I \ \ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNJA SAN DtEGO A MANUAL OF THEOLOGY MANUAL OF THEOLOGY BY THOMAS B. STRONG, D.D. ^^r DBAN OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD SECOND EDITION REVISED AND ENLARGED LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1903 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION The method of Theology. Natural Theology deals with the existence of God, Christian Theology with the Incarnation. Each starts by assuming the truth of its chief fact, and displays its coherence with other things. This is due to the nature of the facts in question, which (1) if true, underlie as absolute conditions the whole world of experience and faith respectively ; (2) are not capable of sensuous verification. Hence the difficulties of Theology and its strained relations with scientific thought. The unbiassed mind. Scheme of the book Pages 1-11 CHAPTER I Natural Religion and the Incarnation. Two interests traceable in all religion ; (1) metaphysical ; (2) moral or spiritual : occasionally pursued dispro- portionately, e.g. in Hellenism and Judaism. A. Both present in early religion as we know it, illustrated by myth, prayer, ritual, sacrifice. B. The import of these two interests. I. The metaphysical assumes that the world is an ordered whole, from which chance is excluded the moral that God is to be found and known in nature. The metaphysical demand gives rise to the three metaphysical proofs of God, i.e. forms an ideal of thought, which is partly realized in the world. It rests upon a claim to treat nature anthropomorphically, which is carried on II. In the moral factor in religion. The world is governed not only by a law of uniformity, but also by a law of good. The proofs interpret the consensus gentium. C. The claim of Christ as set forth in the New Testament answers and satisfies the aspirations of man as seen in natural Theology in four points. (1) It lays down the principle that God can be known in nature. Anthropomorphism true and false. (2) It declares that God redeems, and makes morality possible. (3) In it religion attains its social ends. (4) It meets the conservative instincts of religion . . Pages 12-49 CHAPTER II The Incarnation and its historical evidence. I. Christ in the Gospels appears as human ; yet also more than human. This rests upon His miracles, His teaching, and His actual claims, and is borne out by witness. II. Is such vi CONTENTS a thing as the Incarnation possible in fact ? Materialism excludes the affirmative answer, but not the conception of nature as a moral order. For the analogy of human action shows us that merely physical forces are utilized for moral ends. Nature thus regarded admits variation under conditions partially ascertainable to us. The Incarnation is a consumma- tion of the natural order. III. The historical evidence for it. The nature of such evidence. It differs (1) from direct experience ; (2) from legal ; (3) from scientific evidence, and produces a different mental result. Historic Christianity consists in an appreciation of actual argu- ments ; an act of assent. The mind to receive it is not blank, but re- quires special education and a sense of the unity of all history. Many facts are believed on evidence far from demonstrative. The actual evidence for the Incarnation. The Apostles and the Resurrection. The importance of this fact and its evidence. Chances of deception. Why does the Resurrection prove Christ's claim ? It reverses the inference from His death ; throws light on His life and especially on His miracles Pages 50-91 CHAPTER III The Catholic interpretation of the Incarnation. The idea of Incarnation not easy nor self-evident Hence the necessity of definite doctrine. Differ- ences of interpretation of it require decisive solution. The method of the Apostles to refer (1) to tradition ; (2) to the practical implications of the conflicting theories. Our Lord's two natures. The intellectual influences abroad at the time ; Judaism, Hellenism, Orientalism. Docetic denial of the Humanity ; condemned by reference (as in the Apostolic age) (a) to tradition, which now includes (1) the evidence of the Canon ; (2) tLe witness of the Churches, and () to the practical implications of the question. Arianism( our Lord's impeccability). Apollinarianism (Christ's humanity and the effect of sin). Nestorianism (The Ken6sis, our Lord's human knowledge, especially in relation to scientific and critical questions ; possession by evil spirits). Eutychianism. Monothelitism. Relation of the whole to Anthropomorphism. Danger of the idea of time as applied to God. Importance of Personality . . . Pages 92-133 CHAPTER IV The Incarnation and the doctrine of God. Trinitarianism is closely allied to Monotheism as held in Judsea. The connexion of the doctrine of the Word and Wisdom of God with it. A priori objection that we cannot have such knowledge of God as this doctrine implies, met by representing it as the expanded statement of the Incarnation. Evidence of the New Testament ; Tritheism and Sabellianism. Explanation of the Catholic doctrine. The Unity of God. Unity has two senses generic and organic ; neither quite adequate to God. Personality. In man always known mediately, and requiring completion from without. The Divine Trinity, the archetype of the human. (The Twofold Procession. ) Mean- ing of the word Person as applied to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. CONTENTS vii History of the word. The special functions of the Divine Persons. Trini- tarianism alone satisfies the conception of God as moral and as personal. Its philosophical bearing. In what sense revealed . . Pages 134-190 CHAPTER V Creation and the Fall. Two central notions involved in Creation. I. God is the agent. Objections considered from the point of view of God's changelessness ; His infinity ; the material implications of the idea of love. II. Creation occurred in time. Was matter pre-existent ? Time and God. What is the result of saying that Creation was eternal ; that it comes into being in time. Difficulties of time Creation and Evolution. Man in the scheme of Creation. The angels. Evil. I. In the universe, arose in rebellious wills, is not a flaw in the handiwork of God. Manichaeism maintains its necessity : but fails under the test (A) of conscience, (B) of science. Its modern forms, Optimism and Pessi- mism. Evil and the Omnipotence of God. Freedom, Evil and Fore- knowledge the centre of all the difficulty. The difficulty eased but not solved by recalling meaning of Omniscience ; certainty of Redemption. Source of the difficulty, the inexplicable mystery of God's entering into time. II. Evil in man. (1) The nature of man ; meaning of the image of God ; the Word of God and humanity. Body, soul and spirit in New Testament writers. (2) The effect of the Fall, (i) Disorganization of nature. Universality of sin. (ii) New Testament evidence. Four objec- tions considered, (a) Man is not descended from one pair of human beings. (6) Immorality of the idea of inherited sin. (c) The actual progress of mankind ; (d) exaggerated notion of the wickedness of sin as shown in the doctrine of Eternal separation from God. The use of evil. III. Evil in nature. Pain and death ; closely connected with evil ; yet not on that account devoid of moral significance . . Pages 191-264 CHAPTER VI The Fall and the Atonement. State of man after the Fall. The Son of God takes upon Him the task of Redemption. I. He is the representative man, i.e. in Him the ideal of humanity was realized in the sense that He was sinless and enjoyed full and unbroken Communion with God. The Fall carried with it the certainty that this ideal must be expressed under painful conditions. The ideal man could not appear with any high position or power or genius, all of which man had spoiled. He must present His ideal as being not according to this world's standards. He must enter life under new conditions and be treated as an outcast. The effort of the Incarnation. Christ as Prophet. II. The sacrifice of Christ. A. Sacrifice in general communion, expiation. Its significance. B. The New Testament and the sacrifice of Christ. Sacrifice and sin. III. The participation of man in the Atonement. A. Grace and freedom. (1) The will vitiated by the Fall ; difficulty of the doctrine of grace. (2) meaning of grace ; (3) Predestination as separating individuals from the mass of mankind. Are God's decrees irreversible ? B. Faith and works. The mode of the operation of faith. Difficulties arising in connexion with it Pages 265-314 viii CONTENTS CHAPTER VII The Church and Sacraments as an extension of the Incarnation. The Church keeps alive the memory of Christ. First, did Christ mean to found a society? New Testament evidence. (1) There was to be a society ; (2) in which the Holy Spirit should dwell ; (3) which should be governed by love, and perform certain sacramental rites ; (4) against which the world should fight. Illustrations from Acts, S. Paul, S. John. General objec- tion to this in the interests of a purely spiritual religion. But this exists neither (1) in natural religion ; nor (2) in Old Testament ; (3) it traverses the principle of the Incarnation ; (4) it is not satisfied by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, for man is social in his religion as elsewhere. Church and State. Infallibility. Schism. The Sacraments. Baptism. Its meaning ; (1) its connexion with faith ; (2) infant baptism ; (3) post- baptismal sin ; (4) validity of Baptism in connexion with the Church. Confirmation and its relation to Baptism. The Holy Eucharist. Its character and meaning ; Transubstantiation ; Consubstantiation ; Real Presence. The other ordinances. (1) Penance, (a) The Commission to the Church, and the necessity of absolution, (b) General absolution in the public services and private absolution. How far different? Is private absolution necessary to all ? (2) Matrimony. (3) Unction. (4) Orders. What is an ordained person? Episcopal succession. Validity of Orders. A. Christian life. Ethics and the Church. B. The Com- munion of Saints. The intermediate state. Prayers for the dead. Conclusion Pages 315-413 INTRODUCTION THEOLOGY is the science which deals with the Being and Nature of God. Christian Theology is the expression and analysis of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. All speculation into the First Cause of the world, the ground of moral obligation, even the immortality of the human soul, is or may be theological ; that is, any one of these questions may be so discussed as to bring before us the notion of a Supreme Being, who made the world, whose nature is the source of the distinction of right and wrong, who brought man's soul into being, and preserves it continuously from dissolution. On the other hand, all such questions fail to be theological just in proportion as the idea of the Supreme Being is dropped out of sight. They must then be treated as subor- dinate sections of physics, or of psychology, or of metaphysics. They take their theological colour from their contact with the idea of a Supreme Being, and no treatment of them apart from this idea is, in the strict sense, theological at all. As for the Being and Nature of God, apart from the Christian revelation of Him, we must derive our knowledge of it from the theological treatment of the questions mentioned above. By reflection upon the order of nature, of a certain kind, we reach the notion of a Creator. By reflection of a certain kind upon the moral law we reach the notion of a Personal Euler of mankind, who rewards and punishes ; and this result leads on to the discussion of the Immorality of Man. 2 INTRODUCTION These are the contents of Natural Theology, as it is called ; and they represent more or less completely the area over which man can move in the way of independent speculation. As Natural Theology starts from the facts of experience in nature and the moral life, so Christian Theology starts from the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. As Natural Theology results in an idea of God in nature, real, but somewhat bare and con- jectural in character, so Christian Theology, in virtue of its new start and wider scope, ends in an idea of God which is more certain, more definite, and more coherent. Christian Theology throws light upon the same questions and problems as its simpler predecessor, but just as the treatment of them ceases to be theological when the idea of God is left out of sight, so it ceases to be Christian apart from the assumed truth of the Incarnation. These circumstances point to a fact which distinguishes Theology from many sciences, both in its nature and in its method. No science, we all know, proves its own first principles ; every science must derive them from some one or more of its sister sciences or take them as unexplained facts from the world of experience. The results of arithmetic are assumed in geometry, the conclusions of geometry become premisses in mechanics : or, to take another case, the exist- ence of animals of various kinds is given in nature, and is assumed as a starting-point by biological science. But Theology does rather more than accept as premisses the conclusions which other sciences have proved. It uses its own central facts the Existence of God, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ both as premiss and conclusion. It does not and cannot start with just a few bare assumptions which are not theological in character, and then present its theological doctrines as the reasoned outcome of these, aided by the ordinary rules of inference; but rather, taking the idea of God as a starting-point, it endeavours to set forth the CHARACTER OF THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE 3 necessary coherence of this with all other forms of truth; or taking the Incarnation for fact, it analyses it and traces its full significance, and then endeavours to show the coherence of it with previous apprehensions of God, and with the rest of man's knowledge. To take a parallel case, the evidence for the existence of our own personality is of the same character as the evidence for the existence of God. It appears both as conclusion and as premiss. To prove the existence of my own personality, I must assume it, and show that this assumption falls in coherently with everything else that I know, and that without this assumption all my system of knowledge falls to pieces. It must be assumed anew in every step of any argument I may employ. And when I prove its existence, supposing that I do, I prove at the same time that I could never have taken a single step in argument without assuming its existence. Much the same is true of the existence of God, as we shall hope to make plain in the next chapter. The evidence we allege in proof of the fact proves also that the investigation is reasonable only when the fact is assumed that is, that the existence of God is the hinge upon which the whole process turns. There are various reasons why this should be so. We will mention here only two one depending on the nature of the fact in question, the other upon the nature of scientific in- vestigation in general. First, then, let us consider the nature of the fact in itself. It is not like asking, Are there inhabitants in the moon ? That is a question of detail, a question which relates only to the contents of our world of experience. We may wonder whether our universe contains such beings or not either decision is possible, and neither is very disturbing. But if it be true that there is a Being such as we mean by the name God, His existence will be involved in that of every existing thing. The world outside us, our- selves, our powers of thought and will, are all dependent in 4 INTRODUCTION the strictest sense upon His will, and to consider them apart from it is, strictly speaking, to consider them in a partially false light, if He exists. We cannot expect the idea of God to fit smoothly on to a predominantly godless view of the world. Because God, if He exists, is not merely one of the elements in the universe, which we may or may not take into consideration in our view of it ; He is either the per- manent condition of all that is and happens, or He is nothing at all. To inquire into His existence, then, is not to ask whether we are to include this one more Being in our cata- logue of the contents of the universe, but to ask whether we can form a consistent account of our experience as a whole, assuming the existence of God. Something of the same sort is true of the Incarnation. That the whole of Christian Theology is an expansion and analysis of this truth we hope to show in the sequel. But simply considered as a fact, it is surely true that there is no method of arguing to it, on general principles, except this one of showing its coherence with our whole scheme of things. Secondly, we have said that the nature of scientific investi- gation itself provides an argument for the validity of the method which we regard as distinctively theological. To show this, let us consider first what science professes to be and to do. It differs surely from ordinary knowledge simply in completeness and in coherence. It does not relate to a different order of things. Ordinary knowledge is regulated by circumstances. It consists of the products of a man's observation during his lifetime. If he is a sharp man, quick at forming principles and seeing the working of things, his knowledge will tend towards the scientific ideal. If he is stupid and passively receptive, his mind will be like a sack full of miscellaneous rubbish, from which anything may emerge, but probably nothing of any value. What such a man wants is arrangement, system, coherence. And this is METHOD OF NATURAL SCIENCE 5 what science gives to ordinary experience. Science divides the field of experience into allotments. In each of these it places a body of workers, who collect and tabulate the facts obtainable within their special area. These collections form the special sciences. The greatest achievement, perhaps, yet attained by the scientific mind is the recognition that the barriers between the separate allotments are arbitrary and movable, and that the whole field may be dealt with upon one comprehensive principle. This, then, is what science does. It does not invent new facts. When it finds one it puts it in its place. It is ordinary experience systematized. The man who knows one fact as it really is, knows it so far scientifically. Just as the man who owns sixpence can command the labour of the world to the extent of sixpence, so the man who holds one fact truly is, so far, scientific. Science uses various methods where the ordinary man is content with one, with simple observation. It deduces, it performs experiments, forms and verifies hypotheses. But the end is always the same systematized, empirical, and coherent truth. Now the scientific man deals, for the most part, with facts which the senses can verify. His questions of fact are settled by further observation. His theoretical questions, often the most important of all, arise over the explanation of his facts that is, their place and importance in his system. But the theologian deals with facts which the senses do not and cannot verify, with facts which underlie the created order as a permanent condition, which are always there, and can never be completely left out of account with success. And this is why his facts require a new method. If the life of God and the spiritual world could be separated from the facts of physical nature, and considered alone, they would form a special province of science, in which the usual ways of experiment and observation would be 6 INTRODUCTION valid. Theologian and scientist would pursue each his own way, each using the regular method in his own field. But this cannot be. The theologian has not only to deal with a class of facts of his own, but he has also to look at the facts of the scientist from his own special point of view. He looks for his facts in the same world as the scientist, and he sees the same facts. But he believes them to rest on a condition which his senses cannot verify, and therefore the proper method for him is to show the cohesion of the whole system of sensuous things with this non-sensuous condition, if it be assumed. He does not by co-ordinating sensuous facts alone arrive at the non-sensuous condition as a result, though it may suggest itself as a solution of some difficulties in the interpretation of the sensuous world: he finds the spiritual world in his conclusion only so far as he has assumed it at least, provisionally, in his premisses. 1 It is, we believe, the failure to recognize these truths which has led to much of the strain between Science and Theology. The theologian has been expected and in many cases has himself attempted to use the methods of natural science in his own area, in an area, therefore, for which they are wholly unsuited. If these fail, as, of course, they must, that failure has been ascribed to the intrinsic weakness of the theological case, whereas the truth has been that it is due to the irrelevance of the arguments employed. If we have said what is true above, it is plain that the ultimate truths of Theology will not emerge at the end of a process of argument conducted without assumptions. It is contrary to their nature to expect them to do so. The true method of any Science is that which is most appropriate to its subject-matter : this will be readily admitted. But it is not sufficient to say this only. A Science requires not only a valid intellectual process, but 1 Cf. S. Thorn. Aq., Swrvtna, P. I., Q. xii., Art. 4 and 12 ; and Q. miL, Art. 1. METHOD OF THEOLOGY 7 also a particular attitude of mind. This is, no doubt, widely recognized But the ideal of the scientific mind is some- what narrowly construed : it is assumed to be a mind which passively accepts demonstrated truths. The reason for this assumption is that the popular conception of scientific investigation has been formed during a period of exceptional activity in Natural Science, in which the passive ideal has most claim to be recognized. It is clear that any investiga- tion that depends on exact measurements or precise observa- tion of the results of experimental processes of any sort, will be vitiated if a desire or even a readiness, however slight, to look for one issue rather than another has any influence in relaxing the severe attention of the mind. It is open to argu- ment whether the mind is absolutely passive even in a case like this : but it may be treated as being so without serious misfortune; such problems, however delicate in detail, are of a simple and straightforward order. The case is different when the problems are no longer simple. There are cases in which an entire absence of presuppositions is a positive disqualification for producing a scientific result; because these are cases in which an adequate knowledge of the conditions of the problem, in itself constitutes a form of bias. No person, to take a somewhat extreme instance, who knows anything of the nature of problems of racial and linguis- tic affinity can profess to start with a mind wholly free from presuppositions on such an inquiry as that of the identity of the English with the lost Ten Tribes. In this and similar inquiries it is the unscientific enquirer who starts without presuppositions and as a consequence is deceived by argu- ments which are plausible to his ignoranca In this and in many questions connected with history the presence of knowledge adequate to the investigation of the problem at all, definitely tends to narrow the field of possibility. But there is also a large area of discussion 8 INTRODUCTION in which a condition of will is also necessary to such a right appreciation of the problem as will lead to a scientific result. There must be a readiness to accept a particular conclusion. And this means not merely an intellectual indifference which will be equally pleased with any view : but a sense of the importance of the matter and of the moral issues involved. A person who started to inquire into the nature or authority of the moral law in a state of entire mental and moral indifference would be out of court as a scientific investigator. And something of the same sort is true of theology. The questions of the existence of God and the truth of the Incarnation cannot be approached scientifically in the con- dition of entire indifference described above. The mind will never be compelled in spite of itself to accept such truths as these, as it may be compelled in the region of Pure Mathematics or Logic. But it will be satisfied, and that not in the least degree in an unscientific manner, if it recognizes the special conditions of theological speculation and approaches them in an attitude of readi- ness to follow their leading. It will be led always, never compelled. The condition of will here described is a moral state. And like all other such states it admits of only one alternative. Between the bias for and the bias against there is no half-way house, just as there is no alternative beyond right and wrong at the bar of conscience. The condition of suspended judgment is, in reality, only possible in matters where the mind justly expects to be compelled to have its assent wrung out of it by sheer force. Where this is not the case, the decision turns on the presence or absence of a certain moral condition, and this must be either there or not there. The evidence is admittedly insufficient to force the assent ; but it can never be estimated at its real value, if the mind consciously or unconsciously is either disposed to insist upon compulsory WHY THEOLOGY IS DIFFICULT 9 evidence, or inclined to hope that the evidence may not carry the conclusion. 1 These facts, we are persuaded, have not received adequate attention at the hands of philosophers : still less are they properly recognized in popular discussion. It has been readily assumed that the one hope of a trustworthy decision in these matters lies in the possession of a balanced mind a mind in perfect equilibrium, without any colour of pre- judice or prepossession or natural tendency. Such a condition of mind, we venture to assert roundly, exists nowhere under the sun. Moreover, if it did exist, it would not judge accurately. For it would be deficient in the very capacity for judgment: it would be blank and void, without any materials upon which a judgment could rest. The act of judgment becomes more and more certain, especially in cases where evidence is less than demonstrative, in proportion as the mind is stored with facts which lead it to determine itself in one particular way. All education shuts the mind out of certain positions which it might otherwise assume. The scientist gets to know as he goes on more and more of what is possible in nature ; and his mind becomes therefore, by degrees, biassed against the very possibility of things, which the uneducated mind would think quite likely. So the evidence for theological truth is convincing, not necessarily to any chance mind, specially educated or not ; but to those who are aware of the special character of theological facts, and the peculiar evidence they require. This brief statement of the special character of Theology as a science will not have been wasted if it succeeds in making plain in some degree the reasons why Theology is a difficult science. Its nature is only another name for its difficulty. It is difficult, because it is what it is. It deals 1 Cf. W. Ward, The Wish to Believe, pp. 6-10, and throughout the book. io INTRODUCTION with the most abstruse of all subjects: its questions are raised at the most remote points. Its whole matter lies in a region which the senses cannot verify : and the estimation of its evidence requires a fuller exercise of human powers than is consciously at work in any other field. It makes an exceptionally severe demand both upon the intellect and the will, and the arguments arrayed against it (as their appeal is without complications, and lies directly to the intellect) have almost always a more convincing appearance than they deserve. To put the matter quite briefly, Theology is concerned with all the facts of nature and human life, viewing them as a living whole, in which God is : and the truths of Theology are statements of facts in the life of God, which have their bearing on the life of man, and which lose their meaning when analysed and dissected and treated under separate and exclusive aspects, just as surely as flowers lose their beauty when picked to pieces by a botanist. It is true the botanist learns the structure and the history of the plant he dissects, and can generally correct his merely scientific conception of it by simply looking at another specimen in his garden. But no really scientific botanist would claim to be able to realize the full beauty of a plant which he had never seen growing by mentally putting together the dissected fragments of it. A thing which lives and grows is always far more beautiful than an intellectual reconstruction of its parts would lead us to expect: its beauty appeals to more in us, and requires more of us in the way of sympathy and insight. So it is also with the great truths of Theology. They are too solid and concrete to bear dissection: their value and significance will not emerge in response to a knowledge of their structure and history, however useful this may be for deepening and strengthening their power. They must be believed in order to be fully understood. PLAN OF THE BOOK 11 It remains to indicate briefly the method we propose to follow in this book. We shall start, as we have already- said, from the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. It will be our endeavour (1) to present this, assuming it to be true, as the true outcome and explanation of the various efforts towards the knowledge of God in various peoples and periods; (2) to show its coherence with the claims of Christ for Himself, and His Apostles for Him, and to express its meaning as interpreted by the Church; (3) to indicate its bearing on the idea of God, that is, its connexion with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity ; (4) to place it in relation with the human race and to indicate God's purpose for them as revealed in it; (5) to describe its extension and continuance in the world by means of the Church and the Sacraments. By this method we shall hope to cover all the articles of the Christian Creed. If the order be somewhat unusual, we believe that the unity which will result from our mode of treatment will fully make up for this defect. CHAPTER I THE INCARNATION AS THE SATISFACTION OF HUMAN ASPIRATIONS THERE is a question which would seem to arise naturally, when we are proposing to consider early efforts at expressing the religious idea : and that is the question of the origin of religion. Like all questions of origin it is a difficult one, if treated accurately; for it would mean an attempt to show how, from a non-religious condition, the mind of man passed to a belief in some religious ideas. There are many diffi- culties about this, the chief of which lies in the fact that no certain case has been produced of a man entirely without sense of religion. We have, therefore, no positive idea of the psychological process by which the passage from the non- religious to the religious state of mind has been achieved ; and we are left therefore to guess at the meaning of the problem in question. As this is a singularly unfortunate method of approaching any question it will be better, for the present, to ignore it altogether, and allow ourselves to be guided in our consideration of early religion by verifiable historical facts. As we look back over the history of religion we observe that it has performed, at various times, two prominently different functions for man. It has been the source of his metaphysic, that is his explanation of the world, and of his HEBREW AND GREEK RELIGIONS 13 morality. The gods he has worshipped from time to time have been useful to him as explaining the phenomena of nature. The seasons, the fertility of the earth, the storm, the earthquake, and the like have all appeared to him as the direct and immediate action of separate deities. Instead of a metaphysical system of forces and causes and laws, he has satisfied himself with a heaven full of gods, each with his separate function and range of activity. Then, again, these beliefs have guided him in his life. The gods whose existence he has feigned have been to him a motive for regulating his conduct. He has endeavoured to please them by action of a particular kind, or, at least, to avoid their displeasure. His family and social life have been con- secrated by being connected with his religious beliefs and experience. The truest and loftiest religion will hold these two elements in close connexion. The God who is its object will be at once the Cause and Sustainer of all that is, and the source of the obligation to live a holy life. But it has not always happened so. The history of religion shows us many instances in which the two constituent elements have been separated, or, at least, very differently emphasized. Thus, for instance, the Greeks seem to have had, as it were, a genius for metaphysical speculation, and into this form all that was valuable and permanent in their religious idea soon found its way. The host of deities dwelling in Olympus and elsewhere, by whose arbitrary and capricious action the world was kept in order, gave place to the thought of a universal single substance, by participation in which all things had their being. This development was in many respects a gain. The old religion had sprung out of a lower moral state, and fell far beneath the ideals and aspirations of the greatest minds in Greece. It had its day and perished, as all things must do when they become obsolete. But there 14 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY was loss involved in the change as well as gain. For the philosophical conception of God was intelligible only to a few ; and the philosophical ideal of morality was above the capacity of most Greeks at the time when it appeared, so that it, too, failed to extend the sway of religion over the popular mind. On the other hand, the Hebrew race presented to the world an essentially moral idea of God. They felt the temptation of the surrounding nature-religions, as we may see from the long list of their relapses into the idolatry of their neighbours; that is, their minds were open to the influences which produced these effects in their neighbours ; they were not, so far, peculiarly constituted. But, neverthe- less, there arose amongst them a body of men of whom one chief aim was to destroy not only the crude practices of these heathen religions, but also the very desire for them ; to divert the people from the tendency to nature-worship and fix their hearts on a God who refused to allow any images, even as symbols of His Presence, who was indeed the Creator of the world and all that is therein, but was also a God of Holiness, to whom every sin was an abomination, and every alien worship an insult. This permanent moral interest goes to make the uniqueness of Judaism, and has much to do with their inspiration as a people. And it crushed out every form of metaphysical interest. Strictly speaking the Jews had no metaphysic, as has often been pointed out. They cared little for the difficulties which may be raised about the origin of things ; the mode of God's action upon matter and similar questions had no power to excite the inquisitiveness of the Jewish mind. When the Hellenic influence began to operate in Judaism a philosophy of nature possessing Jewish characteristics became possible, but not till then. These two cases the Greek and the Jew may fairly be CHARACTER OF EARLY RELIGIONS 15 taken as representing the two necessary elements in religion in separation from one another. Each religion followed a one-sided law of development ; neither covered all the ground which religion has at times claimed for its own. But it may be asked, If the two elements are thus separable, may it not be true that neither is necessary ? May it not be that religion is after all merely a mythological form of the investigation of nature, or a theory of morality with the idea of a moral Governor thrown in ? To this question we must now address ourselves. It is an extremely intricate one, but its importance is too great to allow us to pass it by. If the two factors are the normal constituents of the religious impulse, we shall expect to find them fused, or nearly so, in the most primitive types of religion of which we have any information. We will investigate this point first. We shall then pass to a further question far more serious and difficult, and ask, What is it which such early attempts at religion imply ? What is the expectation which they wish to have satisfied ? When this is answered we shall be in a position to decide how far the Incarnation meets and responds to the ultimate religious aspirations of mankind. A. First, then, how far are the metaphysical and moral elements present in early religions ? As to the former there can be no possible question. Any one who has made the most superficial study of Comparative Mythology knows that every known form of undeveloped religion has myths in plenty describing the origin of the world, of the sun, moon, and stars, and all that is on the earth. These myths follow closely similar lines among different peoples. In many cases, it is true, the phenomenon of which the myth is an explanation is not easy to determine; but there is a large body of them, which must certainly be explained as a crude 16 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY and savage attempt at science. Were an illustration of this fact needed, that the savage uses mythical beings as means of explaining phenomena which strike him as obscure, one might be found in a circumstance noted by A. Lang (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, voL i. p. 138) : ' A queer bit of savage science is displayed on a black stone tobacco pipe from the Pacific coast. The savage artist has carved the pipe in the likeness of a steamer, as a steamer is conceived by him. Unable to account for the motive power, he imagines the paddle to be linked round the tongue of a coiled serpent, fastened to the tail of the vessel.' We need not delay further upon this point, for it would probably be disputed by no one. When we come to investigate the question of the presence of a moral factor in early religions, we come into more con- troverted ground. The mythical element in such religions is far the most striking at first sight. It is the point of widest difference between undeveloped paganism and our religious doctrines, and is probably most often associated with the idea of savages. We think of them in their religious aspects as human beings who have a false religion consisting chiefly of absurd and revolting myths. But yet it would seem that it has been a mistake to suppose them capable of nothing else : and that the mistake has given rise to sev^ .:al false theories of religion. Animism the theory which deduces religion from the mistaken views of savages about ghosts l ; 1 Mr. A. Lang in his interesting book, The Making of Religion, has discussed at length the evidence for stories of crystal-gazing and appearances at death, and has argued from them that if it may be supposed possible for such events to take place in the experience of savages, they may have had a real influence on the development of religion, and of the conception of the spiritual world. This is, doubtless, true, and the admission of it as true in no way binds us to the Animistic theory of the origin of religion as developed (e.g. ) by H. Spencer, or to trace its origin to magic as is done (e.g.) by Dr. Frazer in the Golden Bough. Both these theories are in reality explanations of myth rather than of religion. CHARACTER OF EARLY RELfGIONS 17 and Professor Max Miiller's theory which explains religion out of a sense of the infinite, together with a series of linguistic blunders have both taken myth as their starting- point. In their view, apparently, myth is the element which goes deepest into the religious heart of pagan man. Yet the results of some other scientific workers in the field of anthro- pology do not bear them out. Mr. A. Lang (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i. pp. 328, 329) is convinced that the myth is an external feature in savage religion, that the savage really yearns for communion with his deity, and in the hour of peril cries out, as it were, to a friendly power, and does not think of the animal to which in his cooler moments he makes offerings, and of which he tells tales. So Pfleiderer (Religions-philosophic, vol. ii. chap. i. pp. 28, 29) argues against deriving religion from Animism or from Fetichism, or even from mistakes in language on precisely this ground ; that no amount of juggling with crude and immoral and revolting myths will derive from them the loftier contents of religion. And lastly, Professor Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, p. 19) points out that 'mythology ought not to take the prominent place which is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths. . . . Belief in a series of myths was neither obligatory as a part of true reli- gion, nor was it supposed that, by believing, a man acquired religious merit and conciliated the favour of the gods. What was obligatory or meritorious was the exact performance of certain sacred acts prescribed by religious tradition.' These citations of authorities may lead us on to consider in what precise forms the moral element in early religion shows itself. The answer is threefold : in prayer, in ritual, in sacrifice. Of these the most difficult to illustrate is the first. The undeveloped man is, like many more civilized persons, extremely shy of observation in religious matters, and it has been commonly held that his religion is always 18 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY of the coarsest and least spiritual sort. But in the work already mentioned (The Making of Religion) Mr. A. Lang has adduced a considerable amount of evidence on the opposite side. 1 He shows that what seems to be the earliest element of the religion of the Australian aborigines is of a high order, and that ideas of a really lofty moral kind are associated with this early element. It gives rise to prayer, and to a sense of the divine interest in virtue, for which the people have hardly had credit. Upon this he builds a theory, which we mention for its plausibility and interest, that the earliest gods were in most cases ethical in conception, but were dethroned in later times by deified heroes and the like, whose power for mischief made it imperative to keep them in good humour. We have mentioned ritual as being an indication of the moral factor in religion, because it is always in early times supposed to enshrine the proper and safe mode of approach to a deity; that is, it is connected with the desire for Communion, which is essentially an ethical desire. It is not necessary to illustrate so familiar a point at length. But a most important field for the development of the moral element in savage religion is to be found in sacrifice : and to this we must give a somewhat closer attention. There can be no question that men expect to establish some sort of relation between themselves and their god by this means. Whatever the special purpose of particular sacrifices, this desire, at least, must lie at the root of all. And it is important for us to consider in what way the union is supposed to take effect. In order to understand the signifi- cance of sacrifice we must call attention to one or two facts, all the evidence for which we have not space to set down, and for which we rely upon the researches of others, notably Mr. A. Lang and Professor Robertson Smith. In the first 1 Chaps. X.-XIII. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SACRIFICE 19 place, the sacrifice is usually a social act of worship, paid by the tribe to its own god, who is supposed to be connected with the tribe in the way of kinship. Further, sacrifice is usually of the nature of a feast : it is a feast in honour of the tribal god, of which the god himself is a partaker; it keeps alive the feeling of family union between the god and his children. Here we come upon the most important features of sacrifice. (1) Sacrifice is an act of communion. God and man meet at the same table and partake of the same food. This view of sacrifice is illustrated by the ritual observed by Odysseus in Homer when he visits the dead in order to confer with Teiresias. He digs a trench and fills it with the blood of slaughtered victims, and stands to watch : the ghosts come and try to drink, but he warns them off with his sword until Teiresias comes ; he is allowed to drink, and by this means becomes capable of communicating his knowledge (Horn. Od. XL 23-30). This case is neither primitive, as it stands, nor does it refer to communion between man and a god, but it shows with sufficient clear- ness the character of the primitive idea. (2) Further, the man who offers the sacrifice tries to identify himself with his victim. This he does in symbolic fashion in some places, by drawing the skin of the victim over his head. 1 It is possibly in connexion with this latter idea that the notion of atonement which is spread widely over the nations of the world is most easily explained. The life of the animal stands in place of the life of the man, and the ritual em- phasizes the connexion. But the primary idea of sacrifice is communion, and the notion of atonement is a somewhat late development from it. We may note in passing that the Jewish sacrificial system illustrates both these points, but, as is usual in the case of Judaism, what is crude and low in pagan religions, so far as it was admitted at all, is spirit- 1 Cf. A. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. ii pp. 73, 106. 20 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY ualized and purified. 1 Those sacrifices in which a portion is burnt or given to the priest, and the rest consumed by the worshipper and his friends, are parallel to those through which man all over the world has sought communion with his god. Yet it is not suggested that Jehovah consumed the sacrifice. Again in the ritual for the Day of Atonement the high priest lays his hands upon the head of the scape- goat and confesses over it the sins of himself and the people : and so they are borne away into the wilderness. That the notion of communion through sacrifice was consciously present to the minds of men is proved by S. Paul's comments on the duty of Christians as regards idol-feasts. They would be, if they attended them, partakers of the table of devils (1 Cor. x. 21), and this should be impossible to those who partake of the Body of the Lord. The facts brought forward in the last few pages, for which, as we have said, ample evidence is to be found in books dealing specially with the subject, are fully sufficient to prove the persistence in religion, as far back as we can trace it, of the two factors which we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Religion, so far as it is historically known, aims at satisfying the metaphysical desire of man to explain the world, as well as his moral instinct. The history of Judaism and Hellenism shows how far these two elements may fall apart in actual practice. B. We must now turn to the more difficult aspect of this portion of our investigation, and inquire what exactly it is which is involved in these two primary factors in religion. What expectations do they imply on the part of man ? Briefly, we may answer at once as follows : The metaphysical impulse in religion implies an expectation that the world is a coherent and ordered whole : the moral interest implies an 1 Cf. S. Aug., c. Faust, xviii. 6. Ea (sacrificia) magis perverse populo congruenter imposita, quam Deo desideranti oblata. THE INTELLECTUAL DEMAND FOR UNITY 21 expectation that God is to be found and known in nature and in human life. How much or how little these two expectations are expressed in thought or word it does not concern us to inquire. It is necessary, however, to make out that these are the elements of truth which run through religious phenomena from end to end. I. Man expects to find the world a coherent whole. This expectation is the fundamental motive of all intellectual speculation. There is no portion of experience to which it does not apply. All science and all ordinary knowledge result from the operation of this single motive, or perhaps we might better call it, this necessary law. A simple illus- tration will show more clearly than anything else the importance of it as a principle. Man has five senses. 1 Each one of these admits him into a different world. The world of sight is not the same as the world of sound, or the world of sound as the world of smell. But man's capacity to live and utilize his experience depends upon his being able at will to translate the reports of one sense into terms of another, and to feel himself certain of the truthfulness of his results. The eyes report the presence of certain objects to a man as he walks along trees, houses, men, etc. By a process of inference too familiar and rapid to be noticed he thinks of them as different in size as well as in colour. The stile in front of him is an obstacle which he can easily surmount, and the wall by its side one which would be difficult or impossible. That means that the man in question has rapidly translated the reports of his eyes into the language of another sense, viz. touch. Now if his senses are in their normal state, his inference will be right, and he will act easily, without conscious reflection, just as if there were no inference or possibility of error in the matter at all. And yet his inference is not altogether free from uncertainty. 1 Cf. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, ed. i. vol. ii. pp. 356, 357. 22 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY Strictly speaking, his eyes report one set of facts and his sense of touch another; and there is no absolute necessity that the two sets of facts should harmonize. When in a certain condition of atmosphere at the sea-side we see a distant ship upside down in the air, no one dreams of supposing that it is so : that is, no one dreams of supposing that if he went out and examined it, he would find the reports of his other senses in harmony with those of his eyes. And yet there is no reason to blame the eyes as though they had given a false report. They have reported what they saw, but the rest of experience warns us to beware in such a case of trusting them too literally. Now that which is certainly true in the case described might conceivably have been true throughout. It might conceivably have been true that the reports of no one sense could be expressed in terms of another, that man, therefore, would have been in presence of five worlds instead of one. It is needless to say that if this were so, his experience would be a chaos. He would have no right and no power to deal with it as a whole, his expecta- tion that it would be coherent would be simply a delusion. This, then, is the value for thought of the expectation we have mentioned. Unless man can form it and act upon it, he can do nothing safely. His whole intellectual outlook depends upon its truth ; if it is not true he is wandering, as it were, amongst the phantoms of a dream. We now pro- ceed to trace its significance in religion. In the first place, the early efforts of undeveloped man to explain nature to himself embody, consciously or uncon- sciously, this doctrine. He observes certain uniform move- ments, certain recurring sequences of phenomena, and he interprets them on the analogy of his own action. The changes in the world around him, for which he is responsible, he effects by the exercise of his own will, and he not unnatu- rally assumes that the far more elaborate changes for which IMPORTANCE OF INTELLECTUAL DEMAND 23 he is not responsible are due to the operation of much more powerful wills. That they do not occur by accident or without meaning he is firmly convinced. His intuition falls short in that he does not see the difficulty of assuming a separate existence to account for each separate effect. The host of deities which he imagines, conflict in their interests and in the region of their activity, and so the unity and certainty which their presence was to produce vanishes into confusion and chaos. The savage, however, does not know this, and is, doubtless, perfectly happy with his philosophy. But it cannot always be so. As men grow in knowledge, and in grip over their experience, they become dissatisfied with this casual and unscientific method of dealing with the world. The search for unity of principle becomes conscious and definite, and the old mythology vanishes under the criticism of an enlightened philosophy. Thus arises the desire for a metaphysical explanation of things an account of them which traces them all to some one force, or prin- ciple, or cause, such as shall appear in various degrees and shapes in all the multiform variety of experience. Hitherto we have spoken of very elementary manifestations of this fundamental expectation of man in regard to his experience, we must now investigate some far more elaborate attempts in the same direction. In so doing, we shall not confine ourselves to pre-Christian speculation, for the impulse after a unification of experience by no means ceased with the appearance of Christ Incarnate. Men are still as anxious as ever to prove that nature is uniform, or, what is the same problem under another guise, that God exists. We have said that man expects to find the world a coherent whole, and illustrated this position by instances of the way in which he combines the reports of his various senses. He has, of course, much more to do in the interpre- tation of the world than this. Not only does he want to 24 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY feel sure that he may count on things being as he sees them, he also wants to know that they will happen as he expects them. The world must not only be coherent as a whole when he looks at it, but coherent as a process. If he has seen that a certain cause produces a certain effect, he must be assured that this is not a mere accident. In other words, he must gradually exclude chance from every portion of his experience ; there must be no such thing theoretically possible. All must move on fixed and certain principles, without jerks or unevenness or surprise. Chance means the intrusion of an alien and unintelligible principle ; and every such intrusion means that man has failed so far in his aim. He must, at all costs, therefore, eliminate chance. Broadly speaking, chance may enter either at the beginning of the process of the formation of the world, or during its progress, or in relation to its end. That is, there may have been no prime cause upon which the whole necessarily depends ; the world may have been the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms : or there may be still in the course of things an incalculable element, tending to vitiate and limit our reasonings: or there may be no final purpose to which the whole scheme of things is moving. Any one of these positions is possible, and any one of them is fatal to the possession of a complete and satisfactory ideal of thought. This is the expanded state- ment of the expectation of which much has been already said. Practically it takes the form of a belief in a First Cause, in a uniform law of causation in the world, and a rational purpose served by and in the lives and actions of the countless individual elements which go to make the world. At this point we come directly in contact with Theology again. For these beliefs are precisely the principles known in philosophical Theology as the Cosmological and Teleological Proofs of the Existence of God. The belief in the First Cause and a uniform law of causation, when DESIRE FOR UNIFORMITY AND RELIGION 25 expressed as a philosophical necessity, form the cosmological proof : the proof from the order and uniformity of the world that a God exists who creates and governs it And the other the conviction of a firm and constant purpose running through all the particular events in life, is the teleological proof : the proof which rests upon the signs in nature of a rational and intelligent design. These proofs are old in the history of thought. The latter dates back at least as far as Socrates, the former at least as far as Aristotle. And they have had a chequered career. They have not always found favour; at times they have been regarded as positively misleading. It does not fall within our purpose to enter upon their history in detail ; it would necessarily be both obscure and technical. We must pass on to a third conviction or belief, which in its turn is presented philosophically as a further proof. Assuming, for purposes of argument, that man does really acquire the convictions as to the necessity of order, which take shape in the proofs mentioned above, let us ask the question, Why does he thus acquire them ? What right has he to act upon them ? Why does man acquire these convictions ? He does so because he claims to interpret the nature outside him on the analogy of his own. We have seen that man assumes his right to combine and harmonize the reports of his various senses. This fact may be expressed in other words by saying that he imposes unity upon the variety which meets his senses. Now the unity which he thus imposes upon nature is modelled upon his knowledge of himself. As he is one and the same throughout the whole of his experience, so he ex- pects nature to be one in a similar way. Its various moods and manifestations are not single and separate in their own right; they pass and vanish, but the underlying reality remains the same. In fact there is a rooted anthropomor- 26 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY phism in all his dealings with nature. He goes to it not as to a thing which is finally and irreconcilably foreign to him- self, but as expecting to find in it the reflexion of a mind like his own. This is the reason why in early days he saw divine presences in sun and air and sea ; why, when he has grown out of these fancies, he still expects that nature will answer to his demands, and reveal itself as a Thought not wholly dissimilar to such as he can form, unfolded in many parts and in many fashions. The crudest mythologies, then, as well as the most advanced thought represent this one claim to interpret nature by the analogies which thought provides. And this in the technical language of philosophy becomes the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God ; the proof, that is, which rests upon the belief that a condition which is absolutely necessary in order that thought may be true and valid is necessary to the existence of the world. We reach here the most fiercely controverted district of Natural Theology. The ontological proof more than any other has met with the severest criticism. Much of this confusion has arisen, we are sure, from inade- quate accounts of the argument as it was presented by Anselm, who first put it forward in its complete form. 1 His argument, as any one may see who cares, consists of three parts : (1) a demonstration of the necessity to thought of a being than whom no greater can be conceived ; (2) the identi- fication of this with God; (3) the proof that such a being exists necessarily also in fact. The form in which the argument occurs is no doubt scholastic and subtle, but the central fact of it is true that if there be any condition which we can discover necessary to the truth and certainty of our thought, that condition must either be satisfied in nature, or our thought must fall short of truth altogether. Now we have seen that the one condition of the success of 1 See references on p. 48. THE ONTOLOGICAL PROOF 27 man in dealing with the world is that he should be able to interpret it on the analogy of his own nature. Unless it means something real and definite for him, which will go into his language ; unless its order is something like what he means by rational order, nature is simply unintelligible nonsense. Unless, in a word, its uniformity and its firmness of purpose mean that a rational Thought underlies it all, it is mere chaos, and his speculations about it are simply delusive. It is of the highest importance in this connexion to observe (1) that this claim is an assumed claim it cannot be proved; (2) that it is an ideal, philosophically speaking, and cannot be realized. (1) It cannot be proved. For man can never so completely escape out of the regular conditions of life as to see whether nature without him corresponds to that which it seems to be when he looks at it. We believe, no doubt, that things remain the same whether we happen to be looking at them or not; and we are doubtless right in believing this. But we cannot see the proof of it with our own eyes, from the very nature of the case. And (2) the expectation that there is a complete rational unity in nature is an ideal and cannot be realized. Because to realize it would be to know all things to think over again the whole creative Thought of God in response to which the world sprang into being, to think it in all its wide scope and narrowness of detail. Towards this man can only gradually move. Every access to his scientific knowledge, every new uniformity perceived and noted and combined into the general scheme, is a step forwards. Buc the end is not yet. To speak metaphorically, the world from this point of view is like an orchestra playing a symphony of God's composing, conducted by the mind of man. Apart from man's mind, if it can be conceived, it would lie dead and unmeaning, like the printed score. In contact with man's mind, its meaning 28 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY is evoked. The parts of the several instruments combine for the general purpose of the whole, and man hears gradually and in time the thoughts which flashed upon the composer in a moment. 1 All depends upon an ultimate sympathy and similarity between the mind which composes and those which listen. Without this the symphony becomes a mere babble of meaningless sounds. II. So far there is no fully personal result attained. It is true that the Power behind nature is most naturally conceived, even at this stage, as a personal being ; but still the conditions required are satisfied by the bare assumption of a rational thought the relation of which to further personal characters is ignored. We now come to consider this further step, and in so doing approach the other element present in all religion the moral interest. This we saw to involve the demand to know and have communion with the Ruler of the world. The moral consciousness cannot regard God as a mere force, governing events without conscious purpose : it expects to be admitted in some measure into the Divine confidence, if we may use the phrase, to learn something in detail of God's purpose, and to give free aid in carrying it out. We turn, then, to the consideration of the moral sense, and inquire what is its ideal, what demand it makes upon the world. It will not be necessary to argue that there is a continuity in the growth of the moral sense, and that even in its lower and coarser forms there is a sufficient likeness 1 Cf. Jahn's Mozart, Bd. III. pp. 423-425, quoted in Von Hartmann, Phil, d. Unbevmssten, Bd. I. p. 242. Mozart, speaking of the way in which a musical subject grows in his mind, writes : ' This fires my soul, if I am not disturbed : the subject grows bigger, I extend it and make it clearer, and the whole piece (das Ding) becomes actually complete in my head, even though it be long, so that afterwards I survey it at a glance, like a beautiful picture, or a fine figure, and I do not hear it in my imagination successively, as it must afterwards appear, but, as it were, all at once. That is a treat ! all the invention and construction goes on in me as in a beautiful dream : but to hear it over all at once (Alles zusammen), that is the best.' THE MORAL PROOF 29 with the higher, to prove their kinship. Nor again need we spend time upon discussing the rise of moral sentiments out of feelings and desires which are not moral. Whatever its origin, the moral sense considers actions, and especially agents, in the light of what they ought to be rather than what they are. It is, therefore, in the first place, unselfish in its principles. Its judgment falls indifferently (so long as it is not distorted and corrupt) upon all men : it is not, as such, affected by considerations of mere pleasure or pain to oneself or any other person. It rises out of the narrowness of individual interests and longings, and considers these broadly as they are affected by their relations one with another. Like the intellect, it demands universality a law which binds all men alike. But, secondly, the universality of the moral law is different from that which obtains in the intellectual region. The laws of nature, as formulated by the mind, are short statements of a number of facts ; they depend upon the existence of the facts, and they cannot be broken. It may happen that new facts may be observed, which involve a readjustment of the old laws : but this is simply an enlargement of experience, not a breach of law already existing. If it be found that the old law was altogether on wrong principles, it is ourselves who have made the mistake : we have devised a formula to which the world will not answer, and experience has brought our error to light. If, on the other hand, it be found that a law was true so far as it went, but that wider knowledge has enabled us to form a more comprehensive view of things, we have simply to readjust our intellectual formulae reorganize our scheme of nature. It is different with the moral law. That is susceptible of real breach. That which should have been done that which the moral order of the world demanded may be set aside and its contrary realized. Thirdly, we regard the laws of physical nature and the 30 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY moral world with widely different feelings. A man may misinterpret the facts of nature, and formulate a rule which they do not follow : and we say he has made a mistake, a miscalculation, he is intellectually in the wrong. Or, knowing the facts of nature, he may attempt to act as if its laws were non-existent or different. And we call him a fool for his pains. Unless, indeed, his action risks interests which have no business to be trifled with ; and then we con- demn him morally. But the moral condemnation falls upon the act considered morally and not in its physical relations. We do not feel called upon to defend nature's laws morally : if any one succeeded in altering them, no one would mind ; but we know that no one can. These differences depend on the ultimate difference in the constituent elements of the physical and moral worlds. We may perhaps express it by saying that the physical world is a complex of facts, the moral world a society of free persons. Hence the moral law is not conceived as a mechanical and unbroken sequence, but as a law in the true sense ; emerging from the will of a supreme Person; conditioning, of right, the wills of those in the society who owe reverence and love to the Supreme. It is true that attempts have been made to treat it on the analogy of physical law, and to explain breaches of it as mere mistake in judgment; and some of these attempts are plausible. But it would seem that, in the last resort, they are found to have explained away the dis- tinctive element in moral consciousness the sense of a course of action chosen or rejected independently of the dictates of wisdom. It is not arbitrary : it runs back into the ultimate constitution of things. We are under it, because we are human beings. It is inevitable : for, though we may stifle its representative within us, our own conscience, or make it speak at our pleasure, we know that such expedients delude no one but ourselves. Again, the moral law is irksome THE MORAL PROOF 31 only when we resist it : obedience brings us into true and friendly communion with the Power from whom it comes. Hence, owing to the essential difference between physical and moral law in the consciousness of mankind, it has come about that the world, as conceived by the moral sense, is under the rule of a Personal Governor, who is Himself holy : who knows and judges the hearts of men : with whom men are allowed to enter into communion. The ideal of the moral sense is a world in which this law is fully carried out. And it is by reference to this ideal standard that individual moral judgments are made. As in the case of pure thought, this ideal is necessary as an assumption, unless we are prepared to treat the utterances of the moral sense as invalid altogether. We must not, however, fail to recognize that it, like the ideal of thought, is an ideal which is found to have been assumed when moral judgments are analyzed, but which cannot be demonstrated, and contin- ually falls short of realization. As the ideal of Thought is hindered by the failure of knowledge, so the ideal of Morality is perplexed by eviL For the moral sense looks to find the world ruled according to its own best hopes expects that the good should triumph and that any breach of the rule of good should be visited with punishment. But experience conflicts with this. In spite of conscience, the evil does triumph at times to the detriment of the good. And this is a far more perplexing failure than that of the ideal of Thought. Thought claimed to interpret the world on its own principles, and every step it takes in advance brings it nearer attainment of its end. The process is long, but every stage of it adds assurance and certainty. It is a progress carried on in hope. But in the other case the failure is irreparable. Every unpunished wrong is, within this world's scope, a lasting irremediable failure. The martyr can have 32 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY nothing done for him by the world to repair the wrong it has done him. No man survives in the verses of poets, or the sculptor's marble. And yet the moral Ruler of the world has permitted the wrong. Here is indeed a problem. It has been met, of course, with despair : but better than this, it has given a peculiar intensity of hope to the desire for immortality. The wrong done here, it has been felt, cannot really be final. Beyond this world there should be another, where all this crookedness shall be straightened out. We have now traced out at some length the raison d'etre of those ideas which form the content of Natural Theology. We have seen how beliefs and practices which belong to the most undeveloped types of humanity have a real kinship with speculations more elaborate and loftier than they. It may be worth while to pause for a moment, and draw to- gether the results we have attained. They may be expressed briefly thus. This fact emerges on consideration of the history of philosophy and religion, that man claims to interpret the world on the analogy of his own nature, that he expects to find in it the activity of a Personality more or less like his own, who cares about him, and is holy, and rewards holiness here or hereafter ; and this expectation is the permanent fact which explains the presence of so many religious phenomena. To this must be added the fact that men do not even feel themselves certain of the validity of their ideals, and that a large part of the peculiar practices of religion consists in attempts to reach certainty and remove disabilities. All over the world men are religious : as we have seen, it is probable that no such thing as an atheistic tribe of men exists anywhere. And this has been used as a proof of the existence of God, under the name of the proof from the consensus gentium. The fact that men agree so remarkably upon this point has been held to argue the truth of the con- THE CONSENSUS GENTIUM 33 viction upon which they are agreed. Now as it stands we are not prepared to give so much weight as this to the con- sensus gentium, stated as a bare fact. For it would then always be at the mercy of a chance individual who may choose to disclaim any such convictions. But, if it be taken as a fact which is broadly true, the considerations we have here alleged have certainly a very great weight, because they tally on the theoretical side with what is generally true in practice. It is certainly a matter of considerable importance that certain psychological conditions can be found which do operate widely amongst men, and do lead to the result which is no less widely present. We are not weighted with the unhistorical speculations which led to the Deists' devotion to Natural Eeligion in the last century. We do not suppose that primitive man was socially or religiously such as the Deists believed that the social state in which he lived was purer and better than ours, or that the religion which he held was the simple and true basis upon which all successive systems have been erected. We do not hold this, because evolution has taught us not to look for the ideal in the first stages of the progress of an idea, but to find it rather in the law which has determined the progress from stage to stage. But we urge that the consensus, not necessarily of the whole population of individual men, but rather of their various strains of thought converging in one direction, shows that the belief in God as described is truly natural, in the sense that man naturally comes to the consciousness of it so soon as he begins to follow out the natural laws of Thought and Life, and to deal with the world as he is qualified by nature to do. 1 1 It is to be remembered that the whole field which has been thus lightly covered in the preceding section of this chapter is fruitful in controversy. To enter into this controversial region would involve much minute discussion, and would be disproportionate in a work like this. It may be said, moreover, that the disputes are hardly relevant to our present purpose. It is not denied 3 34 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY C. We have now reached the last stage of the inquiry of this chapter : the question, namely, how far the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, assuming it to be true, corresponds with what we have seen to be the natural impulse and hope of man. The simplest method of procedure seems to be, to set down first the more abstract accounts of the Incarnation to be found in S. Paul and S. John, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and then to inquire how far this conception of it answers to the needs of Natural Theology. Let us begin with S. Paul. The Incarnation forms a very important and significant article in his creed, and there are many points of sight from which he considers it. It is, in the first place, a manifestation on the field of history of the Will and Wisdom of God. This idea appears in each separate section of the Pauline Epistles, the two early letters to the Thessalonians alone excepted. We find it in 1 Corinthians, the Galatians, and the Romans, among the four undisputed Epistles ; it reappears in the Epistles of the Captivity, in the Ephesians, and Colossians, and is found last of all in the Pastoral Epistles. It is when ' the fulness of the time ' had come (Gal. iv. 4) that God sent His Son. It is a mystery ' kept in silence in eternal times, but now manifested ' through prophetic writings, ' according to the commandment of the Eternal God, made known unto all the nations unto obedi- ence of faith ' (Rom. xvi. 25-26). 1 So in Christ, God has set forth His good pleasure ' unto a dispensation of the fulness of that the idea of God on the metaphysical side results from an extension of the normal method by which man deals with experience. Nor is it denied that he proceeds by introducing order and law into experiences otherwise chaotic. The disputes turn on the origin and method of these intellectual processes, the existence of which no one denies : in other words, on the relation of soul and body or mind and matter in man. We need only remark here, that while crude materialism would put the whole of theology aside as futile, the discussion between this and some form of idealism seems to lie outside our present intentions. 1 Of. Col. i. 25-27. HOLY SCRIPTURE AND THE INCARNATION 35 the times' (Eph. i. 10). It is the fulfilment of the promise made ' before eternal times,' by c God who cannot lie ' (Tit. i. 2). 1 Secondly, the Incarnate Person is eternal and pre- existent. He is in the form of God (ev fJiop{j Oeou virapxwv) (Phil. ii. 5), and He is the image of God (2 Cor. iv. 4 ; Col. i. 15), prior in time to all created things (CoL L 17). He is Son of God in a special and unique sense: God's own Son (Rom. viii. 3, 32). As such He has mediatorial functions, especially in regard to creation, which has in Him its system, and is brought into being through Him (1 Cor. xv. 20-28 ; CoL i. 16-18). Thirdly, this Son of God became incarnate of the seed of David (Rom. i. 3); was 'found in fashion as a man' (PhiL iL 7). He was the typical and ideal man, corresponding to the first Adam (1 Cor. xv. 45). 2 By His life of humiliation, and especially by His death, He restored in man the image of God (Col. iii. 10) and reversed all the deadly consequences of sin by infusion of new life, 3 such life being eternal to all those who are in Christ (1 Thess. iv. 18, and elsewhere). Next, S. John presents the Incarnation of the Word, firstly, as the climax of the long development of God's self-mani- festation in creation and in the Jewish Dispensation. Grace and truth flowed from His presence, in contrast with the law which Moses gave : new birth and sonship of God were given by Him to those who believed on His name at His coming (i. 1-18). He it is who brings for the first time the true knowledge of the Father : ' no man hath seen God at any time ; God only begotten, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him ' (i. 18) ; ' Not that any hath seen the Father, save He which is from God, He hath seen the Father ' (vi. 46). 4 To make this revelation was the motive of His 1 Cf. 2 Tim. i. 9, 10. 2 Cf. Rom. v. 12, 21. 3 Cf. Rom. v. 8, 9 ; Eph. i. 7 ; Col. ii. 11-16 ; 1 Tim. i. 15. 4 Cf. chap. v. 37, 38, xiv. 6, ivi. 25 ; and in the first Epistle, chap. ii. 23. 36 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY mission from the Father. ' The works which the Father hath given Me to accomplish, the very works which I do, bear witness of Me, that the Father hath sent Me' (v. 36, 37). Secondly, the mission of the Son occurs in its due time and place: the events of it arrive at their proper hour. 1 His coming, and especially His death, are the means of atonement and reconciliation. 2 But it requires faith in His Person (xx. 31) and life in Him 3 in order that we should attain these benefits. Thirdly, this union with Him involves union and mutual love one with another (1 John iii. 9, 11, 14, 16), and the knowledge of God which we thus attain is eternal life (xvii. 3). Again, we turn to the Epistle to the Hebrews. Here too we find the belief in a pre-existent Personality, whose mani- festation is the climax of a series of self -revelations ' in many parts and in many fashions' (chap. i. 1-3). This Person, who is Son of God, is the instrument of creation (chap. 12). He assumed humanity perfect in all things except sin (ii. 14, 17 : cf. iv. 15) and offered Himself as a perfect Sacrifice to God, thus closing the history of the imperfect and symbolic sacrifices of Judaism (ix. 11-14). In virtue of this sacrifice we are cleansed from sin, united with one another, and made capable of eternal life in God's presence (ii. 10-18). These three writers represent different aspects of the Christian faith, but their witness on this point is closely harmonious. According to all three, a Divine Person has taken upon Him our flesh in due time, in accordance with the unfailing order of the world has lived under human conditions a life of obedience and of sacrifice, ending upon the Cross, has thus revealed God truly and fully, and re- moved the barriers which sin had raised and has thus 1 Cf. vii. 30 No man laid hands upon Him, because His hour was not yet come with xvii. 1 Father, the hour is come. 2 Cf. 1 John i. 7, ii. 2. 3 Cf. 1 John iv. 14-16. ANTHROPOMORPHISM, TRUE AND FALSE 37 poured new life into decaying humanity, binding men to God and to one another which life extends beyond the grave. The Doctrine of the Incarnation as thus considered seems to bear comparison with the earlier efforts of men in four particulars. I. It affirms definitely, and with assurance, that a know- ledge of God is attainable through matter through creation through human nature. From this point of view it satisfies the ideal of thought. Precariously and indirectly man reached the conviction and expressed it in various forms, that a First Cause, a uniform order, a moral Euler, are necessary assumptions in order that he may trust his experience. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ confirms this precarious and indirect conclusion. It does not do this, however, in the way in which we might have expected. It reveals, indeed, the truth of the expectation that God may be known in nature : it encourages men thus far, assures them that they are not working upon false lines, but it tells them no more. We saw above that the satisfaction of his ideal for which man longs implies the completion of his knowledge. When he has thought over again the whole thought of creation, then he will have attained the goal towards which he has striven so long. Towards this attainment the Incarnation of our Lord gives him no help : this it leaves to him to win by his own efforts. It does not, in other words, stifle progress by offering intellectual certainty and scientific knowledge without struggle, it only gives assurance that the efforts are not in vain. But at this point the question of anthropomorphism recurs. Has our doctrine nothing to say about this ? Does it not, or ought it not to condemn so poor and meagre a conception of God ? It must be confessed that this involves a discussion which is by no means free from difficulty. For the accusa- tion of anthropomorphism partly no doubt because its 38 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY bearing is far from being certain causes almost panic terror. We are inclined to surrender almost anything rather than be stigmatized in this way. We are afraid of we know not what when we are so styled, and are alarmed to find ourselves afraid. Is not all this the result of a failure to distinguish between a true and a false anthropomorphism between anthropo- morphism which carries with it associations of limitation and weakness, and anthropomorphism which does no such thing? Let us try and distinguish them. The crude and savage tales about the gods which we were considering some few pages back, are, of course, an instance of the false anthropomorphism. The nature of man with all its limita- tions and mistakes is taken as affording an adequate analogy for the nature of God. The gods, in this case, are merely stronger and more wilful men, with no checks upon their passions, and no supreme or superior Powers to hold them in subjection. In applying his own experience to interpret his convictions as to the nature of his gods, man has removed the restrictions which he is apt to find irksome, and left behind all those which are characteristic of derived and circumscribed existence. This is admitted on all hands to be an unworthy conception of God. But the question is then worth raising, whether the philosophical idea of Him, even when crowned by the Incarnation, is not merely a sublimer form of the same impulse; whether the idea of God as mind, as will, as capable of self-revealing activity in the world, in human life, in an Incarnate Person, is less unworthy in the last resort than the old myths; whether it involves any less than savage mythologies a complete transference of human conditions to that which must necessarily transcend them. It will be observed that this is one of the strongest supports of the Agnostic position the appeal to man's consciousness KNOWLEDGE OF GOD THROUGH CHRIST 39 of weakness and limitation even in his higher powers. Still we cannot but demur to it. Its strength lies, let us notice, in its apparently strict appeal to logic. You admit, it tells us, that the savage myths are unworthy and degrading, simply because they transfer human limitations to the character of God. Now, how can you draw a line between these and the higher faculties of mind or will, which are no less liable to failure ? Having admitted one point, you are logically compelled to admit the other. It would seem that our best method of dealing with this contention is to admit it. We acknowledge, so we might answer, we acknowledge that the higher human powers when scrutinized reveal all sorts of faults and inadequacies which we never noticed before ; and although the conscious- ness is nevertheless strong within us, even while we notice this, that there is in them some divine element, some point of resemblance between us and the Divine Ruler, yet we have no sure means of separating the eternal and the trans- itory in them. Yet, when we turn to look at Christ Incarnate the trouble vanishes. The Incarnation, if true, is a hard fact in history, and it affirms that God has revealed Himself in the way in which man had hoped. The Incar- nation, if carefully examined, will doubtless provide some means of deciding where it is safe to talk of God in human language, and where it would land us in gross error. The Incarnate One need say nothing about anthropomorphism, for the Incarnation is the refutation of all anthropomorphism. This hint must be expanded later. II. The doctrine of the Incarnation, as set forth in the writers cited above, bears comparison with the utterances of Natural Religion in regard of redemption. However it may be explained, the fact remains that men at all times have been sensible of a barrier between them and God. Com- munion has never been regarded as an easy thing. It has 40 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY been protected either by an elaborate ritual or by cruel sacrificial customs. There is always a strongly-marked current of fear in heathen religion. The temper of the gods cannot be trusted, and they are apt to take heavy vengeance for any slight they may have received. Much of this is, of course, purely accidental and does not touch the heart of the religion ; but it remains true that the yearning for heavenly communion, which dates back to the beginning of religion, is strained by meeting with a barrier. The sense of an obstacle became explicit in Judaism. There we find a per- vading consciousness that man has fallen short of the Divine ideal. Year after year, according to the developed ritual of Judsea, the whole people required and received a symbolic atonement. And besides this, their casual breaches of the Law had to be repaired and reconciliation made. The Incarnation of Christ, as presented in the New Testament, meets all this directly: and, as in the former case, it does more than was expected of it. The barrier which all men felt, had wider effects than had been supposed. It held men back not only from communion with God, but also from full knowledge of His nature. The philosopher who sought to know God by his wisdom was under the same ban as the ordinary heathen. He was subject to the strangest and most disheartening failures. And what was more, neither Jew nor Greek the Greek far less than the Jew was able to enforce the knowledge he did win in practice. The Jews did their best with their law by an elaborate system of casuistry. The Greek thinkers founded schools, and so insured a certain number of professed followers of a high ideal. But their whole result upon the world of their day was comparatively slight. Now over all this ground the belief that the Son of God had become incarnate and lived and died as man was supremely successful. It made possible at least this was its profession a real and sure knowledge SOCIAL CHARACTER OF CHRISTIANITY 41 of God ; it removed the barrier which separated men from His communion, by presenting a real and final sacrifice ; and it supplied a stream of new life by which men were enabled in some degree to satisfy their ideal in their lives. In saying this, we have purposely left aside some very important questions which lie round this point. We have said nothing of the origin of this sense of separation in the Fall, nothing of the way in which we must think of the barrier as removed. Nor do we propose to pause here in order to show how the Christian idea of vicarious sacrifice hangs together with the conviction that God reveals Himself in the material world and in human life. To all these points we shall return when we come to their proper place. 1 At present we have only to indicate that in fact the Incarnation, if true, satisfies aspirations which the speculations of Natural Theology arouse. III. We have just shown that the doctrine of the Incar- nation gave what no previous system had ever succeeded in giving, a firm basis for morality, in that it bound together more closely than ever before religion and morality. This circumstance leads on to the consideration of a third point, in which it bears comparison with previous efforts its social character. Religion from its earliest days has been a social thing. In savage tribes it binds the members of each individual tribe together. In Greece it was the bond which united the members of a family or clan. To the Jew it was the mark of his separation from all the unenlightened world ; but it was the link between the whole body of descendants from Abraham. Nowhere do we find religion solitary, an operation with which only the individual soul and God were concerned. This social character of religion was emphasized in various ways by tribal or family sacrifices especially, but also by the names bestowed upon the gods. In some 1 Chaps. V. VI. 42 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY sense, often a very material sense, the fatherhood of God was recognized. A savage tribe frequently claims descent from the god it worships; the Greeks regarded Zeus as father of gods and men. This notion expanded into some- thing almost sublime in the hands of the Stoic philosophers, who thought of God as the common father of all mankind : although their inveterate materialism leads one to wonder whether they meant more by it than that He was the physical cause of their being. The Jew regarded God as Father of His own peculiar people, and, in spite of the glimpses of a universal religion which the prophets had opened up from time to time, troubled himself little about the hopes or the prospects of the Gentiles. Christ revealed God as the Father of all men in a fuller sense than before, and made religion the bond of a new society in which all men should have their places as sons, in virtue of their union with the only-begotten Son of God. Thus in this point also the Incarnation of our Lord fulfils and justifies earlier insight. From the first, and throughout all its mani- festations, religion had been bound up with the social character of man, and the new religion makes no change in this. It only widens and strengthens the social idea by destroying the exclusiveness and one-sidedness which be- longed to the earlier stages of the history. IV. There is one point further which must be discussed under this head. It is a common remark that there is nothing so conservative as religion. It dislikes change of any kind, whether in ritual or doctrine. In early stages, as we have seen, the ritual was more permanent than the doctrine; the mythology was in some measure changeable, the ritual traditional and unchanged. In other words, religion tends to become stereotyped and to regard itself as final, at any rate so long as it lasts. It is true that in Greece the old Hellenic faiths were criticized away by the SOCIAL CHARACTER OF CHRISTIANITY 43 new philosophy; but at the same time there was a large number of customs preserved in connexion, for instance, with the Eleusinian mysteries of which the explanation goes back into a primitive age and social condition. In Judaism there was a considerable divergence between the theory and the practice. In theory, the Jewish religion pretended to no finality, looked on always to a day when a fuller and final revelation would come from God. But in practice, as the events of our Lord's life showed, the old conservative instinct of religion displayed itself, and the Pharisees, while holding tenaciously to the belief in a Messiah who should come, resisted anything which seemed likely to change the outward order with which they were familiar. The doctrine of Christ Incarnate meets this instinct directly. It proclaims itself from the first as final, but final just in the region where the tendency had been to admit change in doctrine, not in outward observance. The instinct of finality, so firmly rooted in the religious mind, is seized upon and transfigured. It is centred upon the revealed knowledge of the unchanging nature of God, not upon the methods of approach to Him. The sacrifice of reconciliation is once performed, the Gospel is once given, and the whole scheme as it stands is put forth as a whole a stewardship to be occupied till Christ come. The long delay before this Second Coming has brought into view new needs and new conditions of life which the apostles can never have con- templated ; but the ' faith once delivered ' is the source to which we still look for constant guidance. We shall have to look in detail into some of the adaptations of the old faith to new problems in the chapters which follow. 1 Here it is enough to point out how by its finality of doctrine and indifference to change in rites and ceremonies, Christianity has spiritualized religion without making it vague and fluid, i Chaps. III. IV. 44 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY We have dwelt at some length on the contents of Natural Religion, and the connexion with these of Judaism and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. We have seen how broken lights from earlier days are concentrated in the person of our Lord; how, if the apostolic witness to His Incarnation be true, the fragmentary intuitions of men are made to cohere ; how their partial anticipations of the truth fall into system and order in Him who claims to be the truth. Before passing from this subject into the detailed treatment of the Incarnation, we may pause and ask the question, whether our discussion, so far as it has gone, has thrown any light upon the general character of revelation. We have represented the Incarnation as fulfilling the various aspirations already in existence rather than as introducing any sudden or startling change. Men thought that the order and regularity of nature pointed to the work of a mind, but they failed to prove it : they longed to hold intercourse with the moral Governor of the world and failed to attain it: and the Incarnation meets them where they are and gives them assurance. That is, it has a place in the history, not only of outward events, but of man's mental and spiritual development : it is in organic continuity with the progress of the world. And this character we believe to be one certain note of a revelation from God, that it involves no hopeless breach with the past, that it fulfils but does not destroy. In this aspect it forms a very striking contrast to the ordinary human notion of Divine revelation : it is historic and universal, dealing with particular events through general principles, whereas man looks most often for spasmodic information upon details. He is content, as a rule, with ordinary knowledge obtained through ordinary channels. But now and then he becomes dissatisfied with it. He wishes to know something which is outside the range of his capacities, or to do something which is beyond PHILOSOPHICAL SUPERSTITION 45 his natural powers. And it is here that he expects the activity of God to step in and aid him. He wants to know whether a scheme which he has projected will be successful ; he goes to an oracle and expects an answer from the divine omniscience, or he opens his Bible and accepts the first chance words as a direction from God. Or he wishes to know where the soul of his dead mother is at this moment, and how it is engaged, and he attends a spiritualistic stance. He always looks for some detailed information which will satisfy his particular wishes, give him a certainty in the ordinary ways of life which he cannot acquire by ordinary means, and thus bring him an advantage over his neighbours. His purview is apt to be bounded by his own individual life and conditions ; he does not rise to the conception of a vast historic scheme. But it will be said, This is only true of coarse and vulgar superstition. Has not Buddhism, has not Hellenism, risen to some wider notion than this ? Where will you get such bold drafts on the bank of time as in Buddhism ? How can you say that the Stoic system of recurring cycles fails to be a great historic scheme ? The answer is, that it is true that the systems of the Buddhist and the Stoic have arisen by repulsion from the crude and vulgar superstitions of which we have been speaking. But with all their magnificence they show the faults and exaggerations of a reaction. They look at life from within, as it were, buried in it. If the whole process of the world's movement tends to some ' far-off divine event,' they can only conjecture what it may be. Their knowledge of it is barren : they cannot use it to throw light on what happens now. life, as men see it from within, is incomplete and unsatisfying, and the hope that its order is right and its issue happy is but a hope. And it is a hope which reflection tends to impair. For the causes which we see at work show no signs of ever 46 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY leaving off their activity; they seem to have been active during an indefinite past, and likely to be active during an indefinite future. Any announcement that the process must close seems sudden and violent. We have always lived in the middle of things ; the world has always been going on, and our life makes no difference to it; how then can we seriously imagine that the time will ever come when the world's day will be over ? It must surely always be in the middle of its course, always oscillating under the pressure of the forces of love and hate, of expansion and contraction, of evolution and dissolution, which we see at all times at work in it : the world's history must be a system of recurring cycles without beginning or end. This point of view, which we may be allowed to call the regular form of philosophic superstition, curiously supplements the naive and popular form of superstition. The latter thinks too highly of the importance of human affairs, the former is impressed with their littleness. The one class of men expects the gods to enter into business transactions, into petty political feuds and unheroic warfare, with all the energy and zest of a tradesman, or a vestryman, or a mercenary soldier. They hope to have higher powers on their side to tell them what the event of some petty decision may be, so that they may know it before it becomes public property. The gods are to be swallowed up in human interests. But the philosopher flies off at a tangent from all this. The laws of gravity go on, whichever political party is in power ; fire burns here and among the Persians, whatever may be the state of the funds. No human action has power to stop the steady march of the forces which make the world what it is : their action and reaction go on without the smallest deviation, and the utmost that can be looked for in the way of change will be a periodic alteration in the equilibrium. CONCLUSION 47 Both these are, we maintain, essentially human concep- tions, and both form a vivid contrast with the scheme of Christianity. This deals with the world and its interests from the point of view of the realization of the purpose which they serve. It is part of the finality of the Christian scheme, already noticed, that this should be so. It does look forward to a time when the world's day will be over : and this belief enables it to estimate things at their true value. It affirms that the narrow area and limited interests of human life are of vital importance. Nothing is too small to be the object of the infinite concern of God. But it does not matter so much which way this or that question of human policy is settled, as on what motives this or that human agent made his decision. Thus there is revealed behind the play of physical forces, which is so impressive to the philosopher, a moral battle of which the physical world is merely the scene. Human ends have a human importance, but there is an infinite value in human selves. Small things become great, and great things become small, in proportion as they are fit for the revelation of human character. 1 If our analysis has been correct, it will be clear that the determining difference between human speculation and revelation lies in its relation to human life. It does not enter suddenly and claim to revolutionize all men's opinions. Kather it comes in naturally, and blends easily with the general order. And its proper range of action is to be found 1 Cf. Hutchison Stirling, Gifford Lectures, p. 78. 'Undulations there are, doubtless, that are light to tis : but no undulation will give light to them, the globes. Vibrations there are, doubtless, where there is air, that are sound to its ; but all vibrations are as the dead to them. It is in a cave, in a den, blacker than the blackest night, soundless and more silent than the void of voids, that all those intermingling motions of the globes go on but for us, that is ; but for an eye, and an ear, and a soul behind them ! ' If this be true of the speculative intellect, it is more profoundly true still of the moral life of man. 48 INCARNATION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY in the moral life. It gives a new meaning to moral activity in relation to that new knowledge which it conveys. We started by affirming the presence of two factors in religion, a moral and a metaphysical. We have treated them, and the religions of which they are severally charac- teristic, practically as on an equality. Our last point, how- ever, enables us to strike the balance between them. It now becomes plain how deeply true it is that the Jewish religion was a revealed one. We do not deny that the Jews were conscious of the same feelings as those which led to the mythological developments of pagan religions. We do not deny that the Jewish religion took up and embodied many elements which are found in pagan religions too. But if the Incarnation be true, as we have here assumed, it was the Jews' moral conception of God which in the truest sense prepared for it: it was the Jewish religion which, in the character of its inspiration and the closeness of its relation- ship, is most truly continuous with Christianity. The lists of books appended to this and the following chapters make no claim to be exhaustive. They are simply intended to indicate the sources from which the author has drawn, and to act as a guide to any readers who may care to pursue the subjects further. They represent, in many cases, opinions which the author does not share. For the Anthropology see the following : Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion : The Making of Religion. Magic and Religion. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 2nd ed. Tylor, Primitive Culture. H. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. i. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites. 0. Gruppe, Die Qriechischen Culte und Mythen in ihren Beziehungen zu den orientalischen Religionen. For the Proofs of the Existence of God : In general : Kant, Critique of Pure Reason ; Transcendental Dia- lectic, Bk. ii. ch. iii. ; cf. also E. Caird, Kant's Critical Philosophy, Bk. i. ch. xiii. ; ii. ch. v. /. Caird, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, ch. v. Hegel, Ueber die Beweise vom Daseyn Gottes. Werke, AUTHORITIES 49 Bd. xii. Flint, Theism. Stirling, Gifford Lectures. Bobba, Storia della Filosofia rispetto alia Conoscenza di Dio., 4 vols. The Cosmological Proof. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. xii. (A.) ch. vii. S. Aug., Sermo, 197. S. Thorn. Aq., Summa Theol., Pt. I. Qusest. ii. Art. iii. Summa Cont. Gent., Lib. i. c. xiii. Leibniz, Monadologie, 36-41. The Ideological Proof. Xenophon, Memorabilia, Bk. i. ch. iv. ; cf. Plato, Phaedo, 97 c-99 D. S. Thorn. Aq., Summa, as cited above. Paley, Natural Theology (cf. Temple, Bampton Lectures). Von Hartmann, Wahrheit und Irrthum im Darwinismus. Moore, Science and the Faith, pp. 186-200. Martineau, Study of Religion, vol. i. pp. 270-398. The Ontological Proof. S. Anselm, Monologium Proslogium, ch. i.-iii. (cf. S. Aug., De Trin., Bk. viii. ch. iii.) ; Descartes, Meditations, iii. ; Spinoza, Eth., Bk. i. Def. 2. Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, Bk. iv. ch. ix. Steere, Existence and Attributes of God, Bk. i. pt. iii. ch. iii. The Proof from Conscience. Raymundus Sebundensis, Theologia Natu- ralis, Tit. Ixxxiii. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Bk. ii. sect. ii. ch. v.-viii. Martineau, Study of Religion, Bk. ii. ch. ii. 3. CHAPTER II THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION WE have spent much labour in tracing the coherence of the doctrine of the Incarnation of our Lord with the religious aspirations of previous systems. In order to do this with the requisite detail, it was necessary to anticipate in some measure the subject of the present chapter. We must now turn to inquire more definitely what is the historical evi- dence for the truth of the fact which for the purposes of the last chapter we assumed to be true. I. The first stage in this inquiry will, of course, take us to the Gospels. We shall ask, What account do they give or suggest to us of the nature of our Lord ? In discussing this question, it will be impossible to enter upon a subject which is, properly speaking, preliminary to it, viz. the authenticity of the Gospels themselves. For this is a matter requiring much special knowledge, and far too technical to be undertaken in passing. References will be given at the end of the chapter to works dealing specially with the point ; but for our present purpose their general historical authority must be taken for granted. It will not be disputed by any one that the Gospels repre- sent our Lord as human. Quite directly and simply they ascribe to Him definitely human characteristics. He was born of a human mother, under miraculous conditions, but THE IMPRESSION MADE BY CHRIST 51 still in the ordinary human way. He grew up to manhood with gradually-developing human powers, and was subject to His mother, like other human children; and, while He refused to allow her to govern in any way at all His course of action during His ministry, He still recognized her claims when hanging upon the Cross. Of the years which inter- vened between His birth and His showing forth to Israel but little is told us. When, however, the story is resumed, we find Him sharing our human conditions physically and morally. He is tempted, though without sin (S. Matt. iv. 1-11; S. Mark i. 12, 13; S. Luke iv. 1-13); and in one passage in S. Luke (xxii. 28) He describes His whole ministry as being in some sense temptation. ' Ye are they/ He says to His Disciples, 'who have continued with Me in My temptations (ev rots Tretpacr/xot? JJ.QV). He is capable of emotion, even of violent emotion. He wonders at the un- belief of the Nazarenes (S. Mark vi. 6), at the faith of the centurion (S. Luke vii. 9). He feels compassion on the multitude (S. Matt. xiv. 14; S. Mark viii. 2), upon the widow of Nain (S. Luke vii. 13). He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit (S. Luke x. 21). He wept over Jerusalem (S. Luke xix. 41), and at the grave of Lazarus (S. John xi. 35). He was wroth (S. Mark viii. 12, x, 14). He passed through a strong emotional struggle at the visit of the Greeks (S. John xii 24), and at the agony in the garden (S. Matt, xxvi 38 ; S. Mark xiv. 34; S. Luke xxii. 43, 44). Also He suffered weariness (S. Matt. viii. 24 ; S. Mark iv. 38 ; S. Luke viii 23 ; S. John iv. 6), and hunger (S. Matt. iv. 2, xxi. 18 ; S. Mark xi. 12; S. Luke iv. 2), and thirst (S. John xix. 28). To crown all, He died, was recognized as dead, and buried. Thus throughout His life He gave cause, as these notices imply, for supposing Him no less human than one of ourselves. At the same time, together with these manifestations of 52 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION ordinary human character, there arose a growing sense amongst His nearer followers that He was something more than man. This consciousness certainly developed, but it is not perfectly easy to see by what steps. We propose to consider the question under two heads, (1) with reference to the Synoptic tradition, (2) with reference to that of S. John. (1) The first three, or Synoptic Gospels, are concerned largely, as every one knows, with the history of the Galilean ministry, and describe in a simple and straightforward fashion acts and words of our Lord in His ordinary inter- course with simple and unlearned folk. Yet even in this simple narrative there are signs of a gradual growth of feeling in two distinct directions, one in the direction of more unlimited devotion to our Lord's Person, the other in the direction of increasingly open hostility. Thus the wonder which S. Matthew notes as the effect on the multi- tude of Christ's Sermon on the Mount breaks up into its two component factors attraction and annoyance. The Disciples, upon whom the moral appeal was effective, draw closer round the Lord, while the Pharisees, who see their methods directly assailed by the new Teacher, are surprised and also annoyed. The crowd (6 0^X09) get a very little way beyond this mere wonder. It is noted in S. Matthew's Gospel more than once. In one case (xii. 23, 24) the con- trast is drawn between the verdict of the crowd and that of the Pharisees, the crowd being inclined to identify the new prophet with the ' Son of David.' In chap. xvi. 13, 14, our Lord's question to S. Peter, Whom do men say that I am ? obtains for us a glimpse of the uncertain and vague specu- lations that prevailed at that stage. At the triumphal entry into Jerusalem the crowd came nearest to a positive view about our Lord: but when they cry Crucify, Crucify Him, they cast in their lot finally with the leaders of the people. On the other hand, the Pharisees pass into a position of THE APOSTLES AND THE CROWD 53 hostility at a comparatively early date: they soon ascribe the miracles of our Lord to the powers of darkness, and this draws down upon them a rebuke the most tremendous, perhaps, which our Lord ever uttered (S. Mark iii. 28-30). From that point forward their position remains practically unchanged. The circumstances which called out this twofold judgment were generally of two kinds miracles and teaching. Our Lord traversed in His teaching questions which were regarded as settled, such, for instance, as that of Sabbath observance : but He also gave utterance to many things which no active moral sense could condemn. Moreover, His miracles were almost invariably acts of mercy relief of the sick, restoration of the dead. That is, they were a practical comment on His words; they expressed in action what His words were in- tended to convey. They do not, however, occur with equal frequency over the whole period. As time goes on, our Lord seems less anxious to perform them, more anxious to insist on secrecy. He charges those on whom they are worked to tell no man, and Himself draws back from the advances of the crowd. At the same time His instructions to the Apostles tend to become more and more distinct; as He withdraws Himself from the crowd, He draws nearer to the Apostles, and they do not need any longer the special teaching of miracles. In them miracles have had their proper effect. They have realized the presence of the Son of God in the humble surroundings of Jesus of Nazareth ; they have seen His miracles and heard His words ; and to them it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven. In this connexion great weight should be laid upon the account in S. Luke's Gospel of S. Peter's call (v. 8). The miraculous draught of fishes so impresses S. Peter with a definite idea of Christ's character that he cries, ' Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.' It is not necessary, 54 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION nor indeed is it possible in view of the history of the fourth Gospel, to suppose that this was the first time S. Peter had seen our Lord, but it supplies an example of the way in which our Lord's miracles impressed those to whom the Father was revealing the truth of His Son's nature. And it suggests an account of the real position which the miracles were intended to occupy. It suggests that they were not to be considered as a chief object of our Lord's coming. He performs them naturally enough when occasion demands, but He does not search for an occasion. He does not attempt to force men to bring their sick to Him for healing. He does not heal regardless of the moral condition of the subject of His exercise of power. But He seems to use His acts of power in the same way as His words, to attract that attentive wonder which may in the right sort of soul develop into faith. (2) This process, which is not perfectly clear in the Synoptic Gospels, is definitely marked in S. John. In this Gospel we have at intervals deliberate notes of the growth of feeling as to the Nature of our Lord. Thus at the end of the account of the miracle at Cana, S. John remarks, 'This beginning of miracles did Jesus at Cana in Galilee, and manifested forth His glory, and His disciples believed on Him.' At the end of the sixth chapter, the mysterious discourse upon the Bread of Life, although it followed so closely upon so important a miracle as the Feeding of the Five Thousand, has a double effect. Some go back and walk no more with Him, but this is made a means of tightening the bond with the Disciples. Again, at the end of chap, vii., S. John notes a growing division of opinion; and in like manner, after the healing of the man born blind, in chaps, ix. and x. Lastly, in chap. xii. S. John deliberately sums up the whole position, showing how the position of the Jews at that moment fulfilled the gloomy prophecy of Isaiah: 'He hath blinded their eyes and he hardened their heart; lest they OUR LORD'S CLAIMS 55 should see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and should turn, and I should heal them.' The Life of Christ is presented, then, in the Gospels as having been the means of judgment. It drew out the secret affinities of the people before whom it was displayed, it revealed the thoughts of many hearts. This aspect of it, as we have said, is most plainly marked in S. John, but there are signs of the same thing in the Synoptists also. What then was it which our Lord claimed, which it required moral affinity to understand and to grant? What account does He give of Himself? (1) Beginning again with the Synoptic Gospels, we find our Lord assuming a position of exceptional authority. ' He taught as though He had authority, and not as the scribes.' He contrasted His own assertions as to moral right and wrong with those in the older law, and yet claimed that He had come to fulfil it. He claims the right on earth to forgive sins as Son of man (S. Matt. ix. 2-6 ; S. Mark ii. 5-12), to reveal the will of the Father (S. Matt. xi. 27), the laws of the Divine judgment (S. Matt. xii. 36, 37), of forgiveness (S. Matt, xviii. 35), of life eternal (S. Matt. xix. 16-21). He reads the thoughts of men, He knows beforehand His own sufferings. And He claims the right to confer His own powers upon others in the mission of the twelve (S. Matt. x. 1 ; S. Mark iii. 14-15, vi. 7-13 ; S. Luke ix. 1), in the mission of the seventy (S. Luke x. 1-20), in the permission to S. Peter to walk upon the sea (S. Matt. xiv. 28), and lastly, in His commission to the Church (S. Matt, xxviii. 18-20 ; S. Mark xvi. 15-18 ; S. Luke xxiv. 44-48). Further, He speaks of Himself as the Son in close connexion with the phrase ' the Father ' (S. Matt. xi. 27) ; as the Son of man frequently ; greater than Solomon or than Jonah (S. Matt, xii. 41, 42; S. Luke xi. 31, 32); and at Nazareth (S. Luke iv. 21), and before the High Priest at His trial, He definitely 56 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION claims to be Messiah, and to be coming in judgment as Son of man (S. Matt. xxvi. 64, 65 ; S. Mark xiv. 62, 63 ; S. Luke xxii 68-70). (2) The Gospel of S. John is written ' that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye may have life in His name.' The whole book, therefore, aims at setting forth this one idea. The life of Christ is presented as the manifestation under the conditions of human flesh, of the glory of the Eternal Word. The structure of the Gospel around this central thought is so plain that we need not spend much time in illustrating it. It will be well, however, to put together a few facts which may serve to show the character of our Lord's claims. Our Lord definitely assumes the Messianic character before the woman of Samaria and before the man born blind. In His more elaborate discourses He speaks of Himself as the Son (for instance, in chap, v.), and in other places by some meta- phorical expression calculated to bring out some one special aspect of His character. Thus when He speaks of Himself in chap. vi. as the Bread of Life, the expression serves to emphasize His relation to the Old Covenant (in that He was the reality, of which the manna in the wilderness was the shadow), and to point out the position which He must occupy in the New Dispensation. He must be the food of the Israel of God their life must depend on their sharing His. Again, He is the Water of Life, the Light of the World, the Door of the new society, the Good Shepherd. And in all these there is implied very obviously a wholly special claim. He is indeed sent by the Father to perform a certain work in the world, but His unity with the Father is never broken. He can do nothing of Himself, but then the Father shows Him all things that He doeth. There is never any question as to who the Father may be. It is clear to all to the Jews as well as to the Apostles that God is meant. So we read (chap. v. 18) that the Jews sought to kill Him, THE WITNESS TO OUR LORD 57 because He not only used to break the Sabbath (eXuc) but called God His own Father (Trarepa "Siov), making Himself equal with God. Thus S. John clearly represents Him as claiming an equality with God, and a special mediatorial position between God and man. In making these claims, our Lord was not devoid of witness. In the Synoptists, as before, we have bare facts mentioned, occasions described when witness was borne to our Lord ; whereas in S. John the idea of witness is elaborately de- veloped throughout the whole Gospel. There is (1) in the Synoptic account the witness of the angel Gabriel, and the heavenly host; of prophecy, (specially emphasized in S. Matthew), of Simeon, of Anna, and of the Magi ; of S. John the Baptist ; and even of the evil spirits whom our Lord cast out from men. And the witness of all these is consentient. It tends towards one result, that Christ was more than man. Twice there is mentioned in all three Gospels a witness of the Father to the Son at His baptism and at His trans- figuration. On both occasions the witness is definite : ' This is my Beloved Son' (S. Matt. iii. 17 ; S. Mark i. 11 ; S. Luke iii 22 ; S. Matt, xvii 5 ; S. Mark ix. 7 ; S. Luke ix. 35). (2) In S. John the witness which is alleged as bearing on our Lord's nature is sevenfold. Its significance has been elaborately drawn out by Bishop Westcott in the introduction to his commentary on the fourth Gospel, pp. xlv.-xlvii. We need only summarize it here. It comprises (1) the witness of the Father, (2) of Christ Himself, (3) of works, (4) of the Scriptures, (5) of the forerunner, (6) of disciples, (7) of the Holy Spirit Of these, the last two belong rather to the history of the Church. They are the integral elements of the abiding witness of the Church to Christ, and we have not as yet to do with this. The witness of Scripture and the forerunner are in S. John very much what they are in the other Gospels. At least the differences which are noticeable 58 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION are not sufficiently important to require special and detailed treatment here. The witness of works covers more than the miracles; it includes the whole area of the works which Christ did as man. And the witness they bore consisted in their revealing the character of Him who performed them. Here, too, we do not depart very widely from the position of the Synoptists. But in the description of the witness of the Father, and of Christ Himself, there is a peculiarly Johannine ring. The witness of Christ Himself is to be trusted, not because He has a right to expect the world to accept His own account of Himself that would be the method of the self- commissioned prophets whom the Jews would understand but because He knows whence He came and whither He goes (viii 14). He gives witness to the Father who had sent Him, of His own knowledge, and therefore the witness of Christ to Himself lies in His conscious communion with the Father. The witness of the Father is more difficult to follow and understand. Christ appeals to it as greater than the witness of John the Baptist, and does not identify it with the witness of Scripture (v. 36). Its force is realized by those whose will is at one with that of the Father, and not by others. And it emerges in the coincidence of which Christ is sure, and which the faithful recognize, between the ministry of Christ and the will of the Father. Thus it is internal, as appearing in the consciousness of our Lord Himself, and of those to whom His work appeals. II. The Gospels represent our Lord, then, as being both human and Divine. They offer no solution of the mystery which such an idea involves : it is presented as a mere piece of history. The Divine characteristics enter the story as naturally and simply as the human : there is no discernible effort whatever to separate, or to apportion them, or to merge one nature in the other. The Passion is as natural, falls into its place as readily, as the Transfiguration or the Resurrection. ARE SUCH CLAIMS POSSIBLE? 59 That the Gospels as they stand present this view of our Lord's Person, few scholars of the present day would dispute. But the difficulty of the idea is so great that various expedients have been adopted in various ages in order to avoid it. In the preface to the last edition (1890) of his Bampton Lectures (p. xxvi) Dr. Liddon pointed out that Unitarianism has considerably changed its ground of recent years. Formerly it contested the Catholic interpretation of the Gospels, now it assails the integrity of the Gospels themselves. Since this comparatively recent date there have been many changes of attitude in the regions of speculation and criticism : and these affect so seriously the whole subject of the present chapter that we make no apology for discussing some of the points involved at considerable length. The affirmation of the Incarnation, as a fact, is the affirmation of a historical event, and must so far be tested by the principles of historical evidence. But it is also an event of a very exceptional character, belonging to the class of events called miraculous or supernatural. And therefore a question arises for discussion, which does not arise in connexion with events more completely in accordance with ordinary experience. We have to consider whether such an event as the Incarnation is possible at all. This a priori question must be taken first, for it is obvious that no evidence is worth considering which tends to the establish- ment of the occurrence of an event a priori impossible. Un- til, therefore, we have settled whether the Incarnation is possible, it is no use asking whether the historical evidence for it is good. It is greatly to be deplored that the difference in character and effect of these two lines of evidence is ignored by a large number of critics. The two questions are necessarily closely inter-related, but they are not the same : and any scientific treatment of the matter will take note of the element contributed by each. 60 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION (1) To ask whether such a thing as the Incarnation is possible on general grounds is to ask a very bold question, and it is a question which involves several others. Such an inquiry can only have a meaning in connexion with a theory as to the Nature of God and His relation to the created order. To ask whether the Incarnation is possible is really to ask whether God can make a special revelation of Himself, or whether He is so bound by the order of the created world as to be revealed only and always in order, natural or moral, never in miracle ? That this is so may be easily proved by any one who cares to study the current arguments against the Incarnation. It is commonly urged that our modern notions of the dignity and rationality of firm and constant order prevent our adopting any of those views of God which represent Him as changeable, capable of using expedients to produce special ends, which apparently were not included in the original plan. Miracles, revelations, and the like, it is argued, are of the nature of afterthoughts, and must imply weakness and want of foresight, else why should the occasion for them ever have arisen ? It would be easy to retort upon this position, if a retort were all that were needed, that the question must be dis- cussed after we have considered the historical evidence for the Incarnation. If it be true that Christ was incarnate Son of God, our notion of the Divine Being, whatever it may have been, must be modified to suit that : the theoretical question is involved in the settlement of the historic fact. And there would be a real though only a partial truth in the answer. But we must not forget that there is considerable room for explanation and readjustment in the mere statement of the problem ; and this, though perhaps not conclusive in itself, will at any rate prepare the way for the historical discussion. Let us ask this question then, How does the Incarnation, and the miracles it involves, stand in regard to the order of MEANING OF NATURE 61 nature ? Does it involve a sharp and sudden breach ? and, if so, of what order, and in what sense of the word nature ? l It would be difficult to find words more ambiguous and liable to misapprehension than nature and its various deriva- tions supernatural, etc. We are rarely certain when we use them what nature it is to which we are alluding. There is no doubt that nature means the created world, and, by consequence, those substances and forces which we find in existence and operation there. But then the question arises whether man is to be included in the world of nature or not. It is clear that he has affinities with it on the side of his bodily life : he is subject to its laws, like any other animal. On the side of his mental and spiritual life, the point is not so clear. Popular language probably distinguishes still between the works of nature and the works of the human mind, denies all strictly mental powers to animals, and re- gards man as separate from nature. But the advance of scientific speculation is making all these distinctions more difficult, and the whole higher side of man's structure is claimed as a mere complex illustration of physical principles. Perhaps, the real central association of the word is with the fact that the senses have command over the world of nature. Natural events and powers are capable of sensuous verifica- tion, of verification in some of the ways which are familiar to natural science. Thus by the order of nature we usually mean that system of material laws and uniformities which underlies all our ordinary experience. If man has any such thing in him as an immaterial spiritual part, that does not fall within the scheme of nature so understood. Now if we hold consistently to this meaning of nature, the Incarnation of Christ certainly involves a breach with it. For there is no law of matter, no law capable of any scientific verification, which will account for it. It implies the entry upon the 1 See above, Chap. I. p. 44. 62 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION material world of a new and non-material force, which yet will have its effect upon the material forces already there and in operation. And so long as it is maintained that material things are all that there is to know, so long, it is plain, the Incarnation must be inexplicable, and in the last resort incredible. If this principle be maintained the situation mentioned above will have been reached : no amount of historical evidence, however excellent it might appear under ordinary circumstances, will be adequate to prove such a claim. The general theory of the world will put all such evidence out of court. It would then be simply waste of time to consider arguments in favour of an occurrence which is written down at the outset as impossible. It is probable that those who hold seriously and consciously that there is nothing capable of being known or being con- ceived as existing except matter, are a comparatively small minority in the present day. And it is difficult to see how such persons are to be dealt with in regard to the present question. Certainly there is no room for a discussion with them in this book ; they require not to have evidence for the Incarnation offered to them, but to have their first principles criticized in detail. And this falls outside our scope. 1 We return, then, to the question of nature and the Incar- nation. Granted that the created order is more than a complex of merely material forces, and contains elements which do not entirely surrender to physical tests, how does this help the matter ? It helps us in two ways : (a) it affords us a case within easy reach of ordinary observation, where the forces of the material world are utilized and adapted to ends by a force not themselves. We are all of us familiar 1 The question of the reality and significance of the mental and spiritual part of man, and its connexion with mechanical law, has received a searching examination in Prof. J. Ward's book Naturalism and Agnosticism. This work contains what is probably the most serious and successful vindication of the reality of this side of human life now available. NATURE AND HUMAN WILL 63 with the process of exercising the will. We know how it is done, so far as we are concerned. We conceive an idea, and desire its attainment, and then set our physical powers in action in order to make our idea actual in the material world. The thought, the desire which we realize in action, is different and separate in nature from the act which is its result. That is generally an event in the material world leading to material consequences. A man who fires a mine, for instance, translates his idea into very definite physical form with very definite physical effect. Such an act, if ordinary scientific accounts of things are true, has a wider reach than the immediate occasion of its occurrence. It sets up a chain of physical consequences which alters in a real, if only in a minute degree, the whole face of nature. Here, then, is an intrusive power, entering into and modifying the merely material order. It may be that we cannot fully explain the process ; that means, that we cannot express material force in terms of will, or will in terms of material force, and be satisfied with the explanation. But we know it when it happens ; it is not strange or unusual ; it is part of our regular experience. With fuller knowledge of the con- stitution of either we might see that a solution of the theoretical difficulty is possible : but we need no solution for its practical aspect ; and that for the simple reason, that in this region there is no difficulty. Once more, this intrusive force, if we may so regard it for the nonce, owns certain general rules of its own. When at its best, it is guided by the thought of what ought to be, rather than the thought of what is. In the region of physical force, the conditions of one moment are the direct consequence of the conditions of the preceding moment. There is no alternative; necessity, which knows no modification or uncertainty or indecision, is the principle at work. And no moral issues have any place in the matter at all. Poison kills the saint as well as the 64 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION sinner ; disease cuts off the useful and hard-working as well as the idle and thriftless. But the will, informed by the reason, takes into consideration the very elements which the physical order neglects. In the choice of its aims the objects which it will endeavour to secure in the world it considers not only what the mere physical antecedents would produce if left to themselves, but what, on the highest grounds, ought to be there. It does not ignore the stern certainties of the physical world, but it seeks to use these for its own ends, to mould them, even at times to counteract them. Every man, for instance, comes into the world with a certain physical character ; he has certain powers, capacities, tendencies which, if left to themselves, will produce a certain result from the point of view of material nature, a necessary result. But from the moral point of view this may be by no means a necessary result that is, a result which ought to be. And the will, guided by the moral ideal, will endeavour by education and training so to harmonize and balance the various physical tendencies as to neutralize the result which on merely physical grounds would be necessary. Here we see a moral force working with physical forces, not so as to suspend their operation, but so as to use their known pro- perties with reference to the end desired. This state of things, with which every one is, in practice, familiar, affords us as much help as an analogous case can ever provide towards meeting the difficulty raised by the Incarnation. That is an event outside the range of physical causes or principles, but it enters upon the physical world. And it is the result, we have reason to believe, of motives analogous to those which we call moral. Christ appears in the physical world as a human being, and lives a human life amid material surroundings. He must have induced the same disturbance and need for readjustment of the web of physical causes as the entry of any other person would MORAL CONCEPTION OF NATURE 65 have caused. So far as that is concerned, the appearance of our Lord's superhuman Personality puts us but little more into difficulty than that of any one of our own. Moreover, the manifestation of Christ is due, so we believe, to the presence and operation of moral motives. Here, as in so many cases, the physical order is made subservient to the carrying out of purposes alien to itself. It is this which is the determining cause, if we may so speak with reverence, of the appearance of this particular Personality under physical conditions at this particular time. God so loved the world, we read, that He sent His only-begotten Son into it. The question of the degree in which the whole process involved a disturbance of existing conditions depends upon the degree in which we regard those conditions as fixed. (5) And here we reach a second point in which the an- alogy of man's higher faculties helps us. It emphasizes the necessity of a wider view of nature than perhaps our ordinary experience suggests. We have already observed that in fact the physical world is utilized and managed by spiritual forces. And we saw in the last chapter the general necessity of the notion of end or purpose to a rational interpretation of the world. We said then nothing to indicate what manner of end it was natural to think of in this regard. The notion of God as a moral Being was treated as arising in a different connexion, and not necessarily to be placed in immediate association with the notion of a purpose in nature. At the same time, no doubt, it is more natural to connect them : and perhaps it may be said with truth that our recent remarks as to the relative value of the physical and moral worlds may suggest that if the moral Being whom our moral nature demands as its ideal is also the Cause and Sustainer of the physical world, the end which nature serves will be a moral one. Now if this be so, it is manifest that our whole attitude towards nature in itself must change. It must be regarded 5 66 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION not merely in itself and for itself, as a process of ingeniously balanced forces, but as conveying a moral purpose and serv- ing a moral end. Indeed, apart from a moral purpose, it is very difficult to see what end there can be present in nature at all. Nature considered in itself suggests reciprocal move- ment, conservation of energy, redistribution of matter and force, rather than onward movement towards a definite end. And here we come in sight again of those periodic cycles, those aimless driftings to and fro, which we placed under the head of philosophical superstitions. 1 Surely if we refuse to bind together the moral and the teleological view of nature we run the risk of losing the idea of purpose altogether, of being forced back upon the notion of an equilibrium of unexplained forces, and thus relapsing, practically, into the dominion of chance, from which every scientific movement has been an effort to deliver us. End, purpose such words as these have finally a moral meaning only ; and the world conceived as a purposeful thing must be conceived as the vehicle of a moral purpose. Physical law, then, must be looked upon as the normal method by which the moral purpose of the universe is served. It maintains in us the sense of certainty and assurance without which all our life would have to stop. It is the regular material and condition of our actions : we get used to it, and can hardly imagine its being otherwise. So familiar do we become with its beautiful and easy regularity, that we forget to take into consideration the fact that this has a definite and limited purpose, and that the mind itself has contributed a constructive element to the whole fabric of uniformity. The laws which are the result of the operation of the mind upon the manifold of experience tend to acquire independent existence and indefeasible rights. When the question is brought up of the possibility of any change in this 1 Above, pj 45. CAN GOD CHANGE HIS PURPOSE? 67 even flow of uniformity which we know so well, we are apt to forget all about the purpose which it serves and the history of it, and answer off-hand, ' Of course not : change, breach of uniformity, indecision, would shatter our confidence in the nature of things. We stand or fall by the exhaustive- ness and universality of physical causation. God cannot change the purpose which He must have had in view when He adopted the laws of physical nature, as a means of His self-expression : change in physical order must mean, according to the moral theory of the world just described, a feeble and irrational change of will.' But then, is this so ? Is it true that, while God cannot change His purpose, He is equally restrained from purposing a change ? And have we any right to be sure that physical uniformity exhausts the purpose of God ? What do we conceive the purpose of God to be as regards ourselves ? That is a question which must be asked first. For our present aim, it will not be necessary to open up the discussion in all its bearings. Other aspects of it will claim our attention at different stages. Here we are simply concerned to ask what it is that uniformity does for us in what way we can understand its serving a moral end, and how far that moral end is helped or hindered by variation in the uni- formity ? The only moral end which we can as yet recognize as effected by the uniformity of nature must be the revela- tion of God to ourselves. We cannot look out into the infinite future and see the purpose of things there in its final form : we only know that nature lies between us and God, and that we conjecture of the Worker from His works. From our point of view the only moral purpose to which nature by itself is instrumental must be the knowledge of God in us. And this tallies with our belief in Him as a moral Being. It is of the essence of such a notion that He should desire communion with those whom He has created. 68 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION And nature shadows out for us His character as that of a rational and unchanging Being, in whom is no variableness. But then we have just had occasion to point out that the very ease and smoothness of the regularity tends to unfit it, at last, for doing that which we are sure it is meant to do. The veil through which we learn of God seems to rise up into independent being : it limits our knowledge within its own province, tends to present God as exhaustively described and known from this particular point of view ; which means that the notion of character tends to sink into that of characterless mechanism. Here, then, is a juncture at which the moral end which nature itself reveals requires a more flexible instrument than the order of nature. It is not that the report of nature has proved itself false, but that there is much more to be known than the order of nature could possibly reveal ; and it has become necessary in the course of the Divine Providence to bring this into notice. Theoreti- cally, this is the moment at which miracle may be expected to occur. And when it does occur, it is not to be regarded as a mere change of will on the part of God : it is not that He has grown tired or dissatisfied with the created world ; it is not that He has hit upon a new expedient for calling attention. These are the unworthy and crude ways of con- ceiving miracle, which the attacks upon the truth of them, and often enough the theological defence of them, have rendered familiar. From such points of view, miracles must be as startling and out of the common to the eye of God as to ourselves ; and this surely runs rather close to profanity. But it is true of them that God, retaining unchanged His purpose of self-revelation, adapts the physical order to it in a way which, from the point of view of that physical order, is strange and startling. To the physical order to the human intelligence miracles are certainly supernatural ; but from the point of view of the will of God, and of that NATURE AND THE INCARNATION 69 wider conception of nature which covers all His self-mani- festation through the world, they are natural enough. The wider view of nature which our own moral nature suggests has room in it for such manifestations as these. 1 What bearing has all this upon our doctrine ? In what relation can we place it to the wider view of nature ? The mere ordinary objection that it is miraculous may, we hope, be regarded as having no further weight. But it will be necessary, in view of what we have said, to do our best to make clear that it has a meaning, discernible after the event even to us ; that is, from the point of view of God's desire to make Himself known to man. First of all, let us place it in connexion with the order of nature considered by itself. Till recent years it has been usual to take a very simple view of nature. It was a vast kingdom, separated into provinces, inhabited by animals of different kinds, of which it was the duty of the naturalist to know the names. These various classes of being were all treated teleologically ; they were regarded generally as being 1 It is not supposed that this view of things makes the occurrence of a miracle wholly intelligible to us. From the nature of the position which we occupy in the world, and the method by which we are compelled to deal with it, dualism of a kind almost necessarily results. We distinguish ourselves from the objects of our thought, and this distinction when carried out on the widest scale, ends in two sharply-opposed realms of thought and things. In like manner, the region of bare fact, of knowledge gives rise to the notion of a uniform system of laws ; the region of practice tends to develop the idea of action adapted to varying situations, flexible in outward manifestation, but based on regulative principles. And the only way of overcoming the opposition between these and similar antinomies is by attaining to a point of view wider than both from which they are harmonised. This is the perpetual and perpetu- ally deferred hope of philosophy. We can readily conceive a point of view to which rigid order and flexible variation might both form parts of a single purpose. But what has never been fully done yet, is to work this conception out in detail. It is easy to say, ex post facto, this or that miracle has obvious relation to a scheme of self-manifestation, and it is a better way of dealing with the matter than to talk of arbitrary suspension of laws : but within the limits of our knowledge, it does not so much solve all the questioning that may arise, as remind us of these limits, and of the mischief of allowing the formal and mechanical side of our intellectual methods to dominate the whole. 70 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION there for the use of man. This was almost their only universal bond of union the one thing that could be said quite indiscriminately of all things. And it was easier to say it indiscriminately than to apply it in particular cases, owing to the undoubted presence of noxious beasts and herbs. Still the teleological idea was preserved, and was on the whole a moral idea. But of late, all this has been altered. Instead of looking upon nature as a collection of independent exist- ences which, for scientific purposes, it is convenient to arrange in arbitrarily chosen classes, we have come to look upon it as a single process. We have given up constructing our teleology with reference to our own ends and purposes, and have swept the whole physical order, ourselves included, into the one great process of evolution. The separate kinds are not finally separate, they represent landmarks in the movement of the regulative idea. The first form in which this theory saw the light was not such as to suggest the presence of a regulative idea at all. It seemed as though the whole might be ex- plained as the purposeless result of accidental variations; and there is before the world still a statement of the evolu- tion-philosophy, which depends upon the timely intervention of the principle known as the instability of the homogeneous. 1 But we need not spend time or labour upon the discussion of this particular form of the theory. The most natural and, we believe, the most philosophical exposition of the theory enlightens but does not abolish teleology. According to it the history of the world is the history of an idea, expressed first in simple and unpretending forms, but gradually taking on more and more complex shapes till human life and society, morality and religion, emerge at the end. We cannot say from the knowledge we possess that this is the real and ultimate end ; we look forward still to an indefinitely long progress yet to come. But when we look back, the position 1 See H. Spencer's Firtt Principles, Part II. chap. xix. NATURE AND THE INCARNATION 71 now reached is seen to be the general explanation of all the early stages. It was prepared for from the first; there is no accident and no surprise in its emergence. It is right in its place, and will be completely explicable some day, if ever we grasp in its fulness the idea of creation. Taking our stand, then, in the present order of things, let us apply to them the principle just obtained, that nature as we know it is to be a means of God's self-revelation to us. We do not pretend that this exhausts the meaning of the purpose of the natural world ; but we are sure that we are justified in applying our principle here and now. What do we find, then ? Surely, this, that if nature is meant to reveal God's character to us, the evolution of nature must mean a gradual self-manifestation on the part of God. Each new act and each new complexity is a new revelation of God to us, from this point of view ; each stage illustrates more clearly His wealth of life and freedom, His manifoldness of conception. And more than this, the variety is not a loose chaotic variety ; it converges upon the human race, and upon human conditions of life. Below man, there are things which merely are, and things which are and live, and things which are and live and are conscious of their life ; and then there is man who is all this, and more, in that he is capable of moral and social life. The whole is a gradually intensifying manifestation of Himself by God. But is the climax reached in man ? Surely not, if the object of Creation is self-mani- festation on the part of God to created beings capable of responding to it. In the first place, there is the limitation which comes from the necessity of interpreting the material world. Men can realize and to a large extent have realized the presence of God in Nature : but, as we have seen, it is of the essence of this process that they have no means of testing or proving their intuitions. And this difficulty is enormously increased by the presence of evil a problem 72 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION which will receive fuller treatment further on. The order which should reveal God is imperfect and is impeded in its course; so that the moral aspirations of man are far from being verified in it. But the Incarnation does fall into place from this point of view. If it is what the Church has always held it to be, it throws new light on the God-ward side of nature, and while opening up a way of escape from sin, places the evil that remains in the world in a new context, and indicates the possibility of its overthrow. So far it may be represented as an extraordinary expedient for an occasion which had arisen contrary to the intention of God in the formation of the world. But it is not necessary that it should have this occasional and remedial significance only. We have taken into consideration so far only that aspect of the evolution-history in which physical nature is an expression of the nature of God, and the Incarnation is necessary to remedy failure arising at a particular point. Let us now add the purely moral conception of it, by which nature is regarded as a great appeal to man, a great mani- festation of purpose and love. From this point of view the several stages in nature are stages in self-communication, in- creasing in fulness, in clearness, in intensity. Here again the Incarnation of Christ is a climax ; it gathers up in itself all that had gone before, and explains the early stages of the process. In this way too we can see how consonant it is with the general purposes which nature and life reveal. Grant that the purpose of God is to reveal Himself to man, and then, the gathering together the broken lights into the Person of the Light of the world involves no spasmodic change of will, no sudden veering of purpose, but only alters, and alters for good, the views men might have entertained before. Let us try and gather together the results of this portion of our investigation. We started in presence of a number WHAT IS HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 73 of a priori or theoretical objections to the Incarnation, which seemed to make it impossible and incredible from the first. By means of explanation and analysis it has become clear that these objections depend on a conscious or unconscious use of the word nature in a narrow and material sense, and that they are valid only on the assumption of the truth of this materialism ; but that with a wider and ethical view of nature and its purpose, motives come into sight which we from our position can recognize as bearing with them a divine necessity. That is, however great and finally unin- telligible a mystery may be involved in the coming of the Son of God upon the earth, yet this event stands in some intelli- gible union with the moral principles which we know, and the moral purpose in which we believe. But let us clearly recognize the limits of this result. It removes the possibility of deciding against the Gospel story by the mere denunciation of it as incredible; it gives it an antecedent credibility. But it does not follow from this that even if men had known of God as Love which knowledge is indeed part of the result of the Incarnation they could have inferred, from this datum only, that an Incarnation must take place, or must take place at a given time. But it is important to know that there is no theoretical improbability against it ; that, on the whole, the antecedent probabilities of the case would be in favour of it. III. So bare and negative a result as this requires to be supplemented at once, and it must be supplemented by historical evidence. To this we must now turn. And we must preface our examination of the actual evidence of the truth of the Gospel story with a few remarks touching the nature of historical evidence, because this is a matter as to which there exists, as we think, considerable confusion. The object of alleging evidence in support of a historical statement is to prove that the facts were as they are said to 74 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION have been. That is, historical evidence aims at reproducing the past in such a way as may be possible at bridging over time and enabling us to realize what was going on when we were not there. It can never, therefore (1) give us the certainty of direct experience, for the simple reason that the facts to which it witnesses are, by the very nature of the case, out of the range of our direct experience. Hence, whatever form of certainty may result from historical inquiry, it is not and cannot be of the same sort as the certainty of direct experience. (2) The evidence and the certainty which belong to history are not the same as the evidence or the certainty of a court of law. It has been not infrequently objected to the Christian acceptance of the Gospels that facts are admitted freely by Christians on evidence that would not be received for a moment in a court of law. Now this is simply an irrelevant remark, for the nature of the several inquiries is different. The special court intended is, we presume, a criminal court. It only needs a moment's thought to see that the investigations of a criminal court and those of a historian are diametrically opposed. In the law-court the fact is admitted it is the subject of the inquiry; the question is, Who has done it and what is the legal character of the act ? In history, the facts themselves and sometimes also the agents are in dispute. The parallel would lie, no doubt, if it were the business of the jury at each assize to make a return of all the crimes done within the district since the last assize, together with the names of the criminals : but this is not the practice of modern English law. But it may be argued, perhaps, that this is not the meaning of the parallel; what is meant is, that the reported testimony of dead persons who cannot be cross-examined would not be evidence in law. But then most historical evidence is open to this objection. The law deals for the most part with actions done within the memory of men : and, as it is WHAT IS HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 75 concerned with a definite accusation of a given person, it has to ensure that the evidence is sifted as fully as may be. Hence, evidence which cannot be brought under cross- examination is not evidence which can be allowed to convict. It falls too far short of the individual who is accused. His- torical evidence is usually concerned with events which are long past, and is not capable of being subjected to cross- examination. This matters little, however, because its aim is not to convict. (3) Historical certainty is not the same as scientific certainty. Given a certain number of physical conditions accurately and clearly known, and the scientific inference from them is certain. Thus it would be possible, for any one who cared to take the trouble, to state accurately the number of minutes during which the sun was above the horizon on any given day at any period of history. And it could be done quite as easily with reference to Britain in the time of Boadicea as for Britain at the present moment. And there would be no room for doubt, because the matter is one of scientific certainty ; doubt would mean distrust of the whole scientific theory of the world. On the other hand, unless a trustworthy record happens to have been preserved, it is absolutely impossible to say how many hours of bright sunshine there were on any given day one hundred years ago. Because in this case the conditions are not known. We might conjecture, and the conjecture might be reason- able. We might let it guide us in the description of a scene in a novel relating to that period, and the description might be in keeping with the period assumed ; but for the fact of the matter we should be without any evidence at all It cannot be denied that these peculiarities in the character of historical certainty are apt to be overlooked; it is less overpowering, probably, than any of the other three kinds, and therefore the natural tendency is to attempt to bring it under one or other of these heads. This being so, let us try 76 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION to see what is the special character of historic certainty, to what convictions in us it appeals, and what are the intellectual states it produces. The most remarkable fact about historical certainty is the complexity of the process by which it is reached. A historical event of any importance has, probably, traceable causes and consequences. It may be compared with other events of the same sort and made to illustrate principles. Just as the fall of a stone is an illustration of the law of gravity, so a histori- cal event occurring at a given time and place may illustrate some principle of moral or social evolution. It may be possible to argue that the known conditions present at the given time must necessarily have taken effect in the form of the event in question. These are or may be considerations of great value to the historian : but his knowledge of the conditions present is always so extremely limited that he can never, as the man of science can usually, use his a priori arguments to prove an occurrence at a particular place and time. However clear I may succeed in making it that the political conditions of Europe in the early years of this century led up to a decisive contest such as occurred at Waterloo, the historic reality of the battle is far from being proved. Besides this, the historian requires a posteriori evidence, testimony, oral or documentary, to the effect that the conditions realized by him took a particular form : in other words, evidence that the event in question actually happened. And such evidence as this never compels the reason. There is always a possibility, slight or strong, of mistake or bad faith : often more than one plausible account can be devised of a given historical situation, so that when all is done, the act of belief the vote of confidence in the whole process is still required to give it force. So com- plex a matter it seems that historic certainty must be ; and if it is so complex, it must be idle to expect it to compel the WHAT IS HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 77 assent of an uninterested mind ; its appeal must always be to a mind which is prepared to receive it understands what to expect, and knows when the facts have yielded all the evidence they can. The mind, then, which is to appreciate historical evidence duly must not be a vacuous indifferent one. It must come to the estimate of the evidence impressed already with a definite character. This brings us to the consideration of a point which is frequently passed by in matters of historical criticism. What do we mean by the character necessary to appreciate historical evidence ? We mean first that a certain stock of general convictions and ideas is necessary in order that we may appreciate history at all. Any person with ordinary gifts of memory and attention can learn dates and names, and thus have a knowledge of history in a certain sense. But this does not, by any means, necessarily involve an appreciation of history; for that, some much more rare and special gifts are required. It is, of course, the apprecia- tive historical mind, of which we are endeavouring to under- stand the nature: because the whole business of historical evidence comes before us with reference to a certain body of reputed historical facts which have met with the severest criticism ; and it is, therefore, necessary to assure ourselves whether the criticism does or does not proceed upon valid historical lines. To return, then, history is not a process of ingenious guessing, but a rational and scientific process of reconstruction, depending upon the ultimate unity of all things. The past and the present must be regarded as constituting one whole, or history becomes meaningless. A fact falling totally outside all possible relations to other facts would be wholly incredible even indescribable. For the very thing which gives history its meaning and value, is the fact that it is a step back in thought over the road by which the human race has come to its present position ; it loses all 78 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION meaning whatsoever unless this road be one and continuous, and unless the general laws of life at the present day obtained then too. We must take back our criteria of truth and falsity into the past period, and examine the facts there by their means. The world must be assumed to be governed by the same laws at all times; the past must not be like 'the night in which all cows are black'; it must be as definitely coloured, as sanely and intelligibly ordered, as the life of to-day. On the other hand, it is past : and the laws with which we are familiar must have operated under very different conditions from those which we know now. These are obvious considerations, but they are constantly overlooked. It is very commonly argued by persons who defend the Gospel miracles that such things cannot occur now. It may be true to say that they do not occur now : that is a matter for direct historical evidence ; but it is impossible to argue without qualification that they occurred in Christ's time and cannot occur now. That is to assume a complete breach in the order of history, and can only appeal to minds which have no clear realization of the past at all. On the other hand, the literature of historical criticism is strewn with instances of the misapplication of present-day conditions to the past. This error usually takes the form of trans- ferring the axioms of a modern historian to the mind of an ancient one. These very common but erroneous ways of looking at the past may be illustrated by the practice of certain schools of historical painters. One painter will dress up the characters of an ancient day in the costumes of his own time ; another will devise outlandish clothing which no human being could ever have dreamt of wearing. And both are wrong ; one recognizes no unity at all between his own age and the past, and the other recognizes no difference. We must always go back, then, upon ancient history with our theory of the world formed, at any rate provisionally, WHAT IS HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? 79 and construe the facts described in our evidential documents accordingly. This general recognition of the unity of all human history corresponds with the actual state of things, for, indeed, there is an organic inter-connexion among all the facts of history. That is, every event has its place in the history of the world, and is necessary, whatever it is, to that history. We all admit this about certain epoch-making facts. That the history of Europe would have been in many respects different if Xerxes had won Salamis, or if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon, or if Cromwell had not been prevented from sailing to America, or if Napoleon had won Waterloo, may be safely taken for granted. But when we reflect carefully on this admission, we find it carries much more with it than at first sight appears. Salamis, for instance, we rightly call a decisive battle one of the great events of history. But when we consider what that means, we find that the battle of Salamis is a short name for an extremely complex event. There were involved the particular actions of a host of men on both sides, brought to the scene by various motives, and all under the governance of the Purpose in History, or whatever other universal Power we recognize. None of these elements can be omitted or be supposed to have no part in the general result. It may be said, of course, that the individual soldiers cannot matter, because any one who would have done the same things would have filled the necessary place that it was not, therefore, the particular individuals that formed the inevitable condition but their work. And this is in a measure true, for on historic ground the individual is the work he does, his own private self matters little. But it is only partially true : we see only the result of the work of men whose names and prowess are mostly lost. We lose the connexion between what they did and their private self, their education, and interests. But these, after all, are just 8o EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION the things that do matter ; they have gone to determine the character of the event which we now call epoch-making, they have helped to decide what each man's part should be in it. History remembers, it is true, only the names of the few prominent, but the obscure many are equally necessary to the whole, though it is always impossible to trace out fully the connexion between that abstract of events which history remembers, and the concrete living events themselves. Not only, then, must we approach history in the light of our own experience, and our own theory of our experience, but when we get to it, we find it part of our world, or at least so strongly bound to our world that without it all our experience must have been different. This unity, we must be sure, is there, though we can never fully exhibit it. And this is one of the great causes of the peculiar uncertainty which characterizes history, and makes it to differ so widely from other branches of research. "We are able to trace but a few of the links which bind us to the past ; records perish, events are forgotten, and we are left to put together the past out of the few relics saved from the general wreck. And hence, there is almost always some crucial fact wanting which would decide some obscure point, and let in a flood of light upon later developments. Or, what is still more disastrous, the facts there are may seem to supply all that is needed, while yet the truth may lie concealed in some forgotten document not yet brought to light. The next question which requires brief discussion here relates to the evidence necessary to establish a given fact. The difficulty lies in formulating any general conditions of probability, owing to the great variety of cases. We may say, perhaps, quite generally that there are two main directions in which we may search for probability: both imply the comparison of the event with some general conception. We may compare an alleged event with our HISTORIC CERTAINTY 81 conception of nature : or we may compare it with our concep- tion of man. An event might have probability to a believer in God, which would seem impossible to a pure materialist : in this case its probability would arise from comparison with the general conception of nature. The other comparison is more difficult to carry out. Man is fallible and also at times mendacious. At the best, he speaks in the light of his own theory of things, and interprets what he sees in accordance with his knowledge. The probability of an event depending on testimony for its evidence, is therefore always uncertain, because there is no settled or certain criterion for estimating the liability to error, the tendency to deceive, and the capacity to interpret. Historical criticism is a way of working out some empirical rules on these heads : but it is far from having reached certainty yet. On the whole we may say that an event is probable, when it is in harmony with the general conception of the world and the forces operating in it, when the testimony is such as to suggest real knowledge and adequate appreciation. To this we should add, that its probability is greatly increased, when its occurrence as alleged accounts simply and naturally for subsequent certain effects. We must now consider the intellectual effect of historical evidence. We have seen the complex process by which historic certainty is reached, and something of the principles with which we should approach the evidence. What is then the condition of the mind ? Of course, if the evidence is good, and the mind is capable of appreciating it, it may take that step which we saw was necessary to complete its assent In this case it may be said to believe in the facts described, that is, to feel reasonably sure that the order of events followed this and no other line. That, we think, is the very fullest result which can be produced by historical evidence. To it may be added much by the way of the 6 82 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION imagination ; surviving portraits, buildings, sites, antiquarian knowledge, and the like may all help to form a vivid picture, which will gain a firmer and firmer grip upon the mind, and reduce the chance of error to a minimum. But with all these aids, the resulting certainty will be hard to produce, and fall short, after all, of the direct evidence of our senses, and of the theoretic certainty of science. And it is by no means every fact which can possibly be expected to have such high attestation: only under very exceptional conditions can we erect so exacting a standard. Historical facts for the most part are believed, or at least not denied, when their evidence would fail altogether to produce such certainty. It is in relation with such facts as fall short, in a more or less conspicuous degree, of the ideally complete historical character, that there comes into existence a state of mind somewhat different from the reasonable assurance just mentioned. The facts are believed, on the whole ; there is no need to decide on the claims of two conflicting accounts, they have verisimilitude they are probable there is no particular reason for denying them. Perhaps an instance will make the matter clearer. In S. Clement of Alexandria (Quis Dives Salv. 42) there is an anecdote related about S. John, cited to show that it is never too late to mend. It tells how S. John had converted to the faith of Christ a young man who, after a time, had fallen into evil courses, and had become captain of a band of robbers. S. John, hearing of this, had wandered out into a forest whither his convert had gone, had found him, and brought him back. S. Clement insists that the story is true, but points out that it is variously reported by different authorities. Beyond this mention in S. Clement, there is, we believe, no evidence whatever for or against the story. It is impossible, then, to regard it as proved; it falls far short of anything we can regard as historical certainty. HISTORIC CERTAINTY 83 And yet it is probable enough ; it makes no unusual demand upon our faith ; it is consistent with the character of a Son of Thunder, moulded by the faith and the love of Christ. But that is all If it were disproved, we should have but little to resign; it would disturb no cherished convictions; we should regret it only on sentimental grounds. Till it is disproved, we cannot surely be said to do more than acquiesce in it, we could hardly go so far as to say we believed in it. It is important, we think, to emphasize the existence of this state of mind, because a very large number of the facts ordinarily ranged under the head of history fall, if we are not mistaken, into the province of this acquiescent state of mind. 1 And, if its existence be not recognized, it tends to corrupt our historical judgment. We tend to look for the same evidential support for all historical events, and this means either lax criticism, or unreasonable scepticism. On the one hand we are inclined to accept statements which would really vanish under criticism, because we have to be content with less than is absolutely required for complete historical assurance in so many cases. That is to allow our critical faculty to grow lax. And, on the other hand, the sense that so many facts depend on this sort of evidence, and the want of distinguishing it from real historical certainty, lead to an undue scepticism as to history in general, or to the erection of a false standard of validity in historical evidence. The real battle in historical questions is over the serious and vital events, the presence or absence of which makes 1 It can scarcely be better described than by Robert Browning (FerisktaVs Fancies, p. 16 1st. ed.) ' First, amend, my son, Thy faulty nomenclature, call belief Belief indeed, nor grace with such a name The easy acquiescence of mankind In matters nowise worth dispute, since life Lasts merely the allotted moment.' 84 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION a decisive difference to the whole fabric of history. When these are settled, one way or another, the position we take up in regard to them may help to give credibility or finally rule out as improbable events as to which we had only reached the acquiescent stage before. The story of King Alfred and the cakes can never be proved : it may become more or less probable according to the decision we reach as to the more salient events of Alfred's life. We should all admit the absurdity of making the failure to prove this story evidence against the general historicity of Alfred's life. Yet this inversion of true logical order is common among critics of the Gospels. We must now face the question of the historical evidence for the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. And first let us observe that we wish to attain in regard of it real historical assurance; it must not be a matter in which we easily acquiesce. And next, let us call to mind the remarks we have made as to the necessity of bringing our theory of the world to bear upon our historical problems. We must not accept the Incarnation or the miracles which occur in connexion with it as being one of the things which might easily occur in ancient times, but could not possibly occur now. The possibility of it is a theoretical question, de- pending on the ultimate constitution of things, and not upon the age of the world. If the Incarnation was possible 1900 years ago, it would be in the region of possibility now, supposing that such a need could arise again. For ' possible ' means that it is not excluded by the ultimate character of the world, and that must be true or false for all time. The same must be said of the miracles: if they were possible then, similar conditions would produce them unerringly now. This question has, we hope, been settled. We have seen that the constitution of the world, widely viewed, admits these possibilities, and our discussion of historical THE EVIDENCE FOR THE RESURRECTION 85 evidence has shown us that in approaching the purely his- torical evidence with this question closed, we are fulfilling the demands of the special logic which such matters require. What evidence, then, do the Apostles allege in support of their belief that Christ was Son of God Incarnate ? They say, that what proved it to them was the fact that Christ rose from the dead. They had grown in intimacy and in confidence all through Christ's life : they had felt more and more certain that their interpretation of His nature was a true one, until the Passion came, and the Death on the Cross gave all their convictions a terrible shock. From this they only recovered when the evidence of their senses assured them that He had overcome death, and was alive again. Then they knew that they had been right in their surmises during the period of discipleship : they were sure that He was indeed the Holy One of God. That is their story. They do not pretend to have had a sudden revelation of His true nature, or to have formed their conclusions apart from rational grounds, by some peculiar or inexplicable process. They admit that they were puzzled and put off and thrown back by the Death on the Cross, but they assert that when they knew of the Resurrection they felt sure again. Later they came to see, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Divine necessity and significance of death and resurrection alike. Let us enter upon the discussion at the point which the Apostles represent as vitaL What is the evidence for the Resurrection ? S. Paul in writing to the Church of Corinth found himself in opposition to a class of persons who denied the Resurrection. In his answer he appeals to two sources of evidence the witness of those who had seen the risen Lord, 1 the intrinsic fitness of the Resurrection itself. Under 1 S. Paul's point is that the Resurrection was a historical fact ; the vision of the Risen Lord was as certain and inexpugnable as the vision of Him before 86 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION the first head he enumerates a number of those who had ocular demonstration of the fact, including himself, and adds that of these the greater part were still living, but some had fallen asleep. Now there are the same elements still necessary to prove the Resurrection personal testimony and intrinsic fitness. But in our case the difficulty is in- creased, because there are not and have not been for cen- turies any persons whatever to whom we could appeal Are we then to fall back upon general considerations of intrinsic fitness ? Certainly not. We have already pointed out that these will never prove a fact, they can only remove a priori objections to it. Somehow or other, then, we must put our- selves in contact with those who saw the risen Christ. Under ordinary circumstances what do we do ? We inquire how far the fact in question fits in with other facts, with its period, with the rest of history as it may be known to us. Is it excluded by anything else of which we are certain ? Or are there traces of its existence all down the line of history ? Now it is clear that there is nothing to exclude the Resurrection of Christ, unless it be its impossibility, and this question has been already sufficiently discussed. And it is clear too that no reputed fact in the world has ever left such deep and permanent traces as this of the Resurrection. The testimony of the first witnesses has been believed steadily and continuously from that day to this. There is no break in the continuity of the evidence : no cessation in the stream of believers. The highest and most cultivated as well as the simplest have held to it as a fact. And what is more, it has not passed into the region of mere literature, like so much history; it has remained in full view of the the Crucifixion. His argument especially in 1 Cor. xv. 17-19 is quite irrelevant if it be supposed that he meant a ' spiritual ' resurrection only, or a vigorous emphasis laid by Christ upon the idea of Immortality. The truth is that these attenuations of the meaning of the Resurrection are anachronisms- as applied to the Apostles. THE EVIDENCE FOR THE RESURRECTION 87 consciousness of men throughout. Certainly the first wit- nesses have not lacked continuous support. But it will be said that all this only proves that they believed it; and this may be easily granted: it does not prove that their belief was justified in fact. Certainly it does not; but then no historic evidence ever does or can. The only way to prove that the first witnesses were not deceived is to compare their reports with the facts as they report them: which is impossible. It is true that the Apostles were more ready to believe in this event than men are in modern times: and it is true that they had a very elementary knowledge of nature's laws. It is true also that they may have been deceived, and have followed wandering fires. But we have contended that nature's laws do not exclude the Resurrection: and it is certain that the moral and spiritual effects traced by the Apostles to belief in it as a fact, and produced by no other cause, are verified in every succeeding generation. We are just as near the Resurrection as we are to any other fact in history, and the evidence for it is the same in kind: it differs in degree, indeed, for it rarely happens that any testimony is so continuously and so widely supported. More than this we have no right to expect. It is still possible, of course, to raise further objections, at some of which we ought, for completeness' sake, to glance. For instance, it is possible to maintain that the chances in favour of men being deceived are greater than the chances that a supernatural l event has occurred. That may be true, and yet not decisive; unless it be meant to imply that a supernatural event cannot occur. If that is what it means, no doubt it closes the whole question. But if it does not, if it simply means that supernatural events are uncommon, and therefore are not to be expected to occur often, it does 1 Cf. p. 81. 88 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION not touch the point. If it be possible that such an event should occur, the question whether it has done so or not at a given time and place is one of evidence and testimony. It may have been unlikely, it may be still unlikely that it should occur again ; but unless it is impossible the testimony must be treated on its own merits. Or again it may be argued that no testimony can reach to the supernatural that we may believe on the evidence that the Apostles saw or imagined they saw certain appearances; but that their supernatural interpretation of them cannot be carried by their testimony. This, again, conceals the old difficulty of the possibility of the supernatural at all. If it means that, when men draw an inference from reports of their senses to a supernatural cause, it cannot be trustworthy, that is only the old objection to the possibility of the supernatural, and this we have set aside. But if it means that no testimony can reach beyond the sensuous data, then it is within measurable distance of absurdity. 1 We may now pass on from these minute questions, pausing first to characterize our results. We claim that the evidence for the Resurrection, so far as it is merely a historical event, is as great or greater than the evidence for any other fact in history ; further, that this is such as to justify not only the ' easy acquiescence ' of which we have spoken but that reason- able assurance which historical evidence is calculated to produce. 2 For the most part, the objections raised on the other side are of a theoretical or a priori character, and do not fall properly within historical inquiry at all. And when 1 Cf. Mozley, Hampton Lectures, Lect. v. 2 This does not mean that the Resurrection is the easiest of all facts to believe. Ease of belief is largely a matter of the insignificance of the alleged fact, or the relation of it to our system of interpreting nature. What is meant is that apart from a priori objections, the Resurrection is as firmly attested by contemporary evidence, and as intricately woven into the whole fabric of subsequent history as any fact on record. FORCE OF THE RESURRECTION 89 we come to discuss the Church and Sacraments it will be seen that there is a wide difference between the Resurrection and other historical facts, for the Resurrection is a living fact, present still in the Church and in the hearts of believers. It is not a mere event in history, but a present and operative force among men. The Apostles accepted the fact of the Resurrection as proving sufficiently our Lord's Divine claims: were they right in so doing? We may not unnaturally ask the question, Where lay the connexion ? Why should the Resurrection prove Christ's claims ? It is clear that one of their great reasons for suspecting Him to be more than man during His earthly ministry was His power over the forces of nature. Disease and even death, the powers of wind and wave, and the spirits of evil all alike owned His sway. He had miraculously increased the supply of bread with the 5000 and 4000, the supply of wine at Cana. That one possessing such powers over the material world should have no unusual character, no closer relation with the Creator than ordinary men, seemed incredible. Yet that He should save others, and yet be unable to save Himself from death, interfered sadly with this conjecture. But the Resurrection decisively proved that the risen One had power over His own life power to lay it down and power to take it again. And then there was the evidence of prophecy, which the Resurrection, interpreted as the Apostles interpreted it, explained and made coherent. But more than anything the Resurrection, taken in connexion with the actual words and claims of Christ, left no doubt that He was what He claimed to be. The Resurrection, then, was justly used by the Apostles in justification of their faith in Christ. Has it any special evidential significance for us ? We think it has. It is the one miraculous event in Christ's life with which we are, historically speaking, directly in contact. True, the 90 EVIDENCE FOR THE INCARNATION Church has borne continuous witness to the Crucifixion also, but that, apart from the Resurrection and all that it means, has no miraculous import. But through the Resurrection we may approach the other facts in Christ's life, to which there is no such continuous evidence, with an antecedent probability that some of them will be miraculous. That a Person who was to die and rise again should offer no sign during His lifetime of exceptional character would indeed be surprising. The Gospels tell of such signs, and their credibility on these points is the more easily established, since their character as witnesses is so fully maintained on the crucial fact of the Resurrection. We have now considered, at considerable length, the position of the central doctrine of the Christian faith in regard of Natural Religion and historical evidence, and we hope to have made clear that it is coherent with the facts which we know of nature in the ordinary way, and has sufficient historical evidence to support it. It may, perhaps, be felt that all such discussions as these belong rather to a book on Apologetics than to a Manual of Elementary Theology. It is probable that in another age this might have been so when there was less criticism upon the truths of Christianity, and agreement upon these, at least, might safely have been assumed. This state of things has ceased, and it is not possible any longer to start from the Christian stand-point without making plain at the same time how the faith is situated in regard of the rest of our knowledge. This must be our apology for the argumentative tone adopted hitherto. We disclaim the term Apologetics, because it seems to con- tain an inherent error. The Christian faith needs no apology and no defence : what it does require from time to time is statement statement made with an eye to the intellectual conditions of the particular time. This is all that we have attempted to give. AUTHORITIES 91 Books on the Authenticity of the Gospels, etc. Westcott, Introduction to the Study of the Gospels. Salmon, Introduction to the New Testament. Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion. Sanday, Authorship and Historical Character of the Fourth Gospel ; Gospels in the Second Century ; Essays in Expositor, January-May 1891, on the Synoptic Question. Robinson, The Study of the Gospels. Bampton Lectures : Art. Jesus Christ, in Hastings Diet, of the Bible. Zahn, Geschichte des Neutestamentlichen Kanons. Dak, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels. Carpenter, The Synoptic Gospels. Martineau, The Seat of Authority in Religion. Keim, Life of Jesus of Nazara. Harnack, Caronologie. Miracles and the Order of Nature. S. Ath., De Incarnatione. (On the general question of the Order of Nature and of Grace.) S. Aug., Epp. cxx., cxxxvii., clxii., chs. 5, 6 ; c. Faust. Bk. xxi. 5, 6, xxvi. S. Thorn. Aq. c. Gent. Bk. iii. ch. 100-105. Spinoza, Tractatus-Theologico- Politicus, ch. vi Hume, Essay on Miracles. Butler, Analogy, Pt. II. Mozley, On Miracles. Holland, Christ or Ecclesiastes. Gore, Bampton Lectures. Ulingworth, Bampton Lectures : Reason and Revelation. Historical Evidence. Freeman, Methods of Historical Study, esp. Lect. iii. Stubbs, Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History, No. v. Langlois and Seignobos : Introduction to the Study of History. Trans- lated by G. G. Berry. CHAPTER III AT the end of the last chapter we saw that the Apostles had reached a certain conviction as to the nature of their Lord, which they were to proclaim broadly to the world. To them it appeared in the light of a simple fact : l they had known Christ, known Him as man first, and come to know Him at last as the Son of God. And as such they pro- claimed Him, not with any elaborateness of explanatory statement, but simply as they knew Him. But this simple proclamation of their faith inevitably raised a profound and abstruse problem. It was wholly impossible, in the very nature of things, that men should continue to accept the statement just as it was, without attempting to explain to themselves what it meant. They were called upon to take into their range of ideas what was really a completely new thing; it was not likely or possible that it should remain simply as a bare unexplained fact; it would require to be probed and examined and weighed, that its full importance might appear. There would be no need to point out this fact in any other connexion, because it would be taken for granted on all hands that no body of men would go on maintaining and spreading a belief which they could only assert as an unexplained fact. We should think it inevitable 1 See note at the end of the chapter. THE RISE OF DOGMA 93 that they would find questions asked about it, which they would have to try to answer, doubts arising which they must endeavour to solve. Only the most extravagant dogmatism could possibly hope to come before the world, and call upon it to give up the sins which it loved, for the sake of an alleged fact which could not be explained. And we have seen that the Apostles were not dogmatists : they were witnesses. They alleged their fact, and adapted their proclamation of it to the special needs of their various audiences. In most subjects, we say, it would be superfluous to comment on the necessity of this result ; it is necessary in theology because the process of interpretation, initiated in S. Peter's speeches in the Acts, carried on by S. Paul, and completed by the Catholic Church, ended in the formulation of definite dog- matic articles ; and it has been customary of late to deny the necessity of such definitions of belief. The practical effects of Christianity have come to occupy the whole horizon, and it is contended that, provided these are retained, the whole dogmatic system may be safely dispensed with. Possibly this might be true, if the Christian scheme of morals did not rest upon the Person of Christ, if He were only a human prophet and reformer, aiming at the establishment of a better way of life. And of course there are many who would accept this account of Him. But for those who do not, for those who believe that He was really the Incarnate Son of God, it is imperative to say, as nearly as may be, what this precisely means. For the thought of the Divine Son Incarnate, as it spreads through the testimony of the Church, meets with minds of very various types, with minds furnished with very various prepossessions, and all these will interpret it in various ways. To some it will seem easy enough to believe that God should come upon the earth and reveal Himself to man, but impossible that He should robe Himself in real human flesh, seeing that 94 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH the flesh is corruptible and impure, and responsible for evil. To others it will seem incredible that God should suffer such a change as is apparently involved in an Incarnation. Hence the former class of thinkers will so interpret the witness of the Apostles as to deny virtually the Humanity of Jesus Christ, the others will interpret it so as to deny His Divinity. These will be, of course, private speculations. They are neither affirmed in the earliest form of apostolic preaching nor explicitly denied. But it cannot be maintained that they are unimportant, that one is as true as the other. For they are in flat contradiction as to a matter of fact. Each interprets the testimony of the Apostles to the dual nature of Christ, so as to destroy the duality. The one favours one factor in it, the other exclusively supports the opposite. And it simply is not reasonable that two contradictory propositions should be equally true in relation to one matter of fact. It may be granted that there are certain regions of theology in which our best hope of arriving at a sound position is to state both sides of a contradiction and leave it unsolved; but this can never be the case with matters of fact. It has been maintained, for instance, by theologians of a certain school, 1 that if we say that God exists, and then endeavour to ascertain precisely what we mean, we find that God does not exist under any known form or mode of being, and therefore that the affirmation of the existence of God requires to be completed by its exact contradictory. It may be questioned, perhaps, whether there is not here an ambiguity in the word existence whether it does not refer to the matter of fact in the proposition God exists on the one side, and to our interpretation of the fact on the other. But however this may be, the cases are not parallel. In the one, we are dealing with a wholly transcendent subject- matter, in which our senses and intellect by themselves are 1 Cf. Dionys. Areop. De Div. Norn. ch. v. 8. THE RISE OF DOGMA 95 quite at a loss, and incapable of definite assertion, in the other we are dealing with a fact which has its material as well as its transcendent side. But those who deny the Humanity of our Lord deny the material side of the fact altogether, and those who deny the Divinity deny that the Manhood is in any fundamental sense out of the common. But granted the necessity of interpreting, who is to decide when interpreters differ ? Differ they almost certainly will, as they will approach the matter from various points of view. Whose is the decisive interpretation ? The Apostles while they live will, at least, know which interpretation, if any, expresses their meaning, and will be able also to explain what their meaning is, with reference to the particular problems raised. S. Paul, for instance, when he finds that the Colossian Christians are by way of adopting an elaborate system of angel- worship, writes to them, and stoutly denies that this is even compatible with his view of Christ. And he gives his reasons: it is practically to deny our Lord's unique prerogative as Mediator, both in nature and in grace. The Son, he insists, was the sole instrument of creation ; in Him all things were created and had their system; no created being can share the solitary dignity of the Son. And then in the Incarnate Christ, the fulness of the Godhead dwelt bodily ; into unity with Him Christians were baptized, and in that unity, by Christ's power alone, they were saved. Further, this, he maintains, was the faith he had always preached and taught, the other was the tradition of men. Now here we have an example of the way an Apostle went to work. S. Paul refers to the tradition of the faith as he had delivered it ; but that is not all, he also enters upon the subject apart from Church authority, and shows that the consequences of the theory, with which they are showing sympathy, are subversive of all that the preaching of Christi- anity was meant to do. To hold such a position would bring 96 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH men back under the minute and elaborate rules from which they had escaped, and would infringe the rights of Christ, by whom alone the handwriting which was against us had been removed. This line of argument reveals, when analyzed, the nature of authority as conceived by S. Paul. He appeals to two considerations : harmony with Church tradition and the inherent force of the truths : and an important element on the intellectual side of the question is the practical effect of a given doctrine. S. Paul thus excludes the possibility of a rigid separation between the intellectual and practical sides of Christianity. He assumes that it matters how the Colos- sians express their faith to themselves, for there are ways of doing it which cut at the root of the practical and moral significance of Christianity : so that Christian practice and the precise formulation of the faith must go together. By means of this instance we have obtained considerable light on our problem. We see that the dogmatic statements of the facts in question are necessary not only to secure accuracy of thought, but also to assure the practical effect of them. The two things are not separate, nor are they separ- able. Christ saves because He is the Son of God, and though it is conceivable that men might be saved, as it were, against their will by the mere external operations of a Person whom they neither knew or understood, yet that is not the regular Divine method. Men are brought into a state of salvation when they are united with the Son of God, and to deny that Christ is the Son of God is to deny the possibility of salvation. The doctrines are not merely interesting intellectual specula- tions, they are intellectual exhibitions of practical truth. This, we think, is the result of a consideration of S. Paul's method in the particular case quoted. The force of Church tradition had better be left aside, perhaps, till we come definitely to discuss the Church. The content of the Apostolic witness which they put THE RISE OF DOGMA 97 forward to the world, was that the Man Jesus of Nazareth, whom they knew and accompanied in His ministry through- out Judaea, was none other than the Son of God. The nature of the problem thus offered to the intellect of the Church was as follows : to explain so far as might be how these two natures were united in the one Person. Neither was to be infringed, neither to be robbed of its just rights, the character- istics of both were to be preserved. To describe accurately the way in which the Church approached and dealt with this problem, would be to write the history of the first five centuries. Nothing so elaborate as this can be attempted here. We shall endeavour to indicate generally the outlines of the discussions and point out their practical importance. It is not without significance that the Incarnation occurred, and was first preached in Judaea. The Jewish mind, as we have already seen, felt no attraction towards the elaborate metaphysical discussions which exercised the Greeks. Their notion of God was simple and direct; it contained no elements which made it difficult to imagine the activity of God coming into very close connexion with the material world. The chief interest of their theology was, as we have said, a moral interest. At the same time they clearly recognized that in the material world, the world of nature, the hand of God was to be traced. His power was revealed in the complex order ; He was concealed ' in a pavilion of dark waters, with thick clouds to cover Him ; ' ' He came flying upon the wings of the wind,' but the whole was ordered and directed by Him. ' Wind and storm fulfilled His word.' He makes ' darkness that it may be night, wherein all the beasts of the forest do move : the sun ariseth, and they get them away together and lay them down in their dens, so that man may go forth to his work and to his labour until the evening.' When 'God taketh away their breath they die and turn again to their dust ; when He sends forth His breath they are made, and 7 98 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH the face of the earth is renewed.' The Lord rejoices in His works, and throughout them blesses the righteous, and roots out the sinner. And nature sympathizes with His holy will ; the strife and war in it are dependent upon the evil which has entered upon the world which was created good ; but in the new heaven and earth in which the Messiah's kingdom shall be reared, these wars shall cease ; ' they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.' 1 The same point may be illustrated by reference to the ease with which the Jews used strongly anthropomorphic expres- sions in regard of God, without feeling their difficulty (if the recent theories as to the date of the Pentateuch are true) till a very late period of their history. In all this their position forms a strong contrast with the feeling prevalent both in Greece and in the further East. To the Greek mind, determined in this direction by Plato, matter was the cause of the confusion in the world, and the soul's one chance of obtaining true knowledge and true good was to free itself from the trammels of the body. This point of view had already been brought to bear upon the Jewish Scriptures at Alexandria, and the contact of the two strains of thought had resulted in a sort of compromise. The Jewish Scriptures were still regarded as the pre-eminent source of truth, but side by side with them Greek philosophy was raised almost to a position of equality. For the Scriptures, though still authoritative, were explained in a Hellenistic sense by the method of allegory, their anthropomorphisms were toned down, and the freedom with which the Hebrew writers had spoken of God was balanced by a theory of an absolutely transcendent God, revealed through grades of intermediary beings, of whom one was the Logos. 2 1 Ps. xviii. 10, 11, cxlviii. 8, civ. 20-23, 29, 30, 35 ; Is. xi. 9. 2 It is a keenly disputed question, into which we cannot fully enter, whether the Logos-doctrine which we find in S. John's Prologue is or is not a THE LOGOS DOCTRINE 99 From the countries east of Palestine, especially Persia, there came a strongly dualistic influence a tendency to regard the world as the scene of a conflict between two forces of evil and good, matter being in later days regarded as the seat of the former. It is probable that this theory is directly assailed in the later Isaiah in the passage containing the words, ' I form the light and I create darkness' (Isa. xlv. 7) where God is represented as vindicating to Himself the un- rivalled supremacy over the universe. Thus it is clear that when the doctrine of the Son of God become flesh reached such convictions as these, a struggle must necessarily take place ; it could not be rationally accepted without. It is not conceivable that a person who held that matter was the cause of moral evil or intellectual error, could allow that a Divine Person should take upon Him the robe of our humanity. The appearances, therefore, to which the Apostles witnessed especially the Crucifixion had to be explained. This could be done in one of two ways. It could be maintained that the flesh of Christ was not real, that it was a mere show. This was the view of those who are called Docetists, against whom S. Ignatius development of this Alexandrine idea. There are reasons apart from the identity of the name for supposing that the Apostle had met with the Alexan- drine doctrine, and had been influenced by it. And there is a great difficulty about the opposite view, viz., that the Logos-doctrine in S. John belongs to an independent development in the Palestinian Schools, and not at all to Alexandrine Judaism. It is difficult to prove positively the existence of such a doctrine in Palestine, as the evidence for the history of Jewish thought between the Captivity and the coming of Christ is extremely fragmentary ; and the Targums, in which such a use is found, are of uncertain date. That the Jewish notion of God tended to become transcendent during this period is certain, both from the fact that they gave up using the great name Jehovah, and from the evidence of the Sapiential Books, especially Proverbs and the Book of Wisdom. In whatever way this question may be decided, it is certain that the Logos-doctrine in S. John must have belonged to a theology in which the Incarnation of the Word would not have seemed incredible ; and it is equally clear that the Alexandrine doctrine as stated by Philo would not have admitted the possibility of such an event. (See Hastings' Diet, of the Bible, art. Logos.) ioo INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH writes 1 so passionately. Or it could be argued, that an ordinary human person, born in the ordinary way, was made the home for a time of a special indwelling of Deity. Thus it was maintained by Cerinthus 2 that the Christ descended upon Jesus at His Baptism, and left Him before the Crucifix- ion, so that the works of power were done by this Divine Force or Person, temporarily resident in the man Jesus, whereas the humiliation of the Passion was suffered by the man alone. This position was held in slightly different forms by various heretics, e.g. the Ebionites, and was obviously put forward as a way of solving the difficulty arising in con- nexion with matter. It results, as may be seen at once, in a purely humanitarian conception of Christ. Roughly speak- ing, the former view is prominently characteristic of heretics who are influenced by pagan modes of thought, the latter falls in more naturally with Judaizing speculations. For it would be comparatively easy to the Jewish mind to conceive Christ on the analogy of a prophet, distinguished by a speci- ally full inspiration. But if it be true that the followers of Basilides held this view, it shows that it solved the pagan difficulty as well. Closely allied with these are the more elaborate systems of Gnosticism, which extend a chain of aeons or intermediary beings between the incomprehensible God and the world. It would be beyond our purpose to describe these more fully. We have already indicated by anticipation the practical failure of such theories as these. They utterly destroy the whole meaning of the Incarnation. The idea of redemption from sin, as apart from the emancipation of the soul from matter, is left out completely, and what is more, the whole theory of the nature of God has to be changed. The Chris- tian doctrine of the Incarnation rests upon the assumption 1 S. Ign., ad Trail. 9-11 ; Smyrn. 1-6. 2 Hipp. adv. Hcer. vii. 33. DOCETISM AND GNOSTICISM 101 that God made the world out of His love and continually manifests Himself in it, and that men's actions here are, therefore, important far beyond their external appearance or effect. By means of them he moves nearer towards, or further from the purpose of his being, that is, Communion with God. With this theology, as we hope to show fully later on, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is entirely consist- ent. The act of the Son of God in His coming to earth fixes this spiritual value upon human life and human action as such. But the other theories ignore all this. Creation is practically a mistake, and always must be, so long as its permanent condition, viz. the presence of matter, is regarded as directly causing moral evil or intellectual error. Plato, it is true, and Philo after him, apparently avoid this gloomy inference by saying that God having no envy in His nature, and finding matter floating in a formless condition, did not grudge it existence, but of His goodness gave it form. But the escape is only apparent : the real result of the doctrine of matter which these words contain is seen when it turns out that, after all, the best thing for the soul is to be freed from its trammels. Then it becomes clear, too, that God, for all His kindly lack of jealousy, has achieved absolutely nothing. Unless matter can retain hold of the form He has given it, its position is not improved : it must go back to its formless condition. And since the prevention of this would involve the continued imprisonment of souls in the material world, it would be bad even on Gnostic showing. Thus the Gnostic conceptions of Kedemption are really only an endeavour to remedy rather a bad mistake, which, accord- ing to some systems, arose by accident, according to others was involved in the act of creation : and in either case the endeavour is futile. It is noticeable that these theories, for the most part, pre- vailed in the first three centuries of the Church's history; 102 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH and that, though they were never formally condemned by any general council, there can be no question as to the judgment of the Church upon them. The circumstances of the Church at the time were not such as to admit of a general council Individual churches were somewhat isolated, and it would have been a difficult matter to collect a sufficient body of theologians to form anything like a representative council, even if that had been the only method of reaching a decision. The Apostles, as we saw in the case of S. Paul, had appealed to tradition, and to the consequences, intellectual and moral, of the two rival theories. The Church in its earlier centuries does precisely the same. Tradition, after the Apostles' death, has, of course, to be preserved in some accessible form. This is achieved in two ways : by the formation of the Canon of Holy Scripture and the Episcopal succession. It is hardly necessary to point out that in the early days of the history of the Church there was no New Testament, in our sense of the word. By the end of the first century we believe thao all the books now standing in the New Testament Canon were in existence and in use in some churches, at any rate. But at the same time, there came into existence a large number of other books which did not embody the traditional teaching of the Church, but were written in many cases to recommend such doctrines as those just now mentioned. Neither these nor the canonical books were published under any external imprimatur (except, of course, that the fact of apostolic authorship would carry its own weight), for the simple reason that the Church was not constituted in such a way as to admit of its giving such formal sanction. There was no central unity about it, no such oecumenical organization that a definite opinion could be formulated in a clear and decisive way. But the growth of the Canon, which means the separation of the books which embody the Church tradition from those which do not, implies HOW WAS GNOSTICISM CONDEMNED ? 103 the presence of a consensus of Christian opinion. The Canon, as we have received it, is the standing embodiment of this consensus. But it was not enough to stereotype the doctrine of the Church in the written books ; this written book required to be supplemented and interpreted by the living voice of the Church, as displayed in the succession of the Bishops. It may be true that in some churches, e.g. at Alexandria, a collegiate and not a monarchical episcopate survived till a comparatively late date ; but be this as it may, there is no question that the rulers of the Church, whether one, as in most places, or many, were responsible for preserving intact the apostolic tradition. It is to the consentient testimony of the Scriptures and of the due successors of the Apostles that Irenaeus appeals against the Gnostic heresies. 1 The advantage of this twofold evidence is easy to be seen. A book never explains itself. It is written under certain given conditions, which pass away while it remains. Plato's complaint about books is absolutely true. 2 You can never stop and cross-question them as to what they mean. This difficulty is, in a great measure, obviated when a living tradition accompanies the written word. The living voice is able to apply the written words to new cases and in new circumstances to distinguish between true and false inter- pretations, and to preserve the meaning of the book permanent through change. There is, therefore, a natural fitness and completeness about the method in which the doctrine of the Church was preserved through the stormy days of the first three centuries. And be it noticed that the adoption of the plan of general councils involves no real change whatever in the ultimate seat of authority in doctrine. The difference lies in the method by which the testimony of the successors of the Apostles was obtained. Before, the writings of an 1 S. Iren., Adv. Eaer. iii. 2, 3. 2 Plat., Phccdrus, p. 275 D.E. 104 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH Ignatius, a Melito, an Irenaeus had explained the bearing of Scripture and tradition upon current controversy ; Tertullian, not himself a Bishop, had won the approval of Cyprian and others by his assaults upon Gnostic teachers. In the con- ciliar period questions were discussed and decrees passed by assemblies of Bishops, not as containing new doctrines, but as bulwarks against innovation ; and even so the process is not complete. There were many Councils, of which many were definitely heretical. As in the pre-conciliar period, therefore, the general voice of the Church had still to ratify or reject the conciliar decrees. The representation of this process, not uncommon nowa- days, as a purely accidental one, does too great honour to ecclesiastical history. It implies that the majorities in the Church councils and therefore the decisions of churches, the prevalence of particular opinions were due mainly to external accidents. If this were so, Church history would indeed stand alone amidst the history of all other human institutions. We have already shown that chance is im- possible as an explanation of the course of nature. 1 The course of history is no less certainly governed by fixed laws. Although, therefore, we believe the Church to be a Divine institution specially under Divine guidance, we do not wish to isolate it so completely as this theory would require from the general laws of human things; and it would be com- pletely isolated from all other parts of our experience, if we allowed that it was governed by chance. It has happened in many matters of human controversy that the ultimately prevailing view has turned out to be the right one; we believe this to have been the case in the history of the Church. 2 1 See p. 24. 2 Of. a remarkable passage in Martineau's Essays, vol. ii. p. 375, on Unitarians. THE VOICE OF THE CHURCH 105 We must now return from this long digression to consider further problems arising around the Incarnation. Sabellian- ism, which in historical order would follow next, may be postponed till the chapter in which we shall speak of the Holy Trinity. It is an attempt to express the result of a belief in the Incarnation upon the notion of God, and its effect upon the Incarnation strongly resembles one or other of those theories of which we have already spoken. The Person Jesus Christ would under its influence appear either as a mere man temporarily illuminated in an ex- ceptional manner by a Divine Presence, who might be called indifferently Father or Son, or as a temporary manifestation of the one essence of God, succeeded by another called the Holy Spirit. The arguments against this doctrine from the practical and traditional point of view would be the same as those indicated above. And so we come without further delay to the great period of controversy as to our Lord's two- fold nature, which extends over the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. The controversy with Gnosticism had led to a comparison between the Church doctrine of the Son of God and the Gnostic systems of emanations, or aeons intermediary beings which these thinkers regarded as necessary, in order to bridge over the gap between the incomprehensible God and the material world. It was necessary that this should happen, as most of the Gnostic systems admitted the Word or the Son of God, and sometimes also Jesus Christ, to a place in their scheme. There was also this amount of resemblance between the Christian doctrine and Gnosticism, that the Son of God, upon the Christian premisses, owned a derived existence. ' As the Father hath life in Himself, so He hath given the Son to have life in Himself.' l But there were two great differences: (1) that the Son, according to Church 1 S. John v. 26. io6 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH doctrine, was of the same Divine nature as the Father, no less Divine than He; and (2) that His existence was eternal. Gnosticism, on the other hand, required that the intermediary beings should not be of the same character as the First Principle from which they emerged; they were there on purpose to conceal by a number of successive steps the difference of nature between God and the world. As to the other point there was less agreement, and though some would seem to have admitted the idea of time into their account of the emanations, others would regard the process as eternal. Of course, when men began to think about the nature of the Son of God, a term would be wanted to express His derivation from the Father. Tertullian deliberately adopts from the Gnostic vocabulary the word TrpofioXr] or prolatio, 1 and maintains the possibility of using it without heretical associations. But the title the Son of God naturally suggested the use of the word generation (yeVi/^ov?), and this brought the language of the Church in close contact with Platonism. These terms, then, and especially the last, become part of the regular language of the Church, and as the fact they have to describe is new in the annals of thought, they require to be cleared from associations heretical, philo- sophical, popular. It is true that Origen had expressly used the expression ' The Son is eternally generated,' 2 and had thus marked the fact that the Son is co-eternal with the Father, but the point had been but slightly discussed until the rise of Arianism. In the beginning of the fourth century the ques- tion was seriously brought up. Arius, a parish priest in Alex- andria, was strongly moved to reaction against Sabellianism : and was anxious at all costs to maintain the separate person- ality of the Son of God. Having been trained in the dialectic which was characteristic of the school of Antioch, he formed his theory of the nature of Christ by a logical analysis of the 1 Tert., Adv. Prax. c. viii. 2 Orig., Horn, in Jerem. ix. 4 ad fin. RISE OF ARIANISM 107 word Son. A son, he argued, comes into existence after his father ; there must have been a time when the father existed, and the son did not ; that is part of the essence of the idea of sonship. If this, then, be applied to the Son of God, it will follow that the Father existed alone, that then He formed the Son by an act of creation ; that therefore the Son came into being in time, and in fact is not eternal or Divine in any real sense. He is superior to all other creatures, and was used as God's instrument in their creation ; high things may be said of Him, and high prerogatives belong to Him, by the will of God ; but He is not God ; He is not even free from the possibility of moral fall. This was the context of Arius's first utterance of his views, and this was the starting-point of the whole discussion. Various efforts were made by different parties to modify the extreme Arian position in a direction which might suit the followers of S. Athanasius. We have not space to set them all down here ; they can be found in any history covering the period : the point for us is to see why and how the Church found this account of Christ intolerable. It was very difficult, in the first place, to reconcile it with the language of Scripture taken as a whole. The Arians had certainly a number of proof-texts, which are discussed at length by S. Athanasius in his Orations against the Arians. 1 But the whole tenor of Scripture was in the opposite direction. Secondly, the Arian position was in flat contradiction to the sense of the Church as expressed in the worship of the Son of God. Through the Son of God Incarnate prayers to the Father became possible, as to which there was no fear of error or lack of efficacy. Before Christ's tune, men had 1 Some of them would not strike us, perhaps, as relevant at all. Thus a large portion of the second of the Orations is devoted to the discussion of Prov. viii. 22. ' The Lord possessed me (i.e. the Divine Wisdom) in the beginning of His way, before His works of old.' The LXX. read ' created me ' instead of io8 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH prayed rather in hopes of reaching the ears of some power who would listen and help them; but for prayer in Christ's name there was not hope but certainty. And this certainty depended absolutely upon our Lord's unity of nature with the Father. Were He less than the true Son of God, the prayers of men through Him might be as completely mis- directed as any others offered up in ignorance. This is the meaning of the accusation which we meet with in S. Athanasius, 1 and in many other writers, 2 that the Arians were idolaters. They placed on a level with God one who was, on their own confession, merely a creature. What could idolatry do more ? Thirdly, they applied to God the notions which belong to time. They subjected the generation of the Son by the Father to the laws which are derived from ordinary human experience, and forgot that these are involved in the conditions in which man is placed. Bound up as he is with change and decay, his life begins and ends in time. But to apply this to the nature of God is to say that He begins by being incomplete, and grows by degrees and in time into completion. 3 These are some of the arguments with which S. Athanasius endeavours to exhibit the fatal errors of the Arian position. He does not deny their logic, he does not deny that the idea of Sonship contains what they find in it ; but he deprecates the application of this notion with all the inferences which may be logically drawn from it, in a region where they are so fatally out of place. It is to mark the limitations with which all words expressive of derivation of nature must be used that the expression ' of one substance with the Father ' was added to the Creed. And it means that no accounts of the Son which fall short of absolute equality in all points which are involved in the notion of Divinity can be tolerated 1 Or. c. Ar., I. ch. 8. a Cf. Petav., De Trin ., ii. xii. 3 Or. c. Ar., I. ch. 28. FAILURE OF ARIANISM 109 in the Christian Creed. The Church adopted one side of an exhaustive disjunction Christ must be either God or not; the whole Christian system and consciousness affirmed that He was God. Perhaps the most serious of all the Arian inferences from the original premiss was this, that the Son of God was capable of moral fall. It is worth while to deal specially with this point, however briefly, because on rather different grounds it has become a somewhat popular notion in the present day. How, it is asked, can the example of Christ be of any use to us, if He was incapable of sin, when we are not? The value of an example depends on similarity of conditions ; such a wide dissimilarity makes all relation im- possible between His case and ours. This view, though not always consciously based on an Arian theory of our Lord's nature, is likely to lead to something very like it. It implies that Christ's life and death are really only an example that He is on a par with any one of the heroic souls who have lived in the past, whose principles and practice deserve our imitation. It leaves wholly out of sight the fact that Christ's life and death and resurrection are a permanent source of strength to those who by baptism are made members of Him. The latter aspect of Christ's work (to which we shall return when we come to treat of the Atonement) absolutely demands His impeccability. It can be but a small gain for us to be endowed with the spirit and the power of one no stronger than ourselves ; it makes all the difference to be endowed with the invincible Spirit of God, who in the life of Jesus Christ has already overcome human temptations like our own. If it is only an example that is required, the difference between sinfulness and im- peccability would go far to make Christ's character useless to us for this purpose. And what is more, such an example would be rendered still more useless by the remoteness of i io INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH its date, and the unlikeness to anything modern of the out- ward circumstances of our Lord's life. 1 The next difficulty which appeared in this region of doctrine was that associated with the name of Apollinaris. The originator of this theory, who was a man of consider- able learning and position, was impelled in the direction of false speculation by his violent aversion to Arianism. So determined was he to insist upon the Divinity of Christ that he allowed it to modify the completeness of the humanity. He maintained that the intellect of man was tainted by the Fall, that consequently Christ could not adopt it, but that He had instead the indwelling of the Divine Logos. Together with this he asserted that our Lord's flesh was not ordinary human flesh, but that the divine substance was in some way converted into flesh, from which the taint of sin was absent. 2 It is not hard to see how fatal this theory of Christ's nature is to the practical aims of the Incarnation, as we understand them. What we have already said about our Lord's im- peccability applies with twofold force here. The example and the power of a person who has not even human capacities, who is simply the Divine Son with an appearance of a human body and an incomplete human soul, would indeed be valueless so far as the renewal of life is concerned. 3 Yet there is a real difficulty raised by Apollinarianism. The Fall certainly affected the whole of man's nature and impaired the effectiveness of all his powers. He is not to be saved by intellectual self-development, as the Greeks were apt to think; for the intellect has its own peculiar wrongness and distortion, for which the hereditary taint in man's nature is responsible. How is Christ, then, to take 1 Cf. Church Quarterly Review for July 1883. Art. "Our Lord's Human Example. " 2 C 8. Ath., c. Apoll. I. ii. 3 Cf. S. Ath., Ep. ad Epict. ch. vi. and vii. APOLLIN ARIANISM 1 1 1 these powers? How is He to accept conditions in which sin seems ingrained and permanent ? It is to be noted, of course, that the mischief is conceived as being a departure from the ideal, not inherent in the nature or the powers of man. The difficulty is that the evil touches all men just as if it were essential, because, in S. Paul's language, all men sinned and are short of the Glory of God. The answer to this difficulty is the Catholic doctrine of our Lord's Immaculate Conception. It is true that there is no possi- bility of raising ourselves from the state of original sin into the other higher state. ' That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.' There is no passage between the two realms by way of mere evolu- tion. But Christ cut off the entail of corruption. He was conceived by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary. He intro- duced a new strain and a new series of possibilities into human life. He was, in S. Paul's phrase, the Last Adam, the originator of a new line of descendants, ' born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.' l Hence the humanity which He took was fully and perfectly human, but human without taint or suggestion of sin. In Him it corresponded to the ideal, if we may say so, which God had before Him at the creation; it was not the corrupt and degraded humanity with which sin has made us familiar. But it was a real and complete humanity, not falling short in any particular from that of any other person, save that it was wholly free from sin and from the possibility of sin. And the value of His redemption, in one aspect of it, lay in the fact that He took the whole nature of man, and wore it sinlessly : to except the intellect would be to leave the intellect outside the pale of His redemption. In this connexion we may perhaps make a few remarks upon a point which frequently causes difficulty viz. the 1 S. John L 13. 112 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH liability of our Lord to sickness and pain. Pain and sick- ness, it is argued, are a part of the distortion and misery which result from the presence of sin, so that if our Lord, in His humanity, were subject to these in any way, it would really imply that His human nature was touched by sin. As regards pain, the argument proceeds upon a confusion between sin and its consequences. That Christ accepted and suffered in His own person some of the consequences of sin is of the very essence of the Atonement, but this does not carry with it any sinful taint. A person who is forgiven, whose sins have been absolved, may still be unable to avoid the physical consequences of the sin he has committed; they do not, therefore, imply that he is in a state of sin. Christ had never been capable of sin, but He came into a world where it and its consequences were in full sway. If, therefore, He was to live really amongst men without marked external differences, He could but take upon Him their conditions unchanged, and, though sinless, bear what was in them the consequence of sin. There is some considerable difference between the case of pain and that of sickness. Sickness always involves derange- ment of the body in itself, and this may be due to various causes. Frequently these causes arise from within, such as negligence or excess, and the like. These could have no place in our Lord's nature. Further, His desire to pass through the utmost of human pain and sorrow would neces- sarily be limited by the needs of His ministry. He could not suffer Himself to be disabled. The pains, therefore, which we read of His suffering are such as hunger and weariness, which arise in the body as normally constituted in the existing state of things, or such as were inflicted by external violence. 1 These were simply the result of His entering a world, constituted physically and morally as ours is at the present, and they were involved, and must have been 1 S. Thorn. Aq., Summa, Para 3 a , Qusest. xiv. Art. 4. NESTORIANISM 113 foreseen as involved, in the act of His self-emptying. It is not necessary, nor would it have been possible, that our Lord should anticipate the experience of each individual There is a sense in which the Church carries on His experience, and fills up that which is lacking in His suffer- ings. And we must always keep in view that He came to present Humanity before God in its ideal form, although the sin of others caused such grievous limitations in this presentation. What is vitally necessary is that His human experience should be real and normal, i.e. that it should be the experience of one really living under human conditions, not necessarily bearing our sicknesses in the literal sense of the terms. And this we have seen that it was. We now come to Nestorianism, The theories we have been discussing have been highly speculative : the one result- ing from the application of logic beyond its province, the other from a peculiar theory as to the nature of man. Nes- torianism comes from a school characterized by literal interpretation of Scripture. At Alexandria, from time im- memorial, interpretation had been governed by the principles of allegory. An author was supposed, as a rule, to have some further meaning, not upon the surface, which insight and allegorizing could extract. This method was applied not only to Holy Scripture, but also (with remarkable results) to the Homeric poems. On the other hand, at Antioch a school of interpreters arose, whose chief aim it was to present the literal interpretation of the passage under discussion. The greatest name in the Alexandrine school is that of Origen, the greatest name in the school of Antioch is that of S. Chrysostom. The result of the previous controversies has been to maintain the reality of two natures in our Lord's person, but nothing has been said as to the mode of their cohesion. It is this problem which must now occupy our attention. 8 114 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH The first attempt at its solution was made by Nestorius, a Syrian from Antioch, who became Archbishop of Con- stantinople in the year 428 A.D. A sermon was preached before him by a priest named Anastasius, in which it was asserted that the title Mother of God (CO'TOKO?) was not rightly given to the Blessed Virgin, seeing that the Divinity of our Lord was impassible (incapable of suffering) and un- changeable. The truth, he asserted, would be attained by saying that she was the Mother of the Man Jesus. This sermon was attacked as being heretical, but the Archbishop defended it, basing his defence on the practice of Scripture, by which human characteristics are not predicated of our Lord as God. Let us take these utterances, he might have argued, literally and simply as they stand, and refer them without discussion to that nature to which they apparently belong. 1 Under pressure, Nestorius seems to have gone further than this, and to have said that there were two personalities present in the Incarnate One the personality of the Divine Word, and the human personality of Jesus and that these two were united by a temporary link. This opinion seems to have been originated by Theodore of Mopsuestia. More even than usual on such occasions, the controversy was embittered by passion, and the overbearing behaviour of S. Cyril of Alexandria resulted in a schism of the Eastern Church, which has lasted on into the present day. There are still Christians called Nestorian in the remoter regions of Syria, though it is said that they have almost entirely forgotten the points of doctrine which separated them from Catholic unity. Apart from these disastrous consequences, the controversy was a very serious one. It necessitated a review of the method of literal interpretation ; it touched nearly the whole question of Redemption. As to the former point, there was 1 Cf. Baur, Lehre von der Drdeinigkeit, Bd. I. p. 698. COM MU NIC A TIO IDIOM A TUM 1 1 5 no formal decision, but it is significant that the allegorical method reigned supreme thenceforward throughout the Church till the Eeformation, Nicholas de Lyra being almost the only exception. It has become clear, at any rate, that single passages cannot be isolated as if they were alone in the world, and have their meaning decided without reference to other possibly qualifying passages. The Bible must, after all, be interpreted according to the analogy of the faith. A lesson like this we may well learn from the Nestorian con- troversy and its antecedents. But the great importance of the discussion lies in its bearing on the Redemption. To accept the theory of the Nestorians as to the twofold personality of Christ would be to abolish the whole of the redemptive scheme. For the premisses of Nestorianism involve the conclusion that the experiences of the man Jesus were not necessarily those of the Word of God; that, for instance, the death upon the Cross was not the act of the Word of God, who could not suffer in this way, but simply of the man with whom the Word of God was for the time linked. But the virtue and efficacy of Christ's Cross consist in the fact that the Son of God Himself entered upon human conditions (in a way which must remain finally mysterious to us), and did for us men, and for our salvation, suffer, die, and lie in the grave. The separation of the two natures, still more the suggestion of two personalities, is therefore absolutely destructive of the simplest convictions of Christians. It is in itself, of course, an intellectual speculation, and therefore might be supposed to have no very intimate connexion with the practical questions of life ; but if it be accepted as true, it ceases to be possible to hold rationally and consistently a belief in the saving efficacy of Christ's death. The answer of the Church is to be found in the assertion of what is called technically the communicat'io idiomatum or Ii6 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH avriSoa-is, which we may perhaps translate ' the interchange of properties.' This means that Christians, recognizing the singleness of the personality of Christ, and at the same time the indissoluble union of the Humanity with this one Divine Person, are at liberty to use expressions properly belonging to one nature only, of the Person who as Incarnate possesses both. 1 This does not mean, and must not be understood as implying, any change in the Divine nature, such as would degrade it within the limits of human characteristics; nor does it mean that the humanity was in any way radically altered so as to be virtually something higher than humanity in the ordinary sense. But both natures, present in their fulness of special characteristics, were so united in the One Divine Person, that the life and experience which followed upon their union was one thing the life and experience of the One Person, to whom both natures belonged not merely two parallel and virtually independent lines of life and activity. The questions which flow out from this doctrine are far too numerous and abstruse to be fully discussed here. To some, partial solutions may be found, others are involved in impenetrable mystery. But this, at least, is not so mysterious, that the redemptive efficacy of Christ's death depends on its being, in Hooker's language, the death of the Son of God. We may not fully know why this was necessary, still less how it was possible, but the doctrine of the communicatio idiomaticm is intended to preserve the fact, and of that there is no doubt whatever. As in the other controversies of which we have spoken a real issue was raised which has importance still. The Nestorian discussion brings up the question of the Kenosis, 1 Whereupon it followeth against Nestorius, that no person was born of the Virgin but the Son of God, no person but the Sou of God baptized, the Son of God condemned, the Son of God and no other person crucified. Hooker, Eccl. Pol, Bk. V. Ki 3. THE KEN6SIS 117 as it is called, that is, the self-emptying of the Son of God, the meaning and extent of His self-humiliation. 1 It is im- portant not to pass it by, for there are methods of dealing with it, which have recently become popular, which practi- cally result in Nestorianism. And this, as may have been seen, is a serious danger. The difficulty arises in modern times in the following way. Together with much that is negative and anti- Christian in the intellectual developments of our time, there is also a strong desire for reality in religion. This temper of mind finds itself in close affinity with all that is human in our Lord. The idea of a human Friend affords an emotional satisfaction which does not flow from the thought of the majesty of God. Hence a continually increasing emphasis comes to be laid upon the reality of our Lord's human characteristics His Jimitations, His sorrows, His weakness during the days of His flesh until the contrast between these and the Divine power, which is often sup- posed to be displayed exclusively in the miracles, almost amounts to a distinction of personality between the Son of man and the Son of God. The forms of expression which this point of view receives are, of course, widely different from those of the ancient heresy, but the difficulty is the same, and the danger of it is no less vital. 2 The thought that in and through all these sorrows and limitations the Divine glory is manifested, is no less mysterious than it was, and no easier to keep constantly in view. But it is true, at the same time, that the integrity of the faith demands that the reality and simultaneous presence of both natures in the life of Christ must be held fast. The point of view we have just mentioned gains counten- ance from the extreme difficulty of attempting to explain in 1 Cf. Phil. ii. 7 (R.V.) 2 Cf. Bright, Sermon at the Cuddesdon Festival, 1891, p. 15. ii8 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH what way the two natures affect one another in combination, yet remain without any essential change. In the fifth cen- tury the problem appeared most trying in connexion with the birth and the early years of our Lord. ' The child of two or three months old, I cannot call God,' said Nestorius. The modern discussion has arisen chiefly in connexion with our Lord's human knowledge. That man's knowledge is limited hardly needs saying. It is limited within the narrowest bounds. He has no certain knowledge of the future; his knowledge of the present depends upon the reports of his own senses and those of others ; for the past he depends upon his own memory and the stored-up contents of other people's experience. Also the universe is far wider than his knowledge can compass, at its best and with all the aid that centuries of progress have given it. He has to learn by questioning other men, and utilizing the experience of others where his own fails. These facts are true of man's knowledge at its best, as we have said, and certainly mean a great deal. In contrast with this the knowledge of God is conceived as complete. No fact that is in the created universe can possibly escape Him. He is the Cause; the world was set going through His word ; the various laws are of His devising, their effect must have been calculated, their result in combination foreseen. Even the human will enters into the complex of physical laws, and its effect must lie, as we shall see, within the range of the foreknowledge of God. To the mind of God, if we may so say, the beginning and the end of the world of the whole scheme of creation are simultaneously present. He is omniscient, by virtue of His nature as Creator of all things. Such knowledge as this, we must believe, belonged to the Word of God from all eternity, and yet, without losing any of the Divine characteristics, the same Word of God entered into the narrow conditions of humanity and became flesh. OUR LORD'S HUMAN KNOWLEDGE 119 What can be the meaning of such a condescension ? What its nature ? How can such a knowledge be veiled under human conditions? Various answers have been suggested to these problems. Thus it has been maintained that upon those occasions when our Lord asked questions implying ignorance, or definitely affirmed that He was ignorant of the judgment day, He was feigning a condition which did not actually exist, for the benefit of His Disciples. This view, which is expressed in the least qualified way by Ephraem Syrus, and is to be found not infrequently in many ancient writers, seems to have a Docetic air about it. 1 It is difficult not to feel a certain suspicion that ignorance to these writers was of the nature of sin, and that, therefore, they felt the need of explaining it away at all costs. The Platonist philosophy would offer an analogous case, in which the limitations of knowledge, connected as they were with the existence of the material body, would be closely associated with the notion of evil. Or again, it has been said that Christ possessed all knowledge as it were in possibility, but that He did not realize it in a discursive form : that is, that He knew absolutely all the principles and laws which keep the universe in existence, but that He did not perpetually carry this knowledge out into all its details. It is difficult to estimate such a theory as this, because, however ingenious it may be, however fully it may seem to satisfy some of the conditions of the problem, it does not make it easier to understand how two kinds of consciousness can have been present at one time in one Person. But perhaps it will be best for us to turn to the accounts of Christ's life, and ask what intellectual phenomena we find there. In the first place, we have the definite statement 1 Cf. above, p. 99. 120 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH by S. Luke that our Lord grew 'in wisdom as well as in stature,' and in corroboration, as it were, of this, our Lord's own disclaimer as to the date of the day of judgment. ' The day and the hour knoweth no man, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.' Then, secondly, we find our Lord asking questions as though He were ignorant. Thus He says to those who come to take Him at Gethsemane, ' Whom seek ye ? ' He asks S. Peter, ' Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, am ? ' There are other similar cases which we need not quote in full. These were discussed at length by ancient commentators, and it is for this reason that we mention them here, for they do not seem to be of very decisive importance. They may easily be explained out of the circumstances of the case, and are obviously used to excite the attention of those to whom our Lord was speaking. 1 They do not, of necessity, imply ignorance in our Lord, any more than similar questions would amongst ourselves. Thirdly, our Lord uses the language and the circle of ideas of the people among whom He chose to dwell. He speaks of God making His sun to rise upon the just and upon the unjust, and draws from this certain lessons as to forgiveness. He accepts the popular belief that men can be and are possessed by evil spirits; and in one place He seems to adopt the notion that such spirits haunt diy and desert places. 'When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he (i.e. the spirit) goeth about in dry places seeking rest, and findeth none.' Again he uses the Old Testament Scriptures in a way which would appeal to those with whom He talked, but which requires a certain amount of effort on our part to understand fully. A case in point is to be found in S. John x. 34, where he uses the phrase 1 A case in which the question probably implied ignorance of the ordinary human kind, would be that to Martha, ' Where have ye laid him ? ' S. John li. 34. OUR LORD'S HUMAN KNOWLEDGE 121 in the Psalms, 1 ' I said, Ye are gods,' as an argument to show that His own claims to be divine were not blasphemous or contrary to the intention of Scripture. Also, our Lord uses the then current views as to the authorship of the Books of the Old Testament views, it may be remarked, which have been current ever since, till the rise of the criticism of the last few years. It must not be sup- posed that all these three things the constitution of the physical world, possession by evil spirits, and the ancient views as to the Old Testament Scriptures involve questions which are the same in kind, and stand or fall together. But the three subjects have this in common, that in all of them, if our Lord had attempted to correct the popular view by what many consider a truer one, He would have gratuitously placed a serious additional obstacle in the way of His mission. It seems to be a popular conviction in some circles, that if our Lord had only spent some time in correcting ancient mistakes and settling some of the problems which vex us, our age might have been spared much of its intel- lectual difficulty. Supposing that this contention be true as regards ourselves, it sadly ignores the intellectual position of those among whom Christ spent His life, to whom, therefore, His first appeal was made. And there is an element of nineteenth-century pride in it, as if our education had made us more worth saving than the Jews. This is indeed the only ground upon which we can allow ourselves even to wish that Christ's plan had been different, and it is a mistaken ground. The object of Clirist was a moral revolution, and for this purpose a mere addition to our knowledge, critical or scientific, would be really irrelevant. 1 Ps. Ixxxii. 6. If the ordinary interpretation of this Psalm be the true one, viz. that it is a denunciation of unrighteous judges, modern critics would not feel justified in basing a direct argument upon the word ' gods. ' Although it emphasizes the loftiness of the position of a judge, it means directly nothing but 'judges.' 122 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH The scheme of salvation appeals to the moral constitution of men, an element of sameness which underlies all differences of intellectual endowment. There was, then, a definite reason, intelligible to us after the event, why Christ should not have attempted, if He had wished it, to alter popular views on these points. But now let us turn to the opposite side, and inquire what signs He displayed of a knowledge more than human. First, we have the definite assertion that ' He did not trust Himself to men,' and needed no information as to their character, ' for He Himself knew what was in man.' And in confirmation of this statement we have the various cases in which special insight was shown, e.g. with S. Peter, the Syrophoenician woman, the rich young man, and so on. 1 Secondly, there was a power of direct prevision, displayed especially in regard of the circumstances of the death which our Lord anticipated. Under this head we may also place the words spoken to Nathanael at his call in S. John i. 47-51. Lastly, there come the eschatological discourses, bearing on the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the world. It is in connexion with the latter that our Lord makes His definite denial as to the day of judgment. The simplest method with all these is to attribute them to the glowing and affectionate historical imagination of the Apostles. The occasions when peculiar insight was displayed can then be explained as unusually striking cases of discernment, and those in which there is an apparent ignorance can be re- garded as naturally characteristic of a man. But this is somewhat too simple, if the twofold nature of Christ be held as true. The maintenance of this doctrine makes it necessary to deal more cautiously, and ask whether the 1 The case of Judas involves further considerations than those of mere knowledge of character, for instance, the determining power of predestination (cf. S. John vi. 70, 71). We cannot enter upon these here. THE KEN6SIS 123 manifestations described do not naturally fit in, as a whole, with the Catholic theory of our Lord's nature. The accept- ance of this theory will be found to involve a reserve of power on our Lord's part. First of all, the Son of God, when He came to the earth, did nothing which could alter His essential nature. Being in the form of God before, He so remained. What He did do, was to lay down for the purposes of the Incarnation those attributes of glory which, as equal to the Father, He had of right. He divested Himself of all external signs (if the expression may be allowed) of Godhead, and was found in fashion as a man. As Word of God we believe that He created and sustains the world: the world was sustained by the Word no less during the days of the humiliation. 1 In some sense, therefore, though fully Incarnate in Judaea at a certain time, the worlds still de- pended upon His activity, which was there (or they would have ceased to be), but veiled and unadorned. Further, throughout the narrative of the Passion we see that it involved, as it were, a continuous effort of repression. Pilate has no power over his Prisoner that he can call his own, it is given to him from on high. Were it necessary, more than twelve legions of angels would be at His command. These and other similar utterances imply a conscious reserve of power, which is characteristic of the whole history of the Incarnation. Though conscious and voluntary it does not cease to be painful, as is shown by the great agony in the garden, and the passage of violent emotion which follows upon the visit of the Greeks, 'Father, save Me from this hour : but for this cause came I unto this hour.' There is thus a conscious and voluntary reserve passing through the 1 Cf. S. Ath., de Inc., ch. viii. 1, and the old hymn ' Verbum supermini prodiens Nee Patris linquens dexteram.' 124 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH whole life of Christ, occasionally relieved, as at the Trans- figuration, or in the words to the penitent thief, but con- stantly and persistently renewed. May we not use the analogy of these cases in connexion with our Lord's knowledge as man ? May we not think of a conscious and voluntary reserve here also of an ignorance as real as the Death upon the Cross was real as the adoption of humanity was real ? Such an ignorance would not touch His Divinity, any more than the pain of the Passion penetrated so as to alter the Divine substance. And it would not be feigned or illusory, any more than the Passion was a mere shadow without reality. The knowledge of all things which belongs to Him as God, would be like the twelve legions of angels, ready at His command, but not summoned before Him. But there is a question arising here which must be considered. Can this reserve apply to cdl the knowledge of the Son of God ? and, if not, to what kind of knowledge must we restrict it ? At first sight this seems to be an im- possible question, one, perhaps, which ought not to be asked. But some little reflection will show us that there is light enough to ask and to answer it by, sufficiently for our purpose. We have already had occasion to notice that our Lord, even though really tempted, was incapable of sin ; to allow that a sinful desire found welcome in His soul would be to deny His Divinity. 1 There can have been no such sympathy with evil in the consciousness of the Son of God. Is there, then, any portion of the Divine knowledge the loss of which from Christ's consciousness would mean an infringe- ment of His Divinity? Certainly there is. That Christ .should at any moment of His life have lost the consciousness 1 The suggestion of evil from without does not necessarily carry with it the sympathy of the soul, and it is only when the soul sympathizes that temptation involves actual sin. THE KENOSIS 125 of His unity with the Father would have this result. And we have already pointed out that our Lord alleges this conscious- ness of unity with the Father as one prominent assurance as to His mission. ' My witness is true, because I know whence I came and whither I go.' ' The Son doeth nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing.' And closely allied to this is the knowledge of good and evil. The constant sense of communion with the Father, which we have seen to be a necessary part of Christ's knowledge, would inevitably carry with it moral insight. That Christ should be mistaken in a moral judgment or in a moral precept is simply a contra- diction. This point, which would seem fairly obvious, may help us to mark distinctions in the various objects of man's knowledge, and the probable relation of our Lord to them. In the first place, there is no moral insight involved in such facts as the earth's motion and the like. Such subjects are moral only by accident. A person whose duty it is to investigate them may succeed or fail morally, according as he uses his powers ; and then the degree of truth or error in his convictions is an index of the degree in which he has done his duty. If Sir Isaac Newton had gone on contentedly holding the opinions which satisfied his predecessors, it would have meant that his life was a moral failure ; his business, his vocation, was to find out such things. But the truths he discovers do not in themselves imply or demand any par- ticular moral state. Over all this region, therefore, we can perfectly understand that Christ might use the reserve which we find Him using in analogous cases. The critical questions of authorship of the Old Testament books, etc., of which we have recently heard so much, do not stand quite on the same footing. It is vehemently contended by some that the only intelligible motive assignable for a false claim to the name of an author is that of deliberate intention to deceive. The book so inscribed is a forgery in precisely the same sense as 126 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH the Isidorian Decretals. On the other hand, it is argued that many of the Old Testament books e.g. the Pentateuch and the Psalms grew into their present shape gradually, bearing the names respectively of the founder of Jewish law and Jewish poetry, just as many later laws in Athens were ascribed to Solon. This process would not imply any bad faith, but would simply be one of the natural acts of a people in that stage of cultivation in which we find the Jews. It would mean that a single commanding figure had absorbed the whole memory of a people : that in the perspective of history the successive members of a series had been merged. 1 Much depends, of course, upon the alternative adopted. If we take the former, and decide that all these false ascriptions can be due only to deliberate forgery, it certainly becomes difficult to understand how our Lord used the customary titles. If, however, we follow the other view, the question of authorship falls at once into the category of scientific facts, which ordinary scientific intelligence must discuss a category with regard to which Christ might have been expected to exercise His reserve of knowledge. Thirdly, we come to the question of the possession by evil spirits. Here a claim is made on the part of science. It is argued that in this matter also Christ was only using the ordinary phraseology of His time ; that diseases which we now place under the head of hysteria, hypochondria, lunacy, etc., were then ascribed to the direct agency of evil spirits ; and that, according to His usual plan, Christ made no attempt to change the popular conviction. 1 It would still, we think, be necessary to believe that Moses existed, and was inspired to be the founder of Jewish law ; and that David existed, and was inspired to be the founder of Jewish poetry. For this is not merely a literary question. Unless we take leave of the Gospel narrative altogether, we cannot deny that Christ represented Judaism as a special preparation upon the field of history, for Himself. A series of un embodied literary ideals is not a historical preparation. In any cases, therefore, where questions of authorship can be shown to involve the whole character of Judaism and its relation to Christ, we cannot be satisfied with a merely literary discussion of them. EVIL SPIRITS 127 Of course, there is no theoretical objection to applying this principle in this case, provided it be certain that there is no such difference in it compared with the others as will render the application of the rule misleading. But it is by no means clear that this is so. The existence of the Evil One and of spirits of evil is not altogether a matter for the scientific understanding to verifiy. It is in large measure a moral question. I. Every man is conscious in a more or less degree of temptations that is, of positive incitements to evil. These may be explained in two ways either as the suggestions of our own lower nature, or as provocations from without In the first case, we ourselves are the whole and sole cause of the suggestion ; for the motions of the lower nature are just as much ours as those of the higher. We cannot, as Aristotle observed, make ourselves responsible for our good actions only. It is plain that if this be so, temptation cannot occur to us without a certain degree of sinful acquiescence ; we are tempted when we give ear to the suggestions of the lower part of ourselves. On the other hand, there is in moral natures of a powerful kind a firm conviction of violent struggle, not only with the lower part of self, but with a mighty and masterful will. It is doubtless true that a consciousness akin to this occurs in persons of a nervous and hysterical temperament ; but it stands in their case to the conviction of a saint, as sentimentality stands to constant love. And we believe that the conviction of a struggle with a masterful will increases rather than diminishes in proportion to the strength and acuteness of the character, so that in a mind enlightened by perpetual communion with the Father, and incapable of producing suggestions of evil from within, it reaches a point at which no doubt could be possible. II. In nature also, there are certainly signs of a wrong influence at work ; not merely of a feeble realization of the 128 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH laws of being, but of positive ruin and evil. To attribute all this to the action of God would be profane, to the action of man would be impossible. A third possibility remains, therefore, one which has the authority of Scripture upon its side, as well as a large body of human belief, that an evil spirit is at work in the world as well as in the secret chambers of the heart, to whom some at any rate of the evil in nature is due. The whole subject is profoundly mysterious and obscure, the one thing which is clear about it being this, that the existence of the Evil One, and of those spirits who follow his lead, is a question which none of our senses can settle ; it must depend upon the exercise of those powers in us which enable us to distinguish physical and moral evil. If these contentions be held valid, it would follow that our Lord in ascribing certain physical ailments to the direct agency of evil spirits, and not others, and in revealing the history of His own Temptation, must not be regarded merely as adopting current phraseology, but as really exercising His own moral insight. The difference between this point of view and that of science might possibly be settled by an extension of our scientific knowledge ; some of the cases now assigned to merely physical causes may, hereafter, be allowed to be manifestations of the powers of darkness. 1 This digression has been rendered necessary by the prevalence of the peculiar form of Nestorianism of which we spoke above. The result of it may be expressed shortly as follows : The necessity of insisting upon the twofold nature of our Lord becomes plainer on reflection, even if the mode of it remains obscure. Certain points of departure are given us by the Gospel records, which develope into something like 1 There is a certain risk in resting with any confidence on the evidence of Spiritualists. But it may be fairly said that the investigations of recent years have made the doctrine in the text more, rather than less probable. THE MONOTHELITE CONTROVERSY 129 principles when expressed in full We learn at any rate to restrict the freedom with which we ascribe merely human characteristics to our Lord, to restrict it according to the standard of the powers and attributes which belong neces- sarily to One who is in the form of God. There remain two phases of the discussion upon our Lord's person and nature which we must deal with, though they have less direct interest for the present day. The first is Eutychianism. This was a heresy into which a monk called Eutyches fell in consequence of the violence of his reaction from Nestorianism. So convinced was he that our Lord was essentially one person, that he felt driven to deny the duality of the natures, and to assert that there was no real humanity. It was no doubt a difficult position which the Church had to maintain, and is said to have been complicated by the poverty of the Syriac tongue, which did not distin- guish accurately between nature and person; but there is no doubt that Eutychianism meant virtually a return to Docetic ways of thought. It brought with it all the evil consequences which we have already described : it destroyed the whole significance of the Incarnation. The last controversy with which we need concern ourselves here is that concerning the presence in Christ of two wills, a Divine and human will. Of all the discussions which have arisen in the field of Theology, this has more than any the air of being merely a matter of quibbling distinctions. It seems so impossible and presumptuous to attempt to decide upon a question reaching so far back into the consciousness of One whose mode of being no human mind can fully fathom. But in spite of this appearance of arbitrariness and presumption it- will be found to involve a real issue. The question turns on the constitution of the human nature, and this, it will be remembered, was to be redeemed by regeneration. Does the completeness of human nature involve the possession of a 9 130 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH human will, or may the will be regarded as an essential part of the personality, which (in the case of Christ) we know to have been Divine ? Put in this way there can be but one answer. Human nature in its completeness carries with it the possession of a human will. If a Divine person adopts human nature in its completeness it is, to use the technical phrase, an impersonal humanity which He adopts, but not a humanity without a will. Moreover, the will is the seat of all the decisive movements which conversion and regeneration involve ; and if Christ had not a human will, the human will as a whole would fall outside His redemptive activity. He redeems by assuming the human nature, and He redeems the humanity which He assumes. If, therefore, it is but a maimed and partial humanity which He takes, His redemptive effect will be maimed and partial. If it be asked why will and not personality is to be regarded as essential to human nature, the answer is that directly personality appears the human nature becomes individual it is the humanity of A or B ; but will is one of the powers which belong to all men indifferently it is part of the general character of a human being. 1 We have passed through very shortly some of the points of controversy which exercised the minds of Churchmen during the first five centuries of the history of the Church. 1 There are many objections to the phrase 'an impersonal humanity.' It suggests a kind of abstract idea of man lying untenanted, and adopted by a Divine Person, and it is obvious that it opens the door to scholasticism of an unduly technical sort. But the phrase is convenient, and with explanations may well be retained. It marks the distinction which is certainly real between the individual and the common or universal elements in a given man. The Ego of each individual is in some sense separate and peculiar : the powers which the Ego uses in life are similar in each, and gain individuality by the various uses made of them in different cases. The doctrine we have to preserve is that the Word of God entered into possession of all the human powers which any man can have, and that, in spite of all the avenues for temptation which these supply, He lived without fall. How this happened no man can tell : but it is possible to preserve the truth required (without any implication of a dogmatic theory of personality) by the use of this phrase. INFERENCES FROM THE INCARNATION 131 We have seen by this means how the facts stated simply and without explanation by the Apostles were gradually explained and defined. The dogmas thus formulated were necessary not in themselves, but by relation to the facts which they described. They tended to preserve intact the reality of those facts and the tremendous consequences of them in the moral and spiritual world. Each heresy arose by exaggera- tion of a truth, rather than by arbitrary and unhallowed speculation; and the act of the Church in condemning it recalled men to Scripture and Apostolic tradition and the rational harmony of the faith. We will set down the result so far as attained, and then proceed to point out some of the consequences of the Catholic position. Our result is this. The Word of God, eternally generated, and of one substance with the Father, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven and was made man ; He accepted humanity into indissoluble union with His Person in all its fulness and with its limitations, so far as these involved no essential change in the form of Godhead, which was His by nature. By His triumph over sin in our flesh we triumph too, by His ascension in His glorified humanity to the throne of the Father manhood returns into its right relation with God. It remains to point out certain results which follow from all this discussion. In treating of anthropomorphism in Chap. I. we were forced to admit that the human mind acting alone offers no criterion between true and false anthropo- morphism. We cannot, for lack of certain knowledge, say in what attributes man be regarded as resembling God, what attributes are merely human and must not be ascribed to Him. The Arian controversy has brought out one point clearly, that whenever human phrases are used to express to human minds facts about the Divine nature, they must be used apart from the form of time. Even such a fact as the 132 INCARNATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH generation of the Son must not be allowed the associations of time ; true though it be as a fact, the inferences which man would draw from it on his own level must be distinctly set aside. Secondly, the monophysite discussion, and those which led to it, brought before the world an idea which Greek philosophy had strangely neglected personality. The wholly new importance of each single human soul brought it to men's minds practically; the determinations of the Church upon the subject of our Lord's nature made men distinguish it intellectually from all the powers and activities of which it is the unity. 1 It is important to consider personality in two connexions the meaning of personality in God and in man. The former of these subjects will occupy our attention immedi- ately, as we consider the effect of the Incarnation upon the doctrine of God : the latter must be postponed till Chap V. The growth of doctrine, etc., and the consentient witness of Churches : S. Ign., as cited above, p. 102. S. Iren., adv. Hsereses, esp. Bk. iii. Vincentius Lerinensis, Com- monitorium adv. Hsereses. Gore, Roman Catholic Claims. The Logos-doctrine. Siegfried, Philo, pp. 317, 318. Harnack, Dogmen- geschichte, Bd. i. p. 66 (ed. i.) Westcott, Commentary on S. John's Gospel, Introd. p. xvi. ; Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, ch. ii. pp. 151-156. Cf. Gheyne, Bampton Lectures, p. 332. Sanday, Cont. Review, Oct. 1891. Bigg, Bampton Lectures, 1886. Hastings, Diet. of the Bible, art. Logos. The Discussion as to our Lord's twofold nature. Robertson's Church History, vols. i. ii. (ed. 1875). Bright, History of the Church, A.D. 313- 451. Hooker, Eccl. Pol., Bk. v. l.-lvii. S. Athanasius, Orationes adv. Arianos, I.-III. ; Id., c. Apollinarium ; Id., ad Epictetum. S. Cyril Alex., Ep. ii. ad Nest. ; c. Nest. libr. v. S. Leo, Tome to Flavian, Epp. lix. cxxiv. cxxxix. clxv. ; Canons of the Four Councils. S. John Dama- scene, De Duabus Voluntatibus. The Ken6sis. S. Iren., iii. 22, 2. S. Clem. Alex., Strom, vi. 9. Orig. in Matt. Comm., Tom. x. 14 ; De Princ., ii. 6, 2 ; Horn, in Jerem., i. 7 1 C S. John Dam., De Duabus Voluntatibus, chaps, iii. iv. xx. AUTHORITIES 133 8. S. Ath., Or. c. AT. iii., chaps, xlii.-lvii. Ephraem Syrus, 4. Comm, in Harm. Ev. ad Matt. xxiv. 36. S. Cyril Akx., Apol. adv. Theod. iv. p. 217 ; De Recta Fide, x. xi. S. Ambr., De Inc. vii. 71, 72. Fulgentius ad Trasim. i. 8. S. Jerome in Matt. xxiv. 36. S. John Dam., De Duab. Vol. 35-38. Leont. Byz., Adv. Incorr. (Mai, SpiciL x. p. 79). This passage connects ignorance with sin. S. Thorn. Aq., Summa, Pars 3 a , Quaest. ix.- xii. Petav., De Inc. xi. 1, 2. Liddon, Bampton Lectures, pp. 460-480 (ed. 1890). Gore, Bampton Lectures, Nos. vi. and vii. Swayne, Enquiry into the Nature of our Lord's Knowledge as Man. A. B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ. NOTE TO CHAPTER III. In the foregoing chapter the phrases ' fact ' and ' matter of fact ' have been continually used of the Incarnation, and it seems desirable to offer some explanation of this usage. It is not intended to deny that, in strictness, the assertion that ' the Son of God was Incarnate ' conveys rather a theological explanation of facts than the facts themselves on which the explanation is based. The phraseology is intended to call attention to the Apostolic habit of regarding their teaching about the Lord as a matter of testimony (/laprvpia). In ordinary language facts are said to rest on testimony, while explanations or theories of facts depend on speculation and reasoning. It is a different question whether the Apostles were justified in their practice, viz. the question of the historicity of the Incarnation. CHAPTEE IV THE EFFECT OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION UPON THE CONCEPTION OF GOD THE Christian doctrine of God is a form of Monotheism. Although Christians profess to believe in a Triune God a God who, though one, is yet three this view of the Divine nature stands in no relation whatever with Polytheism. Christianity, though it asserted the Divinity of our Lord quite early in its history, did not then incur the charge of Polytheism. The accusations with which the Acts have made us familiar turned upon the changes produced by Christianity in the customs which Moses delivered, in the Temple worship and the ceremonial law, and not at all upon Theology strictly so called. Again, S. Paul in his Epistles to the Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians, contrasts the faith which his converts have accepted with the following of idol-worship, as they had done in the past. His language implies that Christ is Divine, but he has no idea that this will in any way involve him in comparison with polytheistic worships. The Trini- tarian idea then, however formulated, arose in immediate connexion with the Monotheism of Judaea, as stern and unmodified a system as has ever prevailed in any place or time. The whole tendency to Polytheism, which had been strong among the Jews at an earlier day, had been eradicated from their consciousness since the Captivity, and THE LOGOS-DOCTRINE 135 their mind was full of contempt and hatred of the unen- lightened Gentiles who worshipped stocks and stones, among whom Polytheism flourished. The Trinitarian idea must be discussed, therefore, in close connexion with the Monotheism out of which it arose with which alone it has definite historical associations. The first question to be raised will be to ascertain how far the Hebrew Monotheism showed signs of a development in the direction of plurality of persons. The only facts which can be brought forward in this interest are those which we have already mentioned in another connexion the ideas of the Word and the Wisdom of God. It has been customary to allege as symptoms of Trinitarian tendency the plural name of God (Elohim) the expressions of deliberation in Genesis, Let us make man Let its go down and confound their language the appearance of three angels to Abraham, etc. But it seems difficult to regard any of these as decisive. The plural name may be either a survival from a polytheistic stage in the history of Judaism, or simply a plural of majesty. At any rate it is a bare plural ; the number is not defined. And the plural in the expressions of deliberation can hardly be pressed. It occurs in strongly anthropomorphic sur- roundings, and may possibly, therefore, be explained as a survival. The Alexandrine interpreters, such as Philo, interpreted the phrases of the powers of God, or the angels, and this has a certain measure of support among patristic commentators. The other case is more interesting, where the number three is definitely fixed. But it is difficult even there to lay great emphasis upon the number, since in similar cases with Lot, with Jacob, with Joshua and Manoah, the number of angelic visitors is different, being in Lot's case two, and in the others one. Justin Martyr, whose fixed principle of interpretation was that the Word was the medium of all the Old Testament revelations, explains these theo- 136 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD phanies as manifestations of the Word of God, giving various accounts of the different numbers. 1 Leaving, then, these plural expressions in the Old Testa- ment on one side, we ask whether the Doctrine of the Word and of the Wisdom of God may be held to lead up directly to a notion of plurality in the Godhead. Our answer must be conditional. The doctrine of the Word flourished in Alexandria, as we have already seen, and cannot be regarded as lending itself to plurality in the Godhead. It is rather a means of preserving the absolute unity of God without detaching Him from all contact with the material world. If it be true, then, that there is no specially Palestinian Logos-doctrine, we cannot use it without considerable diffi- culty as an indication of Trinitarian tendency. On the other hand, if, as some contend, the Palestinian Logos-doctrine involves a radically different conception of God from that of Alexandria, it is possible that there is in it a preparation for the Christian Theology. But we have omitted, of necessity, this special discussion (see note, page 98). It will be a simpler plan, therefore, to begin with Christi- anity at once, and, when we have stated its doctrine so far as may be, to trace its historical affinities and the various consequences which may be drawn from it. The Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity represents the effect of the Incarnation on the doctrine of the one God. If the Incarnation, in the Christian sense, be true, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is true also. For there is no break between them; they are parts of one and the same truth. Were it not for the Incarnation it might become a serious question whether we have or can have any such knowledge of the nature of God as Trinitarianism implies and demands. We must dwell on this point somewhat carefully. 1 Cf. Dial. c. Tryph. chs. 56-61. A similar method of explanation occurs in many other patristic writers. MAN'S POWER OF CONCEIVING GOD 137 The nature of God, it may be argued, so far transcends our possibilities of attainment, that though we may be certain or reasonably clear that He is, we cannot possibly enter into any definite details as to His character and attributes. A few moments' consideration will show that the value of this argument depends absolutely upon the attitude which we assume towards the doctrine of the Incarnation. If that be a vague and idle dream, we are in a state of drifting un- certainty as to the real nature of God. "We have already not only admitted this, but insisted upon it. It is the posi- tion in which natural religion leaves us, which is of the very essence of natural religion. For by natural religion we mean the exercise of our natural powers in the religious field without authoritative rules or guidance. And in this region we can never tell whether an anthropomorphic taint is or is not clinging to our highest and most abstract conceptions of the Divine nature. The most philosophical theory of God's nature may be as anthropomorphic as that of the crudest savage, for all we know ; as tightly bound, that is, by human limitations. It does not matter at this stage whether we use the loftier powers of the human mind or the ordinary facts of human life to give definiteness to our belief in God ; the former are as distinctly human as the latter, and apart from positive information we do not know which to choose. Xenophanes discovered a flaw in the current Polytheism of his day, but it may be questioned whether the idea of God which he substituted that of a hollow sphere was in reality less crude and earth-bound: and so Mr. Herbert Spencer makes merry over mediaeval representations of the Christian Trinity, but it may be doubted whether his Infinite, Eternal, and Unknowable Power is less anthropomorphic. 1 In the one case human characteristics were rashly imported into the notion of God; in the other they are simply left 1 Cf. Study of Sociology, p. 137. First Principles, Part I. chap. v. 138 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD out, and there is no clear rule for saying whether or why one is better than the other. In the strict sense of the word, of course, neither the hollow sphere nor the Infinite, etc., are in the form of man ; but the principle of error in anthro- pomorphism covers much more than the use of the human form, it is involved in all human speculations which originate in and do not transcend the mere use of human faculties. On the other hand, our historical sketch of the efforts to define the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation has already shown us one case where the faith of the Church has served to correct an anthropomorphic tendency. The generation of the Son seemed to involve the application of the human idea of time to the nature of God. The Church ejected the idea of time from its foundation of the doctrine, but asserted a relation between the Father and the Son exactly as before. Though not generated in time, the Son is generated. The realities which the forms of human thought are too narrow to hold are not altered ; they do not come into suspicion. Only the use of human analogies is regulated and restricted. And here there appears a further advantage as compared with the ways of ordinary speculation. When once the use of human terminology is criticized, as by Xenophanes, or by H. Spencer, the whole falls into discredit. We begin to talk in negatives of infinites and absolutes and so on ; forgetting that the denial of such attributes as these words deny may be as irrelevant as to say that virtue is not square. The denial tells us nothing ; it may possibly have no real mean- ing whatever. But the Catholic condemnation of the formula of Arius did more than this. It not only denied the truth- fulness of certain statements, and the applicability of certain ideas, but it did so on definite grounds, in face of definite facts, and with a definite meaning. It asserted the generation, and denied that it occurred in time. But it will be said, that this is only a parallel to what Platonism did in establish- VALUE OF THE MORAL IDEAL 139 ing its scheme of the evolution of the world. According to Plotinus the world emerged from an overflow of the life resi- dent in the first Principle, and yet the process did not occur in time. 1 But apart from the fact that the temporal associa- tions are very rarely consistently kept at a distance, the exclusion of them brings us more or less into conflict with facts as they are. The time idea is excluded by Platonism not from the nature of God only, but from creation. Instead of being able to separate the nature of God from that of created things in this respect, we are reduced to combining both in an immanent process which always remains the same. The world as well as God had no beginning and can have no end. The cases, therefore, are not quite parallel after all. In the Catholic definitions we have a limit put upon human logic in a certain connexion, for a particular reason, to preserve intact a particular collection of facts. In Platonism, the difficulty of allowing the notion of time to enter into relation with God is felt as a part of the general failure to express Divine truth in human language ; but the effort made to avoid this difficulty is such as virtually to contradict human experi- ence. It is not, then, by means of metaphysical speculation that we escape from the trammels of our nature. And the difficulty of which we are speaking presses even more hardly when we come to consider the evidence of the moral sense as to the nature of God. We saw in Chap. I. that the moral sense demands a personal ideal ; that the facts of conscience point to a Personal God. But in the first place we pointed out that the moral ideal is capable of as little definite proof as the ideals of thought the First Cause, etc.; it must always remain a hope rather than a certainty. And, secondly, do we, by contemplating it, get any nearer deciding whether a given Doctrine of God is satisfactory or not ? When we think of it in connexion, let Se T\\W> ICTTW T) yevetris r> Iv \p6vw. Enn. v. 1, 6. Cf. v. 2, 1. 140 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD us say, with Trinitarianism, can we really maintain that it offers any suggestions which can reasonably be regarded as pointing towards plurality of persons ? Our notion of Per- sonality is for the most part single and individual, excluding all others who belong to the same class. What do we mean, after all, by saying that God is Personal ? Does it carry any definite information, or is it only a negative idea, simply implying that mechanical views of God do not square with morality ? It must be admitted that difficulties like this will press and be hard to settle, and that on this level of inquiry there is strong reason for saying that man's know- ledge of God is not of such a kind as to allow him to decide in favour of the Trinitarian view. But, if it be true that the Trinitarian account of the Divine nature is simply an expansion and formulated statement of the truth which the Incarnation tells, and true also that the Incarnation has indeed occurred, the argument of which we have been speaking vanishes. For the Incarnation implies certain truths as to the nature of God, and these if they are attainable by the mind at all, must be susceptible of some form of intellectual utterance. Or, if complete and adequate expression be not possible, it will be at least within our powers to notice and point out where the language we use is inade- quate, where natural inferences from it are to be restrained, where the truths we have to deal with seem to allow of accurate expression. The Agnostic argument, for this is what we have really had before us, has a great deal to be said for it within the lines of natural religion. When man starts off independently to seek God with the aid of his own faculties only, he may find them inadequate to the search. He cannot tell why or how ; but he may know that he cannot criticize them or their utterances sufficiently to make his knowledge worth having. But if his aspirations and hopes are met half way by so powerful and significant a revelation of God's GOD THE FATHER IN THE SYNOPTISTS 141 nature as is involved in the Incarnation, he cannot reasonably object to the Catholic doctrine of God, either as transcending the powers of the intellect, or as dealing presumptuously with the nature of God. For these arguments arise at a much earlier stage ; they have nothing to do with Trinitarian- ism, if that part of the Creed be approached in logical and historical order. First of all, then, let us gather together some of the pas- sages in the Gospels in which our Lord's words seem to involve a Trinitarian Theology. In the course of His ministry He alludes to the Father and the Holy Spirit in such a way as to establish the fact that He was different from them, and yet in some sense the same. The passages are, of course, most clearly marked in S. John's Gospel, but there are some few in the Synoptists which will be worth consideration. Let us consider first the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels to the existence and separate Personality of the Father: (1) Our Lord speaks constantly of ' My Father ' in a special and distinctive sense. This is frequent from the time of His answer to His parents when they found Him in the Temple : ' Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business ? ' (S. Luke ii. 49). (2) He makes relationship to Himself depend on obedience to the will of the Father : ' Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, he is My brother, and sister, and mother ' (S. Matt. xii. 50 ; S. Mark iii 35 ; cf. S. Luke viii. 21). (3) To the Father He ascribes the ultimate order of all things, especially in matters of revelation : ' Flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but My Father which is in heaven ' (S. Matt. xvi. 17), which in a measure excludes Himself. So in the great outpouring of thankfulness after the return of the Disciples : ' I confess to Thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes : yea, Father, for so it was well-pleasing in Thy 142 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD sight ' (S. Matt, xi 26 ; S. Luke x. 21). And again : Every plant which My Heavenly Father planted not shall be rooted up' (S. Matt. xv. 13). 'It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish ' (S. Matt, xviii. 14). And there is the great passage about the hour of the judgment, of which we have already spoken (S. Matt. xxiv. 36; S. Mark xiii 32). (4) So our Lord's mission is determined by the Father, and has certain limits : ' To sit on My right hand, and on My left hand, is not mine to give ; but it is for them for whom it hath been prepared of My Father ' (S. Matt. xx. 23 ; S. Mark x. 40). But, at the same time : ' All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father : and no one knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him ' (S. Matt. xi. 27 ; S. Luke x. 22). Therefore He is able to say : ' For the elect' sake He shortened the days ' (S. Mark xiii. 20) ; and again: 'I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of My Father which is in heaven ' (S. Matt, xviii. 10). So He can assure men that the Father will hear prayer (S. Matt, xviii. 19); that He knows the things we need (S. Matt. vi. 25-34) ; that He will forgive sin, if the sinners themselves forgive trespasses against themselves (S. Matt. vi. 14, 15). In all these passages our Lord never identifies Himself with the Father, though He claims unique knowledge of Him and unique relations with Him. And there can be no question that the Father of whom He spoke was God. To these should be added the twofold witness of the Father to the Son at the Baptism and Transfiguration. On the subject of the Person and Divinity of the Holy Ghost we have a number of passages of which the collective import is not wanting in clearness: (1) The being of the Holy Ghost is brought before us chiefly in His connexion with the Incarnation of Christ. Our Lord is Incarnate by the Holy Ghost (S. Luke i. 35). He comes upon Christ at THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE SYNOPTISTS 143 His baptism (S. Matt. iii 16 ; S. Mark i. 10, 11 ; S. Luke iii 22), and from this time forward takes command over the life of Christ. Thus our Lord is led up of the Spirit into the wilderness for the temptation (S. Matt. iv. 1 ; S. Luke iv. 1 and 14; S. Mark i. 12); He cast out devils in the power of the Spirit (S. Matt. xii. 28 ; cf. S. Luke xi 20) ; He rejoices in the Holy Ghost (j/yaAAmo-aro ra> Trvev/jiaTt TOO ay/&>, S. Luke x. 21). (2) Further, the Holy Spirit works in the consciences of men, and hence the tremendous peril of sin against the Holy Ghost the sin against light, by which the moral judgment is destroyed (S. Matt, xii 31, 32 ; S. Mark iii. 28, 29 ; S. Luke xii. 10). This, let it be remembered, is described by Christ as involving graver peril even than sin against the Son of man. (3) Again, the gift of the Holy Spirit is conferred upon the Disciples, especially to be the source of their inspiration on their mission to the world (cf. S. Matt. x. 20; S. Luke xii 12). This gift of the Holy Ghost is closely allied to His functions in the inspiration of S. John the Baptist (S. Luke i 15); Elizabeth (S. Luke i 41); Zacharias (S. Luke i. 67); Simeon (S. Luke ii. 25-27); David (S. Matt, xxii 43 ; S. Mark xii. 36 ; cf. S. Luke xx. 42, ev B//3AP"aA/xoM/). (4) He is one of the three names into which men are to be baptized (S. Matt, xxviii. 19, 20). This fixes the conception of the Holy Ghost as personal. Many of the passages above quoted do not certainly compel this view of His nature. It would be difficult to conceive perhaps, what would be the meaning of sin against the Holy Ghost (a phrase which occurs in all three Gospels) unless He were a person ; but for the most part a sense of the words such as would satisfy the passages in the Old Testament, where the Spirit of the Lord is mentioned, would be adequate here. It is, however, by no means adequate to account for the baptismal formula. In that, the Holy Ghost is placed on a level with the Father and the Son, and it is difficult to see 144 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD how arguments which would deprive the third name of personal significance would fail to produce a similar effect in the case of the Father and the Son. It has, of course, been suggested that the passage is an interpolation, 1 occurring as it does at the end of the Gospel, in a place where interpola- tion would be particularly easy. But if so, it must have been a very early one. There is no such full and varied evidence, such as there is in the case of the last twelve verses of S. Mark, against this passage. There are signs of the existence of a text from which the Triune Name was absent. But it is not likely that this was the original text. Nor, if the passage were really an interpolation in S. Matt., would this dispose of the question of the baptismal formula, and the personality of the Holy Spirit. The evidence of the Acts and Epistles makes it plain that a doctrine such as the baptismal formula implies must have been prior to those works. 2 In passing on to the evidence of S. John's Gospel we move, of course, into another atmosphere. Our Lord's earlier discourses, as reported in this Gospel, abound in references to the Father and His relations with the Son; the last discourses immediately before the Passion contain much that bears on the Holy Ghost, both in regard of His nature and personality, and in regard of His temporal mission in the Church. We have already had occasion, in considering our Lord's claims to be Divine, to cite those which bear upon His relations with the Father. It will not be necessary, therefore, to produce them all again. We need only to fix and define the revelation of the Father's nature and char- acter. Three points emerged from the passages in the Synoptists : (1) The Father is the source of all revelation, and especially reveals the Son ; (2) it is the province of the 1 Cf. Harnack, Dogmengeschichtc, Bd. i. p. 56, n. 1 (ed. 1). 3 See below, p. 161. GOD THE FATHER IN S. JOHN 145 Son to reveal the Father in view of His special knowledge ; (3) relationship to the Son depends on obedience to the Father's will. All these points reappear in S. John with much greater distinctness and fulness. Thus we read (chap, vi. 45) : ' Every man who hath heard from the Father, and hath learned, cometh unto Me'; and again, in the same chapter (vi. 65): 'No man can come unto Me, except it be given him of the Father.' At the same time it is the province of the Son to reveal the Father: 'No man hath seen God at any time ; God only-begotten, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him ' (i. 18). And again: 'Not that any man hath seen the Father, save He which is from God, He hath seen the Father ' (vi. 46). ' I am the way, and the truth, and the life : no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me ' (xiv. 6). 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father ' (xiv. 9). ' I manifested Thy name to the men whom Thou gavest Me out of the world ' (xvii. 6). The Synoptists, as we have remarked, show the necessity of obedience to the Father's will as a condition of real relation- ship with the Son : ' Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, he is My brother, and sister, and mother.' S. John gives us the other side of this truth, when he makes the attitude towards the Son the test of knowledge of the Father: 'Ye have neither heard His voice nor seen His form. And ye have not His word abiding in you : for Him whom He sent ye believe not' (v. 37, 38). This is explained by the actual relation of the Father and the Son. ' The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hands' (iii. 35). So the life of the Son is derived from that of the Father (v. 26), and the Father is greater than the Son (xiv. 28) ; but yet all things which the Father hath are the Son's (xvi. 15). This unity of the Father and the Son is to be the type of the unity of the members of the future Church: 'Holy Father, keep them in Thy name which 10 146 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD Thou hast given Me, that they may be one, even as we are ' (xvii. 11). 'I am the good shepherd, and I know mine own, and mine own know Me, even as the Father knoweth Me, and I know the Father ' (x. 14, 15). The burden of these and similar passages is clear enough. There is no question that the Father means God, and the account of the Son in relation with the Father is such as to leave no room for a distinction in nature. As to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, there is less evidence in the Gospel, for the Church is the true sphere of the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and every thing that is said of Him is by way of anticipation or of prophecy. The character of the Holy Spirit is not, however, left in doubt. There is one passage which requires separate discussion, as it is peculiar. In vii. 39 the English version reads as follows: ' For the Spirit was not yet given ; for Jesus was not yet glorified.' The best Greek texts omit the word for given (SoOev or SeSo/u.evov), and it seems to have been introduced in order to remedy the apparent difficulty in the words as they stood OVTTW yap qv Trvev/na ' OTI 'I^erou? OVTTQ) eSo^aa-Orj. The difficulty is, however, only apparent. The usage of S. John proves that Trvev/xa without the article means 'a spiritual gift ' ; whereas TO Trvev^a would mean the personal Spirit of God. The gloss, then, which appears in some manuscripts and in our version gives the right sense, though it does not belong to the true text. 1 The meaning of the passage will be not that the personal Spirit of God was not yet in exist- ence, but that those special gifts which belong to the tem- poral mission were not yet given, as the close of Christ's earthly career had not yet come. At the close of the earthly ministry of the Son the Church is not to be left in an orphan condition, the ministry of Christ is to be followed by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The departure of Christ 1 Cf. Westcott's note on the passage. THE HOLY SPIRIT IN S. JOHN 147 is a necessary condition to this mission of the Holy Spirit (xvi. 7). A. The mission is spoken of in two ways : (1) As coming from the Father. ' I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter . . . even the Spirit of Truth ' (xiv. 16). And again: 'The Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name ' (xiv. 26) (2) As coming from the Son. 'When the Comforter is. come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of Truth, which proceedeth from the Father ' (xv. 26). B. The mission of the Holy Spirit is not self-chosen or self-originated any more than Christ's mission was. 'He shall not speak from Himself, but what things soever He hears these shall He speak. . . . He shall glorify Me: for He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you. All things whatsoever the Father hath are Mine : therefore said I, that He taketh of Mine and shall declare it unto you' (xvi. 13-15). C. His mission will have various purposes, (1) in relation to the Church, (2) in relation to the world. (1) His presence is to be permanent (xiv. 16), and it is to result in further witness to Christ (xv. 26), and in further glorification of Christ (xvi. 14); and in regard to the Apostles, He will remind them of that which Christ had said (xiv. 26), He will declare to them the things to come (xvi. 13), and lead them into all truth (xvi. 13). (2) His presence will be unknown to the world (xiv. 17), but at the same time He will rebuke or convict it concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment (xvi. 8-11). That is, He will reveal authoritatively the true posi- tion of the world. The unbelief of those who are on the side of the world will be shown by His presence to proceed from sin. Again, His witness to the ascended Lord will declare that the right is on the side of Christ. And the judgment into which the prince of this world falls by his very attitude 148 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD towards Christ and His Church will declare the true nature and principles, and incidence of the Divine judgment. In an earlier passage the dispensation of the Spirit is seen to be identical with the kingdom of heaven, and the baptism of the Spirit is the appointed means of entry into it. There is no passage by mere development from the kingdom of the flesh into the kingdom of the Spirit, nor is the life of those born of the Spirit to be estimated by earthly laws (iii. 5, 6). As in the Synoptists, so in S. John, the Spirit descended upon Christ at His baptism and there abode (i. 32). A doctrine closely similar to this of S. John is expressed in one verse of the Acts of the Apostles : ' Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He hath poured forth this which ye see and hear' (chap. ii. 33). So the Spirit takes command over the Church as before over the life of Christ. He witnesses to Christ (v. 32). He speaks through the Old Testament (i. 16; iv. 25), and in such prophets as Agabus (xi. 28). He guides the decisions of the Church in particular details, as, for instance, at the Council of Jerusalem (xv. 28), the ordination of Paul and Barnabas (xiii. 2). The gifts are conferred by Apostolic means (viii. 16). In this and in similar passages the chief interest is historical. S. Luke describes the actual occurrences, the actual way in which the promise of Christ was fulfilled. In S. Paul's writings we find a more or less elaborate doctrine of the Father and the Holy Spirit. It follows in its main outlines the same course as the statements already cited from the Gospels. But the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, as might be expected, is more definite and full, seeing that it is approached from the point of view of realization and not of anticipation. I. The doctrine of the Father in S. Paul is closely bound THE THEOLOGY OF S. PAUL 149 up with the Old Testament belief in one God, who is cause and Lord of all. The aspect of His nature upon which S. Paul most frequently insists is His ruling providence. He is the only wise God (Horn. xvi. 27), He is King over the ages (1 Tim. i. 17), He worketh all things according to the counsel of His will (Eph. ill). Also, He is the goal to which all things move (1 Cor. viii. 6 ; Eom. xi. 36). The Incar- nation was the effect of His will, occurring in the fulness of time as determined by the Divine wisdom (Gal. iv. 4; cf. 1 Cor. ii. 6, 7 ; Rom. xvi 25, 26 ; Eph. i. 10 ; CoL i. 25-27 ; 2 Tim. i. 9, 10). And this purpose expressed itself even in the particular events of Christ's incarnate life, especially in the Resurrection (1 Thess. i. 10; 1 Cor. vi. 14, etc.; Eph. i. 20, 21 ; Col. ii. 12). It covers also the mission of the Spirit (2 Cor. v. 5 ; Gal. iv. 6), and the foundation and constitution of the Church (Eph. i. 3-5 ; cf. 1 Cor. xii. 6 ; iii. 22), and reaches to the final consummation of all things (1 Cor. xv. 28). The whole rests upon the moral character of God : (a) His faithfulness (1 Thess. v. 24 ; 2 Thess. iii. 3 ; 1 Cor. i. 9 ; 2 Cor. i. 18 ; Rom. iii. 3 ; cf. THO-TO? o Xoyo?, 1 Tim. i. 15; iii. 1; iv. 9, etc.); (/3) His justice (Rom. iii. 6-26; ix. 14, 15); (y) His goodness (Rom. xi. 22; Titus iii. 4; cf. 1 Tim. ii. 4). 1 II. S. Paul's doctrine of the Holy Spirit appears chiefly in connexion with the Church and the position of the redeemed. The Apostle is less directly concerned with the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son. It is noticeable, however, that He is described as the Spirit of Christ as well as of God (Rom. viii. 9, 10, where both phrases occur in close connexion). Also, the Spirit is said to possess 1 It is worth noticing that the doctrines here described in many cases run through the entire body of Pauline writings, except the Epistle to the Hebrews, from which references have not been taken. This implies a very important continuity of doctrine. ISO INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD absolute knowledge of God (1 Cor. ii. 11), and of the inmost mind of those in whom He dwells (Rom. viii. 26, 27). He is the instrument of revelation (1 Cor. ii 10 ; Eph. iii. 5 ; 1 Tim. iv. 1 ; 2 Tim. iii. 16) : and He governs the whole life of the Church, both in its general order (1 Cor. xii. 3-11) and in individual men (1 Cor. vi. 19 ; Rom. viii. 9-14 ; xv. 16, etc.), and in Him is constituted the unity of the Church (1 Cor. xii. 13 ; Eph. iv. 3-6). The gift of the Holy Spirit is the first-fruits of the promises of God (Rom. viii. 23), the pledge that they will be fulfilled (2 Cor. i. 22), the means of the restoration of the true Sonship of God (Gal. iv. 6 ; Rom. viii. 15, 16), and the witness in our hearts that the promises are fulfilled in us. The Spirit was operative in the Incar- nation, especially in the Resurrection (Rom. i. 4 ; cf. Heb. ix. 14, where the Spirit is represented as the medium of Christ's self-oblation). Lastly, it is the Spirit whose operation is discerned in the Christian life (Gal. v. 22, 23, etc.). The passages cited here are not proof-texts in the ordinary sense of the word; that is, they are not accidental and isolated utterances which have but little in common with the context from which they came, but they are passing allusions by the authors to truths which they assume to be present in the minds of those who read. The majority of them, especially of the Pauline passages, would be absolutely unintelligible, unless there were some groundwork of common faith in the minds of those to whom S. Paul wrote. The passages here quoted are, of course, but a small portion of the evidence available, but they are sufficient, we think, to show the general consensus of the New Testament writers in their account of God. Starting from the Incarnation of the Son of God, they speak of the Father and the Holy Spirit as Divine. The Father is uniformly regarded as the source of all activity; but the Son, who is the medium of THE THEOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 151 this activity, as it appears in the world, is also described at times as acting in a manner like that of the Father. This is especially true of the mission of the Holy Ghost. The Spirit of God performs for the new creation what He had done for the old. He dwells in it, and evokes its order. His special home is the heart of man, where He produces the same orderly result. 1 There are few signs as yet of a carefully formulated creed on the subject of the Divine nature. But, as we have already pointed out, the statements about it are of such an allusive character that it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive their appealing to persons whose minds were in an absolutely fluid state as regards the articles of this faith. The Church, we maintain, must at least have reached the position of saying, 'The Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet they are not three Gods but one God.' Though there may have been at this time no effort to explain this, the Three Persons individually were believed to be Divine, and yet the old Jewish Monotheism was not consciously de- serted. This unreasoned conviction seems to have held its ground for some time. In S. Clement of Home, in S. Ignatius, and in the Apology of Aristides, there are pas- sages presenting the same idea of God, but without any attempt at further definition. 2 With Justin we come to the period of pure theological speculation, to which we must now refer at sufficient length to make clear the way in which the Catholic Church has defined for itself a Trini- tarian Theology. Before leaving the apostolic witness, it would be well to ask ourselves what information we can derive from the New 1 To this point we must return later, when we come to speak of the Church and the Sacraments. 2 S. Clem., Ep. ad Cor., chap. Iviii. ; cf. chap. xlvi. S. Ign., Ad Magn. 18. Apol., Arist., chap. xv. 152 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD Testament as to the nature of God considered generally. We have already pointed out that S. Paul traces the activities of God to certain moral characteristics His faithfulness, His wisdom, His goodness. Are there any similar notices as to the Divine nature which may be regarded as forming a general basis for the exhibition of Trinitarian Theology ? Are there any signs of such a view of God as would lead on easily to the Trinitarian conception of Him ? There are three phrases in the writings of S. John which we must consider here. The first is ascribed to our Lord Himself in conversation with the woman of Samaria (chap. iv. 24): God is Spirit. The other two occur in S. John's First Epistle: God is Light (chap. L 5) ; God is Love (iv. 8 and 16). In each case the predicate describes some characteristic of the Divine nature, metaphorically, of course, and not in technical language, but still with sufficient plainness. The first separates God from all material limitations ; it is placed in sharp contrast with those earlier notions of God, which limited His manifestation to particular places and times, and gives, as Bishop Westcott remarks, a metaphysical account of His nature. It is closely allied with earlier Hebrew notions of God. That is, it is in a line with those utterances of the prophets in which the supremacy of God over all time and space and matter is asserted : it would fall in with the dislike to anthropomorphic expressions which was characteristic of the later Jews. So clear an expression of the truth occurs nowhere, we believe, in the Old Testament. Yet there are points of view which are preparatory to it. In the second, which S. John alone of New Testament writers uses in this bare and direct form, we attain to the notion of self-revelation, activity, and purity. Though the phrase occurs only here in the New Testament, there are others which lead up to and suggest it. Thus S. John (chap. iii. 21) points out that ' he that doeth the truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, DOCTRINE OF GOD IN NEW TESTAMENT 153 that they are done in God.' The evil-doer, on the other hand, shuns the light, because it displays the real character of his actions. Thus the idea of light seems to convey the notion of revealing the true state of things, of enlightening and of judging. Christ is the light of the world, and His presence in it is a judgment a separation, a declaration of men's inner affinities. With this may be contrasted S. Paul's phrase about God that He dwells in light unapproachable (1 Tim. vi. 16). In the third of these phrases we make a very important move forwards. For love is social in its very idea, it excludes from the very first any notion of a lonely God without possibility of entering into the concerns and interests of men. A God who is Love is a Person of whom it is possible to think as creating and redeeming the world. By this conception a great advance is made upon earlier speculations, some of the most prominent difficulties which beset them being removed. Thus the principle of movement and activity which some of the Pagan and Gnostic systems found it so hard to introduce into the Divine nature is present from the outset, if God is Love. Love cannot be inactive or exist without a due object ; it is a relation between persons, it is expansive, and that not with vague indeterminateness, but with definite and clear aim. All Deism is set aside by this phrase ; for Deism thinks of God simply as the artificer who made the world and set it going, and probably interferes with its course no more. God on this showing is merely a mythological expedient for getting the world into action: He has no special character or functions beyond this ; and this falls very far short of the idea of a God who is Love. Again, S. John's conception not only sets aside the earlier and more confused notions, but it is in connexion with it that we begin to see the probability of a plurality within the Godhead. It is, we observe, the nature of God Himself to be Love ; and if this is so, and if it be true that Love is always social in its character, we 154 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD must look for the eternal object of the Divine Love either within the unity of the Godhead or in the created world. But we believe that the created world came into being in time, and will have an end in time. We cannot, therefore, regard it as adequate to be the object of the eternal Love of God; we are not as yet in a position to discuss the point further, but we shall return to it later on. This much, how- ever, we may safely affirm at this point, that the idea of the nature of God reached by S. John is such as to suggest a direction in which the ascription of Divinity to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost may be made partially intelligible. We must now turn to the history of Trinitarian Theology, and see how the Church was led to define its faith as to the nature of God. Roughly speaking there are three ways in which the relation of the Three Persons may be described. The difference between each Person and the other two may be accentuated in a crude and careless way ; this will virtu- ally result in Tritheism a belief in three Gods. Or, secondly, the difference may be regarded merely as a difference of mode of self-revelation. It may be held that there is an ultimate, unknowable, Divine substance, which reveals itself succes- sively as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in no one of which forms is the revelation complete or permanent. Or, lastly, attention may be fixed upon the process apparently involved in the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Ghost ; and then the Holy Trinity will be understood on the analogy of the Gnostic aeons as a process by which the absolutely unknown and unknowable Deity is brought into contact with the material world. We shall have, therefore, various interpretations of the unity and Divinity of the three Persons, according to the modes of thought current in various ages. The first and last of these theories are, on the whole, infrequent in their occurrence, at any rate in theological SABELLIANISM 155 minds. It is to be feared, perhaps, that Tritheism is the real faith of many uneducated Christians even at the present day ; but it can hardly, we think, be worth careful discussion here. There are few persons who would fail to see that it is really a most pagan polytheism ; and that it is impossible to worship three Gods. The third of the above-mentioned methods of interpreting the doctrine has less attractions in modern times. Several founders of Gnostic systems found it convenient to adopt the names of the three Persons for some of their seons. This error is virtually the same as that of Sabellianism, and will not, therefore, require separate treatment The second type of Trinitarian doctrine is known as Sabel- lianism, after its founder, a Libyan presbyter named Sabellius (A.D. 257). It was a theory strongly influenced by the Stoic doctrine of the world-spirit. According to the Stoics, the universe was one huge animal in which a soul resided, which was also called the Logos or Eeason of the world. The history of the universe consisted in the succession of the periods of the manifestation of this soul of the world. It had, they thought, two states, of speech and silence, of expansion and contraction. When it was in the state of utterance, the world of creation came into being ; when it was in the state of silence or contraction, all particular things vanished. So it was believed that there was an endless series of these periods, which followed one another like the rise and fall of a man's chest when he breathes. Now Sabellius adopted a system closely similar to this. To his view, God is the Eeason present in and ordering the world. He Himself is for ever unknown, but He passes through three stages of partial self -manifestation, in which He is known by the three names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The first covered practically the Jewish dispensation ; the second the period of our Lord's ministry ; the third is the present dispensation. 156 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD When this is over the whole will relapse again into silence, to pass again through the same series. It is clear that from this point of view all Personality vanishes from the notion of God altogether. Not only do the three Persons lose all reality and all true being, but God Him- self, the ultimate substance of which these are partial mani- festations, passes into the form of a blind force aimlessly repeating merely mechanical activities. No such description of God would be tolerable to the mind of the Church, and we find therefore that Sabellianism was condemned by the general consent of Catholics ; we have already noticed that the fear of it was one of the causes of Arianism. But though condemned, not by conciliar authority, but by the consensus of Churchmen, it was by no means dead. It is attractive always to philosophical minds of a certain order, and is, we may add, not unfamiliar now. It is the form of heresy which is most liable to arise out of two popular lines of thought, one of them the Hegelian idealism, the other the ordinary theory of evolution. Both of them aim at accounting for the present state of things as a gradual process, increasing in clearness and definiteness as it goes on. To this the theory of the Trinity as a gradual self- expression of the One God seems to correspond admirably. The earlier revelation of Judaism, and the Gentile specula- tions, are regarded as the simpler and more direct intuitions of the Divine nature. The Incarnation of Christ is then represented as the manifestation of the Divine law of right ; and the climax of the whole is found in the present state of things. That there has been a real progress in revelation no one seriously doubts : though it is difficult to regard the present century as the climax of any process or even as being capable of suggesting what such a climax might be. But the whole issue of the question turns on the value given to personality in treating of the three Persons in the Trinity. SABELLIANISM 157 So long as the Trinitarian idea is regarded as practically final, that is to say, so long as there is no talk or hint of a Divine substance farther back which is revealed in the threefold process, there is nothing to prevent an orthodox sense being given to language like this ; but if it be implied that the Trinitarian idea is a mere economy, as it is called technically, a mere concession to human weakness of intel- lect, if it be denied that it corresponds with any permanent fact in the Divine nature, it falls under the condemnation of Sabellianism. For the Catholic Church refuses to accept any method of combining the Scripture statements about the three Persons which involves their confusion. It may not be easy to see in what sense They are three and yet also one, but this is the burden of the Christian Creed. We have now considered the problem which the language of Scripture places before the intellect of the Church, and one or two of the ways in which it has been attempted to settle it. The more serious part of our task still remains, viz., to explain so far as may be what the Catholic position is and means, and what changes it involves in the use of popular terms. It would be easy to say shortly that the Church has decided that the Holy Spirit is no less consub- stantial with the Father than the Son. But this is not all that is necessary. Questions which we postponed in our discussion of the doctrine of the Son of God will arise now. We must not only assert that the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one substance with the Father, but explain what we mean by this; in what sense we talk of the unity of God, in view of the tri-personality, and in what sense we speak of God as personal and the Three as Persons. First, then, let us inquire what is meant by unity as applied to God. We have said that the Christian doctrine of God rises straight out of a most rigid and unbending Monotheism, and that Trinitarianism does not involve any radical change 158 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD in this. But we must still inquire what particular type of unity is in our minds when we say that God is one. A. Unity is the name of an idea which does not seem, at first sight, to need investigation in which it does not seem probable that much variety of meaning will be dis- covered. It does not, however, come up to the expectations of simplicity which it excites. As a rule when we talk of one thing, we mean to single it out from a number of others of the same class. One man, one horse, etc. are phrases which limit the substantive numerically. They exclude at the moment all plurality whatever, and fix the mind on a numerical idea. In the background of our thought, when we use the word " one " in this manner, lies the possibility of other numbers a class of substantives, each of them one and individual in itself, but forming in the aggregate a larger number. To put it shortly, one in its ordinary sense means one of a class or lot; it fixes the thought upon a particular individual, and excludes all the others. Now it is plain on the face of it that when we say there is one God we mean much more than this. We mean, it is true, that there are no others, and we say, I believe in one God, on purpose to deny that there is any other God but one. In this case, as before, the word "one" has a generic significance, but its implication in regard of possible others depends upon our knowledge of facts, and our experience. When we say, there is one God, we say it with the implication that there are no more, and this, partly, because we believe this to be the fact, and partly because some other people do not. If I say, I see one man coming across that field, I say it with the implication that there might be more, but that the others are not present. In one case we exclude possible other ones from existence, in the other we simply deny that they are present to our senses. B. Besides this generic sense of unity in which it always MEANING OF UNITY 159 has reference to possible others, there is another which has wholly different associations. When we speak of an individual man, and say that he is one, we may either mean, as before, that he is not any of the others, or we may refer to his single and self-contained unity : that is, we may look aside from his place in the class with the others, and note the continuity and sameness of his personal life. We have, then, made an assertion of a wholly new kind, although the transition seems so slight. Instead of remarking upon a merely external and accidental fact, we assert an important philosophical truth. We have turned away our eyes from the mere fact that a given individual is different from all the others, and concentrated our attention upon the differ- ence and its cause. We find that the difference between ourselves and all other men lies in a secret strain of incommunicable unity, which preserves itself so long as we last in being. This remains roughly true, in spite of all that has been learnt of multiple consciousness in recent years. We have instances of people who seem to sustain at different periods two incompatible lives. But we have no instance in which one person's experience and memory be- comes merged in or confused with the experience and memory of any one else. The experience I have to-day or in my present phase of consciousness is my experience, just in the same sense as the experience of yesterday, in virtue of my being the same in virtue of the fact that I am the same person throughout. How and how far this personal identity throughout all experience can be proved, need not concern us here. We need not discuss here what may be called the inner constitution of the unity which holds together an experience. These are thorny questions, and whatever the result of the theoretical investigation, the practical fact remains the same, that we must assume the permanence of personal identity if we are to talk 160 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD intelligently or intelligibly of individual experience. For our purpose it will be enough to inquire what new possi- bilities are opened to us in the meaning of unity. It needs but little effort to see that unity in the sense here considered is unity in difference. That is, the variety and complexity of the experiences passed through in no way interfere with the unity of the person. He is one and the same throughout them all, and their variety only serves to fill out and illustrate his own identity and unity. Even in cases of multiple consciousness, each ' self ' is constituted by unity of experience. The most monotonous and unvaried life is really full of inconceivable complexities, and when we rise above this level and consider the career of a man of action, it is still more astonishing to reflect upon the chaos of various elements which the unity of his personality threads together into one ordered whole. The real difference between unity in this sense and unity in its generic meaning is, that the former is living and concrete, and the latter dead and abstract. In the latter case, unity is an idea, in the former it is a process. We find out the generic unity by abstract thought and classification; we realize personal unity directly, only by incommunicable experience. It is, however, bounded by two potent limitations time and space. An individual man can absorb into the unity of his own experience the characteristics of various places and times, but only if he takes them in succession. He imposes the unity of his own life upon all the various events which happen to him; they are bound together in his experience: and they are one because they are his. Even if he knows that various events of which he hears took place simultaneously, he cannot fully realize their simultaneity, he must think of them in succession. And so, to realize what we know to be occurring at another place requires the aid of the constructive imagination, and probably the PERSONAL UNITY IN MAN 161 stored-up experience of the past; it is not matter which can be absorbed into the unity of the single life. No man can be in more than one place at one time : he can imagine the occurrence of events other than those he witnesses, and believe that they occupy the same time as his own experience. He can picture scenes in the past which coincided in time and not in place. His direct experience is only of one time and one place. Within these Limits, of which much more might be said, the unity which makes one man to differ from another consists in the absorption into himself of all his own special variety of experience. As such the unity of a man's self is intensely exclusive. No other man, however near to us, has ever the same experience. The same event, witnessed by two separate people, is inevitably transmuted as it passes into their several minds. Each notes in it what he is naturally constituted to note in it puts upon it the inter- pretation which he is fitted by his special characteristics of mind, temper, and imagination to put upon it. There is no unity so impenetrable as this, so exclusive and so com- plete. Not only does it admit of no fusion with any other of the same kind, it is not even wholly explicable to another. It goes deep down below the superficiality of language; it can be hinted at, pictured, described, but never reproduced. Buried experiences, half-conscious emotions, and half -forgotten associations go to colour it at any given moment. And if by the medium of language we can raise some central thought in the mind of another, we cannot give it the exact meaning it has for us, just because the experience, the self to which it appeals, is different. Perhaps a simple illustra- tion will make the point clearer. Every one knows how marked a difference in mutual intelligence there is between the members of a family as compared with friends whose intimacy has begun at later periods. Nothing can quite ii 1 62 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD overcome the lack of community of experience, and yet even this which is the nearest approach to intermixture of personal life does not wholly prevent misunderstandings. We must now return to the question of the unity of God. We see already that the analogy of individual unity repre- sents a far higher and fuller notion than the abstract unity belonging to members of a class. It is the unity of a living thing, which overcomes variety and absorbs it into itself. But it is a terribly anthropomorphic idea to apply without further ado to God. We may be glad to think of Him as living, and maintaining His unity by life ; but the limitations of time and space, the exclusiveness and incommunicable separateness of human individuality, produce difficulties. After all, we do not experience our own unity and identity directly ; we know it only as the variety of the events which come upon us reveals it to us. We find ourselves always the same in the midst of a press of changing phenomena, but we do not know ourselves apart from this stream of outward events. And for this very reason, we do not know what part of our conception of unity to omit, or how to omit it, in applying the idea to God. We come to think that each of us is one and the same through all his experience, only by means of this experience itself. And so, though we may be convinced that we are on right lines when we form our con- ceptions of God on the analogy of our own individual living unity, we cannot tell how far we are anthropomorphic in doing so. We must, therefore, pass on to the consideration of a fuller idea even than unity that of personal life. Hitherto, though speaking of individual life and experience, we have concen- trated our attention upon its unity and nothing else. We must now take in the other elements of the idea, as we know it, or conceive it to be. It cannot fail to be noticed that the one characteristic SELF-SUFFICIENCY OF PERSONAL LIFE 163 which most men feel to be essential to the notion of person- ality is, that it should be sufficient to itself. It must be, in Aristotle's language, avrapicw KOI ovSevos evSew (sufficient to itself and needing nothing). That is, we regard as an en- croachment upon its separateness any hint that it requires external assistance to make it complete. We resent the idea that past generations have influenced the special character of a person, as if that tended to destroy his completeness and simplicity, and turned him into a compound thing. We resent the Aristotelian principle that the solitary individual is only called a man by an equivocation, seeing that he falls so far short of the ideal of manhood. We are inclined to ask, Is not the man in the desert island just as much a per- sonality as a citizen of the most populous city in the world ? His accidental separation from his kind can have made no possible difference to this. Or again, we object to acknow- ledging the right and the interest which other men have in our own personal career. Can we not do as we like with our own ? What does it matter to others how we live ? These very common states of mind, of which most people know the feeling, represent certain anticipations rooted in our minds as to the nature of personality. They do not emerge into full consciousness always in this character; people are conscious of them long before they know or under- stand anything about personality. But in the end, these and all the desires and aversions connected with self-pre- servation must be based upon some sense that the reality of personal life is being infringed, if its self-sufficiency is inter- fered with. It is the presence and the consciousness of this personal life which makes the difference in the form and the intensity of the self-preserving feelings of man as compared with those which we observe in the case of animals. It appears also in the strong hope of immortality which so many peoples retain. They cannot believe that the firm and 164 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD certain personal consciousness should go the way of the corruptible body ; the soul at any rate, they feel should be immortal. There are, then, certain expectations connected with man's consciousness of himself as personal, which, nevertheless, experience continually disappoints. When Psychology turns its attention to man's self, it soon reveals all kinds of com- plications in the personality which seemed so complete and exclusive to the unreflecting consciousness. Gradually the conviction has been slowly worked in upon the minds of men, however individualistic their tendencies, that everyone is by nature social, no man is complete in himself. He requires others, in order to realize his personal powers, and to fill out his own life : and he owes in return certain duties ; he must give his labour and time and interest in order to fill out and complete the lives of others, as his is helped and bettered by theirs. Man is a social being, and his best achievement will always be in a social condition of things. He must recognize that his personality, which he thought he owned so completely, and could rule so irresponsibly, depends for its full realization upon the existence of others, and upon their being in definite reciprocal relations with himself. Without these conditions most of man's highest powers would lie dormant; he would, as Aristotle thought, be scarcely a man at all But this is not all. Not only is man dependent in large measure upon others for the realization of his personal capacities, he cannot ensure the presence of the needful help. It may so happen, and at times does so happen, that a man is deserted by his fellows, and his life then sinks to the lowest possible level. This means that the external supply of force and friendship which man needs is not given him from the outset. He has to win it by effort and struggle with his en- vironment. Unless he does this he fails by his own fault GOD IS LOVE 165 or by that of others to satisfy the end of his existence here. It would seem, then, that the consideration of personality does not help us far towards an analogy with the Divine mode of existence. It seems to involve even more than we supposed of material and earthly conditions. Something of this impression will vanish, however, when we reflect that our investigations of the personal idea have diverted us altogether from the notion of a bare and solitary point, the very existence of which depends upon its excluding all others. Whatever personality may be, it requires for its completeness a full and vigorous life ; it is not like a point in space, of which nothing can be said but that it is not any of the others. Personality is filled out and made real and effective only by means of the love which is the bond of all human society. Apart from this, if such a thing were conceivable, a man would fall back into the state of an atom or point in space ; he would lose everything which makes his life real. As we have gazed at the unity of a human individual, we have seen it change under our eyes into a complex rela- tion of various elements. We have seen that the anticipa- tions which the idea excites are satisfied indeed, but not in the way we expect. Man can become complete and self- sufficient, but only through the presence and co-operation of other men ; and the law of this mutual self-development is love. Here we may return to the consideration of the per- sonal nature of God. As we have already pointed out, S. John's inspired intuition that God is Love points to an open way towards the assertion of plurality in the Godhead. And now our own analysis of the conception of human personality shows that even this is not complete within the limits of a negative and exclusive unity. The hard exclusiveness breaks up, and shows us how the self in one man needs the presence of other selves, which others are bound to him by the cords 166 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD of mutual love. Where man's personality is incomplete, and requires the help of others, the nature of God is complete in itself. For God is Love. The love of the Eternal Father is for ever satisfied in the Eternal Son; the Father and the Son are for ever bound together in the Holy Spirit, who is the bond of the Divine Love. We have adopted (in a form somewhat more suited to modern ears) an analogy whch has been of old used for the illustration of this mysterious doctrine in the Catholic Church. 1 It appeals with varying force to different minds, and must always be used with caution, and under a strong sense of its limitations. The last thing it pretends to be is a rationaliza- tion of the doctrine. What it seems to us to do is to help out thought, but not to subject the doctrine to the limita- tions of thought. We have already argued that the doctrine of the Incarnation, if true, satisfies the various longings and aspirations of which man had long been conscious, but which he could never prove for himself. The analogy which we have drawn from the personal nature of man does the same thing in another sphere. It implies or suggests rather than proves that the strangely difficult and mysterious conception of God which is the result of the Incarnation does not pre- vent our continuing to believe that man is formed in the image of God. It throws light upon those phrases in which our Lord has used the unity of the Godhead as a type of the unity among His Disciples phrases which must always tend to suggest an impersonal absorption into a Divine essence, unless the Trinitarian idea of God be maintained. And still further, it shows that human personality is a pale and piece- 1 The most elaborate presentation of the analogy between the human self and the Nature of God is to be found in S. Aug., De Trin. Bks. ix.-xv. In developing it, S. Aug. speaks of three powers in human nature, memoria, intelligentia, and voluntas ; of which the last is the basis of amor. Each of these acts in reflexive manner, and the unity of the self consists in the com- plete and rightly -ordered activity of the three GOD IS LOVE 167 meal copy of the Divine rather than a type upon which we may form our conceptions of the Divine. In other words, the Trinitarian expression of the doctrine that God is Love im- poses limits and safeguards upon our old enemy, anthropo- morphism. It gives us the threefold relation as really existing in the nature of God ; it rejects the limitations of time and place through which man gradually and partially realizes his human personality. This, we think, is what our analogy does for us ; but we must not omit to describe its limitations. We have said that it cannot pretend to rationalize the doctrine. In this we have virtually said all, but it will be well to expand the statement a little further. It tells us nothing more than the Bible tells us. In the Bible we learn to believe in one God. Through the Incarnation we learn to discern in this unity the operation of Three, whom we call Persons. Yet we also speak of belief in a personal God, and we use different terms to describe the relation of the Father and the Son, and the Father and Spirit. Our analogy makes it dimly intelligible to us how Monotheism may be in no way inconsistent with Trinitarianism. But there it stops. To work it out in detail and press the terms of it is likely enough to lead us into false analogy. This is specially true in regard to the Third Person. It is easy to see that the object of Divine Love can be of no lower mode of Being than that of a Person : we cannot conceive the Divine Love satisfied in that which is inferior to this. But beyond this we tread with uncertain steps. Between two men who love one another there subsists a certain relation : within each of them a certain habit of emotion as regards the other. The relation has reality, no doubt : but one is tempted to regard it as a conceptual reality, i.e., a way in which they may be regarded from outside ; it is not natural to think of any actual link holding them together. On the other hand, it must be said that this account of the matter assumes an exclusive theory of the 168 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD individual, such as we have now rejected : and that it may be, therefore, legitimate to argue (1) that the love of individuals points to a real unity among men, which is more than merely conceptual, though not necessarily subject to physical tests, and (2) that such a bond may be in the highest type of Love conceived as Personal, in the same sense as with reference to the Father and the Son. If it be true that it is ultimately the presence of the unifying Spirit of God that makes all men one in spite of all varieties, we may well think of the Bond of Love as personal, in the unity which is the ideal and type of unity set before us by Christ the unity of God. We cannot leave this subject without entering upon a question which has been productive of much dissension in the Church the question of the Procession of the Holy Ghost The Nicseno-Constantinopolitan Creed, in its original form, asserted only the Procession from the Father : in the West, first in Spain and then gradually in almost all the Western Churches, the Filioque clause, as it was called, was added, so that the Creed now runs, ' Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son.' This addition, owing to political and ecclesiastical rivalries between East and West, was made the overt occasion of the schism between the churches which has lasted till the present day. Two questions are involved in the discussion, one, whether the addition was canonically made, the other, whether it was dogmatically sound. As to the first point, there seems to be little doubt that the Eastern Church was in the right. The Council of Chalcedon had ordered that the Creed of Nicea should be accepted by all orthodox churches throughout the world in the form in which it then stood (i.e., without the Filioque) and that no addition should be made thenceforward without the decision of a General Council. Now the Filioque clause never possessed such sanction. It is asserted dogmatically for the first time in a Spanish provincial council (Toledo, A.D. 589), and seems THE FILIOQUE CLAUSE 169 to have been really added by mistake. 1 It was never accepted by the Greek Church at all, and not by the Latin churches generally for about 300 years. It is difficult, therefore, to defend it on canonical grounds. The dogmatic question is more intricate. The two practices of the Eastern and Western Churches as regards this clause seem to represent two prominently different modes of con- ceiving the relation between the three Persons. All Christians regard the Son as ' subordinate ' to the Father, even within the Godhead. And they mean by that phrase simply that His Being is derived that, though He is God as truly and completely as the Father, He is still the Son and not the Father generated, not the generator. It is true that the Arians laid hold of this point, and attempted to argue that their own account of the Son did not go beyond this : but the answer always remains that, according to Catholic tradi- tion, the subordination of the Son involves no difference in nature; according to the Arians it does. The Son, being subordinate in this sense, is the instrument of all the Father's activity. Whatever the Father does, He does through the Son ; the procession of the Holy Ghost is, therefore, from the Father through the Son. This is the phrase which the Greeks have always accepted, and are prepared to accept still, as the Bonn Conference has recently shown. 2 It is a phrase which is used by S. John Damascene whose authority has largely determined the modern forms of I their faith and it is of importance in that it insists on the unity of the source of deity (/x/a Trrjyr] Oeorj/ro?), a truth which, it was contended, was concealed by the Western phraseology. Moreover, it represents the process, if the phrase may be allowed, of the 1 Cf. H. B. Swete, History of the Doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Spirit, pp. 169, 170. ' Both the King and his Bishops believed [the words] to be a true part of the original Faith.' 2 Cf. H. B. Swete, op. tit., pp. 238, 239. i?o INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD Godhead as following one principle, that of subordination. In its history, it seems to be associated more closely with metaphysical points of view than the other, and was attractive, therefore, to the Eastern mind, which rejoiced in accurate and subtle metaphysical definition. As the subordination-doctrine was especially characteristic of the metaphysical Greeks, so the doctrine of the coinherence was more attractive to the non-metaphysical Westerns. It must not be supposed that the doctrine of the coinherence was absent from Greek theology, or that of the subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the writings of Western theologians. All that is meant is that the one was more calculated to attract thinkers of a metaphysical turn of mind, and the other less. What, then, is the doctrine of the coin- herence (Trepixupwu) f t ne three Persons ? It is simply the dogmatic expression of our Lord's words in the last discourses in S. John, where He speaks of the Father as abiding in Him- self, and of Himself as abiding in the Father. Thus (xvii. 21) we read, ' That they all may be one thing, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in us.' And the passage in which our Lord describes the operation of the Holy Ghost is full of the same thought: 'He shall glorify Me, because He shall take of Mine and shall declare it unto you. All things which the Father hath are Mine, therefore said I that He taketh of Mine and shall declare it unto you.' The thought which these words contain is expressed formally by the doctrine of the coinherence ; by which we affirm that the action of one person involves the co-operation of all, so indissoluble is the unity of the Godhead. Some discussion of this point will be found in S. Athanasius against the Arians (Orat., III. xx.-xxii.) ; but the fullest and most elaborate account of the Holy Trinity from this point of view is that of S. Augustine in the great work to which reference has already been made, De Trinitate. The motive of this book is THE FILIOQUE CLAUSE 171 to put into words somewhat more clearly than had as yet been done the two facts (1) that each Person inheres in the other two, and that the operation of one involves the operation of all ; and (2) that, notwithstanding this, the mission of the Son is the work of the Father, the Incarnation the special manifestation of the Son, and the appearances at Pentecost and all that has followed the peculiar revelation of the Holy Spirit. 1 The subject is discussed at great length, and with the greatest elaboration. The author searches all through nature and human life for analogies by which to make his meaning clearer, and his book has been the source of most speculation upon the subject in the West. It is easy to see that this way of looking at the relations of the three Persons is far more nearly akin to the phrase added by the Westerns to the Nicene Creed than to that which the Eastern theologians prefer. The phrase ' through the Son ' is more definite enters too accurately into the nature, if we may so say, of the procession for the Western mind. Under the influence of S. Augustine Western theologians have thought more of the indissoluble unity of will and operation in the Holy Trinity than of the precise contribution (to speak in human language) of each single 1 Cf. Aug., De Trin., I. v. 5.' But in this matter (i.e. the Catholic faith) some are disturbed when they hear that the Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet that they are not three Gods but one God ; and they ask how to understand this, especially when it is said that the Trinity acts inseparably in everything which God does, and yet that a certain voice of the Father was heard, which was not the voice of the Son ; that none but the Son was born in flesh, suffered, rose, and ascended into heaven ; that none but the Holy Ghost came in the form of a dove they wish to understand how the Trinity produced that voice which was the voice of the Father alone ; and how again the Trinity created that flesh in which none but the Son was born of the Virgin ; and how the same Trinity effected the form of the dove, in which none but the Holy Spirit appeared. . . . Since then men raise these questions, and they are an anxiety to ourselves, let us discuss them as we can, if by the gift of God our weakness has any knowledge on this matter.' i;2 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD Person. To them, therefore, the indifferent conjunction ' and ' is preferable to the definiteness of the Greek pre- position 'through.' And the difficulty which the Greeks raised against their phraseology, that it slurred over the unity of the source of Godhead, can hardly have been before their minds. To say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son would not suggest to them a twofold origin or principle of Deity; it would simply affirm, with the indefiniteness of inadequate knowledge, the co-operation of the Son in that which the Father does. We have entered somewhat more carefully into this matter than may seem quite necessary in a work of the present scale, because it is of great importance to insist that there is no radical dogmatic difference on this point between the Eastern and Western Churches. Both held precisely the same beliefs, and hold them still; but they describe them, as has been shown, in different ways. And a point like this could hardly have been a subject upon which two churches could have suspended communion, if it had not been for the rancour which political disputes imparted to the discussion. But the question may still be asked, Which expression is preferable ? Being in communion with the Western Church, and under Western influences, we not unnaturally prefer the Western use, and see reasons for preferring it. The Eastern phrase, as we have already hinted, is closely associated with metaphysical speculations. It marks the influence of the Greek philosophical types of thought upon the doctrines of the Church. Without in any degree implying any variation from absolute identity of essence between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it still bears a somewhat striking resemblance to those systems of development which Platonism had devised by way of an explanation of the world. The aim of these was, as we have mentioned more than once, to explain the rise of the world as it is at present, from a Being THE WORD PERSON 173 absolutely simple and changeless in nature. To this end the changeless Being was supposed to have evolved beings, like Himself indeed, but with a tendency away from Himself towards creation, through which, many or few as the case might be, creation was evolved. The subordination-idea, when applied to the Holy Trinity without qualification from the other point of view, is apt to look painfully like one of these speculations. And directly the phrases which express it become matter of controversy they tend to lose their due qualifications. The doctrine of the coinherence, on the other hand, is the peculiar property of Christian thought. It is impregnated through and through with the specially Christian belief in God as Love; without in any measure blurring or confusing the distinctions between the Persons, it keeps steadily in view the unity of God, and insists upon the co-operation of the whole Trinity of Persons in every act of God. And we believe that the Western phrase has arisen owing to the emphasis laid upon this doctrine by the greatest theologian of the West. We have been chiefly concerned of late with mysteries. We have spoken to the best of our powers about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, using as a guide the interpretation of it given by S. Augustine. And we have pointed out that the definition of it involved no presumption on the part of the Church, for the problem was set before it by the words of our Lord ; and that no theory about it which regards it as a mere economy or condescension can be regarded as satisfactory. In some sense or another it states what is fact about God (indeed, if it does not, it is hard to see in what sense it is a concession to human infirmity, for it certainly does not make things easier) ; but we have not yet ventured upon the question what exactly it is that it does tell us, what it is that we regard as fact. To this we must now proceed. What do we mean by Person as applied to the Father, 174 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD Son, and Holy Spirit ? We have observed that the analogy of human personality and its complex self-realization fails us here. For men find themselves raised into completeness by means of others no less personal than they, no less independent and self-contained. And all these conditions are human ; they belong to beings who are limited in time and space, who are enclosed in the prison-house of the flesh: union so accidental and dissoluble as that between man and man can hardly be applied directly to the indis- soluble unity of the Godhead. Let us ask first how we came to use this word Person at all. It is of course an inheritance from the Latin Church, and goes back to the days of Tertullian. In Roman law, from which some have derived its use, it means a holder of legal rights. In this sense it would not be quite coextensive with our word ' person.' For we should call a slave a person, though he was incapable of sustaining legal rights, and we should not call a Corporation or College a ' person,' though legal rights may be vested in one. These differences of usage serve to bring out the central meaning of the Latin word : we may paraphrase it ' one who performs, or is capable of, certain functions.' The term is applied in view of these alone, nothing is said of any other characters he may sustain. If this legal phraseology is the origin of the use of the word, there is no Greek theological phrase which precisely corre- sponds with it. But there is another theory of its origin which connects it with the Greek Trpoa-unrov. This word and its Latin equivalent mean ' a character ' in a play, and referred originally to the mask worn by the actor rather than to the part he played. Whatever be the exact history of TT poawTrov and persona in the sense of TT/OOO-WTTOV, there can be no doubt that the words are inadequate to the purpose required of them. They tend to mean merely ' aspects ' of a Divine substance, and therefore savour of Sabellianism. THE THREE PERSONS IN HOLY SCRIPTURE 175 On the Greek side there are two words which are of importance here ova-la and u-TroVrao-i?. They seem origin- ally to have been almost equivalent terms ; that is, it seems to have been equally accurate to say that there is one ova-la, or that there is one viroo-Tcuris in the nature of God. But by degrees, through a process which we need not describe in detail, uxoWao-is was reserved to express the three Persons, while ova-la was used as before for the Divine Substance. Thus it would become necessary to speak of one ovtria and three vTroerrdcrei?. This change caused some stir in the West The Latins had translated inro-crrao-t? into sub-stantia, and used sulstantia as an equivalent to ova-la- It was, therefore, a great shock to Jerome on going to the East to find theo- logians there speaking of three inroarrda-ei?, which he, of course, translated 'tres substantial.' In the end persona is used where vTroa-raa-is would be used in Greek, and substantia is restricted to the sense of ova-ia. The word uxoVroo-/? was a metaphysical word, for which we have no exact equivalent. Having originally meant the sediment at the bottom of a fluid, it came to mean the substratum or ground of qualities, and so a person, that is, the underlying reality upon which various characters and experiences are based. 1 It is plain that this is too strong a word, as persona was seen to be too weak. It goes too far in the way of separation, and inclines towards Tritheism, as the other word had inclined towards Sabellianism. Let us now ask what it is that we know of each of the three Divine Persons. Of the Father we know that He so loved the world that He sent His Son into it to save it ; that He is the source of all that the Son does (S. John v. 19) ; 1 It is worth mentioning that in Heraclides Ponticus the verb constantly means to play the part of, to represent, which may possibly connect inrfaraffis with persona in the sense of 'mask.' Cf. for instance, Horn. All., chap. Ixv. i;6 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD that He has sent us a Comforter in place of the presence of His Son Incarnate. That is, the Father is the ultimate source of all activity and of the whole scheme of things. To Him also all things are to return (1 Cor. viii. 6) ; when the Son shall have yielded up the sovereignty which has been delivered unto Him and God becomes all in all (1 Cor. xv. 28). Of the Son we know that He is the Instrument by whom the Father acts : He is the Word of God, His Wisdom, the Person by whom the Father is naturally and properly revealed both in nature and in the Incarnation. Hence come His functions as Mediator between God and man ; this is the reason, so far as we can see it, why it was the Son who was incarnate ; there is, to speak technically, a special con- gruity with the Person of the Son in the Incarnation. And of the Holy Spirit we know that He brooded over creation and evoked its order ; that by the Spirit of God the Word came to the prophets and holy men of old, so that they spake as they were moved. But the chief and crowning manifestation of the Holy Spirit is in the Church. Since the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit has been upon the Church, guiding it and revealing to it the revelation of the Son. And He has a function in the hearts of individuals also to interpret them, their wants and aspirations, to God. He instructs, consoles, purifies, quickens both the Church as a whole and its individual members. If we put this shortly, the Spirit puts into operation the will of the Father, reflected in the Word. The Son, as S. Irenaeus wrote, is the measure of the Father (mensura patris) the object of His love ; and through the Holy Spirit's agency the will of the Father displayed objectively in the Son is made effectual in the world and in the hearts of men the Divine Love and the eternal object of the Divine Love are held together in perfect realization. So far we have merely been expressing in language more TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE 177 or less technical what the Bible tells us describing the several functions which the Bible mentions in distinctness but without explanation. And that means that we have been dealing with the Holy Trinity as revealed. From the point of view of revelation, then, we know the separateness of the Persons by their separateness of function. They are revealed as really three, and as performing three separate types of action, and we know their Personality through the separate functions which they perform. For us, then, and within the limits of our knowledge, the Personality of the Father consists in His being the source and fount of all existence and activity, will and love ; the Personality of the Son lies just in the fact that He is the objective expression of the Father's will, His Word and His Wisdom ; the distinct Personality of the Holy Ghost lies in His separate functions of interpretation and inspiration. These things we know on the authority of Christ in Scripture, and we may well hesitate to insist upon a greater separateness than these Scriptural distinctions imply. The word 'person' with us no doubt suggests a greater distinctness and exclusiveness ; but then, it is not weighted with the necessity of preserving absolute unity of substance, throughout the difference. On the other hand, we have no right to assume that the distinctions found in Holy Scripture mean less than they say; that is that they are descriptions of different modes of activity, as a man might be said to will, to think, to act. Partly, because, if we do this, we find ourselves with a considerable amount of our Lord's language before us, of which no account can be given at all; and partly because we shall then be driven back upon a conception of the nature of God which we have seen reason to reject. We shall have to return upon the old speculations of natural religion : we shall have to accept a Pantheistic or a Deistic view of God. It will be virtually Pantheism if we think of God as finding the eternal object 12 i;8 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD of His love in the world, because this makes the world necessary to the completeness of the being of God, and if we deny the plurality in the Godhead the world is the only object left ; it will be Deism if we look upon Him simply as creator without further interest or intelligible motive in His dealing with the world. We are now in a position to sum up the results of our investigation so far as it has gone, and to define the affinities, historical and other, of the Catholic Creed. We have learnt that the Church has been led to formulate the scattered hints and unexplained allusions of Scripture in a definite shape, and that the form which its theology has taken is as follows: Each Person the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost is Divine ; is God as fully and completely as if He were alone each is 0X09 6eo9. This is nothing more than a bare restatement of the Scriptural allusions. But there comes a time when development is necessary, when it becomes necessary to say with precision and accuracy what this statement carries with it, what it excludes, what it leaves unde- fined. Starting from the words of Christ, let fall, as one might say, at different times, and especially on the last evening before the Passion, the Church has further affirmed that this Tri-personality must not be so construed as either to reduce the distinction of the Persons to the level of mere aspects or modes of an unknown Divine substance, or to accentuate their individuality to the point of separation. Though each is by Himself God and Lord, yet the Three cannot act separately. God is One, although this unity breaks up as we gaze into a Trinity of Persons. We must insist again that this does not mean any independent or self-willed speculation is no presumptuous pretence of knowledge where knowledge cannot be had ; it is simply the necessarily elaborate expression of truths which underlie the Bible language; it is, as S. Augustine often calls it, THE HISTORY OF THE TRINITARIAN IDEA 179 catholica sanitas, the sound mind of the Catholic Church. 1 Also, it is a development of Monotheism : it arises out of the consideration of the unity of God. The unity of God does not mean the common element in the Three Persons; that would be Tritheism a belief in three individuals forming a class known as God. Instead of this, we hold firm the old faith in one God, but accept, too, the light which the Incarna- tion has thrown upon it. Just as sometimes to use a faint parallel a star, which for ages has been known as single, proves under more Accurate observations to be two or more, held together in a single system. We pointed out, some few pages back, that the Trinitarian idea of God comes in to meet and solve certain difficulties arising in connexion with the personality of man. We pro- pose to illustrate now its theological affinities in two other directions. We propose to show that it alone satisfies the idea of God as a moral Being, and that it alone satisfies the idea of God as a personal Being. The first of these points will not take us far beyond positions already attained. So far as the inner coherence of things is concerned, we have already shown that this doctrine offers the best and truest way of dealing with the revelation of God as Love. It enables us to escape the dangers of Pantheism and Deism alike. But we have said nothing as yet very definitely of the historical affinities of the Catholic doctrine. It is neces- sary to speak of this, because it is constantly affirmed that the primitive Church knew nothing of the doctrine, but that it was passed off upon the Church of the fourth century by means of the influence of purely Greek speculation. We have not ventured to decide the question of the origin of the Logos doctrine, which is the central point of the discus- sion; the evidence at hand is hardly sufficient, we think, for a decision. Now, however, that we have before us a 1 Cf. De Trin., II. xiiL 23. i8o INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD fuller notion of what the Church doctrine really is, something may be said as to its real affinities. It seems to us to stand in the very strongest contrast to anything which Greek speculation produced, in several ways. The Greek specula- tions, the results of which are offered as parallels to the Christian Trinity, are of a purely metaphysical kind. They have no interest in moral life except in so far as it is a necessary part of the evolution of the world. Morality (to speak chiefly of systems in vogue after the time of Christ) was the method by which an escape was sought from the pains and labours of life in no sense a method of self- development with a view to another. Stoicism and Neo- platonism were the loftiest of post-Christian systems, and both are motived by despair. 1 Knowledge is the method of virtue, and virtue a method of escape from knowledge indeed from consciousness at all. It is in harmony with this view of life that the metaphysical account of the world is constructed. The world is referred to God as cause, but it is felt that some reason must be assigned for His allowing the evolution of such a world where the soul is sunk in matter and needs emancipation in order to be itself, or to be absorbed into the soul of the world. Hence Theology and Physics lie close together ; Theology is the explanation of the Divine and physical causation of things. It is clear that no such systems can have room for an Incarnation. The only remedy afforded by them for the present state of things is to clear it all away and begin afresh ; the last thing to be thought of would be the entry of a Divine Person upon the human field. How could such a one be defiled with matter ? But the Trinitarian idea, as we have seen, arises out of and depends upon the truth of the Incarnation. A system, therefore, which has no room for an Incarnation has no ultimate affinity with the Christian Trinity, 1 Cf. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, Bd. I. (ed. i.), pp. 662-680. THE HISTORY OF THE TRINITARIAN IDEA 181 however like it some of its speculations may appear in form. Trinitarianism runs back upon a moral conception of God, whereas the Hellenic interest is predominantly metaphysical. If Greece, then, cannot help us, let us turn to Judaea. We have seen already that the Jewish mind found a very slight attraction in metaphysical questions. The Jews did not feel the Greek impulse to form a connected system of the whole world outside them, a system in which there should be no break and no irreconcileable difference of nature. To their minds God was always separate from the world ; revealed through it, indeed, but existing beyond it with an inexhaustible fulness of light and life. He created it out of nothing, by His Word, and it stood fast ; and now He rules it with His Wisdom. The existence of the world displays the Divine power, the ordering of it His wisdom. Man comes into relation with God in the mere fact of his existence as a part of the natural world ; he is created like the rest of things. But of him God makes the demand to be holy like Himself. It is by holiness of life, by the fear of the Lord, that man finds himself in harmony with the Divine counsels, and therefore with the ordering of the world. It is not the knowledge of any philosophical principle which can give man his true wisdom ; it is the fear of the Lord, and to depart from evil, which constitutes human wisdom and human understanding. The point to notice here is that in following out this moral principle man likens himself to God ; he becomes wise with the Wisdom of God, whereas the fool fails in all things to attain the measure of a man. Even the ceremonial law, minute and trifling as its provisions appear to us, is a symbol of the purity and separateness of one who lives after the manner in which God would have him live. ' I am the Lord ' is the ultimate sanction with which one important section of the ceremonial law is enforced (cf. Lev. xvii.-xxvi.). 182 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD It is true that as time went on the familiar intercourse, so to speak, which this conception of God implied between God and man seemed to offend against the feelings of reverence. And by degrees the majesty of God became transcendent. His immediate touch was no longer believed to lie upon the world and man. His Name was never uttered but on the most solemn occasion in the year. His place as immediate Disposer of earthly things was taken by the Word and the Wisdom of God ideas which tended to take on a personal character. But though withdrawn from the immediate con- duct of the world, the God of the Jews remained an active and holy Person. It was not because action, with its sug- gestion of change; purpose, with its suggestion of choice, of means, and limitation; love and anger, with their apparently material implications it was not because these were impossible to a vacant and inactive abstraction that God became transcendent. For these were never separated from Him. He acts, governs, loves as before, but these activities are manifested to the world through His Word, His Wisdom, His Spirit. These attributes are, as it were, the portion of His glory i.e. the fulness of His Nature and Character, which the weak eyes of mankind can bear to see. In the Greek speculation the starting-point is bare simplicity, from which a movement is made towards variety and complexity ; to the Jew, the Wisdom and the Word of God are but the revealed fragment of the inconceivable fulness of Divine life. As with Moses in the cleft, man could not see the glory of the Lord ; the goodness of the Lord is made to pass before him, and His Name is proclaimed before him. He sees the ' back parts of the Lord,' but His face may not be seen. It would be difficult to imagine any two points of view more diametrically opposed than these two the Greek and the Jewish. The ideal of their thought is different; they TRINITARIANISM, DEISM, PANTHEISM 183 look for truth in different directions. One finds God in the ultimate result of the processes of thought ; the other thinks of Him as partly revealed in nature, partly in the moral life, still more in history. The one trusts simply his own powers of analysia and speculation ; the other relies on communicated information, expressly denying that man by wisdom can find out God. The notion of God in the one case is pro- minently, if not wholly, intellectual; in the other it is ethical through and through. If this account of the two chief lines of ancient Theology be true, it follows that the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity is continuous with Jewish religious developments and not with Greek. The Jew had learnt certain facts about the action of God in the world and His attitude to- wards it. The Incarnation reveals these more precisely, and thereby manifests the truth of the Holy Trinity. It is not intended to deny that the Christian doctrine in later days learned to adopt many forms and expressions of Greek origin. But the history of Arianism, as we have already described it, will show the readiness of the Church to adapt as well as to adopt, to modify the language it borrows in order to avoid modifying its thoughts. 1 One more point remains. We have now to show that Trinitarianism is the necessary completion of Theism. Theism consists in the belief in one God, who is personal, eternal, and capable of self-revelation. It differs from Pan- theism in that it maintains a severance of nature between God and the world; it declines to admit any fusion or indistinctness, whereas Pantheism, in one way or another, regards the world as a necessary part of the Divine Being. And it differs from Deism in that it insists upon a close and permanent relation between God and the world so long as the world exists. 1 Further illustrations might be found in the history of words like tlicin> and \4yos. 184 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD It must not be supposed that Deism and Pantheism have not many arguments in their favour. There are many reasons which can be alleged in favour of these positions and against Theism, which is their negation. Our point here is, then, that these anti-Theistic arguments only lose their force completely when Theism perfects itself in Trini- tarianism. The difficulty of Deism is that it involves a mechanical view of the world's order. God is practically excluded from it. Regarded as its necessary cause, He is excluded from any further relation with the world. Deism takes away with one hand what it gives with the other. It starts with the assurance that God made the world ; but it so limits this notion of cause as virtually jto separate the world and God. On the other hand, it escapes many of the difficulties which arise out of the present state of things when compared with the nature of God. It avoids any semblance of making God responsible for evil ; He made the world good enough, and then it deflected from this standard on its own account. Whereas evil is the great crux of Pantheism. For the tendency to identify God with the world, or to regard it as a necessary condition of His being, is to take evil right into His nature ; since all must admit that evil is here. The great advantage of Pantheism is that it avoids the mechanical consequences of Deism, and brings God near to man. It appeals to the consciousness of art and poetry, and gives to all nature and all modes of life a dignity and beauty which have in them something of the Divine. These are the super- ficial characteristics of the two points of view. They run back upon certain theoretical positions which give them their particular character. Deism depends upon a particular view of cause. A cause, according to it, is the effectual occurrence or act by which a certain result is called into being. The cause and the effect are considered quite separately, the cause being supposed to leave off when the TRINITARIANISM AND THEISM 185 effect begins. This is probably the popular and ordinary view of causation. When we look at the difficulty of Deism, just mentioned above, in this light, it is seen to be a much more serious one than was supposed. God, according to the Deist, was cause of the world, after which His functions were over. But in the light of what we have just said, this will mean, that God is no longer necessary at all ; there is no place for Him in the world. He appeared in answer to a necessity of thought, which is satisfied when the world has come into being. The religious associations of the word God may lead us still to talk of Him as existent, but everything would be just the same if the effort of creation had annihilated Him. The difficulty of Deism is, then, that it means practical atheism. It cuts at the roots of all positive conceptions of God His personality, His eternity, His goodness. Pantheism also has its notion of cause lying at its root, and it is diametrically opposed to that of Deism. Causation, from this point of view, is an immanent process, as it is technically called that is, it consists in the balance of two related forces. The effect is as necessary to complete the cause, as the cause to bring the effect into being. They stand and fall together. When one ceases the other ceases too. This explanation, as in the other case, tends to bring the difficulty of Pantheism into clearer light. God is still cause of the world, but He is immanent cause. The world (evil and all) is the correlative of His existence. Without the world He would have no means of self-expression. He would vanish into blank nothingness. Theism, in the Unitarian sense, tries to cut between these two difficulties. It endeavours to believe in God as separate in nature from the world, yet necessarily living and eternal. Instead of accepting the Deistic view of Him as merely a cause, it endeavours to find Him functions in the world as 186 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD created. It inclines to allow that He occasionally interferes with the progress of the world alters its movement to suit a special occasion, works a miracle here and there. It accepts the Bible account of revelation, thinks of God ruling in history, believes in the special mission of Christ, as a godly man, and so on. But then it comes into violent collision with all orderly speculation about nature. It is not at this stage philosophical at all ; it is eclectic ; it aims at combining and selecting out of a variety of possible positions, and its collision with the man of science reveals its weaknesses only too clearly. The occasional interferences by which it had hoped to keep up a divine influence upon things are shown to be impossible, to render all serious scientific effort hazard- ous and liable to disappointment. It is shown, too, that they must imply weakness if they are, as is contended, occasional. They must mean that the original plan of the world was found not to answer, and was patched up as occasion required. Slowly but surely it is driven over by this kind of criticism into a more or less Pantheistic position. It loses hold of the idea of a personal God ; for it becomes more and more difficult to think of a lonely being with no object for His love or interest. Or perhaps it finds its chief trouble over the idea of eternity. How can this lonely solitary Being while away the endless years till the creation dawns upon it ? The whole theory becomes repulsive, and the warmth of life which Pantheism brings becomes attractive. For Pantheism never leaves God alone. The world is always there, always expressing the will of the Spirit, from whose will it springs, or rather, whose will it perpetually represents. In one case, and, as far as we know, one only, space is made to play the part of the object of the Divine activity. This is in Dr. Martineau's Study of Religion, Bk. II. ch. i. We do not propose to discuss it at length, because we do not think that the theory as it stands is likely to be popular. TRINITARIANISM AND THEISM 187 We only mention it in order to illustrate the straits to which pure Theism is driven in its endeavour to avoid Pantheism and Deism alike. Dr. Martineau, of course, is a philosopher, and the form of Christianity which he represents so ably is credited with being the most philosophical type of it. We are inclined to think, on the other hand, that Unitarian Theism is rather a compromise between a philo- sophical belief in God and the theory of His nature which depends on revelation. The philosophical theory is bandied about between the two tendencies of Transcendence and Immanence, and Theism tries, ineffectually, as we think, to mediate between them. Trinitarianism, however, satisfies the conditions which Theism fails to satisfy. By its assertion of a plurality of persons in the Godhead it avoids the dangers which are fatal to Unitarian Theism. There need be no talk of space or of a world co-eternal with God upon a Trinitarian theory of His nature. We have already shown that the Word and the Holy Spirit answer every condition which we can require of this kind. And the identification of the nature of God with love enables us to shadow out the motive which may have been at the root of the world's existence. It enables us to shadow it out and no more, for we are not so far masters of the ultimate purposes of God as to see how the original counsels are being carried forward to their attain- ment. What we can see is consistent with the motives that we know. But it may be asked, Is not Trinitarianism, then, after all, a mere matter of philosophical speculation, a means of satisfying philosophical problems, and not a matter for a Creed ? The answer is, that it is nothing of the kind. The fact that it satisfies, or appears to some to satisfy, certain philosophical questions is not part of its essence, as it were. In itself, as we have so often argued, it is the 188 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD amplification, the explicit statement of the fact of the Incarnation. Its first appearance is made in the most unphilosophical region of the world. But, once grasped as a matter of fact, it is seen to involve a certain attitude towards questions of philosophy. It does not hold aloof from all these. It carries with it an answer to them. And in order to make this plain, the Church may and will use the language of philosophy. It will express its answers to the philosophical problem in the terms which philosophy employs at the time, just as it teaches its Creed, in contents if not in form, to various nations in the language which they speak. This fact will define the limits within which restatement of the articles of the Catholic faith will be possible. The philosophical language changes from age to age. The philosophical questions are asked in different ways at different times. At all times men have sought to bring into system the three great facts in experience the soul, the world, and God. But the problem has been expressed in different forms. In Greece little was said about the soul. It was assumed that man could know the world and God, and the problem was to order and systematize the knowledge he had to build up a scheme of thoughts which should correspond with and reproduce the scheme of things outside. And the Church entered upon this question and gave its answer. Its doctrine of God, besides every- thing else that it was, offered a solution of this question, which could be expressed in the technical language of the day. Some modifications had to be made, some associations had to be set aside. But, for the most part, the philosophical language of the Church was the language of the Greek philosophic schools, just as the ordinary language of Alexandrian Christians was Greek. In the present day our problem is differently expressed: it is to explain the possibility of our knowledge of God and of the world. Here, TRINITARIANISM AND THEISM 189 again, the old doctrines may be translated into the language which this new aspect of the matter requires, just as the Nicene Creed may be translated into English. The new light, which the investigation leading to the new problem brings, will aid us in restatement. If we may use a portion of the present chapter as an illustration, the peculiar form given to the analogy of human personality to the Holy Trinity is one which does not occur in S. Augustine, but is suggested by more modern speculations. To have recited the Augustinian parallels pure and simple would not, we hope, have involved any departure from our present point of view. But to have done so would have made it necessary to introduce a dissertation upon the psychology of Augustine's day in order to make it reasonably intelligible that there was an analogy at all. It is not quite the same with articles of the Creed, such as the famous Homoousion. This also requires translation; it must be expressed in the language in which we think. But it is the formal definition of the Church of one age, continually accepted by successive ages, of the Catholic belief as to the nature of the Son. It ex- presses the conviction that Jesus Christ is Son of God. We may translate this into any language we like, but we cannot explain it away without a total departure from the ancient faith of Christendom. To say, therefore, that it has only a historic interest, as representing the point of view of that day, does not quite correspond with the facts. It is the Nicene form given to the thought that Christ is Son of God, just as 6/j.oovcriov is the Greek word expressed in English by the phrase " of one substance." The real matter is one of fact, of truth or falsity, and not of expression merely. We have now concluded our account of the Christian doctrine of God. We contend that it is the result of revelation, by which we do not mean that it was thrust in upon the mind of man without any relation to his own 190 INCARNATION AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD method of thought, or that the Word of God had no influence upon the minds of thinkers outside the lines of the Jewish and Christian faiths; but that its certainty is greater than any which can be reached by merely human methods. The nature of this certainty consists largely in certain coin- cidences. It consists in the coincidence of the Christian doctrine of God, as flowing from the Person of Christ, with the highest and best aspirations of man's heart and mind. But more than this, it satisfies questionings which, but for it, could never have arisen. It is not, therefore, a human solution of the world's problem, more successful than others, but it comes from a knowledge of the actual conditions of things which is wider than any that man can boast. All human speculations, so far as they are true, find place under its shadow, and yet there is room. This fact justifies the method which we described in the Introduction. So far from being an advantage to the Creed to be capable of demonstration by ordinary speculative methods, such an event would be the demonstration that its claim was false. The method proper to Theology will not be that of a science of which human experience supplies all the subject-matter. In Theology we shall have done our utmost, and done, too, all that any one has a right to expect, if we show the coherence of the Articles of the Creed with the ultimate needs of man. The Doctrine of God. Sabellianism, etc., Tert., Adv. Praxeam. S. Ath., Or. adv. Ar. IV. S. Bos., Ep. 210. Trinitarianism, Didymus, De Trin. S. Basil, De Spiritu Sancto. S. Aug., De Trinitate. S. Thorn. Aq., Summa, Pt. I. Qusest. xxviii.-xliii. Waterland, On the Trinity. Lux Mundi, Essay ii. Martineau, Study of Religion, Bk. II. ch. i. Moberly, Atonement and Personality. Illingworth, Personality. For the Relation of the Doctrine to Greek Thought. Cudworth, True and Intellectual System. Morgan, The Trinity of Plato and Plotinus. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures. General History of the Doctrine. Baur, Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit. For Theories and Experiments as to the Human Self. James, Psychology. Ency. Britt., art. Psychology, by J. Ward. CHAPTER V THE DOCTRINE OF MAN: CREATION FALL ATONEMENT TILL recent years Creation would have seemed an easy subject to describe. It would have been enough to cite the evidence of the first chapter of Genesis, and then it would have been assumed that the meaning was plain; that God made separately the various kinds of animals, as a man might make various kinds of figures in wood or stone. The exact analysis of the idea of Creation was practically ignored. It would have been thought sufficient to mention it as a fact. But the doctrine of evolution has changed all this. It is no longer possible to speak of Creation and suppose that its meaning is clear ; the exact sense in which God is believed to be in contact with the created world has to be explained. Two ideas seem to be essential to the notion of Creation : (1) that God was really and exclusively the agent in the production of the created world; (2) that the process occurred in time. We must consider both these points somewhat carefully. I. God is really and exclusively the agent in the pro- duction of the created world. In the last chapter we said that the Trinitarian view of God relieved us of the pantheistic necessity of conceiving the world as a necessary condition of the completeness of the Divine Life. The Holy Trinity 192 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN is eternally complete, needing nothing from without ; the world has no necessary existence, it depends for its being simply upon the fiat of God. It is sometimes argued that this theory of Creation really involves a degradation of God, since it contradicts His attributes of changelessness and infinity, and implies the operation of motives of desire and want, thus suggesting material limitations. The argument that the changelessness of God is affected by Creation turns on the assumption that before the created world started into being, God must have meant not to create, that He then changed His mind and brought the world into being. We are not in a position to discuss this fully as yet, because it raises the difficulty of understanding time in connexion with the Divine purpose. We may, however, answer provisionally that though God cannot change His will, He may will a change, 1 and that we have no reason for saying that the will to create was the fruit of a sudden or accidental motive. The question of infinity is more serious. It seems to involve a real limitation upon the infinity of God, that He should fix definite laws for created existence and allow a thought to take shape, as it were, outside Himself in an independent fashion. Moreover the existence of a motive for creation, a desire to embody an idea in a created world, seems, of itself, an infraction of the Infinite. How, it may be asked, can an infinite Being be said to be conscious of any- thing like a desire without contradiction ? It is true, that if the desire arose from without, and was caused, as in the case of men, by some change occurring independently of the subject of it, such a position would be in contradiction with the idea of Infinity. But it is quite different if the desire depends solely upon the will of the Infinite, and if the realization of it, even though it may involve limitation, is 1 S. Thorn. Aq., Summa Theol., Pt. I. Quaest. xix. Art. vii. CREATION AND INFINITY 193 self-chosen. It is quite possible that Creation may mean in some sense a self-limitation on the part of God, though we cannot fully understand in what sense. But it will be remembered that in the last chapter we quoted an ancient doctrine mentioned by S. Irenaeus, that the nature of God is self -limiting ; the Father, writes S. Irenaeus, is unmeasured, the Son is the measure of the Father. 1 And we cannot but think that this thought is far truer, we believe, and more suitable to the notion of God than the popular epithet infinite. This word is purely negative in its associations ; it means literally nothing but the absence of all limits. And there is nothing in it to show that it does not include the absence of all positive existence. Positive existence involves limitations of a certain kind ; it is impossible to imagine a being who has not some definite character, i.e. who is not also necessarily without certain other definite characters ; and if all positive characteristics are equally derogatory to an Infinite Being, there is nothing for it but to deny His existence. 2 Moreover, such a conception of God leaves out of account any idea of personal activity and life which we have seen to be vital to Christian theology ; for these are no less unworthy of a Being conceived negatively as Infinite than actual limi- tations. And thus the notion of God will tend to belong to an atmosphere, as it were, which is beneath personal being ; for a dead, motionless, and characterless person is incon- 1 ' Pater immensus, mensura Patris Filius,' Adv. Haer. IV. iv. 2. 2 It has been maintained, as we mentioned above, p. 94, by a certain class of theologians that the truest form in which we can conceive of the existence of God is a negation that non-existence is as true of God as existence, because His mode of Being must be so widely diverse from anything of which we can have experience that every account of Him must be wrong. We are inclined to think that the strong insistence in modern times upon the conception of infinity has some survival of that negative point of view still remaining in it, and that it is open to the same objections. Cf. Philo, Leg. All. I. xv. S. Clem. Alex., Strom. V. xi. 72, 82, 83. Plot., Enn. VI. ix. 3. Dion. Areop., DC Div. Nv apx*]v M TrjprfcravTas, aAAa cnroXi- TroWay TO ISiov oiKtjTrjpiov) ; and the implication is, that some angels were rebellious and refused the service which had been assigned to them. These are they whom Michael overcomes in war and exiles from heaven. A similar history is given in Gen. iii. of the Fall of Man. Persuaded by the serpent, man aspires to a position which is not his; and he too falls. In both cases, evil is the result of a lawless 1 Jude v. 6. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL MANICH^ISM 213 spirit, and is expressed in an act of rebellion against God. This, then, is in Holy Scripture the ultimate character of evil ; it is a personal refusal to obey the Divine Person ; not a mistake or an accident, but a personal rebellion against personal rule. That means that it lies entirely in the moral region. Kant begins his treatise on the Metaphysic of Ethics with the words : ' There is no absolutely good thing in the world, a good will alone excepted ' ; and we may add as a pendant to this, There is no absolutely evil thing in the world, an evil will alone excepted. The root of all the evil that there is lies in the will of the beings whom God created and planted outside Himself, if we may so speak, to do Him honour and service. Moral evil is prior both in time and in importance to physical evil. In time, for the sin of Satan is prior to the existence of the physical world; in importance, for physical evil is, we believe, one of the results of moral disorder. This point of view has not always been popular, in fact it has never held the ground without a rival In every age, on one principle or another, the moral nature of evil has been denied, and evil has been ascribed to one or other of the neces- sary conditions of human life. The favourite method of ac- counting for evil is to refer it to the interference of matter with the powers of the soul. Manichseism is the name by which such modes of thought are described after the name of a conspicuous supporter of the dualistic hypothesis, Manes or Manichaeus, who nourished in the East in the third century. His peculiar theory, which was combined with much confusion and stupid mythological speculation, 1 came practically to this, that the world is the scene of the conflict of two powers, a good and an evil one, typified by light and darkness ; that the good power made the soul or the spirit, this being indeed a frag- ment of his substance ; that the power of darkness made 1 See S. Aug., c. Faustum, Bks. V. XV. XX. XXI. 214 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN matter, and had caught and imprisoned certain fragments of light. The province of the Redeemer was to free them from their enthralment. This heresiarch (for he was so regarded by the Church of his day) was of Oriental origin, and his scheme suggests strongly the Persian dualistic theory of the two powers Ahriman and Ahuramazda. It was probably influenced from this source. With its origin and mytho- logical characters we have fortunately nothing further to do. It reappeared in a more or less similar guise in the sect called the Priscillianists in the fourth century ; it is possible that it became rife amongst the Knights of the Temple ; and it is said to have been the really serious charge against the Albigenses and Waldenses. Any one who cares to read the publications of the Theosophical Society or of the Rosicru- cians will find that it is not dead, even in its mythological and crude form, at the present day. In an age of ordinary culture the mythology of Manichseism will be to most minds revolting and absurd ; but the principle which underlies it is of permanent significance, and is never without its followers. It appears in all those systems of philosophy which regard evil as an intellectual error, due to the imprisonment of the soul in matter ; and in all those in which evil is regarded as a necessary result of Creation. For all these leave out of sight the fact that evil is abnormal and depends upon an act of will ; it is from their point of view merely a fact which is in the world, and must be supposed to have had the same origin as the world. The conflict of which the soul is conscious in the event of sin is sufficient to suggest some external cause for evil ; * and the material character of many temptations, the real limita- tions, confusions, and impediments which the soul owes to the body, are sufficient to decide that matter shall be the seat of the opposing forces. 1 See above, p. 132. MANICH^ISM 215 Quite apart from the fact that this prevalent theory is in conflict with the authority of Scripture, there are reasons for holding it to be unsound. A. In the first place, it is at variance with the facts of conscience. Conscience convicts not of mistake, not of in- evitable delusion, not of an ill-judged attempt to resist the mechanical laws of nature but of sin. No person who knows what it is to sin, feels in the same way about it as about a mistake in a calculation, a false note in music, and the like. These may proceed from careless indifference, and so partake of the nature of sin, and, when that is the case, conscience is aroused. Otherwise it remains perfectly un- concerned. No one who knows what it is to sin, feels in the same way about it as about the natural deficiencies of his eyes. He may know that the eye is so formed that it does not give an absolutely true impression of what is seen. This is a part of its nature, and any delusion which may result from this is inevitable : but it is accepted and must be put up with; it differs toto coslo from sin. Once more, no one who knows what it is to sin feels about it in the same way as about an attempt to ignore the laws of nature. We do not condemn morally the man who tries to square the circle, unless we know that he ought to be doing something else with his time. We pity an unsuccessful aeronaut, unless we think he has been culpably careless of his life. We honour the man who risks his life for high moral ends, even though the task he has undertaken may be interfered with and brought to a disastrous close by the unbending laws of nature. The breach of these, or the attempt to resist their incidence, is morally indifferent ; moral considerations arising in connexion with such acts may turn them into sin, but nothing else. The conscience, then, when sensible of sin feels something wholly different from any of the states of feeling just described. It is sensible that a personal being 216 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN has been outraged and insulted, to whom reverence and love were due. And it is secretly convinced that this might have been avoided, that the will is responsible for the rebellion, or for listening to the enticement to rebel. This, as a matter of fact, is the content of conscience when a sin has been com- mitted. And it cannot be analyzed down into the sense of mistake or the like. If it be indeed true that there are men in whom the feeling of conscience is wholly dead, who have never felt anything approaching remorse or sinfulness, they cannot be taken as normal or typical characters; they are like persons who have no sense of music or poetry. It may be doubted whether any people exist who ought not to be capable of the consciousness of sin. As a matter of common experience, then, sin appears as a revolt against a person by a personal will ; and Manichseism in all its forms, by concen- trating attention upon the physical side of evil, or regarding it as inevitable, fails to touch the real point of the question. B. Manichaeism is nothing if not a scientific theory of things. However involved in mythological associations at times, it is always at least this. It always professes to explain and co-ordinate the facts. We have already argued that it leaves out of account some which are of vital im- portance to a true theory ; we now contend that it fails upon its own assumption. As so often with speculative theories, instead of accounting for the facts with which it has to deal, it simply reasserts that they are there. Confronted with the fact of evil and disappointment and the like, it asks how and why is this ? Why is there this taint of failure and pain and disaster upon the world ? And the answer given is, It is there; it is inevitable; it belongs to the constitution of things. Which is the same thing as saying, There is no answer ; we cannot get behind the fact ; good and evil are at war ; we cannot tell how they came to be so ; we cannot see how they should ever leave off. This is the answer of pure MANICfLEISM 217 Manichaeism that kind which ends in an unreconciled dualism of the good and evil spirit. But there is another type of answer, differing from this considerably in form, not at all in fact. This point of view consists in denying the reality of the opposition between good and evil. Evil? it answers ; there is no such thing ; what we call evil is just the fact of our limited knowledge ; if we saw more clearly, we should know it to be good. Though different in form, this is in fact simply the old assertion that evil is the necessary result of our connexion with physical nature. It is upon this theory an intellectual muddle that we are in, rather than a state of physical evil : but the cause is the same, viz. the inevitable pressure of the facts. And this, as we have seen, is no answer at all. Corresponding with these two forms of the ultimate asser- tion that evil is inevitable are two attitudes towards life in general ; one, a vehement and angry pessimism, the other a complacent optimism. In the former the mind labours under a sense of inevitable misery for which there seems to be no remedy, to which there is no exception : all action, all effort, and all life seem to rest upon pain and wrong and sorrow. For man is imbedded in a material surrounding which blinds him, and thwarts his calculations, and brings his plans to ruin. The fear of pain and the desire to avoid it sting him into action, but he finds that he has only added to his sorrow. There is an inevitable and endless conflict, which is the law of man's existence here. The philosophy of Schopenhauer is a conspicuous example of this point of view. On the other hand, the optimism of which we speak con- sists of bland and complacent assurances that this is the best of all possible worlds. It brings forward conspicuous in- stances of great apparent disasters, which turn out afterwards to be the greatest possible blessings. It calls attention to the vast complexity of interests involved in the creation of 218 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN the world, and bids us acknowledge that, all things considered, the work of creation has been very fairly done. It is a mere deficiency of knowledge which makes us complain of being injured by the larger movement of the world about us. If only we could see the other possibilities, from which this world relieves us, we should recognize that this is the best possible under the conditions of finite existence. This theory of life (than which it would be difficult to find one more irritating) is characteristic of the eighteenth century ; and belongs in tone to the maudlin and pagan laments over the transitoriness of earthly joys in which that age rejoiced. It found striking expression somewhat earlier in the Thtodicte of Leibniz, a work which aims at justifying the ways of God to man, This work concludes with a myth somewhat in the style of Plato, in which a man is allowed by Jupiter to see realized in a series the various corrections which he had wished to make in the existing state of things. 1 Of course, he finds that they are always for the worse : that if this world is less comfortable than it could be wished, it is nothing to what it might have been. We have classed both these points of view under the head of Manichseism because they both present the characteristic features of that theory. Both alike ignore the moral character of evil, and both assert its inevitableness ; one howling and bemoaning itself, the other consoling itself with the thought that things might have been worse. The real mischief, the really constituent character of Manichaeism lies in its assertion of the inevitableness of evil. The effect of this belief varied in ancient times as it varies now: some found in it a reason for the sternest 1 Leibniz, Th&odic&e, Part III., 414. Vous voyezicile palais des destinees dont j'ai la garde. II y a des representations, non seulement de ce qui arrive, mais encore de tout ce qui est possible ; et Jupiter en ayant fait la revue avant le commencement du monde ezistant, a diger6 les possibility en mondes, et a fait le choii du meilleur de tous. THE SCRIPTURAL THEORY OF EVIL 219 asceticism, others, for the most boundless license. It depends mainly upon temperament how an inevitable fact like this is met: some will look on the bright, others on the dark side of things. But this will not differentiate them from those who hold the Christian view. Within the Church, these differences of temperament and mental habit exist and take effect. The determining difference between Christian thinkers and all others whom we may class under the head of Manichseism is that the Christians deny and Manichaeans affirm that evil is inevitable, and involved in the very structure of things. We return, then, to the theory of evil which the Scriptures offer us ; and ask how could such a thing arise. How was it consistent with the purpose of God? Did He allow it, or create it; and, if so, why? The time-honoured method of approaching this question is by the statement of a dilemma. If God is omnipotent He could have prevented evil, if He were all-good He would have done so ; either, therefore, He could not or would not prevent it ; therefore He is either not good or not omnipotent. The answer to this argument involves us first in a discussion of the exact meaning of omnipotence. The meaning assigned in popular language to the word omnipotence is both negative and materialistic. It is formed on the basis of our conceptions of force, and it means that there is no resistance which an omnipotent being cannot overcome, no line of action that he is not free to take. It is then available for use in the above dilemma. If it be the meaning of omnipotence that God must necessarily destroy any power which opposes His will, that He must necessarily perform any act in which His power would be displayed, the first half of the disjunction will hold good. So long as the question is merely one of conflicting forces, which cannot choose but conflict, there can be no doubt that evil cannot stand against omnipotence : 220 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN it must be swept away the moment it appears. But the objection to this argument is that it leaves out of sight all other considerations except those of mere power. It isolates God's attribute of power to the detriment, even to the exclusion of His loftier prerogatives. This retort may be illustrated by the analogy of human life. If it be asked, Who is the most powerful man in England at the present moment, no one would mention the name of the man who is physically the strongest whose power of resisting mere force is the greatest The most powerful man would be he whose will was most often effected, and in the most weighty concerns the Prime Minister, say, or one of our merchant princes. And he would be most powerful, not because he destroyed all opposition, but because he has the largest means of using it; of converting the interests of others to his own ends, of forcing their wills into the service of his own. So, the weakest and least effective of men is he whose will attains least, and is least often success- ful, not he whose physical force is least. The essence of rational personal force is effectiveness, not the abolition of resistance. 1 But it will be said, This comes to precisely the same thing: the resisting power is overcome just the same, by diplomacy if not by force ; it does not matter whether it is absolutely destroyed or not. On the contrary, it matters a great deal. In the case we are considering, God has not obliterated evil wills from the pale of creation, but He rules their powers to the effecting of His own will and the dis- comfiture of their ends. He gives them freedom, without relinquishing His own ends. They are allowed to go on attempting to resist, seeking their own rebellious ends ; but in the very hour of their success they are thwarted. The most conspicuous instance of this is the Crucifixion of our 1 Cf. Westcott, Historic Faith, pp. 217-221. EVIL AND THE GOODNESS OF GOD 221 Lord. The Death of Christ was the moment of the triumph of all the powers of evil which were opposed to Him ; but it was also the moment of their signal and final defeat. In that lay the manifestation of the Divine omnipotence. He overruled the free choice of the opponents of Christ to His own ends and to their complete discomfiture. And this is the meaning which must be given to omnipotence in Theology ; it is the power of unfettered sovereignty, not the habit of destroying all possible resistance. The existence of evil, then, in view of the actual dealing of God with it, implies no contradiction to the Divine omnipotence, because the rebellion is converted in spite of itself into subservience. But the question of the goodness of God is more serious. It is complex and raises several very important difficulties. In the first place, let us consider this point : how is a creation in which evil is a possible ingredient reconcileable with Divine goodness and love ? We must be careful, in dealing with this matter, to restrict ourselves to the facts before us ; mere speculation is apt to be both futile and dangerous. What have we to consider ? We have the spectacle of a world brought into being out of the love of God, meant to display the glory of Gpd, and to repay His love with praise. The Word of God might have expressed the Divine idea accurately and unerringly in the regularity of nature, the perfectness of instinctive life: but creation was not to be complete until there arose a higher thing than any of these, a being in whom the Word resides; who voluntarily and consciously worships and loves his Creator. In our experience, the peculiar virtue of this form of worship depends upon its being voluntary, upon its being given in response, indeed, to an invitation, to an impulse from within, but still as the free answer of the created will. We have said that creation involves something like a self- limitation on the part of God. That He should have 222 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN constituted the world in this way rather than in that, means a definite decision, a definite withdrawal from certain courses which we may provisionally assume to have been equally possible. And this limitation to a decisive course of action, so far as we can see, would carry with it the consequences of that course of action. If then God in His goodness and love has decided to create beings to whom is to be given the power to return His love freely, that decision, loving and good though it be, will involve the possibility of a refusal of this response. As we see things, the difference between blind instinctive perfection to the creation of free spirit carries with it this possibility. As we see things, the only way to avoid it would have been not to act at all. The measure of the goodness of God, in this matter, will be the amount of risk run, to speak in human words, by such a creation, together with the degree of superiority of voluntary self-submission over mechanical perfection. These things we can only imperfectly estimate. 1 But there is a further difficulty behind. It may be argued, indeed, that God in His omnipotence does overrule evil to His own ends: that in His goodness, His passion for self- sacrifice, if we may so speak, He was prepared to run the risk of this huge indignity to Himself, and piteous ruin to His creatures ; but how can all this be reconciled with His foreknowledge ? If He had not known the event, we might contend, we could understand ; we could appreciate the love with which He comes forward to help when the unforeseen misfortune has occurred ; but He must have known from the beginning ; His wisdom reaches from the one end to the other ; the beginning and the end are simultaneously present to His thought. Are we not wrecked upon this rock of foreknowledge ? It is certainly true that this is the point where the difficulty is most acute. Let us again pause to clear up 1 Of. S. Mt. xviii. 7, xxvi. 24. MEANING OF OMNISCIENCE 223 our terms. First of all, let us consider this attribute of omniscience ; what does it precisely mean ? how are we to represent it to ourselves ? Our own knowledge falls under various heads. There is what is called necessary knowledge, and there is contingent knowledge. Necessary knowledge depends ultimately on the very nature of the mind and the ultimate conditions of the world. Pure mathematics, for instance, is necessary knowledge. It may be that we do not all realize it, we do not all carry the powers we possess in this matter to perfection. But every one has the premisses upon which mathematical knowledge is based. Every one, for instance, who has any intellect at all, under- stands something about number. The laws of arithmetic or algebra may be unknown to a given person, but all the knowledge he possesses about number is of a piece with the exact knowledge of the mathematician. An uneducated man will adopt various clumsy methods of calculation ; but if they are true and right the results he obtains will be the same as those of the mathematician with his rapid and certain expedients. The results are necessary ; they cannot in the present state of things be otherwise. Contingent knowledge is that which is acquired accidentally and by external means. The knowledge which a man obtains by experience depends upon the accidents of his birth and education. Different men have capacities for different types of knowledge, and have different chances, as we say. This kind of knowledge differs from the other also in the fact that it can never be complete. The other is potentially complete from the first ; the first steps have the promise in them of all that is to follow. Contingent knowledge depends for its completeness on the energy of the individual as well as his opportunities, and both these are variable quantities. A man who from the accident of his birth has little education, and lives in a narrow and monotonous region of life, will 224 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN know little of all that there is to be known, however great his energy. And again a man may lose, by lack of energy, the most brilliant chances, and fail to acquire a tithe of what might have been possible to him. But no man can acquire everything in the way of knowledge, because every man's experience is limited : and contingent knowledge is attained not by the exposition of consequences from premisses already attained, but by the slow collection of empirical facts. When we say that God is omniscient, do we imply that the whole scheme of the world lies open before Him more clearly even and more certainly than the whole science of geometry before a mathematician, or do we leave room for contingent knowledge ? Are there things which God has to learn by the event ? Is it possible that there remain any open alternatives of which God does not know the issue? The latter of these two theories seems to us to become in- creasingly difficult the more carefully we look at it. The question depends on the degree in which human life and history is regarded as a single whole. There are two regions of human life in which the appearance of real contingency remains. Every one will admit that the decisive moments in history cannot have been left to determine themselves ; they must have been foreseen, prepared for, and guided. But round these, there is an endless number of unimportant events, of which we can never see the necessity, and which to our eyes might as well have happened in one way as another. Then again, men perform actions, to all appearance, by an entirely capricious exercise of will : they might just as well have done exactly the opposite. It is a tempting hypothesis to reserve all this for the operation of pure contingency, and to restrict the foreknowledge of God to the events which we can see are decisive. The right to do this, however, depends absolutely on our being able to say that our impression of the indifference of these smaller events is valid. If, as is THE REAL DIFFICULTY OF EVIL 225 most probable, the difference of great and small is largely due to our limited outlook, and our incapacity to trace the connexion between the important and unimportant events, the distinction we seek to raise breaks down. On the whole, then, we must say that God foreknows human free action, within what limits we cannot know. It may, however, be suggested that the omniscience of God follows the law of His self-manifestation in Creation ; so that however clearly the end may be present formally the actual manifestation of omniscience as of the creative thought is in time. As Creation comes into being in time, and realizes in time the eternal counsels, and as this involves a self-limitation on the part of God a withholding of the full effectiveness of His will : so there may be some analogous self-restraint in regard of the Divine knowledge, such as would give more than a rhetorical value to Tertullian's famous phrase, that Christ in the Old Testament theophanies was learning to be incarnate. 1 This, if it be possible, is a principle which may be of use : but it cannot be proved, and must be used with the greatest caution. Secondly, there is the certainty of redemption coming in to remedy the defect of the entry of evil, at any rate, as regards man. We have said that the superiority of conscious to instinctive service throws some light upon the reasons which may have accounted for the venture involved in the creation of free beings. If, then, we may believe, as there is much reason to do, that the Word was prepared, as it were, to become Incarnate quite apart from the question of sin, it would follow that the beings created free would not necessarily fall wholly from God, even if sin did enter. The progress of the world would be carried out, although not without the pain and suffering that self-will had produced. The prospect of the Incarnation would provide a way out of the difficulty: it would justify the venture involved in 1 Tert., Dt Came Christi, cap. vi. IS 226 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN the creation of free beings. This suggestion, which is made by Martensen, 1 though somewhat a bold one, has seemed worthy of mention. But it may still be a question whether such a theory is not open to two objections : (1) that it draws attention to the good, and minimizes the evil of physical pain ; for pain is an evil, though it does good : and a world in which it is, seems necessarily a worse one than a world without it; (2) that it starts from a purely human stand-point, which is inadequate, as there was sin in the universe before man came into it. There is, moreover, a reason for expecting that this mystery will prove excessively hard, if not insoluble. The question of foreknowledge is one of the points at which the time- difficulty reappears. In speaking of Creation we pointed out that this always must press hardest upon man's mind, because the solution of it falls necessarily outside the range of his experience. God, we believe, in Himself does not enter into time at all ; His nature is eternal and changeless. Yet in some way, necessarily unknown to us, He determines to express His Purpose of Creation in time. But what this exactly involves, or how it can be expressed, the resources of human thought and language are unable to set forth. Evil is a fact as things are now, but we believe that it was not a necessary part of the scheme. We see how God over- rules it for good, how He uses it in the education of mankind ; we know that through His Son He saves us from it ; and the possibility of it seems to our minds to belong to the exercise of free choice. Further than this we doubt whether the human mind can go. But the mystery which remains insoluble is after all a metaphysical or intellectual mystery ; there is no room for doubt either as to God's Hatred of evil, or His Power to overcome it : the Incarnation is the measure both of His Hatred of evil and of His Power. 1 Christian Dogmatics, Eng. Trans., p. 170. MAN IN THE IMAGE OF GOD 227 II. We must now pass on to the second stage of our inquiry, viz., the presence and significance of evil in respect of man's nature. It will necessarily be more concrete than the wholly theoretical discussion just concluded, and may be expected to throw some light upon some points still obscure. We shall have to consider (1) the nature of man; (2) the effect of the taint of sin upon it and upon its development (1) Man, according to the Creation-story, is made in the image of God. Our first ^task will be to extend and define our interpretation of this expression. The ancient method of exegesis, attracted by the fact that the Word is also called the image of God, explained this statement as implying an indwelling of the Word of God in men. Thus S. Athan- asius writes: 1 God seeing that the race of men 'was not sufficient, according to the law of their own production, to remain for ever, granting them a special gift, created men not exactly after the manner of all the irrational beasts upon the earth, but He made them according to His own image in order that possessing, as it were, shadows of the Word (TOV Ao'yoy), and becoming rational (Xoyi/cot) they might be able to continue in a state of blessedness. . . .' Strictly inter- preted, this would mean that the possession of reason is the quality by[ which man is in the image of God; and this has been, and is, a very popular interpretation of the words. Though this is true beyond doubt, we do not think that it is the whole truth. Keason itself is a result the result of the possession of self-consciousness or personality ; and it is this gift from which flow out all man's highest endowments. It is this, as we have said more than once, through which man becomes fitted to make a conscious return of glory and praise to God who made him. It is this upon which depend his religion, his moral development, his intellectual grasp of the world around him. Moreover, we have found in the 1 De Inc., iii. 3. 228 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF MAN personal life of man some far-off analogy to the nature of God. In what sense, let us ask next, does this connect man with the image of God the Word ? In the Word ' dwells all the fulness of God ' ; His Glory, even in the days of His humiliation, is ' glory as of an only-begotten from a father ' ; it is complete, without flaw or omission. Further, the Word of God pervades creation; all that the will of the Father intended from highest to lowest is expressed through the Word in the created order. The Personality of the Word is, therefore, always a catholic personality; it is the unity in which all particularity is combined. But each man is a particular individual; his tastes, capacities, character are limited and narrow ; he acts in a limited environment. Yet even in this limited way he carries out some fragment of the purpose and revelation of God displays, or would display were he sinless, some aspect of the Divine intention, as the Word reflects it whole. And he does all that he may ever succeed in doing simply by allowing himself to be the medium of the Word's activity, the home and temple of the Holy Ghost. It is, therefore, true to say that the Word is revealed in man, and true also to say that man does or ought to reveal the Word of God within the limits and under the conditions which his place in the world imposes upon him. It is the fact that man possesses a personality, and so too a consciousness of his high privilege and duty, which marks the difference between him and the brute creation. They too show forth the glory of God; they too are created by the Word; but man knows this, and the revelation which he should make of the operation of God within him is conscious, and not blind instinct. Man is, then, in the image of God ; of what character is the nature through which he is to effect the display of God's power and glory ? It is, in the first place, a dual nature. On the one side, man shares the material organization of the THE FLESH IN S. PAUL 229 lower creation ; but on the other, he has a higher nature of a spiritual kind. He is in ordinary language body and soul. But the loftier nature of man is represented at times in Scripture as divided into two the soul, properly so called, and the spirit. This threefold division appears in S. Paul, and probably underlies much of the New Testament language. But it must always be remembered, in any attempt to define the psychology of S. Paul, or of the Bible generally, that the authors are not primarily philosophers, nor do they use language with any great degree of technical accuracy. Any statements, therefore, upon the subject must be taken as approximate only. S. Paul only once (1 Thess. v. 23) mentions the three parts of man's nature together (compare 1 Cor. ii. 9). But it is clear from his language in many places that he distinguished the spirit from the soul, as well as the soul from the body. The body is, of course, the material part of man, that which he has in common with the brutes. This factor in man's nature is alluded to by S. Paul under two names, cra.p and o-w/xa the flesh and the body. Of these the former emphasizes the material, the latter is the organized product of the flesh. So he says, 'There is one flesh of man, another of beasts,' etc., in 1 Cor. xv. 39, and not one body ; and the word crdpg is never used of the Church. The Church is one body Christ's Body, not one flesh. 1 The flesh, then, being the material part of a man, subject to mortality and weakness, comes to imply a certain measure of feebleness. So S. Paul contrasts the confidence in flesh (7TTroi6r)(riv ev