First alternative—A Divine Christ or humanitarianism.

Second alternative—A Divine Christ or Agnosticism.

Third alternative—A Divine Christ or Pessimism.

II. The upward movement from Pessimism to Christ.

Unsatisfactoriness of Pessimism as a theory of existence—it works back to Theism.

The alternative of Pantheism—its degradation to Materialism.

The nobler movement—elevation to Theism.

Theism impels to belief in Revelation.

Recognition in modern systems of idea of Revelation.

Inadequacy of modern theory of Revelation.

Vocation of Israel; Christ the highest Revealer.

Summary—Theism can only secure itself through belief in Christ.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE II.

The Pessimism of Scepticism.—

LECTURE III.

The Theistic Postulate of the Christian View.—

Introductory—

Christianity a theistic system.

The strength of Christian Theism—its connection with Revelation.

This first postulate of the Christian view—how related to modern thought?

I. The negation of the Christian view.

The Agnostic negation—why so regarded?

1. It negates the Christian view of God as self-revealing.

2. The denial of evidence of God’s existence tantamount to denial of His existence.

Mr. Spencer’s admission of the Ultimate Reality or Power; criticism of his view.

Development of the system by Mr. Fiske into Theism.

II. Positive evidence for the Christian view.

1. Concessions of the evolutionary philosophy.

The term “Personal” as applied to God.

2. This theoretic “proofs” for the existence of God—how far valid?

(1) The cosmological argument.

The religious experience corresponding to this proof—the consciousness of absolute dependence.

LECTURE I.

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF THE WORLD IN GENERAL.

Introductory

I Might briefly define the object of the present Lectures by saying that they aim at the exhibition, and, as far as possible within the limits assigned me, at the rational vindication, of what I have called in the title, “The Christian View of the World.” This expression, however, is itself one which calls for definition and explanation, and I proceed, in the first place, to give the explanation that is needed.

The Idea of the “Weltanschauung.”

A reader of the higher class of works in German theology—especially those that deal with the philosophy of religion—cannot fail to be struck with the constant recurrence of a word for which he finds it difficult to get a precise equivalent in English. It is the word “Weltanschauung,” sometimes interchanged with another compound of the same signification, “Weltansicht.” Both words mean literally “view of the world,” but whereas the phrase in English is limited by associations which connect it predominatingly with physical nature, in German the word is not thus limited, but has almost the force of a technical term, denoting the widest view which the mind can take of things in the effort to grasp them together as a whole from the standpoint of some particular philosophy or theology. To speak, therefore, of a “Christian view of the world” implies that Christianity also has its highest point of view, and its view of life connected therewith, and that this, when developed, constitutes an ordered whole.See Note A.—The Idea of the “Weltanschauung.”

To some the subject which I have thus chosen may seem unduly wide and vague. I can only reply that I have deliberately chosen it for this very reason, that it enables me to deal with Christianity in its entirety or as a system, instead of dealing with particular aspects or doctrines of it. Both methods have their advantages; but no one I think, whose eyes are open to the signs of the times, can fail to perceive that if Christianity is to be effectually defended from the attacks made upon it, it is the comprehensive method which is rapidly becoming the more urgent. The opposition which Christianity has to encounter is no longer confined to special doctrines or to points of supposed conflict with the natural sciences,—for example, the relations of Genesis and geology,—but extends to the whole manner of conceiving of the world, and of man’s place in it, the manner of conceiving of the entire system of things, natural and moral, of which we form a part. It is no longer an opposition of detail, but of principle. This circumstance necessitates an equal extension of the line of the defence. It is the Christian view of things in general which is attacked, and it is by an exposition and vindication of the Christian view of things as a whole that the attack can most successfully be met.

Everything here, of course, depends on the view we take of Christianity itself. The view indicated in the title is that which has its centre in the Divine and human Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. It implies the true Divinity as well as the true humanity of the Christian Redeemer. This is a view of Christianity, I know, which I am not at liberty to take for granted, but must be prepared in due course to vindicate. I shall not shrink from the task which this imposes on me, but would only at present point out that, for him who does accept it, a very definite view of things emerges. He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity. This forms a “Weltanschauung,” or “Christian view of the world,” which stands in marked contrast within theories wrought out from a purely philosophical or scientific standpoint.

The idea of the “Weltanschauung” may be said to have entered prominently into modern thought through the influence of Kant, who derives what he calls the “Weltbegriff” from the second of his Ideas of Pure Reason to which is assigned the function of the systematic connection of all our experiences into a unity of a world-whole (Weltganz).Kritik d. r. Vernunft, pp. 302ff. (Bohn’s trans., pp. 256 ff.). The references to Kant throughout are to Erdmann’s edition (1884). But the thing itself is as old as the dawn of reflection, and is found in a cruder or more advanced form in every religion and philosophy with any pretensions to a historical character. The simplest form in which we meet with it is in the rude, tentative efforts at a general explanation of things in the cosmogonies and theogonies of most ancient religions, the mythological character of which need not blind us to the rational motive which operates in them.Cf. Zeller Pre-Socratic Philosophy, pp. 88, 89 (Eng. trans.). With the growth of philosophy, a new type of world-view is developed—that which attempts to explain the universe as a system by the help of some general principle or principles (water, air, number, etc.), accompanied by the use of terms which imply the conception of an All or Whole of things (τὰ πάντα, κόσμος—attributed to the Pythagoreans—mundus, universum, etc.)See Note B.—Classification of “Weltanschauungen.” An example from ancient thought may be given from Lucretius, who, in his famous poem, “De Rerum Natura,” proposes “to discourse of the most high system of heaven and the gods, and to open up the first-beginnings of things, out of which nature gives birth to all things and increase and nourishment, and into which nature likewise resolves them back after their destruction.”Bk. I. L1. 54–57 (Munro’s trans.). Cf. Lucretius and the Atomic Theory, by Professor John Veitch, p. 13. The outlines of his system are well known. By the aid of certain first principles atoms and the void and of certain assumed laws of motion and development, he seeks to account for the existing universe, and constructs for himself a theory on the lines of Epicurus which he thinks satisfies his intellectual necessities. This is his Weltanschauung—the progeny of which is seen in the materialistic systems of the present day. A modern example may be taken from the philosophy of Comte, which, theoretically one of pure phenomenalism, only the more strikingly illustrates the necessity which thought is under to attempting some form a synthesis of its experience. Comte’s standpoint is that of despair of absolute knowledge. Yet he recognises the tendency in the mind which prompts it to organise its knowledge, and thinks it possible to construct a scheme of existence which shall give practical unity to life—imagination eking out the deficiencies of the intellect. In the words of a recent interpreter, “Beneath and beyond all the details in our ideas of things, there is a certain esprit d’ensemble, a general conception of the world without and the world within, in which these details gather to a head.”Caird’s Social Philosophy of Comte, p. 24. It would not be easy to get a better description of what is meant by a “Weltanschauung” than in these words. The centre of unity in this new conception of the universe is Man. Knowledge is to be organised solely with reference to its bearings on the well-being and progress of Humanity. A religion even is provided for the satisfaction of the emotional and imaginative wants of man in the worship of the same abstraction—Humanity, which is to be viewed with affection and gratitude as a beneficent providence interposed between man and the hard pressure of his outward conditions. In a moral respect the individual is to find his all-comprehensive end in the “service of Humanity.” Thus, again, we have a “Weltanschauung” in which knowledge and action are knit up together, and organised into a single view of life.

The causes which lead to the formation of “Weltanschauungen,” that is, of general theories of the universe, explanatory of what it is, how it has come to be what it is, and whither it tends, lie deep in the constitution of human nature. They are twofold—speculative and practical, corresponding to the twofold aspect of human nature as thinking and active. On the theoretical side, the mind seeks unity in its representations. It is not content with fragmentary knowledge, but tends constantly to rise from facts to laws, from laws to higher laws, from these to the highest generalisations possible.Cf. Strauss—“We proceed from the isolated circles of phenomena around us, from the stable basis and the elementary forces, to vegetable and animal life, to the universal life of the earth, from this to that of our solar system, and so ever further, till at last we have grasped the entire range of existence in a single representation; and this is the representation of the universe.—Der alte und der neue Glaube, p.150. Ultimately it abuts on questions of origin, purpose, and destiny, which as questions set by reason to itself, it cannot, from its very nature refuse at least to attempt to answer.“As science becomes more conscious of its problems and its goal, it struggles the more strenuously towards the region where physics melt into metaphysics.”—Fairbairn, Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and History, p. 88. Even to prove that an answer to them is impossible, it is found necessary to discuss them, and it will be strange if, in the course of the discussion, the discovery is not made, that underneath the profession of nescience a positive theory of some kind after all lurks.See Note C—Unconscious Metaphysic. But there is likewise a practical motive urging to the consideration of these well-worn questions of the why, whence, and whither? Looking out on the universe, men cannot but desire to know their place in the system of things of which they form a part, if only that they may know how rightly to determine themselves thereto“The question of questions for mankind the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other, is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature, and of his relation to the universe of things. Whence our race has come, what are the limits of our power over nature and of nature’s power over us? to what goal we are tending? are the problems which present themselves anew, and with undiminished interest, to every man born into the world. Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature. p. 57. Is the constitution of things good or evil? By what ultimate principles ought man to be guided in the framing and ordering of his life? What is the true end of existence? What rational justification does the nature of things afford for the higher sentiments of duty and religion? If it be the case, as the Agnostic affirms, that light absolutely fails us on questions of origin, cause, and end, what conception of life remains? Or, assuming that no higher origin for life and mind can be postulated than matter and force what revision is necessary of current conceptions of private morality and social duty?

It is a singular circumstance that, with all the distaste of the age for metaphysics, the tendency to the formation of world-systems, or general theories of the universe, was never more powerful than at the present day. One cause of this, no doubt, is the feeling which modern science itself has done so much to engender, of the unity which pervades all orders of existence. The naive Polytheism of pagan times, when every hill and fountain was supposed to have its special divinity, is no longer possible with modern notions of the coherence of the universe. Everywhere the minds of men are opening to the conception that, whatever else the universe is, it is one—one set of laws holds the whole together—one order reigns through all. Everywhere, accordingly, we see a straining after a universal point of view—a grouping and grasping of things together in their unity.Cf. Principal Fairbairn—“The search after causes, both efficient and ultimate, is being conducted with the most daring and unwearied enthusiasm. Science has become as speculative, as prolific of physico-metaphysical theories—as the most bewitched metaphysician could desire.. . . The consequent crop of cosmic speculation has been of the most varied and extensive kind, ranging from theories of the origin of species to theories as to the origin of the universe.”—Studies, pp. 65, 66. The philosophy of Mr. Spencer, for example, is as truly an attempt at the unification of all knowledge as the philosophy of a Hegel; the evolutionist is as confident of being able to embrace all that is, or ever has been, or will be—all existing phenomena of nature, history, or mind—in the range of a few ultimate formulas, as if he had already seen how the task was to be accomplished; the Comtist urges to an imaginative in default of a real and objective synthesis, and rears on this basis at once a social theory and religion. The mind, grows bolder with the advance of knowledge, and hopes, if not to reach a final solution of the ultimate mystery of existence, at least to bring thoroughly under its dominion the sphere of the knowable.”“No one can enter on a consideration of the subject of Evolution with the expectation of attending to clear ideas and relatively correct conclusions, unless he first of all thinks of it as cosmic, i.e. comprehensive, in its operation, of the entire universe of matter and mind, and throughout all time.”—Chapman, Pre-organic Evolution, etc., p. 3.

What now, it may be asked, has Christianity to do with theories, and questions, and speculations of this sort? As a doctrine of salvation, perhaps, not much, but in its logical presuppositions and consequences a great deal indeed. Christianity, it is granted, is not a scientific system, though, if its views of the world be true, it must be reconcilable with all that is certain and established in the results of science. It is not a philosophy, though, if it be valid, its fundamental assumptions will be found to be in harmony with the conclusions at which sound reason, attacking its own problems, independently arrives. It is a religion, historical in its origin, and claiming to rest on Divine Revelation. But though Christianity is neither a scientific system, nor a philosophy, it has yet a world-view of its own, to which it stands committed, alike by its fundamental postulate of a personal, holy, self-revealing God, and by its content as a religion of Redemption which, therefore, necessarily brings it into comparison with the world-views already referred to.Cf. Dorner, Syst. of Doct.i. p. 155 (Eng. trans.). It has as every religions should and must have, its own peculiar interpretation to give of the facts of existence; its own way of look in at, and accounting for, the existing natural and moral order; its own idea of a world—aim, and of that “one far-off Divine event,” to which, through slow and painful travail, “the whole creation moves.”Tennyson In Memoriam. As thus binding together the natural and moral worlds in their highest unity, through reference to their ultimate principle, God it involves a “Weltanschauung.”

It need not further be denied that between this view of the world involved in Christianity, and what is sometimes termed “the modern view of the world” there exists a deep and radical antagonism.Note D—Antagonism of Christian and “Modern” Views of the World. This so called “modern view of the world,” indeed, and it is important to observe it, is strictly speaking, not one view, but many view, a group of views—most of them as exclusive of one another as they together are of Christianity.Note E—Internal Conflicts of the “Modern” View. The phrase, nevertheless, does point to a homogeneity of these, various systems to a bond of unity which runs through them all and holds them together in spite of their many differences. This common feature is their thoroughgoing opposition to the supernatural,—at least of the specifically miraculous, their refusal to recognise anything in nature, life, or history, outside the lines of natural development. Between such a view of the world and Christianity, it is perfectly correct to say that there can be no kindredship. Those who think otherwise speculative Theists, e.g., like Pfleiderer can only make good their contention by fundamentally altering the idea of Christianity it self—robbing it also of its miraculous essence and accompaniments. Whether this is tenable we shall consider afterwards. Meanwhile it is to be noted that this at least is not the Christianity of the New Testament. It may be an improved and purified form of Christianity, but it is not the Christianity of Christ and His apostles. Even if, with the newer criticism, we distinguish between the theology of Christ and that of His apostles—between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John—between the earlier form of the synoptic tradition and supposed later embellishments—it is still not to be disputed that, in the simplest view we can take of it, Jesus held and acted on a view of things totally different from the rationalistic conception; while for him who accepts the view of Christianity indicated in the title of these Lectures, it has already been pointed out that a view of things emerges with which the denial of the supernatural is wholly incompatible.

The position here taken, that the question at issue between the opponents and defenders of the Christian view of the world at bottom the question of the supernatural, needs to be guarded against a not uncommon misconception. A good deal of controversy has recently taken place in regard to certain statements of Professor Max Müller, as to whether “miracles” are essential to Christianity.Cf. Max Müller, Preface to his Lectures on Anthropological Religion (Gifford Lectures), 1892. But the issue we have to face is totally misconceived when it is turned into a question of belief in this or that particular miracle—or of miracles in general—regarded as mere external appendages to Christianity. The question is not about isolated “miracles,” but about the whole conception of Christianity—what it is, and whether the supernatural does not enter into the very essence of it? It is the general question of a supernatural or non-supernatural conception of the universe. Is there a supernatural Being—God? Is there a supernatural government of the world? Is there a supernatural relation of God and man, so that God and man may have communion with one another? Is there a supernatural Revelation? Has that Revelation culminated in a supernatural Person—Christ? Is there a supernatural work in the souls of men? Is there a supernatural Redemption? Is there a supernatural hereafter? It is these larger questions that have to be settled first, and then the question of particular miracles will fall into its proper place. Neander has given admirable expression to the conception of Christianity which is really at stake, in the following words in the commencement of his History of the Church—“Now we look upon Christianity not as a power that has sprung up out of the hidden depths of man s nature, but as one that descended from above, when heaven opened itself anew to man’s long alienated race; a power which, as both in its origin and its essence it is exalted above all that human nature can create out of its own resources, was designed to impart to that nature a new life, and to change it in its inmost principles. The prime source of this power is He whose power exhibits to us the manifestation of it—Jesus of Nazareth—the Redeemer of mankind when estranged from God by sin. In the devotion of faith in Him, and the appropriation of the truth which He revealed, consists the essence of Christianity and of that fellowship of the Divine life resulting from it, which we designate by the name of the Church.”History of the Church i. p. 2 (Eng. trans.). It is this conception of Christianity we have to come to an understanding with, before the question of particular miracles can profitably be discussed.

While, from the nature of the case this side of opposition of the Christian view of the world to certain “modern” conceptions must necessarily receive prominence I ought, on the other hand, to remark that it is far from my intention to represent the relation of Christianity to these opposing systems as one of mere negation. This would be to overlook the fact, which cannot be too carefully borne in mind, that no theory which has obtained wide currency, and held powerful sway over the minds of men, is ever wholly false; that, on the contrary, it derives what strength it has from some side or aspect of truth which it embodies, and for which it is in Providence a witness against the suppression or denial of it in some countertheory, or in the general doctrine of the age. No duty is more imperative on the Christian teacher than that of showing that instead of Christianity being simply one theory among the rest, it is really the higher truth which is the synthesis and completion of all the other, that view which, rejecting the error, takes up the vitalising elements in all other systems and religions, and unites them into a living organism with Christ as head.Cf. Baring-Gould—“In every religion of the world is to be found, distorted or exaggerated, some great truth, otherwise it would never have obtained foothold; every religious revolution has been the struggle of thought to gain another step in the ladder that reaches to heaven. That which we ask of Revelation is that it shall take up all these varieties into itself, not that it shall supplant them; and show how that at which each of them aimed, however dimly and indistinctly has its interpretation and realisation in the objective truth brought to light by Revelation. Hence we shall be able to recognise that religion to be the true one, which is the complement and corrective of all the wanderings of the religious instinct in its efforts to provide objects for its own satisfaction.”—Origin and Development of Religious Belief, ii. Pref., p. 10. We are reminded of Milton’s famous figure in the “Areopagitica,” of the dismemberment of truth,—how truth was torn limb from limb, and her members were scattered to the four winds; and how the lovers of truth, imitating the careful search of Isis for the body of Osiris, have been engaged ever since in gathering together the severed parts, in order to unite them again into a perfect whole.Cf. Areopagitica, “English Reprints,” p. 56 Clement of Alexandria has a similar figure, Strom. i. 13. If apologetic is to be spoken of, this surely is the truest and best form of Christian apology—to show that in Christianity, as nowhere else, the severed portions of truth found in all other systems are organically united, while it completes the body of truth by discoveries peculiar to itself. The Christian doctrine of God, for example, may fairly claim to be the synthesis of all the separate elements of truth found in Agnosticism, Pantheism, and Deism, which by their very antagonisms reveal themselves as one-sidednesses, requiring to be brought into some higher harmony. If Agnosticism affirms that there is that in God—in His infinite and absolute existence—which transcends finite comprehension, Christian theology does the same. If Pantheism affirms the absolute immanence of God in the world, and Deism His absolute transcendence over it, Christianity unites the two sides of the truth in a higher concept, maintaining at the same time the Divine immanence and the Divine transcendence.Cf. Eph. iv. 6. Flint, Anti-Theistic Theories, p. 339. Even Polytheism in its nobler forms is in its own dark way a witness for a truth which a hard, abstract Monotheism, such as we have in the later (not the Biblical) Judaism, and in Mohammedanism, ignores—the truth, namely, that God is plurality as well as unity—that in Him there is a manifoldness of life, a fulness and diversity of powers and manifestations, such as is expressed by the word Elohim. This element of truth in Polytheism Christianity also takes up, and sets in its proper relation to the unity of God in its doctrine of Tri-unity—the concept of God which is distinctively the Christian one, and which furnishes the surest safeguard of a living Theism against the extremes of both Pantheism and Deism.Cf. Dorner, Syst. of Doct. i. pp. 366, 367 (Eng. trans.). Even Ed. v. Hartmann recognises the deep “metaphysical sense” of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the service done by it in reconciling the Divine immanence and transcendence.—Selbstzersetzung des Christenthums, p. 108. Optimism and Pessimism are an other pair of contrasts—each in abstraction an error, yet each a witness for a truth which the other overlooks, and Christianity is the reconciliation of both. To take a last example, Positivism a very direct negation of Christianity; yet in its strange “worship of Humanity” is there not that which stretches across the gulf and touches hands with a religion which meets the cravings of the heart for the human in God by the doctrine of the Incarnation? It is the province of a true and wise Christian theology to take account of all this, and to seek, with ever increasing enlargement of vision, the comprehensive view in which all factors of the truth are combined. The practical inference I would draw—the very opposite of that drawn by others from the same premises—is, that it is the unwisest way possible of dealing with Christianity to pare it down, or seek to sublimate it away, as if it had no positive content of its own; or, by lavish compromise and concession, to part with that which belongs to its essence. It is not in a blunted and toned down Christianity, but in the exhibition of the Christian view in the greatest fulness and completeness possible, that the ultimate synthesis of the conflicting elements in the clash of systems around us is to be found.

Relation of Christianity to world-theories.

This is perhaps the place to point out that, whatever the character of the world-view involved in Christianity, it is not one in all respects absolutely new. It rests upon, and carries forward to its completion, the richly concrete view of the world already found in the Old Testament. As an able expounder of Old Testament theology, Hermann Schultz, has justly said—“There is absolutely no New Testament view which does not approve itself as a sound and definitive formation from an Old Testament germ—no truly Old Testament view which did not inwardly press forward to its New Testament fulfilment.”Alttestamentliche Theologie, p. 48. This is a phenomenon which, I think, has not always received the attention it deserves. What are the main characteristics of this Old Testament conception? At its root is the idea of a holy, spiritual, self-revealing God, the free Creator of the world, and its continual Preserver. As correlative to this, and springing out of it, is the idea of man as a being made in God’s image, and capable of moral relations and spiritual fellowship with his Maker; but who, through sin, has turned aside from the end of his creation, and stands in need of Redemption. In the heart of the history, we have the idea of a Divine purpose, working itself out through the calling of a special nation, for the ultimate benefit and blessing of mankind. God’s providential rule extends over all creatures and events, and embraces all peoples of the earth, near and remote. In view of the sin and corruption that have overspread the world, His government is one of combined mercy and judgment; and His dealings with Israel in particular are preparative to the introduction of a better economy, in which the grace already partially exhibited will be fully revealed. The end is the establishment of a kingdom of God under the rule of the Messiah, in which all national limitations will be removed, the Spirit be poured forth, and Jehovah will become the God of the whole earth. God will make a new covenant with His people, and will write His laws by His Spirit in their hearts. Under this happy reign the final triumph of righteousness over sin will be accomplished, and death and all other evils will be abolished. Here is a very remarkable “Weltanschauung,” the presence of which at all in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures is a fact of no ordinary significance. In the comparative history of religions, it stands quite unique.See Note F.—Uniqueness of the Old Testament View. Speculations on the world and its origin are seen growing up in the schools of philosophy; but on the ground of religion there is nothing to compare with this. The lower religions, Fetishism and the like, have of course nothing of the nature of a developed world-view. The rudiments of such a view in the older nature-religions are crude, confused, polytheistic—mixed up abundantly with mythological elements. Brahmanism and Buddhism rest on a metaphysical foundation; they are as truly philosophical systems as the atomistic or pantheistic theories of the Greek schools, or the systems of Schopenhauer and Hartmann in our own day. And the philosophy they inculcate is a philosophy of despair; they contain no spring of hope or progress. Zoroastrianism, with its profound realisation of the conflict of good and evil in the universe, perhaps comes nearest to the religion of the Old Testament, yet is severed from it by an immense gulf. I refer only to its pervading dualism, its reverence for physical elements, its confusion of natural and moral evil—above all, to its total lack of the idea of historical Revelation.Cf. the sketch of Zoroastrianism in Introduction to the Zendavesta in Sacred Books of the East. See also Ebrard’s Christian Apologetics, ii. pp. 186–232. Some interesting remarks will be found in Lotze’s Microcosmus, ii. p. 459. The Biblical conception is separated from every other by its monotheistic basis, its unique clearness, its organic unity, its moral character, and its teleological aim.Dr. Dorner says—“Israel has the idea of teleology as a kind of soul.”—Syst. of Doct. i. p. 274 (Eng. trans.). It does not matter for the purposes of this argument what dates we assign to the books of the Old Testament in which these views are found whether we attribute them, with the critics to the age of the prophets, or to any other. These views are at least there many centuries before the Christian age began and they are found nowhere else than on the soil of Israel. This is the singular fact the critic has to face, and we cannot profess to wonder that, impartially studying it, voices should be heard from the midst of the advanced school itself unhesitatingly declaring, Date your books when you will, this religion is not explicable save on the hypothesis of Revelation!See Note G.—Origin of the Old Testament View—Relation to Critical Theories.

General drift and scope of the Lectures.

The general drift and object of these Lectures should now, I think, be apparent. From the conditions of this Lectureship I am precluded from directly entering the apologetic field. I feel, however, that it would be useless to discuss any important theological subject at the present day without reference to the thought and speculation of the time. No other mode of thought would enable me to do justice to the Christian position, and none, I think, would be so interesting to those for whom the Lectures are primarily intended. This, however, will be subsidiary to the main design of showing that there is a definite Christian view of things, which has a character, coherence, and unity of its own, and stands in sharp contrast with counter theories and speculations, and that this world-view has the stamp of reason and reality upon itself, and can amply justify itself at the bar both of history and of ex experience. I shall endeavour to show that the Christian view of thing forms a logical whole which cannot be infringed on, or accepted or rejected piecemeal, but stands or falls in its integrity, and can only suffer from attempts at amalgamation or compromise with theories which rest on totally distinct bases. I hope thus to make clear at least the true nature of the issues involved in a comparison of the Christian and “modern” views, and I shall be glad if I can in any way contribute to the elucidation of the former.

Christ, and we are not entitled to unchristianise any of them To identify the essence of Christianity with the Incarnation is, it is held, to make a particular dogmatic interpretation of Christianity equivalent to Christianity itself. It is not, indeed, among the extremer sceptics that we find any difficulty in getting the acknowledgment that the Incarnation is central in Christianity. “It is,” says Strauss, “certainly the central dogma in Christianity. Here the Founder is at the same time the most prominent object of worship; the system based on Him loses its support as soon as He is shown to be lacking in the qualities appropriate to an object of religious worship.”Der alte und der neue Glaube, pp. 43, 44. “In Him alone,” says Feuerbach, “is concentrated the Christian religion.”Das Wesen des Christenthums, p. 147 (Eng. trans.). Quite logically, from his point of view, Strauss draws the conclusion that, since the Incarnation is untenable, Christianity falls to the ground with it. But others will not go thus far. They distinguish between Christianity and its accidents, and put this doctrine in the category of the accidents. Nay, it is ostensibly in the interests of what is supposed to be a purer and more primitive form of Christianity that in many quarters the demand for the surrender of this doctrine is made. The cry is, “ Back from Christianity to Christ”—back from the Christianity of the creeds, from the Christianity even of Paul and John—to the Christ of the simple Galilean gospel, who never dreamt of making himself God. As Lessing, in a famous passage, distinguishes between “ the religion of Christ” and “the Christian religion,” meaning by the former the religion which Christ Himself professed and practised, and by the latter the superstructure of dogma subsequently reared on this,Cf. Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, i. p. 141 (Eng. trans.). so an analogous distinction is drawn between the Pauline and Johannine Christ, with His halo of supernatural attributes, and the meek and lowly Jesus, so intensely human, of the Synoptic Gospels.

Nevertheless, the ablest theology of the century will sustain me in the general assertion, that the central principle of Christianity is the Person of its Founder. Whatever may be thought of the great speculative movement in the beginning of the century, connected with the names of Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, it cannot be denied that at least it rendered an essential service to theology in overcoming the shallow rationalism of the preceding period, and in restoring to its place of honour in the Christian system the doctrine of Christ’s Person, which it had become customary to put in the background. Still more influential in this direction was the powerful impulse given to theology by Schleiermacher. Since that time all the best theology in Germany may be said to be Christological. That Christ sustains a different relation to His religion from that of ordinary founders of religion to the faiths they have founded; that in Him there was a peculiar union of the Divine and human; that His appearance and work were of decisive importance for the Church and for humanity—these are thoughts which may be said to be common to all the greater systems, irrespective of schools. They are found among theologians as widely separated in dogmatic standpoint tendency as Rothe and Dorner, Biedermann and Lipsius, Beyschlag and Ritschl, Luthardt and Frank. It is only outside the circles of really influential theology that we find a reversion to the loose deistic conception of Christ as simply a Prophet or moral Teacher, like Moses or Confucius or Buddha.See Note A.—The Central Place of Christ in His Religion. It is indeed a powerful proof of the view that the Person of Christ is of unique importance in His religion, that whenever a new breath of life passes over theology, and an attempt is made to gain a profounder apprehension of Christianity, there is a recurrence to this idea, and the necessity is felt of doing justice to it; thus testifying to the truth of Dorner’s remark, “A Christian system which is unable to make Christology an integral part of itself, has pronounced its own judgment; it has really given up the claim to the title of Christian.”Doct. of Person of Christ, v. p. 49 (Eng. trans.).

At the same time, this acknowledgment of the central and unique place of time Founder of Christianity in His religion does not settle the question of the precise estimate we are to take of His Person. Is He merely human, or is He Divine as well? Or if Divine, in what sense do we attach this predicate to Him? Is it, as with the Hegelians, the mere expression of a metaphysical idea—of that identity of the Divine and the human which is as true of all men as it is of Christ, only that it came first to clear consciousness in Him? Or is it, as with Ritschl, the mere expression of a value judgment of the believer—a predicate denoting the worth which Christ has for the believing soul as the supreme Revealer of God’s character and purpose? Or is it, as with others, an ethical Divinity that is ascribed to Christ—such participation in the Divine nature and life of Sonship as may be experienced also by the believer?Thus, e.g., Wendt in his Inhalt der Lehre Jesu. Or shall we hold, in agreement with the general faith of the Church, that Christ is more than all this—that in Him the Divine pre-existing Word truly and personally became incarnate, and made our nature His own—that therefore He is the Son of God, not simply as we are, but in a high and transcendental sense, in which we cannot compare ourselves with Him? This question, in the present state of controversy, is not so easily settled as might at first sight appear. It is vain, of course, to appeal to the great ecclesiastical creeds, for it is they which are in dispute. It is vain also, at this stage, to attempt to settle the question by the simple method of citation of proof texts. The facts of Christ’s self-revelation, and His witness to His own Person, must indeed, in the last resort, be the ground on which our faith in Him rests, and it will be necessary at a later stage to examine this self-witness of Christ, as well as the apostolic doctrine, with considerable care.Cf. Lecture VI. But at the outset this method is attended by obvious disadvantages. It is easy to say—the original documents of Christianity are before us; let us examine them. But, for one thing, some of these documents—the Fourth Gospel, e.g., and some of the Pauline epistles—are themselves in dispute among our opponents; and, even if genuine, their authority is not accepted as decisive. In the next place, there is the question, whether there are not traces of development in the doctrine of the Person of Christ even within the New Testament—whether all the sacred writers teach the same view. There are many, as I have already said, who will admit that Christ’s Divinity is taught by Paul and John, who would deny that it is taught by Christ Himself. These are difficulties which cannot be satisfactorily met by mere assertion, and the question recurs, whether—as a provisional expedient at least—any other course is open to us?

There is another method which I propose to apply in this Lecture, one which appears to me to have the advantage of dealing with all these issues at once, and at the same time deals with issues of a wider character. It is the method of appeal to history. The individual judgment may err in the opinions it forms, and in the conclusions it deduces from them. It is not given to any man to see all the consequences that follow from his own thinking. He may quite conceivably hold in the scheme of his beliefs propositions that are inconsistent with each other, and, if logically carried out, would destroy each other, and not be aware of the fact. In history things get beaten out to their true issues. The strands of thought that are incompatible with each other get separated; conflicting tendencies, at first unperceived, are brought to light; opposite one-sidednesses correct each other; and the true consequences of theories reveal themselves with inexorable necessity. As Socrates, in Plato’s Republic,Book ii. investigating the nature of Justice, proposes to study it first as “writ large” in the collective magnitude of the State, that thereafter he may return with better knowledge to the study of it in the individual, so the movements of thought are best studied on the broad scale in which they present themselves over large periods of time. It is to this test I propose to bring the great question of Christianity—the same that was proposed by Jesus to the Pharisees eighteen hundred years ago—“What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He?”Matt. xxii. I shall ask what aid history affords us in determining the true estimate to be put upon the Person of Christ, and the place held in the Christian system by the doctrine of the Incarnation.

It is one advantage of this method, that, as I have said, it brings all the issues into court at once. The verdict of history is at once a judgment on the answers which have been given to the theological question; on their agreement with the sum-total of the facts of Christianity; on the methods of exegesis and New Testament criticism by which they have been supported; on their power to maintain themselves against rival views; on how far the existence of Christianity is dependent on them, or bound up with them.

I. History a series of alternatives—the downward movement.

I. History, then, as it seems to me, presents us with a series of alternatives of a deeply interesting character, by studying which we may find our bearings on this question, “What think ye of Christ?” as we can in no other way.

1. First alternative—A Divine Christ or humanitarianism.

1. The first essential service which history has rendered us has been in the elimination of intermediate views—in making it clear as a first alternative that the real issue on this question is between a truly Divine Christ and pure humanitarianism. Intermediate views on Christ’s Person have from time to time arisen, and still go on arising, in the Church; but, like the intermediate species of plants and animals Mr. Darwin tells us of, which are invariably driven to the wall in the struggle for existence, they have never been able to survive. There is, e.g., the Arian view, which has appeared again and again in the history of the Church in times of spiritual decadence. To find a place for the high attributes ascribed to Christ in Scripture, a lofty supernatural dignity is in this view assigned to Him. He was a sort of supreme angel, God’s First-born, His instrument in the creation of the world, etc. But He was not eternal; He was not of Divine essence. It is safe to say that this view is now practically extinct. It would be a shallow reading of history to attribute the defeat of Arianism in the early Church to the anathemas of councils, the influence of court favour, or any other accidental circumstances. It perished through its own inherent weakness.See Note B.—The Defeat of Arianism. Dorner says “Not merely did it tend back to Ebionitism; not merely was it unable, with its Docetism and its doctrine of a created higher spirit, to allow even the possibility of an Incarnation; but, by putting a fantastical under-God between God and man, it separated the two quite as much as it appeared to unite them.”—Person of Christ, ii. p. 261 (Eng. trans.). If the Arians admit all they profess to do about Christ—that He was pre-existent, God’s agent in the creation of the world, etc.—there need be little difficulty in admitting the rest. On the other hand, if they stop short of the higher view to which the Scriptures seem to point, they entangle themselves in difficulties and contradictions, exegetical and other, which make it impossible for them to remain where they are. In reality, these high-sounding attributes which they ascribe to Christ are an excrescence on the system; for on this theory no work remains for Christ to do which could not have been accomplished equally well by a highly endowed man. Historically, therefore, Arianism has always tended to work round to the Socinian or strictly Unitarian view of Christ, where it has not gone upwards, through semi-Arianism, to the recognition of His full Divinity.

But this Socinian or Unitarian view of the Person of Christ—I refer to the older Unitarianism of the Priestley and Channing type—is another of those intermediate views which history also may now be said to have eliminated. Christ, on this view, is the greatest of inspired teachers, a true Prophet. He had a divine mission; He wrought miracles in confirmation of His doctrine; He rose from the dead on the third day; He is expected to return to judge the world. Here also there is a great deal of the halo of the supernatural about Christ. He is supernatural in history, if not in nature, and men saw again that they must either believe more or believe less. The rationalistic leaven, which was already working in the rejection of the higher aspects of Christ’s Person and work, made itself increasingly felt. As the miraculous adjuncts were retained only in deference to the representations of Scripture, they were readily abandoned when criticism professed to show how they might be stripped off without detriment to Christ’s moral image. Be the cause what it may, it is undeniable that Unitarianism of this kind has not been able to maintain itself. It has constantly tended to purge itself of the remaining supernatural features in the portrait of Christ, and to descend to the level of simple humanitarianism, i.e., to the belief in Christ as simply a great man, a religious genius of the first rank, one in whom the light which shines in all men shone in an eminent degree—but still a mere man, without anything supernatural in His origin, nature, or history.See Note C.—Modern Unitarianism.

A further example of the difficulty of maintaining an intermediate position on the doctrine of the Person of Christ, may be taken from the long series of intermediate views which have sprung up on the soil of Germany as the result of the great intellectual and theological movement inaugurated by Hegel and Schleiermacher in the beginning of the century. Passing by the speculative Christologies—in which, when the veil was stripped off, it was found that the idea was every thing, the historical Christ nothing—I may refer here to the Christology of Schleiermacher and his school. Schleiermacher recognises to the full “a peculiar being of God in Christ.”Der christ. Glaube. sect. 94. He affirms Christ’s perfect sinlessness, and the unique significance of His Personality for the Church and for the race. He is the Head, Archetype, Representative, and Redeemer of mankind. Only through Him is redemption from sin and fellowship of life with God possible. But when we come to inquire wherein consists this “peculiar being of God” in Christ, it proves, after all, to be only an exceptionally constant and energetic form of that God-consciousness which exists germinally in all men, and indeed lies at the root of religious experience generally. The difference between Christ and other men is thus in degree, not in kind. In Him this Divine element had the ascendency, in us it has not. He is a miracle, in so far as the Divine dwelt in Him in this unique and exceptional fulness and power, constituting Him the Redeemer and second Adam of the race; but there is no entrance of God into humanity such as we associate with the idea of Incarnation. When, further, we investigate the nature of Christ’s saving activity, we find that the exalted, high-priestly functions which Schleiermacher ascribes to Christ shrink, on inspection, into very meagre dimensions. Christ’s continued saving activity in His Church is presupposed, but it is not the activity of One who still lives and reigns on high, but rather the perpetuation of a posthumous influence, through the preservation of His image in the Gospels, and the fellowship of the Christian society.Thus also Ritschl. Ultimately, therefore, Christ’s saving activity is reduced to example and teaching; at most, to the spiritual influence of a great and unique historic Personality.On Schleiermacher’s Christology, cf. Dorner, Person of Christ, pp. 174–213. “When we have got this length, we are clearly back on the road to simple humanitarianism. Accordingly, none of Schleiermacher’s followers have been able to stop exactly where he did. They have felt the inexorable compulsion of the less or more; and while some have gone back to rationalism, the great majority, as Rothe acknowledges,He says: “Since Schleiermacher’s death, the school proceeding from him has generally gone back into the way of the Church doctrine.”—Dogmatik, ii. p. 162. have pressed on to more positive views, and have come into substantial harmony with confessional orthodoxy. A new wave of mediating theology has recently arisen in the school of Ritschl; but the fundamental principle of this school—the denial of the right of the theoretic reason to have anything to do with religion or theology—is not one that can permanently be approved of, and would, if followed out, end in boundless subjectivity. In this school also, accordingly, the necessity of less or more is asserting itself. Already the members of the school have begun to move off on different and irreconcilable lines—some in a more negative, the greater number in a more positive direction. The attempt of Ritschl to bar off all inquiry into the nature of Christ’s Person, by resolving His “Godhead” into a mere value-judgment of the believer, is felt not to be satisfactory; and the admission is increasingly made that consistency of Christian thinking demands the acknowledgment of a transcendental basis.See Note D.—Concessions of Ritschlians on the Person of Christ.

The general verdict of history, therefore, is clearly against the permanence of these attempts at a middle view of Christ’s Person, and warns us whither they tend. The liberal school in Germany, Holland, and France are clearly right in saying that the only alternative to Christ’s true Divinity is pure humanitarianism; and that, if the former doctrine is rejected, the supernatural view of His Person must be altogether given up. This is a clear issue, and I think it is well to have matters brought to it without shrinking or disguise. I desire now to show that this first alternative soon hands us in a second.

2. Second alternative—A Divine Christ or Agnosticism.

2. The first alternative is between a Divine Christ and a purely human one—the second is between a Divine Christ and pure Agnosticism. Many of those who take the humanitarian view of Christ’s Person are very far from wishing to deny that a great deal of what Christ taught was true. They do not wish to deny the existence of God, or the fact of a future life, or the essentials of Christian morality. In not a few cases they strongly uphold these truths—maintain them to be the true natural religion, in opposition to revealed. They account it Christ’s greatest glory that He saw so clearly, and announced so unambiguously, the Fatherhood of God, the dignity of the soul, the certainty of immortality, and the dependence of happiness here and hereafter on virtue. It is a plausible view to take, for it seems to secure to those who hold it all that they take to be essential in Christianity, while at the same time it leaves them unbounded liberty to accept or reject what they like in modern “advanced” views—to get rid of miracles, go in with progressive theories of science, accept the newest criticism of the Gospels, etc. It is a plausible view, but it is an illusive one; for if there is one thing more than another which the logic of events makes evident, it is, that with the humanitarian view of Christ we cannot stop at simple, abstract Theism, but must go on to pure Agnosticism. This is indeed what the larger number of the more logical minds which leave rejected supernatural Christianity in our own day are doing. Nor is the process which heads to this result difficult to follow. The Deism of the last century rejected Christianity, and sought to establish in its place what it called “Natural Religion,” i.e. a belief in God, in the future life, in a state of rewards and punishments, etc., based on reason alone. But however congruous with reason these doctrines may be in the place which they hold in the religion of Jesus, it was not really reason which had discovered them, or which gave assurance about them; nor did it follow that reason could successfully vindicate them, when torn from their context, and presented in the meagre, abstract form in which they appeared in the writings of the deists. What the deists did was to pick these doctrines out of the New Testament, separating them from the rest of the doctrines with which they were associated, and denuding them of everything which could make them real and vital to the minds and consciences of men; then to baptise this caput mortuum with the name of “Natural Religion.” They were doctrines that had their roots in the Christian system, and the arguments from reason with which they were sup ported wore not the real grounds of belief in them. In the present century men are not so easily satisfied.See Note E.—The Weakness of Deism. They see clearly enough that all the objections which have been levelled against the God of Revelation tell just as powerfully against the God of nature; that to admit Christ’s doctrine of a Heavenly Father, of a soul made in God’s image, of a special providence, of prayer, of forgiveness of sins, of a future life of happiness and misery, is already to have crossed the line which separates a merely natural from a supernatural view of things; and that to reject Christ’s doctrines on these great questions makes it difficult to retain a Theism of any kind.This is where not only Deism, but also the so-called Liberal Protestantism, fails, in rejecting supernatural Christianity, See Note F.—Weakness of Modern Liberal Protestantism. This is not because a theistic view of tine world is ion itself less reasonable than a non-theistic view—to admit this would be to give up the whole case on behalf of Christianity. But it is because the kind of Theism that remains after the Christian element has been removed out of it, is not one fitted to satisfy either the reason or the heart. It is a pale, emasculated conception, which, finding no support in the facts or experiences of the spiritual life, can never stand against the assaults made on it from without. It is here that Pantheism has its advantage over Deism. It is indeed more reasonable to believe in a living personal God, who created and who controls the universe, than in the “One and All” of the pantheist; but it does not follow that it is more reasonable to believe in an abstract Deity—a mere figment of the intellect—who stands in separation from the world, and yields no satisfaction to the religious life. Theism is a reasonable view of the universe, but it must be a living Theism, not a barren and notional one.

If, to avoid this bankruptcy, the attempt is made to deal in earnest with the conception of a personal God, and to reclothe the Deity with the warm, gracious attributes which belong to the Father-God of Christ, then we have indeed a Being whom the soul can love, trust, and hold communion with, but the difficulty recurs of believing Him to be a God who remains self-enclosed, impassive, uncommunicative, towards creatures whom He has dowered with a share of His own rational and moral excellences, who has so shut Himself out by natural law from direct contact with the spirits that seek Him, that He can neither speak to them, answer their prayers, help them in trouble nor or even reach them by inward succours—a silent God, who can no more enter into personal relations with His creatures than if He were impersonal. Such a conception is self-contradictory, and cannot maintain itself. One feels this incongruity very powerfully in dealing with the Theism of such writers as the late Mr. Rathbone Greg, or Dr. Martineau, or the authoress of Robert Elsmere. None of these writers will admit the possibility of miracle; logically, therefore, they shut out the possibility of direct communication between God and man. Yet none of them can rest with the cold abstract God of Deism; or with the immanent impersonal spirit of Pantheism; or with the comfortless negation of Agnosticism. God is with them a personal Being; His will is ethical; communion with Him is longed after and believed in. Let Mr. Greg’s own pathetic words tell how insecure is the Theism thus cut off from positive Revelation. “My own conception,” he says, “perhaps from early mental habit, perhaps from incurable and very conscious metaphysical inaptitude, approaches far nearer to the old current image of a personal God than to any of the sublimated substitutes of modern thought. Strauss’s Universum, Comte’s Humanity, even Mr. Arnold’s Stream of Tendency that makes for Righteousness, excite in me no enthusiasm, command from me no worship. I cannot pray to the ‘Immensities’ and the ‘Eternities’ of Carlyle; they proffer me no help; they vouchsafe me no sympathy; they suggest no comfort. It may be that such a personal God is a mere anthropomorphic creation. It may be—as philosophers with far finer instruments of thought than mine affirm—that the conception of such a Being, duly analysed, is demonstrably a self-contradictory one. But, at least in resting in it, I rest in something I almost seem to realise; at least, I share the view which Jesus indisputably held of the Father whom He obeyed, communed with, and worshipped.”Creed of Christendom, Introd., 3rd. ed., pp. 90, 91. Surely it need hardly be said that a view which, even while holding it, one doubts may be only a result of “early mental habit,” “a mere anthropomorphic creation,” a “self-contradictory” conception, cannot long stand as a basis for life; nor will the trust which Jesus had help much, when one has already rejected as delusion His doctrine of prayer, of special providence, of forgiveness of sins, and His own Messianic claims and expectations. Already we tremble on the verge of Agnosticism, if we have not actually passed its bound.

I think, accordingly, I am justified in saying that when the ground of Divine Revelation is once left behind, we have no logical halting-place short of Agnosticism; not because a theistic view of the world is unreasonable, but because a living Theism requires as its complement belief in Revelation. We have these alternatives: either to revivify our Theism till it approaches in the humane and loving attributes it ascribes to God, the Christian conception of the Heavenly Father—in which case we are back to a supernatural view of the universe; or, if this is thought baseless, to dispense with the idea of God altogether, and try to explain the world without reason, without final cause, without spiritual assumptions of any kind.

3. Third alternative—A Divine Christ or Pessimism.

3. Agnosticism is, however, far from representing the end of this road along which we had begun to travel in rejecting the Divine in Christ. The final alternative—one which we may trust the world at large will never be called upon to face—is a Divine Christ or Pessimism. Agnosticism is not a state in which the mind of an intelligent being can permanently rest. It is essentially a condition of suspense—a confession of ignorance—an abdication of thought on the highest subjects.Generally, however, under the surface of professed Agnosticism, there will he found some more or less positive opinions about the origin and nature of things all of them agreeing in this, that they negate the belief in God. It is not, in the nature of things, possible for the mind to remain persistently in this neutral, passive attitude. It will press on perforce to one or other of the views which present themselves as alternatives—either to Theism, or to Materialism and dogmatic Atheism.On the continent there are fewer agnostics, but more atheists and materialists, than with us. “In Germany,” says Karl Peters, “things are come to such a pass that one is obliged. to ask a sort of absolution if one does not swim with the prevailing atheistic-monistic stream.”—Willenswelt und Weltwille, p. 350. I do not speak, of course, of the individual mind, but of the general historical development. But even Agnosticism has brought with it a train of baleful results. With the loss of certainty on the highest questions of existence there comes inevitably a lowering of the pulse of human endeavour all round—a loosening of certainty about morals, for why should these remain unaffected when every thing else is going?—and as we see to-day, in much of the speculative thought of France and Germany, a hopelessness about the future. For, obviously, when this point is reached, the rational ground is taken away even from belief in progress.See Note G.—Christianity and the Idea of Progress. When the idea of God, which is equivalent to the idea of a reason at the foundation of things, is surrendered—whether in Agnosticism, or in some form of dogmatic denial, makes little difference—it becomes a wholly unwarranted assumption that things must certainly go on from better to better. The opposite may quite as well be the case, and progress, now that a given height is reached, may rather be from better to worse. The analogy of nature shows that this is the law in regard to natural life. The plant blooms, reaches its acme, and dies. So, it may be plausibly argued, it will be with humanity. The fact that some progress has been made in the past does not guarantee that this progress will go on indefinitely; rather, the spur to this progress consisted in what we are now told are illusions, and when these are exploded the motives to progress are gone. A more highly evolved society may lead to an increase of misery rather than of happiness; the growth of enlightenment, instead of adding to men’s enjoyments, may result in stripping them successively of the illusions that remain, and may leave them at last sad, weary, disappointed, with an intolerable consciousness of the burden and wretchedness of existence.Pessimism reverses Pascal’s saying that the greatness of man consists in thought. thought, according to Pessimism, is the fatal gift. “Well for those,” Schopenhauer thinks, ‘who have no consciousness of existence. The life of the animal is more to be envied than that of man; the life of the plant is better than that of the fish in the water, or even of the oyster on the rock. Non-being is better than being, and unconsciousness is the blessedness of what does exist. The best would be if all existence were annihilated. “Cf. Luthardt, Die mod. Welt. p. 150. The height of misery is not that of being man; it is, being man, to despise oneself sufficiently to regret that one is not an animal.”—CARO, Le Pessimisme, p. 135. All this is not fancy. The despairing, pessimistic spirit I am speaking of has already taken hold of extensive sections of society, and is giving startling evidences of its presence. For the first time on European soil we see large and influential systems springing up, and gaining for themselves wide popularity and acceptance, which have for their root-idea exactly this conception of the inherent irrationality and misery of existence. There have always been individual thinkers with a tendency to take a prejudiced and hopeless view of life, but their reveries have not been much regarded. But here, strange to say, under the very shadow of this boasted progress of the nineteenth century—in the very midst of its enlightenment and civilisation and wealth—we see Pessimism raising its head as a serious, carefully thought-out philosophy of existence, and, instead of being scouted and laughed at as an idle dream, it meets with passionate acceptance from multitudes.See Note H.—The Prevalence of Pessimism The same spirit will be found reflected by those who care to note its symptoms in much of our current literature, in the serious raising and discussion, for example, of the question already familiar to us—Is life worth living? Specially noticeable is the tone of sadness which pervades much of the nobler sceptical thinking of the present day—the tone of men who do not think lightly of parting with religion, but feel that with it has gone the hope and gladness of earlier days. This Pessimism of scepticism is to me one of the saddest and most significant phenomena of modern times.See Appendix to Lecture.—The Pessimism of Scepticism. And, granting the premises it starts from, what other conclusion is possible? Deprive the world of God, and everything becomes an insoluble mystery, history a scene of wrecked illusions, belief in a superstition, and life in general “A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”“Macbeth,” act v. scene 5.

II. The upward movement from Pessimism to Christ.

II. The descent from faith in Christ has landed us in the abyss of Pessimism. But just at this lowest point, where the light of religious faith might seem utterly extinguished, a return movement is felt to be inevitable. For Pessimism, no more than Theism, can escape the necessity laid upon it of giving to itself some account of things as they are—of constructing a “Weltanschauung”; and the movement it attempts to do this, making naked the principle on which it rests, its own insufficiency as a philosophy of existence and of life stands glaring and confessed. Possibly the attempt to work out Pessimism as a system will never be made with much more thoroughness, or with better chances of success, than has already been done in the monumental works of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. But the very thoroughgoingness of the attempt is the demonstration of its futility. Of all theories, that which explains the origin of the universe by a mistake—which accounts for it by the blind rushing into existence of an irrational force, call it “Will” or what we please—is surely the most incredible.These Pessimistic theories are not without their roots in the philosophies of Fichte. Schelling, and Hegel. Cf. Fichte’s view of the Absolute as “Will” and Sehelling’s “irrational” ground of the Divine nature (after Bohme). in his Philosophie und Religion (1801), Schelling boldly describes the creation as the result of an “Abfall”—the original assertion by the Ego of its independence. “This inexplicable and timeless act is the original sin or primal fall of the spirit, which we expiate in the circles of time existence” (cf. Professor Seth’s From Kant to Hegel, p. 65). Hegel also, in his own way, speaks of creation as an “Abfall.” It is in the Son,” he says, “in the determination of distinction, that progressive determination proceeds to further distinction. . . . This transition in the moment of the Son is thus expressed by Jacob Bohme—that the first-born was Lucifer, the light-hearer the bright, the clear one; but he turned in upon himself in imagination; i.e. he made himself independent, passed over into being, and so fell.”—Phil. d. Rel. ii. p. 251 (Werke, vol. xii.). How came this irrational will-force to be there? What moved it to this insensate decision? In what state was it before it committed this enormous blunder of rushing into existence? How came it to be possessed of that potential wealth of ideas which now are realised in the world? Of what use were they if they were never intended to be called into existence? What I am at present concerned with, however, is not to refute Pessimism, but rather to show how, as a first step in an upward movement back to Christ, by its own immanent dialectic it refutes itself—inverts, in fact, its own starting-point, and works itself round into a species of Theism.

Schopenhauer and Hartmann both recognise that there is in the universe not only “Will,” but “Idea,” and the manner in which they deal wish this element of “Ideal” is one of the most curious examples of the inversion of an original starting-point in the history of philosophy. For, in the course of its development, Pessimism has actually adopted as its leading principle the thought of a rational teleology in the universe, and as a consequence, as above remarked, has worked itself back to Theism. How this comes about it is not difficult to show. The crucial point for all systems of Pessimism is the presence of reason in the universe. How, if the basis of the universe is irrational, does reason come to find a place in it at all? For, manifestly, account for it as we may, there is reason in the universe now. The universe itself is a law-connected whole; there is order and plan, organisation and system, utility and beauty, means and ends. Above all, in man himself, if nowhere else, there is conscious reason—the very instrument by which this irrationality of the universe is discovered. There is evidently more here than blind, purposeless will. How is its existence to be explained? Schopenhauer postulates “Idea.” In accounting for nature, he has to suppose that in this blind, purposeless will there lies potentially a whole world of ideas, representing all the stages and kingdoms through which nature advances in the course of its history.Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, i. pp. 1 85. 206 (Eng. trans. pp. 203, 219 ff.). Karl Peters remarks: “If the Will alone bears in itself the stages of the World-All as eternal ideas—how can Schopenhauer call it an absolutely irrational Will? And if he conceives of it as a radically blind Will as an insane and altogether groundless ‘Drang,’ how can he vindicate for it these eternal ideas?”—Willenswelt, p. 129. Hartmann unites “Will” and “Idea” yet more closely, regarding them as co-ordinate attributes of the Absolute, though still, somehow, the will is supposed to be in itself a purely irrational force. It is only when the will has made the mistake of rushing into existence that it lays hold on the “Idea” as a means of delivering itself from the unblessedness of its new condition. To this end the universe is represented as ordered with the highest wisdom, the goal of its development being the production of the conscious agent, man, through whom the Redemption of the world-spirit is to be accomplished. I do not pursue these “metaphysics of wonderland” further. I only notice the extraordinary contradictions in which Hartmann involves himself in his conception of the Absolute—“the Unconscious,” as he prefers to term it—and the extraordinary transformation it undergoes in his hands. The absolute is unconscious, and needs to create for itself an organ of consciousness in man before it can attain deliverance from its unblessedness. Yet it knows, plans, contrives, orders everything with consummate wisdom, works out its designs with a precision that is unerring, etc.“The Unconscious wills in one act all the terms of a process, means and end, etc., not before, beside, or beyond, but in the result itself.”—Phil. d. Unbewussten, ii. p. 60 (Eng. trans.). The contradiction here is too patent. For, if unconscious, how can we speak of this Absolute as unblessed? Or how can we think of it as knowing and planning? Hartmann therefore changes his ground, and speaks in other places of his Absolute rather as supra-conscious;The Unconscious, it now appears, has after all a kind of consciousness—is “a transcendent supra-mundane consciousness any thing but blind , rather far-seeing and clairvoyant,” “superior to all consciousness, at once conscious and supra-conscious” (!), its “mode of thinking is, in truth, above consciousness.”—Phil. d. Unbewussten, pp. 246, 247, 258 etc. (Eng. trans.). elsewhere, again, in terms akin to those of Mr. Spencer, as an “Unknowable”—incapable of being represented in forms of our intelligence.Phil. d. Unbewussten, pp. 49, 223, 246, etc. (Eng. trans.). Schopenhauer also declares his “Will” to be in itself, i.e. apart from its phenomenal manifestations, an Unknowable, possibly possessing ways of existing, determinations, qualities, which are absolutely unknowable and incomprehensible to us, and which remain ever as its nature when it has abrogated its phenomenal character, and for our knowledge has passed into empty nothingness.—Die Welt als Wille (Eng. trans.), ii. p. 408. But if the Absolute is supra-conscious, i.e. exists in a state higher than the ordinary consciousness, why should it need the latter to help it out of its misery? The climax is reached when, in a later work—while still holding to the view that the Absolute is not a self-conscious Personality—Hartmann invests it with most of the attributes characteristic of Deity, sees in it, e.g., the ground, not only of a natural, but of a moral order, makes it the object of religious worship, attributes to it, not simply omnipotence and wisdom, but righteousness and holiness, views it as a source of Revelation and grace, expressly names it God!Religionsphilosophie: Part II., Phil. des Geistes, pp. 74–89. We are here far enough from the original assumption of a primitive, irrational will—in fact, what we see is Pessimism passing over in all but the name into Theism. It remained only that this transition should be explicitly made, and this has been done by a disciple of the school, Karl Peters, whose work, Willenswelt und Weltwille is one of the acutest criticisms of previous Pessimism I know. With him we finally leave the ground of the philosophy of the “Unconscious,” and come round to a Theism in which we have the full recognition of God as a self conscious, wise, good, holy Personality, whose providence is over all, and whose ends all things subserve.See Note I.—Transition from Pessimism to Theism—Hartmann and Karl Peters.

The theories of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, though pessimistic, might with equal propriety have been classed in the family of pantheistic systems. When dealing at an earlier stage with than downward movement from faith in Christ, through Agnosticism to Pessimism, I purposely reserved this alternative of Pantheism. This was not because the subject is in itself unimportant, but because it comes at last to the old dilemma, and can best be treated in its higher aspect as a stage in the upward advance to Theism. Pantheism shares the fate of every incomplete system, in being compelled to pass judgment on itself, and either to sink to something lower, or to pass up to something higher. I refer for proof to Germany, which has given birth to some of its noblest forms, but where also history shows how possible it is to descend at one step from the loftiest heights of overstrained Idealism to gross Materialism. Fichte and Schelling and Hegel were followed by Strauss and Feuerbach.See Note J.—Materialism in Germany. The logic of the process is again not difficult to trace. If universal reason is the all, and the finite in comparison with it nothing, in another point of view it is the finite that is all, and reason that is nothing, seeing that in the finite only it attains to actual existence. Concede the premiss, the Absolute has reality only in the universe, and it is but a short step to the conclusion, the universe only is real.“If,” says Dorner. “God be once defined as the essence of the world, it is of subject and predicate logically allowable when Feuerbach, the idea seriously, counted the essence of the world to be a part of the world, made the world the subject, and reduced God to a mere predicate of the world. The transition was thus made to Anthropologism, the forerunner of Materialism.”—Person of Christ, v. p. 160. Interpret the universe now, in accordance with the “modern” conception, in terms of matter and motion, and Feuerbach’s dictum is reached—“Man is what he eats.” The goal of this is the old plunge into Nihilism and Pessimism, in which we have just seen that the mind cannot remain.

The other alternative is, however, possible to Pantheism, by holding fast to the rational element contained in it, to correct and purify itself by a return to Theism; and this is the movement we see taking place in the latter forms of the philosophies Fichte and Schelling and in the speculative Theism of the later Hegelians, In judging of these systems, we must not be misled by too narrow a use of the word “Theism.” The Theism of the writers I refer to is in many respects imperfect, and bears throughout the marks of its speculative origin. Yet, in principle, the line between Pantheism and Theism is crossed whenever God is conceived of no longer as an impersonal Force or Idea, but as a spiritual, self-conscious principle at the basis of the universe—as a knowing, willing Being, with whom man can sustain, not only natural, but moral and spiritual relations. There may be difficulties at this stage as to whether the term “personal” is a suitable term to apply to the Divine; but it is, nevertheless, a theistic conception of God which is shaping itself, and the purgation of the system from remaining pantheistic elements is only a question of time. What for instance, but an approximation to Theism is implied in such words as Fichte’s in his fine apostrophe—“Sublime and Living Will! named by no name, compassed by no thought! I may well raise my soul to Thee, for Thou and I are not divided! Thy voice sounds within me, mine resounds in Thee; and all my thoughts, if they be but good and true, live in Thee also. . . . Thou art best known to the childlike, devoted, simple mind. To it Thou art the searcher of hearts, who seest its inmost depths; the ever-present witness of its truth, who knowest through all the world know it not. Thou art the Father whoever desirest its good, who rulest all things for the best. . . . How Thou art, I may not know. But let me be what I ought to be, and Thy relations to me—the mortal—and to all mortals, lie open before my eyes, and surround me more clearly than the consciousness of my own existence. Thou workest in me the knowledge of my duty, of my vocation in the world of reasonable beings:—how, I know not, nor need I to know. Thou knowest what I think and what I will:—how Thou canst know, through what act Thou bringest about that consciousness, I cannot understand. . . . Thou willest that my free obedience shall bring with it eternal consequences:—the act of Thy will I cannot comprehend, I only know thief it is not like mine. Thou doest, and Thy will itself is the deed: but the way of Thy working is not as my ways—I cannot trace it.”“The Vocation of Man” (Die Bestimmung des Menschen) in Fichte’s “Popular Works,” p. 365 (Eng. trans.). If this is Pantheism, are we not all pantheists? If this is Agnosticism, is it not an Agnosticism in which we must all share? The moment in spiritual Pantheism which impels to this development is of course the recognition of the fact that the universe has its ground in reason. If this position is to be safeguarded against the lapse into Materialism, it must free itself from the internal contradiction of supposing that there can be thought without a thinker;“In spite of Fichte’s imperious tone,” says Professor Seth, “and his warning that we are merely setting the seal to our own philosophic incompetency, we must summon up all our hardihood, and openly confess that to speak of thought as self-existent, without any conscious Being whose the thought is, conveys no meaning to our minds. Thought exists only as the thought of a thinker: it must be centred somewhere.”—Hegelianism and Personality, p. 73. He had formerly expressed himself differently.—From Kant to Hegel, p. 76. reason without a subject to which the reason belongs; rational ends posited and executed without intelligent and self-conscious purpose; moral order without amoral will. In the case of Fichte and Schelling, this revolution in their philosophies is seen taking place within their lifetime; in the case of Hegel, it is seen in the development of his philosophy, in the hands of his disciples, into a speculative Theism. In Vatke and Biedermann—two prominent representatives—the Theism is still very shadowy and incomplete; in I. H. Fichte and Pfleiderer of Berlin, it attains to full and explicit recognition. The latter writer, in particular, takes strong ground, and from his own point of view may be regarded as one of the ablest defenders of theistic positions in recent times. In our own country we have the Neo-Hegelian movement, best represented by the late Mr. Green of Oxford, and in him also the speculative spirit is seen allying itself very closely with the spirit of religion, with the result that his philosophy almost inevitably passes over into Theism. On the metaphysical side, God is already to Mr. Green an “Eternal Self-Consciousness”Prolegomena to Ethics, passim.—the author and sustainer of the system of relations which we call the universe. But, on the religious side, He is thought of much more positively as a conscious Being who is in eternal perfection all that man has it in him to come to be—“a Being of perfect understanding and perfect love “—an infinite Spirit, present to the soul, but other than itself, towards whom “the attitude of man at his highest and completest could still only be that which we have described as self-abasement before an ideal of holiness.”Pp. 93, 142 of “Memoir” by Nettleship, in Green’s Works, vol. iii. Prof. Green’s profound Christian feeling, with his ideological views of Christianity, are well brought out in the same “Memoir,” and accompanying works. The metaphysical contradictions which still inhere in the Neo-Hegelian theory have been well pointed out by one—formerly an ardent Hegelian—who has himself lived through the theory he criticises Prof. Seth of Edinburgh. In him, in the line of this development, we reach at length a perfectly unambiguous position. “It must not be forgotten,” he says, “that if we are to keep the name of God at all, or any equivalent term, subjectivity—an existence of God for Himself, analogous to our own personal existence, though doubtless transcending it infinitely in innumerable ways—is an essential element of the conception. . . . God may be, must be, infinitely more—we are at least certain that He cannot be less—than we know ourselves to be.”Hegelianism and Personality, pp. 222–224. Mr. Green’s theory is discussed more fully in Professor Veitch’s Knowing and Being, which touches many vital points.

The Theism we have thus gained embraces the two notions of God as self-conscious reason, and God as moral will. Once, however, this ground of Theism is reached, we are compelled, in order to secure it, to advance a step further, viz. to the thought of God as self-revealing. We have already seen that Theism can only be secured if God is thought of as standing in a living relation to mankind—that is, as interesting Himself in their welfare, and capable of entering into moral and spiritual fellowship with them. How can one earnestly believe in a living, personal God, and, on the other hand, in man as a being constituted for moral ends, and not also believe that it is the will of God that man should know Him, and be guided by Him to the fulfilment of his destiny? It is, accordingly, a most noteworthy fact, that in all the higher theology of the time— even rationalistic theology—the attempt is made to come to a right understanding with this concept of Revelation. Strange as it may sound to many, there is no proposition on which theologians of all schools at the present day are more willing to agree than this—that all knowledge of God, and consequently all religion, rests on Revelation; and that, if the true idea of God is to be maintained, He must be thought of as self-revealing. This truth is emphasised, not in the orthodox systems alone, but in the theologies, e.g., of Biedermann, of Lipsius of Pfleiderer, of Ritschl—even, as I said before, of the Pessimist irony, his chapters on Faith and Revelation. The point of difference arises when we inquire into the nature of Revelation, and specially when we pass from the sphere of natural to that of supernatural Revelation Supernatural Revelation the theologians of the liberal school—Pfleiderer, Lipsius, etc.—will not allow us to speak of; or rather, natural and supernatural are with them but different sides of the same process. That which, on the Divine side, is viewed as Revelation, is, on the human side, simply the natural development of man’s moral and religious consciousness, and vice versa. In the same way, every truly original moment in the life of a man every birth-moment of a new truth in his man, every flash of insight into some new secret or law of nature, is a Revelation. This, which is the subtlest view of Revelation at present in the field, is not to be set aside without an attempt to do justice to what is true in it.Cf. on this theory Biedermann, Christ. Dogmatik, i. pp. 264–288; Lipsicis, Dogmatik, pp. 41–68; Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, iv. pp. 46–94, specialty pp. 64–75 (Eng. translation, and Grundriss pp. 17–22. H. Schmidt has a good statement and criticism of this theory in his article on The Ethical Oppositions in the Present Conflict of the Biblical and the Modern Theological View of the World,” in the Studien und Kritiken for 1876 (3rd part). “The God whom the Scripture from beginning to end preaches,” he says, “is a God of supernational Revelation, who makes Himself known directly, in distinction from the everyday ordering of our lives; the God of rationalism is a God who, if He still as realty communicates Himself, yet always remains hidden behind the laws of nature, as behind the natural course of the development of the human spirit, who never manifestly represents Himself to the eye of man in His exaltation over the world.” I am, for my part, not concerned to deny that there is a side of truths, and a very important one, in this theory. If it sounds deistical to say, “Revelation is only through the natural activities of mind”; it may, on the other hand, be a wholesome corrective to a deistic view to say that God is immanent in these activities, and that through them He mediates His Revelation to the human spirit—that what we call the “natural “development of mind involves, when rightly understood, a factor of Revelation. Nor can the line ever be drawn so finely between natural and supernatural Revelation as to enable us to say, “Here precisely the natural ends and the supernatural begins.” Time theory in question, therefore, I would be disposed to call inadequate, rather than false; or false only as it professes to cover the whole field of Revelation. For in the latter, it must be contended that we have more than can be accounted for by mere natural development. Taken even on its own ground, this theory involves the valuable admission that it is the will of God to make Himself known to man, and that He has provided in the constitution of things for giving him the knowledge that is necessary for him. The only criticism I shall make at present upon this theory is—and I think it is one which goes to the heart of the matter—that in some sense the end of the theory is the refutation of the beginning of it. The point from which we start is, that God can be known only through the natural activities of the mind. He is present in these activities as He is present in all the other functions of our mental, moral, and even physical being; and He is present in no other way. But the peculiarity of this theory is that it ends in a view of God which affirms the possibility of that with the denial of which it set out—the possibility of direct communion between God and the soul. It is not disputed by any of the advocates of these views that the highest point in this self-revelation of God is the Revelation given to men Christ through Jesus But the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not a Being who communicates with man only in the indirect way which this theory supposes He is a Being who Himself draws near to man, and seeks fellowship with him; whose relations with the spirits He has made are free and personal; who is as lovingly communicative as man, on his part, is expected to be trustfully receptive; to whom man can speak, and He answers. The simply natural is here transcended, and we are in the region of direct intercourse of spirit with spirit. And this view of God is not disputed by the writers I am here referring to, who deny supernatural Revelation. Dr. Martineau says, in words of deep wisdom, “How should related spirits, joined by a common creative aim, intent on whatever things are pure and good, live in presence of each other, the one the bestower, the other the recipient of a sacred trust, and exchange no thought and give no sign of the love which subsists between them?”

Study of Religion ii. p. 48. Cf. the following sentences from his Hours of Thought:—“Whatever else may be included in the truth that ‘God is a Spirit,’ this at least is implied, that He is free to modify His relations to all dependent minds in exact conformity with their changes of disposition and of need, and let the lights and shadows of His look move us swiftly as the undulating wills on which they fall.”—ii. p. 29.

“Passing by this poor mockery I would be understood to speak of a direct and natural communion of spirit with spirit, between ourselves and God, in which He receives our affection and gives a responsive breathing of His inspiration. Such communion appears to me as certain of reality as the daily intercourse between man and man; resting upon evidence as positive, and declaring itself by results as marked. The disposition to throw doubt on the testimony of those who affirm that they know this, is a groundless prejudice, an illusion on the negative side as complete as the most positive dreams of enthusiasm.”—P. 224.

The chief criticism I would be disposed to make upon the design argument, as an argument for intelligence in the cause of the universe, is that it is too narrow. It confines the argument to final causes—that is, to the particular case of the adaptation of means to ends. But the basis for the inference that the universe has a wise and intelligent Author is far wider than this. It is not the marks of purpose alone which necessitate this inference, but everything which bespeaks order, plan, arrangement, harmony, beauty, rationality in the connection and system of things. It is the proof of the presence of thought in the world—whatever shape that may take.Principal Shairp says: “To begin with the outward world, there is, I shall not say so much the mark of design on all outward things as an experience forced in upon the mind of the thoughtful naturalist that, penetrate unto nature wherever he may, thought has been there before him; that, to quote the words of one of the most distinguished, ‘there is really a plan, which may he read in the relations which you and I, and all his-lining beings scattered over the surface of our earth, hold to each other.’”—Studies ins Poetry and Philosophy, p. 367. Cf. also on this aspect of the subject, M’Cosh, Method of Divine Government, pp. 75–151; and on the argument from Beauty and Sublimity in Nature, Kennedy’s Natural Theology and Modern Thought, Lecture IV. (Donnellan Lectures). As we saw in a former part of the Lecture, the assumption on which the whole of science proceeds—and cannot but proceed—in its investigations is, that the system it is studying is intelligible,—that there is an intelligible unity of things. It admits of being reduced to terms of thought. There is a settled and established order on which the investigator can depend. Without this he could not advance one step. Even Kant’s objection, that this argument proved only an architect of the universe, but not a creator of its materials, is seen from this point of view to be invalid.Cf. Lecture IV. on Creation. It may be asked, besides, if it is so certain, as Kant assumes, that only a finite power is needed to create—I do not say a universe, but even an atom; whether there are not finite effects, such as creation, to which only Omnipotence is competent. The point is not that it is an atom, but that it is created. The very materials of the universe—the atoms which compose it—show by their structure, their uniformity, their properties, their mathematical relations, that they must have a Creator; that the Power which originated them, which weighed, measured, and numbered them, which stamped on them their common characters, and gave them their definite laws and relations, must have been intelligent. I admit, however, that as the design argument presupposes the cosmological, to give us the idea of an infinite and necessary Being at the basis of the universe, so both of these arguments need the ontological, to show us in the clearest and most convincing manner that this Being and Cause of the universe is infinite, self conscious Reason.

(3) I come, accordingly, in the third place, to the ontological argument—that which Kant, not without reason, affirms to beat the foundation of the other two, and to be the real ground on which the inference to the existence of a necessary and infinitely perfect Being rests. It is an argument which in these days, owing largely to his criticism upon it, has fallen much into disrepute, though a good deal has also been done by able thinkers to rehabilitate it, and to show its real bearings. It must further be admitted that in the form in which it was wont to be put in the schools, the strictures which Kant makes on it are in the main just.1Kritik, pp. 417–424 (Eng. trans. pp. 364–370). See Note F.—Kant on the Ontological Argument. In the earlier form, it is an argument from the idea of God as a necessary idea of the mind, to His real existence. I have, reasons Anselm, the idea of a most perfect Being. But this idea includes the attribute of existence. For if the most perfect Being did not exist, there could be conceived a greater than He,—one that did exist,—and therefore He would not be the most perfect. The most perfect Being, therefore, is one in the idea of whom existence is necessarily included. In this form the argument seems little better than a logical quibble, and so Kant has treated it. Kant grants the necessity of the idea—shows how it arises—names it The Ideal of Pure Reason—but argues with cogency that from an idea, purely as such, you cannot conclude to real existence. It would be strange, however, if an argument which has wielded such power over some of the strongest intellects were utterly baseless; and Dr. Hutchison Stirling has well shown that when we get to the kernel of Anselm’s thought, as he himself explains it, it has by no means the irrational character which might at first sight appear to belong to it.Phil. and Theol. pp. 182–193. Anselm’s form of the argument, however, it must now be observed, is neither the final nor the perfect one. Kant himself has given the impulse to a new development of it, which shows more clearly than ever that it is not baseless, but is really the deepest and most comprehensive of all arguments—the argument implied in both of the two preceding.

The kernel of the ontological argument, as we find it put, for example, by Prof. Green, is the assertion that thought is the necessary prius of all else that is—even of all possible or conceivable existence. This assertion is not arrived at in any a priori way, but by the strict and sober analysis of what is involved in such knowledge of existence as we have. If we analyse the act of knowledge, we find that in every form of it there are implied certain necessary and universal conditions, which, from the nature of the case, must be conditions of experience also, otherwise it could never be experience for us at all. Thus, any world we are capable of knowing with our present faculties must be a world in space and time,—a world subject to conditions of number and quantity,—a world apprehended in relations of substance and accident, cause and effect, etc. A world of any other kind—supposing it to exist—would be in relation to our thought or knowledge unthinkable. These conditions of knowledge, moreover, are not arbitrary and contingent, but universal and necessary. They spring from reason itself, and express its essential and immutable nature. Thus we feel sure that there is no world in space or time to which the laws of mathematics do not apply; no world possible in which events do not follow each other according to the law of cause and effect; no world in which the fundamental laws of thought and reasoning are different from what they are in our own. Mr. J. S. Mill, indeed, thought there might be worlds in which two and two do not make four; or in which events succeed each other without any causal relation. But in this he will get few to agree with him. In like manner, there are moral principles which our reason recognises as universally and unconditionally valid. We cannot conceive of a world in which falsehood would really be a virtue, and truth-speaking a vice. We hold it, therefore, for certain that reason is the source of universal and necessary principles which spring from its essence, and which are the conditions of all possible knowledge. But this, its own essential nature, reason finds reflected back from the world around it. A world does exist, constituted through these very principles which we find within ourselves,—in space and time, through number and quantity, substance and quality, cause and effect, etc.,—and therefore knowable by us, and capable of becoming an object of our experience. We arrive, therefore, at this—that the world is constituted through a reason similar to our own; that, in Mr. Green’s words, “the understanding which presents an order of nature to us is in principle one with an understanding which constitutes that order itself.”Prol. to Ethics, p. 23. And that such a reason not only does, but must exist, I see not simply by inference from the existence of the world, which is the higher form of the cosmological argument, but by reflection on the necessary character of the principles of reason themselves. For whence these laws of thought—these universal and necessary conditions of all truth and knowledge—which I discover in myself; which my own reason neither makes nor can unmake; which I recognise to be in me and yet not of me; which I know must belong to every rational being in every part of the universe? They are necessary and eternal in their nature, yet they have not the ground of their existence in my individual mind. Can I conclude otherwise than that they have their seat and ground in an eternal and absolute Reason—the absolute Prius of all that is, at once of thought and of existence? It is but a further extension of the same argument when I proceed to show that thought is only possible in relation to an I, to a central principle of self-consciousness, which unifies and connects all thinking and experience.

This argument, which has been called that of “Rational Realism,” is one which in varied forms has been accepted by the deepest thinkers, and finds widespread acknowledgment in literature.See Note G.—Rational Realism. It is not liable to the objection made to the Anselmic form, of involving an illicit inference from mere idea to real existence; but it has this in common with it, that the existence of an Eternal Reason is shown to be involved in the very thinking of this, or indeed of any thought. In the very act of thinking, thought affirms its own existence. But thought can perceive, not only its own existence, but the necessity of its existence—the necessity of its existence, even, as the prius of everything else. What is affirmed, therefore, is not simply my thought, but an Absolute Thought, and with this the existence of an Absolute Thinker; in the words of Dr. Harris, who has done much to give popular expression to this argument, of “an Absolute Reason energising in perfect wisdom and love” in the universe.The Phil. Basis of theism, p.3; cf. pp. 82, 146, 560, etc. I cannot but maintain, therefore, that the onto- logical argument, in the kernel and essence of it, is a sound one, and that in it the existence of God is really seen to be the first, the most certain, and the most indisputable of all truths.

We saw in connection with the cosmological argument that there was a direct fact of consciousness which turned the logical argument into a real one,—which translated, if I may so speak, the abstract proof into a living experience. It is worth our while to inquire, before leaving these theoretic proofs, whether there is anything of the same kind here; anything in actual religious consciousness which answers to that demonstration of a rational element in the world which is given in the two remaining arguments. I think there is. I refer to that very real perception which mankind have at all times manifested of a spiritual presence and power in nature, which is the effect of the total unanalysed impression which nature in its infinite variety and complexity, its wondrous grandeur, order, beauty, and fulness of life and power, makes upon the soul. The more carefully facts have been examined, the more narrowly the history of religions has been scrutinised, the clearer has it become that underlying all the particular ideas men have of their deities,—underlying their particular acts of worship to them,—there is always this sense of something mysterious, intangible, infinite—of an all-pervading supernatural Presence and Power,—which is not identified with any of the particular phenomena of nature, but is regarded rather as manifested through them.This is true of the lowest as well as of the highest religions,—cf. Waitz on The religion of the Negroes, in Max Muller’s Hibbert Lectures, pp. 106, 107,—but is much more conspicuous in the oldest forms of natural religion, e.g. in the Vedic, Babylonian, and Egyptian religions. On the general facts, cf. Max Muller’s works, Revelle’s Hist. of Religions, Sayce’s Hibbert Lectures on The Religion of Ancient Egypt, Fairbairn’s Studies, Loring Brace’s The Unknown God, Pressense’s The Ancient World and Christianity (Eng. trans.), etc.; and see Note F. to Lecture V. It is this which Paul speaks of when he says that “the Eternal Power and Divinity” of God are manifested since the creation of the world in the things that are made.Rom. i. 20. It is Max Muller’s “perception of the infinite,” Schleiermacher’s “consciousness of the infinite in the finite,” the sensus numinis of the older writers, Wordsworth’s “sense of something far more deeply interfused”—

“Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.

Such a sense or perception of the Divine is the common sub- stratum of all religions, and the theory of religion which fails to take account of it is hike the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out.

But how is this sense of the Divine in nature—which is the stronghold of the theology of feeling—to be accounted for? It is certainly not the result of logical argument, and goes beyond anything that logical argument could yield. Yet it may easily be shown that rational elements are implicit in it, and that the rational elements involved are precisely those which the fore going arguments have sought explicitly to unfold. To understand the impression of the Divine which nature makes on man, we have to remember how much the mind of man has already to do with nature. We have to do here with nature, not primarily as an objectively existing system of laws and forces, but as it exists for man as an object of actual knowledge and experience. And how has it come to be this to him? Not without help from the thinking mind which collates and connects the separate impressions made on it through the senses, and gradually reads the riddle of the universe by the help of what it brings to it out of its own resources. We speak of the immaturity of the savage mind, but there is an intense mental activity in the simplest conception which the savage (or the child) can form of the existence of nature, or of a world around him. He sees changes, but he finds the interpretation of these changes in the idea of causality which he brings to it from his own mind. He groups attributes and forms objects, but he does this through the mental law of substance and accident. He perceives the operation of vast forces in nature, but whence does he get the idea of force? He gets it from the consciousness of power within himself, and through this puts meaning into the scene of change and movement which he finds around him. Is it wonderful, then, that man, who has put so much of himself into nature, even when constructing it as an object of thought, should again receive back the reflection of his own spiritual image from nature—receive it back on a grander, vastly enhanced scale, proportionate to the greatness and immensity of the universe on which he looks, and should be filled with awe and reverence in presence of this Other-Self, and Higher-than-Self, as that of a Reason, Power, and Will essentially akin to his own, though infinitely greater? Reason does not create this sense of the Divine; it can only follow in its train, and seek to lay bare and analyse—as is done in the theoretic proofs—the rational elements which it involves.

III. The moral argument—contrast with theoretic proofs.

III. There remains the moral argument, which deserves a place by itself, and which I must briefly consider before I close. The theoretic proofs, as Kant rightly said, can give us no knowledge of God as a moral Being—as a Being who sets before Him moral ends, and governs the world with reference to these ends. For this we are dependent on the Practical Reason, which shows us not what is, but what ought to be, and is the source of laws of moral conduct which we recognise as of binding force for every rational agent. The way in which Kant works out his argument from this point is one of the most interesting parts of his system. Nature in itself, he thinks, knows nothing of a highest end. This is given only in the Practical Reason, which sets before us ends of unconditioned worth, and requires us, if our view of the world is to be consistent, to regard these as supreme, i.e. to view the world as a moral system, in which natural ends are everywhere subordinated to moral. But such a moral teleology is only possible if there is one principle of the natural and of the moral order, and if nature is so arranged as to secure a final harmony of natural and moral conditions; in other words, if the world has a moral as well as an intelligent cause. God, therefore, is a postulate of the Practical Reason.Cf. Kritik d. r. Vernunft, pp. 548–557, on “The Ideal of the Highest Good as a Determining Ground of the last end of Pure Reason” (Eng. trans. pp. 487–496); and the Kritik d. praktischen Vernunft, Part II. 5—“The Being of God as a Postulate of the Pure Practical Reason.” I quote, in further illustration of this argument, Professor Caird’s fuller statement of it, in his excellent exposition of the Critique of Judgment, in which he follows Kant. “The principle of moral determination in man,” he says, “carries with it the idea of a highest end, after which he should strive; in other words, the idea of a system in which all rational beings realise their happiness through their moral perfection, and in proportion to it. But such realisation of happiness through morality is no natural sequence of effect on cause; for there is nothing in the connection of physical causes that has any relation to such an end. We are forced, therefore, by the same moral necessity which makes us set before us such an end, to postulate outside of nature a cause that determines nature, so as finally to secure this result: and from this follows necessarily the idea of an all-wise, all-powerful, all-righteous, all-merciful God. We have a ‘pure moral need’ for the existence of such a Being; and our moral needs differ from physical needs in that they have an absolute claim to satisfaction. . . . Furthermore, we are to remember that the principle which leads us to postulate God is a practical principle, which does not give us, strictly speaking, a knowledge of God, but only of a special relation in which He stands to us and to nature: while, therefore, in order to find in God the principle which realises the highest good, we are obliged to represent Him as a rational Being, who is guided by the idea of an end, and who uses nature as means to it, we are to remember that this conception is based on an imperfect analogy. . . . ‘All that we can say is that, consistently with the nature of our intelligence, we cannot make intelligible to ourselves the possibility of such an adaptation of nature to the moral law and its object as is involved in the final end which the moral law commands us to aim at, except by assuming the existence of a Creator and Governor of the world, who is also its moral Legislator.’” Philosophy of Kant, ii. pp. 504, 505.

It is to this view of God as a postulate of the Practical Reason, and as satisfying a “pure moral need,” that the Ritschlian theology specially attaches itself; but-it must be remarked that such an origin of the idea of God, abstracted from direct experience of dependence on Him, would furnish no adequate explanation of the religious relation. We may, however, accept all that Kant says of God as a postulate of the moral consciousness, and yet carry the argument a good deal further than he does. God is not only a postulate of the moral nature in the sense that His existence is necessary to secure the final harmony of natural and moral conditions, but it may be held that His existence is implied in the very presence of a morally legislating and commanding Reason within us,—just as an eternal self-conscious Reason was seen to be implied in the universal and necessary principles of the theoretic consciousness. That moral law which appears in conscience—the “categorical imperative” of duty for which Kant himself has done so much to intensify our reverence —that ideal of unrealised goodness which hovers constantly above us, awakening in us a noble dissatisfaction with all past attainments,—these are not facts which explain themselves. Nor are they sufficiently explained as products of association and of social convention. Moral law is not comprehensible except as the expression of a will entitled to impose its commands upon us. The rules and ideals of conduct which conscience reveals to us, and which bind the will with such unconditional authority, point to a deeper source in an eternal moral Reason. The ethical ideal, if its absolute character is to be secured, points back to an eternal ground in the Absolute Being. It takes us back to the same conception of God as the ethically perfect Being, source and ground of moral truth fountain of moral law, which we found to be implied in Christianity.Cf. on the moral argument, Conder’s Basis of Faith, pp. 383–431; Martineau’s Study of Religion, ii. pp. 1–42; Kennedy’s Natural Theology and Modern Thought, Lecture VI., “Kant and the Moral Proof”; and M’Cosh’s Divine Government, Book i. chap. 3.

And let me observe, finally, that here also we have more than logical argument—we have experience. The moral consciousness is one of the most powerful direct sources of man’s knowledge of God. In the earliest stages in which we know anything about man, a moral element blends with his thought. There grows up within him—he knows not how—a sense of right and wrong, of a law making its presence felt in his life, prescribing to him moral duties, and speaking to him with a “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” in his soul which he dare not disregard. His thoughts, meanwhile, accuse or else excuse each other. This law, moreover, presents itself to him as something more than a mere idea of his own mind. It is a real judging power in his soul, an arbiter invested with legislative, but also with judicial functions. It has accordingly from the first a sacred character. It is a power not himself making for righteousness within him. He instinctively connects it with the Power be worships, whose existence is borne in on him from other sources. As conscience develops, his deities come to be more invested with a moral character, and are feared, honoured, or propitiated accordingly. It is the moral consciousness particularly which safeguards the personality of God—the Divine tending to sink back into identity with nature in proportion as the ethical idea is obscured.

The conclusion we reach from the various arguments and considerations advanced in this Lecture is, that the Christian view of a personal and holy God, as the Author of the universe, and its moral Legislator and Ruler, is the only one in which the reason and the heart of man can permanently rest. I do not say that reason could have reached the height of the Christian conception for itself; I do not even think it can hold to it unless it accepts the fact of Revelation and the other truths which Christianity associates with it. But I do say that, with this view as given, reason is able to bring to it abundant corroboration and verification. It is not one line of evidence only which establishes the theistic position, but the concurrent force of many,- starting from different and independent standpoints. And the voice of reason is confirmed by the soul’s direct experiences in religion . At the very least these considerations show—even if the force of demonstration is denied to them—that the Christian view of God is not unreasonable; that it is in accordance with the highest suggestions of reason applied to the facts of existence; that there is no bar in rational thought or in science to its full acceptance. And this is all that at present we need ask.

(3) Finally, it is the view of many distinguished evolutionists, that the course of evolution itself compels us to recognise the existence of breaks in the chain of development, where, as they think, some new and creative cause must have come into operation. I may instance Mr. Wallace, a thoroughgoing evolutionist, who recognises three such “stages in the development of the organic world, when some new cause or power must necessarily have come into action,” viz. (a) at the introduction of life, (b) at the introduction of sensation or consciousness, (c) at the introduction of man.Darwinism, pp. 474–476. With the view I hold of development as a process, determined from within, I do not feel the same need for emphasising these as “breaks.” We have, indeed, at the points named, the appearance of something entirely new, but so have we, in a lesser degree, with every advance or improvement in the organism, e.g., with the first rudiment of an eye, or of a new organ of any kind. The action of the creative cause is spread along the whole line of the advance, revealing itself in higher and higher potencies as the development proceeds. It only breaks out more manifestly at the points named, where it founds a new order or kingdom of existence.Mr. Gore has said: “The term supernatural is purely relative to what at any particular stage of thought we mean by nature. Nature is a progressive development of life, and each new stage of life appears supernatural from the point of view of what lies below it.”—The Incarnation (Bampton Lectures), p. 85. Lange has expanded the same thought. “Each stage of nature,” he says, “prepares for a higher; which in turn maybe regarded as above nature, as contrary to nature, and yet as only higher nature, since it introduces a new and higher principle of life into the existent and natural order of things. . . . Thus the chemical principle appeared as a miracle in the elementary world, as introducing a new and higher life; similarly the principle of crystallisation is a miracle with reference to the lower principle of chemical affinity; the plant, a miracle above the crystal; the animal, a miracle in reference to the plant; and man, over all the animal world. Lastly, Christ, as the Second Man, the God-Man, is a miracle above all the world of the first man, who is of the earth earthy.”—Com. on Matt. p. 152 (Eng. trans.).

While thus advocating, as part of the doctrine of creation, a beginning of the world in time, I am not insensible to the enormous difficulties involved in that conception. Prior to that beginning we have still, it may appear, to postulate a beginningless eternity, during which God existed alone. The Divine purpose to create was there, but it had not passed into act. Here arises the difficulty. How are we to fill up in thought these blank eternal ages in the Divine life? The doctrine of the Trinity, with its suggestion of an internal Divine life and love, comes in as an aid,Cf. Professor Flint, in Anti-Theistic Theories, pp. 438, 439. He remarks: “Although Omnipotence cannot express itself fully in the finite world to which we belong, the Divine nature may be in itself an infinite universe, where this and all other attributes can find complete expression. . . . The Divine nature must have in itself a plenitude of power and glory, to which the production of numberless worlds can add nothing.” but, abstracting from the thought of the world, of the universe afterwards to be created, we know of nothing to serve as a content of the Divine mind, unless it be the so-called “eternal truths.” So that here we are in, presence of a great deep. A yet greater difficulty arises when we ask, Since God purposed to create, why was creation so long delayed? Why was a whole eternity allowed to elapse before the purpose was put into execution? This objection was early urged against the doctrine of creation. Cf. Origen, De Principiis, Book iii. 5; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book xi. 5. If it was a satisfaction to love and wisdom to produce a universe, why was creation not as eternal as the purpose of it? Why an eternity’s quiescence, and then this transient act? Or rather, since in eternity no one moment is indistinguishable from another, why this particular moment chosen for creation? The very mentioning of these difficulties suggests that somehow we are on a wrong track, and that the solution lies—since solution there must be, whether we can reach it or not—in the revisal of the notions we set out with as to the relations of eternity to time.

First, some have sought to cut this knot by the doctrine of an Eternal Creation. God, it is thought, did not wait through a solitary eternity before He called the world into existence—the act of creation is coeval with His Being, and the world, though a creature and dependent, is eternal as Himself. This was the doctrine of Origen in the early Church, of Erigena in the Middle Ages, and has been revived by Rothe, Darner, Lotze, and many others in modern times. It is carefully to be distinguished from the doctrine of a pre-existent eternal matter formerly referred to. But I do not think it solves the difficulty. It is either only the doctrine of an eternal series of worlds in another form,. and is exposed to all the difficulties of that assumption; or it seeks to evade these difficulties by the hypothesis of an undeveloping spiritual world, standing, as Dorner says, in the light of eternity, antecedent to the existing one—an hypothesis which leaves the origin of the temporal and developing world precisely where it was. Besides, how is the purpose of God ever to be summed up into a unity, if there is literally no beginning and no goal in creation?See Note D.—“Eternal Creation.” Secondly, another form of solution is that of the speculative philosophers, who would have us regard the distinction of time and eternity as due only to our finite standpoint, and who bid us raise ourselves to that higher point of view from which all things are beheld, in Spinoza’s phrase, sub specie aeternitatis.Spinoza’s Ethics, Part II. Prop. 44, Cor. ii.—“It is the nature of reason to perceive things sub quadam aeternitatis specie.” The meaning of this is, that what exists for our consciousness as a time-development exists for the Divine consciousness as an eternally complete whole. For God, temporal succession has no existence. The universe, with all its determinations, past, present, and future, stands before the Divine mind in simultaneous reality. Language of this kind is found in Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, Green,A good illustration is afforded by Mr. Green in a fragment on Immortality. “As a determination of thought,” he says, “everything is eternal. What are we to say, then, to the extinct races of animals, the past formations of the earth? How can that which is extinct and past be eternal? . . . The process is eternal, and they as stages in it are so too. That which has passed away is only their false appearance of being independent entities, related only to themselves, as opposed to being stages, essentially related to a before and after. In other words, relatively to our temporal consciousness, which can only present one thing to itself at a time, and therefore supposes that when A follows B, B ceases to exist, they have perished; relatively to the thought which, as eternal, holds past, present, and future together, they are permanent; their very transitoriness is eternal.”—Works, iii. p. 159. and is to be met with sometimes in more orthodox theologians. It is, however, difficult to see what meaning can be attached to it which does not reduce all history to an illusion.Hegel, indeed, says: “Within the range of the finite we can never see that the end or aim has really been secured. The consummation of the infinite aim, therefore, consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. . . . It is this illusion under which we live. . . . In the course of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it; and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has created.”—Wallace’s Logic of Hegel, p. 304. For, after all, time-development is a reality. There is succession in our conscious life, and in the events of nature. The things that happened yesterday are not the things that are happening to-day. The things that are happening today are not the things that will happen to-morrow. The past is past; the future is not yet come. It is plain that if time is a reality, the future is not yet present to God, except ideally. The events that will happen to-morrow are not yet existent. Else life is a dream; all, as the Indian philosophers say, is Maya,—illusion, appearance, seeming. Even if life is a dream, there is succession in the thoughts of that dream, and time is still not got rid of. I cannot see, therefore, that without reducing the process of the world to unreality, this view of it as an eternally completed fact can be upheld. In an ideal sense the world may be, doubtless is, present to the Divine mind; but as regards the parts of it yet future, it cannot be so actually.Cf. Veitch’s Knowing and Being, chap. vii.; Seth’s Hegelianism and Personality, pp. 180–184; Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, iii. pp. 293–295 (Eng. trans.); Lotze, Microcosmus, ii. p. 711 (Eng. trans.); and see Note D. to Lect. III. What other solution, then, is possible? The solution must lie in getting a proper idea of the relation of eternity to time, and this, so far as I can see, has not yet been satisfactorily accomplished. The nearest analogy I can suggest is that of the spiritual thinking principle within ourselves, which remains a constant factor in all the flux of our thoughts and feelings. It is in the midst of them, yet it is out of the flux and above them. It is not involved in the succession of time, for it is the principle which itself relates things in the succession of time-for which, therefore, such succession exists. I would only venture to remark, further, that even if the universe were conceived of as originating in an eternal act, it would still, to a mind capable of tracing it back through the various stages of its development, present the aspect of a temporal beginning. Before this beginning, it would be possible for the mind to extend its vision indefinitely backwards through imaginary ages, which yet had no existence save as its own ideal construction. But God’s eternity is not to be identified with this thought of an indefinitely extended time. Eternity we may rather take to be an expression for the timeless necessity of God’s existence; and time, properly speaking, begins its course only with the world.See Note E.—Eternity and Time. A few words before leaving this part of the subject on the motive and end of creation. If we reject the idea of metaphysical necessity, and think of creation as originating in a free, intelligent act, it must, like every similar act, be conceived of as proceeding from a motive, which includes in it at the -same time a rational end. And if God is free, personal Spirit, who is at the same time ethical Will, what motive is possible but goodness or love, or what end can be thought of but an ethical one? In this way it may be held that, though the universe is not the product of a logical or metaphysical necessity, it arises from the nature of God by a moral necessity which is one with the highest freedom, and thus the conception of creation may be secured from arbitrariness. It is an old thought that the motive to the creation of the world was the goodness of the Creator. Plato expresses this idea in his Timaeus,Timaeus, p.29—“Let me tell you, then, why the Creator created and made the universe. He was good, and no goodness can ever have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, He desired that all things should be as like Himself as possible.”—Jowett’s Plato, iii. p. 613. and points to a yet more comprehensive view when, in the Republic, he names “the Good” as the highest principle both of knowledge and of existence.Republic, Bk. vi. Since the time of Kant, philosophy has dealt m very earnest fashion with this idea of “the Good”—now conceived of as ethical good, but likewise as including in it the highest happiness and blessedness—as at once the moving cause and end of the world. Start from the postulate of Kant, that moral ends are alone of absolute worth, and the inference is irresistible that the world as a whole is constituted for moral ends, and that it has its cause in a Supreme Original Good, which produces the natural for the sake of the moral, and is guiding the universe to a moral goal.See last Lecture, pp. 108–109. Hence, from his principles, Kant arrives at the notion of an ethical community or “Kingdom of God,” having the laws of virtue as its basis and aim, as the end to which creation tends.In his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Bk. iii. Cf. Seth’s From Kant to Hegel, pp. 123, 124; Caird’s Philosophy of Kant, pp. 611–613. Lotze takes up the same thought of a world ordered in conformity with the idea of “the Good,” and having its source in a Highest-Good Personal, and from him chiefly it has entered into Ritschlian theology.Cf. Microcosmus, ii. p. 728 (Eng. trans.); Outlines of Metaphysic, pp. 151, 152 (Eng. trans.). But Christian theology from its own standpoint arrives at a similar result. We have but to ask, with Dorner, What is the relation of the ethical nature of God to the other distinctions we ascribe to Him? to see that “the non-ethical distinctions in and the nature of God are related to the ethical as means to an end; but the absolute end can only lie in morality, for it alone is of absolute worth.”Christian Ethics, p. 65 (Eng. trans.). In the graduated system of ends of which the universe consists, the moral, in other words, must be presumed to be the highest. And this is precisely what Christianity declares when it teaches that Christ and the kingdom of God are the consummation of God’s world-purpose; that the government of the world is carried on for moral ends; and that “all things work together for good to them that love God.”Rom. viii. 28.

II. The nature of man, and his place in creation: man the final cause of the world.

II. From the point now reached, the transition is easy to the Scripture doctrine of the nature of man, and of his position in creation. I may begin here with man’s place in creation, which of itself is a testimony which nature bears to the meaning and purpose of God in that creation. Assuming that final cause is to be traced in the world at all, we can get no better clue to it than by simply observing whither the process of development tends—what, as Mr. Spencer says, is “the naturally revealed end” towards which evolution works.Data of Ethics, p. 171. Here is a process of development, of evolution, going on for millenniums—what, as a matter of fact, do we find to be the outcome of it? At the base of the scale is inorganic matter; then we rise to organic life in the vegetable world; as a next round in the ladder of ascent we have animal and sentient life; we rise through all the gradations of that life—through insect, fish, reptile, bird, mammal—till at length, at the close of the long line of evolution, we find—What? Man, a self-conscious, personal, rational moral being; a being capable of entering not only into moral relations with his fellow-men, but, infinitely higher, into spiritual and moral relations with his invisible Creator. Man’s creation, it is true, is only the starting-point of a new line of evolution, but that evolution is one of moral life. So far as the teaching of evolution goes, then, man is the crown and masterpiece of this whole edifice of creation, and this also is the teaching of the Bible. I have been frequently struck with this in reading the works of Mr. Spencer and of other evolutionists, that none of them supposes that evolution is ever to reach a higher being than man; that whatever future development there is to be will not be development beyond humanity, but development within humanity. In this it is implied that man is the end of nature, and that the end of nature is a moral one. In man, if we may so speak, mute and unintelligent nature attains to consciousness of itself, gains the power of reading back meaning into its own blind past, and has a prophecy of the goal to which its future tends. At the summit of nature’s gradations—of her inorganic kingdom and plant kingdom and animal kingdom-there stands a being fitted for the kingdom of God.

The agreement of Scripture and science up to this point is patent and incontestable. In the original picture in Genesis we have, as in nature, a gradually ascending series of creations. We have man at the top of the scale; man as the latest being of all, and distinguished from all by the fact that he alone bears his Creator’s image; man set at the head of the lower orders of creatures, as God’s rational vicegerent and representative. Science corroborates all this. It gives to man the same place in the ascending series of creations as Scripture gives him; declares him to be the last and final product of nature; links him intimately with the past through his physical organisation, in which the whole of nature, as physiology shows, recapitulates itself; and at the same time acknowledges that he stands alone, and far removed from the other creatures, in his powers of thought and language, in his capacity for a selfregulated moral life under general rules, in his religious nature, in his capability of progress, and of boundless productivity in arts, sciences, laws, and institutions. Nay, looking at creation as a whole, from the vantage-ground which our present know ledge gives us, we can feel that its plan would have remained incomplete, its pyramid would have lacked a summit, had man not appeared upon the scene. For man not only stands at the head of creation, but, in virtue of his rational nature, he occupies a position in relation to it different from every other. The animal, however high in the scale of development, is a mere creature of nature; man has a life above nature. He is a being of “large discourse, looking before and after.”Hamlet, act iv. scene 4 He is capable of reflection on himself; on the meaning and causes of things in the world around him; on the ends of his own existence. He can rise above momentary impulse and passion, and guide his life by general principles of reason, and so is capable of morality. For the same reason he is capable of religion, and shows his superiority over nature through the thoughts he cherishes of God, of infinity, of eternity. Till a mind of this kind appeared, capable of surveying the scene of its existence, of understanding the wisdom and beauty displayed in its formations, and of utilising for rational purposes the vast resources laid up in its treasuries, the very existence of such a world as this is remained an inexplicable riddle: an adequate final cause—an end-for-self—was not to be found in it.See Note F.—Man the Head of Creation. It would indeed be an exaggeration to view creation solely from the standpoint here taken. The position that man is the final cause of creation must obviously be held with certain qualifications. Were we to attempt to maintain that the world exists solely for man’s use and benefit, we would be met by unanswerable objections. Because man is the supreme end of nature, it does not follow that there are not lower ends—the happiness of the sentient creatures, e.g., and many others that we do not know. This world, again, is part of a wider system, and there may be not only lower ends, but wider ends, than those prescribed by man’s existence. There is a delight which creative wisdom has in its own productions, which is an end in itself. God saw the works that He had made, and behold they were good; though not till man appeared upon the scene were they declared “very good.”Gen. i. 31. But this in no degree militates against the position that the main use and end of nature is to subserve the purposes of man’s existence. Is not this to a thinking mind implied in its very dispositions and arrangements, in its distribution of land and sea, in its river plains and ocean communication, in its supplies of mineral and other wealth stored up in its recesses, in the forces it puts at man’s disposal for the accomplishment of his purposes, in the very obstacles it interposes in the way of his advancement, stimulating his mental activity, summoning forth his powers to contend with difficulties, and in this way rousing him up to further conquests? There are yet higher teleological relations which nature sustains to man, on which I cannot now dwell—the part, e.g., which natural conditions play, as in Greece, in the development of the character and spirit of peoples; the food which the study of nature affords to his intellect; the beauty which delights, and the sublimity which awes him, both speaking to his spirit of things higher than them-selves; the suggestions it gives of the infinite and eternal, etc. Taking it all in all, we may rest in the view that man, as nature’s highest being, is the key to the understanding of the whole development; that nature does not exist for its own sake, but supremely for the sake of the moral; that its chief end is to furnish the means for such a development as we now see in the mental and moral history of mankind.On the teleological relations of nature to man, see Kant, Kritik d. Urtheilkraft, sect. 83—“Of the last end of nature as a teleological system,” and sect. 84—” Of the final end of the existence of a world, i.e. of the creation itself”; and cf. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, ii. pp. 545–557.

As a compound being, made up of body and of spirit, man is the link which unites the natural and the spiritual worlds.See this thought worked out in Herder’s Ideen zur Phil. d. Gesch. der Menschheit (cf. Book v. 6, quoted in Note F.). The direct link between man and nature is the body, which in its erect posture, its highly evolved brain, its developed limbs, and its countenance lifted up to the heavens, bears witness, as already Ovid reminds us,

Metamorphoses, i. 2:

LECTURE V.

THE POSTULATE OF THE CHRISTIAN VIEW IN REGARD TO THE SIN AND DISORDER OF THE WORLD.

Christianity is the religion of Redemption. As such, it has for its third postulate the sin and disorder of the world. The existence of natural and moral evil is one of the darkest, deepest, and most difficult problems that can occupy human thought. It is one which has exercised the hearts of men in all ages, one which is often raised in Scripture, and which should warn us off from light and superficial views of the Divine character and purposes. Its presence is the great difficulty in the way of a belief on natural grounds in the perfect justice and goodness of God, the obstacle we immediately encounter when we try to persuade ourselves that the universe is created and ordered by a supremely good Being. So grave is this difficulty, even in respect to natural evil, that Mr. J. S. Mill declares “the problem of reconciling infinite benevolence and justice in the Creator of such a world as this” to be “impossible”; and adds, “The attempt to do so not only involves absolute contradiction in an intellectual point of view, but exhibits in excess the revolting spectacle of a jesuitical defence of moral enormities.”Three Essays on Religion, pp. 186, 187. Cf. pp. 24–41, 112, etc. See Note A.—Defects in Creation: an Argument against Theism. From the natural point of view, the assurance of God’s perfect goodness must always be, to some extent, an act of faith, based on the postulate of our own moral consciousness; and even this will often find it difficult to sustain itself, since Christianity alone imparts the moral consciousness in sufficient strength to uphold the faith required.

It is important to observe that, though this problem meets us in connection with the Christian view of the world, it is not Christianity that makes this problem. Natural and moral evil is there as a fact in the universe, and would be there though Christianity had never been heard of. Christianity intensifies the problem by the stronger light it casts on the character of God, and the higher view it gives of man, but it does not create the problem. What it professes to do is to help us to Solve it. But the problem is there all the while, and has to be taken account of by every system, whether Christian or not. It is a difficulty of philosophy, not less than of theology.

While, however, in naturalistic systems moral evil is apt to fall behind natural evil, in Christianity it is the other way —the moral evil is throughout placed in the forefront, and natural evil is looked at mainly in the light of it. This is as it should be; for while, as we shall see, natural evil presents an independent problem, there can be no doubt that its existence is deeply implicated with the existence of moral evil.This is a point which Mr. Mill overlooks. If we subtract from the sum of suffering in the world all that is directly or indirectly caused by sin—by the play and action of forces that are morally evil—we shall reduce the problem to very manageable dimensions indeed. It is the existence moral evil which is the tremendous difficulty from a theistic point of view. I might go further, and say that it is only for a theistic system that the problem of moral evil properly exists.Cf. Ott’s Le Probleme du Mal, pp. 1–5, 98, 99. Materialism and Pantheism may acknowledge natural evil—misfortune, pain, sorrow, misery—but it is only by an inconsistency they can speak of sin. Both are systems of determinism, and leave no place for moral action. There is, besides, in either system, no question of a theodicy, for there is to them no God. Things are as they are by a necessity of nature, which we can neither account for nor get behind. If we could, indeed, really get rid of the problem of sin by adopting either of these systems, there would be some reason for accepting them. But unfortunately the problem of moral evil is one which refuses to be thus summarily got rid of. Sin is there; the feeling of responsibility and of guilt is there; and neither the heart nor the reason of humanity will allow us to treat them as nonentities. Nor does the denial of God’s existence really mitigate the difficulty. Dark as the problem of evil is, it would be immeasurably darker if we were compelled to believe that there is no infinite righteousness and love behind, through which a solution of the problem may ultimately be hoped for. I proceed to consider more narrowly what the Christian view of sin is, and how it stands related to modern theories and speculations.

I. The problem of moral evil: conflict of Christian and modern views.

I. It is in their respective relations to the sin and disorder of the world, perhaps more than at any other point, that the Christian and “modern” views of the world come to a direct issue. On the one hand, there are certain respects in which the Christian view finds unexpected support from the modern view of the world; on the other, there are certain respects in which it is fundamentally at variance with it. Let us briefly consider both.

There are three respects, in particular, in which the modern view of the world comes to the support of the Christian view of sin.

1. The modern view of things is marked by a stronger sense than in former times of the reality and universal presence of evil—both of natural evil and of moral evil, though moral evil, as was to be expected, is regarded more from its side of error, misery, and bondage, than from its side of guilt. The modern view has disposed of the superficial optimism of earlier times. The days of a flimsy optimism, when men demonstrated to their own satisfaction that this was the best of all possible worlds, and made light of the facts which contradicted their pleasing hypothesis, are over, and everywhere there is an oppressive sense of the weight of the evils which burden humanity, and of the unsatisfactoriness of natural existence generally. The strain of modern thought is pessimistic rather than optimistic. Its high-water mark is not optimism, but what George Eliot prefers to call “meliorism.”Cf. Sully’s Pessimism, p. 399. He adopts the term. Herbert Spencer, indeed, still looks for an “evanescence of evil,” as the result of the working of natural and necessary laws of evolution,Social Statics, p. 79. but I do not find that this represents the general temper of the age. Schopenhauer and Hartmann have at least this merit, that they raise the question of the good or evil of existence in a form which makes it impossible ever again to ignore it, or bury it out of sight. Pessimism, as Professor Flint has said, “like Macbeth, has murdered sleep.”Anti-Theistic Theories, p. 294. All this is a gain to the Christian view. Hartmann even goes so far as to find the merit of Christianity in the fact that it is a system of Pessimism.Selbstzersetzung des Christenthusms, p. 51. Its characteristic mark, he thinks, is “the pessimistic conviction of the unworthiness of this world to exist.” Schopenhauer’s language is similar. “Let no one think,” he says, “that Christianity is favourable to optimism; for in the Gospels world and evil are used as almost synonymous.” “The inmost kernel of Christianity is identical with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism.”—Die Welt als Wille, etc., i. p. 420; iii. p. 420 (Eng. trans.). Both systems take for granted the facts of existence, and both look them boldly in the face. But there is this difference—Christianity looks on the world in a spirit of hope; Pessimism looks on it in a spirit of despair.

2. It is an extension of the same remark to say that the modern view of the world has disposed effectually of the shallow Rousseau view of the inherent goodness of human nature, and of the eighteenth-century illumination dreams of a perfectibility of man based on education, and on altered social and political conditions.Schopenhauer says: “Indeed, the fundamental characteristic and the πρῶτον ψεῦδος of Rousseau’s whole philosophy is this, that in the place of the Christian doctrine of original sin, and the original depravity of the human race, he puts an original goodness and unlimited perfectibility of it, which has only been led astray by civilisation and its consequences, and then founds upon this his optimism and humanism.”—Die Welt als Wille, etc., iii. p. 398. The optimistic and Pelagian views of human nature are as completely discredited as the optimistic view of the world generally. Kant struck this deeper keynote when, in opposition to the preceding Rationalism, he acknowledged the presence of a “radical evil” in human nature, which he could only account for by an act of the will above time.Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Book i.—“On the Indwelling of the Evil Principle along with the Good, or on the Radical Evil in Human Nature.” Cf. Caird’s Philosophy of Kant, ii. pp. 566–568. The modern evolutionary philosophy goes even beyond Christianity in its affirmation of the dominance of the brute element in man’s being—of the ascendency of the egoistic over the social impulses in the natural man;

Mr. Flairs says:—“Thus we see what human progress means. It means throwing off the brute-inheritance—gradually throwing it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggle needless. . . . The ape and the tiger in human nature will become extinct. Theology has had much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute-inheritance which every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance towards true salvation.”—Man’s Destiny, p. 103.

Other evidences are afforded by the belief in necromancy, the narratives of resurrection, etc. What kind of place “Sheol” was to the popular imagination is well represented in the words of Job—

There was not much cheer in looking forward to an abode like this, and it is therefore not surprising that even good men, in moments of despondency, when it seemed as if God’s presence and favour were taken from them, should moan, as David did—

or with Hezekiah—

It is not, therefore, in this direction that we are to look for the positive and cheering side of the Old Testament hope of immortality, but in quite another. It is said we have no doctrine of Immortality in the Old Testament. But I reply, we have immortality at the very commencement—for man, as he came from the hands of his Creator, was made for immortal life. Man in Eden was immortal. He was intended to live, not to die. Then came sin, and with it death. Adam called his son Seth, and Seth called his son Enoch, which means “frail, mortal man.” Seth himself died, his son died, his son’s son died, and so the line of death goes on. Then comes an interruption, the intervention, as it were, of a higher law, a new inbreaking of immortality into a line of death. “Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him.”Gen. v. 24. Enoch did not die. Every other life in that record ends with the statement, “and he died”; but Enoch’s is given as an exception. He did not die, but God “took” him, i.e. without death. He simply “was not” on earth, but he “was” with God in another and invisible state of existence.So, later, Elijah. His case is thus in some respects the true type of all immortality, for it is an immortality of the true personality, in which the body has as real a share as the soul. It agrees with what I have advanced in the Lecture, that it is not an immortality of the soul only that the Bible speaks of that is left for the philosophers but an immortality of the whole person, body and soul together. Such is the Christian hope, and such, as I shall now try to show, was the Hebrew hope also.

It is a current view that the doctrine of the Resurrection of the dead was a very late doctrine among the Hebrews, borrowed, as many think, from the Persians, during, or subsequent to, the Babylonian exile. Dr. Cheyne sees in it an effect of Zoroastrian influence on the religion of Israel.Origin of Psalter, Lecture VIII.; and papers in The Expository Times (July and August 1891) on “Possible Zoroastrian Influences on the Religion of Israel.” My opinion, on the contrary, is that it is one of the very oldest doctrines in the Bible, the form, in fact, in which the hope of immortality was held, so far as it was held, from the days of the patriarchs downward.Thus also Hofmann: “Nothing can be more erroneous than the opinion that the resurrection from the dead is a late idea, first entering through human reflection, the earliest traces of which, if not first given by the Parsees to the Jews, are to be met with in Isaiah and Ezekiel.”—Schriftbeweis, ii. p. 461. Cf. on this theory of Parsic influence, Pusey’s Daniel, pp. 512–517. In any case, it was a doctrine of very remote antiquity. We find traces of it in many ancient religions outside the Hebrew, an instructive testimony to the truth of the idea on which it rested. The Egyptians believed, e.g., that the reanimation of the body was essential to perfected existence; and this, according to some, was the thought that underlay the practice of embalming.“There is a chapter with a vignette representing the soul uniting itself to the body, and the text promises that they shall never again be separated.”—Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, p. 188. “They believed,” says Budge, “that the soul would revisit the body after a number of years, and therefore it was absolutely necessary that the body should he preserved, if its owner wished to live for ever with the gods.”—Dwellers on the Nile, p. 156. The ancient Babylonians and Assyrians also had the idea of resurrection. One of their hymns to Merodach celebrates him as the

“Merciful one among the gods,

Merciful one, who restores the dead to life.”Cf. Boscawen, British Museum Lecture, pp. 23, 24; Sayce, pp. 98–100; Cheyne, Origin of Psalter, p. 392. There is no evidence, however, of a general hope of resurrection.

LECTURE VI.

THE CENTRAL ASSERTION OF THE CHRISTIAN VIEW—THE INCARNATION OF GOD IN CHRIST.

Introductory

In the second Lecture I conducted an historical argument intended to show that there is really no intermediate position in which the mind can logically rest between the admission of a truly Divine Christ and a purely humanitarian view. This argument I have now to complete, by showing that the necessity which history declares to exist arises from the actual state of the facts in the Christian Revelation. We have seen what the alternative is, and we have now to ask why it is so.

Why is it that we cannot rest in a conception of Christ as simply a prophet of a higher order? or as a God-filled man in whom the Divine dwelt as it dwells in no other? or as the central Personage of our race, at once ideal man and the Revelation to us of the absolute principles of religion? These views seem plausible; they are accepted by many; they seem at first sight to bring Christ nearer to us than on the supposition of His true God-manhood; why cannot the mind of the Church rest in them? Must not the explanation be that, taking into account the sum-total of the facts of Christianity, they refuse to square with any subordinate view, but compel us to press up to the higher conception? This is what I affirm, and I propose in this Lecture to test the question by an examination of the facts themselves.

There is, I know, in some minds, an insuperable objection, a priori, to the acceptance of the fact of the Incarnation, arising from the lowliness of Christ’s earthly origin and condition. Can we believe, it is said, that in this historical individual, Jesus of Nazareth—this son of a carpenter-God actually became incarnate; that in this humble man, so poor in all His earthly surroundings, there literally dwelt the fulness of the Godhead bodily? Is the thought not on the face of it incredible? The appeal here is to our powers of imagination—of conceiving—to our sense of the likelihood or unlikelihood of things; and to enable us to judge fairly of that appeal, and of its nature as an objection to the Incarnation, a great many things would have to be taken into account, both before and after. I would only say that, as regards a certain class who make that objection—the higher class of liberal theologians especially—the question seems only one of degree. If Christ is, in any ease, as most of them affirm, the central, typical, religiously greatest individual of the race; if the principle of the absolute religion is manifested in Him, as Pfleiderer allows;Cf. his Grundriss, secs. 128, 129. if He is the ideally perfect man in whom the God-consciousness finds its fullest expression, as Schleiermacher declares;ii. secs. 93, 94. if He is alone the sinless Personality of the race, as even Lipsius will grant,Dogmatik, sec. 651.—these are already remarkable claims, and, as compared with His lowly appearance and mean historical environment, create almost as great a feeling of strangeness as on the supposition of His true Divinity. Or let us suppose that the objection comes from the evolutionist. Then contrast the strangeness he speaks of with that of his own views. His objection is, that he cannot believe that in this lowly Man of Nazareth there should reside all the potentialities of Divinity. But what does he ask us to believe? He goes back to the primitive state of things, and there, in that little speck of jelly at the first dawn of life,—in that humble drop of protoplasmic matter buried in some oozy slime,—he bids us believe that there lies wrapped up, only waiting for development, the promise and potency of the whole subsequent evolution of life. In that first germ-cell there lies enfolded—latent—not only the whole wealth of vegetable existence, not only the long procession of future races and species of lower and higher animals, with their bodily powers and mental instincts, but, in addition, the later possibilities of humanity; all that has now come to light in human development—the wealth of genius, the riches of civilisation, the powers of intellect, imagination, and heart, the treasures of human love and goodness, of poetry and art—the genius of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton—the spiritual greatness and holiness of Christ Himself;—all, in a word, that has ever come out of man, is supposed by the evolutionist to have been potentially present from the first in that little primitive speck of protoplasm!Tyndall carries back this promise and potency to the original fire-mist. “For what are the core and essence of this hypothesis? Strip it naked, and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself—emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena—were once latent in a fiery cloud.”—Fragments, ii. p. 132. I confess that, putting his assertion alongside the Christian one, I do not feel that there is much to choose between them in point of strangeness. But evolution, he would tell us, is not deprived of its truth by the strangeness at first sight of its assertion—neither is the Christian view, The question is not one to be settled a priori, but to be brought to the test of facts.

I. Testimony of the apostolic age as throwing light on Christ’s own claims.

I. Godet has said, “Christianity is entirely based upon Christ’s consciousness of Himself, and it is the heroism of faith to rest upon the extraordinary testimony which this Being gave to Himself.”Commentary on John, ii. p. 315 (Eng. trans.). This must be so, for the reason which Christ Himself gives, that He alone has the knowledge which qualifies Him to give a true estimate of Himself. “For I know,” He said to the Jews, “whence I came, and whither I go.”John viii. 14. I propose, however, to begin at a point further down—that to which our first written documents belong—and to ask, What was the view of Christ’s Person held in the apostolic age? The testimony of that age is clearly one of great importance, as throwing light on Christ’s own claims. When men say, Buddha also was raised to the rank of Divinity by his followers, though he himself made no such claim, I answer that the cases are not parallel. It was only long centuries after his death, and within limited circles, that Buddha was regarded as Divine; but one short step takes us from the days when Christ Himself lived and taught on earth, into the midst of a Church, founded by His apostles, which in all its branches worshipped and adored Him as the veritable Son of God made manifest on earth for our salvation. If it can be shown that in the apostolic Church a practically consentient view existed of Christ’s Person, this, of itself, is a strong reason for believing that it rested on claims made by Christ Himself, and rose naturally out of the facts of His historical self-manifestation.A good summary of the apostolic evidence will be seen in Dr. Whitelaw’s How is the Divinity of Jesus depicted in the Gospels and Epistles?

I begin with the broad fact which none can dispute, that, in the first age of Christianity, Christ was universally regarded as one who had risen from the dead, who had ascended on high to the right hand of God, who exercised there a government of the world, who was to return again to judge the quick and dead, and who, on these grounds, was the object of worship and prayer in all the churches.Cf. Weiss’s Bib. Theol. of the New Testament, pp. 177–181 (Eng. trans.); Harnack’s Dogmengeschichte, i. pp. 66–68. This view of Christ is found in every book of the New Testament,—in the Acts, in the Pauline Epistles, in Hebrews, in Peter, in the Book of Revelation, in the Epistles of John, and James, and Jude,—and is so generally acknowledged to be there, that I do not need to delay in quoting special texts. But even so much as this cannot be admitted, without implying that in the faith of the early Church Christ was no mere man, but a supernatural Personage, i.e. that the Ebionitic view was not the primitive one. Think only of what is implied in this one claim to be the Judge of the world—the arbiter of the everlasting destiny of mankind.Cf. Baldensperger, Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, p. 152. “How does such a claim fit into the frame of a human consciousness? Such an assumption lies in fact beyond all our experience, also beyond the highest religious experience,” etc. There is no point on which the writers of the New Testament are more absolutely unanimous than this—that Christ shall come again to be our Judge; and whether the early Christians analysed all that was involved in this belief or not, there can be no doubt in the mind of anyone who has analysed it that it involved the possession of attributes which can belong only to God (e.g., omniscience). Or take the other outstanding fact of worship paid to Christ—such, e.g., as we find in the Book of Revelation. The idea of Divine honours externally conferred on one who is essentially but man is quite foreign to the New Testament; and the only alternative is, to suppose that Christ was from the first regarded as having a supernatural and Divine side to His Person—as being essentially Divine.

As regards the apostolic testimony, the ground is happily cleared in modern times by the large measure of general agreement which exists among impartial exegetes as to the nature of the doctrines taught in the several books. The old Unitarian glosses on passages which seemed to affirm the Divinity of Christ are now seldom met with; and it is freely admitted that the bulk of the New Testament writings teach a doctrine of Christ’s Person practically as high as the Church has ever affirmed. For instance, it is no longer disputed by any competent authority that, in Paul and John, it is the supernatural view of Christ’s Person that is given. As to John—using that name at present for the author of the Fourth Gospel and related Epistles—his doctrine of Christ is of the highest. This is admitted by the most negative critics, e.g., by Dr. Martineau, who says that the phrase “Son of God,” applied to the preexisting Word in the Fourth Gospel, heaves all finite analogies behind. “The oneness with God which it means to mark is not such resembling reflex of the Divine thought and character as men or angels may attain, but identity of essence, constituting Him not god-like alone, but God. Others may be children of God in a moral sense; but by this right of elemental nature, none but He; He is, herein, the only Son; so little separate, so close to the inner Divine life which He expresses, that He is in the bosom of the Father. This language undoubtedly describes a great deal more than such harmony of will and sympathy of affection as may subsist between finite obedience and its infinite Inspirer; it denotes two natures homogeneous, entirely one; and both so essential to the Godhead that neither can be omitted from any truth you speak of it. . . . It was one and the same Logos that in the beginning was with God, who in due time appeared in human form, and showed forth the Father’s pure perfections in relation to mankind, who then returned to His eternal life, with the spiritual ties unbroken which He brought from His finished work.”Seat of Authority, pp. 428, 429. Biedermann, Lipsius, Pfleiderer, Reuss, Reville, etc., all agrees in their estimate of John’s doctrine. Wendt (Die Lehre Jesu, ii. pp. 450–476) seems to go back, and to explain the expressions in John only of an ethical Sonship. Cf. Appendix to Lecture. In this Gospel, therefore, the question is not so much as to the doctrine taught, but as to whether the evangelist has given us an authentic record of what Christ said and did. On this question, so far as it is affected by the Christology, it will be well to reserve our judgment till we see whether the other writings of the apostolic age do not give us—or yield by implication—quite as high a view of Christ’s Person as that which creates offence in John.

To aid us in determining this question, there lie first to hand the writings, above alluded to, of the Apostle Paul. Here, again, it is not seriously doubted that in Paul’s undisputed Epistles we have as clear and strong an assertion of Christ’s Divine dignity as we could well desire. That, in Paul’s theology, Christ had a heavenly pre-existence;See Note A.—The Doctrine of Pre-Existence. that the title “Son of God” applies to Him in this pre-existent state; that He was a being of Divine essence; that He mediated the creation of the world; that in the fulness of time He took on Him human nature; that now, since His death and resurrection, He has been exalted again to Divine power and glory—all this the most candid exegetes now admit. A new turn, however, has been given in recent years to this theology of Paul, by the fancy of some theologians that this heavenly, pre-existent essence of the earlier Pauline Epistles—the “Son of God” who became incarnate in Christ—is not a second Divine Person, as we understand that expression, but a pre-existent “heavenly man,” a being apparently of subordinate rank, at once the perfect spiritual image of God and the heavenly prototype of humanity—a conception easier to state than to make intelligible. This “heavenly man” theory, as we may call it, has been seized on with avidity by many as the true key to the Pauline Christology.It goes back to Baur, and to Ritschl Entstehung, p. 80 (1857), and has been adopted by Holsten, Hilgenfeld, Biedermann, Lipsius, Pfleiderer, etc. Biedermann states it succinctly thus;—“The Person, the I of Christ, has already, before His appearance in the earthly corporeity, in the flesh, preexisted in a pre-earthly condition with God as the εἰκὼν Θεοῦ, as the human image of God, and consequently as the archetypal pattern of humanity; thus is He the Son of God. . . . The appearance of Christ in the world, sent by God in love, is not a becoming man, but a coming of the heavenly, pneumatic Man in the flesh.”—Dogmatik,. B. pp. 93, 97. Beyschlag of Halle adopts it as the basis of his own theory,—in this, however, differing from the others, that he attributes only an ideal pre-existence to this heavenly principle,Christologie, pp. 225, 226, 243. while the majority admit that what Paul had in view was a real and personal pre-existence. This whole hypothesis of the “heavenly man” I can only regard as a new-fangled conceit of exegesis, resting practically on one passage—that in which Paul speaks of “the second man from heaven,”1 Cor. xv. 47 (R.V.).—and in diametric opposition to the general teaching of the Epistles. It is an hypothesis, therefore, which finds no countenance from more sober expositors like Meyer, Weiss, or Reuss, all of whom recognise in Paul’s “Son of God” a Being truly Divine.See Weiss’s criticism in Biblical Theology, i. pp. 410–412, and ii. p. 100; Meyer on 1 Cor. xv. 47; Dorner, System of Doctrine, iii. pp. 175, 176. Christ indeed, in Paul’s view, has humanity, but it is not a humanity which He brought with Him from heaven, but a humanity which He assumed when He came to earth.

The argument for the “heavenly man” theory completely breaks down if we take into account the later Epistles—especially Philippians, Ephesians, and Colossians, the genuineness of which there are no good grounds for disputing.Renan, Reuss, Sabatier, Weiss, etc., accept them all as Pauline. Pfleiderer, who advocates this theory, admits the genuineness of the Epistle to the Philippians, but there we have the strongest assertion of Christ’s pre-existent Divinity. The whole argument in chap. ii. 5-11 turns on Christ’s original condition of Divine glory—” being in the form of God”—and His voluntary abdication of it to take upon. Him “the form of a servant”—“being made in the likeness of men”—“being found in fashion as a man.”Cf. Bruce’s Humiliation of Christ (Cunningham Lectures), pp. 21–28, 403–411. As to the teaching of the Epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians, there is no dispute, even among the friends of this theory. In these Epistles, says Lipsius, “Christ, as the image of God and the first-born of the whole creation, is an essentially Divine Personality, and the Mediator of the creation of the world.”Dogmatik, p. 453. Pfleiderer sees, or imagines he sees, in them the same influence of the Philonic Logos doctrine as is traceable in the Gospel of JohnUrchristenthum, pp. 676, 695.—an indirect witness that between the theology of Paul in these Epistles and that of the Fourth Gospel there is no essential difference. But though the Christology of the later Epistles is admittedly more developed than that of the earlier Epistles, the doctrine of Christ in both is substantially one.Cf. Schmid, Bib. Theol. of New Testament, pp. 469–478 (Eng. trans.). In both, Christ was “the Son of God,” eternally pre-existing in a state of glory with the Father, who, in the fulness of time, moved by love, became incarnate for our salvation.2 Cor. viii. 9; Gal. iv. 4. In both—as also in John—He existed before the creation of the world, and was the agent in its creation.1 Cor. viii. 6. That He is the centre of the Divine purpose, and therefore the One for whom all things as well as by whom all things, are made, is a doctrine as clearly taught in the Epistles to the Romans and the Corinthians as in those to the Colossians and the Ephesians.Cf. Rom. i. 1-4, xvi. 25-27; 1 Cor. viii. 6. Bishop Lightfoot says: “The absolute universal mediation of the Son is declared as unreservedly in this passage from the First Epistle to the Corinthians (‘One Lord Jesus Christ; through whom are all things, and we through Him’), as in any later statement of the apostle; and if all the doctrinal and practical inferences which it implicitly involves were not directly emphasised at this early date, it was because the circumstances did not yet require explicitness on these points.”—Commentary on Colossians, pp. 188, 189. In both, the Divine name Κύριος is freely given to Him; passages applied in the Old Testament to Jehovah are applied to Him also; Divine honour is paid to Him; He is exalted to a Divine sovereignty of the world;Cf. on above statements, Weiss, Biblical Theology, i. pp. 390–393. His name is constantly joined with that of the Father as the source of grace and peace in the introductions to the Epistles,Rom. i. 7; 1 Cor. i. 3; 2 Cor. i. 2; Gal. i. 3. and again with those of the Father and of the Spirit in the apostolic benediction;2 Cor. xiii. 14. it is declared of Him that, as Judge, He has the attribute of the Divine searcher of hearts.Rom. ii. 16; 1 Cor. iv. 5. Taking all the facts into account, and remembering how inconsonant it would have been with Paul’s rigorous Monotheism to attribute Divine honours to a Being not truly Divine, it seems impossible to doubt that, in the view of the Apostle, Christ was truly a Divine Person, one in essence, though distinct in Person from the Father.It is a noteworthy circumstance that nearly all the modern scholars agree in that interpretation of the strongest passage of all, Rom. ix. 5, “who is over all, God blessed for ever, Amen,” which makes it refer to Christ. Thus, E.g., Rothe, Lipsius, Pfleiderer, Ritschl, Schultz, Weiss, etc. But the most remarkable circumstance of all is—and it is a point which I desire specially to emphasise—that in propounding these high views of Christ’s Person, Paul in no case speaks or argues as one teaching a new doctrine, but throughout takes it for granted that his reader’s estimate of the Lord’s dignity is the same as his own. He gives no indication in these letters that he preached or contended for a higher view of Christ’s Person than that which was currently received.Cf. Reuss, History of Christian Theology, i. p. 397 (Eng. trans.). The passage is quoted below. He has no monopoly of this truth, but assumes it as the common possession of the Church. He argues at length for the doctrine of justification by faith, but we never find him arguing for the Divinity of Christ. Whether writing to his own converts, or to churches he had never seen, he uses the same language on this subject, and apparently anticipates no doubt or contradiction on the part of his readers. What inference can we draw, but that the doctrine of Christ’s Person in the early Church was anything but Ebionitic,—that from the first a Divine dignity was ascribed to Christ?

Paul’s Epistles, however, are not the only witnesses on this point of Apostolic theology. Essentially the same doctrine we find in the Epistle to the Hebrews, long attributed to Paul, but now almost universally assigned to another author. It has, therefore, the value of an independent witness. The Epistle is further valuable for its early date, most critics unhesitatingly referring it to the period before the destruction of Jerusalem, probably about A.D. 66.Cf. Weiss, Introduction to New Testament, ii. p. 31 (Eng. trans.); Dr. A. B. Davidson, Hebrews, etc. A few, like Pfleiderer (who, however, thinks Apollos may have been the author), date it later.—Urchristenthum, p. 629. But here, though the writer’s stand- point is somewhat different from both Paul’s and John’s, we find precisely the same doctrine as before,—Jesus, the Divine Son of God, the effulgence of the Father’s glory and very image of His substance, the creator, upholder, and heir of all things, who, because the children were partakers of flesh and blood, Himself likewise partook of the same, and is now again exalted to the right hand of the Majesty on high.Cf. Weiss, ii. pp. 186–190; Reuss, ii. pp. 243, 244. Reuss says: “It is clear from the figures chosen that the intention of the theology is to establish at once the Divinity and the plurality of the Persons in the Godhead, side by side with the monotheistic principle.” Further, in teaching this high Christological view, the author is not conscious any more than Paul of bringing in a new doctrine. He stands rather upon the ground of the common Christian confession, which he exhorts the Hebrews to hold fast.Heb. iv. 14.

It is conceded, however, that in the main the Christology of the Epistle to the Hebrews is of the Pauline type, and the question arises—Have we anywhere a witness of another type, showing how the Person of Christ was viewed in the distinctively Jewish, as contrasted with the Gentile sections of the Church? The answer is given in another book of the apostolic age, the early date of which is one of the articles of the modern creed, and which is supposed by some—e.g., by Volkmar—to have been written expressly with the view of opposing Paul.Pfleiderer shares this view. See it criticised by Reuss, Christian Theology, i. pp. 308–312. Pfleiderer thinks, too, that the passage in Matthew, “Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments,” etc. (Matt. v. 19), is a blow aimed at Paul’s antinomianism!—Hibbert Lectures, p. 178. I refer to the Apocalypse. By general consent of the modem school of critics, this book was composed immediately after the death of Nero,“It is now pretty generally acknowledged that the date of this book is the year 68–69 A.D.”—Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures, p. 153. Since the above was written, the hypothesis promulgated, by Vischer (1886), and favoured by Harnack, etc., has come into vogue, that the present book is a Christian workingup of an older Jewish Apocalypse, or of several such writings. See the views in Jülicher’s Einleitung, pp. 181–183. Jülicher takes the date to be about 95 A.D. Dr. C. A. Briggs, who at first opposed this theory, now adopts it. and its anti-Pauline character is not only admitted, but insisted on. Here, then, we have what may be regarded as a representative early Jewish-Christian writing; and the question is of deep interest, What kind of view of Christ’s Person do we find in it? And the answer must be given that the doctrine of Christ in the Apocalypse is as high, or nearly as high, as it is in either Paul or John. Reuss, who is certainly an unprejudiced witness, has some remarks here which are worth quoting as corroborative of the previous line of argument. “We may here observe,” he says, “that the writings of Paul, which carry us back, so to speak, into the very cradle of the Church, contain nothing to indicate that their Christological doctrine, so different from that of common Ebionitism, was regarded as an innovation, or gave rise to any disputations at the time of its first appearance. But we have in our hands another book, essentially Judaeo-Christian, which gives emphatic support to our assertion. This is the Book of Revelation. . . . It ought unhesitatingly to be acknowledged that Christ is placed in the Revelation on a par with God. He is called the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, and these same expressions are used to designate the Most High.”History of Christian Theology, i. pp. 397, 398 (Eng. trans.). Professor Pfleiderer is another critic who puts this point so strongly and unambiguously, that I cannot do better than give his words. “As, according to Paul,” he says, “Christ has been exalted to the regal dignity of Divine dominion over all, so, according to our author, He has taken His seat on the throne by the side of His Father, participating therefore in His Divine dominion and power—He is the Lord of the churches, holds their stars, or guardian angels, in His hand, and is also Ruler of nations and King of kings, the all-wise and almighty Judge of the nations; indeed, to Him is due a worship similar to that of God Himself. As the author of the Apocalypse, in his apotheosis of Christ as an object of worship, thus almost outstrips Paul, neither does he in his dogmatic definitions of Christ’s nature at all fall behind the Apostle. Like Paul, he calls Christ the ’son of God’ in the metaphysical sense of a godlike spiritual being, and far beyond the merely theocratic significance of the title. . . . As Paul had described the celestial Son of Man as at the same time the image of God, the agent of creation, the head of every man, and finally even God over all, so the Christ of the Apocalypse introduces Himself with the predicates of Divine majesty: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, who is, and who was, and who is to come, the All-powerful’; and He is accordingly called also the ‘Head of Creation,’ and ‘the Word of God,’ that is, the mediating instrument of all Divine Revelation from the creation of the world to the final judgment. It appears from this that the similarity of the Christology of the Apocalypse to that of Paul is complete; this Christ occupies the same exalted position as the Pauline Christ above the terrestrial Son of Man.”Hibbert Lectures, pp. 159–161.

It is not necessary, after these examples, that I should dwell long on the Christology of the Petrine and minor Epistles. Peter is again a distinct witness, and his testimony is in harmony with what we have already seen. Christ is, to refer only to the First Epistle, joined with the Father and the Spirit as one of the principals in the work of salvation;1 Pet. i. 2. He is the Redeemer, foreordained before the foundation of the world, but manifest in these last times;1 Pet. i. 20. His Spirit testified beforehand in the prophets;1 Pet. i. 11. He is called Κύριος, and passages used in the Old Testament of Jehovah are applied to Him—remarkably in chap. iii. 15, “Sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord”;Cf. 1 Pet. i. 5, ii. 13, iii. 12. He has gone into heaven, and is at the right hand of God, angels and authorities and powers being made subject to Him;1 Pet. iii. 22. He is the ordained Judge of quick and dead.1 Pet. iv. 5. He is therefore, as Weiss says, in His exaltation a Divine Being,Biblical Theology of New Testament, i. p. 238. whether the Epistle directly teaches His pre-existence or not, as, however, Pfleiderer thinks it does.Urchristenthum, p. 659. Even James, who barely touches Christology in his Epistle, speaks of Christ as the “Lord of Glory,” and the Judge of the world, and prayer is to be made in His name.James ii. 1, v. 7-9, 14, 15. Not less instructive are the references in the brief Epistle of Jude, who describes Jesus as “our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ”; who exhorts believers to pray in the Holy Spirit, and keep themselves in the love of God, hooking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ; and who concludes his short letter by ascribing to the only God, our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, glory, majesty, dominion, and power, before all time, and now, and for evermore.Jude 4, 20, 21, 25 (R.V.). If to these sources of evidence we add the popular discourses in the Acts of the Apostles, we shall have a tolerably clear idea of the views of Christ held in the Church in the earliest period of Christianity. These discourses, though, as might be expected, containing little or no dogmatic teaching on the origin or constitution of Christ’s Person, yet do not fail to represent Him as possessing a unique dignity;Acts iii. 13, 25, iv. 27. “Servant,” in sense of Isaiah’s “Servant of Jehovah.” as the holy and sinless One, whom it was not possible for death to hold;ii. 24, iii. 14. as the Prince of Life, exalted to the throne of universal dominion;ii. 36, iii. 15. as the Lord on whose name men were to call, the One in whom alone under heaven there was salvation, and through whom was preached forgiveness of sins to men;i. 21, 38, iii. 26, iv. 10-12, v. 30, 31. as the Giver of the Holy Ghostii. 33. as the appointed Judge of the world, whom the heaven must retain till the time of the restitution of all things.iii. 20, 21. These representations, though simpler, are not inconsistent with the more developed Christology of the Epistles, but rather furnish the data or premises from which all the positions of that Christology can be deduced.Cf. Weiss, i. p. 180: “The Messiah who is exalted to this κυριότης must, of course, be a Divine Being, although, for the earliest proclamation, this conclusion gave no occasion for the consideration of the question on how far such an exaltation was rooted in the original nature of His Person.”

The supernatural view of Christ, then, is no late development, but was in all its leading features fully established in the Church in the generation immediately succeeding Christ’s death. We find it presupposed in all the apostolic writings, and assumed as well known among the persons to whom these writings were addressed. If there were, as the Tübingen school alleges, Pauline and Petrine parties in the Church, it was held by both of these; whatever other shades of doctrinal opinion existed, this was a common element. But this, it seems to me, is only conceivable on the supposition that the view in question was in harmony with the facts of Christ’s own life on earth, with the Claims He made, and with the testimony which His apostles had deposited in the various churches regarding Him. We are now to see how far this is borne out by the actual records we possess of Christ’s life.

II. The testimony of the Gospels—Christ in the Fourth Gospel.

II. We go back then to the Gospels, and ask what ‘they teach. Here I leave out of view the Fourth Gospel, about the teaching of which there can be little possible dispute. Not simply the prologue, but the acts and sayings of Christ recorded in that Gospel, are decisive for anyone who admits it, as I do, to be a truthful record by the beloved disciple of what Christ did and said on earth.It is precisely the discourses of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel which Wendt, in his recent Die Lehre Jesu, is disposed to attribute to a genuine Johannine source. On the difference of style between the Johannine and the Synoptical discourses, Godet remarks: “The discourses of the Fourth Gospel, then, do not resemble a photograph, but the extracted essence of a savoury fruit. From the change wrought in the external form of the substance, it doss not follow that the slightest foreign element has been mingled with the latter.”—Introduction to Commentary, p. 135 (Eng. trans.). The contrast, however, may be exaggerated, as shown by comparison of passages where the Synoptics and John cross each other.—Cf. Godet, Introduction, pp. 155–157. It would be out of place here to discuss the question of the genuineness. I would only say that, so far as the objections are drawn from the advanced Christology of the Gospel, and the alleged traces of Alexandrian influence, after what we have seen of the general state of opinion in the apostolic age, very little weight need be attached to them. The Christology of John is not a whit higher than the Christology of Paul, or that of the Epistle to the Hebrews, or even that of the Apocalypse—all lying within the apostolic age; the alleged traces of Philonic influence are as conspicuous in the Epistle to the Hebrews as in the Fourth Gospel. It is not, therefore, necessary to go beyond the apostolic age to account for them. I question, indeed, very much whether, if we except the prologue—i.e., if we keep to Christ’s own doings and sayings—there is much in John’s Gospel at all which would directly suggest the peculiarities of Philo. There is certainly a very exalted doctrine of Christ’s Person, but the doctrine is Christian, not Philonic.Harnack expresses himself very decidedly on this subject. “Neither the religious philosophy of Philo,” he says, “nor the manner of thought out of which it originated, has exercised a provable influence on the first generation of Christian believers. . . . A Philonic element is also not provable in Paul. . . . The apprehension of the relation of God and the world in the Fourth Gospel is not the Philonic. Therefore, also, the Logos doctrine found there is essentially not that of Philo.”—Dogmengeschichte, i. p. 99. See Note B.—Philo and the Fourth Gospel.

It may, however, still be said that at least the SynopticsMatthew, Mark, and Luke. tell a very different story. Here, it will be maintained, we have the human, the truly historical Christ, in contrast with the idealised and untrustworthy picture of the fourth evangelist. Dr. Martineau makes this his strongest ground for the rejection of the Gospel of John. But is it really so? Certainly it is not so, if we let these Gospels—as it is only fair that in the first instance we should do—speak fully and freely for themselves, and do not, in the interest of theory, curtail any part of their testimony. The picture given us in the Synoptics is not at all that of the humanitarian Christ. We have a true human life, indeed,—the life of One who went in and out among men as a friend and brother, who grieved, who suffered, who was tempted, who was poor and despised,—a true “Son of Man,” in every sense of the word. But do we not find more? Does this represent their whole testimony about Christ? On the contrary, does not this lowly Being move as a supernatural Personage throughout, and do not His character and works bear amplest witness to the justice of His claims? Is there, according to the Synoptics, nothing extraordinary in the commencement of Christ’s life, nothing extraordinary in its close, nothing in keeping with this extraordinary beginning and end in the career that lies between? It is easy, no doubt, to get rid of all this by denying the historical character of the Gospels, or pruning them down to suit; but after every allowance is made for possible additions to the narrative, there remains a clear enough picture of Jesus to enable us to determine the great subjects of His teaching, and the general character of His claims. In fact, the further criticism goes, the supernatural character of Jesus stands out in clearer relief. These are not mere embellishments, mere external additions, obscuring the picture of a Christ otherwise human. They are not things that can be stripped off, and the real image of Christ be left behind, as the writing of a palimpsest might be removed and the picture below be brought into view. The history is the picture. All fair historical criticism must see that these supernatural features belong to the very essence of the historical representation of Jesus in the Gospels, and that, if we take them away, we have no longer a historical Christ at all, but only a Christ of our own imaginings;Cf. on this, Bushnell’s Nature and the Supernatural, chap. xii., “Water. marks on the Christian Doctrine,” and Row’s Jesus of the Evangelists. that we must either take these features as part of our view of Christ, or say frankly with Strauss that we really know little or nothing about Him. But it is just the impossibility of resting in this dictum with any fair regard to the canons of historical criticism which has constantly forced even negative critics back to a fuller recognition of the historical reality of the portraiture in the Gospels, and has again placed them in the dilemma of having to reconsider these claims of the Son of Man.

Let us look at these claims of Jesus in the Synoptics a little more in detail. Even this title “Son of Man”—found only in Christ’s own lips, and never given Him by His followers—has something unique and exceptional about it. It wells up from the depths of the consciousness of One who knew Himself to stand in some peculiar and representative relation to humanity, and to bear the nature of man in some exceptional way.Cf. Dorner, Person of Christ, i. p. 55 (Eng. trans.), and System of Doctrine, iii. p. 170; Gess, Christi Person und Werk, i. p. 212. On the various views as to the meaning of the title, see Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, pp. 474–487 (Cunningham Lecture). He is not simply “a Son of Man,” but “the Son of Man”; just as, in a higher relation, He is not simply “a Son of God,” but “the Son of God.” How high this latter relation is, is brought out in the words—“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.”Mat. xi. 27 (R.V.). In conformity with the uniqueness of nature implied in these titles, He claims to be the Messiah,Matt. xi. 1-6; Luke iv.17-21, etc. the Fulfiller of law and prophets,Matt. v. 17. the Founder of the kingdom of God, the supreme Legislator and Head of that kingdom,Matt. xiii. (Parables of Kingdom); Matt. v.-vii. (Sermon on Mount). He, through faith in whom salvation is to be obtained,Matt. xi. 28; Luke vii. 50. the One who demands, as no other is entitled to do, the absolute and undivided surrender of the heart to Himself.Matt. x. 37-39. He forgives sins with Divine authority,Matt. ix. 2, 6. is the giver of the Holy Ghost,Matt. iii. 11, etc. ascribes an expiatory virtue to His death,Matt. xx. 28, xxi. 26-28, etc. anticipates His resurrection and return in glory,Matt. xvi. 21, 27, xvii. 23, xx. 19, etc. announces Himself as the appointed Judge of the world.Matt. xxv. 31-46, etc. This claim of Christ to be the final Judge of the world, found already in the Sermon on the Mount;Matt. vii. 21-23. His repeated declarations of His future return in the glory of His Father, and His own glory, and the glory of the holy angels;Mark viii. 38, etc. the eschatological parables, in which He makes the ultimate destinies of men depend on relation to Himself,Matt. xxv.; Luke xii. 11-27. are among the most remarkable features in His teaching, and are not to be explained away as mere figurative assurances of the ultimate triumph of His cause. They constitute a claim which must either be conceded, or Christ be pronounced the victim of an extravagant hallucination! We have to add to these claims of Christ, His endorsement of Peter’s confession of the unique dignity of His Person—“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”;Matt. xvi. 16, 17. His solemn words, so fraught with selfconsciousness, in answer to the High Priest’s adjuration—“Henceforth ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven”;Matt. xxv. 64. and such sublime declarations, implying an omnipresent and omniscient relation to His Church, as “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.”Matt. xviii. 20.

These are stupendous claims of Christ, but we have next to observe that the whole representation of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels is worthy of them. I do not dwell here on the holy majesty with which Christ bears Himself throughout the Gospels in all circumstances, on the tone of authority with which He speaks, on the grace and tenderness which marked His whole relations to men,—I would concentrate attention on the one point that Christ, according to the picture given of Him in the Gospels, is a sinless Being—in this respect also standing quite apart from other men. It is the uniform testimony of the apostles and other writers of the New Testament—of Paul, of Peter, of John, of the Epistle to the Hebrews, of the Apocalypse,E.g., 2 Cor. v. 21; 1 Pet. ii. 22; 1 John iii. 5; Heb. iv. 15; Rev. iii. 14, etc. Cf. on this subject Ullmann’s Sinlessness of Jesus, and Bushnell’s Nature and the Sapernatural, x.—that Christ was without sin; and the Synoptic narratives, in the picture they give us of a character entirely God-centred, dominated by the passion of hove to men, embracing the widest contrasts, maintaining itself in absolute spiritual freedom in relation to the world, to men and to events, uniformly victorious in temptation, untouched by the faintest stain of base, paltry, or selfish motive, completely bear out this description. So strong is the evidence on this point, that we find the sinlessness of Christ widely admitted, even by the representatives of schools whose general principles, one would imagine, would lead them to deny it—by adherents of the Hegelian school like Daub, Marheineke, Rosenkranz, Vatke;Cf. Dorner’s Person of Christ, v. pp. 121–131; System of Doctrine, iii. p. 261 (Eng. trans.). by mediating theologians of all types, like Schleiermacher,Der christl. Glaube, sec. 98 (ii. 78, 83). Beyschlag,Leben Jesu, i. pp. 181–191. Rothe,Dogmatik, ii. pp. 83, 108. and Ritschl;Unterricht, p. 19. by liberal theologians, like HaseGeschichte Jesu, p. 248. Hase, however, only recognises the sinlessness of Jesus from His entrance on His public work. It was a sinlessness won by struggle. and Schenkel,In his Dogmatik, see sketch in Pfleiderer’s Dev. of Theol. pp. 177–182. Pfleiderer himself doubts the “psychological possibility” of sinless perfection, and does not ascribe it to Christ—Ibid. pp. 117, 118. In his Religionsphilosophie, i. p. 339 (Eng. trans.), he blames Schleiermacher for identifying “this personality so entirely with the ideal principle, that it is exalted to an absolute ideal, and indeed to a miraculous appearance.” This affords a good standard for the measurement of Pfleiderer’s general Christian position. and so decided an opponent of the miraculous even as Lipsius.Dogmatik, sec. 651, p. 569. We must contend, however, that if Christ was really the sinless Being which the Gospels represent Him, and His followers believed Him to be, we have a phenomenon in history which is not to be explained out of mere natural grounds, or on any principle of development, but a literal new creation, a true moral miracle, involving further consequences as to the origin and nature of the exceptional Personality to whom these predicates of sinlessness belong.Strauss acknowledges this when he says: “A sinless, archetypal Christ is not a hair’s-breadth less unthinkable than one supernaturally born, with a Divine and human nature. “—Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte, p. 63. But Strauss himself bears high tribute to the perfection of Jesus. “In the attainment of this serene inward disposition, in unity with God, and comprehending all men as brethren, Jesus had realised in Himself the prophetic ideal of the New Covenant with the Law written in the heart; He had—to speak with the poet—taken the Godhead into His will. . . . In Him man made the transition from bondage to freedom.”—Leben Jesu, p. 207 (1864).

In keeping with the character and with the claims of Jesus are the works ascribed to Him in the Gospels. It is, as the merest glance will show, a supernatural history throughout. The miracles attributed to Jesus are not mere wonders, but deeds of mercy and love—the outflow of just such Divinity as we claim for Him. They are, accordingly, wrought by Jesus in His own name, in the exercise of His own authority,E.g., Matt. viii. 3, 7-10, 26. and are suitably spoken of as simply His “works”Matt. xi. 2. “Mighty works,” in vers. 20, 21, 23, is literally “powers.” “Works” is the favourite term in John.—i.e. standing in the same relation of naturalness to Him, and to His position in the world, as our ordinary works do to us, and to our position in the world. So far from being isolated from the rest of His manifestation, Christ’s miracles are entirely of one piece with it,—are revelations of the powers and spirit of His kingdom,Matt. xi. 4, 5; Luke xi. 20.—are the works of the kingdom, or, as they are called in John, “signs.”John ii. 11, etc. The most skilful criticism, therefore, has never been able to excise them from the narrative. Their roots intertwine inseparably with the most characteristic elements of the gospel tradition,—with sayings of Christ, for example, of unimpeachable freshness, originality, and beauty; and, as part of the history, they produce upon us precisely the same impression of dignity, wisdom, and beneficence, as the rest of the narrative. They are, in short, integral parts of that total presentation of Jesus which produces on us so marked and irresistible an impression of Divinity.Cf. Godet’s Lectures in Defence of the Christian Faith, iii., “The Miracles of Jesus Christ,” p. 124 (Eng. trans.); and Pressense, Vie de Jesus, p. 373 (Eng. trans. p. 277).

Even this is not the highest point in the Synoptic testimony about Christ. If Christ died, He rose again on the third day. Meeting with His disciples, He declares to them, “All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth”; He commissions them to preach repentance and remission of sins in His name to all the nations; He bids them “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” (one name); He utters for their encouragement this sublime promise, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”Matt. xxviii. 18-20. There can be no mistake as to the meaning of this Trinitarian formula, which, as Dorner says, does not express a relation to men, but “requires us to regard the Father as the Father of the Son, and the Son as the Son of the Father, and therefore does not signify a paternal relation to the world in general, but to the Son, who, standing between the Father and the Spirit, must be somehow thought of as pertaining to the sphere of the Divine, and therefore denotes a distinction in the Divine itself.”System of Doctrine, i. p. 351 (Eng. trans.). Attempts are made to challenge the authenticity of these sayings. But they are at least part of the Synoptic representation of Christ, and must be taken into account when the comparison is between the Synoptic representation and that found in John, and in other parts of the New Testament. When, however, Christ’s whole claim is considered, no valid objection can be taken to these sayings, except on principles which imply that the resurrection never took place at all,—a position which works round to the subversion of the claim itself.See Note C—The Resurrection of Christ and the Reality of His Divine Claim.

Such, then, is the view of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels; and the conclusion I draw is, that it is in keeping with the estimate formed of Christ’s Person in the apostolic age. The two things are in harmony. Given such a life as we have in the Gospels, this explains the phenomena of the apostolic age. On the other hand, given the estimate of Christ’s Person and work in the apostolic age, this supports the reliableness of the picture of Christ in the Gospels, for only from such a life could the faith of the Church have originated. We have, in this Synoptic picture, the very Being whom the writings of Paul and John present to us; and the forms they use are the only forms which can adequately interpret Him to us. In other words, given the Christ of the Synoptic Gospels, the doctrine of Paul and John is felt to be the only adequate explanation of His character and claims. I agree, therefore, entirely with Dorner when he says, “It may be boldly affirmed that the entire representation of Christ given by the Synoptics may be placed by the side of the Johannine as perfectly identical, inasmuch as faith, moulded by means of the Synoptic tradition, must have essentially the same features in its concept of Christ as John has”; and adds, “Those who reject the Gospel of John on account of its glorifying of Christ, can hardly have set themselves in clear relations with the Synoptic Christology.”Person of Christ, i. pp. 60, 61.

I claim, then, to have shown that if we are to do justice to the facts of Christianity, we must accept the supernatural view of Christ’s Person, and recognise in Him the appearance of a Divine Being in humanity. The argument I have conducted—if it be correct—goes further than to show that this doctrine is an integral part of Christianity. If this were all, it might still be said, Rather than that this doctrine be accepted, let Christianity go! But if my contention is right, we are not at liberty to let Christianity go. The reason why Christianity cannot be waved out of the world at the bidding of sceptics simply is, that the facts are too strong for the attempt. The theories which would explain Christianity away make shipwreck on the facts. But if Christianity is not to be parted with, its full testimony to itself must be maintained; and we have now seen what this means. Formerly it was shown that the attempts to maintain Christianity, while rejecting the truth of the Incarnation, have uniformly failed. Now we have seen why it is so. It was shown also whither the rejection of Christianity led us, and how the painful steps of return conducted us back through Theism to Revelation, and through Revelation to belief in Christ as the supreme Revealer. But this faith heads us again to His testimony about Himself, and so once more to the Incarnation. Thus it is that the Lord stands constantly challenging the ages to give their answer to His question, “What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He?”Matt. xxii. 42. and increasingly it is shown that it is not in the world’s power to put this question aside. However silenced for the moment, it soon again asserts its rights, and will not cease to be heard till humanity, from one end of the earth to the other, has joined in the devout acknowledgment—“My Lord and my God!”John xx. 28.

III. Doctrinal aspects of the Incarnation: proposed reconstructions.

III. This fact of the Incarnation being given, how are we to interpret it? The full discussion of what, doctrinally, is involved in the Incarnation, belongs rather to dogmatics than to the present inquiry; but certain limiting positions may at least be laid down, which may help to keep our thoughts in harmony with the facts we have had before us, and may serve as a check on modern theories, which, professing to give us a re-reading of this all-important doctrine more in agreement with the Christian verity than the old Christological decisions, fall short of, or go beyond these facts. The early decisions of the Church on Christ’s Person are not, indeed, to be regarded as beyond criticism. It may very well be that reconstruction is needed in this doctrine as in many others. Only, we should be careful not to part with the old formulas till something better—something at least equally true to the facts of Christianity—is put in their place; and I confess that most of the modern attempts at a revised Christology do not seem to me to fulfil this condition.

Constrained by the evidence of Scripture, many theologians agree in ascribing “Godhead” to Christ, whose views of the Person of Christ yet fall short of what the complete testimony of Scripture seems to require. Schleiermacher may be included in this class, though he avoids the term;See Schleiermacher’s views in Der christl. Glaube, ii. pp. 56, 57, 93, He says: “Inasmuch as all the human activity of Christ in its whole connection depends on this being of God in Him, and represents it, the expression is justified that in the Redeemer God became man, in a sense true of Him exclusively; as also each moment of His existence, so far as one can isolate it represents a new and similar incarnation of God and state of being incarnate; since always and everywhere, all that is human in Him proceeds out of that which is Divine.”—Pp. 56, 57. He objects to the term “God-Man” as too definite.—P. 93. of more recent theologians, Rothe, Beyschlag, Ritschl, Lipsius, etc., who speak freely of the “Godhead” (Gottheit), “God-manhood” (Gottmenschheit), of Christ, and of the “Incarnation” (Menschwerdung) of God in Him.Rothe, Dogmatik, B. pp. 88, 107, etc.; Beyschlag, Leben Jesu, p. 191, etc.; Ritschl, Recht. und Ver. iii. pp. 364–393; Unterricht, p. 22; Lipsius, Dogmatik, p. 457. Cf. also Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi, pp. 536, 537; Herrmann, Verkehr des Christen mit Gott, pp. 42–62; Nitzsch, Evangelische Dogmatik, ii. p. 514, etc. [Beyschlag’s views are further expounded in his New Testament Theology, since published and translated.] But what do these expressions mean? In all, or most, of these theories, Christ has a high and unique position assigned to Him. He is the second Adam, or new Head of the race, Son of God in a sense that no other is, archetypal Man, sinless Mediator and Redeemer of mankind.Schleiermacher, ii. p. 19; Lipsius, sec. 638. This is a great deal, and must be recognised in any theory of the Incarnation. All these theories acknowledge, further, a peculiar being or Revelation of God in Christ, on the ground of which these predicates “Godhead” and “God-manhood” are ascribed to Him. But what is its nature? In Schleiermacher, as already seen in the second Lecture, it is the constant and energetic activity of that God-consciousness which is potentially present in every man—which constitutes, therefore, an original element in human nature.Der christl. Glaube, ii. pp. 40, 56. Cf. Lipsius, p. 492. In Rothe, it is an ethical union of God with humanity, gradually brought about in the course of the sinless development of Christ, and constituting, when complete, a perfect indwelling of God in man—a perfect unity of the Divine and human.Dogmatik, ii. pp. 88–97, 165–182. In Beyschlag, it is the consciousness of a perfect and original relation of Sonship to God, which has its transcendental ground in an impersonal (Divine-human) principle eternally pre-existent in the Godhead.Leben Jesu, i. p. 191; Christologie, pp. 58, 84, etc In Ritschl, the “Godhead” of Christ has a purely moral and religious sense, expressing the fact that in Christ, as the supreme Revealer of God, and Founder of the kingdom of God, there is perfect oneness of will with God in this world-purpose, and a perfect manifestation of the Divine attributes of grace and truth, and of dominion over the world.Unterricht, p. 22. It will be seen that this is a tolerably complex idea of “Godhead.” In Lipsius, again, and those who think with him, “Incarnation” and “Godhead” denote the realisation in Christ of that perfect relation of Sonship to God (Gottessohnschaft) which lies in the original idea of humanity, and the perfect Revelation of the Divine will of love (Liebewillen) in that Revelation.Dogmatik, pp. 574, 575. Lipsius distinguishes between the “principle” of the Christian religion—which is that of religion absolutely—and the historical revelation of that principle in the Person and Work of Christ.—Pp. 535, 536. Yet this principle is not accidentally or externally bound up with Christ, as if He were only casually the first representative of it, or His work only the external occasion for the symbolical representation of the general activity of this principle in humanity.—Pp. 537, 538. Now I do not deny that in these theories we have a certain union of the Divine and human, just as believers in Christ, through union with Him and participation in His Spirit, become “sons of God,” and “partakers of the Divine nature.”John i. 12; 2 Pet. i. 4. I do not deny, further, that these theories secure for Christ a certain distinction from every other, in that they make Him the original type of that relation of Divine Sonship into which others can only enter through Him. It is a thought also which not unnaturally occurs, whether on this idea of a God-filled humanity—a humanity of which it may be truly said that in an ethical respect the fulness of the Godhead dwells in it bodily—we have not all that is of practical value in any doctrine of Incarnation. We must beware, however, of imposing on ourselves with words, and I believe that, if we do not rise to a higher view, it will be difficult, as the second Lecture showed, to prevent ourselves drifting to pure humanitarianism.

Two things are to be considered here—First, whether these theories are tenable on their own merits; and, second, whether they do justice to the facts of Christ’s Revelation, and to the data of the New Testament generally. I shall offer a few remarks on these points, then add a brief notice of the theories known as Kenotic.

1. There are two classes of these theories—those which do not, and those which do, presuppose a transcendental or metaphysical ground for the predicate “Godhead” applied to Christ, and as important differences exist between them, it is desirable to distinguish them.

(1) Of the former class are those of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Lipsius, with many others that might be named. I abstract from other features in these theories, and look only at the grounds on which “Godhead” is ascribed to Christ; and I do not find any which transcend the limits of humanity. Christ is archetypal man, ideal man, sinless man, the perfect Revelation of grace and truth, the central individual of the race, the bearer of the principle of true religion, the Founder of the kingdom of God in humanity, the pre-eminent object of the Father’s hove,—but He is not more than man. His humanity may he a “God-filled” humanity; still a God-filled man is one thing, and God become man is another. There may be participation in the Divine life—even in the Divine nature—on the part of the ordinary believer; but the man in whom God thus dwells does not on this account regard himself as Divine, does not speak of himself as a Divine person, does not think himself entitled to Divine honours, would deem it blasphemy to have the term “Godhead” applied to him. If, therefore, this is the only account we can give of Christ’s Person, it is clear that this predicate “Godhead” can never properly be applied to Him. We might speak of the Divine in Christ, but we could not say that Christ Himself was Divine. We might see in Him the highest organ of Divine Revelation, but we would require to distinguish between the God revealing Himself and the humanity through which He is manifested. It would be blasphemy here also to speak of Christ Himself as God. It would be idolatry to give Him Divine honours. We find, therefore, that Ritschl has to admit that it is only in a figurative and improper sense that the Church can attribute “Godhead” to Christ.Ritschl, Recht. und Ver. iii. p. 378. This predicate, he says, is not a theoretic truth, but only a judgment of value—an expression of the worth which Christ has for the religious consciousness of the believer. In further carrying out the same idea, both Schleiermacher and Ritschl strip away, as formerly shown, all the eschatological attributes from Christ, and resolve His sitting at the right hand of God, His return to judge the world, etc., into metaphors. The only real sense in which Christ is spiritually present in His Church is through the perpetuation of His image, of His teaching, and of His influence in the community of believers.Ritschl, Recht. und Ver. pp. 383, 384, 407, 408. “In any other sense,” he thinks, “the formula of the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God is either without content for us, because Christ as exalted is directly bidden for us; or becomes the occasion of all possible extravagance (Schwärmerei).”—P. 407. Schleiermacher, Der christl. Glaube, pp. 84–88, 290–292; Lipsius, Dogmatik, pp. 494, 587. This is the legitimate consequence of a theory which does not go beyond the bounds of the human in its estimate of Christ; for if the eschatological teaching of Jesus is admitted, it seems impossible to stop short of a much higher view of His Person. This method, however, of simply sweeping aside what is distasteful, is too violent to be long endured; there are besides those utterances of Jesus which bespeak the consciousness of a relation different in kind, and not merely in degree, from that sustained by others to the Father. This class of theories, therefore, naturally passes over to another—that which seeks to do justice to the facts by admitting a deeper ground for Christ’s Personality than the earthly one.

(2)Of this second class of theories, I may take those of Rothe and Beyschlag as examples. Rothe thinks he effectually secures the idea of Christ’s Godhead by assuming that, in the course of Christ’s sinless development, God constantly unites Himself with Him in closer and closer relations, till at length a perfect union both of person and of nature is effected.Dogmatik, pp. 165–182. Beyschlag thinks to do the same by supposing that a Divine impersonal principle—a pre-existent ideal humanity—is somehow incarnated in Christ.Christologie, p. 84, etc. But not to speak of the absence of scriptural proof for both of these theories, see the difficulties under which they labour. Can it be seriously said that, if a transcendental ground of Christ’s Person is to be admitted, these theories have any advantage in simplicity or intelligibility over the old view? Take Rothe’s theory. What are we to make of the supposition of a personality which begins as human, and ultimately and gradually is changed into Divine? Then what is meant by two persons merging into one, and this by moral process? For God is one Person to begin with, and Christ is another, and at length a perfect union is effected of both. Do we really in this theory get beyond the idea of an ethical union, or perfect moral friendship, in which, after all, the two Persons remain distinct, though united in will and love? If this is the character of the union, it is only by a misuse of terms that we can speak of Christ becoming really God. Yet Rothe is perfectly in earnest with this conception of the deification of Christ, so we ask finally—How is this newly constituted Person related to God the Father? For Rothe acknowledges no immanent distinction of Persons in the God-head, and it is the Father Himself who thus unites Himself with Christ, and confers Godhead upon His Person. Rothe says expressly, “The Incarnation of God in the Second Adam is essentially an incarnation of both in Him—of the Divine personality, and of the Divine nature.”Dogmatik, ii. p. 172. But if it is the One absolute Personality whom we call God, who enters into the union with the humanity of Jesus, how can the resultant relation be described as that of Father and Son? Or if a new Divine Person really is constituted, does not Rothe’s theory amount to this, that, since the Incarnation, a new Person has been added to the Godhead? But what does the constitution of a new Divine Person mean? Is it not, if the expression is to be taken literally, very like a contradiction in terms? I need not wait long on Beyschlag’s rival theory of a pre-existent impersonal humanity, which solves no difficulties, and is loaded with inconceivabilities of its own. For in what sense can this idea of humanity be spoken of as Divine, any more than any other idea of the Divine mind which is realised in time h—the idea, e.g., of the world, or of the believer, or of the Church. What, besides, is meant by a heavenly, ideal humanity? Does it include only the single Person of Christ, or not also all the members of the human race?Cf. his Christologie, p. 58; and Leben Jesu, p. 46. How, further, is this ideal of humanity, which forms the supernatural principle in Christ, related to His actual humanity of flesh and blood, which came to Him “of the seed of David”?Rom. i. 4. Finally, if Christ’s Person was thus peculiarly constituted, even in respect of its humanity, how can it be said of Him that He was made in all things like unto His brethren?Heb. ii. 17. Beyschlag would avoid some of these difficulties, if he kept consistently by the position that Christ is but the perfect realisation of the “Ebenbild” of humanity, which is fragmentarily realised in ail men,—is, in fact, simply the ideal Man; hut he seeks to establish a metaphysical distinction between Christ’s humanity and ours, in virtue of which His personality is “originally and essentially” Divine, while ours is not.—Christologie, p. 58. See further on Beyschlag’s views in Appendix. It may seem a waste of time to discuss such questions; yet theories like Rothe’s and Beyschlag’s have their uses; for they aid us, by a process of exclusion, in seeing what the true theory must be, and where we are to look for it.

2. The second question I proposed to ask is already in large measure answered in the course of the above discussion, Do these theories do justice to the facts of Christ’s Revelation, and to the data of the New Testament generally? They clearly do not, either in a negative or a positive respect. There is no hint in the Scriptures of either Rothe’s gradual incarnation, or of Beyschlag’s pre-existent principle of humanity; but there are: many passages which directly, or by implication, claim for Christ personal pre-existence, and attribute to Him Divine acts and functions in that state of pre-existence. But, apart from this, all those passages which claim for Christ a unique relation of Sonship to the Father, taken with the sayings which imply His consciousness of the possession of attributes and functions raised above those of humanity, point to a super-earthly and pre-incarnate state of existence. And this brings us back to the fundamental distinction between a true and a false or inadequate doctrine of Incarnation. Incarnation is not simply the endowing of human nature with the highest conceivable plenitude of gifts and graces; it is not a mere dynamical relation of God to the human spirit—acting on it or in it with exceptional energy; it is not simply the coming to consciousness of the metaphysical unity all along subsisting between humanity and God; it is not even such moral union, such spiritual indwelling and oneness of character and will, as subsists between God and the believer; still less, of course, is it analogous to the heathen ideas of sons of the gods, where the relation is that of physical paternity —or of the appearances of gods in human guise—or even of temporary appearances in humanity, as in the case of the Avatars of Vishnu. The scriptural idea of the Incarnation is as unique as is the Biblical conception as a whole. It is not, to state the matter in a word, the union simply of the Divine nature with the human,—for that I acknowledge in the case of every believer through the indwelling Spirit,—but the entrance of a Divine Person into the human. That there is an analogy, and a closer one than is sometimes admitted, between the believer’s relation to God and Christ’s relation to the Father is expressly declared in Christ’s own words in John xvii.21, where He asks “that they may all be one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they may be one in Us.” But the subject here is moral union,—not union of essence, as in John i.1, and perhaps John x.30, hut the mutual ensphering of personalities in an atmosphere of love, such as obtains in its highest degree between the Father and the Son. For “he that abideth in Love, abideth in God, and God abideth in him.”1 John iv. 16. There is this also in Christ. But the distinction remains—these personalities of ours are human, and continue so, no matter how entirely filled, penetrated, possessed, with the light and love and knowledge of God they may be; but His was a Personality of a higher rank—a Divine Personality, which entered into the limitations and conditions of humanity from above, which was not originally human, as ours is, but became so. Here questions deep and difficult, I. acknowledge, crowd thick.upon us, to many of which no answer may be possible; but so much as this, I think, is assuredly implied in the Christian Incarnation.

3. Before, however, venturing further in this direction, I must bestow at least a glance on what is known as the question of the Kenosis. This word, meaning “emptying,” is taken, as is well known, from Phil. ii.7, in which passage Christ is said to have “emptied Himself” (ἑαυτὸν ἐκ ένωσε), taking the form of a servant. The question is, What does this emptying include? Did the Son of God—the Eternal Word—literally lay aside His Divine glory, and, ceasing to he in the form of God, enter by human birth into the conditions of earthly poverty and weakness? Or, if He did not, what is the import of this remarkable phrase? The Kenotic theories—represented en Germany by a long list of honoured namesE.g. Thomasius, Gess, Ebrard, Kahnis, Luthardt, etc.—answer the former question in the affirmative. Godet among French writers advocates the same view. The Divine Logos, he thinks, literally laid aside His Divine attributes at the Incarnation, and entered the sphere of the finite as an unconscious babe.Cf. Commentary on John, i. 14. Pressense and Gretillat are other French Kenoticists. The object of these theories, of course, is to secure the reality of Christ’s humanity, and the fact of a true human development, which seemed imperilled by the older view. Notwithstanding, however, the wide support they have received, I cannot think that these theories will ever permanently commend themselves to the judgment of the Church.For an able discussion of Kenotic theories see Professor Bruce’s Humiliation of Christ, Lecture IV. (Cunningham Lectures). They seem to me—to come to the heart of the matter at once—to involve an impossibility, inasmuch as they ask us to believe in the temporary suspension of the consciousness, and the cessation from all Divine functions, of one of the Persons of the God-head! How does this consist with Scripture? Are we not told of the Son, in particular, not only that by Him all things were created, but that in Him all things consist—that He upholdeth all things by the word of His power? Is this relation to the universe not an essential one? and does the Kenotic theory not reduce it to one wholly unessential and contingent? I cannot therefore accept this theory, nor do I think that the reality of the Incarnation requires it. I might appeal here to the analogy of nature. There is an immanent presence of God in nature, but there is also a transcendent existence of God beyond nature. So the Divine Son took upon Him our nature with its human limits, but above and beyond that, if we may so express it, was the vast “over-soul” of His Divine consciousness. Even human psychology, in making us more familiar than we were with the idea of different strata of consciousness even in the same personal being, gives us a hint which need not be lost. The sense of the apostle’s words seems sufficiently met by the lowly form of Christ’s earthly manifestation—“despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”Isa. liii. 3.

The result of our inquiry has not been to overthrow the Christological decisions of the early Church, but rather to impress us with the justice and tact of these decisions in guarding the truth against opposite errors. Has all the labour and earnestness of modern investigation on this profound subject, then, been absolutely without result? I do not think so. One remarkable gain has already been adverted to, in the tendency of modern speculation to draw the Divine and the human nearer together, and to emphasise, if not their identity, at least their kindredness, and the capacity of the human to receive the Divine.In a practical respect the chief gain is that we begin with the earthly side of Christ’s humanity, and rise to the recognition of His Divinity; more stress is laid on the humanity which manifests the Divinity than formerly. See Kaftan’s Brauchen wir ein neue Dogma? p. 54. But many lights and suggestions have been afforded in the treatment of this subject, from Schleiermacher downwards, which in any attempt at a constructive view must always be of great value. This will perhaps become apparent if, in closing this survey, I notice an objection which is sometimes urged against the view of the Incarnation here presented—the ordinary, and as I believe the scriptural one—namely, that in affirming the incarnation of a heavenly and pre-existent Person we seem to impinge on the reality, or at least the integrity, of the human nature which Christ bore. The question is, Had Christ’s ‘human nature an independent Personality of its own, or was the Divine the only Personality? To guard against Nestorian error, or the assumption of two persons in Christ, the Church, it will be remembered, affirmed what is called the “impersonality” of the human nature of Christ, and, as might appear, with perfect reason on the principles of the Logos Christology.Cf. on this subject of the Anhypostasia, as it is called, Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom, pp. 32, 33; Dorner’s System of Doctrine, iii. p. 254 (Eng. trans.); Bruce’s Humiliation of Christ, pp. 427–430. But this very consequence is made in modern times the ground of an objection to that Christology, which, it is said, while maintaining the Divinity, impairs the integrity of the humanity, of the Redeemer. For (1) If Christ’s human nature had no independent Personality, was not His human nature thereby mutilated? and (2) If it is the Divine Personality that is the subject—the Ego—does not this detract on the other side from the truth of His humanity? For this reason, some are disposed to grant that Christ’s humanity also must be conceived of as personal, and that the Incarnation must be thought of, with Rothe, as the union both of person and of nature. Let us see how it stands with this difficulty on closer inspection, and from what point of view it can best be obviated.

1. It would be well if the objector to the ordinary ecclesiastical view—he who admits in any sense an Incarnation—would think out carefully what is implied in the attribution of an independent Personality to Christ’s human nature. On both sides there will be agreement that the unity of the Person must in some form be maintained. You cannot have two Egos in Christ’s one Divine-human Person—however close the relation between them. If the human Ego retains in any measure its distinction from the Divine, then we have not an Incarnation, but a Nestorian relation of persons. If, therefore, an independent human Ego is to be assumed, it must be supposed to be so incorporated with the Divine Ego—so host in it, so interpenetrated by it, so absorbed in it—that all sense of separate identity is parted with;This was Origen’s view in the early Church. The Logos, he thought, united itself with an unfallen soul in the pro-existent state. Cf. De Principiis, Book ii. chap. vi.: “But since, agreeably to the faculty of free-will, variety and diversity characterised the individual souls, so that one was attached with a warmer love to the Author of its being, and another with a feebler and weaker regard, that soul, . . . inhering from the beginning of the creation, and afterwards, inseparably and indissolubly in Him, as being the Wisdom and Word of God, and the Truth and the true Light, and receiving Him wholly, and passing into His light and splendour, was made with Him an a pre-eminent degree one Spirit, according to the promise of the apostle to those who ought to imitate it, that ‘be who is joined to the Lord is one spirit’ (1 Cor. vi. 17). . . . Neither was it opposed to the nature of that soul, as a rational existence, to receive God, into whom, as stated above, as into the Word and the Wisdom and the Truth, it had already wholly entered. And therefore deservedly is it also called, along with the flesh which it had assumed, the Son of God, and the Power of God, the Christ, and the Wisdom of God, either because it was wholly in the Son of God, or because it received the Son of God wholly into itself.”—Ante-Nicene Library trans. Origen’s view may be compared with Rothe’s, only that Rothe does not allow a separate personality in the Logos. while, on the other hand, the Divine Ego so transfuses itself into the human, so limits and conditions itself, so becomes the ruling and controlling force in the human consciousness, as itself practically to become human. There is perhaps no obvious objection to this view, but, at the same time, it is difficult to see what is gained by it. The human Ego, as a distinct Ego, is as entirely lost sight of—is as completely taken up and merged into the Divine—as on the other supposition. For it is of the essence of the true view of Incarnation that the bond of personal identity should remain unbroken between the Son who shared the glory of the Father in eternity, and the human Christ who prayed, “O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.”John xvii. 5.

3. Was Christ’s “plan” one and the same throughout? (Neander, Schmidt, etc.). Or, did Christ’s views change with the course of events? (Beyschlag, Schenkel, Hase, Keim, Baldensperger, etc.). Was it, e.g., only gradually that He realised the necessity of His death? (Beyschlag, Weiss, Baldensperger, Wendt, etc.).

4. The import and origin of the titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God.” Does the former represent Christ as “weak, creaturely man”? (Holsten, Wendt). Or as “ideal, typical man”? (Neander, Reuss, Beyschlag, etc.). Or simply as Messiah? (Baldensperger). Was it borrowed from Daniel (as most hold), and to what extent was it a popular, well-known title for Messiah? (Against this, Matt. xvi. 13.)

This title expresses the two ideas that Christ at once belongs to the race of humanity, and sustains a peculiar and unique relation to it. It may be held to denote Christ’s consciousness that He is true and perfect Man, that He sustains a universal relation to the race, and that He is the Messiah.

As respects the second title, does it denote an ethical and religious relation (so most of the above), or has it also any metaphysical (or, as I prefer to say, transcendental) implication? (Beyschlag, Reuss, Schmidt, etc.). Is it a tithe which Christ shares with others (in part Wendt), or uses in a peculiar and exceptional sense of Himself? (Beyschlag, Reuss, Weiss, etc.).

It will help the understanding of the subject if I sketch a little more fully the views of some of the above named writers.

Beyschlag’s view does not hang well together. It begins with a Christ who is unique among men—sinless, the Son of God in an absolute sense, whose nature is grounded in eternity, who works miracles, is raised from the dead, is translated into heavenly power and glory, who has Godhead, who demands worship; but who grows only gradually into the consciousness of His Messiahship, is limited in nature and gifts, makes mistakes, errs in His expectations, etc. Beyschlag’s opinions, however, contain many notable elements. On the general subject he says, “First in a Personality in which the Divine nature translates itself so perfectly into the human that it can be said, ‘Who sees Me, sees the Father,’ can the Divine Revelation perfect itself.”Leben Jesu, i. p. 39. The God-manhood is “the wonder of all wonders.”Ibid. i. p. 39. He separates himself from the Church doctrine,. and declares himself in favour of an “anthropocentric” Christology, though only on the ground, as he explains it, of “a theocentric anthropology,” that is, of the view that it is the image of God which is the essential thing in the nature of man.Ibid. i. p.46. He rejects Strauss’s view, that the sinlessness of Jesus is “the death of all true humanity,” and contends that “the Christ of faith” is no impossibility.Ibid. i. pp. 50, 56. The history of the childhood of Jesus, at the same time, he resolves into poetry, and thinks the birth from a virgin not essential to sinlessness, or to a new beginning of humanity.Ibid. pp. 146, 161, 162. On the self-consciousness of Jesus, he holds that the individuality of Jesus had its limitations, but in respect of the consciousness of a Divine Sonship was clear and absolute. “It is not the old Israelitish religious consciousness which lives in Jesus in such all-determining fashion, but a new, till then in the world unheard of and perfect consciousness, which not only is still unsurpassed but in its inwardness and clearness never can be surpassed.”Ibid. i. p. 175. Its central point is the consciousness of God as Father, to which the name “Son” corresponds. “Sonship to God (Gottessohnschaft) is the peculiar expression of the self-consciousness of Jesus.”Ibid. i. p. 176. This name represents the highest aim, or ideal, for all men, but still there is a singularity in its application to Jesus.Ibid. i. p. 177. God was His Father in a special sense. “While He calls God not merely ‘His’ Father, but names Him also ‘the’ Father absolutely, and teaches His disciples to pray ‘our Father in heaven,’ He yet never includes Himself with them under an ‘our Father,’ but always says ‘My Father’ or ‘your Father,’ thus distinguishing His relation from theirs.”Ibid. i. p. 178. This does not mean “that He is the first who has recognised and realised this destination to a Divine Sonship.” It means that, while all others become sons of God through a change of disposition—through conversion, the new birth, etc.—and not through themselves, but only through Him—His relation to the Father is original, perfect, absolute, so that He knows Himself to be the object of God’s love absolutely.Leben Jesu, i. p. 179. In this is involved His sinlessness.Ibid. i. p. 181. This is a necessary pre-supposition of Christian faith—the religious, moral absoluteness of Jesus, and the history confirms it.Ibid. i. p. 190. If He has not this absolute greatness, He is no Saviour of others, but stands in need of salvation Himself.Ibid. i. p. 190. This is the “Godhead” of Jesus. “It is never a relative greatness, however exalted and super-excellent it may be, but the absolute which is the appearance of Godhead in humanity; the religiously and morally perfect, and this alone, is in the domain of the human, the truly Divine, in which we can believe, and which admits of and demands worship.”Ibid. i. p. 191. But this religious-moral Godhead of Christ does not stand in opposition to a metaphysical. A real being of God in Him lies at the foundation of the consciousness of Christ, that which He expresses in the word, “I am in the Father and the Father in Me”; so that in Him in whom the eternal love has perfectly appeared an essential Godhead also may be recognised.Ibid. i. p. 191. The passages in John which seem to imply personal pre-existence, Beyschlag explains away by predestination, etc. On the Messianic calling, he finds the birth-moment of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus in the baptism.Ibid. i. p. 213. He reviews the opinions of those who would put it earlier or hater, and finds them untenable.Ibid. i. pp. 216, 217. But though Christ from this moment knew Himself to be the Messiah, He did not know what the course of His Messianic life was to be.Ibid. i. p. 289. He had no foreseen plan. “The public life of Jesus began under quite other stars than the expectation of the death of the Cross.”Ibid. i. p. 231. Beyschlag distinguishes three stages in the development of Christ’s ideas:Ibid. i. pp. 233–236.—

1. A stage when the kingdom is conceived of as near—standing at the door (early ministry in John).

2. Jesus realises that His people are anything but ready for the kingdom; and sees that its triumph will involve a long-protracted development (Galilean ministry).

3. He foresees His death, and the triumph of the kingdom is now transported into the future, in connection with a second advent. The name “Son of Man,” Beyschlag connects with the Messianic dignity (from Daniel); but holds that Christ knew and felt Himself also as “the heavenly, archetypal (urbildlich). man.”Leben Jesu, i. p. 241. The reality of the resurrection is strongly defended, and the following explanation is given of the ascension. “What, then, was the original thought of the ascent to heaven? What else can it have been than that of the elevation of Jesus above the limits of the earthly life, of His translation into another, supramundane, Divine form of existence,—in a word, of His exaltation or glorification?”Ibid. i. p. 448.

H. Schmidt’s article in the Studien und Kritiken, on “The Formation and Content of the Messianic Consciousness of Jesus,” is an acute criticism of the views of Beyschlag and Weiss, and also an able independent treatment of the subject. He inquires “first as to the time in which Jesus came to the consciousness of His Messianic destination, and then what moments His Messianic consciousness comprehended, and what measure of clearness there was already present in Him as to the nature of His kingdom.”Stud und Krit. 1889, p. 425. As against Weiss, who seeks to lead from the consciousness of Christ’s unique Son-relationship to the consciousness of His Messiahship by way of inference, he argues very powerfully for a peculiarity in the self-consciousness of Jesus other than the mere sense of a perfect religious relation to the Father.Ibid. 1889, 432. Sonship implies a knowledge of the thoughts and love of God to the individual, not of God’s thoughts or purposes for the world. On the other hand—this against Beyschlag—the consciousness of a unique and sinless Sonship could not exist without the idea of a unique calling connected therewith.Ibid. 1889, p. 433. For Jesus to know that He was the only sinless Being in humanity, was already to know that He had a calling beyond that of a Nazarene carpenter. He strongly presses the point that the appearance of a perfectly sinless Being in the empirical state of the race is scarcely comprehensible by us “without the background of a distinction of essence”;Ibid. 1889, p. 499. and shows that Beyschlag’s admission that the peculiarity of Christ’s Person, as the absolute moral ideal, involves a permanent distinction between Him and others, and rests on a metaphysical background, is fatal to his “anthropocentric” view, for it means that the centre of Christ’s Person is in the suprahuman—the Divine.Stud. und Krit. 1889, p. 435. He examines the alleged traces of growth in the Messianic consciousness of Jesus during His public ministry, and demonstrates how weak are the grounds on which this view rests.Ibid. 1889, pp. 448–451. He holds it to have been inconceivable that Jesus should have been in unclearness in regard to, at least, “the constitutive moments” of His kingdom, and therefore in regard to His death.Ibid. 1889, p. 472. He combats Weiss’s view that Jesus thought at first only of Israel, not of a universal kingdom.Ibid. 1889, p. 490. “If at the entrance on His Messianic course, already the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them were offered to Him, one would think He must have had a wide glimpse into this world.”Ibid. 1889, p. 490. The whole essay deserves careful consideration.

Another critic of current theories is Grau, who thus defines the subject in his preface. “The capital question in this domain,” he says, is, “What Jesus has thought about Himself, His vocation, and the significance of His Person?” Another form of the question is, “How is the Christ of the Nicene Creed related to the Christ of the New Testament, and specially to the Christ of the Synoptics”?Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, Preface, pp. 5, 9. He criticises very severely the view of H. Schultz, in his work on The Godhead of Christ, but along with this, the theories of Beyschlag, etc. He quotes Schultz’s criticism on the Socinian writers, that they ascribed “a become Godhead” (eine gewordene Gottheit) to Christ, and asks wherein their view differed from his own, as expressed in the following passage: “If we teach the Godhead of Christ, it is that we are certain that Jesus, after He has completed His work, has become perfectly one with the Christ-idea of God. . . . God has made Him Lord and Christ. And so He has also received, as His personal attribute, the Godhead which is proper to the Christ. The Christ is for us God. Jesus has become God in becoming Christ.”Ibid. Preface, p. 12. The old view, Grau remarks, was that “God became man in Jesus Christ”; now the truth of salvation is expressed by Schultz and his friends in the proposition, “The man Jesus Christ has become God.” “This Godhead,” he says, “can be no ‘true’ Godhead, because it is one that has become. So, finally, is this whole representation nothing else than what it was with the Socinians—a misuse of the name of God.”Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, Preface, p. 13. Cf. the criticism of Schultz in Frank’s Gewissheit p. 444 (Eng. trans). Grau’s own book, however, though it goes on original lines, can hardly be recommended as a satisfactory contribution to the subject. He is often far from concise or clear in his statements, and somewhat unmethodical in his treatment. He does not systematically investigate the question of Christ’s self-consciousness—its development, relation to current ideas, contents, etc.—but aims rather at proving the thesis that Christ is the one who combines in His Messianic calling, all the attributes of Jehovah in the Old Testament. An elaborate discussion of the tithe “Son of Man” sums itself up in the following remark:—“This is the (title) Son of Man, the grasping together and fulfilment of all the offices m the kingdom of God which lie side by side in the Old Testament, and complete each other—those of shepherd, physician, priest (but also of sacrifice), of prophet, of king, and judge.”Ibid. p. 215.

A much more thorough discussion of the subject is Baldensperger’s recent work on The Self-Consciousness of Jesus in the Light of the Messianic Hopes of His Time. Baldensperger will have nothing to say to the “ideal man” theory—which he ridicules as an attempt to carry back our nineteenth-century ideas into a period to which they were quite strange—and treats the title “Son of Man” as simply a designation for the Messiah.Ibid. p. 137; 2nd ed. p. 178. Yet his general view is exposed to the same objections as Beyschlag’s. He makes Jesus first arrive dimly at the feeling that He is Messiah; then, aroused by John’s preaching and baptised, He reaches religious assurance (but still expecting, according to the ideas of the time, signs in confirmation of His call); He is perplexed (the Temptation); after this, He gains clearness, yet not such absolute certainty as warrants Him in publicly proclaiming Himself; ultimately he attains to this certainty, and at the same time sees that His victory is only to be secured through death, and now looks for the completion of the kingdom of God through the Parousia and last judgment, etc.See Wendt’s criticism in his Die Lehre Jesu, ii. pp. 307–310. It is obvious how much of all this is mere theory, without corroboration in the history. To mention only one objection—according to Baldensperger, Christ did not announce Himself as Messiah till the time of Peter’s confession,Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, ii. p. 177; 2nd ed. p. 246. while yet the name “Son of Man,” which Baldensperger takes to be quite equivalent to Messiah, is on His lips in the Gospels from the first.E.g., Matt. xi. 6; Mark ii. 10, 28. Cf. Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, ii. p. 179; 2nd ed. p. 249. To avoid this difficulty, the critic has no alternative but arbitrarily to change the order of the sections, and to assume that all those incidents in which this name occurs, took place after Peter’s confession—a violent and unwarrantable hypothesis.They are to be regarded as “erratic blocks” in the history, Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, p. 180; 2nd ed. p. 252. It is a weakness of Baldensperger’s theory that it fluctuates between a view according to which Jesus is certain of Himself, and another according to which He is in doubt and perplexity. Surely, if there is one thing clearer in the Gospels than another, it is that Christ is quite certain of Himself from the beginning. Not to build on this expression “Son of Man,” can we listen to the tone of authority in the Sermon on the Mount, and doubt it? The hypothesis of a wavering and fluctuating consciousness totally lacks support in the Gospel narrative. Had Christ any doubt of Himself when He answered John’s messengers, when He chose the twelve apostles, when He invited the labouring and heavy laden to come to Him for rest, when He said, “All things are delivered to Me of My Father,” etc.?Matt. xi. 27, 28. One thing which Baldensperger totally fails to show us is, what amount of reliance we are to place in self-beliefs of Christ, arrived at by the psychological methods he indicates, through contact with the apocalyptic notions of the time, etc. In other words, what objective value have these beliefs of Christ for us—His beliefs, e.g., about His atoning death, His Parousia, the judgment of the world, etc.? Apparently Baldensperger attaches great religious weight to these beliefs, stripped at least of their immediate form, yet it is not easy to see on what grounds he can do so. He leaves wholly undetermined, besides, Christ’s relation to His miracles, to the resurrection, etc., without which, surely, His self-witness is not set in its right light.

I would refer, finally, to the important discussion of these subjects in Wendt’s able and exhaustive work on The Doctrine of Jesus. In this book Wendt subjects the opinions of Beyschlag and Baldensperger, as to a change in Christ’s views of His kingdom, to a careful criticism, and arrives at the con: elusion that, in all essential respects, Christ’s views of the nature and coming of His kingdom as a present, spiritual, gradually developing reality on earth, remained unchanged during the period of His ministry.Die Lehre Jesu, ii. pp. 307–325. He holds, however, that this does not apply to the details of the development; and grants, in agreement with the others, that at the beginning of His work Christ had no thought of the necessity of His death, not to speak of so speedy and frightful a death.Ibid. ii. pp. 306, 320. The difference of the two views, therefore, resolves itself into one of degree, for unless it is held that Christ’s death had no essential relation to the nature of His kingdom, and the manner of its setting up, it is impossible to say that ignorance in regard to that event did not affect the conception of the kingdom. Wendt, like Beyschlag, holds that the baptism was the moment of the miraculous revelation to Christ of His Messiahship, though He finds this prepared for in His previous consciousness of standing in an inner communion of love with His heavenly Father. “In this consciousness was given the psychological pre-supposition for His gaining the certainty of His own Messiahship, and therewith, at the same time, obtaining a new, higher knowledge of the nature and coming of the kingdom of God. But, previously to the baptism, this conclusion from His inner fellowship with God as His Son was to Him still not clear.”Ibid. ii. p. 316. On the meaning of the name “Son of Man,” Wendt argues strongly for the view that this title designates Christ as a weak, creaturely being—member, Messiah though He was, of the weak, creaturely race of humanity.Ibid. ii. pp. 442, 443. This view, in turn, is ably criticised by Baldensperger in the work noticed above.Ibid. ii. 2nd ed. p. 182, etc. It cannot be carried through without doing violence to many passages in which this name is evidently used by Christ as a tithe of dignity; the highest Messianic functions being claimed by him, not (as Wendt’s argument would require) despite of His being Son of Man but because He is Son of Man.Mark ii. 28; John v. 27, etc. In general, Wendt’s ideas of Jesus and His teaching are very high. “My interest in the historical treatment of the teaching of Jesus,” he says, “arises from the conviction that the historical Jesus Christ, in His annunciation, by word and deed, of the kingdom of God, was the perfect Revelation of God to men”; and again, “We recognise in His teaching concerning the kingdom of God the highest and perfect Revelation of God.”Preface to recent Eng. trans. of Die Lehre Jesu. Dr. Wendt, however, does not allow anything higher than an ethical Sonship to Jesus, identical in kind with that enjoyed by all the other members of the kingdom of God—“viz, a fellowship of love with God, in which God as the Father bestows His eternal salvation, and man as son trustfully and obediently appropriates and follows the will of God; only that Jesus knows that this relation of Sonship to God is realised in Himself in unique perfection, and on this account regards Himself as the Son of God κατ᾽ εξιχή“—P. 453. He expressly denies to Jesus pre-existence, or a transcendental mode of being, and explains away the sayings in John which seem to teach such higher existence.—Pp. 453–476. On the other hand, this high estimate is limited by the admission that on everything but the one peculiar point of His own mission—the founding of the kingdom of God—Jesus simply occupied the standpoint, and used the language, of His contemporaries. His views of the natural world—e.g. of the Old Testament, of angels and devils, of the future world, etc.—were simply those of His age, and liable to all the error and imperfection of the time.Die Lehre Jesu, ii. pp. 113–129. But then the question cannot help arising, If Jesus is avowedly wrong on all points where a scientific view of the world is concerned, how are we to trust Him when He speaks to us of supernatural and supersensible realities? May not His own words be applied, “If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?”John iii. 12. There need be no dispute as to what Dr. Wendt says of the religious ideas of Christ, of His spiritual conception of the kingdom of God, of His doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood, of His pure and exalted doctrine of righteousness. The sceptic would admit it all. He would only question whether, with the altered view of the world which has arisen since Christ’s time, such doctrines are tenable now as sober, objective truth. And to answer that question satisfactorily, firmer ground must be taken up in regard to Christ’s consciousness as a whole. Dr. Wendt’s book is, in many respects, a richly instructive one, full of suggestive points, but it lacks the means of guarding Christianity against the subjectivity which would grant to it every kind of moral worth and beauty, but would deny its objective truth as Revelation.

(3) The world is a finite object, and cannot be an adequate means for the mediation of an infinite self-consciousness.It is besides only progressively realised, and thus would involve a growing self-consciousness.

(4) Finally, the world is not a personal object. But the true depths of personality are only sounded when the “I” knows itself in contradistinction from and in reciprocal relations with a “Thou”—a counter-self to its own.This objection is not obviated by assuming a world of finite personalities.

The result we reach by this line of thought is that we can only secure the reality of the Divine self-consciousness by regarding it as complete in itself—apart from the idea of the world; and this can only be done by positing an immanent distinction in the Godhead, through which the Divine consciousness carries its object within itself; and this neither an ideal, nor finite, nor impersonal object, but One in whom God sees His own personal image perfectly expressed,—who, in Scripture language, is “the effulgence of His glory, and the very image of His substance” (ὑπόστασις).Heb. i. 3. Pfleiderer supposes that the Divine self-consciousness is mediated by God’s own thoughts (“His changing activities and states”)—but thoughts of what?—Religionsphilosophie, iii. p. 282 (Eng. trans.). The value of the doctrine of the Trinity from this point of view is very evident. The third moment—that which corresponds to the Holy Spirit—is more difficult to arrive at d priori, but one feels the need of it to complete the circle of the Divine life in bringing to light the unity which underlies the previous distinction.Cf. on this argument Dorner, System of Doctrine, pp. 422–426; Christlieb,Moderne Zweifel, pp. 271, 272 (Eng. trans.), etc. Hegel makes it the startingpoint of his deduction. “Knowing implies that there is another which is known; and in the act of knowing, the other is appropriated. Herein it is contained that God, the eternally in-and-for-Himself existing One, eternally begets Himself as His Son, distinguishes Himself from Himself—the absolute act of judgment.”—Religionsphilosophie, ii. p. 228.

2. A more familiar deduction is that from Divine love. Here, in realising what is involved in Divine love, we feel, quite as strongly as in the case of the Divine Personality, the need of sell-distinction. The proof of the Trinity from hove— if proof it can be called—is a favourite one with theologians.It is developed specially by Sartorius in his Doctrine of Divine Love (translated). See also Martensen’s Christian Ethics, i. p. 73; Christlieb’s Moderne Zweifel, pp. 272, 273 (Eng. trans.); Laidlaw’s Bible Doctrine of Man, pp. 126, 127; Murphy’s Scientific Basis of Faith, p. 377; Lux Mundi, p. “God is love.”1 John iv. 16. But love is self-communication to another. There cannot be love without an object to be loved. If, therefore, God is essentially love, this is in other words to say that He has from eternity an object of His love. This object cannot be the world—ideally or really—for the reason already given, that this would be to make God dependent on the world,—to make the world, indeed, an essential moment in God’s life,—whereas the true doctrine is that God has love in its fulness in Himself, and out of that fulness of hove, loves the world.This is an important point in the doctrine of Divine Love. The thought is already met with in lrenaeus. Cf. Dorner, Person of Christ, i. p. 306. Martensen says: “God’s love to the world is only then pure and unmixed holy affection when God, whilst He is sufficient to Himself and in need of nothing, out of infinite grace and mercy calls forth life and liberty beyond His own Being. . . . But this free power of love in the relations of God to the world presupposes the existence of perfect love realised within itself, the love of the Father and the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit.”—Christian Ethics, i. p. 74. Similarly Dorner in his Christian Ethics, p. 94 (Eng. trans.). The world, besides, is a finite object, and could not be an adequate object for the infinite love of God. If, therefore, God is love in Himself—in His own eternal and transcendent being—He must have in some way within Himself the perfect and eternal object of His love—which is just the Scripture doctrine of the Son. This view of God is completed in the perfect communion the Divine Persons have with each other through the Holy Spirit—the bond and medium of their love.

To see the importance of this view, we have but to contrast it with its opposite, and to ask, What can love in God mean on the supposition of His absolute solitariness? What can be the object of God’s love throughout eternity, if there is no triune distinction in God? What can it be but Himself? Instead of love, therefore, as we understand it,—affection going out to another,—what we have in the universe is an infinite solitary Ego; a Being who loves Himself only, as, indeed, there is no other to love. Either, therefore, we must come back to seek an object for God’s love in the finite, created world, or recognise that God has an infinitely blessed life of love within Himself, and this brings us to the doctrine of an immanent Trinity. The value of the doctrine in an ethical aspect is seen when we recognise that only through the Trinitarian distinction are we brought into communion with a Being who has within Himself a life of communion.

3. Connected with this as a third point of view—though it is really only an extension of the foregoing—is a deduction from the Divine Fatherhood. God, is Father. This is Christ’s own new name for Him, and expresses His relation to those who stand in moral dependence on Him, and who bear His image. But Father and Son are terms of relation.This is the mistake of those who, in a Sabellian way, take Father as the name for God as the Creator, etc. The Christian idea of the Father comes to birth only in the Revelation of the Son. The terms are reciprocal. See Note A. If, then, God be Father, where shall we find the Son who corresponds with this relation? If we say, men, created angels, creatures of any kind, we are led to this, that Fatherhood in God depended on there being a creation. God is not Father simply as God. Fatherhood is not of His very essence. This could not easily be better put than it has been by Mr. R. H. Hutton, in a well-known essay on the Incarnation in his volume of Theological Essays. “If Christ is the eternal Son of God,” he says, “God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love, is of the very essence of the Eternal Being; the communication of His life, the reciprocation of His affection, dates from beyond time—belongs, in other words, to the very being of God. . . . The Unitarian conviction that God is—as God and in His eternal essence—a single, solitary Personality . . . thoroughly realised, renders it impossible to identify any of the social attributes with His real essence—renders it difficult not to regard power as the true root of all other Divine life. If we are to believe that the Father was from all time, we must believe that He was as a Father,—that is, that love was actual in Him as well as potential, that the communication of life and thought and fulness of joy was of the inmost nature of God, and never began to be, if God never began to be.”Theological Essays, 3rd ed. p. 257.

4. Finally, this doctrine of the Trinity has a profound bearing on the relation of God to the world. Not without reason does Scripture connect the Son with the creation, and give His person and His work a cosmical significance. We may conceive of God in two relations to the world—either in His absolute transcendence over it, which is the deistic conception, or as immanently identified with it, which is the pantheistic conception. Or we may conceive of Him as at the same time exalted above the world—transcending it, and yet present in it as its immanent sustaining ground, which is the Christian conception. It was to maintain this double relation to the world that, as we have seen, Philo conceived of the Logos as a middle term between God and the creation, and the Neo-Platonists distinguished between God, the νοῦς, and the soul of the world. When a middle term is wanting, we have either, as in the later Judaism and Mohammedanism, an abstract and immobile Monotheism; or, in recoil from this, a losing of God in the world in Pantheism. In the Christian doctrine of the triune God we have the necessary safeguards against both of these errors, and at the same time the link between God and the world supplied which speculation vainly strove to find.This important aspect of the Trinity, as safeguarding the true idea of God in. relation to the world (His immanence and transcendence) against the opposite errors of Deism and Pantheism, is brought out with special fulness by Dorner in his discussion of Sabellianism and Arianism, Person of Christ, i. and B., and his System of Doctrine, i. pp. 365–378. Cf. also Martensen’s Dogmatics, pp. 103–106; Christlieb’s Moderne Zweifel, pp. 263–265; Lux Mundi, pp. 92–102, etc. The Christian view is, therefore, the true protection of a living Theism, which otherwise oscillates uncertainly between these two extremes of Deism and Pantheism, either of which is fatal to it.A remarkable illustration of how the deeper thought on God runs almost necessarily into a Trinitarian mould is furnished by an essay of Dr. Martineau’s on “A Way out of the Trinitarian Controversy,” in his recently published volume of Essays, Ecclesiastical and Historical. See Note B.—Dr. Martineau as a Trinitarian.

II. The Scripture view brings creation and Redemption into line—consequences of this.

II. It is a special service of the doctrine of the Trinity, from the point of view we have now reached, that it brings creation and Redemption into line, teaching us to look on creation and Redemption as parts of one grand whole, and on Christ, now exalted to supreme dominion in the universe, as at once the first-born of creation and the first-born from the dead.Col. i. 15-18. This thought of the Son as the link between God and creation—which is so prominent a thought in the New Testament—forms the transition to the other subject on which I propose to speak in this Lecture—the relation of the Incarnation to the plan of the world. The Revelation of the Trinity is given in the work of Redemption, but once given we can see that it has its bearings also on the work of creation. This is the view of all the leading writers in the New Testament,—of Paul, of John, of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,—who go back, or reason back, to an original agency of the Son in the creation of the world.John i. 3; 1 Cor. viii. 6; Eph. iii. 9-11; Col. i. 15-18; Heb. i. Even the Apocalypse speaks of Christ as “the beginning (ἀρχή, or principle) of the creation of God.”Rev. ii. 14. But once started on this line, it is impossible to shut one’s eyes to the question which inevitably arises, and which has so frequently been discussed in the history of theology—more keenly than ever in modern theology—Did an Incarnation lie in the original plan of the world? Would there have been an Incarnation had man never fallen? Has the Incarnation any relation to the original ends for which the world was made? Or is the Incarnation connected solely with the entrance of sin and the need of Redemption?

To raise a question of this kind at all may be thought by many to savour of idle and presumptuous speculation. It may be thought that it is one which the Scripture directly and expressly settles in the negative, in connecting the Incarnation so intimately as it does with God’s great purpose of salvation to our race—making it, indeed, the crowning proof of His love to sinners that He has sent His only-begotten Son into the world, that the world might live through Him.3 There are, however, certain considerations which should give us pause before coming too hastily to this conclusion.

1. The first is that this is a question which does rise naturally out of so transcendent a fact as the Incarnation.

2. It is a question which has forced itself on the mind of the Church, and has been deeply and reverently discussed by its ablest thinkers for centuries. ‘It is a view which the late Principal Fairbairn, who reasons against it, admits undoubtedly to include among its defenders “some of the most learned theologians of the present day.”Typology of Scripture, 4th ed. I. p. 118.

3. But, mainly, the theory referred to is one not unsuggested by certain of the teachings of Scripture. The same objection which is taken to this—that it lies outside the field of view of Redemption—may be made against the Scripture statements as to the relation of the Son to creation; but it is the grandeur of the Christian view that, starting with our primary necessities as sinners, it opens up principles and views fertile and far-reaching vastly beyond their original application.

It is unnecessary for my purpose to enter at any length into the history of the question. A sketch of it may be seen in Dorner’s History of the Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ,Person of Christ, iii. pp. 361–369. This view was already Involved in the theology of Irenaeus. See Dorner, I. p. 316; and Article “Irenaeus,” in Dictionary of Christian Biography. or in the finely-toned essay on the subject, entitled “The Gospel of Creation,” appended to Bishop Westcott’s Commentary on the Epistles of St. John. These writers, with Archbishop Trench, in his Cambridge University Sermons, take the view that the Incarnation was not conditioned by human sin; and the same view is held by Rothe, Lange, Oosterzee, Martensen, Ebrard, and a large number of other theologians. The opposite view is stated with great temperateness and force by Principal Fairbairn in the fourth edition of his valuable work on the Typology of Scripture.Vol. i. pp. 117–135. It may perhaps be found as the result of a brief consideration of the subject, that the truth does not lie exclusively on either side in this profound and difficult controversy, but that a higher point of view is possible from which the opposition disappears.

The strong point in favour of the view that the Incarnation is conditioned solely by human sin, is the fact that in Scripture it is represented invariably in this connection. I need not quote many passages in illustration of this statement. “The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.”Luke xix. 10. “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”John iii. 16. “God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that He might redeem them which were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”Gal. iv. 4 (R.V.). “To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.”1 John iii. 8. These and numerous other Scriptures explicitly associate Christ’s coming with man’s Redemption Christ is the unspeakable gift of God’s love to men for their salvation.

On the other hand, it is argued that, while the Scripture thus directly connects the Incarnation with the work of Redemption, it leaves room for, and contains passages which necessarily suggest, a wider view. Such are the passages already referred to, which throw light on the original relation of the Son to creation—which declare that all things were made by Him, that all things consist or hold together in Him, that He is the firstborn of all creation—above all, that all things were created for Him—that, in the? language of Dr. Lightfoot, “the Word is the final cause as well as the creative agent of the universe”—“not only the ἀρχή but also the τέλος of creation, not only the first but also the last in the history of the universe.”On Col. i. 16. These past ages I shall advert to again. It is further argued—and this is a point on which great stress is laid—that an event of such tremendous magnitude as the Incarnation cannot be regarded as a mere contingency in the universe; that if it was in view at all, it must have governed the whole plan of creation; and that, in point of fact, it is through it that, according to Scripture, the creation does reach its end—not only redeemed humanity, but all things, both in heaven and in earth, being ultimately gathered up into Christ as Head.Eph. i. 10. A plan of such vast extent cannot, it is held, be conceived of as an afterthought,—as something grafted on creation outside its original design,—it must have lain in the original design itself.

It seems to me that the real source of difficulty in thinking on this subject lies in not grasping with sufficient firmness the fact that, however we may distinguish from our human point of view between parts and aspects of the Divine plan, God’s plan is in reality one, and it is but an abstract way of thinking which leads us to suppose otherwise. In our human way of apprehension, we speak as if God had first one plan of creation—complete and rounded off in itself—in which sin was to have no place; then, when it was foreseen that sin would enter, another plan was introduced, which vitally altered and enlarged the former. But if we take a sufficiently high point of view, we shall be compelled to conclude, I think, that the plan of the universe is one, and that, however harsh the expression may sound, the foresight and permission of sin were from the first included in it. An ultra-Calvinist would speak of the foreordination of sin; I take lower ground, and speak only of the foresight and permission of sin. Dealing with the question on the largest scale, I do not see how either Calvinist or Arminian can get away from this. It is not a question of how sin historically or empirically eventuated,—that we agree it must have done through human freedom,—but it is the question of fact, that sin is here, and that in the Divine plan it has been permitted to exist—that it has been taken up by God into His plan of the world. His plan included the permission of sin, and the treatment of it by Redemption. In a previous Lecture I referred to the view held by some, that nature, even before the Fall, had a prophetic reference to man’s sin, and that in this way is to be explained much that is otherwise mysterious and perplexing in its arrangements. We have only to enlarge our range of vision to see that this way of looking at the subject applies to the whole plan of God. It is idle to speculate whether, had there been no sin, the plan of the universe would have included an Incarnation or not. Had this been different, everything else would have been different also. What we do know is, in that the infinite, possibilities of things, God has chosen to create a universe into which it was foreseen that sin would enter; and the Incarnation is a part of the plan of such a creation. This being so, it may very well be conceived that the Incarnation was the pivot on which everything else in this plan of creation was made to turn. To state my view in a sentence—God’s plan is one; Christ was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world;Rev. xiii. 8. Cf. the interesting remarks in Hugh Miller’s Footprints of the Creator, 23rd ed. p. 289 (1887). and even creation itself is built up on Redemption lines.

We must, I think, on this question allow great weight to the consideration of the revealed end. The Scriptures speak of an ultimate gathering together in one of all things in Christ—of a summing up of them in Him as Head.Eph. i. 10. It is then to be asked, Is this only the external unification of a universe not originally intended to be so unified, but in regard to which God’s original plan was something entirely different? Or did it not lie in its original destination? The end of a thing, we are to remember, is that which in the Divine plan determines the beginning of it. What a thing is to be it is fitted for being by its original make. To turn it from that end, and superinduce another upon it, would be to some extent to contradict its true nature. If this is so in general, must it not be so in the highest degree when the end we speak of is the end of the universe, and the plan in question is that of gathering together in one all things in the Incarnate Son. If such a destination did not lie in the original plan of creation, was it in the nature of things possible that it could afterwards be externally superinduced upon it? Then what, in this view, becomes of the statement that all things were made for Christ, as well as by Him?Col. i. 16. Can it be received at all, for such words go deeper than a mere economical adaptation? The longer these questions are pondered, the clearer will it appear that Christ’s relation to the universe cannot be thought of as something adventitious and contingent; it is vital and organic. This means that His Incarnation had a relation to the whole plan of the world, and not simply to sin.

Dr. Fairbairn himself really admits all that is here contended for, when he says, “The argument derived from the wonderful relationship, the personal and everlasting union into which humanity has been brought with the Godhead, as if the purpose concerning it should be turned into a kind of afterthought, and it should sink, in a manner derogatory to its high and unspeakably important nature, into something arbitrary and contingent, if placed in connection merely with the Fall;—such an argument derives all its plausibility from the limitations and defects inseparable from a human mode of contemplation. To the eye of Him who sees the end from the beginning,—whose purpose, embracing the whole compass of the providential plan, was formed before even the beginning was effected,—there could be nothing really contingent or uncertain in any part of the process.”Typology of Scripture, 4th ed. i. p. 133. That is to say, the Incarnation is not to be placed in connection merely with the Fall; but the plan even of creation had from the first a reference to an Incarnation for the sake of Redemption from sin, and the perfecting of humanity.

When, from this point of view, we look back to the Scriptures, we find them in full harmony with the ideas now indicated.

1. The Scriptures know of only one undivided purpose of God,—that eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus, and which embraces, apparently, both creation and Redemption.Cf. Weiss, Biblical Theology of New Testament, ii. pp. 97–100 (Eng. trans.). On Eph. iii. 9 he says: “If it is said that the mystery of salvation was hid from eternity in God, who created the universe, it is indicated by this characteristic of God, that the purpose of salvation is connected in the closest way with the plan of the world, which began to be realised in creation; and that purpose, having been formed by the Creator before the creation of the world, was regulative even in its creation.”

2. We have the clearest acknowledgment, as has already been shown, of a direct relation of the Son to the work of creation.John i. 3; 1 Cor. viii. 6; Col. i. 15-18; Heb. i. 3. It does not detract from the suggestiveness of the passages which declare this relation, but immensely adds to it, that, as Dr. Fairbairn says, the subject of the assertions is the historical Christ, He by whom believers have obtained Redemption, and in whom they have forgiveness of sins. For the drift of the passages is evidently to bring these two things more completely into line—the work of creation and the work of Redemption, and to show them to be parts of one Divine plan.

3. Still more significant is the fact already insisted on, that, in some of the above passages, Christ is not only represented as the agent in creation, but as the final cause of creation. “All things have been created through Him, and unto Him.”Col. i. 16. He is the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last.Rev. i. 8, 17. Indirectly suggestive of the same idea are the passages which speak of “the kingdom prepared for (believers) from the foundation of the world”;Matt. xxv. 34. of “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”;Rev. xiii. 8. of Christ as “foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world,” etc.1 Pet. i. 20 (R.V.).

4. There are the express statements, also already quoted, of the goal to which God’s purpose actually tends. I may here again avail myself of the words of Bishop Lightfoot, commenting on the phrase “unto Him.”Col. i. 16. “All things,” he says, “must find their meeting-point, their reconciliation, at length in Him from whom they took their rise—in the Word as mediatorial agent, and through the Word in the Father as the primary source. . . . This ultimate goal of the present dispensation in time is similarly stated in several passages. Sometimes it is represented as the birth-throe and deliverance of all creation through Christ—as Rom. viii. 19, sq. Sometimes it is the absolute and final subjection of universal nature to Him—as 1 Cor. xv. 28. Sometimes it is the reconciliation of all things through Him—as below, ver. 20. Sometimes it is the recapitulation, the gathering up in one head, of the universe in Him—as Eph. i. 10. The image involved in this last passage best illustrates the particular expression in the text; but all alike enunciate the same truth in different terms. The Eternal Word is the goal of the universe, as He was the starting-point. It must end in unity, as it proceeded from unity; and the centre of this unity is Christ.”

The conclusion I reach is that this question, Would there have been an Incarnation but for sin? is one which rests upon a false abstraction. There is but one plan of God from the creation of the world, and it includes at once the permission of sin and the purpose of Redemption from it. It includes, therefore, the Incarnation as an integral and essential part of that purpose. The Incarnation has, indeed, immediate reference to Redemption; but it has at the same time a wider scope. It aims at carrying through the plan of creation, and conducts, not the redeemed portion of humanity alone, but the universe at large, to its goal. There is, however, another inference which we are entitled to draw—one which remarkably illustrates the unity of the Christian view. If we rightly interpret that view as implying that the Divine plan of the world contemplates an ultimate gathering up of all things into one in Christ, it will readily be seen that this, in turn, reflects back light on the doctrine of Christ’s Person. It shows that we are right in ascribing to Him full and proper Divinity, not less than true humanity. For it is manifest that no other than a truly Divine Being is fitted to occupy this position which Scripture, with consentient voice, assigns to Christ. From the new height we have reached, light falls back also on Christ’s place in the universe, in remarkable agreement with our previous postulates as to the nature of man, his place in. creation, and the law of ascent and development to which God’s natural works so strikingly testify. As the inferior stages of existence are summed up in man, who stands at the head of the earthly creation, and forms a first link between the natural and the spiritual, so are all stages of humanity summed up in Christ, who in His Person as God-man links the creation absolutely with God.

I. It needs no proof that all the New Testament writers who refer to the subject regard the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of men as connected in quite a peculiar way with the death of Christ; and it is not less evident that they do this because they ascribe to Christ’s death a sacrificial and expiatory value. They do this further, as every one must feel, not in a mere poetic and figurative way, but with the most intense conviction that they have really been redeemed and reconciled to God by the death of Christ upon the cross. The how of this redemptive transaction most of them may not enter into, but Paul, at least, has a theology on this subject, with the main outlines of which the others, judging from the expressions they use, and the propitiatory virtue they ascribe to the shedding of Christ’s blood, must be held to agree.The passages may be seen classified in Dale on The Atonement, or in Professor Crawford’s Doctrine of Holy Scripture respecting the Atonement. Happily we are freed from the necessity of dwelling long on the apostolic testimony on this subject, for the same reason which I gave when speaking of the Person of Christ—namely, that impartial exegesis and Biblical theology practically grant to us all that we assert. Apart from such occasional speculations as, e.g., Holsten’s, that, in Paul’s view, sin is identical with the body or “flesh” of Christ, and that the slaying of Christ’s body or flesh denotes the slaying of sin,Cf. Weiss, Biblical Theology of the New Testament, i. p. 422 (Eng. trans.). it will be found that the descriptions given of the teaching of the Epistles as to the work of Redemption do not differ much from those met with in our ordinary books of theology. The accounts given us, e.g., by Baur or Reuss or Pfleiderer, or even by MartineauCf. Seat of Authority, pp. 478, 479. Baur’s views may be seen in his Paulus, pp. 537–547; those of Reuss in his Hist. of Christ. Theol. in the Apost. Age, ii. pp. 68–74 (Eng. trans.); those of Lipsius in his Dogmatik, p. 498; those of Pfleiderer in his Urchristenthum, pp. 222–242.—not to speak of an exegete like Meyer, or a Biblical theologian like Weiss—of the doctrine of Paul on Redemption, is what, with very slight exception, any of us could accept. The same is true of the other New Testament witnesses—of the Epistle to the Hebrews, of Peter, of Revelation, of the Epistles of John. With differences of standpoint and strong individual characteristics, it is acknowledged that they teach a fundamentally identical doctrine of Redemption from the guilt and power of sin through Christ, and particularly that they ascribe to His death a sacrificial or propitiatory virtue. To get rid of the attribution of this view to the author of the Fourth Gospel, Dr. Martineau has to assume, in face of all probability and evidence, that the First Epistle of John is not by the same author as the Gospel.Seat of Authority, p. 509.

More important is the question which the newer forms of controversy press upon us—Whether Christ’s doctrine on this subject is the same as that of His apostles? We have a theology of propitiation in the Epistles—that is admitted; but have we anything of the same kind in Christ’s own words? Was not the gospel preached in Galilee a much simpler thing than the theological gospel preached by Paul, or contained in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and is it not free from every trace of this cumbrous machinery of Atonement, or of pardon on the ground of the suffering and death of another? Where, it is asked, is there any vestige of this doctrine in the Sermon on the Mount, or in the parable of the Prodigal Son? Is this doctrine not an aftergrowth, the result of the running of the Divine thoughts of the Master, and of the impression produced by His life and death, into the moulds of Jewish sacrificial conceptions which had no real affinity with them, and have indeed served to overlay and obscure them to the apprehension of all subsequent generations?

If the case were as this objection represents it, I grant that it would have very serious consequences for our faith. If the apostles of Christ—the very persons chosen by Him to communicate His doctrine to the world, and to whom He promised the illumination, of His Spirit for this very end—could so seriously misunderstand and pervert His doctrine on this essential point, I do not know what credit we should be able to attach to them on any point on which they profess to represent the mind of Christ. Dr. Dale has argued this point so strongly in his book on the Atonement,Lecture IV. that I do not need to do more than refer to it. It is not for us, it is for the objector to explain how the guides and leaders of the apostolic Church should come with this singular unanimity to shift the centre of gravity in Christ’s gospel from where He Himself had placed it, and so to mislead the world as to the essentials of their Master’s teaching. But the question remains—Have they done so? And this is certainly not proved from the circumstance that, in Christ’s own teaching, the doctrine of Atonement is not brought forward with the same explicitness as it is in the apostolic writings. That Christ took up a central position in relation to the truths which He proclaimed, that he invited men to faith in Himself as the condition of their participation in the blessings of the kingdom, that He promised the fullest satisfaction in the approaching kingdom to the hunger and thirst of the spiritually needy, that He declared that it was by their relation to Him that men would be ultimately judged,—this lies upon the surface of the Gospels. But that He should have preached to the Galilean multitudes truths which, on any hypothesis, could only be intelligible after His death and resurrection had taken place,—that He should have done this before He had even publicly proclaimed Himself to be the Messiah,—this is to ask what in reason we are not entitled to expect. Before there could be any preaching of an Atonement, there must be an Atonement to preach. I grant, however, that if the apostolic gospel really represents the truth about Christ’s work, the facts of His early manifestation ought to bear this out. They must be such, at least, that the apostolic gospel is felt to be the natural key to them. In reality they are much more; for, taken in their entirety, they point unmistakably to just such a view as the apostolic doctrine gives, and explain to us, what else would be a complete enigma, how such a doctrine could arise.

It is significant that the most unbiased modern inquiry into Christ’s teaching recognises that He attributed a redemptive virtue to His death, and connected it directly with the forgiveness of sins.Cf. Baldensperger’s Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, 2nd ed. pp. 153–155; Wendt’s Lehre Jesu, ii. pp. 526–530; Schmoller’s Die Lehre vom Reiche Gottes, pp. 144, 145, etc. Ritschl also acknowledges that Christ first, and after Him the oldest witnesses, connect Redemption or forgiveness, not with His prophetic office, but much more with the fact of His death.Unterricht, p. 36. Taking the testimony of the Gospels as a whole, I think it is exceedingly strong. It is remarkable that in the Gospel of John, the most spiritual of the four, we have both the earliest and the clearest statements of the fact that Christ’s death stood in direct relation to the salvation of the world. I refer to such passages as the Baptist’s utterance, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”;John i. 29. Marg. in R.V., “heareth the sin.” Cf. Dorner, System of Doctrine, iii. p. 415. Christ’s words to Nicodemus, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,”John iii. 15. etc.; and the sayings in chap. vi. about giving His flesh for the life of the world.Vers. 51-56. In the Synoptic Gospels, while in one saying at least of the earlier ministry there is a premonition of the cross,Matt. ix. 15. it was not till after Peter’s great confession that Jesus began to speak explicitly to the disciples of His approaching sufferings and death.Mark viii. 31, ix. 12, 31, x. 33, 34. Then we have many utterances declaring the necessity of His death, and such a saying throwing light upon its character as, “For verily the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.”Mark x. 45 (R.V.). On the Mount of Transfiguration it was the decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem which was the subject of discourse.Luke ix. 31. But the clearest expression of all prior to His death is His solemn utterance at the institution of the Supper, when, taking the sacramental bread and wine, He said, “This is My body; this is My blood of the Covenant, which is shed for many, unto remission of sins.”Matt. xxvi. 26, 28 (R.V.). To this must be added the instruction which the disciples are recorded to have received after the resurrection. On one remarkable occasion we read that Christ said to them “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Behoved it not the Christ to suffer these things, and to enter into His glory? And beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself.”Luke xxiv. 25-27 (R.V.). And at a later meeting with the eleven, “These are My words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, how that all things must needs be fulfilled, which are written in the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the psalms concerning Me. Then opened He their mind, that they might understand the scriptures; and He said unto them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead on the third day; and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name unto all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”Luke xxiv. 44-47. These passages are invaluable as giving us a clue to the clearness and decision of the subsequent apostolic doctrine. What these lengthened interpretations of Jesus included we cannot of course tell, but they must have embraced much light on the significance of His death; and for the nature of that light we are entitled to look to the Spirit-guided utterances of the apostles who received it.

The apostolic Church, therefore, was not left without guidance in its construction of the doctrine of Redemption, any more than in its construction of the doctrine of Christ’s Person. It had various groups of facts to lead it to a conclusion.

1. It had the objective facts themselves of Christ’s death, resurrection, and subsequent exaltation to heaven. Holding fast as it did to the Messiahship and Divine Sonship of Jesus, it could not but find the death of Christ a dark and perplexing problem, till it grasped the solution in the thought of a Divine necessity for that death for the accomplishment of the Messianic salvation. With this had to be taken the fact of Christ’s own command, that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations. Behind this again were all the facts of. His earthly life, with its revelations of Messianic power and grace, and its not less wonderful self-abasement and sorrow.

2. There were the sayings of Christ, above referred to, which threw light upon the meaning and necessity of His sufferings and death. These, in the new illumination of the Spirit, would be earnestly pondered, and are sufficient to explain all the forms in which Christ’s death came to be regarded by them.

3. There was an earlier Revelation with which the new economy stood in the closest relations, and to which Christ Himself had directed His disciples for instruction regarding Himself. In many ways also this old covenant aided them to a fuller comprehension of the meaning of the sufferings and death of Christ.

(1) There were the prophecies of the Old Testament,—foremost among them that wonderful prophecy of the Servant of Jehovah in Isaiah liii., to whose undeserved sufferings, lovingly and submissively borne, an expiatory virtue is expressly ascribed. “There is no exegete,” says Professor G. A. Smith, “but agrees to this: . . . all agree to the fact that by Himself, or by God, the Servant’s life is offered an expiation for sin—a satisfaction to the law of God.”The Book of Isaiah, ii. p. 364.

(2) There was the work of the law in men’s hearts, begetting in them the sense of sin, and, in virtue of its propaedeutic character, creating the deep feeling of the need of Redemption. It is with this consciousness of the want of righteousness wrought by the law, and the consequent feeling of the need of Redemption, that Paul’s doctrine specially connects itself.

(3) There was the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. This was the remaining key in the hands of the early Church to unlock the significance of Christ’s death. If the law created the sense of sin, it was the sacrificial system which created the idea of Atonement. This, in turn, is the thought to which the Epistle to the Hebrews specially attaches itself. When, therefore, exception is taken to the apostles casting their ideas into the moulds of Jewish sacrificial conceptions, we have rather to ask whether the economy of sacrifice was not Divinely prepared for this very end, that it might foreshadow the one and true Sacrifice by which the sin of the world is taken away, and whether this is not in accordance with all the data at our disposal.

II. Assuming, however, that all this is granted,—that it is conceded that the apostles teach Redemption through the death of Christ, and that there is no, discrepancy in this respect between their teaching and that of Christ Himself,—we are still far from a solution of the many questions which may be raised in regard to this great cardinal doctrine. Indeed, our real task is only commencing. Those who think that, on the basis of Scripture passages, a ready-made theory of Atonement lies to our hand, have only to consider the show and gradual process by which the doctrine of the Church has been built up to its present form, to become convinced of the contrary. Christ’s death is a sacrifice, but in what sense is it a sacrifice? It is a propitiation for our sins; but what are the elements in it which give it value as a propitiation? It is connected with the remission of sins; but what is the nature of this connection? These are questions as keenly discussed to-day as ever, and we cannot avoid considering them in connection with the deep and difficult problems which they raise.

Now I for one do not think it is the duty of the Church to rest content—as some express it—with the fact of the Atonement, without further inquiring as deeply as we can into its nature. I cannot believe that any doctrine of Scripture—least of all the doctrine of Atonement, which is represented in Scripture as the Revelation of the innermost heart of God to man, the central and supreme manifestation of His love to the world—was ever meant to lie like a dead-weight on our understanding, incapable of being in any degree assimilated by our thought. Certain it is that any doctrine which is treated in this way will not long retain its hold on men’s convictions, but will sooner or later be swept out of the way as a piece of useless theological lumber. The Atonement, as Dr. John M’Leod Campbell was fond of putting it, must be capable of being seen in its own light. I grant, indeed, that the fact of the Atonement is greater than all our apprehensions of it. We are here in the very Holy of holies of the Christian faith, and our treatment of the subject cannot be too reverential. The one thing a priori certain about the Atonement is, that it has heights and depths, lengths and breadths, greater than any line of ours can fathom or span. It is this which should make us patient of what are called theories of the Atonement. I do not know any one of these theories of which it can justly be said that it is unmixed error,—which has not rather in the heart of it a portion of the truth,—which does not apprehend some side or aspect of the Atonement which other theories neglect, or have thrust into the background. Instead, therefore, of being too keen to scent error in these theories, our wiser plan will be to be ever on the outlook for an enlargement of our knowledge of the truth through them.

If I might indicate in a word what I take to be the tendency of the modern treatment of the Atonement, I would say that it consists in the endeavour to give a spiritual interpretation to the great fact which lies at the heart of our Redemption; not necessarily to deny its judicial aspect,—for that, I take it, will be found impossible,—but to remove from it the hard, legal aspect it is apt to assume when treated as a purely external fact, without regard to its inner spiritual content; and, further, to bring it into harmony with the spiritual laws and analogies which obtain in other spheres. There is the attempt (1) to find spiritual laws which will make the Atonement itself intelligible; and (2) to find spiritual laws which connect the Atonement with the new life which springs from it. I may add that this is a department of the truth in which I think that the theology of our own country has rendered better service to the Christian view than the theology of the Continent.

In accordance with my plan, I am led to study this subject of Atonement through Christ especially from the point of view of the Incarnation. There is an advantage in this method, for as, on the one hand, we see how the Atonement rises naturally out of the Incarnation, so that the Son of God could not appear in our nature without undertaking such a work as this term denotes; so, on the other, we see that the Incarnation is itself a pledge and anticipation of reconciliation. It is evident that such an event could never have taken place had there been no purpose or possibility of salvation; had humanity been a hopelessly ruined and rejected race. In principle, therefore, the Incarnation is the declaration of a purpose to save the world. It is more: it is itself a certain stage in that reconciliation, and the point of departure for every other. In the Incarnation, God and, man are already in a sense one, In Christ a pure point of union is established with our fallen and sin-laden humanity, and this carries with it the assurance that everything else that is necessary for the complete recovery of the world to God will not be lacking. Theories, therefore, have never been wanting in the Church which, in one form or another, lay the stress in Redemption on the simple fact of the Incarnation. As Dr. Hodge has expressed it, “The Incarnation itself, the union of the Divine and human natures, was the great saving act. Christ redeems us by what He is, not by what He does.”System. Theology, ii. p. 585. Germs of such theories appear in some of the early Church fathers, e.g. in Irenaeus.E.g. “To this end the Word of God was made Man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the Son of God.”—Iren. iii. 19. Harnack finds a germ of this doctrine in Justin Martyr.—Dogmengeschichte, i. p. 459. There are, however, other elements in the teaching on Redemption of all these Fathers. They reappeared in the Middle Ages, and at the Reformation.E.g. Osiander, Schwenkfeld. They have a modern analogue in the theories of the Hegelian school, which in the realised unity of God and humanity in Christ see the prototype of that unity of God and man which is to be accomplished in the race in general. The thought of the identity of Incarnation and Redemption colours modern theology in many other ways.E.g. in the school of Erskine of Linlathen. Cf. Murphy, Scientific Basis of Faith (a disciple of this school): “I do not speak of the Incarnation as one act and the Atonement as another—they are one and the same Divine act, which in itself is called the Incarnation, and in its results is called the Atonement. The act of the Son of God in becoming a partaker of our nature is the Incarnation; the result of this act, in making us partakers of the Divine nature, is the Atonement or Reconciliation; though these latter words are both of them inadequate.”—P. 384. These theories are obviously defective, if meant to exhaust the whole Scripture doctrine on the subject; but they have their point of truth in this, that the perfect union of the Word with humanity is already a reconciliation of the race with God in principle, and is, besides, the medium by which a new Divine life is introduced into humanity—a view with which the theology of John specially connects itself.

In further considering the theories on this subject, it will be convenient to observe that all theories of Redemption within Christian limits agree in taking for granted three things as included under this term—

1. There is the removal of guilt, or of the consciousness of guilt, which carries with it the sense of the Divine forgiveness.

2. There is the breaking down of the actual enmity of the heart and will to God, and the turning of the sinner from dead works to serve the hiving and true God.

3. There is the taking up of the believer into the positive fellowship of eternal life with Christ, and into the consciousness of a Divine Sonship.

These are the immediate effects, from which others follow in a changed relation to the world, gradual progress in holiness, and deliverance at death and in eternity from all natural and spiritual evils.

Accordingly now as theories relate themselves predominantly to one or other of these points of view, they present a different aspect.

1. Theories which attach themselves by preference to the last point of view—that of fellowship—are apt to regard Christ chiefly as the type of the normal relation of God to humanity, and to subordinate the other aspects of His life and work to this.

2. Theories which attach themselves to the second point of view—the breaking down of the sinner’s enmity—regard Christ’s work as a great moral dynamic—“the power of God unto salvation,”Rom. i. 16. the effect of which is to break down the natural distrust of the heart towards God, and to melt the sinner into penitence,—“to bring men,” as Bushnell expresses it, “out & their sins, and so out of their penalties.”Vicarious Sacrifice, p. 7.

3. Theories which attach themselves to the first point of view—the removal of guilt—lay special stress on the relation of Christ’s work to the Divine righteousness, and view it specially as an expiation.

A perfect theory, if we could obtain it, would be one which did justice to all these standpoints, and presented them in their scriptural relations to each other and to the Person and work, of the Redeemer.

Without adhering rigidly to the scheme here indicated, which would be indeed impossible, seeing that the different theories cross each other at innumerable points, I shall now glance at the chief standpoints represented in these theories, and try to show that they gradually lead us up to a view which embraces them all; and is in harmony with the full Scripture testimony.

1. We have a class of theories which start from the idea of fellowship, based on the unique relation which Christ sustains to the race as perfect, archetypal Man—a relation expressed in the title—“Son of Man.” The point on which stress is laid here is the solidarity between Christ and the race which He came to save, a true thought in itself, and one which takes the place in modern theology of the older way of looking at Christ’s relation to the race as purely federal or official. The typical example of this class of theories is Schleiermacher’s. With the idea of fellowship Schleiermacher combines that of representation. The essence of Redemption, in his view, consists in deliverance from the miserable contradiction of flesh and spirit, through being taken up into the fellowship of Christ’s life of holiness and blessedness.“The Redeemer takes believers up into the fellowship of His untroubled blessedness, and this is His atoning activity.”—Der christl. Glaube, sec. 101. As standing in this fellowship with Christ, believers are the objects of the love of God, who looks upon them in Him. “Christ,” he says, “purely represents us before God in virtue of His own perfect fulfilment of the Divine will, to which, through His life in us, the impulse is active in us also, so that in this connection with Him we also are objects of the Divine good pleasure.”Ibid. ii. p. 133. In thus speaking of Christ in His sinless perfection as representing believers before God, it might appear as if Schleiermacher held a doctrine of imputation,—indeed, he says this is the true meaning of that much misunderstood phrase, the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.Ibid. ii. p. 133. When, however, we probe the matter a little further, his meaning is found to be nothing more than this—that God already sees in the initial stage of the believer’s holiness the germ of his subsequent full perfection,—of that perfection of which Christ is the pattern or type,—and views him in the light of that ideal.Ibid. ii. pp. 133, 134. This thought of a justification through germinal holiness is a favourite one with writers of a mystical and speculative tendency; but it manifestly shifts the ground of acceptance from Christ for us to Christ in us, and treats objective reconciliation as unnecessary.Note A—The Germ Theory of Justification. In Schleiermacher’s theory, accordingly, as in those of a kindred type, Christ’s sufferings and death have only a very subordinate place. These sufferings arose from His being in a world where evils are a necessary result of sin, and from His fellow-feeling for us in our sins.

LECTURE IX.

THE INCARNATION AND HUMAN DESTINY.

Introductory

Every view of the world has its eschatology. It cannot help raising the question of the whither, as well as of the what and the whence? “O my Lord,” said Daniel to the angel, “what shall be the end of these things?”Dan. xii. 8. What is the end, the final destiny, of the individual? Does he perish at death, or does he enter into another state of being; and under what conditions of happiness or woe does he exist there? What is the end, the final aim, of the great whole; that far-off Divine event to which the whole creation moves? It is vain to tell man not to ask these questions. He will ask them, and must ask them. He will pore over every scrap of fact, or trace of law, which seems to give any indication of an answer. He will try from the experience of the past, and the knowledge of the present, to deduce what the future shall be. He will peer as far as he can into the unseen; and, where knowledge fails, will weave from his hopes and trusts pictures and conjectures. It is not religions only, but philosophy and science also, which have their eschatologies. The Stoics had their conceptions of world-cycles, when everything, reabsorbed in the primal fire, was produced anew exactly as before. The Buddhists had their kalpas, or world-ages, periods of destruction and restoration, “during which (as in Brahmanism) constant universes are supposed to appear, disappear, and reappear”;Buddhism, by Professor Monier-Williams, p. 120. Cf. p. 118. new worlds, phoenix-like, incessantly rising out of the ruins of the old. The pessimist Hartmann has his eschatology as truly as the New Testament has its.On Hartmann’s “Cosmic Suicide,” see Caro’s Le Pessimisme, chap. viii. Kant speculated, in his Theory of the Heavens, on the birth and death of worlds; and Strauss compares the cosmos to one of those tropical trees on which, simultaneously, here a blossom bursts into flower, there a ripe fruit drops from the bough.Der alte und der neue Glaube, p. 152. How is the science of to-day seen peering on into the future, trying to make out what shall be the end of these things; whither the changes, and transformations, and integrations, and dissolutions of the physical universe all tend; and what fate is in store for the earth, and for the physical system as a whole! Mr. Spencer has his eschatology, and speculates on a boundless space, holding here and there extinct suns, fated to remain thus for ever; though he clings to the hope that, in some way he knows not, out of the ashes of this old universe a new universe will arise.First Principles, pp. 529, 537. The authors of The Unseen Universe say, “What happens to our system will happen likewise to the whole visible universe, which will, if finite, become in time a lifeless mass, if indeed it be not doomed to utter desolation. In fine, it will become old and effete, no less truly than the individual,—it is a glorious garment this visible universe, but not an immortal one—we must look elsewhere, if we are to be clothed with immortality as with a garment.”Unseen Universe, 5th ed. p. 196. Cf. pp. 165, 166.

The Christian view of the world, also, has its eschatology—one too, in its physical issues, not very different from that just described. The Christian view, however, is positive, where that of science is negative; ethical, where it is material; human, where it is cosmogonic; ending in personal immortality, where this ends in extinction and death. The eschatology of Christianity springs from its character as a teleological religion. The highest type of “Weltanschauung” is that which seeks to grasp the unity of the world through the conception of an end or aim. It is only through a conception of the world that is itself unified that man can give a true unity to his life—only in reference to an aim or end that he can organise his life to a consistent whole. On the cycle hypothesis, no satisfactory view of life is possible. All is vanity and vexation of spirit. A truly purposeful view of life is only possible on the basis of a world-view which gathers itself up to a highest definite aim. As giving this, Christianity is the teleological religion par excellence. It is, says Dorner, the only absolute teleological religion.System of Doctrine, iv. p. 376 (Eng. trans.). Cf. Martensen, Dogmatics, pp. 465, 466 (Eng. trans.). In one other respect Christianity agrees with the higher speculation—scientific and other—and that is in its breadth and scope, extending in its issues far beyond this little spot called earth, and touching in its influence the remotest regions of creation.

I. Before entering directly on eschatological questions, it may be worth our while, in connection with the fact just mentioned, to glance at the objection sometimes raised to Christianity from the enlargement of our knowledge of the physical universe through modern discoveries—chiefly through astronomy. The enormous expansion of our ideas in regard to the extent of the physical universe brought about through the telescope, and the corresponding sense of the insignificance of our planet, awakened by comparison with the gigantic whole, is supposed by many to be fatal to belief in Christianity. Strauss boldly affirms that the Copernican system gave the death-blow to the Christian view of the world.Is fatal even to belief in a personal God. Cf. his Der alte und der neue Glaube, pp. 108–110. So long as the earth was believed to be the centre of the universe, and the only inhabited spot in it, so long was it possible to maintain that God had a peculiar love to the inhabitants of our world, and had sent His Son for their Redemption. But when the true relation of the earth to the sun, and to the other planets of the system, was discovered—when, beyond this, the infinite depths of the heavens were laid bare, with their innumerable suns, galaxies, and constellations, to which our own sun, with its attendant planets, is but as a drop in the immeasurable ocean—then the idea that this little globe of ours—this insignificant speck—should become the scene of so stupendous a Divine drama as the Christian religion represents; should be the peculiar object of God’s favours, and the recipient of His revelations; that, above all, the Son of God should become incarnate on its surface,—seemed nothing less than incredible. In a universe teeming with worlds, presumably inhabited by intelligences of every order and degree, it is thought preposterous to connect the Deity in this peculiar and transcendent way with one of the very smallest of them.

Here, first, since the objection is made in the name of science, it might fairly be asked how far the premiss on which it rests—the assumption of innumerable spheres peopled with such intelligences as we have in man (I do not refer to angelic intelligences, for the Christian view has always admitted these, without our thoughts of the greatness of the Christian Redemption being thereby lessened, but corporeal inhabitants of other planets and worlds)—how far this assumption is scientifically established, or is even matter of plausible conjecture. Kant declared that he would not hesitate to stake his all on the truth of the proposition—if there were any way of bringing it to the test of experience—that at least some one of the planets which we see is inhabited;Kritik d. r. Ver. p. 561, Erdmann’s ed. (Eng. trans. p. 500). but others may not be prepared to share his confidence. Of direct scientific evidence, of course, there is none, and the argument from analogy is weakened rather than strengthened by the progress of modern discovery. If astronomy has been extending our views of the universe in space, geology has been extending our views of our own world backwards in time, and it has been pointed out that, though preparation was being made through the millions of years of that long past, it is only in quite recent times that man appeared upon its surface, and then under conditions which we have no reason to suppose exist in any other planet of our system.This is the point specially made in Whewell’s The Plurality of Worlds. Are there not worlds in the making, as well as worlds already made? Certain it is, that of the seven hundred and fifty-one parts, or thereabouts, into which our solar systemSun and planets. can be divided, life, such as we know it, or can conceive of it, is not found in seven hundred and fifty of them, for the sun monopolises that enormous proportion of the whole for himself; and of the remaining one part, it is only an insignificant fraction in which the physical conditions exist which render any of the higher conditions of life possible.In Mars, and even here, Professor Ball doubts the possibility—Story of the Heavens, p. 190. If the same proportion prevails through the universe, the area reserved for rational life will be correspondingly restricted. But, in truth, we know nothing of planets in other parts of the heavens at all, or even whether—except in one or two problematical instances—such bodies exist.Professor Ball says: “It may be that, as the other stars are suns, so they too may have other planets circulating round them; but of this we know nothing. Of the stars we can only say that they are points of light, and if they had hosts of planets these planets must for ever remain invisible to us, even if they were many times as large as Jupiter.”—Story of the Heavens, p. 95. What if, after all, our little planet should be the Eden of the planetary system—the only spot on which a place has been prepared for rational life, or in which the conditions favourable to its blossoming forth have been found?“The earth is perhaps at this hour the only inhabited globe in the midst of almost boundless space.”—Renan, Dialogues, p. 61. It is a singular circumstance that the objection here urged against Christianity is not exclusively applicable to it, but bears as strongly against all those speculative systems—Hegelianism, Schopenhauerism, Hartmannism, etc.—which have been hatched in the full light of the nineteenth century. Here, too, it is assumed that our planet stands alone as the place in which the Absolute has come to consciousness of himself (or itself), and where the great drama of his historical evolution is unfolded—where, in Hegelian phrase, God is incarnate in man!Cf. Renan: “For my part I think there is not in the universe any intelligence superior to that of man, so that the greatest genius of our planet is truly the priest of the world, since he is the highest reflection of it.”—Dialogues, p. 283. See on Renan’s extraordinary eschatology— Note A.

Apart from such considerations, however, the real reply to this objection to the Christian view of the world is that it is merely a quantitative one. Be the physical magnitude of the universe what it may, it remains the fact that, on this little planet, life has effloresced into reason; that we have here a race of rational beings who bear God’s image, and are capable of knowing, loving, and obeying Him. This is a fact against which it is absurd to put into comparison any mere quantities of inanimate matter—any number of suns, nebulae, and planets. Even suppose that there were other inhabited worlds, or any number of them, this does not detract from the soul’s value in this world. Mind, if it has the powers we know it has, is not less great because other minds may exist elsewhere. Man is not less great, because he is not alone great. If he is a spiritual being,—if he has a soul of infinite worth, which is the Christian assumption,—that fact is not affected though there were a whole universeful of other spiritual beings, as indeed the Christian Church has always believed there is. The truth is, what we have underlying this objection is that very anthropomorphism in thinking about God against which the objection is directed. It is thought that, while it might be worthy of God to care for man if he existed alone, it is derogatory to God’s greatness to think of him when there are so many other objects in the universe. Or it is thought that God is a Being so exalted that He will lose sight of the individual in the crowd. Those who think thus must have very unworthy ideas of the Being whom they wish to exalt; must forget, too, that the universe can only exist on the condition that God is present in the little as in the great; that His knowledge, power, and care extend, not to things in the mass, but to each atom of matter separately, to each tiniest blade of grass, to each insect on the wing, and animalcule in the drop of water. It is the Bible which gives the true philosophy, when it teaches that the same God who cares for stars cares also for souls; that the very hairs of our head are all numbered; that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without our heavenly Father.Ps. cxlvii. 3, 4; Matt. x. 29-31.

But the question still remains, even if all these bright worlds were inhabited—which they are not,—inhabited by rational beings like to man himself,—are they sinful? Sin retains its awful significance in the universe, no matter how many worlds there may be. If this world alone is sinful, then it is worthy of God to redeem it. Have men’s hearts not recognised the Divineness of that parable of Christ about the lost sheep? Is it not the Divinest thing that God can do to seek and to save the lost? Suppose that this universe were as full of intelligent life as the objection represents, but that this world is the one lost sheep of the Divine flock, would it not be worthy of the Good Shepherd to seek it out and save it? Shall its size prevent? Then is the worth of the soul a thing to be weighed in scales? Mr. Spencer, in one passage of his writings, thinks he has destroyed the case for Revelation, when he asks us if we can believe that “the Cause to which we can put no limits in space or time, and of which our entire solar system is a relatively infinitesimal product, took the disguise of a man for the purpose of covenanting with a shepherd-chief in Syria.”Eccles. Institutions, p. 704. He first defines God in terms which put Him infinitely far away from us, and then asks us to combine with this a conception which seems to contradict it. But what if God is not only the “Cause” of all things—the infinitely great Creator of stars and systems—but, as Mr. Spencer a own principles might lead him to hold, One also infinitely near to us—

“Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and spirit with spirit can meet;
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”Tennyson’s Higher Pantheism.—

and, beyond this, infinite goodness and love as well,—is it then so strange that He should draw a Syrian shepherd to His side, and should establish a covenant with him which had for its ultimate aim, not that shepherd’s personal aggrandisement, but the blessing, through him, of all mankind?

But finally, and this is the complete answer to the objection, if the Christian view is true, the scope of God’s purpose is not confined to this little planet, but embraces all the realms of creation.This is the argument developed in Chalmers’s celebrated Astronomical Discourses. See Note B.—The Gospel and the Vastness of Creation. The Incarnation is not a fact the significance of which is confined to earth. The Scriptures do not so represent it, but seek rather to impress us with the thought of how wide this purpose of God is, how extensive in its sweep, how far-reaching in its issues. The objection to the Christian scheme with many, I fancy, will rather be, that with its base on earth it rises too high; that when it speaks to us of the bearing of the gospel on different parts of creation, of angels desiring to look into it, of principalities and powers in the heavenly places being instructed by it in the many-sided wisdom of God,—above all, of all things in heaven and in earth being gathered up in Christ,1 Pet. i. 12; Eph. ii. 10, i. 10, etc.—it presents us with a plan the magnitude of which soars beyond our powers of belief. But if the Divine plan is on a scale of this grandeur, why complain because its startingpoint is this physically small globe? The answer to this objection, as to the similar one drawn from the earthly lowliness of Christ, must be, Respice finem—Look to the end!

II. In proceeding now to deal directly with the eschatological relations of the Christian view, it is to be remembered that it stands differently with lines of prophecy projected into the future from what it does with facts already past. In dealing with the history of God’s past Revelations—with the ages before the Advent, with the earthly life and Revelation of Jesus Christ, with the subsequent course of God’s Providence in His Church—we are dealing with that which has already been. It stands in concrete reality before us, and we can reason from it as a thing known in its totality and its details. But when the subject of Revelation is that which is yet to be, especially that which is yet to be under forms and conditions of which we have no direct experience, the case is widely altered. Here it is at most outlines we can look for; and even these outlines will be largely clothed in figure and symbol; the spiritual kernel will seek material investiture to body itself forth; the conditions of the future will require to be presented largely in forms borrowed from known relations.Cf. Fairbairn’s Prophecy, chap. iv. sec. 4. The outstanding thoughts will be sufficiently apparent, but the forms in which these thoughts are cast will partake of metaphor and image.

Examples of undue literalism in the interpretation of prophetic language will occur to every one; as an example on the other side, I may instance Ritschl, who, because of the figurative character of the language employed, sweeps the whole of the New Testament eschatology on one side, and simply takes no account of it. This is a drastic method, which makes us wonder why, if these representations convey no intelligible representations to the mind, use was made of them at all. With Ritschl, the sole thing of value is the idea of the kingdom of God, for the realisation of which we are to labour in this world. The form which the kingdom of God will assume beyond this life we cannot know, and need not concern ourselves about. The recoil from this one-sided position of Ritschl is seen in the further development of his school, particularly in Kaftan, who precisely reverses Ritschl’s standpoint, and transports the good of the kingdom of God entirely into the life beyond. “The certainty of an eternal life in a kingdom of God,” he says, “which is above the world, which lies to us as yet in the beyond, is the very nerve of our Christian piety.”This sentence is quoted from Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, ii. p. 206 (Eng. trans.). Cf. Kaftan, Wesen, pp. 67, 71, 171, 173, 214, 213, etc.; Wahrheit, p. 547, etc. This is an exaggeration on the other side, in opposition to which the truth of Ritschl’s view has to be contended for, that there is a kingdom of God to be striven for even in this world. What did Christ come for, if not to impart a new life to humanity, which, working from within outwards, is destined to transform all human relations—all family and social life, all industry and commerce, all art and literature, all government and relations among peoples—till the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ?Rev. xi. 15. Whether more slowly or more rapidly, whether peacefully or, as Scripture seems to indicate, by a succession of crises, surely this grand result of a kingdom of God will be brought about; and it is our duty and privilege to pray and labour for it. What is the reproach which is sometimes brought against Christianity by its enemies, but that of “other-worldliness”—of exclusive devotion to a good beyond this life, to the neglect of interests lying immediately to hand? And what is the remedy for this reproach, but to show that Christianity is a power also for temporal and social salvation, a leaven which is to permeate the whole lump of humanity? It is on this side that a great and fruitful field opens itself up for Christian effort in the present day; on this side that Christianity finds itself in touch with some of the most characteristic movements of the time. The ideals of the day are pre-eminently social; the key-word of Positivism is “Altruism”—the organisation of humanity for social efforts; the call is to a “service of humanity”;Cf. Cotter Morison’s The Service of Man. “The worship of deities has passed .into The Service of Man.’ Instead of Theolatry, we have Anthropolatry; the divine service has become human service.”—P. 265. As if the truest service of God did not carry in it the service of humanity. the air is full of ideas, schemes, Utopias, theories of social reform; and we who believe that Christianity is the motive power which alone Can effectually attain what these systems of men are striving after, are surely bound to put our faith to the proof, and show to men that in deed and in truth, and not in word only, the kingdom of God has come nigh to them. We know something of what Christianity did in the Roman Empire as a power of social purification and reform;Cf. Loring Brace’s Gesta Christi; Schmidt’s Social Results of Early Christianity (Eng. trans.); Uhlhorn’s Christian Charity in the Early Church; Lecky’s History of European Morals, etc. of what it did in the Middle Ages in the Christianising and disciplining of barbarous nations; of the power it has been in modern times as the inspiration of the great moral and philanthropic movements of the century;Note Mr. Stead, himself an enthusiast in social work, says: “Most good work is done by Christians. Mrs. Besant herself expressed to me that they did very little indeed, and those who did were only those who, like herself, had been brought up Christians.”—Church of the Future, p. 9. and this power of Christianity is likely to be yet greater in the future than in the past. There is yet vast work to be accomplished ere the kingdom of God is fully come.Note See Appendix on “The Idea of the Kingdom of God.”

This, therefore, may be said to be the nearer aim of Christianity—the coming of the kingdom of God on earth; but beyond this there is, as certainly, another end. Even on earth the kingdom of God does not consist supremely, or even peculiarly, in the possession of outward good, but in the inward life of the Spirit, in righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.Rom. xiv. 17. History, too, moves onward to its goal, which is not simply a transformed society, but a winding-up of all terrestrial affairs, and the transition from a world of time to a new order of things in eternity, in which the good of the kingdom of God will be perfectly realised. In dealing with the eschatology proper of the Christian view, it will be of advantage to turn our attention first to those aspects of it which stand out distinct and clear. I have said that a truly purposeful life is only possible on the basis of a world-view which has a definite aim. What that aim is in the Christian view, as respects its positive and bright side, is seen in the light of the Incarnation. There are three points here which seem to stand out free from all uncertainty.

1. The aim of God as regards believers is summed up in the simple phrase—conformity to the image of the Son. “Whom He foreknew, He also foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the First-born among many brethren.”Rom. viii. 29 (R.V.). This is the one absolute light-point in the eternal future. The mists and shadows which rest on other parts of the eschatological problem do not affect us here. We see not yet all things put under humanity, “but we behold Him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour,”Heb. ii. 5, 9 (R.V.). and we know that our destiny is to be made like Him. This is conformity to type in the highest degree. By what processes the result is to be brought about we may not know, but the end itself is clear—the assimilation begun on earth shall be perfected above.

2. This conformity to Christ includes not only moral and spiritual likeness to Christ, but likeness to Him also in His glorious body; that is, the Redemption of the body, life in a glorified corporeity. Difficulties rise here of course in great numbers, and the question will be put, “How are the dead raised, and with what manner of body do they come?”1 Cor. xv. 35 (R.V.). But, first, I would say that there are certain things here also which stand out clear.

(1) First of all, this doctrine of the Redemption of the body is needful for the completion of the Christian view. It is not an accident, but an essential and integral part of it. It is essential to a complete Redemption, as we saw in speaking of immortality, that not the soul only, but man in his whole complex personality, body and soul together, should be redeemed. In the disembodied state, the believer indeed is with Christ, rests in the blessedness of unbroken fellowship with Him, but it is the resurrection which is the perfection of his life.The idealistic school, on the other hand, speak slightingly of life in the body. “A renewed embodiment,” says Mr. Green, “if it means anything, would be but a return to that condition in which we are but parts of nature, a condition from which the moral life is already a partial deliverance.”—Works, iii. p. 206. Was Plotinus then right when he blushed that he had a body?

(2) I say, next, that this doctrine of the Resurrection of the body is not exposed to some of the objections often made to it. How, it is asked, can the same body be raised, when it is utterly decayed, and the particles of which it was composed are scattered to the winds of heaven, or perhaps taken up into other bodies? But the doctrine of the Resurrection does not involve any such belief. The solution lies, I think, in a right conception of what This which constitutes identity. Wherein, let us ask, does the identity even of our present bodies consist? Not, certainly, in the mere identity of the particles of matter of which our bodies are composed, for this is continually changing, is in constant process of flux. The principle of identity lies rather in that which holds the particles together, which vitally organises and constructs them, which impresses on them their form and shape, and maintains them in unity with the soul to serve as its instrument and medium of expression. It lies, if we may so say, in the organic, constructive principle, which in its own nature is spiritual and immaterial, and adheres to the side of the soul At death, the body perishes. It is resolved into its elements; but this vital, immaterial principle endures, prepared, when God wills, to give form to a new and grander, because more spiritual, corporeity. The existence of mystery here I grant: we cannot understand the resurrection from natural causes, but only, as Christ teaches us, from the power of God.Matt. xxii. 29. It is a miracle, and the crowning act of an economy of miracles. But we need not make the mystery greater than it is by insisting on a material identity between the new body and the old, which is no part of the doctrine of Scripture—indeed, is expressly contradicted by the words of the apostle, touching on this very point. “Thou foolish one,” says Paul, “that which thou thyself sowest is not quickened, except it die; and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body which shall be, but a bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other kind; but God giveth it a body even as it pleaseth Him, and to each seed a body of its own.”1 Cor. xv. 36-38 (R.V.). Cf. Origen, De Principiis, ii. 6: For him the resurrection is not the reproduction of any particular organism, but the preservation of complete identity of person, an identity maintained under new conditions, which he presents under the apostolic figure of the growth of the plant from the seed: the seed is committed to the earth, perishes, and yet the vital power which it contains gathers a new frame answering to its proper nature.”—Westcott in Dictionary of Christian Biography, iv. p. 121. In the case supposed, we see very clearly, first, that the identity consists only in a very minute degree, if at all—and then only. accidentally—in identity of material particles; and, second, that the real bond lies in the active, vital principle which connects the two bodies.