"t 
 
 LP 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 
 ^^"'^ :Bn3 
 
 HI 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/christeternalordOObuckrich 
 
CHRIST AND THE ETERNAL 
 ORDER 
 
CHRIST 
 
 AND 
 
 THE ETERNAL ORDER 
 
 ^* In whom are all the treasures of wisdom and 
 knowledge hidden^ ^ 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM, D.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN 
 PACIFIC THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 BOSTON 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK — CHICAGO 
 1906 
 
 *' OP TH? ^ 
 
 \ UNIVE 
 
Copyright, 1906 
 
 By The Congregational Sunday-School 
 AND Publishing Society 
 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
TO MY FATHER 
 
 WHO FIRST AWOKE IN ME THE IMPULSE TO FAITH 
 
 AND FIRST LED ME TO PERCEIVE THE 
 
 NOBILITY AND OPPORTUNITY 
 
 OF THEOLOGY 
 
 170819 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Almost from boyhood the writer has been con- 
 cerned in finding a mental setting for Jesus Christ. 
 Sometimes it has been a disturbing, but more often 
 a stimulating, pifoblem. The problem arose ap- 
 parently from the absorption of his earlier religious 
 life in God as Presence and Father, and the diffi- 
 culty in finding such a place beside him for Christ 
 as the Bible and the Church seemed to require. 
 For a time the words, " Believe in God, believe also 
 in me," afforded temporary standing-room. The 
 first clear light on the intellectual problem came, 
 after entering the ministry, through reading Fred- 
 erick Denison Maurice's Theological Essays, in 
 connection with the words in Colossians, " Christ 
 in you, the hope of glory." The result was a great 
 illumination of mind and uplift of heart. The 
 difficulty of accounting for Christ in the contrasted 
 aspects of his historical limitation and his universal 
 significance largely disappeared. The conclusions 
 reached were presented in an article entitled " The 
 Indwelling Christ," published in The Andover Re- 
 view for August, 1 89 1, and met with a very warm 
 response. The substance of this article is included 
 in Chapter II, Part III of this volume. The con- 
 ception was but germinal and needed time for 
 development and that adjustment to theological 
 [vii] 
 
Preface 
 
 movements and systems which the present study 
 aims to give. 
 
 In coming into an ever larger conception of the 
 meaning of Christ and of his relation to God and 
 to humanity, I have been most largely indebted to 
 two men, — the late honored and beloved Professor 
 Egbert C. Smyth, learned interpreter and earnest 
 defender of the Incarnation, and Dr. George A. 
 Gordon, theologian and preacher, friend and inspirer 
 of those who are searching for an ampler con- 
 ception of Christianity. Into the labors of many 
 others also I have entered, as will appear in the 
 pages that follow, and that not without the keen 
 sense of privilege which must come to one who is 
 working in any department of truth to-day. 
 
 In treating such a theme as this, one cannot 
 but feel sometimes that he has transgressed the 
 wisdom of the Psalmist who said, " Neither do I 
 exercise myself in great matters, or in things too 
 wonderful for me." But with all the consciousness 
 of the limitation of knowledge and the inadequate 
 results of our efforts to attain and to express ultimate 
 truth, one cannot but feel also that along with the 
 "dust and chaff" of speculation he gathers enough 
 of real truth to reward the endeavor and to prove 
 the instinct which impels us to seek an answer to the 
 great mysteries of life and God and destiny to be 
 a divine impulse. 
 
 Perhaps the best recommendation this book could 
 have is that it is open to the charges both of mysti- 
 [ viii ] 
 
Preface 
 
 cism and of rationalism; for the two tendencies 
 counteract one another, and a theology which is 
 not both mystical and rational is not a fair inter- 
 pretation of Christian faith. 
 
 If there is any note of dogmatism or of specula- 
 tive presumption here, it is repudiated at the outset. 
 In discussions of this nature, to lay down any 
 challenge of " thus and thus it must be " is both 
 irreverence and folly. One can be very sure only 
 of principles of reason and facts of experience. 
 Interpretations of these facts can be rational and 
 helpful only as they are tentative and suggestive. 
 As such they have both validity and value. 
 
 In concluding this prefatory word let me say 
 that this interpretation of the Christ has not been 
 made from a partisan or one-sided view-point. It 
 is useless to prop up any theology which does not 
 rest upon secure foundations. I have faced both 
 sides of this question. I share sufficiently the 
 spirit of the age to feel keenly the difficulties of 
 the New Testament Christology. It would be 
 much easier, and apparently much more scientific 
 and sensible, to throw aside all the supernatural and 
 metaphysical elements of Christianity and explain 
 Christ simply as a very good man with only a very 
 good man's significance in a revelation which has 
 no particular historical culmination. But would it 
 be true to the facts ? That is the vital question. 
 Truth that is exclusive and not inclusive, that 
 sacrifices reality to clarity, that blinks the harder 
 [ix] 
 
Preface 
 
 facts and ignores the deeper meanings, is no truth. 
 It is only the shallow verdict of a self-sufficient and 
 pseudo-scientific age-spirit. We ought not to 
 decide this Christological problem without getting 
 as near as possible to the absolute human view- 
 point, independent of the presuppositions of either 
 the first century or of our own. When, therefore, 
 we find that on the whole the major witness of the 
 mind of humanity, in its most enlightened part, 
 has recognized supernatural, or better, mystical 
 elements in Christianity, we may well hesitate be- 
 fore eradicating them in obedience to the impulse 
 of our time. If we do, we shall surely pave the 
 way for the misgivings of Bishop Blougram, 
 
 V Once feel about, and soon or late you hit 
 Some sense, in which it might be, after all. 
 Why not, ' The Way, the Truth, the Life '.? '* 
 
 Truth is too large, life is too real, mystery is too 
 great for snap judgments, either by an individual 
 or a generation, especially judgments of denial or 
 exclusion. Far better is it, and far truer, to believe 
 too much than too little, to unduly greaten Christ, 
 if that is possible, than to unduly narrow him. 
 
 Berkeley, California. 
 
 [x] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Part I 
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRIST 
 
 Chapter 
 
 I. The Christology of To-day . . . 
 II. Revelation : Progressive and Final 
 
 III. The Christocentric View-point 
 
 IV. Christ Interpreting God . . 
 V. Christ Interpreting Nature 
 
 VI. Christ Interpreting Man . . 
 VII. The Worship of Christ . . . 
 
 Page 
 3 
 
 lO 
 
 i8 
 26 
 32 
 39 
 
 47 
 
 Part II 
 
 ASPECTS OF CHRIST 
 
 VIII. The Human Christ 57 
 
 IX. The Historic Christ 64 
 
 X. The Eternal Christ 71 
 
 XI. The Living Christ fS 
 
 XII. The Cosmic Christ 85 
 
 [xi] 
 
Contents 
 
 Part III 
 
 THE POTENCIES OF CHRIST 
 
 Chapter 
 
 
 
 
 Page 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Christ Pre-present and Pre-potent . 97 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Christ Indwelling 
 
 . 104 
 
 XV. 
 
 Christ in Conscience . . . 
 
 
 
 . 116 
 
 XVI. 
 
 Christ Regenerating . . . 
 
 
 
 124 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Christ Atoning 
 
 
 
 133 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Christ Risen 
 
 
 
 . 142 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Christ Returning .... 
 
 
 
 • 151 
 
 XX. 
 
 Christ and Social Redemption 
 
 
 
 159 
 
 XXI. 
 
 The Kingdom of Christ . . 
 
 
 
 166 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 I. Historical Sketch of the Christocentric 
 
 Theology 177 
 
 II. The Vital Issues of the Harnack Con- 
 troversy 184 
 
 [xii] 
 
PART I 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRIST 
 
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the 
 Word was God." 
 
 " This teacher was reason itself, it was visible in him and indeed 
 appeared bodily in him." — Justin Martyr. 
 
 "With Clement of Alexandria, the idea of the Logos has a content 
 which is on the one hand so wide that he is found wherever man rises 
 above the level of nature, and on the other so concrete that an authentic 
 knowledge of him can only be obtained from historical revelation." — 
 Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma^ Vol. II. 
 
 " That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 Or decomposes but to rccompose, 
 Become my universe that feels and knows ! " 
 
 — Robert Browning, Epilogue. 
 
 " What we want is not a summation of doctrine. We have had enough 
 of that. What we want a great deal more is something to give us breadth 
 of standing and a greater vitality of idea." — Horace Bushnell, Life 
 and Letters. 
 
 "Ring in the Christ that is to be." —Alfred Tennyson. 
 
^ OF THE 
 
 OF 
 
 CHRIST 
 
 AND THE ETERNAL ORDER 
 
 I 
 
 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF TO-DAY 
 
 We face vital issues in Christology. There is per- 
 plexity, uncertainty, confusion. Divergent theories, 
 varying attitudes prevail. Agnosticism present-day 
 looks upon Christ with a respectful pity, chnstoiogy 
 as one prattling innocently of a God of whom he 
 knew nothing; Monism, the Mysticism of modern 
 science, absorbed in cosmic secrets, feeling after 
 the Unknown, ignores Christ ; Naturalism promptly 
 classifies him with the g-emcs homo and queries no 
 further; Humanitarianism honors his humanity, 
 and is blind to himself; Philosophy and Ethics 
 pay tribute to his teaching and fail to apprehend 
 the Teacher ; the older Orthodoxy clings desper- 
 ately to outgrown formulas of his Deity, convinced 
 of standing fast for a truth that it can neither re- 
 late nor define, yet conscious of the antiquity of 
 its armor and the inadequacy of its defense. The 
 scholarship of the Church is absorbed with ques- 
 tions concerning the literary sources of his life and 
 with problems connected with its historical presen- 
 tation.^ And all the time the Living Christ moves 
 
 ^ '* The unsatisfactoriness of the present teaching, which 
 leaves us only Jesus of Nazareth, is becoming more and more 
 
 [3] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 among men, and they find in him the Way, the 
 Truth, and the Life. 
 
 So long as Christ has not only personal pre- 
 eminence, but the power of saving men, the ques- 
 tion will be, must be, asked : Whence 
 
 A Question , , , . , • , 
 
 that will not has he this power, what is the secret of 
 
 be put aside '- 
 
 his life-giving personality, why does he 
 continue so to dominate our modern thought and 
 ideals? Is it a fictitious and failing hold that he 
 has upon us, or is it real and vital and destined to 
 be controlling? If so, what is the secret? What 
 think ye of Christ ? The question presses and 
 burns, and refuses to be put aside. Thinking men 
 must meet it, meet it anew in this day, and strive 
 to answer it in the light of enlarged conceptions 
 of God and of man and of the universe. 
 
 I 
 
 The most virile and hopeful movement in mod- 
 ern theology is what is known as the Chris toe eti trie 
 Theology} Largely the outgrowth of 
 centric The- modcm study of the Gospels and of the 
 
 ology, and . ', 
 
 its arrested Historic Christ, it has laid hold of the 
 
 Progress , . .^ - - 
 
 true worth and significance of Jesus 
 Christ with an insight and a power that have 
 aroused attention and produced conviction. But 
 it has failed to move onward beyond a certain 
 
 apparent from day to day." — Pres. Charles Cuthbert Hall, 
 The Universal Elements of the Christian Religion^ p. 144. 
 
 ^ A historical sketch of the Chistocentric Theology will 
 be found in the Appendix. 
 
 [4] 
 
The Christology of To-day 
 
 range of affirmation. The principle has been 
 clearly stated, the method justified, the sufficiency 
 of the Christ personality demonstrated, but prog- 
 ress is arrested. It still remains to show how 
 nature and humanity are to be interpreted through 
 Christ. The Christocentric theology is at a stand- 
 still, and for this reason: The Historic Christ (to 
 whom the modern Christocentric thought has con- 
 fined itself) alone is insufficient to hiterpret either 
 humanity or nature. The difficulty is that nature 
 and humanity were here before Jesus. Unless, 
 therefore, Jesus was intimately related to a Logos, 
 who was before him, nature and humanity ex- 
 plain him, rather than he them. With a thrill of 
 insight and joy, the new theology has caught the 
 universal significance of Jesus as the new science 
 of history has disclosed him. Not until the evo- 
 lutionary principle had reconstructed the con- 
 ception of history was it possible to realize how 
 commanding and constructive a place Jesus Christ 
 occupies in human history. It is no wonder that 
 the new theology, smitten with the splendor and 
 significance of this new disclosure of the cen- 
 trality of Jesus, has confined its attention to this 
 illuminating fact, and failed to coordinate with it 
 the fact of the presence of a religious nature 
 and a spiritual Presence in humanity before the 
 Incarnation.^ 
 
 ^ The Ritschlian theology is surprisingly narrow and 
 short-sighted here. " The distinction," says Kaftan, " drawn 
 
 [s] 
 
Chnst and the Eternal Order 
 
 It is this limitation of view, this concentration 
 upon the historic and individual in Christ, to the 
 The Defect of Hcglcct of the inner, eternal, less defin- 
 ceStric'^Tht^ able, more universal in him, that has 
 °'°^^ caused the reluctance and protest, which 
 
 have all along accompanied the new theology, on 
 the part of many philosophical and comprehensive 
 minds. If Christianity can be wholly reduced to 
 historic terms and centered in Jesus Christ, what 
 of those fundamental and underlying elements in 
 Christianity which are common to all religions, 
 and which seem to be an innate possession of the 
 human soul, a part of man so far as he can be 
 detached from a historic setting? 
 
 The time has come when the Christocentric the- 
 ology must either enlarge its conception and its 
 interpretation of Christ, or surrender its position. 
 In order to be the center of the historic movement, 
 Christ must be more than this; he must be the 
 center and power of the whole sphere of the reli- 
 gious life of man. Christian and non-Christian, past 
 and future, elemental and developed, primitive and 
 perfected. 
 
 Thus are we led, just as inevitably as the Chris- 
 tian thought of the first century was led, from the 
 Historic Christ to the Eternal Christ, from the 
 Christ of Experience to the Logos, — showing that 
 
 between a historical and ideal Christ involves the destruc- 
 tion of our faith in the Christian revelation." (^Dogmatiky 
 p. 404.) 
 
 [6] 
 
The Christology of To-Day 
 
 Christianity involves, necessitates, such a develop- 
 ment. 
 
 There are two equally characteristic and signifi- 
 cant facts about the gospel — the simplicity that 
 is in Christ and the profundity that is in Christ. 
 Side by side with the simple story of the Man of 
 Galilee are the mystic, far-reaching intuitions of 
 Paul and of the authors of the Fourth Gospel and 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Cut out one or the 
 other presentation and the New Testament is shorn 
 either of its simplicity or of its splendor. 
 
 II 
 
 Whatever the origin of the Logos doctrine, 
 whether it came from the Greek mind or the Jew- 
 ish, or both, through Plato or the Stoics, 
 
 ' , ., ^ . , ,. , The Value of 
 
 or Philo, matters comparatively little, the Logos 
 
 r^. , ,. . , .\ . ,/- . Doctrine 
 
 The value hes in the idea itself, as it 
 meets a universal conviction of the human mind in 
 its searching into the relation of humanity to God. 
 Greek, Jew, Oriental, Western, first century or 
 fourth century or twentieth century, — so that a 
 theology think itself through concerning Jesus 
 Christ, it comes to much the same conviction of 
 the divineness of humanity and the humanness of 
 God, as both truths stand out strong and clear in 
 the revealing personality of Christ. 
 
 Neither the phenomenal, uncorrelated Christ of 
 Ritschlianism, having the worth of God and repre- 
 senting him to men, yet not himself divine, nor 
 
 [7] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 the racial prototype of Schleiermacher and others, 
 *' a man in advance of his age and surroundings, 
 Transition ^^ exceptional in moral development 
 christoiogy gj^j consciousness as to become and 
 remain a guide and example to his fellow men in 
 all religious faith and conduct," ^ will satisfy Chris- 
 tian thought. Such tentative, makeshift concep- 
 tions of Christ will serve only for transition 
 purposes. We must move on, either into the 
 naturalistic interpretation of Jesus as a singularly 
 good man but without racial significance, or into a 
 reaffirmation and reinterpretation of the Logos 
 doctrine in terms of modern thinking. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This volume is an essay in the direction of the 
 
 adaptation of the fundamental truth of the older 
 
 Christoiogy to the atmosphere and in- 
 
 Christianity , _ 
 
 i« Philosophy terests of the present day. Ever smce 
 
 as well as * "^ 
 
 History and the Hsc of Ritschliauism in Germany 
 and the publication of the Hibbert Lec- 
 tures of Edwin Hatch in England, the tendency has 
 been to abjure the metaphysical element in Chris- 
 tianity and to exalt the historical and ethical. The 
 movement has been healthful, invigorating, clarify- 
 ing, restoring a long-disturbed balance. But it 
 has been a movement of protest, built upon a nar- 
 row foundation, and its limitations are becoming 
 more and more apparent. Minds of a certain type 
 * Evolution of Trinitarianism^ L. L. Paine, p. 282. 
 [8] 
 
The Chris to logy of To -Day 
 
 chafe and are restive under its restrictions. For 
 such at least a larger interpretation of Christ is 
 essential. But must we then say that it is all a 
 matter of temperament, and that the best that can 
 be done is to consign the historical Christ to the 
 man of the practical temperament and the mystical 
 Christ to the man of the mystical temperament and 
 so have done with the problem ? Rather, shall we 
 not say that Christianity is so comprehensive in its 
 scope, and the Christ so sufficient and significant, 
 that he not only meets the need of every type of 
 mind, but that he unites all moral and spiritual 
 values so harmoniously and consistently that every 
 man may recognize in him not only his own especial 
 need but also something of what his fellow finds? 
 
 This is the conviction and purpose with which 
 this book is sent forth. It is an endeavor to de- 
 lineate the Greater Christ. If the aspects of Christ 
 presented seem so many as to be confusing it is 
 only because his import is so large and his poten- 
 cies are so rich. If the historical aspect of Christ 
 is subordinated to the spiritual and eternal it is 
 only because the Historical Christ is now attracting 
 an attention that is too exclusive to be compre- 
 hensive. For it is only in relation to the eternal 
 that the true values of history can be apprehended, 
 just as it is only in history that we can recognize 
 the true values of eternity. 
 
 [9] 
 
II 
 
 REVELATION: PROGRESSIVE AND FINAL 
 
 Religion involves revelation. Otherwise it is 
 purely one-sided and subjective, a bird with a 
 broken wing. The outgoing of God to man, the 
 impartation of the Divine to the human, is revela- 
 tion. Unless there had been revelation from the 
 very beginning of human Hfe, preceding and in- 
 itiating it, religion could have been only a human 
 product and must have withered away, root and 
 branch. For religion is either a divine-human 
 mutuality, or it is a colossal human self-deception. 
 And such a self-deception must have long since 
 worn out. The very survival of religion, if not 
 its very existence, implies revelation. 
 
 Revelation is multiform. The channels of the 
 divine communication are rich and varied. Life 
 Revelation ^^ revealing; nature is revealing; rea- 
 muitiform g^j^^ inspiration, conscience are reveal- 
 ing. God touches man at as many points and 
 through as many media as man touches God. 
 Always the relation is reciprocal. Always on the 
 [lo] 
 
Revelation : Progressive and Final 
 
 part of God it is revelation, and on the part of man 
 religion. " Revelation," it has been well said, " is 
 but the obverse of discovery. No truth is ever 
 revealed to an intelligence except as it is dis- 
 covered ; " nor is any truth discovered except as 
 it is revealed. 
 
 Revelation is universal. Revelation is not con- 
 fined to any one people or age. It is as impartial 
 as the sunlight. 
 
 "Love works at the center, 
 Heart-heaving alway; 
 Forth speed the strong pulses 
 To the borders of day." ^ 
 
 Men were not seeking God vainly in the pre- 
 christian centuries. Revelation reached to the 
 Aztec and the Chinaman, as well as to Revelation 
 the Greek and the Jew. It flowed forth ^p^^^^^ 
 with the stream of Time; it flows to-day. The 
 light dawned with the dawning of intelligence. 
 Through the muddy vesture of human ignorance 
 and superstition it long glowed but dimly, but the 
 light itself was the pure flame of eternal truth. 
 
 But, though revelation is universal, it is not uni- 
 form. God has ever been impartial, but never 
 undiscriminating. Races differ, reli- 
 
 ,. , . . ^ . Revelation 
 
 gions diverge, revelation vanes. Certain discrimina- 
 
 tive 
 
 truths possess certain nations. Racial 
 capacities are unlike. All cups are filled, but all 
 are not of the same shape or capacity. God has 
 1 Emerson, " The Sphinx," ■ 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 some nations, as he has some souls, "whom he 
 whispers in the ear," not that they may keep the 
 secret to themselves, but that they may impart 
 it to others. Revelation is for transmission, as 
 election is for service. 
 
 II 
 
 May we not take another step and say that, as 
 revelation, though universal, is nevertheless dis- 
 Reveiation Criminative and comes to different races 
 Bciccuve jj^ differing forms and degrees, so to two 
 or three races especially, and to one supremely, 
 God revealed himself, in order thus to impart him- 
 self most fully and most normally to humanity at 
 large ? 
 
 Until the later years of the last century it was 
 customary to magnify the revelation to the Jews 
 by disparaging, or denying, revelation to other 
 peoples. Now that the study of religion has 
 shown the reality and extent of the divine revela- 
 tion to many peoples, — and in some measure to 
 all, — the superiority of the Hebrew religion can 
 be made evident only by comparison, no longer 
 simply by contrast. It is by such comparison, 
 free and fair and impartial, and by that only, that 
 the true splendor and scope of the revelation of 
 the divine glory and righteousness to Israel ap- 
 pears. Compared with the imperfect conceptions 
 of other races, the truth reached by the Hebrew 
 
 [12] 
 
Revelation: Progressive and Final 
 
 prophets (but reached only by revelation) is so 
 transcendent in its nature as to justify calling it, 
 not the only, but the highest^ revelation of God to 
 any people. This is simply induction from litera- 
 ture and history, and not mere assumption in 
 behalf of a theory. The superiority of the Hebrew 
 conception of God is a demonstrable fact. And 
 the inference is natural, if not inevitable, that the 
 superiority is due, not simply to greater achieve- 
 ment, but also to a unique and gracious revelation 
 on the part of God. 
 
 Ill 
 
 One more step makes our ascent complete. If 
 the Divine Being may reasonably have revealed 
 himself with especial clearness and ful- 
 
 Revelation 
 
 ness to and through one nation, may he through an 
 
 , , , ,!,.,.- Individual 
 
 not as reasonably have revealed himself 
 yet more fully to and through one individual — 
 still for the sake of humanity? Can any form of 
 revelation conceivable be as pure, as persuasive, 
 as perfect, as incarnation? Detach the question, 
 as far as possible, from its connection with Christ 
 and consider it by itself. 
 
 Besides incarnation in an individual, there are 
 but three other forms which revelation could con- 
 ceivably take for its ultimate expression. Granted 
 that revelation is progressive, it must culminate 
 either in a direct communication from above, or in 
 [■3] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 nature, or in incarnation, general or individual. 
 Revelation by direct communication, oral or writ- 
 ten, appeals to the uncultured mind as quite the 
 most complete and convincing method possible. 
 A Koran from heaven, commandments graven on 
 tablets of stone, an infallible Bible — such, to the 
 unthinking mind, seems the only infallible, abso- 
 lutely satisfying method of revelation. But a 
 moment's consideration of the rigidity and inade- 
 quacy of language displays the defect of such a 
 method. The provincialism and hollowness and 
 unreality which would inevitably attach to it show 
 it unworthy of a God whose thoughts are high 
 above our thoughts and his ways above our ways. 
 When we turn to nature it is at once evident 
 that while nature affords a constant and cumulative 
 revelation of God, it does not constitute 
 
 Nature inad- , i • » ^ « i . xr 
 
 equate for thc highcst, the complctc revclatiou. If 
 
 Revelation , 7 , . i • i 
 
 there is harmony m nature there is also 
 discord ; if there is beauty there is also ugliness ; 
 if there is evolution there is also devolution ; if 
 there is life there is also death. It is conceivable 
 that nature might have been constituted without 
 these defects, but it is questionable how far a flaw- 
 less creation would meet the needs of our moral 
 nature in the struggle for character. A perfected 
 nature goes best, as Paul saw, with a perfected 
 humanity. There is enough in nature of sublimity 
 and beauty to reveal God increasingly to men, but 
 nature herself is not, and could not be, so perfect 
 
 [14] 
 
Revelation: Progressive and Final 
 
 a medium of revelation — so truly capax Dei — as 
 •humanity. 
 
 Coming to humanity, then, as alone capable of 
 affording the highest revelation of God, the ques- 
 tion at once arises whether national, 
 
 - 1 .,..,,. . rr 1 Humanity as 
 
 racial or mdividual mcarnation offers the a whole inad- 
 equate for a 
 purest, most responsive and most inten- Perfect Rcve- 
 
 sive medium for the divine purpose. A 
 chosen nation, as we have already seen, constitutes 
 a natural and effective instrument of revelation, 
 but one that must in the nature of the case have 
 limitations. A peculiar people, peculiarly en- 
 dowed and enlightened, is intelligible, but a perfect 
 people in whom God is perfectly incarnated would 
 be an abnormal spectacle that would alienate the 
 world rather than save it. Only figuratively and 
 by analogy can God be said to have incarnated 
 himself in Israel. And only thus, too, can he be 
 said to have incarnated himself in the race as a 
 whole. The idea of humanity as the incarnation 
 of God has of late gained increasing favor. In 
 a sense it is a true and fruitful conception. God 
 is in humanity, in men of all times and races, 
 revealing himself as virtue, truth and love. But 
 only in a secondary and figurative sense can this 
 be called incarnation. There is a mingling of 
 baser elements with finer, of earthy with spiritual, 
 of Satanic with divine, in humanity which makes it 
 incompetent to speak of humanity as the incarna- 
 tion of God in any reasonably exact sense. Panthe- 
 [■S] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 ism alone can make humanity, as a wliole, wholly- 
 divine by breaking down all distinctions between 
 divine and human, good and evil. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is only in a single life, unitary in its purity 
 and radiance, all-embracing in its winsomeness 
 _ , „ and sympathy, that we can hope to find 
 
 Only a Person J V J ■> r ^ 
 
 can reveal a a truc incamation, a perfect revelation 
 
 Person ' r 
 
 of God, in his human kinship and 
 character. Given such a life, and a true knowl- 
 edge of God and an assured confidence in him 
 follow. Personality alone suffices. Only a person 
 can reveal a person. If God is personal, nothing 
 less than a personal being can reveal him as he is. 
 Nature may reveal certain of his qualities and 
 attributes; humanity in its corporate and supe- 
 rior life may disclose even more of his nature; 
 but only a person, conscious, clear-souled, perfect, 
 can reveal his very Self. ** It is no more unworthy 
 of God," says Athanasius, ** that he should incar- 
 nate himself in one man, than it is that he should 
 dwell in the world. Since he abides in humanity, 
 which is a part of the universe, it is not unreason- 
 able that he should take up his abode in a man, 
 who should thus become the organ by which God 
 acts in the universal life."^ Whether such a 
 Revealer must of necessity be human or divine, 
 
 ^ De Incarnatione Verbi. 
 [i6] 
 
Revelation: Pros^ressive and Final 
 
 ^i> 
 
 or both, is a question that cannot be settled 
 abstractly. The first task of Theology is to focus 
 all its light, concentrate all its attention upon the 
 individual man whom history furnishes as the only 
 possible claimant of such a prerogative and, with- 
 out prejudice or passion, ascertain whether he 
 bears the marks, carries the strength, and exhibits 
 the grace necessary to the fulfilment of so solitary 
 and sublime a mission. 
 
 ['7] 
 
Ill 
 
 THE CHRISTOCENTRIC VIEW-POINT 
 
 Christian Theology should begin where the 
 Christian religion began — with Christ. He is 
 Christ the ^h^ radiating center of both. Theol- 
 for'S&'la?* ogy» of course, precedes Christ, just 
 Theology ^^ j^^g rcHgion. Yet both were made 
 new in him. As a matter of fact we cannot 
 divest ourselves of our Christianity in studying 
 theology. We are Christian by environment, 
 whether we are such by conviction or not We 
 may make pretense to be unaffected by Christian 
 conceptions, and beginning where the untutored 
 savage began, with Natural Theology, ask what 
 are the evidences of God in nature (a question, 
 however, which the primitive man never asked), 
 pass from Natural Theology, as most systems of 
 theology do, to the Bible as a source of revelation, 
 thence to the doctrine of God as a Trinity, thence 
 to anthropology, and so at length arrive at Christ. 
 
 I 
 
 Such a method, although it has the seeming 
 advantage of following and repeating, after a 
 [i8] 
 
The Christocentric View-Pomt 
 
 fashion, the racial experience in reaching Christ, 
 is nevertheless both unreal and irrational. For, in 
 the first place, the racial process cannot 
 
 *^ ^ The True 
 
 be reproduced in one nurtured in Chris- order too long 
 
 ■■^ reversed 
 
 tian truth and standing upon a higher 
 level of revelation. He may look back, but he 
 cannot go back, over the course of develop- 
 ment. Moreover, to ignore our vantage-ground, 
 to defer the study of Christ until after the study of 
 nature, of God and of man, is to fail to make use 
 of our chief source of illumination. It is like 
 hunting in the dark when a light is at hand. " To 
 build up a professedly revealed theology on a pro- 
 fessedly natural one is to construct a system with- 
 out either unity or profound connection," wrote 
 Sabatier. 
 
 The mind of Christ colors, even if it does not 
 shape, all our thought of God, of nature and of 
 humanity. For the mind of Christen- 
 dom is, at least partially and professedly, Light we 
 the mind of Christ. The true method 
 of theology, therefore, is to go first to the 
 Christ, — the ultimate fact of Christianity, the 
 clearest, strongest Light upon the whole reli- 
 gious horizon, — determine, so far as possible, 
 what this Light is, whence it is, how far it throws 
 its beams, and then, if it pfove a true Light, to 
 study God, nature and humanity in the illumina- 
 tion of its rays. In other words. Christian The- 
 ology should be Christocentric. 
 
 [19] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 It is strange how slow we have been in coming 
 to this view-point, or rather in coming back to it, 
 
 for it was that of the early fathers, as 
 toaTra™ well as of the apostles. "Men still 
 
 believe," says Dr. McConnell, " that 
 
 * belief in God ' is a prerequisite, preparing the 
 way for one who would be Christ's disciple. 
 They, therefore, with well-meaning folly, assault 
 the mind with ' evidences.' They would estab- 
 lish first the being of God by means of argu- 
 ments drawn from nature, from history, from 
 intuition, from the reasonableness of things. They 
 would first discover God, then introduce Christ 
 as his Son, and prove the relationship. They 
 strangely fail to note that should they be suc- 
 cessful in the preliminary task, Christ becomes 
 superfluous. It exactly reverses his method. For 
 
 * no one knoweth . . . the Father, save the Son, 
 and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal 
 Him.' " 1 
 
 That theology is slowly but surely adjusting 
 itself to the Christocentric view-point, making 
 him central in form who is central in fact, is as 
 clear as it is hopeful. It means the coming of 
 Christianity to a new and deeper self-conscious- 
 ness, a fresh sense of the reserves of truth and 
 power which lie in- the simple but profound 
 evangel. 
 
 If it be asked what gain will accrue from the 
 1 Christ, p. 206. 
 
 [20] 
 
The Christocentric View- Point 
 
 Christologizing of theology, the answer is, gain in 
 the direction of unity, of reality and of progress. 
 
 II 
 
 That theology needs unifying, hardly admits of 
 question. As theology broadens and becomes 
 more comprehensive with enlarging sci- how to unify 
 entific knowledge, the need of a unifying '^***°^°^ 
 principle becomes more and more evident. Most 
 of the great systems of theology have been at- 
 tempts at unification. They have failed because 
 they have sought unity in system rather than in 
 personality. Cumbrous systems centering in the 
 sovereignty of God, or human sin, or the divine 
 authority of the Church, or the Bible, must give 
 place to the unifying and harmonizing personality 
 of Christ, unfolding, in its revelation of God, the 
 relations and proportions of truth. " The principal 
 content of Christianity," said Schelling, ** is first, 
 Christ himself, not what he said, but what he is 
 and did." To limit the principal content of Chris- 
 tianity to Christ himself might seem to involve a 
 meager and restricted theology. On the contrary 
 the implications of Christ's personality are in- 
 comparably rich and replete. From him, as a 
 center, lines of suggestion and interpretation 
 extend in every direction, Godward, manward, 
 natureward. Toward him all problems point, 
 all paths converge. The unity which results 
 
 [21] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 from making him central is a unity of simplicity, 
 yet one of incomparable comprehensiveness, co- 
 herence and harmony, a unity in which all truths 
 find their order, all legitimate interests their pro- 
 portionate value, all right activities their true 
 place and meaning. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Christologizing of theology means, also, 
 the imparting of new reality to theology. The 
 How to make disposition on the part of theology to 
 Theology real ^^.j^^ j^^^ remote scas of abstraction and 
 
 speculation is all too apparent. It is this that has 
 made theology " caviare to the general " ; this 
 that has made its voice thin and querulous and 
 dogmatic. Men ask for the note of vitality, of 
 sincerity, of reality, in theology. "When the- 
 ology is made to square with life," said Conan 
 Doyle, ** I will read it up." Countless signs to- 
 day point to personality as the key to reality. It 
 is time that theology concerned itself less with the 
 divine attributes and the human will and the two 
 natures of Christ, and more with the God who has 
 attributes and the man who has a will, or is a will, 
 and the Christ whose personality is of far more 
 concern than his nature. It is true that person- 
 ality itself is the greatest of all problems and leads 
 far into the realm of metaphysics and psychology, 
 and the courageous mind cannot content itself 
 
The Christocentric View-Point 
 
 with any taboo which curtails its freedom or any 
 tether which Hmits its range of thought. But in 
 dealing with personality, the mind grasps a reality 
 whose atmosphere attends it in its most remote 
 and difficult adventures into the mystery which 
 enfolds all that is most real. The fact and mean- 
 ing of personality nowhere stand out so vividly 
 and so completely as in Jesus Christ He is the 
 most real person of history, in puissance and 
 permanence. He offers the richest study in per- 
 sonality that humanity presents. He is a real 
 problem and not an academic one. No question 
 is at once so fascinating and so vital as the prob- 
 lem of his personality. The theology that centers 
 in him cannot but be real. 
 
 IV 
 
 The Christologizing of theology also promises 
 progress. If Christianity is a revelation, progress 
 must come through the unfolding of 
 
 , , . The true 
 
 Its content, not through successive ac- Progress of 
 
 Christianity 
 
 cretions. Right here lies the crux of an unfolding 
 
 r f t 1 r ^y ' Revelation 
 
 the question of the absoluteness of Chris- not a series 
 
 * , of Advances 
 
 tianity. If Christianity simply intro- 
 duces and inaugurates a new religious era in which 
 the Spirit continually opens new truth, not con- 
 tained in germ in the original revelation of the 
 incarnate Son, then the claim for Christianity of 
 absoluteness and finality must be relinquished. 
 
 [^3] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 If, on the other hand, the incarnation is central in 
 its significance and inexhaustible in its content, if 
 in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and 
 knowledge, then Christianity is absolute and final, 
 and progress consists in the development of its 
 content, the unfolding of its implications and its 
 applications. Modern thought demands a choice 
 between these alternative conceptions, and the 
 future of Christianity depends largely upon the 
 decision. This is the problem which Robert Brown- 
 ing raises and resolves in A Death in the Desert. 
 He presents first, the view which makes Christianity 
 a stage in the divine revelation : 
 
 " I say that man was made to grow, not stop ; 
 That help, he needed once, and needs no more, 
 Having grown but an inch by, is withdrawn : 
 For he hath new needs, and new helps to these. 
 This imports solely, man should mount on each 
 New height in view ; the help whereby he mounts, 
 The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall. 
 Since all things suffer change save God the Truth. 
 Man apprehends him newly at each stage 
 Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done; 
 And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved." 
 
 To this the aged John replies : 
 "This might be pagan teaching : now hear mine. 
 
 I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
 Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
 All questions in the earth and out of it. 
 And has so far advanced thee to be wise." 
 
The Christocentric View-Point 
 
 Here we have, set over against one another, in 
 their true antithesis: Christianity relative and 
 Christianity absolute, Christianity partial ^he aitema- 
 and Christianity final, progress through **''** 
 an advancing revelation and progress through an 
 unfolding revelation. If the former alternative is 
 accepted, the personality of Christ is but a sec- 
 ondary and comparatively inconsequential factor, 
 revelation is a process of which Christianity is only 
 a stage, not the culmination, and advancing truth 
 leaves Christ behind. If the latter alternative be 
 the true one, Christianity is the absolute religion, 
 the all-inclusive revelation, the Person of Christ is 
 central in human life, and progress in theology 
 consists in the Christologizing of doctrine, the 
 interpretation of the universe in relation to the 
 incarnate Son of God. 
 
 C»5] 
 
IV 
 
 CHRIST INTERPRETING GOD 
 
 Jesus revealed the divine Fatherhood. The sub- 
 stance of the doctrine lay in the dim disclosures 
 "Our of earlier revelations; the doctrine itself 
 
 ^*^*'" came with Jesus Christ. *' In the dis- 
 tinctive peculiarity of that conception lay the root 
 of all the new elements of his teaching,"^ says 
 Wendt. This is but the confirmation at the hands 
 of thorough-going scholarship of the swift intui- 
 tion of Renan : " God conceived immediately as 
 Father — this is the whole theology of Jesus." 
 It is this which Harnack, too, finds to be the 
 essence of Christianity, although he, also, does 
 scant justice to the personality through whom the 
 great truth came.^ 
 
 Not that in point of originality this truth of 
 divine Fatherhood was absolutely new with Jesus, 
 Divine ^^^ ^^ potentiality and in universality 
 
 Tnew'T^fh it was ncw with him. No one before 
 with Jesus Jesus, Jcw or pagan, had ever made it 
 a vital, personal, practical reality. No one before 
 him had given it universal significance and appli- 
 
 1 Teachings of Jesus ^ Vol. I, p. 184. 
 * See the appendix for a discussion of the Harnack con- 
 troversy. 
 
 [26] 
 
Christ htterpreting God 
 
 cation. It is true that if we look for a declamatory, 
 dogmatic assertion of the universality of the divine 
 Fatherhood in the words of Jesus we shall look in 
 vain, but it pervades his whole teaching, as the dawn 
 pervades the sky, silently, serenely, splendidly. 
 
 Whence did Jesus derive this truth of the divine 
 Fatherhood? Partly through the ancient normal 
 medium of social, national, parental ..Noman 
 instruction. But this teaching alone, patiTeVbu?' 
 though passed through the alembic of *^* ^° " 
 religious genius and raised to the highest level of 
 the prophet, fails to account for the intensity and 
 confidence with which Jesus realized this truth. 
 Nothing less than a unique religious consciousness 
 will suffice. Great truths do not originate in small 
 souls. They are not guesses, nor surmises, nor 
 happy hits. Men do not gather grapes from thorns, 
 nor figs from thistles. The man through whom 
 humanity entered into its richest experience of God 
 can hardly have been less than holy, guileless, 
 undefiled, a priest forever after the order of Mel- 
 chizedek, one to whom we may apply every term 
 of endearment and homage without fear or con- 
 straint. From the character of his mission, from 
 the quality of his personality and from the quiet 
 confidence of his own words concerning himself 
 {e. g. Matt II: 27) we are impelled to find in him 
 a sonship peculiar to himself. 
 
 [27] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 II 
 
 But if God was Father to Jesus Christ in an es- 
 pecial sense and manner, does not that make him 
 Perfect somcwhat Icss than a Father to us? 
 
 feqmSs^er- Rathcr, it IS through Jesus Christ that 
 fectsonship j^^ j^ ^ perfect Father to us. The 
 relationship, like that of friendship, is mutual. 
 The father who has an only son who is disobedient 
 and rebellious may learn through suffering love a 
 great deal of what fatherhood means, but if he had 
 a son who was in perfect concord and sympathy 
 with him he would know a great deal more of the 
 meaning of fatherhood through such a son. It 
 may be that God can be a perfect Father to us 
 only because he has a perfect Son. He is a per- 
 fect Father to us, as well as to his only begotten 
 Son, — so far as our imperfection and sin permit 
 the relationship to be perfect. The father in the 
 parable was a truer father to the prodigal because 
 he had an elder son who was ever with him. 
 
 With this truth of perfect Fatherhood through 
 perfect Sonship there enters inevitably the real 
 essence of the Trinitarian conception, 
 andthcTrin- namely, the existence of a wealth of 
 **^ life, of love, of relationship in the Being 
 
 of God such as no naked numerical unity, no soli- 
 tude of absoluteness, no closed circle of existence, 
 will express. To assert that the same human 
 qualities — the best of them — which we find in 
 
 [28] 
 
Christ Interpreting God 
 
 ourselves are also in God, raised to their perfection, 
 is to differentiate the Being of God. For there 
 certainly must be other qualities in him besides 
 these human ones. And to differentiate the Being 
 of God is to postulate that for which the Trinity- 
 stands. To secure a symbol that expresses diver- 
 sity in unity, that postulates in God human as well 
 as transcendent attributes, that makes Fatherhood 
 not a mere contingent relationship but inherent 
 in the divine Selfhood — this is the motive of 
 Trinitarianism. 
 
 To accept Jesus' presentation of God as Father 
 as final does not necessarily mean its acceptance 
 as ultimate. Fatherhood applied to 
 
 _ , . , , * * , The Father- 
 
 Cjod IS more than a metaphor and more hood of God a 
 
 , , . . , , T . Homologue 
 
 than an analogue ; it is a homologue. It is 
 taken from a relationship which is partly physical 
 and partly spiritual ; therefore it cannot be ulti- 
 mate. But as our present nature and environment 
 cannot be wholly spiritual, Fatherhood is final for 
 the present stage. No higher and ampler repre- 
 sentation of God is possible to humanity, for this 
 term as appHed to God seizes and sanctifies our 
 highest and holiest consciousness. It remains for 
 us not to seek a higher conception but simply to 
 unfold the content of this. 
 
 The Fatherhood of God, as taught by Jesus, in- 
 volves: (i) The divine nearness and accessibility. 
 Fatherhood implies home life, and home life is a 
 sphere of close contact and free intercourse be- 
 [^9] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 tween parent and child. Here lies a complete 
 
 and sufficient motive for prayer. (2) Fatherhood 
 
 involves a right over us which by the 
 
 The ImpHca- ^ ' 
 
 tionsof very term is a natural right. To assert 
 
 Fatherhood -^ ^ 
 
 the Fatherhood of God does not define 
 whether he is such by creation, or derivation, or 
 in what manner, but it does imply a deep, funda- 
 mental, inherent bond, which can be broken, but 
 cannot be dissevered. (3) Fatherhood involves 
 the divine love for us. Jesus never said " God is 
 Love." But when he called God " Our Father," 
 he said as much, and said it more concretely and 
 convincingly. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Jesus* conception of God as Father is by no 
 
 means rigid, or exclusive of other conceptions of 
 
 him. The truth of God's sovereigfnty is 
 
 The Father- . , . - . , r , 
 
 hood of God recognized m the title Jesus attaches 
 
 not an Exclu- 
 sive Concep- to him, "Lord of heaven and earth." 
 
 But he is a sovereign Father, rather 
 than a fatherly Sovereign. His spiritual nature 
 is given full recognition in that saying — the 
 nearest to a definition of God which Jesus pre- 
 sents — " God is a spirit" Nevertheless it is as 
 Father that Jesus loves to address and to refer to 
 God. It is significant how seldom he uses the 
 common Old Testament appellations for God. 
 Richer, ampler, dearer, more vital to Jesus than 
 any other is the word Father. 
 [30] 
 
Christ Interpreting God 
 
 The stability and sufficiency of the doctrine of 
 the Divine Fatherhood is proven by its history. 
 The attempts to make other conceptions 
 
 . . . Why the 
 
 of God controllingf have failed. Calvin- truth of the 
 
 Divine 
 
 ism, deism, pantheism have had their Fatherhood 
 
 *■ prevails. 
 
 day and ceased to be ; agnosticism and 
 monism vainly strive to supersede Divine Father- 
 hood, which in spite of doubt and dismay never was 
 so strongly entrenched in the faith and thought of 
 humanity as to-day. The reason is not far to seek. 
 The truth of the Divine Fatherhood is at once a 
 judgment of value and a judgment of reason ; it is 
 both exoteric and esoteric; it satisfies the heart 
 and does not affront the intellect; it is neither 
 anthropomorphic nor speculative; it does not 
 clothe the Deity with ** parts and passions " nor 
 does it dissolve him into a nebulous abstraction. 
 It is as ample as it is definite in the wealth of its 
 meaning for thought and for life. Out of it grows 
 the doctrine of the Trinity, but without exhausting 
 or superseding it; from it flow unfailing currents 
 of life and truth. It is one of the endless mis- 
 understandings of the Unrecognized Christ that so 
 many persons to-day say "Our Father," without 
 realizing through whom the revelation came. 
 
 [31] 
 
V 
 
 CHRIST INTERPRETING NATURE 
 
 Among the rude representations of Jesus carved 
 by a loving though uncultivated Christian art 
 The joyous upon the tombs of the catacombs of 
 Saviour Rome is one which pictures him as a 
 
 youthful shepherd bearing a recovered lamb, or 
 kid,^ upon his shoulders. The fresh countenance 
 and athletic figure serve to suggest not only the 
 saving power and love of the Redeemer, but, in- 
 directly also, a phase of his character which is 
 coming into greater recognition as the perspective 
 of the years gives us a truer conception of the rich- 
 ness of his personality — that is, his closeness to 
 nature. It is well that we have not only the infant 
 innocence and childhood charm of that unknown 
 yet best-known face as it shone upon the souls of 
 the old Masters, not only the various portraits 
 of the mature beneficence and thoughtfulness of 
 Jesus the Teacher, not only the Ecce Homo and 
 other representations of the face marred as no 
 other man's, but also an essay of art to suggest 
 
 ^ The fact that the figure resembles a kid rather than a 
 lamb has furnished Matthew Arnold a touching motif loi his 
 sonnet " The Good Shepherd with the Kid:'' 
 [32] 
 
Christ Interpreting Nature 
 
 the joyous health and grace of the youthful Christ, 
 in the strength and serenity and joy of his redeem- 
 ing might. And no elaborate work of art could 
 better do this than the crude, symbolic shepherd 
 of the catacombs. 
 
 Jesus was not only the Man of Sorrows and 
 acquainted with grief, but the Man of Nature and 
 acquainted with joy. Life sang as weU j^^^^^, j^^^ 
 as sobbed for him, and above its sob °^ Nature 
 arose its song. It was not in barren, priest-ridden 
 Judea that Jesus was brought up and passed 
 most of his life, but in fair, fertile, simple-hearted 
 Galilee where men lived near to nature. Those 
 thirty years in picturesque Nazareth, almost voice- 
 less so far as the Gospel narrative is concerned, 
 are gradually filling the reverent imagination with 
 pictures of Jesus as the inspired student of Scrip- 
 ture poring over the glowing prophecies and 
 nature-psalms of the Old Testament, and as the 
 free, communing, spirit-filled youth, moving alone 
 in contemplative joy through the fields and over 
 the hilltops of Nazareth, looking, listening, loving, 
 drinking in from the fountain of nature all the 
 sweetness, the purity, the wisdom, and the glad- 
 ness with which it overflows. And afterward, in 
 the stress and heat of those burning years of his 
 ministry, how often did he turn aside to the quiet 
 mountainside, the restful lakeshore, the secluded 
 garden for refreshment and soothing and strength 
 in communion with the Father. 
 3 izz^ 
 
Christ and the Eier7ial Order 
 
 The nature-teaching of Jesus is not less marked 
 and characteristic than his personal attachment 
 The best Na- ^"^ rcsort to her. Though neither 
 ture-teaching bo^auist nor geologist, biologist nor 
 ornithologist, never was such a nature-teacher as 
 Jesus. Picture him on the hillside of Galilee, 
 preaching the Sermon on the Mount, the open 
 heavens above him and the fair fields about, the 
 soft breeze caressing him, the dew of youth upon 
 his brow, the light of love upon his face, the poise 
 of health, the freedom of faith and the great joy of 
 his mission upon him. Of what does he speak? 
 Of life and duty and trust and freedom from care, 
 while the skies bend down in benediction and the 
 breeze whispers Yea and the flowers nod a gentle 
 Amen, No part of this sweet sermon which the 
 summer winds of Galilee have wafted to us across 
 the years, is more dear to the heart of Christen- 
 dom than that in which, with the swift seizure of a 
 divine insight, Jesus unfolds the very heart of the 
 scene about him in the words: "Behold the birds 
 of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they 
 reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly 
 Father feedeth them. . . . Consider the lih'es of 
 the field, how they grow ; they toil not, neither do 
 they spin : yet I say unto you, that even Solonlon 
 in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." 
 Here is nature-teaching that has no parallel. So 
 long as birds fly, this lesson will fly with them ; 
 
 [34] 
 
Christ Intrepreting Nature 
 
 so long as flowers bloom, this word will bloom 
 in them. Nor does this passage stand alone. 
 Throughout Jesus' teaching run the roots of nature- 
 symbolism and analogy, holding it fast to reality 
 and supplying it with unfading verdure and beauty. 
 Aphorism, precept, parable, twine about some fa- 
 miliar nature fact which lends form and support, 
 and often, in Jesus' use of it, seems itself a part of 
 the greater spiritual truth which it symbolizes. 
 
 II 
 
 But, according to the Gospels, a still more inti- 
 mate sympathy and fellowship than this existed 
 between Jesus and nature. Nature re- Miracles the 
 sponds to minds that understand and Nlt'u"e^to°^ 
 love her — almost miraculously. Finer P<^''s°"^'»'y 
 laws, subtler adaptations, secret sympathies, flow 
 forth from her to meet the seer, be he scientist, 
 artist or poet. It would be strange, indeed, if she 
 had made no unusual response to Jesus. Given 
 a personality whose insight and purity and force 
 were such as to change the whole course of the 
 life and thought of the world, and what must have 
 been its legitimate and transforming power over 
 nature ! Marked, indeed, would be the discrep- 
 ancy if He who had power on earth to forgive sins, 
 could not also say to the sick of the palsy, " Take 
 up thy bed, and walk"; if He who could cast out 
 seven devils could not also heal the fever-stricken 
 body. 
 
 [35] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 The personality of Jesus is the greater miracle, 
 and carries the other miracles with it, or (if any 
 The greater ^6 offended) stands without them. To 
 Miracle explain the miracles away is quite as 
 
 difficult as to explain them. Of almost all, if not 
 all the miracles of Jesus, it is coming to be seen 
 that the more they are studied the more closely 
 do they cling to his personality and refuse to be 
 torn away. For long, theology strove to make use 
 of miracles in precisely the way that Jesus for- 
 bade, as signs, evidences. As such they have been 
 defeated by science and have come to naught. 
 But the moment we begin with the personality of 
 Jesus, cease defending miracles as infractions of 
 law, and relate them to those subtle mental and 
 spiritual forces to which nature so swiftly responds, 
 science raises her embargo and abandons her hos- 
 tility. The miracles of Jesus attest the accord of na- 
 ture and spirit. They are notes of a deeper harmony 
 which underlies apparent confusion and discord. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be a revela- 
 tion and leave us wholly in the dark concerning 
 Jesus trust- ^^^ rcHgious mcauiugs of nature. If 
 hisNa^Jre- Jcsus has no deep spiritual insights 
 teaching j^^^^ naturc his " credentials " ^ are 
 lacking. If his nature-teaching is wrong, we can- 
 not trust him fully in his revelation of God and 
 * Ecce Homoy Chap. V. 
 
 [36] 
 
Christ Interpreting Nature 
 
 his understanding of man. To make him less than 
 central in revelation is, in the end, to • displace 
 Christianity; to make him central requires that 
 he be trustworthy in his interpretation of nature 
 as well as of God and man. " His was a childlike 
 understanding of nature," it is said, ** possible only 
 at a period before science had discovered to us 
 the true order and understanding of nature." But 
 it may be that the narrowly scientific and un- 
 believing are, after all, the childish, and he, the 
 childlike, the trustful, the far-visioned, the truer 
 scientist, — in the science of ultimate truth. His 
 teaching was not simply a reflection of that of 
 his day. It was not made up of current ideas, 
 scientific or theological. It was his own. While it 
 grew out of the ideas and conceptions of his time, 
 it is on a higher level, a universal plane, where no 
 scientific or theological mutations can touch it. It 
 has the note of the timeless and the universal. 
 
 Not that Jesus' interpretation of nature is com- 
 plete and exhaustive on all sides. On the purely 
 scientific side of nature he did not The failing 
 touch; on the esthetic side he did fSflaXTide 
 not dwell ; it was the moral, the spirit- °^ ^**"" 
 ual interpretation of nature, as it stands related to 
 the life of the soul, with which he was concerned. 
 And here we may accept his word as final. What 
 is that word ? It is that nature is God's — full of 
 his thought and of his love. If it be said that, in 
 this optimistic and providential view of nature, he 
 
 [37] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 ignored entirely that darker side which modern 
 science has brought out in such terrible distinct- 
 ness, the answer is that he did not ignore the 
 darker side but saw it transformed and absorbed 
 in the light of the All-Father's love. The falling 
 sparrow is Jesus' interpretation of the evil and 
 suffering of nature. Explain the pain of nature 
 he docs not, but interpret it he does. ** Not with- 
 out your Father " is a word with larger meaning 
 than has yet been taken from it. All-embracing 
 compassion, all-wise beneficence, all-inclusive ulti- 
 mate justice and well-being are in this word. It 
 goes further and deeper than science ventures to 
 go, or can go. 
 
 Few and simple as are Jesus* words concerning 
 the meaning of nature, the light which they throw 
 upon nature will never cease to invest it. Analyze 
 our modern nature trust and joy, and it will be 
 found to rest ultimately largely upon Christ's 
 teaching. Humanity will come, more and more, 
 to see nature, not only through his eyes, but 
 through himself, through the undivided revela- 
 tion which he brought, — or rather which he was 
 and is, — to the world. 
 
 [38] 
 
VI 
 
 CHRIST INTERPRETING MAN 
 
 In order to understand any organic species it is 
 necessary to know it in its origin, its development, 
 and its maturity. Most emphatically is Humanity 
 this true of humanity. It is not enough thrlfJIh a"^ 
 to trace its origin and its development; ^"'^o^yp^ 
 we should see it also in its perfection. Anthropol- 
 ogy alone is insufficient to explain man ; anthro- 
 pology and history are insufficient; we need also 
 revelation. Since we cannot see the future man, 
 the final product of social evolution, by him to 
 know what manhood is, we require a Prototype, a 
 Forerunner, an Ensample by whom to interpret 
 ourselves and our race. But is this possible? Is 
 not the perfect man impossible save as the product 
 of a perfect society? Yes, unless he enter the race 
 from above, as a sent and supernatural being, ** trail- 
 ing clouds of glory from God who is his home." 
 
 Here, then, we meet our chief problem : Can we 
 find reasonable cause and evidence for the tran- 
 scending of evolution, in the case of Christ? In 
 
 [39] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 other words, is revelation consonant with evolution? 
 If we were obliged to find in Jesus the sole instance 
 
 of departure from a rigid law of devel- 
 and Evolu- opmeut, the strain upon faith would be 
 
 severe ; but such is not the case. The 
 law of evolution grows more flexible as it reaches 
 the higher ranks of life. Other forces enter 
 and act with it. There is at least one phenome- 
 non which is absolutely inexplicable by evolution 
 alone, — the fact of genius. The great souls 
 that have enlightened and enriched humanity can 
 by no means be explained simply as the prod- 
 ucts of racial development They enter the race 
 mysteriously, supernally, royally. Genius cannot 
 be produced as a new rose is, by experiment and 
 culture ; its comes as a gift from above. No form 
 The Mystery ^^ cvolution caH account for Raphael 
 of Genius ^^ Shakcspcare. Ancestry fails to solve 
 the benign mystery of genius. We are in a realm 
 where natural selection and hereditary instinct are 
 puerile futilities. The law of heredity acts, but it 
 is transcended. The supernatural absorbs, molds, 
 transfigures the natural and endows it with a power 
 and radiance that hold us awestruck and spell- 
 bound. By this token, the gift of genius, we know 
 beyond a peradventure that this world is ruled and 
 endowed from above and not from beneath or 
 within. Evolution is God's process — beautiful 
 and fruitful — but it is not his only process. He 
 is not limited to one method. Evolution and rev- 
 
 [40] 
 
Christ Interpreting Man 
 
 elation are not mutually exclusive terms. With 
 the advent of self-consciousness evolution yields 
 to a higher law. " Resident forces " are supple- 
 mented by non-resident ideals. An amoeba does 
 not need an ideal before him in order to stimulate 
 him to perfect development, but a man does. Con- 
 scious development cannot proceed without a goal, 
 an ideal, — a Christ. 
 
 Does this mean that Christ is simply a religious 
 genius ? Yes, and No ! Like every other genius 
 he is a gift of God to men — the Gift of j^sus the 
 God to men. He so far transcends all Q^^^o^God 
 other men in goodness and in greatness as to con- 
 stitute a class by himself, in which, by virtue of his 
 pecuHar vocation, he is the sole possible member. 
 This gives him a relation both to God and to hu- 
 manity which had he been less than divine he could 
 not have fulfilled. His deity is not above his hu- 
 manity nor alongside it, but in and through his 
 humanity. By virtue of his perfect humanity he is 
 the revelation, not only of God, but of humanity, 
 — the God-man. The individual can see himself in 
 the whole splendor and scope of his possibilities 
 only in Christ ; and the highest vision of society is 
 that of a corporate body made up of persons striv- 
 ing toward the Christ-life and thus in their common 
 life realizing the kingdom of heaven. It is only 
 through Christ that a man can know himself, his 
 brother man, or the humanity of which both 
 partake. 
 
 [41] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 II 
 
 The first and greatest revelation that Christ 
 makes to mankind, then, is the revelation of its pos- 
 sibilities. What can a man become, 
 
 Christ re- , 
 
 veals our what Can w^;/ becomc ? The answer hes 
 
 Possibilities . ^i • rr-i 
 
 m the Christ. There have been other 
 partial answers. Every great and good man is such 
 — Gautama, Confucius, Socrates. But the com- 
 plete answer is found only in Christ. The sages, 
 heroes, prophets are but broken lights of him, and 
 he is more than they. When Pilate said. Behold, 
 the man, he unwittingly acted as spokesman to the 
 race. Mankind has looked, and beneath the crown 
 of thorns has seen so regal a brow, behind the 
 purple robe so great a heart of sacrificial love, as 
 to make all who receive him kings and priests unto 
 God. In this Man every man sees his own man- 
 hood transfigured and crowned. His is a manhood 
 magnetic with spiritual currents, vital with com- 
 municative puissance. The moment a man sees 
 Christ, he sees himself in a new light. Undreamt- 
 of possibilities flash upon him. He is a new crea- 
 ture, old things are passed away, behold all things 
 are become new. In an old house in Bruges there 
 is this simple motto: "There is more in me." 
 Beholding Christ every man reads that motto " writ 
 in living characters." It is true that seeing Christ 
 each sees One forever and forever beyond him, 
 but the humanity is so warm and real, the splendor 
 
 [42] 
 
Christ Interpreting Man 
 
 so winsome and impelling that we are attracted 
 and not repelled by the superiority. He is, as 
 Dr. Gordon calls him, the Flying Goal. It is only 
 by poetic license that we can speak of becoming 
 Christs ; but to be like him — that is the result of 
 seeing him as he is. This is Spurgeon's account 
 of his conversion, swift, simple, sufficient: "I 
 looked at Jesus, and Jesus looked at me, and we 
 were one forever." In that look the great preacher 
 saw his own possibilities hidden in Christ's excel- 
 lences. Such an unveiling is there, for all who will 
 look. 
 
 Through Christ man sees, also, the counterpart of 
 his possibility, that is, his sinfulness. On one' side 
 of the coin of humanity is stamped the 
 
 . Christ 
 
 ima^e of the Kine^: on the reverse side reveals our 
 
 ° ^ ' Sinfulness 
 
 that of a distortion almost too devilish 
 to be human. The first possibility could not be, 
 without the second. Christ reveals both, — the 
 one in himself, the other in his anti-self. In see- 
 ing his possible goodness in Christ a man sees 
 also his possible evil, and somewhere between the 
 two his own present sinfulness. If I had not come 
 . . . unto them^ they had not had sin. Sense of sin 
 is independent of Christ ; sensitiveness to sin comes 
 with him. If Christ were not lifted up before men 
 as he is, it is probable that the same fearful moral 
 callousness would recur that cursed the pre-Chris- 
 tian world. Man does not see himself as he is, or 
 as he might be, unless he sees himself also as sinful. 
 
 [43] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 Doubtless the fact of sinfulness has been abnor- 
 mally exaggerated in many periods of the life of 
 the Church, but, if so, it has been only by de- 
 parting from that normal, healthful but poignant 
 sense of sinfulness created by the contact with the 
 real Christ. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Once more, Christ interprets man to himself by 
 revealing to him the true proportions and harmonies 
 Christ reveals of his being. The danger of a one- 
 met^'Strue sidcd development is one of the chiefest 
 *" °° perils of a complex civilization. This 
 
 tendency Christ perpetually and benignly restrains. 
 The physical, the intellectual, the cultural, each 
 clamors for complete control. The paths of in- 
 vitation open to the indulgent development of one 
 side of our nature. And when one has given free 
 rein to such a specializing until he has become 
 a scientific, or literary, or musical monomaniac, 
 all distorted in one direction, all dwarfed in others, 
 and then one day Jesus appears across his path 
 and he looks up and sees the splendid complete- 
 ness and symmetry of his manhood, his own crip- 
 pled life starts forth into distressing shapelessness 
 and incompleteness! 
 
 It is in upholding the supremacy of the moral 
 and spiritual nature that Christ most persistently 
 corrects our inner chaos and restores harmony 
 and balance to our feverish and incoherent lives. 
 
 [44] 
 
Christ Interpreting Man 
 
 With unerring insight and firmness he puts the 
 ethical and reh'gious ideal of life first and then 
 finds a place for all real and worthful interests in 
 subordination to this. This order is in his teaching 
 because it is first in himself. Nothing is more char- 
 acteristic of Christ than the superb poise, both of 
 his character and of his conduct. Sublimity and 
 sweetness, strength and grace, thought and feeling, 
 blend to make his life a perfect symphony. And, 
 witnessing, we know that this is what man was 
 meant to be. Thus the Christ interprets and 
 harmonizes human nature. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is as unreasonable to study man and leave the 
 Man out, as to study history and leave Christianity 
 out. Christ has woven himself into the Christ shapes 
 very mind structure of humanity. Psy- «""^^"«^» 
 chology tells us that it is impossible for a person 
 to read a book without being a somewhat different 
 being for it.^ Much less is it possible to hear the 
 Christ story without being changed by it. And 
 when an entire civilization is saturated with the 
 Christ as its acknowledged Ideal, he must enter, 
 consciously or unconsciously, into all thinking and 
 doing, with a force that it is impossible to measure. 
 Individuals reject him, but humanity has received 
 him. Only through him can we know ourselves — 
 our possibilities, our imperfection, our true harmony 
 1 See James' Psychology^ Vol. I, p. 5. 
 
 [45] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 of being. Man as seen through evolution alone is 
 a racial epiphenomenon, a freak, a nondescript; 
 as seen through the average man he is a bundle 
 of contradictions, ** a groveller on the earth and a 
 gazer at the sky"; as seen through Christ he is 
 a child of God, an heir of the eternal, a unit of 
 realizable possibilities. The light of the Incarna- 
 tion falls upon the entire nature and history of man. 
 It lights up the dull eyes of our low-browed simian 
 ancestor with the promise of immortal progress 
 and attainment ; it falls upon the slowly develop- 
 ing, plodding savage and makes his every upward 
 step significant; it falls upon the most hopeless 
 individual member of the race and reveals him as 
 a brother of the imperial Christ and capable of 
 illimitable progress. 
 
 [46] 
 
VII 
 
 THE WORSHIP OF CHRIST 
 
 It concerns us to ask: What light is thrown by 
 the modern Christocentric theology upon the 
 much debated question concerning the worship of 
 Christ? 
 
 I 
 
 The aversion of the older Unitarian school to 
 the worship of Christ received its most representa- 
 tive expression in Emerson's Sermon 
 on The Lord's Supper, in which he said : the worship 
 
 .« T , ' . . , . ofChrist 
 
 "I am so much a Unitarian as this: 
 that I believe the human mind can admit but one 
 God, and that every effort to pay religious hom- 
 age to more than one being, goes to take away all 
 right ideas. ... In the act of petition the soul 
 stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more pres- 
 ent to your mind than your brother or your child. 
 But is Jesus not called in Scripture the Mediator? 
 He is the Mediator in that only sense in which 
 possibly any being can mediate between God and 
 man — that is, an instructor of man. He teaches 
 us how to become like God. And a true disciple 
 of Jesus will receive the light he gives most thank- 
 
 [47] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 fully, but the thanks he offers, and which an 
 exalted being will accept, are not compliments, 
 commemorations, but the use of that instruction." 
 
 How bare and cold and un-Emersonian this 
 reads, in our day of a broader and richer concep- 
 Theodore ^^^^ °^ Christ ! Indeed the sermon 
 Parker throughout has not a single suggestion 
 
 of the true Emerson. In contrast with its nega- 
 tive and chilling plaintiveness Theodore Parker's 
 indiscriminating heartiness is refreshing. "Jesus 
 made a revolution in the idea of God, and himself 
 went up and took the throne of the world. That 
 was a step in progress, and, if called upon to wor- 
 ship the Jehovah of the Old Testament, or Jesus 
 of Nazareth, a plain man, as he is painted in the 
 first three Gospels, I should not hesitate ; I should 
 worship my brother, for in the highest qualities 
 this actual man is superior to men's conception of 
 God. . . . Let us not be harsh, let us not blame 
 men for worshiping the creature more than the 
 Creator. They saw the Son higher than the 
 Father, and they did right. The popular adora- 
 tion of Jesus to-day is the best thing in the 
 ecclesiastical religion." And yet, with customary 
 outspokenness, he proceeds immediately to add, 
 " But I do not believe in the perfection of Jesus." 
 
 The contrasted attitude of these two devout and 
 virile thinkers upon this subject can be understood 
 only as one traces it to the contrasted tempera- 
 ments and view-points of the two men. Emerson, 
 
 [48] 
 
The Worship of Christ 
 
 the transcendentalist, meditative, mystical, wor- 
 ships the God of nature, the Absolute ; Parker, the 
 humanist, the preacher, the reformer, worships 
 God in his human attributes, his Fatherhood, his 
 Motherhood, his Brotherhood. To the latter, 
 therefore, Jesus representing the human side of 
 God appeals much more strongly. 
 
 II 
 
 Turning to William E. Channing we find his 
 position nearer to that of Parker than to that of 
 Emerson. In his Baltimore Ordination 
 Sermon Channing said: ''We also think EiieryChan- 
 that the doctrine of the Trinity injures 
 devotion, not only by joining to the Father other 
 objects of worship, but by taking from the Father 
 the supreme affection which is his due, and trans- 
 ferring it to the Son. . . . Men want an object of 
 worship like themselves, and the great secret of 
 idolatry lies in this propensity. A God, clothed 
 in our form and feeling our wants and sorrows, 
 speaks to our weak nature more strongly than 
 a Father in heaven, a pure spirit, invisible and 
 unapproachable, save by the reflecting and puri- 
 fied mind. . . . We believe, too, that this worship 
 of Jesus, though attractive, is not most fitted to 
 spiritualize the mind, that it awakens transport 
 rather than that deep veneration of the moral per- 
 fections of God which is the essence of piety." 
 4 [49] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 It is difficult for us in the wider outlook and 
 
 more human atmosphere of this twentieth century 
 
 to realize the point of view of one who 
 
 What is more - i i i • ir 
 
 moral than thus sceks to school himsclf away from 
 
 Love ? . ^ 
 
 the worship of the more human and 
 lovable attributes of the Deity to those of "a 
 pure spirit, invisible and unapproachable, save by 
 the reflecting and purified mind." When Chan- 
 ning goes on to speak of the " moral perfections " 
 of God he must mean, not the highest moral 
 perfections, for those are the very qualities re- 
 vealed in Christ, sympathy, sacrifice, love, but 
 the less central, less '* attractive," perfections, — 
 justice, holiness, impeccability. To imply that 
 these are more " moral " than love is to impeach 
 the very heart of morality, as well as of God. A 
 Unitarian is surely the last Christian of whom we 
 should expect this. 
 
 The question, after all, is this : Is the heart of 
 God essentially human, — in the highest, noblest 
 The Real scnsc of humanity? In other words, is 
 i««*e love central in the divine Being? If 
 
 so, Christ is so true and sufficient a revelation of 
 him that we may accept his words: "He that 
 hath seen me hath seen the Father," and draw 
 from them their natural corollary — he that wor- 
 ships the Son worships the Father. 
 
 It is impossible to worship Christ without wor- 
 shiping God. Herein lies the solution of the whole 
 difficulty — which is purely academic and not real, 
 [so] 
 
The Worship of Christ 
 
 except when it arises from a merely humanitarian 
 conception of Christ. So long as Unitarianism 
 can keep its conception of Christ down at the level 
 of ordinary humanity it is entirely self-consistent 
 in not worshiping him ; but the moment he escapes 
 these limitations (as he often does with Unitari- 
 ans), he inevitably calls out the worship which his 
 perfect Sonship really makes equivalent to worship 
 of the Father. Fatherhood is impossible without 
 Sonship. Imperfect Sonship implies imperfect 
 Fatherhood. Perfect Fatherhood cannot be un- 
 derstood without perfect Sonship. If Jesus had 
 been no more, no higher, than any other son of 
 God we should not have come to the knowledge 
 of the divine Fatherhood that we have in Chris- 
 tianity. To worship Christ is to worship perfect 
 Fatherhood through perfect Sonship. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Seeing in Jesus none other than a good man, 
 it is not strange that Emerson protested against 
 worshiping him and administering the 
 
 . 1^ 1 1 . , , 1 1 • The Secret of 
 
 service which so highly exalts him ; nor chanmng-s 
 that Theodore Parker, while condoning 
 the worship of Christ in others, rejected it for him- 
 self. It is strange, however, that Channing, who 
 held so high a conception of Jesus that he could 
 say, " We believe that Jesus Christ was the most 
 glorious display, expression and representative of 
 God to mankind, so that seeing and knowing him, 
 [S'] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 we see and know the invisible Father," should have 
 objected to the worship of Christ. It can be ex- 
 plained only as arising from his extreme aversion 
 to the doctrine of the Trinity ^ which he understood 
 only as it was so sadly misrepresented in the New 
 England theology of his day. It was Frederick 
 Robertson who said of Channing, ** I should be very 
 glad, if half of those who recognize the hereditary 
 claims of the Son of God to worship, bowed down 
 before his moral dignity with an adoration half 
 as profound or a love half as enthusiastic as 
 Dr. Channing's." 
 
 The discussion concerning the deity of Christ 
 has passed into a distinctly new phase in the 
 The Ritsch- Ritschlian theology. Starting from the 
 lian Attitude vantage-ground of Luther, who, it is 
 held, regarded confidence in Christ as the true 
 confession of Christ, the Ritschlian school, going 
 forth with its famous divining-rod, Worth-jndg- 
 ment, finds the spring of Christ's true divinity in 
 his sinless and perfect character and his perfect 
 fulfilment of his unique vocation in redemption. 
 Ritschl entitles Jesus " the perfect self-revelation 
 of God " and says of him: " He is that magnitude 
 in the world in whose self-end God makes his own 
 eternal self-end in an original manner operative and 
 manifest." ^ " The Deity of Christ can only be ex- 
 pressed by saying that the mind and will of the 
 Everlasting God stand before us in the historically 
 1 The Ritschlian Theolo^, Garvie, p. 280. 
 
 [52] 
 
The Worship of Christ 
 
 active will of this man," ^ writes Hermann. And 
 again, " We first know what Divine Nature is 
 when we apprehend it in Christ." To the same 
 effect Kaftan declares : " That Jesus Christ is God 
 means that in him we have a complete revelation 
 of God." 2 
 
 That this representative relation of Christ to 
 God and to men amounts to actual deity may be 
 doubted. But that it warrants worship of him can 
 hardly be questioned. For as Hermann affirms: 
 " We stand thus toward Christ in a relation of the 
 greatest conceivable dependence." 
 
 Whatever the limitations and inconsistencies of 
 the Ritschlian school, it is firmly grounded and 
 sincere in its devotion to Christ and in its as- 
 cription to him of virtual deity. The difference 
 between the Ritschlian conception of Christ's deity 
 and that of the older Unitarianism represented by 
 Channing, is this : In order to ascribe deity to 
 Christ the early Unitarians thought it necessary 
 to limit and circumscribe his humanity, whereas 
 Ritschlianism conceives that perfect and exalted 
 humanity is, in so far, deity. 
 
 The natural inclination of the heart, won by the 
 grace and glory of Jesus, to pay homage to him 
 who so uniquely reveals the Father, involves no 
 real inconsistency, much less any disloyalty to the 
 Supreme Being. The sincere worship of the true 
 
 ^ Communiofi with Gody p. 138. 
 ^ Doginatiky p. 419. 
 
 [S3] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 Christ includes within itself the worship of the 
 Father. It is worship of the Father in the Son. 
 Hewhowor- ^hc worship directed to Jesus finds 
 wSIhi^t?he its ultimate object and explanation 
 Father also j^^ ^j^^ Eternal Christ, the Logos, in- 
 carnated in Jesus. As such it is worship of 
 the Revealing God, the Father manifested in the 
 Son. 
 
 [54] 
 
PART II 
 
 ASPECTS OF CHRIST 
 
" In him was life ; and the life was the light of men." 
 
 " Many man for Christes love 
 Was martired in Romayne 
 £r any Christendom was knowe there 
 Or any cros honoured." 
 
 — OldEngnsh Verse. 
 
 "All who are rational beings are partakers of the word, that is, of 
 reason, and by this means bear certain seeds implanted within them of 
 w'sdom and justice, which is Christ." — Origen, De Principia. 
 
 " The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou think ? 
 So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too — 
 So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
 Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here I " 
 
 — Robert Browning, An Epistle. 
 
 "Christ is lost, like the piece of money in the parable; but where? In 
 thy house, that is, in thy soul. Thou needest not run to Rome or Jeru- 
 salem to seek him. He sleepeth in thy heart, as he did in the ship; 
 awaken him with the loud cry of thy desire. Howbeit, I believe that thou 
 sleepest oftener to him than he to thee." — Walter Hilton, The Scale 
 of Perfection. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE HUMAN CHRIST 
 
 So far as the modern emphasis upon the Historic 
 Christ is in the interest of his true humanity 
 the motive is unimpeachable. Unless a Human 
 Jesus is understood and felt to be chmt needed 
 deeply, really, richly human, he can have no 
 lasting and saving hold upon humanity. What- 
 ever tends to actualize and vivify Christ's human- 
 ity, therefore, may be hailed as wholesome and 
 true. But the question is : Is the historic Christ, 
 as such, and alone, the most truly and wholly 
 human Christ? On the contrary, we hold that too 
 narrow and exclusive attention upon the historic 
 Christ obscures and limits his real humanity. 
 
 I 
 
 There are two distinct and contrary meanings 
 bound up in the term " human " as we commonly 
 What is it to employ it. The first is that of the 
 be Human? weakness, incompetency, imperfection 
 of which we are conscious as attaching to our 
 human nature. This meaning appears in such 
 common phrases as "to err is human," "human 
 follies," " human nature." On this side of our 
 human nature there is enough that is discour- 
 
 [57] 
 
Christ and the Eternat Order 
 
 aging, weak, pitiful. It is human to be selfish; 
 human to be sensual; human to be indifferent, 
 hateful, cruel. The other hemisphere of our hu- 
 man nature is as bright as this side is dark, as 
 noble and beautiful as this side is ignoble and 
 unholy. To our humanity belong, also, dignity, 
 strength, divineness. It is human to aspire, to 
 rise, to attain, to bless, to sympathize, to love. 
 
 Now it is impossible to think of these higher 
 qualities of our humanity without seeing that while 
 they are ours, while they belong to us and befit us 
 far more than the opposite qualities, they are ours 
 as spiritual rather than as human beings. They 
 are ours as from above and not from beneath. 
 Strangely do these two conflicting lives meet in 
 us, forming the insoluble mystery and tragedy of 
 our being, — 
 
 " My life is twofold; 
 Human and divine, buried and crown'd." 
 
 Whoever has caught, however dimly, a vision of 
 
 ideal manhood, or has striven, however vainly, to 
 
 realize it, knows that if he could only 
 
 humanly is find a man who really is all that a man 
 
 to be divine ^ 
 
 might be, to such a one he would give 
 the utmost homage of heart and soul. Life is one 
 long, disappointing search for the reality of that 
 image of human perfection that lies in the depths 
 of each human heart. Jesus Christ is the fulfil- 
 
 [58] 
 
The Huma7t Christ 
 
 ment of the longing, the end of the search, the 
 realizatj()n of the image. As such he is splen- 
 didly, Supremely human ; but just because he is 
 so supremely human he is also divine. For the 
 perfectly human is divine, because the perfectly 
 human is a human impossibility. No mere man 
 has reached it; no mere rnan can reach it. Not 
 a man who ever lived but has felt that he could 
 have reached a higher manhood, but not a man 
 but has felt that had he done his utmost he 
 could not have been a perfect man. Perfection is 
 outside the range of human possibility, — in the 
 present life at any rate. Paul, who reached it as 
 nearly as any one, exclaims with noble earnest- 
 ness, " Not that I have already obtained, or am 
 already made perfect." Others, looking from the 
 outside, may think a man near perfection ; he him- 
 self knows better. And if he is a true man he will 
 confess his imperfection. Why is it that Jesus 
 never made such a confession? By that token 
 we must infer, either that he was far less perfect 
 than the best of his fellows or far more perfect. 
 
 Thus the study of the historic Christ leads us on 
 into conjectures, convictions, affirmations concern- 
 ing him which take us out of the his- ^he perfect 
 torical, the understandable, the narrowly Si^moTe"^* 
 human, into the realm of the spiritual, *^*" ^^" 
 the mysterious, the universally human. Only so 
 could we have a completely human Christ, a Christ 
 who at once satisfies us and saves us. Of men 
 [59] 
 
Christ and the Eternat Order 
 
 of imperfect, incomplete humanity, nobly striving 
 after perfection, the world has had many, and richly 
 have they helped their fellows ; but not one of them 
 could redeem humanity because not one was wholly, 
 perfectly human. Paradox though it seem, perfect 
 humanity is necessarily superhuman, supernatural, 
 divine. If the best that is in us all is divine, He in 
 whom the best rules absolutely is divine indeed. 
 Would we have a Christ who is wholly, richly, per- 
 fectly human, we needs must have an incarnation. 
 
 II 
 
 Here we are met by what seems an insuperable 
 objection. If Christ is perfectly, supremely, di- 
 vinely human, what of that struggle 
 pe?fcc"chri3t vvith self, that attainment, that victory 
 
 *°^P * over evil which is the very glory and 
 crown of our humanity; without which humanity 
 is but a semblance and no reality? A Christ who 
 is not ** in all points tempted like as we are " is no 
 Christ, at least no human Christ. It is worthy^of 
 note that the author of the Episde to the Hebrews 
 who presents the most touching and humanizing 
 picture of the Christ, tempted, battling, overcom- 
 ing, is one who from start to finish of his noble 
 epistle represents Christ as the divine Mediator, 
 the perfect Revealer of God — " the effulgence of 
 his glory, and the very image of his substance." 
 In his mind there was no incongruity between such 
 divinity and such humanity. 
 
 [60] 
 
The Human Christ 
 
 And not only is there to him no incongruity be- 
 tween these two aspects of Christ, but clearly he 
 feels that the one is essential to the other. For 
 immediately upon asserting the temptability of 
 Christ, he adds "yet without sin." It was that 
 alone which gave significance to Christ's tempta- 
 tion, that it was without sitiy as no other man's has 
 ever been. In other words, it is the divinity of 
 Christ which gives depth and scope and reality to 
 his humanity. If his humanity had not been 
 divine humanity, it could not have been perfect 
 humanity, and if it had not been perfect, it would 
 have had no peculiar and universal significance. 
 
 Ill 
 
 All that Nestorianism and Socinianism, all that 
 Unitarianism and Ritschlianism have insisted upon 
 for the true humanity of Christ, — his 
 dependence, his temptability, his strug- if^'neT^^Ss 
 gle, his victory — finds ample place in Seiy'com- 
 the theology of the incarnation. In glvdopmeSt 
 fact, the very conditions involved in an 
 incarnation afford the only adequate scope for 
 the development and realization of a full, com- 
 plete, perfect humanity. The gradual awakening of 
 Jesus to the consciousness of a peculiar mission to 
 men (Messiahship), based upon a peculiarly pure 
 and intimate sense of communion with God, must 
 in itself have led to peculiar temptations, struggles, 
 yearning toward men, fellowship with God. 
 [6i] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 It is impossible to account for Jesus* assumption 
 of the r61e of Messiahship except as he felt within 
 himself a unique heavenly endowment, qualifying 
 him for a superhuman task. Given this endow- 
 ment and this vocation, and you have the con- 
 ditions essential for the complete development of 
 a character made perfect through sufferings. The 
 stress and sublimity of the temptations attending 
 the assumption of his mission, so graphically and 
 feelingly allegorized in the temptations of the 
 wilderness, are such as are possible to and pro- 
 ductive of a humanity deeper, nobler, more po- 
 tent, than any other man has possessed. And so 
 throughout, to the garden hour and the darkness 
 of the cross. 
 
 The level of a person's life is indicated by the 
 character of his temptations. It is a crude mis- 
 take that any level of human life is free 
 is^obc""*" from temptation. It was far from the 
 tempt wicket gate that Christian met Apollyon. 
 
 Holiness immunes are the victims of a peculiarly 
 subtle temptation. To be above temptation and 
 struggle Christ must have been, not sinless, but 
 unsinable, not perfect but super-perfect. It would 
 be nearer the truth to regard him as the most 
 severely tempted of men. The fact that his temp- 
 tations were on the very highest level does not 
 diminish their power. Sensual temptations may 
 be the most immediate and violent, but not the 
 most insidious and terrible. It is only a Christ, 
 
 [62] 
 
The Human Christ 
 
 looking down from a pinnacle of the temple, who 
 sees the real depths below. 
 
 He who has won his victory on the lower levels 
 of temptation can understand little of the storms 
 that assail him who stands upon the 
 higher. But he who has won on the Se^^fS?" 
 higher levels can understand something sy^mplthy*^^ 
 of the whole range of temptation, down 
 to the very bottom. It is impossible to think of 
 Jesus struggling with lust or alcoholism, yet the 
 intensity of his own temptation lets him into the 
 secret of every temptation with the wealth of com- 
 plete sympathy. Such a One stoops to a Mary 
 Magdalene without effort and treats even a Judas 
 with marvelous charity and pity. 
 
 The Human Christ is touched with a feeling of 
 our infirmity not because of his imperfection but 
 because of his perfection, not because of his limita- 
 tion but because of his fulness, not because he is 
 " merely '* human, but because he is divinely 
 human. 
 
 [63] 
 
IX 
 
 THE HISTORIC CHRIST 
 
 The modern illumination of the Historic Christ is 
 
 twofold : the refreshening of Jesus as a person ifi 
 
 history and the beginnings of an under- 
 
 The Historic , / ^ , . . ^ 
 
 Christ rcvivi- standmg of his mfluence upon history. 
 As the result of the first of these inves- 
 tigations, we have to-day the most vivid and sci- 
 entific knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth reached by 
 any generation, since his own. Not only has the 
 dust been brushed from the original portrait, but 
 new pictures of his country, his people, his environ- 
 ment, have been painted, with the utmost possible 
 accuracy and realism, and hung beside the original, 
 in order that all possible light may be thrown upon 
 this most preeminent of men. Criticism, which 
 seemed at one time about to shatter the reality 
 of the historical Jesus, has resulted in establishing 
 the trustworthiness of the Gospel narrative. It is 
 evidence of the return to equilibrium of Biblical 
 criticism that one of the leading New Testament 
 scholars of the day can say : " Let the plain Bible 
 reader continue to read his Gospels as he has read 
 them ; for in the end the critic cannot read them 
 otherwise." ^ 
 
 ^ Harnack, Christianity and History^ p. 58. 
 
 [64] 
 
The Historic Christ 
 
 The striking and significant fact concerning this 
 fresh illumination of the Jesus of history is that he 
 proves so real and so magnetic to the world of 
 to-day. Many centuries separate him from us; 
 mighty changes have swept across the interven- 
 ing generations ; civilization has moved on through 
 diverse periods and vast developments, but the 
 Man of Nazareth is the same yesterday, to-day and 
 forever in his hold upon men. Above the now 
 curious and outgrown ideas of his time, the meager 
 life, the archaic customs, he rises supremely real, 
 supremely commanding and supremely winsome. 
 
 Knowledge of the second aspect of the Historic 
 Christ, namely, his impress upon history, has not 
 progressed so far. In fact we have just 
 
 r , , , . , The Effect of 
 
 begun vaguely to apprehend, without jesusupon 
 
 - -, , , ,, , History 
 
 yet estmiatmg carefully and broadly, the 
 effect which Jesus has had in determining the 
 course and movement of human history. It is an 
 arduous enterprise and awaits the genius and labor 
 of historians yet to appear. The merest glance 
 at the movement of history reveals how large, how 
 revolutionary, how beneficent, has been the part 
 which Jesus has played in forming men and shap- 
 ing events. Rightly to estimate this, it is neces- 
 sary to study the impact of Jesus, not only upon 
 the history of the Church and of Christianity itself, 
 5 [65] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 but the total, often subtle influence of his teaching 
 and personality upon the entire movement of 
 humanity.^ 
 
 How far has Jesus molded civilization in the last 
 
 two thousand years, — its movements, tendencies, 
 
 events, its thought and life? It cannot 
 
 " Far as the =* 
 
 curse is be Said that he has completely controlled 
 
 found" ^ •' 
 
 Christendom itself He does not yet 
 guide, for he has not yet conquered the motives 
 of world-wide humanity; he has not yet been 
 universally crowned ; he has not yet put all things 
 under his feet Nevertheless, Jesus has dominated 
 history. He has been its Force of greatest mo- 
 ment. Now exalted, now thrust aside, now hon- 
 ored, now ignored, he has persistently asserted his 
 sway over the tumultuous forces of the world. He 
 has bidden its waves and tempests, " Peace, be 
 still." He has commanded its evil spirits, " Come 
 forth." He has spoken *' Ephphatha " to its 
 blindnesses, shamed and driven forth its irreverent 
 money-changers, has said, " Take up thy bed, and 
 walk " to its impotents, " Go, and sin no more " 
 to its penitents. He has called, " Awake " to its 
 dormancy and, " Arise " to its death. Through its 
 market-places he has gone, within its temples he 
 
 * " Jesus therefore cannot belong exclusively to those 
 who call themselves his disciples. He is the common honor 
 of all who bear a human heart. His glory consists not in 
 being banished from history; we render him a truer worship 
 by showing that all history is incomprehensible without him." 
 Renan, Life of Jesus. 
 
 [66] 
 
The Historic Christ 
 
 has entered, into its sick chambers he has softly 
 stolen, across the thresholds of its prisons and 
 dens and brothels and into all its lowest hells he 
 has fearlessly stepped ; within its palaces and par- 
 liaments he has gone; beside its open graves he 
 has stood, and the toiling, sinning, suffering, sor- 
 rowing, aspiring world has felt him and known him 
 and bowed before him and loved him. Of the 
 greatest and most enduring of human organiza- 
 tions, the Church, he has been the acknowledged 
 Master and Lord. To millions of redeemed souls 
 he has been Light-bringer and Life-giver. 
 
 The crises of history have turned upon Christ, 
 not always obviously, but always his teachings, 
 his person, or his Church, have been implicitly, if 
 not explicitly, involved. Evolutions and revolu- 
 tions, wars and pacifications, colonizations and 
 reformations have felt his power. Art, literature, 
 science, have been purified and stimulated by him. 
 Civilization itself has been largely molded by him. 
 Take away all that is distinctively Christian from 
 civilization, and what a disintegration and corrup- 
 tion would remain ! Without him the world 
 might have had another Greece or Rome, but 
 not an England or an America. The free- 
 dom of the slave, the emancipation of woman, 
 the rescue of the helpless, the amelioration of the 
 laborer, the progress toward universal peace — 
 such are some of the achievements of Christ in 
 history. 
 
 [67] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 II 
 
 But is it the Jesus of history simply who has 
 accomplished all this? Could any individual 
 An Ally alonc, howcver vital his influence upon 
 
 withm j^jg ^^^ ^^^ succeeding generations, 
 
 have so mastered and molded human history? 
 Only by virtue of an inner, spiritual principle, in 
 league with him, moving within the human soul 
 both before and at the same time that Jesus moves 
 upon it from without could these great achieve- 
 ments have been effected. No external force, argu- 
 ment or person can affect the individual or society 
 decisively except there be Somewhat or Someone 
 within that responds to, and abets, the outer influ- 
 ence. We may call this inner advocate. Con- 
 science, or Reason, or Ideal, or whatever we 
 choose ; we may assert that it inheres in our very 
 being and constitution ; but when we have done 
 our best to identify this Inner Impulse with our 
 self, we know, that however intimately inwrought 
 into our very selfhood, nevertheless it is not of 
 our earth-born nature, not our individual posses- 
 sion, but is, in its essence, universal and eternal. 
 
 Nor is this inner Reality impersonal, an abstrac- 
 tion or a quality, but a vital, concrete, personal 
 Presence. Who, then, can it be but He of whom 
 Frederick Denison Maurice wrote, in his impas- 
 sioned way : ** I mean a reality, I mean something 
 [68] 
 
The Historic Christ 
 
 that does not proceed from you or belong to you. 
 Nay, stay a moment. I mean that this light 
 comes from a Person, from the Lord and King 
 of your heart and spirit — from the Word — the 
 Son of God." 
 
 Ill 
 
 To neglect, or subordinate, or set aside, the 
 Jesus of history results either in mysticism or 
 in rationalism. The warning is writ ThePeniof 
 large in the history of doctrine. Mysti- g?s°orir*''' 
 cism too often sailed away without ^*^"^* 
 chart or compass upon unknown seas and dis- 
 appeared in fog and futility. Rationalism dug so 
 deep for a foundation for faith that it was buried 
 under the soil upon which it should have built. 
 Absolute Idealism spurned the earth and has 
 always remained in the air. To find in Jesus 
 Christ, as does Hegelianism, only an Idea, how- 
 ever rich in significance and fruitful in influence, 
 of which Jesus is but the concrete expression, is 
 to resolve religion into an unfolding and apothe- 
 osis of Reason, and Christianity into a syncretistic 
 gnosis. Christianity began with a historic person 
 and rests absolutely and permanently upon history. 
 The Jesus of history can never, without apostasy 
 and disaster, be ignored or left behind. 
 
 But to account for Christianity by the Historic 
 Christ alone is quite as one-sided and disastrous, 
 
 L69] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 for it leaves no place for a direct and inner 
 communion with God. Christ means far more 
 The equal ^^ humanity than a historic individual. 
 £g"th^^E^ter-^' ^^^^ unique and potent place which he 
 nai Christ \^q\^^ in the life of the race can be 
 explained only as we connect the Historic Christ 
 with the Christ who was before history and above 
 history, — the Word who was in the beginning 
 with God and was God. This Christ was in the 
 world before Jesus came and remained after he 
 had departed. The Eternal Christ was the first 
 Messenger of the Incarnation and the first Mis- 
 sionary of the Cross. It is he who was preferred 
 before the Historic Christ, for he was before him ; 
 it is he who survived Jesus and glorified him. 
 This is the Christ of consciousness, the Christ 
 of the Fourth Gospel, the Inner and Eternal 
 Prototype and Ideal. 
 
 [70] 
 
X 
 
 THE ETERNAL CHRIST 
 
 The distinction between the Historic Christ and 
 the Eternal Christ is by no means a merely 
 academic and speculative distinction. Aheipfui 
 It represents, even if it fails to ex- ^^^^^^^°^ 
 press, a real element in the Christian conscious- 
 ness. The Christ whom we love and worship we 
 feel is not a mere creature of time. Manifested 
 in time, he nevertheless transcends time, in nature 
 and in significance. Else we could not justify our 
 attitude toward him. It is only as the Historic 
 Christ and the Eternal Christ supplement and 
 fulfil one another that we gain a consistent and 
 complete conception of Christ as he exists in 
 Christian life and consciousness. 
 
 I 
 The Historic Christ gives form and embodiment 
 to the dim and indistinct outlines of the Eternal 
 Christ. Fact ratifies ideal; sight con- The Historic 
 firms consciousness. In the assuringly JiJi"Etera^* 
 real and tangible Jesus, the Eternal ^^"^^ 
 Christ comes forth from the vague background of 
 eternity and the shifting shadows of experience, 
 
 [71] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 and stands out in the clear light of incarnate, 
 historic reality. "That which we have seen and 
 heard declare we unto you." Men turn to him 
 with joy as to One whom they have already known 
 in the deeper insights of the soul. Jewish proph- 
 ecy of the Messiah is but a fragment of the in- 
 stinctive prescience of the human spirit that finds 
 its realization in Jesus. He, as he comes, inter- 
 prets this prescience to itself. The white light of 
 dawn above the eastern hills is part of the sunrise, 
 but when the sun itself swings clear and free above 
 the horizon the fainter flush that preceded it is 
 both explained and exceeded. So the Christ of 
 history explains and exceeds the light of the Eter- 
 nal Christ in the soul. 
 
 At first thought it seems impossible that any 
 
 individual, with his single, segregated qualities and 
 
 his necessary limitations, can represent 
 
 these the heart of the Living God, can in- 
 
 thingB be? t> » 
 
 carnate the Eternal Word. How can 
 one man stand for God ? It seems like snatching 
 a star from infinite space and making it burn upon 
 an earthen candlestick. No wonder that when the 
 proposition is detached from the Person, the in- 
 tellect rebels, faith fails. But when we turn to the 
 New Testament and read the familiar story, in its 
 simple and convincing straightforwardness, the 
 figure of Jesus rises before us so sane and yet so 
 sublime that we feel we cannot compress him into 
 the mold of ordinary humanity. He rises too high 
 
 [72] 
 
The Eternal Christ 
 
 above all other men to be measured by customary- 
 standards. We cannot bind him to the bed of 
 Procrustes. He passes through the midst of us 
 and of our inadequate estimates and standards 
 and leaves us awed and humiliated. He grows 
 upon us in mystery and majesty. What can we 
 do but bid conception follow upon conviction and 
 crown him Lord of all? 
 
 " But," objects the realist, " this is an unwar- 
 ranted idealizing of history, a wholly irrational 
 exaltation of an individual life, a purely arbitrary 
 universalizing of a person fixed to a single genera- 
 tion and a single race." Is this a conclusive ob- 
 jection ? It would be, if Jesus were the sole revela- 
 tion of God, or if he were unrelated to other forms 
 of revelation. The Historic Christ unpreceded by 
 and unrelated to an Eternal Christ would be an anom- 
 aly, thrust into the process of history, unheralded 
 and unexplained. But coming as the embodiment, 
 the historic incarnation of a Christ eternally ex- 
 istent and present in humanity universally and from 
 the beginning, the Historic Christ interprets, clari- 
 fies, consummates the whole process of revelation. 
 
 II 
 
 Not only does the Historic Christ define and 
 fulfil the Eternal Christ, the Eternal Christ ratifies 
 and universalizes the Historic Christ. If the His- 
 toric Christ verifies the Eternal Christ, not less does 
 the Eternal Christ verify the Historic Christ. His- 
 
 [73] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 tory alone will not save the world, even if it be the 
 
 history of a divine Man. History without relation 
 
 to eternity would be a hopeless maze, an 
 
 The Eternal ,, n • i 
 
 Christ wit- endlcss rlux, a meaningless succession. 
 
 nesses to ,_^ , ^, . . . 
 
 the Historic lo make Christianity dependent upon 
 
 Christ , . . ^ , r ^ , . , , 
 
 historic fact alone is as short-sighted 
 and suicidal as to cut it away from fact altogether. 
 *' Woe to us," well says Harnack, ** if our faith 
 rested on a number of details to be demonstrated 
 and established by the historian." ^ To the same 
 effect Sabatier wrote : " Criticism will always be a 
 just cause of alarm to those who elevate any his- 
 torical and contingent form whatever into the ab- 
 solute, for the excellent reason that an historical 
 phenomenon, being always conditioned, can never 
 have the characteristics of the absolute." ^ The 
 Christian consciousness, individual and corporate, 
 which is the ultimate reliance of religious truth, 
 is above historic fact, precedes it, outruns it, out- 
 ranks it. In its pure, essential self, truth may be 
 factless, formless, eternal, absolute. But, for us at 
 least, truth, though not identical with form or fact, 
 is always clothed with form or fact. In this relation- 
 ship the advantage is mutual. If fact expresses 
 truth, not less does truth glorify fact. If the Christ 
 of history focuses, visualizes, incarnates the Eternal 
 Christ, the Eternal Christ interprets, glorifies, trans- 
 figures the Historic Christ. 
 
 ^ Christianity and History y p. 60. 
 
 * Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 167. 
 
 [74] 
 
The Eternal Christ 
 
 III 
 
 It is a daring, and almost overwhelming, hypoth- 
 esis that thus unites history and eternity with 
 the golden link of a single life, a soli- 
 
 . T^ • T_ The Life that 
 
 tary consciousness. It requires a superb iinks Eternity 
 outreach of faith to grasp and hold 
 fast such a conception. To surmise and speculate 
 over it is not difficult, but to hold Christ, as Paul 
 held him, as the solution of all problems and the 
 inspiration of all deeds — this is a summons to 
 supreme heights of thought and life. And yet, it 
 is neither irrational nor without analogy. It taxes 
 reason, by transcending lower superficial and 
 merely common-sense views of the universe, but it 
 does not transgress reason. Philosophy tends 
 more and more to exalt personality. This doc- 
 trine carries forward this tendency and con- 
 centrates all truth in one perfect, divine-human 
 personality. Science furnishes an analogy in what 
 Professor Shaler has termed "critical points," 
 and Professor De Vries ** saltation," where either a 
 sudden leap from below or an external reenforce- 
 ment occurs, as miraculous in natural history as 
 are certain phenomena, scorned by the scientist, 
 in human history. Are there not critical points,- 
 saltations, in human history? Above all is there 
 not one critical point, as epochal as that of the ap- 
 pearance of man on the earth, namely the advent 
 of him whom Paul calls the Second Man, the Lord 
 [7S] 
 
 \ 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 from heaven, in whom time and eternity meet, who 
 thus becomes the Revelation of God and the 
 Creator of a new humanity? 
 
 Moreover, this hypothesis approves itself to the 
 pragmatic test, — it works. The man who takes 
 The Pra Jesus Christ as his Interpreter and End 
 
 xnaticTest f^j^^jg himself in harmony with God, 
 with nature and with humanity. God is real, liv- 
 ing, near; nature is resplendent, harmonious, 
 aspiring; humanity is dear, lovable, salvable. 
 Ethical relations are clarified and strengthened, 
 spiritual insights purified and potentialized. The 
 spiritual mind which is life and peace takes posses- 
 sion of the soul. The universe has a meaning, the 
 present life a purpose, the future a hope. In 
 Christ the man is a new creature. Old things are 
 past away, behold all things are become new. 
 
 Not every man who takes Christ as the Center 
 of his universe, the Explanation and Goal of exist- 
 christ means ^nce, thinks himself through as to what 
 "mln'JhS''^ Christ means to him intellectually as 
 he knows ^^u ^g spiritually. Very rare is the 
 Christian who attempts, or who needs to attempt, 
 to solve the problem of the Christ personality — 
 how he is related to God, to nature and to human- 
 ity, and why he has such power over himself. And 
 yet Christianity demands, for the sake of its own 
 consistency and self-assurance, that this attempt 
 be made. And when made, it inevitably leads to 
 the distinction between the Historic Christ and the 
 
 [76] 
 
The Eternal Christ 
 
 Eternal Christ, the Christ of history and of expe- 
 rience, and the endeavor to relate the two aspects 
 to each other. Only in the Logos Christology 
 is there room for this problem and only in the 
 Living Christ can we find its solution. 
 
 [77] 
 
XI 
 
 THE LIVING CHRIST 
 
 Christ has been to humanity, successively, an 
 inner, prophetic, potential Logos ; a visible, his- 
 toric individual God-Man, and an invisible, exalted, 
 living Lord. We may not say that the Living 
 Christ is a fusion of the Eternal Christ and the 
 Historic Christ; but the Christ whom we know in 
 the blending of these is a completer Christ. In 
 effect he is a new Christ, — new in universality 
 and in potency. 
 
 I 
 
 The Living Christ, risen and redeeming as well 
 as cosmic, indwelling and prepotent, is the Christ 
 ^^ r. of Paul, as the Historic Christ is the 
 
 The Living 
 
 chnst Paul's ChHst of the Synoptics, and the Eternal 
 Christ the Christ of the Fourth Gospel. 
 It was the Living Christ whom Paul met on the 
 Damascus road. For this Living Christ it became 
 Paul's passion to live. Very little of the Historic 
 Christ appears in the writings of the great apostle. 
 He is there, as the indispensable historic revelation 
 (beyond him in the cosmic background the Eternal 
 Christ), but to Paul the resurrection projected 
 
 [78] 
 
The Living Christ 
 
 Jesus into a new and limitless sphere of relation- 
 ships and potentialities, far more vital as well as 
 universal than was possible to Him in his earthly 
 Kfe. And this Living Christ Paul succeeded — to 
 speak after the manner of men — in enthroning as 
 the ever-living Lord of humanity. Once and 
 again the Church has drifted away from him, now 
 toward the merely human and historic Jesus, now 
 toward the Eternal but indistinct Christ of Reason ; 
 but always it has been brought back, face to face, 
 heart to heart, with the Living Christ, and always 
 Paul has had a part, now greater, now less, in 
 effecting the return. It was Paul through whom 
 Luther and Wesley and the Protestant Church 
 found again the Living Christ. 
 
 The Living Christ is our Christ of to-day. The 
 pagan world had the Eternal Christ and rejected 
 him; the Jews had the Historic Christ The Living 
 and crucified him; we have the Living chStof* 
 Christ, and now is the day of salvation. To-<iay 
 Not that we of to-day have not also the Eternal 
 Christ and the Historic Christ. The Living Christ 
 embraces both of these. We do not start where 
 the pagan world started, with a mere revelation 
 within. We do not start where the disciples started, 
 with a flesh and blood Companion. Our Christ 
 has emerged from the shadowy recesses of con- 
 science and reason, has passed through and be- 
 yond the limitations of earthly existence, and 
 become the Living Lord of humanity, clear to 
 
 [79] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 conception, winsome to the heart, potent over the 
 will ; Master of the individual, Lord of the Church, 
 Redeemer of the world. 
 
 Into this Living Christ both the Eternal Christ 
 and the Historic Christ pass, each, as it were, los- 
 ing himself to find himself in one revealing Person, 
 who was before time and place, in time and place, 
 and above time and place, as well as in them, the 
 Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, who was, 
 who is, and who is to come. 
 
 II 
 
 This is the Living Christ because he himself 
 lives. He lives in a deeper, larger sense than 
 '•Life in Jcsus livcd. For Hc who toiled at the 
 
 Himself" carpenter's bench and renewed his phy- 
 sical strength with food and drink and slept away 
 the weariness of the day, was necessarily " cabin'd, 
 cribb'd and confin'd " by material limitations. It 
 could not be otherwise. But, in fuller union with 
 the Eternal Logos, freed from the accidents of in- 
 dividuality, the restrictions of time and place and 
 the confinements of human knowledge and activ- 
 ity, he now truly, completely, gloriously lives. 
 
 Not that the Living Christ, let it be repeated, 
 is another or different being from the lowly, loving 
 Jesus. In character and purpose and communi- 
 cableness he is unchanged, the same yesterday, 
 to-day and forever. But he has passed on into 
 wider relations and fuller life. In Tennyson's /;/ 
 
 [80] 
 
The Living Christ 
 
 Memoriam the poet, in one of the cantos, addresses 
 his immortal friend : 
 
 " Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou, 
 I seem to love thee more and more." 
 
 In the eternal life, identity is not lost in the wider 
 spiritual relationships but is so heightened and 
 glorified as to win a nobler and more unselfish 
 love. Jesus is no less real and lovable in his 
 eternal transfiguration as Living Lord than in his 
 temporal taskmastership. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This is the Living Christ also because he gives 
 life. The earthly Jesus redeemed a few, the Liv- 
 ing Christ redeems many; the former 
 
 ° ^ ' "I came that 
 
 gave life, the latter gives it more abun- they may have 
 
 Life 
 
 dantly. This Life-giver touches the in- 
 dividual and he becomes a new creature. He 
 imparts himself to his Church and reformations and 
 revivals follow. He moves upon society and free- 
 dom, peace, brotherhood dawn, never to set till the 
 kingdom has come. 
 
 The Living Christ is more, not less, /^r^<?;?^/ than 
 the earthly Jesus. The body is, without doubt, an 
 expressive instrument of personality, but 
 
 - - f T "Spirit with 
 
 by no means a perfect mstrument. It spintcan 
 
 • • 1 r ^ r meet " 
 
 IS not sensitive enough for the finest 
 communications. We comprehend one another 
 more by inner intuitions than by outer signs. The 
 6 [8i] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 intimate thought-feeling of another person comes 
 to us as a kind of unmediated personal impact. The 
 finer and more sensitive to one another we grow, 
 the less need of language or symbol. Shouting, 
 pantomime and gesticulation disappear before the 
 finer culture. Signless, soundless, soulful is the 
 purest, deepest self-impartation. The sense of 
 presence, of communion, is the most intense and 
 vital experience that the Christian has. Call it 
 the presence of God, or of Christ, or of the Spirit, it 
 matters not. It is the Father, the Spirit, the Son 
 — the Living God. But let us not forget that the 
 Living God comes to us only through the Living 
 Christ. In his very impartation of himself to us 
 he becomes the Living Christ. Whoever experi- 
 ences the nearness of God feels his nearness in 
 Christ. The Son who reveals him, reveals him 
 near. Such an experience is a living and personal 
 experience. It is too vital to be impersonal. In- 
 deed it is more personal than the ordinary contact 
 of every-day intercourse. More personal even than 
 the communion of the disciple who leaned on Jesus* 
 breast was that of him who said, " It is no longer I 
 that live, but Christ liveth in me." 
 
 IV 
 
 The Living Christ is more, not less, potent 
 than the earthly Jesus. If Christ were only a 
 figure in history, however majestic, however in- 
 
The Living Christ 
 
 fluential, however fadeless, he would fall short of 
 being a Redeemer. There is a sense in which a 
 great spirit of the past, like Washington, 
 
 1- t .,,,..,,.' "I am with 
 
 lives, and ever will live, in the hves of you always, 
 
 even unto the 
 
 his countrymen. Each new generation end of the 
 appropriates him, is made better, more 
 patriotic by him. No effort is needed to keep 
 such a memory, such a personality, alive. It keeps 
 itself alive and inspires and uplifts the heart of the 
 nation perpetually. Jesus Christ lives, and will 
 ever live, in this way, not as a national but as a 
 racial hero. But this is not the only way in which 
 he lives. If it were, " what soul could utter on the 
 true scale of his soul the universal woe, ' We trusted 
 that it should have been He who should have re- 
 deemed mankind ' ? " ^ For such an influence could 
 no more save mankind than the rays of a star 
 could melt the winter snows. It needs more than 
 a memory, a history, a record, to redeem a world. 
 It demands no less than a living, present, vitalizing 
 Person. And such is Christ. Men revere the 
 name of Washington, but they are not baptized 
 into it; nor do they sing to him, " My faith looks 
 up to thee," or, " Dear Lord and Master mine ! " 
 There is a potency as well as a supremacy in the 
 Christ which declares him living in a sense that no 
 other man, past or present, lives. Just how, or 
 why, it is so, we may not be able to tell ; but such 
 
 ^ P. T. Forsyth, The Holy Father and the Living Christy 
 P- 133. 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 is the incontestable consciousness of ever multiply- 
 ing millions who share in part at least the experi- 
 ence of the apostle : " I can do all things in him 
 that strengtheneth me." 
 
 We need a Living Christ, and a Living Christ we 
 have. The Church sometimes longs for one of the 
 The Living ^^7^ o^ the Son of man; the disciple 
 ^'■'^ wishes himself back in the days of the 
 
 Galilean companionship ; but it is not the visible, 
 tangible Christ who is most real, most personal, 
 most vital, but the Christ whose spiritual presence 
 and power are vitally felt It remains for the 
 Church to realize this, to cease thinking of the 
 Christ merely as a historic person, or as an exalted 
 and heavenly being, and to find in him the vital 
 nearness and reality of a Living Lord. With such 
 a Living Christ in human life all best things are 
 possible ; they are certain. We may be of good 
 cheer. The Living God is on the throne. The 
 Living Christ is in the world. 
 
 [84] 
 
XII 
 
 THE COSMIC CHRIST 
 
 In company with fellow travelers, an American 
 once stood, looking down upon Interlaken. Ob- 
 serving how deeply he was moved by a scene 
 the nobility and beauty of the wonder- "Chnstuke" 
 ful scene, a German lady standing next him, her- 
 self sharing his emotion, spoke in an undertone of 
 reverence and joy the single word, " Chrisilich T* 
 It seemed to him, as he caught it, the one word 
 that expressed and interpreted the scene, translat- 
 ing it into spiritual meaning, into human-divine 
 values. 
 
 What was there Christlike in the scene — any- 
 thing more than that its purity and freshness and 
 harmony suggested corresponding moral qualities 
 in the Hfe of the One altogether lovely? Most 
 persons would say, " This is all." But a more 
 tenacious reflection follows further and queries 
 whether it is not possible that, through Him who 
 in some way caused both this beautiful vale and 
 this resplendent Character to be, there may not be 
 some deeper and subtler relationship. 
 [8s] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 It is one of the most striking facts in the history 
 of human thought that a good man who lived a 
 Christ and humble life in a Roman province and 
 died upon a cross two thousand years 
 ago should have aroused in more than one of his 
 contemporaries the conception that he himself 
 was, in some mystical but profoundly real way, 
 uniquely and vitally connected with nature, nay 
 with the process of creation itself. The author of 
 that marvelous book, the Fourth Gospel, which 
 has hushed the world to silence with its deep 
 authoritative note, has dared to affirm that the 
 Word incarnate in Jesus was also the medium of 
 Nothing made universal creation. *' All things were 
 without Him j^^jg through him; and without him 
 was not anything made that hath been made." 
 And Paul, one of the most virile and commanding 
 minds the world has ever known, came to practi- 
 cally the same thought of Christ: "All things have 
 been created through him, and unto him; and he 
 is before all things, and in him all things consist." 
 Nor did these daring minds fail of a following. 
 The Apologists, trained in all the subtleties and 
 skepticisms of Greek thought, took up the con- 
 ception and made it the very center of a theology 
 that won for Christianity intellectual prestige and 
 strength. Origen, that most capacious and glow- 
 ing mind of the Early Church, made for the doc- 
 [86] 
 
The Cosmic Christ 
 
 trine a permanent place in Christian theology. 
 Athanasius gave it a still deeper interpretation, 
 declaring that " he who contemplates Creation 
 rightly is contemplating also the Word who framed 
 it and through him begins to apprehend the 
 Father." ^ To this day this conception has held its 
 own, commanding the support of many of the 
 most acute and thorough thinkers of every genera- 
 tion, including our own. 
 
 Modern science seems, indeed, to shatter this 
 conception as an empty dream. If there is crea- 
 tion at all, it must be continuous, and Does science 
 the process of evolution, by which the «=<"»t^«di*=t? 
 universe came to be what it is, knows Jesus Christ 
 only as a minute and hardly distinguishable prod- 
 uct of human development, having no more to do 
 with its stupendous movement of world-architecture 
 than an insect has to do with the creation of the sun 
 in whose warmth it basks. But is it so sure that 
 modern science thus carelessly fillips Christ into 
 oblivion? 
 
 In all the vast, titanic process by which the uni- 
 verse came to be what it is, if we accept the 
 controverted nebular hypothesis, the 
 whirling of star-dust, the swirl and crush without 
 
 , . r » . 1 Rationality 
 
 of matter, the magic of chemical reac- 
 tions, the emergence of vegetable and animal Hfe, 
 was there no order, no purpose, no progress? Was 
 it all one colossal, fortuitous, meaningless dance of 
 ^ Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians I, 12. 
 
 [87] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 unintelligent, undirected forces? If so, why has 
 evolution been from ** an indefinite incoherent ho- 
 mogeneity, to a definite coherent heterogeneity"? 
 Why have life, harmony, beauty, intelligence 
 emerged? Evolutionary philosophy itself assures 
 us that unless a factor is present in the initial 
 stage of a process it will not emerge in the final 
 stage. We are forced to the conclusion that there 
 has been from the beginning a principle of Order 
 in creation. This principle of Order, — what is it 
 but an unmistakable evidence and expression of 
 Mind, of Reason, of Wisdom? And can Wisdom 
 be less than personal? Here we have reached the 
 prologue of the Fourth Gospel : " In the beginning 
 was the Word." A cosmos demands a cosmic 
 Christ 
 
 The world of nature, as we know it through 
 experience, or through reason, or however, is a 
 What is realm of uniformity. Science is con- 
 uniformity? gtructcd upon the prevalence of uni- 
 formity. Uniformity is not simply a law that we 
 find in nature ; neither is it a category of the hu- 
 man mind which we impose upon nature ; it is a 
 synthesis of the Mind within nature and the mind 
 within ourselves. Nothing will account for the 
 law of uniformity in nature except a divine Mind, 
 a Logos, which precedes and underlies and per- 
 meates the very structure and process of creation, 
 constituting the universe a cosmos and not a chaos. 
 
 [88] 
 
The Cosmic Christ 
 
 II 
 
 But is this Logos teleological, purposive, be- 
 nevolent, as it should be in order to be a true 
 Logos? The answer lies in the existence of beauty, 
 virtue, personality. These realities are here ; sci- 
 ence tells us that once they were not here. What 
 will account for their coming? 
 
 Beauty cannot exist without an eye and an ob- 
 ject. It is neither in the eye alone, nor in the 
 object alone, but in that correspondence ^he same 
 between them which can be explained \?^,^xJtUx 
 only by a common authorship of both. ^""^ ^"''^ 
 The traveler looking down upon Interlaken be- 
 holds a scene whose beauty, as he sees it, is 
 the result of countless millenniums of geologic 
 upheaval and chemical alchemy. And he himself, 
 as he gazes upon it, helping to create for himself 
 the beauty which he sees, is the result of still more 
 marvelous creative processes. Can the joy and 
 reverence with which the conjunction of the scene 
 and of himself stirs his soul be accounted for 
 otherwise than by a vinculum uniting them, a 
 common relationship of both to a Mind, a Logos, 
 through which traveler and vale alike came to be 
 what they are? It is not simply, as Emerson 
 said to the rhodora, *' The self-same Power that 
 brought me here brought you.'* Besides this, we 
 must infer that the same Wisdom that created 
 and inheres in the beautiful flower or the in- 
 
 [89] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 spiring scene created and inheres in the observer 
 and establishes the bond between them. Thus, 
 again we come back to the Eternal Logos, the 
 Cosmic Christ. 
 
 Futhermore, the very existence of personality, 
 as well as the mutual communication between 
 
 human persons, necessitates a Logos 
 impS's^l^ philosophy. Personality cannot have 
 
 come from impersonality. The stream 
 does not rise higher than its source. Nature pro- 
 duces freaks, but her freaks are never finer than 
 her fruits. Personality issuing from impersonality 
 disrupts and derides every law of science, and of phi- 
 losophy, including that of evolution. Personality 
 lives and moves and has its being in an eternal 
 order of reason that is itself a personal, divine 
 Word. Nor can there be, as Horace Bushnell 
 has said, any basis of communication between per- 
 sonalities except through the Logos that is both in 
 themselves and in the medium of communication, 
 " It is only as there is a Logos in the outward world, 
 answering to the logos or eternal reason of the 
 parties, that they can come into a mutual under- 
 standing in regard to any thought or spiritual state 
 whatever." ^ 
 
 The Logos doctrine seems to many, in this sci- 
 entific, practical age, remote, speculative, untenable. 
 Yet Bushnell, one of the most vital, intense, unfet- 
 tered of modern thinkers, is by no means alone in 
 ^ God in Christy p. 21. 
 
 [90] 
 
The Cosmic Christ 
 
 finding in the Logos theology the only adequate 
 interpretation of Christ, of humanity, and of the 
 universe. 
 
 Paul's Cosmic Christ finds little recognition in 
 present-day nature philosophy, but now and again 
 from some deep, devout, reflective mind come 
 words like these from Alfred Tennyson : " I firmly 
 believe that if God were to withdraw himself from 
 the world around us and from within us but for one 
 instant, every atom of creation, both animate and 
 inanimate, would come utterly to naught, for in 
 him alone do all beings and things exist." This is 
 not monism. Taken in connection with the poet's 
 further declaration that in Christ our higher nature 
 was ** truly divine, the very presence of the Father, 
 the one only God, dwelling in the perfect man," 
 it comes much nearer to Paul's word, ** In him all 
 things consist" 
 
 III 
 
 But any view of nature which sees only its 
 divine side and fails to recognize the presence of 
 disorder, disease, imperfection, is rose- 
 colored and unreasonable. It is useless darifsiSeof* 
 to close our eyes to the frustration, the 
 ineptitude, the ugliness, the cruelty, that nature 
 thrusts before our reluctant vision. With pathetic 
 bewilderment the mind of the trustful and sensitive 
 child comes upon the ever-increasing evidences of 
 pain and evil in nature, arousing in him the ques- 
 
 [91] 
 
Christ and the Eteryial Order 
 
 tion finely typified in the closing line of William 
 Blake's child-poem, The Tiger: 
 
 " Did He who made the lamb make thee ? " 
 
 What is the meaning of it all? Is it the blind- 
 ness and stumbling of a self-made, uncaring world? 
 Or were the Persians right in holding that after 
 Ormuzd the Good created, Ahriman the Evil cre- 
 ated also? It seems an insoluble difficulty, the 
 rock upon which faith must go down. And yet 
 the heart compounds with the eyes in approving 
 those words in the old Hebrew cosmogony : ** And 
 God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, 
 it was very good." And a yet deeper response of 
 the soul answers the words of the Logos hymn : 
 " And without him was not anything made that 
 hath been made." 
 
 The only solvent of this obstinate problem in 
 Providence which I have been able to find — and 
 Germinal ^^ IS but partial and tentative — lies 
 fo^**S N«- Ji^ the increasing indications that come 
 *"" from science and from nature-study of 
 
 the presence in nature of something like freedom 
 in man, — the power, however limited, of initiation, 
 of experiment, of self-development. Into the 
 ancient injunction of Elohim to the animal king- 
 dom " be fruitful and multiply," we may well read 
 a meaning larger than that of mere reproduction. 
 The potency of variation, the power to develop 
 fresh functions and new forms, — this is granted to 
 
 [92] 
 
The Cosmic Christ 
 
 the lower forms of life. Creation provides both a 
 divine norm, resident in each divergent type, and 
 also a certain range of self-activity, a field of modi- 
 fication, a power to the contrary, or, in other words, 
 scope for that will to live, and to live in its own 
 way, which is so manifest in all forms of life. ^ 
 
 With such a field for self-energizing, becoming 
 more and more intelligent as life mounts upward, 
 there is room, not only for the great voluntary 
 divergence of vegetable and animal Somufe*^^ 
 forms, but also for that deflection from ^°"" 
 the norm, that distortion and degeneration, whose 
 effects we see in the disease and the deformity 
 marring the face of nature — marring but not de- 
 spoiling the beauty, blurring but not obliterating 
 the meaning, hindering but not frustrating the 
 divine purpose of perfection. For in nature as in 
 humanity, the tendency is upward, the light grows, 
 the divine purpose unfolds. Obnoxious growths, 
 destructive forces, venomous animals, disappear 
 under the control of man, God's agent and collab- 
 orator. The comely, kindly, and serviceable sur- 
 vive. The meek inherit the earth. 
 
 * Since writing the above there has come to my attention 
 a scientific work of great value which strikingly tends to 
 confirm this theory — ^^ Evolution, Racial and Habitudi- 
 nal^' by the veteran missionary and scientist, John T. Gulick, 
 published by the Carnegie University of Washington, D. C. 
 From a careful and detailed study of the habits of the snails 
 on the island of Oahu, Mr. Gulick has demonstrated the 
 preponderance of self-initiated habit over environment in 
 determining the development of new species. 
 
 [93] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 As man advances, nature advances. As his 
 progress is dependent upon her, so is hers upon 
 Waiting for ^^"^- Long indeed has been nature's 
 ?afio!fS*t^ waiting for the manifestation of the 
 Sons of God gQj^g q|. QqJ. but at last the self- 
 imposed bondage of her imperfection has been 
 broken. The inalienable bond between man and 
 nature, constituted in that Eternal Logos who is 
 the sole interpretation of each to the other, is 
 drawing the two into ever closer sympathy and 
 service. Together they move on toward the 
 vision of the prophet, the apocalypse of peace, 
 when " they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my 
 holy mountain." 
 
 Is there no Christ in all this progress in scien- 
 tific knowledge? Is there no Christ-love in all our 
 deepening affection for nature? When our eyes 
 are opened we shall see that every newly-known 
 force of nature released for the blessing and help 
 of man, every new law that admits us to a wider 
 knowledge of the cosmos, every quickened insight 
 into the ongoing of nature, reveals more of that 
 Word which was in the beginning with God, 
 through whom all things were made, and in 
 whom all are to be consummated. 
 
 [94] 
 
PART III 
 THE POTENCIES OF CHRIST 
 
" A perfect man, of the degree of the perfection of Jesus Christ, 
 reaching ' unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,' is to me 
 more incomprehensible, more impossible, than the incarnate Son of God. 
 I would deny no essential likeness of the human to the divine ; but even 
 if we carry the likeness to the possibility of a divine humanity, we are not 
 to overlook the fact that a difference in degree may amount to a difference 
 in kind. I take a drop out of the ocean. The drop is like the ocean, but 
 it is swayed by no tides, it bears no ships on its bosom, it does not unite 
 continents. I take a grain of earth from a mountain. The grain is like 
 the mountain, but I can dig no quarries out of its bowels, I can cut no 
 forests on its slopes, I do not see it lifting its summits to the first light 
 of the day. Man may be like God, but I locate Jesus, not in the drop and 
 the grain, but in the ocean and the mountain. ... I search among the 
 sons of men of all time, and I look in vain for one who had the conscious- 
 ness of 'life in himself.' ... No: any interpretation of the personal life 
 of Jesus Christ which can satisfy my mind must allow it the substance and 
 quality and fulness of the life of God. I grant the mystery of the Incar- 
 nation, but I prefer mystery to insufficiency in my faith. As I watch the 
 process by which men are made to become sons of God, as I follow the 
 stream of human redemption in its ceaseless and widening course, I can 
 trace it to no other or nearer source than the Eternal Sonship of Jesus 
 Christ." — President William Jewktt Tucker, D.D., Life in 
 Himself: A Meditation on the Consciousness of Jesus Christ. 
 
XIII 
 
 CHRIST PRE-PRESENT AND PRE-POTENT 
 
 The term " preexistent," as applied to Christ, is 
 open to three objections: — (i) As a simple time- 
 affirmation it is empty of content ; mere 
 
 , , , Preexistence 
 
 previous existence is a barren and color- a barren 
 
 , ^ N. T • affirmation 
 
 less predicate. (2) It is unrelated and 
 discrete in significance; such a Christ might be 
 anything or nothing, so far as his relation to 
 God and man is concerned. (3) Even in its time- 
 affirmation the term is uncertain and insufficient; 
 for it affirms nothing as to the duration of Christ's 
 preexistence. Ever-existent would be a more 
 adequate term. There is, in truth, but one term 
 that suffices to define the relation of Christ to 
 time — the term eternal. The Eternal Christ tran- 
 scends time as a part of his supremacy over all 
 limitations. It is this truth of the eternity of 
 Christ that theology was striving after when it 
 accepted and canonized the conception of pre- 
 existence. 
 
 I 
 
 As an aid to the conception of the Eternal 
 Christ, the designation pre-present is preferable 
 
 7 [97] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 in many respects to preexistent. The Pre-pre- 
 sent Christ is the Christ present before the in- 
 Pre-present a camation, not Only with God the Father 
 better term ^^^ ^^j^j^ ^^^ Creation, but also with hu- 
 manity. In this usage the term pre-presence 
 may be taken to denote the transcending of place, 
 somewhat as eternal transcends time, conveying 
 us into the realm of pure, not spatial, relations. 
 Indeed the word has already been elevated 
 to this signification in the term omnipresence, 
 — a presence that is super- spatial y rather than 
 spatial. 
 
 The pre-presence of Christ is much nearer the 
 
 New Testament representation than preexistence. 
 
 The Logos of the Fourth Gospel is 
 
 Eternal Life , . • ^ ^ . • 
 
 richer than much more than a preexistent bemg; 
 
 Preexistence , . • t i t /- • 
 
 he is present with the Infinite as the 
 eternal Outflow of his Being, the Revelation of his 
 Nature, the Word of his Wisdom. By virtue of 
 this very relation to God he is present too in crea- 
 tion as its interior structural Secret, the Process 
 and Pattern of its final perfection ; present, also, 
 with humanity, as the Light that lighteth every 
 man coming into the world. Christ himself, as 
 interpreted by the author of the Fourth Gospel, 
 speaks not so much of his preexistence as of his 
 pre-presence. If he were asserting merely his 
 preexistence it would have been more to the pur- 
 pose to say. Before Abraham was born, I was. 
 Instead of that his assertion is, "Before Abraham 
 [98] 
 
Christ Pre-present and Pre-potent 
 
 was born, I am'' This is an affirmation of eter- 
 nity, of the transcendence of time, rather than of 
 mere previous existence in time. The time content 
 is too narrow and confined for Christ's conscious- 
 ness. He breaks it and throws it from him that 
 he may breathe more deeply in the freedom of 
 the eternal life. Yet the eternal life of which he 
 speaks so confidently as his, both to possess and 
 to impart, is never spoken of by him as separate 
 and solipsistic. Always it is intimately associated 
 by him with his Father. His own life and glory 
 are ever " with the Father." 
 
 The Christology of Paul, too, is a Christology 
 of eternal presence rather than of preexistence. 
 Christ is not only before all things, but Christ pre- 
 in him all things consist. He is the P,°en"as*^ 
 spiritual Rock from which the people p'-^-p'-"^"* 
 of God drank, the Rock that followed them in all 
 their wayward wandering. He is the Mediator of 
 universal reconciliation unto God. Thus potent 
 and pervasive is his relationship to the universe. 
 Indeed this Christ of Paul is pre-potent as well as 
 pre-present. He is the active Principle, or rather 
 the active Personality, through whom God has 
 been moving upon his world and within it, the 
 mysterious, indwelling Presence who has been the 
 hidden source and inspiration of all goodness and 
 truth, of all progress and all hope. In a word, he 
 he is not merely a preexistent Christ but a pre- 
 present, pre-potent Christ. 
 [99] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 II 
 
 But how is this eternally present and potent 
 Christ related to the simple, understandable, com- 
 A query municable, human Jesus of the Synoptic 
 
 *™** Gospels? Is there any vital associa- 
 
 tion? Are not the two figures incongruous and 
 irreconcilable? At first, it seems so. Our sen- 
 sations in trying to identify the two may be com- 
 pared to those of a child when, for the first time, 
 he sees his father, whom he has known only in the 
 familiar contact of the home, upon whose knee he 
 has sat, and whom he has caressed, in the ex- 
 ercise of a wider and more august relationship, as 
 a judge on the bench, or a minister in the pul- 
 pit, honored, revered, exalted. Is this the same 
 person with whom he has romped in the nurs- 
 ery and roamed in the fields? The child comes 
 to the consciousness of the identity with wonder- 
 ment. Somewhat similar is our own growing ex- 
 perience of the wider relationships, the deeper 
 meaning, the universal glory, of the Christ whom 
 we have first known in his Galilean simplicity. 
 
 Ill 
 
 How can the same Christ be Plato's Light and 
 
 mine, Simon Peter's Saviour and my neighbor's? 
 
 How can he be eternal and yet have a place in 
 
 history, cosmic yet human, racial yet a Jew, uni- 
 
 [ 100 ] 
 
Christ Pre-present and Pre-potent 
 
 versal yet an individual? The key to the solution 
 of this mystery, the reconciliation of this antinomy, 
 lies in part in the relation of personality 
 
 . . -r, 1' • • Personality 
 
 to individuality. Personality is possi- vs. individu- 
 ble without individuality. God is a 
 person, but not an individual. Individuality, too, 
 can exist without personality. There is individu- 
 ality among animals, but no personality. There is 
 even a suggestion of individuality among crystals, 
 but certainly none of personality. In humanity, 
 personality and individuality are always conjoined. 
 We know no person who is not an individual ; we 
 know no individual who is not, at least incipiently, 
 a person. Jesus was both person and individual. 
 The Logos is intensely personal but not individual. 
 Individuality is limiting, personality is free. As 
 an individual, Jesus was born, lived, and died ; 
 that is, he had a temporal existence. The Eternal 
 Christ, the Logos, has an eternal existence, apart 
 from time, above time. But time and eternity, 
 history and heaven, are not unrelated and incom- 
 municable. The Eternal Christ incarnated himself 
 in the individual Jesus. The Word became flesh. 
 This involved kenosis, self-limitation, humiliation, 
 
 but not degradation. 
 
 IV 
 
 The preexistence or pre-presence of Jesus, as an 
 individual, is unreasonable ; it is the Logos who is 
 preexistent. To assert the existence of the man, 
 
 [lOl] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 the individual, Jesus, before his birth except in 
 
 the purpose of God, is to resolve his humanity into 
 
 a phantom : it is no more nor less than 
 
 The Logos t^ . /^ , 
 
 not Jesus, Docetism. On the other hand, the Lo- 
 
 pre-present i • i i • t 
 
 gos who mdvvelt ni Jesus, transfusing his 
 whole self with a divine personality, must have 
 been, not only preexistent with God, but pre- 
 present in humanity, as the source of all its light 
 and its virtue. Before the incarnation the Logos 
 was in men genetically, partially; in the incarna- 
 tion he took possession of one vian^ completely 
 controlling his whole being, raising his humanity 
 to its highest exercise and fusing it with Deity. 
 At least this is the nearest we can come to the 
 interpretation of this divine mystery. The depth 
 of the mystery we may not penetrate. Indeed we 
 cannot penetrate the mystery of physical life and 
 how can we expect to penetrate this? The very 
 terms in which we attempt to state it are but ac- 
 commodations, adaptations, essays at a meaning 
 which lies beyond our reach. 
 
 It is easy to call this " speculation " and taboo 
 it. It is far simpler and easier to rate Jesus as an 
 exceptionally good and wise man and stop with 
 that. But the easy explanation, the surface valu- 
 ation, is not satisfying. And something in the 
 unique and perduring personality of Jesus has 
 compelled men to seek a deeper secret to account 
 for him. The impulse has led, it is true, to mysti- 
 cism, extravagance, speculation, but in all the fan- 
 [ 102 ] 
 
Christ P re-present and P re-potent 
 
 tastic and futile attempts to interpret this mystery- 
 there is the persistent conviction that, in some way 
 or other, Jesus of Nazareth is peculiarly related to 
 the Eternal God, to his universe, and to humanity. 
 Above time, around time, through time and into 
 time, flows this eternal, timeless revelation of God, 
 this vital, personal, present Word, this pre-present, 
 pre-potent, indwelling Christ. 
 
 [i°3] 
 
XIV 
 
 CHRIST INDWELLING 
 
 An absentee Christ were no better than an ab- 
 sentee God. And a Christ who visited the earth 
 but once — for a mere pin-point of time 
 
 An absentee • , i -n • 1,1 
 
 Saviour insuf. amid the millenniums — would be vir- 
 
 ficient 
 
 tually an absentee Christ. Not such is 
 the Christ of the New Testament, nor of Christian 
 theology.^ To be, in any true sense, a Saviour of 
 humanity, Christ must have been always, as he is 
 now, a present Saviour. And there is only one 
 way in which he can be a present Christ, and that 
 is as an Indwelling Christ. 
 
 I 
 
 To speak of Christ as indwelling at once creates 
 hesitation and confusion in many minds because 
 Immanence °^ ^^ difficulty of concciving him as, at 
 Ionaiity,°nor" ^hc samc time, with the Father in heaven 
 to Place ^^^ ^j^j^ ^^^ ^^ earth. It is in reality 
 
 the same difficulty that arises in harmonizing the 
 Divine transcendence and the Divine immanence. 
 
 * " The Logos has not entered abruptly or from without 
 into humanity; but He was ever in the world." Dorner, 
 System of Christian Doctrine, Vol. Ill, p. 342. 
 
 [ 104] 
 
Christ Indwelling 
 
 In terms of locality such a harmony is quite im- 
 possible. It is necessary to lay aside entirely all 
 ideas of place, and to think of the relation only in 
 terms of compatibility and personality. Is there 
 any reason why a higher personality should not 
 indwell in — that is, constantly influence and move, 
 and, if permitted, direct and mold, — a lower per- 
 sonality } An ardent advocate of free will might 
 protest that this would annul freedom ; but only if 
 influence were compulsory and restrictive. When 
 the influence of one person over another, as in the 
 case of Christ and the soul, is purely rational and 
 persuasive, and in the direction of the highest 
 activity and well-being, freedom is promoted, not 
 retarded. 
 
 Eliminating the notion of locality, there is no in- 
 herent difficulty in conceiving of God as at once 
 transcendent and immanent. " For thus saith the 
 high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose 
 name is Holy : I dwell in the high and holy place, 
 with him also that is of a contrite and humble 
 spirit" Nor is there any greater difficulty in con- 
 ceiving of Christ as at the same time dwelling with 
 the Father in light everlasting and in the human 
 heart. 
 
 II 
 
 It is Paul again who leads the thought of Chris- 
 tianity to the Indwelling Christ. In the Epistle to 
 the Romans (8: lo and lo: 8) and in the Second 
 [ i°S ] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 Epistle to the Corinthians (13: 5) he affirms the 
 presence of Christ in the disciple, and in the strik- 
 ing passage in Colossians (i : 26, 27) he 
 
 Paul and the b t' S V . // 
 
 Indwelling spcaks of " the mystery which hath 
 been hid from the ages and from the 
 generations : but now hath it been manifested to his 
 saints, to whom God was pleased to make known 
 what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among 
 the [you] Gentiles, which is Christ in. you, the hope 
 of glory." 
 
 The passage is difficult and admits of several in- 
 terpretations. 'Ej/ may mean among or it may 
 Christ in mean /;// the latter, as Lightfoot says, 
 y°" seems the more probable. But the 
 
 chief problem is whether ^^« means ^^// Gentiles or 
 yon disciples among the Gentiles. The second 
 meaning goes better with the allusions to the In- 
 dwelling Christ in the earlier epistles referred to, 
 where the allusion is to Christ within the soul 
 of the Christian, but the former meaning fulfils 
 far better the figure of the mystery of which the 
 apostle here makes so much. Is the mystery 
 simply that the Gentiles should come to believe in 
 a Jewish Messiah, or is it, rather, that the invisible 
 Christ who had been among them, in them, through 
 all the ages and generations, now at length, through 
 Jesus, is manifested to them in the clear light of 
 revelation ? ^ 
 
 * That this representation of Christ is given in the New 
 Testament did not escape Calvin, who defined the gospel as 
 
 [106] 
 
Christ Indwelling 
 
 It is not sufficiently certain that this is Paul's 
 meaning, to conclude from these words alone 
 that he teaches a universal indwelling other pas- 
 of Christ, but something not very far ^^^^^ 
 short of this is certainly implied ; and when, in 
 the speech on Mars Hill, he avers, " He is not 
 far from each one of us," he teaches a Divine 
 Immanence of which the Indwelling Christ is but 
 the fuller explanation. Nor in this teaching does 
 Paul stand alone in the New Testament. The 
 author of the Fourth Gospel could hardly have 
 given to this truth of a universally indwelling 
 Christ a more emphatic, certainly he could not 
 have given it a more beautiful and undying, ex- 
 pression than in the words : " There was the true 
 light, . . . which lighteth every man, coming into 
 the world." 
 
 Ill 
 *' There is something good in every man," we 
 are wont to say, with a firm conviction that in the 
 affirmation we have touched a vital 
 
 1 T^r 11 1 1 • 1 . "Something 
 
 truth. Well, then, what is this some- good in every 
 
 man " 
 
 thing good? It is reason, moral sense, 
 conscience. Yes, but if these are only automatic 
 endowments, inherited instincts, functional adjuncts 
 of man's personality, they may be vestiges of a dis- 
 tant Creator, but they are not pledges of a present 
 
 " the clear manifestation of the mystery of Christ," yet con- 
 fined the Christ mystery to the Old Testament. 
 
 [107] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 Redeemer, man is God's creature but not his 
 child, there is no vital kinship and communion 
 between the Divine and the human. What if, on 
 the other hand, Reason and Conscience are God 
 speaking within us, Christ indwelHng in us, the seal 
 of our sonship, the hope of glory? The "some- 
 thing good " within us becomes no 
 
 Someone , 
 
 good in every longer a thmg but a Person, a Some 
 
 man ** ° 
 
 One that makes for righteousness, that 
 impels us on toward that fulfilled personality which 
 consists in complete union with himself. 
 
 This Indwelling Christ is a racial as well as an 
 individual Presence, and the individual is largely 
 One Christ of dependent for the strength and vivid- 
 Indofthe^ ness of the Christ-mystery within him 
 *** upon inherited attitude, moral training, 
 
 religious instruction. But these, potent as they 
 are, do not supply conscience, nor furnish spiritual 
 life, nor insert Christ into his soul. They do but 
 arouse, awaken, appeal to a life, a possession, a 
 Christ, within the individual that is his own, — not 
 apart from the race, but through the race. Christ 
 is, as Ritschlianism insists, a possession of the 
 Christian community, and can be appropriated by 
 the individual only through the mediation of the 
 community, but he is also, in a less vivid form, 
 a possession of the race, a Conscience, a Moral 
 Reason which the individual receives only through 
 the race, mediated to him through the channel of 
 racial and ancestral inheritance and training. But 
 [108] 
 
Christ Indwelling 
 
 more than this, there is also a revelation of Christ 
 to the individual^ a Mystery of his own, clouded or 
 clarified by the racial medium through which his 
 whole life and selfhood comes, but still his own. 
 And his attitude toward this inner revelation de- 
 termines his development and destiny. 
 
 IV 
 
 It has always puzzled theologians to account for 
 the deeds of virtue and honor which light up the 
 pagan world. What is their source and The source of 
 what their explanation? Some have so ^^ 
 far outraged truth as to call them splendida vitiUy 
 beautiful but deceptive flowers growing out of a 
 corrupt soil, utterly destitute of worth or holiness, 
 because not springing from a regenerate principle 
 within. Others have estimated these deeds over- 
 highly, and held them up to show to what heights 
 unaided humanity can attain. The one explana- 
 tion is as far from the truth as the other. Was 
 God absent from the human heart before the 
 Christian revelation? Was there ever a noble 
 deed or a true word that was not God-inspired? 
 No. A divine Mystery underlay all that was 
 noble, true, and beautiful in Greek and Roman as 
 well as Hebrew. That Mystery was " Christ in 
 you, the hope of glory." He was the justice of 
 Aristides, the wisdom of Plato, the heroism of 
 Leonidas. If not, what was the source of that 
 justice, virtue, wisdom ? Surely it was not solely 
 [ 109 ] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 human. And if the divine was interblended, was 
 it not the presence of the yet unveiled Christ, the 
 Immanuel, the Eternal Son, the Light that lightcth 
 every man coming into the world — then a Mys- 
 tery, now a Manifestation? And if Christ was in 
 the world before he came in the flesh, surely he is 
 in men now, and in all men of whatever race and 
 religion. Yes, Christ is in the heathen heart. 
 Dim, indeed, is his image, faint the whisper of his 
 voice, but he is there. How else can we explain 
 the reception which the Gospel meets as it falls 
 from the lips of the missionary? " Yes, that is my 
 Saviour of whom you have told me. I have known 
 him long." Is not this the Mystery coming forth 
 to meet and claim the Manifestation? 
 
 Only by asserting this organic relation of every 
 man to Christ can we convince men of their obli- 
 Every human gations toward Jcsus. Only by attribut- 
 
 virtuc Christ's . n /■ i i 
 
 mg every outnow of moral goodness to 
 its source in Christ can we give him his true place 
 in the human heart. It is time we had done with 
 accounting for the sweet and gracious lives, or the 
 brave and unselfish deeds of men and women who 
 are not professedly Christians as the exalted 
 products of human attainment. If they can be as 
 gentle, as pure and as true without Christ as we 
 are with him, then is our faith vain. But it is not 
 without Christ. Is there any radiant human grace 
 in any life? — it is Christ-begotten. It is this 
 presence of Christ which we see in each other's 
 [i.o] 
 
Christ Indwelling 
 
 lives, this pure radiance which illumines the good 
 and even gleams fitfully at times from those not 
 wholly evil, that gives life all its worth and 
 beauty.^ 
 
 "And every virtue we possess. 
 And every virtue won, 
 And every thought of holiness, 
 Is his and his alone." 
 
 But if this presence of the Indwelling Christ is 
 universal, if Christ is in every man, what advan- 
 tage hath the Christian? What is the difference 
 between the man who has received Christ, and is 
 born again, and the man who has not received 
 him? All the difference between being saved and 
 being unsaved. It makes a heaven-wide differ- 
 ence whether Christ is in the heart as Ruler or 
 Remonstrator ; whether he is there as the accepted 
 
 ^ A number of writers, notably Rev. E. M. Chapman in 
 his stimulating volume, The Dynamic of Christiattityy con- 
 ceive of this universal indwelling source of virtue and truth 
 as the Holy Spirit, rather than the Christ. In one way the 
 difference is not vital. "Now the Lord is the Spirit." 
 Wherever the Christ is the Spirit is, and vice versa. But 
 with the Spirit, rather than the Christ as the source of pre- 
 Christian and extra-Christian goodness, many persons are 
 likely to miss the significance of the incarnation, and the old 
 confusion concerning Christ remains ; whereas the univer- 
 sal presence of Christ involves that of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 [..I] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 Light, the Guide of life, or as a Light breaking 
 fitfully through the darkness; whether the Light 
 Accepting ^^ ovcrcoming the darkness or the dark- 
 t^c inne?'°^ ness the Light ; whether a man prefers 
 ^^"^^^ darkness to light, or light to darkness. 
 
 Receiving Christ the Mystery, leads to receiving 
 Jesus the Manifestation. Whether the Christ 
 within shall be a dying hope, a retreating pres- 
 ence, or an ever-brightening glory, depends upon 
 will and conduct. With attitude toward the In- 
 dwelling Christ is intimately involved attitude 
 toward the Historic Christ. The two blend into 
 each other. The Christ of the inward mystery 
 and the outward manifestation are the same. If 
 we are of the TriitJi we hear his voice. 
 
 There are two objections that naturally arise in 
 this connection, which, though alluded to else- 
 where, demand further consideration. The first 
 of these objections is: What is the need and value 
 of the Manifestation, if such is the worth of the 
 Mystery? The answer is: Sunlight is better than 
 twilight, — though it is always preceded by twi- 
 light. Humanity stumbled in the twilight; it is 
 learning to walk securely in the Light. 
 
 Nor is the Christ — this is essential to the under- 
 standing of him — merely a revealing Personality, 
 Christ but an enabling Personality. That is, 
 
 enabling men j^^ j^ accompanicd, in a measure that 
 the prehistoric Christ could not be, by the Holy 
 Spirit. It is his not only to reveal the Father, but 
 
 [..2] 
 
Christ Indwellhtg 
 
 to enable men to reach the Father. Revealing the 
 Father without potentializing man were an unavail- 
 ing and insufficient service. Christ does far more 
 than that. No better instance of the enabling 
 power of Jesus Christ can be found than that con- 
 tained in the " Confessions " of Augustine. In 
 describing his progress into the light, Augustine 
 thus refers to the influence upon him of Platon- 
 ism : " By the study of the Platonist books I was 
 taught to seek for the incorporeal Truth, and be- 
 held Thy invisible things understood by the things 
 that are made, and though cast back, I felt what 
 the dullness of my soul did not permit me to gaze 
 upon, I had no doubt that Thou art, and that Thou 
 art infinite. ... Of all this I was convinced, yet 
 was I too weak to enjoy Thee. I prated like One 
 who knew, yet, unless I found Thy way in Christ 
 our Saviour, what I deemed true, was like to end 
 in rue." ^ 
 
 In these words is disclosed, through the medium 
 of a personal experience, that which is, equally 
 with revelation, the great office of the Son of God 
 — to impart not only sight but strength, not only 
 the knowledge of the Infinite, but strength to enjoy 
 him, — without which strength, knowledge is but 
 a mocking futility. 
 
 It is in enabling power, as well as in revealing 
 power, that Jesus, the incarnate, visualized, indi- 
 vidualized Christ, exceeds the Logos, the Mystery, 
 1 Chapter xx. 
 8 C"3] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 the prehistoric Christ, — thus constituting Christian- 
 ity the universal religion. The Person who moved, 
 darkling and indistinct, behind the forces of Nature 
 and within the heart of Humanity, could not, ipso 
 facto, have the same commanding glory as when he 
 stood forth, visual and distinct, upon the field of 
 history. If we ask, why then was not the mani- 
 festation earlier made? the answer is, it could not 
 be. In order to be historical, the Incarnation 
 must needs occur at some point in history. That 
 point, that moment, was the divinely opportune 
 one. ** When the fulness of the time came, God 
 sent forth his Son." Nothing could lend such 
 centrality and significance to the Incarnation as a 
 historical event, as to have it the unfolding and 
 outshining of a Reality, a Personality, already per- 
 ceived and felt, but not clearly understood — rather 
 than the advent of a new and hitherto unknown 
 manifestation of the Godhead. 
 
 The second objection is one arising from the 
 mystical character of the theory, and formulates 
 itself somewhat as follows : *' This is a needless and 
 senseless obscuration; all that you mean is that 
 there is a certain responsiveness in the human 
 heart to the presentation of moral obligation and 
 of the claims of the gospel." But what is this re- 
 sponsiveness? Is it a mere quality or capacity 
 that has been inserted or grown up in my soul? 
 Is it mine, simply and solely, — a part of myself? 
 If so, I may do what I choose with it, accounta- 
 ["4] 
 
Christ Indwelling 
 
 ble only to myself. But if it is not mine alone, 
 but God has placed it within me, is it a mere 
 product of his will, or is it not rather chnstthe 
 himself, his Logos, his nature, in me? S'see^d^o^fThe 
 My sin may have corrupted all the ^°"* 
 rest of my being, but this it cannot touch, for 
 it is mine, yet not mine; in me, yet not of me. 
 This is the divine spark, ih^ fitnkelem of the Mys- 
 tics. It is this of which William Law writes, so 
 raptly yet so rationally : " If Christ was to raise a 
 new life like his own in every man, then every man 
 must have had originally in the inmost spirit of his 
 life a seed of Christ, or Christ as a seed of heaven, 
 lying there in a state of insensibility, out of which 
 it could not arise but by the mediatorial power of 
 Christ. . . . For what could begin to deny self, if 
 there was not something in man different from 
 self? . . . The Word of God is the hidden treasure 
 of every human soul, immured under flesh and 
 blood, till as a day-star it arises in our hearts, and 
 changes the son of an earthly Adam into a son of 
 God." 1 
 
 But it is not in the Mystics alone that this truth 
 finds recognition. Alike in religious philosophy 
 and religious devotion, there is found frequent and 
 convincing utterance of this truth of an indwelling 
 divine Mystery, — which is " Christ in you, the 
 hope of glory." 
 
 ^ See Inge : Christian Mysticism^ p. 283. 
 ["S] 
 
XV 
 
 CHRIST IN CONSCIENCE 
 
 The most impressive fact in life, to the reflecting 
 
 mind, is the sense of duty. That a being with 
 
 such a nature as ours, swayed by such 
 
 The Mystery , . .... 
 
 and Might appctitcs and passions, such ambitions 
 and fancies, should be invisibly re- 
 strained on all sides but the highest, and on that 
 side moved imperatively toward that which is 
 worthiest for oneself and best for society, — this, 
 surely, is most significant. The counter fact of 
 disregard of duty has dulled us to the greater fact 
 of duty itself A moment's reflection restores our 
 wonder. Here, in this mysterious sense of duty, 
 is an invisible, intangible power that enters into 
 every life, and every day of every life, with greater 
 or less control, as the great conservator of society. 
 Without it humanity would hasten rapidly to de- 
 generation, perhaps to destruction. It is the 
 balance-wheel of social relations, the savior of 
 humanity. 
 
 Very commonly, and very misleadingly, duty is 
 thought of as a majestic impersonality, an uncon- 
 scious law, like that of gravitation, that knows neither 
 its author, its purpose, nor its objects. But duty 
 [ii6] 
 
Christ in Conscience 
 
 IS such only to withholden eyes. We come up 
 against duty as against a blank wall, only to 
 find stone and mortar resolving into in- j^^y ^^^ 
 telligence and love, — not less firm, but '^^"^^^^^ 
 less forbidding. Duty often seems cruel, only to 
 prove kind. We feel its grasp as of an iron vice, 
 but when we yield it proves the hold of a divine 
 Hand. 
 
 The only adequate account of duty is that it is 
 the reflection of the personal will of God. This 
 alone explains its power, its purposeful- 
 ness, and its personal character. Every in the wm 
 
 , of God 
 
 attempt to mterpret duty as custom oper- 
 ating in consciousness fails before the question. 
 Why does obligation continue to be imperative 
 when it ceases to be instinctive? The sense of 
 obligation refuses to lend itself to any solution 
 save that it originates in the rational appeal of a 
 higher will to ours, in freedom. Through duty 
 God makes his will known to us as it relates to our 
 human life and conduct. 
 
 If duty reflects the will of God, conscience may 
 be called the voice of God. It is a familiar meta- 
 phor and a true one. The language of 
 
 , , - Conscience 
 
 conscience may not always be under- the voice 
 
 of God 
 
 Stood, but the voice is recognized. Its 
 tones, heard in the silences of the soul, too musical 
 and deep for a whisper, are characterized by an 
 C"7] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 authority and finality which belong only to that 
 which is eternal. To make conscience the imper- 
 sonal communication of an impersonal law would 
 argue an impersonal God, and leave duty a puzzle 
 in evolution. Kant recognized the real source of 
 duty when he defined religion as the recognition 
 of all our duties as divine commands. 
 
 If duty is thus personal and conscience revela- 
 tory, there must be relationship here to the Christ, 
 the personal Revealer of God. Without such a 
 relationship of Christ to conscience it is impossible 
 to reconcile our Christianity with our psychology, 
 our philosophy with our faith. If, as Christianity 
 affirms, to obey Christ is to fulfil conscience, then 
 to obey conscience is, in some sense, to obey 
 Christ. Once more we are brought back to the 
 immanent Christ, who is in us, not only as the 
 hope of glory, but also as the guide to conduct, 
 the voice of duty. 
 
 II 
 
 The need of a closer correlation of Christian 
 
 experience with the moral nature upon which it 
 
 rests, has long been felt. If Christian 
 
 Christian . . . in* 
 
 experience experience is treated as wholly unique 
 
 normal 
 
 and peculiar, wholly unrelated to the 
 laws and processes of moral life, it can have 
 neither a rationale nor an apologetic. Until its 
 ethical and psychological sanity and substantiality 
 are made evident, it hangs in the air, the sport of 
 [..8] 
 
Christ m Conscience 
 
 the winds and the proper object of mistrust. No 
 thoughtful Christian is content to leave his expe- 
 rience thus isolated and unexplained. The man 
 who has undergone a change of heart is conscious 
 that he has passed through a unique and trans- 
 forming experience ; he is also persuaded that this 
 experience is profoundly real and normal, and ac- 
 cordant with the deepest laws of his moral and 
 rational nature. 
 
 Undoubtedly there is an element in Christian 
 experience which is not felt in the ordinary proc- 
 esses of moral life — a sense of divine support, of 
 spiritual communion, which lifts the soul into a 
 purer atmosphere. It is difficult to overestimate 
 the reality and importance of this difference be- 
 tween the merely moral life and the regenerate life. 
 Conversion raises the whole content and detail of 
 life into spiritual and personal relations with God. 
 Obedience to duty becomes obedience to God; 
 the behests of conscience become the promptings 
 of Christ. And yet the difference, great as it is, 
 is largely one of recognition — a recognition that 
 transforms dreary obedience into personal devotion. 
 All earnest and unselfish obedience of conscience 
 is obedience to the indwelHng Christ. But it is 
 only when this fact emerges in consciousness that 
 the soul kindles. It may be confidently affirmed, 
 out of general human experience, that no one 
 accepts and devotes himself to a great and noble 
 duty without feeling a sense of personal associa- 
 [119] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 tion, as if he were doing the will of a supreme 
 person in closest relation with himself. He be- 
 Feiiowship comes aware that he is identifying him- 
 th'rough** self with some one ** closer than breath- 
 ^"*^ ing," with whom he thus enters into a 
 
 deep and uplifting alliance that stirs his soul to its 
 noblest exercise. This may be scouted as mysti- 
 cal, but it is the secret of the absorbing appeal and 
 the ennobling effect of duty. This sense of compan- 
 ionship with the Supreme Self makes the soul 
 fearless and joyful in the midst of sacrifice and 
 sorrow, in the service of the higher conscience. 
 What is conversion but this sense of fellowship 
 with God through duty lifted into the conscious 
 control of life? 
 
 Ill 
 
 Those who would guard the sacredness and 
 
 autonomy of individuality here interpose the perti- 
 
 , . nent objection to which we have already 
 
 An Objection '' ^ 
 
 andiuAn- referred:^ "Is not this immanence of 
 
 swer 
 
 God in Christ destructive of personal 
 integrity? Does it not disrupt my own personal 
 character and freedom if Christ is in me, as my very 
 virtue, my better self, my guide, my conscience? 
 Did not Paul dishonor his own selfhood when he 
 said : ' It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth 
 
 * Vide, p. III. 
 
 [.20] 
 
Christ in Conscience 
 
 in me ' ? " Were it other than an absolutely dis- 
 interested guidance and an absolutely free and 
 rational following, it would certainly annul human 
 personality to be thus inhabited and animated by 
 divine personality. But the fact, as reported in 
 consciousness, is that in this relationship, intimate 
 and determinative as it is, there is not the slightest 
 infringement of human freedom and personality, 
 but on the contrary, a conscious development and 
 fulfilment of personal freedom and power; so that 
 the Paul for whom it was Christ to live was the 
 Paul whose own personality thus became freest, 
 most intense, and most replete. It is only the 
 influence of abnormal personality that is coercive 
 and repressive. Live with a thoroughly good 
 person in spiritual intimacy and your soul be- 
 comes saturated with him ; he is in you, his spirit 
 atmospheres yours and instils itself into your 
 thought and conduct. Yet, if his personality is 
 sufficiently pure and high, there is never for an 
 instant a violation of your personality. On the 
 contrary, you are conscious of being your " best 
 self" under his influence. It is thus with the in- 
 dwelling of God in Christ with us. Only because 
 he is within us are we persons at all. And the 
 more fully his presence is recognized and honored, 
 the more completely do we come to ourselves, the 
 more fully and freely do we realize our own per- 
 sonality. The Christ of conscience is the germ of 
 spiritual selfhood within us. 
 
 [,2.] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 IV 
 
 The failure to recognize Christ in conscience has 
 led to a serious misrepresentation of the gospel. 
 Rejection There is much said in evangelistic 
 Rejection of preaching about rejecting Christ, which 
 chnst interprets the rejection simply as that 
 
 of the historical, or, more properly, the ecclesi- 
 astical Christ, and entirely ignores the rejec- 
 tion of the Christ in conscience, — the Christ 
 who stands veiled but central within every duty 
 and every opportunity for service. Not that the 
 acceptance or rejection of the Christ of the 
 Gospels is not of supreme importance, but a 
 great deal more is involved in it than a single 
 apprehension or a momentary choice. The 
 subordination of the moral to the mechanical 
 Christ, of the ethical to the external, results in 
 a travesty of the real Christ, who cares not 
 for the "Lord," "Lord," of him who does not 
 his will. 
 
 It is not enough that Jesus taught morality. If 
 that were all it would leave duty orphaned and 
 unexplained. What we need to know is that right 
 is not a mere human deposit, a product of human 
 creation, however high and worthy, nor yet a 
 mere external will-product of God imposed upon 
 humanity, but that it is of the very being and 
 essence of God, as much a part of his nature as of 
 ours, — the soul of personality, human and divine, 
 [ 122] 
 
Christ hi Conscience 
 
 and therefore the very kernel of the eternal reve- 
 lation that culminated in Jesus Christ. And that 
 we can know only as Christ is recognized in con- 
 science as well as in history, in character as well 
 as in creed. 
 
 [123] 
 
XVI 
 
 CHRIST REGENERATING 
 
 Eternal Love has more than one regenerative 
 process, more than one path by which he leads 
 Regeneration ^^^ O"* ^^ darkncss into light, morc 
 and Life ^j^^^^ ^^^ ^^y ^f re-creating the soul. 
 
 His means are multiform and his messengers 
 many. Too long the Church has been blind to 
 the regenerative agencies which lie at the very 
 heart of life itself. Nature, friendship, home, 
 thought, labor, love are channels through which 
 the divine life flows into the human. The means 
 and messengers of the soul's awaking — who can 
 circumscribe them? 
 
 When the heavenly Beatrice saluted Dante, the 
 
 soul of the poet uprose into a new world. "And 
 
 passing through a street she turned her 
 
 through Hu- eyes thither where I stood abashed : and 
 
 by her unspeakable courtesy, which is 
 
 now garnered in the Great Cycle, she saluted me 
 
 with so virtuous a bearing that I seemed then and 
 
 there to behold the very limits of blessedness." ^ 
 
 ^ Vi'/a Nuova. 
 
 [124] 
 
Christ Regenerating 
 
 This hour of " her most sweet salutation " was the 
 hour of the immortal poet's entrance into the vita 
 nuova. To explain such an experience as only 
 the vibration of the chord of youthful sentiment 
 is to reduce gold to dross. That outshining of 
 purity and beauty made of Dante another man. 
 In that hour he was created a poet. God took 
 him into fellowship with himself. "Every one 
 that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth 
 God." Human love that is deep and pure and 
 sacrificial is of the very quality and essence of the 
 new Hfe, " the eternal life, which was with the 
 Father, and was manifested unto us." 
 
 And if love has power to awaken the soul, so 
 also has truth. If there was ever an awakened soul 
 outside of Christianity, surely it was 
 that of Plato, ** the father of theology," through 
 as Professor Edward Caird calls him. 
 " By their fruits ye shall know them." He who 
 lifted so many into the realm of the good, the true, 
 and the beautiful, — was not he born from above? 
 The Spirit, blowing where it listeth, which stirred 
 John to lofty contemplation and noble expression, 
 must have been the same which moved Plato. 
 Find a man in any age who thinks deeply and 
 loves the truth devoutly, and you have found a 
 man who is born, not of the flesh but of the Spirit, 
 whose life is lifted above the lust of the eyes and 
 the pride of life into the realm where he thinks 
 God's thoughts after him. 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 And if love and thought afford to God awaken- 
 ing access to the soul, so also does nature. Not 
 only are there flashes from her beauty 
 
 Regeneration , . - 
 
 through which move the soul to momentary 
 
 Beauty 
 
 communion with the All-Beautiful, but 
 here and there is one who lives in constant exalta- 
 tion of spirit through communion with her, whose 
 "days are bound each to each by natural piety." 
 What shall we say of the nature poets, whose souls 
 have fed upon dawns and sunsets, hues of flowers 
 and beams of stars? Ignorantly or consciously, 
 they worship the Soul of all beauty. If they refuse 
 whatever of lower suggestion they find in nature, 
 and are true to the highest and finest, are they not 
 led by the Spirit? What of Wordsworth, the high 
 priest of nature, finding God in " the light of set- 
 ting suns," and the law of duty in the march of the 
 stars? What of Emerson, living in Puritan New 
 England like a Greek philosopher or a Hindu sage, 
 oblivious of Sabbath bell and Christian creed, yet 
 in blissful comradeship with nature and in holy 
 converse with the Over-Soul? 
 
 Are not all these pure and high-hearted lovers, 
 thinkers, poets, sons of God, children of the Spirit? 
 Are not all the lowly, love-lit souls, in the narrow 
 furrow of every-day duty, — in the home, the field, 
 the shop, — some of them never having heard of 
 the grace of God in Jesus Christ, some having 
 heard but not consciously accepted, who lift their 
 eyes to the hills and walk steadily and uprightly 
 
 [,26] 
 
Christ Regenerating 
 
 their humble way, — are they not all God's own, 
 ruled by his laws, renewed by his Spirit? 
 
 II 
 
 But what, then, of the relation of these regener- 
 ate ones to Christ? Can they be of the Spirit 
 and not of Christ? Have they no vital 
 
 Yet no Regen- 
 
 touch with Him in whom alone eternal eration with- 
 out Chnst 
 life is revealed, and through whom the 
 
 Spirit works? There can be but one conclusion. 
 
 In some way, and in some degree, all who walk 
 
 by the Spirit, in any age or land, know the Christ, 
 
 — not in the flesh but in the spirit, not all of them 
 
 in his historic embodiment, but all in his eternal 
 
 personality. Because we of the Christian era and 
 
 the Christian area have seen Jesus the Christ we 
 
 have believed; blessed are they that have not 
 
 seen and yet have believed. And if some who 
 
 have the written record of Jesus and yet fail 
 
 to identify him with the eternal Logos in the 
 
 Living Christ, are true to the indwelling Christ, we 
 
 may wonder that the great light blinds their eyes, 
 
 but we may not exclude them from the number 
 
 of those who, being led by the Spirit of God, are 
 
 thereby sons of God. Call these lives of " outside 
 
 saints " incomplete acceptances, if you will, partial 
 
 regenerations ; nevertheless they are real. 
 
 Do we then make Jesus of none effect? Rather 
 
 would we seek to understand and exalt him. Not 
 
 [127] 
 
Christ and tlie Eternal Order 
 
 otherwise can he be understood and exalted 
 than as the full shining of an earlier and eternal 
 Jesus under- ^ight. The prologue of the Fourth 
 ?h°e°Eferaii^^ Gospel IS the inevitable outcome of clear 
 ^^°* and comprehensive thinking upon Jesus 
 
 Christ. Athanasius grappled with the same prob- 
 lem, and reached practically the same conclusion. 
 So has the great body of devout and thoughtful 
 minds in every Christian age. Given Jesus of 
 Nazareth, in the clear and simple outlines of the 
 Synoptic narratives, and steadily and surely re- 
 flection conducts the mind back to the Eternal 
 Word. Jesus interprets the Word, and in turn the 
 Word interprets him. Since, then, the eternal 
 revelation precedes and exceeds the bounds of 
 historical revelation, all who have been and are 
 true to the wider and fainter revelation are one 
 with those who are true to the closer and clearer 
 revelation. For the hardness of our hearts mutual 
 recognition is not always immediate, but when 
 shibboleths cease and veils are torn away, it will 
 be seen that all disciples of the Word, all children 
 of the Spirit, are one. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Inconsistency and confusion have characterized 
 Christian thought concerning the relation of Christ 
 and the Holy Spirit. Theology has never given 
 to this relationship as earnest thought as to the 
 relationship of the Father and the Son. In order 
 [128] 
 
Christ Regenerating 
 
 to account for the righteousness and faith found in 
 humanity, especially in the Hebrew race, before 
 the Incarnation, it has been assumed 
 that the Spirit, independently of the spfri?niver 
 Son, was present in the world before SS^the Ete?" 
 Jesus came. But, besides involving a se- 
 rious contradiction of the Divine Unity, this theory 
 is in every way unsatisfying. To detach the Spirit 
 from the Christ is like separating heat from light. 
 It is like severing will from reason. Neither can 
 be rightly conceived as acting without the other. 
 Nor can their joint activity occur save through the 
 Father, the primary power in all spiritual ener- 
 gizing.^ So close is the relation between Christ 
 and the Spirit in the illumination of the human 
 soul that St Paul (2 Cor. 3: 17) momentarily iden- 
 tifies them. Whenever the veil is taken away 
 from human hearts so that they see clearly, it 
 comes, says Paul, through the turning of the heart 
 to the Lord, who " is the Spirit." 
 
 If Christ is essential to one regeneration he is 
 essential to all. If the new birth cannot take place 
 without the Spirit, neither can it without ^he Ever- 
 the Christ. Jesus, the incarnate Christ, ProwftoSn 
 inexpressibly clarifies, illumines, objec- JSeEtemaf^ 
 tifies, expresses the indwelling Christ; ^^"^* 
 but, after all, it is the latter, not the former, who 
 is the " essential Christ." Wherever and whenever 
 
 1 It was to combat this separation of the activity of the 
 Word and the Spirit that Luther strove. 
 9 [129] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 regeneration, complete or partial, has occurred 
 without the pale of historic Christianity, it must 
 have been through the Ever-present Spirit taking 
 the things of the eternal Christ and showing them 
 to men. If one takes the narrower view and holds 
 that no soul ever entered into the spiritual life until 
 Jesus came, then Christianity is but an unaccount- 
 able historical cataclysm, and revelation a comet, 
 flashing suddenly across the pathway of the steadier 
 stars of human faith and duty and destined to 
 disappear in the darkness out of which it came. 
 
 IV 
 
 Upon the assumption of a circumscribed and 
 enclosed Christianity, whatever of faith, virtue, love, 
 TheAbsurdi- wcrc in humanity before Christ, or be- 
 
 ties that fol- , —,. . _ , 
 
 lowed the yond Christ, are false and deceptive. 
 
 Theory that ;L 
 
 Christianity 1 hcy arc not real because they are not 
 
 is confined to 
 
 History regenerate, and do not spring from the 
 
 life in Christ.^ This inference both Roman Cathol- 
 icism and Calvinism unhesitatingly accept In the 
 unbaptized, the Roman Church finds only corrup- 
 tion and selfishness. Calvin stoutly affirms that 
 " everything that proceeds from the corrupt 
 nature of man is worthy of condemnation." He 
 admits, it is true, that virtues like those of Camil- 
 lus were ** gifts of God," and that there are " most 
 excellent gifts of the Divine Spirit, which for the 
 common benefit of mankind he dispenses to whom- 
 * Vitff, p. 109. 
 
 [•30] 
 
Christ Regenerating 
 
 soever he pleases," but even these natural gifts 
 " have been corrupted, not that they can be defiled 
 in themselves as proceeding from God, but because 
 they have ceased to be pure to polluted man, so 
 that he can obtain no praise from them."^ 
 
 To dissever thus sharply and completely the 
 " natural man " from the " spiritual man " may 
 seem to have a certain warrant in parts of Paul's 
 Epistle to the Romans, but it does not agree with 
 his speech on Mars Hill, or with his doctrine as a 
 whole. Nor does it reflect the teaching of Jesus. 
 The early Church did not recognize this abso- 
 lutely unrelated nature of regeneration. Cornelius' 
 prayer and alms could never have come up to God 
 acceptably if they had arisen from a heart wholly 
 corrupt and evil. Bound up with a narrow and now 
 exploded form of the doctrine of the fall of man, 
 this distorted view of human nature, as utterly per- 
 verted and alienated from God, has been rejected 
 by modern thought as unreal and provincial. 
 With the larger horizons opened by modern sci- 
 ence and history, it is absolutely incompatible. 
 The question now becomes: Shall Humanism or 
 theology go completely over to the Calvinism? 
 opposite extreme, and adopting the creed of 
 humanism, declare human nature, in and of itself, 
 altogether noble and perfect, barring the neces- 
 sities of incomplete development? Or, shall the- 
 ology cling to the real truth which underlies 
 ^ Institutes^ Book I, chapter 3. 
 
 [131] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 Calvinism, namely, the utter worthlessness and 
 sinfulness of humanity without God, and correct 
 its false premise by asserting that, as a matter of 
 fact, humanity never has been entirely without God, 
 but that in every true purpose and holy desire and 
 noble deed the Eternal Word and the Eternal Spirit 
 have been acting upon and with the human spirit ? 
 
 Regeneration thus becomes a divine process as 
 ancient and as varied as humanity, yet coming to 
 its full effect only in Christianity ; the Holy Spirit, 
 no late-sent visitant from heaven descending to 
 earth at Pentecost, nor yet a divine influence re- 
 stricted to one people alone, but the Father's 
 gracious Paraclete, sent to help his children from 
 the beginning; and the Christ, through whom the 
 Spirit operates, not merely the God-man coming 
 in the flesh in the fulness of time, but also the 
 ever-present Word, the Light that lighteth every 
 man coming into the world. 
 
 [ 132] 
 
XVII 
 
 CHRIST ATONING 
 
 It has been a common practise in systematic 
 theology to distinguish so sharply as almost to 
 separate the person of Christ from the incarnation 
 
 work of Christ. Incarnation and atone- ment msep- 
 
 and Atone- 
 ment i 
 arable 
 
 ment have been treated as if they were 
 as distinct as multiplication and division. Incarna- 
 tion has been regarded wholly as a state ; atone- 
 ment as a deed. Thus, Professor Denney in his 
 book, The Death of Chfist^ accentuates the posi- 
 tion of many earlier writers as follows : " Christ 
 not only was something in the world, he did some- 
 thing. He did something that made an infinite 
 difference, and that puts us under an infinite obli- 
 gation. He bore our sins." Most certainly he did 
 something; but was the sum of his doing confined 
 to the sacrifice of the cross? Was not all the 
 rest, — self-conquest, teaching, ministry, — doing 
 as well as being, sacrifice as well as service? 
 Could he have been something without doing 
 something, or done something without being some- 
 thing? It is a limited view which sets the atone- 
 ment over against the incarnation, and argues for 
 
Christ and tJu Eternal Order 
 
 one or the other as central. They are hemispheres 
 cff one full-rounded revelation, and the equator 
 which separates them is, at best, but an imaginary 
 line. 
 
 I 
 
 The issue between the defenders of the incarna- 
 tion and of the atonement is a superficial one, and 
 disappears as soon as the personality of Christ is 
 placed in the foreground. Too long the person of 
 Christ has been obscured. In the doctrine of the 
 incarnation, the nature of Christ has been empha- 
 sized at the expense of his person, and in the 
 doctrine of the atonement, the act at the expense 
 of the person performing the act. Modern the- 
 ology is turning from the vain endeavor to under- 
 An atoning Stand the nature of Christ to the more 
 rh^°M"**^" inspiring contemplation of his person, 
 atoning Death ^j^^ time has comc to interpret the 
 atonement, also, more in the terms of personality 
 and less in those of accomplishment, to exalt 
 the dying Christ rather than the death of Christ, 
 to contemplate the atoning Christ rather than to 
 speculate concerning the nature of the atonement 
 wrought by him. 
 
 The uplifting of the personality of Christ in 
 atonement is a return to the New Testament em- 
 phasis. It is upon him that the ictus there falls, 
 rather than upon his work. '* And I, if I be lifted 
 up from the earth," " And ye know that he was 
 
 [■34] 
 
Christ Atoning 
 
 manifested to take away sins," — this is the Johan- 
 nine emphasis. As High Priest, rather than as 
 sacrifice, did Christ appeal to the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews. " Jesus Christ, and him 
 crucified," was Paul's message. " Who his own 
 self bare our sins in his body upon the tree," was 
 the adoring exaltation of the person of Christ by 
 the author of First Peter. The death of Christ 
 and the cross of Christ are often alluded to in the 
 New Testament, but always in closest association 
 with Christ himself, never in the detached and 
 impersonal manner of our systematic theology, as 
 if the death, the sacrifice, possessed virtue in itself 
 apart from him who died. 
 
 The misdirection of emphasis upon the deed 
 rather than the doer, the work rather than the per- 
 son of Christ, has lent to the atonement an almost 
 magical efficacy in the minds of many. If, instead 
 of exalting him, attention is directed mainly to 
 the debt he is paying, or the propitiation he is 
 making, or the death he is dying, until he himself 
 comes to be looked upon as subordinate to the 
 transaction of which he is the instru- 
 
 1 '1 e r^\ • It., "^^ New 
 
 ment, we lose sight of Christ behind a Testament 
 
 , . T • • 1 • terms, not 
 
 doctrine. It is true, there is much in definitionsbut 
 
 metaphors. 
 
 the New Testament which apparently This makes 
 
 '^ ^ "^ the terms not 
 
 forms a basis for the construction of less but more 
 
 real 
 
 the elaborate theory of the atonement 
 which has been erected, but only if the terms used 
 are taken literally ; and, as Coleridge so pertinently 
 ['35] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 pointed out, these terms are metaphors, not defini* 
 tions. Of this we may be sure, for the reason 
 that, taken literally, they are mutually contradic- 
 tory. Christ cannot be at the same time Ransom 
 and Redeemer, Priest and Sacrifice, Propitiation 
 and Advocate. 
 
 These ardent New Testament disciples have 
 experienced a new life, a transforming truth, a 
 fresh relationship to God in Christ, which no term, 
 no language, is adequate to express. Therefore 
 they seize every symbol which helps to convey a 
 meaning greater than words can contain. To liter- 
 alize rigidly these words, and attempt to turn their 
 vital, flaming utterance into set theological phrase- 
 ology is to withdraw the gaze of the soul from the 
 atoning Christ in order to fasten attention upon 
 a plan, a method, a device, for saving men. 
 
 II 
 
 It is only as we turn from the impersonal, juridical 
 view of the atonement to the personal and ethical, 
 that we enter into its deeper and more searching 
 reality. So long as death, blood, ransom, propiti- 
 ation, substitution, taken literally, constitute the 
 essential factors of atonement, it is impossible to 
 get at the heart of the doctrine ; but the moment 
 its ethical and personal implications are put for- 
 ward, these terms become vivid and luminous 
 symbols, and the doctrine itself vital and thrilling 
 with the touch of the personal Christ. 
 
 [■36] 
 
Christ Atoning 
 
 The need of atonement lies in the very nature of 
 moral relationships, disturbed and ruptured by sin. 
 Men are bound together in a social ^ . . 
 
 ° The vicanous 
 
 whole. None liveth to himself, and Natureofsuf- 
 
 fenng for Sin 
 
 none dieth to himself. Bitter fruits 
 must be shared, evil deeds must be borne by 
 others as well as by the doer. Infinite love cannot 
 reverse this order. " All 's love, but all 's law." 
 There is no offhand forgiveness on the part of 
 God. He never says to his children, "Oh, well, 
 never mind." It only needs to be shown that 
 Christ is racial in his relations for the conclusion 
 to follow that he must needs suffer atoningly for 
 human sin. 
 
 Christ atones by the moral victory which he 
 achieved, by the manifestation of the divine love 
 which he made, by the penitence for sin which he 
 aroused. But this is not all. Christ atones by 
 bearing, and thus bearing away, human sin. 
 This is the vicarious element in atonement. 
 But it is not substitution, nor equivalence, nor 
 imputation. All these quantitative and forensic 
 terms must be flung away. They may, perhaps, 
 have served a purpose, but they have come to 
 obscure those deeper ethical values of the cross 
 which set it at the very heart and center of 
 Hfe. 
 
 You cannot help the person who loves you 
 bearing your sins. Nor can he help it, if he loves 
 you. He suffers with you and for you in your sin 
 
 [137] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 and its consequences, and the more in that he 
 does not sin with you and for you. And this 
 vicarious suffering, bearing our sins by sympathy, 
 helps bear them away, for it arouses us to re- 
 nounce that which can bring such pain to others. 
 The love that thus suffers vicariously burns up the 
 love of sin until it shrivels and dies in the holy 
 flame. Thus, ethically, sympathetically, vicariously 
 — through his racial relationship — the Son of God 
 bears human sin. 
 
 Let us not think that this ethical value of 
 
 the atonement was wholly unrecognized until the 
 
 modern era in theology. It was the 
 
 The ethical ^■' , , ,' , 
 
 Value of the frround-tonc iu the doctrine, which hal- 
 
 Atonement '^ 
 
 lowed it from the first, though overlaid 
 with many false and discordant notes. Now and 
 then one catches vibrations of this deeper note 
 in Anselm's Cur Dens Homo. Jonathan Ed- 
 wards sounds it, full and clear, in his paper on 
 The Satisfaction of Christy in which he repre- 
 sents the sympathy of Christ with God and with 
 men as perfected by his death. But only 
 through the searching thought and spiritual in- 
 sight of such modern theologians as McLeod 
 Campbell, Maurice, Bushnell, Dorner, and Rob- 
 ertson have we come to see the primary ethical 
 quality of the doctrine. As Nitzsch has put it, 
 *' It is in the depth of his sympathy and in the 
 endeavor for the world's salvation that Christ 
 bears the penalty of sin." 
 
 [ '38 ] 
 
Christ Atonino^ 
 
 III 
 
 We have been speaking of the atonement 
 hitherto as if it occurred solely at a given point 
 in time, at a certain crisis in human Etemai 
 history. But more thorough thinking Atonement 
 shows that this cannot be. In order to be in any 
 sense historical, the atonement must be an eternal 
 process in the heart of God. An eternal atone- 
 ment is the necessary corollary of eternal divine 
 love. A love that never suffered for human sin 
 before the crucifixion, or that never before the 
 incarnation in great compassion sought to win 
 men away from sin, would not be love. " The 
 redemption of the Christ was the manifestation of 
 that which is eternal in the being of God." ^ 
 
 An eternal atonement is the only explanation of 
 a historic atonement. To hold any theory which 
 contains the implication that God made Etemai Atone- 
 up his mind, at a certain point in the Sistoilc^^^"* 
 history of human sin, to be atoned by atonement 
 the death of his Son, or even that he determined 
 from eternity to be atoned at that particular time 
 and by that particular event, is to degrade our 
 thought of God. Christ refutes the notion in the 
 parable of The Husbandmen. Many messengers of 
 atonement are sent, and all suffer ill-treatment; 
 the Son comes only when the refusal of other 
 
 ^ Mulford, Republic of God, p. 184. 
 [139] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 endeavors toward reconciliation makes his coming 
 possible and needful. 
 
 Nor need we absolutely exclude — although here 
 we should proceed with extreme hesitation, lest we 
 exercise ourselves in things too high for us — the 
 thought to which theology has clung so tena- 
 ciously, that in the sacrifice of Calvary the heart 
 of God was moved to a still deeper and fuller for- 
 giveness of men. God is unchangeable, yet surely 
 not stagnant. It is not irreverent to conjecture 
 that the heart of the Eternal may have known a 
 fresh outflow of forgiving love to man in the sacri- 
 fice of Calvary, as Bushnell suggested, arguing 
 from the analogy of the man who in sacrificing for 
 one who has wronged him feels a deeper and more 
 complete forgiveness toward him. 
 
 IV 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, neither a purely historic 
 Christ, nor a Christ who was preexistent with the 
 Eternal Atone- ^^^^^^ but entirely unknown to hu- 
 Snlhirn'Sd manity before the incarnation, will suf- 
 ?heHl's"torfc ^ce. God must have been in Christ 
 Atonement reconciling the world unto himself, even« 
 before the great historic reconciliation. Otherwise 
 it is impossible to account for the sense of divine 
 forgiveness and compassion experienced by men 
 before Christianity, as reflected, for example, in 
 the penitential psalms of Assyrians and Egyptians, 
 [ 140] 
 
Christ Atoning 
 
 and in the tender assurances of divine forgiveness 
 in the words of Hebrew prophets and psalmists. 
 
 And yet, how almost universally was this inner 
 revelation despised ; how persistently men pre- 
 ferred darkness rather than light; how urgent be- 
 came the need of an historic atonement ! Eternal 
 love has always waited with the ring and the best 
 robe and the forgiving embrace, and never without 
 cost of suffering and sacrifice ; for although the 
 parable does not tell us what the Father suffered on 
 the day the prodigal took his journey, and the days 
 that followed, we may read it between the lines, 
 in the very warmth of the welcome. But humanity 
 in its sin had rejected the Indwelling Christ, had 
 forgotten the deserted home and the forgiving 
 Father, and it needed the suffering Son of man 
 and the uplifted cross to restore mankind to itself 
 and to God. Thus does the sacrifice of Jesus, 
 in time, disclose the heart of God in eternity and 
 reveal the sacrificial nature of Love. 
 
 [hi] 
 
XVIII 
 
 CHRIST RISEN 
 
 Christian Evidences and Apologetics make far 
 more of the resurrection than of the Risen Christ ; 
 The Risen ^^^ New Testament makes far more of 
 STrwu""' the Risen Christ than of the resurrec- 
 rection ^j^j^ j|^g difference is more radical 
 
 and serious than at first appears. It amounts to 
 a subversion of emphasis, on the part of Apolo- 
 getics, from the personal to the impersonal, from 
 the essential to the incidental. This displacement 
 of emphasis has injured Christianity not a little; 
 for false emphasis is first cousin to false doctrine. 
 
 The Risen Christ was the day-star of Christianity. 
 It was he who reawakened the drooping hearts of 
 Not a resur- ^^^ disciples, and won new believers to 
 hSt*ann?$Jr. their ranks. It is commonly asserted 
 ishabie Person ^j^^^ the rcsurrcction was the central 
 truth of the new propaganda. Rather it was the 
 Risen Christ.^ Not a resurrected body, but an 
 
 ^ " The apostolic conception of the Resurrection is rather 
 'The Lord lives/ than 'The Lord was raised.'" Bishop 
 Wescott, quoted by Canon Hensley Henson in the Hibbert 
 Journal^ April, 1904. 
 
 [ 142 ] 
 
Christ Risen 
 
 imperishable Person saved the world. Peter, in 
 his Pentecostal speech, revealed the secret of the 
 resurrection when he said of Christ : " Whom God 
 raised up, having loosed the pangs of death : be- 
 cause it was not possible that he should be holden 
 of it." A personality too vital to be held by death 
 — it was He whom the Church adored and whom 
 the world could not withstand. 
 
 Here, too, lies the secret of Paul's emphatic 
 resurrection-teaching. To be a Living Christ his 
 Lord must be a Risen Christ, — this he cannot too 
 ardently affirm. " If Christ hath not been raised, 
 then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain." 
 Although to Paul the Risen Christ involves the 
 fact of a resurrection, it is not upon the fact that 
 he places the emphasis, but upon the person who 
 overcame death and led captivity captive. It is he 
 without whom Christianity is disabled, 
 and not the mere external fact of the transcends 
 
 . . . the Event 
 
 resurrection, much less the manner, 
 evidences and accessories of resurrection, upon 
 which theology has been far too prone to dwell.^ 
 True, each of the Gospels presents a circumstantial 
 account of the events attending the resurrection, 
 but it is a narrative of experiences rather than a 
 presentation of evidence. For that very reason it 
 is, in some respects, all the better evidence. The 
 vivid human touches that make up the account 
 are the quickened and memorable impressions that 
 ^ See Harnack's History of Dogma^ Vol. I, p. 85. 
 [M3] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 attend a great experience rather than intentionally 
 gathered testimonies. The disciples were sure of 
 him risen. That was enough. He still lived — it 
 was this that set their hearts throbbing, and sent 
 them forth with the gospel message. The fact 
 that each saw him risen but none saw him rise, 
 itself indicates that the emphasis belongs upon the 
 person rather than upon the miracle involved. It 
 is possible to believe in the actual resurrection of 
 Jesus (as, for example, with such a theory as that 
 of Stapfer ^) without assuming the literal resump- 
 tion by Christ of the crucified body, although all 
 such theories create as many difficulties as they 
 remove. The out-and-out miracle is as reasonable 
 a supposition as any. But, miracle or no miracle, 
 the emphasis does not belong there, but upon 
 the Christ, who so stamped the reality of his risen 
 personality upon the mind of men that it never 
 has been, and apparently never will be, effaced. 
 The Christ survives all theories of the resurrection. 
 He is risen indeed ! 
 
 II 
 
 Christ himself has been too long obscured by 
 his miracles, particularly by that of the resurrection. 
 
 1 " He arose on the third day, but it was not the flesh 
 that formerly lived that returned to life; it was a spiritual 
 and celestial body coming forth from the material and earthly 
 body which died on the cross." See American Jourttal of 
 Theology^ July, 1900. 
 
 [ 144] 
 
Christ Rise7i 
 
 Apologetics has raised so great a dust about this 
 event that it is difficult for the face of the risen 
 Sun of Righteousness to shine through. " The 
 apologist who seeks to refute skepticism by demon- 
 strating the resurrection as the * most certain of all 
 historical events,' and arguing back to the divinity 
 of the mission and character of Jesus, inverts the 
 method in which revelation was historic- 
 
 11 • A Ml 111 Christianity 
 
 ally given. ... A man will not be able to does not rest 
 
 on a Mirac- 
 
 accept this most mysterious of all super- uious occur- 
 natural manifestations, if he has not first 
 been led up, as the disciples were, to find the 
 supernatural in the life and person of Jesus; to find 
 it, that is, in a form in which it can be verified by 
 human experience." ^ To rest the whole weight of 
 Christianity upon the provableness of a single 
 historical event, to make the resurrection the artic- 
 tilus stantis aiit cade?itis eccksiae^ is to entrust it 
 to a support too slender to bear the strain. The 
 evidence for the reality of the Person, Jesus Christ, 
 is absolute and conclusive; the evidence for the 
 external fact of his resurrection is necessarily 
 much less conclusive. It is sufficient only when 
 kept in immediate connection with his unique 
 character and personality. 
 
 Evidence is inevitably influenced by personality. 
 If the same amount of evidence were brought for- 
 ward to prove the resurrection from the dead of 
 
 ^ Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience^ 
 p. 157, 3d ed. 
 
 10 [ 145 ] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 Theudas, or Simon the Sorcerer, as of Jesus Chrtst, 
 who of us would accept it? It makes all the dif- 
 ference in the world of what sort of a person a 
 given act is alleged. It would take a prodigious 
 deal of evidence to convince us that certain per- 
 sons whom we know had done a great deed of 
 self-sacrifice ; of others we would believe it upon 
 the merest hearsay.^ If you were informed that 
 Thomas Edison had invented a success- 
 or evidence ful fiyinc: machine you would be pre- 
 
 affectedby , , ,. . , .- ,, 
 
 the person in- pared to behcvc it, but if you were told 
 that your neighbor's boy, who does not 
 know enough to make a kite, had done so, you 
 would ask to see the machine first. It is unscien- 
 tific to demand the same degree of proof for the 
 resurrection of Jesus Christ as would be required 
 for that of John Smith or Tom Jones. If you ask 
 a man to believe in the resurrection of Jesus who 
 does not first believe in Jesus, you ask an unrea- 
 sonable thing. Nor would it greatly concern us if 
 it were proved that John Smith did rise from the 
 dead — except as a remarkable phenomenon. But 
 if Jesus rose, each of us is intimately concerned, 
 because of that personality which makes him racial 
 and representative and by virtue of which we may 
 say, with St Paul, If He rose I shall rise also. 
 
 * See article by Canon Henson in the Hibbert Journal^ 
 April, 1904. 
 
 [.46] 
 
Christ Risen 
 
 III 
 
 The return of emphasis from the mere external 
 fact of the resurrection to the Risen Christ is one 
 of the marked tendencies of contem- p„„v,„„., ,.„ 
 
 Kmpnasis is 
 
 porary Christianity. The Ritschhan JSiTiLen*" 
 school has done much to promote this ^^"^^ 
 change. Placing Christ at the helm of history, 
 Ritschlianism holds that the resurrection of Christ 
 ** is the completion of the revelation made in him, 
 which not only absolutely corresponds with, but 
 necessarily results from, the worth of his Person." ^ 
 But this subordination of the resurrection of Christ 
 to his Person has become much wider and more 
 pervasive than the tenets of any one school. " A 
 clear distinction has been discerned," says Dr. 
 James M. Whiton, " between the real resurrection 
 of Jesus — his rising from the mortal state into 
 the immortal — and his phenomenal resurrection 
 in the visible world. So conservatively orthodox a 
 writer as Dr. G. D. Boardman goes so far as to 
 say: * After all, the real question is not, Did 
 Christ's body rise? That is but a subordinate, 
 incidental issue.' The real question, as Dr. Board- 
 man admits, is, * Whether Christ himself is risen 
 and is alive to-day.' " ^ As the Church at large 
 gradually comes back to this earlier and truer 
 perspective, the physical resurrection will come 
 
 ^ The Ritschlian Theology^ Garvie, p. 224. 
 
 * Miracles and Supernatural Religion^ p. 115. 
 
 [147] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 more and more universally to be regarded as of 
 minor moment in comparison with the Risen Christ, 
 who proves the resurrection far more than the 
 resurrection proves him. 
 
 IV 
 
 The Risen Christ convinced the disciples of his 
 identity. Does he convince us? Is he " natural," 
 — as depicted in the narratives, — one with the 
 Christ of Galilee and of the upper chamber? The 
 Risen Christ portrayed in the Gospels is the same 
 Jesus, and yet not wholly the same. Had he been 
 too much shadow, or too much substance, the 
 disciples would have doubted, and so would we. 
 But, not so. He is so much the same 
 
 The Rcsur- , t • i /■ , i 
 
 rectiononeof as to be himsclf, and yet too much 
 
 the three , , ' , , , 
 
 Births of chaugcd not to have passed through 
 death. The transition is not a mere re- 
 turn to previous limiting conditions. The old 
 limitations are gone. He comes and goes at will, 
 with the freedom of the Spirit. Nor is the Risen 
 Christ in the same stage of self-development. 
 " According to the New Testament," says Dorner, 
 ** the resurrection is not merely Christ's justification 
 and his vindication, . . . but also an epoch of de- 
 velopment in his person." ^ It is a bold conception, 
 but not without foundation. We instinctively feel 
 that the Risen Christ of the Gospels, while he is at 
 one with the pre-resurrection Christ, has passed on 
 * System of Christian Doctrine, Vol. IV, p. 134. 
 
 [.48] 
 
Christ Risen 
 
 into a wider amplitude of personality and a wider 
 scope of activity. The ancient Church spoke of 
 the resurrection as one of the three births of 
 Christ.^ As such, the resurrection introduces Christ 
 to an ampler sphere of being. He becomes a 
 still richer and more productive personality. His 
 character is just as human and winsome, his con- 
 tact just as intimate and loving as of old, and yet 
 there is a closer converse with the spiritual, a richer 
 self-realization, purities, potencies, pleromas that 
 awaken fresh love and reverence. His salutation, 
 as he enters the room, breathes a vital serenity, as 
 of another realm, and his presence stirs 
 a still deeper faith. To fix firmly in the sus cor- 
 
 poreity 
 
 minds of the disciples the identity of 
 this new selfhood with that of the Jesus with whom 
 they were so familiar, was the constant endeavor 
 of the Risen Christ. If he appears to lay undue 
 stress upon his physical body, his hands, his feet, 
 his side, it is that he may convince the disciples of 
 his identity, not of his corporeity. His one aim is 
 to assure them that this is his very self. 
 
 Thus does the Risen Christ accentuate and am- 
 plify the Christ personality. The resurrection as 
 an external event is absorbed and lost Resurrection 
 sight of in the resurrection as a stage, a prV|?eLso^* 
 waymark in the progress of this expand- ^*'"^* 
 ing Spirit, " machinery just lent, to give the soul 
 
 1 Dorner, System of Christian Doctritie^ Vol. IV, p. 134, 
 note. See Col. 1:18. 
 
 [■49] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 its bent." In the light of the Risen Christ it is 
 easy to understand those words in the Fourth 
 Gospel, so enigmatical at the time they were 
 spoken: "I am the resurrection, and the life." 
 Here is the utterance of a consciousness so vital, 
 so puissant, so triumphant, that it scorns death 
 and sees resurrection only as a phase, a process in 
 its own invincible, outflowing life. Just as surely 
 as this Soul, this Consciousness, this Person whom 
 we call Jesus Christ, is understood in his real 
 strength and supremacy, just so surely the con- 
 viction follows that he could not be holdcn of 
 death, but that the crucified Christ must needs 
 become the Risen Christ. 
 
 [ISO] 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY i 
 
 OF 
 
 XIX 
 
 CHRIST RETURNING 
 
 As the mind of the Church grows more sensitive 
 and discerning in its understanding of Jesus, it 
 becomes increasingly conscious of a dis- ^j^^ discord- 
 cordant note, an inherent self-contra- theG^s^pJS 
 diction, in the Gospel representation of symphony 
 him. For many years past this disharmony has 
 been thought to lie in an irreconcilable discrepancy 
 between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel. 
 But a more mature study of the Fourth Gospel 
 and a more thoughtful comparison of it with the 
 Synoptics shows that this diagnosis has been too 
 hasty. The point at which the real divergence 
 occurs, where the picture of our Lord fails to be 
 true to itself, is that at which Jesus is made to 
 reverse and confute all his previous teaching con- 
 cerning himself and his kingdom and, exchanging 
 the spiritual for the material, the eternal for the 
 eschatological, to descend to the Jewish level of 
 thought and expression, and enwrap himself in the 
 tinsel trappings of his time and people. I refer to 
 the discourse known as " The Last Things." ^ It is 
 1 Matt. 24 and 25 ; Mark 13. 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 safe to say that for the discerning and devout dis- 
 ciple of Jesus to-day it is impossible to read these 
 chapters in the first Gospels without an ever-deep- 
 ening sense of disappointment and incongruity. 
 Instead of the simplicity, the sanity, the spirituality 
 of the Sermon on the Mount, the Parables, the 
 words at the Last Supper, here are extravagance, 
 literalism, apocalypticism. This Jesus seated out- 
 side the walls of Jerusalem is another Jesus from 
 him of the Galilean hills and lakeside, as well as of 
 the upper room. 
 
 I 
 
 The Jesus who speaks in the thirteenth of Mark 
 and the twenty-fourth of Matthew is not the Jesus 
 Thespcctac "^^^ takcs farcwell of his disciples at the 
 sitriuiVsec- Paschal mcal, in the searching spiritual 
 ond Coming language of the Fourth Gospel. The 
 two accounts as they stand are mutually incompat- 
 ible representations of himself and of his kingdom. 
 In the Synoptic discourse Jesus represents his 
 return as external, cataclysmic, spectacular, — " on 
 the clouds of heaven with power and great glory" ; 
 in the Johannine, he represents his return as invisi- 
 ble and spiritual, — "I come unto you," " Ye in me, 
 and I in you." * Between these two representations 
 
 ^ Of the two allusions to a Second Coming in this Gospel 
 (14:3 and 16: 22) the first refers to the entrance of the disci- 
 ple into the future life — *' tliat where I am, there ye may 
 be also" — and the second to the reappearance of Christ 
 after his resurrection. 
 
 [■sO 
 
Christ Returning 
 
 we must choose. Shall we do so upon the mere 
 basis of the priority of the Synoptic tradition or 
 upon the deeper ground of inherent superiority 
 and self-consistency? Which of the two represen- 
 tations coincides best with Jesus' previous teaching, 
 with his character, with his attitude toward Jewish 
 ideas, with his approach to the cross, his conduct 
 upon trial, his outlook upon the world and his 
 estimate of its forces? Upon such principles of 
 choice there can be no hesitation. We turn inevi- 
 tably from the Jesus of the Advent discourse of the 
 Synoptics, unnatural, provincial, predictive, to the 
 Jesus of the last discourse in the Fourth Gospel, 
 familiar, sane, spiritual. In Him we recognize the 
 true, ever-living, ever-returning Lord. 
 
 This preference for the latter tradition by no 
 means requires the Johannine authorship of the 
 Fourth Gospel (although, in the absence of suffi- 
 cient data, the Johannine tradition is too strong 
 to be lightly set aside), nor does it require the 
 acceptance of the discourse at the Last Supper 
 as the ipsissima verba of Christ. It simply re- 
 quires that which such scholars as Wendt and 
 Harnack concede, that this is a genuine and 
 trustworthy representation of the mind of Christ, 
 from the view-point of a disciple of rare spiritual 
 insight. 
 
 [iS3] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 II 
 
 Nor is it simply the Johannine account of the 
 returning Christ with which the representation con- 
 The Kingdom talncd in the discourse on the Last 
 fhVpoAent"'* Things conflicts. // is entirely out of 
 ^^^^^^"^^^^^harmony^alsOf with the earlier representa- 
 tioiis of the Synoptic narratives themselves. The 
 kingdom parables, so characteristic of the first two 
 Gospels, can with difficulty be reconciled with the 
 lurid pictures of the second coming of this dis- 
 course. The kingdom cannot be like a mustard- 
 seed, or leaven hid in the meal, and at the same 
 time be preluded by heavens shaking and stars 
 falling. No ; the earlier part of the Synoptic 
 tradition, in the main, coincides with the Johannine 
 in representing Jesus as from first to last, ethical 
 and spiritual in his attitude, relying upon spiritual 
 truths, spiritual forces, spiritual methods. It is 
 hardly loyal to him to conceive him at the end as 
 renouncing this for materialistic Jewish concep- 
 tions and programs. The case is one of united 
 preponderating Synoptic and Johannine tradition 
 versus a single alien section of Synoptic narrative.^ 
 It is hardly an exaggeration to assert that the 
 
 * It is true that there are other detached references which 
 seem to convey the same external, material conception, as, 
 for example, Mark 8 : 38-9 : i. But this is an allusion to the 
 Daniel passage and is a merely figurative expression of his 
 coming recognition. 
 
 [IS4] 
 
Christ Returning 
 
 issue amounts to this : Was Jesus true to himself 
 to the last, or not? That he was thus faithful 
 to his higher purpose, everything goes to prove. 
 The Risen and Ascending Christ is still true to his 
 earlier teaching and attitude. His words are of 
 witness-bearing, the enduement of the Spirit and 
 of his own unfailing, unseen Presence, and not 
 of his speedy return. It is only the two men in 
 white apparel who reassert the temporal external 
 eschatology that so misled the early Church. 
 
 Ill 
 
 How, then, account for this strange stratum, this 
 incongruous element, in the sayings of Christ? It 
 is possible, of course, to apply heroic The probable 
 treatment to the narrative, and, even SeLal^Dis- 
 without external warrant of any sort, *^°""* 
 cut out these alien passages as belonging to an 
 impure Jewish tradition. But that would leave the 
 universal expectation of the Second Coming in 
 the Early Church too far unexplained. It is much 
 more reasonable to conjecture that Jesus uttered a 
 prophecy, in his own manner, of things to come 
 which was so misunderstood and distorted by the 
 medium through which it passed, as to produce a 
 false and misleading perspective and impression. 
 Modern scholarship has made it possible for us 
 to disentangle, somewhat, the confusion of these 
 words as reported, and form a reasonable conjec- 
 ture concerning their purport. Three main threads 
 [■55] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 of coherent prediction appear running through 
 the highly colored fabric of the prophecy : — 
 ( I ) the approaching destruction of Jerusalem 
 with the consequent disintegration of the Jewish 
 nation — a catastrophe which Jesus clearly antici- 
 pated; (2) the turbulence of the world history 
 as it lay before his vision; (3) the marked and 
 triumphant effect which his own cause was to have 
 among the forces of history. In this triumph he 
 himself was to be personally present as Leader.^ 
 The chief object of the whole prophecy seems to 
 have been to make the disciples observant, watch- 
 ful, active. In this prophecy he again made use of 
 the passage from Daniel from which he may have 
 selected his own title, and which, better than any 
 other Old Testament prophecy, furnished the key to 
 the true nature of his own kingdom, as contrasted 
 with other great world forces and movements. 
 Unless conservative scholarship has entirely mis- 
 read Jesus, he used this apocalyptic passage from 
 Daniel symbolically and not literally, whereas 
 the disciples, the Apostolic Church and the great 
 majority of Christians in all the ages since, have 
 accepted the words as a literal description of the 
 
 * ** For Jesus, the idea of his second coming to execute 
 judgment and to consummate salvation was equivalent to the 
 certainty of the continuance of his Messianic significance in 
 the kingdom of God in spite of his death." Wendt, Teachings 
 ofjesus^ Vol. II, p. 283. But it was more than Messianic 
 significance ; rather. Messianic leadership. 
 
 [■S6] 
 
Christ Eeturning 
 
 manner of his second coming. No more flagrant 
 instance of the bondage of the letter is to be found 
 in history. And yet, it is not difficult to see that 
 in the providence of God this misconception of a 
 speedy Second Advent really helped on an unde- 
 veloped and short-sighted Christianity to take its 
 infant steps until it could bear more light, take 
 wider visions, and form larger conceptions. 
 
 IV 
 
 But if, brushing aside the confusions and mis- 
 understandings of the discourse as we have it, we 
 break through symbol and figure to the Christ's man 
 real meaning of the Master, what do we ^^^^''^s 
 find it to be? Is there to be a return of Christ? 
 If so, what manner of parousia is it? No satisfac- 
 tory answer is possible save that which has been 
 slowly dawning upon the Church through the un- 
 folding of history and the progress of Christianity, 
 namely, that the return of the King is unseen and 
 spiritual, like the kingdom itself. Thus has Christ 
 been not only a Living Christ but a Returning 
 Christ. Thus has he been returning from the day 
 of his ascension to this. Thus did he return to his 
 own generation at Pentecost, at Antioch, at Corinth. 
 In power and great glory he descended to trans- 
 form the Roman Empire, and to become King of 
 the nations of the West. He returned at the Refor- 
 mation to resume his lordship over the Church. 
 At the Great Awakening he sent forth his angels 
 [>57] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 to gather his elect from the four winds. At the 
 rise of the modern missionary movement the Bride- 
 groom came and they that were ready went in with 
 him to the marriage feast. In the release of the 
 slaves, the reconstruction of prisons, the coming 
 of the era of hospitals and homes, every unclouded 
 eye saw him. In the modern social movement he 
 
 is the real Leader. The truth of the Re- 
 already tummg Christ IS thc truth that not only 
 
 is he with his own always, but that he 
 comes to humanity in ever fresh measures and un- 
 expected manners to save, and further save, and 
 yet further save, humanity. 
 
 And not only has the Christ been returning in 
 power and great glory in all the Christian centuries, 
 
 but still more is he to return in the 
 
 years that are before. They are right 
 who believe that Christ has already come. They 
 are most right who believe that he is yet to come. 
 Unto the purifying of the Church he is to come, 
 unto the redemption of society, the overthrow of 
 wrong, the universalizing of opportunity, the fed- 
 eration of the nations, the eternal triumph of peace 
 and righteousness and love, he is to come. Even 
 so, come, Lord Jesus ! 
 
 And still to 
 come 
 
 [158] 
 
XX 
 
 CHRIST AND SOCIAL REDEMPTION 
 
 Is the Christocentric theology in touch with mod- 
 ern life? Has it a message for the time? This is 
 its ultimate test. We are in the whirl The Final 
 and ferment of a period of social recon- "^^^^ 
 struction, in which — however blind the average 
 man may be to the fact — not only ethics but the- 
 ology is deeply involved. Has the Christocentric 
 theology any cogent and vital contribution to make 
 toward the settlement of the problems that press 
 upon us? 
 
 Manifestly one of the foremost requisites of social 
 progress is a right and true conception of the struc- 
 ture of society. If men are held together 
 
 ^ ** Is there a Di- 
 
 by nothing more than physical depend- vine Purpose 
 ences, utilitarian motives, material ad- 
 vantages, the future of humanity is dark — a long 
 vista of clashes and readjustments — with, at the 
 best, nothing in the end but superficial progress, 
 material gains, greater comforts, finer facilities, an 
 apocalypse of conveniences and advantages, in- 
 
 [•59] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 dustrial truce, social stratification, but no vision 
 of human brotherhood, universal peace and good- 
 will, world-wide righteousness and love. With a 
 future limited to material progress, it is an open 
 question whether society is worth perpetuating, 
 whether the game is worth the candle. But if 
 humanity is grounded in a divine purpose and is 
 capable of indefinite progress in true worthiness, 
 if society can become a true mutuality of love and 
 sympathy, then the face of our problem is wholly 
 changed, a great hope takes possession of us, a 
 vision of spiritual splendor attends us: 
 
 " Order, courage, return, 
 Eyes rekindling, and prayers. 
 
 On, to the bound of the waste. 
 On, to the City of God." i 
 
 Unless society were constituted in a divine order, 
 it could never have reached even its present state 
 Yea; for the °^ advancement. Nothing but the sense 
 " obugati^' o^ moral obligation could possibly have 
 reveals jt brought men on into an ordered and 
 secure state of society. The beavers have their 
 colonies, the bees their hives, but there is no im- 
 provement in organization and structure from one 
 millennium to another. Man has not remained 
 stationary, and cannot This sense of obligation, 
 controlling man's growing intelligence as well as 
 his imperious appetites and ambitions — what is it? 
 
 1 Matthew Arnold, Rugby Chapel. 
 [i6o] 
 
Christ and Social Redemption 
 
 whence is it? The great consensus of mankind has 
 been that it issues from a divine Source. Latter-day- 
 attempts to find the genesis of the moral sense in a 
 source no higher than custom and convenience have 
 not been successful. Men are deeply conscious 
 that here, in the sense of Duty, is something that 
 comes from above and beyond themselves. 
 
 The Christocentric theology comes forward with 
 the declaration that the sense of obligation is not 
 merely an instinct implanted by God in the soul, 
 but that it is the living will of God in the soul — 
 the Christ of conscience — that by virtue of this 
 common divine indwelling every man is of worth 
 and can become a true son of God, and that society, 
 possessing this universal divine Presence, is con- 
 stituted in God and can and will develop into God- 
 likeness. 
 
 The older theology, with its emphasis upon the 
 divine sovereignty, with its denial of the worth of 
 all unregenerate virtue and of the presence of 
 Christ outside the pale of the Church, 
 
 ^ . , . 1 1 r 1 A Theology 
 
 and with its wreckage plan oi redemp- for social 
 
 , - . Redemption 
 
 tion, had no adequate theory of society, 
 no true conception of the relation of humanity to 
 Christ, either genetically or historically. It is im- 
 possible for Roman Catholicism, with its institu- 
 tionalism; or Calvinism, with its pessimism; or 
 Arminianism, with its individualism ; or Unitarian- 
 ism, with its naturalism, to grasp the idea of social 
 redemption. Not one of the theologies of the past 
 [ i6i ] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 has had breadth and power enough to realize the 
 fundamental relation of Christ to society, in its very- 
 nature and constitution, or to embrace humanity as 
 a whole in the scope of the divine purpose. The 
 kingdom of God is alien to them all. It is only 
 a theology that dares put Christ at 
 
 The Principle , , t . r i 
 
 of Social the very center and heart of humanity 
 
 Redemption , /. , . . . , - 
 
 that founds society on a principle deep 
 enough and firm enough to uphold the walls of 
 a city of God on earth. Nothing but a Christo- 
 centric theology will convince the world that life 
 itself, in its every part and relation, is sacred, 
 spiritual, and belongs to God, and that whatsoever 
 society does in word or in deed can and should be 
 done in the name of the Lord Jesus, who is its 
 Heart and Soul. 
 
 II 
 
 Not only does the Christocentric theology fur- 
 nish a principle for social redemption, but a motive. 
 Nothing will inspire an enduring enthu- 
 
 The Motive . /* , f^ • ^ • i r 
 
 for Social siasm for humanity, a victorious love for 
 
 Redemption ... 
 
 men, except the conviction that every 
 man is of inestimable worth to God and to human- 
 ity, that there is something in the individual man, 
 as well as something in humanity as humanity, that 
 is of exceeding and eternal value. For that con- 
 viction the Christocentric theology supplies a basis 
 in the conception of the Indwelling Christ, who is 
 in all men, giving to each his individual worth and 
 
 [162] 
 
Christ and Social Redemption 
 
 to humanity as a whole its splendor and possibility. 
 To free this divine life, this Christ within each and 
 within the whole, and make him dominant by 
 means of the appeal of the Christ of history, — 
 this is the joyous task of Christianity ; not to make 
 humanity divine, — for it is that already, potentially, 
 — but to bring out and make regnant the Divine 
 within it. 
 
 Beside principle and motive for social redemp- 
 tion, therefore, the Christocentric theology also 
 furnishes means. — by availing itself of 
 
 , , - . ' ^ ^, . The Means 
 
 the definite and concrete redemption for social 
 
 ... Tx. ^1 ' TT Redemption 
 
 afforded in the Historic Christ. Here 
 lies its power.i It believes in revelation as well as 
 immanence, in the Christ of Calvary as well as the 
 Christ of conscience, in the Son of man as well as 
 the eternal Logos. And in the Living Christ, as 
 he fulfils and potentializes the Indwelling Christ, 
 it finds the only sufficient Redeemer of humanity. 
 Lacking such a historical revelation, we should be 
 without convincing assurance of the divine purpose 
 and love and without adequate leadership in social 
 redemption. 
 
 ^ " There is no question in the world so vital as this of the 
 spiritual power. The temperance question, the sexual ques- 
 tion, the war question, the Irish question, the negro question, 
 the question of labor, the question of the proletariat and other 
 such are most grave and pressing. But none of them are so 
 grave and deep in the long run as the question of the spiritual 
 power." P. T. Forsyth, Report of Second International 
 Congregational Council^ p. 62. 
 
 [163] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 III 
 
 Inspiring and impelling as is the man Jesus, 
 as such alone he would be insufficient to accom- 
 plish the redemption of humanity. The reduction 
 of Jesus to the level of ordinary humanity and the 
 corresponding deification of humanity as suffi- 
 cient to attain its own salvation apparently results 
 in stagnation of effort. To make God a laborer 
 together with man, instead of man a laborer to- 
 gether with God, is stultifying. It needs 
 ceSeredThe- ^ God-infuscd religion, a Christ-centered 
 .de^uJJcfor theology, to stir men to devoted action 
 dcmptioS' ^or social salvation, for world redemp- 
 tion. The great social redemption move- 
 ment of England and America, not only in its 
 evangelistic phases, but in social reform and social 
 settlement has been, in the main, grounded in 
 a Christ-exalting theology. Maurice, Kingsley, 
 General Booth, Arnold Toynbee, and the men who 
 have reproduced their spirit and deeds in America, 
 have had a great faith in Jesus Christ, and in spirit 
 always, if not always in method, have made him 
 central in motive and in aim. The great mission- 
 ary enterprise, the noblest and most fruitful advance 
 toward social redemption in modern times, has been 
 Christ-animated and Christ-directed. 
 
 Around personality converge all problems, all 
 tasks, all hopes. And the Christ Personality alone 
 is sufficient to meet them. " Jesus imparted new 
 
 [164] 
 
Christ and Social Redemption 
 
 values to things: He scattered new thoughts 
 broadcast in the world. But it was only His per- 
 son that gave these new values and these new 
 thoughts that victorious power which transformed 
 the world." ^ 
 
 1 Paul Wernle: The Beginnings of Christianity^ Vol, I, 
 P-37. 
 
 [i6s] 
 
XXI 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST 
 
 The most marked characteristic of modern reli- 
 gious life is undoubtedly the breaking down of the 
 old division between the sacred and the secular, 
 the Church and the world. The fact is patent; it 
 needs no demonstration. What does it signify? 
 
 When an earnest and observant soul looks out 
 into the world about him and tries to gauge its 
 moral and spiritual status, he becomes deeply per- 
 plexed. He is met by an inextricable confusion, 
 an interblending of righteousness and unrighteous- 
 ness, of selfishness and unselfishness, of faith and 
 The World unfaith, which leaves him bewildered. 
 Prophet's ^^ times he is optimistic and filled with 
 ^'■°" hope ; at times he is tempted to reecho 
 
 the severe and solemn verdict of John Henry New- 
 man : " If I looked into a mirror and did not see 
 my face, I should have the same sort of feeling 
 which actually comes upon me, when I look into 
 this living, busy world and see no reflection of its 
 Creator. . . . The sight of the world is nothing 
 else than the prophet's scroll, full of lamentation and 
 mourning and woe." ^ This is the earnest outcry 
 
 ^ Apologia Pro Vita Sua. 
 [ i66 ] 
 
The Kingdom of Christ 
 
 of a soul very jealous for God, and yet it is, after 
 all, a narrow judgment. It fails to take account of 
 the good that lies embedded in the life of the world, 
 running like a vein of gleaming gold through its 
 otherwise worthless strata. The gold is unmined 
 and may not be ecclesiastically marketable, but it 
 is there nevertheless, and — though his stamp may 
 not yet be upon it — it is God's. 
 
 I 
 
 " To see life steadily and see it whole *' ^ — that 
 alone will give the true perspective. And the more 
 steadily and comprehensively one views life, the 
 more clearly do two convictions shape themselves 
 out of its confusions and contradictions. 
 
 *-r.i /-••!• f Eternity 
 
 The first is that into the very structure at the Heart 
 
 . ry r y-r ' r - of Things 
 
 and fiber of life, its necessary function- 
 ings, its common cares, its inevitable ongoings, are 
 wrought sacred possibilities and symbols, — poten- 
 cies, disciplines of an eternal order. Toil, sleep, the 
 daily meal, home duties, community life, trade, 
 study, religious and civic relations — all the obliga- 
 tions, services, and dependences that make up the 
 warp and woof of daily life are in themselves holy 
 and beautiful and capable of such educative and 
 fruitful discipline, such harmony and holiness, that 
 the man of insight who has caught the true mean- 
 ing of life cannot rest content with the common- 
 place, sordid world in which the majority of men 
 
 ^^^^- 1 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 [167] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 There is one, and but one, conception command- 
 ing and comprehensive enough to express and 
 embody the highest ideal of human society, and 
 that is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of 
 God is no less than the world transformed into the 
 medium and expression of the divine life, — the 
 home, the state, the church, business, society, edu- 
 cation, literature, art, everything, become the organ 
 and instrument of God's downreaching and man's 
 upreaching life. Denied, disclaimed, thrust aside, 
 neglected, as this ideal of a perfect God-filled human 
 society has been, humanity is smitten to the heart 
 with its goodliness. Men in all generations have 
 dreamed of a Golden Age to come. The prophets 
 of Israel stretched suppliant hands to God for its 
 advent. The Christian Church saw the Holy City, 
 New Jerusalem, descending out of God from heaven. 
 Poets have sung the coming glory and reformers 
 have suffered and died that it might be hastened. 
 In one form or another the ideal has been growing 
 clearer, more real, more certain. Jesus gave it its 
 fairest form, its noblest description, its strongest 
 impulse, when he called it the Kingdom of God 
 and described it as the pearl of great price, the 
 treasure hid in the field, the seed growing into a 
 great and goodly tree. This Kingdom is at hand, 
 he said to men ; it is among you ; seek it, serve it, 
 realize it. 
 
 It is only in our own time that the true character 
 and scope of the Kingdom has come to be fully 
 [i68] 
 
The Kingdom of Christ 
 
 recognized. Heretofore the seeker after God, the 
 man of ideals, has thought to find God and fashion 
 his character apart from the world, in « Not that 
 the hermitage, the monastery, the church. shoSidest 
 Now he sees that he can win the ideal SJtVfthT 
 only /;/ the world, as he finds God in its ^°^^'^" 
 commonest duty and experience and fills the whole 
 sphere of life with the endeavor to find his pres- 
 ence and realize his will. 
 
 And yet how far are we from the Kingdom still ! 
 The ancient, bitter denunciations of the world even 
 now speak a partial truth. How sodden is busi- 
 ness still, — business which ought to be the very 
 means and instrument of human intercourse and 
 fellowship; how selfish is trade, how infamous 
 politics, how self-seeking and unaspiring literature, 
 how artificial society, how imperfect and worldly 
 the Church ! How near is the Kingdom, yet how 
 far! 
 
 II 
 
 Thus there grows up within us the second con- 
 viction, as strong and as clear as the first, that, ex- 
 cept by the power and grace of God, 
 the kingdom of God, the redemption of kingi!>m 
 
 . . T • come" 
 
 human society can never come. It is 
 his Kingdom ; he alone can bring it to pass. Again 
 and again men have tried to establish this ideal for 
 themselves, by means of their own human effort 
 alone. Utopias, revolutions, reforms, communisms, 
 
 [169] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 democracies, socialisms, — how hopefully have 
 they been instituted, how hopelessly have they 
 failed ! Human nature is too impotent and too viti- 
 ated to succeed of itself. A great cloud of dis- 
 appointment and dismay has been slowly gather- 
 ing over the hearts of those who watch for the 
 coming of the Kingdom because America has so 
 far failed to realize the hope of humanity. Munici- 
 pal evils, legislative corruption, industrial strife, 
 social estrangement, spiritual lethargy, — are these 
 the fruits of the civilization begun in such promise 
 and consecration in this virgin Western world? Is 
 humanity to go on forever at " this poor, dying 
 rate "? Is the world never to roll on into the light 
 of the Golden Age of human brotherhood and 
 peace? It does not satisfy the eager heart of hope 
 to be reminded of the progress already made, and 
 of the necessarily slow and gradual gains by which 
 alone advance in higher life is made. God can 
 surely do more for his children, after two thousand 
 years of Christianity, than this ! 
 
 Ill 
 
 What, then, if men should learn at last to rec- 
 ognize their own impotence and to rely upon God? 
 What if the heart of humanity should turn and 
 become again as the heart of a little child? What 
 if a wide-spread dissatisfaction with material pros- 
 perity, with ease and pleasure and selfishness, 
 
 [170] 
 
TJu Kingdom of Christ 
 
 should come over our twentieth century clvih'za- 
 tion, — a great longing for righteousness and faith? 
 Would the coming of the Kingdom delay and halt 
 as at present? Would not the Golden Age be 
 ushered in and humanity come at last to its own? 
 Some such longing and hope as this seems to 
 be stirring in the hearts of many throughout 
 Christendom to-day, based upon the conviction 
 that political reform and industrial improvement 
 and social betterment are not enough, indeed that 
 they are not possible in any real way, without a 
 regeneration that goes deeper than ex- 
 
 ^ , , , r t "Thine is the 
 
 ternal wrongs and defects and renews kingdom, and 
 
 1 r *^® power, 
 
 the very heart of the individual and of andthegiory, 
 
 ^ forever" 
 
 society. Nothing of power and per- 
 manence can come in social redemption so long as 
 we continue to make of God an Adjunct, an Assist- 
 ant, an Abettor of humanity in the struggle for 
 progress, and of Christ simply a Teacher, a Type, a 
 Helper, to our ends. This is a self-exaltation of 
 humanity, an affront to the divine Being, a per- 
 version of the eternal order, which can result only 
 in futility and disaster. Only the attitude of faith, 
 of humihty, and of service which alone befits man, 
 can prepare him for his part, as a servant of God, 
 in bringing in that Kingdom which God withholds 
 only because man is unprepared to receive it. 
 
 God, not man, is the Author of the Kingdom. 
 If man has dreamed of it, portrayed it, struggled 
 for it, it is only because God has given him the 
 ['7'] 
 
Christ and the Eternal Order 
 
 vision, furnished him the motive, supplied him with 
 the strength. And if God is the Author and End 
 of the Kingdom, God in Christ is the Soul of it. 
 Central within it, furnishing the concrete personal 
 leadership without which it can never reach fulfil- 
 ment, is the Living Christ. It is he who occupies 
 the throne of the Kingdom, not in God's stead, 
 not as his representative, but as the revelation of 
 himself in his human aspects and kinship. Serv- 
 ing this King, one serves not only the King of 
 kings, but the King of all kingdoms, earthly and 
 celestial. 
 
 It is the very presence and grace of God, felt 
 and recognized, not only as a pervasive conscious- 
 ness but as a concrete reality in Christ, 
 name of the which givcs this ideal of the Kingdom 
 
 Lord Jesus" ... , ^ . 
 
 mclusiveness and effectiveness, mcentive 
 and momentum, while other social ideals fade and 
 fail. To make Jesus Christ Lord of trade, of in- 
 dustry, of art, of education, of science, of literature, 
 of all human pursuits and enterprises, — this is the 
 way to bring each to highest fulfilment and to re- 
 late each rightly to all other human interests. This 
 is the summum bonum of human society, the way 
 out of chaos to order, out of discord and evil and 
 imperfection, to harmony, holiness, and happiness. 
 
 IV 
 
 But if this Kingdom were simply a consumma- 
 tion, a climax, a coral island lifted out of the 
 
The Kingdom of Christ 
 
 waters of oblivion upon the sacrificial deposit of 
 those who lived not to share its blessing, it could 
 be neither a truly human nor a truly .. ^j^^^ ^^^^ 
 divine Kingdom. It needs to embrace Soum nofbe 
 humanity, to include all generations; it "^^^^p^"**^*" 
 needs that men come from the East and from the 
 West to sit down within it and share its fulfilled 
 joy. It must needs be, that is, not only historical 
 but eternal, not only earthly but heavenly. Such 
 is the New Testament representation. 
 
 The beginnings of the Kingdom reach far back 
 of history, of humanity, back into the heart of 
 Eternal Love, creating all things, purposing all 
 things, before all time, through the Eternal Word 
 of Wisdom. The builders of the Kingdom — how 
 they multiply upon our vision through the receding 
 generations, a vast army, each one who obeys the 
 Divine Will, the eternal Christ within him, making 
 his contribution to the great structure that has 
 risen through the ages, and within which, in its 
 completion, all shall be gathered who have aided, 
 however slightly, in its construction ; and we know 
 not how many more. For the kingdom is human- 
 ity's Kingdom, and the Christ is humanity's Christ 
 
 [173] 
 
APPENDIX 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 I 
 
 HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE CHRISTO- 
 CENTRIC THEOLOGY! 
 
 Primitive Christian life and thought were Christocen- 
 tric. To the disciples, Jesus was all in all. Paul found 
 in Christ not only the absorbing passion of his life, but 
 the power of God, and the wisdom of God, unto salva- 
 tion. The author of the Fourth Gospel, in his profound 
 meditation, found himself impelled to associate Jesus 
 with the formative Principle of creation and the Light 
 that lighteth every man coming into the world. The 
 Greek theology, finding the nexus of philosophy and 
 Christianity in this Logos doctrine, conceived Christ as 
 the incarnate Reason that illumines the universe. Origen 
 centered his rich and radiating system of theology in 
 Christ. Athanasius, touching a deeper and more ethical 
 spring, found in Christ's eternal Sonship not only the 
 clue to the nature of God and of humanity, but also the 
 link binding the two together. The Antiochian theology 
 followed the Nicene in concentrating its thought upon 
 Christ. 
 
 But with the rise of Western Christianity the doctrine 
 of the centrality of Christ sank into subservience to that 
 of the divine sovereignty as set forth by Augustine. The 
 
 ^ Reprinted, by permission, from The Bibliotheca Sacra^ 
 July, 1905 
 
 12 [177] 
 
Appendix 
 
 Augustine of the " Confessions " is centered upon Christ, 
 but the Augustine of the " City of God " is absorl)ed 
 in the problem of the Church and the ground of its 
 primacy. " It almost seems," says Professor Allen, " as 
 though, if Christ were left out altogether, the scheme of 
 Augustine would still maintain its consistency as a whole 
 and retain its value as a working system." ^ Augustin- 
 ianism was perpetuated by Calvinism. The authority of 
 the Church in Catholicism, and of the Bible in Protes- 
 tantism, inevitably obscured the supremacy of Christ. It 
 was not until, through the combined agency of philoso- 
 phy, science, and Biblical criticism, Christianity was 
 released from the bondage of authority, that a day 
 dawned for the free reconstruction of Christology, and 
 the reassertion of the Christocentric faith. 
 
 It is instructive to watch the current of a new move- 
 ment in the realm of thought widen and deepen. One 
 can see, by anticipation, spiritual fields fertilized and 
 mill-wheels turned by it, if it be of sufficient force and 
 significance. Such interest unquestionably attaches to 
 the modem movement toward the Christologizing of 
 theology, the rereading of the universe in terms of the 
 consciousness of Christ. 
 
 If we ask through whom this movement, in its modem 
 form, took its rise, the name of Friedrich Schleiermacher, 
 that great revivifier of spiritual theology, takes prece- 
 dence of all others. " His it was to make Christ and 
 his redemption the center of one of the most skilfully 
 developed systems of theology which the Christian 
 Church has known," said Henry B. Smith, in his An- 
 dover address on ** Faith and Philosophy." The move- 
 
 1 Continuity of Christian Thought^ p. 158. 
 
 [178] 
 
Appendix 
 
 ment which Schleiermacher thus instituted was carried 
 forward by many able successors, among them Schweizer, 
 Neander, Rothe, and, above all, he whose motto was 
 " Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom 
 and knowledge," Isaac August Dorner. The latter's 
 monumental work, "The Doctrine of the Person of 
 Christ," completed in 1856, together with his constant 
 insistence upon the " universal significance of Christ " as 
 "the productive archetype" and "objective historical 
 center" of the higher Hfe, exerted great influence in 
 shaping thought in the direction of the person of Christ. 
 
 The movement thus begun has progressed with char- 
 acteristic distinctions in Germany, France^ England, and 
 America. 
 
 In England, Coleridge, Thomas Arnold of Rugby, 
 and Frederick D. Maurice prepared the way for a truer 
 conception of Christ, — as did Thomas Erskine and 
 McLeod Campbell in Scotland, by exorcising scholas- 
 ticism and formalism from theology, especially from 
 Christology, and insisting upon sincerity and reality as 
 the absolute prerequisites of a genuine theology. From 
 the day that Maurice, with his searching, iconoclastic 
 sincerity, thus cleared the way for a genuine Christology, 
 religious thought in Great Britain has converged more 
 and more toward the person of Christ. " Ecce Homo " 
 (1863), Robertson's "Sermons," and the "Lives of 
 Christ" of Edersheim, Giekie and Farrar helped in various 
 ways to promote this cause. Liddon's Bampton Lectures 
 on " Our Lord's Divinity," R. W. Dale's writings, A. B. 
 Bruce's "Apologetics" and "Humiliation of Christ," 
 have all furthered the movement. At the present time, 
 the Christocentric theology, as represented in the 
 Establishment by Canon Gore, and among the Free 
 [ 179 ] 
 
Appendix 
 
 Churches by Principal Fairbaim, is unquestionably the 
 vital and dominant theology. In addition to Canon 
 Gore's work on the " Incarnation," and Principal Fair- 
 bairn's "Place of Christ in Modern Theology" and 
 "Philosophy of Christianity," this movement has given 
 us " Lux Mundi," and James Orr's comprehensive and 
 scholarly volume, " The Christian View of God and the 
 World," with its able exposition of the principle that the 
 person of Christ is " necessarily central in his own religion, 
 nay, in the universe." Upon the same lines are work- 
 ing, with great enthusiasm tempered by fine scholarship, 
 D. W. Forrest, — whose work on *'The Christ of His- 
 tory and of Experience," is one of the most suggestive 
 contributions to the discussion, — J. R. lUingworth, Rob- 
 ert Horton, Principal Forsyth, and others who are leading 
 the religious thinking of Great Britain to-day. 
 
 Returning to Germany, whatever may be said in criti- 
 cism of the theological apostasy of Ritschlianism, with 
 its motto, " Back to Christ," it is assuredly a Christo- 
 centric movement. Christ is its chiefest Werthurthdl. 
 In so far, at least, it is apostolic in its character, and 
 should win from every earnest Christian the Pauline 
 thanksgiving for all means by which, in whatever way, 
 Christ is proclaimed. Hermann and Kaftan center 
 theology in Christ; and Hamack himself — that electric 
 battery of present-day theology — (though in his own 
 way) is essentially Christocentric in his position. " Har- 
 nack is not less convinced than Ritschl of the uniqueness 
 and originality of Jesus Christ. If we ask where we are 
 to find the essence of Christianity, Hamack answers in a 
 word. In Jesus Christ and in his gospel." ^ 
 
 * William Adams Brown, Essence of Christianity^ p. 281. 
 
 [ 180 ] 
 
Appendix 
 
 America has not been wanting in her appreciation of 
 the significance of the Christocentric movement, nor in 
 her contributions to its advancement. Henry B. Smith 
 was the prophet of the movement in this country, and as 
 early as 1849, in the remarkable address already alluded 
 to, lifted high and clear the banner of the new theology 
 in the memorable words, " Christianity is not only an 
 historic revelation and an internal experience, but also an 
 organic, diffusive, plastic, and triumphant force in human 
 history ; and in this history, as in the revelation and in 
 the experience, the center round which all revolves is the 
 person of Jesus Christ." But it was not given to Henry 
 B. Smith to work out the large conclusions of this far- 
 sighted inspiration. Before that could be accomplished, 
 it was necessary that some one should do in America 
 a work analogous to that of Maurice in England, and 
 restore to Christology reality and freedom. That was 
 the part so nobly played, and at such cost, by Horace 
 Bushnell. Next to the works of Bushnell, probably no 
 theological treatise in this country has been at once 
 so emancipatory and constructive as Elisha Mulford's 
 " Republic of God." 
 
 The history of the Christocentric movement in America 
 is too fresh and familiar to need repetition. The princi- 
 ple and motive of it received a comprehensive statement 
 from Professor Egbert C. Smyth, in the initial number 
 of The Andover Review ^ in which he wrote : " God is 
 revealed in Christ. The possibility, the unity, the unifi- 
 cation, of a science of theology are given in him and in 
 him alone." 
 
 As the wider Christocentric movement has advanced, 
 it has won for itself here, as in Great Britain, the alle- 
 giance of many of the keenest and most active minds, 
 
 [181] 
 
Appendix 
 
 both in pulpit and seminary chair. Dr. George A. Gordon 
 is one of its most earnest advocates. President A. H. 
 Strong, Dr. A. H. Bradford, and Dr. VVm. Newton Clarke 
 have in various ways interpreted the Christocentric the- 
 ology. The late lamented Professor Stearns of Bangor 
 enthusiastically adopted it in his inaugural, and reaffirmed 
 it in his address before the London International Council. 
 President King, in his notable volumes, " The Recon- 
 struction of Theology " and " Theology and the Social 
 Consciousness," has made a most valuable contribution 
 to Christology. Dr. McConnell's ** Christ," a book at 
 once stimulating and superficial, takes the Christocentric 
 position. The number of Lives of Christ that have 
 appeared within the last twenty years, and are still ap- 
 pearing, evidences the unflagging interest in the historic 
 Christ. Professor William Adams Brown, of Union 
 Seminary, in his timely volume, " The Essence of Chris- 
 tianity," — a clear and effective study in theology, — 
 states the conclusion of his research as follows : *' Would 
 we express in a sentence what makes the genius of Chris- 
 tianity as a historic religion, we cannot do so better than by 
 saying that it is the progressive realization, in thought as 
 in life, of the Supremacy of Christ." 
 
 By far the largest constructive and carrying power in 
 the Christocentric school at present belongs to the work 
 of Principal Fairbairn in England, and of Dr. George A. 
 Gordon in this country. The former, upon a canvass of 
 such magnitude as only he can cover, has given us such 
 a presentation of the " architectonic " nature of Chris- 
 tianity, as it centers in Christ, — its range, its significance, 
 its supremacy, as it is related to other religions and to 
 racial needs, — as affords to Christianity a new concep- 
 tion of its commission and conquering power as the 
 
 [182] 
 
Appendix 
 
 universal religion. The latter, Dr. Gordon, in "The 
 Christ of To-day," " The New Epoch for Faith," and 
 *' Ultimate Conceptions of Christianity," has given us a 
 no less inspiring interpretation of the intensive, as con- 
 trasted with the extensive, relation of Christ to human 
 life and to our civilization, which He has so permeated 
 that it can neither understand itself nor realize its ends 
 apart from Him. 
 
 Sufficient evidence has been adduced, perhaps, to in- 
 dicate how wide-spread, how vital, and how thoroughly 
 an outgrowth of our own period, is this renewed Chris- 
 tologizing of theology.^ That it has for many years been 
 recognized as the dominating principle of modern theol- 
 ogy is witnessed by the statement of Professor Fisher, 
 when, at the close of his " History of Doctrine," in 
 summing up the present doctrinal situation, he concludes : 
 ** The question of the implication of Christ's person and 
 work forms the rubrics of the modern theological system." 
 
 1 How far this revival of interest in Christology is a mod- 
 ern tendency may be seen by noting the proportionate place 
 given to Christology in a comprehensive system of theology 
 of an earlier day, such as Hodge's, which consists of three 
 large volumes : I. Theology; II. Anthropology; HI. So- 
 teriology and Eschatology. 
 
 [183] 
 
II 
 
 THE VITAL ISSUES OF THE HARNACK 
 CONTROVERSY 
 
 In the field of theology and philosophy, certain books 
 serve successively as conflict centers, by means of which 
 opposing parties define and test one another. Such a 
 book is Hamack's " What is Christianity ? " It is 
 admirably adapted to arouse interest and provoke con- 
 troversy. Candid, perspicuous, positive, pertinent, fasci- 
 nating in style, filled with the fruits of ripe scholarship 
 and strenuous thinking, it is not surprising that it has 
 stirred theological stagnation as no book of the century 
 has thus far done. It has interested theological students, 
 shocked Sunday-school teachers, stimulated preachers, 
 roused theologians from their " dogmatic slumbers," and 
 drawn the attention of thoughtful minds outside the 
 Church back to the fundamental problems of theology, 
 in a remarkable way. 
 
 There has been a general effort to " place " the book, 
 — to apperceive it. Is it orthodox or heterodox, sound 
 or dangerous, trustworthy or biased ? Over this problem 
 the Church has, for four years and more, been puzzling. 
 Meanwhile appreciation, endorsement, criticism, and at- 
 tack have been multiplying. 
 
 In estimating the real tendency and significance of 
 Professor Hamack's statement of the essence of Chris- 
 tianity, two criticisms are of special value as coming from 
 
 [.841 
 
Appendix 
 
 contrasted Christian standpoints — Professor Hermann 
 Cremer's " Reply to Harnack " and Alfred Loisy's " The 
 Gospel and the Church." 
 
 The controversy regarding Hamack's representation 
 of the essence of Christianity {Das Wesen des Christes- 
 thums) resolves itself in the light of criticism and in 
 perspective into two issues : ( i ) as to the method of 
 finding the essence of Christianity and (2) as to what is 
 that essence. 
 
 (i) In order to determine the true essence of Chris- 
 tianity, Harnack maintains, it is necessary to go back to 
 the primitive gospel itself, in its purity and simplicity. 
 Very ably and adroitly has M. Loisy, taking the law of 
 evolution as his apologetic principle, argued, in refuta- 
 tion of Harnack, that Christianity is to be understood 
 only in the whole process and product of its develop- 
 ment. " The full life of the gospel," he asserts, " is 
 not in a solitary element of the doctrine of Jesus, but 
 in the totality of its manifestation, which starts from the 
 personal ministry of Christ, and its development in the 
 history of Christianity." ^ This would be convincing if 
 the history of Christianity had been pure development. 
 But, such it has not been. Degeneration has all too 
 plainly accompanied evolution ; the purity of the gospel 
 has been stained by contact with a corrupting environ- 
 ment ; the normal course of development has been de- 
 flected and distorted by opposition and obstacle; the 
 essential and vital truth has been overlaid with extra- 
 neous and irrelevant accretions. Not that there has not 
 been development, pure and progressive ; but in order 
 to trace this it is necessary to disentangle it from false 
 
 1 The Gospel and the Church, p. 115. 
 
Appendix 
 
 forms and from extraneous issues, and, above all, to get 
 back as nearly as possible to the source and spring from 
 which the movement started. This Harnack endeavors 
 to do. 
 
 " Herr Harnack," writes Loisy, " does not conceive 
 Christianity as a seed, at first a plant in potentiality, 
 then a real plant, identical from the beginning of its 
 evolution to the final limit and from the root to the sum- 
 mit of the stem, but as a fruit, ripe, or rather over- 
 ripe, that must be peeled to reach the incorruptible 
 kernel ; and Herr Harnack peels his fruit with such per- 
 severance that the question arises if anything will re- 
 main at the end." ^ It is strange that M. Loisy makes 
 no allusion to the fact that this is precisely what Har- 
 nack, in so many words, had said that he should not do. 
 " We must not be like the child, who, wanting to get at 
 the kernel of a bulb, went on picking off the leaves until 
 there was nothing left, and then could not help seeing 
 that it was just the leaves that made the bulb. En- 
 deavors of this kind are not unknown in the history of 
 the Christian religion, but they fade before those other 
 endeavors [with what prescience he here forestalls Loisy] 
 which seek to convince us that there is no such thing as 
 either kernel or husk, growth or decay, but that every- 
 thing is of equal value and alike permanent." * 
 
 " But did not Harnack peel the bulb, nevertheless ? " 
 it will be asked. That is the question — whether he 
 peeled the bulb, or simply peeled off the dead and useless 
 integument in which it is encased. 
 
 (2) Although in his "preliminary" pages Harnack 
 makes several statements, in which he seems to present 
 
 ^ The Gospel and the Churchy p. 19. 
 * What is Christianity? second edition, p. 16. 
 [.86] 
 
Appendix 
 
 the person of Jesus Christ as the center of the gospel, 
 when he comes to state more precisely the essence of 
 the gospel, we find that he makes it consist in the Father- 
 hood of God ; as revealed, not so much through the 
 character and personality of Christ, as through his 
 knowledge of God — a knowledge such as no one be- 
 fore him ever had. " Rightly understood, the name of 
 Son means nothing but the knowledge of God." ^ For a 
 basis of this theory of revelation, Harnack relies upon 
 the saying, " No one knoweth the Son, save the Father ; 
 neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he 
 to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him." 
 
 Very clear and simple a Christology is this, but also 
 very limited. Is it the Christology of Christ himself? 
 Manifestly not, if we accept the sayings in the Fourth 
 Gospel as in any sense reflecting the mind of Christ. 
 For there Jesus gives a prominence to his personality 
 which makes loyalty to him involve far more than a mere 
 keeping of his commandments. Nor is this the Chris- 
 tology of Paul, nor of the New Testament as a whole. 
 
 It is impossible to measure Harnack without reckoning 
 with Ritschl. It is in the Ritschlian denial of the right 
 of reason to interpret the facts of history and experience 
 — in other words, its attempt to taboo " metaphysical 
 theology " — that we find the secret of Harnack's impov- 
 erization of the gospel. "Thou hast nothing to draw 
 with, and the well is deep," says Ritschlianism to him 
 who seeks to know more of Christ than lies upon the 
 surface of the Synoptic narrative. " Here all research 
 must stop," ^ proclaims Harnack with the same restrictive 
 dogmatism. But the author of the Fourth Gospel could 
 
 1 What is Christianity f second edition, p. 138. 
 * Ibid. p. 139. 
 
 [•87] 
 
Appendix 
 
 not stop here, neither could Paul, nor the unknown writer 
 of the Hebrews, nor the Apologists, nor Athanasius, nor 
 Augustine, nor Thomas Aquinas, nor the Mystics, nor the 
 Reformers, nor the Cambridge Platonists, nor Jonathan 
 Edwards, nor Horace Bushnell, nor Maurice, nor Fair- 
 bairn, nor Gordon, nor Loisy. Strongly, steadily, 
 persistently, this development of the New Testament 
 Christology has gone forward throughout the course of 
 Christian history, in tireless response to Jesus* own ques- 
 tion : " What think ye of the Christ? whose son is he? " 
 If the development has been in the main a baseless and 
 fruitless one, the Church has gone far astray and has 
 much to unlearn. 
 
 But such a conclusion is not likely to be reached. 
 The Pauline conception of Christ is deeply seated in the 
 heart of the Church ; though no Christology is adequate 
 for its full expression. It is not strange, therefore, that 
 such a protest as that of Professor Cremer — undiscrim- 
 inating, unordered, ineffective, but genuine — flames up 
 from the faith of the older Protestantism to challenge 
 Harnack ; while from the side of Catholicism emanates 
 the scholarly, judicious criticism of Loisy, condemned 
 for that very scholarship which is its strength. 
 
 No defect in Harnack's Christology, however, can 
 nullify the freshening and stimulating value of his work. 
 The limitations of his Christology the Christian com- 
 munion will gradually recognize and fill up ; his clarifying 
 and glowing treatment of historic Christianity it will prize 
 and utilize. More than that. In the re-jelation of the 
 Divine Fatherhood^ Harnack has certainly discerned the 
 heart of the gospel. That tnith is reached, as Harnack 
 expressly maintains, through Christ. This is Christianity 
 and it is historic Christianity. It is as distressing as it is 
 [■88] 
 
Appendix 
 
 surprising, therefore, to find Professor Charles A. Briggs 
 asserting : " The solution which Harnack gives is de- 
 structive to historic Christianity. He gives a Christianity, 
 as his German critics rightly say, without Christ. He 
 gives a Christianity to which a Jew or a Mohammedan 
 or any monotheistic Oriental would find little difficulty 
 in subscribing." ^ Such a superficial judgment is most 
 misleading. As a matter of fact, neither Mohammedan- 
 ism, nor Judaism, nor any other Oriental monotheism 
 ever found the universal Fatherhood of God, in the 
 intimate sense in which Harnack defines it. If any 
 Oriental monotheist of to-day has found the Fatherhood, 
 in the full sense of the word, he has found it, mediately 
 or immediately, through Christ. 
 
 To understand Hamack's real estimate of Christ and 
 the place which his personality occupies in the gospel, 
 it is necessary to supplement this volume with such an 
 utterance as that contained in his lecture on " Christian- 
 ity and History," delivered before the Evangelical Union 
 of Berlin, in 1895. In this lecture he discusses the rela- 
 tion of the personality of Jesus to history. To quote but 
 a single sentence : " When God and everything that is 
 sacred threatens to disappear in darkness, or our doom is 
 pronounced ; when the mighty forces of inexorable nature 
 seem to overwhelm us and the bounds of good and evil 
 to dissolve ; when, weak and weary, we despair of finding 
 God at all in this dismal world — it is then that the 
 personality of Christ may save us." ^ The import and 
 emphasis of such declarations are unmistakable in their 
 ringing accord with historic evangelical Christianity. 
 
 No, Harnack has taken the true method and reached 
 
 5^ 1 The Expositor^ April, 1905. 
 
 \ * Translation by T. B. Saunders, p. 47. 
 
 [189] 
 
Appendix 
 
 the real essence of Christianity, only he has failed to 
 recognize the true character and claim of the Mediator 
 through whom he reached it. The medium through 
 which he has seen the truth is so transparent and perfect 
 that he is unaware of it. In order to look through Christ 
 to the Father, he forgets that he had first to look at him. 
 He has not seen the Sonship for the Fatherhood. He is 
 like one who, finding himself in the Holy of holies, forgets 
 the Holy place through which he has entered ; or, if he 
 does not forget it, regards it only as a vestibule, a pene- 
 traUf and not as a part of the Inner Temple. 
 
 UNIVER ^ 
 
 [ 190] 
 
S^r.Soro'MU^enod^ . 
 
 SEP 30 iy3o 
 
 oot 
 
 3 
 
 160c'57RC 
 RECD LD 
 NOV U 1957 
 
VB (3163