great teacher, that the Theophanies were 
 not direct appearances of a Person in the Godhead, 
 but Self-manifestations of God through a created 
 being, had been hinted at by some earlier Fathers', 
 and was insisted on by contemporary and_ later 
 writers of the highest authority’. This explanation 
 
 5 “Sed ait aliquis: cur ergo Scriptum est, Dixit Dominus ad 
 Moysen ; et non potits, Dixit angelus ad Moysen? Quia cwm verba 
 judicis preco pronuntiat, non scribitur in Gestis, ille preeco dixit ; 
 sed ille judex ; sic etiam loquente propheta sancto, etsi dicamus 
 Propheta dixit, nihil aliud quam Dominum dixisse intelligi volumus. 
 Et si dicamus, Dominus dixit ; prophetam non subtrahimus, sed 
 quis per eum dixerit admonemus.” De Trin. iii. ¢. 11, n. 23. 
 
 h “Nihil aliud, quantum existimo, divinorum sacramentorum 
 modesta et cauta consideratio persuadet, nisi ut temeré non dica- 
 mus, Queenam ex Trinitate Persona cuilibet Patrum et Prophetarum 
 in aliquo corpore vel similitudine corporis apparuerit, nisi cum con- 
 tinentia lectionis aliqua probabilia circumponit indicia. ... Per sub- 
 jectam creaturam non solum Filium vel Spiritum Sanctum, sed etiam 
 Patrem corporali specie sive similitudine mortalibus sensibus signi- 
 ficationem Sui dare potuisse credendum est.” De Trin. ii. ὁ. 18, n. 35. 
 
 i Compare S. Irenzeus ady. Heer. iv. 20, ἢ. 7 and 24. “ Verbum 
 naturaliter quidem invisibile, palpabile in hominibus factum.” 
 Origen (Hom. xvi. in Jerem.) speaking of the vision in Exod. iii. 
 says, “ God was here beheld in the Angel.” 
 
 k §. Jerome (ed. Vall.) in Galat. iii. 19 : “Quod in omni Veteri Testa- 
 mento ubi angelus primum visus refertur et postea quasi Deus loquens 
 inducitur, angelus quidem veré ex ministris pluribus quicunque est 
 visus, sed in illo Mediator loquatur, Qui dicit ; Ego sum Deus Abra- 
 ham, ete. Nec mirum si Deus loquatur in angelis, cum etiam per 
 
88 Significance of the Theophanies. [Lecr. 
 
 has since become the predominant although by no 
 means the exclusive judgment of the Church!; and 
 if it is not unaccompanied by considerable difh- 
 culties when we apply it to the sacred text, it 
 certainly seems to relieve us of greater embar- 
 rassments than any which it creates™. 
 
 But whether the ante-Nicene (so to term it) or 
 the Augustinian line of interpretation be adopted 
 with respect to the Theophanies, no sincere be- 
 liever in the historical trustworthiness of Holy 
 Scripture can mistake the importance of their 
 relation to the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity. 
 If the Theophanies were not, as has been pretended, 
 mythical legends, the natural product of the Jew- 
 ish mind at a particular stage of its development, 
 but actual matter-of-fact occurrences in the history 
 of ancient Israel, must we not see in them a deep 
 Providential meaning? Whether in them the Word 
 or Son actually appeared, or whether God made a 
 created angel the absolutely perfect exponent of 
 His Thought and Will, do they not point in either 
 case to a purpose in the Divine Mind which would 
 only be realized when man had been admitted to 
 a nearer and more palpable contact with God than 
 
 angelos, qui in hominibus sunt, loquatur Deus in prophetis, dicente 
 Zaccharia: et ait angelus, qui loquebatur in me, ac deinceps infe- 
 rente; hee dicit Deus Omnipotens.” Cf. 8. Greg. Magn. Mag. Moral. 
 xxvill. 2; S. Athan. Or. iii. c. Arian. § 14. 
 
 ! The earlier interpretation has been more generally advocated 
 by English divines. P. Vandenbroeck’s treatise already referred to 
 shews that it still has adherents in other parts of the Western 
 Church. 
 
 m See especially Dr. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, p. 515, note 20; 
 Ῥ. 516, sqq, 
 
11.) Doctrine of the Kochmah or Wisdom. 89 
 
 was possible under the Patriarchal or Jewish dis- 
 pensations? Do they not suggest as their natural 
 climax and explanation, some Personal Self-unveiling 
 of God before the eyes of His creatures? Would 
 not God appear to have been training His people 
 by this long and mysterious series of communi- 
 cations at length to recognise and to worship Him 
 when hidden under and indissolubly one with a 
 Created Nature? Apart from the specific circum- 
 stances which may seem to have explained each 
 Theophany at the time of its taking place, and 
 considering them as a series of phenomena, is there 
 any other account of them so much in harmony with 
 the general scope of Holy Scripture, as that they 
 were successive lessons addressed to the eye and 
 to the ear of ancient piety, in anticipation of a 
 coming Incarnation of God ? 
 
 (vy) This preparatory service, if we may venture 
 so to term it, which had been rendered to the doc- 
 trie of our Lord’s Divinity by the Theophanies in 
 the world of sense, was seconded by the upgrowth 
 and development of a belief respecting the Divine 
 Kochmah or Wisdom in the region of inspired ideas. 
 The ‘ Wisdom’ of the Jewish Scriptures is certainly 
 more than a human endowment", and even, as 
 
 n The word 193M is, of course, used in this lower sense. It is 
 applied to an inspired skill in making priestly vestments (Exod. 
 XXvili. 3), or sacred furniture generally (Ibid. xxxi. 6 and xxxvi. 1, 
 2); to fidelity to known truth (Deut. iv. 6; cf. xxxii. 6); to great 
 intellectual accomplishments (Dan. i. 17). -Solomon was _ typically 
 Dan: his ‘Wisdom’ was exhibited in moral penetration and judg- 
 ment (1 Kings iii. 28, x. 4, sqq.); in the knowledge of many subjects, 
 specially of the works of God in the natural world (Ibid. iv. 33, 34); 
 in the knowledge of various poems and maxims, which he had either 
 
90 “The Wisdom” as described in Job [ Lect. 
 
 it would seem, more than an Attribute of God. 
 It may naturally remind us of the Archetypal 
 Ideas of Plato, but the resemblance is scarcely 
 more than superficial. The ‘Wisdom’ is hinted at 
 in the Book of Job. In a well-known passage of 
 majestic beauty, Job replies to his own question, 
 Where shall the Wisdom® be found? He repre- 
 sents Wisdom as it exists in God, and as it is 
 communicated in the highest form to man. In 
 God, ‘the Wisdom’ is that Eternal Thought, in 
 which the Divine Architect ever beheld His future 
 creation?. In man Wisdom is seen in moral growth ; 
 it is ‘the fear of the Lord, and ‘to depart from 
 evil4.’ The Wisdom is here only revealed as under- 
 lying, on the one side, the Laws of the physical 
 Universe, on the other, those of man’s moral na- 
 ture. Certainly as yet ‘Wisdom’ is not in any way 
 represented as personal; but we make a great step 
 in passing to the Book of Proverbs. In the Book 
 of Proverbs the Wisdom is co-eternal with Jehovah ; 
 Wisdom assists Him in the work of Creation; 
 Wisdom reigns, as one specially honoured, in the 
 palace of the King of Heaven; Wisdom is the 
 adequate object of the eternal joy of God; God 
 possesses Wisdom, Wisdom delights in God. 
 
 composed or which he remembered (Ibid. iv.32; Prov. i. 1). Wisdom, 
 as communicated to men, included sometimes supernatural powers 
 (Dan. v. 11), but specially moral virtue (Ps. xxxvii. 30, li. 6 ; Prov. 
 x. 31); and piety to God (Ps. exi. 10). In God 793n7 is higher 
 than any of these ; He alone originally possesses It (Job xii. 12, 13, 
 XXVili. 12, Sq.). 
 
 ο Job xxviil. 12. MADINA. P Ibid. vers. 23-27. 
 
 a Ibid. ver. 28. 
 
ἢ and in the Book of Proverbs. ΟῚ 
 
 “Jehovah (says Wisdom) possessed Me in the beginning of His 
 way, 
 
 Before His works of old. 
 I was set up from everlasting, 
 From the beginning, or ever the earth was. 
 When there were no depths, I was brought forth ; 
 When there were no fountains abounding with water. 
 Before the mountains were settled, 
 Before the hills was I brought forth : 
 While as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, 
 Nor the highest part of the dust of the world. 
 When He prepared the heavens, I was there " 
 When He set a compass upon the face of the depth : 
 When He established the clouds above : 
 When He strengthened the fountains of the deep : 
 When He gave to the sea His decree, 
 That the waters should not pass His commandment : 
 When He appointed the foundations of the earth : 
 Then I was by Him, as One brought up with Him : 
 And I was daily His Delight, rejoicing always before Him ; 
 Rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth ; 
 And My delights were with the sons of men*.” 
 
 Are we listening to the language of a real Person 
 or only of a poetic personification? A group of 
 critics defends each hypothesis; and those who 
 maintain the latter, point to the picture of Folly 
 in the succeeding chapters. But may not a study 
 of that picture lead to a very opposite conclusion ? 
 Folly is there no mere abstraction, she is a sinful 
 woman of impure life, ‘whose guests are in the 
 depths of hell.’ The work of Folly is the very work 
 of the Evil One, the real antagonist of the Divine 
 Kochmah. Folly is the principle of absolute Un- 
 
 r Proy. viii. 22+31. For Patristic expositions of this passage see 
 Petavius, de Trin. ii. 1. 8 Prov. ix. 13-18. 
 
92 Is ‘Wisdom’ here represented as personal 2 Lect. 
 » ὔ» 
 
 wisdom, of consummate Moral Evil. Folly, by the 
 force of the antithesis, enhances our impression 
 that ‘the Wisdom’ is personal. The Arians under- 
 stood the wordt which is rendered ‘possessed’ in 
 our English Bible, to mean ‘created,’ and they thus 
 degraded the Wisdom to the level of a creature. 
 But they did not doubt that this created Wisdom 
 was a real being or person". Modern critics know 
 that if we are to be guided by the clear certain 
 sense of the Hebrew root* we shall read ‘ possessed’ 
 and not ‘created,’ and they admit without difficulty 
 that the Wisdom is uncreated by, and co-eternal with 
 the Lord Jehovah. But they resolve Wisdom into 
 an impersonal and abstract idea or quality. The 
 true interpretation is probably related to these op- 
 posite mistakes, as was the Faith of the Church to 
 the conflicting theories of the Arians and the Sabel- 
 hans. Each error contributes its quota to the cause 
 
 * The Arians appealed to the LXX. reading ἔκτισε (not ἐκτήσατο). 
 On κτίζειν as meaning any kind of production, see Bull, Def. Fid. 
 Nie. lib. ii. ὁ. 6, sec. 8. In a note on Athan. Treatises, ii. 342, Dr. 
 Newman cites Aquila, St. Basil, St. Gregory Nyss. and St. Jerome, 
 for the sense ἐκτήσατο. 
 
 u As Kuhn summarily observes: “Das war tiberhaupt nicht die 
 Frage in christlichen alterthum, ob hier von einem Wesen die Rede 
 sei, das war allgemein anerkannt, sondern von welcher Art, in 
 welchem Verhiltniss zu Gott es gedacht sei.” Dogmatik, ii. p. 29, 
 note (2). 
 
 * This both in Hebrew and (with one exception) in Arabic. 
 Cf. Gesenius, Thesaurus, in 3p and 43. So, too, the Syr. es. 
 Neither Gen. xiv. 19. nor Deut. xxxii. 6 require that mp should 
 be translated ‘created,’ still less Ps. exxxix, 13, where it means 
 ‘to have rights over.’ Gesenius quotes no other examples. The cur- 
 rent meaning of the word is ‘to acquire’ or ‘possess,’ as is proved 
 by its certain sense in the great majority of cases where it is used. 
 
11: “Wisdom” in the Greek Sapiential Books. 93 
 
 of truth; the more ancient may teach us that the 
 Wisdom is personal; the more modern, that it is 
 uncreated and co-eternal with God. 
 
 But even if it should be thought that ‘the 
 personified idea of the Mind of God in Creation’ 
 rather than the presence of ‘a distinct HypostasisY’ 
 is all that can with certainty be discovered in the 
 text of the Book of Proverbs, yet no one, looking 
 to the contents of those sacred Sapiential Books, 
 which lie beyond the precincts of the Hebrew Canon, 
 can well doubt that something more had been in- 
 ferred by the most active religious thought in the 
 Jewish Church. The Son of Sirach, for instance, 
 opens his treatise with a dissertation on the source 
 of Wisdom. Wisdom is from all eternity with God ; 
 Wisdom proceeds from God before any finite thing, 
 and is poured out upon all His Works*% But 
 Wisdom, thus “created from the beginning before 
 the world,” and having an unfailing existence’, is 
 bidden by God to make her “dwelling in Jacob, 
 and her inheritance in Israel?.”. Wisdom is thus 
 the prolific mother of all forms of moral beauty‘ ; 
 she is given to all of God’s true children4; but she 
 - is specially resident in the holy Law, “which Moses 
 commanded for an heritage unto the congregations 
 of Jacob®.” In that beautiful chapter which con- 
 tains this passage, Wisdom is conceived of as all- 
 operative, yet as limited by nothing ; as a physical 
 yet also as a spiritual power; as eternal and yet 
 
 y So apparently Déllinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. x. 
 part ili. sec. 2. 
 
 * Eeelus. 1. 1-10. a [bid, xxiv. 9. b ΤΟΙ. vers. 8-12. 
 
 © Ibid. vers. 13-18. a 1014, e [bid. ver, 23. 
 
94 “Wisdom” in the Greek Sapiential Books. — [Lucr. 
 
 having definite relations to time; above all, as 
 perpetually extending the range of her fruitful 
 self-manifestation£ Not to dwell upon language 
 to the same effect in Baruch’, we may observe that 
 in the Book of Wisdom the Sophia is more dis- 
 tinctly personal’. If this Book is less prominently 
 theocratic than Ecclesiasticus, it is even more ex- 
 plicit as to that supreme dignity of Wisdom which 
 is seen in its relation to God. Wisdom is a pure 
 stream flowmg from the glory of the Almighty’; 
 Wisdom is that spotless mirror which reflects the 
 operations of God, and upon which He gazes as He 
 works; Wisdom is the Brightness of the Everlasting 
 Light'; Wisdom is the very Image of the Good- 
 ness of God™. Material symbols are unequal to 
 domg justice to so spiritual an essence: “ Wisdom 
 is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the 
 order of the stars; being compared with the light 
 she is found before it.” “Wisdom is more moving 
 than any motion: she passeth and goeth through 
 all things by reason of her pureness®.” Her sphere 
 is not merely Palestine, but the world, not this or 
 
 f Cf. especially Ecclus. xxiv. 5-8, 10-18, 25-28, and i. 14-17. 
 
 ¢ Compare Baruch iii. 14, 15, 29-32, 35, 36, and the remark- 
 able verse 37. 
 
 h Liicke, who holds that in the Book of Proverbs and in Ecclesi- 
 asticus there is merely a personification, sees a ‘dogmatic hypos- 
 tatizing’ in Wisd. vii. 22, sqq. Cf too Dihne, Alexandrinische 
 Religionsphilosophie, ii. 134, &e. 
 
 i Wisd. vii. 25. 
 
 k Thid. vii. 26: ἔσοπτρον ἀκηλίδωτον τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐνεργείας. 
 
 1 ΤΟΙ. ἀπαύγασμα φωτὸς ἀϊδίου, compare Heb. i. 3. 
 
 m Ibid. εἰκὼν τῆς ἀγαθότητος τοῦ Θεοῦ, compare 2 Cor. iv. 4, Col. i. 15. 
 
 n Tbid. vii. 29. © Ibid. ver. 24, compare ver. 27. 
 
qT] Its identity with the “Word.” 95 
 
 that age, but the history of humanity. All that is 
 good and true in human thought is due to her: 
 “in all ages entering into holy souls she maketh 
 them friends of God and prophets?.” Is there not 
 here, in an Alexandrian dress, a precious and vital 
 truth sufficiently familiar to believing Christians? Do 
 we not already seem to catch the accents of those 
 weighty formule by which Apostles will presently 
 define the pre-existent Glory of their Majestic Lord 1 
 Yet are we not steadily continuing, with no very 
 considerable measure of expansion, in that very line 
 of sacred thought to which the patient servant of 
 God in the desert, and the wisest of kings in Jeru- 
 salem, have already, and so authoritatively, intro- 
 duced us 4 
 
 The doctrine may be traced at a stage beyond, 
 in the writings of Philo Judzus. We at once 
 observe that its form is altered; instead of the 
 Wisdom or Sophia we have the Logos or Word. 
 Philo indeed might have justified the change of 
 phraseology by an appeal even to the Hebrew 
 Scriptures. In the Hebrew Books, the Word of 
 Jehovah manifests the energy of God: He creates 
 the heavens’; He governs the world’. Accordingly, 
 among the Palestinian Jews, the Chaldee paraphrasts 
 almost always represent God as acting, not imme- 
 diately, but through the mediation of the Memras 
 or Word. In the Greek Sapiential Books, the Word 
 is apparently identical with the Wisdom‘; but the 
 
 P Wisd. vii. 27. α Ps, xxxiii. 6. AN) 725. 
 
 r Ps. exlvii. 15; Isai. lv. 11. 8 NW) or 137 
 
 t Thus in Ecclus. xxiv. 3 the σοφία Θεοῦ uses the language which 
 might be expected of the λόγος Θεοῦ, in saying that she came forth 
 
96 Identity of the “Wisdom” and the “Word.’? — (Lixcr. 
 
 Wisdom is always prominent, the Word is rarely 
 mentioned’. Yet the Logos of Ecclesiasticus is the 
 
 from the Mouth of the Most High; while in chap. i. 5 we are told 
 expressly that πηγὴ σοφίας “λόγος Θεοῦ. In the Book of Wisdom σοφία 
 is identified on the one side with the ἅγιον πνεῦμα παιδείας (chap. 1. 
 4, 5), and the πνεῦμα Κυρίου (ver. 7); πνεῦμα and σοφία are united 
 in the expression πνεῦμα σοφίας (vii. 7; compare ix. 17). On the 
 other side σοφία and the λόγος are both instruments of creation 
 (Wisd. ix. 1, 2; for the πνεῦμα, cf. Gen. i. 2, and Ps. xxxiii. 6), 
 they both ‘come down from heaven’ (Ibid. ver. 10, and xviii, 
 15, and the πνεῦμα, ix. 17), and achieve the deliverance of Israel 
 from Egypt (cf. xvii. 15 with x. 15-20). The representation 
 seems to point to no mere ascription of identical functions to 
 altogether distinct conceptions or Beings, but to the inner essential 
 unity of the Spirit, the Word and the Wisdom. “Es ist an sich 
 eine und dieselbe gottliche Kraft, die nach aussen wirksam ist, aber 
 es sind verschiedene Beziehungen und Arten dieser Wirksamkeit, 
 wornach sie Wort, Geist, Weisheit Gottes genannt wird.” Kuhn, p. 
 27. That the πνεῦμα really pointed to a distinct Hypostasis in God 
 became plain only at a later time to the mind of His people. On 
 the relations of the 717° A, the 75M, and the 717735 to each 
 other, see Kuhn, p. 24. 
 
 u Kuhn has stated the relation of the ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Word,’ and 
 ‘Spirit’ to God and to each other, in the Sapiential Books, as follows: 
 -- 16 unterschiedung Gottes und Seiner offenbarung in der Welt 
 ist die Folie, auf der sich ein innerer Unterschied in Gott abspiegelt, 
 der Unterchied Gottes nimlich von Seinem Worte, Seiner Weisheit. 
 Diese, wiewohl sie zuniichst blosse Eigenschaften und somit Sein an 
 Sich seiendes Wesen, oder Krafte und Wirksamkeiten Gottes nach 
 aussen, somit dasselbe Wesen, sofern Es Sich in der Welt manifestirt, 
 ausdriicken, erscheinen sofort tiefer gefasst als etwas fiir sich, unter 
 dem Gesichtspunkt eines eigenen gittlichen Wesens, einer gottlichen 
 Person. Unter einander verhalten sie sich aber so, dass einerseits 
 Wort und Geist, desgleichen andrerseits Wort und Weisheit Gottes 
 theils unterscheiden, theils aber auch wieder wesentlich gleichbedeu- 
 tend genommen sind, so dass ausser dem Hauptunterschiede Gottes 
 von Seinem Andern noch ein weiterer, der Unterschied dieses Andern 
 von einem Dritten hinzuzukommen, zugleich aber auch die Identitiit 
 
11.1 The “Word” eclipses the “Wisdom” in Philo Judaus. ΟἿ 
 
 organ of creation’, while in the Book of Wisdom 
 the Logos is clearly personified, and is a minister of 
 the Divine Judgment*. In Philo, however, the Sophia 
 falls into the background’, and the Logos is the 
 symbol of the general doctrine, for other reasons 
 perhaps, but mainly as a natural result of Philo’s 
 profound sympathy with Stoic and Platonic thought. 
 If the Book of Wisdom adopts Platonic phraseology, 
 its fundamental ideas are continuous with those of 
 the Hebrew Scriptures.” Philo, on the contrary, is a 
 hearty Platonist ; his Platonism enters into the very 
 marrow of his thought. It is true that in Philo 
 Platonism and the Jewish Revelation are made to 
 converge, but the process of their attempted as- 
 similation is an awkward and violent one, and it 
 
 des ihnen (unter Sich und mit Gott) gemeinsamen Wesens angedeu- 
 tet zu sein scheint.” Lehre von Gottl. Dreieinigkeit, p. 23. 
 
 Υ Ecclus. xliii. 26. x Wisd. xviii. 15. 
 
 y Philo distinguishes between Wisdom and Philosophy : Philoso- 
 phy or wise living is the slave of Wisdom or Science ; σοφία is 
 ἐπιστήμη θείων καὶ ἀνθρωπίνων καὶ τῶν τούτων αἰτιῶν (Cong. Qu. Erud. 
 Grat. § 14, ed. Mangey, tom. i. p. 530). Philo explains Exod. xxiv. 6 
 allegorically, as the basis of a distinction between Wisdom as it 
 exists in men and in God, τὸ θεῖον γένος ἀμιγὲς καὶ ἄκρατον (Quis 
 Rer. Div. Heer. ὃ 48,1. p. 498). Wisdom is the mother of the world 
 
 (Quod Det. Potiori Insid. § 16, i. p. 202); her wealth is without 
 ᾿ limits, she is like a deep well, a perennial fountain, &c. But Philo 
 does not in any case seem to personify Wisdom; his doctrine of 
 Wisdom is eclipsed by that of the Logos. 
 
 2 Vacherot (Ecole d’Alexandrie, vol. i. p. 134, Introd.) says of 
 Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus : “Ces monumens renferment peu de 
 traces des idées Grecques dont ils semblent avoir précédé I’ invasion 
 en Orient.” Ecclesiasticus was written in Hebrew under the High- | 
 Priesthood of Simon I, B.c. 303-284, by Jesus the Son of Sirach, 
 and translated into Greek by his grandson, who came to reside at 
 Alexandria under Ptolemy Euergetes. 
 
 ἘΠ 
 
98 Double character of the mind of Philo. [ Lecr. 
 
 involves the great Alexandrian in much involuntary 
 self-contradiction. Philo indeed is in perpetual em- 
 barrassment between the pressure of his intellectual 
 Hellenic instincts on the one side, and the dictates 
 of his religious conscience as a Jewish believer on 
 the other. He constantly abandons himself to the 
 currents of Greek thought around him, and then 
 he endeavours to set himself right with the Creed 
 of Sinai, by throwing his Greek ideas into Jewish 
 forms. If his Logos is apparently moulded after the 
 pattern of the νοῦς βασιλικὸς ἐν τῇ τοῦ Διὸς φύσει--- 
 the Regal Principle of Intelligence in the Nature of 
 Zeus—with which we meet in the Philebus of Plato’, 
 Philo doubtless would fain be translating and ex- 
 plaining the my 127 of the Hebrew Canon, in 
 perfect loyalty to the Faith of Israel. The Logos 
 of Philo evidently pre-supposes the Platonic doctrine 
 of Ideas ; but then, with Philo, these Ideas are some- 
 thing more than the models after which creation 
 is fashioned, or than the seals which are impressed 
 upon concrete forms of existence’. The Ideas of 
 Philo are energizing powers or causes whereby 
 God carries out His plan of creation®. Of these 
 
 a Plat. Philebus, p. 30. “There is not,” says Professor Mansel, 
 “the slightest evidence that the Divine Reason was represented by 
 Plato as having a distinct personality, or as being anything more 
 than an attribute of the Divine Mind.” Cf. art. Philosophy, in 
 Kitto’s Cycl. of Bibl. Literature, new ed. 
 
 b Cf. Philo, de Mund. Opif. § 44, tom. i. p. 30; Legis Allegor. i. 
 § 9, tom. i. p. 47. 
 
 ὁ De Monarchia, i. § 6, tom. ii. p. 219: ὀνομάζουσι δὲ αὐτὰς οὐκ ἀπὸ 
 σκοποῦ τινὲς τῶν παρ᾽ ὑμῖν ἰδέας, ἐπειδὴ ἔκαστον τῶν ὄντων ἰδιοποιοῦσι, τὰ 
 ἄτακτα τάττουσαι, καὶ τὰ ἄπειρα καὶ ἀόριστα καὶ ἀσχημάτιστα περατοῦσαι 
 
 Ν , Ν , al 
 καὶ περιορίζουσαι καὶ σχηματίζουσαι καὶ συνόλως τὸ χεῖρον εἰς τὸ ἄμεινον 
 
17: Relation of Philo’s Logos to his theosophy. 99 
 
 energetic forces, the Logos, according to Philo, is the 
 compendium, the concentration. Philo’s Logos is a 
 necessary complement of his philosophical doctrine 
 concerning God. Philo indeed, as the devout Jew, 
 believes in God as a Personal Being Who has 
 constant and certain dealings with mankind; Philo, 
 in his Greek moods, conceives of God not merely as 
 a single simple Essence, but as beyond personality, 
 beyond any definite form of existence, infinitely dis- 
 tant from all relations to created life, incapable of 
 any contact even with a spiritual creation, subtilized 
 into an abstraction altogether transcending the most 
 abstract conceptions of impersonal being. It might 
 even seem as if Philo had chosen for his master, 
 not Plato the theologian of the Timzeus, but Plato 
 the pure dialectician of the Republic. But how is 
 such an abstract God as this to be also the Creator 
 and the Providence of the Hebrew Bible?  Cer- 
 tainly, according to Philo, matter existed before 
 creation’; but how did God mould matter into 
 created forms of life? This, Philo will reply, was 
 the work of the Logos, that is to say, of the ideas 
 collectively. The Philonian Logos is the Idea of 
 ideas®; he is the shadow of God by which as by 
 an instrument He made the worldsf; he is himself 
 
 μεθαρμοζόμεναι. Comp. the remarkable passage in De Vict. Offer. 
 § 13, tom. il. p. 261. 
 
 ἃ Tn one passage only does Philo appear to ascribe to God the 
 creation of matter. De Somn. i. § 13, tom. i. 632. If so, for once 
 his Jewish conscience is too strong for his Platonism. But even 
 here his meaning is at best doubtful. Cf. Dollinger, Heid. und 
 Judenth. bk. x. pt. 3, § 5. 
 
 € De Mundi Opif. § 6; 1. p. 5 : ἰδέα τῶν ἰδεῶν ὁ θεοῦ λόγος. 
 
 f Legis Allegor. iii. 31; i. p. 106: σκιὰ θεοῦ δὲ ὁ λόγος αὐτοῦ ἐστιν ᾧ 
 
 ἘΠῸ 
 
100 Functions and eminence of the Logos of Philo. {Lxcr., 
 
 the intelligible or Ideal World, the Archetypal Type 
 of all creation®. The Logos of Philo is the most 
 ancient and most general of created things!; he 
 is the Eternal Image of God‘; he is the band 
 whereby all things are held together*; he fills all 
 things, he sustains all things!. Through the Logos, 
 God, the abstract, the intangible, the imaccessible 
 God, deals with the world, with men. Thus the 
 Logos is mediator as well as creator™; he is a 
 high-priest and intercessor with God ; he interprets 
 God to man; he is an ambassador from heaven”. 
 He is the god of imperfect men, who cannot ascend 
 
 καθάπερ ὀργάνῳ προσχρησάμενος ἐκοσμοποίει. De Monarch. ii. ὃ 5; tom. 
 ii, 225 ; De Cherub. § 35, tom. i. p. 162. 
 
 8 De Mund. Opif. § 6, 1. p. 5: ἡ ἀρχέτυπος σφραγὶς, ὅν φαμεν εἶναι 
 κόσμον νοητὸν, αὐτὸς ἂν εἴη τὸ ἀρχέτυπον παράδειγμα... 6 θεοῦ λόγος. 
 The λόγος is dissociated from the παράδειγμα in De Conf. Ling. ¢. xiv. 
 ay 70... 
 
 h Legis Allegor. 111. 61, i. p. 121: καὶ 6 λόγος δὲ τοῦ θεοῦ ὑπεράνω 
 παντός ἐστι τοῦ κόσμου, καὶ πρεσβύτατος καὶ γενικώτατος τῶν ὅσα γέγονε. 
 
 1 De Conf. Ling. § 28, i. 427. “Although,” says Philo, “we 
 are not in a position to be considered the Sons of God, yet we may 
 be the children τῆς ἀϊδίου εἰκόνος αὐτοῦ, λόγου τοῦ ἱερωτάτου. 
 
 k De Plantat. ὃ 2, 1. 331: δεσμὸν γὰρ αὐτὸν ἄῤῥηκτον τοῦ παντὸς 
 6 γεννήσας ἐποίει πατήρ. 
 
 1 De Mundo, § 2, ii. p- 604: τὸ ὀχυρώτατον καὶ βεβαιότατον ἔρεισμα 
 τῶν ὅλων ἐστίν. Οὗτος ἀπὸ τῶν μέσων ἐπὶ τὰ πέρατα καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν ἄκρων εἰς 
 μέσα ταθεὶς δολιχεύει τὸν τῆς φύσεως δρόμον ἀήττητον, συνάγων πάντα τὰ 
 μέρη καὶ σφίγγων. 
 
 m Quis Rer. Div. Her. § 42, i. p. 501: τῷ δὲ ἀρχαγγέλῳ καὶ πρεσ- 
 βυτάτῳ λόγῳ δωρεὰν ἐξαίρετον ἔδωκεν ὁ τὰ ὅλα γεννήσας πατὴρ, Wa μεθόριος 
 στὰς τὸ γενόμενον διακρίνῃ τοῦ πεποιηκότος. 
 
 n Ibid. ; ὁ δ᾽ αὐτὸς ἱκέτης μέν ἐστι τοῦ θνητοῦ κηραίνοντος ἀεὶ πρὸς τὸ 
 ἄφθαρτον, πρεσβυτὴς δὲ τοῦ ἡγεμόνος πρὸς τὸ ὑπήκοον. Cf. De Somniis, 
 § 37, 1. 653; De Migr. Abraham. ὃ 18, 1. 452. De Gigant. ὃ 11: 
 
 ὁ ἀρχιερεὺς λόγος. 
 
11.] Is the Logos of Philo personal ? 101 
 
 by an ecstatic intuition to a knowledge of the 
 supreme God®; he is thus the nutriment of human 
 souls and a source of spiritual delights’. The 
 Logos is the-eldest angel or the archangel; he is 
 God’s Eldest, His Firstborn Son"; and we almost 
 seem to touch upon the apprehension of that 
 sublime, that very Highest Form of communicated 
 Life, which is exclusive of the ideas of inferiority 
 and of time, and which was afterwards so hap- 
 pily and authoritatively expressed by the doctrinal 
 formula of an eternal generation. But, as we listen, 
 we ask ourselves one capital and inevitable question : 
 Is Philo’s Logos a personal being, or is he after all 
 a pure abstraction? Philo is silent; for on such 
 a point as this the Greek and the Jew in him are 
 hopelessly at issue. Philo’s whole system and drift 
 of thought must have inclined him to personify the 
 Logos; but was the ~ personified Logos to be a 
 second God, or was he to be nothing more than a 
 created angel? If the latter, then he would lose 
 all those lofty prerogatives and characteristics, 
 
 ὁ Legis Allegor. iii, § 73,1. 128: οὗτος [sc. ὁ λόγος] yap ἡμῶν 
 τῶν ἀτελῶν ἂν εἴη θεὸς, τῶν δὲ σοφῶν καὶ τελείων, ὁ πρῶτος, 1.6. God 
 Himself. Cf. § 32 and § 33,1. 107. 
 
 Ρ Legis Allegor. ili. ὃ 59, 1. 120: Ὁρᾷς τῆς ψυχῆς τροφὴν οἵα ἐστί; 
 Λόγος θεοῦ συνεχὴς, ἐοικὼς Spdow. Cf. also ὃ 62. De Somniis, ὃ 37, 
 i. 691: τῷ yap ὄντι τοῦ θείου λόγου ῥύμη συνεχὴς μεθ᾽ ὁρμῆς καὶ τάξεως 
 φερομένη, πάντα διὰ πάντων ἀναχεῖται καὶ εὐφραίνει. 
 
 4 De Conf. Ling. § 28, 1. 427: κἂν μηδέπω μέντοι τυγχάνῃ τις 
 ἀξιόχρεως ὧν υἱὸς θεοῦ προσαγορεύεσθαι, σπουδαζέτω κοσμεῖσθαι κατὰ τὸν 
 πρωτόγονον αὐτοῦ Λόγον, τὸν ἄγγελον πρεσβύτατον ὡς ἀρχάγγελον πολυ- 
 ὦνυμον ὑπάρχοντα. 
 
 r De Conf. Ling. § 14,1. 414: τοῦτον μὲν γὰρ πρεσβύτατον υἱὸν ὁ 
 
 a ” ἃ “ὦ ἢ \ 4 δὰ , cer) 
 Τῶν OVT@YV ἀνέτειλε Πατὴρ, ον ἑτέρωθι πρωτόγονον ὠνόμασε, 
 
102 Philo’s indecision. [ Lxcr. 
 
 which, platonically speaking, as well as for the 
 purposes of mediation and creation, were so entirely 
 essential to him. If the former, then Philo must 
 break with the very first article of the Mosaic 
 creed; he must renounce his Monotheism. Con- 
 fronted with this difficulty, the Alexandrian wavers 
 in piteous indecision; he really recoils before it. 
 In one passage indeed he even goes so far as to call 
 the Logos a ‘second God’, and he is accordingly 
 ranked by Petavius among the forerunners of Arius. 
 But on the whole he appears to fall back upon a 
 position which, however fatal to the completeness of 
 his system, yet has the recommendation of relieving 
 him from an overwhelming difficulty. After all that _ 
 he has said, his Logos is really resolved into a 
 mere group of Divine ideas, into a purely imper- 
 sonal quality included in the Divine Being'. That 
 
 5 Fragment quoted from Euseb. Prep. Evang. lib. vii. 6. 13 in 
 Phil. Oper. ii. 625 : θνητὸν yap οὐδὲν ἀπεικονισθῆναι πρὸς τὸν ἀνωτάτω 
 καὶ πατέρα τῶν ὅλων ἐδύνατο, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὸν δεύτερον θεὸν, ὃς ἐστιν ἐκείνου 
 Λόγος. But the Logos is called θεός only ἐν καταχρήσει. Op. i. 655. 
 
 t That Philo’s Logos is mot a distinct Person is maintained by 
 Dorner, Person Christi, Einleitung, p. 23, note i. 44, sqq. note 40; 
 by Déllinger, Heid. und Judenthum, bk. x. p. ili, § 5; and by 
 Burton, Bampton Lectures, note 93. The opposite opinion is that of 
 Gfrorer (see his Philo und die Jiidisch-Alexandrinische Theologie), 
 and of Liicke (see Professor Mansel, in Kitto’s Encyel., art. Philoso- 
 phy, p. 526, note). Professor Jowett, at one time, following Gfrérer, 
 appears to find in Philo ‘the complete personification of the Logos,’ 
 although he also admits that Philo’s idea of the Logos “leaves us 
 in doubt at last whether it is not a quality only, or mode of 
 operation in the Divine Being.” (Ep. of St. Paul, i. p. 510, 2nd ed.) 
 He hesitates indeed to decide the question, on the ground that “the 
 word ‘person’ has now a distinctness and unity which belongs not 
 to that age.” (p. 485.) Surely the idea (at any rate) of personality, 
 
II.] Philo and the New Testament. 103 
 
 advance toward the recognition of a real Hypo- 
 stasis,—so steady, as it seemed, so promising, so 
 fruitful—is but a play upon language, or an intel- 
 lectual field-sport, or at best, the effort which precedes 
 or the mask which covers a speculative failure. We 
 were tempted perchance for a moment to believe 
 that we were listening to the Master from whom 
 Apostles were presently to draw their imspirations ; 
 but, in truth, we have before us in Philo Judzeus 
 only a thoughtful, not insincere, but half-heathenized 
 believer in the Revelation of Simai, groping in a 
 twilight which he has made darker by his Hellenic 
 tastes, after a truth which was only to be disclosed 
 in its fulness by another Revelation, the Revelation 
 of Pentecost. 
 
 This hesitation as to the capital question of the 
 Personality of the Logos, would alone suffice to 
 establish a fundamental difference between the vacil- 
 lating, tentative speculation of the Alexandrian, and 
 the clear, compact, majestic doctrme concerning our 
 
 ΠΑ 
 
 whether distinctly analyzed or no, is a primary element of all 
 human thought. It is due to Professor Jowett to call attention to 
 the extent (would that it were wider and more radical!) to which 
 he disavows Gfrérer’s conclusions. (Ibid. p. 454, note.) And I quote 
 the following words with sincere pleasure: ‘The object of the 
 Gospel is real, present, substantial,—an object such as men may 
 see with their eyes and hold in their hands. ... But in Philo the 
 object is shadowy, distant, indistinct ; whether an idea or a fact 
 we scarcely know.... Were we to come nearer to it, it would 
 vanish away.” (Ibid. p. 413, 1st ed.; p. 509, 2nd ed., in which 
 there are a few variations.) A study of the passages referred to 
 in Mangey’s index will, it is believed, convince any unprejudiced 
 reader that Philo did not know his own mind ; that his Logos was 
 sometimes impersonal and sometimes not, or that he sometimes 
 thought of a personal Logos, and never believed in one. 
 
104 Moral interval between Philo and the Gospel. {Lxcr, 
 
 Lord’s Pre-existent Godhead, which meets us under 
 a somewhat similar phraseological form" in the pages 
 of the New Testament. When it is assumed that 
 the Logos of St. John is but a reproduction of the 
 Logos of Philo the Jew, this assumption overlooks 
 fundamental discrepancies of thought, and rests its 
 case upon occasional coincidences of language’. For 
 besides the contrast between the abstract ideal Logos 
 of Philo, and the concrete Personal Logos of the 
 Fourth Evangelist, which has already been noticed, 
 there are even deeper differences, which would have 
 made it impossible that an Apostle should have sat 
 in spirit as a pupil at the feet of the Alexandrian, 
 or that he should have allowed himself to breathe 
 the same general religious atmosphere. Philo is 
 everywhere too little alive to the presence and to 
 the consequences of moral evil”. The history of 
 
 u On the general question of the phraseological coincidences 
 between Philo and the writers in the New Testament, see the 
 passages quoted in Professor Mansel’s article ‘Philosophy’ (Kitto’s 
 Encyel.), already referred to. I could sincerely wish that I had 
 had the advantage of reading that article before writing the text 
 of these pages. 
 
 v “Gfrorer,” Professor Jowett admits, “has exaggerated the re- 
 semblances between Philo and the New Testament, making them, I 
 think, more real and less verbal than they are in fact.” (Ep. of St. 
 Paul, i. 454, note.) “Tl est douteux,” says Μ. E. Vacherot, “que 
 Saint Jean, qui n’a jamais visité Alexandrie, ait connu les livres 
 du philosophe juif.’” Histoire Critique de lecole d’Alexandrie, i, 
 p. 201. And the limited circulation of the writings of the theoso- 
 phical Alexandrians would appear from the fact that Philo himself 
 appears never to have read those of his master Aristobulus. Cf. 
 Valkenaer, de Aristobulo, p. 95. 
 
 W See the remarks of M. E. de Préssensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 
 Pre: 
 
II.] Doctrinal interval between Philo and the Gospel. 105 
 
 Israel, instead of displaying a long, earnest struggle 
 between the Goodness of God and the wickedness 
 of men, interests Philo only as a complex allegory, 
 which, by a versatile exposition, may be made to illus- 
 trate various ontological problems. The priesthood, 
 and the sacrificial system, instead of pointing to man’s 
 profound need of pardon and expiation, are resolved 
 by him into the symbols of certain cosmical facts 
 or theosophic theories. Philo therefore scarcely hints 
 at the Messiah, although he says much concerning 
 Jewish expectations of a brighter future ; he knows 
 no means of reconciliation, of redemption ; he sees 
 not the need of them. - According to Philo, salvation 
 is to be worked out by a perpetual speculation upon 
 the eternal order of things; and asceticism is of value 
 in assisting man to ascend into an ecstatic philoso- 
 phical reverie. The profound opposition between such 
 a view of man’s moral state and that stern appeal to 
 the humbling realities of human life which is insepa- 
 rable from the teaching of Christ and His Apostles, 
 would alone have made it improbable that the writers 
 -of the New Testament are under any real intellectual 
 obligations to Philo. Unless the preaching which 
 could rouse the conscience to a keen agonizing sense 
 of guilt is in harmony with a lassitude which ignores 
 the moral misery that is in the world; unless the 
 proclamation of an Atoning Victim crucified for the 
 sins of men be reconcilable with an indifference to 
 the existence of any true expiation for sin what- 
 ever, it will not be easy to believe that Philo is 
 the real author of the creed of Christendom. And 
 this moral discrepancy does but tally with a like doc- 
 trinal antagonism. According to Philo, the Divinity 
 
100 Real function of the Alexandrian theosophy. (uct. 
 
 cannot touch that which is material : how can Philo 
 then have been the teacher of an Apostle whose 
 whole teaching expands the truth that the Word, 
 Himself essentially Divine, was made flesh and 
 dwelt among us? Philo’s real spiritual progeny 
 must be sought elsewhere. Philo’s method of inter- 
 pretation may have passed into the Church ; he is 
 quoted by Clement and Origen often and respect- 
 fully. Yet Philo’s doctrine, it has been well ob- 
 served, if naturally developed, would have led to 
 Docetism rather than to Christianity*; and we 
 trace its influence in forms of theosophic Gnosticism, 
 which only agree in substituting the wildest licence 
 of the metaphysical fancy, for simple submission to 
 that historical fact of the Incarnation of God, which 
 is the basis of the Gospel. 
 
 But if Philo was not St. John’s master, it is 
 probable that his writings, or rather the general — 
 theosophic movement of which they are the most 
 representative sample, may have supplied some con- 
 temporary heresies with their stock of metaphysical 
 material, and in this way may have determined, by 
 an indirect antagonism, the providential Form of 
 St. John’s doctrine. Nor can the general positive 
 value of Philo’s labours be mistaken, if he is viewed 
 apart from the use that modern scepticism has 
 attempted to make of particular speculations to 
 which he gave such shape and impulse. In making a 
 way for some leading currents of Greek thought into 
 the heart of the Jewish Revelation, hitherto wellnigh 
 altogether closed to it, Philo was not indeed teach- 
 ing positive truth, but he was breaking down some 
 
 x Dorner, Person Christi, i. 57 (Einleit.). 
 
11.} Real function of the Alewandrian theosophy. 107 
 
 intellectual barriers against its reception, in the 
 most thoughtful portion of the human family. In 
 Philo, Greek Philosophy almost stood at the door 
 of the Catholic Church ; but it was Greek Philoso- 
 phy endeavouring to base itself, however precari- 
 ously, upon the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures. 
 The Logos of Philo, though a shifting and incom- 
 plete speculation, may well have served as a guide 
 to thoughtful minds from that region of unsettled 
 enquiry that surrounds the Platonic doctrine of a 
 Divine Reason, to the clear and strong Faith which 
 welcomes the full Gospel Revelation of the Word 
 made Flesh. Philo’s Logos, while embodying ele- 
 ments foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures, is never- 
 theless in a direct line of descent from the Inspired 
 doctrine of the Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs ; 
 and it thus illustrates the comprehensive vigour of 
 the Jewish Revelation, which could countenance and 
 direct, if it could not absolutely satisfy, those fitful 
 guesses at and gropings after truth which were cur- 
 rent in Heathendom. If Philo could never have 
 created the Christian Doctrine which has been so 
 freely ascribed to him, he could do much, however 
 unconsciously, to prepare the soil of Alexandrian 
 thought for its reception; and from this point of 
 view, his Logos must appear of considerably higher 
 importance than the parallel speculations as to 
 the Memra, the Shekinah, the doctrine of the 
 hidden and the revealed God, which in that and 
 later ages belonged to the tradition of Palestinian 
 Judaism’. “Providence,” says the accurate Neander, 
 
 Υ Compare Dorner, Person Christi, Einleit. p. 59, on the Adam 
 Kadmon, and p. 60, on the Memra, Shekinah, and Metatron. “Zu 
 
108 Relevancy of the foregoing discussion. [ Lzcr. 
 
 “had so ordered it, that in the intellectual world in 
 which Christianity made its first appearance, many 
 ideas should be in circulation, which at least seemed 
 to be closely related to it, and in which Christianity 
 could find a poimt of connection with external 
 thought, on which to base the doctrine of a God 
 revealed in Christ*.” Of these ideas we may well 
 belheve that the most generally diffused and the 
 most instrumental was the Logos of Alexandria, 
 if not the exact Logos of Philo. 
 
 It is possible that such considerations as some 
 of the foregoing, when viewed relatively to the 
 ereat and vital doctrine which is before us in these 
 Lectures, may be objected to on the score of being 
 ‘fanciful’ Nor am I insensible, my brethren, to 
 the severity of such a condemnation when awarded 
 by the practical inteligence of Englishmen. Still 
 it is possible that such a criticism would betoken 
 on the part of those who make it some lack of wise 
 and generous thought. ‘Fanciful, after all, is a 
 relative term; what is solid in one field of study 
 may be fanciful in another. Before we condemn 
 a particular line of thought as ‘fanciful, we do 
 well to enquire whether a penetration, a subtlety, 
 
 der Idee einer Incarnation des wirklich Gottlichen aber haben es 
 alle diese Theologumene insgesammt nie gebracht.” They only 
 involve a parastatic appearance of God, are symbols of His 
 Presence, and are altogether impersonal; or if personal (as the 
 Metatron), they are clearly conceived of as created personalities. 
 This helps to explain the fact that during the first three centuries 
 the main attacks on our Lord’s Godhead were of Jewish origin. 
 Cf. Dorner, ubi sup, note 14. 
 Z Kirchen Geschichte, i. 3, p. 989. 
 
ΠῚ The Jewish belief in a Messiah. 109 
 
 a versatility, I might add, a spirituality of intelli- 
 gence, greater than our own might not convict the 
 condemnation itself of an opposite demerit, which 
 need not be more particularly described. Especially 
 in sacred literature the imputation of fancifulness 
 is a rash one; since a sacred subject-matter is not 
 likely, a priori, to be fairly amenable to the coarser 
 tests and narrower views of a secular judgment. 
 The review of those adumbrations of the doctrine 
 of our Lord’s Divinity in which we have _ been 
 engaged is perhaps more likely to interest and _re- 
 assure a believer than to convince a sceptic. Christ’s 
 Divinity lightens up the Hebrew Scriptures, but to 
 read them profitably by this light we must have 
 some hold upon the truth from which it radiates. 
 Yet it would be an error to suppose that the Old 
 Testament has no relations to the doctrine of Christ’s 
 Godhead of a more independent character. The Old 
 Testament witnesses to the existence of a great 
 national belief, the importance of which cannot be 
 ignored by any man who would do justice to the 
 history of human thought. And we proceed to ask 
 whether that belief has any and what bearing upon 
 the faith of Catholic Christendom as to the Person 
 of her Lord. 
 
 II. There is then one element, or condition of na- 
 tional life, with which no nation can dispense. A 
 nation must have its eye upon a future more or less 
 defined, but fairly within the apparent scope of its 
 grasp. Hope is the soul of moral vitality; and any 
 man, or society of men, who would live, in the moral 
 sense of life, must be looking forward to something. 
 You will scarcely suspect me, my brethren, of seeking 
 
110 Hope in a Future, essential [ Lect. 
 
 to disparage the great principle of tradition ;—that 
 principle to which the Christian Church owes her 
 sacred volume itself, no less than her treasure of 
 formulated doctrine, and the structural conditions 
 and sacramental sources of her life ;—that principle 
 to which each generation of human society is deeply 
 and inevitably indebted for the accumulated social 
 and political experiences of the generations before 
 it. Precious indeed, to every wise man, to every 
 association of truehearted and generous men, must 
 ever be the inheritance of the past. Yet what is 
 the past without the future? What is memory 
 when unaccompanied by hope? Look at the case 
 of the single soul. Is it not certain that a life of 
 high earnest purpose will die outright, if it is per- 
 mitted to sink into the placid reverie of perpetual 
 retrospect, if the man of action becomes the mere 
 ‘laudator temporis acti?’ How is the force of 
 moral life developed and strengthened? Is it not 
 by successive conscious efforts to act and to suffer 
 at the call of duty? Must not any moral life 
 dwindle and fade away if it be not reaching for- 
 ward to a standard higher, truer, purer, stronger 
 than its own ? Will not the struggles, the sacrifices, 
 the self-conquests even of a great character in bygone 
 years, if they now occupy its whole field of vision, 
 only serve to consummate its ruin? As it doatingly 
 fondles them in memory, will it not be stiffened 
 by conceit into a moral petrifaction, or consigned 
 by sloth to the successive processes of moral decom- 
 position? Has not the Author of our life so bound 
 up its deepest instincts and yearnings with His 
 own eternity, that no blessings in the past would 
 
EL.) to Moral and Social Infe. 111 
 
 be blessings to us, if they were utterly unconnected 
 with the future? So it is also in the case of a 
 society. The greatest of all societies among men 
 at this moment is the Church of Jesus Christ. Is 
 she sustained only by the deeds and writings of 
 her saints and martyrs in a distant past, or only 
 by her reverent trustful sense of the Divine Pre- 
 sence which blesses her in the actual present 4 Does 
 she not resolutely pierce the gloom of the future 
 and confidently reckon upon new struggles and 
 triumphs on earth, and, beyond these, upon a home 
 in Heaven, wherein she will enjoy rest and victory, 
 —a rest that no trouble can disturb, a victory that 
 no reverse can forfeit ? Is not the same law familar 
 to us in this place, as it affects the well-being of 
 a great educational institution? Here in Oxford 
 we feel that we cannot rest upon the varied efforts 
 and the accumulated credit even of ten centuries. 
 We too have hopes embarked in the years or im 
 the centuries before us; we have duties towards 
 them. We differ, it may be, even radically, among 
 ourselves as to the direction in which to look for 
 our academical future. The hopes of some of us 
 are the fears of others. This project would fain 
 banish from our system whatever proclaims that 
 God has really spoken, and that it is man’s duty 
 and happiness gladly and submissively to welcome 
 His message; while that scheme would endeavour, 
 if possible, to fashion each one of our intellectual 
 workmen more and more strictly after the type of 
 a believing and fervent Christian. The practical 
 difference is indeed profound ; but we are entirely 
 agreed as to the general necessity for looking for- 
 
112 A Future necessary to the Chosen People, [ Lect. 
 
 ward. On both sides it is understood that an 
 institution which is not struggling upwards towards 
 a higher future, must resign itself to the conviction 
 that it is already in its decadence, and must expect 
 to die. 
 
 Nor is it otherwise with that conglomeration of 
 men which we call a nation, the product of race, 
 or the product of circumstances, the product in any 
 case of a Providential Will, Which welds into a 
 common whole, for the purposes of united action 
 and of reciprocal influence, a larger or smaller num- 
 ber of human beings. A nation must have a future 
 before it; a future which can rebuke its despondency 
 and can direct its enthusiasm ; a future for which it 
 will prepare itself; a future which it will aspire to 
 create or to control. Unless it would barter away 
 the vigorous nerve of true patriotism for the feeble 
 pedantry of a soulless archzeology, a nation cannot 
 fall back altogether upon the centuries which have 
 flattered its ambition, or which have developed 
 its material well-bemg. Something it must pro- 
 pose to itself as an object to be compassed in the 
 coming time ; something which is as yet beyond it. 
 It will enlarge its frontier; or it will develope its 
 commercial resources ; or it will extend its schemes 
 of colonization ; or it will erect its overgrown colo- 
 nies into independent and friendly states ; or it will 
 bind the severed sections of a divided race into one 
 gigantic nationality that shall awe, if it do not 
 subdue, the nations around. Or perchance its atten- 
 tion will be concentrated on the improvement of 
 its social life, and on the details of its internal 
 legislation. It will extend the range of civil privi- 
 
11: notwithstanding the glories of its past History. 113 
 
 leges; it will broaden the basis of government ; 
 it will provide additional encouragements to and 
 safeguards for public morality ; it will steadily aim 
 at bettering the condition of the classes who are 
 forced, beyond others, to work and to suffer. Thank- 
 ful it may well be to the Author of all goodness 
 for the enjoyment of past blessings ; but the spirit of 
 a true thankfulness is ever and very nearly allied 
 to the energy of hope. Self-complacent a nation 
 cannot be, unless it would perish. Woe indeed to 
 the country which dares to assume that it has 
 reached its zenith, and that it can achieve or 
 attempt no more! 
 
 Now Israel as a nation was not withdrawn from 
 the operation of this law which makes the antici- 
 pation of a better future of such vital importance 
 to the common life of a people. Israel indeed had 
 been cradled in an atmosphere of physical and poli- 
 tical miracle. Her great lawgiver could point to 
 the event which gave her national existence as to 
 an event unique in human history*. No subsequent 
 vicissitudes would obliterate the memory of the 
 story which Israel treasured in her inmost memory, 
 the story of the stern Egyptian bondage followed 
 by the triumphant Exodus. How retrospective 
 throughout is the sacred literature of Israel! It is 
 not enough that the great deliverance should be 
 accurately chronicled ; it must be expanded, applied, 
 insisted on in each of its many bearings and aspects 
 by the lawgiver who directed and who described 
 it; it must be echoed on from age to age, in the 
 stern expostulations of Prophets and in the plaintive 
 
 a Deut. iv. 34. 
 I 
 
114 7715 anticipated Future might have been secular (Lxcr. 
 
 or jubilant songs of Psalmists. Certainly the greater 
 portion of the Old Testament is history. Israel 
 was guided by the contents of her sacred books to 
 live in much grateful reflection upon the past. 
 Certainly, it was often her sin and her condem- 
 nation that she practically lost sight of all that 
 had been done for her. Yet if ever it were per- 
 missible to forget the future, Israel, it should seem, 
 might have forgotten it. She might have closed 
 her eyes against the dangers which threatened her 
 from beyond the Lebanon, from beyond the Eastern 
 and the Southern desert, from beyond the Western 
 Sea, from within her own borders, from the streets 
 and the palaces of her capital. She might have 
 abandoned herself in an ecstasy of perpetuated 
 triumph to the voices of her poets and to the rolls of 
 her historians. But there was One Who had loved 
 Israel as a child, and had called His infant people out 
 of Egypt, and had endowed it with His Name and 
 His Law, and had so fenced its life around by pro- 
 tective institutions, that, as the ages passed, neither 
 strange manners nor hostile thought should avail to 
 corrupt what He had so bountifully given to it. Was 
 He forgetful to provide for and to direct that instinct 
 of expectation, without which as a nation it could 
 not live? Had He indeed not thus provided, Israel 
 might have struggled with vain energy after ideals 
 such as were those of the nations around her. She 
 might have spent herself, like the Tyrian or Sidonian 
 merchant, for a large commerce; she might have 
 watched eagerly, and fiercely, like the Cilician pirate 
 or like the wild sons of the desert, for the spoils of 
 adjacent civilizations; she might have essayed to 
 
IT.] but for the Revelation of a Coming Messiah. 115 
 
 combine, after the Greek pattern, a discreet measure 
 of sensuality with a great activity of the speculative 
 intellect; she might have done as did the Babylonian, 
 or the Persian, or the Roman; she might have at- 
 tempted the establishment of a world-wide tyranny 
 around the throne of a Hebrew Belshazzar or of 
 a Hebrew Nero. Nor is her history altogether free 
 from the disturbing influence of such ideals as were 
 these ; we do not forget the brigandage of the days 
 of the Judges, or the imperial state and prowess 
 of Solomon, or the commercial enterprise of Jeho- 
 shaphat, or the union of much intellectual activity 
 with low moral effort which marked more than one 
 of the Rabbinical schools. But the life and energy 
 of the nation was not really embarked, at least in 
 its best days, in the pursuit of these objects; their 
 attractive influence was intermittent, transient, acci- 
 dental. The expectation of Israel was steadily di- 
 rected towards a future, the lustre of which would 
 in some real sense more than eclipse her glorious 
 past. That future was not sketched by the vain 
 imaginings of popular aspirations ; it was unveiled 
 to the mind of the people by a long series of 
 authoritative announcements. These announcements 
 did not merely point to the introduction of a new 
 state of things; they centred very remarkably upon 
 a coming Person. God Himself vouchsafed to satisfy 
 the instinct of hope which sustained the national 
 life of His Own chosen people ; and Israel lived for 
 the expected Messiah. 
 
 But Israel, besides being a civil polity, was a 
 theocracy ; she was not merely a nation, she was 
 a Church. In Israel religion was not, as with the 
 
 Τ2 
 
116 Tsraelitic Belief in a Living God, [ Lucr. 
 
 peoples of pagan antiquity, a mere attribute or 
 function of the national life. Religion was the very 
 soul and substance of the life of Israel; Israel was 
 a Church encased, embodied, in a political consti- 
 tution. Hence it was that the most truly national 
 aspirations in Israel were her religious aspirations. 
 Even the modern naturalist critics cannot fail to 
 observe, as they read the Hebrew Scriptures, that 
 the mind of Israel was governed by two dominant 
 convictions, the like of which were unknown to any 
 other ancient people. God was the first thought 
 in the mind of Israel. The existence, the presence 
 of One Supreme, Living, Personal Bemg, Who 
 alone exists necessarily, and of Himself; Who 
 sustains the hfe of all besides Himself; before 
 Whom, all that is not Himself is but a shadow 
 and vanity; from Whose sanctity there streams 
 forth upon the conscience of man that moral law 
 which is the light of human life; and in Whose 
 mercy all men, especially the afflicted, the suffering, 
 the poor, may, if they will, find a gracious and 
 long-suffering Patron,—this was the substance of 
 the first great conviction of the people of Israel. 
 Dependent on that conviction was another. The 
 eye of Israel was not merely opened towards the 
 heavens; it was alive to the facts of the moral 
 human world. Israel was conscious of the presence 
 and power of sin. The ‘healthy sensuality, as 
 Strauss has admiringly termed it», which pervaded 
 
 b See Luthardt, Apologetische Vortriige, νου]. vii. note 6. The 
 expression occurs in Schubart’s Leben, 11. 461. Luthardt quotes a 
 very characteristic passage from Goethe (vol. xxx. Winckelmann, 
 Antikes Heidnisches, pp. 10-13) to the same effect. “If the modern, 
 
{ΠῚ and in the reality of Sin. bi 
 
 the whole fabric of life among the Greeks, had 
 closed up the eye of that gifted race to a perception 
 which was so familiar to the Hebrews. We may 
 trace indeed throughout the best Greek poetry a 
 view of deep suppressed melancholy’, but the secret 
 of this subtle, this inextinguishable sorrow was 
 unknown to the accomplished artists who gave to it 
 an involuntary expression, and who lavished their 
 choicest resources upon the oft-repeated effort to 
 veil it beneath the bright and graceful drapery of 
 a versatile light-heartedness peculiarly their own. 
 But the Jew knew that sin was the secret of human 
 sorrow: he could not forget sin if he would, for 
 before his eyes the importunate existence and the 
 destructive force of sin were inexorably pictured 
 in the ritual. He witnessed daily sacrifices for sin ; 
 he witnessed the sacrifice of sacrifices which was 
 offered on the Day of Atonement, and by which the 
 ‘nation of religion,’ impersonated in its High Priest, 
 
 at almost every reflection, casts himself into the Infinite, to return 
 at last, if he can, to a limited point; the ancients feel themselves 
 at once, and without further wanderings, at ease only within the 
 limits of this beautiful world. Here were they placed, to this 
 were they called, here their activity has found scope, and their 
 passions objects and nourishment.” The “heathen mind,” he says, 
 produced “such a condition of human existence, a condition in- 
 tended by nature,” that “both in the moment of highest enjoyment 
 and in that of deepest sacrifice, nay, of absolute ruin, we recognise 
 the indestructibly healthy tone of their thought.” Similarly in 
 Strauss’ Leben Miarklin’s, 1851, p. 127, Marklin says, “I would 
 with all my heart be a heathen, for here I find truth, nature, 
 greatness.” 
 
 © See the beautiful passage quoted from Lasaulx, Abhandlung 
 iiber den Sinn der Cidipus-sage, p. το, by Luthardt, ubi supra, 
 note 7. 
 
118 The Idea of Sin protected by the Mosaic ritual. (Lxcr. 
 
 solemnly laid its sins upon the sacrificial victim, 
 and bore the blood of atonement into the Presence- 
 chamber of God. Then the moral law sounded in 
 his ears; he knew that he had not obeyed it. If 
 the Jew could not be sure that the blood of bulls 
 and goats really effected his reconciliation with 
 God; if his own prophets told him that moral 
 obedience was more precious in God’s sight than 
 sacrificial oblations ; if the ritual, interpreted as it 
 was by the Decalogue, created yearnings within 
 him which it could not satisfy, and deepened a 
 sense of pollution which of itself it could not re- 
 lieve ; yet at least the Jew could not ignore sin, 
 or think lightly of it, or essay to gild it over with 
 the levities of raillery. He could not screen from his 
 sight its native blackness, and justify it to himself 
 by a philosophical theory which should represent 
 it as inevitable, or as bemg something else than 
 what it is. The ritual forced sin in upon his daily 
 thoughts; the ritual inflicted it upon his imagi- 
 nation as being a terrible and present fact ; and so it 
 entered into and coloured his whole conception alike 
 of national and of individual life. Thus was it that 
 this sense of sin moulded all true Jewish hopes, all 
 earnest Jewish anticipations of the national future. 
 A future which promised political victory or de- 
 liverance, but which offered no relief to the sense 
 of sin, would have failed to meet the better as- 
 pirations, and to cheer the real heart of a people 
 which, amid whatever unfaithfulness to its measure 
 of light, yet had a true knowledge of God, and was 
 keenly alive to the fact and to the effects of moral 
 evil. And He Who, by His earlier revelations, had 
 
II.) Basis of the Messianic Belief originally religious. 119 
 
 Himself made the moral needs of Israel so deep, - 
 and had bidden the hopes of Israel rise so high, 
 vouchsafed to meet the one, and to offer a plenary 
 satisfaction to the other, in the doctrine of an 
 expected Messiah. 
 
 It is then a shallow misapprehension which re- 
 presents the Messianic belief as a sort of outlying 
 prejudice or superstition incidental to the later 
 thought of Israel, and to which Christianity has 
 attributed an exaggerated importance, that it may 
 the better find a basis in Jewish history for the 
 Person of its Founder. The Messianic belief was in 
 truth interwoven with the deepest life of the people. 
 The promises which formed and fed this belief are 
 distributed along nearly the whole range of the 
 Jewish annals, while the belief rests originally upon 
 sacred traditions, which carry us up to the very 
 eradle of the human family, although they are pre- 
 served in the, sacred Hebrew Books. It is of 
 importance to enquire whether this general Mes- 
 sianic belief carried along with it any definite 
 convictions respecting the Personal Rank of the 
 Being Who was its object. 
 
 In the gradual unfolding of the Messianic doctrine, 
 three stages of development may be noted within 
 the limits of the Hebrew Canon, and ἃ fourth 
 beyond it. (a) Of these the first appears to end 
 with Moses. The Protevangelium contains a broad 
 indeterminate prediction of a victory of humanity® 
 
 4 So two of the Targums, which nevertheless refer the ful- 
 filment of the promise to the days of the King Messiah. The 
 singular form of-the collective noun would here, as in Gen. xxii. 
 18, have been intended to suggest an individual descendant. 
 
120 First period of Messianie Prophecy. [ Lect. 
 
 over the Evil Principle that had seduced man to 
 his fall. The ‘Seed of the woman’ is to bruise the 
 serpent’s heade. With the lapse of years this 
 blessing, at first so general and indefinite, is nar- 
 rowed down to something in store for the posterity 
 of Shem‘, and subsequently for the descendants of 
 Abrahams. In Abraham’s Seed all the families of 
 the earth are to be blessed. Already within this 
 bright but indefinite prospect of deliverance and 
 blessing, we discern the emerging Form of a Per- 
 sonal Deliverer. St. Paul argues, in accordance 
 with the Jewish interpretation, that ‘the Seed’ is 
 here a personal Messiah"; the singular form of the 
 word denoting His individuality, while its collective 
 force suggests the representative character of His 
 Human Nature. ‘The characteristics of this personal 
 Messiah emerge gradually in successive predictions. 
 The dying Jacob looks forward to a Shiloh as One 
 to Whom of right belongs the regal and legislative 
 authorityi, and to Whom the obedient nations will 
 be gathered. Balaam sings of the Star That will 
 come out of Jacob and the Sceptre That will rise 
 out of Israel*. This is something more than an 
 
 e Gen. 111. 15; cf. Rom. xvi. 20; Gal. iv. 4; Heb. ii. 14; 1 St. 
 John iii. 8. 
 
 f Gen. ix. 26. & Ibid. xxii. 18. 
 
 h Gal. iii. 16. See the Rabbinical authorities quoted by Wetstein, 
 in loe. 
 
 i Gen. xlix. ro. On the reading mw see Pusey, Daniel the 
 Prophet, p. 252. The sense given in the text is supported by 
 Targum Onkelos, Jerusalem Targum, the Syr. and Arab. versions, 
 those of Aquila and Symmachus, and substantially by the LXX. 
 and Vulgate. 
 
 k Num. xxiv. 17. 
 
11.1 The Divinity of Messiah not here stated but implied. 121 
 
 anticipation of the reign of David: it manifestly 
 points to the glory and power of a Higher Royalty. 
 Moses! foretells a Prophet Who would in a later age 
 be vaised up from among the Israelites, ike unto 
 himself. This Prophet accordingly was to be the 
 Lawgiver, the Teacher, the Ruler, the Deliverer of 
 Israel. If the prophetic order at large is included 
 in this prediction™, it is only as being personified in 
 the Last and the Greatest of the Prophets, in the 
 One Prophet who was to reveal perfectly the mind 
 of God, and whose words were to be implicitly 
 obeyed. During this primary period we do not find 
 explicit assertions of the Divinity of Messiah. But 
 in that predicted victory over the Evil One; in 
 that blessing which is to be shed on all the fami- 
 lies of the earth; in that rightful sway over the 
 gathered peoples; in the absolute and perfect teach- 
 ing of that Prophet Who is to be like the great 
 Lawgiver while yet He transcends him,—must we 
 not trace a predicted destiny which reaches higher 
 than the known limits of the highest human energy ? 
 Is not this early prophetic language only redeemed 
 from the imputation of exaggeration or vagueness, 
 by the point and justification which are secured 
 to it through the more explicit disclosures of a 
 succeeding age 7 
 
 (G) The second stage of the Messianic doctrine 
 centres in the reigns of David and Solomon. The 
 form of the prophecy here as elsewhere is suggested 
 
 1 Deut. xviii. 18, 19; see Hengstenberg’s Christologie des A. T. 
 vol. i. p. 90; Acts 111. 22, vii. 37; St. John i. 21, vi. 14, xil. 48, 49. 
 m Cf, Deut. xviii. 15. 
 
122 Second period of Messianic Prophecy. [Lecr. 
 
 by the period at which it is uttered. When mankind 
 was limited to a single family, the Hope of the 
 future had lain in the seed of the woman: the 
 Patriarchal age had looked forward to a descendant 
 of Abraham ; the Mosaic to a Prophet and a Legis- 
 lator. In like manner the age of the Jewish mo- 
 narchy in its bloom of youth and prowess, was bid- 
 den fix its eye upon an Ideal David Who was to be 
 the King of the future of the world. Not that the 
 colouring or form of the prophetic announcement 
 lowered its scope to the level of a Jewish or of a 
 human monarchy. The promise of a kingdom to 
 David and to his house for ever™, a promise on 
 which, we know, the great Psalmist rested at the 
 hour of his death®, could not be fulfilled by any 
 mere continuation of his dynasty on the throne of 
 Jerusalem. It implied, as both David and Solomon 
 saw, some Superhuman Royalty. Of this Royalty 
 the Messianic Psalms present us with a series of 
 pictures, each of which illustrates a distinct aspect 
 
 n 2 Sam. vii. 16 (Ps. Ixxxix. 36, 37; St. John xii. 34). “From 
 David’s address to God, after receiving the message by Nathan, 
 it is plain that David understood the Son promised to be the 
 Messiah in Whom his house was to be established for ever. 
 But the words which seem most expressive of this are in this 
 verse now rendered very unintelligibly ‘and is this the manner 
 of man?’ whereas the words DISA nA ANN literally signify 
 ‘and this is (or must be) the law of the man, or of the Adam,’ 
 i.e. this promise must relate to the law, or ordinance, made by 
 God to Adam concerning the Seed of the woman, the Man, or 
 the Second Adam, as the Messiah is expressly called by St. Paul, 
 1 Cor. xv. 45-47.”—Kennicott, Remarks on the Old Testament, 
 p. 115. He confirms this interpretation by comparing 1 Chron, xvii. 
 17 with Rom. v. 14. © 2 Sam, xxiii. 5. 
 
417 ὁ Witness of the Messianic Psalms. 123 
 
 of its dignity, while all either imply or assert the 
 Divinity of the King. In the second Psalm, for 
 instance, Messiah is associated with the Lord of 
 Israel as His Anointed Son?, while against the 
 authority of Both the heathen nations are rismg in 
 rebellion’. Messiah’s inheritance is to include all 
 heathendom' ; His Sonship is not merely theocratic 
 or ethical, but Divine’. All who trust in Him are 
 blessed ; all who incur His wrath must perish with 
 a sharp and swift destruction. In the first recorded 
 prayer of the Church of Christ", in St. Paul's 
 sermon at Antioch of PisidiaY, in the argument 
 which opens the Epistle to the Hebrews*, this 
 Psalm is quoted in such senses, that if we had no 
 Rabbinical text-books at hand, we could not doubt 
 the belief of the Jewish Church respecting it’. 
 The forty-fifth Psalm is a picture of the peaceful 
 and glorious union of the King Messiah with His 
 mystical bride, the Church of redeemed humanity. 
 Messiah is introduced as a Divine King reigning 
 
 P Ps. ii. 7. a Thid. ver. 2. 
 
 r Ibid. vers. 8, 9. 8 ΤΟΙ. ver. 7. 
 
 t Ibid. ver. 12. See Dr. Pusey’s note on St. Jerome’s rendering 
 of 72 3p), Daniel the Prophet, p. 478, note 2. 
 
 u Acts iv. 25, 26. VY Ibid. xiii. 33. 
 
 x Heb. i. 5; cf. Rom. i. 4. 
 
 y The Chaldee Targum refers this Psalm to the Messiah. So 
 the Bereshith Rabba. The interpretation was changed with a 
 view to avoiding the pressure of the Christian arguments. “ Our 
 masters,” says R. Solomon Jarchi, “have expounded [this Psalm] 
 of King Messiah; but, according to the letter, and for furnishing 
 answer to the Minim [i.e. the Christian ‘heretics’], it is better to 
 interpret it of David himself.” Quoted by Pocock, Porta Mosis, 
 note, p. 307. See too Dr. Pye Smith, Messiah, p. 197. 
 
124 Witness of the Messianie Psalms [Lects 
 
 among men. His Form is of more than human 
 beauty; His Lips overflow with grace; God has 
 blessed Him for ever, and has anointed Him with 
 the oil of gladness above His fellows. But Messiah 
 is also directly addressed as God; He is seated 
 upon an everlasting throne”. Neither of these 
 Psalms can be adapted without exegetical violence 
 to the circumstances of Solomon or of any other 
 king of ancient Israel; and the New Testament 
 interprets the picture of the Royal Epithalamium, 
 no less than that of the Royal triumph over the in- 
 surgent heathen, of the one true King Messiah?. In 
 another Psalm ythe character and extent of this 
 
 z Dr. Pusey observes that of those who have endeavoured to 
 evade the literal sense of the words addressed to King Messiah 
 (ver. 6), “ Thy throne, Ὁ God, is for ever and ever,” “no one who 
 thought he could so construct the sentence that the word Hlohim 
 need not designate the being addressed, doubted that Hlohim 
 signified God ; and no one who thought that he could make out 
 for the word Llohim any other meaning than that of ‘God, 
 doubted that it designated the being addressed. A right instinct 
 prevented each class from doing more violence to grammar or to 
 idiom than he needed, in order to escape the truth which he dis- 
 liked. If people thought that they might paraphrase ‘Thy throne, 
 O Judge’ or ‘Prince,’ or ‘image of God,’ or ‘ who art as a God to 
 Pharaoh,’ they hesitated not to render with us ‘Thy throne is for 
 ever and ever.’ If men think that they may assume such an idiom 
 as ‘Thy throne of God’ meaning ‘Thy Divine throne,’ or ‘Thy 
 throne is God’ meaning ‘Thy throne is the throne of God,’ they 
 doubt not that Zlohim means purely and simply God. . . . If people 
 could persuade themselves that the words were ἃ parenthetic 
 address to God, no one would hesitate to own their meaning to 
 be ‘Thy throne, Ὁ God, is for ever and eyer.’” Daniel the Pro- 
 phet, pp. 470, 471, and note ὃ. Rey. v. 13. 
 
 a Heb. i. 8. 
 
II.) to the Divinity of the Christ. 125 
 
 Messianic Sovereignty are more distinctly pictured». 
 Solomon, when at the height of his power, sketches 
 a Superhuman King, ruling an empire which in its 
 character and in its compass altogether transcends 
 his own. The extremest boundaries of the kingdom 
 of Israel melt away before the gaze of the Psalmist. 
 The new kingdom reaches “from sea to sea, and 
 from the flood unto the world’s end¢.” From each 
 frontier of the Promised Land, the new kingdom ex- 
 tends to earth’s remotest regions in the opposite 
 quarter. From the Mediterranean it reaches to the 
 ocean that washes the shores of Eastern Asia; from 
 the Euphrates to the utmost West. At the feet of 
 its mighty monarch all who are most inaccessible 
 to the arms or to the influence of Israel hasten to 
 tender their voluntary submission. The wild sons 
 of the desert*, the merchants of Tarshish in the 
 then distant Spain’, the islanders of the Mediterra- 
 neanf, the Arab chiefs*, the wealthy Nubians, are 
 foremost in proferrmg their homage and _ fealty. 
 But all kings are at last to fall down in submission 
 before the Ruler of the new kingdom; all nations are 
 to do Him service’. His empire is to be co-extensive 
 with the world: it is also to be co-enduring with 
 timek, His empire is to be spiritual ; it is to confer 
 peace on the world, but by righteousness!. The 
 King will Himself secure righteous judgment”, 
 salvation", deliverance®, redemption’, to His sub- 
 
 b Ps. Ixxii. © Thid. ver. 8. ἃ Tbid. ver. 9, OY. 
 e Tbid. ver. ro. f Tbid. & Ibid. 
 
 h Tbid. 83D. i Tbid. ver. 11. k Tbid. ver. 17. 
 
 1 Tbid. ver. 3. -- m [bid, vers. 2, 4. n bid. vers. 4, 13. 
 
 © Ibid. ver. 12. P Ibid. ver. 14. 
 
190 Divine Royalty of the Messiah of David. [ Lecr. 
 
 jects. The needy, the afflicted, the friendless, will 
 be the especial objects of His tender care’. His 
 appearance in the world will be like the descent 
 of ‘the rain upon the mown grass';’ the true life of 
 man seems to have been killed out, but it is yet ca- 
 pable of being restored by Him. He Himself, it is 
 hinted, will be out of sight; but His Name will 
 endure for ever; His Name will ‘ propagate’;’ and 
 men shall be blessed in Him', to the end of time. 
 This King is immortal; He is also all-knowing and 
 all-mighty. “Omniscience alone can hear the cry 
 of every human heart; Omnipotence alone can 
 bring deliverance to every human sufferer".” Look 
 at one more representation of this Royalty, that to 
 which our Lord Himself referred, in dealing with 
 his Jewish opponents*. David describes his Great 
 Descendant Messiah as his ‘Lordy.’ Messiah is sit- 
 ting on the right hand of Jehovah, as the partner 
 of His dignity. Messiah reigns upon a throne which 
 impiety alone could assign to any human monarch ; 
 He is to reign until His enemies are made His 
 footstool? ; He is ruler now, even among His unsub- 
 dued opponents» In the day of His power, His 
 people offer themselves willingly to His service ; 
 they are clad not in earthly armour, but ‘in the 
 beauties of holiness». Messiah is Priest as well as 
 King®; He is an everlasting Priest of that older 
 order which had been honoured by the father of 
 
 4 Ps, lxxii. 12, 13. τ Ibid. ver. 6; cf. 2 Sam. xxiii. 4. 
 
 SePs, bexii. (04. t Ibid. 
 u Daniel the Prophet, p. 479. 
 x St. Matt. xxii. 41-45; Ps. ex. 1. Y Ps. exam 
 
 SPS) ex, ἢ. a Ibid. ver.2. ὃ Ibid. ver.3. © Ibid. ver. 4. 
 
II. | Third period of Messianic Prophecy. 127 
 
 the faithful. Who is this everlasting Priest, this 
 resistless King, reigning thus amid His enemies and 
 commanding the inmost hearts of His servants? He 
 is David’s Descendant; the Pharisees knew that 
 truth. But He is also David’s Lord. How could 
 He be both, if He was merely human? The belief 
 of Christendom can alone answer the question which 
 our Lord addressed to the Pharisees. The Son of 
 David is David’s Lord because He is God; the 
 Lord of David is David’s Son, because He is God 
 Incarnate. 
 
 (vy) These are but samples of that rich store of 
 Messianic prophecy which belongs to the second or 
 Davidic period, and much more of which has an im- 
 portant bearing on our present subject. The third 
 period extends from the reign of Uzziah to the close 
 of the Hebrew Canon in Malachi. Here Messianic 
 prophecy reaches its climax: it expands into the 
 fullest particularity of detail respecting Messiah's 
 Human Life; it mounts to the highest assertions 
 of His Divinity. Isaiah is the richest mine of 
 Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament’. Messiah, 
 
 ad With reference to the modern theory (Renan, Vie de Jésus, 
 Ρ. 37, &e., &c.) of a ‘later Isaiah,’ or ‘Great Unknown,’ living at 
 the time of the Babylonish Captivity, and the assumed author of 
 Is. xl.—Ixvi., it may suffice to refer to Professor Payne Smith’s 
 valuable volume of University Sermons on the subject. When it 
 is taken for granted on ὦ priori grounds that bond fide prediction 
 of strictly future events is impossible, the Bible predictions must 
 either be resolved into the far-sighted anticipations of genius, or 
 when their accuracy is too detailed to admit of this explanation, 
 they must be treated as being only historical accounts of the events 
 referred to, thrown with whatever design into the form of prophecy. 
 The predictions respecting Cyrus in the latter part of Isaiah are 
 
 ~ 
 
128 Messiah's Humanity clearly predicted. [ Lect. 
 
 especially designated as ‘the Servant of God, 15 
 the central figure in the prophecies of Isaiah. 
 Both in Isaiah and in Jeremiah the titles of Mes- 
 siah are often and pointedly expressive of His true 
 Humanity. He is the Fruit of the earthe; He 1s 
 the Rod out of the stem of Jessef; He is the 
 Branch or Sprout of David, the Zemach*. He is 
 called by God from His mother’s womb"; God has 
 put His Spirit upon Him‘. He is anointed to preach 
 good tidings to the meek, to bind up the broken- 
 hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive*. He is 
 a Prophet; His work is greater than that of any 
 prophet of Israel. Not merely will He come as a 
 Redeemer to them that turn from transgression in 
 Jacob!, and to restore the preserved of Israel™; 
 He is also given as a Light to the Gentiles, as the 
 Salvation of God unto the end of the earth". Such 
 is His Spiritual Power as Prophet and Legislator 
 
 too explicit to be reasonably regarded as the results of natural 
 foresight ; hence the modern assumption of a ‘later Isaiah’ as 
 their real author. “Supposing this assumption,” says Bishop 
 Ollivant, “to be true, this later Isaiah was not only a deceiver, 
 but also a witness to his own fraud; for he constantly appeals 
 to prophetic power as a test of truth, making it, and specifically 
 the prediction respecting the deliverance of the Jews by Cyrus, 
 an evidence of the foreknowledge of Jehovah, as distinguished 
 from the nothingness of heathen idols. And yet we are to suppose 
 that when this fraud was first palmed upon the Jewish nation, 
 they were so simple as not to have perceived that out of his own 
 mouth this false prophet was condemned !”—Charge of Bishop of 
 Llandaff, 1866, p. 99, note b. Comp. Delitzsch, Der Prophet Jesaia, 
 
 ΡῬ.25: e Isa. iv. 2. 
 f [bid. xi. 1. & Jer. xxiii. 5; xxxiii. 15. 
 by ΤΕΝ. ἘΣ ΤΙΣ, τὶ i Tbid. xlii. 1. k Tbid. ΠΡ Ὁ 1. 
 
 1 JTbid. lix. 20. m Jpid. xlix, 6, n [bid. 
 
ἘΠῚ Threefold office of Messiah. 129 
 
 that He will write the law of the Lord, not upon 
 tables of stone, but on the heart and conscience 
 of the true Israel®°. In Zechariah as in David He 
 is an enthroned Priest?, but it is the Kingly glory 
 of Messiah which predominates throughout the pro- 
 phetic representations of this period, and in which 
 His Superhuman Nature is most distinctly sug- 
 gested. According to Jeremiah, the Branch of 
 Righteousness, who is to be raised up among the 
 posterity of David, is a King who will reign and 
 prosper and execute judgment and justice in the 
 earth’. According to Isaiah, this expected King, 
 the Root of Jesse, “will stand for an ensign of the 
 people ;” the Gentiles will seek Him; He will be 
 the rallying-point of the world’s hopes, the true 
 centre of its government’. Righteousness, equity, 
 swift justice, strict faithfulness, will mark His ad- 
 ministration’; He will not be dependent like a hu- 
 man magistrate upon the evidence of His senses ; 
 He will not judge after the sight of His eyes, nor 
 reprove after the hearing of His earst; He will 
 rely upon the infallibity of a perfect moral insight. 
 Beneath the shadow of His throne all that is by 
 nature savage, proud, and cruel among the sons of 
 men will learn the habits of tenderness, humility, 
 and love", “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, 
 and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and 
 the calf and the young lion and the fatling to- 
 gether; and a little child shall lead them.” The 
 
 0 Jer. xxxi. 31-35. P Zech. vi. 13. a Jer. xxiii. 5. 
 t Isa. xi. το. 8 Tbid. vers. 4, 5. t Ibid. ver. 3. 
 ἃ Ibid. vers. 6-8. 
 
 K 
 
-: 
 130 Spiritual Royalty of Messiah. [ Lecr. 
 
 reign of moral power, of spiritual graces, of imno- 
 cence, of simplicity, will succeed to the reign of 
 physical and brute force. The old sources of moral 
 danger will become harmless through His protecting 
 presence and blessing ; “The sucking child shall play 
 on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall 
 put his hand on the cockatrice’ den*;” and in the 
 end “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of 
 the Lord, as the waters cover the seaY.” Zechariah 
 too especially pomts out the moral and spiritual 
 characteristics of the reign of King Messiah. The 
 founder of an eastern dynasty must ordinarily wade 
 through blood and slaughter to the steps of his 
 throne, and must maintain his authority by force. 
 But the daughter of Jerusalem beholds her King 
 coming to her, “Just and having salvation, lowly 
 and riding upon an ass.” “The chariots are cut 
 off from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem ;” 
 the King “speaks peace unto the heathen;” the 
 “)battle-bow is broken,” and yet His dominion ex- 
 tends “from sea to sea, and from the river to the 
 ends of the earth?.” 
 
 In harsh and utter contrast, as it seemed, to 
 this representation of Messiah as a Jewish King, 
 the moral conqueror and ruler of the world, there 
 is another representation of Messiah which be- 
 longs to the Davidic period as well as to that 
 of Isaiah. Messiah had been typified in David 
 persecuted by Saul and humbled by Absalom, no 
 less truly than He had been typified in Solomon 
 surrounded by all the glory of his imperial court. 
 
 x sa, xi. 8. y Ibid. ver. 9. z Zech. ix. 9, 10. 
 
Pj Ὁ Messiah the Man of Sorrows. 191 
 
 If Messiah reigns in the forty-fifth or in the 
 seventy-second Psalms, He suffers, nay He is pre- 
 eminent among the suffering, in the twenty-second. 
 It might seem that the suffermg Just One who is 
 described by David, reaches the climax of anguish; 
 but the portrait of an Archetypal Sorrow seems to 
 be even more minutely touched by the hand of 
 Isaiah. In both writers, however, the deepest 
 humiliations and woes are confidently treated as 
 the prelude to an assured victory. The Psalmist 
 passes from what is little less than an elaborate 
 programme of the historical circumstances of the 
 crucifixion to an announcement that by these unex- 
 ampled suffermgs the heathen will be converted 
 and all the kindreds of the Gentiles will be brought 
 to adore the true God*. The Prophet describes 
 the Servant of God as “despised and rejected of 
 men?;” His sorrows are viewed with general satis- 
 faction; they are accounted a just punishment for 
 His own supposed crimes®. Yet in reality He bears 
 our infirmities, and carries our sorrows*; His wounds 
 are due to our transgressions; His stripes have a 
 healing virtue for τ΄. His suffermgs and death 
 are a trespass-offermg!; on Him is laid the iniquity 
 of alls. If in Isaiah the inner meaning of the 
 tragedy is more fully insisted on, the picture itself is 
 not less vivid than that of the Psalter. The suffer- 
 ing Servant stands before His judges; “His Visage 
 is so marred more than any man, and His Form 
 
 8. Pg. xxii. 1-21, and 27. Ὁ Isa. 1111. 3. 
 © Isa, 111]. 4. 4 Thid. e Tbid. ver. 5. 
 f bid. ver. 12. & Ibid. ver. 6. 
 
 Ἰς 2 
 
1992 Significance of the apparent ραγακίου, [ Lect. 
 
 more than the sons of men";” like a lambi, innocent, 
 defenceless, dumb, He is led forth to the slaughter ; 
 “He is cut off from the land of the living.” Yet 
 the Prophet pauses at His grave to note that 
 He “shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall 
 be satisfied!” and that God “will divide Him a 
 portion with the great,” that He will Himself “ di- 
 vide the spoil with the strong.” And all this is to 
 follow “because He hath poured out His soul unto 
 death™.” His death is to be the condition of His 
 victory; His death is the destined instrument 
 whereby He will achieve His mediatorial reign of 
 glory. 
 
 Place yourselves, brethren, by an effort of intel- 
 lectual sympathy in the position of the men who 
 heard this language while its historical fulfilment, 
 so familiar to us Christians, was as yet future. 
 How self-contradictory must it have appeared to 
 them, how inexplicable, how full of paradox! How 
 strong must have been the temptation to anticipate 
 that invention of a double Messiah, to which the 
 later Jewish doctors had recourse that they might 
 escape the manifest cogency of the Christian argu- 
 ment®. That our Lord should actually have sub- 
 mitted Himself to the laws and agencies of disgrace 
 and discomfiture, and should have turned His 
 deepest humiliation into the very weapon of His 
 victory, is not the least among the evidences of 
 
 h Jsa. lii. 14. i Tbid. 11]. 7. k Tbid. ver. 8. 
 
 1 Thbid. ver. 11. m ΤΌ], ver. 12. 
 
 n See Dr. Hengstenberg’s elaborate account of the successive 
 Jewish interpretations of Isaiah 11]. 13—-lii, 12, Christolog. vol. ii. 
 pp. 310-319 (Clarke’s trans.). 
 
11. Divinity ascribed in terms to the Messiah. 133 
 
 His Divine power and mission. And the prophecy 
 which so paradoxically dared to say that He would 
 in such fashion both suffer and reign, assuredly 
 and implicitly contained within itself another and 
 a higher truth. Such majestic control over the 
 ordinary conditions of failure betokened something 
 more than an extraordinary man, something not 
 less than a distinctly Superhuman Personality. 
 Taken in connection with the redemptive powers, 
 the world-wide sway, the spiritual heart-controlling 
 teaching, so distinctly ascribed to Him, this pre- 
 diction that the Christ would die and would convert 
 the whole world by death, prepares us for the most 
 explicit statements of the prophets respecting His 
 Person. It is no surprise to a mind which has 
 dwelt steadily on the destiny which prophecy thus 
 assigns to Messiah, that Isaiah and Zechariah should 
 speak of Him as they do. We will not lay stress 
 upon the fact that in Isaiah the Redeemer of Israel 
 and of men is constantly asserted to be the Creator®, 
 Who by Himself will save His people?. Significant 
 as such language is as to the bent of the Divine 
 Mind, it is not properly Messianic. But in that 
 great prophecy‘, the full and true sense of which 
 is so happily suggested to us by its place in the 
 Church services for Christmas Day, the ‘Son’ who 
 is given to Israel receives a fourfold Name. He is 
 a Wonder-Counsellor, or Wonderful, above all earthly 
 
 beings; He possesses a Nature which man cannot 
 
 © Isa, xliy. 6; xlvil., 12, 13, 17. 
 P Ibid. xlv. 21-24; Hos. i. 7; ef. Rom. xiv. 11; Phil. ii. 10; 
 isa, xxx: 4, xl. 3, ro, ᾳ Isa, ix. 6. 
 
194 Divinity ascribed in terms to the Messiah. [ Lecr. 
 
 fathom. He thus shares and unfolds the Divine 
 Mind". He is the Father of the Everlasting Age 
 or of Eternity’; He is the Prince of Peace. Above 
 vall, He is expressly named, the Mighty God‘. Con- 
 formably with this Jeremiah calls Him Jehovah 
 
 r yyy xbp. These two words must clearly be connected, al- 
 though they do not stand in the relation of the status constructus. 
 Gen. xvi. 12. yn’ designated the attribute here concerned, nda 
 the superhuman Possessor of it. 
 
 s 4y72x, Bp. Lowth’s Transl. of Isaiah in loc. 
 
 t This is the plain literal sense of the words. The habit of 
 construing 2-8 as ‘strong hero,’ which was common to Gese- 
 nius and the older rationalists, has been abandoned by later 
 writers, such as Hitzig and Knobel. Hitzig observes that to 
 render 23758 by ‘strong hero’ is contrary to the wsus loquendi. 
 «y.” he argues, “is always, even in such passages as Gen, xxxi. 29, 
 to be rendered ‘God,’ In all the passages which are quoted to 
 prove that it means ‘princeps,’ ‘potens,’ the forms are,” he says, 
 “to be derived not from >X, but from 5%, which properly means 
 ‘yam,’ then ‘leader,’ or ‘ prince’ of the flock of men.” (See the quot. 
 in Hengst. Christ. ii. p. 88, Clarke’s transl.). But while these later 
 rationalists recognise the true meaning of the phrase, they en- 
 deavour to represent it as a mere name of Messiah, indicating 
 nothing as to His possessing a Divine Nature. Hitzig contends 
 that it is applied to Messiah “by way of exaggeration, in so far as 
 He possesses divine qualities ;” and Knobel, that it belongs to 
 Him as a hero, who in His wars with the Gentiles will shew that 
 He possesses divine strength. But does the word ‘El’ admit of 
 being applied to a merely human hero? “EI,” says Dr. Pusey, 
 “the name of God, is nowhere used absolutely of any but God. 
 The word is used once relatively, in its first appellative sense, the 
 mighty of the nations (Ezek. xxxi. 11), in regard to Nebuchadnezzar. 
 Also once in the plural (Ezek. xxxii. 21). It occurs absolutely 
 in Hebrew 225 times, and in every place is used of God.” Daniel, 
 p. 483. Can we then doubt its true force in the present passage, 
 especially when we compare Isa. x. 21, where aby is applied 
 indisputably to the Most High God? Cf. Delitzsch, Jesaia, p. 155. 
 
II.] Divinity ascribed in terms to the Messiah. 135 
 
 Tsidkenu", as Isaiah had called Him Emmanuel’. 
 Micah speaks of His eternal pre-existence™, as Isaiah 
 had spoken of His endless reign*. Daniel predicts 
 that His dominion is an everlasting dominion that 
 shall not pass away’. Zechariah terms Him the 
 Fellow or Equal of the Lord of Hosts’; and refers 
 in the clearest language to His Incarnation and 
 Passion as being that of Jehovah Himself*. Haggai 
 implies His Divinity by foretelling that His presence 
 will make the glory of the second temple greater 
 than the glory of the first”. Malachi points to Him 
 as the Angel of the Covenant, Jehovah, Whom Israel 
 
 u Jer. xxiii. 5, 6, ἘΣ ΧΗΣ 15, 16. 
 
 v Isa, vii. 14, St. Matt. i. 23. That this title, like Jehovah 
 Tsidkenu in Jer. xxiii. 5, 6, is descriptive of our Lord’s Nature 
 and not merely appellative, is implied in language used respecting 
 Him elsewhere. Dr. Pye Smith, Messiah, p. 241. 
 
 w Mie. v. 2. x Isa. ix. 6. y Dan. vii. 14. 
 
 Zech. xiii. 7. MOY does not mean only an associate of any 
 kind, or a neighbour. “The word rendered ‘ My fellow’ was revived 
 by Zechariah from the language of the Pentateuch. It was used 
 eleven times in Leviticus, and then was disused. There is no 
 doubt then that the word, being revived out of Leviticus, is to be 
 understood as in Leviticus; but in Leviticus it is used strictly 
 of a fellow-man, one who is as himself. Lev. vi. 2, xvili. 20, xix. 11, 
 Is, 17, XXiv. 19, XXV. 14, 15,17... The name designates not one 
 joined by friendship or covenant, or by any voluntary act, but one 
 united indissolubly by common bonds of nature, which a man may 
 violate, but cannot annihilate. . . . When then this title is applied 
 to the relation of an individual to God, it is clear that That Indi- 
 vidual can be no mere man, but must be one united with God by 
 an Unity of Being. The ‘Fellow’ of the Lord is no other than 
 He Who said in the Gospel, ‘I and My Father are One.’” Pusey, 
 Daniel, pp. 487, 488. Hengst. Christ. iv. pp. 108-112. 
 
 a Zech. ii. 10-13; xii.10; St. John xix. 34, 37; Rev. 1. 7. 
 
 b Hag. ii. 7, 9. 
 
136 Attitude of the Naturalist Interpreters. [ Lecr. 
 
 was seeking, and Who would suddenly come to 
 His temple °. 
 
 Read this language as a whole; read it by the 
 light of the great doctrine which it attests, and 
 which in turn illuminates it, the doctrine of a 
 Messiah Divine as well as Human ;—all is natural, 
 consistent, full of point and meaning. But divorce 
 it from that doctrine in obedience to a foregone 
 and arbitrary placitum of the negative criticism to 
 the effect that Jesus Christ shall be banished at 
 any cost from the scroll of prophecy ;—how full of 
 difficulties does such language forthwith become, 
 how overstrained and exaggerated, how insipid and 
 disappointing! Doubtless it is possible to bid de- 
 fiance alike to Jewish and to Christian mterpreters, 
 and to resolve upon seeing in the prophets only 
 such a sense as may be consistent with the theo- 
 retical exigencies of Naturalism. It is possible to 
 suggest that what looks like supernatural prediction 
 is only a clever or chance farsightedness, and that 
 expressions which literally anticipate a distant 
 history are but the exuberance of poetry which 
 from its very vagueness happens to coincide with 
 some feature real or imagined of the remote future. 
 It is possible to avoid any hearty and _ honest 
 recognition of the imposing majesty of converg- 
 ing and consentient lines of prophecy, and_ to 
 refuse to encounter the prophetic utterances, except 
 in detail and one by one; as if forsooth Messianic 
 prophecy were an intellectual enemy whose forces 
 must be divided by the criticism that would con- 
 quer it. It is possible, alas! even for accom- 
 
 ¢ Mal. 111. 1. 
 
IT.] Witness of the Rabbinical Literature. 137 
 
 plished scholarship to carp so fretfully at each 
 instance of pure prediction in the Bible, to nibble 
 away the beauty and dim the lustre of each leading 
 utterance with such persevering industry as at 
 length to persuade itself that the predictive element 
 in Scripture is insignificantly small, or even that 
 it does not exist at all. That modern criticism of 
 this temper should refuse to accept the prophetic 
 witness to the Divinity of the Messiah is more to be 
 regretted than to be wondered at. And yet if it were 
 seriously supposed that such criticism had succeeded 
 in blottmg out all reference to the Godhead of 
 Christ from the pages of the Old Testament, we 
 should still have to encounter that massive testi- 
 mony to the Messianic belief which lives on in 
 the Rabbinical literature ;, since that literature, 
 whatever be the date of particular existing treatises, 
 contains traditions, neither few nor indistinct, of 
 indisputable antiquity. In that literature nothing 
 is plainer than that the ancient Jews believed 
 Messiah to be Divine’. It cannot be pretended 
 that this belief came from without, from the schools 
 of Alexandria, or from the teaching of Zoroaster. 
 It was notoriously based upon the language of the 
 Prophets and Psalmists. And we of to-day, even 
 with our improved but strictly mechanical apparatus 
 of grammar and dictionary, can scarcely pretend to 
 correct the earlier unprejudiced interpretation of men 
 who read the Old Testament with at least as much 
 instinctive insight into the meaning of its archaic 
 
 4 For the Rabbinical conception of the Person of Messiah, see 
 Schottgen, Hor. Hebr. vol. ii. de Messia, lib. i. 9.1 sqq. 
 
198 Last period of the Messianic Doctrine. [ Lect. 
 
 language, and of its older forms of thought and of 
 feeling, as an Englishman in this generation can 
 command when he applies himself to the study of 
 Shakespeare or of Milton. 
 
 (0) The last stage of the Messianic doctrine begins 
 only after the close of the Hebrew Canon. Among 
 the Jews of Alexandria, the hope of a Messiah seems 
 to have fallen into the background. This may have 
 been due to the larger attractions which doctrines 
 such as those of the Sophia and the Logos would 
 have possessed for Hellenized populations, or to a 
 somewhat diminished interest in the future of Jewish 
 nationality caused by long absence from Palestine, or 
 to a cowardly unwillingness to avow startling reli- 
 gious beliefs in the face of keen heathen critics. 
 The two latter motives may explain the partial or 
 total absence of Messianic allusions from the writings 
 of Philo and Josephus; the former will account for 
 the significant silence of the Book of Wisdom. 
 Among the peasantry and in the schools of Pales- 
 tine, the Messianic doctrine lived on. The literary 
 or learned form of the doctrine being based on and 
 renewed by the letter of Scripture, was higher and 
 purer than the impaired and debased belief which 
 gradually established itself among the masses of 
 the people. The popular degradation of the doc- 
 trme may be traced to the later political circum- 
 stances of the Jews, acting upon the secular and 
 materialized element in the national character. The 
 Messianic doctrine, as has been shewn, had two as- 
 pects corresponding respectively to the political and 
 to the religious yearnings of the people of Israel. If 
 the doctrine was a relief to a personal or national 
 
1.1 Popular degradation of the Messianic Doctrine. 139 
 
 sense of sin, it was also a relief to a sense of politi- 
 cal disappointment or degradation. And a keen sense 
 of political failure became a dominant sentiment 
 among the Jewish people during the centuries 
 immediately preceding our Lord’s Incarnation. With 
 some brilliant glimpses of national life, as under 
 the Maccabees, the Jews of the Restoration passed 
 from the yoke of one heathen tyranny to that of 
 another. As in succession they served the Persian 
 monarchs, the Syrian Greeks, the Idumzan king, 
 and the Roman magistrate, the Jewish people cast 
 an eye more and more wistfully to the political 
 hopes which might be extracted from their ancient 
 and accepted Messianic belief. They learned to pass 
 more and more lightly over the prophetic pictures 
 of a Messiah robed in moral majesty, of a Messiah 
 relieving the woes of the whole human family, of 
 a Messiah suffering torture and shame in the cause 
 of truth. They dwelt more and more eagerly upon 
 the pictures of His world-wide conquest and impe- 
 rial sway, and they construed those promises of 
 coming triumph in the most earthly and secular 
 sense; they looked for a Jewish Alexander or for 
 a Jewish Cesar. The New Testament exhibits the 
 popular form of the Messianic doctrine, as it lay in 
 the minds of Galileans, of Samaritans, of the men 
 of Jerusalem. It is plain how deeply, when our 
 Lord appeared, the hope of a Deliverer had sunk 
 into the heart both of peasant and townsman ; yet 
 it is equally plain how earthly was the taimt which 
 had passed over the popular apprehension of this 
 glorious hope since its first full proclamation in the 
 days of the Prophets. Doubtless there were saints 
 
Τὰ 
 
 140 Our Lord claimed to be the Messiah [ Lxcr. 
 
 like the aged Simeon, whose eyes longed sore for the 
 Divine Christ foretold in the great age of Hebrew 
 prophecy. But generally speaking, the piety of the 
 enslaved Jew had become little more than a wrong- 
 headed patriotism. His religious expectations had 
 been taken possession of by his civic passions, and 
 were liable at any moment to be placed at the ser- 
 vice of a purely political agitation. Israel as a theo- 
 cracy was sacrificed in his thought to Israel as a 
 state; and he was willing to follow any adventurer 
 into the wilderness or across the Jordan, if only there 
 was a remote prospect of bringing the Messianic 
 predictions to bear against the hated soldiery and 
 police of Rome. A religious creed is always im- 
 poverished when it is degraded to serve political 
 purposes; and belief in the Divinity of Messiah 
 naturally waned and died away when the highest 
 functions attributed to Him were merely those of 
 a successful general or of an able statesman. The 
 Apostles themselves, at one time, looked mainly or 
 only for a temporal prince; and the people who 
 were willing to hail Jesus as King Messiah and to 
 conduct Him in royal pomp to the gates of the 
 holy city, had so lost sight of the great truth which 
 Messiahship involved, that when He claimed to be 
 God, they endeavoured to stone Him for blasphemy, 
 and this claim of His was in point of fact the 
 crime for which their leaders persecuted Him to 
 death. 
 
 And yet when Jesus Christ presented Himself 
 to the Jewish people, He did not condescend to 
 sanction the misbelief of the time, or to swerve 
 
 e Cf. Lect. IV. pp. 287-289. 
 
ἘΠῚ] of David and therefore to be Divine. 141 
 
 from the tenor of the ancient revelation. He 
 claimed to satisfy the national hopes of Israel by 
 a prospect which would identify the future of 
 Israel with that of the world. He professed to an- 
 swer to the full, unmutilated, spiritual expectations 
 of prophets and of righteous men. They had desired 
 to see and had not seen Him, to hear and had not 
 heard Him. Long ages had passed, and the hope 
 of Israel was still unfulfilled. Psalmists had turned 
 back in accents wellnigh of despair to the great 
 deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, when the 
 Lord brake the heads of the dragons in the waters, 
 and brought fountains out of the hard rock. Pro- 
 phets had been assured that at last “He that shall 
 come will come and will not tarry,” and had been 
 bidden “though He tarry, wait for Him, because 
 He will surely come, He will not tarry.” Each 
 victory, each deliverance, prefigured His work ; each 
 saint, each hero, foreshadowed some separate ray of 
 His personal glory ; each disaster gave strength to 
 the mighty cry for His intervention: He was the 
 true soul of the history as well as of the poetry 
 and prophecy of Israel. And so much was demanded 
 of Him, so superhuman were the proportions of His 
 expected action, that He would have disappointed 
 Israel’s poetry and history no less than her prophecy 
 had He been merely One of the sons of men. Yet 
 when at last in the fulness of time He came that 
 He might satisfy the desire of the nations, He was 
 rejected by a stiffnecked generation because He was 
 true to the highest and brightest anticipations of His 
 Advent. A Christ who had contented himself with 
 the debased Messianic ideal of the Herodian period, 
 
1432 Doctrine of the Unity of God in the Old Testament {Lxct. 
 
 might have precipitated an insurrection against the 
 Roman rule, and might have antedated, after what- 
 ever intermediate struggles, the fall of Jerusalem. 
 Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be the Divine Messiah 
 of David and of Isaiah, and therefore He died upon 
 the cross, to achieve, not the political enfranchise- 
 ment of Palestine, but the spiritual redemption of 
 humanity. 
 
 1. Permit me to repeat an observation which has 
 already been hinted at. The several lines of teach- 
 ing by which the Old Testament leads up to the 
 doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity, are at first sight 
 apparently at issue with that primary truth of 
 which the Jewish Scriptures and the Jewish people 
 were the appointed guardians. “Hear, O Israel, 
 the Lord our God is one Godf.” That was the 
 fundamental law of the Jewish belief and polity. 
 How copious are the warnings against the sur- 
 rounding idolatries in the Jewish Scriptures$! With 
 what varied, what delicate, what incisive irony do 
 the sacred writers lash the pretensions of the most — 
 gorgeous idol-worships, while guarding the solitary 
 Majesty and the unshared prerogatives of the God of 
 Israel"! “The specific distinction of Judaism,” says 
 Baur, “marking it off from all forms of heathen re- 
 ligious belief whatever, is its purer, more refined, and 
 monotheistic conception of God. From the earliest 
 antiquity downwards, this was the essential basis 
 
 f Deut. vi. 4; cf. ibid. iv. 35; xxxil. 39; Ps. xevi. 5; Isa. xlii. 8, 
 ἘΠῚ 10-13, xliv. 6, 8, xlv. 5, 6, 18, 21, 22, xlviil. 11, 12; Wisd. xii. 
 13; Ecclus. i. 8. & Deut. iv. 16-18. 
 
 h Ps. exv. 4-8 ; Isa. xxxvii. 19, xliv. 9-20, xlvi. 5, sq.; Jer. ii. 27, 
 28, x. 3-6, 8-10, 14, 16; Hab. ii. 18, 19 ; Wisd. xiii. xiv. 
 
1171  a,foil to the anticipations of our Lord’s Godhead. 148 
 
 of the Old Testament religion!” But then this 
 discrimiating and fundamental truth does but 
 throw out into sharper outline and relief those 
 suggestions of personal distinctions in the Godhead ; 
 that Personification of the Wisdom, if the Wisdom 
 be not indeed a Person; those visions in which a 
 Divine Being is so closely identified with the Angel 
 Who represents Him; those successive predictions of 
 a Messiah personally distinct from Jehovah, yet also 
 the Saviour of men, the Lord and Ruler of all, the 
 Judge of the nations, Almighty, Everlasting, nay, 
 One Whom prophecy designates as God. How was 
 the Old Testament consistent with itself, how was 
 it loyal to its leading purpose, to its very central and 
 animating idea, unless it was in truth entrusted 
 with a double charge; unless besides teaching ex- 
 plicitly the Creed of Sinai, it was designed to teach 
 implicitly a fuller revelation, and to prepare men 
 for the Creed of the Day of Pentecost? If indeed 
 the Old Testament had been a semi-polytheistic lite- 
 rature ; if in Israel the Divine Unity had been only 
 a philosophical speculation, shrouded from the popu- 
 lar eye by the various forms with which some imagi- 
 native antiquity had peopled its national heaven ; if 
 the line of demarcation between such angel minis- 
 ters and guardians as we read of-in Daniel and 
 Zechariah, and the One High and Holy One Who 
 inhabiteth eternity, had been indistinct or uncertain; 
 if the Most Holy Name had been really lavished 
 upon created beings with an indiscriminate profusion 
 that deprived it of its awful, of its incommunicable 
 
 i Christenthum, p. 17. 
 
144 Our Lord’s Godhead indirectly implied [ Lect. 
 
 valuek,—then these intimations which we have been 
 reviewing would have been less startling than 
 they are. As it is, they receive prominence from 
 the sharp, unrelieved antagonism in which they 
 seem to stand to the main scope of the books which 
 contain them. And thus they are a perpetual wit- 
 ness that the Jewish Revelation is not to be final ; 
 they irresistibly suggest a deeper truth which is to 
 break forth from the pregnant simplicity of God’s 
 earlier message to mankind; they point, as we know, 
 to the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel and to the 
 Council Chamber of Niczea, in which the absolute 
 Unity of the Supreme Being will be fully exhibited 
 as harmonizing with the true Divinity of Him Who 
 was thus announced in His distinct Personality to 
 the Church of Israel. 
 
 2. It may be urged that the Old Testament might 
 conceivably have set forth the doctrine of Christ’s 
 Godhead in other and more energetic terms than 
 those which it actually employs. Even if this should 
 be granted, it is still to be observed that the wit- 
 ness of the Old Testament to this truth is not con- 
 fined to the texts which expressly assert that Messiah 
 should be Divine. The Human Life of Messiah, His 
 supernatural birth, His character, His death, His tri- 
 umph, are predicted in the Old Testament with a 
 minuteness which utterly defies the rationalistic in- 
 sinuation, that the argument from prophecy in favour 
 of Christ’s claims may after all be resolved into an 
 adroit manipulation of sundry more or less irrelevant 
 quotations. No amount of captious ingenuity will 
 
 k On the senses of Zlohim in the Old Testament, see Appendix, 
 Note B. 
 
11. in the fullness of prophecy respecting His Manhood. 145 
 
 destroy the substantial fact that the leading fea- 
 tures of our Lord’s Human manifestation were 
 announced to the world some centuries before He 
 actually came among us. Do I say that to be the 
 subject of prophecy is of itself a proof of Divinity ? 
 Certainly not. But at least when prophecy is so 
 copious and elaborate, and yet withal so true to 
 the facts of history which it predicts, its higher 
 utterances, which lie beyond the verification of the 
 human senses, acquire corresponding significance and 
 credit. If the circumstances of Christ’s Human Life 
 were actually chronicled by prophecy, prophecy is 
 entitled to submissive attention when she proceeds 
 to assert, in whatever terms, that the Christ Whom 
 she has described is more than Man. It must be 
 a robust and somewhat coarse scepticism which can 
 treat those early glimpses into the laws of God’s 
 inner being, those mysterious apparitions to Patri- 
 archs and Lawgivers, those hypostatized represen- 
 tations of Divine Attributes, above all, that Divinity 
 repeatedly and explicitly ascribed to the predicted 
 Restorer of Israel, only as illustrations of the ex- 
 uberance of Hebrew imagination, only as redundant 
 tropes and moods of Eastern poetry. When the 
 destructive critics have done their worst, we are still 
 confronted by the fact of a considerable literature, 
 indisputably anterior to the age of Christianity, and 
 foretelling in explicit terms the coming of a Divine 
 and Human Saviour. We cannot be insensible to 
 the significance of this fact. Those who in modern 
 days have endeavoured to establish an absolute 
 power over the conduct and lives of their fellow- 
 L 
 
140 Significance of our Lord’s appeal [Lecr. 
 
 men have found it necessary to spare no pains in 
 one department of political effort. They have en- 
 deavoured to ‘inspire, if they could not suppress, 
 that powerful agency, which both for good and for 
 evil moulds and informs popular thought. The con- 
 trol of the press from day to day is held in our 
 times to be among the highest exercises of despotic 
 power over a civilized community; and yet the stern- 
 est despotism will in vain endeavour to recast in its 
 own favour the verdict of History. History, as she 
 points to the irrevocable and unchanging past, can 
 be won neither by violence nor by blandishments to 
 silence her condemnations, or to lavish her approvals, 
 or in any degree to unsay the evidence of her chroni- 
 cles, that she may subserve the purpose and esta- 
 blish the claim of some aspiring potentate. But He 
 Who came to reign by love as by omnipotence, 
 needed not to put force upon the thought and speech 
 of His contemporaries, even could He have willed to 
 do 50. For already the literature of fifteen centu- 
 ries had been enlisted in His service; and the 
 annals and the hopes of an entire people, to say 
 nothing of the yearnmgs and guesses of the world, 
 had been moulded into one long anticipation of 
 Himself. Even He could not create or change the 
 past ; but He could point to its unchangeable voice 
 as the herald of His Own claims and destiny. His 
 language would have been folly on the lips of the 
 greatest of the sons of men, but it does no more 
 than simple justice to the true mind and _ con- 
 stant drift of the Old Testament. With His Hand 
 
 1 Lacordaire. 
 
II.] to the sacred literature of the Jewish people. 147 
 
 upon the Jewish Canon, Jesus Christ could look 
 opponents or disciples in the face, and bid them 
 “Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye 
 
 have eternal life, and they are they which testify 
 of. Me,’ 
 
LECTURE 11, 
 
 OUR LORD’S WORK IN THE WORLD A WITNESS 
 TO HIS DIVINITY. 
 
 Whence hath This Man this wisdom, and these mighty works ? 
 Is not This the carpenter's Son ? is not His mother called 
 Mary? and His brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and 
 Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Whence 
 then hath This Man alt these things ? 
 
 St. Marr. xin. 54-56. 
 
 A SCEPTICAL prince once asked his chaplain to 
 give him some clear evidence of the truth of Chris- 
 tianity, but to do so in a few words, because a king 
 had not much time to spare for such matters. The 
 chaplain tersely replied, “The Jews, your majesty.” 
 The chaplain meant to say that the whole Jewish 
 history was a witness to Christ. In the ages before 
 the Incarnation Israel witnessed to His work and 
 to His Person, by its Messianic belief, by its Scrip- 
 tures, by its ritual, by its rabbinical schools. In 
 the ages which have followed the Incarnation, Israel 
 has witnessed to Him no less powerfully as the 
 people of the dispersion. In all the continents, 
 amid all the races of the world, we meet with the 
 
Our Lord’s ‘plan? 149 
 
 nation to which there clings an unexpiated, self- 
 imprecated guilt. This nation dwells among us and 
 around us Englishmen; it shares largely in our 
 material prosperity; its social and civil life are 
 shaped by our national institutions; it sends its 
 representatives to our tribunals of justice and to 
 the benches of our senate: yet its heart, its home, 
 its future, are elsewhere. It still hopes for Him 
 Whom we Christians have found; it still witnesses, 
 by its accumulating despair, to the truth of the 
 creed which it so doggedly rejects. Our rapid sur- 
 vey then of those anticipations of our Lord’s Divinity 
 which are furnished by the Old Testament, and by 
 the literature more immediately dependent on it, 
 has left untouched a district of history fruitful in 
 considerations which bear upon our subject. But it 
 must suffice to have hinted at the testimony which 
 is thus indirectly yielded by the later Judaism; and 
 we pass to-day to a topic which is in some sense 
 continuous with that of our last lecture. We have 
 seen how the appearance of a Divine Person, as the 
 Saviour of men, was anticipated by the Old Testa- 
 ment; let us enquire how far Christ’s Divinity is 
 attested by the phenomenon which we encounter 
 in the formation and continuity of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 I. When modern writers examine and discuss the 
 proportions and character of our Lord’s ‘plan,’ a 
 Christian believer may rightly feel that such a 
 term can only be used in such a connection with 
 some mental caution. He may urge that in 
 forming an estimate of strictly human action, we 
 can distinguish between a plan and its realization ; 
 
150 Reserve in the use of such an expression. [Lecr. 
 
 but that this distinction is obviously inapplicable 
 to Him with Whom resolve means achievement, 
 and Who completes His action, really if not visibly, 
 when He simply wills to act. It might further be 
 maintained, and with great truth, that the preten- 
 sion to exhibit our Lord’s entire design in His 
 Life and Death proceeds upon a misapprehension. 
 It is far from being true that our Lord has really 
 laid bare to the eyes of men the whole purpose 
 of the Eternal Mind in respect of His Incarnation. 
 Indeed nothing is plainer, or more upon the very 
 face of the New Testament, than the limitations and 
 reserve of His disclosures on this head. We see 
 enough for faith and for practical purposes, but we 
 see no more. Amid the glimpses which are offered 
 us respecting the scope and range of the Incarna- 
 tion, the obvious shades off continually into mystery, 
 the visible commingles with the unseen. We Chris- 
 tians know just enough to take the measure of our 
 ignorance ; we feel ourselves hovering intellectually 
 on the outskirts of a vast economy of mercy, the 
 complete extent and the inner harmonies of which 
 One Eye Alone can survey. 
 
 If however we have before us only a part of the 
 plan which our Lord meant to carry out by His In- 
 carnation and Death, assuredly we do know some- 
 thing and that from His Own Lips. If it is true 
 that success can never be really doubtful to Omni- 
 potence, and that no period of suspense can be pre- 
 sumed to intervene between a resolve and its ac- 
 complishment in the Eternal Mind ; yet, on the other 
 hand, it is a part of our Lord’s gracious condescen- 
 sion that He has, if we may so speak, entered into 
 
ἘΠῚ Our Lord designed to found a society. 151 
 
 the lists of history. He has come among us as 
 one of ourselves; He has made Himself of no 
 reputation, and has been found in fashion as a man. 
 He has despoiled Himself of His advantages; He 
 has actually stated what He proposed to do in the 
 world, and has thus submitted Himself to the ver- 
 dict of man’s experience. His Own Words are our 
 warrant for comparing them with His Work; and 
 He has interposed the struggles of centuries be- 
 tween His Words and their fulfilment. He has so 
 shrouded His Hand of might as at times to seem 
 as if He would court at least the possibilities of 
 failure. Putting aside then for the moment any 
 recorded intimations of Christ's Will in respect of 
 other spheres of being, with all their mighty issues 
 of life and death, let us enquire what it was that 
 He purposed to effect within the province of hu- 
 man action and history. 
 
 Now the answer to this question is simply that 
 He proclaimed Himself the Founder of a world-wide 
 and imperishable Society. He did not propose to 
 act powerfully upon the convictions and the cha- 
 racters of individual men, and then to leave to 
 them, when they believed and felt alike, the liberty 
 of voluntarily forming themselves into an associa- 
 tion, with a view to reciprocal sympathy and united 
 action. From the first, the formation of a society 
 was quite as essential a feature of Christ’s plan, as 
 was His redemptive action upon single souls. This 
 society was not to be a school of thinkers, or a self- 
 associated company of enterprising fellow-workers ; 
 it was to be a Kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, 
 
152 The Kingdom of Heaven, or, of God. [ποτ΄ 
 
 or, as it is also called, the kingdom of God* 
 For ages indeed the Jewish theocracy had been a 
 kingdom of God upon earth”. God was the one true 
 King of ancient Israel. He was felt to be present 
 in Israel as a Monarch living among His subjects. 
 The temple was His palace ; its sacrifices and ritual 
 were the public acknowledgment of His present but 
 invisible Majesty. But the Jewish polity, con- 
 sidered as a system, was an external rather than 
 an internal kingdom of God. Doubtless there were 
 great saints in ancient Israel; doubtless Israel had 
 prayers and hymns such as may be found in the 
 Psalter, than which nothing more searching and 
 more spiritual has been since produced in Christen- 
 dom. Looking however to the popular working of 
 the Jewish theocratic system, and to what is im- 
 plied as to its character in Jeremiah’s prophecy of 
 a profoundly spiritual kingdom which was to suc- 
 ceed it®, may we not conclude that the Royalty of 
 God was represented rather to the senses than to 
 the heart and intelligence of at least the mass of His 
 ancient subjects? Jesus Christ our Lord announced a 
 new kingdom of God; and by terming it the King- 
 dom of God He implied that it would first fully 
 deserve that sacred name, as corresponding with 
 
 a βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν occurs thirty-two times in St. Matthew’s 
 Gospel, to which it is peculiar ; βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ five times. The 
 latter term occurs fifteen times in St. Mark, thirty-three times 
 in St. Luke, twice in St. John, seven times in the Acts of the 
 Apostles. In St. Matt. xiii. 43, xxvi. 29, we find ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ 
 Πατρός. Our Lord speaks of ἡ βασιλεία ἡ ἐμὴ three times, St. John 
 xviii. 36. b St. Matt. xxi. 43. 
 
 © Jer, xxxi. 31-34, quoted in Heb. viii. 8-11. 
 
III.] The Kingdom of Heaven not properly a republic. 153 
 
 Daniel’s prophecy of a fifth empire’. Let us more- 
 over note, in passing, that when using the word 
 ‘kingdom, our Lord did not announce a republic. 
 Writers who carry into their interpretation of the 
 Gospels ideas which have been gained from a study 
 of the Platonic dialogues or of the recent history 
 of France, may permit themselves to describe our 
 Lord as Founder of the Christian republic. And 
 certainly St. Paul, when accommodating himself to 
 the Greek forms of political thought which pre- 
 vailed largely throughout the Roman world, repre- 
 sents and recommends the Church of Christ as the 
 source and home of the highest moral and mental 
 liberty, by speaking freely of our Christian ‘citizen- 
 ship, and of our coming at baptism to the ‘city’ of 
 the living God*’. Not that the Apostle would press 
 the metaphor to the extent of implying that the 
 new society was to be a spiritual democracy ; since 
 he very earnestly taught that even the inmost 
 thoughts of its members were to be ruled by their 
 Invisible King!’ This indeed had been the claim 
 of the Founder of the kingdom Himself’; He willed 
 to be King absolutely and without a rival in the 
 new society; and the nature and extent of His 
 legislation shews us in what sense He meant to 
 reign. 
 
 ἃ Dan. vii. 9-15. 
 
 e Phil. ili. 20: ἡμῶν yap τὸ πολίτευμα ἐν οὐρανοῖς ὑπάρχει. Cf. Acts 
 XXiii. 1: πεπολίτευμαι τῷ Θεῷ. Phil. i. 27: ἀξίως τοῦ εὐαγγελίου πολιτεύεσθε. 
 Heb. xiii. τ4. In Heb. xi. το, xii. 22, πόλες apparently embraces the 
 whole Church of Christ, visible and invisible ; in Heb. xi. 16, xiii. 
 14, it is restricted to the latter. 
 
 f2Cor.x.5. g St. Matt. xxiii. 8. 
 
154 Laws of the Kingdom of Heaven. [ Lect. 
 
 The original laws of the new kingdom are for 
 the. most part set forth by its Founder in His Ser- 
 mon on the Mount. After a preliminary statement 
 of the distinctive character which was to mark the 
 life and bearing of those who would fully corre- 
 spond to His Mind and Will, and a further sketch 
 of the nature and depth of the influence which His 
 subjects were to exert upon other meni, He pro- 
 _ceeds to define the general relation of the new law 
 which He is promulgating to the law that had 
 preceded it*. The vital principle of His legislation, 
 namely, that moral obedience shall be enforced, not 
 merely in the performance of or im the abstinence 
 from outward acts, but in the deepest and most 
 secret springs of thought and motive, is traced in 
 its application to certain specific enactments of the 
 older Law!; while other ancient enactments are 
 modified or set aside by the stricter purity™, the 
 genuine simplicity of motive and character”, the 
 entire unselfishness®, and the superiority to personal 
 prejudices and exclusiveness? which the New Law- 
 giver insisted on. The required life of the new 
 kinedom is then exhibited in detail; the duties of 
 almsgiving, of prayer’, and of fasting’,' are suc- 
 cessively enforced ; but the rectification of the ruling 
 motive is chiefly insisted on as essential. In per- 
 forming religious duties God’s Will, and not any 
 
 h St. Matt. v. 1-12. i Tbid. vers. 13-16. 
 k Tbid. vers. 17-20. 1 Ibid. vers. 21-30. 
 m Jbid. vers. 31, 32. n Ibid. vers. 33-37. 
 © Ibid. vers. 38-42. P Ibid. vers. 43-47. 
 4 Ibid. vi. 1-4. t Tbid, vers. 5-8. 
 
 8 [bid. vers. 16-18. 
 
11Π] The Sermon on the Mount. 155 
 
 conventional standard of human opinion, is to be 
 kept steadily before the eye of the soul. The 
 Legislator insists upon the need of a single, supreme, 
 unrivalled motive in thought and action, unless all 
 is to be lost. The uncorruptible treasure must be 
 in heaven ; the body of the moral life will only be 
 full of light if “the eye is single;” no man can 
 serve two masters. The birds and the flowers 
 suggest the lesson of trust in and devotion to 
 the One Source and End of life; all will really 
 be well with those who in very deed seek His king- 
 dom and His righteousness". Charity in judgment of 
 other men*, circumspection in communicating sacred 
 truth’, confidence and constancy in prayer’, perfect 
 consideration for the wishes of others*, yet also a 
 determination to seek the paths of difficulty and 
 sacrifice, rather than the broad easy ways trodden 
 by the mass of mankind” ;—these features will mark 
 the conduct of loyal subjects of the kingdom. They 
 will beware too of false prophets, that is, of the 
 movers of spiritual sedition, of teachers who are 
 false to the truths upon which the kingdom is based 
 and to the temper which is required of its true 
 children. The false prophets will be known by their 
 moral unfruitfulness®, rather than by any lack of 
 popularity or success. Obedience to the law of 
 the kingdom is finally insisted on as the one con- 
 dition of safety; obedience’,—as distinct from pro- 
 
 t St. Matt. vi. 24. ἃ bid. vers. 25-34. 
 x Tbid. vil, 1-5. y Ibid. ver. 6. 
 
 z Tbid. vers. 7-11. a [bid. ver. 12. 
 
 Ὁ Ibid. vers. 13, 14. e Ibid. vers. 15-20. 
 d 
 
 Ibid. vers. 21-23. 
 
 - 
 
156 The Kingdom to be a visible polity [Lecr. 
 
 fessions of loyalty ; obedience,—which will be found 
 to have really based a man’s life upon the immove- 
 able rock at that solemn moment when all that 
 stands upon the sand must utterly perish. 
 
 Such a proclamation of the law of the kingdom as 
 was the Sermon on the Mount, already implied that 
 the kingdom would be at once visible and inyisible. 
 On the one hand certain outward duties, such as the 
 use of the Lord’s Prayer and fasting, are prescribedf; 
 on the other, the new law urgently pushes its claim 
 of jurisdiction far beyond the range of material 
 acts into the invisible world of thought and motive. 
 The visibility of the kingdom lay already in the fact 
 of its being a society of men, and not a society solely 
 made up of incorporeal beings such as the angels. 
 The King never professes that He will be satisfied 
 with a measure of obedience which sloth or timidity 
 might confine to the region of inoperative feelings 
 and convictions; He insists with great emphasis 
 upon the payment of homage to His Invisible 
 Majesty, outwardly, and before the eyes of men. 
 Not to confess Him before men is to break with 
 Him for evers; it is to forfeit His blessing and 
 protection when these would most be needed. The 
 consistent bearing then of His loyal subjects will 
 bring the reality of His rule before the sight of 
 men ; but, besides this, He provides His realm with 
 a visible government, deriving its authority from 
 Himself, and entitled on this account to deferential 
 and entire obedience on the part of His subjects. 
 To the first members of this government His com- 
 
 e St. Matt. vii. 24-27. f Thid. vi. 9-13, τό. 
 8 Ibid. x. 32; St. Luke xii. 8. 
 
111: with a deep invisible life. 157 
 
 mission runs thus :—“He that receiveth you, receiv- 
 eth Με", It is the King Who will Himself reign 
 throughout all history on the thrones of His repre- 
 sentatives; it is He Who, in their persons, will 
 be acknowledged or rejected. In this way His 
 empire will have an external and political side ; 
 nor is its visibility to be limited to its govern- 
 mental organization. The form of prayer! which 
 the King enjoins on His subjects, and the outward 
 visible actions by which, according to His appoint- 
 ment, membership in His kingdom is to be begun/ 
 and maintained‘, make the very life and movement 
 of the new society, up to a certain point, visible. 
 But undoubtedly the real strength of the kingdom, 
 its deepest life, its truest action, are veiled from sight. 
 At bottom it is to be a moral, not a material em- 
 pire; it is to be a realm not merely of bodies but 
 of souls, of souls instinct with intelligence and love. 
 Its seat of power will be the conscience of mankind. 
 Not ‘here’ or ‘there’ in outward signs of establish- 
 ment and supremacy, but in the free conformity 
 of the thought and heart of its members to the 
 Will of their Unseen Sovereign, shall its power be 
 most clearly recognised. Not as an oppressive out- 
 ward code, but as an inward buoyant exhilarating 
 motive, will the King’s Law mould the life of His 
 subjects. Thus the kingdom of God will be found 
 to be ‘within’ men!; it will be set up, not like 
 
 h St. Matt. x. 40; comp. St. Luke x. 16. 
 
 i St. Matt. vi. 9-13. 
 
 ἢ [bid. xxviii. 19; St. John iii. 5. 
 
 k St. Luke xxii. 19; 1 Cor. xi. 24; St. John vi. 53. 
 1 §t. Luke xvii. 21. 
 
158 Parables of the Kingdom. [Lecr. 
 
 an earthly empire by military conquest or by violent 
 revolution, but noiselessly and ‘not with observa- 
 tion™.” It will be maintained by weapons more 
 spiritual than the sword. “If,” said the Monarch, 
 “My kingdom were of this world, then would My 
 servants fight, but now is My kingdom not from 
 hence".” 
 
 The charge to the twelve Apostles exhibits the 
 outward agency by which the kingdom would be 
 established® ; and the discourse in the supper-room 
 unveils yet more fully the secret sources of its 
 strength and the nature of its influence?. But 
 the ‘plan’ of its Founder with reference to its 
 establishment in the world is perhaps most fully 
 developed in that series of parables, which from 
 their common object and from their juxtaposition in 
 St. Matthew’s Gospel, are commagnly termed Parables 
 of the Kingdom. 
 
 How various would be the attitudes of the hu- 
 man heart towards the ‘word of the kingdom, that 
 is, towards the authoritative announcement of its 
 establishment upon the earth, is pomted out in the 
 Parable of the Sower. The seed of truth would 
 fall from His Hand throughout all time by the 
 wayside, upon stony places, and among thorns, as 
 well as upon the good ground’, It might be ante- 
 cedently supposed that within the limits of the 
 new kingdom none were to be looked for save the 
 holy and the faithful. But the Parable of the Tares 
 corrects this too idealistic anticipation; the king- 
 
 m St. Luke xvii. 20. ἢ St. John xviii. 36. 
 o St. Matt. x. 5-42. P St. John xiv. xv. xvi. 
 a δύ. Matt. xiii. 3-8, 19-23. 
 
| Parables of the Kingdom. 159 
 
 dom’ is to be a field in which until the final har- ἡ 
 vest the tares must grow side by side with the 
 wheat". The astonishing expansion of the kingdom 
 throughout the world is illustrated by “the grain 
 of mustard seed, which indeed is the least of all 
 seeds, but when it is grown it is the greatest among 
 herbs’.” The principle and method of that expan- 
 sion are to be observed in the action of “the leaven 
 hid in three measures of meal'” A secret invisible 
 influence, a soul-attracting, soul-subduing enthusiasm 
 for the King and His work would presently pene- 
 trate the dull, dense, dead mass of human society, 
 and its hard heart and stagnant thought would 
 expand, in virtue of this inward impulse, into a 
 new life of light and love. Thus the kingdom is 
 represented not merely as a mighty whole, of which 
 each subject soul is a fractional part; it is also 
 viewed as an attractive influence, acting energetically 
 upon the inner personal life of individuals. It is 
 itself the great intellectual and moral prize of which 
 each truth-seeking soul is in quest, and to obtain 
 which all else may wisely and well be left behind. 
 The kingdom is a treasure hid in a field®, that is, 
 
 r St. Matt. xiii. 24-30, 36-43. “In catholicd enim ecclesia, que 
 non in sola Africa sicut pars Donati, sed per omnes gentes, sicut 
 promissa est, dilatatur atque diffunditur, in universo mundo, sicut 
 dicit Apostolus, fructificans et crescens, et boni sunt et mali.” 8. Aug. 
 Ep. 208, n. 6. “Si boni sumus in ecclesia Christi, frumenta sumus ; 
 si mali sumus in ecclesia Christi, palea sumus, tamen ab area non 
 recedimus. Tu qui vento tentationis foris volasti, quid es? Triti- 
 cum non tollit ventus ex area. Ex eo ergo, ubi es, agnosce quid 
 es.” In Ps. Ixx. (Vulg.) Serm. ii. n. 12. Civ. Dei, i. 35, and es- 
 pecially Retract. ii..18. 8 St. Matt. xiii. 31, 32. 
 
 t Tbid. ver. 33. ἃ Tbid. ver. 44. 
 
160 Parables of the Kingdom. [Lxcr. 
 
 in a line of thought and enquiry, or in a particular 
 discipline and mode of life; and the wise man will 
 gladly part with all that he has to buy that field. 
 Or the kingdom is like a merchant-man seeking 
 “ goodly pearls,” who sells all his possessions that he 
 may buy the “one pearl of great price.” Here it is 
 hinted that the kingdom alone embodies that one 
 absolute and highest Truth which is contrasted with 
 the lower and relative truths current among men. 
 Further, the preciousness of membership in the king- 
 dom is only to be completely realized by an unre- 
 served submission to the law of sacrifice ; the king- 
 dom flashes forth in its full moral beauty before the 
 eye of the soul, as the merchant-man resigns his all 
 in favour of the one priceless pearl. In these two 
 parables, then, the individual soul is represented as 
 seeking the kingdom; and it is suggested how 
 tragic in many cases would be the incidents, how 
 excessive the sacrifices, attendant upon “pressing 
 into it.” But a last parable is added in which the 
 kingdom is pictured, not as a prize which can be 
 seized by separate souls, but as a vast imperial sys- 
 tem, as a world-wide home of all the races of man- 
 kind. Like a net* thrown into the Galilean lake, 
 so would the kingdom extend its toils around en- 
 tire tribes and nations of men; the vast struggling 
 multitude would be drawn nearer and nearer to the 
 eternal shore; until at last the awful and final 
 separation would take place beneath the eye of 
 Absolute Justice ; the good would be gathered into 
 vessels, but the bad would be cast away. 
 
 ν St. Matt. xiii. 45, 46. x [bid. vers. 47-50. 
 
PET) Two characteristics of our Lord’s ‘plan? 161 
 
 The proclamation of this kingdom was termed the 
 Gospel, that is, the good news of God. It was good 
 news for mankind, Jewish as well as Pagan, that a 
 society was set up on earth wherein the human soul 
 might rise to the height of its original destiny, might 
 practically understand the blessedness and the awful- 
 ness of life, and might hold constant communion 
 in a free, trustful, joyous, childlike spirit with the 
 Author and the End of its existence. The minis- 
 terial work of our Lord was one long proclamation 
 of this kingdom. He was perpetually defining its 
 outline, or promulgating and codifying its laws, or 
 instituting and explaining the channels of its organic 
 and individual life, or gathering new subjects into it 
 by His words of wisdom or by His deeds of power, 
 or perfecting and refining the temper and cast of 
 character which was to distinguish them. When at 
 length He had Himself overcome the sharpness of 
 death, He opened this kingdom of heaven to all 
 believers on the Day of Pentecost. His ministry 
 had begun with the words, “Repent ye, for the 
 kingdom of heaven is at handy;” He left the world, 
 bidding His followers carry forward the frontier of 
 His kingdom to the utmost limits of the human 
 family’, and promising them that His presence with- 
 in it would be nothing less than co-enduring with 
 time’. 
 
 Let us note more especially two features in the 
 ‘plan’ of our Blessed Lord. 
 
 (a2) And, first, its originality. Need I say, 
 
 y St. Matt. iv. 17. 
 2 Ibid. xxviii. το ; St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i. 8. 
 ® St. Matt. xxviii. 20. 
 
 M 
 
162 Originality of our Lord’s ‘plan? [Lecr. 
 
 brethren, that real originality is rare? In this 
 place many of us spend our time very largely in 
 imitating, recombining, reproducing existing thought. 
 Conscious as we are that for the most part we are 
 only passing on under a new form that which in 
 its substance has come to us from others, we honestly 
 say so; yet it may chance to us at some time to 
 imagine that in our brain an idea or a design has 
 taken shape, which is originally and in truth our 
 own creation— 
 
 “Libera per vacuum posui vestigia princeps ; 
 Non aliena meo pressi pede.” 
 
 Those few, rapid, decisive moments in which genius 
 consciously enjoys the exhilarating sense of wield- 
 ing creative power, may naturally be treasured in 
 memory; and yet, even in these, how hard must 
 it be to verify the assumed fact of an absolute 
 originality! We of this day find the atmosphere 
 of human thought, even more than the surface of 
 the earth, thronged and crowded with the results of 
 man’s activity in times past and present. In pro- 
 portion to our consciousness of our real obligations to 
 this general stock of mental wealth, must we not 
 hesitate to presume that any one idea, the imme- 
 diate origin of which we cannot trace, is in reality our 
 own? But let us suppose that in this or that in- 
 stance we believe ourselves, in perfect good faith, 
 to have produced an idea which is really entitled 
 to the merit of originality. Yet may it not be, 
 that if at the right moment we could have ex- 
 amined the intellectual air around us with a sutt- 
 
 b Hor. Ep. i. το: 21. 
 
ἘΠῚ Real limits of originality. 163 
 
 ciently powerful microscope, we should have detected 
 the germ of our idea floating in from without upon 
 our personal thought? We only suppose ourselves 
 to have created the idea because at the time of our 
 inhaling it we were not conscious of doing so. The 
 idea perhaps was suggested indirectly; it came to 
 us along with some other idea upon which our 
 attention was mainly fixed; it came to us so 
 disguised or so undeveloped, that we cannot recog- 
 nise it, so as to trace the history of its growth. 
 It came to us during the course of a casual con- 
 versation ; or from a book the very name of which we 
 have forgotten ; and our relationship towards it has 
 been after all that of a nurse, not that of a parent. 
 We have protected it, cherished it, warmed it, and 
 at length it has grown within the chambers of our 
 mind, until we have recognised its value and led it 
 forth into the sunlight, shaping it, colouring it, ex- 
 pressing it after a manner strictly our own, and 
 believing in good faith that because we have so 
 entirely determined its form, we are the creators 
 of its substance. At any rate, my brethren, genius 
 herself has not been slow to confess the rarity and 
 the difficulty of a real originality. In one of his 
 later recorded conversations Goethe was endeavour- 
 ing to decide what are the real obligations of genius 
 to the influences which inevitably affect it. “ Much,” 
 said he, “is talked about originality; but what does 
 originality mean? We are no sooner born than 
 the world around begins to act upon us; its action 
 lasts to the end of our lives and enters into every- 
 thing. All that we can truly call our own is our 
 energy, our vigour, our will. If I,” he continued, 
 M 2 
 
164 Isolation of our Lord’s Human Life, [ Lecr. 
 
 “could enumerate all that I really owe to the great 
 men who have preceded me, and to those of my 
 own day, it would be seen that very little is really 
 my own. It is a point of capital importance to 
 observe at what time of life the influence of a great 
 character is brought to bear on us. Lessing, Win- 
 kelmann, and Kant, were older than I, and it has 
 been of the greatest consequence to me that the 
 two first powerfully influenced my youth and the 
 last my old age®.” On such a subject, Goethe may 
 be deemed a high authority, and he certainly was not 
 likely to do an injustice to genius, or to be guilty 
 of a false humility when speaking of himself. 
 
 But our Lord’s design to establish upon the earth 
 a kingdom of souls was an original design. Remark, 
 as bearing upon this originality, our Lord’s isolation 
 in His early life. His social obscurity is, in the eyes 
 of thoughtful men, the safeguard and guarantee of 
 His originality. It is not seriously pretended, on 
 any side, that Jesus Christ was enriched with one 
 single ray of His Thought from Athens, from Alex- 
 andria, from the mystics of the Ganges or of the 
 Indus, from the disciples of Zoroaster or of Confucius. 
 The centurion whose servant He healed, the Greeks 
 whom He met at the instance of St. Philip, the 
 Syro-phenician woman, the judge who condemned 
 and the soldiers who crucified Him, are the few Gen- 
 tiles with whom He is recorded to have had deal- 
 ings during His earthly life. But was our Lord 
 equally isolated from the world of Jewish speculation 2 
 M. Renan, indeed, impatient at the spectacle of an 
 
 ¢ Conversations de Goethe, trad. Delerot, tom. 11. p. 342, quoted 
 in the Rey. des Deux Mondes, 15 Oct. 1865. 
 
IIT. } considered in its bearing upon His originality. 165 
 
 unrivalled originality, suggests that Hillel was the 
 real master of Jesus’. But Dr. Schenkel will tell 
 us that this suggestion rests on no historical basis 
 whatever®, while we may remark in passing that it 
 is at issue with a theory which you would not care to 
 notice at length, but which M. Renan cherishes with 
 much fondness, and which represents our Lord’s ‘tone 
 of thought’ as a psychological result of the scenery 
 of north-eastern Palestinef. The assumption that 
 when making His yearly visits to Jerusalem for 
 the Feast of the Passover, or at other times, Jesus 
 must have become the pupil of some of the lead- 
 ing Jewish doctors of the day, is altogether gra- 
 tuitous. Once indeed, when He was twelve years 
 old, He was found in a synagogue, hard by the 
 
 ἃ “ Hillel fut le vrai maitre de Jésus, 511 est permis de parler de 
 maitre quand il s’agit d’une si haute originalité.” Vie de Jésus, 
 Ρ. 35: 
 
 e “Ganz unbewiesen ist es,” Scheukel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 39, 
 note. When however Dr. Schenkel himself says, “Den Einblick, den 
 Er [se. Jesus] in das Wesen und Treiben der religiésen Richtungen 
 und Parteiungen seines Volkes in so hohem Masse befass, hat Er aus 
 personlicher Wahrnehmung und unmittelbarem Verkehr mit den 
 Hiuptern und Vertretern der verschiedenen Parteistandpunkte 
 gewonnen”’ (ibid.), where is the justification of this assertion, ex- 
 cept in the Humanitarian and Naturalist theory of the writer, 
 which makes some such assumption necessary ἢ 
 
 f Vie de Jésus, p. 64: “Une nature rayissante contribuait a 
 former cet esprit.” Then follows a description of the flowers, 
 the animals, the insects, and the mountains (p. 65), the farms, 
 the fruit-gardens, and the vintage (p. 66), of Northern Galilee. 
 M. Renan concludes, “cette vie contente et facilement satisfaite . 
 se spiritualisait en réves éthérés, en une sorte de mysticisme poétique 
 confondant le ciel et la terre. . . . Toute l’histoire du Christianisme 
 naissant est devenue de la sorte une délicieuse pastorale.” p. 67. 
 
166 Our Lord under no intellectual obligations —_ [Lxcr. 
 
 temple, in close intellectual contact with aged 
 teachers of the Law. But all who hear Him, even 
 then, in His early Boyhood, are astonished at 
 His understanding and answers ; and the narrative 
 of the Evangelist implies that the occurrence was 
 not repeated. Moreover there was no teaching in 
 Judea at that era, which had not, in the true sense 
 of the expression, a sectarian colouring. But what 
 is there in the doctrine or in the character of Jesus 
 that connects Him with a Pharisee or a Sadducee, 
 or an Herodian, or an Essene type of education ? 
 Is it not significant that, as Schlelermacher remarks, 
 “of all the sects then in vogue none ever claimed 
 Jesus as representing it, none branded Him with 
 the reproach of apostasy from its tenets#?” Even if 
 we lend an ear to the precarious conjecture that He 
 may have attended some elementary school at Naza- 
 reth, it is plain that the people believed Him to 
 have gone through no formal course of theological 
 trainmg. “How knoweth This Man letters, having 
 never learned? 2?” was a question which betrayed the 
 popular surprise created by a Teacher Who spoke 
 with the highest authority, and Who yet had never 
 sat at the feet of an accredited doctor. It was the 
 homage of public enthusiasm which honoured Him 
 with the title of Rabbi; since this title did not 
 then imply that one who bore it had been qualified 
 by any intellectual exercises for an official teaching 
 position. Isolated, as it seemed, obscure, unculti- 
 vated, illiterate, the Son of Mary did not concern 
 Himself to struggle against or to reverse what man 
 would deem the crushing disadvantages of His lot. 
 
 δ Leben Jesu, vorl. xvi. h §t. John vii. 15. 
 
111: to Jewish or Pagan thinkers. 167 
 
 He did not, like philosophers of antiquity, or like 
 the active spirits of the middle ages, spend His 
 Life in perpetual transit between one lecturer of 
 reputation and another, between this and that focus 
 of earnest and progressive thought. He was not a 
 Goethe, continually enriching and refining his con- 
 ceptions by contact with a long catalogue of in- 
 tellectual friends that reaches from Lavater to Eck- 
 ermann. Still less did He, as a Young Man, live 
 in any such atmosphere as that of this place, where 
 interpenetrating all our differences of age and occu- 
 pation, and even of conviction, there is the magni- 
 ficent inheritance of a common fund of thought, to 
 which, whether we know it or not, we are all con- 
 stantly and inevitably debtors. He mingled neither 
 with great thinkers who could mould educated 
 opinion, nor with men of gentle blood who could 
 give its tone to society; He passed those thirty 
 years as an Under-workman in a carpenter's shop ; 
 He lived in what might have seemed the depths of 
 mental solitude and of social obscurity ; and then 
 He went forth, not to foment a political revolution, 
 nor yet to found a local school of evanescent sen- 
 timent, but to proclaim an enduring and world-wide 
 Kingdom of Souls, based upon the culture of a 
 common moral character, and upon intellectual sub- 
 mission to a common creed. 
 
 Christ’s isolation then is the guarantee of His 
 originality ; yet had He lived as much in public as 
 He lived in obscurity, where, let me ask, is the king- 
 dom of heaven anticipated as a practical project in 
 the ancient world? What, beyond the interchange 
 of thought on moral subjects, has the kingdom 
 
108 The Kingdom of Heaven radically unlike [Lecr. 
 
 proclaimed by our Lord in common with the 
 philosophical schools or coteries which grouped 
 themselves around Socrates and other teachers 
 of classical Greece? These schools, indeed, dif- 
 fered from the kingdom of heaven, not merely 
 in their lack of any pretensions to supernatural 
 aims or powers, but yet more, in that they only 
 existed for the sake of a temporary convenience, 
 and that their members were bound to each other 
 by no necessary ties. Again, what was there in 
 any of the sects of Judaism that could have sug- 
 gested such a conception as the kingdom of heaven? 
 Each and all they differ from it, I will not say in 
 organization and structure, but in range and com- 
 pass, in life and action, in spirit and aim. Or was 
 the kingdom of heaven even traced in outline by 
 the vague yearnings and aspirations after a better 
 time which entered so mysteriously into the popular 
 thought of the heathen populations in the Augustan 
 ageJ? Certainly it was an answer, complete yet 
 unexpected, to these aspirations. They did not origi- 
 nate it; they could not have originated it; they pri- 
 marily pointed to a material rather than to a moral 
 Utopia, to an idea of improvement which did not 
 enter into the plan of the Founder of the new 
 
 i This point is well stated in Ecce Homo, p. 91,344. The writer 
 observes that if Socrates were to appear at the present day, he 
 would form no society, as the invention of printing would have 
 rendered it unnecessary. But the formation of an organized society 
 was of the very essence of the work of Christ. I heartily rejoice 
 to recognise the fulness with which this vital truth is set forth 
 by one from whom serious Churchmen must feel themselves to 
 be separated by deep differences of belief and principle. 
 
 j Virgil, Ecl. iv.; Ain. vi. 793, and Suetonius, Vespasianus, iv. 5. 
 
III.) the schools of Greek Philosophy and the Jewish sects. 169 
 
 kingdom. But you ask if the announcement of the 
 kingdom of heaven by our Lord was not really a 
 continuation of the announcement of the kingdom 
 of heaven by St. John the Baptist? You might go 
 further, and enquire whether this proclamation of 
 the kingdom of heaven is not to be traced up to 
 the prophecy of Daniel respecting a fifth empire ? 
 For the present of course I waive the question 
 which an Apostlet would have raised, namely, 
 whether the Spirit That spoke in St. John and 
 in Daniel was not the Spirit of the Christ Himself. 
 But let us enquire whether Daniel or St. John do 
 anticipate our Lord’s plan in such a sense as to rob 
 it of its immediate originality. The Baptist and the 
 prophet foretell the kingdom of heaven. Be it so. 
 But a name is one thing, and the vivid complete 
 grasp of an idea is another. You are accustomed 
 to distinguish with some wholesome severity be- 
 tween originality of phrase and originality of 
 thought. You observe that an intrinsic poverty of 
 thought may at times succeed in formulating an 
 original expression; while a true originality will 
 often, nay generally, welcome a time-honoured and 
 conventional phraseology if it can thus secure 
 currency and acceptance for the truth which it has 
 brought to light and which it serves to convey. The 
 originality of our Lord’s plan lay not in its name 
 but in its substance. When St. John said that the 
 kingdom of heaven was at hand!, when Daniel 
 
 k 1 St. Peter i. rr. 
 
 1 The teaching of St. John Baptist centred around three points : 
 (x) the call to penitence (St. Matt. iii. 2, 8-10; St. Mark i. 4; 
 St. Luke iii. 3, ro-14); (2) the relative greatness of Christ (St. Matt. 
 
170 Our Lord’s originality observable [Lucr. 
 
 represented it as a world-wide and imperishable em- 
 pire, neither prophet nor Baptist had really antici- 
 pated the idea ; one furnished the name of a coming 
 system, the other a measure of its greatness. But 
 what was the new institution to be in itself; what 
 were to be its controlling laws and principles; 
 what the animating spirit of its mhabitants, what 
 the sources of its life, what the vicissitudes of its 
 establishment and triumph? ‘These and other ele- 
 ments of His plan are exhibited by our Lord Him- 
 self, in His discourses, His parables, His institutions. 
 What was as yet wholly or partially vague He 
 made definite, what had hitherto been abstract He 
 put into a concrete form, what had been ideal He 
 clothed with the properties of a living and working 
 reality, what had been scattered over many books 
 and ages He brought into a focus. If prophecy 
 supplied Him with some of the materials which 
 He employed, prophecy could not have suggested 
 the secret of their combination. He combined them 
 because He was Himself; His Person supplied the 
 secret of their combination. His originality is in- 
 deed seen in the reality and life with which He 
 
 iii, 11-14; St. Mark i. 7; St. Luke iii. 16; St. John 1. 15, 26, 
 27, 30-34); (3) the Judicial (οὗ τὸ πτύον ἐν τῇ χειρὶ αὐτοῦ, St. Matt. 
 111. 12; St. Luke iii. 17) and Atoning (ἴδε ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ, ὁ αἴρων 
 τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου, St. John i. 29, 36) Work of Christ. In this 
 way St. John corresponded to prophecy as preparing the way of 
 the Lord (St. Matt. iii. 3; St. Mark 1.3; St. Luke iii. 4; St. John i. 
 23; Isa. xl. 3); but beyond naming the kingdom, the nature of 
 the preparation required for entering it, the supernatural greatness, 
 and two of the functions of the King, St. John did not anticipate 
 our Lord’s disclosures. St. John’s teaching left men quite unin- 
 formed as to what the kingdom of heaven was to be in itself. 
 
1117] im His use of the materials supplied by prophecy. 171 
 
 lighted up the language used by men who had 
 been sent in earlier ages to prepare His way; but 
 if His creative Thought employed these older mate- 
 rials, it did not depend on them. He actually 
 elaborated into a practical and energetic form the 
 idea of a society of spiritual beings with enlight- 
 ened and purified consciences extending throughout 
 earth and heaven. When He did this, prophets 
 were not His masters; they had only foreshadowed 
 His work. His plan can be traced in that master- 
 ful completeness and symmetry, which is the seal 
 of its intrinsic originality, to no source beyond 
 Himself. Well might we ask with His astonished 
 countrymen the question which was indeed prompted 
 by their jealous curiosity, but which is natural to a 
 very different temper, “ Whence hath This Man 
 this wisdom 1 
 
 (8) And this opens upon us the second charac- 
 teristic of our Lord’s plan, I mean its audacity. 
 This audacity is observable, first of all, in the fact 
 that the plan is originally proposed to the world 
 with what might appear to us to be such hazardous 
 completeness. The idea of the kingdom of God 
 issues almost “as if in a single jet™” and with a fully 
 developed body from the Thought of Jesus Christ. 
 Put together the Sermon on the Mount, the Charge 
 to the Twelve Apostles, the Parables of the King- 
 dom, the Discourse in the Supper-room, and the 
 institution of the two great Sacraments, and the plan 
 of our Saviour is before you. And it is enunciated 
 with an accent of calm unfaltermg conviction that 
 it will be realized in human history. 
 
 m Préssensé, Jésus Christ, p. 325. 
 
172 Audacity of our Lord’s ‘plan’? (Lect. 
 
 This is a phenomenon which we can only appre- 
 ciate by contrasting it with the law to which it is so 
 signal an exception. Generally speaking, an am- 
 bitious idea appears at first as a mere outline, and 
 it challenges attention in a tentative way. It is put 
 forward enquiringly, timidly, that it may be com- 
 pleted by the suggestions of friends or modified by 
 the criticism of opponents. The highest genius is 
 always most keenly alive to the vicissitudes which 
 may await its own creations; it knows with what 
 difficulty a promising project is launched safely and 
 unimpaired out of the domain of abstract specu- 
 lation into the region of practical human life. Even 
 in art, where the materials to be moulded are, as 
 compared with the subjects of moral or political 
 endeavour, so much under command, it is not pru- 
 dent to presume that a design or a conception will 
 be carried out without additions or without cur- 
 tailments. In this place we all have heard that 
 between the θεωρία and the γένεσις of art there may 
 be a fatal interval. The few bold strokes by 
 which a Raffaelle has suggested a new form of 
 power or of beauty, may never be filled up upon 
 his canvass. The working-drawings of a Phidias 
 or a Michael Angelo may never be copied in stone 
 or in marble. As has been said of δ. T. Coleridge, 
 art is perpetually throwing out designs which re- 
 main designs for ever; and yet the artist possesses 
 over his material, and even over his hand and his 
 eye, a control which is altogether wanting to the 
 man who would reconstruct or regenerate human 
 society. For human society is an aggregate of hu- 
 man intelligences and of human wills, that is to say, 
 
ἘΠῚ as shewn by its completeness. 173 
 
 of profound and mysterious forces, upon the direction 
 of which under absolutely new circumstances it is 
 impossible for man to calculate. Accordingly, social 
 reformers tell us despondingly that “facts make sad 
 havoc of their fairest theories * and that schemes 
 which were designed to brighten and to beautify the 
 life of nations are either forgotten altogether, or, 
 like the Republic of Plato, are remembered only as 
 famous samples of the impracticable. For whenever 
 a great idea, affecting the well-being of society, is 
 permitted to force its way into the world of facts, 
 it is lable to be carried out of its course, to be 
 thrust hither and thither, to be compressed, exag- 
 gerated, disfigured, mutilated, degraded, caricatured. 
 It may encounter torrents of hostile opinion and 
 of incompatible facts, upon which its projector had 
 never reckoned ; its course may be determined into 
 a direction the exact reverse of that which he most 
 earnestly desired. In the first French Revolution 
 some of the most humane sociological projects were 
 distorted into becoming the very animating princi- 
 ples of wholesale and extraordinary barbarities. In 
 England we are fond of repeating the political 
 maxim that “constitutions are not made, but grow ;” 
 we have a proverbial dread of the paper-schemes 
 of government which from time to time are popular 
 among our gifted and volatile neighbours. It is 
 not that we English cannot admire the creations of 
 political genius; but we hold that in the domain 
 of human life genius must submit herself to the 
 dictation of circumstances, and that she herself 
 seems to shade off into erratic folly when she can- 
 not clearly recognise the true limits of her power. 
 
174 No proof of change in the ‘plan’ of our Lord.  [Lxct. 
 
 Now Jesus Christ our Lord was in the true and 
 very highest sense of the term a Social Reformer ; 
 yet He fully proclaimed the whole of His social 
 plan before He began to realize it. Had He been 
 merely a ‘great man,’ He would have been more 
 prudent. He would have conditioned His design; 
 He would have tested it; He would have developed 
 it gradually; He would have made trial of its work- 
 ing power; and then He would have re-fashioned, or 
 contracted, or expanded it, before finally proposing it 
 to the consideration of the world. But His actual 
 course must have seemed one of utter and reckless 
 folly, unless the event had shewn it to be the dic- 
 tate of a more than human wisdom. He speaks as 
 One Who is sure of the compactness and faultless- 
 ness of His thought; He is certain that no human 
 obstacle can baulk its realization. He produces it 
 simply, without effort, without reserve, without ex- 
 aggeration ; He is calm, because He is in possession 
 of the future, and sees His way clearly through its 
 tangled maze. There is no proof, no distant imti- 
 mation of a change or of a modification of His plan. 
 He did not, for instance, first aim at a political suc- 
 cess and then cover His failure by giving a religious 
 turn or interpretation to His previous manifestos; He 
 did not begin as a religious teacher and then aspire 
 to convert His increasing religious influence into 
 political capital. No attempts to demonstrate any 
 such vacillation in His thought have reached even a 
 moderate measure of success". Certainly, with the 
 
 n Dr. Schenkel, in his Charakterbild Jesu, represents our Lord 
 as a pious Jew, who did not assume to be the Messiah before the 
 scene at Cesarea Philippi. Kap. xii. ὃ 4, p. 138: “Dadurch, dass 
 
III. ] Our Lord certain of the future. 175 
 
 lapse of time, He enters upon a larger and 
 larger area of ministerial action; He developes 
 with majestic assurance, with decisive rapidity, the 
 integral features of His work; His teaching cen- 
 tres more and more upon Himself as its central 
 Subject ; but He nowhere retracts, or modifies, or 
 speaks or acts as One Who feels that He is depen- 
 dent upon events or agencies which He cannot 
 control. A poor woman pays Him a ceremonial 
 respect at a feast, and He simply announces that 
 the act will be told as a memorial of her through- 
 out the world®; He bids His Apostles to do all 
 things whatsoever He had commanded them?; He 
 promises them His Spirit as a Guide into all neces- 
 sary truth4: but He invests them with no such dis- 
 cretionary powers, as might imply that His design 
 would need revision under possible circumstances, or 
 could be capable of improvement. He calmly turns 
 the glance of His thought upon the long perspec- 
 tives of the years which lay before Him, and in 
 the immediate foreground of which was His Own 
 
 Jesus Sich nun wirklich zu dem Bekenntnisse des Simon bekannte, 
 trat er mit einem Schlage aus der verworrenen und verwirrenden 
 Lage heraus, in welche Er, durch die Unklarheit seiner Jiinger 
 und den Meinungstreit in seiner Umgebung gebracht war. Ein 
 Stichwort war jetzt gesprochen.” This theory is obliged to reject 
 the evangelical accounts of our Lord’s Baptism and Temptation, 
 and to distort from their plain meaning the narratives of our 
 Lord’s sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth (St. Luke iv. 16), 
 of His call of the Twelve Apostles, and of His claim to forgive 
 sin, See the excellent remarks of M. Préssensé, Jésus Christ, 
 ΡΡ. 326, 327. 
 
 ο St. Matt. xxvi. 13; St. Mark xiv. 9. 
 
 P St. Matt. xxviii. 20. q St. John xvi. 13. 
 
 c 
 
176 Audacity of our Lord’s plan’ as seen in its substance. { Lxct. 
 
 humiliating Death™. Other founders of systems or 
 of societies have thanked a kindly Providence for 
 shrouding from their gaze the vicissitudes of coming 
 time, 
 “ Prudens futuri temporis exitum 
 Caliginosa nocte premit deus’;”’ 
 
 but the Son of Man speaks as One Who sees beyond 
 the most distant possibilities, and Who knows full 
 _ well that His work is indestructible. “The gates of 
 hell,” He calmly observes, “shall not prevail against 
 itt;” “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My 
 words shall not pass away”.” 
 
 Nor is the boldness of Christ’s plan less ob- 
 servable in its actual substance, than in the fact 
 of its original production in such completeness. 
 Look at it, for the moment, from ἃ political 
 pomt of view. Here is, as it seems, a Galilean 
 Peasant, surrounded by a few followers taken 
 like Himself from the lowest orders of society; 
 yet He deliberately proposes to rule all human 
 thought, to make Himself the Centre of all human 
 affections, to be the Lawgiver of humanity, and 
 the Object of man’s adoration. He founds a spiritual 
 society, the thought and heart and activity of which 
 are to converge upon His Person, and He tells His 
 followers that this society which He is forming is 
 the real explanation of the highest visions of 
 seers and prophets, that it will embrace all races 
 and extend throughout all time. He places Him- 
 self before the world as the true object of its 
 
 τ St. Matt. xx. 19; St. Mark viii. 31. 8 Hor. Od. iii. 29. 29. 
 t St. Matt. xvi. 18. Ὁ Ibid. xxiv. 35. 
 
111.] Audacity of our Lord’s ‘plan’ as seen in its substance. 177 
 
 expectations, and He points to His proposed work 
 as the one hope for its future. There was to be a 
 universal religion, and He would found it. A uni- 
 versal religion was just as foreign an idea to hea- 
 thenism as to Judaism. Heathenism held that the 
 state was the highest form of social life ; religious 
 life, like family life, was deemed subordinate to poli- 
 tical interests. Morality was pretty nearly dwarfed 
 down to the measure of common political virtue; 
 sin was little else than political misdemeanour ; 
 religion was a subordinate function of the national 
 life, differing in different countries according to the 
 varying genius of the people, and rightly liable to 
 being created or controlled by the government. A 
 century and a half after the Incarnation, in his 
 attack upon the Church, Celsus ridicules the idea 
 of a universal religion as a manifest folly*; yet Jesus 
 Christ has staked His whole claim to respect and 
 confidence upon announcing it. Jesus Christ made 
 no concessions to the passions or to the prejudices of 
 mankind; the laws and maxims of His kingdom 
 are for the most part in entire contradiction to the 
 instincts of average human nature: yet He pre- 
 dicts that His Gospel will be preached in all the 
 world, and that finally there will be one fold and 
 One Shepherd of men’. “Go,” He says to His 
 Apostles, “make disciples of all nations, baptizing 
 them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, 
 and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all 
 things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, lo, 
 I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
 
 x Origen. contr. Celsum, ii. 46. y St. John x. 16. 
 N 
 
178 Realization of our Lord’s ‘plan? [ Lec, 
 
 world’.” He founds a world-wide religion, and He 
 promises to be the present invigorating force of that 
 religion to the end of time. Are we not too accus- 
 tomed to this language to feel the full force of 
 its original meaning? How must it have sounded 
 in the ears of Apostles! Such words as these are 
 not accounted for by any difference between the 
 East and the West, between ancient and modern 
 modes of speech. They will not bear honest trans- 
 lation into any modern phrase that would enable 
 good men to use them now. Imagine such a com- 
 mand as that of our Lord upon the lips of the best, 
 the wisest of men whom you have ever known! 
 You cannot. It is simply to imagine that goodness 
 or wisdom has been exchanged for the folly of an 
 intolerable presumption. Such language 7s folly, 
 unless it be something else; unless it be proved 
 by the event to have been the highest wisdom, 
 the wisdom of One, Whose ways are not our ways, 
 nor His thoughts our thoughts* 
 
 II. But has the plan of Jesus Christ been carried 
 out? Does the kingdom of heaven exist on earth ? 
 
 The Church of Christ is the living answer to 
 that question. Boileau says somewhere that the 
 Church is a great thought which every man ought 
 to study. It would be more practical to say that 
 the Church is a great fact which every man ought 
 to measure. Probably we Christians are too familiar- 
 ized with the blessed presence of the Church to do 
 justice to her as a world-embracing institution, and 
 as the nurse and guardian of our moral and mental 
 
 z St. Matt, xxvili. 19, 20, a Isa, lv. 8. 
 
1171.} Continuous growth of the Church. 179 
 
 life. Like the air we breathe, she bathes our whole 
 being with influences which we do not analyse ; and 
 we hold her cheap in proportion to the magnitude of 
 her secret services. The sun rises on us day by day 
 in the heavens, and we heed not his surpassing 
 beauty until our languid sense is roused by some ob- 
 servant astronomer or artist. The Christian Church 
 pours even upon those of us who love her least 
 floods of intellectual and moral light ; and yet it is 
 only by an occasional intellectual effort that we 
 detach ourselves sufficiently from the tender mono- 
 tony of her influences to understand how intrinsi- 
 cally extraordinary is the fact of her perpetuated 
 existence and of her continuous expansion. 
 
 Glance for a moment at the history of the 
 Christian Church from the days of the Apostles 
 until now. What is it but a history of the gra- 
 dual, unceasing self-expansion of an institution 
 which, from the first hour of its existence, delibe- 
 rately aimed, as it is aiming even now, at the 
 conquest of the world’? Compare the Church 
 which sought refuge and which prayed in the upper 
 chamber at Jerusalem, with the Church of which 
 St. Paul is the pioneer and champion in the latter 
 portion of the Acts of the Apostles, or with the 
 Church to which he refers, as already making its 
 way throughout the world, in his Apostolical Epi- 
 stles®. Compare again the Church of the Apostolical 
 age with the Church of the age of Tertullian. 
 Christianity had then already penetrated, at least 
 
 Ὁ St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i. 8,ix.15; Mark xvi. 20. 
 ¢ Rom. i, 8, x. 18, xv. 18-21; Col. i. 6, 23; cf. 1 St. Peter i. 1, &c. 
 bs 
 
180 Continuous growth of the Church. [Lecr. 
 
 in some degree, into all classes of Roman society4, 
 and was even pursuing its missionary course in re- 
 gions far beyond the frontiers of the empire‘, in 
 the forests of Germany, in the wilds of Scythia, in 
 the deserts of Africa, and among the unsubdued and 
 barbarous tribes who inhabited the northern ex- 
 tremity of our own island. Again, how nobly con- 
 scious is the Church of the age of St. Augustine 
 of her world-wide mission, and of her ever-widening 
 area! how sharply is this consciousness contrasted 
 with the attempt of Donatism to dwarf down the 
 realization of the plan of Jesus Christ to the nar- 
 row proportions of a national or provincial enter- 
 prisef! In the writings of Augustine especially, we 
 
 ἃ Tert. Apol. 37: “Hesterni sumus, et vestra omnia implevimus, 
 urbes, insulas, castella, municipia, conciliabula, castra ipsa, tribus, 
 decurias, palatium, senatum, forum, sola vobis relinquimus templa.” 
 Cf. de Rossi, Roma Sotteranea, i. p. 309. 
 
 e Tert. adv. Judeos, c. 7: “Jam Getulorum varietates, et Mau- 
 rorum multi fines, Hispaniarum omnes termini, et Galliarum di- 
 verse nationes, et Britannorum inaccessa Romanis arma, Christo 
 vero subdita, et Sarmatarum, et Dacorum, et Germanorum, et 
 Seytharum, et abditarum multarum gentium et provinciarum, et 
 insularum multarum nobis ignotarum, et que enumerare minus 
 possumus. In quibus omnibus locis, Christi nomen, qui jam venit, 
 regnat, utpote ante Quem omnium civitatum porte sunt aperte.” 
 
 f§. Aug. Ep. xlix. ἢ. 3: “Querimus ergo, ut nobis respondere 
 non graveris, quam causam forté noveris qua factum est, ut Christus 
 amitteret hereditatem Suam per orbem terrarum diffusam, et 
 subito in solis Afris; nec ipsis omnibus remaneret. Etenim ecclesia 
 Catholica est etiam in AfricA quia per omnes terras eam Deus esse 
 voluit et predixit. Pars autem vestra, que Donati dicitur, non 
 est in omnibus illis locis, in quibus et literee et sermo et facta 
 apostolica cucurrerunt.” In Ps, Ixxxy. ἢ. 14: “Christo enim tales 
 maledicunt, qui dicunt, quia periit ecclesia de orbe terrarum, et 
 remansit in sola Africa.” Compare 8. Hieron. ady. Lucifer. tom. 
 
TET}. _ Continuous growth of the Church. 181 
 
 see the Church of Christ tenaciously grasping the 
 deposit of revealed unchanging doctrine, while litur- 
 gies the most dissimilar, and teachers of many 
 tongues®, and a large variety of ecclesiastical customs?, 
 find an equal welcome within her comprehensive 
 bosom. Yet contrast the Church of the fourth and 
 fifth centuries with the Church of the middle ages, 
 or with the Church of our own day. In the fourth 
 and even in the fifth century, whatever may have 
 been the activity of individual missionaries, the 
 Church was still for the most part contained within 
 the limits of the empire; and of parts of the em- 
 pire she had scarcely as yet taken possession. She 
 was still confronted by powerful sections of the popu- 
 lation passionately attached for various reasons to 
 the ancient superstition: nobles such as the powerful 
 
 iv. pt. ii. p. 298: “Si in Sardinia tantum habet [ecciesiam Christus] 
 nimium pauper factus est.” And 8. Chrys. in (οἷ. Hom. 1. n. 2; in 
 1 Cor. Hom. xxxii. n. 1. 
 
 & In Ps. xliv. (Vulg.) Enarr. n. 24: “Sacramenta doctrine in 
 linguis omnibus variis. Alia lingua Afra, alia Syra, alia Greeca, 
 alia Hebrea, alia illa et illa; faciunt iste linguze varietatem vestis 
 regine hujus; quomodo autem omnis varietatis vestis in unitate 
 concordat, sic et omnes linguee ad unam fidem.” 
 
 h Ep. liv. ad Januar. ἢ. 2: “ Alia vero. [sunt] que per loca ter- 
 rarum regionesque variantur, sicuti est quod alii jejunant sabbato, 
 alii non ; alii quotidié communicant Corpori et Sanguini Domini, 
 alii certis diebus accipiunt ; alibi nullus dies preetermittitur, quo 
 non offeratur, alibi sabbato tantum et dominico, alibi tantum do- 
 minico ; et si quid aliud hujusmodi animadverti potest, fofwm hoc 
 genus rerum liberas habet observationes; nec disciplina ulla est in 
 his melior gravi prudentique Christiano, quam ut eo modo agat, 
 quo agere viderit ecclesiam, ad quam forte devenerit. Quod enim 
 neque contra fidem, neque bonos mores esse conyincitur, indifferen- 
 ter est habendum et propter eorum, inter quos vivitur, societatem 
 servandum est.” 
 
182 Actual area of the Church at this hour. [Lecr. 
 
 Symmachus, and orators like the accomplished Liba- 
 nius, were among her most earnest opponents. But 
 it is now scarcely less than a thousand years since 
 Jesus Christ received at least the outward submis- 
 sion of the whole of Europe; and from that time 
 to this His empire has been continually expanding. 
 The newly-discovered continents of Australia and 
 America have successively acknowledged His sway. 
 He is shedding the light of His doctrine first upon 
 one and then upon another of the islands of the 
 Pacific. He has beleaguered the vast African con- 
 tinent on either side with various forms of missionary 
 enterprise. And although in Asia there are vast, 
 ancient, and highly organized religions which are 
 still permitted to bid Him defiance, yet India, 
 China, Tartary, and Kamschatka have within the 
 last few years witnessed heroic labours and sacrifices 
 for the spread of His kingdom, which would not 
 have been unworthy of the purest and noblest en- 
 thusiasms of the Primitive Church. Nor are these 
 efforts so fruitless as the ruling prejudices or the 
 lack of trustworthy information on such subjects, 
 which are so common in Western Europe, might 
 occasionally suggest. 
 
 Already the kingdom of the Redeemer may be 
 said to embrace three continents; but what are its 
 prospects, even if we mheasure them by a strictly hu- 
 man estimate? Is it not a simple matter of fact that 
 at this moment the progress of the human race is 
 entirely identified with the spread of the influence 
 of the nations of Christendom? What Buddhist, 
 or Mohammedan, or Pagan nation is believed by 
 others or believes itself to be able to affect for good 
 
TE.) Prospects of the Church at this hour. 183 
 
 the future destinies of the human race? The idea 
 of an indefinite progress of humanity, to whatever 
 perversions that idea may have been subjected, is 
 really a creation of the Christian faith. The nations 
 of Christendom, in exact proportion to the strength, 
 point, and fervour of their Christianity, seriously be- 
 lieve that they can command the future, and instinct- 
 ively associate themselves with the Church’s aspira- 
 tions for a world-wide empire. Such a confidence, by 
 the mere fact of its existence, is already on the road 
 to justifying itself by success. It never was stronger 
 than it is in our own day; and if in certain dis- 
 tricts of European opinion it may seem to be 
 waning, this is only because such sections of opinion 
 have for the moment rejected the empire of Christ. 
 Their aberrations do not set aside, they rather act 
 as a foil to that general belief in a moral and 
 social progress of mankind which at bottom is so 
 intimately associated with the belief of Christian 
 men in the coming triumph of the Church. 
 
 But long ere this, my brethren, as I am well aware, 
 you have been prepared to interrupt me with a group 
 of objections. Surely, you will say, this representation 
 of the past, of the present, and of the future of the 
 Church may suffice for an ideal picture, but it is not 
 history. Is not the verdict of history a different and 
 a less encouraging one? First of all, do Church an- 
 nals present this spectacle of an ever-widening ex- 
 tension of the kingdom of Christ? What then is 
 to be said of the spread of great and vital heresies 
 such as the medizeval Nestorianism through coun- 
 tries which once believed with the Church in the One 
 Person and two Natures of her Lord? Again, is 
 
184 Objections to the foregoing representation. [ Lrcr. 
 
 it not a matter of historical fact that the Church 
 has lost entire provinces both in Africa and in the 
 East, since the rise of Mohammedanism? And are 
 her losses only to be measured by the territorial 
 area which she once occupied, and from which she 
 has been beaten back by the armies of the alien ? 
 Has she not, by the controversies of the tenth and 
 of the sixteenth centuries, been herself splintered 
 into three great sections, which still continue to act 
 in outward separation from each other, to their own 
 extreme mutual loss and discouragement, and to 
 the immense and undisguised satisfaction of all 
 enemies of the Christian name? Are not large 
 bodies of active and earnest Christians living in 
 separation from her communion? Do not our mis- 
 slonary associations perpetually lament their failures 
 to achieve any large permanent conquests for Christ 7 
 Once more, is it not a matter of notoriety that the 
 leading nations of Christian Europe are themselves 
 honeycombed by a deadly rationalism, which gives 
 no quarter in its contemptuous yet passionate on- 
 slaughts on the faith of Christians, and which never 
 calculated more confidently than it does at the 
 present time upon achieving the total destruction 
 of the empire of Jesus Christ ? 
 
 My brethren, you do a service to my argument in 
 stating these apparent objections to its force; for the 
 substance of what you urge cannot be left out of sight 
 by any who would honestly apprehend the matter 
 before us. You point to the territorial losses which 
 the Church has sustained at the hands of heretical 
 Christians or of Moslem invaders. True: the Church 
 of Christ has sustained such losses. But has she not 
 
III. | Losses and divisions of Christendom. 185 
 
 more than redressed them in other directions? is 
 she not now in India and in Africa, carrying the 
 banner of the Cross into the territory of the Cres- 
 cent? You insist upon the grave differences which 
 form a barrier at this moment between the Eastern 
 and the Western Churches, and between the two great 
 divisions of the Western Church itself. Your esti- 
 mate of those differences may be a somewhat exag- 
 gerated one. But even if the renewed harmony 
 and co-operation of the separated portions of the 
 family of Christ is not so entirely remote as you 
 would suggest ; still we must acknowledge that the 
 existing divisions are undoubtedly, like all habitual 
 sin within the sacred precincts of the Church, a 
 standing and very serious violation of the law of 
 its Founder. Nor is this disorder summarily to be 
 remedied by our ceding to the unwarrantable pre- 
 tensions of one section of the Church, which may en- 
 deayvour to persuade the rest of Christendom, that it 
 is itself co-extensive with the whole kingdom of the 
 Saviour. The divisions of Christendom, lamentable 
 and in many ways disastrous as they are, must be 
 ended, if at all, by the warmer charity and more fer- 
 vent prayers of believing Christians. But meanwhile, 
 do not these very divisions themselves afford an in- 
 direct illustration of the extraordinary vitality of the 
 new kingdom? Has the kingdom ceased to enlarge 
 its territory since the troubled times of the six- 
 teenth century 4 On the contrary, it is simply a mat- 
 ter of fact that, since that date, its ratio of extension 
 has been greater than at any previous period. The 
 philosopher who supposes that the Church is on the 
 point of dying out because of her divisions must 
 
180 Threatening attitude of modern unbelief. [ Lec. 
 
 be strangely insensible to the convictions which are 
 increasingly prevailing in the minds of men. The 
 confessions of failure on the part of some of our mis- 
 sionaries are certainly balanced by many and thank- 
 ful narratives of great results accomplished under 
 circumstances of the utmost discouragement. But I 
 understand you to point most emphatically to the 
 spread and to the strength of modern rationalism. 
 You say that rationalism is enthroned in the midst 
 of civilizations which the Church herself has formed 
 and nursed. You urge that rationalism, like the rot- 
 tenness which has seized upon the heart of the forest 
 oak, must sooner or later arrest the growth of branch 
 and foliage, and bring the tree which it is destroy- 
 ing to the ground. Now we cannot deny, what is 
 indeed a patent and melancholy fact, that some of 
 the most energetic of the intellectual movements 
 in modern Europe frankly avow and enthusiastically 
 advocate an explicit and total rejection of the 
 Christian creed. But it is possible to overrate the 
 importance and to mistake the true significance of 
 such a fact as this. Of course Christian faith can 
 be surprised or daunted by no form or intensity of 
 opposition to truth, where there are so many 
 reasons for opposing it. We Christians know what 
 we have to expect from the human heart in its 
 natural state; while on the other hand we have 
 been told that the gates of hell shall not prevail 
 against the Church of the Redeemer. But when 
 we contemplate the future destinies of the Church, 
 as they are affected by rationalism, this hopeful 
 confidence of a sound faith may be seconded by 
 the calm estimate of the reflective reason. For, 
 
111} Counterbalancing considerations. 187 
 
 first, it may fairly be questioned whether the pub- 
 licly proclaimed unbelief of modern times is really 
 more general or more pronounced than the secret 
 but active and deeply penetrating scepticism which 
 during considerable portions of the middle ages laid 
 such hold upon the intellect of Europe; and yet 
 the medizeval sceptics cannot be said to have per- 
 manently hampered the progress of the Church. 
 Again, modern unbelief may be deemed less formid- 
 able when we steadily observe its moral impotence. 
 Its strength and genius lie only in the direction of 
 destruction ; it has shewn no sort of power to build 
 up any spiritual fabric which can take the place of 
 that which it seeks to do away with, as a shelter 
 and a discipline for the hearts and lives of men®. 
 Leaving some of the deepest, most legitimate, and 
 most ineradicable needs of the human soul utterly 
 unsatisfied, modern unbelief can never really hope 
 permanently to establish a true ‘religion of hu- 
 manity®.’ The force of its intellectual onset upon 
 revealed dogma is continually being broken by the 
 consciousness that it cannot long maintain the 
 ground which it may seem to itself for the mo- 
 ment to have won; since in practice its speculative 
 energy is more than counterbalanced by the moral 
 
 © The attempt of M. Auguste Comte, in his later life, to 
 elaborate a kind of ritual as a devotional and esthetical appendage 
 to the Positivist Philosophy, implies a sense of this truth. 
 M. Comte however does not appear to have carried any large 
 section of the Positivist school with him in his ritualistic 
 enterprise. The same poverty of moral and spiritual provision 
 for the soul of man is observable in rationalistic systems which 
 stop very far short of the literal godlessness of the Positive 
 Philosophy. 
 
~ 
 
 188 Unbelief unintentionally the servant of the Church. [Lxctr. 
 
 power of some humble teacher of a positive creed 
 for whom possibly it entertains nothing less than 
 a sovereign contempt. Thirdly, unbelief resembles 
 social or political persecution in this, that imdirectly 
 it does an inevitable service to the Faith which it 
 attacks. It forces earnest believers in Jesus Christ 
 to desire and to endeavour to minimize all differ- 
 ences which are less than fundamental. It forces 
 Christian men to repress with a strong hand all 
 exaggeration of existing motives for a divided 
 action. It obliges Christians, sometimes im spite of 
 themselves, to work side by side for their insulted 
 Lord. Thus it not only creates freshened sympa- 
 thies between temporarily severed branches of the 
 Church ; it draws toward the Church herself, with 
 an attraction more and more powerful and com- 
 prehensive, many of those earnestly believing men, 
 who, as is the case with numbers among our non- 
 conformist brethren in this country, already belong, 
 in St. Augustine’s language, to the soul, although not 
 to the body, of the Catholic Communion. Lastly, it 
 unwittingly contributes to augment the evidential 
 strength of Christianity, at the very moment of 
 its assault upon Christian doctrine. The fierceness 
 of man turns to the praise of Jesus Christ, by de- 
 monstrating, each day, each year, each decade of 
 years, each century, the indestructibility of His work 
 in the world; and unbelief voluntarily condemns itself 
 to the task of maintaming before the eyes of men 
 that enduring tradition of an implacable hostility to 
 the kingdom of heaven, which it is the glory of our 
 Saviour so explicitly to have predicted, and so con- 
 sistently and triumphantly to have defied. 
 
TII.] Our Lord’s work at this hour in Christian souls. 189 
 
 For these and other reasons, modern unbelief, 
 although formidable, will not be deemed so full of 
 menace to the future of the kingdom of our Lord 
 as may sometimes be apprehended by the nervous 
 timidity of Christian piety. This will appear more 
 certain if from considering the extent of Christ's 
 realm we turn to the intensive side of His work 
 among men. For indeed the depth of our Lord’s 
 work in the soul of man has ever been more won- 
 derful than its breadth. The moral intensity of the 
 life of a sincere Christian is a more signal illustra- | 
 tion of the reality of the reign of Christ, and of 
 the success of His plan, than is the territorial range 
 of the Christian empire. “The King’s daughter is 
 all glorious within.” Christianity may have con- 
 ferred a new sanction upon civil and domestic rela- 
 tionships among men; and it certainly infused a new 
 life into the most degraded society that the world 
 has yet seen’, Still this was not its primary aim ; 
 its primary efforts were directed not to this world, 
 but to the next*. Christianity has changed many 
 
 f §. Aug. Ep. exxxviii. ad Marcellin. ἢ. 15: “Qui doctrinam 
 Christi adversam dicunt esse reipublicee, dent exercitum talem, 
 quales doctrina Christi esse milites jussit, dent tales provinciales, 
 tales maritos, tales conjuges, tales parentes, tales filios, tales 
 dominos, tales servos, tales reges, tales judices, tales denique 
 debitorum ipsius fisci redditores et exactores, quales esse preecipit 
 doctrina Christiana, et audeant eam dicere adversam esse reipub- 
 lice, immd verd non dubitent eam confiteri magnam, si obtempe- 
 retur, salutem esse reipublice.” 
 
 & §. Hieronymus adv. Jovin. lib. ii. tom. iv. pars 11. p. 200, ed. 
 Martian: “Nostra religio non πυκτὴν, non athletam (St. Jerome 
 might almost have in his eye a certain well-known modern theory) 
 non nautas, non milites, non fossores, sed sapientiz erudit secta- 
 
190 Actual empire of Christ over the mind, (Lect. 
 
 of the outward aspects of human existence ; it has 
 created a new religious language, a new type of 
 worship, a new calendar of time. It has furnished 
 new ideals to art; it has opened nothing less than 
 a new world to literature ; it has invested the forms 
 of social intercourse among men with new graces of 
 refinement and mutual consideration. Yet these are 
 but some of the superficial symptoms of its real 
 work. It has achieved these changes in the out- 
 ward life of Christian nations, because it has pene- 
 trated to the very depths of man’s heart~and 
 thought ; because it has revolutionized his convic- 
 tions and tamed his will, and then expressed its 
 triumph in the altered social system of that section 
 of the human race which has generally received it. 
 How complete at this moment is the reign of Christ 
 in the soul of a sincere Christian! Christ is not 
 a constitutional, He is emphatically an absolute Mo- 
 narch ; and yet His rule is welcomed by His subjects 
 with more than that enthusiasm which a free people 
 can feel for its elected magistracy. Every sincere 
 Christian bows to Jesus Christ as to an Intellectual 
 Master. Our Lord is not merely held to be a Teacher 
 of Truth ; He is the very Absolute Truth itself. No 
 portion of His teaching is received by true Christians 
 merely as a ‘ view, or as a ‘tentative system, or as a 
 ‘theory,’ which may be entertained, discussed, partially 
 adopted, and partially set aside. Those who deal thus 
 with Him are understood to have broken with Chris- 
 tianity, at least as a practical religion. For a Chris- 
 tian, the Words of Christ are, one and all, an abso- 
 
 torem, qui se Dei cultui dedicavit, et scit cur creatus sit, cur 
 versetur in mundo, quo abire festinet.” 
 
Τ}} heart, and will of a true Christian. 191 
 
 lute rule of truth. All that Christ has authorized is 
 simply accepted with the whole energy of the Chris- 
 tian reason. Christ’s Thought is reflected, it is repro- 
 duced, in the thought of the true Christian. Christ’s 
 dictatorship in the sphere of speculative truth is 
 thankfully acknowledged by the Christian’s voluntary 
 and unreserved submission to the slightest known 
 intimations of his Master’s judgment. High above the 
 din of human voices, the tremendous Self-assertion of 
 Jesus Christ echoes on from age to age,—“ I am the 
 Truth.” And from age to age the Christian responds 
 by a life-long endeavour “to bring every thought 
 into captivity unto the obedience of Christi.” But 
 if Jesus Christ is Lord of the Christian’s thought, 
 He is also Lord of the Christian’s affections. Beauty 
 it is which provokes love ; and Christ is the Highest 
 Moral Beauty. He does not merely rank as a Teacher 
 of the purest morality; He is Absolute Virtue itself. 
 As such He claims to reign over the inmost affections 
 of man; He claims and He secures the first place in 
 the heart of every true Christian. To have taken the 
 measure of His Beauty, and yet not to love Him, is, 
 in a Christian’s judgment, to be self-condemned. “If 
 any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be 
 Anathema Maranatha*.” And ruling the affections 
 of the Christian, Christ is also King of the sovereign 
 faculty in the Christianized soul; He is Master of 
 the Christian will. He has tamed its native stubborn- 
 ness, and now He teaches it day by day a more and 
 more pliant accuracy of movement in obedience to 
 Himself. Nay, He is not merely its rule, but its very 
 
 h St. John xiv. 6. Δι. Cor. x: &. 
 k x Cor. xvi. 22. 
 
109 The Christian a witness to the Living Christ. [Lxct. 
 
 motive power ; each act of devotion and self-sacrifice 
 of which it is capable is but an extension of the 
 energy of Christ’s Own moral Life. “Without Me,” 
 He says to His servants, “ye can do nothing';” and 
 with St. Paul His servants reply, “I can do all 
 things through Christ Which strengtheneth me™.” 
 This may be expressed in other terms by saying 
 that both intellectually and morally Christ is Chris- 
 tianity. Christianity is not related to our Lord as 
 a philosophy might be to a philosopher, that is, as 
 a moral or intellectual system thrown off from his 
 mind, resting thenceforward on its own merits, and 
 implying no necessary attitude towards its author 
 on the part of those who receive it, beyond a certain 
 sympathy with what was at one time a portion of 
 his thought. A philosophy may be thus abstracted 
 altogether from the person of its originator, with 
 entire impunity. Platonic thought would not have 
 been damaged, if Plato had been annihilated ; and in 
 our day men are Hegelians or Comtists without be- 
 lieving that the respective authors of those systems 
 are in existence at this moment, nay rather, in the 
 majority of cases, while deliberately holding that 
 they have ceased to be. The utmost stretch of per- 
 sonal allegiance, on the part of the disciple of a 
 philosophy to its founder, consists, ordinarily speak- 
 ing, in a sentiment of devotion ‘to his memory.’ 
 But detach Christianity from Christ, and it vanishes 
 before your eyes into intellectual vapour. For it is 
 of the essence of Christianity that, day by day, hour 
 by hour, the Christian should live in conscious, felt, 
 sustained relationship to the Ever-living Author of 
 
 1 St. John xv. 5. m Phil. iv. 13. 
 
III.) Christ the Life of all living Christianity. 193 
 
 his creed and of his life. Christianity is non-existent 
 apart from Christ; it centres in Christ ; it radiates, 
 now as at the first, from Christ. It is not a mere 
 doctrine bequeathed by Him to a world with which 
 He has ceased to have dealings; it perishes outright 
 when men attempt to abstract it from the Living 
 Person of its Founder. He is felt by His people to 
 be their Living Lord, really present with them now, 
 and even unto the end of the world. The Christian 
 life springs from and is sustained by the apprehen- 
 sion of Christ present in His Church, present in and 
 with His members as a πνεῦμα ζωοποιοῦν", Christ is 
 the quickening Spirit of Christian humanity; He 
 lives in Christians; He thinks in Christians; He 
 acts through Christians and with Christians; He is 
 indissolubly associated with every movement of the 
 Christian’s deepest life. “I live,” exclaims the Apo- 
 stle, “yet not I, but Christ liveth in me®.” This 
 felt presence of Christ it is, which gives both its 
 form and its force to the sincere Christian life. That 
 life is a loyal homage of the intellect, of the heart, 
 and of the will, to a Divine King, with Whom will, 
 heart, and intellect are in close and constant com- 
 munion, and from Whom there flows forth through 
 the Spirit and the Sacraments, that supply of light, 
 of love, and of resolve, which enriches and ennobles 
 the Christian soul. My brethren, I am not theorizing 
 or describing any merely ideal state of things; I am 
 but putting into words the inner experience of every 
 true Christian among you; I am but exhibiting a 
 set of spiritual circumstances which, as a matter of 
 course, every true Christian endeavours to realize 
 n i Cor. xv. 45. ο Gal. ii. 20. 
 Ω 
 
104 Actual influence of the Sermon on the Mount.  {Lxct. 
 
 and make his own, and which, as a matter of fact, 
 blessed be God! very many Christians do realize, 
 to their present peace, and to their eternal welfare. 
 Certainly it is not uncommon in our day to be 
 informed, that ‘the Sermon on the Mount is a dead 
 letter in Christendom. In consequence (so men 
 speak) of the engrossing interest which Christians 
 have wrongly attached to the discussion of dogmatic 
 questions, that original draught of essential Chris- 
 tianity, the Sermon on the Mount, has been wellnigh 
 altogether lost sight of. Perhaps you yourselves, my 
 brethren, ere now have repeated some of the current 
 commonplaces on this topic. But have you endea- 
 voured to ascertain whether it is indeed as you say? 
 You remark that you at least have not met with 
 Christians who seemed to be making any sincere 
 efforts to turn the Sermon on the Mount into prac- 
 tice. It may be so. But the question is, where have 
 you looked for them? Do you expect to meet them 
 rushing hurriedly along the great highways of life, 
 with the keen, eager, self-asserting multitude? Do 
 you expect, that with their eye upon the Beatitudes 
 and upon the Cross, they will throng the roads which 
 lead to worldly success, to earthly wealth, to tem- 
 poral honour? Be assured that those who know 
 where moral beauty, aye, the highest, is to be found, 
 are not disappointed, even at this hour, in their 
 search for it. Until you have looked more carefully, 
 more anxiously than has probably been the case, for 
 the triumphs of our Lord’s work in Christian souls, 
 you may do well to take upon trust the testimony 
 of others. You may at least be sufficiently generous, 
 aye, and sufficiently reasonable, to believe in the exist- 
 
1111 Moral creativeness of our Lord in modern times. 105 
 
 ence at this hour of the very highest types of Chris- 
 tian virtue. It is a simple matter of fact that in our 
 day, multitudes of men and women do lead the life 
 of the Beatitudes; they pray, they fast, they do 
 alms to their Father Which seeth in secret. There 
 are numbers who take no thought for the morrow. 
 There are numbers whose righteousness does exceed 
 that worldly and conventional standard of religion, 
 which knows no law save the corrupt public opinion 
 of the hour, and which inherits in every generation 
 the essential spirit of the Scribes and Pharisees. 
 There are numbers who shew forth the moral crea- 
 tiveness of Jesus Christ in their own deeds and 
 words ; they are living witnesses to His solitary and 
 supreme power of changing the human heart. They 
 were naturally proud; He has enabled them to be 
 sincerely humble. They were, by the inherited taint 
 of their nature, impure; He has in them shed 
 honour upon the highest forms of chastity. They 
 too were, as in his natural state man ever is, sus- 
 picious of and hostile to their fellow-men, unless 
 connected with them by blood, or by country, or 
 by interest. But Jesus Christ has taught them the 
 tenderest and most practical forms of love for man 
 viewed simply as man; He has inspired them with 
 the only true, that is, the Christian, humanitarianism. 
 Do not suppose that the moral energy of the Chris- 
 tian life was confined to the Church of the Catacombs. 
 At this moment, there are millions of souls in the 
 world, that are pure, humble, and loving. But for 
 Jesus Christ our Lord these millions would have been 
 proud, sensual, selfish. At this very day, and even in 
 atmospheres where the taint of scepticism dulls the 
 Ὡ 
 
106 Moral creativeness of our Lord in modern times. {LEct. 
 
 brightness of Christian thought, and enfeebles the 
 strength of Christian resolution, there are to be 
 found men, whose intelligence gazes on Jesus with 
 a faith so clear and strong, whose affection clings 
 to Him with so trustful and so warm an embrace, 
 whose resolution has been so disciplined and braced 
 to serve Him by a persevering obedience, that, be- 
 yond a doubt, they would joyfully die for Him, if by 
 shedding their blood they could better express their 
 devotion to His Person, or lead others to know and 
 to love Him more. Blessed be God, that portion of 
 His one Fold in which He has placed us, the Church 
 of England, has not lacked the lustre of such lives 
 as these. Such assuredly was Ken; such was Bishop 
 Wilson ; such have been many whose names have 
 never appeared in the page of history. Has not 
 one indeed quite lately passed from among us, the 
 boast and glory of this our University, great as a 
 poet, greater still perhaps as a scholar and a theo- 
 logian, greatest of all as a Christian saint? Cer- 
 tainly to know him, even slightly, was imevitably 
 to know that he led a life, distinct from, and higher 
 than, that of common men; to know him well, was 
 to revere and to love in him the manifested beauty 
 of his Lord’s presence ; it was to trace the sensibly 
 perpetuated power of the Life, of the Teaching, of 
 the Cross of Jesusp. 
 
 On the other hand look at certain palpable effects 
 of our Lord’s work which lie on the very face of 
 human society. If society, apart from the Church, 
 
 Ρ The author of the Christian Year had passed to his rest 
 during the interval that elapsed between the delivery of the 
 second and the third of these lectures, on March 30, 1866. 
 
1Π|:] Social results of the spread of Christianity. 197 
 
 is more kindly and humane than in heathen times, 
 this is due to the work of Christ on the hearts of 
 men. The era of ‘humanity’ is the era of the In- 
 carnation. The sense of human brotherhood, the 
 acknowledgment of the sacredness of human rights, 
 the recognition of that particular stock of rights 
 which appertains to every human being, is a cre- 
 ation of Christian dogma. It has radiated from 
 the heart of the Christian Church into the society 
 of the outer world. Christianity is the power which 
 first gradually softened slavery, and is now finally 
 abolishing it. Christianity has proclaimed the dignity 
 of poverty, and has insisted upon the claims of the 
 poor, with a success proportioned to the sincerity 
 which has welcomed her doctrines among the different 
 peoples of Christendom. The hospital is an inven- ἢ 
 tion of Christian philanthropy; the active charity 
 of the Church of the fourth century forced into the 
 Greek language a word for which Paganism had 
 had no occasion. The degradation of woman in the 
 Pagan world has been exchanged for a position of 
 special privilege and high honour, accorded to her 
 by the Christian nations. The sensualism which 
 Paganism mistook for love has been placed under 
 the ban of all true Christian feeling ; and in Chris- 
 tendom, love is now the purest of moral impulses ; 
 it is the tenderest, the noblest, the most refined of 
 the movements of the soul. The old, the universal, 
 the natural feeling of bitter hostility between races, 
 nations, and classes of men is denounced by Chris- 
 tianity. The spread of Christian truth inevitably 
 breaks down the ferocities of national prejudice, and 
 prepares the world for that cosmopolitanism which, 
 
108 These social improvements radiate from the Church. { Lucr. 
 
 we are told, is its most probable future. International 
 law had no real existence until the nations, taught 
 by Christ, had begun to feel the bond of brother- 
 hood. International law is now each year becoming 
 more and more powerful im regulating the affairs 
 of the civilized world. And if we are sorrowfully 
 reminded that the prophecy of a world-wide peace 
 within the limits of Christ’s kingdom has not yet 
 been realized ; if Christian lands in our day as be- 
 fore are reddened by streams of Christian blood; yet 
 the utter disdain of the plea of right, the high- 
 handed and barbarous savagery, which marked the 
 wars of heathendom, have given way to sentiments 
 in which justice can at least obtain a hearmg, and 
 which compassion and generosity, drawing their in- 
 spirations from the Cross, have at times raised to the 
 level of chivalry. But neither these improvements 
 in human society, nor the regenerate life of the indi- 
 vidual Christian, would, taken separately, have rea- 
 lized our Lord’s ‘plan.’ His design was to found 
 a society or Church ; individual sanctity and social 
 amelioration are only effects radiating from the 
 Church. The Church herself is the true proof of His 
 success. After the lapse of eighteen centuries the 
 kingdom of Christ is here, and it is still expanding. 
 How fares it generally with a human undertaking 
 when exposed to the action of a long period of time ? 
 The idea which was its very soul is thrown into 
 the shade by some other idea; or it 1s warped, or dis- 
 torted, or diverted from its true direction, or changed 
 by some radical corruption. In the end it dies out 
 from among the living thoughts of men, and takes 
 its place in the tomb of so much forgotten specula- 
 
HE) Recuperative powers resident in the Church. 199 
 
 tion, on the shelves of a library. Within a short 
 lifetime we may follow many a popular moral im- 
 pulse from its cradle to its grave. From the era of 
 its young enthusiasm we mark its gradual entry upon 
 its stage of fixed habit ; from this again we pass to 
 its day of lifeless formalism and to the rapid pro- 
 gress of its decline. But the Society founded by Jesus 
 Christ is here, still animated by its original idea, 
 still carried forward by the moral impulse which 
 sustained it in its infancy. If Christian doctrine 
 has, in particular branches of the Church, been over- 
 laid by an encrustation of foreign and earthly ele- 
 ments, its body and substance is untouched in each 
 great division of the Catholic Society ; and much 
 of it, we may rejoice to know, is retained by bodies 
 external to the Holy Fold. If intimate union with 
 the worldly power of the State has sometimes (as 
 especially in* England during the last century) 
 seemed to chill the warmth of Christian love, and to 
 substitute a heartless externalism for the spiritual 
 life of a Christian brotherhood ; yet again and again 
 the flame of That Spirit Whom the Son of Man sent 
 to ‘glorify’ Himself, has burst up from the depths 
 of the living heart of the Church, and has kindled 
 among a generation of sceptics or sensualists a pure 
 and keen enthusiasm which confessors and martyrs 
 might have recognised as their own. The Church 
 of Christ in sooth carries within herself the secret 
 forces which renew her moral vigour, and which will, 
 in God’s good time, visibly re-assert her essential 
 unity. Her perpetuated existence among ourselves at 
 this hour bears a witness to the superhuman powers 
 of her Founder not less significant than that afforded 
 
200 How to account for the success of Jesus Christ? | Lixcr. 
 
 by the intensity of the individual Christian life, or 
 by the territorial range of the Christian empire. ° 
 
 III. The work of Jesus Christ in the world is 
 a patent fact, and it is still in full progress before 
 our eyes. The question remains, How are we to 
 account for its success 4 
 
 If this question is asked with respect to the ascen- 
 dancy of such a national religion as the popular 
 Paganism of Greece, it is obvious to refer to the doc- 
 trine of the prehistoric mythus. The Greek religious 
 creed was, at least in the main, a creation of the 
 national imagination at a period when reflection and 
 experience could scarcely have existed. It was re- 
 commended to subsequent generations not merely by 
 the indefinable charm of poetry which was thrown 
 around it, not merely by the antiquity which 
 shrouded its actual origin, but by its accurate sym- 
 pathy with the genius as with the degradations of 
 the gifted race which had produced it. But of late 
 years we have heard less of the attempt to apply 
 the doctrine of the mythus to a series of well- 
 ascertained historical events, occurring in the mid- 
 day light of history, and open to the hostile eriti- 
 cism of an entire people. The historical imagination, 
 steadily applied to the problem, refuses to picture 
 the unimaginable process by which such stupendous 
 ‘myths’ as those of the Gospel could have been fes- 
 tooned around the simple history of a humble preacher 
 of righteousness. The early Christian Church does 
 not supply the intellectual agencies that could have 
 been equal to any such task. As Rousseau has 
 observed, the inventor of such a history would 
 have been not less remarkable than its Subject ; 
 and the utter reversal of the ordinary laws of a 
 
11. Cases of the Greek Polytheism and of Buddhism. 90] 
 
 people’s mental development would have been itself 
 a miracle. Nor was it to be anticipated that a reli- 
 gion which was, as the mythical school asserts, the 
 ‘creation of the Jewish race, would have made itself 
 a home, at the very beginning of its existence, among 
 the Greek and the Roman peoples of the Western 
 world. If however we are referred to the upgrowth 
 and spread of Buddhism, as to a phenomenon 
 which may rival and explain the triumph of Chris- 
 tianity, it may be sufficient to reply that the 
 writers who insist upon this parallel are themselves 
 eminently successful in analysing the purely natural 
 causes of the success of Cakya-Mouni. They dwell 
 among other points on the rare delicacy and fertility 
 of the Aryan imagination4, and on the absence of any 
 strong counter-attraction to arrest the course of the 
 new doctrine in Central and South-eastern Asia. 
 Nor need we fear to admit, that, mingled with the 
 darkest errors, Buddhism contained elements of truth 
 so undeniably powerful as to appeal with great 
 force to some of the noblest aspirations of the soul 
 of man. But Buddhism, vast as is the population 
 which professes it, has never yet found its way into 
 a second continent"; while the religion of Jesus 
 Christ is to be found in every quarter of the globe. 
 As for the rapid and widespread growth of the 
 religion of the False Prophet, it may be explained 
 partly by the -practical genius of Mohammed, partly 
 by the rare qualities of the Arab race. If it had not 
 
 « Cf. on this point the interesting Essay of M. Taine, Etudes 
 Critiques, p. 321. 
 
 τ There is, I believe, a single Buddhist temple at San Francisco, 
 Japan and the islands of the Eastern Archipelago belong of course 
 properly to Asia. 
 
202 Cases of Mohammedanism and Confucianism. {Lxcr. 
 
 claimed to be a new revelation, Mohammedanism 
 might have passed for a heresy adroitly constructed 
 out of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Its doc- 
 trine respecting Jesus Christ reaches the level of 
 Socinianism ; and, as against Polytheism, its specu- 
 lative force lay in its insistance upon the truth of the 
 Divine Unity. A religion which consecrated sensual 
 indulgence could bid high for an Asiatic popularity 
 against the Church of Christ; and Mohammed deli- 
 vered the scymetar, as the instrument of his Aposto- 
 late, into the hands of a people whose earlier poetry 
 shews it to have been gifted with intellectual fire 
 and strength of purpose of the highest order. But 
 it has not yet been asserted that the Church fought 
 her way, sword in hand, to the throne of Constan- 
 tine; nor were the first Christians naturally calcu- 
 lated to impose their will forcibly upon the civilized 
 world, had they ever desired to do so. Still less is 
 a parallel to the work of Jesus Christ to be found 
 in that of Confucius. Confucius indeed was not a 
 warrior like Mohammed, nor a mystic like Cakya- 
 Mouni; he appealed neither to superior knowledge 
 nor to miraculous power. Confucius collected, codi- 
 fied, enforced, reiterated all that was best in the 
 moral traditions of China; he was himself deeply 
 penetrated with the best ethical sentiments of Chi- 
 nese antiquity. His success was that of an earnest 
 patriot who was also, as a patriot, an antiquarian 
 moralist. But he succeeded only in China, nor could 
 his work roll back that invasion of Buddhism which 
 took place in the first century of the Christian era. 
 Confucianism is more purely national than Buddhism 
 and Mohammedanism; in this respect it contrasts 
 more sharply with the world-wide presence of Chris- 
 
cS hay World-wide activity of the Christian Church. 203 
 
 tianity. Yet if Confucianism is unknown beyond the 
 frontiers of China, it is equally true that neither 
 Buddhism nor Mohammedanism have done more than 
 spread themselves over territories contiguous to their 
 original homes. Whereas, almost within the first 
 century of her existence, the Church had her mis- 
 sionaries in Spain on one hand, and, as it seems, in 
 India on the other; and her Apostle proclaimed 
 that his Master’s cause was utterly independent of 
 all distinctions of race and nation’. At this mo- 
 ment, Christian charity is freely spending its ener- 
 gies and its blood in efforts to carry the work of 
 Jesus Christ into regions where He has been so 
 stoutly resisted by these ancient and highly organ- 
 ized forms of error. Yet in the streets of London 
 or of Paris we do not hear of the labours of Mos- 
 lem or Buddhist missionaries, instinct with any 
 such sense of a duty and mission to all the world 
 in the name of Truth as that which animates at 
 this very hour those heroic pioneers of Christen- 
 dom whom Europe has sent to Delhi or to Pekin" 
 From the earliest ages of the Church, the 
 rapid progress of Christianity in the face of appa- 
 
 SCO). Wh. Dive τη, αὐ 14. 
 
 τ We are indeed told that “if we were to judge from the history 
 of the last thousand years, it would appear to shew that the per- 
 manent area of Christianity is conterminous with that of Western 
 civilization, and that its doctrines could find acceptance only among 
 those who, by incorporation into the Greek and Latin races, have 
 adopted their system of life and morals.” International Policy, 
 p- 508. The Anglo-Positivist school however is careful to explain 
 that it altogether excludes Russia from any share in ‘ Western civi- 
 lization ;’ Russia, it appears, is quite external to ‘the West.’ Ibid. 
 pp: 14-17, 58, 95, Ke. 
 
204 Gibbon’s account of the success of Jesus Christ. | Lxcr. 
 
 rently insurmountable difficulties, has attracted at- 
 tention, on the score of its high evidential value". 
 The accomplished but unbelieving historian of the 
 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire under- 
 took to furnish the scepticism of the last century 
 with a systematized and altogether natural account 
 of the spread of Christianity*. The five ‘causes’ 
 which he instances as sufficient to explain the work 
 of Jesus Christ in the world are, the ‘zeal’ of the 
 early Christians, the ‘doctrine of a future life,’ the 
 ‘miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive Church,’ 
 the ‘pure and austere morals of the first Christians,’ 
 and ‘the union and discipline of the Christian repub- 
 lic’ But surely each of these causes points at once 
 and irresistibly to a cause beyond itself. If the zeal 
 of the first Christians was, as Gibbon will have it, a 
 fanatical habit of mind inherited from Judaism, how 
 came it not merely to survive, but to acquire a new 
 intensity, when the narrow nationalism which pro- 
 voked it in the Jew had been wholly renounced 4 
 What was it that made the first Christians so 
 zealous amid surrounding lassitude, so holy amid 
 encompassing pollution? Why should the doctrine 
 of a life to come have had a totally different effect 
 when proclaimed by the Apostles from any which 
 it had had when taught by Socrates or by Plato, 
 
 u §. Justin, Dialog. cum Tryph, 117, 121; 8S. Irenzeus, adv. Heer. 
 i.c. 10, ὃ 2; Tertull. adv. Judzos, vil; Apolog. 37 ; Orig. contr. 
 Celsum, i. 26, il. 79. 
 
 x No reader of Gibbon will be misled by the profane sarcasm 
 of the opening paragraphs of Decl. and Fall. ὁ, xv. Would that 
 Gibbon had really supposed himself to be describing only the 
 ‘secondary causes’ of the progress of Christianity ! 
 
IIT.) Recent theory of the success of our Lord. 205 
 
 or by other thinkers of the Pagan world? How 
 came it that a few peasants and tradesmen could 
 erect a world-wide organization, so elastic as to 
 adapt itself to the genius of races the most various, 
 so uniform as to be everywhere visibly conservative 
 of its unbroken identity? If the miracles of the 
 early Church, or any one of them, were genuine, 
 how can they avail to explain the natwralness of 
 the spread of Christianity? If they were all false, 
 how extraordinary is this spectacle of a moral tri- 
 umph, such as even Gibbon acknowledges that of 
 Christianity to be, brought about by means of a vast 
 and odious imposition! Gibbon’s argument would 
 have been more conclusive if the ‘causes’ to which 
 he points could themselves have been satisfactorily 
 accounted for in a natural way. As it was, the 
 historian of Lausanne did an indirect service to 
 Christendom, of that kind which our country has 
 sometimes owed to the threatening preparations of 
 a great military neighbour. Gibbon indicated very 
 clearly the direction which would be taken by mo- 
 dern assailants of the faith; but he is not singular 
 in having strengthened the cause which he sought 
 to ruin, by an indirect demonstration of the essen- 
 tially supernatural character of the spread of the 
 Gospel. 
 
 But you remind me that if the sceptical artillery 
 of Gibbon is out of date, yet the ‘higher criticism’ 
 of our day has a more delicate, and, as is presumed, 
 a more effective method of stating the naturalistic 
 explanation of the work of Jesus Christ in the 
 world. Jesus Christ, you say, appeared at a time 
 when the world itself forced victory upon Him, or 
 
206 Recent theory of the success of our Lord. [ Lxcr. 
 
 at least ensured for Him an easy triumph’. The 
 wants and aspirations of a worn-out civilization, 
 the dim but almost universal presentiment of a 
 coming Restorer of mankind, the completed organ- 
 ization of a great world-empire, combined to do 
 this. You urge that it is possible so to correspond 
 to the moral and intellectual drift of a particular 
 period, that nothing but a perverse stupidity can 
 escape a success which is all but inevitable. You 
 add that Jesus Christ ‘had this chance’ of appear- 
 ing at a critical moment in the history of humanity; 
 and that when the world was ripe for His religion, 
 He and His Apostles had just adroitness enough 
 not to be wholly unequal to the opportunity. The 
 report of His teaching and of His Person was car- 
 ried on the crest of one of those waves of strange 
 mystic enthusiasm, which so often during the age 
 of the Cesars rolled westward from Asia towards 
 the capital of the world; and though the Founder 
 of Christianity, it 1s true, had perished in the surf, 
 His work, you hold, in the nature of things, could 
 not but survive Him. 
 
 In this representation, my brethren, there is a 
 partial truth which I proceed to recognise. It is 
 true that the world was weary and expectant; it 
 is true that the political fabric of the great empire 
 
 y Renan, Les Apdtres, pp. 302, 303. M. Renan is of opinion that 
 “la conversion du monde aux idées Juives (!) et chrétiennes etait 
 inévitable ;” his only astonishment is that ‘cette conversion se 
 soit fait si lentement et si tard.” On the other hand the new 
 faith is said to have made “de proche en proche d’étonnantes 
 progrés” (Ibid. p. 215); and, with reference to Antioch, “on 
 sétonne des progrés accomplis en si peu de temps.” Ibid. p. 236. 
 
1111 No adequate explanation furnished by Judaism. — 20% 
 
 afforded to the Gospel the same facilities for self- 
 extension as those which it offered to the religion 
 of Osiris or to the fable of Apollonius Tyanzeus. 
 But those favourable circumstances are only what 
 we should look for at the hands of a Divine Provi- 
 dence, when the true religion was to be introduced 
 into the world; and they are altogether unequal to 
 account for the success of Christianity. You say 
 that Christianity corresponded to the dominant moral 
 and mental tendencies’ of the time so perfectly, 
 that those tendencies secured its triumph. But is 
 this accurate? Christianity was cradled in Juda- 
 ism; but was the later Judaism so entirely in har- 
 mony with the temper and aim of Christianity? Was 
 the age of the Zealots, of Judas the Gaulonite, of 
 Theudas, likely to welcome the spiritual empire of 
 such a teacher as our Lord? Were the moral dis- 
 positions of the Jews, their longings for a political 
 Messiah, their fierce legalism, their passionate jea- 
 lousy for the prerogatives of their race, calculated 
 —I do not say to further the triumph of the 
 Church, but—to enter even distantly into her dis- 
 tinctive spirit and doctrines? Did not the Syna- 
 gogue persecute Jesus to death, when it had once 
 discerned the real character of His teaching? Per- 
 haps you suggest that the favourable dispositions in 
 question which made the success of Christianity 
 practically mevitable were to be found among the 
 Hellenistic Jews*. The Hellenistic Jews were less 
 cramped by national prejudices, less strictly obser- 
 vant of the Mosaic ceremonies, more willing to wel- 
 come Gentile proselytes than was the case with the 
 
 2 Renan, Les Apétres, 6. 19, pp. 366, sqq. a Tbid. p. 113. 
 
208 No adequate explanation furnished by Judaism.  {Lxcr. 
 
 Jews of Palestine. Be it so. But the Hellenistic 
 Jews were just as opposed as the Jews of Palestine 
 to the capital truths of Christianity. A crucified 
 Messiah, for instance, was not a more welcome doc- 
 trine in the synagogues of Corinth or of Thessalo- 
 nica than in those of Jerusalem. Never was Juda- 
 ism broader, more elastic, more sympathetic with 
 external thought, more disposed to make concessions 
 than in Philo Judzeus, the most representative of 
 Hellenistic Jews. Yet Philo insists as stoutly as 
 any Palestinian Rabbi upon the perpetuity of the 
 law of Moses. As long, he says, as the human race 
 shall endure, men shall carry their offerings to the 
 temple of Jerusalem®. Indeed in the first age of 
 Christianity the Jews, both Palestinian and Helle- 
 nistic, illustrate, unintentionally of course, but very 
 remarkably, the supernatural law of the expansion 
 of the Church. They persecute Christ in His mem- 
 bers, and yet they submit to Him; they are fore- 
 most in enriching the Church with converts, after 
 enriching her with martyrs. Wherever the preachers 
 of the Gospel appear, it is the Jews who are 
 their fiercest persecutors®; the Jews rouse against 
 them the passions of the Pagan mob, or appeal to 
 the prejudice of the Pagan magistrate’. Yet the 
 
 Ὁ De Monarchia, lib. ii. § 3, ii. 224: ἐφ᾽ ὅσον yap τὸ ἀνθρώπων 
 γένος διαμενεῖ, det καὶ ai πρόσοδοι τοῦ ἱεροῦ φυλαχθήσονται συνδιαινωνίζουσαι 
 παντὶ τῷ κόσμῳ. 
 
 ¢ How far St. Paul thought that Judaism contributed to the 
 triumph of the Church might appear from 1 Thess. ii. 15, 16. Com- 
 pare Acts xiii. 50; xiv. 5,19; XVil. 5,13; XVill. 12; XIx.9; XXIl. 
 21, 22. 
 
 ἃ Renan, Les Apdtres, p. 143: “Ce qu’il importe, en tout cas, de 
 remarquer, c’est qu’a l’époque oi nous sommes, les persécuteurs 
 
111.1 No adequate explanation furnished by Judaism. 209 
 
 synagogue is the mission-station from which the 
 Church’s action originally radiates; the synagogue 
 as a rule yields their first spiritual conquests to 
 the soldiers of the cross. In the Acts of the 
 Apostles we remark on the one hand the hatred 
 and opposition with which the Jew met the ad- 
 vancing Gospel, on the other the signal and rapid 
 conquests of the Gospel among the ranks of the 
 Jewish population’. The former fact determines 
 the true significance of the latter. Men do not per- 
 secute systems which answer to their real sympa- 
 thies; St. Paul was not a Christian at heart, and 
 without intending it, before his conversion. The 
 Church triumphed in spite of the dominant ten- 
 dencies and the fierce opposition of Judaism, both 
 in Palestine and elsewhere ; she triumphed by the 
 force of her inherent and Divine vitality. The pro- 
 cess whereby the Gospel won its way among the 
 Jewish people was typified in St. Paul’s experience ; 
 the passage from the traditions of the synagogue to 
 the faith of Pentecost cost nothing less than a vio- 
 lent moral and intellectual wrench, such as could 
 be achieved only by a supernatural force interrupt- 
 ing the old stream of thought and feeling and in- 
 troducing a new one. 
 
 du Christianisme ne sont pas les Romains; ce sont les Juifs 
 orthodoxes. . . C’etait Rome, ainsi que nous l’ayons deja plusieurs 
 fois remarqué, qui empéchait le Judaisme de se livrer pleinement 
 ‘ses instincts d’intolérance, et d’étouffer les développements Jibres 
 qui se produisaient dans son sein. Toute diminution de l’autorité 
 Juive était un bienfait pour la secte naissante.” (p. 251.) 
 
 e Acts vi.7. This one text disposes of M. Renan’s assertion as 
 to the growth of the Church, that “les orthodoxes rigides s’y 
 prétaient peu.” Apdtres, p. 113. 
 
 P 
 
410 Does Payanism furnish any adequate explanation | Lxct. 
 
 But if success was not forced upon the Christian 
 Church by the dispositions and attitude of Judaism ; 
 can it be said that Paganism supplies us with the 
 true explanation of the triumph of the Gospel ? 
 What then were those intellectual currents, those 
 moral ideals, those movements, those aspirations, 
 discoverable in the Paganism of the age of the 
 Ceesars, which were in such effective alliance with 
 the doctrine and morality of the New Testament ? 
 What was the general temper of Pagan intellect, 
 but a self-asserting, cynical scepticism? Pagan in- 
 tellect speaks in orators like Cicerof, publicly deri- 
 ding the idea of rewards and punishments hereafter, 
 and denying the intervention of a higher Power 
 in the affairs of men’; or it speaks in statesmen 
 hke Ceesar, proclaiming from his place in the Roman 
 senate that the soul does not exist after death"; 
 or in historians like Tacitus, repudiating with self- 
 confident disdain the idea of a providential govern- 
 ment of the worldi; or in poets like Horace, insulting 
 the most cherished religious convictions of the time 
 with the versatile ridicule’ of an accomplished pro- 
 fligate; or in men of science like Strabo! and Pliny™, 
 
 f Cicero however, in his speculative moods, was the “only Ro- 
 man who undertook to rest a real individual existence of souls 
 after death on philosophical grounds.” Dollinger, Heidenthum und 
 Judenthum, bk. viii. ὃ 3. 
 
 & Cie. pro Cluentio, c. 61; De Nat. Deor. iii. 32; De Off. iii. 28; 
 De Divin. ii. 17. 
 
 h Sallust. Catilin. 50-52. 
 
 i Tacitus, Ann. xvi. 33, vi. 22. Yet see Hist. i. 3, iv. 78. 
 
 k Hor. Sat. i. 5. 100, sq.; ef. Lucret. v. 83; vi. 57, 86. 
 
 1 Geogr. i. ὁ. 2; οὗ, Polyb. Hist. Gen. vi. 56. 
 
 m Plin. vii. 55. 
 
11: of the triumph of the Gospel ? Q11 
 
 maintaining that religion is a governmental device 
 for keeping the passions of the lower orders under 
 restraint, and that the soul’s immortality is a mere 
 dream or nursery-story. “Unbelief in the official 
 religion,” says M. Renan, “was prevalent throughout 
 the educated class. The very statesmen who most 
 ostentatiously upheld the public worship of the 
 empire made very amusing epigrams at its ex- 
 pense.” What was the moral and social condition of 
 Roman Paganism? Modern unbelief complains that 
 St. Paul has characterized the social morality of 
 the Pagan world in terms of undue severity®. Yet 
 St. Paul does not exceed the specific charges of 
 Tacitus, of Suetonius, of Juvenal, of Seneca, that is 
 to say, of writers who had no interest in misrepre- 
 senting or exaggerating the facts which they de- 
 ploreP. When Tacitus summarizes the moral condi- 
 tion of Paganism by his exhaustive phrase ‘ corrwm- 
 pere et corrumpt, he more than covers the sorrow- 
 ing invective of the Apostle. Indeed our modern 
 historian of the Apostolic age, who sees nothing 
 
 ἢ Renan, Les Apdtres, 340, 341. 
 
 © Ibid. p. 309, note r: “L’opinion beaucoup trop sévére de 
 Saint Paul (Rom, i. 24 et suiv.) s’explique de la méme maniére. 
 Saint Paul ne connaissait pas la haute société Romaine. Ce 
 sont 1a, d’ailleurs, de ces invectives comme en font les _prédi- 
 eateurs, et qu'il ne faut jamais prendre ἃ la lettre.” Do the 
 Satires of Juvenal lead us to suppose that if St. Paul had ‘known 
 the high society of Rome, he would have used a less emphatic 
 language? And is it a rule with preachers, whether Apostolic 
 or post-Apostolic, not to mean what they say? 
 
 P Juvenal, Sat. i. 87; 11. 37; 111. 62; vi. 293. Seneca, Epist. xevii.; 
 De Benefic. i. 9; iii. 16. Tacitus, Hist. i. 2; Germ. xix. See other 
 quotations in Wetstein, Nov. Test. in loc. 
 
 iP 2 
 
212 Moral characteristics of the Pagan world, [ Lecr. 
 
 miraculous in the success of the Gospel4, has him- 
 self characterized the moral condition of the Pagan 
 world in terms yet more severe than those of the 
 Apostle whom he condemns. According to M. Renan, 
 Rome under the Czesars ‘became a school of immo- 
 rality and cruelty";’ it was a ‘veritable hell8;’ “the 
 reproach that Rome had poisoned the world at 
 large, the Apocalyptic comparison of Pagan Rome 
 to a prostitute who had poured forth upon the 
 earth the wine of her immoralities, was in many 
 respects a just comparisont.” Nor was the moral 
 degradation of Paganism confined to the capital of 
 the great empire. The provinces were scarcely purer 
 than the ‘capital. Each province poured its separate 
 contribution of moral filth into the great store 
 which the increasing centralization of the empire had 
 
 a Renan, Les Apétres, p. 366: “Tel etait le monde que les 
 missionaires chrétiens entreprirent de convertir. On doit voir 
 maintenant, ce me semble, qu’une telle entreprise ne fut pas une 
 folie, et que sa réussite ne fut pas un miracle.” 
 
 r ΤΡ. p. 305. 
 
 8 Ibid. p. 310: “Lresprit de vertige et de cruauté débordait 
 alors, et faisait de Rome un véritable enfer.” P. 317: “A Rome, 
 il est vrai, tous les vices s’affichaient avee un cynisme révol- 
 tant; les spectacles surtout avaient introduit une aftreuse cor- 
 ruption.” 
 
 t Ibid. p. 325: “Le reproche d’avoir empoisonné la terre, l’as- 
 similation de Rome & une courtisane qui a versé au monde le vin 
 de son immoralité, était juste ἃ beaucoup d’égards.” Yet M. Renan 
 is so little careful about contradicting himself that he elsewhere 
 says, “Le monde, ἃ l’époque Romaine, accomplit un progrés de 
 moralité et subit une décadence scientifique.” (p. 326.) The nature 
 of this progress seems to have been somewhat Epicurean: “ Le 
 monde s’assouplissait, perdait sa rigeur antique, acquérait de la 
 mollesse, et de la sensibilité. (p. 318.) 
 
Ill.) . contrasted with the ethics of Christianity. 213 
 
 accumulated in the main reservoir at Rome; each 
 province in turn received its share of this recipro- 
 cated corruption". In particular, the East, that very 
 portion of the empire in which the Gospel took its 
 rise, was the main source of the common infection’. 
 Antioch was itself a centre of moral putrefaction™. 
 Egypt was one of the most corrupt countries in the 
 world ; and the same account might be given gene- 
 rally of those districts and cities of the empire in 
 which the Church first made her way, of Greece, 
 and Asia Minor, and Roman Africa, of Ephesus and 
 Corinth, of Alexandria and Carthage. “The middle 
 of the first century of our era was, in point of fact, 
 one of the worst epochs of ancient history *.” 
 
 But was such an epoch, such a world, such a 
 ‘civilization’ as this calculated to ‘force success’ on 
 an institution like ‘the kingdom of heaven,’ or on a 
 doctrine such as that of the New Testament? If 
 
 ἃ Les Apétres, p. 326: “La province valait mieux que Rome, 
 ou plutdt les éléments impurs qui de toutes parts s’amassaient 
 ἃ Rome, comme en un égout, avaient formé la wn foyer dinfec- 
 tion.” 
 
 Υ Ibid. p. 305: “Le mal venait surtout de lOrient, de ces 
 flatteurs de bas étage, de ces hommes infames que |’Egypte et la 
 Syrie envoyaient ἃ Rome.” P. 306: “Le plus choquantes igno- 
 minies de l’empire, telles que l’apothéose de l’empereur, sa divi- 
 nisation de son vivant, venaient de l’Orient, et surtout de l’Egypte, 
 qui était alors un des pays les plus corrumpus de l’univers.” 
 
 w ΤΟΙ, p. 218: “La légéreté Syrienne, le charlatanisme Baby- 
 lonien, toutes les impostures de l’Asie, se confondant ἃ cette 
 limite des deux mondes avaient fait d’Antioche la capitale du men- 
 songe, la sentine de toutes les infamies.” P. 219: “ L’avilissement 
 des Ames y était effroyable. Le propre de ces foyers de putréfaction 
 morale, c'est d’amener toutes les races au méme niveau.” 
 
 x Thid. p. 343. 
 
914 The spirit of Paganism and Jesus Crucified. (Lect. 
 
 indeed Christianity had been an ‘idyll’ or ‘pas- 
 toral? the product of the simple peasant life and of 
 the bright sky of Galilee, there is no reason why 
 it should not have attracted a momentary interest 
 in literary circles, although it certamly would have 
 escaped from any more serious trial at the hands of 
 statesmen than an unaffected indifference to its popu- 
 larity. But what was the Gospel as it met the 
 eye and fell upon the ear of Roman Paganism ? 
 “We preach,” said the Apostle, “Christ Crucified, 
 to the Jews an offence, and to the Greeks a folly.” 
 “T determined not to know anything among you 
 Corinthians, save Jesus Christ, and Him Crucified.” 
 Here was a truth linked imextricably with other 
 truths equally ‘foolish’ in the apprehension of Pa- 
 gan intellect, equally condemnatory of the moral de- 
 gradation of Pagan life. In the preaching of the 
 Apostles, Jesus Crucified confronted the intellectual 
 cynicism, the social selfishness, and the sensualist 
 degradation of the Pagan world. To its intellect 
 He - said, “I am the Truth@;” He bade its proud 
 self-confidence bow before His intellectual absolutism. 
 To its selfish, heartless society, careful only for 
 bread and amusement, careless of the agonies which 
 gave interest to the amphitheatre, He said, “A new 
 commandment give I unto you, that ye love one 
 another, as I have loved you.” Disinterested love 
 of slaves, of barbarians, of political enemies, of social 
 
 y 1 Cor.i. 23: ἡμεῖς δὲ κηρύσσομεν Χριστὸν ἐσταυρουμένον, ᾿Ιουδαίοις 
 μὲν σκάνδαλον, Ἕλλησι δὲ μωρίαν. 
 
 % Thid. il. 2: οὐ γὰρ ἔκρινα τοῦ εἰδέναι τι ἐν ὑμῖν, εἰ μὴ ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστὸν, 
 καὶ τοῦτον ἐσταυρωμένον. 
 
 4 $t. John xiv. 6. Ὁ Ibid. xiii. 34. 
 
Il.) The real wants of Paganism satisfied by Christ. 91 
 
 rivals, love of man as man, was to be a test of true 
 discipleship. And to the sensuality, so gross, and 
 yet often so polished, which was the very law of 
 individual Pagan life, He said, “If any man will 
 come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up 
 his cross daily, and follow Me¢;” “If thine eye offend 
 thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; it is 
 better for thee that one of thy members should 
 perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast 
 into hell4.” Sensuality was to be dethroned, not by 
 the negative action of a prudential abstinence from 
 indulgence, but by the strong positive force of self- 
 mortification. Was such a doctrine likely, of its own 
 weight and without any assistance from on high, to 
 win its way to acceptance®? Is it not certain that 
 debased souls are so far from aspiring naturally 
 towards that which is holy, elevated and pure, that 
 they feel towards it only hatred and repulsion ? 
 Certainly Rome was unsatisfied with her old national 
 idolatries ; but if she turned her eyes towards the 
 East, it was to welcome not the religion of Jesus, 
 but the impure rites of Isis and Serapis, of Mithra 
 and Astarte. The Gospel came to her unbidden, in 
 obedience to no assignable attraction in Roman so- 
 ciety, but simply in virtue of its own expansive, 
 world-embracing force. Certainly Christianity an- 
 swered to the moral wants of the world, as it really 
 answers at this moment to the true moral wants of 
 
 ο St. Matt. xvi. 24; St. Mark viii. 34. 
 
 d St. Matt. xviii.g; St. Mark ix. 47. 
 
 ¢ M. Renan himself observes that “la degradation des Ames en 
 Egypte y rendait rares, d’ailleurs, les aspirations qui ouvrirent 
 partout (!) au christianisme de si faciles accés.” Les Apdétres, 
 Ῥ. 284. 
 
216 Complex opposition of Pagan society to the Church. [1 ποτ. 
 
 all human beings, however unbelieving or immoral 
 they may be. The question is, whether the world 
 so clearly recognised its real wants as forthwith to 
 embrace Christianity. The Physician was there ; but 
 did the patient know the nature of his own malady 
 sufficiently well not to view the presence of the 
 Physician as an intrusion? Was it likely that 
 the old Roman society, with its intellectual pride, 
 its social heartlessness, and its unbounded personal 
 self-indulgence, should be enthusiastically in love 
 with a religion which made intellectual submission, 
 social unselfishness, and personal mortification, its 
 very fundamental laws? The history of the three 
 first centuries is the answer to that question. The 
 kingdom of God was no sooner set up in the 
 Pagan world than it found itself surrounded by all 
 that combines to make the progress of a doctrine 
 or of a system impossible. The thinkers were op- 
 posed to it: they denounced it as a dream of 
 follyf. The habits and passions of the people were 
 opposed to it: it threatened somewhat rudely to 
 interfere with them. There were venerable insti- 
 tutions, coming down from a distant antiquity, and 
 gathering around them the stable and thoughtful 
 elements of society: these were opposed to it, as 
 to an audacious innovation, as well as from an in- 
 stinctive perception that it might modify or destroy 
 themselves. National feeling was opposed to it: it 
 flattered no national selflove; it was to be the home 
 
 f Tac. Ann. xv. 44: “Repressa in presens exitiabilis superstitio 
 rursus erumpebat.” Suetonius, Claudius, xxy.; Nero, xvi.: ‘“ Chris- 
 tiani, genus hominum superstitionis nove ac malefice.” Celsus 
 apud Origenem, 111. 17. Celsus compared the Church’s worship 
 of our Lord with the Egyptian worship of cats, crocodiles, &e. 
 
Figs] The Church triumphs by persistent suffering. Q17 
 
 of human kind; it was to embrace the world ; and 
 as yet the nation was the highest conception of as- 
 sociated life to which humanity had reached. Nay, 
 religious feeling itself was opposed to it; for reli- 
 gious feeling had been enslaved by ancient false- 
 hoods. There were worships, priesthoods, beliefs, in 
 long-established possession; and they were not likely 
 to yield without a struggle. Picture to yourselves 
 the days when the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter 
 was still thronged with worshippers, while the Eu- 
 charist was secretly celebrated in the depths of the 
 Catacombs. It was a time when all the adminis- 
 trative power of the empire was steadily concen- 
 trated upon the extinction of the Name of Christ. 
 What were then to a human eye the future pros- 
 pects of the kingdom of God? It had no allies, like 
 the sword of the Mahommedan, or like the congenial 
 mysticism which welcomed the Buddhist, or like the 
 politicians who strove to uphold the falling Paganism 
 of Rome. It found no countenance in the Stoic mo- 
 ralists; they were indeed its fiercest enemies. If it 
 ever was identified by Pagan opinion, as M. Renan 
 maintains, with the eetus dliciti, with the collegia 
 dlicita, with the burial-clubs of the imperial epoch ; 
 this would only have rendered it more than ever an 
 object of suspicion to the governments. Between 
 the new doctrine and the old Paganism there was 
 a deadly feud ; and the question for the Church was 
 simply whether she could suffer as long as her ene- 
 mies could persecute. Before she could triumph in 
 the western world, the soil of the empire had to be 
 reddened by Christian blood. Ignatius of Antioch 
 
 & Les Apétres, pp. 355, 361, 362. 
 
218 Our Lord Creator of the moral force of Christendom. { Lxcr. 
 
 given to the lions at Rome; Polycarp of Smyrna 
 condemned to the flamesi; the martyrs of Lyons 
 and Vienne, and among them the tender Blandinaj, 
 extorting by her fortitude the admiration of the 
 very heathen; Perpetua and Felicitas at Car- 
 thage* conquering a mother’s love by a stronger 
 love for Christ ;—these are but samples of the ‘no- 
 ble army’ which vanquished heathendom. “ Plures 
 efficimur,” cries Tertullian, spokesman of the Church 
 in her exultation and in her agony, “quoties meti- 
 mur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum!,” 
 To the heathen it seems a senseless obstinacy ; but 
 with a presentiment of the coming victory, the 
 Apologist exclaims, “Illa ipsa obstinatio quam ex- 
 probatis, magistra est™,” 
 
 Who was He That had thus created a moral force 
 which could embrace three centuries of a protracted 
 agony, in the confidence that victory would come 
 at last"? What was it in Him, so fascinating and 
 sustaining to the thought of His followers, that for 
 Him men and women of all ages and ranks in life 
 gladly sacrificed all that is dearest to man’s heart 
 and nature? Was it only His miracles? But the 
 evidential force of miracle may be easily evaded.. One 
 main object of St. John’s Gospel appears to have been 
 the furnishing an authoritative explanation of the 
 
 h A.D, 107. i A.D. 169. j alp. 177. 
 
 k A.D. 202. 1 Apol. 1. m bid. 
 
 Ὦ M. Renan observes scornfully, “Il n’y a pas eu beaucoup des 
 martyrs trés intelligents.” Apdtres, p. 382. Possibly not, if a 
 man’s intelligence is to be measured by his amount of unbelief, 
 Yet the French Institute, if we may judge from some of the dis- 
 tinguished names which it has honoured, does not seem to be of 
 that opinion. 
 
111.} His Divinity explains the moral force of Christendom. 219 i 
 
 moral causes which actually prevented the Jews from 
 recognising the significance of our Lord’s miracles. 
 Was it simply His character? But to understand 
 a perfect character you must be attracted to it, and 
 have some strong sympathies with it. And the 
 language of human nature in the presence of su- 
 perior goodness is often that of the Epicurean in 
 the Book of Wisdom: “Let us lie in wait for the 
 righteous, because he is not for our turn, and he is 
 clean contrary to our doings. .. . He was made to 
 reprove our thoughts; he is grievous unto us even 
 to behold; for his life is not like other men’s, his 
 ways are of another fashion®.” Was it His teach- 
 ing? ‘True, never man spake like this Man; but 
 taken alone, the highest and holiest teaching might 
 have seemed to humanity to be no more than “the 
 sound of one that had a pleasant voice, and could 
 play well upon an instrument.” His Death? Cer- 
 tainly He predicted that in dying He would draw 
 all men unto Him; but Who was He That could 
 thus turn the instrument of His humiliation into 
 the certificate of His glory? His Resurrection? His 
 Resurrection indeed was emphatically to be the re- 
 versal of a false impression, but it was to witness 
 to a truth beyond itself; our Lord had expressly 
 predicted that He would rise from the grave, and 
 that His Resurrection would attest His claims P. 
 None of these things taken separately will account 
 for the power of Christ in history. In the conver- 
 gence of all these; of these majestic miracles; of 
 that Character, which commands at once our love and 
 our reverence; of that teaching, so startling, so awful, 
 
 © Wisd. ii. 12, 15. P St. Matt. xii. 39; Rom. i. 4. 
 
220 Christendom could not have been created [ Lect. 
 
 so searching, so tender; of that Death of agony, 
 encircled with such a halo of moral glory; of that 
 deserted tomb, and the majestic splendour of the 
 Risen One ;—a deeper truth, underlying all, justify- 
 ing all, explaiming all, is seen to reveal itself. We 
 discern, as did the first Christians, beneath and be- 
 yond all that meets the eye of sense and the eye of 
 conscience, the Eternal Person of our Lord Himself. 
 It is not the miracles, but the Worker; not the 
 character, but its living Subject; not the teach- 
 ing, but the Master; not even the Death or the 
 Resurrection, but He Who died and rose, upon 
 Whom Christian thought, Christian love, Christian 
 resolution ultimately rests. The truth which really 
 and only accounts for the establishment in this our 
 human world of such a religion as Christianity, and 
 of such an institution as the Church, is the truth that 
 Jesus Christ was believed to be more than Man, the 
 truth that Jesus Christ is what men believed Him 
 to be, the truth that Jesus Christ is God. 
 
 It is here that we are enabled duly to estimate 
 one broad feature of the criticism of Strauss. Both in 
 his earler and scientific work, published some thirty 
 years ago for scholars, and in his more recent pub- 
 lication addressed to the German people, that writer 
 strips Jesus Christ our Lord of all that makes Him 
 superhuman. Strauss eliminates from the Gospel 
 most of Christ’s discourses, all of His miracles, His 
 supernatural Birth, and His Resurrection from the 
 grave. The so-termed “historical” residuum might 
 easily be compressed within the limits of a newspaper 
 paragraph, and it retains nothing that can rouse 
 a moderate measure, I do not say of enthusiasm, but 
 
LE} by the Christ of Strauss. 221 
 
 even of interest. And yet few minds on laying down 
 either of these unhappy books can escape the rising 
 question: “Is this hero of a baseless legend, this 
 impotent, fallible, erring Christ of the ‘higher cri- 
 ticism, in very deed the Founder of the Christian 
 Church?” The difficulty of accounting for the phe- 
 nomenon presented by the Church, on the suppo- 
 sition that the ‘historical’ account of its Founder is 
 that of Dr. Strauss, does not present itself forcibly 
 to an Hegelian who loses himself in ὦ priori theories 
 as to the necessary development of a thought, and 
 is thus entranced in a sublime forgetfulness of the 
 actual facts and laws which affect humanity. But 
 here M. Renan is unwittingly a witness against the 
 writer to whom he is mainly indebted for his own 
 critical apparatus. The finer political instinct, the 
 truer sense of the necessary proportions between 
 causes and effects in human history, which might be 
 expected to characterize a thoughtful Frenchman, 
 will account for those points in which M. Renan has 
 departed from the path traced by his master. He 
 feels that there is an impassable chasm between the 
 life of Jesus according to Strauss, and the actual 
 history of Christendom. He is keenly alive to the 
 absurdity of supposing that such an impoverished 
 Christ as the Christ of Strauss, can have created 
 Christendom. Although therefore, as we have seen, he 
 subsequently4 endeavours to account for the growth 
 of the Church in a naturalistic way, his native sense 
 of the fitting proportions of things impels him to 
 retouch the picture traced by the German, and to 
 ascribe to Jesus of Nazareth, if not the reality, yet 
 
 4 In his later work, Les Apétres. 
 
229 Opinion of Napoleon the First respecting [ Lecr. 
 
 some shadowy semblance of Divinity". Hence such 
 features of M. Renan’s work as his concessions in 
 respect of St. John’s Gospel. In making these con- 
 cessions, he is for the moment impressed with the 
 political absurdity of ascribing Christendom to the 
 thought and will of a merely human Christ ; and 
 although his unbelief is too radical to allow him 
 to do adequate justice to the consideration, his in- 
 direct admission of its force has a value, which 
 Christian believers will not mistake. 
 
 But a greater than M. Renan has expressed the 
 common-sense of mankind in respect of the Agency 
 which alone can account for the existence of the 
 Christian Church. If the first Napoleon was not 
 a theologian, he was at least a man whom vast 
 experience had taught what kind of forces can 
 really produce a lasting effect upon mankind, and 
 under what conditions they may be expected to do 
 so. A time came when the good Providence of God 
 had chained down that great but ambitious spirit to 
 the rock of St. Helena; and the conqueror of civi- 
 lized Europe had leisure to gather up the results 
 of his unparalleled life, and to ascertain with an 
 accuracy, not often attainable by monarchs or con- 
 querors, his own true place in history. When con- 
 versing, as was his habit, about the great men of 
 the ancient world, and comparing himself with them, 
 he turned, it is said, to Count Montholon with the 
 enquiry, “Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was ?” 
 The question was declined, and Napoleon proceeded, 
 “Well, then, I will tell you. Alexander, Ceesar, 
 
 Charlemagne, and I myself have founded great 
 
 t Vie de Jésus, pp. 250, 426, 457. 
 
ΠΙ|.1Ὶ {ἦ6 witness of our Lord’s work to His Divinity. — 223 
 
 empires; but upon what did these creations of our 
 genius depend? Upon force. Jesus Alone founded 
 His empire upon love, and to this very day millions 
 would die for Him..... I thmk I understand 
 something of human nature; and I tell you, all 
 these were men, and I am a man: none else is like 
 Him; Jesus Christ was more than man... I have 
 inspired multitudes with an enthusiastic devotion 
 such that they would have died for me, .. but to do 
 this it was necessary that I should be visibly present 
 with the electric influence of my looks, of my 
 words, of my voice; when I saw men and spoke 
 to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in 
 their hearts. . . . Christ Alone has succeeded in so 
 raising the mind of man towards the Unseen, that 
 it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and 
 space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years 
 Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all 
 others difficult to satisfy; He asks for that which 
 a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands 
 of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride 
 of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks 
 for the human heart; He will have it entirely to 
 Himself. He demands it unconditionally ; and forth- 
 with His demand is granted. Wonderful! In de- 
 fiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all 
 its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to 
 the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe 
 in Him, experience that remarkable supernatural 
 love towards Him. This phzenomenon is wnaccount- 
 able; it is altogether beyond the scope of man’s 
 creative powers, Time, the great destroyer, is power- 
 less to extinguish this sacred flame; time can 
 
224 The work of Christ unrivalled. [Lrcr. 
 
 neither exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its 
 range. This is it which strikes me most; I have 
 often thought of it. This it is which proves to me 
 quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christs.” 
 Here surely is the common-sense of humanity. The 
 victory of Christianity is itself the great standing 
 miracle. Its significance is enhanced if the miracles 
 of the New Testament are rejected*, and if the 
 Apostles are held to have received no illumination 
 from on high", Let those in our day who believe 
 
 8 This is freely translated from the passages quoted by Luthardt, 
 Apologetische Vortrige, pp. 234, 293; and Bersier, Serm. p. 334. 
 Ihave not been able to meet with General Bertrand’s Memoires 
 de Ste. Heléne, from which these writers quote. In the preface of 
 Bertrand’s Campagnes d’Egypte et de Syrie, to which the title of 
 his other work is frequently given, there is an allusion to some 
 reported conversations of Napoleon on the questions of the ex- 
 istence of God and of our Lord’s Divinity, which, the General 
 says, never took place at all. The Emperor’s real conversations 
 on the latter topic have been collected into a small brochure 
 (Napoléon, Meyrueis, Paris 1859), attributed to M. le Pasteur 
 Bersier, and published by the Religious Tract Society. Comp. 
 Chauvelot, Divinité du Christ, pp. 11-13, Paris 1863, where the 
 Emperor’s words are reported with some variations. 
 
 t “Se il mondo si rivolse al cristianesmo 
 Diss’ io, senza miracoli, quest’ uno 
 E tal, che gli altri non sono il centesmo ; 
 Che tu entrasti povero e digiuno 
 In campo, a seminar la buona pianta, 
 Che fu gia vite, ed ora ἃ fatta pruno.” 
 Dante, Paradiso, xxiv. 106-111. 
 
 u “Apres la mort de Jésus Christ, douze pauvres pécheurs et 
 artisans entreprirent d’instruire et de convertir le monde... . le 
 succés fut prodigieux.... Tous les chrétiens couraient au mar- 
 tyre, tous les peuples couraient au baptéme; Vhistoire de ces 
 premiers temps etait wn prodige continuel.” Rousseau, Réponse 
 au Roi de Pologne, Paris 1829, Discours, pp. 64, 65. 
 
ETT The work of Christ beyond human rivalry. 225 
 
 seriously that the work of Christ may be accounted 
 for on natural and human grounds, say who among 
 themselves will endeavour to rival it. Who of our 
 contemporaries will dare to predict that eighteen 
 hundred years hence his ideas, his maxims, his 
 institutions, however noble or philanthropic they 
 may be, will still survive in their completeness 
 and in their vigour? Who can dream that his own 
 name and history will be the rallying-pomt of a 
 world-wide interest and enthusiasm in some distant 
 age? Who can suppose that beyond the political, 
 the social, the intellectual revolutions which lie in 
 the future of humanity, he will himself still sur- 
 vive in the memory of men, not as a trivial fact 
 of archeology, but as a moral power, as the object 
 of a devoted and passionate affection? What man 
 indeed that still retains, I will not say the faith 
 of a Christian, but the modesty of a man of sense, 
 must not feel that there is a literally imfinite 
 interval between himself and That Majestic One 
 Who, in the words of Jean Paul Richter, “being 
 the Holiest among the mighty, and the Mightiest 
 among the holy, has lifted with His pierced Hand 
 empires off their hinges, has turned the stream of 
 centuries out of its channel, and still governs the 
 ages * ?” 
 
 The work of Jesus Christ is not merely a fact 
 of history, it is a fact, blessed be God! of indi- 
 vidual experience. If the world is one scene of His 
 conquests, the soul of each true Christian is another. 
 The soul is the microcosm within which in all its 
 
 x Jean Paul: “ Ueber den Gott in der Geschichte und im Leben.” 
 Siimmtl. Werke, xxxiii. 6; Stirm. p. 194. 
 Q 
 
226 The redeemed soul confesses a Divine Saviour. 
 
 strength the kingdom of God is set up. Many of you 
 know from a witness that you can trust Christ’s power 
 to restore to your inward life its original harmony. 
 You are conscious that He is the fertilizing and 
 elevating principle of your thought, the purifying 
 principle of your affections, the invigorating prin- 
 ciple of your wills. You need not to ask the ques- 
 tion “whence hath This Man this wisdom and these 
 mighty works?” Man, you are well assured, cannot 
 thus from age to age enlarge the realm of moral light, 
 and make all things new; man cannot thus endow 
 frail natures with determination, and rough natures 
 with tenderness, and sluggish natures with keen 
 energy, and restless natures with true and lasting 
 peace. These every-day tokens of Christ’s presence 
 in His kingdom, of themselves answer the question 
 of the text. If He Who could predict that by 
 dying in shame He would secure the fulfilment of 
 an extraordinary plan, and assure to Himself a 
 world-wide empire, can be none other than the 
 Lord of human history; so certainly the Friend, 
 the Teacher, the Master Who has fathomed and 
 controlled our deepest life of thought and passion, 
 is welcomed by the Christian soul as something 
 more than a student explormg its mysteries, or 
 than a philanthropic experimentalist alleviating its 
 sorrows. He is hailed, He is loved, He is wor- 
 shipped, as One Who possesses a knowledge and 
 a strength which human study and human skill 
 fail to compass; it is felt that He is so manifestly 
 the true Saviour of the soul, because He is none 
 other than the Beng Who made it. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 OUR LORD’S DIVINITY AS WITNESSED BY HIS 
 CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 The Jews answered Him, saying, For a good work we stone Thee 
 not; but for blasphemy ; and because that Thou, being a Man, 
 makest Thyself God.—S8v. Joun X. 32: 
 
 τ is common ithw. some modern writers to repre- 
 sent the questions at issue between the Faith and 
 its opponents with respect to the Person of our 
 Lord, as being substantially a question between the 
 historical spirit and the spirit of dogmatism. The 
 dogmatic temper is painted by them as a baseless 
 but still powerful superstition, closely pressed by 
 the critical enquiries and negative conclusions of 
 our day, but culpably shutting its eyes against the 
 advancing truth, the power of which nevertheless it 
 cannot but instinctively feel, and clinging with the 
 wrong-headed obstinacy of despair to the cherished 
 but already condemned formule of its time-honoured 
 and worn-out metaphysics. Opposed to it, we are 
 told, is the historical spirit, young, vigorous, fearless, 
 truthful, flushed with successes already achieved, as- 
 sured of successes yet to come. The historical spirit 
 Q 2 
 
228 The Christ of dogma and the Christ of history. (Ect. 
 
 is thus said to represent the cause of an enlightened 
 progress in conflict with a stupid and immoral con- 
 servatism. The historical spirit is described as the 
 love of sheer reality, as the longing for hard fact, 
 determined to make away with all ‘idols of the 
 den, however ancient, venerated, and influential, in 
 the sphere of theology. The historical spirit ac- 
 cordingly undertakes to disentangle the real Person 
 of Jesus from the metaphysical envelope with which 
 theology is said to have encased Him. The Christ 
 is to be rescued from that cloud-land of abstract 
 and fanciful speculation to which He is stated to 
 have been banished by the patristic and scholastic 
 divines; He is to be restored to Christendom in 
 manifest subjection to all the actual conditions and 
 laws of human history. Look, it is said, at that 
 figure of the Christ which you see traced in 
 mosaics in the apsis of a Byzantine church. That 
 Countenance upon which you gaze, with its rigid, 
 unalterable outline, with its calm, strong mien of 
 unassailable majesty ; that Form from which there 
 has been stripped all the historic circumstance of 
 life, all that belongs to the changes and chances of 
 our mortal condition; what is it but an artistic 
 equivalent and symbol of the Catholic dogma ? 
 Elevated thus to a world of unfading glory, and 
 throned in an imperturbable repose, the Byzantine 
 Christos Pantocrator must be viewed as the expres- 
 sion of an idea, rather than as the transcript of a 
 fact. A certain interest may be allowed to attach to 
 such a representation, from its illustrating a particular 
 stage in the development of religious thought. But 
 the historical spirit must create what it can consider 
 
ΙΝ.] The new Christ of history. 229 
 
 a really historical Christ, who will be to the Christ 
 of St. Athanasius and St. John what a Rembrandt 
 or a Rubens is to a Giotto or a Cimabue. If the 
 illustration be objected to, at any rate, my brethren, 
 the aim of the historical spirit is sufficiently plain. 
 The historical spirit proposes to fashion a Christ 
 who is to be zsthetically graceful and majestic, but 
 strictly natural and human. This Christ will be 
 emancipated from the bandages which ‘supernatu- 
 ralism has wrapped around the Prophet of Nazareth.’ 
 He will be divorced from any idea of incarnating 
 essential Godhead ; but, as we are assured, He will 
 still be something, aye more than the Christ of the 
 Creed has ever been yet, to Christendom. He will 
 be at once a living man, and the very ideal of hu- 
 manity ; at once a being who obeys the invincible 
 laws of nature, like ourselves, yet of moral propor- 
 tions so mighty and so unrivalled that his appear- 
 ance among men shall adequately account for the 
 phenomenon of an existing and still extending 
 Church. Accordingly by this representation it 15 
 designed to place us in a dilemma. ‘You must 
 ἜἜΒΗ͂Ν men seem to say, ‘between history and 
 dogma ; you must choose between history which can 
 be verified, and dogma which belongs to the sphere 
 of inaccessible abstractions. You must make your 
 choice ; since the Catholic dogma of Christ’s Divinity 
 is pronounced by the higher criticism to be irrecon- 
 cileable with the historical reality of the Life of 
 Jesus. And in answer to that challenge, let us 
 proceed, my brethren, to choose history, and as 
 a result of that choice, if it may be, to maintain 
 that the Christ of history is either the God Whom 
 
ς. 
 
 230 The Catholic dogma really historical [Lecr. 
 
 we believers adore, or that He is far below the 
 moral level of the undivinized man, whom rational- 
 ism still at least professes generally to respect in 
 the pages of its mutilated Gospel. 
 
 For let us observe that the Catholic doctrine has 
 thus much in its favour: it takes for granted the 
 only existing history of Jesus Christ. It is not 
 compelled to mutilate it, to enfeeble it, to do it 
 critical violence. It is in harmony with it, it is 
 at home, as no other doctrine is at home, in the 
 pages of the Evangelists. 
 
 Consider, first of all, the general impression re- 
 specting our Lord’s Person which arises upon a sur- 
 vey of the miracles ascribed to Him in all the 
 extant accounts of His Life. To a _ thoughtful 
 
 ‘Humanitarian, who believes in the preeternatural 
 
 elements of the Gospel history, our Lord’s miracles, 
 taken as a whole, must needs present an embar- 
 rassing difficulty. The miraculous cures indeed 
 which more particularly in the earlier days of 
 Christ’s ministry drew the eyes of men towards Him, 
 as to the Healer of sickness and of pain, have 
 been ‘explained, however unsatisfactorily, by those 
 methods which found such favour with the older 
 rationalists. A Teacher, it used to be argued, of 
 such character as Jesus Christ, must have created 
 a profound impression; He must have inspired an 
 entire confidence ; and the cures which He seemed 
 to work were the immediate results of the impres- 
 sion which He created, they were the natural conse- 
 quences of the confidence which He inspired. Now, 
 apart from other and many obvious objections to 
 this theory, let us observe that it is altogether 
 
IV.] as harmonizing with our Lord’s ‘miracles of power? 231 
 
 inapplicable to the ‘miracles of power,’ as they are ’ 
 frequently termed, which are recorded by the three 
 first Evangelists, no less than by St. John. “Miracles 
 of this class,” says a freethinking writer, “are not 
 cures which could have been effected by the influ- 
 ence of a striking sanctity acting upon a simple 
 faith. They are prodigies; they are, as it seems, 
 works which Omnipotence Alone could achieve. In 
 the case of these miracles it may be said that the 
 laws of nature are simply suspended. Jesus does 
 not here merely exhibit the power of moral and 
 mental superiority over common men; He upsets 
 and goes beyond the rules and bounds of the order 
 of the universe. A word from His mouth stills 
 a tempest. A few loaves and fishes are fashioned 
 by His Almighty Hand into an abundant feast, 
 which satisfies thousands of hungry men. At His 
 bidding life returns to inanimate corpses. By His 
 curse a fig-tree which had no fruit on it is 
 withered up*.” The writer proceeds to argue that 
 such miracles must be expelled from any Life of 
 Christ which ‘criticism’ will condescend to accept. 
 They belong, he contends, to that ‘torrent of le- 
 gend, with which, according to the rationalistic 
 creed, Jesus was surrounded after His Death by 
 the unthinking enthusiasm of His disciples». But 
 
 a Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 21. Dr. Schenkel concludes : 
 “Sonst erscheint Jesus in den drei ersten Evangelien durchgingig 
 als ein wahrer, innerhalb der Grenzen menschlicher Beschriinkung 
 sich bewegender Mensch; durch Seine Wunderthitigkeit werden 
 diese Grenzen durchbrochen; Allmachtswunder sind menschlich 
 nicht mehr begreiflich.” 
 
 b Tbid. p. 21: “Dass ein Lebensbild, wie dasjenige des Erlisers, 
 
232 Christ’s Resurrection from the grave cannot be γεγ)θοίθα | Lxcr. 
 
 then a question arises as to how much is to be 
 ‘included within this legendary ‘torrent.’ In par- 
 ticular, and above all else, is the Resurrection of 
 Jesus Christ from the grave to be regarded as 
 a part of its contributions to the Life of Christ ? 
 Here there is a division among the rationalizing 
 critics. There are writers who reject our Lord’s 
 miracles of power, His miraculous Conception, and 
 even His Ascension into heaven, and who yet 
 shrmk from denying that very fundamental fact 
 of all, the fact that on “the third day He rose 
 from the dead, according to the Scriptures ὁ." 
 A man must have made up his mind against 
 Christianity more conclusively than men are gene- 
 rally willing to avow, if he is to speculate with 
 M. Renan in the face of Christendom, as to the 
 exact spot in which “the worms consumed the life- 
 less body” of Jesus’. This explicit denial of the 
 literal Resurrection of Jesus from the grave is not 
 compensated for by some theory identical with, or 
 
 bald nach dessen irdischem Hinscheiden von einem reichen Sa- 
 genstrom umflossen wurde, liegt in der Natur der Sache.” It 
 may be asked—Why? If these legendary decorations are the 
 inevitable consequences of a life of devotion to moral truth 
 and to philanthropy, how are we to explain their absence in 
 the cases of so many moralists and philanthropists ancient and 
 modern ¢ 
 
 ὁ Cf, Hase, Leben Jesu, p. 281, compared with p. 267. 
 
 4 Les Apdtres, p. 38: “Pendant que la conviction inébranlable 
 des Apotres se formait, et que la foi du monde se préparait, en quel 
 endroit les vers consumaient-ils le corps inanimé qui avait été, 
 le samedi soir, déposé au sépulchre? On ignorera toujours ce 
 détail; car, naturellement, les traditions chrétiennes ne peuvent 
 rien nous apprendre 1a-dessus.” 
 
 -» 
 
IV.] without a total and explieit rejection of Christianity. 233 
 
 analogous to, that of Hymenzeus and Philetus® 
 respecting the general Resurrection, whereby the 
 essential subject of Christ’s Resurrection is changed, 
 and the idea of Christianity, or the soul of the 
 converted Christian, as distinct from the Body 
 of the Lord Jesus, is said to have been raised 
 from the dead. For such a denial, let us mark it 
 well, of the literal Resurrection of the Human 
 Body of Jesus involves nothing less than an abso- 
 lute and total rejection of Christianity. All ortho-“ 
 dox Churches, all the great heresies, even Socinian- 
 ism, have believed in the Resurrection of Jesus. 
 The literal Resurrection of Jesus was the cardinal 
 fact upon which the earliest preachers of Chris- 
 tianity based their appeal to the Jewish people. 
 St. Paul, writing to a Gentile Church, expressly 
 makes Christianity answer with its life for the 
 literal truth of the Resurrection. “If Christ be not 
 risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is 
 also vain. . . Then they also which are fallen asleep 
 in Christ are perished.” Some modern writers 
 would possibly have reproached St. Paul with offer- 
 ing a harsh alternative instead of an argument. 
 But St. Paul would have replied, first, that our 
 Lord’s honour and credit was entirely staked upon 
 the issue, since He had foretold His Resurrection 
 as the ‘sign’ which would justify His claims! ; and 
 secondly, that the fact of the Resurrection was at- 
 
 © 2 Tim, ii. 18: Ὑμέναιος καὶ Φίλητος, οἵτινες περὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν 
 ἠστόχησαν, λέγοντες τὴν ἀνάστασιν ἤδη γεγονέναι. 1 Tim. i. 20. 
 
 f Acts i. 22; ii. 24, 32; iii. 15; ἦν. 10; Vv. 303 X. 403 xiii. 30, 
 330945 Xvil. 31. ~- 
 
 & 1 Cor. xv. 14, 18. h St. Matt. xii. 39, 40. 
 
394 The Resurrection the warrant of other miracles. { Lxct. 
 
 tested by evidence which must outweigh everything 
 except an ὦ priori conviction of the impossibility 
 of miracle, since it was attested by the word of 
 more than two hundred and fifty living persons 
 : who had actually seen the Risen Jesusi. As to ob- 
 jections to miracle of an ὦ prior? character, St. Paul 
 would have argued, as most Theists, and even the 
 French philosopher, have argued, that such objec- 
 tions’ could not be urged by any man who be- 
 / lieved seriously in a living God at all*. But on 
 the other hand, if the Resurrection be admitted 
 to be a fact, it is puerile to object to the other 
 miracles of Jesus, or to any other Christian mira- 
 ’ cles, provided they be sufficiently attested. To have 
 admitted the stupendous truth that Jesus, after 
 predicting that He would be put to a violent death, 
 and then rise from the dead, was actually so killed, 
 and then did actually so rise, must incapacitate any 
 thoughtful man for objecting to the supernatural 
 Conception or to the Ascension into heaven, or to 
 the more striking wonders wrought by Jesus, on 
 any such ground as that of intrinsic improbability. 
 ΤΟ The Resurrection has, as compared with the other 
 miraculous occurrences narrated in the Gospels, all 
 the force of an ὦ fortiors argument ; they follow, if 
 
 i 1 Cor. xv. 6: ἔπειτα ὥφθη ἐπάνω πεντακοσίοις ἀδελφοῖς ἐφάπαξ, ἐξ 
 ὧν οἱ πλείους μένουσιν ἕως ἄρτι, τινὲς δὲ καὶ ἐκοιμήθησαν. 
 
 k “Dieu peut-Il faire des miracles, c’est ἃ dire, peut-il déroger 
 aux lois, 411] a établies? Cette question sérieusement traitée 
 serait impie, si elle n’était absurde. Ce serait faire trop d’honneur 
 a celui, qui la resoudrait negativement, que de le punir ; il suffirait 
 de l’enfermer. Mais aussi, quel homme a jamais nié, que Dieu 
 put faire des miracles?” Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la Montagne, 
 Lettre iii. 
 
IV.] Value of our Lord’s miracles not merely evidential, 235 
 
 we may use the term, naturally from it; they are 
 fitly complemental incidents of a history in which 
 the Resurrection has already made it plain that we 
 are dealing with One in Whose case our ordinary 
 experience of the limits and conditions of human 
 power is altogether at fault. 
 
 But if the miracles of Jesus be admitted in the 
 block, as by a ‘rational’ believer in the Resurrection 
 they must be admitted; they do poimt, as I have 
 said, to the Catholic belief, as distinct from any lower 
 conceptions respecting the Person of Jesus Christ. 
 They differ from the miracles of prophets and 
 Apostles in that, instead of being answers to prayer, 
 granted by a Higher Power, they manifestly flow 
 forth from the majestic Life resident in the Worker!. 
 And instead of presenting so many ‘difficulties’ 
 which have to be surmounted or set aside, they are 
 in entire harmony with that representation of our 
 Saviour’s Personal glory which is embodied in the 
 Creeds. St. John accordingly calls them Christ’s 
 ‘works, meaning that they were just such acts as 
 might be expected from Him, being such as He 
 was. For indeed our Lord’s miracles are not merely 
 evidences of His being the Organ of a Divine reve- 
 lation. They do not merely secure a deferential 
 attention to His disclosures respecting the nature 
 of God, the duty and destiny of man, His Own 
 Person, mission, and work. Certainly they have this 
 properly evidential force; He Himself appealed to 
 them as having it™. But it would be difficult alto- 
 gether to account for their form, or for their varieties, 
 
 1 Wilberforce on the Incarnation, p. 91, note 11. 
 m St. John x. 38. 
 
236 Our Lord’s miracles exhibit His Redemptive Work, (Luct. 
 
 or for the times at which they were wrought, or 
 for the motives which were actually assigned for 
 working them, on the supposition that their value 
 was only evidential. They are lke the kind deeds 
 of the wealthy, or the good advice of the wise ; they 
 are like that debt of charity which is due from 
 the possessors of great endowments to suffering hu- 
 manity. Christ as Man owed this tribute of mercy 
 which His Godhead had rendered it possible for Him 
 to pay, to those whom (such was His love) He was > 
 not ashamed to call His brethren. But besides this, 
 Christ’s miracles are physical and symbolic repre- 
 sentations of His redemptive action as the Divine 
 Saviour of mankind. Their form is carefully adapted 
 to express this action. By healing the palsied, the 
 blind, the lame, Christ threw into a visible form 
 His redemptive power to cure spiritual diseases, 
 such as the weakness, the darkness, the motionless- 
 ness of the soul. By casting out devils from the 
 possessed, He pointed to His victory over the prin- 
 cipalities and powers of evil, whereby man would 
 be freed from their thraldom and restored to moral 
 liberty. By raising from the grave the putrid 
 corpse of Lazarus He proclaimed Himself not merely 
 a Revealer of the Resurrection, but the Resurrec- 
 tion and the Life itself. The drift and meaning of 
 such a miracle as that in which our Lord’s ‘ Eph- 
 phatha’ brought hearing and speech to the deaf and 
 dumb is at once apparent when we place it in the 
 light of the sacrament of baptism?. The feeding of 
 the five thousand is remarkable as the one miracle 
 which is narrated by all the Evangelists ; and even 
 
 p St. Mark viii. 34, 35. 
 
EV] and then lead us to contemplate His Person. 237 
 
 the least careful among readers of the Gospel cannot 
 fail to be struck with the solemn actions which 
 precede the wonder-work, as well as by the startling 
 magnificence of the result. Yet the redemptive 
 significance of that extraordinary scene at Bethsaida 
 Julias is never really understood, until our Lord’s 
 discourse in the great synagogue of Capernaum, 
 which immediately follows it, is read as the spiritual 
 exposition of the physical miracle, which is thus 
 seen to be a commentary, palpable to sense, upon 
 _the vital efficacy of the Holy Communion”. 
 
 In our Lord’s miracles then we have before us 
 something more than a set of credentials; since 
 they manifest forth His Mediatorial Glory. They 
 exhibit various aspects of that redemptive power 
 whereby He designed to save lost man from sin and 
 death ; and they lead us to study from many sepa- 
 rate points of view Christ’s Majestic Personality as 
 the Source of the various wonders which radiate 
 
 © Compare St. John vi. 26-59 ; and observe the correspondence 
 between the actions described in St. Matt. xiv. 19, and xxvi. 26. 
 The deeper Lutheran commentators are honourably distin- 
 guished from the Calvinistic ones in recognising the plain Sacra- 
 mental reference of St. John vi. 53, sqq. See Stier, ‘Reden Jesu,’ 
 in loc.; Olshausen, Comm. in loe.; Kahnis, H. Abendmahl, p. 104, 
 sqq. For the ancient Church, see St. Chrys. Hom. in loc.; Theo- 
 phylact, &e. The Church of England authoritatively adopts the 
 sacramental interpretation of the passage by her use of it in the 
 Exhortation at the time of the celebration of the Holy Com- 
 munion. ‘The benefit is great, if with a true penitent heart 
 and lively faith we receive that Holy Sacrament: for then (i.e. by 
 such reception, as distinct from a trust in Christ’s merits without 
 it) we spiritually eat the Flesh of Christ and drink His Blood ; 
 then we dwell in Christ and Christ in us; we are one with Christ 
 and Christ with us.” Cf. too the “ Prayer of Humble Access.”’ 
 
238 The mysteries of our Lord’s Human Life [Lecr. 
 
 from it. And assuredly such a study can have but one 
 result for those who honestly believe in the literal 
 reality of the wonders described ; it must force upon 
 them a conviction of the Divinity of the Worker P. 
 But the miracles which especially pomt to the 
 Catholic doctrine as their justification, and which 
 are simply imcumbrances blocking up the way of 
 a Humanitarian theorist, are those of which our 
 Lord’s Manhood is Itself the subject. According to 
 the Gospel narrative Jesus enters this world by one 
 miracle, and He leaves it by another. His human 
 manifestation centres in that miracle of miracles, 
 His Resurrection from the grave after death. The 
 Resurrection is the central fact up to which all 
 leads, and from which all radiates. Such miracles as 
 
 Ρ It may be urged that Socinians have been earnest believers 
 in the Resurrection and other preeternatural facts of the Life of 
 Christ, while explicitly denying His Godhead. This is true; but it 
 is strictly true only of past times, or of those of our contemporaries 
 who are more or less inaccessible, happily for themselves, to the 
 intellectual influences of modern scepticism. It would be difficult 
 to find a modern Socinian of high education who believed in the 
 literal truth of all the preeternatural phenomena recorded in the 
 Gospels. This is not merely a result of modern objections to 
 miracle ; it is a result of the connexion, more clearly felt, even 
 by sceptics, than of old, between the admission of miracles 
 and the obligation to admit attendant dogma. In his Essay on 
 Channing, M. Renan has given expression to this instinct of modern 
 sceptical thought. “Tl est certain,” he observes, “que si l’esprit 
 moderne a raison de vouloir une religion, qui, sans exclure le 
 surnaturel, en diminue la dose autant que possible, la religion de 
 Channing est la plus parfaite et la plus épurée qui ait paru 
 jusqu’ici. Mais est-ce 14 tout, en verité, et quand le symbole sera 
 réduit ἃ croire ἃ Dieu et au Christ, qu’y aura-t-on gagné? Le 
 scepticisme se tiendra-t’il pour satisfait? La formule de lunivers 
 
IV.] point directly to a Superhuman Person. 239 
 
 Christ’s Birth of a virgin-mother, His Resurrection 
 from the tomb, and His Ascension into heaven, are 
 not merely the credentials of our redemption, they 
 are distinct stages and processes of the redemptive 
 work itself. Taken in their entirety, they mterpose 
 a measureless interval between the Life of Jesus 
 and the lives of the greatest of prophets or of 
 Apostles, even of those to whom it was given to 
 still the elements and to raise the dead. To expel 
 these miracles from the Life of Jesus is to destroy 
 the identity of the Christ of the Gospels; it is to 
 substitute a new Christ for the Christ of Christen- 
 dom. Who would recognise the true Christ in the 
 natural son of a human father, or in the crucified 
 prophet whose body has rotted in an earthly grave? 
 
 en sera-t-elle plus compléte et plus claire? La destinée de Phomme 
 et de ’humanité moins impénétrable? Avec son symbole épuré, 
 Channing évite-t-il mieux que les théologiens catholiques les ob- 
 jections de Vinerédulité? Helas! non. 1] admet la résurrection 
 de Jésus-Christ, et n’admet pas sa Divinité; il admet le Bible, 
 et n’admet pas l’enfer. Il déploie toutes les susceptibilités d’un 
 scholastique pour ¢tablir contre les Trinitaires, en quel sens le 
 Christ est fils de Dieu, et en quel sens il ne l’est pas, Or, si 
 Yon accorde qu’il y a eu une Existence réelle et miraculeuse d’un 
 bout a l’autre, pourquoi ne pas franchement l’appeler Divine ? 
 L’un ne demande pas un plus grand effort de croyance que l'autre. 
 En vérité, dans cette voie, il n’y a que le premier pas qui coute ; 
 il ne faut pas marchander avec le surnaturel; la foi va d'une 
 seule piece, et, le sacrifice accompli, il ne sied pas de réclamer 
 en détail les droits dont on a fait une fois pour toutes l’entiére 
 cession.” Etudes d’Histoire Religieuse, pp. 377, 378. Who would 
 not rather, a thousand times over, have been Channing than be 
 M. Renan? Yet is it not clear that, half a century later, Channing 
 must have believed much less, or as we may well trust, much more, 
 than was believed by the minister of Federal-street Chapel, Boston ? 
 
940 The miraculous element [Lecr. 
 
 Yet on the other hand, who will not admit that He 
 Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost and born 
 of a Virgin-mother, Who after being crucified, dead, 
 and buried, rose again the third day from the dead, 
 and then went up into heaven before the eyes of 
 His Apostles, must needs be an altogether super- 
 human Being? This is what has been already urged 
 by saying that the Catholic doctrine is at home 
 among the facts of the Gospel narrative, while the 
 modern Humanitarian theories are ill at ease among 
 those facts. The four Evangelists, amid their dis- 
 tinguishing peculiarities, concur in representing a 
 Christ Whose Life is encased in a setting of miracles. 
 The Catholic doctrine meets these representations 
 more than half-way; they are in perfect sympathy 
 with itself. The Gospel miracles point at the very 
 least to a Christ Who is altogether above the range 
 of human experience; and the Creeds simply con- 
 firm and recognise this by saying that He is Divine. 
 Thus the Christ of dogma is the Christ of history: 
 He is the Christ of the only extant history which 
 describes the Founder of Christendom at all. He 
 may not be the Christ of some modern commenta- 
 tors upon that history; but these commentators do 
 not affect to take the history as it has come down 
 to us. As the Gospel narratives stand, they present 
 a block of difficulties to Humanitarian theories ; and 
 these difficulties can only be removed by mutilations 
 of the narratives so wholesale and radical as to de- 
 stroy their substantial interest, besides rendering the 
 retention of the fragments which may be retained 
 a purely arbitrary procedure. The Gospel narratives 
 describe the Author of Christianity as the Worker 
 
IV.] cannot be eliminated from the Gospel narratives. 241 
 
 and the Subject of extraordinary miracles ; and these 
 miracles are such as to afford a natural lodgment 
 for, nay, to demand as their correlative, the doctrine 
 of the Creed. That doctrine must be admitted to 
 be, if not the divinely authorized explanation, at 
 least the best intellectual conception and résumé of 
 the evangelical history. A man need not be a be- 
 hever in order to admit, that in asserting Christ’s 
 Divinity we make a fair translation of the Gospel 
 story into the language of abstract thought; and 
 that we have the best key to that story when we 
 see in it the doctrine that Christ is God, unfolding 
 itself in a series of occurrences which on any other 
 supposition seem to wear an air of nothing less than 
 legendary extravagance. 
 
 It may—it probably will—be objected to all this, 
 that a large number of men and women at the 
 present day are on the one hand strongly prepos- 
 sessed against the credibility of all miracles what- 
 ever, while on the other they are sincere ‘admirers’ 
 of the moral character of Jesus Christ. They may 
 not wish explicitly and in terms to reject the mi- 
 raculous history recorded in the Gospels; but still 
 less do they desire to commit themselves to an un- 
 reserved acceptance of it. Whether from indifference 
 to miraculous phzenomena, or because their judgment 
 is altogether in suspense, they would rather keep 
 the preeternatural element in our Lord’s Life out 
 of sight, or shut their eyes to it. But they are 
 open to the impressions which may be produced 
 by the spectacle of high ethical beauty, if only 
 the character of Christ can be disentangled from a 
 series of wonders, which, as transcending all ordinary 
 
 R 
 
242 Integrity of our Lord’s moral character [ Lzcr. 
 
 human experience, do not touch the motives that 
 compel their assent to religious truth. Accordingly 
 we are warned that if it is not a piece of spiritual 
 thoughtlessness, and even cruelty, it is at any rate 
 a rhetorical mistake to insist upon a consideration 
 so opposed to the intellectual temper of the time. 
 This is what may be urged: but observe, my 
 brethren, that the objector assumes a point which 
 should rather have been proved. He assumes the 
 possibility of putting forward an honest picture of 
 the Life of Jesus, which shall uphold the beauty, 
 and even the perfection of His moral character, while 
 denying the historical reality of His miracles, or at 
 any rate while ignoring them. Whereas, if the only 
 records which we possess of the Life of Jesus are 
 to be believed at all, they make it certain that 
 Jesus Christ did claim to work, and was Himself 
 the embodiment, of startling miracles’, How can 
 this fact be dealt with by a modern disbeliever in 
 the miraculous? Was Christ then the ignorant vic- 
 tim and promoter of a crude superstition? Or was 
 He, as M. Renan considers, the conscious performer 
 of thaumaturgic tricks"? On either supposition, is 
 
 ᾳ Eece Homo, p. 43: ‘On the whole, miracles play so important 
 a part in Christ’s scheme, that any theory which would represent 
 them as due entirely to the imagination of His followers or of 
 a later age, destroys the credibility of the documents, not par- 
 tially, but wholly, and leaves Christ a personage as mythical as 
 Hercules.” 
 
 r Cf. Vie de Jésus, p. 265: “Il est done permis de croire qu’on 
 lui imposa sa réputation de thaumaturge, qu'il n'y résista pas 
 beaucoup, mais qu'il ne fit rien non plus pour y aider, et qu’en 
 tout cas, il sentait la vanité de opinion a cet égard. Ce serait 
 manquer ἃ la bonne méthode historique d’écouter trop ici nos 
 
IV.] depends on the reality of His miracles. 243 
 
 it possible to uphold Him as ‘the moral Ideal of 
 Humanity, or indeed as the worthy Object of any 
 true moral enthusiasm? My brethren, you cannot 
 decline this question; it is forced upon you by the 
 subject-matter. A neutral attitude towards the 
 miraculous element in the Gospel history is im- 
 possible. The claim to work miracles is not the 
 least prominent element of our Lord’s teaching ; 
 nor are the miracles which are said to have been 
 wrought by Him a fanciful or ornamental appendage 
 to His action. "The miraculous is inextricably inter- 
 woven with the whole Life of Christ. The ethical 
 beauty, nay the moral integrity of our Lord’s cha- 
 racter is dependent, whether we will it or not, upon 
 the reality of His miracles. It may be very desirable 
 to defer as far as possible to the mental prepossessions 
 
 of our time; but it is not practicable to put asunder | 
 
 two things which ‘God hath joined together, namely, 
 the beauty of Christ’s character and the bond fide 
 reality of the miracles which He professed to work. 
 But let us nevertheless follow the lead of this 
 objection by turning to consider what is the real 
 bearing of our Lord’s moral character upon the 
 question of His Divinity. In order to do this, it 
 
 . . . ν 
 is necessary to ask a previous question. What 
 
 position did Jesus Christ, either tacitly or explicitly, 
 claim to occupy in His intercourse with men? What 
 allusions did He make to the subject of His Per- 
 sonality? You will feel, my brethren, that it is, 
 impossible to overrate the solemn importance of 
 such a point as this. We are here touching the | 
 répugnances.” See M. Renan’s account of the raising of 
 
 Lazarus, ibid. pp. 361, 362. 
 R 2 
 
 } 
 
 j 
 
 \ 
 
a 
 
 244 What did Christ say respecting His Personality? {| Lect. 
 
 very heart of our great subject : we have penetrated 
 to the inmost shrine of Christian truth, when we 
 thus proceed to examine those words of the Gospels 
 which exhibit the consciousness of the Founder of 
 Christianity respecting His rank in the scale of being. 
 With what awe, yet with what loving eagerness, 
 must not a Christian enter on such an examination! 
 
 No reader of the Gospels can fail to see that, 
 speaking generally, and without reference to any 
 presumed order of the events and sayings in the 
 Gospel history, there are two distinct stages or 
 levels in the teaching of Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 I. Of these the first is mainly concerned with 
 primary fundamental moral truth. It is in substance 
 a call to repentance, and the proclamation of a new 
 life. It is summarized in the words, “Repent ye, 
 for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’.” A change 
 of mind, both respecting self, and respecting God, 
 was necessary before a man could lead the new life 
 of the kingdom of heaven. In a previous lecture 
 we have had occasion to consider the kingdom of 
 heaven as the outline or plan of a world-wide insti- 
 tution which was to take its place in history. But 
 viewed in its relation to the life of the soul, the 
 kingdom of heaven is the home and the native 
 atmosphere of a new and higher order of spiritual 
 existence. This new life is not merely active 
 thought, such as might be stimulated by the cross- 
 questioning of a Socrates; nor is it moral force, the 
 play of which was limited to the single soul that 
 possessed it. It is moral and mental life, having 
 God and men for its objects, and accordingly lived 
 
 8 St. Matt. iv. 17. 
 
IV.] First stage of teaching, mainly ethical. 245 
 
 in an organized society, as the necessary counter- 
 part of its energetic action. Of this stage of our 
 Lord’s preaching the Sermon on the Mount is the 
 most representative document. The Sermon on 
 the Mount preaches penitence by laying down the 
 highest law of holiness. It contrasts the external- 
 ized devotion, the conventional and worldly religion 
 of the time, created and sanctioned by the leading 
 currents of public opinion, and described as the 
 righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, with 
 a new and severe ideal of morality, embodied in the 
 new law of Christian perfection. It stimulates and 
 regulates penitence, by proposing a new conception 
 of blessedness ; by contrasting the spirit of the new 
 law with the literalism of the old; by exhibiting 
 the devotional duties, the ruling motives, the cha- 
 racteristic temper, and the special dangers of the 
 new life. Incidentally the Sermon on the Mount 
 states certain doctrines, such as that of the Diviné 
 Providence, with great explicitnesst; but, throughout 
 it, the moral element is predominant. This great 
 discourse quickens and deepens a sense of sin by 
 presenting the highest ideal of an inward holiness. 
 In the Sermon on the Mount our Lord is laying 
 broad and deep the foundations of His spiritual 
 edifice. A pure and loving heart; an open and 
 trustful conscience ; a freedom of communion with 
 the Father of spirits; a love of man as man, the 
 measure of which is to be nothing less than a man’s 
 love of himself; above all a stern determination, at 
 any cost, to be true, true with God, true with men, 
 true with self;—such were the pre-requisites for 
 
 t St. Matt. vi. 25-33. 
 
940 Christ never confesses moral deficiencies. { Lecr. 
 
 genuine discipleship ; such the spiritual and subjec- 
 tive bases of the new and Absolute Religion; such 
 the moral material of the first stage of our Lord’s 
 public teaching. 
 
 In this first stage of our Lord’s teaching let us 
 moreover note two characteristics. 
 
 (a) And first, that our Lord’s recorded language 
 is absolutely wanting in a feature which, on the 
 hypothesis of His being merely human, would seem 
 to have been practically indispensable. Our Lord 
 does not place before us any relative or lower 
 standard of morals. He proposes the highest stan- 
 dard, the Absolute morality. “Be ye therefore per- 
 fect,” He says, “even as your Father Which is in 
 heaven is perfect".” Now in the case of a human 
 teacher of high moral and spiritual attamments, 
 what should we expect as an inevitable concomitant 
 of this teaching? Surely we should expect some 
 confession of personal unworthiness thus to teach. 
 We should look for some trace of a feeling (so in- 
 evitable in this pulpit) that the message which 
 must be spoken is the rebuke, if not the condem- 
 nation, of the man who must speak it. Conscious 
 of many shortcomings, a human teacher must at 
 some time relieve his natural sense of honesty, his 
 fundamental instinct of justice, by noting the dis- 
 crepancy between his struggling, imperfect, perhaps 
 miserable self, and his sublime and awful message. 
 He must draw a line between his official and his 
 personal self; and in his personal capacity he must 
 honestly, anxiously, persistently associate himself 
 with his hearers, as being before God like each one 
 
 u St. Matt. v. 48. 
 
IV.] Contrast with the Hebrew prophets. 24:7 
 
 of themselves, a learning, struggling, erring soul. 
 But Jesus Christ makes no approach to such a dis- 
 tinction between Himself and His message. He bids 
 men be like God, and He gives not the faintest 
 hint that any trace of unlikeness to God in Him- 
 self obliges Him to accompany the delivery of that 
 precept with a protestation of His Own personal 
 unworthiness. Do you say that this is only a rhe- 
 torical style or mood derived by tradition from the 
 Hebrew prophets, and natural in any Semitic teacher 
 who aspired to succeed them? I answer, that nothing 
 is plainer in the Hebrew prophets than the clear 
 distinction which is constantly maintained between 
 the moral level of the teacher and the moral level 
 of His message. The prophetic ambassador repre- 
 sents the Invisible King of Israel; but the holiness 
 of the King is never measured, never compromised 
 by the imperfections of His representative. The, 
 prophetic writings abound in confessions of weak- 
 ness, in confessions of shortcomings, in confessions 
 of sin. The greatest of the prophets is permitted 
 to see the glory of the Lord, and he forthwith 
 exclaims in agony, “Woe is me! for I am undone;| 
 because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in 
 the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes 
 have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts*.” But the 
 silence of Jesus as to any such sense of personal un- 
 worthiness has been accounted for by His unrivalled 
 closeness of life-long communion with God. Is it then 
 certain that the holiest souls are least alive to per- 
 sonal sin? Do they whose life of thought is little less 
 than the breath of a perpetual prayer, and who dwell 
 
 x Isa. vi. 5: 
 
 Γ 
 ( 
 
248 The sense of sin deepened by real nearness to God. (Lect. 
 
 continuously in the presence-chamber of the King of 
 kings, profess themselves insensible to that taint of 
 sin, from which none are altogether free? Is this the 
 lesson which we learn from the language of the best 
 of the servants of God? My brethren, the very re- 
 verse is the case. Those who have lived nearest to 
 God, and have known most about Him, and have 
 been most visibly irradiated by the light of His 
 countenance, have been foremost to acknowledge 
 that the burden of remaining imperfection in them 
 was truly intolerable. Their eager protestations have 
 often seemed to the world to be either the exag- 
 gerations of fanaticism, or else the proof of a more 
 than ordinary wickedness. For blemishes which 
 might have passed unobserved in a spiritual twilight, 
 are lighted up with torturing clearness by those 
 searching, scorching rays of moral truth, that stream 
 from the bright Sanctity of God upon the soul that 
 beholds It. In That Presence the holiest of creatures 
 must own with the Psalmist, “ Thou hast set our mis- 
 deeds before Thee, and our secret sins in the light 
 of Thy countenanceY.” Such self-accusing, broken- 
 hearted confessions of sin have been the utterances of 
 men the most conspicuous in Christendom for holiness 
 of life; and no true saint of God ever supposed that 
 by a constant spiritual sight of God the soul would 
 lose its keen truthful sense of personal sinfulness. 
 No man could imagine that the sense of sinfulness, 
 as distinct from the sense of unpardoned guilt, would 
 be banished by close communion with God, unless 
 his moral standard was low, and his creed im- 
 perfect. Such an imagination is inconsistent with 
 
 y Ps. xe. 8. 
 
ἘΝῚ Our Lord claims positively to be sinless. 249 
 
 a true sight of Him Whose severe and stainless 
 beauty casts the shadow of failure upon all that 
 is not Himself, and Who charges His very angels 
 with moral folly. Yet Jesus Christ never once con- “ 
 fesses sin; He never once asks for pardon. He, 
 Who so sharply rebukes the self-righteousness of the 
 Pharisee ; He, Who might seem to ignore all human 
 piety that is not based upon a broken heart; He, 
 Who deals with human nature at large as the pro- 
 digal son, in whose return to a Father’s love lies 
 the one condition of its peace and bliss,—He never 
 Himself lets fall a hint, He never Himself breathes 
 a prayer, which implies any, the shehtest trace, of a 
 personal remorse. From no casual admission do we 
 gather that any, the most venial sin, has ever been 
 His; never for one moment does He associate Himself 
 with any passing experience of that anxious dread of 
 the penal future with which His Own awful words 
 must fill the sinner’s heart. If His Soul is troubled, 
 at least His moral sorrows are not His Own, they 
 are a burden laid on Him by His love for others. 
 Nay, He even challenges His enemies to convince 
 Him of sin; He declares positively that He does 
 always the Will of the Father?; and He always, 
 even when speaking of Himself as Man, refers to 
 eternal life as His inalienable possession. It might, 
 so perchance we think, be the illusion of a moral 
 dullness, if only He did not penetrate the sin of) 
 others with such relentless analysis; it might, we. 
 imagine, be a subtle pride, if we did not know Him 
 to be so unrivalled in His great Humility’. This 
 « St. John viii. 46; Ibid. ver. 29 ; cf. ver. 26. 
 ἃ Hollard, Charactére de Jésus Christ, p. 150. 
 
250 Attitude of our Lord towards [ Lecr. 
 
 consciousness of an absolute sinlessness in such a 
 Soul as That of Jesus Christ, points to a moral 
 elevation unknown to our actual human experience, 
 and is, at the very least, suggestive of a relation 
 to the Perfect Moral Being altogether unique in 
 humanity». 
 
 (G8) The other characteristic of this stage of our 
 Lord’s teaching is the attitude which He at once 
 and, if I may so say, naturally assumes, not merely 
 towards the teachers of His time, but towards the 
 letter of that older, divinely-given Revelation which 
 they preserved and interpreted. The people early 
 remarked that Jesus “taught as One having autho- 
 
 b Cf. Mr. F. W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, p. 143: “ We 
 have a very imperfect history of the Apostle James; and I do 
 not know that I could adduce any fact specifically recorded con- 
 cerning him in disproof of his absolute moral perfection, if any 
 of his Jerusalem disciples had chosen to set up this as a dogma 
 of religion. Yet no one would blame me as morose, or indisposed 
 to acknowledge genius and greatness, if I insisted on believing 
 James to be frail and imperfect, while admitting that I knew 
 almost nothing about him. And why? Singly and surely, because 
 we know him to be ὦ man: that suffices. To set up James or 
 John or Daniel as my model and my Lord; to be swallowed up 
 in him, and press him upon others as a universal standard, would 
 be despised as a self-degrading idolatry, and resented as an ob- 
 trusive favouritism. Now why does not the same equally apply 
 if the name Jesus be substituted for these? Why, in defect of 
 all other knowledge than the bare fact of his manhood, are we 
 ποῦ unhesitatingly to take for granted that he does πού exhaust 
 all perfection, and is at best only one amongst many brethren and 
 equals?” The answer is that we have to choose between believing 
 in Christ’s moral perfection, and condemning Him of being guilty 
 of intolerable presumption; and that His teaching, His actions, 
 and (Mr. Newman will allow us to add) His supernatural cre- 
 dentials, taken together, make believing Him the easier alternative. 
 
DY the Jewish teachers, and the Mosaic Revelation. 251 
 
 rity, and not as the Scribes®.” The Scribes reasoned, 
 they explained, they balanced argument against 
 argument, they appealed to the critical or verifying 
 faculty of their hearers. But here is a Teacher, 
 Who sees truth intuitively, and announces it simply, 
 . without condescending to recommend it by argument. 
 He is a Teacher, moreover, not of truth obvious 
 to all, but of truth which might have seemed to 
 the men who first heard it to be what we should 
 call paradoxical. He is a Teacher Who condemns 
 in the severest language the doctrine and the prac- 
 tice of the most influential religious authorities 
 among His countrymen. He takes up instinctively 
 a higher position than He assigns to any who had 
 preceded Him in Israel. He passes in review, and 
 accepts or abrogates not merely the traditional doc- 
 trines of the Jewish schools, but the Mosaic law 
 
 But Mr. Newman’s remarks are of substantial value, as indirectly 
 shewing from a point of view further removed from Catholic 
 belief than Socinianism itself, how steadily a recognition of our 
 Lord’s moral perfection as Man tends to promote an acceptance 
 of the Catholic doctrine that He is Gop. “If,” says Mr. Newman, 
 “T were already convinced that this person (he means our Lord) 
 was a great Unique, separated from all other men by an im- 
 passable chasm in regard to his physical origin, I (for one) should 
 be much readier to believe that he was unique and unapproachable 
 in other respects; for all God’s works have an internal harmony. 
 It could not be for nothing that this exceptional personage was 
 sent into the world. That he was intended for head of the X 
 human race in one or more senses, would be a plausible opinion ; 
 nor should I feel any incredulous repugnance against believing 
 his morality to be, if not divinely perfect, yet separated from that 
 of common men so far that he might be a God to us, just as 
 every parent is to a young child.” Ibid. p. 142. 
 © St. Matt. vii. 29. 
 
252 Contrast with the practice of the Prophets. (Lecr. 
 
 itself. His style runs thus: “It was said to them 
 of old time,... but I say unto you.” Again, my 
 brethren, let us protest against statements which 
 imply that this authoritative teaching of Jesus was 
 merely a continuation of the received prophetic 
 style. It is true that the prophets gave promi- 
 nence to the moral element in the teaching of the 
 Pentateuch, that they expanded it, and that so far 
 they anticipated one side of the ministry of Jesus 
 Himself. But the prophets always appealed to 
 a higher sanction; the prophetic argument ad- 
 dressed to the conscience of Israel was ever “Thus 
 saith the Lord.” How significant, how full of im- 
 port as to His consciousness respecting Himself is 
 our Lord’s substitute, “Verily, verily, J say unto 
 you.” What prophet ever set himself above the 
 great Legislator, above the Law written by the 
 finger of God on Sinai? What prophet ever un- 
 dertook to ratify the Pentateuch as a whole, to 
 contrast his own higher morality with some of its 
 precepts in detail, to imply even remotely that he 
 was competent to revise that which every Israelite 
 knew to be the handiwork of God? What prophet 
 ever thus implicitly placed himself on a line of 
 equality, not with Moses, not with Abraham, but 
 with the Lord God Himself? <A claim so momen- 
 tous requires explanation if the claimant be only 
 human. This impersonation of the source of moral 
 law must rest upon some basis: what is that basis 
 on which it rests/—Yet in the Sermon on the Mount 
 Jesus Christ does not deign to justify His lofty 
 
 d St. Matt. v.27. For the translation of τοῖς ἀρχαίοις see Arch- 
 bishop Trench on Auth. Vers. of New Testament, p. 79. 
 
IV.] A scrutiny of our Lord’s personal claims inevitable. 258 
 
 critical and revisionary attitude towards the ancient 
 Law; He neither explains nor exaggerates His 
 power to review the older revelation, and to reveal 
 new truth; He simply teaches, He abrogates, He 
 establishes, He sanctions, He unfolds, as the case 
 may be, and in a tone which implies that His right 
 to teach is not a matter for discussion. 
 
 It was inevitable that the question should be 
 asked, anxiously, earnestly, fiercely, ‘Who is This 
 Teacher?’ I say, it was inevitable: for if you teach 
 the lowest moral truth, in the humblest sphere, your 
 right to do so will sooner or later be called in 
 question. To teach moral truth is to throw down 
 a challenge to human nature, human nature being 
 such as it actually is, that is to say, conscious of 
 more or less disloyalty to the moral light which it 
 already possesses, and indisposed to become respon- 
 sible for knowledge of a yet higher standard of 
 moral truth, the existence of which it may already 
 suspect. Accordingly the challenge which is thus 
 made is generally met by a sharp counter-scrutiny 
 into the claims, be they personal or official, of the 
 teacher who dares to make it. This penalty of 
 teaching can only be escaped either in certain rare 
 and primitive conditions of society, or else when 
 the teacher fails to do his duty. Missionaries have 
 described savage tribes whose sense of ignorance was 
 too sincere, and who were too grateful for know- 
 ledge, to take umbrage at the practical bearings of 
 a new doctrine. Poets have sung of ancestors 
 
 “ Qui preeceptorem sancti voluere parentis 
 Esse loco®.” 
 
 e Juv. vii. 207, 8. 
 
254 A fearless teacher of moral truth { Lect. 
 
 Again, immunity from criticism may possibly be 
 secured by signal inefficiency, feebleness, or dis- 
 loyalty to principle, on the part of the teacher. A 
 teacher of morals may have persuaded his conscience 
 that the ruling worldly opinion of his time can 
 safely be regarded as its court of final appeal. He 
 may have forced his thought to shape itself with 
 prudent docility into those precise conventionalities 
 of expression which are understood to mean nothing 
 or which have lost their power. In such a case it 
 may so happen that the total failure to achieve 
 moral and spiritual victories will not necessarily 
 entail on the teacher complete social or professional 
 obscurity, while it will certainly protect him against 
 any serious liability to hostile interference. But 
 picture to yourselves a teacher who is not merely 
 under the official obligation to say something, but 
 who is morally convinced that he has something to 
 say. Imagine one who believes alike in the truth 
 of his message and in the reality of his mission 
 to deliver it; while his message combines those 
 moral contrasts which give permanency and true 
 force to a doctrine, and which the Gospel alone has 
 combined in their perfection. Let this teacher be 
 tender, yet searching; let him win the hearts of 
 men by his kindly humanity, while he probes, aye 
 to the quick, their moral sores. Let him be uni- 
 formly calm, yet manifestly moved by the fire of 
 repressed passion. Let him be stern yet not un- 
 loving, and resolute without lessening the elasticity 
 of his sympathy, and genial without condescending 
 to be the weakly accomplice of moral mischief. Let 
 him pursue and expose the latent evil of the human 
 
IV.| cannot but provoke enquiry into his right to teach. 255 
 
 heart through all the mazes of its unrivalled deceit- 
 fulness, without sullying his own purity, and with- 
 out lessening his strong belief in the present capa- 
 city of every human being for goodness. Let him 
 be one who ‘knows what is in man,’ and yet, with 
 this knowledge clearly before him, not only does not 
 despair of humanity, but respects it, nay loves it, even 
 enthusiastically. Above all, let this teacher be per- 
 fectly independent ; let him be independent of the 
 voice of the multitude; independent of the enthusiasm 
 and promptings of his disciples ; independent still 
 when face to face with the bitter criticism and scorn 
 of his antagonists ; independent of all save God and 
 his conscience. In a word, conceive one whose moral 
 authority and beauty combine to elicit a simultaneous 
 tribute of reverence and of love. Clearly such a 
 teacher must be a moral power; and as a conse- 
 quence, his claim to teach must be scrutinized with 
 a severity proportioned to the interest which he 
 excites, and to the hostility which he cannot hope 
 to escape provoking. And such a Teacher, and 
 much more than this, was Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 Nor is this all. The scrutiny which our Lord 
 necessarily encountered from without was responded 
 to, or rather it was anticipated, by Self-discovery 
 from within. The soul, it has been said, like the 
 body, has its pores; and in a sincere soul the pores 
 of its life are always open. Instinctively, uncon- 
 sciously, and whether a man will or not, the insig- 
 nificance or the greatness of the inner life always 
 reveals itself. In our Lord this selfrevelation was 
 not involuntary, or accidental, or oe it was in 
 the highest degree deliberate. He knew the thoughts 
 
 y 
 
256 Self-assertion in the second stage of Christ's teaching. [Lxcr. 
 
 of those about Him, and He anticipated their ex- 
 pression. He placed beyond a doubt, by the most 
 explicit statements, that which might have been 
 more than suspected, if He had only preached the 
 Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 II. (a) It is characteristic then of what may be 
 termed the second stage of our Lord’s public teach- 
 ing, that He distinctly, repeatedly, energetically 
 preaches Himself. He does not leave men to draw 
 inferences about Himself from the power of His 
 moral teaching, or from the awe-inspiring nature 
 of His miracles. He does not content Himself with 
 teaching primary moral truths concerning God and 
 our duties towards God and towards one another. 
 He does not bequeath to His Apostles the task of 
 elaborating a theory respecting the Personal Rank 
 of their Master in the scale of being. On the con- 
 trary, He Himself persistently asserts the real cha-, 
 racter of His position relatively to God and man, | 
 and of His consequent claims upon the thought 
 and heart of mankind. Whether He employs meta-, 
 phor, or plain unmetaphorical assertion, His meaning 
 lis too clear to be mistaken. He speaks of Himself 
 as the Light of a darkened world’, as the Way by 
 which man may ascend to heavens, as the Truth 
 which can really satisfy the cravings of the soul?, 
 as the Life which must be imparted to all who 
 would live in very deed, to all who would really 
 
 f St. John viii. 12: Ἐγώ εἶμι τὸ φῶς τοῦ κόσμου" ὁ ἀκολουθῶν ἐμοὶ 
 οὐ μὴ περιπατήσει ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ, ἀλλ᾽ ἕξει τὸ φῶς τῆς ζωῆς. 
 
 5 Ibid. xiv. 6: Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς. 
 
 h Jbid.: ᾿Εγώ εἶμι... ἡ ἀλήθεια. Mark xiii. 31: ὁ οὐρανὸς καὶ ἡ γῆ 
 παρελεύσονται" οἱ δὲ λόγοι μου ov μὴ παρέλθωσι. [παρελεύσονται. Tisch. } 
 
IVa Our Lord’s persistent Self-assertion. 257 
 
 an undefined and eternal communication of it from 
 the Father*. He is the Bread of Life!. He is the 
 Living Bread That came down from heaven™; be- 
 lievers in Him will feed on Him and will have 
 eternal life™. He points to a living water of the 
 Spirit, which He can give, and which will quench the 
 thirst of souls that drink it®. All who came before 
 Him He characterizes as having been, by comparison 
 with Himself, the thieves and robbers of mankindP. 
 He is Himself the One Good Shepherd of the souls 
 of men’; He knows and He is known of His true 
 sheep’. Not only is He the Shepherd, He is the very 
 Door of the sheepfold; to enter through Him is to 
 be safe’. He is the Vine, the Life-tree of regenerate 
 humanity*. All that is truly fruitful and lovely in 
 the human family must branch forth from Him"; 
 all spiritual life must wither and die, if it be 
 
 live for everi. Life is resident in Him in virtue a 
 
 i St. John xiv. 6: Ἐγώ εἰμι. ... ἡ ζωή. 
 
 k [hid. v. 26: ὥσπερ yap ὁ πατὴρ ἔχει ζωὴν ἐν ἑαυτῷ, οὕτως ἔδωκε καὶ 
 τῷ υἱῷ ζωὴν ἔχειν ἐν ἑαυτῷ. 
 
 1 Thid. vi. 35: Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἄρτος τῆς ζωῆς. Ibid. ver. 48. 
 
 m Tbid. ver. 51: ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἄρτος ὁ ζῶν 6 ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καταβάς. 
 
 n ΤΠ]. ver. 47: ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ὁ πιστεύων εἰς ἐμὲ, ἔχει ζωὴν 
 αἰώνιον. Ibid. vy. 40: οὐ θέλετε ἐλθεῖν πρός με, ἵνα ζωὴν ἔχητε. 
 
 © Ibid. iv. 14: ὃς δ᾽ ἂν πίῃ ἐκ τοῦ ὕδατος οὗ ἐγὼ δώσω αὐτῷ, οὐ μὴ 
 διψήσει εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα. 
 
 P Ibid. x. 8: πάντες ὅσοι πρὸ ἐμοῦ ἦλθον, κλέπται εἰσὶ καὶ λῃσταί. 
 
 4 [bid. ver. 11: ᾿Εγώ εἰμι ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός. Ibid. ver. 14. 
 
 τ [bid. ver. 14: γινώσκω τὰ ἐμὰ, καὶ γινώσκομαι ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν. 
 
 5. Ibid. ver. 9: ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ θύρα: δὲ’ ἐμοῦ ἐάν τις εἰσέλθῃ, σωθήσεται. 
 
 t ΤρΙά. xv. 1: ᾿Εγώ εἰμι ἡ ἄμπελος ἡ ἀληθινὴ. 
 
 ἃ Thid. ver. 5: ὁ μένων ἐν ἐμοὶ, κἀγὼ ἐν αὐτῷ, οὗτος φέρει καρπὸν 
 πολύν" ὅτι χωρὶς ἐμοῦ οὐ δύνασθε ποιεῖν οὐδέν. 
 
 Ξ 
 
258 Our Lord’s persistent Self-assertion { Lecr. 
 
 severed from His*. He stands consciously between 
 earth and heaven. He claims to be the One Means 
 of a real approach to the Invisible God: no soul 
 of man can come to the Father but through Himy. 
 He promises that all prayer offered in His Name 
 shall be answered: “ If ye ask anything in My Name 
 1 will do 105. He contrasts Himself with a group 
 of His countrymen as follows: “Ye are from be- 
 neath, I am from above; ye are of this world, I am 
 not of this world?.” He anticipates His Death, and 
 foretells its consequences ; “I, if I be lifted up from 
 the earth, will draw all men unto Myself.” He 
 claims to be the Lord of the realm of death; He 
 will Himself wake the sleeping dead; all that are 
 in the graves shall hear His voice®; nay, He will 
 raise Himself from the dead“. He proclaims, “I am 
 the Resurrection and the Life®.” He encourages men 
 to trust in Him as they trust in Godf; to make 
 
 x St. John xv. 6: ἐὰν μή tis μείνῃ ἐν ἐμοί, ἐβλήθη ἔξω ws τὸ κλῆμα, 
 καὶ ἐξηράνθη. 
 
 y Ibid. xiv. 6: οὐδεὶς ἔρχεται πρὸς τὸν πατέρα, εἰ μὴ OV ἐμοῦ. 
 
 2 Jbid. ver. 14: ἐάν τι αἰτήσητε ἐν τῷ ὀνόματί μου, ἐγὼ ποιήσω. 
 
 a Thid. vill. 23: Ὑμεῖς ἐκ τῶν κάτω ἐστέ, ἐγὼ ἐκ τῶν ἄνω εἰμί: ὑμεῖς 
 ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου ἐστέ, ἐγὼ οὐκ εἰμὶ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου. 
 
 b bid. xii. 32: κἀγὼ ἐὰν ὑψωθῶ ἐκ τῆς γῆς, πάντας ἑλκύσω πρὸς ἐμαυτόν. 
 
 ὁ Tbid. v. 28, 29: ἔρχεται ὥρα, ἐν ἣ πάντες οἱ ἐν τοῖς μνημείοις ἀκού- 
 σονται τῆς φωνῆς αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐκπορεύσονται. Ibid. vi. 39; ΧΙ. 25. 
 
 ἃ Tbid. ἢ. το: Avoare τὸν ναὸν τοῦτον, καὶ ἐν τρισὶν ἡμέραις ἐγερῶ 
 αὐτόν. Ibid. x. 18: ἐξουσίαν ἔχω θεῖναι αὐτήν [τὴν ψυχήν μου], καὶ ἐξου- 
 σίαν ἔχω πάλιν λαβεῖν αὐτήν. 
 
 6. bid. xi. 25: Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ἀνάστασις καὶ ἡ ζωή. 
 
 f Tbid. xiv. 1: μὴ ταρασσέσθω ὑμῶν ἡ καρδία: πιστεύετε εἰς τὸν Θεὸν, 
 καὶ εἰς ἐμὲ πιστεύετε. Ibid. xvi. 33: ταῦτα λελάληκα ὑμῖν, ἵνα ἐν ἐμοὶ 
 εἰρήνην ἔχητε. ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ θλίψιν ἕξετε: [ἔχετε, Tisch.] ἀλλὰ θαρ- 
 
 σεῖτε, ἐγὼ νενίκηκα τὸν κόσμον. 
 
FV: characteristic of His last Discourse. 259 
 
 Him an object of faith just as they believe in 
 Gods; to honour Him as they honour the Father”. 
 To love Him is a necessary mark of the children 
 of God: “If God were your Father, ye would have 
 loved Met.” It is not possible, He rules, to love 
 God, and yet to hate Himself: “He that hateth 
 Me, hateth My Father alsoJj.” The proof of a true 
 love to Him hes in doing His bidding: “If ye love 
 Me, keep My commandments.” Of this stage of 
 our Lord’s teachmg the most representative docu- 
 ment is the Discourse in the supper-room. How 
 great is the contrast between that discourse and 
 the Sermon on the Mount. In the Sermon on the 
 Mount, which deals with questions of human cha- 
 racter and of moral obligation, the reference to our 
 Lord’s Person is comparatively imdirect. It 1165, 
 not in explicit statements, but in the authority of 
 His tone, in the attitude which He tacitly assumes 
 towards the teachers of the Jewish people, and 
 towards the ancient Law. In the Last Discourse it 
 is His Person rather than His teaching which is 
 
 & St. John vi. 29: Τοῦτό ἐστι τὸ ἔργον τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἵνα πιστεύσητε eis ὃν 
 ἀπέστειλεν ἐκεῖνος. Ibid. ver. 40: τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν τὸ θέλημα τοῦ 
 πατρός μου ἵνα πᾶς ὁ θεωρῶν τὸν υἱὸν καὶ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν, ἔχῃ ζωὴν 
 αἰώνιον. Ibid. ver. 47: ὁ πιστεύων εἰς ἐμὲ, ἔχει ζωὴν αἰώνιον. Cf. 
 Acts xxvi. 18: τοῦ λαβεῖν αὐτοὺς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν, καὶ κλῆρον ἐν τοῖς 
 ἡγιασμένοις, πίστει τῇ εἰς ἐμέ. 
 
 h St. John vy. 23: ἵνα πάντες τιμῶσι τὸν υἱὸν, καθὼς τιμῶσι τὸν πατέρα. 
 
 ΤΡΊΑ. viii. 42: Εἰ ὁ Θεὸς πατὴρ ὑμῶν ἦν, ἠγαπᾶτε ἂν ἐμέ. Cf. Ibid. 
 Xvi. 27. 
 
 J Ibid. xv. 23: ὁ ἐμὲ μισῶν, καὶ τὸν πατέρα μου μισεῖ. 
 
 k ΤΙ. χῖν. 15: ἐὰν ἀγαπᾶτέ με, τὰς ἐντολὰς τὰς ἐμὰς τηρήσατε. 
 2 St. John 6: καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀγάπη, ἵνα περιπατῶμεν κατὰ τὰς ἐντολὰς 
 αὐτοῦ. 
 
 S 2 
 
260 This Self-assertion not confined to the fourth Gospel. [{|807. 
 
 especially prominent ; His subject in that discourse 
 is Himself. Certainly He preaches Himself in His 
 relationship to His redeemed ; but still He preaches 
 above all and in all, Himself. All radiates from 
 Himself, all converges towards Himself. The sor- 
 rows and perplexities of His disciples, the mission 
 and work of the Paraclete, the mingling predictions 
 of suffering and of glory, are all bound up with the 
 Person of Jesus, as manifested by Himself; in those 
 matchless words all centres so consistently in Jesus, 
 that it might seem that Jesus Alone is before us; 
 Alone in the greatness of His supramundane glory; 
 Alone in bearing His burden of an awful, fathom- 
 less sorrow. 
 
 It will naturally oceur to us that language such 
 as that which has just been quoted is mainly cha- 
 racteristic of the fourth Gospel; and you will per- 
 mit me, my brethren, to consider the objection 
 which may underlie that observation somewhat at 
 length in a future lecture!. For the present the 
 author of “Ecce Homo” may remind those who, 
 for whatever reasons, refuse to believe that our 
 Lord used these words, that “we cannot deny that 
 He used words which have substantially the same 
 meaning. We cannot deny that He called Himself 
 King, Master, and Judge of men; that He pro- 
 mised to give rest to the weary and the heavy-laden ; 
 that He instructed His followers to hope for life 
 from feeding on His Body and His Blood™.” 
 
 Indeed so entirely is our Lord’s recorded teaching 
 penetrated by His Self-assertion, that in order to 
 represent Him as simply teaching moral truth while 
 
 1 See Lecture V. m Ecce Homo, p. 177. 
 
ΠῚ Christ proclaims Himself Judge of all men. 261 
 
 keeping Himself strictly in the background of His 
 doctrine, it would be necessary to deny the trust- 
 worthiness of all the accounts of His teaching which 
 we possess. » To recognise the difference which has 
 been noticed between the two phases of His teach- 
 ing merely amounts to saying that in the former 
 His Self-proclamation is implied, while it is avowed 
 in the latter. For even in that phase of Christ’s 
 teaching which the three first Evangelists more 
 particularly record, the public assumption of titles and 
 functions such as those of King, Teacher, and Judge 
 of the human race, implies those statements about 
 Himself which are preserved in the fourth Gospel. 
 Consider, for instance, what is really involved in 
 a claim to judge the world. That Jesus Christ did 
 put forward this claim must be conceded by those 
 who admit that we have in our hands any true 
 records of Him whatever. Men who reject that 
 account of the four Gospels which is given us by 
 the Catholic Church, may perhaps consent to listen 
 to the opinion of Mr. Francis W. Newman. “1 be- 
 lieve,” says that writer, “that Jesus habitually spoke 
 of Himself by the title Son of Man, [and] that in 
 assuming that title He tacitly alluded to the seventh 
 chapter of Daniel, and claimed for Himself the 
 throne of judgment over all mankind. I know no 
 reason to doubt that He actually delivered in sub- 
 stance the discourse in the twenty-fifth chapter of 
 St. Matthew.” That our Lord advanced this tre- 
 mendous claim to be the Judge of all mankind is 
 equally the conviction of foreign critics, who are 
 as widely removed as possible from any respect 
 
 n Phases of Faith, p. 149 ; cf. St. Matt. xxv. 31-46. 
 
262 Christ proclaims Himself to be the Universal Judge. (Lucr. 
 
 whatever for the witness of the Church of Christ 
 to Holy Writ®. But let us reflect steadily on what 
 Christ is thus admitted to have said about Him- 
 self by the most advanced representatives of the 
 destructive criticism. Christ says that He will 
 return to earth as Judge of all mankind. He will 
 sit upon a throne of glory, and will be attended by 
 bands of obedient angels. Before Him will be 
 gathered all the nations of the world, and He will 
 judge them. In other words, He will proceed to 
 discharge a function involving such spiritual insight, 
 such discernment of the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart of each one of the millions at His Feet, such 
 awful, unshared supremacy in the moral world, that 
 the imagination recoils in sheer agony from the task 
 of seriously contemplating the exercise of this func- 
 tion by any created intelligence. He will draw a 
 sharp trenchant line of eternal separation through 
 the dense throng of all the assembled races and 
 generations of men. He will force every individual 
 human being into one of two distinct classes re- 
 spectively destined for endless happiness and endless 
 woe. He will reserve no cases as involving complex 
 moral problems beyond His Own power of decision. 
 
 © Baur, Vorlesungen tiber N. T. Theologie, p. 109: “ Dass Jesus 
 Sich Selbst als den kiinftigen Richter betrachtete, und ankiindigte, 
 lisst sich auch nach dem Evangelium Matthaus nicht in Zweifel 
 ziehen. Fasst man die Lehre und Wirksamkeit Jesu auch nur nach 
 dem sittlichen Gesichtspunkt auf, unter welchen sie der Bergrede 
 und den Parabeln zufolge zu stellen ist, so gehért dazu wesentlich 
 auch die Bestimmung, dass sie der Absolute Maastab zur Beur- 
 theilung des sittlichen Werthes des Thuns, und Verhaltens der 
 menschen ist.” 
 
IV.) Christ proclaims Himself to be the Universal Judge. 263 
 
 He will sanction no intermediate class of awards to 
 meet the neutral morality of souls whom men might 
 deem “too bad for heaven, yet too good for hell.” 
 If it should be urged that our Lord is teaching 
 truth in the garb of parable, and that His words 
 must not be taken too literally, it may be answered 
 that, supposing this to be the case (a supposition 
 by no means to be conceded) the main features, 
 the purport and drift of the entire representation 
 cannot be mistaken. The Speaker claims to be 
 Judge of all the world. Whenever, or however, you 
 understand Him to exercise His function, Christ 
 claims in that discourse to be nothing less than 
 the Universal Judge. You cannot honestly translate 
 His language into any modern and prosaic equi- 
 valent, that does not carry with it this tremendous 
 claim. Nor is it relevant to observe that Messiah 
 had been pictured in prophecy as the Universal 
 Judge, and that in assuming to judge the world 
 Jesus Christ was only claiming an official conse- 
 quence of the character which He had _ previously 
 assumed. Surely this does not alter the nature of 
 the claim. It does indeed shew what was involved 
 in the original assertion that He was the Messiah ; 
 but it does not shew that the title of Universal 
 Judge was a mere idealist decoration having no 
 practical duties attached to it. On the contrary, 
 Jesus Christ asserts the practical value of the title 
 very deliberately ; He insists on and expands its 
 significance ; He draws out what it implies into 
 a vivid picture. It cannot be denied that He 
 literally and deliberately put Himself forward as 
 Judge of all the world; and the moral significance 
 
264 Absolute claims of Christ on the entire [ Lecr. 
 
 of this Self-exaltation is not affected by the fact 
 that He made it, as a part of His general Messianic 
 claim. If He could not claim to be Messiah without 
 making it, He ought not to have claimed to be 
 Messiah unless He had a right to make it. It may 
 be pleaded that He Himself said that the Father had 
 given Him authority to execute judgment because He 
 is the Son of Manp. But this, as has already been 
 shewn, means simply that He is the Universal 
 Judge because He is Messiah. True, the chosen title 
 of Messiahship implies His real Humanity; and His 
 Human Nature invests Him with special fitness for 
 this as for the rest of His mediatorial work. But 
 then the title Son of Man, as implying His humanity, 
 is in felt contrast to a Higher Nature which it sug- 
 gests. He is more than human ; but He is to judge 
 us because He is also Man. On the whole it is impos- 
 sible to reflect steadily on this claim of Jesus Christ 
 without feeling that either such a claim ought never 
 to have been made, or that it carries us forward irre- 
 sistibly to a truth beyond and above itself. 
 
 In dealing with separate souls our Lord’s lan- 
 guage and attitude is not less significant. We will 
 not here dwell on the fact of His forgiving sins 4, 
 and of transmitting to His Church the power of 
 forgiving them™. But it is clear that He treats 
 
 Ὁ St. John v. 27. 
 
 a St. Matt. ix. 6; St. Mark ii. το. M. Salvador represents in our 
 own day the Jewish feeling respecting this claim of our Lord. 
 “ Voila pourquoi les docteurs se recriérent de nouveau en entendant 
 le Fils de Marie s’arroger ἃ lui-meme, et transmettre ἃ ses délégués 
 le droit du pardon; ils y voyaient une autre maniére de prendre la 
 place de Dieu.” Jésus-Christ, tom. 11. p. 83. 
 
 r St. Matt. xvi. 19 ; St. John xx. 23. 
 
ΤΥ allegiance of the souls of men. 265 
 
 those who come to Him as literally belonging to 
 Himself, in virtue of an existing right. He com- 
 mands, He does not invite, discipleship. To Philip, 
 to Levi, to the sons of Zebedee, to the rich young 
 man, He says simply, “ Follow Mes.” In the same 
 spirit His Apostles are bidden to resent resistance 
 to their Master’s doctrine: “ When ye come into an 
 house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let 
 your peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, 
 let your peace return to you. And whosoever shall 
 not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart 
 out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your 
 feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable 
 for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of 
 judgment, than for that cityt.” And as His mes- 
 sage is to be received upon pain of eternal loss, so 
 in receiving it, men are to give themselves up to 
 Him simply and unreservedly. No rival claim, how- 
 ever strong, no natural affection, however legitimate 
 and sacred, may interpose between Himself and the 
 soul of His follower. “He that loveth father or 
 mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and 
 he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is 
 not worthy of Me";” “If any man come to Me, 
 and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and 
 children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own 
 life also, he cannot be My disciple*.” Accordingly 
 He predicts the painful severance between near 
 relations which would accompany the advance of the 
 Gospel: “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace 
 
 ® St. Matt. iv. 19 ; vill. 22 ; ix. 9; xix. 21; St. Mark 11. 14; St. 
 Luke v. 27; St. John 1, 43; x. 27. 
 
 t St. Matt. x. 12-15. ἃ Tbid. 37. x δύ, Luke xiv. 26. 
 
266 Absolute claims of Christ on the entire [Lecr. 
 
 on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: 
 for from henceforth there shall be five in one house 
 divided, three against two, and two against three. 
 The father shall be divided against the son, and 
 the son against the father; the mother against the 
 daughter, and the daughter against the mother ; 
 the mother in law against her daughter in law, and 
 the daughter in law against her mother in lawY.” 
 And the Gospel narrative itself furnishes us with a 
 remarkable illustration of our Lord’s application of 
 His claim. “He said unto another, Follow Me. But 
 he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my 
 father. Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury 
 their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom 
 of God. And another also said, Lord, I will follow 
 Thee ; but let me first go bid them farewell, which 
 are at home at my house. And Jesus said unto 
 him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, 
 and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God2.” 
 
 It is impossible to ignore this imperious claim 
 on the part of Jesus to rule the whole soul of man. 
 Other masters may demand a man’s active energies, 
 or his time, or his purse, or his thought, or some 
 large share in his affections. But here is a claim 
 on the whole man, on his very inmost self, on the 
 sanctities of his deepest life. Here is a claim which 
 sets aside and ignores the dearest ties of family and 
 kindred, if perchance they interfere with it. Does any 
 who is merely man dare to advance such a claim as 
 this? If so, is 1t possible that, believing him to be 
 only a fellow-creature, we can listen to the claim with 
 respect, with patience, without earnest indignation ? 
 
 y St. Luke xii. 51-53. 2 Ibid. ix. 59-62. 
 
VV 
 
 IV.] allegiance of the souls of men. 267 
 
 Do not our souls belong only and wholly to Him 
 Who made them? Can we not bury ourselves out 
 of the sight and reach of every fellow-creature, in the 
 hidden recesses of the spirit which we carry within? 
 Can we not escape, if we will, from all scrutiny save 
 One, from all wills save One, from all voices save 
 One, from all beings save Him Who gave us life ? 
 How then can we listen to the bidding of this claim 
 of the Prophet of Nazareth? Is it tolerable if He 
 is only man? If He does indeed share with ourselves 
 the great debt of creation at the hand of God; if He 
 exists, like ourselves, from moment to moment merely 
 upon sufferance ; or rather, if He is upheld in being 
 in virtue of a continuous and gratuitous ministration 
 of life, supplied to Him by the Author of all life ; is 
 it endurable that He should thus assume to deal with 
 us as His own creatures, as beings who have no rights 
 before Him, and whom He may command at will 7 
 Doubtless He speaks of certain souls as given Him 
 by His Father ; but then He claims the fealty, the 
 submission of all. And even if souls are only ‘ given’ 
 to Christ, what is the moral explanation of this 
 absolute gift of an immortal soul to a human Lord 1 
 What, in short, is the moral justification of Christ’s 
 demand upon a man’s whole being? How can He bid 
 men live for Him as for the very End of their exist- 
 ence ? how can He rightly draw towards Himself the 
 whole thought and love, I do not say, of a world, but 
 of one single human being, with this imperious 
 urgency, if He be indeed only the Christ of the Hu- 
 manitarian teachers, if He be anything else or less 
 than the supreme Lord of life 4 
 ἃ St. John x. 29. 
 
268 Such claims, to be justifiable, imply Divinity. (xc. 
 
 It is then not merely an easy transition, it is a 
 positive moral relief, to pass from considering these 
 statements and claims to those declarations in which 
 Jesus Christ explains them by explicitly asserting 
 His Divinity. For although the solemn sentences 
 in which He makes that supreme revelation are 
 comparatively few, it is clear that the truth is latent, 
 in the entire moral and intellectual posture which 
 we have been considering, unless we are prepared 
 to fall back upon a fearful alternative which it will 
 | be my duty presently to notice. 
 
 Every man who takes a public or stirring part 
 in hfe may assume that he has to deal with three 
 different classes of men. He must face his personal 
 friends, his declared opponents, and a large neutral 
 body which is swayed by turns in the opposite direc- 
 tions of friendliness and opposition. ‘Towards each 
 of these classes he has varying obligations ; and from 
 their different points of view they form their estimate 
 of his character and action. Now our Lord, entering 
 as He did perfectly into the actual conditions of our 
 human and social existence, exposed Himself to this 
 triple scrutiny, and met it by a correspondingly 
 threefold revelation. He revealed His Divinity to 
 His disciples, to the Jewish people, and to His em- 
 bittered opponents, the chief priests and Pharisees. 
 
 Bearing in mind His acceptance of the confessions of 
 Nathanael» and of St. Peter®, as well as His solemn 
 words to Nicodemus4, let us consider His language 
 in the supper-room to St. Philip. It may have been 
 Philip’s restlessness of mind, taking pleasure, as men 
 
 b St. John i. 49. ο St. Matt. xvi. τό. 
 ἃ δύ, John 11]. 18. 
 
IV.] Christ reveals His Godhead to the Aposttes. 269 
 
 will, in the mere starting a religious difficulty for its 
 own sake ; it may have been an instinctive wish to 
 find some excuse for escaping from those sterner 
 obligations which, on the eve of the Passion, disciple- 
 ship would threaten presently to impose. However 
 this was, Philip preferred to our Lord the peremptory 
 request, “ Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth 
 us.” The answer may well have thrilled those who 
 heard it. “ Have I been so long time with you, and 
 yet thou hast not known Me, Philip? He that hath 
 seen Me hath seen the Father ; and how sayest thou 
 then, Shew us the Father? Believest thou not that 
 I am in the Father, and the Father in Mee?” Now 
 what this indwelling really implied is seen in our 
 Lord’s answer to a question of St. Jude. St. Jude had 
 asked how it was that Christ would manifest Himself 
 to His servants and not to the world. Our Lord re- 
 plies that the heavenly revelation is made to love ; 
 but the form in which this answer is couched is of 
 the highest significance. “Ifa man love Me, he will 
 keep My words; and My Father will love him, and 
 We will come unto him, and make Our abode with 
 μι, “ We will come unto him and make Our 
 abode!” Reflect: Who is This Speaker That pro- 
 mises to dwell in the soul of man? And with 
 Whom does He associate Himself? It may be true 
 of any eminent saint, that “God speaks not to him, 
 as to one outside Himself; that God is in him ; 
 that he feels himself with God; that he draws from 
 his own heart what he tells us of the Father ; that 
 he lives in the bosom of God by the intercommunion 
 
 6. St. John xiv. 9, ro. f Ibid. ver. 23. 
 
270 Christ reveals His Godhead to the Jewish people. (Luc. 
 
 of every moments.” But such an one could not 
 forget that, favoured as he is by the Divine Presence 
 Uluminating his whole inner life, he is still at an 
 immeasurable interval beneath the Being Whose con- 
 descension has so enriched him. In virtue of his 
 sanctity, he would surely shrink with horror from 
 associating himself with God ; from promising, along 
 with God, to make a dwelling-place of the souls that 
 love himself; from representing his presence with 
 men as a blessing co-ordinate with the presence of 
 the Father; from proclaiming an absolute oneness 
 of will with the Will of God; from implying that 
 side by side with the Father of spirits, he was him- 
 self equally a ruler and helper of the life of the soul 
 of man. 
 
 The most prominent statements however which 
 our Lord made on the subject of His Divinity occur 
 in those conversations with the Jews which are spe- 
 cially recorded in the fourth Gospel. Our Lord 
 discovers this great truth to the Jewish people by 
 three distinct methods of statement. 
 
 (a) In the first place, He distinctly places Himself 
 on terms of equality with the Father, by a double 
 claim. He claims a parity of working power, and He 
 claims an equal right to the homage of mankind. 
 Of these claims the former is implicitly contained in 
 passages to which allusion has been already made. 
 
 8 Quoted in Dean Stanley’s Lectures on the Jewish Church, 
 part 11. p. 161, from Renan (Vie de Jesus, p. 75), who is speaking of 
 our Lord. M. Renan, in using this language, is very careful to 
 explain that he does not mean to assert that our Lord is God : 
 “Jésus n’énonce pas un moment lidée sacrilége (!) qu’il soit Dieu.” 
 
 Ibid. 
 
IV.] Ground of our Lord’s claim to work on the Sabbath. 271 
 
 We have seen that it is contained in the assumption 
 of a judicial authority equal to the task of deciding 
 the final condition of every individual human being. 
 Although this office is delegated to and exercised 
 by our Lord as Man, yet so stupendous a task is 
 obviously not less beyond the reach of any created 
 intelligence than the providential government of the 
 world. In like manner, this claim of an equality 
 in working power with the Father is mseparable 
 from our Lord’s statements that He could confer 
 animal life, and that the future restoration of the 
 whole human race to life would be effected by an 
 act of His Willi’ These statements were made by 
 - our Lord after healing the impotent man at the pool 
 of Bethesda. They are in fact deductions from a 
 previous and more comprehensive one. Our Lord 
 had healed the impotent man on the Sabbath day, 
 and had bidden him take up his bed and walk. The 
 Jews saw an infraction of the Sabbath, both in the 
 command given to the impotent man, and in the act 
 of healing him. They sought to slay our Lord ; but 
 He justified Himself by saying, “ My Father worketh 
 
 h St. John v. 21: ὁ vids obs θέλει ζωοποιεῖ. The quickening the dead 
 is a special attribute of God (Deut. xxxii. 39; 1 Sam. ii. 6). If our 
 Lord’s power of quickening whom He would had referred only 
 to the moral life of man, the statement would not have been less 
 significant. To raise a soul from spiritual death is at least as great 
 a miracle, and as strictly proper to God Almighty, as to raise a dead 
 body. But the ξωοποίησις here in question, if moral in ver. 25, is 
 physical in ver. 28; our Lord is alluding to His recently-performed 
 miracle as an illustration of His power. Ibid. vers. 8, 9. 
 
 i St. John v. 28: ἔρχεται ὥρα, ἐν 7) πάντες οἱ ἐν τοῖς μνημείοις ἀκου- 
 σονται τῆς φωνῆς αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐκπορεύσονται, οἱ τὰ ἀγαθὰ ποιήσαντες, εἰς 
 
 » - - 
 ἀνάστασιν ζωῆς, οἱ δὲ τὰ φαῦλα πράξαντες, εἰς ἀνάστασιν κρίσεως. 
 
272 Ground of our Lord’s claim to work on the Sabbath, {Lxcr. 
 
 hitherto, and I workJ.” “Therefore,” continues the 
 Evangelist, “the Jews sought the more to kill Him, 
 because He not only had broken the Sabbath, but said 
 also that God was His Own Father, making Himself 
 equal with God.” Now the Jews were not mistaken 
 as to our Lord’s meaning. They knew that the Ever- 
 lasting God “neither rests nor is weary ;” they knew 
 that if He could slumber but for a moment the uni- 
 verse would collapse into the nothingness out of 
 
 J St. John v. 17: ‘O πατήρ pov ἕως ἄρτι ἐργάζεται, κἀγὼ ἐργάζομαι. 
 “Wie der Vater seit Anbeginn nicht aufgehdrt habe, zum Heil 
 der Welt zu wirken, sondern immer fortwirke bis zur jetzigen 
 Stunde, so mit Nothwendigkeit und Recht, ungeachtet des Sab- 
 bathsgesetzes, auch Er, als der Sohn, Welcher als Solcher in dieser 
 Seiner Wirksamkeit nicht dem Sabbathsgesetze unterthan sein kann, 
 sondern Herr des Sabbaths ist.” (St. Matt. xii. 8; St. Mark 11. 28.) 
 Meyer in loc. 
 
 k St. John v. 18: Πατέρα ἴδιον ἔλεγε τὸν Θεὸν, ἴσον ἑαυτὸν ποιῶν 
 τῷ Θεῷ. Μ. Salvador points out the abiding significance of our 
 Lord’s language in the opinion of his co-religionists. “Si lon ne 
 s’attaquait qu’aux traditions et interprétations abusives, c’était s’en 
 prendre a la jurisprudence du jour, aux docteurs, aux hommes ; 
 c’était user simplement du droit commun en Israél, et provoquer 
 une réforme. Mais si l’on se mettait au dessus de l’institution en 
 elle-méme, si, comme Jésus devant les docteurs, on se proclamait le 
 Maitre absolu du sabbath, dans ce cas, entre circoncis, ¢’était atta- 
 quer ἃ la loi, en renverser une des pierres angulaires; ¢’était im- 
 poser au grand Sacrificateur le devoir de faire entendre une voix 
 accusatrice ; enfin c’était s’élever au dessus du Dieu des Juifs, 
 ou tout-au-moins se prétendre son Egal. Aussi une temoignage 
 éclatant vient ἃ l’appui de cette distinction, et ajoute une preuve 
 A la conformité générale des quatres Evangiles. ‘Les Juifs,’ dit 
 judicieusement l’apdtre et évangéliste Jean, ‘ne poursuivirent pas 
 Jésus, par ce seul motif qu'il violait les ordonnances relatives au 
 sabbath. On lui intenta une action par cette autre raison ; qu'il 
 se faisait égal ἃ Dieu.’” Salvador, Jésus-Christ, ii. pp. 80, 81. 
 
IV.] Ground of Christ’s claim to work on the Sabbath. 278 
 
 which He has summoned it. They knew that He 
 “rested on the seventh day” from the creation of 
 new beings; but that in maintaining the life of those 
 which already exist, He “worketh hitherto.” They 
 knew that none could associate himself as did 
 Jesus with this world-sustaining energy of God, 
 who was not himself God. They saw clearly that 
 no one could cite God’s example of an uninter- 
 rupted energy in nature and providence as a reason 
 for setting aside God’s positive law, without also and 
 thereby claiming to be Divine. It did not occur to 
 them that our Lord’s words need have implied no 
 more than a resemblance between His working and 
 the working of the Father. If indeed our Lord had 
 meant nothing more than this, He would not have 
 met the objection urged by the Jews against His 
 breaking the Sabbath. It would have been no argu- 
 ment against the Jews to have said that because 
 God’s incessant activity is ever working in the uni- 
 verse, therefore a holy Jew might work on unin- 
 terruptedly, although he thereby violated the Sabbath 
 day. With equal reason might it have been urged, 
 that because God sees good to take the lives of His 
 creatures, in His mercy no less than in His justice, 
 therefore a religious man might rightfully put to 
 death his tempted or afflicted brother. The Sabbath) 
 was a positive precept, but it rested on a moral basis. 
 It had been given by God Himself. Our Lord claims 
 a right to break the Sabbath, because God’s ever active 
 Providence is not suspended on that day. Our Lord 
 thus places both His Will and His Power on the 
 level of the Power and Will of the Father. He might 
 have parried the Jewish attack by saying that the 
 un 
 
274 Christ's Power Divine, although [eternally] given. (Lect. 
 
 miracle of healing the impotent man was a work of 
 God, and that He was Himself but the unresisting 
 Organ of a Higher Being. On the Socinian hypo- 
 thesis He ought to have done so. But He represents 
 the miracle as His own work. He claims distinctly 
 to be Lord of nature, and thus to be equal with the 
 Father in point of operative energy. He makes the 
 same assertion in saying that “whatsoever things 
 the Father doeth, those things the Son also doeth in 
 hke manner!” To narrow down these words so as 
 to make them only refer to Christ’s imitation of the 
 moral nature of God, is to take a liberty with the 
 text for which it affords no warrant; it is to make 
 void the plain meaning of Scripture by a sceptical 
 tradition. Our Lord simply and directly asserts that 
 the works of the Father, without any restriction, are, 
 both as to their nature and mode of production, the 
 works of the Son. Certainly our Lord insists very 
 carefully upon the truth that the power which He 
 wielded was derived originally from the Father. It 
 is often difficult to say whether He is speaking, as 
 Man, of the honour of union with Deity and of the 
 graces which flowed from Deity, conferred upon His 
 Manhood; or whether, as the Everlasting Son, He 
 is describing those Natural and Eternal Gifts which 
 are inherent in His Godhead, and which He receives 
 from the Father, the Fountain or Source of Deity, 
 not as a matter of grace or favour, but in virtue of 
 His Eternal Generation. As God, “the Son can do 
 nothing of Himself,” and this, “not from lack of 
 power, but because His Being is inseparable from 
 
 1 St. John v. 19: ἃ yap ἄν ἐκεῖνος ποιῇ, ταῦτα Kat ὁ Υἱὸς ὁμοίως 
 
 ποιεῖ. 
 
IV.} The Son to be honoured equally with the Father. Q45 
 
 That of the Father™.” It is true of Christ as God 
 in one sense—it is true of Him as Man in another 
 —that “as the Father hath life in Himself, so 
 hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.” 
 But neither is an absolute harmony of the works of 
 Christ with the Mind and Will of the Father, nor 
 a derivation of the Divine Nature of Christ Itself 
 from the Being of the Father by an unbegun and 
 unending Generation, destructive of the force of 
 our Lord’s representation of His operative energy 
 as being on a par with that of the Father. On 
 the other hand, our Lord’s real sense is made 
 plain by His statement that “the Father hath 
 committed all judgment unto the Son; that all 
 [men] should honour the Son even as they honour 
 the Father".” This claim is indeed no more than 
 He had already advanced in bidding His followers 
 trust Him and love Him. The obligation of honour- 
 ing the Son is defined to be just as stringent as 
 the obligation of honouring the Father. What- 
 ever form that honour may take, be it thought, or 
 language, or outward act, or devotion of the affec- 
 tions, or submission of the will, or that union of 
 thought and heart and will into one complex act 
 of self-prostration before Infinite Greatness, which 
 we of the present day usually mean by the term 
 “adoration,” such honour is due to the Son no less 
 than to the Father. How fearful is such a claim if 
 the Son is only Human ; how natural, how moderate, 
 how just, if He is in very deed Divine! 
 
 (8) Beyond this assertion of an equal operative 
 Power, and of an equal right to the homage of man- 
 
 m Euthym. n §t. John vy. 22, 23. 
 dal? 
 
276 Our Lord claims to be One with the Father. [ Lect. 
 
 kind with the Father, is our Lord’s revelation of 
 His absolute Oneness of Essence with the Father. 
 The Jews gathered around Him at the Feast of 
 Dedication in the Porch of Solomon, and pressed 
 Him to tell them whether He was the Christ or 
 not®, Our Lord referred them to the teaching 
 which they had heard, and to the miracles which 
 they had witnessed in vainP; but He proceeded to 
 say that there were docile and faithful souls whom 
 He terms His ‘sheep,’ and whom He ‘knew,’ while 
 they too understood and followed Him4. He goes 
 on to insist upon the blessedness of these His true 
 followers. With Him they were secure; no power 
 in earth or in heaven could “pluck them out of His 
 Hand’.” A second reason for the blessedness of His 
 sheep follows: “My Father which gave them Me is 
 a Greater Power (μεῖζον) than all: and no man is 
 able to pluck them out of My Father's Hands.” In 
 these words our Lord repeats His previous assurance 
 of the security of His sheep, but He gives a different 
 reason for it. He had represented them as “in 
 His Own Hand ;” He now represents them as in the 
 Hand of the Almighty Father. How does He con- 
 solidate these two reasons which together assure 
 His ‘sheep’ of their security? By distinctly as- 
 serting His Own oneness with the Father : “I and My 
 Father are One Thingt.”, Now what kind of unity 
 is that which the context obliges us to see in this 
 
 ο St. John x. 22, 23. P Ibid. ver. 25. 
 
 4 Ibid. ver. 27. r Tbid, ver. 28. 8 Ibid. ver. 29. 
 
 t Ibid. ver. 30: Ἐγὼ καὶ ὁ Πατὴρ ἕν ἐσμεν. For a full explanation 
 of this text see Bishop Beveridge’s noble sermon on the Unity 
 of Christ with God the Father, Works, vol. ii. Serm. xxv. 
 
IV.] Nature of this Unity. Q77 
 
 solemn statement? Is it such a unity as that which 
 our Lord desired for His followers in His intercessory 
 prayer; a unity of spiritual communion, of reciprocal 
 love, of common participation in a new and heaven- 
 sent Nature"? Is it a unity of design and co-opera- 
 tion, such as that which, in varying degrees, is shared 
 by all true workers for GodY 4 How would either of 
 these lower unities sustain the full sense of the con- 
 text, which represents the Hand of the Son as one 
 with the Hand—that is, with the Love and Power— 
 of the Father, securing to the souls of men effectual 
 preservation from eternal ruin? A unity like this 
 must be a dynamic unity, as distinct from any mere 
 moral and intellectual union, such as might exist 
 in a real sense between a creature and its God. 
 Deny this dynamic unity, and you destroy the in- 
 ternal connexion of the passagex. Admit this dy- 
 namic unity, and you admit by necessary impli- 
 
 u As in St. John xvii. 11, 22, 23. Vv x Cor. ii. 8. 
 
 x Meyer in Joh. x. 29: “Der Vater in dem Sohne ist und wirkt, 
 und daher dieser, als Organ und Triger [He is, of course, much 
 more than this) der gottlichen Thiatigkeit bei Ausfiihrung des Mes- 
 sianischen Werk, nicht geschieden von Gott [i. 6. the Father] nicht 
 ein zweiter ausser und neben Gott ist, sondern nach dem Wesen 
 jener Gemeinschaft Lins mit Gott. Gottes Hand ist daher seine Hand 
 in der Vollziehung des Werkes, bei welchem Er Gottes Macht, 
 Liebe u. s. w. handhabt und zur Ausfiihrung bringt. Die Einheit 
 ist mithin die der dynamischen Gemeinschaft, wornach der Vater 
 im Sohne ist, und doch grésser als der Sohn, [i. e. as man,] weil Er 
 ihn geweiht und gesandt hat. Die Arianische fassung von der 
 Lthischen Harmonie geniigt nicht, da die Argumentation, ohne die 
 Einheit der Macht (welche Chrys. Euth. Zig. u. A. auch Liicke mit 
 Recht urgiren) zu verstehen, nicht zutreffen wiirde.” This interpre- 
 tation is remarkable for its scholarly fairness in a writer who sits 
 so loosely to the Catholic belief in our Lord’s Godhead as Meyer. 
 
278 Our Lord’s reference to the eighty-second Psalm. [Lxct. 
 
 cation, a unity of Essence. The Power of the Son, 
 which shields the redeemed from the foes of their 
 salvation, is the very Power of the Father; and 
 this identity of Power is itself the outflow and the 
 manifestation of a Oneness of Nature. Not that at 
 this height of contemplation the Person of the Son, 
 so distinctly manifested just now in the work of 
 ceuarding His redeemed, melts away into any mere 
 aspect or relation of the Divine Being in His dealings 
 with His creatures. As St. Augustine observes on 
 this text, the ‘unum’ saves us from the Charybdis 
 of Arianism ; the ‘sumus’ is our safeguard against 
 the Scylla of Sabellius. The Son, within the incom- 
 municable unity of God, is still Himself; He is not 
 the Father, but the Son. Yet this personal sub- 
 sistence is in the mystery of the Divine Life strictly 
 compatible with Unity of Essence ;—the Father and 
 the Son are one Thing. | 
 
 “Tntellexerunt Jude, quod non intelligunt Ariani.” 
 The Jews understood our Lord to assume Divine 
 honours, and proceeded to execute the capital sen- 
 tence decreed against blasphemy by the Mosaic lawy. 
 His words gave them a fair ground for saying that 
 “being Man He made Himself God4.” Now if our 
 Lord had been in reality only Man, He might have 
 been fairly expected to say so. Whereas He proceeds, 
 as was often His wont, to reason with His opponents 
 upon their own real or assumed grounds, and so to 
 bring them back to a point at which they were forced 
 to draw for themselves the very inference which had 
 just roused their indignation. With this view our 
 Lord points to the application of the word Elohim, to 
 
 y St. John x. 31. 2 Thid. 33: 30, ἄνθρωπος ὧν, ποιεῖς Σεαυτὸν Θεόν. 
 
IV.] Our Lord re-asserts His original position. 279 
 
 the wicked judges under the Jewish theocracy, in the 
 eighty-second Psalm?, Surely, with this authoritative 
 language before their eyes, His countrymen could not 
 object to His calling Himself the Son of God. And 
 yet He irresistibly imphes that His title to Divinity 
 is higher than, and indeed distinct in kind from, that 
 of the Jewish magistrates. If the Jews could tolerate 
 that ascription of a lower and relative divinity to the 
 corrupt officials who, theocratically speaking, repre- 
 sented the Lord Jehovah ; surely, looking to the wit- 
 ness of His works, Divinity could not be denied to 
 One Who so manifestly wielded Divine power as did 
 Jesus’, Our Lord’s argument is thus @ minor ad 
 majus ; and He arrives a second time at the assertion 
 which had already given such offence to His country- 
 men, and which He now repeats in terms expressive 
 of His sharing not merely a dynamical but an essen- 
 tial unity with the Father: “The Father is in Me, 
 and I in Him®¢.” What the Father is to the Son, the 
 Son is to the Father. The context again forbids us 
 to compare this expression with the phrases which 
 are often used to express the indwelling of God with 
 holy souls, since no moral quality is here in question, 
 but an identity of Power for the performance of 
 superhuman works. Our Lord expresses this truth 
 of His wielding the power of the Father, by asserting 
 His identity of Nature with the Father, which in- 
 volves His Omnipotence. And the Jews understood 
 Him. He had not retracted what they accounted blas- 
 phemy, and they again endeavoured to take His life4. 
 
 a Ps. Ixxxii. 6. b St. John x. 37, 38. 
 © Thid. ver. 38 : ἐν Ἐμοὶ 6 Πατὴρ, κἀγὼ ἐν αὐτῷ. 
 
 4 Tbid. ver. 39 : ἐζητοῦν οὖν πάλιν αὐτὸν πιάσαι. 
 
280 The Jews understood what our Lord meant. — {Lxcr. 
 
 It will probably be said that the Church’s inter- 
 pretation of Christ’s language in the Porch of 
 Solomon is but an instance of that disposition to 
 materialize spiritual truth, which seems to be so 
 unhappily natural to the mind of man. What 
 grossness of apprehension, it will be urged, is here! 
 How can you thus confound language which merely 
 asserts the sustained intercommunion of a holy soul 
 with God, and those hard formal scholastic assertions 
 of an identity of essence? But it is obvious to re- 
 jom that in cases lke that before us, language 
 must be morally held to mean what it is understood 
 to mean by those to whom it is addressed. After 
 all, language is designed to convey thought, and if 
 a speaker perceives that his real mind has not 
 been conveyed by one statement, he is bound to 
 correct the deficiencies of that statement by another. 
 Had our Lord been speaking to populations accus- 
 tomed to Pantheistic modes of thinking, and insen- 
 sible to the interval that parts the Uncreated from 
 created life, His assertion of His oneness with the 
 Father might perhaps have passed for nothing more 
 than the rapture of a subjective ecstasy, in which the 
 consciousness of the Speaker had been so raised above 
 its ordinary level, that He could hyperbolically de- 
 scribe His sensations as Divine. Had our Lord been 
 an Indian, or an Alexandrian, or a German mystic, 
 some such interpretation might have been reasonably 
 affixed to His language. Had our Lord been a 
 Christian instead of the Author of Christianity, we 
 might, after carefully detaching His words from their 
 context, have even supposed that He was describing 
 the blessed experience of millions of believers ; it 
 
IV.| References made by our Lord to His Pre-existence. 81 
 
 being certain that, since the Incarnation, the soul of 
 man is capable of a real union with the All-holy 
 God. Undoubtedly writers like St. Augustine and 
 many of later date do speak of the union between 
 God and the Christian soul in terms which signally 
 illustrate the loving condescension of God truly pre- 
 sent in holy souls, of God’s gift of Himself to His 
 redeemed creatures. But the belief of these writers 
 respecting the Nature of the Most High has placed 
 the phrases of their mystical devotion beyond the 
 reach of a possible misunderstanding. Our Lord 
 however was addressing earnest monotheists, keenly 
 alive to the interval that separates the Life of the 
 Creator from the life of the creature, and religiously 
 jealous of the Divine prerogatives. The Jews did 
 not understand Christ’s claim to be One with the 
 Father in any merely moral, spiritual, or mystical 
 sense. Christ did not encourage them so to under- 
 stand it. The motive of their indignation was not 
 disowned by Him. They believed Him to mean that 
 He was Himself a Divine Person; and He never re- 
 pudiated that construction of His language. 
 
 (γ) In order however to determine the real sense of 
 our Saviour’s claim to be One with the Father, let 
 us ask a simple question. Does it appear that He is 
 recorded to have been conscious of having existed 
 previously to His Human Life upon this earth? Sup- 
 pose that He is only a good man enjoying the highest 
 degree of constant spiritual imtercommunion with 
 God, no references to a Pre-existent Life can be anti- 
 cipated. There is nothing to warrant such a belief 
 in the Mosaic. Revelation, and to have professed it 
 on the soil of Palestine would simply have been 
 
282 Christ contrasts His Eternal Existence (Lecr. 
 
 taken by the current opinion of the people as a proof 
 of mental derangement. But believe that Christ is 
 the Only-begotten Son of God, manifested in the 
 sphere of sense and time, and clothed in our human 
 nature, and some references to a consciousness ex- 
 tending backwards through the past into a boundless 
 eternity are only what would naturally be looked 
 for at His hands. 
 
 Let us then listen to Him as He is proclaiming 
 to His countrymen in the temple, “If a man keep 
 My saying, He shall never see death®.”. The Jews 
 exclaim that by such an announcement He assumes 
 to be greater than Abraham and the prophets. They 
 indignantly ask, “Whom makest Thou Thyself?” 
 Here as elsewhere our Lord keeps both sides of His 
 relation to the Eternal Father in full view: it is the 
 Father that glorifies His Manhood, and the Jews would 
 glorify Him too if they were the Father's true 
 children. But the Jews were at variance not merely 
 with their Heavenly Father. The earthly ancestor of 
 the Jewish race might be invoked to rebuke his re- 
 creant posterity. “Your father Abraham rejoiced to 
 see My day, and he saw it and was glad.” Abraham 
 had seen the day of Messiah by the light of prophecy, 
 and accordingly this statement was a claim on the 
 part of Jesus to be the true Messiah. Of itself such 
 a claim would not have shocked the Jews; they would 
 have discussed it on its merits. They had latterly 
 looked for a political chief, victorious but human, in 
 their expected Messiah ; they would have welcomed 
 any prospect of realizing their expectations. But 
 
 e St. John viii. 52 : ἐάν τις τὸν λόγον τὸν ἐμὸν τηρήσῃ, θάνατον ov μὴ 
 
 θεωρήσῃ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα. 
 
IV.] with the life of Abraham. 283 
 
 they detected a deeper and to them a less welcome 
 meaning in the words of Christ. He had meant, they 
 thought, by His ‘Day’ something more than the years 
 of His Human Life. At any rate they would ask 
 Him a question, which would at once justify their 
 suspicions or enable Him to clear Himself. “Thou,” 
 they said to Him, “art not yet fifty years old, and 
 hast Thou seen Abraham?” Now if our Lord had 
 only claimed to be a human Messiah, such as the 
 Jews of later years had learned to look for, He must 
 have earnestly disavowed any such inference from 
 His words. He might have replied that if Abraham 
 saw Him by the light of prophecy, this did not of 
 itself imply that He was Abraham’s contemporary, 
 and so that He had Himself literally seen Abraham. 
 But His actual answer more than justified the most 
 extreme suspicions of His examiners as to His real 
 meaning. “Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say 
 unto you, Before Abraham was, J am.” In these tre- 
 mendous words the Speaker institutes a double con- 
 trast, in respect both of the duration and of the mode 
 of His existence, between Himself and the great 
 ancestor of Israel. Πρὶν ᾿Αβραὰμ γενέσθαι. Abraham, 
 then, had come into existence at some given point of 
 time. Abraham did not exist until his parents gave 
 him birth. But, γώ εἰμι. Here is simple existence, 
 with no note of beginning or end‘, Our Lord says 
 
 f St. John viii. 58. Meyer in loc.: “ Ehe Abraham ward, bin Ich, 
 ailter als Abraham’s Werden ist meine Existenz.” Stier characterizes 
 our Lord’s words as “a sudden [not to Himself] flash of revelation 
 out of the depths of His own Eternal Consciousness.” That Christ 
 should finally have spoken thus, is not, Stier urges, to be wondered 
 at, on the supposition of this Eternal Consciousness ever abiding 
 
984 Christ speaks of having come down from heaven, [Lucr. 
 
 not, “Before Abraham was, I was,” but “I am.” He 
 claims pre-existence indeed, but He does not merely 
 claim pre-existence ; He unveils a consciousness of 
 Eternal Being. He speaks as One on Whom time 
 has no effect, and for Whom it has no meaning. He 
 is the I AM of ancient Israel; He knows no past, as 
 He knows no future; He is unbeginning, unending 
 Being; He is the eternal ‘Now.’ This is the plain 
 sense of His language, and perhaps the most in- 
 structive commentary upon its force is to be found 
 in the violent expedients to which humanitarian 
 writers have been driven in order to evade 108, 
 
 Here again the Jews understood our Lord, and 
 attempted to kill Him ; while He, instead of explain- 
 ing Himself in any sense which would have disarmed 
 their anger, simply withdrew from the temple. 
 
 With this statement we may compare our Lord’s 
 references to His pre-existence in His two great 
 
 with Him. Rather is it wonderful, that He should ordinarily, 
 and as a rule, have restrained it so much. Here too, indeed, He 
 restrains Himself. He does not go on to say, as afterwards in the 
 Great Intercession—zpo τοῦ τὸν κόσμον εἶναι (St. John xvii. 5). 
 
 & Of. Meyer in St. Joh. viii. 58: “Das ἐγώ εἰμι ist aber weder : 
 Ich bin es (der Messias) zu deuten (Faustus Socinus, Paulus, ganz 
 contextwidrig), noch in den Rathschluss Gottes, zu verlegen (Sam. 
 Orel, Grotius, Paulus, B. Crusius), was schon durch das Praes. 
 verboten wird. Nur noch geschichtlich bemerkenswerth ist die 
 von Faustus Socinus auch in das Socinianische Bekenntniss (s. 
 Catech. Racov. ed. Oeder, p. 144, f.) uebergegangene Auslegung : 
 ‘Ehe Abraham, Abraham, d.i. der Vater vieler Volker, wird, bin 
 Ich es, niimlich der Messias, das Licht der Welt.’ Damit ermahne 
 Er die Juden, an Ihn zu glauben, so lange es noch Zeit sei, ehe die 
 Gnade non ihnen genommen und auf die Heiden tibergetragen 
 werde, wodurch dann Abraham der Vater vieler Volker werde.” 
 
 h δύ, John viii. 59. 
 
IV.] and of ascending up to where He was before. 285 
 
 Sacramental Discourses. Conversing with Nico- 
 demus He describes Himself as the Son of Man 
 Who had come down from heaven, and Who while 
 yet speaking was in heaveni. Preaching in the 
 ereat synagogue of Capernaum, He calls Himself 
 “the Bread of Life Which had come down from 
 heaven.” He repeats and expands this description 
 of Himself. His pre-existence is the warrant of His 
 lifegiving power*. The Jews objected that they 
 knew His father and mother, and did not under- 
 stand His advancing any such claim as this to a 
 Pre-existent Life. Our Lord replied by saying that 
 no man could come to Him unless taught of God 
 to do so, and then proceeded to re-assert His pre- 
 existence in the same terms as before!. He pursued 
 His former statement into its mysterious conse- 
 quences. Since He was the heaven-descended Bread 
 of Life, His Flesh was meat indeed and His Blood was 
 drink indeed™. They only would have life in them 
 who should eat this Flesh and drink this Blood®. 
 Life eternal, Resurrection at the last day°, and His 
 own Presence even now within the soul, would follow 
 upon a due partaking of that heavenly food. When 
 the disciples murmured at this doctrine as a ‘hard 
 saying 4,’ our Lord met their objections by predicting 
 His coming Ascension into heaven as an event which 
 would justify His allusions to His Pre-existence, no 
 less than to the life-giving Virtue of His Manhood. 
 “What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend 
 
 i St. John iii. 13. k Tbid. vi. 33. 
 1 Thid. vers. 44-51. m bid. ver. 55. 
 n Ibid. ver. 53. © Ibid. ver. 54. 
 
 P Ibid. ver. 56. a Ibid. ver. 60. 
 
286 Christ’s Glory before the world was. [ Lect. 
 
 up where He was before™?” And the truth of our 
 Lord’s pre-existence lightens up such mysterious say- 
 ings as the following: “I know whence I came, 
 and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, 
 and whither I gos ;” “I am from above: ... 1 am not 
 of this worldt;” “If ye believe not that I am He, ye 
 shall die in your sins";” “I came forth from the 
 Father, and am come into the world : again, I leave 
 the world, and go to the Father*.” And how full of 
 solemn significance is that reference to “the glory 
 which I had with Thee before the world wasY,” in 
 the great intercession which our Incarnate Saviour 
 offered to the Eternal Father on the eve of His . 
 
 agony ! 
 Certainly taken alone, our Lord’s allusions to His 
 
 r St. John vi. 62. Strauss thinks it “ difficult but admissible” to 
 interpret St. John vill. 58, with the Socinian Crell, of a purely 
 ideal existence in the predetermination of God. He considers it 
 however “scarcely possible to view the prayer to the Father (St. 
 John xvii. 5) to confirm the δόξα which Jesus had with Him before 
 the world was, as an entreaty for the communication of a glory 
 predestined for Jesus from eternity.” He adds that the language 
 of Jesus (St. John vi. 62) where He speaks of the Son of Man 
 re-ascending where He was before, ἀναβαίνειν ὅπου ἢν τὸ πρότερον, 
 is in its intrinsic meaning, as well as in that which is reflected 
 on it from other passages, unequivocally significative of actual, not 
 merely of ideal pre-existence.” Leben Jesu, pt. ii. kap. 4. § 65. 
 
 Here, as sometimes elsewhere, Strauss incidentally upholds the 
 natural and Catholic interpretation of the text of the Gospels; nor 
 are we now concerned with the theory to which he eventually 
 applies it. It may be further observed, that Strauss might have 
 at least interpreted St. John viii. 58 by the light of St. John vi. 62. 
 
 8 Ibid. viii. 14. t Ibid. ver. 23. 
 
 ἃ Tbid. ver. 24. x Ibid. xvi. 28. 
 
 y Ibid. xvii. 5. 
 
ΙΝ. Our Lord’s testimony when before the Sanhedrim. 987 
 
 Pre-existence need not imply His true Divinity. 
 There is indeed no ground for the theory of a Pales- 
 tinian doctrine of metempsychosis ; and even Strauss 
 shrinks from supposing that the Fourth Evangelist 
 makes Jesus the mouthpiece of Alexandrian theories 
 of which a Jewish peasant would never have heard. 
 But Arianism would argue, and with reason, that in 
 some of the passages just referred to, though not in 
 all, our Lord might conceivably have been speaking 
 of a created although pre-existent life. Yet if we 
 take these passages in connexion with our Lord's 
 assertion of His being One with the Father, each 
 truth forthwith falls into its place. On the one 
 hand, Christ asserts His substantial oneness with 
 Deity, on the other His distinct pre-existent Per- 
 sonality. He might be an inferior and created Being, 
 if He were not thus absolutely One with God. He 
 might be only a saintly man, or an aspect, a relation 
 of the Divine Life, if His language about His pre- 
 existence did not clearly imply that before His birth 
 of Mary He was a living and superhuman Person. 
 
 If indeed, in His dealings with the multitude, our 
 Lord had been really misunderstood, He had a last 
 opportunity for explaining Himself when He was 
 arraigned before the Sanhedrim. Nothing is more 
 certain than that, whatever was the dominant motive 
 that prompted our Lord’s apprehension, the Sanhe-| 
 drim condemned Him because He claimed Divinity. 
 The members of the court stated this before Pilate. 
 “We have a law, and by our law He ought to die, 
 because He made Himself the Son of God4.” Their 
 
 z St. John xix.7. “Devant ce procurateur,” observes M. Sal- 
 vador, “chacune des parties émit une parole capitale. Telle fut 
 
288 Our Lord condemned for claiming to be Divine. {Lcr. 
 
 language would have been meaningless if they had 
 understood by the ‘Son of God’ nothing more than 
 the ethical or theocratic Sonship of their own an- 
 cient kings and saints. If the Jews held Christ to 
 be a false Messiah, a false prophet, a blasphemer, it 
 was because He claimed literal Divinity. True, the 
 Messiah was to have been Divine. But the Jews had 
 humanized the Messianic promises ; and the Sanhe- 
 drim held Jesus Christ to be worthy of death under 
 the terms of the Mosaic law, as expressed in Levi- 
 ticus and Deuteronomy*. After the witnesses had 
 delivered their various and inconsistent testimonies, 
 the high priest arose and said, “I adjure Thee by the 
 living God, that Thou tell us whether Thou be the 
 Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou 
 hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter 
 shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right 
 hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 
 Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He 
 hath spoken blasphemy.” The blasphemy did not 
 consist in the assumption of the title Son of Man, 
 or in the claim to be Messiah, or even, excepting 
 indirectly, in that which by the terms of Daniel’s 
 prophecy was involved in Messiahship, namely, the 
 commission to judge the world. It was the further 
 claim to be the Son of God, not in any moral or 
 
 celle du conseil ou de ses délégués : ‘ Nous avons une loi; d’aprés 
 cette loi il doit mourir,’ non parce quwil s’est fait Fils de Dieu, 
 selon l’expression familiére ἃ notre langue et a nos prophétes ; mais 
 parce qu'il se fait égal ἃ Dieu, et Dieu méme.” Salvador, Jésus- 
 Christ, ii. p. 204. 
 
 a Ley. xxiv. 16; Deut. xiii. 5; cf. Wilson, Illustration of the 
 Method of Explaining the New Testament, p. 26. 
 
 b St. Matt. xxvi. 63-65. 
 
IV.] Our Lord condemned for claiming to be Divine. 289 
 
 theocratic, but in the natural sense, at which the high 
 priest and his coadjutors professed to be so deeply 
 shocked. The Jews felt, as our Lord intended, that 
 the Son of Man in Daniel’s prophecy could not but 
 be Divine; they knew what He meant by appro- 
 priating such words as applicable to Himself. Just 
 as one body of Jews had endeavoured to destroy 
 Jesus when He called God His Father in such 
 sense as to claim Divinity® ; and another when He 
 contrasted His Eternal Being with the fleeting life 
 of Abraham in a distant past’; and another when 
 He termed Himself Son of God, and associated Him- 
 self with His Father as being dynamically and so 
 substantially One® ;—just as they murmured at His 
 pretension to “have come down from heavenf,” and 
 detected blasphemy in His authoritative remission of 
 sins$; so when, before His judges, He admitted that 
 He claimed to be the Son of God, all further dis- 
 cussion was at an end, The high priest exclaimed 
 “Ye have heard His blasphemy,” and they all con- 
 demned Him to be guilty of death. And a very 
 accomplished Jew of our own day, M. Salvador, has 
 shewn that this question of our Lord’s Divinity 
 was the real point at issue in that momentous trial, 
 He maintains that a Jew had no other logical alter- 
 native to belief in the Godhead of Jesus Christ than 
 the imperative duty of putting Him to death®, 
 
 ¢ St. John v. 17, 18. ἃ Tbid. viii. 58, 59. 
 
 © Ibid, x. 30, 31, 39. f Ibid. vi. 42. 
 
 & St. Matt. ix. 3; St. Luke v. 20, 21. 
 
 h Salvador, Jésus-Christ, ii. pp. 132, 133, 195: “ La question 
 
 avait un coté politique ou national juif: c’était la résistance du 
 Fils de Marie, dans Jérusalem méme, aux ordres et avertissements 
 U 
 
900 What are the features which chiefly impress us (Liner. 
 
 III. In order to do justice to the significance of 
 our Lord’s language about Himself, let us for a mo- 
 ment recall our very fundamental conceptions of His 
 character. There is mdeed a certain seeming im- 
 propriety in using that word ‘character’ with respect 
 to Jesus Christ at all. For im modern language 
 ‘character’ generally implies the predominance or the 
 absence of some side or sides of that great whole 
 which we picture to ourselves in the background of 
 each individual man as the true and complete ideal 
 of human nature. This predominance or absence of 
 particular traits or faculties, this precise combination 
 of active or of passive qualities, determines the moral 
 flavour of each individual life, and constitutes cha- 
 racter. Character is that whereby the individual is 
 marked off from the presumed standard or level of 
 
 du grand Conseil. Au point de vue religieux, selon la loi, Jésus 
 se trouvait en cause pour s’étre déclaré égal ἃ Dieu et Dieu lui- 
 méme.” See also the Rev. W. Wilson’s Illustration of the Method 
 of Explaining the New Testament, p. 77, sqq. Mr. Wilson shews 
 that the Sanhedrim sincerely believed our Lord to be guilty of 
 the crime of blasphemy, as inseparable, to a Jewish apprehension, 
 from His claim to be Divine. This is argued (1) from the regularity 
 of the proceedings of the Sanhedrim, the length of the trial, and the 
 earnestness and unanimity of the judges. The false witnesses were 
 considered as such by the Sanhedrim: our Lord was condemned 
 on the strength of His Own confession; (2) from the language of 
 the members of the Sanhedrim before Pilate: “By owr law He 
 ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God ;” (3) from 
 the fact that the members of the Sanhedrim had no material object 
 to gain by pronouncing Jesus guilty, without being persuaded of 
 His criminality in claiming to be a Divine Person. Mr. Wilson 
 fortifies these considerations by appealing to our Lord’s silence, to 
 St. Peter’s address to his countrymen in Acts ili. 14-17, and to 
 the general conduct of the Jewish people. 
 
ἘΝῚ] in Christ's moral character 2 291 
 
 typical manhood. Yet the closest analysis of the 
 actual Human Life of Jesus reveals a moral Portrait 
 not only unlike any that men have witnessed before 
 or since, but especially remarkable in that It pre- 
 sents an equally balanced and entirely harmonious 
 representation of all the normal elements of our per- 
 fected moral nature. Still, we may dare to ask the 
 question: What are the features in That perfectly 
 harmonious moral Life, upon which the reverence and 
 the love of Christians dwells most constantly, most 
 thankfully, most enthusiastically 4 
 
 If then on such a subject I may utter a truism 
 without irreverence, I say first of all that Jesus Christ 
 was sincere. He possessed that one indispensable 
 qualification for any teacher, specially for a teacher 
 of religion: He believed in what He said, without 
 reserve ; and He said what He believed, without re- 
 gard to consequences. Material error, my brethren, 
 you may pardon, if it be error which in good faith 
 believes itself to be truth. But evident insincerity 
 you cannot pardon; you cannot regard with any other 
 sentiment than that of indignation the conscious 
 propagation of what is known to be false, or even 
 to be exaggerated. If any could doubt the sincerity 
 of our Lord, it might suffice, among the various 
 facts which so irresistibly prove this truth, to point 
 to His dealings with persons who followed and 
 trusted Him. It is easy to denounce the errors of 
 men who oppose us; but it is difficult to be always 
 perfectly outspoken with those who love us, or who look 
 up to us, or whose services may be of use to us, and 
 who may be alienated by our outspokenness. Now 
 Jesus Christ does not merely drag forth to the light 
 
 U2 
 
292 Sincerity of Jesus Christ. { Lecr. 
 
 of day the hidden motives of His powerful adver- 
 saries, that He may exhibit them with so mercifully 
 implacable an accuracy, in all their baseness and pre- 
 tension. He exposes, with equal impartiality, the 
 weakness, or the unreality, or the self-deception of 
 others who already regard Him with affection or who 
 desire to espouse His cause. A disciple addresses 
 Him as “Good Master.” In order to mark His dis- 
 pleasure at perceiving that the speaker was using 
 a conventional expression which, however true in 
 itself, he did not mean, our Lord sharply asked, 
 “Why callest thou Me Good? There is none good 
 but One, that is, Godi.” A multitude which He has 
 fed miraculously returns to seek Him on the follow- 
 ing day, but instead of silently accepting this tacit 
 proof of His popular power, He observes, “ Ye seek 
 Me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye 
 did eat of the loaves and were filled*.” On another 
 oecasion, we are told, “there went great multitudes 
 with Him.” He turns, warns them that all human 
 affections must be sacrificed to His service, and that 
 none could be His disciple who does not take up the 
 cross!. He solemnly bids men “ count the cost” before 
 they “build the tower” of discipleship™. He is on 
 the pomt of being deserted by all, and an Apostle 
 protests with fervid exaggeration that he is ready 
 to go with Him to prison or to death., But our 
 Lord, instead of at once welcoming the affection which 
 dictated this protestation, pauses to shew Simon 
 Peter how little he really knew of the weakness of 
 
 i St. Matt. xix. 16, 17. k St. John vi. 26. 
 1 St. Luke xiv. 26, 27. m Tbid. ver. 28. 
 
1] Unselfishness of Jesus Christ. 293 
 
 his own heart®. With the woman of Samaria, with 
 Simon the Pharisee, with the Jews in the temple, 
 with the rich young man, it is ever the same ; Christ 
 cannot flatter, He cannot disguise, He cannot but set 
 forth truth in its hmpid purity. Such was His moral 
 attitude throughout : sincerity was the mainspring of 
 His whole thought and action ; and when He stood 
 before His judges He could exclaim, in this as in a 
 wider sense, “To this end was I born, and for this 
 cause came I into the world, that I should bear 
 witness unto the truth®.” Surely this sincerity of our 
 Holy Saviour is even at this hour a main secret of His 
 attractive power. Others, we know, may flatter and 
 deceive us till at length we grow sick and weary at 
 heart of a world, from which Truth in her ‘stern sim- 
 plicity might sometimes seem to have fled. But 
 Jesus Christ, speaking to us from the Gospel pages, 
 or speaking in the secret chambers of conscience, 15 
 a Monitor Whom we can trust to tell us the un- 
 welcome but wholesome truth; and could we conceive 
 of Him as false, He would no longer be Himself in 
 our thought ; He would not be changed ; He would 
 simply have disappeared. 
 
 A second moral truism : Jesus Christ was unselfish. 
 His Life was a prolonged act of Self-sacrifice ; and 
 sacrifice of self is the practical expression and mea- 
 sure of unselfishness. It might have seemed that 
 where there was no sin to be curbed or worn away 
 by sorrow and pain, there room might have been 
 found for a lawful measure of self-satisfaction. But 
 “even Christ pleased not Himself ;” He “sought not 
 His Own glory ;” He “came not to do His Own 
 
 n Ὁ, John xiii. 37, 38. 0 Ibid. xviii. 37. 
 
294 Humility of Jesus Christ. [Lecr. 
 
 will.” His Body and His Soul, with all the faculties, 
 the activities, the latent powers of Each, were offered 
 to the Divine Will. His friends, His relatives, His 
 mother and His home, His pleasure, His reputation, 
 His repose, were all abandoned for the glory of God 
 and for the good of His brethren. His Self-sacrifice 
 included the whole range of His human thought and 
 affection and action ; it lasted throughout His Life ; 
 its highest expression was His Death upon the Cross. 
 Those who believe Him to have been merely a man 
 endowed with the power of working miracles, or even 
 only with the power of wielding vast moral influence 
 over masses of men, cannot but recognise the rare 
 loveliness and sublimity of a Life in which great 
 powers were consciously possessed, yet were never ex- 
 ercised for those objects which the selfish instinct of 
 ordinary men would naturally pursue. It is this dis- 
 interestedness ; this devotion to the real interests of 
 humankind; this radical antagonism of His character 
 to that vile thing selfishness, which in our better 
 moments we men hate in ourselves and which we 
 always hate in others ;—it is this unrivalled and 
 majestic renunciation of all that has no object be- 
 yond self, which has won to Jesus Christ the heart 
 of mankind. In Jesus Christ we hail the One Friend 
 Who loves perfectly ; Who expresses perfect love by 
 the utter surrender of Self; Who loves even unto 
 death. In Jesus Christ we greet the Good Shep- 
 herd of humanity ; He is the Good Shepherd under 
 Whose care we can lack nothing, and Whose glory 
 it is that He “ giveth His Life for the sheep 4.” 
 
 P Rom. xv. 3; St. John v. 30; vi. 38; St. Matt. xxvi. 39. 
 ᾳ St. John x. 11, 
 
IV.) These virtues depend on the truth of His Divinity. 905 
 
 A third moral truism: Jesus Christ was humble. 
 He might have appeared even to human eyes as 
 “One naturally contented with obscurity; wanting 
 the restless desire for eminence and distinction which 
 is SO Common in great men; hating to put forward 
 personal claims; dishking competition and disputes 
 who should be greatest ;... fond of what is simple 
 and homely, of children, and poor people’™” It 
 might have almost seemed as if His preternatural 
 powers were a source of distress and embarrass- 
 ment to Him ; so eager was He to economize their 
 exercise and to veil them from the eyes of men. He 
 was particularly careful that His miracles should not 
 add to His reputation’. Again and again He very 
 earnestly enjoined silence on those who were the 
 subjects of His miraculous curest. He would not 
 gratify persons whose motive in seeking His com- 
 pany was a vain curiosity to see the proofs of His 
 power". By this humility is Jesus Christ most em- 
 phatically distinguished from the philosophers of the 
 ancient world. Whatever else they may have been, 
 they were not humble. But Jesus Christ loses His 
 individuality if you separate Him in thought for one 
 moment from His ‘great humility.’ His humility is 
 the key to His whole life ; it is the measuring-line 
 whereby His actions, His sufferings, His words, His 
 very movements are to be meted in order to be 
 understood. “Learn of Me,” He says, “for I am 
 meek and lowly of heart ; and ye shall find rest unto 
 your souls’.” 
 
 τ Eece Homo, pp. 178, 179. s δύ, Luke viii. 51. 
 
 t St. Matt. ix.30: ἐνεβριμήσατο; xii. 16: ἐπετίμησεν αὐτοῖς. 
 
 u St. Mark viii. 11, 12; St. Matt. xvi. 1, 4; St. Luke xi. 16; 
 St. John vi. 30. ν St. Matt. xi. 29. 
 
296 Is Jesus Christ humble, if Heis not God? — {Lxcr. 
 
 But what becomes of these integral features of 
 His character if, after considering the language 
 which He actually used about Himself, we should 
 go on to deny that He is God 4 
 
 Is He, if He be not God, really humble? Is that 
 reiterated Self-assertion, to the accents of which we 
 have been listening this morning, consistent with 
 any known form of creaturely humility? Can Jesus 
 thus bid us believe in Him, love Him, obey Him, 
 live by Him, live for Him; can He thus claim to 
 be the universal Teacher and the universal Judge, 
 the Way, the Truth, the Life of humanity,—if He 
 be indeed only man? What is humility but the 
 honest recognition of truth respecting self? Could 
 any mere man claim that place in thought, in 
 society, in history, that authority over conscience, 
 that relationship to the Most High ; could he claim 
 such powers and duties, such a position, and such 
 prerogatives as are claimed by Jesus Christ, and yet 
 be justly deemed “meek and lowly of heart?” If 
 Christ is God as well as Man, His language falls 
 ‘into its place, and all is intelligible; but if you 
 deny His Divinity, you must conclude that some 
 of the most precious sayings in the Gospel are but 
 the outbreak of a preposterous self-laudation ; they 
 breathe, you might add, the very spirit of another 
 Lucifer. 
 
 If Jesus Christ be not God, is He really unselfish 1 
 He bids men make Himself the centre of their affec- 
 tions and their thoughts; and when God does this He 
 is but recalling man to that-which is man’s proper 
 duty, to the true direction and law of man’s being. 
 But deny Christ’s Divinity, and what will you say of 
 
IV.] 75 Jesus Christ unselfish, if He is not God ? 297 
 
 the disinterestedness of His perpetual Self-asser- 
 tion*? What matters it that He teaches the ‘en- 
 thusiasm of humanity,’ if that enthusiasm was after 
 all to centre in His merely human Self, and to sur- 
 round His Personal Manhood with a tribute of 
 superhuman honour? What avails it that He teaches 
 the law of self-renouncement, if He is Himself thus 
 culty of its signal infraction? Nay, to what pur- 
 pose will you still insist that He dies upon the Cross 4 
 The Cross is indeed for Christians the symbol and 
 the throne of a boundless Love ; but it is only such 
 to those who believe in the Divinity of the Crucified. 
 Deny the truth of Christ’s account of Himself; deny 
 the overwhelming moral necessity for His perpetual 
 Self-assertion ; and His Death may assume another 
 aspect. For He plainly courted death by His last de- 
 nunciations against the Pharisees, and by His presence 
 at a critical moment in Jerusalem. That He was 
 
 x M. Renan thinks that our Lord’s self-assertion may be ac- 
 counted for satisfactorily in the following manner. “II ne préchait 
 pas ses opinions,’ M. Renan observes, “il se préchait lui-méme. 
 Souvent des Ames trés grandes et trés-désintéressées présentent, 
 associé ἃ beaucoup d’élévation, ce caractére de perpétuelle atten- 
 tion ἃ elles-mémes, et d’extréme susceptibilité personnelle, qui en 
 général est le propre des femmes. Leur persuasion que Dieu est en 
 elles et s’occupe perpétuellement d’elles est si forte qu’elles ne 
 craignent nullement de s’imposer aux autres.” (Vie de Jésus, p. 76.) 
 Accordingly, we are told that “Jésus ne doit pas étre jugé sur la 
 γὰρ] de nos petites conyenances. L’admiration de ses disciples 
 le débordait et lentrainait. 1] est évident que le titre de Rabbi, 
 dont il s’était d’abord contenté, ne lui suffisait plus ; le titre méme 
 de prophéte on d’enyoyé de Dieu ne répondait plus ἃ sa pensée. 
 La position qu'il s’attribuait était celle d’un étre surhumain, et il 
 voulait qu’on’ le regard&t comme ayant avec Dieu un rapport plus 
 élevé que celui des autres hommes.” (Vie de Jésus, p. 246.) 
 
298 Is Jesus Christ sincere, if He is not God ? [Lecr. 
 
 thus voluntarily slain and has redeemed us by His 
 Blood is indeed the theme of the praises which 
 Christians daily offer Him on earth and in paradise. 
 But if He be not the Divine Victim freely offering 
 Himself for men upon the altar of the Cross, may 
 He not be what Christian lips cannot force them- 
 selves to uttery? You urge that at least He would 
 be a man freely devoting Himself for truth and 
 goodness. But it is precisely here that His exces- 
 sive Self-assertion would impair our confidence in 
 the purity of His motive. Is not self-sacrifice, even 
 when pushed to the last extremity, a suspected and 
 tainted thing, when it goes hand in hand with 
 a consistent effort to give unwarranted prominence 
 to self? Have not men ere now even risked death 
 for the selfish, albeit unsubstantial, object of a post- 
 humous renown? If Jesus was merely man,’ and 
 His death no more than the fitting close, the su- 
 preme effort of a life consistently devoted to the 
 assertion of self, has He not succeeded beyond the 
 dreams of the most delirious votary of fame?? If 
 ‘the blood of a merely human Christ was the price 
 which was deliberately paid for glory on Mount 
 Calvary, then it is certain that the sufferer has had 
 his reward. But at least he died, only as others 
 have died, who have sought and found in death as 
 in life, a tribute of sympathy, of admiration, of 
 honour at the hands of their fellow-men. And we 
 owe to such a sufferer nothing beyond the com- 
 passionate silence wherewith charity would fain veil 
 the violence of selfishness, robed in her garments - 
 and seeking to share her glory and her power, 
 
 y Cf. Newman, Phases of Faith, p. 159. z Félix, 
 
IV.] Ts Jesus Christ sincere, if He is not God ? 299 
 
 while false to the very vital principle which makes 
 her what she is. 
 
 Once more, if Jesus Christ is not God, can we 
 even say that He is sincere? Let us suppose that it 
 were granted, as it is by no means granted, that Jesus 
 Christ nowhere asserts His literal Godhead. Let us 
 suppose that He was after all merely man, and had 
 never meant to do more than describe in the lan- 
 guage of mysticism the intertwining of His human 
 Soul with the Spirit of God, in a communion so 
 deep and absorbing as to obliterate His sense of 
 distinct human personality. Let this, 1 say, be 
 supposed to have been His meaning, and let His 
 sincerity be taken for granted. Who then shall 
 anticipate the horror of His soul or the fire of His 
 words, when He is once made aware of the terrible 
 misapprehension to which His language has given 
 rise in the minds around Him? “Thou being a man, 
 makest Thyself God.” The charge was literally true: 
 being human, He did make Himself God. Christians 
 believe that He only ‘made’ Himself What He 15. 
 But if He is not God, where does He make any ade- 
 quate repudiation of a construction of His words so 
 utterly derogatory to the great Creator, so necessarily 
 
 a M. Renan indeed says, “Jésus n’énonce pas un moment l’idée 
 sacrilége qu’il soit Dieu.” (Vie de Jésus, p. 75.) Yet, “on ne nie 
 pas qu’il y eit dans les affirmations de Jésus, le germe de la doc- 
 trine qui devait plus tard faire de lui une hypostase divine.” (Ibid. 
 p- 247.) M. Renan even explains our Lord’s language as to His 
 Person on the ground that “Vidéalisme transcendant de Jésus 
 ne lui permit jamais d’avoir une notion bien claire de sa propre 
 personnalité. 71 est son Pere, son Pere est lui.” (p. 244.) In other 
 words, our Lord did affirm His Divinity, but only because He was, 
 unconsciously perhaps, a Pantheist ! 
 
900 Jesus Christ not sincere, if He is not God. [Lucr, 
 
 abhorrent to a good man’s thought? If it should be 
 urged that on one occasion He “explained His claim 
 to Divinity by a quotation which implied that He 
 shared that claim with the chiefs of the theocracy,” 
 it has already been shewn that by that quotation 
 our Lord only deprecated immediate violence, and 
 claimed a hearing for language which the Jews 
 themselves regarded as not merely allowable, but 
 sacred. The quotation justified His language only, 
 and not His full meaning, which, upon gaining the 
 ear of the people, He again proceeded to assert. If 
 it should be contended that in such sayings as 
 that addressed to His disciples, “ My Father is greater 
 than I>,” He abandoned His claim to be a Person 
 internal to the Essential Life of God ; it may suffice 
 to reply, that this saying can have no such force, 
 if its application be restricted, as the Latin Fathers 
 do restrict it, and with great apparent probability, 
 to our Lord’s Manhood. But even if our Lord 15 
 here speaking, as the Greeks generally maintain, 
 of His Essential Deity, His Words still express very 
 exactly a truth which is recognised and required 
 by the Catholic doctrine. The Subordination of the 
 Everlasting Son to the Everlasting Father is strictly 
 compatible with the Son’s absolute Divinity ; it is 
 
 b St. John xiv. 28: πορεύομαι πρὸς τὸν Πατέρα" ὅτι ὁ Πατήρ μου μείζων 
 μου ἐστί. For Patristic arguments against the Arian abuse of this 
 text, see Suicer, Thes. 11. p. 1368. The μειζονότης of the Father is 
 referred by St. Athanasius, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Chrysostom, 
 St. Basil, and St. Hilary, to His being the Unbegotten One ; by 
 St. Cyril, St. Augustine (in loc. ; de Trin. i. 7 ; Enchiridion, x.), 
 St. Ambrose (tom. iii. p. 795), St. Leo (Ep. xxviii. 6. 4), to the 
 Son’s humiliation as incarnate. See the very full but unsatisfactory 
 note of Meyer in loc, 
 
IV.} Jesus Christ not sincere, if He is not God. 901 
 
 abundantly implied in our Lord’s language ; and it 
 is an integral element of the ancient doctrine which 
 steadily represents the Father as Alone Unoriginate, 
 the Fount of Deity in the Eternal Life of the Ever- 
 blessed Trinity’. An admission on the part of one 
 in whom men saw nothing more than a fellow-crea- 
 ture, that the Everlasting God in heaven was 
 ‘greater’ than himself, would fail to satisfy a 
 thoughtful listener that no claim to Divinity was 
 advanced by the speaker. Such an admission pre- 
 supposes some assertion to which it stands in the 
 relation of a necessary qualification. If any good 
 man of our acquaintance should say that God was 
 greater than himself, should we not hold him to be 
 guilty of something worse than a stupid truism 4 
 Should we not accuse him of implying that he was 
 not a creature of God’s Hand, and even that the 
 
 ¢ Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. iv. i. 1: “ Decretum illud Synodi Ni- 
 cenie, quo statuitur Filium Dei esse Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ, Deum de Deo, 
 suo caleculo comprobarunt doctores Catholici, tum qui ante cum 
 qui post Synodum illam secripsére. Nam illi omnes uno ore docu- 
 erunt naturam perfectionesque divinas, Patri Filioque competere 
 non collateraliter aut coordinaté, sed subordinaté; hoe est, Filium 
 eandem quidam naturam divinam cum Patre communem habere, 
 sed ἃ Patre communicatam ; ita silicet ut Pater solus naturam illam 
 divinam a se habeat, sive ἃ nullo alio, Filius autem ἃ Patre ; pro- 
 - inde Pater, Divinitatis que in Filio est, fons, origo ac principium 
 sit.” See Bull’s remarks on the fundamental character of the error 
 of calling the Son αὐτόθεος, as though He were not begotten of the 
 Father, Ibid. iv. i. 7. Also Petavius, De Deo Deique proprietatibus, 
 ii. 3,6. Compare Hooker’s Works, vol. i., Keble’s Preface, p. 1xxxi. 
 When St. Athanasius calls our Lord αὐτόθεος αὐτοσοφία, &e., αὐτὸς 
 has the sense of ‘full reality’ as distinct from that of ‘Self-origina- 
 tion ;’ the idea is excluded that He had only a measure of Wisdom 
 or Divinity. See Petavius de Trin. vii. 11. 
 
302 Insincerity of the Christ of M. Renan. [ Lect. 
 
 hypothesis of his absolute equality with God was 
 not altogether out of the question? Should we 
 not remind him indignantly that the life of man is 
 related to the Life of God, not as the less to the 
 oreater, but as the created to the Uncreated, and 
 that it was an impertinent irrevereuce to admit 
 superiority of rank, where the real truth could only 
 be expressed by an assertion of radical difference of 
 natures? Or would it content a sincere man, who 
 had often been charged with associating himself 
 with the Supreme Being, to say merely that God 
 was greater than himself? Would not such a man, 
 knowing himself to be only a man, insist again and 
 again with jealousy and passion upon the incom- 
 municable glory of the great Creator? Would not 
 Christ our Lord, had He been only a man, have an- 
 ticipated the burning words of His Own Apostles at 
 the gate of Lystra? Far more welcome to such an one 
 most surely it would have been to have been accused 
 of blasphemy for meaning what he never meant, than 
 to have been literally supposed to mean it. Brethren, 
 there are occasions when silence is impossible to a 
 sincere soul. Especially is this the case when ac- 
 quiescence in falsehood is likely to gain personal 
 reputation, when connivance at a misapprehension 
 may agegrandize self, ever so slightly, at the cost 
 of others. How would the sincerity of a human 
 teacher deserve the name if he were indeed capable 
 of passively allowing the language of moral elevation. 
 or of mystical devotion to be construed without pro- 
 test or repudiation into an assertion of his claiming 
 ~ the Rank and Name of the great God in heaven ? 
 It is here that the so-termed historical Christ of 
 
BV] Insincerity of the Christ of M. Renan. 303 
 
 M. Renan, who, as we are assured, is stil) the moral 
 chief of humanity¢, would appear even to our natural 
 English sense of honesty to be involved in serious 
 moral difficulties. M. Renan indeed with much ver- 
 satility assures us that there are many standards 
 of sincerity®; that is to say, that it is possible under 
 
 ἃ Renan, Vie de Jésus, p. 457: “Cette sublime personne, qui 
 chaque jour préside encore au destin du monde, il est permis de 
 l'appeler divine, non en ce sens que Jésus ait absorbé tout le divin, 
 on lui ait été adéquat (pour employer l’expression de la scolastique) 
 mais en ce sens que Jésus est Vindividu qui ὦ fait faire ἃ son 
 espece le plus grand pas vers le divin. L’humanité dans son en- 
 semble offre un assemblage d’étres bas, égoistes, supérieurs ἃ 
 Yanimal en cela seul que leur égoisme est plus réfléchi. Mais, au 
 milieu de cette uniforme vulgarité, des colonnes s’élévent vers le 
 ciel et attestent une plus noble destinée. Jésus est la plus haute 
 de ces colonnes qui montrent ἃ homme d’ou il vient, et ot il doit 
 tendre. En lui s’est condensé tout ce qu'il y a de bon et d’élevé 
 dans notre nature.” On the other hand M. Renan is not quite 
 consistent with himself, as he is of opinion that certain Pagans and 
 unbelievers were in some respects superior to our Lord. “ L’hon- 
 néte et suave Marc-Auréle, humble et doux Spinosa, n’ayant pas 
 cru aw miracle, ont été exempts de quelques erreurs que Jésus 
 partagea.” (Ibid. p. 451.) Moreover, this superiority to our Lord 
 seems to be shared by that advanced school of sceptical enquirers 
 to which M. Renan himself belongs. “Par notre extréme délica- 
 tesse dans l’emploi des moyens de conviction, par notre sincérité 
 absolue et notre amour désintéressé de Vidée pure, nous avons fondé, 
 nous tous qui avons voué notre vie a la science, wn nowvel idéal 
 de moralité.” (Ibid.) Indeed as regards our Lord, M. Renan 
 suggests that “il est probable que beaucoup de ses fautes ont été 
 dissimulées.” (Ibid. p. 458.) 
 
 e Ibid. p. 252: “ Pour nous, races profondément sérieuses, la 
 conviction signifie la sincérité avec soi-méme. Mais la sincérité 
 avec soi-méme n’a pas beaucoup de sens chez le peuples orientaux, 
 peu habitués aux délicatesses de l’esprit critique. Bonne foi et 
 imposture sont des mots~qui, dans notre conscience rigide, s’oppo- 
 
904 Insincerity of the Christ of M. Renan. [Lecr. 
 
 certain circumstances to acquiesce knowingly in what 
 is false, while yet being, in some very refined sense, 
 sincere. Thus, just as the Christ of M. Renan can 
 permit the raising of Lazarus to look liké a mi- 
 racle, while he must know that the whole episode 
 has been a matter of previous arrangementf, so he 
 
 sent comme deux termes inconciliables. En orient, il y a de l’un 
 ἃ Vautre mille fuites et mille détours. Les auteurs de livres 
 apocryphes (de ‘Daniel,’ d’ ‘Henoch,’ par exemple), hommes si 
 exaltés, commettaient pour leur cause, et bien certainement sans 
 ombre de scrupule, un acte que nous appellerions un faux. La 
 vérité matérielle a trés-peu de prix pour Voriental ; il voit tout ἃ 
 travers ses idées, ses intéréts, ses passions. L histoire est impos- 
 sible, si ’on n’admet hautement gw y a pour la sincérité plusieurs 
 mesures.” : 
 
 ΓΜ, Renan introduces his account of the resurrection of Lazarus 
 by observing that “les amis de Jésus désiraient un grand miracle 
 qui frappat vivement Vincrédulité hiérosolymite. La résurrection 
 d’un homme connu a Jérusalem dut paraitre ce qu'il y avait de plus 
 convaincant. [1 faut se rappeler ici que la condition essentielle 
 de la vraie critique est de comprendre la diversité des temps, et 
 de se dépouiller des répugnances instinctives qui sont le fruit 
 d'une éducation purement raisonnable. [1 faut se rappeler aussi 
 que dans cette ville impure et pesante de Jérusalem Jésus n était 
 plus lui-méme. Sa conscience, par la faute des hommes, et non par 
 la sienne, avait perdu quelque chose de sa limpidité primordiale.” 
 (Vie de Jésus, p. 359.) Under these circumstances, “il se passa a 
 Béthanie quelque chose qui fut regardé comme une résurrection.” 
 (p. 360.) “ Peut-étre Lazare, pale encore de sa maladie, se fit-il 
 entourer de bandelettes comme un mort, et enfermer dans son 
 tombeau de famille... Jésus désira voir encore une fois celui αι] 
 avait aimé, et, la pierre ayant été ecartée, Lazare sortit avec ses 
 bandelettes et la téte entourée d’un suaire. Cette apparition dut 
 naturellement étre regardée par tout le monde comme une résur- ἡ 
 rection, La foi ne connait d’autre loi que l’intérét de ce qu'elle 
 croit le vrai..... Quant a Jésus, il n’était pas plus maitre que 
 saint Bernard, que saint Frangois d’Assise de modérer l’avidité 
 
IV.] Insincerity of the Christ of M. Renan. 305 
 
 can apparently use language which is generally un- 
 derstood to claim Divinity, without being bound to 
 explain that he is altogether humans. The “ideal 
 of humanity” contents Himself, it appears, with a 
 lower measure, so to call it, of sincerity ; and while 
 we are scarcely embarrassed by the enquiry whether 
 such sincerity is sincere or not, we cannot hesitate 
 to observe that it is certainly consistent neither with 
 real humility nor with real unselfishness. 
 
 Thus our Lord’s human glory fades before our 
 eyes when we attempt to conceive of it apart from 
 the truth of His Divinity. He is only perfect as 
 Man, because He is truly God. If He is not God, 
 He is not a humble or an unselfish man. Nay, He 
 is not even sincere; unless indeed we have recourse 
 to a supposition upon which the most desperate of 
 His modern opponents have not yet ventured, and 
 say with His jealous kinsmen in the early days of 
 His ministry, that He was beside Himself. Cer- 
 
 de la foule et de ses propres disciples pour le merveilleux. La 
 mort, dailleurs, allait dans quelques jours lui rendre sa liberté 
 divine, et Parracher aux fatales nécessités dun rile qui chaque jour 
 devenait plus exigeant, plus difficile ἃ soutenir.” (p. 363.) 
 
 & Sometimes M. Renan endeavours to avoid this conclusion by 
 representing our Lord’s self-proclamation as being in truth the 
 result of a vain self-surrender to the fanatical adulation of His 
 followers, the reiteration of which in the end deceived Himself. 
 Vie de Jésus, p. 139: “ Naturellement, plus on croyait en lui, plus 
 il croyait en lui-méme.” Accordingly (p. 210) “sa légende (i.e. the 
 account given of Him in the Gospels and in the Apostles’ Creed, 
 and specially the doctrine of His Divinity) était le fruit d’une 
 grande conspiration toute spontanée et s’élaborait autour de lui de 
 son vivant.” Thus (p. 238) the Christ of M. Renan first allows 
 himself to be falsely called the Son of David, and then “il finit, 
 ce semble, par y prendre plaisir.” Cf. p. 297, note. 
 
 x 
 
906 ‘Alternatives’ sometimes inevitable. [Lecr. 
 
 tainly it would seem that there must have been 
 strange method in a madness which could command 
 the adoration of the civilized world ; nor would any 
 such supposition be seriously entertamed by those 
 who know under what conditions the very lowest 
 forms of moral influence are at all possible. The 
 choice really lies between the hypothesis of conscious 
 and culpable insincerity, and the belief that Jesus 
 speaks literal truth and must be taken at His word. 
 You complain that this is one of those alterna- 
 tives which orthodoxy is wont to substitute for less 
 violent arguments, and from the exigencies of which 
 you piously recoil? But under certain circumstances 
 such alternatives are egitimate_guides to truth, nay, 
 they are the only guides available. Certainly we 
 cannot create such alternatives by any process of 
 dialectical manufacture, if they do not already exist. 
 If they are not matters of fact, they can easily be 
 convicted of inaccuracy. We who stand in this pulpit 
 are not makers or masters of the eternal harmonies ; 
 we can but exhibit them as best we may. Truth, 
 even in her severer moods, must ever be welcome to 
 sincerity ; and she does us a service by reminding us 
 that it is not always possible to embrace within the 
 range of our religious negations just so much dogma 
 as we wish to deny, and to leave the rest really 
 intact. It is no hardship to reason that we cannot 
 deny the conclusion of a proposition of Euclid with- 
 out impugning the axioms which are the basis of its 
 demonstration. It is no hardship to faith that we 
 cannot deny the Divinity of Jesus without casting 
 a slur upon His Human Character. There are fatal 
 inclines in the world of religious thought; and even 
 
ΙΝ.] Balance of the Argument. 307 
 
 if men deem it courteous to ignore them, such cour- 
 tesy is scarcely charitable. If our age does not guide 
 anxious minds by its loyal adherence to God’s Reve- 
 lation, its very errors may have their uses; they may 
 warn us off ground, on which Reason cannot rest, and 
 where Faith is imperilled, by enacting before our eyes 
 a reductio ad absurdum or a reductio ad horribile. 
 Of a truth the alternative before us is terrible ; 
 but can devout and earnest thought falter for a mo- 
 ment in the agony of its suspense? Surely it can- 
 not. The moral Character of Christ viewed in con- 
 nexion with the preternatural facts of His Human 
 Life, will bear the strain which the argument puts 
 upon it. It is easier for a good man to believe that, 
 in a world where he is encompassed by mysteries, 
 where his own being itself is a consummate mystery, 
 the Moral Author of the wonders around him should 
 for great moral purposes have taken to Himself a 
 Created Form, than that the One Human Life which 
 realizes the idea of humanity, the One Man Who is at 
 once perfect strength and perfect tenderness, the One 
 Pattern of our race in Whom its virtues are com- 
 bined and from Whom its vices are eliminated, should 
 have been guilty when speaking about Himself of an 
 arrogance, of a self-seeking, and of an insincerity 
 which, if admitted, must justly degrade Him far below 
 the moral level of millions among His unhonoured wor- 
 shippers. It is easier, in short, to believe that God has 
 consummated His works of wonder and of mercy by a 
 crowning Self-Revelation in which mercy and beauty 
 reach their climax, than to close the moral eye to the 
 brightest spot that meets it in human history, and 
 —since a bare Theism reproduces the main difficul- 
 X 2 
 
908 Warrantry of our Lord’s claim to be Divine, — [Lucr. 
 
 ties of Christianity without any of its compensations 
 —to see at last in man’s inexplicable destiny only the 
 justification of his despair. Yet the true alternative 
 to this frightful conclusion is in reality a frank ac- 
 ceptance of the doctrine which is under consideration 
 in these lectures. For Christianity, both as a creed 
 and as a life, depends absolutely upon the Personal 
 Character of its Founder. Unless His virtue wasé 
 only apparent, unless His miracles were nothing 
 better than a popular delusion, we must admit that 
 His Self-assertion is justified, even in the full mea- 
 sure of its blessed and awful import. We must deny 
 the antagonism which is said to exist between the 
 doctrine of Christ’s Divinity and the history of His 
 human manifestation. We must believe and con- 
 fess that the Christ of history is the Christ of the 
 Catholic Creed. 
 
 Eternal Jesus! it is Thyself Who hast thus bidden 
 us either despise Thee or worship Thee. Thou 
 wouldest have us despise Thee as our fellow-man, if 
 we will not worship Thee as our God. Gazing on 
 Thy Human Beauty, and listening to Thy Words, 
 we cannot deny that Thou art the Only Son of God 
 Most High; disputing Thy Divinity, we could no 
 longer clearly recognise Thy Human perfections. But 
 if our ears hearken to Thy revelations of Thy great- 
 ness, our souls have already been won to Thee by 
 Thy truthfulness, by Thy lowliness, and by Thy love. 
 Convinced by these Thy moral glories, and by Thy 
 majestic exercise of creative and healing power, we 
 believe and are sure that Thou hast the words of 
 eternal life. Although in unveiling Thyself before 
 Thy creatures, Thou dost stand from age to age at 
 
IV.] discoverable in His Works and Character. 309 
 
 the bar of hostile and sceptical opinion, yet assuredly 
 from age to age, by the assaults of Thine enemies 
 no less than in the faith of Thy believing Church, 
 Thou art justified in Thy sayings and art clear when 
 Thou art judged. Ofa truth, Thou art the King of 
 Glory, O Christ ; Thou art the Everlasting Son of 
 the Father. 
 
LECTURE YV. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST’S DIVINITY IN THE 
 WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN. 
 
 That Which was from the beginning, Which we have heard, 
 Which we have seen with our eyes, Which we have looked 
 upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life; (for 
 the Life was manifested, and we have seen It, and bear witness, 
 and shew unto you that Eternal Infe, Which was with the 
 Father, and was manifested unto us ;) That Which we have 
 seen and heard declare we unto you.—1 St. JOHN 1. 1-3. 
 
 AN attempt was made last Sunday to determine 
 from the recorded language of Jesus Christ what 
 was the verdict of His Own consciousness, expressed 
 as well as implied, respecting the momentous ques- 
 tion of His higher and Eternal Nature. But we were 
 incidentally brought face to face with a problem, the 
 fuller consideration of which lies naturally in the 
 course of the present discussion. It is undeniable 
 that the most numerous and direct claims to Di- 
 vinity on the part of our Lord are to be found in 
 the Gospel of St. John. While this fact has a 
 significance of a positive kind which will be noticed 
 presently, it also involves the doctrine before us 
 in the entanglement of a large critical question. 
 To leave this question undiscussed would, under 
 existing circumstances, be impossible. To discuss it, 
 
The question of St. John’s Gospel. 311 
 
 within the limits assigned to the lecturer, and even 
 with a very moderate regard to the amount of details 
 which it necessarily involves, must needs make a 
 somewhat unwonted demand, as you will indulgently 
 bear in mind, upon the patience and attention of the 
 audience. 
 
 If the Book of Daniel has been recently described 
 as the battle-field of the Old Testament, it is not 
 less true that St. John’s Gospel is the battle-field 
 of the New. It is well understood on all sides that 
 no mere question of fancy or abstract criticism is at 
 stake when the authenticity of St. John’s Gospel is 
 challenged. The point of this momentous question lies 
 close to the very heart of the creed of Christendom ; 
 
 “ Neque enim levia aut ludicra petuntur 
 Premia; sed Turni de vita et sanguine certant®.” 
 
 Strange and mournful it may well seem to a Chris- 
 tian that the pages of the Evangelist of Divine love 
 should have been the object of an attack so energetic, 
 sO persevering, 50 inventive, so unsparing! Strange 
 indeed such vehement hostility might be deemed, 
 if only it were not in harmony with that deep in- 
 stinct of our nature which forbids neutrality when 
 we are face to face with high religious truth ; which 
 forces us to take really, if not avowedly, a side re- 
 specting it ; which constrains us to hate or to love, 
 to resist or to obey, to accept or to reject it. If 
 St. John’s Gospel had been the documentary illustra- 
 tion of some extinct superstition, or the title-deed of 
 some suppressed foundation, at best capable of 
 attracting the placid interest of studious antiqua- 
 
 ἃ Virg. Ain. xii. 764, 765 
 
912 Ancient and first modern Oljections. [ Lect. 
 
 rianism, the attacks which have been made on it 
 might well have provoked our marvel. As it is, there 
 is no room for legitimate wonder, that the words of 
 the Evangelist, like the Person of the Master, should 
 be a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. For 
 St. John’s Gospel is the most conspicuous written 
 attestation to the Godhead of Him Whose claims 
 upon mankind can hardly be surveyed without 
 passion, whether it be the passion of adoring love 
 or the passion of vehement and determined enmity. 
 I. From the disappearance of the obscure heretics 
 called Alogi, in the later sub-apostolic age, until the 
 end of the seventeenth century, the authenticity of 
 St. John’s Gospel was not questioned. The earliest 
 modern objections to it seem to have been put forward 
 in this country, and to have been based on the assump- 
 tion of a discrepancy between the narrative of St.John 
 and those of the first three Gospels. These objections 
 were combated by the learned Leclerc ; and for well- 
 nigh a century the question was thought to have 
 been decided». The brilliant reputation of Herder 
 secured attention for his characteristic theory that 
 St. John’s Gospel describes, not the historical, but 
 Yan ideal Christ ; and Herder was followed by several 
 German writers, who accepted conclusions which he 
 had implied, and who expressly rejected the authen- 
 ticity of the fourth Gospel. But these negative 
 criticisms were met in turn by the arguments of 
 Roman Catholic divines like Hug, and of critics who 
 
 b It ought perhaps to have been added that Evanson’s attack 
 upon St. John in 1792 was answered by Dr. Priestley. 
 
 ¢ Especially by Dr. Ammon, preacher and professor of theology 
 at Erlangen and Dresden successively. 
 
Υ.] The “ Probabilia” of Bretschneider. 313 
 
 were by no means loyal even to Lutheran orthodoxy, 
 such as Eichhorn and Kuinoel. By their labours the 
 question was again held to have been set at rest in 
 the higher regions of German scholarship and free- 
 thinking. This second settlement of the question 
 was rudely disturbed by the publication of the 
 famous “Probabilia” of Bretschneider, the learned 
 superintendent of Gotha, in the year 18204 Re- 
 producing the arguments which had been advanced 
 by the earlier negative speculation, and adding others 
 of his own, Bretschneider rekindled the discussion. 
 Bretschneider exaggerated the contrast between the 
 representation of our Lord’s Person in St. John and 
 that in the synoptists into a positive contradiction. 
 Protestant Germany was then fascinated by the 
 school of Schleiermacher, which, by the aid of a 
 combination of criticism and mysticism, was groping 
 its way back towards the creeds of the Catholic 
 Church. Schleiermacher, as is well known, not only 
 accepted the Church-belief respecting the fourth 
 Gospel, but he made that Gospel the criterion of 
 his somewhat reckless estimate of the other three. 
 The sharp controversy which followed resulted in 
 Bretschneider’s retractation of his thesis, and the 
 impression produced by this retractation was not 
 violently interfered with until 1835, when Dr. Strauss 
 shocked the conscience of all that was Christian in 
 Europe by the publication of his first “ Life of Jesus.” 
 Dr. Strauss’ position in respect of St. John’s Gospel 
 was a purely negative one. He confined himself to 
 asserting that St. John’s Gospel was not what the 
 
 ἃ Probabilia de Evangelii et Epistolarum Johannis Apostoli 
 indole et origine. Lipsiz, 1820, 
 
914 Theory of the later Tubingen School. (Lect. 
 
 Church had always believed it to be, that it was not 
 the work of the son of Zebedee. The school of 'Tubin- 
 gen aspired to supplement this negative criticism of 
 Strauss by a positive hypothesis. St. John’s Gospel 
 was held to represent a highly-developed stage of an 
 orthodox gnosis, the growth of which presupposed 
 the lapse of at Jeast a century since the age of the 
 Apostles. It was decided by the leading writers 
 of the school of Tubingen, by Drs. Baur, Schwegler, 
 and Zeller, that the fourth Gospel was not com- 
 posed until after the year a.p. 160. And, although 
 this opinion may have been slightly modified by 
 later representatives of the Tubingen school, such 
 as Hilgenfeld ; the general position, that the fourth 
 Gospel was not written before the middle of the 
 second century, is held by disciples of that school 
 as one of its very fundamental tenets. 
 
 Here then it is necessary to enquire, what was 
 the belief of the second century itself, as to the 
 date and authenticity of St. John’s Gospel. 
 
 Now it is scarcely too much to assert that every 
 decade of the second century furnishes its quota of 
 proof that the four Gospels as a whole, and St. John’s 
 in particular, were to the Church of that age what 
 they are to the Church of the present. Beginning 
 at the end of the century, we may observe how 
 general at that date was the reception of the four 
 Gospels throughout the Catholic Church. Writing 
 at Lyons, in the last decade of the century, St. Ire- 
 neus discourses on various cosmical and spiritual 
 analogies to the fourfold form of the Gospel nar- 
 rative (εὐαγγέλιον τετράμορφον) in a strain of mys- 
 tical reflection which implies that the co-ordinate 
 
WA The Church of the Second Century. 815 
 
 authority of the four Gospels had been already long 
 established®. St. Irenzeus, it is well known, had sat 
 at the feet of St. Polycarp, who was himself a disciple 
 of St. John. St. Irenzeus, in his letter to the erring 
 Florinus, records with reverent affection what Polycarp 
 had told him of the lessons which he had personally 
 learnt from John and the other disciples of Jesusf. 
 Now is it conceivable that Irenzeus should have 
 imagined that a literary forgery, which is asserted 
 to have been produced at a date when he was himself 
 a boy of twelve or fourteen years of age, was actually 
 the work of the Apostle Johns? At Carthage, about 
 
 e §. Irenzus, adv. Heer. ili. 11. 8: ἐξ ὧν φανερὸν, ὅτι ὁ τῶν ἁπάντων 
 , , ε , Sink - r \ ‘ ΄ \ , 
 τεχνίτης Λόγος, 6 καθήμενος ἐπὶ τῶν Χερουβὶμ καὶ συνέχων τὰ πάντα, 
 ‘ .“ 3 , od ce ee , ‘ > s cn 
 φανερωθεὶς τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, ἔδωκεν ἡμῖν τετράμορφον τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, ἑνὶ 
 δὲ πνεύματι συνεχόμενον... . Καὶ γὰρ τὰ Χερουβὶμ τετραπρόσωπα᾽ καὶ 
 ‘ , ae Sy) a , he en a a ‘ 
 τὰ πρόσωπα αὑτῶν, εἰκόνες τῆς πραγματείας τοῦ Yiov Tov Θεοῦ... Kat 
 τὰ εὐαγγέλια οὖν τούτοις σύμφωνα, ἐν οἷς ἐγκαθέζεται Χριστός. Τὸ μὲν 
 ‘ A > , A > A A A c ‘ > aA ‘ 
 yap κατὰ ᾿ἸΙωάννην, τὴν ἀπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἡγεμονικὴν airod .... . καὶ 
 » \ “~ ΄ A > > - 3 c 4 
 ἔνδοξον γενεὰν διηγεῖται, λέγων᾽ ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος. 
 
 f §. Irenzeus, fragment, vol. i. p. 822, ed. Stieren: εἶδον γάρ σε, 
 mais ὧν ἔτι ἐν τῇ κάτω "Agia παρὰ τῷ Πολυκάρπῳ, λαμπρῶς πράττοντα 
 > - - 2 \ , > ~ ’ Ψ πὰς a \ 
 ev τῇ βασιλικῇ αὐλῇ, καὶ πειρώμενον εὐδοκιμεῖν παρ᾽ αὐτῷ: μᾶλλον γὰρ 
 τὰ τότε διαμνημονεύω τῶν ἔναγχος γινομένων" (ai γὰρ ἐκ παίδων μαθήσεις 
 
 ΄ ΄“ ΄“ c “ Ca a ’ > ~ ‘ 4 
 συναύξουσαι τῇ ψυχῇ, ἑνοῦνται αὐτῇ) ὥστε pe δύνασθαι εἰπεῖν καὶ τὸν 
 τόπον, ἐν ᾧ καθεζόμενος διελέγετο ὁ μακάριος Πολύκαρπος, καὶ τὰς προ- 
 σόδους αὐτοῦ καὶ τὰς εἰσόδους καὶ τὸν χαρακτῆρα τοῦ βίου καὶ τὴν τοῦ 
 
 , 29.7 ‘ ‘ , a > “ ‘ \ a ‘ ‘ \ 
 σώματος ἰδέαν καὶ τὰς διαλέξεις ἃς ἐποιεῖτο πρὸς τὸ πλῆθος, καὶ τὴν μετὰ 
 » , ‘ «ς > U A ‘ “ “- ~ is , 
 Iwavvov συναναστροφὴν ὡς ἀπήγγελλε, καὶ τὴν τῶν λοιπῶν τῶν ἑωρακότων 
 \ , Φ' ὧδ > , ‘ πος Fs ‘ ‘ “ 
 τὸν Κύριον, καὶ ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευε τοὺς λόγους αὐτῶν᾽ καὶ περὶ τοῦ Κυρίου 
 τίνα ἦν ἃ παρ᾽ ἐκείνων ἀκηκόει, καὶ περὶ τῶν δυνάμεων αὐτοῦ, καὶ περὶ 
 τῆς διδασκαλίας, ὡς παρὰ τῶν αὐτοπτῶν τῆς ζωῆς τοῦ Λόγου παρειληφὼς 
 ὁ Πολύκαρπος, ἀπήγγελλε πάντα σύμφωνα ταῖς γραφαῖς. Cf. Eus. Hist. 
 Keel. ν. 20. St. Irenzeus succeeded St. Pothinus in the see of Lyons. 
 Pothinus was martyred A.p. 177, and Irenzeus died A.D. 202. 
 
 ® Ady. Her. iii. 1. St. Ireneeus was probably born about A.D. 140. 
 
316 Witness of the Second Century | Lcr. 
 
 the same time, Tertullian wrote his great work against 
 the heretic Marcion®. Tertullian brought to the dis- 
 cussion of critical questions great natural acuteness, 
 which had been sharpened during his early life by 
 his practice at the African bar. Tertullian distin- 
 gushes between the primary, or actually apostolical 
 rank of St. Matthew and St. John, and the rank of 
 St. Mark and St. Luke, as being apostolical men of 
 a secondary ranki; but he treats of all four as in- 
 spired writers of an authority beyond discussion *, 
 Against Marcion’s mutilations of the sacred text Ter- 
 tullian fearlessly appeals to the witness of the most 
 ancient apostolical Churches. Tertullian’s famous 
 canon runs thus: “Si constat id verius quod prius, 
 id prius quod et ab initio, id ab initio quod ab apo- 
 stolis, pariter ubique constabit, id esse ab apostolis 
 
 h Tertullian was born at Carthage about A.D. 160. Cave places 
 his conversion to Christianity at A.D. 185, and his lapse into the 
 Montanist heresy at A.D. 199. Dr. Pusey (Libr. of Fathers) makes 
 his conversion later, A.D. 195, and his secession from the Church 
 ASD) 201. 
 
 i Ady. Mare. iv. 6. 2: “Constituimus imprimis evangelicum in- 
 strumentum apostolos auctores habere, quibus hoc munus evangelii 
 promulgandi ab Ipso Domino sit impositum. Si et apostolicos, 
 non tamen solos, sed cum apostolis et post apostolos, quoniam 
 preedicatio discipulorum suspecta fieri posset de gloriz studio, si 
 non adsistat illi auctoritas magistrorum, immo Christi, que magis- 
 tros apostolos fecit. Denique nobis fidem ex apostolis Joannes 
 et Matthzeus insinuant, ex apostolicis Lucas et Marcus instaurant.” 
 
 K Ady. Mare. iv. 6. 5: ‘‘Eadem auctoritas ecclesiarum apostoli- 
 carum ceteris quoque patrocinabitur Evangeliis, que proinde per 
 illas et secundum illas habemus, Joannis dico et Matthei, licet et 
 Marcus quod edidit Petri affirmetur, cujus interpres Marcus. Nam 
 et Luce digestum Paulo adscribere solent. Capit magistrorum 
 videri que discipuli promulgarint.” 
 
χω to St. John’s Gospel. 317 
 
 traditum, quod apud ecclesias apostolorum fuerit 
 sacrosanctum!.” But what would have been the 
 worth of this appeal if it could have been even sus- 
 pected that the last Gospel was really written when 
 Tertullian was a boy or even a young man? At 
 Alexandria, almost contemporaneously with Ter- 
 tullian, St. Clement investigated the relation of the 
 synoptic Gospels to St. John™, and he terms the 
 latter the εὐαγγέλιον πνευματικὸν, It is unnecessary 
 to say that the intellectual atmosphere of that 
 famous Greeco-Egyptian school would not have been 
 favourable to any serious countenance of a really 
 suspected document. At Rome St. John’s Gospel 
 was certainly received as being the work of that 
 Apostle in the year 170. This is clear from the 
 so-termed Muratorian fragment®; and if in receiving 
 it the Roman Church had been under a delusion 
 so fundamental as is implied by the Tubingen 
 
 1 Adv. Marcion. iv. 5. 
 
 m Westcott, Canon of the New Testament, 2nd ed. p. 104. See Mr. 
 Westcott’s remarks on St. Clement’s antecedents and position in the 
 Church, ibid. pp. 298, 299. St. Clement lived from about 165 to 
 220. He flourished as a Christian Father under Severus and 
 Caracalla, 193-220. 
 
 n Kus. Hist. Eecl. vi. 14, condensing Clement’s account, says, τὸν 
 μέντοι Ἰωάννην ἔσχατον συνιδόντα ὅτι τὰ σωματικὰ ἐν τοῖς εὐαγγελίοις 
 δεδήλωται, προτραπέντα ὑπὸ τῶν γνωρίμων, Πνεύματι θεοφορηθέντα, πνευ- 
 ματικὸν ποιῆσαι εὐαγγέλιον. 
 
 © Westcott on the Canon, p. 170. The Muratorian fragment 
 claims to have been written by a contemporary of Pius I., who 
 probably ruled the Roman Church from about A.D. 142 to 157. 
 “Pastorem vero nuperrime temporibus nostris in urbe Roma 
 Hermas conscripsit, sedente cathedra urbis Rome ecclesie Pio 
 episcopo fratre ejus.” Cf. Hilgenfeld, Der Kanon und die Kritik 
 des N. T., p. 39, sqq. 
 
918 Witness of the Second Century [Lecr. 
 
 hypothesis, St. John’s own pupil Polycarp might 
 have been expected to have corrected his Roman 
 brethren when he came to Rome in the year 163. 
 In the farther East, St. John’s Gospel had already 
 been translated as a matter of course into the Pes- 
 chito Syriac versionP. It had been translated im 
 Africa into the Latin Versio Italad. At or soon after 
 
 P On the difficulty of fixing the exact date of the Peschito, see 
 Mr. Westcott’s remarks, Canon of New Testament, pp. 206-210. 
 Referring (1) to the Syriac tradition of its Apostolic origin at 
 Edessa, repeated by Gregory Bar Hebreus; (2) to the necessary 
 existence of an early Syriac version, implied in the controversial 
 writings of Bardesanes ; (3) to the quotations of Hegesippus from the 
 Syriac, related by Eusebius (Hist. Heel. iv. 22); (4) to the antiquity 
 of the language of the Peschito as compared with that of St. Ephrem, 
 and the high authority in which this version was held by that 
 Father; (5) to the liturgical and general use of it by heretical as 
 well as orthodox Syrians; and (6) to the early translations made 
 from it ;—Mr. Westcott concludes that in the absence of more 
 copious critical resources which might serve to determine the date 
 of this version on philological grounds, “there is no sufficient 
 reason to desert the opinion which has obtained the sanction of 
 the most competent scholars, that its formation is to be fixed 
 within the first half of the second century.” (p. 211.) That it was 
 complete then in A.D. 150-160, we may assume without risk of 
 serious error. 
 
 4 This version must have been made before A.D. 170. “How 
 much more ancient it really is cannot yet be discovered. Not 
 only is the character of the version itself a proof of its extreme 
 age, but the mutual relation of different parts of it shew that it 
 was made originally by different hands; and if so, it is natural 
 to conjecture that it was coeval with the introduction of Chris- 
 tianity into Africa, and the result of the spontaneous effort of 
 African Christians.” (Westcott on the Canon of the New Testament, 
 pp. 224, 225.) Mr. Westcott shews from Tertullian (Adv. Prax. 
 ce. 5; De Monog. ὁ. 11) that at the end of the century the Latin 
 translation of St. John’s Gospel had been so generally circulated in 
 
ve] to St. John’s Gospel. 319 
 
 the middle of the century two works were published 
 which implied that the four Gospels had long been 
 received as of undoubted authority: I refer to the 
 Harmonies of Theophilus’, Bishop of Antioch, and of 
 Tatian’ the heterodox pupil of St. Justin Martyr. 
 St. John is quoted by either writer independently, 
 in the work which was addressed by Theophilus to 
 Autolycust, and in the Apology of Tatiant. When, 
 about the year 170, Apollinaris of Hierapolis points 
 out the bearings of the different evangelical narra- 
 tives upon the Quartodeciman controversy, his argu- 
 ment implies a familiarity with St. John. Apollinaris 
 refers to the piercing of our Lord’s Sidex, and Poly- 
 crates of Ephesus speaks of John as the disciple who 
 lay on the Bosom of Jesusy. Here we see that the 
 last Gospel must have been read and heard in the 
 Christian Churches with a care which dwells upon 
 its distinctive peculiarities. It is surely inconceivable 
 
 Africa, as to have moulded the popular theological dialect. (Ibid. 
 pp. 218, 219.) 
 
 r At latest Theophilus was bishop from A.D. 168 to 180. 
 St. Jerome says: “Theophilus . . . quatuor evangelistarum in unum 
 opus dicta compingens, ingenii sui nobis monumenta dimisit.” 
 Epist. 121 (al. 151) ad Algas. c. 6. 
 
 8 Eus. Hist. Eccl. iv. 29: ὁ Τατιανὸς συνάφειάν twa καὶ συναγωγὴν 
 οὐκ οἶδ᾽ ὅπως τῶν εὐαγγελίων συνθεὶς τὸ Διὰ τεσσάρων τοῦτο προ- 
 σωνόμασεν. Theodoret, Her. Fab. i. 20; Westcott, Canon, pp. 279, 
 280, sqq. 
 
 t Ad Autol. ii. 31. p. 174, ed. Wolf. - Οἱ St. John i. 1, 3. Theo- 
 philus is the first writer who quotes St. John by name. 
 
 ἃ Orat. contr. Gree. c. 4 (St. John iv. 24); ὁ. 5 (Ibid. i. 1); 6. 13 
 (Ibid. i. 5); ¢. 19 (Ibid. i. 3). 
 
 x Chron. Pasch. p. 14 ; ef. St. John xix. 34 ; Routh, i. 160, sq. ; 
 Westcott, Canon of New Testament, pp. 198, 199. 
 
 y Apud Eus. v. 24. Cf. St. John xiii. 23 ; xxi. 20. 
 
320 Witness of the Second Century [Lecr. 
 
 that a work of such primary claim to speak on 
 the question of highest interest for Christian be- 
 lievers could have been forged, widely circulated, 
 and immediately received by Africans, by Romans, 
 by Gauls, by Syrians, as a work of an Apostle who 
 had passed to his rest some sixty years before. And, 
 if the evidence before us ended here, we might fairly 
 infer that, considering the difficulties of communica- 
 tion between Churches in the sub-apostolic age, and 
 the various elements of moral and intellectual cau- 
 tion, which, as notably in the case of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews, were likely to delay the cecumenical 
 reception of a canonical book, St. John’s Gospel 
 must have been in existence at the beginning of 
 the second century. 
 
 But the evidence does not desert us at this point. 
 Through Tatian we ascend into the earlier portion 
 of the century as represented by St. Justin Martyr. 
 It is remarkable that St. Justin’s second Apology, 
 written in ΤΟΊ, contains fewer allusions to the Gos- 
 pels than the earlier Apology written in 138, and 
 than the intermediate composition of this Father, his 
 Dialogue with the Jew Trypho. Now passing by re- 
 cent theories respecting a Gospel of the Hebrews 
 or a Gospel of Peter, by which an endeavour has 
 been made to weaken St. Justin’s witness to the sy- 
 noptic Evangelists, let us observe that his testimony 
 
 z On the identity of the ‘Gospel of the Hebrews’ with the 
 original Hebrew draught of the Gospel of St. Matthew, see the 
 remarks of Tischendorf in his pamphlet, Wann wurden unsere 
 Evangelien verfasst? pp. 17-19. To that admirable compendium 
 I am indebted for several remarks in the text of this and the 
 following pages. 
 
Va to St. John’s Gospel. 321 
 
 to St. John is particularly distinct. Justin’s emphatic 
 reference of the doctrine of the Logos to our Lord®, 
 not to mention his quotation of John the Baptist’s 
 reply to the messengers of the Jews”, and of our 
 Saviour’s language about the new birth’, makes 
 his knowledge of St. John’s Gospel much more than 
 a probability’. Among the great Apostolic fathers, 
 St. Ignatius alludes to St. John in his Letter to the 
 Romans®, and St. Polycarp quotes the Apostle’s first 
 Epistlef. In these sub-apostolic writings there are 
 large districts of thought and expression, of a type 
 unmistakeably Johannean’, which, like St. Justin’s 
 
 a (Of, Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst ἢ 
 p- 16: “Die Uebertragung des Logos auf Christus, von der uns 
 keine Spur weder in der Synoptikern noch in den iltesten Parallel- 
 schriften derselben vorliegt, an mehreren Stellen Justins von 
 Johannes abzuleiten ist.” 
 
 b Tbid. Dialog. cum Tryph. 88. Cf. St. John i. 20. 
 
 © Apolog. i. 61: καὶ yap ὁ Χριστὸς εἴπεν. “Av μὴ ἀναγεννηθῆτε, οὐ 
 μὴ εἰσέλθητε εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν: Ὅτι δὲ καὶ ἀδύνατον εἰς τὰς 
 μήτρας τῶν τεκουσῶν τοὺς ἅπαξ γενομένους ἐμβῆναι φανερὸν πᾶσίν ἐστι. 
 Cf. Westcott, Canon of the New Testament, p. 130. 
 
 ἃ Cf. however Mr. Westcott’s remarks (Canon of the New Tes- 
 tament, p. 145) on the improbability of St. John’s being quoted in 
 apologetic writings addressed to Jews and heathen. St. Justin 
 nevertheless does “ exhibit types of language and doctrine which, if 
 not immediately drawn from St. John (why not‘), yet mark the pre- 
 sence of his influence and the recognition of his authority.” Westcott, 
 Ibid.) Besides the passages already alluded to, St. Justin appears 
 to refer to St. John xii. 49 in Dialog. cum Tryph. ¢. 56; to St. John 
 i. 13 in Dialog. ὁ. 63; to St. John vii. 12 in Dialog. c. 69; to St. John 
 i. 12 in Dialog. 6. 123. Cf. Liicke, Comm. Ey. Joh. pp. 34, 566. 
 
 e §. Ign. ad. Rom. c. 7. Cf. St. John xvi. 11. 
 
 f Ep. ad Phil. c. 7. Cf. 1 St. John iv. 3. 
 
 ε Cf. St. Barn. Ep. v. vi. xii. (ef St. John iii. 14); Herm. Past. 
 Simil. ix. 12 (ef. Ibid. x. 7, 9; xiv. 6); S. Ignat. ad Philad. 7 (cf. 
 
 δ 
 
322 Witness of the Second Century [ Lect. 
 
 doctrine of the Logos, witness no less powerfully 
 to the existence of St. John’s writings than direct 
 citations. The Tubingen writers lay emphasis upon 
 the fact that in the short fragment of Papias which 
 we possess, nothing is said about St. John’s Gospel. 
 
 Ibid. iii. 8); ad Tral. 8 (cf. Ibid. vi. 51); ad Magnes. 7 (ef. Ibid. 
 ΧΙ 49; X. 30; xiv. 11);-ad Rom. 7 (cf. Ibid. vi. 32). 
 
 h Meyer, Evan. Johann. Einl. p. 14: “ Die continuitat [i.e. of the 
 evidence in favour of the fourth Gospel] geht sowohl von Irenzus 
 iiber Polycarp, als auch von Papias, sofern diesem der Gebrauch des 
 ersten Briefs Joh. bezeugt ist, iiber den Presbyter Johannes, au/ den 
 Apostel selbst zuriick. Dass aber das Fragment des Papias das 
 Evangel. Joh. nicht erwihnt, kann nichts verschlagen, da es iiber- 
 haupt keine schriftlichen Quellen, aus welchen er seine Nachrichten 
 geschopft habe, auffiihrt, vielmehr das Verfahren des Papias dahin 
 bestimmt, dass er bei den Apostelschiilern die Aussagen der Apostel 
 erkundet habe, und dessen ausdriicklichen Grundsatz ausspricht : 
 ov yap τὰ ἐκ τῶν βιβλίων τοσοῦτόν pe ὠφελεῖν ὑπελάμβανον, ὅσον τὰ 
 παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ μενούσης. Papias wirft hier die damals vor- 
 handenen evangelischen Schriften (τῶν βιβλίων) deren eine Menge 
 war (Luk. i. 1) alle ohne Auswahl zusammen, und wie er das Evan- 
 gel. Matthei und das des Marcus mit darunter begriffen hat, 
 welche beide er spiiter besonders erwihnt, so kann er auch das 
 Evangel. Joh. mit bei τῶν βιβλίων gemeint haben, da Papias einen 
 Begriff von kanonischen Evangelien als solchen offenbar noch nicht 
 hat (vergl. Credn. Beitr. i. p. 23) und diese auszuzeichnen nicht 
 veranlasst ist. Wenn aber weiterhin Eusebius noch zwei Aussagen 
 des Papias iiber die Evangelien des Mark, und Matthaiis anfihrt, 
 so wird damit unser Evangelium nicht ausgeschlossen, welches 
 Papias in anderen Theilen seines Buchs erwihnt haben kann, son- 
 dern jene beiden aussagen werden nur deshalb bemerklich gemacht, 
 weil sie iiber die Hnstehung jener Evangelien etwas Absonderliches, 
 besonders Merkwiirdiges enthalten, wie auch das als besonders 
 bemerkenswerth von Eusebius angefiihrt wird, das Papias aus zwei 
 epistolischen Schriften. (1 Joh. u. 1 Petr.) | Zeugnisse gebrauche, 
 und eine Erziihlung habe, welche sich im Hebriier-Evangel. finde. 
 Cf. also Westcott, Canon, p. 65. 
 
Μη to St. John’s Gospel. 393 
 
 But at least we have no evidence that Papias did 
 not speak of it in that larger part of his writings 
 which has been lost; and if his silence is a valid 
 argument against the fourth Gospel, it is equally 
 available against the Gospel of St. Luke, and even 
 against each one of those four Epistles which the 
 Tubingen writers themselves. recognise as the work 
 of St. Paul. 
 
 The testimony of the Catholic Church during this 
 century is supplemented by that of the contemporary 
 heretics. St. Irenzeus has pointed out how the sys- 
 tem of the celebrated Gnostic, Valentinus, was mainly 
 based upon a perversion of St. John’s Gospel! This 
 assertion is borne out by that remarkable work, the 
 Philosophumena of St. Hippolytus, which, as we in 
 Oxford well remember, was discovered some few years 
 since at Mount AthosJj. Of the pupils of Valentinus, 
 Ptolemzeus quotes from the prologue of St. John’s 
 
 i St. Ireneus (Heer. iii. 11, 7) lays down the general position: 
 “Tanta est circa Evangelia hee firmitas, ut et ipsi heeretici testi- 
 monium reddant eis, et ex ipsis egrediens unusquisque eorum 
 conetur suam confirmare doctrinam.” After illustrating this from 
 the cases of the Ebionites, Marcion, and the Cerinthians, he pro- 
 ceeds, “ Hi autem qui a Valentino sunt, eo [sc. evangelio] quod est 
 secundum Johannem plenissimé utentes, ad ostensionem conjuga- 
 tionum suarum ; ex ipso detegentur nihil rect? dicentes.” “ Gewiss 
 war (says Meyer) die ganze Theosophie des Valentin mit auf 
 Johanneischem Grund und Boden erwachsen. . . . Die Valentinian- 
 ische Gnosis mit ihren Aeonen, Syzygien τι. 5. w. verhialt sich zum 
 Prolog des Joh, wie das kiinstlich Gemachte und Ausgespon- 
 nene zum Einfachen und Schiépferischen.” (Einl. in Joh. p. 12, 
 note.) For an illustration of the truth of this, οἵ, 5. Iren. adv. 
 Her. i. 8, 5. 
 
 i Cf. Refut. Heer: vi. 35, init., for the use made by Valentinus of 
 St. John x. 8. 
 
 wey 
 
324 Witness borne to St. John’s Gospel [ Lxcr. 
 
 Gospel in his extant letter to Florak. Heracleon, 
 another pupil, wrote a considerable commentary 
 upon St. John!. Heracleon lived about 150; Valen- 
 tinus was a contemporary of Marcion, who was 
 teaching at Rome about 140. Marcion had ori- 
 ginally admitted the claims of St. John’s Gospel, 
 and only denied them when, for the particular 
 purposes of his heresy, he endeavoured at a later 
 time to demonstrate an opposition between St. Paul 
 and St. John™. Basilides taught at Alexandria 
 under Adrian, apparently about the year 120. 
 Basilides is known to have written twenty-four 
 books of commentaries on the Gospel®; but if it can- 
 not be certainly affirmed that some of these com- 
 mentaries were on St. John, it is certain from St. Hip- 
 polytus that Basilides appealed to texts of St. John 
 in favour of his system®. Before Basilides, in the 
 
 k Apud §. Epiph. adv. Heer. lib. i. tom. i. Her. 33; Ptol. ad 
 Flor. Cf. St. John i. 3; also Stieren’s St. Irenzeus, vol. i. p. 924. 
 
 1 Fragments of Heracleon’s Commentary on St. John, collected 
 from Origen, are published at the end of the first vol. of Stieren’s 
 edition of St. Irenzeus, pp. 938-971. St. John iv. is chiefly illus- 
 trated by these remains of the great Valentinian commentator. Two 
 points strike one on perusal of them: (1) that before Heracleon’s 
 time St. John’s Gospel must have acquired, even among heretics, 
 the highest authority; (2) that Heracleon has continually to resort 
 to interpretations so forced (as on St. John 1. 3; 1.18; ii. 17; cited 
 by Westcott, Canon, p. 266, note) as ‘to prove sufficiently that 
 St. John’s Gospel was no Gnostic work.” 
 
 m Tertullian. adv. Marcion. iv. 3; De Carne Christi, c. 2: quoted 
 by Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? pp. 
 eR, 26. 
 
 n Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iv. 7, 7. 
 
 © Refut. Her. vii. 22 (quoted by Tischendorf, ubi supr.), where 
 Basilides uses St. John i. g; 1]. 4. 
 
Va by the Heretics of the Second Century. 325 
 
 two first decades of the century, we find Ophitic 
 Gnostics, the Naasenians?, and the Peratze4, appeal- 
 ing to passages in St. John’s Gospel, which was thus 
 already, we may say in the year 110, a recognised 
 authority externally to the Catholic Church. 
 
 It may further be observed that the whole doctrine 
 of the Paraclete in the heresy of Montanus is a mani- 
 fest perversion of the treatise on that subject in 
 St. John’s Gospel, the wide reception of which it 
 accordingly presupposes’. The Alogi, who were he- 
 retical opponents of Montanism, rejected St. John’s 
 Gospel for dogmatic reasons, which are really con- 
 firmatory of the general tradition in its favour’. 
 Nor may we forget Celsus, the keen and satirical 
 opponent of the Christian faith, who wrote, even 
 according to Dr. Hilgenfeld, between 160 and 170 
 but more probably, according to other authorities, 
 
 P Refut. Her. v. 6 sqq., 8 (St. John i. 3, 4); ¢. 9 ({bid. iv. 21; and 
 iv. 10): quoted by Tischendorf. 
 
 a Ibid. v. 12 sqq., 16 (St. John iii. 14; 1 1-4); 6. τῇ (Ibid. 
 viil. 44). 
 
 r See however Meyer, Einl. in Joh. p. 13, for the opinion that 
 Montanism originally grew out of belief in the Parousia of our 
 Lord. Baur, Christenthum, p. 213. The Paraclete of Montanus 
 was doubtless very different from the Paraclete of St. John’s Gos- 
 pel. Still St. John’s Gospel must have furnished the name; and 
 it is probable that the idea of the Montanistic Paraclete is originally 
 due to the same source, although by a rapid development, con- 
 tortion, or perversion, the Divine Gift announced by our Lord had 
 been exchanged for Its heretical caricature. The rejection of the 
 promise of the Paraclete alluded to by St. Irenzeus (adv. Heer. iii. 
 11. 9) proceeded not from Montanists, but from opponents to 
 Montanism, who erroneously identified the teaching of St. John’s 
 Gospel with that heresy. 
 
 8 §. Epiph. Heer. li. 3. 
 
326 St. John’s Gospel thus referred [ Lrcr. 
 
 as early as 150. Celsus professes very ostenta- 
 tiously to confine himself to the writings of the 
 disciples of Jesust; but he refers to St. John’s 
 Gospel in a manner which would be utterly incon- 
 celvable if that book had been in his day a lately 
 completed, or indeed a hardly completed forgery". 
 This evidence might be largely reimforced from 
 other quarters*, and especially by an examination of 
 that mass of apocryphal literature which belongs to 
 the earlier half of the second century, and the rela- 
 tion of which to St. John’s Gospel has lately been 
 very clearly exhibited by an accomplished critical 
 scholary. But we are already in a position to admit 
 that the facts before us force back the date of 
 St. John’s Gospel within the lines of the first century. 
 
 t Origen, contr. Celsum, ii. 74. 
 
 ἃ Thid. i. 67; cf. St. John ii. 18. Contr. Celsum, 11. 31, 36, 55; 
 ef. St. John xx. 27. 
 
 x E.g. the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, Eus. 
 v. 1, which quotes St. John xvi. 2 as an utterance of our Lord Him- 
 self. Athenagoras, Leg. pro Christianis, το: οἵ St. John 1. 1-11; 
 Xvil. 21-23. The Clementine Homilies, xix. 22: ef. St. John ix. 
 2, 3; lil. 52; x. 9, 27. Recognitions, vi. g: ef. St. John iii. 3-5; 
 ii. 48; v. 23. Ibid. v.12: cf. St. John ὙΠ: 34. 
 
 y Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? p. 35, 
 sqq. That the Acta Pilati in particular were composed at the 
 beginning of the second century, appears certain from the public 
 appeal to them which St. Justin makes in his Apology to the 
 Roman Emperor. The Acta Pilati “presuppose not only the synop- 
 tists, but particularly and necessarily the Gospel of St. John. It is 
 not that we meet with a passage here and there quoted from that 
 Gospel. If that were the case we might suspect later interpolation. 
 The whole history of the condemnation of Jesus is based essen- 
 tially upon St. John’s narrative; while in the accounts of the 
 Crucifixion and the Resurrection, it is rather certain passages of 
 the synoptists which are particularly suggested.” 
 
ΔΗ to its Apostolical Origin. 327 
 
 And when this is done the question of its authen- 
 ticity is practically decided. It is irrational to sup- 
 pose that a forgery claiming the name and authority 
 of the beloved disciple could have been written and 
 circulated beneath his very eyes, and while the 
 Church was still illuminated by his oral teaching. 
 Arbitrary theories about the time which is thought 
 necessary to develope an idea cannot rightly be held 
 to counterbalance such a solid block of historical evi- 
 dence as we have been considering. This evidence 
 shews that long before the year 160 St. John’s Gos- 
 pel was received throughout orthodox and heretical 
 Christendom, and that its recognition may be traced 
 up to the Apostolic age itself. Ewald shall supply 
 the words with which to close the foregoing conside- 
 rations. “Those who since the first discussion of this 
 question have been really conversant with it, never 
 could have had and never have had a moment’s 
 doubt. As the attack on St. John has become fiercer 
 and fiercer, the truth durimg the last ten or twelve 
 years has been more and more solidly established, 
 error has been pursued into its last hiding-places, 
 and at this moment the facts before us are such that 
 no man who does not will knowingly to choose error 
 and to reject truth, can dare to say that the fourth 
 Gospel is not the work of the Apostle John2.” 
 Certainly Ewald here expresses himself with vehe- 
 mence ; and some of you, my brethren, may possibly 
 be disposed to complain of him as being too dog- 
 matic. It may be that you have made impatience 
 of certainty a part of your creed; you may hold 
 
 z Review of Renan’s Vie de Jésus, in the Gottingen Scientific 
 Journal, 5 Aug. 1863; quoted by Gratry, Jésus-Christ, p. 119. 
 
328 Purposes of St. John’s Gospel : [ Lect. 
 
 generally that a regulated measure of well-expressed 
 doubt is essential to true intellectual culture. You 
 may urge in particular that the weight of external 
 testimony in favour of St. John’s Gospel does not 
 “silence the difficulties which arise upon an exami- 
 nation of its contents. You point to the presence of 
 a mystical and metaphysical terminology, to the re- 
 petition of abstract expressions, such as Word, Life,. 
 Light, Truth, Paraclete. You remark that St. John’s 
 Gospel exhibits the Life of our Lord under an en- 
 tirely new aspect. Not to dwell immoderately upon 
 points of detail, you insist that the plan of our 
 Lord’s life, the main scenes of His ministry, all His 
 miracles save one, the form and matter of His dis- 
 courses, nay, the very attitude and moral physio- 
 gnomy of His opponents, are so represented in this 
 Gospel as to interfere with your belief in its Apo- 
 stolical origin. 
 
 But are not these peculiarities of the Gospel ex- 
 plained when we consider the purpose with which 
 it was written 4 
 
 τ. St. John’s Gospel is in the first place an histo- 
 rical supplement. It was designed to chronicle dis- 
 courses and events which had been omitted in the 
 narratives of the three preceding Evangelists. Chris- 
 tian antiquity attests this design with remarkable 
 unanimity®. It is altogether arbitrary to assert that 
 if St. John had seen the works of earlier Evangelists 
 he would have alluded to them ; and that if he had 
 intended to supply the omissions of their narratives he 
 would have formally announced his intention of doing 
 
 ® See especially the remarkable passage in Eus. Hist. Heel. iii. 24, 
 S. Epiph. Heer. ii. 51. 
 
Wa 1. An Historical Supplement to the Synoptists. 329 
 
 sob, It is sufficient to observe that the literary con- 
 ventionalities of modern Europe were not those of the 
 sacred writers, whether of the Synagogue? or of the 
 Church. An inspired writer does his work without 
 the self-consciousness of a modern composer ; he is 
 not necessarily careful to define his exact place in 
 literature, his precise obligations to, or his presumed 
 improvements upon, the labours of his predecessors. 
 He is the organ of a Higher Intelligence ; he owes 
 both what he borrows and what he is believed to 
 originate to the Mind Which inspires him to originate 
 or which guides him to select. While the stream of 
 sacred truth is flowing forth from his entranced and 
 burning soul, and is being forthwith crystallized in 
 the moulds of an imperishable language, the eagle- 
 eyed Evangelist does not stoop from heaven to earth 
 for the purpose of guarding or reserving the rights 
 of authorship by shewing how careful he is to ac- 
 knowledge its obligations. Certainly St. John does 
 repeat in part the narratives of his predecessors4, but 
 this repetition does not interfere with: the supple- 
 mentary character of his work as a whole®. Yet his 
 
 b These arguments of Liicke are noticed by Dr. Wordsworth, 
 New Test. part i. p. 206. 
 
 e “The later prophets of the Old Testament enlarge upon and 
 complete the prophecies of the earlier. But they do not mention 
 their names, or declare their own purpose to do what they do.” 
 Townson, pp. 134-147; quoted by Dr. Wordsworth, ubi supr. 
 
 d As in chaps. vi. and xii. 
 
 e M. Renan admits the supplementary character of St. John’s 
 Gospel, but attributes to the Evangelist a motive of personal pique 
 in writing it. He was annoyed at the place assigned to himself 
 in earlier narratives! “On est tenté de croire, que Jean, dans sa 
 vieillesse, ayant lu les récits évangéliques qui circulaient, d’une part, 
 
990 2. A Polemical Treatise against [ Lecr. 
 
 Gospel is not only or mainly to be regarded as an 
 historical supplement. It exhibits the precision of 
 method and the orderly development of ideas which 
 are proper to a complete doctrinal essay or treatise. 
 It is indeed rather a treatise illustrated by history, 
 than a history written with a theological purpose. 
 Viewed in its historical relation to the first three 
 Gospels, it is supplemental to them; but this rela- 
 tive character is not by any means an adequate 
 explanation of its motive and function. It might 
 easily have been written if no other Evangelist had 
 written at all; it has a character and purpose which 
 are strictly its own; it is part of a great whole, yet 
 it 1s algo, in itself, organically perfect. 
 
 2. St. John’s Gospel is a polemical treatise. It is 
 addressed to an intellectual world widely different 
 from that which had been before the minds of the 
 earlier Evangelists. The earliest forms of Gnostic 
 thought are recognisable in the Judaizing theoso- 
 phists whom St. Paul has in view in his Epistles to 
 the Ephesians and the Colossians. These Epistles 
 were written at the least some thirty years before 
 the fourth Gospel. The fourth Gospel confronts or 
 anticipates a more developed Gnosticism, although 
 we may observe in passing that it certainly does not 
 contain references to any of the full-grown Gnostic 
 systems which belong to the middle of the second 
 
 y remarqua diverses inexactitudes, de l’autre, fut froissé de voir 
 qu’on ne lui aceordait pas dans histoire du Christ une assez grande 
 place ; qu’alors il commenga ἃ dicter une foule de choses quil 
 savait mieux que les autres, avec [intention de montrer que dans 
 beaucoup de cas οὗ on ne parlait que de Pierre, il avait figuré 
 avec et avant lu.” Vie de Jésus, pp. XXvil. XXvill, 
 
Waj the earlier forms of Gnosticism. 331 
 
 century. The fourth Gospel is in marked opposition 
 to the distinctive positions of Ebionites, of Docete, 
 of Cerinthians. But among these the Cerinthian 
 gnosis appears to be more particularly contemplated. 
 In its earlier forms especially, Gnosticism was as 
 much a mischievous intellectual method as a formal 
 heresy. The Gnostic looked upon each revealed truth 
 merely in the light of an addition to the existing 
 stock of materials ready to his hand for speculative 
 discussion. He handled it accordingly with the free- 
 dom which was natural to a belief that it was in no 
 sense beyond the range of his intellectual grasp. He 
 commingled it with his cosmical or his psychological 
 theories ; he remodelled it; he submitted it to new 
 divisions, to new combinations. Thus his attitude 
 towards Christianity was friendly and yet super- 
 cilious. But he threatened the faith with utter 
 destruction, to be achieved by a process of eclectic 
 interpretation. Cerimthus. was an early master of 
 this art. Cerinthus as a Chiliastic Judaizer was natu- 
 rally disposed to Humanitarianism. As an eclectic 
 theorist, who had been trained in the “teaching of 
 the Egyptians’,” he maintained that the world had 
 been created by “some power separate and distinct 
 from Him Who is above all.” Jesus was not born of 
 a virgin; He was the son of Joseph and Mary; He 
 was born naturally like other men. But the Aon 
 Christ had descended upon Jesus after His baptism, 
 in the form of a dove, and had proclaimed the un- 
 known Father, and had perfected the virtues of Jesus. 
 The spiritual impassible Christ had flown back to 
 heaven on the eve of the Passion of Jesus; the 
 
 ΤΡ, Hippolytus, Refut. Heer. vii. 33. 
 
332 3. A Life of Jesus, as the Incarnate God. — [Lxct. 
 
 altogether human Jesus of Cerinthus had suffered 
 and had risen alone’. To this fantastic Christ of the 
 Cerinthian gnosis St. John opposes the counteracting 
 truth of our Lord’s Divine and Eternal Nature, as 
 manifested in and through His human hfe. This 
 Nature was united to the manhood of Jesus from the 
 moment of the Incarnation. It was not a transient 
 endowment of the Person of Jesus; since it was 
 Itself the seat of His Personality, although clothed 
 with a human form. This Divine Nature was ‘ glori- 
 fied’ in Christ’s Passion, as also in His miracles and 
 His Resurrection. St. John disentangles the Catholic 
 doctrine from the negations and the speculations of 
 Cerinthus ; he proclaims the Presence among men 
 of the Divine Word, Himself the Creator of all things, 
 incarnated in Jesus Christ. 
 
 3. Thus St. John’s Gospel has also a direct, posi- 
 tive, dogmatic purpose. It is not merely a contro- 
 versial treatise, as it is not merely an_ historical 
 
 & §. Irenzeus, i. 26: “Et Cerinthus autem quidam in Asia non 
 a primo Deo factum esse mundum docuit, sed a virtute quadam 
 valde separata et distante ab ea principalitate, que est super uni- 
 versa, et ignorante eum qui est super omnia, Deum.. Jesum autem 
 subjecit, non ex virgine natum (impossibile enim hoe ei visum 
 est) ; fuisse autem Kum Joseph et Marie filium similiter ut reliqui 
 omnes homines, et plus potuisse justitia et prudentiad et sapientia 
 ab hominibus. Et post baptismum descendisse in eum ab ea 
 principalitate que est super omnia, Christum figura columbe; et 
 tune annuntiasse incognitum Patrem et virtutes perfecisse; in fine 
 autem revolasse iterum Christum de Jesu, et Jesum passum esse 
 et resurrexisse; Christum autem impassibilem perseverdsse, exis- 
 tentem spiritalem.” When St. Epiphanius represents Cerinthus as 
 affirming that Jesus would only rise at the general resurrection, 
 he seems to be describing the logical results of the heresy, not 
 the actual doctrine which it embraced. (Heer. xxviii. 6.) 
 
γι] Peculiarities of the narrative explained. 33 
 
 appendix. Its teaching is far deeper and wider than 
 was needed to refute the errors of Cerinthus. It 
 teaches the highest revealed truth concerning the 
 Person of our Lord. Its substantive and enduring 
 value consists in its manifesting the Everlasting 
 Word or Son of God as historically incarnate, and as 
 uniting Himself to His Church. 
 
 The peculiarities of St. John’s Gospel are explained 
 when this threefold aspect of it is kept in view. 
 As a supplementary narrative it presents us, for the 
 most part, with particulars concerning our Blessed 
 Lord which are unrecorded elsewhere. It meets the 
 doubts which might naturally have arisen in the 
 later Apostolical age, when the narratives of the 
 earlier Evangelists had been for some time before 
 the Church. If the question was raised why, if 
 Jesus was so holy and so supernatural a Person, His 
 countrymen and contemporaries did not believe in 
 Him, St. John shews the moral causes which pre- 
 vented this; and he pourtrays the fierce hatred 
 of the Jews against rejected moral truth, ever in- 
 creasing in its intensity as the sanctity of Jesus 
 shines out more and more brightly. If men asked 
 anxiously for more proof that the Death and Resur- 
 rection of Jesus were real events, St. John meets 
 that demand by recording his own experience as an 
 eye-witness, and by carefully accumulating the wit- 
 ness of others. If it was objected that Christ’s 
 violent Death was inconsistent with His Divine claims, 
 St. John- points out that it was strictly voluntary, 
 and even that by it Christ’s true glorification was 
 achieved. If the authority of the Apostles and of 
 those who were succeeding them was depreciated 
 
994. St. John’s peculiarities explained [Lecr. 
 
 on the score of their being rude and illiterate men, 
 St. John shews from the discourse in the supper- 
 room that the claims of Apostles upon the dutiful 
 submission of the Church did not depend upon any 
 natural advantages which they possessed. Jesus had 
 promised a Divine Comforter Who was to guide them 
 into the whole truth, and to bring to their minds 
 whatever He had said to them». 
 
 As a polemical writer, St. John selects and mar- 
 shals his materials with a view to confuting, from 
 historical data, the Humanitarian or Docetic errors 
 of the time. St. John is anxious to bring a par- 
 ticular section of the Life of Jesus to bear upon 
 the intellectual world of Ephesus?. He puts forward 
 an aspect of the original truth which was certain 
 to command present and local attention; he is sufli- 
 ciently in correspondence with the age to which he 
 ministers, and with the speculative temper of the 
 men around him. He had been led to note and to 
 treasure up in his thought certain phases of the 
 teaching and character of Jesus with especial care. 
 He had remembered more particularly those discourses 
 in which Jesus speaks of His Eternal Relation to the 
 Father, and of the profound mystic communion of 
 life into which He would enter with His followers 
 through the Holy Spirit and the Sacraments. These 
 cherished memories of St. John’s earlier life, unshared 
 in their completeness by less privileged Apostles, were 
 well fitted to meet the hard necessities of the Church 
 
 h Cf. Alford, Greek Test. vol. i. Prolegom. p. 60. 
 
 i §. Irenseus αν. Her. iii, 1. See Ebrard’s discussion of the 
 objections which have been urged against this statement. Gospel 
 History, pt. 2, div. 2, § 127. 
 
Ay by his polemical and dogmatie aim. 335 
 
 in the closing years of the beloved disciple. To 
 St. John the gnosis of Cerinthus must have appeared 
 to be in direct contradiction to the sacred certainties 
 which he had heard from the Lips of Jesus, and 
 which he treasured in his heart and memory. In 
 order to confute the heresy which separated the man 
 Jesus from the ‘Aon’ Christ, he had merely to publish 
 what he remembered of the actual words and works 
 of Jesus. His translation of those divine words may 
 be sufficiently coloured by the phraseological turns 
 of the school which he is addressing, to make them 
 popularly intelligible. But the peculiarities of his 
 language have been greatly exaggerated by criticism, 
 while they are naturally explained by the polemical 
 object which he had in view. To that object, the 
 language, the historical arrangement, the selection 
 from conversations and discourses‘ before unpub- 
 lished, the few deeply significant miracles, the 
 description of opponents by a generic name which 
 ignores the differences of character, class, and sect 
 
 k Baur begs the whole question by saying that “the discourses 
 in St. John could not be historical, since they are essentially 
 nothing more than an explanation of the Logos-idea put forth by 
 that writer.” This might be true if the doctrine of the Logos had 
 been the product of Gnostic speculations. But if Jesus was really 
 the Divine Son, manifesting Himself as such to men, such language 
 as that reported by St. John is no more than we should expect. 
 St. John never represents our Lord as announcing His Divinity 
 in the terms in which it is announced in the Prologue to the 
 Gospel ; he would have done so, had he really been creating 
 a fictitious Jesus designed to illustrate a particular theosophic 
 speculation. As to the alleged difference between the discourses 
 reported in St. John and those in the Synoptists, ef. e.g. St. Matt. 
 X1, 25-30. 
 
336 St. John’s depth and simplicity. [Lecr. 
 
 among them, and notices them only so far as they 
 are in conflict with the central truth manifested in 
 Jesus,—all contribute. But these very peculiarities 
 of the fourth Gospel subserve its positive devotional 
 and didactic aim even more directly than its contro- 
 versial one. The false gnosis is refuted by an exhibi- 
 tion of the true. The true is set forth for the sake 
 of Christian souls. These things “are written that 
 ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of 
 God, and that believing, ye might have life through 
 His Name!.” 
 
 We may perhaps have wondered how a Galilean 
 fisherman could have thus mastered a subtle and 
 sublime theosophy, how the son of Zebedee could 
 have appropriated the language of Athens and of 
 Alexandria to the service of the Crucified. The 
 answer is that St. John knew from experience the 
 blessed and tremendous truth that his Lord and 
 Friend was a Divine Person. Apart from the guid- 
 ance of the Blessed Spirit, St. John’s mental strength 
 and refinement may be traced to the force of his keen 
 interest in this single fact. Just as a desperate moral 
 or material struggle developes forces and resources 
 unused before, so an intense religious conviction fer- 
 tilizes intellect, and developes speculative talent, not 
 unfrequently in the most unlearned. Every form of 
 thought which comes even into indirect contact 
 with the truth to which the soul clings adoringly, 
 is scanned by it with deep and anxious interest, 
 whether it be the interest of hope or the interest 
 of apprehension. St. John certainly is a theosophic 
 philosopher, but he is only a philosopher because he 
 
 1 St. John xx. 31. 
 
WA Prologue of St. John’s Gospel. 337 
 
 is a theologian; he is such a master of abstract 
 thought because he is so devoted to the Incarnate 
 God. The fisherman of Galilee could never have 
 written the prologue of the fourth Gospel, or have 
 guided the religious thought of Ephesus, unless he 
 had clung to this sustaining Truth, which makes him 
 at once so popular and so profound. For St. John is 
 spiritually as simple, as he is intellectually majestic. 
 In this our day he is understood by the spiritual in- 
 sight of the unlettered and the poor, while the learned 
 can sometimes see in him only the weary repetition of 
 metaphysical abstractions. The poor understand that 
 revelation of God, the Creator of the world, as pure 
 Light and Truth ; they understand the moral dark- 
 ness which commits sin, and excuses sin, and hates 
 the light; they receive gratefully and believingly 
 the Son of God made Man, and conquering darkness 
 by the laying down His Life; they follow, from 
 experience of their own temptations or sins, or hopes 
 or fears, those heart-searching conversations with 
 Nicodemus, with the Samaritan woman, with the 
 Jews. In truth, St. John’s language and the words 
 of Christ in St. John are as simple as they are 
 profound ; they still speak peace and joy to little 
 children ; they are still a stumbling-block to, and a 
 condemnation of, the virtual successors of Cerinthus. 
 
 II. If there were nothing else to the purpose in 
 the whole of the New Testament, those first four- 
 teen verses of the fourth Gospel would suffice to 
 teach the believer in Holy Scripture the truth of 
 the absolute Godhead of Jesus Christ. It is a mis- 
 take to regard those fourteen verses as a mere pre- 
 fatory attack upon the gnosis of Cerinthus, having 
 
 Z 
 
998 Doctrine of the Eternal Word [ Lecr. 
 
 no necessary connexion with the narrative which 
 follows, and representing nothing essential to the 
 integrity of the Apostle’s thought. For, as Baur 
 very truly observes, the doctrine of the prologue is 
 the very fundamental idea which underlies the whole 
 ‘Johannean theology™’” It is not enough to say 
 that between the prologue and the history which 
 follows there exists an intimate organic connexion. 
 The prologue is itself the beginning of the history. 
 “It is impossible,” says Baur, “to deny that ‘the 
 Word made flesh™’ is one and the same subject with 
 the Man Christ Jesus on the one hand, and with 
 the Word Who ‘was in the beginning, Who was 
 with God, and Who was God, on the other?®.” 
 Taking then the prologue of St. John’s Gospel in 
 connexion with the verses which immediately suc- 
 ceed it, let us observe that St. John attaches 
 to our Lord’s Person two names which together 
 yield a complete revelation of His Divine glory. 
 Our Lord is called the ‘Word, and the ‘Only-be- 
 gotten Son. It is doubtless true, as Neander ob- 
 serves, that “the first of these names was” put 
 prominently forward at Ephesus, “in order to lead 
 those who busied themselves with speculations on 
 the Logos as the centre of all theophanies, from a 
 mere religious idealism to a religious realism, to lead 
 them in short to a recognition of God revealed in 
 Christ.” It has already been shewn that the Logos 
 of St. John differs materially from the Logos of later 
 
 m Vorlesungen, p. 351. n St. John i. 14. 
 
 ο Baur, ubi sup. St. John i. 1. 
 
 P Neander, Kirchengeschichte, p. 549; quoted by Tholuck, Ev. 
 Johan. kap. 1. 
 
γη in the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel. 339 
 
 Alexandrian speculation, while it is linked with great 
 lines of teaching in the Old Testament. No reason 
 can be assigned why St. John had recourse to the 
 word Logos at all, unless he was already im posses- 
 sion of the material truth to which this word sup- 
 plied a philosophical form. If the word did express 
 in a form familiar to the ears of the men of Ephesus 
 a great truth which they had buried beneath a heap 
 of errors, that truth, as Bruno Bauer admits, must 
 have been held independently and previously by the 
 Apostle’. The direct expression of that truth was 
 St. John’s primary motive in using the word ; his 
 polemical and corrective action upon the Cerinthian 
 onosis was a secondary motive. 
 
 By the word Logos, then, St. John carries back 
 his history of our Lord to a point at which it 
 has not yet entered into the sphere of sense and 
 time. “In the four Gospels,” says St. Augustine, 
 “or rather in the four books of the one Gospel, the 
 Apostle St. John, deservedly compared to an eagle, 
 by reason of his spiritual understanding, has lifted 
 his enunciation of truth to a far higher and sublimer 
 point than the other three, and by this elevation 
 would fain have our hearts lifted up likewise. For 
 the other three Evangelists walked, so to speak, on 
 earth with our Lord as Man. Of His Godhead they 
 said but a few things. But John, as if it were op- 
 pressive to him to walk on earth, has opened his 
 treatise as it were with a peal of thunder; he has 
 raised himself not merely above the earth, and the 
 whole compass of the air and heaven, but even above 
 
 4 Kritik der Evangel. Geschichte des Joh. p. 5; quoted by 
 Tholuck, ubi supra. 
 Z2 
 
940 Doctrine of the Eternal Word [Lecr. 
 
 every angel-host, and every order of the invisible 
 powers, and has reached even to Him by Whom all 
 things were made, in that sentence, ‘In the begin- 
 ning was the Word'.’” Instead of opening his nar- 
 rative at the Human Birth of our Lord, or at the 
 commencement of His ministry, St. John places him- 
 self in thought at the starting-point (as we should 
 conceive it) of all time. Nay rather it would seem 
 that if mwa at the beginning of Genesis signifies 
 the initial moment of time itself; ἐν ἀρχῇ rises to the 
 absolute conception of that which is anterior to, or 
 rather independent of time’. Then, when time was 
 not, or at a point to which man cannot apply his 
 finite conception of time, there was—the Logos or 
 Word. When as yet nothing had been made, He 
 was. What was the Logos? Such a term in a po- 
 sition of such moment, when so much depends on 
 our rightly understanding it, has a moral no less 
 
 r St. Aug. tr. 36 in Johan. 
 
 8 Meyer in loc.: “ Johannes parallelisirt zwar den Anfang seines 
 Evangel. mit dem Anfange des Genesis; aber er steigert den his- 
 torischen Begriff nwa, welcher (Gen. i. 1) den Anfangsmoment 
 der Zeit selbst bedeutet, zum absoluten Begriffe der Vorzeit- 
 lichkeit.” This is alone sufficient to refute the assertion of a 
 modern writer that St. John does not teach the Eternity of the 
 Divine Word. “Une des théses fondamentales de la speculation 
 ecclésiastique, cest idée de l’éternité du Verbe. Depuis que le 
 concile de Nicée en a fait une des pierres angulaires de la théologie 
 Catholique, sa décision est restée heritage commun de tous les 
 systemes orthodoxes. Eh bien! les écrits de Jean n’en parlent pas.” 
 Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 438. The author is mistaken in attributing 
 to ἐν ἀρχῇ a merely relative force, and thence arguing that if the 
 Word is eternal, the world is eternal also (Gen. i. 1). Besides, 
 Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος. How is the Word other than eternal if He is thus 
 identified with the ever-existing Being ? 
 
Υ.] in the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel. 841 
 
 than an intellectual claim upon us, of the highest 
 order. We are bound to try to understand it just 
 as certainly as we are bound to obey the command 
 to love our enemies. No man who earries his 
 morality into the sphere of religious thought can 
 affect or afford to maintain that the fundamental 
 idea in the writings of St. John is ἃ scholastic 
 conceit with which practical Christians need not 
 concern themselves. And indeed St. John’s doc- 
 trine of the Logos has been scrutinized anxiously 
 and from the first by the mind of Christendom. 
 Clearly the term Logos denotes at the very least 
 something intimately and everlastingly present with 
 God, something as internal to the Being of God as 
 is thought to the soul of man. The Divine Logos 
 is God reflected in His Own eternal Thought; in 
 the Logos God is His Own Object. The Infinite 
 Thought, the reflection and counterpart of God, 
 subsisting in God as a Being or Hypostasis, and 
 having a tendency to self-communication,—such is the 
 Logos. The Logos is the Thought of God, not inter- 
 mittent and precarious like human thought, but sub- 
 sisting with the intensity of a personal form. The very 
 expression seems to court the argument of Athena- 
 goras, that since God could never have been ἄλογος, 
 the Logos must have been not created but eternal; 
 and the further inference that since reason is man’s 
 noblest faculty, the Uncreated Logos must. be at least 
 equal with God. It might have in any case been 
 asked why the term was used at all, if these obvious 
 inferences were not to be deduced from it; but as a 
 matter of fact they are not mere inferences, since they 
 are warranted by the express language of St. John. 
 
342 Relation between the Word and God, [ Lect. 
 
 St. John says that the Word was “in the beginning.” 
 The question then arises: What was His relation to 
 the Self-existent Being? He was not merely παρὰ τῷ 
 Θεῷ *, along with God, but πρὸς τὸν Θεόν. This last 
 preposition expresses, beyond the fact of co-existence 
 or immanence, the more significant fact of per- 
 petuated intercommunion. The Face of the Ever- 
 lasting Word, if we may dare so to express ourselves, 
 was ever directed towards the Face of the Everlasting 
 Father", But was the Logos then an independent 
 being, existing externally to the One God? To con- 
 ceive of an independent being, anterior to creation, 
 would be an error at issue with the first truth of 
 monotheism; and therefore Θεὸς ἣν ὁ Λόγος. The Word 
 is not merely a Divine Being, but He is in the absolute 
 sense God*. Thus from eternal existence we ascend to 
 
 t St. John xvii. 5. 
 
 u Meyer in loc: “mpés bezeichnet das Befindlichsein des Logos 
 bei Gott im Gesichtspunkte der Richtung der Gemeiuschaft.” 
 Bernhardy Syntax, p. 265. 
 
 x Here is the essential difference between the Logos of St. John and 
 the Logos of Philo. Meyer, who apparently holds Philo to have defi- 
 nitely considered his Logos as a real hypostasis, states it as follows, in 
 his note on the words καὶ θεὸς ἢν ὁ λόγος. “ Wie also Johannes, mit 
 dem nichtartikulirten θεὸς kein niedrigeres Wesen, als Gott Selbst 
 hat, bezeichnen will; so unterscheidet sich die Johanneische Logos- 
 Idee bestimmt von derjenigen bei Philo, welcher θεός ohne Artikel 
 im Sinne wesentlicher Unterordnung, ja, wie Er Selbst sagt, ἐν 
 καταχρήσει (i. p. 655, ed. Mangey) vom Logos priidicirt ;—wie denn 
 auch der Name ὁ δεύτερος θεός, welchen er ihm giebt, nach ii. p. 625. 
 Euseb. prep. Ev. vii. 13, ausdriicklich den Begriff eines Zwis- 
 chenwesens zwischen Gott und dem Menschen bezeichnen soll, nach 
 dessen Bilde Gott den Menschen geschaffen hat. Dieser Subordi- 
 natianismus, nach welchem der Logos zwar μεθόριός τις θεοῦ φύσις, 
 aber τοῦ μὲν ἐλάττων, ἀνθρώπου δὲ κρείττων ist (i. p. 683) ist nicht der 
 
V.] Representations of the Divine Nature in δέ. John. 948 
 
 the idea of a distinct Personality ; from the idea of 
 a Personality to that of substantial Godhead. Yet 
 the Logos necessarily suggests to our minds the 
 further idea of communicativeness ; the Logos is 
 Speech as well as Thoughty. And of His actual 
 self-communication St. John mentions two phases 
 or stages; the first creation, the second revelation. 
 The Word unveils Himself to the soul through the 
 mediation of objects of sense in the physical world, 
 and He also unveils Himself immediately. Accord- 
 ingly St. John says that “all things were made” 
 by the Word, and that the Word Who creates 
 is also the Revealer: “the Word was made flesh, 
 and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.” He 
 possesses δόξα, that is, in St. John, the totality of 
 the Divine attributes. This ‘glory’ is not merely 
 something belonging to His Essential Nature ; since 
 He allows us to behold It through His veil of Flesh. 
 
 What indeed this δόξα or glory was, we may ob- 
 serve by considering that St. John’s writings bring 
 God before us more particularly under a threefold 
 aspect. 
 
 1. God is Life (ζωή). The Father is “living*;” He 
 “has life in Himself@” God is not merely the living 
 God, that is, the real God, in contrast to the non- 
 existent and feigned deities of the heathen. God 
 
 neu-testamentliche, welcher vielmehr die Ewige Weseneinheit des 
 Vaters und des Sohnes zur Voraussetzung hat (Phil. ii. 6 ; Kol. i. 
 15 f.), und die Unterordnung des letztern in dessen Abhiingigkeit 
 vom Vater setzt.” 
 
 y Cf. Delitzsch, System der Biblischen Psychologie, p. 138. 
 
 2 St. John vi. 57: ἀπέστειλέ pe ὁ ζῶν Πατήρ. 
 
 ἃ Ibid. v. 26: ὁ Πατὴρ ἔχει ζωὴν ἐν ἑαυτῷ. 
 
944. God revealed as Life and as Love. (Lecr. 
 
 is Life, in the sense of Self-existent Bemg; He is 
 the Focus and the Fountain of universal life. In 
 Him life may be contemplated in its twofold activity, 
 as issuing from its source, and as returning to its 
 object. The Life of God passes forth from Itself; 
 It lavishes Itself throughout the realms of nothing- 
 ness ; It summons into being worlds, systems, intelli- 
 gences, orders of existences unimagined before. In 
 doing this It obeys no necessary law of self-expansion, 
 but pours Itself forth with that highest generosity 
 that belongs to a perfect freedom. In other words, 
 God as the Life, is God the Creator. On the other 
 hand, God is Being returning into Itself, finding in 
 Itself Its perfect and consummate satisfaction. -God 
 is thus the Object of all dependent life ; He is indeed 
 the Object of His Own Life; all His infinite powers 
 and faculties turn ever inward with uncloyed delight 
 upon Himself as upon their one adequate End or 
 Object. We cannot approach more nearly to a defini- 
 tion of pleasure than by saying that it is the exact 
 correspondence between a faculty and its object. 
 Pleasure is thus a test of vitality; and God, as being 
 Life, is the One Beng Who is supremely and per- 
 fectly happy. 
 
 2. Again, God is Love (ἀγάπη). Love is the re- 
 lation which subsists between God and all that lives 
 as He has willed. Love is the bond of the Being 
 of God. Love binds the Father to that Only Son 
 Whom He has begotten from all eternity’. Love 
 
 Ὺ » - “, 
 θα St.John iv. 8: ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν, οὐκ ἔγνω τὸν Θεόν ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη 
 ἐστίν. Ibid. ver. 16: ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστὶ, καὶ ὁ μένων ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ, ἐν τῷ 
 “ A \ c A > > ΄σ 
 Θεῷ μένει, καὶ ὁ Θεὸς ἐν αὐτῷ. 
 
 ο St. John iii. 35: 6 Πατὴρ ἀγαπᾷ τὸν Υἱὸν καὶ πάντα δέδωκεν ἐν τῇ 
 
1 God revealed as Light. 345 
 
 itself knows no beginning; it proceeds from the 
 Father and the Son from all eternity. God loves 
 created life, whether in nature or in grace ; He loves 
 the race of men, the unredeemed world4; He loves 
 Christians with a special love®. In beings thus ex- 
 ternal to Himself, God loves the life which He has 
 given them; He loves Himself in them; He is still 
 Himself the ultimate, rightful, necessary Object of 
 His love. Thus love is of His essence; it is the 
 expression of His necessary delight in His Own 
 existence. 
 
 3. Lastly, God is Light (φῶς). That is to say, He 
 is absolute intellectual and moral Truth; He is Truth 
 in the realms of thought, and Truth in the sphere of 
 action. He is the All-knowing and the perfectly 
 Holy Being. No intellectual ignorance can darken 
 His all-embracing survey of actual and possible fact ; 
 no stain can soil His robe of awful Sanctity. Light 
 is not merely the sphere in which He dwells: He 
 is His own sphere of existence ; He is Himself Light, 
 and in Him is no darkness at all. 
 
 χειρὶ αὐτοῦ, Ibid. v. 20: ὁ yap Πατὴρ φιλεῖ τὸν Υἱὸν, καὶ πάντα δείκνυσιν 
 αὐτῷ ἃ αὐτὸς ποιεῖ. Ibid. χ. 17; xv. 9. Ibid. xvii. 24: ἠγάπησάς Με 
 πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου. 
 
 4 St. John iii. 16: οὕτω γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν Yidv 
 αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν. 1 St. John iv. 10: αὐτὸς ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς, καὶ 
 ἀπέστειλε τὸν Υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἱλασμὸν περὶ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν. Ibid. ver. 19: 
 ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν αὐτὸν, ὅτι αὐτὸς πρῶτος ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς. 
 
 e St. John xiv. 23; xvi. 27. 
 
 f 1 St. Johni. 5: ὁ Θεὸς φῶς ἐστι, καὶ σκοτία ἐν αὐτῷ οὐκ ἔστιν 
 οὐδεμία. Ibid. ver. 7: αὐτός ἐστιν ἐν τῷ φωτί. Here ἐν does not 
 merely point to the sphere in which God dwells. In St. John this 
 preposition is constantly used to denote the closest possible rela- 
 tionship between two subjects, or, as here, between a subject and its 
 
946 The Incarnate Word [Lecr. 
 
 These three aspects of the Divine Nature, denoted 
 by the terms .Life, Love, and Light, are attributed 
 in St. John’s writings with abundant explicitness to 
 the Word made flesh. 
 
 Thus, the Logos is Light. He is the Light, that 
 is, the Light Which is the very essence of God. The 
 Baptist indeed preaches truth ; but the Baptist must 
 not be confounded with the Light Which he heralds. 
 The Logos is the true Light, All that has really 
 enlarged the stock of intellectual truth or of moral 
 goodness among men, all that has ever lighted any 
 soul of man, has radiated from Him‘. He proclaims 
 Himself to be the Light of the world*, and the 
 Truth!; and His Apostle, speaking of the illumina- 
 
 attribute. Cf. Reuss, Théologie Chrétienne, ii. p. 434, to whom I 
 am indebted for many of the above observations and references. 
 
 & St. John i. 7: οὗτος ἦλθεν εἰς μαρτυρίαν, iva μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ 
 φωτός. Ibid. ver. 8: οὐκ ἢν ἐκεῖνος τὸ φῶς, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ 
 φωτός. 
 
 h Jbid. ver. 9: ἦν τὸ φῶς τὸ ἀληθινόν. 
 
 i Ibid. ver. 9: ὃ φωτίζει πάντα ἄνθρωπον ἐρχόμενον εἰς τὸν κόσμον 
 “Das φωτίζειν πάντα ἄνθρωπον, als characteristiche Wirksamkeit des 
 wahren Lichts, bleibt wahr, wenngleich empirisch diese Erleuch- 
 tung von Vielen nicht empfangen wird. Das empirische Verhalt- 
 niss kommt darauf zuriick: quisquis illuminatur ab hac luce 
 illuminatur. (Beng.).” Meyer in Joh. i. 9. The Evangelist means 
 more than this: no human being is left without a certain measure 
 of natural light, and this light is given by the Divine Logos in 
 all cases. 
 
 k Tbid. vili. 12: ἐγώ εἰμι τὸ φῶς τοῦ κόσμου: ὁ ἀκολουθῶν ἐμοὶ, οὐ μὴ 
 περιπατήσει ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ, GAN ἕξει τὸ φῶς τῆς ζωῆς. Ibid. ill. 19: τὸ 
 φῶς ἐλήλυθεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον, that 15, in the Incarnate Word. eit 
 1X. 5: ὅταν ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ὦ, φῶς εἶμι τοῦ κόσμου. Ibid. xii. 46: 
 φῶς εἰς τὸν κόσμον ἐλήλυθα, ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς ἐμὲ, ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ μὴ 
 μείνῃ. 
 
 ! Thid. xiv. 6. 
 
V.] revealed as Light, Love, and Life. 347 
 
 tion shed by Him upon the Church, reminds Chris- 
 tians that “the darkness is passing, and the true 
 Light now shineth™.” 
 
 The Logos is Love. He refracts upon the Father 
 the fulness of His love". He loves the Father as 
 the Father loves Himself. .The Father’s love sends 
 Him into the world, and He obeys out of love®. It 
 is love which draws Him equally with the Father 
 to make His abode in the souls of the faithful P. 
 
 The Logos is Life. He is the Life4, the eternal 
 Life’, the Life Which is the Essence of God. It 
 has been given Him to have life in Himself, as 
 the Father has life in Himself’. He can give 
 lifet; nay, life is so emphatically His prerogative 
 oift, that He is called the Word of Life®. 
 
 Thus the Word reveals the Divine Essence; His 
 Incarnation makes that Life, that Love, that Light, 
 which is eternally resident in God, obvious to souls 
 that steadily contemplate Himself. These terms, Life, 
 Love, Light—so simple, so abstract, so suggestive— 
 
 my §t. John il. 8: ἡ σκοτία mapdyera, καὶ τὸ φῶς τὸ ἀληθινὸν ἤδη 
 φαίνει. 
 
 n St. John xiv. 31. 
 
 © 1 St.John 11. 16: ἐν τούτῳ ἐγνώκαμεν τὴν ἀγάπην (the absolute 
 charity), ὅτι ἐκεῖνος ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἔθηκε. Cf. St. John 
 111. τό. 
 
 P St. John xiv. 23: ἐάν τις ἀγαπᾷ με, τὸν λόγον μου τηρήσει, καὶ ὁ 
 Πατήρ μου ἀγαπήσει αὐτόν, καὶ πρὸς αὐτὸν ἐλευσόμεθα, καὶ μονὴν παρ᾽ αὐτῷ 
 ποιήσομεν. Ibid. xill. τα; Xv. 9. 
 
 ᾳ Ibid. xi. 25: ἐγώ εἰμι... ἡ fon. Ibid. xiv. 6. 
 
 r 1 St. Johny. 20: οὗτός ἐστιν. . . ἡ ζωὴ αἰώνιος. The οὗτος is 
 referred to the Father by Liicke and Winer. But see p. 357, note 6. 
 
 8 St. John v. 26: ἔδωκε καὶ τῷ Υἱῷ ζωὴν ἔχειν ἐν ἑαυτῷ. 
 
 bpd: i. 3).4) 0°. 
 
 ἃ τ δὲ, John i. 1: ὁ λόγος τῆς ζωῆς. 
 
348 The Word is the Only-begotten Son. [ Lxcr. 
 
 meet in God; but they meet also in Jesus Christ. 
 They do not only make Him the centre of a philosophy. 
 They belong to the mystic language of faith more 
 truly than to the abstract terminology of speculative 
 thought. They draw hearts to Jesus; they invest 
 Him with a higher than any intellectual beauty. The 
 Life, the Love, the Light, are the ‘glory’ of the Word 
 Incarnate which His disciples ‘beheld, pouring its 
 rays through the veil of His human tabernacle*. 
 The Light, the Love, the Life, constitute the ‘fulness’ 
 whereof His disciples recetvedY. Herein is com- 
 prised that entire body of grace and truth’, by 
 which the Word Incarnate gives to men the night 
 to become sons of God. 
 
 But, as has been already abundantly implied, the 
 Word is also the Son. As applied to our Lord, the title 
 ‘Son of God’ is protected by epithets which sustain 
 and define its unique significance. In the synoptic 
 Gospels, Christ is termed the ‘well-beloved’ Son?. 
 In St. Paul He is God’s ‘Own’ Sone. In St. John 
 He is the Only-begotten Son, or simply the Only- 
 begotten4, This last epithet surely means, not merely 
 
 x St. John 1. 14: ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο, καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ 
 ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ. 
 
 y Ibid. ver. τό : καὶ ἐκ τοῦ πληρώματος αὐτοῦ ἡμεῖς πάντες ἐλάβομεν. 
 
 2 Ibid. ver. 14: πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας. 
 
 a Tbid. i. 12: ὅσοι δὲ ἔλαβον αὐτὸν, ἔδωκεν αὐτοῖς ἐξουσίαν τέκνα 
 Θεοῦ γένεσθαι. 
 
 Ὁ ἀγαπητός, St. Matt. ili. 17; xii. 18; xvii. 5; St. Mark 1.11; 
 ix. 7; xii. 6; St. Luke iii. 22. ix. 35. Cod. Alex. reads ἐκλελεγ- 
 μένον, Xx. 13; cf. 2 St. Peter i. 17. 
 
 ¢ Rom. viii. 32: τοῦ ἰδίου Yiod οὐκ ἐφείσατο. Ibid. ver. 3: τὸν 
 ἑαυτοῦ Υἱὸν πέμψας. 
 
 ἃ δύ, John i. 14: ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ 
 
V.] Relation of the Only-begotten Son to the Father. 5849 
 
 that God has no other such Son, but that His Only- 
 begotten Son is, in virtue of this Sonship, a partaker 
 of that Incommunicable and Imperishable Essence, 
 Which is sundered from all created life by an im- 
 passable chasm. If St. Paul speaks of the Resur- 
 rection as manifesting this Sonship to the worlde, 
 the sense of the word μονογενής remains in St. John, 
 and it is plainly “defined by its context to relate to 
 something higher than any event occurring in time, 
 however great or beneficial to the human race.” 
 The Only-begotten Son is in the bosom of the 
 Father (ὁ ὧν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ Πατρός) just as the 
 Logos is πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, ever contemplating, ever as it 
 were moving towards Him in the ceaseless activities 
 of an ineffable communion. The Son is His Father’s 
 equal, in that He is partaker of His nature: He is 
 
 Πατρός. Ibid. 1. 18: ὁ μονογενὴς Υἱὸς, ὁ dv eis τὸν κόλπον τοῦ Πατρός. Ibid. 
 iii. 16: [ὁ Θεὸς] τὸν Υἱὸν αὑτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν. Ibid. ver. 18: 6 δὲ 
 μὴ πιστεύων ἤδη κέκριται, ὅτι μὴ πεπίστευκεν εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ μονογενοῦς 
 Υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ. Cf. 1 St. John iv. 9: τὸν Υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ 
 ἀπέσταλκεν ὁ Θεὸς εἰς τὸν κόσμον, ἵνα ζήσωμεν δι’ αὐτοῦ The word 
 μονογενής is used by St. Luke of the son of the widow of Nain 
 (vii. 12), of the daughter of Jairus (viil. 42), and of the lunatic 
 son of the man who met our Lord on His coming down from the 
 mount of the transfiguration (ix. 38). In Heb. xi. 17 it is applied 
 to Isaac. μονογενής means in each of these cases ‘ that which exists 
 once only, that is, singly in its kind.’ (Tholuck, Comm. in Joh. 
 i. 14.) God has One Only Son Who by nature and necessity is 
 His Son. 
 
 e Acts xiii. 32, 33; Rom.i. 4. Compare on the other hand, 
 Heb. v. 8. 
 
 f Newman’s Arians, p. 174. 
 
 & St. John i. 18, ὁ μονογενὴς Υἱός, where however the Vatican and 
 Sinaitic MSS. and Cod. Ephr. read 6 μονογενὴς ΘΕΟΣ. For the Pa- 
 tristic evidence on the subject see Alford in loc. 
 
350 ‘Word’ and ‘Son’ complete and guard each other. [Τ|ῈΟΥ.Ψ 
 
 His Subordinate, in that this Equality is eternally 
 derived. But the Father worketh hitherto and the 
 Son works ; the Father hath life in Himself, and has 
 given to the Son to have life in Himself; all men are 
 to honour the Son even as they honour the Father. 
 Each of these expressions, the Word and the Son, 
 if taken alone, might have led to a fatal mis- 
 conception. In the language of Church history, the 
 Logos, if unbalanced by the idea of Sonship, might 
 have seemed to sanction Sabellianism. The Son, 
 without the Logos, might have been yet more suc- 
 cessfully pressed into the service of Arianism. An 
 Eternal Thought or Reason, even although constantly 
 tending to express Itself in speech, is of Itself too 
 abstract to oblige us to conceive of It as of a Per- 
 sonal Subsistence. On the other hand the filial re- 
 lationship carries with it the idea of dependence and 
 of comparatively recent origin, even although it 
 should suggest the reproduction in the Son of all the 
 qualities of the Sire. Certainly St. John’s language 
 in his prologue protects the Personality of the Logos, 
 and unless he believed that God could be divided or 
 could have had a beginning, the Apostle teaches 
 that the Son is co-eternal with the Father. Yet 
 the bare metaphors of ‘Word’ and ‘Son’ might 
 separately lead divergent thinkers to conceive of 
 Him to Whom they are applied, on the one side 
 as an impersonal quality or faculty of God, on the 
 other as a concrete and personal but inferior and 
 dependent being. But combine them, and each cor- 
 rects the possible misuse of the other. The Logos, 
 Who is also the Son, cannot be an impersonal and 
 abstract quality; since such an expression as the Son 
 
γ The Eternal Word historically manifested. 351 
 
 would be utterly misleading unless it implied at the 
 very least the fact of personal subsistence distinct 
 from that of the Father. On the other hand, the Son, 
 Who is also the Logos, cannot be of more recent 
 origin than the Father ; since the Father cannot be 
 conceived of as subsisting without that Eternal 
 Thought or Reason Which is the Son. Nor may the 
 Son be deemed to be in aught but the order of Divine 
 subsistence inferior to the Father, since He is iden- 
 tical with the Eternal Intellectual Life of the Most 
 High. Each metaphor reinforces, supplements, and 
 protects the other ; and together they exhibit Christ 
 before His Incarnation as at once personally distinct 
 from, and yet equal with, the Father; He is That 
 personally subsisting and “ Eternal Life, Which was 
 with the Father, and was manifested unto us,” 
 
 St. John’s Gospel is a narrative of that manifes- 
 tation. It is a Life of the Eternal Word tabernacling 
 in Human Nature among men!, The Hebrew schools 
 employed a similar expression to designate the per- 
 sonal presence of the Divinity in this finite world. 
 In St. John’s Gospel the eternal Personality of Christ 
 makes Itself felt wellnigh at every step of the nar- 
 rative*, Each discourse, each miracle, nay each sepa- 
 
 h 1 St. John i. 2. 
 
 i St. John i. 14: ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν. The image implies both the 
 reality and the transient character of our Lord’s manifestation in 
 the flesh. Olshausen, Meyer, and Liicke see in it an allusion to 
 the ‘Shekinah,’ in which the Divine glory or radiance (4)35) dwelt 
 enshrined. 
 
 k Baur, Dogmengeschichte, i. 602: “Was das johanneische 
 Evangelium betrifft, so versteht es sich ohnediess von selbst, dass 
 das eigentliche Subject der Persénlichkeit Christi nur der Logos 
 ist, die Menschwerdung besteht daher nur in dem σὰρξ yéveoOa ; 
 
952 The Eternal Word historically manifested. — [Lucr. 
 
 rate word and act, is a fresh ray of glory streaming 
 forth from the Person of the Word through the veil 
 of His assumed Humanity. The miracles of the Word 
 Incarnate are frequently called His works! The 
 Evangelist means to imply that “the wonderful is 
 only the natural form of working for Him in Whom 
 all the fulness of God dwells.” Christ’s Divine Nature 
 must of necessity bring forth works greater than the 
 works of man. The Incarnation is the one great 
 wonder; other miracles follow as a matter of course. 
 The real marvel would be if the Incarnate Being 
 should work no miracles™; as it is, they are the 
 natural results of His presence among men, rather 
 than its higher manifestation. His true glory is not 
 perceived except by those who gaze at it with a 
 meditative and reverent intentness®. The Word In- 
 carnate is ever conscious of His sublime relationship 
 to the Father. He knows whence He 159, He refers 
 
 dass der Logos Fleisch geworden, im Fleisch erschienen ist, ist seine 
 menschliche Erscheinung.” It will be borne in mind that σάρξ, in its 
 full New Testament meaning, certainly includes ψυχή as well as the 
 animal organism (see Olshausen on Rom. vii. 14), and St. John attri- 
 butes to the Word Incarnate spiritual experiences which must have 
 had their seat in His human Soul (xi. 33, 38; xiii. 21). But Baur’s 
 general position, that in St. John’s Gospel the Personality of the 
 Eternal Word is perpetually before us, is unquestionably true. 
 
 I ἔργα, St. Jobn’v. 30; Vil. 21: 55525, 3% 35; XUV. ub, bey cove 
 23. Cf. too St. Matt. xi. 2. The word is applied to Old Testament 
 miracles in Heb. ili. 9; Ps. xciv. 9, LXX. Cf. Archbishop Trench 
 on the Miracles, p. 7. That, notwithstanding the wider use of ἔργον 
 in St. John xvii. 4, ἔργα in the fourth Gospel do mean Christ’s 
 miracles, cf. Trench, Mir. p. 8, note f. 
 
 m Trench, ubi supra, p. 8. 
 
 n St. John uses the words θεωρεῖν, θεάσασθαι to describe this. 
 
 ο St. John vill. 14: οἶδα πόθεν ἦλθον. 
 
> We) The Eternal Word historically manifested. 353 
 
 not unfrequently to His Pre-existent Lifep. He sees 
 into the deepest purposes of the human hearts around 
 Him4. He has a perfect knowledge of all that con- 
 cerns God'. His works are simply the works of God®. 
 To believe in the Father is to believe in Him. To 
 have seen Him is to have seen the Father. To reject 
 and hate Him is to reject and hate the Father. He 
 demands at the hands of men the same tribute of 
 affection and submission as that which they owe 
 to the Person of the Fathert. In St. John the 
 
 P St. John iii. 13; vi. 62; vili. 58; xvi. 28; xvii. 5. 
 
 TiTbid; Wess Ave τὴ Ν. ΤᾺ 42; ΜΠ ΤΕ: 
 
 r Ibid. vill. 55; X. 15. 
 
 BL ΤΡΤΩ τς. 1 X. 37, Β66.; XIV. LO. 
 
 t As M. Reuss admits: “Tl résulte (from the prerogatives 
 ascribed to the Word Incarnate in St. John’s Gospel) que le Verbe 
 révélateur pouvait demander pour Iui-méme, de la part des 
 hommes, les mémes sentiments, et les mémes dispositions, qu’ils 
 doivent avoir ἃ l’égard de la personne du Pére. Ces sentiments 
 sont exprimés par un mot, qui contient la notion d’un respect 
 professé pour un supérieur, la reconnaissance d’une dignité devant 
 laquelle on s’incline. <A cet égard, i y a égalité des deux personnes 
 divines vis-a-vis de Vhomme. On ne croit pas ἃ lune sans croire 
 i l'autre; qui voit l’une voit l'autre; rejeter, hair le Fils, c’est 
 rejeter et hair le Pére (St. Jean iii. 33, 34; xil. 44; xv. 23). Mais 
 dans tout ceci (proceeds M. Reuss) il ne s’agit pas de ce qu’on 
 appele le culte dans le langage pratique de I’Fglise. Le culte 
 appartient ἃ Dieu le Pere, et lui sera offert désormais avec d’autant 
 plus d’empressement qu’il est mieux révélé, et que rien ne sépare 
 plus de lui les croyants.” (Reuss, Théol. Chr. ii. 455.) How incon- 
 sequent is this restriction! If the Incarnate Word has a right to de- 
 mand for Himself the same ‘sentiments’ and ‘dispositions’ as those 
 which men cherish towards the Almighty Father, He has a right 
 to the same tribute of an adoration in spirit and in truth as that 
 which is due to the Father. What is worship but a complex 
 act of such ‘sentiments’ and ‘dispositions’ as faith, love, self- 
 
 A a 
 
954 Self-manifestation of the Word Incarnate. [Τ|807.Ψ 
 
 Incarnation is exhibited, not as the measure of the 
 humiliation of the Eternal Word, but as the veil of 
 His enduring and unassailable glory. The angels of 
 God ascend and descend upon Him: He is still in 
 heaven. He has only taken an earthly form and 
 entered a Human Frame. He has raised humanity 
 rather than abased Himself. In St. John the status 
 inanitionis, the intrinsic humiliation of Christ’s In- 
 carnate Life, is thrown into the background of the 
 reader’s thought; all is illuminated by the never- 
 failing presence of the Word in His glory. Even 
 when Jesus dies, His Death is no mere humiliation; 
 His Death is the crisis of His exaltation", of His 
 glory*.. Not that He can personally increase in 
 glory; already He is the Son; He is the Word. But 
 He can glorify and exalt That Manhood which is the 
 robe through which His movements are discernible ; 
 He can glorify Himself, as God is glorified, by draw- 
 ing towards His Person the faith and love and reve- 
 rence of men. It were folly to conceive of Him as 
 enhancing His Divinity; but He can make larger 
 and deeper that measure of homage which ascends 
 
 prostration, self-surrender before the Most Holy? If τιμᾷν (St. John 
 γ. 23), within the general meaning of due acknowledgment, includes 
 much else besides adoration, it cannot be applied to the duties 
 of man to God without including adoration. Our Lord’s words 
 place Himself and the Father simply on a level; if the Son is not 
 to be adored, neither is the Father ; if the Father is to be adored, 
 then must the Son be adored in the same sense and measure. 
 This is certainly not interfered with by St. John iv. 20, sqq. 
 
 u St. John 111. 14: ὑψωθῆναι δεῖ τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. Ibid. viii. 
 29.) ἘΠῚ 2: 
 
 x Tbid. xil, 23: ἐλήλυθεν ἡ ὥρα ἵνα δοξασθῇ ὁ Yids τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. 
 Thid. xiii. 31. 
 
V.] Christology of St. John’s First Epistle. 355 
 
 towards His throne from human understandings and 
 from human hearts’. 
 
 III. But does St. John’s teaching in his earlier 
 writings on the subject of our Lord’s Person har- 
 monize with the representations placed before us in 
 the fourth Gospel? The opening words of his first 
 Epistle might go far to answer that question. 
 St. John’s position in this Epistle is, that the Eter- 
 nal immaterial Word of Life resident in God had 
 become historically manifest, and that the Apostles 
 had consciously seen, and heard, and handled Hin, 
 and were now publishing their experience to the 
 world’, The practical bearing of this announcement 
 lay in the truth that “he that hath the Son hath 
 the Life, and he that hath not the Son hath not the 
 Life>.” For “God hath given to us the Eternal Life, 
 and this, the Life, is in His Sone.” If then the soul 
 is to hold communion with God in the Life of Light 
 and Righteousness and Love, it must be through 
 communion with His Divine Son. Thus all prac- 
 tically depends upon the attitude of the soul towards 
 ' the Son. Accordingly “whosoever denieth the Son, 
 the same hath not the Father¢;” while on the other 
 
 y Cf. Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 456; although the statements of 
 this writer cannot be adopted without much qualification. 
 
 z On the question of the authorship of the three Epistles, see 
 Dean Alford’s exhaustive discussion, Greek Test. vol. iv., Prolego- 
 mena, chaps. 5, 6. ἃ τ St. John i. 1-3. 
 
 Ὁ Thid. v. 12: 6 ἔχων τὸν Υἱὸν ἔχει τὴν Conv? ὁ μὴ ἔχων τὸν Υἱὸν 
 τοῦ Θεοῦ τὴν ζωὴν οὐκ ἔχει. 
 
 © Ibid. ver. 11: καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ μαρτυρία (i.e. the revealed doc- 
 trine resting on a Divine authority) ὅτε ζωὴν αἰώνιον ἔδωκεν ἡμῖν ὁ 
 Θεὸς, καὶ αὕτη ἡ ζωὴ ev τῷ Yid αὐτοῦ ἐστίν. 
 
 ἃ α St. Johnii. 22: οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ ἀντίχριστος, ὁ ἀρνούμενος τὸν Πατέρα 
 
 Α ἃ 2 
 
950 Christology of St. John’s First Epistle. [Lecr. 
 
 hand, whosoever sincerely and in practice acknow- 
 ledges the Son of God in His historical manifesta- 
 tion, enjoys a true communion with the Life of God. 
 “ Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of 
 God, God dwelleth in him and he in Gode.” St. John 
 constantly teaches that the Christian’s work in this 
 state of probation is to conquer ‘the world’ Τὺ is, 
 
 καὶ τὸν Υἱόν. A humanitarian might have urged that it was possible 
 to deny the Son, while confessing the Father. But St. John, on 
 the ground that the Son is the Only and the Adequate Manifesta- 
 tion of the Father, denies this: πᾶς ὁ ἀρνούμενος τὸν Yidv οὐδὲ τὸν 
 Πατέρα ἔχει. 
 
 θα δύ, John iv. 15: ὃς ἂν ὁμολογήσῃ ὅτι ᾿Ιησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ Yids τοῦ Θεοῦ, 
 ὁ Θεὸς ἐν αὐτῷ μένει, καὶ αὐτὸς ἐν τῷ Θεῷ. 
 
 f Tbid. ii. 15: ἐάν τις ἀγαπᾷ τὸν κόσμον, οὐκ ἔστιν ἣ ἀγάπη τοῦ Πατρὸς 
 ἐν αὐτῷ. Compare Martensen, Christ]. Dogmat. ὃ 96: “If we consider 
 the effects of the Fall upon the course of historical development, 
 not only in the case of individuals but of the race collectively, 
 the term ‘world’ (κόσμος) bears a special meaning different from 
 that which it would have, were the development of humanity 
 normal. The cosmical principle having been emancipated by the 
 Fall from its due subjection to the Spirit, and invested with a false 
 independence, and the universe of creation having obtained with 
 man ἃ higher importance than really attaches to it, the historical 
 development of the world has become one in which the advance 
 of the kingdom of God is retarded and hindered. The created 
 universe has, in a relative sense, life in itself, including, as it does, 
 a system of powers, ideas, and aims, which possess a relative value. 
 This relative independence, which ought to be subservient to the 
 kingdom of God, has become a fallen ‘world-autonomy.’ Hence 
 arises the scriptural expression ‘this world’ (ὁ κόσμος οὗτος). By 
 this expression the Bible conveys the idea that it regards the 
 world not only ontologically but in its definite and actual state, 
 the state in which it has been since the Fall. ‘This world’ means 
 the world content with itself, in its own independence, its own 
 glory ; the world which disowns its dependence on God as its 
 Creator. ‘This world’ regards itself, not as the κτίσις, but only 
 
V.] Christology of St. Johi’s First Epistle. 357 
 
 in other words, to fight successfully against that 
 view of life which ignores God, against that complex 
 system of attractive moral evil and specious intel- 
 lectual falsehood which is organized and marshalled 
 by the great enemy of God, and which permeates 
 and inspires non-Christianized society. The world’s 
 force is seen especially in “the lust of the flesh, in 
 the lust of the eyes, and in the pride of life.” These 
 three forms of concupiscence manifest the inner life of 
 the worlds; if the Christian would resist and beat them 
 back, he must have a strong faith, a faith in a Divine 
 -Saviour. “ Who is he that overcometh the world, but 
 he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of Godh?” 
 This faith, which introduces the soul to communion 
 with God in Light, attained through communion with 
 His Blessed Son, exhibits the world in its true colours. 
 The soul spurns the world as she clings believingly 
 to the Divine Son. The whole picture of Christ’s work 
 in St. John’s first Epistle, and especially the pointed 
 and earnest opposition to the specific heresy of Cerin- 
 thus', leads us up to the culminating statement that 
 
 as the κόσμος, as a system of glory and beauty which has life in 
 itself, and can give life. The historical embodiment of ‘ this world’ 
 is heathendom, which honoureth not God as God.” 
 
 # St.John ii. 16: πᾶν τὸ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκὸς, καὶ ἡ 
 ἐπιθυμία τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν, καὶ ἡ ἀλαζονεία τοῦ βίου, οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς, 
 ἀλλ᾽ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου ἐστί. 
 
 h Tbid. ν. 4,5: αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ νίκη ἡ νικήσασα τὸν κόσμον, ἡ πίστις 
 ἡμῶν" τίς ἐστιν ὁ νικῶν τὸν κόσμον, εἰ μὴ ὁ πιστεύων ὅτι Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν 
 ὁ Yids τοῦ Θεοῦ ; 
 
 1 Specially 1 St. John iv. 2, 3, where the Apostle’s words contain 
 a double antithesis to the Cerinthian gnosis, which taught that the 
 Aon Christ entered into the Man Jesus at His baptism, and re- 
 mained with Him until His Passion, Jesus being a mere man. 
 St. John asserts in opposition (1) that Jesus and the Christ are 
 
358 Characteristic temper of St. John, (Lect. 
 
 Jesus Himself is the true God and the Eternal Life, 
 Throughout this Epistle the Apostle has been writing 
 to those “who believe on the Name of the Son of 
 God,” that is to say, on the symbol which unveils 
 His essential Nature ; St. John’s object has been to 
 convince believers that by that faith they had the 
 Eternal Life, and to force them to be true to [0]. 
 
 In each of St. John’s Epistles™ we encounter that 
 
 one and the same Person, (2) that the one Lord Jesus Christ came 
 ‘in’ not ‘into the flesh,’ He did not descend into an already exist-— 
 ing man, but He appeared clothed in Human Nature. See the 
 exhaustive note of Ebrard, Johannis briefe in loc. 
 
 k 1 St. John v. 20: οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ ἀληθινὸς Θεὸς, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ αἰώνιος. 
 After having distinguished the ἀληθινός from His Υἱός, St. John, by 
 a characteristic turn, simply identifies the Son with the ἀληθινὸς 
 Θεός. To refer this sentence to the Father, Who has been twice 
 called 6 ἀληθινός, would be unmeaning repetition. Moreover the 
 previous sentence declared, not that we are in God as Father, Son 
 and Spirit, but that we are in God as being in His Son Jesus 
 Christ. This statement is justified when οὗτος is referred to Υἱῷ. 
 As to the article before ἀληθινός, it has the effect of stating, not 
 merely What, but Who our Lord is; it says not Christ is Divine, 
 but Christ is God. This does not really go beyond what the 
 Apostle has already said about the Λόγος at the beginning of this 
 Epistle. To say with Diisterdieck that this interpretation obscures 
 the distinction between the Father and the Son, is inaccurate ; 
 St. John does not say This is the Father, but This is the true God. 
 ὋὉ ἀληθινὸς Θεός is the Divine Essence, in opposition to all creatures. 
 The question of hypostatic distinctions within that Essence is not 
 here before the Apostle. Our being in the true God depends upon 
 our being in Christ, and St. John clenches this assertion by saying 
 that Christ is the true God Himself. 
 
 1 + St. John v. 13: ταῦτα ἔγραψα ὑμῖν [τοῖς πιστεύουσιν eis τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ 
 Υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ, Rec.) ἵνα εἰδῆτε ὅτι ζωὴν ἔχετε αἰώνιον, καὶ ἵνα πιστεύητε 
 [οἱ πιστεύοντες, ΤῚ50}),] εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 
 m In St. John’s second Epistle observe (1) the association of 
 Christ with the Father as the source of χάρις, ἔλεος, and εἰρήνη 
 
—" 
 
 V.] a union of tenderness and decision. 359 
 
 special temper, at once so tender and so peremptory, 
 which is an ethical corollary to belief in an Incar- 
 nate God. St. John has been called the Apostle of 
 the Absolute. Those who would concede to Chris- 
 tianity no higher dignity than that of relative and 
 provisional truth, will fail to find any countenance 
 for their doctrine in the New Testament Scriptures. 
 But nowhere will they encounter more earnest op- 
 position to it than in the pages of the writer who 
 is pre-eminently the Apostle of charity. St. John 
 preaches the Christian creed as the one absolute cer- 
 tainty. The Christian faith might have been only 
 relatively true, if it had reposed upon the word of 
 a human messenger. But St. John specially insists 
 upon the fact that God had revealed Himself, not 
 merely through, but in Christ. Thus the Absolute 
 Religion is introduced by a Self-revelation of the 
 Absolute Being Himself. God has appeared, God 
 has spoken ; and the Christian faith is the result. 
 St. John then does not treat Christianity as a phase 
 in the history even of true religion, as a religion con- 
 taining elements of truth, or even more truth than 
 any religion which had preceded it; he says, “ We 
 Christians are in Him that is True.” Not to admit 
 that Jesus Christ has come in the Flesh, is to be a 
 deceiver and an antichrist. St. John presents Chris- 
 tianity to the soul as a religion which must be every- 
 
 (ver. 3) ; (2) the denunciation of the Cerinthian doctrine as anti- 
 Christian (ver. 7); (3) the significant statement that a false pro- 
 gress (ὁ προάγων, A. B., not as rec. ὁ παραβαίνων) which did not rest 
 in the true Apostolic διδαχὴ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, would forfeit all communion 
 with God. We know Him only in Christ His Blessed Son, and to 
 reject Christianity is to reject the only true Theism (vers, 8, 9). 
 
900 St. John’s characteristic temper [Lecr. 
 
 thing to it, if it is not really to be worse than 
 nothing". The opposition between truth and error, 
 between the friends and the foes of Christ, is for 
 St. John as sharp and trenchant a thing as the con- 
 trast between light and darkness, between life and 
 death®, This is the temper of a man who will not 
 enter the public baths along with the heretic who 
 has dishonoured his Lord?. This is the spirit of the 
 teacher who warns his flock to beware of eating with 
 a propagator of false doctrine, and of bidding him 
 God speed, lest they should partake of his “evil 
 deeds4.” Yet this is also the writer whose pages 
 beyond any other in the New Testament beam with 
 the purest, tenderest love of humanity. Side by side 
 with this resolute antagonism to dogmatic error, 
 St. John exhibits and inculeates an enthusiastic af- 
 fection for humankind as such, which our professed 
 philanthropists cannot rival". The man who loves not 
 
 ny St. John 11. 21: οὐκ ἔγραψα ὑμῖν ὅτι οὐκ οἴδατε τὴν ἀλήθειαν, 
 GAN ὅτι οἴδατε αὐτήν, καὶ ὅτι πᾶν ψεῦδος ἐκ τῆς ἀληθείας οὐκ ἔστι. 
 
 Ω 7) fe x , “ r ’ Υ̓ ΘΈΑ 
 Ibid. v. 10: ὁ μὴ πιστεύων τῷ Θεῷ Ψεύστην πεποίηκεν αὐτόν. 
 
 © Ibid. 11. 15: ἐάν τις ἀγαπᾷ τὸν κόσμον οὐκ ἔστιν ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ 
 Πατρὸς ἐν αὐτῷ. Ibid. ver. 19: ἐξ ἡμῶν ἐξῆλθον [501]. οἱ ἀντίχριστοι] ἀλλ᾽ 
 
 > > 2 ¢ “ Ξ » \ > 5 c “ , A > ¢ lol = 5 ΟΝ. 
 οὐκ ἦσαν ἐξ ἡμῶν" εἰ γὰρ ἦσαν ἐξ ἡμῶν, μεμενήκεισαν ἂν μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν" ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα 
 ‘pavepwOdow ὅτι οὐκ εἰσὶ πάντες ἐξ ἡμῶν. Ibid. ver. 22: οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ 
 > , ς > ’ \ , \ \ τὰ 
 
 ἀντίχριστος, ὃ ἀρνούμενος τὸν Πατέρα καὶ τὸν Yiov. 
 
 Ρ §. Irenzeus, adv. Heer. iii. 3, 4: καὶ εἰσὶν οἱ ἀκηκοότες αὐτοῦ (τοῦ 
 Πολυκάρπου) ὅτι ᾿Ιωάννης ὁ τοῦ Κυρίου μαθητής, ἐν τῇ ᾿Εφέσῳ πορευθεὶς 
 λούσασθαι, καὶ ἰδὼν ἔσω Κήρινθον, ἐξήλατο τοῦ βαλανείου μὴ λουσάμενος 
 ἀλλ᾽ ἐπειπών, Φύγωμεν, μὴ καὶ τὸ βαλανεῖον συμπέσῃ, ἔνδον ὄντος Κηρίνθου, 
 τοῦ τῆς ἀληθείας ἐχθροῦ. Cf. Eus. Hist. Eccl. iii. 28. 
 
 4 2 St.John το, τα: εἴ τις ἔρχεται πρὸς ὑμᾶς, καὶ ταύτην τὴν διδαχὴν 
 
 > ΄ \ , ον > ey A , > - \ ,ὔ c A 
 ov φέρει, μὴ λαμβάνετε αὐτὸν εἰς οἰκίαν, καὶ χαίρειν αὐτῷ μὴ A€yere’ ὁ yap 
 λέγων αὐτῷ χαίρειν, κοινωνεῖ τοῖς ἔργοις αὐτοῦ τοῖς πονηροῖς. 
 
 f gSt: John i. 11. 
 
V.] a product of the doctrine of an Incarnate God. 361 
 
 his brother man, whatever be his spiritual estimate 
 of himself, abideth in death’, No divorce is practi- 
 cally possible between the first and the second parts 
 of charity : the man who loves his God must love his 
 brother alsot. Love is the moral counterpart of 
 intellectual light". It is a modern fashion to repre- 
 sent these two tempers, the dogmatic and the philan- 
 thropic, as necessarily opposed. This representation is 
 not indeed in harmony even with modern experience ; 
 but in St. John it meets with a most energetic con- 
 tradiction. St. John is at once earnestly dogmatic 
 and earnestly philanthropic ; for the Incarnation has 
 taught him both the preciousness of man and the 
 preciousness of truth. The Eternal Word, incarnate 
 and dying for the truth, inspires St. John to guard 
 it with apostolic chivalry ; but also, this revelation 
 of the Heart of God melts him into tenderness 
 towards the race which Jesus has loved so well*. 
 To St. John a lack of love for men seems sheer dis- 
 honour to the love of Christ. And the heresy 
 
 aes a » 7) 
 
 8 1 St. John iil. 14: ἡμεῖς οἴδαμεν ὅτι μεταβεβήκαμεν ἐκ τοῦ θανάτου eis 
 τὴν ζωὴν, ὅτι ἀγαπῶμεν τοὺς ἀδελφούς" ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν μένει 
 ἐν τῷ θανάτῳ. 
 
 t Tbid. iv. 20, 21: ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ὃν ἑώρακε, 
 
 ‘ A 4 > er -~ ᾿ Δ > a“ \ ΔΛ) ‘ > A 
 τὸν Θεὸν ὃν οὐχ ἑώρακε πῶς δύναται ἀγαπᾶν; Kal ταύτην τὴν ἐντολὴν 
 » pe > a .“ ς > ~ \ \ > bal \ \ > A 
 ἔχομεν am αὐτοῦ, wa ὁ ἀγαπῶν τὸν Θεὸν ἀγαπᾷ καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν 
 αὐτοῦ. 
 
 . ee - 3 a 
 
 ἃ Thid. ii. 9, 10: ὁ λέγων ἐν τῷ φωτὶ εἶναι, καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ 
 
 cal > “ , > ‘ " a c > - > > - > 
 μισῶν, ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ ἐστὶν ἕως ἄρτι. ὁ ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν 
 
 a ‘ ΄ 
 τῷ φωτὶ μένει. 
 
 raat” wns : ; 2 : 
 
 x Ibid. iil, 16: ἐν τούτῳ ἐγνώκαμεν τὴν ἀγάπην (i.e. absolute 
 charity), ὅτι ἐκεῖνος ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν τὴν Ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἔθηκε" καὶ ἡμεῖς ὀφεί- 
 
 c ‘4 ~ > ~ A A , Θ s > , 
 λομεν ὑπὲρ τῶν ἀδελφῶν τὰς ψυχὰς τιθέναι. Ibid. iv. g: ἐν τούτῳ 
 > , ε > , ε “- - > can o ‘ εν > a ‘ - 
 ἐφανερώθη ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν ἡμῖν, ὅτι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ 
 
 » , “ ΄- 
 ἀπέσταλκεν ὁ Θεὸς εἰς τὸν κόσμον, ἵνα ζήσωμεν δι’ αὐτοῦ. 
 
362 Christology of the Apocalypse. [Lecr. 
 
 which mutilates the Person or denies the work of 
 Christ, does not present itself to St. John only as 
 speculative misfortune, as clumsy negation of fact, 
 as barren intellectual error. Heresy is with this 
 Apostle a crime against charity; not only because 
 heresy breeds divisions among brethren, but yet more 
 because it kills out from the souls of men that 
 blessed and prolific Truth, Which, when sincerely 
 believed, cannot but fill the heart with love to God 
 and to man. St. John writes as one whose eyes had 
 looked upon and whose hands had handled the very 
 present Form of Truth and Love. That close contact 
 with the Absolute Truth Incarnate had kindled in 
 him a holy impatience of antagonist error ; that felt 
 glow of the Infinite Charity of God had shed over 
 his whole character and teaching the beauty and 
 pathos of a tenderness which, as our hearts tell us 
 while we read his pages, is not of this world. 
 
 This ethical reflection of the doctrme of an In- 
 earnate God is perhaps mainly characteristic of 
 St. John’s first Epistle ; but it is not wanting in the 
 Apocalypse. The representation of the Person of 
 our Saviour in the Apocalypse is independent of any 
 indistinctness that may attach to the interpretation 
 of the historical imagery of that wonderful book. 
 In the Apocalypse, Christ is the First and the Last ; 
 He is the Alpha and the Omega; He is the Begin- 
 ning and the End of all existencey. He possesses 
 the seven spirits or perfections of God*% He has 
 a mysterious Name which no man knows save He 
 
 y Rev.i. 8: ἐγώ εἶμι τὸ A καὶ τὸ Q, ὁ πρῶτος καὶ ὁ ἔσχατος. CF. 
 Thid. ii. 8; xxi. 6; xxii. 13: ἀρχὴ καὶ τέλος. 
 
 2 Ibid. ili. 1: ὁ ἔχων τὰ ἑπτὰ πνεύματα τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 
. 
 
 ¥j Divinity of Jesus in the Apocalypse. 363 
 
 Himself? His Name is written on the foreheads of 
 the faithful®; His grace is the blessing of Chris- 
 tians®. In the Apocalypse, His Name is called the 
 Word of God4; as in the first Epistle He is the Word 
 of Life, and in the Gospel the Word in the beginning. 
 As He rides through heaven on His errand of tri- 
 umph and of judgment, a Name is written on His 
 vesture and on His thigh; He is “King of kings, 
 and Lord of lords®.” St. John had leaned upon His 
 breast at supper in the familiarity of trusted friend- 
 ship. St. John sees Him but for a moment in His 
 supramundane glory, and forthwith falls at His feet 
 as dead’. In the Apocalypse especially we are 
 confronted with the solemn truth that the true Lord 
 of Heaven is none other than the Crucified One. 
 The armies of heaven follow Him, clothed as He 
 is in a vesture dipped in blood, the symbol and 
 token of His Passion and of His Victorys. But 
 of all the teachings of the Apocalypse on this sub- 
 ject, perhaps none is so full of significance as the 
 representation of Christ in His Wounded Humanity 
 upon the throne of the Most High. The Lamb, as 
 It had been slain, is in the very centre of the court 
 of heaven’; He receives the prostrate adoration of 
 
 a Rey. xix. 12: ἔχων ὄνομα γεγραμμένον ὃ οὐδεὶς οἶδεν εἰ μὴ αὐτός. 
 
 b Ibid. 111..1.2.; cf. il. 17. 
 
 6 Ibid. xxii. 21. 
 
 ἃ Thid. xix. 13: καλεῖται τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ὁ Λόγος τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 
 6 Ibid. ver. τό: ἔχει ἐπὶ τὸ ἱμάτιον καὶ ἐπὶ τὸν μηρὸν αὐτοῦ τὸ ὄνομα 
 γεγραμμένον, Βασιλεὺς βασιλέων καὶ Κύριος κυρίων. Cf. τ Tim. vi. 15. 
 
 f Ibid. 1. 17: ὅτε εἶδον αὐτὸν, ἔπεσα πρὸς τοῦς πόδας αὐτοῦ ὡς νεκρός. 
 
 & Ibid. xix. 13, 14. 
 
 7 > , δι δ ᾽ ΄ ες ‘ ε > ’, 
 h Tbid. v. 6: ἐν μέσῳ τοῦ θρόνου... ᾿Αρνίον ἑστηκὸς ὡς ἐσφαγμένον. 
 
9604 Ts the Divine Christ of St. John {Lucr. 
 
 the highest intelligences around the throne!; and as 
 the Object of that solemn, uninterrupted, awful wor- 
 shipk, He is associated with the Father, as being 
 in truth the Almighty, Uncreated, Supreme God!. 
 
 IV. Considerable, then, as may have been the in- 
 terval between the composition of the Apocalypse and 
 that of the fourth Gospel, we find in the two docu- 
 ments one and the same doctrine, in substance if not 
 in terms, respecting our Lord’s Eternal Person ; and 
 further, this doctrine accurately corresponds with that 
 of St. John’s first Epistle. But it may be asked 
 whether St. John, thus consistent with himself upon 
 a point of such capital importance, is really in har- 
 mony with the teaching of the earlier Evangelists ? 
 It is granted that between St. John and the three 
 first Gospels there is a broad difference of charac- 
 teristic phraseology, of the structure, scene, and 
 matter of the several narratives. Does this dif- 
 ference strike deeper still? Is the Christology of 
 the son of Zebedee fundamentally distinct from 
 that of his predecessors 4 Can we recognise the 
 Christ of the earlier Evangelists in the Christ of 
 St. John 4 
 
 Now it is obvious to remark that the difference 
 between the three first Evangelists and the fourth, 
 
 ἡ \ , a \ ee} 4 , » 
 i Rev. v. 8: τὰ τέσσαρα ζῶα καὶ οἱ εἰκοσιτέσσαρες πρεσβύτεροι ἔπεσον 
 a if 
 
 ἐνώπιον τοῦ Apviov, κ. τ. A. 
 
 k Tbid. ver. 12: ἄξιόν ἐστι τὸ ᾿Αρνίον τὸ ἐσφαγμένον λαβεῖν τὴν δύναμιν 
 Ἴ P 
 
 ‘ a ν , ἈΝ \ Ν \ Ν , Ν > ’ 
 
 καὶ πλοῦτον καὶ σοφίαν καὶ ἰσχὺν καὶ τιμὴν καὶ δόξαν καὶ εὐλογίαν. 
 
 . = a s 3. ἢ “-“ , ‘A ὧν 9 , c > , 
 
 1 [hid. ver. 13: τῷ καθημένῳ emt τοῦ θρόνου καὶ τῷ Apviw ἡ εὐλογία 
 A « A ‘ c / Ν A , > \ >. ΄“΄ 7 
 
 καὶ ἡ τιμὴ Kat ἡ δόξα Kai τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς aidvas τῶν αἰώνων. ΟἿ, 
 τ ; 
 
 Ibid. xvil, 14: τὸ ᾿Αρνίον νικήσει αὐτοὺς, ὅτι Κύριος κυρίων ἐστὶ καὶ 
 
 Βασιλεὺς βασιλέων. 
 
Vi] also the Christ of the Synoptists ? 365 
 
 in their respective representations of the Person of 
 our Lord, is in one sense, at any rate, a real differ- 
 ence. There is a real difference in the point of view 
 of the writers, although the truth before them 15 
 one and the same. Each from his own stand-point, 
 the first three Evangelists seek and pourtray sepa- 
 rate aspects of the Human side of the Life of Jesus. 
 They set forth His perfect Manhood in all Its regal 
 grace and majesty, in all Its Human sympathy and 
 beauty, in all Its healing and redemptive virtue. 
 In one Gospel Christ is the true Fulfiller of the 
 Law, and withal by a touching contrast the Man of 
 Sorrows. In another He is the Lord of Nature and 
 the Leader of men; all seek Him, all yield to Him ; 
 He moves forward in the independence of majestic 
 strength. Ina third He is active and all-embracing 
 Compassion; He is the Shepherd, Who goes forth as 
 for His Life-work, to seek the sheep that was lost; 
 He is the Good Samaritan™. Thus the obedience, 
 the force, and the tenderness of His Humanity are 
 successively depicted ; but room is left for another 
 aspect of His Life, differmg from these and yet in 
 harmony with them. If we may dare so to speak, 
 the synoptists approach their great Subject from 
 without, St. John unfolds it from within. St. John 
 has been guided to pierce the veil of sense; he has 
 penetrated far beyond the Human Features, nay 
 even beyond the Human Thought and Human Will 
 of the Redeemer, into the central depths of His 
 Eternal Personality. He sets forth the Life of our 
 Lord and Saviour on the earth, not in any one of 
 the aspects which belong to It as Human, but as 
 
 m Cf, Holtzmann, Die Synoptischen Evangelien. 
 
366 The Evangelists have distinet points of view, [Lor. 
 
 being the consistent and adequate expression of the 
 glory of a Divine Person, manifested under a visible 
 Form to men. The miracles described, the discourses 
 selected, the plan of the narrative, are all in har- 
 mony with the point of view of the fourth Evan- 
 gelist, and it at once explaims and accounts for 
 them. 
 
 Plainly, my brethren, two or more observers may 
 approach the same object from different pots of 
 view, and may be even entirely absorbed with distinct 
 aspects of it; and yet it does not follow that any 
 one of these aspects is necessarily at variance with 
 the others. Still less does it follow that one as- 
 pect alone represents the truth. Socrates does not 
 lose his identity because he is so much more to 
 Plato than he is to Xenophon. You yourselves, my 
 brethren, may each of you be studied at the same 
 time by the anatomist and by the psychologist. Cer- 
 tainly the aspect of your complex nature which the 
 one study insists upon, is sufficiently remote from 
 the aspect which presents itself to the other. In 
 the eyes of one observer you are but pure spirit; 
 you are thought, affection, memory, will, imagination. 
 As he analyses you he is almost indifferent to 
 the material body in which your higher nature is 
 encased, upon which it has left its mark, and 
 through which it expresses itself’ But to the 
 other observer this your material body is every- 
 thing ; its veins and muscles, its pores and nerves, 
 its colour, its proportions, its functions, absorb his 
 whole attention; he is nervously impatient of any 
 speculations about you which cannot be tested by 
 his instruments. Yet is there any real ground for 
 
Vi) yet they agree fundamentally. 367 
 
 a petty jealousy between the one study of your 
 nature and the other? Is not each student a ser- 
 vant whom true science will own as doing her work ? 
 May not each illustrate, supplement, balance, and 
 check the conclusions of the other? Must you ne- 
 cessarily view yourselves as all mind, if you will 
 not be persuaded that you are merely matter? Must 
 you needs be materialists if you will not become 
 the most transcendental of mystics? Or will not 
 a little physiology usefully restrain you from a fan- 
 ciful supersensualism, while a study of the immate- 
 rial side of your being forbids you to listen, even 
 for a moment, to the brutalizing suggestions of con- 
 sistent materialism ? 
 
 These questions admit of easy reply; each half 
 of the truth is practically no less than speculatively 
 necessary to the other. Nor is it otherwise with 
 the first three Gospels as generally related to the 
 fourth. Yet it should be added that the Synoptists 
 do teach the Divine Nature of Jesus, although in 
 the main His Sacred Manhood is most prominent 
 in their pages. Moreover the fourth Gospel. as has 
 been noticed, insists clearly upon Christ’s true Hu- 
 manity. But for the fourth Gospel we should have 
 known much less of one side of His Human Cha- 
 racter than we actually know. For in it we see 
 Christ engaged in earnest conflict with the worldly 
 and unbelieving spirit of His time, while surrounded 
 by the little company of His disciples, and devoting 
 Himself to them even “unto the end.” The aspects 
 of our Lord’s Humanity which are thus brought into 
 prominence would have remained, comparatively 
 speaking, in the shade, had the last Gospel not been 
 
908 The title ‘Son of God? in the Synoptists. [Lcr. 
 
 written. But the symmetry of conception of our 
 Lord’s Character which modern critics have remarked 
 upon as especially distinguishing the fourth Gospel, 
 is to be referred to the manner in which St. John 
 lays bare the true Eternal Personality of Jesus, in 
 Which the scattered rays of glory noticeable in the 
 earlier Evangelists find their point of unity. By 
 laying such persistent stress upon Christ’s Godhead, 
 as the seat of His Eternal Personality, the fourth 
 Gospel is doctrinally complemental (how marvellous 
 is the complement!) to the other three; and yet 
 these three are so full of suggestive implications 
 that they practically anticipate the higher teaching 
 of the fourth. 
 
 For in the synoptic Gospels Christ is called the 
 Son of God in a higher sense than the ethical or 
 than the theocratic. In the Old Testament an 
 anointed king or a saintly prophet is a son of God. 
 Christ is not merely One among these many sons: 
 He is the Only, the Well-beloved Son of the Father". 
 His relationship to the Father is unshared by any 
 other, and is absolutely unique. It is indeed pro- 
 bable that of our Lord’s contemporaries many applied 
 to Him the title ‘Son of God’ only as an official 
 designation of the Messiah ; while others used it to 
 acknowledge that surpassing and perfect moral cha- 
 racter which proclaimed Jesus of Nazareth to be the 
 
 n Compare the voice from heaven at our Lord’s baptism, οὗτός ἐστιν 
 ὁ Yids pov ὁ ἀγαπητός, St. Matt. iii. 17, repeated at His transfigu- 
 ration (Ibid. xvii. 5); the profound sense of His question to the 
 Pharisees, τίνος vids ἐστιν ; [se. 6 Χριστὸς] (Ibid. ΧΧΊΙ, 41). And that 
 as the Υἱός rod Θεοῦ, Christ is superhuman, seems to be implied in 
 the questions of the tempter. (Ibid. iv. 3, 6; St. Luke iv. 3, 9.) 
 
ΔΎΩ, The title «Son of God’ in the Synoptists. 369 
 
 One Son, worthy of the moral Perfections of our 
 Heavenly Father, Whom our earth has seen. But the 
 official and ethical senses of the term are rooted 
 in a deeper sense to which St. Luke refers it at 
 
 the beginning of his Gospel. “The Holy Ghost shall 
 
 come upon thee,” so ran the angel-message to the 
 Virgin-mother, “and the power of the Highest shall 
 overshadow thee: therefore also that Holy Thing 
 Which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son 
 of God®.” This may be contrasted with the predic- 
 tion respecting St. John the Baptist, that he should 
 be filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother’s 
 wombp. St. John then is in existence before his 
 sanctification by the Holy Spirit; but Christ’s Hu- 
 manity Itself is formed by the agency of the Holy 
 Ghost. In like manner St. Matthew’s record of the 
 angel’s words asserts that our Lord was conceived by 
 the power of the Holy Ghost. But St. Matthew's 
 reference to the prophetic name Emmanuel", points 
 to the full truth, that Christ is the Son of God as 
 being of the Divine Essence. 
 
 Indeed the whole history of the Nativity and its 
 attendant circumstances, guard the narratives of 
 St. Matthew and St. Luke’ against the inroads of 
 
 ο St. Luke i. 35. 
 
 P Ibid. ver. 15: Πνεύματος ᾿Αγίου πλησθήσεται ἔτι ἐκ κοιλίας μητρὸς 
 αὐτοῦ. 
 
 4 St. Matt. i. 20: τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ Πνεύματός ἐστιν ‘Ayiov. 
 
 τ Thid. ver. 23. This prophecy was fulfilled when our Lord was 
 called Jesus. Cf. Pearson on the Creed (ed. Oxf. 1847), art. ii. 
 p- 89, and note. 
 
 5. For a vindication of these narratives against the mythical 
 theory of Strauss, see Dr. Mill’s Christian Advocate’s Publications 
 for 1841, 1844, reprinted in his Mythical Interpretations. 
 
 Bb 
 
910 Significance of the history of the Nativity {Lecr. 
 
 Humanitarian interpreters. Our Lord’s Birth of a 
 Virgin-mother is as irreconcileable with “an Ebionitic 
 as it is with a Docetic conception of the entrance 
 of the God-man into connexion with humanity.” 
 The worship of the Infant Christ in St. Matthew 
 by the wise men, in St. Luke by the shepherds of 
 Bethlehem, represents Jesus as the true Lord of 
 humanity, whether Jewish or Gentile, whether edu- 
 cated or unlettered. Especially noteworthy are the 
 greetings addressed to the mother of our Lord by 
 heavenly as well as earthly visitants. The Lord is 
 with her; she is graced and blessed among women", 
 
 t Martensen, Christl. Dogm. ὃ 39 (Clark’s transl.): “ Christ is 
 born, not of the will of a man, nor of the will of the flesh; but 
 the holy Will of the Creator took the place of the will of man 
 and of the will of the flesh. That is, the Creating Spirit Who was 
 in the beginning fulfilled the function of the plastic principle. 
 Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, the chosen woman of the 
 chosen people. It was the task of Israel to provide, not, as has 
 often been said, Christ Himself, but the mother of the Lord ; 
 to develope the susceptibility for Christ to a point where it might 
 be able to manifest itself as the profoundest unity of nature and 
 spirit—an unity which found expression in the pure Virgin. In 
 her the pious aspirations of Israel and of mankind, and their faith 
 in the promises, are centred. She is the purest point in history 
 and in nature, and she therefore becomes the appointed medium 
 for the New Creation. And while we must confess that this 
 Virgin Birth is enveloped in a veil impenetrable to physical 
 reasonings, yet we affirm it to be the only one which fully satis- 
 fies the demands of religion and theology. This article of our 
 Creed, ‘conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,’ 
 is the only sure defence against both the Ebionitic and the Docetic 
 view of the entrance of the God-man into connexion with hu- 
 manity.” 
 
 u St. Luke i. 28: χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη" ὁ Κύριος μετὰ σοῦ, εὐλογημένη 
 
 A > , 
 σὺ ἐν γυναιξίν. 
 
V.] in the First and the Third Gospels. 371 
 
 Her Son will be great; He will be called the Son of 
 the Highest; His kingdom will have no end*. Eliza- 
 beth echoes the angel’s words; Mary is_ blessed 
 among women, and the Fruit of her womb is Blessed. 
 
 Elizabeth marvels that such an one as herself should 
 be visited by the mother of her Lord’. The Evan- 
 
 _gelical canticles, which we owe to the third Gospel, 
 
 remarkably illustrate the point before us; they sur- 
 round the cradle of the Infant Saviour with the devo- 
 tional language of ancient Israel, now consecrated to 
 the direct service of the Lord Incarnate. Mary, the 
 Virgin-mother, already knows that all generations 
 shall call her blessed ; for the Mighty One has done 
 great things unto her%, And as the moral and social 
 fruits of the Incarnation unfold themselves before her 
 prophetic eye, she proclaims that the promises to 
 the forefathers are at length fulfilled, and that God, 
 “remembering His mercy hath holpen His servant 
 Israel*.” Zacharias rejoices that the Lord God of 
 Israel has in the new-born Saviour redeemed His 
 people’; this Saviour is the Lord, whose fore- 
 runner has been announced by prophecy’; He is 
 
 x St. Luke i. 32: οὗτος ἔσται μέγας, καὶ vids ὑψίστου κληθήσεται. 
 Ver. 33: τῆς βασιλείας αὐτοῦ οὐκ ἔσται τέλος. 
 
 y Ibid. ver. 42: εὐλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξὶ, καὶ εὐλογημένος ὁ καρπὸς 
 τῆς κοιλίας σοῦ. Ver. 43: καὶ πόθεν μοι τοῦτο, ἵνα ἔλθῃ ἡ μήτηρ τοῦ 
 Κυρίου μου πρός με; 
 
 2 Ibid. ver. 48: ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν μακαριοῦσί με πᾶσαι αἱ γενεαί: ὅτι 
 ἐποίησέ μοι μεγαλεῖα ὁ δυνατός. 
 
 ἃ Thid. vers. 51-55. 
 
 Ὁ Ibid. ver. 68. 
 
 ὁ Ibid. i. 69, Christ is the κέρας σωτηρίας. Ibid. ver. 76, to St. John 
 it is said, προπορεύσῃ yap mpd προσώπου Κυρίου, ἑτοιμάσαι ὁδοὺς αὐτοῦ. 
 Cf. Mal. iii. 1; iv. 5. 
 
 Bb2 
 
372 Christ's Nativity according to the Synoptists. [Lucr. 
 
 the Day-star from on high, bringing a new mor- 
 ning to those who sat in the darkness and death- 
 shadows of the world“, Simeon desires to depart in 
 peace, since his eyes have seen his Lord’s Salvation. 
 The humble Babe Whom the old man takes in his 
 arms belongs not to the lowly scenes of Bethlehem 
 and Nazareth; He is the inheritance of the world. 
 He is the Divine Saviour; all nations are interested 
 in His Birth ; He is to shed light upon the heathen ; 
 He is to be the pride and glory of the new Israel®. 
 The accounts then of our Lord’s Birth in two of 
 the synoptic Evangelists, as illustrated by the sacred 
 songs of praise and thanksgiving which St. Luke has 
 preserved, point clearly to the entrance of a super- 
 human Being into this our human world. Who indeed 
 He was is stated more explicitly by St. John ; but 
 St. John does not deem it necessary to repeat the 
 history of His Advent. The accounts of the Annun- 
 ciation and of the Miraculous Conception would not 
 by themselves imply the Divinity of Christ. But 
 they do imply that Christ is Superhuman ; they 
 harmonize with the anticipations which might be 
 created by St. John’s doctrine of Christ’s pre-existent 
 glory. These accounts cannot be forced within 
 the limits and made to illustrate the laws of nature. 
 But at least St. John’s narrative justifies mysteries 
 in the synoptic Gospels which would be unintelligible 
 
 4 St. Luke i. 78: ἐπεσκέψατο ἡμᾶς ἀνατολὴ ἐξ ὕψους, ἐπιφᾶναι τοῖς 
 ἐν σκότει καὶ σκιᾷ θανάτου καθημένοις: τοῦ κατευθῦναι τοὺς πόδας ἡμῶν 
 εἰς ὁδὸν εἰρήνης. Isa. ix. 1; xlii. 7; xlix. 9, are thus applied in a 
 strictly spiritual sense. 
 
 e St. Luke 11. 30-32: τὸ σωτήριόν cov, ὃ ἡτοίμασας κατὰ πρόσωπον 
 πάντων τῶν λαῶν. φῶς εἰς ἀποκάλυψιν ἐθνῶν, καὶ δόξαν λαοῦ σου 
 
 "Iopand. Cf. Isa, xxv. 7. 
 
Wal Our Lord’s Doctrine according to the Synoptists. 979 
 
 without it; and it is a vivid commentary upon 
 hymns the lofty strains of which might of them- 
 selves be thought to savour of exaggeration. 
 
 If the synoptists are in correspondence with 
 St. John’s characteristic doctrine when they describe 
 our Lord’s Nativity and its attendant circumstances, 
 that correspondence is even more obvious in their 
 accounts of His teaching, and in the pictures which 
 _ they set before us of His Life and work. They 
 present Him to us mainly, although not exclusively, 
 as the Son of Man. As has already been hinted, 
 that title, besides its direct signification of His true 
 and representative Humanity, is itself the “product 
 of a self-consciousness for which the being human 
 was not a matter of course, but something secondary 
 and superinducedf.” In other words, this title imples 
 an Original Nature to Which His Humanity was 
 a subsequent accretion, and in Which His true and 
 deepest Consciousness, if we may dare so to speak, 
 was at home. Thus in the synoptic Gospels He is 
 frequently called simply the Song. He is the true 
 Son of Man, but He is also the true Son of God. 
 
 f Cf. Dorner, Person Christi, Einl. p. 82: “Von einem Selbst- 
 bewusstseyn aus muss diese Bezeichnung ausgepragt seyn, fiir 
 welche das Mensch -oder- Menschensohnseyn nicht das Niichst- 
 liegende, sich von selbst unmittelbar Verstehende, sondern das 
 Secundiire, Hinzugekommene, war. Ist aber Christi Selbsthe- 
 wusstseyn so geartet gewesen, dass das Menschseyn ihm als das 
 Secundiire sich darstellte: so muss das Primire in Seinem Be- 
 wusstseyn ein Anderes seyn, dasjenige, was sich, z. B. bei Johannes 
 XVii. 5 ausspricht ; und das Urspriingliche, worin Sein Selbstbewusst- 
 seyn sich unmittelbar heimisch weiss (vgl. Lue. ii. 49) muss wenig- 
 stens von der Zeit an, wo Er sich selbst ganz hat, wo sein Innerstes 
 Wirklichkeit geworden ist, das Gittliche gewesen seyn.” 
 
 & St. Matt. xi. 27; xxviii. 20. 
 
914 Our Lord’s Doctrine in the Synoptists [Lecr. 
 
 In Him Sonship attains its archetypal form; in Him 
 it is seen in its unadulterated perfection. Accor- 
 dingly He never, as if sharing His Sonship with His 
 followers, calls the Father our Father. He always 
 speaks of My Father®. In the parable of the vine- 
 yard, the prophets of the old theocracy are con- 
 trasted with the Son, not as His predecessors or 
 rivals, but as His slaves To this Divine Sonship 
 He received witness from heaven both at His Bap- 
 tism and at His Transfiguration. Thus He lives 
 among men as the One True Son of His Father's 
 home, as Alone freeborn among a race of natural 
 slaves ; but instead of guarding His solitary dignity 
 with jealous exclusiveness, He vouchsafes to raise the 
 slaves around Him to an adopted sonship; He will 
 buy them out of bondage by pouring forth His Blood ; 
 He will lay down His Life, that He may prove His 
 generous measureless love towards them . 
 
 The synoptic Gospels record parables in which 
 Christ is Himself the central Figure. They record 
 miracles which seem to have no ascertainable object 
 beyond that of exhibiting the superhuman Might of 
 the Worker. They tell us of His claim to forgive 
 sins, and that He supported this claim by the ex- 
 ercise of His miraculous powers! Equally with 
 
 h St. Matt. xviii. 10,19, 35; XX. 23; Xxvi. 53; cf. St. Luke xxiii. 46. 
 
 i St. Matt. xxi. 34: ἀπέστειλε τοὺς δούλους αὐτοῦ πρὸς τοὺς yewp- 
 yous. Ibid. ver. 36: πάλιν ἀπέστειλεν ἄλλους δούλους. Ibid. ver. 37: 
 ὕστερον δὲ ἀπέστειλε πρὸς αὐτοὺς τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ, λέγων, "Evtparnoovtat 
 τὸν υἱόν μου. 
 
 k [bid. xx. 28: ἦλθε... δοῦναι τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν. 
 Ibid. xxvi. 28: τὸ αἷμά μου, τὸ τῆς καινῆς διαθήκης, τὸ περὶ πολλῶν 
 ἐκχυνόμενον εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν. 
 
 1 St. Matt. ix. 2-6; St. Luke v. 20, 24. 
 
Val considered as implying His Divinity. 375 
 
 St. John they represent Him putting Himself’ for- 
 ward as being not merely the Teacher but the Object 
 of His religion. He insists on faith in His Own 
 Person™. He institutes the initial Sacrament, and He 
 deliberately inserts His Own Name into the sacra- 
 mental formula; He inserts it between that of the 
 Father and that of the Spirit. This Self-intrusion 
 into the sphere of Divinity would be unintelligible 
 if the synoptists had really represented Jesus as 
 only the teacher and founder of a religious doctrine 
 or temper. But if in St. John Christ is the Logos, 
 in these Gospels He is the Sophia®. Thus He ascribes 
 to Himself the exclusive knowledge of the Highest. 
 Nothing in St. John really exceeds the terms in which, 
 according to two synoptists, He claims to know 
 and to be known of the Father. “No man knoweth 
 the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the 
 
 Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son — 
 will reveal HimP.” Here then is a reciprocal rela- 
 tionship: the Son Alone has a true knowledge of 
 the Father; the Son is Himself Such that the Father 
 Alone understands Him. Again, Christ ascribes to 
 Himself Sanctity; He even places Himself above the 
 
 τὰ St. Matt. xvi. 16, 17. 
 
 n Tbid. xxviii. rg. Cf. Waterland’s Eighth Sermon at Lady 
 Moyer’s Lecture, Works, vol. ii. p. 171. 
 
 © St. Luke vil. 35: ἐδικαιώθη ἡ σοφία ἀπὸ τῶν τέκνων αὐτῆς πάντων. 
 St. Matt. xi. 19, and apparently St. Luke xi. 49, where ἡ σοφία 
 τοῦ Θεοῦ equals ἔγω in St. Matt. xxiii. 34. 
 
 P St. Matt. xi. 27: οὐδεὶς ἐπιγινώσκει τὸν Υἱὸν εἰ μὴ ὁ Πατήρ οὐδὲ 
 τὸν Πατέρα τὶς ἐπιγινώσκει, εἰ μὴ ὁ Υἱὸς, καὶ ᾧ ἐὰν βούληται ὁ Υἱὸς 
 ἀποκαλύψαι. St. Luke x. 22: οὐδεὶς γινώσκει τίς ἐστιν ὁ Yids εἰ μὴ 
 ὁ Πατὴρ, καὶ τίς ἐστιν ὁ Πατὴρ, εἰ μὴ ὁ Yids, καὶ ᾧ ἐὰν βούληται ὁ 
 
 Υἱὸς ἀποκαλύψαι. 
 
376 Our Lord’s Doctrine in the Synoptists [Lecr. 
 
 holiest thing in ancient Israel4. He and His people 
 are greater than the greatest in the old covenanty. 
 He scruples not to proclaim His consciousness of 
 having fulfilled His mission. He asserts that all 
 power is committed to Him both on earth and in 
 heaven’, All nations are to be made disciples of His 
 religion*t. In the first three Evangelists, when we 
 weigh their language, it will be found that Christ 
 is represented as the Absolute Good and the Absolute 
 Truth not less distinctly than in St. John. Τύ is in 
 this character that He is exhibited ag in conflict not 
 with subordinate or accidental forms of evil, but with 
 the evil principle itself, with the prince of evil. 
 Thus too, as the Absolute Good, Christ tests the moral 
 worth or worthlessness of men by their acceptance 
 or rejection, not of His doctrine but of His Person. 
 It is St. Matthew who records such sentences as the 
 following: “Be not ye called Rabbi; for One is your 
 Master, even Christ*;” and “He that loveth father or 
 mother more than Me is not worthy of Mey;” “Who- 
 soever shall confess Me before men, him will I con- 
 fess also before My Father”;” “Come unto Me, all ye 
 that labour, and I will give you rest®;” and “Take 
 My yoke upon you, and learn of Me».” In St. Mat- 
 thew then Christ speaks as One Who knows Himself 
 to be a universal and infallible Teacher in spiritual 
 
 4 St. Matt. xil. 6: λέγω δε ὑμῖν ὅτι τοῦ ἱεροῦ μεῖζόν [Tisch.] ἐστιν ὧδε. 
 
 τ Ibid: ΧΙΤῚ xi. 41}2; x 553. Ξ ΠΝ Str Luke vil. 28. 
 
 8 St. Matt. xi.27; St. Luke x. 22; St. Matt. xxvili. 18: ἐδόθη μοι 
 πᾶσα ἐξουσία ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς. t St. Matt. xxvili. 19. 
 
 u St. Luke x. 18: ἐθεώρουν τὸν Σατανᾶν ὡς ἀστραπὴν ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ 
 πεσόντα. St. Matt. iv. 1-11; ΧΙ]. 27-29; xiii. 38, 39. 
 
 x St. Matt. xxiii. 8. ὙΠ το στ age 
 
 z Ibid. ver. 32; St. Luke xii. 8. 
 
 a St. Matt. xi. 28. b Ibid. ver. 29. 
 
Vi] considered as implying His Divinity. 377 
 
 things; Who demands submission of all men, and 
 at whatever cost or sacrifice ; Who offers to all man- 
 kind those deepest consolations which are every- 
 where else sought in vain. Nor is it otherwise with 
 St. Luke and St. Mark. It is indeed remarkable 
 that our Lord’s most absolute and peremptory 
 claims® to rule over the affections and wills of men 
 are recorded by the first and third, and not by the 
 fourth Evangelist. These royal rights over the 
 human soul can be justified upon no plea of human 
 relationships between teacher and learner, between 
 child and elder, between master and servant, between 
 friend and friend. If the title of Divinity is more 
 explicitly put forward in St. John, the rights which 
 imply it are advanced most emphatically by the 
 earlier Evangelists. The synoptists represent our 
 Lord, Who is the Object of Christian faith no less 
 than the Founder of Christianity, as designing the 
 whole world for the field of His conquests4, and as 
 claiming the submission of every individual human 
 soul. All are to be brought to discipleship. Only 
 then will the judgment come, when the Gospel has 
 been announced to the whole circle of the nations®. 
 Christ, the Good and the Truth Incarnate, must reign 
 throughout all timef. He knows, according to the 
 synoptists no less than St. John, that He is a perfect 
 
 ο St. Matt. x. 39; St. Luke xiv. 26. 
 
 4 St. Matt. xxviii. 19: πορευθέντες οὖν μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη. 
 St. Mark xvi. 15; St. Luke xxiv.47. Cf. St. Matt. xiii. 32, 38, 41; 
 ΧΕΙ͂Ρ, 14, 
 
 e St. Matt. xxiv. 14: καὶ κηρυχθήσεται τοῦτο τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς 
 βασιλείας ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ οἰκουμένῃ, εἰς μαρτύριον πᾶσι τοῖς ἔθνεσι καὶ τότε 
 ἥξει τὸ τέλος. 
 
 f St. Luke xxii. 69: ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν ἔσται ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καθή- 
 
 μενος ἐκ δεξιῶν τῆς δυνάμεως τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 
918 Mysteries of our Lord’s Life in the Synoptists. {Lcr. 
 
 and final Revelation of God. He is the Centre-point 
 of the history and of the hopes of man. None shall 
 advance beyond Him: the pretension to surpass 
 Him is but the symptom of disastrous error and 
 reaction &. 
 
 The Transfiguration is described by all the synop- 
 tists ; and it represents our Lord in His true rela- 
 tion to the legal and prophetic dispensations, and as 
 visibly invested for the time being with a glory which 
 was rightfully His. The Ascension secures His per- 
 manent investiture with that glory ; and the Ascen- 
 sion is described by St. Mark and St. Luke. The Re- 
 surrection is recorded by the first three Evangelists 
 as accurately as by the fourth ; and it was to the 
 Resurrection that He Himself appealed as the sign by 
 which men were to know His real claim upon their 
 homage. According to the first three Gospels, all 
 of Christ’s humiliations are consistently lmked to the 
 consummation of His victory: He is buffeted, spat 
 upon, scourged, crucified, only to rise from the dead 
 the third day"; His Resurrection is the prelude to 
 His ascent to heaven. He leaves the world, yet He 
 bequeaths the promise of His Presence. He pro- 
 mises to be wherever two or three are gathered in 
 His Namei; He institutes the Sacrament of His 
 Body and His Blood®; He declares that He will be 
 among His Own even to the end of the world). 
 
 But it is more particularly in our Lord’s discourses 
 
 & St. Matt. xxiv. 23-26, &e. 
 
 h Tbid. xx. 19; St. Mark x. 34; St. Luke xviii. 33. 
 
 i St. Matt. xviii. 20: οὗ γάρ εἰσι δύο ἢ τρεῖς συνηγμένοι εἰς τὸ ἐμὸν 
 ὄνομα, ἐκεῖ εἰμὶ ἐν μέσῳ αὐτῶν. 
 
 k Thid. xxvi. 26; St. Mark xiv. 22; St. Luke xxii. το. 
 
 1 St. Matt. xxviii. 20: ἐγὼ pe? ὑμῶν εἰμι πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας ἕως 
 
 τῆς συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος. 
 
Vv.) Our Lord’s eschatological discourses. 379 
 
 respecting the end of the world and the final judg- 
 ment, as recorded by the synoptists, that we perceive 
 the matchless dignity of His Person. It is reflected 
 in His asserted relation to the moral and material 
 universe, and in the absolute finality of His religion. 
 The Lawgiver Who is above all other legislators, and 
 Who revises all other legislation, will also be the 
 final Judge™. At that last awful revelation of His 
 personal glory, none shall be able to refuse Him 
 submission. Then will He put an end to the humili- 
 ations and the sorrows of His Church; then, out of 
 the fulness of His majesty, He will clothe His de- 
 spised followers with glory ; He will allot the king- 
 dom to those who have believed on Him ; and at His 
 heavenly board they shall share for ever the royal 
 feast of life. Certainly the Redeemer and Judge of 
 men, to Whom all spiritual and natural forces, all 
 earthly and heavenly powers must at last submit, is 
 not merely a divinely gifted prophet. His Person “has 
 a metaphysical and cosmical significance™.” Could any 
 preside so authoritatively over the history and des- 
 tiny of the world who was a stranger to the throne of 
 
 m St. Matt. vii. 22: πολλοὶ ἐροῦσί por ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ, Κύριε, 
 Κύριε, οὐ τῷ σῷ ὀνόματι προεφητεύσαμεν, καὶ τῷ σῷ ὀνόματι δαιμόνια 
 ἐξεβάλομεν, καὶ τῷ σῷ ὀνόματι δυνάμεις πολλὰς ἐποιήσαμεν ; καὶ τότε 
 ὁμολογήσω αὐτοῖς, ὅτι οὐδέποτε ἔγνων ὑμᾶς. ἀποχωρεῖτε ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ οἱ 
 ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν. St. Luke ΧΙ. 25. St. Matt. xiii. 41: ἀποστε- 
 λεῖ ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου τοὺς ἀγγέλους αὐτοῦ, καὶ συλλέξουσιν ἐκ τῆς βασι- 
 λείας αὐτοῦ πάντα τὰ σκάνδαλα καὶ τοὺς ποιοῦντας τὴν ἀνομίαν, καὶ 
 βαλοῦσιν αὐτοὺς εἰς τὴν κάμινον τοῦ πυρός. Ibid. x. 32; St. Mark 
 viii. 38. St. Matt. xxiv. 31: ἀποστελεῖ τοὺς ἀγγέλους αὐτοῦ μετὰ σάλ- 
 πίγγος φωνῆς μεγάλης, καὶ ἐπισυνάξουσι τοὺς ἐκλεκτοὺς αὐτοῦ ἐκ τῶν 
 τεσσάρων ἀνέμων, am ἄκρων οὐρανῶν ἕως ἄκρων αὐτῶν. Ibid. xxv. 
 834-46; St. Luke xii. 35; xvii. 30, 31. 
 
 n Martensen, Christl. Dogm. § 128. 
 
980 Relation of Christ to the world’s future. [Lxcr. 
 
 its Creator? No. The eschatological discourses in the 
 synoptists do but tally with the prologue of St. John’s 
 Gospel. In contemplating the dignity of our Lord’s 
 Person, the preceding Evangelists for the most part 
 look forward; St. John looks backward no less than 
 forward. St. John dwells on Christ’s Pre-existence ; 
 the synoptists, if we may so phrase it, on His Post- 
 existence. In the earlier Evangelists His personal 
 glory is viewed in its relation to the future of the 
 human race and of the universe; in St. John it is 
 viewed in its relation to the origin of the Cosmos, 
 and to the solitary and everlasting years of God. 
 In St. John, Christ our Saviour is the First; in the 
 synoptists He is more especially the Last. 
 
 In the synoptic Gospels, then, the Person of Christ 
 Divine and Human is the centre-point of the Chris- 
 tian religion. Christ is here the Supreme Lawgiver ; 
 He is the Perfect Saint; He is the Judge of all 
 men. He controls both worlds, the physical and the 
 spiritual ; He bestows the forgiveness of sins, and 
 the Holy Spirit; He promises everlasting life. His 
 Presence is to be perpetuated on earth, while yet 
 He will reign as Lord of heaven. “The entire 
 representation,” says Professor Dorner, “of Christ 
 which is given us by the synoptists, may be placed 
 side by side with that given by St. John, as being 
 altogether identical with it. For a faith moulded in 
 obedience to the synoptic tradition concerning Christ, 
 must have essentially the same features in its 
 resulting conception of Christ as those which _be- 
 long to the Christ of St. John®.” In other words, 
 
 © Dorner, Person Christi, Einl. p. 89: “Das synoptische Total- 
 bild von Christus dem johanneischen insofern vollkommen an die 
 Seite setzen kann, als der durch vermittlung der synoptischen 
 
“τ ener meee 
 
 bl Summary of the Synoptical Christology. 981 
 
 think over the miracles wrought by Christ and nar- 
 rated by the synoptists, one by one. Think over 
 the discourses spoken by Christ and recorded by the 
 synoptists, one by one. Look at the whole bearing 
 and scope of His Life, as the three first Evangelists 
 describe It, from His supernatural Birth to His dis- 
 
 » appearance beyond the clouds of heaven. Mark well 
 
 how pressing and tender, yet withal how full of 
 stern and majestic Self-assertion, are His words! 
 Consider how merciful and timely, yet also how 
 expressive of immanent and unlimited power, are 
 His miracles! Put the three representations of the 
 Royal, the Human, and the Healing Redeemer to- 
 
 _ gether, and deny, if it is possible, that Jesus is Di- 
 
 _vine. If the Christ of the synoptists is not indeed 
 
 an unreal phantom, such as Docetism might have 
 constructed, He is far removed above the Ebionitic 
 conception of a purely human Saviour. If Christ’s 
 Pre-existence is only obscurely hinted at in the first 
 three Gospels, His relation to the world of spirits is 
 brought out in them even more clearly than in 
 St. John by the discourses which they contain on 
 the subject of the Last Judgment. If St. John could 
 be blotted out from the pages of the New Testa- 
 ment, St. John’s central doctrine would still live on 
 in the earlier Evangelists as implicitly contained 
 within a history otherwise inexplicable, if not as 
 the illuminating truth of a heavenly gnosis. There 
 would still remain the picture of a Life Which belongs 
 
 Tradition gebildete Glaube wesentlich ganz dieselben Ziige in 
 seinem Christusbegriff haben musste, wie sie der johanneische 
 Christus hat.” See also for the preceding remarks, Person Christi, 
 Einl. pp. 80-89, to which I am largely indebted. 
 
382 Unity of Christ’s Person in St. John as God and Man. [Lxcr. 
 
 indeed to human history, but Which the laws which 
 govern human history neither control nor can ex- 
 plain. It would still be certain that One had lived 
 on earth, wielding miraculous powers, and claiming 
 a moral and intellectual place which belongs only 
 to the Most Holy; and if the problem presented 
 to faith might for a moment be more intricate, its 
 ultimate resolution could not be different from 
 that which is supplied in the pages of the beloved 
 disciple. 
 
 V. But what avails it, say you, to shew that 
 St. John is consistent with himself, and that he is 
 not really at variance with the Evangelists who 
 preceded him, if the doctrine which he teaches, and 
 which the Creed re-asserts, is itself incredible? You 
 object to this doctrine that it “involves an invin- 
 cible contradiction.” It represents Christ on the one 
 hand as a Personal Being, while on the other it 
 asserts that two mutually self-excluding Essences 
 are really united in Him. How can He be personal, 
 you ask, if He be in very truth both God and Man ? 
 If He is thus God and Man, is He not, in point of 
 fact, a ‘double Being ;’ and is not unity of being 
 an indispensable condition of personality? Surely, 
 you insist, this condition is forfeited by the very 
 terms of the doctrine. Christ either is not both God 
 and Man, or He is not a single Personality. To say 
 that He is One Person in Two Natures is to affirm 
 the existence of a miracle which is incredible, if for 
 no other reason, simply on the score of its unin- 
 
 telligibilityp. 
 
 P Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 2: “ Es gehort vor Allem zum 
 Begriffe Einer Person, dass sie im Kerne ihres Wesens eine Einheit 
 
V.] Christ is One Person both in the Gospel and the Creed. 383 
 
 This is what may be said; but consider, my 
 brethren, whether to say this does not, however 
 unintentionally, caricature the doctrine of St. John 
 and of the Catholic Creed. Does it not seem as if 
 both St. John and the Creed were at pains to make 
 it clear that the Person of Christ in His pre-existent 
 glory, in His state of humiliation and sorrow, and 
 in the majesty of His mediatorial kingdom, is con- 
 tinuously, unalterably One? Does not the Nicene 
 Creed, for instance, first name the Only-begotten Son 
 of God, and then go on to say how for us men and 
 for our salvation He was Himself made Man, and 
 was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate? Does not 
 St. John plainly refer to One and the Same Agent 
 in such verses as the following? “All things were 
 
 bildet ; nur unter dieser Voraussetzung liisst sie sich geschichtlich 
 begreifen. Diese Einheit wird durch die herkémmliche Lehre in 
 der Person des Welterlésers aufgehoben. Jesus Christus wird in 
 der kirchlichen Glaubenslehre als ein Doppel-Wesen dargestellt, als 
 die persénliche Vereinigung zwier Wesenheiten, die an sich nichts 
 mit einander gemein haben, sich vielmehr schlechthin widersprechen 
 und nur vermége eines alle Begriffe iibersteigenden Wunders in die 
 engste und unaufléslichste Verbindung mit einander gebracht wor- 
 den sind. Lr ist demzufolge Mensch und Cott in einer und der- 
 selben Person. Die kirchlichen Theologen haben grosse Anstren- 
 gungen gemacht, um die unanflésliche Verbindung von Gott und 
 Mensch in einer Person als begreiflich und méglich darzustellen ; 
 sie haben sich aber zuletzt doch immer wieder zu dem Gestindniss 
 genvthigt gesehen, dass die Sache unbegreiflich sei, und dass ein 
 undurchdringliches Geheimniss iiber dem Personleben Jesu Christi 
 schwebe. Allein eine solche Berufung auf Geheimnisse und Wunder 
 ist, wo es auf die Erklirung einer geschichtlichen Thatsache an- 
 kommt, fiir die Wissenschaft ohne allen Werth; sie offenbart uns 
 die Unfihigkeit des theologischen Denkens, das in sich Wider- 
 sprechende vorstellbar, das geschichtlich Unbegreifliche denkbar 
 zu machen.” : 
 
384 Nestorius makes our Lord a ‘double Being? — {Lucr. 
 
 made by Him, and without Him was not anything 
 made that was made4.” “He riseth from supper, 
 and laid aside His garments ; and took a towel, and 
 girded Himself. After that He poureth water into 
 a bason, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and 
 to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was 
 girded'.” If St. John or the Creed had proceeded 
 to mtroduce a new subject to whom the circum- 
 stances of Christ’s earthly Life properly belonged, 
 and who only maintained a mysterious even although 
 it were an indissoluble connexion with the Eternal 
 Word in heaven, then the charge of making Christ 
 a ‘double Being’ would be warrantable. Nestorius 
 was fairly lable to that charge. He practically de- 
 nied that the Man Christ Jesus was One Person with 
 the Eternal Word. In order to heighten the ethical 
 import of the Human Life of Christ, Nestorianism 
 represents our Lord as an individual Man, Who, 
 although He is the temple and organ of the Deity to 
 Which He is united, yet has a separate basis of Per- 
 sonality in His Human Nature. The individuality of 
 the Son of Mary is thus treated as a distinct thing 
 from that of the Eternal Word; and the Christ of 
 Nestorianism is really a ‘double Being,’ or rather He 
 is two distinct persons mysteriously joined in one’, 
 
 ᾳ St. John i. 3. t Ibid. xiii. 4, 5. 
 
 s Ap. Marium Mere. p. 54: “Non Maria peperit Deum. Non 
 peperit creatura increabilem, sed peperit hominem Deitatis instru- 
 mentum. Divido naturas, sed conjungo reverentiam.” Cf. Nestorii 
 Ep. i. ad Ceelestin. (Mansi, tom. iv. 1197): τὸ προελθεῖν τὸν Θεὸν 
 Λόγον ἐκ τῆς χριστοτόκου παρθένου παρὰ τῆς θείας ἐδιδάχθην γραφῆς" 
 τὸ δὲ γεννηθῆναι Θεὸν ἐξ αὐτῆς, οὐδαμοῦ ἐδιδάχθην. And his ‘famous’ 
 saying, “I will never own a child of two months old to be 
 God.” 
 
Ve] Nestorianism condemned by the Church. 385 
 
 But the Church has formally condemned this error, 
 and in so doing she was merely throwing into the 
 form of a doctrinal proposition the plain import of 
 the narrative of St. John’s Gospelt. 
 
 Undoubtedly, you reply, the Church has not al- 
 lowed her doctrine to be stated in terms which 
 would dissolve the Redeemer into two distinct agents, 
 and so forfeit altogether the reality of redemption". 
 
 t §. Leo in Epist. ad Leonem Aug. ed. Ballerino, 165 : “ Anathe- 
 matizetur ergo Nestorius, qui beatam virginem non Dei, sed 
 hominis tantummodo credidit genitricem ut aliam personam car- 
 nis faceret, aliam Deitatis; nee unum Christum in Verbo Dei et 
 carne sentiret, sed separatum atque sejunctum alterum Filium Dei, 
 alterum hominis preedicaret.” Symb. Ephesin. cf. Mansi, v. 303: 
 “Oporoyotpev τὸν Κύριον ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστὸν, τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ, Θεὸν 
 τέλειον καὶ ἄνθρωπον τέλειον ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς καὶ σώματος, πρὸ αἰώνων 
 μὲν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα κατὰ τὴν Θεότητα, ἐπ᾿ ἐσχάτων δὲ τῶν 
 ἡμερῶν τὸν αὐτὸν ἐκ Μαρίας κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρὶ 
 κατὰ τὴν θεότητα, ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα, δύο γὰρ φύσεων 
 ἕνωσις γέγονε. Κατὰ ταύτην τὴν τῆς ἀσυγχύτου ἑνώσεως ἔννοιαν ὁμολογοῦ- 
 μεν τὴν ἀγίαν παρθένον Θεοτόκον διὰ τὸ τὸν Θεὸν Λόγον σαρκωθῆναι καὶ 
 ἐνανθρωπῆσαι, καὶ ἐξ αὐτῆς τῆς συλλήψεως ἑνῶσαι ἑαυτῷ τὸν ἐξ αὐτῆς ληφ- 
 θέντα ναόν. Τὰς δὲ εὐαγγελικὰς περὶ τοῦ Κυρίου φωνὰς ἴσμεν τοὺς θεο- 
 λόγους ἄνδρας τὰς μὲν κοινοποιοῦντας ὡς ἐφ᾽ ἑνὸς προσώπου, τὰς δὲ 
 διαιροῦντας ὡς ἐπὶ δύο φύσεων, καὶ τὰς μὲν θεοπρεπεῖς κατὰ τὴν Θεότητα 
 τοῦ Χριστοῦ, τὰς δὲ ταπεινὰὲ κατὰ τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα αὐτοῦ παραδι- 
 δόντας. The definition of Chalcedon is equally emphatic on the sub- 
 ject of the Hypostatie Union. 
 
 u Jackson on the Creed, Works, vol. vii. p. 294: “ That proper 
 blood wherewith God is said to have purchased the church, was the 
 blood of the Son of God, the second Person in Trinity, after a more 
 peculiar manner than it was the blood either of God the Father 
 or of God the Holy Ghost. It was the blood of God the Father 
 or of God the Holy Ghost, as all other creatures are, by common 
 right of creation and preservation. It was the blood of God the 
 Son alone by personal union. If this Son of God, and High Priest 
 of our souls, had offered any other sacrifice for us than Himself, or 
 
 Cc 
 
986 Our Lord’s Godhead the seat of His Personality. [1 ποτ. 
 
 But the question is whether the orthodox statement 
 is really successful in avoiding the error which it 
 deprecates. Certainly the Church does say that “al- 
 though Christ be God and Man, yet He is not two, 
 but one Christ.” But is this possible? How can 
 Godhead and Manhood thus coalesce without for- 
 feiture of that unity which is a condition of per- 
 sonality ? The answer, my brethren, to this question 
 lies in the fact upon which St. John insists with 
 such prominence, that our Lord’s Godhead is the 
 seat of His Personality. The Son of Mary is not 
 a distinct human person mysteriously linked with the 
 Divine Nature of the Eternal Word*. The Person 
 
 the Manhood thus personally united unto Him, His offering could 
 not have been satisfactory, because in all other things created, the 
 Father and the Holy Ghost had the same right or interest which 
 the Son had, He could not have offered anything to Them which 
 were not as truly Theirs as His. Only the Seed of Abraham, or 
 Fruit of the Virgin’s womb Which He assumed into the Godhead, 
 was by the assumption made so His own, as it was not Theirs, His 
 own by incommunicable property of personal union. By reason 
 of this incommunicable property in the woman’s seed, the Son of 
 God might truly have said unto His Father, ‘ Lord, Thou hast pur- 
 chased the church, yet with My blood :’ but so could not the Man 
 Christ Jesus say unto the Son of God, ‘Lord, Thou hast paid the 
 ransom for the sins of the world, yet with My blood, not with 
 Thine own.’” 
 
 x §. Ful. de fide ad Petr. ο. 17: “Deus Verbum non accepit 
 personam hominis, sed naturam ; et in sternam personam divini- 
 tatis accepit temporalem substantiam carnis.” 8. Joh. Damase. de 
 Πα. Orthod. 11. 11: ὁ Θεὸς Adyos σαρκωθεὶς od τὴν ἐν τῷ εἴδει θεω- 
 ρουμένην, οὐ γὰρ πάσας τὰς ὑποστάσεις ἀνέλαβεν: ἀλλὰ τὴν ἐν ἀτόμῳ, 
 ἀπαρχὴν τοῦ ἡμετέρου φυράματος, ov κάθ᾽ ἑαυτὴν ὑποστᾶσαν καὶ ἄτομον 
 χρηματίσασαν πρότερον, καὶ οὕτως ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ προσληφθεῖσαν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν τῇ 
 αὐτοῦ ὑποστάσει ὑπάρξασαν, αὕτη γὰρ ἡ ὑπόστασις τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγου 
 
 ἐγένετο τῇ σαρκὶ ὑπόστασις. He states this in other terms (e. 9) 
 
Ν.]  Christ’s Manhood an ‘instrument? of His Godhead. 387 
 
 of the Son of Mary is divine and eternal ; It is none 
 other than the Person of the Word. When He took 
 upon Him to deliver man, the Eternal Word did 
 not abhor the Virgin’s womb. He clothed Himself 
 with man’s bodily and man’s immaterial nature ; 
 He united it to His Own Divinity. He “took man’s 
 Nature upon Him in the womb of the Blessed Vir- 
 gin, of her substance, so that two whole and perfect 
 Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, 
 were joined together in One Person, never to be 
 divided, whereof is One Christy.” Thus to speak of 
 Christ as ὦ Man may lead to a serious misconception ; 
 He is the Man, or rather He is Man. Christ’s Man- 
 hood is not of Itself an individual being; It is not 
 a seat and centre of personality ; It has no conceiv- 
 able existence apart from the act of Self-icarnation 
 whereby the Eternal Word called It into being and 
 made It His Own% It is a vesture which He has 
 folded around His Person; It is an instrument 
 through which He places Himself in contact with 
 men, and whereby He acts upon humanity*. He 
 
 by saying that our Lord’s Humanity had no subsistence of itself. 
 It was not ἰδιοσύστατος, nor was it strictly ἀνυπόστατος, but ἐν αὐτῇ 
 τῇ τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγου ὑποστάσει ὑποστῶσα, ἐνυπόστατος. He speaks too 
 of Christ’s ὑπόστασις σύνθετος. ¥ Art: εἴ]: 
 
 z §. Aug. c. Serm. Arian. ὁ. 6: “Nec sic assumptus est [homo] 
 ut priis crearetur, post assumeretur, sed ut in ipsd assumptione 
 crearetur.” 
 
 ἃ Jackson on the Creed, Works, vol. vii. p. 289: “‘ The Humanity 
 of Christ is such an instrument of the Divine Nature in His Person, 
 as the hand of man is to the person or party whose hand it is. 
 And it is well observed, whether by Aquinas himself or no I re- 
 member not, but by Viguerius, an accurate summist of Aquinas’ 
 sums, that albeit the intellectual part of man be a spiritual sub- 
 
 ΟΟ 2 
 
388 Analogy between the composite nature [ Lecr. 
 
 wears It in heaven, and thus robed in It He repre- 
 sents, He impersonates, He pleads for the race of 
 beings to which It belongs. In saying that Christ 
 “took our nature upon Him,” we imply that His 
 Person existed before, and that the Manhood which 
 He assumed was Itself impersonal. Therefore He did 
 not make Himself a ‘double Being’ by becoming in- 
 carnate. His Manhood no more impaired the unity of 
 His Person than each human body with its various 
 organs and capacities impairs the unity of that per- 
 sonal principle which is the centre and pivot of each 
 separate human existence, and which has its seat 
 within the soul of each one of us. “As the reasonable 
 soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one 
 Christ.” As the personality of man resides in the 
 soul, after death has severed soul and body, so the 
 Person of Christ had Its eternal seat in His Godhead 
 before His Incarnation. Intimately as the ‘I,’ or per- 
 sonal principle within each of us, is associated with 
 every movement of the body, the ‘I’ itself resides in 
 stance, and separated from the matter or bodily part, yet is the 
 union betwixt the hand and intellectual part of man no less firm, 
 no less proper, than the union between the feet or other organical 
 parts of sensitive creatures, and their sensitive souls or mere phy- 
 sical forms. For the intellectual part of man, whether it be the 
 form of man truly, though not merely physical, or rather his 
 essence, not his form at all, doth use his own hand not as the 
 carpenter doth use his axe, that is, not as an external or separated, 
 but as his proper united instrument: nor is the union between the 
 hand as the instrument and intellective part as the artificer or 
 commander of it an union of matter and form, but an union per- 
 sonal, or at the least such an union as resembles the hypostatical 
 union between the Divine and Human Nature of Christ much better 
 
 than any material union wherein philosophers or school-divines 
 can make instance.” 
 
V.] of man, and the Incarnate Word. 389 
 
 the soul; the soul is that which is conscious, which 
 remembers, which wills, and which thus realizes per- 
 sonality. Certainly it is true that in our present 
 state of existence we have never as yet realized 
 what personal existence is apart from the body. 
 But we shall do this, even the youngest of us, ere 
 many years have passed. Meanwhile we know that 
 when divorced from the personal principle which 
 rules and inspires it, the body is a lump of lifeless 
 clay. The body then does not superadd a second 
 personality to that which is in the soul: it supplies 
 the personal soul with an instrument; it introduces 
 it to a sphere of action; it is the obedient slave, 
 the plastic ductile form of the personal soul which 
 tenants it. The hand is raised, the voice is heard ; 
 but these are acts of the selfsame personality as 
 that which, in the voiceless invisible recesses of its 
 immaterial self, goes through intellectual acts of in- 
 ference, or moral acts of aversion or of love. In 
 short, man is at once animal and spirit, but his 
 personal unity is not thereby impaired: and Jesus 
 Christ is not other than a Single Person, although 
 He has united the Perfect Nature of Man to His 
 Divine and Eternal Being. Therefore although He 
 says “I and the Father are One,” He never says 
 “TI and the Son” or “I and the Word are One.” 
 For He is the Word; He is the Son, and His 
 Human Life is not a distinct Person, but the robe 
 which is folded around His Eternal Personality. 
 But if the illustration of the Creed is thus sug- 
 gestive of the unity of Christ's Person, is it, you 
 may ask, equally suggestive of the Scriptural and 
 Catholic doctrine of His Perfect Manhood? If 
 
900 Reality of our Lord’s Human Will [ Lect. 
 
 Christ's Humanity stands to His Godhead in the 
 relation of the body of a man to his soul, does not 
 this imply that Christ has no human Soul?, or at 
 any rate no distinct human Will? You remind 
 me that ‘the truth of our Lord’s Human Will is 
 essential to the integrity of His Manhood, to the 
 reality of His Incarnation, to the completeness of 
 His redemptive work. It is plainly asserted by 
 Scripture; and the error which denies It has been con- 
 demned by the Church. If Nestorius errs on one side, 
 Apollinaris, Eutyches, and finally the Monothelites, 
 warn us how easily we may err in the other. Christ 
 has a Human Will as being Perfect Man, no less 
 than He has a Divine Will as being Perfect God. 
 But this is not suggested by the analogy of the 
 union of body and soul in man. And if there are 
 two Wills in Christ, must there not also be two 
 Persons? and may not the Sufferer Who kneels in 
 Gethsemane be another than the Word by Whom 
 all things were made ?’ 
 
 Certainly, my brethren, the illustration of the 
 Creed cannot be pressed closely without risk of 
 serious error. An illustration is generally used to 
 indicate correspondence in a single particular; and 
 it will not bear to be erected into an absolute and 
 
 b This preliminary form of the objection is thus noticed by the 
 Master of the Sentences, Petr. Lomb. 1. iii. d. 5 (858). “Non 
 accepit Verbum Dei personam hominis, sed natwram. ἘΠ: A qui- 
 busdam opponitur, quod persona assumit personam. Persona enim 
 est substantia rationalis individu nature, hoe autem est anima. 
 Ergo si animam assumsit, et personam. Quod ideo non sequitur, 
 quia anima non est persona, quando alii rei unita est personaliter, 
 sed quando per se est. Illa autem anima (our Lord’s) nunquam 
 fuit, quia esset alii rei conjuncta.” 
 
V.)] consistent with the Impersonality of His Manhood. 391 
 
 consistent parallel, supposed to be in all respects 
 analogous to that with which it has a single point 
 of correspondence. But is it not easy to mistake what 
 the Creed really does say? The Creed says that as 
 body and soul meet in a single man, so do Perfect 
 Godhead and Perfect Manhood meet in One Christ. 
 The Perfect Manhood of Christ, not His Body merely 
 but His Soul, and therefore His Human Will, is part 
 of the One Christ. Unless in His condescending love 
 our Eternal Lord had thus taken upon Him our 
 fallen nature in its integrity, that is to say, a Human 
 Soul as well as a Human Body, a Human Will as 
 an integral element of the Human Soul, mankind 
 would not have been really represented on the cross 
 or before the throne. We should not have been truly 
 redeemed or sanctified by union with the Most Holy. 
 Yet in taking upon Him a Human Will, the Eternal 
 Word did not assume a second principle of action 
 destructive of the real unity of His Person. Within 
 the precincts of a single human soul may we not 
 observe volition in its higher and in its lower forms, 
 here animated almost entirely by reason, there as 
 exclusively by passion? St. Paul has described a 
 moral dualism within a single will as characteristic 
 of the first stage of the regenerate life, in a won- 
 derful passage of his Epistle to the Romans*. The 
 
 ¢ Rom. vii. 14-25. Origen, St. Chrysostom, and Theodoret 
 understand this passage of the state of man before regeneration. 
 St. Augustine was of this mind in his earlier theological life 
 (Confess. vii. 21; Prop. 45 in Ep. ad Rom., quoted by Meyer, 
 Romer. p. 246), but his struggle with the Pelagian heresy led him 
 to understand the passage of the regenerate (Retractat. i. 23; ii. 1; 
 contr. duas Ep. Pelag. i. 10; contr. Faust. xv. 8). This judgment 
 
392 Reality of our Lord’s Human Will (Lect. 
 
 real self is loyal to God; yet the Christian sees 
 within him a second self, warring against the law of 
 his mind, and bringing him into captivity to that 
 which his central being, in its loyalty to God, ener- 
 getically rejects’. Yet in this great conflict between 
 the old and the new self of regenerate man, there 
 is, we know, no real schism of an indivisible person, 
 although for the moment antagonist elements within 
 the soul are so engaged as to look like separate hos- 
 tile agencies. Of course this is not more than an 
 illustration of the pomt before us ; but it may enable 
 us to understand the case of the Incarnation, where 
 a Human and a Divine Will, really distinct yet 
 necessarily harmonious, are mysteriously attached 
 to a single Personality. In the Incarnate Christ the 
 Human Will is a distinct extension of the province 
 of volition into the sphere of finite and created life. 
 But Christ’s Human Will, although a proper principle 
 of action, was not, could not be in other than the 
 most absolute harmony with the Will of Gode. 
 Christ’s sinlessness is the historical expression of this 
 
 was accepted by the great divines of the middle ages, St. Anselm 
 and Aquinas, and generally by the moderns; although of late there 
 have been some earnest efforts to revive the Greek interpretation. 
 
 d ‘Rom: vil. 17,22, 23. 
 
 e This was the ground taken in the General Council of Constan- 
 tinople, A.D. 680, when the language of Chalcedon was adapted 
 to meet the error of the Monothelites. Avo φυσικὰς θελήσεις ἐν αὐτῷ 
 καὶ δύο φυσικὰς ἐνεργείας ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀμερίστως, ἀσυγχύτως 
 κατὰ τὴν τῶν ἁγίων πατέρων διδασκαλίαν κηρύττομεν, καὶ δύο φυσικὰ 
 θελήματα οὐκ ὑπεναντία, μὴ γένοιτο, καθὼς οἱ ἀσεβεῖς ἔφησαν αἱρετικοὶ, 
 GAN ἑπόμενον τὸ ἀνθρώπινον αὐτοῦ θέλημα, καὶ μὴ ἀντιπίπτον, μᾶλλον 
 μὲν οὖν καὶ ὑποτασσόμενον τῷ θείῳ αὐτοῦ καὶ πανσθενεῖ θελήματι. Mansi, 
 
 tom. xi. p. 637. 
 
V.] consistent with the Impersonality of His Manhood. 393 
 
 harmony. The Human Will of Christ corresponded 
 to the Eternal Will with unvarying accuracy; because 
 in point of fact God, Incarnate in Christ, willed each 
 volition of Christ's Human Will. Christ’s Human 
 Will then had a distinct existence, yet Its free vo- 
 litions were but the earthly echoes of the Will of 
 the All-holy. At the Temptation It is confronted 
 with the personal principle of evil; in Gethsemane 
 It is thrown for a moment into strong relief as Jesus 
 bends to accept the chalice of suffering from which 
 His Human Sensitiveness cannot but shrink. But 
 from the first It is controlled by the Divine Will 
 to which It is indissolubly united; just as, if we 
 may use the comparison, in a holy man passion and 
 impulse are brought entirely under the empire of 
 reason and conscience. As God and Man our Lord 
 has two Wills; but the Divine Will originates and 
 rules His Action; the Human Will is but the docile 
 servant of that Will of God which has its seat in 
 Christ’s Divine and Eternal Personf. Here indeed we 
 touch upon the line at which revealed truth shades 
 off into inaccessible mystery ; we cannot penetrate 
 the secrets of that marvellous θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια ; but 
 we know that each Nature is perfect, and that the 
 Person of Christ is One and Indissoluble 8, 
 
 f §. Ambros. de Fide, v. 6: “ Didicisti, quod omnia 5101 Ipsi sub- 
 jicere possit secundum operationem utique Deitatis ; disce nunc 
 quod secundum carnem omnia subjecta accipiat.” 
 
 * §. Leo, Ep. ad Flavianum, ¢. 4: “Qui verus est Deus, idem 
 verus est Homo, et nullum est in hae unitate mendacium, dum 
 invicem sunt et humilitas hominis et altitudo deitatis. Agit 
 enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est ; 
 Verbo scilicet operante quod Verbi est, et carne exsequente quod 
 earnis est. Unum horum coruscat miraculis, alterum succumbit 
 
394 Mysteriousness of our present being [ Lect. 
 
 The illustration of the Creed might at least re- 
 mind us that we carry about with us the mystery 
 of a composite nature which should lead a thought- 
 ful man to pause before pressing such objections as 
 are urged by modern scepticism against the truth of 
 the Incarnation. The Christ Who is revealed in the 
 Gospels and Who is worshipped by the Church, is 
 rejected as an unintelligible Wonder! True, He is, 
 as well in His condescension as in His greatness, 
 utterly beyond the scope of our finite comprehensions. 
 “Salva proprietate utriusque Nature, et in unam 
 coeunte personam, suscepta est a majestate humilitas, 
 a virtute infirmitas, ab eternitate mortalitash.” We 
 do not profess to solve the mystery of that Union 
 between the Almighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent 
 Being, and a Human Life, with its limited power, 
 its partial knowledge, its restricted sphere. We only 
 know that in Christ the finite and the Infinite are 
 thus united. But we can understand this mysterious 
 union at least as well as we can understand the 
 union of such an organism as the human body to 
 a spiritual immaterial principle ike the human soul. 
 How does spirit thus league itself with matter 4 
 Where and what is the life-principle of the body? 
 Where is the exact frontier-line between sense and 
 consciousness, between brain and thought, between 
 the act of will and the movement of muscle? Is 
 human nature then so utterly commonplace, and have 
 
 injuriis.” S. Joh. Damase. ili. 19: Θεοῦ ἐνανθρωπήσαντος, καὶ ἡ avOpw- 
 
 πίνη αὐτοῦ ἐνέργεια θεία ἦν, ἤγουν τεθεωμένη, καὶ οὐκ ἄμοιρος τῆς θείας 
 
 αὐτοῦ ἐνεργείας" καὶ ἡ θεία αὐτοῦ ἐνέργεια οὐκ ἄμοιρος τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης 
 “ a > / > > ε ἊΝ A - CS, , 
 
 αὐτοῦ ἐνεργείας" ἀλλ᾽ ἑκατέρα σὺν τῇ ἑτέρᾳ θεωρουμένη. 
 
 bh §, Leo Ep. ad Flavianum, ο. 3. 
 
Vs] guides us to the mystery of the Word Incarnate. 395 
 
 its secrets been so entirely unravelled by contem- 
 porary science, as to entitle us to demand of the Al- 
 mighty God that when He reveals Himself to us He 
 shall disrobe Himself of mystery? If we reject His 
 Self-revelation in the Person of Jesus Christ on the 
 ground of our inability to understand the difficulties, 
 great and undeniable, although not greater than we 
 might have anticipated, which do in fact surround 
 it; are we also prepared to conclude that, because 
 we cannot explain how a spiritual principle like the 
 soul can be robed in and act through a material 
 body, we will therefore close our eyes to the argu- 
 ments which certify us that the soul is an immaterial 
 essence, and take refuge from this oppressive sense of 
 mystery in some doctrine of consistent materialism 7 
 Certainly St. John’s doctrine of the Divinity of 
 the Word Incarnate cannot be reasonably objected 
 to on the score of its mysteriousness by those who 
 allow themselves to face their real ignorance of the 
 mysteries of our human nature. Nor does that doc- 
 trine involve a necessary internal self-contradiction 
 on such a ground as that “the Word by Whom all 
 things were made, and Who sustains all things, can- 
 not become His Own creature.” Undoubtedly the 
 Word Incarnate does not cease to be the Word ; but 
 He can and does assume a Nature which He has cre- 
 ated, and in which He dwells, that in it He may 
 manifest Himself. Between the processes of Cre- 
 ation and Incarnation there is no necessary contra- 
 diction in Divine revelation, such as is presumed 
 to exist by certain Pantheistic thinkers. The Self- 
 incarnating Being creates the form in which He 
 manifests Himself simultaneously with the act of 
 
906 Incarnation, how related to Creation. [Lecr. 
 
 His Self-manifestation. Doubtless when we say that 
 God creates, we imply that He gives an existence 
 to something other than Himself. On the other 
 hand, it is certain that He does in a real sense 
 Himself exist in each object which He creates. He 
 is in every such object the constitutive, sustaining, 
 bindmg force which perpetuates its being. Thus 
 in varying degrees the creatures are temples and 
 organs of the indwelling Presence of the Creator, 
 although in His Essence He is infinitely removed 
 from them. If this is true of the irrational and, in 
 a lower measure, even of the inanimate creatures, 
 much more is it true of the family of man, and of 
 each member of that family. In vast morganic 
 masses God discovers Himself as the supreme, creative, 
 sustaining Force. In the graduated orders of vital 
 power which range throughout the animal and vege- 
 table worlds, God unveils His activity as the Foun- 
 tain of all life. In man, a creature exergising con- 
 scious reflective thought and free self-determining 
 will, God proclaims Himself a free Intelligent Agent. 
 Man indeed may, if he will, reveal much more than 
 this of the glory of God: he may shed forth by the 
 free movement of his will, rays of God’s moral glory, 
 of love, of mercy, of purity, of justice. But whether 
 each man will make this higher revelation depends 
 not upon the necessary constitution of his nature, 
 but upon the free co-operation of his will with the 
 designs of God. God however is obviously able to , 
 create a Bemg who will reveal Him perfectly and 
 of necessity, as expressing His perfect image and 
 likeness before His creatures. All nature points 
 to such a Beig as its climax and consummation. 
 
We Belief in Chris?s Godhead, how originating. 397 
 
 And such a Being is the Archetypal Manhood as- 
 sumed by the Eternal Word. It is the climax of 
 God’s Creation ; It is the climax also of God’s Self- 
 revelation. At this point God’s creative activity be- 
 comes entirely one with His Self-revealing activity. 
 The Sacred Manhood is a creature, yet It is indis- 
 solubly united to the Eternal Word. It differs from 
 every other created being, in that God personally 
 tenants It. So far then are Incarnation and Creation 
 from being antagonistic conceptions of the activity 
 of God, that the Absolutely Perfect Creature only 
 exists as a perfect reflection of the Divine glory. In 
 the Incarnation, God creates only to reveal, and He 
 reveals perfectly by That which He creates. “The 
 Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we 
 beheld His glory.” 
 
 VI. But if the truth of our Lord’s Divinity, as 
 taught by St. John, cannot be reasonably objected to 
 on such grounds as have been noticed, can it be 
 destroyed by a natural explanation of its upgrowth 
 and formation? Here, brethren, we touch upon a sus- 
 picion which underlies much of the current unbelief 
 of the day; and with a few words on this momentous 
 topic we may conclude the present lecture. 
 
 Those who reject the doctrine that Christ is God 
 are confronted by the fact that after the lapse 
 of eighteen centuries since His appearance on this 
 earth, He is believed in and worshipped as God by 
 a Christendom which embraces the most. civilized 
 section of the human family. The question arises 
 how to account for this fact. There is no difficulty 
 at all in accounting for it if we suppose Him to be, 
 
 1 On this subject see Martensen, Christ]. Dogmat. ὃ 132. 
 
998 Theory that Jesus was divinized (Lecr. 
 
 and to have proclaimed Himself to be, a Divine Person. 
 But if we say that, in point of historical fact, He 
 was a mere man, how are we to explain the world- 
 wide upgrowth of so extraordinary a belief about 
 Him, as is this belief in His Divinity? Scepticism 
 may fold its arms and may smile at what it deems 
 the intrinsic absurdity of the dogma believed in; 
 but it cannot ignore the prevalence of the belief 
 which accepts the dogma. The belief is a phenome- 
 non which challenges attention. How has that belief 
 been spread? How is it that for eighteen hundred 
 years, and at this hour, a conviction of the truth of 
 the Godhead of Jesus dominates over the world of 
 Christian thought? Here, if scepticism would save its 
 intellectual credit, it must change its traditional tac- 
 tics. It must cease from the perpetual reiteration of 
 doubts and negations unrelieved by any frank admis- 
 sions or assertions of positive truth; it must make 
 a venture; it must commit itself to the responsi- 
 bilities of a positive position, however inexact and 
 shadowy ; it must hazard an hypothesis and be pre- 
 pared to defend it. Accordingly the hypothesis 
 which is to explain the belief of Christendom in 
 the Godhead of Christ sets forth that Christ was 
 divinized by the enthusiasm of His first disciples. 
 We are told that ‘man instinctively creates a creed 
 that shall meet the wants and aspirations of his 
 understanding and of his heart*, The teaching of 
 Christ created in His first followers a passionate 
 devotion to His Person, and a desire for unreserved 
 submission to His dictatorship. Not that Christ’s 
 Divinity was decreed Him by any formal act of 
 
 k Feuerbach, Geist. d. Christenth. Einl. 
 
Nal by the enthusiasm of His first disciples. 399 
 
 public honour ; it was the spontaneous and irregular 
 tribute of a passionate enthusiasm. Could any ex- 
 pression of reverence seem exaggerated to an admi- 
 ration and a love which knew no bounds? Could 
 any intellectual price be too high to pay for the 
 advantage of placing the authority of the Greatest 
 of Teachers upon that one basis of authority which 
 is beyond assault? Do not love and reverence, 
 centring with eager intensity upon an object, turn 
 a somewhat impatient ear to the cautious protes- 
 tations of the critical reason, when any such voice 
 can make itself heard? Do they not pass by im- 
 perceptible degrees into an adoration which takes for 
 granted the Divinity of the Object which it has 
 learned unreflectingly and imperceptibly to adore ?’ 
 The enthusiasm created by Jesus Christ in those 
 around Him, thus comes to be credited with the in- 
 vention and propagation of the belief in His Divinity. 
 ‘So mighty was the enthusiasm, that nothing short 
 of that stupendous belief would satisfy it. The heart 
 of Christendom gave law to its understanding. Chris- 
 tians wished Christ to be God, and they forthwith 
 thought that they had sufficient reasons for believing 
 in His Godhead. The feeling of a society of affec- 
 tionate friends found its way in process of time into 
 the world of speculation : it fell into the hands of the 
 dialecticians, and into the hands of the metaphysi- 
 clans; it was analysed, it was defined, it was coloured 
 by contact with foreign speculations; it was enlarged 
 by the accretion of new intellectual material ; and at 
 length Fathers and Councils had finished their grace- 
 less and pedantic task, and that which had at first 
 been the fresh sentiment of simple and loving hearts 
 
400 St. John’s writings fatal to the theory. [ Lect. 
 
 was at length hardened and rounded off into a solid 
 block of repulsive dogma.’ 
 
 Now St. John’s writings are a standing difficulty 
 in the way of this enterprising hypothesis. We 
 have seen that the fourth Gospel must be recog- 
 nised as St. John’s, unless, to use the words of 
 Ewald, “ we are prepared knowingly to receive false- 
 hood and to reject truth.” But we have also seen 
 that in the fourth Gospel Jesus Christ is proclaimed 
 to be God by the whole drift of the argument, and 
 in terms as explicit as those of the Nicene Creed. 
 We have not then to deal with any supposed pro- 
 cess of divinization ‘transfiguring’ the Person of 
 Jesus in the apprehension of sub-apostolic, or post- 
 apostolic Christendom. It is St. John who proclaims 
 that Jesus is the Word Incarnate, and that the Word 
 is God. How can we account for St. John’s repre- 
 senting Him as God, if He was in truth only man? 
 It is not sufficient to argue that St. John wrote his 
 Gospel in his old age, and that the memories of his 
 youthful companionship with Jesus had been co- 
 loured, heightened, transformed, idealized, by the 
 meditative enthusiasm of more than half a century. 
 It will not avail to say that the reverence of the 
 beloved disciple for his ascended Master was fatal 
 to the accuracy of the portrait which he drew of 
 Him. My brethren, what is this but to misapprehend 
 the very fundamental nature of reverence? Truth is 
 the basis, as 1ὖ 15 the object of reverence, not less than 
 of every other virtue. Reverence prostrates herself 
 before a greatness the truth of which is obvious to 
 her; but she would cease to be reverence if she 
 could exaggerate the greatness which provokes her 
 
V.] True reverence necessarily truthful. 401 
 
 homage, not less surely than if she could depreciate 
 or deny it. The sentiment which, in contemplating 
 its object, abandons the guidance of fact for that of 
 imagination, is disloyal to that subjective truthful- 
 ness which is of the essence of reverence; and it 
 is certain at last to subserve the purposes of the 
 scorner and the spoiler. St. John insists that he 
 teaches the Church only that which he has seen and 
 heard. Even a slight swerving from truth must be 
 painful to real reverence ; but what shall we say of 
 an exaggeration so gigantic, if an exaggeration it 
 be, as that which transforms a human friend into the 
 Almighty and Everlasting God? If Jesus Christ is 
 not God, how is it that the most intimate of His 
 earthly friends came to believe and to teach that 
 He is God? Place yourselves, my brethren, fairly 
 face to face with this difficulty; imagine your- 
 selves, for the moment, in the position of St. John. 
 Think of any whom you have loved and revered, 
 beyond measure, as it has seemed, in past years. 
 He has gone; but you cling to him more earnestly 
 in thought and affection than while he was here. 
 You treasure his words, you revisit his haunts, 
 you delight in the company of his friends, you 
 represent to yourself his wonted turns of thought 
 and phrase, you con over his handwriting, you fondle 
 his likeness. These things are for you precious and 
 sacred. Even now, there are times when the tones 
 of that welcome voice seem to fall with hving power 
 upon your strained ear; even now, the outline of that 
 countenance, upon which the grave has closed, flits, 
 as if capriciously, before your eye of sense; the air 
 around you yields it perchance to your intent gaze, 
 
 pd 
 
402 Tf Christ had been merely Human, [Lecr. 
 
 radiant with a higher beauty than it wore of old. 
 Others, you feel, may be forgotten as memory grows 
 weak, and the passing years bring with them the 
 quick succession of new fields and objects of interest, 
 pressing importunately upon the heart and thoughts. 
 But one such memory as I have glanced at fades not 
 at the bidding of time. It cannot fade; it has become 
 a part of the mind which clings to it. Some who are 
 here may have known those whom they thus remem- 
 ber; a few of us assuredly have known such, But can 
 we conceive it possible that, after any lapse of time, 
 we should ever express our reverence and love for 
 the unearthly goodness, the moral strength, the ten- 
 derness of heart, the fearlessness, the justice, the un- 
 selfishness of our friend, by saying that he was not 
 an ordinary human being, but a superhuman person 4 
 Can we imagine ourselves incorporating our recol- 
 lections about him with some current theosophic 
 doctrine elevating him to the rank of a Divine hy- 
 postasis 7 While he lies in his silent grave, can we 
 picture ourselves describing him as the very abso- 
 lute Light and Life, as the Incarnate Thought of the 
 Most High, as standing in a relationship altogether 
 unique to the Eternal and Self-existent Being, nay as 
 being literally God? To say that “St. John lived 
 in a different intellectual atmosphere from our own,” 
 does not meet the difficulty. If Jesus was merely 
 human, St. John’s statements about Him are among 
 the most preposterous fictions which have imposed 
 upon the world. They were advanced with a full 
 knowledge of all that they involved. St. John was at 
 least as profoundly convinced as we are of the truth 
 of the unity of the Supreme Being. St. John was 
 
V3 St. John could not have proclaimed Him Divine. 403 
 
 at least as alive as we can be to the infinite interval 
 which parts the highest of creatures from the Great 
 Creator. If we are not naturally lured on by 
 some irresistible fascination, by the poetry or by the 
 credulity of our advancing years, to believe in the 
 Godhead of the best man whom we have ever 
 known, neither was St. John. If Jesus had been 
 merely human, St. John would have felt what we 
 feel about a loved and revered friend whom we 
 have lost. In proportion to our belief in our 
 friend’s goodness, in proportion to our loving reve- 
 rence for his character, is the strength of our con- 
 viction that we could not now do him a more cruel 
 injury than by entwining a blasphemous fable, such 
 as the ascription of Divinity would be, around the 
 simple story of his merely human life. This ‘divini- 
 zation of Jesus by the enthusiasm’ of St. John would 
 have been consistent neither with St. John’s reve- 
 rence for God, nor with his real loyalty to a merely 
 human friend and teacher. St. John worshipped the 
 ‘jealous’ God of Israel; and he has recorded the 
 warning which he himself received against wor- 
 shipping the angel of the Apocalypse!. If Christ 
 had not really been Divine, the real beauty of His 
 Human Character would have been disfigured by 
 any association with such legendary exaggeration, 
 and Christianity would assuredly have perished 
 within the limits of the first century. 
 
 But the hypothesis that Jesus was divinized by 
 enthusiasm assumes the existence of a general dis- 
 position in mankind which is unwarranted by 
 
 1] Rey. xxii. 9. 
 pd2 
 
404 Real functions of the Divine Comforter [Lecr. 
 
 experience. Generally speaking men are not eager to 
 believe in the exalted virtue, much less in the super- 
 human origin or dignity, of their fellow-men. And 
 to do them justice, the writers who maintain that 
 Jesus was divinized by enthusiasm illustrate the 
 weakness of their own principle very conspicuously. 
 While they assert that nothing was more easy and 
 obvious for St. John in the apostolic age than to 
 believe in the Divinity of his Master, they them- 
 selves reject that truth with the greatest possible 
 obstinacy and determination, well-attested though it 
 be, now as then, by historical miracles and by over- 
 whelming moral considerations; but also now pro- 
 claimed, as it was not then, by the faith of eighteen 
 centuries, and by the suffrages of all that is purest 
 and truest in our existing civilization. 
 
 But, it is suggested that the apostolic narrative 
 itself bears out the doctrine that Jesus was divinized 
 through enthusiasm by the functions which are 
 ascribed, especially in St. John’s Gospel, to the Com- 
 forter. Was not the Comforter sent to testify of 
 Jesus? Is it not said “ He shall glorify Me”? Does 
 not this language look like the later endeavour of 
 an enthusiasm to account for exaggerations of which 
 it is conscious, by a bold claim to supernatural illu- 
 mination? Now this suggestion implies that the 
 Last Discourse of our Lord is in reality a forgery, 
 which can no more claim to represent His real 
 thought than the political speeches in Thucydides 
 can be seriously supposed to express the minds of 
 the speakers to whom they are severally attri- 
 buted. The suggestion further implies that a purely 
 human feeling is here clothed by our Lord Him- 
 
ey not the enthusiasm of human imaginations. 405 
 
 self with the attributes of a Divine Person. Of 
 course if St. John was capable of deliberately attri- 
 buting to his Master that which He did not say, 
 he was equally capable of attributing to Him actions 
 which He did not do; and we are driven to the 
 theory that the closest friend of Jesus was believed 
 by apostolical Christendom to be writing a history, 
 when in truth he was only composing a biographical 
 novel. But, as Rousseau has observed, the original 
 inventor of the Gospel history would have been as 
 miraculous a being as its historical Subject. In like 
 manner the moral fascination which the last dis- 
 course possesses for every pure and true soul at this 
 hour, combines with the testimony of the Church to 
 assure us that it could have been spoken by no 
 merely human lips, and that it is beyond the inven- 
 tive scope of even the highest human genius. Those 
 three chapters which M. Renan pronounces to be 
 full of “the aridity of metaphysics and the darkness 
 of abstract dogmas” have been, as a matter of fact, 
 watered by the tears of all the purest love and deepest 
 sorrow of Christian humanity for eighteen centuries. 
 Never is the New Testament more able to dispense 
 with external evidence than here; nowhere more than 
 here is it sensibly divine. Undoubtedly it is a fact 
 that in these chapters our Lord does promise to His 
 apostles the supernatural aid of the Holy Spirit. It 
 is true that the Spirit was to testify of Christ™ and 
 to glorify Christ”, and to guide the disciples into alle 
 truth. But how? “ He shall take of Mine and shall 
 
 m St. John xv. 26: ἐκεῖνος μαρτυρήσει περὶ ἐμοῦ. 
 n [bid. xvi. 14: ἐκεῖνος ἐμὲ δοξάσει. 
 
 © Ibid. ver. 13: ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν. 
 
406 Guidance of the Spirit, how related [Lecr. 
 
 shew it unto youP;” “He shall teach you all things, 
 and bring all things to your remembrance whatso- 
 ever I have said unto you4%.” The Holy Spirit was to 
 bring the Words and Works and Character of Jesus 
 before the illuminated intelligence of the Apostles. 
 The school of the Spirit was to be the school 
 of reflection; but it was not to be the school of 
 legendary invention. Acts which, at the time of 
 their being witnessed, might have appeared trivial or 
 commonplace, would be seen, under the guidance of 
 the Spirit, to have had a deeper interest. Words to 
 which a transient or local value had been assigned 
 at first, would now be felt to invite a world-wide 
 and eternal meaning. “ These things understood not 
 His disciples at the first” is true of much else be- 
 sides the entry into Jerusalem’. Moral, spiritual, 
 physical powers which, though unexplained, could 
 never have passed for the product of purely human 
 activity, would in time be referred by the Invisible 
 Teacher to their true source, they would be regarded 
 with awe as the very rays of Deity. Thus the 
 work of the Spirit would but complete, systematize, 
 digest the results of previous natural observation. 
 Certainly it was always impossible that any man 
 could say that Jesus was the Lord but by the Holy 
 Ghost. The Holy Ghost Alone could make the God- 
 head of Jesus a certainty of faith as well.as a con- 
 clusion of the intellect. But the intellectual con- 
 ditions of belief were at first mseparable from 
 
 Ρ St. John xvi. 14, 15: ἐκ τοῦ ἐμοῦ λήψεται, καὶ ἀναγγελεῖ ὑμῖν. 
 4 Ibid. xiv. 26: ἐκεῖνος ὑμᾶς διδάξει πάντα, καὶ ὑπομνήσει ὑμᾶς πάντα 
 ἃ εἶπον ὑμῖν. 
 
 r Tbid. xii. 14-16. 
 
δυΣἢ to antecedent natural observation. 407 
 
 natural contact with the living Human Form of 
 Jesus during the years of His earthly Life. Our 
 Lord implies this in saying “Ye also shall bear 
 witness, because ye have been with Me from the 
 beginning.” The Apostles lived with One Who com- 
 bined an exercise of the highest miraculous powers 
 with a faultless human Character, and Who asserted 
 Himself, by implication and expressly, to be per- 
 sonally God. The Spirit strengthened and formalized 
 that earlier and vague belief which was created by 
 His language, but His language had fallen on the 
 natural ears of the Apostles, and it was the germi- 
 nal principle of their riper faith in His Divinity. 
 
 The unbelief of our day is naturally anxious to 
 evade the startling fact that the most intimate of the 
 companions of Jesus is also the most strenuous asser- 
 tor of His Godhead. There is a proverb to the effect 
 that no man’s life should be written by his private 
 servant. That proverb expresses the general convic- 
 tion of mankind that, as a rule, like some mountain 
 scenery or ruined castles, moral greatness in men is 
 more picturesque when viewed from a distance. The 
 proverb bids you not to scrutinize even a good man 
 too narrowly, or you may perchance discover flaws in 
 his character which will somewhat rudely shake your 
 conviction of his goodness. It is hinted that some un- 
 obtrusive weaknesses which escape public observation 
 will be obvious to a man’s everyday companion, and 
 will be fatal to the higher estimate which, but for 
 such close scrutiny, might have been formed respect- 
 ing him. But in the case of Jesus Christ the moral 
 of this cynical proverb is altogether at fault. Jesus 
 Christ chooses one disciple to be the privileged sharer 
 
408 Real force of St. John’s testimony [Lecr. 
 
 of a nearer intimacy than any other. The son of 
 Zebedee lies upon His bosom at supper, and is “the 
 disciple whom Jesus loved.” Along with St. Peter and 
 St. James, this disciple is taken to the heights of 
 Tabor to witness the glory of his Transfigured Lord. 
 He enters the empty tomb on the morning of the 
 Resurrection. He is in the upper chamber when the 
 risen Jesus blessed the ten and the eleven. He is on 
 the mount of the Ascension when his Master goes up 
 visibly into heaven. But he also is summoned to the 
 garden where Jesus kneels in agony beneath the olive- 
 trees; and alone of the twelve he faces the fierce mul- 
 titude on the road to Calvary, and stands with Mary 
 beneath the cross, and sees Jesus die. He sees more 
 of the Divine Master than any other, more of His 
 glory, more too of His humiliation. His witness is 
 proportioned to His nearer and closer observation. 
 Beyond any other of the followers of Jesus,—whether 
 he is writing Epistles of encouragement and warning, 
 or narrating heavenly visions touching the future 
 of the Church, or recording the experiences of those 
 years when he enjoyed that intimate, unmatched 
 companionship,—St. John is the persistent herald 
 and teacher of our Lord’s Divinity. 
 
 How and by what successive steps it was that the 
 full truth embodied in his Gospel respecting the 
 Person of his Lord made its way into and mastered 
 the soul of the beloved disciple, who indeed shall 
 presume to say 1 Who of us can determine the exact 
 and varied observations whereby we learn to measure 
 and to revere the component elements of a great 
 human character? The absorbing interest of such a 
 process is generally fatal to an accurate analysis of its 
 
Wi] depends on his close intimacy with our Lord. 409 
 
 stages. We penetrate deeper and deeper, we mount 
 higher and higher as we follow the complex system 
 of motives, capacities, dispositions, which, one after 
 another, open upon us. We cannot, on looking back, 
 say when this or that feature became distinctly clear 
 to us. We know not now by what accretions and 
 developments the general impression which we have 
 received took its shape and outline. St. John would 
 doubtless have learnt portions of the mighty truth 
 from definite statements and at specified times. 
 The true voice of prophecy’, the explicit confessions 
 of disciplest, the assertions by which our Lord replied 
 to the malice or the ignorance of His opponents¥, 
 were doubtless distinct lessons in the Apostle’s train- 
 ing in the school of truth. St. John must have 
 learned something of Christ’s Divine power when, at 
 His word, the putrid corpse of Lazarus, bound with 
 its grave-clothes, moved forward into air and life. 
 St. John must have learned yet more of his Mas- 
 ter’s condescension when, girded with a towel, Jesus 
 bent Himself to the earth that He might wash the 
 feet of the traitor Judas. Each miracle, each dis- 
 course supplied a distinct ray of light ; but the total 
 impression must have been formed, strengthened, 
 deepened, mainly by daily intercourse, by hourly, 
 momentary observation. For every human soul, en- 
 cased in its earthly prison-house, seeks and finds pub- 
 heity through countless outlets. The immaterial 
 
 5. St. John xii. 41: ταῦτα εἶπεν Ἡσαΐας, ὅτε cide τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, 
 καὶ ἐλάλησε περὶ αὐτοῦ. Isa. vi. 9. 
 
 t St. John i. 50. After our Lord’s words implying His omni- 
 presence, Nathanael says, ‘PaSBi, σὺ εἶ ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 
 ἃ Tbid, viii. 58, ἄς, 
 
410 The most intimate of the companions of Jesus [Lucr. 
 
 spirit traces its history with an almost invisible 
 delicacy upon the coarse hard matter which is its 
 servant and its organ. The unconscious involuntary 
 movements of manner and countenance, the un- 
 studied phrases of daily or of casual intercourse, the 
 emphasis of silence not less than the emphasis of 
 speech, help in various ways to complete that self- 
 revelation which every individual character makes 
 to all around, and which is studied by all in each. 
 Not otherwise did the Incarnate Word reveal Him- 
 self to the purest and keenest love which He found 
 and chose from among the sons of men. One flaw 
 or fault of temper, one symptom of moral impotence, 
 or of moral perversion, one hasty word, one ill-consi- 
 dered act, would have shattered the ideal for ever. 
 But, in fact, to St. John the Life of Jesus was as 
 the light of heaven, unchangeable in its own magnifi- 
 cence, but ever varying its illuminating powers as 
 it falls upon the leaves of the forest oak or upon 
 the countless ripples of the ocean. In the eyes of 
 St. John the Eternal Person of Jesus shone forth 
 through His Humanity with translucent splendour, 
 and wove and folded around Itself, as the days and 
 weeks passed on, a moral history of faultless gran- 
 deur. It was not the disciple who idealized the 
 Master ; it was the Master Who revealed Himself 
 in His majestic glory to the illumined eye and to 
 the entranced touch of the disciple. No treachery 
 of memory, no ardour of temperament, no sustained 
 reflectiveness of soul, could have compassed the 
 transformation of a human friend into the Almighty 
 and Everlasting Bemg. Nor was there room for 
 serious error of judgment after a companionship so 
 
VA the strongest assertor of His real Divinity. 411 
 
 intimate, so heart-searching, so true, as had been 
 that of Jesus with St. John. To the beloved disciple 
 the Divinity of his Lord was not a scholastic formula, 
 nor a pious conjecture, nor a controversial thesis, nor 
 the adaptation of a popular superstition to meet the 
 demands of a strong enthusiasm, nor a mystic reverie. 
 It was nothing less than a fact of personal experi- 
 ence. “That Which was from the beginning, Which 
 we have heard, Which we have seen with our eyes, 
 Which we have looked upon and our hands have 
 handled, of the Word of Life; (for the Life was 
 manifested, and we have seen It, and bear wit- 
 ness, and shew unto you that Eternal Life, Which 
 was with the Father, and was manifested unto us ;) 
 That Which we have seen and heard declare we 
 unto you.” 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 OUR LORD’S DIVINITY AS TAUGHT BY ST. JAMES, 
 ST. PETER, AND ST. PAUL. 
 
 And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, 
 perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me 
 and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should 
 go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision. 
 
 GAL. Il. Ὁ: 
 
 THE meditative temper of thought and phrase 
 which is so observable in St. John, may be thought 
 to bear in two different manners upon the question 
 before us in these lectures. Such a temper, regarded 
 from a point of view entirely naturalistic, must be 
 admitted on the one hand to be a guarantee against 
 the presumption that St. John im his enthusiastic 
 devotion to Jesus committed himself to hasty beliefs 
 and assertions respecting the Person of his Friend 
 and Master. An over-eager and undiscriminating 
 admiration would not naturally express itself in 
 metaphysical terminology of a reflective and mystical 
 character. But on the other hand, it may be asked 
 whether too much stress has not been laid by the 
 argument of the last lecture upon the witness of 
 St. John? Can the conclusions of a mind of high- 
 
The idiosyncrasy of particular beliefs. 413 
 
 strung and contemplative temper be accepted as 
 little less, if at all less, than a sufficient basis for 
 a cardinal point of belief in the religion of man- 
 kind? May not such a belief be inextricably lmked 
 to the moral and intellectual idiosyncrasies of the 
 single soul? The belief may indeed be the honest 
 and adequate result of that particular life of obser- 
 vation and reflection of which the soul in question 
 has been the scene. As such the belief may legiti- 
 mately be an object of general interest and respect ; 
 but is not this respect and interest due to it on the 
 precise ground that it is the true native product of 
 a group of conditions which co-exist nowhere else 
 save in the particular soul which generated it? Will 
 the belief, in short, bear transplantation into the 
 moral and mental soil around? Can it be nourished 
 and handed on by minds of a different calibre, by cha- 
 racters of a distinct cast from that in which it origi- 
 nally grew? Dr. Samuel Johnson, for instance, had 
 private beliefs which were obviously due to the tone 
 and genius of his particular character. These beliefs 
 go far to constitute the charm of the picture with 
 which we are familiar in the pages of Boswell. 
 But our respect for Dr. Johnson does not force us to 
 accept each and all of his quaint beliefs. They are 
 peculiar to himself, beg such as he was. We ad- 
 mire them as belonging to the attractive and eccen- 
 tric individuality of the man. We do not suppose 
 that they are capable of being domesticated in the 
 general and diversified mind of England. 
 
 Now, if it be hinted that some similar estimate 
 should be formed respecting St. John’s doctrine of 
 our Lord’s Divinity, the present, for obvious reasons, 
 
414 St. John’s faith is that of the other apostles. [Lxcr. 
 
 is not the moment to insist upon a consideration 
 which for us Christians must have paramount weight, 
 namely, that St. John was taught by an infallible 
 Teacher, by none other than God the Holy Ghost. 
 But let us remark, first of all, the fact that St. John 
 did convey to a large circle of minds his own deep 
 conviction that his Friend and Master was a Divine 
 Person; paradoxical as that conviction must at first 
 have seemed to them. If we could have travelled 
 through Asia Minor at the end of the first century 
 of our era, we should have fallen in with a number 
 of persons, in various ranks of society, who so en- 
 tirely believed in St. John’s doctrine, as to die for 
 it without any kind of hesitation®. But it would 
 have been a mistake to suppose that the prevalence of 
 the doctrine was due only to the activity of St. John. 
 While St. John was teaching this doctrine under the 
 form which he had been guided to adopt, a parallel 
 communication of the substance of the doctrine was 
 taking place in several other quarters. St. John 
 was supported, if I may be allowed to use such 
 an expression, by men whose minds were of a 
 totally distinct natural cast, and who expressed their 
 
 ἃ The Apocalypse was probably written immediately after Do- 
 mitian’s persecution of the Church. Antipas had been martyred 
 at Pergamos. (Rev. 11. 13.) St. John saw the souls of martyrs 
 who had been beheaded with the axe; εἶδον ras ψυχὰς τῶν πεπελε- 
 κισμένων διὰ τὴν μαρτυρίαν ᾿Ιησοῦ. (Rev. xx. 4.) This was the Roman 
 custom at executions. In the persecution under Nero other and 
 more cruel kinds of death had been practised. The Bishops of 
 Pergamos (Ibid. ii, 13) and Philadelphia (Ibid. 11. 8) had confessed 
 Christ. St. Clemens Romanus alludes to the violence of this 
 persecution, (Ep. ad Cor. 6.) The Apostle himself was banished 
 
 to Patmos. 
 
ΨΙ1 Φογηιλαέϊο significance of the interview at Jerusalem. 415 
 
 thoughts in phrases and a style which had little 
 enough in common with that current in the school 
 of Ephesus. Nevertheless it will be our duty 
 this morning to note how radical was their agree- 
 ment with St. John in urging upon the acceptance 
 of the human race the doctrine that Jesus Christ 
 is God. 
 
 Very ingenious theories concerning a supposed 
 division of the Apostolical Church into schools of 
 thought holding antagonistic beliefs, have been ad- 
 vanced of late years. And they have had the effect of 
 directing a large amount of attention to the account 
 which St. Paul gives in his Epistle to the Galatians 
 of his interview with the leading Apostles at Jeru- 
 salem. The accuracy of that account is not ques- 
 tioned even by the most destructive of the Tubingen 
 divines. According to St. Irenzeus and the great 
 majority of authorities, both ancient and modern, the 
 interview took place on the occasion of St. Paul’s 
 attendance at the Apostolical Council of Jerusalem. 
 St. Paul says that St. James, St. Peter, and St. John, 
 who had the credit of being “ pillars” of the Church, 
 with the Judaizing Christians as well as with Chris- 
 tians generally, gave the right hands of fellowship 
 to himself and to Barnabas. “It was agreed,” says 
 St. Paul, “that we should go unto the heathen, and 
 they unto the circumcision.” Now the historical in- 
 terest which attaches to this recorded division of 
 labour among the leading Apostles, is sufficiently 
 obvious ; but the dogmatic interest of the passage, 
 although less direct, is even higher than the his- 
 torical. This passage warrants us in inferring at 
 least thus much,—that the leading Apostles of our 
 
410 One faith of the apostles respecting our Lord.  [Lucr. 
 
 Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ were not hopelessly 
 at issue with each other on a subject of such central 
 and primary importance as the Divine and Eternal 
 Nature of their Master. 
 
 It might well seem, at first sight, that to draw 
 such an inference at all within the walls of a Chris- 
 tian church was itself an act for which the faith of 
 Christians would exact an apology. But those who 
 are acquainted with the imaginative licence of recent 
 theories will not deem our inference altogether im- 
 pertinent and superfluous. Of late years St. James 
 has been represented as more of a Jew than a Chris- 
 tian, and as holding in reality a purely Ebionitic and 
 Humanitarian belief as to the Person of Jesus. St. Paul 
 has been described as the teacher of such a doctrine 
 of the Subordination of the Son as to be practically 
 Arian. St. Peter is then exhibited as occupying 
 a feeble undecided dogmatic position, intermediate 
 to the doctrines of St. Paul and St. James; while 
 all the three are contrasted with the distinct and 
 lofty Christology proper to the gnosis of St. John. 
 Now, as has been already remarked, the historical 
 trustworthiness of the passage in the Galatians has 
 not been disputed even by the Tubmgen divines. 
 That passage represents St. John as intimately asso- 
 ciated not merely with St. Peter but with St. James. 
 It moreover represents these three apostles as giving 
 pledges of spiritual co-operation and fellowship from 
 their common basis of belief and action to the 
 more recent convert St. Paul. Is it to be supposed 
 that St. Paul could have been thus accepted as 
 a fellow-worker on one and the same occasion by the 
 Apostle who is said to be a simple Humanitarian, 
 
VE. The Apostles not indifferent to doctrinal truth. 417 
 
 and by the Apostle whose whole teaching centres in 
 Jesus considered as the historical manifestation of 
 the Eternal Word? Or are we to suppose that the 
 apostles of Christ anticipated that imdifference to 
 doctrinal exactness which is characteristic of some 
 modern schools? Did they regard the question of 
 our Lord’s Personal Godhead as a kind of specula- 
 tive curiosity; as a scholastic conceit ; as having no 
 necessary connexion with vital, essential, fundamental 
 Christianity? And is St. Paul in the Epistle to 
 the Galatians only describing the first great eccle- 
 siastical compromise, in which truths of primary 
 importance were sacrificed for an immediate prac- 
 tical object, more ruthlessly than on any subsequent 
 occasion 4 
 
 My brethren, the answer to these questions could 
 not be really doubtful to any except the most para- 
 doxical of modern theorists. To say nothing of 
 St. Peter and St. Jude, St. Paul’s general language 
 on the subject of heresy”, and St. John’s particular 
 application of such terms as “the har” and “anti- 
 christ®” to Cerinthus and other heretics, make the 
 
 b He speaks of αἱρέσεις in the sense of sectarian movements 
 tending to or resulting in separation from the Church, as a form 
 of evil which becomes the unwilling instrument of good (1 Cor. 
 xi. 19). And αἱρέσεις are thus classed among the works of the 
 flesh (Gal. v. 20). Using the word in its sense of dogmatic error 
 on vital points, St. Paul bids Titus reject a ‘heretic’ after two 
 warnings from the communion of the Church: αἱρετικὸν ἄνθρωπον 
 μετὰ μίαν καὶ δευτέραν νουθεσίαν παραιτοῦ (Tit. 111. 10). On the invio- 
 late sacredness of the apostolical doctrine, cf. Gal. 1. 8; ἐὰν ἡμεῖς 
 ἢ ἄγγελος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ εὐαγγελίζηται ὑμῖν παρ᾽ ὃ εὐηγγελισάμεθα ὑμῖν, 
 ἀνάθεμα ἔστω. Cf. 2 Pet. ii. 1. 
 
 ¢ 1 St. John ii. 22: τίς ἐστιν ὁ ψεύστης, εἰ μὴ ὁ ἀρνούμενος ὅτι 
 
 Ee 
 
418 The Apostles believe in One Christ, [Lecr. 
 
 supposition of such indifference as is here in ques- 
 tion, in the case of the apostles, utterly inadmissible. 
 If the apostles had differed vitally respecting the 
 Person of Christ, they would have shattered the 
 work of Pentecost in its infancy. And the terms 
 in which they speak of each other would be reduced 
 to the level of meaningless or insincere convention- 
 alities?. Considering that the Gospel presented 
 itself to the world as an absolute and exclusive 
 draught of Divine truth, contrasted as such with the 
 perpetually-shifting forms of human thought around 
 it, we may deem it antecedently probable that those 
 
 ᾿Ιησοῦς οὐκ ἔστιν ὁ Χριστός ; οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ ἀντίχριστος, ὁ ἀρνούμενος τὸν 
 Πατέρα καὶ τὸν Υἱὸν. πᾶς ὁ ἀρνούμενος τὸν Υἱὸν, οὐδὲ τὸν Πατέρα ἔχει. 
 Cf. Ibid. iv. 3; 2 St. John 7. 
 
 d St. Paul associates himself with the other apostles as bearing 
 the stress of a common confessorship for Christ (2 Cor. xii. 12). 
 The apostles are, together with the prophets, the foundations of 
 the Church (Eph. ii. 20). The apostles are first in order (Eph. 
 iv. 11). Although the grace of God in himself had laboured 
 more abundantly than all the apostles, St. Paul terms himself 
 the least of the apostolic college (1 Cor. xv. 9). The equality 
 of the Gentile believers in Christ with the Jewish believers was 
 a truth made known to St. Paul by special revelation, and 
 he called it his Gospel; but it implied no properly doctrinal 
 difference between himself and the apostles of the circumcision. 
 The harmonious action of the apostles as a united spiritual cor- 
 poration is implied in such passages as 2 St. Pet. iii. 2, St. Jude 17; 
 and neither of these passages affords ground for Baur’s inference re- 
 specting the post-apostolic age of the writer. In 2 St. Pet. 111. 15, 
 16, St. Peter distinguishes between the real mind of ‘our beloved 
 brother Paul’ as being in perfect agreement with his own, and 
 the abuse which had been made by teachers of error of certain 
 difficult truths put forward in the Pauline Epistles: δυσνόητά τινα, 
 ἃ οἱ ἀμαθεῖς καὶ ἀστήρικτοι στρεβλοῦσιν ὡς καὶ Tas λοιπὰς γραφὰς, πρὸς 
 
 A 5 Υ > “ > ’ 
 τὴν ἰδίαν αὐτῶν ἀπώλειαν, 
 
VI.) while representing distinct types of doctrine. 419 
 
 critics are mistaken who profess to have discovered 
 at the very fountain-head of Christianity at least 
 three entirely distinct doctrines respecting so funda- 
 mental a question as the Personal Rank of Christ in 
 the scale of being. 
 
 Undoubtedly it is true that as the Evangelists 
 approach the Person of our Lord from distinct points 
 of view, so do the writers of the apostolic epistles 
 represent different attitudes of the human soul 
 towards the one evangelical truth ; and in this way 
 they impersonate types of thought and feeling which 
 have ever since found a welcome and a home in the 
 world-embracing Church of Jesus Christ. St. James 
 insists most earnestly on the moral obligations of 
 Christian believers ; and he connects the Old Testa- 
 ment with the New by shewing the place of the 
 law, now elevated and transfigured into a law of 
 liberty, in the new life of Christians. He may in- 
 deed for a moment engage in the refutation of a 
 false doctrine of justification by faith®. But this is 
 because such a doctrine prevents Christians from 
 duly recognizing those moral and spiritual truths 
 and obligations upon which the Apostle is most 
 eagerly insisting. Throughout his Epistle, doctrine 
 is, comparatively speaking, thrown into the back- 
 ground; he is intent upon practical considerations, 
 to the total, or wellnigh total, exclusion of doc- 
 trinal topics. St. Paul, on the other hand, abounds 
 in dogmatic statements. Still, in St. Paul, doctrine 
 is, generally speaking, brought forward with a view 
 to some immediate practical object. Only in five out 
 of his fourteen Epistles can the doctrinal element be 
 
 e St. James ii. 14-26. 
 EH e€ 2 
 
4.20 Various types of Apostolical teaching [Lxcr. 
 
 said very decidedly to predominatef. St. Paul as- 
 sumes that his readers have gone through a course 
 of oral instruction in necessary Christian doctrine § ; 
 he accordingly completes, he expands, he draws out 
 into its consequences what had been already taught by 
 himself or by others. St. Paul’s fiery and impetuous 
 style is in keeping with his general relation, through- 
 out his Epistles, to Christian dogma. The calm 
 enunciation of an enchained series of consequences 
 flowing from some central or supreme truth is per- 
 petually interrupted in St. Paul by the exclamations, 
 the questions, the parentheses, the anacoloutha, the 
 quotations from liturgies, the solemn ascriptions of 
 
 f And yet in these five Epistles an immediate practical purpose 
 is generally discernible. In the Romans the Apostle is harmonizing 
 the Jewish and Gentile elements within the Catholic Church, by 
 shewing that each section is equally indebted to faith in Jesus 
 Christ for a real justification before God. In the Galatians he is 
 opposing this same doctrinal truth to the destructive and reac- 
 tionary theory of the Judaizers. In the Ephesians and Colossians 
 he is meeting the mischievous pseudo-philosophy and Cabbalism 
 of the earliest Gnostics, here positively and devotionally, there 
 polemically, by insisting on the dignity of our Lord’s Person, and 
 the mystery of His relation to the Church. In the Hebrews, 
 written either by St. Paul himself or by St. Luke under his direc- 
 tion, our Lord’s Person and Priesthood are exhibited in their 
 several bearings as a practical reason against apostasy to Judaism, 
 it would seem, of an Alexandrian type. 
 
 & τ Thess. ili. 10: νυκτὸς καὶ ἡμέρας ὑπὲρ ἐκ περισσοῦ δεόμενοι eis τὸ 
 ἰδεῖν ὑμῶν τὸ πρόσωπον, καὶ καταρτίσαι τὰ ὑστερήματα τῆς πίστεως ὑμῶν. 
 The Apostle desires to see the Roman Christians, not that he may 
 teach them any supplementary truths, but to confirm them in their 
 existing belief (εἰς τὸ στηριχθῆναι ὑμᾶς, Rom. i. 11) by the interchange 
 of spiritual sympathies with himself. See 1 Cor. xv. 1; Gal. i. 11, 12; 
 iv. 13, 14; 1 Thess. 11. 2; 2 Thess. ii. 15. Compare 1 St. John ii. 
 
 21: οὐκ ἔγραψα ὑμῖν, ὅτι οὐκ οἴδατε τὴν ἀλήθειαν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι οἴδατε αὐτήν. 
 
ΝΠ consist with its fundamental unity. 421 
 
 glory to the Source of all blessings, the outbursts 
 by which argument suddenly melts into stern de- 
 nunciation, or into versatile expostulation, or into 
 irresistible appeals to sympathy, or into the highest 
 strains of lyrical poetry. Thus it is that in St. Paul 
 primary dogma appears as it were rather in flashes 
 of light streaming with rapid coruscations across his 
 pages, than in highly elaborated statements such as 
 might abound throughout a professed doctrinal trea- 
 tise of some later age; and yet doctrine, although 
 thus introduced as it might seem incidentally to some 
 general or special purpose, is inextricably bound up 
 with the Apostle’s whole drift of practical thought. 
 As for St. John, he is always a contemplative and 
 mystical theologian. The eye of his soul is fixed 
 on God, and on the Word Incarnate. St. John 
 simply describes his intuitions. He does not argue ; 
 he asserts. He looks up to heaven, and as he gazes 
 he tells us what he sees. He continually takes an 
 intuition, as it were, to pieces, and recombines it ; he 
 resists forms of thought which contradict it ; but he 
 does not engage in long arguments as if he were 
 a dialectician defending or attacking a theological 
 thesis. Nor is St. John’s temper any mere love of 
 speculation divorced from practice. Each truth which 
 the Apostle beholds, however unearthly and sublime, 
 has a direct transforming moral power; St. John 
 knows nothing of realms of thought which leave the 
 heart and conscience altogether untouched. Thus, 
 speaking generally, the three Apostles respectively 
 represent the moralist, the practical dogmatist, and 
 the saintly mystic; while St. Peter, as becomes the 
 Apostle first in order in the sacred college, seems 
 
422 St. James’ teaching on justification [ Lect. 
 
 to blend in himself the three types of apostolical 
 teachers. His Epistles are not without elements that 
 more especially characterize St. John; while they 
 harmonize in a very striking manner those features 
 of St. Paul and St. James which seem most nearly 
 to approach divergence. It may be added that 
 St. Peter's second Epistle finds its echo in St. Jude. 
 I. The marked reserve which is observable in 
 St. James’ Epistle as to matters of doctrine, combined 
 with his emphatic allusions to the social duties 
 attaching to property and to class distinctions, have 
 been taken to imply that this Epistle represents what 
 is assumed by some developmentalists to have been 
 the earliest form of Christianity. The earliest Chris- 
 tians are sometimes represented as having been, both 
 in their Christology and in their sociological doc- 
 trines, Ebionites. But St. James’ Epistle is so far 
 from belonging to the teaching of the earliest apo- 
 stolical age, that it presupposes nothing less than 
 a very widespread and indirect effect of the distine- 
 tive teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul’s emphatic teach- 
 ing respecting faith as the receptive cause of justi- 
 fication must have been promulgated long enough 
 and widely enough to have been perverted into a par- 
 ticular gnosis of an immoral Antinomian type. With 
 that gnosis St. James enters into earnest conflict. 
 Baur indeed maintains that St. James is engaged 
 in a vehement onslaught upon the actual teaching, 
 upon the zpsissima verba, of St. Paul himselfi. Now 
 
 i Baur, Vorlesungen, ἄρον N. T. Theologie, p. 277: “In dem 
 Brief Jacobi dagegen begegnet uns nun eine auf den Mittelpunkt 
 der paulinischen Lehre losegehende Opposition. Dem paulinischen 
 Hauptsatz Rom. 11]. 28: δικαιοῦσθαι πίστει ἀνθρώπον, χωρὶς ἔργων νόμου 
 
Vd; presupposes the Christology of St. Paul. 423 
 
 even if you should adopt that paradox, you would 
 still obviously be debarred from saying that St. James’ 
 Epistle is a sample of the earliest Christianity, of the 
 Christianity of the pre-Pauline age of the Church, 
 But in point of fact, as Bishop Bull and others have 
 long since shewn, St. James is attacking an evil 
 which, although it presupposes and is based upon 
 St. Paul’s teaching, is as foreign to the mind of 
 St. Paul as to his own. The justification by faith 
 without works which is denounced by St. James is 
 a corruption and a caricature of that sublime truth 
 which is taught us by the author of the Epistles to 
 the Romans and the Galatians. Correspondent to the 
 general temper of mind which in the later apostolical 
 age began to regard the truths of faith and morals 
 only as an addition to the intellectual stock of human 
 thinkers, there arose a conception of faith itself which 
 degraded it to the level of mere barren consent on 
 the part of the speculative faculty. This ‘faith’ had 
 
 wird nun hier der Satz entgegengestellt, Jac. ii. 24: ὅτι ἐξ ἔργων 
 δικαιοῦται ἄνθρωπος, καὶ οὐκ ἐκ πίστεως μόνον. Alle Versuche, die man 
 gemacht hat, um der Anerkennung der Thatsache zu entgehen, dass 
 ein directer Widerspruch zwischen diesen beiden Lehrbegriffen statt- 
 finde und der Verfasser des Jacobusbriefs die paulinische Lehre 
 zum unmittelbaren Gegenstand seiner Polemik mache, sind véllig 
 vergeblich.” In his Christenthum (p. 122) Baur speaks in a some- 
 what less peremptory sense. St. James “ bekiimpft eine einseitige, 
 fiir das praktische Christenthum nachtheilige Auffassung der pauli- 
 nischen Lehre.” 
 
 k Baur, Christenthum, p. 122: “Der Brief des Jacobus, wie 
 unmoglich verkannt werden kann, die paulinische Rechtfertigungs- 
 lehre voraussetzt, so kann er auch nur eine antipaulinische, wenn 
 auch nicht unmittelbar gegen den Apostel selbst gerichtete Tendenz 
 haben.” 
 
424 St. James’ teaching on justification (Lect. 
 
 no necessary relations to holiness and moral growth, 
 to sanctification of the affections, and subdual of the 
 will!. Thus for the moment error had imposed upon 
 the sacred name of faith a sense which emptied it 
 utterly of its religious value, and which St. Paul 
 would have disavowed as vehemently as St. James. 
 St. James denies that this mere consent of the intellect 
 to a speculative position carrying with it no neces- 
 sary demands upon the heart and upon the will, can 
 justify a man before God. But when St. Paul speaks 
 of justifying faith, he means an act of the soul, 
 simple indeed at the moment and in the process of 
 its living action, but complex in its real nature, and 
 profound and far-reaching in its moral range. The 
 eye of the soul is opened upon the Redeemer: it 
 believes. But in this act of living belief, not the m- 
 tellect alone, but in reality, although unperceivedly, 
 the whole soul, with all its powers of love and 
 resolution, goes forth to meet its Saviour. This is 
 St. Paul’s meaning when he insists upon justifying 
 faith as being πίστις Ov ἀγάπης ἐνερ γουμένη ™, Faith, 
 according to St. Paul, when once it lives in the soul, 
 
 1 Messmer, Erkl. des Jacobus-briefes, p. 38: ‘ Der glaube ist bei 
 Jacobus nichts anders als die Annahme, der Besitz oder auch das 
 leere Bekenntniss der christlichen Wahrheiten (sowohl der Glaubens- 
 als-Sitten-wahrheiten,) Resultat des blossen Horens und eigentlich 
 bloss in der Erkenntniss liegend..... Ein solcher Glaube kann 
 fiir sich, wie ein unfruchtbarer Keim, voéllig wirkungslos fiir das 
 Leben in Menschen liegen, oder auch in leeren Gefiihlen bestehen ; 
 er ist nichts als Namen-und-Scheinchristenthum, das keine Heilig- 
 keit hervorbringt..... Das. was diesem Glauben erst die Seele 
 einhaucht, ist die Gottliche Liebe, durch welche der Wille und 
 alle Krafte des Menschen zum Dienste des Glaubens gefangen ge- 
 nommen werden.” m Gal. v. 6. 
 
VEE] presupposes the Christology of St. Paut. 425 
 
 is all Christian practice in the germ. The living 
 apprehension of the Crucified One, whereby the soul 
 attains light and liberty, may be separable in idea, 
 but in fact it is inseparable from a Christian hfe. 
 If the apprehension of revealed truth does not carry 
 within itself the secret will to yield the whole being 
 to God’s quickening grace and guidance, it is spi- 
 ritually worthless, according to St. Paul. St. Paul 
 goes so far as to tell the Corinthians that even a faith 
 which was gifted with the power of performing 
 stupendous miracles, if it had not charity, would 
 profit nothing". Thus between St. Paul and St. James 
 there is no real opposition. When St. James speaks 
 of a faith that cannot justify, he means a barren 
 intellectual consent to certain religious truths, a phi- 
 losophizing temper, cold, thin, heartless, soulless, 
 morally impotent, divorced from the spirit as from 
 the fruits of charity. When St. Paul proclaims that 
 we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, he means 
 a faith which only realizes its life by love, and which, 
 if it did not love, would cease to live. When 
 St. James contends that “by works a man is justified, 
 and not by faith only,” he imples that faith is the 
 animating motive which gives to works their justi- 
 fying power, or rather that works only justify as 
 being the expression of a living faith. When St. Paul 
 argues that a man is justified neither by the works 
 of the Jewish law, nor by the works of natural mo- 
 rality, his argument shews that by a ‘work’ he means 
 
 n τ Cor, xiii. 2: ἐὰν ἔχω πᾶσαν τὴν πίστιν, ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάνειν, 
 ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω, οὐδέν εἰμι. The γνῶσις of 1 Cor, vill. 1 seems to be 
 identical with the bare πίστις denounced by St. James. The ἀγάπη 
 of 1 Cor, viii. 1 is really the πίστις δί᾽ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη of Gal. ν. 6. 
 
426 St. James, how far supplementary to St. Paul. [Lxcr. 
 
 a mere material result or product, a soulless act, un- 
 enlivened by the presence of that one supernatural 
 motive which, springing from the grace of Christ, 
 can be indeed acceptable to a perfectly holy God. 
 But if on the question of justification St. James’ 
 position is in substance identical with that of St. Paul, 
 yet St. James’ position, viewed historically, does un- 
 doubtedly presuppose not merely a wide reception 
 of St. Paul’s teaching, but a perverse development 
 of one particular side of it. In order to do justice 
 to St. James, we have to contemplate first, the fruit- 
 less ‘faith’ of the Antinomian, with which the Apostle 
 is immediately in conflict, and which he is denounc- 
 ing; next, the living faith of the Christian believer, 
 as insisted upon by St. Paul, and subsequently cari- 
 catured by the Antinomian perversion ; lastly, the 
 Object of the believer's living faith, Whose Person 
 and work are so prominent in St. Paul’s teaching. 
 It is not too much to say that all this is in the 
 mind of St. James. But there was no necessity for 
 his insisting upon what was well understood; he 
 says only so much as is necessary for his imme- 
 diate purpose. His Epistle is related to the Pauline 
 Epistles in the general scheme of the New Testament, 
 as an explanatory codicil might be to a will. The 
 codicil does not the less represent the mind of the 
 testator because it is not drawn up by the same 
 lawyer as the will itself. The codicil is rendered 
 necessary by some particular liability to misconstruc- 
 tion which has become patent since the time at 
 which the will was drawn up. Accordingly the co- 
 dicil defines the real intention of the testator; it 
 cuards that intention against the threatened mis- 
 
VI.J St. James insists earnestly upon moral obligations. 497 
 
 construction. But it does not repeat in detail all the 
 provisions of the will, in order to protect the true 
 sense of a single clause. Still less does it revoke 
 any one of those provisions; it takes for granted 
 the entire document to which it is a pendant. 
 
 The elementary character of parts of the moral 
 teaching of St. James is sometimes too easily as- 
 sumed to imply that that Apostle must be held to 
 represent the earliest stage of the supposed develop- 
 ments of apostolical Christianity. But is it not pos- 
 sible that in apostolical as well as in later times, 
 ‘advanced’ Christians may have occasionally incurred 
 the danger of forgetting some important precepts 
 even of natural morality, or of supposing that their 
 devotion to particular truths or forms of thought, or 
 that their experience of particular states of feeling, 
 constituted a religious warrant for such forgetful- 
 ness°? If this was indeed the case, St. James’ Epistle 
 is placed in its true heht when we see in it a health- 
 ful appeal to that primal morality which can never 
 be ignored or slighted without the most certain 
 risk to those revealed truths, such as our Lord’s 
 plenary Satisfaction for sin, in which the enlightened 
 
 o After making reference to Luther’s designation of this Epi- 
 stle as an ‘ Epistle of straw, a modern French Protestant writer 
 proceeds as follows: ‘“ Nous-mémes, nous ne pouvons considérer 
 la doctrine de Jacques ni comme bien logique, ni comme suflisante ; 
 nous y voyons la grande pensée de Jésus rétrécie et appauvrie par 
 le principe légal du mosaisme. Le christianisme de Jacques n’était 
 qu’a demi émancipé des entraves de la loi; ¢’était un degré in- 
 férieur du Christianisme, et qui ne contenait pas en germe tous les 
 developpements futurs de la vérité chrétienne. II est douteux que 
 cette Epitre ait jamais converti personne.” Premitres Transforma- 
 tions du Christianisme, par A, Coquerel fils, Paris, 1866. (p. 65.) 
 
428 Moral truth the basis of dogmatic faith. [Lucr. 
 
 conscience finds its final relief from the burden and 
 misery of recognised guilt. If the sensitiveness of 
 conscience be dulled or impaired, the doctrines which 
 relieve the anguish of conscience will soon lose their 
 power. St. Paul himself is perpetually insisting 
 upon the nature and claims of Christian virtue, and 
 on the misery and certain consequences of wilful sin. 
 St. James, as the master both of natural and of Chris- 
 tian ethics, is in truth reinforcing St. Paul, the herald 
 and exponent of the doctrines of redemption and 
 justification. Thus St. James’ moral teaching gene- 
 rally, not less than his special polemical discussion of 
 the question of justification, appears to presuppose 
 St. Paul. It presupposes St. Paul as we know him 
 now in his glorious Epistles, enjoming the purest and 
 loftiest Christian sanctity along with the most perfect 
 acceptance by faith of the Person and work of the 
 Divine Redeemer. But it also presupposes St. Paul, 
 as Gnostics who preceded Marcion had already misre- 
 presented him, as the idealized sophist of the earliest 
 Antinomian fancies, the sophist who had proclaimed 
 a practical or avowed divorce between the sanctions 
 of morality and the honour of Christ. There is at 
 times a flavour of irony in St. James’ language, such 
 as might force a passage for the voice of truth and 
 love through the dense tangle of Antinomian self- 
 delusions. St. James urges that to listen to Chris- 
 tian teaching without reducing it to practice is but 
 the moral counterpart of a momentary listless glance 
 in a polished mirrorP; and that genuine devotion 
 
 = ” > 2 
 Ρ St. James 1. 23: εἴ τις ἀκροατὴς λόγου ἐστὶ καὶ οὐ ποιητὴς, οὗτος 
 ἔοικεν ἀνδρὶ κατανοοῦντι τὸ πρόσωπον τῆς γενέσεως αὑτοῦ ἐν ἐσόπτρῳ" 
 
 , ‘ G \ Ayes) , Ν ba ea > ΄ ε “ 3 
 κατενόησε γὰρ ἑαυτὸν, καὶ ἀπελήλυθε, καὶ εὐθέως ἐπελάθετο ὁποῖος ἦν. 
 
: ; 
 VI.} Christianity viewed as the New Law. 499 
 
 is to be really tested by such practical results as 
 works of mercy done to the afflicted and the poor, 
 and by conscientious efforts to secure the inward 
 purity of an unworldly life4, 
 
 In his earnest opposition to the Antinomian prin- 
 ciple St. James insists upon the continuity of the 
 New dispensation with the Old. Those indeed who 
 do not believe the representations of the great Apo- 
 stles given us in the Acts to have been a romance 
 of the second century composed with a view to recon- 
 ciling the imagined dissensions of the sub-apostolical 
 Church, will not fail to note the significance of 
 St. James’ attitude at the Council of Jerusalem. After 
 referring to the prophecy of Amos as confirmatory 
 of St. Peter's teaching respecting the call of the 
 Gentiles, St. James advises that no attempt should 
 be made to impose the Jewish law generally upon 
 the Gentile converts". Four points of observance were 
 to be insisted on for reasons of very various kinds’; 
 but the general tenor of the speech proves how radi- 
 cally the Apostle had broken with Judaism as 
 a living system. Yet in his Epistle the real con- 
 tinuity of the Law and the Gospel is undeniably 
 prominent. Considering Christianity as a rule of 
 life based upon a revealed creed, St. James terms it 
 also a Law. But the Christian Law is no mere repro- 
 duction of the Sinaitic. The New Law of Christen- 
 dom is distinguished by epithets which define its 
 essential superiority to the law of the synagogue, 
 
 4 St. James i. 27: θρησκεία καθαρὰ καὶ ἀμίαντος παρὰ τῷ Θεῷ καὶ Πατρὶ 
 M4 > ‘ > , > ‘ ‘ ΄ > a“ , » κα ” 
 αὕτη ἐστὶν, ἐπισκέπτεσθαι ὀρφανοὺς καὶ χήρας ἐν τῇ θλίψει αὐτῶν, ἄσπιλον 
 ἑαυτὸν τηρεῖν ἀπὸ τοῦ κόσμου. 
 
 r Acts xv. 14-10. 8 Ibid. ver. 20. 
 
430 Lofty idea of Christs Person implied in {Lucr. 
 
 and which moreover indirectly suggest the true dig- 
 nity of its Founder. The Christian law is the law 
 of liberty—vopos τῆς ἐλευθερίας, To be really obeyed 
 it must be obeyed in freedom. A slave cannot obey 
 the Christian law, because it demands not merely 
 the production of certain outward acts, but the living 
 energy of inward motives, whose soul and essence 
 is love. Only a son whom Christ has freed from 
 slavery, and whose heart would rejoice, if so it might 
 be, to anticipate or to go beyond his Father’s Will, 
 can offer that free service which is exacted by the 
 law of liberty. That service secures to all his facul- 
 ties their highest play and exercise ; the Christian 
 is most conscious of the buoyant sense of freedom 
 when he is most eager to do the Will of his 
 Heavenly Parent. The Christian law, which is the 
 law of love, is further described as the royal law— 
 νόμος βασιλικόςἃ, Not merely because the law of love 
 
 t St. James i. 25: ὁ δὲ παρακύψας εἰς νόμον τέλειον τὸν τῆς ἐλευ- 
 θερίας, καὶ παραμείνας, οὗτος οὐκ ἀκροατὴς ἐπιλησμονῆς γενόμενος, ἀλλὰ 
 ποιητὴς ἔργου, οὗτος μακάριος ἐν τῇ ποιήσει αὑτοῦ ἔσται. Tbid. ii. 12: 
 οὕτω λαλεῖτε καὶ οὕτω ποιεῖτε, ὡς διὰ νόμου ἐλευθερίας μέλλοντες κρίνεσθαι. 
 Messmer in loc. : “ Gesetz der Freiheit, weil es nicht mehr ein bloss 
 aiisserliches knechtendes Gebot ist, wie das alte Gesetz, sondern 
 mit dem innerlich ungewandelten Willen uebereinstimmt, wir 
 also nicht mehr aus Zwang, sondern mit freier Liebe dasselbe 
 erfiillen.” 
 
 ἃ St. James 11. 8: εἰ μέντοι νόμον τελεῖτε βασιλικὸν, κατὰ τὴν γραφὴν, 
 ᾿Αγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον Gov ὡς σεαυτὸν, καλῶς ποιεῖτε. This compen- 
 dium of the Christian’s whole duty towards his neighbour, as en- 
 joined by our Blessed Lord (St. Matt. xxii. 39; St. Mark xii. 31), 
 is not a mere republication of the Mosaic precept (Lev. xix. 18). 
 In the latter the “neighbour” is apparently “one of the children 
 of thy people;” in the former it includes any member of the 
 human family, since it embraced even those against whom the 
 
VI.) =the ‘ Perfect Law’ and the ‘ Engrafted Word? 431 
 
 is specifically the first of laws, higher than and in- 
 clusive of all other laws*; but because Christ, the 
 King of Christians, prescribes this law to Christian 
 love. To obey is to own Christ’s legislative supre- 
 macy. Once more, the Christian law is the perfect 
 law—vouos τέλειος, It is above human criticism. 
 It will not, like the Mosaic law, be completed by 
 another revelation. It can admit of no possible im- 
 provement. It exhibits the whole Will of the un- 
 erring Legislator respecting man in his earthly state. 
 It guarantees to man absolute correspondence with 
 the true idea of his life, in other words, his perfection ; 
 if only he will obey it. In a like spirit St. James 
 speaks of Christian doctrine as the word of truth 
 ---λόγος ἀληθείας, Christian doctrine is the abso- 
 lute truth; and it has an effective regenerating 
 force in the spiritual world which corresponds to 
 that of God’s creative word in the region of physical 
 nature. But Christian doctrine is also the engrafted 
 word—)dyos ἔμφυτος ἃ. It is capable of being taken 
 
 Jew had the strongest religious prepossessions. (St. Luke x.29 sqq.) 
 This injunction of a love of man as man, according to the mea- 
 sure of each man’s love of self, is the law of the true King of 
 humanity, Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 x Rom. xiii. 9. y St. James i. 25. 
 
 z St. James i. 18: βουληθεὶς ἀπεκύησεν ἡμᾶς λόγῳ ἀληθείας, εἰς τὸ εἶναι 
 ἡμᾶς ἀπαρχήν τινα τῶν αὑτοῦ κτισμάτων. ἀποκύειν is elsewhere used of 
 the female parent. Hence it indicates the tenderness of the Divine 
 love, as shewn in the new birth of souls ; just as βουληθείς points to 
 the freedom of the grace which regenerates them, and ἀπαρχήν twa 
 τῶν κτισμάτων to the end and purpose of their regeneration. Com- 
 pare St. John i. 12, 13: ὅσοι δὲ ἔλαβον αὐτὸν... ἐκ Θεοῦ ἐγεννήθησαν. 
 
 ἃ St. James i. 21: ἐν πρᾳὔτητι δέξασθε τὸν ἔμφυτον λόγον, τὸν δυνά- 
 μενον σῶσαι τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν. Messmer in loe.: “ Die Offenbarung 
 heisst hier das eingepflanzte, eingewachsene Wort ; niimlich bei der 
 
432 St. James and St. Paul on the Christian Law, [Lxcr. 
 
 up into, and livingly united with, the life of human 
 souls. It will thus bud forth imto moral foliage and 
 fruits which, without it, human souls are utterly 
 incapable of yielding. This λόγος is clearly not the 
 mere texture of the language in which the faith is 
 taught. It is not the bare thought of the believer 
 moulded into conformity with the ideas suggested 
 by the language. It is the very substance and core 
 of the doctrine; it is He in Whom the doctrine 
 centres; it is the Person of Jesus Christ Himself, 
 Whose Humanity is the Sprout, Shoot, or Branch 
 of Judah, engrafted by His Incarnation upon the 
 old stock of humanity, and sacramentally engrafted 
 upon all living Christian souls. Is not St. James 
 here in fundamental agreement not merely with 
 St. Paul, but with St. John? St. James’ picture of the 
 new law of Christendom harmonizes with St. Paul’s 
 teaching that the old law of Judaism without the 
 grace of Christ does but rouse a sense of sin which 
 it cannot satisfy, and that therefore the law of the 
 spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made Christians 
 free from the law of sin and death. St. James’ doc- 
 
 Wiedergeburt durch die christliche Lehre eingepflanzt. Wenn nun 
 yon einem Aufnehmen der eingepflanzten Lehre die Rede ist, so 
 ist das natiirlich nicht die erste Aufnahme, sondern vielmehr das 
 immer innigere Insichhineinnehmen und Aneignen derselben und 
 das Sichhineinleben in dieselbe.” See too Dean Alford in loc. : 
 ‘The Word whose attribute and ἀρετή it is to be ἔμφυτος, and 
 which is ἔμφυτος, awaiting your reception of it, to spring up and 
 take up your being into it and make you new plants.” 
 
 b Baur admits that “dem Verfasser des Briefs auch die pauli- 
 nische Verinnerlichung des Gesetzes nicht fremd, indem er nicht 
 blos das Gebot der Liebe als kénigliches Gesetz bezeichnet, sondern 
 auch von einem Gesetze der Freiheit spricht, zu welchem ihm das 
 
VI] δέ. James’ direct references to Our Blessed Lord. 498 
 
 trine of the’ Engrafted’ Word is a compendium of 
 the first, third, and sixth chapters of St. John’s Gos- 
 pel; the word written or preached does but unveil 
 to the soul the Word Incarnate, the Word Who ean 
 give a new life to human nature, because He 1s 
 » Himself the Source of Life. 
 
 It is in correspondence: with these currents of 
 doctrme that St: James, although our Lord’s Own 
 first-cousin, opens his Epistle by representing him- 
 self as standing in the same relation to Jesus Christ 
 as to God. He is the slave of God and of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ®. In like manner he appears to apply 
 the word Κύριος, throughout his Epistle, to the God 
 of the Old Testament and to Jesus Christ quite 
 indifferently. | Especially noteworthy is his assertion 
 that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Judge of men, is not 
 the delegated representative of an absent Majesty, 
 but is Himself the Legislator enforcing His own laws. 
 The Lawgiver, he says, is One Being with the Judge 
 Who can save and can destroy’; the Son of man, 
 coming in the clouds of heaven, has enacted the law 
 which He thus administers.. With a reverence which 
 is as practical as his teaching is suggestive, St. James 
 in this one short Epistle reproduces more of the 
 
 Gesetz nur dadurch geworden sein kann, dass er, der Aeusserlich- 
 keit des Gesetzes gegeniiber sich innerlich ebenso frei von ihm 
 wusste, wie der Apostel Paulus von seinem Standpunkt aus.” 
 Christenthum, p. 122. 
 
 ¢ St. James i. 1: Ἰάκωβος Θεοῦ καὶ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος. 
 
 ἃ Tbid. iv. 12: εἷς ἐστιν 6 νομοθέτης καὶ κριτὴς ὁ δυνάμενος σῶσαι 
 καὶ ἀπολέσαι. (καὶ κριτής is omitted by text. recept., inserted by 
 A. B.8.) So De Wette: “ Einer ist der Gesetzgeber und Richter, 
 der da vermag zu retten und zu verderben.” Cf. Alford in loc., 
 who quotes this. 
 
 Ff 
 
484. Reverential reserve of St. James. [Lecr. 
 
 words spoken by Jesus Christ our Lord than are to 
 be found in all the other Epistles of the New Tes- 
 tament taken together®. He hints that all social 
 barriers between man and man are as nothing when 
 we place mere human eminence in the light of 
 Christ’s majestic Person; and when he names the 
 faith of Jesus Christ, he terms it with solemn em- 
 phasis the “faith of the Lord of Glory,” thus adopting 
 one of the most magnificent of St. Paul’s expressions‘, 
 and attributing to our Lord a Majesty altogether 
 above this human worlds. In short, St. James’ re- 
 cognition of the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity is 
 just what we might expect, if we take into account 
 the immediately practical scope of his Epistle. Our 
 Lord’s Divinity is never once formally proposed as 
 a doctrine of the faith; but it is largely, although 
 indirectly, implied. It is implied in language which 
 
 e The following are his references to the Sermon on the Mount. 
 St. James i. 2; St. Matt. v. ro-12. St. James i. 4; St. Matt. v. 48. 
 St. James i. 5; St. Matt. vii. 7. St. James i. g; St. Matt. v. 3. 
 St. James i. 20; St. Matt. v.22. St. James ii. 13; St. Matt. vi. 14, 
 15; v.7. St. James ii. 14 sqq.; St. Matt. vil. 21 sqq. St. James 
 iii. 17, 18; St. Matt. v. 9. St. James iv. 4; St. Matt. vi 24. 
 St. James iv. 10; St. Matt. v. 3,4. St. James iv. 11; St. Matt. vii. 
 1 sqq. St. James v. 2; St. Matt. vi. 19. St. James v. 10; St. Matt. 
 v.12. St. James v.12; St. Matt. v.33 sqq. And for other dis- 
 courses of our Lord: St. James i. 14; St. Matt. xv. 1g. St. James 
 iv. 12; St. Matt. x. 28. Again, St. James v. 1-6; St. Luke vi. 24 
 sqq. See reff.; and Alford, vol. iv. p. 107, note. 
 
 f 1 Cor. ii. 8. 
 
 S St. James 11. 1: ἀδελφοί pov, μὴ ἐν προσωποληψίαις ἔχετε τὴν πίστιν 
 τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ τῆς δόξης. Here τῆς δόξης must be 
 regarded as a second genitive governed by Κυρίου. Or, as Dean 
 Alford suggests, it may be an epithetal genitive, such as constantly 
 follows the mention of the Divine Name. 
 
ΜΠ] Missionary sermons of St. Peter. 435 
 
 would be exaggerated and overstrained on any other 
 supposition. It is implied in a reserve which may 
 be felt to mean at least as much as the most demon- 
 strative protestations. A few passing expressions of 
 the lowliest reverence disclose the great doctrine’ of 
 the Church respecting the Person of her Lord, 
 throned in the background of the Apostle’s thought. 
 And if the immediate interests of his ministry oblige 
 St. James to confine himself to considerations which 
 do not lead him more fully to exhibit the doctrine, 
 we are not allowed, as we read him, to forget the 
 love and awe which veil and treasure it so tenderly 
 and so reverently in the inmost sanctuary of his 
 illuminated soul. 
 
 II. Of St. Peter’s recorded teaching there are 
 two distinct stages in the New Testament. The 
 first is represented by his missionary sermons in 
 the Acts of the Apostles; the second by his general 
 Epistles. 
 
 Although Jesus Christ is always the central Sub- 
 ject in the sermons of this Apostle, yet the distinct- 
 ness with which he exhibits our Lord in the glory 
 of His Divine Nature seems to vary with the vary- 
 ing capacity for receiving truth on the part of his 
 audience. Like Jesus Christ Himself, St. Peter 
 teaches as men are able to bear his doctrine; he 
 does not cast pearls before swine. In his missionary 
 sermons he is addressing persons who were believers 
 in the Jewish dispensation, and who were also our 
 Lord’s contemporaries. Accordingly his sermons 
 contain a double appeal; first, to the known facts 
 of our Lord’s Life and Death, and above all, of His 
 Resurrection from the dead; and secondly, to the 
 
 Ff2 
 
436 Christ’s Person the centre-point of Hebrew prophecy (uct. 
 
 correspondence of these facts with the predictions 
 of the Hebrew Scriptures. Like St. James, St. Peter 
 lays. especial stress on the continuity subsisting be- 
 tween Judaism and the Gospel: but while St. James 
 insists upon the moral element of that connexion, 
 ‘St. Peter addresses himself rather to the prophetical. 
 Even before the Day of Pentecost, St. Peter points 
 to the Psalter as foreshadowing the fall of Judas?. 
 When preaching to the multitude which had just 
 witnessed the Pentecostal gifts, St. Peter observes 
 _ that these wonders are merely a realization of the 
 prediction of Joel respecting the last days!; and he 
 argues elaborately that the language of David in the 
 sixteenth Psalm could not have been fulfilled in the 
 case of the prophet-king himself, still lying among his 
 people in his honoured sepulchre, while it had been 
 literally fulfilled by Jesus Christ®, Who had notoriously 
 risen from the grave. In his sermon to the multitude 
 after the healing of the lame man in the Porch of 
 Solomon, St. Peter contends that the sufferngs of 
 Christ had been “shewed before” on the part of the 
 God of Israel by the mouth of all His prophets!, and 
 that in Jesus Christ the prediction of Moses respect- 
 ing a coming Prophet, to Whom the true Israel would 
 yield an implicit obedience, had received its explana- 
 tion™. When arraigned before the Council”, the Apo- 
 stle argues that Jesus is the true ‘ Corner-stone’ of the 
 Temple of Souls, who had been foretold both by 
 
 heActs τ τό, co. ΒΗ ΕΠ Ὁ; xix: 25. 
 
 i Acts ii, 14-21; Joel ii. 28-31. 
 
 k Acts ii. 24-36. 1 [bid. iii. 18. 
 m [bid, iii. 22-24; Deut. xviii. 15, 18, 19. n Acts iv; 11. 
 
VI.} im St. Peter’s missionary sermons. 437 
 
 Isaiah°, and by a later Psalmistp ; and that although 
 He had been set at nought by the builders of Israel, 
 He was certainly exalted and honoured by God. In 
 the instruction delivered to Cornelius before his bap- 
 tism, St. Peter states that “all the prophets give wit- 
 ness” to Jesus, “that through His Name, whosoever 
 believeth on Him shall receive remission of sins 4.” 
 And we seem to trace the influence of St. Peter as 
 the first great Christian expositor of prophecy, in the 
 teaching of the deacons St. Stephen and St. Philip. 
 St. Philip’s exposition of Christian doctrine to the 
 Ethiopian eunuch was based upon Isaiah’s predic- 
 tion of the Passion’, St. Stephen’s argument before 
 his judges was cut short by a violent interruption, 
 while it was yet incomplete. But St. Stephen, like 
 St. Peter, appeals to the prediction in Deuteronomy 
 of the prophet to whom Israel would hearken’. And 
 the drift of the protomartyr’s address goes to shew 
 that the whole course of the history of Israel pointed 
 to the advent of One Who should be greater than 
 either the law or the templet,—of One in Whom 
 Israel’s wonderful history would reach its natural 
 climax,—of that: “Just One” Who in truth had al- 
 ready come, but Who, like prophets before Him, 
 had been betrayed and murdered by a people, still 
 as of old, “stiffmecked and uncircumcised in heart 
 and ears".” 
 
 It is not too much to say that. in the teaching 
 of the earhest Church, as represented by the mis- 
 
 ο Isa. xxviii. 16. 
 
 P Ps. exviii. 22, Our Lord Himself claimed the prophecy, 
 St. Matt. xxi 42. Ὁ a Acts x. 43. r Ibid. viii. 32+35. 
 
 8 Ibid. vii. 37. t Ibid. vi. 13. ἃ Tbid. vii. 51-53. 
 
438 St. Peter mounts from Christ's Human History [Lxct. 
 
 sionary discourses of St. Peter and the deacons, Jesus 
 Christ is the very soul and end of Jewish prophecy. 
 This of itself suggests an idea of His Person which 
 rises high above any merely Humanitarian standard. 
 St. Peter indeed places himself habitually at the 
 point of view which would enable him to appeal to 
 the actual experience of the generation he was ad- 
 dressing. He begins with our Lord’s Humiliation, 
 which men had witnessed, and then he proceeds to 
 describe His Exaltation as the honour shed by God 
 upon His Human Nature. He speaks of our Lord’s 
 Humanity with fearless plainness*. As Man, Christ 
 is exhibited to the world as a miracle-worker;: as 
 Man, He is anointed with the Holy Ghost and with 
 power Y; as the true Servant of God, He is glorified 
 by the God of the patriarchs?; He is raised from the 
 dead by Divine Power®; He is made by God both 
 Lord and Christ»; and He will be sent by the Lord 
 at “the times of refreshing®” as the ordained Judge 
 of quick and dead. But this general representation 
 of the Human Nature by Which Christ had entered 
 into Jewish history, is interspersed with glimpses of 
 His Divine Personality Itself, Which is veiled by His 
 Manhood. Thus we find St. Peter in the Porch of Solo- 
 mon applying to our Lord a magnificent title which at 
 once carries our thoughts into the very heart of the 
 
 x Acts ll. 22: Ἰησοῦν τὸν Ναζωραῖον, ἄνδρα [not here the generic 
 »” een a EWS) ’ , Coa , κ᾿ ΄ 
 ἄνθρωπον] ἀπὸ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἀποδεδειγμένον εἰς ὑμᾶς δυνάμεσι καὶ τέρασι 
 
 ‘ , e > , 3 > ~ ie \ » , τ ΤΥ 
 καὶ σημείοις, οἷς ἐποίησε Ot αὐτοῦ ὁ Θεὸς ἐν μέσῳ ὑμῶν. 
 
 y ΠΡ: 58: 2. Tbid. iii. 13. 
 § bids, 2435 ΠΡΟ vA TOs Vv. 91; Ἑ 40) 
 Ὁ Tbid. ii. 36. ¢ [bid. ili. 19, 20. 
 
 d Thid. x. 42. 
 
ΔῈ 5 to the consideration of His Higher Nature. 439 
 
 distinctive Christology of St. John. Christ, although 
 crucified and slain, is yet the Leader or Prince of Life 
 — Apxnyos τῆς Cons’. That He should be held in bond- 
 age by the might of death was not possiblef. The hea- 
 vens must receive Him’, and He is now the Lord of 
 all things». It is He Who from His heavenly throne 
 has poured out upon the earth the gifts of Pente- 
 costi, His Name spoken on earth has a wonder- 
 working powerk; as unveiling His Nature and office, 
 it is a symbol upon which faith fastens herself, and 
 by the might of which the servants of God can re- 
 lieve even physical suffermg!. As a refuge for sin- 
 ners the Name of Jesus stands alone; no other Name 
 has been given under heaven whereby the one true 
 salvation can be guaranteed to the sons of men”. 
 Here St. Peter clearly implies that the religion of 
 
 e Acts ili. 15. 
 
 f Ibid. ii. 24: ὃν ὁ Θεὸς ἀνέστησε, λύσας τὰς ὠδῖνας τοῦ θανάτου, 
 καθότι οὐκ ἦν δυνατὸν κρατεῖσθαι αὐτὸν ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ. This ‘impossibility’ 
 depended not merely on the fact that prophecy had predicted 
 Christ’s resurrection, but on the dignity of Christ’s Person, implied 
 in the existence of any such prophecy respecting Him. 
 
 £ Ibid. iii. 21: ὃν δεῖ οὐρανὸν μὲν δέξασθαι ἄχρι χρόνων ἀποκατα- 
 στάσεως πάντων. 
 
 h Ibid. x. 36: οὗτός ἐστι πάντων Κύριος. 
 
 ΤΡΊΑ. ii. 33: ἐξέχεε τοῦτο ὃ νῦν ὑμεῖς βλέπετε καὶ ἀκούετε. 
 
 K Jbid. ili. 6: ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Ναζωραίου, ἔγειραι καὶ 
 
 t μ ” ρ ρ 9 ἐγεῖρ 
 περιπάτει. 
 
 1 Tbid. ver. 16: καὶ ἐπὶ τῇ πίστει τοῦ ὀνόματος αὐτοῦ, τοῦτον ὃν 
 θεωρεῖτε καὶ οἴδατε, ἐστερέωσε τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ. Ibid. ἵν. 10: γνωστὸν 
 ἔστω πᾶσιν ὑμῖν καὶ παντὶ τῷ λαῷ ᾿Ισραὴλ, ὅτι ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ 
 ἔστω πᾶσιν ὑμῖν καὶ παντὶ τῷ λαῷ ᾿Ισραὴλ, ὅτι ἐν τῷ dvdpare’ ly ριστοῦ 
 
 A , 4 ς - > , 4 © ‘ »᾿ > a > 
 τοῦ Ναζωραίου, ὃν ὑμεῖς ἐσταυρώσατε, ὃν ὁ Θεὸς ἤγειρεν ἐκ νεκρῶν, ἐν 
 τούτῳ οὗτος παρέστηκεν ἐνώπιον ὑμῶν ὑγιής. 
 
 m Tbid. iv. 12: οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν ἄλλῳ οὐδενὶ ἡ σωτηρία" οὔτε γὰρ ὄνομά 
 ’ ” e_9 ‘ > \ \ , > > , > τ “ σ΄ 
 ἐστιν ἕτερον ὑπὸ τὸν οὐρανὸν τὸ δεδομένον ἐν ἀνθρώποις, ἐν ᾧ δεῖ σωθῆναι 
 
 ἡμᾶς. 
 
440 Christology of St. Peter’s General Epistles. (Lixcr. 
 
 Jesus is the true, the universal, the absolute religion. 
 This implication of itself implies much beyond as to 
 the true dignity of Christ’s Person. Is it conceivable 
 that He Who is Himself the sum and substance of 
 His religion, Whose Name has such power on earth, 
 and Who wields the resources and is invested with 
 the glories of heaven, is notwithstanding in. the 
 thought of His first apostles only a glorified man, or 
 only a super-angelic inteligence? Do we not inter- 
 pret these early discourses most naturally when we 
 bear in mind the measure of reticence which active 
 missionary work always renders necessary if truth is 
 to win its way amidst: prejudice and opposition 4 
 And will not this consideration alone enable us to 
 do justice to those vivid glimpses of Christ’s Higher 
 Nature, the fuller exhibition of Which is before us 
 in the Apostle’s general Epistles 4 
 
 In St. Peter’s general Epistles it is easy to trace 
 the same mind as that which speaks to us in the 
 earliest missionary sermons of the Acts. As addressed 
 to Christian believers”, these Epistles exhibit Chris- 
 tian doctrine in its fulness, but incidentally to spi- 
 ritual objects, and without the methodical complete- 
 ness of an oral instruction. Christian doctrine is 
 not propounded as a new announcement: the writer 
 takes it for granted as furnishing a series of mo- 
 tives, the force of which would be admitted by those 
 who had already recognized the true majesty and 
 proportions of the faith. St. Peter announces him- 
 self as the Apostle of Jesus Christ, and as His 
 
 n 1 St. Pet. i. 1, 2: ἐκλεκτοῖς. παρεπιδήμοις διασπορᾶς,. . . . . κατὰ 
 
 , a \ > ε εκ , > G \ we: 
 πρόγνωσιν Θεοῦ Πατρὸς, ἐν ἁγιασμῷ Ἡνεύματος, eis ὑπακοὴν Kal ῥαντισ- 
 μὸν αἵματος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 2 St. Ῥοῦ. i. 1: τοῖς ἰσότιμον ὑμῖν λαχοῦσι 
 
 πίστιν. 
 
11 Relation of Jesus Christ to prophecy. 441 
 
 slave as well as His Apostle®. In: his Epistles, 
 St. Peter lays the same stress on prophecy that is so 
 observable in his missionary sermons. Thus as in 
 his speech before the Council, so in his first Epistle, 
 he specially refersP to the prophecy of the Rejected 
 Corner-stone, which our Lord had-applied to Himself. 
 But St. Peter's general doctrine of our Lord’s rela- 
 tion to Hebrew prophecy should be more particularly 
 noticed. In our day theories have been put forward 
 on this subject which make the Hebrew propheti- 
 cal Scriptures little better than a large dictionary 
 of quotations, to which the writers and preachers 
 of the New Testament are said to have had recourse 
 when they wished to illustrate their subject by some 
 shadowy analogy, or by some vague semblance of 
 a happy anticipation. St. Peter asserts the exact 
 inverse of such a position. According to St. Peter, 
 the prophets of the Old Testament did not only utter 
 literal predictions of the expected Christ, but in 
 doing this they were Christ’s Own servants; His 
 heralds, His organs. He Who is the Subject of the 
 Gospel story, and the living Ruler of the Church, 
 had also, by His Spirit, been Master and Teacher 
 of the prophets. Under His guidance it was that 
 they had foretold His sufferings. It was the Spirit 
 of Christ Which was in the prophets, testifying 
 beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories 
 that would follow4. The prophets did not at first 
 
 © 1 St. Pet. i. 1: ἀπόστολος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 2 St. Pet. i. 1: δοῦλος 
 καὶ ἀπόστολος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 P 1 St. Pet. ii, 6....Cf. Acts.iv..11;.Isa. xxviii. 16; Ps. exvill. 22. 
 
 4 1 St. Pet.i. 11: τὸ ἐν αὐτοῖς Πνεῦμα Χριστοῦ, προμαρτυρόμενον τὰ 
 εἰς Χριστὸν παθήματα, καὶ τὰς μετὰ ταῦτα δόξας. Here Χριστοῦ is clearly 
 a genitive of the subject. 
 
448 Lofty idea of the Person of Christ implied — [Luct. 
 
 learn the full scope and meaning of the words they 
 uttered’, but they spoke glorious truths which the 
 Church of Jesus understands and enjoys’. Thus the 
 proclamation of Christian doctrine is older than the 
 Incarnation: Christianity strikes its roots far back 
 into the past of ancient Israel. The Pre-existent 
 Christ moulding the utterances of Israel’s prophets 
 to proclaim their anticipations of His advent, had 
 indeed reigned in the old theocracy; and yet the 
 privileged terms in which the members of God’s elder 
 kingdom upon earth described their prerogatives 
 were really applicable, in their deeper sense, to those 
 who lived within the kingdom of the Divine Incar- 
 nation*. Indeed St. Peter’s language on the nature 
 and privileges of the Christian life is suggestive of 
 the highest conception of Him Who is its Author 
 and its Object. St. Peter speaks of conversion from 
 Judaism or heathendom as the “being called out 
 of darkness into God’s marvellous light".” It is the 
 happiness of Christians to suffer and to be reviled 
 
 ry St. Pet. 1. 10,11: περὶ ἧς σωτηρίας ἐξεζήτησαν καὶ ἐξηρεύνησαν 
 προφῆται οἱ περὶ τῆς εἰς ὑμᾶς χάριτος προφητεύσαντες, ἐρευνῶντες εἰς τίνα 
 ἢ ποῖον καιρὸν ἐδήλου τὸ ἐν αὐτοῖς Πνεῦμα Χρίστου. Ibid. ver. 12: οἷς 
 2 , e > c “ e «a 5 , ae 4 aA > ΄ Cy 
 ἀπεκαλύφθη ὅτι οὐχ ἑαυτοῖς, ἡμῖν δὲ διηκόνουν αὐτὰ, ἃ viv ἀνηγγέλη ὑμῖν. 
 
 5.2 δῦ. Pet. i. 20: πᾶσα προφητεία γραφῆς ἰδίας ἐπιλύσεως οὐ γίνεται. 
 The Spirit in the Church understands the Spirit speaking by the 
 prophets. 
 
 t 1 St. Pet. ii. 9, 10: ὑμεῖς δὲ γένος ἐκλεκτὸν, βασίλειον ἱεράτευμα, 
 ᾿»»,ὔ isd A , , i A > A > , A“ > 
 ἔθνος ἅγιον, λαὸς eis περιποίησιν, ὅπως τὰς ἀρετὰς ἐξαγγείλητε τοῦ ἐκ 
 
 , Cpe , > A ‘ ς a “- ς ‘ > A 
 σκότους ὑμᾶς καλέσαντος eis TO θαυμαστὸν αὑτοῦ φῶς" οἱ ποτὲ ov λαὸς, 
 νῦν δὲ λαὸς Θεοῦ" οἱ οὐκ ἠλεημένοι, νῦν δὲ ἐλεηθέντες. Ibid. ver. 5: ὡς 
 
 , ~ > - oe \ « , a > ΄ 
 λίθοι ζῶντες οἰκοδομεῖσθε, οἶκος πνευματικὸς, ἱεράτευμα ἅγιον, ἀνενέγκαι 
 πνευματικὰς θυσίας εὐπροσδέκτους τῷ Θεῷ διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 u Ubi supra. 
 
VI.) in St. Peter’s representation of the Christian Infe. 448 
 
 for the Name of Christ*. The Spirit of glory 
 and of God rests upon them. The Spirit is blas- 
 phemed by the unbelieving world, but He is visibly 
 honoured by the family of God’s childreny. It is the 
 Person of Jesus in Whom the spiritual life of His 
 Church centres%. The Christians whom St. Peter is 
 addressing never saw Him in the days of His flesh ; 
 they do not see Him now with the eye of sense. But 
 they love Him, invisible as He is, because they believe 
 in Him. The eye of their faith does see Him. They 
 rejoice in this clear constant inward vision with a joy 
 which language cannot describe, and which is ra- 
 diant with the glory of the highest spiritual beauty. 
 They are in possession of a spiritual sense® whereby 
 the goodness of Jesus may be even tasted ; and yet 
 the truths on which their souls are fed are mysteries 
 so profound as to rouse the keen but baffled wonder 
 of the intelligences of heaven’. Such language ap- 
 pears to point irresistibly to the existence of a super- 
 natural religion with a superhuman Founder; unless 
 we are to denude it of all spiritual meaning what- 
 ever, by saying that it only reflects the habitual 
 
 x 1 St. Pet. iv. 13: καθὸ κοινωνεῖτε τοῖς τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθήμασι, χαίρετε, 
 ἵνα καὶ ἐν τῇ ἀποκαλύψει τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ χαρῆτε ἀγαλλιώμενοι. Ei 
 ὀνειδίζεσθε ἐν ὀνόματι Χριστοῦ, μακάριοι. 
 
 Υ Ibid. ver. 14: ὅτι τὸ τῆς δόξης καὶ τὸ τοῦ Θεοῦ Πνεῦμα ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς 
 ἀναπαύεται" κατὰ μὲν αὐτοὺς βλασφημεῖται, κατὰ δὲ ὑμᾶς δοξάζεται. 
 
 % [bid. i. 7, 8: Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ" ὃν οὐκ εἰδότες ἀγαπᾶτε, εἰς ὃν ἄρτι μὴ 
 ὁρῶντες, πιστεύοντες δὲ, ἀγαλλιᾶσθε χαρᾷ ἀνεκλαλήτῳ καὶ δεδοξασμένῃ. 
 
 ® Tbid. ii. 3: εἴπερ ἐγεύσασθε ὅτι χρηστὸς ὁ Κύριος. Cf. Ps. xxxiv. 8. 
 Cf. Heb. vi. 4: γευσαμένους τε τῆς δωρεᾶς τῆς ἐπουρανίου. There is 
 possibly in both passages an indirect reference to sacramental 
 communion. 
 
 b 1 St. Pet. 1.1.2: εἰς ἃ ἐπιθυμοῦσιν ἄγγελοι παρακύψααι. 
 
444 Dignity of Ολγϑέ 5 Person impliedin [ Lect. 
 
 exaggeration of Eastern fervour. Why is the intel- 
 lectual atmosphere of the Church described as “mar- 
 vellous light?” Why is suffering for Jesus so much a 
 matter for sincere self-congratulation?: Why does the 
 Divine Spiit rest so surely upon Christian confessors ? 
 Why is the Invisible Jesus the Object of such love, 
 the Source of such inexpressible and glorious joy ; 
 if, after all, the religion of Jesus is merely a higher 
 phase of human opinion and feeling, and His Church 
 a human organization, and His Person only human, 
 or at least not literally Divme? The language’ of 
 St. Peter respecting the Christian life manifestly 
 points to a Divine Christ. If the Christ of St. Peter 
 had. been the Christ, we will not say of a Strauss or of 
 a Renan, but the Christ of a Socinus, nay, the Christ 
 of an Arius, it is not easy to understand what: should 
 have moved the angels with that strong desire to 
 bend from their thrones above that they might gaze 
 with unsuccessful intentness at: the humiliations of 
 a created being, their peer or their inferior in the 
 scale. of creation. Surely the Angels must be long- 
 ing. to unveil a transcendent mystery, or a series of 
 mysteries, such as are in fact the mystery of the 
 Divine Incarnation and the consequences which de- 
 pend on it in the kingdom of grace. St. Peter's 
 words are sober and truthful if read by the light 
 of faith in an Incarnate God; divorced from such 
 a faith they are fanciful, inflated, exaggerated. 
 
 St. Peter lays especial stress both on the moral 
 significance and on the atoning power of the Death 
 of Jesus Christ. Here he enters within that. circle 
 of truths which are taught most fully in the Hpistle 
 to the Hebrews ; and. his exhibition of the Passion 
 
VI.] St. Peter's references to His Death and His Blood. 445 
 
 might almost appear to presuppose the particular 
 Christological teaching of that Epistle. St. Peter 
 says that “Christ has once. suffered for sins, the 
 Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to 
 God¢.” This vicarious suffermg depended upon the 
 fact that Jesus, when dying, impersonated. sinful 
 humanity. “He bare our sins in His Own Body on 
 the tree*.” -Stricken by the anguish of His Passion, 
 the dying Christ is the consummate» Model? for all 
 Christian sufferers, in His innocence‘, in His silence®, 
 in His perfect: resignation’. But also the souls of 
 men, wounded by the shafts of sin, may be healed by 
 - the virtue of that Sacred Pam; and a special power 
 to wash out the stains of moral guilt is expressly 
 ascribed to the Redeemer’s Blood. “The Christian 
 as such is predestined in the Eternal Counsels, not 
 merely to submission to the Christian faith, but also 
 to “a sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ*.” The 
 Apostle earnestly insists that it was no mere perish- 
 able earthly treasure, no silver or golden wares, 
 whereby Christians had been bought out of their 
 
 e 1 St. Pet. iii. 18: Χριστὸς ἅπαξ περὶ ἁμαρτιῶν ἔπαθε, Δίκαιος ὑπὲρ 
 ἀδίκων, ἵνα ἡμᾶς προσαγάγῃ τῷ Θεῷ. 
 d Tbid. ii. 24: ὃς τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν αὐτὸς ἀνήνεγκεν ἐν τῷ σώματι 
 ig “~ a A ’ 
 αὑτοῦ ἐπὶ τὸ ξύλον. 
 6. ΤΌΙΑ. ver. 21: Χριστὸς ἔπαθεν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν, ἡμῖν ὑπολιμπάνων ὑπο- 
 αμμὸν, ἵνα ἐπακολουθήσητε τοῖς ἴχνεσιν αὐτοῦ. 
 γραμμὸν, non x 
 f ΤΡΊΑ. ver. 22: ὃς ἀμαρτίαν οὐκ ἐποίησεν, οὐδὲ εὑρέθη δόλος ἐν τῷ 
 στόματι αὐτοῦ. Isa. 1111. g; 2 Cor. v. 21; 1 St. John iii. 5. 
 © r St. Pet. 11. 23: ὃς λοιδορούμενος οὐκ ἀντελοιδόρει, πάσχων οὐκ 
 ἠπείλει. In the ἠπείλει there lies the consciousness of power. 
 h Tbid. : παρεδίδου δὲ τῷ κρίνοντι δικαίως. 
 i Tbid. ver. 24: οὗ τῷ μώλωπι αὐτοῦ ἰάθητε. 
 
 k Tbid. i. 2 : εἰς ὑπακοὴν. καὶ ῥαντισμὸν αἵματος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 ’ 
 
440 Christ?s Godhead explains the virtue of His Passion. { Lxcr. 
 
 old bondage to the traditional errors and accus- 
 tomed sins of Judaism or of heathendom. The mighty 
 spell of moral and intellectual darkness had indeed 
 been broken, but by no less a ransom than the 
 Precious Blood of Christ, the Lamb without blemish 
 and Immaculate!. Are we to suppose that while 
 using this burning language to extol the Precious 
 Blood of redemption, St. Peter is recklessly follow- 
 ing a rhetorical impulse, or that he is obscuring the 
 moral meaning of the Passion, by dwelling upon its 
 details in misleading language which savours too 
 strongly of the sacrificial ritual of the temple? Is he 
 not even echoing the Baptist™? Is he not in corre- 
 spondence with his brother apostles? Is he not sum- 
 marizing St. Paul™? Is he not anticipating St. John°? 
 Certainly this earnest recognition of Christ’s true 
 Humanity as the seat of His suffermgs is a most 
 essential feature of the Apostle’s doctrine P; but what 
 
 1 1 St. Pet. 1. 18, 19: εἰδότες ὅτι οὐ φθαρτοῖς, ἀργυρίῳ ἢ χρυσίῳ, ἐλυ- 
 τρώθητε ἐκ τῆς ματαίας ὑμῶν ἀναστροφῆς πατροπαραδότου, ἀλλὰ τιμίῳ 
 αἵματι ὡς ἀμνοῦ ἀμώμου καὶ ἀσπίλου Χριστοῦ. 
 
 m δύ. John i. 29: ἴδε ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ, ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ 
 κόσμου. It is impossible to doubt that the sacrificial rather than 
 the moral ideas associated with the ‘ Lamb’ are here in question. 
 
 n Acts xx. 28: ποιμαίνειν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἣν περιεποιήσατο 
 διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος. τ Cor. vy. 7: τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν ἐτύθη Χριστός. 
 Heb. ix. 12: διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος εἰσῆλθεν ἐφάπαξ εἰς τὰ ἅγια, αἰωνίαν 
 λύτρωσιν εὑράμενος. 
 
 © 1 St.John 1. 7: τὸ αἷμα Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Yiod αὐτοῦ καθαρίζει 
 ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ πάσης ἁμαρτίας. ον. i. 5: τῷ ἀγαπήσαντι ἡμᾶς καὶ λούσαντι 
 ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτίων ἡμῶν ἐν τῷ αἵματι αὑτοῦ... .. αὐτῷ ἡ δόξα καὶ 
 τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. ἀμήν. Ibid. ν. ο: ἄξιος εἶ λαβεῖν 
 τὸ βιβλίον, καὶ ἀνοῖξαι τὰς σφραγῖδας αὐτοῦ; ὅτι ἐσφάγης, καὶ nydpacas 
 τῷ Θεῷ ἡμᾶς ἐν τῷ αἵματί σου. 
 
 Ρ St. Peter expressly alludes to our Lord’s Human Body (1 St. Pet. 
 
ΜΓ] St. Peter’s doxology to Jesus Glorified. 447 
 
 is it that gives to Christ’s Human Acts and Sufferings 
 such preterhuman value? Is it not that the truth 
 of Christ’s Divine Personality underlies this entire 
 description of His redemptive work, rescuing it from 
 the exaggeration and turgidity with which it would 
 be fairly chargeable, if Christ were merely human or 
 less than God? That this is in fact the case is abun- 
 dantly manifest; and imdeed the Person of Christ 
 appears to be hinted at in St. Peter’s Epistle, by the 
 same august expression which has been noticed as 
 common to St. James and to St. John. The Logos or 
 Word of God, living and abiding for ever 4, is the 
 Author of the soul’s new birth; and Christ Jesus 
 our Lord does not only bring us this Logos from 
 heaven, He is this Logos. And thus in His home 
 of glory, angels and authorities and powers are made 
 subject unto Him'; and He is not said to have been 
 taken up into heaven, but to have gone up thither, 
 as though by His Own deed and wills And when 
 St. Peter exhorts Christians to act in such a manner 
 that God in all things may be glorified through 
 
 Jesus Christ, he pauses reverently at this last most 
 
 ii, 24; ili. 18; iv. 1), and to His Human Soul, after Its separation 
 from the Body of Jesus on the cross, as descending to preach to 
 the spirits in prison (Ibid. iii. 18). 
 
 4 1 St. Pet. i. 23: ἀναγεγεννημένοι οὐκ ἐκ σπορᾶς φθαρτῆς, ἀλλὰ ἀφθάρ- 
 του, διὰ λόγου ζῶντος Θεοῦ καὶ μένοντος εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα. By understanding 
 the λόγος here to mean only the written word, Baur maintains 
 his paradox, that in St. Peter’s Epistles the written word is sub- 
 stituted for, and does the work of, the Person of Christ in St. Paul’s 
 writings. Vorlesungen, p. 296. 
 
 τ Ibid. ili, 22: ὑποταγέντων αὐτῷ ἀγγέλων καὶ ἐξουσιῶν καὶ δυ- 
 νάμεων. 
 
 5 Ibid.: ὅς ἐστιν ἐν δεξιᾷ τοῦ Θεοῦ πορευθεὶς εἰς οὐρανύν. 
 
448 St. Peter on the ‘Higher Knowledge’ of Jesus Christ. (Lucr. 
 
 precious and sacred Name, to add, “to Whom is the 
 glory and the power unto ages. beyond agest.” 
 
 St. Peter's second Epistle", like his first, begins 
 and ends with Jesus’. Its main. positive theme is 
 the importance of the higher practical knowledge* 
 of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christy. Jesus is not 
 set before Christians as. a revered and departed 
 Teacher Whose words are to be gathered up and 
 studied, He is. set forth rather as an Invisible and 
 Living Person Who is to be spiritually known by 
 souls. Along with this practical knowledge of Jesus, 
 as with knowledge of God, there will be an increase 
 of grace, and of its resultant inward evidence, spi- 
 ritual peace”. For this practical knowledge of Jesus 
 is the crowning point of other Christian attaimments®. 
 It is the consummate result both of faith and prac- 
 tice, both of the intellectual and of the moral sides 
 of the Christian life. In the long line of graces 
 which this special knowledge implies, are faith and 
 general religious knowledge on the one hand, and 
 on the other, moral strength, self-restraint, patience, 
 piety, brotherly love, and, in its broadest sense, 
 
 t 1 St. Pet. iv. 11: ἵνα ἐν πᾶσι δοξάζηται ὁ Θεὸς διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ᾧ 
 ἐστιν ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. ἀμήν. 
 
 u For an examination of the arguments which have been urged 
 against the genuineness and authenticity of this Epistle, see 
 Olshausen, Opuscula Theologica, pp. 1-88. 
 
 VY 2 St. Pets πο τ 18. Χ ἐπίγνωσις. 
 
 . Ibid. i. 2,.,5, 8... 1.1205, 11: 78. 
 
 5. Ibid. 1. 2: χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη ἐν ἐπιγνώσει τοῦ Θεοῦ, 
 καὶ ᾿Ιησοῦ τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν. 
 
 a Thid. ver. 8: ταῦτα γὰρ (that is, the eight graces previously 
 enumerated) ὑμῖν ὑπάρχοντα καὶ πλεονάζοντα, οὐκ ἀργοὺς οὐδὲ ἀκάρπους 
 
 ! > A a , « cal > A r Lo ae) , 
 καθίστησιν εἰς τὴν τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐπίγνωσιν. 
 
VI.] The ‘higher knowledge’ of Jesus Christ. 449 
 
 charity». In this higher knowledge of Jesus, all 
 these excellences find their end and their completion. 
 On any other path, the soul is abandoned to spi- 
 ritual blindness, tending more and more to utter for- 
 getfulness of all past purifications from sin®. For this 
 higher practical knowledge of Jesus Christ is the 
 means whereby Christians escape from the polluting 
 impurities of the life of the heathen world, It raises 
 Christian souls towards the Unseen King in His 
 glory; it secures their admission to His everlasting 
 realm®. If Christians would not be carried away 
 from their stedfast adherence to the truth and life 
 of Christianity by the errors of those who hate all 
 law, let them endeavour to grow in this blessed 
 knowledge of Jesusf.. The prominence given to the 
 Person of Christ in this doctrine of an ἐπίγνωσις of 
 which His Person is the Object, leads us up to the 
 truth of His real Divinity. If Jesus, thus known and 
 loved, were not God, then we must say that God is in 
 this Epistle thrown utterly into the background, and 
 that His Human Messenger has taken His place. 
 Nor is the negative and polemical side of the Epi- 
 stle much less significant than its constructive and 
 hortatory side. The special misery of the false 
 teachers of whom the Apostle speaks as likely to 
 
 b 2 St. Pet. i. 5, 6, 7. ¢ Tbid. ver. 9. 
 
 ἃ Thid. ii. 20: ἀποφυγόντες τὰ μιάσματα τοῦ κόσμου ἐν ἐπιγνώσει τοῦ 
 Κυρίου καὶ σωτῆρος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Cf. Ibid. 1. 4: ἀποφυγόντες τῆς ἐν 
 κόσμῳ ἐν ἐπιθυμίᾳ φθορᾶς. 
 
 © Tbid. i. τα: οὕτω γὰρ πλουσίως ἐπιχορηγηθήσεται ὑμῖν ἡ εἴσοδος εἰς 
 τὴν αἰώνιον βασιλείαν τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 f Thid. iii. 17, 18: φυλάσσεσθε, ἵνα μὴ τῇ τῶν ἀθέσμων πλάνῃ συνα- 
 παχθέντες, ἐκπέσητε τοῦ ἰδίου στηριγμοῦ: αὐξάνετε δὲ ἐν χάριτι καὶ γνώσει 
 τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 Go 
 
 i=] 
 
450 Prominence of our Lord’s Person in this Epistle. [1 ποτ. 
 
 afflict the Church, will consist in their “denying the 
 Prince that bought them,” and so bringing on them- 
 selves swift destruction’. Unbelievers might contend 
 that the apostolical teachings respecting the present 
 power and future coming of Jesus were cleverly- 
 invented myths; but St. Peter had himself witnessed 
 the majesty of Jesus in His Transfiguration! The 
 Apostle knows that he himself will quickly die; he 
 has had a special revelation from the Lord Jesus 
 to this effect*. Throughout this Epistle the Person 
 of Jesus is constantly before us. As He is the true 
 Object of Christian knowledge, so He is the Lord of 
 the future kingdom of the saints. He is mocked at 
 and denied by the heretics ; His Coming it is which 
 the scoffing materialism of the age derides; His 
 judgments are foreshadowed by the great destructive 
 woes of the Old Testament. Again and again, as if 
 with a reverent eagerness which takes pleasure in the 
 sacred words, the Apostle names his Master’s Name 
 and titles. He is Jesus our Lord!; He is our Lord 
 
 5. 2 δύ, Pet. 11. 1: παρεισάξουσιν αἱρέσεις ἀπωλείας, καὶ τὸν ἀγοράσαντα 
 αὐτοὺς Δεσπότην ἀρνούμενοι, ἐπάγοντες ἑαυτοῖς ταχινὴν ἀπώλειαν. 
 
 h Tbid. 1. 16: οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες ἐγνω- 
 ρίσαμεν ὑμῖν τὴν τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ δύναμιν καὶ παρου- 
 σίαν. 
 
 i [bid.: ἐπόπται γενηθέντες τῆς ἐκείνου μεγαλειότητος. Ibid. ver. 18: 
 ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ ἁγίῳ. 
 
 k Jbid. ver. 14: εἰδὼς ὅτι ταχινή ἐστιν 7 ἀπόθεσις τοῦ σκηνώματός μου, 
 καθὼς καὶ ὁ Κύριος ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐδήλωσέ μοι. Here ταχινή 
 seems to mean ‘soon,’ ‘not distant,’ rather than ‘rapid.’ Cf. 
 St. John xxi. 18 ; but some independent revelation, made shortly 
 before these words were written, is probably alluded to. Hege- 
 sippus, de excidio Hierosol. lib. iii. 2; §. Ambros. Serm. contra 
 Auxentium, de Basilicis tradendis, n. 13 in Epist. 21. 
 
 1 Ibid. ver. 2. This occurs elsewhere only at Rom. iv. 24. 
 
ΜῈ] Christology of St. Jude. 451 
 
 Jesus Christ™; He is the Lord and Saviour®; He is 
 our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ®; He is our God 
 and Saviour Jesus ChristP. His power is spoken of 
 as Divine4; and by the precious things promised by 
 Him to His Church (must we not here specially un- 
 derstand the sacraments?) Christians are made par- 
 takers of the Nature of God’. To Christ, in His 
 exalted majesty, a tribute of glory is due, both now 
 and to the day of eternity’. Throughout this Epi- 
 stle Jesus Christ is evidently and constantly in the 
 place of God. The Apostle does not merely pro- 
 claim the Divinity of Jesus in formal terms; he 
 everywhere feels and implies it. 
 
 III. Akin to St. Peter's second Epistle in its 
 language and purpose is the short Epistle of 
 St. Jude. Like his brother St. James, St. Jude, al- 
 though our Lord’s first-cousin, introduces himself 
 as the slave of Jesus Christ. St. Jude does not 
 also term himself the slave of Godt. If believing 
 Christians are sanctified in God the Father, they 
 are preserved in a life of faith and holiness by 
 union with Jesus Christ". The religion of Jesus, 
 according to St. Jude, is the final revelation of God, 
 
 m 2 δύ. Pet.i. 14, 16. n Jbid. ili. 2. 
 
 0, Jbid: ΤΙ; 11: 205 111. 18: P Ibid. i. 1. 
 
 ᾳ Ibid. i. 3: τῆς θείας δυνάμεως αὐτοῦ τὰ πρὸς ζωὴν καὶ εὐσέβειαν 
 δεδωρημένης. αὐτοῦ apparently refers to Ἰησοῦ (ver. 2), and is so 
 distinguished from the Eternal Father rod καλέσαντος ἡμᾶς (ver. 3). 
 
 r Ibid. ver. 4: τιμία ἐπαγγέλματα δεδώρηται, iva διὰ τούτων γένησθε 
 θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως. 
 
 8 Ibid. iii. 18: αὐτῷ ἡ καὶ νῦν καὶ εἰς ἡμέραν αἰῶνος. “Tota eter- 
 nitatis una dies est,” Estius. 
 
 t St. Jude ver. 1: Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος, ἀδελφὸς δὲ ᾿Ιακώβου. 
 
 ἃ Tbid.: τοῖς ἐν Θεῷ πατρὶ ἡγιασμένοις καὶ ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστῷ τετηρημένοις 
 
 κλητοῖς. 682 
 
4δῷ Jesus Christ in St. Jude’s Epistle. [Lect. 
 
 the absolute truth, the true faith. Men should 
 spare no efforts on behalf of the true faith. It is 
 the faith once for all delivered to the saints*. The 
 Gnostics alluded to in this Epistle, like those fore- 
 told by St. Peter, are said to “deny our Only Prince 
 and Lord Jesus Christy.” They are threatened with 
 the punishments awarded to unbelieving Israel in 
 the wilderness, to the rebel angels, to Sodom and 
 Gomorrha%. The Book of Enoch is cited to describe 
 Jesus coming to the universal judgment, surrounded 
 by myriads of saints®. The authors of all unholy 
 deeds will then be convicted of their crimes; the 
 hard things spoken against the Judge by impious 
 sinners will be duly punished. Christians, however, 
 are to build themselves up upon their most holy 
 faith»: their life is fashioned in devotion to the 
 Blessed Trinity. It is a life of prayer: their souls 
 live in the Holy Spirit as in an atmosphere®. It is 
 a life of persevermg love, whereof the Almighty 
 Father is the Object. It is a life of expectation: 
 they look forward to the indulgent mercy which our 
 Lord Jesus Christ will shew them at His coming®. 
 
 x St. Jude ver. 3: παρακαλῶν ἐπαγωνίζεσθαι τῇ ἅπαξ παραδοθείσῃ τοῖς 
 ἁγίοις πίστει, 
 
 y Ibid. ver, 4: τὸν μόνον Δεσπότην καὶ Κύριον ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν 
 ἀρνούμενοι. 
 
 % Ibid. vers. 5--). 
 
 a Tbid. ver. 14: ἦλθε Κύριος ἐν μυριάσιν ἁγίαις αὐτοῦ, ποιῆσαι κρίσιν 
 κατὰ πάντων, 
 
 Ὁ Thid. ver. 20: ὑμεῖς δὲ, ἀγαπητοὶ, τῇ ἁγιωτάτῃ ὑμῶν πίστει ἐποικοδο- 
 μοῦντες ἑαυτοὺς. 
 
 ὁ Tbid.: ἐν Πνεύματι Ἁγίῳ προσευχόμενοι, 
 
 ἃ Tbid. ver. 21; ἑαυτοὺς ἐν ἀγάπῃ Θεοῦ τηρήσατε. 
 
 6 [bid.: προσδεχόμενοι τὸ ἔλεος τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ, εἰς 
 
 ‘ 7 
 ζωὴν αἰώνιον. 
 
ὙΠ:) Distinctive form of St. Pauls Christology. 453 
 
 Christ is the Being to Whom they look for mercy ; 
 and the issue of His compassion is everlasting life. 
 Could any merely human Christ have had this place 
 in the heart and faith of Christians, or on the 
 judgment-seat of God 4 
 
 IV. But it is time that we should proceed to 
 consider, however briefly, the witness of that great 
 Apostle whose Epistles form so much larger a con- 
 tribution to the sacred volume of the New Testa- 
 ment than is supplied by any other among the in- 
 spired servants of Christ. 
 
 1. In comparing St. Paul with St. John, a modern 
 writer has remarked that at first sight two objects 
 stand out prominently in the theological teaching 
 of the beloved disciple, while three immediately 
 challenge observation in the writings of the Apostle 
 of the Gentiles. At first sight, St. John’s doctrine 
 appears to place us face to face only with God and 
 the human world. Christ as the Eternal Logos is 
 in St. John plainly identical with God, although 
 within the Godhead personally distinct from the 
 Father. We cannot really understand St. John and 
 withal establish in our thought an essential sepa- 
 ration between God and the Word Incarnate. ΑἹ- 
 though Jesus is a manifestation of God’s glory in 
 the world of sense, He is ever within that Divine 
 Essence Whose glory He manifests ; He is with God, 
 and He is God. In St. Paul, on the other hand, we 
 are confronted more distinctly with three objects ; 
 we see God, the human world, and between the two, 
 Jesus Christ, Divine and Human, the One Mediator 
 between God and man. Of course the primd facie 
 impression produced on the mind by the sacred 
 
454 St. Paul’s insistance upon the truth [ Lect. 
 
 writers is all that is here in question, and this im- 
 pression is not to be confounded with their real 
 relations to each other. The Christ of St. John 
 is truly Human, and the Christ of St. Paul is lite- 
 rally Divine; St. John exhibits the Mediator not 
 less truly than St. Paul, St. Paul the Divine Son of 
 the Father not less truly than St. John. But the 
 observation referred to enables us to do justice to 
 the form of St. Paul’s Christology ; and we may 
 well observe in his writings the prominence which 
 is given to two truths which supply the foil, on 
 this side and on that, to the doctrine of our Lord’s 
 essential Godhead. 
 
 (a) St. Paul insists with particular earnestness upon 
 the truth of our Lord’s real Humanity. This truth is 
 not impaired by such expressions as the “form of a 
 servantf,” the “fashion of a man&,” the “likeness of 
 sinful fleshh,” which are employed either to describe 
 Christ’s Humanity as a mode of being, or to hint at 
 Its veiling a Higher Nature undiscerned by the senses 
 of man, or to mark the point at which, by Its glorious 
 inaccessibility to sin, It is in contrast with the nature 
 of that frail and errmg race to which It truly be- 
 longs. Nor is our Lord’s Humanity conceived of as 
 a phantom when the Apostle has reached a point of 
 spiritual growth at which the outward circumstances 
 of Christ’s Life are wellnigh forgotten in an overmas- 
 tering perception of His spiritual and Divine glory}. 
 
 f Phil. ii. 7: μορφὴν δούλου. 
 
 & Ibid. ver. 8: σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος. 
 
 h Rom. viii. 3: ἐν ὁμοιώματι σαρκὸς ἁμαρτίας. 
 
 i 2 Cor. v.16: εἰ δὲ καὶ ἐγνώκαμεν κατὰ σάρκα Χριστὸν, ἀλλὰ νῦν 
 
 οὐκ ἔτι γινώσκομεν. 
 
VI.) of our Lord’s Humanity. 455 
 
 St. Paul speaks plainly of our Lord as being mani- 
 fest in the flesh*; as possessing a Body of material 
 Flesh!; as being “made of a woman™;” as being “born 
 of the seed of David according to the flesh®;” as 
 having drawn the substance of His Flesh from the 
 race of Israel°. As a Jew, Christ was born under the 
 yoke of the Law’. His Human Life was not merely 
 one of self-denial4 and obedience ; it was pre-emi- 
 nently a Life of sharp suffermg’. The Apostle uses 
 energetic expressions to describe our Lord’s real 
 share in our physical human weakness δ, as well 
 as in those various forms of pain, mental and 
 bodily, which He willed to undergo, and which 
 reached their climax in the supreme agonies of the 
 Passiont. If however Christ became obedient unto | 
 death, even the death of the cross", this, as is im- 
 plied, was of His Own free condescension; and 
 St. Paul dwells with rapture upon the glory of 
 Christ’s risen Body, to which our bodies of hu-, 
 miliation will hereafter in their degrees, by His 
 
 Κα Tim. iii. 16: ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί. 
 
 1 Col. i. 22: ἐν τῷ σώματι τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ. 
 
 m Gal. iv. 4: γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός. 
 
 n Rom. i. 3: τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαβὶδ κατὰ σάρκα. 
 
 © Ibid. ix. 5: ἐξ ὧν ὁ Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα. 
 
 P Gal. iv. 4: γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον. 
 
 4 Rom. xv. 3: καὶ γὰρ ὁ Χριστὸς οὐκ ἑαυτῷ ἤρεσεν. 
 
 tr Heb. ν. 8: καίπερ ὧν υἱὸς, ἔμαθεν ἀφ᾽ ὧν ἔπαθε τὴν ὑπακοήν. 
 
 8 2 Cor. xill. 4: ἐσταυρώθη ἐξ ἀσθενείας. 
 
 t [bid. i. 5: τὰ παθήματα τοῦ Χριστοῦ. Phil. iii. 10: τὴν κοινωνίαν 
 τῶν παθημάτων αὐτοῦ. Col. 1. 24: τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ 
 Χριστοῦ. 
 
 u Phil. 11. 8 : ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν, γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου, 
 
 θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ. 
 
456 Truth of Chris?s Manhood consistent [Lecr. 
 
 Almighty Power, be assimilatedy. Upon two fea- 
 tures of our Lord’s Sacred Humanity does St. Paul 
 lay especial stress. First, Christ’s Manhood was 
 clearly void of sin, both in Soul and Body; and in 
 this respect It was unlike any one member of the 
 race to which It belonged*®. This sinlessness,; how- 
 ever, did but restore humanity “in Christ” to its 
 original type of perfection. Thus, secondly, Christ's 
 Manhood is representative of the human race; it 
 realizes the archetypal idea of humanity in the Di- 
 vine Mind. Christ, the Second Adam, according to 
 St. Paul, stands in a relation to the regenerate family 
 of men analogous to that ancestral relationship in 
 which the first Adam stands to all his natural de- 
 scendants. But this correspondence is balanced by 
 a contrast. In two great passages St. Paul exhibits 
 the contrast which exists between the Second Adam 
 and the firsty. This contrast is physical, psycho- 
 logical, moral, and historical. The body of the first 
 Adam is corruptible and earthly ; the Body of the 
 Second Adam is glorious and incorruptible, The 
 first Adam enjoys natural life; he is made a living 
 soul. The Second Adam is a supernatural Being, 
 
 v Phil. iii. 21: ὃς μετασχηματίσει τὸ σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν, 
 . σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ 
 
 δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι ἑαυτῷ τὰ πάντας, I Cor. XV. 44: σῶμα 
 πνευματικόν. 
 
 ν᾿ \ \ \ , c , G . δὰ τως c , ? , 
 
 x 2 Cor. v. 21: τὸν yap μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν, ὑπερ ἡμῶν ἀμαρτιᾶν εποιη- 
 σεν. Gal. ii. 17: ἄρα Χριστὸς ἁμαρτίας διάκονος; μὴ γένοιτο. Rom. viii. 3; 
 ef. Art. xv. 
 
 y Rom. v. 12-21; 1 Cor. xv. 45-49. 
 
 Ὺ ς “ ive > ual ikos’ 6 δεύ ‘ive 
 
 z τ Cor. xv. 47: ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ἐκ γῆς, χοϊκός" ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρω- 
 
 πος [ὁ Κύριος], ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. Οἷος ὁ χοϊκὸς, τοιοῦτοι καὶ οἱ χοϊκοί καὶ οἷος 
 
 lol Poe. , 
 ὁ ἐπουράνιος, τοιοῦτοι καὶ οἱ ἐπουράνιοι. 
 
ΕΙΣ] with its sinlessness and archetypal character. 457 
 
 capable of communicating His Higher Life to others; 
 He is a quickening Spirit*?. The first Adam is 
 a sinner, and his sin compromises the entire race 
 which springs from him. The Second Adam sins 
 not; His Life is one mighty act of righteousness? ; 
 and they who are in living communion with Him 
 share in this His righteousness®. The historical con- 
 sequence of the action of the first Adam is death, the 
 death of the body and of the soul. This consequence 
 is transmitted to his descendants along with his other 
 legacy of transmitted sin. The historical consequence 
 of the action and suffering of the Second Adam is 
 life ; and communion with His living righteousness 
 is the gauge and assurance to His faithful disciples 
 of a real exemption from the law of sin and death’ 
 Such a contrast, you observe, might well suggest 
 that the Second Adam, Representative of man’s race, 
 its true Archetype, its Restorer and its Saviour, is 
 Himself more than man. Certainly; but neverthe- 
 less it is as Man that Christ is contrasted with our 
 
 ἃ τ Cor. xv. 45: ἐγένετο ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ᾿Αδὰμ eis ψυχὴν ζῶσαν" 
 εν > A > ~ ~ 
 ὁ ἔσχατος ᾿Αδὰμ εἰς πνεῦμα ζωοποιοῦν. 
 
 Ὁ δικαίωμα, Rom. vy. 18. 
 
 ¢ Rom. vy. 18, 19: ἄρα οὖν ὡς δι ἑνὸς παραπτώματος, εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώ- 
 
 > , Ὁ“ ΑΙ a οι Β > , > , > 
 mous, εἰς κατάκριμα" οὕτω καὶ Ov ἑνὸς δικαιώματος, εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους, εἰς 
 , -“ a ‘ 4 -“ Led ΄- δ. δ > Ul c ‘ 
 δικαίωσιν ζωῆς. ὥσπερ yap διὰ τῆς παρακοῆς τοῦ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἁμαρτωλοὶ 
 , « ‘ 7 Ν A Ns e - - ΘΝ , 
 κατεστάθησαν οἱ πολλοὶ, οὕτω καὶ διὰ τῆς ὑπακοῆς τοῦ ἑνὸς δίκαιοι κατα- 
 σταθήσονται οἱ πολλοί. 
 
 ἃ Tbid. ver. 12: δι᾿ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἡ ἁμαρτία εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθε, καὶ 
 διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ θάνατος. Ibid. ver. 17: εἰ γὰρ ἐν ἑνὶ [τῷ τοῦ ἑνὸς, 
 text. rec.] παραπτώματι ὁ θάνατος ἐβασίλευσε διὰ τοῦ ἑνὸς, πολλῷ μάλ - 
 λον οἱ τὴν περισσείαν τῆς χάριτος καὶ τῆς δωρεᾶς τῆς δικαιοσύνης λαμ- 
 βάνοντες, ἐν ζωῇ βασιλεύσουσι διὰ τοῦ ἑνὸς ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Cf. Ibid. 
 ver. 21. 
 
458 St. Paul dwells upon (ἦγ 5 Manhood [Lecr. 
 
 first parent; and it is in virtue of His Manhood 
 that He is our Mediator, our Redeemer®, our Saviour 
 from Satan’s power, our Intercessor with the Father. 
 Great stress indeed does St. Paul lay upon the Man- 
 hood of Christ as the instrument of His mediation 
 between earth and heaven, as the channel through 
 which intellectual truth and moral strength de- 
 scend from God into the souls of men, as the Ex- 
 emplar wherein alone human nature has recovered 
 its ideal beauty, as That whereby the Sinless One 
 could offer the acceptable, world-representing sacri- 
 fice of a perfectly obedient Will. So earnestly and 
 constantly does St. Paul's thought dwell on our 
 Lord’s mediating Humanity, that to unreflecting 
 persons his language might at times appear to imply 
 that Jesus Christ is personally an inferior being, ex- 
 ternal to the Unity of the Divine Essence. Thus he 
 tells the Corinthians that Christians have one Lord 
 Jesus Christ as well as One Gods. Thus he reminds 
 
 e τ Tim. ii. 5,6: ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς ᾿Ιησοῦς, ὁ δοὺς ἑαυτὸν ἀντίλυτρον 
 ὑπὲρ πάντων. 
 
 f Heb. ii. 14: ἐπεὶ οὖν τὰ παιδία κεκοινώνηκε σαρκὸς καὶ αἵματος, καὶ 
 αὐτὸς παραπλησίως μετέσχε τῶν αὐτῶν, ἵνα διὰ τοῦ θανάτου καταργήσῃ 
 τὸν τὸ κράτος ἔχοντα τοῦ θανάτου, τουτέστι, τὸν διάβολον. Ibid. v. τ. 
 
 Βα Cor. vill. 6: εἷς Κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός. Here however (1) 
 Κύριος, as contrasted with Θεὸς, implies no necessary inferiority ; 
 else we must say that the Father is not Κύριος ; while (2) the clause 
 δι οὗ τὰ πάντα, καὶ ἡμεῖς δι᾿’ αὐτοῦ, which cannot be restricted to our 
 Lord’s redemptive work without extreme exegetical arbitrariness, 
 and which certainly refers to His creation of the universe, places 
 Jesus Christ on a level with the Father. Compare the position of 
 διὰ between ἐξ and εἰς, Rom. xi. 36; ef. Col. i. 16. Our Lord is here 
 distinguished from the “One God,” as being Human as well as Di- 
 vine ; cf. the relation of μεσίτης to Θεός in τ Tim. ii. 5. Baur’s re- 
 marks on 1 Cor. viii. 6 (Vorlesungen, p. 193), which proceed upon 
 
VI] as the Instrument of His Mediation. 459 
 
 St. Timothy that there is One God and One Mediator 
 between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus, Who 
 gave Himself a ransom for 8118, Thus he looks 
 forward to a day when the Son Himself also, mean- 
 ing thereby Christ’s sacred Manhood, shall be sub- 
 ject to Him That put all things under Him, that 
 God may be all in alli It is at least certain that 
 no modern Humanitarian could recognise the literal 
 reality of our Lord’s sacred Humanity more expli- 
 citly than did the Apostle who had never seen Him 
 
 the assumption that only four Epistles of St. Paul are extant, and 
 therefore that Col. i. 16,17 is nothing to the purpose, and which 
 moreover endeavours to impose the plain redemptive reference of 
 2 Cor. v.17, 18 upon this passage, are so capricious as to shew very 
 remarkably the strength and truth of the Catholic interpretation. 
 
 h τ Tim. ii. 5, 6: εἷς yap Θεὸς, εἷς καὶ μεσίτης Θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπων, 
 ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς ᾿Ιησοῦς. 
 
 i xy Cor. xv. 28: ὅταν δὲ ὑποταγῇ αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα, τότε καὶ αὐτὸς 
 ὁ Yids ὑποταγήσεται τῷ ὑποτάξαντι αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα, ἵνα ἢ ὁ Θεὸς τὰ πᾶντα 
 ἐν πᾶσιν. That our Lord’s Humanity is the subject of ὑποταγήσεται 
 is the opinion of St. Augustine (de Trin. i. ο. 8), St. Jerome (adv. 
 Pelag. i. 6), Theodoret (in loc.). Τῇ αὐτὸς ὁ Υἱός means the Divine 
 Son most naturally, the predicate ὑποταγήσεται is an instance of 
 communicatio idiomatum (cf. Acts xx. 28; 1 Cor. ii. 8; Rom. viii. 
 32; ix. 5; St, John iii. 13); since it can only apply to a created 
 nature. A writer who believed our Lord to be literally God (Rom. 
 ix. 5) could not have supposed that at the end of His media- 
 torial reign as Man a new relation would be introduced between the 
 Persons of the Godhead. The subordination (κατὰ τάξιν) of the Son 
 is an eternal fact in the inner Being of God. But the visible sub- 
 jection of His Humanity (with Which His Church is so organically 
 united as to be called ‘Christ,’ 1 Cor. xii. 12) to the supremacy of 
 God will be realized at the close of the present dispensation. 
 Against the attempt to infer from this passage an ἀποκατάστασις 
 of men and devils, cf. Meyer in loc.; and against Pantheistic in- 
 ferences from τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν, cf. Julius Miiller, Lehre von ἃ. 
 Siinde, 1. p. 157, quoted ibid. 
 
400 St. Paul on the Divine Unity. [Lecr. 
 
 on earth, and to whom He had been made known 
 by visions which a Docetic enthusiast might have 
 taken as sufficient warrant for denying His real 
 participation in our flesh and blood. 
 
 (8) On the other hand, St. Paul is as strict a 
 monotheist as any unconverted pupil of Gamaliel ; 
 he does not merely retain, he has an especial devo- 
 tion to the primal truth of God’s inviolate Unity. 
 God is parted from the very highest forms of created 
 life by a measureless interval, and yet the universe 
 is a real reflection of His Naturek. The relation of 
 creation to God is threefold. Nothing exists which 
 has not proceeded originally from God’s creative 
 Hand. Nothing exists which is not upheld in 
 being and perfected by God’s sustaining and working 
 energy. Nothing exists which shall not at the last, 
 whether mechanically or consciously, whether wil- 
 lingly or by a terrible constraint, subserve God’s high 
 and resistless purpose. For as He is the Creator and 
 Sustainer, so He is the One last End of all created 
 existences. Of Him, and through Him, and unto 
 Him, are all things! So absolute an idea of God 
 excludes all that is local, transient, particular, finite. 
 God’s supreme Unity is the truth which determines 
 the universality of the Gospel; since the Gospel 
 
 k Rom. 1. 20: τὰ γὰρ ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασι 
 νοούμενα καθορᾶται. 
 
 1 [bid. xi. 36: ὅτι ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ πάντα. 
 “Alles ist aus Gott (Urgrund), in sofern Alles aus Gottes Schépfer- 
 krafte hervorgegangen ist; durch Gott (Vermittelungsgrund), in 
 sofern nichts ohne Gottes Vermittelung (continuirliche Einwirkung) 
 existirt ; ftir Gott (teleologische Bestimmung), in sofern Alles den 
 Zwecken Gottes dient.” Meyer in loc. 
 
i Ground of St. Paul’s judgment of Paganism. 461 
 
 unveils and proclaims the One supreme, world-con- 
 trolling God™. Hence the Apostle infers the deep 
 misery of Paganism. The Pagan representation of 
 Deity was ‘a lie’ by which this essential truth of 
 God’s Being" was denied. The Pagans had forfeited 
 that partial apprehension of the glory of the incor- 
 ruptible God which the physical universe and the 
 light of natural conscience placed within their reach. 
 They had yielded to those instincts of creature- 
 worship® which mere naturalism is ever prone to 
 indulge. The Incarnation alone subdues these in- 
 stincts by consecrating them to the service of God 
 Incarnate; while beyond the Church they threaten 
 naturalistic systems with an utter and disastrous 
 subjection to the empire of sense. When man 
 then had fairly lost sight of the Unity and Spi- 
 rituality of God, Paganism speedily allowed him to 
 sink beneath a flood of nameless sensualities; he 
 had abandoned the Creator to become, in the most 
 debased sense, the creature’s slave?. The Avpostle’s 
 thought rests for an instant upon the elegant but 
 
 m Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 205: “Auf dieser Auffassung der Idee 
 Gottes beruht der Universalismus des Apostels, wie er diess in dem 
 Satz ausspricht, dass Gott sowohl der Heiden als der Juden Gott 
 sei. Rom. 11. 113 ili. 29; x. 12. Das Christenthum ist selbst nichts 
 anderes (it zs this, but it is a great deal more) als die Aufhebung 
 alles Particularistischen, damit die reine absolute Gottes-Idee in 
 der Menschheit sich verwirkliche, oder in ihr zum Bewusstsein 
 komme.” The Pantheistic touch of the last phrase does not destroy 
 the general truth of the observation. 
 
 n Rom. i. 25: μετήλλαξαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν τῷ ψεύδει. 
 
 © Ibid. vers. 18-- 25; especially 23: ἤλλαξαν τὴν δόξαν τοῦ ἀφθάρτου 
 Θεοῦ ἐν ὁμοιώματι εἰκόνος φθαρτοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ πετεινῶν καὶ τετραπόδων 
 καὶ ἑρπετῶν, κ. τ. Δ. ᾿ 
 
 P Ibid, ver. 24: παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς 6 Θεὸς ἐν ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις τῶν 
 
462 St. Paul’s doxologies to the One God. [ Lecr. 
 
 impure idolatries to which the imagination and the 
 wealth of Greece had consecrated those beautiful 
 temples which adorned the restored city of Corinth. 
 “To us Christians,” he fervently exclaims, “there is 
 but one God, the Father ; all things owe their exist- 
 ence to Him, and we live for His purposes and His 
 glory’.” In after years, St. Paul is writing to a fel- 
 low-labourer for Christ, and he has in view some 
 of those Gnostic imaginations which already pro- 
 posed to link earth with heaven by a graduated hier- 
 archy of Atjons, thus threatening the re-introduction 
 either of virtual polytheism or of conscious creature- 
 worship. Against this mischievous speculation the 
 Apostle utters his protest; but it issues from his 
 adoring soul upwards to the footstool of the One 
 Supreme and Almighty Being in what is perhaps 
 the richest and most glorious of the doxologies 
 which occur in his Epistles. God is the Blessed 
 and Only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of 
 lords; He only has from Himself, and originally, 
 immortality; He dwells in the light which is 
 inaccessible to creatures; no man. has seen Him ; 
 no man can see Him; let honour and power be for 
 ever ascribed to Him". 
 
 καρδιῶν αὐτῶν eis ἀκαθαρσίαν. Ibid. ver. 26: εἰς πάθη ἀτιμίας. Ibid. 
 ver. 28: εἰς ἀδόκιμον νοῦν. See the whole context. 
 
 4 τ Cor. vill. 5, 6: καὶ yap εἴπερ εἰσὶ λεγόμενοι θεοὶ, εἴτε ἐν οὐρανῷ, 
 εἴτε ἐπὶ γῆς (the two departments of polytheistic invention) ὥσπερ 
 εἰσὶ θεοὶ πολλοὶ, καὶ κύριοι πολλοί" ἀλλ᾽ ἡμῖν εἷς Θεὸς ὁ πατὴρ, ἐξ οὗ τὰ 
 πάντα, καὶ ἡμεῖς εἰς αὐτόν. 
 
 r y Tim. vi. 15, 16: ὁ μακάριος καὶ μόνος δυνάστης, ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν 
 βασιλευόντων, καὶ Κύριος τῶν κυριευόντων, ὁ μόνος ἔχων ἀθανασίαν, φῶς 
 οἰκῶν ἀπρόσιτον, ὃν εἶδεν οὐδεὶς ἀνθρώπων, οὐδὲ ἰδεῖν δύναται, ᾧ τιμὴ καὶ 
 
 ? ΄ 
 κράτος αἰώνιον, ἀμήν. 
 
VI.) Bearing of his Monotheism on his Christology. 463 
 
 Unquestionably, my brethren, St. Paul is an ear- 
 nest monotheist ; his faith is sensitively jealous on 
 behalf of the supremacy and the rights of God. 
 What then is the position which he assigns to Jesus 
 Christ in the scale of being? That he believed 
 Jesus Christ to be merely a man is a paradox which 
 could be maintained by no careful reader of his 
 Epistles. But if, according to St. Paul, Christ is 
 more than man, what is He? Is He still only a 
 creature? or is He a Divine Person? In St. Paul’s 
 thought this question could not have been an open 
 one. His earnest, trenchant, sharply-defined faith 
 in the One Most High God must force him to say 
 either that Christ is a created being, or that He is 
 internal to the Essence of God. Nor is the subject 
 of such a nature as to admit of accommodation 
 or compromise in its expression. St. Paul may, im 
 practical matters, and where the law of God per- 
 mits it, become all things to all men that he may 
 by all means save some’. But he cannot, as if 
 he were a pagan politician of old, or a modern 
 man of the world, compliment away his deepest 
 faitht. He cannot ascribe Divinity to a fellow- 
 creature by way of panegyrical hyperbole ; his 
 belief in God is too powerful, too exacting, too 
 keen, too real. St. Paul may teach the Athenians 
 that we live and move and have our being in the 
 all-present, all-encompassing Life of God"; he may 
 bid the Cormthians expect a time when God shall 
 be known and felt by every member of His great 
 family to be all in 4115, But St. Paul cannot merge 
 
 8 1 Cor. ix. 22. t 2 Cor. i. 18; ii. 17. 
 u Acts xvii. 28. x 1 Cor. xv. 28. 
 
404 Christ absolutely God if not merely a creature. {Lxcr. 
 
 the Maker and Ruler of the universe, so gloriously 
 free in His creative and providential action’, in any 
 conception which identifies Him with the work of 
 His hands, or which reduces Him to the level of 
 an impersonal quality or force. The Apostle may 
 contemplate the vast hierarchy of the blessed an- 
 gels, ranging in their various degrees of glory be- 
 tween the throne of God and the children of men?. 
 But no heavenly intelligence, however exalted, is 
 seen in his pages to trench for one moment upon 
 the incommunicable prerogatives of God. St. Paul 
 may describe the regenerate life of Christians in 
 such terms as to warrant us in saying that Christ’s 
 true members are divinized by spiritual communion 
 with God in His Blessed Son*. But the saintliest 
 of men, the most exalted and majestic of seraphs, 
 are alike removed by an infinite interval from the 
 One Uncreated, Self-existent, Incorruptible Essence?. 
 There is no room in St. Paul’s thought for an ima- 
 ginary being like the Arian Christ, hovering indis- 
 tinctly between created and Uncreated life; since, 
 where God is believed to be so utterly remote from 
 the highest creatures beneath His throne, Christ must 
 either be conceived of as purely and simply a crea- 
 ture with no other than a creature’s nature and 
 rights, or He must be adored as One Who is for 
 ever and necessarily internal to the Uncreated Life 
 of the Most High. 
 
 2. It has been well observed by the author of “Ecce 
 
 y Rom. ix. 21. 
 
 z Col. i. 16. These hierarchical distinctions appear to have been 
 preserved among the fallen angels (Eph. vi. 12). 
 
 a 1 Cor; ii) τὸ Τῇ; vi 19, 20. b Rom. xi. 34-36. 
 
VI.) = St. Paul’s devotion to our Lord’s condescension. 405 
 
 Homo” that “the trait in Christ which filled St. Paul’s 
 whole mind was His condescension ;” and that “the 
 charm of that condescension lay in its bemg volun- 
 tary’.” Certainly. But condescension is the act of 
 bending from a higher station to a lower one; and 
 the question is, from what did Christ condescend 4 
 If Christ was merely human, what was the human 
 eminence from which St. Paul believed Him to be 
 stooping? Was it a social eminence? But as the fa- 
 vourite of the synagogue, and withal protected by the 
 majesty of the Roman franchise‘, St. Paul occupied 
 a social position not less widely removed from that 
 of a Galilean peasant leading a life of vagrancy, than 
 ~ are your circumstances, my brethren, who belong to 
 the middle and upper classes of this country, re- 
 moved from the lot of the homeless multitudes who 
 day by day seek relief in our workhouses. Was it 
 an intellectual eminence? But the Apostle who had 
 sat at the feet of Gamaliel, and had drawn largely 
 from the fountains of Greek thought and culture, 
 had at least enjoyed educational advantages which 
 were utterly denied to the Prophet of Nazareth. 
 Was it then a moral eminence? But, if Jesus was 
 merely Man, was He, I do not say morally perfect, 
 but morally eminent at all? Was not His Self- 
 assertion such as to be inconsistent with any truth- 
 ful recognition whatever of the real conditions of 
 a created existence? But was the eminence from 
 which Christ condescended angelical as distinct from 
 human? St. Paul has drawn the sharpest distinc- 
 tion between Christ and the angels; Christ is re- 
 lated to the angels, in the belief of the Apostle, 
 
 © Eece Homo, p. 49. ἃ Acts xxii. 29. 
 H 
 
400 Christ condescended from a [Lxct. 
 
 simply as the Author of their being®; while the 
 appointed duties of the angels are to worship His 
 Person and to serve His servantsf. 
 
 What then was the position from which Christ 
 condescended ? Two stages of condescension are in- 
 deed noted, one within and one beyond the limits 
 of our Lord’s Human Life. Being found in fashion 
 as a Man, He voluntarily humbled Himself and _be- 
 came obedient unto death®. But the earlier and 
 the greater act of condescension was that whereby 
 He had become Man out of a state of pre-existent 
 glory. St. Paul constantly refers to the pre-existent 
 Life of Jesus Christ. The Second Adam differs from 
 the first in that He is ‘from heaven! When ancient 
 Israel was wandering in the desert, Christ had been 
 Himself invisibly present as Guardian and Sustainer 
 of the Lord’s people*. St. Paul is pleading on behalf 
 of the poor Jewish Churches with their wealthier 
 Corinthian brethren ; and he points to the grace of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, when He was rich, for 
 our sakes became poor, that we through His poverty 
 might be rich!. Here Christ’s eternal wealth is in 
 
 € Ὁ 011. τὸ; ci. p. 477. f Heb. i. 6, 14. 
 
 & Phil. 11. 8: σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος, ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν, γενόμε- 
 νος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου, θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ. 
 
 h [bid. vers. 6, 7: ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων, ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε, . . μορφὴν 
 δούλου λαβών. Ἶ 
 
 i x Cor. xv. 47: ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος [ὁ Κύριος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. Cf. 
 Tert. ady. Mare. v. 10. 
 
 Κα Cor. x. 4: ἡ δὲ πέτρα [the πέτρα ἀκολουθοῦσα commemorated by 
 Jewish traditions] ἦν ὁ Χριστός. Ibid. ver. g: μηδὲ ἐκπειράζωμεν τὸν 
 Χριστὸν, καθὼς καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐπείρασαν. 
 
 1 2 Cor. vill. 9: γινώσκετε γὰρ τὴν χάριν τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ 
 Χριστοῦ, ὅτι δι’ ὑμᾶς ἐπτώχευσε πλούσιος ὧν, ἵνα ὑμεῖς τῇ ἐκείνου πτωχείᾳ 
 
 πλουτήσητε. 
 
VI.) state of pre-existent glory. 467 
 
 contrast with His temporal impoverishment. For 
 
 His poverty began with the manger of Bethlehem ; 
 
 He became poor by the act of His Incarnation ; 
 
 being rich according to the unbegun, unending Life 
 
 of His Higher Nature, He became poor in Time™. 
 
 When St. Paul says that our Lord was “manifested / 
 in the flesh,” he at least implies that Christ existed’ 
 before this manifestation ; when St. Paul definitely 
 
 ascribes to our Lord the function of a Creator Who 
 
 creates not for a Higher Power but for Himself, we 
 
 rise from the idea of pre-existence to the idea of 
 
 a relationship towards the universe, which can be- 
 
 long to One Being Alone. This will presently be 
 
 considered. 
 
 m Baur suggests that ἐπτώχευσε need mean no more than that 
 Christ was poor. (Vorlesungen, p. 193.) But “der Aorist bezeich- 
 net das einst geschehene Hintreten des Armseins (denn πτωχεύειν 
 heisst nicht arm werden, sondern arm sein), nicht das von Christo 
 gefiihrte ganze Leben in Armuth und Niedrigkeit, wobei er gleich- 
 wohl reich an Gnade gewesen sei.” (Meyer in 2 Cor. viii. 9.) 
 
 n x Tim. iii. 16: ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκί. Cf. Bishop Ellicott in loc. 
 The bishop pronounces és to be the reading of the Codex A. in 
 this text, “after minute personal inspection,” and has adopted it 
 in his text. For a summary of authorities see too Tischendorf, ed. 
 74, App. Crit. The question may still perhaps be asked whether 
 enough stress has been laid on the probability that a faint line like 
 the bar of the © would in time be rubbed out from older MSS. ; 
 and whether here as elsewhere the presumption that copyists were 
 always anxious to alter the text of the New Testament in theo- 
 logical interests, is not pressed somewhat excessively. But if the 
 reading ΘΣ is too doubtful to be absolutely relied on ; in any case 
 our Lord’s Pre-existence lies in the ἐφανερώθη (1 St. John i. 2), 
 which cannot without violence be watered down into the sense of 
 Christ’s manifestation in the teaching and belief of the Church as 
 distinct from His manifestation in history. 
 
 ἩΗ ἢ 2 
 
408 Christ is “over all, [Lecr. 
 
 Certainly St. Paul used the terms ‘form of God,’ 
 ‘image of God, when speaking of the Divinity of 
 Jesus Christ®°. But these terms do not imply that 
 Christ’s Divinity only resembles or is analogous to the 
 Divinity of the Father. They do not mean that as 
 Man, He represents the Divine Perfections in an in- 
 ferior and partial manner to our finite intelligence, 
 which is incapable of raising itself sufficiently to con- 
 template the transcendent reality. They are necessary 
 in order to define the personal distinction which ex- 
 ists between the Divine Son and the Eternal Father. 
 Certainly it is no mere human being or seraph 
 Whom St. Paul describes as being “over all, God 
 blessed for ever?.” You remind me that these words 
 are referred by some modern scholars to the Eternal 
 Father. Certainly they are: but on what grounds ? 
 Of scholarship 1 What then is St. Paul’s general pur- 
 pose when he uses these words? He has just been 
 enumerating those eight privileges of the race of 
 Israel, the thought of which kindled in his true 
 Jewish heart the generous and passionate desire to 
 be made even anathema for his rejected country- 
 men. To these privileges he subjoins a climax. 
 The Israelites were they ἐξ dv ὁ Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ 
 σάρκα, ὁ ὧν ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. 
 It was from the blood of Israel that the true 
 Christ had sprung, so far as His Human Nature 
 was concerned; but Christ’s Israelitic descent is, 
 in the Apostle’s eyes, so consummate a glory for 
 Israel, because Christ is much more than one of 
 the sons of men, because by reason of His Higher 
 Pre-existent Nature He is “over all, God blessed for 
 
 Ὁ Phil. 11.6; Coli, 15. P Rom. ix. 5. 
 
VI] God blessed for ever.? 469 
 
 ever.” This is the natural4 sense of the passage. 
 If the passage occurred in a profane author, and 
 there were no anti-theological interest to be pro- 
 moted, few men would think of overlooking the anti- 
 thesis between Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα and Θεὸς εὐλο- 
 yntost. Still less possible would it be to destroy 
 this antithesis outright and impoverish the climax 
 of the whole passage by cutting off the doxology 
 from the clause which precedes it, and erecting it 
 
 4 Reuss, Théol. Chr. ii. 76, note. M. Reuss says that the Catho- 
 lic interpretation of Rom. ix. 5 is “explication la plus simple et la 
 plus naturelle.” “Man hat hier verschiedene Auswege gesucht, der 
 Nothwendigkeit zu entgehen, [6] ὧν ἐπὶ πάντων Θεός auf Christum 
 zu beziehen ; aber bei jedem bieten sie solche Schwierigkeiten dar, 
 die immer wieder auf die einfachste und von der Grammatik gebo- 
 tene Auslegung zuriickfiihren.” (Usteri, Entwickelung des Paulin- 
 ischen Lehrbegriffes, p. 309.) That the text was understood in 
 the early Church to apply to Jesus Christ will appear from §. Iren. 
 iii. 16, 3; Tert. adv. Prax. 13; 5. Hipp.c. Noet. 6. So Origen, 
 Theodoret, S. Athan. Orat. c. Ar, i. το, ἄρ. It seems probable 
 that the non-employment of so striking a passage by the Catholics 
 during their earlier controversial struggles with the Arians is to be 
 attributed to their fear of being charged with construing it in 
 a Sabellian sense. (Cf. Olsh. in loc.; Reiche, Comm. ii. 268, note.) 
 The language of the next age was unhesitating: εἶπεν αὐτὸν “ ἐπὶ 
 mavrav’... “Θεὸν᾽. ,. “ εὐλογητὸν᾽ ... ἔχοντες οὖν τὸν Χριστὸν καὶ ὄντα 
 Θεὸν καὶ εὐλογητὸν, αὐτῷ προσκυνήσωμεν. ὃ. Procl. ad Arm. (Labbe, 
 iii. 1231.) Wetstein erroneously assumed that those early fathers 
 who refused to apply 6 ἐπὶ πάντων Θεός to Christ, would have 
 objected to the predicate actually employed by the Apostle, ἐπὶ 
 πάντων Θεός. (Cf. Fritzche, Comm. in Rom. i. p. 262 sqq.) And 
 indeed Socinus himself (see Tholuck in loc.) had no doubt of the 
 reference of this passage to Christ ; although he explained it of a 
 conferred, not of a ‘natural’ Divinity. (Cat. Rac. 159 sqq.) See 
 too Dr. Vaughan, Comm. in loe. 
 
 t Observe Rom. i. 3, where ἐκ σπέρματος Δαβὶδ κατὰ σάρκα is in 
 contrast with υἱοῦ Θεοῦ... κατὰ Πνεῦμα ᾿Αγιωσύνης. 
 
470 Christ 18. “over all, [Lecr. 
 
 into an independent ascription of praise to God the 
 Fathers’. If we should admit that the doctrine of 
 
 s As to the punctuation of this passage the early MSS. them- 
 selves of course determine nothing ; but the citations and versions 
 to which Lachmann generally appeals for the formation of his text 
 are decisively in favour of referring ὁ ὧν to Χριστός. The Sabellian 
 use of the text to prove that the Father became Man, and the 
 orthodox replies shewing that this was not the sense of the pas- 
 sage, equally assume that the doxological clause refers to Christ. 
 Nothing can with safety be inferred as to the received reading 
 in the Church from the general and of course prejudiced statement 
 of the Emperor Julian, that τὸν γοῦν ᾿Ιησοῦν οὔτε Παῦλος ἐτόλμησεν 
 εἰπεῖν Θεόν. §,. Cyrill. cont. Jul. x. init., Op. tom. vi. p. 327. Two 
 cursive MSS. of the twelfth century (5 and 47, cf. Meyer), are 
 the first which distinctly interpose a punctuation after σάρκα, and 
 so erect the following clause into an independent doxology ad- 
 dressed to God the Father. But the construction which is thus ren- 
 dered necessary (1) makes the participle ὧν altogether superfluous. 
 In 2 Cor. xi. 31, ὁ ὧν εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας is an exactly parallel 
 construction to that of Rom. ix. 5. Nothing but strong anti-theo- 
 logical bias can explain the facility with which the natural force of 
 the passage is at once recognised in the former and denied in the 
 latter case (see Prof. Jowett in loc., and Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 194, 
 who begs the question,—“ Christus ist noch wesentlich Mensch, 
 nicht Gott.”). It need scarcely be added that there is no authority 
 for transposing 6 ὧν into ὧν 6, in order to evade the natural force 
 of the participle. (2) The construction which the isolation of 
 the clause renders necessary violates the invariable usage of Bibli- 
 cal Greek. “If the Apostle had wished to express ‘God, Who is 
 over all, be blessed for ever,’ he must, according to the unvarying 
 usage of the New Testament and the LXX. (which follows the use 
 of 9)72), have placed εὐλογητός first, and written εὐλογητὸς ὁ dv k.7.A. 
 There are about forty places in the Old Testament and five in 
 the New in which this formula of doxology occurs, and in every 
 case the arrangement is the same, ‘Blessed be the God Who is 
 over all, for ever.” (Christ. Rem. April 1856, p. 469.) It may 
 be added that in Ps. Ixvii. 19, LXX. (cited by Winer, N. T. Gr. 
 Eng. Tr. p. 573) Κύριος ὁ Θεὸς εὐλογητὸς, εὐλογητὸς Κύριος, the first 
 
VI.) God blessed for ever.” ᾿ val 
 
 Christ’s Godhead is not stated in this precise form 
 elsewhere in St. Paul’s writingst, that admission 
 cannot be held to justify us in violently breaking 
 up the passage in order to escape from its natural 
 meaning. Nor in point of fact does St. Paul say 
 
 εὐλογητὸς has no corresponding word in the Hebrew text, and 
 appears to be interpolated. Dean Alford observes that 1 Kings 
 x. 6; 2 Chron. ix. 8; Job i. 21; Ps. exii. 2, are not exceptions ; 
 “since in all of them the verb εἴη or γένοιτο is expressed, requiring 
 the substantive to follow it closely.” We may be very certain that, 
 if ἐπὶ πάντων Θεύς could be proved to be an unwarranted reading, 
 no scholar, however Socinianizing his bias, would hesitate to say 
 that 6 dv εὐλογητός «.7.4, should be referred to the proper name 
 which precedes it. 
 
 t Our Lord is not, we are reminded, called εὐλογητός elsewhere 
 in the New Testament. But εὐλογημένος is certainly applied to 
 Him, St. Matt. xxi. 9; St. Luke xix. 28; and as regards εὐλο- 
 yntés, the remarkable fewness of doxologies addressed to Him 
 might account for the omission. The predicate could only be 
 refused to Him on the ground of His being, in the belief of 
 St. Paul, merely a creature. It is arbitrary to maintain that no 
 word can possibly be applied to a given subject because there is 
 not a second instance of such application within a limited series of 
 books. Against ἐπὶ πάντων Θεός, besides the foregoing objection, 
 it is further urged that it cannot be applied to our Lord, Who, 
 although consubstantial with, is subordinate to, the Eternal Father, 
 and withal personally distinct from Him; cf. Eph. iv. 5; 1 Cor. 
 viii. 6, where, however, His Manhood, as being essential to His 
 mediation, is specially in the Apostle’s eye. But St. Paul does not 
 eall our Lord ὁ ἐπὶ πάντων Ocds—the article would lay the expression 
 open to a direct Sabellian construction ; St. Paul says that Christ 
 is ἐπὶ πάντων Θεός, where the Father of course is not included among 
 τὰ πάντα, 1 Cor. xvil. 27 ; and the sense corresponds substantially 
 with Acts x. 36, Rom. x. 12. It asserts that Christ is internal 
 to the Divine Essence, without denying His personal distinctness 
 from, or His filial relation to, the Father. Cf Alford in loc. ΗΝ 
 Usteri, Entwickelung des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffes, p. 309 566. ; 
 Olshausen, Comm. in loc. 
 
472 Christ is “our Great God and Saviour.” [Lecr. 
 
 more in this famous text than when in writing to 
 Titus he describes Christians as “looking for the 
 blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our 
 great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who gave 
 Himself for us".” Here the grammar apparently, 
 and the context certainly, oblige us to recognise 
 the identity of “our Saviour Jesus Christ” and “our 
 Great God.” As a matter of fact, Christians are 
 not waiting for any manifestation of the Father. 
 And He Who gave Himself for us can be none 
 other than our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 Reference has already been made to that most 
 solemn passage in the Epistle to the Philippians, 
 which is read by the Church in the Communion 
 
 u Tit. 11. 13: προσδεχόμενοι τὴν μακαρίαν ἐλπίδα καὶ ἐπιφάνειαν τῆς 
 δόξης τοῦ μεγάλου Θεοῦ καὶ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ὃς ἔδωκεν 
 ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν. ‘ Nicht Gott und Christus, sondern bloss Chris- 
 tus gemeint ist ; denn es ist von der herrlichen Wiederkunft Christi 
 die Rede, und eine Erscheinung Gottes (of the Father) auzuneh- 
 men, wire ausser aller Analogie; auch bediirfte Gott der Vater 
 nicht erst des erhebenden und preisenden epithets μέγας, vielmehr 
 deutet auch dieses auf Christum.” (Usteri, Lehrbegriff, p. 310.) To 
 these arguments Bishop Ellicott adds that the subsequent allusion 
 to our Lord’s profound Self-humiliation accounts for St. Paul’s 
 ascribing to Him, by way of reparation, “a title, otherwise unusual, 
 that specially and antithetically marks His glory,” and that two 
 ante-Nicene writers, Clemens Alexandr. (Protrep. 7) and St. Hip- 
 polytus, together with the great bulk of post-Nicene fathers, al- 
 though not all, concur in this interpretation. And the bishop holds 
 that grammatically there is a presumption in favour of this 
 interpretation, but, on account of the defining genitive ἡμῶν, 
 nothing more. Nevertheless, taking the great strength of the 
 exegetical evidence into account, he sees in this text a “ direct, 
 definite, and even studied declaration of the Divinity of the Eternal 
 Son.” See his note, and Wordsworth in loc. ; Middleton, Greek 
 Article, ed. Rose, p. 393. 
 
ΜΙ. Christ “thought it not robbery to equal God.’ 473 
 
 Service on Palm Sunday Χ, in order, as it would seem, 
 to remind Christians of the real dignity of their 
 suffering Lord. Our Lord’s Divine Nature is here 
 represented as the seat of His Eternal Personality ; 
 His Human Nature is a clothing which He assumed 
 in Time. “Ev μορφῆ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων, . . . . ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε, 
 μορφὴν δούλου AaBevy. It is impossible not to be 
 struck by the mysterious statement that Christ, 
 being in the form of God, did not look upon 
 equality with God (τὸ εἶναι ἶσα Θεῷ) as a prize to be 
 jealously clutched at (οὐκ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο). It has 
 been maintained that St. Paul is here contrasting the 
 apostolic belief in our Lord’s condescending love with 
 an early Gnostic speculation respecting an Aton. 
 This Alon desired to grasp directly, and by a violent 
 assault, the invisible and incomprehensible God ; 
 whereas God could only be really known to and con- 
 templated by the Monogenes. The ambition of the 
 
 x See Epistle for Sunday next before Easter. 
 
 y Phil. ii. 6, 7. “Die Gnostiker sprachen von einem Aeon, wel- 
 cher das absolute Wesen Gottes auf unmittelbare Weise erfassen 
 wollte, und weil er so das an sich Unmédgliche erstrebte aus dem 
 πλήρωμα in das κένωμα herabfiel. Dieser Aeon begieng so gleichsam 
 einem Raub, weil er, der in der Qualitaét eines gittlichen Wesens 
 an sich die Fahigkeit hatte, sich mit dem Absoluten zu vereinigen, 
 diese Identitit, welche erst durch den ganzen Weltprocess realisirt 
 werden konnte, gleichsam sprungweise, mit Einem Male, durch 
 einem gewaltsamen Act, oder wie durch einen Raub an sich reissen 
 wollte. So erhalt erst die bildliche vorstellung eines ἁἅρπαγμός ihre 
 ergentliche Bedeutung.” (Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 266.) Compare, how- 
 ever, Meyer, Philipperbrief, p. 68, Anmerkung. Baur has spun 
 a large web out of St. Irenzeus, Cont. Her. I. 2.1. 2. The notion 
 that the AZon sought to attain an identity with God,—and this 
 assumption is necessary in order to construct a real parallel with 
 St. Paul’s words,— has no foundation in the text of St. Lrenzeus, 
 
474 Christ “in the form of God” and “equal with God.” [Lucr. 
 
 fabled Afton is thus said to be in contrast with the 
 ‘self-emptying’ of the Eternal Christ. But such a 
 contrast, even if it had been in the Apostle’s mind, 
 would have implied the Absolute Pre-existent Di- 
 vinity of Christ. Christ voluntarily lays aside the 
 glory which was His; the fabled Alon would vio- 
 lently grasp a glory which could not nghtfully 
 belong to him. And even if this explanation of 
 the energetic negative phrase of the Apostle should 
 not be accepted, it is in any case clear that the 
 force of St. Paul’s moral lesson in the whole pas- 
 sage must depend upon the real Divinity of the 
 Incarnate and Self-immolating Christ. The point 
 of our Lord’s example lies in His emptying Him- 
 self of the glory or ‘form’ of His Eternal God- 
 head. Worthless indeed would have been the force 
 of His example had He been in reality a created 
 Being, who abstained from grasping at Divine pre- 
 rogatives which a creature could not have arrogated 
 to himself without impious folly% Christians are 
 to have in themselves the Mind of Christ Jesus ; 
 but what that Mind is they can only understand by 
 
 z The Arian gloss upon this text ran thus: ὅτε θεὸς dv ἐλάττων 
 οὐχ ἥρπασε τὸ εἶναι ἴσα τῷ Θεῷ τῷ μεγάλῳ καὶ μείζονι. St. Chrysostom 
 comments thus: Καὶ μικρὸς καὶ μέγας Θεὸς ἔνι ; καὶ τὰ Ἑλληνικὰ τοῖς τῆς 
 ἐκκλησίας δόγμασιν ἐπεισάγετε;... El γὰρ μικρὸς, πῶς καὶ Θεός ; (Hom. 
 vi. in loc.) The μορφὴ θεοῦ is apparently the manifested glory of 
 Deity, implying of course the reality of the Deity so manifested. 
 Compare δόξα, St. John xvii. 5. Of this μορφή (as distinct from 
 the Deity Itself) our Lord ἐκένωσεν ἑαυτόν. The word ὑπάρχειν 
 points to our Lord’s ‘original subsistence’ in the splendour of the 
 Godhead. The expression ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχειν is virtually equi- 
 valent to τὸ εἶναι ἴσα Θεῷ. See Dean Alford’s exhaustive note upon 
 this passage. 
 
VI.] Christ the “Image of the Invisible God.” 475 
 
 considering what His Apostle believed Christ Jesus 
 to have been before He took on Him the form of 
 a servant and became obedient unto death. 
 
 Perhaps the most exhaustive assertion of our 
 Lord’s Godhead which is to be found in the writings 
 of St. Paul, is that which occurs in the Epistle to the 
 Colossians*. This magnificent dogmatic passage is 
 introduced, after the Apostle’s manner, with a strictly 
 practical object. The Colossian Church was exposed 
 to the imtellectual attacks of a theosophic doctrine, 
 which degraded Jesus Christ to the rank of one of 
 a long series of inferior beings, supposed to range 
 between mankind and the supreme God. Against 
 this position St. Paul asserts that Christ is the εἰκὼν 
 τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ aopatov—the Image of the Invisible 
 God», The expression εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ supplements 
 the title of “the Son.” As ‘the Son, Christ is de- 
 rived eternally from the Father, and He is of One 
 Substance with the Father. As ‘the Image,’ Christ 
 is, in that One Substance, the exact likeness of the 
 Father, in all things except being the Father. The 
 Son is the Image of the Father, not as the -Father, 
 but as God: the Son is ‘the Image of God.’ The 
 εἰκών 18 indeed originally God’s unbegun, unending 
 reflection of Himself in Himself; but the εἰκών is 
 also the Organ Whereby God, in His Essence in- 
 visible, reveals Himself to His creatures. Thus the 
 εἰκών 15, 80 to speak, naturally the Creator, since cre- 
 ation is the first revelation which God has made 
 of Himself. Man is the highest point in the visible 
 universe; in man God’s attributes are most lumi- 
 nously exhibited; man is the image and glory of 
 
 a Col. i, 15-17. b Cf. 2 Cor. iv. 4: ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 
476 Christ “ Begotten before every creature.” [ Lxcr. 
 
 God*. But Christ is the Adequate Image of God, 
 God’s Self-reflection in His Own thought, eternally 
 present with Himself. As the εἰκών, Christ is the 
 πρωτότοκος πάσης Kticews; that 1s to say, not the 
 First in rank among created beings, but begotten 
 before any created beings. That this is a true 
 sense of the expression is etymologically certain ; 
 
 © Cor. xi. 7: εἰκὼν καὶ δόξα Θεοῦ. 
 
 d As εἰκών here defines our Lord’s relation to God the Father, so 
 πρωτότοκος defines His relation to creation. βούλεται δεῖξαι ὅτι πρὸ 
 πάσης τῆς κτίσεώς ἐστιν ὁ Yids* πῶς ὧν ; διὰ γενήσεως" οὐκοῦν Kal τῶν 
 ἀγγέλων πρότερος, καὶ οὕτως, ὥστε καὶ αὐτὸς ἔκτισεν αὐτούς. (Theophyl. 
 in loc.) Christ is not the first of created spirits ; He exists before 
 them, and as One ‘begotten not made.’ “ Der genit. πάσης κτίσεως 
 ist nicht Genit. partitiv. (obwohl diess noch de Wette fiir unzweifel- 
 haft hilt), weil πᾶσα κτίσις nicht die ganze Schépfung heisst, mithin 
 nicht die Kategorie oder Gesammtheit aussagen kann, zu welcher 
 Christus als ihr erstgebornes Individuum gehore: es heisst, jed- 
 wedes Cleschipf (5. Bernhardy, p. 139) d. h. eher geboren als jedes 
 Geschopf. Vrgl. Bahr z. St. u. Ernesti Ursprung ἃ. Siinde, p. 241. 
 Anders ist das Verhiiltniss Apoe. i. 5: πρωτότοκος τῶν νεκρῶν, WO τῶν 
 νεκρῶν die Kategorie anzeigt, vrgl. πρωτότοκος ἐν πολλοῖς ἀδελφοῖς 
 (Rom. viii. 29). Unser Genit. ist ganz zu fassen wie der ver- 
 gleichende Genit. bei πρῶτος Joh. i. 15, 30; Winer, Ὁ. 218; 
 Fritzsche ad Rom. 11. p. 421. Das Vergleichungs-Moment ist das 
 Verhiltniss der Zeit, und zwar in Betreff des Ursprungs : da aber 
 letzterer bei jeder κτίσις anders ist als bei Christo, so ist nicht 
 πρωτόκτιστος oder πρωτόπλαστος gesagt, welches von Christo eine 
 gleiche Art der Enstehung wie von der Creatur anzeigen wiirde, 
 sondern πρωτότοκος gewiihlt, welches in der Zeitvergleichung des 
 Ursprungs die Absonderliche Ar¢ der Enstehung in Betreff Christi 
 anzeigt, dass er nimlich von Gott nicht geschaffen sei, wie die 
 anderen Wesen, bei denen diess in der Benennung κτίσις liegt, 
 sondern geboren, aus dem Wesen Gottes gleichartig hervorgegangen. 
 Richtig Vheodoret : οὐχ ὡς ἀδελφὴν ἔχων τὴν κτίσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς πρὸ πάσης 
 κτίσεως γεννηθείς. Wortwidrig ist daher die Arianische Erklirung, 
 dass Christus als das erste Geschipf Gottes bezeichnet werde.” 
 Meyer, Kolosserbrief, p. 184. 
 
VI.] ~~ Christ the Author and the End of created life. 477 
 
 but it is also the only sense which is in real 
 harmony with the relation in which, according to 
 the context, Christ is said to stand to the created 
 universe. That relation, according to St. Paul, is 
 threefold. Of all things in earth and heaven, of 
 things seen and unseen, of the various orders of the 
 angelic hierarchy, of thrones, of dominions, of princi- 
 palities, of powers—it is said that they were cre- 
 ated in Christ, by Christ, and for Christ. “Ev αὐτῷ, 
 exticOy .... Ol αὐτοῦ, καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν ἔκτισταιθ. In Him. 
 There was no creative process external to and in- 
 dependent of Him ; since the archetypal forms after 
 which the creatures are modelled and the sources of 
 their strength and consistency of being, eternally 
 reside in Him’. By Him. The force which has 
 summoned the worlds out of nothingness into being, 
 
 e Compare Rom. xi. 36: ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ δ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ 
 πάντα. ΑΒ in this passage the Apostle is speaking of God, without 
 hinting at any distinction of Persons within the Godhead, he 
 writes ἐξ αὐτοῦ, not ἐν airé. The Eternal Father is the ultimate 
 Source of all life, both intra and extra Deum; while the production 
 of created beings depends immediately upon the Son. The other 
 two prepositions—the last being theologically of most import— 
 correspond in the two passages. 
 
 f ἐκτίσθη describes the act of creation ; ἐκτίσται points to creation 
 as a completed and enduring fact. In ἐν αὐτῷ, the preposition 
 signifies that “in Christo beruhete (ursichlich) der Act der Schép- 
 fung, so dass die Vollziehung derselben in Seinen Person begriindet 
 war, und obne ihn nicht geschehen wire.” Cf. St. John i. 3: χωρὶς 
 αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν, ὃ γέγονεν. But although the preposition im- 
 mediately expresses the dependence of created life upon Christ as 
 its cause, it hints at the reason of this dependence, namely, that 
 our Divine Lord is the causa exemplaris of creation, the κόσμος 
 νοητός, the Archetype of all created things, “die Dinge ihrer 
 Idee nach, Selbst, er tragt ihre Wesenheit in sich.” (Olshausen 
 in loc.) 
 
478 Christ the Author and the End of created life. {Lxcr. 
 
 and which upholds them in being, is His; He wields 
 it; He is the One Producer and Sustainer of all 
 created existence. Hor Him. He is not, as Arianism 
 afterwards pretended, merely an inferior workman, 
 creating for the glory of a higher Master, for a God 
 superior to Himself. He creates for Himself; He is 
 the End of created things as well as their immediate 
 Source ; and living for Him is to every creature at 
 once the explanation and the law of its bemg. For 
 “He is before all things, and by Him all things con- 
 sist¢.” After such a statement it follows naturally 
 that the πλήρωμα, that is to say, the entire cycle of the 
 Divine attributes, considered as a series of powers 
 or forces, dwells in Jesus Christ; and this, not in 
 any merely ideal or transcendental manner, but with 
 that actual reality which men attach to the presence 
 of material bodies which they can feel and measure 
 through the organs of sense. “Ev αὐτῷ κατοικεῖ πᾶν τὸ 
 πλήρωμα τῆς θεότητος σωματικῶς " Although through- 
 
 & Col. 1. 17: καὶ αὐτός ἐστι πρὸ πάντων, καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέ- 
 στηκε. “Und Er (Er eben), durch welchen und fiir welchen τὰ 
 πάντα ἔκτισται, hat eine friihere Existenz als Alles, und das Simmt- 
 liche besteht in ihm..... πρὸ πάντων Wie πρωτότοκος von der Zeit, 
 nicht vom Range ; wiederholt und nachdriicklich betont wird von 
 P. die Priiexistenz Christi. Statt ἔστε hatte er ἦν sagen kdnnen 
 (Joh. i. 1); jenes aber ist gesagt, wiel Er die Permanenz des Seins 
 Christi im Auge hat und darstellt, nicht aber historisch tiber ihn 
 berichten will, was nur in den Hiilfsiitzen mit ὅτι vers. 16 τι. 19, 
 geschieht.” (Meyer in loc; ef. St. John viii. 58.) 
 
 h Col. ii. g: πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα. “ Wird durch τῆς θεότητος niher 
 bestimmt, welches angiebt, was seiner ganzen Fiille nach, d.i. nicht 
 etwa blos theilweise, sondern in seiner Gesammtheit, in Christo 
 wohne..... ἡ θεότης die Gottheit (Lucian, Iearom. 9 ; Plut. Mor. 
 p. 415, C.) das Abstractum von 6 Θεός, ist zu unterscheiden von ἡ 
 θειότης dem Abstractum von θεῖος (Rom. i. 20; Sap. xviii. 9; Lucian 
 
--- 
 
 VI.] Christianity based on the Divinity of Christ. 479 
 
 out this Epistle the word λόγος is never introduced, 
 it is plain that the εἰκών of St. Paul is equivalent 
 
 in His rank and functions to the Adyos of St. John. 
 
 Each exists prior to creation; each is the One Agent 
 in creation ; each is a Divine Person; each is equal 
 with God and shares His essential Life; each is 
 really none other than God. 
 
 Indeed with this passage in the Colossians only 
 two others can, as a whole, be compared in the 
 entire compass of the New Testament. Allusion has 
 already been made to the prologue of St. John’s Gos- 
 pel; and it is no less obvious to refer to the opening 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Most of 
 those writers who earnestly reject the Pauline au- 
 thorship of that Epistle admit that it is of primary 
 canonical authority, and assign to its author the 
 highest place of honour in ‘the school of St. Paul.’ 
 There are reasons for believing that, at the utmost, 
 it is not more distantly related to his mind than is 
 the Gospel of St. Luke; if indeed it does not fur- 
 nish a culminating instance of the spiritual versa- 
 tility of the great Apostle, addressing himself to 
 a set of circumstances unlike any other of which 
 the records of his ministry have given us infor- 
 mation. Throughout the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 a comparison is instituted between Christianity 
 
 de Calumn. 17). Jenes ist Deitas, das Grttsein, d.i. die gittliche 
 Wesenheit Gottheit ; dieses aber die Divinitas, d.i. die gottliche 
 Qualitdt, Gottlichkeit.” Thus in this passage the πλήρωμα must be 
 understood in the metaphysical sense of the Divine Essence, even 
 if in Col. i. το it is to be referred to the fullness of Divine grace. 
 Contrast too the permanent fact involved in the present κατοκεῖ 
 of the one passage with the historical εὐδόκησε of the other. 
 
480 Christ contrasted with Moses and Aaron. [Lecr. 
 
 and Judaism; and this comparison turns partly on 
 the spiritual advantages which belong to the two 
 systems respectively, and partly on the relative dig- 
 nity of the persons who represent the two dispen- 
 sations, and who mediate accordingly, in whatever 
 senses, between God and humanity. Thus our Lord 
 as the one great High-priest is contrasted with 
 Aaron: and his successors. Thus too as the one per- 
 fect Revealer of God He is compared with Moses 
 and the Jewish prophets. As the antitype of Melchi- 
 sedec, Christ is a higher Priest than Aaron!; as a Son 
 reigning over the house of God, Christ is a greater 
 Ruler than the legislator whose praise it was that 
 he had been a faithful servant™. As Author of a 
 final, complete, and unique revelation, Christ stands 
 altogether above the prophets by whom God had 
 revealed His Mind in many modes and in many 
 fragments, in revelations very various as to their 
 forms, and, at certain epochs, almost incessant in 
 their occurrence. But if the superiority of Chris- 
 tianity to Judaism was to be completely established, a 
 further comparison was necessary. The later Jewish 
 
 LN Ie) oes ee Sgt ΠῚ. k Tbid. iii. 1-6. 1 Thid. vii. r-22. 
 
 m Thid. ili. 5,6: καὶ Μωσῆς μὲν πιστὸς ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ οἴκῳ αὐτοῦ, ὡς 
 θεράπων, .... Χριστὸς δὲ, ὡς vids ἐπὶ τὸν οἶκον αὑτοῦ, οὗ οἶκός ἐσμεν 
 ἡμεῖς. The preceding words are yet more noteworthy: Moses and 
 the house of Israel stand to Jesus Christ in the relation of creature 
 to the Creator. πλείονος yap δόξης οὗτος παρὰ Μωσῆν ἠξίωται, καθ᾽ 
 ὅσον πλείονα τιμὴν ἔχει τοῦ οἴκου 6 κατασκευάσας αὐτόν. πᾶς γὰρ οἶκος 
 κατασκευάζεται ὑπό τινος" ὁ δὲ τὰ πάντα κατασκευάσας (sc. Jesus Christ), 
 Θεός. So too the ἀπὸ Θεοῦ ζῶντος of ver. 12 refers most naturally 
 to our Lord, not to the Father. 
 
 n ΤΟΙ. 1. 1; πολυμέρως και πολυτρόπως πάλαι ὁ Θεὸς λαλήσας τοῖς 
 
 πατράσιν ἐν τοῖς προφήταις. 
 
ΜΠ Christ served and worshipped by the Angels. 481 
 
 theologians had laid much. stress upon the delivery 
 of the Sinaitic Law through+the agency of angels 
 acting as delegates for the Most High God®. The 
 Author of Christianity might be superior to Moses 
 and the prophets, but could He challenge com- 
 parison with those pure and mighty spirits before 
 whom the greatest of the sons of Israel, as beings 
 of flesh and blood, were insignificant and sinful 4 
 The answer is, that if Christ is not the peer of the 
 angels, this is because He is their Lord and Master. 
 The angels are ministers of the Divine Will; they 
 are engaged in stated services enjoimed on them 
 towards creatures lower than themselves, but re- 
 deemed by Christ’. But He, in His glory above the 
 heavens, is invested with attributes to which the 
 highest angel could never pretend. In His crucified 
 but now enthroned Humanity He is seated at the 
 right hand of the Majesty on high4; He is seated 
 there, as being Heir of all things"; the angels them- 
 selves are but a part of His vast inheritance. The 
 dignity of His titles is symbolical of His essential 
 rank’, Indeed He is expressly addressed as Godt ; 
 
 © Heb. ii. 2: ὁ δὲ ἀγγέλων λαληθεὶς λόγος. Acts vil. 38: μετὰ τοῦ 
 ἀγγέλου τοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτῷ ἐν τῷ ὄρει Σινᾶ. Ibid. ver. 53: οἵτινες ἐλά- 
 Bere τὸν νόμον εἰς διαταγὰς ἀγγέλων. Gal. iil. 19: ὁ νόμος... προσετέθη 
 ... διαταγεὶς δι’ ἀγγέλων, 
 
 P Ibid. i. 14: λειτουργικὰ πνεύματα, εἰς διακονίαν ἀποστελλόμενα διὰ 
 τοὺς μέλλοντας κληρονομεῖν σωτηρίαν. 
 
 4 Ibid. ver. 3: ἐκάθισεν ἐν δεξιᾷ τῆς μεγαλωσύνης ἐν ὑψηλοῖς. 
 
 t [bid. ver. 2: κληρονόμον πάντων. 
 
 5. Ibid. ver. 4: τοσούτῳ κρείττων γενόμενος τῶν ἀγγέλων, ὅσῳ διαφορώ- 
 τερον παρ᾽ αὐτοὺς κεκληρονόμηκεν ὄνομα. 
 
 t Ibid. ver. 8: πρὸς δὲ τὸν Υἱὸν, “ὁ θρόνος σου, ὁ Θεὺς, εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα 
 τοῦ αἰῶνος. Ps, xly. 6. 
 
 Tj 
 
482 Christ served and worshipped by the Angels. [Lxcr. 
 
 and when He is termed the Son of God, or the Son, 
 the full sense of that term is drawn out in lan- 
 guage adopted, as it seems, from the Book of Wis- 
 dom", and not less explicit than that which we 
 have been considering in the Epistle to the Colos- 
 sians, although of a distinct type. That He is One 
 with God as having streamed forth eternally from 
 the Father’s Essence, like a ray of light from the 
 parent fire with which it is unbrokenly joined, is 
 implied in the expression ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης". That 
 He is both personally distinct from, and yet literally 
 equal to, Him of Whose Essence He is the adequate 
 imprint, is taught us in the phrase χαρακτὴρ τῆς 
 ὑποστάσεως. By Him, therefore, the universe was 
 made’; and at this moment all things are preserved 
 and upheld in being by the fiat of His almighty 
 word*, What created angel can possibly compare 
 with Him? In the Name which He bears and which 
 unveils His Nature’; in the honours which the 
 heavenly intelligences themselves may not refuse to 
 pay Him, even at the moment of His profound 
 Self-humiliation®; in the contrast between their 
 ministerial duties and His Divine and unchanging 
 Royalty’; in His relationship both to earth and 
 heaven as their Creator®; and in the majestic cer- 
 
 u Wisd. vii. 26; cf. p. 94. x Heb. 1. 3. y Ibid. 
 
 z Heb. i. 2: δι᾽ οὗ καὶ τοὺς αἰῶνας ἐποίησεν. 
 
 a ΤΌΙΑ. ver. 3: φέρων τε τὰ πάντα τῷ ῥήματι τῆς δυνάμεως αὑτοῦ. 
 
 b Ibid. ver. 5: Υἱὸς μου εἶ σύ. 
 
 ¢ Thid. ver. 6: προσκυνησάτωσαν αὐτῷ πάντες ἄγγελοι Θεοῦ. Psalm 
 xevil. 7. 
 
 ἃ Heb. i. 7-9, 14. 
 
 e [bid. ver. 10: σὺ κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς, Κύριε, τὴν γῆν ἐθεμελίωσας, καὶ ἔργα 
 
 τῶν χειρῶν σου εἰσὶν οἱ οὐρανοί. 
 
VI.] The doctrine not confined to particular texts of St. Paul. 488 
 
 tainty of His triumph over all who shall oppose the 
 advance of His kingdom f,—we recognise a Being, for 
 Whose Person, although It be clothed in a finite 
 Human Nature &, there is no real place between hu- 
 manity and God. While the Epistle to the Hebrews: 
 lays almost more emphasis than any other book of 
 the New Testament upon Christ’s true Humanity®, it 
 is nevertheless certain that no other book more expli- 
 citly asserts the reality of His Divine prerogatives. 
 
 3. Enough has been said, my brethren, to shew that 
 the Apostle Paul believed in the Divinity of Jesus 
 Christ, not in the moral sense of Socinianism, not in 
 the ditheistic sense of Arianism, but in the literal, 
 metaphysical, and absolute sense of the Catholic 
 Church. Those passages in his writings which may 
 appear to interfere with this conclusion are certainly 
 to be referred either to his anxiety to insist upon 
 the reality of our Lord’s Manhood, or to his recog- 
 nition of the truth that Christ’s Eternal Sonship is 
 Itself derived from the Person of the Father. From 
 the Father Christ eternally receives an equality of 
 life and power, and to Him therefore, as a recipient, 
 He is in a sense subordinate. We have indeed al- 
 ready seen that Christ’s eternal derivation from the 
 Father is set forth nowhere more fully than in 
 the Gospel of St. John, and by the mouth of our 
 Lord Himself. But the doctrine before us, as it 
 hes in the writings of St. Paul, is not to be only 
 measured by an analysis of those particular texts 
 
 f Heb. i. 13: πρὸς τίνα δὲ τῶν ἀγγέλων εἴρηκέ ποτε, ‘Kdbou ἐκ δεξιῶν 
 μὴ - ‘ > Ld c , ~ N fel > 
 μου, ἕως ἂν θῶ τοὺς ἐχθρούς σου ὑποπόδιον τῶν ποδῶν σου ; 
 & ΤΡΊΑ. ii, 2; πιστὸν ὄντα τῷ ποιήσαντι αὐτὸν. 
 h Tbid. ii. 14, 18; iv. 15; v. 7. 
 it 2 
 
484. The doctrine bound up with St. Paul’s whole mind. [Lxct. 
 
 which proclaim it in terms. The doctrine is not in 
 suspense until such time as the critics may have 
 finally decided by their microscopical and chemical 
 apparatus whether the bar of the © in a famous pas- 
 sage of St. Paul’s first Epistle to Timothy is or is not 
 really discoverable in the Alexandrian manuscript. 
 The doctrine lies too deep to be affected by such 
 contingencies. It is indeed, as we have seen, as- 
 serted by St. Paul with sufficient explicitness ; but 
 it is implied more widely than it is asserted. Just 
 as it is inseparable from the whole didactic activity 
 of our Lord Himself, so is it inextricably interwoven 
 with the deepest and most vital teaching of His 
 Apostle. You cannot make St. Paul a preacher of 
 Humanitarianism without warping, mutilating, de- 
 grading his whole recorded mind. Particular texts, 
 when duly isolated from the Apostle’s general mind, 
 may be pressed with plausible effect imto the ser- 
 vice of Arian or Humanitarian theories; but take 
 St. Paul’s teaching as a whole, and you must admit 
 that it centres in One Who is at once and truly 
 God as well as Man. 
 
 St. Paul never speaks of Jesus Christ as a pupil 
 of less genius and originality might speak of a 
 master in moral truth, whose ideas he was recom- 
 mending, expanding, defining, defending, popular- 
 izing, among the men of a later generation. St. Paul 
 never professes to be working on the common level 
 of human power and knowledge with a master from 
 whom he differed, as an inferior teacher might differ, 
 only in the degree of his capacity and authority. 
 St. Paul always writes and speaks as becomes 
 the slave of Jesus. He is indeed a most willing 
 
V1.) — Christology of St. Paul’s missionary sermons. 485 
 
 and enthusiastic slave, reverently gathering up 
 and passionately enforcing all that touches the 
 work and glory of that Divine Master to Whom he 
 has freely consecrated his liberty and his hfe. In 
 St. Paul’s earliest sermons we do not find the moral 
 precepts of Jesus a more prominent element than the 
 glories of His Person and His redemptive work. 
 That the reverse is the case is at once apparent 
 from a study of the great discourse which was pro- 
 nounced in the synagogue of the Pisidian Antioch. 
 The past history of Israel is first summarized from 
 a point of view which regards it as purely prepara- 
 tory to the manifestation of the Saviour!; and then 
 the true Messiahship of Jesus is enforced by an ap- 
 peal to the testimony of John the Baptist*, to the cor- 
 respondence of the circumstances of Christ’s Death 
 with the prophetic announcements!, and to the histo- 
 rical fact of His Resurrection from the grave™, which 
 had been witnessed by the apostles as distinctly” as 
 it had been foretold by the prophets®. Thus the 
 Apostle reaches his practical conclusion. ‘To believe 
 in Jesus Christ is the one condition of receiving re- 
 mission of sins and (how strangely must such words 
 have sounded in Jewish ears!) justification from all 
 things from which men could not be justified by 
 the divinely-given law of Moses?. To deny Jesus 
 Christ is to incur those penalties which the Hebrew 
 
 i Acts xiii. 17-23. k Jbid. vers. 24, 25. 
 1 Thid. vers. 26-30. m Tbid. ver. 30. 
 n [bid. ver. 31. 9 Ibid. vers. 32-37. 
 
 P Ibid. vers. 38, 39: διὰ τούτου ὑμῖν ἄφεσις ἁμαρτιῶν καταγγέλλεται" 
 καὶ ἀπὸ πάντων ὧν οὐκ ἠδυνήθητε ἐν τῷ νόμῳ Μωῦσέως δικαιωθῆναι, ἐν τούτῳ 
 
 nw , ~ 
 mas ὁ πιστεύων δικαιοῦται. 
 
480 Christology of δέ. Paul’s missionary sermons.  [Lxcr. 
 
 Scriptures denounced against scornful indifference to 
 the voice of God and to the present tokens of His 
 Love and Power‘. 
 
 At first sight, St. Paul’s sermon from the steps of 
 the Areopagus might seem to be rather Theistic than 
 Christian. St. Paul had to gain the ear of a ‘phi- 
 losophical’ audience which imagined that “Jesus and 
 the Resurrection” were two “strange demons?” who 
 might presently be added to the stock of deities 
 already venerated by the Athenian populace. St. Paul 
 is therefore eager to set forth the lofty spirituality 
 of the God of Christendom ; but, although he in- 
 sists chiefly on those Divine attributes which are 
 observable in nature and Providence, his sermon 
 ends with Jesus. After shewing what God is in 
 Himeelf§, and what are the natural relations which 
 subsist between humanity and Godt, St. Paul touches 
 the conscience of his Athenian audience by a sharp 
 denunciation of the vulgar idolatry which it de- 
 spised¥, and calls men to repent by a reference to 
 the coming judgment, which conscience itself fore- 
 shadowed. But the certainty of that judgment has 
 been attested by the historical fact of the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus ; the risen Jesus is the future Judge*. 
 
 Again, listen to St. Paul as with fatherly authority 
 and tenderness he is taking his leave of his fellow- 
 labourers in Christ, the presbyters of Ephesus, on 
 
 a Acts xiii. 40: βλέπετε οὖν μὴ ἐπέλθῃ ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς τὸ εἰρημένον ἐν τοῖς 
 προφήταις" “Ἴδετε, οἱ καταφρονηταὶ, καὶ θαυμάσατε καὶ ἀφανίσθητε" ὅτι 
 ἔργον ἐγὼ ἐργάζομαι ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ὑμῶν. Hab. i. 5. 
 
 r Acts xvil. 18: ξένων δαιμονίων δοκεῖ καταγγελεὺς εἶναι. 
 
 s Ibid. vers. 24, 25. t Ibid. vers. 26-28. 
 
 u Tbid. vers. 29, 30. x Ibid. ver. 31. 
 
VI.) = Christology of St. Paul’s apologetic discourses. 487 
 
 the strand of Miletus. Here the Apostle’s address 
 moves incessantly round the Person of Jesus. He 
 protests that to lead men to repentance towards 
 God and faith towards the Lord Jesus Christ’, had 
 been the single object of his public and private 
 ministrations at Ephesus. He counts not his life 
 dear to himself, if only he can complete the mis- 
 sion which is so precious to him because he has 
 received it from the Lord Jesus%. The presbyters 
 are bidden to “shepherd the Church of God which 
 He has purchased with His Own Blood*;” and the 
 Apostle concludes by quoting a saying of the Lord 
 Jesus which has not been recorded in the Gospels, 
 but which was then reverently treasured in the 
 Church, to the effect that “it is more blessed to 
 give than to receive.” 
 
 In the two apologetic discourses delivered, the one 
 from the stairs of the tower of Antonia before the 
 angry multitude, and the other in the council- 
 chamber at Czesarea before King Agrippa II. of 
 Chalcis, St. Paul justifies his missionary activity by 
 dwelling upon the circumstances which accompanied 
 
 y Acts xx. 21: διαμαρτυρόμενος .... τὴν εἰς τὸν Θεὸν μετάνοιαν, καὶ 
 πίστιν τὴν εἰς τὸν Κύριον ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστόν. 
 
 z Ibid. ver. 24. 
 
 a Tbid. xx. 28: ποιμαίνειν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ [Kupiov, Tisch. al.] 
 ἣν περιεποιήσατο διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου. See Dr. Wordsworth’s note 
 in loc. In the third edition of his Greek Testament Dean Alford 
 restored the reading rod Θεοῦ, which he had abandoned for Κυρίου 
 in the two former editions. Nothing can be added to the argu- 
 ment of the note in his fifth edition. For Κυρίου are A, C, D, E ; 
 for Θεοῦ, B, δὲ, Syr., Vulg. 
 
 Ὁ Thid. xxii. 35: μνημονεύειν τε τῶν λόγων τοῦ Κυρίου ᾿Ιησοῦ, ὅτι 
 
 ἮΝ “ ΄ 
 αὐτὸς εἶπε. ‘ Μακάριόν ἐστι μᾶλλον διδόναι ἢ λαμβάνειν.᾽ 
 
488 Christology of St. Paul’s apologetic discourses. {Lincr. 
 
 and immediately followed his conversion. Everything 
 had turned upon a fact which the Apostle abundantly 
 insists upon,—he had received a revelation of Jesus 
 Christ in His heavenly glory. It was Jesus Who had 
 spoken to St. Paul from heaven’; it was Jesus Who 
 had revealed Himself as persecuted in His suffering 
 Church ; it was to Jesus that St. Paul had surren- 
 dered his moral liberty’; it was from Jesus that he 
 had received specific orders to go into Damascus’; 
 Jesus had commissioned him to be a minister and 
 witness both of what he had seen, and of the truths 
 which were yet to be disclosed to him’; it was by 
 Jesus that he was sent both to Jews and Gentiles, 
 “to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness 
 to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, 
 that,” continued the Heavenly Speaker, “they may 
 receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among 
 them which are sanctified by faith that is in Me».” 
 It was Jesus Who had appeared to St. Paul when 
 he was in an ecstasy in the Temple, had bidden 
 him leave Jerusalem suddenly, and had sent him 
 to the Gentiles’ The revelation of Jesus had been 
 emphatically the turning-point of the A postle’s life; 
 it had determined the direction and had quickened 
 the intensity of his action. He could plead with 
 truth before Agrippa that he had not been disobe- 
 dient unto the heavenly vision*. But who can fail to 
 
 CVACIS ἘΣΤΙ; ΣΕΥ Τὴ, d Ibid. xxii. 8; xxvi. 15. 
 
 e Ibid. xxii. το. Γ Tbid. 
 
 8. Ibid. xxvi. 16. h bid. vers. 17, 18. 
 
 i Ibid. xxii. 17: éeyevero..... προσευχομένου μου ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ, γενέ- 
 
 σθαι με ἐν ἐκστάσει, καὶ ἰδεῖν αὐτὸν λέγοντά μοι, Σπεῦσον καὶ ἔξελθε ἐν 
 τάχει ἐξ Ἱερουσαλήμ. Ibid. ver. 21: εἰς ἔθνη μακρὰν ἐξαποστελῶ σε. 
 
 - . Εν ς so) é ay 4) ὃ , 2 \ a pigs , 
 k ΤΟΙ. xxvi. 19: οὐκ ἐγενόμην ἀπειθὴς τῇ οὐρανίῳ ὀπτασίᾳ. 
 
VI.) The doctrine, how ‘implied’ in the Pauline Epistles. 489 
 
 see that the Lord Who in His glorified Manhood thus 
 speaks to His servant from the skies, and Who is 
 withal revealed to him in the very centre of his soul!, 
 is no created being, is neither saint nor seraph, 
 but rather is the Master of consciences, the Monarch 
 Who penetrates, inhabits, and rules the secret life 
 of spirits, the King Who claims the fealty and 
 Who orders the ways of men 4 
 
 St. Paul’s popular teaching then is emphatically a 
 “preaching of Jesus Christ™.” Our Lord is always 
 the Apostle’s theme; but the degree in which His 
 Divine glory is unveiled varies with the capacities of 
 the Jewish or heathen listeners for bearmg the great 
 discovery. The doctrine is distributed, if we may so 
 speak, in a like varying manner over the whole text 
 of St. Paul’s Epistles. It lies in those greetings" by 
 which the Apostle associates Jesus Christ with God 
 the Father as the source no less than the channel of 
 the highest spiritual blessings. It is implied in the 
 benedictions which the Apostle pronounces in the 
 Name of Christ without naming the Name of God®. 
 
 1 Gal. 1. 15, 16: εὐδόκησεν ὁ Θεὸς... .. ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν Υἱὸν αὐτοῦ 
 ἀρ μαι 
 
 m Acts ix. 20; xvii. 3, 18. xxviii. 31: διδάσκων τὰ περὶ τοῦ Κυρίου 
 Ἰησοῦ. Cf. Ibid. v. 42; 2 Cor. iv. 15. 
 
 n Rom. i. 7: χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη ἀπὸ Θεοῦ Πατρὸς ἡμῶν καὶ Κυρίου 
 "Ingod Xpiorod. 1 Cor. i. 3; 2 Cor. i. 2; Gal. i. 3; Eph i. 2; 
 Phil. i. 2; Col. i. 2; 1 Thess. 1, 1; 2 Thess. i. 2; Philemon 3. In 
 1 Tim. i. 2, 2 Tim. i. 2, Tit. i. 4, ἔλεος is inserted between χάρις and 
 εἰρήνη, probably because the clergy, on account of their vast re- 
 sponsibilities, need the pitying mercy of God more than Christian 
 laymen. 
 
 © Rom. xvi. 20, 24: ἡ χάρις τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ pera 
 πάντων ὑμῶν. τ Cor, xvi. 23; 2 Cor. xiii. 13. In Gal. vi. 18, μετὰ τοῦ 
 
400 The doctrine, how ‘implied’ in the Pauline Epistles, [Τιποτ. 
 
 It underlies those early apostolical hymns, sung, as it 
 would seem, in the Redeemer’s honour? ; it justifies 
 
 πνεύματος ὑμῶν. Phil. iv. 23; 1 Thess. v. 28. 2 Thess. 11. 16: αὐτὸς 
 δὲ ὁ Κύριος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς, καὶ ὁ Θεὸς καὶ Πατὴρ ἡμῶν, ὁ ἀγαπήσας 
 ἡμᾶς καὶ δοὺς ταράκλησιν αἰωνίαν καὶ ἐλπίδα ἀγαθὴν ἐν χάριτι, παρακαλέσαι 
 ὑμῶν τὰς καρδίας, καὶ στηρίξαι ὑμᾶς ἐν παντὶ λόγῳ καὶ ἔργῳ ἀγαθῷ. 
 P Such are 1 Tim. i. 15, from a hymn on redemption. 
 Χριστὸς ᾿Ιησοῦς 
 ἦλθεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον 
 
 ἁμαρτωλοὺς σῶσαι. 
 
 And Ibid. iii. 16, from ἃ hymn on our Lord’s Incarnation and 
 triumph. 
 ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκὶ, 
 ἐδικαιώθη ἐν πνεύματι, 
 ὥφθη ἀγγέλοις, 
 ἐκηρύχθη ἐν ἔθνεσιν, 
 ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσμῳ, 
 ἀνελήφθη ἐν δόξῃ. 
 And 2 Tim. ii. 11-13, from a hymn on the glories of martyrdom. 
 εἰ συναπεθάνομεν, καὶ συζήσομεν" 
 εἰ ὑπομένομεν, καὶ συμβασιλεύσομεν" 
 εἰ ἀρνούμεθα, κἀκεῖνος ἀρνήσεται ἡμᾶς" 
 εἰ ἀπιστοῦμεν, ἐκεῖνος πιστὸς μένει" 
 
 > , ς A > » 
 ἀρνήσασθαι €AUTOV OU δύναται. 
 
 And Tit. iii. 4-7, from a sacramental hymn. 
 ὅτε δὲ ἡ χρηστότης καὶ ἡ φιλανθρωπία ἐπεφάνη τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Θεοῦ, 
 οὐκ ἐξ ἔργων τῶν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ ὧν ἐποιήσαμεν ἡμεῖς, 
 > A A A ς Low. » Ν “ 
 ἀλλὰ κατὰ τὸν αὑτοῦ ἔλεον, ἔσωσεν ἡμᾶς, 
 διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας, καὶ ἀνακαινώσεως Πνεύματος ᾿Αγίου, 
 
 οὗ ἐξέχεεν ἐφ᾽ ἡμᾶς πλουσίως, διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν, 
 
 ἵνα δικαιωθέντες τῇ ἐκείνου χάριτι, 
 
 κληρονόμοι γενώμεθα κατ᾽ ἐλπίδα ζωῆς αἰωνίου. 
 
 Although in Tit. ili. 4 Σωτῆρος Θεοῦ refers to the Father, it is Jesus 
 Christ our Saviour through Whom He has given the Spirit and the 
 sacraments, the grace of justification, and inheritance of eternal 
 life. Jesus is the more prominent Subject of the hymn. Compare 
 
ME.) The Christ of the Epistle to the Romans. 491 
 
 thanksgivings and doxologies poured forth to His 
 praised. It alone can explain the application of 
 passages, which are used in the Old Testament of 
 the Lord Jehovah, to the Person of Jesus Christ? ; 
 such an application would have been impossible un- 
 less St. Paul had renounced his belief in the autho- 
 rity and sacred character of the Hebrew Scriptures, 
 or had explicitly recognised the truth that Jesus 
 Christ was Himself Jehovah visiting and redeeming 
 His people. 
 
 Mark too how the truth before us enters into 
 the leading topics of St. Paul’s great Epistles ; 
 how it is presupposed even where it is not as- 
 serted in terms. Does that picture of the future 
 Judge Whose Second Coming is again and again 
 brought before us in the Epistles to the Thessa- 
 lonians befit one who is not Divine’? Is it pos- 
 sible that the Justifier of humanity in the Epistles 
 to the Romans and the Galatians can be only a 
 human martyr after all? Why then is the effect 
 of His Death so distinct in kind from any which 
 has followed upon the martyrdom of His servants‘ ? 
 the fragment of a hymn on penitence, based on Isa. lx. 1, and 
 quoted in Eph. v, 14. 
 
 ἔγειραι 6 καθεύδων 
 καὶ ἀνάστα ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν, 
 καὶ ἐπιφαύσει σοι ὁ Χριστός. 
 
 a Rom, ix. 5. 1 Tim. i. 12 : χάριν ἔχω τῷ ἐνδυναμώσαντί με Χριστῷ 
 ᾿Ιησοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν κ.τ.λ. 
 
 τ e.g. Joel ii. 32 in Rom. x. 13 ; Jer. ix. 23, 24 in 1 Cor. i. 31, ete. 
 
 Β x Thess. iv. 16,17; 2 Thess. i. 7, 8; 11, 8. 
 
 t Rom. iii. 25, 26; Gal. ii. 16, ete. St. Paul’s argument in 
 Gal. iii. 20 implies our Lord’s Divinity ; since, if He is merely 
 Human, He would be a mediator in the same sense in which Moses 
 was a mediator. The μεσίτης of 1 Tim. ii. 5 is altogether higher. 
 
492 The Christ of the Epistles to the Corinthians. {Lxcr. 
 
 How comes it that by dying He has achieved that 
 restoration of man to the rightful relations of his 
 being towards God and moral truth", which the law 
 of nature and the Law of Sinai had alike failed 
 to secure? Does not the whole representation of 
 the Second Adam in the Epistle to the Romans 
 and in the first Epistle to the Corinthians point to 
 a dignity more than human? Can He Who is not 
 merely a living soul, but a quickening Spirit ; from 
 Whom life radiates throughout renewed humanity ; 
 from Whom there flows a stream of grace more 
 abundant than the inheritance of sin which was 
 bequeathed by our fallen parent,—can He be, in the 
 Apostle’s mind, merely one of the race which He 
 thus blesses and saves? And if Jesus Christ be 
 more than man, is it possible to suggest any inter- 
 mediate position between humanity and the throne 
 of God, which St. Paul, with his earnest belief in 
 the God of Israel, could have believed Him to 
 occupy 4 
 
 In the Epistles to the Corinthians St. Paul is not 
 especially maintaining any one great truth of reve- 
 lation, but is entering with practical versatility into 
 the varied active life and pressing wants of the 
 Church. Yet these Epistles might alone suffice to 
 shew the position which Jesus Christ holds in the 
 Apostle’s heart and thought. Is the Apostle con- 
 trasting his preaching with the philosophy of the 
 Greek and the hopes of the Jewish world around 
 him? Jesus crucified® is his central subject ; Jesus 
 
 τ δικαιοσύνη. 
 x 1 Cor. 1. 23, 24: ἡμεῖς δε κηρύσσομεν Χριστὸν ἐσταυρωμένον... ... 
 Θεοῦ δύναμιν καὶ Θεοῦ σοφίαν. 
 
ME. | The Christ of the Epistles to the Corinthians.- 499 
 
 erucified is his whole philosophy’. Is he prescribing 
 the law of apostolic labours in building up souls or 
 Churches? “Other foundation can no man lay” than 
 “Jesus Christ”.”. Is he unfolding the nature of the 
 Church? It is not a self-organized multitude of reli- 
 gionists who agree in certain tenets, but “the Body 
 of Christ*.” Is he arguing against sins of impurity ? 
 Christians have only to remember that they are 
 members of Christ”. Is he deepening a sense of 
 the glory and of the responsibility of bemg a 
 Christian? Christians are reminded that Jesus 
 Christ is in them except they be reprobates*. Is he 
 excommunicating or reconciling a flagrant offender 
 against natural law? He delivers to Satan in the 
 Name of Christ; he absolves in the Person of 
 Christ’. Is he rebuking irreverence towards the 
 Holy Eucharist? The Eucharist is not the pictur- 
 esque symbol of an absent Teacher, but the veil of 
 a gracious yet awful Presence; the irreverent re- 
 
 ceiver is guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord 
 
 y 1 Cor. ii. 2: οὐ yap ἔκρινα τοῦ εἰδέναι τι ἐν ὑμῖν, εἰ μὴ ᾿Ιησοῦν 
 Χριστὸν, καὶ τοῦτον ἐσταυρωμένον. 
 
 2 [bid. iii. 11: θεμέλιον γὰρ ἄλλον οὐδεὶς δύναται θεῖναι παρὰ τὸν 
 κείμενον, ὅς ἐστιν ᾿Ιησοῦς ὁ Χριστός. Isa. ΧΧΥΠΙ. 16; Eph. ii. 20. 
 
 ἃ y Cor. ΧΙ]. 27 : ὑμεῖς δέ ἐστε σῶμα Χριστοῦ καὶ μέλη ἐκ μέρους. 
 Thus he even identifies the Church with Christ. Ibid. ver. 12 : 
 καθάπερ yap τὸ σῶμα ἕν ἐστι, καὶ μέλη ἔχει TOAAA.... οὕτω καὶ ὁ 
 Χριστός. 
 
 b Tbid. vi. 15: οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν μέλη Χριστοῦ ἐστιν ; 
 
 © 2 Cor. ΧΙ]. 5: ἢ οὐκ ἐπιγινώσκετε ἑαυτοὺς, ὅτι ᾿Ιησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐν 
 ὑμῖν ἐστιν; εἰ μή τι ἀδόκιμοί ἐστε. 
 
 ἃ τ Cor. v. 4, 5: ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ,..... σὺν τῇ 
 δυνάμει τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ παραδοῦναι τὸν τοιοῦτον τῷ Σατανᾷ. 
 2 Cor. li. 10: καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ εἴ τι κεχάρισμαι, ᾧ κεχάρισμαι, δ ὑμᾶς, ἐν 
 
 προσώπῳ Χριστοῦ, ἵνα μὴ πλεονεκτηθῶμεν ὑπὸ τοῦ Σατανᾶ 
 ρ ω 4 pe TOV, να μὴ Εονεκ ul με υπτὸο ov 2aTara, 
 
404 Lhe Christ of the Epistles to the Corinthians. [Lxcr. 
 
 Which he does not “discern®.” Is he pointing to the 
 source of the soul’s birth and growth in the life of 
 hight? It is the “illumination of the Gospel of the 
 glory of Christ, Who is the Image of God ;” it is 
 the “illumination of the knowledge of the glory 
 of God in the Person of Jesus Christ f.” Is he de- 
 scribing the spirit of the Christian life? It is per- 
 petual self-mortification for the love of Jesus, that 
 the moral life of Jesus may be manifested to the 
 world in our frail human natures. Is he sketching 
 out the intellectual aim of his ministry? Every 
 thought is to be brought as a captive into submis- 
 sion to Christ. Is he unveiling the motive which 
 sustained him in his manifold sufferings? All was 
 undergone for Christi. Is he suffering from a severe 
 bodily or spiritual affliction? He prays three times 
 to Jesus Christ for relief; and when he is told that 
 the trial will not be removed, since in having Christ’s 
 
 © x Cor. x. 16: τὸ ποτήριον τῆς εὐλογίας ὃ εὐλογοῦμεν, οὐχὶ κοινωνία 
 τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐστι; τὸν ἄρτον ὃν κλῶμεν, οὐχὶ κοινωνία τοῦ 
 σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐστι; Ibid. xi. 27: ὃς ἂν ἐσθίῃ τὸν ἄρτον τοῦτον 
 ἢ πίνῃ τὸ ποτήριον τοῦ Κυρίου ἀναξίως, ἔνοχος ἔσται τοῦ σώματος καὶ 
 αἵματος τοῦ Κυρίου. Ibid. ver. 29: 6 γὰρ ἐσθίων καὶ πίνων ἀναξίως, 
 κρίμα ἑαυτῷ ἐσθίει καὶ πίνει, μὴ διακρίνων τὸ σῶμα τοῦ Κυρίου. 
 
 f 2 ον. ἵν. 4. The god of this world has blinded the thoughts 
 of the unbelievers, εἰς τὸ μὴ αὐγάσαι αὐτοῖς τὸν φωτισμὸν Tod εὐαγγελίου 
 τῆς δόξης τοῦ Χριστοῦ, ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ. On the other hand, 
 God, Who bade light shine out of darkness, has shined in the 
 hearts of believing Christians, πρὸς φωτισμὸν τῆς γνώσεως τῆς δόξης 
 τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν προσώπῳ ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ (ver. 6). 
 
 8. Ibid. ver. 10: ἵνα καὶ ἡ ζωὴ τοῦ Ιησοῦ ἐν τῷ σώματι ἡμῶν φανε- 
 ρωθῇ. 
 
 h Thid. x. ς : αἰχμαλωτίζοντες πᾶν νόημα εἰς τὴν ὑπακοὴν τοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 i Ibid. xii, 10: εὐδοκῶ ἐν ἀσθενείαις, ἐν ὕβρεσιν, ἐν ἀνάγκαις, ἐν διω- 
 
 γμοῖς, ἐν στενοχωρίαις ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ, 
 
VI.] The Christ of the Epistles to the Corinthians. 495 
 
 grace he has all he needs, he rejoices in the infirmity 
 against which he had prayed, “that the power of 
 Christ may tabernacle upon him¥.” Would he sum- 
 marize the relations of the Christian to Christ? To 
 Christ he owes his mental philosophy, his justification 
 before God, his progressive growth in holiness, his 
 redemption from sin and death! Would he mark 
 the happiness of knowing that ‘hidden philosophy’ 
 which was taught in the Church among the perfect, 
 and which was unknown to the rulers of the non- 
 Christian world? It might have saved them from 
 erucifying the Lord of Glory™. Would he lay down 
 an absolute criterion of moral ruin? “If any man. 
 love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema 
 Maran-atha®.” Would he impart an apostolical bene- 
 diction? In one Epistle he blesses his readers m 
 the Name of Christ Alone®; in the other he names 
 the Three Blessed Persons: but “the grace of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ” is mentioned, not only before the 
 “fellowship of the Holy Ghost,” but even before the 
 “love of God P.” 
 
 These are but texts selected almost at random 
 from two of the longer Epistles of St. Paul, which 
 
 k 2 Cor. xii. 7-9: ἐδόθη μοι σκόλοψ τῇ σαρκὶ... . ὑπὲρ τούτου τρὶς 
 τὸν Κύριον παρεκάλεσα, ἵνα ἀποστῇ ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ" καὶ εἴρηκέ μοι, ““᾿Αρκεῖ σοι ἡ 
 
 , ῷ c ‘ ’ , > " , - ” a > ΄ 
 χάρις μου; ἡ γὰρ δύναμίς μου ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ τελειοῦται. ἥδιστα οὖν μᾶλλον 
 καυχήσομαι ἐν ταῖς ἀσθενείαις μου, ἵνα ἐπισκηνώσῃ ἐπ᾽ ἐμὲ ἡ δύναμις τοῦ 
 Χριστοῦ. 
 
 had ΄“ “ ΄ 
 
 1 x Cor. i. 30: ὃς ἐγενήθη ἡμῖν σοφία ἀπὸ Θεοῦ, δικαιοσύνη τε καὶ 
 ἁγιασμὸς καὶ ἀπολύτρωσις. 
 
 m Ibid. ii. 8: εἰ γὰρ ἔγνωσαν, οὐκ ἂν τὸν Κύριον τῆς δόξης ἐσταύρωσαν. 
 
 n Ibid. xvi. 22: εἴ τις οὐ φιλεῖ τὸν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν, ἤτω 
 Ὁ , ‘A > , 
 ἀνάθεμα, μαρὰν ἀθά, 
 
 ο Ibid. ver. 23. P 2 Cor, xiii. 13. 
 
400 The Christ of the Epistles of the First Imprisonment. [Lxcv. 
 
 are most entirely without the form and method 
 of a doctrinal treatise, dealing as they do with the 
 varied contemporary interests and controversies 
 of a local Church. Certainly some of these texts 
 taken alone ‘do not assert the Divinity of Jesus 
 Christ. But put them together; add, as you 
 might add, to their number; and consider whether 
 the whole body of language before you, however 
 you interpret it, does not imply that Christ held 
 a place in the thought, affections, and teaching of 
 St. Paul, higher than that which a sincere Theist 
 would assign to any creature, and, if Christ be only 
 a creature, obviously inconsistent with the supreme 
 and exacting rights of God. It is not the teaching, 
 but the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, upon 
 which St. Paul’s eye is mainly fixed: Christ Him- 
 self is, in St. Paul’s mind, the Gospel of Christ ; 
 and if Christ be not God, St. Paul cannot be ac- 
 quitted of assigning to Him generally a prominence 
 which is inconsistent with loyalty to a serious 
 monotheism. 
 
 Still more remarkably do the Epistles of the First 
 Imprisonment present us with a picture of our Lord’s 
 Work and Person which absolutely demands, even 
 where it does not in terms assert, the doctrine of 
 His Divinity. The Epistles to the Ephesians and 
 the Colossians are even more intimately related to 
 each other than are those to the Romans and the 
 Galatians. They deal with the same lines of truth ; 
 they differ only in method of treatment. That to 
 the Ephesians is devotional and expository ; that to 
 the Colossians is polemical. In the Colossians the 
 dignity of Christ’s Person is asserted most explicitly 
 
VI.] The Christ of the Epistles of the First Imprisonment. 497 
 
 as against the speculations of a Judaizing theosophy 
 which degraded Christ to the rank of an archangel4, 
 and which recommended an asceticism based on cer- 
 tain naturalistic doctrines as a substitute for Christ’s 
 redemptive work’. In the Epistle to the Ephesians 
 our Lord’s Personal dignity is asserted more indi- 
 rectly. It is implied in His reconciliation of the 
 Jewish and heathen worlds to each other and to 
 God, and still more in His relationship to the pre- 
 destination of the saints’. In both Epistles we en- 
 counter two prominent lines of thought, each, in 
 a high degree, pointing to Christ’s Divine dignity. 
 The first, the absolute character of the Christian 
 faith as contrasted with the relative character of 
 heathenism and Judaismt; the second, the re-creative 
 
 4 Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 274: “Die im Colosserbrief gemeinten 
 Engelsverehrer setzten ohne Zweifel Christus selbst in die Classe 
 der Engel, als ἕνα τῶν ἀρχαγγέλων, wie diess Epiphanius als einen 
 Lehrsatz der Ebioniten angibt, wogegen der Colosserbrief mit allem 
 Nachdruck auf ein solches κρατεῖν τὴν κεφαλὴν dringt, dass alles, was 
 nicht das Haupt selbst ist, nur in emem Absoluten Abhingigkeits- 
 verhaltniss zu lhm stehend gedacht wird. ii. 19.” 
 
 r Tbid. 
 
 8 Ibid. p. 270: “Der transcendenten Christologie dieser Briefe 
 und ihrer darauf beruhenden Anschauung von dem alles umfas- 
 senden und iiber alles tibergreifenden Charakter des Christen- 
 thums ist es ganz gemiiss, dass sie in der Lehre von der Beseligung 
 der Menschen auf eine iiberzeitliche Vorherbestimmung zuriick- 
 gehen, Eph. i. 4, f.” 
 
 t Ibid. p. 273: “So ist auch die absolute Erhabenheit des 
 Christenthums iiber Judenthum und Heidenthum  ausgespro- 
 chen. LBeide verhalten sich gleich negativ (but by no means 
 in the same degree) zum Christenthum, das ihnen gegeniiber ὁ 
 λόγος τῆς ἀληθείας ist Eph. i. 13, oder φῶς im Gegensatz von σκότος 
 (v. 8). Die Juden und die Heiden waren wegen der allgemeinen 
 
 Kk 
 
408 The Christ of the Epistles of the First Imprisonment. {Lect. ~ 
 
 power of the grace of Christ". In both Epistles we 
 are brought face to face with the Church considered 
 as a vast spiritual society* which, besides embracing 
 as its heritage all races of the world, pierces the 
 veil of the unseen, and includes the families of 
 heavenY in its majestic compass. Of this society 
 Christ is the Head’, and it is “ His Body, the fulness 
 of Him That filleth all in all.” Christ is the pre- 
 destined point of unity in which earth and heaven, 
 Jew and Gentile, meet and are one®. Christ’s Death 
 is the triumph of peace in the spiritual world; and 
 this, not only through the taking away of the law 
 of condemnation by the Dying Christ Who nails it 
 to His Cross and openly triumphs over the powers 
 of darkness», but also and especially because the 
 
 Siindhaftigkeit dem géttlichen Zorn verfallen, Eph. ii. 3. Der 
 religiése Charakter des Heidenthums wird noch besonders dadurch 
 bezeichnet, dass die Heiden ἄθεοι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ sind (ii. 12), ἐσκο- 
 τωμένοι τῇ διανοίᾳ ὄντες (iv. 18), ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι THs ζωῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ διὰ 
 τὴν ἄγνοιαν τὴν οὖσαν ἐν αὐτοῖς (iv. 18), περιπατοῦντες κατὰ τὸν αἰῶνα 
 τοῦ κόσμου τούτου κατὰ τὸν ἄρχοντα τῆς ἐξουσίας τοῦ ἀέρος (ii, 2). 
 Beiden Religionen gegeniiber ist das Christenthum die absolute 
 Religion. Der absolute Charakter des Christenthums selbst aber 
 ist bedingt durch die Person Christi.” 
 
 u Col. iii. 9; Eph. iv. 21 sqq.; ef. Ibid. ii, 8-10. Baur, Vorle- 
 sungen, p. 270: “Die Gnade ist das den Menschen durch den 
 Glauben an Christus neu schaffende Princip. Etwas Neues muss 
 nimlich der Mensch durch das Christenthum werden.” 
 
 X Col. i. 5, 6: rod εὐαγγελίου, rod παρόντος εἰς ὑμᾶς, καθὼς καὶ ἐν παντὶ 
 τῷ κόσμῳ, καὶ ἔστι καρποφορούμενον. Eph. i. 13. y Eph. iii. 15. 
 
 % Eph. i. 22, 23: αὐτὸν ἔδωκε κεφαλὴν ὑπὲρ πάντα τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ, ἥτις 
 ἐστὶ τὸ σῶμα αὐτοῦ, τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ πάντα ἐν πᾶσι πληρουμένου. 
 
 ἃ Ibid. ver. 10: ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ, τά τε ἐν 
 τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς" ἐν αὐτῷ, ἐν ᾧ καὶ ἐκληρώθημεν. 
 
 b Col. ii. 14, 15. 
 
VI.] The Christ of the Epistles of the First Imprisonment. 499 
 
 Cross is the centre of the moral universe’. Divided 
 races, religions, nationalities, classes, meet beneath the 
 Cross; they embrace as brethren; they are fused into 
 one vast society which is held together by an Indwell- 
 ing Presence, reflected in the general sense of bound- 
 less indebtedness to a transcendent Lovet. Hence in 
 these Epistles such marked emphasis is laid upon 
 the unity of the Body of Christ ®; since the reunion 
 
 ¢ Col. i. 20, 21: 80 αὐτοῦ ἀποκαταλλάξαι τὰ πάντα εἰς αὑτὸν, εἰρηνο- 
 ποιήσας διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ σταυροῦ αὐτοῦ, Ov αὐτοῦ, εἴτε τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς 
 γῆς, εἴτε τὰ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς. 
 
 ἃ Tbid. ili. τα: οὐκ ἔνι Ἕλλην καὶ ᾿Ιουδαῖος, περιτομὴ καὶ ἀκροβυστία, 
 βάρβαρος, Σκύθης, δοῦλος, ἐλεύθερος" ἀλλὰ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἐν πᾶσι Χριστός. 
 Observe the moral inferences in vers. 12-14, the measure of 
 charity being καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς ἐχαρίσατο ὑμῖν. Especially Jews 
 and Gentiles are reconciled beneath the Cross, because the Cross 
 cancelled the obligatoriness of the ceremonial law. Eph. ii. 14-17: 
 αὐτὸς γάρ ἐστιν ἡ εἰρήνη ἡμῶν, ὁ ποιήσας τὰ ἀμφότερα ἕν, καὶ TO μεσό- 
 τοιχον τοῦ φραγμοῦ λύσας, τὴν ἔχθραν ἐν τῇ σαρκὶ αὐτοῦ, τὸν νόμον τῶν 
 ἐντολῶν ἐν δόγμασι, καταργήσας" ἵνα τοὺς δύο κτίσῃ ἐν ἑαυτῷ εἰς ἕνα καινὸν 
 ἄνθρωπον, ποιῶν εἰρήνην, καὶ ἀποκαταλλάξῃ τοὺς ἀμφοτέρους ἐν ἑνὶ σώματι 
 τῷ Θεῷ διὰ τοῦ σταυροῦ, ἀποκτείνας τὴν ἔχθραν ἐν αὐτῷ. 
 
 e Baur, Christenthum, p. 11g: “ Die Einheit ist das eigentliche 
 Wesen der Kirche, diese Einheit ist mit allen zu ihr gehérenden 
 Momenten durch das Christenthum gegeben, es ist Ein Leib, Ein 
 Geist, Ein Herr, Ein Glaube, Eine Taufe u. 5. w. Eph. iv. 4, f. 
 Von diesem Punkte aus steigt die Anschauung hiher hinauf, bis 
 dahin, wo der Grund aller Einheit liegt. Die einigende, eine 
 allgemeine Gemeinschaft stiftende Kraft des Todes Christi liisst sich 
 nur daraus begreifen, dass Christus iiberhaupt der alles tragende 
 und zusammenhaltende Centralpunkte des ganzen Universums ist. 
 
 . Die Christologie der Beiden Briefe hingt aufs Innigste 
 zusammen mit dem in der unmittelbaren Gegenwart gegebenen 
 Bediirfniss der Einigung in der Idee der Einen, alle Unterschiede 
 und Gegensiitze in sich aufhebenden Kirche. Es ist, wenn wir 
 uns in die Anschauungsweise dieser Briefe hineinversetzen, schon 
 
 Kk 2 
 
500 The Christ of the Epistles of the First Imprisonment. [Lucr. 
 
 of moral beings shews forth Christ’s Personal Glory. 
 Christ is the Unifier. As Christ in His Passion is 
 the Combiner and Reconciler of all things in earth 
 and heaven; so He ascends to heaven, He descends 
 to hell on His errand of reconciliation and com- 
 bination’. He institutes the hierarchy of the 
 Churchs; He is the Root from which her life 
 springs, the Foundation on which her superstructure 
 rests; He is the quickening, organizing, Catholi- 
 cizing Principle within heri. He is the Standard 
 of perfection with Which she must struggle to cor- 
 respond. Her members must grow up unto Him in 
 all things. Accordingly, not to mention the great 
 passage, already referred to, in the Epistle to the 
 Colossians, Jesus Christ is said in that Epistle to 
 possess the intellectual as well as the other attri- 
 butes of Deity®. In the allusions to the Three Most 
 
 ein cht Katholisches Bewusstsein das sich in ihnen ausspricht.” 
 This may be fully admitted without accepting Baur’s conclusions 
 as to the date and authorship of the two Epistles. 
 
 f Eph. iv. 10: ὁ καταβὰς, αὐτός ἐστι καὶ ὁ ἀναβὰς ὑπεράνω πάντων τῶν 
 οὐρανῶν, ἵνα πληρώσῃ τὰ πάντα. 
 
 8 Ibid. vers. 11-13: καὶ αὐτὸς ἔδωκε τοὺς μὲν ἀποστόλους, τοὺς δὲ 
 προφήτας, τοὺς δὲ εὐαγγελιστὰς, τοὺς δὲ ποιμένας καὶ διδασκάλους, πρὸς τὸν 
 καταρτισμὸν τῶν ἁγίων, εἰς ἔργον διακονίας, εἰς οἰκοδομὴν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ 
 Χριστοῦ: μέχρι καταντήσωμεν οἱ πάντες εἰς τὴν ἑνότητα τῆς πίστεως καὶ 
 τῆς ἐπιγνώσεως τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ, εἰς ἄνδρα τέλειον, εἰς μέτρον ἡλικίας 
 τοῦ πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 h Col. ii. 7: ἐρριζωμένοι καὶ ἐποικοδομούμενοι ἐν αὐτῷ. 
 
 i Eph. iv. 15, 16: ὁ Χριστὸς, ἐξ οὗ πᾶν τὸ σῶμα συναρμολογούμενον 
 καὶ συμβιβαζόμενον διὰ πάσης ἁφῆς τῆς ἐπιχορηγίας, κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν ἐν 
 μέτρῳ ἑνὸς ἑκάστου μέρους, τὴν αὔξησιν τοῦ σώματος ποιεῖται εἰς οἰκοδομὴν 
 ἑαυτοῦ ἐν ἀγάπῃ. Col. 11. 19. 
 
 k Col. li. 3: ἐν ᾧ εἰσὶ πάντες οἱ θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας καὶ τῆς γνώσεως 
 
 ἀπόκρυφοι. Ibid. i. 19; 11. 9. 
 
VI.) The Christ of the Epistles of the First Imprisonment. 501 
 
 Holy Persons, which so remarkably underlie the 
 structure and surface-thought of the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians, Jesus Christ is associated most  signifi- 
 cantly with the Father and the Spirit! He is the 
 Invisible King, Whose slaves Christians are, and 
 Whose Will is to be obeyed™. The kingdom of God 
 is His kingdom™. He is the Subject of Christian 
 study, the Object of Christian hope®. In the Epistle 
 to the Philippians it is expressly said that all cre- 
 ated beings in heaven, on earth, and in hell, when 
 His triumph is complete, shall acknowledge the 
 majesty even of His Human Naturep. The preach- 
 ing the Gospel is described as the preaching Christ4. 
 Death is a blessing for the Christian, since by death 
 he gains the eternal presence of Christ". The Phi- 
 lippians are specially blessed in being permitted, not 
 
 1 Eph. i. 3: Πατὴρ rod Κυρίου. Ibid. ver. 6: ἐν τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ. 
 Ibid. ver. 13: ἐσφραγίσθητε τῷ Τινεύματι. Ibid. 11. 18: δι᾿ αὐτοῦ ἔχομεν 
 τὴν προσαγωγὴν οἱ ἀμφότεροι ἐν ἑνὶ Πνεύματι πρὸς τὸν Πάτερα. Ibid. 
 ili. 6: συγκληρόνομα, καὶ σύσσωμα, καὶ συμμέτοχα, Where the Father 
 Whose heirs we are, the Son of Whose Body we are members, the 
 Spirit of Whose gifts we partake, seem to be glanced at by the 
 adjectives denoting our relationship to the ἐπαγγελία. Cf. Ibid. 
 iil, 14-17. 
 
 m Tbid. vi. 6: μὴ κατ᾽ ὀφθαλμοδουλείαν ὡς ἀνθρωπάρεσκοι, ἀλλ᾽ ws 
 δοῦλοι τοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 π Tbid. v. 5: ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ Θεοῦ. Col. i. 13: τὴν 
 βασιλείαν τοῦ Yiod τῆς ἀγάπης αὐτοῦ. 
 
 o Eph. iv. 20; 1: 12. 
 
 P Phil. ii. 10: ἵνα ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ πᾶν γόνυ κάμψῃ ἐπουρανίων 
 καὶ ἐπιγείων καὶ καταχθονίων. 
 
 a Ibid. i. 16: τὸν Χριστὸν καταγγέλλουσιν. Ibid. ver. 18: Χριστὸς 
 καταγγέλλεται. 
 
 τ [bid. ver. 23: ἐπιθυμίαν ἔχων εἰς τὸ ἀναλῦσαι, καὶ σὺν Χριστῷ 
 
 > 
 εἰναι, 
 
502 The Christ of the Epistles of the First Imprisonment. | Lc. 
 
 merely to believe on Christ, but to suffer for Him, 
 The Apostle trusts in Jesus Christ that it will be 
 possible to send Timothy to Philippit. He contrasts 
 the selfishness of ordinary Christians with a disin- 
 terestedness that seeks the things (it is not said 
 of God, but) of Christ". The Christian ‘boast’ or 
 ‘glory’ centres in Christ, as did the Jewish in the 
 Law*; the Apostle had counted all his Jewish pri- 
 vileges as dung that he might win Christ¥; Christ 
 strengthens him to do all things”; Christ will one 
 day change this body of our humiliation, that it may 
 become of like form with the Body of His Glory, 
 according to the energy of His ability even to subdue 
 all things unto Himself®. In this Epistle, as in 
 those to the Corinthians, the Apostle is far from pur- 
 suing any one line of doctrinal statement : moral ex- 
 hortations interspersed with allusions to persons and 
 matters of interest to himself and to the Philippians 
 constitute the staple of his letter. And yet how con- 
 stant are the allusions to Jesus Christ, and how in- 
 consistent are they, taken as a whole, with any con- 
 ception of His Person which denies His Divinity! 
 
 8 Phil. i. 29: ὑμῖν ἐχαρίσθη τὸ ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ, od μόνον τὸ εἰς αὐτὸν 
 ’ 3 ‘A \ A ς ‘ > ~ ,ὔ 
 
 πιστεύειν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ πάσχειν. 
 
 t Ibid. 11. 19: ἐλπίζω δὲ ἐν Κυρίῳ ᾿Ιησοῦ, Τιμόθεον ταχέως πέμψαι ὑμῖν. 
 
 u Tbid. ver. 21: οἱ πάντες γὰρ τὰ ἑαυτῶν ζητοῦσιν, οὐ τὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ 
 Ἰησοῦ. 
 
 x [bid. ill. 3: καυχώμενοι ἐν Χριστῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ. 
 
 y Ibid. ver. 8: δι’ ὃν τὰ πάντα ἐζημιώθην" καὶ ἡγοῦμαι σκύβαλα εἶναι, 
 o yr A δή Ν c θῶ > > a“ 
 iva Χριστὸν κερδήσω, καὶ εὑρεθῶ ἐν αὐτῷ. 
 
 2 3 , > , > ΄“ > ~ , ~ 
 
 4 Tbid. iv. 13: πάντα ἰσχύω ἐν τῷ ἐνδυναμοῦντί pe Χριστῷ. 
 
 a Tbid. ili. 21: ὃς μετασχηματίσει τὸ σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν, εἰς τὸ 
 γενέσθαι αὐτὸ σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν 
 
 A , > \ ee ὁ , ς ~ εἶ , 
 τοῦ δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι ἑαυτῷ τὰ πάντα. 
 
12] The Christ of the Pastoral Epistles. 503 
 
 The Pastoral Epistles are distinguished not merely 
 by the specific directions which they contain respect- 
 ing the Christian hierarchy and religious societies in 
 the apostolical Church >, but also and especially by 
 the stress which they lay upon the vital distinction 
 between heresy and orthodoxy®. ach of these 
 lines of teaching radiates from a most exalted con- 
 ception of Christ’s Person, whether He is the Source 
 
 boy Tim. iit. tv. v.; “Tit. 1. 50; i. 1-10, &e. 
 
 © St. Paul’s language implies that the true faith is to the soul 
 what the most necessary conditions of health are to the body. 
 ὑγιαίνουσα διδασκαλία (τ Tim. i. 10; Tit. 1. g; 11. 1); 80 λόγος ὑγιής 
 (Tit. ii, 8), λόγοι ὑγιαίνοντες (2 Tim. i. 13). Thus the orthodox 
 teaching is styled ἡ καλὴ διδασκαλία (1 Tim. iv. 6), or simply ἡ 
 διδασκαλία (Ibid. vi. 1), as though no other deserved the name. 
 Any deviation (ἑτεροδιδασκαλεῖν, Ibid. i. 3; vi. 3) is self-condemned 
 as being such. The heretic prefers his own self-chosen private 
 way to the universally-received doctrine ; he is to be cut off, after 
 two admonitions, from the communion of the Church (Tit. ii. 10) 
 on the ground that ἐξέστραπται ὁ τοιοῦτος, καὶ ἁμαρτάνει, ὧν αὐτοκατά- 
 κριτος (Ibid.). Heresy is spoken of by turns as a crime and a 
 misery, περὶ τὴν πίστιν ἐναυάγησαν (1 Tim. i. 19) ; ἀπεπλανήθησαν ἀπὸ 
 τῆς πίστεως (Ibid. vi. 10) ; περὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἠστόχησαν (2 Tim. 11. 18). 
 Deeper error is characterized in severer terms, ἀποστήσονται τῆς 
 πίστεως, προσέχοντες πνεύμασι πλάνοις καὶ διδασκαλίαις δαιμονίων... 
 κεκαυτηριασμένων τὴν ἰδίαν συνείδησιν κιτιὰλ. (1 Tim. ἵν. 1, 2); οὗτοι ἀν- 
 θίστανται τῇ ἀληθείᾳ, ἄνθρωποι κατεφθαρμένοι τὸν νοῦν, ἀδόκιμοι περὶ τὴν 
 πίστιν (2 Tim. 111. 8) ; ἀπὸ τῆς ἀληθείας τὴν ἀκοὴν ἀποστρέψουσιν, ἐπὶ 
 δὲ τοὺς μύθους ἐκτραπήσονται (Ibid. iv. 4). Heresy eats its way into 
 the spiritual body like a gangrene, ὁ λόγος αὐτῶν ὡς yayypawa νομὴν 
 ἕξει (Ibid. ii. 17). It is observable that throughout these Epistles 
 πίστις is not the subjective apprehension, but the objective body 
 of truth ; not fides qud creditur, but the Faith. And the Church 
 is στύλος καὶ ἑδραίωμα τῆς ἀληθείας (1 Tim. iii. 15). This truth, which 
 the Church supports, is already embodied in a ὑποτύπωσις ὑγιαινόν- 
 των λόγων (2 Tim. i. 13). 
 
504 The Christ of the Pastoral Epistles [ Lecr. 
 
 of ministerial power, or the Sun and Centre-point 
 of orthodox truth®. In stating the doctrine of re- 
 demption these Epistles insist strongly upon its 
 universality £ The whole world was redeemed in 
 the intention of Christ, however that intention might 
 be limited in effect by the will of man. As the 
 theories, Jewish and Gnostic, which confined the 
 benefits of Christ’s redemptive work to races or 
 classes, were more or less Humanitarian; so along 
 with the recognition of a world-embracing redemp- 
 tion was found belief m a Divine Redeemer. <Ac- 
 cordingly in the Pastoral Epistles the Divinity of our 
 Lord is taught both in express terms$ and by tacit 
 implication. His functions as the Awarder of indul- 
 gence and mercy, His Living Invisible Presence in 
 
 ἃ τ Tim. i. 12: θέμενος εἰς διακονίαν. 2 Tim. 11. 3: στρατιώτης 
 Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. So when the young widows who have entered 
 into the Order of widows wish to marry again, this is represented 
 as an offence against Christ, with Whom they have entered into 
 a personal engagement, ὅταν yap καταστρηνιάσωσι τοῦ Χριστοῦ, γαμεῖν 
 θέλουσιν, ἔχουσαι κρίμα, ὅτι τὴν πρώτην πίστιν ἠθέτησαν (1 Tim. y. 11,1 2). 
 
 e y Tim. vi. 3, where moral and social truth is specially in 
 question. 
 
 f Ibid. ii. 3. Intercession is to be offered for all. τοῦτο yap 
 καλὸν καὶ ἀπόδεκτον ἐνώπιον τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Θεοῦ, ὃς πάντας ἀνθρώπους 
 θέλει σωθῆναι καὶ εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν ἀληθείας ἐλθεῖν. εἷς γὰρ Θεὸς, εἷς καὶ 
 μεσίτης Θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπων, ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς ᾿Ιησοῦς, 6 δοὺς ἑαυτὸν 
 ἀντίλυτρον ὑπὲρ πάντων. Cf. Ibid. iv. 10; Tit. i. τι. 
 
 5. Tit. 11. £3: τοῦ μεγάλου Θεοῦ καὶ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 
 
 h 1 Tim. i. 16: διὰ τοῦτο ἠλεήθην, ἵνα ἐν ἐμοὶ πρώτῳ ἐνδείξηται Ἰησοῦς 
 Χριστὸς τὴν πᾶσαν μακροθυμίαν. Cf. ver. 13. Compare the intercession 
 for the (apparently) deceased Onesiphorus: δῴη αὐτῷ ὁ Κύριος εὑρεῖν 
 ἔλεος παρὰ Κυρίου ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ (2 Tim. i. 18) ; where the second 
 Κύριος also must be Jesus Christ the Judge, at Whose Hands 
 St. Paul himself expects to receive the crown of righteousness 
 (Ibid. iv. 8). 
 
VI.J and of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 505 
 
 the Church', His active providence over His ser- 
 vants, and His ready aid in trouble*, are introduced 
 naturally as familiar topics. And if the Manhood of 
 the One Mediator is prominently alluded to as being 
 the Instrument of His Mediation!, His Pre-existence 
 in a Higher Nature is as clearly intimated™. 
 After what has already been said on the promi- 
 nence of the doctrine of Christ's Divinity in the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, it may suffice here to re- 
 mark that the power” of His Priestly Mediation as 
 there insisted on, although exhibited in His Glorified 
 Humanity, does of itself imply a Superhuman Per- 
 sonality. This indeed is more than hinted at in the 
 terms of the comparison which is instituted between 
 Melchisedec and His Divine Antitype. History re- 
 cords nothing of the parents, of the descent, of the 
 birth, or of the death of Melchisedec ; he appears in 
 the sacred narrative as if he had no beginning of 
 days or end of life. In this he is “made like unto 
 the Son of God,” with His Eternal Pre-existence and 
 
 i Observe the remarkable adjurations, διαμαρτύρομαι ἐνώπιον τοῦ 
 Θεοῦ καὶ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ τῶν ἐκλεκτῶν ἀγγέλων (1 Tim. v. 21); 
 παραγγέλλω σοι ἐνώπιον τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ ζωοποιοῦντος τὰ πάντα, καὶ Χριστοῦ 
 Ἰησοῦ τοῦ μαρτυρήσαντος ἐπὶ Πυντίου Πιλάτου τὴν καλὴν ὁμολογίαν 
 (Ibid. vi. 13). 
 
 k 2 Tim. iv. 17: ὁ δὲ Κύριός μοι παρέστη, καὶ ἐνεδυνάμωσέ με. Ibid. 
 ver. 18: ῥύσεταΐ με ὁ Κύριος ἀπὸ παντὸς ἔργου πονηροῦ. 
 
 Pex Tim... 6, 
 
 τὰ [bid. iii. 16. Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 351: “Mensch wird zwar 
 Christus ausdriicklich genannt (1 Tim. ii. 5) aber von einem mensch- 
 lichen Subject kann doch eigentlich nicht gesagt werden ἐφανερώθη 
 ev σαρκί. Es passt diess nur fiir ein hoheres tibermenschliches 
 Wesen.” 
 
 n Heb, vii. 25: σώζειν εἰς τὸ παντελὲς δύναται. 
 
506 Why can no Human Name be substituted (Lect. 
 
 His Endless Glory®. This Eternal Christ can save 
 to the uttermost, because He is Eternalp. In short, 
 if we bear in mind that, as the Mediator, Christ is 
 God and Man, St. Paul’s whole language about Him 
 falls into its place. On the one hand, the true force 
 of the distinction between One God and ‘One Lord’ 
 or ‘One Mediator’ becomes apparent in those pas- 
 sages where Christ in His assumed Manhood is for 
 the moment in contrast with the Unincarnate Deity of 
 the Father4. On the other hand, it is only possible 
 to read the great Christological passages of the 
 Apostle without doing violence to the plain force of 
 his language, when we believe that Christ is God. 
 Doubtless a Divine Christ 15 shrouded in mystery; 
 but can there be any real intercourse re-established 
 with heaven which is wholly unmysterious? Strip 
 Christ of His Godhead that you may denude Him 
 of mystery, and what becomes, I do not say of par- 
 ticular texts, but of the whole characteristic teaching 
 of St. Paul? Substitute, if you can, throughout 
 those Epistles the name of the first of saints or of 
 the highest among angels, for the Name of the 
 Divine Redeemer, and see how they read. Accept 
 the Apostle’s implied challenge, Imagine for a mo- 
 ment that Paul was crucified for you, that you were 
 baptized in the name of Paul"; that wisdom, holi- 
 ness, redemption, come from an apostle who, saint 
 
 ο Heb. vii. 3: ἀπάτωρ, ἀμήτωρ, ἀγενεαλόγητος" μήτε ἀρχὴν ἡμερῶν, 
 μήτε ζωῆς τέλος ἔχων᾽ ἀφωμοιωμένος δὲ τῷ Υἱῷ τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 
 Ρ Ibid. ver. 25: ὅθεν καὶ σώζειν εἰς τὸ παντελὲς δύναται. 
 
 ἃ τ Cor. viii. 6; Eph. iv. ἢ 5 Tim m5: 
 
 r y Cor. i. 13: μὴ Παῦλος ἐσταυρώθη ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν; ἢ εἰς τὸ ὄνομα 
 
 Παύλου ἐβαπτίσθητε ; 
 
ΜΙ im St. Paul’s writings for the Name of Jesus? δΟῚ 
 
 though he be, is only a brother-man. Conceive 
 that the Apostle ascends for a moment his Master's 
 throne; that he says anathema to any one who loves 
 not the Apostle Paul; that he is bent upon bringing 
 every thought captive to the obedience of Paul ; 
 that he announces that in Paul are hid all the 
 treasures of wisdom and knowledge; that instead 
 of protesting “We preach not ourselves, but Christ 
 Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ 
 sake,” he could say, “Paul is the end of the law 
 to every one that believeth.” You cannot conceive it. 
 What then is it in the Name of Christ which renders 
 this language, when applied to Him, other than un- 
 intelligible or intolerable ἡ. Why is it that when 
 coupled with any other name, however revered and 
 saintly, the words of Paul respecting Jesus Christ 
 must seem not merely stramed, but exaggerated 
 and blasphemous? Is it not that truth answers to 
 truth, that all through these Epistles, and not merely 
 in particular assertions, there is an underlying idea 
 of Christ’s Divinity which is taken for granted, as 
 being the very soul and marrow of the entire series 
 of doctrines? that when this is lost sight of, all is 
 misshapen and dislocated? that when this is recog- 
 nised, all falls into its place as the exhibition of 
 a boundless Power and Mercy, clothed indeed in a 
 vesture of humiliation and sacrifice, and devoted to 
 the succour and enlightenment of man ? 
 
 4. It is with the prominent features of St. Paul’s 
 characteristic teaching as with the general drift of 
 his great Epistles ; they irresistibly imply a Christ 
 Who is Divine. 
 
 ‘(a) Every reader of the New Testament associates 
 
508 St. Paul’s account of Faith [Lrcr. 
 
 St. Paul with a special advocacy of the necessity 
 of faith as the indispensable condition of man’s 
 justification before God. What is this ‘faith’ of 
 St. Paul? It is in experience the most simple of the 
 movements of the soul; and yet, if analysed, it 
 turns out to be one of the most complex ideas in the 
 New Testament. The word πίστις implies first of 
 all the double idea of faithfulness and confidence §; 
 but religious confidence is closely allied to belief, 
 that is to say, to a persuasion that an unseen 
 fact is true’. This belief, having for its object the 
 unseen, is opposed by St. Paul to ‘sight";’ it is fed 
 by, or rather it is in itself, a higher intuition than 
 any of which nature is capable ; it 1s the continuous 
 exercise of a new sense of spiritual truth with which 
 man has been endowed by grace. It is indeed a spi- 
 ritual second-sight ; and yet reason has ancillary du- 
 ties towards it. Reason may prepare the way of faith 
 in the soul by removing intellectual obstacles to its 
 claims ; or she may arrange, digest, explain, system- 
 atize, express the conclusions of faith in accordance 
 with the needs of a particular time or locality. 
 This active intellectual appreciation of the object- 
 matter of faith, which analyses, discusses, combines, 
 infers, is by no means necessary to the life of the 
 
 5. Rom. iii. 3. πίστις Θεοῦ is the faithfulness of God in accom- 
 plishing His promises. Cf. πιστὸς ὁ Θεός, 1 Cor. i. 9 ; 1 Thess. v. 24. 
 πίστις is confidence in God, Rom. iv. 19, 20; as memiorevpa, “1 
 have been entrusted with’ (Gal. ii. 7; 1 Tim. i. 11). 
 
 t The transition is observable in Rom. vi. 8: εἰ δὲ ἀπεθάνομεν 
 σὺν Χριστῷ, πιστεύομεν ὅτι καὶ συζήσομεν αὐτῷ: For belief in the 
 truth of an unseen fact upon human testimony, cf. 1 Cor. xi. 18 : 
 ἀκούω σχίσματα ἐν ὑμῖν ὑπάρχειν, καὶ μέρος τι πιστεύω. 
 
 u 2 Cor. v. 7: διὰ πίστεως γὰρ περιπατοῦμεν, οὐ διὰ εἴδους. 
 
ὙΠ implies a Divine Christ. 509 
 
 Christian soul. It is a special accomplishment, which 
 belongs only to a small fraction of the whole body 
 of the faithful. Their faith is supplemented by 
 what St. Paul terms, in this peculiar sense, ‘ know- 
 ledge*” Faith itself, by which the soul lives, is 
 mainly passive, at least in respect of its intellectual 
 ingredients: the believing soul may or may not ap- 
 prehend with scientific accuracy that which its faith 
 receives. The “word of knowledge,’ that is, the 
 power of analysis and statement which is wielded by 
 theological science, is a distinct gift, of great value 
 to the Church, but not of absolute necessity for all 
 Christians. But “without faith it is impossible to 
 please God ;” and in its simplest forms, faith pre- 
 supposes a proclamation of its object by the agency of 
 preaching’. Sometimes indeed the word preached 
 does not profit, “not being mixed with faith in them 
 that hear 1.5. But when the soul in very truth re- 
 sponds to the message of God, the complete respon- 
 sive act of faith is threefold. This act proceeds simul- 
 taneously from the intelligence, from the heart, and 
 from the will of the believer. His intelligence recog- 
 nises the unseen object as a fact*. His heart em- 
 
 x 1 Cor, xii. 8: ἄλλῳ δὲ [δίδοται] λόγος γνώσεως, κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ Πνεῦμα. 
 2 Cor, vill. 7: ἐν παντὶ περισσεύετε, πίστει, καὶ λόγῳ, καὶ γνώσει. So in 
 I Cor. xill. 2 πᾶσα ἡ γνῶσις evidently means intellectual appreci- 
 ation of the highest revealed truths, of which it is said in ver. 8 
 that καταργηθήσεται. Of course this γνῶσις was from the first 
 capable of being abused; only, when it is so abused, to the hin- 
 drance of Divine truth, the Apostle maintains that it does not 
 deserve the name (ἀντιθέσεις τῆς ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως. 1 Tim. vi. 20). 
 
 y Rom. x. 14-17: ἡ πίστις ἐξ ἀκοῆς. Cf. Adyos ἀκοῆς, 1 Thess. 
 Hy £3) . z Heb. iv. 2. 
 
 a 1 Thess, iv. 14, πιστεύειν is used of recognising two past. his- 
 
510 St. Paul's account of Faith (Lucr. 
 
 braces the object thus present to his understanding ; 
 his heart opens instinctively and unhesitatingly to 
 receive a ray of heavenly light®. And his will too 
 resigns itself to the truth before it ; it places the soul 
 at the disposal of the object which thus rivets its eye 
 and conquers its affections. The believer accordingly 
 merges his personal existence in that of the object 
 of his faith ; he lives, yet not he, but Another lives 
 in τη, He gazes on truth, he loves it, he yields 
 himself to it, he loses himself in it. So true is it, 
 that in its essence, and not merely in its conse- 
 quences, faith has a profoundly moral character. 
 Faith is not merely a perception of the understand- 
 ing; it is rather an act of the whole soul, which, 
 by one simultaneous complex movement, sees, feels, 
 and obeys the truth presented to it. 
 
 Now, according to St. Paul, it is Jesus Christ 
 Who is eminently the great Object of Christian 
 faith. The intelligence, the heart, the will of the 
 Christian unite to embrace Him. How versatile 
 and many-sided a process this believing apprehen- 
 sion of Christ is, might appear from the constantly 
 varied phrase of the Apostle when describing it. 
 Yet of faith in all its aspects Christ is the End 
 
 torical facts; Rom. vi. 8, of recognising a future fact; 2 Thess. 
 ii. 11, of believing that to be a fact which is a falsehood. 
 
 b Rom. x. 9, 10: ἐὰν ὁμολογήσῃς ἐν τῷ στόματί σου Κύριον Ἰησοῦν, 
 καὶ πιστεύσῃς ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ σου ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς αὐτὸν ἤγείρεν ἐκ νεκρῶν, σωθήσῃ" 
 καρδίᾳ γὰρ πιστεύεται εἰς δικαιοσύνην. Thus coincidently with the 
 act of faith, ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐκκέχυται ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡμῶν (Rom. 
 v. 5). The love of God is infused into the heart at the moment 
 when His truth enters the understanding; and it is in this co- 
 operation of the moral nature that the essential power of faith 
 resides : hence faith is necessarily δι᾿ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη. 
 
 © Gal. 11. 20: ζῶ δὲ οὐκ ἔτι ἐγὼ, Gh δὲ ἐν ἐμοὶ Χριστός. 
 
Were] implies a Divine Christ. 511 
 
 and Object. Does St. Paul speak as if faith were 
 a movement of the soul towards an end? That 
 end is Christ4. Does he point to faith as a repose 
 of the soul resting upon a support which guarantees 
 its safety 1 That support is Christ’. Does he seem 
 to imply that by faith the Christian has entered into 
 an atmosphere which encircles and protects his spi- 
 ritual life, and which fosters its growth? That 
 atmosphere is Christf, Thus the expression “the 
 faith of Christ” denotes the closest possible union 
 between Christ and the faith which apprehends 
 Hims. And this union, effected on man’s side by 
 faith, on God’s by the instrumentality of the sacra- 
 ments", secures man’s real justification; the be- 
 liever is justified by this identification with Christ, 
 Whose perfect obedience and expiatory sufferings 
 are thus transferred to him. St. Paul speaks of 
 belief in Christ as involving belief in the Christian 
 
 d This seems to be the force of εἰς with πιστεύειν. Col. 11. 5: τὸ 
 στερέωμα τῆς εἰς Χριστὸν πίστεως ὑμῶν. Phil. i. 29; Rom. x. 14. 
 The preposition πρὸς indicates the direction of the soul’s gaze, 
 without necessarily implying the idea of movement in that di- 
 rection. In Philem. 5: τὴν πίστιν, ἣν ἔχεις πρὸς τὸν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν. Cf. 
 1 Thess. i. 8. 
 
 e 1 Tim. i. 16: πιστεύειν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ (sc. Jesus Christ) εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον. 
 Πιστεύειν ἐπὶ is used with the ace. of trust in the Eternal Father. 
 Cf. Rom. iv. 5, 24: 
 
 f Gal. iii. 26: πάντες γὰρ viol Θεοῦ ἐστε διὰ τῆς πίστεως ἐν Χριστῷ 
 Ἰησοῦ. Eph. 1.15: ἀκούσας τὴν καθ᾽ ὑμᾶς πίστιν ἐν τῷ Κυρίῳ ᾿Ιησοῦ. 
 2 Tim. iii. 15. The Old Testament can make wise unto salvation, 
 διὰ πίστεως τῆς ἐν Χριστῷ “Inood. 
 
 § Rom. iii, 22: διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Gal. ii. 16. This 
 genitive seems to have the force of the construct state in He- 
 brew. 
 
 h Tit. ii. ¢; 1 Cor. x. 16. 
 
512 St. Paul’s acccount of Faith [ Lect. 
 
 creedi; Christ has warranted the ventures which 
 faith makes, by assuring the believer that He has 
 guaranteed the truth of the whole object-matter of 
 faith*. Faith then is the starting-pomt and the 
 strength of the new life; and this faith must be 
 pre-eminently faith in Christ! The precious Blood 
 of Christ, not only as representing the obedience 
 of His Will, but as inseparably joined to His Majestic 
 Person, is itself an object in which faith finds life 
 and nutriment ; the baptized Christian is bathed in 
 it, and his soul dwells on its pardoning and cleans- 
 ing power. It is Christ's Blood; and Christ is the 
 great Object of Christian faith™. For not Christ’s 
 teaching alone, not even His redemptive work alone, 
 but emphatically and beyond all else the Person of 
 the Divine Redeemer is proposed by St. Paul to 
 Christians as That upon Which their souls are more 
 especially to gaze in an ecstasy of chastened and 
 obedient love. 
 
 iy Tim. ili. 16: ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσμῳ. Christ’s Person is here said 
 to have been believed in as being the Centre of the New Dispen- 
 sation. 
 
 k 2 Tim. 1. 12: οἶδα γὰρ ᾧ πεπίστευκα, καὶ πέπεισμαι ὅτι δυνατός ἐστι 
 τὴν παραθήκην μου φυλάξαι εἰς ἐκείνην τὴν ἡμέραν. 
 
 1 Gal. ii. 16: ἡμεῖς εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐπιστεύσαμεν, ἵνα δικαιωθῶμεν 
 ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ. So Rom. 1. 17: δικαιοσύνη γὰρ Θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ (Christ’s 
 Gospel) ἀποκαλύπτεται ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν. In like manner the 
 Christian is termed ὁ ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ : his spiritual life dates from, 
 and depends upon his faith. Rom, 111. 26. So, of ἐκ πίστεως (Gal. 
 iii. 7); and, with an allusion to the Church as the true home 
 of faith, οἴκειοι τῆς πίστεως (Gal. vi. 10). 
 
 m Rom. 111. 25: διὰ τῆς πίστεως ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι. We might have 
 expected ἐπὶ; and St. Paul would doubtless have used it, if he 
 had meant to express no more than confidence in the efficacy of 
 Christ’s Blood. 
 
 =. 
 » 
 
WE: ] implies a Divine Christ. 513 
 
 Now if our Lord had been, in the belief of His 
 Apostle, only a created being, is it conceivable that 
 He should have been thus put forward as having 
 a right wellnigh to engross the vision, the love, the 
 energy of the human soul? For St. Paul does ex- 
 pressly, as well as by implication, assert that the 
 hope" and the love® of the soul, no less than its 
 belief, are to centre in Christ. He never tells us that 
 a bare intellectual realization of Christ’s existence or 
 of Christ’s work will avail to justify the sinner before 
 God. By faith the soul is to be moving ever towards 
 Christ, resting ever upon Christ, living ever in Christ. 
 Christ is to be the end, the support, the very atmo- 
 sphere of its life. But how is such a relation possible 
 if Christ be not God? Undoubtedly faith does per- 
 ceive and apprehend the existence of invisible crea- 
 tures as well as of the Invisible God. Certainly the 
 angels are discerned by faith ; the Evil One himself 
 is an object of faith. That is to say, the supernatural 
 sense of the soul perceives these inhabitants of the 
 unseen world in their different spheres of wretched- 
 ness and bliss. But angels and devils are not ob- 
 jects of the faith which saves humanity from sin 
 and death. The blessed spirits command not that 
 loyalty of heart and will which welcomes Christ to the 
 Christian soul. The soul loves them as His minis- 
 ters, not as its end. No creature can be the legiti- 
 mate satisfaction of a spiritual activity so complex 
 in its elements, and so soul-absorbing in its range, 
 as is the faith which justifies. No created form 
 can thus be gazed at, loved, obeyed in that inmost 
 
 ΤΠ 1: ἢ’ ΟΣ ὺ, 70; COL i Δ΄. 
 © x Cor. xvi. 22. 
 
 ral 
 
 o, 
 
 =: 
 
δ14 St. Paul's account of Regeneration [ Lect. 
 
 sanctuary of a soul, which is consecrated to the exclu- 
 sive glory of the great Creator. If Christ had been 
 a creature, we may dare to affirm that St. Paul’s 
 account of faith in Christ ought to have been very 
 different from that which we have been considering. 
 If Christ is only a creature, in the belief of St. Paul ; 
 then it must be said that St. Paul, by his doctrine 
 of faith in Christ, does lead men to live for a crea- 
 ture rather than for the Creator. In the spiritual 
 teaching of St. Paul, Christ eclipses God if He is 
 not God ; since it is emphatically Christ’s Person as 
 warranting the preciousness of His work Which is 
 the Object of justifying faith. Nor can it be shewn 
 that the intellect and heart and will of man could 
 conspire to give to God a larger tribute of spiritual 
 homage than they are required by the Apostle to 
 give to Christ. 
 
 (8) Again, how much is implied as to the Person 
 of Christ by the idea of regeneration, as it 1s 
 brought before us in the writings of St. Paul! 
 St. Paul uses the word itself only onceP. But the 
 idea recurs continually throughout his writings ; it 
 is not less prominent in them than is the idea of 
 faith. This idea of regeneration is sometimes ex- 
 pressed by the image of a change of vesture4. The 
 
 P παλιγγενεσία, Tit. 111. 5. In St. Matt. xix. 28 the word has 
 a much wider and a very distinct sense. 
 
 4 Col. 111. 9, 10: ἀπεκδυσάμενοι τὸν παλαιὸν avOpwmov...... καὶ 
 ἐνδυσάμενοι τὸν νέον. Eph. iv. 22-24: ἀποθέσθαι... ..... τὸν παλαιὸν 
 ἄνθρωπον τὸν φθειρόμενον κατὰ τὰς ἐπιθυμίας τῆς ἀπάτης" ἀνανεοῦσθαι δὲ 
 τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ νοὸς ὑμῶν, καὶ ἐνδύσασθαι τὸν καινὸν ἄνθρωπον τὸν κατὰ 
 Θεὸν κτισθέντα ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ ὁσιότητι τῆς ἀληθείας. Gal. iil. 27: 
 
 Χριστὸν ἐνεδύσασθε. Rom. xili. 14. 
 
ie implies our Lord’s Divinity. 515 
 
 regenerate nature has put off the old man, with his 
 deeds of untruthfulness and lust, and has put on the 
 new or ideal man, the Perfect Moral Being, the Christ, 
 Sometimes the idea of regeneration is expressed 
 more closely by the image of a change of form’. 
 The regenerate man has been metamorphosed. He 
 is made to correspond to the Form of Christ; he is 
 renewed in the Image of Christ ; his moral being is 
 reconstructed. Sometimes, however, and most em- 
 phatically, regeneration is paralleled with natural 
 birth. Regeneration is a second birth. The regene- 
 rate man is a new creature’; he is a work of God'; 
 he has been created according to a Divine standard ¥. 
 But—and this is of capital importance—he is also 
 said to be created in Christ Jesus*; Christ is the 
 sphere of the new creationY. The instrument of re- 
 generation on Christ’s part, according to St. Paul, is 
 the sacrament of baptism?, to which the Holy Spirit 
 gives its efficacy, and which in the case of an adult 
 recipient must be corresponded to by repentance and 
 faith. Regeneration thus implies a double process, 
 one destructive, the other constructive; by it the 
 
 r Rom, ΧΙ]. 2: μεταμορφοῦσθε τῇ ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ νοὸς ὑμῶν. Ibid. 
 Vill. 29: ots προέγνω, καὶ προώρισε συμμόρφους τῆς εἰκόνος τοῦ Ὑἱοῦ αὑτοῦ. 
 Cf. Col. ili. 10: κατ᾽ εἰκόνα τοῦ κτίσαντος αὐτόν. 
 
 Gal. vi. 15: καινὴ κτίσις. 
 Eph. ii. 10: αὐτοῦ γάρ [se. Θεοῦ] ἐσμεν ποίημα. 
 
 Ibid. iv. 24: τὸν κατὰ Θεὸν κτισθέντα. 
 
 “ = or @ 
 
 Ibid. 11. 10: κτισθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς. 
 
 2 Cor. v. 17; and perhaps 1 Cor. vill. 6, where ἡμεῖς means ‘ we 
 regenerate Christians.’ 
 
 “- 
 
 2 Tit. ill, 5: ἔσωσεν ἡμᾶς, διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας καὶ ἀνακαινώσεως 
 Πνεύματος ᾿Αγίου, Gal. iii. 27: ὅσοι γὰρ εἰς Χριστὸν ἐβαπτίσθητε, Χρισ- 
 τὸν ἐνεδύσασθε. 1 Cor. xii. 13. 
 
 L12 
 
516 St. Paul’s account of Regeneration [Lecr. 
 
 old life is killed, and the new life forthwith bursts 
 into existence. This double process is effected by 
 the sacramental incorporation of the baptized, first 
 with Christ crucified and dead®, and then with Christ 
 rising from the dead to life; although the language 
 of the Apostle distinctly intimates that a continued 
 share in the resurrection-life depends upon the co- 
 operation of the will of the Christian, But the 
 moral realities of the Christian life, to which the 
 grace of baptism originally introduces the Christian, 
 correspond with, and are effects of, Christ’s Death and 
 Resurrection. Looked at historically, these events 
 belong to the irrevocable past. But for us Christians 
 the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not merely 
 past events of history; they are energizing facts from 
 which no lapse of centuries can sever us; they are 
 perpetuated to the end of time within the kingdom 
 of the Redemption ὁ. The Christian is crucified with 
 
 ἃ Rom. vi. 3, 4: ἢ ἀγνοεῖτε ὅτι ὅσοι ἐβαπτίσθημεν εἰς Χριστὸν ᾿Ιησοῦν, 
 εἰς τὸν θάνατον αὐτοῦ ἐβαπτίσθημεν ; συνετάφημεν οὖν αὐτῷ διὰ τοῦ βαπ- 
 τίσματος εἰς τὸν θάνατον. 
 
 b Ibid. vers. 4, 5: ἵνα ὥσπερ ἠγέρθη Χριστὸς ἐκ νεκρῶν διὰ τῆς δόξης 
 τοῦ Πατρὸς, οὕτω καὶ ἡμεῖς ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς περιπατήσωμεν. Ei γὰρ 
 σύμφυτοι γεγόναμεν τῷ ὁμοιώματι τοῦ θανάτου αὐτοῦ, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῆς ἀνα- 
 στάσεως ἐσόμεθα. 
 
 ¢ Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 140: “La régénération en tant qu'elle 
 comprend ces deux éléments d’une mort et d'une renaissance, est 
 tout naturellement mise en rapport direct avec la mort et la résur- 
 rection de Jésus-Christ. Ce rapport a été compris par quelques 
 théologiens comme si le fait historique était un symbole du fait 
 psychologique, pour lequel il aurait fourni la terminologie figurée. 
 Mais assurément la pensée de l’apdtre va au dela Tun simple 
 rapprochement idéal et nous propose le fait d'une relation objective 
 et réelle. Nous nous trouvons encore une fois sur le terrain du 
 mysticisme évangélique ; il est question trés-positivement d’wnre 
 
VI] implies our Lord’s Divinity. 517 
 
 Christ?; he dies with Christ®; he is buried with 
 Christ! ; he is quickened together with Christs ; he 
 rises with Christ’ ; he lives with Christ’. He is not 
 merely made to sit together in heavenly places as 
 
 being in Christ Jesus‘, he is a member of His Body, 
 as being of His Flesh and of His Bones! And of 
 
 identification avec la mort et la vie du Sauveur, et il n’y a ici de 
 Jfigurée que Vexpression, puisqu’au fond il ne s’agit pas de lexist- 
 ence physique du Chrétien. Oui, d’aprés Paul, le croyant meurt 
 avec Christ, pour ressusciter avec lui; et cette phrase ne s’explique 
 pas par ce que nous pourrions appeler un jeu de mots spirituel, 
 ou un rapprochement ingenieux ; elle est Vapplication du grand 
 principe de union personnelle, Paprés lequel Pexistence propre de 
 Thomme cesse réellement, pour se confondre avec celle du Christ, 
 qui répéte, pour ainsi dire, la sienne, avec ses deux faits capitaux, 
 dans chaque individualité se donnant a lui.” Ο si sic omnia! 
 
 ἃ Rom. vi. 6: ὁ παλαιὸς ἡμῶν ἄνθρωπος συνεσταυρώθη. Gal. 1]. 20: 
 Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι. 
 
 e 2 Tim. ii, 11: συναπεθάνομεν. Rom. vi. 8: ἀπεθάνομεν σὺν 
 Χριστῷ. 
 
 f Rom. vi. 4: συνετάφημεν οὖν αὐτῷ διὰ τοῦ βαπτίσματος. Col. ii. 
 [2: συνταφέντες αὐτῷ ἐν τῷ βαπτίσματι. 
 
 5 Eph. ii. 5: συνεζωοποίησε τῷ Χριστῷ. Col. ii. 13: συνεζωοποίησε 
 σὺν αὐτῷ. 
 
 h Eph. ii. 6: συνήγειρε [τῷ Χριστῷ]. There is no sufficient reason 
 for understanding Eph. ii. 5, 6 of the future resurrection alone ; 
 although in that passage the idea of the future resurrection (cf. 
 ver. 7) is probably combined with that of the spiritual resurrection 
 of souls in the kingdom of grace. We have been raised with 
 Christ here, that we may live with Him hereafter. Col. 11. 12: ἐν 
 ᾧ καὶ [sc. ἐν Χριστῷ] συνηγέρθητε διὰ τῆς πίστεως τῆς ἐνεργείας TOU Θεοῦ. 
 Ibid. iii. 1. 
 
 i Rom. vi. 8: συζήσομεν αὐτῷ. 2 Tim. 11. 11: εἰ γὰρ συναπεθάνομεν, 
 καὶ συζήσομεν. 
 
 k Eph. ii. 6: συνεκάθισεν ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ. 
 
 1 Thid. v. 30: μέλη ἐσμὲν τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ, ἐκ τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ, 
 καὶ ἐκ τῶν ὀστέων αὐτοῦ. Cf. Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 56, 7: “We are 
 
δ18 St. Paul’s account of Regeneration [Lecr. 
 
 this profound incorporation baptism is the original 
 instrument. The very form of the sacrament of 
 regeneration, as it was administered to the adult 
 multitudes who in the early days of the Church 
 pressed for admittance into her communion, harmo- 
 nizes with the spiritual results which it effects. As 
 the neophyte is bathed beneath the waters, so the old 
 nature is slain and buried with Christ. As Christ 
 crucified and entombed rises with irresistible might 
 from the grave which can no longer hold Him, so 
 the Christian is raised from the bath of regeneration 
 radiant with a new and supernatural life. His eye 
 is to be fixed henceforth on Christ, Who, being 
 raised from the dead, dieth no more. The Christian 
 indeed may fail to persevere ; he may fall from this 
 high grace in which he stands. But he need not do 
 so; and meanwhile he is bound to account himself as 
 “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord™.” 
 
 This regenerate or Christian life is described by 
 two most remarkable expressions. The Apostle 
 speaks sometimes of Christians being in Christ; 
 sometimes of Christ being in Christians®. The most 
 recent criticism refuses to sanction the efforts which 
 in former years have been made to empty these ex- 
 
 of Him and in Him, even as though our very flesh and bones 
 should be made continuate with His.” 
 
 m Rom. vi. 10, 11: ὃ yap ἀπέθανε [sc. ὁ Χριστὸς], τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ ἀπέθανεν 
 ἐφάπαξ’ ὃ δὲ Gh, ζῇ τῷ Θεῷ. οὕτω καὶ ὑμεῖς λογίζεσθε ἑαυτοὺς νεκροὺς μὲν 
 εἶναι τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ, ζῶντας δὲ τῷ Θεῶ ἐν Χριστῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν. 
 
 ὉΠ ἘΠῚ Ρ; a Cor. 1; 2; ΤΥ 22; Σ Cor ΠῚ; “vs ἘΠ: ἘΠῚ ΤΌΣ 
 Galli 20.026; ΠΡ τ 5.) τὸ; 6; Phil ΤῚΣ y Thess 1γ: 16. 
 
 © Gal. ii. 20; Eph. iii. 17; 2 Cor. xiii. 5; Col. i. 27. 
 
¥E.) implies our Lord’s Divinity. 519 
 
 pressions of their literal and natural force. Even 
 Hooker had observed that it is “too cold an inter- 
 pretation whereby some men expound being in Christ 
 to import nothing else but only that the selfsame 
 nature which maketh us to be men is in Him, and 
 maketh Him man as we are. For what man in the 
 world is there which hath not so far forth com- 
 munion with Jesus Christp?” Nor will it suffice to 
 say that in such phrases as are here in question 
 ‘Christ’ means only the moral teaching of Christ, 
 and that a Christian is ‘in Christ’ by the force of 
 mere intellectual loyalty to the Sermon on the 
 Mount. The expression is too energetic to admit of 
 this treatment ; it resists any but a literal explana- 
 tion. By a vigorous metaphor an enthusiastic Pla- 
 tonist might perhaps speak οἵ his ‘living in’ Plato, 
 meaning thereby that his whole intellectual bemg 
 was absorbed by and occupied with the recorded 
 thought of that philosopher. But he would scarcely 
 say that he was ‘in’ Plato; since such a phrase 
 would imply not merely intellectual communion with 
 Plato’s mind, but objective inherence in his nature 
 or being. Still less possible would it be to adopt 
 the alternative phrase, and say that Plato is ‘in’ 
 the student of Plato. When St. Paul uses these 
 expressions to denote a Christian’s relation to Christ, 
 he plainly is not recording any subjective impres- 
 sion of the human mind; he is pointing to an ob- 
 jective independent fact strictly peculiar to the king- 
 dom of the Incarnation. The regenerate Christian is 
 as really ‘in’ Christ as every member of the human 
 
 P Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 56, 7. 
 
520 Our Lords Divinity, how related (Lect. 
 
 family is ‘in’ our first parent Adam4. Christ is 
 indeed the sphere in which he really moves and 
 breathes ; but Christ is also the Parent of that new 
 nature in which he shares; Christ is the Head, 
 of Whose Body he is a member; nay, the Body of 
 Which he is a member is itself Christ’. From 
 Christ, risen, ascended, glorified, as from an ex- 
 haustless storehouse, there flow powers of unspeak- 
 able virtue; and in this life-stream the believing 
 and baptized Christian lives. And conversely, Christ 
 lives in the Christian; the soul and body of the 
 Christian are a temple of Christ ; the Christian is 
 well assured that Jesus Christ is in him, except 
 he be reprobate 5. 
 
 My brethren, what becomes of this language if 
 Jesus Christ be not truly God? No conceivable rela- 
 tionship to a human teacher or to a created being 
 will sustain its weight. [τὸ be not a mass of crude, 
 vapid, worthless metaphor, it indicates relationship 
 with One Who is altogether higher than the sons 
 of men, altogether higher than the highest arch- 
 angel. It is true that we are in Him, by being 
 joined to His Human Nature; but what is it which 
 thus makes His Human Nature a re-creative and 
 world-embracing power? Why is it that if any 
 man be in Christ, there is a new creationt of his 
 moral being? And how can Christ really be in us, 
 if He is not One with the Searcher of hearts ? 
 Surely He Only Who made the soul can thus 
 
 4 See Olshausen on the Epistle to the Romans, § 9, “ Parallel 
 between Adam and Christ,” chap. v. 12-21, Introductory Remarks. 
 
 Ὁ ΤΌΣ ἘΠ 02. 8 2 Cor. xiii. 5. 
 
 Ὁ Ibid. v. 17: εἴ τις ἐν Χριστῷ, καινὴ κτίσις. 
 
VE] to St. Paul's controversy with the Judaizers. 521 
 
 sound its depths and dwell within it, and renew its 
 powers and enlarge its capacities. And must we 
 not add that if Christ be not God, this renewal of 
 man’s nature rests only on an empty fiction, this 
 regeneration of man’s soul is but the ecstasy of an 
 enthusiastic dreamer 4 
 
 Tt would, then, be a considerable error to recognise 
 the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity only in those pas- | 
 sages of St. Paul’s writings which distinctly assert 
 it. The indirect evidence of the Apostle’s hold upon | 
 the doctrine is much wider and deeper than to ad-_ 
 mit of being exhibited in a given number of iso-/ 
 lated texts; since the doctrine colours, underlies, 
 interpenetrates the most characteristic features of 
 his thought and teaching. The proof of this might) 
 be extended almost indefinitely ; but let it suffice to 
 observe that the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity is: 
 the key to the greatest polemical struggle of the 
 Apostle’s whole life. Of themselves neither the im- 
 portation of Jewish ceremonial, nor even the dispo- 
 sition to sacrifice the Catholicity of the Church to a 
 petty nationalism, would fully account for the Apo- 
 stle’s attitude of earnest hostility to those Judaizing 
 teachers whom he encountered at Corinth, in Galatia, 
 and, in a Somewhat altered guise, at Colosse and at 
 Ephesus. For, in point of fact, the Judaizers implied 
 more than they expressly asserted. They implied 
 that Christ’s religion was not of so perfect and abso- 
 lute a character as to make additions to it an irreve- 
 rent impertinence. They implied that they did its 
 Founder no capital wrong when, instead of recognising 
 Him as the Saviour of the whole human family, 
 they practically purposed to limit the applicability of 
 
522 Our Lord’s Divinity, how related [ Lect. 
 
 His work to a narrow section of it. They implied 
 that there was nothing in His Majestic Person 
 which should have forbidden them to range those 
 dead rites of the old law, which He had fulfilled and 
 abolished, side by side with the Cross and Sacraments 
 of Redemption. The keen instinct of the Apostle de- 
 tected the wound thus indirectly but deeply aimed 
 at his Master’s honour ; and St. Paul’s love for Christ 
 was the exact measure of his determined opposition 
 to the influence and action of the Judaizers. If 
 the Judaizers had believed in the true Divinity of 
 Jesus, they could not have returned to the “weak 
 and beggarly elements” of systems which had paled 
 and died away before the glories of His Advent. 
 If they had fully and clearly believed Jesus to be 
 God, that faith must have opposed an insurmount- 
 able barrier to these reactionary yearnings for “the 
 things which had been destroyed.” Their attempt to 
 re-introduce circumcision into the Galatian Churches 
 was a reflection upon the glory of Christ’s finished 
 work, and so, ultimately, upon the transcendent dig- 
 nity of His Person. They knew not or heeded not 
 that they were members of a kingdom in which cir- 
 cumcision and uncircumcision were irrelevant acci- 
 dents, and in which the new creation of the soul by 
 the sacramental grace of the Incarnate Saviour was 
 the one point of vital import". Although they had 
 
 ἃ Gal. vi. 15: ἐν yap Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ οὔτε περιτομή τι ἰσχύει οὔδε 
 ἀκροβυστία, ἀλλὰ καινὴ κτίσις. Here regeneration is viewed from 
 without, on the side of the Divine Energy Which causes it; in 
 Gal. v. 6, where it is equally contrasted with legal circumcision, 
 it is viewed from within the soul, as consisting essentially in πίστις 
 δ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη. 
 
11 to St. Paul’s controversy with the Judaizers. 523 
 
 not denied Christ in terms, yet He had become of 
 no effect to them; and the Apostle sorrowfully pro- 
 claimed that as many of them as were justified 
 by the law had fallen from grace’. They had prac- 
 tically rejected the plenary efficacy of Christ’s saving 
 and re-creating power; they had implicitly denied 
 that He was a greater than Moses. Their work did 
 not at once perish from among men. For the Juda- 
 izing movement bequeathed to the Churches of the 
 Lesser Asia many of those theological influences 
 which were felt by later ages in the traditional tem- 
 per of the School of Antioch; while outside the 
 Church it was echoed in the long series of Humani- 
 tarian mutterings which culminated in the blasphe- 
 mies of Paulus of Samosata. It must thus be al- 
 lowed to rank conspicuously in the intellectual an- 
 cestry of the Arian heresy; and St. Paul, not less 
 than St. John, is an apostolical representative of the 
 cause and work of Athanasius. ὲ 
 Although the foregoing observations may have 
 taxed your indulgent patience somewhat severely, 
 they furnish at best only a sample of the evidence 
 which might be brought to illustrate the point before 
 us. But enough will have been urged to dispose of 
 the suspicion that St. John’s belief and teaching re- 
 specting the Divinity of Jesus Christ was only an in- 
 tellectual or spiritual peculiarity of that Apostle. If 
 the form and clothing of St. John’s doctrine was pe- 
 culiar to him, its substance was common to all the 
 
 Vv Gal. v. 4: κατηργήθητε ἀπὸ rod Χριστοῦ, οἵτινες ἐν νόμῳ δικαιοῦσθε, 
 τῆς χάριτος ἐξεπέσατε. Cf. Ibid. v. 2: ἐὰν περιτέμνησθε, Χριστὸς ὑμᾶς 
 jis χάρ ριτέμνησθε, Χρ 
 
 οὐδὲν ὠφελήσει. 
 
524 Contrasts between the Apostles enhance [ Lect. 
 
 apostles of Jesus Christ. Just as the titles and po- 
 sition assigned to Jesus Christ in the narrative of 
 the fourth Gospel are really in harmony with the 
 powers which He wields and with the rights which 
 He claims in the first three Evangelists, so St. John’s 
 doctrine of the Eternal Word is substantially one 
 with St. Paul’s doctrine of the “Image of the 
 Father,” and with his whole description of the 
 redemptive work of Christ, and of the attitude of 
 the Christian soul towards Him. St. John’s fuller 
 statements do but supply the key to the fervid 
 doxologies of St. Peter, and to the profound and 
 significant reverence of St. James. Indeed from 
 these Apostles he might seem to differ in poimt of 
 intellectual temper and method, even less than he 
 differs from St. Paul. Between St. Paul and St. John 
 how great is the contrast! In St. Paul we are struck 
 mainly by the wealth of sacred thought ; in St. John 
 by its simplicity. St. Paul is versatile and discur- 
 sive; St. John seems to be fixed in the entranced 
 bliss of a perpetual intuition. St. Paul is a dialec- 
 ticlan who teaches us by reasoning ; he refutes, he 
 infers, he makes quotations, he deduces corollaries, 
 he draws out his demonstrations more or less at 
 length, he presses impetuously forward, reverently 
 bending before the great dogmas which he proclaims, 
 yet moving in an atmosphere of perpetual conflict. 
 St. John speaks as if the highest life of his soul was 
 the wondering study of one vast Apocalypse: he 
 teaches, not by demonstrating truths, but by ex- 
 hibiting his contemplations ; he states what he sees ; 
 he repeats the statement, he mverts it, he repeats 
 it once more; he teaches, as it seems, by the ex- 
 
a 
 
 VI.] the force of their common witness to Christ's Divinity. 525 
 
 quisite tact of scarcely disguised but uninterrupted 
 repetition, which is justified because there is no 
 higher attainable truth than the truth which he 
 repeats. St. Paul begins with anthropology, St. John 
 with theology ; St. Paul often appeals to theology 
 that he may enforce truths of morals, St. John finds 
 the highest moral truth in his most abstract theo- 
 logical contemplations. St. Paul usually describes 
 the redemptive gift of Christ as Righteousness, as 
 the restoration of man to the true law of his being ; 
 St. John more naturally contemplates it as Life, as the 
 outflow of the Self-existent Being of God into His 
 creatures through the quickening Humanity of the 
 Incarnate Word. In St. Paul the ethical element 
 predominates, in St. John the mystical. St. John is 
 more especially the spiritual ancestor of such fathers 
 as was St. Gregory Nazianzen ; St. Paul of such as 
 St. Augustine. It may be said, with some reser- 
 vations, that St. Paul is the typical Apostle of West- 
 ern, as St. John is of Eastern Christendom ; that the 
 contemplative side of the Christian life finds its 
 pattern in St. John, the active in St. Paul. Yet 
 profound as are these differences of spiritual method 
 and temper, they are found in these great apostles 
 side by side with an entire unity of teaching as to 
 the Person of our Lord. “Certainly,” says Neander, 
 with deep truth, “it could be nothing merely ac- 
 eidental which induced men so differently con- 
 stituted and trained as Paul and John to connect 
 such an idea [as that of Divinity] with the doctrine 
 of the Person of Christ. This must have been the 
 result of a higher necessity, which is founded in the 
 nature of Christianity, in the power of the impression 
 
526 Contrasts between the Apostles enhance [ Lect. 
 
 which the Life of Christ had made on the lives of 
 men, in the reciprocal relation between the appear- 
 ance of Christ and the archetype that presents 
 itself as an inward revelation of God in the depths 
 of the higher self-consciousness. And all this has 
 found its pomt of connexion and its verification in 
 the manner in which Christ, the Unerring Witness, 
 expressed His consciousness of the indwelling of the 
 Divine Essence within Him*.” 
 
 This is indeed the only reasonable explanation 
 of the remarkable fact before us,—of the fact that 
 the persecutor who was converted on the road to 
 Damascus, and the disciple who had lain on Christ’s 
 breast at supper, were absolutely agreed as to the 
 Divine Prerogatives of their Master. And if we, my 
 brethren, have ever been tempted to think that a 
 creed like that of St. John befits only a contempla- 
 tive or mystic life, alien to the habits of our age and 
 to the necessities of our position, let us turn our eyes 
 towards the great Apostle of the Gentiles. It would 
 be difficult, even in this busy day, to rival St. Paul’s 
 activity; and human weakness might well shrink from 
 sharing his burden of pain and care. It is given 
 to few to live “in journeyings often, in perils of 
 
 x Planting and Training, i. 505, Bohn’s edit. Neander adds: 
 “Had the doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship, when it was first 
 promulgated by Paul, been altogether new and peculiar to himself, 
 it must have excited much opposition as contradicting the common 
 monotheistic belief of the Jews, even among the apostles, to whom, 
 from their previous habits, such a speculative or theosophic element 
 must have remained unknown, unless it had found a point of con- 
 nexion in the lessons received from Christ, and in their Christian 
 knowledge.” Of such opposition, direct and avowed, there is no 
 trace, 
 
VI) the force of their common faith in Christ's Divinity. 527 
 
 waters, in perils of robbers, in perils from a man’s own 
 countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in 
 the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the 
 sea, in perils among false brethrenY,” for a purely 
 unselfish object. Few rise to the heroic scope of 
 a life passed “in weariness and painfulness, in watch- 
 ings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, 
 in cold and nakedness.” But this is certain,—that 
 at much lower levels of moral existence, there is 
 much to be done, and much, sooner or later, to be 
 endured, which we can only do manfully and suffer 
 meekly in the strength of the Apostle’s great con- 
 viction. If St. Paul can suffer the loss of all things 
 that at the last he may win Christ, if he can do all 
 things through Christ that strengtheneth him, this is 
 because he is consciously reaching towards or leaning 
 on the arm of a Saviour Who is God as well as Man. 
 And if we, looking onward to the unknown changes 
 and chances of this mortal life, and to death beyond 
 it, would fain live and die like Christians, we too 
 must see to it that we fold to our inmost souls that 
 central truth of the Christian creed which was the 
 strength and joy of the first servants of Christ. We 
 too must believe and confess that that Human Friend 
 Whose words enlighten us, Whose Blood cleanses us, 
 Whose Sacraments have renewed and even now sus- 
 tain us, is in the truth of His Higher Nature none 
 other and no less than the Unerring, the All-merciful, 
 
 the Almighty God. 
 
 y 2 Cor.®xi. 25, 26. 
 z Ibid. ver. 27. Cf. Ibid. vi. 4-10, and xi. 5 sqq. 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 ΕΓ OM 00 UST ON: 
 
 Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that 
 he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to 
 convince the gainsayers.—Tir. 1. 9. 
 
 A GREAT doctrine which claims to rule the 
 thought of men and to leave its mark upon their 
 conduct, must of necessity encounter some rude and 
 _ probing tests of its vitality as it floats along the 
 stream of time. The common speech of mankind, 
 embodying the verdict of man’s experience, lays 
 more emphasis upon the ‘ravages’ than upon the 
 constructive or conservative effects of time ;— 
 
 “Tempus edax rerum, tuque invidiosa vetustas, 
 Omnia destruitis, vitiataque dentibus evi 
 Paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte?®.” 
 
 The destructive force of time is no less observable 
 in the sphere of human ideas and doctrines than 
 in that of material and social facts. Time exposes 
 every doctrine or speculation to the action of causes 
 
 a Ovid, Met. xv. 234. 
 
The vitality of a doctrine, how tested. 529 
 
 which, if more disguised and subtle, are not less 
 certainly at work than those which threaten political 
 systems or works of art with decay and dissolution. 
 A doctrine is liable to suffer with the lapse of 
 time from without and from within. From within 
 it is exposed to the risk of decomposition by ana- 
 lysis. When once it has been launched into the 
 ocean of our public intellectual life, it is forth- 
 with subjected, as a condition of its acceptance, to 
 the play and scrutiny of many and variously consti- 
 tuted minds. The several ingredients which consti- 
 tute it, the primary truths to which it appeals or 
 upon which it ultimately reposes, are separately and 
 constantly examined. It may be that certain ele- 
 ments of the doctrine, essential to its perfect repre- 
 sentation, are rejected altogether. It may be that 
 all its constitutive elements are retained, but the 
 proportions in which they are blended are radically 
 altered. It may be that an impulse is given to 
 some active intellectual solvent, hitherto dormant, 
 but from the first latent in the constitution of the 
 doctrine, and likely, according to any ordinary hu- 
 man estimate, to break it up. Or some poimt of 
 attraction between the doctrine and a threatening 
 philosophy outside it is discovered and insisted on ; 
 and the philosophy, in a patronizing spirit, proposes 
 to meet the doctrine half way, and to ratify one 
 half of it if the other may be abandoned. Or some 
 subtle intellectual poison is injected into the doc- 
 trine ; and while men fancy that they are adapting 
 it to the temper of an age, or to the demands of a 
 line of thought, its glow and beauty are forfeited, 
 or its very life and heart are eaten out. And for 
 Mm 
 
530 The vitality of a doctrine, how tested. [ Lecr. 
 
 awhile its shell or its skeleton lie neglected by 
 the side of the great highway of thought ; until at 
 length some one of those adventurers who in every 
 age devote themselves to the manufacture of eclectic 
 systems, gives it a place in his private museum, 
 side by side with the remains of other extinct theo- 
 ries, to which in its life-time it was fundamentally 
 opposed. 
 
 But even if a doctrine reposes upon bases sufli- 
 ciently assured to resist internal decomposition, it 
 must in any case be prepared to encounter the shock of 
 opposition from without. To no doctrine is it given 
 to be absolutely moftensive ; and therefore sooner or 
 later every doctrine is opposed. Every doctrine, 
 however frail and insignificant it may be, provokes 
 opposition by the mere fact of its existence. It 
 challenges a certain measure of attention which 15 
 coveted by some other doctrines. It takes up a cer- 
 tain amount of mental room which other doctrines 
 would fain appropriate, if indeed it does not jostle 
 inconveniently against them, or contradict them out- 
 right. Thus it rouses against itself resentment, or 
 at any rate, opposition; and this opposition is rein- 
 forced by an appetite which is shared in by those 
 who hold the opposed doctrine no less than by those 
 who oppose it. The craving for novelty is no mere 
 specialty of quickwitted races like the Athenians of 
 the apostolical age or the French of our own day. 
 It is profoundly and universally human ; and it en- 
 ters into our appreciation of subject-matters the most 
 various. Novelty confers a charm upon high efforts of 
 thought and enquiry as well as upon works of art or 
 imagination, or even upon fashions in amusement or 
 
ΠῚ The vitality of a doctrine, how tested. 591 
 
 in dress. But to treat this yearning for novelty as 
 though it were only a vicious frivolity is to over- 
 look its profound significance. For, even in its 
 lowest and unloveliest forms, it is a living and per- 
 petual witness to the original nobility of the soul 
 of man. It is the restlessness of a desire which 
 One Being Alone can satisfy; it reminds us that 
 the Infinite One has made us for Himself, and that 
 no object, person, or doctrine that is merely finite 
 and earthly, can take His place in our heart and 
 thought, and bid us finally be still. And therefore 
 as man passes through life on his short and rapid 
 pilgrimage, unless his eye be fixed on that treasure 
 in heaven which “neither moth nor rust doth cor- 
 rupt,” he is of necessity the very slave of novelty. 
 Each candidate for his admiration wins from him, it 
 may be, a passing glance of approval ; but, unsatisfied 
 at heart, he is ever seeking for some new stimulant 
 to his evanescent sympathies. He casts to the winds 
 the faded flower which he had but lately stooped 
 to gather with such eager enthusiasm; he buries 
 beneath. the waves the useless pebble which, when 
 his eye first detected it sparkling on the shore, had 
 yielded him a moment of such bright enjoyment. No- 
 thing human can insure its life against the attrac- 
 tions of something more recent than itself in point 
 of origin; no doctrine of earthly mould can hope 
 to escape the sentence of superannuation when it 
 is fairly confronted with the intellectual creations of 
 an age later than its own. A human doctrine may 
 Jive for a few years, or it may live for centuries. 
 Its duration will depend partly upon the amount 
 of absolute truth which it embodies, and partly 
 Mm 2 
 
532 The doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity [ Lecr. 
 
 upon the strength of the rivals with which it is 
 brought into competition. But it cannot always 
 satisfy the appetite for novelty ; its day of extinc- 
 tion can only be deferred. 
 
 , 
 οὐκ ἔχω προσεικάσαι, 
 πάντ᾽ ἐπισταθμώμενος, 
 πλὴν Διὸς, εἰ TO μάταν ἀπὸ φροντίδος ἄχθος 
 \\ a ° , 
 xen βαλεῖν ἐτητύμως. 
 
 Ὁ) Φ , > , 
 οὐδ᾽ ὅστις πάροιθεν ἣν μέγας, 
 , , , 
 παμμάχῳ θράσει βρύων, 
 
 Δ 
 οὐδὲν ἂν λέξαι πρὶν ὧν, 
 ὃς δ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ἔφυ, τρια- 
 
 κτῆρος οἴχεται τυχών b 
 
 So it must ever fare with a religious dogma of 
 purely human authorship. In obedience to the lapse 
 of time it must perforce be modified, corrupted, 
 revolutionized, and then yield to some stronger 
 successor. 
 
 “Our little systems have their day, 
 They have their day and cease to be.” 
 
 This is the true voice of human speculation on Di- 
 vine things, conscious that it is human, conscious 
 of its weakness, and mindful of its past and ever- 
 accumulating experience. He Only, “with Whom 
 is no variableness neither shadow of turning,” can 
 be the Author of a really unchanging doctrine ; and, 
 as a matter of historical fact, “His truth endureth 
 from generation to generation.” 
 
 When the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity entered 
 into the world of human thought, it was not screened 
 
 b Asch. Ag. 163-171. 
 
VIL.) tested in the modes above indicated. 533 
 
 from the operation of such antagonistic influences 
 as have been just noticed. It was confronted with 
 the passion for novelty beneath the eyes of the 
 apostles themselves. The passion for novelty at 
 Colossze appears to have combined a licentious fer- 
 tility of the religious imagination with a taste for 
 such cosmical speculations as were current in that 
 age; while in the Galatian Churches it took the 
 form of a return to the discarded ceremonial of the 
 Jewish law. In both cases the novel theory was 
 opposed to the apostolical account of our Lord’s 
 personal dignity ; and in another generation the wild 
 imaginings of a Basilides or of a Valentinus illus- 
 trated the attractive force of a new fashion in Chris- 
 ~ tological speculation still more powerfully. Some- 
 what later the dialectical method of the Alexandrian 
 writers subjected the doctrine to acute internal ana- 
 lysis, while the neo-Platonic philosophy brought a 
 powerful intellectual sympathy to bear upon it, 
 which, as an absorbing or distorting influence, might 
 well have been fatal to a human dogma. Lastly, the 
 doctrine was directly opposed by a long line of 
 Humanitarian teachers, reaching, with but few inter- 
 missions, from the Ebionitic period to the Arian. 
 
 In the history of the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity 
 the Arian heresy was the climax of difficulty and of 
 triumph ; it tested the doctrine at one and the same 
 time in all of the three modes which have been no- 
 ticed. Arianism was ostentatiously anxious to ap- 
 pear to be an original speculation, and accordingly 
 it taunted the Nicene fathers with their intellectual 
 poverty ; it branded them as ἀφελεῖς καὶ ἰδιώται be- 
 cause they adhered to the ground of handing on 
 
534 Doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity confirmed — {Lxcr. 
 
 simply what they had received. Its dialectical me- 
 thod was inherited from the Alexandrian eclectic 
 school; and by this method, as well as by the as- 
 sumption that certain philosophical placita were 
 granted, Arianism endeavoured to kill the doctrine 
 from within by a destructive analysis. And it need 
 scarcely be added that Arianism inherited and in- 
 tensified the direct opposition which had been offered 
 to the doctrine by earlier heresies; Arianism is im- 
 mortalized, however ingloriously, in those sufferings, 
 in those struggles, in those victories of the great 
 Athanasius, of which its own bitter hostility to our 
 Lord’s Essential Godhead was the immediate cause. 
 That such a doctrine as our Lord’s Divinity should 
 be thus opposed was not unnatural. It is in itself 
 so startling, so awful ; 1t confers so absolutely a new 
 conception of the whole worth and drift of Chris- 
 tianity upon the man who honestly and intelligently 
 believes it; it is so utterly intolerable if you admit 
 a suspicion of its bemg false; it is so necessarily 
 exacting when once you have recognised it as true ; 
 it makes such large and immediate demands, not 
 merely upon the reason and the imagination, but also 
 upon the affections and the will, that a specific oppo- 
 sition to it, as distinct from a professed general oppo- 
 sition to the religion of which it is the very heart 
 and soul, is only what might have been expected. 
 ‘Such a doctrine certamly could not at first bring 
 peace on earth; rather it could not but bring di- 
 vision. It could not but divide families, cities, na- 
 tions, continents ; it could not but arm against itself 
 the edge and pomt of every weapon that might be 
 forged or whetted by the ingenuity of a passionate 
 
WEE | by the opposition which it encountered. 535 
 
 animosity. It could not but have collapsed utterly 
 and vanished away when confronted with the heat 
 of opposition which it provoked, had it not descended 
 from the Source of Truth, had it not reposed upon 
 an absolute and indestructible basis. The Arian con- 
 troversy broke upon it as an intellectual storm, the 
 violence of which must have shattered any human 
 theory. But when the storm had spent itself, the 
 doctrine emerged from the conciliar decisions of the 
 fourth century as luminous and perfect as it had 
 been when proclaimed by St. Paul and St. John. 
 Resistance does but strengthen truth which it can-/ 
 not overthrow: and when the doctrine had defied 
 the craving for novelty, the disintegrating force of 
 hostile analysis, and the vehement onslaught of pas- 
 sionate denunciation, it was seen to be vitally unlike 
 those philosophical speculations which might have 
 been confused with it by a superficial observer. 
 Its exact area was unaltered ; it involved and it ex- 
 cluded now precisely what it had excluded and in- 
 volved from the first. But henceforth it was to be 
 held with a clearer recognition of its real frontier, 
 and of the necessity for insisting upon that recog- 
 nition. In the Homoousion, after such hesitation as 
 found expression at Antioch, the Church felt that she 
 had lighted upon a symbol which was practically ade- 
 quate to an expression of the truth which she had 
 from the first possessed, and capable of resisting the 
 intellectual solvents which had seemed to threaten 
 that truth with extinction. The Homoousion did not 
 change, it protected the doctrine. It clothed the doc- 
 trine in a vesture of language which rendered it in- 
 telligible to a new world of thought while preserving 
 
536 Triumph of the doctrine embodied in the Homoousion. [Lucr. 
 
 its strict unchanging identity. It translated the 
 apostolical symbols of the Image and the Word of 
 God into a Platonic equivalent ; and it remains with 
 us to this hour, in the very heart of our Creed, as the 
 complete assertion of Christ’s Absolute Oneness with 
 the Essence of Deity, as the monument which records 
 the greatest effort and the greatest defeat of its an- 
 tagonist error, as the guarantee that the victorious 
 truth maintains and will maintain an unshaken em- 
 pire over the thought of Christendom. 
 
 We are all sufficiently familiar with the line of 
 criticism to which such a formula as the Homoousion 
 is exposed in our day and generation. A con- 
 trast is projected and insisted upon with more 
 vehemence than accuracy, between the unfixed 
 popular faith of Christians in the first age of the 
 Church and the keen theological temper of the 
 fourth century. It is said that the Church’s earliest 
 faith was unformed, simple, vague, too full of child- 
 like wonder to analyse itself, too indeterminate to 
 serve the purposes of a theology. It is asserted 
 that at Alexandria the Church learned how to fix 
 her creed in precise, rigid, exclusive moulds; that 
 she there gradually crystallized what had once been 
 fluid, and cramped and fettered what had_ before 
 been free. And it is insmuated that in this process, 
 whereby the fresh faith of the infant Church “was 
 hardened into the creed of the Church of the Coun- 
 cils,” there was some risk, or more than risk, of an 
 alteration or enlargement of the original faith. ‘How 
 do you know, men ask, ‘that the formulary which 
 asserts Christ’s Consubstantiality with the Father is 
 really expressive of the simple faith im which the 
 
VII.) Relation of the Homoousion to the worship of Christ. 537 
 
 first Christians lived and died? Do ποὺ proba- 
 bilities pomt the other way? Is it not likely that 
 when this effort was made to fix the expression of 
 the faith in an unchanging symbol, there was a si- 
 multaneous growth, however unsuspected and un- 
 recognised, in the subject-matter of the faith ex- 
 pressed? May not the hopes and feelings of a 
 passionate devotion, as well as the inferential argu- 
 ments of an impetuous logic, have contributed some- 
 thing to fill up the outline and to enhance the 
 significance of the original germ of revealed truth ? 
 May not the Creed of Niczea be thus in reality 
 a creed distinct from, if not indeed more extensive 
 than, the creed of the apostolic age?’ Such is the 
 substance of many a whispered question or of many 
 a confident assertion which we hear around us ; 
 and it is necessary to enquire whether the admitted 
 difference of form between the apostolic and Nicene 
 statements does really, or only in appearance, involve 
 a deeper difference—a difference in the object of 
 faith. 
 
 I. Observe then, my brethren, that a belief may 
 be professed either by stating it in terms, or by 
 acting im a manner which necessarily implies that 
 you hold it. A man may profess a creed with which 
 his life is at variance ; but he may also live a creed, 
 if I may so speak, which he has not the desire or 
 the skill to put into exact words. There is no moral 
 difference between the sincere expression of a con- 
 viction in language, and its consistent reflection in 
 life. There is, for example, no difference between my 
 saying that a given person is not to be relied upon 
 when dealing with money matters, and my pointedly 
 
δ98 The Homoousion justifies the practice of Christendom { Lxct. 
 
 declining to act with him on a particular trust, when 
 asked to do so. It is not necessary that I should 
 express my complete opinion of his character, until 
 I am pressed to express it. 1 content myself with 
 acting in the only manner which is prudent under 
 the circumstances. Meanwhile my line of action 
 speaks for itself; its meaning is evident to all who 
 are practically interested in the subject. Until I am 
 challenged for an explanation, until the assumption 
 upon which I act is denied, there is no necessity 
 for my putting into words an opinion which my 
 line of conduct has already stated in the language 
 of action and with such unmistakeable decision. 
 
 Did then the ante-Nicene Church as a whole— 
 did its congregations of worshippers as well as its 
 councils of divines—did its poor, its young, its un- 
 lettered as well as its saints and doctors, so act and 
 speak as to imply a belief that Jesus Christ is 
 actually God 4 
 
 A question such as this may at first sight seem to 
 be difficult to answer, by reason of the usual one- 
 sidedness and caprice of history. History for the 
 most part concerns herself with the actions and 
 opinions of the great and the distinguished, that 
 is to say, of the few. Incidentally or on particular 
 occasions she may glance at what passes beyond 
 the region of courts and battle-fields; but it is 
 not her wont to enable us readily to ascertain 
 the real currents of thought and feeling which 
 have swayed the minds of multitudes in a distant 
 age. 
 
 Such at any rate is the rule with secular history ; 
 but the genius of the Church of Christ is of a 
 
ΠῚ] in adoring Jesus Christ. 539 
 
 nature to limit the force of the observation. In her 
 eyes the interests of the many, the customs, the 
 deeds, the sufferings of the illiterate and of the poor, 
 are, to say the least, not less precious and noteworthy 
 than those of kings and prelates. For the standard 
 of aristocracy within her borders is not an intel- 
 lectual or a social, but a moral standard; and her 
 Founder has put the highest honour not upon those 
 who rule and are of reputation, but upon those who 
 serve and are unknown. ‘The history of the Chris- 
 tian Church does therefore serve to illustrate the 
 point before us; and it proves the belief of Chris-' 
 tian people in the Godhead of Jesus by its wit- 
 ness to the early and universal practice of adoring 
 Him. 
 
 The early Christian Church did not content her- 
 self with ‘admiring’ Jesus Christ. She adored Him. 
 She approached His Majestic Person with that very 
 tribute of prayer, of self-prostration, of self-surrender, 
 by which all serious Theists, whether Christian or 
 non-Christian, are accustomed to express their felt 
 relationship as creatures to the Almighty Creator. 
 For as yet it was not supposed that a higher and 
 truer knowledge of the Infinite God would lead man 
 to abandon the sense and the expression of complete 
 dependence upon Him and of unmeasured indebted- 
 ness to Him, which befits a reasonable creature 
 whom God has made, and whom God owns and can 
 dispose of, when such a creature is dealing with 
 God. As yet it was not imagined that this bearing 
 would or could be exchanged for the more easy 
 demeanour of an equal, or of one deeming himself 
 scarcely less than an equal, who is Εἴ 
 
540 = Jesus Christ not simply “ admired’ but ‘adored? {| Lucr. 
 
 appreciating the existence of a remarkably wise 
 and powerful Being, entitled by His activities to 
 a very large share of speculative attention. The 
 Church simply adored God, and she adored Jesus 
 Christ as believing Him to be God. Nor did she 
 destroy the significance of this act by conceiving that 
 admiration differs from adoration only in degree, that 
 a sincere admiration is practically equivalent to ado- 
 ration, that adoration after all is only admiration 
 raised to the height of an enthusiasm. 
 
 You will not deem it altogether unnecessary, under 
 our present intellectual circumstances, to consider for 
 a moment whether this representation of the relation- 
 ship between admiration and adoration be strictly 
 accurate. So far indeed is this from being the case, 
 that adoration and admiration are at one and the 
 same moment and with reference to a single object, 
 mutually exclusive of each other. Certainly in the 
 strained and exaggerated language of poetry or of 
 passion you may speak of adoring that on which 
 you lavish an unlimited admiration. But the com- 
 mon sense and judgment of men refuses to regard 
 
 ὁ Cf. Lecky, History of Rationalism, i. 309. Contrasting the 
 Christian belief in a God Who can work miracles with the ‘sci- 
 entific’ belief in a God Who is the slave of ‘law,’ Mr. Lecky re- 
 marks, that the former “predisposes us most to prayer,” the latter 
 to “reverence and admiration.” Here the antithesis between 
 ‘reverence’ and ‘prayer’ seems to imply that the latter word is 
 used in the narrow sense of petition for specific blessings, instead 
 of in the wider sense which embraces the whole compass of the 
 soul’s devotional activity, and among other things, adoration. 
 Still, if Mr. Lecky had meant to include under ‘reverence’ any- 
 thing higher than we yield to the highest forms of human great- 
 ness, he would scarcely have coupled it with ‘admiration.’ 
 
ὙΠ ‘ Admiration’ and ‘ Adoration,’ 541 
 
 admiration as an embryo form of adoration, or as 
 other than a fundamentally distinct species of mental 
 activity. Adoration may be an intensified reve- 
 rence, but it certainly is not an intensified ad- 
 miration. The difference between admiration and 
 adoration is observable in the difference of their 
 respective objects; and that difference is immea- 
 surable. For, speaking strictly, we admire the finite ; 
 we adore the Infinite. Why is this? It is because 
 admiration requires a certain assumption of equality 
 with the object admired, an assumption of ideal, if 
 not of literal equality. Admiration such as is here 
 in question is not vague unregulated wonder ; it 
 involves a judgment ; it is a form of criticism. And 
 since it is a criticism, it consists in our internally 
 referrmg the object which we admire to a criterion. 
 That criterion is an ideal of our own, and the act 
 by which we compare the admired object with the 
 ideal is our own act. We may have borrowed the 
 ideal from another; and we do not for a moment 
 suppose that we ourselves could give it perfect ex- 
 pression, or even could rival the object which com- 
 mands our critical admirations. Yet, after all, the 
 ideal is before us; it is, in a sense, our own; we 
 take a certain credit to ourselves for possessing it, 
 and for comparing the object before us with it ; nay, 
 we identify ourselves more or less with the ideal 
 when we compare it with the object before us. When 
 you, my brethren, express your admiration of a good 
 painting, you do not mean to assert that you your- 
 selves could have painted it. But you do imply that 
 you have before your mind an ideal of what a good 
 painting should be, and that you are able to form 
 
542 ‘Admiratiow’ and ‘Adoration? [ Lect. 
 
 a Judgment as to the correspondence of a particular 
 work of art with that ideal. Thus it is that, whether 
 justifiably or not, your admiration of the painting 
 has the double character of self-appreciation and of 
 patronage. Indeed it may be questioned whether as 
 an art-critic, intent upon the beauty of your ideal, 
 you are not much more disposed secretly to claim 
 for yourself a share of merit than would have been 
 the case if you had been the artist himself whose 
 success you consent to admire ; since the artist, we 
 may be sure, is at least conscious of some measure 
 of failure, and is humbled, if not depressed, by 
 a sense of the difficulty of translating his ideal 
 into reality, by the anxieties and struggles which 
 are attendant on the process of production. 
 
 Now this element of self-esteem, or at any rate 
 of approving reflection upon self, which enters so 
 penetratingly mto admiration, is utterly incom- 
 patible with the existence of genuine adoration. 
 For adoration is no mere prostration of the body ; 
 it is a prostration of the soul. It is reverence car- 
 ried to the highest poimt of possible exaggeration. 
 It is mental self-annihilation before a Boundless 
 Greatness Which utterly transcends all human and 
 finite standards. In That Presence self knows that 
 it has neither plea nor right to any consideration ; 
 it is overwhelmed by the sense of its utter insig- 
 nificance. The adorimg soul bends thought and 
 heart and will before the footstool of the One Self- 
 existing, All-creating, All-upholding Being ; the soul 
 wills to be as nothing before Him, or to exist only 
 that it may recognise His greatness as altogether 
 surpassing its words and thoughts. If any one 
 
Ὑ11.] ‘ Admiration’ and “ Adoration? 543 
 
 element of adoration be its most prominent cha- 
 racteristic, it is a heartfelt uncompromising renun- 
 ciation of the claims of self. 
 
 Certainly admiration may lead up to adoration ; 
 but then real admiration dies away when its object 
 is seen to be entitled to something higher than and 
 distinct from it. Admiration ceases when it has 
 perceived that its Object altogether transcends any 
 standard of excellence or beauty with which man 
 can compare Him. Admiration may be the ladder 
 by which we mount to adoration, but it is useless, 
 or rather it is an impertinence, when adoration has 
 been reached. Every man of intelligence and mo- 
 desty meets in life with many objects which call 
 for his free and sincere admiration, and he himself 
 gains both morally and intellectually by answering 
 such a call. But while the objects of human admira- 
 tion are as various as the minds and tastes of men, 
 
 “ Denique non omnes eadem mirantur amantque,” 
 
 One Only Being can be rightfully adored. To ‘ad- 
 mire’ God would involve an irreverence only equal 
 to the impiety of adoring a fellow-creature. It 
 would be as reasonable to pay Divine worship to 
 our every-day associates, as to substitute for that 
 incommunicable honour which is due to the Most 
 High some one of the tranquil and self-satisfied 
 forms of favourable notice with which we greet ac- 
 complishments or excellence in our fellow-creatures. 
 “When I saw Him,” says St. John, speaking of Jesus 
 in His glory, “I fell at His feet as dead*.” That 
 
 was something more than admiration, even the 
 
 d . 4 ; 
 ἃ Rey. 1. 17: ὅτε εἶδον αὐτὸν, ἔπεσα πρὸς rods πόδας αὐτοῦ ws νεκρός. 
 
544 The adoration of Jesus coeval with the Church. [Lucr. 
 
 most enthusiastic; it was an act, my brethren, of 
 adoration. 
 
 If Jesus Christ had been only a morally perfect 
 Man, He would have been entitled to the highest 
 human admiration ; although it may be questioned, as 
 we have seen, whether He can be deemed morally per- 
 fect if He is in reality only human. But the historical 
 fact before us is, that from the earliest age of Chris- 
 tianity, Jesus Christ has been adored as God. This 
 adoration was not yielded to Him in consequence of 
 the persuasions of theologians who had pronounced 
 Him to be a Divine Person ; it had nothing in com- 
 mon with the fulsome and servile insincerities which 
 ever and anon rose like incense around the throne 
 of some pagan Ceesar who had received the equivocal 
 honour of an apotheosis. Nor was this adoration of 
 Jesus the product of a spiritual fascination too 
 subtle or too strong to admit of accurate analysis. 
 You cannot trace the stages of its progressive de- 
 velopment. You cannot fix the period at which it 
 was regarded only as a pious custom or luxury, and 
 then mark this off from a later period when it had 
 become, in the judgment of Christians, an imperious 
 Christian duty. Never was the adoration of Jesus 
 protested against in the Church as a novelty, de- 
 rogatory to the honour and claims of God. Never 
 was there a time when Jesus was only ‘invoked’ as 
 if He had been an interceding saint, by those who 
 had not yet learned to prostrate themselves before 
 His throne as the throne of the Omnipotent and 
 the Eternal. In vain will you endeavour to establish 
 a parallel between the adoration of Jesus and some 
 modern ‘devotion’ unknown to the early days of 
 
Wii Worship of Jesus during Mis earthly Infe. 545 
 
 Christendom, but now popularized largely in portions 
 of the Christian Church; since the adoration of 
 Jesus is as ancient as Christianity, and Jesus has 
 been ever adored on the score of His Divine Per- 
 sonality—that Personality of which this tribute of 
 adoration is not merely a legitimate but a neces- 
 sary acknowledgment. r 
 During the days of His earthly life our Lord 
 was surrounded by acts of homage, ranging, as it 
 might seem, so far as the intentions of those who 
 offered them were concerned, from the wonted forms 
 of Eastern courtesy up to the most direct and con- 
 scious acts of Divine worship. As an Infant He 
 was ‘worshipped’ by the Eastern sages®; and during 
 His ministry He constantly received and welcomed 
 acts and words expressive of an intense devotion 
 to His Sacred Person on the part of those who 
 sought or who had received from Him some super- 
 natural aid or blessing. The leper worshipped Him, 
 saying, “Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me 
 cleanf.” Jairus worshipped Him, saying, “ My 
 daughter is even now dead: but come and lay Thy 
 hand upon her, and she shall lives.” The mother of 
 Zebedee’s children came near to Him, worshipping 
 Him, and asking Him to bestow upon her sons the 
 first places of honour in His kingdom". The woman 
 of Canaan, whose daughter was “grievously vexed 
 
 e St. Matt. ii, 11: πεσύντες προσεκύνησαν αὐτῷ. 
 
 f Tbid. viii. 2: Κύριε, ἐὰν θέλῃς, δύνασαί pe καθαρίσαι. 
 
 & Ibid. ix. 18: προσεκύνει αὐτῷ, λέγων, “Ὅτι ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι 
 ἐτελεύτησεν. ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ᾽ αὐτὴν, καὶ ζήσεται." 
 
 h Tbid. xx. 20: προσῆλθεν αὐτῷ ἡ μήτηρ τῶν υἱῶν Ζεβεδαίου μετὰ τῶν 
 υἱῶν αὐτῆς, προσκυνοῦσα καὶ αἰτοῦσά τι παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ. 
 
 INH 
 
δ40 Worship of Jesus during His earthly Life. [1|807. 
 
 with a devil,” “came and worshipped Him, saying, 
 Lord, help mei.” The father of the poor lunatic, who 
 met Jesus as He descended from the Mount of 
 Transfiguration, “came, kneeling down to Him, and 
 saying, Lord, have mercy on my son*.” These are 
 instances of worship accompanying prayers for spe- 
 cial mercies. And did not the dying thief offer at 
 least a true inward worship to Jesus Crucified, along 
 with the words, “Lord, remember me when Thou 
 comest into Thy kingdom”? At other times visible 
 worship was an act of acknowledgment or of thanks- 
 giving. Thus it was with the grateful Samaritan 
 leper, who, “ when he saw that he was healed, turned 
 back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell 
 down on his face at His Feet, giving Him thanks!.” 
 Thus it was when Jesus had appeared walking on 
 the sea and had quieted the storm, and “they that 
 were in the ship came and worshipped Him, say- 
 ing, Of a truth Thou art the Son of God™.” Thus 
 it was after the miraculous draught of fishes, that 
 St. Peter, astonished at the greatness of the miracle, 
 “fell down at Jesus’ Knees, saying, Depart from 
 me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord®.” Thus the 
 
 i St. Matt. xv. 25: ἡ δὲ ἐλθοῦσα προσεκύνει αὐτῷ, λέγουσα, “Κύριε, 
 βοήθει por.” 
 
 k Ibid =a 5 fol ὑτῷ ave ~ >A ‘ 
 
 nd, XV. I 15: προσ εν αὑτῷ avOpwWTOs γονυπετῶν AUT@, Και 
 ᾽ ἜΘΟΣ) ; γ > 
 λέγων, “ Κύριε, ἐλέησόν pov τὸν vidv.” 
 
 1 St. Luke xvii. 15, 16: εἷς δὲ ἐξ αὐτῶν, ἰδὼν ὅτι ἰάθη, ὑπέστρεψε, 
 μετὰ φωνῆς μεγάλης δοξάζων τὸν Θεόν" καὶ ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον παρὰ 
 τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ, εὐχαριστῶν αὐτῷ. 
 
 m St. Matt. xiv. 32, 33: ἐκόπασεν ὁ ἄνεμος" οἱ δὲ ἐν τῷ πλοίῳ ἐλ- 
 θόντες προσεκύνησαν αὐτῷ, λέγοντες, ““᾿Αληθῶς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς εἶ," 
 
 n St. Luke v. 8: ἰδὼν δὲ Σίμων Πέτρος προσέπεσε τοῖς γόνασι τοῦ 
 
 ᾿Ιησοῦ, λέγων, ““Ἔξελθε ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ, ὅτι ἀνὴρ ἁμαρτωλός εἰμι, Κύριε." 
 
WIT.] Worship of Jesus during His earthly Life. 547 
 
 penitent, “when she knew that Jesus sat at meat 
 in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of 
 ointment, and stood at His Feet behind Him weep- 
 ing, and began to wash His Feet with tears, and 
 did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed 
 His Feet, and anointed them with the ointment”.” 
 Thus too when the man born blind confesses his faith 
 in “the Son of God,” he accompanies it by an un- 
 doubted act of adoration. “And he said, Lord, I be- 
 lieve. And he worshipped Him?.” Thus the holy 
 women, when the Risen “Jesus met them, saying, ‘All 
 hail, came... and held Him by the Feet, and wor- 
 shipped Him4.” Thus apparently Mary of Magdala, 
 in her deep devotion, had motioned to embrace His 
 Feet in the garden, when Jesus bade her “Touch Me 
 not™.” Thus the eleven disciples met our Lord by 
 appointment on a mountain in Galilee, and “when 
 they saw Him,” as it would seem, in joy and 
 fear, “they worshipped Hims.” Thus, pre-eminently, 
 
 © St. Luke vii. 37,38: κομίσασα ἀλάβαστρον μύρου, καὶ στᾶσα παρὰ τοὺς 
 πόδας αὐτοῦ ὀπίσω κλαίουσα, ἤρξατο βρέχειν τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ τοῖς δάκρυσι, 
 καὶ ταῖς θριξὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτῆς ἐξέμασσε, καὶ κατεφίλει τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ, 
 καὶ ἤλειφε τῷ μύρῳ. These actions were expressive of a passionate 
 devotion ; they had no object beyond expressing it. 
 
 P St. John ix. 35-38: ἤκουσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς ὅτι ἐξέβαλον αὐτὸν ἔξω" 
 καὶ εὑρὼν αὐτὸν, εἶπεν αὐτῷ, “Sv πιστεύεις εἰς τὸν Yiov τοῦ Θεοῦ ; ἢ 
 ᾿Απεκρίθη ἐκεῖνος καὶ εἶπε, “Tis ἐστι, Κύριε, ἵνα πιστεύσω εἰς αὐτόν ; " 
 Εἶπε δὲ αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, “Καὶ ἑώρακας αὐτὸν, καὶ ὁ λαλῶν μετὰ 
 σοῦ, ἐκεῖνός ἐστιν." ‘O δὲ ἔφη, “Πιστεύω, Κύριε"" καὶ προσεκύνησεν 
 αὐτῷ. 
 
 a St. Matt. xxviii. g: ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀπήντησεν αὐταῖς, λέγων, “ Xaipere.” 
 Ai δὲ προσελθοῦσαι ἐκράτησαν αὐτοῦ τοὺς πόδας, καὶ προσεκύνησαν 
 αὐτῷ. 
 
 r St. John xx. 17. 
 
 5. St. Matt. xxviii. 17: καὶ ἰδόντες αὐτὸν, προσεκύνησαν αὐτῷ" οἱ δὲ 
 
 ΝῺ 2 
 
548 Worship of Jesus during His earthly Iife. — [Lxcr. 
 
 St. Thomas uses the language of adoration, even 
 if we are not told that it was accompanied by any 
 corresponding outward act. When, in reproof for 
 his scepticism, he had been bidden to probe the 
 Wounds of Jesus, he burst forth into the adoring 
 confession, “My Lord and my God'.” Thus, when 
 the Ascending Jesus was being borne upwards into 
 heaven, the disciples, as if thanking Him for His 
 great glory, worshipped Him; and then “returned 
 to Jerusalem with great joy".” 
 
 It may be that in some of these instances the 
 ‘worship’ paid to Jesus did not express more than a 
 profound reverence. Sometimes He was worshipped 
 as a Superhuman Person, wielding superhuman 
 powers ; sometimes He was worshipped by those 
 who instinctively felt His moral majesty, which 
 forced them, they knew not how, upon their knees. 
 But if He had been only a ‘good man, He must 
 have checked such worship. He had Himself re- 
 affirmed the foundation-law of the religion of Israel: 
 “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him 
 only shalt thou serve*.” Yet He never hints that 
 danger lurked in the prostration of hearts and wills 
 before Himself; He welcomes, by a tacit approval, 
 
 ἐδίστασαν. If some doubted, the worship offered by the rest was 
 a very deliberate act. 
 
 t St. John xx. 28: καὶ ἀπεκρίθη ὁ Θωμᾶς, καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, “ὋὉ Κύριός 
 μου καὶ ὁ Θεός pov.” Against the attempt of Theodore of Mopsuestia 
 and others to resolve this into an ejaculation addressed to the 
 Father, see Alford in loc. 
 
 ἃ St. Luke xxiv. 51, 52: καὶ ἀνεφέρετο eis τὸν οὐρανόν. καὶ 
 αὐτοὶ προσκυνήσαντες αὐτὸν, ὑπέστρεψαν εἰς Ἱερουσαλὴμ μετὰ yapas 
 μεγάλης. 
 
 x δύ. Matt. iv. το. 
 
VII.] Adoration of Jesus Glorified. 549 
 
 the profound homage of which He is the Object. 
 His rebuke to the rich young man implies, not that 
 He Himself had no real claim to be called ‘Good 
 Master, but that such a title, in the mouth of the 
 person before Him, was an unmeaning compliment. 
 He seems to invite prayer to Himself, even for the 
 highest spiritual blessings, in such words as those 
 which He addressed to the woman of Samaria: “If 
 thou knewest the gift of God, and Who it is that 
 saith unto thee, Give Me to drink ; thou wouldest 
 have asked of Him, and He would have given thee 
 living water Y.” He predicts indeed a time when the 
 spiritual curiosity of His disciples would be satisfied 
 in the joy of perfectly possessing Him; but He no- 
 where hints that He would Himself cease to receive 
 their prayers’. He claims all the varied homage 
 which the sons of men, in their want and fullness, 
 in their joy and sorrow, may rightfully and _pro- 
 fitably pay to the Eternal Father; all men are to 
 “honour the Son even as they honour the Father.” 
 Certain it is that no sooner had Christ been lifted 
 up from the earth, in death and in glory, than He 
 forthwith began to draw all men unto Him?. This 
 attraction expressed itself, not merely in an assent to 
 His teaching, but in the worship of His Person. No 
 sooner had He ascended to His throne than there burst 
 
 y St. John iv. 10: εἰ ἤδεις τὴν δωρεὰν τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ τίς ἐστιν ὁ 
 
 ,ὔ , - A a” > ‘ ‘ ” ΕΣ “ 
 λέγων σοι, Δός μοι πιεῖν, σὺ ἂν ἤτησας αὐτὸν, καὶ ἔδωκεν ἄν σοι ὕδωρ 
 ζῶν. 
 
 2 Thid. xvi. 22: πάλιν δὲ ὄψομαι ὑμᾶς, καὶ χαρήσεται ὑμῶν ἡ καρδία, 
 
 4 \ 4 J ΄“ > ‘ » > » ς -“" . ‘ > > , -»- c , > 4 > 
 καὶ τὴν χαρὰν ὑμῶν οὐδεὶς αἴρει ἀφ᾽ ὑμῶν" καὶ ἐν ἐκείνῃ TH ἡμέρᾳ ἐμὲ οὐκ 
 ἐρωτήσετε οὐδέν. Here ἐρωτήσετε means ‘ question.’ 
 
 a Tbid. xii. 32. 
 
550 Apostolic prayer at the election of St. Matthias. [Lucr. 
 
 upwards from the heart of His Church a tide of ado- 
 ration which has only become wider and deeper with 
 the lapse of time. In the first days of the Church, 
 Christians were known as “those who called upon 
 the Name of Jesus Christ?” Prayer to Jesus Christ, 
 so far from bemg a devotional eccentricity, was the 
 universal practice of Christians; it was the devo- 
 tional act which specially characterized a Christian. 
 It would seem more than probable that the prayer 
 offered by the assembled apostles at the election of 
 St. Matthias, was addressed to Jesus glorified’. A 
 
 b Thus Ananias pleads to our Lord that Saul “hath authority 
 from the chief priests to bind πάντας τοὺς ἐπικαλουμένους τὸ ὄνομά cov.” 
 (Acts ix. 14.) On St. Paul’s first preaching in Jerusalem, “ All 
 that heard him were amazed, and said, Is not this he that de- 
 stroyed in Jerusalem τοὺς ἐπικαλουμένους τὸ ὄνομα τοῦτο ;” (Ibid. ver. 
 21.) Thus the title was applied to Christians both by themselves 
 and by Jews outside the Church. In after years St. Paul inserts 
 it at the beginning of his first Epistle to the Corinthians, which 
 is addressed to the Church of God at Corinth σὺν πᾶσι τοῖς ἐπικαλου- 
 μένοις τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. (1 Cor. i. 2.) The 
 expression is illustrated by the dying prayer of St. Stephen, whom 
 his murderers stoned ἐπικαλούμενον καὶ λέγοντα, ““Κύριε “Inood, δέξαι τὸ 
 πνεῦμά pov.” (Acts vii. 59.) It cannot be doubted that in Acts xxii. 
 16, 2 Tim. ii. 22, the Κύριος Who is addressed is our Lord Jesus 
 Christ. ᾿Επικαλεῖσθαι is not followed by an accusative except in the 
 sense of appealing to God or man, Its meaning is clear when it 
 is used of prayer to the Eternal Father, τ St. Pet. 1. 17; Acts ii. 21 
 (but cf. Rom. x. 13); or of appeal to Him, 2 Cor. i. 23; or of 
 appeal to a human judge, Acts xxv. 11, 12, 21, 253 ΧΧΥ͂Ι. 32; 
 Xxvili. 19, Its passive use occurs in texts of a different construc- 
 tion: Acts iv. 36; x. 18; xii. 2; xv. 17; Heb. xi. 16; St. James 
 1:09 
 
 c Acts i, 24: καὶ προσευξάμενοι εἶπον, “ Σὺ Κύριε καρδιογνῶστα πάν- 
 ἢ κτλ. The selection 
 of the twelve apostles is always ascribed to Jesus Christ. Acts i. 2: 
 
 των, ἀνάδειξον ἐκ τούτων τῶν δύο ἕνα ὃν ἐξελέξω 
 
VII. ] The dying prayer of St. Stephen. 551 
 
 few months later the dying martyr St. Stephen 
 passed to his crown. His last cry was a prayer to 
 our Lord, moulded upon two of the seven sayings 
 which our Lord Himself had uttered on the Cross. 
 Jesus had prayed the Father to forgive His exe- 
 cutioners. Jesus had commended His Spirit into 
 the Father's Hands¢. The words which are ad- 
 dressed by Jesus to the Father, are by St. Stephen 
 addressed to Jesus. To Jesus Stephen turns in 
 that moment of supreme agony ; to Jesus he prays 
 for pardon on his murderers; to Jesus, as to the 
 
 ods ἐξελέξατο. St. Luke vi. 13: προσεφώνησε τοὺς μαθητὰς adrov: 
 kal ἐκλεξάμενος am αὐτῶν δώδεκα, ods καὶ ἀποστόλους ὠνόμασε. St. John 
 Vi. 70: οὐκ ἐγὼ ὑμᾶς τοὺς δώδεκα ἐξελεξάμην ; Ibid. xill. 18: ἐγὼ 
 οἶδα ods ἐξελεξάμην. Ibid. xv. 16: οὐχ ὑμεῖς με ἐξελέξασθε, ἀλλ᾽ 
 ἐγὼ ἐξελεξάμην ὑμᾶς. Ibid. ver. 19: ἐγὼ ἐξελεξάμην ὑμᾶς ἐκ τοῦ 
 κόσμου. Meyer quotes Acts xv. 7: ὁ Θεὸς ἐξελέξατο διὰ τοῦ 
 στόματός μου ἀκοῦσαι τὰ ἔθνη τὸν λόγον τοῦ εὐαγγελίου, in order 
 to shew that the Eternal Father must have been addressed. But 
 this assumes that Θεός can have no reference to our Lord. More- 
 over St. Peter is clearly referring, not to his original call to the 
 apostolate, but to his being directed to evangelize the Gentiles. 
 St. Paul was indeed accustomed to trace up his apostleship to the 
 Eternal Father as the ultimate Source of all authority (Gal. i. 15 ; 
 2 Cor. i. 1; Eph. 1. 1; 2 Tim. i. 1); but this is not inconsistent 
 with the fact that Jesus Christ chose and sent each and all of 
 the apostles. The epithet καρδιογνώστης, and still more the word 
 Κύριος, are equally applicable to the Father and to Jesus Christ. 
 For the former see St. John i. 49; ii. 25; vi. 64; xxi. 17. It was 
 natural that the apostles should thus apply to Jesus Christ to fill 
 up the vacant chair, unless they believed Him to be out of the 
 reach of prayer or incapable of helping them. See Alford and 
 Olshausen in loc. ; Baumgarten’s Apost. History in loc. 
 
 ἃ Acts vii. 59, Go: ἐλιθοβόλουν τὸν Στέφανον, ἐπικαλούμενον καὶ 
 λέγοντα, “Κύριε ᾿Ιησοῦ, δέξαι τὸ πνεῦμά pov.” Θεὶς δὲ τὰ γόνατα, ἔκραξε 
 
 φωνῇ μεγάλῃ, “Κύριε, μὴ στήσῃς αὐτοῖς τὴν ἁμαρτίαν ταύτην." 
 
552 The dying prayer of St. Stephen. (Lect. 
 
 King of the world of spirits, he commends his part- 
 ing soul. Is it suggested that St. Stephen’s words 
 were “only an ejaculation forced from him in the 
 extremity of his agony,” and that as such they are 
 “highly unfitted to be made the premise of a theo- 
 logical inference?” But the question is whether the 
 earliest apostolical Church did or did not pray to 
 Jesus Christ. And St. Stephen’s dying prayer is 
 strictly to the point. An ‘ejaculation’ may shew 
 more clearly than any set formal prayer the ordinary 
 currents of devotional thought and feeling; an 
 ejaculation is more instinctive, more spontaneous, 
 and therefore a truer index of the real man, than 
 a prayer which has been used for years. And 
 how could the martyr’s cry to Jesus have been 
 the product of a thoughtless impulse? Dymg men 
 do not cling to devotional fancies or to precarious 
 opinions; the soul in its last agony instinctively 
 falls back upon its deepest certainties. Assuredly 
 the unpremeditated ejaculation of a man dymg 
 in shame and torture cannot be credited with 
 that element of dramatic artifice which may in 
 rare cases have coloured the parting words and 
 actions of those who, on the brink of eternity, have 
 thought more of their “place in history” than of 
 the awful Presence into which they were hastening. 
 Is it hinted that St. Stephen was a recent convert 
 not yet entirely instructed in the complete faith 
 and mind of the apostles, and not unlikely to ex- 
 ageerate particular features of their teaching? But 
 St. Stephen is expressly described as a man “full 
 of faith and of the Holy Ghost.” As such he had 
 
 © Acts vi. 5: ἄνδρα πλήρη πίστεως καὶ Πνεύματος ‘Ayiov. 
 
VII.) The dying prayer of St. Stephen. 553 
 
 recently been chosen to fill an important office in — 
 the Church; and as a prominent missionary and 
 apologist of the faith he might seem almost to have 
 taken rank with the apostles themselves. Is it 
 urged that St. Stephen’s prayer was offered under 
 the exceptional circumstances of a vision of Christ 
 vouchsafed in mercy to His dying servantf? But 
 it does not enter into the definition of prayer or 
 worship that it must of necessity be addressed to 
 an invisible Person. And the vision of Jesus stand- 
 ing at the right hand of God may have differed in 
 the degree of sensible clearness, but in its general 
 nature it did not differ from that upon which the 
 eye of every dying Christian has rested from the 
 beginning. St. Stephen would not have prayed to 
 Jesus Christ then, if he had never prayed to Him 
 before ; the vision of Jesus would not have tempted 
 him to innovate upon the devotional law of his life ; 
 the sight of Jesus would have only carried him in 
 thought upwards to the Father, if the Father alone 
 had been the Object of the Church’s earliest ado- 
 ration. St. Stephen would never have prayed to 
 Jesus if he had been taught that such prayer was 
 hostile to the supreme prerogatives of God; and 
 the apostles, as monotheists, must have taught thus, 
 unless they had taught that Jesus was God, and 
 had accordingly prayed to Him. Indeed St. Stephen’s 
 prayer may be illustrated, so far as this point is 
 concerned, by that of Ananias at Damascus. To 
 Ananias Jesus appeared in a vision, and desired him 
 
 f So apparently Meyer in loc.: “ Das Stephanus Jesum anrief, 
 war héchst natiirlich, da er eben Jesum fiir ihn bereit stehend 
 gesehen hatte.” 
 
554 Prayer of Ananias to Jesus Christ. {Lecr. 
 
 to go to the newly-converted Saul of Tarsus “in 
 the street that is called Straight.” The reply of 
 Ananias is an instance of that species of prayer in 
 which the soul trustfully converses with God even 
 to the verge of argument and remonstrance, while 
 yet it is controlled by the deepest sense of God’s 
 awful greatness: “Lord, I have heard by many of 
 this man, how much evil he hath done to Thy 
 saints at Jerusalem: and here he hath authority 
 from the chief priests to bind all that call on Thy 
 Names.” Our Lord overrules the objections of His 
 servant. But what man has not at times prayed 
 for exemption when God has made it plain that 
 He wills him to undertake some difficult duty, or 
 to embrace some sharp and heavy cross? Who has 
 not pleaded with God the claims of His interests 
 and His honour against what appears to be His 
 Will, so long as it has been possible to doubt 
 whether His Will is really what it seems to be? 
 -Ananias’ ‘remonstrance’ is a prayer ; it is a spiritual 
 colloquy ; it is a form of prayer which implies daily, 
 hourly familiarity with its Object; it is the lan- 
 guage of a soul habituated to constant communion 
 with Jesus. And it is noteworthy as shewing that 
 Jesus occupies the whole field of vision in the soul 
 of His servant. The ‘saints’ whom Saul of Tarsus 
 has persecuted at Jerusalem, are the ‘saints,’ it is 
 said, not of God, but of Jesus; the Name which is 
 called upon by those whom Saul has authority to 
 
 & Acts ix. 13, 14: Κύριε, ἀκήκοα ἀπὸ πολλῶν περὶ τοῦ ἀνδρὸς τού- 
 
 μὴ A > ‘ cal « , > c , ὃ \ @ » > 
 Tov, ὅσα κακὰ ἐποίησε τοῖς ἁγίοις σου ἐν ἹΙερυυσαλήμ' καὶ ὧδε ἔχει ἐξ- 
 ουσίαν παρὰ τῶν ἀρχιερέων, δῆσαι πάντας τοὺς ἐπικαλουμένους τὸ ὄνομά 
 
 σου. 
 
VII.] St. Paul’s early prayers to Jesus. 555 
 
 bind at Damascus, is the Name of Jesus. Ananias 
 does not glance at One higher than Jesus, as if 
 Jesus were lower than God; Jesus is to Ananias 
 his God, the Recipient of his worship, and yet the 
 Friend with Whom he can plead the secret thoughts 
 of his heart with earnestness and freedom. 
 
 But he to whom, at the crisis of his wonderful 
 destiny, Ananias brought consolation and relief from 
 Jesus, was himself conspicuous for his devotion to 
 the adorable Person of our Lord. At the very 
 moment of his conversion Saul of Tarsus surren- 
 dered himself in prayer to Christ, as to the lawful 
 Lord of his beng. “ Lord,” he cried, “what wilt Thou 
 have me to doh?” And when afterwards in the 
 temple our Lord bade St. Paul, “ Make haste and get 
 thee quickly out of Jerusalem,” we find the Apostle, 
 hike Ananias, unfolding to Jesus his secret thoughts, 
 his fears, his regrets, his confessions; laying them 
 out before Him, and waiting for His response in 
 the secret chambers of his souli. Indeed St. Paul 
 constantly uses language which shews that he ha- 
 bitually thought of Jesus as of Divine Providence 
 in a Human Form, watching over, befriending, con- 
 soling, guiding, providing for him and his with 
 Infinite foresight and power, but also with the ten- 
 derness of a human sympathy. In this sense Jesus 
 
 . - με , 
 
 h Acts ix. 6: τρέμων τε καὶ θαμβῶν εἶπε, “Κύριε, τί με θέλεις 
 
 a ” 
 ποιῆσαι; ν 
 
 ° = ee , A “ > 
 
 i Tbid. xxii. το, 20: Κύριε, αὐτοὶ ἐπίστανται, ὅτι ἐγὼ ἤμην φυλακί- 
 
 ‘ , \ ‘ ‘ \ ’ ΠΕ 49 oa > 
 
 (wv καὶ δέρων κατὰ τὰς συναγωγὰς τοὺς πιστεύοντας ἐπὶ GE’ καὶ ὅτε ἐξε- 
 
 “ \ τ , a ΄ , Ν Ὁ " > ‘ ‘ 
 χεῖτο τὸ αἷμα Στεφάνου τοῦ μάρτυρός σου, καὶ αὐτὸς ἤμην ἐφεστὼς καὶ 
 
 ~ cal , - ~ > ’ 
 
 συνευδοκῶν τῇ ἀναιρέσει αὐτοῦ, καὶ φυλάσσων τὰ ἱμάτια τῶν ἀναιρούντων 
 
 αὐτόν. 
 
556 Prayer to Jesus, how recognised [ Lect. 
 
 is placed on a level with the Father in St. Paul’s 
 two earliest Epistles. “Now God Himself and our 
 Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, direct our way 
 unto youk;” “Now our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, 
 and God, even our Father, Which hath loved us, and 
 hath given us everlasting consolation and good hope 
 through grace, comfort your hearts, and stablish you 
 in every good word and work!.” Thus Jesus is asso- 
 ciated with the Father, in one instance as directing 
 the outward movements of the Apostle’s life, in an- 
 other as building up the inward life of his converts. 
 Sometimes, however, the Name of Jesus stands alone. 
 “T trust in the Lord Jesus,” so the Apostle writes 
 to the Philippians, “to send Timotheus shortly unto 
 you™.” “1 thank Christ Jesus our Lord,” so he assures 
 St. Timothy, “Who hath given me power, for that He 
 counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry™.” 
 Is not this the natural language of a soul which is 
 constantly engaged in communion with Jesus, whe- 
 ther the communion of praise or the communion of 
 prayer? Jesus is to St. Paul, not a deceased teacher 
 or philanthropist, who has simply done his great work 
 
 k 1 Thess. ili. 11: Αὐτὸς δὲ ὁ Θεὸς καὶ Πατὴρ ἡμῶν, καὶ ὁ Κύριος ἡμῶν 
 ἸΙησοῦς Χριστὸς, κατευθύναι τὴν ὁδὸν ἡμῶν πρὸς ὑμᾶς. ᾿ 
 
 1 2 Thess. ii. τό, 17: αὐτὸς δὲ ὁ Κύριος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς, καὶ 
 ὁ Θεὸς καὶ Πατὴρ ἡμῶν, 6 ἀγαπήσας ἡμᾶς καὶ δοὺς παράκλησιν αἰωνίαν 
 καὶ ἐλπίδα ἀγαθὴν ἐν χάριτί, παρακαλέσαι ὑμῶν τὰς καρδίας, καὶ στη- 
 
 , c a > Ν ’ Ἄν ΝΣ > Lol 
 ρίξαι ὑμᾶς ἐν παντὶ λόγῳ καὶ ἔργῳ ἀγαθῷ. 
 
 m Phil. ii. 19: ἐλπίζω δὲ ἐν Κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ, Τιμόθεον ταχέως πέμψαι. 
 “This hope was ἐν Κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ : it rested and centred in Him ; 
 it arose from no extraneous feelings or expectations, and so would 
 doubtless be fulfilled.” Bp. Ellicott in loc. 
 
 9 . é Ν , » a .8 , , σε, a 
 
 Ber Tim. 1, LaF kat Xap ἐχὼ τῷ ἐνδυναμώσαντί με Χριστῷ Ιησοῦ 
 
 Lol K , « lal id / ς , θέ 5 ὃ , 
 τῷ υριῷ μων, OTL πιστὸν με ἡγήσατο, VEMEVOS ELS takoviay, 
 
VII.] in St. Paul’s Epistles. 557 
 
 and left it as his inheritance to the world; He is 
 God living and present, the Giver of temporal and 
 spiritual blessings, the Guide and Friend both of 
 man’s outward and of his inward life. If we had no 
 explicit records of prayers offered by St. Paul to Je- 
 sus, we might be sure that such prayers were offered, 
 or that such language as he employs could not have 
 been used. But, in point of fact, the Apostle has not 
 left us in doubt as to his faith or his practice in 
 this respect. “If,” he asserts, “thou shalt confess 
 with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe 
 in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the 
 dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man 
 believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth 
 confession is made to salvation. For the Scripture 
 saith, Whosoever believeth on Him shall not be 
 ashamed. For there is no difference between the 
 Jew and the Greek: for the Same is Lord over all, 
 rich unto all that call upon Him. For whosoever 
 shall call upon the Name of the Lord shall be 
 saved.” The prophet Joel had used these last 
 words of prayer to the Lord Jehovah. St. Paul, 
 as the whole context shews beyond reasonable doubt, 
 understands them of prayer.to_Jesus?. And what 
 
 ο Rom, x. 9-13: ἐὰν ὁμυολογήσῃς ἐν τῷ στόματί σου Κύριον ᾿Ιησοῦν, 
 καὶ πιστεύσῃς ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ σου ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς αὐτὸν ἤγειρεν ἐκ νεκρῶν, σωθήσῃ" 
 καρδίᾳ γὰρ πιστεύεται εἰς δικαιοσύνην, στόματι δὲ ὁμολογεῖται εἰς σωτηρίαν. 
 Λέγει γὰρ ἡ γραφὴ, ‘Mas ὁ πιστεύων ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ οὐ καταισχυνθήσεται᾽ Οὐ 
 γάρ ἐστι διαστολὴ ᾿Ιουδαίου τε καὶ Ἕλληνος" ὁ γὰρ αὐτὸς [Κύριος πάντων, 
 πλουτῶν εἰς πάντας τοὺς ἐπικαλουμένους αὐτόν. “ Πᾶς γὰρ ὃς ἂν ἐπικαλέ- 
 σηται τὸ ὄνομα Κυρίου, σωθήσεται Cf. Isa, xxviii. 16 ; Joel il. 32. 
 St. Paul applies to Jesus the language which had been used by 
 the prophets of the Lord Jehovah. Cf. Acts ii. 21. 
 
 ν» Cf. Meyer in Rom. x. 12: ὁ yap αὐτὸς Κύριος πάντων. “ Dieser 
 
558 Prayer to Jesus, how recognised [ Lect. 
 
 are the Apostle’s benedictions in the Name of Christ 
 but indirect prayers to Christ that His blessing 
 might be vouchsafed to the Churches whom the 
 Apostle is addressing 4 “Grace be to you from God 
 our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ4.” 
 “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you 
 8111. Or what shall we say of St. Paul's prayers 
 that he might be freed from the mysterious and 
 humiliating infirmity which he terms his ‘thorn 
 in the flesh?’ He tells us that three times he 
 besought the Lord Jesus Christ that it might 
 depart from him, and that in mercy his prayer 
 was refused’. Are we to believe that that prayer 
 to Jesus was an isolated act in St. Paul’s spiritual 
 life? Does any such religious act stand alone in 
 the spiritual history of an earnest man? Apostles 
 believed that when the First-begotten was brought 
 into the inhabited world, the angels of heaven 
 
 Κύριος ist Christus, der αὐτός ver. 11 und der mit diesem αὐτός 
 nothwendig identische Κύριος ver. 13. Wire Gott (i.e. the Father) 
 gemeint, so miisste man grade den christlichen Charakter der 
 Beweisfiihrung erst hinzutragen (wie O/sh. ‘Gott in Christo’), was 
 aber willkiirlich wire.” For Κύριος πάντων see Phil. ii. τ΄. Cf. 
 8. Chrys. in loe. 
 
 aa Cor 3% 
 
 r Rom. xvi. 24; and almost in the same words, ver, 20. 
 
 8 2 Cor. xii. 8,9: ὑπὲρ τούτου τρὶς τὸν Κύριον παρεκάλεσα, iva ἀποστῇ 
 ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ" καὶ εἴρηκέ μοι, ““᾿Αρκεῖ σοι ἡ χάρις μου ἡ γὰρ δύναμίς μου ἐν 
 ἀσθενείᾳ τελειοῦται." ἥδιστα οὖν μᾶλλον καυχήσομαι ἐν ταῖς ἀσθενείαις 
 μου, ἵνα ἐπισκηνώσῃ ἐπ᾽ ἐμὲ ἡ δύναμις τοῦ Χριστοῦ. Meyer in loc. : 
 “τὸν Κύριον, nicht Gott sondern Christum (5. v. 9, ἡ δύναμις τοῦ 
 Χριστοῦ), der ja der miichtige Bezwinger des Satan’s ist... .. Wie 
 Paulus die Antwort, den χρηματισμός (Matt. 11. 12; Luk. ii. 6 ; 
 Act. x. 22) von Christo empfangen habe, ist uns vollig unbe- 
 kannt.” 
 
VII.) in St. Paul’s Epistles. 559 
 
 were bidden to worship Him‘. They believed 
 Him, when His day of humiliation and suffering 
 
 t Heb. 1. 6: ὅταν δὲ πάλιν εἰσαγάγῃ τὸν πρωτότοκον εἰς τὴν οἰκουμένην, 
 λέγει, ‘Kal προσκυνησάτωσαν αὐτῷ πάντες ἄγγελοι Θεοῦ On this 
 passage see the exhaustive note of Delitzsch, Comm. zum. Br. an 
 die Hebrier, pp. 24-29. ‘“ Die LXX. iibers. hier ganz richtig mpoo- 
 κυνήσατε, denn NOAA ist ja kein praet. consec., und Augustin 
 macht die den rechten Sinn treffende schéne Bemerkung : ‘ adorate 
 Eum ; cessat igitur adoratio angelorum, qui non adorantur, sed 
 adorant ; mali angeli volunt adorari, boni adorant nec se adorari 
 permittunt, ut vel saltem eorum exemplo idolatrie cessent.’ Es 
 fragt sich nun aber: mit welchem Rechte oder auch nur auf 
 welchem Grunde bezieht der Verf. eine Stelle, die von Jehova 
 handelt, auf Christum?” After discussing some unsatisfactory 
 replies, he proceeds: “Der Grundsatz, von welchem der Verf. 
 ausgeht, ist .... dieser: Ueberall wo im A. T. von einer end- 
 zeitigen letztentscheidenden Zukunft (Parusie), Erscheinung und 
 Erweisung Jehova’s in seiner zugleich richterlichen und _heilwiir- 
 tigen Macht und Herrlichkeit die Rede ist, von einer gegenbildlich 
 zur mosaischen Zeit sich verhaltenden Offenbarung Jehova’s, von 
 einer Selbstdarstellung Jehova’s als Konigs seines Reiches: da ist 
 Jehova = Jesus Christus ; denn dieser ist Jehova geoffenbaret im 
 Fleisch ; Jehova, eingetreten in die Menscheit und ihre Geschichte ; 
 Jehova, aufgegangen als Sonne des Heils iiber seinem Volke. 
 Dieser Grundsatz ist auch unumstésslich wahr ; auf ihm ruht der 
 heilsgeschichtliche Zusammenhang, die tiefinnerste Einheit beider 
 Testamente. Alle neutest. Schriftsteller sind dieses Bewusstseins 
 voll, welches sich gleich auf der Schwelle der Evangelischen Ge- 
 schichte ausspricht ; denn dem ‘7 Oy soll Elia vorausgehn Mal. 
 111. 23 f. und πρὸ προσώπου Κυρίου Johannes Le. i. 76, vgl. 17. 
 Darum sind auch alle Psalmen in welchen die Verwirklichung des 
 weltiiberwindenden Koénigthums Jehova’s besungen wird, messia- 
 nisch und werden von unserem Verf. als solehe betrachtet, denn 
 die schliessliche Glorie der Theokratie ist nach heilsgeschichtlichem 
 Plane keine andere als die der Christokratie, das Reich Jehova’s 
 und das Reich Christi ist Eines.” Phil. ii. 9, 10: ὁ Θεὸς αὐτὸν ὑπερ- 
 ὕψωσε, καὶ ἐχαρίσατο αὐτῷ ὄνομα τὸ ὑπὲρ πᾶν ὄνομα' ἵνα ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι 
 
 ᾿Ιησοῦ πᾶν γόνυ κάμψῃ ἐπουρανίων καὶ ἐπιγείων καὶ καταχθονίων' καὶ πᾶσα 
 
560 St. John on the power of prayer to Christ. [Lxcr. 
 
 had ended, to have been so highly exalted that the 
 Name which He had borne on earth, and which 
 is the symbol of His Humanity, was now the very 
 nutriment and atmosphere of all the streams of 
 prayer which rise from the moral world beneath 
 His throne; that as the God-Man He was wor- 
 shipped by angels, by men, and among the dead. 
 Their practice did but illustrate their faith; and 
 the prayers offered to Jesus by His servants on earth 
 were believed to be but a reflection of that worship 
 which is offered to Him by the Church of heaven. 
 
 If this belief is less clearly traceable in the brief 
 Epistles of St. Peter", it is especially observable in 
 St.John. St. John is speaking of the Son of God, when 
 he exclaims, “ This is the confidence that we have in 
 Him, that, if we ask anything according to His Will, 
 He heareth us: and if we know that He hear us, 
 .... we know that we have the petitions that we de- 
 sired of Him*.” These petitions of the earthly Church 
 
 γλῶσσα ἐξομολογήσηται ὅτι Κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς εἰς δόξαν Θεοῦ Πατρός. 
 See Alford in loe.: “The general aim of the passage is.... the 
 exaltation of Jesus. The εἰς δόξαν Θεοῦ Πατρός below is no de- 
 duction from this, but rather an additional reason why we should 
 carry on the exaltation of Jesus wntil this new particular is in- 
 troduced. This would lead us to infer that the universal prayer 
 is to be éo Jesus. And this view is confirmed by the next clause, 
 where every tongue is to confess that Jesus Christ is Κύριος, when 
 we remember the common expression, ἐπικαλεῖσθαι τὸ ὄνομα Κυρίου, 
 for prayer. Rom. x. 12; 1 Cor.i. 23 ayTim. 11. 22.” 
 
 ἃ Yet 1 St. Pet. iv. 11 is a doxology “framed, as it might seem, 
 for common use on earth and in heaven.” See also 2 St. Pet. iii. 18. 
 
 x 1 St. John v. 13-15: ἵνα πιστεύητε εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Yiovd τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 Καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ παρρησία ἣν ἔχομεν πρὸς αὐτὸν, ὅτι ἐάν τι αἰτώμεθα κατὰ τὸ 
 θέλημα αὐτοῦ, ἀκούει ἡμῶν" καὶ ἐὰν οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἀκούει ἡμῶν, ὃ ἂν αἰτώμεθα, 
 
 οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἔχομεν τὰ αἰτήματα ἃ ἠτήκαμεν παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ. The natural 
 
VIL] The Adoration of the Lamb. 561 
 
 correspond to the adoration above, where the 
 wounded Humanity of our Lord is throned in the 
 highest heavens. “I beheld, and lo, in the midst of 
 the throne .... stood a Lamb as It had been slain.” 
 Around Him are three concentric circles of ado- 
 ration. The immost proceeds from the four myste- 
 rious creatures and the four and twenty elders who 
 “have harps, and golden vials full of odours, which 
 are the prayers of the saints*.” These are the 
 courtiers who are placed on the very steps of the 
 throne; they represent more distant worshippers. 
 But they too fall down before the throne, and sing 
 the new song which is addressed to the Lamb slain 
 and glorified®: “Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed 
 us to God by Thy Blood out of every kindred, 
 and tongue, and people, and nation; and hast made 
 us unto our God kings and priests, and we shall 
 reign on the earth>”” Around these, at a greater 
 distance from the Most Holy, there is a count- 
 less company of worshippers: “I heard the voice 
 of many angels round about the throne and the 
 
 construction of this passage seems to oblige us to refer αὐτοῦ and 
 τὸ θέλημα to the Son of God (ver. 13). The passage 1 St. John 11]. 
 21, 22 does not forbid this ; it only shews how fully in St. John’s 
 mind the honour and prerogatives of the Son are those of the 
 Father. 
 
 y Rev. v. 6: καὶ εἶδον, καὶ ἰδοὺ ἐν μέσῳ τοῦ θρόνου καὶ τῶν τεσσάρων 
 ζώων, καὶ ἐν μέσῳ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων, ἀρνίον ἑστηκὸς ὡς ἐσφαγμένον. 
 
 z Ibid. ver. 8: ἔχοντες ἕκαστος κιθάρας, καὶ φιάλας χρυσᾶς γεμούσας 
 θυμιαμάτων, αἵ εἰσιν ai προσευχαὶ τῶν ἁγίων. 
 
 ἃ Thid.: ἔπεσον ἐνώπιον τοῦ dpviov.... καὶ ᾷδουσιν ὠδὴν καινήν. 
 
 Ὁ Ibid. ver. 9: ἐσφάγης, καὶ ἠγόρασας τῷ Θεῷ ἡμᾶς ἐν τῷ αἵματί 
 σου, ἐκ πάσης φυλῆς καὶ γλώσσης καὶ λαοῦ καὶ ἔθνους, καὶ ἐποίησας ἡμᾶς 
 τῷ Θεῷ ἡμῶν βασιλεῖς καὶ ἱερεῖς" καὶ βασιλεύσομεν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς. 
 
 00 
 
562 The Adoration of the Lamb. [ Lecr. 
 
 creatures and the elders: and the number of them 
 was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands 
 of thousands ; saying with a loud voice, Worthy is 
 the Lamb That was slain to receive power, and 
 riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and 
 glory, and blessing*.” Beyond these again, the 
 entranced Apostle discerns a third sphere in which 
 is maintained a perpetual adoration. Lying outside 
 the two inner circles of conscious adoration offered 
 by the heavenly intelligences, there is in St. John’s 
 vision an assemblage of all created life, which, 
 whether it wills or not, lives for Christ’s as for 
 the Father’s glory : “And every creature which is 
 in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, 
 and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, 
 heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and 
 -power, be unto Him That sitteth upon the throne, 
 and unto the Lamb for ever and ever4.” This is 
 the hymn of the whole visible creation, and to it 
 the response comes from the inmost circle of the 
 worshippers, ratifying and harmonizing this adoring 
 movement of universal life: “ And the four creatures 
 said, Amen®.” Nor does the redeemed Church on 
 earth fail to bear her part in this chorus of praise: 
 
 ὁ Rev. v. 11, 12 : καὶ εἶδον, καὶ ἤκουσα φωνὴν ἀγγέλων πολλῶν 
 κυκλόθεν τοῦ θρόνου καὶ τῶν ζώων καὶ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων... .. καὶ χιλιάδες 
 χιλιάδων, λέγοντες φωνῇ μεγάλῃ, "Δξιόν ἐστι τὸ ἀρνίον τὸ ἐσφαγμένον 
 λαβεῖν τὴν δύναμιν καὶ πλοῦτον καὶ σοφίαν καὶ ἰσχὺν καὶ τιμὴν καὶ δόξαν 
 καὶ εὐλογίαν. 2 
 
 d - 4 ν ‘ “ , ΓΙ > a > a Vs. a a 
 
 Ibid. ver. 13: και Tay κτισμα ὁ εστιν ἐν τῷ οὕὔρανῳ, Kal EV TH γῆ; 
 Cian anit . IT's 
 καὶ ὑποκάτω τῆς γῆς; καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης ἅ ἐστι, Kal τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς πάντα, 
 ἤκουσα λέγοντας, Τῷ καθημένῳ ἐπὶ τοῦ θρό ὶ τῷ ἀρνίῳ ἡ εὐλογία καὶ 
 ἤκ γοντας, Τῷ καθημένῳ ἐπὶ ρόνου καὶ τῷ ἀρνίῳ ἡ εὐλογία καὶ 
 ς \ Aas , ‘ \ ΄ st) \ dA a 7 
 ἡ τιμὴ καὶ ἡ δόξα καὶ TO κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. 
 
 e Ibid. ver. 14: καὶ τὰ τέσσαρα ζῶα ἔλεγον, ᾿Αμήν. 
 
Ὑ11.7 Characteristics of the worship of Jesus in the N. 1. 563 
 
 “Unto Him That loved us, and washed us from our 
 sins in His Own Blood, and hath made us kings 
 and priests unto God and His Father; to Him be 
 glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen*.” 
 You will not, my brethren, mistake the force and 
 meaning of this representation of the adoration of 
 the Lamb in the Apocalypse. This representation 
 cannot be compared with the Apocalyptic pictures 
 of the future fortunes of the Church, when the 
 imagery employed leaves room for interpretations 
 so diverse that no interpretation can be positively 
 assigned to them without a certain intellectual 
 and spiritual immodesty in the interpreter who 
 essays to do so. You may in vain endeavour satis- 
 factorily to solve the questions which encompass 
 such points as the number of the beast or the era 
 of the millennium, but you cannot doubt for one 
 moment Who is meant by ‘the Lamb,’ or what is the 
 character of the worship that is paid to Him. 
 
 But upon this worship of Jesus Christ as we meet 
 with it im the apostolical age let us here make 
 three observations. 
 
 a. First, then, it cannot be accounted for, and so 
 set aside, as being part of an undiscriminating cultus 
 of heavenly or superhuman beings in general. Such 
 a cultus finds no place in the New Testament, ex- 
 cept when it, or something very much resembling 
 it, is expressly discountenanced. By the Mouth of 
 our Lord Himself the New Testament reaffirms the 
 
 ς a 3 U a , “ lal € 
 
 f Rev. i. 5, 6: τῷ ἀγαπήσαντι ἡμᾶς καὶ λούσαντι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρ- 
 ΄- cal ΄ “ “ ΄ ΄ ΄ - 
 τιῶν ἡμῶν ἐν τῷ αἵματι αὑτοῦ" καὶ ἐποίησεν ἡμᾶς βασιλεῖς καὶ ἱερεῖς τῴ 
 
 - ‘ \ ε “, 5 var) € ‘ \ , > ‘ dA - 
 Θεῷ καὶ Πατρὶ αὑτοῦ" αὐτῷ ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν 
 Ὁ > , 
 αἰώνων. ἀμήν, 
 
 002 
 
564 Significance of the worship of Jesus not weakened [Lxctr. 
 
 Sinaitic law which restricts worship to the Lord 
 God Himself. St. Peter will not sanction the self- 
 prostrations of the grateful Cornelius, lest Cornelius 
 should think of him as more than human’. When, 
 at Lystra, the excited populace, with their priest, 
 desired to offer sacrifice to St. Paul and St. Barna- 
 bas, as to “deities who had come down to them 
 in the likeness of men,” the Apostles in their 
 unfeigned distress protested that they were but 
 men of like passions with those whom they were 
 addressing, and claimed for the living God that 
 service which was His exclusive right! When 
 St. John fell at the feet of the angel of the Apo- 
 calypse in profound acknowledgment of the mar- 
 vellous privileges of sight and sound to which he 
 had been admitted, he was peremptorily checked on 
 the ground that the angel too was only his fellow- 
 slave and that God was the rightful Object of 
 worship’. One of the most salient features of the 
 Gnostico-Jewish theosophy which threatened the 
 faith of the Church of Colossze was the worshipping 
 of angels; and St. Paul censures it on the ground 
 
 & Acts X. 25: συναντήσας αὐτῷ ὁ Κορνήλιος, πεσὼν ἐπὶ τοὺς πόδας 
 ’ 
 προσεκύνησεν. ὁ δὲ Πέτρος αὐτὸν ἤγειρε λέγων, ᾿Ανάστηθι: κἀγὼ αὐτὸς 
 ΜΝ , > 
 ἄνθρωπός εἰμι. 
 be 2) 5 a 
 h Thid. xiv. 14, 15: διαῤῥήξαντες τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτῶν εἰσεπήδησαν εἰς τὸν 
 ” , ‘ ΄ ay a ΘΑ ees ~ c 
 ὄχλον, κράζοντες καὶ λέγοντες, “Avdpes, τι ταῦτα ποιεῖτε ; Kal ἡμεῖς ὁμοιο- 
 παθεῖς ἐσμεν ὑμῖν ἄνθρωποι, εὐαγγελιζόμενοι ὑμᾶς ἀπὸ τούτων τῶν ματαίων 
 > , 8 γος \ A οἷ δ 
 ἐπιστρέφειν ἐπὶ τὸν Θεὸν τὸν ζῶντα. 
 
 i Rev. xxii. 8: καὶ ἐγὼ Ἰωάννης ὁ βλέπων ταῦτα καὶ ἀκούων᾽ καὶ ὅτε 
 ἤκουσα καὶ ἔβλεψα, ἔπεσα προσκυνῆσαι ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ποδῶν τοῦ ἀγγέλου 
 .- ὃ ’ , οι τ “-“ K A x if "0 ’ “Ἢ “2 ὃ λ , , 
 τοῦ δεικνύοντός μοι ταῦτα. καὶ λέγει μοι, Ὅρα μὴ" σύνδουλός σου γάρ 
 
 > ‘ an > a “ a \ a ΄ ‘ , 
 εἶμι καὶ τῶν ἀδελφῶν σου τῶν προφητῶν, Kal τῶν τηρούντων τοὺς λόγους 
 
 Ξ , Pt ee 5 
 τοῦ βιβλίου τούτου: τῷ Θεῷ προσκύνησον. 
 
VIL] by any “ secondary’ worship in the New Testament. 565 
 
 that it tended to loosen men’s hold upon the in- 
 communicable prerogatives of the great Head of 
 the Church. Certainly the New Testament does 
 teach that we Christians have close communion with 
 the blessed angels and with the sainted dead, such 
 as would be natural to members of one great family. 
 The invisible world is not merely above, it is around 
 us ; we have come into it; and Christ’s kingdom on 
 earth and in heaven! forms one supernatural whole. 
 But the worship claimed for, accepted by, and paid 
 to Jesus, stands out in the New Testament in the 
 sharpest relief. This relief is not softened or shaded 
 off by any instances of an inferior homage paid, 
 whether legitimately or not, to created beings. We 
 do not meet with any clear distinction between a 
 primary and a secondary worship, by which the 
 force of the argument might have been seriously 
 weakened. Worship is claimed for, anéd_is_given 
 to, God alone: if Jesus is worshipped, this is be- 
 cause Jesus is God. 
 
 8. The worship paid to Jesus in the apostolic 
 
 Kk Col. 11. 18: μηδεὶς ὑμᾶς καταβραβευέτω θέλων ἐν ταπεινοφροσύνῃ καὶ 
 θρησκείᾳ τῶν ἀγγέλων. The Apostle condemns this (1) on the moral 
 ground that the Gnostic teacher here alluded to claimed to be in 
 possession of truths respecting the unseen world of which he really 
 was ignorant, ἃ μὴ ἑώρακεν euBarevor, elk φυσιούμενος ὑπὸ Tod νοὸς 
 τῆς σαρκὸς αὑτοῦ : (2) On the dogmatic ground of a resulting inter- 
 ference with a recognition of the Headship of Jesus Christ, the 
 One Source of the supernatural life of the Church, καὶ οὐ κρατῶν τὴν 
 κεφαλὴν, ἐξ οὗ πᾶν τὸ σῶμα διὰ τῶν ἁφῶν καὶ συνδέσμων ἐπιχορηγού- 
 μενον καὶ συμβιβαζόμενον, αὔξει τὴν αὔξησιν τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 
 1 Heb. xii. 22: προσεληλύθατε Σιὼν ὄρει, καὶ πόλει Θεοῦ ζῶντος, Ἵε- 
 ρουσαλὴμ ἐπουρανίῳ, καὶ μυριάσιν ἀγγέλων, πανηγύρει καὶ ἐκκλησίᾳ πρω- 
 τοτόκων ἐν οὐρανοῖς ἀπογεγραμμένων, καὶ κριτῇ Θεῷ πάντων, καὶ πνεύ- 
 
 Υ̓͂ - 
 μασι δικαίων τετελειωμένων, καὶ διαθήκης νέας μεσίτῃ ᾿Ιησοῦ. 
 
566 = Jesus worshipped with the adoration due to God, [Lxct. 
 
 age was certainly in many cases that adoration which 
 is due to the Most High God, and to Him alone, 
 from all His intelligent creatures. God Himself 
 must needs have been, then as ever, the One Object 
 of real worship. But the Eternal Son, when He 
 became Man, ceased not to be God. As God, He 
 received from those who believed in Him the 
 only worship which their faith could render™. 
 Thus much is clear from the representations 
 which we have been considering in the Apoca- 
 lypse, even if we take no other passages into 
 account. That worship of our glorified Lord is 
 not any mere honorary acknowledgment that His 
 redemptive work is complete; since even at the 
 moment of His Incarnation it is addressed to His 
 Divine and Eternal Person. Doubtless the language 
 addressed to Him in the Gospels represents many 
 postures of the human soul, ranging between that 
 utter self-prostration which we owe to the Most 
 High, and that trustful familiarity with which we 
 pour our joys and sorrows, our hopes and fears into 
 
 m Meyer’s remarks are very far from satisfactory. ‘Das anrufen 
 Christi ist nicht das Anbeten schlechthin, wie es nur in Betreff des 
 Vaters als des einigen absoluten Gottes geschieht, wohl aber die 
 Anbetung nach der durch das Verhialtniss Christi zwm Vater (dessen 
 wesensgleicher Sohn, Ebenbild, Throngenosse, Vermittler, und Fiir- 
 sprecher fiir die Menschen τι. s. w. er ist) bedingten Relativitit im 
 betenden Bewusstsein....... Der Christum Anrufende ist sich 
 bewusst, er rufe ihn nicht a/s den schlechthinigen Gott, sondern als 
 dem gottmenschlichen Vertreter und Mittler Gottes an.” In Rom. 
 x. 12 our Lord is adored as being of one substance with the 
 Father, and as therefore equally entitled to adoration: Adoration 
 is due only to the Uncreated Substance of God, and to Jesus 
 Christ as being personally of It. The mediatorial functions of 
 His Manhood cannot affect the bearings of this truth. 
 
VIE] Adoration of the Sacred Manhood of Jesus. 567 
 
 the ear of a human friend. Such ‘lower forms’ of 
 worship lead up to, and are explained by, the higher. 
 They illustrate the purpose of the Incarnation. But 
 the familiar confidence which the Incarnation invites 
 cannot be pleaded against the rights of the Incar- 
 nate God. A free, trustful, open-hearted converse 
 with Christ is compatible with the lowliest worship 
 of His Person; Christian confidence even “leans 
 upon His Breast at supper,” while Christian faith 
 discerns His Glory, and “falls at His Feet as 
 dead.” 
 
 y. The apostolic worship of Jesus Christ embraced 
 His Manhood no less than it embraced His God- 
 head". According to St. Paul His Human Name 
 of Jesus, that is, His Human Nature, is worshipped 
 on earth, in heaven, and among the dead. It is 
 not the Unincarnate Logos, but the wounded Hu- 
 manity of Jesus, Which is enthroned and adored in 
 the vision of the Apocalypse. To adore Christ’s 
 Deity while carefully refusing to adore His Man- 
 
 n Cf, Pearson, Minor Theological Works, vol. i. 307: “ Christus 
 sive Homo Ille Qui est Mediator, adoratus est. Heb. i. 6 ; Apoe. v. 
 11,12. Hee est plenissima descriptio adorationis. Et hic Agnus 
 occisus erat Homo 1116, Qui est Mediator ; Ergo Homo 1116, Qui est 
 Mediator est adorandus. §. Greg. Nazianzen. Orat. li.: Εἴτις μὴ 
 προσκυνεῖ τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον, ἀνάθεμα ἔστω, καὶ τετάχθω μέτα τῶν θεο- 
 κτόνων." Cf. also Ibid. p. 308: “Christus, qua est Mediator, est 
 unica adoratione colendus. Concil. Gen. V. Collat. viii. can. 9. 
 Si quis adorari in duabus naturis dicit Christum, ex quo duas 
 adorationes introducat, semotim Deo Verbo, et semotim Homini : 
 aut si quis..... adorat Christum, sed non wrdé adoratione Deum 
 Verbum Incarnatum cum Ejus Carne adorat, extra quod sancti 
 Dei ecclesiz ab initio traditum est ; talis anathema sit.” See the 
 whole of this and the preceding ‘ Determination.’ 
 
568 References to the worship of Jesus Christ [ Lect. 
 
 hood would be to forget that His Manhood is for 
 ever joined to His Divine and Eternal Person, 
 Which is the real Object of our adoration. Since 
 He has taken the Manhood into God, It is an in- 
 separable attribute of His Personal Godhead ; every 
 knee must bend before It; henceforth the angels 
 themselves around the throne must adore, not as 
 of yore the Unincarnate Son, but “the Lamb as It 
 had been slain.” 
 
 Thus rooted in the doctrine and practice of the 
 apostles, the worship of Jesus Christ was handed 
 down to succeeding ages as an integral and recog- 
 nized element of the spiritual life of the Church. 
 The early fathers refer to the worship of our Lord 
 as to a matter beyond dispute. Even before the 
 end of the first century St. Ignatius bids the Roman 
 Christians “put up litanies to Christ” on his behalf, 
 that he might attain the distinction of martyrdom’. 
 St. Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians opens with 
 a benediction which is in fact a prayer to Jesus 
 Christ, as being, together with the Almighty Father, 
 the Giver of peace and mercy?. Polycarp prays that 
 “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and 
 the Eternal Priest Himself, Jesus Christ, the Son of 
 God, would build up his readers in faith and truth 
 and in all meekness, .. . and would give them a part 
 and lot among the saints4.” And at a later day, 
 
 ο §. Ign. ad Rom. 4: λιτανεύσατε τὸν Χριστὸν [τὸν Κύριον ed. 
 Dressel, which, however, must here mean our Lord] ὑπὲρ ἐμοὺ, iva 
 διὰ τῶν ὀργάνων τούτων [Θεῷ ed. Dressel] θυσία εὑρεθῶ Cf. ad 
 Magn. 7. 
 
 PS. Polye. ad Phil. τ: ἔλεος ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη παρὰ Θεοῦ παντοκρά- 
 τορος καὶ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν πληθυνθείη. 
 
 q Ibid. 12: “Deus autem et Pater Domini nostri Jesu Christi, et 
 
ἍΈΠῚ: in the sub-apostolie Fathers. 569 
 
 standing bound at the pyre of martyrdom, he cries, 
 “For all things, Ὁ God, do I praise and bless and 
 glorify Thee, together with the Eternal and Heavenly 
 Jesus Christ, Thy well-beloved Son, with Whom, to 
 Thee and the Holy Ghost, be glory, both now and 
 for ever. Ament.” After his death, Nicetas begged 
 the proconsul not to deliver up his body for burial, 
 “lest the Christians should desert the Crucified 
 One, and should begin to worship this new mar- 
 tyr’.” The Jews, it appears, had suggested an argu- 
 ment which may have been the language of sarcasm 
 or of a real anxiety. “They know not,” continues 
 the encyclical letter of the Church of Smyrna, 
 “that neither shall we ever be able to desert Christ 
 Who suffered for the salvation of all who are saved 
 in the whole world, nor yet to worship any other. 
 For Him indeed, as being the Son of God, we do 
 adore; but the martyrs, as disciples and imitators 
 of the Lord, we worthily love by reason of their 
 unsurpassed devotion to Him their own King and 
 Teacher. God grant that we too may be fellow- 
 partakers and fellow-disciples with themt!” The 
 
 ipse Sempiternus Pontifex, Dei Filius Jesus Christus, edificet vos 
 in fide et veritate et in omni mansuetudine,..... et det vobis 
 sortem et partem inter sanctos suos.” 
 
 t Mart. 8. Polye. οἱ 14. 
 
 5 Ibid. ὁ. 17: μὴ, φησὶν, ἀφέντες τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον, τοῦτον ἄρξωνται 
 σέβεσθαι. 
 
 t [bid.: ἀγνοοῦντες, ὅτι οὔτε τὸν Χριστόν ποτε καταλιπεῖν δυνησόμεθα 
 τὸν ὑπὲρ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς κόσμου τῶν σωζομένων σωτηρίας παθόντα, οὔτε 
 ἕτερόν τινα σέβεσθαι. τοῦτον μὲν γὰρ Ὑἱὸν ὄντα τοῦ Θεοῦ προσκυνοῦμεν" 
 τοὺς δὲ μάρτυρας, ὡς μαθητὰς καὶ μιμητὰς τοῦ Κυρίου, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀξίως, 
 ἕνεκα εὐνοίας ἀνυπερβλήτου τῆς εἰς τὸν ἴδιον βασιλέα καὶ διδάσκαλον" ὧν 
 
 ΄- ’ , 
 γένοιτο καὶ ἡμᾶς συγκοινωνούς τε καὶ συμμαθητὰς γενέσθαι. 
 
570 heferences to the worship of Jesus Christ [ Lecr. 
 
 writers of this remarkable passage were not wanting 
 in love and honour to the martyr of Christ. “ After- 
 ward,” say they, “we, having taken up his bones, 
 which were more precious than costly stones, and of 
 more account than gold, placed them where it was 
 fitting.” But they draw the sharpest line between 
 such a tribute of affection and the worship of the 
 Redeemer; Jesus was worshipped as “ being the Son 
 of God.” The Apologists instance the adoration of 
 Jesus Christ, as well as that of the Father, when re- 
 plying to the heathen charge of atheism. St. Justin 
 protests to the emperors that the Christians worship 
 God alone*. Yet he also asserts that the Son and 
 the Spirit share in the reverence and worship which 
 is offered to the Father’; and in controversy with 
 
 u Mart. S. Polye. c. 18. 
 
 x Apol. i. ὃ 17, p. 44, ed. Otto. After quoting St. Luke xx. 
 22-25 he proceeds: ὅθεν Θεὸν μὲν μόνον προσκυνοῦμεν, ὑμῖν δὲ πρὸς 
 τὰ ἄλλα χαίροντες ὑπηρετοῦμεν. 
 
 y Ibid. i. § 6, p. 14, ed. Otto.: Καὶ ὁμολογοῦμεν τῶν τοιούτων νομι- 
 ζομένων θεῶν ἄθεοι εἶναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὐχὶ τοῦ ἀληθεστάτου καὶ πατρὸς δικαιο- 
 σύνης καὶ σωφροσύνης καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἀρετῶν, ἀνεπιμίκτου τε κακίας 
 θεοῦ ἀλλ᾽ ἐκεῖνόν τε, καὶ τὸν παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ Ὑἱὸν ἐλθόντα καὶ διδάξαντα 
 ἡμᾶς ταῦτα, καὶ τὸν τῶν ἄλλων ἑπομένων καὶ ἐξομοιουμένων ἀγαθῶν 
 ἀγγέλων στρατόν, Πνεῦμά τε τὸ προφητικὸν σεβόμεθα καὶ προσκυνοῦμεν 
 λόγῳ καὶ ἀληθείᾳ τιμῶντες. With regard to the clause of this 
 passage which has been the subject of so much controversy (kai 
 τὸν τῶν ἄλλων... .. ἀγγέλων στρατόν), (1) it is impossible to make 
 στρατόν depend upon σεβόμεθα καὶ προσκυνοῦμεν without involving 
 St. Justin in self-contradiction (cf. the passage quoted above), and 
 Bellarmine’s argument based on this construction (de Beatitud. 
 Sanctor. lib. i. 6.13} proves, if anything, too much for his purpose, 
 viz. that the same worship was paid to the angels as to the Persons 
 of the Blessed Trinity. Several moderns (quoted by Otto in loc.) 
 who adopt this construction use it for a very different object. 
 (2) It is difficult to accept Bingham’s rendering (Ant. bk. 13, ¢. 2,§ 2) 
 
VEE] im SS. Justin, Irenaeus, and Clement. 571 
 
 Trypho he especially urges that prophecy foretold 
 the adoration of Messiah”. St. Irenzeus insists that 
 the miracles which were in his day of common oc- 
 currence in the Church were not to be ascribed to 
 any invocation of angels, nor yet to magical incan- 
 tations, nor to any form of evil curiosity. They 
 were simply due to the fact that Christians con- 
 stantly prayed to God the Maker of all things, and 
 called upon the Name of His Son Jesus Christ. 
 Clement of Alexandria has left us three treatises, 
 designed to form a missionary trilogy. In one he 
 is occupied with converting the heathen from idola- 
 try to the faith of Christ ; in a second he instructs 
 the new convert in the earlier lessons and duties 
 of the Christian faith ; while in his most considerable 
 work he labours to impart the higher knowledge 
 to which the Christian is entitled, and so to render 
 him ‘the perfect Gnostic. In each of these treatises, 
 widely different as they are in point of practical aim, 
 
 which joins ἀγγέλων στρατόν and ὑμᾶς with διδάξαντα, and makes Christ 
 the Teacher not of men only but of the angel host. This idea, how- 
 ever, seems to have no natural place in the passage, and we should 
 have expected ταῦτα ἡμᾶς not ἡμᾶς ταῦτα. (3) It seems better, there- 
 fore, with Bull, Chevallier (Transl. p. 152), Mohler (Tubing. Theol. 
 Quartalsch. 1833, Fase. i. p. 53 sqq., quoted by Otto) to make 
 ἀγγέλων στρατόν and ταῦτα together dependent upon διδάξαντα : “ the 
 Son of God taught us not merely about these (viz. evil spirits, ef. 
 § 5) but also concerning the good angels,” &ec.; τὸν ἀγγέλων στράτον 
 being elliptically put for τὰ περὶ τοῦ... ἀγγέλων στρατοῦ. 
 
 z Dial. cum Tryph. ¢. 68: γραφάς, at διαῤῥήδην τὸν Χριστὸν καὶ πα- 
 θητὸν καὶ προσκυνητὸν καὶ Θεὸν ἀποδεικνύουσιν. Ibid. ο. 76: Kat Δαυὶδ 
 .. + « Θεὸν ἰσχυρὸν καὶ προσκυνητόν, Χριστὸν ὄντα, ἐδήλωσε. 
 
 a Her. ii. § 32: “Ecclesia..... nomen Domini nostri Jesu 
 Christi invocans, virtutes ad utilitates hominum, sed non ad se- 
 ductionem, perficit.” Observe too the argument which follows. 
 
572 References to the worship of Jesus Christ [ Lect. 
 
 Clement bears witness to the Church’s worship of 
 our Lord. In the first, his Hortatory Address to 
 the Greeks, he winds up a long argumentative in- 
 vective against idolatry with a burst of fervid en- 
 treaty: “Believe, O man,” he exclaims, “in Him 
 Who is both Man and God; believe, O man, in 
 the living God, Who suffered and Who is adored?.” 
 The Peedagogus concludes with a prayer of singular 
 beauty ending in a doxology®, and in these the Son 
 is worshipped and praised as the Equal of the 
 Father. In the Stromata, as might be expected, 
 prayer to Jesus Christ is rather taken for granted ; 
 the Christian life is to be a continuous worship of 
 the Word, and through Him of the Father’. Ter- 
 tullian in his Apology grapples with the taunt that 
 the Christians worshipped a Man Who had been con- 
 demned by the Jewish tribunals®. Tertullian does not 
 deny or palliate the charge; he justifies the Christian 
 
 Ὁ Protrept. ¢. x. p. 84, ed. Potter: πίστευσον, ἄνθρωπε, ἀνθρώπῳ 
 καὶ Θεῷ πίστευσον, ἄνθρωπε, τῷ παθόντι καὶ προσκυνουμένῳ Θεῷ ζῶντι" 
 πιστεύσατε οἱ δοῦλοι τῷ νεκρῷ πάντες ἄνθρωποι, πιστεύσατε μόνῳ τῷ 
 πάντων ἀνθρώπων Θεῷ᾽ πιστεύσατε καὶ μισθὸν λάβετε σωτηρίαν κ. τ. Δ. 
 
 © Peedagog. lib. iii. 6. 7, p. 311, ed. Potter: ὅπερ οὖν λοιπὸν ἐπὶ τοιαύτῃ 
 πανηγύρει τοῦ Λόγου, TO Λόγῳ προσευξώμεθα: Ἵλαθι τοῖς σοῖς, madaywye, 
 παιδίοις, ἸΤατὴρ, ἡνίοχε Ἰσραὴλ, Υἱὲ καὶ Πατὴρ, Ἕν ἄμφω Κύριε. δὸς δὲ 
 ἡμῖν τοῖς σοῖς ἐπομένοις παραγγέλμασι τὸ ὁμοίωμα πληρῶσαι ...... αἰνοῦν- 
 τας εὐχαριστεῖν, [εὐχαριστοῦντας] αἰνεῖν, τῷ μόνῳ Πατρὶ καὶ Υἱῷ, Υἱῷ καὶ 
 Πατρὶ, παιδαγωγῷ καὶ διδασκάλῳ Υἱῷ, σὺν καὶ τῷ ἁγίῳ Πνεύματι, πάντα τῷ 
 ‘Evi, ἐν ᾧ τὰ πάντα, δι᾽ ὃν τὰ πάντα ἕν,... ᾧ ἡ δόξα καὶ νῦν καὶ εἰς αἰῶνας. 
 
 4 See the fine passage, Stromat. lib. vii. ¢. 7, ad init. p. 851, ed. 
 Potter. 
 
 e Apolog. ὁ. 21: “Sed et vulgus jam scit Christum ut hominum 
 aliquem, qualem Judeei judicaverunt, quo facilius quis nos hominis 
 cultores existimaverit. Verum neque de Christo erubescimus, cum) 
 sub nomine ejus deputari et damnari juvat.” 
 
ET. | in Tertullian and Origen. 573 
 
 practice. Whatever Christ might be in the opinion 
 of the pagan world, Christians knew Him to be 
 of one substance with the Father’. The adoration 
 of Christ, then, was not a devotional eccentricity ; 
 it was an absolute duty. Tertullian argues against 
 mixed marriages with the heathen on the ground 
 that there could in such cases be no joint worship 
 of the Redeemer®; elsewhere he implies that the 
 worship of Jesus was co-extensive with faith in 
 Christianity’. 
 
 Origen’s erratic intellect may have at times be- 
 trayed him, on this as on other subjects, into lan- 
 guage* which is inconsistent with his own general 
 
 g Apolog. 6.21: “ Hune ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione 
 generatum, et idcirco Filium Dei et Dewm dictum, ex unitate 
 Substantie.” 
 
 h Ad Uxor. lib, ii. c. 6: “Audiat...de ganea. Quz Dei mentio ? 
 quee Christi invocatio 1 
 
 i Ady. Jud. ¢. 7: “ Ubique creditur, ab omnibus gentibus supra 
 enumeratis colitur, ubique regnat, ubique adoratur.” 
 
 k Particularly in the treatise, De Oratione, c. 15, vol. i. ed. Ben. 
 Pp. 223: πῶς δὲ οὐκ ἔστι κατὰ τὸν εἰπόντα" “Ti με λέγεις ἀγαθόν ; οὐδεὶς 
 ἀγαθὸς εἰ μὴ εἷς ὁ Θεὸς, ὁ Πατήρ" εἰπεῖν ἄν" Τί ἐμοὶ προσεύχῃ ; Μόνῳ τῷ 
 Πατρὶ προσεύχεσθαι χρὴ, ᾧ κἀγὼ προσεύχομαι ὅπερ διὰ τῶν ἁγίων γραφῶν 
 μανθάνετε" ᾿Αρχιερεῖ yap τῷ ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν κατασταθέντι ὑπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς, καὶ παρα- 
 κλήτῳ ὑπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς εἶναι λαβόντι, εὔχεσθαι ἡμᾶς οὐ δεῖ, ἀλλὰ δι᾿ ἀρχιερέως 
 καὶ παρακλήτου κατ. Χ. This indefensible language was a result of the 
 line taken by Origen in opposing the Monarchians. “As the latter, 
 together with the distinction of substance in the Father and the 
 Son, denied also that of the Person, so it was with Origen a matter of 
 practical moment, on account of the systematic connexion of ideas 
 in his philosophical system of Christianity, to maintain in oppo- 
 sition to them the personal independence of the Logos. Some- 
 times in this controversy he distinguishes between wnity of sub- 
 stance and personal unity or unity of subject, so that it only con- 
 cerned him to controvert the latter. And this certainly was the 
 
574 References to the worship of Jesus Christ [ Lect. 
 
 line of teaching, by which it must in fairness be 
 interpreted. Origen often insists upon the worship 
 of Jesus Christ as a Christian duty!; he illustrates 
 this duty frequently, especially in his Homilies, by 
 his personal example™; he refers it to that great 
 
 point of greatest practical moment to him; and he must have 
 been well aware that many of the Fathers who contended for a per- 
 sonal distinction held firmly at the same time to a wnity of sub- 
 stance. But according to the internal connection of his own 
 system (Neander means his Platonic doctrine of the τὸ ὄν) both 
 fell together ; wherever he spoke, therefore, from the position of 
 that system, he affirmed at one and the same time the ἑτερότης 
 τῆς οὐσίας and the ἑτερότης τῆς ὑποστάσεως OY τοῦ ὑποκειμένου." 
 Neander, Ch. Hist. ii. 311, 312. From this philosophical premiss 
 Origen deduces his practical inference above noticed : εἰ yap ἕτερος, 
 ὡς ἐν ἄλλοις δείκνυται, Kat οὐσίαν καὶ ὑποκείμενός ἐστιν 6 Yids τοῦ 
 Πατρὸς, ἤτοι προσκυνητέον τῷ Ὑἱῷ καὶ οὐ τῷ Πατρὶ, ἢ ἀμφοτέροις, ἢ τῷ 
 Πατρὶ μόνῳ. De Orat. ὁ. 15, sub init. p. 222. Although, then, Origen 
 expresses his conclusion in Scriptural terminology, it is a conclusion 
 which is traceable to his philosophy as distinct from his strict re- 
 ligious belief, and it is entirely contradicted by a large number of 
 other passages in his writings. 
 
 1 Contr. Cels. v. 12, sub fin. vol. i. p. 587. Also Ibid. viii. 12, 
 Pp. 750: ἕνα οὖν Θεὸν, ws ἀποδεδώκαμεν, τὸν Πατέρα καὶ τὸν Υἱὸν θεραπεύ- 
 ομεν" καὶ μένει ἡμῖν ὁ πρὸς τοὺς ἄλλους ἀτενὴς λόγος" καὶ ov τὸν ἔναγχός γε 
 φανέντα, ὡς πρότερον οὔκ ὄντα, ὑπερθρησκεύομεν. Ibid. vill. 26: μόνῳ γὰρ 
 προσευκτέον τῷ ἐπὶ πᾶσι Θεῷ, καὶ προσευκτέον γε τῷ Μονογενεῖ, καὶ Πρω- 
 τοτόκῳ πᾶσης κτίσεως, Λόγῳ Θεοῦ. 
 
 m See his prayer on the furniture of the tabernacle, as spiritually 
 explained, Hom. 13 in Exod. xxxv. p. 176: “Domine Jesu, preesta 
 mihi, ut aliquid monumenti habere merear in tabernaculo Tuo. Ego 
 optarem (si fieri posset), esse aliquid meum in illo auro, ex quo pro- 
 pitiatorium fabricatur, vel ex quo arca contegitur, vel ex quo can- 
 delabrum fit luminis et lucerne. Aut si aurum non habeo, ar- 
 gentum saltem aliquid inveniar offerre, quod proficiat in columnas, 
 vel in bases earum. Aut certe vel ris aliquid..... Tantum ne in 
 omnibus jejunus et infecundus inveniar.” Cf. too Hom. 1. in Lev.,: 
 Hom. γ. in Ley., quoted by Bingham, Ant. xiii. 2, § 3. 
 
Vil] in Origen and Novatian. 575 
 
 truth which justifies it". It is in keepmg with 
 this that Origen explains the frankincense offered 
 by the wise men to our Infant Saviour as an ac- 
 knowledgment of His Godhead, since such an action 
 obviously involved that adoration which is due only 
 to God°. This explanation at any rate could not 
 have been advanced by any but a devout worshipper 
 of Jesus. In the work on the Trinity?, ascribed to 
 
 n Comm. in Rom. x. lib. viii. vol. 4, p. 624, ed. Ben., quoted by 
 Bingham, ubi supra: “[Apostolus] in principio Epistole quam ad 
 Corinthios seribit, ubi dicit, ‘Cum omnibus qui invocant nomen 
 Domini nostri Jesu Christi, in omni loco ipsorum et nostro’ eum 
 cujus nomen invocatur, Dominum Jesum Christum esse pronuntiat. 
 Si ergo et Enos, et Moyses, et Aaron, et Samuel, ‘invocabant 
 Dominum et ipse exaudiebat eos,’ sine dubio Christum Jesum 
 Dominum invocabant ; et si invocare nomen Domini et orare Domi- 
 num unum atque idem est; sicut invocatur Deus, invocandus est 
 Christus; et sicut oratur Deus, ita et orandus est Christus ; et sicut 
 offerimus Deo Patri primo omnium orationes, ita et Domino Jesu 
 Christo ; et sicut offerimus postulationes Patri, ita offerimus postu- 
 lationes et Filio; et sicut offerimus gratiarum actiones Deo, ita 
 et gratias offerimus Salvatori. Unum namque utrique honorem 
 deferendum, id est Patri et Filio, divinus edocet sermo, cum dicit : 
 ‘Ut omnes honorificent Filium, sicut honorificant Patrem.’” 
 
 © Contr. Cels. i. 60, p. 375: φέροντες μὲν δῶρα, ἃ (ἵν᾽ οὕτως ὀνομάσω) 
 συνθέτῳ τινὶ ἐκ Θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπου θνητοῦ προσήνεγκαν, σύμβολα μὲν, ws 
 βασιλεῖ τὸν χρυσὸν, ὡς δὲ τεθνηξομένῳ τὴν σμύρναν, ὡς δὲ Θεῷ τὸν λίβα- 
 νωτόν' προσήνεγκαν δὲ, μαθόντες τὸν τόπον τῆς γενέσεως αὐτοῦ. "ANN 
 ἐπεὶ Θεὸς ἦν, ὁ ὑπὲρ τοὺς βοηθοῦντας ἀνθρώποις ἀγγέλους ἐνυπάρχων Σωτὴρ 
 τοῦ γένους τῶν ἀνθρώπων, ἄγγελος ἠμείψατο τὴν τῶν μάγων ἐπὶ προσκυ- 
 νῆσαι τὸν ᾿Ιησοῦν εὐσέβειαν, χρηματίσας αὐτοῖς “ μὴ ἤκειν πρὸς τὸν 
 Ἡρώδην, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπανελθεῖν ἄλλῃ ὁδῷ εἰς τὰ οἰκεῖα" Cf. 8. Tren. adv. 
 Heer. iil. 9. 2. 
 
 vp Novat. de Trin. c. 14, quoted by Bingham : “Si homo tantum- 
 modo Christus, quomodo adest ubique invocatus, quum heee 
 hominis natura non sit, sed Dei, ut adesse omni loco possit 4” 
 
576 Hymnody coutributes to the worship of Jesus. | Liner. 
 
 Novatian, in the treatises and letters4 of St. Cyprian, 
 in the apologetic works of Arnobius" and Lactantius’, 
 references to the subject are numerous and decisive. 
 But our limits forbid any serious attempt to deal 
 with the materials which crowd upon us as we 
 advance into the central and later decades of the 
 third century; and at this point it may be well 
 to glance at the forms with which the primitive 
 Church approached the throne of the Redeemer. 
 Remark, then, my brethren, that Christian hymnody 
 contributed to the worship of Jesus Christ a very 
 considerable element. Hymnody actively educates, 
 
 q Κ΄. Cyprian. de bono Patientiz, p. 220, ed. Fell. : “ Pater Deus 
 precepit Filium suum adorari: et Apostolus Paulus, divini preecepti 
 memor, ponit et dicit: ‘Deus exaltavit eum et donavit illi nomen 
 quod est super omne nomen ; ut in nomine Jesu omne genu flec- 
 tatur, ccelestium, terrestrium, et infernorum:’ et in Apocalypsi ange- 
 lus Joanni volenti adorari se resistit et dicit : ‘Vide ne feceris, quia 
 conservus tuus sum et fratrum tuorum ; Jesum Dominum adora.’ 
 Qualis Dominus Jesus, et quanta patientia ejus, ut qui in ceelis 
 adoratur, necdum vindicetur in terris?” In Rev. xx. 9, St. Cyprian 
 probably read τῷ Κυρίῳ instead of τῷ Θεῷ. See his language to 
 Lucius, Bishop of Rome, who had recently been a confessor in a 
 sudden persecution of Gallus, A.D. 252 (Ep. 61, p. 145, ed. Fell.) : 
 “ Has ad vos literas mittimus, frater carissime, et representantes 
 vobis per epistolam gaudium nostrum, fida obsequia caritatis ex- 
 promimus ; hic quoque in sacrificiis atque in orationibus nostris 
 non cessantes Deo Patri, et Christo Filio Ejus Domino nostro gra- 
 tias agere, et orare pariter ac petere, ut qui perfectus est atque per- 
 ficiens, custodiat et perficiat in vobis confessionis vestre gloriosam 
 coronam.” 
 
 t Arnobius ady. Gentes, i. 36: “Quotidianis supplicationibus 
 adoratis.” And Ibid. 1. 39: “Neque [Christus] omni illo qui 
 vel maximus potest excogitari divinitatis afficiatur cultu?” [ed. 
 Oehler]. 
 
 8 Lactantius, Div. Inst. iv. 16. 
 
VII.] Value of Hymns as expressions of Christian doctrine. 577 
 
 while it partially satisties, the instinct of worship ; 
 it is a less formal and sustained act of worship 
 than prayer, yet it may really involve transient 
 acts of the deepest adoration. But because it is 
 less formal,—because in using it the soul can pass, 
 as it were, unobserved and at will from mere sym- 
 pathetic states of feeling to adoration, and from ado- 
 ration back to passive although reverent sympathy, 
 —hymnody has always been a popular instrument for 
 the expression of religious feeling. And from the 
 earliest years of Christianity it seems to have been 
 consecrated to the honour of the Redeemer. We 
 have already noted traces of such apostolical hymns 
 in the Pauline Epistles ; but the early Humanitarian 
 teachers did unintentional service by bringing into 
 prominence the value of hymns as witnesses to 
 Christian doctrine, and as efficient aids to popular 
 dogmatic teaching. When the followers of Arte- 
 mon maintained that the doctrime of Christ’s God- 
 head was only brought into the Church during 
 the episcopate of Zephyrinus, an early writer, quoted 
 by Eusebius, observes, by way of reply, that “the 
 psalms and hymns of the brethren, which from 
 the earliest days of Christianity had been written 
 by the faithful, all celebrate Christ, the Word of 
 God, proclaiming His Divinityt.” Origen pointed 
 out that hymns were addressed only to God and 
 
 to His Only-begotten Word, Who is also God’, 
 
 t ~, is ‘ Ss ἂν ‘ > 4 > - sy και - 
 Eus. Hist. Eccl. vy. 28: ψαλμοὶ δὲ ὅσοι καὶ δαὶ ἀδελφῶν ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς 
 ε 4 ”~ - ‘ ,ὔ ~ σὰ 4 ‘ c ~ 
 ὑπὸ πιστῶν γραφεῖσαι, τὸν Λόγον τοῦ Θευῦ τὸν Χριστὸν ὑμνοῦσι θεο- 
 λογοῦντες. 
 
 ἃ Contr. Cels. viii. 67: ὕμνους γὰρ εἰς μόνον τὸν ἐπὶ πᾶσι λέγομεν 
 Θεὸν, καὶ τὸν μονογενῆ αὐτοῦ Λόγον καὶ Θεόν" καὶ ὑμνοῦμέν γε Θεὸν καὶ τὸν 
 
 Μονογενῆ αὐτοῦ. Pp 
 
578 Christ adored in the Tersanctus, the Gloria in Excelsis, [ Linct. 
 
 And the practical value of these hymns as teach- 
 ing the doctrine of Christ’s Deity was illustrated by 
 the conduct of Paulus of Samosata. He banished 
 from his own and neighbouring churches the psalms 
 which were sung to our Lord Jesus Christ; he 
 spoke of them contemptuously as beimg merely 
 modern compositions’. This was very natural in 
 a prelate who “did not wish to confess with the 
 Church that the Son of God had descended from 
 heaven*;” but it shews how the hymnody of the 
 primitive Church protected and proclaimed the 
 truths which she taught and cherished. 
 
 Of the early hymns of the Church of Christ 
 some remain to this day among us as witnesses 
 and expressions of her faith in Christ’s Divinity. 
 Such are the Tersanctus and the Gloria in Excelsis. 
 Both belong to the second century ; both were in- 
 troduced, it is difficult to say how early, into the 
 Eucharistic Office ; both pay Divine honours to our 
 Blessed Lord. And as each morning dawned the 
 Christian of primitive days repeated in private the 
 Gloria in Excelsis as a hymn of praise to Christ 
 
 his Lord. How wonderfully does that hymn blend 
 
 Vv Eus. Hist. Eccl. vii. 30: ψαλμοὺς δὲ τοὺς μὲν eis τὸν Κύριον ἡμῶν 
 ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστὸν παύσας, ws δὴ νεωτέρους καὶ νεωτέρων ἀνδρῶν συγγράμ- 
 para. The account continues: εἰς ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἐν μέσῃ τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ, τῇ 
 μεγάλῃ τοῦ πάσχα ἡμέρᾳ ψαλμῳδεῖν γυναῖκας παρασκευάζων, ὧν καὶ ἀκούσας 
 ἄν τις φρίξειεν. They seem to have sung in this prelate’s own 
 presence, and with his approbation, odes which greeted him as 
 “an angel who had descended from heaven,” although Paulus de- 
 nied our Lord’s pre-existence. Vanity and unbelief are naturally 
 and generally found together. 
 
 Χ Tbid.: τὸν μὲν yap Yidv rod Θεοῦ ov βούλεται συνομολογεῖν ἐξ ov- 
 
 ρανοῦ κατεληλυθέναι. 
 
ὙΠ: and the Evening Hymn of the early Church. δ9 
 
 the appeal to our Lord’s human sympathies with 
 the confession of His Divine prerogatives! “O Lord 
 God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, That takest 
 away the sins of the world, have merey upon us.” 
 How thrilling is that burst of praise, which at last 
 drowns the plaintive notes of entreaty that have 
 preceded it, and hails Jesus Christ glorified on His 
 throne in the heights of heaven! “For Thou only 
 art holy; Thou only art the Lord; Thou only, O 
 Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the 
 glory of God the Father.” Each evening too, in those 
 early times, the Christian offered a hymn of praise 
 which was also addressed to his ascended Lord :— 
 
 “Hail! gladdening Light, of His pure glory poured, 
 Who is th’ Immortal Father, heavenly, blest, 
 Holiest of Holies—Jesus Christ our Lord ! 
 Now we are come to the sun’s hour of rest, 
 The lights of evening round us shine, 
 We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Divine ! 
 Worthiest art Thou at all times to be sung 
 With undefiled tongue, 
 Son of our God, Giver of life, Alone! 
 Therefore in all the world, Thy glories, Lord, they owny.” 
 
 y Cf. Lyra Apostolica, No. 63. The original is given in Routh’s 
 Reliquize Sacr. 111. p. 515: 
 Φῶς ἱλαρὸν ἁγίας δόξης ἀθανάτου Πατρὸς 
 οὐρανίου, ἁγίου, μάκαρος, 
 Ἰησοῦ Χριστὲ, 
 ἐλθόντες ἐπὶ τοῦ ἡλίου δύσιν, 
 ἰδόντες φῶς ἑσπερινὸν, 
 ὑμνοῦμεν ἸΠατέρα, καὶ Ὑἱὸν, καὶ Ἅγιον Πνεῦμα Θεοῦ. 
 ἄξιος εἶ ἐν πᾶσι καιροῖς ὑμνεῖσθαι φωναῖς ὁσίαις, 
 Υἱὲ Θεοῦ, ζωὴν ὁ διδούς" 
 διὸ ὁ κόσμος σε δοξάζει. 
 St. Basil quotes it in part, De Spir. Sanct. 73. It is still the Vesper 
 
 Hymn of the Greek Church. Pp2 
 
580 Adoration of Christ in the Te Deum, { Lecr. 
 
 A yet earlier illustration is afforded by the ode 
 with which Clement of Alexandria concludes his 
 Peedagogus. Although its phraseology was strictly 
 adapted to the ‘perfect Gnostic’ at Alexandria in 
 the second century, yet it seems to have been 
 intended for congregational use. It praises our 
 Lord, as ‘the Dispenser of wisdom,’ ‘the Support 
 of the suffering, the ‘Lord of immortality, the 
 ‘Saviour of mortals,’ ‘the Mighty Son, ‘the God of 
 peace.’ It insists three times on the ‘sincerity’ of 
 the praise thus offered Him. It concludes :— 
 
 “Sing we sincerely 
 The Mighty Son ; 
 We, the peaceful choir, 
 We, the Christ-begotten ones, 
 We, the people of sober life, 
 Sing we together the God of peace.” 
 
 Nor may we forget a hymn which, in God’s good 
 providence, has been endeared to all of us from child- 
 hood. In its present form, the Te Deum is clearly 
 Western, whether it belongs to the age of St. Au- 
 gustine, with whose baptism it is connected by the 
 popular tradition, or, as is probable, to a later period. 
 
 4. Clem. Alex. Pied. iii. 12, fin. p. 313; Daniel, Thesaurus Hymno- 
 logicus, tom. 111. p. 3. “Der Ton des Liedes ist... . gnostisch 
 versinnlichend.” (Fortliige Gesiinge Christlicher Vorzeit, p. 357, 
 qu. by Daniel.) 
 
 μέλπωμεν ἁπλῶς 
 παῖδα κρατερόν, 
 χορὸς εἰρήνης 
 
 οἱ χριστόγονοι, 
 λαὸς σώφρων, 
 
 ψάλλωμεν ὁμοῦ Θεὸν εἰρήνης. 
 
VII.] ἠη ancient doxologies, and the Kyrie Eleison. 581 
 
 But we can scarcely doubt that portions of it are of 
 Eastern origin, and that they carry us up wellnigh 
 to the sub-apostolic period. The Te Deum is at 
 once a song of praise, a creed, and a supplication. 
 In each capacity it is addressed to our Lord. In 
 the Te Deum how profound is the adoration offered 
 to Jesus, whether as One of the Most Holy Three, 
 or more specially in His Personal distinctness as the 
 King of Glory, the Father’s Everlasting Son! How 
 touching are the supplications which remind Him 
 that when He became incarnate “He did not abhor 
 the Virgin’s womb,” that when His Death-agony was 
 passed He “opened the kingdom of heaven to all 
 believers!” How passionate are the pleadings that 
 He would “help His servants whom He has re- 
 deemed with His most precious Blood,” that He 
 would “make them to be numbered with His saints 
 in glory everlasting!” Much of this language is of 
 the highest antiquity; all of it is redolent with 
 the fragrance of the earliest Church; and, as we 
 English Christians use it still m our daily services, 
 we may rejoice to feel that it unites us altogether 
 in spirit, and to a great extent in the letter, with 
 the Church of the first three centuries. 
 
 The Apostolical Constitutions contain ancient doxo- 
 logies which associate Jesus Christ with the Father 
 as “inhabiting the praises of Israel,” after the 
 manner of the Gloria Patri» And the Kyrie 
 
 a Constitutiones, viii. 12 (vol. i. p. 482, ed. Labbe), quoted by 
 Bingham. mapaxadodpéev ce..... ὅπως ἅπαντας ἡμᾶς διατηρήσας ἐν τῇ 
 > ’ > ΄ >  - , a a a a , 
 εὐσεβείᾳ, ἐπισυναγάγῃς ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ Χριστοῦ σου τοῦ Θεοῦ πάσης 
 αἰσθητῆς καὶ νοητῆς φύσεως, τοῦ βασιλέως ἡμῶν, ἀτρέπτους, ἀμέμπτους, 
 
 > , “ “ , , \ > , ‘ \ ΄ 
 ἀνεγκλήτους" ὅτι σοι πᾶσα δόξα, σέβας καὶ εὐχαριστία, τιμὴ καὶ προσκύνησις 
 
582 Worship of Christ at the celebration of the Eucharist (Lc. 
 
 Eleison, that germinal form of supplication, of 
 which the countless litanies of the modern Church 
 are varied expansions, is undoubtedly sub-apostolic. 
 Together with the Tersanctus and the Gloria in 
 Excelsis it shews very remarkably, by its pre- 
 sence in the Eucharistic Office, how ancient and 
 deeply rooted was the Christian practice of prayer 
 to Jesus Christ. For the Eucharist has a double 
 aspect: it is a gift to earth from heaven, but it 
 is also an offerimg to heaven from earth. In 
 the Eucharist the Christian Church offers to the 
 Eternal Father the Death and Passion of His dear 
 Son; since Christ Himself has said, “Do this in 
 remembrance of Me.” The Council of Carthage ac- 
 cordingly expresses the more ancient law and in- 
 stinct of the Church : “ Cum altari adsistitur, semper 
 ad Patrem dirigatur oratio.” Yet so strong was the 
 impulse to offer prayer to Christ, that this canon 
 is strictly observed by no single liturgy, while some 
 rites violate it with the utmost consistency. The 
 
 - .- ΄“΄ ΄“ , ΄“ ‘ 
 τῷ Πατρὶ, καὶ τῷ Υἱῷ, καὶ τῷ Ἁγίῳ Πνεύματι καὶ viv καὶ ἀεὶ καὶ εἰς τοὺς 
 ἀνελλειπεῖς καὶ ἀτελευτήτους αἰῶνας τῶν αἰῶνων. Ibid. 13 (p. 483): διὰ 
 τοῦ Χριστοῦ σου" μεθ᾽ οὗ σοι δόξα, τιμὴ, αἶνος, δοξολογία, εὐχαριστία, 
 A aE U ’ ᾽ ‘ 3A > ΄ υ ᾿ς > , ς 
 καὶ τῷ Ἁγίῳ Πνεύματι, εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν. ITbid.: εὐλογημένος ὁ 
 ἐρχόμενος ἐν ὀνόματι Κυρίου Θεὸς, Κύριος, καὶ ἐπέφανεν ἡμῖν ᾿Ὡσαννὰ ἐν 
 ΄ G , - ἐμ \ ns a ~ ΄ 3 , 
 τοις ὑψίστοις. Ibid. 14 (p. 486) : εαὐτοὺς τῷ Θεῷ τῷ μόνῳ ayevvnT@ 
 aA ‘ a a > a , . A ΄ ὄν 
 Θεῷ, καὶ τῷ Χριστῷ αὐτοῦ παραθώμεθα. Ibid. 15 (p. 486) : πάντας ἡμᾶς 
 ἐπισυνάγαγε εἰς τὴν τῶν οὐρανῶν βασιλείαν, ἐν Χριστῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ 
 γι, 7 ’ pLoaD ay) ῳ Κυρίῳ 
 ἡμῶν" μεθ᾽ οὗ σοι δόξα, τιμὴ καὶ σέβας καὶ τῷ Ἁγίῳ Πνεύματι εἰς τοὺς 
 - . a > 
 αἰῶνας, ἀμήν. Ibid. (p. 487): ὅτι σοι δόξα, αἶνος, μεγαλοπρεπεία, σέβας, 
 προσκύνησις, καὶ τῷ σῷ παιδὶ ᾿Ιησοῦ τῷ Χριστῷ σου τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν 
 a - ees ’ a a 
 καὶ Θεῷ καὶ βασιλεῖ, καὶ τῷ “Αγίῳ Πνεύματι, νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ καὶ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας 
 ΄ Ul 
 τῶν αἰώνων, ἀμήν. 
 b Cone. Carth. iii. ο.. 23, Labbe, vol. ii. p. 1170. 
 
ΨΙ11.7 notwithstanding the rule of the Council of Carthage. 588 
 
 Mozarabic rite is a case in point: its collects wit- 
 ness to the Church’s long struggle with, and final 
 victory over, the tenacious Arianism of Spain’. It 
 
 ¢ Taking a small part of the Mozarabic Missal, from Advent Sunday 
 to Epiphany inclusive, we find sixty cases in which prayer is offered, 
 during the altar service, to our Lord. These cases include (1) three 
 ‘Tllations’ or Prefaces, for the third Sunday in Advent, Circum- 
 cision, and Epiphany (and part at least of this Mass for the Epi- 
 phany is considered by Dr. Neale in his Essays on Liturgiology, 
 p. 138, to be at least not later “than the middle of the fourth 
 century”); also (2) several prayers in which our Lord’s agency 
 in sanctifying the Eucharistic sacrifice, or even in receiving it, is 
 implied—e. g. “Jesu, bone Pontifex...... sanctifica hane oblatio- 
 nem ;” or, in a “ Post Pridie” for fifth Sunday in Advent: “ Hee 
 oblata Tibi..... benedicenda assume libamina (.... tui Adventtis 
 gloriam, &c.).”” (Miss. Moz. p. 17.) So again, on Mid-Lent Sunday : 
 “ Keee, Jesu... deferimus Tibi hoe sacrificium nostree redemptionis 
 
 Sota accipe hoe sacrificium ;” 
 
 on which Leslie quotes St. Ful- 
 gentius, de Fide, ο. το : “Cui (i.e. to the Incarnate Son) cum Patre 
 et Spiritu Sancto....sacrificium panis et vini.... Ecclesia..... 
 offerre non cessat.” Again, in the Mass for Easter Friday, in an 
 “Alia Oratio:” “Ecce, Jesu Mediator.... hance Tibi afferimus vic- 
 timam sacrificii singularis.” From Palm Sunday to Easter Day in- 
 clusive, the prayers offered to Christ, according to this Missal, are 
 twenty-nine. The zeal of the Spanish Church for the Divinity of 
 the Holy Spirit is remarkably shewn in a “ Post Pridie” for Whit- 
 sunday: “Suscipe..... Spiritus Sancte, omnipotens Deus, sacri- 
 ficia ;” on which Leslie’s note says, ‘“Ariani negabant sacrificium 
 debere Dei Filio offerri, aut Spiritui Sancto.... contra quos Catho- 
 lici Gotho-Hispani Filio et Spiritui Sancto sacrificium Eucharisti- 
 cum distineté offerunt;” and he proceeds to quote another passage 
 from Fulgentius that worship and sacrifice were offered alike to all 
 the Three Persons, “hoc est, Sancte Trinitati.” The Gallican 
 Liturgies, though in a less degree, exhibit the same feature of 
 Eucharistic prayer to our Lord. In the very old series of frag- 
 mentary Masses, discovered by Mone, and edited by the Rev. G. H. 
 Forbes and Dr. Neale (in Ancient Liturgies of the Gallican Church, 
 part 1,), as the ‘““Missale Richenovense” (from the abbey of Reichenau, 
 
584 Eucharistic prayers to Jesus Christ. [ Lect. 
 
 might even appear to substitute for the rule laid 
 down at Carthage, the distmct although, considering 
 the relation of the Three Holy Persons to each 
 other, the perfectly consistent principle that the 
 Eucharist is offered to the Holy Trinity. This too 
 would seem to be the mind of the Eastern Church‘. 
 
 where they were found), there are four cases of prayer to Christ ; 
 one of them, in the ninth Mass, being in a “Contestatio” or 
 Preface. In the “Gothic” (or southern-Gallic) Missal, prayer is 
 made to Him about seventy-six times. Some of these cases 
 are very striking. Thus on Christmas Day, “Suscipe,.... Domine 
 Jesu, omnipotens Deus, sacrificium laudis oblatum.” (Muratori, 
 Lit. Rom. ii. 521; Forbes and Neale, p. 35.) The “Immolatio” 
 (another term for the Contestatio) of Palm Sunday is addressed 
 to Christ. The “Old Gallican” Missal, belonging to central Gaul, 
 has sixteen cases of prayer to Him, including the “ Immolatio” 
 of Easter Saturday. The “Gallican Sacramentary” (called also 
 the Sacramentarium Bobiense, and by Mr. Forbes the Missal of 
 Besancon), has twenty-eight such cases, including three Contes- 
 tations. 
 
 d The principle affirmed in the old Spanish rite, that the Eucha- 
 rist was to be offered to the whole Trinity, and therefore to the 
 Son, is also affirmed in the daily Liturgy of the Eastern Church. 
 The prayer of the Cherubic Hymn, which indeed was not originally 
 a part of St. Chrysostom’s Liturgy, having been inserted in it not 
 earlier than Justinian’s reign, has this conclusion: Σὺ yap εἶ 6 
 προσφέρων καὶ προσφερόμενος, kat προσδεχόμενος, καὶ διαδιδόμενος, Χριστὲ 
 ὁ Θεὸς ἡμῶν, καὶ Σοὶ τὴν δόξαν ἀναπέμπομεν κ. τι λ. About 1155 ἃ dis- 
 pute arose as to προσδεχόμενος, and Soterichus Panteugenus, patri- 
 arch-elect of Antioch, who taught that the sacrifice was not offered 
 to the Son, but only to the Father and the Holy Spirit, was con- 
 demned in a council at Constantinople, 1156. “This,” says Neale 
 (Introd. to East. Church, i. 434), “was the end of the controversy 
 that for more than seven hundred years had vexed the Church on 
 the subject of the Incarnation.” Between this event and the con- 
 demnation of Monothelitism, Neale reckons the condemnation of 
 Adoptionism, in 794. Compare also, in the present Liturgy of 
 
γΠ.} Pagan notice of the worship of Christ. 585 
 
 It is unnecessary to observe that at this day, both 
 in the Eucharistic Service and elsewhere, prayer to 
 Jesus Christ is as completely a feature of the devo- 
 tional system of the Church of England, as it was 
 of the ancient, or as it is of the contemporary Use 
 of Western Christendom<®. 
 
 Nor was the worship of Jesus Christ by the early 
 Christians an esoteric feature of the Christian sys- 
 tem, obvious only to those who were within the 
 Church, who cherished her creed, and who took part 
 in her services. It was not an abstract doctrine, 
 but a living practice, daily observed by, and recom- 
 mended to, Christians; and in this concrete ener- 
 getic form it challenged the observation of the 
 heathen from a very early date. It is probable 
 indeed that the Jews, as notably on the occasion 
 of St. Polycarp’s martyrdom , drew the attention of 
 pagan magistrates to the worship of Jesus, in order 
 
 St. James, a prayer just before the “Sancta Sanctis,” addressed to 
 our Lord, in which the phrase occurs, “ Zhy holy and bloodless 
 sacrifices.” The same Liturgy has other prayers addressed to Him. 
 See also in St. Mark’s Liturgy, among other prayers to Christ, one 
 which says, “Shew Thy face on this bread and these cups.” In 
 fact, the East seems never to have accepted the maxim that Eucha- 
 ristic prayer was always addressed to the Father. Our “ Prayer 
 of St. Chrysostom,” addressed to the Son, is the “prayer of the 
 third Antiphon” in Lit. 8. Chrys.; and the same rite, and the 
 Armenian, have the remarkable prayer, “Attend, O Lord Jesus 
 Christ our God..... and come to sanctify us,” &e. In the 
 Coptic Liturgy of St. Basil, our Lord is besought to send down 
 the Spirit on the elements. The present Roman rite has three 
 prayers to Christ between the “Agnus Dei” and the “Panem 
 coelestem.” 
 
 e See Note C in Appendix. 
 
 f Martyr. S. Polyc. ὁ. 17. 
 
586 Pliny’s letter to the Emperor Trajan. [Lecr. 
 
 to stir up contempt and hatred against the Chris- 
 tians. But such a worship was of itself calculated 
 to strike the administrative mind of the Roman 
 officials as an unauthorized addition to the regis- 
 tered divinities of the empire, even before they dis- 
 covered it to be irreconcileable with adherence to 
 the established ceremonies, and specially with any 
 acknowledgment of the divinity of the reilenmg em- 
 peror. The younger Pliny is drawing up a report for 
 the eye of his imperial master Trajan ; and he writes 
 with the cold impartiality of a pagan statesman 
 who is permitting himself to take a distant philo- 
 sophical interest in the superstitions of the lower 
 orders. Some apostates from the Church had been 
 brought before his tribunal, and he had questioned 
 them as to the practices of the Christians in Asia 
 Minor. It appeared that on a stated day the Chris- 
 tians met before daybreak, and sang among them- 
 selves, responsively, a hymn to Christ as God8. 
 Here it should be noted that Pliny is not recording 
 a vague report, but a definite statement, elicited 
 from several persons in cross-examination, moreover 
 touching a point which, in dealing with a Roman 
 magistrate, they might naturally have desired to 
 
 g Plin. Ep. lib. x. ep. 97: “Ali ab indice nominati esse se Chris- 
 tianos dixerunt, et mox negaverunt; fuisse quidem sed desiisse ; 
 quidam ante triennium, quidam ante plures annos, non nemo 
 etiam ante viginti quoque. Omnes et imaginem tuam, deorum- 
 que simulacra venerati sunt, ii et Christo maledixerunt. Adfirma- 
 bant autem, hance fuisse summam vel culpz sue vel erroris, quod 
 essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire, carmenque Christo, 
 quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem, seque sacramento non in scelus 
 aliquod obstringere, sed ne furta, ne latrocinia, ne adulteria com- 
 mitterent.” 
 
VEG Sarcastic observations of Lucian. 587 
 
 keep in the background®. Again, the emperor 
 Adrian, when writing to Servian, describes the popu- 
 lation of Alexandria as divided between the wor- 
 ship of Christ and the worship of Serapisi. That 
 One Who had been adjudged by the law to death 
 as a criminal should receive Divine honours, must 
 have been sufficiently perplexing to the Roman ofli- 
 cial mind; but it was less irritatmg to the states- 
 men than to the philosophers. In his life of the 
 fanatical cynic and apostate Christian, Peregrinus 
 Proteus, whose voluntary self-immolation he himself 
 witnessed at Olympia in A.D. 165, Lucian gives vent 
 to the contemptuous sarcasm which was roused in 
 him, and in men like him, by the devotions of the 
 Church. “The Christians,” he says, “are still wor- 
 shipping that great man who was gibbetted in 
 Palestine*.”. He complains that the Christians are 
 taught that they stand to each other in the relation 
 of brethren, as soon as they have broken loose from 
 the prevailing customs, and have denied the gods 
 of Greece, and have taken to the adoration of that 
 impaled Sophist of theirs! The Celsus with whom 
 we meet in the treatise of Origen may or may not 
 
 h That the ‘carmen’ was an incantation, or that Christ was 
 saluted as a hero, not as a Divine Person, are glosses upon the 
 sense of this passage, rather than its natural meaning. See Augusti, 
 Denkwiirdigkeiten, tom. v. p. 33. 
 
 i Apud Lamprid. in vita Alex. Severi: “ab aliis Serapidem, ab 
 aliis adorari Christum.” 
 
 k De Morte Peregrini, ὁ. 11: τὸν μέγαν οὖν ἐκεῖνον ἔτι σέβουσιν ἄν- 
 θρωπον, τὸν ἐν Παλαιστίνῃ ἀνασκολοπισθέντα. 
 
 1 Ibid. ¢. 13: ἐπειδὰν ἅπαξ παραβάντες, θεοὺς μὲν Ἑλληνικοὺς ἀπαρ- 
 νήσωνται, τὸν δ᾽ ἀνεσκολοπισμένον ἐκεῖνον σοφιστὴν αὐτῶν προσκυ- 
 
 νῶσι. 
 
588 Indignation of Celsus [ Lecr. 
 
 have been the friend of Lucian™. Celsus, it has 
 been remarked, represents a class of intellects which 
 is constantly found among the opponents of Chris- 
 tianity ; Celsus has wit and acuteness without moral 
 earnestness or depth of research ; he looks at things 
 only on the surface, and takes delight in construct- 
 ing and putting forward difficulties and contradic- 
 tions". The worship of our Lord was certain to 
 engage the perverted ingenuity of a mind of this 
 description ; and Celsus attacks the practice upon 
 a variety of grounds which are discussed by Origen. 
 The general position taken up by Celsus is that 
 the Christians had no right to denounce the poly- 
 theism of the pagan world, since their own worship 
 of Christ was essentially polytheistic. It was absurd 
 in the Christians, he contends, to point at the hea- 
 then gods as idols, whilst they worshipped One Who 
 was in a much more wretched condition than the 
 idols, and indeed was not even an idol at all, since 
 He was a mere corpse®. The Christians, he urges, 
 worshipped no God, no, not even a demon, but only 
 a dead man?. If the Christians were bent upon 
 
 m Neander decides in the negative (Ch. Hist. i. 225 sqq), (1) on 
 the ground of the vehemence of the opponent of Origen, as con- 
 trasted with the moderation of the friend of Lucian ; (2) because 
 the friend of Lucian was an Epicurean, the antagonist of Origen 
 a neo-Platonist. 
 
 n See the remarks of Neander, Ch. Hist. vol. i. p. 227, ed. Bohn. 
 
 ο Contr. Cels. vil. 40, p. 722: ἵνα μὴ παντάπασιν ἦτε καταγέλαστοι 
 τοὺς μὲν ἄλλους, τοὺς δεικνυμένους θεοὺς, ws εἴδωλα βλασφημοῦντες" τὸν δὲ 
 καὶ αὐτῶν ὡς ἀληθῶς εἴδωλων ἀθλιώτερον, καὶ μηδὲ εἴδωλον ἔτι, ἀλλ᾽ ὄντως 
 νεκρὸν, σέβοντες, καὶ Πατέρα ὅμοιον αὐτῷ ζητοῦντες. 
 
 P Jbid. vil. 68, p. 742: διελέγχονται σαφῶς οὐ Θεὸν, ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ δαί- 
 
 μονα ἀλλὰ νεκρὸν σέβοντες. 
 
ὙΗ.3 at the adoration of Jesus Christ. 589 
 
 religious innovations; if Hercules, and Ausculapius, 
 and the gods who had been of old held in honour, 
 were not to their taste; why could they not have 
 addressed themselves to such distinguished mortals 
 as Orpheus, or Anaxarchus, or Epictetus, or the 
 Sibyl? Nay, would it not have been better to 
 have paid their devotions to some of their own 
 prophets, to Jonah under the gourd, or to Daniel 
 in the lion’s den, than to a man who had lived an 
 infamous life, and had died a miserable death4 1 
 In thus honouring a Jew Who had been appre- 
 hended and put to death, the Christians were no 
 better than the Getz who worshipped Zamolxis, 
 than the Cilicians who adored Mopsus, than the 
 Acarnanians who prayed to Amphilochus, than the 
 Thebans with their cultus of Amphiaraus, than the 
 Lebadians who were devoted to Trophonius’. Was 
 it not absurd in the Christians to ridicule the hea- 
 then for the devotion which they paid to Jupiter 
 on the score of the exhibition of his sepulchre in 
 Crete, while they themselves adored One Who was 
 Himself a tenant of the tomb’? Above all, was 
 not the worship of Christ fatal to the Christian 
 
 a Contr. Cels. vii. 53, p. 732: πόσῳ δ᾽ ἦν ὑμῖν ἄμεινον, ἐπειδή ye 
 καινοτομῆσαι τι ἐπεθυμήσατε, περὶ ἄλλον τινὰ τῶν γενναίως ἀποθανόντων, καὶ 
 θεῖον μῦθον δέξασθαι δυναμένων, σπουδάσαι; Φέρε, εἰ μὴ ἤρεσκεν Ἡρακλῆς, 
 καὶ ᾿Ασκληπιὸς, καὶ οἱ πάλαι δεδοξασμένοι, Ophea εἴχετε κατ. λ. Cf. 57. 
 
 r Tbid. iii. 34, p. 469: μετὰ ταῦτα “ παραπλήσιον ἡμᾶς" οἴεται ““πε- 
 ποιηκέναι,᾽ τὸν (ὥς φησιν ὁ Κέλσος) ἁλόντα καὶ ἀποθανόντα OpyoKevovtas,” 
 τοῖς Γέταις σέβουσι τὸν Ζάμολξιν, καὶ Κίλιξι τὸν Μόψον, καὶ ᾿Ακαρνᾶσι τὸν 
 Ἀμφίλοχον, καὶ Θηβαίοις τὸν ᾿Ασφιάρεων, καὶ Λεβαδίοις τὸν Τροφώνιον." 
 
 ao - 
 “Ore καταγελῶμεν 
 
 5. Ibid. ili, 43, p. 475: μετὰ ταῦτα λέγει περὶ ἡμῶν 
 τῶν προσκυνούντων τὸν Δία, ἐπεὶ τάφος αὐτοῦ ἐν Κρήτῃ δείκνυται" καὶ 
 
 να a 
 οὐδὲν ἧττον σέβομεν τὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ τάφου ᾽ κ. τ. A. 
 
590 Tenor of Origen’s replies. [Lecr. 
 
 doctrine of the Unity of God? If the Christians 
 really worshipped no God but One, then their reason- 
 ing against the heathen might have had force in it. 
 But while they offer an excessive adoration to this 
 Person Who has but lately appeared in the world, 
 how can they think that they commit no offence 
 against God, by giving these Divine honours to His 
 Servant ? 
 
 In his replies Origen entirely admits the fact 
 upon which Celsus comments in this lively spirit 
 of raillery. He does not merely admit that prayer 
 to Christ was the universal practice of the Church ; 
 he energetically justifies it. In presence of the 
 heathen opponent of His Master’s honour, Origen is 
 the Christian believer rather than the philosophizing 
 Alexandrian". He deals with the language of Celsus 
 patiently and in detail. The objects of heathen 
 worship were unworthy of worship; the Jewish 
 prophets had no claim to it ; Christ was worshipped 
 as the Son of God, as God Himself. “If Celsus,” 
 he says, “had understood the meaning of this, ‘I 
 and the Father are One,’ or what the Son of God says 
 in His prayer, ‘As I and Thou are One, he would 
 never have imagined that we worship any but the 
 
 God Who is over all; for Christ says, ‘The Father 
 
 t Contr. Cels. vill. 12, p. 750: δόξαι δ᾽ ἄν τις ἐξῆς τούτοις πιθα- 
 vov τι καθ᾽ ἡμῶν λέγειν ἐν τῷ, “Εἰ μὲν δὴ μηδένα ἄλλον ἐθεράπευον 
 οὗτοι πλὴν ἕνα Θεὸν, ἦν ἄν τις αὐτοῖς ἴσως πρὸς τοὺς ἄλλους ἀτενὴς 
 λόγος" νυνὶ δὲ τὸν ἔναγχος φανέντα τοῦτον ὑπερθρησκεύουσι, καὶ ὅμως 
 οὐδὲν πλημμελεῖν νομίζουσι περὶ τὸν Θεὸν, εἰ καὶ ὑπηρέτης αὐτοῦ θερα- 
 πευθήσεται.᾽" 
 
 u See however Contr. Cels. v. στ, sub fin. p. 586, where, never- 
 theless, the conclusion of the passage shews his real mind in De 
 Orat. c. 15, quoted above. 
 
VII.) = Later pagan hostility to the worship of Jesus. 591 
 
 is in Me and I in Him’.”” Origen then proceeds, 
 although by a questionable analogy, to guard this 
 language against a Sabellian construction : the wor- 
 ship. addressed to Jesus was addressed to Him as 
 personally distinct from the Father. Origen indeed, 
 in vindicating this worship of our Lord, describes it 
 elsewhere as prayer in an improper sense, on the 
 ground that true prayer is offered to the Father only. 
 This has been explained to relate only to the media- 
 torial aspect of His Manhood as our High Priest’ ; 
 and Bishop Bull further understands him to argue 
 that the Father, as the Source of Deity, is ultimately 
 the Object of all adoration”. But the fact that Jesus 
 received Divine honours is fully admitted to be, 
 and is defended as being, an integral element of 
 the Church’s life*. 
 
 The stress of heathen criticism, however, still con- 
 tinued to be directed against the adoration of our 
 Lord. “Our gods,” so ran the heathen language of 
 a later day, “are not displeased with you Christians 
 for worshipping the Almighty God. But you main- 
 tain the Deity of One Who was born as a man, and 
 
 v Contr. Cels. viii. 12, p. 750: εἴπερ νενοήκει ὁ Κέλσος τὸ" Eye καὶ 
 ὁ Πατὴρ ἕν ἐσμεν" καὶ τὸ ἐν εὐχῇ εἰρημένον ὑπὸ τοῦ Yiod τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν TH 
 «Ὡς ἐγὼ καὶ σὺ ἕν ἐσμεν," οὐκ dv ᾧετο ἡμᾶς καὶ ἄλλον θεραπεύειν, παρὰ τὸν 
 ἐπὶ πᾶσι Θεὸν. ““Ὃ γὰρ Πατὴρ," φησὶν, “Ev ἐμοὶ, κἀγὼ ἐν τῷ Πατρί." 
 
 x Ibid. v. 4: τῆς περὶ προσευχῆς κυριολεξίας καὶ καταχρήσεως. 
 
 y Ibid. viii. 13, 16. “Loquitur de Christo,” says Bishop Bull, 
 “ut Summo Sacerdote.” Def. Fid. Nie. ii. 9, 15. 
 
 z Bull, Def. Fid. Nie. sect. ii. ο. 9, n. 15: “Sin Filium intueamur 
 relatt, qua Filius est, et ex Deo Patre trahit originem, tum rursus 
 certum est, cultum et venerationem omnem, quem ipsi deferimus, ad 
 Patrem redundare, in ipsumque, ut πηγὴν θεότητος ultimo referri.” 
 
 a See Reading’s note on Orig. de Orat. § 15. 
 
592 Haxplanations given by Lactantius and Arnolius, (Lect. 
 
 Who was put to death by the punishment of the 
 cross (a mark of infamy reserved for criminals of 
 the worst kind) ; you believe Him to be still alive, 
 and you adore Him with daily supplications”.” “The 
 heathen,” observes Lactantius, “throw in our teeth 
 the Passion of Christ; they say that we worship 
 a Man, and a Man too Who was put to death by 
 men under circumstances of ignominy and torture*.” 
 Lactantius and Arnobius reply to the charge in pre- 
 cisely the same manner. They admit the truth of 
 Christ’s Humanity, and the shame of His Passion ; 
 but they earnestly assert His literal and absolute 
 Godhead as the great certainty upon which, however 
 the heathen might scorn it, the eye of His Church 
 was persistently fixed—as the truth by which her 
 practice of adoring Him was necessarily determined”. 
 
 2 Arnob. adv. Gentes, i. 36: “Sed non idcirco Dii vobis infesti 
 sunt, quod omnipotentem colatis Deum: sed quod hominem natum, 
 et (quod personis infame est vilibus) crucis supplicio interemptum, 
 et Deum fuisse contenditis, et superesse adhuc creditis, et quotidi- 
 anis supplicationibus adoratis.” 
 
 a Lact. Div. Inst. iv. 16: “Venio nune ad ipsam Passionem, 
 que velut opprobrium nobis objectari solet, quod et hominem, et 
 ab hominibus insigni supplicio adfectum et excruciatum colamus : 
 ut doceam eam ipsam Passionem ab Eo cum magna et divina 
 ratione susceptam, et in θᾶ sola et virtutem, et veritatem, et sa- 
 pientiam contineri.” 
 
 b Arnob. ady. Gentes, i. 42: “ Natum hominem colimus. Etiamsi 
 esset id verum, locis ut in superioribus dictum est, tamen pro mul- 
 tis et tam liberalibus donis, que ab eo profecta in nobis sunt, 
 Deus dici appellarique deberet. Cum vero Deus sit re certa, et 
 sine ullius rei dubitationis ambiguo, inficiaturos arbitramini nos 
 esse, quam maxime illum a nobis coli, et presidem nostri corporis 
 nuncupari ? Ergone, inquiet aliquis furens, iratus, et percitus, Deus 
 ille est Christus? Deus, respondebimus, et interiorum potentiarum 
 
VET. | Pagan caricature of the adoration of Jesus. 593 
 
 If the Gospel had only enjoined the intellectual 
 acceptance of some philosophical theistic theory, and 
 had thus been cold, abstract, passionless, impotent, 
 it would never have provoked the earnest scorn of 
 a Lucian or of a Celsus. They would have con- 
 doned or passed it by, even if they had not cared 
 to patronize it. But the continuous adoration of 
 Jesus by His Church made the neutrality of such 
 men as these morally impossible. They knew what 
 it meant, this worship of the Crucified ; it was too 
 intelligible, too soul-enthralling, to be ignored or to 
 be tolerated. And the lowest orders of the popu- 
 lace were as intelligently hostile to it as were the 
 philosophers. Witness that remarkable caricature 
 of the adoration of our crucified Lord, which was 
 discovered some ten years ago beneath the ruins 
 of the Palatine palace’. It is a rough sketch, 
 
 Deus ; et quod magis infidos acerbissimis doloribus torqueat, rei 
 maxime causa a summo Rege ad nos missus.” Lact. Div. Inst. 
 iv. 29: “Quum dicimus Deum Patrem et Deum Filium, non diver- 
 sum dicimus, nec utrumque secernimus: siquidem nec Pater sine 
 Filio nuncupari, nec Filius potest sine Patre generari.” 
 
 © See “Deux Monuments des Premiers Siécles de I’Eglise expli- 
 qués, par le P. Raphaél Garrucci,’ Rome, 1862. He describes the 
 discovery and appearance of this “ Graffito Blasfemo” as follows :— 
 “Comme tant d’autres ruines, le palais des Césars récélait aussi de 
 nombreuses inscriptions dictées par le caprice. Aprés avoir recueilli 
 celles qui couvraient les parois de toute une salle, nous arrivames a 
 trouver quelques paroles grecques, inscrites au sommet d'un mur 
 enseveli sous les décombres. Ce fut Ἰὰ un précieux indice qui nous 
 fit poursuivre nos recherches. Bient6t apparut le contour d’une 
 téte d’animal sur un corps humain, dont les bras étaient étendus 
 comme ceux des orantes dans les Catacombes. La découverte 
 paraissait avoir un ‘haut intérét: aussi Mgr. Milesi, Ministre des 
 travaux publics, nous autorisa-t-il, avec sa bienveillance accoutumée, 
 
 Q4q 
 
594 The ‘Graffito blasfemo’ of the Palatine. [ Lor. 
 
 traced, in all probability, by the hand of some 
 pagan slave in one of the earliest years of the 
 third century of our era‘, A human figure with an 
 
 ἃ faire enlever la terre et les débris qui encombraient cette chambre, 
 le τι Novembre, 1857. Nous ne tardames point 4 contempler une 
 image que ces ruines avaient conservée intacte ἃ travers les siécles, 
 et dont nous pfimes relever un calque fidéle. 
 
 “Elle réprésente une croix, dont la forme est celle du 7'aw gree, 
 surmonté d’une cheville qui poste une tablette. Un homme est 
 attaché & cette croix, mais la téte de cette figure n’est point hu- 
 maine, c’est celle du cheval ou plutdt de lonagre. Le crucifié est 
 revétu de la tunique de dessous, que les anciens désignaient sous le 
 nom d’interula, et d’une autre tunique sans ceinture ; des bandes 
 appelées crwrales enveloppent la partie inférieure des jambes. A la 
 gauche du spectateur, on voit un autre personnage, qui sous le 
 méme vétement, semble converser avec la monstrueuse image, et 
 éléve vers elle sa main gauche, dont les doigts sont separés. A 
 droite, au dessus de la croix, se lit la lettre Y; et au dessous, l’in- 
 scription suivante : 
 
 AAEZAMENOS SEBETE (pour 2EBETAI) 
 ΘΕΟΝ 
 Alexamenos adore son Dieu.” 
 
 For the reference to this interesting paper I am indebted to the 
 kindness of Professor Westwood. See also Archdeacon Words- 
 worth’s Tour in Italy, 11. p. 143. 
 
 a P. Garucci fixes this date on the following grounds: (1) In- 
 scriptions on tiles and other fragments of this part of the Palatine 
 palace shew that it was constructed during the reign of the Em- 
 peror Adrian. The dates 123 and 126 are distinctly ascertained. 
 (Deux Monuments, &e., p. 10.) The inscription is not therefore 
 earlier than this date. (2) The calumny of the worship of the ass’s 
 head by the Christians is not mentioned by any of the Apologists 
 who precede Tertullian, nor by any who succeed Minucius Felix ; 
 which may be taken to prove that this misrepresentation of Chris- 
 tian worship was only in vogue among pagan critics in Rome and 
 Africa at the close of the second and at the beginning of the third 
 century. (3) It is certain from Tertullian that there were Chris- 
 
ΜΠ) The ‘Graffito blasfemo’ of the Palatine. 595 
 
 ass’s head is represented as fixed to a cross; while 
 another figure in a tunic stands on one side. This 
 figure is addressing himself to the crucified mon- 
 ster, and is making a gesture which was the cus- 
 tomary pagan expression of adoration. Underneath 
 there runs a rude inscription: Alexamenos adores 
 his God. Here we are face to face with a touch- 
 ing episode of the life of the Roman Church in 
 the days of Severus or of Caracalla. As under 
 Nero, so, a century and a half later, there were 
 worshippers of Christ in the household of the 
 Cesar. But the paganism of the later date was 
 more intelligently and bitterly hostile to the Church 
 than the paganism which had shed the blood of the 
 apostles. The Gnostic invective which attributed 
 to the Jews the worship of an ass, was applied by 
 
 tians in the imperial palace during the reign of the Emperor 
 Severus: “Even Severus himself, the father of Antoninus, was 
 mindful of the Christians ; for he sought out Proculus a Chris- 
 tian, who was surnamed Torpacion, the steward of Euodia, who had 
 once cured him by means of oil, and kept him in his own palace, 
 even to his death: whom also Antoninus very well knew, nursed 
 as he was upon Christian milk.” Ad Scapulam, 6. 4. Caracalla’s 
 playmate was a Christian boy; see Dr. Pusey’s note on Tertull. 
 Ρ. 148, Oxf. Tr. Libr. Fath. (4) “Rien dans le monument du 
 Palatin ne contredit cette opinion, ni la paléographie, qui trahit la 
 méme époque, tant ἃ cause de l’usage simultané de l’E carré et de 
 ΤῈ semicirculaire dans la méme inscription, que par la forme géné- 
 rale des lettres ; ni moins encore l’ortographe, car on sait que le 
 changement de l’Al en E a plus d’un exemple ἃ Rome, méme sur 
 les monuments grecs du régne d’Auguste. Enfin les autres in- 
 scriptions grecques de cette chambre, qui sans préjudice pour notre 
 thése, pourraient étre d’une autre temps, ne font naitre aucune 
 difficulté sérieuse, étant parfaitement semblables ἃ celle dont nous 
 nous occupons.” Garucci, Ibid. p. 13. 
 
 Qq 2 
 
596 The ‘Graffito blasfemo’ of the Palatine. [ Lxcr. 
 
 pagans indiscriminately to Jews and Christians. 
 Tacitus attributes the custom to a legend respecting 
 services rendered by wild asses to the Israelites in 
 the desert® ; “and so, I suppose,” observes Tertul- 
 lian, “it was thence presumed that we, as bordering 
 on the Jewish religion, were taught to worship such 
 a figure ἢ Such a story, once current, was easily 
 adapted to the purposes of a pagan caricaturist. 
 Whether from ignorance of the forms of Christian 
 worship, or in order to make his parody of it more 
 generally intelligible to its pagan admirers, the 
 draughtsman has ascribed to Alexamenos the gestures 
 of a heathen devotee®. But the real object of his 
 parody is too plain to be mistaken. Jesus Christ, 
 we may be sure, had other confessors and wor- 
 shippers in the imperial palace as well as Alexa- 
 menos. The moral pressure of the advancing Church 
 was felt throughout all ranks of pagan society ; 
 ridicule was invoked to do the work of argument ; 
 and the moral persecution which crowned all true 
 Christian devotion was often only the prelude to 
 a sterner test of that loyalty to a crucified Lord, 
 
 e Tac. Hist. v. c. 4. He had it probably from Apion; see 
 Josephus, ὁ. Ap. ii. ro. It is repeated by Plutarch, Symp. iv. 5 : 
 τὸν ὄνον ἀναφήναντα αὐτοῖς πηγὴν ὕδατος τιμῶσι. And by Democritus : 
 Χρυσῆν ὄνου κεφαλὴν προσεκύνουν. Apud Suidas, voc. ᾿Ιουδάς. 
 
 f Apolog. 16. Tertullian refutes Tacitus by referring to his own 
 account of the examination of the Jewish temple by Cn. Pompeius 
 after his capture of Jerusalem; Pompey ‘found no image’ in the 
 temple. For proof that the early Christians were constantly iden- 
 tified with the Jews by the pagan world, see Dr. Pusey’s note on 
 Tert. ubi supra, in the Oxf. Tr. Libr. Fath. 
 
 8 Job xxxi. 27. §. Hieronym. in Oseam, ὁ. 13: “Qui adorant 
 solent deosculari manum suam.” Comp. Minue. Fel. Oct. ¢. 2. 
 
VII.|] = Jesus Christ adored by the primitive martyrs. 597 
 
 which was as insensible to the misrepresentations, 
 as Christian faith was superior to the logic, of hea- 
 thendom. 
 
 The death-cry of the martyrs must have familiar- 
 ized the heathen mind with the honour paid to the 
 Redeemer by Christians. Of the worship offered 
 in the Catacombs, of the stern yet tender discipline 
 whereby the early Church stimulated, guided, moulded 
 the heavenward aspirations of her children, pagan- 
 ism knew, could know, nothing. But the bearing 
 and the exclamations of heroic servants of Christ 
 when arraigned before the tribunals of the empire 
 or when exposed to a death of torture and shame 
 in the amphitheatres, were matters of public noto- 
 riety. The dying prayers of St. Stephen expressed 
 the instinct, if they did not provoke the imitation, 
 of many a martyr of later days. What matters it 
 to Blandina of Lyons that her pagan persecutors 
 have first entangled her lmbs in the meshes of 
 a large net, and then exposed her to the fury of 
 a wild bull? She is insensible to pain; she is en- 
 tranced in a profound communion with Christ}. 
 What matters it to that servant-boy in Palestine, 
 Porphyry, that his mangled body is “ committed 
 to a slow fire?” He does but call more earnestly in 
 his death-struggle upon Jesus' Felix, an African 
 bishop, after a long series of persecutions, has been 
 
 " Eus. Hist. Eee. v. 1: εἰς γύργαθον βληθεῖσα, ταύρῳ παρεβλήθη" καὶ 
 ἱκανῶς ἀναβληθεῖσα πρὸς τοῦ ζώου, μηδὲ αἴσθησιν ἔτι τῶν συμβαινόντων 
 ἔχουσα διὰ τὴν ἐλπίδα καὶ ἐποχὴν τῶν πεπιστευμένων καὶ ὁμίλιαν πρὸς 
 Χριστόν. 
 
 i Thid. Mart. Pal. τὰ: καθαψαμένης αὐτοῦ τῆς φλογὸς ἀπέῤῥηξε φω- 
 
 νὴν, τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ ᾿Ιησοῦν βοηθὸν ἐπιβοώμενος. 
 
598 Prayers to Jesus Christ [ Lect. 
 
 condemned to be beheaded at Venusium for re- 
 fusing to give up the sacred books to the pro- 
 consul. “Raising his eyes to heaven, he said with 
 a clear voice .....‘O Lord God of heaven and 
 earth, Jesu Christ, to Thee do I bend my neck by 
 way of sacrifice, O Thou Who abidest for ever, to 
 Whom belongs glory and majesty, world without 
 end. Amen k,’” Theodotus of Ancyra has been be- 
 trayed by the apostate Polychronius, and is joming 
 in a last prayer with the sorrowing Church. “Lord 
 Jesu Christ,” he cries, “Thou Hope of the hopeless, 
 grant that I may finish the course of my conflict, 
 and offer the shedding of my blood as a libation 
 and sacrifice, to the relief of all those who suffer for 
 Thee. Do Thou lghten their burden; and still 
 this tempest of persecution, that all who believe in 
 Thee may enjoy rest and quietness!.” And after- 
 
 k Ruinart, Acta Martyrum Sincera, ed. Veronese, 1731, p. 314. 
 Acta §. Felicis Episcopi, anno 303: “Felix Episcopus, elevans 
 oculos in ccelum, clara voce dixit, Deus, gratias Tibi. Quinqua- 
 ginta et sex annos habeo in hoc seculo. Virginitatem custodivi, 
 Evangelia servavi, fidem et veritatem predicavi. Domine Deus coli 
 et terre, Jesu Christe, Tibi cervicem meam ad victimam flecto, Qui 
 permanes in eternum; Cur est claritas et magnificentia in scecula 
 seculorum. Amen.” 
 
 1 Thid. p. 303, Passio 8S. Theodoti Ancyrani, et septem virgi- 
 num: “ Theodotus, valedicens fratribus, jubensque ne ab oratione 
 cessarent, sed Deum orarent ut corona ipsi obtingeret, preeparavit 
 se ad verbera sustinenda. Simul igitur perstiterunt in oratione 
 cum martyre, qui prolixe precatus, tandem ait: Domine Jesu 
 Christe, spes desperatorum, da mihi certamuns cursum perficere, et 
 sanguinis effusionem pro sacrificio et libatione offerre, ommium eorum 
 causa qui propter Te affiguntur. Alleva onus eorum; et com- 
 pesce tempestatem, ut requie et profundd tranquillitate potiantur 
 omnes qui in Te credunt.” 
 
VIL.) offered by the martyrs in their agony. 599 
 
 wards in the extremity of his torture he prays 
 thus: “Lord Jesu Christ, Thou Hope of the hope- 
 less, hear my prayer, and assuage this agony, seeing 
 that for Thy Name’s sake I suffer thus™.” And when 
 the pain had failed to bend his resolution, and the 
 last sentence had been pronounced by the angry 
 judge, “O Lord Jesu Christ,” the martyr exclaims, 
 “Thou Maker of heaven and earth, Who forsakest 
 not them that put their hope in Thee, I give Thee 
 thanks for that Thou hast made me meet to be 
 citizen of Thy heavenly city, and to have a share 
 in Thy kingdom. I give Thee thanks that Thou 
 hast given me strength to conquer the dragon, 
 and to bruise his head. Give rest unto Thy ser- 
 vants, and stay the fierceness of the enemies in my 
 person. Give peace unto Thy Church, and set her 
 free from the tyranny of the devil®.” 
 
 Thus it was that the martyrs prayed and died. 
 Their voices reach us across the chasm of intervening 
 
 m Ruinart, Acta, p. 307: “ Videns ergo Preses se frustra labo- 
 rare, et fatigatos tortores deficere ; depositum de ligno jussit super 
 ignitas testulas collocari. Quibus etiam interiora corporis pene- 
 trantibus gravissimum dolorem sentiens Theodotus, oravit dicens, 
 Domine Jesu Christe, spes desperatorum, exaudi orationem meam, 
 et cruciatum hune mitiga ; quia propter Nomen Sanctum Tuum ista 
 patior.” 
 
 n Ibid.: “Cumque ad locum pervenissent, orare ccepit Martyr 
 in hee verba: Domine Jesu Christe, celi terraque conditor, qui non 
 derelinquis sperantes in Te, gratias Tibi ago, quia fecisti me dig- 
 num ceelestis Tuc Urbis civem, Tuique regni consortem. Gratias 
 Tibi ago, quia donasti mihi draconem vincere, et caput ejus con- 
 terere. Da requiem servis Tuis, atque in me siste violentiam 
 inimicorum, Da, Ecclesiae Tue pacem, eruens eam ὦ tyrannide 
 diaboli.” 
 
600 Prayers to Jesus Christ [Lecr. 
 
 centuries; but time cannot impair the moral majesty, 
 or weaken the accents of their strong and simple 
 conviction. One after another their piercing words, 
 in which the sharpest human agony is so entwined 
 with a superhuman faith, fall upon our ears. “O 
 Christ, Thou Son of God, deliver Thy servants®.” 
 “© Lord Jesu Christ, we are Christians; we are 
 Thy servants; Thou art our Hope; Thou art the 
 Hope of Christians. O God Most Holy, O God 
 Most High, O God Almighty?.” “O Christ,” cries 
 a martyr again and again amidst his agonies, “O 
 Christ, let me not be confounded’.” “ Help, I pray 
 
 © Ruinart, p. 340; Acta SS. Saturnini, Dativi, et aliorum pluri- 
 morum martyrum in Africa, a. 304: “Thelica martyr, media de 
 ipsa carnificum rabie hujusmodi preces Domino cum gratiarum 
 actione effundebat : Deo gratias. Jn Nomine Tuo, Christe Dei Fili, 
 hibera servos Tuos.” 
 
 P Tbid.: “Cum ictibus ungularum concussa fortius latera sul- 
 earentur, profluensque sanguinis unda violentis tractibus emanaret, 
 Proconsulem sibi dicentem audivit: Incipies sentire que vos pati 
 oporteat. Et adjecit: Ad gloriam. Gratias ago Deo regnorwm. 
 Apparet regnum eternum, regnum incorruptum. Domine Jesu 
 Christe, Christiani sumus ; Tibi servimus ; Tu es spes nostra ; Tu 
 es spes Christianorum ; Deus sanctissime ; Deus altissime ; Deus 
 omnipotens.” 
 
 a Ibid. p. 341: “ Advolabant truces manus jussis velocibus le- 
 viores, secretaque pectoris, disruptis cutibus, visceribusque divulsis, 
 nefandis adspectibus profanorum adnexa crudelitate pandebant. 
 Inter hee Martyris mens immobilis perstat: et licet membra rum- 
 pantur, divellantur viscera, latera dissipentur, animus tamen mar- 
 tyris integer, inconcussusque perdurat. Denique dignitatis suze 
 memor Dativus, qui et Senator, tali voce preces Domino sub car- 
 nifice rabiente fundebat: O Christe Domine, non confundar.” 
 Tbid. p. 342: “At martyr, inter vulnerum cruciatus szvissimos 
 pristinam suam repetens orationem: Logo, ait, Christe, non con- 
 Sundar.” 
 
Wiz. | offered by the martyrs in their agony. 601 
 
 Thee, O Christ, have pity. Preserve my soul, guard 
 my spirit, that I be not ashamed. I pray Thee, O 
 Christ, grant me power of endurance’.” “I pray 
 Thee, Christ, hear me. I thank Thee, my God ; 
 command that I be beheaded. I pray Thee, Christ, 
 have mercy ; help me, Thou Son of Gods.” “I pray 
 Thee, O Christ: all praise to Thee. Deliver me, 
 O Christ; I suffer in Thy Name. I suffer for a 
 short while ; I suffer with a willing mind, O Christ 
 my Lord: let me not be confounded” 
 
 Or listen to such an extract from an early docu- 
 ment as the following :—“ Calvisianus, interrupting 
 Euplius, said, ‘Let Euplius, who hath not in com- 
 pliance with the edict of the emperors given up 
 the sacred writings, but readeth them to the peo- 
 ple, be put to the torture. And while he was 
 being racked, Euplius said, ‘I thank Thee, O Christ. 
 Guard Thou me, who for Thee am suffering thus.’ 
 Calvisianus the consular said, ‘Cease, Euplius, from 
 this folly. Adore the gods, and thou shalt be set 
 at liberty.’ Euplius said, ‘I adore Christ ; I utterly 
 
 τ Acta, p. 342: “Spectabat interea Dativus lanienam corporis 
 sui potius quam dolebat : et cujus ad Dominum mens animusque 
 pendebat, nihil dolorem corporis eestimabat, sed tantum ad Domi- 
 num precabatur, dicens; Subveni, rogo, Christe, habe pietatem. 
 Serva animam meam ; custodi spiritum meum ut non confundar, 
 Rogo, Christe, da sufferentiam.” 
 
 5. Jbid.: “Ne inter moras torquentium exclusa anima corpus 
 supplicio pendente desereret, tali voce Dominum presbyter preca- 
 batur: Logo Christe, ecaudi me. Gratias Tibi ago, Deus: jube me 
 decollarit. Rogo Christe, miserere. Dei Fili, subveni.” 
 
 Ὁ Ibid. p. 343: “Emeritus martyr ait:..... Rogo, Christe, Tibi 
 laudes : libera me Christe, patior in Nomine Tuo. Breviter patior, 
 libenter patior, Christe Domine ; non confundar.” 
 
602 Prayers of the martyrs to Jesus [ Lect. 
 
 hate the demons. Do what thou wilt: I am a 
 Christian. Long have I desired what now I suffer. 
 Do what thou wilt. Add yet other tortures: I am 
 a Christian.’ After he had been tortured a long 
 while, the executioners were bidden hold _ their 
 hands. And Calvisianus said, ‘ Unhappy man, adore 
 the gods. Pay worship to Mars, Apollo, and Aiscu- 
 lapius.’ Euplius said, ‘I worship the Father and 
 the Son and the Holy Ghost. I adore the Holy 
 Trinity, beside Whom there is no God. Perish the 
 gods who did not make heaven and earth, and all 
 that is in them. I am a Christian.’ Calvisianus the 
 preefect said, ‘ Offer sacrifice if thou wouldest be set 
 at liberty” Euplius said, ‘I sacrifice only myself to 
 Christ my God: more than this I cannot do. In 
 vain dost.thou attempt [to conquer me], I am a 
 Christian.” Calvisianus gave orders that he should 
 be tortured again more severely. And while he 
 was being tortured, Huplius said, ‘Thanks to Thee, 
 O. Christ. Help me, O Christ. For Thee do I 
 suffer thus, Ὁ Christ.’ And he said this repeatedly. 
 And as his strength gradually failed him, he went 
 on repeating these or other exclamations, with his 
 lips only—his voice was gone.” 
 
 u Ruinart, p. 362; Acta 8. Euplii Diaconi et Martyris, a. 304: 
 “ Calvisianus interlocutus dixit : Huplius qui secundum Edictum 
 Principum non tradidit Scripturas, sed legit populo, torqueatur, 
 Cumque torqueretur, dixit Euplius: Gratias Tibi Christe. Me cus- 
 todi qui propter Te hee patior. Dixit Calvisianus Consularis : 
 Desiste, Hupli, ab insaniad hac. Deos adora et liberaberis. Euplius 
 dixit: Adoro Christuwm, detestor demonia. Fac quodvis, Christi- 
 anus sum. Hee diu optawi. Fae quod vis. Adde alia, Chris- 
 tianus sum. Postquam diu tortus esset, jussi sunt cessare carni- 
 fices. Et dixit Calvisianus: J/iser, adora deos: Martem cole, 
 
111 not to be dismissed as ‘ejaculations? 603 
 
 You cannot, as I have already urged, dismiss 
 from your consideration such prayers as these, on 
 the ground of their being ‘mere ejaculations.’ Do 
 serious men, who know that they are dying, ‘ejacu- 
 late’ at random? Is the hour of death that at 
 which a man would naturally innovate upon the 
 devotional habits of a lifetime? Is it an hour at 
 which he would make hitherto unattempted enter- 
 prises into the unseen world and address himself 
 to beings with whom he had not before deemed 
 it lawful or possible to hold spiritual communion 7 
 Is not the reverse of this supposition notoriously 
 the case? Surely, brethren, those who have wit- 
 nessed the last hours of the servants of Christ 
 cannot doubt that it isso. As the soul draws nigh 
 to the gate of death, the solemnities of the eternal 
 future are wont to cast their shadows upon the 
 thought and heart ; and whatever is deepest, truest, 
 most assured and precious, thenceforth engrosses 
 every power. At that dread yet blessed hour, the 
 soul clings with a new intensity and deliberation 
 to the most certain truths, to the most prized and 
 familiar words. The mental creations of an intel- 
 
 Apollinem et Asculapium. Dixit Euplius: Patrem et Filium et 
 Spiritum Sanctum adoro: Sanctum Trinitatem adoro, preter quam 
 non est Deus. Pereant dit qu non fecerunt celum et terram, et 
 que in eis sunt. Christianus sum. Calvisianus preefectus dixit : 
 Sacrifica, si vis liberwi, Euplius dixit : Sacrifico modo CHRISTO 
 DEO me ipsum: quid ultra faciam, non habeo. Frustra conaris : 
 Christianus sum. Calvisianus preecepit iterum torqueri δου δ. 
 Cumque torqueretur, dixit Euplius: Gratias Til, Christe. Succurre 
 Christe. Propter Te hee patior Christe. Et dixit sepius. Et 
 deficientibus viribus, dicebat labiis tantum, absque voce hee vel 
 alia.” 
 
604 The Arian invocation of Christ, [ΠΕ]. 
 
 lectual over-subtlety, or of a thoughtless enthusiasm, 
 or of an unbridled imagination, or of a hidden per- 
 versity of will, or of an unsuspected unreality of 
 character, fade and are discarded. To gaze upon 
 the naked truth is the one necessity ; to plant the 
 feet upon the Rock Itself, the supreme desire, in 
 that awful, searching, sifting moment. Often, too, 
 at a man’s last hour, will habit strangely assert its 
 mysterious power of recovering, as if from the grave, 
 thoughts and memories which seemed to have been 
 lost for ever. Truths which have been half forgot- 
 ten or quite forgotten since childhood, and prayers 
 which were learned at a mother’s knee, return 
 upon the soul with resistless persuasiveness and 
 force, while the accumulations of later years dis- 
 appear and are lost sight of. Depend upon it, my 
 brethren, the martyrs prayed to Jesus in their 
 agony because they had prayed to Him long before, 
 many of them from childhood ; because they knew 
 from experience that such prayers were blessed and 
 answered. They had been taught to pray to Him ; 
 they had joined in prayers to Him; they had been 
 taunted and ridiculed for praying to Him; they 
 had persevered in praying to Him; and when at 
 last their hour of trial and of glory came, they had 
 recourse to the prayers which they knew full well 
 to be the secret of their strength, and those prayers 
 carried them on through their agony, to the crown 
 beyond it. 
 
 And, further, you will have remarked that the 
 worship of Jesus by the martyrs was full of the 
 deepest elements of worship. It was made up of 
 trust, of resignation, of self-surrender, of self-oblation. 
 
VTS] how commented on by Catholics. 605 
 
 Nothing short of a belief in the absolute Godhead of 
 Jesus could justify such worship. The Homoousion 
 was its adequate justification. Certainly the Arians 
 worshipped our Lord, although they rejected the 
 Homoousion. So clear were the statements of Scrip- 
 ture, so strong and so universal was the tradition 
 of Christendom, that Arianism could not resist the 
 claims of a practice which was nevertheless at vari- 
 ance with its true drift and principle. For, ‘as 
 St. Athanasius pointed out, the Arians did in reality 
 worship one whom they believed to be distinct from 
 the Supreme God. The Arians were creature-wor- 
 shippers not less than the heathen’. The later Arians 
 appear to have attempted to retort the charge of 
 creature-worship by pointing to the adoration of 
 our Lord’s Humanity by the Catholic Church. But, 
 as St. Athanasius explains, our Lord’s Manhood was 
 adored, not as a distinct and individual Being, but 
 only as inseparably jomed to the adorable Person 
 of the Everlasting Word*. To refuse to adore 
 Christ’s Manhood was to imply that after the Incar- 
 nation men could truly conceive of It as separate 
 from Christ’s Eternal Person’. There was no real 
 
 . «Ἱ 7 . » , - 
 
 * §. Athanas. Epist. ad Adelphium, § 3: οὐ κτίσμα προσκυνοῦμεν, 
 μὴ γένοιτο, ἐθνικῶν yap καὶ ᾿Αρειανῶν ἡ τοιαύτη πλάνη" ἀλλὰ τὸν Κύριον 
 τῆς κτίσεως σαρκωθέντα τὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγον προσκυνοῦμεν. 
 
 Χ Tbid.: εἰ γὰρ καὶ ἡ σὰρξ αὐτὴ καθ᾽ ἑαυτὴν μέρος ἐστὶ τῶν κτισμά- 
 
 μὰ ‘A “ , “ ‘ a» ‘ δὰ cal > e ‘ 
 των, ἀλλὰ Θεοῦ γέγονε σῶμα. καὶ οὔτε TO τοιοῦτον σῶμα καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸ 
 διαιροῦντες ἀπὸ τοῦ Λόγου προσκυνοῦμεν, οὔτε τὸν Adyov προσκυνῆσαι 
 , ’ .΄- , 
 θέλοντες μακρύνομεν αὐτὸν ἀπὸ τῆς σαρκός" ἀλλ᾽ εἰδότες, καθὰ προείπο- 
 ‘ 4 , ΄ ” a ‘ ’ , , 
 μεν, τὸ ““ὁ Λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο, τοῦτον καὶ ἐν σαρκὶ γενόμενον ἐπιγινώ- 
 σκομεν Θεόν. 
 . 5: ΄ - “ ΄ σι; τ > ἢ 
 Y Ibid.: τίς τοιγαροῦν οὕτως ἄφρων ἐστὶν ὡς λέγειν τῷ Κυρίῳ: ἀπόστα 
 ‘ ‘ 
 
 , ‘ - ‘ ” , Υ . " 
 απὸ τοὺ σώματος Wa σε προσκυνήσω ; κ. τ. A, Compare Ibid. § 5: ἵνα 
 
000 Early Socinian ‘worship? of Christ [Lucr. 
 
 analogy between this worship and the Arian worship 
 of a being who was in no wise associated with the 
 Essence of God; and Arianism was either virtually 
 ditheistic or consciously idolatrous. It was idola- 
 trous, if Christ was a created being; it was dithe- 
 istic, if He was conceived of as really Divine, yet 
 distinct in essence from the Essence of the Father’. 
 The same phenomenon of the vital principle of a 
 heresy being overridden for a while by the strength 
 of the tradition of universal Christendom was re- 
 produced, twelve centuries later, in the case of 
 Socinianism. The earliest Socinians taught that the 
 Son of God was a mere man, who was conceived of 
 the Holy Ghost, and was therefore called the Son 
 of God. But they also maintained that on account 
 of His obedience, He was, after finishing His work of 
 redemption, exalted to Divine dignity and honour*. 
 Christians were to treat Him as if He were God: 
 they were to trust Him implicitly; they were 
 to adore Him. Faustus Socinus zealously insisted 
 
 καὶ τολμῶσι λέγειν (sc. Ariani), od προσκυνοῦμεν ἡμεῖς τὸν Κύριον μετὰ 
 τῆς σαρκὸς, ἀλλὰ διαιροῦμεν τὸ σῶμα καὶ μόνῳ τούτῳ λατρεύομεν. 
 z 5). Athanas. contr. Arian. Orat. ii. § 14, sub fin. p. 482. Orat. 
 11. § τό, p. 565, εἰ yap μὴ οὕτως ἔχει, GAN ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐστὶ κτίσμα Kal 
 , ς ΄ x > a \ > \ \ \ =) Sah “ “- 
 ποίημα ὁ Λόγος, ἢ οὐκ ἔστι Θεὸς ἀληθινὸς, διὰ τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸν ἕνα τῶν κτισ- 
 U x >? \ yee ? , > , \ “- - ἌΣ τ 
 μάτων, ἢ εἰ Θεὸν αὐτὸν ὀνομάζουσιν ἐντρεπόμενοι παρὰ τῶν γραφῶν, ἀνάγκη 
 λέγειν αὐτοὺς δυὸ θεοὺς, ἕνα μὲν κτίστην, τὸν δὲ ἕτερον κτιστὸν, καὶ δύο 
 κυρίοις λατρεύειν, ἑνὶ μὲν ἀγενήτῳ, τῷ δὲ ἑτέρῳ γενητῷ καὶ κτίσματι... 
 A ‘ “~ , A , , , a A “ 
 οὕτω δὲ φρονοῦντες πάντως καὶ πλειόνας συνάψουσι θεούς" τοῦτο γὰρ τῶν 
 ἐκπεσόντων ἀπὸ τοῦ ἑνὸς Θεοῦ τὸ ἐπιχείρημα. διατί οὖν οἱ ᾿Ἀρειανοὶ τοι- 
 avta λογιζόμενοι καὶ νοοῦντες οὐ συναριθμοῦσιν ἑαυτοὺς μετὰ τῶν ἋἝλ- 
 λήνων ; 
 @ Socin. de Justif. Bibl. Fr. Pol. tom. i. fol. 601, col. 1. 
 b Cat. Racov. : “Qu. 236. Quid preterea Dominus Jesus huic 
 precepto addidit? Resp. Id quod etiam Dominum Jesum pro 
 
VII.] abandoned, as resting on antiquarian feeling. 607 
 
 upon the duty of adoring Jesus Christ; and the 
 Racovian Catechism expressly asserts that those who 
 do not call upon or adore Christ are not to be 
 accounted Christians’. But this was only the ar- 
 cheology, or at most the better feeling of Socinian- 
 ism. Any such mere feeling was destined to yield 
 surely and speedily to the logic of a strong destruc- 
 tive principle. In vain did Blandrata appeal to 
 Faustus Socinus himself, when endeavouring to per- 
 suade the Socinians of Transylvania to adore Jesus 
 Christ : the Transylvanians would not be persuaded 
 to yield an act of adoration to any creature’, In 
 vain did the Socinian Catechism draw a distinction 
 
 Deo agnoscere tenemur, id est, pro 60, qui in nos potestatem habet 
 divinam, et cui nos divinum exhibere honorem obstricti sumus. 
 Qu. 237. Jn quo is honor divinus Christo debitus consistit ? Resp. 
 In 60, quod quemadmodum adoratione divind eum prosequi tene- 
 mur, ita in omnibus necessitatibus nostris ejus opem implorare 
 possumus. Adoramus verd ewm propter ipsius sublimem et di- 
 vinam ejus potestatem.” Cf. Mohler, Symbolik. Mainz. 1864, 
 Ῥ. 609. 
 
 © Cat. Rac.: “Qu. 246. Quid verd sentis de tis hominibus, qui 
 Christum non invocant, nec adorandum censent ? Resp. Prorsis 
 non esse Christianos sentio, cum Christum non habeant. Et licet 
 verbis id negare non audeant, reipsi negant tamen.” 
 
 d Cf. Mohler, Symbolik, p. 609 ; Bp. Pearson, Minor Works, vol. 
 i. p. 300, and note. Coleridge’s Table Talk, 2nd ed. p. 304: ‘“ Faus- 
 tus Socinus worshipped Jesus Christ, and said that God had given 
 Him the power of being omnipresent. Davyidi, with a little more 
 acuteness, urged that mere audition or creaturely presence could 
 not possibly justify worship from men ;—that a man, how glorified 
 soever, was no nearer God than the vulgarest of the race. Prayer 
 therefore was inapplicable.” For himself Coleridge says (Ibid. p. 
 50), “In no proper sense of the term can I call Unitarians and 
 Socinians believers in Christ ; at least not in the only Christ of 
 
 ᾽᾽ 
 
 Whom I have read or know anything.’ 
 
608 The Homoousion summarizes the early Christology. [Lxct. 
 
 between a higher and a lower worship, of which 
 the former was reserved for the Father, while the 
 latter was paid to Christ®. Practically this led on 
 to a violation of the one positive fundamental prin- 
 ciple of Socinianism; it obscured the incommunicable 
 prerogatives of the Supreme Being. Accordingly, in 
 spite of the texts of Scripture upon which their 
 worship of Christ was rested by the Socinian theo- 
 logians, all such worship was soon abandoned ; and 
 the later practice of Socimians has illustrated the 
 true force and meaning of that adoration which 
 Socinianism refuses, but which the Church unceas- 
 ingly offers, to Jesus, the Son of God made Man. 
 Of this worship the only real justification is that 
 full assertion of Christ’s Essential Unity with the 
 Father which is expressed by the Homoousion. 
 
 II. But the Homoousion did not merely justify 
 and explain the devotional attitude of the Church 
 towards Jesus Christ : it was, in reality, in keeping 
 with the general drift and sense of her traditional 
 language. 
 
 Reference has already been made to the prayers of 
 the primitive martyrs ; but the martyrs professed in 
 terms their belief in Christ’s divinity, as frequently 
 
 e Cat. Rac.: “Qu. 245. Lrgo is honor et cultus ad eum modum 
 tribuitur, ut nullum sit inter Christum et Deum hoc in genere dis- 
 crimen ἡ Resp. Imo, permagnum est. Nam adoramus et colimus 
 Deum, tanquam causam primam salutis nostre ; Christum tan- 
 quam causam secundam; aut ut cum Paulo loquamur, Deum 
 tanquam Hum ex quo omnia, Christum ut eum per quem omnia.” 
 Cf. Bibl. Frat. Pol. tom. 11. fol. 466, qu. by Mohler, Symbolik, 
 p- 609. Mohler observes that “man sieht dass an Christus eine Art 
 von Invocation gerichtet wird, die mit der Katholischen Anrufung 
 der Heiligen einige Aehnlichkeit hat.” 
 
VII.) Confession of Chris?s Divinity by the primitive martyrs. 609 
 
 as they implied that belief by their adorations of 
 Christ. This is the more observable because it is 
 at variance with the suggestions by which those who 
 do not share the faith of the martyrs, sometimes 
 attempt to account for the moral pheenomenon which 
 martyrdom presents. It has been: said that the 
 martyrs did not bear witness to any definite truth or 
 dogma ; that the martyr-temper, so to term it, was 
 composed of two elements, a kind of military en- 
 thusiasm for an unseen Leader, and a strange un- 
 natural desire to brave physical suffering ; that the 
 prayers uttered by the martyrs were the product of 
 this compound feeling, but that such prayers did not 
 imply any clearly defined conceptions respecting 
 the rank and powers of Him to Whom they were 
 addressed. Now without denying that the martyrs 
 were sustained by a strictly supernatural contempt 
 for pain, or that their devotion to our Lord was of 
 the nature of an intense personal attachment which 
 could not brook the least semblance of slight or dis- 
 loyalty, or that they had not analysed their in- 
 tellectual apprehension of the truth before them in 
 the manner of the divines of the Nicene age, I never- 
 theless affirm that the martyrs did suffer on behalf of 
 a doctrine which was dearer to them than life. The 
 Christ with Whom they held such close and passion- 
 ate communion, and for Whose honour they shed 
 their blood, was not to them a vague floating idea, or 
 a being of whose rank and powers they imagined 
 themselves to be ignorant. If there be one doctrine 
 of the faith which they especially confessed at death, 
 it is the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity. This truth 
 was not only confessed by bishops and presbyters, 
 RY 
 
610 Confessions of Christ’s Divinity [ Lec. 
 
 Philosophers like Justinf ; soldiers such as Maurice, 
 and Tarachus", and Theodorus ; young men of per- 
 sonal beauty like Peter of Lampsacus*, or literary 
 
 f Ruinart, Acta, p. 49: “ἴσο quidem ut homo imbecillis sum, et 
 longé minor quam ut de infinita illius Deitate aliquid magnum 
 dicere possim : Prophetarum munus hoc esse fateor.” 
 
 & Ibid. p.243: “IMihtes sumus, Imperator, tui: sed tamen servi, 
 quod liberé confitemur, Dei ........ Habes hie nos confitentes 
 Deum Patrem auctorem omnium ; et Filium Ejus Jesum Christum 
 Deum credimus.” 
 
 h Tbid. p. 377: Tapayos εἶπεν" Νῦν ἀληθῶς φρονιμώτερόν pe ἐποί- 
 noas, ταῖς πληγαῖς ἐνδυναμώσας pe, ἕτι μᾶλλον πεποιθέναι pe ἐν TO 
 ὀνόματι τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ. Μάξιμος ἡγεμὼν εἶπεν" ἀνοσι- 
 ὦτατε καὶ τρισκατάρατε, πῶς δυσὶ θεοῖς λατρεύεις, καὶ αὐτὸς ὁμολογῶν, τοὺς 
 θεοὺς ἀρνῇ ; Τάραχος εἶπεν ᾿Εγὼ Θεὸν ὁμολογῶ τὸν ὄντως ὄντα. Μάξιμος 
 ἡγεμὼν εἶπεν. καὶ μὴν καὶ Χριστόν τινα ἔφης εἶναι Θεόν. Τάραχος εἶπεν" 
 οὕτως ἔχει" αὐτὸς γάρ ἐστιν ὁ Χριστὸς ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ ζῶντος, ἡ ἐλπὶς 
 τῶν Χριστιανῶν, Sv ὃν καὶ πάσχοντες σωζόμεθα. 
 
 i Ibid. p. 425: “ Vos autem erratis qui demonas fallaces et 
 impostores Dei appellatione honoratis ; mihi vero Deus est Christus, 
 Dei Unigenitus Filius. Pro pietate igitur atque confessione Istius, 
 et qui vulnerat incidat; et qui verberat laceret; et qui cremat 
 flammam admoveat ; et qui his vocibus meis offenditur, linguam 
 exumat.” 
 
 k Ibid. p.135: “ Comprehensus est quidam, Petrus nomine, 
 valdé quidem fortis in fide; pulcher animo et speciosus corpore. 
 Proconsul dixit: Habes ante oculos decreta invictissimorum prin- 
 cipum. Sacrifica ergo magne dee Venert. Petrus respondit : 
 Miror, si persuades mihi, optime Proconsul, sacrificare impudice 
 muliert et sordide, que talia opera egit ut confusio sit enarrare 
 ΠΣ Oportet ergo me magis DEO viwo et vero, Regi seculorum 
 omnium Christo sacrificium offerre orationis deprecationis, com- 
 punctionis et laudis. Audiens hee Proconsul jussit eum adhue 
 xtate adolescentulum tendi in rota, et inter ligna in circuitu posita, 
 vinculis ferreis totum corpus ejus fecit constringi: ut contortus et 
 confractus [1] minutatim ossa ejus comminuerentur. Quanto autem 
 plus torquebatur famulus Dei, tanto magis fortior apparebat. Con- 
 stans vero aspectu, et ridens de ejus stultitid, conspiciens in ccelum 
 
1. by the primitive martyrs. 611 
 
 friends of high mental cultivation as were Epipodius 
 and Alexander! ; widows, such as Symphorosa™, and 
 poor women like Domnina"; and slaves such as Vi- 
 talis®°, and young boys such as Martialis? ;—the 
 
 ait: Tibi ago gratias, Domine Jesu Christe, qui mihi hanc toleran- 
 tiam dare dignatus es ad vincendum nequissimum tyrannum. Tune 
 Proconsul videns tantam ejus perseverantiam, et nec his quidem 
 defecisse tormentis, jussit eum gladio percuti.” 
 
 1 Acta, p. 65, cire. a. 178: “Ita literis eruditissimi, concordia 
 crescente, adeo provecti sunt: ..... ad hee beatus Epipodius. 
 septate Sempiternum vero Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum quem 
 crucificum memoras, resurrexisse non nosti, qui ineffabili mysterio 
 homo pariter et Deus, famulis suis tramitem immortalitatis institutt, 
 RAPE Pts is Christum cum Patri ac Spiritu Sancto Dewm esse con- 
 Jiteor, dignumque est ut illi animam meam refundam, qui mihi et 
 Creator est et Redemptor.” 
 
 m Ibid. p. 21, a. 120: “St pro nomine Christi Dei mei incensa 
 Suero, illos demones tuos magis exuro.” 
 
 n [bid. p. 235: “Ne im ignem eternam incidam, et tor- 
 menta perpetua, Deum colo et Christum ejus, qui fecit celuwm et 
 terram.” 
 
 ο Ibid. p. 410 (ef. S. Ambr. de Exh. Virgin. ὁ. 1), cire. a. 304: 
 “ Martyri nomen Agricola est, cui Vitalis servus fuit ante, nunc 
 consors et collega martyrii. Preecessit servus, ut provideret locum ; 
 secutus est dominus...... cumque sanctus Vitalis cogeretur a 
 persequentibus ut Christum negaret, et ille amplits profiteretur 
 Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, omnia tormentorum genera 
 in eum exercentes, ut non esset in corpore ejus sine vulnere locus, 
 orationem fudit ad Dominum dicens ; Domine Jesu Christe, Sal- 
 vator meus, et Deus meus ; jube suscipit spiritum meum ; quia jam 
 desidero ut accipiam coronam, quam angelus tuus sanctus mihi 
 ostendit. Et completa oratione emisit spiritum.” 
 
 P Ibid., Passio 8. Felicitatis et Septem Filiorum Ejus, p. 23: 
 “Hoe quoque amoto, jussit septimum Martialem ingredi, eique 
 dixit : Crudelitatis vestre factores effecti, Augustorum instituta 
 contemnitis, et in vestra pernicie permanetis. Respondit Martialis : 
 O si nosses que pene idolorum cultoribus parate sunt ! Sed adhue 
 differt Deus tram suam in vos et idola vestra demonstrare. Omnes 
 
 her 2 
 
612 Confessions of Christ?s Divinity [ Lecr. 
 
 learned and the illiterate, the young and the old, the 
 noble and the lowly, the slave and his master, united 
 in this confession. Sometimes it was wrung from 
 the martyr reluctantly by cross-examination ; some- 
 times it was proclaimed as a truth with which the 
 Christian heart was full to bursting, and which, out 
 of the heart’s abundance, the Christian mouth could 
 not but speak. Sometimes Christ’s Divinity is as- 
 serted as belonging to the great Christian contradic- 
 tion of the polytheism of the heathen world around ; 
 sometimes it is explained as involving Christ’s Unity 
 with the Father, against the pagan imputation of 
 ditheism4 ; sometimes it is proclaimed as justifying 
 the worship which, as the heathens knew, Christians 
 paid to Christ. The martyrs look paganism in the 
 face, and maintain that, although Christ was cruci- 
 fied, yet nevertheless Christ is God ; that even while 
 His very Name is cast out as evil, Christ is really 
 Master of the fortunes of Rome and Disposer of the 
 events of history; that the pagan empire itself did 
 
 enim qui non confitentur CHRISTUM VERUM esse DEUM im ignem 
 ceternum mittentur.” 
 
 a Ruinart, Acta, p.122: “Post hee cum adstante haud procul 
 Asclepiade, quis diceretur inquireret [Polemon scilicet] respondit 
 Asclepiades, Christianus. Polemon : Cujus ecclesize ? Asclepiades : 
 Catholice. Polemon: Quem Deum colis? Respondit: Christwm. 
 Polemon: Quid ergo? iste alter est? Respondit: Mon, sed ipse 
 quem et ipsit paullo ante confessi sunt.” 
 
 Cf. Prudentius, Peristeph. Hymn. 10. 671 :— 
 
 “ Arrisit infans, nec moratus retulit : 
 Est quidquid illud, quod ferunt homines Deum, 
 Unum esse oportet, et quod uni est unicum. 
 Cum Christus hoe sit, Christus est verus Deus. 
 Genera deorum multa nee pueri putant.” 
 
Υ11:] by the primitive martyrs. 615 
 
 but unwittingly subserve His purposes and prepare 
 His triumph"; that He Who is the Creator of 
 
 t Prudentius has given a poetical amplification of the last prayer 
 of St. Laurence, which, whatever its historic value, at any rate 
 may be taken to represent the primitive Christian sentiment re- 
 specting the relation of Jesus Christ to the pagan empire. It 
 should be noticed that neither St. Ambrose nor St. Augustine, in 
 their accounts of the martyrdom, report anything of this kind ; 
 Prudentius may have followed a distinct and trustworthy tradition. 
 The martyr is interceding for Rome. 
 
 “Ὁ Christe, numen unicum, 
 O splendor, O virtus Patris, 
 O factor orbis et poli, 
 Atque auctor horum meenium ! 
 
 Qui sceptra Rome in vertice 
 Rerum locasti, sanciens 
 Mundum Quirinali togze 
 Servire, et armis cedere : 
 
 Ut discrepantum gentium 
 Mores, et observantiam, 
 Linguasque et ingenia et sacra 
 Unis domares legibus. 
 
 En omne sub regnum Remi 
 Mortale concessit genus : 
 Idem loquuntur dissoni 
 Ritus, id ipsum sanciunt. 
 
 Hoe destinatum quo magis 
 Jus Christiani nominis, 
 Quodcumque terrarum jacet 
 Uno illigaret vinculo. 
 
 Da, Christe, Romanis tuis 
 Sit Christiana ut civitas : 
 _ Per quem dedisti, ut ceteris 
 Mens una sacrorum foret.” 
 Peristeph. 2, 413. 
 
614 Confessions of Christ's Divinity by primitive martyrs. [ Lucr. 
 
 heaven and earth, can afford to wait, and is certain 
 of the future. This was the faith which made any 
 compromise with paganism impossible’. “What God 
 dost thou worship?” enquired the judges of the 
 Christian Pionius. “I worship,” replied Pionius, 
 “Him Who made the heavens, and Who beautified 
 them with stars, and Who has enriched the earth 
 with flowers and trees.” “ Dost thou mean,” asked 
 the magistrates, “Him Who was crucified ?” “ Cer- 
 tainly,” replied Pionius; “Him Whom the Father 
 
 t? 
 
 ‘sent for the salvation of the world’ 
 
 The point before us, my brethren, admits of the 
 most copious illustration": and it is impossible to 
 mistake its significance. If the dying words of this 
 or that martyr are misreported, or exaggerated, or 
 
 8 Prud. Peristeph. Hymn. 5. 57; qu. by Ruinart, Acta, p. 330. 
 De 8. Vincentii martyrio :— 
 “Vox nostra que sit accipe. 
 Est Christus et Pater Deus : 
 Servi hujus ac testes sumus ; 
 Extorque si potes fidem. 
 
 Tormenta, carcer, ungulee 
 Stridensque flammis lamina 
 Atque ipsa peenarum ultima ; 
 Mors Christianis ludus est.” 
 
 t Ruinart, p. 125: “ Judices interim dixerunt: Quem Dewm 
 colitis ? Pionius respondit: Hune qui caelum fecit, et sideribus 
 ornavit, qui terram statuit, et floribus arboribusque decoravit ; qui 
 ordinavit circumflua terre et maria, et statuta terminorum vel lito- 
 rum lege signavit. Tum illi: Jllwm dicis qui crucifieus est ? Et 
 Pionius : Z//wm dico quem pro salute orbis Pater misit.” 
 
 u Ibid., Acta Sincera, p. 210, for the confession of Sapricius, 
 who afterwards fell; p. 235; p. 256 for that of Victor at Marseilles; 
 PP: 274, 314, 341, 435, 438, 439, 467, 470, 479, 483, 506, 513, 
 514, 521. 
 
Vil] What is the worth of their testimony ? 615 
 
 coloured by the phraseology of a later age, the gene- 
 ral phenomenon cannot but be admitted, as a fact 
 beyond dispute. The martyrs of the primitive Church 
 died, in a great number of cases, expressly for the 
 dogma of Christ's Divinity. The confessions of the 
 martyrs explain and justify the prayers of the mar- 
 tyrs; the Homoousion combines, summarizes, fixes 
 the sense of their confessions. The martyrs did not 
 pray to or confess a creature external to the Essence 
 of God, however dignified, however powerful, how- 
 _ ever august. They prayed to Christ as God, they 
 confessed that Christ is God, they died for Christ 
 as God. They prayed to Him and they spoke of 
 Him as of a distinct Person, Who yet was one with 
 God. Does not this simple faith of the Christian 
 people cover the same area as the more clearly de- 
 fined faith of the Nicene fathers? Or could it be 
 more fairly or more accurately summarized by any 
 other symbol than it is by the Homoousion 4 
 
 But you admit that the Nicene decision did very 
 fairly embody and fix in a symbolical form the po- 
 pular creed of earlier centuries. ‘This,’ you say, ‘is 
 the very pith of our objection; it was the popular 
 creed to which the Council gave the sanction of its 
 authority. You suggest that although a dying 
 martyr may be an interesting ethical study, yet 
 that the moral force which carries him through his 
 sufferings is itself apt to be a form of fanaticism 
 hostile to any severely intellectual conception of the 
 worth and bearings of his creed. You admit that 
 the martyr represents the popular creed; but then 
 you draw a distinction between a popular creed, as 
 such, and the ‘ideas’ of the ‘thinkers.’ ‘What is 
 
616 The people at one with the ‘higher minds? { Lect. 
 
 any and every creed of the people, say you, ‘but 
 the child of the wants and yearnings of humanity, 
 fed at the breast of mere heated feeling, and nursed 
 in the lap of an ignorance more or less profound ?’ 
 A popular creed, you admit, may have a restricted 
 interest, as affording an insight into the intellectual 
 condition of the people which holds it; but you 
 deem it worthless as a guide to absolute truth. The 
 question, you maintain, is not, What was believed 
 by the primitive Christians at large? The question 
 is, What was taught by the well-instructed teachers 
 of the early Church? Did the creed of the people, 
 with all its impulsiveness and rhetoric, keep within 
 the lines of the grave, reserved, measured, hesitating, 
 cautious language of the higher minds of primitive 
 Christendom 4 
 
 Now here, my brethren, I might take exception 
 to your distinction between a popular and an edu- 
 cated creed, as in fact inapplicable to the genius 
 and circumstances of early Christianity. Are not 
 your criteria really derived from your conceptions 
 of modern societies, political and religious? It was 
 once said of an ancient state, that each of its citi- 
 zens was so identified with the corporate spirit and 
 political action of his country, as to be in fact 
 a statesman. And in the primitive Church, it was 
 at least approximately true that every Christian, 
 through the intensity and intelligence of the popu- 
 lar faith, was a sound divine. Men did not then die 
 for rhetorical phrases, any more than they would do 
 so now; and if the martyrs were, as a rule, men 
 of the people, it is also true that not a few were 
 bishops and theologians of repute. But that we 
 
VIL.) Chriss Divinity taught by sub-apostolic fathers.  61T 
 
 may do justice to the objection, let us enquire 
 briefly what the great Church teachers of the first 
 three centuries say respecting the Higher and Eter- 
 nal Nature of Jesus Christ. 
 
 And here let us remark, first of all, that a chain 
 of representative writers, reaching from the sub- 
 apostolic to the Nicene age, does assert in strong 
 and explicit language the belief of the Church that 
 Jesus Christ is God. 
 
 Thus St. Ignatius of Antioch dwells upon. our 
 Lord’s Divine Nature as a possession of the Church, 
 and of individual Christians; he calls Jesus Christ 
 “my God,” “our God.” “Jesus Christ our God,” he 
 says, “was carried in the womb of Mary’.” The Blood 
 of Jesus is the Blood of God*. Ignatius desires to 
 imitate the sufferings of his Gody. The sub-apostolic 
 author of the Letter to Diognetus teaches that “the 
 Father hath sent to men, not one of His servants, 
 whether man or angel, but the very Architect and Au- 
 thor of all things, by Whom all has been ordered and 
 settled, and on Whom all depends. ... He has sent 
 Him as being God’.” And because He is God, His 
 Advent is a real revelation of God; He has shewn 
 Himself to men, and by faith men have seen and 
 
 ν Ad Eph. 18: 6 yap Θεὸς ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς ὁ Χριστὸς ἐκυοφορήθη ὑπὸ 
 Μαρίας. Cf. Ibid. 7: ἐν σαρκὶ γενόμενος Θεός. 
 x Eph. 1: ἀναζωπυρήσαντες ἐν αἵματι τοῦ Θεοῦ. 
 : ᾿Ξ " . - 
 Υ Rom. 6: ἐπιτρέψατέ μοι μιμητὴν εἶναι τοῦ πάθους τοῦ Θεοῦ μου. 
 2 Ep. ad Diogn. 7: αὐτὸς ὁ παντοκράτωρ καὶ παντοκτίστης καὶ ἀόρατος 
 > ΄ » he > , © , ‘ , 
 Geos ὁ τα; οὐ καθάπερ ἄν τις εἰκάσειεν, ἀνθρώποις ὑπηρέτην τινὰ πέμψας 
 ~ » a » a BY - , ‘ er | » ‘ - 
 ἢ ἄγγελον, ἢ ἄρχοντα, ἢ Twa τῶν διεπόντων τὰ ἐπίγεια, ἢ τινὰ τῶν πεπι- 
 id ‘4 > > , 4 3 , > ‘ ‘ , ‘ 
 στευμένων τὰς ἐν οὐράνοις διοικήσεις, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὸν τὸν τεχνίτην Kai δημιουρ- 
 γὸν τῶν ὅλων... .... ὡς Θεὸν ἔπεμψεν, ὡς πρὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔπεμψεν, ὡς 
 σώζων ἔπεμψεν. 
 
ΟΙ8 Christ?s Divinity taught by SS. Polycarp and Justin, { Lcr. 
 
 known their God*% St. Polycarp appeals to Him 
 as to the Everlasting Son of God*; all things on 
 earth and in heaven, all spirits obey Him’; He is 
 the Author of our justification; He is the Object 
 of our hope’. Justin Martyr maintains that the 
 Word is the First-born of God, and so God? ; that 
 He appeared in the Old Testament as the God of 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob®; that He is sometimes 
 called the Glory of the Lord, sometimes the Son, 
 sometimes the Wisdom, sometimes the Angel, some- 
 times Godf. St. Justin argues against Tryphon that 
 if the Jews had attentively considered what the 
 prophets have written, they would not have denied 
 
 that Christ is God, and the Only Son of the Un- 
 begotten Gods. He maintains that the Word is 
 
 z Kp. ad Diogn. ¢. 8: τίς yap ὅλως ἀνθρώπων ἠπίστατο τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ 
 Θεὸς, πρὶν αὐτὸν ἐλθεῖν... . ἀνθρώπων δὲ οὐδεὶς οὔτε εἶδεν οὔτε ἐγνώρισεν, 
 αὐτὸς δὲ ἑαυτὸν ἐπέδειξεν, ἐπέδειξε δὲ διὰ πίστεως, ἣ μόνῃ Θεὸν ἰδεῖν συγκε- 
 χώρηται. 
 
 a Epist. Eccl. Smyrn. de Mart. 3. Polye. n. 14. 
 
 b Ad Phil. 2: Ὧι ὑπετάγη τὰ πάντα ἐπουράνια καὶ ἐπίγεια' ᾧ πᾶσα 
 πνοὴ λατρεύει. 
 
 ὁ Ibid. 8: ἀδιαλείπτως οὖν προσκαρτερῶμεν τῇ ἐλπίδι ἡμῶν καὶ τῷ 
 ἀῤῥαβῶνι τῆς δικαιοσύνης ἡμῶν, ὅς ἐστι Χριστὸς ᾿Ιησοῦς. 
 
 d Apol. 1. ἢ. 63: ὃς Λόγος καὶ πρωτοτόκος dy τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ Θεὸς 
 ὑπάρχει. 
 
 e Tbid. 
 
 f See the argument of the whole passage, Contr. Tryph. 57-61: 
 ἀρχὴν πρὸ πάντων τῶν κτισμάτων ὁ Θεὸς γεγέννηκε δύναμίν τινα ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ 
 λογικὴν, ἥτις καὶ Soka Κυρίου ὑπὸ τοῦ Πνεύματος τοῦ ᾿Αγίου καλεῖται, ποτὲ 
 δὲ Υἱὸς, ποτὲ δὲ Σοφία, ποτὲ δὲ "Ayyedos, ποτὲ δὲ Θεός. 
 
 & Ibid. 126: εἰ νενοήκατε τὰ εἰρημένα ὑπὸ τῶν προφητῶν, οὐκ ἂν ἐξηρ- 
 νεῖσθε αὐτὸν εἶναι Θεὸν τοῦ μόνου καὶ ἀγεννήτου Θεοῦ Υἱόν. Of. Ibid. 
 63: προσκυνητός----καὶ Θεός. Justin expresses the truth of our Lord’s 
 distinct Personality by the phrase Θεὸς ἕτερος ἀριθμῷ ἀλλ᾽ οὐ γνώμῃ 
 (Ibid. 56). 
 
VII. ] by Tatian, Athenagoras, and St. Irenaeus. 619 
 
 Himself the witness to His Own Divine Generation 
 of the Father"; and that the reality of His Son- 
 ship is itself a sufficient evidence of His True 
 Divinity’. Tatian is aware that the Greeks deem 
 the faith of the Church utter folly ; but he never- 
 theless will assert that God has appeared on earth 
 in a human form*. Athenagoras proclaims with 
 special emphasis the oneness of the Word with the 
 Father, as Creator and Ruler of the universe!. 
 Melito of Sardis speaks of Jesus as being both God 
 and Man™: “Christians,” he says, “do not worship 
 senseless stones, as do the heathen, but God and 
 His Christ, Who is God the Word®.” St. Irenzeus 
 perhaps represents the purest and deepest stream of 
 apostolic doctrine which flowed from St. John through 
 Polycarp into the Western Church. St. Irenseus 
 speaks of Christ as sharing the Name of the only 
 true God. He maintains against the Valentinians 
 that the Divine Name in its strictest sense was not 
 
 h Contr. Tryph. 61: μαρτυρήσει δέ μοι ὁ Λόγος τῆς σοφίας αὐτὸς ὧν 
 οὗτος ὁ Θεὸς ἀπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς τῶν ὅλων γεννηθείς. 
 
 i Ibid. 126 ; Apolog. i. 63. 
 
 k Ady. Gree. 6. 21: οὐ yap μωραίνομεν, ἄνδρες Ἕλληνες, οὐδὲ λήρους 
 ἀπαγγέλλομεν, Θεὸν ἐν ἀνθρώπου μορφῇ γεγονένα. Cf. Ibid. n. 13: 
 τοῦ πεπόνθοτος Θεοῦ. 
 
 1 Legat. n. 10: πρὸς αὐτοῦ γὰρ καὶ δι᾿ αὐτοῦ πάντα ἐγένετο, ἑνὸς ὄντος 
 τοῦ Πατρὸς καὶ τοῦ Υἱοῦ. 
 
 m See Eus. Hist. Eccl. ν. 28. Compare the magnificent passage 
 from St. Melito’s treatise on Faith, given in Cureton’s Spicilegium 
 Syriacum, pp. 53, 54, and quoted by Westcott on the Canon, 
 p. 196. 
 
 n Apol. apud Auct. Chron, Pasch. (Gall. tom. i. p. 678): οὐκ ἐσμὲν 
 λίθων οὐδεμίαν αἴσθησιν ἐχόντων θεραπευταὶ, ἀλλὰ μόνου Θεοῦ τοῦ πρὸ 
 πάντων καὶ ἐπὶ πάντων, καὶ ἔτι τοῦ Χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ ὄντος Θεοῦ Λόγου πρὸ 
 
 αἰώνων ἐσμὲν θρησκευταί. Routh, Rel. Sacr. i. 118, 133. 
 
0920 Christ's Divinity taught by Clement of Alexandria [Lxct. 
 
 given to any angel; and that when in Scripture the 
 Name of God is given to any other than God Him- 
 self there is always some explanatory epithet or 
 clause in order to shew that the full sense of the 
 word is not intended®. None is directly called 
 God save God the Father of all things and His 
 Son Jesus Christ’. In both Testaments Christ is 
 preached as God and Lord, as the King Eternal, as 
 the Only-begotten, as the Word Incarnate4. If 
 Christ is worshipped’, if Christ forgives sins’, if 
 Christ is Mediator between God and man‘, this: is 
 because He is really a Divine Person. 
 
 And if from Gaul we pass to Africa, and from 
 the second to the third century, the force and num- 
 ber of primitive testimonies to the Divinity of our 
 Lord increase upon us so rapidly as to render it 
 impossible that we should do more than glance at 
 a few of the more prominent. At Alexandria we 
 find Clement speaking of That Living God Who 
 suffered and Who is adored"; of the Word, Who 
 
 ο΄ Ady. Her. iii. 6, n. 3. 
 
 Ρ Tbid. iii. 6, ῃ. 2: “Nemo igitur alius Deus nominatur, aut 
 Dominus appellatur nisi qui est omnium Deus et Dominus, qui et 
 Moysi dixit, Ego sum Qui sum,..... et Hujus Filius Jesus Chris- 
 tus.” Cf. iii. 8, n. 3: “ Deus Solus.” 
 
 4 Ibid. ii, 19, n. 2: “Quoniam autem Ipse proprié preeter omnes 
 qui fuerunt tune homines, Deus, et Dominus, et Rex Auternus et 
 Unigenitus, et Verbum Incarnatum predicatur, et a prophetis om- 
 nibus et apostolis, et ab ipso Spiritu, adest videre omnibus qui vel 
 modicum veritatis attigerint.” 
 
 t Tbid. iii. 9, 2. “Thus [obtulerunt magi] quoniam Deus.” 
 
 se hid. Vt 7,0. 5: 
 
 Ὁ Ibid. iii. 18,7. 
 
 ἃ Protrept. 10: πίστευσον, ἄνθρωπε, ἀνθρώπῳ καὶ Θεῷ, τῷ παθόντι καὶ 
 
 προσκυνουμένῳ Θεῷ ζῶντι, 
 ε c 
 
VEL] and by Origen. 621 
 
 is both God and man, and the Author of all 
 blessngs* ; of God the Savioury, Who saves us, as 
 being the Author and Archetype of all existing 
 beings. Clement alludes to our Lord’s Divinity as 
 explaining His equality with the Father’, His pre- 
 science during His Human Life*, His revelation of 
 the Father to men”. Origen maintains Christ’s true 
 Divinity against the contemptuous criticisms of 
 Celsus®. Origen more than once uses the expression 
 ‘the God Jesus*’ He teaches that the Word, the 
 Image of God, is Gode®; that the Son is as truly 
 Almighty as the Fatherf; that Christ is the Very 
 Word, the Absolute Wisdom, the Absolute Truth, the 
 Absolute Righteousness Itself*. Christ, according to 
 
 x Protrept. i.: αὐτὸς οὗτος ὁ Λόγος, ὁ μόνος ἄμφω, Θεύς τε καὶ ἄνθρω- 
 πος, ἁπάντων ἡμῖν αἴτιος ἀγαθῶν. 
 
 Υ Strom. ii. 9: Θεῷ τῷ Σωτῆρι; Ibid. v. 6: ὁ Θεὸς Σωτὴρ κεκλη- 
 μένος, ἡ τῶν ὅλων ἀρχὴ, ἥτις ἀπεικόνισται μὲν ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ ἀορά- 
 Tov πρώτη καὶ πρὸ αἰώνων, τετύπωκεν δὲ τὰ μέθ᾽ ἑαυτὴν ἄπαντα γενό- 
 μενα. 
 
 2 Protrept. 10: ὁ φανερώτατος ὄντως Θεὸς, ὁ τῷ Δεσπότῃ τῶν ὅλων 
 ἐξισωθείς. 
 
 a Quis Diy. Salv. 6: προεῖδε ὡς Θεὸς ἃ μέλλει διερωτηθήσεσθαι. 
 
 b Ped. 1. 8. We know God from our knowledge of «[65118.--- ἐκ 
 τρυτάνης ἰσοσθενοῦς. 
 
 ὁ Contr. Cels. ii. 9, 16 sqq ; vii. 53, de. 
 
 ἃ Θεὸν Ἰησοῦν, Ibid. v. 51; vi. 66. 
 
 e Select. in Gen. In Gen. ix. 6. 
 
 f Prine. 1. 11, ἢ. ro: “ Ut autem unam eandemque Omnipotentiam 
 Patris et Filii esse cognoscas, sicut unus atque idem est cum Patre 
 Deus et Dominus, audi hoe modo Johannem in Apocalypsi di- 
 centem: Heee dixit Dominus Deus, qui est et qui erat, et qui ven- 
 turus est, Omnipotens ; qui enim vyenturus est, quis est alius nisi 
 Christus.” . 
 
 5. Contr. Cels. iii. 41: αὐτόλογος, αὐτοσοφία, αὐτοαλήθεια. Ibid. y. 
 
 39: a ὑτοδικαιοσύνης. 
 
622 Christ's Divinity taught by Origen, Tertullian, {Lxcr. 
 
 Origen, possesses all the attributes of Deity ; God 
 is contemplated in the contemplation of Christ '. 
 Christ’s Incarnation is like the economical language 
 of parables which describes Almighty God as if He 
 were a human being, although in reality He is God ; 
 and such language about Him is known to be only a 
 condescension to finite intelligences‘. There is no 
 Highest Good in existence which is superior to 
 Christ!; as Very God Christ is present in all the 
 world; He is present with every man™. Origen con- 
 tinually closes his Homilies with a doxology to our 
 Lord ; and he can only account for refusal to believe 
 in His Divinity by the hypothesis of some kind of 
 mental obliquity". Tertullian’s language is full of 
 Punic fire, but in speaking of Christ’s Divinity he is 
 dealing with opponents who would force him to be 
 
 h Τὴ Jerem. Hom. vill. ἢ. 2: πάντα γὰρ ὅσα τοῦ Θεοῦ, τοιαῦτα ἐν 
 SES ee, ς , > ν᾿ “ a 3) a8 > , ΦῈ χα 
 αὐτῷ ἔστι, ὁ Χριστός ἐστι σοφία τοῦ Θεοῦ... αὐτὸς ἀπολύτρωσις, αὐτὸς 
 , » A 
 φρόνησις ἔστι Θεοῦ. 
 - ee col “ » , 
 i In Joan, t. xxxll. ἢ. 18 : θεωρεῖται yap ἐν τῷ Λόγῳ, ὄντι Θέῳ καὶ 
 » , “A ~ > , 
 εἰκόνι TOU Θεοῦ ἀοράτου. 
 k Τὴ Matt. t. xvii. n. 20: ὥσπερ ὁ Θεὸς ἀνθρώπους οἰκονομῶν ὡς ἐν 
 “ a J ᾽, , ‘ , 5 A ie A 
 παραβολαῖς ἄνθρωπος λέγεται, τάχα δέ πὼς καὶ γίνεται" οὕτως καὶ ὁ Σωτὴρ 
 ἐς ἐν x a [ον \ \ » Ν ἐν a Sree: > a 
 προηγουμένως Yios Sv τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ Θεὸς ἔστιν, καὶ Yids τῆς ἀγάπης αὐτοῦ, 
 Δ ΑΝ ἘΝ a a ~ > ΄ 5 > ΄ A. 5 he) , > \ 
 καὶ εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ Tod ἀοράτου" ov μένει δὲ ἐν ᾧ ἐστι προηγουμένως, ἀλλὰ 
 , > > , a“ > ~ , > , 4 \ 
 γίνεται κατ᾽ οἰκονομίαν τοῦ ἐν παραβολαῖς λεγομένου ἀνθρώπου ὄντως δὲ 
 Θεοῦ, Υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου κατὰ τὸ μιμεῖσθαι, ὅταν ἀνθρώπους οἰκονόμῃ, τὸν Θεὸν 
 ; ρ ὰ τὸ μιμεῖσθαι, ὅταν ἀνθρώπους οἰκονόμῃ, 
 λεγόμενον ἐν παραβολαῖς καὶ γινόμενον ἄνθρωπον. 
 1 Τὴ Joan. ᾧ. i. ἢ. 11 : οὐ σιωπητέον.... τὸν μετὰ τὸν Πάτερα τῶν ὅλων 
 Θεὸν Λόγον, οὐδενὸς γὰρ ἔλαττον ἀγάθου καὶ τοῦτο τὸ ἀγαθόν, 
 m 1014. t. vi. ἢ. 15: δοξολογίαν περὶ τῆς προηγουμένης οὐσίας 
 a “ [τ ’ , » a \ 7 -: “ 
 Χριστοῦ διηγεῖται, ὅτι δύναμιν τοσαύτην ἔχει, ὡς καὶ ἀόρατος εἶναι τῇ 
 θειότητι αὐτοῦ, παρὼν παντὶ ἀνθρώπῳ, παντὶ δὲ καὶ τῷ ὅλῳ κόσ 
 ῃ » παρ νθρώπῳ, ὶ ὶ τῷ ὅλῳ κόσμῳ συμπα- 
 ρεκτεινόμενος. 
 n Contr. Cels. iii. 29. 
 
VII. } St. Cyprian, and others. 623 
 
 accurate, even if there were not a higher motive for 
 accuracy. ‘Tertullian anticipates the Homoousion in 
 terms : Christ, he says, is called God, by reason of His 
 oneness of substance with God®. Christ alone is be- 
 gotten of Godp ; He is God and Lord over all men4. 
 Tertullian argues at length that an Incarnation of 
 God is possible’ ; he dwells upon its consequences in 
 language which must appear paradoxical to unbelief 
 or half-belief, but which is natural to a sincere and 
 intelligent faith in its reality. Tertullian speaks of 
 a Crucified Gods; of the Blood of God, as the price 
 of our redemptiont. Christians, he says, believe in a 
 God Who was dead, and Who nevertheless reigns for 
 ever", St. Cyprian argues that those who believe in 
 Christ’s power to make a temple of the human soul 
 must needs believe in His Divinity; nothing but 
 utter blindness or wickedness can account for a re- 
 fusal to admit this truth*, St. Hippolytus had urged 
 
 © Apol. ὁ. 21: “ Hune ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione 
 generatum, et idcirco Filium Dei, et Deum dictum wnitate sub- 
 stantie.” Tbid.: “Quod de Deo profectum est, Deus est, et Dei Filius, 
 et Unus ambo.” Ady. Prax. 4: “Filium non aliunde deduco, sed de 
 substantia Patris.” Ibid. 3: “ Consortibus [Filio et Spiritu Sancto |} 
 substantiz Patris.” 
 
 P Ady. Prax. 7: “Solus ex Deo genitus.” 
 
 a Ady, Jud. 7: “Christus omnibus Deus et Dominus est.” Cf. ¢. 12. 
 
 r Cf. De Carne Christi, c. 3, 4. 
 
 8 Ady. Mare. 11. 27: “ Deum crucifixum.” 
 
 t Ad Uxor. ii. 3: ‘‘ Non sumus nostri, sed pretio empti, et quali 
 pretio? Sanguine Dei.” 
 
 u Ady. Mare. ii. 16: “ Christianorum est etiam Deum mortuum 
 credere, et tamen viventem in seyo evorum.” 
 
 x Ep. 73, ad Jubaianum, 12: “Si peccatorum remissam consecutus 
 est... . et templum Dei factum est, quero cujus Dei? Si Creatoris, 
 non potuit in eum qui non credidit. Si Christi, nee ejus fieri potest 
 
624 Varied indirect testimony of the third century. (Lucr. 
 
 it against Jews and Sabelliansy ; Arnobius determines 
 to indent it upon the pagan mind by dint of constant 
 repetition” ; Theonas of Alexandria instructs a can- 
 didate for the imperial librarianship how he may 
 gradually teach it to his pagan master*. Dionysius 
 of Alexandria vehemently repudiates as a cruel scan- 
 dal the report of his having denied it”. St. Peter 
 of Alexandria would prove it from an examination 
 of Christ’s miracles®. For the rest, St. Methodius of 
 
 templum qui negat Deum Christum.” Cf. Ep. 74, 6. 6: “Qu 
 verd est anime cecitas, que pravitas, fidei unitatem de Deo Patre, 
 et de Jesu Christi Domini et Dei nostri traditione venientem nolle 
 agnoscere,” de. 
 
 y Ady. Jud. ¢ 6: Θεὸς dv ἀληθινῶς. Contr. Noet. ο. 6: οὗτος ὁ 
 dv ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς ἐστίν' λέγει γὰρ οὕτω μετὰ παῤῥησίας" Πάντα μοι 
 παραδέδοται ὑπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς. “ὁ ὧν ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς εὐλογητὸς, γεγένηται, καὶ 
 ἄνθρωπος γενόμενος, Θεός ἐστιν εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. Apud Routh, Opuse. i. 
 Ρ. 55. And c.17: Θεὸς Λόγος ἀπ᾽ οὐρανῶν κατῆλθεν εἰς τὴν ἁγίαν παρ- 
 θένον. Adv. Beron. et Helic. n. 2: γέγονεν ἄνθρωπος ὁ τῶν ὅλων Θεός. 
 So in Eus. v. 28, it is called our εὔσπλαγχνος Θεός. 
 
 z Ady. Gent. ii. 60: “Ideo Christus, licet vobis invitis, Deus ; 
 Deus inquam Christus—hoc enim sepe dicendum est, ut infidelium 
 dissiliat et disrumpatur auditus — Dei principis jussione loquens 
 sub hominis forma.” Ibid. i. 53: “ Deus ille sublimis fuit ; Deus 
 radice ab intima, Deus ab incognitis regnis, et ab omnium principe 
 Deus sospitator est missus.” 
 
 a Apud Routh, Rel. Sacr. iii. p. 443; Ep. ad Lucian. Cubicul. 
 Prepos. ὁ. 7: “Interdum et divinas scripturas laudare conabitur 
 ate: laudabitur et interim Evangelium Apostolusque pro divinis 
 oraculis : insurgere poterit Christi mentio, explicabitur paullatim 
 ejus sola Divinitas.” 
 
 b Ep. ad Dionys. Rom. apud §. Athan. Op. tom. i. p. 255: καὶ 
 δι’ ἄλλης ἐπιστολῆς ἔγραψα, ἐν ois ἤλεγξα καὶ ὃ προφέρουσιν ἔγκλημα κατ᾽ 
 ἐμοῦ, ψεῦδος ὃν, ὡς οὐ λέγοντος τὸν Χριστὸν ὁμοούσιον εἶναι τῷ Θεῷ. 
 
 ¢ Apud Routh, Rel. Sac. iv. 48: τὰ δὲ σημεῖα πάντα ἃ ἐποίησε καὶ 
 αἱ δυνάμεις δεικνῦσιν αὐτὸν Θεὸν εἶναι ἐνανθρωπήσαντα. τὰ συναμφότερα 
 
 “ > ΄ ΄ ” , 
 τοίνυν δείκνυται" ὅτι Θεὸς Hv φύσει, καὶ γέγονεν ἄνθρωπος φύσει. 
 
VIL] Ls the language of the Fathers mere ‘rhetoric’? 625 
 
 Tyre may represent the faith of western Asia‘; the 
 martyred Felix that of the Roman chair ; and, to 
 omit other illustrations’, the letter of the council 
 to Paulus of Samosata summarizes the belief both 
 of eastern and western Christendom during the latter 
 half of the third century 8. 
 
 This language of the preceding centuries does in 
 effect and substance anticipate the Nicene decision. 
 When once the question of Christ’s Divinity had been 
 raised in the metaphysical form which the Homo- 
 ousion presupposes, no other answer was possible, 
 unless the Nicene fathers had been prepared to re- 
 nounce the most characteristic teaching of their pre- 
 decessors. Certainly it did not occur to them that 
 the Catholic language of earlier writers had been 
 ‘mere rhetoric, and could, as such, be disregarded. 
 What is the real meaning of this charge of ‘ rhetoric’ 
 which is brought so freely against the early Chris- 
 tian fathers? It really amounts to saying that a 
 
 ἃ De Symeon. et Anna, n. 6: Σὺ Θεὸς πρῶτος, ἔμπροσθέν σου οὐκ 
 ἐγεννήθη θεὸς ἄλλος ἐκ Θεοῦ Πατρὸς, καὶ μετὰ σου οὐκ ἔσται ἄλλος Υἱὸς 
 τῷ Πατρὶ ὁμοούσιος καὶ ὁμότιμος. un, 8: διὰ τοῦ μονογενοῦς καὶ ἀπαραλ- 
 λάκτου καὶ ὁμοουσίου Παιδός σοῦ τὴν λύτρωσιν ἡμῖν ποιησάμενος. N. 14: 
 φῶς ἀληθινὸν ἐκ φωτὸς ἀληθινοῦ, Θεὸς ἀληθινὸς ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ. Quoted 
 by Klee. 
 
 e Ep. ad Maximin. Epp. et Cler. Alex. : “De Verbi autem In- 
 carnatione et fide credimus in Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, 
 ex Virgine Maria natum, quod Ipse est sempiternus Dei Filius et 
 Verbum, non autem homo a Deo assumptus, ut alius sit ab Illo ; 
 neque enim hominem assumpsit Dei Filius, ut alius ab ipso exsistat. 
 Sed cum perfectus Deus esset, factus est simul Homo Perfectus ex 
 Virgine Incarnatus.” Labbe et Coss. Cone. iii. 511. 
 
 f Cf. more especially S. Greg. Thaumaturgi, Orat. Panegyr. in 
 Origenem, n. 4 ; Lact. Div. Inst. iv. 22, 29. 
 
 g Labbe, i. 845-850. 
 
 ss 
 
626 Ts the language of the Fathers mere ‘rhetoric’ 5 [12ΕῈΟ7. 
 
 succession of men who were at least intelligent, were 
 nevertheless, when writing upon the subject which 
 lay nearest to their hearts, wholly unable to com- 
 mand that amount of jealous self-control, and cautious 
 accuracy in the use of language, which might save 
 them from misrepresenting their most fundamental 
 convictions. My brethren, is this judgment morally 
 probable? Doubtless the fathers felt strongly, and, 
 being sincere men, they wrote as they felt. But 
 they were not always exhorting or declaiming or 
 perorating : they wrote, at times, in the temper of 
 cold unimpassioned reasoners, who had to dispute 
 their ground inch by inch with pagan or here- 
 tical opponents. Tertullian is not always ‘fervid’ ; 
 St. Chrysostom is not always eloquent ; Origen does 
 not allegorize under all circumstances ; St. Ambrose 
 can interpret Scripture literally and morally as well 
 as mystically. The fathers were not a uniform series 
 of poets or transcendentalists. Many of them were 
 eminently practical, or, if you will, prosaic ; and they 
 continually wrote in view of hostile criticism, as 
 well as in obedience to strong personal convictions. 
 To men like Justin, Origen, and Cyprian the ques- 
 tion of the Diviity of our Lord was one of an 
 interest quite as pressing and practical as any that 
 moves the leaders of political or commercial or scien- 
 tific opinion in England of to-day. And when men 
 write with their lives in their hands, and moreover 
 believe that the endless happiness of their fellow- 
 creatures depends in no slight degree upon the con- 
 scientious accuracy with which they express them- 
 selves, they are not likely to yield to the tempta- 
 tion of writing for the miserable object of mere 
 
VII.] Doubtful statements in the ante-Nieene writers. 627 
 
 rhythmical effect ;—they may say what others deem 
 strong and startling things without being, in the 
 depreciatory sense of the term, ‘rhetorical.’ 
 
 But,—to be just,—those who insist most eagerly 
 upon the ‘rhetorical’ shortcomings of the fathers, 
 are not accustomed to deny to them under all cir- 
 cumstances the credit of writing with intelligence 
 and upon principle. If, for example, a father uses 
 expressions, however inadvertently or provisionally, 
 which appear to contradict the general current of 
 Church teaching, he is at once welcomed as a se- 
 rious writer who is entitled to marked and respect- 
 ful attention. It is not impossible that our present 
 argument may yield an illustration of this tendency. 
 Let me assume you to admit what has just now 
 been urged with respect to the charge of unprin- 
 cipled rhetoric as brought against the fathers. ‘But 
 look,’ you say, ‘to the bearing of the argument which 
 screens them. Give it its full and honest scope. If 
 the Nicene fathers were not mere rhetoricians, neither 
 were the ante-Nicene. If Athanasius, Basil, and the 
 Gregories are to be taken at their word, so are Justin 
 Martyr, Clement, Origen, and their contemporaries. 
 If the orthodox language of one period is not rhetoric, 
 then the doubtful or unorthodox language of another 
 period is not rhetoric. If we admit the principle 
 upon which you are insisting, we claim that it shall 
 be applied impartially,—to the second century as to 
 the fourth, to the language which is said to favour 
 Arius, no less than to the language which is in- 
 sisted upon by the friends of Athanasius.’ 
 
 ‘Is it not notorious, you urge, ‘that some ante- 
 Nicene writers at times use language which falls short 
 
 Ss 2 
 
628 Doubtful statements in the ante-Nicene writers. {Lxct. 
 
 of, if it does not contradict, the doctrine of the Nicene 
 Council? Does not St. Justin Martyr, for instance, 
 speak of the Son as subserving the Father’s Will} ? 
 nay, as being begotten of Him at His Willi? Does 
 not Justin even speak of Christ as “another God 
 under the Creator*#” Do not Athenagoras, Tatian, 
 Theophilus, and St. Hippolytus apply the language 
 of Scripture respecting the generation of the Word 
 to His manifestation at the creation of the world, 
 as a distinct being from God? Do they not so 
 distinguish between the λόγος ἐνδιάθετος and the 
 λόγος προφορικός as to imply that the Word was 
 hypostatized only at the creation! ? Does not Cle- 
 ment of Alexandria implicitly style the Word the 
 Second Principle of things™; does he not permit 
 himself to say that the Nature of the Son is 
 most close to the Sole Almighty One®? Although 
 Origen first spoke of the Saviour as being ‘ever- 
 begotten®, has he not, amidst much else that is 
 questionable, contrasted the Son as the immediate 
 Creator of the world with the Father as the original 
 Creator’? Did not Dionysius of Alexandria use 
 
 h Tryph. 126: ὑπηρετῶν τῇ βουλῇ αὐτοῦ Cf. Athan. Treat. i. 118, 
 note 7. 
 
 i Tryph. 128. But cf. Athan. Treat. ii. p. 486, note g. 
 
 k Dial. contr. Tryph. ¢. 56: Θεὸς ἕτερος ὑπὸ τὸν ποιητήν. 
 
 1 Petav. 3. 6 ; Newman’s Arians, p. 106. But see Athan. Treat. 
 i. 113, note 2; and Bull, Def. Fid. Nice. iii. 5. 6. 7, 8. 
 
 m Strom. lib. vii. 3, p. 509, apud Pet.: δεύτερον αἴτιον. 
 
 n ΤΟΙ. 2, p. 504: ἡ Υἱοῦ φύσις, ἡ τῷ μόνῳ Παντοκράτορι προσεχε- 
 στάτη. Bull, Def. Fid. Nie. ii. 6, 6. 
 
 © ὁ Σωτὴρ ἀεὶ γεννᾶται. Apud Routh, Rel. Sacer. iv. 354. 
 
 P Orig. contr. Cels. vi. 60, apud Petay. de Trin. i. 4, 5: τὸν μὲν 
 προσεχῶς δημιουργὸν εἶναι τὸν Ὑἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγον καὶ ὡσπερεὶ αὐτουργὸν 
 
 - ᾿ ‘ \ , εὐ , , 
 TOU κόσμου" TOV δὲ Ilarepa oo - ClLVaE πρώτως δημιουργόν. 
 
VII.) Doubtful statements in the ante-Nicene writers. 629 
 
 language which he was obliged to account for, and 
 which is repudiated by St. Basil4? Was not Lucian 
 of Antioch excommunicated, and, martyr though he 
 was, regarded as the founder of an heterodox sect 4 
 Is not Tertullian said to be open to the charge that 
 he combated Praxeas with arguments which did the 
 work of Ariuss? Has he not, m his anxiety to 
 avoid the Monarchianist confusion of Persons, spoken 
 of the Son as a “derivation from, and portion of, 
 the whole Substance of the Father',” or even as 
 if once He was not"? Does any Catholic writer 
 undertake to apologise for the expressions of Lactan- 
 tius? Has not recent criticism, you add, tended to 
 enhance the reputation of Petavius at the expense of 
 Bishop Bull*4 Nay, is not Bull’s great work itself 
 an illustration of what is at least the primd facie 
 state of the case? Does it not presuppose a consider- 
 able apparent discrepancy between some ante-Nicene 
 and the post-Nicene writers? Is it not throughout 
 
 a Cf. Pet. de Trin. i. 4,10; S. Bas. Ep. 9. But cf. Athan. Sent. 
 Dion. 
 
 r Alexander ap. Theodoret. Hist. lib. 1. 6. 4; Pet. de Trin. i. 4, 13. 
 
 5. Petavius attacks him especially on the score of this treatise. 
 
 De Trin. i. 5, 2: “ Opinionem explicat suam,” 
 
 says Petavius, “ quze 
 etiam Arianorum hzeresim impietate et absurditate superat.” For 
 a fairer estimate see Klee, Dogmengeschichte, ii. c. 2. 
 
 t Adv. Prax. ὁ. 9: “Pater enim tota Substantia est, Filius verd 
 derivatio totius et portio.” See the remarks of Baur, Dogmen- 
 geschichte, i. 444, to which, however, a study of the context will 
 yield a sufficient answer; e.g. ὦ. 8: ‘Sermo in Patre semper 
 hunquam separatus a Patre.”’ 
 
 u Ady. Hermog. 6. 3. See Bull, Def. iii. το. Comp. Ibid. ii. 7. 
 
 x The writer himself would on no account be understood to assent 
 to this opinion. Even in criticizing Bull, Dr. Newman admits that 
 he does his work ‘triumphantly.’ Developm. p. 159. 
 
630 The ante-Nicene fathers held the perfect faith, \Lxcr. 
 
 explanatory and apologetic ? can we deny that out 
 of the long list of writers whom he reviews he has, 
 for one cause or other, to explain nearly one-half ? 
 
 This line of argument in an earlier guise has been 
 discussed so fully by a distinguished predecessor ¥ in 
 the present Lecture, that it may suffice to notice 
 very summarily the considerations which must be 
 taken into account if justice is to be done, both to 
 its real force and to the limits which ought to be, 
 but which are not always, assigned to it. 
 
 (a) Undoubtedly, my brethren, it must be frankly 
 granted that some of the ante-Nicene writers do at 
 times employ terms which, judged by a Nicene 
 standard, must be pronounced unsatisfactory. You 
 might add to the illustrations you have already 
 quoted ; and you might urge that, if they admit of 
 a Catholic interpretation, they do not always invite 
 one. For in truth these ante-Nicene fathers were 
 feeling their way, not towards the substance of the 
 faith, which they possessed in its fulness, but towards 
 that intellectual mastery both of its relationship to 
 outer forms of thought, and of its own iternal 
 harmonies and system, which is obviously a perfectly 
 distinct gift from the simple possession of the faith 
 itself. As Christians they possessed the faith itself. 
 The faith, delivered once for all, had been given to 
 the Church in its completeness by the apostles. But 
 the finished intellectual survey and treatment of the 
 faith is a superadded acquirement ; it is the result 
 of conflict with a hostile criticism, and of devout re- 
 flections matured under the guidance of the Spirit 
 of Truth. Knowledge of the drift and scope of 
 
 y Dr. Burton. 
 
——— 
 
 VII.| but had not mastered ali its intellectual bearings. 681 
 
 particular lines of speculation, knowledge of the real 
 force and value of a new terminology, comes, whether 
 to a man or a society, in the way of education and 
 after the discipline of partial and temporary failure. 
 Heresy indirectly contributed to form the Church’s 
 mind: it gave point and sharpness to current con- 
 ceptions of faith by its mutilations and denials ; it 
 illustrated the fatal tendencies of novel lines of 
 speculation, or even of misleading terms; it unwit- 
 tingly forced on an elucidation of the doctrines of 
 the Church by its subtle and varied opposition. 
 But before heresy had thus accomplished its provi- 
 dential work, individual Church teachers might in 
 perfect good faith attempt to explain difficulties, 
 or to win opponents, by enterprising speculations, in 
 this or that direction, which were not yet shewn 
 to be perilous to truth. Not indeed that the Uni- 
 versal Church in her collective capacity was ever 
 committed to any of those less perfect statements of 
 doctrine which belong to the ante-Nicene period. 
 Particular fathers or schools of thought within her 
 might use terms and illustrations which she after- 
 wards disavowed; but then they had no Divine 
 guarantee of imerrancy, such as had been vouch- 
 safed to the entire body of the faithful. They were 
 in difficult and untried circumstances; they were 
 making experiments in unknown regions of thought ; 
 their language was tentative and provisional. Com- 
 pared with the great fathers of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries, who spoke when collective Christendom 
 had expressed or was expressing its mind in the 
 (Ecumenical: Councils, and who therefore more nearly 
 represented it, and were in a certain sense its 
 
632 The ante-Nicene fathers held the perfect faith, | Lcr. 
 
 accepted organs, such ante-Nicene writers occupy a 
 position inferior, if not in love and honour, yet cer- 
 tainly in weight of authority. If without lack of 
 reverence to such glorious names the illustration is 
 permissible, the Alexandrian teachers of the second 
 and third centuries were, relatively to their suc- 
 cessors of the age of the Councils, in the position 
 of young or half-educated persons, who know at 
 bottom what they mean, who know yet more dis- 
 tinctly what they do not mean, but who as yet have 
 not so measured and sounded their thoughts, or so 
 tested the instrument by which thought finds ex- 
 pression, as to avoid misrepresenting their meaning 
 more or less considerably, before they succeed in 
 conveying it with accuracy. When for example 
 St. Justin, and after him Tertullian, contrast the 
 visibility of the Son with the invisibility of the 
 Father, all that their language is probably intended 
 to convey is that the Son had from everlasting de- 
 signed to assume a nature which would render Him 
 visible. Thus again St. Justin speaks of the Son 
 as a Minister of God, an expression which connects 
 Him without explanation with the ministering Angel 
 of the Old Testament, yet which need involve no- 
 thing beyond a reference to His humiliation in 
 time. Hence too the ultra-subordinationist language 
 of Origen and Tertullian in dealing with two forms 
 of heretical Monarchianism ; hence the misinterpreted 
 phrases of the saintly Dionysius im his resistance 
 to a full-blown Sabellianism’%. Language was em- 
 ployed which obviously admitted of being misun- 
 derstood. It would not have been used at a later 
 
 t Petav. de Trin. 1. 4, 10. 
 
Ν11.1 ut had not mastered all its intellectual bearings. 633 
 
 period. “It may be,” says St. Jerome, with reference 
 to some of the ante-Nicene fathers, “that they sim- 
 ply fell into errors, or that they wrote in a sense 
 distinct from that which lies on the surface of their 
 writings, or that the copyists have gradually cor- 
 rupted their writings. Or at any rate before Arius, 
 like ‘the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday,’ 
 was born in Alexandria, these writers spoke, in terms 
 which meant no harm, and which were less cautious 
 than such as would be used now, and which accord- 
 ingly are open to the unfriendly construction which 
 ill-disposed persons put upon them*.” 
 
 Indeed it is observable that the tentative and 
 perplexing Christological language which was used 
 by earlier fathers, at a time when the chief quick- 
 sands of religious thought had not yet been explored 
 by heresy, does not by any means point, as is some- 
 times assumed, exclusively in an Arian direction. If, 
 for instance, certain phrases in St. Justin may be 
 cited by Arianism with a certain plausibility, a simi- 
 lar appeal to him is open from the opposite direction 
 of Sabellianism. In his anxiety to discountenance 
 Emanatist conceptions of the relation of the Logos to 
 the Father, Justin hastily refers the beginning of the 
 Personal Subsistence of the Word to revelation or to 
 the creation, and he accordingly speaks of the Word 
 as being caused by the Will of God. But Justin did 
 
 a Apolog. ady. Ruffin. ii. Oper. tom. iv. p. ii. p. 409, apud Petay. 
 de Trin. i. 1: “Fieri potest, ut vel simpliciter erraverint, vel alio 
 sensu scripserint, vel a librariis imperitis eorum paullatim scripta 
 corrupta sint. Vel certé, antequam in Alexandria, quasi demo- 
 nium meridianum, Arius nasceretur, innocenter quiedam et nimis 
 caute locuti sunt, ef que non possint perversorum hominum ca- 
 lumniam declinare.” Cf. 8. Athan. contr. Ar. iii. 59. 
 
094. Ante-Nicene ‘Subordinationist’ language explained | Lxcr. 
 
 not place the Son on the footing of a creature ; he 
 did not hold a strict subordinationism”; since he 
 teaches distinctly that the Logos is of the Essence 
 of God, that He is potentially and eternally in 
 God*. Thus St. Justin’s language at first sight 
 seems to embrace two opposite and not yet refuted 
 heresies : both can appeal to him with equal justice, 
 or rather with equal want of it”. 
 
 (8) Reflect further that a doctrime may be held in 
 its integrity, and yet be presented to two different 
 periods, under aspects in many ways different. So it 
 was with the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity, in the 
 ante-Nicene as compared with the post-Nicene age of 
 its promulgation. While the Gospel was still im con- 
 flict with paganism throughout the empire, the 
 Church undoubtedly laid the utmost possible stress 
 upon the Unity of the Supreme Being. For this 
 was the primal truth which she had to assert 
 most emphatically in the face of polytheism. In 
 order to do this it was necessary to insist with par- 
 ticular emphasis upon those relations which secure 
 and explain the Unity of Persons in the Blessed 
 Trinity. That, in the ineffable mystery of the 
 Divine Life, the Father is the Fount or Source of 
 Godhead, from Whom. by eternal Generation and 
 Procession respectively the Son and the Spirit de- 
 rive their Personal Being, was the clear meaning of 
 the theological statements of the New Testament. 
 
 Ὁ Dorner, Person Christi, Erster Theil, p. 426, n. 22. 
 
 ¢ Contr. Tryph. ὁ. 61: ὁ Θεὸς γεγέννηκε δύναμίν twa ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ 
 λογικήν. 
 
 ἃ Dorner, Person Christi, Erster Theil, p. 426. See the whole 
 passage, in which this is very ably argued against Semisch. 
 
VIL.) ἐν the Chureh’s attitude towards Polytheism. 635 
 
 When, then, Origen speaks of the Father as the ‘ first 
 God*, he means what the Apostle meant by the ex- 
 pression, “ One God and Father of all, Who is above 
 all.” He implicitly means that, independently of all 
 time and inferiority, the Son’s Life was derived from, 
 and, in that sense, subordinate to the Life of the 
 Father. Now it is obvious that to speak with perfect 
 accuracy upon such a subject, so as to express the 
 ideas of derivation and subordinateness, while avoid- 
 ing the cognate but false and disturbing ideas of 
 posteriority in time and inferiority of nature, was 
 difficult. For as yet the dogmatic language of the 
 Church was comparatively unfixed, and a large dis- 
 cretion was left to individual teachers. They used 
 material images to express what was in their thoughts. 
 These images, drawn from created things, were of 
 course not adequate to the Uncreated Object Which 
 they were designed to illustrate. Yet they served 
 to introduce an imperfect conception of It! The 
 
 e Contr. Cels. vi. 47 : ὁ πρῶτος καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσι Θεύς. 
 
 f “Tn some instances [of ante-Nicene language] which are urged, 
 it is quite obvious on the surface that the writer is really wishing 
 to express the idea of the Son’s generation being absolutely coeval 
 with the Eternal Being of the Father, and is using the examples 
 from the natural world, where the derivation is most immediately 
 consequent upon the existence of the thing derived from, in order 
 broadly to impress that idea of coeval upon the reader’s mind. 
 “The Son,’ says St. Clement of Alexandria, ‘issues from the Father 
 quicker than light from the sun.’ Here, however, the very aim of 
 the illustration to express simultaneousness is turned against it, 
 and special attention is called to the word ‘ quicker,’ as if the writer 
 had only degrees of quickness in his mind, and only made the Son’s 
 generation from His source ‘quicker’ than that of light from its 
 source, and not absolutely coeval.” Christian Remembrancer, Jan. 
 1847, Art. Newman on Development, p. 237. 
 
090 ‘Subordinationism’ guards the Divine Unity. | Lucr. 
 
 fathers who employed them, having certain Ema- 
 natist theories in view, repeatedly urged that the 
 Son is derived from the Father in accordance with 
 the Divine attributes of Will and Power. We con- 
 ceive of will as prior to that which it calls into 
 being ; but in God the Eternal Will and the Eter- 
 nal Act are coincident ; and the phrase of St. Justin 
 which refers the existence of the Logos to the Divine 
 Will is only misunderstood because it is construed 
 in an anthropomorphic sense. In like manner the 
 Alexandrian distinction between the λόγος ἐνδιάθετος 
 and the λόγος προφορικός fell in naturally with the 
 subordinationist teaching in the ante-Nicene Church. 
 It could, in a sense, be said that the Son left the 
 Bosom of the Father when He went forth to create, 
 and the act of creation was thus described as a kind 
 of second generation of the Son. But the expression 
 did not imply, as it has been understood to imply, 
 a denial of His eternal Generation, and of His un- 
 begotten, unending Subsistence in God. This indeed 
 is plain from the very writers who use it’. Gene- 
 rally speaking, the early fathers are bent on insist- 
 ing on the subordination (κατὰ τάξιν) of the Son, as 
 protecting and explaining the doctrine of the Divine 
 Unity. If some of these expressed themselves too 
 incautiously or boldly, the general truth itself was 
 never discredited in the Church. Subordinationism 
 was indeed allowed to fall somewhat into the shade, 
 when the decline of paganism made it possible, and 
 the activities of Arianism made it necessary, to 
 contemplate Jesus Christ in the absoluteness of His 
 
 & See the examination of passages in Newman's Arians, pp. 
 215-218. 
 
ὙΠ) The real mind of the ante-Nicene Church. 637 
 
 Personal Godhead rather than in that relation of a 
 subordinate, in the sense of a derived subsistence, in 
 which He stands to the Eternal Father. But Bishop 
 Bull has shewn how earnestly such a doctrine of 
 subordination was taught in the Nicene period ; 
 and to this day we confess it in the Nicene Creed. 
 And the stress which was laid upon it in the 
 second and third centuries, and which goes far to 
 explain much of the language which is sometimes 
 held to be of doubtful orthodoxy, is in reality per- 
 fectly consistent with the broad fact already noticed, 
 namely, that the general current of Church language 
 from the first proclaims the truth that Jesus Christ 
 is God. 
 
 (y) For that truth was beyond doubt the very 
 central feature of the teaching of the ante-Nicene 
 Church, even when Church teachers had not yet 
 recognised all that it necessarily involved, and had 
 not yet elaborated the accurate statement of its 
 relationship to other truths around it. The writers 
 whose less-considered expressions are brought for- 
 ward in favour of an opposite conclusion do not 
 sustain it. That Justin may be quoted by those 
 who push the Divinity of Christ to the denial of 
 His Personal distinction from the Father, no less 
 than by Arianizers, has been already noticed. In 
 like manner, as Petavius himself admitsi, both Ori- 
 gen and Tertullian anticipate the very language of 
 the Nicene Creed; nor, when their expressions are 
 fairly examined, can it be denied that the writers 
 who imported the philosophical category of the λόγος 
 ἐνδιάθετος and προφορικός into Christian theology did 
 
 h Petav. de Trin. i. 6, 6. ἘΠ)... 7 Ὁ} ἢ Ἢ: 
 
098 The veal mind of the ante-Nicene Church declared (Lcr. 
 
 really believe with all their hearts in the eternal 
 Generation of the Word. But it should especially 
 be remarked that when the question of our Lord’s 
 Divinity was broadly proposed to the mind of the 
 ante-Nicene Church, the answer was not a doubtful 
 or hesitating one. Any recognised assault upon it 
 stirred the heart of the Church to energetic protest. 
 When Victor of Rome excommunicated the Quarto- 
 decimans, his censures were answered either by open 
 remonstrance or by tacit disregard, throughout Gaul 
 and the East*. When he cut off Theodotus from 
 the communion of the Church, the act commanded 
 universal acquiescence ; the Christian heart thrilled 
 with indignation at ‘the God-denying apostasy’ of 
 the tanner of Byzantium!. When Dionysius of Alex- 
 andria, writing with incautious zeal against the 
 Sabellians, was charged with heterodoxy on the sub- 
 ject of our Lord’s Divine Nature, he at once ad- 
 dressed to Dionysius of Rome an explanation which 
 is in fact an anticipation of the language of Atha- 
 nasius™, When Paulus of Samosata appeared in one 
 of the first sees of Christendom, the universal ex- 
 citement, the emphatic protests, the final, measured, 
 and solemn condemnation which he provoked, proved 
 how deeply the Divinity of Jesus Christ was rooted 
 in the heart of the Church of the third century. 
 Moreover, unless Christ’s absolute Godhead had 
 been thus a matter of Catholic belief, the rise of 
 such a heresy as that of Sabellianism would have 
 been impossible. Sabellianism exaggerates what 
 
 k Kus. Hist. Eccl. v. 24. 
 1 Thid. v. 28: τῆς ἀρνησιθέον ἀποστασίας. Epiphan. Her. 54. 
 m See 8. Athan. de Sent. Dionysii, ὁ. 4 sqq. 
 
Ν11.] whenever Christ's Godhead was called in question. 689 
 
 Arianism denies. Sabellianism presupposes the truth 
 of Christ’s Godhead, which, if we may so speak, it 
 exaggerates even to the point of denying His Per- 
 sonal distinctness from the Father. If the belief of 
 the ante-Nicene Church had been really Arianizing, 
 Noetus could not have appealed to it as he did, 
 while perverting it to a denial of hypostatic dis- 
 tinctions in the Godhead” ; and Arius himself might 
 have passed for a representative of the subor- 
 dinationism of Origen, and of the literalism of 
 Antioch, instead of a sophistical dialectician who 
 had broken altogether with the historical tradition 
 of the Church, and was daringly denying a central 
 truth of her unchanging faith. 
 
 The idea that our Lord’s Divinity was introduced 
 into the belief and language of the Church at a 
 period subsequent to the death of the apostles, was 
 indeed somewhat adventurously put forward by some 
 early Humanitarians. Reference has already been 
 made in another connection to a passage which is 
 quoted by Eusebius from an anonymous writer who 
 appears to have flourished in the early part of the 
 third century. This passage enables us to observe 
 the temper and method of treatment encountered 
 by any such theory in ante-Nicene times. 
 
 The Humanitarian Artemon, who seems to have 
 been an accomplished philosopher and mathema- 
 tician, maintained that the Divinity of Christ was 
 imported into the Church during the episcopate of 
 Zephyrinus, who succeeded Victor in the Roman 
 
 n §. Hippol. Contr. Heer. Noeti, ὁ. 1: 6 δὲ ἀντίστατο λέγων, 
 “Ti οὖν κακὸν ποιῶ δοξάζων τὸν Χριστόν; See also Epiphanius, 
 
 Heer. 57. 
 
640 The argument of ‘The Inttle Labyrinth? [Lecr. 
 
 chair. Now if this could have been substantiated, 
 it would have been necessary to suppose, either that 
 the Church was the organ of a continuous and not 
 yet completed revelation, or else that the doctrine 
 was a human speculation unwarrantably added to 
 the simpler creed of an earlier age. But the writer 
 to whom I have referred meets the allegation of 
 Artemon by denying it point-blank. “ Perchance,” 
 he archly observes, “what they [the Artemonites] 
 say might be credible, were it not that the Holy 
 Scriptures contradict them ; and then also there are 
 works of certain brethren, older than the days of 
 Victor, works written in defence of the truth, and 
 against the heresies then prevailing. I speak of 
 Justin and Miltiades, and Tatian and Clement, and 
 many others, by all of whom the Divinity of Christ 
 is asserted. For who,” he continues, “knows not 
 the works of Irenzeus and Melito, and the rest, in 
 which Christ is announced as God and Man°?” This 
 was the argument upon which the Church of those 
 ages instinctively fell back when she was accused of 
 adding to her creed. Particular writers might have 
 understated truth, or they might have ventured 
 upon expressions requiring explanation, or they 
 might have written economically as in view of par- 
 ticular lines of thought, and have been construed 
 by others without the qualifications which were pre- 
 sent to their own minds. But there could be no 
 mistake about the continuous drift and meaning of 
 the belief around which they moved, and which was 
 always in the background of their thoughts and 
 
 © Eus. Hist. Eccl. v. 28. It is probable that St. Hippolytus wrote 
 “The Little Labyrinth.” 
 
ὙΠ) Was the Homoousion a ‘development? ? 641 
 
 language. There could be no room for the charge 
 that they had invented a new dogma, when it could 
 be shewn that the Church from the beginning, and 
 the New Testament itself, taught what they were 
 said to have invented. 
 
 III. Of the objections to which the Homoousion 
 is exposed in the present day, there are two which 
 more particularly demand our attention. 
 
 (a) ‘Is not the Homoousion,’ it is said, ‘a develop- 
 ment ? Was it not rejected at the Council of 
 Antioch sixty years before it was received at Nicza 4 
 Is not this fact indicative of a forward movement in 
 the mind of the Church? Does it not shew that 
 the tide of dogmatic belief was rising, and that it 
 covered ground in the Nicene age which it had 
 deliberately left untouched in the age preceding 1 
 And, if this be so, if we admit the principle of 
 a perpetual growth in the Church’s creed; why 
 should we not accept the latest results of such a 
 principle as unequivocally as we close with its earlier 
 results? If we believe that the Nicene decision is 
 an assertion of the truth of God, why should we 
 hesitate to adopt a similar belief respecting that 
 proclamation of the sinless conception of the Blessed 
 Virgin which startled Christendom twelve years ago, 
 and which has since that date been added to the 
 official creed of the largest section of the Christian 
 Church 2’ 
 
 Here, the first poimt to be considered turns on 
 a question of words. What do we mean by a 
 doctrinal development? Do we mean an expla- 
 nation of an already existing idea or belief, pre- 
 sumably giving to that belief greater precision and 
 
 Tt 
 
642 The Homoousion represents [Lecr. 
 
 exactness in our own or other minds, but adding 
 nothing whatever to its real area? Or do we mean 
 the positive substantial growth of the belief itself, 
 whether through an enlargement from within, just 
 as the acorn developes into the oak, or through an 
 accretion from without of new intellectual matter 
 gathered around it, like the aggrandisements where- 
 by the infant colony developes into the powerful 
 empire ? 
 
 Now if it be asked which is the natural sense of 
 the word ‘development, I reply that we ordinarily 
 mean by it an actual enlargement of that which is 
 said to be developed. And in that sense I proceed 
 to deny that the Homoousion was a development. 
 It was not related to the teaching of the apostles 
 as an oak is related to an acorn. Its real relation 
 to their teaching was that of an exact and equivalent 
 translation of the language of one intellectual period 
 into the language of another. The New Testament 
 had taught that Jesus Christ is the Lord of nature P 
 and of men4, of heaven, and of the spiritual world? ; 
 that He is the world’s Legislator, its King and its 
 Judge’; that He is the Searcher of heartst, the 
 
 Ρ St. John v. 17; St. Matt. vill. 3, 19; 1x. 6,22, 25,205 
 St. John iv. 50; v. 8. This power over nature He delegated to 
 others: St. Matt. x. 1,8; St. Mark xvi.17; St. Luke x. 17; 
 St. John xiv. 12°; Acts iil, 6,12, 163 ixag4; xvi. 19. 
 
 a St. Matt. xxviii. 18-20; St. John v. 21, 22; xvii. 2. 
 
 r St. Matt. vii. 21, 23; xviii. 18; xxvi. 64; St. John i. 51; 
 =x, 12, arc, 
 
 8 St. Matt. v.—vii.; xi. 29, 30; xv. 185 xvill. 19 ; XXV. 34, 40; 
 St. John vill. 36; xiv. 21; Xv. 12; xx. 23, de. 
 
 t St. John i. 47-803 ii. 24, 25 5 iv. 17, 183 vi. 15, 705 XVI. 
 19, 32; Rev. ii. 23. 
 
VIT.] the teaching of the New Testament. 643 
 
 Pardoner of sins", the Well-spring of life*; that 
 He is Giver of true blessedness and salvationY, and 
 the Raiser of the dead#; it distinctly attributed to 
 Him omnipresence*, omnipotence), omniscience? ; 
 eternity, absolute likeness to the Father®, absolute 
 oneness with the Fatherf, an equal share in the 
 honour due to the Fathers, a like claim upon the 
 trust, the faithi, and the love* of humanity. 
 The New Test»ment had spoken of Him as the 
 Creator! and Preserver of the world™, as the Lord 
 of all things, as the King of kings®, the Distributor 
 of all graces°, the Brightness of the Father’s Glory 
 and the Impress of His BeingP; as being in the form 
 
 Ὁ ΞΕ Matt.tx, 5, 6; St. Luke-v. 20, 24.; vil. -48.; xxiv. 4; 
 and St. John xx. 23, where He delegates the absolving power to 
 others. 
 
 x St, John iv. 13, 14; Vv. 21, 26, 40; vi. 47, 51-58; x. 28. 
 
 y St. Matt. vii. 21 sq.; St. John vi. 39, 40; x. 28; Acts iv. 12 ; 
 Heb. ii. 10, 14. 
 
 z St. John v. 21, 25; xi. 25. Christ raises Himself from death : 
 St. John ii. 19; x. 18. 
 
 a Thid. iii. 13; St. Matt. xviil. 20. 
 
 b St. Matt. xxviii. 18; Phil. iii. 21; Heb. i. 3. 
 
 ¢ St. Matt. xi. 27; St. John iii. 11-13; vi. 46; x. 15; Col. 1]. 3. 
 
 d St. John vill. 58; xvii. 5; Rev. i. 8; ii. 8; xxii. 12, 13. 
 
 © St. John vy. τὴν τὸ, 21 2264) x. 28,20 5 XIV.-7: 
 
 f Thid. x. 28, 30; xiv. Io. 
 
 £ Ibid. v. 23. 
 
 h Ibid. xiv. 1; xvi. 33; Col. i. 27 ; St. Matt. xii. 21. 
 
 i St. John vi. 27; 1 St. John 111. 23 ; Acts xvi. 31; xx. 21. 
 
 Καὶ Cor. xvi. 22; St. John xiv. 23. 
 
 1 §t. John i. 3; Col. i. 16; Heb. i. 2, ro. 
 
 m Col. i. 17; Heb. i. 3. 
 
 n Acts x. 36; Jude 4; Rev. xvii. 14; xix. τό. 
 
 ο St. John i. 12, 14, 16,17; 2 Thess. ii. 16. 
 
 P Heb. i. 3; Col. 1.15 ; 2 Cor. iv. 4. 
 
 Ἢ ae. 
 
644 The faith explained, not enlarged, { Lecr. 
 
 of God4, as containing in Himself all the fulness of 
 the Godhead’, as being Gods. This and much more 
 to the same purpose had been said in the New 
 Testament. When therefore the question was raised 
 whether Jesus Christ was or was not “of one sub- 
 stance with” the Father, it became clear that of two 
 courses one must be adopted. Lither an affirmative 
 answer must be given, or the teaching of the apostles 
 themselves must be explained away*. As a matter 
 of fact the Nicene fathers only affirmed, in the 
 philosophical language of the fourth century, what 
 our Lord and the apostles had taught in the 
 popular dialects of the first. If then the Nicene 
 Council developed, it was a development by ex- 
 planation. It was a development which placed the 
 intrinsically unchangeable dogma, committed to the 
 guardianship of the Church, in its true relation to a 
 new intellectual world which had grown up around 
 Christians in the fourth century. Whatever vacil- 
 lations of thought might have been experienced 
 here or there, whatever doubtful expressions might 
 have escaped from theologians of the intervening 
 
 4 Phil. ii. 6. 
 
 tT Col. ii. Ὁ ; St. John i. 14, 16. 
 
 8 St John i. τ; Acts xx. 983. ‘Romivix.7 9); Ditus: ΤΠ ΤῊ; 
 1 St. John vy. 20. Compare Rom. viii. g-11 with Rom. xiv. to-12. 
 
 t Mohler, Symbolik, p. 610: ‘‘ Waren sie (the Socinians) schirfere 
 Denker gewesen, so mussten sie zur Einsicht gelangen, dass, wenn 
 das Evangelium den Sohn als ein perséhnliches Wesen, und zugleich 
 als Gott darstellt, wie die Socinianer nicht laiigneten (Christ. Relig. 
 institut. bibl. frat. Pol. tom. i. p. 655, es wird Joh. i. 1; xx, 21 
 citirt.), kein anderes Verhiltniss zwischen ihm und dem Vater 
 denkbar sei, als jenes, welches die katholische kirche von Anfang an 
 geglaubt hitte.” 
 
VII.] by the imposition of the Homoousion. 645 
 
 period, no real doubt could be raised as to the 
 meaning of the original teachers of Christianity, or 
 as to the true drift and main current of the con- 
 tinuous traditional belief of the Church. The Nicene 
 divines interpreted in a new language the belief 
 of their first fathers in the faith. They did not en- 
 large it ; they protested that they were simply pre- 
 serving and handing on what they had received. 
 The very pith of their objection to Arianism was its 
 novelty : it was false because it was of recent 
 origin". They themselves were forced to say what 
 they meant by their creed, and they said it. Their 
 explanation added to the sum of authoritative 
 ecclesiastical language, but it did not add to the 
 number of articles in the Christian faith: the area 
 of the creed was not enlarged. The Nicene Council 
 ‘did not vote a new honour to Jesus Christ which 
 jHe had not before possessed: it defined more 
 ‘clear ly the original and unalterable bases of that 
 supreme place which from the days of the apostles 
 He had held in the thought and heart, in the 
 speculative and active life of Christendom. 
 
 The history of the symbol Homoousion during the 
 third century might, at first sight, seem to favour 
 the position that its adoption at Nicaea was of 
 the nature of an accretive development. Already, 
 indeed, Dionysius and others (perhaps Origen) had 
 employed it to express the faith of the Church ; 
 but it had been, so to speak, disparaged and dis- 
 coloured by the patronage of the Valentinians and 
 the Manicheans. In the Catholic theology the word 
 
 u Socr. Hist. Eeel. 1. 6. 
 
040 Why the Homoousion was rejected at Antioch [Τ|80Υ.Ψ 
 
 denoted full participation in the absolute self-existing 
 Individuality of God*. Besides this the word sug- 
 gested the distinct personality of its immediate Sub- 
 ject ; unless it had suggested this, it would have 
 been tautologous. In ordinary language it was ap- 
 plied to things which are only similar to each other, 
 and are considered as one by an abstraction of our 
 minds. No such abstraction was possible in the 
 contemplation of God. His οὐσία is Himself, peculiar 
 to Himself, and One; and therefore to be ὁμοούσιος 
 with Him is to be internal to that Uncreated Nature 
 Which is utterly and necessarily separate from all 
 created beings. But the Valentinians used the word 
 to denote the relation of their AZons to the Divine 
 Pleroma; and the Manichzans said that the soul 
 of man was ὁμοούσιον τῷ Θεῷ, in a materialistic 
 sense. When then it was taken into the service of 
 these Emanatist doctrines, the Homoousion implied 
 nothing higher than a generic or specific bond of 
 unityy. These uses of the word implied that οὐσία 
 
 x δύ, Cyril of Alexandria defines οὐσία as πρᾶγμα αὐθύπαρκτον, 
 μὴ δεόμενον ἑτέρου πρὸς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ σύστασιν. Apud Suicer. in voc. 
 οὐσία. 
 
 y ““μοούσιος properly means of the same nature —i.e. under the 
 same general nature or species. It is applied to things which are 
 but similar to each other, and are considered as one by an ab- 
 straction of our minds. Thus Aristotle speaks of the stars being 
 ὁμοούσια With each other.” Newman, Arians, p. 203. “ Valentinian- 
 ism,” he says (p. 206), “ applied the word to the Creator and His 
 creatures in this its original philosophical sense. The Manichees 
 
 followed . . . . they too were Emanatists,” &c. But such a 
 usage offends against “the great revealed principle” of “the in- 
 communicable . . . Individuality of the Divine Essence :” ac- 
 
 cording to which principle ὁμοούσιος, as used of the Son, defined 
 
VII.] and adopted at Nicea. 647 
 
 itself was something beyond God, and moreover, as 
 was suggested by its Manichzean associations, some- 
 thing material. Paulus of Samosata availed himself 
 of this depreciation of the word to attack its Catholic 
 use as being really materialistic. Paulus argued that 
 “if the Father and the Son were ὁμοούσιοι, there 
 was some common οὐσία in which they partook,” 
 higher than, and “distinct from, the Divine Persons 
 themselves%.” Firmilian and Gregory were bent, 
 not upon the philological object of restoring the 
 word ὁμοόυσιος to its true sense, but upon the re- 
 ligious duty of asserting the true relation of the 
 Son to the Father, in language the meaning of 
 which would be plain to their contemporaries. 
 The Nicene Fathers, on the other hand, were able, 
 under altered circumstances, to vindicate for the 
 word its Catholic sense, unaffected by any Ema- 
 natist gloss ; and accordingly, in their hands it pro- 
 tected the very truth which sixty years earlier it 
 would have obscured at Antioch. St. Athanasius 
 tells us that “the fathers who deposed the Samo- 
 satene took the word Homoousion in a corporeal 
 sense. For Paulus sophisticated by saying, that 
 if .... Christ was consubstantial with the Father, 
 there must necessarily be three substances, one 
 which was prior and two others springing from 
 it. Therefore, with reason, to avoid that sophism 
 of Paulus, the fathers said that Christ was not 
 consubstantial, that is, that He was not in that 
 
 Him as “necessarily included in That Individuality.” See Dr. 
 Newman’s valuable note on St. Athanasius’ Treatises, i. 152, note ὦ 
 (Libr. Fath.) ; Ibid. 35, note ¢; and Soc. i. 8. 
 
 Newman, Arians, p. 209. See the whole passage. 
 
048 The adoption of the Homoousion cannot be paralleled (Lucr. 
 
 relation to the Father which Paulus had in his 
 mind. On the other hand,’ continues St. Atha- 
 nasius, “those who condemned the Arian heresy saw 
 through the cunning of Paulus, and considered that 
 in things incorporeal, especially in God, ‘ consub- 
 stantial’ did not mean what he had supposed ; 80 
 they, knowing the Son to be begotten of the Sub- 
 BMC, τς with reason called Him consubstan- 
 tiala.” Paulus, as a subtle and hardheaded dia- 
 lectician, had contrived to impose upon the term a 
 sense, which either made the Son an inferior being 
 or else destroyed the Unity of God. He used the 
 word, as St. Hilary says, as mischievously as the 
 Arians rejected the use of it?; while the fathers at 
 Antioch set it aside from a motive as loyal to 
 Catholic truth as was that which led to its adoption 
 at Niceea®. Language is worth, after all, just what it 
 
 a §. Athan. De Synodis, ὃ 45; cf. Cave, Hist. Lit. 1.134. ‘Non 
 aliud dicit Athanasius quam Paulum ex detorto Catholicorum vo- 
 cabulo sophisticum argumentum contra Christi Divinitatem ex- 
 cogitasse ; nempe, nisi confiteremur Christum ex homine Deum 
 factum esse, sequeretur ipsum Patri esse ὁμοούσιον, ac proinde 
 tres esse substantias, unam quidem primariam, duas ex illa deri- 
 vatas : σωματικῶς enim et crasso sensu vocabulum accepit, quasi in 
 essentia divina, perinde ac in rebus corporeis usu venit, ut ab 
 una substantia altera, eaque diversa, derivetur. Quocirea, ne hac 
 voce heretici ulteriis abuterentur, silentio supprimendam censue- 
 runt patres Antiocheni: non quod Catholicum vocis sensum dam- 
 narent, sed ut omnem sophistice cavillandi occasionem heereticis 
 preriperent, ut ex Athanasio, Basilio, aliisque, abunde liquet.” 
 
 b §. Hil. de Syn. 86: “Malé Homoousion Samosatenus confessus 
 est, sed nunquam melits Ariani negaverunt.” 
 
 ο Routh, Rel. Sacr. 11. 360, ed. 1846. See too Dr. Newman’s 
 note 2, in St. Athanasius’ Select Treatises, i. p. 166 (Oxf. Libr. 
 Fath.). 
 
VIL.| with the definition of the Immaculate Conception. 049 
 
 means to those who use it. As Origen had rejected 
 and Tertullian had defended the προβολή from an 
 identical theological motive, so the opposite lines 
 of action, adopted by the Councils of Antioch and 
 Nicea respectively, are so far from proving two 
 distinct beliefs respecting the higher Nature of Jesus 
 Christ, that when closely examined, they exhibit an 
 absolute identity of creed and motive brought face 
 to face with two distinct sets of intellectual circum- 
 stances. The faith and aim of the Church was one 
 and unchanging. But the question, whether a par- 
 ticular symbol would represent her mind with prac- 
 tical accuracy, received an answer at Antioch which 
 would have been an error at Nicea. The Church 
 looked hard at the Homoousion at Antioch, when 
 heresy had perverted its popular sense ; and she set 
 it aside. She examined it yet more penetratingly 
 at Nicza; and from then until now it has been the 
 chosen symbol of her unalterable faith in the literal 
 Godhead of her Divine Head. 
 
 Therefore between the imposition of the Homo- 
 ousion and the recent definition of the Immaculate 
 Conception, there is no real correspondence. It is 
 not merely that the latter is accepted only by a 
 section of the Christian Church, and was promul- 
 gated by an authority whose modern claims the 
 fathers of Nicaea would have regarded with un- 
 feigned astonishment. The difference between the 
 two cases is still more fundamental; it lies in the 
 substance of the two definitions respectively. The 
 Nicene fathers did but assert a truth which was held 
 to be of primary and vital import from the first; they 
 asserted it in terms which brought it vividly home 
 
650 The Homoousion and the Immaculate Conception. {| Lxcr. 
 
 to the intelligence of their day. They were ex- 
 plaining old truth, they were not revealing truth 
 unrevealed before. But the recent definition pro- 
 claims a new fact; or rather it asserts that an hypo- 
 thesis, unheard of for centuries after the first promul- 
 gation of the Gospel, and then vehemently maintained 
 and as vehemently controverted by theologians of at 
 least equal claims to orthodoxy, is a fact of Divine 
 revelation, to be received by all who would receive 
 the true faith of the Redeemer. In the one case an 
 old truth is vindicated by an explanatory reassertion ; 
 in the other a new truth is added to the Creed. The 
 Nicene fathers only maintaimed in the language of 
 their day the original truth that Jesus Christ is God: 
 but the question whether the Conception of Mary 
 was or was not sinless is a distinct question of fact, 
 standing by itself, with no necessary bearing upon 
 her office in the economy of the Incarnation, and 
 not related in the way of an explanatory vindication 
 to any originally revealed truth beyond it. It was 
 one thing to reassert the revealed Godhead of Jesus ; ’ 
 it is, in principle, a fundamentally distinct thing to 
 ‘decree a new honour’ to Mary. The Nicene decision 
 is the act of a Church believing itself commissioned to 
 guard a body of truth delivered from heaven in its 
 integrity, once for all. The recent definition presup- 
 poses a Church which can do much more than guard 
 the faith, which is empowered to make continual ad- 
 ditions to the number of revealed certainties, which 
 is the organ no less than the recipient of a continuous 
 revelation. It is one thing to say that language has 
 changed its value, and that a particular term which 
 was once considered misleading will now serve to 
 
ὙΠ. Was a definition of the faith really needed ¢ 651 
 
 vindicate an ancient truth; it is another thing to 
 claim the power of transfiguring a precarious and 
 contradicted opinion, resting on no direct scriptural 
 or primitive testimony, and impugned in terms by 
 writers of the date and authority of Aquinas‘, into 
 an alleged certainty said to be imposed upon the 
 faith of Christendom by nothing less than a Divine 
 authority. Nothing then is less warrantable than 
 the statement that those who reject the Immaculate 
 Conception would of old have rejected the Homo- 
 ousion. No rhetorical vehemence should persuade 
 us that those who bow with implicit faith before 
 the Nicene decision are bound, as a matter of con- 
 sistency, to yield the same deference of heart 
 and thought to the most modern development of 
 doctrine within the Latin section of Catholic 
 Christendom. 
 
 (8) But it may be rejoined: ‘Why was a fresh 
 definition deemed needful at Nicezea at all? Why 
 could not the Church of the Nicene age have con- 
 tented herself with saying that Jesus Christ is God, 
 after the manner of the Church of earlier days ? 
 Why was the thought of Christendom to be saddled 
 with a metaphysical symbol which at least tran- 
 scends, if it does not destroy, the simplicity of the 
 Church’s first faith in our Lord’s Divinity ?’ 
 
 Now the answer is simply as follows. In the Arian 
 age it was not enough to say that Jesus Christ is 
 God, because the Arians had contrived to impoverish 
 and degrade the idea conveyed by the Name of God 
 
 ἃ Sum. Th. 111. a. 27, 4. 2: “B. Virgo contraxit quidem ori- 
 ginale peccatum, sed ab eo fuit mundata antequam ex utero nas- 
 ceretur.” 
 
652 The ‘ Household of Faith? not a debating-club.  (Lxcr. 
 
 so completely as to apply that sacred word to a 
 creature. Of course, if it had been deemed a matter 
 of sheer indifference whether Jesus Christ was or was 
 not God, it would have been a practical error to have 
 insisted on the truth of His real Divinity, and an 
 equivocal expression might have been allowed to 
 stand. If the Church of Christ had been, ποὺ the 
 school of revealed truth, in which the soul was to 
 make knowledge the food and stimulant of love, but 
 a world-wide debating club, “ever seeking and never 
 coming to the knowledge of the truth,” it would then 
 have been desirable to keep this and all other fun- 
 damental questions open®. Perhaps in that case the 
 Nicene decision might with truth have been de- 
 scribed as the “greatest misfortune that has hap- 
 pened to Christendom.” But the Church believed 
 herself to possess a revelation from God, essential 
 to the eternal well-being of the soul of man. She 
 further believed that the true Godhead of Jesus 
 Christ was a truth of such fundamental and capital 
 import, that, divorced from it, the creed of Christen- 
 _dom must perish outright. Plainly therefore it 
 was the Church’s duty to assert this truth in such 
 language as might be unmistakeably expressive of 
 it. Now this result was secured by the Homo- 
 ousion. It was at the time of its first imposition, 
 and it has been ever since, a perfect criterion of 
 real belief in the Godhead of our Lord. It excluded 
 the Arian sense of the word God, and on this 
 
 e See the letter addressed in Constantine’s name to St. Alexander 
 and to Arius (Soc. i. 7), in which the writer—probably Eusebius 
 of Nicomedia—insists “that the points at issue are minute and 
 trivial.” Bright’s Hist. Ch. p. 20. 
 
VII.] The question at issue of vital importance. 653 
 
 account it was adopted by the orthodox. How much 
 it meant was proved by the resistance which it then 
 encountered, and by the subsequent efforts which 
 have been made to destroy or to evade it. The 
 sneer of Gibbon about the iota which separates the 
 semi-Arian from the Catholic symbol (Homoiousion 
 from Homoousion) is naturally repeated by those 
 who believe that nothing was really at stake beyond 
 the emptiest of abstractions, and who can speak of 
 the fourth century as an age of meaningless logo- 
 machies. But to men who are concerned, not with 
 words, but with the truths which they enshrine, not 
 with the mere historic setting of a great struggle, 
 but with the vital question at issue in it, the full 
 importance of the Nicene symbol will be sufficiently 
 obvious. The difference between Homoiousion and 
 Homoousion convulsed the world for the simple reason 
 that in that difference lay the whole question of 
 the real truth or falsehood of our Lord’s actual Di- 
 vinity. If in His Essence He was only like God, 
 He was still a distinct Being from God, and there- 
 fore either created, or (per impossibile) a second God. 
 In a great engagement, when man after man is laid 
 low in defence of the colours of his regiment, it 
 might seem to a bystander, unacquainted with the 
 forms of war, a prodigious absurdity that so great a 
 sacrifice of life should be incurred for a piece of silk 
 or cotton of a particular hue; and he might make 
 many caustic epigrams at the expense of the strug- 
 gling and suffering combatants. But a soldier would 
 tell him that the flag is a symbol of the honour and 
 prowess of his country ; and that he is not dying for 
 a few yards of coloured material, but for the moral 
 
654 St. Athanasius a man of realities, not of words. (Lircr. 
 
 and patriotic idea which the material represents. If 
 ever there was a man who was not the slave of lan-_ 
 guage, who had his eye upon ideas, truths, facts, 
 and who made language submissively do their work, 
 that man was the great St. Athanasius. He ad- 
 vocated the Homoousion at Niczea, because he was 
 convinced that it was the one adequate symbol of the 
 treasure of truth committed to the Church: but 
 years afterwards, he declined to press it upon such 
 of the semi-Arians as he knew to be at bottom sin- 
 cerely loyal to the truth which it guarded’. And 
 during a period of fifteen centuries experience has 
 not shewn that any large number of real believers 
 in our Saviour’s Godhead have objected to the 
 Nicene statement; while its efficacy in guarding 
 against a lapse into Arian error has amply con- 
 firmed the far-sighted wisdom which, full of jea- 
 lousy for the rightful honour of Jesus$ and of 
 charity for the souls of men, has incorporated it 
 for ever with the most authoritative profession of 
 faith in the Divinity of Christ which is possessed 
 by Christendom. 
 
 f De Synod. 41: Πρὸς δὲ τοὺς ἀποδεχομένους τὰ μὲν ἄλλα πάντα τῶν 
 ἐν Νικαίᾳ γραφέντων, περὶ δὲ μόνον τὸ ομοούσιον ἀμφιβάλλοντας, χρὴ μὴ 
 ὡς πρὸς ἐχθροὺς διωκεῖσθαι ..... ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἀδελφοὶ πρὸς ἀδελφοὺς διαλεγό- 
 μεθα, τὴν αὐτὴν μὲν ἡμῖν διάνοιαν ἔχοντας, περὶ δὲ τὸ ὄνομα μόνον διστά- 
 ΠΣ ΝΣ τὰ οἷ Οὐ μακράν εἰσιν ἀποδέξασθαι καὶ τὴν τοῦ “Ομοουσίου λέξιν. 
 He repeatedly declares that the Homoousion as a Nicene formula 
 is intended to guard the reality of the Divine Sonship as uncreated. 
 Ibid. 39, 45, 48, 54- 
 
 & St. Athanasius’ “zeal for the Consubstantiality had its root in 
 his loyalty to the ConsusstanTIAL. He felt that in the Nicene 
 dogma were involved the worship of Christ and the life of Chris- 
 tianity.” Bright’s Hist. Ch. p. 149. 
 
Via} - Creeds cannot be dispensed with now. 655 
 
 It may indeed be urged that freedom from creeds is 
 ideally and in the abstract the highest state of Chris- 
 tian communion. It may be pleaded that a public con- 
 fession of faith will produce in half-earnest and su- 
 perficial souls a formal and mechanical devotion; that 
 the exposure of the most sacred truth in a few con- 
 densed expressions to the scepticism and irreverence 
 of those who are strangers to its essence will lead to 
 inevitable ribaldry and scandal. But it is sufficient 
 to reply that these liabilities do not outweigh the 
 necessity for a clear “form of sound words,” since 
 formalists will be formal, and sceptics will be irreve- 
 rent with or without it. And those who depreciate 
 creeds among us now, do not really mean to recom- 
 mend that truth should be kept hidden, as in the 
 first centuries, in the secret mind of the Church : 
 they have far other purposes in view. Rousseau 
 might draw pictures of the superiority of simple 
 primitive savage life to the enervated civilization of 
 Paris; but it would not have been prudent in the 
 Parisians at the end of the last century to have 
 attempted a return to the barbaric life of their 
 ancestors, who had roamed as happy savages in the 
 oreat forests of Europe. The Latitudinarians who 
 suggest that the Church might dispense with the 
 Catholic creeds, advise us to revert to the defence- 
 lessness of ecclesiastical childhood. But, alas! they 
 cannot guarantee to us its mnocence, or its immu- 
 nities. We could not, if we would, reverse the 
 thought of centuries, and ignore the questions which 
 heresy has opened, and which have been cecume- 
 nically decided. We might not thus do despite 
 to the kindly providence of Him, Who, with the 
 
656 Especial claims of the Nicene Creed. [Lecr. 
 
 temptations to faith that came with the predestined 
 course of history, has in the creeds opened to us 
 such “a way to escape that we may be able to bear 
 them.” 
 
 Certainly if toil and suffering confer a value on 
 the object which they earn or preserve; if a country 
 prizes the liberties which were baptized in the blood 
 of her citizens; if a man rejoices in the honour which 
 he has kept unstained at the risk of life ; then we, who 
 are the heirs of the ages of Christendom, should cling 
 with a peculiar loyalty and love to the great Nicene 
 confession of our Lord’s Divinity. For the Nicene 
 definition was wrung from the heart of the agonized 
 Church by a denial of the truth on which was fed, 
 then as now, her inmost life. In the Arian heresy 
 the old enemies of the Gospel converged as for a 
 final and desperate effort to achieve its destruction 
 The carnal, gross, external, Judaizing spirit, embodied 
 in the frigid literalism of the school of Antioch ; 
 the Alexandrian dialectics, substituting philosophical 
 placita for truths of faith; nay, paganism itself, van- 
 quished in the open field, but anxious to take the 
 life of its conqueror by private assassination,—these 
 were the forces which reappeared in Arianism. It 
 was no mere exasperation of rhetoric which saw Por- 
 phyry in Arius, and which compared Constantius 
 to Diocletian. The life of Athanasius after the 
 Nicene Council might well have been lived before the 
 Edict of Milan. Arianism was a political force ; it 
 ruled at court. Arianism was a philosophical dis- 
 putant, and was at home in the schools. Arianism 
 was, moreover, a popular proselytizer ; it had verses 
 and epigrammatic arguments for the masses of the 
 
ΜΠ Especial claims of the Nicene Creed. 657 
 
 people; and St. Gregory of Nyssa, in a passage) 
 which is classical, has described its extraordinary 
 success among the lower orders. Never was a heresy 
 stronger, more versatile, more endowed with all the 
 apparatus of controversy, more sure, as it might 
 have seemed, of the future of the world. It was a 
 long, desperate struggle, by which the original faith 
 of Christ conquered this fierce and hardy antagonist. 
 At this day the Creed of Niceea is the living proof 
 of the Church’s victory ; and as we confess it we 
 should, methinks, feel somewhat of the fire of our 
 spiritual ancestors, some measure of that fresh glow 
 of thankfulness, which is due to God after a great 
 deliverance, although wrought out in a distant age. 
 To unbelief this creed may be only an ecclesiastical 
 ‘test, only an additional ‘incubus’ weighing down 
 ‘honest religious thought. But to the children of 
 faith, the Nicene confession must be the welcome ex- 
 pression of their most cherished conviction. May we 
 henceforth repeat it at those most solemn moments 
 when the Church puts it into our mouths, with joy 
 and gratitude. Not as if it were the mere trophy 
 of a controversial victory, or the dry embodiment 
 
 " See Dr. Newman’s translation of it in Athan. Treatises, i. 213, 
 note aw: “Men of yesterday and the day before, mere mechanics, 
 off-hand dogmatists in theology, servants too, and slaves that have 
 been flogged....... are solemn with us and philosophical about 
 things incomprehensible. .. Ask about pence, and he will discuss the 
 Generate and Ingenerate ; inquire the price of bread, he answers, 
 ‘Greater is the Father, and the Son is subject;’ say that a bath 
 would suit you, and he defines that the Son is out of nothing.” 
 See also 8. Athan. Orat. contr. Ari. i. 22, on the profane questions 
 put to boys and women in the Agora; and Ibid. 4 sqq. on the 
 ‘Thalia’ of Arius, 
 
 Uu 
 
658 Especial claims of the Nicene Creed. 
 
 of an abstract truth in the language of speculation, 
 should we welcome this glorious creed to our hearts 
 and lips. Rather let us welcome it as the intel- 
 lectual sentinel which guards the shrine of faith in 
 our inmost souls from the profanation of error, as 
 the good angel who warns us that since the Incar- 
 nation we move in the very ante-chamber of a Di- 
 vine Presence, as a mother’s voice reminding us of 
 that tribute of heartfelt love and adoration, which 
 is due from all serious Christians to the Lord Jesus 
 Christ our Saviour and our God. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE DOCTRINE OF OUR 
 LORD’S DIVINITY. 
 
 He That spared not His Own Son, but delivered Him up for us 
 all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things ? 
 Rom. vit. 32. 
 
 Or late years we have been familiarized with cau- 
 tions and protests against what has been termed by 
 way of disparagement ‘ Inferential Theology.’ And 
 no one would deny that in all ages of the Church, 
 the field of theology has been the scene of hasty, un- 
 warrantable, and misleading inferences. False con- 
 clusions have been drawn from true premisses ; and 
 even doubtful or false premisses have been occasionally 
 assumed or even asserted to be true. Moreover, even 
 earnest believers have forgotten that in a subject- 
 matter such as the creed of Christendom, they are 
 confessedly below truth and not above it. They have 
 forgotten that it is given us here to see a part only, 
 and not the whole. In reality we can but note the 
 outskirts of a vast economy, whose body and sub- 
 stance stretch far away from our gaze into infinitude. 
 Many an intercepting truth, not the less true because 
 
 unseen and unsuspected, ought to arrest the hardy 
 τ Ὁ 
 
660 ‘ Inferential’ theology. [Lecr. 
 
 and confident logic, which insists upon this or that 
 particular conclusion as following necessarily upon 
 these or those premisses of which it is already in 
 possession. But this caution has not always been 
 kept in view. And when once pious affection or 
 devout imagination have seized the reins of reli- 
 gious thought, it is easy for individuals or schools 
 to wander far from the beaten paths of a clear yet 
 sober faith, into some theological wonderland, the 
 airiest creation of the liveliest fancy, where, to the 
 confusion and unsettlement of souls, the wildest 
 fiction and the highest truth may be inextricably 
 intertwined in an entanglement of hopeless and 
 bewildering disorder. 
 
 But if this should be admitted, it would not follow 
 that theology is im no sense ‘inferential. Within 
 certain limits, and under due guidance, ‘inference’ is 
 the movement, it is the life of theology. The primal 
 records of revelation itself, as we find them in Scrip- 
 ture, are continually inferential ; and it is at least 
 the business of theology to observe and marshal 
 these revealed inferences, to draw them out, and to 
 make the most of them. The illuminated reason of 
 the collective Church has for ages been engaged in 
 studying the original materials of the Christian 
 revelation. It thus has shaped, rather than created, 
 modern theology. What is theology, but a con- 
 tmuous series of observed and systematized in- 
 ferences ? Do you say that no ‘inference’ is under any 
 circumstances legitimate ; that no one truth in theo- 
 logy necessarily implies another ; that the Christian 
 mind ought to preserve in a jealous and _ sterile 
 isolation each proposition that can be extracted from 
 
WEEE. | ‘Inferential’ theology. 661 
 
 Scripture? Do you suppose that the several truths 
 of the Christian creed are so many separate, unfruit- 
 ful, unsuggestive dogmas, having no traceable inter- 
 relations with each other? Do you take it for 
 granted that each revealed truth involves nothing 
 that is not immediately apparent as lymg on the 
 very surface of the terms which express it? or do 
 you, in your inmost thought, regard the truths of 
 revelation as so many barren abstractions, which a 
 merely human speculation on divine things has from 
 age to age elaborated and formulated? If so, of 
 course it is natural that you should deprecate any 
 earnest scrutiny of the worth and consequences of 
 these abstractions ; you deprecate it as interfering 
 with moral and practical interests; you deem an 
 inferential theology alike illusory and mischievous. 
 If here I touch the bottom of your thought, at least, 
 my brethren, I admit its consistency ; but then your 
 original premiss is of a character to put you out 
 of all relations with the Christian Church, except 
 those of fundamental opposition. The Christian 
 Church believes that God has really spoken; and 
 she assumes that no subject can have a higher 
 practical interest for man than a consideration of 
 the worth and drift of what He has said. Of course 
 no one would waste his time upon systematizing 
 what he believed to be only a series of abstract 
 phantoms. And if a man holds a doctrine with so 
 slight and doubtful a grasp that it illuminates no- 
 thing within him, that it moves nothing, that it leads 
 on to nothing beyond itself, he is in a fair way to 
 forfeit it altogether. We scan anxiously and cross- 
 question keenly that which we really possess and 
 
662 ‘ Inferential’ theology. [ Lect. 
 
 cherish as solid truth : a living faith is pretty certain 
 to draw inferences. The seed which has not shrivelled 
 up into an empty husk cannot but sprout, if you place 
 it beneath the sod ; the living belief which has really 
 been implanted in the soil of thought and feeling 
 cannot but bear its proper flower and fruit in the 
 moral and intellectual life of a thoughtful and earnest 
 man. If you would arrest the growth of the seed, 
 you must cut it off from contact with the soil, and 
 so in time you must kill it: you may, for awhile, 
 isolate a religious conviction by some violent moral 
 or intellectual process; but be sure that the con- 
 viction which cannot germinate in your heart and 
 mind is already condemned to death. 
 
 If theology is inferential, she infers under guid- 
 ance and within restricted limits. If the eccentric 
 reasonings of individual minds are to be received 
 with distrust, the consent of many minds, of many 
 ages, of many schools and orders of thought, may 
 command at least a respectful attention. If we 
 reject conclusions drawn professedly from the sub- 
 stance of revelation, but really enlarging instead of 
 explaining it, it does not follow that we should 
 reject inferences which are simply explanatory, or 
 which exhibit the bearing of one revealed truth upon 
 another. This indeed is the most fruitful and le- 
 gitimate province of inference in theological enquiry. 
 Such ‘inference’ brings out the meaning of the details 
 of revelation. It raises this feature to prominence, 
 it throws that into the shade. It places language to 
 which a too servile literalism might have attributed 
 the highest force, in the lower rank of metaphor and 
 symbol ; it elicits pregnant and momentous truths 
 
VIII.) What does Christ's Divinity involve ? 663 
 
 from incidents which may have been deemed, in the 
 absence of sufficient guidance or reflection, to pos- 
 sess only a secondary degree of significance. 
 
 To-day we reach the term of those narrow limits 
 within which some aspects of a subject im itself ex- 
 haustless have been so briefly and imperfectly dis- 
 cussed. It is natural then for any earnest man 
 to ask himself —‘ If I believe in Christ’s Divinity, 
 what does this belief involve? Is it possible that 
 such a faith can be a dead abstraction, having no 
 real influence upon my daily life of thought and 
 action? If this great doctrine be true, is there not 
 still something to be done, when I am satisfied of 
 its truth, besides proving it? Can it be other than 
 a practical folly to have ascertained the truth that 
 Jesus is God, and then to consign so momentous 
 a conclusion to a respectful oblivion in some obscure 
 corner of my thought, as if it were a well-bound 
 but disused book that could only ornament the 
 shelves of a library? Must I not enshrine it in the 
 very centre of my soul’s life? Must I not contem- 
 plate it, nay, if it may be, penetrate and feed on 
 it by a reiterated contemplation, that it may illu- 
 minate and sustain and transfigure my inward being ? 
 Must I not be reasonably anxious till this great con- 
 viction shall have moulded all else that it can bear 
 on, or that can bear on it—all that I hold in any 
 degree for religious truth ὁ Must not such a faith 
 at last radiate through my every thought? must it 
 not supply with a new and deeper motive my every 
 action ? If Jesus, Who lived and died and rose for 
 me, be God, can my duties to Him end with a bare 
 confession of His Divinity? Will not the significance 
 
004 What does Christ's Divinity involve ? (Lect. 
 
 of His Life and of His Death, will not the obli- 
 gatoriness of His commands, will not the nature 
 and reality of His promises and gifts, be felt to 
 have a new and deeper meaning, when I contem- 
 plate them in the light of this glorious truth ? 
 Must not all which the Divine Christ blesses and 
 sanctions have in some sense the virtue of His 
 Divinity ?’ 
 
 My brethren, you are right; the doctrine of 
 Christ’s Godhead is, both in the sphere of belief and 
 in that of morals, as fruitful and as imperious as 
 you anticipate. St. Pauls question is in harmony 
 with the spirit of your own. St. Paul makes the 
 doctrine of a Divine Christ, given for the sins of 
 men to a Life of humiliation and to a Death of 
 anguish, the premiss of the largest consequences, 
 the warrant of the most unbounded expectations. 
 “He That spared not His Own Son, but gave Him 
 up for us all, how shall He not with Him also 
 freely give us all things?” Let us then hasten to 
 trace this somewhat in detail ; and let us remark, in 
 passing, that on the present occasion we shall not be 
 leaving altogether the track of former lectures. For 
 in studying the results of a given belief, we may 
 add to the number of practical evidences in its fa- 
 vour ; we may approach the belief itself under con- 
 ditions which are more favourable for doing justice 
 to it than those which a direct argument supplies. 
 To contemplate such a truth as the Godhead of our 
 Lord in itself, is like gazing with open eyelids at 
 the torturing splendour of the noon-day sun. We 
 can best admire the sun of the natural heavens 
 when we take note of the beauty which he sheds 
 
VIII. j Protection of Theistic truth. 665 
 
 over the face of the world, when we mark the floods 
 of light which stream from him, and the deep sha- 
 dows which he casts, and the colours and forms 
 which he lights up and displays before us. In 
 like manner, perchance, we may most truly enter 
 into the meaning of the Divinity of the Sun of 
 Righteousness, by observing the truths which de- 
 pend more or less directly on that glorious doc- 
 trine,—truths on which it sheds ἃ significance 
 so profound, so unspeakably awful, so unspeakably 
 blessed. 
 
 There are three distinct bearings of the doctrine 
 of our Lord’s Divinity which it is more especially 
 of importance to consider. This doctrine protects 
 truths prior to itself, and belonging both to natural 
 and to revealed theology. Again, it illuminates the 
 meaning, it asserts the force of truths which depend 
 upon itself, which are, to speak humanly, below it, 
 and which can only be duly appreciated when they 
 are referred to it as justifyimg and explaining them. 
 Lastly, it fertilizes the Christian’s moral and spiritual 
 life, by supplying a motive to the virtues which are 
 most characteristically Christian, and without which 
 Christian ethics sink down to the level of a merely 
 natural morality. 
 
 1. Observe, first, the conservative force of the 
 doctrine. It protects the truths which it pre- 
 supposes. Placed at the centre of the creed of 
 Christendom, it looks backward as well as forward ; 
 it guards in Christian thought the due apprehension 
 of those fundamental verities without which no 
 religion whatever is possible, since they are the 
 postulates of all religious thought and activity. 
 
666 Inability of Deism to guard | Lecr. 
 
 1, What, let us ask, is the practical relation of 
 the doctrine before us to the primal truth that a 
 Personal God really exists 7 
 
 Both in the last century and in our own day, it 
 has been the constant aim of a philosophical Deism 
 to convince the world that the existence of a Su- 
 preme Being would be more vividly, constantly, 
 practically realized, if the dogma of His existence 
 were detached from the creed of Christendom. The 
 pure Theistic idea, we are told, if τὸ were freed from 
 the earthly and material accessories of an Incarna- 
 tion, if it were not embarrassed by the ‘ metaphysical 
 conception’ of distinct personal Subsistences within 
 the Godhead, if it could be left to its native force, 
 to its spirituality of essence, to its simplicity of 
 form,—would exert a prodigious influence on human 
 thought, if not on human conduct. This influence is 
 said to be practically impossible so long as Theistic 
 truth is overlaid by the ‘thick integument’ of Chris- 
 tian doctrine. But has such an anticipation been 
 realized? Is it bemg realized at this moment ? 
 Need I remind you that throughout Europe the most 
 earnest assaults of infidelity upon the Christian 
 creed within the last ten years have been directed 
 against its Thevstic as distinct from its peculiarly 
 Christian elements? When the possibility of mira- 
 cle is derided ; when a Providence is scouted as the 
 fond dream of an exaggerated human self-love; when 
 belief in the power of prayer is asserted to be only 
 a superstition, illustrative of man’s ignorance of the 
 scientific conception of law ; when the hypothesis of 
 absolutely invariable law, and the cognate conception 
 of nature as a self-evolved system of self-existent 
 
VEER. the idea of God in the soul of man. 667 
 
 forces and self-existent matter, are advancing with 
 giant strides in large departments of the literature 
 of the day ;—it is not Christianity as such, it is 
 Theism which is insulted and jeopardized. Now 
 among the forces arrayed against Christianity at this 
 hour, the most formidable, because the most con- 
 sistent and the most sanguine, is that pure material- 
 ism, which has been intellectually organized in the 
 somewhat pedantic form known as Positivism. To 
 the Positivist the most etherealized of deistic theo- 
 ries is just as much an object of pitying scorn as 
 the creed of a St. John and a St. Athanasius. Both 
 are relegated to ‘the theological period’ of human 
 development. And if we may judge from the pre- 
 sent aspect of the controversy between non-Christian 
 spiritualists and the apostles of Positivism, it must 
 be added that the latter appear to gain steadily and 
 surely on their opponents. This fact is more evi- 
 dent on the continent of Europe than in our own 
 country. It cannot be explained by supposing that 
 the spiritualistic writers are intellectually inferior 
 to the advocates of materialism. Still less is an 
 explanation to be sought in the intrinsic indefensi- 
 bility of the truth which the spiritualists defend ; 
 it is really furnished by the conditions under which 
 they undertake to defend it. A living, energetic, 
 robust faith, a faith, as it has been described, not 
 of ether, but of flesh and blood, is surely needed, 
 in order to stand the reiterated attacks, the subtle 
 and penetrating misgivings, the manifold wear and 
 tear of a protracted controversy with so brutal an 
 antagonist. Can Deism inspire this faith? The 
 pretension of deists to refine, to spiritualize, to 
 
668 Lnability of Deism to guard {Lecr. 
 
 etherealize the idea of God almost indefinitely, is 
 fatal to the living energy of their one conviction. 
 Where an abstract deism is not killed out by the 
 violence of atheistic materialism, it is apt, although 
 left to itself, to die by an unperceived process of 
 evaporation. For a living faith in a Supreme Being, 
 the human mind requires motives, corollaries, con- 
 sequences, supports. These are not supplied by the 
 few abstract considerations which are entertained by 
 the philosophical deists. Whatever may be the in- 
 tellectual strength of their position against atheism, 
 the practical weakness of that position is a matter of 
 notoriety ; and if this weakness is apparent in the 
 case of the philosophers themselves, how much more 
 patent is it when deism attempts to make itself a 
 home in the heart of the people! That abstract 
 and inaccessible being who is placed at the summit 
 of deistic systems is too subtle for the thought 
 and too cold for the heart of the multitudes of the 
 human family. When God is regarded less as the 
 personal Object of affection and worship than as the 
 necessary term of an intellectual equation, the senti- 
 ment of piety is not really satisfied; it hungers, it 
 languishes, it dies. And this purely intellectual ap- 
 prehension of God, which kills piety, is so predomi- 
 nant in every genuine deistic system as to determine, 
 in no long lapse of time, its impotence and extinction 
 as a popular religious force. The Supreme Agent, 
 without whom the deist cannot construct an ade- 
 quate or satisfactory theory of being, is gradually 
 divested of personal characteristics, and is resolved 
 into a formula expressing only supreme agency. His 
 moral characteristics fall into the background of 
 
VIII.) the idea of God in the soul of man. 669 
 
 thought, while he is conceived of, more and more 
 exclusively, as the Universal Mind. And his intel- 
 lectual attributes are in turn discarded, when for the 
 Supreme Mind is substituted the conception of the 
 Mightiest Force. Long before this point is reached 
 deistic thought is nervously alarmed, lest its God 
 should penetrate as a living Providence down into 
 this human world of suffering and sin. Accordingly, 
 in a professed anxiety for his true dignity and repose, 
 it weaves around his liberty a network of imaginary 
 law ; and at length, if he has not been destroyed by 
 the materialistic controversialists, he is conducted by 
 the cold respect of deistic thinkers to the utmost 
 frontier of the conceivable universe, and _ there, 
 throned in a majestic inaction, he is as respectfully 
 abandoned. As suggesting a problem which may 
 rouse a faint spasmodic intellectual interest, his name 
 may be permitted to reappear periodically in the 
 world of letters. But the interest which he creates 
 is at best on a level with that of the question 
 whether the planets are or are not inhabited. As 
 an energetic, life-controlling, life-absorbing power, the 
 God of Deism is extinct. 
 
 Now the doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is the 
 Incarnate God protects this primal theistic truth 
 which non-Christian deism is so incapable of popu- 
 larizing, and even of retaming. The Incarnation 
 bridges over the abyss which opens in our thought 
 between earth and heaven ; it brings the Almighty, 
 Allwise, Illimitable Being down to the mind and 
 heart of His reasonable creatures. The Word made 
 Flesh is God condescending to our finite capacities ; 
 and this condescension has issued in a clear, strong 
 
670 Belief in a personal living God [ Lect. 
 
 sense of the Being and Attributes of God, such as 
 is not found beyond the frontiers of Christendom. 
 The last prayer of Jesus, that His redeemed might 
 know the only true God, has been answered in his- 
 tory. How profound, how varied, how fertile is the 
 idea of God, of His Nature and of His attributes, in 
 St. John, in St. Paul, in St. Gregory Nazianzen, in 
 St. Augustine! How energetic is this idea, how 
 totally is it removed from the character of an im- 
 potent speculation! How does this keen, strong 
 sense of God’s present and majestic Life leave its 
 mark upon manners, literatures, codes of law, na- 
 tional institutions, national characters! How utterly 
 does its range of energy transcend any mere employ- 
 ment of the intellect ; how does it, again and again, 
 bend wills, and soften hearts, and change the current 
 and drift of lives, and transfigure the souls of men! 
 And why is this? It is because the Incarnation 
 rivets the apprehension of God on the thought and 
 heart of the Church, so that within the Church 
 theistic truth bids defiance to those influences which 
 tend perpetually to sap or to volatilize it elsewhere. 
 Instead of presenting us with an etherealised ab- 
 straction, inaccessible to the intellect and disappoint- 
 ing to the heart, the Incarnation points to Jesus. 
 Jesus is the Almighty restraining His illimitable 
 powers ; Jesus is the Incomprehensible voluntarily 
 submitting to bonds ; Jesus is Providence clothed in 
 our own flesh and blood ; Jesus is the Infinite Charity 
 tending us with the kindly looks and tender hand- 
 ling of a human love ; Jesus is the Eternal Wisdom 
 speaking out of the depths of infinite thought in a 
 human language. Jesus is God making Himself, if 
 
VEE.) secured by belief in a Divine Christ. 671 
 
 I may dare so to speak, our tangible possession ; 
 He is God brought “very nigh to us, in our mouth 
 and in our heart ;” we behold Him, we touch Him, 
 we cling to Him, and lo! we are θείας κοινωνοὶ 
 φύσεως", partakers of the Nature of Deity, through 
 our actual membership in His Body, in His Flesh, 
 and in His Bones”; we dwell, if we will, evermore 
 in Him, and He in us. 
 
 This then is the result of the Divine Incarnation : 
 it brings God close to the inmost being of man, yet 
 without forfeiting, nay rather while guarding most 
 carefully, in man’s thought, the spirituality of the 
 Divine Essence. Nowhere is the popular idea of 
 God more refined, more spiritual, than where the 
 faith in the Divinity of Jesus is clearest and strong- 
 _est. No writers have explained and asserted the 
 immateriality, the simplicity, the indivisibility of the 
 Essence of God more earnestly than those who have 
 most earnestly asserted and explained the doctrines 
 of the Holy Trinity and of the Divine Incarnation. 
 For if we know our happiness in Christ, we Christians 
 are united to God, we possess God, we consciously 
 live, and move, and have our being in God. Our 
 intelligence and our heart alike apprehend God in 
 His majestic and beautiful Life so truly and con- 
 stantly, because He has taken possession of our 
 whole nature, intellectual, moral, and corporeal, and 
 has warmed and illuminated and blessed it by the 
 quickening Manhood of Jesus. We cannot reflect 
 upon and rejoice in our union with Jesus, without 
 finding ourselves face to face with the Being and 
 Attributes of Him with Whom in Jesus we are made 
 
 ® 2 St. Pet. i. 4. b Eph. v. 30. 
 
672 The idea of God destroyed by Pantheism, { Lrcr. 
 
 one. Holy Seripture has traced the failure and 
 misery of all attempts on the part of a philosophical 
 deism to create or to maintain in the soul of man a 
 real communion with our heavenly Parent. ‘“ Whoso- 
 ever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father *.” 
 And the Christian’s practical security against those 
 speculative difficulties to which his faith in a living 
 God may be exposed, lies in that constant contem- 
 plation of and communion with Jesus, which is of 
 the essence of the Christian life. “God, who com- 
 manded the light to shine out of darkness, hath 
 shined in our hearts, to give the light of the know- 
 ledge of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus 
 Christ %” 
 
 2. But if belief in our Saviour’s Godhead protects 
 Christian thought against the intellectual dangers 
 which await an arid Deism, does it afford an equally 
 effective safeguard against Pantheism? In conceiv- 
 ing of God, the choice before a pantheist hes between 
 alternatives from which no genius has as yet devised 
 a real escape. God, the pantheist must assert, is 
 literally everything ; God is the whole material and 
 spiritual universe ; He is humanity in all its mani- 
 festations ; He is by inclusion every moral and im- 
 moral agent; and every form and exaggeration of 
 moral evil, no less than every variety of moral ex- 
 cellence and beauty, is part of the all-pervading, 
 all-comprehending movement of His Universal Life. 
 If this revolting blasphemy be declined, then the 
 God of pantheism must be the barest abstraction 
 of abstract being ; He must, as with the Alexandrian 
 thinkers, be so exaggerated an abstraction as to 
 
 ¢ 1 St. John ii. 23. a2 Cor: iv. 6. 
 
VIII.) but guarded by faith in a Divine Christ. 673 
 
 transcend existence itself ; He must be conceived of 
 as utterly unreal, lifeless, non-existent; while the 
 only real beings are these finite and determinate 
 forms of existence whereof ‘nature’ is composed®, 
 This dilemma haunts all the historical transforma- 
 tions of pantheism, in Europe as in the East, to-day 
 as two thousand years ago. Pantheism must either 
 assert that its God is the one only existing being 
 whose existence absorbs and is identified with the 
 universe and humanity ; or else it must admit that 
 he is the rarest and most unreal of conceivable 
 abstractions ; in plain terms, that he is no being at 
 all. And the question before us is, Does the Incarna- 
 tion of God, as taught by the Christian doctrine, ex- 
 pose Christian thought to this dilemma? Is God 
 “brought very nigh to us” Christians in such sort, as 
 to bury the Eternal in the temporary, the Infinite in 
 the finite, the Absolute and Self-existent in the tran- 
 sient and the relative, the All-holy in the very sink 
 of moral evil, unless, in order to save His honour 
 in our thought, we are prepared to attenuate our 
 idea of Him into nonentity ? 
 
 Now, not merely is there no ground for this appre- 
 hension ; but the Christian doctrine of an Incarnate 
 God is our most solid protection against the inroads 
 of pantheistic error. 
 
 The strength of pantheistic systems les in that 
 craving both of the intellect and of the heart for 
 union with the Absolute Being, which is the most 
 legitimate and the noblest instinct of our nature. 
 This craving is satisfied by the Christian’s union 
 
 « Saisset, Philosophie Réligieuse, i. 181 ; 11. 368. 
 X X 
 
674 The Incarnation unites man with God, { Lect. 
 
 with the Incarnate Son. But while satisfymg it, 
 the Incarnation raises an effective barrier against its 
 abuse after the fashion of pantheism. Against the 
 dogma of an Incarnate God, rooted in the faith of 
 a Christian people, the waves of pantheistic thought 
 may surge and lash themselves and break in vain. 
 For the Incarnation presupposes that master-truth 
 which pantheism most passionately denies. It pre- 
 supposes the truth that between the finite and the 
 Infinite, between the Creator and the Cosmos, be- 
 tween God and man, there is of necessity a measure- 
 less abyss. On this pot its opposition to pan- 
 theism is as earnest as that of the most jealous 
 deism ; but the Christian creed escapes from the 
 deistic conception of an omnipotent moral being, 
 surveying intelligently the vast accumulation of sin 
 and misery which we see on this earth, yet withal 
 remaining unmoved, inactive, indifferent. The Chris- 
 tian creed spans this gulf which yawns between earth 
 and heaven, by proclaiming that the Everlasting 
 Son has taken our nature upon Him. In His Per- 
 son a Created Nature is joined to the Uncreated, 
 by a union which is for ever indissoluble. But what 
 is that truth which underlies this transcendant mys- 
 tery? What sustains it, what enhances it, what for- 
 bids it to melt away in our thoughts into a chaotic 
 confusion out of which neither the Divine nor the 
 Human could struggle forth into the light for dis- 
 tinct recognition? It is, I reply, the truth that 
 the Natures thus united in the Person of Jesus are 
 radically, by their essence, and for ever, distinct. It 
 is by reason of this ineffaceable distinctness that 
 the union of the Godhead and Manhood in Jesus is 
 
Weil, but without sanctioning Pantheism. 675 
 
 such an object of wondering and thankful contem- 
 plation to Christians. Accordingly, at the very heart 
 of the creed of Christendom, we have a guarantee 
 against the cardinal error of pantheism; while yet 
 by our living fellowship as Christians with the Di- 
 vine and Incarnate Son, we realize the aspiration 
 which pantheism both fosters and perverts. Christian 
 intellect then, so long as it is Christian, can never 
 be betrayed into the admission that God is the 
 universe ; Christian intellect can never be reduced 
 to the extremity of choosing between a denial of 
 moral distinctions and an assertion that God is the 
 parent of all immoral action, or to the desperate 
 endeavour to escape this alternative by volatilizing 
 God into non-existence. And Christian love, while 
 it is really Christian, cannot for one moment doubt 
 that it enfolds and possesses and is united to its 
 Divine Object. But this intellectual safeguard and 
 this moral satisfaction alike vanish, if the real Deity 
 of Jesus be denied or obscured: since it is the 
 Deity of our truly human Lord which satisfies the 
 Christian heart, while it protects the Christian in- 
 tellect against fatal aberrations. A deism which 
 would satisfy the heart, inevitably becomes pan- 
 theistic in its awkward attempts to become devo- 
 tional ; and although pantheism should everywhere 
 breathe the tenderness which almost blinds a reader 
 of Spinosa’s ethics to a perception of their real cha- 
 racter, still pantheism is at bottom and in its re- 
 sults not other than a graceful atheism. To par- 
 take of the Divine Nature incarnate in Christ is 
 not to bury God in the filth of moral pollution, nor 
 yet to transcendentalize Him into an abstraction, 
 oe ae 
 
676 The doctrine of a Divine Christ [ Lucr. 
 
 which mocks us, when we attempt to grasp it, as 
 an unmeaning nonentity! 
 
 3. One more sample shall be given of this pro- 
 tective efficacy of the doctrine before us. If it 
 guards in our thought the honour, the majesty, the 
 Life of God, it also protects the true dignity and 
 the rights of man. The unsettled spirit of our time, 
 when it has broken with the claims of faith, oscillates, 
 whether from caprice or in bewilderment, between 
 the most inconsistent errors. If at one while its 
 audacity would drive the Great God from His throne 
 in heaven to make way for the lawless intellect and 
 will of His creature, at another it seems possessed 
 by an infatuated passion for the degradation of man- 
 kind. It either ignores such features of the higher 
 side of our complex being as are the powers of re- 
 flection and of inference, or it arbitrarily assumes 
 that they are only the products of civilization. It 
 fixes its attention exclusively upon the graduated 
 variety of form perceptible in a long series of crania 
 which it has arranged in its museum, and then it pro- 
 claims with enthusiasm that a Newton or a Herschel 
 is after all only the cultivated descendant of a gro- 
 tesque and irrational ape. It even denies to man the 
 possession of any spiritual nature whatever ; thought 
 is asserted to be inherent in the substance of the 
 
 f M. Renan’s frequent mention of ‘God’ in his “ Vie de Jésus” 
 does not imply that he believes in a Supreme Being. ‘God’ means 
 with M. Renan only ‘the category of the ideal, and not any existing 
 personal being whatever. “Les sciences supposent qu'il n’y a pas 
 d’étre libre, supérieur ἃ |’ homme, auquel on puisse attribuer une 
 part appréciable dans la conduite morale pas plus que dans la con- 
 duite matérielle de l’univers.”— Haplications ἃ mes colléques, p. 24. 
 
ὙΠ: guards the true dignity of man. O77 
 
 brain ; belief in the existence of an immaterial es- 
 sence is treated as an unscientific and superstitious 
 prejudice ; virtuous and vicious actions are alluded 
 to as alike results of purely physical agencies® ; 
 man is to all intents and purposes a soulless brute. 
 My brethren, you will not suppose that I am de- 
 siring to derogate, however indirectly, from the 
 claims of that noble science which patiently investi- 
 gates the physiology of our animal nature; I am 
 only protesting against a rash and insulting hypo- 
 thesis, for which science, if her sons could speak 
 with one voice, would be loath to make herself re- 
 sponsible, since by it her true utterances are piteously 
 caricatured. It cannot be said that such a theory 
 is a harmless eccentricity of over-eager speculation ; 
 for it destroys that high and legitimate estimate 
 of God’s natural gifts to man which is an important 
 element of earnest and healthy morality in the in- 
 dividual, and which is still more essential to the 
 onward march of our social progress. 
 
 But so long as the Christian Church believes in 
 the true Divinity of our Incarnate Lord, it is 
 not probable that theories which deny the higher 
 aspects of human nature will meet with large ac- 
 ceptance. We Christians can bear to be told that 
 the skull of this or that section of the human 
 family bears this or that degree of resemblance to 
 the skull of a gorilla. We know, indeed, that as 
 receivers of the gift of life we are simply on a 
 level with the lowest of the lower creatures; we 
 
 & Cf. M. Taine, Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise, Introduction, 
 Ρ. xv: “Le vice et la vertu sont des produits comme le sucre et le 
 vitriol.” 
 
678 The doctrine of a Divine Christ [ Lrcr. 
 
 owe all that we are and have to God. Do we not 
 thank Him for our creation, preservation, and all the 
 blessings of this life? Might He not have given 
 us less than we have? might He not have given 
 us nothing? What have we, what are we, that we 
 have not received? The question of man’s place in 
 the universe touches not any self-achieved dignity 
 of our own, but the extent and the nature of the 
 Divine bounty. But while we believe the creed of 
 Christendom, we cannot view such a question as 
 open, or listen with any other feelings than those 
 of sorrow and repugnance to the arguments of the 
 apostles of human degradation. We cannot consent 
 to suppose ourselves to be mere animal organisms, 
 without any immaterial soul or future destiny, parted 
 by no distinctive attribute from the perishing beasts 
 around us. For the true nobility of our nature has 
 received the seal of a recognition, which forbids 
 our intellectual complicity with the physics or the 
 ‘psychology’ of materialism. Do not we Christians 
 call to mind, often, every day of our lives, that God 
 has put such high and distinctive honour upon our 
 common humanity as to clothe Himself in it, and 
 to bear it to heaven in its glorious and unsullied 
 perfection, that for all eternity it may be the ape 
 of His throne 4 
 Tremunt videntes angeli 
 Versam vicem mortalium ; 
 
 Peccat caro, mundat Caro, 
 Regnat Deus Dei Caro. 
 
 But this exaltation of our human nature would be 
 the wildest dream, unless Jesus were truly God as 
 well as Man. His Divinity is the warrant that in 
 
VIII.] guards the true dignity of man. 679 
 
 Him our race is “crowned with glory and honour,” 
 and that in taking upon Him “not the nature of 
 angels, but the seed of Abraham,” He was vindicating 
 our individual capacity for the highest greatness. 
 Apart from the phzenomena of reflection and reason, 
 the hopes which are raised by the Incarnation utterly 
 forbid speculations that would degrade man to the 
 level of a brute incapable of any real morality. If 
 we are told that such hopes are not direct replies to 
 the arguments of physiology, we answer that physi- 
 ology can and does correct the occasional eccen- 
 tricities of its exponents, and that the thought of 
 Christendom maintains its faith in the dignity of 
 man amidst the creatures of God by its faith in the 
 Incarnation of the Divine Son. “ Beloved, now are 
 we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what 
 we shall be: but we know that, when He shall 
 appear, we shall be like Him ; for we shall see Him 
 as He ish.” 
 
 II. These are but a few out of many illustrations 
 of the protection afforded by the doctrine of Christ’s 
 Divinity to sundry imperilled truths of natural re- 
 ligion. Let us proceed to consider the illuminative 
 or explanatory relation in which the doctrine stands 
 to truths which are internal to the Christian revela- 
 tion, and which themselves presuppose some definite 
 belief respecting the Person of Christ. 
 
 Now our Lord’s whole Mediatorial work, while it is 
 discharged through His assumed Humanity, is effi- 
 cacious and complete, simply because the Mediator 
 is not merely Man but God. As a Prophet His 
 utterances are infallible. As a Priest He offers a 
 
 h y St. John iii: 2. 
 
080 A Livine Christ infallible. [ Lucr. 
 
 prevailing sacrifice. As a King He wields an autho- 
 rity which has absolute claims upon the conscience, 
 and a power which will ultimately be proved to be 
 resistless. 
 
 (2) A sincere and intelligent belief in the Divinity 
 of Jesus Christ obliges us to believe that Jesus Christ, 
 as a Teacher, is infallible. His infallibility is not a 
 gift, it is an original and necessary endowment of 
 His higher Nature. If indeed Christ had been merely 
 man, He might still have been endowed with an 
 infallibility such as was that of His own apostles. 
 As it is, to charge Him with error is to deny that 
 He is God. Unless God’s wisdom can be limited, or 
 His veracity can be sullied by the suspicion of deceit ; 
 unless God can Himself succumb to error, or can 
 consent to deceive His reasonable creatures ; a sincere 
 believer in the true Divinity of Jesus Christ will bow 
 before His words in all their possible range of signifi- 
 cance, as before the words of a literally infallible Mas- 
 ter. So obvious an inference would only be disputed 
 under circumstances of an essentially transitional 
 character, such as are those which have perplexed 
 the Church of England during the last few years. 
 Deny that Jesus Christ is God, and you may or may 
 not proceed to deny that He is infallible. But con- 
 fess His Godhead, and the common sense of men of 
 the world will concur with the judgment of divines, 
 in bidding you avoid the irrational as well as blas- 
 phemous conception of a fallible Deity. To maintain, 
 on the one hand, that Jesus Christ is God, and, on 
 the other, that He is a teacher and propagator, not of 
 trivial and unimportant, but of far-reaching and sub- 
 stantial errors ;—this would have appeared to ancient 
 
ὙΠ Our Lord’s infallibility denied. 681 
 
 Christendom a paradox so singular as to be abso- 
 lutely incredible. But we have lived to hear men 
 proclaim the legendary and immoral character of 
 considerable portions of those Old Testament Scrip- 
 tures, upon which our Lord has set the seal of His 
 infallible authority’, And yet, side by side with 
 this rejection of Scriptures so deliberately sanctioned 
 by Christ, there is an unwillingness which, ilogical 
 _as it is, we must sincerely welcome, to profess any 
 explicit rejection of the Church’s belief in Christ’s 
 Divinity. Hence arises the endeavour to intercept a 
 conclusion, which might otherwise have seemed so 
 plain as to make arguments in its favour an intellec- 
 tual impertinence. Hence a series of singular refine- 
 ments, by which Christ is presented to the modern 
 world as really Divine, yet as subject to fatal error ; 
 as Founder of the true religion, yet as the credulous 
 patron of a volume replete with worthless legends ; 
 as the highest Teacher and Leader of humanity, yet 
 withal as the ignorant victim of the prejudices and 
 follies of an unenlightened age. 
 
 It will be urged by those who impugn the trust- 
 
 i Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. iii. p. 623: ‘“ [In Matt. iv. 4, 
 7, 10] we have quotations from Deut. viii. 3 ; vi. 16; vi. 13; Χ. 20. 
 And it is well known that there are many other passages in the 
 Gospels and Epistles, in which this book is referred to, and in some 
 of which Moses is expressly mentioned as the writer of the words 
 in question, 6. g. Acts iii. 22; Rom. x. 1g. And, though it is true 
 that, in the texts above quoted, the words are not, indeed, ascribed 
 to Moses, but are merely introduced with the phrase ‘It is written,’ 
 yet in Matt. xix. 7 the Pharisees refer to a passage in Deut. xxiv. I 
 as a law of Moses, and our Lord in His reply, v. 8, repeats their 
 language, and practically adopts it as correct, and makes it His 
 own.” 
 
682 Our Lord said to be fallible as Man. { Lrcr. 
 
 worthiness of the Pentateuch without denying in terms 
 the Divinity of Christ, that such a representation as 
 the foregoing does them a certain measure of injustice. 
 They do not wish to deny that Christ, as the Eternal 
 Son of God, is infallible. But the Christ Who speaks 
 in the Gospels is, they contend, “a Son of man,” and 
 as such He is subject to the human infirmities of igno- 
 rance and error‘. ‘Does He not profess Himself, they 
 ask, ‘in the plainest words, ignorant of the day of the 
 last judgment ? Does not His Evangelist assure us 
 that He increased in ‘ wisdom’ as well as in stature ? 
 This being so, was not His human knowledge limited ; 
 and was not error possible, if not mevitable, when He 
 passed beyond the limits of such knowledge as He 
 
 k Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. i. p. xxxi.: “It is perfectly con- 
 sistent with the most entire and sincere belief in our Lord’s Divinity 
 to hold, as many do, that, when He vouchsafed to become a ‘ Son of 
 Man,’ He took our nature fully, and voluntarily entered into all the 
 conditions of humanity, and, among others, into that which makes 
 our growth in all ordinary knowledge gradual and limited. We are 
 expressly told, in Luke ii. 52, that ‘ Jesus increased in wisdom,’ as 
 well as in ‘stature.’ It is not supposed that, in His human nature, 
 He was acquainted, more than any educated Jew of the age, with 
 the mysteries of all modern sciences ; nor, with St. Luke’s expres- 
 sions before us, can it be seriously maintained that, as an infant or 
 young child, He possessed a knowledge surpassing that of the most 
 pious and learned adults of His nation, upon the subject of the 
 authorship and age of the different portions of the Pentateuch. At 
 what period, then, of His life upon earth, is it to be supposed that 
 He had granted to Him, as the Son of Man, swpernaturally, full 
 and accurate information on these points, so that He should be ex- 
 pected to speak about the Pentateuch in other terms than any other 
 devout Jew of that day would have employed? Why should it be 
 thought that He would speak with certain Divine knowledge on this 
 matter, more than upon other matters of ordinary science or his- 
 tory 1" 
 
VIII.) Our Lord said to be fallible as Man. 685 
 
 possessed ? Why should He be supposed to speak of 
 the Pentateuch with a degree of critical acumen, to 
 which the foremost learning of His day and country 
 had not yet attained ? Take care,’ so they warn us, 
 ‘lest in your anxiety to repudiate Arius and Nes- 
 torius, you deny the reality of Christ’s Human Soul, 
 and become the unconscious associate of A pollinaris 
 or of Eutyches. Take care, lest you make Chris- 
 tianity answer with its life for the truth of a ‘theory’ 
 about the historical trustworthiness of the Old Tes- 
 tament, which, although it certainly was sanctioned 
 and put forward by Jesus Christ, yet has been as 
 decidedly condemned by the ‘higher criticism’ of 
 the present day.’ 
 
 Let us remark in this position, first of all, the 
 indirect admission that Christ, as the Eternal Son of 
 God, is strictly infallible. Obvious as such a truth 
 should be to a Christian, Arianism, be it remembered, 
 did not confess it. Arianism held that the Word 
 Himself was ignorant of the day of judgment. Such 
 a tenet was perfectly consistent with the denial that 
 the Word was consubstantial with the Omniscient 
 
 rod ; but it was utterly at variance with any pre- 
 tension honestly to believe in His Divinity! Yet it 
 
 1 St. Athanasius comments as follows upon St. Mark xiii. 
 32, οὐδὲ ὁ Υἱός. Contr. Arian. Or. 111. ¢. 44: διὰ τοῦτο καὶ περὶ 
 ἀγγέλων λέγων οὐκ εἴρηκεν ἐπαναβαίνων, ὅτι οὐδὲ τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον, ἀλλ᾽ 
 ἐσιώπησε, δεικνὺς κατὰ δύο ταῦτα, ὅτι εἰ τὸ Πνεῦμα οἶδεν, πολλῷ μᾶλλον ὁ 
 Λόγος ἧ Λόγος ἐστὶν οἶδε, παρ᾽ οὗ καὶ τὸ Πνεῦμα λαμβάνει, καὶ ὅτι περὶ τοῦ 
 Πνεύματος σιωπήσας φάνερον πεποίηκεν, ὅτι περὶ τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης αὐτοῦ 
 λειτουργίας ἔλεγεν᾽ οὐδὲ ὁ Υἱός. καὶ τούτου τεκμήριον, ὅτι ἀνθρωπίνως 
 εἰρηκώς, ode ὁ Υἱὸς οἷδε, δείκνυσιν ὅμως θεϊκῶς ἑαυτὸν τὰ πάντα εἰδότα. ὅν 
 
 γὰρ λέγει Ὑἱὸν τὴν ἡμέραν μὴ εἰδέναι, τοῦτον εἰδέναι λέγει τὸν Πατέρα" 
 
084 Our Lord’s ‘growth in knowledge.’ [ Lxcr- 
 
 must be recorded with sorrow, that some writers who 
 would desire nothing less than to uphold the name 
 and errors of the opponent of Athanasius, do never- 
 theless seem to speak at times as if it were seriously 
 possible that the Infallible could have erred, or that 
 the boundless knowledge of the Eternal Mind could 
 be really limited. Let us then note and welcome 
 the admission that the Eternal Son of God is lite- 
 rally infallible, even though it be made in quarters 
 where His authority, as the Incarnate Christ teach- 
 ing unerringly substantial truth, is directly impugned 
 and repudiated. 
 
 It is of course urged that our Lord’s Human Soul is 
 the seat of that ‘ignorance’ which is insisted upon as 
 being so fatal to His authority as a Teacher. Let us 
 then enquire what the statements of Scripture on 
 this mysterious subject would really appear to affirm. 
 
 1. When St. Luke tells us that our Lord increased 
 in wisdom and stature™, we can scarcely doubt that 
 an intellectual development of some kind in Christ’s 
 human soul is indicated, correspondent to the growth 
 of His bodily frame. But St. Luke had previously 
 spoken of the Child Jesus as “being filled with 
 
 οὐδεὶς yap, φησί, γίνωσκει τὸν Πατέρα εἰ μὴ ὁ Yios. πᾶς δὲ πλὴν τῶν 
 ᾿Αρειανῶν συνομολογήσειεν, ὡς 6 τὸν Πατέρα γινώσκων πολλῷ μᾶλλον οἶδεν 
 τῆς κτίσεως τὸ ὅλον, ἐν δὲ τῷ ὅλῳ καὶ τὸ τέλος ἐστὶ ταύτης. 
 
 Olshausen observes, in Ev. Matt. xxiv. 36, Comm. i. p. 900, “ Ist 
 aber vom Sohne Gottes hier die Rede, so kann das von ihm pridi- 
 cirte Nichtwissen der ἡμέρα und ὥρα kein absolutes seyn indem die 
 Wesenseinheit des Vaters und des Sohnes das Wissen des Sohnes und 
 des Vaters nicht specifisch zu trennen gestattet ; es muss vielmehr 
 nur von dem Zustande der κένωσις des Herrn in Stande seiner 
 Niedrigkeit verstanden werden.” 
 
 m δύ, Luke il. 52: Ἰησοῦς προέκοπτε σοφίᾳ καὶ ἡλικίᾳ. 
 
ΜΠ Our Lord’s ‘growth in knowledge, 685 
 
 wisdom®”,” and St. John teaches that as the Word In- 
 carnate, Jesus was actually “full of truth.” St. John 
 means not only that our Lord was veracious, but 
 that He was fully in possession of objective truth”. 
 It is clearly implied that, according to St. John, this 
 fulness of truth was an element of that glory which 
 the first disciples beheld or contemplated’. This 
 statement appears to be incompatible with the sup- 
 position that the Human Soul of Jesus, through 
 spiritual contact with which the disciples ‘beheld’ 
 the glory of the Eternal Word, was Itself not ‘ full 
 of truth.’ St. John’s narrative does not admit of our 
 confining this ‘fulness of truth’ to the later days 
 of Christ’s ministry, or to the period which followed 
 His resurrection. There are then two representa- 
 tions before us, one suggesting a limitation of know- 
 ledge, the other a fulness of knowledge in the human 
 soul of Christ. In order to harmonize these state- 
 ments, we need not fall back upon the vulgar ration- 
 alistic expedient of supposing that between St. John’s 
 representation of our Lord’s Person, and that which is 
 given in the three first Gospels, there is an intrinsic 
 and radical discrepancy. If we take St. John’s ac- 
 count together with that of St. Luke, might it not 
 seem that we have here an instance of that tender 
 condescension, by which Jesus willed to place Him- 
 self in a relation of real sympathy with the various 
 experiences of our finite existence? Although by 
 an infused knowledge He was already, even as a 
 Child, ‘full of truth, yet that He might enter 
 n $t. Luke 11. 40: πληρούμενον σοφίας. 
 υ St. John 1. 14: πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας. 
 
 » [bid.: ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ. 
 
080 Our Lord’s «growth in knowledge.’ [ Lxcr. 
 
 with the sympathy of experience into the condi- 
 tions of our intellectual life, He might seem to 
 have acquired by the slow labour of observation 
 and inference a new mastery over truths which He 
 already possessed. Such a co-existence of growth 
 in knowledge with a possession of its ultimate re- 
 sults would not be without a parallel in ordinary 
 human life. In moral matters, a living example 
 may teach with a new power the truth of a prin- 
 ciple which we have before recognised intuitively. In 
 another field of knowledge, the telescope or the 
 theodolite may verify some result of which we had 
 been already apprised by a mathematical calculation. 
 Thus the reality of our Lord’s intellectual develop- 
 ment would not necessarily be inconsistent with the 
 simultaneous perfection of His knowledge. He 
 might have possessed an infused knowledge of all 
 truth, and yet have mastered what He already pos- 
 sessed by experience and in detail, in order to satisfy 
 the intellectual conditions of our human existence. 
 Taken by itself, however, St. Luke’s language appears 
 simply to describe an increase of wisdom in our 
 Lord’s Human Mind. But if this—as distinct from 
 an increasing manifestation of knowledge—should 
 be the real meaning of the Evangelist, does such an 
 increase warrant our saying that, in the days of His 
 ministry, our Lord was ignorant of the real character 
 of the Jewish Scriptures? Nay, are we to go further, 
 and to maintain that, when He made definite state- 
 ments on the subject, He was both the victim 
 and the propagator of serious error? Surely such 
 inferences are not less unwarranted by the language 
 and sense of Scripture than they are destructive 
 
Ν1Π.1 Our Lord’s words, “ neither the Son.” 687 
 
 of Christ's character and authority as a teacher of 
 truth ! 
 
 2. But it will be argued that our Lord, in de- 
 claring His ignorance of the day of the last judg- 
 ment, does positively assign a specified limit to the 
 knowledge actually possessed by His Human Soul. 
 “Of that day,” He says, “and that hour knoweth no 
 man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither 
 the Son, but the Fathers.” ‘If these words,’ you 
 urge, ‘do not refer to His ignorance as God, they 
 must refer to His ignorance in the only other pos- 
 sible sense, that is to say, to His ignorance as 
 Man.’ 
 
 Of what nature then is the ‘ignorance’ to which our 
 Lord alludes in this much-controverted text? Is it 
 a real matter-of-fact ignorance, or is it an ignorance 
 which is only ideal and hypothetical? Is it an igno- 
 rance to which man, as man, is naturally subject, but 
 to which the Soul of Christ, the Perfect Man, was not 
 subject, since His human intelligence was illuminated 
 by an infused omniscience'? or is it an economical 
 as distinct from a real ignorance? Is it the ignorance 
 of the Teacher, who withholds from His disciples a 
 knowledge which He actually possesses, but which it 
 is not for their advantage to acquires? or is it the 
 
 a4 St. Mark xiii. 32: περὶ Se τῆς ἡμερᾶς ἐκείνης καὶ τῆς ὥρας, οὐδεὶς 
 οἶδεν, οὐδὲ οἱ ἄγγελοι οἱ ἐν οὐρανῷ, οὐδὲ ὁ Υἱὸς, εἰ μὴ ὁ Πατήρ. 
 
 r §. Greg. Magn. Epist. lib. x. 39. ad Eulog.: “Jn natura qui- 
 dem humanitatis novit diem et horam, judicii, sed tamen hune non 
 ex natura humanitatis novit.” 
 
 s §. Aug. de Trin. i. 12: “ Hoe enim nescit, quod nescientes 
 facit, id est, quod non ita sciebat ut tune discipulis indicaret 
 8. Ambros. de Fide, ν. ὃ 222: “ Nostrum assumpsit affectum, ut 
 
 ” 
 
 nostra ignoratione nescire se diceret, non quia aliquid ipse nesciret.” 
 
088 Our Lord’s words, « neither the Son.” [Lect. 
 
 ignorance which is compatible with implicit know- 
 ledge 1 Does Christ implicitly know the date of the 
 day of judgment, yet, that He may rebuke the for- 
 wardness of His disciples, does He refrain from, con- 
 templating that which is potentially within the 
 range of His mental vision? Is He deliberately 
 turning away His gaze from the secrets which are 
 open to it, and which a coarse, earthly curiosity 
 would have greedily and quickly investigated 4 
 With our eye upon the literal meaning of our 
 Lord’s words, must we not hesitate to accept any 
 of these explanations? It is indeed true that 
 to many very thoughtful and saintly minds, the 
 words, “neither the Son,” have not appeared to 
 imply any ‘ignorance’ in the Son, even as Man. 
 But antiquity does not furnish any decisive con- 
 sent in favour of this belief; and it might seem, 
 however involuntarily, to put a certain force upon 
 the direct sense of the passage. There is no 
 sufficient eround for questioning the correctness 
 of the text"; and here, as always, “if a literal 
 explanation will stand, the furthest from the letter 
 is commonly the worst.” If elsewhere, in the course 
 of these lectures, we have appealed to the literal 
 force of the great texts in St. John and St. Paul 
 as yielding a witness to the Catholic doctrine, can 
 we substitute for the literal sense of the passage 
 before us a sense which, to say the least, is not 
 
 Ὁ. Hil. de Trin. ix.62. See the passages accumulated by Dr. New- 
 man, Select Treatises of St. Athanasius, p. 464, note /, Lib. Fath. 
 
 t So Lange, Leben Jesu, ii. 3, p. 1280. 
 
 Ὁ §. Ambr. de Fid. v. ὃ 193: “ Primum veteres non habent 
 codices Greeci, quia nee Filius scit.” 
 
VIII. ] how understood by St. Athanasius. 689 
 
 that suggested by the letter? But if we should un- 
 derstand that our Lord in His Human Soul was, at 
 the time of His speaking, actually ignorant of the 
 day of the last judgment, we should find ourselves 
 sheltered by fathers of unquestioned orthodoxy. 
 St. Irenzeus discovers in our Lord’s Human ignorance 
 a moral argument against the intellectual self-asser- 
 tion of his own Gnostic contemporaries* ; while he 
 attributes Omniscience to the Divine Nature of 
 Christ in the clearest terms. St. Athanasius insists 
 that the explanation which he gives, restricting our 
 Lord’s ignorance to His Human Soul, is a matter 
 in which the faithful are well instructedY. He 
 is careful to assert again and again our Lord’s 
 
 x §. Iren. adv. Heer. ii. 28, 6: “ Irrationabiliter autem inflati, 
 audaciter inenarrabilia Dei mysteria scire vos dicitis ; quandoqui- 
 dem et Dominus, ipse Filius Dei, ipsum judicii diem et horam con- 
 cessit scire solum Patrem, manifesté dicens, ‘ De die autem illa et 
 hora nemo scit, neque Filius, sed Pater solus.’ (Mare. xiii. 32.) Si 
 igitur scientiam diei illius Filius non erubuit referre ad Patrem, sed 
 dixit quod verum est ; neque nos erubescamus, que sunt in que- 
 stionibus majora secundum nos, reservare Deo. Nemo enim super 
 magistrum est.” That St. Irenus is here referring to our Lord’s 
 humanity is clear from the appeal to His example. Of His Divinity 
 he says (ii. 28, 7): “Spiritus Salvatoris, qui in eo est, scrutatur 
 omnia, et altitudines Dei.” Cf. Bull, Def. Fid. Nie. ii. 5, 8. 
 
 y §. Athan. contr. Arian. Orat. ili. c. 45: of δὲ φιλόχριστοι καὶ 
 χριστοφόροι γινώσκωμεν, ὡς οὐκ ἀγνοῶν ὁ Λόγος ἧ Λόγος ἐστὶν ἔλεγεν, “ οὐκ 
 οἶδα," οἷδε γάρ, ἀλλὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον δεικνύς, ὅτι τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἴδιόν ἐστι τὸ 
 ἀγνοεῖν, καὶ ὅτι σάρκα ἀγνοοῦσαν ἐνεδύσατο, ἐν 7 dv σαρκικῶς ἔλεγεν. 
 Dr. Mill resents the suggestion “that when even an Athanasius 
 could speak (with the Scriptures) of the limitation of human 
 knowledge in the Incarnate Son, the improved theology of later 
 times is entitled to censure the sentiment, as though impeaching 
 His Divine Personality.” On the Nature of Christianity, p. 18, 
 
 wy 
 
690 Our Lord’s words in St. Mark xin. 32, [ Lect. 
 
 omniscience as God the Word ; he attributes Christ’s 
 ‘ignorance’ as Man to the condescending love by which 
 He willed to be like man in all things’, and com- 
 pares it, accordingly, to His hunger and thirst®. “To 
 whom,” exclaims St. Gregory Nazianzen, “can it be 
 a matter of doubt that Christ has a knowledge of 
 that hour as God, but says that He is ignorant of it 
 as Man>?” δύ. Cyril of Alexandria argues that our 
 Lord’s ‘ignorance’ as Man is in keeping with the 
 whole economy of the Incarnation. As God, Christ 
 did know the day of judgment ; but it were consistent 
 with the law of self-humiliation prescribed by His 
 infinite love that He should assume all the conditions 
 of real humanity, and therefore, with the rest, a 
 limitation of knowledge. There would be no reason- 
 able ground for offence at that which was only a 
 
 2 §. Athan. contr. Arian. Orat. 111. ¢. 43 : ἀμέλει λέγων ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ 
 περὶ TOU κατὰ TO ἀνθρώπινον αὐτοῦ" Πάτερ, ἐλήλυθεν ἡ ὥρα" δόξασόν σου 
 ‘ © 756 ~ , > ed a A ‘ “ , ω ς ‘ , 
 τὸν Υἱόν" δῆλός ἐστιν ὅτι καὶ THY περὶ τοῦ πάντων τέλους ὥραν ws μὲν Λόγος 
 , ς δὲ Bd 6 > = > 6 , ν 18 A > “ ‘ , 
 γινώσκει, ὡς δὲ ἄνθρωπος ἀγνοεῖ" ἀνθρώπου yap ἴδιον τὸ ἀγνοεῖν, Kal μά- 
 λιστα ταῦτα. ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦτο τῆς φιλανθρωπίας ἴδιον τοῦ Σωτῆρος. ἐπειδὴ 
 γὰρ γέγονεν ἄνθρωπος, οὐκ ἐπαισχύνεται διὰ τὴν σάρκα τὴν ἀγνοοῦσαν 
 > ΄ > 9 “ , e NF ς \ > “ a > ” 
 εἰπεῖν, οὐκ οἶδα, ἵνα δείξῃ ὅτι εἰδώς ὡς Θεὸς ἀγνοεῖ σαρκικῶς. οὐκ εἴρηκε 
 ΄ A - J oa col 
 γοῦν, οὐδὲ ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ οἴδεν, ἵνα μὴ ἡ θεότης ἀγνοοῦσα φαίνηται" ἀλλ᾽ 
 ς ΄σ , “ - - 
 ἁπλῶς, οὐδὲ ὁ Υἱός, ἵνα τοῦ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων γενομένου Yiod ἡ ἄγνοια ἧ. 
 ἘΞ i 
 ἃ Contr. Ar. Or. lil. 46: ὥσπερ yap ἄνθρωπος γενόμενος μετὰ ἀνθρώ- 
 a A ὃ Lad ‘ , Ld A ‘ cal > ’ ς BLA 
 Tov πεινᾷ καὶ διψᾷ καὶ πάσχει, οὕτως μετὰ μὲν τῶν ἀνθρώπων ὡς ἄνθρωπος 
 3 on Ξ x ‘nn 
 οὐκ οἶδε, θεϊκῶς δὲ ἐν τῷ Πατρὶ ὧν Λόγος καὶ Σοφία οἶδε, καὶ οὐδέν ἐστιν ὃ 
 ἀγνοεῖ. 
 1 “ “ a 
 b §. Greg. Naz. Orat. xxx. 15: καίτοι πῶς ἀγνοεῖ τι τῶν ὄντων ἡ 
 5 γΎ ἡ 
 Σοφία ὁ ποιητὴς τῶν αἰώνων, 6 συντελεστὴς καὶ μεταποιητὴς, τὸ πέρας τῶν 
 Ἅ n ΄ 
 γενομένων ; . ... ἢ πᾶσιν εὔδηλον, ὅτι γινώσκει μὲν, ὡς Θεὸς, ἀγνοεῖν δέ 
 ¢ m” - 
 φησιν, ὡς ἄνθρωπος, ἄν τις τὸ φαινόμενον χωρίσῃ τοῦ vooupévov;...... 
 a A a ς λ , 74 A > ͵ ον , ‘ ~ 
 ὥστε τὴν ἄγνοιαν ὑπολαμβάνειν ἐπὶ τὸ εὐσεβέστερον, TH ἀνθρωπίνῳ, μὴ τῷ 
 
 ᾿ Ψ'. , 
 Θείῳ ταύτην λογιζομένους. 
 
VIII.) = how understood by St. Cyril of Alexandria. 691 
 
 consequence of the Divine Incarnation®. You will 
 remark, my brethren, the significance of such a 
 judgment when advanced by this great father, the 
 uncompromising opponent of Nestorian error, the 
 strenuous assertor of the Hypostatic Union, the chief 
 inheritor of all that is most characteristic in the 
 theological mind of St. Athanasius. It is of course 
 true that a different belief was already widely received 
 within the Church: it is enough to pomt to the 
 ‘retractation’ of Leporius, to which St. Augustine 
 
 e §. Cyril. Alex. Thesaurus, Op. tom. v. p. 221: ὥσπερ οὖν avy- 
 κεχώρηκεν ἑαυτὸν ὡς ἄνθρωπον γενόμενον μετὰ ἀνθρώπων καὶ πεινᾷν καὶ 
 διψῆν καὶ τὰ ἄλλα πάσχειν ἅπερ εἴρηται περὶ αὐτοῦ, τὸν αὐτὸν δὴ τρόπον 
 ἀκόλουθον μὴ σκανδαλίζεσθαι κἂν ὡς ἄνθρωπος λέγῃ μετὰ ἀνθρώπων ἀγνοεῖν, 
 ὅτι τὴν αὐτὴν ἡμῖν ἐφόρεσε σάρκα" οἶδε μὲν γὰρ ὡς Σοφία καὶ Λόγος ὧν 
 ἐν Πατρί: μὴ εἰδέναι δέ φησι δὲ ἡμᾶς καὶ μέθ᾽ ἡμῶν ὡς ἄνθρωπος. But 
 see the whole discussion of the bearing of St. Mark xiii. 32 upon 
 the Homoousion (Thesaurus, pp. 217-224). Certainly St. Cyril 
 refers to the οἰκονομία, and he speaks of Christ’s “saying that He 
 did not know, on our account,” and of His professing not to know 
 ‘humanly.’ But this language does not amount to saying that 
 Christ really did know, as Man, while for reasons of His Own, 
 which were connected with His love and φιλανθρωπία, He said He 
 knew not. St. Cyril’s mind appears to be, that our Lord did 
 know as God, but in His love He assumed all that belongs to real 
 manhood, and, therefore, actual limitation of knowledge. The 
 word οἰκονομία does not seem to mean here simply a gracious or 
 wise arrangement, but the Incarnation, considered as involving 
 Christ’s submission to human limitations. The Latin translator 
 renders it “administrationi sive Incarnationi.” 8. Cyr. Op. v. p.218. 
 St. Cyril does not say that Christ really did know as Man; he must 
 have said so, considering the bearing of his argument, had he 
 believed it. He thus states the principle which he kept in view : 
 οὔτω yap ἔκαστον τῶν λεγομένων ἐν TH οἰκείᾳ τάξει κείσεται" οὔτε τῶν ὅσα 
 πρέπει γυμνῷ τῷ Λόγῳ καταφερομένων εἰς τὸ ἀνθρώπινον, οὔτε μὴν τῶν 
 ἀνθρωπίνων ἀναβαινόντων εἰς τὸν τῆς θεότητος λόγον. Thes. p. 253: 
 
 Yy2 
 
692 The heresy of the Agnoete. [Lecr. 
 
 was one of the subscribing bishops". But although a 
 contrary judgment subsequently predominated in the 
 West, it 15 certain that the leading opponents of Arian- 
 ism did not shrink from recognising a limitation of 
 knowledge in Christ’s Human Soul, and that they ap- 
 pealed to His Own words as a warrant for doing so®. 
 
 ‘But have we not here,’ you ask, ‘albeit disguised 
 under and recommended by the sanction of great 
 names, the old heresy of the Agnoetee?’ No. The 
 Agnoetz attributed ignorance not merely to our 
 Lord’s Human Soul, but to the Eternal Word. They 
 seem to have imagined a confusion of Natures in 
 Christ, after the Eutychian pattern, and then to have 
 attributed ignorance to that Divine Nature into which 
 His Human Nature, as they held, was absorbed ?. 
 
 ἃ Quoted by Petavius, De Incarn. xi.; ¢. 1, ὃ 14. Leporius 
 appears to have answered the Arian objections by restricting the 
 ignorance to our Lord’s Human Soul, after the manner of St. Atha- 
 nasius. He retracts as follows: “Ut autem et hine nihil cuiquam 
 in suspicione derelinquam, tune dixi, immd ad objecta respondi, 
 Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum secundum hominem ignorare : 
 sed nunc non solum dicere non presumo, verum etiam priorem 
 anathematizo prolatam in hae parte sententiam.” 
 
 © Compare Bishop Forbes on Nic. Creed, p. 146, 2nd ed. And 
 see S. Hil. in Matt. Comm. c. 26, n. 4; Theodoret in Ps. xv. § 7, 
 quoted by Klee. 
 
 f See Suicer in voe. ᾿Αγνοηταί, i. p. 65: “Hi docebant divinam 
 Christi naturam (hanc enim solam post Unionem agnoscebant, tan- 
 quam absorpta esset plané humana), quedam ignorasse, ut horam 
 extremi judicii.” Eulogius of Alexandria, who wrote against them, 
 denied any actual limitation of knowledge in Christ’s Manhood, but 
 admitted that earlier fathers had taught this, πρὸς τὴν τῶν ᾿Δρειανῶν 
 μανίαν ἀντιφερόμενοι : but, as he thinks, because οἰκονομικώτερον ἐδοκί- 
 μασαν ἐπὶ τῆς ἀνθρωπότητος ταῦτα φέρειν ἢ παραχωρεῖν ἐκείνους μεθέλκειν 
 ταῦτα κατὰ τῆς θεότητος. Apud Photium. Cod. 230, ed. Bekker. 
 p. 284, 6, sub fin. 
 
VIII.) Real range of the difficulty before us. 693 
 
 They were thus, on this point, in agreement with 
 the Arians ; while Eulogius of Alexandria, who wrote 
 against them, admitted that Catholic fathers before 
 him had taught that, as Man, Christ had been sub- 
 ject to a certain limitation of knowledges. 
 
 ‘At any rate, you rejoin, ‘if our Lord’s words are 
 to be taken literally, if they are held to mean that 
 the knowledge of His Human Soul is in any degree 
 limited, are we not in danger of Nestorian error ? 
 Does not this ‘knowledge’ and ‘ignorance’ with re- 
 spect to a single subject, dissolve the unity of the 
 God-man'? Js not this intellectual dualism incon- 
 sistent with any conception we can form of a single 
 personality ἡ Can we not understand the indisposi- 
 tion of later theologians to accept the language of 
 St. Athanasius and others without an explanation, 
 even although a sense which it does not of itself 
 suggest is thereby forced upon it 2’ 
 
 The question to be considered, my brethren, is 
 whether such an objection has not a larger range 
 than you contemplate. Is it not equally valid 
 against other and undisputed contrasts between the 
 Divine and Human Natures of the Incarnate Soni 4 
 
 £ It is remarkable that “die Ansicht dass Christi Menschheit 
 gleich nach der Vereinigung mit dem Logos Alles wusste, als 
 Irrthum des Arnold von Villanova 1309 formlich verurtheilt wor- 
 den.” Klee, Dogm. p. 511. 
 
 h Stier, Reden Jesu in Matt. xxiv. 36. 
 
 i See Klee, Dogmatik, p. 511: “ Der Menschheit Christi kann 
 keine absolute Vollendung und Imperfectibilitat der Erkenntniss 
 von Anfang an zugelegt werden, weil dann Christus im Eingange in 
 seine Glorie in Bezug auf sie unverherrlicht geblieben wiire, was 
 nicht wohl angenommen werden kann ; weil ferner dann in Christo 
 
694 Omniserence and Limited Knowledge, [Lecr. 
 
 For example, as God, Christ is omnipresent; as 
 Man, He is present at a particular point in space. 
 Do you say that this, however mysterious, is more 
 conceivable than the co-existence of ignorance and 
 knowledge, with respect to a single subject in a 
 single personality ? Let me then ask whether this 
 co-existence of ignorance and knowledge is more 
 mysterious than a co-existence of absolute blessed- 
 ness and intense suffermg? If the Scriptural words 
 which describe the sufferings of Jesus are under- 
 stood literally, without establishing Nestorianism ; 
 why are we in danger of Nestorianism if we 
 understand Him to -be speaking of His Manhood, 
 when He asserts that the Son is ignorant of the 
 day of judgment? If Jesus, as Man, could be 
 without the Divine attribute of perfect blessed- 
 ness, without prejudice to His full possession of 
 it, as God; why could He not, in like manner, 
 as Man, be without the Divine attribute of per- 
 fect knowledge? If as He knelt in Gethsemane, 
 He was in one sphere of existence All-blessed, 
 and in another “sore amazed, very heavy, sorrow- 
 ful even unto death;” might He not with equal 
 
 eine wahrhafte Allwissenheit angenommen werden miisste, was mit 
 der menschlichen Natur und dem menschlichen Willen nicht wohl 
 zu vereinbaren ist ; und wenn Einige sich damit helfen zu koénnen 
 glaubten, dass diese Allwissenheit immer nur eine aus Gnade mit- 
 getheilte wire, so ist dagegen zu bemerken, dass die Menschheit 
 dann aus Gnade auch die andern géttlichen Attribute, z. B. All- 
 macht haben kénnte, und wenn man dieses mit der Entgegnung 
 aus dem Felde zu schlagen glaubt, dass die Allmacht die Gottheit 
 selbst, mithin absolut incommunicabel ist, so muss erwidert werden, 
 dass die Allwissenheit ebenso Gottes Wesen selbst, somit unmitt- 
 
 heilbar ist.” ok 
 
δ᾿ ὁ Ὁ δ; how co-existent in the One Christ. 695 
 
 truth be in the one Omniscient, and in the other 
 subject to limitations of knowledge? The difhi- 
 culty* is common to all the contrasts of the Divine 
 Incarnation; but these contrasts, while they en- 
 hance our sense of our Lord’s love and conde- 
 scension, do not destroy our apprehension of the 
 Personal Unity of the Incarnate Christ!. His Single 
 Personality has two spheres of existence : in the one 
 It is all-blessed, undying, and omniscient; in the 
 other It meets with pain of mind and body, with 
 actual death, and with a correspondent liability to 
 a limitation of knowledge. No such limitation, we 
 may be sure, can interfere with the completeness 
 of His redemptive office ; but at least it places Him 
 as Man in a perfect sympathy with the actual con- 
 ditions of the mental life of His brethren ™. 
 
 k Bishop Ellicott, in Aids to Faith, p. 445: “Is there really any 
 greater difficulty in such a passage [as St. Mark xiii. 32] than in 
 John xi, 33, 35, where we are told that those holy cheeks were still 
 wet with human tears, while the loud Voice was crying, ‘ Lazarus, 
 come forth!’ ” 
 
 1 See Leibnitz’s reply to Wissowatius, quoted by Lessing, Sammtl. 
 Schrift. ix. 277: “ Potest quis ex nostra hypothesi simul esse ille 
 qui nescit diem judicii, nempe homo, et ille qui est Deus Altissimus, 
 Qu hypothesis nostra, quod idem simul possit esse Deus et homo, 
 quamdiu non evertitur, tamdiu contrarium argumentum petit 
 principium.” 
 
 m See Klee, ubi supra: “Auch das kann nicht gesagt werden, dass 
 die menschliche Natur, wenn sie nicht absolut vollkommen und imper- 
 fectibel ist, dann mit Unwissenheit behaftet ist; denn nicht-allwissend 
 ist nicht unwissend, sonst war Adam vor seinem Falle schon, und 
 sind die Engel und Heiligen in ihrer Glorie immerfort in der 
 Unwissenheit. Unwissenheit ist Negation des nothwendigen und 
 ziemenden Wissens, und solche ist in der Menschheit Christi nicht, 
 in welche die ihr verbundene Gottheit alles zu ihrem Berufe 
 
696 Only one limitation of Christ's knowledge recorded. | Linct. 
 
 But if this limitation of our Lord’s human know- 
 ledge be admitted, to what does the admission lead 4 
 It leads, properly speaking, to nothing beyond itself, 
 It amounts to this: that at the particular time of 
 His speaking, the Human Soul of Christ was limited 
 as to Its range of knowledge in one particular 
 direction. We have no real grounds for asserting 
 that this particular ignorance was only removed 
 after the Resurrection, or that it existed at any 
 other period of our Lord’s earthly life. We have 
 still less reason for imagining that Christ’s know- 
 ledge was limited on any other subject whatever. 
 
 Certain it is from Scripture that our Lord was 
 constantly giving proofs, during His earthly life, 
 of an altogether superhuman range of knowledge. 
 There was not merely in Him the quick and pene- 
 trating discernment of a very holy soul,—not merely 
 “that unction from the Holy One” whereby Chris- 
 tians instinctively “know all things” that concern 
 their salvation. It was emphatically a knowledge 
 of hard matters of fact, not revealed to Him by the 
 senses, and beyond the reach of sense. Thus He 
 knows the exact coin which will be found in the 
 mouth of the first fish which His apostle will pre- 
 sently take. He bases His discourse on the great- 
 est in the kingdom of heaven, on an accurate 
 
 gehérige und durch sie alles zum Heile der Menschheit gehorige 
 iiberstrémte. Darum war auch die Steigerung der Wissenschaft der 
 Menschheit keine Erlosung derselben, und fallt der Einwand, dass, 
 wenn die Menschheit etwas nicht gewusst hatte, sie eine erlésungs- 
 bediirftige gewesen wire, was doch nicht angenommen werden 
 konne, weg.” 
 
 n St. Matt. xvii. 27. 
 
Vint. | Superhuman vastness of His knowledge. 697 
 
 knowledge of the secret communings in which His 
 conscience-stricken disciples had indulged on the 
 road to Capernaum®. He gives particular instructions 
 to the two disciples as to the finding of the ass on 
 which He will make His entry into Jerusalem P. 
 He is perfectly cognizant of the secret plottings of 
 the traitor, although no human informant had dis- 
 closed them4, Nor is this knowledge supernaturally 
 communicated at the moment; it is the result of 
 an actual supra-sensuous sight of that which He 
 describes. “Before that Philip called thee,” He 
 says to Nathanael, “when thou wast under the 
 fig-tree, I saw thee.” Do you compare this to the 
 knowledge of secrets ascribed to Elisha’, to Danielt, 
 to St. Peter"? In these instances, as eminently in 
 that of Daniel, the secret was revealed to the soul 
 of the prophet or apostle. In the case of Christ we 
 hear of no such revelation ; He speaks of the things 
 of heaven with a majestic familiarity which is 
 natural to One Who knows them as beholding them 
 “in Himself.” 
 
 Indeed, our Lord’s knowledge embraced two dis- 
 tricts, each of which really lies open only to the 
 Eye of the Most High. We will not dwell on His 
 knowledge of the unsuspected future, a know- 
 ledge inherent in Him, as it was imparted to those 
 prophets in whom His Spirit had dwelt. We will 
 not insist on His knowledge of a strictly contingent 
 
 © St. Luke ix. 47: ἰδὼν τὸν διαλογισμὸν τῆς καρδίας αὐτῶν. 
 
 Ρ St. Matt. xxi. 2; St. Mark xi. 2; St. Luke xix. 30. 
 
 4 St. John xiii. 11. r Tbid. 1. 49. 
 
 s 2 Kings vi. 9, 32. t Dan. ii. rg. 
 
 u Acts v. 3. x St. John vi. 61: ἐν ἑαυτῷ. 
 
698 Superhuman vastness { Lucr, 
 
 futurity, such as is involved in His positive asser- 
 tion that Tyre and Sidon would have repented of 
 their sins if they had enjoyed the opportunities of 
 Chorazin and Bethsaiday ; although such knowledge 
 as this, considering the vast survey of motives 
 and circumstances which it implies, must be strictly 
 proper to God alone. But He knew the secret 
 heart of man, and He knew the hidden thought 
 and purpose of the Most High God. Such a “dis- 
 cerner” was He “of the thoughts and intents” of 
 human hearts4, so truly did His Apocalyptic title, 
 the “Searcher of the reins and hearts,” belong to 
 Him in the days of His historical manifestation, 
 that “ He needed not that any should testify to Him 
 of men, for He knew what was in man?.” This was 
 not a result of His taking careful note of pecu- 
 liarities of action and character manifested to the 
 eye by those around Him, but of His “perceiving 
 in His Spirit” and “knowing in Himself¢” the 
 unuttered reasonings and volitions which were taking 
 shape, moment by moment, within the secret souls 
 of men, just as clearly as He saw physical facts not 
 ordinarily appreciated except by sensuous perception. 
 This was the conviction of His apostles. “We are 
 sure,” they said, “that Thou knowest all things4.” 
 
 y St. Matt. xi. 21. 
 
 z Heb. iv. 12: κριτικὸς ἐνθυμήσεων καὶ ἐννοιῶν καρδίας. 
 
 a Rey. ii. 22. The message from Jesus to each of the angels of 
 the seven Churches begins with the word οἶδα, in order to remind 
 these bishops of His penetrating omniscience. 
 
 b St. John ii. 25: οὐ χρείαν εἶχεν ἵνα τὶς μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ av- 
 θρώπου᾽ αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐγίνωσκε τί ἢν ἐν τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ. 
 
 ο St. Mark ii. 8; v. 30. 
 
 ἃ St. John xvi. 30: νῦν οἴδαμεν ὅτι οἶδας πάντα. 
 
VIII.] of Christ's knowledge as Man. 699 
 
 “Lord, Thou knowest all things,” cries St. Peter, 
 “Thou knowest that I love Thee®.” Yet more, in 
 the Eternal Father Jesus encounters no impene- 
 trable mysteries; for Jesus no clouds and dark- 
 ness are round about Him, nor is His way in the 
 sea, and His path in the deep waters, and His 
 footsteps unknown. On the contrary, our Lord 
 reciprocates the Father’s knowledge of Himself by 
 an equivalent knowledge of the Father. “As the 
 Father knoweth Me, even so know I the Father ;” 
 “No man knoweth Who the Son is, but the Father ; 
 and Who the Father is, but the Son, and he to 
 whom the Son will reveal Hims.” This witness 
 of Scripture is here insisted on, because it sup- 
 plies the true foil to our Lord’s assertion respect- 
 ing the day of judgment. If that statement should 
 be construed literally, it manifestly describes, not 
 the normal condition of His Human Intelligence, 
 but a strictly exceptional phenomenon. For the 
 Gospel history implies that the knowledge imfused 
 into the Human Soul of Jesus was ordinarily and 
 practically equivalent to omniscience. “We may 
 conjecture,” says Hooker, “how the powers of That 
 Soul are illuminated, Which, beg so inward unto 
 God, cannot choose but be privy unto all things 
 which God worketh, and must therefore of necessity 
 be endued with knowledge so far forth universal, 
 though not with infinite knowledge peculiar to Deity 
 Itself.” St. Paul’s statement that “in Christ are 
 
 e St. John xxi. 17; Κύριε, σὺ πάντα οἶδας: σὺ γινώσκεις ὅτι 
 φιλῶ σε. f St. John x. 15. 
 & St. Luke x. 22. h Eccl. Pol. y. 54. 7, 
 
700 Knowledge, like bliss, temporarily obscured. [Τ|507.Ψ 
 
 hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge',” 
 may well be understood of Christ’s earthly life, and 
 not be restricted to His life of glory. If then His 
 Human Intellect, flooded as it was by the imfusion 
 of boundless light streaming from His Deity, was 
 denied, at a particular time, knowledge of the date 
 of a particular future event, this can only be com- 
 pared with that deprivation of the consolations of 
 ‘ Deity, to which His Human Affections and Will 
 were exposed when He hung dying on the Cross. 
 If “the Divine Wisdom,” as Bishop Bull has said, 
 “impressed its effects upon the Human Soul of Christ 
 pro temporum ratione, in the degree required by 
 particular occasions or emergencies,” this would be 
 only one application of the principle recognised by 
 St. Ireneeus and Theodoret, and rendered familiar 
 to many of us in the language of Hooker. “As the 
 parts, degrees, and offices of that mystical adminis- 
 tration did require, which He voluntarily undertook, 
 the beams of Deity did in operation always ac- 
 cordingly restrain or enlarge themselves!” We may 
 not attempt rashly to specify the exact motive 
 which may have determined our Lord to deny to 
 
 i Col. ii. 3: ἐν @ εἰσι πάντες οἱ θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας Kal τῆς γνώ- 
 σεως ἀπόκρυφοι. 
 
 k Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. i 5,8: “Quippe divinam Sapientiam 
 menti humane Christi effectus suos impressisse pro temporwm ra- 
 tione, Christumque, qua Homo fuit, προκόψαι σοφίᾳ, profecisse sapi- 
 entid (Lue. ii. 52) adeoque pro tempore suze ἀποστολῆς, quo ista 
 scientia opus non habebat (this seems to hint at more than what 
 the text of the New Testament warrants) diem judicii universalis 
 ignorare potuisse, nemini sano absurdum videbitur.” 
 
 1 Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 54. 6. See Mr. Keble’s references from 
 Theodoret (Dial. iii. t. 4, pars. i. 232) and 8. Tren. Heer. ili. ¢. 19. 3. 
 
ὙΠ: Limited knowledge is not fallibility. 701 
 
 His Human Soul at one time the point of know- 
 ledge here in question ; although we may presume 
 generally that it was a part of that condescending 
 love which led Him to be “in all things like unto 
 His brethren.” That He was ever ignorant of aught 
 else, or that He was ignorant on this point at any 
 other time, are inferences for which we have no 
 warrant, and which we make at our peril. 
 
 But it is not on this account alone that our 
 Lord’s human ignorance of the day of judgment, 
 if admitted, cannot be made the premiss of an ar- 
 gument intended to destroy His authority when 
 He sanctions the Mosaic authorship and _ historical 
 trustworthiness of the Pentateuch. That argument 
 involves a confusion between limitation of know- 
 ledge and liability to error ; whereas, plainly enough, 
 a limitation of knowledge is one thing, and falli- 
 bility is another. St, Paul says that “we know in 
 part™,” and that “we see through a glass darkly™.” 
 Yet St. Paul is so certain of the truth of that which 
 he teaches, as to exclaim, “If we or an angel from 
 heaven preach any other Gospel to you than that 
 which we have preached unto you, let him be ac- 
 cursed®.” St. Paul clearly believed in his own in- 
 fallibility as a teacher of religious truth; and the 
 Church of Christ has ever since regarded his Epi- 
 stles as part of an infallible literature. But it is 
 equally clear that St. Paul believed his knowledge of 
 religious truth to be limited. Infallibility does not 
 imply omniscience, any more than limited know- 
 
 my Cor, xili. 9 : ἐκ μέρους yap γινώσκομεν. 
 n Ibid. ver. 12 : βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι dC ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι. 
 
 © Gal. i. 8, 9. 
 
02 Recent attacks on the Pentateuch ascribe [ Lect. 
 
 ledge implies error. Infallibility may be conferred 
 on a human teacher with very limited knowledge, 
 by a special endowment preserving him from error. 
 When we say that a teacher is infallible we do not 
 mean that his knowledge is encyclopzedaic, but merely 
 that, when he does teach, he is incapable of pro- 
 pounding as truth that which, in point of fact, is 
 not trueP. 
 
 Now the argument in question assumes that Christ 
 our Lord, when teaching religious truth, was not 
 merely fallible, but actually in serious error. If 
 indeed our Lord had believed Himself to be igno- 
 rant of the authorship or true character of the 
 Book of Deuteronomy, we may presume that He 
 would not have fallen below the natural level of 
 ordinary heathen honesty, by speaking with au- 
 thority upon a subject with which He was con- 
 sciously unacquainted. It is admitted that He 
 spoke as believing Himself to be teaching truth. 
 But was He, in point of fact, not teaching truth ? 
 Was that which He believed to be knowledge no- 
 thing better than a servile echo of contemporary 
 
 Ρ Cf. Bishop H. Browne, Pentateuch and Elohistic Psalms, p. 13: 
 “Tonorance does not of necessity involve error. Of course in owr 
 present state of being, and with our propensity to lean on our 
 wisdom, ignorance is extremely likely to lead to-.error. But 
 ignorance is not error: and there is not one word in the Bible 
 which could lead us to suppose that our blessed Lord was liable 
 to error in any sense of the word or in any department of know- 
 ledge. I do not say that we have any distinct statements to the 
 contrary, but there.is nothing like a hint that there was such a 
 liability : whereas His other human infirmities, weakness, weari- 
 ness, sorrow, fear, suffering, temptation, ignorance, all these are 
 put forward prominently, and many of them frequently.” 
 
VIL] to Christ both falhibility and error. 703 
 
 ignorance? Was His knowledge really limited on 
 a subject-matter, where He was Himself unsuspicious 
 of the existence of a limitation? Was He then 
 not merely deficient in information, but fallible ; 
 not merely fallible, but actually in error? and has 
 it been reserved for the criticism of the nineteenth 
 century to set Him right? Plainly, my brethren, 
 our Lord’s statement respecting the day of judg- 
 ment will not avail to sustain a deduction which 
 supposes, not an admitted limitation of knowledge, 
 but an unsuspected self-deception of a character and 
 extent which, in the case of a purely human teacher, 
 would be altogether destructive of any serious claim 
 to teach substantial truth. 
 
 Nor is this all. The denial of our Lord’s infalli- 
 bility, m the form in which it has come before us 
 of late years, involves an unfavourable judgment, 
 not merely of His intellectual claims, but of the 
 penetration and delicacy of His moral sense. This 
 is the more observable because it is fatal to 
 a distinction which has been projected, between our 
 Lord’s authority as a teacher of spiritual or moral 
 truth, and His authority when dealing with those 
 questions which enter into the province of history 
 or criticism. If in the latter sphere He is said to 
 have been liable and subject to error, in the former, 
 we are sometimes told, His instinct was invariably 
 unerring. But is this the case if our Lord was really 
 deceived in His estimate of the Book of Deuter- 
 onomy, and if further the account of the origin and 
 composition of that book which is put forward by 
 His censors be accepted as satisfactory? Our Lord 
 quotes Deuteronomy as a work of the highest 
 
704 Attacks on the Pentateuch ascribe [ Lecr. 
 
 authority on the subject of man’s relations and duties 
 to God4. Yet we are assured that in point of fact 
 this book was nothing better than a pious forgery 
 of the age of Jeremiah, if indeed it was not a work 
 of that prophet, m which he employed the name 
 and authority of Moses as a restraint upon the 
 increasing polytheism of the later years of king 
 Josiah". That hypothesis has been discussed else- 
 
 a St. Matt. iv. 4, Deut. viii. 3; St. Matt. iv. 7, Deut. vi. 16 ; 
 St. Matt. iv. 10, Deut. vi. 13, and x. 20. 
 
 τ Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. ii. p. 427. “Supposing (to 
 fix our ideas) that Jeremiah really wrote the book, we must not 
 forget that he was a prophet, and, as such, habitually disposed to 
 regard all the special impulses of his mind to religious activity as 
 direct inspirations from the Divine Source of Truth. To us, with 
 our inductive training and scientific habits of mind, the correct 
 statement of facts appears of the first necessity ; and consciously to 
 misstate them, or to state as fact what we do not know or believe 
 from external testimony to be fact, is a crime against truth. But 
 to a man who believed himself to be in immediate communication 
 with the Source of all Truth, this condition must have been re- 
 versed. The inner voice, which he believed to be the voice of 
 the Divine Teacher, would become all-powerful—would silence at 
 once all doubts and questionings. What it ordered him to do, he 
 would do without hesitation, as by direct command of God, and all 
 considerations as to morality or immorality would either not be 
 entertained at all, or would only take the form of misgivings as 
 to whether, possibly, in any particular case, the command itself 
 was really Divine. 
 
 “ Let us imagine, then, that Jeremiah, or any other contemporary 
 seer, meditating upon the condition of his country, and the means 
 of weaning his people from idolatry, became possessed with the idea 
 of writing to them an address, as in the name of Moses, of the 
 kind which we have just been considering, in which the laws 
 ascribed to him, and handed down from an earlier age, which were 
 now in many respects unsuitable, should be adapted to the present 
 
ὙΠ1:1 to Christ some lack of moral perception. 705 
 
 where and by others on its own critical merits. 
 Here it may suffice to observe, that if it could have 
 been seriously entertained it would involve our 
 Lord in something more than intellectual fallibility. 
 If Deuteronomy is indeed a forgery, Jesus Christ 
 was not merely ignorant of a fact of criticism. His 
 moral perceptions were at fault. They were not 
 sufficiently fine to miss the consistency, the ring of 
 truth, in a document which professed to have come 
 from the great Lawgiver with a Divine authority ; 
 while, according to modern critics, it was only the 
 ‘pious’ fiction of a later age, and its falsehood had 
 only not been admitted by its author, lest its ‘ effect’ 
 should be counteracted 5, 
 When, in the middle of the ninth century, shee 
 pseudo-Isidorian decretals were first brought from 
 beyond the Alps to Rome, they were almost im- 
 mediately cited by Nicholas I, in reply to an appeal 
 
 circumstances of the times, and re-enforced with solemn _pro- 
 phetical utterances. This thought, we may believe, would take 
 in the prophet’s mind the form of a Divine command. All question 
 of deception or fraus pia would vanish.” 
 
 8 Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. ii. p. 429. “ Perhaps, at first, 
 it was felt to be difficult or undesirable to say or do anything which 
 might act as a check upon the zeal and energy which the king 
 himself exhibited, and in which, as it seems, he was generally 
 supported by the people, in putting down by force the gross 
 idolatries which abounded in his kingdom. That impulsive effort, 
 which followed immediately the reading of the ‘ Book,’ might have 
 been arrested, if he had been told at once the true origin of those 
 awful words which had made so strong an impression on him. 
 They were not less awful, indeed, or less true, because uttered in 
 the name of Moses by such a prophet as Jeremiah. But still it 
 is obvious that their effect was likely to be greatly intensified under 
 the idew that they were the last utterances of Moses himself.” 
 
 ZZ 
 
706 Illustration from the False Decretals. (Lect. 
 
 of Hinemar of Rheims, in order to justify and extend 
 the then advancing claims of the Roman Chairt. Now 
 we must either suppose that this Pope was really 
 incapable of detecting a forgery, which no Roman 
 Catholic writer would now think of defending", or 
 else we must imagine that in order to advance an 
 immediate ecclesiastical object, he could condescend 
 to quote a document which he knew to have been 
 recently forged, as if it had been of ancient and un- 
 doubted authority. The former supposition is un- 
 doubtedly most welcome to the common sense of 
 Christian charity ; but it is of course fatal to any 
 belief in the personal infallibility of Pope Nicholas I. 
 A like dilemma awaits us in the Gospel history, if 
 those unhappy theories respecting the Pentateuch to 
 which 1 have alluded are to be seriously entertained. 
 Before us is no mere question as to whether Christ's 
 knowledge was or was not limited; the question is 
 whether as a matter of fact He taught or implied 
 the truth of that which is not true, and which a finer 
 moral sense than His might have seen to be false. 
 The question is plainly whether He was ἃ trust- 
 worthy teacher of religious no less than of historical 
 truth. The attempted distinction between a critical 
 judgment of historical or philological facts, and a 
 moral judgment of strictly spiritual and moral truths, 
 is inapplicable to a case in which the moral judgment 
 is no less involved than the intellectual; and we 
 have really to choose between the infallibility, moral 
 no less than intellectual, of Jesus Christ our Lord 
 
 t Dean Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. ii. p. 379. 
 ἃ Compare Walter, Lehrbuch des Kirchenrechts, pp. ‘206- 
 210. 
 
VIII.} ο error would discredit Christ s teaching. 707 
 
 on the one hand, and the conjectural speculations 
 of critics, of whatever degree of critical eminence, 
 on the other. 
 
 Indeed, as bearing upon this vaunted distinction 
 between spiritual truth, in which our Lord is still, it 
 seems, to be an authority, and historical truth in 
 which His authority is to be set aside, we have 
 words of His Own which prove how truly He made 
 the acceptance of the lower portions of His teaching 
 a preliminary to belief in the higher. “If I have 
 told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how 
 shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things* ¢” 
 How indeed? If, when He sets the seal of His 
 authority upon the writings of Moses as a whole, 
 and upon the most miraculous incidents which they 
 relate in detail, He is really only the uneducated Jew 
 who ignorantly repeats and reflects the prejudice of 
 a barbarous age; how shall we be sure that when 
 He reveals the Character of God, or the precepts of 
 the new life, or the reality and nature of the endless 
 world, He is really trustworthy—trustworthy as an 
 Authority to whom we are prepared to cling in life 
 and in death? You say that here your conscience 
 ratifies His teaching,—that the ‘enthusiasm of hu- 
 manity’ which is in you sets its seal upon this higher 
 teaching of the Redeemer of men. But in this case 
 your conscience is in truth the ultimate and only 
 teacher ; you have anticipated, and you might dis- 
 pense with, the teaching of Christ. And what if 
 your conscience, as is surely not impossible, has itself 
 been warped or misled? What if, in surveying the 
 moral matter of His teaching, you still exercise your 
 
 x St. Jobn iii. 12. 
 ZZ2 
 
708 Christ?’s Divinity illuminates His Passion. — [Lxcr. 
 
 ‘verifying faculty,’ and object to this precept as over- 
 ascetic, and to that command as over-exacting, and 
 to yonder most merciful revelation of an endless woe 
 as ‘Tartarology!’ Alas! my brethren, experience 
 proves it, the descent into the Avernus of unbelief 
 is only too easy. There are broad highways in the 
 life of faith, just as in the life of morality, which a 
 man cannot leave without certain risk of losing his 
 way in a trackless wilderness. ΤῸ deny our Lord’s 
 infallibility, on the precarious ground of a single 
 known limitation of knowledge in His human in- 
 tellect, is not merely an inconsequence, it is incon- 
 sistent with any serious belief in His real Divinity. 
 The common sense of faith assures us that if Christ 
 is really Divine, His infallibility follows as a thing 
 of course. The man who sincerely believes that 
 Jesus Christ is God will not doubt that His every 
 word standeth sure, and that whatever has been 
 sealed and sanctioned by His supreme authority is 
 independent of, and unassailable by, the fallible 
 judgment of His creatures respecting it. 
 
 (6) If the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity implies 
 that as a teacher of truth He is infallible, it also 
 illuminates His suffermg death upon the Cross with 
 an extraordinary significance. 
 
 The degrees of importance which are attributed 
 to the several events and stages of our Lord’s Life 
 on earth, will naturally vary with the variations of 
 belief respecting His Person. With the Humani- 
 tarian, for instance, the dominant, almost the ex- 
 clusive, interest will be found to centre in Christ’s 
 ministry, as affording the largest illustrations of His 
 Human Character and of His moral teaching. The 
 
VIII.) Humanitarian estimate of the Passion. 709 
 
 mysteries which surround His entrance into and His 
 departure from our human world, will have been 
 thrown into the background as belonging to ques- 
 tions of a very inferior degree of importance, or 
 possibly, as at best serving to illustrate the legendary 
 creativeness of a subsequent age. Perhaps a certain 
 historical and chronological value will still be al- 
 lowed to attach to Christ’s Birth. Perhaps, if His 
 Resurrection be still admitted to have been a matter 
 of historical occurrence, a high evidential significance 
 will be still assigned to it, such as was recognised by 
 Priestley and by all Socinians of the last generation. 
 But the interest of Christ’s Death to a Humanitarian 
 will be of a yet higher order. For Christ’s Death| 
 enters into His moral Self-manifestation; it is the) 
 heroic climax of His devotion to truth; it is the| 
 highest seal which a teacher can set upon his doc- 
 trine. Thus a Humanitarian will admit that the 
 dying Christ saves the world by enriching its stock | 
 of moral life, by setting before the eyes of men, for | 
 all future time, the example of a transcendant sacri- | 
 fice of self. But in the bare fact that Jesus died, 
 Humanitarianism sees no mystery beyond that which | 
 attaches to the death of any ordinary man. The | 
 Crucifixion is regarded as only a practical appendix 
 to the Sermon on the Mount. And thus to the | 
 Socinian pilgrim, the mountain of the beatitudes | 
 
 and the shores of the Sea of Galilee will always } 
 
 and naturally appear more worthy of reverence and 
 attention than the spot on which Mary brought her 
 Son into the world, or than the hill on which 
 Jesus died. 
 
 Far otherwise must it ever be with a sincere 
 
 i 
 ! 
 
 | 
 
710 A believer’s estimate of the Passion [Lecr. 
 
 believer in our Saviour’s Godhead. Not that he can 
 be insensible to the commanding moral interest which 
 the Life and teaching of the Perfect Man ever rouses 
 in the heart of Christians. That Life and that 
 teaching have indeed for him a meaning into which 
 the Humanitarian cannot enter; since the believer 
 knows that it is God Who lives and speaks in Jesus. 
 But contemplating Jesus as the Incarnate God, he 
 is necessarily attracted by those points in our Lord’s 
 earthly Life, at which the contrast is most vividly 
 marked between His Divine and Eternal Nature and 
 His state of humiliation as Man. 
 
 This attraction is reflected in the believer's reli- 
 gious thought, in his devotions, in the instinctive 
 attitude of his interest towards the Life of Jesus. 
 The creed expresses the thought of the company of 
 the faithful. After stating that the Only-begotten 
 Son, consubstantial with the Father, for us men and 
 for our salvation came down from heaven and was 
 made Man, the creed proceeds to speak of His Cru- 
 cifixion, Sufferings, Burial, Resurrection, and Ascen- 
 sion. The creed makes no allusion to His example, 
 or to the nature and contents of His doctrine. 
 In an analogous sense the Litany expresses the 
 devotion of the collective Church. In the Litany, 
 Jesus our ‘Good Lord’ is entreated to deliver us 
 ‘by’ the successive mysteries of His earthly Self- 
 manifestation. Dependent on the mystery of His 
 holy Incarnation are His ‘holy Nativity and 
 Circumcision, His ‘Baptism, Fasting, and Temp- 
 tation, His ‘Agony and Bloody Sweat,’ His ‘Cross 
 and Passion, His ‘ precious Death and Burial,’ His 
 ‘glorious Resurrection and Ascension.’ Here again 
 
VIII.) determined by faith in Christ's Divinity. ras | 
 
 there is no reference to His sinless example, or to 
 His words of power. Why is this? Is it not be- 
 cause the thought of the Church centres most per- 
 sistently upon the Person of Jesus? His teaching 
 and His example, although they presuppose. His 
 Divinity, yet in many ways appeal to us indepen- 
 dently of it. But the significance of His birth into 
 the world, of His varied sufferings, of His death, 
 of His rising from the tomb, and of His ascent to 
 heaven, resides chiefly, if not altogether, in the fact 
 that His Person is Divine. That truth illuminates 
 these features of His earthly Self-manifestation, which 
 else might be thrown into the shade by the moral 
 beauty of His example or of His doctrine. The 
 birth and death of a mere man, and even the re- 
 surrection and glorification of a mere man, would 
 only be the accessories of a higher interest centring 
 in the range and influence of his ideas, in the force 
 and consistency of his conduct, in the whole bearing 
 of his moral and intellectual action upon the men of 
 his time. But when He Who is born, Who suffers, 
 Who dies, Who rises and ascends, is known to be 
 personally and literally God, it is inevitable that the 
 interest of thought and devotion should take a direc- 
 tion in which the ‘mystery of godliness’ is most 
 directly and urgently felt. Christian devotion neces- 
 sarily hovers around those critical turning-points in 
 the Self-manifestation of the Infinite and Almighty 
 Being, at which His gracious and immeasureable 
 Self-humiliation most powerfully illustrates His tran- 
 scendant love, by the contrast which it yields to 
 the majesty of His Divine and Eternal Person. No 
 one would care for the birthplace or grave of the 
 
712 Humanitarian description of the Passion. [ Lecr. 
 
 philosopher, when he could visit the scene of his in- 
 tellectual victories ; but the Christian pilgrim, in all 
 ages of the Church, is less rivetted by the lake-side 
 and mountains of Galilee, than by the sacred sites 
 where his God and Saviour first drew human breath 
 and poured forth His Blood upon the Cross οἵ 
 shame. 
 
 Let us imagine, my brethren, that our Lord’s life 
 had been written, not by the blessed Evangelists, 
 but by some modern Socinian or Humanitarian 
 author. Would not the relative proportions assigned 
 to the several parts of His life have been very 
 different from those which we find in the New 
 Testament ? We should have been presented with 
 an analytical exposition of the moral greatness of 
 Christ, in its several bearings upon the individual 
 and social life of man; and His teaching would have 
 been insisted upon as altogether eclipsing in import- 
 ance any questions which might be raised as to His 
 ‘origin’ or His ‘place in the world of spirits.’ As 
 for His Death, it would of course have been intro- 
 duced as the natural result of His generous conflict 
 with the great evils and corruptions of His day. 
 But this closing episode would have been treated 
 hurriedly and with reserve. The modern writer would 
 have led us to the foot of Calvary. There he would 
 have left us to our imagination, and all that followed 
 would have been summarized in a couple of sen- 
 tences. The modern writer would have avoided all 
 semblance of giving prominence to the ‘physical 
 aspects’ of the tragedy, to the successive insults, 
 cruelties, words, which indicated so many distinct 
 phases of mental or bodily agony in the Sufferer. 
 
VIII.} The Passion as described by the Evangelists. 713 
 
 He would have argued that to dwell intently on 
 these things was unnecessarily harrowing to the 
 feelings, and that it moreover might distract at- 
 tention from the general moral interest to which 
 the Death of Jesus was, in his judgment, only sub- 
 sidiary. Clearly he would not have followed in the 
 track of the Evangelists. For the four Evangelists, 
 while the plan and materials of their several nar- 
 ratives present many points of difference, yet concur 
 in assigning an extraordinary importance, not merely 
 to the general narrative of the Passion, but to its 
 minute details. This is more in harmony with the 
 genius of St. Mark and St. Luke than with that of 
 St. Matthew ; but considering the scope and drift of 
 the fourth Gospel, it is at first sight most remarkable 
 in St. John. For instead of veiling the humiliations 
 of the Word Incarnate, St. John regards them as 
 so many illustrations of His ‘glory ; and, indeed, 
 each of the four evangelical narratives, however 
 condensed may be its earlier portions, expands into 
 the minute particularity of a diary, as it approaches 
 the foot of the Cross. 
 
 Now this concurrent disposition of the four Evan- 
 gelists is eminently suggestive. It implies that there 
 is a momentous interest attaching, not merely to 
 the Death of Christ as a whole, but to each stage 
 and feature of the great agony in detail. It implies 
 that this interest is not merely moral and human, 
 but of a higher and distinct kind. The moral re- 
 quirements of the history would have been satisfied, 
 had we been compendiously informed that Christ 
 died at last in attestation of the moral truth which 
 He taught; but this detailed enumeration of the 
 
714 Christ’s Divinity accounts to believers [ Lecr. 
 
 successive stages and shades of suffering, both physical 
 and mental, leads the devout Christian insensibly to 
 look beneath the varying phases of protracted agony, 
 at the unruffled, august, eternal Person of the in- 
 sulted Sufferer; and thus the thought rests with 
 more and more of anxious intensity upon the possible 
 or probable results of an event so stupendous as His 
 Death. 
 
 Upon this problem human reason, left to itself, 
 could shed no light whatever: it could only be sure 
 of this, that much more must be involved in the 
 Death of Christ than in the death of the best of 
 men. Had Christ been merely human, greater love 
 among men, greater enthusiasm for truth as truth, 
 greater devotion to the sublimest of moral teachings 
 and to the Will of the Universal Father, greater 
 contempt for pleasure when pleasure is in conflict 
 with duty, and for pain when pain is recommended 
 by conscience, would certainly have followed upon 
 His Death. These effects follow in varying degrees 
 upon every sincere and costly act of human self- 
 renouncement ; and the moral kingdom of God is 
 a vast treasure-house of saintly and living memories, 
 in which the highest place of honour is for ever 
 assigned to those who exhibit the most perfect sacri- 
 fice of self. Nor, most assuredly, is any the least 
 and lowest act of sacrifice destined to perish: it 
 thrills on in its undying force through the ages ; it 
 kindles, first in one and then in another unit of the 
 vast company of moral beings, a new devotion to 
 truth, to duty, to man, to God. But when we know 
 that Jesus Christ is God, we are prepared to hear 
 that something much more stupendous than any 
 
ΨΠΠ1Π.] for the infinite efficacy of His Death. 715 
 
 moral impulse, however strong and enduring, must 
 have resulted from His Death—something (as yet 
 we know not what) reaching far beyond the sphere 
 and laws of history, beyond the world of sense and 
 of time, of natural moral sequence, and of those 
 ascertainable or hidden influences which radiate from 
 man to man and from age to age. 
 
 Nowhere is the illuminative force of Christ’s Di- 
 vinity more felt than here. The tremendous premiss, 
 that He Who died upon the Cross is truly God, 
 when seriously and firmly believed, avails to carry 
 the believer forward to any representation of the 
 efficacy of His Death which rests upon an adequate 
 authority. 
 
 “No person,” says HookerY, “was born of the 
 Virgin but the Son of God, no person but the Son 
 of God baptized, the Son of God condemned, the 
 Son of God and no other person crucified ; which one 
 only point of Christian belief, the infinite worth of 
 the Son of God, is the very ground of all things be- 
 lieved concerning life and salvation by that which 
 Christ either did or suffered as man in our behalf.” 
 “That,” says Bishop Andrewes, “which setteth the 
 high price upon this sacrifice is this, that He which 
 offereth it to God, is God%” “Marvel not,” says 
 St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “if the whole world has been 
 redeemed, for He Who has died for us is no mere 
 man, but the Only-begotten Son of God?.” “Christ,” 
 
 Υ Keel. Pol. v. 52. 3. 
 
 2 Second Sermon on the Passion. For other references see 
 Rey. W. Bright’s Sermons of St. Leo, p. 89, 
 
 ® Catech. 13. 2: μὴ θαυμάζης εἰ κόσμος ὅλος ἐλυτρώθη, οὐ yap ἢν ἄν- 
 θρωπος ψιλὸς, ἀλλ᾽ Υἱός Θεοῦ μονογενὴς ὁ ὑπεραποθνήσκων, St. Proclus, 
 
716 The Divinity of Christ explains ° (Lect. 
 
 says St. Cyril of Alexandria, “would not have been 
 equivalent [as a sacrifice] for the whole creation, nor 
 would He have sufficed to redeem the world, nor 
 have laid down His life by way of a price for it, 
 and poured forth for us His precious Blood, if He 
 be not really the Son, and God of God, but a 
 
 creature ».” 
 
 This, as has been already noticed, is St. Peter’s 
 meaning when he says that we were not redeemed 
 with corruptible things, as silver and gold, but with 
 the precious Blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without 
 blemish and immaculate®. This underlies St. Paul’s 
 contrast between the blood of bulls and goats and 
 the Blood of Christ offermg Himself without spot 
 to God 4. This is the substance of St. John’s state- 
 ment that the Blood of Jesus Christ the Son of God 
 cleanseth us from all sine. Apart from this illu- 
 
 Hom. in Incarn., ¢. 5: ἔδει τοίνυν δυοῖν θάτερον, ἢ πᾶσιν ἐπαχθῆναι τὸν ἐκ 
 on , , > , εἶ , a a A ~~ A 
 τῆς καταδίκης θάνατον, ἐπείδη Kal πάντες ἥμαρτον᾽ ἢ τοιοῦτον δοθῆναι πρὸς 
 ἀντίδοσιν τίμημα, ᾧ πᾶν ὑπῆρχε δικαίωμα πρὸς παραίτησιν. λνθρωπος μὲν 
 οὖν σῶσαι οὐκ ἠδύνατο, ὑπέκειτο γὰρ τῷ χρέει τῆς ἁμαρτίας. “Ayyedos 
 
 » , 4 > ΄ > my > ᾿ς A [4 ’ 
 ἐξαγοράσασθαι τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα οὐκ ἴσχυεν, ἠπόρει γὰρ τοιούτου λύτρου. 
 Λοιπὸν οὖν 6 ἀναμάρτητος Θεὸς ὑπὲρ τῶν ἡμαρτηκότων ἀποθανεῖν ὥφειλεν᾽ 
 LA ‘ » , , a a Εἰ ’ al , 
 αὕτη yap ἐλείπετο μόνη τοῦ κακοῦ ἡ λύσις. ὁ. 6: ὦ τῶν μεγάλων πραγ- 
 , cA > 4 A > , > A A ce wn > /, 
 μάτων ! ἄλλοις ἐπραγματεύσατο τὸ ἀθάνατον, αὐτὸς yap ὑπῆρχεν ἀθάνατος. 
 τοιοῦτος γὰρ ἄλλος κατ᾽ οἰκονομίαν οὔτε γέγονεν, οὔτε ἦν, οὔτε ἔσται ποτε, ἢ 
 , > a ΄ \ N \ o» 4 > > ΄ 
 μόνος ἐκ τῆς παρθένου τεχθεὶς Θεὸς καὶ ἄνθρωπος" οὐκ ἀντιταλαντεύουσαν 
 μόνον ἔχων τὴν ἀξίαν τῷ πλήθει τῶν ὑποδίκων, ἀλλὰ καὶ πάσαις ψήφοις 
 ὑπερέχουσαν. 6. 9: ἄνθρωπος ψιλὸς σῶσαι οὐκ ἴσχυε, Θεὸς γυμνὸς παθεῖν 
 οὐκ ἠδύνατο. τί οὖν; αὐτὸς dv Θεὸς ὁ ᾿Εμμανουὴλ, γέγονεν ἄνθρωπος. 
 (Labbe, iii. 13 sq.) 
 b §. Cyril Alex. de Sancta Trinitate, dial. 4, tom. v. pp. 508, 
 509. See too Ad Reginas, i. ὁ. 7; Labbe, iii. 112. 
 ¢ 1 St. Pet. i. 19. d Heb. ix. 13. 
 e 1 St. John i. 7. 
 
MEE] Apostolic language on the Atonement. 717 
 
 minating doctrine of the Godhead of Jesus Christ 
 crucified, how overstrained and exaggerated are the 
 New Testament representations of the effects of His 
 Death. He has redeemed man from a moral and 
 spiritual slavery!; He has made a propitiation for 
 our sins$; He has really reconciled God and His 
 creatures', But how is such a redemption possible, 
 unless the price be infinitely costly? How could 
 such a propitiation be offered, save by One Whose 
 intrinsic worth might constitute a worthy offering 
 from a boundless Love to a perfect Justice? How 
 was a real reconciliation between God and His 
 creatures to be effected, unless the Reconciler had 
 some natural capacity for mediating, by representing 
 God to man no less truly than man to God? How 
 could He ‘exchange’ Divine glory for human misery, 
 or raise man in his misery to companionship with 
 God, unless He were Himself Divine? Alas! brethren, 
 if Jesus Christ be not God, the promises of redemp- 
 tion to which the penitent or dying sinner clings 
 
 f ᾿Απολύτρωσις presupposes the slavery of humanity, from which 
 Christ our Lord redeems us by the λύτρον of His precious Blood. 
 St. Matt. xx. 28; 1 Cor. i. 30; Eph.i. 7, 14, iv. 30. The idea of 
 purchase is vividly expressed by the verb eayopd¢ew, Gal. ili. 13 ; 
 IV. 5. 
 
 © ἵλασμός presupposes the unexpiated sin of humanity, for which 
 Christ makes a propitiation, 1 St. John ii. 2, iv. 10; Heb. ii. 17. 
 Our Lord Himself is the θυσία, the προσφορά (Eph. v. 2; Heb. 
 x. 12); He is the πάσχα (1 Cor. ν. 7); He is the sacrificial ἀμνός 
 (St. John i. 29, 36; 1 St. Peter i. 19); He is the slain ἀρνίον 
 (Rey.v. 6,8, 02, 19» Vi. 2); 
 
 h καταλλαγή presupposes the existence of an enmity between God 
 and man, which is done away by Christ’s ‘exchanging’ His glory 
 for our misery and pain, while He gives us His glory. Rom. y. 10 ; 
 2 Cor. v. 18, 19. 
 
718 The Divinity of Christ explains (Lect. 
 
 with such thankful tenacity, dissolve into the evan- 
 escent forms of Jewish modes of thought, and un- 
 substantial misleading metaphors. If Jesus be not 
 God, we stand face to face in the New Testament, 
 not with the unsearchable riches, the boundless 
 mercy of a Divine Saviour, able “to save to the 
 uttermost those that come unto God by Him,” but 
 only with the crude and clinging prejudices of His 
 uneducated or semi-educated followers. But if it 
 be certain that “in this was manifested the love of 
 God towards us, because that God sent His Only- 
 begotten Son into the world, that we might live 
 through Himi,” then the disclosures of revelation 
 respecting the efficacy of His Death fall into their 
 place. Vast as is the conception of a world of 
 sinners redeemed, atoned for, reconciled, the premiss 
 that Jesus Crucified was truly God more than covers 
 it. The history of the Passion itself responds to the 
 faith of the Church. Why those darkened heavens, 
 that rent veil in the temple, those shattered rocks, 
 those “bodies of the saints which slept” returning 
 from the realms of death to the city of the living 4 
 Nature, could she speak, would answer that her 
 Lord is crucified. But her convulsive homage is as 
 nothing when compared to the moral miracle of 
 which the only sensible symptoms are an entreaty 
 and a promise, uttered alike in human words. “Not 
 when Christ raised the dead, not when He rebuked 
 the sea and the winds, not when He expelled the 
 devils,—but when He was crucified, pierced with the 
 nails, insulted, spit upon, reproached, reviled,—had 
 
 i xt St. John iv. 9. 
 
ὙΈΠΕῚ the atoning efficacy of His Death. 719 
 
 He strength to change the evil disposition of the 
 robber, to draw to Himself that soul, harder though 
 it were than the rocks around, and to honour 
 it with the promise, “To-day shalt thou be with 
 Me in Paradisek,.” That promise was a revelation 
 of the depth and height of His redemptive power, 
 it was a flash of His Godhead, illuminating the true 
 meaning of His humiliations as Man. If we believe 
 Him to be God, we bow our heads before His Cross, 
 as in the presence of fathomless mystery, when His 
 apostles enumerate the results of His Death. If we 
 should be perplexed with some difficulties in con- 
 templating these results, we may remember that we 
 are but hovering on the outskirts of a vast economy 
 of mercy reaching far away into infinitude, an 
 economy in which the seen will one day be explained 
 by the unseen. But at least no magnitude of re- 
 demptive mercies can possibly surprise us, when the 
 Redeemer is Divine, and we say to ourselves with 
 the Apostle, “If God spared not His Own Son, but 
 freely gave Him up for us all, how shall He not 
 with Him also freely give us all things 7” 
 
 (vy) As our Lord’s Divinity is the truth which illu- 
 minates and sustains the world-redeeming virtue of 
 His death ; so in like manner it explains and justi- 
 fies the power of the Christian Sacraments as actual 
 channels of supernatural grace. 
 
 To those who deny that Jesus Christ is God, the 
 Sacraments are naturally nothing more than “badges 
 or tokens” of social co-operation!, The one Sacrament 
 
 k §. Chrysost. De Cruce et Latrone, Hom. i. § 2. tom. ii. 404. 
 1 Art. XXV. condemns this Zwinglian account of the Sacra- 
 ments, 
 
720 Bearing of Christ's Divinity on the Sacraments. [ Lucr. 
 
 is only “a sign of profession and mark of difference, 
 whereby Christian men are discerned from others that 
 be not christened™.” The other is at best “only a 
 sign of the love that Christians ought to have one to- 
 wards another®.” Thus Sacraments are viewed as alto- 
 gether human acts; God gives nothing in them; He 
 has no special relation to them®. They are regarded 
 as purely external ceremonies, which may possibly 
 suggest certain moral ideas by recalling the memory 
 of a Teacher who died many centuries agoP. They 
 help to save His name from dying out among men. 
 Thus they discharge the functions of a public monu- 
 ment, or of a ribbon or medal implying membership 
 in an association, or of an anniversary festival in- 
 stituted to celebrate the name of some departed 
 historical worthy. It cannot be said that in point of 
 effective moral power they rise to the level of a good 
 statue or portrait; since a merely outward cere- 
 monial cannot recal character and suggest moral 
 sympathy as effectively as an accurate rendering of 
 the human countenance in stone, or colour, or the 
 lines of an engraving. Rites, with a function so 
 purely historical, are not likely to survive any serious 
 
 m Art. XXVIT. condemns this Zwinglian account of Baptism. 
 
 n Art. XXVIII. condemns this Zwinglian account of the Holy 
 Communion. 
 
 ο Cat. Rac. Qu. 202: “Quomodo confirmare potest nos in fide 
 id, quod nos ipsi facimus, quodque, licet a Domino institutum, opws 
 tamen nostrum est, nihil prorsus mirt in se continens ?” 
 
 P Ibid. Qu. 334: “Christi institutum ut fideles ipsius panem 
 frangant et comedant, et ἃ calice bibant, mortis ipsius annuntiande 
 causa.” Ibid. 337: “Nonne alia causa, ob quam ccenam instituit 
 Dominus, superest? Nulla prorsus. Etsi homines multas excogi- 
 tarint.” 
 
VIII.) Sacraments of the Church not bare “ signs? 721 
 
 changes in human feelings and associations. Men 
 gradually determine to commemorate the object of 
 their regard in some other way, which may perhaps be 
 more in harmony with their personal tastes ; they do 
 not admit that this particular form of commemora- 
 tion, although enjoined by the Author of Christianity, 
 binds their consciences with the force of any moral 
 obligation ; they end by deciding that it is just as 
 well to neglect such commemorations altogether. 
 
 If the Socinian and Zwinglian estimate of the 
 Sacraments had been that of the Church of Christ, 
 the Sacraments would long ago have been abandoned 
 as useless ceremonies. But the Church has always 
 seen in them not mere outward signs addressed to 
 the taste or to the imagination, nor even signs (as 
 Calvinism asserts) which are tokens of grace re- 
 ceived independently of them4, but signs which, 
 through the power of the promise and words of 
 Christ, effect what they signify. They are “effec- 
 tual signs of grace and God’s good-will towards us, 
 by the which He doth work invisibly in us.” Thus 
 
 4 See Cartwright, quoted by Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 60. 3, note. 
 
 r Art. XAV. Cf. P. Lombard, lib. iv. d. 1. 2: “Sacramentum est 
 invisibilis gratize visibilis forma... . . Ita signum est gratiz Dei, et 
 invisibilis gratiz forma, ut ipsius imaginem gerat et causa existat.” 
 Church Catechism: “An outward and visible sign of an inward 
 and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained by Christ Himself, as 
 a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us 
 thereof.” See Martensen, Christ. Dogm. p. 418, Clark’s Transl. : 
 “The essential difference” [between Prayer and Sacraments] “con- 
 sists in this: the sacred tokens of the New Covenant contain also 
 an actual communication of the Being and Life of the risen Christ, 
 Who is the Redeemer and Perfecter, not only of man’s spiritual, 
 but of man’s corporeal nature. In Prayer there is only a unio 
 
 at Ae 
 
γ Christ’s Divinity explains the power [ Lect. 
 
 in baptism the Christian child is made “a member 
 of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the 
 Kingdom of Heavens.” And “the Body and Blood of 
 Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by 
 the faithful m the Lord’s Suppert.” 
 
 This lofty estimate of the effective power of the 
 Christian Sacraments is intimately connected with 
 belief in the Divinity of the Incarnate Christ. The 
 importance attached to the words in which Christ 
 institutes and explains the Sacraments, varies con- 
 comitantly with belief in the Divinity of the Speaker. 
 If the Speaker be held to be only man, then, in 
 order to avoid imputing to him the language of in- 
 flated and thoughtless folly, it becomes necessary to 
 empty the words of their natural and literal force by 
 violent exegetical processes which, if applied gene- 
 rally, would equally destroy the witness of the New 
 Testament to the Atonement or to the Divinity of 
 Christ. But if Christ be in very truth believed to 
 be the Eternal Son of God, then the words in which 
 He provides for the communication of His life- 
 giving Humanity in His Church to the end of time 
 may well be allowed to stand in all the force and sim- 
 plicity of their natural meaning. Baptism will then 
 
 mystica, a real, yet only spiritual, psychological union: but in the 
 Sacraments the deepest mystery rests in the truth that in them 
 Christ communicates Himself, not only spiritually, but in His glo- 
 rified corporeity.” 
 
 8 Church Catechism. 
 
 t Ibid. Mr. Fisher observes that “out of twenty-five ques- 
 tions of which the Catechism now consists, no less than seventeen 
 relate exclusively to the nature and efficacy of the Sacraments.” 
 Liturgical Purity, p. 293, 1st ed. 
 
VIII.) of the Christian Sacraments. 723 
 
 be the laver of a real regeneration", the Eucharist 
 will be a real “communion of the Body and Blood” 
 of the Incarnate Jesus*. If, with our eye upon 
 
 u Tit. ili, 5: διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας. Common Prayer-book, 
 Office of Private Baptism : “This child, who being born in original 
 sin and in the wrath of God, is now by the laver of regeneration in 
 Baptism received into the number of the children of God.” For 
 the connection between Baptismal grace and our Lord’s Divinity 
 see 8. Cyril Alex. de Recté Fide, ¢. 37: Ti dpas, & οὗτος, κατακο- 
 μίζων ἡμῶν eis γῆν τὴν ἐλπίδα; βεβαπτίσμεθα yap οὐκ εἰς ἄνθρωπον ἁπλῶς, 
 ἀλλ᾽ εἰς Θεὸν ἐνηνθρωπηκότα, καὶ ἀνίεντα ποινῆς καὶ τῶν ἀρχαίων αἰτιαμάτων 
 τοὺς τὴν εἰς αὐτὸν πίστιν ἐκδεδεγμένους ..... ἀπολύων γὰρ ἁμαρτίας τὸν 
 αὐτῷ προσκείμενον, τῷ ἰδίῳ λοιπὸν καταχρίει πνεύματι" ὅπερ ἐνίησι μὲν 
 αὐτὸς, ὡς ἐκ Θεοῦ Πατρὸς Λόγος, καὶ" ἐξ ἰδίας ἡμῖν ἀναπηγάζει φύσεως. He 
 quotes Rom. viii. 9, ro. 
 
 x 1 Cor. x. 16: κοινωνία τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ... κοινωνία τοῦ σώ- 
 patos τοῦ Χριστοῦ. S. Just. Mart. Apol. i. 66: Οὐ γὰρ ὡς κοινὸν ἄρτον 
 οὐδὲ κοινὸν πόμα ταῦτα λαμβάνομεν" ἀλλ᾽ ὃν τρόπον διὰ Λόγου Θεοῦ σαρκο- 
 ποιηθεὶς Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ὁ Σωτὴρ ἡμῶν καὶ σάρκα καὶ αἷμα ὑπὲρ σωτηρίας 
 ἡμῶν ἔσχεν, οὕτως καὶ τὴν δι’ εὐχῆς λόγου τοῦ παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ εὐχαριστηθεῖσαν 
 τροφὴν, ἐξ ἧς αἷμα καὶ σάρκες κατὰ μεταβολὴν τρέφονται ἡμῶν, ἐκείνου τοῦ 
 σαρκοποιηθέντος ᾿Ιησοῦ καὶ σάρκα καὶ αἷμα ἐδιδάχθημεν εἶναι. Cf. Dorner, 
 Person Christi, Erster Theil, p. 435, note 47: “Justin denkt sich 
 den ganzen Christus in Verbindung mit dem Abendmahl. Auch 
 so kann er sich diese unter dem Bilde der Incarnation denken, 
 indem Christus die Elemente zum sichbaren Organ seiner Wirk- 
 samkeit und Selbstmittheilung macht, und das durch seine Er- 
 héhung verlorne Moment der Sichtbarkeit seiner objectiven Er- 
 scheinung sich in jedem Abendmahl durch Assumtion der sicht- 
 baren Elemente wieder herstellt.” For the connection between the 
 Holy Eucharist and our Lord’s Divinity, see 8. Cyril Alex. Epist. 
 Synod. ad Nestorium, ο. 7: Τὴν ἀναίμακτον ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις τελοῦμεν 
 θυσιάν, πρόσιμέν τε οὕτω ταῖς μυστικαῖς εὐλογίαις καὶ ἁγιαζόμεθα, μέτοχοι 
 γενόμενοι τῆς τε ἁγίας σαρκὸς, καὶ τοῦ τιμίου αἵματος τοῦ πάντων ἡμῶν 
 Σωτῆρος Χριστοῦ" καὶ οὐχ ὡς σάρκα κοινὴν δεχόμενοι (μὴ γένοιτο) οὔτε μὴν 
 ὡς ἀνδρὸς ἡγιασμένου καὶ συναφθέντος τῷ Λόγῳ κατὰ τὴν ἑνότητα τῆς 
 ἀξίας, ἤγουν ὡς θείαν ἐνοίκησιν ἐσχηκότος, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ζωοποιὸν ἀληθῶς καὶ 
 
 3542 
 
124 Chris?s Divinity forbids depreciation [Lecr. 
 
 Christ’s actual Godhead, we carefully weigh the 
 momentous sentences in which He ordained’, and the 
 still more explicit terms in which He explained, His 
 institutions ; if we ponder well His earnestly en- 
 forced doctrine, that they who would have part in 
 the Eternal Life must be branches of that Living 
 Vine* whose trunk is Himself; if we listen to His 
 Apostle proclaiming that we are members of His 
 Body, from His Flesh and from His Bones; then in 
 a sphere, so inaccessible to the measurements of na- 
 tural reason, so absolutely controlled by the great 
 axioms of faith, it will not seem other than fitting 
 and consequent that “as many as have been baptized 
 into Christ” should really “have put on Christ°,” or 
 that “the Body of Jesus Christ which was given for 
 us” should now, when received sacramentally, “ pre- 
 serve our bodies and souls unto everlasting life?” In 
 
 ἰδίαν αὐτοῦ tod Λόγου. Ζωὴ yap ὧν κατὰ φύσιν ὡς Θεὸς, ἐπειδὴ γέγονεν 
 ἕν πρὸς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ σάρκα, ζωοποιὸν ἀπέφηνεν αὐτήν. This epistle, given 
 in Routh, Ser. Opuse. 1. 17, ed. 3, was written Nov. 430, and read 
 with tacit approval, as it seems, at the General Council of Ephesus 
 in 431. (See Bright’s Hist. Ch. pp. 326, 333.) A similar passage is 
 in St. Cyril’s Explanatio xii. Capitum, (tom. vi. p. 156,) to the 
 effect that the Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist are οὐχ ἑνὸς 
 τῶν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς καὶ ἀνθρώπου κοινοῦ, but ἴδιον σῶμα καὶ αἷμα τοῦ τὰ πάντα 
 ζωογονοῦντος Λόγου" κοινὴ γὰρ σὰρξ ζωοποιεῖν οὐ δύναται, καὶ τούτου μάρτυς 
 αὐτὸς ὁ Σωτὴρ, λέγων, ““Ἢ σὰρξ οὐκ ὠφελεῖ οὐδὲν, τὸ πνεῦμά ἐστι τὸ 
 ζωοποιοῦν.᾽ So in his Comm. in Joan. lib, iv. (tom. iv. p. 361) he 
 says that as Christ’s Flesh, by union with the Word, Who is essen- 
 tially Life, ζωοποιὸς γέγονε, therefore ὅταν αὐτῆς ἀπογευσόμεθα, τότε 
 τὴν ζωὴν ἔχομεν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς. 
 
 y St. Matt. xxviii. 19; xxvi. 26. 
 
 2. St. John iii. 5; vi. 53 866. ἃ τ St. John xv. 1 sqq. 
 
 b Eph. v. 30. ¢ Gal. πὶ. 27. 
 
 4 Communion Service. 
 
VITl.] of the Christian Sacraments. 725 
 
 view of our Lord’s Divinity, we cannot treat as so 
 much profitless and vapid metaphor the weighty sen- 
 tences which Apostles have traced around the Font 
 and the Altar, any more than we can deal thus 
 hightly with the precious hopes and promises that 
 are graven by the Divine Spirit upon the Cross. 
 The Divinity of Christ warrants the realities of sa- 
 cramental grace as truly as it warrants the cleansing 
 virtue of the Atoning Blood. If it forbids our seeing 
 in the Great Sacrifice for sin, nothing higher than a 
 moral exemplar; it also forbids our degrading the 
 august institutions of the Divine Redeemer to the 
 level of the dead ceremonies of the ancient law. 
 On the other hand, belief in the reality of sacra- 
 mental grace protects belief in a Christ Who is really 
 Divine; Sacraments, if fully believed in, are out- 
 works in the religious thought and in the daily 
 habits of the Christian, which necessarily and jea- 
 lously guard the prerogatives and honour of his 
 adorable Lord. 
 
 That depreciation of the Sacraments has led with 
 general consistency to depreciation of our Lord’s 
 Eternal Person is a simple matter of history. True, 
 there have been and are believers in our Lord’s 
 Divinity who deny the realities of sacramental grace. 
 But experience appears to shew that their position is 
 only a transitional one. For history illustrates this 
 law of fatal declension even in cases where sacra- 
 mental belief, although imperfect, has been far nearer 
 to the truth than is the naturalism of Zwingh. Many 
 of the most considerable Socinian congregations in 
 England were founded by the Presbyterians who fell 
 away from the Church in the seventeenth century. 
 
726 Sacraments guard Christ's true Divinity. [ Lecr. 
 
 The pulpit and the chair of Calvin are now filled by 
 men who have, alas! much more in common with the 
 Racovian Catechism than with the positive elements 
 of the theology of the Institutes. The restless mind 
 of man cannot but at last push its principle to the 
 real limit of its application, even although centu- 
 ries should intervene between the premiss and the 
 conclusion. Imagine that the Sacraments are only 
 picturesque memorials of an absent Christ, and the 
 mind is in a fair way to believe that the Christ Who 
 is thus commemorated as absent by a barren cere- 
 mony is Himself only and purely human. Certainly 
 if Christ were not Divine, the efficacy of Sacraments 
 as channels of graces that flow from His Manhood 
 would be the wildest of fancies. Certainly if Sa- 
 craments are not thus channels of His grace, it is 
 difficult to shew that they have any rightful place 
 in a dispensation, from which the dead forms and 
 profitless shadows of the synagogue have been 
 banished, and where all that is authorized is instinct 
 with the power of a heavenly life. The legitimacy 
 of the Sacraments implies their real efficacy: their 
 efficacy points to the Godhead of their Founder. 
 Instead of only reviving the thought of a distant 
 past, they quicken all the powers of the Christian 
 by union with a present and living Saviour; they 
 assure us that Jesus of Nazareth is to us at this 
 moment what He was to His first disciples eighteen 
 centuries ago ; they make us know and feel that He 
 is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, unchang- 
 ing in His human tenderness, because Himself the 
 Unchangmg God. It is the doctrine of Christ’s 
 Divinity to which they point, and which in turn 
 
VIII.| Priesthood and Royalty of the Divine Christ. 127 
 
 irradiates the perpetuity and the reality of their 
 power. ἢ 
 
 (δ) It is unnecessary for us to dwell more at 
 length upon the light which our Lord’s Divinity 
 sheds upon His priestly office. We know that as 
 His promise and presence makes poor human words 
 and simple elements the channels of His mercy, by 
 taking them up into His kingdom and giving them a 
 power which of themselves they have not, so it is His 
 Divinity which makes His Intercession in Heaven 
 so omnipotent a force. He intercedes above, by 
 His very presence ; He does not bend as a suppliant 
 before the Sanctity of God; He is a Priest upon 
 His Throne*. Nor may we linger over the bearings 
 of His Divinity upon His Kingly office. The fact 
 that He rules with a boundless power, may assure 
 us that whether willingly or by constraint, yet as- 
 suredly in the end, all moral beings shall be put 
 under Him‘, But you do not question the legitimacy 
 of this obvious inference. And time forbids us to 
 linger upon the topic, suggestive and interesting as 
 it is. We pass then to consider an objection which 
 will have been taking shape in many minds during 
 the course of the preceding discussion. 
 
 III. You admit that the doctrine of Christ’s God- 
 head illuminates the force of other doctrines in the 
 Christian creed, and that it explains the importance 
 attributed to her sacramental ordinances by the 
 Christian Church. But you have the interests of 
 morality at heart ; and you are concerned lest this 
 doctrine should not merely fail to stimulate the 
 moral life of men, but should even deprive mankind 
 
 e Zech. vi. 13. f x Cor. xv. 25; Heb. ii. 8. 
 
728 Supposed ‘moral’ oljection to Christ's Divinity. (Lxcr. 
 
 of a powerful incentive to moral energy. The Hu- 
 manitarian Christ is, you contend, the most precious 
 treasure in the moral capital of the world. He is 
 the Perfect Man; and men can really copy a life 
 which a brother man has lived. But if Christ’s 
 Godhead be insisted on, you contend that His Hu- 
 man Life ceases to be of value as an ethical model 
 for humanity. An example must be in some sense 
 upon a level with those who essay to imitate it. A 
 model being, the conditions of whose existence are 
 absolutely distinct from the conditions which sur- 
 round his imitators, will be deemed to be beyond the 
 reach of any serious imitation. If then the dogma 
 of Christ’s Godhead does iluminate and support 
 other doctrines, this result is, in your judgment, 
 purchased at the cost of practical interests. <A 
 merely human saviour would at least be imitable; 
 and he would thus better respond to the immediate 
 moral necessities of man. For man is, after all, the 
 child of common sense ; and before he embarks upon 
 a serious enterprise, he desires to be reasonably satis- 
 fied that he is not aiming at the impracticable. 
 
 Now this objection is of an essentially ἃ priort 
 character. It contends that, if Christ is God, His 
 Manhood must be out of the reach of human imi- 
 tation. It does not deny the fact that He has 
 been most closely imitated by those who have be- 
 lieved most entirely in His true Divinity. In fact 
 it seems to leave out of sight two very pertinent 
 considerations. 
 
 You forget, my brethren, on the one hand, that 
 according to the terms of the Catholic doctrine, our 
 
 Lord is truly and literally Man, and that it is His 
 
Ὑ111.] Christ's true Humanity really imitable. 729 
 
 Human Nature which is proposed to our imitation. 
 His Divinity does not destroy the reality of His 
 Manhood, by overshadowing or absorbing it. Cer- 
 tainly the Divine attributes of Jesus are beyond 
 our imitation; we can but adore a boundless In- 
 telligence or a resistless Will. But the province of 
 the imitable in the Life of Jesus is not indistinctly 
 traced. As the Friend of publicans and sinners, as 
 the Consoler of those who suffer, and the Helper 
 of those who want, Jesus Christ is at home among 
 us. We can copy Him, not merely in the outward 
 activities of charity, but in its inward temper; we 
 can copy the tenderness, the meekness, the patience, 
 the courage, which shine forth from His Perfect 
 Manhood. His Human Perfections constitute indeed 
 a faultless Ideal of Beauty, which, as moral artists, 
 we are bound to keep in view. What the true 
 and highest model of a human life is, has been 
 decided for us Christians by the appearance of 
 Jesus Christ in the flesh. Others may endeavour 
 to reopen that question. For us it is settled, and 
 settled irrevocably. Nor are Christ’s Human Per- 
 fections other than human; they are not, in the 
 sense of Divine attributes, out of our reach; they 
 are not designed only to remind us of what human 
 nature should, but cannot, be. We can approximate 
 to them, even indefinitely. That in our present 
 state of imperfection we should reproduce them in 
 their fulness is indeed impossible ; but it is certain 
 that a close imitation of Jesus of Nazareth is at 
 once our duty and our privilege. For God has 
 “predestinated us to be conformed” by that which 
 we do, not less than by that which we endure, to 
 
730 Imitation of Christ possible only through grace. {Lxcr. 
 
 the Human Image of His Blessed Son, “that He might 
 jbe the Firstborn among many brethrens.” 
 
 On the other hand, you forget that if we can thus 
 copy our Lord, it is not in the strength of our fallen 
 nature. Hopeless indeed would be the task, if in a 
 spirit of Pelagian self-reliance we should endeavour 
 to reproduce in our own lives the likeness of Christ, 
 Our nature left to itself} enfeebled and depraved, 
 cannot realize the ideal of which it is a wreck, until 
 a higher power has entered into it, and made it 
 what of itself it cannot be. Therefore the power of 
 imitating Jesus comes from Jesus through His Spirit, 
 His Grace, His Presence. Now, as in St. Paul’s day, 
 “Jesus Christ is in us” Christians, “except we be 
 reprobates.” The “power that worketh in us” is 
 no mere memory of a distant past. It is not natural 
 force of feeling, nor the strength with which self- 
 discipline may brace the will. It is a living, ener- 
 sizing, transforming influence, inseparable from the 
 presence of a “quickening Spiriti” such as is our 
 glorified Lord. If Christ bids us follow Him, it is 
 because He Himself is the enabling principle of our 
 obedience. If He would have us be like unto Him- 
 self, this is because He is willing by His indwelling 
 Presence to reproduce His likeness within us. If 
 it is His Will that we should grow up unto Him 
 in all things Who is the Head, even Christ*; this 
 is because His vitalizing power is really distributed 
 throughout the body of His members! Of our- 
 selves we are “miserable, and poor, and blind, and 
 
 & Rom. viii, 29. A= Gor: xiii. 5. 
 Lon Cor, ἘΥ 45: k Eph. iv. 15. 
 1 Ibid. i. 23; iv. τό. 
 
VIII.) Moral fruitfulness of faith in Chris?s Godhead. 731 
 
 naked™.” But we take counsel of Him, and buy of His 
 “gold tried in the fire;” and forthwith we “can do 
 all things through Christ That strengtheneth us™.” It 
 is the Spiritual Presence of Christ in the Church and 
 in Christian souls which makes the systematic imita- 
 tion of Christ something more than a waste of energy°. 
 But if the Christ Whom we imitate be truly human, 
 the Christ Who thus creates and fertilizes moral 
 power within us must be Divine. His Divinity does 
 not disturb the outline of that model which is sup- 
 plied by His Manhood; while it does furnish us 
 with a stock of inward force, in the absence of which 
 the imitation of our Lord would be ἃ hopeless 
 enterprise. 
 
 Indeed, it is precisely the belief in the Divinity of 
 our Lord which has enriched human life with moral 
 virtues such as civilized paganism could scarcely 
 have estimated, and certainly could not have created. 
 The fruitfulness of this great doctrine in the sphere 
 of morals will be more immediately apparent, if we 
 consider one or two samples of its productiveness. 
 
 (2) When Greek thought was keenest, and Greek 
 art most triumphantly creative, and Greek political 
 life so organized as to favour in a degree elsewhere 
 unknown among men the play of man’s _ highest 
 natural energies, Greek society was penetrated 
 through and through by an invisible enemy, more 
 fatal in its ravages to thought, to art, to freedom, 
 than the sword of any Persian or Macedonian foe. 
 And already in the age of the Czesars, Rome carried 
 in her bosom the secret of her impending decline 
 
 m Rey, iii. 17. n Phil. iv. 13. 
 ο Eph. iv. 15-24. 
 
732 The grace of purity a product [ Lucr. 
 
 and fall in the coming centuries. St. Paul detected 
 and exposed it in termsP which are not more ex- 
 plicit than those employed by Tacitus and Juvenal. 
 The life-blood of a race may be drained away less 
 nobly than on the battle-field. Every capacity for 
 high and generous exertion, or for the cheerful en- 
 durance of suffering at the bidding of duty, all the 
 stock of moral force on which a country can rely 
 in its hour of trial, may be sapped, destroyed, 
 annihilated by a domestic traitor. So it fared 
 with imperial Rome. The fate of the great empire 
 was not really decided on the Rhine or on the 
 Danube. Before the barbarians mustered their 
 savage hordes upon the frontiers of ancient civili- 
 zation, their work had wellnigh been completed, 
 their victory had been won, in the cities, the palaces, 
 nay, in the very temples of the empire. And 
 against such a foe pagan Rome had no resources. 
 Not the State. The Emperor was the State by 
 impersonation ; and not unfrequently it happened 
 that the Emperor was the public friend and patron 
 of the State’s worst enemy. Not philosophy. Doubt- 
 less philosophy meant well in some of its phases, 
 in some of its representatives. But philosophy is 
 much too feeble a thing to enter the lists success- 
 fully with animal passion ; and, as a matter of fact, 
 philosophy has more than once been compelled or 
 cajoled into placing her intellectual weapons at the 
 disposal of the sensualist. Nor did religion herself, 
 in her pagan guise, supply the needed element of re- 
 sistance and cure. Her mysteries were the sanction, 
 her temples the scene, her priests the ministers of 
 
 P Rom. i. 24-32. 
 
VIII.) of faith in Christ?s Divinity. 733 
 
 the grossest debaucheries : and the misery of a de- 
 graded society might have seemed to be complete, 
 when the institutions which were designed to shed 
 some rays of light and love from a higher sphere 
 upon the woes and brutalities of this lower world, 
 did but consecrate and augment the thick moral 
 darkness which made of earth a very hell. 
 
 Now, that Jesus Christ has breasted this evil is 
 a matter of historical fact. His victory is chronicled, 
 if not in the actual practice, yet in the conventional 
 standard of modern society. Certainly the evil in 
 question has not been fairly driven beyond the 
 frontiers of Christendom ; the tone of our society, 
 the sympathies of our literature, the proceedings of 
 our law, would remind us from time to time “that 
 the Canaanite is yet in the land.” But if he is not 
 yet expelled from our borders, at least he is forced 
 to skulk away from the face of a society which still 
 names the Name of Jesus Christ. The most ad- 
 vanced scepticism among us at the present day does 
 not venture with impunity to advocate habits which 
 were treated as matters of course by the friends of 
 Plato: even the licence of our sensuous poetry 
 does not screen such advocacy from earnest and 
 general indignation. This is because, far beyond the 
 circle of His true worshippers, Jesus Christ has 
 created in modern society a public opinion which 
 is determined to discountenance and condemn moral 
 mischief, which it may be unable wholly to prevent. 
 This public opinion is sometimes tempted to disown 
 its parentage and its obligations. Instead of re- 
 joicing to confess itself the pupil of Christ, it imagines 
 schemes of independent morality, which may relieve it 
 
734 The grace of purity a product [Lecr. 
 
 of its sense of indebtedness to our Lord. But as a 
 matter of fact, all that is thus true and wholesome in 
 public opinion is an intellectual radiation from that 
 actual mass of living purity, wherewith the Healer of 
 men has beautified the lives of millions of Christians. 
 And how has Jesus made men pure? Did He insist 
 upon prudential and hygienic considerations? Did 
 He prove that the laws of the physical world cannot 
 be strained or broken with physical impunity? No. 
 Jesus Christ knew human nature well: and expe- 
 rience does not justify the anticipation that scien- 
 tific demonstrations of the physical consequences of 
 sensual indulgence are equal to the task of checking 
 the surging impetuosity of passion. Did Christ, then, 
 call men to purity only by the beauty of His Own 
 example? Did He only confront them with a living 
 ideal of purity, so bright and beautiful as to shame 
 them into hatred of animal degradation ? Again I say, 
 Jesus Christ knew human nature well. If He had 
 only offered an example of perfect purity, He would 
 but have repeated the work of the ancient Law ; He 
 would have given us an ideal, without the capacity 
 of realizing it; He would have at most created a 
 torturing sense of shortcoming and pollution, stimu- 
 lated by the vision of an unattainable standard of 
 perfection. Therefore He did not merely afford us 
 in a Human Form a faultless example of chaste 
 humanity. He did more. He did that which He 
 could only do as being in truth the Almighty God. 
 He made Himself One with our human nature, that 
 He might heal and bless it through its contact with 
 His Divinity. He folded it around His Eternal 
 Person ; He made it His Own ; He made it a power 
 
VIII. ] of faith in Christ's Divinity. 735 
 
 which could quicken and restore us. And then, by 
 the gift of His Spirit, and by sacramental joints 
 and bands, He bound us to it4, He bound us 
 through it to Himself; nay, He robed us in it; by 
 it He entered into us, and made our members His 
 Own. Henceforth, then, the tabernacle of God is 
 with men” ; and “corpus regenerati fit caro Crucifixi.” 
 Henceforth Christian humanity is to be conscious 
 of a Presence within it’, before which the unclean 
 spirit cannot choose but shrink away discomfited and 
 shamed *. The Apostle’s argument to the Corinthian 
 Christians expresses the language of the Christian 
 conscience in presence of impure temptations, to the 
 end of time. “ Know ye not that your bodies are 
 the members of Christ ? shall I then take the mem- 
 bers of Christ, and make them the members of an 
 harlot? God forbid".” From that day to this, the 
 recoil from an ingratitude which a Christian only 
 can exhibit, the dread of an act of sacrilege which 
 a Christian only can commit, the loving recognition 
 of an inward Presence which a Christian only can 
 possess—these have been the controlling, sustaining, 
 hallowing motives which by God’s grace have won the 
 victory. But these motives are rooted in a doctrine 
 of Christ’s sacramental union with His people, which 
 is the veriest fable unless the indwelling Christ be 
 truly God. The power of these motives to sustain 
 us in purity varies with our hold on the master-truth 
 which they so entirely presuppose. Such motives 
 are strong and effective when our faith in a Divine 
 
 a Col. ii. 10. r Rev, xxi. 3. 
 ® Col. i. 27; 2 Cor. xili. 5. t St. Luke iv. 33. 
 u x Cor. vi. 15. 
 
736 The grace of humility a product [ Lect. 
 
 Christ is strong; they are weak when our faith in 
 His Divinity is weak: they vanish from our moral 
 life, and leave us a prey to our enemy, when the 
 Godhead of Jesus is explicitly denied, and when the 
 language which asserts the true incorporation of an 
 Almighty Saviour with our frail humanity is resolved 
 into the fantastic drapery of an empty metaphor. 
 
 (6) If the civilized pagan was impure, he was also 
 proud and self-asserting. He might perhaps deem 
 overt acts of pride an imprudence, on the ground that 
 they were likely to provoke a Nemesis from some 
 spiteful deity. The fates were against continued 
 prosperity ; and it was unwise to boast of that which 
 they waited to destroy,— 
 
 “Tnvida fatorum series, summisque negatum 
 Stare dit, nimioque graves sub pondere lapsus¥.” 
 
 But when this prudential consideration did not weigh 
 with him, the pagan gave full scope to the assertion 
 of self in thought, word, and act. The sentiment of 
 pride was not in conflict with his higher conscience, 
 as would be the case with Christians. He indulged 
 it without scruple, nay rather upon principle,— 
 
 “Secundas fortunas decent superbize *.” 
 
 He was utterly unable to see intrinsic evil in it; and 
 it penetrated in a subtle but intense form into the 
 heart of those better ethical systems which, like the 
 later Stoicism, appeared most nearly to rival the moral 
 glories of the Gospel. Pride indeed might seem to 
 have been the misery of paganism rather than its 
 fault. For man cannot detach himself from himself. 
 
 Vv Luean i. 70. x Plaut. Stich. 11. 1. 27. 
 
VIII.] of faith in Christ’s Divinity. 737 
 
 Man is to himself, under all circumstances, an ever- 
 present subject of thought; but whether this thought 
 is humbly to correspond to the real conditions of his 
 existence, or is to assume the proportions of a turgid 
 and miserable exaggeration, will depend on the ques- 
 tion whether man does or does not see constantly and 
 truly that One Being Who alone can reveal to him 
 his true place in the moral and intellectual universe. 
 Paganism was not humble, because to paganism 
 the true God was but a name. The whole life and 
 thought of the pagan world was therefore very na- 
 turally based on pride. Its literature, its govern- 
 ments, its religious institutions, its social organization 
 and hierarchy, its doctrines about human life and 
 human duty—all alike were based on the principle 
 of a boundless self-assertion. They were based on 
 that cruel and brutal principle which in the end 
 hands over to the keenest wit and to the strongest 
 arm the sceptre of a tyranny, that knows no bounds 
 save those of its strongest lust, checked and con- 
 trolled by the most lively apprehensions of its selfish 
 foresight. Now how did Jesus Christ confront this 
 power of pride thus dominant in the old pagan 
 world. By precept? Undoubtedly. “The kings 
 of the Gentiles,” He said to His followers, “exercise 
 lordship over them ; and they that exercise authority 
 upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not 
 be soy.” “ Whosoever exalteth himself shall be 
 abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be 
 exalted’.” By example? Let us listen to Him. 
 “Learn of Me; for 1 am meek and lowly in heart: 
 
 y St. Luke xxii. 25. z Thid. xiv. 11. 
 
 3 B 
 
738 The grace of humility a product [Lecr. 
 
 and ye shall find rest unto your souls*.” “If I 
 your Lord and Master have washed your feet, ye 
 ought also to wash one another's feet.” 
 
 But why was His example so cogent? What was 
 it in Jesus Christ which revealed to man the moral 
 beauty and the moral power of the humiliation of 
 self? Was it that being a Man, who had within 
 His grasp the prizes which are at the command of 
 genius, or the state and luxuries which may be 
 bought by wealth, He put these things from Him 4 
 If He was only Man, did He really forego wealth 
 and station? Were they ever—at least on a great 
 scale—within His reach? Even if it be true that 
 they were, was His renunciation of them a measure 
 of “that mind which is in Christ Jesus®,” to which 
 St. Paul directs the gaze of the practical Christian 4 
 St. Paul, as we have seen, meant something far higher 
 than the refusal of any earthly greatness when he 
 drew attention to the self-renunciation of his Lord and 
 Master. “Being in the form of God, ... He emptied 
 Himself of His glory, and took on Him the form of 
 a slave.” Historically speaking, it is not Christ's 
 renunciation of earthly advantages which has really 
 availed to make Christians humble. The strongest 
 motives to Christian humility are, first, the nearer 
 sight of God’s Purity and Blessedness which we 
 attain through communion with His Blessed Son, 
 and next, or rather especially, as the Apostle points 
 out, the real scope and force of Christ’s Own example. 
 Christ left the glory wkich He had with the Father 
 before the world was, to become Man. He “took 
 
 a St. Matt. xi. 29. Ὁ St. John xiii. 14. 
 ce Phil. ii. 5. d Thid. 6, 7. 
 
VIII.] of faith in Christ?s Divinity. 739 
 
 upon Him our flesh, and suffered death upon the 
 Cross, that all mankind might follow the example of 
 His great humility®.” Therefore the manifestations 
 of humility in Christendom have varied, on the 
 whole, correspondingly with earnestness of belief in 
 that pre-existent glory from which the Redeemer 
 bent so humbly to the Cross of shame. Certainly, in 
 Jesus this supreme humiliation was the fruit of His 
 charity for souls; whereas, in us, humble thoughts 
 and deeds are the necessary because the just ex- 
 pression of a true self-knowledge. Yet, neverthe- 
 less, the doctrine of Christ’s true Godhead, discerned 
 through the humiliations of His Manhood, braces hu- 
 mility, and rebukes pride at the bar of the Christian 
 conscience. Can men really see God put such honour 
 on humility, and be as though they saw it not? Can 
 a creature, who has nothing good in him that he has 
 not received, and whose moral evil is entirely his own, 
 behold the Highest One thus teaching him the truth- 
 ful attitude of a created life, without emotion, with- 
 out shame, without practical results? What place is 
 there for great assertions of self in a man who sin- 
 cerely believes that he has been saved by the Death 
 of the Incarnate Son of God? Who has the heart to 
 vaunt his own opinion, or to parade his accomplish- 
 ments, or to take secret pleasure in income or station 
 or intellectual power, when he reflects upon the 
 astonishing grace of our Lord Jesu Cirist, Who, 
 when He was rich, for our sakes became poorf? It is 
 the Incarnation which has confronted human pride, 
 by revealing God clearly to the conscience of men, 
 but also, and especially, by practically setting the 
 
 e Collect for Sunday before Easter. f 2 Cor. viii. 9. 
 3B 2 
 
140 The grace of charity a product [ Lxcr. 
 
 highest possible honour upon extreme self-humilia- 
 tion. It is the Incarnation which has led men to veil 
 high gifts, and to resign places of influence, and to 
 forego the advantages of wealth and birth, that they 
 might have some part, however fractionally small, in 
 the moral glories of Bethlehem and Calvary. It is 
 the Incarnation which has thus saved society again 
 and again from the revolutionary or despotic violence 
 of unbridled ambitions, by the corrective, compensat- 
 ing force of active self-abasement. An enthusiasm 
 for withdrawal from the general struggle to aggran- 
 dise self has fascinated those worshippers of an 
 Incarnate God, who have learnt from Him the true 
 glory of taking the lowest place at the feast of 
 human life. But the motive for such self-renounce- 
 ment is powerful only so far as faith in Christ’s God- 
 head is clear and strong. The culture of humility 
 does not enter into the ordinary schemes of natural 
 ethics; and Humanitarian doctrines are found, as a 
 rule, to accompany intellectual and social self-asser- 
 tion. It has been true from the first, it is true at 
 this hour, that a sincere faith which recognises in 
 the Son of Mary, laid in His manger and nailed to 
 His Cross, none other than the Only-begotten Son of 
 God, is the strongest incentive to conquer the na- 
 tural pride of the human heart, and to learn the 
 bearing of a little child’—that true note of pre- 
 destined nobility—in the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 (vy) Let us take one more illustration of the moral 
 fruitfulness of a faith in the Divinity of our Saviour. 
 There is a grace, to which the world itself does 
 homage, and which those who bend neither heart nor 
 
 & St. Matt. xviii. 3. 
 
VIII.) of belief in Christ?s Divinity. 741 
 
 knee before the world’s Redeemer admit to be the 
 consequence of His appearance among men. 
 
 Heathenism, my brethren, as being impure and 
 proud, was consistently unloving. For as the one 
 vice eats out the delicacy and heart of all true ten- 
 derness, so the other systematically enthrones self 
 upon the ruins of the unselfish affections. Despite 
 the Utopian sketches which have been drawn by 
 philosophers of the last century, the sentiment of 
 ‘humanity’ is too feeble a thing to create in us 
 a true love of man as man. Man does not, in his 
 natural state, love his brother man, except it be 
 from motives of interest or blood-relationship. Nay, 
 man regards all who are not thus related to him as 
 his natural rivals and enemies, from whom he has 
 nothing to expect save that which the might or the 
 prudence of self-interest may dictate. 
 
 τὸ γὰρ οἰκεῖον πιέζει 
 
 πάνθ᾽ ὁμῶς" εὐθὺς δ᾽ ἀπήμων κραδία 
 
 κᾶδος ἀμφ᾽ ἀλλότριον, 
 Such is the voice of unchristianized nature: man’s 
 highest love is the love of self, varied by those sub- 
 ordinate affections which minister to self-love : and 
 society is an agglomeration of self-loving beings, 
 whose ruling instincts are shaped by force or by 
 prudence into a political whole, but who are ever 
 ready, as opportunity may arise, to break forth imto 
 the excesses of an unchecked barbarism. Contempt 
 for and cruelty towards the slave, hatred of the 
 political or literary rival, suspicious aversion for the 
 foreigner, disbelief in the reality of human virtue and 
 
 h Pind. Nem. i. 82. 
 
742 The grace of charity a product (Lect. 
 
 of human disinterestedness, were taken for granted 
 by the temper of pagan society. The science of life 
 consisted in solving a practical equation between the 
 measure of evil which it was desirable to inflict upon 
 others, and the amount of suffering which it might 
 be necessary to endure at their hands. Love of 
 mankind would have seemed folly to a society the 
 recognised law of whose life was selfishness, and 
 whose vices culminated in a mutual hatred between 
 man and man, class and class, race and race, thinly 
 veiled by the hollow conventionalisms which dis- 
 tinguished civilization from pure barbarism, 
 
 How did Jesus Christ reform such a society? He 
 gave it the New Commandment. “This is My com- 
 mandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved 
 yous.” But was His love merely the love of a holy 
 man for those whose moral life was too dull and 
 earthly to love Him in return? Could such a human 
 love as this have availed to compass a moral revolu- 
 tion, and to change the deepest instincts of mankind 4 
 15 it not a fact that Christians have measured the 
 love of Jesus Christ as man measures all love, by 
 observing the degree in which it involves the gift of 
 self? Love is ever the gift of self. It gives that 
 which costs us something, or it is not love. Its 
 spirit may vary in the degree of intensity, but it is 
 ever the same. It is always and everywhere the 
 sacrifice of self. It is the gift of time, or of labour, 
 
 5 ὰ ase i , ἣν ἴδ σῷ > > a 
 i Tit. 11. 3: ἦμεν γάρ ποτε καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀνόητοι, ἀπειθεῖς, πλανώμενοι, 
 δουλεύοντες ἐπιθυμίαις καὶ ἡδοναῖς ποικίλαις, ἐν κακίᾳ καὶ φθόνῳ διάγοντες, 
 στυγητοί, μισοῦντες ἀλλήλους. 
 k St. John xv. 12. 
 
VIII.) of faith in Christ’s Divinity. 743 
 
 or of income, or of affection ; it is the surrender of 
 reputation and of honour; it is the acceptance of 
 sorrow and of pain for others. The warmth of the 
 spirit of love varies with the felt greatness of the 
 sacrifice which expresses it and which is its life. 
 Therefore the love of the Divine Christ is infinite. 
 “ He loved me,” says an apostle, “and gave Himself 
 for me!” The ‘Self’? which He gave for man was 
 none other than the Infinite God: the reality of 
 Christ’s Godhead is the truth which can alone 
 measure the greatness of His love. The charities 
 of His earthly life are but so many sparks from 
 this one column of flame, which is seen in the 
 Self-devotion of the Eternal Son of God. The 
 agonies of His Passion are illuminated each and all 
 with a moral no less than a doctrinal meaning, by 
 the transcendant truth that He Who is crucified 
 between two thieves is nevertheless the Lord of 
 Glory. From this faith in the voluntary Self-im- 
 molation of the Most Holy, a power of love has 
 streamed forth into the soul of man, of which before 
 the Incarnation man had no experience, but which 
 his moral education would not even have enabled 
 him to admire. But the Infinite Being descending 
 to Self-chosen humiliation and agony, that, without 
 violating His essential attributes, He might win to 
 Himself the heart of His erring creatures, has pro- 
 voked an answer of responsive love, first towards Him- 
 self, and then for His sake towards His creatures. 
 Thus “ with His Own right Hand, and with His holy 
 Arm, He hath gotten Himself the victory™” over 
 the selfishness as over the sins of man. “ We love 
 
 1 Gal. ii. 20. m. Ps, xevili. 2. 
 
744 The moral life of man is fertilized [ Lect. 
 
 Him because He first loved us.” If human life has 
 been brightened by the thousand courtesies of our 
 Christian civilization ; if human pain has been alle- 
 viated by the unnumbered activities of Christian 
 charity ; if the face of Christendom is beautified by 
 institutions which cheer the earthly existence of 
 millions ; these results are due to Christian faith in 
 the Charity of the Redeemer, which is infinite be- 
 cause the Redeemer is Divine. And thus the temples 
 of Christendom, visibly perpetuating the worship of 
 Christ from age to age, are not the only visible wit- 
 nesses among us to His Divine prerogatives. The 
 hospital, in which the bed of anguish is soothed by 
 the hand of science under the guidance of love ; the 
 penitentiary, in which the victims of a selfish passion 
 are raised to moral life by the care and delicacy of an 
 unmercenary tenderness; the school, which gathers 
 the ragged outcasts of our great cities to rescue them 
 from the ignorance and vice of which else they must 
 be the prey ;—what is the fountain-head of these 
 blessed and practical results but the truth of His 
 Divinity, Who has kindled man into charity by giving 
 Himself for man? The moral results of Calvary are 
 what they are, because Christ is God. He Who 
 stooped from heaven to the humiliations of the Cross 
 has opened in the heart of redeemed man a fountain 
 of love and compassion. No distinctions within the 
 vast circle of the human family can narrow or pervert 
 its course ; nor can it cease to flow while Christians 
 believe that Christ crucified for men is the Only- 
 begotten Son of God. 
 
 It is therefore an error to suppose that the doc- 
 
 n 1 St. John iv, 19. 
 
VIII] by faith in Christ’s Divinity. 745 
 
 trme of our Lord’s Divinity has impoverished the 
 moral life of Christendom “ by removing Christ from 
 the category of imitable beings.” For on the one 
 hand, the doctrine leaves His Humanity altogether 
 intact; on the other, it enhances the force of His 
 example as a model of the graces of humility and 
 love. Thus from age to age this doctrine has in truth 
 fertilized the moral soil of human life, no less than 
 it has guarded and illuminated intellectual truth. 
 How indeed could it be otherwise? “If God spared 
 not His Own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, 
 how shall He not with Him also freely give us all 
 things?” Who shall wonder if wisdom and righteous- 
 ness and sanctification and redemption are given with 
 the gift of the Eternal Son? Who shall wonder if 
 by this gift a keen, strong sense of the Personality 
 and Life of God, and withal a true estimate of man’s 
 true dignity, of his capacity, through grace, for the 
 highest forms of life, are guarded in the sanctuary 
 of human thought ? Who shall gainsay it, if along 
 with this gift we inherit a body of revealed and 
 certain truth, reposing on the word of an Infallible 
 Teacher ; if we are washed in a stream of cleansing 
 Blood, which flows from the atoning fountain opened 
 on Calvary for the sin and uncleanness of a guilty 
 world; if we are sustained by sacraments which make 
 us really partakers of the Nature of our God ; if we 
 are capable of virtues which embellish and elevate hu- 
 manity, yet which, but for the strength and example 
 of our Lord, might have seemed unattainable 4 
 
 For the Divinity of God’s Own Son, freely given 
 for us sinners to suffer and to die, is the very heart 
 of our Christian faith. It cannot be denied without 
 
746 Recapitulation. [ Lect. 
 
 tearing out the vitals of a living Christianity. Its 
 roots are struck far back into the prophecy, the 
 typology, the ethics, of the Old Testament. It alone 
 supplies a satisfactory explanation of the moral 
 attitude of our Lord towards His contemporaries. 
 It is the key to His teaching, to His miracles, to 
 the leading mysteries of His life, to His power of 
 controlling the issues of history. It is put forward 
 by apostles who, differing in much besides, were 
 made one by this faith in His Divinity and in 
 the truths which are bound up with it. It enters 
 into the world of speculative discussion ; it is ana- 
 lysed, criticized, denounced, proscribed, betrayed ; yet 
 it emerges from the crucible wherein it has been 
 exposed to the action of every intellectual solvent 
 that hostile ingenuity could devise; it has lost no- 
 thing from, it has added nothing to, its original 
 significance ; it has been clothed in a symbol which 
 interprets it to new generations, and which lives 
 in the confessions of the grateful Church. Its 
 later history is explained when we remember the 
 basis on which it really rests. The question of 
 Christ’s Divinity is the question of the truth or 
 falsehood of Christianity. “If Christ be not God,” 
 it has been truly said, “He is not so great as 
 Mohammed.” But Christ’s moral relation to Mo- 
 hammed may safely be left to every unsophisticated 
 conscience ; and if the conscience owns in Him the 
 Moral Chief of humanity, it must take Him at His 
 word when He reveals His superhuman glory. 
 
 But the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity does not 
 merely bind us to the historic past, and above all to 
 the first records of Christianity ; it is at this hour 
 
VIII.] οΟὐγιδεέ᾽ 5 Divinity the strength of His Church. 747 
 
 the strength of the Christian Church. There are 
 forces abroad in the world of thought which, if 
 viewed by themselves, might well make a Christian 
 fear for the future of Christendom and of humanity. 
 It is not merely that the Church is threatened 
 with the loss of possessions secured to her by the 
 reverence of centuries, and of a place of honour 
 which has perhaps guarded civilization more eftec- 
 tively than it has strengthened religion. The Church 
 has once triumphed without these gifts of Provi- 
 dence ; and, if God wills, she can again dispense 
 with them. But never since the first ages of the 
 Gospel was fundamental Christian truth denied and 
 denounced so largely, and with such passionate 
 animosity, as is the case at this moment in each 
 of the most civilized nations of Europe. It may 
 be that God has in store for His Church greater 
 trials to her faith than she has yet experienced ; 
 it may be that along with the revived scorn of the 
 old pagan spirit, the persecuting sword of pagan 
 hatred will yet be unsheathed. Be it so, if so He 
 wills it. The holy city is strong in knowing “that 
 God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not 
 be removed ; God shall help her, and that right 
 early. The heathen make much ado, and the king- 
 doms are moved ; but God hath shewed His Voice, 
 and the earth shall melt away.” When the waters 
 of human opinion rage and swell, and the mountains 
 shake at the tempest of the same, our Divine Lord 
 is not unequal to the defence of His Name and 
 His Honour. If the sky seem dark and the winds 
 contrary ; if ever and anon the strongest intellectual 
 and social currents of our civilization mass themselves 
 
748 Christ’s Divinity a rallying-point [ Lect. 
 
 threateningly, as if to overwhelm the holy bark as 
 she rides upon the waves ; we know Who is with 
 her, unwearied and vigilant, though He should seem 
 to sleep. Huis presence forbids despondency ; His 
 presence assures us that a cause which has con- 
 sistently triumphed in its day of apparent failure, 
 cannot but calmly abide the issue. “Although the 
 fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in 
 the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and 
 the fields shall yield no meat; the flocks shall be 
 cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd 
 in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will 
 joy in the God of my salvation.” 
 
 Would that these anxieties might in God’s good 
 providence work out a remedy for the wounds of His 
 Church! Would that, in presence of the common 
 foe, and yet more by clinging to the common faith, 
 Christians could learn to understand each other! 
 Surely it might seem that agreement in so stupen- 
 dous a belief as the Divinity of our Crucified Lord 
 might avail to overshadow, or rather to force on a 
 reconciliation between the differences which lie around 
 it, Is it but the indulgence of a fond dream to hope 
 that a heartier, more meditative, more practical grasp 
 of the Divinity of Jesus will one day again unite His 
 children in the bonds of a restored unity? Is it 
 altogether chimerical to expect that Christians who 
 believe that Christ is God, will see more clearly 
 what is involved in that faith, and what is incon- 
 sistent with it; that they will supply what is want- 
 ing or will abandon what is untenable in their creed 
 and practice, so that before men and angels they may 
 unite in the adoring confession of their Divine Head 4 
 
Ἅ111: Jor disunited Christendom. 749 
 
 The pulse quickens, and the eyes fill with tears, at 
 the bare thought of this vision of peace, at this dis- 
 tant but blessed prospect of a reunited Christendom. 
 What dark doubts would it not dispel! What deep 
 consolations would it not shed forth on millions of 
 souls! What fascination would not the spectacle of 
 concordant prayer and harmonious action among the 
 servants of Christ exert over the hearts of sinners! 
 With what majestic energy would the remvigorated 
 Church, “terrible as an army with banners,” address 
 herself forthwith to the heartier promotion of man’s 
 best interests, to the richer development of the 
 Christian life, to more energetic labours for the 
 conversion of the world! But we may not dwell, 
 except in hope and prayer, upon the secrets of 
 Divine Providence. It may be our Lord’s purpose 
 to shew to His servants of this generation only His 
 work, and to reserve for their children the vision 
 of His glory. It must be our duty, in view of His 
 revealed Will, and with a simple faith in His Wisdom 
 and His Power, to pray our Lord “that all they 
 that do confess God’s Holy Name, may agree in the 
 truth of His Holy Word, and live in unity and 
 godly love.” 
 
 But here we must close this attempt to reassert, 
 against some misapprehensions of modern thought, 
 the great truth which guards the honour of Christ, 
 and which is the most precious feature in the intel- 
 lectual heritage of Christians. And for you, dear 
 brethren, who by your generous interest or by your 
 warm sympathies have so accompanied and sustained 
 him, what can the preacher more fittingly or more 
 sincerely desire than that any clearer sight of the 
 
750 Conclusion. [ Lect. 
 
 Divine Person of our glorious and living Lord which 
 may have been granted you, may be, by Him, blessed 
 to your present sanctification and to your endless 
 peace? If you are intellectually persuaded. that in 
 confessing the true Godhead of Jesus you have not 
 followed a cunningly-devised fable, or the crude 
 imagination of a semi-barbarous and distant age, then 
 let me entreat you not to rest content with this in- 
 tellectual persuasion. A truth so sublime, so im- 
 perious, has other work to do in you besides shaping 
 into theoretic compactness a certain district of your 
 thought about the goodness of God and the wants 
 of man. The Divine Christ of the Gospel and the 
 Church is no mere actor, though He were the greatest, 
 in the great tragedy of human history; He belongs 
 not exclusively or especially to the past ; He is “the 
 Same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” He is at this 
 moment all that He was eighteen centuries ago, all 
 that He has been to our fathers, all that He will be 
 to our children. He is the Divine and Infallible 
 Teacher, the Healer and Pardoner of sin, the Source 
 of all graces, the Conqueror of Satan and of death 
 —now, as of old, and as hereafter. Now as of old, 
 He is “able to save unto. the uttermost them that 
 come unto God by Him;” now, as on the day of 
 His triumph over death, “He opens the Kingdom 
 of Heaven to all believers;” now, as in the first 
 age of the Church, He it is “that hath the key of 
 David, that openeth and no man shutteth; and 
 shutteth, and no man openeth®.” He is ever the 
 Same; but, as the children of time, whether for 
 good or evil, we move onwards in perpetual change. 
 
 © Rev. iii. 7. 
 
VIII.] Conclusion. 751 
 
 The hours of life pass, they do not return; they 
 pass, yet they are not forgotten; “pereunt et impu- 
 tantur.” But the present is our own; we may re- 
 solve, if we will, to live as men who live for the glory 
 of an Incarnate God. Brethren, you shall not repent 
 it, if, when life’s burdens press most heavily, and 
 especially at that solemn hour when human help 
 must fail, you are able to lean with strong confi- 
 dence on the Arm of an Almighty Saviour. May 
 He in deed and truth be with you, alike in your 
 pilgrimage through this world, and when that brief 
 journey is drawing to its close. May you, sustained 
 by His Presence and aid, so pass through the valley 
 of the shadow of death as to fear no evil, and to 
 find, at the gate of the eternal world, that all the 
 yearnings of your faith and hope are to be more 
 than satisfied by the vision of the Divine “ King 
 in His Beauty.” 
 
Bs i ΚΝ 
 ᾿ -¥F δου hy ae | τ ia a ae) 
 ary Ok πο avis ie fbi Wn 
 . eet fore: as: ΤΟΠΥΓΕ 
 ᾿ > ᾿ Ν 
 ; > ΤΉΝ. ὁ wat brag ¥ ore ΔΝΗΣ ΠΝ 
 qe ae ΠῚ Ἢ ἫΝ if - 
 
 οἱ; ney | Phi 
 
 5 i τ 
 ΣΝ τὰ Ὁ 
 ΡΠ i 
 had 
 ¥,” -Ξ ΝΡ 
 aS Mord δ 
 ᾿ ΤΥ ᾿ <a 
 TW et he Fi > ' ν = 
 ᾿ νὰ ἀπ ὦ “ὦ σ᾽ ge Ν ye 
 yt ay . ν Ἴ ¥ γ᾽ 
 = 
 * . Φ. = 
 e« bey ὃ an == 
 ° ᾿ηάνι: -" eS 
 us a eee 
 Ἂϑ τ ὦ ex, 
 
 : Ag Pe is - Oe Ἷ es ἐν. 
 TS * wit§, ae 
 Ὁ, 
 
 ΑΝ ye ὃ athers= ὦ 
 ie;'-¢ a ἀφ τὰν Ὅν, oh 2 
 ᾿ ἴω > A “@ ᾿ , i 
 a Oi wae δὲ. Nae 
 Ε ͵ avs 4 1. 9@ ΓΝ ᾽ ὶ 
 
 oe: ' Ξ 
 ὰ i. ΦΑ - i gine Wl aw a 
 
ΝΘ ES. 
 
 NOTE A., ON PAGE 22. 
 
 Tue works upon the Life of our Lord alluded to in the text 
 are the following. 
 
 1. Das Leben Jesu, von Dr. F. 1). Strauss. 1835. This work 
 passed through several editions, and in 1864 was followed up 
 by Das Leben Jesu, fiir das Deutsche Volk bearbeitet. Leipsig, 
 Brookhaus. 
 
 Strauss’ argument is chiefly concerned with the differences be- 
 tween the Evangelists, and with the miraculous features of their 
 narratives. He regards the miracles as ‘myths,’ that is to say, 
 as pure fictions. His position is, that the speculative ideas about 
 Jesus which were circulating in the first century were dressed 
 up in a traditional form, the substance of which was derived from 
 the Messianic figures of the Old Testament. This violent sup- 
 position was really dictated by Strauss’ philosophy. Denying 
 the possible existence of miracle, of the supernatural, of the 
 invisible world, and even the existence of a personal living God, 
 Strauss undertakes to explain the Gospel-history as the natural 
 development of germs previously latent in the world of human 
 life and thought. Asserting that all is relative, that nothing is 
 absolute, Strauss will not allow that any one man can absolutely 
 have realized the ‘idea’ of humanity; and he contends that, 
 historically, Jesus fell far below the absolute Idea to which the 
 thought of the Apostolical age endeavoured to elevate Him by 
 the ‘mythical’ additions to his ‘Life.’ Thus Strauss’ criticism 
 is in reality the application of Hegel’s doctrine of ‘absolute 
 
 30 
 
784 NOTES. 
 
 idealism’ to the Gospel narratives. “It is,’ observes Dr. Mill, 
 “far more from a desire of working out on a historical ground 
 the philosophical principles of his master, than from any attach- 
 ment to mythical theories on their own account, that we are 
 clearly to deduce the destructive process which Strauss has applied 
 to the Life of Jesus.” (Myth. Interpr. p. 11.) 
 
 Strauss’ later work is addressed not to the learned, but to 
 the German people, with a view to destroying the influence of 
 the Lutheran clergy. He observes in his Preface: “Wer die 
 Pfaffen aus der Kirche schaffen will, der muss erst das Wunder 
 aus der Religion schaffen.” (Vorrede, p. xix.) With this practical 
 object he sets to work; and although the results at which he 
 arrives are perhaps more succinctly stated than in his earlier book, 
 the real difference between them is not considerable. He makes 
 little use of the critical speculations on the Gospels which have 
 been produced in Protestant and Rationalistic Germany during 
 the last thirty years. Thus he is broadly at issue with the 
 later Tiibingen writers on the subject of St. Mark’s Gospel ; 
 he altogether disputes their favourite theory of its ‘ originality,’ and 
 views it as only a colourless réswmé of the narratives of St. 
 Matthew and St. Luke. His philosophical theory is, however, 
 still dominant in his thought: Jesus did for religion what 
 Socrates did for philosophy, and Aristotle for science. Although 
 the appearance of Jesus in the world constituted an epoch, 
 He belonged altogether to humanity: He did not rise above 
 it; He might even be surpassed. The second book, like the 
 first, is an elaboration of the thesis that “the idea cannot attain 
 its full development in a single individual of the species;” and 
 to this elaboration there are added some fierce democratical and 
 anti-clerical onslaughts, designed to promote an anti-Christian 
 social revolution in northern Germany. 
 
 2. Das Characterbild Jesu, ein biblischer Versuch, von Dr. 
 Daniel Schenkel. 2te Auflage. Wiesbaden, 1864. 
 
 Dr. Schenkel begins by insisting upon the ‘ irrational’ character 
 of the Church’s doctrine of the Union of two Natures in our 
 Lord’s Person. Nothing, he thinks, short of the oppression with 
 which the medieval Church treated all attempts at free thought 
 can account for the perpetuation of such a dogma. The Reformers, 
 
NOTES. 755 
 
 although they proclaimed the principle of free enquiry, yet did 
 not venture honestly to apply it to the traditional doctrine of 
 Christ’s Person; primitive Protestantism was afraid of the con- 
 sequences of its fundamental principle. The orthodox doctrine 
 accordingly outlived the Reformation; but the older Rationalism 
 has established a real claim upon our gratitude by insisting 
 upon the pure Humanity of Christ, although, Dr. Schenkel thinks, 
 it has too entirely stripped Him of His ‘ Divinity,’ that is to 
 say, of the moral beauty to which we may still apply that 
 designation. Then, the Christ of Schleiermacher is a product 
 of the yearnings and aspirations of that earnest and gifted 
 teacher, but is not, according to Schenkel, the Jesus of his- 
 tory. Strauss does represent Jesus such as He was in the 
 reality of His historical life; but Strauss’ representation is too 
 much tinged with modern colourings; nor are his desolating 
 negations sufficiently counterbalanced by those positive results 
 of this thoroughgoing ‘criticism’ upon which Dr. Schenkel 
 proposes to dwell. For the future, faith in Christ is to rest 
 on more solid bases than “auf denen des Aberglaubens, der 
 Priesterherrschaft, und einer mit heiteren oder schreckenden 
 Bildern angefiillten Phantasie.” (p. 11.) 
 
 Dr. Schenkel makes the most of the late Tiibingen theory 
 of the ‘originality, as it is called, of St. Mark, and of the 
 non-historical character, as he maintains, of the Gospel of St. John; 
 although he deals very ‘freely’ with the materials, which he 
 reserves as still entitled to historical consideration. Dr. Schenkel 
 does not hold that the Evangelistic account of Christ’s miracles is 
 altogether mythical; it has, he thinks, a certain basis of fact. He 
 admits that our Lord may have possessed what may be termed a 
 miraculous gift, even if this should be rightly explained to be only 
 a rare natural endowment. He had a power of calming persons of 
 deranged mind ; His assurances of the pardon of their sins, acting 
 beneficially on their nervous system, produced these restorative 
 effects. Dr. Schenkel holds it to be utterly impossible that Jesus 
 could have worked any of the ‘miracles of nature ;’ since this would 
 have proved him to be truly God. All such narratives as His 
 calming the storm in the lake are therefore part of that “torrent 
 of legend” with which the historical germ of His real Life has 
 been overlaid by-later enthusiasms. The Resurrection, accordingly, 
 
 302 
 
756 NOTES. 
 
 is not a fact of history ; it is a creation of the imaginative devo- 
 tion of the first disciples. (See p. 314.) Dr. Schenkel considers the 
 appearances of our Risen Lord to have been only so many glorifica- 
 tions of His character in the hearts of those who believed in Him. 
 To them He was manifested as One who lives eternally, who founds 
 His kingdom on earth by His word and His Spirit. 
 
 The main idea of Dr. Schenkel’s book is to make the Life of 
 Jesus the text of an attack upon those who are Conservatives 
 in politics and orthodox Lutherans in religion. It is not so 
 much a biography, or even a sketch of character, as a polemical 
 pamphlet. The treatment of our Lord’s words and actions, and 
 still more the highly-coloured representation of the Pharisees, 
 are throughout intended to express the writer’s view of schools 
 and parties in Lutheran Germany. The Pharisees of course 
 are the orthodox Lutherans; while Jesus Christ is the political 
 demagogue and liberal sceptic. With few exceptions, the etiquette 
 of history is scrupulously observed ; and yet the really historical 
 interest is as small, as the polemical references are continuous 
 and piquant. The woes which Jesus pronounces against the 
 Pharisees are not directed simply against hypocrisy and formalism ; 
 “the curse of Christ,” we are told, “like the trumpet of the last 
 Judgment, lights for ever upon every church that is based upon 
 tradition and upon the ascendancy of a privileged clergy.” ‘ Der 
 Weheruf Jesu ist noch nicht verklungen. Er trifft noch heute, 
 wie eine Posaune des Gerichts, jedes auf die Satzungen der 
 Ueberlieferung und auf die Herrschaft eines mit Vorzugsrechten 
 ausgestatteten Klerus gegriindete Kirchenthum.” (p. 254.)  Per- 
 haps the most singular illustration of profane recklessness in 
 exegesis that can easily be found in modern literature is Dr, 
 Schenkel’s explanation of the sin against the Holy Ghost. This sin, 
 he tells us, does not consist, as we may have mistakenly supposed, 
 in a deliberate relapse from grace into impenitence; it is not 
 the sin of worldly or unbelieving persons. It is the sin of 
 _ orthodoxy ; it is ἃ “Theologisch-hierarchischer Verhirtung und 
 Verstockung ;” and those who defend and propagate the ancient 
 faith of Christians, in spite of rationalistic warnings against 
 doing so, are really guilty of it. (Charact. p. 106.) 
 
 Dr. Schenkel has explained himself more elaborately on some 
 points in his pamphlet “Die Protestantische Freiheit, in ihrem 
 
NOTES. 757 
 
 gegenwirtigen Kampfe mit der kirchlichen Reaktion.” Wiesbaden, 
 1865. He fiercely demands a Humanitarian Christology (p. 153). 
 He laments that even Zwingli’s thought was still fettered by the 
 formule of Niczea and Chalcedon (p. 152), nay, he remarks that 
 St. Paul himself has assigned to Christ a rank which led on naturally 
 to the Church-belief in the Divinity of His Person (p. 148). That 
 belief Dr. Schenkel considers to be a shred of heathen thought 
 which had found its way into the circle of Christian ideas (ibid.) ; 
 while he urges that the adoration of Jesus, both in the public 
 Services of the Church and in the Christian consciousness, has 
 superseded that of God the Father. “Vom fiinften Jahrhundert 
 bis zur Reformation (he might have begun four centuries earlier 
 and gone on for three centuries later) wird Jesus Christ durch- 
 gingig als der Herrgott verelrt” (p. 149). Indeed, throughout 
 this brochure Dr. Schenkel’s positions are simply those of the 
 old Socinianism, resting however upon a Rationalistic method of 
 treatment, which in its more logical phases regards Socinianism 
 itself as the yoke of an intolerable orthodoxy. 
 
 3. Geschichte Christus’ und Seiner Zeit, von Heinrich Ewald. 
 Gottingen, 1857. 2% Ausgabe. 
 
 This work is on no account to be placed on the level of those 
 of Strauss or Schenkel, to which in some most vital particulars 
 it is opposed. Indeed, Ewald’s defence of St. John’s Gospel, 
 and his deeper spirituality of tone, must command a religious 
 interest, which would be of a high order, if only this writer 
 believed in our Lord’s Godhead. That this, unhappily, is not 
 the case, will be apparent upon a careful study of the concluding 
 chapter of this volume in “Die Ewige Verherrlichung,” pp. 496-- 
 504,—-beautiful as are some of the passages which it contains. 
 His explanation of the titles ‘Son of God’ and ‘Word of God,’ 
 p. 502, is altogether inadequate; and his statement that “nie 
 hat Jesu als der Sohn und das Wort Gottes sich mit der Vater 
 und Gotte Selbst (from whom Ewald accordingly distinguishes 
 our Lord) verwechselt oder yermessen sich selbst diesem gleich- 
 gestellt,” is simply contradicted by St. John v. and x. 
 
758 NOTES. 
 
 4. Die Menschliche Entwickelung Jesu Christi, von Th. Keim. 
 Ziirich, 1861. Die geschichtliche Wiirde Jesu, von Th. Keim. 
 Ziirich, 1864. Der geschichtliche Christus, Hine Reihe von 
 Vortragen mit Quellenbeweis und Chronologie des Lebens Jesu, 
 von Th. Keim. Ziirich, 1866. 
 
 Dr. Keim, although rejecting the fourth Gospel, retains too 
 much of the mind of Schleiermacher to be justly associated 
 with Drs. Strauss or Schenkel. Dr. Keim, indeed, sees in our 
 Lord only a Man, but still an eminently mysterious Man of 
 incomparable grandeur of character. He recognises, although 
 inadequately, the startling self-assertion of our Lord; and he 
 differs most emphatically from Strauss, Schenkel, and Renan 
 in recognizing the sinlessness of Jesus. He admits, too, the his- 
 torical value of our Lord’s eschatological discourses; he does 
 not regard His miracles ‘of nature’ as absolutely impossible ; 
 and he heartily believes in the reality of Christ’s own Resurrec- 
 tion from the dead. He cannot account for the phzenomenon 
 of the Church, if the Resurrection be denied. Altogether he seems 
 to consider that the Life of Jesus as a spiritual, moral, and, in some 
 respects, supernatural fact, is unique; but an intellectual spectre, 
 the “laws of nature,” interposes to prevent him from drawing the 
 otherwise inevitable inference. Yet for such as he is, let us hope 
 much, 
 
 5. La Vie de Jésus, par Μ΄. Renan. Paris, 1863. 
 
 Of this well-known book it may suffice here to say a very few 
 words. Its one and only excellence is its incomparable style. 
 From every other point of view it is deplorable. Historically, 
 it deals most arbitrarily with the data upon which it professes to 
 be based. Thus in the different pictures of Christ’s aim and 
 action, during what are termed the second andthe third periods 
 of His Ministry, a purely artificial contrast is presented. Thec- 
 logically, this work proceeds throughout on a really atheistic 
 assumption, disguised beneath the thin veil of a pantheistic phrase- 
 ology. It assumes that no such being as a personal God exists at 
 all. The “God” with whom, according to M. Renan, Jesus has 
 such uninterrupted communion, but from whom he is so entirely 
 distinct, is only the “category of the ideal.” It is, however, when 
 
NOTES. 759 
 
 we look at the “ Vie de Jésus” from a moral point of view, that its 
 shortcomings are most apparent in their length and breadth. Its 
 hero is a fanatical impostor, who pretends to be and to do that 
 which he knows to be beyond him, but who nevertheless is held 
 up to our admiration as the ideal of humanity. In place of the 
 Divine and Human Christ of the Gospels, M. Renan presents us 
 with a character devoid of any real majesty, of any tolerable con- 
 sistency, and even of the constituent elements of moral goodness. 
 If M. Renan himself does not perceive that the object of his en- 
 thusiasm is simply an offence to any healthy conscience, this is only 
 an additional proof, if one were needed, of the fatal influence of 
 pantheistic thought upon the most gifted natures. It destroys 
 the sensitiveness of the moral nerve. Enough to say that 
 M. Renan presents us with a Christ who in his Gethsemane was 
 possibly thinking of “les jeunes filles qui auraient peut-étre con- 
 senti ἃ l’aimer.” (p. 379.) 
 
 It ought perhaps here to be added that M. de Pressensé’s work, 
 “ Jésus-Christ, son temps, sa vie, son ceuvre,” Paris, 1865, although 
 failing (as might be expected) to do justice to the sacramental 
 side of our Lord’s Incarnation and Teaching, is yet on the whole 
 a most noble contribution to the cause of Truth, for which the 
 deep gratitude of all sincere Christians cannot but be due to its 
 accomplished author. 
 
 6. Eece Homo ; a Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. 
 London and Cambridge, Macmillan, 1866. 
 
 Every one who reads “ Ecce Homo” must heartily admire the 
 generous passion for human improvement which glows throughout 
 the whole volume. And especial acknowledgment is due to the 
 author from Christian believers, for the emphasis with which 
 he has insisted on the following truths :— 
 
 Christ’s moral sublimity. 
 Christ’s claim of supremacy. 
 Christ’s success in His work. 
 
 Incidentally, moreover, he has brought out into their true pro- 
 minence some portions of the truth, which are lost sight of by 
 popular religionists in England. As an instance of this, his 
 dwelling upon the visibility of the Society founded by Christ may 
 be mentioned. But, on the other hand, the writer has carefully 
 
700 NOTES. 
 
 avoided all reference to the question of Christ’s Person; and he 
 tells us that he has done this deliberately. (Pref. to 5th Ed. p. xx.) 
 The result however is, that his book is pervaded, as it seems to 
 many of his readers, by a vital flaw. It is not merely that our 
 Lord’s claims cannot be morally estimated apart from a clear 
 estimate of His Person. But the author professes to be answering 
 the question, “What was Christ’s object in founding the Society 
 which is called by His Name? Yet to profess to answer this 
 question, while dismissing all theological consideration of the 
 dignity of Christ’s Person, involves the tacit assumption that the 
 due estimate of His Person is not relevant to the appreciation of 
 His Work ; in other words, the assumption that the Christology 
 of the Nicene Creed is at least uncertain. Now the author of 
 “Ecce Homo” is either a Humanitarian, or he is a believer in our 
 Lord’s Divinity, or he is undecided. If he is a Humanitarian, then 
 the assumption is, as far as it goes, in harmony with his personal 
 convictions ; only it should, for various and obvious reasons, have 
 been more plainly stated, since, inter alia, it embarrasses his view of 
 our Lord’s claims and character with difficulties which he does not 
 recognize. If he believes in Christ’s Divinity, then in his forth- 
 coming volume (besides rewriting such chapters as chap. 2, on 
 The Temptation) he will have to enlarge very seriously, or rather 
 altogether to recast, the account which he has given of Christ’s 
 work. If the writer were himself in doubt as to whether Christ is 
 or is not God, then he would not be in a position to give any 
 account whatever of Christ’s work, which is within the limits of 
 human capacity on one hypothesis, and as utterly transcends them 
 on the other. In short, it is impossible for a man to profess to give 
 a real answer to the question, what Christ intended to accomplish, 
 until he has told us who and what Christ was. That fragment of 
 Christ’s work of which we gather an account from history contri- 
 butes its quota to the solution of the question of Christ’s Person ; 
 but that question is too intimately bound up with the moral 
 justification of Christ’s language, and with the real nature and 
 range of His action upon humanity, to bear the adjournment 
 which the author of “ Ecce Homo” has thought advisable. 
 There are several errors in the volume which might seem to shew 
 that the author was himself external to the faith of the Church ; 
 as they would not have been natural in a person who believed it, 
 
NOTES. 761 
 
 but who was throwing himself for the time being into the mental 
 position of a Humanitarian in order the better to do justice to his 
 arguments. For instance, the author confounds St. John’s Baptism 
 with Christ’s. He supposes that Nicodemus came to Jesus by 
 night in order to seek a dispensation from being publicly baptized, 
 and so admitted into Christ’s Society. He imagines that Christ 
 prayed on the Cross only for the Roman soldiers who actually 
 crucified Him, and not for the Pharisees, against whom (it is a most 
 painful as well as an unwarranted suggestion) He continued to feel 
 fierce indignation. This indeed is an instance of the author’s habit 
 of identifying his own imaginations with the motives and feelings 
 of Jesus Christ, where Scripture is either silent or points in an 
 opposite direction. The author is apparently carried away by his 
 earnest indignation against certain forms of anti-social vice, such as 
 Pharisaism ; nor is he wholly free from the tendency so to colour 
 the past as to make it express suggestively his own feelings 
 about persons and schools of the present day. The naturalistic 
 tone of his thought is apparent in his formula of ‘enthusiasm,’ as 
 equivalent to inspiration and the gift of the Holy Spirit; in his 
 general substitution of the conception of anti-social vice for the 
 deeper Scriptural idea of sin ; and in his suggestion that Christians 
 may treat the special precepts of Christ with the same ‘boldness’ 
 with which He treated those of the law of Moses. 
 
 Of the practical results of his book it is difficult to form an 
 estimate. In some minds it may lead to the contented substitution 
 of a naturalistic instead of a miraculous Christianity, of philan- 
 thropic ‘enthusiasm’ instead of a supernatural life, of loyalty to a 
 moral reforming hero, instead of religious devotion to a Divine 
 Saviour of the World. But let us also trust that so fearless a 
 recognition of the claims of Christ to be the King and Centre of 
 renewed humanity, may lead other minds on to the truth which 
 alone makes those claims, taken as a whole, justifiable ; and may 
 recruit the ranks of our Lord’s true worshippers from among 
 the many thoughtful but uninstructed persons who have never 
 faced the dilemma which this book so forcibly, although tacitly, 
 suggests. 
 
702 NOTES. 
 
 NOTE B., on pace 144. 
 
 The word ‘ Elohim’ is used in the Old Testament— 
 
 (1) Of the One True God, as in Deut. iv. 35, 1 Kings xviii. 
 21, etc., where it has the article; and without the article, 
 Gen. yi 2, oxi) 38) 5. Exod: xe51.03,.xxxv. 545 ΝΠ, παῖς: 
 2, ete. 
 
 (2) Of false gods, as Exod. xii. 12; 2 Chron. xxviii. 23; Josh. 
 xxiv. 15; Judg. vi. ΤΟ, ete. 
 
 (3) Of judges to whom a person or matter is brought, as 
 representing the Divine Majesty in the theocracy, yet uot 
 in the singular, Exod. xxi. 6, xxii. 7, 8, (in Deut. xix. 17 it 
 is said in the like case that the parties “shall stand before the 
 Lorp,” 717°); and in allusion to the passages in Exodus, 
 Ps. Ixxxil. 1, 6, “ Recte Abarbenel observavit, judices et 
 magistratus nusquam vocari ΩΝ, nisi respectu loci judicii, 
 quod ibi Dei judicia exerceant.” (Ges.) 
 
 (4.) There is no case in which the word appears from the context 
 to be certainly applied, even collectively, to superhuman beings 
 external to the Divine Essence. “ Nullus exstat locus,” says 
 Gesenius, “in quo hee significatio vel necessaria vel pre 
 ceteris apta sit.” In Ps. Ixxxii. 1, the word is explained by 
 verses 2 and 6 of the “sons of God,” 1. 6. judges ; cf. especially 
 verse 8. Yet in Ps. xevii. 7, the LXX, Vulg., Syr. translate 
 
 ’ the Chaldee paraphrases “the worshippers of 
 
 idols ;” in Ps. exxxvill. 1, the LXX and Vulg. render “angels,” 
 
 the Chald. “judges,” the Syr. “kings ;” in Ps. viii. 2, the 
 
 Chald. too renders “angels,” and is followed by Rashi, Kimchi, 
 
 and Abenezra (who quotes Elahin, Dan. ii. 11), and others. 
 
 It is possible that the earlier Jewish writers had a traditional 
 
 knowledge that oxndx might be taken as DN7II, Job i. 6, 
 
 ii. 1, xxviii. 17, and ΟΝ 92. 
 
 (73 7 
 angels ; 
 
 (5) But, however this may be, it remains certain that Elohim is 
 nowhere used with the singular of any except Almighty God. 
 
NOTES. 763 
 
 NOTE C., on Lect. VII. 
 
 The worship of Jesus Christ as prescribed by the Authorized 
 Services of the Church of England. 
 
 In a letter to the Editor of the “Times,” dated August 9, and 
 published in that journal on September 26, 1866, Dr. Coleuso 
 writes as follows :— 
 
 “T have drawn attention to the fact that out of 180 collects and 
 prayers contained in the Prayer-book, only three or fowr at most 
 are addressed to our Lord, the others being all addressed through 
 Christ to Almighty God. TI have said that there are also ejacula- 
 tions in the Litany and elsewhere addressed to Christ. But I have 
 shewn that the whole spirit and the general practice of our Liturgy 
 manifestly tend to discourage such worship and prayer, instead of 
 making it the ‘ foundation-stone’ of common worship.” 
 
 “Tt appears,” Dr. Colenso further observes, “that the practice in 
 question is not based on any Scriptural or Apostolical authority, 
 but is the development of a later age, and has very greatly increased 
 within the Church of England during the last century, beyond what 
 (as the Prayer-book shews) was the rule at the time of the Re- 
 formation—chiefly, as I believe, through the use of unauthorized 
 hymns.” 
 
 1. Now here it is to be observed, first of all, that prayer to our 
 Lord is either right or wrong. If it is right, if Jesus Christ does 
 indeed hear and answer prayer, and prayer to Him is agreeable to 
 the Divine Will, then three or four hundred collects addressed to 
 Him (supposing the use of them not to imply a lack of devotion 
 to the Eternal Father and the Holy Spirit) are quite as justi- 
 fiable as three or four. If such prayer is wrong, if Jesus Christ 
 does not hear it, and it is opposed to the real Will of God, then 
 a single ejaculation, a single Christe Eleison, carries with it the 
 whole weight of a wrongful act of worship, and is immoral, as 
 involving a violation of the rights of God. 
 
 Dr. Colenso says that prayer to Jesus Christ is “not based on 
 Scriptural or Apostolical authority, but is the development of a 
 later age.” He does not mean to assert that ‘development’ is a 
 sufficient justification of a Christian doctrine or practice ; since he is 
 
764 NOTES. 
 
 assigning a reason for the discouragement which he feels it to be 
 his duty to offer to the practice of prayer to our Lord. But, if his 
 reason be valid, ought it not to make any one such prayer utterly 
 out of the question? It is not easy to understand the principle 
 upon which, after admitting that “three or four collects” in the 
 Prayer-book are addressed to our Lord, Dr. Colenso adds, “ I am 
 prepared to use the Liturgy of the Church of England as it 
 stands.” 
 
 To a clear mind, unembarrassed by the difficulties of a false 
 position, this painful inconsistency would be impossible. Either 
 Jesus Christ is God or He is not; there is no third alternative. 
 If He is God, then natural piety makes prayer to Him inevitable: 
 to call Him God is to call Him adorable. If He is not God, then 
 one-tenth part of the worship which the Church of England in her 
 authorized formularies offers to Him is just as idolatrous as a 
 hundred litanies would be. Dr. Colenso would not explain his use 
 of “ Christ have mercy upon us” as Roman Catholics explain an “ Ora 
 pro nobis.” If one such “ ejaculation” is right, then prayer to our 
 Lord for an hour together is right also. In short, it is not a 
 question of more or fewer prayers to Christ ; the question is, Can 
 we rightly worship Him at all ? 
 
 2. Dr. Colenso maintains that “the whole spirit and the general 
 practice of our Liturgy manifestly tends to discourage” prayer to 
 our Lord. 
 
 What is meant by the “whole spirit” of our Liturgy? If this ex- 
 pression is intended to describe some sublimated essence, altogether 
 distinct from the actual words of the Prayer-book, it is of course 
 very difficult to say what it may or may not ‘tend’ to ‘dis- 
 courage. But if the ‘whole spirit’ of a document be its intel- 
 lectual drift and purpose as gathered from its actual words, and 
 from the history of its formation, then we may say that Dr. Colenso’s 
 assertion is entirely opposed to the facts of the case. 
 
 (a) The devotional addresses to our Lord Jesus Christ a/one in 
 the Church Service are as follows :— 
 
 Daily Service, Morning and Lvening— 
 
 Verses of the Te Deum ν ᾿ 4 ; 5 16 
 
 LS) 
 
 “Christ have mercy upon us” 
 Prayer of St. Chrysostom 
 
 N 
 
NOTES. 76 
 
 Litany— 
 
 Invocation, “Ὁ God the Son”. ; , , i 
 
 “Remember not, Lord”. Ξ . ' ‘ 1 
 
 Deprecations . ἢ ‘ 2 : Ἶ : 5 
 
 Obsecrations : : ; 2 
 
 “Tn all time of our tribulation” . ‘ ; : Ι 
 
 Petitions . : ‘ : : : 21 
 
 “Son of God, we Heseenh Thee Sten ς ; : I 
 
 “Q Lamb of God, That,” ete. . ' 2 
 
 “QO Christ hear us” I 
 
 “Christ have mercy upon us”. : . : I 
 
 Preces, ‘ From our enemies” . ‘ ‘ Ξ IO 
 
 Prayer of St. Chrysostom I 
 Collects— 
 
 Third Sunday in Advent. : : : : I 
 
 St. Stephen’s Day. : : : Ι 
 
 First Sunday in Lent : é : : Ι 
 Communion Office— 
 
 Of the three parts of the Gloria in Excelsis . t 2 
 Solemnization of Matrimony— 
 
 “Christ have mercy upon us”. : : : I 
 Visitation of the Sick— 
 
 “Remember not, Lord”. : : ; 5 I 
 
 “Christ have mercy upon us”. : Ι 
 
 “Ὁ Saviour of the world, Who by Thy Casa” : I 
 Burial of the Dead— 
 
 “Tn the midst of life,” ete. . : 3 : : Ι 
 
 “Christ have mercy upon us”. : : : I 
 Churching of Women— 
 
 “Christ have mercy upon us”. : : ς I 
 Commination— 
 
 “Christ have mercy upon us”. : : : I 
 Prayers to be used at Sea— 
 
 “Q blessed Saviour, That didst save” . : : I 
 
 “Christ have mercy upon us”. ‘ : , I 
 
 “0 Christ hear us”. ‘ : ‘ ἡ : I 
 
766 NOTES. 
 
 (8) Devotional addresses to our Lord conjointly with the Eternal 
 Father and the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Daily Morning and Evening Services, not including 
 
 the Psalms—Gloria Patri at least . : : 6 
 Athanasian Creed—Gloria Patri 
 Litany — 
 “Ὁ Holy, Blessed, and Glorious Trinity”. c I 
 Gloria Patri ; : : Ξ ; : Ι 
 
 Collect for Trinity Sunday 
 Communion Office— 
 
 Preface for Trinity Sunday I 
 Ter Sanctus : I 
 Matrimony—Gloria Patri : : : : : I 
 Visitation of the Sick—Gloria Patri : ᾿ I 
 Burial of the Dead—Gloria Patri at least . : : Ι 
 Churching of Women—Gloria Patri 
 Commuination-—Gloria Patri. : : : : Ι 
 Psalter —Gloria Patri : : ; ΠῚ 
 Prayers to be used at Sea— 
 Gloria Patri. : : ᾿ : : : 4 
 “God the Father, God the Son,” ete. . : 4 I 
 193 
 
 Besides this, there are seven ascriptions of Glory, at the end of 
 prayers, to Christ our Lord with the Father and the Holy Spirit. 
 In one Collect (Ordering of Deacons) the ascription is to Christ 
 alone. . 
 
 (y) It should further be added, that in each of the Ordination 
 Services the whole of that large part of the Litany which is 
 addressed to our Lord is repeated except the Prayer of St. Chry- 
 sostom ; while in the Doxology, twice repeated, at the end of the 
 Veni Creator, Christ is praised with the Father and the Holy Ghost. 
 Nor should the solemn Benedictions in the name of the Three 
 Blessed Persons which occur in the Communion, the Confirmation, 
 and the Marriage Services, be forgotten in estimating the devotional 
 attitude of the Church towards our Lord. For a view of the real 
 amount of change in the Prayer-book which would be necessary in 
 order to expel from it the worship of our Lord, see “The Book of 
 
NOTES. 767 
 
 Common Prayer of the Church of England adapted for general use 
 1852. 
 This compilation appears to have been the work of a Socinian ; as 
 
 in other Protestant Churches.” London, William Pickering, 
 those Protestant Dissenters who believe in the Godhead of our 
 Lord would regard most of its ‘adaptations’ as shocking to their 
 dearest convictions. 
 
 (δ) Of the Collects now addressed to the Father, only two (those 
 for the Fourth Sunday in Advent and Sunday after Ascension) 
 were, in the old Ritual, prayers to Christ. On the other hand, 
 of the three Collects now addressed to our Lord, that for the First 
 Sunday in Lent dates from 1549, that for the Third Sunday in 
 Advent from 1661, while that for St. Stephen’s Day was enlarged 
 and intensified in 1661. The Office for Use at Sea, containing 
 prayers to Christ, also belongs to 1661. 
 
 In order to do justice to the spirit of the Reformers of the 
 sixteenth century on this subject, two facts should be noted. 
 
 1. Prayers to our Lord abound in the semi-authorized Primers 
 which were put out at that period. In Edward the Sixth’s Primer 
 of 1553 there are sixteen. In Elizabeth’s Primer of 1559 there are 
 twenty-two. In one portion of the Preces Privat of 1564 there 
 are twenty-one. In the “Christian Prayers” of 1578 there are 
 fifty-five. 
 
 2. On the other hand, from all of these manuals, as from the 
 public services of the Church, all addresses to any created being 
 were rigorously excluded. And one effect of the expulsion of 
 antiphons and hymns addressed to the Blessed Virgin and other 
 Saints from the Liturgy of the Church of England, has been to 
 throw the praises, prayers, and adorations which the Church of 
 England publicly addresses to our Lord Jesus Christ into a sharper 
 prominence than belonged to such prayers in pre-Reformation 
 times, or than belongs to them now in the Church of Rome. 
 
 Even Puritanism would have shrunk with horror from the 
 discouragement of prayer to our Lord. Witness the speech of Sir 
 E. Dering in the Long Parliament of 1641, after an order of the 
 House of Commons forbidding men to bow at the Name of Jesus :— 
 
 “Was it ever hard before, that any men of any religion, in any 
 age, did ever cut short or abridge any worship, upon any occasion, 
 to their God? ‘Take heed, Sir, and let us all take heed, whither 
 we are going. If Christ be Jesus, if Jesus be God, all reverence, 
 
708 NOTES. 
 
 exterior as well as interior, is too little for Him. I hope we are 
 not going up the back stairs to Socinianism!” (Southey, Book of 
 the Church, p. 462.) 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE. 
 On Lect. IV. 
 «The Presbyter John” and the Apostle. 
 
 Who was the author of the second and third Epistles attributed 
 to St. John the Evangelist in the present Canon of the New 
 Testament ? 
 
 I. The existence of a “ Presbyter John,” a contemporary of the 
 Apostle, depends on the following evidence :— 
 
 (i.) Papias in Eus. iii. 39 names him with Aristion separately 
 from St. John, as a disciple of the Lord. Eusebius adds that 
 this confirms the report of (2) two Johns in Asia who had 
 been in close relations with our Lord, (8) two tombs at 
 Ephesus both bearing the name of John. 
 
 (ii.) Dionysius of Alexandria, in Eus. vii. 25, ascribes the 
 authorship of the Apocalypse to “the Presbyter John,” as 
 Eusebius himself was inclined to do. Dionysius repeats the 
 story of the two tombs. 
 
 (iii.) The “ Apostolical Constitutions” (vii. 47) says that a 
 second John was made Bishop of Ephesus by the Apostle 
 St. John. 
 
 (iv.) St. Jerome (Catal. Script. c. 9 and 18) makes a statement 
 to the same effect: he says that John the Presbyter’s tomb is 
 still shewn at Ephesus, although some maintained that both 
 tombs were memorials of St. John the Evangelist. 
 
 Dr. Dollinger admits that John Presbyter lived as a con- 
 temporary of the Evangelist, and that his grave could be seen 
 at Ephesus next to St. John’s. (First Age of the Church, p. 113, 
 Eng. trans., 2nd edit.) 
 
 II. But this admission would not necessarily involve the further 
 admission that the Presbyter John was the author of the Second 
 
NOTES. 769 
 
 and Third Epistles ascribed to the Apostle. All that can be 
 advanced in favour of the Presbyter’s authorship is stated by 
 Ebrard (Einleitung) ; the ordinary belief being defended by Liicke, 
 Huther, Wordsworth, and Alford. Among reasons for it are the 
 following :— 
 
 i. The argument from style. The differences upon which Ebrard 
 lays such stress may fairly be accounted for by the distinct 
 character aud object of the two Epistles ; while their general type 
 of language and thought is unmistakeably Johannean.  Bret- 
 schneider denied that the Apostle had written any one of the three 
 Epistles. Yet he had no doubt of the fact that all three had been 
 written by a single author. 
 
 uu. Church-tradition. 
 
 (a) The great authority, in this matter especially, of St. Ire- 
 neus; Her. i. 16. 3; iii. 16. 8. (See Alford.) Neither 
 St. Irenzeus nor Polyerates had ever heard, it would appear, 
 of the Presbyter John, which shews at least that he cannot 
 have been an eminent person in the Church. 
 
 (8) That of Clement and Dionysius of Alexandria (see Alford); 
 Aurelius, quoted by St.Cyprian in Cone. Carth.; St. Jerome, 
 ef. Ep. 2 ad Paulinum, Ep. ad Evagrium. 
 
 (y) On the other hand, Origen was doubtful about the 
 authorship as about many other things. (Eus. vi. 25.) The 
 two Epistles are not even mentioned by Tertullian or 
 Theodoret. They were rejected, together with the other 
 Catholic Epistles, by Theodore of Mopsuestia. 
 
 (δ) The late reception of the two Epistles into the canon of 
 so many Churches may be accounted for, according to 
 Ebrard, by (1) their private character; (2) the fact that 
 one was addressed to a woman; (3) the amount of matter 
 in them common to the first Epistle (?). The verdict of the 
 Muratorian Fragm. is doubtful. The Peschito probably did 
 not contain either. Eusebius reckons them among the 
 Antilegomena ; yet his own opinion appears in Dem. Ey. 
 iii. 5. (See Alford.) 
 
 3D 
 
770 NOTES. 
 
 iii, Nothing against the apostolic authorship can be inferred 
 from the title ὁ πρεσβύτερος. St. Paul calls himself ὁ πρεσβύτης 
 (Philem. 9), and St. Peter ὁ συμπρεσβύτερος (τ Pet. v. 1). Probably 
 “the Presbyter” John did not assume the title until after the 
 death of the Apostle. St. John may have used it in his private 
 correspondence either to hint at his age, or as a formal title the 
 force of which was at once recognised and admitted. Surely the 
 Presbyter would have added to ὁ πρεσβύτερος, his name ᾿Ιωάννης. 
 An Apostle could afford to omit his name. The authority too, of 
 which the writer of the third Epistle is conscious in his reference 
 to Diotrephes, seems inconsistent with the supposition of a non- 
 apostolical authorship. 
 
PND Ex, 
 
 The numerals refer to the Lectures, the figures to the pages. 
 
 A. 
 
 Adoration, distinguished from ‘ admi- 
 ration,’ vii. 540; of Christ in Hea- 
 ven as the Lamb Slain, 560; of the 
 Sacred Manhood of Christ, 567. 
 
 Agnoetz, the, viii. 692. 
 
 Alexandrian Theosophy, real function 
 of, ii. 106. 
 
 Alogi, the, v. 325. 
 
 Ananias, prayer of, to Christ, vii. 553. 
 
 Angel of the Lord, the, ii. 79-88. 
 
 Angels, the holy, vi. 481. 
 
 Ante-Nicene Fathers, their testimony 
 to the Divinity of Christ, vii. 618 ; 
 alleged doubtful passages in, on the 
 Divinity of Christ, 627; charge of 
 ‘rhetoric’ against, 625 ; had not yet 
 mastered the intellectual bearings 
 of the Faith, 630; real mind of, 
 637. 
 
 Anti-dogmatic Moralists, i. 57. 
 
 Apollinarianism, i. 38. 
 
 Apostles, their agreement as to the 
 Divinity of Christ, vi. 415, 524; 
 represent different types of doc- 
 trine, 419; always represented in 
 the New Testament as chosen by 
 Christ Himself, vii. 550, note. 
 
 Apotheosis, in Imperial Rome, i. 41, 
 note. ° 
 
 Arianism, i. 24, 39, 47, 85; vi. 523; 
 vii. 533 ; its popularity, 656. 
 
 Arian worship of Christ, vii. 605. 
 
 Arnobius, his reply to pagan objec- 
 tions to the worship of Christ, vii. 
 592. 
 
 Artemon, vii. 639. 
 
 Athanasius, St., vii. 654. 
 
 Atonement, the, viii. 716. 
 
 B. 
 Baptism, viii. 723. 
 Baur, i. 40; iv. 262; v. 314, 325, 
 338, 351; Vi. 422, 473, 4907: 
 Bretschneider, his ‘“ Probabilia,’ v. 
 313. ᾿ 
 Buddhism, iii. 201. 
 Bull, Bishop, vii. 629 ; viii. 700. 
 
 C. 
 
 CHRIST, His claims for Himself, i. 
 7; ii. 140; iv. 244, 249, 253, 256, 
 297; contrast between, and merely 
 human teachers, i. 8; the centre- 
 point of human studies, 18; views 
 of, among modern German philo- 
 sophers, 19 ; lives of, 22; Ap- 
 pendix, Note A; His Humanity, 
 reality of, 28; clearly predicted, 
 ii. 128; how related to His God- 
 head, v. 387; importance of His 
 real Humanity to our inner life, i. 
 38; the Founder of a Society, iii. 
 151; originality of His ‘Plan,’ 
 161 ; audacity and completeness of 
 it, 1,2; realized in the Church, 
 178; prayer to. an universal prac- 
 tice, vii. 550; His present work 
 in Christian souls, iii. 189, 225; 
 satisfied the real wants of Pagan- 
 ism, 215; never confesses moral 
 deficiencies, iv. 246; two stages of 
 His teaching, 244, 256; reveals 
 His Godhead to the Jews, 270; 
 refers to His Pre-existence, 281; 
 condemned for claiming to be Di- 
 vine, 288; His sincerity, 292; 
 unselfishness, 293 ; and humility, 
 295; His Nativity, according to 
 the Synoptists, v. 372; His teach- 
 ing, as described in the Synoptists, 
 372; His discourses concerning 
 the end of the world, 378; His 
 Personality One, 382; and seated 
 in His Godhead, 386; His Man- 
 hood, how related to His Godhead, 
 387; insisted on by St. Paul, vi. 
 454, 458; is adored, vii. 567; His 
 Human Will, v. 390; represented 
 by St. Peter as the centre-point of 
 Hebrew Prophecy, vi. 436; the 
 Second Adam, 456, 492 ; His priestly 
 mediation implies a superhuman 
 Personality, 505 ; worshipped during 
 His earthly life, vii. 546; imme- 
 diately after His Ascension, 540 ; 
 in Heaven, as the Lamb Slain, 
 
772 
 
 560; by the primitive Martyrs, 
 597; His Divinity acknowledged 
 by Sub-Apostolic Fathers, 617; 
 by St. Justin, 618; Tatian, Athena- 
 goras, St. Irenzus, 619; Clement 
 of Alexandria, 620; Origen, 621; 
 Tertullian, 622 ; St. Cyprian, 623 ; 
 His Infallibility, viii. 680; His 
 Human Knowledge, how far limited, 
 684 ; power of His Example, 729. 
 
 Caricature of the worship of the 
 Crucified Jesus, vii. 593. 
 
 Celsus, iii. 177, 216, note; v. 325; his 
 indignation at the worship of Christ, 
 vii. 589. 
 
 Central question of Christian Theo- 
 logy, i. 9; vil. 653. 
 
 Cerinthus, v. 331, 357. 
 
 Chalcedon, Council of, v. 385. 
 
 Channing, i. 57, 61. 
 
 Christian, the, a living witness to 
 Christ, 111. 192. 
 
 Christianity, social results of, ili. 197 ; 
 causes and account of its success, 
 200, 204. 
 
 Church, the, its continuous growth, 
 111. 179 ; present prospects of, 183 ; 
 villi. 747; losses and divisions of, 
 
 ili. 184; the source of social im- 
 provement, 198; its recuperative 
 powers, 199; the early Church 
 adored Christ, vii. 539, 544. 
 
 Clement of Alexandria, v. 317. 
 
 Colenso, Dr., viii. 681, 705 ; Note C. 
 
 Comte, iii. 187. 
 
 Conception, the Immaculate, defini- 
 tion of, not parallel to that of the 
 Homoousion, vii. 649. 
 
 Confucianism, 111. 201. 
 
 Creeds, cannot be dispensed with, 
 vii. 655. 
 
 Cyril Alex., St., vill. 691. 
 
 D. 
 
 Deism, unable really to guard the 
 true idea of God in the soul, viii. 
 666. 
 
 Delitzsch, on Heb. i. 6, vii. 559, note. 
 
 Divine Nature, how represented in 
 St. John, v. 343. 
 
 Divinity of Christ (see ‘Adoration of,’ 
 ‘Prayer to, * Worship of’ Christ), 
 asserted in prophecy, ii. 1333 in- 
 directly implied, 144; revealed 
 by Himself to the Jews, iv. 270; 
 really necessary to completeness of 
 His moral character, 296, Kc. ; 
 implied in the accounts of His 
 teaching in the Synoptists, v. 374 ; 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 belief in, how originating, 397 ; 
 false theory of its origin in en- 
 thusiastic admiration, 398 ; implied 
 in St. James’s teaching, vi. 430; 
 acknowledged by the Primitive 
 Martyrs, vii. 597, 609; by the 
 Sub-apostolic Fathers. 617 ; by the 
 Ante-Nicene writers, 618; alleged 
 doubtful statements concerning, in 
 the Aute-Nicene writers, 627; need 
 of the Nicene definition of, 651 ; 
 consequences of the Doctrine of, 
 Lecture VIII.; what it involves, 
 663; protects Theistic truth, 665 ; 
 secures belief in a personal living 
 God, 670. 
 
 Doctrinal ‘ Development,’ what is 
 meant by, vii. 641. 
 
 Dogmatic Theology, inseparable from 
 Religion, i. 4, 62. 
 
 Dorner, i. 47; Vv. 373 3 Vii. 634. 
 
 E. 
 
 Ebionite view of Christ, i. 23. 
 
 ‘ Ecce Homo,’ i. 22 ; iii. 168 ; Note A. 
 
 ‘Elohim,’ Note B. 
 
 ‘Emmanuel,’ v. 368. 
 
 Enoch, Book of, i. 10. 
 
 Eucharist, the Holy, vi. 493 ; viil. 723. 
 
 Hutychians, viii. 692. 
 
 Evangelists, fundamental agreement 
 of, v. 366. 
 
 Ewald, i. 22 ; v. 327, 400. 
 
 G. 
 
 Gibbon, iii. 204; his shallow sneer 
 about the Homoousion, vii. 653. 
 
 Gnosticism, v. 330. 
 
 Goethe, on originality, iii. 163. 
 
 ‘Graffito Blasfemo,’ the, vii. 593. 
 
 Gregory of Nyssa, St., on the popu- 
 larity of Arianism, vii. 657. 
 
 H. 
 
 Heresy, vi. 417, 503. 
 
 Homoousion, the, see Lecture VII. ; 
 modern arguments against, vii. 536 ; 
 summarizes the early Christology, 
 608 ; objections to in the present 
 day, 64%; not a ‘ development,’ 
 641; represents the teaching of the 
 New Testament, 642; explains, not 
 enlarges, the Faith, 644; why re: 
 jected at Antioch, 646. 
 
 Hope, its necessity and uses, ii. E10 ; 
 of a Messiah amongst the Jews, 
 pee 
 
 Hug, v. 312. 
 
 Humanity, see 6 Christ.’ 
 
INDEX. is 
 
 Hymns, value of, as expressions of 
 Christian doctrine, vii. 577. 
 
 Hypostatic Union, i. 34 ; v. 385; viii. 
 715. 
 
 lt 
 
 ‘Tgnorance’ and Error, not identical, 
 viii. 702. 
 
 Importance of the rete at the pre- 
 sent day, i. 17, 21, 
 
 INCARNATION, THE, illustrated 
 by mysteries in our present being, 
 v. 394; how related to Creation, 
 
 396. 
 
 § Inferential Theology,’ viii. 659. 
 
 Treneus, St., his testimony to St. 
 John’s Gospel, v. 314, 332. 
 
 Isaiah’s prophecy, unity of, ii. 127. 
 
 J. 
 
 James, St., his teaching presupposes 
 the Christolory of St. Paul, vi. 
 422; 
 obligations, 427; his frequent refe- 
 rences to our Lord’s words, 434. 
 
 Jews, their later history a witness to 
 Christ, ii. 148. 
 
 John, St., his witness to the Divinity 
 of Christ, Lecture V.; his charac- 
 teristic temper, v. 358; his close 
 intimacy with our Lord, 408 ; con- 
 trasted with St. Paul, vi. 524. 
 
 — Gospel of, its authenticity, v. 312; 
 relation to the other Gospels, 329, 
 364; the Prologue of, 337. 
 
 — Epistles of, v. 355. 
 
 — Apocalypse of, v. 362; vi. 414. 
 Judaizers of the Apostolic Age, the 
 precursors of Arianism, vi. 523. 
 Jude, St., his teaching as to our Lord, 
 
 Vi. 451. 
 Justin Martyr, v. 320; vii. 570. 
 
 K. 
 Kingdom of Heaven, iii. 152 ; visible, 
 156; Parables concerning, 158 ; 
 
 unlike Philosophical Schools or 
 Jewish Sects, 168. 
 
 L. 
 Lactantius, his reply to pagan objec- 
 tions to the worship of Christ, vii. 
 
 592. 
 
 Lazarus, raising of, Renan on, iv. 
 304, note. 
 
 ‘Little Labyrinth,’ the, probably 
 
 written by St. Hippolytus, vii. 640. 
 Love, principle of Christian, viii. 742. 
 Lucian, his testimony to the worship 
 
 of Christ, vii. 587. 
 
 insists earnestly on moral | 
 
 vo 
 
 M. 
 
 _ Martensen, v. 356, note ; 370, note. 
 
 Martyrs, Pray - Christ in dei agony, 
 597, 6 
 
 ies oe our Loki? 8, not merely evi- 
 dential, iv. 235; cannot be elimi- 
 nated from the Gospel narrative, 
 240; reality of, essential to inte- 
 grity of His moral character, 242. 
 
 Mohammedanism, iii. 202. 
 
 Monophysite heresy, i i, 38. 
 
 | Monothelite heresy, i. 38; v. 392. 
 
 Moral glory of Christ, involved in 
 ae of His Divinity, iv. 296; 
 
 5 
 
 Moasitunrs Missal, prayer to Christ in, 
 vii. 583, note. 
 
 Mysteries in our present natural 
 being, v. 394. 
 
 N. 
 
 Napoleon’s testimony to Christ, iii. 
 222. 
 
 Nestorianism, i. 38 ; v. 384. 
 
 Newman, F. W., iv. 250, note; 
 298. 
 
 Nicene Creed, especial claims of, vii. 
 
 656. 
 
 261, 
 
 O. 
 Only-begotten, applied to Christ, v. 
 | 3848. 
 | Origen, questionable language of, vii. 
 5733; veplies to Celsus’ sarcasms 
 about the worship of Christ, 590. 
 
 ἜΣ 
 
 | Paganism degrades the idea of God, 
 vi. 461. 
 
 Pantheism, i. 39, 42; element of 
 truth in, 45; destroys the idea of 
 God, viii. 672. 
 
 PASSION, virtue of the, depends on 
 Christ’s Godhead, vi. 447; vill. 715. 
 
 Paul, St., his interview with the Three 
 at Jerusalem, vi. 415; his Christo- 
 logy as compared with St. John’s, 
 453; is essentially Monotheistic, 
 
 460; his sense of our Lord’s con- 
 
 |  descension, 465 ; Christology of his 
 
 sermons and discourses, 485; his 
 
 teaching about Faith implies a 
 
 Divine Christ, 508; so also his 
 
 teaching about Regeneration, 514 ; 
 
 his faith in Christ’s Godhead gives 
 its meaning to his controversy with 
 the Judaizers, 521; contrasted with 
 
 St. John, 524. 
 
 Paulus of Samosata, i. 38. 
 
 | Pelayianism, viii. 730. 
 
er 
 
 774 IN DEX. 
 
 Pentateuch, cited by Christ, viii. 681. 
 
 Περιχώρησις, i. 61, note. 
 
 Personality of Christ, v. 384; seated 
 in His Godhead, 386. 
 
 Persons, distinction of, within the 
 Godhead, i. 49; intimated in the 
 Old Testament, ii. 7 2. 
 
 Peter, St., his confession of Christ, i. 
 14; his Missionary Sermons, vi. 
 435; Christology of his Epistles, 
 
 440. 
 
 Philo Judzus, ii. 95. 
 
 Pietism, i. 62. 
 
 Pliny’s Letter to Trajan, vii. 586. 
 
 Positivism, vili. 
 
 Prayer to Christ universal in the 
 Church from the beginning, vii. 
 549 ; St. Stephen’s dying prayer to 
 Christ, 551; Ananias’ prayer to 
 Christ, 553; St. Paul’s, 555; re- 
 cognised in St. Paul’s Epistles, 556 ; 
 in St. John, 560; in the Church 
 Service, Note C. 
 
 Prophecies of the Messiah, ii. 119 ; 
 vi. 441 ; as suffering, ii. 130. 
 
 Psalms, the Messianic, ii. 125. 
 
 R. 
 
 Rabbinical literature, testimony of, to 
 the Divinity of the Messiah, ii. 137. 
 
 Rationalism, i. 20. 
 
 Regeneration, as taught by St. Paul, 
 implies our Lord’s Divinity, vi. 514. 
 
 Renan, i. 22; iii. 164, 206, &c.; iv. 
 232, 242, 207, 299, 303; V- 329, 
 405 ; the Christ of, insincere and 
 morally defective, iv. 303 ; Note A. 
 
 RESURRECTION, the denial of, in- 
 volves the rejection of Christianity, 
 lv. 232. 
 
 Reuss, v. 353, note; vi. 516, note. 
 
 Reverence, if true, necessarily truth- 
 ful, v. 401. 
 
 ‘Rhetoric,’ charge of, against the early 
 Christian Fathers, vii. 625. 
 
 Rousseau, on miracles, iv. 234. 
 
 S. 
 
 Sacraments, grace of, vill. 718, 735. 
 
 Salvador, iv. 264, 272, 287, 289. 
 
 Schelling, i. 19, 42. 
 
 Schenkel, iv. 231; Note A. 
 
 Schleiermacher, i. 24; v. 313. 
 
 Scriptures, the Holy, unity of, 1i. 67. 
 
 Self-assertion of Christ, iv. 256. 
 
 Sermon on the Mount, the, iii. 154, 194. 
 
 Sin, consciousness of, among the Jews, 
 ii. 116. 
 
 Sinlessness of Christ, i. 35 ; vi. 456. 
 
 Socinianism, 1. 23, 39, 40; iv. 238; 
 vii. 606 ; viii. 709, 720. 
 
 Socinians, worship of Christ by, vii. 
 606. 
 
 Socinus, vii. 606. 
 
 SON OF GOD, meaning of this title 
 of Christ, i. 15 ; v. 348; as used in 
 the Synoptic Gospels, 368. 
 
 SON OF MAN, as a title of Christ, 
 
 i. Ὁ; 
 HOLY SPIRIT, THE, work of, 
 
 Vv. 404 
 
 St. Stephen’s dying prayer to Christ, 
 Vii. 551. 
 
 Strauss i. 22; ili. 220; iv. 286; v. 
 313; Note A. 
 
 ‘Subordination’ of the Son to the 
 Father, iv. 300; vii. 632. 
 
 Supernatural, the, in life of Christ, 
 1. 18. 
 
 Synoptic Gospels, their teaching con- 
 cerning Christ, see Lect. V.; sum- 
 mary of their Christology, v. 380. 
 
 At 
 
 ‘Te Deum,’ its Eastern and early 
 origin, vii. 580. 
 Tertullian, v. 316; vii. 572. 
 Theophanies, or Divine Manifesta- 
 tions, in the Old Testament, ii. 78. 
 Time, a test of the vitality of doc- 
 trines, vii. 528. 
 Tiibingen School, v. 314, 3223 vi. 
 4s. 
 ΤΠ: 
 Unbelief, modern, iii. 188. 
 Unity of Christ’s Person, v. 382. 
 Unity of the Godhead, doctrine of, in 
 the Old Testament, ii. 142. 
 Unity of the Son with the Father, iv. 
 276. 
 Wi. 
 
 Valentinians, vii. 646. 
 
 W. 
 
 Waterland, i. 27. 
 
 Will, Human, in Christ, v. 300, 
 
 Wisdom, the Divine, in the Personal 
 sense, or “ Kochmah,’ ii. 89. 
 
 Word, the ἘΡΡΈΘΒΗΙ: or ‘Logos,’ 
 
 bya Ve 
 
 we of Christ (see ἜΡΕΜΕΣ ἴο 
 Christ’), in the Litany, 61; iv. 
 275; Vil. 545, 549 ; pene charac- 
 teristics of, in the New Testament, 
 563; is the adoration due to God, 
 566 ; included the adoration of His 
 Sacred Manhood, 567; references 
 
INDEX. 
 
 to in the Sub-apostolic Fathers, 
 508 ; SS. Justin, lrenzeus, and Cle- 
 ment,570; Tertullian, 572; Origen, 
 573; Novatian, 575; in Christian 
 Hymnody, 576; in the Te Deum, 
 580; at the Eucharist, 552; in the 
 Mozarabie Missal, 583, note ; ob- 
 served by Pagans, 585; Pagan 
 
 775 
 
 caricature of, 593; offered by 
 Martyrs, 597; by the Arians, 605 ; 
 by the early Socinians, 606; no 
 ‘secondary worship’ in the New 
 Testament, vii. 565. 
 
 Z. 
 
 Zwinglianism, viii. 720. 
 
 TEXTS SPECIALLY 
 
 GENESIS I. I, ii 73; I. 26, ii. 74; 3- 
 ΤΡ Ἴ2Ο; 5: 22; alle 75); 6.ΨὉ2; 
 ΤΡ ΤΙ be aha, Wane τ: Nines ane 
 795 18: 1,°2, i. 785 19: 24, 11.795 
 B25 01, Το 10; 70.80.28: 0.3; 
 δου τ, ls CO! 521 24,030, 
 ii. 80; 48. 15, 16, ii. 80; 49. 10; 
 iii. 120, 
 
 EXxopUusS 3. 2, 4, 6-14, ii. 80; 4. 22, 
 i, 15}; 29.90, 11.0.81; 353:.2.,3.Ψψ11: 81. 
 
 NUMBERS 6. 23, ii. 176; ,24. 17, il. 
 120. 
 
 DeEuTERONOMY 6. 4, iii. 142; 17. 9,1. 
 15; 18.15, 18, 19, ii. 121, vi. 436. 
 
 JOSHUA 5. 13, li. 82. 
 
 JUDGES 2. I-5, ii. 82; 6. 11-22, ii. 
 83; 13. 6-22, ii. 83. 
 
 II SAMUEL 7. 14. i. 16; 7. 16, ii. 122, 
 
 JOB 28. 12, ii. go. 
 
 PSALMS 2. 2, 7-9, li. 123; 22. I, sq., 
 Ἵ 151: ΜΞ Δ, 1138 ee, Ont. 124 
 72., 11.125 ; 82.6, i. 15, iv. 270; 90. 
 8, iv. 248; I10., ii. 126; 118. 22, 
 vi. 437. 
 
 PrRovERBS 8. 22-31, ii. gI. 
 
 IsataH 6. 2, 9q., iv. 247; . 6, ii. 
 133; II. 1, 8Q., ii. 129; 52. 14, il. 
 11. 88. 2, ΕΠ. 11, 51: 
 
 JEREMIAH 23. 5, 6, ii. 135. 
 
 DANIEL 3. 25, 1. 153 7. ΤᾺ 93 ἢ: 
 14, li. 135. 
 
 Hosea 11. 1, i. 16. 
 
 Haae@al 2. 7, 9, il. 135. 
 
 ZECHARIAH 9. 9, 10, li. 130; 13. 7, 
 ii. 135. 
 
 MALACHT 3. 1, ii. 135. 
 
 WISDOM 7. 24, 27, 29, li. 94, 95. 
 
 ECOLESIASTIOUS 24. 8-12, 23, li. 93. 
 
 Sr. MATTHEW 2. 11, vil. 545; 2.15, 
 i. 16; 4. 10, vii. 543; 4.17, iil. 244; 
 5-7.) iil. 154. 8q.3 5.127, Iv. 252; 
 δ. 48, ἦν. 240; 7. 0 ΠΥ ΟΒΙ; Sb 2 
 
 REFERRED ΤΟ. 
 
 vii. 545; 8: 20, 1: 12. 9. 18, vii. 
 5453 10. 12-15, 37, iv. 265; 10. 40, 
 ili, 157; 11. 27, 28, v. 375. 376; ΤΥ. 
 29, iv. 295; 12. 39, 40. 111. 233; 
 13.3, Sq., lil. 158; 14. 33, Vii. 546; 
 IB. 25, vu. §46;, 16.13 ἃ 1, ἘΠῚ: 
 16. 24, iii. 215; 17. 14, vii. 546; 
 17.25, i. 333 18.9, 111. 215; 20. 20, 
 Vli. 545; 21. 42, Vi. 437; 23 8, v. 
 376; 24. 30, 1.10; 24. 35, iil 176; 
 26. 64, i. 10, iv. 288; 28. 9, 17, 
 vii. 547; 28. 19, 20, ill. 177. 
 
 Sr. MaRK 1. 35 1. 33; 8: 34, 35, ili. 
 
 236; 10. 18; I. 35, iv. 292, vil. 
 49 3 13- 32, Vili. 687. 
 
 5 
 Sr. LUKE I. 35, v- 369; 1 48, 8q., V. 
 
 371, 3723 2. 52, Vill. 684; 5. 8, vil. 
 546; 7. 37» Vil. 547; 9. 59-62, iv. 
 266; I0. 22, ν- 375, Vill. 699; 12. 
 51-53, iv. 266 ; 14. 26, iv. 265 ; 14. 
 28, iv. 292; 23. 34, 1- 34: 
 
 Sr. JOHN I. I, 8q., Υ. 340, 8q.; I. 14, 
 
 i. 28; 1. 18, v. 349; I. 29, Vi. 446; 
 2. 25, viii. 698; 3. 13, iv. 285; 4. 
 10, Vii. 549 3 5-17-19, iv. 272-274; 
 5. 22, 23, iv. 275, Vil. 549; 5. 27» 
 i. 11; 5. 39, ili. 147; 6. 26-59, iii. 
 237; 6. 62, iv. 285; 7. 15, iii. 166 ; 
 8. 23, iv. 258; 8. 42, iv. 259; 8. 46, 
 i. 35; 8. 52-58, iv. 282-284; 9. 38, 
 vil. 547; 10. 15, Vili. 699 ; 10. 29, 
 iv. 267; 10. 30, sq., iv. 276, Βα."; 
 II. 28, iv. 258; 12. 32, iv. 258; 13. 
 4, ἢν V. 3843 13-34, ili. 214; 14. 6, 
 iii. 191, 214; 14. 9, 10, iv. 269; 14. 
 14,15, iv. 258, 259 ; 14. 23, iv. 269 ; 
 14. 26, v. 406 ; 14. 28, iv. 300; 15. 
 23, iv. 259 ; 16. 14, vi. 417; 16. 23, 
 vil. 549; 17. 5, iv. 286; 18. 37, iv. 
 293; 19. 7, iv. 287; 20. 28, vil. 
 548; 20. 31, τ 336; 21.17, Vili. 
 699. 
 
776 
 
 ACTS I, 16-20, vi. 436; I. 24, Vii. 550; 
 2. 24-36, vi. 436; 3.15, vi. 439; 
 3. 18, vi. 436; 4. 11, vi. 436; 7. 
 37, 51- 53, Vi. 4373 7. 59, Vil. 551; 
 8. 32 35, Vi. 437; 9. 6, vii. 555; 9. 
 14, Vil. 550; 10. 25, 26, vii. 564; 
 14.14, 15, vii. 564; 15. 14-20, vi. 
 429; 17. 18, vi. 486; 20. 28, 35, 
 vi. 487; 22.19, Vil. 555; 26.17, 18, 
 vi. 488. 
 
 RoMANS I. 4, i. 60; 1.11, vi. 420; 5. 
 12, 84.» vi. 456 ; δ. 18, 00, vi: 518 ; 
 8. 3, i. 5.5.» Oh Rye 468 ; 10. 9. Sq., 
 vil. 557. 
 
 1 CoRINTHIANS I. 23, iii. 214; 2. 2, 
 is 21; 2. 8, Wal JOR S 5.11 vat 
 493; 8. I, vi. 425; 8. 6, vi. 458, 
 4625 11. 29, Vi. 404 ; 13-2, :Vi. 425 5 
 15. 9. Vi. 418; 15. 14-18, ‘iii. 233; 
 15. 28, vi. 459; 15.45, 111. 193; 15. 
 47, Vi. 456, 466; 16. 22, iii. 191, 
 VIS 495. 
 
 II CorInTHIANS 4. 6, vill. 672; 8.9, 
 vi. ee 10. 5, lil. I9g1; 12. 7, 8q., 
 
 - 495, Vil. 558; 13. 5, Vill. 730; 
 τὰ 13, Vi. 495. 
 
 GALATIANS 2. 9. Vi 415; 3. 16, ii 
 
 120; 3. 20, V1. 491; 5. 6, Vi. 424. 
 
 | 
 | 
 { 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 COLOSSIANS I. 15-17, vi. 475, 8q.3 I. 
 17, 2..0;, Vas AS = 12) DS, cvil. 565: 
 
 I THESSALONIANS 3. 11, vii. 556. 
 
 II THESSALONIANS 2. 16, vii. 556. 
 
 1 ΤΥΜΌΤΗΥ 1. 12, vil. 556); 2. 5.) vie 
 BOO; 3. 16, νι. 407; 6: τες TO; vis 
 462. 
 
 TITUS 2. 
 490. 
 
 HEBREWS I. 3, vi. 482; 1.6, Vil. 559 ; 
 3. 3-6, vi. 480; 7. 3, Vi. 506; 12. 
 22, vil. 565. 
 
 Sr. JAMES I. 18, vi. 4313 I. 23, 27, Vi. 
 ΦΘΊΣΕΙ. 2, 1. 430): 2: Τὴν} 324; 
 2. 8, vi. 430; 2. 14, 8q-, Vi. 422. 
 
 I St. PETER r. 2, vi. 445 ; 1. 11. vi. 
 AAT 1212. Via 2442. 1- 18; Τὸ» Υἱ: 
 440; 2.9, νἱ. ΠΣ; 2. 23, 24, Vi. 
 445; 3. 18, vi. 4455 3. 22, Vi. 
 447 5 4. 11, vi. 448. 
 
 II Sr. Peter 1. 8, vi. 448; 2 
 450; 3. 15, vi. 418. 
 
 I Sr. JouN 1. 1-3, v. 355, 411 ; 2. 16, 
 V. 357; 2. 22, Vi. 417; 2. 23, Vill. 
 672 5 3. 5, i. 33; 4: 2. 3.0. 357; 
 4. 18, χὸ 3505 8. 4s 5, Ve 3573 5+ 13, 
 Sq., Vii. 560; 5. 20, v. 358. 
 
 II Sr. JoHn Vd 34.3 το, Fig 309: 
 
 13, Vi. 472, 504; 3. 4-7, Vi. 
 
 ni Ve 
 
 EPHESIANS I. 23, Vi. 498; 3.6, vi. | St. JUDE 4, Vi. 452. 
 5ol. | REVELATION I. 5, 6, vil. 563; 1. 8, v. 
 PHILIPPIANS 2. 6, Sq., Vi. 473, 501, | 362; 1. 17, Vil. 543; 5- 6, 9, vii. 
 vil. 560; 2. 19, vii. 556; 3. 21, 561 ; 5. 11, sq., vii. 562 ; το. 16, v. 
 1. 455; 4. 13, lil. 192. sibs O38 22.10. varity. 
 ERRATA. 
 
 p. 26, last line, before sect. xix, insert ch. 8, 
 
 p. 29, note d, for αὑτοῦ read αὐτοῦ. 
 
 Ρ. 86, last line, after 22 add 27. 
 
 p. 104, note w, 171, note m, 175, note n, for 
 Préssensé read Pressensé, 
 
 p. 123, last line, before p. 197 insert vol, i. 
 
 p. 232, note ἃ, jor sépulchre vead sépulecre. 
 
 p. 249, last line, for Charactére read Caractere. 
 
 p. 252, last line, for 207, 8, read 209. 
 
 p. 292, note i, for St. Matt. xix. 16, 17 read 
 St. Mark x. 18, 
 
 p. 342, line 14, for ἢν read ἣν. 
 
 p. 391, line 3, for isit....say? read itis.... 
 say. 
 
 p. 463, line 10, for a creature read an Arian 
 Christ, 
 
 p. 467, line 5. for Time read time, 
 
 p. 487, note b, for xxii. read xx. 
 
 p. 489, note m, for 15 read 5. 
 
 p. 551, note ο, for St. Johni, 49 read St. John 
 i, 50. 
 
 OXFORD: 
 
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