he is also the vital principle which moulds each individual of that race into its own similitude. The perfect type exists potentially through all the intermediate stages by which it is more and more nearly approached, and, if it did not exist, neither could they. There could be no development of an absent life. The goal of man's evolution, the perfect type of manhood, is Christ. He exists and always has existed potentially in the race and in the individual, equally before as after his visible incarnation, equally in the millions of those who do not, as in the far fewer millions of those who do, bear his name. In the strictest sense of the words, he is the life of man, and that in a far deeper and more intimate sense than he can be said to be the life of the universe." Dale, Christian Fellowship, 159" Christ's incarnation was not an isolated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness to the true and ideal relation of all men to God." The incarnation was no detached event,-it was the issue of an eternal process of utterance on the part of the Word "whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting" (Micah 5: 2).

(e) A human nature germinal, and capable of self-communication, – so constituting him the spiritual head and beginning of a new race, the second Adam from whom fallen man individually and collectively derives new and holy life.

In Is. 96, Christ is called "Everlasting Father." In Is. 53:10, it is said that "he shall see his seed." In Rev. 22:16, he calls himself "the root" as well as "the offspring of David." See also John 5: 21— "the Son also giveth life to whom he will "; 15: 1-"I am the true vine" — whose roots are planted in heaven, not on earth; the vine-man, from whom as its stock the new life of humanity is to spring, and into whom the half-withered branches of the old humanity are to be grafted that they may have life divine. See Trench, Sermon on Christ, the True Vine, in Hulsean Lectures. John 17: 2-"thou gavest him authority over all flesh, that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life"; 1 Cor. 15: 45-"the last Adam became a life-giving spirit"-here "spirit"= not the Holy Spirit, nor Christ's divine nature, but "the ego of his total divine-human personality."

Eph. 5:23 "Christ also is the head of the church" the head to which all the members are united, and from which they derive life and power. Christ calls the disciples his "little children "* (John 13:33); when he leaves them they are "orphans" (14:18 marg.). "He represents himself as a father of children, no less than as a brother" (2017-"my brethren "; cf. Heb. 2:11 -"brethren", and 13-"Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me"; see Westcott, Com. on John 13:33). The new race is propagated after the analogy of the old; the first Adam is the source of the physical, the second Adam of spiritual, life; the first Adam the source of corruption, the second of holiness. Hence John 12: 24 - "if it die, it beareth much fruit"; Mat. 10: 37 and Luke 14: 26" He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" none is worthy of me, who prefers his old natural ancestry to his new spiritual descent and relationship. Thus Christ is not simply the noblest embodiment of the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity, the new source of life for the race. Cf. 1 Tim. 2: 15—"she shall be saved through the child-bearing" which brought Christ into the world. See Wilberforce, Incarnation, 227-241; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 638-664; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2: 451 sq. (Syst. Doct., 3:349 sq.).

-"Here ȧpxý = 1. pri

Lightfoot on Col. 1: 18"who is the beginning, the first fruits from the dead ority in time. Christ was first fruits of the dead (1 Cor. 15: 20, 23); 2. originating power, not only principium principiatum, but also principium principians. As he is first with respect to the universe, so he becomes first with respect to the church; cf. Heb. 7: 15, 16'another priest, who hath been made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life." Paul teaches that "the head of every man is Christ" (1 Cor. 11 : 3), and that "in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. 2:9). Whiton, Gloria Patri, 88-92, remarks on Eph. 1: 10, that God's purpose is "to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth - to bring all things to a head (ávaκepadaiwoao@a). History is a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ. In him the before unconscious sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. He is worthiest to bear the name of the Son of God, in a preeminent, but not exclusive right. We agree with these words of Whiton, if they mean that Christ is the only giver of life to man as he is the only giver of life to the universe.

Hence Christ is the only ultimate authority in religion. He reveals himself in nature, in man, in history, in Scripture, but each of these is only a mirror which reflects him to us. In each case the mirror is more or less blurred and the image obscured, yet HE appears in the mirror notwithstanding. The mirror is useless unless there is an eye to look into it, and an object to be seen in it. The Holy Spirit gives the eyesight, while

Christ himself, living and present, furnishes the object (James 1:23-25; 2 Cor. 3:18; 1 Cor. 13:12). Over against mankind is Christ-kind; over against the fallen and sinful race is the new race created by Christ's indwelling. Therefore only when he ascended with his perfected manhood could he send the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit which makes men children of God is the Spirit of Christ. Christ's humanity now, by virtue of its perfect union with Deity, has become universally communicable. It is as consonant with evo'ution to derive spiritual gifts from the second Adam, a solitary source, as it is to derive the natural man from the first Adam, a solitary source; see George Harris, Moral Evolution, 409; and A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 174.

....

Simon, Reconciliation, 308 —"Every man is in a true sense essentially of divine nature-even as Paul teaches, delov yévos (Acts 17:29). At the centre, as it were, enswathed in fold after fold, after the manner of a bulb, we discern the living divine spark, impressing us qualitatively if not quantitatively, with the absoluteness of the great sun to which it belongs." The idea of truth, beauty, right, has in it an absolute and divine quality. It comes from God, yet from the depths of our own nature. It is the evidence that Christ, "the light that lighteth every man" (John 1:9), is present and is working within us.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1 : 272 - "That the divine idea of man as 'the son of his love' (Col. 1: 13), and of humanity as the kingdom of this Son of God, is the immanent final cause of all existence and development even in the prior world of nature, this has been the fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet been able to shake or to surpass this thought-the corner stone of an idealistic view of the world." But Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 10, says of Pfleiderer and Ritschl: "Both recognize Christ as morally perfect and as the head of the Christian Church. Both deny his pre-existence and his essential Deity. Both reject the traditional conception of Christ as an atoning Redeemer. Ritschl calls Christ God, though inconsistently; Pfleiderer declines to say one thing when he seems to mean another."

The passages here alluded to abundantly confute the Docetic denial of Christ's veritable human body, and the Apollinarian denial of Christ's veritable human soul. More than this, they establish the reality and integrity of Christ's human nature, as possessed of all the elements, faculties, and powers essential to humanity.

2. The Deity of Christ.

The reality and integrity of Christ's divine nature have been sufficiently proved in a former chapter (see pages 305-315). We need only refer to the evidence there given, that, during his earthly ministry, Christ:

(a) Possessed a knowledge of his own deity.

་་

John 3:13 "the Son of man, who is in heaven -a passage with clearly indicates Christ's consciousness, at certain times in his earthly life at least, that he was not confined to earth but was also in heaven [ here, however, Westcott and Hort, with & and B, omit ò v év Toupave; for advocacy of the common reading, see Broadus, in Hovey's Com. on John 3:13]; 8:58-"Before Abraham was born, I am here Jesus declares that there is a respect in which the idea of birth and beginning does not apply to him, but in which he can apply to himself the name "I am" of the eternal God; 14: 9, 10"Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?"

Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 24-49, gives the following instances of Jesus' supernatural knowledge: 1. Jesus' knowledge of Peter (John 1:42); 2. his finding of Philip (1:43); 3. his recognition of Nathanael (1:47-50); 4. of the woman of Samaria (4:17-19, 39); 5. miraculous draughts of fishes (Luke 5:6-9; John 21:6); 6. death of Lazarus (John 11:14); 7. of the ass's colt (Mat. 21:2); 8. of the upper room (Mark 14:15); 9. of Peter's denial (Mat. 26:34); 10. of the manner of his own death (John 12:33; 18: 32); 11. of the manner of Peter's death (John 21:19); 12. of the fall of Jerusalem (Mat. 24:2).

Jesus does not say our Father" but "my Father" (John 20:17). Rejection of him is a greater sin than rejection of the prophets, because he is the "beloved Son" of God (Luke 20:13). He knows God's purposes better than the angels, because he is the Son of God (Mark 13:32). As Son of God, he alone knows, and he alone can reveal, the Father (Mat.

11:27). There is clearly something more in his Sonship than in that of his disciples (John 1:14-"only begotten"; Heb. 1:5-"first begotten"). See Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 37; Denney, Studies in Theology, 33.

(b) Exercised divine powers and prerogatives.

John 2:24, 25-"But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all men, and because he needed not that any one should bear witness concerning man; for he himself knew what was in man"; 18: 4-"Jesus therefore, knowing all the things that were coming upon him, went forth"; Mark 4:39 - "he awoke, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm"; Mat. 9:6— "But that ye may know that the Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of the palsy ), Arise, and take up thy bed, and go unto thy house"; Mark 2:7-"Why doth this man thus speak? he blasphemeth: who can forgive sins but one, even God?"

It is not enough to keep, like Alexander Severus, a bust of Christ, in a private chapel, along with Virgil, Orpheus, Abraham, Apollonius, and other persons of the same kind; see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xvi. "Christ is all in all. The prince in the Arabian story took from a walnut-shell a miniature tent, but that tent expanded so as to cover, first himself, then his palace, then his army, and at last his whole kingdom. So Christ's being and authority expand, as we reflect upon them, until they take in, not only ourselves, our homes and our country, but the whole world of sinning and suffering men, and the whole universe of God"; see A. H. Strong, Address at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference, April 23, 1900.

Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 39-"What is that law which I call gravitation, but the sign of the Son of man in heaven? It is the gospel of self-surrender in nature. It is the inability of any world to be its own centre, the necessity of every world to center in something else.... In the firmament as on the earth, the many are made one by giving the one for the many." "Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter; Churches change, forms perish, systems go; But our human needs, they will not alter, Christ no after age will e'er outgrow. Yea, amen, O changeless One, thou only Art life's guide and spiritual goal; Thou the light across the dark vale lonely, Thou the eternal haven of the soul."

But this is to say, in other words, that there were, in Christ, a knowledge and a power such as belong only to God. The passages cited furnish a refutation of both the Ebionite denial of the reality, and the Arian denial of the integrity, of the divine nature in Christ.

Napoleon to Count Montholon (Bertrand's Memoirs): "I think I understand somewhat of human nature, and I tell you all these [ heroes of antiquity] were men, and I am a man; but not one is like him: Jesus Christ was more than man." See other testimonies in Schaff, Person of Christ. Even Spinoza, Tract. Theol.-Pol., cap. 1 (vol. 1:383), says that "Christ communed with God, mind to mind.... this spiritual closeness is unique" (Martineau, Types, 1:254), and Channing speaks of Christ as more than a human being, -as having exhibited a spotless purity which is the highest distinction of heaven. F. W. Robertson has called attention to the fact that the phrase "Son of man" (John 5:27; cf. Dan. 7:13) itself implies that Christ was more than man; it would have been an impertinence for him to have proclaimed himself Son of man, unless he had claimed to be something more; could not every human being call himself the same? When one takes this for his characteristic designation, as Jesus did, he implies that there is something strange in his being Son of man; that this is not his original condition and dignity; in other words, that he is also Son of God.

It corroborates the argument from Scripture, to find that Christian experience instinctively recognizes Christ's Godhead, and that Christian history shows a new conception of the dignity of childhood and of womanhood, of the sacredness of human life, and of the value of a human soul,- all arising from the belief that, in Christ, the Godhead honored buman nature by taking it into perpetual union with itself, by bearing its guilt and punishment, and by raising it up from the dishonors of the grave to the glory of heaven. We need both the humanity and the deity of Christ; the humanity, -for, as Michael Angelo's Last Judgment witnesses, the ages that neglect Christ's humanity must have some human advocate and Savior, and find a poor substitute for the ever-present Christ in Mariolatry, the invocation of the saints, and the 'real presence' of the wafer and the mass; the deity,- for, unless Christ is God, he cannot offer an infinite atonement for us, nor bring about a real union between our souls and the

Father. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:325-327 (Syst. Doct., 3:221-223)-" Mary and the saints took Christ's place as intercessors in heaven; transubstantiation furnished a present Christ on earth." It might almost be said that Mary was made a fourth person in the Godhead.

Harnack, Das Wesen des Christenthums: "It is no paradox, and neither is it rationalism, but the simple expression of the actual position as it lies before us in the gospels: Not the Son, but the Father alone, has a place in the gospel as Jesus proclaimed it "; i. e., Jesus has no place, authority, supremacy, in the gospel,- the gospel is a Christianity without Christ; see Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 48. And this in the face of Jesus' own words: "Come unto me" (Mat. 11:28); "the Son of man.... shall sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations" (Mat. 25:31, 32); "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9); "he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3:36). Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, advocates the nut-theory in distinction from the onion-theory of doctrine. Does the fourth gospel appear a second century production? What of it? There is an evolution of doctrine as to Christ. "Harnack does not conceive of Christianity as a seed, at first a plant in potentiality, then a real plant, identical from the beginning of its evolution to the final limit, and from the root to the summit of the stem. He conceives of it rather as a fruit ripe, or over ripe, that must be peeled to reach the incorruptible kernel, and he peels his fruit so thoroughly that little remains at the end." R. W. Gilder: "If Jesus is a man, And only a man, I say That of all mankind I will cleave to him, And will cleave alway. If Jesus Christ is a God, And the only God, I swear I will follow him through heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air."

On Christ manifested in Nature, see Jonathan Edwards, Observations on Trinity, ed. Smyth, 92-97-"He who, by his immediate influence, gives being every moment, and by his Spirit actuates the world, because he inclines to communicate himself and his excellencies, doth doubtless communicate his excellency to bodies, as far as there is any consent or analogy. And the beauty of face and sweet airs in men are not always the effect of the corresponding excellencies of the mind; yet the beauties of nature are really emanations or shadows of the excellencies of the Son of God. So that, when we are delighted with flowery meadows and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see his love and purity. So the green trees and fields, and singing of birds, are the emanations of his infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and vines are shadows of his beauty and loveliness. The crystal rivers and murmuring streams are the footsteps of his favor, grace and beauty. When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of his glory and goodness, and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things wherein we may behold his awful majesty: in the sun in his strength, in comets, in thunder, in the hovering thunder clouds, in ragged rocks and the brows of mountains. That beauteous light wherewith the world is filled in a clear day is a lively shadow of his spotless holiness, and happiness and delight in communicating himself. And doubtless this is a reason why Christ is compared so often to these things, and called by their names, as the Sun of Righteousness, the Morning Star, the Rose of Sharon, and Lily of the Valley, the apple tree among trees of the wood, a bundle of myrrh, a roe, or a young hart. By this we may discover the beauty of many of those metaphors and similes which to an unphilosophical person do seem so uncouth. In like manner, when we behold the beauty of man's body in its perfection, we still see like emanations of Christ's divine perfections, although they do not always flow from the mental excellencies of the person that has them. But we see the most proper image of the beauty of Christ when we see beauty in the human soul."

On the deity of Christ, see Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:262, 351; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 127, 207, 458; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:61-64; Hovey, God with Us, 17-23; Bengel on John 10:30. On the two natures of Christ, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 201-212.

III.

THE UNION OF THE TWO NATURES IN ONE PERSON. Distinctly as the Scriptures represent Jesus Christ to have been possessed of a divine nature and of a human nature, each unaltered in essence and undivested of its normal attributes and powers, they with equal distinctness

represent Jesus Christ as a single undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and inseparably united, so that he is properly, not God and man, but the God-man. The two natures are bound together, not by the moral tie of friendship, nor by the spiritual tie which links the believer to his Lord, but by a bond unique and inscrutable, which constitutes them one person with a single consciousness and will, this consciousness and will including within their possible range both the human nature and the divine.

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 79-81, would give up speaking of the union of God and man; for this, he says, involves the fallacy of two natures. He would speak rather of the manifestation of God in man. The ordinary Unitarian insists that Christ was “a mere man." As if there could be such a thing as mere man, exclusive of aught above him and beyond him, self-centered and self-moved. We can sympathize with Whiton's objection to the phrase “God and man,” because of its implication of an imperfect union. But we prefer the term "God-man" to the phrase "God in man," for the reason that this latter phrase might equally describe the union of Christ with every believer. Christ is "the only begotten," in a sense that every believer is not. Yet we can also sympathize with Dean Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:115-"Alas that a Church that has so divine a service should keep its long list of Articles! I am strengthened more than ever in my opinion that there is only needed, that there only should be, one, viz., 'I believe that Christ is both God and man.'"

1. Proof of this Union.

(a) Christ uniformly speaks of himself, and is spoken of, as a single person. There is no interchange of 'I' and 'thou' between the human and the divine natures, such as we find between the persons of the Trinity (John 17:23). Christ never uses the plural number in referring to himself, unless it be in John 3: 11-"we speak that we do know," and even here "we" is more probably used as inclusive of the disciples. 1 John 4:2 "is come in the flesh". is supplemented by John 1:14—"became flesh"; and these texts together assure us that Christ so came in human nature as to make that nature an element in his single personality.

John 17:23 "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me"; 3:11 "We speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness"; 1 John 4:2-"every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God"; John 1: 14-"And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us' he so came in human nature that human nature and himself formed, not two persons, but one person. In the Trinity, the Father is objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both to the Spirit. But Christ's divinity is never objective to his humanity, nor his humanity to his divinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 97-"He is not so much God and man, as God in, and through, and as man. He is one indivisible personality throughout. . . . . We are to study the divine in and through the human. By looking for the divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both." We mistake when we say that certain words of Jesus with regard to his ignorance of the day of the end (Mark 13:32) were spoken by his human nature, while certain other words with regard to his being in heaven at the same time that he was on earth (John 3:13) were spoken by his divine nature. There was never any separation of the human from the divine, or of the divine from the human, -all Christ's words were spoken, and all Christ's deeds were done, by the one person, the God-man. See Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 49-100.

(b) The attributes and powers of both natures are ascribed to the one Christ, and conversely the works and dignities of the one Christ are ascribed to either of the natures, in a way inexplicable, except upon the principle that these two natures are organically and indissolubly united in a single person (examples of the former usage are Rom. 1:2 and 1 Pet.