IvIBRARY 
 
 • . ,OF TliE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 Mrs; SARAH P. WALSWORTH. 
 
 Received October, 1894. 
 ^Accessions No.S%>$^3^ I , Class No, 
 

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THE 
 BAMPTON LECTUEES 
 
 rOE M.DCCaLXVI 
 
RIVINGTONS 
 
 ^ContJiin Waterloo Place 
 
 (J^xfortf High Street 
 
 C^ambritigc Trinitt Stbbbt 
 
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 EIGHT LECTUEES 
 
 PREACHED . BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 
 IN THE YEAR 1866, 
 
 On the foundation of the late Bev. John Bampton, M.A., 
 
 CANON OF SALISBURY. 
 
 BY HENEY PARKY LIDDON, M.A. 
 
 STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, 
 ATfD CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF SALISBURY. 
 
 |[tta |0rli 
 
 SCRIBNER, WELFORD, AND CO. 
 
 1869 
 

 * Wenu Cliristus niclit wahrer Gott ist \ die mahometanisclie 
 Religion eine unstreitige Verbesserung der christliclieii war, und 
 Mahomet selbst ein ungleich grossrer und wiirdigerer Mann 
 gewesen ist als Christus.' 
 
 Lessing, Sdmmtl. Bchriften^ Bd. g, p. 291. 
 
 *Simul quoque cum beatis videamus 
 Glorianter vultum Tuum, Cbriste Deus, 
 Gaudium quod est immensum atque probum, 
 Saecula per infinita sseculorum.' 
 
 Rhythm. JEJccL 
 
c^O^ 
 
 EXTEACT 
 
 FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT 
 
 OF THE LATE 
 •. \, 
 
 ■ <ik 
 
 REV. JOHN BAMPTON, 
 
 CANON OF SALISBURY. 
 
 " I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the 
 
 " Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford 
 " for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said Lands or 
 " Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes hereinafter 
 " mentioned ; that is to say, I will and appoint that the Vice- 
 " Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time being shall 
 " take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits thereof, and 
 " (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions made) 
 " that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight 
 " Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the 
 " said University, and to be performed in the manner following : 
 
 " I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter 
 " Term, a Lecturer may be yearly chosen by the Heads of Col- 
 " leges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to the 
 " Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the morning and 
 " two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture 
 " Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, between 
 " the commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the 
 " end of the third wfeek in Act Term. 
 
vi Extract from Canon Bamptons Will, 
 
 " Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture 
 " Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following 
 " Subjects — to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and 
 " to confute all heretics and schismatics — upon the divine 
 " authority of the holy Scriptures — upon the authority of the 
 " writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice 
 " of the primitive Church — upon the Divinity of our Lord and 
 " Saviour Jesus Christ — upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost — 
 " upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in 
 " the Apostles' and Nicene Creed. 
 
 " Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lec- 
 " ture Sermons shall be always printed, within two months after 
 " they are preached ; and one copy shall be given to the Chan- 
 " cellor of the University, and one copy to the Head of every 
 " College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city of Oxford, and 
 " one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library ; and the 
 " expense of printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of 
 " the Land or Estates given for establishing the Divinity Lecture 
 " Sermons ; and the Preacher shall not be paid, nor be entitled 
 " to the revenue, before they are printed. 
 
 " Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified 
 " to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken 
 " the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the two Uni- 
 " versities of Oxford or Cambridge ; and that the same person 
 " shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons twica" 
 
PKEFACE 
 
 TO THE FIEST EDITION. 
 
 Perhaps an apology may be due to the University for the 
 delay which has occurred in the appearance of this volume. If 
 so, the writer would venture to plead that he undertook the 
 duties of the Bampton Lecturer at a very short notice, and, it 
 may be, without sufficiently considering what they involved, 
 When, however, the accomplished Clergyman whom the Uni- 
 versity had chosen to lecture in the year 1866 was obliged by 
 a serious illness to seek a release from his engagement, the 
 vacant post was offered to the present writer with a kindness 
 and generosity which, as he thought, obliged him, although 
 entirely unprepared, to accept it and to meet its requirements as 
 well as he could. 
 
 Under such circumstances, the materials which were made 
 ready in some haste for use in the pulpit seemed to require 
 a close revision before publication. In making this revision — 
 which has been somewhat seriously interrupted by other duties 
 — the writer has not felt at liberty to introduce alterations 
 except in the way of phrase and illustration. He has, however, 
 availed himself of the customary licence to print at length some 
 considerable paragraphs, the sense of which, in order to save 
 time, was only summarily given when the lectures were 
 delivered. And he has subjoined the Greek text of the more 
 important passages of the New Testament to which he has had 
 occasion to refer ; as experience seems to prove that very many 
 
Preface to the First Edition. 
 
 readers do not verify quotations from Holy Scripture for them- 
 selves, or at least that they content themselves with examining 
 the few which are generally thought to be of most importance. 
 Whereas, the force of the argument for our Lord's Divinity, as 
 indeed is the case with other truths of the New Testament, is 
 eminently cumulative. Such an argument is to be appreciated^ 
 not by studying the comparatively few texts which expressly 
 assert the doctrine, but that large number of passages which 
 indirectly, but most vividly, imply it. 
 
 It is perhaps superfluous to observe that eight lectures can 
 deal with little beyond the outskirts of a vast, or to speak more 
 accurately, of an exhaustless subject. The present volume 
 attempts only to notice, more or less directly, some of those 
 assaults upon the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity which have 
 been prominent or popular of late years, and which have, 
 unhappily, had a certain weight among persons with whom the 
 writer is acquainted. 
 
 Whatever disturbing influence the modern destructive criti- 
 cism may have exerted upon the form of the old argument for 
 the Divinity of Christ, the main features of that argument 
 remain substantially unchanged. The writer will have deep 
 reason for thankfulness, if any of those whose inclination or 
 duty leads them to pursue the subject, should be guided by his 
 references to the pages of those great theologians whose names, 
 whether in our own country or in the wider field of Catholic 
 Christendom, are for ever associated with the vindication of this 
 most fundamental truth of the Faith. 
 
 In passing the sheets of this work through the press, 
 the writer has been more largely indebted than he can well 
 say to the invigorating sympathy and varied learning of the 
 Rev. W. Bright, Fellow of University College ; while the Index 
 is due to the friendly interest of another Fellow of that College, 
 the Rev. R G. Medd. 
 
 That in so wide and so mysterious a subject all errors have 
 been avoided, is much more than the writer dares to hope. 
 
Preface to the First Edition. ix 
 
 But at least he has not intentionally contravened the clear sense 
 of Holy Scripture, or any formal decision whether of the Undi- 
 vided Church or of the Church of England. May He to the 
 honour of Whose Person this volume is devoted, vouchsafe to 
 pardon in it all that is not calculated to promote His truth and 
 His glory 1 And for the rest, 'quisquis hsec legit, ubi pariter 
 certus est, pergat mecum ; ubi pariter hsesitat, quserat mecum \ 
 ubi errorem suum cognoscit, redeat ad me ; ubi meum, revocet 
 me. Ita ingrediamur simul charitatis viam, tendentes ad Eum 
 de Quo dictum est, Quserite Faciem Ejus semper a.* 
 
 Cheist Chdech, 
 
 Ascension Day, 1867. 
 
 ^ S. Aug. de Trin. i. 5. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 The kindly welcome given to this volume, both at home and 
 in America, has led to a demand for another edition, which has 
 taken the writer somewhat by surprise. He has, however, availed 
 himself of the opportunity to make what use he could of the cri- 
 ticisms which have come, from whatever quarter, under his notice. 
 Some textual errors have been corrected. Some ill-considered 
 or misunderstood expressions have been modified. References 
 to authorities and sources of information, which were accidentally 
 omitted, have been supplied. To a few of the notes there has 
 been added fresh matter, of an explanatory or justificatory cha- 
 racter. The index, too, has been remodelled and enlarged. But 
 the book remains, it is needless to say, substantially unchanged. 
 And if it is now offered to the public in a somewhat altered 
 guise, this has been done in order to meet the views of friends, 
 who have urged, not perhaps altogether without reason, that ' in 
 the Church of England, books on Divinity are so largely adapted 
 to the taste and means of the wealthier classes, as to imply that 
 the most interesting of all subjects can possess no attractions for 
 the intelligence and heart of persons who enjoy only a moderate 
 income.' 
 
 Of the topics discussed in this book, there is one which has 
 invited a larger share of attention than others, both from those 
 who share and from those who reject the Faith of the Church. 
 It is that central argument for our Saviour's Deity, which is 
 based on HiB persistent self-assertion, taken in conjunction with 
 
Preface to the Second Edition. 
 
 the sublimity of His Human character. The supreme importance 
 of this consideration is indeed obvious. Certainly, in the order 
 of historical treatment, the inferences which may be deduced 
 from Prophecy, and from Christ's supernatural design to found 
 the * Kingdom of Heaven,' naturally precede that which arises 
 from His language about Himself. But, in the order of the 
 formation of conviction, the latter argument must claim prece- 
 dence. It is, in truth, more fundamental. It is the heart of 
 the entire subject, from which a vital strength flows into the 
 accessory although important topics grouped around it. Apart 
 from Our Lord's personal claims, the language of prophecy would 
 have been only a record of unfulfilled anticipations, and the lofty 
 Christology of the Apostles only a sample of their misguided 
 enthusiasms; whereas the argument which appeals to Christ's 
 claims, taken in conjunction with His character, is independent 
 of the collateral arguments which in truth it supports. If the 
 argument from prophecy could be discredited, by assigning new 
 dates to the prophetical books, and by theories of a cultured 
 political foresight; if the faith of the Apostles could be accounted 
 for upon grounds which referred it to their individual peculiar- 
 ities of thought and temper ; there would still remain the unique 
 phenomenon of the sublimest of characters inseparably linked, in 
 the Person of Jesus, to the most energetic proclamation of self. 
 
 In this inmost shrine of Christian Truth, there are two courses 
 open to the negative criticism. It may endeavour to explain 
 away Our Lord's self-assertion in the interests, as it conceives, 
 of His Human Character. The impossibility of really doing 
 this has been insisted upon in these lectures. Por Christ's self- 
 assertion is not merely embodied in statements which would be 
 blasphemy in the mouth of a created being; it underlies and 
 explains His entire attitude towards His disciples, towards His 
 countrymen, towards the human race, towards the religion of 
 Israel. Nor is Christ's self-assertion confined to the records of 
 one Evangelist, or to a particular period in His ministry. The 
 three first Evangelists bear witness to it, in difi'erent terms, yet 
 
Preface to the Second Edition. xiii 
 
 not less significantly than does St. John \ and it belongs as truly, 
 though not perhaps so patently, to Our Lord's first great discourse 
 as to His last. From first to last He asserts, He insists upon 
 the acceptance of Himself. When this is acknowledged, a man 
 must either base such self-assertion on its one sufficient justifica- 
 tion, by accepting the Church's faith in the Deity of Christ \ or 
 he must regard it as fatal to the moral beauty of Christ's Human 
 character. — Christus, si non Deus, non bonus. 
 
 It is urged by persons whose opinions are entitled to great 
 respect that, however valid this argument may be, its religious 
 expediency must be open to serious question. And undoubtedly 
 such like arguments cannot at any time be put forward without 
 involving those who do so in grave responsibility. Of this the 
 writer, as he trusts, has not been unmindful. He has not used a 
 dangerous weapon gratuitously, nor, so far as he knows his own 
 motives, with any purpose so miserable as that of producing a 
 rhetorical effect. 
 
 What, then, are the religious circumstances which appear to 
 warrant the employment of such an argument at present ? 
 
 Speaking roughly, men's minds may be grouped into three 
 classes with reference to the vital question which is discussed in 
 these lectures. 
 
 I. There are those who, by God's mercy, have no doubt on 
 the subject of Our Lord's Godhead. To mere dialecticians their 
 case may appear to be one of sheer intellectual stagnation. But 
 the fact is, that they possess, or at least that they have altogether 
 within their reach, a far higher measure of real *life' than is 
 even suspected by their critics. They are not seeking truth ; 
 they are enjoying it. They are not like Alpine climbers still 
 making their way up the mountain side ; they have gained the 
 summit, and are gazing on the panorama which is spread around 
 and beneath them. It is even painful to them to think of ^ prov- 
 ing' a truth which is now the very life of their souls. In their 
 whole spiritual activity, in their prayers, in their regular medita- 
 tions, in their study of Holy Scripture, in their habitual thoughts 
 
Preface to the Second Edition, 
 
 respecting the eternal Future, they take Christ's Divinity for 
 granted ; and it never occurs to them to question a reality from 
 which they know themselves to be continually gaining new 
 streams of light and warmth and power. 
 
 To such as these, this book may or may not be of service. 
 To some Christians, who are filled with joy and peace in be- 
 lieving, a review of the grounds of any portion of their faith 
 may be even distressing. To others such a process may be 
 bracing and helpful. But in any case it should be observed 
 that the foot-notes contain passages from unbelieving writers, 
 which are necessary to shew that the statements of the text 
 are not aimed at imaginary phantoms, but which also are not 
 unlikely to shock and distress religious and believing minds, very 
 seriously. In such a matter to be forewarned is to be forearmed. 
 2. There are others, and, it is to be feared, a larger class than 
 is often supposed, who have made up their minds against the 
 claims of Divine Eevelation altogether. They may admit the 
 existence of a Supreme Being, in some shadowy sense, as an In- 
 finite Mind, or as a resistless Force. They may deny that there 
 is any satisfactory reason for holding that any such Being exists 
 at all. But whether they are Theists or Atheists, they resent the 
 idea of any interference from on high in this human world, and 
 accordingly they denounce the supernatural, on h priori grounds. 
 The trustworthiness of Scripture as an historical record is to 
 their minds sufficiently disproved by the undoubted fact, that its 
 claim to credit is staked upon the possibility of certain extra- 
 ordinary miracles. When that possibility is denied, Jesus Christ 
 must either be pronounced to be a charlatan, or a person of 
 whose real words and actions no trustworthy account has been 
 transmitted to us. 
 
 Whichever conclusion be accepted by those who belong to 
 the class in question, it is plain that this book cannot hope to 
 assist them. For it treats as certain, facts of which they deny 
 even the possibility. It must of necessity appear to them to 
 be guilty of a continuous petUio j)rincipii ; since they dispute its. 
 
Preface to the Second Edition, 
 
 fundamental premises. If any such should ever chance to ex- 
 amine it, they would probably see in it 'only another illustration 
 of the hopelessness of getting "orthodox" believers even to appre- 
 ciate the nature and range of the diflSculties which are felt by 
 liberal thinkers.' 
 
 It may be replied that something should have been done 
 towards meeting those particular ' difficulties.' But, in point of 
 fact, this would have been to choose another subject for the lec- 
 tures of 1866. A few lectures, after all, can only deal with some 
 aspects of a great Doctrine ; and every treatise on a question 
 of Divinity cannot be expected to begin ah ovo, and to discuss the 
 Existence and the Personality of God. However little may be 
 assumed, there will always be persons eager to complain of the 
 minimized ^assumption' as altogether unjustifiable; because there 
 are always persons who deny the most elementary Theistic truth. 
 This being the case, the practical question to be determined is 
 this : — How much is it advisable to take for granted in a given 
 condition of faith and opinion, with a view to dealing with the 
 doubts and difficulties of the largest number ? The existence and 
 personality of God, and the possibility and reality of the Chris- 
 tian Revelation, have been often discussed ; while the truth and 
 evidential force of miracles were defended in the year 1865 by a 
 Bampton Lecturer of distinguished ability. Under these circum- 
 stances, the present writer deliberately assumed , a great deal 
 which is denied in our day and country by many active minds, 
 with a view to meeting the case, as it appeared to him, of a 
 much larger number, who would not dispute his premises, but 
 who fail to see, or hesitate to acknowledge, the conclusion which 
 they really warrant. 
 
 3. For, in truth, the vast majority of our countrymen still 
 shrink with sincere dread from anything like an explicit rejec- 
 tion of Christianity. Yet no one who hears what goes on 
 in daily conversation, and who is moderately conversant with 
 the tone of some of the leading organs of public opinion, can 
 doubt the existence of a wide-spread unsettlement of religious 
 
xvi Preface to the Second Edition, 
 
 belief. People have a notion that the present is, in the hack- 
 neyed phrase, *a transitional period,' and that they ought to 
 be keeping pace with the general movement. Whither indeed 
 they are going, they probably cannot say, and have never very 
 seriously asked themselves. Their most definite impression is 
 that the age is turning its back on dogmas and creeds, and is 
 moving in a negative direction under the banner of ' freedom.' 
 They are, indeed, sometimes told by their guides that they are 
 hurrying forward to a chaos in which all existing beliefs, even 
 the fundamental axioms of morality, will be ultimately submerged. 
 Sometimes, too, they are encouraged to look hopefully forward 
 beyond the immediate foreground of conflict and confusion, 
 to an intellectual and moral Elysium, which will be reached 
 when Science has divested Keligion of all its superstitious incum- 
 brances, and in which thought' and * feeling,' after their long 
 misunderstanding, are to embrace under the supervision of a 
 philosophy higher than any which has yet been elaborated. 
 But these visions are seen only by a few, and they are not 
 easily popularized. The general tendency is to avoid specula- 
 tions, whether hopeful or discouraging, about the future, yet to 
 acquiesce in the theory so constantly suggested, that there 
 is some sort of necessary opposition between dogma and good- 
 ness, and to recognise the consequent duty of promoting good- 
 ness by the depreciation and destruction of dogma. Thus, the 
 movement, although negative in one sense, believes itself to be 
 eminently positive in another. With regard to dogma, it is 
 negative. But it sincerely affects a particular care for morality ; 
 and in purifying and enforcing moral truth, it endeavours to 
 make its positive character most distinctly apparent. 
 
 It is easy to understand the bearing of such a habit of mind 
 when placed face to face with the Person of Our Lord. It tends 
 to issue practically (although, in its earlier stages, not with 
 any very intelligent consciousness) in Socinianism. It regards 
 the great statements whereby Christ's Godhead is taught or 
 guarded in Scripture and the Creeds, if not with impatience 
 
Preface to the Second Edition, xvii 
 
 and contempt, at least with real although silent aversion. 
 Church formularies appear to it simply in the light of an 
 incubus upon true religious thought and feeling \ for it is in- 
 sensible to the preciousness of the truths which they guard. 
 Hence as its aims and action become more and more defined, 
 it tends with increasing decision to become Humanitarian. Its 
 dislike of the language of Nicsea hardens into an explicit denial 
 of the truth which that language guards. Yet, if it exults in 
 being unorthodox, and therefore is hostile to the Creed ; it 
 is ambitious to be pre-eminently moral, and therefore it lays 
 especial emphasis upon the beauty and perfection of Christ's 
 Human character. It aspires to analyse, to study, to imitate 
 that character in a degree which was, it thinks, impossible 
 during those ages of dogma which it professes to have closed. 
 It thus relieves its desire to be still loyal in some sense to Jesus 
 Christ, although under new conditions : if it discards ancient 
 formularies, it maintains that this rejection takes place only 
 and really in the interest of moral truth. 
 
 Now it is to such a general habit of mind that this book as a 
 whole, and the argument from Our Lord's self-assertion in par- 
 ticular, ventures to address itself. Believing that the cause of 
 dogma is none other than the cause of morality, — that the 
 perfect moral character of Jesus Christ is really compatible 
 only with the Nicene assertion of His absolute Divinity, — the 
 writer has endeavoured to say so. He has not been at pains to 
 disguise his earnest conviction, that the hopes and sympathies, 
 which have been raised in many sincerely religious minds by the 
 so-called Liberal-religious movement of our day, are destined 
 to a rude and bitter disappointment. However long the final 
 decision between 'some faith' and 'no faith' may be deferred, 
 it must be made at last. Already advanced rationalistic thought 
 agrees with Catholic believers in maintaining that Christ is not 
 altogether a good man, if He is not altogether Syiperhumiin^ ^^^ 
 And if this be so, surely it is prudent as well as honest to say^^ **> \\ 
 so. They who do not wish to break with Christ Our Xor<^ ■ ,7 
 
 6 
 
 d^ 
 
 Qh:: 
 
xviii Preface to the Second Edition, 
 
 and to cast out His very Name as evil, in the years to come, 
 will fee thankful to have recognised the real tendencies of an 
 anti-dogmatic teaching which for the moment may have won their 
 sympathies. It is of the last importance in religious thinking, 
 not less than in religious practice, that the question, Whither am 
 I going % should be asked and answered. Such a question is not 
 the less important because for the present all is smooth and 
 reassuring, combining the reality of religious change with the 
 avoidance of any violent shock to old convictions. It has been 
 said that there is a peculiar fascination in the movement of a 
 boat which is gliding softly and swiftly down the rapids above 
 Niagara. But a man must be strangely constituted to be 
 able, under such circumstances, so to abandon himself to the 
 sense of present satisfaction as to forget the fate which is 
 immediately before him. 
 
 The argument from Christ's character to His Divinity which 
 is here put forward can make no pretence to originality. To 
 the present writer, it was suggested in its entirety, some years 
 ago, upon a perusal of Mr. F. W. Newman's * Phases of Faith.' 
 The seventh chapter of that remarkable but saddening work 
 yielded the analysis which has been expanded in these lectures, 
 and which the lecturer had found, on more than one occasion, to 
 be serviceable in assisting Socinians to understand the real basis 
 of the Church's faith respecting the dignity of her Head. It 
 agrees, moreover, even in detail, with the work of the great 
 preacher of the Church of France, to whose earnestness and 
 genius the present writer has elsewhere professed himself to 
 be, and always must feel, sincerely indebted. 
 
 The real justification of such arguments lies in a fact which 
 liberal thinkers will not be slow to recognise a. If the moral 
 
 a Do we not however find a sanction for this class of arguments in appeals 
 such as the following ? St. John vii. 42 : 'If God were your Father, ye 
 would have loved Me.' St. John v. 38 : ' And ye have not His Word 
 abiding in you : for, whom He hath sent. Him ye believe not.' And is not 
 this summarized in the apostolical teaching ? I St. John ii. 23 : 'Whosoever 
 . denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.' Such passages appear to 
 
Preface to the Second Edition. xix 
 
 sense of man be impaired by the Fall, it is not so entirely dis- 
 abled as to be incapable of discerning moral beauty. If it may 
 err when it attempts to determine, on purely h jpriori human 
 grounds, what should be the conduct and dispensations of God 
 in dealing with His creatures, it is not therefore likely to be 
 in ^rror when it stands face to face with human sincerity, and 
 humility, and love. At the feet of the Christ of the Gospels, the 
 moral sense may be trusted to protest against an intellectual 
 aberration which condemns Him as vain and false and selfish, 
 only that it may rob Him of His aureole of Divinity. * In the 
 seventh chapter of the " Phases of Faith," ' I quote the words of 
 a thoughtful friend, * there is the satisfaction of feeling that one 
 has reached the very floor of Pandemonium, and that a rebound 
 has become almost inevitable. Anything is better than to be 
 sinking still, one knows not how deeply, into the abyss.' 
 
 It may be said that other alternatives have been put for- 
 ward, with a view to forcing orthodox members of the Church 
 of England into a position analogous to that in which the argu- 
 ment of these lectures might place a certain section of Lati- 
 tudinarian thinkers. For example, some Roman Catholic and 
 some sceptical writers unite in urging that either all orthodox 
 Christianity is false, or the exclusive claims of the Church of 
 Rome must be admitted to be valid. Every such alternative 
 must be considered honestly, and in view of the particular 
 evidence which can be produced in its support. But to pro- 
 pound the present alternative between Rome and unbelief, is 
 practically to forget that the acceptance of the dogmatic prin- 
 ciple, or of any principle, does not commit those who accept it 
 to its exaggerations or corruptions j and that the promises 
 of Our Lord to His people in regard alike to Unity and to 
 Holiness, are, in His mysterious providence, permitted to be 
 
 shew, that to press an inference, whether it be moral or doctrinal, from an 
 admitted truth, by insisting that the truth itself is virtually rejected if the 
 inference be declined, is not accurately described as a trick of modern 
 orthodoxy. 
 
 62 
 
XX Preface to the Second Edition. 
 
 traversed by the misuse of man's free-will. In a word, the 
 dilemma between Eoman Catholicism and infidelity is, as a 
 matter of fact, very far from being obviously exhaustive : 
 but it is difficult to see that any intermediate position can be 
 really made good between the denial of Christ's Human per- 
 fection and the admission that He is a Superhuman Person. 
 And when this admission is once fairly made, it leads by easy 
 and necessary steps to belief in His true Divinity. 
 
 The great question of our day is, whether Christ our Lord 
 is only the author and founder of a religion, of which another 
 Being, altogether separate from Him, namely, God, is the ob- 
 ject j or whether Jesus Christ Himself, true God and true Man, 
 is, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, the Object of Christian 
 faith and love as truly as, in history. He was the Founder of 
 Christendom. Come what may, the latter belief has been, is, 
 and will be to the end, the Faith of His Church. 
 
 May those who are tempted to exchange it for its modern 
 rival reflect that the choice before them does not lie between 
 a creed with one dogma more, and a creed with one dogma less, 
 nor yet between a mediaeval and a modern rendering of the 
 Gospel history. It is really a choice between a phantom and 
 a reality \ between the implied falsehood and the eternal truth 
 of Christianity ; between the interest which may cling to a dis- 
 credited and evanescent memory of the past, and the worship 
 of a living, ever-present, and immaculate Redeemer. 
 
 Christ Church, 
 
 Whitsuntide, 1868. 
 
ANALYSIS OF THE LECTURES. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE QUESTION BEFOEE US. 
 
 St. Matt. xvi. 13. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Question before us in these Lectures is proposed by 
 
 our Lord Himself, and is a strictly theological one . 3 
 
 Its import i. as affirming that Christ is the Son of Man 6 
 
 2. as enquiring what He is besides . . 9 
 
 I. Enduring interest of the question thus raised even for 
 
 non-believers 11 
 
 II. Three answers to it are possible — 
 
 1. The Humanitarian . , , , • '5 
 
 2. The Arian . . . . . . ,16 
 
 3. The Catholic 17 
 
 Of these the Arian is unsubstantial, so that prac- 
 tically there are only two . . . • 1 7 
 
 III. The Catholic Answer 
 
 1. jealousy guards the truth of Christ's Manhood 18 
 
 2. secures its full force to the idea of Godhead . 26 
 
 IV. Position taken in these Lectures stated • • •34 
 
 Objections to the necessary discussion — 
 
 a. From the ground of Historical ^stheticism . 34 
 j3. From the ground of ^Anti-doctrinal' Morality 37 
 7. From the ground of Subjective Pietism . .41 
 
 Anticipated course of the argument . . . • 42 
 
xxii A nalysis of the Lectures. 
 
 LECTUEE 11. 
 
 ANTICIPATIONS OF CHRIST's DIVINITY IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 Gal. iii. 8. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Principle of the Organic Unity of Scripture. — ^Its import- 
 ance in the argument . . . . . , -44 
 
 I. Foreshadowings — 
 
 a. Indications in the Old Testament of a Plurality 
 
 of Persons within the One Divine Essence . 48 
 
 /3. The Theophanies ; their import . . • 5 ^^ 
 7. The Divine ^Wisdom' 
 
 1. in the Hebrew Canon . . . -59 
 
 2. in the later Greek Sapiential Books . 6 1 
 
 3. In Philo Judaeus . . , , .62 
 
 Contrast between Philo and the New Testament . 68 
 
 Probable Providential purpose of Philo's speculations . 70 
 
 II. Predictions and Announcements — 
 
 Hope in a future, a moral necessity for men and nations 72 
 Secured to Israel in the doctrine of an expected 
 Messiah . . • . . . . . •75 
 
 Four stages observable in the Messianic doctrine — 
 
 a. From the Protevangelium to the death of Moses 7 8 
 jS. Age of David and Solomon . , . -79 
 
 y. From Isaiah to Malachi 
 
 S. After Malachi 
 
 Contrast between the original doctrine and the se- 
 cularized form of it . 
 
 83 
 90 
 
 91 
 93 
 
 Christ was rejected for appealing from the debased 
 
 to the original doctrine .... 
 
 Conclusion : The foregoing argument illustrated — 
 
 1. from the emphatic Monotheism of the Old 
 
 Testament . . . . . '93 
 
 2. from its full description of Christ's Manhood . 94 
 Christ's appeal to the Old Testament . . .96 
 
Analysis of the Lecture^, 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 OUR lord's work in the world a witness to his divinity. 
 St. Matt. xiii. 54-56. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Our Lord's Tlan' (caution as to the use of the ex- 
 
 pression) 98 
 
 Its substance — the formation of a world-wide spi- 
 ritual society, in the form of a kingdom . . 99 
 
 It is set forth in His Discourses and Parables • .100 
 
 Its two leading characteristics — 
 
 a. originality .105 
 
 ^. 'audacity' 113 
 
 II. Success of our Lord's 'Plan' — 
 
 1. The verdict of Church history . . .118 
 
 2. Objections from losses and difficulties, con- 
 
 sidered . . . . . . ,121 
 
 3. Internal empire of Christ over souls . . 124 
 
 4. External results of His work observable in 
 
 human society . . . . .130 
 
 III. How to account for the success of our Lord's 'Plan' — 
 
 1. Not by reference to the growth of other 
 
 Religions . . . . . ,132 
 
 2. Not by the 'causes' assigned by Gibbon . 135 
 
 3. Not by the hypothesis of a favourable crisis . 136 
 
 which ignores the hostility both of a. Judaism 137 
 
 and /3. Paganism 139 
 
 But only by the belief in, and truth of Christ's Divinity 145 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 OUR lord's divinity as witnessed by his consciousness. 
 St. John X. 33. 
 
 The 'Christ of history' none other than the 'Christ of 
 dogma' •«•••..•• 152 
 
xxiv Analysis of the Lectures, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A. The Miracles of the Gospel History — 
 
 Their bearing upon the question of Christ's Person . 153 
 Christ's Moral Perfection bound up with their reality 160 
 
 B. Our Lord's Self-assertion 161 
 
 I. First stage of His Teaching chiefly Ethical . .162 
 
 marked by a. silence as to any moral defect . .163 
 /3. intense authoritativeuess , • • 166 
 
 II. Second stage : increasing Self-assertion . . . 169 
 
 which is justified by dogmatic revelations of His 
 Divinity . . . . . . -177 
 
 a. in His claim of co-equality with the Father 179 
 iS. in His assertion that He is essentially one 
 
 with the Father 182 
 
 7. in His references to His actual Pre-exist- 
 ence . . . . . . .186 
 
 Ground of Christ's condemnation by the Jews . 190 
 
 III. Christ's Self-assertion viewed in its bearing upon 
 
 His Human Character : 
 
 His I. Sincerity 192 
 
 2. Unselfishness . • . . •194 
 
 3. Humility 195 
 
 all dependent upon the truth of His Divinity 195 
 
 The argument necessarily assumes the form of a 
 great alternative 203 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 THE DOCTEINE OF CHRIST's DIVINITY IN THE WRITINGS OF 
 ST. JOHN. 
 
 I St. John i. 1-3. 
 
 St. John's Gospel *the battle-field' of the New Testament 208 
 
 I. Ancient and modern objections to its claims . .208 
 Witness of the second century . . . .210 
 
 Its distinctive internal features may be explained 
 generally by its threefold purpose — 
 
 1. Supplementary . . . • • .219 
 
 2. Polemical . . . . . . .220 
 
 3. Dogmatic . 222 
 
Analysis of the Lechtres, xxv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 II. It is a Life of the Eternal Word made flesh. 
 
 Doctrine of the Eternal Word in the Prologue . .226 
 
 Manifestation of the Word, as possessing the Divine 
 Perfections 
 
 of I. Life 230 
 
 2. Love . . . . . . * • 230 
 
 3- Light 231 
 
 The Word identical with the only-begotten Son . . 233 
 
 III. It is in doctrinal and moral unison with — 
 
 1. The Epistles of St. John . . . •237 
 
 2. The Apocalypse 242 
 
 ly. Its Christology is in essential unison with that of the 
 Synoptists. Observe — 
 
 1. their use of the title ^ Son of God ' . .246 
 
 2. their account of Christ's Nativity • .247 
 
 3. their report of His Doctrine and Work, and 249 
 
 4. of His eschatological discourses . . -253 
 Summary ........ 254 
 
 V. It incurs the objection that a God-Man is philosophi- 
 
 cally incredible . . . . . . '255 
 
 This objection misapprehends the Scriptural and Ca- 
 tholic Doctrine . . . . . . .256 
 
 Mysteriousness of our composite nature illustrative of 
 
 the Incarnation . . . . . . .264 
 
 VI. St. John's writings oppose an insurmountable barrier 
 
 to the Theory of a Deification by Enthusiasm . 266 
 
 Significance of St. John's witness to the Divinity of 
 
 Christ . . . . . . . .272 
 
Analysts of the Lechtres, 
 
 LECTUEE VI. 
 
 OUR lord's divinity as taught by ST. JAMES, ST. PETER, 
 AND ST. PAUL. 
 
 Gal. ii. 9. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 St. John's Cliristology not an intellectual idiosyncrasy . 277 
 The Apostles present One Doctrine under various forms . 278 
 
 I. St. James's Epistle — 
 
 1. presupposes the Christology of St. Paul . 282 
 
 2. implies a high Christology by incidental ex- 
 
 pressions 287 
 
 II. St. Peter— 
 
 1. leads his hearers up to understand Christ's 
 
 true dignity, in his Missionary Sermons . 291 
 
 2. exhibits Christ's Godhead more fully, in his 
 
 Epistles ....... 294 
 
 III. St. Jude's Epistle implies that Christ is God • 301 
 
 IV. St. Paul— 
 
 1. form of his Christology compared with that 
 
 of St. John ...... 302 
 
 prominent place given by him to the truths 
 
 a. of our Lord's true Mediating Manhood 303 
 ^. of the Unity of the Divine Essence . 307 
 
 2. Passages from St. Paul asserting the Divinity 
 
 of Christ in terms . . . . .310 
 
 3. A Divine Christ implied in the general teaching 
 
 of St. Paul's Missionary Sermons . .324 
 of St. Paul's Epistles . . . .328 
 
 4. And in some leading features of that teach- 
 
 ing, as in 
 
 a. his doctrine of Faith . . • 339 
 
 i3. his account of Regeneration - . . 344 
 
 y. his attitude towards the Judaizers . 348 
 Y. Contrasts between the Apostles do but enhance the 
 
 force of their common faith in a Divine Christ . 350 
 
Analysis of the Lectures. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 THE HOMOOUSIOIS". 
 
 
 Tit. i. 9. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 353 
 
 357 
 358 
 
 Vitality of doctrines, how tested 
 
 Doctrine of Christ's Divinity strengthened by opposition . 
 Objections urged in modern times against the Homoousion 
 Eeal justification of the Homoousion — 
 
 I. The ante-Nicene Church adored Christ • • . . 359 
 
 Adoration of Jesus Christ 
 
 1. during His earthly Life . . .364 
 
 2. by the Church of the Apostles after His 
 
 Ascension . . . . '367 
 
 Characteristics of the Adoration of Christ in the 
 Apostolic Age — 
 
 a. It was not combined with any worship 
 
 of creatures ..... 376 
 0. It was really the worship due to God . 378 
 7. It was nevertheless addressed to Christ's 
 
 Manhood, as being united to His Deity 379 
 
 2. by the post- Apostolic Church, 
 
 in sub- Apostolic Age . . . -379 
 
 in later part of Second Century . .381 
 
 in Third Century . . . . -383 
 
 expressed in hymns and doxologies . -385 
 
 and signally at Holy Communion . '389 
 
 assailed by Pagan sarcasms . . -391 
 
 embodied in last words of martyrs . -398 
 
 inconsistently retained by Arians . .403 
 
 and even by early Socinians . . 404 
 
 II. The ante-Mcene Church spoke of Christ as Divine 405 
 
 Value of testimony of martyrs . . . .406 
 
 Similar testimony of theologians . . .411 
 
 Their language not mere * rhetoric ' . . •417 
 
 Objection from doubtful statements of some ante- 
 
 Nicenes . . , 418 
 
xxviii Analysis of the Lectures, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Answer : a. They had not grasped all the intellectual 
 
 bearings of the faith. . . .419 
 
 iS. They were anxious to put strongly for- 
 ward the Unity of God . . ,422 
 
 y. The Church's real mind not doubtful , 424 
 
 III. The Homoousion 
 
 a. not a development in the sense of an enlarge- 
 ment of the faith ..... 426 
 /3. necessary i. in the Arian struggle . . .434 
 2. in our own times . . .436 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE DOCTRINE OF OUR LORd's DIVINITY. 
 
 Rom. viii. 32. 
 Theology must be, within limits, ' inferential ' . . .441 
 What the doctrine of Christ's Divinity involves • •442 
 
 I. Conservative force of the doctrine — 
 
 1. It protects the Idea of God in human thought, 444 
 
 a. which Deism cannot guard . . • 444 
 
 ^. and which Pantheism destroys . .448 
 
 2. It secures the true dignity of Man . . .451 
 
 II. Illuminative force of the doctrine — 
 
 a. It implies Christ's Infallibility as a Teacher . 455 
 
 Objections from certain texts . . • 456 
 
 1. St. Luke ii. 52 considered . .456 
 
 2. St. Mark xiii. 32 considered . .458 
 
 A single limitation of knowledge in Christ's 
 Human Soul apparently indicated • -459 
 admitted by great Fathers . • .460 
 does not involve Agnoetism . • .462 
 nor Nestorianism . . . .463 
 
 is consistent with the practical immensity 
 
 of Christ's human knowledge . . 464 
 is distinct from, and does not imply fal- 
 libility, still less actual error . .4^7 
 Application to our Lord's sanction of the 
 Pentateuch 4^8 
 
Analysis of the Lecttcres. xxix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 jS. It explains the atoning virtue of Christ's Death 472 
 y. It explains the supernatural power of the 
 
 Sacraments 479 
 
 5. It irradiates the meaning of Christ's kingly 
 
 office . . • • • • '4^5 
 
 III. Ethical fruitfulness of the doctrine — 
 
 Objection — that a Divine Christ supplies no standard 
 
 for our imitation . . . . . .485 
 
 Answer — i. An approximate imitation of Christ 
 secured ........ 
 
 a. by the reality of His Manhood . 486 
 jS. by the grace which flows from Him 
 
 as God and Man . . . 4S7 
 2. Belief in Christ's Godhead has propa- 
 gated virtues, unattainable by pagan- 
 ism and naturalism — 
 
 a. Purity 488 
 
 ^. Humility . • • • •491 
 
 y. Charity 494 
 
 Kecapitulation of the argument . . . •497 
 Faith in a Divine Christ, the strength of the Church 
 under present dangers 498 
 
 Conclusion 499 
 
THE LECTUEES. 
 
LECTUEE I. 
 
 THE QUESTION BEFORE US. 
 
 When Jesus came into the coasts of Ccesarea Philippi, He asJced His 
 disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am ? And 
 they said, Some say that Thou art John the Baptist : some, Elias ; 
 and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, 
 But whom say ye that I am? — St. Matt. xvi. 13. 
 
 Thus did our Lord propose to His first followers the mo- 
 mentous question, which for eighteen centuries has riveted the 
 eye of thinking and adoring Christendom. The material set- 
 ting, if we may so term it, of a great intellectual or moral 
 event ever attracts the interest and lives in the memory of 
 men ; and the Evangelist is careful to note that the question 
 of our Lord was asked in the neighbourhood of Csesarea Phi- 
 lippi. Jesus Christ had reached the northernmost point of His 
 journey ings. He was close to the upper source of the Jordan, 
 and at the base of the majestic mountain which forms a natural 
 barrier to the Holy Land at its northern extremity. His 
 eye rested upon a scenery in the more immediate foreground, 
 which from its richness and variety has been compared by 
 travellers to the Italian Tivoli^. Yet there belonged to this 
 spot a higher interest than any which the beauty of merely 
 inanimate or irrational nature can furnish ; it bore visible 
 traces of the hopes, the errors, and the struggles of the human 
 soul. Around a grotto which Greek settlers had assigned 
 to the worship of the sylvan Pan, a Pagan settlement had 
 gradually formed itself. Herod the Great had adorned the 
 spot with a temple of Avhite marble, dedicated to his patron 
 Augustus ; and more recently, the rising city, enlarged and 
 beautified by Philip the tetrarch, had received a new name 
 
 a Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, p. 397. 
 
 [lect. i] B 
 
Where the question was raised. 
 
 which combined the memory of the Caesar Tiberius with that 
 of the local potentate. It is probable that our Lord at least 
 had the city in view^, even if He did not enter it. He was 
 standing on the geographical frontier of Judaism and Heathen- 
 dom. Paganism was visibly before Him in each of its two 
 most typical forms of perpetual and world-wide degradation. 
 It was burying its scant but not utterly lost idea of an Eternal 
 Power and Divinity ^ beneath a gross materialistic nature- 
 worship ; and it was prostituting the sanctities of the human 
 conscience to the lowest purposes of an unholy and tyrannical 
 statecraft. And behind and around our Lord was that peculiar 
 people, of whom, as concerning the flesh. He came Himself d, 
 and to which His first followers belonged. Israel too was 
 there ; alone in her memory of a past history such as no 
 other race could boast ; alone in her sense of a present de- 
 gradation, political and moral, such as no other people could 
 feel ; alone in her strong expectation of a Deliverance which 
 to men who were ^ aliens from ' her sacred ^ commonwealth ' 
 seemed but the most chimerical of delusions. On such a spot 
 does Jesus Christ raise the gi*eat question which is before 
 us in the text, and this, as we may surely believe, not without 
 a reference to the several wants and hopes and efforts of man- 
 kind thus visibly pictured around Him. How was the human 
 conscience to escape from that political violence and from 
 that degrading sensualism which had riveted the yoke of 
 Pagan superstition % How was Israel to learn the true drift 
 and purpose of her marvellous past % How was she to be really 
 relieved of her burden of social and moral misery ? How were 
 her high anticipations of a brighter future to be explained 
 and justified % And although that ' middle wall of partition,' 
 which so sharply divided off her inward and outward life from 
 that of Gentile humanity, had been built up for such high 
 and necessary ends' by her great inspired lawgiver, did not 
 such isolation also involve manifest counterbalancing risks 
 and loss % was it to be eternal ? could it, might it be '• broken 
 down ?' These questions could only be answered by some further 
 Eevelation, larger and clearer than that already possessed by 
 Israel, and absolutely new to Heathendom. They demanded 
 some nearer, fuller, more persuasive self -unveiling than any 
 
 ^ Dean Stanley surmises that the rock on which was placed the Temple 
 of Augustus may possibly have determined the form of our Lord's promise 
 to St. Peter in 8,t. Matt. xvi. i8. Sinai and Palestine, p. 399. 
 
 c Rom. i. 20. ^ Ibid. ix. 5. 
 
 r LECT. 
 
Religion mid TJieology. 
 
 which the Merciful and Almighty God had as yet vouchsafed 
 to His reasonable creatures. May not then the suggestive 
 scenery of Csesarea Philippi have been chosen by our Lord, 
 as well fitted to witness that solemn enquiry in the full answer 
 to which Jew and Gentile were alike to find a rich inheritance 
 of light, peace and freedom '? Jesus ^ asked His disciples, saying, 
 Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am T 
 
 Let us pause to mark the significance of the fact that our 
 Lord Himself proposes this consideration to His disciples 
 and to His Church. 
 
 It has been often maintained of late that the teaching of 
 Jesus Christ Himself differs ft-om that of His Apostles and 
 of their successors, in that He only taught religion, while 
 they have taught dogmatic theology e. 
 
 This statement appears to proceed upon a presumption that 
 religion and theology can be separated, not merely in idea 
 and for the moment, by some process of definition, but per- 
 manently and in the world of fact What then is religion? 
 If you say that religion is essentially thought whereby man 
 unites himself to the Eternal and Unchangeable Being ^, it 
 is at least plain that the object-matter of such a religious 
 activity as this is exactly identical with the object-matter 
 of theology. Nay more, it would seem to follow that a re- 
 ligious life is simply a life of theological speculation. If you 
 make religion to consist in Hhe knowledge of our practical 
 duties considered as God's commandments?,' your definition 
 irresistibly suggests God in His capacity of universal Legis- 
 lator, and it thus carries the earnestly and honestly religious 
 man into the heart of theology. If you protest that religion 
 
 e Baur more cautiously says : *Wenn wir mit der Lehre Jesu die Lehre 
 des Apostels Paulus zusammenhalten, so fallt sogleich der grosse Unter- 
 schied in die Augen, welcher hier stattfindet zwischen einer noch in der 
 Form eines allgemeinen Prijinciys sick aussprechenden Lehre, und einem 
 schon zur Bestimmtheit des Dogma's gestalteten Lehrbegriff.' Vorlesungen 
 Uber N. T. Theologie. p. 123. But it would be difficult to shew that the 
 * Universal Principle' does not involve and embody a number of definite 
 dogmas. Baur would not admit that St. John xiv., xv., xvi. contain worda 
 really spoken by Jesus Christ : but the Sermon on the Mount itself is 
 sufficiently dogmatic. Cf. St. Matt. vi. 4, 6, 14, 26, 30, vii. 21, 22. 
 
 f So Fichte, quoted by Klee, Dogmatik, c. 2. With this definition those 
 of Schelling and Hegel substantially concur. It is unnecessary to remark 
 that thought is only one element of true religion. 
 
 & So Kant, ibid. This definition (i) retluces religion to being merely 
 an affair of the understanding, and (2) identifies its substance with that 
 of morahty. 
 l] B 2 
 
Religion and Theology. 
 
 has nothing to do with intellectual skill in projecting defini- 
 tions, and that it is at bottom a feeling of tranquil dependence 
 upon some higher Power h, you cannot altogether set aside 
 the capital question which arises as to the nature of that 
 Power upon which religion thus depends. Even if you should 
 contend that feeling is the essential element in religion, still 
 you cannot seriously maintain that the reality of that to which 
 such feeling relates is altogether a matter of indifference^. 
 For the adequate satisfaction of this religious feeling lies not 
 in itself but in its object ; and therefore it is impossible to 
 represent religion as indifferent to the absolute truth of that 
 object, and in a purely sesthetical spirit, concerned only with 
 the beauty of the idea before it, even in a case where the 
 reflective understanding may have condemned that idea as 
 logically false. Eeligion, to support itself, must rest consciously 
 on its object : the intellectual apprehension of that object as 
 true is an integral element of religion. In other words, religion 
 is practically inseparable from theology. The religious Ma- 
 hommedan sees in Allah a being to whose absolute decrees he 
 must implicitly resign himself; a theological dogma then is 
 the basis of the specific Mahommedan form of religion. A child 
 reads in the Sermon on the Mount that our Heavenly Father 
 takes care of the sparrows, and of the lilies of the field J, 
 and the child prays to Him accordingly. The truth upon 
 which the child rests is the dogma of the Divine Providence, 
 which encourages trust, and warrants prayer, and lies at the 
 root of the child's religion. In short, religion cannot exist 
 without some view of its object, namely, God ; but no sooner 
 do you introduce any intellectual aspect whatever of God, 
 nay, the bare idea that such a Being exists, than you have 
 before you not merely a religion, but at least, in some sense, 
 a theology k. 
 
 ^ * Abhangigkeitsgefiihl.' Schleiermacher's account of religion has been 
 widely adopted in our own day and country. But (i) it ignores the active 
 side of true religion, (2) it loses sight of man's freedom no less than of 
 God's, and (3) it may imply nothing better than a passive submission to 
 the laws of the Universe, without any belief whatever as to their Author. 
 
 i Dorner gives an account of this extreme theory as maintained by De 
 Wette in his Religion und Theologie, 18 15. De Wette appears to have 
 followed out some hints of Herder's, while applying Jacobi's doctrine of 
 feeling, as *the immediate perception of the Divine,' and the substitute 
 for the practical reason, to theology. Cf. Dorner, Person Christi, Zw. Th. 
 p. 996, sqq. 
 
 i St. Matt. vi. 25-30. 
 
 ^ Religion includes in its complete idea the knowledge and the worship 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Place of Christ in His own doctrine. 5 
 
 Had our Lord revealed no one truth except the Parental 
 character of God, while at the same time He insisted upon 
 a certain morality and posture of the soul as proper to man's 
 reception of this revelation, He would have been the Author 
 of a theology as well as of a religion. In point of fact, besides 
 teaching various truths concerning God, which were unknown 
 before, or at most only guessed at, He did that which in a 
 merely human teacher of high purpose would have been morally 
 intolerable. He drew the eyes of men towards Himself. He 
 claimed to be something more than the Founder of a new 
 religious spirit, or than the authoritative promulgator of a 
 higher truth than men had yet known. He taught true religion 
 indeed as no man had yet taught it, but He bent the religious 
 spirit which He had summoned into life to do homage to 
 Himself, as being its lawful and adequate Object. He taught 
 the highest theology, but He also placed Himself at the very 
 centre of His doctrine, and He announced Himself as sharing 
 the very throne of that God Whom He so clearly unveiled. 
 If He was the organ and author of a new and final revelation, 
 He also claimed to be the very substance and material of His 
 own message ; His most startling revelation was Himself. 
 
 These are statements which will be justified, it is hoped, 
 hereafter 1; and, if some later portions of our subject are for 
 a moment anticipated, it is only that we may note the true and 
 extreme significance of our Lord's question in the text. But 
 let us also ask ourselves what would be the duty of a merely 
 human teacher of the highest moral aim, entrusted with a great 
 spiritual mission and lesson for the benefit of mankind] The 
 example of St. John Baptist is an answer to this enquiry. Such 
 a teacher would represent himself as a mere Woice' crying aloud 
 in the moral wilderness around him, and anxious, beyond aught 
 else, to shroud his own insignificant person beneath the majesty 
 of his message. Not to do this would be to proclaim his own 
 
 of God. (S. Aug. de Util. Cred. c. 12. n. 27.) Cicero gives the limited 
 sense which Pagan Rome attached to the word : * Qui omnia quse ad cultum 
 deorum pertinerent, diligenter retractarent et tanquam relegerent, sunt dicti 
 religiosi, ex relegendo.' (De Nat. Deorum, ii. 28.) Lactantius gives the 
 Christian form of the idea, whatever may be thought of his etymology : 
 * Vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo, et religati sumus, unde ipsa religio nomen 
 accepit.' (Inst. Div. iv. 24.) Religion is the bond between God and man's 
 whole nature : in God the heart finds its happiness, the reason its rule 
 of truth, the will its freedom. 
 1 See Lecture IV. 
 
 I] 
 
The 'Son of Man! 
 
 moral degradation ; it would be a public confession that he 
 could only regard a great spiritual work for others as furnishing 
 an opportunity for adding to his own social capital, or to his 
 official reputation. When then Jesus Christ so urgently draws 
 the attention of men to His Personal Self, He places us in a 
 dilemma. We must either say tliat He was unworthy of His 
 own words in the Sermon on the Mount i», or we must confess 
 that He has some right, and is under the pressure of some 
 necessity, to do that which would be morally insupportable in a 
 merely human teacher. Now if this right and necessity exist, 
 it follows that when our Lord bids us to consider His Personal 
 rank in the hierarchy of beings, He challenges an answer. 
 Eemark moreover that in the popular sense of the term the 
 answer is not less a theological answer if it be that of the 
 Ebionitic heresy than if it be the language of the Nicene Creed. 
 The Christology of the Church is in reality an integral part of 
 its theology ; and Jesus Christ raises the central question of 
 Christian theology when He asks, ' Whom do men say that I 
 the Son of Man am ]' 
 
 It may be urged that our Lord is inviting attention, not to 
 His essential Personality, but to His assumed office as the Jewish 
 Messiah ; that He is, in fact, asking for a confession of His 
 Messiahship. 
 
 Now observe the exact form of our Lord's question, as given 
 in St. Matthew's Gospel 3 which, as Olshausen has remarked, is 
 manifestly here the leading narrative : ' Whom do men say that 
 I the Son of Man am f This question involves an assertion, 
 namely, that the Speaker is the Son of Man. What did He 
 mean by that designation ? It is important to remember that 
 with two exceptions" the title is only applied to our Lord in 
 the New Testament by His own lips. It was His self-chosen 
 Name : why did He choose it ? 
 
 First, then, it was in itself, to Jewish ears, a clear assertion of 
 Messiahship. In the vision of Daniel ^ One like unto the Son of 
 
 Man o had come with the clouds of heaven, and there was 
 
 given Him dominion and glory and a kingdom.' This kingdom 
 succeeded in the prophet's vision to four inhuman kingdoms, 
 correspondent to the four typical beasts ; it was the kingdom of 
 a prince, human indeed, and yet from heaven. In consequence 
 
 ™ Observe the principle involved in St. Matt. vi. 1-8. 
 
 " Acts vii. 56 ; Rev. i. 13, xiv. 14. 
 
 o UJ:« "IID— ws vib% aj/6p(l!>nov, LXX. Dan. vii. 13, sqq. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The 'Son of Man! 
 
 of this prophecy, the * Son of Man' became a popular and 
 official title of the Messiah. In the Book of Enoch, which is 
 assigned with the highest probability by recent criticisin to the 
 second century before our eraP, this and kindred titles are 
 continually applied to Messiah. Our Lord in His prophecy over 
 Jerusalem predicted that at the last day * they shall see the Son 
 of Man coming in the clouds with power and great glory q.' 
 And when standing at the tribunal of Caiaphas He thus addressed 
 His judges : ^ I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see the Son of 
 Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming in the 
 clouds of heaven r/ In these passages there is absolutely no 
 room for doubting either His distinct reference to the vision in 
 Daniel, or the claim which the title Son of Man was intended to 
 assert. As habitually used by our Lord, it was a constant setting 
 forth of His Messianic dignity, in the face of the people of 
 Israel ». 
 
 Why indeed He chose this one, out of the many titles of 
 Messiah, is a further question, a brief consideration of which lies 
 in the track of the subject before us. 
 
 It would not appear to be sufficient to reply that the title 
 Son of Man is the most unpresuming, the least glorious of the 
 titles of Messiah, and was adopted by our Lord as such. For if 
 such a title claimed, as it did claim, Messiahship, the precise 
 etymological force of the word could not neutralize its current 
 and recognised value in the estimation of the Jewish people. 
 The claim thus advanced was independent of any analysis of the 
 exact sense of the title which asserted it. The title derived its 
 popular force from the office with which it was associated. To 
 adopt the title, however humble might be its strict and intrinsic 
 meaning, was to claim the great office to which in the minds 
 of men it was indissolubly attached. 
 
 P Cf. Dillmann, Das Buch Enoch, 1853, p. 157. Dillmann places tlie 
 book in the time of John Hyrcanus, b. c. 130-109, Dr. Pusey would 
 assign to it a still earlier date. Cf. Daniel the Prophet, p. 390, note 2, and 
 391, note 3. 1 St. Matt. xxiv. 30. r Ibid. xxvi. 64. 
 
 ■ * Den Namen des vCbs tov audpcvnou gebraucht Jesus Selbst auf eine so 
 eigenthiimliche Weise von Sich, dass man nur annehmen kann, Er habe mit 
 jenem Namen, wie man auch seine Bedeutung genauer bestimmen mag, irgend 
 eine Beziehung auf die Messiasidee ausdriicken wollen.' Baur, Das Christen- 
 thum, p. 37. Cf. also the same author's Vorlesungen liber Neutestamentliche 
 Theologie, p. 76, sqq. In St. Matt. x. 23, xiii. 37-4T, the official force of the 
 title is obvious. That it was a simple periphrasis for the personal pronoun, 
 without any reference to the office or Person of the Speaker, is inconsistent 
 with Acts vii. 56, and St. Matt.xvi. 13. 
 
The 'Son of Man' 
 
 As it had been addressed to the prophet Ezekiel*, the title 
 Son of Man seemed to contrast the frail and shortlived life of 
 men with the boundless strength and the eternal years of the 
 Infinite God. And as applied to Himself by Jesus, it doubtless 
 expresses a real Humanity, a perfect and penetrating community 
 of nature and feeling with the lot of human kind. Thus, when 
 our Lord says that authority was given Him to execute judg- 
 ment because He is the Son of Man, it is plain that the point 
 of the reason lies, not in His being Messiah, but in His being 
 Human. He displays a genuine Humanity which could deem 
 nothing human strange, and could be touched with a feeling of 
 the infirmities of the race which He was to judge". But the 
 title Son of Man means more than this in its application to our 
 Lord. It does not merely assert His real incorporation with 
 our kind ; it exalts Him indefinitely above us all as the repre- 
 sentative, the ideal, the pattern Man^. He is, in a special sense, 
 the Son of Mankind, the genuine off*spring of the race. His is 
 the Human Life which does justice to the idea of Humanity. 
 All human history tends to Him or radiates from Him. He is 
 the point in which humanity finds its unity ; as St. Irenseus 
 says. He 'recapitulates' itY. He closes the earlier history of 
 our race ; He inaugurates its future. Nothing local, transient, 
 individualizing, national, sectarian, dwarfs the proportions of 
 His world-embracing Character ; He rises above the parentage, 
 the blood, the narrow horizon which bounded, as it seemed, 
 His Human Life ; He is the Archetypal Man in Whose presence 
 distinctions of race, intervals of ages, types of civilization, 
 degrees of mental culture are as nothing. This sense of the 
 title seems to be implied in such passages as that in which 
 He contrasts ' the foxes which have holes, and the birds of the 
 air which have nests,' with *the Son of Man Who hath not 
 where to lay His Head^.' It is not the official Messiah, as 
 
 * m«-p i.e. * mortal.' (Cf. Gesen. in voc. Gi«.) It is so used eighty- 
 nine times in Ezekiel. Compare Num. xxiii. iq ; Job xxv. 6, xxxv. 8. In 
 this sense it occurs frequently in the plural. In Ps. viii. 4, 5 and Ixxx. 1 7 
 it refers, at least ultimately, to our Lord. 
 
 u St. John V. 27 ; Heb. iv. [5. 
 
 * * Urbild der Menscheit.* Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, p. 130, sqq. 
 Mr. Keble draws out the remedial force of the title as 'signifying that 
 Jesus was the very seed of the woman, the Second Adam promised to undo 
 what the first had done.' Eucharistical Adoration, pp. 31-33. 
 
 y Adv. Hser. III. 18. i. * Longam hominum expositionem in Se Ipso 
 recapitulavit, in compendio nobis salutem prsestans.' 
 « St. Matt. viii. 20 ; St. Luke ix. 58. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Real force of our Lord's question, 9 
 
 such ; but ^ the fairest among the children of men,' the natural 
 Prince and Leader, the very prime and flower of human kind. 
 Whose lot is thus harder than that of the lower creatures, and 
 in Whose humiliation humanity itself is humbled below the 
 level of its natural dignity. 
 
 As the Son of Man then, our Lord is the Messiah ; He is 
 a true member of our human race, and He is moreover its 
 Pattern and Eepresentative ; since He fulfils and exhausts that 
 moral Ideal to which man's highest and best aspirations have 
 ever pointed onward. Of these senses of the term the first 
 was the more popular and obvious ; the last would be discerned 
 as latent in it by the devout reflection of His servants. For the 
 disciples the term Son of Man implied first of all the Messiah- 
 ship of their Master, and next, though less prominently. His 
 true Humanity. When then our Lord enquires 'Whom do 
 men say that I the Son of Man am V He is not merely asking 
 whether men admit what the title Son of Man itself imports, 
 that is to say, the truth of His Humanity or the truth of His 
 Messiahship. The point of His question is this : — what is He 
 besides being the Son of Man"? As the Son of Man, He is 
 Messiah ; but what is the Personality which sustains the 
 Messianic office ? As the Son of Man, He is truly Human ; 
 but what is the Higher Nature with which this emphatic claim 
 to Humanity is in tacit, but manifest contrast*? What is He 
 in the seat and root of His Being? Is His Manhood a robe 
 which He has thrown around a Higher form of pre-existent 
 Life, or is it His all % Has He been in existence some thirty 
 years at most, or are the august proportions of His Life only 
 to be meted out by the days of eternity? 'Whom say men 
 that I the Son of Man am V 
 
 The disciples reply, that at that time, in the public opinion 
 of Galilee, our Lord was, at the least, a preternatural personage. 
 On this point there was, it would seem, a general consent. The 
 cry of a petty local envy which had been raised at Nazareth, 
 *Is not this the Carpenter's Son?' did not fairly represent the 
 matured or prevalent opinion of the people. The people did 
 not suppose that Jesus was in truth merely one of themselves, 
 only endued with larger powers and with a finer religious 
 instinct. They thought that His Personality reached back 
 somehow into the past of their own wonderful history. They 
 took Him for a saint of ancient days, who had been re-invested 
 with a bodily form. He was the great expected miracle-working 
 Elijah ; or He was the disappointed prophet who had followed 
 
 1] 
 
10 St, Peter s Confession. 
 
 His country to its grave at the Captivity; or He was the 
 recently- martyred preacher and ascetic John the Baptist; or 
 He was, at any rate, one of the order which for four 
 hundred years had been lost to Israel; He was one of the 
 Prophets. 
 
 Our Lord turns from these public misconceptions to the 
 judoment of that little Body which was already the nucleus 
 of His future Church : * But whom say ye that I am ? ' St. Peter 
 replies, in the name of the other disciples a, ' Thou art the Christ, 
 the Son of the Living God.' In marked contrast to the popular 
 hesitation which refused to recognise explicitly the justice of 
 the claim so plainly put forward by the assumption of the title 
 *Son of Man,' the Apostle confesses, ^Thou art the Christ.' 
 But St. Peter advances a step beyond this confession, and 
 replies to the original question of our Lord, when he adds * The 
 Son of the Living God.' In the first three Evangelists, as well 
 as in St. John, this solemn designation expresses something 
 more than a merely theocratic or ethical relationship to God b. 
 If St. Peter had meant that Christ was the Son of God solely 
 in virtue of His membership in the old Theocracy, or by reason 
 of His consummate moral glory ^^ the confession would have 
 
 * St. Chrysostom, in loc, calls St. Peter t^ arSixa. roSi/ aTroo-ToAcor, 6 
 navraxov dep/xSs. 
 
 *» See Lect. V. p. 246, sqq. 
 
 c The title of ' sons' is used in the Old Testament to express three 
 relations to God. (i) God has entered into the relation of Father to all 
 Israel (Deut. xxxii. 6 ; Isa. Ixiii. 16), whence he entitles Israel ' My son,* 
 *My firstborn' (Exod. iv. 22, 23), when claiming the people from Pharaoh; 
 and Ephraim, 'My dear son, a pleasant child' (Jer. xxxi. 20), as an earnest 
 of restoration to Divine favour. Thus the title is used as a motive to 
 obedience (Deut. xiv. i); or in reproach for ingratitude (Ibid, xxxii. 5; 
 Isa. i. 2, XXX. I, 9; Jer. in. 14) ; or especially of such as were God's sons, 
 not in name only, but in truth (Ps. Ixxiii. 15 ; Prov. xiv. 26; and perhaps 
 Isa. xliii. 6). (2) The title is applied once to judges in the Theocracy 
 (Ps. Ixxxii. 6), 'I have said. Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the 
 Most High.' Here the title refers to the name Elohim, given to the judges 
 as representing God in the Theocracy, and as judging in His Name and by 
 His Authority. Accordingly to go to them for judgment is spoken of as 
 going to Elohim (Deut. xvii. 9). (3) The exact phrase ' sons of God' is, with 
 perhaps one exception (Gen. vi. 2), used of superhuman beings, who until 
 the Incarnation were more nearly like God than were any of the family 
 of men (Job i. 6, ii. i, xxxviii. 7). The singular, 'My Son,' 'The Son,' 
 is used only in prophecy of the Messiah (Ps. ii. 7, 12 ; and Acts xiii. 33; 
 Heb. i. 5, V. 5), and in what is believed to have been a Divine manifestation, 
 very probably of God the Son (Dan. iii. 25). The line of David being the 
 line of the Messiah, culminating in the Messiah, as in David's One perfect 
 Son, it was said in a lower sense of each member of that line, but in its 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Modern interest in the subject. 1 1 
 
 involved nothing distinctive with respect to Jesus Christ, 
 nothing that was not in a measure true of every good Jew, and 
 that may not be truer far of every good Christian. If St. Peter 
 had intended only to repeat another and a practically equivalent 
 title of the Messiah, he would not have equalled the earlier 
 confession of a Nathanael^, or have surpassed the subsequent 
 admission of a Caiaphas®. If we are to construe his language 
 thus, it is altogether impossible to conceive why ^ flesh and 
 blood ' could not have ^ revealed ' to him so obvious and trivial 
 an inference from his previous knowledge, or why either the 
 Apostle or his confession should have been solemnly designated 
 as the selected Rock on which the Eedeemer would build His 
 imperishable Church. 
 
 Leaving however a fuller discussion of the interpretation of 
 this particular text, let us note that the question raised at 
 Coesarea Philippi is still the great question before the modern 
 world. Whom do men say now that Jesus, the Son of Man, is ] 
 
 I. No serious and thoughtful man can treat such a subject 
 with indifference. I merely do you justice, my brethren, when 
 I defy you to murmur that we are entering upon a merely 
 abstract discussion, which has nothing in common with modern 
 human interests, congenial as it may have been to those whom 
 some writers have learnt to describe as the professional word- 
 warriors of the fourth and fifth centuries. You would not be 
 guilty of including the question of our Lord's Divinity in your 
 catalogue of tolerahiles ineptice. There is that in the Form of 
 the Son of Man which prevails to command something more 
 than attention, even in an age so conspicuous for its boisterous 
 self-assertion as our own, and in intellectual atmospheres as far 
 as possible removed from the mind of His believing and adoring 
 Church. Never since He ascended to His Throne was He the 
 object of a more passionate adoration than now ; never did He 
 encounter the glare of a hatred more intense and more defiant : 
 and between these, the poles of a contemplation incessantly di- 
 rected upon His Person, there are shades and levels of thought and 
 feeling, many and graduated, here detracting from the highest 
 
 full sense only of Messiah, * I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to 
 Me a Son' (2 Sam. vii. 14; Heb. i. 5 ; Ps. Ixxxix. 27). The application 
 of the title to collective Israel in Hos. xi. i, is connected by St. Matthew 
 (ii. 15) with its deeper force as used of Israel's One true Heir and Repre- 
 sentative. Cf. Mill, Myth. Interp. p. 330. Compare too the mysterious 
 intimations of Prov. xxx. 4, Ecclus. li. 10, of a Divine Sonship internal to 
 the Being of God. ^ St. John i. 49. ^ gt. Matt. xxvi. 63. 
 
 1] 
 
1 2 Christ and modern culture, 
 
 expressions of faith, there shrinking from the most violent 
 extremities of blasphemy. A real indifference to the claims 
 of Jesus Christ upon the thoughts and hearts of men is scarcely 
 less condemned by some of the erroneous tendencies of our age 
 than by its characteristic excellences. An age which has a 
 genuine love of historical truth must needs fix its eye on that 
 august Personality which is to our European world, in point of 
 creative influence, what no other has been or can be. An age 
 which is distinguished by a keen aesthetic appreciation, if not by 
 any very earnest practical culture of moral beauty, cannot but be 
 enthusiastic when it has once caught sight of that incomparable 
 Life which is recorded in the Gospels. But also, an anti- 
 dogmatic age is nervously anxious to attack dogma in its central 
 stronghold, and to force the Human Character and Work of the 
 Saviour, though at the cost of whatever violence of critical mani- 
 pulation, to detach themselves from the great belief with which 
 they are indissolubly associated in the mind of Christendom. 
 And an age, so impatient of the supernatural as our own, is 
 irritated to the highest possible point of disguised irritability by 
 the spectacle of a Life which is supernatural throughout, which 
 positively bristles with the supernatural, which begins with 
 a supernatural birth, and ends in a supernatural ascent to 
 heaven, which is prolific of physical miracle, and of which the 
 moral wonders are more startling than the physical. Thus it is 
 that the interest of modern physical enquiries into the laws of 
 the Cosmos or into the origin of Man is immediately heightened 
 when these enquiries are suspected to have a bearing, however 
 indirect, upon Christ's Sacred Person. Thus your study of the 
 mental sciences, aye, and of philology, ministers whether it will 
 or no to His praise or His dishonour, and your ethical specula- 
 tions cannot complete themselves without raising the whole 
 question of His Authority. And such is Christ's place in 
 history, that a line of demarcation between its civil and its 
 ecclesiastical elements seems to be practically impossible ; your 
 ecclesiastical historians are prone to range over the annals of 
 the world, while your professors of secular history habitually 
 deal with the central problems and interests of theology. 
 
 If Christ could have been ignored, He would have been 
 ignored in Protestant Germany, when Christian Faith had been 
 eaten out of the heart of that country by the older Eationalism. 
 Yet scarcely any German * thinker' of note can be named who 
 has not projected what is termed a Christology. The Christ of 
 Kant is the Ideal of Moral Perfection, and as such, we are told, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christ and recent philosophy, 1 3 
 
 he is to be carefully distinguished from the historical Jesus, 
 since of this Ideal alone, and in a transcendental sense, can the 
 statements of the orthodox creed be predicated ^. The Christ 
 of Jacobi is a Keligious Ideal, and worship addressed to the 
 historical Jesus is denounced as sheer idolatry, unless beneath 
 the recorded manifestation the Ideal itself be discerned and 
 honoured ?. According to Fichte, on the contrary, the real 
 interest of philosophy in Jesus is historical and not metaphysical; 
 Jesus first possessed an insight into the absolute unity of the 
 being of man with that of God, and in revealing this insight He 
 communicated the highest knowledge which man can possess^. 
 Of the later Pantheistic philosophers, Schelling proclaims that 
 the Christian theology is hopelessly in error, when it teaches 
 that at a particular moment of time God became Incarnate, 
 since God is ^ external to' all time, and the Incarnation of God 
 is an eternal fact. But Schelling contends that the man Christ 
 Jesus is the highest point or effort of this eternal incarnation, 
 and the beginning of its real manifestation to men : * none before 
 Him after such a manner has revealed to man the Infinite i.' 
 And the Christ of Hegel is not the actual Incarnation of God in 
 Jesus of Nazareth, but the symbol of His incarnation in 
 ^ humanity at large J. Fundamentally differing, as do these con- 
 ceptions, in various ways, from the creed of the Church of 
 Christ, they nevertheless represent so many efforts of non- 
 
 f Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. Werke, Bd. x. 
 p. 73, esp. p. 142. 
 
 s Schrift von den Gottl. Dingen, p. 62, sqq. 
 
 *^ Anweisung zum seligen Leben Vorl. 6. Werke, Bd. v. p. 482. 
 
 * Vorlesungen iiber die methode des Akad. Studien. Werke, Bd. v. 
 p. 298, sqq. 
 
 J Rel, Phil. Bd. ii. p. 263. This idea is developed by Strauss. See his 
 Glaubenslehre, ii. 209, sqq. ; and Leben Jesu, Auf. 2, Bd. ii. p. 739, sqq. 
 ' Der Schliissel der ganzen Christologie ist, das als Subject der Pradikate, 
 welche die Kirche Christo beilegt, statt eines Individuums eine Idee, aber 
 eine reale, nicht Kantisch unwirkliche gesetzt wird. . . . Die JMenscheit ist die 
 Vereinigung der beiden Naturen, der Menschgewordene Gott .... Durch 
 den Glauben an diesen Christus, namentlich an Seinen Tod und seine 
 Auferstehung wird der Mensch vor Gott gerecht, d. h., durch die Belebung 
 der Idee der Menscheit in sich/ &c. Feuerbach has carried this forward into 
 pure materialism, and he openly scorns and denounces Christianity : Strauss 
 has more recently described Feuerbach as 'the man who put the dot upon 
 the i which we had found,' and he too insists upon the moral necessity of 
 rejecting Christianity; Lebens und Characterbild Marklins, pp. 124, 125, 
 sqq., quoted by Luthardt, Apolog. p. 301. Other disciples of Hegel, such 
 as Marheinecke, Rosenkranz, and Goschel, have endeavoured to give to their 
 master's teaching a more positive direction. 
 
 1] 
 
14 Christ and the negative criticism. 
 
 Christian thought to do such homage as is possible to its great 
 Object ; they are so many proofs of the interest which Jesus 
 Christ necessarily provokes in the modern world, even when it is 
 least disposed to own His true supremacy. 
 
 Nor is the direction which this interest has taken of late 
 years in the sphere of unbelieving theological criticism less 
 noteworthy in its bearings on our present subject. The earlier 
 Rationalism concerned itself chiefly with the Apostolical age. 
 It was occupied with a perpetual analysis and recombination 
 of the various influences which were supposed to have created 
 the Catholic Church and the orthodox creed. St. Paul was 
 the most prominent person in the long series of hypotheses 
 by which Rationalism professed to account for the existence 
 of Catholic Christianity. St. Paul was said to be the ^ author' 
 of that idea of a universal religion which was deemed to be 
 the most fundamental and creative element in the Christian 
 creed : St. Paul's was the vivid imagination which had throrwn 
 around the life and death of the Prophet of Nazareth a halo 
 of superhuman glory, and had fired an obscure Jewish sect 
 with the ambition of founding a spiritual empire able to 
 control and embrace the world. St, Paul, in short, was held 
 to be the real creator of Christianity; and our Lord was 
 thrown into the background, whether from a surviving instinct 
 of awe, or on the ground of His being relatively insignificant. 
 This studied silence of active critical speculation with respect 
 to Jesus Christ, might indeed have been the instinct of reve- 
 rence, but it was at least susceptible of a widely different 
 interpretation. 
 
 In our day this equivocal reserve is no longer possible. 
 The passion for reality, for fact, which is so characteristic 
 of the thought of recent years, has carried critical enquiry 
 backwards from the consciousness of the Apostle to that on 
 which it reposed. The interest of modern criticism centres 
 in Him Who is ever most prominently and uninterruptedly 
 present to the eye of faith. The popular controversies around 
 us tend more and more to merge in the one great question 
 respecting our Lord's Person : that question, it is felt, is 
 bound up with the very existence of Christianity. And a 
 discussion respecting Christ's Person obliges us to consider 
 the mode of His historical manifestation \ so that His Life 
 was probably never studied before by those who practically 
 or avowedly reject Him so eagerly as it is at this moment. 
 For Strauss He may be no more than a leading illustration 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Answers to Chris fs question, (i) the Edionitic, 15 
 
 of the applicability of the Hegelian philosophy to purposes 
 of historical analysis ; for Schenkel He may be a sacred im- 
 personation of the anti-hierarchical and democratic temper, 
 which aims at revolutionizing Germany. Ewald may see in 
 Him the altogether human source of the highest spiritual life 
 of humanity ; and Eenan, the semi -fabulous and somewhat 
 immoral hero of an oriental story, fashioned to the taste of 
 a modern Parisian public. And what if you yourselves are 
 even now eagerly reading an anonymous writer, of far nobler 
 aim and finer moral insight than these, who has endeavoured, 
 by a brilliant analysis of one side of Christ's moral action, to 
 represent Him as embodying and originating all that is best 
 and most hopeful in the spirit of modern philanthropy, but 
 who seems not indisposed to substitute for the creed of His 
 Church, only the impatient proclamation of His Eoman judge. 
 Aye, though you salute your Saviour in Pilate's words, Behold 
 the Man ! at least you cannot ignore Him ; you cannot resist 
 the moral and intellectual forces which converge in our day 
 with an ever-increasing intensity upon His Sacred Person ; 
 you cannot turn a deaf ear to the question which He asks 
 of His followers in each generation, and which He never asked 
 more solemnly than now : * Whom say men that I the Son 
 of Man am^r 
 
 II. Now all serious Theists, who believe that God is a 
 Personal Being essentially distinct from the work of His hands, 
 must make one of three answers, whether in terms or in 
 substance, to the question of the text. 
 
 I. The Ebionite of old, and the Socinian now, assert that 
 Jesus Christ is merely man, whether (as Faustus Socinus himself 
 teaches) supernaturally born of a Virgin 1, or (as modern 
 Rationalists generally maintain) in all respects subject to ordi- 
 nary natural laws ™, although of such remarkable moral 
 eminence, that He may, in the enthusiastic language of ethical 
 admiration, be said to be Divine. And when Sabellianisni 
 would escape fi'om the manifold self-contradictions of Patri- 
 passianism », it too becomes no less Humanitarian in its doctrine 
 as to the Person of our Lord, than Ebionitism itself. The 
 Monarchianism of Praxeas or of Noetus which denied the 
 
 ^ On recent ^Lives' of our Lord, see Appendix, Note A. ..---^ 
 
 * Chr. Rel. Brevissima Inst. i. 654: ' De Christi essentia ita statue v -ilium 
 
 esse hominem in virginis utero, et sic sine viri ope Divini SpiritfliS Vi . 
 
 conceptum.' pj? " '^ .^ 
 
 ™ Wegscheider, Instit. § 120, sqq. ^ Cf. Tertull. adv. Prax^ ^'2. -- " 
 
1 6 (2) The Avian Answer, 
 
 distinct Personality of Christ « while proclaiming His Divinity 
 in the highest terms, was practically coincident in its popular 
 result with the coarse assertions of Theodotus and Artemon p. 
 And in modern days, the phenomenon of practical Humani- 
 tarianism, disguised but not proscribed by very vehement pro- 
 testations apparently condemning it, is reproduced in the case of 
 such well-known writers as Schleiermacher or Ewald. They 
 use language at times which seems to do the utmost justice to 
 the truth of Christ's Divinity : they recognise in Him the perfect 
 Revelation of God, the true Head and Lord of human kind; but 
 they deny the existence of an immanent Trinity in the Godhead; 
 they recognise in God no pre-existent Personal Form as the 
 basis of His Self-Manifestation to man ; they are really Monar- 
 chianists in the sense of Praxeas ; and their keen appreciation of 
 the ethical glory of Christ's Person cannot save them from con- 
 sequences with which it is ultimately inconsistent, but which are 
 on other grounds logically too inevitable to be permanently 
 eluded Q. A Christ who is * the perfect Revelation of God,' yet 
 who ^is not personally God,' does not really differ from the 
 altogether human Christ of Socinus ; and the assertion of the 
 Personal Godhead of Christ can only escape from the profane 
 absurdities of Patripassianism, when it presupposes the eternal 
 and necessary existence in God of a Threefold Personality. 
 
 2. The Arian maintains that our Lord Jesus Christ existed 
 before His Incarnation, that by Him, as by an instrument, the 
 Supreme God made the worlds, and that, as being the most 
 ancient and the highest of created beings, He is to be wor- 
 shipped ; that, however, Christ had a beginning of existence 
 {apxr)v v7rap^€(os), that there was a time when He did not exist 
 (fjv 6y€ ovk rjv) ; that He has His subsistence from what once 
 was not (e^ OVK ovT(x)v ex^i rr)p {jroVrao-ti/ *"), and cannot therefore 
 
 ' Hsec perversitas, quae se exlstimat meram veritatem possidere, dum 
 unicum Deum non alias putat credendum quam si ipsum emidemque et 
 Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum dicat. Quasi non sic quoque unus 
 sit omnia, dum ex uno omnia, per suhstantice scilicet unitatem, et nihilomintis 
 custodiatur olKovofxias sacramentum, quae unitatem in trinitatem disponit, tres 
 dirigens, Patrem et Filium, et Spiritum Sanctum.' (Ibid.) 
 
 P Euseb. Hist, Eccl. v. 28 : ^piXhv Mpwirov yeveaduL rhv ^corrjpa. Tert. de 
 Praescr. Haer. c. 53. App. ; Theodoret, Haer. Fab. lib. ii. init. 
 
 1 Cf. Dorner, Pers. Christi, Band ii. p. 153. Schleiermacher, although 
 agreeing with Schelling and Hegel in denying an immanent Trinity in the 
 Godhead, did not (Dorner earnestly pleads) agree in the Pantheistic basis of 
 that denial. P. C. ii. p. 12 12. Compare Ewald, Geschichte Christus, p. 447, 
 quoted by Dorner. 
 
 *■ Socrates, i. 5. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
(s) Answer of the Catholic Church, 17 
 
 be called God in the sense in wliich that term is applied by 
 Theists to the Supreme Being «. 
 
 3. In contrast with these two leading forms of heresy stands 
 the faith, from the first and at this hour, of the whole Catholic 
 Church of Christ : * I believe in One Lord Jesus Christ, the 
 Only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of His Father before all 
 worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, 
 Begotten not made. Being of one substance with the Father ; 
 By Whom all things were made ; Who for us men and for our 
 salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the 
 Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made Man.' 
 
 Practically indeed these three answers may be still further 
 reduced to two, the first and the third ; for Arianism, no less than 
 Sabellianism, is really a form of the Humanitarian or naturalist 
 reply to the question. Arianism does indeed admit the exist- 
 ence of a pre-existent being who became incarnate in Jesus, but it 
 parts company with the Catholic belief, by asserting that this 
 being is himself a creature, and not of the very Substance of the 
 Supreme God. Thus Arianism is weighted with the intellectual 
 difficulties of a purely supernatural Christology, while yet it 
 forfeits all hold upon the Great Truth which to a Catholic 
 believer sustains and justifies the remainder of his creed. The 
 real question at issue is not merely whether Christ is only a 
 man ; it is whether or not He is only a created being. When 
 the question is thus stated, Arianism must really take its place 
 side by side with the most naked Deism ; while at the same time 
 it suggests, by its incarnation of a created Logos, the most dif- 
 ficult among the problems which meet a believer in the Hypo- 
 static Union of our Lord's Two Natures. In order to escape 
 from this position, it virtually teaches the existence of two Gods, 
 each of whom is an object of worship, one of whom has been 
 created by the Other ; One of whom might, if He willed, anni- 
 hilate the other *. Thus in Arianism reason and faith are equally 
 
 s C£ further Waterland, Defence of Some Queries, Works (ed. Van- 
 Mildert), vol. i. pp. 402, 403. 
 
 * Waterland, Works, vol. i. p. 78, note f. Bp. Van-Mildert quotes from 
 Mr. Charles Butler's Historical Account of Confessions of Faith, chap. x. 
 sect. 2, a remarkable report of Dr. Clarke's conference with Dr. Hawarden 
 in the presence of Queen Caroline. After Dr. Clarke had stated his system 
 at great length and in very guarded terms, Dr. Hawarden asked his permission 
 to put one simple question, and Dr. Clarke assented. 'Then,' said Dr. Ha- 
 warden, *I ask, Can God the Father annihilate the Son and the Holy Ghost? 
 Answer me Yes or No.' Dr. Clarke continued for some time in deep 
 thought, and then said, ' It was a question which he had never considered.* 
 I] c 
 
1 8 The three Answers are practically two. 
 
 disappointed : the largest demands are made upon faith, yet the 
 Arian Christ after all is but a fellow-creature ; and reason is 
 encouraged to assail the mysteries of the Catholic creed in 
 behalf of a theory which admits of being reduced to an irrational 
 absurdity. Arianism therefore is really at most a resting- 
 point for minds which are sinking from the Catholic creed 
 downwards to pure Humanitarianism ; or which are feeling their 
 way upwards from the depths of Ebionitism, or Socinianism, 
 towards the Church. This intermediate, transient, and essen- 
 tially unsubstantial character of the Arian position was indeed 
 made plain, in theory, by the vigorous analysis to which the 
 heresy was subjected on its first appearance by St. Athanasius", 
 and again in the last century, when, at its endeavour to make a 
 home for itself in the Church of England, in the person of 
 Dr. Samuel Clarke, it was crushed out, under God, mainly by 
 the genius and energy of the great Waterland. And history 
 has verified the anticipations of argument. Arianism at this 
 day has a very shadowy, if any real, existence ; and the Church 
 of Christ, holding in her hands the Creed of Nicaea, stands 
 face to face with sheer Humanitarianism, more or less disguised, 
 according to circumstances, by the thin varnish of an admiration 
 yielded to our Lord on aesthetic or ethical grounds. 
 
 III. At the risk of partial repetition, but for the sake of 
 clearness, let us here pause to make two observations respecting 
 that complete assertion of the Divinity of our Lord for which 
 His Church is responsible at the bar of human opinion. 
 
 I. The Catholic doctrine, then, of Christ's Divinity in no 
 degree interferes with or overshadows the complemental truth 
 of His perfect Manhood. It is perhaps natural that a greater 
 emphasis should be laid upon the higher truth which could 
 be apprehended only by faith than on the lower one which, 
 during the years of our Lord's earthly Life, was patent to 
 the senses of men. And Holy Scripture might antecedently 
 be supposed to take for granted the reality of Christ's Manhood, 
 on the -ground of there being no adequate occasion for full, 
 precise, and reiterated assertions of so obvious a fact. But 
 nothing is more remarkable in Scripture than its provision for 
 the moral and intellectual needs of ages far removed from 
 those which are traversed by the books included in the Sacred 
 
 On the * precarious'' existence of God the Son, according to the Arian 
 hypothesis, see Waterland's Farther Vindication of Christ's Divinity, eh. iii. 
 sect. 19. ^ See Lect. VII. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Reality of oitr Lord's Humanity. 19 
 
 Canon. In the present instance, by a series of incidental 
 although most significant statements, the Gospels guard us 
 with nothing less than an exhaustive precaution against the 
 fictions of a Docetic or of an Apollinarian Christ. We are 
 told that the Eternal Word uap^ iyevero ^, that He took human 
 nature upon Him in its reality and completeness 7. The Gospel 
 narrative, after the pattern of His own words in the text, 
 exhibits Jesus as the Son of Man, while yet it draws us on 
 by an irresistible attraction to contemplate that Higher Nature 
 which was the seat of His eternal Personality. The superhuman 
 character of some most important details of the Gospel history 
 does not disturb the broad scope of that history as being 
 the record of a Human Life, with Its physical and mental 
 aflftnities to our own daily experience. 
 
 The great Subject of the Gospel narratives has a true human 
 Body. He is conceived in the womb of a human Mother^. He 
 is by her brought forth into the world ^j He is fed at her 
 breast during infancy b. As an Infant, He is made to undergo 
 the painful rite of circumcision c. He is a Babe in swaddling- 
 clothes lying in a manger d. He is nursed in the arms of 
 the aged Simeon 6. His bodily growth is traced up to His 
 attaining the age of twelve^, and from that point to manhood &. 
 His presence at the marriage-feast in Cana^^ at the great 
 entertainment in the house of Levi \ and at the table of Simon 
 the Pharisee k; the supper which He shared at Bethany with 
 the friend whom He had raised from the grave \ the Paschal 
 festival which He desired so earnestly to eat before He suf- 
 
 X St. John i. 14. Cf. Meyer in loc. for a refutation of Zeller's attempt 
 to limit (rapl in this passage to the bodily organism, as exclusive of the 
 anima rationalis. 
 
 y St. John viii. 40 ; 1 Tim. ii. 5. 
 
 z crvW'fjrpr) iv yaarpl, St. Luke i. 31. Trp^ rod (rvKK7](pQrivai ahrhv 4y 
 ry KoiXia^ Ibid. ii. 21. evpeOri 4v ya(rTpi exovcra ck Uvev/xaros 'Ayiovy 
 St. Matt. i. 18. rh yap 4i/ aury yivv7]Q\v e/c livev^ards iffTiv 'Ayiov, Ibid, 
 i. 20 ; Isa. vii. 14. 
 
 a St. Matt. i. 25 ; St. Luke ii. 7, 11 ; Gal. iv. 4: ilatricrr^tXev 6 ©eby 
 rhv Tlov avTov, yevd/xcvou 4k yvvaiKds. 
 
 b St. Luke xi. 27 : pAaroi ovs iQ'i)Ka(ras. ^ Ibid. ii. 21. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 12 : Bp€(pos iairapyavwfxevov, K^ifi^vov iv tyj <p(XTvr). 
 
 ® Ibid. ii. 28: KoX avrhs e5e|aT0 aurh ets ras ayKoiKas avTOv, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 40 : rh Se Traidiop riv^ave. 
 
 & Ibid. ii. 52 : 'Irjaovs Trpoe/coTrre . . . TjXiKia. 
 
 ^ St. John ii. 2. 
 
 * St. Luke. V. 29 : 8oxV /ueyaAr;^ 
 
 k St. Luke vii. ^6. ^ St. John xii. 2. 
 
 l] C 2 
 
20 Witness of Scrip here to Chris fs Human Body, 
 
 fered^i, the bread and fish of which He partook before the 
 eyes of His disciples in the early dawn on the shore of the 
 Lake of Galilee, even after His Eesurrection », — are witnesses 
 that He came, like one of ourselves, * eating and drinking «.' 
 When He is recorded to have taken no food during the forty 
 days of the Temptation, this implies the contrast presented 
 by His ordinary habit p. Indeed, He seemed to the men of 
 His day much more dependent on the physical supports of 
 life than the great ascetic who had preceded Him^. He 
 knew, by experience, what are the pangs of hunger, after the 
 forty days' fast in the wilderness^, and in a lesser degree, 
 as may be supposed, when walking into Jerusalem on the 
 Monday before His Passions. The profound spiritual sense 
 of His redemptive cry, * I thirst,' uttered while He was hanging 
 on the Cross, is not obscured, when its primary literal meaning, 
 that while dying He actually endured that weilnigh sharpest 
 form of bodily suffering, is explicitly recognised *. His deep 
 sleep on the Sea of Galilee in a little bark which the waves 
 threatened momentarily to engulf *i, and His sitting down at 
 the well of Jacob, through great exhaustion produced by a 
 long journey on foot from Judaea x, proved that He was subject 
 at times to the depression of extreme fatigue. And, not to 
 dwell at length upon those particular references to the several 
 parts of His bodily frame which occur in Holy Scripture y, 
 it is obvious to note that the evangelical account of His 
 physical Sufferings, of His Death z, of His Burial a, and of 
 the Wounds in His Hands and Feet and Side after His Eesur- 
 
 ™ St Luke xxii. 8, 15. ^ St. John xxi. 12, 13. 
 
 ° St. Luke vii. 34 : e\7}\v9€V 6 Tlhs rod avQpdoirov iardicov koI irivcav, 
 
 P Ibid. iv. 2 : ovk ((payev ovSep ij/ rais rifxcpaLS iKeivais. 
 
 ^ Ibid. vii. 34: IBov, ^.vdpMiros <pdyos Kal olpoirorrjs* 
 
 ^ St. Matt. iv. 2 : vcmpov iTreivaa-e. 
 
 * Ibid. xxi. 18 : iiravdy(DV els r^v iroMVt €7retVa(re. 
 
 * St. John xix, 28 : 5zT|/aj. 
 
 " St. Matt. viii. 24 : avThs Se e/ca^evSe. 
 
 ^ St. John iv. 6 : d ovv 'Irjaovs KeKomaKcos Ik ttjs oBoiiropias iKade^ero ovrcos 
 €irt rrj trrjyij. 
 
 y r^v K€<pcLK^v, St. Luke vii. 46 ; St. Matt, xxvii. 29, 30; St. John xix. 
 30; Tovs Tr6ha.s, St. Luke vii. 38 ; ras X^^P"-^) ^^' Luke xxiv. 40 ; rep daK- 
 TvK(ff St. John viii. 6 ; Ta (TKeK-r], St. John xix. 33 ; ra y6vaTa, St. Luke 
 xxii. 41 ; T^v irXevpau, St. John xix. 34 ; rh aufia, St. Luke xxii. ig, &c. 
 
 ^ St. Luke xxii. 44, &c, xxiii. ; St. Matt, xxvi., xxvii. ; St. Mark xiv. 32, 
 seq., XV. 
 
 * St. John xix. 39, 40 : e\a^ov oZu rh (Tufia rod *lr](rov Koi ebrjtrav avrh 
 odoviois fiera twv apwixdroov : cf. ver. 42. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Witness of Scripture to Christ's Hmnan Soul. 2 1 
 
 rection^, are so many emphatic attestations to the fact of 
 His true and full participation in the material side of our 
 common nature. 
 
 Equally explicit and vivid is the witness which Scrij)ture 
 affords to the true Human Soul of our Blessed Lord ^. Its 
 general movements are not less spontaneous, nor do Its affections 
 flow less freely, because no sinful impulse finds a place in It, and 
 each pulse of Its moral and mental Life is in conscious harmony 
 with, and subjection to, an all-holy Will. Jesus rejoices in spirit 
 on hearing of the spread of the kingdom of heaven among the 
 simple and the poor ^ : He beholds the young ruler, and forth- 
 with loves him ^. He loves Martha and her sister and Lazarus 
 with a common, yet, as seems to be implied, with a discriminating 
 affection ^. His Eye on one occasion betrays a sudden movement 
 of deliberate anger at the hardness of heart which could steel 
 itself against truth by maintaining a dogged silence?^. The 
 scattered and fainting multitude melts Him to compassion ^ : 
 He sheds tears of sorrow at the grave of Lazarus i, and at the 
 sight of the city which has rejected His Love^. In contem- 
 plating His approaching Passion l and the ingratitude of the 
 traitor-Apostle ™, His Soul is shaken by a vehement agitation 
 which He does not conceal from His disciples. In the garden 
 of Gethsemane He wills to enter into an agony of amazement 
 and dejection. His mental sufferings are so keen and piercing 
 that His tender frame gives way beneath the trial, and He sheds 
 
 ^ St. John XX. 27; St. Luke xxiv. 39 : ^ere ras x^^P^^ Mov koI robs 
 »r65as fiov, on avTos iyu et/xf ^r]\a<f)r}(Tar4 fie Kal IfSere* Sri irvevixa adpKa 
 KoX oarea ovk ex^i Kad^s ifie deoopeTre exovra. 
 
 *' I St. Pet. iii. 18: OavaTwdeU fieu ffapKi, QaoiroifiOeis Se 7r»/€i5/xaTi eV w 
 KoiX Tols 61/ (pvKaK^ irvevfiacriv iropivdets iKr]pv^€v. The rep before irpeviu.ari in 
 the Textus Receptus being only an insertion by a copyist, irvevixa here means 
 our Lord's Human Soul. No other passage in the New Testament places It 
 in more vivid contrast with His Body. 
 
 ^ St. Luke X. 21: r}ya\\id(TaTo rep Trvev/xaTi. 
 
 6 St. Mark x. 21: 6 5e 'Irjaovs ijx^\4\l/as ahrtp TjydTrrjcrev olvtSv. 
 
 ^ St. John xi. 5. 
 
 8 St. Mark iii. 5 : Trepi^Xerpd/xeyos avrovs ficr opyrjs, (rvXKvnovfjuvos iin rij 
 TTwpwo-ei Trjs /capSms avrSov. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. ix. 36: 4 (TTrXay XJ^'^o'Gri irepl avroov. 
 
 ' St. John. xi. 33-35: ^l7](Tovs ovv ws eldei/ avrrju KXaiovcrav kcu tovs (Tvv^XQovras 
 avrfj 'lovdaiovs KXaiovras^ ive^pi/xija-aTO r^ irveviiaTi^ Kal irdpa^eu eavrou. . . , 
 'EdaKpvaev 6 ^lyjaovs. 
 
 k St. Luke xix. 41: 'Idcbv rriv irSXiv, eKXavaev kit avT-f}. 
 
 ^ St. John xii. 27: vvv rj ^vxv P-ov rerdpaKrai. 
 
 ^ Ibid. xiii. 21:6 ^Itjctovs eTapdxOv to; irvevixari /cat 4fjLapTvp7](T€. 
 
2 2 Reality of Chris fs Manhood not 
 
 His Blood before they nail Him to the Cross '^. His Human 
 Will consciously submits itself to a Higher Will % and He learns 
 obedience by the discipline of pain P. He carries His dependence 
 still further, He is habitually subject to His parents q; He recog- 
 nises the fiscal regulations of a pagan state ^ ; He places Himself 
 in the hands of His enemies « ; He is crucified through weak- 
 ness *. If an Apostle teaches that all the treasures of wisdom 
 and knowledge are hidden in Him ^^ an Evangelist records that 
 He increases in wisdom as He increases in stature ^. Conform- 
 ably with these representations, we find Him as Man expressing 
 creaturely dependence upon God by prayer. He rises up a 
 great while before day at Capernaum, and departs into a solitary 
 place, that He may pass the hours in uninterrupted devotion y. 
 He offers to Heaven strong crying with tears in Gethsemane ^ ; 
 He intercedes majestically for His whole redeemed Church in 
 the Paschal supper-room a ; He asks pardon for His Jewish and 
 Gentile murderers at the very moment of His Crucifixion ^ ; He 
 resigns His departing Spirit into His Father's Hands ^. 
 
 Thus, as one Apostle teaches, He took a Body of Flesh ^, and 
 His whole Humanity both of Soul and Body shared in the sin- 
 less infirmities which belong to our common nature ®. To deny 
 this fundamental truth, ' that Jesus Christ is come in the Flesh,' 
 
 ° St. Mark xiv. 33: ijp^aro iKdaix^ilaBai kou a8r)jxovf:'LV, kolL \4yei avrols, 
 ^Yl€pi\vTT6s €(TTiv 7} ^vx^ M-Ov €cas davdrov.^ St. Luke xxii. 44: yeuSfievos iv 
 aycovia iKTCuio-repop TrpocTjuxero, iy^vero Se b tdpcas avTOv docrei dpS/x^oi a'l- 
 fxaros Kara&aivovTcs iirl r^v yW' Cf. Heb. V. ^ . 
 
 o St. Luke xxii. 42 : /u^ to deXriiuLd julov, aWa rh ahv yeviaQca, 
 
 P Heb. V. 8 : efxadeu a0' wv enaOe r)]v urraKo-qu. 
 
 <i St. Luke ii. 51: ^v vTroTaacrdixevos avrois. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. xxii. 21. For our Lord's payment of the Temple tribute, cf. 
 Ibid. xvii. 25, 27. 
 
 8 Ibid. xvii. 22; St. John x. t8: ouSez? aip^i avTT^v [sc. tV ^^xh^ /^of] 
 ctTr' iixov, dAA.' ^yiSo rldrjjULi avr^u air* ejuavrov. 
 
 * 2 Cor. xiii. 4 : icrravpcaQy] h^ aaOeveias. 
 
 " Col. ii. 3: ei/ w eiVi Trdvr^s ot Orjffavpol rrjs (Tocpias kol Trjs yvdxT^cos aTrSfcpvcfyoi. 
 "^ St. Luke ii. 40 : iKpuTaiovro irpevfiaTi. ver. 52. irpoiKoirre ffocpia. See 
 Lect. VIIL y St. Mark i. 35. 
 
 * Heb. V. 7: iu Tous 7]/i4pa(s ttjs (rapKhs avrov, ^ei^aeis re /cat tKerrjpias .... 
 fxera Kpavyrjs laxvpas kol BaKpvwv irpocreveyKaS' 
 
 * St. John xvii, i : eV^pe rovs 6(p6aAiuLov5 avrov els rhv ovpavhv, Koi eiire. 
 
 ^ St. Luke xxiii. 34: irdrep, a(p^s avrois' ov yap oXdaai ri ttoiovcti. That 
 this prayer referred to the Jews, as w^ell as the Roman soldiers, is clear from 
 Acts iii. 17. <' St. Luke xxiii. 46. 
 
 * Col. 1. 22 : (rdo/xari ttjs (rapK6s. 
 
 ® Heb. ii. 11: o re yap ayta^toi/ Ka\ 01 ayiaCofievoi e| hhs irdvrcs. Ver. I4: 
 /jl€t4(tx^ (TapKos Ka\ a't/uaros. Ver. 17: (otpeiXe Kara ndvra ro7s ade\(pois dfjLoioO' 
 Orjvai. Ibid. iv. 15 : TreTreipaa-fxcvou 5h /card iravra Kd$' o/jLoiSTTjra. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
forfeited by Its prerogative graces. 23 
 
 is, in the judgment of another Apostle, the mark of the Deceiver, 
 of the Antichrist A Nor do the prerogatives of our Lord's 
 Manhood destroy Its perfection and reality, although they do 
 undoubtedly invest It with a robe of mystery, which Faith must 
 acknowledge, but which she cannot hope to penetrate. Christ's 
 Manhood is not unreal because It is impersonal ; because in Him 
 the place of any created individuality at the root of thought and 
 feeling and will is supplied by the Person of the Eternal Word, 
 Who has wrapped around His Being a created Nature through 
 which, in its unmutilated perfection. He acts upon humankind &. 
 Christ's Manhood is not unreal, because It is sinless ; because 
 the entail of any taint of transmitted sin is in Him cut off by a 
 supernatural birth of a Virgin Mother ; and because His whole 
 life of thought, feeling, will, and action is in unfaltering harmony 
 with the law of absolute Truth li. Nor is the reality of His 
 Manhood impaired by any exceptional beauty whether of out- 
 ward form or of mental endowment, such as might become One 
 * fairer than the children of meni/ and taking precedence of 
 them in all things k j since in Him our nature does but resume 
 its true and typical excellence as the crowning glory of the 
 visible creation of God 1. 
 
 f I St. John iv. 1 : ttSv irj/eG/uo % dfioXoye? ^Irjcovv Xpiardu ip (rapKi €\r}\v- 
 dSra, iK Tov &€ov iari. 2 St. John 7 : iroWol ttKoluoi clariXdov els rov kSct/jlov, 
 01 fjL^ dfioXoyovvres 'Irjaovv Xpiarhj/ ipx^l^^yoj/ iv aapici' ovtos iariv 6 irXdvos 
 KoX 6 ^ApTLxpta-Tos. 
 
 s The avviroo-raaia of our Lord's Humanity is a result of the Hypostatic 
 Union. To deny it is to assert that there are Two Persons in Christ, or else 
 it is to deny that He is more than Man. Compare Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 52. 3, 
 who appeals against Nestorius to Heb. ii. 16, 0^70:^ drjirov aYY^hcoj/ imXaiJ.- 
 fidu€Tai, aWa aTrepfxaros 'A^paa/x iiriXa/m^di/eTai. At His Incarnation the Eter- 
 nal Word took on Him Human Nature, not a Human Personality. Luther 
 appears to have denied the Impersonality of our Lord's Manhood. But see 
 Dorner, Person Christi, Bd. ii. p. 540. 
 
 ^ The Sinlessness of our Lord's Manhood is implied in St. Luke i. 35. 
 Thus He is hv 6 Tlar^p rjyiaae koI aizicmtKev els rhu Kdafiov, St. John x. 36 ; 
 and He could challenge His enemies to convict Him of sin, St. John viii. 46. 
 In St. Mark x. 18, St Luke xviii. 19, He is not denying that He is good; 
 but He insists that none should call Him so who did not believe Him to be 
 God. St. Paul describes Him as thv fx-ij ypoi/ra a^xapTicLV^ 2 Cor. v. 2 1 ; and 
 Christ is expressly said to be xoipls a/xapTias, Heb. iv. 15; 'daiosj 6,KaKos, 
 a/xiavroSy Kexoi'picfijLfpos airh ruv afxapT coAcov, Heb. vii. 26 ; a/uLvhs ^./xcafios Kal 
 HaririXos, I St. Pet. i. 19 ; 6 ayios Kal diKuios, Acts iii. 14. Still more em- 
 phatically we are told that a/xapria it/ avrca ovk ecrri, I St. John iii. 5 ; while 
 the same truth is indirectly taught, when St. Paul speaks of our Lord as sent 
 iv ofjLOLccfjLaTi aapKos aixaprias, Rom. viii. 3. Mr. F. W. Newman does justice 
 to the significance of a Sinless Manhood, although, unhappily, he disbelieves 
 in It ; Phases of Faith, p. 141, sqq. i Ps. xlv. 3. 
 
 ^ Col. i. 18: iv TtaaL npwrevuv. ^ Psalm viii. 6-8. Cp. Heb. ii. 6-10. 
 
24 Witness of the Church to Chrisfs true Manhood. 
 
 This reality and perfection of our Lord's Manhood has been 
 not less jealously maintained by the Church than it is clearly 
 asserted in the pages of Scripture. From the first the Church 
 has taught that Jesus Christ is ^Perfect Man, of a reasonable 
 Soul and Human Flesh subsisting "i.' It is sometimes hinted 
 that believers in our Saviour's Godhead must necessarily enter- 
 tain some prejudice against those passages of Scripture which 
 expressly assert the truth of His Manhood. It is presumed that 
 such passages must be regarded by them as so many difficulties to 
 be surmounted or evaded by a theory which is supposed to be 
 conscious of their hostility to itself. Whereas, in truth, to a 
 Catholic instinct, each declaration of Scripture, whatever be its 
 apparent bearing, is welcome as being an unveiling of the Mind 
 of God, and therefore as certainly reconcileable with other sides 
 of truth, whether or no the method of such reconciliation be 
 immediately obvious. As a matter of fact, our Lord's Humanity 
 has been insisted upon by the great Church teachers of antiquity 
 not less earnestly than His Godhead. They habitually argue 
 that it belonged to His essential Truth to be in reality what He 
 seemed to be. He seemed to be human; therefore He was 
 Human 11. Yet His Manhood, so they proceed to maintain, 
 would have been fictitious, if any one faculty or element of 
 human nature had been wanting to It. Therefore His Eeason- 
 able Soul was as essential as His Bodily Frame o. Without a 
 Reasonable Soul His Humanity would have been but an animal 
 existence P ; and the intellectual side of man's nature would have 
 been unredeemed <3. Nor did the Church in her collective ca- 
 pacity ever so insist on Christ's Godhead as to lose sight of the 
 
 in Athanasian Creed. 
 
 " St. Irenseus, Adv. Hser. v. I. 2 : et Se /i^ tiv &v6pcoiros icpaiucro dvOpwrro^, 
 ofjTC: t "fiv €7r' aKrjdeias, efxeive irpcvfia @€ov, eVel aSparov to irvev/iia, ovt€ aX-fj- 
 Oeid ris ^p ev avr^, ov yap ^p cKeTva anep i(paip€To. Tert. De Carne Christi, 
 cap. 5 : * Si caro cum passionibus ficta, et spiritus ergo cum virtutibus falsus. 
 Quid dimidias mendacio Christum ? Totus Veritas est. Maluit crede [non] 
 nasci quam ex aliquH parte mentiri, et quidem in Semet ipsum, ut carnem 
 gestaret sine ossibus duram, sine musculis solidam, sine sanguine cruentam, 
 sine tunic^ vestitam, sine fame esurientem, sine dentibus edentem, sine 
 lingu^ loquentem, ut phantasma auribus fuit sermo ejus per imaginem vocis.' 
 St. Aug. De Div. Qu. 83. qu. 14 : *Si phantasma fuit corpus Christi, fefellit 
 Christus, et si fefellit, Veritas non est. Est autem Veritas Christus. Non 
 ergo phantasma fuit Corpus Ejus.' Docetism struck at the very basis of 
 truth, by sanctioning Pyrrhonism. St. Iren. Adv. Haer. iv. 33. 
 
 o St. Aug. Ep. 187, ad Dardan. n. 4: 'Non est Homo Perfectus, si vel 
 anima carni, vel animae ipsi mens humana defuerit/ Confess, vii. c. 19. 
 
 P St. Aug. De Div. Qu. 83, qu. 80. n. i. 
 
 q St. Cyr. Alex. De Inc. c. 15. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Importance of this truth to the life of the Soul. 25 
 
 truth of His Perfect Manhood. Whether by the silent force of 
 the belief of her children, or by her representative writers on 
 behalf of the faith, or by the formal decisions of her councils, 
 she has ever resisted the disposition to sacrifice the confession 
 of Christ's created nature to that of His uncreated Godhead r. 
 She kept at bay intellectual temptations and impulses which 
 might have easily overmastered the mind of a merely human 
 society. When Ebionites were abroad, she maintained against 
 the Docetse that our Saviour's body was not fictitious or appari- 
 tional. When the mutterings of that Humanitarian movement 
 which culminated in the great scandal of Paulus of Samosata 
 were distinctly audible, she asserted the truth of our Lord's 
 Human Soul against Beryllus of Bostra s. When Arianism had 
 not as yet ceased to be formidable, she was not tempted by 
 Apollinaris to admit that the Logos in Christ took the place of 
 the rational element in man. While ISTestorianism was still 
 vigorous, she condemned the Monophysite formula which prac- 
 tically made Christ an unincarnate God : nor did she rest until 
 the Monothelite echo of the more signal error had been silenced 
 by her assertion of the reality of His Human Will. 
 
 Nor is the Manhood of our Saviour prized by the Church 
 only as a revealed dogma intellectually essential to the formal 
 integrity of the Creed. Every believing Christian knows that 
 it touches the very heart of his inner life. What becomes of 
 the one Mediator between God and man, if the Manhood 
 whereby He places Himself in contact with us men is but 
 unreal and fictitious ? What becomes of His Human Example, 
 of His genuine Sympathy, of His agonizing and world- 
 redeeming Death, of His plenary representation of our race 
 in heaven, of the recreative virtue of His Sacraments, of the 
 * touch of nature' which makes Him, most holy as He is, in 
 very deed kin with us ? All is forthwith uncertain, evanescent, 
 unreal. If Christ be not truly Man, the chasm which parted 
 earth and heaven has not been bridged over. God, as before 
 the Incarnation, is still awful, remote, inaccessible. Tertullian's 
 
 ' It may suffice to quote the language of the Council of Chalcedon, a.d. 
 451 : reXcLOV rhv avrhv ip QeSTTjTi Kal riX^iovrhv ahr'bv iv av6pcoir6rr}Ti, Qihv 
 a\r}d(il}s Kol 6.u6pcoTrov aKrjdcos, rhv avrhv e/c i\iv)(Tis XoyiKris Koi adofxaros^ dfxoov- 
 (TLov Tw Tiarpl KaTU tV &^6Tr]ra Koi bixoovaiov rhv ahrhv rj/juv Kara r^v 
 avOpooiroTrjra, KUTa iroLvra ojxoiov tjiluv x^pi^s a/xapr/as. Routh. Opusc. ii. 78. 
 When these words were spoken, the cycle of possible controversy on the 
 subject was complete. The Monothelite question had virtually been settled 
 by anticipation. 
 
 ^ Socr. H. E. iii. 7 : cfiTpvxop ehai rhv ivavOpco-n-fjo-aPTa. Syn. Bost. anno 244. 
 
26 yesus Christ is God in no equivocal sense, 
 
 inference is no exaggeration : ^ Cum mendacium deprehenditur 
 Christi Caro, . . . omnia quae per Carnem Christi gesta sunt, 
 
 mendacio gesta sunt Eversum est totum Dei opus*.' Or, 
 
 as St. Cyril of Jerusalem tersely presses the solemn argument : 
 
 61 ^a.vTa(T\La rjv rj ivavdpoiirTjcns, cj^oLvrao-fxa Koi r) (T(OTr)pLa^. 
 
 2. Let it be observed, on the other hand, that the Nicene 
 assertion of our Blessed Lord's Divinity does not involve any 
 tacit mutilation or degradation of the idea conveyed by the 
 sacred Name of God. When Jesus Christ is said by His Church 
 to be God, that word is used in its natural, its absolute, its 
 incommunicable sense. This must be constantly borne in mind, 
 if we would escape from equivocations which might again and 
 again obscure the true point before us. For Arianism will 
 confess Christ's Divinity, if, when it terms Him God, it may 
 really mean that He is only a being of an inferior and created 
 nature. Socinianism will confess Christ's Divinity, if this con- 
 fession involves nothing more emphatic than an acknowledge- 
 ment of the fact that certain moral features of God's character 
 shone forth from the Human Life of Christ with an absolutely 
 unrivalled splendour. Pantheism will confess Christ's Divinity, 
 but then it is a Divinity which He must share with the uni- 
 verse. Christ may well be divine, when all is divine, although 
 Pantheism too may admit that Christ is divine in a higher 
 sense than any other man, because He has more clearly recog- 
 nised or exhibited Hhe eternal oneness of the finite and the 
 Infinite, of God and humanity.* The coarsest forms of unbelief 
 will confess our Lord's Divinity, if they may proceed to add, 
 by way of explanation, that such language is but the echo of 
 an apotheosis, informally decreed to the prophet of Nazareth by 
 the fervid but uncritical enthusiasm of His Church. 
 
 No : the Divinity of Jesus Christ is not to be thus emptied 
 of its most solemn and true significance. It is no mere titular 
 distinction, such as the hollow or unthinking flattery of a mul- 
 titude might yield to a political chief, or to a distinguished 
 philanthropist. Indeed Jesus Christ Himself, by His own 
 teaching, had made such an apotheosis of Himself morally 
 impossible. He had, as no teacher before Him, raised, ex- 
 panded, spiritualized man's idea of the Life and Nature of the 
 Great Creator. Baur has remarked that this higher exhibition 
 of the solitary and incommunicable Life of God is nowhere so 
 apparent as in that very Gospel the special object of which is to 
 
 t Adv. Marc. iii. 8. u Catech. iv. 9. 
 
Christ is not the god of an Apotheosis, 2j 
 
 exhibit Christ Himself as the eternal Word made Flesh '^. 
 Indeed God was too vividly felt to be a living Presence by the 
 early Christians, to be transformed by them upon occasion into 
 a decoration which might wreathe the brow of any, though it 
 were the highest human virtue. In heathendom this was 
 naturally otherwise. Yet animal indulgence and intellectual 
 scepticism must have killed out the sense of primary truths 
 which nature and conscience had originally taught, before 
 imperial Eome could feel no difficulty in decreeing temples and 
 altars to such samples of our race as were not a few of the men 
 who successively filled the throne of the Csesarsy. The Church, 
 with her eye upon the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible z, 
 could never have raised Jesus to the full honours of Divinity, 
 had He been merely Man. And Christianity from the first has 
 proclaimed herself, not the authoress of an apotheosis, but the 
 child and the product of an Incarnation. 
 
 She could not have been both. Speaking historically, an 
 apotheosis belongs strictly to the Greek world ; while a mimicry 
 of the Incarnation is characteristically oriental. Speaking phi- 
 losophically, the god of an apotheosis is a creation of human 
 thought or of human fancy ; the God of an incarnation is 
 presupposed as an objectively existing Being, Who manifests 
 Himself by it in the sphere of sense. Speaking religiously, 
 belief in an apotheosis must be fatal to the primary movements 
 of piety towards its object, whenever men are capable of earnest 
 and honest reflection ; while it is incontestable that the doctrine 
 of an incarnation stimulates piety in a degree precisely pro- 
 portioned to the sincerity of the faith which welcomes it. Thus 
 the ideas of an apotheosis and an incarnation stand towards 
 each other in historical, philosophical, and religious contrast. 
 Need I add that religiously, philosophically, and historically, 
 Christianity is linked to the one, and is simply incompatible 
 with the other? 
 
 ^ Vorlesungen iiber N. T. Theologie, p. 354. 
 
 y On this subject see Dollinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. viii. 
 pt. 2. § 2 (apotheosis). The city of Cyzicus was deprived of its freedom for 
 being unwilling to worship Augustus (Tac. Ann. iv. 36). Thrasea Paetus was 
 held guilty of treason for refusing to believe in the deification of Poppsea 
 (Tac. Ann. xvi. 22). Caligula insisted on being worshipped as a god during 
 his lifetime (Suetonius, Caius, xxi. 22). On the number of cattle sacrificed 
 to Domitian, see Pliny, Panegyr. xi. The worship of Antinous, who had 
 lived on terms of criminal intercourse with Hadrian, was earnestly promoted 
 by that Emperor. Dollinger reckons fifty-three apotheoses between that of 
 Caesar and that of Diocletian, fifteen of which were those of ladies belonging 
 to the Imperial family. « i Tim. i. 17. 
 
 I] 
 
28 Christ is not God in 
 
 No : the Divinity of Jesus is not such divinity as Pantheism 
 might ascribe to Him. In the belief of the Church Jesus 
 stands alone among the sons of men as He of Whom it can 
 be said without impiety, that He is not merely divine, but 
 God. Such a restriction in favour of a Single Personality, 
 contradicts the very vital principle of Pantheistic thought. 
 Schelling appropriately contends that the Indians with their 
 many incarnations shew more intelligence respecting the real 
 relations of God and the world than is implied by the doctrine 
 of a solitary incarnation, as taught in the Creed of Christendom. 
 Upon Pantheistic grounds, this is perfectly reasonable \ although 
 it might be added that any limited number of incarnations, 
 however considerable, would only approximate to the real 
 demands of the theory which teaches that God is incarnate 
 in everything. But then, such divinity as Pantheism can 
 ascribe to Christ is, in point of fact, no divinity at all. When 
 God is nature, and nature is God, everything indeed is divine, 
 but also nothing is Divine ; and Christ shares this phantom- 
 divinity with the universe, nay with the agencies of moral 
 evil itself. In truth, our God does not exist in the appre- 
 hension of Pantheistic thinkers; since, when such truths as 
 creation and personality are denied, the very idea of God is 
 fundamentally sapped, and although the prevailing belief of 
 mankind may still be humoured by a discreet retention of 
 its conventional language, the broad practical result is in reality 
 neither more nor less than Atheism. 
 
 You may indeed remind me of an ingenious distinction, 
 by which it is suggested that the idea of God is not thus 
 sacrificed in Pantheistic systems, and on the ground that 
 although God and the universe are substantially identical, 
 they are not logically so. Logically speaking, then, you pro- 
 ceed to distinguish between God and the universe. You look 
 out upon the universe, and you arrive at the idea of God by 
 a double process, by a process of abstraction, and by a process 
 of synthesis. In the visible world you come into sensible 
 contact with the finite, the contingent, the relative, the im- 
 perfect, the individual. Then, by a necessary operation of your 
 reason, you disengage from these ideas their correlatives; you 
 ascend to a contemplation of infinity, of necessity, of the 
 absolute, the perfect, the universal. Here abstraction has done 
 its work, and synthesis begins. By synthesis you combine 
 the general ideas which have been previously reached through 
 abstraction. These general ideas are made to converge in your 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
the sense of Pantheism. 29 
 
 brain under the presidency of one central and unifying idea, 
 which you call God. You are careful to insist that this god 
 is not a real but an ideal being; indeed it appears that he 
 is so ideal, that he would cease to be god if he could be supposed 
 to become real. God, you say, is the ' Idea ' of the universe ; 
 the universe is the ^realization' of God. The god who is 
 enthroned in your thought must have abandoned all contact 
 with reality; let him re-enter but for a moment upon the 
 domain of reality, and, such are the exigencies of your doctrine, 
 that he must forthw^ith be compelled to abdicate his throne a. 
 But meanwhile, as you contend, he is logically distinct from 
 the universe; and you repel with some warmth the orthodox 
 allegation, that to identify him substantially with the universe, 
 amounts to a practical denial of his existence. 
 
 Yet after all, let us ask what is really gained by thus 
 distinguishing between a logical and a substantial identity] 
 What is this god, who is to be thus rescued from the 
 religious ruins which mark the track of Pantheistic thought "J 
 Is he, by the terms of your own distinction, anything more 
 than an *Idea;' and must he not vary in point of perfection 
 with the accuracy and exhaustiveness of those processes of 
 abstraction and synthesis by which you undertake to construct 
 him 1 And if this be so, is it worth our while to discuss 
 the question whether or not so precarious an *Idea' was or 
 was not incarnate in Jesus Christ ] Upon the terms of the 
 theory, would not an incarnation of God be fatal to His 
 * logical, ' that is to His only admitted mode of existence ? 
 or would such divinity, if we could ascribe it to Jesus Christ, 
 be anything higher than the fleeting and more or less imperfect 
 speculation of a finite brain % 
 
 Certainly Pantheism would never have attained to so strong 
 a position as that which it actually holds in European as well 
 as in Asiatic thought, unless it had embodied a great element 
 of truth, which is too often ignored by some arid Theistic 
 systems. To that element of truth we Christians do justice, 
 when we confess the Omnipresence and Incomprehensibility 
 of God; and still more, when we trace the gracious con- 
 sequences of His actual Incarnation in Jesus Christ. But we 
 Christians know also that the Great Creator is essentially 
 distinct from the work of His Hands, and that He is What 
 
 a Cf. M. Caro's notice of Vacherot's La Mdtaphysique et la Science, 
 Idee de Dieu, p. 265, sqq. ; especially p. 289, sqq. 
 
30 Christ is not merely divine 
 
 He is, in utter independence of the feeble thought whereby 
 He enables us to apprehend His Existence. We know that 
 all which is not Himself, is upheld in being from moment 
 to moment by the fiat of His Almighty Will. We know that 
 His Existence is, strictly and in the highest sense, Personal. 
 Could we deny these truths, it would be as easy to confess the 
 Divinity of Christ, as it would be impossible to deny the 
 divinity of any created being. If we are asked to believe 
 in an impersonal God, who has no real existence apart from 
 creation or from created thought, in order that we may expe- 
 rience fewer philosophical difficulties in acknowledging our 
 Lord's Divinity, we reply that our faith cannot consent thus 
 ^propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.^ We cannot thus sacri- 
 fice the substance of the first truth of the Creed that we 
 may retain the phraseology of the second. We dare not thus 
 degrade, or rather annihilate, the very idea of God, even for 
 the sake of securing a semblance (more it could not be) of 
 those precious consolations which the Christian heart seeks 
 and finds at the Manger of the Divine Child in Bethlehem, or 
 before the Cross of the Lord of Glory on Mount Calvary. 
 
 No: the Divinity of Jesus is not divinity in the sense of 
 Socinianisra. It is no mere manifestation whether of the highest 
 human goodness, or of the noblest of divine gifts. It is not 
 merely a divine presence vouchsafed to the soul ; it is not 
 merely an intercommunion of the soul and God, albeit main- 
 tained even ceaselessly — maintained in its fulness from moment 
 to moment. Such indeed was the high grace of our Lord's 
 sinless Humanity, but that grace was not itself His Divinity. 
 For a work of grace, however beautiful and perfect, is one thing ; 
 an Uncreated Divine Essence is another. In the Socinian sense 
 of the term, you all, my Christian brethren, are, or may be, 
 divine ; you may shew forth God's moral glory, if less fully, yet 
 not less truly, than did Jesus. By adoption, you too are sons 
 of God ; and the Church teaches that each of you was made 
 a partaker of the Divine Nature at his baptism. But suppose 
 that neither by act, nor word, nor thought, you have done aught 
 to forfeit tliat blessed gift, do I forthwith proceed to profess 
 my belief in your divinity 1 And why not ? Is it not because 
 I may not thus risk a perilous confusion of thought, issuing 
 in a degradation of the Most Holy Name ? Your life of gTace 
 is as much a gift as your natural life ; but however glorious 
 may be the gift, aye, though it raise you from the dust to the 
 very steps of God's Throne, the gift is a free gift after all, and 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
in the sense of Socinianism. 31 
 
 its greatness does but suggest the interval wliich parts the 
 recipient from the inexhaustible and boundless Life of the 
 Giver. 
 
 Most true indeed it is that the perfect holiness which shone 
 forth from our Lord's Human Life, has led thousands of souls 
 to perceive the truth of His essential Godhead. When once it 
 is seen that His moral greatness is really unique, it is natural 
 to seek and to accept, as a basis of this greatness, His possession 
 of a unique relationship to the Fountain of all goodness b. Thus 
 the Sermon on the Mount leads us naturally on to those dis- 
 courses in St. John's Gospel in which Christ unveils His 
 Essential Oneness with the Father. But the ethical premiss 
 is not to be confused with the ontological conclusion. It is true 
 that a boundless love of man shone forth from the Life of 
 Christ ; it is true that each of the Divine attributes is com- 
 mensurate with the Divine Essence. It is true that ' he that 
 dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.' But it is 
 not true that every moral being which God blesses by His 
 Presence is God. The Divine Presence, as vouchsafed to Chris- 
 tian men, is a gift superadded to and distinct from the created 
 personality to which it is accorded : there was a time when 
 it had not been given, and a time may come when it will be 
 withdrawn. Such a Presence may indeed in a certain secondary 
 
 b ' Je mehr sich so dem erkennenden Glauben die Ueberzeugung von der 
 Einzigkeit der sittlichen Hoheit Christi erschliesst, desto natiirlicher ja 
 nothwendiger muss es nun auch von diesem festen Punkte aus demselben 
 Glauben werden, mit Verstandniss Christo in das Gebiet Seiner Reden zu 
 folgen, wo Er Seiner eigentliiimlichen und einzigen Beziehung zu dem Vater 
 gedenkt. Jesu Heiligkeit und Weisheit, durch die Er unter den slindigen, 
 vielirrenden Menschen einzig dastebt, weiset so, da sie nicht kann noch will 
 als rein subjeJctives, menschliches ProduJd angesehen werden, auf einen 
 ilbernatiirlichen Ursprung Seiner Person. Diese muss, um inmitten der 
 Siinderwelt begreiflich zu sein, aus einer eigenthiimlichen und wunderbar 
 schopferischen That Gottes abgeleitet, ja es muss in Christus, wenn doch 
 Gott nicht deistisch von der Welt getrennt sondern in Liebe ihr nahe und 
 wesentlich als Liebe zu denken ist, von Gott aus betraohtet eine Incarnation 
 gottlicher Liebe, also gbttUchen Wesens gesehen werden, was Ihn als den 
 Punkt erscheinen lasst, wo Gott und die Menscheit einzig und innigst 
 geeinigt sind. Freilich, man lasst sich in diesem Stiicke noch so oft 
 durch einen abstracten, subjectiven Moralismus irre raachen, der die Tiefe 
 des Ethischen nicht erfasst. Aber wer tiefer blickend auch von einer 
 ontologiscJien und metaphysiscJien Bedeutung des Etliisclien weiss, dem 
 muss die Einzigkeit der Heiligkeit und Liebe Christi ihren Grund in einer 
 Einzigkeit auch Seines Wesens haben, diese aber in Gottes Sich mittheil- 
 ender, offenbarender Liebe.' (Dorner, Person Christi, Bd. ii. pp. 121 1, 
 1212.) 
 
32 Christ is not the ' inferior god^ of Arianisfn. 
 
 sense * divinize' a created person^, robing him with so much of 
 moral beauty and force of deity as a creature can bear. But 
 this blessed gift does not justify us in treating the creature to 
 whom it is vouchsafed as the Infinite and Eternal God. When 
 Socinianism deliberately names God, it means equally with 
 ourselves, not merely a Perfect Moral Being, not merely Perfect 
 Love and Perfect Justice, but One Whose Knowledge and 
 Whose Power are as boundless as His Love. It does not mean 
 that Christ is God in this, the natural sense of the word, when 
 it confesses His moral divinity; yet, beyond all controversy, 
 this full and natural sense of the term is the sense of the 
 Nicene Creed. 
 
 No : Jesus Christ is not divine in the sense of Arius. He 
 is not the most eminent and ancient of the creatures, decorated 
 by the necessities of a theological controversy with That Name 
 which a serious piety can dare to yield to One Being alone. 
 Ascribe to the Christ of Arius an antiquity as remote as you 
 will from the age of the Incarnation, place him at a height 
 as high as any you can conceive, above the highest archangel; 
 still what, after all, is this ancient, this super-angelic being 
 but a creature who had a beginning, and who, if the Author of 
 his existence should so will, may yet cease to be % Such a being, 
 however exalted, is parted from the Divine Essence by a 
 fathomless chasm ; whereas the Christ of Catholic Christendom 
 is internal to That Essence ; He is of one Substance with the 
 Father — ofioovcnos r« UaTpi : and in this sense, as distinct from 
 any other. He is properly and literally Divine. 
 
 This assertion of the Divinity of Jesus Christ depends on 
 a truth beyond itself. It postulates the existence in God of 
 certain real distinctions having their necessary basis in the 
 Essence of the Godhead. That Three such distinctions exist is 
 a matter of Kevelation. In the common language of the 
 Western Church these distinct Forms of Being are named Per- 
 sons. Yet that term cannot be employed to denote Them, 
 without considerable intellectual caution. As applied to men, 
 Person implies the antecedent conception of a species, which is 
 determined for the moment, and by the force of the expression, 
 into a single incommunicable modification of being d. But the 
 
 c 2 St. Peter i. 4: 'Ipa 5ia rovroov [sc. iirayyeXfidTuu'] yei/rjo-Oe Q^ias 
 KOivcopol (pvareas. 
 
 d So runs the definition of Boethius . * Persona est naturae rationalis 
 individua substantia.' (De Pers. et Duabus Naturis, c. 3.) Upon which 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The doctrine impliesHypostatic distinctions in (9oz).33 
 
 conception of species is utterly inapplicable to That One Supreme 
 Essence Which we name God; and, according to the terms of 
 the Catholic doctrine, the same Essence belongs to Each of the 
 Divine Persons. Not however that we are therefore to suppose 
 nothing more to be intended by the revealed doctrine than three 
 varying relations of God in His dealings with the world. On 
 the contrary, His Self-Revelation has for its basis certain eternal 
 distinctions in His Nature, which are themselves utterly anterior 
 to and independent of any relation to created life. Apart from 
 these distinctions, the Christian Revelation of an Eternal Father- 
 hood, of a true Incarnation of God, and of a real communication 
 of His Spirit, is but the baseless fabric of a dream ^. These 
 three distinct ^ Subsistences V which we name Father, Son, and 
 Spirit, while they enable us the better to understand the mystery 
 of the Self-sufficing and Blessed Life of God before He sur- 
 rounded Himself with created beings, are also strictly compatible 
 with the truth of the Divine Unity &. And when we say that 
 
 St. Thomas observes : * Conveniens est ut hoc nomen (persona) de Deo 
 dicatur ; non tamen eodem modo quo dicitur de creaturis, sed excellentiori 
 modo.' (Sum. Th., la. qu. 29, a. 3.) When the present use of oxxxio. and 
 viT6aTa.(ns had become fixed in the East, St. Gregory Nazianzen tells us that 
 in the formula * /uia ovaiay rpels vTroardaeis,^ ovaia signifies r^v <pvoriu rrjs 
 6€l6t7]tos, while viroaraaeis points to ray tu>v rpiwv IhidT-qras. He observes 
 that with this sense the Westerns were in perfect agreement ; but he deplores 
 the poverty of their theological language. They had no expression really equi- 
 valent to vTv6<TTa(ns, as contrasted with ohaiaj and they were therefore obliged 
 to employ the Latin translation of -npoaMiTov that they might avoid the ap- 
 pearance of believing in three ovaiai. (Orat. xxi. 46.) St. Augustine laments the 
 necessity of having to say ' quid Tria sint, Quae Tria esse fides vera pronuntiat.' 
 (De Trin. vii. n. 7.) *Cum ergo quaeritur quid Tria, vel quid Tres, conferimus 
 nos ad inveniendum aliquod speciale vel generale nomen, quo complectamur 
 haec Tria: nequc occurrit animo, quia excedit supereminentia Divinitatis 
 usitati eloquii facultatem.' (Ibid.) 'Cum conaretur humana inopia loquendo 
 proferre ad hominum sensus, quod in secretario mentis pro captu tenet de 
 Domino Deo Creatore suo, sive per piam fidem, sive per qualemcunque intel- 
 ligentiam, timuit dicere tres essentias, ne intelligeretur in Ilia Summd jEqaali- 
 tate ulla diversitas. Rursus non esse tria quaedam non poterat dicere, quod 
 Sabellius quia dixit, in haeresim lapsus est. . . . Qusesivit quid Tria diceret, et 
 dixit substantias sive personas, quihus nominibus non diversitatem intelligi 
 voluit, sed singularitatem noluit' (De Trin. vii. n. 9.) Cf. Serm. cxvii. 7, 
 ccxv. 3, ccxliv. 4. On the term Person, see further St. Athan. TreatiseSj^ i. 155, 
 note f. (Lib. Fath.) 
 
 « Cf. Wilberforce on the Incarnation, p. 152. 
 
 ' ' Subsistentiae, relationes subsistentes.' Sum. Th. i*. qu. 29. a. 2 ; and 
 qu. 40. a. 2. 
 
 K This compatibility is expressed by the doctrine of the 7r€pixot>pr}(^ts — the 
 safeguard and witness of the Divine Unity. St. John xiv.ii ; i Cor. ii. 11. 
 This doctrine, as * protecting the Unity of God, without entrenching on the 
 l] D 
 
34 Objectors, {i)The school of j^sthetical historians, 
 
 Jesus Christ is God, we mean that in the Man Christ Jesus, 
 the Second of these Persons or Subsistences, One in Essence 
 with the First and with the Third, vouchsafed to become 
 Incarnate. 
 
 IV. The position then which is before us in these lectures is 
 briefly the following : Our Lord Jesus Christ, being truly and 
 perfectly Man, is also, according to His Higher Pre-existent 
 Nature, Very and Eternal God ; since it was the Second Person 
 of the Ever Blessed Trinity, Who, at the Incarnation, robed 
 Himself with a Human Body and a Human Soul. Such explicit 
 language will of course encounter objections in more than one 
 quarter of the modern world ; and if of these ol^'ections one or 
 two prominent samples be rapidly noticed, it is possible that, at 
 least in the case of certain minds, the path of our future discus- 
 sion will be cleared of difficulties which are at present more or 
 less distinctly supposed to obstruct it. 
 
 (a) One objection to our attempt in these lectures may be 
 expected to proceed from that graceful species of literary activity 
 which can be termed, without our discrediting it. Historical 
 ^stheticism. The protest will take the form of an appeal to 
 the sense of Beauty. True Beauty, it will be argued, is a 
 creation of nature; it is not improved by being meddled with. 
 The rocky hill-side is no longer beautiful when it has been 
 quarried ; nor is the river-course, when it has been straightened 
 and deepened for purposes of navigation ; nor is the forest which 
 has been fenced and planted, and made to assume the disciplined 
 air of a symmetrical plantation. In like manner, you urge, that 
 incomparable Figure whom we meet in the pages of the New 
 Testament, has suff'ered in the apprehensions of orthodox 
 Christians, from the officious handling of a too inquisitive 
 Scholasticism. As cultivation robs wild nature of its beauty, 
 even so, you maintain, is ^definition' the enemy of the fairest 
 creations of our sacred literature. You represent ^definition' as 
 ruthlessly invading regions which have been beautified by the 
 freshness and originality of the moral sentiment, and as sub- 
 stituting for the indefinable graces of a living movement, the 
 grim and stiff" artificialities of a heartless logic. You wonder at 
 the bad taste of men who can bring the decisions of Nicsea and 
 Chalcedon into contact with the story of the Gospels. What is 
 
 perfections of the Son and the Spirit, may even be called the characteristic of 
 Catholic Trinitarianism, as opposed to all counterfeits, whether philosophical, 
 Arian, or oriental.' Newman's * Arians,' p. 190, ist ed. Cf. Athan. Treatises, 
 ii. 403, note i. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
This school ignores the solemn question at issue, '>^t^ 
 
 there in common, you ask, between these dead metaphysical 
 formulae and the ever-living tenderness of that matchless Life % 
 You protest that you would as readily essay to throw the text of 
 Homer or of Milton into a series of syllogisms, that you would 
 with as little scruple scratch the paint from a masterpiece 
 of Raffaelle with the intention of subjecting it to a chemical 
 analysis, as go hand in hand with those Church-doctors who 
 force Jesus of Nazareth into rude juxtaposition with a world of 
 formal thought, from which, as you conceive, He is severed by 
 the intervention of three centuries of disputation, and still more 
 by all which raises the highest forms of natural beauty above the 
 awkward pedantry of debased art. 
 
 Well, my brethren, if the object of the Gospel be attained 
 when it has added one more chapter to the poetry of human 
 history, when it has contributed one more Figure to the world's 
 gallery of historical portraits, upon which a few educated persons 
 may periodically expend some spare thought and feeling ; — if 
 this be so, you are probably right. Plainly you are in pursuit 
 of that which may nourish sentiment, rather than of that which 
 can support moral vigour or permanently satisfy the instinct of 
 truth. Certainly your sentiment of beauty may be occasionally 
 shocked by those direct questions and rude processes, which are 
 necessary to the investigation of intellectual truth and to the 
 sustenance of moral life. You would repress these processes ; 
 you would silence these questions \ or at least you would not 
 explicitly state your own answer to them. Whether, for instance, 
 the stupendous miracle of the Resurrection be or be not as cer- 
 tain as any event of public interest which has taken place in 
 Europe during the present year, is a point which does not aifect, 
 as it seems, the worth or the completeness of your Christology. 
 Your Christ is an Epic ; and you will suffer no prosaic scholiast 
 to try his hand upon its pages. Your Christ is a portrait ; 
 and, as we are all agreed, a portrait is a thing to admire, and not 
 to touch. 
 
 But there is a solemn question which must be asked, and 
 which, if a man is in earnest, he will inevitably ask ; and that 
 question will at once carry him beyond the narrow horizon of 
 a literary sestheticism in his treatment of the matter before us. 
 . . . My brethren, where is Jesus Christ now % and what is He % 
 Does He only speak to us from the pages which were traced by 
 His followers eighteen centuries ago % Is He no more than the 
 first of the shadows of the past, the first of memories, the first of 
 biographies, the most perfect of human ideals % Is He only an 
 
 l] D 2 
 
$6 Where and What is Our Lord now? 
 
 Ideal, after alH Does He reign, only in virtue of a mighty- 
 tradition of human thought and feeling in His favour, which 
 creates and supports His imaginary throne ? Is He at this 
 moment a really living Being % And if living, is He a human 
 ghost, flitting we know not where in the unseen world, and 
 Himself awaiting an award at the hands of the Everlasting % or 
 is He a super- angelic Intelligence, sinless and invested with 
 judicial and creative powers, but as far separated from the 
 inaccessible Life of God as must be even the first of creatures 
 from the everlasting Creator % Does He reign, in any true sense, 
 either on earth or in heaven % or is His Regal Government in 
 any degree independent of the submission or the resistance which 
 His subjects may offer to it % Is He present personally as a living 
 Power in this our world % Has He any certain relations to you % 
 Does He think of you, care for you, act upon you % Can He help 
 you % Can He save you from your sins, can He blot out their 
 stains and crush their power, can He deliver you in your death- 
 agony from the terrors of dissolution, and bid you live with Him 
 in a brighter world for ever? Can you approach Him now, 
 commune with Him now, cling to Him now, become one with 
 Him now, not by an unsubstantial act of your own imaginations, 
 but by an actual objective transaction, making you incorporate 
 with His Life % Or is the Christian answer to these most press- 
 ing questions a weakly delusion, or at any rate too definite a 
 statement ; and must we content ourselves with the analysis of 
 an historical Character, while we confess that the Living Per- 
 sonality which once created and animated It may or may not be 
 God, may or may not be able to hear us and help us, may or may 
 not be in distinct conscious existence at this moment, may or 
 may not have been altogether annihilated some eighteen hundred 
 years ago ? Do you urge that it is idle to ask these questions, 
 since we have no adequate materials at hand for dealing with 
 them ? That is a point which it is hoped may be more or less 
 cleared up during the progress of our present enquiry. But if 
 such questions are to remain unanswered, do not shut your eyes 
 to the certain consequence. A Christ who is conceived of as 
 only pictured in an ancient literature may indeed furnish you 
 with the theme of a magnificent poetry, but he cannot be the 
 present object of your religious life. A religion must have for. 
 its object an actually Living Person: and the purpose of the 
 definitions which you deprecate, is to exhibit and assert the exact 
 force of the revealed statements respecting the Eternal Life of 
 Cbrist, and so to place Him as a Living Person in all His Divine 
 
 [lect. 
 
Objectors. (2) The Anti-doctrinal Moralists. 37 
 
 Majesty and all His Human Tenderness before the eye of the 
 soul which seeks Him. When you fairly commit yourself to 
 the assertion that Christ is at this moment living at all, you 
 leave the strictly historical and sesthetical treatment of the Gos- 
 pel record of His Life and character, and you enter, whether it 
 be in a Catholic or in an heretical spirit, upon the territory of 
 Church definitions. In your little private sphere, you bow to 
 tliat practical necessity which obliged great Fathers and Coun- 
 cils, often much against their will, to take counsel of the Spirit 
 Who illuminated the collective Church, and to give point and 
 strength to Christian faith by authoritative elucidations of Chris- 
 tian doctrine. Nor are you therefore rendered insensible to 
 the beauty of the Gospel narrative, because you have discovered 
 that thus to ascertain and bear in mind, so far as Revelation 
 warrants your effort, what is the exact Personal dignity and what 
 the enduring prerogatives of Him in Whom you have believed, is 
 in truth a matter of the utmost practical importance to your 
 religious life. 
 
 (iS) But the present enquiry may be objected to, on higher 
 grounds than those of literary and aesthetic taste. *Are there 
 not,' it will be pleaded, ' moral reasons for deprecating such dis- 
 cussions % Surely the dogmatic and theological temper is suf- 
 ficiently distinct from the temper which aims, beyond everything 
 else, at moral improvement. Surely good men may be indifferent 
 divines, while accomplished divines may be false or impure at 
 heart. Nay more, are not morality and theology, not merely 
 distinct, but also more or less antagonistic interests ? Does not 
 the enthusiastic consideration of dogmatic problems tend to 
 divert men's minds from that attention which is due to the 
 practical obligations of lifel Is not the dogmatic temper, you 
 ask, rightly regarded as a species of " intellectual ritualism" which 
 lulls men into the belief that they have true religion at heart, 
 when in point of fact they are merely gratifying a private taste 
 and losing sight of honesty and sober living in the intoxicating 
 study of the abstractions of controversy] On the other hand, will 
 not a high morality slirink with an instinctive reverence from 
 the clamorous and positive assertions of the theologians % In 
 particular, did Jesus Christ Himself require at the hands of His 
 disciples a dogmatic confession of belief in His Divinity ^ % Was 
 He not content if they acted upon His moral teaching, if they 
 embraced that particular aspect of moral obligations which is of 
 
 ^ Ecce Homo, p. 69, sqq. 
 
 I] 
 
38 Channing on the study of Chris fs character, 
 
 the highest importance to the well-being of society, and which 
 we have lately termed the Enthusiasm of Humanity]' This is 
 what is urged ; and then it is added, ^ Shall we not best succeed 
 in doing our duty if we try better to understand Christ's Human 
 Character, while we are careful to keep clear of those abstract 
 and transcendental questions about Him, which at any rate have 
 not promoted the cause of moral progress V 
 
 This language is notoriously popular in our day ; but the sub- 
 stantial objection which it embodies has been already stated by 
 a writer whom it is impossible to name without mingled admi- 
 ration and sorrow, — admiration for his pure and lofty humanity, 
 ^-sorrow for the profound errors which parted him in life and 
 in death from the Church of Jesus Christ. 'Love to Jesus 
 Christ,' says William Channing, * depends very little on our con- 
 ception of His rank in the scale of being. On no other topic 
 have Christians contended so earnestly, and yet it is of secondary 
 importance. To know Jesus Christ is not to know the precise 
 place He occupies in the Universe ; it is something more : it 
 is to look into His mind; it is to approach His soul; to 
 comprehend His spirit, to see how He thought and felt and 
 purposed and loved. . . I am persuaded,' he continues, Hhat 
 controversies about Christ's Person have in one way done 
 great injury. They have turned attention from His character. 
 Suppose that, as Americans, we should employ ourselves in 
 debating the questions, where Washington was born, and from 
 what spot he came when he appeared at the head of our armies ; 
 and that in the fervour of these contentions we should overlook 
 the character of his mind, the spirit that moved within him, 
 
 how unprofitably should we be employed % Who is it 
 
 that understands Washington ? Is it he that can settle his rank 
 in the creation, his early history, his present condition % or he to 
 whom the soul of that good man is laid open, who comprehends 
 and sympathizes with his generous purposes i.' 
 
 Channing's illustration of his position in this passage is im* 
 portant. It unconsciously but irresistibly suggests that indiffer- 
 ence to the clear statement of our Lord's Divinity is linked to a 
 fundamental assumption of its falsehood. Doubtless Washing- 
 ton's birthplace and present destiny is for the Americans an 
 altogether unpractical consideration, when placed side by side 
 with the study of his character. But the question had never 
 been raised whether the first of religious duties which a 
 
 i Works, vol. ii. p. 145. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Moral obligation of facing the dogmatic question, 39 
 
 creature should pay to the Author and End of his existence was 
 or was not due to Washington. Nobody has ever asserted that 
 mankind owes to the founder of the American Eepublic the 
 tribute of a prostrate adoration in spirit and in truth. Had it 
 occurred to Channing's mind as even possible that Jesus Christ 
 was more than a mere man who lived and died eighteen cen- 
 turies ago, he could not have permitted himself to make use of 
 such an illustration. To do justice to Channing, he had much 
 too clear and fine an intellect to imagine that the fundamental 
 question of Christianity could be ignored on moral grounds. 
 Those who know anything of his works are aware that his own 
 opinion on the subject was a very definite one, and that he has 
 stated the usual arguments on behalf of the Socinian heresy with 
 characteristic earnestness and precision. 
 
 My brethren, all are agreed as to the importance of studying 
 and copying the Human Character of Jesus Christ. Whether it 
 be really possible to have a sincere admiration for the Character 
 of Jesus Christ without believing in His Divinity, is a question 
 which I shall not shrink from considering hereafter J. Whether 
 a true morality does not embrace, as one part of it, an honest 
 acceptance and profession of all attainable religious Truth, is a 
 question which men can decide without being theologians. As 
 for reverence, there is a time to keep silence, and a time to 
 speak. Keverence will assuredly speak, and that plainly, when 
 silence would dishonour its Object : the reverence which is always 
 silent as to matters of belief may be but the drapery of a profound 
 scepticism, which lacks the courage to unveil itself before the 
 eyes of men. Certainly our Lord did not Himself exact from 
 His first followers, as an indispensable condition of discipleship, 
 any profession of belief in His Godhead. But why] Simply 
 because His requirements are proportioned to the opportunities 
 of mankind. He had taught as men were able to bear His 
 teaching k. Although His precepts. His miracles. His character, 
 His express language, all pointed to the Truth of His Godhead, 
 the conscience of mankind was not laid under a formal obligation 
 to acknowledge It until at length He had been defined 1 to be 
 * the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of Holiness, 
 by the Resurrection from the dead.' Our present moral relation, 
 then, to the truth of Christ's Divinity differs altogether from 
 that in which His first disciples were placed. It is a simple 
 matter of history that Christendom has believed the doctrine for 
 
 J See Ldfcture IV. ^ St. John xvi. 12. 
 
 1 Rom. i. 4 : toD SpiaOei/ros vtov ©eoD. 
 
 I] 
 
40 Moral relations of belief and worship, 
 
 eighteen centuries ; but besides this, the doctrine challenges at 
 our hands, as I have already intimated, a moral duty as its 
 necessary expression both in the sanctuary of our own thought 
 and before the eyes of men. 
 
 Let us face this aspect of the subject in its concrete and 
 every-day form. Those whom I now see around me are without 
 exception, or almost without exception, members of the Church 
 of England. If any here have not the happiness to be commu- 
 nicants, yet, at least, my brethren, you all attend the ordinary 
 Sunday morning service of our Church. In the course of doing 
 so, you sing the Te Deum, you repeat several times the Gloria 
 Patri ; but you also kneel down, or profess to kneel down, as 
 joining before God and man in the Litany. Now the second 
 petition in the Litany runs thus : ' God the Son, Redeemer 
 of the world, have mercy upon us miserable sinners.' What do 
 you seriously mean to do when you join in that petition ? Whom 
 are you really addressing^ What is the basis and ground of 
 your act? What is its morality*? If Jesus Christ is merely a 
 creature, is He in a position to have mercy upon you ? Are you 
 doing dishonour to the Most High by addressing Christ in these 
 terms at all % Channing has said that the petition, ^ By Thine 
 agony and bloody sweat, by Thy cross and passion. Good Lord, 
 deliver us,' is appalling^. On the Socinian hypothesis, Chan- 
 ning's language is no exaggeration : the Litany is an ' appalling' 
 prayer, as the Gloria Patri is an 'appalling' doxology. Nor 
 would you escape from this moral difficulty, if unhappily you 
 should refuse to join in the services of the Church. Your 
 conscience cannot decline to decide in favour of the general 
 duty of adoring Jesus Christ, or against it. And this decision 
 presupposes the resolution, in one sense or the other, of the dog- 
 matic question on which it depends. Christ either is, or He is 
 not God. The worship which is paid to Christ either ought to 
 be paid to Him, or it ought to be, not merely withheld, but 
 denounced. It is either rigorously due from all Christians to 
 our Lord, or it is an outrage on the rights of God. In any case 
 to take part in a service which, like our Litany, involves the 
 prostrate adoration of Jesus Christ, without explicitly recognis- 
 ing His right to receive such adoration, is itself immoral. If to 
 be true and honest in our dealings with each other is a part of 
 mere natural virtue, surely to mean what we say when we are 
 dealing with Heaven is not less an integral part of morality ^, 
 
 ™ Unitarian Christianity, Works, vol. ii. p. 541. 
 
 ° Bp. Butler, Analogy, ii. i. p. 157. 'Christianity, even what is peculiarly 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Objectors, (3) The school of Subjective Pietism, 41 
 
 I say nothing of that vast unseen world of thought and feeh'ng 
 which in the soul of a Christian believer has our Blessed Saviour 
 for its Object, and the whole moral justification of which depends 
 upon the conception which we form of Christ's *rank in the 
 scale of being.' It is enough to point out to you that the dis- 
 cussion in hand has a practical, present, and eminently a moral 
 interest, unless it be consistent with morality to use in the presence 
 of God and man, a language which we do not believe, or as to 
 the meaning of which we are content to be indifferent. 
 
 (y) Once more. It may be urged, from a widely different 
 quarter, that our enquiry is dangerous, if not to literary or 
 moral interests, yet to the spirit of simple Christian piety. 
 ' Take care,' so the warning may run, ' lest, instead of preaching 
 the Gospel, you should be merely building up a theological 
 pyramid. Beware of sacrificing spiritual objects to intellectual 
 ones. Surely the great question for a sinner to consider is 
 whether or not he be justified before God : do not then let us 
 bury the simple Gospel beneath a heap of metaphysics.' 
 
 Now the matter to be considered is whether this absolute 
 separation between what is assumed to be the * simple Gospel ' 
 and what is called * metaphysics ' is really possible. In point of 
 fact the simple Gospel, when we come to examine it, is neces- 
 sarily on one side metaphysical. Educated men, at least, will 
 not be scared by a term, which a scarcely pardonable ignorance 
 may suppose to denote nothing more than the trackless region 
 of intellectual failure. If the Gospel is real to you ; if you 
 believe it to be true, and possess it spiritually and intellectually ; 
 you cannot but see that it leads you on to the frontier of a 
 world of thought which you may yourselves shrink from entering, 
 but which it is not prudent to depreciate. You say that the 
 main question is to know that you are justified % Very well ; 
 but, omitting all other considerations, let me ask you one ques- 
 tion : Who is the Justifier % Can He really justify if He is only 
 Man % Does not His power to * save to the uttermost those that 
 come unto God by Him' depend upon the fact that He is Him- 
 self Divine % Yet when, with St. John, you confess that He is 
 the Eternal Logos, you are dealing quite as distinctly with a 
 
 so called, as distinguished from natural religion, has yet somewhat very 
 important, even of a moral nature. For, the office of our Lord being made 
 known, and the relation He stands in to us, the obligation of religious regards 
 to Him is plainly moral, as much as charity to mankind is ; since this obhga- 
 tion arises, before external commands, immediately out of that His office and 
 relation itself.' 
 
4^ Christian piety requires a definite Chris to logy. 
 
 question of ' metaphysics,' as if you should discuss the value of 
 ova-ia and viroa-raa-is in primitive Christian Theology. It is true 
 that such discussions will carry you beyond the region of Scrip- 
 ture terminology ; but, at least to a sober and thoughtful mind, 
 can it really matter whether a term, such as ' Trinity,' be or be 
 not in Scripture, if the area of thought which it covers be 
 identical with that contained in the Scripture statements ^ ] And, 
 to undervalue those portions of truth which cannot be made 
 rhetorically or privately available to excite religious feeling, is to 
 accept a principle which, in the long run, is destructive of the 
 Faith. In Germany, Spener the Pietist held no mean place 
 among the intellectual ancestors of Paulus and of Strauss. In 
 England, a gifted intellect has traced the ^ phases ' of its progres- 
 sive disbelief ; and if, in its downward course, it has gone so far 
 as to deny that Jesus Christ was even a morally righteous Man, 
 its starting-point was as nearly as possible that of the earnest 
 but shortsighted piety, which imagines that it can dare actively 
 to exercise thought on the Christian Eevelation, and withal to 
 ignore those ripe decisions which we owe to the illuminated 
 mind of Primitive Christendom. 
 
 There is no question between us, my brethren, as to the 
 supreme importance of a personal understanding and contract 
 between the single soul and the Eternal Being Who made and 
 Who has redeemed it. But this understanding must depend 
 upon ascertained Truths, foremost among which is that of the 
 Godhead of Jesus Christ. And in these lectures an attempt will 
 be made to lay bare and to re-assert some few of the bases upon 
 which that cardinal Truth itself reposes in the consciousness of 
 the Church, and to kindle perchance, in some souls, a fresh sense 
 of its unspeakable importance. It will be our object to examine 
 such anticipations of this doctrine as are found in the Old Testa- 
 ment P, to note how it is implied in the work of Jesus Christ % 
 and how inseparable it is from His recorded Consciousness of 
 His Personality and Mission r, to trace its distinct, although 
 varying assertion in the writings of His great Apostles s, and in 
 the earliest ages of His Church*, and finally to shew how in- 
 timate and important are its relations to all that is dearest to 
 the heart and faith of a Christian ^. 
 
 o Sum. Th. i». qu. 29. a. 3. Waterland, Works, iii. 652. Importance of 
 Doctrine of H. Trin. c. 7. • The sense of Scripture is Scripture.' Dr. Mill's 
 Letter on Dr. Hampden's Bampton Lectures, p. 14. See Lect. VIII. 
 p Lect. II. 1 Lect. III. ' Lect. IV. 
 
 B Lect. V, VI. t Lect. VII. « Lect. VIII. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Warnings and hopes, 43 
 
 It must be a ground of rejoicing that throughout these lec- 
 tures we shall keep thus close to the Sacred Person of our Lord 
 Himself. And, if indeed, none of us as yet believed in His 
 Godhead, it might be an impertinence on the part of the preacher 
 to suggest any spiritual advice which takes for granted the 
 conclusion of his argument. But you who, thank God, are 
 Christians by living conviction as well as by baptismal privilege, 
 must already possess too strong and too clear a faith in the 
 truth before us, to be in any sense dependent on the success or 
 the failure of a feeble human effort to exhibit it. You at least 
 will endeavour, as we proceed, to bear steadily in mind, that He 
 of Whom we speak and think is no mere tale or portrait of the 
 ancient world, no dead abstraction of modern or of mediaeval 
 thought, but a living Being, Who is an observant witness alike 
 of the words spoken in His Name and of the mental and moral 
 response which they elicit. If we must needs pass in review the 
 erring thoughts and words of men, let us be sure that our final 
 object is not a criticism of error, but the clearer apprehension 
 and possession of truth. They who believe, may by reason of 
 the very loyalty and fervour of their devotion, so anxiously and 
 eagerly watch the fleeting, earth-born mists which for a moment 
 have threatened to veil the Face of the Sun of Eighteousness, as 
 to forget that the true weal and safety of the soul is only assured 
 while her eye is persistently fixed on His imperishable glory. 
 They who have known the aching misery of earnest doubt, may 
 perchance be encouraged, like the once sceptical Apostle, to 
 probe the wounds with which from age to age error has lacerated 
 Christ's sacred form, and thus to draw from a nearer contact 
 with the Divine Redeemer the springs of a fresh and deathless 
 faith, that shall win and OAvn in Him to all eternity the 
 unclouded Presence of its Lord and God. 
 
 I] /^y^^ 
 
LECTUEE 11. 
 
 ANTICIPATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE IN THE OLD 
 TESTAMENT. 
 
 The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through 
 faith, preached before the Gospel unto AhralCam, saying, In thee shall 
 all nations he blessed. — Gal. iii. 8. 
 
 If we endeavour to discover how often, and by what modes 
 of statement, such a doctrine as that of our Lord's Divinity 
 is anticipated in the Old Testament, our conclusion will be 
 materially affected by the belief which we entertain respecting 
 the nature and the structure of Scripture itself. At first sight, 
 and judged by an ordinary literary estimate, the Bible presents 
 an appearance of being merely a large collection of hetero- 
 geneous writings. Historical records, ranging over many 
 centuries, biographies, dialogues, anecdotes, catalogues of moral 
 maxims, and accounts of social experiences, poetry, the most 
 touchingly plaintive and the most buoyantly triumphant, pre- 
 dictions, exhortations, warnings, varying in style, in authorship, 
 in date, in dialect, are thrown, as it seems, somewhat arbitrarily 
 into a single volume. No stronger tie is supposed to have 
 bound together materials so various and so ill-assorted, than 
 the interested or the too credulous industry of some clerical 
 caste in a distant antiquity, or at best than such uniformity 
 in the general type of thought and feeliug as may naturally 
 be expected to characterize the literature of a nation or of 
 a race. But beneath the differences of style, of language, and 
 of method, which are undeniably prominent in the Sacred 
 Books, and which appear so entirely to absorb the attention 
 of a merely literary observer, a deeper insight will discover in 
 Scripture such manifest unity of drift and purpose, both moral 
 and intellectual, as to imply the continuous action of a Single 
 Mind. To this unity Scripture itself bears witness, and 
 nowhere more emphatically than in the text before us. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Principle of an Organic Unity in Holy Scripture, 45 
 
 Observe that St. Paul does not treat the Old Testament 
 as being to liim what Hesiod, for instance, became to the 
 later Greek world. He does not regard it as a great reperto- 
 rium or storehouse of quotations, which might be accidentally 
 or fancifully employed to illustrate the events or the theories 
 of a later age, and to which accordingly he had recourse for 
 purposes of literary ornamentation. On the contrary, St. Paul's 
 is the exact inverse of this point of view. According to 
 St. Paul, the great doctrines and events of the Gospel dis- 
 pensation were directly anticipated in the Old Testament, If 
 the sense of the Old Testament became patent in the New, 
 it was because the New Testament was already latent in the 
 Old ^. Ylpo'ihovda d€ rj ypa<pr} on €K nia-Tecos diKatoT. ra eSptj 6 9e6y, 
 7rpo€vr}yye\L(TaTo to) 'A/Spaa/x. Scripture is thus boldly identified 
 with the Mind Which inspires it ; Scripture is a living 
 Providence. The Promise to Abraham anticipates the work of 
 the Apostle ; the earliest of the Books of Moses determines 
 the argument of the Epistle to the Galatians. Such a position 
 is only intelligible when placed in the light of a belief in the 
 fundamental Unity of all Kevelation, underlying, and strictly 
 compatible with its superficial variety. And this true, internal 
 Unity of Scripture, even when the exact canonical limits of 
 Scripture were still unfixed, was a common article of belief 
 to all Christian antiquity. It was common ground to the 
 sub-apostolic and to the Nicene age ; to the East and to the 
 West; to the School of Antioch and to the School of Alex- 
 andria ; to mystical interpreters like St. Ambrose, and to lite- 
 ralists like St. Chrysostom ; to cold reasoners, such as Theodoret, 
 and to fervid poets such as Ephrem the Syrian ; to those who, 
 with Origen, conceded much to reason, and to those who, 
 with St. Cyril or St. Leo, claimed much for faith. Nay, this 
 belief in the organic oneness of Scripture was not merely 
 shared by schools and writers of divergent tendencies within 
 the Church ; it was shared by the Church herself with her 
 most vehement heretical opponents. Between St. Athanasius 
 and the Arians there was no question as to the relevancy of 
 the reference in the book of Proverbs^ to the pre-existent 
 Person of our Lord, although there was a vital difference 
 between them as to the true sense and force of that reference. 
 Scripture was believed to contain an harmonious and integral . 
 
 « St. Aug. Qusest. in Ex. qu. 73 : 'quan:iuam et in Vetere Novum lateat, 
 et in Novo Vetus pateat.' ^ Prov. viii. 22. 
 
 "1 
 
46 Organic Unity of Scripture consistent with its 
 
 body of Sacred Truth, and each part of that body was treated 
 as being more or less directly, more or less ascertainably, 
 in correspondence with the rest. This belief expressed itself 
 in the world-wide practice of quoting from any one book 
 of Scripture in illustration of the mind of any other book. 
 Instead of illustrating the sense of each writer only from 
 other passages in his own works, the existence of a sense common 
 to all the Sacred Writers was recognised, and each writer 
 was accordingly interpreted by the language of the others. 
 To a modern naturalistic critic it might seem a culpable, 
 or at least an undiscriminating procedure, when a Father 
 illustrates the Apostolical Epistles by a reference to the Pen- 
 tateuch, or even one Evangelist by another, or the dogmatic 
 sense of St. Paul by that of St, John. And unquestionably, 
 in a merely human literature, such attempts at illustration 
 would be misleading. The different intellectual horizons, modes 
 of thought, shades and turns of feeling, which constitute the 
 peculiarities of different writers, debar us from ascertaining, 
 under ordinary circumstances, the exact sense of any one 
 writer, except from himself. In an uninspired literature, such 
 as the Greek or the English, it would be absurd to appeal 
 to a primitive annalist or poet with a view to determining 
 the meaning of an author of some later age. We do not 
 suppose that Hesiod 'foresaw' the political doctrines of 
 Thucydides, or the moral speculations of Aristotle. We do 
 not expect to find in Chaucer or in Clarendon a clue to or 
 a forecast of the true sense of Macaulay or of Tennyson. 
 No one has ever imagined that either the Greek or the English 
 literature is a whole in such sense that any common purpose 
 runs persistently throughout it, or that we can presume upon 
 the existence of a common responsibility to some one line 
 of thought in the several authors who have created it, or 
 that each portion is under any kind of obligation to be in 
 some profound moral and intellectual conformity with the rest. 
 But the Church of Christ has ever believed her Bible to be 
 throughout and so emphatically the handiwork of the Eternal 
 Spirit, that it is no absurdity in Christians to cite Moses 
 as foreshadowing the teaching of St. Paul and of St. John. 
 According to the tenor of Christian belief, Moses, St. Paul, 
 and St. John are severally regarded as free yet docile organs 
 of One Infallible Intelligence, Who places them at different 
 points along the line of His action in human history; Who 
 through them and others, as the ages pass before Him, slowly 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
character as a record of successive Revelations, 47 
 
 unveils His Mind; Who anticipates the fulness of later reve- 
 lations by the hints contained in His earlier disclosures ; Who 
 in the compass of His boundless Wisdom *reacheth from one 
 end to another mightily, and sweetly ordereth all things c.' 
 
 Such a belief in the organic unity of Scripture is not fatal 
 to a recognition of those diiFerences between its several portions, 
 upon which some modern critics would lay an exaggerated 
 emphasis. When St. Paul recognises an organic connection 
 between the distant extremities of the records of Revelation, 
 he does not debar himself from recognising diiFerences in form, 
 in matter, in immediate purpose, which part the Law of Moses 
 from the writings of the New Testament <^. The unlikeness 
 which subsists between the head and the lower limbs of an 
 animal is not fatal to their common share in its nervous 
 system and in the circulation of its blood. Nay more, this 
 oneness of Scripture is a truth compatible with the existence 
 within its compass of different measures and levels of Eevela- 
 tion. The unity of consciousness in a human life is not 
 forfeited by growth of knowledge, or by difference of circum- 
 stances, or by varieties of experience. Novatian compares 
 the unfolding of the Mind of God in Revelation to the gradual 
 breaking of the dawn, attempered as it is to the human eye, 
 which after long hours of darkness could not endure a sudden 
 outflash of noonday sunlight ®. The Fathers trace in detail the 
 application of this principle to successive revelations in Scrip- 
 ture, first, of the absolute Unity of God, and afterwards, of 
 Persons internal to that Unity f. The Sermon on the Mount 
 contrasts its own higher moral level with that of the earlier 
 dispensation Z. Ethically and dogmatically the New Testament 
 is an advance upon the Old, yet both are within the Unity 
 of Inspiration. Different degrees of light do not imply any 
 intrinsic contrariety. If the Epistle to the Galatians points 
 out the moral incapacity of the Mosaic Law, the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews teaches us its typical and unfailing significance. 
 If Christian converts from Judaism had been * called out of 
 
 *5 Wisd. viii. i. 
 
 ^ e. g. cf. Gal. iii. 23-25 ; Rom. x. 4 ; Heb. viii. 13. 
 
 ® Novatian, de Trin. c. 26 : * Gradatim enim et per incrementa fragilitas 
 humana nutriri debet, . . periculosa enim sunt quae magna sunt, si repentina 
 sunt. Nam etiam lux solis subita post tenebras splendore nimio insuetis 
 oculis non ostendet diem, sed potius faciet csecitatem.' 
 
 f St. Epiphanius, Hseres. 74. 10 ; St. Gregor. Nazianzen, Orat. xxxi. n. 26. 
 Cf. Kuhn, Dogmatik, Band ii. p. 5. 
 
 « St. Matt. V. 21, 22, 27, 28, 33, 34; comp. Ibid. xii. 5-8. 
 
 "J 
 
48 Earliest hints respecting the Divine Natttre, 
 
 darkness into God's marvellous light ^,' yet still * whatsoever 
 things were written aforetime,' in the Jewish Scriptures, * were 
 written for the learning' of Christians ^ 
 
 You will have anticipated, my brethren, the bearing of these 
 remarks upon the question before us. There are explicit refer- 
 ences to the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity in the Old Testa- 
 ment, which w^e can only deny by discrediting the historical 
 value of the documents which contain them. But there are also 
 occult references to this doctrine which we are not likely to 
 detect, unless, while seeking them, we are furnished with an 
 exegetical principle, such as was that of the organic unity of 
 Scripture, as understood by the Ancient Church. The geologist 
 can inform us from surface indications, where and at what depths 
 to find the coal-field or the granite \ but we can all recognise 
 granite or coal when we see them in the sunlight. Let us then 
 first place ourselves under the guidance of the great minds of 
 antiquity, with a view to discovering some of those more hidden 
 allusions to the doctrine which are found in earlier portions of 
 the Old Testament Scriptures ; and let us afterwards trace, how- 
 ever hastily, those clearer intimations of it which abound in the 
 later Messianic prophecies, and which are indeed so plain, that 
 * whoso runs may read them.' 
 
 I. (a) At the beginning of the Book of Genesis there appear 
 to be intimations of the existence of a plurality of Persons 
 within the One Essence of God. It is indeed somewhat remark- 
 able that the full significance of the two words J, by which Moses 
 describes the primal creative act of God, was not insisted upon 
 by the primitive Church teachers. It attracted attention in the 
 middle ages, and it was more particularly noticed after the re- 
 vival of Hebrew Letters. When Moses is describing this Divine 
 action, he joins a singular verb to a plural noun. Language, it 
 would seem, thus submits to a violent anomaly, that she may the 
 better hint at the mystery of Several Powers or Persons, Who 
 not merely act together, but Who constitute a Single Agent. 
 We are indeed told that this Name of God, Elohim, was borrowed 
 from Polytheistic sources, that it was retained in its plural form 
 in order to express majesty or magnificence, and that it was 
 then united to singular verbs and adjectives in order to 
 make it do the work of a Monotheistic CreedK But on the 
 other hand, it is confessed on all sides that the promulgation 
 and protection of a belief in the Unity of God was the central 
 
 b I St. Pet. ii. 9. i Rom. xv. 4. J Gen. i .1, D^n^^ t^in. 
 
 k Herder, Geist der Hebr. PoUsie, Bd. i. p. 48. 
 
 [legt. 
 
The Inner Life of God adtmibrated in Genesis, 49 
 
 and dominant object of the Mosaic literature and of the Mosaic 
 legislation. Surely such an object would not have been im- 
 perilled for no higher purpose than that of amplification. There 
 must have been a truth at stake which demanded the risk. The 
 Hebrew language could have described God by singular forms 
 such as El, Eloah, and no question would have been raised as to 
 the strictly Monotheistic force of those words. The Hebrew 
 language might have ^amplified' the idea of God thus conveyed 
 by less dangerous processes than the employment of a plural 
 form. Would it not have done so, unless the plural form had 
 been really necessary, in order to hint at the complex mystery 
 of God's inner Life, until that mystery should be more clearly 
 unveiled by the explicit Eevelations of a later day] The analo- 
 gies of the language may indeed prove that the plural form of 
 the word had a majestic force; but the risk of misunderstanding 
 would surely have counterbalanced this motive for using it, un- 
 less a vital need had demanded its retention. Nor will the 
 theory that the plural noun is merely expressive of majesty in 
 tDTib^ b^^l, avail to account for the plural verb in the words, 
 ' Let Us make man l.' In these words, which precede the final 
 act and climax of the Creation, the early Fathers detected a 
 clear intimation of a Plurality of Persons in the Godhead i^. 
 The supposition that in these words a Single Person is in a 
 dramatic colloquy with Himself, is less reasonable than the 
 opinion that a Divine Speaker is addressing a multitude of in- 
 ferior beings, such as the Angels. But apart from other con- 
 siderations, we may well ask, what would be the ^ likeness ' or 
 ' image ' common to God and to the Angels, in which man was to 
 be created ^ % or why should created essences such as the Angels 
 be invited to take part in a Creative Act at all % Each of the 
 foregoing explanations is really weighted with greater difficulties 
 than the Patristic doctrine, to the effect that the verb, * Let Us 
 make,' points to a Plurality of Persons within the Unity of the 
 One Agent, while the '■ Likeness,' common to All These Persons 
 and itself One, suggests very pointedly Their participation in an 
 Undivided Nature. And in such sayings as * Behold the man 
 
 1 Gen i. 26. 
 
 ^ Cf. the references in Petavius, de Trinitate, ii. 7. 6. 
 
 "^ * Non raro etiam veteres recentioresque interpretes, ut D^nbi^ de angelis 
 intelligerent, theologicis potius quam exegeticis argumentis permoti esse 
 videnter ; cf. . . . Gen. i. 26, 27, ex quo Samaritan! cum Abenezra 
 hominem ad angelorum, non ad Dei, similitudinem creatum esse probant,* 
 Gesenius, Thesaur. in voc. DWi^, 2. 
 11] E 
 
50 A Threefold Personality in God, suggested by 
 
 is become like One of Us o/ used with reference to the Fall, or 
 * Go to ; let Us go down and there confound their language P,' 
 uttered on the eve of the dispersion of Babel, it is clear that an 
 equality of rank is distinctly assumed between the Speaker and 
 Those Whom He is addressing. The only adequate alternative 
 to that interpretation of these texts which is furnished by the 
 Trinitarian doctrine, and which sees in them a preparation for 
 the disclosures of a later age, is the violent supposition of some 
 kind of pre-Mosaic Olympus, the many deities of which are upon 
 a level of strict equality with each other q. But if this supposi- 
 tion be admitted, how are we to account for the presence of such 
 language in the Pentateuch at all ] How can a people, con- 
 fessedly religious and intelligent, such as were the Hebrews, 
 have thus stultified their whole religious history and literature, 
 by welcoming or retaining, in a document of the highest possible 
 authority, a nomenclature which contained so explicit a denial of 
 the first Article of the Hebrew Faith % 
 
 The true sense of the comparatively indeterminate language 
 which occurs at the beginning of Genesis, is more fully explained 
 by the Priestly Blessing which we find to be prescribed for ritual 
 usage in the Book of Numbers r. This blessing is spoken of as a 
 putting the Name of God^, that is to say, a symbol unveiling 
 His Nature t, upon the children of Israel. Here then we dis- 
 cover a distinct limit to the number of the Persons Who are 
 hinted at in Genesis, as being internal to the Unity of God. 
 The Priest is to repeat the Most Holy Name Three times. The 
 Hebrew accentuation, whatever be its date, shews that the Jews 
 themselves saw in this repetition the declaration of a mystery in 
 the Divine Nature. Unless such a repetition had been designed 
 to secure the assertion of some important truth, a single mention 
 of the Sacred Name would have been more natural in a system, 
 the object of which was to impress belief in the Divine Unity 
 upon an entire people. This significant repetition, suggesting 
 
 o Gen. iii. 22. "isrso fn«3. LXX. ws th e'l ritxoov. 
 
 P Gen. xi. 7. 
 
 « Klose, De polytheism! vestigiis apud Hebrseos ante Mosen, Getting. 1830, 
 referred to by Kuhn, Dogmatik, Bd. ii. p. 10. 
 
 r Num. vi. 23-26. s Ibid. ver. 27. 
 
 * ' Nach der biblischen Anschauung und inbesondere des A.T. ist iiberhaupt 
 der Zusammenhang zwisohen Name und Sache ein sehr enger, und ein ganz 
 anderer als im modernen Bewusstein, wo sich der Name meist zu einem bloss 
 conventionellen Zeichen abgeschwacht hat ; der Name ist die Sache selbst, 
 sofern diese in die Erscheinung tritt und erkannt wird, der ins Wort gefasste 
 Ausdruck des Wesens.* Konig, Theologie der Psalmen, p. 266. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
the Priestly Blessing and by the Vision of Isaiah, 51 
 
 without distinctly asserting a Trinity in the Being of God, did 
 its work in the mind of Israel. It is impossible not to be struck 
 with the recurrence of the Threefold rhythm of prayer or praise, 
 again and again, in the Psalter^. Again and again the poetical 
 parallelism is sacrificed to the practical and theological object of 
 making the sacred songs of Israel contain an exact acknowledg- 
 ment of that inner law of God's Nature, which had been 
 shadowed out in the Pentateuch. And to omit traces of this 
 influence of the priestly blessing which are discoverable in Jere- 
 miah and Ezekiel^, let us observe the crowning significance of 
 the vision of Isaiah 7. In that adoration of the Most Holy 
 Three, Who yet are One^, by the veiled and mysterious Sera- 
 phim; in that deep self-abasement and misery of the Prophet, 
 who, though a man of unclean lips, had yet seen with his eyes 
 the King, the Lord of Hosts^; in that last enquiry on the part 
 of the Divine Speaker, the very terms of which reveal Him as 
 One and yet more than One^, — what a flood of almost Gospel 
 lights is poured upon the intelligence of the elder Church ! If 
 we cannot altogether assert with the opponents of the Lutheran 
 Calixtus, that the doctrine of the Trinity is so clearly contained 
 in the Old Testament as to admit of being deduced from it with- 
 out the aid of the Apostles and Evangelists; enough at least has 
 been said to shew that the Old Testament presents us with a 
 doctrine of the Divine Unity which is very far removed from 
 the hard and sterile Monotheism of the Koran. Within the 
 Uncreated and Unapproachable Essence, Israel could plainly 
 distinguish the shadows of a Truth which we Christians fully 
 express at this hour, when we * acknowledge the glory of the 
 Eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty worship 
 the Unity.' 
 
 (3) From these adumbrations of Personal Distinctions within 
 the Being of God, we pass naturally to consider that series of 
 remarkable apparitions which are commonly known as the Theo- 
 phanies, and which form so prominent a feature in the early 
 history of the Old Testament Scriptures. When we are told 
 that God spoke to our fallen parents in Paradise <^, and appeared 
 
 ^ Cf. Ps. xxix. 4, 5, and 7, 8 ; xcvi. I, 2, and 7 8 ; cxv. 9, 10, 11 ; cxviii. 
 2-4, and 10-12, and 15, 16. 
 
 X On this subject, see Dr.Pusey's Letter to the Bishop of London, p. 131. 
 
 y Isaiah vi. 2-8. ^ Ibid. ver. 3. a Ibid. ver. 5. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 8. Heb. i. 1. 
 
 ^ Gen. iii. 8 : ' They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the 
 garden in the cool of the day.' 
 11] E 2 
 
52 The Theophanies, 
 
 to Abram in his ninety-ninth year e, there is no distinct intima- 
 tion of the mode of the Divine manifestation. But when ^Je- 
 hovah appeared' to the gi'eat Patriarch by the oak of Mamre^ 
 Abraham * lift up his eyes and looked, and lo, Three Men stood 
 by himg.' Abraham bows himself to the ground; he offers 
 hospitality; he waits by his Visitors under the tree, and they 
 eat^. One of the Three is the spokesman ; he appears to bear 
 the Sacred Name Jehovah i; he is seemingly distinguished from 
 the ' two angels ' who went first to Sodomi ; he promises that 
 the aged Sarah shall have a son, and that * all the nations of the 
 earth shall be blessed in Abraham k.' With him Abraham 
 intercedes for Sodom^; by him judgment is afterwards executed 
 upon the guilty city. When it is said that 'Jehovah rained 
 upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah 
 out of heaven"^,' a sharp distinction is established between a 
 visible and an Invisible Person, each bearing the Most Holy 
 Name. This distinction introduces us to the Mosaic and later 
 representations of that very exalted and mysterious being, the 
 mrp it^te or Angel of the Lord. The Angel of the Lord is cer- 
 tainly distinguished from Jehovah ; yet the names by which he 
 is called, the powers which he assumes to wield, the honour 
 which is paid to him, shew that in him there was at least a 
 special Presence of God. He seems to speak sometimes in his 
 own name, and sometimes as if he were not a created person- 
 ality, but only a veil or organ of the Higher Nature That spoke 
 and acted through him. Thus he assures Hagar, as if speaking 
 in the character of an ambassador from God, that ' the Lord had 
 heard her affliction".' Yet he promises her, ' I will multiply thy 
 seed exceedingly o,' and she in return ' called the Name of the 
 Lord that spake unto her. Thou God seest me p.' He arrests 
 Abraham's arm, when the Patriarch is on the point of carrying 
 out God's bidding by offering Isaac as a sacrificed ; yet he asso- 
 ciates himself with Him from Whom 'Abraham had not with- 
 held his son, his only son.' He accepts for himself Abraham's 
 obedience as rendered to God, and he subsequently at a second 
 appearance adds the promise, ' In thy seed shall all the nations of 
 
 ® Gen. xvii. 1-3 : * The Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I 
 am the Almighty God. . . And Abram fell on his face: and God talked 
 with him.' * Ibid, xviii. i. 
 
 » Ibid. ver. 2. t Ibid. ver. 8. ^ Ibid. ver. 17. 
 
 J Compare Gen. xviii. 22 and xix. I. LXX. liK^ov Se ol 5uo ayycXoi. 
 k Gen. xviii. 10, l8. ^ Ibid. vers. 23-33, ^ Ibid. xix. 24. 
 
 » Ibid. xvi. II. o Ibid. ver. 10. P Ibid. ver. 13. 
 
 <i Ibid. xxii. 11, 12. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Theophanies, ^^ 
 
 the earth be blessed ; because thou hast obeyed My voice i".' He 
 appears to Jacob in a dream, he announces himself as ' the God 
 of Bethel, where thou anointedst the pillar, and where thou 
 vowedst a vow unto Me^.' Thus he was * the Lord ' who in 
 Jacob's vision at Bethel had stood above the ladder and said, ' I 
 am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac*.' 
 He was, as it seems, the Chief of that angel-host whom Jacob 
 met at Mahanaim^ ; with him Jacob wrestled for a blessing at 
 Peniel; of him Jacob says, ^I have seen God face to face, and 
 my life is preserved/ When blessing the sons of Joseph, the 
 dying Patriarch invokes not only ' the God Which fed me all my 
 life long unto this day,' but also ^ the Angel which redeemed me 
 from all evil^.' In the desert of Midian, the Angel of the Lord 
 appears to Moses ' in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.' 
 The bush remains miraculously unconsumedy. ' Jehovah ' sees 
 that Moses turns aside to see, and ^ Elohim ' calls to Moses out 
 of the midst of the bush z. The very ground on which Moses 
 stands is holy ; and the Lawgiver hides his face, ^ for he was 
 afraid to look upon God a.' The Speaker from the midst of the 
 bush announces Himself as the God of Abraham, the God of 
 Isaac, and the God of Jacob ^. His are the Mercy, the Wisdom, 
 the Providence, the Power, the Authority of the Most High^ ; 
 nay, all the Divine attributes c. When the children of Israel are 
 making their escape from Egypt, the Angel of the Lord leads 
 them j in the hour of danger he places himself between the camp 
 of Israel and the host of Pharaoh ^l How deeply Israel felt the 
 value of his protecting care, we may learn from the terms of the 
 message to the King of Edom^. God promises that the Angel 
 shall keep Israel in the way, and bring the people to Canaan ^ ; 
 his presence is a guarantee that the Amorites and other idola- 
 trous races shall be cut offg. Israel is to obey this Angel, and 
 to provoke him not ; for the Holy * Name is in him h.' Even 
 after the sin of the Golden Calf, the promised guardianship of 
 the Angel is not forfeited ; while a distinction is clearly drawn 
 between the Angel and Jehovah Himself i. Yet the Angel is 
 
 ' Gen. xxii. i8. " Ibid. xxxi. ii, 13. * Ibid, xxviii. 13. 
 
 "^ Ibid, xxxii. i. * Ibid, xlviii. 15, 16. y Exod. iii. i, 2. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 4. * Ibid. ver. 6. ^ Ibid. vers. 7-14. 
 ^ Ibid. vers. 14-16. ^ Exod. xiv. 19. « Num. xx. 16. 
 
 ^ Exod. xxiii. 20 ; compare xxxii. 34. 
 K Ibid, xxiii. 23 ; cf! Joshua v. 13-15. 
 ^ Exod. xxiii. 21, inpi ^qu? '3. 
 
 * Ibid, xxxiii. 2, 3 : * I will send an angel before thee ... for T will not 
 go up in the midst of thee ; for thou art a stiff-necked people.' 
 
54 The Theophanies. 
 
 expressly called the Angel of God's Presence^ j he fully represents 
 God. God must in some way have been present in him. No 
 merely created being, speaking and acting in his own right, 
 could have spoken to men, or have allowed men to act towards 
 himself, as did the Angel of the Lord. Thus he withstands 
 Balaam, on his faithless errand, and bids him go with the mes- 
 sengers of Balak ; but adds, * Only the word that I shall speak 
 unto thee, that thou shalt speak.' As ^ Captain of the host of 
 the Lord,' he appears to Joshua in the plain of Jericho. Joshua 
 worships God in him 1 ; and the Angel asks of the conqueror of 
 Canaan the same tokens of reverence as had been exacted from 
 Moses D^. Besides the reference in the Song of Deborah "^ to the 
 curse pronounced against Meroz by the Angel of the Lord, the 
 Book of Judges contains accounts of three appearances, in each 
 of which we are scarcely sensible of the action of a created per- 
 sonality, so completely is the language and bearing that of the 
 Higher Nature present in the Angel. At Bochim he expostu- 
 lates with the assembled people for their breach of the covenant 
 in failing to exterminate the Canaanites. God speaks by him as 
 in His own Name ; He refers to the covenant which He had 
 made with Israel, and to His bringing the people out of Egypt ; 
 He declares that, on account of their disobedience He will not 
 drive the heathen nations out of the land ». In the account of his 
 appearance to Gideon, the Angel is called sometimes the Angel 
 of the Lord, sometimes the Lord, or Jehovah. He bids Gideon 
 attack the Midianite oppressors of Israel, and adds the promise, 
 *I will be with thee.' Gideon places an offering before the 
 Angel, that he may, if he wills, manifest his character by some 
 sign. The Angel touches the offering with the end of his staff, 
 whereupon fire rises up out of the rock and consumes the offering. 
 The Angel disappears, and Gideon fears that he will die because 
 he has seen Hhe Angel of the Lord face to face P.* When the 
 wife of Manoah is reporting the Angel's first appearance to 
 herself, she says that ^ A man of God came ' to her, '• and his 
 countenance was like the countenance of the Angel of God, very 
 terrible.' She thus speaks of the Angel as of a Being already 
 
 *^ Exod. xxxiii. 14 ; compare Isaiah Ixiii. 9. 
 
 1 la Josh. vi. 2 the captain of the Lord's Host (cf. ch. v. 14) appears to 
 be called Jehovah. But c£ Mill, Myth. Int. p. 354. 
 
 ™ Josh. V. 13-15; Exod. iii. 53 compare Exod. xxiii. 23. 
 
 " Judges V. 23. " Ibid. ii. 1-5. See Keil, Comm. in loc. 
 
 P Judg. vi. 11-22. Keil, Comm. in loc. See Hengstenberg, Christol. 
 O. Test., vol. iv. append, iii. p. 292. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Who was the 'Angel of the Lord? ' 55 
 
 known to Israel. At his second appearance the Angel bids 
 Manoah, who ^ knew not that he was an Angel of the Lord,' and 
 offered him common food, to offer sacrifice unto the Lord. The 
 Angel refuses to disclose his Name, which is ' wonderful q.' 
 When Manoah offers a kid with a meat-offering upon a rock 
 unto the Lord, the Angel mounts visibly up to heaven in the 
 flame of the sacrifice. Like Gideon, Manoah fears death after 
 such near contact with so exalted a Being of the other world. 
 * We shall surely die,' he exclaims to his wife, * because we have 
 seen God^^.' 
 
 But you ask. Who was this Angel ? The Jewish interpreters 
 vary in their explanations s. The earliest Fathers answer with 
 general unanimity that he was the Word or Son of God Himself. 
 For example, in the Dialogue with Trypho, St. Justin proves 
 against his Jewish opponent, that God did not appear to Abra- 
 ham by the oak of Mamre, hefore the appearance of the ^ three 
 men,' but that He was One of the Three *. Trypho admits this, 
 but he objects that it did not prove that there was any God 
 besides Him Who had appeared to the Patriarchs. Justin re- 
 plies that a Divine Being, personally although not substantially 
 distinct from the supreme God, is clearly implied in the state- 
 ment that * the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah, 
 brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven^.' Trypho 
 yields the point. Here it is plain that St. Justin did not sup- 
 pose that a created being was called God on account of his 
 mission ; St. Justin believes that One Who was of the substance 
 of God appeared to Abraham ^. Again, the Fathers of the first 
 Synod at Antioch, in the letter which was sent to Paulus of 
 Samosata before his deposition, state that the * Angel of the 
 
 I ""^^bD, cf. Is. ix. 6. 
 
 ' Judges xiii. 6-22. Cf. Keil, Comm. in loc. Hengst. ubi supra. Vi- 
 tringa de Angelo Sacerdote, obs. vi. 14. 
 
 8 Cf. the authorities quoted by Drach, Lettres d'un Rabbin Converti, 
 Lettre ii. p. 169. On the other side, Abenezra, in Exod. iii. 2. 
 
 * With St. Justin's beUef that the Son and two Angels appeared to Abra- 
 ham, cf. TertulUan. adv. Marc. ii. 27, iii. 9 ; St. Hil. de Trin. iv. 27. That 
 three created Angels appeared to Abraham was the opinion of St. Augustine 
 (De Civ. Dei, x. 8, xvi. 29). St. Ambrose sees in the ' three men ' an adum- 
 bration of the Blessed Trinity : * Tres vidit et unum Dominum appellavit.' 
 De Abraham, i. c. 5 ; Prudent. Apotheosis, 28. This seems to be the sense 
 of the English Church. See First Lesson for Evensong on Trinity Sunday. 
 
 ^ Gen. xix. 24. 
 
 ^ Dial, cum Tryph. § 56, sqq. On the appearance in the burning bush, 
 cf. Ibid. § 59-61 ; cf. too ch. 127. Comp. St. Justin, Apol. i. c. 63. 
 
S6 Opi7iio7i of the earlier Fathers, 
 
 Father being Himself Lord and God, fxeyaXrjs 13ov\tjs ayyeXosy, 
 appeared to Abraham, and to Jacob, and to Moses in the burning 
 bush z.' It is unnecessary to multiply quotations in proof of a 
 fact which is beyond dispute K 
 
 The Arian controversy led to a modification of that estimate 
 of the Theophanies which had prevailed in the earlier Church. 
 The earlier Church teachers had clearly distinguished, as Scripture 
 distinguishes, between the Angel of the Lord, Himself, as they 
 believed, Divine, and the Father. But the Arians endeavoured 
 to widen this personal distinctness into a deeper difference, a 
 difference of Natures. Appealing to the often-assigned ground ^ 
 of the belief respecting the Theophanies which had prevailed in 
 the ante-Nicene Church, the Arians argued that the Son had 
 been seen by the Patriarchs, while the Father had not been seen, 
 and that an Invisible Nature was distinct from and higher than 
 a nature which was cognizable by the senses c. St. Augustine 
 boldly faced this difficulty, and bis great work on the Trinity 
 gave the chief impulse to another current of interpretation in 
 the Church. St. Augustine strenuously insists upon the Scrip- 
 tural truth <i of the Invisibility of God as God^. The Son, 
 
 y This gloss of the LXX. in Is. ix. 6 was a main ground of the early 
 Patristic application of the title of the Angel to God the Son. ' Although 
 Malachi foretells our Lord's coming in the Flesh under the titles of " the 
 Lord," "the Angel," or *' Messenger of the Covenant," (chap. iii. i) there is 
 no proof that He is anywhere spoken of, absolutely as " the Angel," or that 
 His Divine Nature is so entitled.' Dr. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, p. 516, 
 note I. 
 
 2 Mansi, Cone. i. p. 1035. 
 
 a Compare however St. Irenseus adv. Her. iv. 7- § 4 5 Clem. Alex. Paed. i. 7 ; 
 Theophilus ad Autol. ii. 31 ; Constit. Apostol. v. 20; Tertullian. adv. Prax. 
 cap. 13, 14, and 15; St. Cyprian, adv. Judseos, ii. c. 5, 6; St. Cyr. Hieros. 
 Catech. 10 ; St. Hil. de Trin. lib. 4 and 5 ; St. Chrysost. Horn, in Genes. 42, 48; 
 Theodoret, Interr. v. in Exod. (Op. i. p. 121), on Exod. iii. 2. Cf some 
 additional authorities given by P. Vandenbroeck, De Theophaniis, sub Vet. 
 Testamento, p. 17, sqq ; Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. lib. i. c. I. 
 
 b e.g. cf. TertuUian. adv. Marc. ii. c. 27. 
 
 c St. Aug. Serm. vii. n. 4. The Arian criticism ran thus: 'Filius visus est 
 patribus, Pater non est visus : invisibilis autem et visibilis diversa natura est.* 
 
 d St. John i. 18, &c. 
 
 ® ' Ipsa enim natura vel substantia vel essentia, vel quolibet alio nomine 
 appellandum est id ipsum, quod Deus est, quidquid illud est corporaliter videri 
 non potest.' De Trin. ii. c. 18, n. 35. The Scotists, who opposed the general 
 Thomist doctrine to the effect that a created angel was the instrument of the 
 Theophanies, carefully guarded against the ideas that the substance of God 
 could be seen by man in the body, or that the bodily form which they be- 
 lieved to have been assumed was personally united to the Eternal Word, 
 since this was peculiar to the Divine Incarnation. (Scotus in Hb. ii. sent. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
how modified by St. Augustme, 57 
 
 therefore, as being truly God, was by nature as invisible as the 
 Father. If the Son appeared to the Patriarchs, He appeared 
 through the intermediate agency of a created being, who repre- 
 sented Him, and through whom He spoke and acted f. If the 
 Angel who represented Him spoke and acted with a Divine 
 authority, and received Divine honours, we are referred to the 
 force of the general law whereby, in things earthly and heavenly, 
 an ambassador is temporarily put in the place of the Master who 
 accredits him&. But Augustine further warns us against at- 
 tempting to say positively. Which of the Divine Persons mani- 
 fested Himself, in this or that instance, to Patriarchs or Prophets, 
 except where some remarkable indications determine our con- 
 clusion very decisively li. The general doctrine of this great 
 teacher, that the Theophanies were not direct appearances of a 
 Person in the Godhead, but Self-manifestations of God through 
 a created being, had been hinted at by some earlier Fathers i, 
 
 dist. 8.) Scotus explains that the being who assumes a bodily form, need 
 only be ' intrinsecus motor corporis ; nam tunc assumit, id est ad se sumit, 
 quia ad operationes proprias sibi explendas utitur illo sicut instrumento.' 
 (Ibid. Scholion i.) 
 
 f ' Proinde ilia omnia, quae Patribus visa sunt, cum Deus illis secundum 
 suam dispensationem temporibus congruam preesentaretur, per creaturam 
 
 facta esse, manifestum est Sed jam satis quantum existimo . . . 
 
 demonstratum est, . . . quod antiquis patribus nostris ante Incarnationem 
 Salvatoris, cum Deus apparere dicebatur, voces illse ac species corporales per 
 angelos factae sunt, sive ipsis loquentibus vel agentibus aliquid ex person^ 
 Dei, sicut etiam prophetas solere ostendimus, sive assumentibus ex creaturd 
 quod ipsi non essent, ubi Deus figuratb demonstraretur hominibus ; quod 
 genus significationum nee Prophetas omisisse, multis exemplis docet Scrip- 
 tura.' De Trin. iii. Il, n. 22, 27. 
 
 ^ * Sed ait aliquis : cur ergo Scriptum est, Dixit Dominus ad Moysen ; et 
 non potitis. Dixit angelus ad Moysen ? Quia cum verba judicis prceco pro- 
 nuntiat, non scribitur in Gestis, ille prseco dixit ; sed ille judex ; sic etiam 
 loquente prophets sancto, etsi dicamus Propheta dixit, nihil aliud quam 
 Dominum dixisse intelligi volumus. Et si dicamus, Dominus dixit ; pro- 
 phetam non subtrahimus, sed quis per eum dixerit admonemus.* De Trin. iii. 
 c. II, n. 23. 
 
 h 'Nihil aliud, quantum existimo, divinorum sacramentorum modesta et 
 cauta consideratio persuadet, nisi ut temerb non dicamus, Quaenam ex Trini- 
 tate Persona cuilibet Patrum et Prophetarum in aliquo corpore vel simili- 
 tudine cor])oris apparuerit, nisi cum continentia lectionis aliqua probabilia 
 circumponit indicia. . . . Per subjectam creaturam non solum Filium vel 
 Spiritum Sanctum, sed etiam Patrem corporali specie sive similitudine mor- 
 talibus sensibus significationem Sui dare potuisse credendum est.' De Trin. ii. 
 C.18, n. 35. 
 
 i Compare St.Irenaeus adv. Haer. iv. 20, n. 7 and 24. ' Verbum naturaliter 
 quidem invisibile, palpabile in hominibus factum/ Origen (Hom. xvi. in 
 Jerem.) speaking of the vision in Exod. iii. says, * God was here beheld in the 
 Angel/ 
 
 «] 
 
58 Significance of the Theophanies, 
 
 and was insisted on by contemporary and later writers of the 
 highest authority k This explanation has since become the 
 predominant although by no means the exclusive judgment of 
 the Church 1 ; and if it is not unaccompanied by considerable 
 difficulties when we apply it to the sacred text, it certainly 
 seems to relieve us of greater embarrassments than any which it 
 creates ^. 
 
 But whether the ante-Nicene (so to term it) or the Augustinian 
 line of interpretation be adopted with respect to the Theophanies, 
 no sincere believer in the historical trustworthiness of Holy 
 Scripture can mistake the importance of their relation to the 
 doctrine of our Lord's Divinity. If the Theophanies were not, 
 as has been pretended, mythical legends, the natural product of 
 the Jewish mind at a particular stage of its development, but 
 actual matter-of-fact occurrences in the history of ancient Israel, 
 must we not see in them a deep Providential meaning % Whether 
 in them the Word or Son actually appeared, or whether God 
 made a created angel the absolutely perfect exponent of His 
 Thought and Will, do they not point in either case to a purpose 
 in the Divine Mind which would only be realized when man had 
 been admitted to a nearer and more palpable contact with God 
 than was possible under the Patriarchal or Jewish dispensations % 
 Do they not suggest, as their natural climax and explanation, 
 some Personal Self-unveiling of God before the eyes of His 
 creatures % Would not God appear to have been training His 
 people, by this long and mysterious series of communications, at 
 length to recognise and to worship Him when hidden under, and 
 indissolubly one with a created nature % Apart from the specific 
 circumstances which may seem to have explained each Theophany 
 at the time of its taking place, and considering them as a series 
 of phenomena, is there any other account of them so much in 
 
 ^ St. Jerome (ed. Vail.) in Galat. iii. 19 : * Quod in omni Veteri Testa- 
 mento ubi angelus primum visus refertur et postea quasi Deus loquens 
 inducitur, angelus quidem verb ex ministris pluribus quicunque est visus, sed 
 in illo Mediator loquatur. Qui dicit; Ego sum Deus Abraham, etc. Nee 
 mirum si Deus loquatur in angelis, cum etiam per angelos, qui in hominibus 
 sunt, loquatur Deus in prophetis, dicente Zacchari^ : et ait angelus, qui 
 loquebatur in me, ac deinceps inferente ; hsec dicit Deus Omnipotens.' Cf. 
 St. Greg. Magn. Mag. Moral, xxviii. 2 ; St. Athan. Or. iii. c. Arian. § 14. 
 
 ^ The earUer interpretation has been more generally advocated by English 
 divines. P. Vandenbroeck's treatise already referred to shews that it still has 
 adherents in other parts of the Western Church. 
 
 ™ See especially Dr. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, p. 515, note 20 ; p. 516, 
 sqq. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Doctrine of the Kochmah or Wisdom, 59 
 
 harmony with the general scope of Holy Scripture, as that they 
 were successive lessons addressed to the eye and to the ear of 
 ancient piety, in anticipation of a coming Incarnation of 
 God? 
 
 (y) This preparatory service, if we may venture so to term it, 
 which had been rendered to the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity 
 by the Theophanies in the world of sense, was seconded by the 
 upgrowth and development of a belief respecting the Divine 
 Kochmah or Wisdom in the region of inspired ideas. 
 
 I. The * Wisdom' of the Jewish Scriptures is certainly more 
 than a human endowment^, and even, as it would seem, more 
 than an Attribute of God. It may naturally remind us of the 
 Archetypal Ideas of Plato, but the resemblance is scarcely more 
 than superficial. The * Wisdom ' is hinted at in the Book of 
 Job. In a well-known passage of majestic beauty, Job replies to 
 his own question. Where shall the Wisdom o be found % He re- 
 presents Wisdom as it exists in God, and as it is communicated in 
 the highest form to man. In God, * the Wisdom ' is that Eternal 
 Thought, in which the Divine Architect ever beheld His future 
 creation p. In man. Wisdom is seen in moral growth ; it is ' the 
 fear of the Lord,' and * to depart from evil Q.' The Wisdom is 
 here only revealed as underlying, on the one side, the laws of the 
 physical universe, on the other, those of man's moral nature. 
 Certainly as yet, * Wisdom' is not in any way represented as 
 personal ; but we make a great step in passing to the Book of 
 Proverbs. In the Book of Proverbs the Wisdom is co-eternal 
 with Jehovah ; Wisdom assists Him in the work of Creation ; 
 Wisdom reigns, as one specially honoured, in the palace of the 
 King of Heaven ; Wisdom is the adequate object of the eternal 
 joy of God; God possesses Wisdom, Wisdom delights in God. 
 
 n The word HTDDn is, of course, used in this lower sense. It is applied to 
 an inspired skill in making priestly vestments (Exod. xxviii. 3), or sacred 
 furniture generally (Ibid. xxxi. 6 and xxxvi. I, 2) ; to fidelity to known truth 
 (Deut. iv. 6 ; cf. xxxii. 6) ; to great intellectual accomplishments (Dan. i. 17). 
 Solomon was typically D3n : his * Wisdom ' was exhibited in moral pene- 
 tration and judgment (i Kings iii. 28, x. 4, sqq.) ; in the knowledge of many 
 subjects, specially of the works of God in the natural world (Ibid. iv. 33, 34) ; 
 in the knowledge of various poems and maxims, which he had either composed 
 or which he remembered (Ibid. iv. 32 ; Prov. i. i). Wisdom, as communi- 
 cated to men, included sometimes supernatural powers (Dan. v. 11), but 
 specially moral virtue (Ps. xxxvii. 30, li. 6 ; Prov. x. 31) ; and piety to God 
 (Ps. cxi. 10). In God noDnn is higher than any of these; He alone originally 
 possesses It (Job xii. 12, 13, xxviii. 12, sqq.). 
 
 o Job xxviii. 12. HDDnn. p Ibid. vers. 23-27. * Ibid. ver. 28. 
 
6o The ' Wisdo77i ^ m the Hebrew Scriptures, 
 
 * Jehovah (says Wisdom) possessed Me in the beginning of His way, 
 Before His works of old. 
 
 I was set up from everlasting, 
 
 From the beginning, or ever the earth was. 
 
 When there were no depths, I was brought forth ; 
 
 When there were no fountains abounding with water. 
 
 Before the mountains were settled. 
 
 Before the hills was I brought forth : 
 
 While as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, 
 
 Nor the highest part of the dust of the world. 
 
 When He prepared the heavens, I was there : ' 
 
 When He set a compass upon the face of the depth: 
 
 When He established the clouds above : 
 
 When He strengthened the fountains of the deep : 
 
 When He gave to the sea His decree, 
 
 That the waters should not pass His commandment : 
 
 When He appointed the foundations of the earth : 
 
 Then I was by Him, as One brought up with Him : 
 
 And I was daily His Delight, rejoicing always before Him; 
 
 Rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth ; 
 
 And My delights were with the sons of men >•.' 
 
 Are we listening to the language of a real Person or only of a 
 poetic personification % A group of critics defends each hypo- 
 thesis ; and those who maintain the latter, point to the picture 
 of Folly in the succeeding chapter s. But may not a study of 
 that picture lead to a very opposite conclusion % Folly is there 
 no mere abstraction, she is a sinful woman of impure life, * whose 
 guests are in the depths of hell.' The work of Folly is the very 
 work of the Evil One, the real antagonist of the Divine Koch- 
 mah. Folly is the principle of absolute Unwisdom, of consum- 
 mate moral Evil. Folly, by the force of the antithesis, enhances 
 our impression that * the Wisdom ' is personal. The Arians 
 understood the word * which is rendered ' possessed ' in our Eng- 
 lish Bible, to mean * created,' and they thus degraded the Wisdom 
 to the level of a creature. But they did not doubt that this 
 created Wisdom was a real being or person^. Modern critics 
 
 J* Prov. viii. 22-31. For Patristic expositions of this passage, seePetavius, 
 de Trin. ii. i. 
 
 8 Prov. ix. T3-18. 
 
 * The Arians appealed to the LXX. reading e/cTttre (not e/cr^aTo). On 
 Kri^eiv as meaning any kind of production, see Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. lib. ii. 
 c. 6, sec. 8. In a note on Athan. Treatises, ii. 342, Dr. Newman cites Aquila, 
 St. Basil, St. Gregory Nyss. and St. Jerome, for the sense eKT'fjaaro. 
 
 " As Kuhn summarily observes : ' Das war iiberhaupt nicht die Frage in 
 christlichen Alterthum, ob hier von einem Wesen die Rede sei, das war allge- 
 mein anerkannt, sondern von welcher Art, in welchem Yerhaltniss zu Gott 
 es gedacht sei.' Dogmatik, ii. p. 29, note (2). 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
and in the Greek Sapiential Books, 61 
 
 know that if we are to be guided by the clear certain sense of 
 the Hebrew root x we shall read ' possessed ' and not ^ created,' 
 and they admit without difficulty that the Wisdom is uncreated 
 by, and co-eternal with the Lord Jehovah. But they resolve 
 Wisdom into an impersonal and abstract idea or quality. The 
 true interpretation is probably related to these opposite mistakes, 
 as was the Faith of the Church to the conflicting theories of the 
 Arians and the Sabellians. Each error contributes something to 
 the cause of truth ; the more ancient may teach us that the 
 Wisdom is personal ; the more modern, that it is uncreated and 
 co-eternal with God. 
 
 2. But even if it should be thought, that * the personified idea 
 of the Mind of God in Creation,' rather than the presence of ' a 
 distinct Hypostasis y,' is all that can with certainty be discovered 
 in the text of the Book of Proverbs ; yet no one, looking to the 
 contents of those sacred Sapiential Books, which lie outside the 
 precincts of the Hebrew Canon, can well doubt that something 
 more had been inferred by the most active religious thought in 
 the Jewish Church. The Son of Sirach, for instance, opens his 
 great treatise with a dissertation on the source of Wisdom. 
 Wisdom is from all eternity with God ; Wisdom proceeds from 
 God before any finite thing, and is poured out upon all His 
 Works z. But Wisdom, thus ^ created from the beginning before 
 the world,' and having an unfailing existence ^, is bidden by God 
 to make her ' dwelling in Jacob, and her inheritance in Israel b.' 
 Wisdom is thus the prolific mother of all forms of moral beauty ^ ; 
 she is given to all of God's true children ^ ; but she is specially 
 resident in the holy Law, * which Moses commanded for an 
 heritage unto the congregations of Jacob 6.' In that beautiful 
 chapter which contains this passage, Wisdom is conceived of as 
 all-operative, yet as limited by nothing ; as a physical yet also as 
 a spiritual power; as eternal, and yet having definite relations to 
 time ; above all, as perpetually extending the range of her fruitful 
 
 '^ This both in Hebrew and (with one exception) in Arabic. Cf. Gesenius, 
 Thesaurus, in HDp and U^. So, too, the Syr, \ . 1 O . Neither Gen. xiv. 19 
 nor Deut. xxxii. 6 require that tm"^ should be translated 'created,' still less 
 Ps. cxxxix. 13, where it means ' to have rights over.* Gesenius quotes no 
 other examples. The current meaning of the word is ' to acquire * or 
 * possess,' as is proved by its certain sense in the great majority of cases where 
 it is used. 
 
 y So apparently DoUinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. x. part iii, 
 sec. 2. 
 
 * Ecclus. i. i-TO. » Ibid. xxiv. 9. ^ Ibid. vers. 8-13. 
 
 c Ibid. vers. 13-18. ^ Ibid. e Ibid. ver. 23. 
 
6% Identity of the A lexandria7i ' Wisdom ^ 
 
 self-manifestation f. Not to dwell upon language to the same 
 effect in Baruch ?, we may observe tliat in the Book of Wisdom 
 the Sophia is more distinctly personal \ If this Book is less 
 prominently theocratic than Ecclesiasticus, it is even more ex- 
 plicit as to the supreme dignity of Wisdom, as seen in its unique 
 relation to God. Wisdom is a pure stream flowing from the 
 glory of the Almighty i ; Wisdom is that spotless mirror which 
 reflects the operations of God, and upon which He gazes as He 
 works k ; Wisdom is the Brightness of the Everlasting Light 1 j 
 Wisdom is the very Image of the Goodness of God ^. Material 
 symbols are unequal to doing justice to so spiritual an essence : 
 * Wisdom is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order 
 of the stars ; being compared with the light she is found before 
 it ^.' * Wisdom is more moving than any motion : she passeth 
 and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness ^J Her 
 sphere is not merely Palestine, but the world, not this or that 
 age, but the history of humanity. All that is good and true in 
 human thought is due to her ; * in all ages entering into holy 
 souls she maketli them friends of God and prophets P.' Is there 
 not here, in an Alexandrian dress, a precious and vital truth 
 sufficiently familiar to believing Christians % Do we not already 
 seem to catch the accents of those weighty formulsB by which 
 Apostles will presently define the pre-existent glory of their 
 Majestic Lord? Yet are we not steadily continuing, with no 
 very considerable measure of expansion, in that very line of 
 sacred thought, to which the patient servant of God in the 
 desert, and the wisest of kings in Jerusalem, have already, and 
 so authoritatively, introduced us % 
 
 3. The doctrine may be traced at a stage beyond, in the 
 writings of Philo Judseus. We at once observe that its form is 
 altered ; instead of the Wisdom or Sophia we have the Logos or 
 Word. Philo indeed might have justified the change of phrase- 
 ology by an appeal even to the Hebrew Scriptures. In the 
 Hebrew Books, the Word of Jehovah manifests the energy of 
 
 ' Cf. especially Ecclus. xxiv. 5-8, 10-18, 25-28, and i. I4-t7- 
 
 8 Compare *Baruch iii. 14, 15, 29-32, 35, 36, and the remarkable verse 37. 
 
 h Liicke, who holds that in the Book of Proverbs and in Ecclesiasticus 
 there is merely a personification, sees a ' dogmatic hypostatizing ' in Wisd. vii. 
 22, sqq. Cf. too Dahne, Alexandrinische Religionsphilosophie, ii. 134, &c. 
 
 i Wisd. vii. 25. 
 
 k Ibid. 26 : ea-oirrpov aKTjXidcaToi/ ttJs rod @€ov ivepydas. 
 
 1 Ibid, airavyao-fxa (pcorhs ai^lov, compare Heb. i. 3. 
 
 ^ Ibid. eiKwv rTJs oryaOSr-nros rod 0eoD, compare 2 Cor. iv. 4, Col. i. 15. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 29. » Ibid. ver. 24, compare ver. 27. p Ibid. ver. 27. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
with the Logos of Philo Judaeus, 6^ 
 
 God : He creates the heavens^ ; He governs the world'*. Ac- 
 cordingly, among the Palestinian Jews^ the Chaldee paraphrasts 
 almost always represent God as acting, not immediately, but 
 through the mediation of the Memra ^ or Word. In the Greek 
 Sapiential Books, the Word is apparently identical with the 
 Wisdom t ; but the Wisdom is always prominent, the Word is 
 rarely mentioned '^. Yet the Logos of Ecclesiasticus is the 
 organ of creation^', while in the Book of Wisdom the Logos is 
 clearly personified, and is a minister of the Divine Judgment ^, 
 In Philo, however, the Sophia falls into the background y, and 
 
 « Ps. xxxiii. 6. mn^ nn. 
 
 ' Ps. cxlvii. 15 ; Isai. Iv. II. « i>?nQ^O or -nm. 
 
 * Thus in Ecclus. xxiv. 3 the (ro(pia ®€ov uses the language which might 
 be expected of the \6yos Qeov, in saying that she came forth from the Mouth 
 of the Most High ; while in chap. i. 5 we are told expressly that ^9777/ (ro<pias 
 \6yos ®eov. In the Book of Wisdom aocpia is identified on the one side 
 with the ayiov irvevfia TratSeias (chap. i. 4, 5), and the irvev/xa Kvpiov (ver. 7); 
 TTVivixa and aocpioL are united in the expression irvevfj-a (Tocplas {\iL 7; compare 
 ix. 17). On the other side (ro(pia and the \6yos are both instruments of 
 creation (Wisd. ix, i, 2 ; for the irvivfxa, cf. Gen. i. 2, and Ps. xxxiii. 6), 
 they both *come down from heaven' (Ibid. ver. 10, and xviii. 15, and the 
 vpev/Liaj ix. 17), and achieve the deliverance of Israel from Egypt (cf. xviii. 
 1 5 'with X. 15-20). The representation seems to suggest no mere ascription 
 of identical functions to altogether distinct conceptions or Beings, but a 
 real inner essential unity of the Spirit, the Word, and the Wisdom. * Es ist 
 an sich eine und dieselbe gottliche Kraft, die nach aussen wirksam ist, aber es 
 sind verschiedene Beziehungen und Arten dieser Wirksamkeit, wornach sie 
 Wort, Geist, Weisheit Gottes gennant wird.' Kuhn, p. 27. That the 
 irvev/uLa really pointed to a distinct Hypostasis in God became plain only at a 
 later time to the mind of His people. On the relations of the mrr mi, the 
 riD^n, and the mn> *im to each other, see Kuhn, p. 24. 
 
 •^ Kuhn has stated the relation of the 'Wisdom,' * Word/ and 'Spirit' to 
 God and to each other, in the Sapiential Books, as follows : — 'Die Untfer- 
 scheidung Gottes und Seiner OfFenbarung in der Welt ist die Folic, auf der 
 sich ein innerer Unterschied in Gott abspiegelt, der Unterschied Gottes nam- 
 lich von Seinem Worte, Seiner Weisheit. Diese, wiewohl sie zunachst blosse 
 Eigenschaften und somit Sein an Sich seiendes Wesen, oder Krafte und 
 Wirksamkeiten Gottes nach aussen, somit dasselbe Wesen, sofern Es Sich in 
 der Welt manifestirt, ausdriicken, erscheinen sofort tiefer gefasst als etwas fiir 
 sich, unter dem Gesichtspunkt eines eigenen gottlichen Wesens, einer gott- 
 lichen Person. Unter einander verhalten sie sich aber so, dass einerseits 
 Wort und Geist, desgleichen andrerseits Wort und Weisheit Gottes theils 
 unterschieden, theils aber auch wieder wesentlich gleichbedeutend genommen 
 sind, so dass ausser dem Hauptunterschiede Gottes von Seinem Andern noch 
 ein weiterer, der Unterschied dieses Andern von einem Dritten hinzuzukom- 
 men, zugleich aber auch die Identitat des ihn'en (unter Sich und mit Gott) 
 gemeinsamen Wesens angedeutet zu sein scheint.' Lehre von Gottl. 
 Dreieinigkeit, p. 23. 
 
 ' Ecclus. xliii. 26. • * Wisd. xviii. 15. 
 
 y Philo distinguishes between Wisdom and Philosophy: Philosophy or 
 
 "1 
 
64 Double character of the mind of Philo, 
 
 the Logos is the symbol of the general doctrine, for other reasons 
 perhaps, but mainly as a natural result of Philo's profound sym- 
 pathy with Stoic and Platonic thought. If the Book of Wisdom 
 adopts Platonic phraseology, its fundamental ideas are continuous 
 with those of the Hebrew Scriptures 2. Philo, on the contrary, 
 is a hearty Platonist ; his Platonism enters into the very marrow 
 of his thought. It is true that in Philo Platonism and the 
 Jewish Revelation are made to converge. But the process of their 
 attempted assimilation is an awkward and violent one, and it 
 involves the great Alexandrian in much involuntary self-contra- 
 diction. Philo indeed is in perpetual embarrassment between 
 the pressure of his intellectual Hellenic instincts on the one side, 
 and the dictates of his religious conscience as a Jewish believer 
 on the other. He constantly abandons himself to the currents 
 of Greek thought around him, and then he endeavours to set 
 himself right with the Creed of Sinai, by throwing his Greek 
 ideas into Jewish forms. If his Logos is apparently moulded 
 after the pattern of the vovs ^aa-LkiKo^ iv rrj tov A16? cpvaci — the 
 Regal Principle of Intelligence in the Nature of Zeus — with 
 which we meet in the Philebus of Plato a, Philo doubtless would 
 fain be translating and explaining the mn^ in of the Hebrew 
 Canon, in perfect loyalty to the Faith of Israel. The Logos of 
 Philo evidently pre-supposes the Platonic doctrine of Ideas ; but 
 then, with Philo, these Ideas are something more than the 
 models after which creation is fashioned, or than the seals which 
 
 wise living is the slave of Wisdom or Science ; <To<pia is iina'T'fjjULT} Q^tcav koX 
 avdpcairii/cov Koi ruu rovrcov alricov (Cong. Qu. Erud. Grat. § 14, ed. Mangey, 
 torn. i. p. 530). Philo explains Exod. xxiv. 6 allegorically, as the basis of a 
 distinction between Wisdom as it exists in men and in God, rh Oeiou yevos 
 aixiyls KoX &KpaTov (Quis Rer. Div. Hser. § 38, i. p. 498). Wisdom is the 
 mother of the world (Quod Det. Potiori Insid. § 16, i. p. 202); her wealth 
 is without limits, she is like a deep well, a perennial fountain, &c. But Philo 
 does not in any case seem to personify Wisdom ; his doctrine of Wisdom is 
 eclipsed by that^of the Logos. 
 
 z Vacherot (Ecole d'Alexandrie, vol. i. p. 134, Introd.) says of Wisdom 
 and Ecclesiasticus : * Ces monumens renferment peu de traces des iddes 
 Grecques dont ils semblent avoir precede I'invasion en Orient.' Ecclesiasticus 
 was written in Hebrew under the High-Priesthood of Simon I, B.C. 303-284, 
 by Jesus the Son of Sirach, and translated into Greek by his grandson, who 
 came to reside at Alexandria under Ptolemy Euergetes. 
 
 a Plat. Philebus, p. 30. 'There is not,' says Professor Mansel, *the 
 slightest evidence that the Divine Reason was represented by Plato as having 
 a distinct personality, or as being anything more than an attribute of the 
 Divine Mind.' Cf. art. Philosophy, in Kitto's Cycl. of Bibl. Literature, 
 new ed, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Relation of Philds Logos to his theosophy, 6^ 
 
 are impressed upon concrete forms of existence^. The Ideas of 
 Philo are energizing powers or causes whereby God carries out 
 His plan of creation c. Of these energetic forces, the Logos, ac- 
 cording to Philo, is the compendium, the concentration. Philo's 
 Logos is a necessary complement of his philosophical doctrine 
 concerning God. Philo indeed, as the devout Jew, believes in 
 God as a Personal Being Who has constant and certain dealings 
 with mankind ; Philo, in his Greek moods, conceives of God not 
 merely as a single simple Essence, but as beyond personality, 
 beyond any definite form of existence, infinitely distant from all 
 relations to created life, incapable of any contact even with a 
 spiritual creation, subtilized into an abstraction altogether trans- 
 cending the most abstract conceptions of impersonal being. It 
 might even seem as if Philo had chosen for his master, not Plato 
 the theologian of the Timseus, but Plato the pure dialectician of 
 the Republic. But how is such an abstract God as this to be 
 also the Creator and the Providence of the Hebrew Bible 1 Cer- 
 tainly, according to Philo, matter existed before creation ^ ; but 
 how did God mould matter into created forms of life *? This, 
 Philo will reply, was the work of the Logos, that is to say, of 
 the ideas collectively. The Philonian Logos is the Idea of 
 ideas 6 ; he is the shadow of God by which as by an instrument 
 He made the worlds f; he is himself the intelligible or Ideal 
 World, the Archetypal Type of all creation?. The Logos of 
 Philo is the most ancient and most general of created things^ ; 
 
 * Cf. Philo, de Mundi Opif. § 44, torn. i. p. 30 ; Legis AUegor. i. § 9, 
 torn. i. p. 47. 
 
 ^ De Monarchic, i. § 6, torn. ii. p. 219 : ovoixd^ovcri Se alras ovk airh (Tko- 
 TTov rLV€S Tuv TTap viXLV Ideas, iTTeibr} cKacrrov twv ovrcav IbioiroLOvaij ra &TaKTa 
 rdrTovaai, koL ra 6.Treipa Kal aSpicrra Ka\ aa'X'ni^dTKTTa Treparovaai Kal irepiopi- 
 ^ovaai Ka\ (rxVf^(^'>''-Cov(Tai Kal (rvvoKcos rh x^^pov els rh ^jxeivov fxeQap 1x0^6 [xevaL. 
 Comp. the remarkable passage in De Vict. Offer. § 13, torn. ii. p. 261. 
 
 ^ In one passage only does Philo appear to ascribe to God the creation of 
 matter. De Somn. i. § 13, torn. i. 632. If so, for once his Jewish conscience 
 is too strong for his Platonism. But even here his meaning is at best doubt- 
 ful. Cf Dollinger, Heid, und Judenth. bk. x. pt. 3, § 5. 
 
 ® De Mundi Opif. § 6 ; i. p. 5 : tSeo rav ibewp 6 ©eoO \6yos. 
 
 ' Legis Allegor. iii. 31 ; i. p. 106 : o-km ©eoO Se 6 Xoyos avrov iariv ^ 
 KaBaiTfp opyduus Trpoo-xpvf^dinevos iKoa/jLonoUi, De Monarch, ii. § 5 ; tom. ii. 
 225 ; De Cherub. § 35, tom. i. p. 162. 
 
 8 De Mundi Opif. § 6, i. p. 5 : ij apxervrros (rtppayh, ov (pafxev tlvai KSfffxov 
 vorjTou, avrhs h.v etr] rh apx^rvTrov irapddeiyfxa ... 6 &eov XSyos. The \6yo5 
 is dissociated from the -napabeiyina in De Conf. Ling. c. xiv. i. 414. 
 
 ^ Legis Allegor. iii. 61, i. p. 121 : /cal 6 \6yos Se rov &eov virepduco iravrSs 
 i(TTi rov Kdcr/xoVf koI Trpeafivraros Kal ye^iKwraros ruv 'dara yiyovi. 
 Ill F 
 
66 Is the Logos of P kilo personal? 
 
 he is tlie Eternal Image of God i ; he is the band whereby all 
 things are held together k ; he fills all things, he sustains all 
 things 1. Through the Logos, God, the abstract, the intangible, 
 the inaccessible God, deals with the world, with men. Thus the 
 Logos is mediator as well as creator ^^ ; he is a high-priest and 
 intercessor with God ; he interprets God to man ; he is an am- 
 bassador from heaven °. He is the god of imperfect men, who 
 cannot ascend by an ecstatic intuition to a knowledge of the 
 supreme God « ; he is thus the nutriment of human souls, and a 
 source of spiritual delights p. The Logos is the eldest angel or 
 the archangel q ; he is God's Eldest, His Firstborn Son "^ ; and 
 we almost seem to touch upon the apprehension of that sublime, 
 that very highest form of communicated life, which is exclusive 
 of the ideas of inferiority and of time, and which was afterwards 
 so happily and authoritatively expressed by the doctrinal formula 
 of an eternal generation. But, as we listen, we ask ourselves 
 one capital and inevitable question : Is Philo's Logos a personal 
 being, or is he after all a pure abstraction ? Philo is silent ; for 
 on such a point as this the Greek and the Jew in him are hope- 
 
 * De Conf. Ling. § 28, i. 427. 'Although/ says Philo, 'we are not in a 
 position to be considered the Sons of God, yet we may be the children t^s 
 ai^iov €Ik6vos ahrov, xSyou rov UpiaraTov. 
 
 k De Plantat. § 2, I. 33 1 : decrfihv yap avrhv apprjKTov rov iravrhs 6 yew^- 
 aas iiroici irar7}p. 
 
 * De Mundo, § 2, ii. p. 604 : t^ dxvp(*>TaTov Kal B^^aiorarov epeifffia rS>v 
 %\<av iariv. Ouros airh rtav fiecrav inl ra irepara koI airh rG>v 6.Kpoov els fieara 
 radels doKix^vei rhv rrjs (pvaews dpofiov ai]rrT]rov, avvdyuv ivdvTa ra ^4p7] KoiX 
 c<f>iyyci)V. 
 
 ^ Quis Rer. Div. Haer. § 42, i. p. 501 : rep Se apxayyeXca Koi irpea^vTaTcp 
 \6y(f} Swpeav e^aiperov edcoK€v 6 ra '6\a yevvi]cras iraT^p, 'Lva p.eB6pios (TTcts rh 
 yevSjJLCVov ^LaKpivr) rov ireTroirjKSros. 
 
 ° Ibid. : 6 5' avrbs iKerrjs fieu iari rod Ovrjrov Kfipaivovros ail irphs rh 
 &(pdaprov, Trpeo-jSuT^s Se rov T]y e/nSvos irphs rh virriKoou. Cf. De Somniis, § 37, 
 i. 653 ; De Migr. Abraham. § 18, i. 452. De Gigant. § 11 : 6 apxt^p^vs 
 \6yos. 
 
 Legis AUegor. iii. § 73, i. 128 : ovros [sc. 6 \6yos'] yhp rjfxwv rS>v areXwv 
 Uv iX-q Qihsy rcov Se (rocpuv Kal reXiiuv, 6 Trpcaros, i. e. God Himself. Cf. § 32 
 and § 33, i. 107. 
 
 P Legis Allegor. iii. § 59, i. 120 : 'Opas ttjs rpvxvs rpo(pr]u o'la eari; ASyos 
 0€oG awexh^f ioiKODS dpSacp. Cf. also § 62. De Somniis, § 37, i. 691 : t^ 
 yap ovri rov deiov \6yov pifirj avvdxv^ /i*60' opixris Ka\ rd^ews (pipo(x4v7]j Trdvra 
 dia irdvraiv auax^^raL Kal evcppaivei. 
 
 1 De Conf. Ling. § 28, i. 427 : Kav jUT^SeVw }x4vroi rvyxavrj ris a^L6xpe(as 
 &>u vlhs &€ov TTpoaayopeveadai, (nrov^a^erca KoaixuaQai Kara rhv 'irpwr6yovov au- 
 rov A6yov, rhv 6.yy€\ov irpecr^vrarov ws apxdyyeXov iToKvdovvfxov virdpxovra. 
 
 ^ De Conf Ling. § 14, i. 414: rovrov p.ev yap Trpea^vrarov vlhv b rcov 
 ovrup avereiKe Uar^pj %v krcpoodi. Trpcoroyovou wySfxacre. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
P kilos indecision. 67 
 
 lessly at issue. Philo's whole system and drift of thought must 
 have inclined him to personify the Logos; but was the personified 
 Logos to be a second God, or was he to be nothing more than a 
 created angel 1 If the latter, then he would lose all those lofty 
 prerogatives and characteristics, which, platonically speaking, as 
 well as for the purposes of mediation and creation, were so en- 
 tirely essential to him. If the former, then Philo must break 
 with the very first article of the Mosaic creed ; he must renounce 
 his Monotheism. Confronted with this difficulty, the Alexandrian 
 wavers in piteous indecision ; he really recoils before it. In one 
 passage indeed he even goes so far as to call the Logos a ^ second 
 Gods,' and he is accordingly ranked by Petavius among the 
 forerunners of Arius. But on the whole he appears to fall back 
 upon a position which, however fatal to the completeness of his 
 system, yet has the recommendation of relieving him from an 
 overwhelming difficulty. After all that he has said, his Logos is 
 really resolved into a mere group of Divine ideas, into a purely 
 impersonal quality included in the Divine Being *=. That advance 
 
 s Fragment quoted from Euseb. Praep. Evang. lib. vii. c. 1 3 in Phil. Oper. 
 ii. 625 : OvTjrhu yap ouSei/ aTreiKovKrdrjvai irphs rhv avcardTO) koI Trare pa rwv 
 '6\(av ^hvvaroy aKXa irphs rhv devrepou deoVj <is iffriv iKeivov Adyos, But the 
 Logos is called deos only eV KaTaxp^(T€i. Op. i. 655, 
 
 * That Philo's Logos is not a distinct Person is maintained by Dorner, 
 Person Christi, Einleitung, p. 23, note i. 44, sqq. note 40; by DoUinger, 
 Held, und Judenthum, bk. x. p. iii. § 5 ; and by Burton, Bampton Lectures, 
 note 93. The opposite opinion is that of Gfrorer (see his Philo und die 
 Jiidisch-Alexandrinische Theologie), and of Liicke (see Professor Mansel, in 
 Kitto's EncycL, art. Philosophy, p. 526, note). Professor Jowett, at one 
 time, following Gfrorer, appears to find in Philo *the complete personification 
 of the Logos,' although he also admits that Philo's idea of the Logos ' leaves 
 us in doubt at last whether it is not a quality only, or mode of operation in 
 the Divine Being.' (Ep. of St. Paul, i. p. 510, 2nd ed.) He hesitates in- 
 deed to decide the question, on the ground that 'the word "person" has now 
 a distinctness and unity which belongs not to that age.' (p. 485.) Surely the 
 idea (at any rate) of personality, whether distinctly analyzed or no, is a 
 primary element of all human thought. It is due to Professor Jowett to call 
 attention to the extent (would that it were wider and more radical !) to which 
 he disavows Gfrorer's conclusions. (Ibid. p. 454, note.) And I quote the 
 following words with sincere pleasure : ' The object of the Gospel is real, 
 present, substantial, — an object such as men may see with their eyes and 
 hold in their hands. . . . But in Philo the object is shadowy, distant, indis- 
 tinct ; whether an idea or a fact wre scarcely know. . . . Were we to come 
 nearer to it, it would vanish away.' (Ibid. p. 413, ist ed. ; p. 509, 2nd ed., 
 in which there are a few variations.) A study of the passages referred to in 
 Mangey's index will, it is believed, convince any unprejudiced reader that 
 Philo did not know his own mind ; that his Logos was sometimes impersonal 
 and sometimes not, or that he sometimes thought of a personal Logos, and 
 never believed in one. 
 11] F 2 
 
68 Philo and the New Testament, 
 
 toward the recognition of a real Hypostasis, — so steady, as it 
 seemed, so promising, so fruitful, — is but a play upon language, 
 or an intellectual field-sport, or at best, the effort which precedes 
 or the mask which covers a speculative failure. We were 
 tempted perchance for a moment to believe that we were listen- 
 ing to the master from whom Apostles were presently to draw 
 their inspirations ; but, in truth, we have before us in Philo 
 Judaeus only a thoughtful, not insincere, but half-heathenized 
 believer in the Kevelation of Sinai, groping in a twilight which 
 he has made darker by his Hellenic tastes, after a truth which 
 was only to be disclosed in its fulness by another Revelation, the 
 Eevelation of Pentecost. 
 
 This hesitation as to the capital question of the Personality of 
 the Logos, would alone suffice to establish a fundamental dif- 
 ference between the vacillating, tentative speculation of the 
 Alexandrian, and the clear, compact, majestic doctrine concern- 
 ing our Lord's Pre-existent Godhead, which meets us under a 
 somewhat similar phraseological form" in the pages of the New 
 Testament. When it is assumed that the Logos of St. John is 
 but a reproduction of the Logos of Philo the Jew, this assump- 
 tion overlooks fundamental discrepancies of thought, and rests 
 its case upon occasional coincidences of language v. For besides 
 the contrast between the abstract ideal Logos of Philo, and the 
 concrete Personal Logos of the fourth Evangelist, which has 
 already been noticed, there are even deeper differences, which 
 would have made it impossible that an Apostle should have sat 
 in spirit as a pupil at the feet of the Alexandrian, or that he 
 should have allowed himself to breathe the same general re- 
 ligious atmosphere. Philo is everywhere too little alive to the 
 presence and to the consequences of moral evil^. The history 
 
 ^ On the general question of the phraseological coincidences between Philo 
 and the writers in the New Testament, see the passages quoted in Professor 
 Mansel's article * Philosophy' (Kitto's Encycl.), already referred to. I could 
 sincerely wish that I had had the advantage of reading that article before 
 writing the text of these pages. 
 
 V ' Gfrorer,* Professor Jowett admits, 'has exaggerated the resemblances 
 between Philo and the New Testament, making them^ I think, more real and 
 less verbal than they are in fact.' (Ep. of St. Paul, i. 454, note.) * II est 
 douteux,' says M. E. Vacherot, ' que Saint Jean, qui n*a jamais visits 
 Alexandrie, ait connu les livres du philosophe juif.* Histoire Critique de 
 I'ecole d' Alexandrie, i. p. 201. And the limited circulation of the writings of 
 the theosophical Alexandrians would appear from the fact that Philo himself 
 appears never to have read those of his master Aristobulus. Cf. Valkenaer, 
 de Aristobulo, p. 95. 
 
 '^ See the remarks of M. E. de Pressense, Jesus-Christ, p. 112. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Contrasts between Philo and the Gospel, 69 
 
 of Israel, instead of displaying a long, earnest struggle between 
 the Goodness of God and the wickedness of men, interests Philo 
 only as a complex allegory, which, by a versatile exposition, 
 may be made to illustrate various ontological problems. The 
 priesthood, and the sacrificial system, instead of pointing to 
 man's profound need of pardon and expiation, are resolved by 
 him into the symbols of certain cosmical facts or theosophic 
 theories. Philo therefore scarcely hints at the Messiah, al- 
 though he says much concerning Jewish expectations of a 
 brighter future; he knows no means of reconciliation, of re- 
 demption ; he sees not the need of them. According to Philo, 
 salvation is to be worked out by a perpetual speculation upon 
 the eternal order of things ; and asceticism is of value in assist- 
 ing man to ascend into an ecstatic philosophical reverie. The 
 profound opposition between such a view of man's moral state, 
 and that stern appeal to the humbling realities of human life 
 which is inseparable from the teaching of Christ and His 
 Apostles, would alone have made it improbable that the writers 
 of the New Testament are under serious intellectual obligations 
 to Philo. Unless the preaching which could rouse the con- 
 science to a keen agonizing sense of guilt is in harmony with a 
 lassitude which ignores the moral misery that is in the world ; 
 unless the proclamation of an Atoning Victim crucified for the 
 sins of men be reconcilable with an indifference to the existence 
 of any true expiation for sin whatever ; it will not be easy to 
 believe that Philo is the real author of the creed of Christendom. 
 And this moral discrepancy does but tally with a like doctrinal 
 antagonism. According to Philo, the Divinity cannot touch that 
 which is material : how can Philo then have been the teacher of 
 an Apostle whose whole teaching expands the truth that the 
 Word, Himself essentially Divine, was made flesh and dwelt 
 among us % Philo's real spiritual progeny must be sought else- 
 where. Philo's method of interpretation may have passed into 
 the Church \ he is quoted by Clement and by Origen, often and 
 respectfully. Yet Philo's doctrine, it has been well observed, if 
 naturally developed, would have led to Docetism rather than to 
 Christianity^ ; and we trace its influence in forms of theosophic 
 Gnosticism, which only agree in substituting the wildest licence 
 of the metaphysical fancy, for simple submission to that historical 
 fact of the Incarnation of God, which is the basis of the Gospel. 
 But if Philo was not St. John's master, it is probable that his 
 
 * Dorner, Person Christi, i. 57 (Einleit.). 
 
70 Real function of the Alexandrian tkeosopky, 
 
 writings, or rather the general theosophic movement of which 
 they are the most representative sample, may have supplied 
 some contemporary heresies with their stock of metaphysical 
 material, and in this way may have determined, by an indirect 
 antagonism, the providential form of St. John's doctrine. Nor 
 can the general positive value of Philo's labours be mistaken, if 
 he is viewed apart from the use that modern scepticism has 
 attempted to make of particular speculations to which he gave 
 such shape and impulse. In making a way for some leading 
 currents of Greek thought into the heart of the Jewish Eevela- 
 tion, hitherto wellnigh altogether closed to it, Philo was not 
 indeed teaching positive truth, but he was breaking down some 
 intellectual barriers against its reception, in the most thoughtful 
 portion of the human family. In Philo, Greek Philosophy 
 almost stood at the door of the Catholic Church ; but it was 
 Greek Philosophy endeavouring to base itself, however precari- 
 ously, upon the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Logos 
 of Philo, though a shifting and incomplete speculation, may well 
 have served as a guide to thoughtful minds from that region of 
 unsettled enquiry that surrounds the Platonic doctrine of a 
 Divine Eeason, to the clear and strong faith which welcomes the 
 full Gospel Eevelation of the Word made Flesh. Philo's Logos, 
 while embodying elements foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures, is 
 nevertheless in a direct line of descent from the Inspired doc- 
 trine of the Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs; and it thus 
 illustrates the comprehensive vigour of the Jewish Revelation, 
 which could countenance and direct, if it could not absolutely 
 satisfy, those fitful guesses at and gropings after truth which 
 were current in Heathendom. If Philo could never have created 
 the Christian Doctrine which has been so freely ascribed to him, 
 he could do much, however unconsciously, to prepare the soil of 
 Alexandrian thought for its reception ; and from this point of 
 view, his Logos must appear of considerably higher importance 
 than the parallel speculations as to the Memra, the Shekinah, 
 the doctrine of the hidden and the revealed God, which in that 
 and later ages belonged to the tradition of Palestinian Judaism y. 
 
 y Compare Doraer, Person Christi, Einleit. p. 59, on the Adam Kadmon, 
 and p. 60, on the Memra, Shekinah, and Metatron. * Zu der Idee einer 
 Incarnation des wirklich Gottlichen aber haben es alle diese Theologumene 
 insgesammt nie gebracht.' They only involve a parastatic appearance of 
 God, are symbols of His Presence, and are altogether impersonal ; or if per- 
 sonal (as the Metatron), they are clearly conceived of as created personaUties. 
 This helps to explain the fact that during the first three centuries the main 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Relevancy of the foregoing considerations, 7 1 
 
 ' Providence,' says the accurate Neander, ' had so ordered it, that 
 in the intellectual world in which Christianity made its first 
 appearance, many ideas should be in circulation, which at least 
 seemed to be closely related to it, and in which Christianity could 
 find a point of connection with external thought, on which to 
 base the doctrine of a God revealed in Christ z.' Of these ideas 
 we may well believe that the most generally diffused and the 
 most instrumental was the Logos of Alexandria, if not the exact 
 Logos of Philo. 
 
 It is possible that such considerations as some of the fore- 
 going, when viewed relatively to the great and vital doctrine 
 which is before us in these lectures, may be objected to on the 
 score of being * fanciful.' Nor am I insensible, my brethren, to 
 the severity of such a condemnation when awarded by the 
 practical intelligence of Englishmen. Still it is possible that 
 such a criticism would betoken on the part of those who make 
 it some lack of wise and generous thought. * Fanciful,' after 
 all, is a relative term ; what is solid in one field of study may 
 seem fanciful in another. Before we condemn a particular line 
 of thought as * fanciful,' we do well to enquire whether a pene- 
 tration, a subtlety, a versatility, I might add, a spirituality of 
 intelligence, greater than our own, might not convict the con- 
 demnation itself of an opposite demerit, which need not be more 
 particularly described. Especially in sacred literature the im- 
 putation of fancifulness is a rash one j since a sacred subject- 
 matter is not likely, h 'priori, to be fairly amenable to the 
 coarser tests and narrower views of a secular judgment. It 
 may be that the review of those adumbrations of the doctrine 
 of our Lord's Divinity, in which we have been engaged, is rather 
 calculated to reassure a believer than to convince a sceptic, 
 Christ's Divinity illuminates the Hebrew Scriptures, but to read 
 them as a whole by this light we must already have recognised 
 the truth from which it radiates. Yet it would be an error to 
 suppose that the Old Testament has no relations of a more 
 independent character to the doctrine of Christ's Godhead. The 
 Old Testament witnesses to the existence of a great national 
 belief, the importance of which cannot be ignored by any man 
 who would do justice to the history of human thought. And 
 we proceed to ask whether that belief has any, and what, bearing 
 upon the faith of Catholic Christendom as to the Person of her 
 Lord. 
 
 attacks on our Lord's Godhead were of Jewish origin. Cf. Dorner, ubi sup. 
 note 14. 2 Kirchen Geschichte, i. 3, p. 989. 
 
7^ Hope in a Future, essential 
 
 II. There is then one element, or condition of national life, 
 with which no nation can dispense. A nation must have its eye 
 upon a future, more or less defined, but fairly within the appa- 
 rent scope of its grasp. Hope is the soul of moral vitality ; and 
 any man, or society of men, who would live, in the moral sense 
 of life, must be looking forward to something. You will scarcely 
 suspect me, my brethren, of seeking to disparage the great prin- 
 ciple of tradition ; — that principle to which the Christian Church 
 owes her sacred volume itself, no less than her treasure of formu- 
 lated doctrine, and the structural conditions and sacramental 
 sources of her life ;— that principle to which each generation of 
 human society is deeply and inevitably indebted for the accumu- 
 lated social and political experiences of the generations before it. 
 Precious indeed, to every wise man, to every association of true- 
 hearted and generous men, must ever be the inheritance of the 
 past. Yet what is the past without the future % What is 
 memory when unaccompanied by hope % Look at the case of 
 the single soul. Is it not certain that a life of high earnest pur- 
 pose will die outright, if it is permitted to sink into the placid 
 reverie of perpetual retrospect, if the man of action becomes the 
 mere ^ laudator temporis acti ^! How is the force of moral life 
 developed and strengthened ] Is it not by successive conscious 
 efforts to act and to suffer at the call of duty % Must not any 
 moral life dwindle and fade away if it be not reaching forward to 
 a standard higher, truer, purer, stronger than its own % Will 
 not the stl-uggles, the sacrifices, the self-conquests even of a 
 great character in bygone years, if they now occupy its whole 
 field of vision, only serve to consummate its ruin % As it doat- 
 ingly fondles them in memory, will it not be stiffened by conceit 
 into a moral petrifaction, or consigned by sloth to the successive 
 processes of moral decomposition % Has not the Author of our 
 life so bound up its deepest instincts and yearnings with His 
 own eternity, that no blessings in the past would be blessings to 
 us, if they were utterly unconnected with the future % So it is 
 also in the case of a society. The greatest of all societies among 
 men at this moment is the Church of Jesus Christ. Is she sus- 
 tained only by the deeds and writings of her saints and mart3n:s 
 in a distant past, or only by her reverent trustful sense of the 
 Divine Presence which blesses her in the actual present % Does 
 she not resolutely pierce the gloom of the future, and confidently 
 reckon upon new struggles and triumphs on earth, and, beyond 
 these, upon a home in Heaven, wherein she will enjoy rest and 
 victory, — a rest that no trouble can disturb, a victory that no 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
to moral vigour and to national life, 73 
 
 reverse can forfeit % Is not the same law familiar to us in this 
 place, as it affects the well-being of a great educational institu- 
 tion? Here in Oxford we feel that we cannot rest upon the 
 varied efforts and the accumulated credit even of ten centuries. 
 We too have hopes embarked in the years or in the centuries 
 before us ; we have duties towards them. We differ, it may be, 
 even radically, among ourselves as to the direction in which to 
 look for our academical future. The hopes of some of us are 
 the fears of others. This project would fain banish from our 
 system whatever proclaims that God had really spoken, and that 
 it is man's duty and happiness gladly and submissively to wel- 
 come His message; while that scheme would endeavour, if pos- 
 sible, to fashion each one of our intellectual workmen more and 
 more strictly after the type of a believing and fervent Christian. 
 The practical difference is indeed profound ; but we are entirely 
 agreed as to the general necessity for looking forward. On both 
 sides it is understood that an institution which is not struggling 
 upwards towards a higher future, must resign itself to the con- 
 viction that it is already in its decadence, and must expect 
 to die. 
 
 Nor is it otherwise with that conglomeration of men which 
 we call a nation, the product of race, or the product of circum- 
 stances, the product in any case of a Providential Will, Which 
 welds into a common whole, for the purposes of united action 
 and of reciprocal influence, a larger or smaller number of human 
 beings. A nation must have a future before it; a future which 
 can rebuke its despondency and can direct its enthusiasm ; a 
 future for which it will prepare itself ; a future which it will 
 aspire to create or to control. Unless it would barter away the 
 vigorous nerve of true patriotism for the feeble pedantry of a 
 soulless archaeology, a nation cannot fall back altogether upon 
 the centuries which have flattered its ambition, or which have 
 developed its material well-being. Something it must propose 
 to itself as an object to be compassed in the coming time ; some- 
 thing which is as yet beyond it. It will enlarge its frontier ; or 
 it will develope its commercial resources ; or it will extend its 
 schemes of colonization ; or it will erect its overgrown colonies 
 into independent and friendly states; or it will bind the severed 
 sections of a divided race into one gigantic nationality that shall 
 awe, if it do not subdue, the nations around. Or- perchance its 
 attention will be concentrated on the improvement of its social 
 life, and on the details of its internal legislation. It will extend 
 the range of civil privileges ; it will broaden the basis of 
 
74 ^ Fuhire necessary to the Chosen People, 
 
 government ; it will provide additional encouragements to and 
 safeguards for public morality ; it will steadily aim at bettering 
 the condition of the classes who are forced, beyond others, to 
 work and to suffer. Thankful it may well be to the Author of 
 all goodness for the enjoyment of past blessings ; but the spirit of 
 a true thankfulness is ever and very nearly allied to the energy 
 of hope. Self-complacent a nation cannot be, unless it would 
 perish. Woe indeed to the country which dares to assume that 
 it has reached its zenith, and that it can achieve or attempt no 
 more ! 
 
 Now Israel as a nation was not withdrawn from the operation 
 of this law, which makes the anticipation of a better future 
 of such vital importance to the common life of a people. Israel 
 indeed had been cradled in an atmosphere of physical and 
 political miracle. Her great lawgiver could point to the 
 event which gave her national existence as to an event unique 
 in human history Q-. No subsequent vicissitudes would obliterate 
 the memory of the story which Israel treasured in her inmost 
 memory, the story of the stern Egyptian bondage followed 
 by the triumphant Exodus. How retrospective throughout 
 is the sacred literature of Israel ! It is not enough that the 
 great deliverance should be accurately chronicled ; it must 
 be expanded, applied, insisted on in each of its many bearings 
 and aspects by the lawgiver who directed and who described 
 it ; it must be echoed on from age to age, in the stern 
 expostulations of Prophets and in the plaintive or jubilant 
 songs of Psalmists. Certainly the greater portion of the 
 Old Testament is history. Israel was guided by the contents 
 of her sacred books to live in much grateful reflection upon 
 the past. Certainly, it was often her sin and her condemnation 
 that she practically lost sight of all that had been done for 
 her. Yet if ever it were permissible to forget the future, 
 Israel, it should seem, might have forgotten it. She might 
 have closed her eyes against the dangers which threatened 
 her from beyond the Lebanon, from beyond the Eastern and 
 the Southern desert, from beyond the Western sea, from 
 within her own borders, from the streets and the palaces 
 of her capital. She might have abandoned herself in an 
 ecstasy of perpetuated triumph to the voices of her poets 
 and to the rolls of her historians. But there was One Who 
 had loved Israel as a child, and had called His infant people 
 
 * Deut. iv. 34. 
 
 r LECT. 
 
Its character, not secular but religiotcs, 75 
 
 out of Egypt, and had endowed it with His Name and His 
 Law, and had so fenced its life around by protective institutions, 
 that, as the ages passed, neither strange manners nor hostile 
 thought should avail to corrupt what He had so bountifully 
 given to it. Was He forgetful to provide for and to direct 
 that instinct of expectation, without which as a nation it 
 could not live ? Had He indeed not thus provided, Israel 
 might have struggled with vain energy after ideals such as 
 were those of the nations around her. She might have spent 
 herself, like the Tyrian or Sidonian merchant, for a large 
 commerce; she might have watched eagerly, and fiercely, like 
 the Cilician pirate or like the wild sons of the desert, for 
 the spoils of adjacent civilizations ; she might have essayed 
 to combine, after the Greek pattern, a discreet measure of 
 sensuality with a great activity of the speculative intellect ; 
 she might have fared as did the Babylonian, or the Persian, 
 or the Roman; at least, she might have attempted the estab- 
 lishment of a world-wide tyranny around the throne of a 
 Hebrew Belshazzar or of a Hebrew Nero. Nor is her history 
 altogether free from the disturbing influence of such ideals 
 as were these ; we do not forget the brigandage of the days 
 of the Judges, or the imperial state and prowess of Solomon, 
 or the commercial enterprise of Jehoshaphat, or the union 
 of much intellectual activity with low moral effort which 
 marked more than one of the Eabbinical schools. But the 
 life and energy of the nation was not really embarked, at 
 least in its best days, in the pursuit of these objects ; their 
 attractive influence was intermittent, transient, accidental. 
 The expectation of Israel was steadily directed towards a 
 future, the lustre of which would in some real sense more 
 than eclipse her glorious past. That future was not sketched 
 by the vain imaginings of popular aspirations ; it was unveiled 
 to the mind . of the people by a long series of authoritative 
 announcements. These announcements did not merely point 
 to the introduction of a new state of things ; they centred 
 very remarkably upon a coming Person. God Himself vouch- 
 safed to satisfy the instinct of hope which sustained the national 
 life of His own chosen people ; and Israel lived for the expected 
 Messiah. 
 
 But Israel, besides being a civil polity, was a theocracy; 
 she was not merely a nation, she was a Church. In Israel 
 religion was not, as with the peoples of pagan antiquity, a 
 mere attribute or function of the national life. Religion was 
 
76 Israeli tic belief concerning God and sin, 
 
 the very soul and substance of the life of Israel ; Israel was 
 a Church encased, embodied in a political constitution. Hence 
 it was that the most truly national aspirations in Israel were her 
 religious aspirations. Even the modern naturalist critics can- 
 not fail ^o observe, as they read the Hebrew Scriptures, that 
 the mind of Israel was governed by two dominant convictions, 
 the like of which were unknown to any other ancient people. 
 God was the first thought in the mind of Israel. The existence, 
 the presence of One Supreme, Living, Personal Being, Who 
 alone exists necessarily, and of Himself; Who sustains the 
 life of all besides Himself; before Whom, all that is not 
 Himself is but a shadow and vanity; from Whose sanctity 
 there streams forth upon the conscience of man that moral 
 law which is the light of human life ; and in Whose mercy 
 all men, especially the afflicted, the suffering, the poor, may, 
 if they will, find a gracious and long-suffering Patron, — this 
 was the substance of the first great conviction of the people 
 of Israel. Dependent on that conviction was another. The 
 eye of Israel was not merely opened towards the heavens ; it 
 was alive to the facts of the moral human world. Israel was 
 conscious of the presence and power of sin. The ^ healthy sen- 
 suality,' as Strauss has admiringly termed it^, which pervaded 
 the whole fabric of life among the Greeks, had closed up the 
 eye of that gifted race to a perception which was so familiar to 
 the Hebrews. We may trace indeed throughout the best Greek 
 poetry a vein of deep suppressed melancholy c; but the secret 
 of this subtle, of this inextinguishable sadness was unknown 
 
 ^ See Luthardt, Apologetische Vortrage, vorl. vii. note 6. The expression 
 occurs in Schubart's Leben, ii. 461. Luthardt quotes a very characteristic 
 passage from Goethe (vol. xxx. Winckelmann, Antikes Heidnisches, pp. 
 10-13) to the same effect. * If the modern, at almost every reflection, casts 
 himself into the Infinite, to return at last, if he can, to a limited point ; the 
 ancients feel themselves at once, and without further wanderings, at ease only 
 within the limits of this beautiful world. Here were they placed, to this 
 were they called, here their activity has found scope, and their passions 
 objects and nourishment.' The 'heathen mind,' he says, produced * such a 
 condition of human existence, a condition intended by nature,' that * both in 
 the moment of highest enjoyment and in that of deepest sacrifice, nay, of 
 absolute ruin, we recognise the indestructibly healthy tone of their thought.' 
 Similarly in Strauss' Leben Miirklin's, 185 1, p. 127, Marklin says, 'I would 
 with all my heart be a heathen, for here I find truth, nature, greatness.' 
 
 c See the beautiful passage quoted from Lasaulx, Abhandlung iiber den 
 Sinn der (Edipus-sage, p. 10, by Luthardt, ubi supra, note 7. Cf. also 
 Bollinger, Heid. und Jud. bk. v. pt. i, § 2 ; Abp. Trench, Huls. Lectures, 
 6<i- 3> P- 305* also Comp. II. xvii. 446; Od. xi. 489, xviii. 130; Eurip. Hippol. 
 190, Med. 1224, Fragm. No. 454, 808. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
points to a religious Deliverer. 77 
 
 to the accomplished artists who gave to it an involuntary ex- 
 pression, and who lavished their choicest resources upon the 
 oft-repeated effort to veil it beneath the bright and graceful 
 drapery of a versatile light-heartedness peculiarly their own. 
 But the Jew knew that sin was the secret of human sorrow. 
 He could not forget sin if he would ; for before his eyes, the 
 importunate existence and the destructive force of sin were 
 inexorably pictured in the ritual. He witnessed daily sacrifices 
 for sin ; he witnessed the sacrifice of sacrifices which was 
 ofl^ered on the Day of Atonement, and by which the * nation of 
 religion,' impersonated in its High Priest, solemnly laid its sins 
 upon the sacrificial victim, and bore the blood of atonement into 
 the Presence-chamber of God. Then the moral law sounded in 
 his ears \ he knew that he had not obeyed it. If the Jew could 
 not be sure that the blood of bulls and goats really effected his 
 reconciliation with God ; if his own prophets told him that 
 moral obedience was more precious in God^s Sight than sacrificial 
 oblations ; if the ritual, interpreted as it was by the Decalogue, 
 created yearnings within him which it could not satisfy, and 
 deepened a srense of pollution which of itself it could not relieve ; 
 yet at least the Jew could not ignore sin, or think lightly of it, 
 or essay to gild it over with the levities of raillery. He could 
 not screen from his sight its native blackness, and justify it to 
 himself by a philosophical theory which should represent it as 
 inevitable, or as beinof something: else than what it is. The 
 ritual forced sin in upon his daily thoughts ; the ritual inflicted 
 it upon his imagination as being a terrible and present fact ; 
 and so it entered into and coloured his whole conception alike of 
 national and of individual life. Thus was it that this sense of 
 sin moulded all true Jewish hopes, all earnest Jewish antici- 
 pations of the national future. A future which promised 
 political victory or deliverance, but which offered no relief to 
 the sense of sin, would have failed to meet the better aspirations, 
 and to cheer the real heart of a people which, amid whatever 
 unfaithfulness to its measure of light, yet had a true knowledge 
 of God, and was keenly alive to the fact and to the effects of 
 moral evil. And He Who, by His earlier revelations, had Him- 
 self made the moral needs of Israel so deep, and had bidden the 
 hopes of Israel rise so high, vouchsafed to meet the one, and to 
 offer a plenary satisfaction to the other, in the doctrine of an 
 expected Messiah. 
 
 It is then a shallow misapprehension which represents the 
 Messianic belief as a sort of outlying prejudice or superstition, 
 
 /4<\ 
 
 ^ 
 
7 8 First Period of Messianic prophecy, 
 
 incidental to the later thought of Israel, and to which Chris- 
 tianity has attributed an exaggerated importance, that it may 
 the better find a basis in Jewish history for the Person of its 
 Founder. The Messianic belief was in truth interwoven with 
 the deepest life of the people. The promises which formed and 
 fed this belief are distributed along nearly the whole range of 
 the Jewish annals ; while the belief rests originally upon sacred 
 traditions, which carry us up to the very cradle of the human 
 family, although they are preserved in the sacred Hebrew Books. 
 It is of importance to enquire whether this general Messianic 
 belief included any definite convictions respecting the personal 
 rank of the Being Who was its object. 
 
 In the gradual unfolding of the Messianic doctrine, three 
 stages of development may be noted within the limits of the 
 Hebrew Canon, and a fourth beyond it. (a) Of these the first 
 appears to end with Moses. The Protevangelium contains a 
 broad indeterminate prediction of a victory of humanity d over 
 the Evil Principle that had seduced man to his fall. The ^ Seed 
 of the woman' is to bruise the serpent's head^. With the lapse 
 of years this blessing, at first so general and indefinite, is nar- 
 rowed down to something in store for the posterity of Shem^, 
 and subsequently for the descendants of Abraham^. In Abra- 
 ham's Seed all the families of the earth are to be blessed. 
 Already within this bright but generally indefinite prospect of 
 deliverance and blessing, we begin to discern the advent of a 
 Personal Deliverer. St. Paul argues, in accordance with the 
 JcAvish interpretation, that ^the Seed' is here a personal Mes- 
 siah^; the singular form of the word denoting His individu- 
 ality, while its collective force suggests the representative 
 character of His Human Nature. The characteristics of this 
 personal Messiah emerge gradually in successive predictions. 
 The dying Jacob looks forward to a Sbiloh as One to Whom of 
 right belongs the regal and legislative authority i, and to Whom 
 
 d So two of the Targums, which nevertheless refer the fulfilment of the 
 promise to the days of the King Messiah. The singular form of the collective 
 noun would here, as in Gen. xxii. i8, have been intended to suggest an indi- 
 vidual descendant. 
 
 e Gen. iii. 15 ; cf. Rom. xvi. 20 ; Gal. iv. 4; Heb. ii. 14 ; i St. John iii. 8. 
 
 f Gen. ix. 26. ^ Ibid. xxii. 18. 
 
 t Gal. iii. 16. See the Kabbinical authorities quoted by Wetstein, in 
 loc. On the objection raised from the collective force of (nrepfxa, cf. Bishop 
 Ellicott, in loc. 
 
 i Gen. xlix. 10. On the reading nb© see Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, 
 p. 252. The sense given in the text is supported by Targum Onkelos, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
 • 
 
Second Period of Messianic prophecy . 7 9 
 
 the obedient nations will be gathered. Balaam sings of the Star 
 That will come out of Jacob and the Sceptre That will rise out 
 of Israel k. This is something more than an anticipation of the 
 reign of David : it manifestly points to the glory and power of 
 a Higher Royalty. Moses 1 foretells a Prophet Who would in a 
 later age be raised up from among the Israelites, like unto him- 
 self. This Prophet accordingly was to be the Lawgiver, the 
 Teacher, the Euler, the Deliverer of Israel. If the prophetic 
 order at large is included in this predictions^, it is only as being 
 personified in the Last and the Greatest of the Prophets, in the 
 One Prophet Who was to reveal perfectly the mind of God, and 
 Whose words were to be implicitly obeyed. During this primary 
 period we do not find explicit assertions of the Divinity of 
 Messiah. But in that predicted victory over the Evil One ; in 
 that blessing which is to be shed on all the families of the earth ; 
 in that rightful sway over the gathered peoples ; in the absolute 
 and perfect teaching of that Prophet Who is to be like the great 
 Lawgiver while yet He transcends him, — must we not trace 
 a predicted destiny which reaches higher than the known limits 
 of the highest human energy % Is not this early prophetic lan- 
 guage only redeemed from the imputation of exaggeration or 
 vagueness, by the point and justification which are secured to it 
 through the more explicit disclosures of a succeeding age % 
 
 ($) The second stage of the Messianic doctrine centres in the 
 reigns of David and Solomon. The form of the prophecy here 
 as elsewhere is suggested by the period at which it is uttered. 
 When mankind was limited to a single family, the Hope of the 
 future had lain in the seed of the woman : the Patriarchal age 
 had looked forward to a descendant of Abraham ; the Mosaic to 
 a Prophet and a Legislator. In like manner the age of the 
 Jewish monarchy in its bloom of youth and prowess, was bidden 
 fix its eye upon an Ideal David Who was to be the King of the 
 future of the world. Not that the colouring or form of the 
 prophetic announcement lowered its scope to the level of a 
 Jewish or of a human monarchy. The promise of a kingdom to 
 David and to his house for ever^, a promise on which, we know, 
 
 Jerusalem Targum, the Syr. and Arab, versions, those of Aquila and Sym- 
 machus, and substantially by the LXX. and Vulgate. 
 
 ^ Num. xxiv. 17. 
 
 1 Deut. xviii. i8, 19 ; see Hengstenberg's Christologie des A. T. vol. i. 
 p. 90; Acts iii. 22, vii. 37 ; St. John i. 21, vi. 14, xii. 48, 49. 
 
 ™ Cf. Deut. xviii. 15. 
 
 » 2 Sam. vii. 16 (Ps. Ixxxix. 36, 37; St. John xii. 34). 'From David's 
 address to God, after receiving the message by Nathan, it is plain that David 
 
So Witness of the Messianic Psalms. 
 
 the great Psalmist rested at the hour of his death o, could not be 
 fulfilled by any mere continuation of his dynasty on the throne 
 of Jerusalem. It implied, as both David and Solomon saw, 
 some Superhuman Eoyalty. Of this Royalty the Messianic 
 Psalms present us with a series of pictures, each of which 
 illustrates a distinct aspect of its dignity, while all either imply 
 or assert the Divinity of the King. In the second Psalm, for 
 instance, Messiah is associated with the Lord of Israel as His 
 Anointed ScmP, while against the authority of Both the heathen 
 nations are rising in rebellion q. Messiah's inheritance is to in- 
 clude all heathendomrj His Sonship is not merely theocratic or 
 ethical, but Divine s. All who trust in Him are blessed ; all 
 who incur His wrath must perish with a sharp and swift de- 
 struction*. In the first recorded prayer of the Church of 
 Christ", in St. Paul's sermon at Antioch of Pisidia^, in the 
 argument which opens the Epistle to the Hebrews x, this Psalm 
 is quoted in such senses, that if we had no Rabbinical text- 
 books at hand, we could not doubt the belief of the Jewish 
 Church respecting ity. The forty-fifth Psalm is a picture of the 
 
 understood the Son promised to be the Messiah in Whom his house was to 
 be established for ever. But the words which seem most expressive of this 
 are in this verse now rendered very unintelligibly " and is this the manner of 
 man ?'* whereas the words m«n min nW'JT literally signify " and this is (or 
 must be) the law of the man, or of the Adam," i.e. this promise must relate 
 to the law, or ordinance, made by God to Adam concerning the Seed of the 
 woman, the Man, or the Second Adam, as the Messiah is expressly called by 
 St. Paul, I Cor. xv. 45-47.' — Kennicott, Remarks on the Old Testament, 
 p. 115. He confirms this interpretation by comparing i Chron. xvii. 17 with 
 Rom. V. 14. <> 2 Sam. xxiii. 5. 
 
 P Ps. ii. 7. ^ Ibid. ver. 2. 
 
 ' Ibid. vers. 8, 9. s ibid. ver. 7. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 12. See Dr. Pusey*s note on St. Jerome's rendering of 
 "^np"©:, Daniel the Prophet, p. 478^ note 2. *It seems to me that St. Jerome 
 preferred the rendering "the Son," since he adopted it where he could 
 explain it, [viz. in the brief commentary,] but gave way to prejudice in 
 rendering " adore purely." * Cf. also Replies to Essays and Reviews, p. 98. 
 Also Delitzsch Psalmen, i. p. 15, note. ' Dass ni den Artikel nicht vertragt, 
 dient auch im Hebr. ofter die Indetermination ad amplijicandum (s. Fleischer 
 zu Zamachschari's Gold. Halsbandern Anm. 2 S. i f.) indem sie durch die in 
 ihr liegende Unbegrenztheit die Einbildungskraft zur Vergrosserung des so 
 ausgedriickten Begriffs aufFordert. Ein arab. Ausleger wiirde an u. St. erk- 
 laren : " Kiisset einen Sohn, und was fiir einen Sohn ! " ' 
 
 1 Acts iv. 25, 26. V Ibid. xiii. 33. 
 
 ^ Heb. i. 5 ; cf. Rom. i. 4. 
 
 F The Chaldee Targum refers this Psalm to the Messiah. So the Bereshith 
 Rabba. The interpretation was changed with a view to avoiding the pressure 
 of the Christian arguments. ' Our masters,' says R. Solomon Jarchi, * have 
 expounded [this Psalm] of King Messiah ; but, according to the letter, and 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Divine Royalty of Messiah in the Psalms, 8i 
 
 peaceful and glorious union of the King Messiah with His 
 mystical bride, the Church of redeemed humanity. Messiah is 
 introduced as a Divine King reigning among men. His form is 
 of more than human beauty ; His lips overflow with grace ; 
 God has blessed Him for ever, and has anointed Him with the 
 oil of gladness above His fellows. But Messiah is also directly 
 addressed as God; He is seated upon an everlasting throne ^ 
 Neither of these Psalms can be adapted without exegetical vio- 
 lence to the circumstances of Solomon or of any other king of 
 ancient Israel \ and the New Testament interprets the picture of 
 the Royal Epithalamium, no less than that of the Eoyal triumph 
 over the insurgent heathen, of the one true King Messiah a. In 
 another Psalm the character and extent of this Messianic 
 Sovereignty are more distinctly pictured b. Solomon, when at 
 the height of his power, sketches a Superhuman King, .ruling 
 an empire which in its character and in its compass altogether 
 transcends his own. The extremest boundaries of the kingdom 
 of Israel melt away before the gaze of the Psalmist. The new 
 kingdom reaches ' from sea to sea, and from the flood unto the 
 world's endc.' It reaches from each frontier of the Promised 
 Land, to the remotest regions of the known world, in the 
 opposite quarter. From the Mediterranean it extends to the 
 ocean that washes the shores of Eastern Asia ; from the 
 
 for furnishing answer to the Minim [i. e. the Christian " heretics"], it is better 
 to interpret it of David himself.' Quoted by Pearson on art. 2, notes ; 
 Chandler, Defence of Christianity, p. 212 ; Pocock, Porta Mosis, note, p. 307. 
 See too Dr. Pye Smith, Messiah, vol. i. p. 197. 
 
 z Dr. Pusey observes that of those who have endeavoured to evade the 
 literal sense of the words addressed to King Messiah (ver. 6), ' Thy throne, 
 O God, is for ever and ever,' ' no one who thought he could so construct the 
 sentence that the word Eloliim need not designate the being addressed, 
 doubted that Elohim signified God ; and no one who thought that he could 
 make out for the word Elohim any other meaning than that of '* God," 
 doubted that it designated the being addressed. A right instinct prevented 
 each class from doing more violence to grammar or to idiom than he needed, 
 in order to escape the truth which he disliked. If people thought that they 
 might paraphrase " Thy throne, O Judge" or "Prince," or "image of God," 
 or " who art as a God to Pharaoh," they hesitated not to render with us " Thy 
 throne is for ever and ever." If men think that they may assume such an 
 idiom as "Thy throne of God" meaning "Thy Divine throne," or "Thy 
 throne is God" meaning '^Thy throne is the throne of God," they doubt not 
 that Elohim means purely and simply God. ... If people could persuade 
 themselves that the words were a parenthetic address to God, no one would 
 hesitate to own their meaning to be " Thy throne, O God, is for ever and 
 ever."* Daniel the Prophet, pp. 470, 471, and note 8. Rev. v. 13. Cf. 
 Delitzsch in loo. 
 
 a Heb. 1. 8. b Ps. ixxii. c Ibid. ver. 8. 
 
 11] G 
 
82 Divine Royalty of Messiah in the Psalms. 
 
 Euphrates to tlie utmost West. At the feet of its mighty 
 Monarch, all who are most inaccessible to the arms or to the 
 influence of Israel hasten to tender their voluntary submission. 
 The wild sons of the desert d, the merchants of Tarshish in the 
 then distant Spain ^, the islanders of the Mediterranean ^ th« 
 Arab chiefs ?, the wealthy Nubians^, are foremost in proffering 
 their homage and fealty. But all kings are at last to fall down 
 in submission before the Ruler of the new kingdom ; all nations 
 are to do Him service i. His empire is to be co-extensive with 
 the world : it is also to be co-enduring with timeK His empire 
 is to be spiritual ; it is to confer peace on the world, but by 
 righteousness 1. The King will Himself secure righteous judg- 
 ment"^, salvation >!, deliverance o, redemption?, to His subjects. 
 The needy, the afflicted, the friendless, will be the especial 
 objects of His tender careQ. His appearance in the world will 
 be like the descent of Hhe rain upon the mown grass^"/ the true 
 life of man seems to have been killed out, but it is yet capable 
 of being restored by Him. He Himself, it is hinted, will be out 
 of sight \ but His Name will endure for ever ; His Name will 
 ' propagate s ;' and men shall be blessed in Him*, to the end of 
 time. This King is immortal ; He is also all-knowing and all- 
 mighty. * Omniscience alone can hear the cry of every human 
 heart ; Omnipotence alone can bring deliverance to every human 
 sufferer^.' Look at one more representation of this Royalty, 
 that to which our Lord Himself referred, in dealing with his 
 Jewish adversaries^. David describes his Great Descendant 
 Messiah as his ^ LordY.' Messiah is sitting on the right hand of 
 Jehovah, as the partner of His dignity. Messiah reigns upon a 
 throne which impiety alone could assign to any human monarch ; 
 He is to reign until His enemies are made His footstool^ ; He is 
 ruler now, even among His unsubdued opponents^. In the day 
 of His power, His people offer themselves willingly to His 
 service ; they are clad not in earthly armour, but * in the 
 beauties of holiness^.' Messiah is Priest as well as Kingc; He 
 is an everlasting Priest of that older order which had been 
 
 <^ Ps. Ixxii. 9, D*^!?. ^ Tbid. ver. lo. ^ Ibid. 
 
 g Ibid. ^ Ibid. i>»nD. ^ Ibid. ver. Ii. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 17. ^ Ibid. ver. 3. "^ Ibid. vers. 2, 4. 
 
 " Ibid. vers. 4, 13. *> Ibid. ver. 12. p Ibid. ver. 14. 
 
 Q Ibid. vers. 12, 13. •" Ibid. ver. 6; cf. 2 Sam. xxiii. 4. 
 
 ^ Ps. Ixxii. 17. * Ibid. 
 
 " Daniel the Prophet, p. 479. 
 
 X St. Matt. xxii. 41-45; Ps ex. I. y Ps. ex. i. ^ Ibid. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 2. ^ Ibid. ver. 3. ^ Ibid. ver. 4. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Third Period of Messianic prophecy. 83 
 
 honoured by the father of the faithful. Who is this everlasting 
 Priest, this resistless King, reigning thus amid His enemies 
 and commanding the inmost hearts of His servants % He is 
 David's Descendant ; the Pharisees knew that truth. But He 
 is also David's Lord. How could He be both, if He was merely 
 human % The belief of Christendom can alone answer the 
 question which our Lord addressed to the Pharisees. The Son 
 of David is David's Lord, because He is God \ the Lord of 
 David is David's Son, because He is God Incarnate d. 
 
 (y) These are but samples of that rich store of Messianic 
 prophecy which belongs to the second or Davidic period, and 
 much more of which has an important bearing on our present 
 subject. The third period extends from the reign of Uzziali to 
 the close of the Hebrew Canon in Malachi. Here Messianic 
 prophecy reaches its climax : it expands into the fullest par- 
 ticularity of detail respecting Messiah's Human life ; it mounts 
 to the highest assertions of His Divinity. Isaiah is the richest 
 mine of Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament^. Messiah, 
 especially designated as *the Servant of God/ is the central 
 figure in the prophecies of Isaiah. Both in Isaiah and in 
 Jeremiah, the titles of Messiah are often and pointedly ex- 
 pressive of His true Humanity. He is the Fruit of the earth ^; 
 
 d On Ps. no, see Pusey on Daniel, p. 466, sqq. Delitzsch Psalmen ii. 
 p. 639. 
 
 e With reference to the modern theory (Renan, Vie de J^sus, p. 37, &c. 
 &c.) of a ' later Isaiah,' or * Great Unknown,' living at the time of the 
 Babylonish Captivity, and the assumed author of Is. xl.-lxvi., it may suffice 
 to refer to Professor Payne Smith's valuable volume of University Sermons 
 on the subject. When it is taken for granted on a priori grounds that hond 
 fide prediction of strictly future events is impossible, the Bible predictions must 
 either be resolved into the far-sighted anticipations of genius, or, if their 
 accuracy is too detailed to admit of this explanation, they must be treated as 
 being only historical accounts of the events referred to, thrown with whatever 
 design into the form of prophecy. The predictions respecting Cyrus in the 
 latter part of Isaiah are too explicit to be reasonably regarded as the results 
 of natural foresight ; hence the modern assumption of a ' later Isaiah' as their 
 real author. * Supposing this assumption,' says Bishop Ollivant, * to be true, 
 this later Isaiah was not only a deceiver, but also a witness to his own fraud ; 
 for he constantly appeals to prophetic power as a test of truth, making it, 
 and specifically the prediction respecting the deliverance of the Jews by 
 Cyrus, an evidence of the foreknowledge of Jehovah, as distinguished from 
 the nothingness of heathen idols. And yet we are to suppose that when this 
 fraud was first palmed upon the Jewish nation, they were so simple as not to 
 have perceived that out of his own mouth this false prophet was con- 
 demned 1 ' — Charge of Bishop of LlandafF, 1866, p. 99, note b. Comp. 
 DeUtzsch, Der Prophet Jesaia, p. 23. Smith's Diet. Bible, art. 'Isaiah.' 
 
 f Isa. iv. 2. 
 11] G 2 
 
84 Divine Royalty of Messiah in the prophets . 
 
 He is the Eod out of the stem of Jesses ; He is the Branch or 
 Sprout of David, the Zemach^. He is called by God from His 
 mother's wombi; God has put His Spirit upon HimK He is 
 anointed to preach good tidings to the meek, to bind up the 
 broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captivel. He is a 
 Prophet ; His work is greater than that of any prophet of 
 Israel. Not merely will He come as a Eedeemer to them that 
 turn from transgression in Jacob "i, and to restore the preserved 
 of Israel^ ; He is also given as a Light to the Gentiles, as the 
 Salvation of God unto the end of the earth «. Such is His 
 Spiritual Power as Prophet and Legislator that He will write 
 the law of the Lord, not upon tables of stone, but on the heart 
 and conscience of the true Israel p. In Zechariah as in David 
 He is an enthroned Priest % but it is the Kingly glory of 
 Messiah which predominates throughout the prophetic repre- 
 sentations of this period, and in which His Superhuman Nature 
 is most distinctly suggested. According to Jeremiah, the Branch 
 of Righteousness, who is to be raised up among the posterity of 
 David, is a King who will reign and prosper and execute judg- 
 ment and justice in the earth r. According to Isaiah, this 
 expected King, the Root of Jesse, ^ will stand for an ensign of 
 the people ;' the Gentiles will seek Him ; He will be the 
 rallying-point of the world's hopes, the true centre of its govern- 
 ments. Righteousness, equity, swift justice, strict faithfulness, 
 will mark His administration* ; He will not be dependent like a 
 human magistrate upon the evidence of His senses ; He will not 
 judge after the sight of His eyes, nor reprove after the hearing 
 of His ears " ; He will rely upon the infallibility of a perfect moral 
 insight. Beneath the shadow of His throne, all that is by nature 
 savage, proud, and cruel among the sons of men will learn the 
 habits of tenderness, humility, and love ^. ^ The wolf also shall 
 dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the 
 kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together ; 
 and a little child shall lead them.' The reign of moral power, of 
 spiritual graces, of innocence, of simplicity, will succeed to the 
 reign of physical and brute force. The old sources of moral 
 danger will become harmless through His protecting presence 
 and blessing ; * The sucking child shall play on the hole of the 
 
 ff Tsa. xi. I. ^ Jer. xxiii. 5; xxxiii. 15. ^ Isa. xlix. 1. 
 
 k Ibid. xlii. I. 1 Ibid. Ixi. i. "^ Ibid. lix. 20. 
 
 "i Ibid. xlix. 6. o Ibid. P Jer. xxxi. 31-35. 
 
 q Zech. vi. 13. >• Jer. xxiii. 5. « Isa. xi. 10. 
 
 t Ibid. vers. 4, 5. " Ibid. ver. 3. ^ Ibid. vers. 6-8. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Messiah is to win the world by His sttfferings, 85 
 
 asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' 
 deny ;' and in the end ^the earth shall be full of the knowledge 
 of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea^.' Daniel is taught 
 that at the ^anointing of the Most Holy' — after a defined 
 period — God will ' finish the transgressions/ and ^ make an end 
 of sins,' and ^make reconciliation for iniquity,' and 'bring in 
 everlasting righteousness a.' Zechariah too especially points out 
 the moral and spiritual characteristics of the reign of King 
 Messiah. The founder of an eastern dynasty must ordinarily 
 wade through blood and slaughter to the steps of his throne, 
 and must maintain his authority by force. But the daughter of 
 Jerusalem beholds her King coming to her, * Just and having 
 salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass.' ' The chariots are cut 
 off from Ephraira, and the horse from Jerusalem j' the King' 
 ' speaks peace unto the heathen ;' the ' battle-bow is broken / 
 and yet His dominion extends 'from sea to sea, and from the 
 river to the ends of the earth t»/ 
 
 In harsh and utter contrast, as it seems, to this repre- 
 sentation of Messiah as a Jewish King, the moral conqueror and 
 ruler of the world, there is another representation of Him which 
 belongs to the Davidic period as well as to that of Isaiah. 
 Messiah had been typified in David persecuted by Saul and 
 humbled by Absalom, no less truly than He had been typified in 
 Solomon surrounded by all the glory of his imperial court. 
 If Messiah reigns in the forty-fifth or in the seventy-second 
 Psalms, He suffers, nay He is pre-eminent among the suffering, 
 in the twenty- second. We might suppose that the suffering Just 
 One who is described by David, reaches the climax of anguish ; 
 but the portrait of an archetypal Sorrow has been even more 
 minutely touched by the hand of Isaiah. In both writers, how- 
 ever, the deepest humiliations and woes are confidently treated 
 as the prelude to an assured victory. The Psalmist passes, from 
 what is little less than an elaborate programme of the historical 
 circumstances of the Crucifixion, to an announcement that by 
 these unexampled sufferings the heathen will be converted, and 
 all the kindreds of the Gentiles will be brought to adore the 
 true Godc. The Prophet describes the Servant of God as 
 Mespised and rejected of men^;' His sorrows are viewed with 
 general satisfaction j they are accounted a just punishment for 
 
 y Isa. xi. 8. ^ Ibid. ver. 9. « Dan. ix. 24. ^ Zech. ix. 9, 10. 
 
 c Ps. xxii. 1-21, and 27. Phillips, on Ps. xxii., argues that the Messianic 
 sense is 'the true and only true* sense of it. ^ Isa. liii. 3. 
 
86 Sig7iifica7ice of the theory of a double Messiah. 
 
 His own supposed crimes e. Yet in reality He bears our in- 
 firmities, and carries our sorrows ^ ; His wounds are due to our 
 transgressions ; His stripes have a healing virtue for us ?. His 
 sufferings and death are a trespass -offering ^^ ; on Him is laid 
 the iniquity of alii, if in Isaiah the inner meaning of the 
 tragedy is more fully insisted on, the picture itself is not less 
 vivid than that of the Psalter. The suffering Servant stands 
 before His judges ; * His Visage is so marred more than any 
 man, and His Form more than the sons of men^ ;' like a lamb*, 
 innocent, defenceless, dumb, He is led forth to the slaughter ; 
 ^ He is cut off from the land of the living «i.' Yet the Prophet 
 pauses at His grave to note that He ^ shall see of the travail of 
 His soul and shall be satisfied n,' that God ^will divide Him a 
 portion with the great,' and that He will Himself ^ divide the spoil 
 with the strong.' And all this is to follow ^because He hath 
 poured out His soul unto death o/ His death is to be the con- 
 dition of His victory ; His death is the destined instrument 
 whereby He will achieve His mediatorial reign of glory. 
 
 Place yourselves, brethren, by an effort of intellectual sym- 
 pathy in the position of the men who heard this language 
 while its historical fulfilment, so familiar to us Christians, 
 was as yet future. How self-contradictory must it have 
 appeared to them, how inexplicable, how full of paradox ! 
 How strong must have been the temptation to anticipate 
 that invention of a double Messiah, to which the later Jewish 
 doctors had recourse, that they might escape the manifest 
 cogency of the Christian argument?. That our Lord should 
 actually have submitted Himself to the laws and agencies 
 of disgrace and discomfiture, and should have turned His 
 deepest humiliation into the very weapon of His victory, is 
 not the least among the evidences of His Divine power and 
 mission. And the prophecy which so paradoxically dared to 
 say that He would in such fashion both suffer and reign, 
 assuredly and implicitly contained within itself another and 
 a higher truth. Such majestic control over the ordinary con- 
 ditions of failure betokened something more than an extraor- 
 
 e Isa. liii. 4. ^ Ibid. » Ibid. ver. 5. 
 
 h Ibid. ver. 12. ^ Ibid. ver. 6. ^ Ibid. lii. 14. 
 
 ^ Ibid. liii. 7. "^ Ibid. ver. 8. ^ Ibid. ver. 11. 
 
 o Ibid. ver. 1 2. 
 
 p See Dr. Hengstenberg's elaborate account of the successive Jewish 
 interpretations of Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 12, Christolog. vol. ii. pp. 310-319 
 (Clarke's trans.). Dr. Payne Smith on Isaiah, p. 172. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Diviitity ascribed in terms to the Messiah, 87 
 
 dinary man, something not less than a distinctly Superhuman 
 Personality. Taken in connection with the redemptive powers, 
 the world-wide sway, the spiritual, heart-controlling teaching, 
 so distinctly ascribed to Him, this prediction that the Christ 
 would die, and would convert the whole world by death, pre- 
 pares us for the most explicit statements of the prophets 
 respecting His Person. It is no surprise to a mind which 
 has dwelt steadily on the destiny which prophecy thus assigns 
 to Messiah, that Isaiah and Zechariah should speak of Him 
 as Divine. We will not lay stress upon the fact, that in 
 Isaiah the Redeemer of Israel and of men is constantly asserted 
 to be the Creator q, Who by Himself will save His people ^*. 
 Significant as such language is as to the bent of the Divine 
 Mind, it is not properly Messianic. But in that great pro- 
 phecys, the full and true sense of which is so happily suggested 
 to us by its place in the Church services for Christmas Day, 
 the ^ Son' who is given to Israel receives a fourfold Name. He 
 is a Wonder-Counsellor, or Wonderful, above all earthly beings ; 
 He possesses a Nature which man cannot fathom ; and He 
 thus shares and unfolds the Divine Mind ^ He is the Father 
 of the Everlasting Age or of Eternity". He is the Prince 
 of Peace. Above all, He is expressly named, the Mighty God v. 
 
 <i Isa. xliv. 6 ; xlviii. 12, 13, 17. 
 
 r Ibid. xlv. 21-24; Hos. i. 7; cf. Rom. xiv. ii ; Phil. ii. lo ; Isa. 
 XXXV. 4, xl. 3, TO. B Isa. ix. 6. 
 
 * y-^^v i«?bD. These two words must clearly be connected, although they 
 do not stand in the relation of the status constructus. Gen. xvi. 12. yrv 
 designated the attribute here concerned, vhu the superhuman Possessor 
 of it. ^ T^-^yi^y Bp. Lowth's Transl. of Isaiah in loc. 
 
 ^ This is the plain literal sense of the words. The habit of construing 
 "Tlirbt* as ' strong hero,' which was common to Gesenius and the older 
 rationalists, has been abandoned by later writers, such as Hitzig and Knobel. 
 Hitzig observes that to render "ill^'bi^ by 'strong hero' is contrary to the 
 usus loquendi. *b«,* he argues, 'is always, even in such passages as 
 Gen. xxxi. 29, to be rendered " God." In all the passages which are 
 quoted to prove that it means "princeps" "potens/'the forms are,' he says, 
 'to be derived not from ^«, but from b'i^, which properly means "ram," 
 then "leader," or "prince" of the flock of men.' (See the quot. in Hengst. 
 Christ, ii. p. 88, Clarke's transl.). But while these later rationalists 
 recognise the true meaning of the phrase, they endeavour to represent 
 it as a mere name of Messiah, indicating nothing as to His possessing a 
 Divine Nature. Hitzig contends that it is applied to Messiah ' by way 
 of exaggeration, in so far as He possesses divine qualities ;' and Knobel, 
 that it belongs to Him as a hero, who in His wars with the Gentiles 
 will shew that He possesses divine strength. But does the word 'El* 
 admit of being applied to a merely human hero ? 'El/ says Dr. Pusey, 
 
 "1 
 
88 Divinity of Messiah in the prophets. 
 
 Conformably with this Jeremiah calls Him Jehovah Tsidkenu w^ 
 as Isaiah had called Him Emmanuel ^, Micah speaks of His 
 eternal pre-existence y, as Isaiah had spoken of His endless 
 reign z. Daniel predicts that His dominion is an everlasting 
 dominion that shall not pass away a. Zechariah terms Him the 
 
 •the name of God, is nowhere used absolutely of any but God. The 
 word is used once relatively, in its first appellative sense, the mighty of 
 the nations (Ezek. xxxi. ii), in regard to Nebuchadnezzar. Also once 
 in the plural (Ezek. xxxii. 21). It occurs absolutely in Hebrew 225 times, 
 and in every place is used of God.' Daniel, p. 483. Can we then doubt 
 its true force in the present passage, especially when we compare Isa. x. 2 1 , 
 where mar'jN is applied indisputably to the Most High God ? Cf. Delitzsch, 
 Jesaia, p. 155. * 
 
 ^ Jer. xxiii. 5, 6. This title is also applied by Jeremiah to Jerusalem 
 in the Messianic age, in other words, to the Christian Church. Jer. xxxiii. 
 15, 16. The reason is not merely to be found in the close fellowship 
 of Christ with His Church as taught by St. Paul, (Eph. v. 23, 30); 
 who even calls the Church, Christ (i Cor. xii. 12). Jehovah Tsidkenu 
 expresses the great fact of which our Lord is the author, and Christendom 
 the result. That fact is the actual gift of God's justifying, sanctifying 
 righteousness to our weak sinful humanity. As applied to the Church 
 then, the title draws attention to the reality of the gift ; as applied to 
 Christ, to the Person of Him through Whom it is given. It cannot be 
 paralleled with names given to inanimate objects such as Jehovah Nissi, 
 nor even with such personal names as Jehoram, Jehoshaphat, and the 
 like. In these cases there is no ground for identifying the kings in 
 question with the Exalted Jehovah, or with Jehovah the Judge. The 
 title before us, of itself, may not necessarily imply the Divinity of Christ ; 
 it was indeed given in another form to Zedekiah. Its real force, as applied 
 to our Lord, is however shewn by other prophetic statements about Him, 
 just as He is called Jesus, in a fundamentally distinct sense from that 
 which the word bore in its earlier applications. But cf. Pye Smith, 
 Messiah, i. 271, sqq. Hengst. Christ, ii. 415, sqq. Reinke, Messianischen 
 Weissagungen, iii. 510, sqq. Critici Sacri, vol. 4, p. 5638. Pearson on 
 Creed, ii. 181, ed. 1833. 
 
 * Isa. vii. 14 ; St. Matt. i. 23. Like Jehovah Tsidkenu, Emmanuel does 
 really point to our Lord's Divine Person, as Isa. ix. 6, would alone imply. 
 That 'n'ob^ means a literal virgin, that the fulfilment of this prophecy 
 is to be sought for only in the birth of our Lord, and that this announcement 
 of God's mighty Salvation in the future, might well have satisfied Ahaz 
 that the lesser help against the two kings in the immediate present would 
 not be wanting, are points well discussed by Hengstenberg, Christ, ii. 43-66. 
 Reinke, Weissagung von der Jungfrau und von Immanuel, Miinster, 1848. 
 Even if it were certain that the Name Emmanuel was in the first instance 
 given to a child born in the days of Ahaz, it would still be true that 
 •then did God in the highest sense become with us, when He was seen 
 upon earth.' St. Chrys. in Isa. ch. vii. s. 6, quoted by Hengst. Christol. ubi 
 supra. See too. Smith's Diet, of Bible, art. 'Isaiah,' i. p. 879; Dr. Payne 
 Smith, Proph. of Isaiah, pp. 21-27. 
 
 y Mic. V. 2. See Chandler's Defence of Christianity, p. 124; Mill on 
 Mythical Interpr. p. 318. '■ Isa. ix. 6. ^ Dan. vii. 14. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Attitttde of the N aturalistic criticism, 89 
 
 Fellow or Equal of the Lord of Hosts ^ ; and refers in the 
 clearest language to His Incarnation and Passion as being 
 that of Jehovah Himself c. Haggai implies His Divinity 
 by foretelling that His presence will make the glory of the 
 second temple greater than the glory of the first <^. Malachi 
 points to Him as the Angel of the Covenant, Jehovah, 
 Whom Israel was seeking, and Who would suddenly come 
 to His temple®. 
 
 Eead this language as a whole ; read it by the light of the 
 great doctrine which it attests, and which in turn illuminates 
 it, the doctrine of a Messiah Divine as well as Human; — all 
 is natural, consistent, full of point and meaning. But divorce 
 it from that doctrine in obedience to a foregone and arbitrary 
 placitum of the negative criticism, to the effect that Jesus 
 Christ shall be banished at any cost from the scroll of prophecy ; 
 — how full of difficulties does such language forthwith become, 
 how overstrained and exaggerated, how insipid and disappoint- 
 ing ! Doubtless it is possible to bid defiance alike to Jewish 
 and to Christian interpreters, and to resolve upon seeing in 
 the prophets only such a sense as may be consistent with 
 the theoretical exigencies of Naturalism. It is possible to 
 suggest that what looks like supernatural prediction is only 
 a clever or chance farsightedness, and that expressions which 
 literally anticipate a distant history are but the exuberance of 
 poetry, which, from its very vagueness, happens to coincide 
 with some feature, real or imagined, of the remote future. 
 It is possible to avoid any frank acknowledgment of the im- 
 posing spectacle presented by converging and consentient lines 
 
 ^ Zech. xiii. 7. n"*03? does not mean only an associate of any kind, 
 or a neighbour. 'The word rendered " My fellow" was revived by Zechariah 
 from the language of the Pentateuch. It was used eleven times in Leviticus, 
 and then was disused. There is no doubt then that the word, being 
 revived out of Leviticus, is to be understood as in Leviticus; but in 
 Leviticus it is used strictly of a fellow-man, one who is as himself. 
 Lev. vi. 2, xviii. 20, xix. 11, 15, 17, xxiv. 19, xxv. 14, 15, 17. . . The name 
 designates not one joined by friendship or covenant, or by any voluntary 
 act, but one united indissolubly by common bonds of nature, which a 
 man may violate, but cannot annihilate. . . . When then this title is applied 
 to the relation of an individual to God, it is clear that That Individual can 
 be no mere man, but must be one united with God by an Unity of Being. 
 The " Fellow" of the Lord is no other than He Who said in the Gospel, 
 *' I and My Father are One." ' Pusey, Daniel, pp. 487, 488. Hengst. 
 Christ, iv. pp. 108-TI2. 
 
 c Zech. ii. 10-13, xii. 10; St. John xix. 34, 37; Rev. i. 7. 
 
 ^ Hag. ii. 7, 9. ^ Mai. iii. i. 
 
90 L ast Period of Messianic prophecy, 
 
 of prophecy, and to refuse to consider the prophetic utterances, 
 except in detail and one by one ; as if forsooth Messianic 
 prophecy were an intellectual enemy whose forces must be 
 divided by the criticism that would conquer it. It is possible, 
 alas ! even for accomplished scholarship so fretfully to carp 
 at each instance of pure prediction in the Bible, to nibble 
 away the beauty and dim the lustre of each leading utterance 
 with such persevering industry, as at length to persuade itself 
 that the predictive element in Scripture is insignificantly small, 
 or even that it does not exist at all. That modern criticism 
 of this temper should refuse to accept the prophetic witness 
 to the Divinity of the Messiah, is more to be regretted than 
 to be wondered at. And yet, if it were seriously supposed 
 that such criticism had succeeded in blotting out all reference 
 to the Godhead of Christ from the pages of the Old Testament, 
 we should still have to encounter and to explain that massive 
 testimony to the Messianic belief which lives on in the Eab- 
 binical literature ; since that literature, whatever be the date 
 of particular existing treatises, contains traditions, neither few 
 nor indistinct, of indisputable antiquity. In that literature 
 nothing is plainer than that the ancient Jews believed the 
 expected Messiah to be Divine f. It cannot be pretended that 
 this belief came from without, from the schools of Alexandria, 
 or from the teaching of Zoroaster. It was notoriously based 
 upon the language of the Prophets and Psalmists. And we 
 of to-day, even with our improved but strictly mechanical 
 apparatus of grammar and dictionary, can scarcely pretend to 
 connect the early unprejudiced interpretation of men who read 
 the Old Testament with at least as much instinctive insight 
 into the meaning of its archaic language, and of its older 
 forms of thought and of feeling, as an Englishman in this 
 generation can command when he applies himself to the study 
 of Shakespeare or of Milton. 
 
 (S) The last stage of the Messianic doctrine begins only after 
 the close of the Hebrew Canon. Among the Jews of Alexandria, 
 the hope of a Messiah seems to have fallen into the background. 
 This may have been due to the larger attractions which doctrines 
 such as those of the Sophia and the Logos would have possessed 
 for Hellenized populations, or to a somewhat diminished interest 
 in the future of Jewish Nationality caused by long absence from 
 
 f For the Rabbinical conception of the Person of Messiah, see Schottgen, 
 Hor. Hebr. vol. ii. de Messi^, lib. i. c. i, sqq. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Popular degradation of the Messianic Ideal, 91 
 
 Palestine, or to a cowardly unwillingness to avow startling reli- 
 gious beliefs in the face of keen heathen critics. The two latter 
 motives may explain the partial or total absence of Messianic 
 allusions from the writings of Philo and Josephus ; the former 
 will account for the significant silence of the Book of Wisdom. 
 Among the peasantry, and in the schools of Palestine, the Mes- 
 sianic doctrine lived on. The literary or learned form of the 
 doctrine, being based on and renewed by the letter of Scripture, 
 was higher and purer than the impaired and debased belief which 
 gradually established itself among the masses of the people. The 
 popular degradation of the doctrine may be traced to the later 
 political circumstances of the Jews, acting upon the secular and 
 materialized element in the national character. The Messianic 
 belief, as has been shewn, had two aspects, corresponding re- 
 spectively to the political and to the religious yearnings of the 
 people of Israel. If such a faith was a relief to a personal or 
 national sense of sin, it was also a relief to a sense of political 
 disappointment or degradation. And keen consciousness of 
 political failure became a dominant sentiment among the Jewish 
 people during the centuries immediately preceding our Lord's 
 Incarnation. With some fitful glimpses of national life, as under 
 the Asmoneans, the Jews of the Kestoration passed from the 
 yoke of one heathen tyranny to that of another. As in succes- 
 sion they served the Persian monarchs, the Syrian Greeks, the 
 Idumsean king, and the Eoman magistrate, the Jewish people 
 cast an eye more and more wistfully to the political hopes which 
 might be extracted from their ancient and accepted Messianic 
 belief. They learned to pass more and more lightly over the 
 prophetic pictures of a Messiah robed in moral majesty, of a 
 Messiah relieving the woes of the whole human family, of a 
 Messiah suffering torture and shame in the cause of truth. They 
 dwelt more and more eagerly upon the pictures of His world- 
 wide conquest and imperial sway, and they construed those 
 promises of coming triumph in the most earthly and secular 
 sense ; they looked for a Jewish Alexander or for a Jewish 
 Caesar. The New Testament exhibits the popular form of the 
 Messianic doctrine, as it lay in the minds of Galileans, of 
 Samaritans, of the men of Jerusalem. It is plain how deeply, 
 when our Lord appeared, the hope, of a Deliverer had sunk into 
 the heart both of peasant and townsman ; yet it is equally plain 
 how earthly was the taint which had passed over the popular 
 apprehension of this glorious hope, since its first full proclamation 
 in the days of the Prophets. Doubtless there were saints like 
 
92 Christ claimed to be the Messiah of prophecy. 
 
 the aged Simeon, whose eyes longed sore for the Divine Christ 
 foretold in the great age of Hebrew prophecy. But generally 
 speaking, the piety of the enslaved Jew had become little else 
 than a wrong-headed patriotism. His religious expectations had 
 been taken possession of by his civic passions, and were liable at 
 any moment to be placed at the service of a purely political 
 agitation. Israel as a theocracy was sacrificed in his thought to 
 Israel as a state ; and he was willing to follow any adventurer 
 into the wilderness or across the Jordan, if only there was a 
 remote prospect of bringing the Messianic predictions to bear 
 against the hated soldiery and police of Kome. A religious 
 . creed is always impoverished when it is degraded to serve 
 political purposes ; and belief in the Divinity of Messiah na- 
 turally waned and died away, when the highest functions 
 attributed to Him were merely those of a successful general or 
 of an able statesman. The Apostles themselves, at one time, 
 looked mainly or only for a temporal prince; and the people 
 who were willing to hail Jesus as King Messiah, and to conduct 
 Him in royal pomp to the gates of the holy city, had so lost 
 sight of the real eminence which Messiahship involved, that 
 when He claimed to be God, they endeavoured to stone Him for 
 blasphemy, and this claim of His was in point of fact the crime 
 for which their leaders persecuted Him to death?. 
 
 And yet when Jesus Christ presented Himself to the Jewish 
 people. He did not condescend to sanction the misbelief of the 
 time, or to swerve from the tenor of the ancient revelation. He 
 claimed to satisfy the national hopes of Israel by a prospect 
 which would identify the future of Israel with that of the world. 
 He professed to answer to the full, unmutilated, spiritual ex- 
 pectations of prophets and of righteous men. They had desired 
 to see and had not seen Him, to hear and had not heard Him. 
 Long ages had passed, and the hope of Israel was still unfulfilled. 
 Psalmists had turned back in accents wellnigh of despair to the 
 great deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, when the Lord 
 brake the heads of the dragons in the waters, and brought foun- 
 tains out of the hard rock. Prophets had been assured that at 
 last the vision of ages should ^ speak and not lie,' and had been 
 bidden ' though it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come, 
 it will not tarry.' Each victory, each deliverance, prefigured 
 Messiah's work ; each saint, • each hero, foreshadowed some 
 separate ray of His personal glory ; each disaster gave strength 
 
 g Cf. Lect. IV. pp. 190, 191. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Heh^ew Monotheism, a foil to Messiah! s Divinity. 93 
 
 to the mighty cry for His intervention : He was the true soul of 
 the history, as well as of the poetry and prophecy of Israel. And 
 so much was demanded of Him, so superhuman were the propor- 
 tions of His expected actions, that He would have disappointed 
 Israel's poetry and history no less than her prophecy, had He 
 been merely one of the sons of men. Yet when at last in the 
 fulness of time He came, that He might satisfy the desire of the 
 nations, He was rejected by a stiff-necked generation, because 
 He was true to the highest and brightest anticipations of His 
 Advent. A Christ who had contented himself with the debased 
 Messianic ideal of the Herodian period, might have precipitated 
 an insurrection against the Roman rule, and might have ante- 
 dated, after whatever intermediate struggles, the fall of Jeru- 
 salem. Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be the Divine Messiah of 
 David and of Isaiah ; and therefore He died upon the cross, 
 to achieve, not the political enfranchisement of Palestine, but 
 the spiritual redemption of humanity. 
 
 I. Permit me to repeat an observation which has already been 
 hinted at. The several lines of teaching by which the Old Testa- 
 ment leads up to the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, are at first 
 sight apparently at issue with that primary truth of which the 
 Jewish people and the Jewish Scriptures were the appointed 
 guardians. ^ Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is one God ^J 
 That was the fundamental law of the Jewish belief and polity. 
 How copious are the warnings against the surrounding idolatries 
 in the Jewish Scriptures M With what varied, what delicate, 
 what incisive irony do the sacred writers lash the pretensions 
 of the most gorgeous idol- worships, while guarding the solitary 
 Majesty and the unshared prerogatives of the God of Israel ^ I 'The 
 specific distinction of Judaism,' says Baur, ' marking it off from 
 all forms of heathen religious belief whatever, is its purer, more 
 refined, and monotheistic conception of God. From the earliest 
 antiquity downwards, this was the essential basis of the Old 
 Testament religion 1.' And yet this discriminating and funda- 
 mental truth does but throw out into sharper outline and relief 
 those suggestions of personal distinctions in the Godhead ; that 
 personification of the Wisdom, if indeed the Wisdom be not a 
 
 h Deut. vi. 4; cf. ibid. iv. 35, xxxii, 39; Ps. xcvi. 5; Isa. xlii. 8, xliii. 
 10-13, xliv. 6, 8, xlv. 5, 6, 18, 21, 22, xlviii. 11, 12; Wisd. xii. 13; Ecclus. i. 8. 
 
 i Deut. iv. 16-18. 
 
 ^ Ps. cxv. 4-8; Isa. xxxvii. 19, xliv. 9-20, xlvi. 5, sq.j Jer. ii. 27, 28, 
 X. 3-6, 8-10, 14, 16; Hab. ii. 18, 19; Wisd. xiii. xiv. 
 
 ^ Christenthum, p. 17. 
 
94 The Divinity of Messiah is implied in the 
 
 Person ; those visions in which a Divine Being is so closely 
 identified with the Angel who represents Him \ those successive 
 predictions of a Messiah personally distinct from Jehovah, yet 
 also the Saviour of men, the Lord and Euler of all, the Judge of 
 the nations. Almighty, Everlasting, nay. One Whom prophecy 
 designates as God. How was the Old Testament' consistent 
 with itself, how was it loyal to its leading purpose, to its very 
 central and animating idea, unless it was in truth entrusted with 
 a double charge ; unless, besides teaching explicitly the Creed of 
 Sinai, it was designed to teach implicitly a fuller revelation, and 
 to prepare men for the Creed of the Day of Pentecost % If indeed 
 the Old Testament had been a semi-polytheistic literature \ if in 
 Israel the Divine Unity had been only a philosophical specula- 
 tion, shrouded from the popular eye by the various forms with 
 which some imaginative antiquity had peopled its national 
 heaven ; if the line of demarcation between such angel ministers 
 and guardians as we read of in Daniel and Zechariah, and the 
 High and Holy One Who inhabiteth eternity, had been indistinct 
 or uncertain ; if the Most Holy Name had been really lavished 
 upon created beings with an indiscriminate profusion that de- 
 prived it of its awful, of its incommunicable value "i, — then 
 these intimations which we have been reviewing would have 
 been less startling than they are. As it is, they receive promi- 
 nence from the sharp, unrelieved antagonism in which they seem 
 to stand to the main scope of the books which contain them. 
 And thus they are a perpetual witness that the Jewish Eevela- 
 tion is not to be final ; they irresistibly suggest a deeper truth 
 which is to break forth from the pregnant simplicity of God's 
 earlier message to mankind ; they point, as we know, to the 
 Prologue of St. John's Gospel and to the Council chamber of 
 Nicsea, in which the absolute Unity of the Supreme Being will 
 be fully exhibited as harmonizing with the true Divinity of Him 
 Who was thus announced in His distinct Personality to the 
 Church of Israel. 
 
 2. It may be urged that the Old Testament might conceivably 
 have set forth the doctrine of Christ's Godhead in other and 
 more energetic terms than those which it actually employs. 
 Even if this should be granted, let us carefully bear in mind 
 that the witness of the Old Testament to this truth is not con- 
 fined to the texts which expressly assert that Messiah should be 
 Divine. The Human Life of Messiah, His supernatural birth, 
 
 m On the senses of EloJdm in the Old Testament, see Appendix, Note B. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
ftchiess of prophecy respecting His Manhood, 95 
 
 His character, His death, His triumph, are predicted in the Old 
 Testament with a minuteness which utterly defies the rationalistic 
 insinuation, that the argument from prophecy in favour of 
 Christ's claims may after all be resolved into an adroit manipu- 
 lation of sundry more or less irrelevant quotations. No amount 
 of captious ingenuity will destroy the substantial fact that the 
 leading features of our Lord's Human manifestation were an- 
 nounced to the world some centuries before He actually came 
 among us. Do I say that to be the subject of prophecy is of 
 itself a proof of Divinity % Certainly not. But at least when 
 prophecy is so copious and elaborate, and yet withal so true to 
 the facts of history which it predicts, its higher utterances, which 
 lie beyond the verification of the human senses, acquire corre- 
 sponding significance and credit. If the circumstances of Christ's 
 Human Life were actually chronicled by prophecy, prophecy is 
 entitled to submissive attention when she proceeds to assert, in 
 whatever terms, that the Christ Whom she has described is more 
 than Man. 
 
 It must be a robust and somewhat coarse scepticism which 
 can treat those early glimpses into the laws of God's inner 
 being, those mysterious apparitions to Patriarchs and Lawgivers, 
 those hypostatized representations of Divine Attributes, above 
 all, that Divinity repeatedly and explicitly ascribed to the pre- 
 dicted Eestorer of Israel, only as illustrations of the exuberance 
 of Hebrew imagination, only as redundant tropes and moods of 
 Eastern poetry. For when the destructive critics have done their 
 worst, we are still confronted by the fact of a considerable litera- 
 ture, indisputably anterior to the age of Christianity, and fore- 
 telling in explicit terms the coming of a Divine and Human 
 Saviour. We cannot be insensible to the significance of this 
 broad and patent fact. Those who in modern days have 
 endeavoured to establish an absolute power over the conduct 
 and lives of their fellow-men have found it necessary to spare 
 no pains in one department of political effort. They have en- 
 deavoured to ' inspire,' if they could not suppress, that powerful 
 agency, which both for good and for evil moulds and informs 
 popular thought. The control of the press from day to day is 
 held in our times to be among the highest exercises of despotic 
 power over a civilized community \ and yet the sternest despot- 
 ism will in vain endeavour to recast in its own favour the verdict 
 of history. History, as she points to the irrevocable and un- 
 changing past, can be won neither by violence nor by blandish- 
 ments to silence her condemnations, or to lavish her approvals, 
 
g6 Christy and the Sacred liter ahcre of Israel, 
 
 or in any degree to unsay the evidence of her chronicles, that 
 she may subserve the purpose and establish the claim of some 
 aspiring potentate. But He Who came to reign by love as by 
 omnipotence, needed not to put force upon the thought and 
 speech of His contemporaries, even could He have willed to do 
 so n For already the literature of fifteen centuries had been 
 enlisted in His service ; and the annals and the hopes of an 
 entire people, to say nothing of the yearnings and guesses of the 
 world, had been moulded into one long anticipation of Himself. 
 Even He could not create or change the past; but He could 
 point to its unchanging voice as the herald of His own claims 
 and destiny. His language would have been folly on the lips of 
 the greatest of the sons of men, but it does no more than simple 
 justice to the true mind and constant drift of the Old Testament. 
 With His Hand upon the Jewish Canon, Jesus Christ could look 
 opponents or disciples in the face, and bid them * Search the 
 Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they 
 are they which testify of Me.' 
 
 » Lacordaire. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 OUR LORD'S WORK IN THE WORLD A WITNESS TO 
 HIS DIVINITY. 
 
 Whence liath TJds Man this Wisdom, and these mighty ivorks ? Is not This 
 the carpenters Son ? is not His mother called Mary ? and IJis hrethren^ 
 James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas ? And Bis sisters, are they not 
 all with us ? Whence then hath This Man all these things ? 
 
 St. Matt. xiii. 54-56. 
 
 A SCEPTICAL prince once asked his chaplain to give him some 
 clear evidence of the truth of Christianity, but to do so in a few 
 words, because a king had not much time to spare for such mat- 
 ters. The chaplain tersely replied, ^ The Jews, your majesty.' 
 The chaplain meant to say that the whole Jewish history was a 
 witness to Christ. In the ages before the Incarnation Israel 
 witnessed to His work and to His Person, by its Messianic be- 
 lief, by its Scriptures, by its ritual, by its rabbinical schools. In 
 the ages which have followed the Incarnation, Israel has wit- 
 nessed to Him no less powerfully as the people of the dispersion. 
 In all the continents, amid all the races of the world, we meet 
 with the nation to which there clings an unexpiated, self-impre- 
 cated guilt. This nation dwells among us and around us 
 Englishmen ; it shares largely in our material prosperity ; its 
 social and civil life are shaped by our national institutions ; it 
 sends its representatives to our tribunals of justice and to the 
 benches of our senate : yet its heart, its home, its future, are 
 elsewhere. It still hopes for Him Whom we Christians have 
 found ; it still witnesses, by its accumulating despair, to the 
 truth of the creed which it so doggedly rejects. Our rapid sur- 
 vey then of those anticipations of our Lord's Divinity which are 
 furnished by the Old Testament, and by the literature more im- 
 mediately dependent on it, has left untouched a district of history 
 fruitful in considerations which bear upon our subject. But it 
 must suffice to have hinted at the testimony which is thus 
 
 III] H 
 
98 Oitr Lord's 'plan' of founding 
 
 indirectly yielded by the later Judaism ; and we pass to-day to a 
 topic which is in some sense continuous with that of our last 
 lecture. We have seen how the appearance of a Divine Person, 
 as the Saviour of men, was anticipated by the Old Testament ; 
 let us enquire how far Christ's Divinity is attested by the phe- 
 nomenon Avhich we encounter in the formation and continuity of 
 the Christian Church. 
 
 I. When modern writers examine and discuss the proportions 
 and character of our Lord's 'plan/ a Christian believer may 
 rightly feel that such a term can only be used in such a connec- 
 tion with some mental caution. He may urge that in forming 
 an estimate of strictly human action, we can distinguish between 
 a plan and its realization ; but that this distinction is obviously 
 inapplicable to Him with Whom resolve means achievement, and 
 Who completes His action, really if not visibly, when He simply 
 wills to act. It might further be maintained, and with great 
 truth, that the pretension to exhibit our Lord's entire design in 
 His Life and Death proceeds upon a misapprehension. It is far 
 from being true that our Lord has really laid bare to the eyes of 
 men the whole purpose of the Eternal Mind in respect of His 
 Incarnation. Indeed nothing is plainer, or more upon the very 
 face of the New Testament, than the limitations and reserve of 
 His disclosures on this head. We see enough for faith and for 
 practical purposes, but we see no more. Amid the glimpses 
 which are offered us respecting the scope and range of the In- 
 carnation, the obvious shades off continually into mystery, the 
 visible commingles with the unseen. We Christians know just 
 enough to take the measure of our ignorance ; we feel ourselves 
 hovering intellectually on the outskirts of a vast economy of 
 mercy, the complete extent and the inner harmonies of which 
 One Eye alone can survey. 
 
 If however we have before us only a part of the plan which 
 our Lord meant to carry out by His Incarnation and Death, 
 assuredly we do know something and that from His Own Lips. 
 If it is true that success can never be really doubtful to Omni- 
 potence, and that no period of suspense can be presumed to 
 intervene between a resolve and its accomplishment in the 
 Eternal Mind ; yet, on the other hand, it is a part of our Lord's 
 gracious condescension that He has, if we may so speak, entered 
 into the lists of history. He has come among us as one of our- 
 selves ; He has made Himself of no reputation, and has been 
 found in fashion as a man. He has despoiled Himself of His 
 advantages ; He has actually stated what He proposed to do in 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
the 'Kingdom of Heaven ' or ' of God! 99 
 
 the world, and has thus submitted Himself to the verdict of 
 man's experience. His own Words are our warrant for compar- 
 ing them with His Work ; and He has interposed the struggles 
 of centuries between His Words and their fulfilment. He has so 
 shrouded His Hand of might as at times to seem as if He would 
 court at least the possibilities of failure. Putting aside then for 
 the moment any recorded intimations of Christ's Will in respect 
 of other spheres of being, with all their mighty issues of life and 
 death, let us enquire what it was that He purposed to effect 
 within the province of human action and history. 
 
 Now the answer to this question is simply, that He proclaimed 
 Himself the Founder of a world-wide and imperishable Society. 
 He did not propose to act powerfully upon the convictions and 
 the characters of individual men, and then to leave to them, 
 when they believed and felt alike, the liberty of voluntarily 
 forming themselves into an association, with a view to reciprocal 
 sympathy and united action. From the first, the formation of a 
 society was not less an essential feature of Christ's plan, than was 
 His redemptive action upon single souls. This society was not 
 to be a school of thinkers, nor a self- associated company of enter- 
 prising fellow-workers ; it was to be a Kingdom, the kingdom 
 of heaven, or, as it is also called, the kingdom of God ^ For 
 ages indeed the Jewish theocracy had been a kingdom of God 
 upon earth b, God was the one true King of ancient Israel. 
 He was felt to be present in Israel as a Monarch living among 
 His subjects. The temple was His palace ; its sacrifices and 
 ritual were the public acknowledgment of His present but in- 
 visible Majesty. But the Jewish polity, considered as a system, 
 was an external rather than an internal kingdom of God. 
 Doubtless there were great saints in ancient Israel ; doubtless 
 Israel had prayers and hymns such as may be found in the 
 Psalter, than which nothing more searching and more spiritual 
 has been since produced in Christendom. Looking however to 
 the popular working of the Jewish theocratic system, and to 
 what is implied as to its character in Jeremiah's prophecy of a 
 profoundly spiritual kingdom which was to succeed it ^, may we 
 
 * ^acriXsia ruv ohpavcov occurs thirty-two times in St. Matthew's Gospel, to 
 which it is pecuhar; fiaa-iXda rod Qeov five times. The latter term occurs 
 fifteen tiines in St. Mark, thirty-three times in St. Luke, twice in St. John, 
 seven times in the Acts of the Apostles. In St. Matt. xiii. 43, xxvi. 29, we 
 find 7] jSaciAeia rod UarpSs. Our Lord speaks of t) fiacriXda t) e/x^ three times, 
 St. John xviii. 36. ^ St. Matt. xxi. 43. 
 
 0* Jer. xxxi. 31-34, quoted in Heb. viii. 8-1 1. 
 Ill] H 2 
 
100 Laws of the Kingdom of Heave^i, as given 
 
 not conclude that the Royalty of God was represented rather to 
 the senses than to the heart and intelligence of at least the mass 
 of His ancient subjects % Jesus Christ our Lord announced a 
 new kingdom of God ; and, by terming it tlie Kingdom of God, 
 He implied that it would first fully deserve that sacred name, as 
 corresponding with Daniel's prophecy of a fifth empire \ Let 
 us moreover note, in passing, that when using the word ' king- 
 dom,' our Lord did not announce a republic. Writers who carry 
 into their interpretation of the Gospels ideas which have been 
 gained from a study of the Platonic dialogues or of the recent 
 history of France, may permit themselves to describe our Lord 
 as Founder of the Christian republic. And certainly St. Paul, 
 when accommodating himself to political traditions and aspira- 
 tions which still prevailed largely throughout the Roman world, 
 represents and recommends the Church of Christ as the source 
 and home of the highest moral and mental liberty, by speaking 
 freely of our Christian ^citizenship,' and of our coming at baptism 
 to the ^city' of the living God*^. Not that the Apostle would 
 press the metaphor to the extent of implying that the new 
 society was to be a spiritual democracy ; since he very earnestly 
 taught that even the inmost thoughts of its members were to be 
 ruled by their Invisible King f. This indeed had been the claim 
 of the Founder of the kingdom Himself g ; He willed to be King, 
 absolutely and without a rival, in the new society ; and the 
 nature and extent of His legislation plainly shews us in what 
 sense He meant to reign. 
 
 The original laws of the new kingdom are for the most part 
 set forth by its Founder in His Sermon on the Mount. After a 
 preliminary statement of the distinctive character which was to 
 mark the life and bearing of those who would fully correspond 
 to His Mind and Will^, and a further sketch of the nature and 
 depth of the influence which His subjects were to exert upon 
 other meni. He proceeds to define the general relation of the 
 new law which He is promulgating to the law that had preceded 
 it ^. The vital principle of His legislation, namely, that moral 
 obedience shall be enforced, not merely in the performance of or 
 
 ^ Dan.'vii. 9-15. 
 
 « Phil. iii. 20 : -^^wj/ •yh.p ro TTbKir^vfxo. €v ovpavo7s virapx^^' Cf. Acts xxiii. I : 
 7re7ro\iT6U)uat tw &€w. Phil. i. 27 : a^ioos rod evayyeXiov Tro\iT€V€<T6€. Heb. 
 xiii. 14. In Heb. xi. 10, xii. 22, iroAis apparently embraces the whole Church 
 of Christ, visible and invisible; in Heb. xi. 16, xiii. 14, it is restricted to the 
 latter. ^ 2 Cor. x. 5. s St. Matt, xxiii. 8. 
 
 b Ibid. V. 1-12. i Ibid. vers. 13-16. ^ Ibid* vers. 17-20. 
 
 r LECT. 
 
in the Sermon on the Mozmt, loi 
 
 in the abstinence from outward acts, but in the deepest and most 
 secret springs of thought and motive, is traced in its application 
 to certain specific prescriptions of the older Law ^ ; while other 
 ancient enactments are modified or set aside by the stricter 
 purity "\ the genuine simplicity of motive and character », the 
 entire unselfishness o, and the superiority to personal prejudices 
 and exclusiveness P which the New Lawgiver insisted on. The 
 required life of the new kingdom is then exhibited in detail ; the 
 duties of almsgivings, of prayer r, and of fasting s, are successively 
 enforced ; but the rectification of the ruling motive is chiefly 
 insisted on as essential. In performing religious duties, God's 
 Will, and not any conventional standard of human opinion, is to 
 be kept steadily before the eye of the soul. The Legislator 
 insists upon the need of a single, supreme, unrivalled motive in 
 thought and action, unless all is to be lost. The uncorruptible 
 treasure must be in heaven ; the body of the moral life will only 
 be full of light if ^ the eye is single ;' no man can serve two 
 masters *. The birds and the flowers suggest the lesson of trust 
 in and devotion to the One Source and End of life; all will 
 really be well with those who in very deed seek His kingdom 
 and His righteousness ^. Charity in judgment of other men ^, 
 circumspection in communicating sacred truth y, confidence and 
 constancy in prayer 2;, perfect consideration for the wishes of 
 others a, yet also a determination to seek the paths of difficulty 
 and sacrifice, rather than the broad easy ways trodden by the 
 mass of mankind^; — these features will mark the conduct of 
 loyal subjects of the kingdom. They will beware too of false 
 prophets, that is, of the movers of spiritual sedition, of teachers 
 who are false to the truths upon which the kingdom is based and 
 to the temper which is required of its real children. The false 
 prophets will be known by their moral unfruitfulness % rather 
 than by any lack of popularity or success. Finally, obedience to 
 the law of the kingdom is insisted on as the one condition of 
 safety ; obedience ^, — as distinct from professions of loyalty ; 
 obedience, — which will be found to have really based a man's 
 life upon the immoveable rock at that solemn moment when all 
 that stands upon the sand must utterly perish % 
 
 1 St. Matt. V. 21-30. ™ Ibid. vers. 31, 32. ^ Ibid. vers. 33-37. 
 o Ibid. vers. 38-42. P Ibid. vers. 43-47. ^ Ibid. vi. 1-4. 
 
 ^ Ibid. vers. 5-8. « Ibid. vers. 16-18. * Ibid. ver. 24. 
 
 " Ibid. vers. 25-34. ^ Ibid. vii. 1-5. y Ibid. ver. 6. 
 
 2 Ibid. vers. 7-11. » Ibid. ver. 12. ^ Ibid. vers. 13, 14. 
 ^ Ibid. vers. 15-20. ^ Ibid. vers. 21-23. ® Ibid. vers. 24-27. 
 
 m] 
 
102 The Kingdom both visible and invisible. 
 
 Such a proclamation of the law of the kingdom as was the 
 Sermon on the Mount, already implied that the kingdom would 
 be at once visible and invisible. On the one hand certain out- 
 ward duties, such as the use of the Lord's Prayer and fasting, 
 are prescribed ^ ; on the other, the new law urgently pushes its 
 claim of jurisdiction far beyond the range of material acts into 
 the invisible world of thought and motive. The visibility of the 
 kingdom lay already in the fact of its being a society of men, 
 and not a society solely made up of incorporeal beings such as 
 the angels. The King never professes that He will be satisfied 
 with a measure of obedience which sloth or timidity might con- 
 fine to the region of inoperative feelings and convictions ; He 
 insists with great emphasis upon the payment of homage to His 
 Invisible Majesty, outwardly, and before the eyes of men. Not 
 to confess Him before men is to break with Him for ever g ; it 
 is to forfeit His blessing and protection when these would most 
 be needed. The consistent bearing, then, of His loyal subjects 
 will bring the reality of His rule before the sight of men ; but, 
 besides this. He provides His realm with a visible government, 
 deriving its authority from Himself, and entitled on this account 
 to deferential and entire obedience on the part of His subjects. 
 To the first members of this government His commission runs 
 thus : — ' He that receiveth you, receiveth Me ^.* It is the King 
 Who will Himself reign throughout all history on the thrones of 
 His representatives ; it is He Who, in their persons, will be 
 acknowledged or rejected. In this way His empire will have an 
 external and political side; nor is its visibility to be limited to 
 its governmental organization. The form of prayer i which the 
 King enjoins on His subjects, and the outward visible actions by 
 which, according to His appointment, membership in His king- 
 dom is to be begun J and maintained^, make the very life and 
 movement of the new society, up to a certain point, visible. 
 But undoubtedly the real strength of the kingdom, its deepest 
 life, its truest action, are veiled from sight. At bottom it is to 
 be a moral, not a material empire \ it is to be a realm not merely 
 of bodies but of souls, of souls instinct with intelligence and love. 
 Its seat of power will be the conscience of mankind. Not ^here' 
 or 'there' in outward signs of establishment and supremacy, but 
 in the free conformity of the thought and heart of its members 
 
 ^ St. Matt. vi. 9-13, 16. 8 Ibid. x. 32 ; St. Luke xil 8. 
 
 b St. Matt. X. 40; corap. St. Luke x. 16. ^ St. Matt. vi. 9-13. 
 
 i Ibid, xxviii. 19; St. John iii. 5. 
 
 ^ St. Luke xxii. 19 ; i Cor. xi. 24 ; St. John vi. 53. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Parables of the Kingdoin, 1 03 
 
 to the Will of their Unseen Sovereign, shall its power be most 
 clearly recognised. Not as an oppressive outward code, but as 
 an inward buoyant exhilarating motive, will the King's Law 
 mould the life of His subjects. Thus the kingdom of God will 
 be found to be ' within ' men 1 ; it will be set up, not like an 
 earthly empire by military conquest or by violent revolution, but 
 noiselessly and ' not with observation^.' It will be maintained by 
 weapons more spiritual than the sword. ^ If,' said the Monarch, 
 * My kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight, 
 but now is My kingdom not from hence ".' 
 
 The charge to the twelve Apostles exhibits the outward 
 agency by which the kingdom would be established o ; and 
 the discourse in the supper- room unveils yet more fully the 
 secret sources of its strength and the nature of its influence P. 
 But the ^plan' of its Founder with reference to its establish- 
 ment in the world is perhaps most fully developed in that 
 series of parables, which, from their common object and from 
 their juxtaposition in St. Matthew's Gospel, are commonly 
 termed Parables of the Kingdom. 
 
 How various would be the attitudes of the human heart 
 towards the *word of the kingdom/ that is, towards the 
 authoritative announcement of its establishment upon the 
 earth, is pointed out in the Parable of the Sower. The seed 
 of truth would fall from His Hand throughout all time by 
 the wayside, upon stony places, and among thorns, as well 
 as upon the good ground q. It might be antecedently supposed 
 that within the limits of the new kingdom none were to be 
 looked for save the holy and the faithful. But the Parable 
 of the Tares corrects this too idealistic anticipation ; the king- 
 dom is to be a field in which until the final harvest the 
 tares must grow side by side with the wheat ^. The astonishing 
 expansion of the kingdom throughout the world is illustrated 
 
 1 St. Luke xvii. 21. ^ Ibid. ver. 20. ° St. John xviii. 36. 
 
 o St. Matt. X. 5-42. p St. John xiv. xv. xvi. 
 
 q St. Matt. xiii. 3-8, 19-23. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. xiii. 24-30, 36-43. 'In catholic^ enim ecclesi^, quae non in 
 sol^ Afric^ sicut pars Donati, sed per omnes gentes, sicut promissa est, 
 dilatatur atque diffunditur, in universe mundo, sicut dicit Apostolus, fruc- 
 tificans et crescens, et boni sunt et mali.' St. Aug. Ep. 208, n. 6. ' Si 
 boni sumus in ecclesi^ Christi, frumenta sumus ; si mali sumus in ecclesi^ 
 Christ], palea sumus, tamen ab arc^ non recedimus. Tu qui vento tenta- 
 tionis foris volasti, quid es ? Triticum non tollit ventus ex are^. Ex eo 
 ergo, ubi es, agnosce quid es.' In Ps. Ixx. (Vulg ) Serm. ii. n. 12, Civ. 
 Dei, i. 35, and especially Retract, ii. 18. 
 
 Ill] 
 
104 Parables of the Kingdom, 
 
 by ^ tlie grain of mustard seed, which indeed is the least of 
 all seeds, but when it is grown it is the greatest among herbs s/ 
 The principle and method of that expansion are to be observed 
 in the action of ^the leaven hid in the three measures of meal^.' 
 A secret invisible influence, a soul-attracting, soul-subduing 
 enthusiasm for the King and His work, would presently pene- 
 trate the dull, dense, dead mass of human society, and its 
 hard heart and stagnant thought would expand, in virtue of 
 this inward impulse, into a new life of light and love. Thus 
 the kingdom is not merely represented as a mighty whole, 
 of which each subject soul is a fractional part. It is exhibited 
 as an attractive influence, acting energetically upon the inner 
 personal life of individuals. It is itself the great intellectual 
 and moral prize of which each truth-seeking soul is in quest, 
 and to obtain which all else may wisely and well be left behind. 
 The kingdom is a treasure hid in a field ", that is, in a line 
 of thought and enquiry, or in a particular discipline and mode 
 of life ; and the wise man will gladly part with all that he 
 has to buy that field. Or the kingdom is like a merchant-m'an 
 seeking * goodly pearls v;' he sells all his possessions that he 
 may buy the ' one pearl of great price.' Here it is hinted that 
 entrance into the kingdom is a costly conquest and mastery 
 of truth, of that one absolute and highest Truth, which is 
 contrasted with the lower and relative truths current among 
 men. The preciousness of membership in the kingdom is 
 only to be completely realized by an unreserved submission 
 to the law of sacrifice ; the kingdom flashes forth in its 
 full moral beauty before the eye of the soul, as the merchant- 
 man resigns his all in favour of the one priceless pearl. In 
 these two parables, then, the individual soul is represented 
 as seeking the kingdom ; and it is suggested how tragic in 
 many cases would be the incidents, how excessive the sacrifices, 
 attendant upon ' pressing into it.' But a last parable is added 
 in which the kingdom is pictured, not as a prize which can 
 be seized by separate souls, but as a vast imperial system, 
 as a world-wide home of all the races of mankind. Like 
 a net^ thrown into the Galilean lake, so would the kingdom 
 extend its toils around entire tribes and nations of men ; 
 the vast struggling multitude would be drawn nearer and 
 nearer to the eternal shore ; until at last the awful and final 
 
 8 St. Matt. xiii. 31, 32. * Ibid. ver. 33. " Ibid. ver. 44. 
 
 ▼ Ibid. vers. 45, 46. * Ibid. vers. 47-50. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Two sharacteristics of the 'plan offestcs Christ. 105 
 
 separation would take place beneath the eye of Absolute Justice ; 
 the good would be gathered into vessels, but the bad would 
 be cast away. 
 
 The proclamation of this kingdom was termed the Gospel, 
 that is, the good news of God. It was good news for mankind, 
 Jewish as well as Pagan, that a society was set up on earth 
 wherein the human soul might rise to the height of its original 
 destiny, might practically understand the blessedness and the 
 awfulness of life, and might hold constant communion in a 
 free, trustful, joyous, childlike spirit with the Author and 
 the End of its existence. The ministerial work of our Lord 
 was one long proclamation of this kingdom. He was per- 
 petually defining its outline, or promulgating and codifying 
 its laws, or instituting and explaining the channels of its 
 organic and individual life, or gathering new subjects into 
 it by His words of wisdom or by His deeds of power, or , 
 perfecting and refining the temper and cast of character which . 
 was to distinguish them. When at length He had Himself 
 overcome the sharpness of death. He opened this kingdom of 
 heaven to all believers on the Day of Pentecost. His ministry 
 had begun with the words, ^ Repent ye, for the kingdom of 
 heaven is at hand y ; ' He left the world, bidding His followers 
 carry forward the frontier of His kingdom to the utmost limits 
 of the human family z, and promising them that His presence 
 within it would be nothing less than co-enduring with time \ 
 
 Let us note more especially two features in the *plan' of 
 our Blessed Lord. 
 
 (a) And, first, its originality. Need I say, brethren, that 
 real originality is rare 1 In this place many of us spend our 
 time very largely in imitating, recombining, reproducing existing 
 thought. Conscious as we are that for the most part Ave are 
 only passing on under a new form that which in its substance 
 has come to us from others, we honestly say so ; yet it may 
 chance to us at some time to imagine that in our brain an 
 idea or a design has taken shape, which is originally and 
 in truth our own creation — 
 
 ' Libera per vacuum posui vestigia princeps ; 
 Non aliena meo pressi pede'^.' 
 
 Those few, rapid, decisive moments in which genius consciously 
 enjoys the exhilarating sense of wielding creative power, may 
 
 y St. Matt. iv. 17. 2 Ibid, xxviii. 19 ; St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i. 8. 
 
 * St. Matt, xxviii. 20. ^ Hor. Ep. 1. 19. 21. 
 
 Ill] 
 
io5 ' Originality ^ of our Lord's ^ plan', as* 
 
 naturally be treasured in memory ; and yet, even in these, 
 how hard must it be to verify the assumed fact of an absolute 
 originality ! We of this day find the atmosphere of human 
 thought, even more than the surface of the earth, preoccupied 
 and thronged with the results of man's activity in times past 
 and present. In proportion to our consciousness of our real 
 obligations to this general stock of mental wealth, must we 
 not hesitate to presume that any one idea, the immediate origin 
 of which we cannot trace, is in reality our own- Suppose 
 that in this or that instance we do believe ourselves, in perfect 
 good faith, to have produced an idea which is really entitled 
 to the merit of originality. May it not be, that if at the right 
 moment we could have examined the intellectual air around 
 us with a sufficiently powerful microscope, we should have 
 detected the germ of our idea ^floating in upon our personal 
 thought from without c]' We only imagine ourselves to have 
 created the idea because, at the time of our inhaling it, we 
 were not conscious of doing so. The idea perhaps was suggested 
 indirectly ; it came to us along with some other idea upon 
 which our attention was mainly fixed ; it came to us so dis- 
 guised or so undeveloped, that we cannot recognise it, so as 
 to trace the history of its growth. It came to us during the 
 course of a casual conversation ; or from a book the very name 
 of which we have forgotten; and our relationship towards it 
 has been after all that of a nurse, not that of a parent. We 
 have protected it, cherished it, warmed it, and at length 
 it has grown within the chambers of our mind, until we have 
 recognised its value and led it forth into the sunlight, shaping 
 it, colouring it, expressing it after a manner strictly our own, 
 and believing in good faith that because we have so entirely 
 determined its form, we are the creators of its substance d. 
 At any rate, my brethren, genius herself has not been slow to 
 confess how difficult it is to say that any one of her triumphs 
 is certainly due to a true originality. In one of his later 
 recorded conversations Goethe was endeavouring to decide 
 what are the real obligations of genius to the influences which 
 inevitably affect it. ' Much,' said he, 'is talked about originality; 
 but what does originality mean % We are no sooner born than 
 the world around begins to act upon us ; its action lasts to 
 the end of our lives and enters into everything. All that we 
 
 c This illustration was suggested to me, some years ago, by a well-known 
 Oxford tutor. It is developed, with his usual force, by F^lix, Jesus-Christ 
 p. 128. ' ^ Bautain, fitude sur I'art de pailer en pubHc. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
guarmiteed by the isolation of His Early Life. 107 
 
 can truly call our own is our energy, our vigour, our will. If 
 I,' he continued, ^ could enumerate all that I really owe to 
 the great men who have preceded me, and to those of my 
 own day, it would be seen that very little is really my own. 
 It is a point of capital importance to observe at what time of 
 life the influence of a great character is brought to bear on us. 
 Lessing, Winkelmann, and Kant, were older than I, and it 
 has been of the greatest consequence to me that the two first 
 powerfully influenced my youth and the last my old age^/ 
 On such a subject, Goethe may be deemed a high authority, 
 and he certainly was not likely to do an injustice to genius, 
 or to be guilty of a false humility when speaking of himself. 
 
 But our Lord/s design to establish upon the earth a kingdom 
 of souls was an original design. Eemark, as bearing upon this 
 originality, our Lord's isolation in His early life. His social 
 obscurity is, in the eyes of thoughtful men, the safeguard and 
 guarantee of His originality. It is not seriously pretended, 
 on any side, that Jesus Christ was enriched with one single 
 ray of His thought from Athens, from Alexandria, from the 
 mystics of the Ganges or of the Indus, from the disciples of 
 Zoroaster or of Confucius. The centurion whose servant He 
 healed, the Greeks whom He met at the instance of St. Philip, 
 the Syro- Phoenician woman, the judge who condemned and tlie 
 soldiers who crucified Him, are the few Gentiles with whom ' 
 He is recorded to have had dealings during His earthly life. 
 But was our Lord equally isolated from the world of Jewish 
 speculation? M. Eenan, indeed, impatient at the spectacle of 
 an unrivalled originality, suggests, not without some hesitation, 
 that Hillel was the real teacher of Jesus f. But Dr. Schenkel 
 
 ® Conversations de Goethe, trad. Delerot, torn. ii. p. 342, quoted in 
 the Rev. des Deux Mondes, 15 Oct. 1865. 
 
 f 'Hillel fut le vrai raaltre de J^sus, s'il est permis de parler de maltre 
 quand il s'agit d'une si haute originality.' Vie de Jesus, p. 35. As an 
 instance of our Lord's real independence of Hillel, a single example may 
 suffice. A recent writer on 'the Talmud' gives the following story. 'One 
 day a heathen went to Shammai, the head of the rival academy, and asked 
 him mockingly to convert him to the law while he stood on one leg. The 
 irate master turned him from the door. He then went to Hillel, who gave 
 him that reply — since so widely propagated — ' Do not unto another what 
 thou wouldest not have another do unto thee. This is the whole law: 
 the rest is mere commentary.' Quarterly Review, Oct. 1867, p. 441. art. 
 'The Talmud.' Or, as Hillel's words are rendered by Lightfoot : 'Quod 
 tibi ipsi odiosum est, proximo ne feceris : nam haec est tota lex.* Hor. 
 Hebr. in Matt. p. 1-29. The writer in the Quarterly Review appears to 
 assume the identity of Hillel's saying with the precept of our Blessed Lord. 
 St. Matt. vii. 12 ; St. Luke vi. 31. Yet in truth how wide is the interval 
 
 III] 
 
io8 ' Originality ' of ottr Lord's 'plan' as 
 
 will tell us that this suggestion rests on no historical basis 
 whatever ?, while we may remark in passing that it is at issue 
 with a theory which you would not care to notice at length, 
 but which M. Kenan cherishes with much fondness, and which 
 represents our Lord's Hone of thought' as a psychological 
 result of the scenery of north-eastern Palestine^. The kindred 
 assumption that when making His yearly visits to Jerusalem 
 for the Feast of the Passover, or at other times, Jesus must 
 have become the pupil of some of the leading Jewish doctors 
 of the day, is altogether gratuitous. Once indeed, when He 
 was twelve years old. He was found in a synagogue, hard by 
 the temple, in close intellectual contact with aged teachers 
 of the Law. But all who hear Him, even then, in His early 
 Boyhood, are astonished at His understanding and answers ; 
 and the narrative of the Evangelist implies that the occurrence 
 was not repeated. Moreover there was no teaching in Judaea 
 at that era, which had not, in the true sense of the expression, 
 a sectarian colouring. But what is there in the doctrine or 
 in the character of Jesus that connects Him with a Pharisee 
 or a Sadducee, or an Herodian, or an Essene type of education ] 
 Is it not significant that, as Schleiermacher remarks, ^of all 
 the sects then in vogue none ever claimed Jesus as representing 
 it, none branded Him with the reproach of apostasy from its 
 tenets i'?' Even if we lend an ear to the precarious conjecture 
 that He may have attended some elementary school at Nazareth, 
 
 between the merely nc^a^ive rule of the Jewish President, (which had already- 
 been given in Tobit iv. 15.) and the positive precept — oVa &r deArjre 'Iva 
 TToiaxTiv v/MP ot &v6pcM)Troii ovTo) Koi uyuels -noutre avrois — of the Divine Master. 
 On Gibbon's citation from Isocrates of a precept equivalent to Hillel's, 
 see Archbishop Trench, Huls. Lect. p. 157. 
 
 g 'Ganz unbewiesen ist es,' Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 39, note. 
 When however Dr. Schenkel himself says, ' Den Einblick, den Er [sc. Jesus] 
 in das Wesen und Treiben der religiosen Richtungen und Parteiungen 
 seines Volkes in so hohem Masse befass, hat Er aus personlicher Wahrneh- 
 mung und unmittelbarem Verkehr mit den Hiiuptern und Vertretern der 
 verschiedenen Parteistandpunkte gewonnen' (ibid.), where is the justification 
 of this assertion, except in the Humanitarian and Naturalistic theory of the 
 writer, which makes some such assumption necessary ? 
 
 ^ Vie de J^sus, p. 64: *Une nature ravissante contribuait k former 
 cet esprit.' Then follows a description of the flowers, the animals, the 
 insects, and the mountains (p. 65), the farms, the fruit-gardens, and the 
 vintage (p. 66), of Northern Galilee. M. Renan concludes, 'cette vie 
 contente et facilement satisfaite . . se spiritualisait en reves ^there's, en 
 une sorte de mysticisme po^tique confondant le ciel et la terre. . . . Toute 
 I'histoire du Christianisme naissant est devenue de la sorte une d^licieuse 
 pastorale.' p. 67. ^ Leben Jesu, vorl. xvi. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
guaranteed by the isolation of His Early Life, 109 
 
 it is plain that the people believed Him to have gone through 
 no formal course of theological training. ^ How knoweth This 
 Man letters, having never learned ^f was a question which 
 betrayed the popular surprise created by a Teacher Who spoke 
 with the highest authority, and Who yet had never sat at 
 the feet of an accredited doctor. It was the homage of public 
 enthusiasm which honoured Him with the title of Eabbi ; 
 since this title did not then imply that one who bore it had 
 been qualified by any intellectual exercises for an official teaching 
 position. Isolated, as it seemed, obscure, uncultivated, illiterate, 
 the Son of Mary did not concern Himself to struggle against 
 or to reverse what man would deem the crushing disadvantages 
 of His lot. He did not, like philosophers of antiquity, or like 
 the active spirits of the middle ages, spend His Life in perpetual 
 transit between one lecturer of reputation and another, between 
 this and that focus of earnest and progressive thought. He 
 was not a Goethe, continually enriching and refining his con- 
 ceptions by contact with a long succession of intellectual friends, 
 reaching from Lavater to Eckermann. Still less did He, 
 during His early Manhood, live in any such atmosphere as 
 that of this place, where interpenetrating all our differences 
 of age and occupation, and even of conviction, there is the 
 magnificent inheritance of a common fund of thought, to which, 
 whether we know it or not, we are all constantly and inevitably 
 debtors. He mingled neither with great thinkers who could 
 mould educated opinion, nor with men of gentle blood who 
 could give its tone to society; He passed those thirty years 
 as an under-workman in a carpenter's shop \ He lived in what 
 might have seemed the depths of mental solitude and of social 
 obscurity ; and then He went forth, not to foment a political 
 revolution, nor yet to found a local school of evanescent sen- 
 timent, but to proclaim an enduring and world-wide Kingdom 
 of souls, based upon the culture of a common moral character, 
 and upon intellectual submission to a common creed. 
 
 Christ's isolation, then, is the guarantee of His originality ; 
 yet had He lived as much in public as He lived 4n obscurity, 
 where, let me ask, is the kingdom of heaven anticipated as a 
 practical project in the ancient world % What, beyond the inter- 
 change of thought on moral subjects, has the kingdom proclaimed 
 by our Lord in common with the philosophical schools or coteries 
 which grouped themselves around Socrates and other teachers 
 
 ^ St. John vii. 1 5. 
 
 m] 
 
1 10 Who cotild have suggested Christ's ' plan^f 
 
 of classical Greece ^ % These schools, indeed, differed from the 
 kingdom of heaven, not merely in their lack of any pretensions 
 to supernatural aims or powers, but yet more, in that they only 
 existed for the sake of a temporary convenience, and that their 
 members were bound to each other by no necessary ties "™. 
 Again, what was there in any of the sects of Judaism that could 
 have suggested such a conception as the kingdom of heaven] 
 Each and all they differ from it, I will not say in organization 
 and structure, but in range and compass, in life and action, in 
 spirit and aim. Or was the kingdom of heaven even traced in 
 outline by the vague yearnings and aspirations after a better 
 time, which entered so mysteriously into the popular thought of 
 the heathen populations in the Augustan age^ % Certainly it was 
 an answer, complete yet unexpected, to these aspirations. They 
 did not originate it ; they could not have originated it ; they 
 primarily pointed to a material rather than to a moral Utopia, 
 to an idea of improvement which did not enter into the plan of 
 the Founder of the new kingdom. But you ask if the announce- 
 ment of the kingdom of heaven by our Lord was not really a 
 continuation of the announcement of the kingdom of heaven by 
 
 1 Mr. Lecky makes an observation upon the originality of our Lord's moral 
 teaching, cons'dered generally, which is well worthy of attention. Rational- 
 ism in Europe, i. p. 338. 'Nothing too, can, as I conceive, be more er- 
 roneous or superficial than the reasonings of those who maintain that 
 the moral element in Christianity has in it nothing distinctive or pecuhar. 
 The method of this school, of which Bolingbroke may be regarded as the 
 type, is to collect from the writings of different heathen writers, certain 
 isolated passages embodying precepts that were inculcated by Christianity ; 
 and when the collection had become very large the task was supposed to be 
 accomplished. But the true originality of a system of moral teaching depends 
 not so much upon the elements of which it is composed, as upon the manner 
 in which they are fused into a symmetrical whole, upon the proportionate 
 value that is attached to different qualities, or, to state the same thing by a 
 single word, upon the type of character that is formed. Now it is quite 
 certain that the Christian type differs, not only in degree, but in kind from 
 the Pagan one.' This general observation might legitimately include the 
 vital differences which sever all merely human schemes of moral association 
 and co-operation from that of the Founder of the Christian Church. See also 
 Tulloch on The Christ of the Gospels, p. 190. 
 
 ™ This point is well stated in Ecce Homo, p. qi, sqq. The writer observes 
 that if Socrates were to appear at the present day, he would form no society, 
 as the invention of printing would have rendered it unnecessary. " But the 
 formation of an organized society was of the very essence of the work of 
 Christ. I heartily rejoice to recognise the fulness with which this vital 
 truth is set forth by one from whom serious Churchmen must feel themselves 
 to be separated by some deep differences of belief and principle. 
 
 » Virgil; Eel. iv.,^n. vi. 793, and Suetonius, Vespasianus, iv. 5. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Its * originality ^ substantial, not verbal. 
 
 III 
 
 St. John the Baptist ] You might go further, and enquire, whether 
 this proclamation of the kingdom of heaven is not to be traced 
 up to the prophecy of Daniel respecting a fifth empire % For the 
 present of course I waive the question which an Apostle o would 
 have raised, as to whether the Spirit That spoke in St. John and 
 in Daniel was not the Spirit of the Christ Himself. But let us 
 enquire whether Daniel or St. John do anticipate our Lord's 
 plan in such a sense as to rob it of its immediate originality. 
 The Baptist and the prophet foretell the kingdom of heaven. 
 Be it so. But a name is one thing, and the vivid complete 
 grasp of an idea is another. We are accustomed to distinguish 
 with some wholesome severity between originality of phrase and 
 originality of thought. An intrinsic poverty of thought may at 
 times succeed in formulating an original expression ; while a 
 true originality will often, nay generally, welcome a time- 
 honoured and conventional phraseology, if it can thus secure 
 currency and acceptance for the truth which it has brought to 
 light and which it desires to set forth p. The originality of our 
 Lord's plan lay not in its name, but in its substance. When 
 St. John said that the kingdom of heaven was at hand <i, when 
 Daniel represented it as a world-wide and imperishable empire, 
 neither prophet nor Baptist had really anticipated the idea ; one 
 furnished the name of a coming system, the other a measure of 
 its greatness. But what was the new institution to be in itself j 
 what were to be its controlling laws and principles; what the 
 
 o I St Peter i. ii. 
 
 P Pascal, Pensdes, art. vii. 9. (ed. Ha vet. p. 123) * Qu'on ne dise pas 
 que je n'ai rien dit de nouveau ; la disposition des mati^res est nouvelle. 
 Quand on joue k la paume, c'est une meme balle donton joue I'un et I'autre; 
 mais I'un la place mieux. J'aimerais autant qu'on me dit que je me 
 suis servi des mots anciens. Et comme si les memes pens^es ne formaient 
 pas un autre corps de discours par une disposition difF^rente, aussi bien que 
 les m^mes mots forment d'autres pens^es par leur difFerente disposition/ 
 
 <i The teaching of St. John Baptist centred around three points: (i) the 
 call to penitence (St. Matt. iii. 2, 8-10 ; St. Mark i. 4 ; St. Luke iii. 3, 
 10-14); (2) the relative greatness of Christ (St. Matt. iii. 11-14 ; St. Mark i. 
 7; St. Luke iii. 16; St. John i. 15, 26, 27, 30—34); (3)the Judicial {ov rh 
 TTTvou iv TTJ X^'P^' avTov, St. Matt. iii. 12 ; St. Luke iii. 17) and Atoning (tSe 
 6 aixvhs rod Qeov, 6 aXp<av t^v ajxapriav rov Koa/xov, St. John i. 29, 36) Work 
 of Christ. In this way St. John corresponded to prophecy as preparing the 
 way of the Lord (St. Matt. iii. 3 ; St. Mark i. 3 ; St. Luke iii. 4 ; St. John i. 
 23 ; Isa. xl. 3) ; but beyond naming the kingdom, the nature of the prepara- 
 tion required for entering it, the supernatural greatness, and two of the 
 functions of the King, St. John did not anticipate our Lord's disclosures. 
 St. John's teaching left men quite uninformed as to what the kingdom of 
 heaven was to be in itself. 
 
 Ill] 
 
112 Notes of ^ originality ^ in our Lord's ^ plan! 
 
 animating spirit of its inhabitants ; what the sources of its life ; 
 what the vicissitudes of its establishment and triumph % These 
 and other elements of His plan are exhibited by our Lord Him- 
 self, in His discourses, His parables. His institutions. That 
 which had been more or less vague, He made definite ; that which 
 bad been abstract, He threw into a concrete form; that which had 
 been ideal. He clothed with the properties of working reality; 
 that which had been scattered over many books and ages, 
 He brought into a focus. If prophecy supplied Him with some 
 of the materials which He employed, prophecy could not have 
 enabled Him to succeed in combining them. He combined them 
 because He was Himself; His Person supplied the secret of 
 their combination. His originality is indeed seen in the reality 
 and life with which He lighted up the language used by men 
 who had been sent in earlier ages to prepare His way ; but 
 if His creative thought employed these older materials, it did 
 not depend on them. He actually gave a practical and ener- 
 getic form to the idea of a strictly independent society of 
 spiritual beings, with enlightened and purified consciences, 
 cramped by no national or local bounds of privilege, and destined 
 to spread throughout earth and heaven r. When He did this, 
 
 ^ Guizot, Essence de la Religion clir^tienne, p. 307 : * Je reprends ces 
 deux grands principes, ces deux grandes actes de J^sus-Christ, I'abolition de 
 tout privilege dans les rapports des hommes avec Dieu, et la distinction de 
 la vie religieuse, et de la vie civile ; je les place en regard de tous les faits, de 
 tons les dtats sociaux ant^rieurs k la venue de J^sus-Christ, et ^e ne puis 
 decouvrir a ces caracteres essentiels de la religion chretienne, aucune filiation, 
 aucune origine humaine. Partout, avant Jisus-Christ, les religions dtaient 
 nationales, locales, ^tablissant entre les peuples, les classes, les individus, des 
 distances et des in^galit^s ^normes. Partout aussi avant Jdsus-Christ, la vie 
 civile et la vie religieuse ^taient confondues et s'opprimaient mutuellement ; 
 la religion ou les religions dtaient des institutions incorpor^es dans I'^tat, et 
 que ritat rdglait ou r^primait selon son intdret. Dans Tuniversalit^ de la 
 foi religieuse, et I'independance de la soci^te religieuse, je suis contraint de 
 voir des nouveautes sublimes, des Eclairs de la lumiere divine !* Even Chan- 
 ning, who understates our Lord's * plan/ is alive to the originality and great- 
 ness of that part of it which he recognises, Works, ii. 57. 'The plans and 
 labours of statesmen sink into the sports of children, when compared with 
 
 the work which Jesus announced The idea of changing the moral 
 
 aspect of the whole earth, of recovering all nations to the pure and inward 
 worship of the one God, and to a Spirit of Divine and fraternal love (our 
 Lord proposed much more than this), was one of which we meet not a trace 
 in philosopher or legislator before Him. The human mind had given no 
 
 promise of this extent of view We witness a vastness of purpose, a 
 
 grandeur of thought and feeling, so original, so superior to the workings of 
 all other minds, that nothing but our familiarity can prevent our contempla- 
 tion of it with wonder and profound awe.' 
 
 r LECT. 
 
k 
 
 Bold^iess of the ' plan of Jesus Christ. 113 
 
 prophets were not His masters ; tliey had only foreshadowed 
 His work. His plan can be traced in that masterful com- 
 pleteness and symmetry, which is the seal of its intrinsic 
 originality, to no source beyond Himself. Well might we ask 
 with His astonished countrymen the question which was indeed 
 prompted by their jealous curiosity, but which is natural to a 
 very different temper, ' Whence hath this Man this wisdom » V 
 
 (3) And this opens upon us the second characteristic of our 
 Lord's plan, I mean that which in any merely human plan, we 
 should call its audacity. This audacity is observable, first of all, 
 in the fact that the plan is originally proposed to the world with 
 what might appear to us to be such hazardous completeness. 
 The idea of the kingdom of God issues almost ' as if in a single 
 jet*' and with a fully developed body from the thought of Jesus 
 Christ. Put together the Sermon on the Mount, the Charge to 
 the Twelve Apostles, the Parables of the Kingdom, the Discourse 
 in the Supper-room, and the institution of the two great Sacra- 
 ments, and the plan of our Saviour is before you. And it is 
 enunciated with an accent of calm unfaltering conviction that it 
 will be realized in human history. 
 
 This is a phenomenon which we can only appreciate by con- 
 trasting it with the law to which it is so signal an exception. 
 Generally speaking, an ambitious idea appears at first as a mere 
 outline, and it challenges attention in a tentative way. It is put 
 forward enquiringly, timidly, that it may be completed by the 
 suggestions of friends or modified by the criticism of opponents. 
 The highest genius is always most keenly alive to the vicissitudes 
 which may await its own creations ; it knows with what difficulty 
 a promising project is launched safely and unimpaired out of the 
 domain of abstract speculation into the region of practical human 
 life. Even in art, where the materials to be moulded are, as 
 compared with the subjects of moral or political endeavour, so 
 much under command, it is not prudent to presume that a design 
 or a conception will be carried out without addi^ons or without 
 curtailments. In this place we all have heard that between the 
 OecDpla and the yeveais of art there may be a fatal interval. The 
 few bold strokes by which a KafFaelle has suggested a new form 
 
 ■ See F^lix, Jesus-Christ et la Critique Nouvelle, pp. 1 27-133 ; Bushnell, 
 Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 237-8. Keim has exaggerated the influence 
 of Pharisaism upon the language a-nd teaching of our Lord, which only 
 resembled Pharisaism as being addressed to the Jewish mind in terms which 
 it understood. Geschichtliche Christus, pp. 18-22. 
 
 * Pressens^, Jdsus-Christ, p. 325. 
 Ill] I 
 
114 Chrisfs 'plan^ complete fro7n the first. 
 
 of power or of beauty, may never be filled up upon bis canvass. 
 Tbe working-drawings of a Pbidias or a Micbael Angelo may 
 never be copied in stone or in marble. As has been said of S. T. 
 Coleridge, art is perpetually throwing out designs which remain 
 designs for ever ; and yet the artist possesses over his material, 
 and even over his hand and his eye, a control which is altogether 
 wanting to the man who would reconstruct or regenerate human 
 society. For human society is an aggregate of human intelli- 
 gences and of human wills, that is to say, of profound and mys- 
 terious forces, upon the direction of which under absolutely new 
 circumstances it is impossible for man to calculate. Accordingly, 
 social reformers tell us despondingly that facts make sad havoc 
 of their fairest theories ; and that schemes which were designed 
 to brighten and to beautify the life of nations are either forgotten 
 altogether, or, like the Eepublic of Plato, are remembered only 
 as famous samples of the impracticable. For whenever a great 
 idea, affecting the well-being of society, is permitted to force its 
 way into the world of facts, it is liable to be carried out of its 
 course, to be thrust hither and thither, to be compressed, exag- 
 gerated, disfigured, mutilated, degraded, caricatured. It may 
 encounter currents of hostile opinion and of incompatible facts, 
 upon which its projector had never reckoned ; its course may be 
 forced into a direction the exact reverse of that which he most 
 earnestly desired. In the first French Revolution some of the 
 most humane sociological projects were distorted into becoming 
 the very animating principles of wholesale and extraordinary 
 barbarities. In England we are fond of repeating the political 
 maxim that ' constitutions are not made, but grow ; ' we have a 
 proverbial dread of the paper-schemes of government which from 
 time to time are popular among our gifted and volatile neigh- 
 bours. It is not that we English cannot admire the creations of 
 political genius ; but we hold that in the domain of human life 
 genius must submit herself to the dictation of circumstances, and 
 that she herself seems to shade off" into erratic folly when she 
 cannot clearly recognise the true limits of her power. 
 
 Now Jesus Christ our Lord was in the true and very highest 
 sense of the term a social reformer ; yet He fully proclaimed 
 the whole of His social plan before He began to realize it. Had 
 He been merely a ^ great man,' He would have been more pru- 
 dent. He would have conditioned His design ; He would have 
 tested it ; He would have developed it gradually ; He would 
 have made trial of its working power ; and then He would have 
 re-fashioned, or contracted, or expanded it, before finally pro- 
 
 [lect. 
 
No evidence of change in ottr Lord^s ^plan! 115 
 
 posing it to the consideration of the world. But His actual 
 course must have seemed one of utter and reckless folly, unless 
 the event had shewn it to be the dictate of a more than human 
 wisdom. He speaks as One Who is sure of the compactness and 
 faultlessness of His design ; He is certain that no human obstacle 
 can baulk its realization. He produces it simply without effort, 
 without reserve, without exaggeration ; He is calm, because He 
 is in possession of the future, and sees His way clearly through 
 its tangled maze. There is no proof, no distant intimation of a 
 change or of a modification of His plan. He did not, for instance, 
 first aim at a political success, and then cover His failure by 
 giving a religious turn or interpretation to His previous mani- 
 festoes ; He did not begin as a religious teacher, and afterwards 
 aspire to convert His increasing religious influence into political 
 capital. No attempts to demonstrate any such vacillation in 
 His purpose have reached even a moderate measure of success^. 
 Certainly, with the lapse of time, He enters upon a larger and 
 larger area of ministerial action ; He developes with majestic 
 assurance, with decisive rapidity, the integral features of His 
 work ; His teaching centres more and more upon Himself as its 
 central subject ; but He nowhere retracts, or modifies, or speaks 
 or acts as would one who feels that he is dependent upon events 
 or agencies which he cannot control ^. A poor woman pays Him 
 
 " Dr. Schenkel, in his Charakterbild Jesu, represents our Lord as a pious 
 Jew, who did not assume to be the Messiah before the scene at Csesarea 
 Philippi. Kap. xii. § 4, p. 138 : * Dadurch, dass Jesus Sich nun wirklich zu 
 dem Bekenntnisse des Simon bekannte, trat er mit einem Schlage aus der 
 verworrenen und verwirrenden Lage heraus, in welche Er, durch die Unklar- 
 heit seiner JUnger und den Meinungstreit in seiner Uragebung gebracht war. 
 Ein Stichwort war jetzt gesprochen.' This theory is obliged to reject the 
 evangelical accounts of our Lord's Baptism and Temptation, and to distort 
 from their plain meaning the narratives of our Lord's sermon in the synagogue 
 at Nazareth (St. Luke iv. 16), of His call of the twelve Apostles, and of His 
 claim to forgive sin. See the excellent remarks of M. Pressens^, J^sus- Christ, 
 pp. 326, 327. 
 
 ^ Channing, Works, ii. 55. ' We feel that a new Being, of a new order of 
 mind, is taking part in human affairs. There is a native tone of grandeur and 
 authority in His teaching. He speaks as a Being related to the whole human 
 race. A narrower sphere than the world never enters His thoughts. He 
 speaks in a natural spontaneous style of accomplishing the most arduous and 
 important change in human affairs. This unlaboured manner of expressing 
 great thoughts is particularly worthy of attention. You never hear from 
 Jesus that swelling, pompous, ostentatious language, which almost necessarily 
 springs from an attempt to sustain a character above our powers. He taiks 
 
 of His glories, as one to whom they were familiar He speaks of saving 
 
 and judging the world, of drawing all men to Himself, and of giving everlast- 
 ing life, as we speak of the ordinary powers which we exert.' 
 Ill ] 12 
 
ii6 Boldness of Chrisfs plan, co7isidered 
 
 ceremonial respect at a feast, and He simply announces that 
 the act will be told as a memorial of her throughout the world y; 
 He bids His Apostles 'do all things whatsoever He had com- 
 manded them z ; He promises them His Spirit as a Guide into 
 all necessary truth a : but He invests them with no such dis- 
 cretionary powers, as might imply that His design would need 
 revision under possible circumstances, or could be capable of 
 improvement. He calmly turns the glance of His thought upon 
 the long and chequered future which lies clearly displayed before 
 Him, and in the immediate foreground of which is his own 
 humiliating Death b. Other founders of systems or of societies 
 have thanked a kindly Providence for shrouding from their gaze 
 the vicissitudes of coming time ; 
 
 * Prudens futuri temporis exitum 
 Caliginos^ nocte premit deus "^ ;' 
 
 but the Son of Man speaks as One Who sees beyond the most 
 distant possibilities, and Who knows full well that His work is 
 indestructible. * The gates of hell,' He calmly observes, * shall 
 not prevail against it^;' * Heaven and earth shall pass away, but 
 My words shall not pass away e.' 
 
 Nor is the boldness of Christ's plan less observable in its 
 actual substance, than in the fact of its original production in 
 such completeness. Look at it, for the moment, from a political 
 point of view. Here is, as it seems, a Galilean peasant, sur- 
 rounded by a few followers taken like Himself from the lowest 
 orders of society; yet He deliberately proposes to rule all 
 human thought, to make Himself the Centre of all human 
 affections, to be the Lawgiver of humanity, and the Object 
 of man's adoration ^. He founds a spiritual society, the thought 
 and heart and activity of which are to converge upon His 
 Person, and He tells His followers that this society which 
 He is forming is the real explanation of the highest visions 
 of seers and prophets, that it will embrace all races and extend 
 
 y St. Matt. xxvi. 13 ; St. Mark xiv. 9. 
 
 2 St. Matt, xxviii. 20. « St. John xvi. 13. 
 
 t> St. Matt. XX. 19 ; St. Mark viii. 31. « Hor. Od. iii. 29. 29. 
 
 d St. Matt. xvi. 18. « Ibid. xxiv. 35. 
 
 f Buslinell, Nature and the Supernatural, p. 232. 'To Jesus alone, the 
 simple Galilean carpenter, it happens . . . that, having never seen a map 
 of the world in His whole life, or heard the name of half the great nations 
 on it, He undertakes, coming out of His shop, a scheme as much vaster 
 and more difficult than that of Alexander, as it proposes more, and what 
 is more Divinely benevolent.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
as a religiotcs and social enterprise. 117 
 
 throughout all time. He places Himself before the world as 
 the true goal of its expectations, and He points to His 
 proposed work as the one hope for its future. There was to 
 be a universal religion, and He would found it. A universal 
 religion was just as foreign an idea to heathenisms as to Judaism.. 
 Heathenism held that the state was the highest form of social 
 life; religious life, like family life, was deemed subordinate 
 to political interests. Morality was pretty nearly dwarfed down 
 to the measure of common political virtue ; sin was little else 
 than political misdemeanour; religion was but a subordinate 
 function of national life, differing in different countries according 
 to the varying genius of the people, and rightly liable to being 
 created or controlled by the government. A century and a 
 half after the Incarnation, in his attack upon the Church, 
 Celsus ridicules the idea of a universal religion as a manifest 
 folly ^ ; yet Jesus Christ has staked His whole claim to respect 
 and confidence upon announcing it. Jesus Christ made no 
 concessions to the passions or to the prejudices of mankind. 
 The laws and maxims of His kingdom are for the most part 
 in entire contradiction to the instincts of average human nature ; 
 yet He predicts that His Gospel will be preached in all the 
 world, and that finally there will be one fold and One Shepherd 
 of meni. 'Go,' He says to His Apostles, *make disciples 
 of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, 
 and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ; teaching them to 
 observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you ; and, 
 lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world k» 
 He founds a world-wide religion, and He promises to be the 
 present invigorating force of that religion to the end of time. 
 Are we not too accustomed to this language to feel the full 
 force of its original meaning*? How startlingly must it not 
 have fallen upon the ears of Apostles ! Words like these are 
 not accounted for by any difference between the East and 
 the West, between ancient and modern modes of speech. They 
 will not bear honest translation into any modern phrase that 
 would enable good men to use them now. Can we imagine 
 such a command as that of our Lord upon the lips of the 
 best, of the wisest of men whom we have ever known % Would 
 it not be simply to imagine that goodness or wisdom had been 
 
 s Origen. contr. Celsum, ii. 46. ^ St. John x. 16. 
 
 i The Stoic 'cosmopolitanism* (Sir A. Grant's Ethics of Aristotle, 
 vol. i. 255 ; Merivale on Conversion of Roman Empire, p. 60) did not 
 amount to a religion. k St. Matt, xxviii. 19, 20. 
 
 Ill] 
 
ii8 Realisation of our Lord's 'plan! 
 
 exchanged for the folly of an intolerable presumption] Such 
 language as that before us is indeed folly, unless it be something 
 else ; unless it be proved by the event to have been the highest 
 wisdom, the wisdom of One, Whose ways are not our ways, 
 nor His thoughts our thoughts ^ 
 
 II. But has the plan of Jesus Christ been carried out % Does 
 the kingdom of heaven exist on earth % 
 
 (i.) The Church of Christ is the living answer to that 
 question. Boileau says somewhere that the Church is a great 
 thought which every man ought to study. It would be more 
 practical to say that the Church is a great fact which every 
 man ought to measure. Probably we Christians are too fami- 
 liarized with the blessed presence of the Church to do justice 
 to her as a world-embracing institution, and as the nurse 
 and guardian of our moral and mental life. Like the air 
 we breathe, she bathes our whole being with influences which 
 we do not analyse ; and we hold her cheap in proportion 
 to the magnitude of her unostentatious service. The sun rises 
 on us day by day in the heavens, and we heed not his surpassing 
 beauty until our languid sense is roused by some observant 
 astronomer or artist. The Christian Church pours even upon 
 those of us who love her least, floods of intellectual and moral 
 light ; and yet it is only by an occasional intellectual effort 
 that we detach ourselves sufficiently from the tender monotony 
 of her influences, to understand how intrinsically extraordinary 
 is the double fact of her perpetuated existence and of her 
 continuous expansion. 
 
 Glance for a moment at the history of the Christian Church 
 from the days of the Apostles until now. What is it but a 
 history of the gradual, unceasing self-expansion of an institution 
 which, from the first hour of its existence, deliberately aimed, 
 as it is aiming even now, at the conquest of the world "^ % Com- 
 pare the Church which sought refuge and which prayed in the 
 upper chamber at Jerusalem, with the Church of which St. Paul 
 is the pioneer and champion in the latter portion of the Acts of 
 the Apostles, or with the Church to which he refers, as already 
 making its way throughout the world, in his Apostolical 
 Epistles n. Compare again the Church of the Apostolical age 
 with the Church of the age of Tertullian. Christianity had then 
 
 ^ Tsa. Iv. 8. Cf. Buslmell, Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 231-233. 
 F^lix, ubi supra, pp. 134-139. 
 
 "1 St. Luke xxiv. 47; Acts i. 8, ix. 15; Mark xvi. 20. 
 
 " Rom. i. 8, x. 18, XV. 18-21 ; Col. i. 6, 23 ; cf. i St. Peter i. i, &c. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Continuous growth of the Church, 119 
 
 already penetrated, at least in some degree, into all classes of 
 Eoman society o, and was even pursuing its missionary course in 
 regions far beyond the frontiers of the empire?, in the forests of 
 Germany, in the wilds of Scythia, in the deserts of Africa, and 
 among the unsubdued and barbarous tribes who inhabited the 
 northern extremity of our own island. Again, how nobly con- 
 scious is the Church of the age of St. Augustine of her world- 
 wide mission, and of her ever-widening area ! how sharply is 
 this consciousness contrasted with the attempt of Donatism to 
 dwarf down the realization of the plan of Jesus Christ to the 
 narrow proportions of a national or provincial enterprise^ ! In 
 the writings of Augustine especially, we see the Church of 
 Christ tenaciously grasping the deposit of revealed unchanging 
 doctrine, while liturgies the most dissimilar, and teachers of 
 many tongues r, and a large variety of ecclesiastical customs s, 
 
 o Tert. Apol. 37: 'Hesterni sumus, et vestra omnia implevimus, urbes, 
 insulas, castella, municipia, conciliabula, castra ipsa, tribus, decurias, pala- 
 tium, senatum, forum, sola vobis relinquimus templa.* Cf. de Rossi, Roma 
 Sotteranea, i. p. 309. 
 
 P Tert. adv. Judaeos, c. 7 : * Jam Getulorum varietates, et Maurorum multi 
 fines, Hispaniarum omnes termini, et Galliarum diversse nationes, et Britan- 
 norum inaccessa Eomanis loca, Christo vero subdita, et Sarmatarum, et 
 Dacorum, et Germanorum, et Scytharum, et abditarum multarum gentium et 
 provinciarum, et insularum multarum nobis ignotarum, et quae enumerare 
 minus possumus. In quibus omnibus locis, Christi nomen, qui jam venit, 
 regnat, utpote ante Quem omnium civitatum portse sunt apertse.* 
 
 <i St. Aug. Ep. xlix. n. 3 : ' Quserimus ergo, ut nobis respondere non 
 graveris, quam causam forte noveris qu^ factum est, ut Christus amitteret 
 hsereditatem Suam per orbem terrarum difFusam, et subito in solis Afris, nee 
 ipsis omnibus remaneret. Etenim ecclesia Catholica est etiam in Afric^ quia 
 per omnes terras eam Deus esse voluit et praedixit. Pars autem vestra, quae 
 Donati dicitur, non est in omnibus illis locis, in quibus et literae et sermo et 
 facta apostolica cucurrerunt.' In Ps. Ixxxv. n. 14: 'Christo enim tales 
 maledicunt, qui dicunt, quia periit ecclesia de orbe terrarum, et remansit in 
 sol^ Africa. ' Compare S. Hieron. adv. Lucifer, tom. iv. pt. ii. p. 298: *Si 
 in Sardinia tantum habet [ecclesiam Christus] nimium pauper factus est.* 
 And St. Chrys. in Col. Horn. i. n. 2 ; in i Cor. Horn, xxxii. n. i. 
 
 ^ In Ps. xliv. (Vulg.) Enarr. n. 24: ' Sacramenta doctrinae in Unguis 
 omnibus variis. Alia lingua Afra, alia Syra, alia Graeca, alia Hebrgea, alia 
 ilia et ilia ; faciunt istae linguae varietatem vestis reginae hujus ; quomodo 
 autem omnis varietatis vestis in unitate concordat, sic et omnes linguae ad 
 unam fidem.' 
 
 8 Ep. liv. ad Januar. n. 2 : *Alia vero [sunt] quae per loca terrarum 
 regionesque variantur, sicuti est quod alii jejunant sabbato, alii non ; alii 
 quotidib communicant Corpori et Sanguini Domini, alii certis diebus ac- 
 cipiunt ; alibi nuUus dies praetermittitur, quo non ofFeratur, alibi sabbato 
 tantum et dominico, alibi tantum dominico ; et si quid aliud Imjusmodi 
 animadverti potest, totum hoc genus rerum liheras habet observationes ; nee 
 HI ] 
 
120 Actual area and prospects of the Church, 
 
 find an equal welcome within her comprehensive bosom. Yet 
 contrast the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries with the 
 Church of the middle ages, or with the Church of our own 
 day. In the fourth and even in the fifth century, whatever may 
 have been the activity of individual missionaries, the Church 
 was still for the most part contained within the limits of the 
 empire ; and of parts of the empire she had scarcely as yet 
 taken possession. She was still confronted by powerful sections 
 of the population, passionately attached for various reasons to 
 the ancient superstition : nobles such as the powerful Sym- 
 machus, and orators like the accomplished Libanius, were among 
 her most earnest opponents. But it is now scarcely less than a 
 thousand years since Jesus Christ received at least the outward 
 submission of the whole of Europe ; and from that time to this 
 His empire has been continually expanding. The newly-dis- 
 covered continents of Australia and America have successively 
 acknowledged His sway. He is shedding the light of His 
 doctrine first upon one and then upon another of the islands of 
 the Pacific. He has beleaguered the vast African continent on 
 either side with various forms of missionary enterprise. And 
 although in Asia there are vast, ancient, and highly organized 
 rehgions which are still permitted to bid Him defiance, yet 
 India, China, Tartary, and Kamschatka have within the last few 
 years witnessed heroic labours and sacrifices for the spread of 
 Hi3 kingdom, which would not have been unworthy of the 
 purest and noblest enthusiasms of the Primitive Church. Nor 
 are these efforts so fruitless as the ruling prejudices or the lack 
 of trustworthy information on such subjects, which are so com- 
 mon in Western Europe, might occasionally suggest*. 
 
 Already the kingdom of the Kedeemer may be said to em- 
 brace three continents ; but what are its prospects, even if we 
 measure them by a strictly human estimate % Is it not a simple 
 matter of fact that at this moment the progress of the human 
 race is entirely identified with the spread of the influence of the 
 nations of Christendom ? What Buddhist, or Mohammedan, or 
 Pagan nation is believed by others, or believes itself, to be able to 
 
 disciplina ulla est in his melior gravi prudentique Christiano, quam ut eo 
 modo agat, quo agere viderit ecclesiam, ad quam forte deveneHt. Quod enim 
 neque contra fidem, neque bonos mores esse convincitur, indifferenter est 
 habendum et propter eorum, inter quos vivitur, societatem servandum est.' 
 
 * As to the Russian Missions, see Boissard, Eglise de Russie, tom. i. pp. loo- 
 104; Voices from the East, by Rev. J. M. Neale, London, Masters, 1859, 
 pp. 81-113. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Objection; Losses and divisio7ts of Christe^idom, 121 
 
 affect for good the future destinies of the human race? The 
 idea of a continuous progress of humanity, whatever perversions 
 that idea may have undergone, is really a creation of the 
 Christian faith. The nations of Christendom, in exact pro- 
 portion to the strength, point, and fervour of their Christianity, 
 seriously believe that they can command the future, and in- 
 stinctively associate themselves with the Church's aspirations 
 for a world-wide empire. Such a confidence, by the mere fact 
 of its existence, is already on the road to justifying itself by 
 success. It never was stronger, on the whole, than it is in our 
 own day. If in certain districts of European opinion it may 
 seem to be waning, this is only because such sections of opinion 
 have for the moment rejected the empire of Christ. Their 
 aberrations do not set aside, they rather act as a foil to that 
 general belief in a moral and social progress of mankind which 
 at bottom is so intimately associated with the belief of Christian 
 men in the coming triumph of the Church. 
 
 (2.) But long ere this, my brethren, as I am well aware, you 
 have been prepared to interrupt me with a group of objections. 
 Surely, you will say, this representation of the past, of the 
 present, and of the future of the Church may suffice for an ideal 
 picture, but it is not history. Is not the verdict of history a 
 different and a less encouraging one % First of all, do Church 
 annals present this spectacle of an ever- widening extension of 
 the kingdom of Christ % What then is to be said of the spread 
 of great and vital heresies, such as the mediaeval Nest onanism, 
 through countries which once believed with the Church in the 
 One Person and two Natures of her Lord^ % Again, is it not 
 a matter of historical fact that the Church has lost entire pro- 
 vinces both in Africa and in the East, since the rise of Moham- 
 medanism? And are her losses only to be measured by the 
 territorial area which she once occupied, and from which she 
 has been beaten back by the armies of the alien % Has she not, 
 by the controversies of the tenth and of the sixteenth centuries, 
 been herself splintered into three great sections, which still con- 
 tinue to act in outward separation from each other, to their own 
 extreme mutual loss and discouragement, and to the immense 
 and undisguised satisfaction of all enemies of the Christian 
 name % Are not large bodies of active and earnest Christians 
 living in separation from her communion ? Do not our mis- 
 sionary associations perpetually lament their failures to achieve 
 
 ^ See Gibbon, Decl. and Fall, ch. xlvii. 
 
 Ill] 
 
1 22 Losses and divisions of Christendo^n. 
 
 any large permanent conquests for Christ ■? Once more, is it 
 not a matter of notoriety that the leading nations of Christian 
 Europe are themselves honeycombed by a deadly rationalism, 
 which gives no quarter in its contemptuous yet passionate on- 
 slaughts on the faith of Christians, and which never calculated 
 more confidently than it does at the present time upon achieving 
 the total destruction of the empire of Jesus Christ % 
 
 My brethren, you do a service to my argument in stating 
 these apparent objections to its force. The substance of your 
 plea cannot be ignored by any who would honestly apprehend 
 the matter before us. You point, for instance, to the territorial 
 losses which the Church has sustained at the hands of heretical 
 Christians or of Moslem invaders. True : the Church of Christ 
 has sustained such losses. But has she not more than redressed 
 them in other directions'? Is she not now, in India and in 
 Africa, carrying the banner of the Cross into the territory of 
 the Crescent % You insist upon the grave differences which form 
 a barrier at this moment between the Eastern and the Western 
 Churches, and between the two great divisions of the Western 
 Church itself. Your estimate of those differences may be a 
 somewhat exaggerated one. The renewed harmony and co- 
 operation of the separated portions of the family of Christ may 
 not be so entirely remote as you would suggest. Yet we must 
 undoubtedly acknowledge that existing divisions, like all ha- 
 bitual sin within the sacred precincts of the Church, are a 
 standing and very serious violation of the law of its Founder. 
 Nor is this disorder summarily to be remedied by our ceding to 
 the unwarrantable pretensions of one section of the Church, 
 which may endeavour to persuade the rest of Christendom, that 
 it is itself co-extensive with the whole kingdom of the Saviour. 
 The divisions of Christ's family, lamentable and in many ways 
 disastrous as they are, must be ended, if at all, by the warmer 
 charity and more fervent prayers of believing Christians. But 
 meanwhile, do not these very divisions afford an indirect illus- 
 tration of the extraordinary vitality of the new kingdom % Has 
 the kingdom ceased to enlarge its territory since the troubled 
 times of the sixteenth century % On the contrary, it is simply a 
 matter of fact that, since that date, its ratio of extension has 
 been greater than at any previous period. The philosopher who 
 supposes that the Church is on the point of dying out because of 
 her divisions must be strangely insensible to the higher con- 
 victions which are increasingly prevailing in the minds of men. 
 And the confessions of failure on the part of some of our 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Strength and weakness of modern unbelief, 123 
 
 missionaries are certainly balanced by many and thankful nar- 
 ratives of great results accomplished under circumstances of the 
 utmost discouragement. 
 
 But you insist most emphatically upon the spread and upon 
 the strength of modern rationalism. You say that rationalism 
 is enthroned in the midst of civilizations which the Church her- 
 self has formed and nursed. You urge that rationalism, like 
 the rottenness which has seized upon the heart of the forest oak, 
 must sooner or later arrest the growth of branch and foliage, 
 and bring the tree which it is destroying to the ground. Now 
 we cannot deny, what is indeed a patent and melancholy fact, 
 that some of the most energetic of the intellectual movements 
 in modern Europe frankly avow and enthusiastically advocate 
 an explicit and total rejection of the Christian creed. Yet it is 
 possible to overrate the importance and to mistake the true sig- 
 nificance of this recent advance of unbelief. Of course Christian 
 faith can be daunted or surprised by no form or intensity of 
 opposition to truth, when there are always so many reasons for 
 opposing it. We Christians know what we have to expect from 
 the human heart in its natural state ; while on the other hand 
 we have been told that the gates of hell shall not prevail against 
 the Church of the Redeemer. But, in speculating on the future 
 destinies of the Church, as they are affected by rationalism, this 
 hopeful confidence of a sound faith may be seconded by the 
 calm estimate of the reflective reason. For, first, it may fairly 
 be questioned whether the publicly proclaimed unbelief of 
 modern times is really more general or more pronounced than 
 the secret but active and deeply penetrating scepticism which 
 during considerable portions of the middle ages laid such hold 
 upon the intellect of Europe x. Yet the mediaeval sceptics cannot 
 be said to have permanently hampered the progress of the 
 Church. Again, modern unbelief may be deemed less formid- 
 able when we steadily observe its moral impotence for all con- 
 structive purposes. Its strength and genius lie only in the 
 direction of destruction. It has shewn no sort of power to 
 build up any spiritual fabric or system which, as a shelter and a 
 discipline for the hearts and lives of men, can take the place of 
 that which it seeks to destroy. Leaving some of the deepest, 
 most legitimate, and most ineradicable needs of the human 
 soul utterly unsatisfied, modern unbelief can never really hope 
 
 ^ Cf. Newman, Lectures on University Subjects, pp. 296, 297. Milman, 
 Latin Christianity, vi. 444. See too St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, i. 4. 
 
 m] 
 
1 24 Unbelief, undesignedly the servant of the Chtirch, 
 
 permanently to establish a popular ' religion of human ityy.' Thus 
 the force of its intellectual onset upon revealed dogma is con- 
 tinually being broken by the consciousness, that it cannot long 
 maintain the ground which it may seem to itself for the moment 
 to have won. Its highest speculative energy is more than 
 counterbalanced by the moral power of some humble teacher of 
 a positive creed for whom possibly it entertains nothing less 
 than a sovereign contempt. Thirdly, unbelief resembles social 
 or political persecution in this, that, indirectly, it does an 
 inevitable service to the Faith which it attacks. It forces 
 earnest believers in Jesus Christ to minimize all differences 
 which are less than fundamental. It compels Christian men to 
 repress wdth a strong hand all exaggeration of existing motives 
 for a divided action. It obliges Christians, sometimes in spite 
 of themselves, to work side by side for their insulted Lord. 
 Thus it not only creates freshened sympathies between tem- 
 porarily severed branches of the Church ; it draws toward the 
 Church herself, with an increasingly powerful and comprehensive 
 attraction, many of those earnestly believing men, who, as is the 
 case with numbers among our nonconformist brethren in this 
 country, already belong, in St. Augustine's language, to the soul, 
 although not to the body, of the Catholic Communion. Lastly, 
 it unwittingly contributes to augment the evidential strength of 
 Christianity, at the very moment of its assault upon Christian 
 doctrine. The fierceness of man turns to the praise of Jesus 
 Christ, by demonstrating, each day, each year, each decade of 
 years, each century, the indestructibility of His work in the 
 world ; and unbelief voluntarily condemns itself to the task of 
 maintaining before the eyes of men that enduring tradition of 
 an implacable hostility to the kingdom of heaven, which it is the 
 glory of our Saviour so explicitly to have predicted, and so con- 
 sistently and triumphantly to have defied. 
 
 3. For these and other reasons, modern unbelief, although 
 formidable, wall not be deemed so full of menace to the future of 
 the kingdom of our Lord as may sometimes be apprehended by 
 the nervous timidity of Christian piety. This will appear more 
 
 y The attempt of M. Auguste Comte, in his later h'fe, to elaborate a kind 
 of ritual as a devotional and sesthetical appendage to the Positivist Phi- 
 losophy, implies a sense of this truth. M. Comte however does not appear 
 to have carried any large section of the Positivist school with him in this 
 singular enterprise. But a like poverty of moral and spiritual provision for 
 the soul of man is observable in rationalistic systems which stop very far 
 short of the literal godlessness of the Positive Philosophy. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Intensity of our Lord's work in souls. 125 
 
 certain if from considering the extent of Christ's realm we turn 
 to the intensive side of His work among men. For indeed the 
 'depth of our Lord's work in the soul of man has ever been more 
 wonderful than its breadth. The moral intensity of the life of a 
 sincere Christian is a more signal illustration of the reality of 
 the reign of Christ, and of the success of His plan, than is the 
 territorial range of the Christian empire. * The King's daughter 
 is all glorious within.' Christianity may have conferred a new 
 sanction upon civil and domestic relationships among men ; 
 and it certainly infused a new life into the most degraded 
 society that the world has yet seen ^. Still this was not its pri- 
 mary aim j its primary efforts were directed not to this world, 
 but to the next^. Christianity has changed many of the out- 
 ward aspects of human existence ; it has created a new religious 
 language, a new type of worship, a new calendar of time. It has 
 furnished new ideals to art ; it has opened nothing less than a 
 new world of literature ; it has invested the forms of social 
 intercourse among men witli new graces of refinement and 
 mutual consideration. Yet these are but some of the superficial 
 symptoms of its real work. It has achieved these changes in the 
 outward life of Christian nations, because it has penetrated to 
 the very depths of man's heart and thought ; because it has 
 revolutionized his convictions and tamed his will, and then ex- 
 pressed its triumph in the altered social system of that section 
 of the human race which has generally received it. How com- 
 plete at this moment is the reign of Christ in the soul of a 
 sincere Christian ! Christ is not a limited. He is emphatically 
 an absolute Monarch. Yet His rule is welcomed by His subjects 
 with more than that enthusiasm which a free people can feel for 
 its elected magistracy. Every sincere Christian bows to Jesus 
 Christ as to an Intellectual Master. Our Lord is not merely 
 
 ^ St. Aug. Ep. cxxxviii. ad Marcellin. n. 15 : 'Qui doctrinam Christi 
 adversam dicunt esse reipublicse, dent exercitum talem, quales doctrina 
 Christi esse milites jussit, dent tales provinoiales, tales maritos, tales con- 
 juges, tales parentes, tales filios, tales dominos, tales servos, tales reges, tales 
 judices, tales denique debitorum ipsius iisci redditores et exactores, quales 
 esse praecipit doctrina Christiana, et audeant earn dicere adversam esse rei- 
 publicse, imm5 ver5 non dubitent earn confiteri magnam, si obtemperetur, 
 salutem esse reipublicae.' 
 
 * St. Hieronymiis adv. Jovin. lib. ii. torn. iv. pars ii. p. 200, ed. Martian : 
 ' Nostra religio non ttu/ct^j/, non athletam (St. Jerome might almost have in 
 his eye a certain well-known modern theory) non nautas, non milites, non 
 fossores, sed sapientise erudit sectatorem, qui se Dei cultui dedicavit, et scit 
 cur creatus sit, cur versetur in mundo, quo abire festinet.' 
 
 Ill] 
 
126 Intensity of our LorcTs work m souls, 
 
 listened to as a Teacher of Truth ; He is contemplated as the 
 absolute Truth itself. Accordingly no portion of His teaching is 
 received by true Christians merely as a ' view/ or as a ^ tenta- 
 tive system,' or as a * theory,' which may be entertained, dis- 
 cussed, partially adopted, and partially set aside. Those who 
 deal thus with Him are understood to have broken with Chris- 
 tianity, at least as a practical religion. For a Christian, the 
 Words of Christ constitute the highest criterion and rule of truth. 
 All that Christ has authorized is simply accepted, all that He 
 has condemned is simply rejected, with the whole energy of the 
 Christian reason. Christ's Thought is reflected, it is reproduced, 
 in the thought of the true Christian. Christ's authority in the 
 sphere of speculative truth is thankfully acknowledged by the 
 Christian's voluntary and unreserved submission to the slightest 
 known intimations of his Master's judgment. High above the 
 claims of human teachers, the tremendous self-assertion of Jesus 
 Christ echoes on from age to age, — ' I am the Truth '^.' And 
 from age to age the Christian mind responds by a life-long 
 endeavour ^ to bring every thought into captivity unto the obe- 
 dience of Christ^.' But if Jesus Christ is Lord of the Christian's 
 thought. He is also Lord of the Christian's affections. Beauty 
 it is which provokes love ; and Christ is the highest Moral 
 Beauty. He does not merely rank as an exponent of the purest 
 morality. He is absolute Virtue, embodied in a human life, and 
 vividly, energetically set forth before our eyes in the story of 
 the Gospels. As such, He claims to reign over the inmost 
 affections of men. As such, He secures the first place in the 
 heart of every true Christian. To have taken the measure of 
 His Beauty, and yet not to love Him, is, in a Christian's judg- 
 ment, to be self-condemned. * If any man love not the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha <^.' And ruling 
 the affections of the Christian, Christ is also King of the 
 sovereign faculty in the Christianized soul ; He is Master of the 
 Christian will. When He has tamed its native stubbornness, 
 He teaches it day by day a more and more pliant accuracy of 
 movement in obedience to Himself. Nay, He is not merely its 
 rule of action, but its very motive power ; each act of devotion 
 and self-sacrifice of which it is capable is but an extension of the 
 energy of Christ's Own moral Life. ' Without Me,' he says to 
 His servants, ^ye can do nothing e;' and with St. Paul His 
 
 ^ St. John xiv. 6. « 2 Cor. x. 5. 
 
 d I Cor. xvi. 22. « St. John xv. 5. 
 
 r LECT. 
 
I 
 
 * Christ is Christianity! 12'] 
 
 servants reply, 'I can do all things through Christ Which 
 strengtheneth Me^/ 
 
 This may be expressed in other terms by saying that, both 
 intellectually and morally, Christ is Christianity. Christianity 
 is not related to our Lord as a philosophy might be to a philo- 
 sopher, that is, as a moral or intellectual system thrown off from 
 his mind, resting thenceforward on its own merits, and implying 
 no necessary relation towards its author on the part of those 
 who receive it, beyond a certain sympathy with what was at 
 one time a portion of his thought ^. A philosophy may be thus 
 abstracted altogether from the person of its originator, with 
 entire impunity. Platonic thought would not have been 
 damaged, if Plato had been annihilated ; and in our day men 
 are Hegelians or Comtists, without believing that the respective 
 authors of those systems are in existence at this moment, nay 
 rather, in the majority of cases, while deliberately holding that 
 they have ceased to be. The utmost stretch of personal alle- 
 giance, on the part of the disciple of a philosophy to its founder, 
 consists, ordinarily speaking, in a sentiment of devotion * to his 
 memory.' But detach Christianity from Christ, and it vanishes 
 before your eyes into intellectual vapour. For it is of the 
 essence of Christianity that, day by day, hour by hour, the 
 Christian should live in conscious, felt, sustained relationship to 
 the Ever -living Author of his creed and of his life. Christianity 
 is non-existent apart from Christ ; it centres in Christ ; it 
 radiates, now as at the first, from Christ. It is not a mere 
 doctrine bequeathed by Him to a world with which He h:is 
 ceased to have dealings ; it perishes outright when men attempt 
 to abstract it from the Living Person of its Founder. He is felt 
 by His people to be their Living Lord, really present with them 
 now, and even unto the end of the world. The Christian life 
 springs from and is sustained by the apprehension of Christ 
 present in His Church, present in and with His members as a 
 TTvev^a C<oo7roLovv \ Christ is the quickening Spirit of Christian 
 humanity ; He lives in Christians ; He thinks in Christians ; 
 He acts through Christians and with Christians ; He is indis- 
 solubly associated with every movement of the Christian's deepest 
 life. *I live,' exclaims the Apostle, 'yet not I, but Christ liveth 
 in meV This felt presence of Christ it is, which gives both its 
 
 f Phil.iv. 13. 
 
 o Luthardt, Grundwahrheiten des Christenthums, p, 227: *Er ist der 
 Inhalt seiner Lehre.' ^ I Cor. xv. 45. * Gal. ii. 20. 
 
 Ill] 
 
128 Is the Sermo7i on the Mount a dead letter? 
 
 form and its force to the sincere Christian life. That life is a 
 loyal homage of the intellect, of the heart, and of the will, to a 
 Divine King, with Whom will, heart, and intellect are in close 
 and constant communion, and from Whom there flows forth, 
 through the Spirit and the Sacraments, that supply of light, of 
 love, and of resolve, which enriches and ennobles the Christian 
 soul. My brethren, I am not theorizing or describing any 
 merely ideal state of things ; I am but putting into words the 
 inner experience of every true Christian among you j I am but 
 exhibiting a set of spiritual circumstances which, as a matter of 
 course, every true Christian endeavours to realize and make his 
 own, and which, as a matter of fact, blessed be God ! very many 
 Christians do realize, to their present peace, and to their eternal 
 welfare. 
 
 Certainly it is not uncommon in our day to be informed, that 
 'the Sermon on the Mount is a dead letter in Christendom.' 
 In consequence (so men speak) of the engrossing interest which 
 Christians have wrongly attached to the discussion of dogmatic 
 questions, that original draught of essential Christianity, the 
 Sermon on the Mount, has been wellnigh altogether lost sight 
 of. Perhaps you yourselves, my brethren, ere now have repeated 
 some of the current commonplaces on this topic. But have you 
 endeavoured to ascertain whether it is indeed as you say % You 
 remark that you at least have not met with Christians who 
 seemed to be making any sincere efforts to turn the Sermon on 
 the Mount into practice. It may be so. But the question is, 
 where have you looked for them % Do you expect to meet them 
 rushing hurriedly along the great highways of life, with the 
 keen, eager, self-asserting multitude % Do you expect, that with 
 their eye upon the Beatitudes and upon the Cross, they will 
 throng the roads which lead to worldly success, to earthly 
 wealth, to temporal honour % Be assured that those who know 
 where moral beauty, aye, the highest, is to be found, are not 
 disappointed, even at this hour, in their search for it. Until 
 you have looked more carefully, more anxiously than has 
 probably been the case, for the triumphs of our Lord's work in 
 Christian souls, you may do well to take upon trust the testi- 
 mony of others. You may at least be sufficiently generous, aye, 
 and sufficiently reasonable, to believe in the existence at this 
 present time of the very highest types of Christian virtue. It is 
 a simple matter of fact that in our day, multitudes of men and 
 women do lead the life of the Beatitudes ; they pray, they fast, 
 they do alms to their Father Which seeth in secret. These are 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Is the Sermon on the Motmt a dead letter? 129 
 
 Christians who take no thought for the morrow. These are 
 Christians whose righteousness does exceed that worldly and 
 conventional standard of religion, which knows no law save the 
 corrupt public opinion of the hour, and which inherits in every 
 generation the essential spirit of the Scribes and Pharisees. 
 These are Christians who shew forth the moral creativeness of 
 Jesus Christ in their own deeds and words \ they are living 
 witnesses to His solitary and supreme power of changing the 
 human heart. They were naturally proud ; He has enabled 
 them to be sincerely humble. They were, by the inherited 
 taint of their nature, impure ; He has in them shed honour upon 
 the highest forms of chastity. They too were, as in his natural 
 state man ever is, suspicious of and hostile to their fellow-men, 
 unless connected with them by blood, or by country, or by interest. 
 But Jesus Christ has taught them the tenderest and most 
 practical forms of love for man viewed simply as man ; He has ^ 
 inspired them with the only true, that is, the Christian, huma- 
 nitarianism. Think not that the moral energy of the Christian 
 life was confined to the Church of the first centuries. At this 
 moment, there are millions of souls in the world, that are pure, 
 humble, and loving. But for Jesus Christ our Lord, these 
 millions would have been proud, sensual, selfish. At this very 
 day, and even in atmospheres where the taint of scepticism dulls 
 the brightness of Christian thought, and enfeebles the strength 
 of Christian resolution, there are to be found men, whose intel- 
 ligence gazes on Jesus with a faith so clear and strong, whose 
 affection clings to Him with so trustful and so warm an embrace, 
 whose resolution has been so disciplined and braced to serve 
 Him by a persevering obedience, that, beyond a doubt, they 
 would joyfully die for Him, if by shedding their blood they could 
 better express their devotion to His Person, or lead others to 
 know and to love Him more. Blessed be God, that portion of 
 His one Fold in which He has placed us, the Church of England, 
 has not lacked the lustre of such lives as these. Such assuredly 
 was Ken ; such was Bishop Wilson ; such have been many whose 
 names have never appeared in the page of history. Has not one 
 indeed quite lately passed from among us, the boast and glory of 
 this our University, great as a poet, greater still, it may be, as 
 a scholar and a theologian, greatest of all as a Christian saint % 
 Certainly to know him, even sliglitly, was inevitably to know 
 that he led a life distinct from, and higher than, that of common^^:^'- 
 men. To know him well, was to revere and to love in himj^j^i'^- 
 manifested beauty of his Lord's presence \ it was to tr^w^^e" ,^<''<'' 
 III] K J%''^ ^ 
 
130 Social results of Christianity, 
 
 sensibly perpetuated power of the Life, of the Teaching, of the 
 Cross of Jesus K 
 
 4. On the other hand, look at certain palpable effects of our 
 Lord's work which lie on the very face of human society. If 
 society, apart from the Church, is more kindly and humane than 
 in heathen times, this is due to the work of Christ on the hearts 
 of men. The era of * humanity' is the era of the Incarnation. 
 The sense of human brotherhood, the acknowledgment of the 
 sacredness of human rights, the recognition of that particular 
 stock of rights which appertains to every human being, is a cre- 
 ation of Christian dogma. It has radiated from the heart of the 
 Christian Church into the society of the outer world. Chris- 
 tianity is the power which first gradually softened slavery, and 
 is now finally abolishing it. Christianity has proclaimed the 
 dignity of poverty, and has insisted upon the claims of the poor, 
 with a success proportioned to the sincerity which has welcomed 
 her doctrines among the different peoples of Christendom. The 
 hospital is an invention of Christian philanthropy^; the active 
 charity of the Church of the fourth century forced into the Greek 
 language a word for which Paganism had had no occasion. The 
 degradation of woman in the Pagan world has been exchanged 
 for a position of special privilege and honour, accorded to her 
 by the Christian nations. The sensualism which Pagans mistook 
 for love has been placed under the ban of all true Christian 
 feeling; and in Christendom, love is now the purest of moral 
 impulses ; it is the tenderest, the noblest, the most refined of 
 the movements of the soul. The old, the universal, the natural 
 feeling of bitter hostility between races, nations, and classes of 
 men is denounced by Christianity. The spread of Christian 
 truth inevitably breaks down the ferocities of national prejudice, 
 and prepares the world for that cosmopolitanism which, we are 
 told, is its most probable future. International law had no real 
 existence until the nations, taught by Christ, had begun to feel 
 the bond of ^brotherhood. International law is now each year 
 becoming more and more powerful in regulating the affairs of the 
 civilized world. And if we are sorrowfully reminded that the 
 prophecy of a world-wide peace within the limits of Christ's 
 kingdom has not yet been realized ; if Christian lands, in our 
 
 ^ The author of the Christian Year had passed to his rest during the in- 
 terval that elapsed between the delivery of the second and the third of these 
 lectures, on March 30, 1866. 
 
 1 Hallara's Middle Ages, chap. ix. part i. vol. ii. p. 365 . 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Perpehiity of the Chtcrch. 131 
 
 day as before, are reddened by streams of Christian blood ; yet 
 the utter disdain of the plea of right, the high-handed and 
 barbarous savagery, which marked the wars of heathendom, have 
 given way to sentiments in which justice can at least obtain 
 a hearing, arid which compassion and generosity, drawing their 
 inspirations from the Cross, have at times raised to the level of 
 chivalry. 
 
 But neither would any improvements in man's social life, nor 
 even the regenerate lives of individual Christians, of themselves, 
 have realized our Lord's ^ plan' in its completeness i^. His design 
 was to found a society or Church ; individual sanctity and social 
 amelioration are only effects radiating from the Church. The 
 Church herself is the true proof of His success. After the lapse 
 of eighteen centuries the kingdom of Christ is here, and it is 
 still expanding. How fares it generally with a human under- 
 taking when exposed to the action of a long period of time*? The 
 idea which was its very soul is thrown into the shade by some 
 other idea ; or it is warped, or distorted, or diverted from its 
 true direction, or changed by some radical corruption. In the 
 end it dies out from among the living thoughts of men, and 
 takes its place in the tomb of so much forgotten speculation, on 
 the shelves of a library. Within a short lifetime we may follow 
 many a popular moral impulse from its cradle to its grave. 
 From the era of its young enthusiasm, we mark its gradual 
 entry upon the stage of fixed habit ; from this again we pass to 
 its day of lifeless formalism, and to the rapid progress of its de- 
 cline. But the Society founded by Jesus Christ is here, still 
 animated by its original idea, still carried forward by the moral 
 impulse which sustained it in its infancy. If Christian doctrine 
 
 ™ A reviewer, who naturally must dissent from parts of the teaching of 
 these lectures, but of whose generosity and fairness the lecturer is deeply 
 sensible, reminds him that ' Our Lord came to carry out the counsel of the 
 Eternal Father ; and that counsel was, primarily, to estabUsh, through His 
 sacrificial death, an economy of mercy, under which justification and spiritual 
 and eternal life should be realized by all who should penitently rely on Him.' 
 St. John iii. i6, vi. 38-40. Undoubtedly. But this 'economy of mercy 
 included the establishment of a world-embracing church, within which it was 
 to be dispensed. Col. i. 10-14. Our Lord founded His Church, not by way 
 of achieving a vast social feat or victory, but with a view to the needs of the 
 human soul, which He came from heaven to save. Nevertheless the Church 
 is not related to our Lord's design as an 'inseparable accident.' It is that 
 design itself, viewed on its historical and social side; it is the form which, 
 so far as we know, His redemptive work necessarily took, and which He Him- 
 self founded as being the imperishable result of His Incarnation and Death. 
 St. Matt. xvi. 1 8. Cf. Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, Dec. 1867, p. 1086. 
 Ill ] K 2 
 
13^ How to accotmtfor the success of Christ^ s 'plan! 
 
 has, in particular branches of the Church, been overlaid by an 
 encrustation of foreign and earthly elements, its body and sub- 
 stance is untouched in each great division of the Catholic 
 Society; and much of it, we rejoice to know, is retained by com- 
 munities external to the Holy Fold. If intimate union with the 
 worldly power of the State (as especially in England during 
 the last century) has sometimes seemed to chill the warmth of 
 Chri^ian love, and to substitute a heartless externalism for the 
 spiritual life of a Christian brotherhood ; yet again and again 
 the flame of that Spirit Whom the Son of Man sent to ^glorify' 
 Hitnself, has burst up from the depths of the living heart of the 
 Church, and has kindled among a generation of sceptics or sen- 
 sualists a pure and keen enthusiasm which confessors and martyrs 
 might have recognised as their own. The Church of Christ in 
 sooth carries within herself the secret forces which renew her 
 moral vigour, and which will, in God's good time, visibly re- 
 assert her essential unity. Her perpetuated existence among 
 ourselves at this hour bears a witness to the superhuman powers 
 of her Founder, not less significant than that afforded by the 
 intensity of the individual Christian life, or by the territorial 
 range of the Christian empire. 
 
 III. The work of Jesus Christ in the world is a patent fact, 
 and it is still in full progress before our eyes. The question 
 remains, How are we to account for its success % 
 
 I. If this question is asked with respect to the ascendancy 
 of such a national religion as the popular Paganism of Greece, 
 it is obvious to refer to the doctrine of the prehistoric mythus. 
 The Greek religious creed was, at least in the main, a creation of 
 the national imagination at a period when reflection and ex- 
 perience could scarcely have existed. It was recommended to 
 subsequent generations, not merely by the indefinable charm of 
 poetry which was thrown around it, not merely by the antiquity 
 which shrouded its actual origin, but by its accurate sympathy 
 with the genius as with the degradations of the gifted race which 
 had produced it. But of late years we have heard less of the 
 attempt to apply the doctrine of the mythus to a series of well- 
 ascertained historical events, occurring in the mid-day light of 
 history, and open to the hostile criticism of an entire people. 
 The historical imagination, steadily applied to the problem, re- 
 fuses to picture the unimaginable process by which such stupen- 
 dous ' myths ' as those of the Gospel could have been festooned 
 around the simple history of a humble preacher of righteousness ". 
 
 » Luthardt, Grundwahrheiten des Christenthums, p. 234. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Not parallel to the Success of false religions, 133 
 
 The early Christian Church does not supply the intellectual 
 agencies that could have been equal to any such task. As 
 Rousseau has observed, the inventor of such a history would 
 have been not less wonderful than its Subject « ; and the utter 
 reversal of the ordinary laws of a people's mental development 
 would have been itself a miracle. Nor was it to be anticipated 
 that a religion which was, as the mythical school asserts, the 
 ' creation of the Jewish race,' would have made itself a home, at 
 the very beginning of its existence, among the Greek and the 
 Roman peoples of the Western world. If however we are re- 
 ferred to the upgrowth and spread of Buddhism, as to a pheno- 
 menon which may rival and explain the triumph of Christianity, 
 it may be sufficient to reply that the writers who insist upon this 
 parallel are themselves eminently successful in analysing the 
 purely natural causes of the success of Cakya-Mouni. They 
 dwell among other points on the rare delicacy and fertility of 
 the Aryan imagination P, and on the absence of any strong 
 counter-attraction to arrest the course of the new doctrine in 
 Central and South-eastern Asia. Nor need we fear to admit, 
 that, mingled with the darkest errors. Buddhism contained 
 elements of truth so undeniably powerful as to appeal with 
 great force to some of the noblest aspirations of the soul of 
 man <i. But Buddhism, vast as is the population which professes 
 it, has not yet made its way into a second continent ; while the 
 religion of Jesus Christ is to be found in every quarter of the 
 globe. As for the rapid and widespread growth of the religion 
 of the False Prophet, it may be explained, partly by the practical 
 genius of. Mohammed, partly by the rare qualities of the Arab 
 race. If it had not claimed to be a new revelation, Moham- 
 medanism might have passed for a heresy adroitly constructed 
 out of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Its doctrine re- 
 specting Jesus Christ reaches the level of Socinianism ; and, as 
 against Polytheism, its speculative force lay in its insistance upon 
 the truth of the Divine Unity. A religion which consecrated 
 
 The well-known words of the fimile are these : 'Jamais des auteurs juifs 
 n'eussent trouv^ ce ton ni cette morale ; et I'Evangile a des caract^res de 
 v^rite si grands, si frappants, si parfaitement inimitables, que I'inventeur en 
 serait plus dtonnant que le h^ros.* 
 
 P Cf. on this point the interesting Essay of M. Taine, fitudes Critiques, 
 p. 321. 
 
 1 Cf. Saint- Hilaire, Le Bouddha et sa Eeligion, pp. 142-148. Yet M. St. 
 Hilaire describes Buddhism as presenting *un spiritualisme sans ame, une 
 vertu sans devoir, une morale sans liberty, une charitd sans amour, un monde 
 sans nature et sans Dieu.* lb. p. 182. 
 
 Ill] 
 
134 Success of false religions and of Christianity, 
 
 sensual indulgence could bid high for an Asiatic popularity 
 against the Church of Christ; and Mohammed delivered the 
 scymetar, as the instrument of his-iapostolate, into the hands of 
 a people whose earlier poetry shews it to have been gifted with 
 intellectual fire and strength of purpose of the highest order. 
 But it has not yet been asserted that the Church fought her 
 way, sword in hand, to the throne of Constantine ; nor were the 
 first Cliristians naturally calculated to impose their will forcibly 
 upon the civilized world, had they ever desired to do so. Still 
 less is a parallel to the work of Jesus Christ to be found in that 
 of Confucius. Confucius indeed was not a warrior like Moham- 
 med, nor a mystic like Qakya-Mouni ; he appealed neither to 
 superior knowledge nor to miraculous power. Confucius col- 
 lected, codified, enforced, reiterated all that was most elevated in 
 the moral traditions of China ; he was himself deeply penetrated 
 with the best ethical sentiments of Chinese antiquity r. His 
 success was that of an earnest patriot who was also, as a patriot, 
 an antiquarian moralist. But he succeeded only in China, nor 
 could his work roll back that invasion of Buddhism which took 
 place in the first century of the Christian era. Confucianism 
 is more purely national than Buddhism and Mohamme- 
 danism \ and in this respect it contrasts more sharply with 
 the world-wide presence of Christianity. Yet if Confucianism is 
 unknown beyond the frontiers of China, it is equally true that 
 neither Buddhism nor Mohammedanism have done more than 
 spread themselves over territories contiguous to their original 
 homes. Whereas, almost within the first century of her exist- 
 ence, the Church had her missionaries in Spain on one hand, 
 and, as it seems, in India on the other ; and her Apostle pro- 
 claimed that his Master's cause was utterly independent of all 
 distinctions of race and nation s. In our own day, Christian 
 charity is freely spending its energies and its blood in efforts to 
 carry the work of Jesus Christ into regions where He has been 
 so stoutly resisted by these ancient and highly organized forms 
 of error. Yet in the streets of London or of Paris we do not 
 hear of the labours of Moslem or Buddhist missionaries, instinct 
 with any such sense of a duty and mission to all the world in the 
 name of truth, as that which animates, at this very hour, those 
 heroic pioneers of Christendom whom Europe has sent to Delhi 
 or to Pekin *. 
 
 ' Cf. Max Miiller, Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. p. 308. 
 " Col. iii. II ; Rom. i. 14. 
 
 * We are indeed told that ' if we were to judge from the history of the last 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Gtddon!s account of the success of^esus Christ, 135 
 
 2. From the earliest ages of the Church, the rapid progress 
 of Christianity in the face of apparently insurmountable diffi- 
 culties, has attracted attention, on the score of its high evidential 
 value ^. The accomplished but unbelieving historian of the De- 
 cline and Fall of the Eoman Empire undertook to furnish the 
 scepticism of the last century with a systematized and altogether 
 natural account of the spread of Christianity ^ The five ^ causes ' 
 which he instances as sufficient to explain the work of Jesus 
 Christ in the world are, the * zeal ' of the early Christians, the 
 * doctrine of a future life,' the * miraculous powers ascribed to 
 the primitive Church,' the ' pure and austere morals of the first 
 Christians,' and ' the union and discipline of the Christian 
 republic/ But surely each of these causes points at once and 
 irresistibly to a cause beyond itself x. If the zeal of the first 
 Christians was, as Gibbon will have it, a fanatical habit of mind 
 inherited from Judaism, how came it not merely to survive, but 
 to acquire a new intensity, when the narrow nationalism which 
 provoked it in the Jew had been wholly renounced 1 What was 
 it that made the first Christians so zealous amid surrounding 
 lassitude, so holy amid encompassing pollution 1 Why should 
 the doctrine of a life to come have had a totally different effect 
 when proclaimed by the Apostles from any which it had had 
 when taught by Socrates or by Plato, or by other thinkers of the 
 Pagan world ] How came it that a few peasants and tradesmen 
 could erect a world-wide organization, sufficiently elastic to 
 adapt itself to the genius of races the most various, sufficiently 
 uniform to be everywhere visibly conservative of its unbroken 
 identity ? If the miracles of the early Church, or any one of 
 them, were genuine, how can they avail to explain the natural- 
 ness of the spread of Christianity ? If they were all false, how 
 
 thousand years, it would appear to shew that the permanent area of Chris- 
 tianity is conterminous with that of Western civihzation, and that its doctrines 
 could find acceptance only among those who, by incorporation into the Greek 
 and Latin races, have adopted their system of life and morals.' International 
 Policy, p. 508. The Anglo- Positivist school however is careful to explain 
 that it altogether excludes Russia from any share in ' Western civilization ; ' 
 Russia, it appears, is quite external to Hhe West.* Ibid. pp. 14-17, 58, 
 95, &c. 
 
 " St. Justin. Dialog, cum Tryph. T17, 121 ; St.Irenseus, adv. Hser. i. c. 10, 
 § 2 ; Tertull. adv. Judseos, vii ; Apolog. 37 ; Grig, contr. Celsum, i. 26, 
 ii. 79' Cf. Freppel, Examen Critique, p. 110. 
 
 " No reader of Gibbon will be misled by the sarcasm of the opening para- 
 graphs of Decl. and Fall, c. xv. Would that Gibbon had really supposed 
 himself to be describing only the 'secondary causes' of the progress of Chris- 
 tianity ! X Eclipse of Faith, p. 186. 
 Ill] 
 
136 Recent theory of the success of our Lord, 
 
 extraordinary is this spectacle of a moral triumph, such as even 
 Gibbon acknowledges that of Christianity to be, brought about by 
 means of a vast and odious imposition ! Gibbon's argument would 
 have been more conclusive if the ' causes ' to which he points 
 could themselves have been satisfactorily accounted for in a 
 natural way. As it was, the historian of Lausanne did an in- 
 direct service to Christendom, of that kind for which England 
 has sometimes been indebted to the threatening preparations of 
 a great military neighbour. Gibbon indicated very clearly the 
 direction which would be taken by modern assailants of the 
 faith ; but he is not singular in having strengthened the cause 
 which he sought to ruin, by furnishing an indirect demonstration 
 of the essentially supernatural character of the spread of the 
 Gospel. 
 
 3. But you remind me that if the sceptical artillery of Gibbon 
 is out of date, yet the ' higher criticism' of our day has a more 
 delicate, and, as is presumed, a more effective method of stating 
 the naturalistic explanation of the work of Jesus Christ in the 
 world. Jesus Christ, you say, was born at a time when the 
 world itself forced victory upon Him, or at least ensured for 
 Him an easy triumph y. The wants and aspirations of a worn- 
 out civilization, the dim but almost universal presentiment of 
 a coming Restorer of mankind, the completed organization of a 
 great world-empire, combined to do this. You urge that it is 
 possible so to correspond to the moral and intellectual drift of 
 a particular period, that nothing but a perverse stupidity can 
 escape a success which is all but inevitable. You add that Jesus 
 Christ ^ had this chance ' of appearing at a critical moment in 
 the history of humanity \ and that when the world was ripe for 
 His religion. He and His Apostles had just adroitness enough 
 not to be wholly unequal to the opportunity. The report of His 
 teaching and of His Person was carried on the crest of one of 
 those waves of strange mystic enthusiasm, which so often during 
 the age of the Caesars rolled westward from Asia towards the 
 capital of the world ; and though the Founder of Christianity, it 
 is true, had perished in the surf. His work, you hold, in the 
 nature of things, could not but survive Him. 
 
 y Renan, Les Ap6tres, pp. 302, 303. M. Renan is of opinion that * la 
 conversion du monde aux id^es juives (1) et chr^tiennes ^tait inevitable;' 
 his only astonishment is that * cette conversion se soit fait si lenteraent et si 
 tard.' On the other hand, the new faith is said to have made ' de proche en 
 proche (Tetonnantes progrfes' (Ibid. p. 215) ; and, with reference to Antioch, 
 'on setonne des progres accomplis en si peu de temps.' Ibid. p. 236. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Was our LorcVs triumph dtce to ytidaism ? 137 
 
 (a) In this representation, my brethren, there is a partial 
 truth which I proceed to recognise. It is true that the world 
 was weary and expectant ; it is true that the political fabric of 
 the great empire afforded to the Gospel the same facilities for 
 self-extension as those which it offered to the religion of Osiris, 
 or to the fable of Apollonius Tyanseus. But those favourable • 
 circumstances are only what we should look for at the hands of 
 a Divine Providence, when the true religion was to be introduced 
 into the world ; and they are altogether unequal to account for 
 the success of Christianity. It is alleged that Christianity cor- 
 responded to the dominant moral and mental tendencies ^ of the 
 time so perfectly, that those tendencies secured its triumph. 
 But is this accurate % Christianity was cradled in Judaism ; 
 but was the later Judaism so entirely in harmony with the 
 temper and aim of Christianity % Was the age of the Zealots, of 
 Judas the Gaulonite, of Theudas, likely to welcome the spiritual 
 empire of such a teacher as our Lord ^ % Were the moral dispo- 
 sitions of the Jews, their longings for a political Messiah, their 
 fierce legalism, their passionate jealousy for the prerogatives of 
 their race, calculated — I do not say to further the triumph of 
 the Church, but — to enter even distantly into her distinctive 
 spirit and doctrines ? Did not the Synagogue persecute Jesus 
 to death, when it had once discerned the real character of His 
 teaching % It may be argued that the favourable dispositions in 
 question which made the success of Christianity practically 
 inevitable were to be found among the Hellenistic Jews ^ The 
 Hellenistic Jews were less cramped by national prejudices, less 
 strictly observant of the Mosaic ceremonies, more willing to 
 welcome Gentile proselytes than was the case with the Jews of 
 Palestine. Be it so. But the Hellenistic Jews were just as 
 opposed as the Jews of Palestine to the capital truths of Chris- 
 tianity., A crucified Messiah, for instance, was not a more -wel- 
 come doctrine in the synagogues of Corinth or of Thessalonica 
 than in those of Jerusalem. Never was Judaism broader, more 
 elastic, more sympathetic with external thought, more disposed 
 to make concessions than in Philo Judseus, the most representa- 
 tive of Hellenistic Jews. Yet Philo insists as stoutly as any 
 Palestinian Eabbi upon the perpetuity of the law of Moses. As 
 long, he says, as the human race shall endure, men shall carry 
 
 * Renan, Les Ap6tres, c. 19, pp. 366, sqq. 
 » Freppel, Examen Critique, p. 1 14. 
 ^ Kenan, Les Ap6tres, c. 19, p. 113. 
 
 Ill] 
 
138 Was Christ's trhimph due to Jewish sympathy? 
 
 their offerings to the temple of Jerusalem c. Indeed in the first 
 age of Christianity the Jews, both Palestinian and Hellenistic, 
 illustrate, unintentionally of course, but very remarkably, the 
 supernatural law of the expansion of the Church. They perse- 
 cute Christ in His members, and yet they submit to Him ; they 
 are foremost in enriching the Church with converts, after en- 
 riching her with martyrs. Wherever the preachers of the Gospel 
 appear, it is the Jews who are their fiercest persecutors ^ ; the 
 Jews rouse against them the passions of the Pagan mob, or 
 appeal to the prejudice of the Pagan magistrate e. Yet the 
 synagogue is the mission-station from which the Church's action 
 originally radiates ; the synagogue, as a rule, yields their first 
 spiritual conquests to the soldiers of the Cross. In the Acts of 
 the Apostles we remark on the one hand the hatred and opposi- 
 tion with which the Jew met the advancing Gospel, on the other, 
 the signal and rapid conquests of the Gospel among the ranks of 
 the ~^J^wish population f The former fact determines the true 
 significance of the latter. Men do not persecute systems which 
 answer to their real sympathies ; St. Paul was not a Christian 
 at heart, and without intending it, before his conversion. The 
 Church triumphed in spite of the dominant tendencies and the 
 fierce opposition of Judaism, both in Palestine and elsewhere ; 
 she triumphed by the force of her inherent and Divine vitality. 
 The process whereby the Gospel won its way among the Jewish 
 people was typified in St. Paul's experience ; the passage from 
 the traditions of the synagogue to the faith of Pentecost cost 
 nothing less than a violent moral and intellectual wrench, such 
 as could be achieved only by a supernatural force, interrupting 
 
 c De Monarchic, lib. ii. § 3, ii. 224 : e^' '6(Tov yap rh avOpcinrcov yivos Zia- 
 /uereZ, det kcCL at irpSo-o^oi rod Upov (pvKax^^o'ovTai avpdiaivoji/i^ovcrai, iravrl r^ 
 k6(Tjjlci} : quoted by Freppel. 
 
 <^ How far St. Paul thought that Judaism contributed to the triumph of 
 the Church might appear from i Thess. ii. 15, 16. Compare Acts xiii. 50, 
 xiv. s^ 19* xvii. 5, 13, xviii. 12, xix. 9, xxii. 21, 22. 
 
 e Renan, Les Ap6tres, p. 143 : ' Ce qu'il importe, en tout cas, de remar- 
 quer, c'est qu'k I'epoque oti nous sommes, les pers^cuteurs du Christianisme 
 ne sont pas les Romains ; ce sont les Juifs orthodoxes. . . C'^tait Rome, 
 ainsi que nous I'avons ddjk plusieurs fois remarqufe, qui empechait le Judaisme 
 de se livrer pleinement h. ses instincts d'intolerance, et d'^toufFer les d^- 
 veloppements libres qui se produisaient dans son sein. Toute diminution de 
 I'autoritd juive ^tait un bienfait pour la secte naissante.' (p. 251.) See 
 Martyr. St. Poly c. c. 13, 
 
 f Acts vi. 7. This one text disposes of M. Renan's assertion as to the 
 growth of the Church, that 'les orthodoxes rigides s'y pretaient peu.* 
 Ap6tres, p. 113. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Was Chrisfs triumph due to Pagan aspirations? 139 
 
 the old stream of thought and feeling and introducing a new 
 one. 
 
 (/3) But if success was not forced upon the Christian Church 
 by the dispositions and attitude of Judaism ; can it be said that 
 Paganism supplies us with the true explanation of the triumph 
 of the Gospel? What then were those intellectual currents, 
 those moral ideals, those movements, those aspirations, discover- 
 able in the Paganism of the age of the Caesars, which were in 
 such effective alliance with the doctrine and morality of the New 
 Testament % What was the general temper of Pagan intellect, 
 but a self-asserting, cynical scepticism % Pagan intellect speaks 
 in orators like Cicero?, publicly deriding the idea of rewards and 
 punishments hereafter, and denying the intervention of a higher 
 Power in the affairs of men^i ; or it speaks in statesmen like 
 Caesar, proclaiming from his place in the Roman senate that the 
 soul does not exist after death i ; or in historians like Tacitus, 
 repudiating with self-confident disdain the -idea of a providential 
 government of the world J ; or in poets like Horace, making 
 profession of the practical Atheism of the school of Epicurus, it 
 is hard to say, whether in jest or in earnest ^ j or in men of 
 science like Strabol and Pliny ^, maintaining that religion is 
 a governmental device for keeping the passions of the lower 
 orders under restraint, and that the soul's immortality is a mere 
 dream or nursery -story. ^ Unbelief in the official religion,' says 
 M. Penan, Svas prevalent throughout the educated class. The very 
 statesmen who most ostentatiously upheld the public worship of 
 the empire made very amusing epigrams at its expense ».' What 
 was the moral and social condition of Poman Paganism ] ' 
 Modern unbelief complains that St. Paul has characterized the 
 social morality of the Pagan world in terms of undue severity o. 
 
 8 Cicero however, in his speculative moods, was the 'only Roman who 
 undertook to rest a real individual existence of souls after death on philo- 
 sophical grounds.' Diillinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. viii. § 3. 
 
 ^ Cic. pro Cluentio, c. 61 ; De Nat. Deor. iii. 32; De Off. iii. 28; De 
 Divin. ii. 17. 
 
 i Sallust. Catilin. 50-52. 
 
 J Tacitus, Ann. xvi. 33, vi. 22. Yet see Hist. i. 3, iv. 78, 
 
 ^ Hor. Sat. i. 5, 100, sq. ; cf. Lucret. v. 83, vi. 57, sq. 
 
 1 Geogr. i. c. 2 ; cf. Polyb. Hist. Gen. vL 56. 
 
 ™ Plin. vii. 55. 
 
 ° Renan, Les Apotres, pp. 340, 341. 
 
 o Ibid. p. 309^ note i : * L'opinion beaucoup trop s^vbre de Saint Paul 
 (Rom. i. 24 et suiv.) s'explique de la meme manibre. Saint Paul ne connais- 
 salt pas la haute societe Romaine. Ce sont Ik, d'ailleurs, de ces invectives 
 ni] 
 
140 Moral characteristics of the Pagan world 
 
 Yet St. Paul does not exceed the specific charges of Tacitus, of 
 Suetonius, of Juvenal, of Seneca, that is to say, of writers who, 
 at least, had no theological interest in misrepresenting or exagge- 
 rating the facts which they deplore p. When Tacitus summarizes 
 the moral condition of Paganism by his exhaustive phrase 
 ^ corrumpere et corrumpi,' he more than covers the sorrowing 
 invective of the Apostle. Indeed our modern historian of the 
 Apostolic age, who sees nothing miraculous in the success of the 
 Gospels, has himself characterized the moral condition of the 
 Pagan world in terms yet more severe than those of the Apostle 
 whom he condemns. According to M. Eenan, Kome under the 
 Caesars ^became a school of immorality and cruelty r;' it was a 
 * very hells ;' Hhe reproach that Eome had poisoned the world 
 at large, the Apocalyptic comparison of Pagan Kome to a prosti- 
 tute who had poured forth upon the earth the wine of her 
 immoralities, was in many respects a just comparison*.' Nor 
 was the moral degradation of Paganism confined to the capital 
 
 comme en font les pr^dicateurs, et qu'il ne faut jamais prendre k la lettre.' 
 Do the Satires of Juvenal lead us to suppose that if St. Paul had * known 
 the high society of Rome,' he would have used a less emphatic language? 
 And is it a rule with preachers, whether Apostolic or post-Apostolic, not to 
 mean what they say ? 
 
 P Juvenal, Sat. i. 87, ii. 37, iii. 62, vi. 293. Seneca, Epist. xcvii. ; De 
 Benefic. i. 9, iii. 16. Tacitus, Hist. i. 2 ; Germ. xix. See other quotations 
 in Wetstein, Nov. Test, in loc. It may be that Tacitus, in his affection for 
 the old regime of the republic, was tempted to exaggerate the sins of the 
 empire, and that Juvenal dwelt upon the vices of the capital with somewhat 
 of the narrow prejudice of provincialism. Still, after allowing for this, there 
 is a groundwork of fact in these representations which amply justifies 
 St. Paul. 
 
 ^ Renan, Les Ap6tres, p. 2,^6 : * Tel ^tait le monde que les missionaires 
 chrdtiens entreprirent de convertir. On doit voir maintenant, ce me semble, 
 qu'une telle entreprise ne fut pas une folie, et que sa r^ussite ne fut pas un 
 miracle.' 
 
 ' Ibid. p. 305. 
 
 ■ Ibid. p. 3 10 : ' L*esprit de vertige et de cruautd d^bordait alors, et faisait 
 de Rome un veritable enfer.' P. 3 1 7 : 'A Rome, il est vrai, tous les vices 
 s'aflfichaient avec un cynisme r^voltant ; les spectacles surtout avaient intro- 
 duit une affreuse corruption.' This statement is not an exaggeration. See 
 Dollinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. ix. pt. ii. § 3, 4, pp. 704-721. 
 
 * Ibid. p. 325 : *Le reproche d'avoir empoisonn^ la terre, I'assimilation de 
 Rome k une courtisane qui a vers^ au monde le vin de son immorality dtait 
 juste k beaucoup d'dgards.' Yet M. Renan is so little careful about contra- 
 dicting himself that he elsewhere says, ' Le monde, k I'^poque Romaine, ac- 
 complit un progrfes de morality et subit une decadence scientifique.' (p. 326.) 
 The nature of this progress seems to have been somewhat Epicurean : ' Le 
 monde s'assouplissait, perdait sa rigeur antique, acqudrait de la mollesse^ et 
 de la sensibility.' (p. 318.) 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
contrasted with the teaching of the Gospel, 141 
 
 of the great empire. The provinces were scarcely purer than 
 the capital. Each province poured its separate contribution of 
 moral filth into the great store which the increasing centraliza- 
 tion of the empire had accumulated in the main reservoir at 
 Eome \ each province in turn received its share of this recipro- 
 cated corruption ". In particular, the East, that very j)ortion of 
 the empire in which the Gospel took its rise, was the main 
 source of the common infection v. Antioch was itself a centre of 
 moral putrefaction w. Egypt was one of the most corrupt 
 countries in the world ; and the same account might be given 
 generally of those districts and cities of the empire in which the 
 Church first made her way, of Greece, and Asia Minor, and 
 Koman Africa, of Ephesus and Corinth, of Alexandria and Car- 
 thage. ^ The middle of the first century of our era was, in point 
 of fact, one of the worst epochs of ancient history x.' 
 
 But was such an epoch, such a world, such a * civilization' 
 as this calculated to ^ force success ' on an institution like 
 *the kingdom of heaven,' or on a doctrine such as tliat of 
 the New Testament? If indeed Christianity bad been an 4dyir 
 or ^pastoral,' the product of the simple peasant life and of 
 the bright sky of Galilee, there is no reason why it should 
 not have attracted a momentary interest in literary circles, 
 although it certainly would have escaped from any more serious 
 trial at the hands of statesmen than an unaffected indifference 
 to its popularity. But what was the Gospel as it met the 
 eye and fell upon the ear of Boman Paganism % ' We preach,' 
 said the Apostle, ' Christ Crucified, to the Jews an offence, 
 and to the Greeks a folly y.' ^ I determined not to know any- 
 thing among you Corinthians, save Jesus Christ, and Him 
 
 " Les Apdtres, p. 326: 'La province valait mieux que Rome, ou plut6t 
 les ^l^raents impurs qui de toutes parts s'amassaient a Rome, comme en un 
 dgotit, avaient form^ Ik un foyer dHnfection.* 
 
 " Ibid. p. 305 ; ' Le mal venait surtout de I'Orient, de ces flatteurs de bas 
 dtage, de ces hommes inf^mes que TEgypte et la Syrie envoyaient a Rome.' 
 P. 306 : 'Les pliJi^ choquantes ignominies de I'empire, telles que Tapothdose 
 de I'erapereur, sa divinisation de son vivant, venaient de I'Orient, et surtout 
 de I'Egypte, qui dtait alors un des pays les plus corrumpus de I'univers.' 
 
 "^ Ibid. p. 218 : 'La Idgeret^ Syrienne, le charlatanisme Babylonien, toutes 
 les impostures de I'Asie, se confondant a cette limite des deux mondes avaient 
 fait d'Antioche la capitale du mensonge, la sentine de toutes les infamies.' 
 P. 219 : ' L'avilissement des ames y ^tait efFroyable. Le pro'pre de ces foyers 
 de putrefaction morale, c'est d'amener toutes les races au meme niveau.'' 
 
 » Ibid. p. 343. 
 
 y I Cor. i. 23 : Tjfiels Se Kr\pv(T(TO}iiv XpicxThv ^aroLvpov^JiiuoVy *lov^aiois fxty 
 
 III] 
 
14a The Spirit of Paganism and Jestcs Crucified, 
 
 Crucified z.' Here >vas a truth linked inextricably with other 
 truths equally ^foolish' in the apprehension of Pagan intellect, 
 equally condemnatory of the moral degradation of Pagan life. 
 In the preaching of the Apostles, Jesus Crucified confronted the 
 intellectual cynicism, the social selfishness, and the sensualist 
 degradation of the Pagan world. To its intellect He said, 
 * I am the truth a • ' He bade its proud self-confidence bow 
 before His intellectual Eoyalty. To its selfish, heartless society, 
 careful only for bread and amusement, careless of the agonies 
 which gave interest to the amphitheatre. He said, *A new 
 commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another, 
 as I have loved you^' Disinterested love of slaves, of bar- 
 barians, of political enemies, of social rivals, love of man as 
 man, was to be a test of true discipleship. And to the sen- 
 suality, so gross, and yet often so polished, which was the 
 very law of individual Pagan life, He said, *If any man will 
 come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross 
 daily, and follow Mec-' *If thine eye offend thee, pluck it 
 out and cast it from thee ; it is better for thee that one of 
 thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body 
 should be cast into helH.' Sensuality was to be dethroned, 
 not by the negative action of a prudential abstinence from 
 indulgence, but by the strong positive force of self-mortification. 
 Was such a doctrine likely, of its own weight and without 
 any assistance from on high, to win its way to acceptance e? 
 Is it not certain that debased souls are so far from aspiring 
 naturally towards that which is holy, elevated and pure, that 
 they feel towards it only hatred and repulsion % Certainly Kome 
 was unsatisfied with her old national idolatries ; but if she 
 turned her eyes towards the East, it was not to welcome 
 the religion of Jesus, but the impure rites of Isis and Serapis, 
 of Mithra and Astarte. The Gospel came to her unbidden, 
 in obedience to no assignable attraction in Eoman society, 
 but simply in virtue of its own expansive, world-embracing 
 force. Certainly Christianity answered to the moral wants 
 of the world, as it really answers at this moment to the 
 
 * 1 Cor. ii. 2 : oh yap eKpiva rod elbei/ai ri iv vfxtv, cl ju^ ^lT)(rovi/ Xpia-roi/f 
 Koi ravTov iaTavpca/xevoy, * St. John xiv. 6. 
 
 •• Ibid. xiii. 34. c gt. Matt. xvi. 24 ; St. Mark viii. 34. 
 
 ^ St. Matt, xviii. 9 ; St. Mark ix. 47. 
 
 6 M, Renan himself observes that ' la degradation des ^mos en Egypte 
 y rendait rares, d'ailleurs, les aspirations qui ouvrirent partout (!) au 
 christianisme de si faciles acces.' Les Ap6tres, p. 284. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Attitude of Pagan Society towards the Church, 143 
 
 true moral wants of all human beings, however unbelieving 
 or immoral they may be. The question is, whether the world 
 so clearly recognised its real wants as forthwith to embrace 
 Christianity. The Physician was there; but did the patient 
 know the nature of his own malady sufficiently well not to 
 view the presence of the Physician as an intrusion % Was it 
 likely that the old Koman society, with its intellectual pride, 
 its social heartlessness, and its unbounded personal self-indul- 
 gence, should be enthusiastically in love with a religion which 
 made intellectual submission, social unselfishness, and personal 
 mortification, its very fundamental laws] The history of the 
 three first centuries is the answer to that question. The 
 kingdom of God was no sooner set up in the Pagan world 
 than it found itself surrounded by all that combines to make 
 the progress of a doctrine or of a system impossible. The 
 thinkers were opposed to it : they denounced it as a dream 
 of folly t The habits and passions of the people were opposed 
 to it: it threatened somewhat rudely to interfere with them. 
 There were venerable institutions, coming down from a distant 
 antiquity, and gathering around them the stable and thoughtful 
 elements of society : these were opposed to it, as to an audacious 
 innovation, as well as from an instinctive perception that it 
 might modify or destroy themselves. National feeling was 
 opposed to it : it flattered no national self-love ; it was to 
 be the home of human kind ; it was to embrace the world ; 
 and as yet the nation was the highest conception of associated 
 life to which humanity had reached. Nay, religious feeling 
 itself was opposed to it ; for religious feeling had been enslaved 
 by ancient falsehoods. There were worships, priesthoods, be- 
 liefs, in long-established possession ; and they were not likely 
 to yield without a struggle. Picture to yourselves the days 
 when the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter was still thronged 
 with worshippers, while often the Eucharist could only be 
 celebrated in the depths of the Catacombs. It was a time 
 when all the administrative power of the empire was steadily 
 concentrated upon the extinction of the Name of Christ. What 
 were then to a human eye the future prospects of the kingdom 
 of God % It had no allies, like the sword of the Mahommedan, 
 
 f Tac. Ann. xv. 44 : ' Repressa in prfesens exitiabilis superstitio rursus 
 erumpebat.' Suetonius, Claudius, xxv. ; Nero, xvi. : * Christiani, genus 
 horainum superstitionis novae ac maleficse.' Celsus apud Origenem, iii. 17. 
 Celsus compared the Church's worship of our Lord with the Egyptian 
 worship of cats, crocodiles, &c. 
 
 m] 
 
144 TheChurch triumphs through persistent suffering, 
 
 or like the congenial mysticism which welcomed the Buddhist, 
 or like the politicians who strove to uphold the falling Paganism 
 of Rome. It found no countenance even in the Stoic moral- 
 ists & ; they were indeed among its fiercest enemies. If, as 
 M. Renan maintains, it ever was identified by Pagan opinion, 
 with the coetus illicitly with the collegia illicita, with the burial- 
 clubs of the imperial epoch ; this would only have rendered 
 it more than ever an object of suspicion to the government ^^ 
 Between the new doctrine and the old Paganism there was 
 a deadly feud ; and the question for the Church was simply 
 whether she could suffer as long as her enemies could persecute. 
 Before she could triumph in the western world, the soil of 
 the empire had to be reddened by Christian blood. Ignatius 
 of Antioch given to the lions at Rome i ; Poly carp of Smyrna 
 condemned to the flames ^ ; the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, 
 and among them the tender Blandina^, extorting by her for- 
 titude the admiration of the very heathen ; Perpetua and 
 Felicitas at Carthage ^ conquering a mother's love by a stronger 
 love for Christ; — these are but samples of the ^ noble army' 
 which vanquished heathendom. ^Plures efficimur,' cries Ter- 
 tullian, spokesman of the Church in her exultation and in 
 her agony, *quoties metimur a vobis j semen est sanguis 
 
 K Dollinger, Heidenth. und Judenth., bk. ix. pt. 2. §. 6. has some very 
 interesting remarks on the characteristics of the later Stoicism. It was 
 a recoil from the corruption of the time. * Wie die Aerzte in Zeiten grosser 
 Krankheiten ihre besten Studien machen, so batten auch die Stoiker in 
 dem allgemein herrschenden Sittenverderben ihren moralischen Blick 
 geschiirft,' p. 729. Seneca's knowledge of the human heart, the pathos 
 and solemnity of M. Aurelius, the self-control, patience, and self-denying 
 courage preached by Epictetus and Arrian, are fully acknowledged. But 
 Stoicism was virtue upon paper, unrealized except in the instance of a 
 few coteries of educated people. It was virtue, affecting Divine strength 
 in the midst of human weakness. Nothing could really be done for 
 humanity by * diesen selbstgefalligen Tugendstolz, der alles nur sich selbst 
 verdanken woUte, der sich der Gottheit gleich vsetzte, und bei aller men- 
 schlichen Gebrechlichkeit doch die Sicherheit der Gottheit fiir sich in 
 Anspruch nahm.' (Sen. Ep. 53.) Stoicism had no lever with which 
 to raise man as man from his degradations : and its earlier expositors 
 even prescribed suicide as a means of escape from the miseries of life, and 
 from a sense of moral failure. (Doll, ubi supra, p. 728; comp. Sir A. Grant's 
 Ethics of Arist. vol. i. p. 272.) Who can marvel at its instinctive hatred 
 of a religion Which proclaimed a higher code of Ethics than its own, and 
 which, moreover, possessed the secret of teaching that code practically to 
 all classes of mankind? 
 
 ^ Les Apdtres, pp. 355, 361, 362. * a. d. 107. 
 
 I'A. D. 169. ^A.D. 177. "^A. D. 202. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christ's Person the stay of the suffermg Chttrch, 145 
 
 Cliristianorum'i/ To the heathen it seems a senseless obstinacy; 
 but with a presentiment of the coming victory, the Apologist 
 exclaims, ' Ilia ipsa obstinatio quam exprobatis, magistra est ».' 
 
 Who was He That had thus created a moral force which could 
 embrace three centuries of a protracted agony, in the confidence 
 that victory would come at last p % What was it in Him, so 
 fascinating and sustaining to the thought of His followers, that 
 for Him men and women of all ages and ranks in life gladly 
 sacrificed all that is dearest to man's heart and nature % Was it 
 only His miracles % But the evidential force of miracle may be 
 easily evaded. St. John's Gospel appears to have been written 
 with a view to furnishing, among other things, an authoritative 
 explanation of the moral causes which actually prevented the 
 Jews from recognising the significance of our Lord's miracles. 
 Was it simply His character 1 But to understand a perfect 
 character you must be attracted to it, and have some strong 
 sympathies with it. And the language of human nature in the 
 presence of superior goodness is often that of the Epicurean in 
 the Book of Wisdom : ^ Let us lie in wait for the righteous, 
 because he is not for our turn, and he is clean contrary to our 
 
 doings He was made to reprove our thoughts ; he is 
 
 grievous unto us even to behold ; for his life is not like other 
 men's, his ways are of another fashion <i.* Was it His teaching ? 
 True, never man spake like this Man j but taken alone, the 
 highest and holiest teaching might have seemed to humanity to 
 be no more than ' the sound of one that had a pleasant voice, 
 and could play well upon an instrument.' His Death? Certainly 
 He predicted that in dying He would draw all men unto Him ; 
 but Who was He That could thus turn the instrument of His 
 humiliation into the certificate of His glory % His Eesurrection % 
 His Resurrection indeed was emphatically to be the reversal of 
 a false impression, but it was to witness to a truth beyond itself; 
 our Lord had expressly predicted that He would rise from the 
 grave, and that His Resurrection would attest His claims r. 
 None of these things taken separately will account for the power 
 of Christ in history. In the convergence of all these ; of these 
 majestic miracles j of that Character, which commands at once 
 
 !» Apol. 1. o Ibid. 
 
 p M. Renan observes scornfully, * II n'y a pas eu beauconp de martyrs 
 tres-intelligents.' Apotres, p. 382. Possibly not, if intelligence is but another 
 name for scepticism. Certain it is that martyrdom requires other and higher 
 qualities than any which mere intelligence can supply. 
 
 q Wisd. ii. 12, 15. i" St. Matt. xii. 39 ; Rom. i. 4. 
 
 Ill] I' 
 
146 Christendom i7nplies the Divinity of Christ, 
 
 our love and our revereuce ; of that teaching, so startling, so 
 awful, so searching, so tender ; of that Death of agony, encircled 
 with such a halo of moral glory ; of that deserted tomb, and the 
 majestic splendour of the Risen One ; — a deeper truth, underlying 
 all, justifying all, explaining all, is seen to reveal itself. We 
 discern, as did the first Christians, beneath and beyond all that 
 meets the eye of sense and the eye of conscience, the Eternal 
 Person of our Lord Himself. It is not the miracles, but the 
 Worker ; not the character, but its living Subject ; not the 
 teaching, but the Master ; not even the Death or the Resurrec- 
 tion, but He Who died and rose, upon Whom Christian thought, 
 Christian love. Christian resolution ultimately rest. The truth 
 which really and only accounts for the establishment in this our 
 human world of such a religion as Christianity, and of such an 
 institution as the Church, is the truth that Jesus Christ was 
 believed to be more than Man, the truth that Jesus Christ is 
 what men believed Him to be, the truth that Jesus Christ 
 is God. 
 
 It is here that we are enabled duly to estimate one broad 
 feature of the criticism of Strauss. Both in his earlier and 
 scientific work, published some thirty years ago for scholars, and 
 in his more recent publication addressed to the German people, 
 that writer strips Jesus Christ our Lord of all that makes Him 
 superhuman. Strauss eliminates from the Gospel most of Christ's 
 discourses, all of His miracles, His supernatural Birth, and His 
 Resurrection from the grave. The so-termed ^historical' resi- 
 duum might easily be compressed within the limits of a newspaper 
 paragraph, and it retains nothing that can rouse a moderate 
 measure, I do not say of enthusiasm, but even of interest. And 
 yet few minds on laying down either of these unhappy books 
 can escape the rising question: ^Is this hero of a baseless legend, 
 this impotent, fallible, erring Christ of the '^ higher criticism," in 
 very deed the Founder of the Christian Church % ' The difficulty 
 of accounting for the phenomenon presented by the Church, on 
 the supposition that the ^ historical ' account of its Founder is 
 that of Dr. Strauss, does not present itself forcibly to an Hege- 
 lian, who loses himself in a 'priori theories as to the necessary 
 development of a thought, and is thus entranced in a sublime 
 forgetfulness of the actual facts and laws of human life and his- 
 tory. But here M. Renan is unwittingly a witness against the 
 writer to whom he is mainly indebted for his own critical appa- 
 ratus. The finer political instinct, the truer sense of the necessary 
 proportions between causes and effects in human history, which 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Christ of Strauss, mid Christeiido77i. 147 
 
 might be expected to characterize a thoughtful Frenchman, will 
 account for those points in which M. Renan has departed from 
 the path traced by his master. He feels that there is an impas- 
 sable chasm between the life of Jesus according to Strauss, and 
 the actual history of Christendom. He is keenly alive to the 
 absurdity of supposing that such an impoverished Christ as the 
 Christ of Strauss, can have created Christendom. Although 
 therefore, as we have seen, he subsequently ^ endeavours to account 
 for the growth of the Church in a naturalistic way, his native 
 sense of the fitting proportions of things impels him to retouch 
 the picture traced by the German, and to ascribe to Jesus of 
 Nazareth, if not the reality, yet some shadoAvy semblance of 
 Divinity t. Hence such features of M. Kenan's work as his 
 concessions in respect of St. John's Gospel. In making these 
 concessions, he is for the moment impressed with the political 
 absurdity of ascribing Christendom to the thought and will of a 
 merely human Christ. Although his unbelief is too radical to 
 allow him to do adequate justice to such a consideration, his 
 indirect admission of its force has a value, to which Christian 
 believers will not be insensible. 
 
 But a greater than M. Renan is said to have expressed the 
 common-sense of mankind in respect of the Agency which alone 
 can account for the existence of the Christian Church. If the 
 first Napoleon was not a theologian, he was at least a man whom 
 vast experience had taught what kind of forces can really produce 
 a lasting effect upon mankind, and under what conditions they 
 may be expected to do so. A time came when the good Provi- 
 dence of God had chained down that great but ambitious spirit 
 to the rock of St. Helena ; and the conqueror of civilized Europe 
 had leisure to gather up the results of his unparalleled life, and 
 to ascertain with an accuracy, not often attainable by monarchs 
 or conquerors, his own true place in history. When conversing, 
 as was his habit, about the great men of the ancient world, and 
 comparing himself with them, he turned, it is said, to Count 
 Montholon with the enquiry, ^ Can you tell me who Jesus Christ 
 was?' The question was declined, and Napoleon proceeded, 
 'Well, then, I will tell you. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, 
 and I myself have founded great empires ; but upon what did 
 these creations of our genius depend % Upon force. Jesus alone 
 founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions 
 would die for Him I think I understand something of 
 
 * In his later work, Les ApCtres. * Vie de Jdsus, pp. 250, 426, 457. 
 Ill ] L 2 
 
148 opinion of Napoleon the First respecting the 
 
 human nature ; and I tell you, all these were men, and I am a 
 man : none else is like Him ; Jesus Christ was more than man. 
 . . I have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion 
 that they would have died for me, . . but to do this it was ne- 
 cessary that I should be visibly present with the electric influence 
 of my looks, of my words, of my voice. When I saw men and 
 spoke to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their 
 hearts. . . . Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of 
 man towards the Unseen, that it becomes insensible to the 
 barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred 
 years, Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others 
 difficult to satisfy; He asks for that which a philosopher may 
 often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his 
 children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He 
 asks for the human heart ', He will have it entirely to Himself. 
 He demands it unconditionally ; and forthwith His demand is 
 granted. Wonderful ! In defiance of time and space, the soul of 
 man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to 
 the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in Him, ex- 
 perience that remarkable supernatural love towards Him. This 
 phenomenon is unaccountable ; it is altogether beyond the scope 
 of man's creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless 
 to extinguish this sacred flame ; time can neither exhaust its 
 strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it which strikes 
 me most ; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves 
 to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christ ^.' 
 
 ^ This is freely translated from the passages quoted by Luthardt, Apolo- 
 getische Vortriige, pp. 234, 293; and Bersier, Serm. p. 334. The same con- 
 versation is given substantially by Chauvelot, Divinity du Christ, pp. 11-13, 
 Paris 1863; in a small brochure attributed to M. le Pasteur Bersier, and 
 published by the ReUgious Tract Society, NapoMon, Meyrueis, Paris, 1859; 
 by M. Auguste Nicolas, in his Etudes Philosophiques sur le Christianisme, 
 Bruxelles, 1849, tom. ii. pp. 352-356 ; and by the Chevalier de Beauterne in 
 his Sentiment de Napoleon sur le Christianisme, ddit. par M. Bathild Bouniol, 
 Paris 1864, pp. 87-118. In the preface to General Bertrand's Campagnes 
 d'Egypte et de Syrie, there is an allusion to some reported conversations of 
 Napoleon on the questions of the existence of God and of our Lord's Divinity, 
 which, the General says, never took place at all. But M. de Montholon, who 
 with General Bertrand was present at the conversations which are recorded 
 by the Chevalier de Beauterne, writes from Ham on May 30, 1841, to that 
 author : * J'ai lu avec un vif interet votre brochure : Sentiment de Napoleon 
 sur la Divinite de Jesus- Christ, et je ne pense pas qu'il soit possible de mieux 
 exprimer les croyances religieuses de I'empereur.' Sentiment de Napoldon, 
 Avertissem. p. viii. Writing, as it would seem, in ignorance of this testimony, 
 M. Nicolas says : ' Cite plusieurs fois et dans des^ circonstances solennelles, 
 ce jugement passe gendralement pour historique.' Etudes, ii. p. 352. note (i). 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
witness of our Lord^s work to His Divinity, 149 
 
 Here surely is the commoii-sense of humanity. The victory 
 of Christianity is the great standing miracle which Christ has 
 wrought. Its significance is enhanced if the miracles of the 
 New Testament are rejected'^, and if the Apostles are held to 
 have received no illumination from on highy. Let those in 
 our day who believe seriously that the work of Christ may be 
 accounted for on natural and human grounds, say who among 
 themselves will endeavour to rival it. Who of our contem- 
 poraries will dare to predict that eighteen hundred years hence 
 his ideas, his maxims, his institutions, however noble or philan- 
 thropic they may be, will still survive in their completeness and 
 in their vigour % Who can dream that his own name and history 
 will be the rallying-point of a world-wide interest and enthu- 
 siasm in some distant age? Who can suppose that beyond 
 the political, the social, the intellectual revolutions which lie 
 in the future of humanity, he will himself still survive in the 
 memory of men, not as a trivial fact of archaeology, but as a 
 moral power, as the object of a devoted and passionate affection % 
 What man indeed that still retains, I will not say the faith of a 
 Christian, but the modesty of a man of sense, must not feel that 
 there is a literally infinite interval between himself and that 
 Majestic One, Who, in the words of Jean Paul Richter, ' being 
 the Holiest among the mighty, and the Mightiest among the 
 holy, has lifted with His pierced Hand empires off their hinges, 
 has turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still 
 governs the ages z ?' 
 
 The work of Jesus Christ is not merely a fact of history, it is 
 a fact, blessed be God ! of individual experience. If the world 
 is one scene of His conquests, the soul of each true Christian is 
 another. The soul is the microcosm within which, in all its 
 strength, the kingdom of God is set up. Many of you know, 
 
 « * Se il mondo si rivolse al cristianesmo 
 Diss* io, senza miracoli, quest' uno 
 il tal, che gli altri non sono il centesmo; 
 Che tu entrasti povero e digiuno 
 In campo, a seminar la buona pianta, 
 Che fu gib, vite, ed ora ^ fatta prune' 
 
 Dante, Paradiso, xxiv. 106-111. 
 y * Apres la mort de Jesus-Christ, douze pauvres pecheurs et artisans en- 
 treprirent d'instruire et de convertir le monde. . . . le succes fut prodigieux 
 .... Tous les Chretiens couraient au martyre, tous les peuples couraient au 
 bapteme ; I'histoire de ces premiers temps dtait un jprodige continueL* Rous- 
 seau, R^ponse au Roi de Pologne, Paris, 1829, Discours, pp. 64, 65. 
 
 2 Jean Paul: 'Ueber den Gott in der Geschichte und im Leben.' Sammtl. 
 Werke, xxxiii. 6; Stirm. p. 194. 
 Ill] 
 
150 The redeemed soul owns a Divine Savioitr, 
 
 from a witness that you can trust, Christ's power to restore to 
 your inward life its original harmony. You are conscious that 
 He is the fertilizing and elevating principle of your thought, the 
 purifying principle of your affections, the invigorating principle 
 of your wills. You need not to ask the question ^ whence hath 
 this Man this wisdom and these mighty works'?' Man, you are 
 well assured, cannot thus from age to age enlarge the realm of 
 moral light, and make all things new ; man cannot thus endow 
 frail natures with determination, and rough natures with tender- 
 ness, and sluggish natures with keen energy, and restless natures 
 with true and lasting peace. These every-day tokens of Christ's 
 presence in His kingdom, of themselves answer the question of 
 the text. If He Who could predict that by dying in shame He 
 would secure the fulfilment of an extraordinary plan, and assure 
 to Himself a world-wide empire, can be none other than the 
 Lord of human history ; so certainly the Friend, the Teacher, the 
 Master Who has fathomed and controlled our deepest life of 
 thought and passion, is welcomed by the Christian soul as some- 
 thing more than a student exploring its mysteries, or than a 
 philanthropic experimentalist alleviating its sorrows. He is 
 hailed. He is loved, He is worshipped, as One Who possesses a 
 knowledge and a strength which human study and human skill 
 fail to compass ; it is felt that He is so manifestly the true 
 Saviour of the soul, because He is none other than the Being 
 Who made it. 
 
 [lect. 
 
LECTUEE IV. 
 
 OUR LORD'S DIVINITY AS WITNESSED BY HIS 
 CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 The Jews answered Him, saying, For a good worJc we stone Thee not; hut 
 for blasphemy; and because that Thou, being a 3Ian, mahest Thyself 
 God. — St. John x. 33. 
 
 It is common with some modern writers to represent the ques- 
 tions at issue between the Faith and its opponents, in respect of 
 the Person of our Lord, as being substantially a question between 
 the ^historical spirit' and the spirit of dogmatism. The dog- 
 matic temper is painted by them as a baseless but still powerful 
 superstition, closely pressed by the critical enquiries and negative 
 conclusions of our day, but culpably shutting its eyes against the 
 advancing truth, the power of which nevertheless it cannot but 
 instinctively feel, and clinging with the wrong-headed obstinacy 
 of despair to the cherished but already condemned formulae of 
 its time-honoured and worn-out metaphysics. Opposed to it, 
 we are told, is the * historical spirit,' young, vigorous, fearless, 
 truthful, flushed with successes already achieved, assured of suc- 
 cesses yet to come. The * historical spirit ' is thus said to repre- 
 sent the cause of an enlightened progress in conflict with a stupid 
 and immoral conservatism. The ' historical spirit ' is described 
 as the love of sheer reality, as the longing for hard fact, deter- 
 mined to make away with all ^ idols of the den,' however ancient, 
 venerated, and influential, in the sphere of theology. The ^ his- 
 torical spirit' accordingly un4ertakes to * disentangle the real 
 Person of Jesus from the metaphysical envelope' within which 
 theology is said to have ^encased' Him. The Christ is to be 
 rescued from that cloud-land of abstract and fanciful speculation, 
 to which He is stated to have been banished by the patristic and 
 scholastic divines ; He is to be restored to Christendom in mani- 
 fest subjection to all the actual conditions and laws of human 
 history. * Look,' it is said, ^ at that figure of the Christ which 
 you see traced in mosaics in the apsis of a Byzantine church. 
 
 IV] 
 
152 The Christ of dogma and the Christ of history. 
 
 That Countenance upon which you gaze, with its rigid, unalter- 
 able outline, with its calm, strong mien of unassailable majesty ; 
 that Form from which there has been stripped all the historic 
 circumstance of life, all that belongs to the changes and chances 
 of our mortal condition ; what is it but an artistic equivalent 
 and symbol of the Catholic dogma % Elevated thus to a world 
 of unfading glory, and throned in an imperturbable repose, the 
 Byzantine Christos Pantocrator must be viewed as the expression 
 of an idea, rather than as the transcript of a fact. A certain 
 interest may be allowed to attach to such a representation, from 
 its illustrating a particular stage in the development of religious 
 thought. But the "historical spirit" must create what it can 
 consider a really " historical " Christ, who will be to the Christ of 
 St. Athanasius and St. John what a Kembrandt or a Eubens is 
 to a Giotto or a Cimabue.' If the illustration be objected to, at 
 any rate, my brethren, the aim of the so -termed * historical ' 
 school is sufficiently plain. It proposes to fashion a Christ 
 who is to be aesthetically graceful and majestic, but strictly 
 natural and human. This Christ will be emancipated from the 
 bandages which * supernaturalism has wrapped around the Pro- 
 phet of Nazareth.' He will be divorced from any idea of incar- 
 nating essential Godhead ; but, as we are assured. He will still 
 be something, aye more than the Christ of the Creed has ever 
 been yet, to Christendom. He will be at once a living man, and 
 the very ideal of humanity ; at once a being who obeys the in- 
 vincible laws of nature, like ourselves, yet of moral proportions 
 so mighty and so unrivalled that his appearance among men 
 shall adequately account for the phenomenon of an existing and 
 still expanding Church. 
 
 Accordingly by this representation it is intended to place us 
 in a dilemma. ^ You must choose,' men seem to say, * between 
 history and dogma ; you must choose between history which can 
 be verified, and dogma which belongs to the sphere of inaccessible 
 abstractions. You must make your choice ; since the Catholic 
 dogma of Christ's Divinity is pronounced by the higher criticism 
 to be irreconcileable with the historical reality of the Life of 
 Jesus.' And in answer to that challenge, let us proceed, my 
 brethren, to choose history, and as a result of that choice, if it 
 may be, to maintain that the Christ of history is either the God 
 Whom we believers adore, or that He is far below the assumed 
 moral level of the mere man, whose character rationalism still, 
 at least generally, professes to respect in the pages of its 
 mutilated Gospel. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Catholic dogma really historicaL 153 
 
 For let us observe that the Catholic doctrine has thus much 
 in its favour : — it takes for granted the only existing history of 
 Jesus Christ. It is not compelled to mutilate or to enfeeble it, 
 or to do it critical violence. It is in league with this history; it is 
 at home, as is no other doctrine, in the pages of the Evangelists. 
 
 Consider, first of all, the general impression respecting our 
 Lord's Person, which arises upon a survey of the miracles 
 ascribed to Him in all the extant accounts of His Life. To a 
 thoughtful Humanitarian, who believes in the preternatural 
 elements of the Gospel history, our Lord's miracles, taken as 
 a whole, must needs present an embarrassing difficulty. The 
 miraculous cures indeed, which, more particularly in the earlier 
 days of Christ's ministry, drew the eyes of men towards Him, as 
 to the Healer of sickness and of pain, have been * explained,' 
 however unsatisfactorily, by the singular methods generally ac- 
 cepted among the older rationalists. A Teacher, it used to be 
 argued, of such character as Jesus Christ, must have created a 
 profound impression ; He must have inspired an entire confi- 
 dence ; and the cures which He seemed to work were the imme- 
 diate results of the impression which He created ; they were the 
 natural consequences of the confidence which He inspired. Now, 
 apart from other and many obvious objections to this theory, let 
 us observe that it is altogether inapplicable to the * miracles of 
 power,' as they are frequently termed, which are recorded by 
 the three first Evangelists, no less than by St. John. * Miracles 
 of this class,' says a freethinking writer, * are not cures which 
 could have been effected by the influence of a striking sanctity 
 acting upon a simple faith. They are prodigies ; they are, as it 
 seems, works which Omnipotence Alone could achieve. In the 
 case of these miracles it may be said that the laws of nature are 
 simply suspended. Jesus does not here merely exhibit the 
 power of moral and mental superiority over common men ; He 
 upsets and goes beyond the rules and bounds of the order of the 
 universe. A word from His mouth stills a tempest. A few 
 loaves and fishes are fashioned by His Almighty hand into an 
 abundant feast, which satisfies thousands of hungry men. At 
 His bidding life returns to inanimate corpses. By His curse a 
 fig-tree which had no fruit on it is withered up a.' The writer 
 
 * Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 2t. Dr. Schenkel concludes: ^Sonst 
 erscheint Jesus in den drei ersten Evangelien durchgangig als ein wahrer, 
 innerhalb der Grenzen menschlicher Beschrankung sich bewegender Mensch ; 
 durch Seine Wunderthatigkeit werden diese Grenzen durchbrochen ; All- 
 machtswunder sind menschlich nicht melir begreiflich.' 
 IV] 
 
154 The Resurrection, a7idthe truth of Christianity. 
 
 proceeds to argue that sucli miracles must be expelled from any 
 Life of Christ which ' criticism ' will condescend to accept. They 
 belong, he contends, to that 'torrent of legend,' with which, 
 according to the rationalistic creed, Jesus was surrounded after 
 His Death by the unthinking enthusiasm of His disciples b. But 
 then a question arises as to how much is to be included within 
 this legendary ' torrent.' In particular, and above all else, is the 
 Eesurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave to be regarded as a 
 part of its contributions to the Life of Christ % Here there is a 
 division among the rationalizing critics. There are writers who 
 reject our Lord's miracles of power. His miraculous Conception, 
 and even His Ascension into heaven, and who yet shrink from 
 denying that very fundamental fact of all, the fact that on * the 
 third day He rose from the dead, according to the Scriptures c.' 
 A man must have made up his mind against Christianity more 
 conclusively than men are generally willing to avow, if he is to 
 speculate with M. Kenan in the face of Christendom, as to the 
 exact spot in which ' the worms consumed the lifeless body ' of 
 Jesus ^. This explicit denial of the literal Resurrection of Jesus 
 from the grave is not compensated for by some theory identical 
 with, or analogous to, that of Hymenseus and Philetus ^ respecting 
 the general Eesurrection, whereby the essential subject of Christ's 
 Resurrection is changed, and the idea of Christianity, or the soul 
 of the converted Christian, as distinct from the Body of the Lord 
 Jesus, is said to have been raised from the dead. For such a 
 denial, let us mark it well, of the literal Resurrection of the 
 Human Body of Jesus involves nothing less than an absolute and 
 total rejection of Christianity. All orthodox Churches, all the 
 great heresies, even Socinianism, have believed in the Resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus. The literal Resurrection of Jesus was the cardinal 
 
 ^ Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 21 : ' Dass ein Lebensbild, wie dasjenige 
 des Erlosers, bald nach dessen irdischem Hinscheiden von einem reichen Sa- 
 genstrom umflosseii wurde, liegt in der Natur der Sache/ It may be asked — 
 Why ? If these legendary decorations are the inevitable consequences of a 
 life of devotion to moral truth and to philanthropy, how are we to explain 
 their absence in the cases of so many moraUsts and philanthropists ancient 
 and modern ? 
 
 c Cf. Hase, Leben Jesu, p. 281, compared with p. 267. 
 
 "* Les Ap6tres, p. 38 : ' Pendant que la conviction indbranlable des Ap6tres 
 se formait, et que la foi du monde se prdparait, en quel endroit les vers con- 
 sumaient-ils le corps inanimd qui avait^td, le samedisoir, ddpos^ au sdpulcre? 
 On ignorera to uj ours ce detail ; car, naturellement, les traditions chrdtiennes 
 ne peuvent rien nous apprendre Ik-dessus.' 
 
 6 2 Tim. ii. 18 : 'Tfxevaios koX ^i\r]Tos, oirivis nepl rrjv dXTjOeiav "^cTToxfJ' 
 aav, \iyovTes tt^v avaaraaiv •^drj yeyovivai. I Tim. i, 20. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The ResiLrrectio7i, and other Christia7i miracles, 155 
 
 fact upon which the earliest preachers of Christianity based their 
 appeal to the Jewish people f. St. Paul, writing to a Gentile 
 Church, expressly makes Christianity answer with its life for the 
 literal truth of the Kesurrection. ^ If Christ be not risen, then 
 is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. . . Then they 
 also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished?.' St)me 
 modern writers would possibly have reproached St. Paul with 
 offering a harsh alternative instead of an argument. But St. 
 Paul would have replied, first, that our Lord's honour and credit 
 were entirely staked upon the issue, since He had foretold His 
 Resurrection as the ^ sign ' which would justify His claims ^ ; 
 and secondly, that the fact of the Resurrection was attested by 
 evidence which must outweigh everything except an h 'priori 
 conviction of the impossibility of miracle, since it was attested by 
 the word of more than two hundred and fifty living persons who 
 had actually seen the Risen Jesus i. As to objections to miracle 
 of an h priori character, St. Paul would have argued, as most 
 Theists, and even the French philosopher, have argued, that such 
 objections could not be urged by any man who believed seriously 
 in a living God at all^. But on the other hand, if the Resur- 
 rection be admitted to be a fact, it is puerile to object to the other 
 miracles of Jesus, or to any other Christian miracles, provided 
 
 ^ Acts i. 22, ii. 24, 32, iii. 15, iv. 10, v. 30, x. 40, xiii. 30, 33, 34, xvii. 31. 
 
 8 I Cor. XV. 14, 18. ^ St. Matt. xii. 39, 40. 
 
 * I Cor. XV. 6 : cTretra &(^Qr] eVaj/co TrevraKocriois dSeXc^oTs icpdira^, €| wy oi 
 vXelovs jxhovffiv %(as 6,pTi, rives Se kol €KOLfMr}67](rai/. It is quite arbitrary to 
 say that ' the Resurrection with Paul is by no means a human corporeal re- 
 surrection as with the Evangelists,' that ' his iocpdrj Kafioi implies no more 
 than a flash and a sound, which he interpreted as a presence of Christ.' 
 (Westm. Rev. Oct. 1867, p. 529.) On this shewing, the &<pdv 'Xificovi in St. 
 Luke xxiv. 34 might similarly be resolved into an illusion. The kcopaKafxeu 
 of St. John XX. 25 might be as unreal as the kci>paKa of I Cor. ix. I. It is 
 also a mere assumption to say that a ' palpable body ' could not be seen at 
 once by 500 persons ; and the suggestion that St. Paul's own belief in * a 
 continued celestial life of Christ,' and in the moral resurrection of Christians 
 was ' afterwards materialized ' into * the history of a bodily resurrection of 
 Christ, and the expectation of a bodily resurrection of mankind from the 
 grave,' is nothing less than to fasten upon the Apostle the pseudo-spiritual- 
 istic error, against which in this chapter he so passionately contends. On 
 this subject, see * The Resurrection of Jesus Christ,' by R. Macpherson, D.D., 
 PP- 127,346. 
 
 ^ ' Dieu peut-Il faire des miracles, c'est k dire, peut-il ddroger aux lois, 
 qu'Il a ^tablies ? Cette question serieusement trait^e serait impie, si elle 
 n'dtait absurde. Ce serait faire trop d'honneur a celui, qui la resoudrait nega- 
 tivement, que de le punir ; il suffirait de I'enfermer. Mais aussi, quel homme 
 a jamais ni^, que Dieu pdt faire des miracles ?' Rousseau, Lettres Sorites de 
 la Montagne, Lettre iii. 
 IV] 
 
1^6 Chrisfs miracles how related to His Divinity. 
 
 they be sufficiently attested. To have admitted the stupendous 
 truth that Jesus, after predicting that He would be put to a violent 
 death, and then rise from the dead, was actually so killed, and 
 then did actually so rise, must incapacitate any thoughtful man 
 for objecting to the supernatural Conception or to the Ascension 
 into heaven, or to the more striking wonders wrought by Jesus, 
 on any such ground as that of intrinsic improbability. The 
 Eesurrection has, as compared with the other miraculous occur- 
 rences narrated in the Gospels, all the force of an a fortiori 
 argument j they follow, if we may use the term, naturally from 
 it ; they are fitly complemental incidents of a history in which 
 the Resurrection has already made it plain, that we are dealing 
 with One in Whose case our ordinary experience of the limits 
 and conditions of human power is altogether at fault. 
 
 But if the miracles of Jesus be admitted in the block, as by a 
 'rational' believer in the Resurrection they must be admitted; 
 they do point, as I have said, to the Catholic belief, as distinct 
 from any lower conceptions respecting the Person of Jesus Christ. 
 They differ from the miracles of prophets and Apostles in that, 
 instead of being answers to prayer, granted by a Higher Power, 
 they manifestly flow forth from the majestic Life resident in the 
 Worker^. And instead of presenting so many * difficulties' 
 which have to be surmounted or set aside, they are in entire 
 harmony with that representation of our Saviour's Personal 
 glory which is embodied in the Creeds. St. John accordingly 
 calls them Christ's ^ works,' meaning that they were just such 
 acts as might be expected from Him, being such as He was. 
 For indeed our Lord's miracles are not merely evidences that 
 He was the organ of a Divine revelation. They do not merely 
 secure a deferential attention to His disclosures respecting the 
 nature of God, the duty and destiny of man. His own Person, 
 mission, and work. Certainly they have this properly evidential 
 force; He Himself appealed to them as having it^^. But it 
 would be difficult altogether to account for their form, or for 
 their varieties, or for the times at which they were wrought, or 
 for the motives which were actually assigned for working them, 
 on the supposition that their value was only evidential. They 
 are like the kind deeds of the wealthy, or the good advice of the 
 wise ; they are like that debt of charity which is due from the 
 possessors of great endowments to suffering humanity. Christ 
 
 * Wilberforce on the Incarnation, p. 91, note 11. Christian Remem- 
 brancer, Oct. 1863, p. 274. ^ St. John X. 38. 
 
 r LECT. 
 
Their value not merely evidential, 157 
 
 as Man owed this tribute of mercy which His Godhead had 
 rendered it possible for Him to pay, to those whom (such was 
 His love) He was not ashamed to call His brethren. But 
 besides this, Christ's miracles are physical and symbolic repre- 
 sentations of His redemptive action as the Divine Saviour of 
 mankind. Their form is carefully adapted to express this 
 action. By healing the palsied, the blind, the lame, Christ 
 clothed with a visible form His plenary power to cure spiritual 
 diseases, such as the weakness, the darkness, the deadly torpor 
 of the soul. By casting out devils from the possessed. He 
 pointed to His victory over the principalities and powers of evil, 
 whereby man would be freed from their thraldom and restored 
 to moral liberty. By raising Lazarus from the corruption of 
 the grave, He proclaimed Himself not merely a Kevealer of the 
 Resurrection, but the Resurrection and the Life "itself The 
 drift and meaning of such a miracle as that in which our Lord's 
 *Ephphatha' brought hearing and speech to the deaf and dumb 
 is at once apparent when we place it in the light of the Sacra- 
 ment of baptism^. The feeding of the ^yq thousand is remark- 
 able as the one miracle which is narrated by all the Evangelists ; 
 and even the least careful among readers of the Gospel cannot 
 fail to be struck with the solemn actions which precede the 
 wonder-work, as well as by the startling magnificence of the 
 result. Yet the permanent significance of that extraordinary 
 scene at Bethsaida Julias is never really understood, until our 
 Lord's great discourse in the synagogue of Capernaum, which 
 immediately follows it, is read as the spiritual exposition of the 
 physical miracle, which is thus seen to be a commentary, pal- 
 pable to sense, upon the vital efficacy of the Holy Communion ». 
 
 » St. Mark viii. 34, 35. 
 
 o Compare St. John vi. 26-59 ' ^^^ observe the correspondence between 
 the actions described in St. Matt. xiv. 19, and xxvi. 26. The deeper Lutheran 
 commentators are noticeably distinguished from the Calvinistic ones in re- 
 cognising the plain Sacramental reference of St. John vi. 53, sqq. See Stier, 
 * Reden Jesu/ in loc. ; Olshausen, Comm. in loc. ; Kahnis, H. Abendmahl, 
 p. 104, sqq. For the ancient Church, see St. Chrys. Horn, in loc. ; Tertull. 
 De Orat. 6; Clem. Alex. Psedagog. I. vi. p. 123; St. Cyprian, De Oratione 
 Dominic^, p. 192 ; St. Hilary, De Trin. viii. 14, cited in Wilb. H. Euch. p. 199. 
 The Church of England authoritatively adopts the sacramental interpretation 
 of the passage by her use of it in the Exhortation at the time of the cele- 
 bration of the Holy Communion. *The benefit is great, if with a true 
 penitent heart and lively faith we receive that Holy Sacrament : for then we 
 spiritually eat the Flesh of Christ and drink His Blood ; then we dwell in 
 Christ and Christ in us ; we are one with Christ and Christ with us.* Cf. too 
 the * Prayer of Humble Access.' 
 IV] 
 
158 The mysteries of otcr Loi^d's Earthly Life 
 
 In our Lord's miracles then we have before us something 
 more than a set of credentials ; since they manifest forth His 
 Mediatorial Glory. They exhibit various aspects of that re- 
 demptive power whereby He designed to save lost man from sin 
 and death ; and they lead us to study, from many separate points 
 of view, Christ's majestic Personality, as the Source of the various 
 wonders which radiate from it. And assuredly such a study can 
 have but one result for those who honestly believe in the literal 
 reality of the wonders described; it must force upon them a 
 conviction of the Divinity of the worker p. 
 
 But the miracles which especially point to the Catholic doc- 
 trine as their justification, and which are simply incumbrances 
 blocking up the way of a Humanitarian theorist, are those of 
 which our Lord's Manhood is Itself the subject. According to 
 
 P It may be urged that Socinians have been earnest believers in the 
 Resurrection and other preternatural facts of the Life of Christ, while ex- 
 plicitly denying His Godhead. This is true ; but it is strictly true only of 
 past times, or of those of our contemporaries who are more or less inacces- 
 sible, happily for themselves, to the intellectual influences of modern 
 scepticism. It would be difficult to find a modern Socinian of high edu- 
 cation who believed in the literal truth of all the miraculous incidents 
 recorded in the Gospels. This is not merely a result of modern objections 
 to miracle ; it is a result of the connexion, more clearly felt, even by sceptics, 
 than of old, between the admission of miracles and the obligation to admit 
 attendant dogma. In his Essay on Channing, M. Renan has given expression 
 to this instinct of modern sceptical thought. * II est certain,' he observes, 
 ' que si Tesprit moderne a raison de vouloir une religion, qui, sans exclure le 
 surnaturel, en diminue la dose autant que possible, la religion de Channing 
 est la plus parfaite et la plus ^pur^e qui ait paru jusqu'ici. Mais est-ce la 
 tout, en vdritd, et quand le symbole sera r^duit k croire k Dieu et au Christ, 
 qu'y aura-t-on gagn^ ? Le scepticisme se tiendra-t'il pour satisfait ? La 
 formule de I'univers en sera-t-elle plus complete et plus claire ? La destin^e 
 de I'homme et de I'humanit^ moins impenetrable ? Avec son symbole dpurd, 
 Channing ^vite-t-il mieux que les thdologiens catholiques les objections de 
 Tincr^dulitd ? H^las ! non. II admet la resurrection de Jdsus-Christ, et 
 n'admet pas sa Divinity ; il admet le Bible, et n'admet pas I'enfer. II ddploie 
 toutes les susceptibilit^s d'un scholastique pour etablir centre les Trinitaires, 
 en quel sens le Christ est fils de Dieu, et en quel sens il ne Test pas. Or, si 
 Von accorde quHl y aeu une Existence reelle et miraculeuse d'un lout a I'autre, 
 pourquoi ne pas franchement Vappeler Divine ? L'un ne demande pas un 
 plus grand effort de croyance que I'autre. En \4nt4, dans cette voie, il n'y a 
 que le premier pas qui coute ; il ne faut pas marchander avec le surnaturel ; 
 la foi va d'une seule piece, et, le sacrifice accompli, il ne sied pas de rdclamer 
 en detail les droits dont on a fait une fois pour toutes I'entifere cession.' 
 fitudes d'Histoire Religieuse, pp. 377, 378. Who would not rather, a 
 thousand times over, have been Channing than be M. Renan ? Yet is it nfll 
 clear that, half a century later, Channing must have believed much less, or, 
 as we may well trust, much more, than was believed by the minister of 
 Federal-street Chapel, Boston ? 
 
 [lect. 
 
imply that His Person is Superkuma7i, 159 
 
 the Gospel narrative, Jesus enters this world by one miracle, and 
 He leaves it by another. His human manifestation centres in 
 that miracle of miracles. His Resurrection from the grave after 
 death. The Eesurrection is the central fact up to which all 
 leads, and from which all radiates. Such wonders as Christ's 
 Birth of a Virgin-mother, His Resurrection from the tomb, and 
 His Ascension into heaven, are not merely the credentials of our 
 redemption, they are distinct stages and processes of the re- 
 demptive work itself. Taken in their entirety, they interpose a 
 measureless interval between the Life of Jesus and the lives of 
 the greatest of prophets or of Apostles, even of those to whom it 
 was given to still the elements and to raise the dead. To expel 
 these miracles from the Life of Jesus is to destroy the identity 
 of the Christ of the Gospels ; it is to substitute a new Christ for 
 the Christ of Christendom. Who would recognise the true 
 Christ in the natural son of a human father, or in the crucified 
 prophet whose body has rotted in an earthly grave ? Yet on the 
 other hand, who will not admit that He Who was conceived of 
 the Holy Ghost and born of a Virgin-mother, Who, after being 
 crucified, dead, and buried, rose again the third day from the 
 dead, and then went up into heaven before the eyes of His 
 Apostles, must needs be an altogether superhuman Being 1 The 
 Catholic doctrine then is at home among the facts of the Gospel 
 narrative by the mere fact of its proclaiming a superhuman 
 Christ, while the modern Humanitarian theories are ill at ease 
 among those facts. The four Evangelists, amid their dis- 
 tinguishing peculiarities, concur in representing a Christ Whose 
 Life is encased in a setting of miracles. The Catholic doctrine 
 meets these representations more than half-way; they are in 
 sympathy with, if they are not admitted to anticipate, its as- 
 sertion. The Gospel miracles point at the very least to a Christ 
 Who is altogether above the range of human experience ; and 
 the Creeds recognise and confirm this indication by saying that 
 He is Divine. Thus the Christ of dogma is the Christ of 
 history : He is the Christ of the only extant history which 
 describes the Founder of Christendom at all. He may not be 
 the Christ of some modern commentators upon that history ; 
 but these commentators do not aff*ect to take the history as it 
 has come down to us. As the Gospel narratives stand, they 
 present a block of difiiculties to Humanitarian theories ; and 
 these difficulties can only be removed by mutilations of the 
 narratives so wholesale and radical as to destroy their sub- 
 stantial interest, besides rendering the retention of the fragments 
 iv] 
 
i6o Ca7i oiLT Lor£s miracles be denied or ig7tored? 
 
 which may be retained, a purely arbitrary procedure. The 
 Gospel narratives describe the Author of Christianity as the 
 Worker and the subject of extraordinary miracles ; and these 
 miracles are such as to afford a natural lodgment for, nay, to 
 demand as their correlative, the doctrine of the Creed. That 
 doctrine must be admitted to be, if not the divinely authorized 
 explanation, at least the best intellectual conception and resum.e 
 of the evangelical history. A man need not be a believer in 
 order to admit, that in asserting Christ's Divinity we make a 
 fair translation of the Gospel story into the language of abstract 
 thought ; and that we have the best key to that story when we 
 see in it the doctrine that Christ is God, unfolding itself in a 
 series of occurrences which on any other supposition seem to 
 wear an air of nothing less than legendary extravagance. 
 
 It may — it probably will — be objected to all this, that a large 
 number of men and women at the present day are on the one 
 hand strongly prepossessed against the credibility of all miracles 
 whatever, while on the other they are sincere ^ admirers ' of the 
 moral character of Jesus Christ. They may not wish explicitly 
 and in terms to reject the miraculous history recorded in the 
 Gospels ; but still less do they desire to commit themselves to 
 an unreserved acceptance of it. Whether from indifference to 
 miraculous occurrences, or because their judgment is altogether 
 in suspense, they would rather keep the preternatural element 
 in our Lord's Life out of sight, or shut their eyes to it. But 
 they are open to the impressions which may be produced by the 
 spectacle of high ethical beauty, if only the character of Christ 
 can be disentangled from a series of wonders, which, as trans- 
 cending all ordinary human experience, do not touch the motives 
 that compel their assent to religious truth. Accordingly we are 
 warned, that if it is not a piece of spiritual thoughtlessness, and 
 even cruelty, it is at any rate a rhetorical mistake to insist upon 
 a consideration so opposed to the intellectual temper of the 
 time. 
 
 This is what may be urged : but let it be observed, that the 
 objector assumes a point which should rather have been proved. 
 He assumes the possibility of putting forward an honest picture 
 of the Life of Jesus, which shall uphold the beauty, and even the 
 perfection of His moral character, while denying the historical 
 reality of His miracles, or at any rate while ignoring them. 
 Whereas, if the only records which we possess of the Life of 
 Jesus are to be believed at all, they make it certain that Jesus 
 Christ did claim to work, and was Himself the embodiment, of 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Our Lord's references to His Person, i6i 
 
 startling miracles <i. How can this fact be dealt with by a modern 
 disbeliever in the miraculous? Was Christ then the ignorant 
 victim and promoter of a crude superstition ] Or was He, as 
 M. Kenan considers, passive and unresisting, while credited with 
 working wonders which He knew to be merely thaumaturgic 
 tricks r % On either supposition, is it possible to uphold Him as 
 * the moral ideal of humanity,' or indeed as the worthy object of 
 any true moral enthusiasm % We cannot decline this question ; 
 it is forced upon us by the subject-matter. A neutral attitude 
 towards the miraculous element in the Gospel history is impos- 
 sible. The claim to work miracles is not the least prominent 
 element of our Lord's teaching ; nor are the miracles which are 
 said to have been wrought by Him a fanciful or ornamental 
 appendage to His action. The miraculous is inextricably inter- 
 woven with the whole Life of Christ. The ethical beauty, nay 
 the moral integrity of our Lord's character is dependent, whether 
 we will it or not, upon the reality of His miracles. It may be 
 very desirable to defer as far as possible to the mental pre- 
 possessions of our time ; but it is not practicable to put asunder 
 two things which God has joined together, namely, the beauty of 
 Christ's character and the bond fide reality of the miracles which 
 He professed to work. 
 
 But let us nevertheless follow the lead of this objection by 
 turning to consider what is the real bearing of our Lord's moral 
 character upon the question of His Divinity. In order to do 
 this, it is necessary to ask a previous question. What position 
 did Jesus Christ, either tacitly or explicitly, claim to occupy in 
 His intercourse with men % What allusions did He make to the 
 subject of His Personality % You will feel, my brethren, that it 
 is impossible to overrate the solemn importance of such a point 
 as this. We are here touching the very heart of our great 
 subject : we have penetrated to the inmost shrine of Christian 
 truth, when we thus proceed to examine those words of the 
 
 <i Ecce Homo, p. 43 : ' On the whole, miracles play so important a part in 
 Christ's scheme, that any theory which would represent them as due entirely 
 to the imagination of His followers or of a later age, destroys the credibility 
 of the documents, not partially, but wholly, and leaves Christ a personage as 
 mythical as Hercules.* 
 
 "* Cf. Vie de Jdsus, p. 265 : * II est done permis de croire qu'on lui imposa 
 sa reputation de thaumaturge, quil n'y resista pas beaucoup, mais qu'il ne fit 
 rien non plus pour y aider, et qu'en tout cas, il sentait la vanity de I'opinion 
 k cet ^gard. Ce serait manquer a la bonne mdthode historique d'ecouter trojj 
 ici nos repugnances.' See M. Kenan's account of the raising of Laza 
 ibid. pp. 361, 362. yZ,^ , 
 
 IV ] M /^<^ 
 
1 62 First stage of Chris fs teaching, mainly ethical. 
 
 Gospels which exhibit the consciousness of the Founder of 
 Christianity respecting His rank in the scale of being. With 
 what aw^e, yet with what loving eagerness, must not a Christian 
 enter on such an examination ! 
 
 No reader of the Gospels can fail to see that, speaking gene- 
 rally, and without reference to any presumed order of the events 
 and sayings in the Gospel history, there are two distinct stages 
 or levels in the teaching of Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 I. Of these the first is mainly concerned with primary funda- 
 mental moral truth. It is in substance a call to repentance, and 
 the proclamation of a new life. It is summarized in the words, 
 ' Eepent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand s.' A change 
 of mind, both respecting self, and respecting God, was necessary 
 before a man could lead the new life of the kingdom of heaven. 
 In a previous lecture we have had occasion to consider the king- 
 dom of heaven as the outline or plan of a world-wide institution 
 which was to take its place in history. But viewed in its relation 
 to the life of the soul, the kingdom of heaven is the home and the 
 native atmosphere of a new and higher order of spiritual exist- 
 ence. This new life is not merely active thought, such as might 
 be stimulated by the cross-questioning of a Socrates ) nor is it 
 moral force, the play of which was limited to the single soul that 
 possessed it. It is moral and mental life, having God and men 
 for its objects, and accordingly lived in an organized society, as 
 the necessary counterpart of its energetic action. Of this stage 
 of our Lord's preaching, the Sermon on the Mount is the most 
 representative document. The Sermon on the Mount preaches 
 penitence by laying down the highest law of holiness. It con- 
 trasts the externalized devotion, the conventional and worldly 
 religion of the time, created and sanctioned by the leading cur- 
 rents of public opinion, and described as the righteousness of the 
 Scribes and Pharisees, with a new and severe ideal of morality, 
 embodied in the new law of Christian perfection. It stimulates 
 and regulates penitence, by proposing a new conception of 
 blessedness ; by contrasting the spirit of the new law with the 
 literalism of the old ; by exhibiting the devotional duties, the 
 ruling motives, the characteristic temper, and the special dangers 
 of the new life. Incidentally the Sermon on the Mount states 
 certain doctrines, such as that of the Divine Providence, with 
 great explicitness * ; but, throughout it, the moral element is 
 predominant. This great discourse quickens and deepens a 
 
 • St. Matt. iv. 17. ' Ibid. vi. 25-33. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
No confession of personal shortcomings. 163 
 
 sense of sin by presenting the highest ideal of an inward holi- 
 ness. In the Sermon on the Mount our Lord is laying broad 
 and deep the foundations of His spiritual edifice. A pure and 
 loving heart \ an open and trustful conscience j a freedom of 
 communion with the Father of spirits ; a love of man as man, 
 the measure of which is to be nothing less than a man's love of 
 himself ; above all a stern determination, at any cost, to be true, 
 true with God, true with men, true with self; — such are the 
 pre-requisites for genuine discipleship ; such the spiritual and 
 subjective bases of the new and Absolute Eeligion ; such the 
 moral material of the first stage of our Lord's public teaching. 
 
 In this first stage of our Lord's teaching let us moreover note 
 two characteristics. 
 
 (n) And first, that our Lord's recorded language is absolutely 
 wanting in a feature, which, on the supposition of His being 
 merely human, would seem to have been practically indispensable. 
 Our Lord does not place before us any relative or lower standard 
 of morals. He proposes the highest standard ; He enforces the 
 absolute morality. /Be ye therefore perfect,' He says, 'even as 
 your Father Which is in heaven is perfect ^.' Now in the case 
 of a human teacher of high moral and spiritual attainments, 
 what should we expect to be a necessary accompaniment of this 
 teaching % Surely we should expect some confession of personal 
 unworthiness thus to teach. We should look for some trace of 
 a feeling (so inevitable in this pulpit) that the message which 
 must be spoken is the rebuke, if not the condemnation, of the 
 man who must speak it. Conscious of many shortcomings, a 
 human teacher must at some time relieve his natural sense of 
 honesty, his fundamental instinct of justice, by noting the dis- 
 crepancy between his weak, imperfect, perhaps miserable self, 
 and his sublime and awful message. He must draw a line, if I 
 may so speak, between his official and his personal self; and in 
 his personal capacity he must honestly, anxiously, persistently 
 associate himself with his hearers, as being before God, like each 
 one of themselves, a learning, struggling, erring soul. But Jesus 
 Christ makes no approach to such a distinction between Himself 
 and His message. He bids men be like God, and He gives not 
 the faintest hint that any trace of unlikeness to God in Himself 
 obliges Him to accompany the delivery of that precept with a 
 protestation of His own personal unworthiness. Do you say 
 that this is only a rhetorical style or mood derived by tradition 
 
 « St. Matt. V. 48. » 
 
 IV] M 2 
 
1 64 The sense of sin cojumon ly qiiicke^ied by sanctity, 
 
 from the Hebrew prophets, and natural in any Semitic teacher 
 who aspired to succeed them % I answer, that nothing is plainer 
 in the Hebrew prophets than the clear distinction which is con- 
 stantly maintained between the moral level of the teacher and 
 the moral level of His message. The prophetic ambassador 
 represents the Invisible King of Israel ; but the holiness of the 
 King is never measured, never compromised by the imperfec- 
 tions of His representative. The prophetic writings abound in 
 confessions of weakness, in confessions of shortcomings, in 
 confessions of sin. The greatest of the prophets is permitted 
 to see the glory of the Lord, and he forthwith exclaims in agony, 
 'Woe is me ! for I am undone ; because I am a man of unclean 
 lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips : for 
 mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts x. ' 
 
 But the silence of Jesus respecting any such sense of personal 
 unworthiness has been accounted for by the unrivalled closeness 
 of His life-long communion with God. Is it then certain that 
 the holiest souls are least alive to personal sin % Do they whose 
 life of thought is little less than the breath of a perpetual prayer, 
 and who dwell continuously in the presence-chamber of the King 
 of kings, profess themselves ^insensible to that taint of sin, from 
 which none are altogether free % Is this the lesson which we 
 learn from the language of the best of the servants of God ? My 
 brethren, the very reverse is the case. Those who have lived 
 nearest to God, and have known most about Him, and have been 
 most visibly irradiated by the light of His countenance, have 
 been foremost to acknowledge that the ^burden' of remaining 
 imperfection in themselves was truly ^ intolerable.^ Their eager 
 protestations have often seemed to the world to be either the 
 exaggerations of fanaticism, or else the proof of a more than 
 ordinary wickedness. For blemishes which might have passed 
 unobserved in a spiritual twilight, are lighted up with torturing 
 clearness by those searching, scorching rays of moral truth, that 
 stream from the bright Sanctity of God upon the soul that 
 beholds It. In that Presence the holiest of creatures must own 
 with' the Psalmist, ^ Thou hast set our misdeeds before Thee, and 
 our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance y.' Such self- 
 accusing, broken-hearted confessions of sin have been the utter- 
 ances of men the most conspicuous in Christendom for holiness 
 of life ; and no true saint of God ever supposed that by a con- 
 stant spiritual sight of God the soul would lose its keen truthful 
 sense of personal sinfulness. No man could presume that tliis 
 ^ Isa. vi. 5. y Ps. xc. 8. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Significance of Chris fs sense of perfect sinlessness. 1 6^ 
 
 sense of sinfulness, as distinct from the sense of unpardoned 
 guilt, would be banished by close communion with God, unless 
 his moral standard was low, and his creed imperfect. Any such 
 presumption is utterly inconsistent with a true sight of Him 
 Whose severe and stainless beauty casts the shadow of failure 
 upon all that is not Himself, and Who charges His very angels 
 with moral folly. 
 
 Yet Jesus Christ never once confesses sin; He never once 
 asks for pardon. Is it not He, Who so sharply rebukes the 
 self -righteousness of the Pharisee ? Might He not seem to ignore 
 all human piety that is not based upon a broken heart % Does 
 He not deal with human nature at large as the true prodigal, who 
 must penitently return to a Father's love as the one condition of 
 its peace and bliss. Yet He Himself never lets fall a hint, He 
 Himself never breathes a prayer, which implies any, the slightest 
 trace, of a personal remorse. From no casual admission do we 
 gather that any, the most venial sin, has ever been His. Never 
 for one moment does He associate Himself with any passing 
 experience of that anxious dread of the penal future with which 
 His own awful words must needs fill the sinner's heart. If His 
 Soul is troubled, at least His moral sorrows are not His own, 
 they are a burden laid on Him by His love for others. Nay, 
 He challenges His enemies to convince Him of sin. He declares 
 positively that He does always the Will of the Father z. Even 
 when speaking of Himself as Man, He always refers to eternal 
 life as His inalienable possession. It might, so perchance we 
 think, be the illusion of a moral dullness, if only He did not 
 penetrate the sin of others with such relentless analysis. It 
 might, we imagine, be a subtle pride, if we did not know Him 
 to be so unrivalled in His great humility a. This consciousness 
 
 * St. John viii. 46, ibid. ver. 29, cf. ver. 26. 
 
 a Hollard, Caractfere de Jdsus-Christ, p. 150. Cf. also Ullraann, Stindlo- 
 sigkeit, Th. I. Kap. 3. § 4. The frivolous objections to our Lord's sin- 
 lessness which are urged from St. Luke ii. 41-52, St. Matt. xxi. 12-17, 
 and 17-22, and from His relation to Judas, are discussed in this work, 
 Th. III. Kap. i. § 4. This interesting writer however, while asserting non 
 peccdsse of our Lord, falls short of Catholic truth in denying to Him the 
 'non poss€ peccare.* The objections advanced by M. F. Pecant in his Le 
 Christ et la Conscience, 1859, are plainly a result of that writer's Humani- 
 tarianism. Our Lord's answers to His Mother, His cursing the barren fig- 
 tree, His sending the devils into the herd of swine. His driving the money- 
 changers from the temple, and His last denunciations against the Pharisees, 
 present no difficulty to those who see in Him the Lord, as well as the Son of 
 Mary, the Maker and Owner of the world of nature, the Searcher and Judge 
 of human hearts. Cf. also note C. 
 IV] 
 
1 66 Aiithoritative character of Chris fs teachi7ig. 
 
 of an absolute sinlessness in such a Soul as that of Jesus Christ, 
 points to a moral elevation unknown to our actual human expe- 
 rience. It is, at the very least, suggestive of a relation to the 
 Perfect Moral Being altogether unique iii human history b. 
 
 (/3) The other characteristic of this stage of our Lord's teach- 
 ing is the attitude which He at once and, if I may so say, 
 naturally assumes, not merely towards the teachers of His time, 
 but towards the letter of that older, divinely-given Revelation 
 which they preserved and interpreted. The people early remarked 
 that Jesus ^taught as One having authority, and not as the 
 Scribes ^^ The Scribes reasoned, they explained, they balanced 
 argument against argument, they appealed to the critical or 
 verifying faculty of their hearers. But here is a Teacher, Who 
 
 ^ Cf. Mr. F. W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, p. 143 : 'We have a 
 very imperfect history of the Apostle James ; and I do not know that I 
 could adduce any fact specifically recorded concerning him in disproof of his 
 absolute moral perfection, if any of his Jerusalem disciples had chosen to set 
 up this as a dogma of religion. Yet no one would blame me as morose, or 
 indisposed to acknowledge genius and greatness, if I insisted on beheving 
 James to be frail and imperfect, while admitting that I knew almost nothing 
 about him. And why ? Singly and surely, because we know him to be a 
 man : that suffices. To set up James or John or Daniel as my model and 
 my Lord; to be swallowed up in him, and press him upon others as a uni- 
 versal standard, would be despised as a self-degrading idolatry, and resented 
 as an obtrusive favouritism. Now why does not the same equally apply 
 if the name Jesus be substituted for these ? Why, in defect of all other 
 knowledge than the bare fact of his manhood, are we not unhesitatingly to 
 take for granted that he does not exhaust all perfection, and is at best only 
 one amongst many brethren and equals ?* The answer is that we have to 
 choose between believing in Christ*s moral perfection, and condemning Him 
 of being guilty either of spiritual blindness or hypocrisy (see Ullmann ubi 
 sup.); and that His teaching, His actions, and (Mr. Newman will allow us to 
 add) His supernatural credentials, taken together, make believing Him to be 
 sinless the easier alternative. But Mr. Newman*s remarks are of substantial 
 value, as indirectly shewing, from a point of view much further removed from 
 Catholic belief than Socinianism itself, how steadily a recognition of our 
 Lord's moral perfection as Man tends to promote an acceptance of the truth 
 that He is God. ' If,* says Mr. Newman, *I were already convinced that this 
 person (he means our Lord) was a great Unique, separated from all other 
 men by an impassable chasm in regard to his physical origin, I (for one) 
 should be much readier to believe that he was unique and unapproachable in 
 other respects ; for all God's works have an internal harmony. It could not 
 be for nothing that this exceptional personage was sent into the world. 
 That he was intended for head of the human race in one or more senses, 
 would be a plausible opinion ; nor should I feel any incredulous repugnance 
 against believing his morality to be, if not divinely perfect, yet separated from 
 that of common men so far that he might be a God to us, just as every parent 
 is to a young child.' Ibid. p. 142. « St. Matt. vii. 29. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
His claim to revise the Sinaitic Revelation, 167 
 
 sees truth intuitively, and announces it simply, without con- 
 descending to recommend it by argument. He is a Teacher, 
 moreover, not of truth obvious to all, but of truth which might 
 have seemed to the men who first heard it to be what we should 
 call paradoxical. He condemns in the severest language the 
 doctrine and the practice of the most influential religious au- 
 thorities among His countrymen. He takes up instinctively a 
 higher position than He assigns to any who had preceded Him 
 in Israel. He passes in review, and accepts or abrogates not 
 merely the traditional doctrines of the Jewish schools, but the 
 Mosaic law itself. His style runs thus : * It was said to them 
 of old time, . . . but I say unto you d. ' 
 
 Here too, it is necessary to protest against statements which 
 imply that this authoritative teaching of Jesus was merely a 
 continuation of the received prophetical style. It is true that 
 the prophets gave prominence to the moral element in the 
 teacliing of the Pentateuch, that they expanded it, and that so 
 far they anticipated one side of the ministry of Jesus Himself. 
 But the prophets always appealed to a higher sanction ; the 
 prophetic argument addressed to the conscience of Israel was 
 ever, ^Thus saith the Lord.' How significant, how full of im- 
 port as to His consciousness respecting Himself is our Lord's 
 substitute, ^ Verily, verily, / say unto you.' What prophet ever 
 set himself above the great Legislator, above the Law written 
 by the finger of God on Sinai % What prophet ever undertook to 
 ratify the Pentateuch as a whole, to contrast his own higher 
 morality with some of its precepts in detail, to imply even 
 remotely that he was competent to revise that which every 
 Israelite knew to be the handiwork of God ] What prophet ever 
 thus implicitly placed himself on a line of equality, not with 
 Moses, not with Abraham, but with the Lord God Himself? So 
 momentous a claim requires explanation if the claimant be 
 only human. This impersonation of the source of moral law 
 must rest upon some basis : what is the basis on which it rests % 
 
 In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus Christ does not deign to 
 justify His lofty critical and revisionary attitude towards the 
 ancient Law. He neither explains nor exaggerates His power 
 to review the older revelation, and to reveal new truth. He 
 simply teaches ; He abrogates, He establishes. He sanctions, He 
 unfolds, as the case may be, and in a tone which implies that 
 His right to teach is not a matter for discussion. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. V. 27. For the translation of toIs apxaioiSt see Archbishop 
 Trench on Auth. Vers, of New Testament, p. 79. 
 IV] 
 
1 68 Why Christ provoked unfriendly scrutiny. 
 
 It was inevitable that the question should be asked, anxiously, 
 earnestly, fiercely, ' Who is This Teacher f I say, it was inevit- 
 able : for if you teach the lowest moral truth, in the humblest 
 sphere, your right to do so will sooner or later be called in 
 question. To teach moral truth is to throw down a challenge 
 to human nature, human nature being such as it actually is, 
 that is to say, conscious of more or less disloyalty to the moral 
 light which it already possesses, and indisposed to become re- 
 sponsible for knowledge of a yet higher standard of moral truth, 
 the existence of which it may already suspect. Accordingly the 
 challenge which is thus made is generally met by a sharp counter- 
 scrutiny into the claims, be they personal or official, of the 
 teacher who dares to make it. This penalty of teaching can 
 only be escaped either in certain rare and primitive conditions 
 of society, or else when the teacher fails to do his duty. Mis- 
 sionaries have described savage tribes whose sense of ignorance 
 was too sincere, and who were too grateful for knowledge, to 
 take umbrage at the practical bearings of a new doctrine. Poets 
 have sung of ancestors 
 
 * Qui praeceptorem sancti voluere parentis 
 Esse loco ®.* 
 
 Generally speaking, however, an immunity from criticism is to 
 be secured by signal inefficiency, feebleness, or disloyalty to prin- 
 ciple, on the part of the teacher. A teacher of morals may have 
 persuaded his conscience that the ruling worldly opinion of his 
 time can safely be regarded as its court of final appeal. He may 
 have forced his thought to shape itself with prudent docility into 
 those precise conventionalities of expression which are understood 
 to mean nothing, or which have lost their power. In such a 
 case too it may happen that the total failure to achieve moral 
 and spiritual victories will not necessarily entail on the teacher 
 complete social or professional obscurity, while it will certainly 
 protect him against any serious liability to hostile interference. 
 
 Picture to yourselves, on the contrarj^, a teacher who is not 
 merely under the official obligation to say something, but who is 
 morally convinced that he has something to say. Imagine one 
 who believes alike in the truth of his message and in the reality 
 of his mission to deliver it. Let his message combine those 
 moral contrasts which give permanency and true force to a 
 doctrine, and which the Gospel alone has combined in their per- 
 fection. Let this teacher be tender, yet searching ; let him win 
 
 e Juv. vii. 209. 
 
 r LECT. 
 
Second stage of our Lords teaching. 169 
 
 the hearts of men by his kindly humanity, while he probes, aye 
 to the quick, their moral sores. Let him be uniformly calm, yet 
 manifestly moved by the fire of repressed passion. Let him be 
 stern yet not unloving, and resolute without sacrificing the 
 elasticity of his sympathy, and genial without condescending to 
 be the weakly accomplice of moral mischief. Let him pursue 
 and expose the latent evil of the human heart through all the 
 mazes of its unrivalled deceitfulness, without sullying his own 
 purity, and without forfeiting his strong belief in the present 
 capacity of every human being for goodness. Let him ' know 
 what is in man,' and yet, with this knowledge clearly before 
 him, let him not only not despair of humanity, but respect it, 
 nay love it, even enthusiastically. Above all, let this teacher be 
 perfectly independent. Let him be independent of the voice of 
 the multitude ; independent of the enthusiasm and promptings 
 of his disciples ; independent even when face to face with the 
 bitter criticism and scorn of his antagonists ; independent of all 
 save God and his conscience. In a word, conceive a case in 
 which moral authority and moral beauty combine to elicit a 
 simultaneous tribute of reverence and of love. Clearly such 
 a teacher must be a moral power; and as a consequence, his 
 claim to teach must be scrutinized with a severity proportioned 
 to the interest which he excites, and to the hostility which he 
 cannot hope to escape provoking. And such a Teacher, or 
 rather much more than this, was Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 Nor is this all. The scrutiny which our Lord thus necessarily 
 encountered from without was responded to, or rather it was 
 anticipated, by self-discovery from within. ^The soul,' it has 
 been said, ^ like the body, has its pores ;' and in a sincere soul 
 the pores of its life are always open. Instinctively, uncon- 
 sciously, and whether a man will or not, the insignificance or 
 the greatness of the inner life always reveals itself In our 
 Lord this self-revelation was not involuntary, or accidental, or 
 forced ; it was in the highest degree deliberate. He knew the 
 thoughts of those about Him, and He anticipated their ex- 
 pression. He placed beyond a doubt, by the most explicit 
 statements, that which might have been more than suspected, if 
 He had only preached the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 II. It is characteristic then of what may be termed the 
 second stage of our Lord's public teaching, that He distinctly, 
 repeatedly, energetically preaches Himself. He does not leave 
 men to draw inferences about Himself from the power of His 
 moral teaching, or from the awe-inspiring nature of His miracles. 
 
 IV] 
 
I JO Fo7nns of our Lord^s Self-assertion, 
 
 He does not content Himself with teaching primary moral truths 
 concerning God and our duties towards God and towards one 
 another. He does not bequeath to His Apostles the task of 
 elaborating a theory respecting the Personal rank of their 
 Master in the scale of being. On the contrary, He Himself 
 persistently asserts the real character of His position relatively 
 to God and man, and of His consequent claims upon the thought 
 and heart of mankind. Whether He employs metaphor, or plain 
 unmetaphorical assertion. His meaning is too clear to be mis- 
 taken. He speaks of Himself as the Light of a darkened world f, 
 as the Way by which man may ascend to heaven^, as the Truth 
 which can really satisfy the cravings of the soul^i, as the Life 
 which must be imparted to all who would live in very deed, to 
 all who would really live for everi. Life is resident in Him in 
 virtue of an undefined and eternal communication of it from the 
 Father k. He is the Bread of Lifel. He is the Living Bread 
 That came down from heaven^ ; believers in Him will feed on 
 Him and will have eternal life^. He points to a living water of 
 the Spirit, which He can give, and which will quench the thirst 
 of souls that drink it^. All who came before Him He cha- 
 racterizes as having been, by comparison with Himself, the 
 thieves and robbers of mankind p. He is Himself the One Good 
 Shepherd of the souls of men^ ; He knows and He is known of 
 His true sheep J". Not only is He the Shepherd, He is the very 
 Door of the sheepfold ; to enter through Him is to be safe®. 
 He is the Vine, the Life-tree of regenerate humanity*. All that 
 is truly fruitful and lovely in the human family must branch 
 
 ^ St. John viii. 12 : 'EycS ^Xyn rh (peas rod kSctiioV 6 aKoXovOwp ifiol ov (j.^ 
 irfpnrar^o'ii iv rrj (TKOTia, a\\* e^et to (poos rrjs C^rjs, 
 
 8 Ibid. xiv. 6 : 'Eyu> elfii 7} d^6s. ' 
 
 ^ Ibid. : 'Eyu) elfxt . . . rj a\T]9€ia. Mark xiii. 31 : 5 ovpavhs Koi rj yrj irape- 
 Xivaovrai' ol 5e ^^^701 fiov ov fJ.^ irap€\dcccn. [TrapeXevcTOPTai, Tisch.] 
 
 i St. John xiv. 6 : 'Eyci elfxi . . . . r} ((vfj. 
 
 ^ Ibid. V. 26 : oiffTTcp yap 6 Uar^p e^et C^rjv iv eavr^, ovrcos eocaKe Koi rep 
 
 1 Ibid. vi. 35 : 'Eydo eljuLi 6 &pTos rrjs C^rjs. Ibid. ver. 48. 
 
 ™ Ibid. ver. 51 : 'EycH) dfxi 6 ^pros 6 ^cov 6 e'/c rov ovpavov Kara^ds. 
 
 " Ibid. ver. 47 : afiTju a/xV Aeyco ufiiv, 6 iricmvoov els e/xe, e^et Ci^V alcaviou. 
 Ibid. V. 40 : ov deAere iKduv irp6s fxe, 'Iva ^<jo)]v 6X'?t6. 
 
 o Ibid. iv. 14 : %s S' tiv irit] e/c rov v^aros ov iyd) Suxro) avTcS, ov p.)] Bi'^rjo'ei 
 els rhv aloova. 
 
 P Ibid. X. 8 : ndures '6<toi -n-pb efiov ^KBoVf KXeirrai elcrl koi XTja-rai. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 11 : 'Eyw etVt 6 iroiij.^v 6 Ka\6s. Ibid. ver. 14. 
 
 '" Ibid. ver. 14 : yit^axTKca ra e^tot, Koi. yiuaxrHo/xai viro tSov e/xccv. 
 
 8 Ibid. ver. 9: 'Eyco elfii rj 6vpa' 5t' epLov edu tis elaeXdrj, (TU)Q'i](TeTai. 
 
 * Ibid. XV. I : 'Eyci elyn i] ^ixireXos 7} aX-qdivf], 
 
 [lect. 
 
Forms of our Lord^s Self-assertion. 171 
 
 forth from Him^; all spiritual life must wither and die, if it be 
 severed from His^. He stands consciously between earth and 
 heaven. He claims to be the One Means of a real approach to 
 the Invisible God : no soul of man can come to the Father but 
 through Himy. He promises that all prayer offered in His 
 Name shall be answered : ' If ye ask anything in My Name / 
 will do it^.' He contrasts Himself with a group of His country- 
 men as follows : ^ Ye are from beneath, I am from above ; ye 
 are of this world, I am not of this world a.' He anticipates His 
 Death, and foretells its consequences : ' I, if I be lifted up from 
 the earth, will draw all men unto Myself t>.' He claims to be 
 the Lord of the realm of death ; He will Himself wake the 
 sleeping dead ; all that are in the graves shall hear His voice ^ ; 
 nay, He will raise Himself from the dead^. He proclaims, '• I am 
 the Resurrection and the Life®.' He encourages men to trust in 
 Him as they trust in God^j to make Him an object of faith 
 just as they believe in Gods ; to honour Him as they honour 
 the Father li. To love Him is a necessary mark of the children 
 of God : ^If God were your Father, ye would have loved Me^.' 
 It is not possible, He rules, to love God, and yet to hate Him- 
 
 " St. John XV. 5 : b fxivwv iv ifxoi^ kclj^ iv avTcf, ovtos (pcpei Kapwhv iroXvV 
 OTi X'*'P'y ^f^ov oh Svuaade ttoiup ovZiv, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 6 : iav fxr} ris fx^ivri iv i/JLoi, ipXTidrj e^oo cos rh K\ri^a^ K(A 
 €^r]pdv6rj. 
 
 y Ibid. xiv. 6 : ov^€\5 cpx^'^ai irphs rbv Uarepa, et ju); 5t' ^/xou. 
 
 2 Ibid. ver. 14 : idu rt alrT)(n]ri iv Tq5 ovSfxari /lov, iyoj Trot^^trco. 
 
 * Ibid. viii. 23 : vij.€7s e/c ra>v Karoo eVre, iyd) e/c rwv 6.v(a eljxi' Ujue?s Ik rot/ 
 KSff/xov TovTov iarlf iyd) ovk et/xi e/c rov kSc/jlov tovtov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. xii. 32 : Kayw iav v\l/oo9co e/c rfjs yrjs, ivoLvras k\Kv(T<a vphs ifxavrSu. 
 
 <= Ibid. V. 28, 29 : epx^rai wpa, iv rj Trdvres ot iv rots ixvriii^ims OLKOvaovrai 
 T?7S (poivris aifToVy koI iKTiop^xxrovrai. Ibid. vi. 39, xi. 25. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 19 : Xvaare rhv pobv tovtov, koX iv Tpialv rjfxepais iyepoo avrSv. 
 Ibid. X. 18 : i^ovaiav e^w Q^lvai avTijv [tt/v ^vx^v /xou], koL k^oucriav e^w 
 irdXiv Ka^eiv avT7]v. 
 
 ® Ibid. xi. 25 : 'E7C0 em* V a,vd(TTa<ns Koi r} (co-fi. 
 
 ^ Ibid. xiv. I : fx^ rapaaa-fadca v/jlcov t) /capSia* vKTrcvcre els rhv ©ehv^ Koi 
 els €yU6 TTicrTeveTe. Ibid. xvi. 33 : TavTa AeAaAry/ca vfuVf 'ha iv ifxol clp-fjvrjv 
 ^XV'''^' ^^ '''^ k6(T/jl(^ 6\l\1/iv 6|6Te* l^x^T^f Tisch.] ctAAct OapaeTre^ iycb vevi- 
 
 K7]Ka Thv KOa/JLOV. 
 
 s Ibid. vi. 29 : rovrS icrri rh tpyov rod ©eoO, 'Iva Tria-T€vcr7)T€ els tv airi- 
 (rT€i\€v iKe7vos. Ibid. ver. 40 : tovto ydp i<jTiv t5 QiX-^fxa tov TlaTpSs /jlov' 
 'Iva iras 6 dfcopoov rhv Tlhv Kal TTKmvoov els avrhv, exv C^h^ alwviov. Ibid, 
 ver. 47 : 6 iriarevcov els i/j-e, exei C^"^^ aldoviov. Cf. Acts xxvi. 18 : rov Xa^^tv 
 avTovs 6.<pe(nv afiapriuv, Kal KXripov iv to7s riyiacTixevois, iria-Tet rrj els ifie. 
 
 ^ St. John V. 23 : 'Iva Tidvres rifiuo'i rhv Tlhv, Kadws rifxSxri rhv Harepa. 
 
 ^ Ibid. viii. 42 : el 6 Qeos irar'^p vfiSjv -^Vj Tiya-nure Uv ifie. Cf. Ibid, 
 xvi. 27. 
 IV] 
 
172 All the Gospels record Christ^ s Self-assertion, 
 
 self: 'He that hatetli Me, liateth My Father alsoJ.' The proof 
 of a true love to Him lies in doing His bidding : ' If ye love 
 Me, keep My commandments K' 
 
 Of this second stage of our Lord's teaching the most 
 representative document is the Discourse in the supper-room. 
 How great is the contrast between that discourse and the 
 Sermon on the Mount ! In the Sermon on the Mount, which 
 deals with questions of human character and of moral obilgation, 
 the reference to our Lord's Person is comparatively indirect. 
 It lies, not in explicit statements, but in the authority of His 
 tone, in the attitude which He tacitly assumes towards the 
 teachers of the Jewish people, and towards the ancient Law. 
 In the last discourse it is His Person rather than His teaching 
 which is especially prominent ; His subject in that discourse is 
 Himself. Certainly He preaches Himself in His relationship to 
 His redeemed ; but still He preaches above all and in all. Him- 
 self All radiates from Himself, all converges towards Himself. 
 The sorrows and perplexities of His disciples, the mission and 
 work of the Paraclete, the mingling predictions of suffering and 
 of glory, are all bound up with the Person of Jesus, as mani- 
 fested by Himself. In those matchless words all centres so con- 
 sistently in Jesus, that it might seem that Jesus alone is before 
 us \ alone in the greatness of His supramundane glory ; alone 
 in bearing His burden of an awful, fathomless sorrow. 
 
 It will naturally occur to us that language such as that which 
 has just been quoted is mainly characteristic of the fourth 
 Gospel ; and you will permit me, my brethren, to consider the 
 objection which may underlie that observation somewhat at 
 length in a future lecture 1. For the present the author of 
 *Ecce Homo' may remind those who, for whatever reasons, 
 refuse to believe Christ to have used these words, that 'we 
 cannot deny that He used words which have substantially the 
 same meaning. We cannot deny that He called Himself King, 
 Master, and Judge of men ; that He promised to give rest to the 
 weary and the heavy-laden ; that He instructed His followers to 
 hope for life from feeding on His Body and His Blood "^.' 
 
 Indeed so entirely is our Lord's recorded teaching penetrated 
 by His Self-assertion, that in order to represent Him as simply 
 
 i St. John XV. 23 : b ifie puffuv, Koi rbv Uaripa fiov /xKrei. 
 ^ Ibid. xiv. T5 : iau ayairaTe /xe, ras ivroXas ras i/xas rriprjcraTe. 2 St. 
 John 6 : Ka\ avrr] eVriv i] aydirr], 'Iva TrepiiraTa/jLev Kara ras ivroKas ai/TOv. 
 ^ See Lecture V. 
 n» Ecce Homo, p. 177. Cf. also Mill, Myth. Interpret, p. 59. 
 
 [ LECT, 
 
Christ proclaims Hijnself the Judge of all men. 1 73 
 
 teaching moral truth, while keeping Himself strictly in the back- 
 ground of His doctrine, it would be necessary to deny the trust- 
 Avorthiness of all the accounts of His teaching which we possess. 
 To recognise the difference which has been noticed between the 
 two phases of His teaching merely amounts to saying that in the 
 former His Self- proclamation is implied, while it is avowed in 
 the latter. For even in that phase of Christ's teaching which 
 the three first Evangelists more particularly record, the public 
 assumption of titles and functions such as those of King, 
 Teacher, and Judge of the human race, implies those statements 
 about Himself which are preserved in the fourth Gospel. 
 
 Consider, for instance, what is really involved in a claim to 
 judge the world. That Jesus Christ did put forward this claim 
 must be conceded by those who admit that we have in our hands 
 any true records of Him whatever. Men who reject that account 
 of the four Gospels which is given us by the Catholic Church, 
 may perhaps consent to listen to the opinion of Mr. Francis W. 
 Newman. ' I believe,' says that writer, * that Jesus habitually 
 spoke of Himself by the title Son of Man, [and] that in assum- 
 ing that title He tacitly alluded to the seventh chapter of Daniel, 
 and claimed for Himself the throne of judgment over all mankind. 
 I know no reason to doubt that He actually delivered in sub- 
 stance the discourse in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew^. * 
 That our Lord advanced this tremendous claim to be the Judge 
 of all mankind is equally the conviction of foreign critics, who 
 are as widely removed as possible from any respect whatever for 
 the witness of the Church of Christ to Holy Writ o. But let us 
 reflect steadily on what Christ is thus admitted to have said about 
 Himself by the most advanced representatives of the destructive 
 criticism. Christ says that He will return to earth as Judge of all 
 mankind. He will sit upon a throne of glory, and will be attended 
 by bands of obedient angels. Before Him will be gathered all the 
 nations of the world, and He will judge them. In other words, 
 He will proceed to discharge an office involving such spiritual 
 insight, such discernment of the thoughts and intents of the 
 
 n Phases of Faith, p. 149; cf. St. Matt. xxv. 31-46. 
 
 o Baur, Vorlesungen iiber N. T. Theologie, p. 109: ' Dass Jesus Sich 
 Selbst als den kiinftigen Richter betrachtete, und ankiindigte, lasst sich auch 
 nach dem Evangelium Matthaus nicht in Zweifel ziehen. Fasst man die 
 Lehre und Wirksamkeit Jesu auch nur nach dem sittlichen Gesichtspunkt 
 auf, unter welchen sie der Bergrede und den Parabeln zufolge zu stellen ist, 
 so gehort dazu wesentlich auch die Bestimmune-, dasB sie der absolute Maasstab 
 zur BeuHheilung des sittlichen Werthes des Thuns und Verkaltens der Men'- 
 schen isU'' 
 IV] 
 
1 74 Force of the claim to be Universal Judge, 
 
 heart of each one of the millions at His feet, such awful, unshared 
 supremacy in the moral world, that the imagination recoils in 
 sheer agony from the task of seriously contemplating the assump- 
 tion of these duties by any created intelligence. He will draw 
 a sharp trenchant line of eternal separation through the dense 
 throng of all the assembled races and generations of men. He 
 will force every individual human being into one of the two • 
 distinct classes respectively destined for endless happiness and 
 endless woe. He will reserve no cases as involving complex moral 
 problems beyond His own power of decision. He will sanction 
 no intermediate class of awards, to meet the neutral morality of 
 souls whom men might deem ^ too bad for heaven, yet too good 
 for hell.' If it should be urged that our Lord is teaching truth 
 in the garb of parable, and that His words must not be taken 
 too literally, it may be answered that, supposing this to be the 
 case (a supposition by no means to be conceded) the main features, 
 the purport and drift of the entire representation cannot be mis- 
 taken. The Speaker claims to be Judge of all the world. When- 
 ever, or however, you understand Him to exercise His function, 
 Christ claims in that discourse to be nothing less than the Uni- 
 versal Judge. You cannot honestly translate His language into 
 any modern and prosaic equivalent, that does not carry with it 
 this tremendous claim. Nor is it relevant to observe that Mes- 
 siah had been pictured in prophecy as the Universal Judge, 
 and that in assuming to judge the world Jesus Christ was only 
 claiming an official consequence of the character which He had 
 previously assumed. Surely this does not alter the nature of 
 the claim. It does indeed shew what was involved in the 
 original assertion that He was the Messiah ; but it does not 
 shew that the title of Universal Judge was a mere idealist 
 decoration having no practical duties attached to it. On the con- 
 trary, Jesus Christ asserts the practical value of the title very 
 deliberately 3 He insists on and expands its significance ; He 
 draws out what it implies into a vivid picture. It cannot be 
 denied that He literally and deliberately put Himself forward as 
 Judge of all the world ; and the moral significance of this Self- 
 exaltation is not affected by the fact that He made it, as a part 
 of His general Messianic claim. If He could not claim to be 
 Messiah without making it, He ought not to have claimed to be 
 Messiah unless He had a right to make it. It may be pleaded 
 that He Himself said that the Father had given Him authority 
 to execute judgment because He is the Son of Man p. But this, 
 P St. John V. 27. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Demands of Christ upon the human soul, 175 
 
 as has already been shewn, means simply that He is the Uni- 
 versal Judge because He is Messiah. True, the chosen title of 
 Messiahship implies His real Humanity ; and His Human Nature 
 invests Him with special fitness for this as for the rest of His 
 mediatorial work. But then the title Son of Man, as implying 
 His humanity, is in felt contrast to a higher Nature which it 
 suggests. He is more than human ; but He is to judge us, 
 because He is also Man. On the whole it is impossible to reflect 
 steadily on this claim of Jesus Christ without feeling that either 
 such a claim ought never to have been made, or that it carries us 
 forward irresistibly to a truth beyond and above itself. 
 
 In dealing with separate souls our Lord's tone and language 
 are not less significant. We will not here dwell on the fact of 
 His forgiving sins % and of transmitting to His Church the power 
 of forgiving them r. But it is clear that He treats those who 
 come to Him as literally belonging to Himself, in virtue of an 
 existing right. He commands, He does not invite, discipleship. 
 To Philip, to the sons of Zebedee, to the rich young man, He 
 says simply, ' Follow Me ».' In the same spirit His Apostles are 
 bidden to resent resistance to their Master's doctrine : ' When ye 
 come into an house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let 
 your peace come upon it : but if it be not worthy, let your 
 peace return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, 
 nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, 
 shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall 
 be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the 
 day of judgment, than for that city *.' And as His message is to 
 be received upon pain of eternal loss, so in receiving it, men are 
 to give themselves up to Him simply and unreservedly. No 
 rival claim, however strong, no natural affection, however legiti- 
 mate and sacred, may interpose between Himself and the soul of 
 His follower. * He that loveth father or mother more than Me 
 is not worthy of Me \ and he that loveth son or daughter more 
 than Me is not worthy of Me^^ ;' *If any man come to Me, and 
 hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and 
 
 Q St. Matt. ix. 6 ; St. Mark ii. lo. M. Salvador represents in our own 
 day the Jewish feeling respecting this claim of our Lord. ' Voila pourquoi 
 les docteurs se recrierent de nouveau en entendant le Fils de Marie s'arroger 
 k lui-meme, et transmettre a ses delegues le droit du pardon : ils y voyaient 
 une autre maniere de prendre la place de Dieu.' Jdsus-Christ, torn. ii. p. 83. 
 
 J* St. Matt. xvi. 19 ; St. John xx. 23. 
 
 8 St. Matt. iv. 19, viii. 22, ix. 0, xix. 21; St. Mark ii. 14; St. Luke v. 27; 
 St. John i. 43, X. 27. * St. Matt. x. 12-15. " Ibid. 37. 
 
 IV ] 
 
176 All intolerable claim, if Christ be only Man. 
 
 brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My 
 disciple x/ Accordingly He predicts the painful severance be- 
 tween near relations which would accompany the advance of the 
 Gospel : ' Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth % 
 I tell you, Nay j but rather division : for from henceforth there 
 shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two 
 against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and 
 the son against the father; the mother against. the daughter, 
 and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against 
 her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother 
 in lawy/ And the Gospel narrative itself furnishes us with a 
 remarkable illustration of our Lord's application of His claim. 
 * He said unto another. Follow Me. But he said, Lord, suffer 
 me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said unto him. Let the 
 dead bury their dead : but go thou and preach the kingdom of 
 God. And another also said. Lord, I will follow Thee ; but let 
 me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house. 
 And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the 
 plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God 2.' 
 
 It is impossible to ignore this imperious claim on the part 
 of Jesus to rule the whole soul of man. Other masters may 
 demand a man's active energies, or his time, or his purse, or 
 his thought, or some large share in his affections ; but here is 
 a claim on the whole man, on his very inmost self, on the 
 sanctities of his deepest life. Here is a claim which sets aside 
 and ignores the dearest ties of family and kindred, if perchance 
 they interfere with it. Does any who is merely man dare to 
 advance such a claim as this % If so, is it possible that, believing 
 him to be only a fellow-creature, we can listen to the claim with 
 respect, with patience, without earnest indignation % Do not our 
 souls belong only and wholly to Him Who made them % Can we 
 not bury ourselves out of the sight and reach of every fellow-crea- 
 ture, in the hidden recesses of the spirit which we carry within ] 
 Can we not escape, if we will, from all eyes save One, from all 
 wills save One, from all voices save One, from all beings excepting 
 Him Who gave us life % How then can we listen to the demand 
 which is advanced by Jesus of Nazareth % Is it tolerable if He 
 is only man % If He does indeed share with ourselves the great 
 debt of creation at the hand of God ; if He exists, like ourselves, 
 from moment to moment merely upon sufferance ; or rather, if 
 He is upheld in being in virtue of a continuous and gratuitous 
 ministration of life, supplied to Him by the Author of all life ; 
 
 » St. Luke xiv. 26. >' Ibid. xii. 51-53. « Ibid. ix. 59-62. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Our Lord reveals His Godhead explicitly, 177 
 
 is it endurable that He should thus assume to deal with us as 
 His own creatures, as beings who have no rights before Him, 
 and whom He may command at will % Doubtless He speaks of 
 certain souls as given Him by His Father ^\ but then He claims 
 the fealty, the submission of all. And even if souls are only 
 ^ given' to Christ, how are we to account for this absolute 
 gift of an immortal soul to a human Lord? What, in short, 
 is the real moral justification of a claim, than which no larger 
 could be urged by the Creator % How can Christ bid men live 
 for Himself as for the very End of their existence % How can He 
 rightly draw towards Himself the whole thought and love, I do 
 not say, of a world, but of one single human being, with this 
 imperious urgency, if He be indeed only the Christ of the Hu- 
 manitarian teachers, if He be anything else or less than the 
 supreme Lord of life ] 
 
 It is then not merely an easy transition, it is a positive 
 moral relief, to pass from considering these statements and 
 claims to the declarations in which Jesus Christ explains them 
 by explicitly asserting His Divinity. For although the solemn 
 sentences in which He makes that supreme revelation are com- 
 paratively few, it is clear that the truth is latent, in the entire 
 moral and intellectual posture which we have been considering, 
 unless we are prepared to fall back upon a fearful alternative 
 which it will be my duty presently to notice. 
 
 Every man who takes a public or stirring part in life may 
 assume that he has to deal with three different classes of men. 
 He must face ^ his personal friends, his declared opponents, and 
 a large neutral body which is swayed by turns in the opposite 
 directions of friendliness and opposition.' Towards each of these 
 classes he has varying obligations ; and from their different 
 points of view they form their estimate of his character and 
 action. Now our Lord, entering as He did perfectly into the 
 actual conditions of our human and social existence, exposed 
 Himself to this triple scrutiny, and met it by a correspondingly 
 threefold revelation. He revealed His Divinity to His disciples, 
 to the Jewish people, and to His embittered opponents, the chief 
 priests and Pharisees. 
 
 Bearing in mind His acceptance of the confessions of Na- 
 thanaelb and of St. Peter c, as well as His solemn words to 
 Nicodemus ^ , let us consider His language in the supper-room to 
 St. Philip. It may have been Philip's restlessness of mind, taking 
 
 » St. John X. 29. b Ibid. i. 49. « St. Matt. xvi. 16. d St. John ill. 18. 
 
 IV] N 
 
178 Christ reveals His Godhead to the Apostles. 
 
 pleasure, as men will, in tlie mere starting a religious difficulty 
 for its own sake ; it may have been an instinctive wish to find 
 some excuse for escaping from those sterner obligations which, 
 on the eve of the Passion, discipleship would threaten presently 
 to impose. However this was, Philip preferred to our Lord the 
 peremptory request, ' Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth 
 us.* Well might the answer have thrilled those who heard it. 
 * Have I been so long time with you, and yet thou hast not 
 known Me, Philip % He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; 
 and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father % Believest thou 
 not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me e ?' Now 
 what this indwelling really implied is seen in our Lord's answer 
 to a question of St. Jude. St. Jude had asked how it was that 
 Christ would manifest Himself to His servants, and not to the 
 world. Our Lord replies that the heavenly revelation is made 
 to love ; but the form in which this answer is couched is of the 
 highest significance. ' If a man love Me, he will keep my words ; 
 and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and 
 make Our abode with him ^.' * We will come unto him and 
 make Our abode !' Eeflect : Who is This Speaker That pro- 
 mises to dwell in the soul of man ? And with Whom does He 
 associate Himself^ It may be true of any eminent saint, that 
 *God speaks not to him, as to one outside Himself; that God is 
 in him ; that he feels himself with God ; that he draws from his 
 own heart what he tells us of the Father ; that he lives in the 
 bosom of God by the intercommunion of every moment ?.' But 
 such an one could not forget that, favoured as he is by the Divine 
 Presence illuminating his whole inner life, he still lives at an 
 immeasurable distance beneath the Being Whose condescension 
 has so enriched him. In virtue of his sanctity, he would surely 
 shrink with horror from associating himself with God; from 
 promising, along with God, to make a dwelling-place of the 
 souls that love himself; from representing his presence with 
 men as a blessing co-ordinate with the presence of the Father ; 
 from attributing to himself oneness of will with the Will of 
 God ; from implying that side by side with the Father of spirits, 
 
 « St. John xiv. 9, 10; Williams on Study of the Gospels, p. 403. 
 
 ^ St. John xiv. 23. 
 
 & Quoted in Dean Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church, part ii. p. t6i, 
 from Renan (Vie de Jdsus, p. 75), who is speaking of our Lord. M. Renan, 
 in using this language, is very careful to explain that he does not mean to 
 assert that our Lord is God : * Jdsus n'enonce pas un moment I'idee sacri- 
 lege (!) qu'il soit Dieu.' Ibid. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
 1 
 
Christ reveals His Godhead to the Jewish people, 179 
 
 he was himself equally a ruler and helper of the life of the souls 
 of men. 
 
 The most prominent statements however which our Lord 
 made on the subject of His Divinity occur in those conversations 
 with the Jews which are specially recorded in the fourth Gospel. 
 Our Lord discovers this great truth to the Jewish people by 
 three distinct methods of statement. 
 
 (a) In the first place, He distinctly places Himself on terms 
 of equality with the Father, by a double claim. He claims a 
 parity of working power, and He claims an equal right to the 
 homage of mankind. Of these claims the former is implicitly 
 contained in passages to which allusion has been already made. 
 We have seen that it is contained in the assumption of a judicial 
 authority equal to the task of deciding the final condition of 
 every individual human being. Although this office is delegated 
 to and exercised by our Lord as Man, yet so stupendous a task 
 is obviously not less beyond the reach of any created intelligence 
 than the providential government of the world. In like manner, 
 this claim of an equality in working power with the Father is 
 inseparable from our Lord's statements that He could confer 
 animal life^, and that the future restoration of the whole human 
 race to life would be effected by an act of His Willi. These 
 statements were made by our Lord after healing the impotent 
 man at the pool of Bethesda. They are in fact deductions from 
 a previous and more comprehensive one. Our Lord had healed 
 the impotent man on the Sabbath day, and had bidden him take 
 up his bed and walk. The Jews saw an infraction of the Sab- 
 bath, both in the command given to the impotent man, and in 
 the act of healing him. They sought to slay our Lord; but He 
 justified Himself by saying, ' My Father worketh hitherto, and I 
 work J.' ' Therefore/ continues the Evangelist, ^ the Jews sought 
 
 ^ St. John V. 21 : b Tlhs ovs OeXci Ccaoiroiel. The quickening the dead is a 
 special attribute of God (Deut. xxxii. 39; i Sam. ii. 6). If our Lord's 
 power of quickening whom He would had referred only to the moral life of 
 man, the statement would not have been less significant. To raise a soul 
 from spiritual death is at least as great a miracle, and as strictly proper to 
 God Almighty, as to raise a dead body. But the CwoTroirja-is here in question, 
 if moral in ver. 25, is physical in ver. 28; our Lord is alluding to His re- 
 cently-performed miracle as an illustration of His power. Ibid. vers. 8, 9. 
 
 ^ St. John V. 28, 29 : ipx^^ai copa, ip fi irdvres ot eV ro7s [jLVTjfidois OLKovaovraL 
 rris (fyoovrjs avTov, Koi iKTropevaovrai, ot ra ayada TroLijaai/T€S, els avdaTaffiv 
 ^ojt)?, ol Se TO. (pavKa irpd^avresj €19 ai/darrao-LV Kpiaecos, 
 
 i St. John V. 17: 6 UaTrjp /xov ecos &pri ipyd^erai, Kay(h ^pyd^ofxai. 'Wie 
 der Vater seit Anbeginn nicht aufgehort habe, zum Heil der Welt zu 
 IV ] N 2 
 
i8o Otcr Lo7^d^s claim to work on the Sabbath 
 
 the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the Sab- 
 bath, but said also that God was His Own Father, making Him- 
 self equal with God k.' Now the Jews were not mistaken as to 
 our Lord's meaning. They knew that the Everlasting God 
 ^neither rests nor is weary;' they knew that if He could slumber 
 but for a moment the universe would collapse into the nothing- 
 ness out of which He has summoned it. They knew that He 
 ' rested on the seventh day ' from the creation of new beings ; 
 but that in maintaining the life of those which already exist. He 
 * worketh hitherto.' They knew that none could associate him- 
 self as did Jesus with this world-sustaining energy of God, who 
 was not himself God. They saw clearly that no one could cite 
 God's example of an uninterrupted energy in nature and provi- 
 dence as a reason for setting aside God's positive law, without 
 also and thereby claiming to be Divine. It did not occur to them 
 that our Lord's words need have implied no more than a resem- 
 blance between His working and the working of the Father. If 
 indeed our Lord had meant nothing more than this. He would 
 not have met the objection urged by the Jews against His break- 
 ing the Sabbath. It would have been no argument against the 
 Jews to have said, that because God's incessant activity is ever 
 working in the universe, therefore a holy Jew might work on 
 uninterruptedly, although he thereby violated the Sabbath day. 
 With equal reason might it have been urged, that because God 
 
 wirken, sondern immer fortwirke bis zur jetzigen Stunde, so mit Nothwen- 
 digkeit und Recht, ungeachtet des Sabbathsgesetzes, auch Er, als der Sohn, 
 Welcher als Solcher in dieser Seiner Wirksamkeit nicht dem Sabbathsgesetze 
 unterthan sein kann, sondern Herr des Sabbaths ist.' (St. Matt. xii. 8 ; 
 St. Mark ii. 28.) Meyer in loc. 
 
 ^ St. John V. 18 : Harcpa XSiov eAeye rhv Qehv, tarov eavrhv iroiuv r^ Qe^. 
 M. Salvador points out the abiding significance of our Lord's language in the 
 opinion of his co-religionists. * Si Ton ne s'attaquait qu'aux traditions et 
 interpretations abusives, c'etait s'en prendre a la jurisprudence du jour, aux 
 docteurs, aux hommes; c'^tait user simplement du droit commun en Israel, et 
 provoquer une rdforme. Mais si Ton se mettait au dessus de I'institution en 
 elle-m^me, si, corame J^sus devant les docteurs, on se proclamait le Maitre 
 absolu du sabhath, dans ce cas, entre circoncis, c'^tait attaquer a la loi, en 
 renverser une des pierres angulaires ; c'dtait imposer au grand Sacrificateur 
 le devoir de faire entendre une voix accusatrice; enfin c'^tait s'elever au 
 dessus du Dieu des Juifs, ou tout-au-moins se pretendre son Egal. Aussi une 
 temoignage dclatant vient a Tg^ppui de cette distinction, et ajoute une preuve 
 k la conformity g^ndrale des (^^atres Evangiles. '' Les Juifs," dit judicieuse- 
 ment l'ap6tre et ^vangdliste Jdfen, "ne poursuivirent pas J^sus, par ce seul 
 motif qu'il violait les ordonnaiices relatives au sabbath. On lui intenta une 
 action par cette autre raisoii ; qu'il se faisait egal a Dieu." ' Salvador, Jdsus- 
 Christ, ii. pp. 80, 81. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
involves His trtce Divinity, 1 8 1 
 
 sees good to take the lives of His creatures, in His mercy no less 
 than in His justice, therefore a religious man might rightfully 
 put to death His tempted or afflicted brother. The Sabbath was 
 a positive precept, but it rested on a moral basis. It had been 
 given by God Himself. Our Lord claims a right to break the 
 Sabbath, because God's ever active Providence is not suspended 
 on that day. Our Lord thus places both His Will and His Power 
 on the level of the Power and Will of the Father. He might 
 have parried the Jewish attack by saying that the miracle of 
 healing the impotent man was a work of God, and that He was 
 Himself but the unresisting organ of a Higher Being. On the 
 Socinian hypothesis He ought to have done so. But He repre- 
 sents the miracle as His own work. He claims distinctly to be 
 Lord of nature, and thus to be equal with the Father in point of 
 operative energy. He makes the same assertion in saying that 
 ' whatsoever things the Father doeth, those things the Son also 
 doeth in like manner 1.' To narrow down these words so as to 
 make them only refer to Christ's imitation of the moral nature 
 of God, is to take a liberty with the text for which it affords no 
 warrant ; it is to make void the plain meaning of Scripture by a 
 sceptical tradition. Our Lord simply and directly asserts that 
 the works of the Father, without any restriction, are, both as to 
 their nature and mode of production, the works of the Son. 
 Certainly our Lord insists very carefully upon the truth that 
 the power which He wielded was derived originally from the 
 Father. It is often difficult to say whether He is speaking, as 
 Man, of the honour of union with Deity and of the graces which 
 flowed from Deity, conferred upon His Manhood ; or whether, 
 as the Everlasting Son, He is describing those natural and 
 eternal Gifts which are inherent in His Godhead, and which He 
 receives from the Father, the Fountain or Source of Deity, not 
 as a matter of grace or favour, but in virtue of His Eternal 
 Generation. As God, * the Son can do nothing of Himself/ and 
 this, '• not from lack of power, but because His Being is insepar- 
 able from That of the Father ^^ It is true of Christ as God in 
 one sense — it is true of Him as Man in another — that ^ as the 
 Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to 
 have life in Himself.' But neither is an absolute harmony of 
 the works of Christ with the Mind and Will of the Father, nor a 
 derivation of the Divine Nature of Christ Itself from the Being 
 
 * St. John V. 19 : h. yap tLV ^Keivos iroifj, ravra kcli 6 Tlus ofxoloos Troie?. 
 J" Euthym. 
 IV] 
 
1 82 Our Lord claims to be One with the Father. 
 
 of the Father by an unbegun and unending Generation, destruc- 
 tive of the force of our Lord's representation of His operative 
 energy as being on a par with that of the Father. 
 
 For, our Lord's real sense is made plain by His subsequent 
 statement that * the Father hath committed all judgment unto 
 the Son ; that all should honour the Son even as they honour 
 the Father^.' This claim is indeed no more than He had 
 already advanced in bidding His followers trust Him and love 
 Him. The obligation of honouring the Son is defined to be just 
 as stringent as the obligation of honouring the Father. What- 
 ever form that honour may take, be it thought, or language, or 
 outward act, or devotion of the affections, or submission of the 
 will, or that union of thought and heart and will into one 
 complex act of self-prostration before Infinite Greatness, which 
 we of the present day usually mean by the term ^adoration,' 
 such honour is due to the Son no less than to the Father. How 
 fearful is such a claim if the Son be only human ; how natural, 
 how moderate, how just, if He is in very deed Divine ! 
 
 (/3) Beyond this assertion of an equal operative Power with 
 the Father, and of an equal right to the homage of mankind, is 
 our Lord's revelation of His absolute Oneness of Essence with 
 the Father. The Jews gathered around Him at the Feast of 
 Dedication in the Porch of Solomon, and pressed Him to tell 
 them whether He was the Christ or not^. Our Lord referred 
 them to the teaching which they had heard, and to the miracles 
 which they had witnessed in vainP ; but He proceeded to say 
 that there were docile and faithful souls whom He terms His 
 'sheep,' and whom He 'knew,' while they too imderstood and 
 followed Him<i. He goes on to insist upon the blessedness of 
 these His true followers. With Him they were secure \ no 
 power on earth or in heaven could 'pluck them out of His 
 Hand^.' A second reason for the blessedness of His sheep 
 
 " St. John V. -22, 23. Meyer in loc. : * In dera richtenden Sohne erscheint 
 der beauftragte Stellvertreter des Vaters, und er ist in so fern (also immer 
 relativ) zu ehren wie der Vater,' But if the honour paid to the Son be merely 
 relative, if He be merely honoured as an Ambassador or delegated Judge, then 
 men do not honour Him as they honour the Father. No identity of language 
 or of outward reverence can atone for a vital difference of principle in this 
 tribute of honour. Moses had been *as a God unto Pharaoh:' he had been 
 God's ambassador and judge among the children of Israel. Does he there- 
 fore claim a 'relative' honour, equal in its outward symptoms, to that paid to 
 God ? And if not, why not ? 
 
 o St. John X. 22, 23. P Ibid. ver. 25. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 27. ' Ibid. ver. 28. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Nature of this Unity, 183 
 
 follows : * My Father which gave them Me is a Greater Power 
 {yifi^ov) than all : and no man is able to pluck them out of My 
 Father's Hands/ In these words our Lord repeats His previous 
 assurance of the security of His sheep, but He gives a different 
 reason for it. He had represented them as * in His own Hand / 
 He now represents them as in the Hand of the Almighty Father. 
 How does He consolidate these two reasons which together 
 assure His ^ sheep' of their security? By distinctly asserting 
 His own oneness with the Father : ' I and My Father are One 
 Thing*/ Now what kind of unity is that which the context 
 obliges us to see in this solemn statement % Is it such a unity 
 as that which our Lord desired for His followers in His in- 
 tercessory prayer ; a unity of spiritual communion, of reciprocal 
 love, of common participation in an imparted, heaven-sent 
 Nature^? Is it a unity of design and co-operation, such as 
 that which, in varying degrees, is shared by all true workers for 
 Godv? How would either of these lower unities sustain the 
 full sense of the context, which represents the Hand of the Son 
 as one with the Hand — that is, with the Love and Power — of 
 the Father, securing to the souls of men an effectual preservation 
 from eternal ruin % A unity like this must be a dynamic unity, 
 as distinct from any mere moral and intellectual union, such as 
 might exist in a real sense between a creature and its God. 
 Deny this dynamic unity, and you destroy the internal con- 
 nexion of the passage 3^. Admit this dynamic unity, and you 
 admit, by necessary implication, a unity of Essence. The Power 
 of the Son, which shields the redeemed from the foes of their 
 
 8 St. John X. 29. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 30 : 'Eycb koX 6 Uar^p %v iafjLci/, For a full explanation of this 
 text see Bishop Beveridge's noble sermon on the Unity of Christ with God 
 the Father, Works, vol. ii. Serm. xxv. See also note D. 
 
 " As in St. John xvii. 11, 22, 23. ▼ I Cor. iii. 8. 
 
 * Meyer in Joh. x. 29 : * Der Vater in dem Sohne ist und wirkt, und daher 
 dieser, als Organ und Triiger [He is, of course, much more than this] der 
 gottlichen Thatigkeit bei AusfUhrung des Messianischen Werks, nicht ge- 
 schieden von Gott [i. e. the Father] nicJit ein zweiter aiisser und neben Gott ist, 
 sondern nach dem Wesen jener Gemeinschaft Eins mit Gott. Gottes Hand 
 ist daher seine Hand in der VoUziehung des Werkes, bei welchem Er Gottes 
 Macht, Liebe u. s. w. handhabt und zur AusfUhrung bringt. Die Einheit ist 
 mithin die der dynamischen Gemeinschaft, wornach der Vater im Sohne ist, 
 und doch grosser als der Sohn, [i. e. as man,] weil Er ihn geweiht und gesandt 
 hat. Die Arianische Fassung von der ethischen Harmonic geniigt nicht, da die 
 Argumentation, ohne die Einheit der Macht (welche Chrys. Euth. Zig. u. V. 
 auch Liicke mit Recht urgiren) zu verstehen, nicht zutrefFen wurde.' This 
 interpretation is remarkable for its scholarly fairness in a writer who sits so 
 loosely to the Catholic beUef in our Lord's Godhead as Meyer. 
 
 IV] 
 
184 Our LorcTs reference to Psalm Ixxxii. 6. 
 
 salvation, is the very Power of the Father ; and this identity of 
 Power is itself the outflow and the manifestation of a Oneness 
 of Nature. Not that at this height of contemplation the Person 
 of the Son, so -distinctly manifested" just now in the work of 
 guarding His redeemed, melts away into any mere aspect or 
 relation of the Divine Being in His dealings with His creatures. 
 As St. Augustine observes on this text, the ^unum' saves us 
 from the Charybdis of Arianism; the ^sumus' is our safeguard 
 against the Scylla of Sabellius. The Son, within the incom- 
 municable unity of God, is still Himself ; He is not the Father, 
 but the Son. Yet this personal subsistence is in the mystery of 
 the Divine Life strictly compatible with Unity of Essence ; — the 
 Father and the Son are one Thing. 
 
 * Intellexerunt Judsei, quod non intelligunt Ariani.' The Jews 
 understood our Lord to assume Divine honours, and proceeded 
 to execute the capital sentence decreed against blasphemy by 
 the Mosaic lawy. His words gave them a fair ground for saying 
 that ^ being Man, He made Himself God^/ Now if our Lord 
 had been in reality only Man, He might have been fairly ex- 
 pected to say so. Whereas He proceeds, as was often His wont, 
 to reason with His opponents upon their own real or assumed 
 grounds, and so to bring them back to a point at which they 
 were forced to draw for themselves the very inference which had 
 just roused their indignation. With this view our Lord points 
 out the application of the word Elohim, to the wicked judges 
 under the Jewish theocracy, in the eighty-second Psalm a. 
 Surely, with this authoritative language before their eyes, His 
 countrymen could not object to His calling Himself the Son of 
 God. And yet He irresistibly implies that His title to Divinity 
 is higher than, and indeed distinct in kind from, that of the 
 Jewish magistrates. If the Jews could tolerate that ascription 
 of a lower and relative divinity to the corrupt officials who, 
 theocratically speaking, represented the Lord Jehovah ; surely, 
 looking to the witness of His works, Divinity could not be 
 denied to One Who so manifestly wielded Divine power as did 
 Jesus ^. Our Lord's argument is thus a minori ad majus ; and 
 He arrives a second time at the assertion which had already 
 given such offence to His countrymen, and which He now 
 repeats in terms expressive of His sharing not merely a dy- 
 namical but an essential unity with the Father : ' The Father is 
 
 y St. John X. 31. ^ Ibid. 33 : Sw, dudpctiiros &y, TroieTs a^avThp @e6v. 
 
 a Ps. Ixxxii. 6. ^ St. John x. 37, 38. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Jews understood our Lord^s meaning, 185 
 
 in Me, and I in Himc/ What the Father is to the Son, the 
 Son is to the Father. The context again forbids us to compare 
 this expression with the phrases which are often used to express 
 the indwelling of God with holy souls, since no moral quality is 
 here in question, but an identity of Power for the performance 
 of superhuman works. Our Lord expresses this truth of His 
 wielding the power of the Father, by asserting His identity of 
 Nature with the Father, which involves His Omnipotence. And 
 the Jews understood Him. He had not retracted what tliey 
 accounted blasphemy, and they again endeavoured to take His 
 lifed. 
 
 It will probably be said that the Church's interpretation of 
 Christ's language in the Porch of Solomon is but an instance of 
 that disposition to materialize spiritual truth, which seems to be 
 so unhappily natural to the mind of man. ' What grossness of 
 apprehension,' it will be urged, ^ is here ! How can you thus 
 confound language which merely asserts the sustained inter- 
 communion of a holy soul with God, and those hard formal 
 scholastic assertions of an identity of essence?' But it is 
 obvious to rejoin that in cases like that before us, language 
 must be morally held to mean what it is understood to mean by 
 those to whom it is addressed. After all, language is designed 
 to convey thought ; and if a speaker perceives that his real mind 
 has not been conveyed by one statement, he is bound to correct 
 the deficiencies of that statement by another. Had our Lord 
 been speaking to populations accustomed to Pantheistic modes 
 of thinking, and insensible to the fundamental distinctness of 
 the Uncreated from all forms of created life. His assertion of 
 His oneness with the Father might perhaps have passed for 
 nothing more than the rapture of a subjective ecstasy, in which 
 the consciousness of the Speaker had been so raised above its 
 ordinary level, that He could hyperbolically describe His sensa- 
 tions as Divine. Had our Lord been an Indian, or an Alex- 
 andrian, or a German mystic, some such interpretation might 
 have been reasonably affixed to His language. Had Christ been 
 a Christian instead of the Author of Christianity, we might, 
 after carefully detaching His words from their context, have 
 even supposed that He was describing the blessed experience of 
 millions of believers ; it being certain that, since the Incarnation, 
 the soul of man is capable of a real union with the All-holy 
 God. Undoubtedly writers like St. Augustine, and many of 
 
 c St. John X. 38 : eV e/xoi 6 Har^p, Kor/bi eV a.vT(^, 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 39: i(r}Tovv ovv iraAiv avrhp Tridaai, 
 IV ] 
 
1 85 Our Lord refers to His P re-existence. 
 
 later date^ do speak of the union between God and the Chris- 
 tian in terms which signally illustrate the loving condescension 
 of God truly present in holy souls, of God's gift of Himself to 
 His redeemed creatures. But the belief of these writers re- 
 specting the Nature of the Most High has placed the phrases 
 of their mystical devotion beyond the reach of a possible 
 misunderstanding. And our Lord was addressing earnest 
 monotheists, keenly alive to the essential distinction between 
 the Life of the Creator and the life of the creature, and re- 
 ligiously jealous of the Divine prerogatives. The Jews did not 
 understand Christ's claim to be One with the Father in any 
 merely moral, spiritual, or mystical sense. Christ did not en- 
 courage them so to understand it. The motive of their in- 
 dignation was not disowned by Him. They believed Him to 
 mean that He was Himself a Divine Person ; and He never 
 repudiated that construction of His language. 
 
 (y) In order however to determine the real sense of our 
 Saviour's claim to be One with the Father, let us ask a simple 
 question. Does it appear that He is recorded to have been con- 
 scious of having existed previously to His Human Life upon this 
 earth*? Suppose that He is only a good man enjoying the highest 
 degree of constant spiritual intercommunion with God, no refer- 
 ences to a Pre-existent Life can be anticipated. There is nothing 
 to warrant such a belief in the Mosaic Revelation, and to have 
 professed it on the soil of Palestine would simply have been 
 taken by the current opinion of the people as a proof of mental 
 derangement. But believe that Christ is the Only-begotten Son 
 of God, manifested in the sphere of sense and time, and clothed 
 in our human nature ; and some references to a consciousness 
 extending backwards through the past into a boundless eternity 
 are only what would naturally be looked for at His hands. 
 
 Let us then listen to Him as He is proclaiming to His 
 countrymen in the temple, * If a man keep My saying, He shall 
 never see death f. ' The Jews exclaim that by such an announce- 
 ment He assumes to be greater than Abraham and the prophets. 
 They indignantly ask, * Whom makest Thou Thyself^' Here as 
 elsewhere our Lord keeps both sides of His relation to the 
 Eternal Father in full view : it is the Father that glorifies His 
 
 « e.g. Thomas k Kempis. Of his teaching respecting the union between God 
 and the devout soul, there is a good summary in Ullmann's Reformers before 
 the Reformation, vol. ii. pp. 139-149. Clarke's transl. 
 
 f St. John viii. 52 : I6.v rts t^v \6yov rhu ifibv T7}pi}ar}, Qdvarov ov fi^ deoo- 
 pr}ffrj us rhv alcava, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
'Before Abraham was, I am! 187 
 
 Manhood, and the Jews would glorify Him too if they were the 
 Father's true children. But it was not their Heavenly Father 
 alone, with whom the Jews were at variance. The earthly 
 ancestor of the Jewish race might be invoked to rebuke his 
 recreant posterity. 'Your Father Abraham rejoiced to see My 
 day, and he saAv it and was glad.' Abraham had seen the day of 
 Messiah by the light of prophecy, and accordingly this statement 
 was a claim on the part of Jesus to be the true Messiah. Of 
 itself such a claim would not have shocked the Jews ; they 
 would have discussed it on its merits. They had latterly looked 
 for a political chief, victorious but human, in their expected 
 Messiah ; they would have welcomed any prospect of realizing 
 their expectations. But they detected a deeper and to them a 
 less welcome meaning in the words of Christ. He had meant, 
 they thought, by His ' Day' something more than the years of 
 His Human Life. At any rate they would ask Him a question, 
 which would at once justify their suspicions or enable Him to 
 clear Himself. ' Thou,' they said to Him, ' art not yet fifty years 
 old, and hast Thou seen AlDraham ? ' Now if our Lord had only 
 claimed to be a human Messiah, such as the Jews of later years 
 had learned to look for, He must have earnestly disavowed any 
 such inference from His words. He might have replied that if 
 Abraham saw Him by the light of prophecy, this did not of itself 
 imply that He was Abraham's contemporary, and so that He 
 had Himself literally seen Abraham. But His actual answer 
 more than justified the most extreme suspicions of His examiners 
 as to His real meaning. ' Jesus said unto them. Verily, verily, I 
 say unto you. Before Abraham was, /am.' In these tremendous 
 v/ords the Speaker institutes a double contrast, in respect both 
 of the duration and of the mode of His existence, between Him- 
 self and the great ancestor of Israel. Up\v *A/3paa/^ y^viaBai. 
 Abraham, then, had come into existence at some given point of 
 time. Abraham did not exist until his parents gave him birth. 
 But, *Eya) ei/xi. Here is simple existence, with no note of 
 beginning or end&. Our Lord says not, * Before Abraham 
 
 e St. John viii. 58. Meyer in loc. : ' Ehe Abraham ward, bin Ich, alter 
 als Abraham's Warden ist meine Existenz.' Stier characterizes our Lord's 
 words as ' a sudden [not to Himself] flash of revelation out of the depths of 
 His own Eternal Consciousness.* That Christ should finally have spoken 
 thus, is not, Stier urges, to be wondered at, on the supposition of this Eternal 
 Consciousness ever abiding with Him. Rather is it wonderful, that He 
 should ordinarily, and as a rule, have restrained it so much. Here too, 
 indeed, He restrains Himself. He does not go on to say, as afterwards in the 
 Great Intercession — tt/jo rov rhv Koa-fiop ehai (St. John xvii. 5). 
 IV] 
 
1 88 Christ speaks of having come down from heaven^ 
 
 was, I was/ but ^I am.' He claims pre-existence indeed, but He 
 does not merely claim pre-existence ; He unveils a conscious- 
 ness of Eternal Being. He speaks as One on Whom time has no 
 effect, and for Whom it has no meaning. He is the I AM of 
 ancient Israel ; He knows no past, as He knows no future ; He 
 is unbeginning, unending Being ; He is the eternal ' Now.' 
 This is the plain sense of His language, and perhaps the most 
 instructive commentary upon its force is to be found in the 
 violent expedients to which Humanitarian writers have been 
 driven in order to evade it h. 
 
 Here again the Jews understood our Lord, and attempted to 
 kill Him j while He, instead of explaining Himself in any sense 
 which would have disarmed their anger, simply withdrew from 
 the temple i. 
 
 With this statement we may compare Christ's references to 
 His pre-existence in His two great sacramental Discourses. 
 Conversing with Nicodemus He describes Himself as the Son of 
 Man Who had come down from heaven, and Who while yet 
 speaking was in heaven k Preaching in the great synagogue of 
 Capernaum, He calls Himself Hhe Bread of Life Which had 
 come down from heaven.' He repeats and expands this descrip- 
 tion of Himself. His pre-existence is the warrant of His life- 
 giving pov/er I The Jews objected that they knew His father 
 and mother, and did not understand His advancing any such 
 claim as this to a Pre-existent Life. Our Lord replied by saying" 
 that no man could come to Him unless taught of God to do so, 
 and then proceeded to re-assert His pre-existence in the same 
 terms as before °^. He pursued His former statement into its 
 mysterious consequences. Since He was the heaven- descended 
 Bread of Life, His Flesh was meat indeed and His Blood was 
 drink indeed '^, They only would have life in them who should 
 
 ^ Cf. Meyer on St. John viii. 58: *Das I'ydi elfii ist aber weder: Ich bin 
 es (der Messias) zu deuten (Faustus Socinus, Paulus, ganz contextwidrig), 
 noch in den Bathschluss Gottes, zu verlegen {Sam. Crell, Grotius, Paulas, 
 B. Crusius), was schon durch das Praes. verboten wird. Nur noch 
 geschichtlich bemerkenswerth ist die von Faustus Socinus auch in das 
 Socinianische Bekenntniss (s. Catech. Racov. ed. Oeder, p. 144, f.) uberge- 
 gangene Auslegung: '^Ehe Abraham, Abraham, d. i. der Vater vieler Volker, 
 wird, bin Ich es, namHch der Messias, das Licht der Welt." Damit ermahne 
 Er die Juden, an Ihn zu glauben, so lange es noch Zeit sei, ehe die Gnade 
 von ihnen genoramen und auf die Heiden ubergetragen werde, wodurch dann 
 Abraham der Vater vieler Volker werde.' 
 
 i St. John viii. 59. ^ ibid. iii. 13. ^ Ibid. vi. 33. 
 
 ™ Ibid. vers. 44-51. ° Ibid. ver. 55. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
and of ascendmg tip to where He was before, 189 
 
 eat this Flesh and drink this Blood «. Life eternal, Kesurrection 
 at the last day p, and His own Presence even now within the 
 soul % would follow upon a due partaking of that heavenly food. 
 When the disciples murmured at this doctrine as a ^ hard say- 
 ing r,' our Lord met their objections by predicting His coming 
 Ascension into heaven as an event which would justify His allu- 
 sions to His pre-existence, no less than to the life-giving virtue 
 of His Manhood. ^ What and if ye shall see the Son of Man 
 ascend up where He was before s]' Again, the reality of our 
 Lord's pre-existence lightens up such mysterious sayings as the 
 following : ^ I know whence I came, and whither I go ; but ye 
 cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go ^ ; ' ^ I am from 
 above : ... I am not of this world ^ ;' ^ If ye believe not that I 
 am He, ye shall die in your sins^;' *I came forth from the 
 Father, and am come into the wofld : again, I leave the 
 world, and go to the Father y.' Once more, how full of solemn 
 significance is that reference to Hhe glory which I had with 
 Thee before the world was 2,' in the great intercession which our 
 Incarnate Saviour offered to the Eternal Father on the eve of 
 His agony ! 
 
 Certainly taken alone, our Lord's allusions to His Pre-existence 
 need not imply His true Divinity. There is indeed no ground 
 for the theory of a Palestinian doctrine of metempsychosis ; and 
 even Strauss shrinks from supposing that the fourth Evangelist 
 makes Jesus the mouthpiece of Alexandrian theories of which a 
 Jewish peasant would never have heard. Arianism however 
 would argue, and with reason, that in some of the passages just 
 
 o St. John vi. 53. P Ibid. ver. 54. 
 
 <i Ibid. ver. 56. "■ Ibid. ver. 60. 
 
 8 Ibid. ver. 62. Strauss thinks it * difficult but admissible' to interpret 
 St. John viii. 58, with the Socinian Crell, of a purely ideal existence in the 
 predetermination of God. He considers it however 'scarcely possible to view 
 the prayer to the Father (St. John xvii. 5) to confirm the ho^a. which Jesus 
 had with Him before the world was, as an entreaty for the communication of 
 a glory predestined for Jesus from eternity.' He adds that the language of 
 Jesus (St. John vi. 62) where He speaks of the Son of Man re-ascending 
 where He was before, apafiaiveiv oirov ^v rh irpSrcpov, is *in its intrinsic mean- 
 ing, as well as in that which is reflected on it from other passages, unequivo- 
 cally significative of actual, not merely of ideal pre-existence.' Leben Jesu, 
 pt. ii. kap. 4. § 65. 
 
 Here, as sometimes elsewhere, Strauss incidentally upholds the natural and 
 Catholic interpretation of the text of the Gospels ; nor are we now concerned 
 with the theory to which he eventually applies it. It may be further ob- 
 served, that Strauss might have at least interpreted St. John viii. 58 by the 
 light of St. John vi. 62. * Ibid. viii. 14. ^ Ibid. ver. 23. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 24. y Ibid. xvi. 28. ^ Ibid. xvii. 5. 
 
 IV] 
 
190 OurLord^s testimony when before the Smihedrin, 
 
 referred to, though not in all, our Lord might conceivably have 
 been speaking of a created, although pre-exi stent, life. Yet if 
 we take these passages in connexion with our Lord's assertion of 
 His being One with the Father, each truth will be seen to sup- 
 port and complete the other. On the one hand, Christ asserts 
 His substantial oneness with Deity, on the other, His distinct 
 pre-exi stent Personality. He might be an inferior and created 
 Being, if He were not thus absolutely One with God. He might 
 be only a saintly man, and, as such, described as an * aspect,' a 
 'manifestation' of the Divine Life, if His language about His 
 pre-existence did not clearly imply that before His birth of 
 Mary He was already a living and superhuman Person. 
 
 If indeed, in His dealings with the multitude, our Lord had 
 been really misunderstood. He had a last opportunity for ex- 
 plaining Himself when He was arraigned before the Sanhedrin. 
 Nothing is more certain than that, whatever was the dominant 
 motive that prompted our Lord's apprehension, the Sanhedrin 
 condemned Him because He claimed Divinity. The members of 
 the court stated this before Pilate. * We have a law, and by our 
 law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son ofGoda' 
 Their language would have been meaningless if they had under- 
 stood by the ' Son of God' nothing more than the ethical or 
 theocratic Sonship of their own ancient kings and saints. If the 
 Jews held Christ to be a false Messiah, a false prophet, a blas- 
 phemer, it was because He claimed literal Divinity. True, the 
 Messiah was to have been Divine. But the Jews had secularized 
 the Messianic promises ; and the Sanhedrin held Jesus Christ 
 to be worthy of death under the terms of the Mosaic law, as ex- 
 pressed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy^. After the witnesses 
 had delivered their various and inconsistent testimonies, the 
 high priest arose and said, ' I adjure Thee by the living God, 
 that Thou tell us whether Thou be the Christ, the Son of God. 
 Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said : nevertheless I say unto 
 you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right 
 hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the 
 high priest rent his clothes, saying. He hath spoken blasphemy^.' 
 
 a St. John xix. 7. * Devant ce procurateur,' observes M. Salvador, ' chacune 
 des parties dmit une parole capitale. Telle fut celle du conseil ou de ses 
 d^Mgu^s : " Nous avons une loi ; d'aprbs cette loi il doit mourir," non parce- 
 qu'il s'est fait Fils de Dieu, selon Texpression familibre a notre langue et a nos 
 prophfetes ; mais parcequ'il se fait ^gal k Dieu, et Dieu meme.* Salvador, 
 J^sus-Christ, ii. p. 204. 
 
 *> Lev. xxiv. 16; Deut. xiii. 5 ; cf. Wilson, Illustration of the Method of 
 Explaining the New Testament, p. 26. '^ St. Matt. xxvi. 63-65. 
 
 [lect. 
 
He is condemned for claiming to be Divine. 191 
 
 The blasphemy did not consist, either in the assumption of the 
 title Son of Man, or in the claim to be Messiah, or even, except- 
 ing indirectly, in that which by the terms of Daniel's prophecy 
 was involved in Messiahship, namely, the commission to judge 
 the world. It was the further claim d to be the Son of God, 
 not in any moral or theocratic, but in the natural sense, at which 
 the high priest and his coadjutors professed to be so deeply 
 shocked. The Jews felt, as our Lord intended, that the Son of 
 Man in Daniel's prophecy could not but be Divine ; they knew 
 what He meant by appropriating such words as applicable to 
 Himself. Just as one body of Jews had endeavoured to destroy 
 Jesus when He called God His Father in such sense as to claim 
 Divinity ® ; and another when He contrasted His Eternal Being 
 with the fleeting life of Abraham in a distant past^; and another 
 when He termed Himself Son of God, and associated Himself 
 with His Father as being dynamically and so substantially One?; 
 — just as they murmured at His pretension to ' have come down 
 from heaven ^/ and detected blasphemy in His authoritative re- 
 mission of sins i; — so when, before His judges, He admitted that 
 He claimed to be the Son of God, all further discussion was at 
 an end. The high priest exclaimed ' Ye have heard His blas- 
 phemy;' and they all condemned Him to be guilty of death. 
 And a very accomplished Jew of our own day, M. Salvador, has 
 shewn that this question of our Lord's Divinity was the real 
 point at issue in that momentous trial. He maintains that 
 a Jew had no logical alternative to belief in the Godhead of 
 Jesus Christ except the imperative duty of putting Him to 
 death ^, 
 
 d Pressens^, J^sus-Christ, pp. 341, 615. ® St. John v. 17, 18. 
 
 ^ Ibid. viii. 58, 59. « Ibid. x. 30, 31, 39. ^ Ibid. vi. 42. 
 
 * St. Matt. ix. 3 ; St. Luke v. 20, 21. 
 
 fe Salvador, Jesus-Christ, ii. pp. 132, 133, 195: 'La question avait un c6t^ 
 politique ou national juif : c'dtait la resistance du Fils de JMarie, dans Jeru- 
 salem m^me, aux ordres et avertissements du grand Conseil. Au point de 
 vue religieux, selon la loi, J^sus se trouvait en cause pour s'etre declare dgal 
 k Dieu et Dieu lui-m^me.' See also the Rev. W. Wilson's Illustration of the 
 Method of Explaining the New Testament, p. 77, sqq. Mr. Wilson shews 
 that the Sanhedrin sincerely believed our Lord to be guilty of the crime of 
 blasphemy, as inseparable, to a Jewish apprehension, from His claim to be 
 Divine. This is argued (i) from the regularity of the proceedings of the 
 Sanhedrin, the length of the trial, and the earnestness and unanimity of the 
 judges. The false witnesses were considered as such by the Sanhedrin : o\ir 
 Lord was condemned on the strength of His Own confession ; (2) from the 
 language of the members of the Sanhedrin before Pilate : ^By our laio He 
 ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God;' (3) from the fact 
 IV] 
 
igz Chrises Self-assertion and His character, 
 
 III. In order to do justice to the significance of onr Lord's 
 language about Himself, let us for a moment reflect on our very 
 fundamental conceptions of His character. There is indeed a 
 certain seeming impropriety in using that word ' character' with 
 respect to Jesus Christ at all. For in modern language 
 * character' generally implies the predominance or the absence 
 of some side or sides of that great whole, which we picture to 
 ourselves in the background of each individual man as the true 
 and complete ideal of human nature. This predominance or 
 absence of particular traits or faculties, this precise combination 
 of active or of passive qualities, determines the moral flavour of 
 each individual life, and constitutes character. Character is 
 that whereby the individual is marked off from the presumed 
 standard or level of typical manhood. Yet the closest analysis 
 of the actual Human Life of Jesus reveals a moral Portrait not 
 only unlike any that men have witnessed before or since, but 
 especially remarkable in that it presents an equally balanced and 
 entirely harmonious representation of all the normal elements of 
 our perfected moral nature 1. Still, we may dare to ask the 
 question : What are the features in that perfectly harmonious 
 moral Life, upon which the reverence and the love of Christians 
 dwells most constantly, most thankfully, most enthusiastically % 
 
 I. If then on such a subject I may utter a truism without 
 irreverence, I say first of all that Jesus Christ was sincere. He 
 possessed that one indispensable qualification for any teacher, 
 specially for a teacher of religion : He believed in what He said, 
 without reserve ; and He said what He believed, without regard 
 to consequences. Material error is very pardonable, if it be 
 error which in good faith believes itself to be truth. But evident 
 insincerity we cannot pardon ; we cannot regard with any other 
 
 that the members of the Sanhedrin had no material object to gain by pro- 
 nouncing Jesus guilty, without being persuaded of His criminahty in claiming 
 to be a Divine Person. Mr. Wilson fortifies these considerations by appeal- 
 ing to our Lord's silence, to St. Peter's address to his countrymen in Actsiii. 
 14-17, and to the general conduct of the Jewish people. 
 
 ' Young, Christ of History, p. 217 : 'The difficulty which we chiefly feel 
 in dealing with the character of Christ, as it unfolded itself before men, 
 arises from its absolute perfection. On this very account it is less fitted to 
 arrest observation. A single excellence unusually developed, though in the 
 neighbourhood of great faults, is instantly and universally attractive. Per- 
 fect symmetry, on the other hand, does not startle, and is hidden from 
 common and casual observers. But it is this which belongs emphatically to 
 the Christ of the Gospels ; and we distinguish in Him at each moment that 
 precise manifestation which is most natural and most right.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Sincerity of yesus Christ, 1 93 
 
 sentiment than that of indignation the conscious propagation of 
 what is known to be false, or even to be exaggerated. If however 
 the sincerity of our Lord could be reasonably called in question, 
 it might suffice, among the various facts which so irresistibly 
 establish it, to point to His dealings with persons who followed 
 and trusted Him. It is easy to denounce the errors of men who 
 oppose us ; but it is difficult to be always perfectly outspoken 
 with those who love us, or who look up to us, or whose services 
 may be of use to us, and who may be alienated by our out- 
 spokenness. Now Jesus Christ does not merely drag forth to 
 the light of day the hidden motives of His powerful adversaries, 
 that He may exhibit them with so mercifully implacable an 
 accuracy, in all their baseness and pretension. He exposes, with 
 equal impartiality, the weakness, or the unreality, or the self- 
 deception of others who already regard Him with affection or 
 who desire to espouse His cause. A disciple addresses Him as 
 ' Good Master.' The address was in itself sufficiently justifiable ; 
 but our Lord observed that the speaker had used it in an unreal 
 and conventional manner. In order to mark His displeasure He 
 sharply asked, ^ Why callest thou Me Good % There is none good 
 but One, that is, God "i.' A multitude which He has fed miracu- 
 lously returns to seek Him on the following day ; but instead 
 of silently accepting this tacit proof of His popular power. He 
 observes, ^ Ye seek Me, not because ye saw the miracles, but 
 because ye did eat of the loaves and were filled ^.' On another 
 occasion, we are told, * there went great multitudes with Him.' 
 He turns, warns them that all human affections must be sacrificed 
 to His service, and that none could be His disciple who does not 
 take up the cross^. He solemnly bids men 'count the cost' before 
 they 'build the tower' of discipleshipP. He is on the point of being 
 deserted by all, and an Apostle protests with fervid exaggeration 
 that he is ready to go with Him to prison or to death. But our 
 Lord, instead of at once welcoming the affection which dictated 
 this protestation, pauses to shew Simon Peter how little he really 
 knew of the weakness of his own hearts. With the woman of 
 Samaria, with Simon the Pharisee, with the Jews in the temple, 
 with the rich young man, it is ever the same ; Christ cannot 
 flatter, He cannot disguise. He cannot but set forth truth in its ^^^ 
 limpid purity i'. Such was His moral attitude throughout : ^\np/^^'^\ 
 
 ™ St. Mark x. i8. " St. John vi. 26. <> St. Luke xiv.j^6;/2 7.'- ^ 
 
 P Ibid. ver. 28. q St. John xiii. 37, 38. 
 
 ' Cf. Newman, Parochial Sermons, vol. v. p. 37, serm. 3: 'Unrea|'Words.' 
 IV] o \^ 
 
194 Unselfishness of Jesus Christ, 
 
 cerity was the mainspring of His whole thought and action ; and 
 when He stood before His judges He could exclaim, in this as in 
 a wider sense, ^ To this end was I born, and for this cause came 
 I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth «.' 
 Surely this sincerity of our Holy Saviour is even at this hour 
 a main secret of His attractive power. Men, we know, may 
 flatter and deceive, till at length the soul grows sick and weary 
 of a world, which Truth in her stern simplicity might some- 
 times seem to have abandoned. But Jesus Christ, speaking to us 
 from the Gospel pages, or speaking in the secret chambers of 
 conscience, is a Monitor Whom we can trust to tell us the un- 
 welcome but wholesome truth ; and could we conceive of Him 
 as false, He would no longer be Himself in our thought ; He 
 would not be changed ; He would simply have disappeared \ 
 
 2. A second moral truism : Jesus Christ was unselfish. His 
 Life was a prolonged act of Self-sacrifice ; and sacrifice of self is 
 the practical expression and measure of unselfishness. It might 
 have seemed that where there was no sin to be curbed or worn 
 away by sorrow and pain, there room might have been found for 
 a lawful measure of self-satisfaction. But * even Christ pleased 
 not Himself.' He ' sought not His Own glory ;' He * came not 
 to do His Own will^.' His Body and His Soul, with all the 
 faculties, the activities, the latent powers of each, were offered 
 to the Divine Will. His friends. His relatives. His mother and 
 His home. His pleasure, His reputation. His repose, were all 
 abandoned for the glory of God and for the good of His 
 brethren. His Self-sacrifice included the whole range of His 
 human thought and affection and action ; it lasted throughout 
 His Life ; its highest expression was His Death upon the Cross. 
 Those who believe Him to have been merely a man endowed 
 with the power of working miracles, or even only with the 
 power of wielding vast moral influence over masses of men, 
 cannot but recognise the rare loveliness and sublimity of a Life 
 in which great powers were consciously possessed, yet were 
 
 « St. John xviii. 37. 
 
 * Felix, J^sus-Christ, p. 316; Channing, Works, ii. 55 : 'When I trace 
 the unaffected majesty which runs through the life of Jesus, and see Him 
 never falling below His sublime claims amidst poverty, and scorn, and in His 
 last agony, I have a feeHng of the reality of His character which I cannot ex- 
 press. I feel that the Jewish carpenter could no more have conceived and 
 sustained this character under motives of imposture, than an infant's arm 
 could repeat the deeds of Hercules, or his unawakened intellect comprehend 
 and rival the matchless works of genius.' 
 
 « Rom. XV. 3 ; St. John v. 30, vi. 38 ; St. Matt. xxvi. 39. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Htcmility of Jesus Christ, 195 
 
 never exercised for those objects which the selfish instinct of 
 ordinary men would naturally pursue. It is this disinterested- 
 ness ; this devotion to the real interests of humankind ; this 
 radical antagonism of His whole character to that deepseated 
 selfishness, which in our better moments we men hate in our- 
 selves and which we always hate in others ; — it is this complete 
 renunciation of all that has no object beyond self, which has won 
 to Jesus Christ the heart of mankind. In Jesus Christ we hail 
 the One Friend Who loves perfectly ; Who expresses perfect 
 love by the utter surrender of Self ; Who loves even unto death. 
 In Jesus Christ we greet the Good Shepherd of humanity ; He 
 is the Good Shepherd under Whose care we can lack nothing, 
 and Whose glory it is that He ^giveth His Life for the sheep ^.' 
 
 3. A third moral truism : Jesus Christ was humble. He might 
 have appeared, even to human eyes, as ' One naturally con- 
 tented with obscurity ; wanting the restless desire for eminence 
 and distinction which is so common in great men ; hating to 
 put forward personal claims ; disliking competition and dis- 
 putes who should be greatest ; . . . fond of what is simple and 
 homely, of children, and poor people y.' It might have almost 
 seemed as if His preternatural powers were a source of distress 
 and embarrassment to Him ; so eager was He to economize 
 their exercise and to veil them from the eyes of men. He was 
 particularly careful that His miracles should not add to His repu- 
 tation z. Again and again He very earnestly enjoined silence 
 on those who were the subjects of His miraculous cures a. He 
 would not gratify persons whose motive in seeking His com- 
 pany was a vain curiosity to see the proofs of His power b. 
 By this humility is Jesus Christ most emphatically distinguished 
 from the philosophers of the ancient world. Whatever else 
 they may have been, they were not humble. But Jesus Christ 
 loses His individuality if you separate Him in thought for one 
 moment from His ' great humility.' His humility is the key to 
 His whole life; it is the measuring-line whereby His actions, His 
 sufferings. His words. His very movements must be meted in 
 order to be understood. ' Learn of Me,' He says, ^ for I am meek 
 and lowly of heart ; and ye shall find rest unto your souls «.' 
 
 But what becomes of these integral features of His character 
 
 * St. John X. II. y Ecce Homo, pp. 178, 179. 
 
 ^ St. Luke viii. 51. 
 
 "■ St. Matt. ix. 30: kvcPpifJL'^aaTo; xii. 16: kircTiixrjffcv avrois. 
 
 ^ St. Mark viii. n, 12 ; St. Matt. xvi. i, 4 ; St. Luke xi. 16 ; St. John 
 vi. 30. c St. Matt. xi. 29. 
 
 IV] 2 
 
196 Is yesus Christ humble^ if He is not Gob? 
 
 if, after considering the language which He actually used about 
 Himself, we should go on to deny that He is God ] 
 
 Is He, if He be not God, really humble % Is that reiterated 
 Self-assertion, to the accents of which we have been listening 
 this morning, consistent with any known form of creaturely 
 humility'? Can Jesus thus bid us believe in Him, love Him, 
 obey Him, live by Him, live for Him; can He thus claim to 
 be the universal Teacher and the universal Judge, the Way, the 
 Truth, the Life of humanity, — if He be indeed only man? 
 What is humility but the honest recognition of truth respect- 
 ing self? Could any mere man claim that place in thought, 
 in society, in history, that authority over conscience, that rela- 
 tionship to the Most High; could he claim such powers and 
 duties, such a position, and such prerogatives as are claimed 
 by Jesus Christ, and yet be justly deemed * meek and lowly 
 of heart ]' If Christ is God as well as Man, His language falls 
 into its place, and all is intelligible ; but if you deny His 
 Divinity, you must conclude that some of the most precious 
 sayings in the Gospel are but the outbreak of a preposterous 
 self-laudation ; they might well seem to breathe the very spirit 
 of another Lucifer d. 
 
 If Jesus Christ be not God, is He really unselfish? He bids 
 men make Himself the centre of their affections and their 
 thoughts ; and when God does this He is but recalling man 
 to that which is man's proper duty, to the true direction and 
 law of man's being. But deny Christ's Divinity, and what will 
 you say of the disinterestedness of His perpetual self-assertion e] 
 
 d Mr. F. W. Newman, Phases of Faith, p. 154 : 'When I find his high 
 satisfaction at all personal recognition and bowing before his individuality, I 
 almost doubt whether, if one wished to draw the character of a vain and 
 vacillating pretender, it would be possible to draw anything nearer to the 
 purpose than this/ (p. 158), 'I can no longer give the same human reverence 
 as before to one who has been seduced into vanity so egregious [as to claim 
 to be the Son of Man].' So our Lord's parabolical sayings are said (p. 153) 
 to 'indicate vanity and incipient sacerdotalism;' (p. I57)» His tone, in dealing 
 with the rich young man, is 'magisterial, decisive, and final,' so as to keep up 
 *his own ostentation of omniscience;' His precept bidding men receive 
 those whom He sent (Matt. x. 40) suggests the observation that inasmuch 
 as the disciples 'had no claims whatever, intrinsic or extrinsic, to reverence, 
 it appears to me a very extravagant and fanatical sentiment thus to couple 
 the favour or wrath of God with their reception or rejection' (p. 157). 
 Compare Felix, Jesus-Christ, pp. 301-322. 
 
 6 M. Renan accounts for our Lord's self-assertion in the following manner. 
 'II ne prechait pas ses opinions, il se prechait lui-meme. Souvent des ^mes 
 trfes-grandes et trbs-desinteressees presentent, associe k beaucoup d'elevation, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Is testes Christ U7iselfish, if He is not Gob? 197 
 
 What matters it that He teaches the * enthusiasm of humanity,' 
 if that enthusiasm was after all to centre in a merely human 
 self, and to surround His human presence with a tribute of 
 superhuman honour % What avails it that He proclaims the law 
 of self-renouncement, if He is Himself thus guilty of its signal 
 infraction % Nay, for what generous purpose can He still be held 
 to have died upon the Cross % The Cross is indeed for Christians 
 the symbol and the throne of a boundless Love ; but it is only 
 such to those who believe in the Divinity of the Crucified. 
 Deny the truth of Christ's account of Himself ; deny the over- 
 whelming moral necessity for His perpetual Self-assertion ; and 
 His Death may assume another aspect. For He plainly courted 
 death by His last denunciations against the Pharisees, and by 
 His presence at a critical moment in Jerusalem. That He was 
 thus voluntarily slain and has redeemed us by His Blood is indeed 
 the theme of the praises which Christians daily offer Him on 
 earth and in paradise. But if He be not the Divine Victim 
 freely offering Himself for men upon the altar of the Cross, may 
 He not be what Christian lips cannot force themselves to utter? 
 You urge that in any case He would be a man freely devoting 
 himself for truth and goodness. But it is precisely here that 
 His excessive self-assertion would impair our confidence in the 
 purity of His motive. Is not self-sacrifice, even when pushed 
 to the last extremity, a suspected and tainted thing, when it 
 goes hand in hand with a consistent effort to give unwarranted 
 prominence to self? Have not men ere now even risked death 
 for the selfish, albeit unsubstantial, object of a posthumous 
 renown^? If Jesus was merely man, and His death no more 
 
 ce caractbre de perpetuelle attention a elles-m^mes, et d^ extreme susceptihilite 
 personnelle, qui en general est le propre des femmes. Leur persuasion que 
 Dieu est en elles et s'occupe perp^tuellement d'elles est si forte qu'elles ne 
 craignent nuUement de s'imposer aux autres.* (Vie de Jdsus, p. 76.) Ac- 
 cordingly, we are told that ' J^sus ne doit pas ^tre jugd sur la regie de nos 
 petites convenances. L'admiration de ses disciples le ddbordait et I'entral- 
 nait. II est Evident que le titre de Rabbi, dont il sMtait d'abord contents, 
 ne lui suffisait plus ; le titre meme de prophete ou d' envoy d de Dieu ne r^- 
 pondait plus k sa pens^e. La position qu'il s'attribuait ^tait celle d'un etre 
 surhumain, et il voulait qu'on le regard^t comme ayant avec Dieu un rapport 
 plus ^lev^ que celui des autres hommes.' (Vie de Jdsus, p. 246.) 
 
 ^ Newman, Phases, p. 158 : 'When he had resolved to claim Messiahship 
 publicly, one of two results was inevitable, if that claim was ill-founded : — 
 viz., either he must have become an impostor in order to screen his weak- 
 ness ; or he must have retracted his pretensions amid much humiliation and 
 have retired into privacy to learn sober wisdom. From these alternatives there 
 was escape only hy deaths and upon death Jesus purposely rushed.* (p. 161.) 
 IV] 
 
igS Is Jesus Christ sincere, if He is not God ? 
 
 than the fitting close, the supreme effort of a life consistently 
 devoted to the assertion of self, has He not 'succeeded beyond 
 the dreams of the most delirious votary of fame 1 If the blood 
 of a merely human Christ was the j^rice which was deliberately 
 paid for glory on Mount Calvary, then it is certain that the 
 sufferer has had his reward. But at least he died, only as others 
 have died, who have sought and found at the hands of their 
 fellow-men, in death as in life, a tribute of sympathy, of ad- 
 miration, of honour. And we owe to such a sufferer nothing 
 beyond the compassionate silence wherewith charity would fain 
 veil the violence of selfishness, robed in her garments, and 
 seeking to share her glory and her power, while false to the very 
 vital principle which makes her what she is?.' 
 
 Once more, if Jesus Christ is not God, can we even say that 
 He is sin cereal 1 Let us suppose that it were granted, as it is by 
 no means granted, that Jesus Christ nowhere asserts His literal 
 Godhead i. Let us suppose that He was after all merely man, 
 and had never meant to do more than describe, in the language 
 of mysticism, the intertwining of His human Soul with the Spirit 
 
 * Does my friend deny that the death of .Tesus was wilfully incurred ? The 
 "orthodox" not merely admit but maintain it. Their creed justifies it by 
 the doctrine that his death was a " sacrifice" so pleasing to God as to expiate 
 the sins of the world. This honestly meets the objections to self-destruction ; 
 for how better could life be used than by laying it down for such a prize.' 
 
 s Fdlix, J^sus-Christ, p. 314 ; Young, The Christ of History, p. 229. 
 
 ^ Newman, Phases, p. 154 : 'It sometimes seems to me the picture of a 
 conscious and wilful impostor. His general character is too high for this ; 
 and I therefore make deductions from the account. Still I do not see how 
 the present narrative could have grown up, if he had been really simple and 
 straightforward and not perverted by his essentially false position.' Mr. New- 
 man is complaining that our Lord ' does not honestly and plainly renounce 
 pretension to miracle, as Mr. Martineau would,' but his language obviously 
 suggests a wider application, (p. 158.) * I feel assured, a priori, that such 
 presumption [as that of claiming to be the Son of Man of Dan. vii.] must 
 have entangled him into evasions and insincerities, which naturally end in 
 crookedness of conscience and real imposture, however noble a man's com- 
 mencement, and however unshrinking his sacrifice of goods and ease and 
 life.' 
 
 i M. Renan indeed says, * J^sus n'enonce pas un moment I'ide'e sacrilege 
 qu'il soit Dieu.' (Vie de Jesus, p. 75.) Yet, 'on ne nie pas qu'il y eut dans 
 les affirmations de J^sus le germe de la doctrine qui devait plus tard faire de 
 lui une hypostase divine.' (Ibid. p. 247.) M. Renan even explains our 
 Lord's language as to His Person on the ground that ' I'id^alisme transcend- 
 ant de Jdsus ne lui permit jamais d'avoir une notion bien claire de sa propre 
 personnalitd. II est son Pere^ son Pere est lui.'' (p. 244.) In other words, 
 our Lord did affirm His Divinity, but only because He was, unconsciously 
 perhaps, a Pantheist ! 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Did Christ explain away His claims ? 199 
 
 of God, in a communion so deep and absorbing as to obliterate 
 His sense of distinct human personality. Let this, I say, be 
 supposed to have been His meaning, and let His sincerity be 
 taken for granted. Who then shall anticipate the horror of His 
 soul or the fire of His words, when He is once made aware of 
 the terrible misapprehension to which his language has given 
 rise in the minds around Him % ' Thou being a man, makest 
 Thyself God.' The charge was literally true : being human. He 
 did make Himself God. Christians believe that He only ^made' 
 Himself that which He is. But if He is not God, where does 
 He make any adequate repudiation of a construction of His 
 words so utterly derogatory to the great Creator, so necessarily 
 abhorrent to a good man's thought % 
 
 Is it urged that on one occasion He ' explained His claim to 
 Divinity by a quotation which implied that He shared that claim 
 with the chiefs of the theocracy ? ' It has already been shewn 
 that by that quotation our Lord only deprecated immediate 
 violence, and claimed a hearing for language which the Jews 
 themselves regarded as not merely alloAvable, but sacred. The 
 quotation justified His language only, and not His full meaning, 
 which, upon gaining the ear of the people. He again proceeded 
 to assert. Is it contended that in such sayings as that addressed 
 to His disciples, 'My Father is greater than I^/ He abandoned 
 any pretension to be a Person internal to the Essential Life of 
 God % It may sufiice to reply, that this saying can have no 
 such force, if its application be restricted, as the Latin Fathers 
 do restrict it, and with great apparent probability, to our Lord's 
 Manhood. But even if our Lord is here speaking, as the 
 Greeks generally maintain, of His essential Deity, His Words 
 still express very exactly a truth which is recognised and re- 
 quired by the Catholic doctrine. The Subordination of the 
 Everlasting Son to the Everlasting Father is strictly compatible 
 with the Son's absolute Divinity; it is abundantly implied in 
 our Lord's language ; and it is an integral element of the 
 ancient doctrine which steadily represents the Father as Alone 
 
 ^ St. John xiv. 28 : ivop^voixai irpos rov Uarepa' Sri 6 Har'fjp fiov fiii^cop fiov 
 €(TTi. For Patristic arguments against the Arian abuse of this text, see Suicer, 
 Thes. ii. p. 1368. The ijl€i^ov6t7}s of the Father is referred by St. Athana- 
 sius, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Chrysostom, St. Basil, and St. Hilary, to 
 His being the tlnbegotten One ; by St., Cyril, St. Augustine (in loo. ; de 
 Trin. i. 7 ; Enchiridion, x.), St. Ambrose (tom. iii. p. 795), St. Leo (Ep. ad 
 Flav. xxviii. c. 4), to the Son's humiliation as incarnate. See the very full 
 but unsatisfactory note of Meyer in loo. 
 IV] 
 
200 yesus Christ not sincere, if He is not God, 
 
 Unoriginate, the Fount of Deity in tlie Eternal Life of the 
 Ever-blessed Trinity^. 
 
 But surely an admission on the part of one in whom men saw 
 nothing more than a fellow-creature, that the Everlasting God 
 was ^greater' than himself, would fail to satisfy a thoughtful 
 listener that no claim to Divinity was advanced by the speaker. 
 Such an admission presupposes some assertion to which it stands 
 in the relation of a necessary qualification. If any good man of 
 our acquaintance should announce that God was * greater' than 
 himself, should we not hold him to be guilty of something worse 
 than a stupid truism "^ % Would he not seem to imply that he 
 was not really a creature of God's hand 1 Would not his words 
 go to suggest that the notion of his absolute equality with God 
 was not to be dismissed as altogether out of the question? 
 Should we not peremptorily remind him that the life of man is 
 related to the Life of God, not as the less to the greater, but as 
 the created to the Uncreated, and that it is an impertinent 
 irreverence to admit superiority of rank, where the real truth can 
 only be expressed by an assertion of radical difference of natures'? 
 And assuredly a sane and honest man, who had been accused of 
 associating himself with the Supreme Being, could not content 
 himself with admitting that God was greater than himself. 
 Knowing himself to be only human, would he not insist again and 
 again, with passionate fervour, upon the incommunicable glory 
 of the great Creator ? Would not a purely human Christ have 
 anticipated the burning words of the indignant Apostles at the 
 gate of Lystra 1 Far more Avelcome to human virtue most surely 
 it would have been, to be accused of blasphemy for meaning what 
 
 1 Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. iv. i. i : * Decretum illud Synodi Nicaense, quo 
 statyiitur Filium Dei esse 0€oj/ iK ©eoD, Deum de Deo, suo calculo com- 
 probS,runt doctores Catholici, turn qui ante cum qui post Synodum illam 
 scripsere. Nam illi omnes uno ore docuerunt naturam perfectionesque 
 divinas, Patri Filioque competere non collateral iter aut coordinate, sed sub- 
 ordinate ; hoc est, Filium eandem quidem naturam divinam cum Patre com- 
 munem habere, sed a Patre communicatam ; ita scilicet ut Pater solus naturam 
 illam divinam a se habeat, sive k nullo alio, Filius autem a, Patre ; proinde 
 Pater, Diviniiatis quce in Filio est, fons, origo ac principium sit.^ See Bull's 
 remarks on the fundamental character of the error of calling the Son abroQ^os, 
 as though He were not begotten of the Father, Ibid. iv. i. 7. Also Petavius, 
 De Deo Deique proprietatibus, ii. 3, 6. Compare Hooker's Works, vol. i., 
 Keble's Preface, p. Ixxxi. When St. Athanasius calls our Lord avr6d€os, 
 avTO(ro(pia, &c., avrbs has the sense of 'full reality' as distinct from that of 
 * Self-origination ;' the idea is excluded that He had only a measure of Wisdom 
 or Divinity. See Petavius de Trin. vii. 11. 
 
 ™ Coleridge, Table-talk, p. 25. 
 
 [lect. 
 
Insincerity of the Christ of M. Renan. io\ 
 
 was never meant, than to be literally supposed to mean it. For 
 indeed there are occasions when silence is impossible to a sincere 
 souln. Especially is this the case when acquiescence in falsehood 
 is likely to gain personal reputation, when connivance at a mis- 
 apprehension may aggrandize self, ever so slightly, at the cost of 
 others. How would the sincerity of a human teacher deserve 
 the name, if, passively, without repudiation, without protest, he 
 should allow language expressive whether of his moral elevation 
 or of his mystical devotion to be popularly construed into a 
 public claim to share the Eank and Name of the great God in 
 heaven % 
 
 It is here that the so-termed historical Christ of M. Renan, 
 who, as we are informed, is still the moral chief of humanity o 
 would appear even to our natural Englisli sense of honesty to be 
 involved in serious moral difficulties. M. Renan indeed assures 
 tis, somewhat eagerly, that there are many standards of sincerity Pj 
 
 >» See Dean Alford on St. John xix. 9. 
 
 o Renan, Vie de Jdsus, p. 457 : ' Cette sublime personne, qui cliaque 
 jour preside encore au destin du monde, il est permis de I'appeler divine, non 
 en ce sens que J^sus ait absorb^ tout le divin, ou lui ait ^td ad^quat (pour 
 employer I'expression de la scolastique) mais en ce sens que Jdsus est 
 I'individu qui a fait faire a son espdce le plus grand pas vers le divin. 
 L'humanitd dans son ensemble offre un assemblage d'etres bas, dgoistes, 
 supdrieurs k I'animal en cela seul que leur dgoisme est plus r^fldchi. Mais, 
 au milieu de cette uniforme vulgarity, des colonnes s'dievent vers le ciel et 
 attestent une plus noble destinde. Jdsus est la plus haute de ces colonnes 
 qui montrent a I'homme d'oti il vient, et oh il doit tendre. En lui s'est con- 
 dens^ tout ce qu'il y a de bon et d'6le\4 dans notre nature.' On the other 
 hand, M. Renan is not quite consistent with himself, as he is of opinion that 
 certain Pagans and unbelievers w^ere in some respects superior to our Lord. 
 ' L'honnete et suave Marc-Aurfele, I'humble et doux Spinoza, nayant pas 
 cru au miracle, ont ete exempts de quelques erreurs que Jesus partagea.* 
 (Ibid. p. 451.) Moreover, this superiority to our Lord seems to be shared 
 by that advanced school of sceptical enquirers to which M. Renan himself 
 belongs. ' Par notre extreme ddlicatesse dans I'emploi des moyens de con- 
 viction, par notre sincerite ahsolue et notre amour desinteresse de Videe pure, 
 nous avons fondd, nous tous qui avons voud notre vie a la science, un nouvel 
 ideal de moralite.'' (Ibid.) Indeed, as regards our Lord, M. Renan suggests 
 that ' il est probable que beaucoup de ses fautes ont dt^ dissimulees." (Ibid, 
 p. 458.) 
 
 p Ibid. p. 252 : 'Pour nous, races profouddment sdrieuses, la conviction 
 signifie la sinc^rit^ avec soi-meme. Mais la sincdritd avec soi-m§me n'a pas 
 beaucoup de sens chez les peuples orientaux, peu habitues aux delicatesses 
 de Tesprit critique. Bonne foi et imposture sont des mots qui, dans notre 
 conscience rigide, s'opposent comme deux termes inconciliables. En Orient, 
 il y a de I'un a Tautre mille fuites et mille detours. Les auteurs de livres 
 apocryphes (de ''Daniel,'* d'" Henoch," par exemple), hommes si exalt^s, 
 cnmmettaient pour leur cause, et bien certainement sans ombre de scrupule, 
 IV] 
 
202 Moral defects of the Hzmianitarian Christ, 
 
 that is to say, that it is possible, under certain circumstances, to 
 acquiesce knowingly in what is false, while yet being, in some 
 transcendental sense, sincere. Thus, just as the Christ of 
 M. Renan can permit the raising of Lazarus to look like a 
 miracle, while he must know that the whole episode has been 
 a matter of previous arrangement <i, sa he can apparently use 
 language which is generally understood to claim Divinity, with- 
 out being bound to explain that he is altogether human r. The 
 'ideal of humanity' contents himself, it appears, with a lower 
 measure, so to call it, of sincerity; and while we are scarcely 
 embarrassed by the enquiry whether such sincerity is sincere or 
 
 un acte que nous appellerions un faux. La v^ritd mat^rielle a trbs-peu de 
 prix pour I'oriental; il voit tout k travers ses id^es, ses intdrets, ses passions. 
 L'histoire est impossible, si Ton n'admet hautement qyHil y a pour la sincerite 
 plusieurs mesures.* 
 
 q M. Renan introduces his account of the resurrection of Lazarus by ob- 
 serving that • les amis de J^sus d^siraient un grand miracle qui frapp^t vive- 
 ment I'incr^dulit^ hidrosolymite. La resurrection d'un homme connu h, 
 Jerusalem dut paraltre ce qu'il y avait de plus convaincant. II faut se rap- 
 peler ici que la condition essentielle de la vraie critique est de comprendre la 
 diversity des temps, et de se d^pouiller des repugnances instinctives qui sont 
 le fruit d'une Education purement raisonnable. II faut se rappeler aussi que 
 dans cette ville impure et pesante de Jerusalem Jesus rCetait plus lui-meme. 
 Sa conscience, par la faute des hommes et rion par la sienne, avait perdu 
 quelque chose de sa limpidite prlmordiale* (Vie de J^sus, p. 359.) Under 
 these circumstances, * il se passa k B^thanie quelque chose qui fut regard^ 
 comme une resurrection.* (p. 360.) * Peut-etre Lazare, pale encore de sa 
 maladie, se fit-il entourer de bandelettes comme un mort, et enfermer dans 
 son tombeau de famille. . . .Tdsus d^sira voir encore une fois celui qu'il avait 
 aime, et, la pierre ayant 6\.i e'cart^e, Lazare sortit avec ses bandelettes et la 
 tite entouree d'un suaire. Cette apparition dut naturellement dtre regardee 
 par tout le monde comme une resurrection. Lafoi ne connalt d'autre loi que 
 
 I'interet de ce qu'elle croit le vrai Quant k Jesus, il n'etait pas plus 
 
 maitre que saint Bernard, que saint FraTi9ois d' Assise de mod^rer Favidite de 
 la foule et de ses propres disciples pour le merveilleux. La mort, d'ailleurs, 
 allait dans quelques jours lui rendre sa liberie divine, et Varracher aux 
 fatales necessites d'un role qui chaque jour devenait plus exigeant, plus difficile 
 d soutenir.' (p. 363.) 
 
 ' Sometimes M. Renan endeavours to avoid this conclusion by representing 
 our Lord's self-proclamation as being in truth the result of a vain self-sur- 
 render to the fanatical adulation of His followers, the reiteration of which in 
 the end deceived Himself. (Vie de Jesus, p. 139): 'Naturellement, plus on 
 croyait en lui, plus il croyait en lui-m^me.* Accordingly (p. 240) ' sa legende 
 (i.e. the account given of Him in the Gospels and in the Apostles* Creed, 
 and specially the doctrine of His Divinity) etait le fruit d'une grande conspi- 
 ration toute spontanee et s^elahorait autour de lui de son vivant.' Thus 
 (p. 238) the Christ of M. Renan first allows himself to be falsely called the 
 Son of David, and then ' il finit, ce semble, par y prendre plaisir.* Cf. p. 297, 
 note. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
* Christies, si non Deus, non bonus! 203 
 
 not, we cannot hesitate to observe that it is certainly consistent 
 neither with real humility nor with real unselfishness s. 
 
 Thus our Lord's human glory fades before our eyes when we 
 attempt to conceive of it apart from the truth of His Divinity. 
 He is only perfect as Man, because He is truly God. If He is 
 not God, He is not a humble or an unselfish man. Nay, He is 
 not even sincere \ unless indeed we have recourse to a supposi- 
 tion upon which the most desperate of His modern opponents 
 have not yet ventured, and say with His jealous kinsmen in the 
 early days of His ministry, that He was beside Himself*. Cer- 
 tainly it would seem that there must have been strange method 
 in a madness which could command the adoration of the civilized 
 world ; nor would any sucli supposition be seriously entertained 
 by those who know under what conditions the very lowest forms 
 of moral influence are at all possible. The choice really lies 
 between the hypothesis of conscious and culpable insincerity, 
 and the belief that Jesus speaks literal truth and must be taken 
 at His word ". 
 
 You complain that this is one of those alternatives which 
 orthodoxy is wont to substitute for less violent arguments, and 
 from the exigencies of which you piously recoil % But under 
 certain circumstances such alternatives are legitimate guides to 
 truth, nay, they are the only guides available. Certainly we 
 cannot create such alternatives by any process of dialectical 
 manufacture, if they do not already exist. If they are not mat- 
 ters of fact, they can easily be convicted of inaccuracy. We who 
 stand in this pulpit are not makers or masters of the eternal 
 harmonies ; we can but exhibit them as best we may. Truth, 
 even in her severer moods, must ever be welcome to sincerity ; 
 and she does us a service by reminding us that it is not always 
 possible to embrace within the range of our religious negations 
 
 8 F^lix, Jesus-Christ, p. 321. 
 
 * Channing, Works, ii. 56: 'The charge of an extravagant, self-deluding 
 enthusiasm is the last to be fastened on Jesus. Where can we find traces of 
 it in His history ? Do we detect them in the calm authority of His pre- 
 cepts ; in the mild, practical, beneficent spirit of His religion ; in the un- 
 laboured simplicity of the language in which He unfolds His high powers 
 and the sublime truths of religion ; or in the good sense, the knowledge of 
 human nature which He always discovers in His estimate and treatment of 
 the different classes of men with whom He acted ? . . . . The truth is, that, 
 remarkable as was the character of Jesus, it was distinguished by nothing 
 more than by calmness and self-possession.* 
 
 '^ Cf. Guizot, Meditations sur 1' Essence de la Religion Chrdtienne. Paris, 
 1864, pp. 324-326. 
 IV] 
 
204 Our Lord's claim to be Divine 
 
 just so much dogma as we wish to deny, and to leave the rest 
 really intact. It is no hardship to reason that we cannot deny 
 the conclusion of a proposition of Euclid, without impugning 
 the axioms which are the basis of its demonstration. It is no 
 hardship to faith that we cannot deny the Divinity of Jesus, ' 
 without casting a slur upon His Human Character. There are 
 fatal inclines in the world of religious thought; and even if men 
 deem it courteous to ignore them, such courtesy is scarcely 
 charitable. If our age does not guide anxious minds by its 
 loyal adherence to God's Kevelation, its very errors may have 
 their uses ; they may warn us off ground, on which Reason can- 
 not rest, and where Faith is imperilled, by enacting before our 
 eyes a reductio ad ahsurdum or a reductio ad horribile. 
 
 Of a truth the alternative before us is terrible ; but can 
 devout and earnest thought falter for a moment in the agony 
 of its suspense ? Surely it cannot. The moral Character of 
 Christ, viewed in connexion with the preternatural facts of His 
 Human Life, will bear the strain which the argument puts upon 
 it X. It is easier for a good man to believe that, in a world 
 where he is encompassed by mysteries, where his own being 
 itself is a consummate mystery, the Moral Author of the wonders 
 around him should for great moral purposes have taken to Him- 
 self a created form, than that the one Human Life which realizes 
 the idea of humanity, the one Man Who is at once perfect 
 strength and perfect tenderness, the one Pattern of our race in 
 "Whom its virtues are combined, and from Whom its vices are 
 eliminated, should have been guilty, when speaking about Him- 
 self, of an arrogance, of a self-seeking, and of an insincerity 
 which, if admitted, must justly degrade Him far below the moral 
 level of millions among His unhonoured worshippers. It is 
 easier, in short, to believe that God has consummated His works 
 of wonder and of mercy by a crowning Self-revelation in which 
 mercy and beauty reach their climax, than to close the moral 
 
 ^ Channing, Works, ii. 6i. *I know not what can be added to heighten 
 the wonder, reverence, and love, which are due to Jesus. When I consider 
 Him, not only as possessed with the consciousness of an unexampled and 
 unbounded majesty, but as recognising a kindred nature in all human beings, 
 and living and dying to raise them to a participation of His divine glories ; 
 and when I see Him under these views allying Himself to men by the 
 tenderest ties, embracing them with a spirit of humanity which no insult, 
 injury, or pain could for a moment repel or overpower, I am filled with 
 wonder as well as reverence and love. I feel that this character is not of 
 human invention, that it was not assumed through fraud or struck out by 
 enthusiasm ; for it is infinitely ab^ove their reach.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
warrmited by His Works mid Character, 205 
 
 eye to the brightest spot that meets it in human history, and — 
 since a bare Theism reproduces the main difficulties of Chris- 
 tianity without any of its compensations — to see at last in man's 
 inexplicable destiny only the justification of his despair. Yet 
 the true alternative to this frightful conclusion is in reality a 
 frank acceptance of the doctrine which is under consideration in 
 these lectures y. For Christianity, both as a creed and as a life, 
 depends absolutely upon the Personal Character of its Founder. 
 Unless His virtue was only apparent, unless His miracles were 
 nothing better than a popular delusion, we must admit that His 
 Self-assertion is justified, even in the full measure of its blessed 
 and awful import. We must deny the antagonism which is said 
 to exist between the doctrine of Christ's Divinity and the history 
 of His human manifestation. We must believe and confess that 
 the Christ of history is the Christ of the Catholic Creed. 
 
 Eternal Jesus ! it is Thyself Who hast thus bidden us either 
 despise Thee or worship Thee. Thou wouldest have us despise 
 Thee as our fellow-man _, if we will not worship Thee as our God. 
 Gazing on Thy Human beauty, and listening to Thy words, we 
 cannot deny that Thou art the Only Son of God Most High ; 
 disputing Thy Divinity, we could no longer clearly recognise 
 Thy Human perfections. But if our ears hearken to Thy 
 revelations of Thy greatness, our souls have already been won 
 to Thee by Thy truthfulness, by Thy lowliness, and by Thy love. 
 Convinced by these Thy moral glories, and by Thy majestic 
 exercise of creative and healing power, we believe and are sure 
 that Thou hast the words of eternal life. Although in unveiling 
 
 y Channing might almost seem to have risen for a moment to the full 
 faith of the Church of Christ in the following beautiful words. Works, ii. 57 : 
 * I confess when I can escape the deadening power of habit, and can receive 
 the full import of such passages as the following: "Come unto Me all ye 
 that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest ; " "I am come to 
 seek and to save that which was lost ;" '^ He that confesseth Me before men, 
 him will I confess before My Father in Heaven;" "Whosoever shall be 
 ashamed of Me before men, of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed when 
 He cometh in the glory of the Father with the holy angels;" "In My 
 Father's house are many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you ;" I say, 
 when I can succeed in realising the import of such passages, I feel myself 
 listening to a being such as never before and never since spoke in human 
 language. I am awed by the consciousness of greatness which these 
 simple words express ; and when I connect this greatness with the proofs of 
 Christ's miracles, I am compelled to speak with the centurion, "Truly this 
 was the Son of God." ' Alas ! that this language does not mean what we 
 might hope, is too certain from other passages in his writings. See e.g. 
 Works, ii. 510 : * Christ is a being distinct from the one God.' 
 IV] 
 
2o6 The Christ of history is the Christ of dogma. 
 
 Thyself before Thy creatures, Thou dost stand from age to age 
 at the bar of hostile and sceptical opinion; yet assuredly from 
 age to age, by the assaults of Thine enemies no less than in the 
 faith of Thy believing Church, Thou art justified in Thy sayings 
 and art clear when Thou art judged. Of a truth, Thou art the 
 King of Glory, Christ ; Thou art the Everlasting Son of the 
 Father. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
LECTUEE V. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST'S DIVINITY IN THE 
 WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN. 
 
 That Which was from the heginning, Which we have heard, Which we have 
 seen with our eyes. Which we have looked upon, and our hands have 
 handled, of the Word of Life j {for the Life was manifested, and we have 
 seen It, and bear witness, and shew unto you that Eternal Life, Which 
 was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That Which we have 
 seen and heard declare we unto you. — i St. John i. 1-3. 
 
 An attempt was made last Sunday to determine, from the re- 
 corded language of Jesus Christ, what was the verdict of His 
 Own consciousness, expressed as well as implied, respecting the 
 momentous question of His higher and Eternal Nature. But 
 we were incidentally brought face to face with a problem, the 
 fuller consideration of which lies naturally in the course of the 
 present discussion. It is undeniable that the most numerous 
 and direct claims to Divinity on the part of our Lord are to be 
 found in the Gospel of St. John. While this fact has a signi- 
 ficance of a positive kind which will be noticed presently, it 
 also involves the doctrine before us in the entanglement of a 
 large critical question. To leave this question undiscussed 
 would, under existing circumstances, be impossible. To discuss 
 it, within the limits assigned to the lecturer, and even with a 
 very moderate regard to the amount of details which it neces- 
 sarily involves, must needs make a somewhat unwonted demand, 
 as you will indulgently bear in mind, upon the patience and 
 attention of the audience. 
 
 If the Book of Daniel has been recently described as the 
 battle-field of the old Testament, it is not less true that 
 St. John's Gospel is the battle-field of the New. It is well 
 understood on all sides that no question of mere .dilettante 
 
 V] 
 
2o8 Earliest objections to St. John's GospeL 
 
 criticism is at stake when the authenticity of St. John's Gospel 
 is challenged. The point of this momentous enquiry lies close 
 to the very heart of the creed of Christendom ; 
 
 ' Neque enim levia aut ludicra petuntur 
 Prsemia ; sed Turni de vit^ et sanguine certant*.' 
 
 Strange and mournful it may well seem to a Christian that the 
 pages of the Evangelist of Divine love should have been the 
 object of an attack so energetic, so persevering, so inventive, so 
 unsparing ! Strange indeed such vehement hostility might be 
 deemed, if only it were not in harmony with that deep instinct 
 of our nature which forbids neutrality when we are face to face 
 with high religious truth ; which forces us to take really, if not 
 avowedly, a side respecting it ; which constrains us to hate or 
 to love, to resist or to obey, to accept or to reject it. If St. 
 John's Gospel had been the documentary illustration of some 
 extinct superstition, or the title-deed of some suppressed founda- 
 tion, at best capable of attracting the placid interest of studious 
 antiquarianism, the attacks which have been made on it might 
 well have provoked our marvel. As it is, there is no room for 
 legitimate wonder, that the words of the Evangelist, like the 
 Person of the Master, should be a stone' of stumbling and a rock 
 of offence. For St. John's Gospel is the most conspicuous 
 written attestation to the Godhead of Him Whose claims upon 
 mankind can hardly be surveyed without passion, whether it be 
 the passion of adoring love, or the passion of vehement and 
 determined enmity. 
 
 I. From the disappearance of the obscure heretics called 
 Alogi, in the later sub-apostolic age, until the end of the seven- 
 teenth century, the authenticity of St. John's Gospel was not 
 questioned. The earliest modern objections to it seem to have 
 been put forward in this country, and to have been based on the 
 assumption of a discrepancy between the narrative of St. John 
 and those of the first three Gospels. These objections were 
 combated by the learned Leclerc ; and for well-nigh a century 
 the point was thought to have been decided b. The brilliant 
 reputation of Herder secured attention for his characteristic 
 theory that St. John's Gospel describes, not the historical, but 
 an ideal Christ. Herder was followed by several German writers, 
 
 a Virg. ^n. xii. 764, 765. 
 
 ^ It ought perhaps to have been added that Evanson*s attack upon 
 St. John in 1 792 was answered by Dr. Priestley. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The ^ Probabilia ' of Bretschneider, 209 
 
 who accepted conclusions which he had implied, and who 
 expressly rejected the authenticity of the fourth Gospel «. But 
 these negative criticisms were met in turn by the arguments of 
 Roman Catholic divines like Hug, and of critics who were by no 
 means loyal even to Lutheran orthodoxy, such as Eichhorn and 
 Kuinoel. By their labours the question was again held to have 
 been set at rest in the higher regions of German scholarship and 
 free-thinking. This second settlement was rudely disturbed by 
 the publication of the famous ' Probabilia' of Bretschneider, the 
 learned superintendent of Gotha, in the year 1820 d. Repro- 
 ducing the arguments which had been advanced by the earlier 
 negative speculation, and adding others of his own, Bretschneider 
 rekindled the discussion. He exaggerated the contrast between 
 the representation of our Lord's Person in St. John and that in 
 the synoptists into a positive contradiction. Protestant Ger- 
 many was then fascinated by the school of Schleiermacher, 
 which, by the aid of a combination of criticism and mysticism % 
 was groping its way back towards the creeds of the Catholic 
 Church. Schleiermacher, as is well known, not only accepted 
 the Church-belief respecting the fourth Gospel, but he found 
 in that Gospel the reason for his somewhat reckless estimate of 
 the other three. The sharp controversy which followed resulted 
 in Bretschneider's retractation of his thesis, and the impression 
 produced by this retractation was not violently interfered with 
 until 1835, when Dr. Strauss shocked the conscience of all that 
 was Christian in Europe by the publication of his first ' Life of 
 Jesus.' Dr. Strauss' position in respect of St. John's Gospel 
 was a purely negative one. He confined himself to asserting 
 that St. John's Gospel was not what the Church had always 
 believed it to be, that it was not the work of the son of Zebedee. 
 The school of Tubingen aspired to supplement this negative 
 criticism of Strauss by a positive hypothesis. St. John's Gospel 
 was held to represent a highly-developed stage of an orthodox 
 gnosis, the growth of which presupposed the lapse of at least a 
 
 c Especially by Dr. Aramon, preacher and professor of theology at Erlangen 
 and Dresden successively. 
 
 ^ Probabilia de Evangelii et Epistolarum Johannis Apostoli indole et 
 origine. Lipsiae, 1820. 
 
 ^ See more especially Schleiermacher' s Glaubenslehre^ and compare Pro- 
 fessor Auberlen's account of the process through which, at Tiibingen, he 'was 
 led back, among other things, mainly by Schleiermacher's mysticism, so full 
 of life and spirit, to the sanctuary of rehgion, and learnt to sit again at the 
 feet of the Redeemer.' On Divine Revelation, pref. 
 T] P 
 
2IO Theory of the later Tubingen school, 
 
 century since the age of the Apostles. It was decided by the 
 leading writers of the school of Tubingen, by Drs. Baur, 
 Schwegler, and Zeller, that the fourth Gospel was not composed 
 until after the year a.d. i6o. And, although this opinion may 
 have been slightly modified by later representatives of the 
 Tubingen school, such as Hilgenfeld ; the general position, that 
 the fourth Gospel was not written before the middle of the 
 second century, is held by disciples of that school as one of 
 its very fundamental tenets. 
 
 Here then it is necessary to enquire, what was the belief of 
 the second century itself, as to the date and authenticity of 
 St. John's Gospel. 
 
 Now it is scarcely too much to assert that every decade of the 
 second century furnishes its share of proof that the four Gospels 
 as a whole, and St. John's in particular, were to the Church of 
 that age what they are to the Church of the present. Beginning 
 at the end of the century, we may observe how general at that 
 date was the reception of the four Gospels throughout the 
 Catholic Church. Writing at Lyons, in the last decade of the 
 century, St. Irenseus discourses on various cosmical and spiritual 
 analogies to the fourfold form of the Gospel narrative (evayyeXiov 
 T€TpdfjLopcf)oi/) in a strain of mystical reflection which implies that 
 the co-ordinate authority of the four Gospels had been already 
 long established f. St. Irenaeus, it is well known, had sat at the 
 feet of St. Polycarp, who was himself a disciple of St. John. 
 St. Irenseus, in his letter to the erring Florinus, records with 
 reverent affection what Polycarp had told him of the lessons 
 which he had personally learnt from John and the other disciples 
 of Jesus S. Now is it barely probable that Irena^us should have 
 
 f St. Irenaeus, adv. Haer. iii. Ii. 8 : 4^ wv <pav€phv, on d rwv airavrcav 
 T€xviT7}5 Aoyos, d KaOvixevos iirl rwu Xepou^lu koI avvexo^t^ to. irdvra, <}>avepci}- 
 0649 roh avQpujirois, e^wKcv 7]ixiv tct pa.ixop<pov to fvayy^\iov, evl Se irpevimaTi 
 avv€x6iuL€fOv. . . . Kal yap to. Xepov&lix reTpaTrpSaooTra' Kal ra Trpiaooira au- 
 rdov, uk6v€s rrjs Trpaynareias rev Tlov rov &€ov, . . Kal ra evayy €\ia ovv 
 rovrois <Tvix<p(t}va, kv ols iyKaOe^erai XpicTTOS. Th /xlp yap Kara ^Icodwqv, r^p 
 
 ttTTo Tov Harphs 7)y€fiopiK7]j/ avTOv Kal ev^o^oy yeveau bir]yi7Tai, XiytaV 
 
 iu apxv ^v b A6yos. 
 
 8 St. Irenaeus, fragment, vol. i. p. 822, ed. Stieren : d^ov yap ae, 7ra?s &p 
 en 61/ T^ KCCTO) 'A(Tia -napa tc5 YloXvKdptrc^^ XajXTrpoos irpdrrovra iu ttj ^aaiXiKij 
 avXi], Kal Treipwfievov evdoKiiJL^lv irap avT(f' fiaXXov yap ra rSre Biafivrjixov^vca 
 rcov iuayxos yLvo/x^voov (at yap 4k Tvaidcop fxadrjaeis, (Tuvavlovaai rfi ^pvxv> 
 kpovvrai avrrj) u>are yue hvpaaOat €lTr€7p Kal top tottop, e" w KaBiC^jJ.^POS 5i6- 
 X676T0 6 ixaKapios UoXvKapivos, Kal ras irpoaS^ov? avrov Kal ras dffo^ovs Kal rbp 
 XapaKTTJpa tov ^iov Kal t^]p tov (Twfxaros idiap Kal ras diaX^^^iS &s e-rroie^ro 
 npos rh nX^doSf Kal rrjp /xera "'Iwdppov avpapa(Trpo^r,p cl's o.-n7]yyeXX€, koL t^jp 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Saint yohns Gospel in the Second Centnry, 211 
 
 imagined that a literary forgery, which is asserted to have been 
 produced at a date when he was himself a boy of twelve or four- 
 teen years of age, w^as actually the work of the Apostle John ^ % 
 At Carthage, about the same time, Tertullian wrote his great 
 work against the heretic Marcion \ Tertullian brought to the 
 discussion of critical questions great natural acuteness, which 
 had been sharpened during his early life by his practice at the 
 African bar. Tertullian distinguishes between the primary, or 
 actually apostolical rank of St, Matthew and St. John, and the 
 lower standing of St. Mark and St. Luke, as being apostolical 
 men of a secondary degree ^ ; but he treats all four as inspired 
 writers of an authority beyond discussion 1. Against Marcion's 
 mutilations of the sacred text Tertullian fearlessly appeals to the 
 witness of the most ancient apostolical Churches. Tertullian's 
 famous canon runs thus : * Si constat id verius quod prius, id 
 prius quod et ab initio, id ab initio quod ab apostolis, pariter 
 ubique constabit, id esse ab apostolis traditum, quod apud eccle- 
 sias apostolorum fuerit sacrosanctum i^.' But w^hat would have 
 been the worth of this appeal if it could have been even suspected 
 that the last Gospel was really written when Tertullian was a 
 boy or even a young man % At Alexandria, almost contempo- 
 . raucously with Tertullian, St. Clement investigated the relation 
 
 Tiav KonrZv tS>v ecopaicSrocv rou Kvpiov^ Kot wy airffLj/rnnSveve robs \(^yovs av- 
 TcoV Kol Trepl Tov Kupiou rlva ^v cl Trap' iKeivcav aKr}K6ei, kol vepl Tcav 5uj/d/jL€cov 
 avTOVy Koi irepl rrjs dioa<TKa\laSy ojs irapa tcov aifToirTUV rrjs ^wvjs tov A6yov 
 vap€L\r](pci)s 6 YioKvKapiros^ airi]yyiXX€ trdvra (rvfipccva rais ypa(pa7s. Cf. Eus. 
 Hist. Eccl. V, 20. St. Irenseus succeeded St. Pothinus in the see of Lyons. 
 Pothinus was martyred a.d. 177, and Irenseus died a.d, 202. 
 
 ^ Adv. Haer. iii. i. St. Ireneeus was probably born about a.d. 140. 
 
 * Tertullian was born at Carthage about a.d. 160. Cave places his con- 
 version to Christianity at a.d. 185, and his lapse into the Montanist heresy 
 at A.D. 199. Dr. Pusey (Libr. of Fathers) makes his conversion later, 
 A.D. 195, and his secession from the Church a.d. 201. 
 
 ^ Adv. Marc. iv. c. 2 : ^Constituimus imprimis evaiigelicum instrumentum 
 apostolos auctores habere, quibus hoc munus evangelii promulgandi ab Ipso 
 Domino sit impositum. Si et apostolicos, non tamen solos, sed cum apostolis 
 et post apostolos, quoniam prsedicatio discipulorum suspecta fieri posset de 
 glorise studio, si non adsistat illi auctoritas magistrorum, immo Christi, quae 
 magistros apostolos fecit. Denique nobis fidem ex apostolis Joannes et 
 Matthaeus insinuant, ex apostolicis Lucas et Marcus instaurant.' 
 
 ^ Adv. Marc. iv. c. 5 : ' Eadem auctoritas ecclesiarum apostolicarum ceteris 
 quoque patrocinabitur Evangeliis, quae proinde per illas et secundum illas 
 habemus, Joannis dico et Matthaei, licet et Marcus quod edidit Petri 
 ; affirmetur, cujus interpres Marcus. Nam et Lucae digestum Paulo adscribere 
 Solent. Capit magistrorum videri quae discipuli promulgarint.* 
 
 ™ Adv. Marcion. iv. 5. 
 v.] P 2 
 
 I 
 
212 Witness borne to Saint Johns Gospel 
 
 of the synoptic Gospels to St. John ^, and he terms the latter 
 the €vayy€\Lov TrvevfiariKov o. It is unnecessary to say that the 
 intellectual atmosphere of that famous Grseco -Egyptian school 
 would not have been favourable to any serious countenance of a 
 really suspected document. At Rome St. John's Gospel was 
 certainly received as being the work of that Apostle in the year 
 170. This is clear from the so-termed Muratorian fragment? ; 
 and if in receiving it the Roman Church had been under a delu- 
 sion so fundamental as is implied by the Tubingen hypothesis, 
 St. John's own pupil Polycarp might have been expected to have 
 corrected his Roman brethren when he came to Rome in the 
 year 163. In the farther East, St. John's Gospel had already 
 been translated as a matter of course into the Peschito Syriac 
 version^i. It had been translated in Africa into the Latin Versio 
 Itala r. At or soon after the middle of the century two works 
 
 >* Westcott, Canon of the New Testament, 2nd ed. p. 104. See I\Ir. 
 Westcott's remarks on St. Clement*s antecedents and position in the Church, 
 ibid. pp. 298, 299. St. Clement lived from about 165 to 220. He flourished 
 as a Christian Father under Severus and Caracalla, 193-220. 
 
 o Eus. Hist. Eccl. vi. 14, condensing Clement's account, says, rhv fievroi 
 *Ioi}6.uprjp €(Txo-Tov (TvvL^dvra '6ri to. aroofxaTiKO, ev ro7s €vayye\iois SeS^^A-cyTai, 
 irporpairevTa virb rwv yvcapifxwu, UvevfiaTi 6€0<pvpr]d€pra, -nvfv^a.riKbv iroiriffai 
 €vayy4\iov, 
 
 P Westcott on the Canon, p. 170. The Muratorian fragment claims to 
 have been written by a contemporary of Pius I., who probably ruled the 
 Roman Church from about a.d. 142 to 157. * Pastorem vero nuperrim^ 
 temporibiis nostris in urbe Roma Hermas conscripsit, sedente cathedr^ urbis 
 Romae ecclesiae Pio episcopo fratre ejus.' Cf. Hilgenfeld, Der Kanon und die 
 Kritik des N. T., p. 39, sqq. 
 
 1 On the diflSculty of fixing the exact date of the Peschito, see Mr. 
 Westcott's remarks. Canon of New Testament, pp. 206-210. Referring 
 (1) to the Syriac tradition of its Apostolic origin at Edessa, repeated by 
 Gregory Bar Hebraeus ; (2) to the necessary existence of an early Syriac 
 version, implied in the controversial writings of Bardesanes ; (3) to the quo- 
 tations of Hegesippus from the Syriac, related by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. iv. 
 22) ; (4) to the antiquity of the language of the Peschito as compared with 
 that of St. Ephrem, and the high authority in which this version was held by 
 that Father ; (5) to the liturgical and general use of it by heretical as well as 
 orthodox Syrians ; and (6) to the early translations made from it ; — Mr. 
 Westcott concludes that in the absence of more copious critical resources 
 which might serve to determine the date of this version on philological 
 grounds, * there is no sufficient reason to desert the opinion which has ob- 
 tained the sanction of the most competent scholars, that its formation is to 
 be fixed within the fir.<t half of the second century.'' (p. 211.) That it was 
 complete then in a.d. 150-160, we may assume without risk of serious error. 
 
 ^ This version must have been made before a. d. i 70. ' How much more 
 ancient it really is cannot yet be discovered. Not only is the character of the 
 version itself a proof of its extreme age, but the mutual relation of different 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
by Catholics of the Second Century, 213 
 
 were published which implied that the four Gospels had long 
 been received as of undoubted authority : I refer to the Harmo- 
 nies of Theophilus s, Bishop of Antioch, and of Tatian *, the hete- 
 rodox pupil of St. Justin Martyr, St. John is quoted by either 
 writer independently, in the work which was addressed by Theo- 
 philus to Autolycus ", and in the Apology of Tatian x. When, 
 about the year 170, Apollinaris of Hierapolis points out the 
 bearings of the different evangelical narratives upon the Quarto- 
 deciman controversy, his argument implies a familiarity with 
 St. John. Apollinaris refers to the piercing of our Lord's Sidey, 
 and Polycrates of Ephesus speaks of John as the disciple who 
 lay on the bosom of Jesus 2. Here Ave see that the last Gospel 
 must have been read and heard in the Christian Churches with 
 a care which dwells upon its distinctive peculiarities. It is 
 surely inconceivable that a work of such primary claim to speak 
 on the question of highest interest for Christian believers could 
 have been forged, widely circulated, and immediately received 
 by Africans, by Eomans, by Gauls, by Syrians, as a work of an 
 Apostle who had passed to his rest some sixty years before. 
 And, if the evidence before us ended here, we might fairly infer 
 that, considering the difficulties of communication between 
 Churches in the sub-apostolic age, and the various elements of 
 moral and intellectual caution, which, as notably in the case of 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews, were likely to delay the oecumenical 
 
 parts of it shew that it was made originally by different hands ; and if so, it 
 is natural to conjecture that it was coeval with the introduction of Chris- 
 tianity into Africa, and the result of the spontaneous effort of African 
 Christians.' (Westcott on the Canon of the New Testament, pp. 224, 225.) 
 Mr. Westcott shews from Tertullian (Adv. Prax. c. 5 ; De Monog. c. 11) 
 that at the end of the century fhe Latin translation of St. John's Gospel had 
 been so generally circulated in Africa, as to have moulded the popular theo- 
 logical dialect. (Ibid. pp. 218, 219.) 
 
 8 At latest Theophilus was bishop from a.d. 168 to 180. St. Jerome 
 says : * Theophilus . . . quatuor evangelistarum in unum opus dicta com- 
 pingens, ingenii sui nobis monumenta dimisit.' Epist. 121 (al. 151) ad 
 Algas. c. 6. 
 
 * Eus. Hist. Eccl. iv. 29 : 6 Tariavos (Twdcfyeidv riva kcu (Tvvayody^^v ovk oTS' 
 ^TTcus Tcoi/ evayyeXicov avvdels rh Aia retradpcav tovto irpoa-coi/dfxaffev. Theo- 
 doret, Hser. Fab. i, 20; Westcott, Canon, pp. 279, 280, sqq. 
 
 ^ Ad Autol. ii. 31. p. 174, ed. Wolf. Cf. St. John i. i, 3. Theophilus is 
 the first writer who quotes St. John hy name. 
 
 ^ Orat. contr. Grsec. c. 4 (St. John iv. 24); c. 5 (Ibid. i. i); c. 13 
 (Ibid. i. 5); c. 19 (Ibid. 1. 3). 
 
 y Chron. Pasch. p. 14; cf. St. John xix. 34 ; Routh, i. 160, sq. ; Westcott, 
 Canon of New Testament, pp. 198, 199. 
 
 "" Apud Eus. V. 24. Cf. St. John xiii. 23, xxi. 20. 
 
214 Witness borne to Saint yohfis Gospel 
 
 reception of a canonical book, St. John's Gospel must have been 
 in existence at the beginning of the second century. 
 
 But the evidence does not desert us at this point. Through 
 Tatian we ascend into the earlier portion of the century as 
 represented by St. Justin Martyr. It is remarkable that 
 St. Justin's second Apology, written in i6i, contains fewer 
 allusions to the Gospels than the earlier Apology written in 
 138, and than the intermediate composition of this Father, his 
 Dialogue with the Jew Trypho. Now passing by recent theories 
 respecting a Gospel of the Hebrews^ or a Gospel of Peter, by 
 which an endeavour has been made to weaken St. Justin's 
 witness to the synoptic Evangelists, let us observe that his 
 testimony to St. John is particularly distinct. Justin's emphatic 
 reference of the doctrine of the Logos to our Lord^, not to 
 mention his quotation of John the Baptist's reply to the mes- 
 sengers of the Jews^, and of our Saviour's language about the 
 new birth d, makes his knowledge of St. John's Gospel much 
 more than a probability®. Among the great Apostolic fathers, 
 St. Ignatius alludes to St. John in his Letter to the Romans^, 
 and St. Polycarp quotes the Apostle's first Epistle ». In these 
 sub-apostolic writings there are large districts of thought and 
 
 a On the identity of the * Gospel of the Hebrews' with the original Hebrew 
 draught of the Gospel of St. Matthew, see the remarks of Tischendorf in his 
 pamphlet, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? pp. 17-19- To that 
 admirable compendium I am indebted for several remarks in the text of this 
 and the following pages. 
 
 *> Cf. Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? p. 16 : 'Die 
 Uebertragung des Logos auf Christus, von der uns keine Spur weder in der 
 Synoptikern noch in den altesten Parallelschriften derselben vorliegt, an 
 mehreren Stellen Justins von Johannes abzuleiten ist.* 
 
 c Ibid. Dialog, cum Tryph. 88. Cf. St. John i. 20. 
 
 d Apolog. i. 61 : KoX yap 6 Xpiarhs dir^v' '*Aj^ /j,^ avayfvvrjOrjre, ov jx^ 
 cla-eXdrjTe ets t^v Bao-iA^iav rSov oupavcav'^ "On Se Koi aZvvarov ets ras fx^Tpas 
 r£v TeKovacoy rovs ara| yevofxivovs e/xfirjuai (pavepov iraaiv icm. Cf. Westcott, 
 Canon of the New Testament, p. 1 30. 
 
 e Cf. however Mr. Westcott's remarks (Canon of the New Testament, 
 p. 145) on the improbability of St. John's being quoted in apologetic writings 
 addressed to Jews and heathen. St. Justin nevertheless does ' exhibit types 
 of language and doctrine which, if not immediately drawn from St. John (why 
 not?), yet mark the presence of his itiflaence and the recognition of his 
 authority.' Westcott, Ibid. Besides the passages already alluded to, St. 
 Justin appears to refer to St. John xii. 49 in Dialog, cum Tryph. c. 56 ; to 
 St. John i. 13 in Dialog, c. 63 ; to St. John vii. 12 in Dialog, c 69 ; to St. 
 John i. 12 in Dialog, c. 123. Cf. Liicke, Comm. Ev. Job. p. 34, sqq. 
 
 f St. Ign. ad. Rom. c. 7. Cf. St. John vi. 32, 48, 53, xvi. 11. 
 
 s Ep. ad Phil. c. 7. Cf. I St. John iv. 3. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
by Catholics of the Second Century, 215 
 
 expression, of a type unmistakeably Johannean^, which, like 
 St. Justin's doctrine of the Logos, witness no less powerfully to 
 the existence of St. John's writings than direct citations. The 
 Tubingen writers lay emphasis upon the fact that in the short 
 fragment of Papias which we possess, nothing is said about 
 St. John's Gospeli. But at least we have no evidence that 
 Papias did not speak of it in that larger part of his writings 
 which has been lostJ ; and if his silence is a valid argument 
 against the fourth Gospel, it is equally available against the 
 Gospel of St. Luke, and even against each one of those four 
 Epistles which the Tiibingen writers themselves recognise as the 
 work of St. Paul. 
 
 The testimony of the Catholic Church during this century is 
 supplemented by that of the contemporary heretics. St. Irenseus 
 has pointed out how the system of the celebrated Gnostic, 
 
 ^ Cf. St. Barn. Ep. v. vi, xii. (cf. St. John iii. 14); Herm. Past. Simil. ix. 12 
 (cf. Ibid. X. 7, 9, xiv. 6) ; St. Ignat. ad Pliilad. 7 (cf. Ibid. iii. 8) ; ad Tral. 8 
 (cf. Ibid. vi. 51) ; ad Magnes. 7 (cf. Ibid. xii. 49, x. 30, xiv. 11) ; ad Rom. 7 
 (cf. Ibid. vi. 32). 
 
 i Meyer, Evan. Johann. Einl. p. T4: *Die Continuitat [i.e. of the evidence 
 in favour of the fourth Gospel] geht sovrohl von Irenseus iiber Poly carp, als 
 auch von Papias, sofern diesem der Gebrauch des ersten Briefs Joh. bezeugt 
 ist, iiber den Presbyter Johannes, auf den A'postel selhst zurilck. Dass aber 
 das Fragment des Papias das Evangel. Job. nicht erwahnt, kann nichts 
 verschlagen, da es iiberhaupt keine schriftlichen Quellen, aus welchen er seine 
 Nachrichten geschopft habe, auffiihrt, vielmehr das Verfahren des Papias 
 dahin bestimmt, dass er bei den Apostelschiilern die Aussagen der Apostel 
 erkundet habe, und dessen ausdriicklichen Grundsatz ausspricht : oh yap ra 
 iK Twv ^i^Xioou TO(rovr6v fxe 03<p€Kilv vTreXd/n^avou, oaou ra Trapa (caaris (pcoprjs 
 Kal fx€vov(T7]s. Papias wirft hier die damals vorhandenen evangelischen 
 Schriften (ruiv ^i^Xioov) deren eine Menge war (Luk. i. i) alle ohne Auswahl 
 zusammen, und wie er das Evangel. Matthsei und das des Marcus mit 
 darunter begrifFen hat, welche beide er spater besonders erwahnt, so kann er 
 auch das Evangel. Joh. mit bei rwv ^i^Xiojv gemeint haben, da Papias einen 
 Begriff von Jcanonischen Evangelien als solchen ofFenbar noch nicht hat (vergl. 
 Credn. Beitr. i. p. ■23), und diese auszuzeichnen nicht veranlasst ist. "Wenn 
 aber weiterhin Eusebius noch zwei Aussagen des Papias liber die Evangelien 
 des Mark, und Matthjius anfiihrt, so wird damit unser Evangelium nicht 
 ausgeschlossen, welches Papias in anderen Theilen seines Buchs erwahnt 
 haben kann, sondern jene beiden Aussagen werden nur deshalb bemerklich 
 gemacht, weil sie iiber die Entstehung jener Evangelien etwas Absonderliches, 
 besonders Merkwiirdiges enthalten, wie auch das als besonders bemerkens- 
 werth von Eusebius angefiihrt wird, dass Papias aus zwei epistolischen 
 Schriften (i Joh. u. i Petr.) Zeugnisse gebrauche, und eine Erziihlung habe, 
 welche sich im Hebriier-Evangel. finde.' Cf. also Westcott, Canon, p. 65. 
 
 J It should be added that Papias is stated by Eusebius (iii. 39) to have 
 quoted St. John's First Epistle. This he could hardly have done, without 
 acknowledging St. John's Gospel. 
 V] 
 
2i6 Wihiess borne to Saint yohiis Gospel 
 
 Valentinus, was mainly based upon a perversion of St. John's 
 Gospel k This assertion is borne out by that remarkable work, 
 the Philosophumena of St. Hippolytus, which, as we in Oxford 
 well remember, was discovered some few years since at Mount 
 Athos^. Of the pupils of Valentinus, Ptolemseus quotes from 
 the prologue of St. John's Gospel in his extant letter to Flora i^. 
 Heracleon, another pupil, wrote a considerable commentary 
 upon St. John II. Heracleon lived about 150; Valentinus was 
 a contemporary of Marcion, who was teaching at Eome about 
 140. Marcion had originally admitted the claims of St. John's 
 Gospel, and only denied them when, for the particular purposes 
 of his heresy, he endeavoured at a later time to demonstrate an 
 opposition between St. Paul and St. Johno. Basilides taught 
 at Alexandria under Adrian, apparently about the year 120. 
 Basilides is known to have written twenty-four books of com- 
 mentaries on the Gospel P ; but if it cannot be certainly affirmed 
 that some of these commentaries were on St. John, it is certain 
 from St. Hippolytus that Basilides appealed to texts of St. John 
 in favour of his system^. Before Basilides, in the two first 
 
 '^ St. Irenseus (Hoer. iii. 11, 7) lays down tlie general position : 'Tanta est 
 circa Evangelia hsec firmitas, ut et ipsi haeretici testimonium reddant eis, et 
 ex ipsis egrediens unusquisque eorum conetur suam confirmare doctrinam.' 
 After illustrating this from the cases of the Ebionites, Marcion, and the Ce- 
 rinthians, he proceeds, ' Hi autem qui a Valentino sunt, eo [sc. evangelio] 
 quod est secundum Johannem plenissime utentes, ad ostensionem conjuga- 
 tionum suarum ; ex ipso detegentur nihil rect^ dicentes.' ' Gewiss war (says 
 Meyer) die ganze Theosophie des Valentin mit auf Johanneischem Grund 
 und Boden erwachsen. . . . Die Valentinianische Gnosis mit ihren Aeonen, 
 Syzygien u. s. w. verhUlt sich zum Prolog des Joh. wie das kiinsthch Gemachte 
 und Ausgesponnene zum Einfachen und Schopferischen.' (Einl. in Joh. p. 12, 
 note.) For an illustration of the truth of this, cf. St. Tren. adv. Hser. i. 8, 5. 
 
 1 Cf. Refut. Hser. vi. 35, init., for the use made by Valentinus of St. John x. 8. 
 
 ™ Apud St. Epiph. adv. Haer. lib. i. tom. i. Haer. 33 ; Ptol. ad Flor. Cf. 
 St. John i. 3 ; also Stieren's St. Irenseus, vol. i. p. 924. 
 
 ^ Fragments of Heracleon's Commentary on St. John, collected from 
 Origen, are published at the end of the first vol. of Stieren's edition of 
 St. Irenseus, pp. 938-971. St. John iv. is chiefly illustrated by these remains 
 of the great Valentinian commentator. Two points strike one on perusal of 
 them: (i) that before Heracleon's time St. John's Gospel must have acquired, 
 even among heretics, the highest authority ; (2) that Heracleon has con- 
 tinually to resort to interpretations so forced (as on St. John i. 3, i. 18, 
 ii. 17; cited by Westcott, Canon, p. 266, note) as 'to prove sufficiently that 
 St. John's Gospel was no Gnostic work.' 
 
 o TertuUian. adv. Marcion. iv. 3 ; De Came Christi, c. 2 ; quoted by 
 Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst ? pp. 25, 26. 
 
 P Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iv. 7, 7. 
 
 q Refut. Hser. vii. 22 (quoted by Tischendorf^ ubi supr.), where Basilides 
 uses St. John i. 9, ii. 4. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
by Heretics of the Second Century. 217 
 
 decades of the century, we find Opliitic Gnostics, the Naase- 
 nians^, and the Peratse^, appealing to passages in St. John's 
 Gospel, which was thus already, we may say in the year no, 
 a recognised authority among sects external to the Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 It may further be observed that the whole doctrine of the 
 Paraclete in the heresy of Montanus is a manifest perversion of 
 the treatise on that subject in St. John's Gospel, the wide 
 reception of which it accordingly presupposes*. The Alogi, 
 who were heretical opponents of Montanism, rejected St. John's 
 Gospel for dogmatic reasons, which are really confirmatory of 
 the general tradition in its favour ". Nor may we forget Celsus, 
 the keen and satirical opponent of the Christian faith, who 
 wrote, even according to Dr. Hilgenfeld, between 160 and 170, 
 but more probably, as is held by other authorities, as early as 
 150. Celsus professes very ostentatiously to confine himself 
 to the writings of the disciples of Jesus ^ ; but he refers to 
 St. John's Gospel in a manner which would be utterly incon- 
 ceivable if that book had been in his day a lately completed, or 
 indeed a hardly completed forgery y. 
 
 This evidence might be largely reinforced from other quarters ^ 
 and especially by an examination of that mass of apocryphal 
 literature which belongs to the earlier half of the second century, 
 
 ' Refut. Hser. v. 6 sqq., 8 (St. John i. 3, 4) ; c. 9 (Ibid. iv. 21, and iv. 10) : 
 quoted by Tischendorf. 
 
 8 Ibid. V. 12 sqq., 16 (St. John iii. 17, i. 1-4) ; c. 17 (Ibid. viii. 44). 
 
 * See however Meyer, Einl. in Joh. p. 13, for the opinion that Montanism 
 originally grew out of belief in the Parousia of our Lord. Baur, Christenthum, 
 p. 213. The Paraclete of Montanus was doubtless very different from the 
 Paraclete of St. John's Gospel. Still St. John's Gospel must have furnished 
 the name ; and it is probable that the idea of the Montanistic Paraclete is 
 originally due to the same source, although by a rapid development, con- 
 tortion, or perversion, the Divine Gift announced by our Lord had been ex- 
 changed for Its heretical caricature. The rejection of the promise of the 
 Paraclete alluded to by St. Irenseus (adv. Haer. iii. 1 1 . 9) proceeded not from 
 Montanists, but from opponents to Montanism, who erroneously identified 
 the teaching of St. John's Gospel with that heresy. 
 
 "^ St. Epiph. Hser. li. 3. Cf. Pressens^, Jdsus-Christ, p. 227. 
 
 ^ Origen, contr. Celsum, ii. 74. 
 
 y Ibid. i. 67; cf. St. John ii. 18. Contr. Celsum, ii. 31, 36, 55; cf. 
 St. John XX. 27. 
 
 2 E.g. the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, Eus. v. i, which 
 quotes St. John xvi. 2 as an utterance of our Lord Himself. Athenagoras, 
 Leg. pro Christianis, 10 : cf. St. John i. i-ii, xvii. 21-23. The Clementine 
 Homilies, xix. 22; cf. St. John ix. 2, 3, iii. 52, x. 9, 27. Recognitions, 
 vi. 9 \ cf. St. John iii. 3-5, ii. 48, v. 23. Ibid. v. 12 ; of. St. John viii. 34. 
 Y] 
 
2i8 The Fourth Gospel certainly Saint Johis, 
 
 and the relation of wliich to St. John's Gospel has lately- 
 been very clearly exhibited by an accomplished scholar a. But 
 we are already in a position to admit that the facts before us 
 force back the date of St. John's Gospel within the lines of the 
 first century b. And when this is done the question of its 
 authenticity is practically decided. It is irrational to suppose 
 that a forgery claiming the name and authority of the beloved 
 disciple could have been written and circulated beneath his very 
 eyes, and while the Church was still illuminated by his oral 
 teaching. Arbitrary theories about the time which is thought 
 necessary to develope an idea cannot rightly be held to counter- 
 balance such a solid block of historical evidence as we have been 
 considering. This evidence shews that, long before the year 
 1 60, St. John's Gospel was received throughout orthodox and 
 heretical Christendom, and that its recognition may be traced 
 up to the Apostolic age itself. Ewald shall supply the words 
 with which to close the foregoing considerations. ' Those who 
 since the first discussion of this question have been really con- 
 versant with it, never could have had and never have had a 
 moment's doubt. As the attack on St. John has become fiercer 
 and fiercer, the truth during the last ten or twelve years has 
 been more and more solidly established, error has been pursued 
 into its last hiding-places, and at this moment the facts before 
 us are such that no man who does not will knowingly to choose 
 error and to reject truth, can dare to say that the fourth Gospel 
 is not the work of the Apostle John^.' 
 
 Certainly Ewald here expresses himself with vehemence. 
 Some among yourselves may possibly be disposed to complain 
 
 » Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? p. 35, sqq. 
 That the Acta Pilati in particular were composed at the beginning of the 
 second century, appears certain from the public appeal to them which 
 St. Justin makes in his Apology to the Roman Emperor. The Acta Pilati 
 'presuppose not only the synoptists, but particularly and necessarily the 
 Gospel of St. John. It is not that we meet with a passage here and there 
 quoted from that Gospel. If that were the case we might suspect later 
 interpolation. The whole history of the condemnation of Jesus is based 
 essentially upon St. John's narrative ; while in the accounts of the Cruci- 
 fixion and the Resurrection, it is rather certain passages of the synoptists 
 which are particularly suggested.* 
 
 *> Pressens^, Jdsus-Christ, p. 232. * Rien n'est plus yain que de vouloir 
 faire sortir du mouvement des id^es au second sibcle I'Evangile, qui a prd- 
 cis^ment donn^ le branle k ce mouvement, et le domine apr^s I'avoir 
 enfantd.' 
 
 c Review of Renan's Vie de Jdsus, in the Gottingen Scientific Journal, 
 5 Aug. 1863 ; quoted by Gratry, Jdsus-Christ, p. 119. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
(i) // is sttpplementary to the first three, 219 
 
 of liim as being too dogmatic. For it may be that you have 
 made impatience of certainty a part of your creed \ and you 
 may hold that a certain measure of cautious doubt on all sub- 
 jects, is inseparable from true intellectual culture. You may urge 
 in particular that the weight of external testimony in favour of 
 St. John's Gospel does not silence the difficulties which arise 
 upon an examination of its contents. You point to the use of 
 a mystical and metaphysical terminology, to the repetition of 
 abstract expressions, such as Word, Life, Light, Truth, Para- 
 clete. You remark that St. John's Gospel exhibits the Life of 
 our Lord under an entirely new aspect. Not to dwell im- 
 moderately upon points of detail, you insist that the plan of our 
 Lord's life, the main scenes of His ministry, all His exhibitions 
 of miraculous power save two, the form and matter of His dis- 
 courses, nay, the very attitude and moral physiognomy of His 
 opponents, are so represented in this Gospel as to interfere with 
 your belief in its Apostolical origin. 
 
 But are not these peculiarities of the Gospel explained when 
 we consider the purpose with which it was written ] 
 • I. St. John's Gospel is in the first place an historical sup- 
 plement. It was designed to chronicle discourses and events 
 which had been omitted in the narratives of the three preceding 
 Evangelists. Christian antiquity attests this design with re- 
 markable unanimity d It is altogether arbitrary to assert that 
 if St. John had seen the works of earlier Evangelists he would 
 have alluded to them ; and that if he had intended to supply 
 the omissions of their narratives he would have formally an- 
 nounced his intention of doing so®. It is sufficient to observe 
 that the literary conventionalities of modern Europe were not 
 those of the sacred writers, whether of the Synagogue^ or of the 
 Church. An inspired w^riter does his work without the self- 
 consciousness of a modern composer ; he is not necessarily 
 careful to define his exact place in literature, his precise obliga- 
 tions to, or his presumed improvements upon, the labours of his 
 predecessors. He is the organ of a Higher Intelligence ; he 
 
 d See especially the remarkable passage in Eus. Hist. Eccl. iii. 24, St. Epiph. < 
 Hser. ii. 51. 
 
 « These arguments of Liicke are noticed by Dr. Wordsworth, New Test, 
 part i. p. 206. 
 
 f 'The later prophets of the Old Testament enlarge upon and complete 
 the prophecies of the earlier. But they do not mention their names, or 
 declare their own purpose to do what they do.' Townson, pp. 134-147; 
 quoted by Dr. Wordsworth, ubi supr. 
 
220 (2) Saint Johns Gospel is 
 
 owes both what he borrows and what he is believed to originate 
 to the Mind Which inspires him to originate, or Which guides 
 him to select. While the stream of sacred truth is flowing forth 
 from his entranced and burning soul, and is being forthwith 
 crystallized in the moulds of an imperishable language, the 
 eagle-eyed Evangelist does not stoop from heaven to earth for 
 the purpose of guarding or reserving the rights of authorship, 
 by displaying his care to acknowledge its obligations. Certainly 
 St. John does repeat in part the narratives of his predecessors?. 
 But this repetition does not interfere with the supplementary 
 character of his work as a wholel^. And yet his Gospel is not 
 only or mainly to be regarded as an historical supplement. It 
 exhibits the precision of method and the orderly development of 
 ideas which are proper to a complete doctrinal essay or treatise. 
 It is indeed rather a treatise illustrated by history, than a history 
 written with a theological purpose. Viewed in its historical 
 relation to the first three Gospels, it is supplemental to them ] 
 but this relative character is not by any means an adequate 
 explanation of its motive and function. It might easily have 
 been written if no other Evangelist had written at all ; it 
 has a character and purpose which are strictly its own ; it 
 is part of a great whole, yet it is also, in itself, organically 
 perfect. 
 
 2. St. John's Gospel is a polemical treatise. It is addressed 
 to an intellectual world widely different from that which had 
 been before the minds of the earlier Evangelists. The earliest 
 forms of Gnostic thought are recognisable in the Judaizing 
 theosophists whom St. Paul has in view in his Epistles to the 
 Ephesians and the Colossians. These Epistles were written at 
 the least some thirty years before the fourth Gospel. The 
 fourth Gospel confronts or anticipates a more developed Gno- 
 sticism; although we may observe in passing that it certainly 
 does not contain references to any of the full-grown Gnostic 
 
 K As in chaps, vi. and xii. 
 
 ^ M. Kenan admits the supplementary character of St. John's Gospel, but 
 attributes to the Evangelist a motive of personal pique in writing it. He was 
 annoyed at the place assigned to himself in earlier narratives 1 ' On est tentd 
 de croire, que Jean, dans sa vieillesse, ayant lu les rdcits dvang^liques qui 
 circulaient, d'une part, y remarqua diverses inexactitudes, de I'autre, fut 
 froiss^ de voir qu'on ne lui accordait pas dans I'histoire du Christ une assez 
 grande place ; qu'alors il commen9a k dieter une foule de choses qu'il savait 
 mieux que les autres, avec Vintention de montrer que, dans heaucoup de cas ou 
 on ne parlait que de Pierre, il avait JigurS avec et avant lui.* Vie de J^sus, 
 pp. xxvii. xxviiL 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
a polemical treatise, 221 
 
 systems which belong to the middle of the second century. The 
 fourth Gospel is in marked opposition to the distinctive po- 
 sitions of Ebionites, of Docetse, of Cerinthians. But among 
 these the Cerinthian gnosis appears to be more particularly 
 contemplated. In its earlier forms especially, Gnosticism was 
 as much a mischievous intellectual method as a formal heresy. 
 The Gnostic looked upon each revealed truth merely in the 
 light of an addition to the existing stock of materials ready to 
 his hand for speculative discussion. He handled it accordingly 
 with the freedom which was natural to a belief that it was in no 
 sense beyond the range of his intellectual grasp. He com- 
 mingled it with his cosmical or his psychological theories ; he 
 remodelled it ; he submitted it to new divisions, to new com- 
 binations. Thus his attitude toward Christianity was friendly 
 and yet supercilious. But he threatened the faith with utter 
 destruction, to be achieved by a process of eclectic interpretatioi# 
 Cerinthus was an early master of this art. Cerinthus as a 
 Chiliastic Judaizer was naturally disposed to Humanitarianism. 
 As an eclectic theorist, who had been trained in the ^ teaching of 
 the Egyptians V he maintained that the world had been created 
 by ' some power separate and distinct from Him Who is above 
 all.' Jesus was not born of a virgin ; He was the son of Joseph 
 and Mary ; He was born naturally like other men. But the 
 ^on Christ had descended upon Jesus after His baptism, in the 
 form of a dove, and had proclaimed the unknown Father, and 
 had perfected the virtues of Jesus. The spiritual impassible 
 Christ had flown back to heaven on the eve of the Passion of 
 Jesus ; the altogether human Jesus of Cerinthus had suffered 
 and had risen alone K To this fantastic Christ of the Cerinthian 
 
 i St. Hippolytus, Eefut. Haer. vii. 33. 
 
 ^ St. Irenaeus, i. 26 : * Et Cerinthus autem quidam in Asid non a primo 
 Deo factum esse mundum docuit, sed a virtute quadam valde separate et 
 distante ab e^ principalitate, quae est super universa, et ignorante eum qui 
 est super omnia, Deum. Jesum autem subjecit, non ex virgine natum 
 (impossibile enim hoc ei visum est) ; fuisse autem Eum Joseph et Marias 
 filium similiter ut reliqui omnes homines, et plus potuisse justitia et prudential 
 et sapienti^ ab horainibus. Et post baptismum descendisse in eum ab ea 
 principalitate quae est super omnia, Christum figura columbse ; et tunc an- 
 nuntiasse incognitum Patrem et virtutes perfecisse ; in fine autem revoldsse 
 iterum Christum de Jesu, et Jesum passum esse et resurrexisse ; Christum 
 autem impassibilem persever^sse, existentem spiritalem.' When St. Epi- 
 phanius represents Cerinthus as affirming that Jesus would only rise at tlie 
 general resurrection, he seems to be describing the logical results of the 
 heresy, not the actual doctrine which it embraced. (Haer. xxviii. 6.) 
 
222 (3) Saint yohns Gospel teaches positive dogma, 
 
 gnosis St. John opposes the counteracting truth of our Lord's 
 Divine and Eternal Nature, as manifested in and through His 
 human life. This Nature was united to the Manhood of Jesus 
 from the moment of the Incarnation, It was not a transient 
 endowment of the Person of Jesus ; since it was Itself the seat 
 of His Personality, although clothed with a human form. This 
 Divine Nature was * glorified' in Christ's Passion, as also in 
 His miracles and His Resurrection. St. John disentangles the 
 Catholic doctrine from the negations and the speculations of 
 Cerinthus ; he proclaims the Presence among men of the Divine 
 Word, Himself the Creator of all things, incarnate in Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 3. Thus St. John's Gospel has also a direct, positive, dogmatic 
 purpose. It is not merely a controversial treatise, as it is not 
 merely an historical appendix. Its teaching is far deeper and 
 #rider than would have been necessary, in order to refute the 
 errors of Cerinthus. It teaches the highest revealed truth con- 
 cerning the Person of our Lord. Its substantive and enduring 
 value consists in its displaying the Everlasting Word or Son of 
 God as historically incarnate, and as uniting Himself to His 
 Church. 
 
 The peculiarities of St. John's Gospel are explained, when 
 this threefold aspect of it is kept in view. As a supplementary 
 narrative it presents us, for the most part, with particulars 
 concerning our Blessed Lord which are unrecorded elsewhere. 
 It meets the doubts which might naturally have arisen in the 
 later Apostolical age, when the narratives of the earlier Evan- 
 gelists had been for some time before the Church, If the 
 question was raised, why, if Jesus was so holy and so super- 
 natural a Person, His countrymen and contemporaries did not 
 believe in Him, St. John shews the moral causes which account 
 for their incredulity. He pourtrays the fierce hatred of the 
 Jews against the moral truth which they had rejected ; he 
 exhibits this hatred as ever increasing in its intensity as the 
 sanctity of Jesus shines out more and more brightly. If men 
 asked anxiously for more proof that the Death and Resurrection 
 of Jesus were real events, St. John meets that demand by 
 recording his own experience as an eye-witness, and by carefully 
 accumulating the witness of others. If it was objected that 
 Christ's violent Death was inconsistent with His Divine claims, 
 St. John points out that it was strictly voluntary, and even 
 that by it Christ's true glorification was achieved. If the 
 authority of the Apostles and of those who were succeeding 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Peculiarities in Saint yohn explained. 223 
 
 them was popularly depreciated on the score of their being 
 rude and illiterate men, St. John shews from the discourse 
 in the supper-room that the claims of Apostles upon the 
 dutiful submission of the Church did not depend upon any 
 natural advantages which they possessed. Jesus had promised 
 a Divine Comforter, Who was to guide them into the whole 
 truth, and to bring to their minds whatever He had said 
 to them I 
 
 As a polemical writer, St. John selects and marshals his 
 materials with a view to confuting, from historical data, the 
 Humanitarian or Docetic errors of the time. St. John is 
 anxious to bring a particular section of the Life of Jesus to 
 bear upon the intellectual world of Ephesus^i, He puts for- 
 ward an aspect of the original truth which was certain to 
 command present and local attention \ he is sufficiently in 
 correspondence with the .age to which he ministers, and with 
 the speculative temper of the men around him. He had been 
 led to note and to treasure up in his thought certain phases 
 of the teaching and character of Jesus with especial care. He 
 had remembered more accurately those particular discourses, 
 in which Jesus speaks of His eternal relation to the Father, 
 and of the profound mystic communion of life into which He 
 would enter with His followers through the Holy Spirit and 
 the Sacraments. These cherished memories of St. John's earlier 
 years, unshared in their completeness by less privileged Apo- 
 stles, were well fitted to meet the hard necessities of the Church 
 during the closing years of the beloved disciple. To St. John 
 the gnosis of Cerinthus must have appeared to be in direct 
 contradiction to the sacred certainties which he had heard from 
 the lips of Jesus, and which he treasured in his heart and 
 memory. In order to confute the heresy which separated the 
 man Jesus from the ' ^on ' Christ, he had merely to publish what 
 he remembered of the actual words and works of Jesus ^i. His 
 translation of those divine words may be coloured, by a phrase- 
 ology current in the school which he is addressing, sufficiently 
 to make them popularly intelligible. But the peculiarities of 
 his language have been greatly exaggerated by criticism, while 
 they are naturally explained by the polemical and positively 
 doctrinal objects which he had in view. To these objects, the 
 
 * Cf. Alford, Greek Test. vol. i. Prolegom. p. 60. 
 
 ™ St. Irenseus adv. Hser. iii. i. See Ebrard's discussion of the objections 
 which have been urged against this statement. Gospel History, pt. 2, 
 div. 2, § 127. '^ Cf. Pressensd, Jdsus-Christ, p. 246. 
 
224 Peculiar ities in Saint yohn explained. 
 
 language, the historical arrangement, the selection from con- 
 versations and discourses before unpublished, the few deeply- 
 significant miracles, the description of opponents by a generic 
 name — the ' Jews' — which ignores the differences of character, 
 class, and sect among them, and notices them only so far as 
 they are in conflict with the central truth manifested in Jesus, 
 — all contribute. But these very peculiarities of the fourth 
 Gospel subserve its positive devotional and didactic aim even 
 more directly than its controversial one®. The false gnosis 
 
 o The internal difficulties urged against St. John's Gospel appear to be 
 overborne by the weight of the external testimony, taken in conjunction 
 with the characteristics and necessities of the later Apostolical age. These 
 difficulties may however be very briefly summarized as follows : — 
 
 1. As to time : 
 
 (a) ' The fourth Gospel implies a long Ministry, with festivals for its 
 landmarks.' But the three, (Westcott, Study of Gospels, 267,) at 
 least allow of a ministry as long as the fourth can require ; while 
 reference to the festivals was natural in a narrative, the main scene 
 of which is laid at Jerusalem. 
 (3) 'The fourth Gospel appears to place the crucifixion on Nisan 14, 
 the three on Nisan 15.' This real difficulty has been explained 
 by various hypotheses, as 
 e, g. (l) Of an ajiticipated passover, kept by our Lord, on Nisan 1 3. Bp. 
 Ellicott, Huls. Lect. p. 322, and others. This is perhaps most satis- 
 factory. The objection drawn from the observance of Nisan 14, by 
 those churches in the second century which inherited St, John's 
 traditions, assumes that such observance was commemorative of the 
 Last Supper, and not, as is probable, of our Lord's Death. Cf. 
 Meyer, Ev. Joh. Einl. p. 18. 
 (7) Of a passover postponed by the chief priests. St. Chrys. Estius. 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 (3) Of a difference of computation, as to the true day of the Pass- 
 over, owing to the variation between the Solar and Lunar 
 reckonings. Petavius, qu. by Neale, Int. East. ch. ii. 1054. 
 
 (4) Of a possible explanation of St. John's language, (xviii. 28, &c.,) 
 which would make it consistent with the date of Nisan 15, as that of the 
 crucifixion. Diet, of Bible, vol. ii. 720; St. Tho. Sum.p.iii. q.46.a,9. 
 
 If none of these explanations be quite unobjectionable, they may fairly 
 warn us against concluding with our present knowledge that the difficulty 
 is by any means insuperable. 
 
 2. As to the scene of Christ's teaching : — ' St. John places it chiefly in 
 Judaea; the three in Galilee.' But no Gospel professes to be a complete 
 history of our Lord's actions, and records of a Galilean and of a Judaean 
 ministry respectively leave room for each other. Westcott on the Gospels, 
 p. 265. 
 
 3. As to the style of Christ's teaching: — «Si Jdsus parlait comme le veut 
 Matthieu, il n'a pu parler comme le veut Jean.' But, the diff'erence of 
 subjects, hearers, and circumstances in the two cases, taken in conjuncti{m 
 with the differing mental peculiarities of the Apostles who report our Lord's 
 words, will account for the difference of style. The phrases assumed to be 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Saint yohns depth and simplicity, 11^ 
 
 is refuted by an exhibition of the true. The true is set forth 
 for the sake of Christian souls. These things * are written that 
 ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of Ood ; and 
 that believing ye might have life through His Name P.' 
 
 We may perhaps have wondered how a Galilean fisherman 
 could have been the author of a subtle and sublime theosophy, 
 how the son of Zebedee could have appropriated the language 
 of Athens and of Alexandria to the service of the Crucified. 
 The answer is that St. John knew from experience the blessed 
 and tremendous truth that his Lord and Friend was a Divine 
 Person. Apart from the guidance of the Blessed Spirit, 
 St. John's mental strength and refinement may be traced to 
 the force of his keen interest in this single fact. Just as a 
 desperate moral or material struggle brings to light forces and 
 resources unused before, so an intense religious conviction fer- 
 tilizes intellect, and developes speculative talent, not unfrequently 
 in the most unlearned. Every form of thought which comes 
 even into indirect contact with the truth to which the soul 
 clings adoringly, is scanned by it with deep and anxious interest, 
 whether it be the interest of hope or the interest of apprehen- 
 sion. St. John certainly is a theosophic philosopher, but he 
 is only a philosopher because he is a theologian; he is such 
 a master of abstract thought because he is so devoted to the 
 Incarnate God. The fisherman of Galilee could never have 
 written the prologue of the fourth Gospel, or have guided 
 the rehgious thought of Ephesus, unless he had clung to this 
 sustaining Truth, which makes him at once so popular and so 
 profound. For St. John is spiritually as simple, as he is 
 intellectually majestic. In this our day he is understood by 
 
 peculiar to, and really of frequent occurrence in St. John are by no means 
 unknown to the Synoptists. E.g. The antithesis between Light and darkness. 
 4. As to the matter of Christ's teaching : — Baur begs the whole question 
 by saying that ' the discourses in St. John could not be historical, since 
 they are essentially nothing more than an explanation of the Logos-idea 
 put forth by that writer.' This might be true if the doctrine of the 
 Logos had been the product of Gnostic speculations. But if Jesus was 
 really the Divine Son, manifesting Himself as such to men, such language 
 as that reported by St. John is no more than we should expect. St. John 
 never represents our Lord as announcing His Divinity in the terms in 
 which it is announced in the Prologue to the Gospel ; he would have 
 done so, had he really been creating a fictitious Jesus designed to illus- 
 trate a particular theosophic speculation. This is discussed hereafter, 
 p. 364. See Pressensd, Jesus-Christ, p. 244; Luthardt, das Johanneische 
 Evangelium, pp. 26-35. ^ St. John xx. 31. 
 
 V] Q 
 
226 Doctrine of the Eternal Word 
 
 the religious insight of the unlettered and the poor, while the 
 learned can sometimes see in him only the weary repetition of 
 metaphysical abstractions. The poor understand this sublime 
 revelation of God, the Creator of the world, as pure Light and 
 Truth. They understand the picture of a moral darkness which 
 commits and excuses sin, and which hates the light. They 
 receive gratefully and believingly the Son of God, made Man, 
 and conquering evil by the laying down His Life. They follow, 
 with the experience of their own temptations, or sins, or hopes, 
 or fears, those heart-searching conversations with Nicodemus, 
 with the Samaritan woman, with the Jews. In truth, St. John's 
 language and, above all, the words of Christ in St. John, are 
 as simple as they are profound. They still speak peace and joy 
 to little children ; they are still a stumbling-block to, and a 
 condemnation of, the virtual successors of Cerinthus. 
 
 II. If there were nothing else to the purpose in the whole of 
 the New Testament, those first fourteen verses of the fourth 
 Gospel would suffice to persuade a believer in Holy Scripture of 
 the truth that Jesus Christ is absolutely God. It is a mistake 
 to regard those fourteen verses as a mere prefatory attack upon 
 the gnosis of Cerinthus, having no necessary connexion with the 
 narrative which follows, and representing nothing essential to 
 the integrity of the Apostle's thought. For, as Baur very truly 
 observes, the doctrine of the prologue is the very fundamental 
 idea which underlies the whole * Johannean theology Q.' It is not 
 enough to say that between the prologue and the history which 
 follows there exists an intimate organic connexion. The pro- 
 logue is itself the beginning of the history. ^ It is impossible,' 
 says Baur, *to deny that "the Word made fleshy" is one and 
 the same subject with the Man Christ Jesus on the one hand, 
 and with the Word Who " was in the beginning. Who was with 
 God, and Who was God," on the others.' 
 
 Taking then the prologue of St. John's Gospel in connexion 
 with the verses which immediately succeed it, let us observe that 
 St. John attaches to our Lord's Person two names which to- 
 gether yield a complete revelation of His Divine glory. Our 
 Lord is called the ' Word,' and the ^ Only-begotten Son.' It is 
 doubtless true, as Neander observes, that 'the first of these 
 names was' put prominently forward at Ephesus, 'in order to 
 lead those who busied themselves with speculations on the 
 
 « Vorlesungen, p. 351. 'St. John i. 14. 
 
 8 Baur, ubi sup. St. John i. 1. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
in the Prologue of Saint yolms Gospel, 227 
 
 Logos as the centre of all* theophanies, from a mere religious 
 idealism to a religious realism, to lead them in short to a 
 recognition of God revealed in Christ*.' It has already been 
 shewn that the Logos of St. John differs materially from the 
 Logos of later Alexandrian speculation, while it is linked to 
 great lines of teaching in the Old Testament. No reason can 
 be assigned why St. John had recourse to the word Logos at 
 all, unless he was already in possession of the underlying fact 
 to which this word supplied a philosophical form. If the word 
 did express, in a form familiar to the ears of the men of Ephe- 
 sus, a great truth which they had buried beneath a heap of 
 errors, that truth, as Bruno Bauer admits, must have been 
 held independently and previously by the Apostle^. The 
 direct expression of that truth was St. John's primary motive 
 in using the word ; his polemical and corrective action upon 
 the Cerinthian gnosis was a secondary motive. 
 
 By the Avord Logos, then, St. John carries back his history of 
 our Lord to a point at which it has not yet entered into the 
 sphere of sense and time. * In the four Gospels,' says St. Augus- 
 tine, * or rather in the four books of the one Gospel, the Apostle 
 St. John, deservedly compared to an eagle, by reason of his 
 spiritual understanding, has lifted his enunciation of truth to a 
 far higher and sublimer point than the other three, and by this 
 elevation he would fain have our hearts lifted up likewise. For 
 the other three Evangelists walked, so to speak, on earth with 
 our Lord as Man. Of His Godhead they said but a few things. 
 But John, as if he found it oppressive to walk on earth, has 
 opened his treatise as it were with a peal of thunder ; he has 
 raised himself not merely above the earth, and the whole com- 
 pass of the air and heaven, but even above every angel-host, and 
 every order of the invisible powers, and has reached even to Him 
 by Whom all things were made, in that sentence, " In the begin- 
 ning was the Word^." ' 
 
 Instead of opening his narrative at the Human Birth of our 
 Lord, or at the commencement of His ministry, St. John places 
 himself in thought at the starting-point (as we should conceive 
 it) of all timey. Nay rather, it would seem that if ii^tl^ll at the 
 
 * Neander, Kirchengeschichte, p. 549 ; quoted by Tholuck, Ev. Johan. 
 kap. I. 
 
 " Kritik der Evangel. Geschichte des Job. p. 5 ; quoted by Tboluck, ubi 
 supra. ^ St. Aug. tr. 36 in Johan. 
 
 y Meyer in loc. note : ' Vollig unexegetisch ist die Fassung der Socinianer 
 (s. Catech. Racov. p. 135, ed. Oeder): kv apxv beisse in initio evangelii* 
 V] Q 2 
 
228 Doctrme of the Eter7ial Word 
 
 beginning of Genesis signifies the initial moment of time itself \ 
 €v dpxfi rises to the absolute conception of that which is anterior 
 to, or rather independent of, time^. Then, when time was not, 
 or at a point to which man cannot apply his finite conception of 
 time, there was — the Logos or Word. When as yet nothing had 
 been made, He was. What was the Logos ? Such a term, in a 
 position of such moment, when so much depends on our rightly 
 understanding it, has a moral no less than an intellectual claim 
 upoQ us, of the highest order. We are bound to try to under- 
 sti^nd it, just as certainly as we are bound to obey the command 
 tO;,lo\\e our enemies. No man who carries his morality into the 
 spJi^re of religious thought can affect or afford to maintain, that 
 tbe; fundamental idea in the writings of St. John is a scholastic 
 CQaiceifc, with which practical Christians need not concern them- 
 selves. And indeed St. John's doctrine of the Logos has from 
 the first been scrutinized anxiously by the mind of Christendom. 
 It xiould not but be felt that the term Logos denotes at the very 
 least something intimately and everlastingly present with God, 
 something as internal to the Being of God as thought is to the 
 soul, of man. In truth the Divine Logos is God reflected in His 
 own eternal Thought; in the Logos, God is His own Object. 
 This Infinite Thought, the reflection and counterpart of God, 
 subsisting in God as a Being or Hypostasis, and having a ten- 
 dency to self-communication, — such is the Logos. The Logos 
 is the Thought of God, not intermittent and precarious like 
 human thouglit, but subsisting with the intensity of a personal 
 form. The very expression seems to court the argument of 
 Athenagoras, that since God could never have been aXoyos% the 
 Logos jnust have been not created but eternal. It suggests 
 
 ^ Meyer ia loc. : * Johannes parallelisirt zwar den Anfang seines Evangel, 
 mit dem Anfange der Genesis; aber er steigert den historischen Begriff 
 JT'K^'73 welehe? (Gen. i. i) den Anfangsmoment der Zeit selbst bedeutet, 
 zum absoluten BegrifFe der VorzeitlichJceit.' This might suffice to refute the 
 assertion of a modern writer that St. John does not teach the Eternity of the 
 Divine Word. ' Une des theses fondamentales de la speculation ecclesiastique, 
 c'est idde de I'^ternitd du Verbe. Depiiis que le concile de Nicee en a fait 
 une des pierres angulaires de la thdologie Catholique, sa decision est restde 
 Th^ritage commun de tons les systemes orthodoxes. Eh bien ! les dcrits de 
 Jean n'en parlent pas.' Reuss, Thdol. Chrdt. ii. 438. The author is mis- 
 taken in attributing to eV apxrj a merely relative force, and thence arguing 
 that if the Word is eternal, the world is eternal also (Gen. i. i). Besides, 
 @ehs ?iv 6 A6yos. How is the Word other than eternal, if He is thus iden- 
 tified with the ever-existing Being ? 
 
 a Athenag. Suppl. pro Christ. 10 (46 D. ed. Otto) : ilx^v avrhs iv kavTw rhu 
 AdyoVf a'iUcas \oyiKhs ^v, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
in the Prologue of Saint Jolms Gospel, 229 
 
 the further inference that since reason is man's noblest faculty, 
 the Uncreated Logos must be at least equal with God. In any 
 case it might have been asked why the term was used at all, if 
 these obvious inferences were not to be deduced from it ; but as 
 a matter of fact they are not mere inferences, since they are 
 warranted by the express language of St. John. St. John says 
 that the Word was 4n the beginning.' The question then 
 arises : What was His relation to the Self-existent Being % He 
 was not merely Trapa tg) 9ea)t>^ along with God, but Trpos tov GeoV. 
 This last preposition expresses, beyond the fact of co-existence 
 or immanence, the more significant fact of perpetuated inter- 
 communion. The face of the Everlasting Word, if we may dare 
 so to express ourselves, was ever directed towards the face of the 
 Everlasting Father c. But was the Logos then an independent 
 being, existing externally to the One God ? To conceive of an 
 independent being, anterior to creation, would be an error at 
 issue with the first truth of monotheism ; and therefore Geo? ^1/ 
 6 Aoyoff. The Word is not merely a Divine Being, but He is in 
 the absolute sense God<i. Thus from His eternal existence we 
 ascend first to His distinct Personality, and then to the full truth 
 of His substantial Godhead. 
 
 Yet the Logos necessarily suggests to our minds the further 
 idea of communicativeness ; the Logos is Speech as well as 
 Thought®. And of His actual self-communication St. John 
 
 *» St. John xvii. 5. 
 
 c Meyer in loc. : ^vp^s bezeichnet das BefindlicTisein des Logos bei Gott 
 im Gesichtspunkte der Richtung der Gemeinschaft.* Bernliardy, Syntax, 
 p. 2b5. 
 
 ^ Here is the essential difference between the Logos of St. John and the 
 Logos of Philo. Meyer, who apparently holds Philo to have definitely con- 
 sidered his Logos as a real hypostasis, states it as follows, in his note on the 
 words KoX 06^s ^v b Af^yoy. * Wie also Johannes, mit dem nichtartikulirten 
 Q^os kein niedrigeres Wesen, als Gott Selbst hat, bezeichnen will ; so unter- 
 scheidet sich die Johanneische Logos-Idee bestimmt von derjenigen bei Philo, 
 welcher ^eos ohne Artikel im Sinne wesentlicher Unterordnung, ja, wie Er 
 Salbst sagt, eV KaraxPV<J'^i' (}• P- 655, ed. Mangey) vom Logos prjidicirt ; — 
 wie denn auch der Name 6 bevrepos deSs, welchen er ihm giebt, nach ii. 
 p. 625. Euseb. prsep. Ev. vii. 13, ausdriicklich den Begriff eines Zwischen- 
 wesens zwischen Gott und dem Menschen bezeichnen soil, nach dessen 
 Bilde Gott den Menschen geschaffen hat. Dieser Subordinatianismus, nach 
 welchem der Logos zwar /xeOopios ns deov <t>v(ns, aber tov fxlv iKarrwv, 
 avdpcoirov Se Kpeirrcou ist (i. p. 683) ist nicht der neu-testamentliche, welcher 
 vielmehr die ewige Wesenseinheit des Yaters und des Sohnes zur Vorausset- 
 zung hat (Phil. ii. 6 ; Kol. i. 15 f.), und die Unterordnung des letztcrn in 
 dessen Abhangigkeit vom Vater setzt.' 
 
 ® Cf. Dehtzsch, System der Biblischen Psychologic, p. 138. 
 V] 
 
230 The Divine Nattcre, how represented inSt, J ohn, 
 
 mentions two phases or stages ; the first creation^ the second 
 revelation. The Word unveils Himself to the soul throuo-h the 
 mediation of objects of sense in the physical world, and He also 
 unveils Himself immediately. Accordingly St. John says that 
 ^all things were made' by the Word, and that the Word Who 
 creates is also the Revealer : ^ the Word was made flesh, and 
 dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.' He possesses ho^a^ 
 that is, in St. John, the totality of the Divine attributes. This 
 ^ glory' is not merely something belonging to His Essential 
 Nature ; since He allows us to behold It through His veil of 
 Flesh. 
 
 W^hat indeed this ho^a or glory was, we may observe by con- 
 sidering that St. John's writings appear to bring God before us, 
 at least more particularly, under a threefold aspect. 
 
 1. God is Life (C^). The Father is ' living f;' He Mias life 
 in Himself &'.' God is not merely the living God, that is, the 
 real God, in contrast to the non-existent and feigned deities of 
 the heathen : God is Life, in the sense of Self-existent Being ; 
 He is the Focus and the Fountain of universal life. Tn Him 
 life may be contemplated in its twofold activity, as issuing from 
 its source, and as returning to its object. The Life of God 
 passes forth from Itself ; It lavishes Itself throughout the realms 
 of nothingness ; It summons into being Avorlds, systems, intelli- 
 gences, orders of existences unimagined before. In doing this 
 It obeys no necessary law of self-expansion, but pours Itself 
 forth with that highest generosity that belongs to a perfect 
 freedom. That is to say, that God the Life is God the Creator. 
 On the other hand, God is Being returning into Itself, finding 
 in Itself Its perfect and consummate satisfaction. God is thus 
 the Object of all dependent life ; He is indeed the Object of His 
 own Life ; all His infinite powers and faculties turn ever inward 
 with uncloyed delight upon Himself as upon their one adequate 
 End or Object. We cannot approach more nearly to a definition 
 of pleasure than by saying that it is the exact correspondence 
 between a faculty and its object. Pleasure is thus a test of 
 vitality ; and God, as being Life, is the one Being Who is 
 supremely and perfectly happy. 
 
 2. Again, God is Love (dyaTr?;) ^1. Love is the relation which 
 
 f St. John vi. 57: aTr€(TT€i\€ fic 6 (^cau TIaTr;p. 
 
 S Ibid. V. 26 : 6 Uarrip exet C*^V ^'' cavrcd. 
 
 ^ I St. John iv. 8 : o ij.^ ayaircav, ovk eyvca rhv @e6v' Sri 6 Qehs ayaTrt) icrriv. 
 Ibid. ver. l6 : 6 0ebs aydin} icrrl, koI 6 ixevonv iu ry aydirri^ iv T<f QeS /xeveiy 
 Koi 6 &ehs iv avTcv. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Relation between God and the Incarnate Word. 231 
 
 subsists between God and all that lives as He has willed. Love 
 is the bond of the Being of God. Love binds the Father to that 
 Only Son Whom He has begotten from all eternity i. Love 
 itself knows no beginning ; it proceeds from the Father and 
 the Son from all eternity. God loves created life, whether in 
 nature or in grace ; He loves the race of men, the unredeemed 
 world k; He loves Christians with a special love I In beings thus 
 external to Himself, God loves the life which He has given them ; 
 He loves Himself in them ; He is still Himself the ultimate, 
 rightful, necessary Object of His love. Thus love is of His 
 essence; it is the expression of His necessary delight in His 
 own existence. 
 
 3. Lastly, God is Light (^ws). That is to say, He is absolute 
 intellectual and moral Truth; He is Truth in the realms of 
 thought, and Truth in the sphere of action. He is the All- 
 knowing and the perfectly Holy Being. No intellectual igno- 
 rance can darken His all-embracing survey of actual and possible 
 fact ; no stain can soil His robe of awful Sanctity. Light is not 
 merely the sphere in which He dwells : He is His own sphere 
 of existence ; He is Himself Light, and in Him is no darkness 
 at all m. 
 
 These three aspects of the Divine Nature, denoted by the 
 terms Life, Love, and Light, are attributed in St. John's writings 
 with abundant explicitness to the Word made flesh. 
 
 Thus, the Logos is Light. He is the Light, that is, the Light 
 Which is the very essence of God. The Baptist indeed preaches 
 truth ; but the Baptist must not be confounded with the Light 
 Which he heralds 11. The Logos is the true Light <>. All that 
 
 ^ St. John iii. 35 : b Uarrjp ay ana tov Tlhv koI Travra SeduKcv iv ry X€<pl 
 ahrov. Ibid. v. 20 : 6 yap TlaT^p (piXu rhv Tlhf, koI Trdvra SeiKuvaiv avr^ & 
 avrhs Trotet. Ibid. x. 1 7, xv. 9. Ibid. xvii. 24. : rjydiTrjads fi€ irph KaraPoKris 
 k6(Tixov. 
 
 ^ St. John iii. 16: ovra yap Tjydirrjcrcv 6 Gehs rhv k6(TIxov, &(TT€ tov Tlbv 
 avrov TOV fxovoycvTJ e^ooK€V. I St. John iv. 10 : avrbs 7}ydTrr}(r€V rjixas, Ka\ 
 d7r6(rT6:A.€ tov Tlov avTov tXaafxbv ircpl toov afiapTiSov rjfxwv. Ibid. ver. 1 9 : 
 rjjjLeis ayairwij.€v avTov, oti avrbs irpcoTOs -qyainrja^v rj/JLas, 
 
 1 St. John xiv. 23, xvi. 27. 
 
 ™ I St. John. i. 5 : 6 &ebs (pus icri, Koi crKorla iv avT^ ovk iffTiv ovdefiia. 
 Ibid. ver. 7 : avros iariv kv tcU (poori. Here eV does not merely point to the 
 sphere in which God dwells. In St. John this preposition is constantly used 
 to denote the closest possible relationship between two subjects, or, as here, 
 between a subject and its attribute. Cf. Reuss, Theologie Chretienne, ii. 
 p. 434, for this as well as many of the above observations and references. 
 
 '^ St. John i. 7 : ovtos 9)\9€v els jxapTvpiav, 'Iva /JLaprvp-fjay irepl tov (pcoros. 
 Ibid. ver. 8 : ovk ^v iKcTvos to (f>a>s, aA\' 'Iva ixapTvpiitrrj ircpl tov (pooTSs, 
 
 " Ibid. ver. 9 : 9jv rb (pus to aXriOivSv. 
 
23 2 God revealed by the Word Incarnate. 
 
 has really enlarged the stock of intellectual truth or of moral 
 goodness among men, all that has ever lighted any soul of man, 
 has radiated from HimP. He proclaims Himself to be the Light 
 of the world % and the Truth ^ j and His Apostle, speaking of 
 the illumination shed by Him upon the Church, reminds Chris- 
 tians that *the darkness is passing, and the true Light now 
 shineth ».' 
 
 The Logos is Love. He refracts upon the Father the fulness 
 of His love *. He loves the Father as the Father loves Himself. 
 The Father's love sends Him into the world, and He obeys out 
 of love ^. It is love which draws Him together with the Father 
 to make His abode in the souls of the faithful ^. 
 
 The Logos is Life. He is the Life y, the eternal Life z, the 
 Life Which is the Essence of God. It has been given Him to 
 have life in Himself, as the Father has life in Himself ^ He 
 can give life ^ ; nay, life is so emphatically His prerogative gift, 
 that He is called the Word of Life c. 
 
 Thus the Word reveals the Divine Essence ; His Incarnation 
 makes that Life, that Love, that Light, which is eternally resident 
 in God, obvious to souls that steadily contemplate Himself. 
 These terms, Life, Love, Light — so abstract, so simple, so sug- 
 
 P St. John i. 9: ^ (pcoriCei trdt/ra &v6poo'irov ep^o/xeuov els rov KSafiov. 'Das 
 {jxaTi^eiv iravra ^vOpco-rrov, als charakteristische Wirksamkeit des wahren Lichts, 
 bleibt wahr, wenngleich empirisch diese Erleuchtung von Vielen nicht emp- 
 fangen wird. Das empirische Verhaltniss kommt darauf zuriick : quisquis illu- 
 minatur, ab hac luce illuminatur. (Beng.).' Meyer in Job. i. 9. The Evan- 
 gelist means more than this : no human being is left without a certain mea- 
 sure of natural light, and this light is given by the Divine Logos in all cases. 
 
 1 Ibid. viii. 12 : eyci elfiirh <p6os rod KSa-fioV 6 aKo\ov6a>v ifJLol, oh (i)) irepi- 
 TraT^tret ev rij (TKOTiay d\\^ €|et to <f)S>s rrjs C<^7)s. Ibid. iii. 19 : to <}>a)S 
 i\7}\v6€v els rbv Kofffxoy, that is, in the Incarnate Word. Ibid. ix. 5 : orav iv 
 r^ Koafiq) &, (pus elfii rod KSafiov. Ibid. xii. 46 : 670? ^cos els rbv Kdafiov 
 e\7j\v6a, 'Cva ■nas 6 irio-revcov els ifie, ev ry ffKorla. [JL^ fieivp. 
 
 ' Ibid. xiv. 6. 
 
 8 I St. John ii. 8 : 7} (TKOTia irapdyeTat, koI rh (pus rh a\7}diuhv ^S?7 (paii/ei, 
 
 * St. John xiv. 31. 
 
 ^ I St. John iii. 16 : eV rovrcp eypcaKafieu t))v aydinjv (the absolute charity), 
 hri eKelvos vnep 7]fxoov t^v ^vx^^ avrov edr)Ke. Cf. St. John iii. 16. 
 
 ^ St. John xiv. 23 : edv ris ayanS. /xe, rhu x6yov fxov T7]pi}(Tei, koI 6 IlaT^p 
 fiov ayaTTTjau avrSy, koI Trphs avrhv iAeuaSfieda, Koi fiou'/jv itap avrcp noi'fjaoiJ.ev. 
 Ibid. xiii. i, xv. 9. 
 
 y Ibid. xi. 25 : iycv elimt . , . rj ^co^. Ibid. xiv. 6. 
 
 2 I St. John V. 20 : ovtSs ecmv . . . rj (od^ aldouios. The outos is referred 
 to the Father by Liicke and Winer. But see p. 239, note ^ 
 
 a St. John V. 26 : eSw/ce koI ru Tlc^ Cwtjv ex^iv ^v eavr^. 
 
 b Ibid. i. 3, 4. 
 
 c I St. John i. I : ^ \6yos rrjs Co^rjs. Reuss, Thdol. Clirdt. ii. p. 445. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Word is the Only-degotten Son, 233 
 
 gestive — meet in God; but they meet also in Jesus Christ. 
 They do not only make Him the centre of a philosophy. They 
 belong to the mystic language of faith more truly than to the 
 abstract terminology of speculative thought. They draw hearts 
 to Jesus ; they invest Him with a higher than any intellectual 
 beauty. The Life, the Love, the Light, are the ^ glory' of the 
 Word Incarnate which His disciples ^beheld,' pouring its rays 
 through the veil of His human tabernacle ^ The Light, the 
 Love, the Life, constitute the ^fulness' whereof His disciples 
 received ®. Herein is comprised that entire body of grace and 
 truth f by which the Word Incarnate gives to men the right to 
 become the sons of God &. 
 
 But, as has been already abundantly implied, the Word is also 
 the Son. As applied to our Lord, the title 'Son of God' is 
 protected by epithets which sustain and define its unique sig- 
 nificance. In the synoptic Gospels, Christ is termed the 
 'well-beloved' Sonh. In St. Paul He is God's 'Own' Soni. . 
 In St. John He is the Only -begotten Son, or simply the Only- 
 begotten ^. This last epithet surely means, not merely that God 
 has no other such Son, but that His Only-begotten Son is, in 
 virtue of this Sonship, a partaker of that incommunicable and 
 imperishable Essence, Which is sundered from all created life by 
 an impassable chasm. If St. Paul speaks of the Kesurrection as 
 
 ^ St. John i. 14: 6 \6yos (rapl iyiverOj Koi icTKiivaxT^v ivrjfxTv, Kal ideaardixeda 
 tV ^o^ap avTOv. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 16 : koI e/c rod irXripcaiuaTos avrov rj/xus irdvres i\dPofjL€y, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 14 : irX'fjprjs x^P^tos Kal aArjOeias. 
 
 8 Ibid. i. 12: oaoi be iXa^ou avrov^ ^BuKev avroTs i^ovaiau riKva 0eoG 
 y^viaQai. 
 
 ^ ayairrjTOT, St. Matt. iii. 17, xii. 1 8, xvii. 5 ; St. Mark i. il, ix. 7, xii. 6; 
 St. Luke iii. 22, ix. 35. Cod. Alex, reads €/cAeA.67/i€Vor, xx. 13; cf. 
 2 St. Peter i. 17. 
 
 i Rom. viii. 32 : rod iUov Tiov ovk icpeicraro. Ibid. ver. 3 : rhv eavrov Tlhy 
 ir^ix^as. 
 
 ^ St. John i. 14: iOeaadfjLeda r))v ho^av avrov, bo^av a^s fiovoyevovs iraph 
 Tlarpos. Ibid. i. 18 : b /jLovoycp-^s Tib?, 6 &p ets rbu kSXttov rod UarpSs. Ibid, 
 iii. 16 : [o 06os] rbv Tlbv avrov rbu fiovoyet/r) edooKeu. Ibid. ver. 18: o Se jli^ 
 iriarcvcav Tjbri KCKpirai, on /x^ TreTriVreuwrev els rb ovofxa rod fiovoyevovs Tlov 
 rod &€od. Cf. I St. John iv. 9 : rbv Tlbv avrod rbv /novoyevri aireorraXKCv 6 
 06OS fis rbv k6(TijloVj 'tva ^jaco/jL^v di' avrod. The word fJLovoy€vi]s is used by 
 St. Luke of the son of the widow of Nain (vii. 12), of the daughter of Jairus 
 (viii. 42), and of the lunatic son of the man who* met our Lord on His coming 
 down from the mount of the transfiguration (ix. 38). In Heb. xi. 17 it is 
 applied to Isaac, fxovoyeviis means in each of these cases ' that which exists 
 once only, that is, singly in its kind.' (Tholuck, Cotnra. in Joh. i. 14.) God 
 has one Only Son Who by nature and necessity is His Son. 
 
234 ' Word' and 'Soil' complete and guard each other, 
 
 manifesting this Sonsliip to the world 1, the sense of the word 
 fxovoyevrjs remains in St. John, and it is plainly ^ defined by its 
 context to relate to something higher than any event occurring 
 in time, however great or beneficial to the human race ^.' The 
 Only-begotten Son^ is in the bosom of the Father (6 Siv eh rbv 
 kqKttov tov Uarpos) just as the Logos is Trpos- t6v Qeov, ever con- 
 templating, ever, as it were, moving towards Him in the ceaseless 
 activities of an ineffable communion. The Son is His Father's 
 equal, in that He is partaker of His nature : He is His Subordi- 
 nate, in that this Equality is eternally derived. But the Father 
 worketh hitherto and the Son works ; the Father hath life in 
 Himself, and has given to the Son to have life in Himself ; all 
 men are to honour the Son even as they honour the Father o. 
 
 Each of these expressions, the Word and the Son, if taken 
 alone, might have led to a fatal misconception. In the language 
 of Church history, the Logos, if unbalanced by the idea of Sonship, 
 might have seemed to sanction Sabellianism. The Son, without 
 the Logos, might have been yet more successfully pressed into 
 the service of Arianism. An Eternal Thought or Eeason, even 
 although constantly tending to express itself in speech, is of itself 
 too abstract to oblige us to conceive of it as of a personal Sub- 
 sistence. On the other hand the filial relationship carries with 
 it the idea of dependence and of comparatively recent origin, 
 even although it should suggest the reproduction in the Son of 
 all the qualities of the Father. Certainly St, John's language in 
 his prologue protects the Personality of the Logos, and unless 
 he believed that God could be divided or could have had a 
 beginning, the Apostle teaches that the Son is co- eternal with 
 the Father. Yet the bare metaphors of * Word' and ^ Son,' taken 
 separately, might lead divergent thinkers to conceive of Him to 
 Whom they are applied, on the one side as an impersonal quality 
 or faculty of God, on the other, as a concrete and personal but in- 
 ferior and dependent being. But combine them, and each corrects 
 the possible misuse of the other. The Logos, Who is also the 
 Son, cannot be an impersonal and abstract quality ; since such 
 an expression as the Son would be utterly misleading, unless it 
 implied at the very least the fact of a personal subsistence dis- 
 tinct from that of the Father. On the other hand, the Son, Who 
 
 1 Acts xiii. 32, 33 ; Rom. i. 4. Compare on the other hand, Heb. v. 8. 
 
 ^ Newman's Arians, p. 174. 
 
 ° St. John i. 18, 6 fiovoyei/rjs Ti6s, where however the Vatican and Sinaitic 
 MSS. and Cod. Ephr. read 6 fxoj/oyev^s 0EO5. For the Patristic evidence 
 on the subject, see Alford in loc. *> St. John. v. 1 7, 23, 26. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Manifestation of the Word in history. 2.35 
 
 is also the Logos, cannot be of more recent origin than the 
 Father ; since the Father cannot be conceived of as subsisting 
 without that Eternal Thought or Keason Which is the Son. Nor 
 may the Son be deemed to be in any respect, save in the order of 
 Divine subsistence, inferior to the Father, since He is identical 
 with the eternal intellectual Life of the Most High. Thus each 
 metaphor reinforces, supplements, and protects the other. Taken 
 together they exhibit Christ before His Incarnation as at once 
 personally distinct from, and yet equal with, the Father ; He is 
 That personally subsisting and ' Eternal Life, Which was with 
 the Father, and was manifested unto us p.' 
 
 St. John's Gospel is a narrative of that manifestation. It 
 is a Life of the Eternal Word tabernacling in Human Nature 
 among menq. The Hebrew schools employed a similiar ex- 
 pression to designate the personal presence of the Divinity 
 in this finite world. In St. John's Gospel the Personality of 
 Christ makes Itself felt as Eternal and Divine at wellnigh every 
 step of the narrative r. Each discourse, each miracle, nay, each 
 separate word and act, is a fresh ray of glory streaming forth 
 from the Person of the Word through the veil of His assumed 
 Humanity. The miracles of the Word Incarnate are frequently 
 called His works s. The Evangelist means to imply that * the 
 wonderful is only the natural form of working for Him in Whom 
 all the fulness of God dwells/ Christ's Divine Nature must 
 
 P St. John i. 2. Cf. Newman's Arians, ch. ii. sect. 3. 
 
 1 St. John i, 14: €(TKijuca(T€u eV rjfjui'. The image implies both the reality 
 and the transient character of our Lord's manifestation in the flesh. Ols- 
 hausen, Meyer, and Liicke see in it an allusion to the ' Shekinah,' in which 
 the Divine glory or radiance (ni:3) dwelt enshrined. 
 
 ^ Baur, Dogmengeschichte, i. 602: 'Was das johanneische Evangelium 
 betrifft, so versteht es sich ohnediess von selbst, dass das eigentliche Subject 
 der Personlichkeit Christi nur der Logos ist, die jNIenscliwerdung besteht 
 daher nur in dem aap^ yev4(r6ai; dass der Logos Fleisch geworden, im 
 Fleisch erschienen ist, ist seine menschliche Erscheinung.* It will be borne 
 in mind that (rap|, in its full New Testament meaning, certainly includes 
 ^vxv as well as the animal organism (see Olshausen on Rom. vii. 14), 
 and St. John attributes to the Word Incarnate spiritual experiences which 
 must have had their seat in His human Soul (xi. 33, 38, xiii. 21). But 
 Baur's general position, that in St. John's Gospel the Personality of the 
 Eternal Word is perpetually before us, is unquestionably true. 
 
 « epya, St. John v. 36, vii. 2T, x. 25, 32, 38, xiv. 11, t2, xv. 23. 
 Cf. too St. Matt. xi. 2. The word is applied to the Old Testament miracles 
 in Heb. iii. 9 ; Ps. xciv. 9, LXX. Cf. Archbishop Trench on the Miracles, 
 p. 7. That, notwithstanding the wider use of epyov in St. John xvii. 4, 
 epya in the fourth Gospel do mean Christ's miracles, cf. Trench, Mir. p. 8', 
 note i*. 
 
23<^ Manifestation of the Word in history, 
 
 of necessity bring fortli works greater than the works of man. 
 The Incarnation is the one great wonder; other miracles follow 
 as a matter of course. The real marvel would be if the In- 
 carnate Being should work no miracles*; as it is, they are 
 the natural results of His presence among men, rather than 
 its higher manifestation. His true glory is not perceived except 
 by those who gaze at it with a meditative and reverent intent- 
 ness'^. The Word Incarnate is ever conscious of His sublime 
 relationship to the Father. He knows whence He is^. He 
 refers not unfrequently to His pre-existent Lifey. He sees 
 into the deepest purposes of the human hearts around Him^. 
 He has a perfect knowledge of all that concerns God a. His 
 works are simply the works of God ^. To believe in the Father 
 is to believe in Him. To have seen Him is to have seen the 
 Father. To reject and hate Him is to reject and hate the 
 Father. He demands at the hands of men the same tribute 
 of affection and submission as that which they owe to the 
 Person of the Father c. 
 
 * Trench, ubi supra, p. 8. 
 
 ^ St. John uses the words ^fwpeTv, dedaaaOai to describe this. 
 
 * St. John viii. 14 : oJSa irSdev 'f)\Qov. 
 
 y St. John iii. 13, vi. 62, viii. 58, xvi. 28, xvii. 5. 
 
 * Ibid. ii. 24, iv. 17, v. 14, 42, vi. 15. » Ibid. viii. 55, x. 15. 
 ^ Ibid. ix. 4, X. 37, sqq., xiv. 10. 
 
 ^ As M. Reuss admits : *I1 rdsulte (from the prerogatives ascribed to the 
 Word Incarnate in St. John's Gospel) que le Verbe r^v^lateur pouvait 
 demander pour lui-m§me, de la part des hommes, les memes sentiments, 
 et les memes dispositions, qu'ils doivent avoir a I'egard de la personne du 
 Pbre. Ces sentiments sont exprimes par un mot, qui contient la notion 
 d'un respect profess^ pour un superieur, la reconnaissance d'une dignity 
 devant laquelle on s'incline. A cet egard, il y a egalite des deux personnes 
 divines vis-a-vis de Vhomme. On ne croit pas a I'une sans croire a I'autre ; 
 qui voit Tune voit I'autre ; rejeter, hair le Fils, c'est rejeter et hair le Pere. 
 (St. Jean iii. 33, 34, xii. 44, xv. 23). Mais dans tout ceci (proceeds 
 M. Reuss) ij ne s'agit pas de ce qu'on appele le culte dans le langage pra- 
 tique de TEglise. Le culte appartient k Dieu le Pere, et lui sera ofFert 
 desormais avec d'autant plus d'empressement qu'il est mieux revdl^ et que 
 rien ne separe plus de lui les croyants.' (Reuss, Theol. Chr^t. ii. 455.) How 
 inconsequent is this restriction ! If the Incarnate Word has a right to 
 demand for Himself the same ' sentiments ' and ' dispositions ' as those which 
 men cherish towards the Almighty Father, He has a right to the same 
 tribute of an adoration in spirit and in truth as that which is due to the 
 Father. What is worship but a complex act of such 'sentiments' and 
 * dispositions ' as faith, love, self-prostration, self-surrender before the Most 
 Holy ? Jiriixav (St. John v. 23), within the general meaning of due acknow- 
 ledgment, includes much else besides adoration, it cannot be applied to the 
 duties of man to God without including adoration. Our Lord's words place 
 Himself and the Father simply on a level; if the Son is not to be adored, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
This explains St, yolms point of view, 237 
 
 In St. John's Gospel, the Incarnation is exhibited, not as 
 the measure of the humiliation of the Eternal Word, but as 
 the veil of His enduring and unassailable glory. The angels of 
 God ascend and descend upon Him. Nay, He is still in heaven. 
 Certainly He has taken an earthly form; He has clothed himself 
 with a human frame. But He has thereby raised humanity rather 
 than abased Himself. In St. John the status inanitionis, the 
 intrinsic humiliation of Christ's Incarnate Life, is thrown into the 
 backgTound of the reader's thought. The narrative is throughout 
 illuminated by the never-failing presence of the Word in His 
 glory d. Even when Jesus dies. His Death is no mere humilia- 
 tion ; His Death is the crisis of His exaltation ^^ of His glory f. 
 Not that He can personally increase in glory. He is already 
 the Son ; He is the Word. But He can glorify and exalt that 
 Manhood which is the robe through which His movements are 
 discernible : He can glorify Himself, as God is glorified, by 
 drawing towards His Person the faith and love and reverence 
 of men. It were folly to conceive of Him as enhancing His 
 Divinity ; but He can make larger and deeper that measure 
 of homage w^hich ascends towards His throne from human 
 understandings and from human hearts s. 
 
 III. I . But does St. John's teaching in his earlier writings on 
 the subject of our Lord's Person harmonize with the representa- 
 
 neither is the Father ; if the Father is to be adored, then must the Son 
 be adored in the same sense and measure. This is certainly not interfered 
 with by St. John iv. 20, sqq. ; while the best practical comment upon it 
 is to be found in the confession of St. Thomas, xx. 28; on which see 
 Lect. VII. 
 
 d This may seem inconsistent with (i) St. John xiv. 28 : 6 Ua-r^p fidCccv 
 fxov ia-Tiv. But such a statement would be ' unmeaning ' in a mere man. 
 See Lect. IV. pp. 199-201 ; (2) St. John xvii. 3: uutt} Se icmu rj alcavios 
 (cor], 'iva yivwa-Kcaaiv ae rhv fiduou a\r]9ivhv Qiov, Kal hv aTreVretAas ^lr](rovu 
 XpiffrSv. But here a Socinian sense is excluded, (1) by the consideration 
 that 'the knowledge of God and a creature could not be Eternal Life' 
 (see Alford in loc); (2) by the plain sense of verse i, which places the 
 Son and the Father on a level : ' What creature could stand before his Creator 
 and say, 'Glorify me, that I may glorify thee?' Stier apud Alf. ; (3) by 
 verse 5, which asserts our Lord's pre-existent hola. It follows that the 
 restrictive epithets [xovov aX-ndivov must be held to be exclusive, not of the 
 Son, but of false gods, or creatures external to the Divine Essence. See 
 Estius in loc. 
 
 ® St. John iii. 14: v\poo6rjvai Set top Tlhp rov avOpcoirov. Ibid viii. 28, 
 xii. 32. 
 
 ^ Ibid. xii. 23: i\7}Xvd€u r] wpa 'iva Bo^aaO^ 6 Tlhs rov avQpdnrov. 
 Ibid. xiii. 31. 
 
 e Cf. Reuss, Theol. Chrdt. ii. 456 ; although the statements of this writer 
 cannot be adopted without much qualification. 
 
238 Chris tology of St. Johis First Epistle. 
 
 tions placed before us in the fourth GospeU The opening 
 words of his first Epistle li might go far to answer that question. 
 St. John's position in this Epistle is, that the Eternal immaterial 
 Word of Life resident in God had become historically manifest, 
 and that the Apostles had consciously seen, and heard, and 
 handled Him, and were now publishing their experience to the 
 world i. The practical bearing of this announcement lay in the 
 truth that ^ he that hath the Son hath the Life, and he that hath 
 not the Son hath not the Lifei.' For ' God hath given to us the 
 Eternal Life, and this, the Life, is in His Son^^.' If then the 
 soul is to hold communion with God in the Life of Light and 
 Righteousness and Love, it must be through communion with 
 His Divine Son. Thus all practically depends upon the attitude 
 of the soul towards the Son. Accordingly, * whosoever denieth 
 the Son, the same hath not the Father l;' while on the other 
 hand, whosoever sincerely and in practice acknowledges the Son 
 of God in His historical manifestation, enjoys a true communion 
 with the Life of God. ' Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is 
 the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God^^.' 
 
 St. John constantly teaches that the Christian's work in this 
 state of probation is to conquer ^the world i^.' It is, in other 
 
 ^ On the question of the authorship of the three Epistles, see Dean Al- 
 ford's exhaustive discussion, Greek Test. vol. iv., Prolegomena, chaps. 5, 6. 
 See too Appendix, note E. i i St. John i. 1-3. 
 
 J Ibid. V. 12 : b ^x^^ "^^^ '^'■^^ ^X^* "^hv Mv 6 /u^ 6x«i/ rbi/ Tlbi/ rod ©eoG 
 
 T^U C^r)V OVK 6X€£. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 11: Koi aVrrj ia-rlv ^ fxaprvpla (i.e. the revealed doctrine resting 
 on a Divine authority) on Qw^iv alcapiov edwKev rjfuv 6 ®ehsj Koi avrr} r] (ootj iv 
 
 T^ Tlw aVTOV €(TTIP. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 22 : ovtos icriv 6 aifTixpt(TTOs, 6 apvovfxevos rhu Uarepa Koi rhv 
 TtSv. A Humanitarian might have urged that it was possible to deny the 
 Son, while confessing the Father. But St. John, on the ground that the Son 
 is the Only and the Adequate Manifestation of the Father, denies this : iras 
 6 apvov/jLevos rov Tlov owSe tov Tlartpa ex^** 
 
 ™ Ibid. iv. 15 : os hv dfioXoyfjo-rj '6ri. ^lrj(rovs icrriv 6 Tibs rod 06oP, 6 &ebs iv 
 avT^ Ijl4p€Ij Koi avTos iv r^ ©ew. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 15 : idv rts ayairS. rhv k6(Tijlov, ovk i(TTiv 7} aydirrj rov Uarphs iv 
 avrcp. Compare Martensen, Christl. Dogmat. § 96 : ' If we consider the 
 effects of the Fall upon the course of historical development, not only in the 
 case of individuals but of the race collectively, the term "world" {Koa/uLos) 
 bears a special meaning different from that which it would have, were the de- 
 velopment of humanity normal. The cosmical principle having been emanci- 
 pated by the Fall from its due subjection to the Spirit, and invested with a 
 false independence, and the universe of creation having obtained with man 
 a higher importance than really attaches to it, the historical development of 
 the world has become one in which the advance of the kingdom of God is 
 retarded and hindered. The created universe has, in a relative sense, life in 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christology of St. Johns Fh'st Epistle, 239 
 
 words, to fight successfully against that view of life which 
 ignores God, against that complex system of attractive moral 
 evil and specious intellectual falsehood, which is marshalled and 
 organized by the great enemy of God, and which permeates and 
 inspires non-Christianized society. The world's force is seen 
 especially in ^ the lust of the flesh, in the lust of the eyes, and in 
 the pride of life.' These three forms of concupiscence manifest 
 the inner life of the world <^ ; if the Christian would resist and 
 beat them back, he must have a strong faith, a faith in a Divine 
 Saviour. ' Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that 
 believeth that Jesus is the Son of GodP ^ This faith, which 
 introduces the soul to communion with God in Light, attained 
 through communion with His Blessed Son, exhibits the world 
 in its true colours. The soul spurns the world as she clings 
 believingly to the Divine Son. 
 
 St. John's picture of Christ's work in this first Epistle, and 
 especially his pointed and earnest opposition to the specific 
 heresy of Cerinthus^i, leads us up to the culminating statement 
 that Jesus Himself is the true God and the Eternal Life^. 
 
 itself, including, as it does, a system of powers, ideas, and aims, which 
 possess a relative value. This relative independence, which ought to be sub- 
 servient to the kingdom of God, has become a fallen *' world-autonomy."" Hence 
 arises the scriptural expression ''this world" (d kSctihos ovtos). By this ex- 
 pression the Bible conveys the idea that it regards the world not only 
 ontologically but in its definite and actual state, the state in which it has 
 been since the Fall. "This world" means the world content with itself, in its 
 own independence, its own glory ; the world which disowns its dependence 
 on God as its Creator. " This world" regards itself, not as the Kriais, but only 
 as the KoayLos, as a system of glory and beauty which has life in itself, and 
 can give life. The historical embodiment of "this world" is heathendom, 
 which honoureth not God as God.' 
 
 I St. John ii. i6 : irav rb iv t^ KSa-jjico, 7} iiriBv/xia rfjs aapKhs, Kal ri 
 iiTiSv/jiia Twv 6(p9a\fxcoi/, Kol rj a\a^oviia tov Piov, ovk iarij/ iK rod Ilarphs, 
 ctAV €K TOV KOCTfj-ov eVrt. 
 
 P Ibid. V. 4, 5 : avrrj ecrrXu rj viKrj rj viKriaacra rhv Koa/JLoVy r) tvIctis riixSoV 
 rls eariv 6 vikoov tov kSo-jjloUj et fi^ 6 tnaTdvuv oti ^Irjcrovs iffTiv 6 Tlhs tov 
 Qeov ; 
 
 1 Specially I St. John iv. 2, 3, where the Apostle's words contain a double 
 antithesis to the Cerinthian gnosis, which taught that the JEon Christ entered 
 into the Man Jesus at His baptism, and remained with Him until His 
 Passion, Jesus being a mere man. St. John asserts in opposition (1) that 
 Jesus and the Christ are one and the same Person, (2) that the one Lord 
 Jesus Christ came *in' not *into the flesh,' He did not descend into an 
 already existing man, but He appeared clothed in Human Nature. See the 
 exhaustive note of Ebrard, Die Briefe Johannis, in loc. 
 
 "■ I St. John V. 20 : ovt6s ia-Tiv 6 a\r)9Lvhs ©ebs, koI t] ^^^ altavios. After 
 having distinguished the aKrjOivSs from His Ttos, St. John, by a characteristic 
 V] 
 
240 Characteristic temper of St, yohn. 
 
 Throughout this Epistle the Apostle has been writing to those 
 * who believe on the Name of the Son of God,' that is to say, on 
 the Divine Nature of Jesus which the verbal symbol guards and 
 suggests. Throughout this Epistle St. John's object has been 
 to convince believers that by that faith they had the Eternal 
 Life, and to force them to be true to It^. 
 
 In each of St. John's Epistles * we encounter that special 
 temper, at once so tender and so peremptory, which is an ethical 
 corollary to belief in an Incarnate God. St. John has been 
 named the Apostle of the Absolute. Those who would concede 
 to Christianity no higher dignity than that of teaching a relative 
 and provisional truth, will fail to find any countenance for their 
 doctrine in the New Testament Scriptures. But nowhere will 
 they meet with a more earnest opposition to it than in the 
 pages of the writer who is pre-eminently the Apostle of charity. 
 St. John preaches the Christian creed as the one absolute cer- 
 tainty. The Christian faith might have been only relatively 
 true, if it had reposed upon the word of a human messenger. 
 But St. John specially insists upon the fact that God has re- 
 vealed Himself, not merely through, but in, Christ. The Abso- 
 lute Eeligion is introduced by a Self-revelation of the Absolute 
 
 turn, simply identifies the Son with the a\T}6iphs QeSs. To refer this sentence 
 to the Father, Who has been twice called 6 a\7j6iv6s, would be unmeaning 
 repetition. Moreover the previous sentence declared, not that we are in God 
 as Father, Son and Spirit, but that we are in God as being in His Son Jesus 
 Christ. This statement is justified when ovtos is referred to Tt^. As to the 
 article before aK-ndifSs, it has the effect of stating, not merely What, but Who 
 our Lord is ; it says not, Christ is Divine, but, Christ is God. This does not 
 really go beyond what the Apostle has already said about the A6yos at the 
 beginning of this Epistle. To object with Diisterdieck that this interpreta- 
 tion obscures the distinction between the Father and the Son, is inaccurate ; 
 St. John does not say, This is the Father, but. This is the true God. 'O d\n- 
 Oivos SeSs is the Divine Essence, in opposition to all creatures. The question 
 of hypostatic distinctions within that Essence is not here before the Apostle. 
 Our being in the true God depends upon our being in Christ, and St. John 
 clenches this assertion by saying that Christ is the true God Himself. See 
 St. Ath. Or. c. Ar. iv. 26 ; St. Cyril. Thes. p. 302 ; Waterland, Works, ii. 130. 
 
 « I St. John V. [3: ravra e'Ypa\l/a vjjuv [to7s TTicnevovaiv els rb orofxa rov 
 Tlov Tov 06o»", Rec] 'iua etS^re on ^co^v ^X^"^^ alooviov, Koi 'iua TTKTTevTjre [01 
 TTKn^vovres, Tisch.] ets rh ovofxa tov Tlov rov Geov. 
 
 * In St. John's second Epistle observe (1) the association of Christ with the 
 Father as the source of x<^/"5, eAeos, and €lp'f)V7j (ver. 3) ; (2) the denunciation 
 of the Cerinthian doctrine as anti-Christian (ver. 7) ; (3) the significant state- 
 ment that a false progress (6 -npoayoiv^ A.B., not as rec. 6 irapa^aipcov) which 
 did not rest in the true Apostolic 5t5ax^ rov Xpicnov, would f nfeit all com- 
 munion with God. We know Him only in Christ His Blessed Son, and to 
 reject Christianity is to reject the only true Theism (vers. 8, 9). 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Union of tenderness with decision in St. fo/m. 241 
 
 Being Himself. God has appeared, God has spoken ; and the 
 Christian faith is the result. St. John then does not treat 
 Christianity as a phase in the history even of true religion, nor 
 as a religion containing elements of truth, even though it were 
 more true than any religion which had preceded it. St. John 
 proclaims that ^ we " Christians" are in Him that is True.' Not 
 to admit that Jesus Christ has come in the Flesh, is to be a de- 
 ceiver and an antichrist. St, John presents Christianity to the 
 soul as a religion which must be its all, if it is not really to be 
 worse than nothing^. The opposition between truth and error, 
 between the friends and the foes of Christ, is for St. John as 
 sharp and trenchant a thing as the contrast between light and 
 darkness, between life and death ^. This is the temper of a man 
 who will not enter the public baths along with the heretic who 
 has dishonoured his Lord J. This is the spirit of the teacher 
 who warns his flock to beware of eating with a propagator of 
 false doctrine, and of bidding him God speed, lest they should 
 partake of his 'evil deeds z/ Yet this is also the writer whose 
 pages, beyond any other in the New Testament, beam with the 
 purest, tenderest love of humanity. Side by side with this 
 resolute antagonism to dogmatic error, St. John exhibits and 
 inculcates an enthusiastic affection for humankind as such, which 
 our professed philanthropists could not rival a. The man who 
 loves not his brother man, whatever be his spiritual estimate of 
 himself, abideth in death b. No divorce is practically possible 
 between the first and the second parts of charity : the man who 
 
 " I St. John ii. 21 : ovk eypwpa vfuv *6ri ovk otBare tV aKrideiav, a\\* '6ri 
 ot^uTs avr)]Vj kcu Sri irav ^\i€vZos e/c rris a^rjOdas ovk iari. Ibid. v. 10 : 6 /a^ 
 
 TTLdT^VOOV T^ ©toj IpeUO'TTJi' ir€Troir)K€v aVTOV. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 15 : ectj/ tls arya-na rbv Koafxov ovk eariv rf aydin] tov Tlarphs iv 
 ahrS). Ibid. ver. 19 : e| 7)i.Loi}v i^riKQov [scil. ol avrixp^o'TOL] aAA.' ovk ficrav l| 
 ijfiwV d yap fiaav 6| ^juw^, /zejuevrj/ceicrai/ Uu fx^Q" ^jumw a\A' 'iva (pav^pcadoixTLV 
 '6tl ovk elal iravres 6| rjfjLcov. Ibid. ver. 22 : out6s iffriv 6 aurixp^o-Tos, 6 
 apuovfjLcvos rhu narepa koI rhv TiSu. 
 
 y St. Irenseus, adv. Heer. iii. 3, 4 : Kot elalv ol a.K-r)Ko6r€s avrov {rov TloXv 
 KOLpTTov) '6rt ^Icadvvqs 6 tov Kvp(ov /j.a6rjT7)S, eV rfj 'Ec^eVf^ iropevdels XovaaaOai, 
 Kol idoop ecw K-hpLudof, i0]KaTO tov ^aXavdov p.^ Xovadix^vos ^AA.' iireiir^i/j 
 ' ^vycop.frV, fiT) Kal Th ^aKavelov (TviMTrearj, %vZov ovtos Kr}piu6ov, rov rijs 
 aXrjdeias ix^P^^-* Cf. Eus. Hist. Eccl. iii. 28. 
 
 ^ 2 St. John 10, II : (tris epx^rai Tvphs u/iSs, Kol ravrr\v r^v 5i5axV ov 
 <p^piiy p-h Xap^duiTe avrhv els oiKiav, koI x^'-'-P^'-^ avrca p.^ Xiyen' b yap \4yccu 
 avTcp xa'pezi/, Koivoove7 to7s epyois avrov ro7s iropTjpo^s. ^w^^^'C^" 
 
 a iSt.Johniii.il. ^y.-"^^-.. I£'v 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 14: r]p€7s oX^apev 'Sri p.era^e^i]Kap€V €k rov Oavdmv elf'r^v.f* ._ 
 ^ojTjj/, oTi ayairu/xep rovs a^ekcpovs' 6 pyj aya-KODV rhv dSeA^o*/ pev^' ey^rM* ''• 
 dai'drcf, / ' f O"" ^; 
 
242 6"^. yohfCs temper a product of his doctrine, 
 
 loves his God must love his brother also^. Love is the moral 
 counterpart of intellectual light <^. 
 
 It is a modern fashion to represent these two tempers, the 
 dogmatic and the philanthropic, as necessarily opposed. This 
 representation indeed is not even in harmony with modern ex- 
 perience ; but in St. John it meets with a most energetic con- 
 tradiction. St. John is at once earnestly dogmatic and earnestly 
 philanthropic ; for the Incarnation has taught him both the 
 preciousness of man and the preciousness of truth. The Eternal 
 Word, incarnate and dying for the truth, inspires St. John to 
 guard it with apostolic chivalry ; but also, this revelation of the 
 Heart of God melts him into tenderness towards the race which 
 Jesus has loved so well®. To St. John a lack of love for men 
 seems sheer dishonour to the love of Christ. And the heresy 
 which mutilates the Person or denies the work of Christ, does 
 not present itself to St. John as purely speculative misfortune, 
 as clumsy negation of fact, as barren intellectual error. Heresy 
 is with this Apostle a crime against charity ; not only because 
 heresy breeds divisions among brethren, but yet more because it 
 kills out from the souls of men that blessed and prolific Truth, 
 which, when sincerely believed, cannot but fill the heart with 
 love to God and to man. St. John writes as one whose eyes had 
 looked upon and whose hands had handled the sensibly present 
 form of Light and Love. That close contact with the Absolute 
 Truth Incarnate had kindled in him a holy impatience of an- 
 tagonist error ; that felt glow of the Infinite Charity of God had 
 shed over his whole character and teaching the beauty and 
 pathos of a tenderness, which, as our hearts tell us while we 
 read his pages, is not of this world. 
 
 2. This ethical reflection of the doctrine of God manifest in 
 the flesh is perhaps mainly characteristic of St. John's first 
 Epistle ; but it is not wanting in the Apocalypse f. The repre- 
 
 ^ I St. John iv. 20, 21 : h \th\ h.-yairusv rhv a^eXcphv avrov %v ecopaKe, rhv ©ehu 
 tv ovx 6wpa/c€ TTcos Svi/arai ayairav ; Ka\ ravT7]v t)]v evToX)]v exofxej/ an avTov, 
 %va 6 a7a7rci;v rhv Qehv ayaTra Koi rhv adeXcpov avrov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 9, 10 : 6 Xeyuv 4v rcf (purl eJvai, koI rhv ad^Xcphv avrov ixktooVj iu 
 ri) (TKoria iarip ecas &pri. 6 ayaircov rhv ad€X(phv avrov iv rtp (poorl jx4v€i, 
 
 « Ibid. iii. 16: iv rovr^ iyvcoKafiev r^v aydirrjv (i.e. absolute charity), Sri 
 cKuvos vtrep r^fxSov r)iv ^vxhv avrov edrjKe' Kal rjfxeTs cxpeiXofx^v vnhp rSov 
 a^€X(pctiV ras \l/vxo.s ridevai. Ibid. iv. 9 : iv rovrcp i(pavepu}dr) rj aydirr} rod 
 &€uv iv r}iMV, '6ti rhv Tlhv avrov rhv fxovoyevrj airiaraXK^v 6 @ehs iis rhv 
 KSajxov, 'iva ^^o'oofKv 5t' avrov. 
 
 f On the Johannean authorship of the Apocalypse, see Alford, Gk. Test. 
 vol. iv. pp. 198-229 ; and Dr. Wait's remarks in the pref. to Hug's Intro- 
 duction, pp. 145-177. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
 i 
 
Divinity of yesits Christ in the Apocalypse, 243 
 
 sentation of the Person of our Saviour in the Apocalypse is 
 independent of any indistinctness that may attach to the in- 
 terpretation of the historical imagery of that wonderful book. 
 In the Apocalypse, Christ is the First and the Last j He is the 
 Alpha and the Omega ; He is the Beginning and the End of all 
 existence ^^. He possesses the seven spirits or perfections of 
 God^\ He has a mysterious Name which no man knows save 
 He Himself i. His Name is written on the foreheads of the 
 faithfuP^ ; His grace is the blessing of Christians 1. In the 
 Apocalypse, His Name is called the Word of God^^; as in 
 the first Epistle He is the Word of Life, and in the Gospel 
 the Word in the beginning. As He rides through heaven on 
 His errand of triumph and of judgment, a Name is written on 
 His vesture and on His thigh ; He is ^ King of kings, and Lord 
 of lords n.' St. John had leaned upon His breast at supper in 
 the familiarity of trusted friendship. St. John sees Him but for 
 a moment in His supramundane glory, and forthwith falls at His 
 feet as deado. In the Apocalypse especially we are confronted 
 with the startling truth that the true Lord of Heaven is none 
 other than the Crucified One. The armies of heaven follow 
 Him, clothed as He is in a vesture dipped in blood, the symbol 
 and token of His Passion and of His Victory p. But of all the 
 teachings of the Apocalypse on this subject, perhaps none is so 
 full of significance as the representation of Christ in His 
 wounded Humanity upon the throne of the Most High. The 
 Lamb, as It had been slain, is in the very centre of the court of 
 heaven^ ; He receives the prostrate adoration of the highest 
 intelligences around the throne ^ ; and as the Object of that 
 solemn, uninterrupted, awful worship^, He is associated with the 
 
 g Rev. i. 8 : eyco ei/xt rb A kcu rb H, b trpcoros Koi 6 ecxaros. Cf. Ibid, 
 ii. 8, xxi. 6, xxii. 13 : apxh k".1 reAos. 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. I : 6 exwi/ rd eTrra irv^vjxara rov ®€ov. 
 
 i Ibid. xix. 1 2 : ex(»v uyofia yey pa fifiivov % ovBels oibev ei fXT] avrSs. 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. 12, cf. ii. 17. 
 
 ' Ibid. xxii. 21. 
 
 ^ Ibid. xix. 13 : Ka\€7Tai rh vvofxa avrov 'O ASyos rov @€ov. 
 
 " Ibid. ver. 16 : exei eVi rb ifxariov koL eirl rhv fXTjphv avrov rh ui/ofxa ye- 
 ypaixjxhov, Ba(rtAeus ^aaiXecav Ka\ Kvpios Kvpicav. Cf. I Tim. vi. 1 5. 
 
 ^ Ibid. i. I 7 : '6re eidov avrhVf eneaa Tvphs tovs TrcJSas avrov cbs veKpSs. 
 
 P Ibid. xix. 13, 14. 
 
 <i Ibid. V. 6 : eV ^utVw rod 6p6uov . . . 'Apvlov ea-rrjKos ws i(r(payjx€vov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. V. 8 : ra reaaapa ^coa kol 01 €iKo(nr4(raapes Trpecr^vrepoL eTrecop 
 ivojiTiov rov 'Apvlov. 
 
 8 Ibid. ver. 12 : &^i6v io-ri rh ^Apviov rh ccrcpay/neuov Ka^elv rrjv ^vvapnv Koi 
 -nXovroif Ka\ <ro<piav koi la^yv Ka\ rLfX7]v Ka\ hd^av Ka\ ivXoyiav. 
 V] R 2 
 
244 ^^ ^^^ Divine Christ of St, John 
 
 Father, as being in truth one with the Almighty, Uncreated, 
 Supreme God*. 
 
 IV. Considerable, then, as may have been the interval be- 
 tween the composition of the Apocalypse and that of the fourth 
 Gospel, we find in the two documents one and the same doc- 
 trine, in substance if not in terms, respecting our Lord's Eternal 
 Person ; and further, this doctrine accurately corresponds with 
 that of St. John's first Epistle. But it may be asked whether 
 St. John, thus consistent with himself upon a point of such 
 capital importance, is really in harmony with the teaching of the 
 earlier Evangelists ? It is granted that between St. John and 
 the three first Gospels there is a broad difference of characteristic 
 phraseology, of the structure, scene, and matter of the several 
 narratives. Does this difference strike deeper stilH Is the 
 Christology of the son of Zebedee fundamentally distinct from 
 that of his predecessors'? Can we recognise the Christ of the 
 earlier Evangelists in the Christ of St. John % 
 
 Now it is obvious to remark that the difference between the 
 three first Evangelists and the fourth, in their respective repre- 
 sentations of the Person of our Lord, is in one sense, at any 
 rate, a real difference. There is a real difference in the point of 
 view of the writers, although the truth before them is one and 
 the same. Each from his own stand-point, the first three Evan- 
 gelists seek and pourtray separate aspects of the Human side of 
 the Life of Jesus. They set forth His perfect Manhood in all Its 
 regal grace and majesty, in all Its Human sympathy and beauty, 
 in all Its healing and redemptive virtue. In one Gospel Christ 
 is the true Fulfiller of the Law, and withal, by a touching con- 
 trast, the Man of Sorrows. In another He is the Lord of Nature 
 and the Leader of men ; all seek Him ; all yield to Him ; He 
 moves forward in the independence of majestic strength. In a 
 third He is active and all-embracing Compassion \ He is the 
 Shepherd, Who goes forth as for His Life-work, to seek the 
 sheep that was lost ; He is the Good Samaritan^. Thus the 
 obedience, the force, and the tenderness of His Humanity are 
 successively depicted j but room is left for another aspect of His 
 
 * Rev. V. 13 : tw KaO-q^ifvcfi eVi rov Bp6vov koL r^ ^Apvio) rj evXoyia koI t) 
 ' Tifx^ Koi 7) d6^a Koi rh Kpdros ds tovs aldouas rS>v alwi'cou. Cf. Ibid. xvii. 14 : 
 T^ 'Apviov viK7](T€i avTovs, '6tl Kvpios Kvpicov iffrl Koi BacTiKevs ^affiXiwu. See 
 also the remarkable expression xx. 6 : icrovrai Upe75 rov &eov Kal rov Xpicrrov, 
 which clearly associates Christ with the Father in the highest honour which 
 man can render to God, namely, the offering of sacrifice. 
 
 " Cf. Holtzmann, Die Synoptischen Evangelien. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
ide7itical with the Christ of the Synoptists ? 245 
 
 » Life, differing from these and yet in harmony with them. If we 
 may dare so to speak, the synoptists approach their great Sub- 
 ject from without, St. John unfolds it from within. St. John 
 has been guided to pierce the veil of sense ; he has penetrated 
 far beyond the Human features, nay even beyond the Human 
 thought and Human will of the Eedeemer, into the central 
 depths of His Eternal Personality. He sets forth the Life of 
 our Lord and Saviour on the earth, not in any one of the aspects 
 which belong to It as Human, but as being the consistent and 
 adequate expression of the glory of a Divine Person, manifested 
 to men under a visible form. The miracles described, the dis- 
 courses selected, the plan of the narrative, are all in harmony 
 with the point of view of the fourth Evangelist, and it at once 
 explains and accounts for them. 
 
 Plainly, my brethren, two or more observers may. approach 
 the same object from different points of view, and may be even 
 entirely absorbed with distinct aspects of it ; and yet it does not 
 follow that any one of these aspects is necessarily at variance 
 with the others. Still less does it follow that one aspect alone 
 represents the truth. Socrates does not lose his identity, because 
 he is so much more to Plato than he is to Xenophon." Each of 
 yourselves may be studied at the same time by the anatomist 
 and by the psychologist. Certainly the aspect of your complex 
 nature which the one study insists upon, is sufficiently remote 
 from the aspect which presents itself to the other. In the eyes 
 of one observer you are purely spirit ; you are thought, affection, 
 memory, will, imagination. As he analyses you he is almost in- 
 different to the material body in which your higher nature is 
 encased, upon which it has left its mark, and through which it 
 expresses itself But to the other observer this your material 
 body is everything. Its veins and muscles, its pores and nerves, 
 its colour, its proportions, its functions, absorb his whole atten- 
 tion. He is nervously impatient of any speculations about you 
 which cannot be tested by his instruments. Yet is there any 
 real ground for a petty jealousy between the one study of your 
 nature and the other % Is not each student a servant whom true 
 science will own as doing her work % May not each illustrate, 
 supplement, balance, and check the conclusions of the other? 
 Must you necessarily view yourselves as being purely mind, if 
 you will not be persuaded that you are merely matter % Must 
 you needs be materialists, if you will not become the most tran- 
 scendental of mystics % Or will not a little physiology usefully 
 restrain you from a fanciful supersensualism, while a study of 
 
246 The title ' Son of God ^ in the Synoptists. 
 
 the immaterial side of your being forbids you to listen, even 
 for a moment, to the brutalizing suggestions of consistent ma- 
 terialism % 
 
 These questions admit of easy reply ; each half of the truth 
 is practically no less than speculatively necessary to the other. 
 Nor is it otherwise with the general relation of the first three 
 Gospels to the fourth. Yet it should be added that the Synop- 
 tists do teach tlie Divine Nature of Jesus, although in the main 
 His Sacred Manhood is most prominent in their pages. More- 
 over the fourth Gospel, as has been noticed, abundantly insists 
 upon Christ's true Humanity. Had we not possessed the fourth 
 Gospel, we should have known much less of one side of His Hu- 
 man Character than we actually know. For in it we see Christ 
 engaged in earnest conflict with the worldly and unbelieving 
 spirit of His time, while surrounded by the little company of His 
 disciples, and devoting Himself to them even ^unto the end.' The 
 aspects of our Lord's Humanity which are thus brought into 
 prominence would have remained, comparatively speaking, in 
 the shade, had the last Gospel not been written. But that 
 'symmetrical conception' of our Lord's Character, which modern 
 critics have remarked upon, as especially distinguishing the 
 fourth Gospel, is to be referred to the manner in which St. John 
 lays bare the eternal Personality of Jesus. For in It the scattered 
 rays of glory which light up the earlier Evangelists find their 
 point of unity. By laying such persistent stress upon Christ's 
 Godhead, as the true seat of His Personality, the fourth Gospel 
 is doctrinally complemental (how marvellous is the complement !) 
 to the other three ; and yet these three are so full of suggestive 
 implications that they practically anticipate the higher teaching 
 of the fourth. 
 
 I. For in the synoptic Gospels Christ is called the Son of 
 God in a higher sense than the ethical or than the theocratic. 
 In the Old Testament an anointed king or a saintly prophet is 
 a son of God. Christ is not merely one among many sons. He 
 is the Only, the Well-beloved Son of the Father x. His relation- 
 ship to the Father is unshared by any other, and is absolutely 
 unique. It is indeed probable that of our Lord's contemporaries 
 
 » Compare the voice from heaven at our Lord's baptism, ovr6s iariv b 
 Tt6s jxov 6 ayawnrhSf St. Matt. iii. 17, repeated at His transfiguration (Ibid, 
 xvii. 5); the profound sense of His question to the Pharisees, rivos vl6s 
 iffriv] [so. 6 XpiffThs] (Ibid. xxii. 41). And that as the Tihs rod @€ovj 
 Christ is superhuman, seems to be implied in the questions of the tempter. 
 (Ibid. iv. 3, 6 ; St. Luke iv. 3, 9.) 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Significance of the history of the Nativity, 247 
 
 many applied to Him the title ' Son of God ' only as an official 
 designation of the Messiah \ while others used it to acknowledge 
 that surpassing and perfect character which proclaimed Jesus of 
 Nazareth to be the One Son, Who had appeared on earth, wor- 
 thily showing forth the moral perfections of our Heavenly 
 Father. But the official and ethical senses of the term are 
 rooted in a deeper sense, which St. Luke connects with it at the 
 beginning of his Gospel. *The Holy Ghost shall come upon 
 thee,' so ran the angel-message to the Virgin-mother, 'and the 
 power of the Highest shall overshadow thee : therefore also that 
 Holy Thing Which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son 
 of God y.' This may be contrasted with the prediction respecting 
 St. John the Baptist, that he should be filled with the Holy Ghost 
 even from his mother's womb 2^. St. John then is in existence 
 before his sanctification by the Holy Spirit ; but Christ's Hu- 
 manity Itself is formed by the agency of the Holy Ghost. In 
 like manner St. Matthew's record of the angel's words asserts 
 that our Lord was conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost ». 
 But St. Matthew's reference to the prophetic name Emmanuel ^, 
 points to the full truth, that Christ is the Son of God as being 
 of the Divine Essence. 
 
 2. Indeed the whole history of the Nativity and its attendant 
 circumstances, guard the narratives of St. Matthew and St. Luke*' 
 against the inroads of Humanitarian interpreters. Our Lord's 
 Birth of a Virgin-mother is as irreconcileable with * an Ebionitic 
 as it is with a Docetic conception of the entrance of the God- man 
 into connexion with humanity d,' The worship of the Infant 
 
 7 St. Luke i. 35. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 15 : rii/eu^aTos *A7toi; irXrjcrO'fia-eTai erz ^k Koi\ias fjirfrphs avrov, 
 
 * St. Matt. i. 20 : rh yap kv avrrj yewndev €/c UpcvfjLarSs iariv 'Ayiov. 
 
 *» Ibid. ver. 23. This prophecy was fulfilled when our Lord was called 
 Jesus. Cf. Pearson on the Creed (ed. Oxf. 1847), art. ii. p. 8g, and note. 
 
 c For a vindication of these narratives against the mythical theory of 
 Strauss, see Dr. Mill's Christian Advocate's Publications for 1841, 1844, 
 reprinted in his work on the ' Mythical Interpretation.' 
 
 d Martensen, Christl. Dogm. § 39 (Clark's transl.): 'Christ is born, not 
 of the will of a man, nor of the will of the flesh ; but the holy Will of the 
 Creator took the place of the will of man and of the will of the flesh. That 
 is, the Creating Spirit, Who was in the beginning, fulfilled the function of 
 the plastic principle. Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, the chosen woman 
 of the chosen people. It was the task of Israel to provide, not, as has often 
 been said, Christ Himself, but the mother of the Lord ; to develope the 
 susceptibility for Christ to a point where it might be able to manifest itself 
 as the profoundest unity of nature and spirit — an unity which found expres- 
 sion in the pure Virgin. In her the pious aspirations of Israel and of 
 
243 Significa7ice of the Evangelical Canticles, 
 
 Christ, in St. Matthew by the wise men, in St. Luke by the 
 shepherds of Bethlehem, represents Jesus as the true Lord of 
 humanity, whether Jewish or Gentile, whether educated or un- 
 lettered. Especially noteworthy are the greetings addressed to 
 the Mother of our Lord by heavenly as well as earthly visitants. 
 The Lord is with her; she is graced and blessed among women 6. 
 Her Son will be great; He will be called the Son of the Highest; 
 His kingdom will have no end f. Elizabeth echoes the angel's 
 words ; Mary is blessed among women, and the Fruit of her 
 womb is Blessed. Elizabeth marvels that such an one as herself 
 should be visited by the Mother of her Lord?. 
 
 The Evangelical canticles, which we owe to the third Gospel, 
 remarkably illustrate the point before us. They surround the 
 cradle of the Infant Saviour with the devotional language of 
 ancient Israel, now consecrated to the direct service of the In- 
 carnate Lord. Mary, the Virgin-mother, already knows that all 
 generations shall call her blessed ; for the Mighty One has done 
 great things unto her^. And as the moral and social fruits of 
 the Incarnation unfold themselves before her prophetic eye, she 
 proclaims that the promises to the forefathers are at length ful- 
 filled, and that God, ' remembering His mercy hath holpen His 
 servant Israel i.' Zacharias rejoices that the Lord God of Israel 
 has in the new-born Saviour redeemed His peopled This 
 Saviour is the Lord, whose forerunner has been announced by 
 prophecy l ; He is the Day-star from on high, bringing a new 
 
 mankind, and their faith in the promises, are centred. She is the purest 
 point in history and in nature, and she therefore becomes the appointed 
 medium for the New Creation. And while we must confess that this Virgin 
 Birth is enveloped in a veil impenetrable to physical reasonings, yet we affirm 
 it to be the only one which fully satisfies the demands of religion and theo- 
 logy. This article of our Creed, ' conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the 
 Virgin Mary,' is the only sure defence against both the Ebionitic and the 
 Docetic view of the entrance of the God-man into connexion with humanity.* 
 
 e St. Luke i. 28 : X^'^P^j Kcxapiruixivrj' 6 Kvpios fxera (tovj evAoyn/x^uri 
 (TV €v yvvai^LV. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 32 : ovtos ecrrai jueyas, Koi vlhs vypiarov K\7iOi](Terai. Ver. 33 : 
 rfjs Bao-iKfias ahrov ovk iffrai reAos. 
 
 g Ibid. ver. 42 : €v\oyrifX€v7} av iv yvvai^\, kol €v\oynfx€vos u Kapirhs ryjs 
 KoiXias (Tov, Ver. 43 : Koi iroOev fioi toGto, 'Iva €\6r) rj fxiirrip rov Kvplov /xov 
 trpns /X6 ; 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 48 : airh rod vvv fxaKapiovai jue iraaai at yev^ai' '6ti eVotr^o-e fioi 
 fji€ya\€7a 6 SvvarSs. 
 
 i Ibid. vers. 51-55. ^ Ibid. ver. 6S. 
 
 1 Ibid. i. 69, Christ is the K€pas (rcar-qpias. Ibid. ver. 76; to St. John it is 
 said, irpoTTopevaT] yap irph irpoacaiTov Ki/pfou, eroip-daai o^ovs avTov. Cf. Mai. 
 iii. i,iv. 5. 
 
 [lect. 
 
Our Lord^s Doctrine, according to the Synoptists, 249 
 
 morning to those who sat in the darkness and death -shadows of 
 the world "». Simeon desires to depart in peace, since his eyes 
 have seen his Lord's Salvation. The humble Babe Whom the 
 old man takes in his arms belongs not to the lowly scenes of 
 Bethlehem and Nazareth ; He is the destined inheritance of the 
 world. He is the Divine Saviour ; all nations are interested in 
 His Birth ; He is to shed light upon the heathen ; He is to be 
 the pride and glory of the new Israel^. 
 
 The accounts then of our Lord's Birth in two of the synoptic 
 Evangelists, as illustrated by the sacred songs of praisd and 
 thanksgiving which St. Luke has preserved, point clearly to the 
 entrance of a superhuman Being into this our human world. 
 Who indeed He was, is stated more explicitly by St. John ; but 
 St. John does not deem it necessary to repeat the history of His 
 Advent. The accounts of the Annunciation and of the Mi- 
 raculous Conception would not by themselves imply the Divinity 
 of Christ. But they do imply that Christ is superhuman ; they 
 harmonize with the kind of anticipations respecting Christ's 
 appearance in the world, which might be created by St. John's 
 doctrine of His pre-existent glory. These accounts cannot be 
 forced within the limits, and made to illustrate the laws, of 
 nature. But at least St. John's narrative justifies the mysteries 
 of the synoptic Gospels which would be unintelligible without 
 it ; and it is a vivid commentary upon hymns the lofty strains 
 of which might of themselves be thought to savour of exag- 
 geration. 
 
 3. If the synoptists are in correspondence with St. John's 
 characteristic doctrine when they describe our Lord's Nativity 
 and its attendant circumstances, that correspondence is even 
 more obvious in their accounts of His teaching, and in the 
 pictures which they set before us of His Life and work. They 
 present Him to us mainly, although not exclusively, as the Son 
 of Man. As has already been hinted, that title, besides its 
 direct signification of His true and representative Humanity, is 
 itself the 'product of a self-consciousness, for which the being 
 human is not a matter of course, but something secondary and 
 
 ™ St. Luke i. 78 : eTretr/cevl/aro 7\\xZ.s avaroX-i] i^ vrpovs, iirKpavai tois iy 
 (Tk6t€l kolL (TKia. davdrov KaOrj/xepois' rov KarevOvvai rovs irodas rifjLUV els dbhv 
 ilpy]V7)s. Isa. ix. i, xlii. 7, xlix. 9, Ix. 2, are thus applied in a strictly 
 spiritual sense. 
 
 ° St. Luke ii. 30-32 • to (T(ari]pi6v cou, % 7)Toiixa(Tas Kara irpSo'coTrov irdvTcov 
 TMu XaSov <pu>s €ts QL-KOKoXvi^LV iQvwv^ Koi Zo^av Xaov aov 'l(Tpar}\. Cf. Isa. 
 XXV. 7, xliv; 4. 
 
 V] 
 
250 The teaching of Christ according to the Synoptists 
 
 superinduced o* In other words, this title implies an original 
 Nature to Which Christ's Humanity was a subsequent accretion, 
 and in Which His true and deepest Consciousness, if we may 
 dare so to speak, was at home. Thus, often in the synoptic 
 Gospels He is called simply the Son P. He is the true Son of 
 Man, but He is also the true Son of God. In Him Sonship 
 attains its archetypal form ; in Him it is seen in its unsullied 
 perfection. Accordingly He never calls the Father, our Father, 
 as if He shared His Sonship with His followers. He always 
 speaks of My Father <3. To this Divine Sonship He received 
 witness from heaven both at His Baptism and at His Trans- 
 figuration. In the parable of the vineyard, the prophets of the 
 old theocracy are contrasted with the Son, not as His predeces- 
 sors or rivals, but as His slaves r. Thus He lives among men as 
 the One True Son of His Father's home. He is Alone free by 
 birthright among a race of born slaves. Yet instead of guard- 
 ing His solitary dignity with jealous exclusiveness. He vouch- 
 safes to raise the slaves around Him to an adopted sonship ; He 
 will buy them out of bondage by pouring forth His Blood ; He 
 will lay down His Life, that He may prove the generosity of 
 His measureless love towards them s. 
 
 The synoptic Gospels record parables in which Christ is 
 Himself the central Figure. They record miracles which seem 
 to have no ascertainable object beyond that of exhibiting the 
 superhuman might of the Worker. They tell us of His claim to 
 forgive sins, and that He supported this claim by the exercise of 
 
 o Cf. Dorner, Person Christi, Einl. p. 82 : * Von einem Selbstbewusstseyn 
 aus muss diese Bezeichnung ausgepragt seyn, fur welches das Mensch-oder- 
 Menschensohnseyn nicht das Nachstliegende, sich von selbst unmittelbar 
 Verstehende, sondem das Secundare, Hinzugekommene, war. 1st aber 
 Christi Selbstbewusstseyn so geartet gewesen, dass das Menschseyn ihm als 
 das Secundare sich darstellte : so muss das Primare in Seinem Bewusstseyn 
 ein Anderes seyn, dasjenige, was sich, z. B. bei Johannes xvii. 5 ausspricht ; 
 und das Urspriingliche, worin Sein Selbstbewusstseyn sich unmittelbar 
 heimisch weiss (vgl. Luc. ii. 49) muss wenigstens von der Zeit an, wo Er 
 sich selbst ganz hat, wo sein Innerstes Wirklichkeit geworden ist, das 
 Gottliche gewesen seyn.' 
 
 P St. Matt. xi. 27, xxviii. 20. 
 
 <i Ibid, xviii. 10, 19, 35, xx. 23, xxvi. 53; cf. St. Luke xxiii. 46. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. xxi. 34; aTreVretAe roivs SovAovs avrovvphs rovs yioopyovs. Ibid, 
 ver. 36: Trdkiv dTreVretAei/ aWovs SovKovs. Ibid. ver. 37: vartpoi/ oe oTre- 
 <rT€i\6 irphs avTovs rhv vthp avrov, \4yoov, ' ^Evrpairrjaourai rov vUv jiov* 
 
 8 Ibid. XX. 28 : ■^A0e. . . Zovucil ri]v ^vxhv avTov Xvrpov a.v7\ ttoXXSov. Ibid. 
 xxvi. 28: TO atixd (jlov, to rrjs Kaiv7]s ^iadj}K7}Sf rh irepl ■koKKojv iKX^voiievov els 
 &(p€(nv afxapriuy, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
considered as implyi7ig His Divinity, 25 1 
 
 His miraculous powers ^. Equally with St. John they represent 
 Him as claiming to be not merely the Teacher but the Object of 
 His religion. He insists on faith in His own Person u. He 
 institutes the initial Sacrament, and He deliberately inserts His 
 own Name into the sacramental formula ; He inserts it between 
 that of the Father and that of the Spirit ^, Such self -intrusion 
 into the sphere of Divinity would be unintelligible if the synop- 
 tists had really represented Jesus as only the teacher and founder 
 of a religious doctrine or character. But if Christ is the Logos 
 in St John, in these Gospels He is the Sophia y. Thus He 
 ascribes to Himself the exclusive knowledge of the Highest. 
 No statement in St. John really goes beyond the terms in which, 
 according to two synoptists. He claims to know and to be known 
 of the Father. ^No man knoweth the Son but the Father, 
 neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to 
 whomsoever the Son will reveal Him z/ Here then is a recipro- 
 cal relationship of equality : the Son Alone has a true knowledge 
 of the Father ; the Son is Himself such, that the Father Alone 
 understands Him. In these Gospels, moreover, Christ ascribes 
 to Himself, sanctity ; He even places Himself above the holiest 
 thing in ancient Israel a. He and His people are greater than 
 the greatest in the old covenant ^. He scruples not to proclaim 
 His consciousness of having fulfilled His mission. He asserts 
 that all power is committed to Him both on earth and in 
 heaven c. All nations are to be made disciples of His religion ^. 
 When we weigh the language of the first three Evangelists, it 
 will be found that Christ is represented by it as the Absolute 
 Good and the Absolute Truth not less distinctly than in St. 
 John. It is on this account that He is exhibited as in conflict 
 
 t St. Matt, ix, 2-6; St. Luke v. 20, 24. « Ibid. xvi. 16, 17. 
 
 ^ Ibid, xxviii. 19. Cf. Wateiiand's Eighth Sermon at Lady Moyer's Lec- 
 ture, Works, vol. ii. p. 171. 
 
 y St. Luke vii. 35 : ibiKaLwOr] rj (ro0ia anh rSov tckvuv avTTJs Trdvrcou. St. 
 Matt. xi. 19, and apparently St. Luke xi. 49, where ^ crocpia rod Qeov corres- 
 ponds to 67C0 in St. Matt, xxiii. 34. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. xi. 27 : ovdels eTTLyivdocrKei rhv Tlhp el fi^ 6 Har-fip' ovBe rhv 
 Uarepa rls iTriyivco(rK€i, €t ju^ 6 Tlhs, koI ^ iav l3ov\7)Tai 6 Tibs airoKuAv^pai. 
 St. Luke X. 22 : ovdeU yivcoaKci ris iariv 6 Tlhs el fx)) 6 IlaT^p, koI tIs 
 eariv 6 Uarrjp, el fiy 6 Tibs, Koi ^ iav ^ov\7)rai 6 Tibs d7roKaAi^i|/at. See 
 Mill on Myth. Interp. p. 59. 
 
 a St. Matt. xii. 6 : Ae7a) de vjxlv on tov lepov iJie7^6v [Tisch.] ecrnv wSe. 
 
 ** Ibid. xi. II, xii. 4I, 42, xxi. 33, sqq.; St. Luke vii. 28. 
 
 c St. Matt. xi. 27 ; St. Luke x. 22 ; St. Matt, xxviii. 18 : eMi] fioi iracra 
 e^ova-ia iv ovpavt^ Kcd irrl y?]S, ^ St. Matt, xxviii. 19. 
 
252 Otcr Lord's claims to rule the soids of men, 
 
 not with subordinate or accidental forms of evil, but with the 
 evil principle itself, with the prince of evil®. And, as the 
 Absolute Good, Christ tests the moral worth or worthlessness of 
 men by their acceptance or rejection, not of His doctrine but of 
 His Person. It is St. Matthew who records such sentences as 
 the following : * Be not ye called Kabbi \ for One is your Master, 
 even Christ^;' *He that loveth father or mother more than 
 Me is not worthy of MeS;' * Whosoever shall confess Me before 
 men, him will I confess also before My Father ^ ;' ' Come unto 
 Me, all ye that labour, and I will give you rest^;' *Take My 
 yoke upon you, and learn of MeK ' In St. Matthew then Christ 
 speaks as One Who knows Himself to be a universal and infallible 
 Teacher in spiritual things; Who demands submission of all 
 men, and at whatever cost or sacrifice ; Who offers to man- 
 kind those deepest consolations which are sought from all others, 
 in vain. Nor is it otherwise with St. Luke and St. Mark. It 
 is indeed remarkable that our Lord's most absolute and peremp- 
 tory claims! to rule over the affections and wills of men are 
 recorded by the first and third, and not by the fourth Evan- 
 gelist. These royal rights over the human soul can be justified 
 upon no plea of human relationships between teacher and 
 learner, between child and elder, between master and servant, 
 between friend and friend. If the title of Divinity is more 
 explicitly put forward in St. John, the rights which imply it are 
 insisted on in words recorded by the earlier Evangelists. The 
 synoptists represent our Lord, Who is the object of Christian 
 faith no less than the Founder of Christianity, as designing the 
 whole world for the field of His conquests ^, and as claiming the 
 submission of every individual human soul. All are to be 
 brought to discipleship. Only then will the judgment come, 
 when the Gospel has been announced to the whole circle of the 
 nations D. Christ, the Good and the Truth Incarnate, must 
 reign throughout all time o. He knows, according to the synop- 
 
 « St. Luke X. 18: idcttipovv rou ^aravav d>s acrrpaTT^v e/c rod ovpavov 
 ireaoi/ra. St. Matt. iv. l-li, xii. 27-29, xiii. 38, 39. 
 
 f St. Matt, xxiii. 8. « Ibid. x. 37. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 32 ; St. Luke xii. 8. ^ St. Matt. xi. 28. 
 
 k Ibid. ver. 29. 1 Ibid. x. 39; St. Luke xiv. 26. 
 
 ^ St. Matt, xxviii. 19 : TropevOcvres odu fxad-nreva are irdvTa ra idvT}. St. Mark 
 xvi. 15; St. Luke xxiv. 47. Cf. St. Matt. xiii. 32, 38, 41, xxiv. 14. 
 
 ° St. Matt. xxiv. 14 : koL K-qpvxdVfJ'^Tai. tovto to evayytXiov rfys ^acriXuas 
 iv (i\rj rfi olKovix4vri, cis fxaprvpiov iraffi ro7s eOueai' Kol r6Te Tfj^ei to reAos. 
 
 o St. Luke xxii. 69 : arro rod vvv earai b Tlhs rod avdpdoirou KadT}fxei/os iK 
 Sf^twy TTJs dwd/x^MS rod ©eoO. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
are especially prominent in the Synoptists, 253 
 
 tists no less than St. John, that He is a perfect and final Reve- 
 lation of God. He is the Centre-point of the history and of the 
 hopes of man. None shall advance beyond Him : the preten- 
 sion to surpass Him is but the symptom of disastrous error 
 and reaction P. 
 
 The Transfiguration is described by all the synoptists ; and it 
 represents our Lord in His true relation to the legal and pro- 
 phetic dispensations, and as visibly invested for the time being 
 with a glory which was rightfully His. The Ascension secures 
 His permanent investiture with that glory; and the Ascension 
 is described by St. Mark and St. Luke. The Resurrection is 
 recorded by the first three Evangelists as accurately as by the 
 fourth ; and it was to the Resurrection that He Himself appealed 
 as being the sign by which men were to know His real claim 
 upon their homage. In the first three Gospels, all of Christ's 
 humiliations are consistently linked to the assertion of His power, 
 and to the consummation of His victory. He is buffeted, spat 
 upon, scourged, crucified, only to rise from the dead the third 
 day Q ; His Resurrection is the prelude to His ascent to heaven. 
 He leaves the world, yet He bequeaths the promise of His 
 Presence. He promises to be wherever two or three are gathered 
 in His Name ^ ; He institutes the Sacrament of His Body and 
 His Blood s; He declares that He will be among His people even 
 to the end of the world *. 
 
 4. But it is more particularly through our Lord's discourses 
 respecting the end of the world and the final judgment, as re- 
 corded by the synoptists, that we may discern the matchless 
 dignity of His Person. It is reflected in the position which He 
 claims to fill with respect to the moral and material universe, 
 and in the absolute finality which He attributes to His religion. 
 The Lawgiver Who is above all other legislators, and Who 
 revises all other legislation, will also be the final Judge ". At 
 
 P St. Matt. xxiv. 23-26, &c. 
 
 q Ibid. XX. 19 ; St. Mark x. 34; St. Luke xviii. 33. 
 
 ' St. Matt, xviii. 20 : oS ^ap elcri dvo ^ rpels avvqy/xevoi els Th ifibv ovofxa^ 
 €/ce? ujxi 4u fxeao) avTcau. 
 
 8 Ibid. xxvi. 26 ; St. Mark xiv. 22; St. Luke xxii. 19. 
 
 * St. Matt, xxviii. 20 : iycb fxed^ v^xoov et^ut ■Ka.aas tcls rjfjLfpas ecos rris <rvvT€' 
 Xclas rod aloovos. 
 
 " Ibid. vii. 2 2 : ttoWoI ipovo-i fxoi iv eK^lvr) rfj Vf^^p^, ' Ki5pte, Kvpte, ov 
 rqi era) ovSixari irpoecpriTivaraiJLfi/, koI tw ow ovo/nari baifxdvia i^e^dko/xeu, Kal 
 Tcp fTo) hvofxari Svtdfx^is iroWas iTroir]aafX€v ;' koI rare dfxoKoyrjcTQ} avTo7s, on 
 ' ovSenoTe eyvcav vfias. aTroxoope7T€ ctTr' i/xov ol ipya^ofxevoi rrju avofxiav.' 
 St. Luke xiii. 25. St. Matt. xiii. 41 : dTroo-TeAe? b Tibs tov avdpdjirov rovs 
 
254 Christ the Lord of the world's f utter e, 
 
 that last awful revelation of His personal glory, none shall be 
 able to refuse Him submission. Then will He put an end to the 
 humiliations and the sorrows of His Church ; then, out of the 
 fulness of His majesty. He will clothe His despised followers 
 with glory ; He will allot the kingdom to those who have be- 
 lieved on Him ; and at His heavenly board they shall share for 
 ever the royal feast of life. Certainly the Redeemer and Judge 
 of men, to Whom all spiritual and natural forces, all earthly and 
 heavenly powers must at last submit, is not merely a divinely 
 gifted prophet. His Person ^ has a metaphysical and cosmical 
 significance x.' None could preside so authoritatively over the 
 history and destiny of the world who was not entitled to share 
 the throne of its Creator. 
 
 The eschatological discourses in the synoptists do but tally 
 with the prologue of St. John's Gospel. In contemplating the 
 dignity of our Lord's Person, the preceding Evangelists for the 
 most part look forward ; St. John looks backward no less than 
 forward. St. John dwells on Christ's Pre-existence ; the synop- 
 tists, if we may so phrase it, on his Post-existence. In the 
 earlier Evangelists His personal glory is viewed in its relation to 
 the future of the human race and of the universe ; in St. John 
 it is viewed in its relation to the origin of created things, and to 
 the solitary and everlasting years of God. In St. John, Christ 
 our Saviour is the First ; in the synoptists He is more especially 
 the Last. 
 
 In the synoptic Gospels, then, the Person of Christ Divine 
 and Human is the centre-point of th€ Christian religion. Christ 
 is here the Supreme Lawgiver ; He is the Perfect Saint ; He is 
 the Judge of all men. He controls both worlds, the physical and 
 the spiritual ; He bestows the forgiveness of sins, and the Holy 
 Spirit; He promises everlasting life. His Presence is to be 
 perpetuated on earth, while yet He will reign as Lord of heaven. 
 ^ The entire representation,' says Professor Dorner, ' of Christ 
 which is given us by the synoptists, may be placed side by side 
 with that given by St. John, as being altogether identical with 
 it. For a faith moulded in obedience to the synoptic tradition 
 
 hrfy^Kovs aitroVf koi avWi^ovcriv €K rrjs ^acriXeias avTov iravra ra (TKavdaXa 
 Koi rovs TToiovvTas r)]v avofxiav, koi ^dkovffiv avrovs ds t)]V Kafxivov rod irvpSs. 
 Ibid. X. 32 ; St. Mark viii. 38. St. Matt. xxiv. 31 : aTrocrreAe? rovs ayy^Kovs 
 avTov fx^rh (rdXirLyyos (pwvrjs fi€yd\r}5, koI iirKTvvd^ovo'i rovs 4K\eKTovs avrov 
 t'/c Tcoif T€(r(rdpo}V avejxoov, air' &Kpcov ovpavSov 'decs &Kpwv avTwv. Ibid. xxv. 
 34-46 ; St. Luke xii. 35, xvii. 30, 31. 
 » Martensen, Christl. Dogm. § 128. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Summary of the Synoptical Christology, 255 
 
 concerning Christ, must have essentially the same features in 
 its resulting conception of Christ as those which belong to the 
 Christ of St. John Y.' In other words, think over the miracles 
 wrought by Christ and narrated by the synoptists, one by one. 
 Think over the discourses spoken by Christ and recorded by the 
 synoptists, one by one. Look at the whole bearing and scope of 
 His Life, as the three first Evangelists describe It, from His 
 sujDcrnatural Birth to His disappearance beyond the clouds of 
 heaven. Mark well how pressing and tender, yet withal how 
 full of stern and majestic Self-assertion, are His words ! Con- 
 sider how merciful and timely, yet also how expressive of imma- 
 nent and unlimited power, are His miracles ! Put the three 
 representations of the Eoyal, the Human, and the Healing 
 Redeemer together, and deny, if it is possible, that Jesus is 
 Divine. If the Christ of the synoptists is not indeed an unreal 
 phantom, such as Docetism might have constructed, He is far 
 removed above the Ebionitic conception of a purely human 
 Saviour. If Christ's Pre-existence is only obscurely hinted at 
 in the first three Gospels, His relation to the world of spirits is 
 brought out in them even more clearly than in St. John by the 
 discourses which they contain on the subject of the Last Judg- 
 ment. If St. John could be blotted out from the pages of the 
 New Testament, St. John's central doctrine would still live on 
 in the earlier Evangelists as implicitly contained within a history 
 otherwise inexplicable, if not as the illuminating truth of a 
 heavenly gnosis. There would still remain the picture of a Life 
 Which belongs indeed to human history, but Which the laws 
 that govern human history neither control nor can explain. 
 It would still be certain that One had lived on earth, wielding 
 miraculous powers, and claiming a moral and intellectual place 
 which belongs only to the Most Holy ; and if the problem pre- 
 sented to faith might seem for a moment to be more intricate, 
 its final solution could not differ in substance from that which 
 meets us in the pages of the beloved disciple. 
 
 V. But what avails it, say you, to shew that St. John is con- 
 sistent with himself, and that he is not really at variance with 
 the Evangelists who preceded him, if the doctrine which he 
 
 y Dorner, Person Christi, Einl. p. 89 : ' Das synoptische Totalbild von 
 Christus dem johanneischen insofern vollkommen an die Seite setzen kaan, 
 als der durch Vermittlung der synoptischen Tradition gebildete Glaube 
 wesentlich ganz dieselben Ziige in seinem ChristusbegrifF haben rausste, wie 
 sie der johanneische Christus hat.^ For the preceding remarks, see Person 
 Christi, Einl. pp. 80-89. 
 
256 Christ, thus God mid Man, in One Perso7i, 
 
 teaches, and which the Creed re-asserts, is itself incredible % You 
 object to this doctrine that it ' involves an invincible contradic- 
 tion.' It represents Christ on the one hand as a Personal Being, 
 while on the other it asserts that two mutually self-excluding 
 Essences are really united in Him. How can He be personal, 
 you ask, if He be in very truth both God and Man % If He is 
 thus God and Man, is He not, in point of fact, a ^double Being;' 
 and is not unity of being an indispensable condition of person- 
 ality % Surely, you insist, this condition is forfeited by the very 
 terms of the doctrine. Christ either is not both God and Man, 
 or He is not a single Personality. To say that He is One Person 
 in Two Natures is to affirm the existence of a miracle which is 
 incredible, if for no other reason, simply on the score of its 
 unintelligibility z. 
 
 This is what may be said ; but let us consider, first of all, 
 whether to say this does not, however unintentionally, caricature 
 the doctrine of St. John and of the Catholic Creed. Does it not 
 seem as if both St. John and the Creed were at pains to make 
 it clear that the Person of Christ in His pre-existent glory, in 
 His state of humiliation and sorrow, and in the majesty of His 
 mediatorial kingdom, is continuously, unalterably One % Does 
 not the Mcene Creed, for instance, first name the Only-begotten 
 Son of God, and then go on to say how for us men and for our 
 salvation He was Himself made Man, and was crucified for us 
 under Pontius Pilate ] Does not St. John plainly refer to One 
 
 ^ Schenkel, Charakterbild Jesu, p. 2 : ' Es gehort vor Allem zum Begriffe 
 einer Person, dass sie im Kerne ihres Wesens eine Einheit bildet ; nur unter 
 dieser Voraussetzung lasst sie sich geschichtlich begreifen. Diese Einheit 
 wird durch die herkommliche Lehre in der Person des Welterlosers aufge- 
 hoben. Jesus Christus wird in der kirchlichen Glaubenslebre als ein Doppel- 
 Wesen dargestellt, als die personliche Vereinigung zweier Wesenheiten, die 
 an sich nichts mit einander gemein haben, sich vielmehr schlechthin wider- 
 sprechen uud nur vermoge eines alle Begriffe iibersteigenden Wunders in die 
 engste und unaufloslichste Verbindung mit einander gebracht worden sind. 
 Er ist demzufolge Mensch und Gott in einer und derselben Person. Die 
 kirchlichen Theologen haben grosse Anstrengungen gemacht, um die unauf- 
 losliche Verbindung von Gott und Mensch in einer Person als begreiflich 
 und moglich darzustellen ; sie haben sich aber zuletzt doch immer wieder zu 
 dem Gestandniss genothigt gesehen, dass die Sache unbegreiflich sei, und 
 dass ein undurchdringliches Geheimniss iiber dem Personleben Jesu Christi 
 schwebe. Allein eine solche Berufung auf Geheimnisse und Wunder ist, wo 
 es auf die Erklarung einer geschichtlichen Thatsache ankommt, fiir die 
 Wissenschaft ohne alien Werth ; sie offenbart uns die Unfahigkeit des theo- 
 logischen Denkens, das in sich Widersprechende vorstellbar, das geschichtlich 
 Unbegreifliche denkbar zu machen/ Cf. Strauss, Leben Jesu, § 146; 
 Schleiermacher, Glaubenslebre, ii. § 96-98. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Nestorians deny the unity of Chrisfs Person, 257 
 
 and the Same Agent in such verses as the following % ' All 
 things were made by Him, and without Him w^as not anything 
 made that was made a.' ' He riseth from supper, and laid aside 
 His garments ; and took a towel, and girded Himself, After 
 that He poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the 
 disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He 
 was girded^.' If St. John or the Creed had proceeded to intro- 
 duce a new subject to whom the circumstances of Christ's earthly 
 Life properly belonged, and who only maintained a mysterious, 
 even although it were an indissoluble connexion with the Eternal 
 Word in heaven, then the charge of making Christ a ^ double 
 Being' would be warrantable. Nestorius was fairly liable to 
 that charge. He practically denied that the Man Christ Jesus 
 was One Person with the Eternal Word. In order to heighten 
 the ethical import of the Human Life of Christ, Nestorianism 
 represents our Lord as an individual Man, Who, although He is 
 the temple and organ of the Deity to which He is united, yet 
 has a separate basis of personality in His Human Nature. The 
 individuality of the Son of Mary is thus treated as a distinct 
 thing from that of the Eternal Word ; and the Christ of Nesto- 
 rianism is really a ' double Being,' or rather He is two distinct 
 persons, mysteriously joined in one^. But the Church has 
 formally condemned this error, and in so doing she was merely 
 throwing into the form of a doctrinal proposition the plain 
 import of the narrative of St. John's Gospel \ 
 
 Undoubtedly, you reply, the Church has not allowed her doc- 
 
 a St. John i. 3. ^ Ibid. xiii. 4, 5. 
 
 c Ap. Marium Merc. p. 54 : ' Non Maria peperit Deum. Non peperit 
 creatura increabilem, sed peperit hominem Deitatis instrumentum. Divido 
 naturas, sed conjungo reverentiam.' Cf. Nestorii Ep. iii. ad Coelestin. 
 (Mansi, torn. iv. 1197): t^ Trpo€\6€7v rhu ©chu ASyoi/ 4k ttjs xpi(rTOT(J/foi; 
 TrapOeuov irapa rrjs diias i^idaxOyju ypacpTJs' rh Se yei^vqOT^uai &ehv 6| avTrjSj 
 ovda/iiov ididdx^VV' And his ' famous ' saying, ' I will never own a child of 
 two months old to be God.' (Labbe, iii. 506.) 
 
 d St. Leo in Epist. ad Leonem Aug. ed. Ballerino, 165 : ' Anathematizetur 
 ergo Nestorius, qui beatam Virginem non Dei, sed hominis tantummodo cre- 
 didit genitricem, ut aliam personam carnis faceret, aliam Deitatis ; nee unum 
 Christum in Verbo Dei et carne sentiret, sed separatum atque sejunctum 
 alterum Filium Dei, alterum hominis prsedicaret.' See Confession of the 
 Easterns, accepted by St. Cyril, Labbe, iii. 11 07. 'OfioAoyovineu rov Kvpiou 
 7]ix6ov ^Irjcrovu Xpiarhi/, rhv Yihp rod ©eoD, &€hj/ reXeiov koI ^-vOpoorroj/ r4\iiov ck 
 ypvxv^ ^oyiKYis Kot adoinaros, irph aloovoov /jlcu €k tov Tlarphs y^vvq^^vra Kara 
 T^v Ge6T7]Ta, 67r' iaxo-Twv St twu 7)iJ,€pcav rhu avrhu e/c Maplas Kara rrjv ai^dpo)- 
 Tr6T7]Ta, o/JLOOvcriov raJ UaTpl Kara r7]U &c6Tr]Ta, ufxoovaiov rjfxiu Kara r^qu ai'Qpo- 
 irSr-qra' 5uo yap (pvaewv eucaffts yfyove. Kara ravrrjy rrju rrjs aavyxvrov ^ ' 
 €vdo(T€U5 iuvoLav d/xo\oyovixiy r)]V ayiav TJapdiyov QeoroKov, Bi.a rh rhv (d^hv* 
 
 f^^<^ 
 
258 The ' Co77iiminicatio idioniatu7n! 
 
 trine to be stated in terms which would dissolve the Eedeemer into 
 two distinct agents, and would so altogether forfeit the reality of 
 redemption «. But the question is whether the orthodox state- 
 
 1^6'^ov (TapKooOrjpai Koi ivavOpcaTrrja'ai, Koi i^ avTrjs rrjs crvW-fjipccos ei/Sxrai eavrS 
 rhv e| avTTJs \r]<pd€i^Ta va.6v. Tas Se ^vorfiO^.iKo.s irepl rov Kvpiov ^covas lafxev 
 Tovs d€o\6yovs &vdpas ras fxhu KOivoiroiovvras us i(p'' evhs irpocrwirov, ras Se 
 diaipovPTas CDS iirl Bvo (f)V(T€uv, Kol ras jxiv diOTrpeTrcTs Kara r^u ©edrrjra rod 
 XpKTTov, ras 5e raTveivas Kara r^v avdp(aTr6ry]Ta aurov TrapadiS Suras. The 
 definition of Chalcedon is equally emphatic on the subject of the Hypostatic 
 Union. Routh, Scr. Op. ii. 78. Bright, Hist. Ch. p. 409. The title Theo- 
 tokos, assigned to the Blessed Virgin by eminent Fathers before the Nestorian 
 controversy (see Bright, ib. p. 302), and by the whole Church ever since the 
 Council of Ephesus, is essentially a tribute to Christ's personal glory. It is 
 in exact accordance with that well-known Scriptural usus loquendi, whereby 
 God is said to have ' purchased the Church with His own Blood' (Acts xx. 
 28, see Lect. VI. ; and compare l Cor. ii. 8), as conversely, 'the Son of Man,' 
 while yet on earth, is said to have been ' in heaven ' (St. John iii. 13). This 
 * communicatio idiomatum,* Koivoiroirja-is or avridocris (St. John Dam. Orth. 
 Fid. iii. 4), as it is technically termed, is only intelligible on the principle 
 that whatever belongs to our Lord in either of His two spheres of Existence 
 belongs to Him as the One Christ, Who is, and is to be spoken of as, both 
 God and IMan. In other words, the properties of both His Natures are the 
 properties of His Person. (Hooker, E. P. v. 53 ; St. Thorn. Summ. iii. 16, 4.) 
 In the same sense then as that in which St. Paul could attribute 'crucifixion,' 
 and ' shedding His Blood,' to ' God,' that is to say, to our Divine Saviour in 
 His Manhood, the Church could attribute to Him Birth of a human Mother. 
 The phrase deorSKos is implicitly sanctioned by the phrase aTfj.a &€ov. It 
 presupposes the belief that Jesus Christ, the Son of Mary, is our Lord and 
 God ; that ' the Son which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlast- 
 ing of the Father, very and eternal God, took Man's Nature upon Him in the 
 womb of the Blessed Virgin, of her substance,' art. 2. In sub-apostolic language, 
 6 yap &ehs rifxoov 'It/itoGs 6 Xpicrbs iKvo(}>op7}dr] airh Maptas. Ign. ad Eph. 18. 
 
 8 Jackson on the Creed, Works, vol. vii. p. 294 : ' That proper blood 
 wherewith God is said to have purchased the church, was the blood of the 
 Son of God, the second Person in Trinity, after a more peculiar manner than 
 it was the blood either of God the Father or of God the Holy Ghost. It was 
 the blood of God the Father or of God the Holy Ghost, as all other creatures 
 are, by common right of creation and preservation. It was the blood of 
 God the Son alone by personal union. If this Son of God, and High Priest 
 of our souls, had offered any other sacrifice for us than Himself, or the Man- 
 hood thus personally united unto Him, His offering could not have been 
 satisfactory, because in all other things created, the Father and the Holy 
 Ghost had the same right or interest which the Son had. He could not have 
 offered anything to Them which were not as truly Theirs as His. Only the 
 Seed of Abraham, or Fruit of the Virgin's womb Which He assumed into the 
 Godhead, was by the assumption made so His own, as it was not Theirs, His 
 own by incommunicable property of personal union. By reason of this 
 incommunicable property in the woman's seed, the Son of God might truly 
 have said unto His Father, * Lord, Thou hast purchased the church, yet 
 with My blood : ' but so could not the Man Christ Jesus say unto the Son 
 of God, ' Lord, Thou hast paid the ransom for the sins of the world, yet 
 with My blood, not with Thine own.' 
 
 [lect. 
 
Chris fs Manhood an instrument of His Deity, 259 
 
 ment be really successful in avoiding the error which it depre- 
 cates. Certainly the Church does say that ' although Christ be 
 God and Man, yet He is not two, but one Christ.' But is this 
 possible % How can Godhead and Manhood thus coalesce without 
 forfeiture of that unity which is a condition of personality % 
 
 The answer to this question lies in the fact, upon which 
 St. John insists with such prominence, that our Lord's Godhead 
 is the seat of His Personality. The Son of Mary is not a distinct 
 human person mysteriously linked with the Divine Nature of 
 the Eternal Word f. The Person of the Son of Mary is divine 
 and eternal \ It is none other than the Person of the Word. 
 When He took upon Him to deliver man, the Eternal Word did 
 not abhor the Virgin's womb. He clothed Himself with man's 
 bodily and man's immaterial nature ; He united it to His Own 
 Divinity. He ^ took man's Nature upon Him in the womb of 
 the Blessed Virgin, of her substance, so that two whole and per- 
 fect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were 
 joined together in One Person, never to be divided, whereof is 
 One Christ g.' Thus to speak of Christ as a Man, at least with- 
 out explanation, may lead to a serious misconception ; He is the, 
 Man, or rather He is Man. Christ's Manhood is not of Itself an 
 individual being ; It is not a seat and centre of personality ; It 
 has no conceivable existence apart from the act whereby the 
 Eternal Word in becoming Incarnate called It into being and 
 made It His Own ^. It is a vesture which He has folded around 
 His Person ; It is an instrument through which He places Him- 
 self in contact with men, and whereby He acts upon humanity \ 
 
 f St. Ful. de Fide ad Petr. c. 1 7 : ' Deus Verbum non accepit personam 
 hominis, sed naturam ; et in seternam personam divinitatis accepit tempora- 
 lem substantiam carnis.' St. Joh. Damasc. de Fid. Orthod. iii. 11:6 0€^s 
 A(^70S (TapKoodels ov rrjv iv tw elh^i BecopouixevTjv, ov yap irdcras ras inroaTciaeis 
 aveKa^ii/' aWa Trji^ iv arS/xcf, airapxr]^ rod rj/JLerepov (pvpo-ixaroSi ov Kd&' eav- 
 TTjv viroaraaav Koi ^rofxav xP'Ol^^riaacrav irporepou, Koi ovtcos v'k avrov irpoff- 
 KT]<pQit(Tav, ctAA' iv rfj avrov vTroardaci virdp^acrau, avrr] yap tj inrSaTacis rod 
 06oG Aoyov 4y4i/eTo rfj trapKl vnoffracns. He states this in other terms (c. 9) 
 by saying that our Lord's Humanity had no subsistence of itself. It was not 
 idioavaraTos, nor was it strictly on/vTr^araTos, but iv avT^ rij rov ©eoO Aoyov 
 vrroaTacrei virocnaaa, ^vvirScrraros. He speaks too of Christ's viroaraais avv- 
 Beros. Hooker, E. P. v. 52. 3. g Art. ii. 
 
 ^ St. Aug. c. Serm. Arian. c. 6 : * Nee sic assumptus est [homo] ut priiis 
 crearetur, post assumeretur, sed ut in ipsa assumptione crearetur.' Newman's 
 Par. Sermons, vi. 68. 
 
 ^ Jackson on the Creed, Works, vol. vii. p. 289 : ' The Humanity of 
 Christ is such an instrument of the Divine Nature in His Person, as the 
 hand of man is to the person or party whose hand it is. And it is well 
 observed, whether by Aquinas himself or no I remember not, but by 
 V] S 2 
 
i6o Analogy fro7n the composite natitre of man. 
 
 He wears It in heaven, and thus robed in It He represents, He 
 impersonates, He pleads for the race of beings to which It 
 belongs. In saying that Christ ^ took our nature upon Him,' 
 we imply that His Person existed before, and that the Manhood 
 which He assumed was Itself impersonal. Therefore He did not 
 make Himself a ^ double Being ' by becoming incarnate. His 
 Manhood no more impaired the unity of His Person than each 
 human body, with its various organs and capacities, impairs the 
 unity of that personal principle which is the centre and pivot of 
 each separate human existence, and which has its seat within 
 the soul of each one of us. 
 
 ^As the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and 
 man is one Christ.' As the personality of man resides in the 
 soul, after death has severed soul and body, so the Person of 
 Christ had Its eternal seat in His Godhead before His Incarna- 
 tion. Intimately as the ^ I,' or personal principle within each 
 of us, is associated with every movement of the body, the ' I ' 
 itself resides in the soul. The soul is that which is conscious, 
 which remembers, which wills, and which thus realizes person- 
 ality. Certainly it is true that in our present state of existence 
 we have never as yet realized what personal existence is, apart 
 from the body. But the youngest of us will do this, ere many 
 years have passed. Meanwhile we know that, when divorced 
 from the personal principle which rules and inspires it, the body 
 is but a lump of lifeless clay. The body then does not superadd 
 a second personality to that which is in the soul. It supplies 
 the personal soul with an instrument; it introduces it to a 
 sphere of action ; it is the obedient slave, the plastic ductile 
 form of the personal soul which tenants it. The hand is raised, 
 the voice is heard ; but these are acts of the selfsame personality 
 
 Viguerius, an accurate summist of Aquinas' sums, that albeit the intellectual 
 part of man be a spiritual substance, and separated from the matter or bodily 
 part, yet is the union betwixt the hand and intellectual part of man no less 
 firm, no less proper, than the union between the feet or other organical 
 parts of sensitive creatures, and their sensitive souls or mere physical forms. 
 For the intellectual part of man, whether it be the form of man truly, though 
 not merely physical, or rather his essence, not his form at all, doth use his 
 own hand not as the carpenter doth use his axe, that is, not as an external 
 or separated, but as his proper united instrument : nor is the union between 
 the hand as the instrument and intellective part as the artificer or commander 
 of it an union of matter and form, but an union personal, or at the least 
 such an union as resembles the hypostatical union between the Divine and 
 Human Nature of Christ much better than any material union wherein 
 philosophers or school-divines can make instance.' Cf. Viguerius, Institu- 
 tiones, c. 20. introd. p. 259, commenting on St. Thom. 3*. q. 2. a. i. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Alleged danger of Apollinarian error, 261 
 
 as that which, in the invisible voiceless recesses of its immaterial 
 self, goes through intellectual acts of inference, or moral acts of 
 aversion or of love. In short, man is at once animal and spirit, 
 but his personal unity is not thereby impaired : and Jesus Christ 
 is not other than a Single Person, although He has united the 
 Perfect Nature of Man to His Divine and Eternal Being. 
 Therefore, although He says *I and the Father are One,' He 
 never says ' I and the Son ' or * I and the Word are One.' For 
 He is the Word ; He is the Son. And His Human Life is not 
 a distinct person, but the robe which is folded around His 
 Eternal Personality^. 
 
 But if the illustration of the Creed is thus suggestive of the 
 unity of Christ's Person, is it, you may fairly ask, altogether in 
 harmony with the Scriptural and Catholic doctrine of His 
 Perfect Manhood? If Christ's Humanity stands to His God- 
 head in the relation of the body of a man to his soul, does not 
 this imply that Christ has no human SouU, or at any rate no 
 distinct human Will *? You remind me that ^ the truth of our 
 Lord's Human Will is essential to the integrity of His Manhood, 
 to the reality of His Incarnation, to the completeness of His 
 redemptive work. It is plainly asserted by Scripture ; and the 
 error which denies It has been condemned by the Cliurch. If 
 Nestorius errs on one side, Apollinaris, Eutyches, and finally the 
 Monothelites, warn us how easily we may err on the other. 
 Christ has a Human Will as being Perfect Man, no less than He 
 has a Divine Will as being Perfect God. But this is not sug- 
 gested by the analogy of the union of body and soul in man. 
 And if there are two Wills in Christ, must there not also be two 
 Persons ? and may not the Sufferer Who kneels in Gethsemane 
 be another than the Word by Whom all things were made 1 ' 
 
 Certainly, the illustration of the Creed cannot be pressed 
 closely without risk of serious error. An illustration is gene- 
 rally used to indicate correspondence in a single particular ; and 
 it will not bear to be erected into an absolute and consistent 
 
 ^ On the objection that the illustration in the Athanasian Creed favours 
 Nestorianism, cf. St. Tho. 3*. 2. 5. 
 
 1 This preliminary form of the objection is thus noticed by the Master of 
 the Sentences, Petr. Lomb. 1. iii. d. 5 (858). 'Non accepit Verbum Dei 
 personam hominis, sed naturam. E : A quibusdam opponitur, quod persona 
 assumit personam. Persona enim est substantia rationalis individuse naturae, 
 hoc autem est anima. Ergo si aniraam assumsit, et personam. Quod ideo 
 non sequitur, quia anima non est persona, quando alii rei unita est perso- 
 naliter, sed quando per se est. Ilia autem anima (our Lord's) nunquam fuit, 
 quia esset alii rei conjuncta.' 
 
26 z Reality of our Lord^s Htiinan Will co7zsistent 
 
 parallel, supposed to be in all respects analogous to that with 
 which it has a single point of correspondence. But the Creed 
 protects itself elsewhere against any such misuse of this par- 
 ticular illustration. The Creed says that as body and soul meet 
 in a single man, so do Perfect Godhead and Perfect Manhood 
 meet in one Christ. The Perfect Manhood of Christ, not His 
 Body merely but His Soul, and therefore His Human Will, is 
 part of the One Christ. Unless in His condescending love our 
 Eternal Lord had thus taken upon Him our fallen nature in its 
 integrity, that is to say, a Human Soul as well as a Human 
 Body, a Human Will as an integral element of the Human Soul, 
 mankind would not have been really represented on the cross or 
 before the throne. We should not have been truly redeemed or 
 sanctified by a real union with the Most Holy. 
 
 Yet in taking upon Him a Human Will, the Eternal Word 
 did not assume a second principle of action which was de- 
 structive of the real unity of His Person. Within the precincts 
 of a single human soul may we not observe two principles of 
 volition, this higher and that lower, this animated almost en- 
 tirely by reason, that as exclusively by passion 1: St. Paul has 
 described the moral dualism within a single will which is cha- 
 racteristic of the first stage of the regenerate life, in a wonderful 
 passage of his Epistle to the Eomans"i. The real self is loyal to 
 God ', yet the Christian sees within him a second self, warring 
 against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to 
 that which his central being, in its loyalty to God, energetically 
 rejects^. Yet in this great conflict between the old and the new 
 self of the regenerate man, there is, we know, no real schism of 
 an indivisible person, although for the moment antagonist ele- 
 ments within the soul are so engaged as to look like separate 
 hostile agencies. The man's lower nature is not a distinct 
 person, yet it has what is almost a distinct will, and what is 
 thus a shadow of the Created Will which Christ assumed along 
 with His Human Nature. Of course in the Incarnate Christ, 
 the Human Will, although a proper principle of action, was not, 
 
 m Rom. vii. 14-25. Origen, St. Chrysostom, and Theodoret understand 
 this passage of the state of man before regeneration. St. Augustine was of 
 this mind in his earlier theological life (Confess, vii. 21 ; Prop. 45 in Ep. ad 
 Rom., quoted by Meyer, Romer. p. 246), but his struggle with the Pelagian 
 heresy led him to understand the passage of the regenerate' (Retractat. i. 23, 
 ii. I ; contr. duas Ep. Pelag. i. 10 ; contr. Faust, xv. 8). This judgment was 
 accepted by the great divines of the middle ages, St. Anselm and Aquinas, 
 and generally by the moderns ; although of late there have been some earnest 
 efforts to revive the Greek interpretation. " Rom. vii. 17, 22, 23. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
with the Impersonality of His Manhood, 263 
 
 could not be, in other than the most absolute harmony ^ith the 
 Will of Godo. Christ's sinlessness is the historical expression of 
 this harmony. The Human Will of Christ corresponded to the 
 Eternal Will with unvarying accuracy ; because in point of fact 
 God, Incarnate in Christ, willed each volition of Christ's Human 
 Will. Christ's Human Will then had a distinct existence, yet 
 Its free volitions were but the earthly echoes of the Will of the 
 All-holy P. At the Temptation It was confronted with the per- 
 sonal principle of evil ; but the Tempter without was seconded 
 by no pulse of sympathy within. The Human Will of Christ 
 was incapable of willing evil. In Gethsemane It was thrown 
 forward into strong relief as Jesus bent to accept the chalice of 
 suffering from which His Human sensitiveness could not but 
 shrink. But from the first It was controlled by the Divine Will 
 to which It is indissolubly united ; just as, if we may use the 
 comparison, in a holy man, passion and impulse are brought 
 entirely under the empire of reason and conscience^. As God 
 and Man, our Lord has two Wills ; but the Divine Will origi- 
 nates and rules His Action ; the Human Will is but the docile 
 servant of that Will of God which has its seat in Christ's Divine 
 and Eternal Person r. Here indeed we touch upon the line at 
 which revealed truth shades off into inaccessible mystery. We 
 may not seek to penetrate the secrets of that marvellous BeavBpiKTj 
 €V€py€La : but at least we know that each Nature of Christ is 
 perfect, and that the Person which unites them is One and in- 
 dissoluble s. 
 
 o This was the gTotmd taken in the Sixth General Council, a.d. 680, 
 when the language of Chalcedon was adapted to meet the error of the Mono- 
 thelites. Auo <pv(riKas de\i](reis ijrot. de\r}fA.ara iv avTCf Koi dvo (pvaiKas 
 iycpyeias adiaip€T<cs, dTpeTTTccy, a/j.^ piaruSy acrvyx^Toos, Kara t))v twu ayioov 
 iraripoov BidaaKaXiaj/ K7]pvrroixiv, Kal dvo (pvo-iKo, deX'fifiaTa ovk virci/avria, ju}] 
 yevoLTO, Kadcbi oi aaefi^^s e^i7(rai/ alperiKoly aW' kirSfx^vov rh audpwTvivov avrov 
 6e\r]iJ.a^ Koi jx)] avmriiTTOP, fi avTLTra\a7ov fxaKXov [xkv ovv Ka\ virorafforSfx^vov 
 Ty Q^ica avrov Koi iravaQ^v^i BeK'nixari. Mansi, torn. xi. p. 637. Routh, Scr. 
 Op. ii. 236. Hooker, E. P. v. 48. 9. 
 
 p ' In ancient language, a twofold voluntas is quite compatible with a single 
 volitio.' Klee Dogmengesch. ii. 4. 6. 
 
 <i St. Maximus illustrates the two harmonious operations of the Two Wills 
 in Christ, by the physical image of a heated sword which both cuts and burns. 
 Disp. cont. Pyrrh, apud Klee ubi sup. 
 
 *■ St. Ambros. de Fide, v. 6 : ' Didicisti, quod omnia sibi Ipsi subjicere possit 
 secundum operationem utique Deitatis ; disce nunc quod secundum carnem 
 omnia subjecta accipiat.* 
 
 * St. Leo, Ep. ad Flavianum, c. 4 : ' Qui verus est Deus, idem verus est 
 Homo ; et nullum est in hac unitate mendacium, dum invicem sunt et hu- 
 militas hominis et altitude deitatis. Agit enim utraque forma cum alterius 
 
264 Mystery, no reasonable bar to faith. 
 
 For the illustration of the Creed might at least remind us 
 that we carry about with us the mystery of a composite nature, 
 which should lead a thoughtful man to pause before pressing 
 such objections as are urged by modern scepticism against the 
 truth of the Incarnation. The Christ Who is revealed in the 
 Gospels and Who is worshipped by the Church, is rejected as 
 being ' an unintelligible wonder ! ' True, He is, as well in His 
 condescension as in His greatness, utterly beyond the scope of 
 our finite comprehensions. ' Salva proprietate utriusque Naturae, 
 et in unam coeunte personam, suscepta est a maj estate humilitas, 
 a virtute intirmitas, ab seternitate mortalitas*.' We do not pro- 
 fess to solve the mystery of that Union between the Almighty, 
 Omniscient, Omnipresent Being, and a Human Life, with its 
 bounded powers, its limited knowledge, its restricted sphere. 
 We only know that in Christ, the finite and the Infinite are thus 
 united. But we can understand this mysterious union at least 
 as well as we can understand the union of such an organism as 
 the human body to a spiritual immaterial principle like the 
 human souL How does spirit thus league itself with matter % 
 Where and what is the life-principle of the body % Where is the 
 exact frontier-line between sense and consciousness, between 
 brain and thought, between the act of will and the movement of 
 muscle % ■ Is human nature then so utterly commonplace, and 
 have its secrets been so entirely unravelled by contemporary 
 science, as entitle us to demand of the Almighty God that 
 when He reveals Himself to us He shall disrobe Himself of 
 mystery? If we reject His Self-revelation in the Person of 
 Jesus Christ on the ground of our inability to understand the 
 difficulties, gi-eat and undeniable, although not greater than we 
 might have anticipated, which do in fact surround it ; are we 
 also prepared to conclude that, because we cannot explain how a 
 spiritual principle like the soul can be robed in and act through 
 a material body, we will therefore close our eyes to the argu- 
 ments which certify us that the soul is an immaterial essence, 
 and take refuge from this oppressive sense of mystery in some 
 doctrine of consistent materialism 1 
 
 communione quod proprium est ; Verbo scilicet operante quod Verbi est, et 
 carne exsequente quod carnis est. Unum horum coruscat miraculis, alterum 
 succumbit injuriis.* St. Job. Damasc. iii. 19 : &€ov iuavdpuir'fio-avTos, kol rj 
 avOpcjoTTLPT] auTov ivfpyna deia fjv, ^yovv TidecajUfvif^ Kal ovk 6,/j.oipos rijs deias 
 avTov ivepycias' Kol 7] diia avTov iuepy^ia ovk &iuoipos ttjs aifdpooirii/rjs avrov 
 iuepyeias' ctAA.' cKarfpa avv rij kr4pa dioopov/uLevr]. He urges, here and in 
 iii. 15, that Two Natures imply Two Energies co-operating, for no nature is 
 avcvepyrjTos. See St. Tho. 3*. 19. i. t gt. Leo, Ep. ad Flavianum, c. 3. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Incarnation^ how related to Creation, 265 
 
 Certainly St. John's doctrine of the Divinity of the Word 
 Incarnate cannot be reasonably objected to on the score of its 
 mysteriousness by those who allow themselves to face their real 
 ignorance of the mysteries of our human nature. Nor does that 
 doctrine involve a necessary internal self-contradiction on such a 
 ground as that Hhe Word by Whom all things were made, and 
 Who sustains all things, cannot become His Own creature.' Un- 
 doubtedly the Word Incarnate does not cease to be the Word ; 
 but He can and does assume a Nature which He has created, 
 and in which He dwells, that in it He may manifest Himself. 
 Between the processes of Creation and Incarnation there is no 
 necessary contradiction in Divine revelation, such as is presumed 
 to exist by certain Pantheistic thinkers. He who becomes In- 
 carnate creates the form in which He manifests Himself simul- 
 taneously with the act of His Self-manifestation. Doubtless 
 when we say that God creates, we imply that He gives an exist- 
 ence to something other than Himself. On the other hand, it is 
 certain that He does in a real sense Himself exist in each created 
 object, not as being one with it, but as upholding it in being. He 
 is in every such object the constitutive, sustaining, binding force 
 which perpetuates its being. Thus in varying degrees the 
 creatures are temples and organs of the indwelling Presence of 
 the Creator, although in His Essence He is infinitely removed 
 from them. If this is true of the irrational and, in a lower 
 measure, even of the inanimate creatures, much more is it true 
 of the family of man, and of each member of that family. In 
 vast inorganic masses God discovers Himself as the supreme, 
 creative, sustaining Force. In the graduated orders of vital 
 power which range throughout the animal and vegetable worlds, 
 God unveils His activity as the Fountain of all life. In man, a 
 creature exercising conscious reflective thought and free self- 
 determining will, God proclaims Himself a free Intelligent 
 Agent. Man indeed may, if he will, reveal much more than 
 this of the beauty of God. Man may shed abroad, by the free 
 movement of his will, rays of God's moral glory, of love, of 
 mercy, of purity, of justice. Whether a man will thus declare 
 the glory of his Maker depends not upon the necessary con- 
 stitution of his nature, but upon the free co-operation of his will 
 with the designs of God. God however is obviously able to 
 create a Being who will reveal Him perfectly and of necessity, 
 as expressing His perfect image and likeness before His creatures. 
 All nature points to such a Being as its climax and consumma- 
 tion. And such a Being is the Archetypal Manhood, assumed 
 
 V] 
 
266 Origi7i of belief in the Godhead of Christ, 
 
 by the Eternal Word. It is the climax of God's creation ; It is 
 the climax also of God's Self-revelation. At this point God's 
 creative activity becomes entirely one with His Self-revealing 
 activity. The Sacred Manhood is a creature, yet It is indis- 
 solubly united to the Eternal Word. It differs from every other 
 created being, in that God personally tenants It. So far then 
 are Incarnation and Creation from being antagonistic concep- 
 tions of the activity of God, that the absolutely Perfect Creature 
 only exists as a perfect reflection of the Divine glory. In the 
 Incarnation, God creates only to reveal, and He reveals perfectly 
 by That which He creates. ^ The Word was made flesh and 
 dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory ^.' 
 
 VI. But if belief in our Lord's Divinity, as taught by St. 
 John, cannot be reasonably objected to on such grounds as have 
 been noticed, can it be destroyed by a natural explanation of its 
 upgrowth and formation % Here, undoubtedly, we touch upon a 
 suspicion which underlies much of the current scepticism of the 
 day ; and with a few words on this momentous topic we may 
 conclude the present lecture. 
 
 Those who reject the doctrine that Christ is God are con- 
 fronted by the consideration that, after the lapse of eighteen 
 centuries since His appearance on this earth. He is believed in 
 and worshipped as God by a Christendom which embraces the 
 most civilized portion of the human family. The question arises 
 how to account for this fact. There is no difliculty at all in 
 accounting for it if we suppose Him to be, and to have pro- 
 claimed Himself to be, a Divine Person. But if we hold that, 
 as a matter of history. He believed Himself to be a mere man, 
 how are we to explain the world-wide upgrowth of so extra- 
 ordinary a belief about Him, as is this belief in His Divinity % 
 Scepticism may fold its arms and may smile at what it deems 
 the intrinsic absurdity of the dogma believed in ; but it cannot 
 ignore the existing prevalence of the belief which accepts the 
 dogma. The belief is a phenomenon which at least challenges 
 attention. How has that belief been spread % How is it that 
 for eighteen hundred years, and at this hour, a conviction of the 
 truth of the Godhead of Jesus dominates over the world of 
 Christian thought % Here, if scepticism would save its intellec- 
 tual credit, it must cease from the perpetual reiteration of doubts 
 and negations, unrelieved by any frank assertions or admissions 
 of positive truth. It must make a venture \ it must commit 
 itself to the responsibilities of a positive position, however inexact 
 « On this subject, see Martensen, Christl. Dogmat. § 132. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Theory of ' Deificatio7i by enthusiasm! ^267 
 
 and shadowy ; it must hazard an hypothesis and be prepared to 
 defend it. 
 
 Accordingly the theory which proposes to explain the belief 
 of Christendom in the Godhead of Christ maintains that Christ 
 was ^deified' by the enthusiasm of His first disciples. We are 
 told that ^man instinctively creates a creed that shall meet the 
 wants and aspirations of his understanding and of his heart ^.* 
 The teaching of Christ created in His first followers a passionate 
 devotion to His Person, and a desire for unreserved submission to 
 His dictatorship. Not that Christ's Divinity was decreed Him by 
 any formal act of public honour ; it was the spontaneous and 
 irregular tribute of a passionate enthusiasm. Could any expres- 
 sion of reverence seem exaggerated to an admiration and a love 
 which knew no bounds'? Could any intellectual price be too 
 high to pay for the advantage of placing the authority of the 
 Greatest of teachers upon that one basis of authority which is 
 beyond assault % Do not love and reverence, centring upon a 
 friend, upon a memory, with eager intensity, turn a somewhat 
 impatient ear to the cautious protestations of the critical reason, 
 when any such voice can make itself heard % Do they not pass 
 by imperceptible degrees into adoration % Does not adoration 
 take for granted the Divinity of the object which it has learned 
 imperceptibly and unreflectingly to adore? The enthusiasm 
 created by Jesus Christ in those around Him, thus comes to be 
 credited with the invention and propagation of the belief in His 
 Divinity. ' So mighty was the enthusiasm, that nothing short 
 of that stupendous belief would satisfy it. The heart of 
 Christendom gave law to its understanding. Christians wished 
 Christ to be God, and they forthwith thought that they had 
 sufficient reasons for believing in His Godhead. The feeling of 
 a society of affectionate friends found its way in process of time 
 into the world of speculation. It fell into the hands of the dia- 
 lecticians, and into the hands of the metaphysicians ; it was 
 analysed, it was defined, it was coloured by contact with foreign 
 speculations ; it was enlarged by the accretion of new intellectual 
 material. At length Fathers and Councils had finished their 
 graceless and pedantic task, and that which had at first been the 
 fresh sentiment of simple and loving hearts was duly hardened 
 and rounded off into a solid block of repulsive dogma.' 
 
 Now St. John's writings are a standing difficulty in the way 
 of this enterprising hypothesis. We have seen that the fourth 
 Gospel must be recognised as St. John's, unless, to use the words 
 ▼ Feuerbach, Geist. d. Christenth. Einl, 
 
268 S^, Johns writings fatal to the theory, 
 
 of Ewald, * we are prepared knowino-ly to receive falsehood and 
 to reject truth/ But we have also seen that in the fourth 
 Gospel, Jesus Christ is proclaimed to be God by the whole drift 
 of the argument, and in terms as explicit as those of the Nicene 
 Creed. We have not then to deal with any supposed process of 
 deification, whereby the Person of Jesus was ' transfigured ' in 
 the apprehension of sub-apostolic, or post-apostolic Christendom. 
 It is St. John who proclaims that Jesus is the Word Incarnate, 
 and that the Word is God. How can we account for St. John's 
 conduct in representing Him as God, if He was in truth only 
 man % It will not avail to argue that St. John wrote his Gospel 
 in his old age, and that the memories of his youthful companion- 
 ship with Jesus had been coloured, heightened, transformed, 
 idealized, by the meditative enthusiasm of more than half a 
 century. It will not avail to say that the reverence of the 
 beloved disciple for his ascended Master was fatal to the accuracy 
 of the portrait which he drew of Him. For what is this but to 
 misapprehend the very fundamental nature of reverence % Truth 
 is the basis, as it is Ihe object of reverence, not less than of 
 every other virtue. Reverence prostrates herself before a great- 
 ness the reality of which is obvious to her ; but she would cease 
 to be reverence if she could exaggerate the greatness which pro- 
 vokes her homage, not less surely than if she could depreciate 
 or deny it. The sentiment which, in contemplating its object, 
 abandons the guidance of fact for that of imagination, is disloyal 
 to that honesty of purpose which is of the essence of reverence ; 
 and it is certain at last to subserve the purposes of the scorner 
 and the spoiler. St. John insists that he teaches the Church 
 only that which he has seen and heard. Even a slight swerving 
 from truth must be painful to genuine reverence ; but what 
 shall we say of an exaggeration so gigantic, if an exaggeration 
 it be, as that which transforms a human friend into the Almighty 
 and Everlasting God % If Jesus Christ is not God, how is it 
 that the most intimate of His earthly friends, came to believe 
 and to teach that He really is God % 
 
 Place yourselves, my brethren, fairly face to face with this 
 difficulty ; imagine yourselves, for the moment, in the position 
 of St. John. Think of any whom you have loved and revered, 
 beyond measure, as it has seemed, in past years. He has 
 gone ; but you cling to him more earnestly in thought and 
 affection than while he was here. You treasure his words, you 
 revisit his haunts, you delight in the company of his friends, you 
 represent to yourself his wonted turns of thought and phrase, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Could St, John have ^ deified^ a htcman friend? 269 
 
 you con over his handwriting, you fondle his likeness. These 
 things are for you precious and sacred. Even now, there are 
 times when the tones of that welcome voice seem to fall with 
 living power upon your strained ear. Even now, the outline 
 of that countenance, upon which the grave has closed, flits, as 
 if capriciously, before your eye of sense. The air around you 
 yields it perchance to your intent gaze, radiant with a higher 
 beauty than it wore of old. Others, you feel, may be forgotten 
 as memory grows weak, and the passing years bring with them 
 the quick succession of new fields and objects of interest, press- 
 ing importunately upon the heart and thoughts. But one such 
 memory as I have glanced at, fades not at the bidding of time. 
 It cannot fade ; it has become a part of the mind which clings 
 to it. Some who are here may have known those whom they 
 thus remember ; a few of us assuredly have known such. But can 
 we conceive it possible that, after any lapse of time, we should 
 ever express our reverence and love for the unearthly goodness, 
 the moral strength, the tenderness of heart, the fearlessness, the 
 justice, the unselfishness of our friend, by saying that he was 
 not an ordinary human being, but a superhuman person % Can 
 Ave imagine ourselves incorporating our recollections about him 
 with some current theosophic doctrine elevating him to the rank 
 of a Divine hypostasis % While he lies in his silent grave, can 
 we picture ourselves describing him as the very absolute Light 
 and Life, as the Incarnate Thought of the Most High, as stand- 
 ing in a relationship altogether unique to the Eternal and Self- 
 existent Being, nay, as being literally God ] To say that ' St. John 
 lived in a different intellectual atmosphere from our own,' does 
 not meet the difficulty. If Jesus was merely human, St. John's 
 statements about Him are among the most preposterous fictions 
 which have imposed upon the world. They were advanced with 
 a full knowledge of all that they involved. St. John was at least 
 as profoundly convinced as we are of the truth of the unity of 
 the Supreme Being. St. John was at least as alive as we can 
 be to the infinite interval which parts the highest of creatures 
 from the Great Creator. If we are not naturally lured on by 
 some irresistible fascination, by the poetry or by the credulity of 
 our advancing years, to believe in the Godhead of the best man 
 whom we have ever known, neither was St. John. If Jesus had 
 been merely human, St. John would have felt what we feel about 
 a loved and revered friend whom we have lost. In proportion 
 to our belief in our friend's goodness, in proportion to our loving 
 reverence for his character, is the strength of our conviction that 
 
270 Ma7ikind not prone to ^ deify ^ human virttte, 
 
 we could not now do him a more cruel injury than by entwining 
 a blasphemous fable, such as the ascription of Divinity would 
 be, around the simple story of his merely human life. This 
 ^ deification of Jesus by the enthusiasm ' of St. John would have 
 been consistent neither with St. John's reverence for God, nor 
 with his real loyalty to a merely human friend and teacher. 
 St. John worshipped the * jealous' God of Israel; and he has 
 recorded the warning which he himself received against wor- 
 shipping the angel of the Apocalypse ^. If Christ had not really 
 been Divine, the real beauty of His Human Character would have 
 been disfigured by any association with such legendary exagge- 
 ration, and Christianity would assuredly have perished within the 
 limits of the first century. 
 
 The theory that Jesus was deified by enthusiasm assumes the 
 existence of a general disposition in mankind which is unwar- 
 ranted by experience. Generally speaking men are not eager to 
 believe in the exalted virtue, much less in the superhuman origin 
 or dignity, of their fellow-men. And to do them justice, the 
 writers who maintain that Jesus was invested with Divine 
 honours by popular fervour, illustrate the weakness of their own 
 principle very conspicuously. While they assert that nothing 
 was more easy and obvious for the disciple of the apostolic age 
 than to believe in the Divinity of his Master, they themselves 
 reject that truth with the greatest possible obstinacy and deter- 
 mination ; well -attested though it be, now as then, by historical 
 miracles and by overwhelming moral considerations ; but also 
 proclaimed now, as it was not then, by the faith of eighteen cen- 
 turies, and by the suffrages of all that is purest and truest in our 
 existing civilization. 
 
 But, it is suggested that the apostolic narrative itself bears 
 out the doctrine that Jesus was deified through enthusiasm by 
 its account of the functions which are ascribed, especially in 
 St. John's Gospel, to the Comforter. Was not the Comforter 
 sent to testify of Jesus % Is it not said, ' He shall glorify Me % ' 
 Does not this language look like the later endeavour of a 
 religious phrenzy, to account for exaggerations of which it is 
 conscious, by a bold claim to supernatural illumination % 
 
 Now this suggestion implies that the last Discourse of our 
 Lord is in reality a forgery, which can no more claim to repre- 
 sent His real thought than the political speeches in Thucydides 
 can be seriously supposed to express the minds of the speakers 
 to whom they are severally attributed. Or, at the least, it im- 
 » Rev. xxii. 9. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Ilhtminative Office of the Holy Ghost. 271 
 
 plies that a purely human feeling is here clothed by language 
 ascribed to our Lord Himself with the attributes of a Divine 
 Person. Of course, if St, John was capable of deliberately 
 attributing to his Master that which He did not say, he was 
 equally capable of attributing to Him actions which He did not 
 do ; and we are driven to imagine that the closest friend of 
 Jesus was believed by apostolical Christendom to be writing a 
 history, when in truth he was only composing a biographical 
 novel. But, as Rousseau has observed in words which have 
 been already quoted, the original inventor of the Gospel history 
 would have been as miraculous a being as its historical Subject. 
 And the moral fascination which the last discourse possesses for 
 every pure and true soul at this hour, combines with the testi- 
 mony of the Church to assure us that it could have been spoken 
 by no merely human lips, and that it is beyond the inventive 
 scope of even the highest human genius. Those three chapters 
 which M. Eenan pronounces to be full of ^ the dryness of meta- 
 physics and the darkness of abstract dogmas' have been, as a 
 matter of fact, watered by the tears of all the purest love and 
 deepest sorrow of Christian humanity for eighteen centuries. 
 Never is the New Testament more able to dispense with external 
 evidence than in those matchless words ; nowhere more than 
 here is it sensibly divine. 
 
 Undoubtedly it is a fact that in these chapters our Lord does 
 promise to His apostles the supernatural aid of the Holy Spirit. 
 It is true that the Spirit was to testify of Christ y and to glorify 
 Christ z, and to guide the disciples into all a truth. But how ? 
 ^ He shall take of Mine and shall shew it unto you b ;' ' He shall 
 teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance 
 whatsoever I have said unto you<^.' The Holy Spirit was to 
 bring the words and works and character of Jesus before the 
 illuminated intelligence of the Apostles. The school of the 
 Spirit was to be the school of reflection. But it was not to be 
 the school of legendary invention. Acts, which, at the time of 
 their being witnessed, might have appeared trivial or common- 
 place, would be seen, under the guidance of the Spirit, to have 
 had a deeper interest. Words, to which a transient or local 
 
 y St. John XV. 26 : iK^vos jULaprvp-fiffei trepi ifiov, 
 ^ Ibid. xvi. 14 : e/ce?i/os ifie So^daci. 
 * Ibid. ver. 1 3 : dbTiyqffei v/LLcis eh Traarav t V o.X-fjQciav, 
 *» Ibid. vers. 14, 15 : e'/c rov ifiov X^xl/eraiy kol avayycXu v/j.7v. 
 <5 Ibid. xiv. 26 : iKuyos v/xas SiSa^et irdi/raf /cat vTrofivrjani vficis irdvTa & 
 (lirov vfjuv, 
 
 V] 
 
272 Guidance of the Spirit and natural observation, 
 
 value had been assigned at first, would now be felt to invite 
 a world-wide and eternal meaning. ' These things understood 
 not His disciples at the first,' is true of much else besides the 
 entry into Jerusalem d Moral, spiritual, physical powers which, 
 though unexplained, could never have passed for the product of 
 purely human activity, would in time be referred by the Invisible 
 Teacher to their true source ; they would be regarded with awe 
 as the very rays of Deity. 
 
 Thus the work of the Spirit would but complete, systematize, 
 digest the results of previous natural observation. Certainly it 
 was always impossible that any man could ^say that Jesus is 
 the Lord but by the Holy Ghost ®.' The inward teaching of the 
 Holy Ghost alone could make the Godhead of Jesus a certainty 
 of faith as well as a conclusion of the intellect. But the intel- 
 lectual conditions of belief were at first inseparable from natural 
 contact with the living Human Form of Jesus during the years 
 of His earthly life. Our Lord implies this in saying ^ Ye also 
 shall bear witness, because ye have been with Me from the 
 beginning.* The Apostles lived with One Who combined an 
 exercise of the highest miraculous powers with a faultless human 
 character, and Who asserted Himself, by implication and ex- 
 pressly, to be personally God. The Spirit strengthened and 
 formalized that earlier and more vague belief which was created 
 by His language ; but it was His language which had fallen on 
 the natural ears of the Apostles, and which was the germinal 
 principle of their riper faith in His Divinity. 
 
 The unbelief of our day is naturally anxious to evade the 
 startling fact that the most intimate of the companions of Jesus 
 is also the most strenuous assertor of His Godhead. There is a 
 proverb to the effect that no man's life should be written by his 
 private servant. That proverb expresses the general conviction 
 of mankind that, as a rule, like some mountain scenery or ruined 
 castles, moral greatness in men is more picturesque when it is 
 viewed from a distance. The proverb bids you not to scrutinize 
 even a good man too narrowly, lest perchance you should dis- 
 cover flaws in his character which will somewhat rudely shake 
 your conviction of his goodness. It is hinted that some un- 
 obtrusive weaknesses which escape public observation will be 
 obvious to a man's everyday companion, and will be fatal to the 
 higher estimate which, but for such close scrutiny, might have 
 been formed respecting him. But in the case of Jesus Christ 
 
 d St. John xii. 14- 1 6. 
 
 « I Cor. xii. 3 : ouSels hvva.Ta.1. clireTv Kvpiov ^l7i<rovv, d fJi^ eV Uvev/xaTt 'Ayiw. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
k 
 
 Significance of St. Johns intimacy with our Lord, 273 
 
 the moral of this cynical proverb is altogether at fault. Jesus 
 Christ chooses one disciple to be the privileged sharer of a 
 nearer intimacy than any other. The son of Zebedee lies upon 
 His bosom at supper; he is Hhe disciple whom Jesus loved.' 
 Along with St. Peter and St. James, this disciple is taken to the 
 holy mount, that he may witness the glory of his Transfigured 
 Lord. He enters the empty tomb on the morning of the Resur- 
 rection. He is in the upper chamber when the risen Jesus 
 blessed the ten and the eleven. He is on the mount of the 
 Ascension when the Conqueror moves up visibly into heaven. 
 But he also is summoned to the garden where Jesus kneels in 
 agony beneath the olive-trees ; and alone of the twelve he faces 
 the fierce multitude on the road to Calvary, and stands with 
 Mary beneath the cross, and sees Jesus die. He sees more of 
 the Divine Master than any other, more of His glory, more too 
 of His humiliation. His witness is proportioned to his nearer 
 and closer observation. Whether he is writing Epistles of en- 
 couragement and warning, or narrating heavenly visions touch- 
 ing the future of the Church, or recording the experiences of 
 those years when he enjoyed that intimate, unmatched com- 
 panionship, — St. John, beyond any other of the sacred writers, 
 is the persistent herald and teacher of our Lord's Divinity. 
 
 How and by what successive steps it was that the full truth 
 embodied in his Gospel respecting the Person of his Lord made 
 its way into and mastered the soul of the beloved disciple, who 
 indeed shall presume to say? Who of us can determine the 
 exact and varied observations whereby we learn to measure and 
 to revere the component elements even of a great human cha- 
 racter? The absorbing interest of such a process is generally 
 fatal to an accurate analysis of its stages. We penetrate deeper 
 and deeper, we mount higher and higher, as we follow the 
 complex system of motives, capacities, dispositions, which, one 
 after another, open upon us. We cannot, on looking back, say 
 when this or that feature became distinctly clear to us. We 
 know not now by what additions and developments the general 
 impression which we have received took its shape and outline. 
 St. John would doubtless have learnt portions of the mighty 
 truth from definite statements and at specified times. The real 
 sense of prophecy f, the explicit confessions of disciples?, the 
 
 ^ St. John xii. 41 : raOra elTrev 'HtrataF, *6t^ elSe t\v S6^av avrov, koI 
 i\d\T](T€ Trepl avrov. Isa. vi. 9. 
 
 8 St. John i. 49. After our Lord's words implying His omnipresence, 
 Nathanael says, 'PajSiSl, av el 6 Tibs rod 0eov. 
 V] T 
 
274 The most mtimate companio7iship with J^estis 
 
 assertions by which our Lord replied to the malice or to the 
 ignorance of His opponents^, were doubtless distinct elements 
 of the Apostle's training in the school of truth. St. John must 
 have learned something of Christ's Divine power when, at His 
 word, the putrid corpse of Lazarus, bound with its grave-clothes, 
 moved forward into air and life. St. John must have learned 
 yet more of his Master's condescension when, girded with a 
 towel, Jesus bent Himself to the earth, that He might wash the 
 feet of the traitor Judas. Each miracle, each discourse supplied 
 a distinct ray of light ; but the total impression must have been 
 formed, strengthened, deepened, by the incidents of daily inter- 
 course, by the effects of hourly, momentary observation. For 
 every human soul, encased in its earthly prison-house, seeks and 
 finds publicity through countless outlets. The immaterial spirit 
 traces its history with an almost invisible delicacy upon the 
 coarse hard matter which is its servant and its organ. The un- 
 conscious, involuntary movements of manner and countenance, 
 the unstudied phrases of daily or of casual conversation, the 
 emphasis of silence not less than the emphasis of speech, help in 
 various ways to complete that self-revelation which every indi- 
 vidual character makes to all around, and which is studied by 
 all in each. Not otherwise did the Incarnate Word reveal Him- 
 self to the purest and keenest love which He found and chose 
 from among the sons of men. One flaw or fault of temper, one 
 symptom of moral impotence, or of moral perversion, one hasty 
 word, one ill-considered act, would have shattered the ideal for 
 ever. But, in fact, to St. John the Life of Jesus was as the light 
 of heaven ; it was as one constant unfailing outflow of beauty, 
 ever varying its illuminating powers as it falls upon the leaves of 
 the forest oak or upon the countless ripples of the ocean. In the 
 eyes of St. John the Eternal Person of Jesus shone forth through 
 His Humanity with translucent splendour, and wove and folded 
 around itself, as the days and weeks passed on, a moral history 
 of faultless grandeur. It was not the disciple who idealized the 
 Master ; it was the Master Who revealed Himself in His majestic 
 glory to the illumined eye and to the entranced touch of the 
 disciple. No treachery of memory, no ardour of temperament, 
 no sustained reflectiveness of soul, could have compassed the 
 transformation of a human friend into the Almighty and Ever- 
 lasting Being. Nor was there room for serious error of judg- 
 ment after a companionship so intimate, so heart-searching, so 
 
 h St. John viii. 58, &c. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
issues in the strongest assertions of His Divinity, 275 
 
 true, as had been that of Jesus with St. John. And thus to the 
 beloved disciple the Divinity of his Lord was not a scholastic 
 formula, nor a pious conjecture, nor a controversial thesis, nor 
 the adaptation of a popular superstition to meet the demands of 
 a strong enthusiasm, nor a mystic reverie. It was nothing less 
 than a fact of personal experience. * That Which was from the 
 beginning. Which we have heard. Which we have seen with our 
 eyes, Which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, 
 of the Word of Life ; (for the Life was manifested, and we have 
 seen It, and bear witness, and shew unto you that Eternal Life, 
 Which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us ;) That 
 Which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.' 
 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 OUR LORD'S DIVINITY AS TAUGHT BY ST. JAMES, 
 ST. PETER, AND ST. PAUL. 
 
 And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to he pillars, perceived 
 the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the 
 Hght hands of fellowship ; that we should go unto the heathen, and they 
 unto the circumcision. — Gal. ii. 9. 
 
 The meditative temper of thought and phrase, which is so ob- 
 servable in St. John, may be thought to bear in two different 
 manners upon the question before us in these lectures. On the 
 one hand, such a temper, regarded from a point of view entirely 
 naturalistic, must be admitted to be a guarantee against the pre- 
 sumption that St. John, in his enthusiastic devotion to Jesus, 
 committed himself to hasty beliefs and assertions respecting the 
 Person of his Friend and Master. An over-eager and undis- 
 criminating admiration would not naturally express itself in 
 metaphysical terminology of a reflective and mystical character. 
 But on the other hand, it may be asked whether too much stress 
 has not been laid by the argument of the last lecture upon the 
 witness of St. John ^ Can the conclusions of a mind of high- 
 strung and contemplative temper be accepted as little less, if at 
 all less, than a sufficient basis for a cardinal point of belief in the 
 religion of mankind? May not such a belief be inextricably 
 linked to the moral and intellectual idiosyncrasies of the single 
 soul 1 The belief may indeed be the honest and adequate result 
 of that particular measure and kind of observation and reflection 
 which a single mind has achieved. As such the belief may be 
 a worthy object of philosophical interest and respect ; but is not 
 this respect and interest due to it on the precise ground that it 
 is the true native product of a group of conditions, which co- 
 exist nowhere else save in the particular mind which generated 
 it 1 Will the belief, in short, bear transplantation into the moral 
 and mental soil around ] Can it be nourished and handed on 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
St,yoh}isChristology,sharedbythe other apostles. 277 
 
 by minds of a different calibre, by characters of a distinct cast 
 from that in which it originally grew % Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
 for instance, had private beliefs which were obviously due to the 
 tone and genius of his particular character. These beliefs go far 
 to constitute the charm of the picture with which we are familiar 
 in the pages of Boswell. But our respect for Dr. Johnson does 
 not force us to accept each and all of his quaint beliefs. They 
 are peculiar to himself, being such as he was. We admire them 
 as belonging to the attractive and eccentric individuality of the 
 man. We do not suppose that they are capable of being domes- 
 ticated in the general and diversified mind of England. 
 
 Now, if it be hinted that some similar estimate should be 
 formed respecting St. John's doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, the 
 present, for obvious reasons, is not the moment to insist upon a 
 consideration which for us Christians must have paramount 
 weight, namely, that St. John was taught by an infallible 
 Teacher, by none other than God the Holy Ghost. But let us 
 remark, first of all, the fact that St. John did convey to a large 
 circle of minds his own deep conviction that his Friend and 
 Master was a Divine Person ; paradoxical as that conviction 
 must at first have seemed to them. If Ave could have travelled 
 through Asia Minor at the end of the first century of our era, 
 we should have fallen in with a number of persons, in various 
 ranks of society, who so entirely believed in St. John's doctrine, 
 as to be willing to die for it without any kind of hesitation a. 
 But it would have been a mistake to suppose that the prevalence 
 of the doctrine was due only to the activity of St. John. While 
 St. John was teaching this doctrine under the form which he 
 had been guided to adopt, a parallel communication of the sub- 
 stance of the doctrine was taking place in several other quarters. 
 St. John was supported, if I may be allowed to use such an ex- 
 pression, by men whose minds were of a totally distinct natural 
 cast, and who expressed their thoughts in a religious phraseology 
 which had little enough in common with that which was current 
 in the school of Ephesus. Nevertheless it will be our duty this 
 
 a The Apocalypse was probably written immediately after Domitian's 
 persecution of the Church. Antipas had been martyred at Pergamos. 
 (Rev. ii. 13.) St. John saw the souls of martyrs who had been beheaded 
 with the axe ; elSoi/ ray "^vyoLS tcov ireTreXcKiafxevoov Sia r^t/ fxaprvpiau ^Itjctov. 
 (Rev. XX. 4.) This was the Roman custom at executions. In the perse- 
 cution under Nero other and more cruel kinds of death had been inflicted. 
 The Bishops of Pergamos (Ibid. ii. 13) and Philadelphia (Ibid. iii. 8) had 
 confessed Christ. St. Clement of Rome alludes to the violence of this perse- 
 cution. (Ep. ad Cor. 6.) The Apostle himself was banished to Patmos. 
 VI] 
 
278 Doctrinal bearings of the meeting at J erusalem, 
 
 morning to observe, how radical was tlieir agreement with 
 St. John, in urging upon the acceptance of the human race the 
 doctrine that Jesus Christ is God. 
 
 Very ingenious theories concerning a supposed division of the 
 Apostolical Church into schools of thought holding antagonistic 
 beliefs, have been advanced of late years. And they have had 
 the efiect of directing a large amount of attention to the account 
 which St. Paul gives, in his Epistle to the Galatians, of his inter- 
 view with the leading Apostles at Jerusalem. The accuracy of 
 that account is not questioned even by the most destructive of 
 the Tubingen divines. According to St. Irenaeus and the great 
 majority of authorities, both ancient and modern, the interview 
 took place on the occasion of St. Paul's attendance at the Apo- 
 stolical Council of Jerusalem. St. Paul says that St. James, 
 St. Peter, and St. John, who were looked upon as ^ pillars ' of 
 the Church, among the Judaizing Christians as well as among 
 Christians generally, gave the right hands of fellowship to him- 
 self and to Barnabas. ' It was agreed,' says St. Paul, ^ that we 
 should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision.* 
 Now the historical interest which attaches to this recorded 
 division of labour among the leading Apostles, is sufficiently 
 obvious ; but the dogmatic interest of the passage, although less 
 direct, is even higher than the historical. This passage warrants 
 us in inferring at least thus much ; — that the leading Apostles 
 of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ were not hopelessly at 
 issue with each other on a subject of such central and primary 
 importance as the Divine and Eternal Nature of their Master. 
 
 It might well seem, at first sight, that to draw such an 
 inference at all within the walls of a Christian church was itself 
 an act for which the faith of Christians would exact an apology. 
 But those who are acquainted with the imaginative licence of 
 recent theories will not deem our inference altogether im- 
 pertinent and superfluous. Of late years St. James has been 
 represented as more of a Jew than a Christian, and as holding 
 in reality a purely Ebionitic and Humanitarian belief as to the 
 Person of Jesus. St. Paul has been described as the teacher of 
 such a doctrine of the Subordination of the Son as to be prac- 
 tically Arian. St. Peter is then exhibited as occupying a feeble 
 undecided dogmatic position, intermediate to the doctrines of 
 St. Paul and St. James ; while all the three are contrasted with 
 the distinct and lofty Christology, said to be proper to the gnosis 
 of St. John. Now, as has been already remarked, the historical 
 trustworthiness of the passage in the Galatians has not been 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Apostles not indifferent to doctrinal truth, 279 
 
 disputed even by the Tiibingen divines. That passage repre- 
 sents St. John as intimately associated, not merely with St. Peter 
 but with St. James. It moreover represents these three apostles 
 as giving pledges of spiritual co-operation and fellowship, from 
 their common basis of belief and action, to the more recent con- 
 vert St. Paul. Is it to be supposed that St. Paul could have 
 been thus accepted as a fellow-worker on one and the same 
 occasion by the Apostle who is said to be a simple Humani- 
 tarian, and by the Apostle whose whole teaching centres in Jesus 
 considered as the historical manifestation of the Eternal Word ] 
 Or are we to imagine that the apostles of Christ anticipated 
 that indifference to doctrinal exactness which is characteristic 
 of some modern schools % Did they regard the question of our 
 Lord's Personal Godhead as a kind of speculative curiosity ; as 
 a scholastic conceit \ as having no necessary connexion with 
 vital, essential, fundamental Christianity % And is St. Paul, in 
 his Epistle to the Galatians, only describing the first great ec- 
 clesiastical compromise, in which truths of primary importance 
 were sacrificed for an immediate practical object, more ruthlessly 
 than on any subsequent occasion % 
 
 My brethren, the answer to these questions could not be 
 really doubtful to any except the most paradoxical of modern 
 theorists. To say nothing of St. Peter and St. Jude, St. Paul's 
 general language on the subject of heresy^, and St. John's parti- 
 cular application of such terms as Hhe liar' and * antichrist c' to 
 Cerinthus and other heretics, make the supposition of such in- 
 difference as is here in question, in the case of the apostles, 
 utterly inadmissible. If the apostles had differed vitally respect- 
 ing the Person of Christy they would have shattered the work of 
 Pentecost in its infancy. And the terms in which they speak of 
 each other would be reduced to the level of meaningless or 
 
 ^ He speaks of alpeaeis in the sense of sectarian movements tending to or 
 resulting in separation from the Church, as a form of evil which becomes the 
 unwilling instrument of good (i Cor. xi. 19). And atpeVets are thus classed 
 among the works of the flesh (Gal. v. 20). Using the word in its sense of 
 dogmatic error on vital points, St. Paul bids Titus reject a ' heretic ' after 
 two warnings from the communion of the Church : alpsTiKhv Mpcawoj/ fiera 
 fxiav KoX SevT€pau vovOediav irapanov (Tit. iii. lo). On the inviolate sacred- 
 ness of the apostolical doctrine, cf. Gal. i. 8 : iav rjixeTs ^ HyyeXos e^ ovpavov 
 €vayye\i^7]Tai vfuv Trap* h €V7iyy€\i(rdfjL€6a vfup, avadefia ear 00. Cf. 2 Pet. ii. I. 
 
 ^ I St. John ii. 22 : ris icrnv 6 rpeixrTrjSt «* M^ o apvovjxevos '6ti ^Irjcrovs ovk 
 €(Triv 6 XpiarSs ; ovt6s icrriy 6 avrixpio'ToSi 6 apj/ov/xcpos rhu Uarepa Koi rbv 
 yl6j/. was 6 apvovfievos rhy Tlhyf ouSe rhi/ Uarepa exet. Cf. Ibid. iv. 3 ; 
 2 St. John 7. 
 VI] 
 
28o The Apostles preach one Divine Christ, 
 
 insincere conventionalities d. Considering that the Gospel pre- 
 sented itself to the world as an absolute and exclusive draught 
 of Divine truth, contrasted as such with the perpetually- shifting 
 forms of human thought around it; we may deem it ante- 
 cedently probable, that those critics are mistaken, who profess 
 to have discovered at the very fountain-head of Christianity at 
 least three entirely distinct doctrines, respecting so fundamental 
 a question as the Personal Eank of Christ in the scale of being. 
 Undoubtedly it is true that as the Evangelists approach the 
 Person of our Lord from distinct points of view, so do the 
 writers of the apostolic epistles represent different attitudes of 
 the human soul towards the one evangelical truth ; and in this 
 way they impersonate types of thought and feeling which have 
 ever since found a welcome and a home in the world-embracing 
 Church of Jesus Christ. St. James insists most earnestly on the 
 moral obligations of Christian believers ; and he connects the Old 
 Testament with the New by shewing the place of the law, now 
 elevated and transfigured into a law of liberty, in the new life of 
 Christians. He may indeed for a moment engage in the refuta- 
 tion of a false doctrine of justification by faith ^. But this is 
 because such a doctrine prevents Christians from duly recogniz- 
 ing those moral and spiritual truths and obligations upon which 
 the Apostle is most eagerly insisting. Throughout his Epistle, 
 doctrine is, comparatively speaking, thrown into the background ; 
 he is intent upon practical considerations, to the total, or well- 
 nigh total, exclusion of doctrinal topics. St. Paul, on the other 
 hand, abounds in dogmatic statements. Still, in St. Paul, doc- 
 
 d St. Paul associates himself with the other apostles as bearing the stress 
 of a common confessorship for Christ (2 Cor. xii. 12). The apostles are, 
 together with the prophets, the foundations of the Church (Epli. ii. 20). 
 The apostles are first in order (Eph. iv. 11). Although the grace of God in 
 himself had laboured more abundantly than all the apostles, St. Paul terms 
 himself the least of the apostolic college (i Cor. xv. 9). The equality of the 
 Gentile believers in Christ with the Jewish believers was a truth made known 
 to St. Paul by special revelation, and he called it his Gospel ; but it implied 
 no properly doctrinal difference between himself and the apostles of the 
 circumcision. The harmonious action of the apostles as a united spiritual 
 corporation is implied in such passages as 2 Pet. iii. 2, St. Jude 17 ; and neither 
 of these passages affords ground for Baur's inference respecting the post- 
 apostolic age of the writer. In 2 St. Pet. iii. 15, 16, St. Peter distinguishes 
 between the real mind of 'our beloved brother Paul' as being in perfect 
 agreement with his own, and the abuse which had been made by teachers of 
 error of certain difficult truths put forward in the Pauline Epistles : dvavorird 
 riva, & ol CLjULadels Kal aa-riipiKroL aTpefi\ov(riy ws Ka\ ras KoLiras ypacpas, nphs 
 tV tStW aifTwi' b.TT(li)Miav, ® St. James ii. 14-26. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
They exhibit distinct types of the one doctrine, 281 
 
 trine is, at least, generally brought forward with a view to 
 some immediate practical object. Only in five out of his four- 
 teen Epistles can the doctrinal element be said very decidedly to 
 predominate^. St. Paul assumes that his readers have gone 
 through a course of oral instruction in necessary Christian doc- 
 trine & j he accordingly completes, he expands, he draws out into 
 its consequences what had been already taught by himself or by 
 others. St. Paul's fiery and impetuous style is in keeping with 
 his general relation, throughout his Epistles, to Christian dogma. 
 The calm enunciation of an enchained series of consequences 
 flowing from some central or supreme truth is perpetually in- 
 terrupted, in St. Paul, by the exclamations, the questions, the 
 parentheses, the anacoloutha, the quotations from liturgies, the 
 solemn ascriptions of glory to the Source of all blessings, the 
 outbursts by which argument suddenly melts into stern denun- 
 ciation, or into versatile expostulation, or into irresistible appeals 
 to sympathy, or into the highest strains of lyrical poetry. Thus 
 it is that in St. Paul primary dogma appears, as it were, rather 
 in flashes of light streaming with rapid coruscations across his 
 pages, than in highly elaborated statements such as might 
 abound throughout a professed doctrinal treatise of some later 
 age ; and yet doctrine, although it might seem to be introduced 
 incidentally to some general or special purpose, nevertheless is 
 inextricably bound up with the Apostle's whole drift of practical 
 thought. As for St. John, he is always a contemplative and 
 
 ^ And yet in these five Epistles an immediate practical purpose is generally 
 discernible. In the Romans the Apostle is harmonizing the Jewish and 
 Gentile elements within the Catholic Church, by shewing that each section is 
 equally indebted to faith in Jesus Christ for a real justification before God. 
 In the Galatians he is opposing this same doctrinal truth to the destructive 
 and reactionary theory of the Judaizers. In the Ephesians and Colossians 
 he is meeting the mischievous pseudo-philosophy and Cabbalism of the ear- 
 liest Gnostics, here positively and devotionally, there polemically, by insist- 
 ing on the dignity of our Lord's Person, and the mystery of His relation to 
 the Church. In the Hebrews, written either by St. Paul himself or by 
 St. Luke under his direction, our Lord's Person and Priesthood are exhibited 
 in their several bearings as a practical reason against apostasy to Judaism (it 
 would seem) of an Alexandrian type. 
 
 s I Thess. iii. lo : vvKrhs koI 7](x4pas vnep €k TrcpKrcrov SeS/xevoi els rh Idf^u 
 vfjLooi/ rh TrpSacoTTOi/j Kot Karapriaai ra ixrrepiiixaTa ttJs iriancos vfxcoi/. The 
 Apostle desires to see the Roman Christians, not that he may teach them any 
 supplementary truths, but to confirm them in their existing belief (els rh 
 cTTTipixOripai v/jLas, Rom. i. ii) by the interchange of spiritual sympathies with 
 himself. See i Cor. xv. i; Gal. i. ii, 12, iv. 13, 14; 1 Thess. ii. 2; 
 2 Thess. ii. 15. Compare i St. John ii. 21 : ovk eypa^a vfxiv, on ovk otSare 
 tV oLK-fjOeiav. dAA* on oWare abriiv. 
 
 VI] 
 
282 S^, James erroneously deemed Ebionitic, 
 
 mystical theologian. The eye of his soul is fixed on God, and 
 on the Word Incarnate. St. John simply describes his intui- 
 tions. He does not argue ; he asserts. He looks up to heaven, 
 and as he gazes he tells us what he sees. He continually takes 
 an intuition, as it were, to pieces, and recombines it ; he resists 
 forms of thought which contradict it ; but he does not engage 
 in long arguments, as if he were a dialectician, defending or 
 attacking a theological thesis. Nor is St. John's temper any 
 mere love of speculation divorced from practice. Each truth 
 which the Apostle beholds, however unearthly and sublime, has 
 a directly practical and transforming power ; St. John knows 
 nothing of realms of thought which leave the heart and con- 
 science altogether untouched. Thus, speaking generally, the 
 three Apostles respectively represent the moralist, the practical 
 dogmatist, and the saintly mystic ; while St. Peter, as becomes 
 the Apostle first in order in the sacred college, seems to blend 
 in himself the three types of apostolical teachers. His Epistles 
 are not without elements that more especially characterize 
 St. John \ while they harmonize in a very striking manner 
 those features of St. Paul and St. James which seem most nearly 
 to approach divergence. It may be added that St. Peter's 
 second Epistle finds its echo in St. Jude. 
 
 I. I. The marked reserve which is observable in St. James' 
 Epistle as to matters of doctrine, combined with his emphatic 
 allusions to the social duties attaching to property and to class 
 distinctions, have been taken to imply that this Epistle repre- 
 sents what is assumed by some theories of development to have 
 been the earliest form of Christianity. The earliest Christians 
 are sometimes referred to, as having been, both in their Christ- 
 ology and in their sociological doctrines, Ebionites. But St. 
 James' Epistle is so far from belonging to the teaching of the 
 earliest apostolical age, that it presupposes nothing less than a 
 very widespread and indirect effect of the distinctive teaching 
 of St. Paul. St. Paul's emphatic teaching respecting faith as the 
 receptive cause of justification must have been promulgated long 
 enough and widely enough to have been perverted into a parti- 
 cular gnosis of an immoral Antinomian type. With that gnosis 
 St. James enters into earnest conflict. Baur indeed maintains 
 that St. James is engaged in a vehement onslaught upon the 
 actual teaching, upon the ipsissima verba, of St. Paul himself^. 
 
 ^ Baur, Vorlesungen, iiber N. T. Theologie, p. 277: *In dem Brief 
 Jacobi dagegen begegnet uns nun eine auf den Mittelpunkt der paulinischen 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
His Epistle belo7tgs to the later Apostolical age. 283 
 
 Now even if you should adopt that paradox, you would still 
 obviously be debarred from saying that St. James' Epistle is a 
 sample of the earliest Christianity, of the Christianity of the pre- 
 Pauline age of the Church ^ But in point of fact, as Bishop Bull 
 and others have long since shewn, St. James . is attacking an 
 evil Avhich, although it presupposes and is based upon St. Paul's 
 teaching, is as foreign to the mind of St. Paul as to his own. 
 The justification by faith without works which is denounced by 
 St. James is a corruption and a caricature of that sublime truth 
 which is taught us by the author of the Epistles to the Romans 
 and the Galatians. Correspondent to the general temper of mind 
 which, in the later apostolical age, began to regard the truths of 
 faith and morals only as an addition to the intellectual stock of 
 human thinkers, there arose a conception of faith itself which de- 
 graded it to the level of mere barren consent on the part of the 
 speculative faculty. This * faith' had no necessary relations to 
 holiness and moral growth, to sanctification of the affections, and 
 subdual of the will k. Thus, for the moment, error had imposed 
 upon the sacred name of faith a sense which emptied it utterly of 
 its religious value, and which St. Paul would have disavowed as 
 vehemently as St. James. St. James denies that this mere con- 
 sent of the intellect to a speculative position, carrying with it no 
 necessary demands upon the heart and upon the will, can justify 
 
 Lehre losgehende Opposition. Dem paulinischen Hauptsatz Rom. iiL 28 : 
 diKaiovaOai ttIcttci avOpdirov, x<^P^^ epycou vofxov wird nun hier der Satz entge- 
 gengestellt, Jac. ii. 24 : '6tl 4^ epyoov SiKaiovTai ^vOpuiros, koI ovk e/c irlareous 
 lx6vov. AUe Versuche, die man gemacht hat, um der Anerkennung der 
 Thatsache zu entgehen, dass ein directer Widerspruch zwischen diesen beiden 
 LehrbegrifFen stattfinde und der Verfasser des Jacobusbriefs die paulinische 
 Lehre zum unmittelbaren Gegenstand seiner Polemik mache, sind vollig ver- 
 geblich.' In his Christenthum (p. 122) Baur speaks in a somewhat less 
 peremptory sense. St. James ' bekiimpft eine einseitige, fiir das praktische 
 Christenthum nachtheihge AufFassung der paulinischen Lehre.' 
 
 i Baur, Christenthum, p. 122: * Der Brief des Jacobus, wie unmoglich 
 verkannt werden kann, die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre voraussetzt, so 
 kann er auch nur eine antipaulinische, wenn auch nicht unmittelbar gegen 
 den Apostel selbst gerichtete Tendenz haben.' 
 
 ^ Messmer, Erkl. des Jacobus-briefes, p. 38 : * Der glaube ist bei Jacobus 
 nichts anders als die Annahme, der Besitz oder auch das leere Bekenntniss 
 der christlichen Wahrheiten (sowohl der Glaubens-als-Sitten-wahrheiten,) 
 Resultat des blossen Horens und eigentlich bloss in der Erkenntniss liegend. 
 .... Ein solcher Glaube kann fur sich, wie ein unfruchtbarer Keim, vollig 
 wirkungslos fiir das Leben in Menschen liegen, oder auch in leeren GefUhlen 
 bestehen; er ist nichts als Namen-und-Scheinchristenthum, das keine Heilig- 
 
 keit hervorbringt Das, was diesem Glauben erst die Seele einhaucht, 
 
 ist die gottliche Liebe, durch welche der Wille und alle Krafte des Menschen 
 
 zum Dienste des Glaubens gefangen genommen werden.* 
 
 VI] 
 
284 S^. fames' teaching on justification 
 
 a man before God. But when St. Paul speaks of justifying 
 faith, he means an act of the soul, simple indeed at the moment 
 and in the process of its living action, but complex in its real 
 nature, and profound and far-reaching in its moral effect. The 
 eye of the soul is opened upon the Kedeemer : it believes. But 
 in this act of living belief, not the intellect alone, but in reality, 
 although imperceptibly, the whole soul, with all its powers of 
 love and resolution, goes forth to meet its Saviour. This is 
 St. Paul's meaning when he insists upon justifying faith as being 
 
 TTia-TLS di dycnrrjs evepyov^evrj^. Faith, according to St. Paul, 
 
 when once it lives in the soul, is all Christian practice in the 
 germ. The living apprehension of the Crucified One, whereby 
 the soul attains light and liberty, may be separable in idea, 
 but in fact it is inseparable from a Christian life. If the 
 apprehension of revealed truth does not carry within itself the 
 secret will to yield the whole being to God's quickening grace 
 and guidance, it is spiritually worthless, according to St. Paul. 
 St. Paul goes so far as to tell the Corinthians, that even a faith 
 which was gifted with the power of performing stupendous 
 miracles, if it had not charity, would profit nothing "^. Thus 
 between St. Paul and St. James there is no real opposition. 
 When St. James speaks of a faith that cannot justify, he means 
 a barren intellectual consent to certain religious truths, a philo- 
 sophizing temper, cold, thin, heartless, soulless, morally impo- 
 tent, divorced from the spirit as from the fruits of charity. 
 When St. Paul proclaims that we are justified by faith in Jesus 
 Christ, he means a faith which only realizes its life by love, and 
 which, if it did not love, would cease to live. When St. James 
 contends that *by works a man is justified, and not by faith 
 only,' he implies that faith is the animating motive which gives 
 to works their justifying power, or rather that works only 
 justify as being the expression of a living faith. When St. Paul 
 argues that a man is justified neither by the works of the Jewish 
 law, nor by the works of natural morality, his argument shews 
 that by a ' work ' he means a mere material result or product, a 
 soulless act, unenlivened by the presence of that one supernatural 
 motive which, springing from the grace of Christ, can be indeed 
 
 1 Gal. V. 6. 
 
 ™ I Cor. xiii. 2 : ihy ex« Tracrai/ t^v irlcrriv, &(TT€ 6fyn fi^Bitrrdv^iv, aydirrju 
 Se jUL^ €xw, ovdei/ eijULi. The yvcSa-is of i Cor. viii. i seems to be substantially 
 identical with the bare iria-ris denounced by St. James, although the former 
 was probably of a more purely scientific and intellectual character. The 
 aydirr) of I Cor. viii. i is really the iriaris di' aydiryjs ivepyoviiip-q of Gal. v. 6. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
presupposes the Christology of St, Paul. ^zS^ 
 
 acceptable to a perfectly holy God. But if on the question of 
 justification St. James' position is in substance identical with 
 that of St. Paul, yet St. James' position, viewed historically, does 
 undoubtedly presuppose not merely a wide reception of St. Paul's 
 teaching, but a perverse development of one particular side of it. 
 In order to do justice to St. James, we have to contemplate first, 
 the fruitless ^ faith ' of the Antinomian, with which the Apostle 
 is immediately in conflict, and which he is denouncing ; next, 
 the living faith of the Christian believer, as insisted upon by 
 St. Paul, and subsequently caricatured by the Antinomian per- 
 version \ lastly, the Object of the believer's living faith. Whose 
 Person and work are so prominent in St. Paul's teaching. It is 
 not too much to say that all this is in the mind of St. James. 
 But there was no necessity for his insisting upon what was well 
 understood ; he says only so much as is necessary for his imme- 
 diate purpose. His Epistle is related to the Pauline Epistles in 
 the general scheme of the New Testament, as an explanatory 
 codicil might be to a will. The codicil does not the less repre- 
 sent the mind of the testator because it is not drawn up by the 
 same lawyer as the will itself. The codicil is rendered necessary 
 by some particular liability to misconstruction, which has be- 
 come patent since the time at which the will was drawn up. 
 Accordingly the codicil defines the real intention of the testator; 
 it guards that intention against the threatened misconstruction. 
 But it does not repeat in detail all the provisions of the will, in 
 order to protect the true sense of a single clause. Still less does 
 it revoke any one of those provisions ; it takes for granted the 
 entire document to which it is appended. 
 
 The elementary character of parts of the moral teaching of 
 St. James is sometimes too easily assumed to imply that that 
 Apostle must be held to represent the earliest stage of the sup- 
 posed developments of apostolical Christianity. But is it not 
 possible that in apostolical as well as in later times, ^ advanced ' 
 Christians may have occasionally incurred the danger of forget- 
 ting some important precepts even of natural morality, or of 
 supposing that their devotion to particular truths or forms of 
 thought, or that their experience of particular states of feeling, 
 constituted a religious warrant for such forgetfulness ^% If this 
 
 ^ After making reference to Luther's designation of this Epistle as an 
 
 * Epistle of straw/ a modern French Protestant writer proceeds as follows : 
 
 * Nous-memes, nous ne pouvons consid^rer la doctrine de Jacques ni comme 
 bien logique, ni comme suffisante ; nous y voyons la grande pensee de Jdsus 
 r^trecie et appauvrie par le principe l^gal du mosaisme. Le christianisme de 
 VI] 
 
286 Moral truth the basis of dogmatic faith, 
 
 was indeed the case, St. James' Epistle is placed in its true light 
 when we see in it a healthful appeal to that primal morality, 
 which can never be ignored or slighted without the most certain 
 risk to those revealed truths, such as our Lord's plenary Satis- 
 faction for sin, in which the enlightened conscience finds its final 
 relief from the burden and misery of recognized guilt. If the 
 sensitiveness of conscience be dulled or impaired, the doctrines 
 which relieve the anguish of conscience will soon lose their 
 power. St. Paul himself is perpetually insisting upon the nature 
 and claims of Christian virtue, and on the misery and certain 
 consequences of wilful sin. St. James, as the master both of 
 natural and of Christian ethics, is in truth reinforcing St. Paul, 
 the herald and exponent of the doctrines of redemption and 
 justification. Thus St. James' moral teaching generally, not less 
 than his special polemical discussion of the question of justifica- 
 tion, appears to presuppose St. Paul. It presupposes St. Paul 
 as we know him now in his glorious Epistles, enjoining the 
 purest and loftiest Christian sanctity along with the most perfect 
 acceptance by faith of the Person and work of the Divine 
 Redeemer. But it also presupposes St. Paul, as Gnostics who 
 preceded Marcion had already misrepresented him, as the 
 idealized sophist of the earliest Antinomian fancies, the sophist 
 who had proclaimed a practical or avowed divorce between the 
 sanctions of morality and the honour of Christ. There is at 
 times a flavour of irony in St. James' language, such as might 
 force a passage for the voice of truth and love through the dense 
 tangle of Antinomian self-delusions. St. James urges that to 
 listen to Christian teaching without reducing it to practice is 
 but the moral counterpart of a momentary listless glance in a 
 polished mirror o ; and that genuine devotion is to be really 
 tested by such practical results as works of mercy done to the 
 afflicted and the poor, and by conscientious efforts to secure the 
 inward purity of an unworldly life P. 
 
 Jacques n'^tait qu'k demi ^mancip^ des entraves de la loi ; c'^tait un degr^ 
 infdrieur du Christianisme, et qui ne contenait pas en germe tous les ^ddve- 
 loppements futurs de la v^rite chr^tienne. II est douteux que cette Epitre 
 ait jamais converti personne.' Premieres Transformations du Christianisme, 
 par A. Coquerel fils. Paris, 1866. (p. 65.) 
 
 o St. James i. 23 : ^1 ns UKpoaTTjs Koyov itrri koX oh ttoitjttjs, ovtos €olk€v 
 avdpl Karapoovvri rh TTp6<T(aiTov rrjs yevccrecos avrov iv iaSTTTpcj)' KaT€v67}(r€ yhp 
 eavrhv, koI aireX-fiXvOe^ koi evOccas 67reAa0eTo diroios ?iv. 
 
 P Ibid. ver. 27 : dprjaKeia Kadapa koL afxiavros iraph tw ©eo? kolI TlarpX avrr} 
 ia-rlu, iiri(TKiTrT€(rdaL op<pavovs koX xhp^^ ^^ "^V ^^'W'^* avrwv, 6.fnri\ov cavrhv 
 r-qpuv airb rod KScrfxov. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christianity considered as the New Law, 287 
 
 2. In his earnest opposition to the Antinomian principle 
 St. James insists upon the continuity of the New dispensation 
 with the Old. Those indeed who do not believe the representa- 
 tions of the great Apostles given us in the Acts to have been a 
 romance of the second century, composed with a view to recon- 
 ciling the imagined dissensions of the sub-apostolical Church, 
 will not fail to note the significance of St. James' attitude at the 
 Council of Jerusalem. After referring to the prophecy of Amos 
 as confirmatory of St. Peter's teaching respecting the call of the 
 Gentiles, St. James advises that no attempt should be made to 
 impose the Jewish law generally upon the Gentile converts <1. 
 Four points of observance were to be insisted on, for reasons of 
 very various kinds r ; but the general tenor of the speech proves 
 how radically the Apostle had broken with Judaism as a living 
 system. Yet in his Epistle the real continuity of the Law and 
 the Gospel is undeniably prominent. Considering Christianity 
 as a rule of life based upon a revealed creed, St. James terms it 
 also a Law. But the Christian Law is no mere reproduction of 
 the Sinaitic. The New Law of Christendom is distinguished by 
 epithets which define its essential superiority to the law of the 
 synagogue, and which moreover indirectly suggest the true 
 dignity of its Founder. The Christian law is the law of liberty 
 — w'/xo? r^s iXevOfpias s. To be really obeyed it must be obeyed 
 in freedom. A slave cannot obey the Christian law, because it 
 demands not merely the production of certain outward acts, but 
 the living energy of inward motives, whose soul and essence is 
 love. Only a son whom Christ has freed from slavery, and 
 whose heart would rejoice, if so it might be, to anticipate or to 
 go beyond his Father's Will, can offer that free service which is 
 exacted by the law of liberty. That service secures to all his 
 faculties their highest play and exercise ; the Christian is most 
 conscious of the buoyant sense of freedom when he is most 
 eager to do the Will of his Heavenly Parent. The Christian law, 
 which is the law of love, is further described as the royal law — 
 
 1 Acts XV. 14-19. ' Ibid. ver. 20. 
 
 ■ St. James i. 25 : 6 54 irapaKvrpas els v6ixov reXeiou rhv rrjs eAeu^eptay, Ka\ 
 irapaiMiivas, ovros ovk aKpouTTjs iiriX-Tiaixovris yivofxevoSf aXXa TroiTjr^s fpyov, 
 ovTos fiuKapios iv r-p iroiTjaeL auTov earai. Ibid. ii. 1 2 : ovtu AaAetre Kal ovtco 
 ttoicIt^, us 5ia vofxov eKevd^pias fieWovres Kpiveadai. Messmer in loc. : 
 ' Gesetz der Freiheit, weil es iiicht mehr ein bloss aiisserliches knechtendes 
 Gebot ist, wie das alte Gesetz, sondern mit dem innerlich umgewandelten 
 Willen uebereinstimmt, wir also nicht mehr aus Zwang, sondern mit freier 
 liiebe dasselbe erfiillen.' 
 
 yi] 
 
288 Christianity both a Law and a Doctrine. 
 
 vofios ^acriKiKos K Not merely because the law of love is specifi- 
 cally the first of laws, higher than and inclusive of all other 
 laws ^ ; but because Christ, the King of Christians, prescribes 
 this law to Christian love. To obey is to own Christ's legislative 
 supremacy. Once more, the Christian law is the perfect law — 
 pofMos TeXdos ^. It is above human criticism. It will not, like 
 the Mosaic law, be completed by another revelation. It can 
 admit of no possible improvement. It exhibits the whole Will 
 of the unerring Legislator respecting man in his earthly state. 
 It guarantees to man absolute correspondence with the true idea 
 of his life, in other words, his perfection ; if only he will obey it. 
 In a like spirit St. James speaks of Christian doctrine as the 
 word of truth — \6yos aKrjOeias y. Christian doctrine is the abso- 
 lute truth ; and it has an effective regenerating force in the 
 spiritual world, which corresponds to that of- God's creative 
 word in the region of physical nature. But Christian doctrine is 
 also the engrafted word — \6yos efKpvros z. It is capable of being 
 taken up into, and livingly united with, the life of human souls. 
 It will thus bud forth into moral foliage and fruits which, 
 
 * St. James ii. 8 : €t fxeuroi v6yL0V TeAeTre ^acriXiKbv, Karb, r)]v ypa(p))v^ 
 ^Ayax-f^fffi? rhv irATjarlov aov cos (reaurhv, KaXcos iroielre. This compendium of 
 the Christian's whole duty towards his neighbour, as enjoined by our Blessed 
 Lord (St. Matt. xxii. 39; St. Mark xii. 31), is not a mere republication of 
 the Mosaic precept (Lev. xix. 18). In the latter the 'neighbour' is appa- 
 rently 'one of the children of thy people ;' in the former it includes any 
 member of the human family, since it embraced even those against whom the 
 Jew had the strongest religious prepossessions. (St. Luke x. 29, sqq.) This 
 injunction of a love of man as man, according to the measure of each man's 
 love of self, is the law of the true King of humanity, Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 ** Rom. xiii. 9. ^ St. James i. 25. 
 
 y St. James i. 18 : jSouArj^eis aTreKvrja-ev 7]ixa.s \6ycfi aXrjdeias, els rh ^hai 
 T}fms cLTrapxw fipa tcSu avrov KTio'indTcoi/. airoKveiv is elsewhere used of the 
 female parent. Hence it indicates the tenderness of the Divine love, as 
 shewn in the new birth of souls ; just as fiov\7}6ci5 points to the freedom of 
 the grace which regenerates them, and airapxw 'rtva tuu Knaixariav to the 
 end and purpose of their regeneration. Compare St. John i. 12, 13 : '6(tol 5e 
 €\afiou avrhv . . e/c &€ov iy€i/v7]6Tj(Tav. 
 
 2 St. James i. 2 1 : iv TrpavTTjTi Se^aade rhv ijxtpvrov XSyov^ rhv ^vvdix^vov 
 a-QffaL ras x^/vxas v/jlcvv. Messmer in loc. : * Die OfFenbarung heisst hier das 
 eingepflanzte, eingewachsene Wort ; namlich bei der Wiedergeburt durch die 
 christliche Lehre eingepflanzt. Wenn nun von einem Aufnehmen der ein- 
 gepflanzten Lehre die Rede ist, so ist das natiirlich nicht die erste Aufnahme, 
 sondem vielmehr das immer innigere Insichhineinnehmen und Aneignen der- 
 selben und das Sichhineinleben in dieselbe.' See too Dean Alford in loc. : 
 'The Word whose attribute and aperi] it is to be efxcpvTos, and which is 
 efKpvTos, awaiting your reception of it, to spring up and take up your being 
 into it and make you new plants.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
St, James direct references to our Blessed Lord, 289 
 
 without it, human souls are utterly incapable of yielding. This 
 \6yo^ is clearly not the mere texture of the language in which 
 the faith is taught. It is not the bare thought of the believer 
 moulded into conformity with the ideas suggested by the lan- 
 guage. It is the very substance and core of the doctrine ; it is 
 He in Whom the doctrine centres ; it is the Person of Jesus 
 Christ Himself, Whose Humanity is the Sprout, Shoot, or 
 Branch of Judah, engrafted by His Incarnation upon the old 
 stock of humanity, and sacramentally engrafted upon all living 
 Christian souls. Is not St. James here in fundamental agree- 
 ment not merely with St. Paul, but with St. John % St. James' 
 picture of the new law of Christendom harmonizes with St. Paul's 
 teaching, that the old law of Judaism without the grace of 
 Christ does but rouse a sense of sin which it cannot satisfy, and 
 that therefore the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has 
 made Christians free from the law of sin and death a. St. James' 
 doctrine of the Engrafted Word is a compendium of the first, 
 third, and sixth chapters of St. John's Gospel ; the word written 
 or preached does but unveil to the soul the Word Incarnate, the 
 Word Who can give a new life to human nature, because He is 
 Himself the Source of Life. 
 
 It is in correspondence with these currents of doctrine that 
 St. James, although our Lord's own first cousin^, opens his 
 Epistle by representing himself as standing in the same relation 
 to Jesus Christ as to God. He is the slave of God and of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ c. In like manner, throughout his Epistle, 
 he appears to apply the word Kvptos to the God of the Old 
 Testament and to Jesus Christ, quite indifferently. Especially 
 noteworthy is his assertion that the Lord Jesus Christ, the 
 Judge of men, is not the delegated representative of an absent 
 Majesty, but is Himself the Legislator enforcing His own laws. 
 The Lawgiver, he says, is One Being with the Judge Who can 
 
 * Baur admits that ' dem Verfasser des Briefs audi die paulinische Verin- 
 nerlichung des Gesetzes nicht fremd, indem er nicht bios das Gebot der Liebe 
 als konigliches Gesetz bezeichnet, sondern auch von einem Gesetze der Frei- 
 heit spricht, zu welchem ihm das Gesetz nur dadurch geworden sein kann, 
 dass er, der Aeusserlichkeit des Gesetzes gegeniiber sich innerlich ebenso frei 
 von ihm wusste, wie der Apostel Paulus von seinem Standpunkt aus.' 
 Christenthum, p. 122. 
 
 "^ Comp. St. Matt, xxvii. 56, St. Mark xv. 40, with St. John xix. 25. See 
 Pearson on Creed, Art. iii. ; Mill on Myth. Int. p. 226 ; Bp. Ellicott, Huls. 
 Lect. pp. 97, 354. ^ ^ ^ • 
 
 <^ St. James i. I : 'laKccjSos ©^ov koX Kvplov 'Irjcrov Xpicrov dov\os. 
 VI] U 
 
290 Reverential reserve of St y antes. 
 
 save and can destroy ^ • the Son of man, coming in the clouds of 
 heaven, has enacted the law which He thus administers. With 
 a reverence which is as practical as his teaching is suggestive, 
 St. James in this one short Epistle reproduces more of the 
 words spoken by Jesus Christ our Lord than are to be found in 
 all the other Epistles of the New Testament taken together f. 
 He hints that all social barriers between man and man are as 
 nothing when we place mere human eminence in the light of 
 Christ's majestic Person ; and when he names the faith of Jesus 
 Christ, he terms it with solemn emphasis the ' faith of the Lord 
 of Glory,' thus adopting one of the most magnificent of St. Paul's 
 expressions ?, and attributing to our Lord a Majesty altogether 
 above this human world ^. In short, St. James' recognition of 
 the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity is just what we might expect 
 it to be if we take into account the mainly practical scope of 
 his Epistle. Our Lord's Divinity is never once formally proposed 
 as a doctrine of the faith ; but it is largely, although indirectly, 
 implied. It is implied in language which would be exaggerated 
 and overstrained on any other supposition. It is implied in a 
 reserve which may be felt to mean at least as much as the most 
 demonstrative protestations. A few passing expressions of the 
 lowliest reverence disclose the great doctrine of the Church 
 respecting the Person of her Lord, throned in the background of 
 the Apostle's thought. And if the immediate interests of his 
 ministry oblige St. James to confine himself to considerations 
 which do not lead him more fully to exhibit the doctrine, we are 
 
 ® St. James iv. 12 : efs iariv 6 vofxoOerrjs Koi KpiT7]s 6 dvvd/xevos awcrai koi 
 aTro\4<rai. {koI KpiT-fjs is omitted by text recept., inserted by A. B.N.) So 
 De Wette : ' Einer ist der Gesetzgeber und Richter, der da vermag zu retten 
 und zu verderben.* Cf. Alford in loc, who quotes this. 
 
 ^ The following are his references to the Sermon on the Mount. St. James 
 i. 2; St. Matt. V. 10-12. St. James 1. 4; St. Matt. v. 48. St. James i. 5 ; 
 St. Matt. vii. 7. St. James i. 9 ; St. Matt. v. 3. St. James i. 20 ; St. Matt. 
 V. 22. St. James 11. 13 ; St. Matt. vi. 14, 15, v. 7. St. James ii. 14 sqq.; 
 St. Matt. vll. 21 sqq. St. James ill. 17, 18 ; St. Matt. v. 9. St. James iv. 4 ; 
 St. Matt. vi. 24. St. James Iv. 10 ; St. Matt. v. 3, 4. St. James Iv. 11; 
 St. Matt. vil. I sqq. St. James v. 2; St. Matt. vi. 19. St. James v. 10; 
 St. Matt. V. 12. St. James v. 12 ; St. Matt. v. 33 sqq. And for other dis- 
 courses of our Lord : St. James 1. 14; St. Matt. xv. 19. St. James iv. 12 ; 
 St. Matt. X. 28. Again, St. James v. 1-6 ; St. Luke vi. 24 sqq. See refF. ; 
 and Alford, vol. Iv. p. 107, note. s i Cor. 11. 8. 
 
 ^ St. James 11. I : adeXcpoi fxov, fx^ iv TrpoarooTroXTj^iais ^x^'re tV Tricrriv tov 
 Kvpiov y}ix(ap 'iTjcroG XpiffTov r^s 5(^|r/s. Here ttjs 5(^|7;s must be regarded as 
 a second genitive governed by Kvpiov. Or, as Dean Alford suggests, it may 
 be an epithetal genitive, such as constantly follows the mention of the Divine 
 Name. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Missionary Sermons of St, Peter. 2gi 
 
 not allowed, as we read him, to forget the love and awe which 
 veil and treasure it, so tenderly and so reverently, in the inmost 
 sanctuary of his illuminated soul. 
 
 11. Of St. Peter's recorded teaching there are two distinct 
 stages in the New Testament. The first is represented by his 
 missionary sermons in the Acts of the Apostles j the second by 
 his general Epistles. 
 
 I. Although Jesus Christ is always the central Subject in the 
 sermons of this Apostle, yet the distinctness with which he 
 exhibits our Lord in the glory of His Divine Nature seems to 
 vary with the varying capacity for receiving truth on the part 
 of his audience. Like Jesus Christ Himself, St. Peter teaches as 
 men are able to bear his doctrine; he does not cast pearls before 
 swine. In his missionary sermons he is addressing persons who 
 were believers in the Jewish dispensation, and who were also 
 our Lord's contemporaries. Accordingly, his sermons contain a 
 double appeal ; first, to the known facts of our Lord's Life and 
 Death, and above all, of His Kesurrection from the dead ; and 
 secondly, to the correspondence of these facts with the predictions 
 of the Hebrew Scriptures. Like St. James, St. Peter lays 
 especial stress on the continuity subsisting between Judaism and 
 the Gospel. But while St. James insists upon the moral element 
 of that connexion, St. Peter addresses himself rather to the pro- 
 phetical. Even before the Day of Pentecost, St. Peter points 
 to the Psalter as foreshadowing the fall of Judas ^ When 
 preaching to the multitude which had jiist witnessed the Pente- 
 costal gifts, St. Peter observes that these wonders are merely a 
 realization of the prediction of Joel respecting the last days ^ ; 
 and he argues elaborately that the language of David in the 
 sixteenth Psalm could not have been fulfilled in the case of the 
 prophet-king himself, still lying among his people in his 
 honoured sepulchre, while it had been literally fulfilled by 
 Jesus Christ 1, Who had notoriously risen from the grave. In 
 his sermon to the multitude after the healing of the lame man 
 in the Porch of Solomon, St. Peter contends that the suffierings 
 of Christ had been * shewed before' on the part of the God of 
 Israel by the mouth of all His prophets ^, and that in Jesus 
 Christ the prediction of Moses respecting a coming Prophet, to 
 Whom the true Israel would yield an implicit obedience, had 
 received its explanation ^i. When arraigned before the Council o, 
 
 i Acts i. 1 6, 20. Cf. Ps. xli. 9, Ixix. 25. ^ Acts ii. i4-'2i; Joel ii, 
 
 ^ Acts ii. 24-36. =a Ibid. iii. 18. // '</ '<x 
 
 " Ibid. iii. 22-24; Deut. xviii. 15, 18, 19. o Acts vfnAj^^ ^(L^'" 
 
 CAtM 
 
292 Christ the chief theme of Hebrew prophecy. 
 
 the Apostle insists that Jesus is that true ^ Corner-stone' of the 
 temple of souls, which had been foretold both by Isaiah p, and by 
 a later Psalmist q; and that although He had been set at nought 
 by the builders of Israel, He was certainly exalted and honoured 
 by God. In the instruction delivered to Cornelius before his 
 baptism, St. Peter states that * all the prophets give witness ' to 
 Jesus, Hhat through His Name, whosoever believeth on Him 
 shall receive remission of sins^.' And we seem to trace the 
 influence of St. Peter, as the first great Christian expositor of 
 prophecy, in the teaching of the deacons St. Stephen and 
 St. Philip. St. Philip's exposition of Christian doctrine to the 
 Ethiopian eunuch was based upon Isaiah's prediction of the 
 Passions. St. Stephen's argument before his judges was cut 
 short by a violent interruption, while it was yet incomplete. 
 But St. Stephen, like St. Peter, appeals to the prediction in 
 Deuteronomy of the Prophet to Whom Israel would hearken *. 
 And the drift of the protomartyr's address goes to shew, that 
 the whole course of the history of Israel pointed to the advent 
 of One Who should be greater than either the law or the temple^, 
 — of One in Whom Israel's wonderful history would reach its 
 natural climax, — of that ^ Just One ' Who in truth had already 
 come, but Who, like prophets before Him, had been betrayed 
 and murdered by a people, still as of old, ^ stifFnecked and un- 
 circumcised in heart and ears x.* 
 
 It is not too much to say that in the teaching of the earliest 
 Church, as represented by the missionary discourses of St. Peter 
 and the deacons, Jesus Christ is the very soul and end of Jewish 
 prophecy. This of itself suggests an idea of His Person which 
 rises high above any merely Humanitarian standard. St. Peter 
 indeed places himself habitually at the point of view which 
 would enable him to appeal to the actual experience of the 
 generation he was addressing. He begins with our Lord's 
 Humiliation, which men had witnessed, and then he proceeds to 
 describe His Exaltation as the honour put by God upon His 
 Human Nature. He speaks of our Lord's Humanity with fearless 
 plainness y. The Man Christ Jesus is exhibited to the world as 
 
 P Isa. xxviii. 16. 
 
 ^ Ps. cxviii. 22. Our Lord Himself claimed the prophecy, St. Matt. 
 xxi. 42. *■ Acts X. 43. * Ibid. viii. 32-35. 
 
 t Ibid. vii. 37. •« Ibid. vi. 13. '^ Ibid. vii. 51 -53. 
 
 y Acts ii. 22: ''\t](Tovv rhv NaCa}pa7ov, dvdpa [not here the generic &v9pcoirov] 
 oiri> Tov &€ov aivohiheiyfjiiifov els v/xas dvvd/j.€(ri /cat repaai /cat arifxeiois, ois 
 iiroirjae St' avrov 6 ©ihs iv /ueVy vixwv* 
 
 [ LECU 
 
Christ's HtcmanL if esuggestsHisHigher Nature, 293 
 
 a miracle-worker ; as Man, He is anointed with the Holy Ghost 
 and with power z; as the true Servant of God, He is glorified by 
 the God of the patriarchs ^ ; He is raised from the dead by 
 Divine Power b ^ He is made by God both Lord and Christ c j 
 and He will be sent by the Lord at *the times of refreshing ^ ' as 
 the ordained Judge of quick and dead ®. But this general repre- 
 sentation of the Human Nature by Which Christ had entered 
 into Jewish history, is interspersed with glimpses of His Divine 
 Personality Itself, Which is veiled by His Manhood. Thus we 
 find St. Peter in the porch of Solomon applying to our Lord a 
 magnificent title, which at once carries our thoughts into the very 
 heart of the distinctive Christology of St. John. Christ, although 
 crucified and slain, is yet the Leader or Prince of life — 'Apxrjyos 
 TTji fcD^jf. That He should be held in bondage by the might of 
 death was not possible S. The heavens must receive Him \ and 
 He is now the Lord of all things i. It is He Who from His 
 heavenly throne has poured out upon the earth the gifts of 
 Pentecost K His Name spoken on earth has a wonder-working 
 power 1; as unveiling His Nature and office, it is a symbol which 
 faith reverently treasures, and by the might of which the ser- 
 vants of God can relieve even physical suflfering ^. As a refuge 
 for sinners the Name of Jesus stands alone; no other Name has 
 been given under heaven whereby the one true salvation can be 
 guaranteed to the sons of men ". Here St. Peter clearly implies 
 that the religion of Jesus is the true, the universal, the absolute 
 
 * Acts X. 38. * Ibid. iii. 13. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 24, iii. 15, iv. 10, v. 31, x. 40. c ibid. ii. ^6. 
 
 d Ibid. iii. 19, 20. e ibid. x. 42. f Ibid. iii. 15. 
 
 8 Ibid. ii. 24 : ^j/ 6 &ehs avearrja-e, Xvaas ras 0}^7vas rov Bavdrov, KaOSri 
 ovK ?iv bvvarhv KparclaOat. avrhu vir' avrov. This * impossibility ' depended 
 not merely on the fact that prophecy had predicted Christ's resurrection, but 
 on the dignity of Christ's Person, implied in the existence of any such pro- 
 phecy respecting Him. 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. 21: hi^ 5e7 ohpavhv fxev de^aadai ^XP* XP^^"^ aTCOKaraffTaa^ws 
 irdvroov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. X. 36 : ovtSs icTi irdvroov Kvpios. 
 
 k Ibid. ii. 33 : e'lexee rovro h vvv vfxe^s j8A.€7r€T€ Kol aKovcre. 
 
 1 Ibid. iii. 6 : iv r(f ovofiari. 'Itjotov Xpiarov rod "Na^copaiov, eyeipai kuI irepi- 
 vdrei. 
 
 ™ Ibid. ver. 16: koI 4rr\ rf} Tricrrci rod ovS/j-aros avrov, rovrov hv Qeupetre 
 Kol oXhar€j €(rr€p€Q3cre rh ovo/na avrov. Ibid. iv. 10 : yvc»}(Trhv icrrco iraaiv 
 vfuv Ka\ Travrl rw Xaia 'lapa^\, '6ri 4v rca ovSjULari 'Irjaov Xpiarov rov Na^cypa/ou, 
 hv u/xeTs karavpdoo-ariy %v 6 Oehs ijyeipev €k veKpcav, iv ro-vrcp ovros TrapearrjKev 
 ivdoTTiov v/uLcov vyi-qs. 
 
 ^ Ibid. iv. 12: OVK ear IV iv &\\(p ov^cvl 7] a-wrrjpla* oUre yap ovofxd iariv 
 erepov virh rhv ovpavov rh 5e5o/xeVoi' iv avOpuirois, iv ^ Se? aooQrivai Tjixas, 
 TI] 
 
294 Chris to logy of St. Peter's general Epistles, 
 
 religion. This implication of itself suggests niucli beyond as to 
 the true dignity of Christ's Person. Is it conceivable that He 
 Who is Himself the sum and substance of His religion, Whose 
 Name has such power on earth, and Who wields the resources 
 and is invested with the glories of heaven, is notwithstanding in 
 the thought of His first apostles only a gloi'ified man, or only a 
 super-angelic intelligence ? Do we not interpret these early dis- 
 courses most naturally, when we bear in mind the measure of 
 reticence which active missionary work always renders necessary, 
 if truth is to win its way amidst prejudice and opposition % And 
 wdll not this consideration alone enable us to do justice to those 
 vivid glimpses of Christ's Higher Nature, the fuller exhibition of 
 Which is before us in the Apostle's general Epistles % 
 
 2. In St. Peter's general Epistles it is easy to trace the same 
 mind as that which speaks to us in the earliest missionary ser- 
 mons of the Acts. As addressed to Christian believers o, these 
 Epistles exhibit Christian doctrine in its fulness, but incidentally 
 to spiritual objects, and without the methodical completeness 
 of an oral instruction. Christian doctrine is not propounded as 
 a new announcement : the writer takes it for granted as furnish- 
 ing a series of motives, the force of which would be admitted by 
 those who had already recognized the true majesty and propor- 
 tions of the faith. St. Peter announces himself as the Apostle 
 of Jesus Christ ; he is Christ's slave as well as His Apostle p. In 
 his Epistles, St. Peter lays the great stress on prophecy which is 
 so observable in his missionary sermons. Thus, as in his speech 
 before the Council, so in his first Epistle, he specially refers ^ to 
 the prophecy of the Rejected Corner-stone, which our Lord had 
 applied to Himself. But St. Peter's general doctrine of our 
 Lord's relation to Hebrew prophecy should be more particularly 
 noticed. In our day theories have been put forward on this 
 subject which appear to represent the Hebrew prophetical Scrip- 
 tures as little better than a large dictionary of quotations, to 
 which the writers and preachers of the New Testament are said 
 to have had recourse when they wished to illustrate their subject 
 by some shadowy analogy, or by some vague semblance of a 
 happy anticipation. St. Peter is as widely removed from this 
 
 ° I St. Pet. i. I, 2 : €k\€Kto7s Trapcrrid-fjiLLOis SiaaTropas, Kara 
 
 irpSyvcoaiu &€ov Tlarphs, iv ayiacr/jiei} TlvevfxaTOS, e/y viruKorju koI pavricfxbv 
 aifxaros ^Irjaov Xpig-Tov. 2 St. Pet. i. i : to7s IcrdTifiov v/mv Xaxovcri iriariv. 
 
 P I St. Pet. i. I : airSaroXos 'Itjctov Xpiarov. 2 St. Pet. i. I : 5ov\os 
 Kcu airScrToKos 'l7)(rov Xpia-rov. 
 
 1 I St. Pet. ii. 6. Cf. Acts iv. ii ; Isa. xxviii. i6 j Ps. cxviii. 22. 
 
 [lect. 
 
A Divine Christ implied in the Christian life, 295 
 
 position, as it is possible to conceive. According to St. Peter, 
 the prophets of the Old Testament did not only utter literal pre- 
 dictions of the expected Christ, but in doing this they were 
 Christ's own servants, His heralds, His organs. He Who is the 
 subject of the Gospel story, and the living Ruler of the Church, 
 had also, by His Spirit, been Master and Teacher of the pro- 
 phets. Under His guidance it was that they had foretold His 
 sufferings. It was the Spirit of Christ Who was in the pro- 
 phets, testifying beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the 
 glories that would follow r. The prophets did not at first 
 learn the full scope and meaning of the words they uttered s, 
 but they spoke glorious truths which the Church of Jesus 
 understands and enjoys *. Thus the proclamation of Christian 
 doctrine is older than the Incarnation : Christianity strikes its 
 roots far back into the past of ancient Israel. The pre-existent 
 Christ, moulding the utterances of Israel's prophets to proclaim 
 their anticipations of His advent, had indeed reigned in the old 
 theocracy ; and yet the privileged terms in which the members 
 of God's elder kingdom upon earth described their prerogatives 
 were really applicable, in a deeper sense, to those who lived 
 within the kingdom of the Divine Incarnation^. Indeed, 
 St. Peter's language on the nature and privileges of the Chris- 
 tian life is suggestive of the highest conception of Him Who is 
 its Author and its Object. St, Peter speaks of conversion from 
 Judaism or heathendom as the ^ being called out of darkness into 
 God's marvellous light ^.' It is the happiness of Christians to 
 suffer and to be reviled for the Name of Christ y. The Spirit of 
 
 '^ I St, Pet. 1. 11: T^ eV avTOLS Yiv^vyia XpicTTOVy irpo/uaprvpSjULevov rh 
 els XpKTThv iraQiiixara, koX ras ficra ravra dS^as. Here Xpicnov is clearly 
 a genitive of the subject. 
 
 s Ibid. vers. lo, ii : Trepl ^s cwrrjplas i^e^-fjTTjo'av Kal i^T]p€vvr](rav 
 irpocprJTai ol Trepl rrjs els vfias x^P*"*""^ Trpo(pr]rev<Tavres, ipevj/covres els riva 
 ^ TTolov Kaiphv id7}\ov rh ev avrois Uvevfia XpicrroVc Ibid. ver. 12: oTs 
 aireKaAvcpdr} '6ri ovx eavrocs, rjixiv 5e dirjKovovu aura, & uvp ai/7}yye\r] vfxlv, 
 
 * 2 St. Pet. i. 20 : traaa irpocprjreia ypacprjs Idias eiriXvcrecos oh ytuerai. 
 The Spirit in the Church understands the Spirit speaking by the prophets. 
 
 " I St. Pet. ii. 9, 10 : vfieis Se yevos eKKeKrhv^ fiacTiKeiov leparevfjia, eOj/os 
 ayioj/y \ahs els TrepLTroirjo'LV, 'dircas t^s aperas e^ayyeiKrjre rod €K (TKotovs v/xas 
 KoKeaavTos els rh davfiao-rhv avrov (poos' ot nore ov \ahst vvv 5e Kabs Qeov' 
 ol ovK TjKeTifievoi, vvv Se eXe'qQevres. Ibid. ver. 5 : ws KiSoL ^cavres olKodo- 
 fie7<fde, oIkos irvevfiuTLKhs, lepoLTevjua ayioVf aveveyKai TrveufxariKas Ovcrias 
 evirpocrheKTovs rtp ©eaj Sta 'Irjcrov Xpicnov. ^ Ubi supra. 
 
 y 1 St. Pet. iv. 13 ; KaBh KoivcoveiTe to7s tov Xpi<rrov TraO-fjfxao-i, x^-'^P^re, 
 Xva Koi ev rfj airoKaKv^ei tvs b6^7}s avrov x<^P^Te ayaW lufievoi. El oveidi^eade 
 ev ovd/xari XpicTTOv, fiaKoipiou 
 VI] 
 
2g6 Dignity of Chris fs Person suggested by 
 
 glory and of God rests upon them. The Spirit is blasphemed 
 by the unbelieving world, but He is visibly honoured by the 
 family of God's children z It is the Person of Jesus in Whom 
 the spiritual life of His Church centres a. The Christians whom 
 St. Peter is addressing never saw Him in the days of His flesh ; 
 they do not see Him now with the eye of sense. But they love 
 Him, invisible as He is, because they believe in Him. The eye 
 of their faith does see Him. The Lord Christ is present in 
 their hearts; they are to ^sanctify' Him there, as God was 
 'sanctified' by the worship of Israel^. They rejoice in this 
 clear constant inward vision with a joy which language cannot 
 describe, and which is radiant with the glory of the highest 
 spiritual beauty. They are in possession of a spiritual sense c 
 whereby the goodness of Jesus may be even tasted ; and yet the 
 truths on which their souls are fed are mysteries so profound as 
 to rouse the keen but baffled wonder of the intelligences of hea- 
 ven d. Such language appears to point irresistibly to the exist- 
 ence of a supernatural religion with a superhuman Founder; 
 unless we are to denude it of all spiritual meaning whatever, by 
 saying that it only reflects the habitual exaggeration of Eastern 
 fervour. Wliy is the intellectual atmosphere of the Church 
 described as ' marvellous light % ' Why is suffering for Jesus so 
 much a matter for sincere self- congratulation % Why does the 
 Divine Spirit rest so surely upon Christian confessors 1 Why is 
 the Invisible Jesus the Object of such love, the Source of such 
 inexpressible and glorious joy; if, after all, the religion of Jesus 
 is merely a higher phase of human opinion and feeling, and His 
 Church a human organization, and His Person only human, or 
 at least not literally Divine 1 The language of St. Peter respect- 
 ing the Christian life manifestly points to a Divine Christ. If 
 the Christ of St. Peter had been the Christ, we will not say of 
 a Strauss or of a Renan, but the Christ of a Socinus, nay, the 
 Christ of an Arius, it is not easy to understand what should 
 
 « I St. Pet. iv. 14 : Sti t^ t^s h6l-ns Koi tJ> toC ©eoG Tlv^vfjLa €({> vfias ava- 
 iravcrar Karh fiev aurovs ^Ka(T(pr]ixi7Tai, Karb. Se v/ulus 5o|a^€rat. 
 
 » Ibid. i. 7, 8 : 'Ir/o-oG Xpicrrov' tu ovk elSSres kyairarCy els hp &pri jx^ 
 6p(avTf:5, Tnarevovres Se, ayaXKiaaQe x^P^ cti/e/cAaA^Tcp kol SeSolatr/xcVr? . 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. 1 5 : Kvpiov 5e rhv Xpiarrhp ayidaare iu rats Kaphiais vfxoov. 
 That Xpicrrhv and not ©chv is the true reading here, see Scrivener, Introduc- 
 tion to Crit. N. T. p. 456. Compare Isaiah viii. 13. Isaiah is quoted again 
 in I St. Pet. ii. 8. 
 
 c Ibid. ii. 3 : direp iyevaraffOe on XRVf^^^^ ^ Kvpios. Cf. Ps. xxxiv. 8. 
 Cf. Heb. vi. 4 : yevtraixhovs re ttis Zcapeas rris eTrovpaviov. There is possibly 
 in both passages an indirect reference to sacramental communion. 
 
 d I St. Pet. i. 12 : els & kmSvfjLOuaiv &yy€\oi irapaKvif/ai, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
SL Peters references to the Passion. 297 
 
 have moved the angels with that strong desire to bend from 
 their thrones above, that they might gaze with unsuccessful 
 intentness at the humiliations of a created being, their peer or 
 their inferior in the scale of creation. Surely the Angels must 
 be longing to unveil a transcendent mystery, or a series of mys- 
 teries, such as are in fact the mystery of the Divine Incarnation 
 and the consequences which depend on it in the kingdom of 
 grace. St. Peter's words are sober and truthful if read by the 
 light of faith in an Incarnate God ; divorced from such a faith, 
 they are fanciful, inflated, exaggerated. 
 
 St. Peter lays especial stress both on the moral significance 
 and on the atoning power of the Death of Jesus Christ. Here 
 he enters within that circle of truths which are taught most 
 fully in the Epistle to the Hebrews ; and his exhibition of the 
 Passion might almost appear to presuppose the particular Christ- 
 ological teaching of that Epistle. St. Peter says that ' Christ 
 has once suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, that He might 
 bring us to God «.' This vicarious suffering depended upon the 
 fact that Jesus, when dying, impersonated sinful humanity. ' He 
 bare our sins in His own Body on the tree f. Stricken by the 
 anguish of His Passion, the dying Christ is the consummate 
 Model & for all Christian sufferers, in His innocence ^^ in His 
 silence i, in His perfect resignation K But also the souls of men, 
 wounded by the shafts of sin, may be healed by the virtue of that 
 sacred Pain^; and a special power to wash out the stains of moral 
 guilt is expressly ascribed to the Eedeemer's Blood. The Chris- 
 tian as such is predestined in the Eternal Counsels, not merely 
 to submission to the Christian faith, but also to ' a sprinkling of 
 the Blood of Jesus Christ ^.' The Apostle earnestly insists that 
 it was no mere perishable earthly treasure, no silver or golden 
 wares, whereby Christians had been bought out of their old 
 bondage to the traditional errors and accustomed sins of Judaism 
 
 ® I St. Pet. iii. 18 ; X-piffrbs aira^ irepl afiapriuv eirade, AIkuios virep adifcojv, 
 %va rifxas rrpoaaydyr) Tcp ©t^j. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 24 ; hs ras ajxaprias 7}^wv avrhs a.v{]v^yKiv iv T(p adofiari avroO 
 iirl rh ^vKov. 
 
 8 Ibid. ver. 21 : Xpicrbs eTraOev vwlp TjfiwVf 7ifi7v xmoXuntdvoov vTroypajxfjihy, 
 'iva iTraKo\ov6^(r7iT€ to7s 'ixv€<nv aitTov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 22: hs afiapriav ovk iirol7](r€i/f ovdh cvpiBrj Z6Xos €V t^ (rrSfiaTi 
 avrov. Isa. Hii. 9; 2 Cor. v. 21 ; i St. John iii. 5. 
 
 ^ I St. Pet. ii. 23 : ts \oiSopovfX€vos ovk avreXoiSSpeif Ti&.ffX'^v ovk i]W€l\€i» 
 In the TjrrdXeL there lies the consciousness of power. 
 
 ^ Ibid. : Trapedibov 5e rep Kpivovri BiKaicas. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 24 : ov rep fxdoXairi avrov iddrjre, 
 
 ™ Ibid. i. 2 : its viraKorjP Ka\ pavrtapibv alfiaros ^Irjaov Xpurrod, 
 VI] 
 
298 S^. Peter on the ever-living Word of God, 
 
 or of heathendom. The mighty spell of moral and intellectual 
 darkness had indeed been broken, but by no less a ransom than 
 the Precious Blood of Christ, the Lamb without blemish and 
 Immaculate '^. Are we to suppose that while using this burning 
 language to extol the Precious Blood of redemption, St. Peter is 
 recklessly following a rhetorical impulse, or that he is obscuring 
 the moral meaning of the Passion, by dwelling upon its details 
 in misleading language which savours too strongly of the sacri- 
 ficial ritual of the temple % Is he not even echoing the Baptist ^1 
 Is he not in correspondence with his brother apostles'? Is he not 
 summarizing St. Paul P *? Is he not anticipating St. John <i % 
 Certainly this earnest recognition of Christ's true Humanity as 
 the seat of His sufferings is a most essential feature of the Apo- 
 stle's doctrine^; but what is it that gives to Christ's Human acts 
 and sufferings such preterhuman value 1 Is it not that the truth 
 of Christ's Divine Personality underlies this entire description of 
 His redemptive work, rescuing it from the exaggeration and 
 turgidity with which it would be fairly chargeable, if Christ 
 were merely human or less than God ? That this is in fact the 
 case is abundantly manifest ; and indeed the Person of Christ 
 appears to be hinted at in St. Peter's Epistle, by the same august 
 expression which has been noticed as common to St. James and 
 to St. John. The Logos or Word of God, living and abid- 
 ing for ever ^, is the Author of the soul's new birth ; and Christ 
 
 " I St. Pet. i. 18, 19: €i5JT6s '6ri oh (pQaprots, apyvpica ^ XP^^'^-V^ ^^^' 
 rpa>dr}r€ e/c ttjs fiaraias vjxZv avacrrpoipTJs TrarpoTrapaBSTOVf dWa rifiicf} alixari 
 us afipov aimdofjLOV Koi aairiKov Xpiarov. 
 
 St. John i. 29 : tSe 6 a/xuhs rod 06oC, 6 atpwv tV CkfjLapriav rod kSct/jlov. 
 It is impossible to doubt that the sacrificial rather than the moral ideas 
 associated with the ' Lamb * are here in question. See Alford in loc. 
 
 P Acts XX. 28 : Troifiaii/€iv r^v iKK\7]<rlap rod 0€oD, ^v irepLfiroi-fjo-aTO 5t^ 
 rov idlov atjuttTos. I Cor. v. 7 : rh irdax^ r)ixwv irvdrj XpicrrSs. Heb. ix. 12 : 
 dia Tov Idiov aifiaros €l(rr}\d€P icpdira^ els rtt. ayia, alojuiau XvTpcaaiv evpa/nevos. 
 
 1 I St. John i. 7 : rh affxa 'l7j(rov Xpiffrov rov Tlov avrov KaOapi^ei 7]inas 
 airb Trd(T7]s afiaprias. Rev. i. 5 : tgj ayair'fiaayri ri/xas koI Xoixravri 7]^as a-rrh 
 rwv afxapriHv TjfxSjv iv rep aifjiari avrov .... avrcf 7] 5o|a koI rh Kpdros 
 its robs alupas rcop al<aPQ}p. afx-fjp. Ibid. v. 9 : H^ios f! Xa^dp rh ^i^Xiop, 
 Kal OLPo'i^ai ras (T<ppay7das avrov' on ia-tpdyrjs Kal r)y6pa(ras r^ @ecp rj/xas 
 fv rep al/jLari aov. 
 
 ' St. Peter expressly alludes to our Lord's Human Body (i St. Pet. ii. 24, 
 iii. 18, iv. 1), and to His Human Soul, after Its separation from the Body 
 of Jesus on the cross, as descending to preach to the spirits in prison 
 (Ibid. iii. 18). 
 
 8 I St. Pet. i. 23 : avayeyepp-qfiGPOL ovk iK cnropas epOaprris, aW^ a(p9dproVj 
 dicL \6yov (wpros &eov Kal fiepopros els rhp alwpa. By understanding the 
 \6yos here to mean only the written word, Baur maintains his paradox, 
 
 [lect. 
 
The ' higher knowledge ^ of Jesus Christ. 299 
 
 Jesus our Lord does not only bring us this Logos from heaven ; 
 He is this Logos. And thus in His home of glory, angels and 
 authorities and powers are made subject unto Him*; and He is 
 not said to have been taken up into heaven, but to have gone 
 up thither, as though by His own deed and will ^ And when 
 St. Peter exhorts Christians to act in such a manner that God 
 in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, he pauses 
 reverently at this last most precious and sacred Name, to add, 
 *to Whom is the glory and the power unto ages beyond ages\' 
 
 St. Peter's second Epistle ^ like his first, begins and ends 
 with Jesus ^. Its main positive theme is the importance of 
 the higher practical knowledge Y of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ z. Jesus is not set before Christians as a revered and 
 departed Teacher whose words are to be gathered up and 
 studied ; He is set forth rather as an Invisible and Living Person 
 Who is to be spiritually known by souls. Along with this 
 practical knowledge of Jesus, as with knowledge of God, there 
 will be an increase of grace, and of its resultant inward evidence, 
 spiritual peace ^ For this practical knowledge of Jesus is the 
 crowning point of other Christian attainments^. It is the 
 consummate result both of faith and practice, both of the 
 intellectual and of the moral sides of the Christian life. In 
 the long line of graces which this special knowledge implies, are 
 faith and general religious knowledge on the one hand, and on 
 the other, moral strength, self-restraint, patience, piety, brotherly 
 love, and, in its broadest sense, charity ^, In this higher know- 
 ledge of Jesus, all these excellences find their end and their 
 completion. On any other path, the soul is abandoned to 
 
 that in St. Peter's Epistles the written word is substituted for, and does 
 the work of, the Person of Christ in St. Paul's writings. Vorlesungen, 
 p. 296. 
 
 * I St. Pet. iii. 22 : viroTayevrwv avr^ dyycXcov koI i^ova-icoj/ koI dwdficuv, 
 ^ Ibid. : Ss icrriv 4v 5€|(^ rov ©eoG iropcvQeis ils ovpavdv. 
 
 V Ibid. iv. 1 1 : 'Iva kv iraai do^d^r]Tat 6 ©ehs 5ia 'Irjcrov Xpiarov, ^ 
 iffTiv f] 8d£a Ka\ rb Kpdros els rovs alwvas tSov alwv(av, afir^p. 
 
 ^ For an examination of the arguments which have been urged against 
 the genuineness and authenticity of this Epistle, see Olshausen, Opuscula 
 Theologica, pp. 1-88, and Canon Cook's art. * Peter/ in Smith's Diet. Bibl. 
 
 » 2 St. Pet. i. I, iii. 18. y iTriyvua-ts. 
 
 * Ibid. i. 2, 3, 8, ii. 20, iii. 18. 
 
 * Ibid. i. 2 : x^P*^ ^H-^^ '^"^ clpiivr] irXTjdvvdelT] iv iTriyvcc(r€i rod 0€oO, koI 
 *lr)(rov rov Kvpiov rjfxcot/. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 8 : ravra yap (that is, the eight graces previously enumerated) 
 viMV virdpxovra Koi ivXiovd^ovra^ ovk apyovs ovde aKdpTrovs Kadi(rT7)(Tiy els r^v 
 rov Kvpiov 7}fxS)v 'Irjaov Xpicrrov iiriyvacnv, 
 
 « Ibid. i. 5, 6, 7. 
 
 yi] 
 
300 Characteristics of St. Peters later Christology, 
 
 spiritual blindness, tending more and more to utter forgetfulness 
 of all past purifications from sin^ For this higher practical 
 knowledge of Jesus Christ is the means whereby Christians 
 escape from the polluting impurities of the life of the heathen 
 world e. It raises Christian souls towards the Unseen King in 
 His glory ; it secures their admission to His everlasting realm^. 
 If Christians would not be carried away from their stedfast 
 adherence to the truth and life of Christianity by the errors of 
 those who hate all law, let them endeavour to grow in this 
 blessed knowledge of Jesus?. The prominence given to the 
 Person of Christ, in this doctrine of an iirlyvoiaLs of which His 
 Person is the Object, leads us up to the truth of His real Di- 
 vinity. If Jesus, thus known and loved, were not accounted 
 God, then we must say that God is in this Epistle thrown 
 utterly into the background, and that His human messenger 
 has taken His place. 
 
 Nor is the negative and polemical side of the Epistle much 
 less significant than its constructive and hortatory side. The 
 special misery of the false teachers of whom the Apostle speaks 
 as likely to afflict the Church, will consist in their ' denying the 
 Sovereign that bought them,' and so bringing on themselves 
 swift destruction li. Unbelievers might contend that the apo- 
 stolical teachings respecting the present power and future coming 
 of Jesus were cleverly-invented myths ' ; but St. Peter had 
 himself witnessed the majesty of Jesus in His Transfiguration J. 
 The Apostle knows that he himself will quickly die ; he has 
 had a special revelation from the Lord Jesus to this effect k, 
 
 d 2 St. Pet. i. 9. 
 
 * Ibid. ii. 20 : airo<pvy6vr€S n-h fiidfffiara tov kSctiiov iv lirtyvtaffei rod 
 Kvpiou Kot aariipos 'lr](rov XpKrrov. Cf. Ibid. i. 4 : airoipvySyTes r^s iv 
 K6(rix(p iv imdviiiia (pOopas. 
 
 f Ibid. Lit: ovtco yap nXovaricos iTrixopyjyriOrja-eTai vfx7v rj e^ao^os €ts t^p 
 alcoviov ^acrtXiiav tov Kvplov rificoj/ koI (rooTTJpos 'Irjaov Xpiarov. 
 
 S Ibid. iii. 17, 18 : <pv\d(r<T€(rd€, ha fi^ ry ruv adfcr/jMV ir\dvY) (Twa-rraxBtv- 
 T6S, iKir€a7iT€ rod iSlou (Tr7]piyixov' av^dvere Se iy x°'P^'^^ '^°^ yvcaaei tov 
 Kvplov riawv koX acaTrjpos 'Irjaov Xpiarov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. I : Trapciad^ova-iv alpeaeis awccXdas, Koi Thp ayopdcravTa avrovs 
 A€(nr6T7}v apvovfievoij iirdyovT€s iavTo7s raxt^'V a-ndoKeiav. 
 
 i Ibid. i. 16: ov yap <re(TO(pi(rix€uois fxvQois i^aKoXovOrjo-avTcs iypwpiaafiep 
 vfuv Tr}v TOV Kvpiov 7]fji.(cv ^lr}aov XpiaTov dvvafxiv Ka\ irapova-iav. 
 
 J Ibid. : ^Tr6iTTaL yevriQivT^s rrjs iKeipov fieyaKeidrrjTos. Ibid. ver. i8 : eV 
 T^ 6p€L Tcfi ayicp. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 14: etScbs Srt Taxtvf} io-Tip rj anSOecris rov (rKfivdifxaTSs ijlov, 
 KaOibs Kal 6 Kvpios rjfJMP 'Irjaovs XpiffThs eS^Aoxre fxoi. Here raxi-^h seems to 
 mean 'soon,' 'not distant,' rather than * rapid.' Cf. St. John xxi. 18; but 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christology of St, Jude, 30 1 
 
 Throughout this Epistle the Person of Jesus is constantly before 
 us. As He is the true Object of Christian knowledge, so He is 
 the Lord of the future kingdom of the saints. He is mocked at 
 and denied by the heretics ; His Coming it is which the scoffing 
 materialism of the age derides; His judgments are foreshadowed 
 by the great destructive woes of the Old Testament. Again 
 and again, as if with a reverent eagerness which takes pleasure 
 in the sacred words, the Apostle names his Master's Name and 
 titles. He is Jesus our Lord^; He is our Lord Jesus Christ"^; 
 He is the Lord and Saviour"; He is our Lord and Saviour 
 Jesus Christ « ; He is our God and Saviour Jesus Christ P. His 
 power is spoken of as Divine ci ; and through the precious things 
 promised by Him to His Church (must we not here specially 
 understand the sacraments ]) Christians are made partakers of 
 the Nature of God^. To Christ, in His exalted majesty, a 
 tribute of glory is due, both now and unto the day of eternity s. 
 Throughout this Epistle Jesus Christ is constantly named where 
 we should expect to find the Name of God. The Apostle does 
 not merely proclaim the Divinity of Jesus in formal terms ; he 
 everywhere feels and implies it. 
 
 IIL Akin to St. Peter's second Epistle in its language and 
 purpose is the short Epistle of St. Jude. Like his brother 
 St. James, St. Jude, although our Lord's first cousin, introduces 
 himself as the slave of Jesus Christ. St. Jude does not also 
 term himself the slave of God*. If believing Christians are 
 sanctified in God the Father, they are preserved in a life of 
 faith and holiness by union with Jesus Christ ". The religion 
 of Jesus, according to St. Jude, is the final revelation of God, 
 the absolute truth, the true faith. Men should spare no efforts 
 
 some independent revelation, made shortly before these words were written, 
 is probably alluded to. Hegesippus, de Excidio Hierosol. lib. iii. 2 ; St. Am- 
 bros. Serm. contra Auxentium, de Basilicis tradendis, n. 13 in Epist. 21, 
 
 1 2 St. Pet. i. 2. This occurs elsewhere only at Rom. iv. 24. 
 
 m 2 St. Pet. i. 14, 16. « Ibid. iii. 2. » Ibid. i. 11, ii. 20, iii. 18. 
 
 P Ibid. i. I. Cf. Bp. Middleton on Gr. Art. p. 433. 
 
 4 Ibid. i. 3 : TT\s deias dvvdixeoos avrov ra irphs C'^rjv Koi evcreficiau dedccpf]- 
 fxcv-qs. avrov apparently refers to 'Ir^coD (ver. 2), and is so distinguished from 
 the Eternal Father rov KaXecravTos T]jxas (ver. 3). 
 
 ' Ibid. ver. 4 : riyna eTrayyeKfiara deSuprjrai, 'iva 5ia tovtodv yevTjffde Betas 
 Koivciovol <p{)(Te(as. 
 
 8 Ibid. iii. 18 : avrc^ r} 5J|a kclI vvv koL eh rjfiepav aloovos. *Tota aeternitas 
 una dies est.' Estius. 
 
 t St. Jude ver. I : 'Ifjffov Xpiarov dovXos, aSeX^bs 5e 'luKdofiov, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ; To7s iv 0e^ irarpl TiyiaafAevois koX 'Itjo-ov Xpiarcp TerripTiyiivoiS 
 KKtirols, 
 
302 Christology of St. Paul, 
 
 on behalf of the true faith. It is the faith ODce for all delivered 
 to the saints ^. The Gnostics alluded to in this Epistle, like 
 those foretold by St. Peter, are said to * deny our only Sovereign 
 and Lord, Jesus Christ Y.' They are threatened with the punish- 
 ments awarded to unbelieving Israel in the wilderness, to the 
 rebel angels, to Sodom and Gomorrha^. The Book of Enoch 
 is cited to describe Jesus coming to the universal judgment, 
 surrounded by myriads of saints a. The authors of all unholy 
 deeds will then be convicted of their crimes ; the hard things 
 spoken against the Judge by impious sinners will be duly 
 punished. Christians, however, are to build themselves up upon 
 their most holy faith ^ : their life is fashioned in devotion to 
 the Blessed Trinity. It is a life of prayer : their souls live in 
 the Holy Spirit as in an atmosphere c. It is a life of persevering 
 love, whereof the Almighty Father is the Object d. It is a life 
 of expectation : they look forward to the indulgent mercy which 
 our Lord Jesus Christ will shew them at His coming e. Christ 
 is the Being to Whom they look for mercy \ and the issue of 
 His compassion is everlasting life. Could any merely human 
 Christ have had this place in the heart and faith of Christians, 
 or on the judgment-seat of God % 
 
 IV. But it is time that we should proceed to consider, how- 
 ever briefly, the witness of that great Apostle, whose Epistles 
 form so much larger a contribution to the sacred volume of the 
 New Testament than is supplied by any other among the inspired 
 servants of Christ. 
 
 I. In comparing St. Paul with St. John, a modern author has 
 remarked that at first sight two objects stand out prominently 
 in the theological teaching of the beloved disciple, while three 
 immediately challenge observation in the writings of the Apostle 
 of the Gentiles. At first sight, St. John's doctrine appears to 
 place us face to face only with God and the human world. Christ 
 
 ^ St. Jude ver. 3 : vapaKuKtcy iirayavt^eaOai tt? oiira^ Trapadodeio-p to7s 
 aylois TTiVret. , 
 
 y Ibid. ver. 4 : rov fiSvoy Aea-irSTrjv Koi Kvpiop fffiuv ^Irjcrovp Xpiarhu 
 apvovfi€voi. ^ Ibid. vers. 5-7. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 14: ^A8e Kvpios iu fivpidcriv aylais aurov, TroLrjaaL Kplcriv kut^ 
 vavTbov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 20 : ^/xets Se, o.yairr\To\j rfj ayiuTdrri vfiwy irtcmi iiroiKoBo' 
 fiovPTCs eavTOvs. 
 
 <5 Ibid. : €P TluevfAari *Ayiq) vpoffevx^P^^vot, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 2 1 : kavrovs iv aydirr) @€ov rripi^ffare. 
 
 ® Ibid.: TrpocSep^t^jUei'ot t6 eAeoy rod Kvpiov rjiJ-wy ^li^aov Xpicrrov, els ^aV 
 aXwpioy, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Its distinctive form, Christ's Manhood, 303 
 
 as the Eternal Logos is in St. John plainly identical with God ; 
 although when we contemplate the life of the Godhead He is dis- 
 cerned to be personally distinct from the Father. But we cannot 
 really understand St. John, and withal establish in our thought 
 an essential separation between God and the Word Incarnate. 
 Although Jesus is a manifestation of God's glory in the world 
 of sense, He is ever internal to that Divine Essence Whose glory 
 He manifests ; He is with God, and He is God. In St. Paul, 
 on the other hand, Ave are confronted more distinctly with three 
 objects. These are, God, the human world, and between the 
 two, Jesus Christ, Divine and Human, the One Mediator between 
 God and man. Of course \h^ 'prima facie impression produced 
 on the mind by the sacred writers is all that is here in question, 
 and this impression is not to be confounded with their real 
 relations to each other. The Christ of St. John is as truly 
 Human as the Christ of St. Paul is literally Divine ; St. John 
 exhibits the Mediator not less truly than St. Paul, St. Paul the 
 Divine Son of the Father not less truly than St. John. But the 
 observation referred to enables us to do justice to the form of 
 St. Paul's Christology ; and we may well observe in his writings 
 the prominence which is given to two truths which supply the 
 foil, on this side and on that, to the doctrine of our Lord's 
 essential Godhead. 
 
 (a) St. Paul insists with particular earnestness upon the truth 
 of our Lord's real Humanity. This truth is not impaired by 
 such expressions as the 'form of a servant V the * fashion of a 
 man &,' the ' likeness of sinful flesh 1^,' which are employed either 
 to describe Christ's Humanity as a mode of being, or to hint at 
 Its veiling a Higher Nature undiscerned by the senses of man, 
 or to mark the point at which, by Its glorious inaccessibility to 
 sin. It is in contrast with the nature of that frail and erring race 
 to which It truly belongs. Nor is our Lord's Humanity con- 
 ceived of as a phantom, when the Apostle has reached a point 
 of spiritual growth at which the outward circumstances of Christ's 
 Life are wellnigh forgotten in an overmastering perception of 
 His spiritual and Divine glory i. St. Paul speaks plainly of our 
 Lord as being manifest in the flesh k j as possessing a Body of 
 
 ^ Phil. ii. 7 : /zop<|) V 5oi5a.ou. 
 
 6 Ibid. ver. 8 : crx'^lf^o-Ti €vpe9els us &v6pa)Tros, 
 
 ^ Kom. viii. 3 : iv d^OKjofxan aapKos afiaprias. 
 
 ^ 2 Cor. V. 16 ; ei 5e Koi iyvuKafxev Kara. adpKa XpLarhi/y aWa vvv ovk en 
 yivcocTKOfjLev. 
 
 ^ I Tim. iii. 16 : icpai/epcadt) iy crapKl, 
 VI] 
 
304 vS/. Paul on our Lords Manhood. 
 
 material flesh l ; as being ' made of a woman ^ ;' as being ^ born 
 of the seed of David according to the flesh ^ ;' as having drawn 
 the substance of His Flesh from the race of Israel o. As a Jew, 
 Jesus Christ was born under the yoke of the Law p. His Hu- 
 man Life was not merely one of self-denial ^ and obedience ; it 
 was pre-eminently a life of sharp suffering '^. The Apostle uses 
 energetic expressions to describe our Lord's real share in our 
 physical human weakness s, as well as in those various forms 
 of pain, mental and bodily, which He willed to undergo, and 
 which reached their climax in the supreme agonies of the Pas- 
 sion t. If however Christ became obedient unto death, even the 
 death of the cross", this, as is implied, was of His own free 
 condescension ; and St. Paul dwells with rapture upon the glory 
 of Christ's risen Body, to which our bodies of humiliation will 
 hereafter in their degrees, by His Almighty Power, be assimi- 
 lated v. Upon two features of our Lord's Sacred Humanity 
 does St. Paul lay especial stress. First, Christ's Manhood was 
 clearly void of sin, both in Soul and Body ; and in this respect 
 It was unlike any one member of the race to which It belonged x. 
 This sinlessness, however, did but restore humanity 4n Christ' 
 to its original tjrpe of perfection. Thus, secondly, Christ's Man- 
 hood is representative of the human race ; it realizes the arche- 
 typal idea of humanity in the Divine Mind. Christ, the Second 
 Adam, according to St. Paul, stands in a relation to the regene- 
 rate family of men analogous to that ancestral relationship in 
 which the first Adam stands to all his natural descendants. But 
 this correspondence is balanced by a contrast. In two great 
 
 1 Col. i. 22. kv tQ (Tdofxari ttjs arapKhs avrov, 
 
 ™ Gal. iv. 4 : yevSfievov e/c yvvaiKds. 
 
 ^ Rom. i. 3 : toO yevofxevov ck (nrepixaros Aa)8t5 Karh. ffdpKOU 
 
 o Ibid. ix. 5 : 6| wv 6 XpiaTos rh Karh. ardpKa. 
 
 P Gal. iv. 4 : yevSfievov vnb v6/j.ov, 
 
 q Rom. XV. 3 : /cat yap 6 Xpia-rhs ovk eavr^ ^p€(T€v. 
 
 ' Heb. V. 8 : Ka'nrep iiv vlhs, cfiaBev a<p' &v iiraQe tV vTraKo-f}V, 
 
 8 2 Cor. xiii. 4 : ia-Tavpcadrj e'l acrdeveias. 
 
 t Ibid. i. 5 : Ttt iradrifxaTa rod XpLO-rov. Phil. iii. 10 : r^v KoiJHiopiav rwv 
 tradrjfidTcov aurov. Col. i. 24 : to v(TTepi]ixara riav dKi^pecop rov XpiffTov, 
 
 ^ Phil. ii. 8 : irair^ivooff^v iavrbv, y^vSyL^vos v7ri}Koos fJi^xpi davdrov, 
 Oavdrov Se ffravpov. 
 
 ^ Phil. iii. 21 : hs fx^rao'xv^o-'Tio'^L rh arufia rrjs raTrcii/doo'ecos ri^Zv, .... 
 (r{>fifjLop(pov rep (rw/xari rrjs So^tjs avrov, Kara rriv €V€py€Lav rod BvyaaOai avrhv 
 KoL vTTord^ai iavrcf ra irdvra. I Cor. xv. 44 : crooixa iTV€vixariK6v. 
 
 ^ 2 Cor. v. 2 1 : rhv yap ix^ yv6vra ajULapriav, virlp rnxooy afxapriav iiroirjcrev. 
 Gal. ii. 17: ^pa Xpiarhs afiaprias diaKouos; fx^ y^voiro. Rom. viii. 3 ; cf. 
 Art. XV. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
S^. Paid on ottr Lord's Maiihood, 305 
 
 passages St. Paul exhibits the contrast which exists between the 
 Second Adam and the first Y. This contrast is physical, psycho- 
 logical, moral, and historical. The body of the first Adam is 
 corruptible and earthly ; the Body of the Second Adam is 
 glorious and incorruptible 2^. The first Adam enjoys natural 
 life ; he is made a living soul. The Second Adam is a super- 
 natural Being, capable of communicating His Higher Life to 
 others ; He is a quickening Spirit ^. The first Adam is a sinner, 
 and his sin compromises the entire race which springs from 
 him. The Second Adam sins not ; His Life is one mighty act 
 of righteousness ^ \ and they who are in living communion with 
 Him share in this His righteousness <^. The historical conse- 
 quence of the action of the first Adam is death, the death of the 
 body and of the soul. This consequence is transmitted to his 
 descendants along with his other legacy of transmitted sin. 
 The historical consequence of the action and suffering of the 
 Second Adam is life; and communion with His living right- 
 eouness is the gauge and assurance to His faithful disciples 
 of a real exemption from the law of sin and death ^. Such a 
 contrast, you observe, might well suggest that the Second Adam, 
 Representative of man's race, its true Archetype, its Restorer 
 and its Saviour, is Himself more than man. Certainly ; but 
 nevertheless it is as Man that Christ is contrasted with our first 
 parent ; and it is in virtue of His Manhood that He is our 
 Mediator, our Redeemer e, our Saviour from Satan's power, our 
 Intercessor with the Father f. Great stress indeed does St. Paul 
 
 y Rom. V. 12-21 ; I Cor. xv. 45-49. 
 
 ^ I Cor. XV. 47 : ^ irpcoTos 6.v6p(t}7ros iK yrif, xol'xcJs' 6 Sevrepos ^vOpooiros 
 [0 Kvpios], 6| ovpauov. Olos 6 xo't'^^s^ roiovroi /cat oi xoi■/co^ /cat oios 6 iirov- 
 pdvios^ Toiovroi /cat ot iirovpduioi. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 45 : iyevero 6 irpuros &i^6puwos 'A5a/x its 4"^xV C^<Tav' 6 
 €(r;^aTos 'A5a^ eis irvevfia ^coottoiovv. 
 
 ^ St/catco/xa, Rom. v. 18. 
 
 c Rom. V. 18, 19 : dpa ovv ojs St' ivbs irapaiTTdoiJ.aTos, eis Ttavras avOpcv-rrov*:, 
 €ts KOLTCLKpiixa' ouTO) KOI 5i' evbs diKaico/xaTos, €(s irdvras avdpdiitovSy els 
 hiKaicoaiv ^wr)?. Socnrep yap Sta ttjs irapaKoris rod evhs avdpdoTrov OLixaprcaXoi 
 KaTearrdd-qaau ol TroWol^ ourco Kol Sta ttjs viraKo-qs rod kvhs biKaioi Karaara- 
 6r]0'ouraL ol ttoWol. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 12 : 5t' €uhs avOpocirov r) afiapria els rhv k6(T(xov clariXde, koI 
 dia rrjs OLixaprlas 6 Odvaros. Ibid. ver. 17 : et yap eV efl [tg; rov l^^s, text, 
 rec] TrapaTvrdojiiari 6 Bdvaros i^acriX^vae Zia rov kvos, iro\K(f^ /maWov oi r^u 
 TTcpKradav rrjs x^'-P^'^os Kot ttjs Sccpeas rrjs diKaioavvr]s Xajx^dvovris, iv (wfj 
 fiaaiXdvffovai Sta rov kvhs 'ItjctoD 'Kpi.arov. Cf. Ibid. ver. 21. 
 
 ^ I Tim. ii. 5, 6 : dvdpoiiros Xpiaros 'Irycous, 6 Sous eavrhv avriXvrpov virep 
 irdprcov. 
 
 ^ Heb. ii. 14 : iirel ovv ra iraibia K€Koivdov7]K€ aapKhs koI al/uLaros, koI avrhs 
 VI] X 
 
3o6 Christ is the Mediator as being truly Man. 
 
 lay upon the Manhood of Christ as the instrument of His media- 
 tion between earth and heaven, as the channel through which 
 intellectual truth and moral strength descend from God into 
 the souls of men, as the Exemplar wherein alone human nature 
 has recovered its ideal beauty, as entering a sphere wherein the 
 Sinless One could offer the perfect, world-representing sacrifice 
 of a truly obedient Will. So earnestly and constantly does 
 St. Paul's thought dwell on our Lord's mediating Humanity, 
 that to unreflecting persons his language might at times appear 
 to imply that Jesus Christ is personally an inferior being, ex- 
 ternal to the Unity of the Divine Essence. Thus he tells the 
 Corinthians that Christians have one Lord Jesus Christ as well 
 as One God ?. Thus he reminds St. Timothy that there is One 
 God and One Mediator between God and man, the Man 
 Christ Jesus, Who gave Himself a ransom for all^. Thus he 
 looks forward to a day when the Son Himself also, meaning 
 thereby Christ's sacred Manhood, shall be subject to Him That 
 put all things under Him, that God may be all in all i. It is at 
 
 irapaTrX77(ria>s /uereVxe Tm> ahruv, %va Sta rov Bavdrov Karapyna-g rhv rh Kpdros 
 ^xovra Tov Oaudrovy rovT^ariy rhv did^oXov. Ibid. v. I. 
 
 s I Cor. viii. 6: els Kvpios ^Irjauv^ XpiarSs. Here however (i) Kupios, as 
 contrasted with ©cos, implies no necessary inferiority ; else we must say that 
 the Father is not Kvpios ; cf. St. Chrys. de Incompr. Dei Nat. v. 2 ; while (2) 
 the clause St' ov ra irdvra^ /cat rifx^ls 5t' avrov, which cannot be restricted to 
 our Lord's redemptive work without extreme exegetical arbitrariness, and 
 which certainly refers to His creation of the universe, places Jesus Christ on 
 a level with the Father. Compare the position of Sza between e| and els, 
 Rom.xi. 36; cf. Col. i. 16. Our Lord is here distinguished from the ^ One 
 God,' as being Human as well as Divine ; cf. the relation of fiea-'nrjs to @€hs 
 in I Tim. ii. 5. Baur's remarks on i Cor. viii. 6 (Vorlesungen, p. 193), 
 which proceed upon the assumption that only four Epistles of St. Paul are 
 extant, and therefore that Col. i. 16, 17 is nothing to the purpose, and which 
 moreover endeavour to impose the plain redemptive reference of 2 Cor. v. 
 1 7, 1 8 upon this passage, are so capricious as to shew very remarkably the 
 strength and truth of the Catholic interpretation. 
 
 ^ I Tim. ii. 5,6: els yap ©ehs, efs koI fJLscriTTjs ©eov Kal avOpooiroov, it.vOp(iOTTOs 
 XpiffTos *lr}(rovs. 
 
 i I Cor. XV. 28 : 'Srau Se virorayfj avrcf ra irdura, rore Kal avros 6 Ttos 
 VTroTayf]<T€Tai rw viroTa^avTi avrS ra irdvra, 'Iva y 6 &ebs ra irdura iv iraoiv. 
 That our Lord's Humanity is the subject of virorayfjaeraL is the opinion of 
 St. Augustine (de Trin. i. c. 8), St. Jerome (adv. Pelag. i. 6), Theodoret (in 
 loc). If avrhs 6 flhs means the Divine :<on most naturally, the predicate 
 VTrorayha-erai is an instance of communicatio idiomatum (cf. Acts xx. 28 ; 
 I Cor. ii. 8; Rom. viii. 32; ix. 5 ; St. John iii. 13); since it can only apply 
 to a created nature. A writer wlio believed our Lord to he literally God 
 (Rom. ix. 5) could not have supposed that, at the end of His mediatorial 
 reign as 31 an, a new relation would be introduced between the Persons of 
 the Godhead. The subordination {Kara rd^iv) of the Son is an eternal fact 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
S^. Paul on the Divine Unity, 307 
 
 least certain that no modern Humanitarian could recognise the 
 literal reality of our Lord's Humanity with more explicitness 
 than did the Apostle who had never seen Him on earth, and to 
 whom He had been manifested in visions which a Docetic en- 
 thusiast might have taken as sufficient warrant for denying His 
 actual participation in our flesh and blood ^. 
 
 (13) On the other hand, St. Paul is as strict a monotheist as 
 any unconverted pupil of Gamaliel ; he does not merely retain 
 his hold upon the primal truth of God's inviolate Unity ; he is 
 especially devoted to it, 
 
 God is parted from the very highest forms of created life by 
 a measureless interval, and yet the universe is a real reflection 
 of His Nature!. The relation of the creatures to God is three- 
 fold. Nothing exists which has not proceeded originally from 
 God^s creative Hand. Nothing exists which is not upheld in 
 being and perfected by God's sustaining and working energy. 
 Nothing exists which shall not at the last, whether mechanically 
 or consciously, whether willingly or by a terrible constraint, sub- 
 serve God's high and resistless purpose. For as He is the 
 Creator and Sustainer, so He is the One last End of all created 
 existences. Of Him, and through Him, and unto Him, are all 
 things ^^. So absolute an idea of God excludes all that is local, 
 transient, particular, finite. God's supreme Unity is the truth 
 which determines the universality of the Gospel; since the Gospel 
 unveils and proclaims the One suj)reme, world-controlling God". 
 
 in the inner Being of God. But tlie visible subjection of His Humanity 
 (with Which His Church is so organically united as to be called ' Christ' 
 I Cor. xii. 1 2) to the supremacy of God will be realized at the close of the 
 present dispensation. Against the attempt to infer from this passage an 
 a-noKaraaraffis of men and devils, cf. Meyer in loc. : and against Pantheistic 
 inferences from ra iravra eV Tratri*', cf. Julius Miiller, Lehre von d. Sunde, i. 
 p. 157, quoted ibid. 
 
 ^ There seems, however, to be a distinction between such visions and 
 trances as those of 2 Cor. xii. I-4 j Acts xviii. 9; xxii. 17, and the appaarance 
 of ,Tesus Christ at midday, at St. Paul's conversion, Acts ix. 17. Of this 
 last St. Paul appears to speak more especially in 1 Cor. ix. i, and xv. 8. Cf. 
 Macpherson on the Resurrection, p. 330. 
 
 1 Rom. i. 2d: rk yap aopara avTov UTrh KTtVectfS KSfffiov rots rroL'fj/xaai 
 voovfieva Kadoparai. 
 
 ^ Ibid. xi. 36 : on e| avrov kcu 5i avTOv Koi els avrhv ra irdvra. 'Alles ist 
 aus Gott (Urgrund), in sofern AUes aus Gottes Schopferkrafte hervorgegangen 
 ist ; darch Gott ( Vermittelangsr/rund), in sofarn niehts ohne Gottes Ver- 
 mittelung (continuirliche Einwirkung) existirt ; fur Gott (teleologische Be- 
 stimmung), in sofern AUes den Zwecken Gottes dient.' Meyer in loc. 
 
 " Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 205 : ' Auf dieser AufFassung der Idee Gottes 
 beruht der UniversaUsmus des Apostels, wie er diess in dem Satz ausspricht, 
 VI ] X 2 
 
3o8 Ground of St, PauVs jicdgment of Paganism. 
 
 Hence the Apostle infers the deep misery of Paganism. The 
 Pagan representation of Deity was 'a lie' by which this essential 
 truth of God's Being « was denied. The Pagans had forfeited 
 that partial apprehension of the glory of the incorruptible God 
 which the physical universe and the light of natural conscience 
 placed within their reach. They had yielded to those instincts 
 of creature-worship P which mere naturalism is ever prone to 
 indulge. The Incarnation alone subdues these -instincts by 
 consecrating them to the service of God Incarnate ; while beyond 
 the Church they perpetually threaten naturalistic systems with 
 an utter and disastrous subjection to the empire of sense. When 
 man then had fairly lost sight of the Unity and Spirituality of 
 God, Paganism speedily allowed him to sink beneath a flood of 
 nameless sensualities ; he had abandoned the Creator to become, 
 in the most debased sense, the creature's slave a. 
 
 At another time the Apostle's thought rests for an instant 
 upon the elegant but impure idolatries to which the imagination 
 and the wealth of Greece had consecrated those beautiful temples 
 which adorned the restored city of Corinth. ^ To us Christians,' 
 he fervently exclaims, * there is but one God, the Father ; all 
 things owe their existence to Him, and we live for His purposes 
 and His glory r.' In after years, St. Paul is writing to a fellow- 
 labourer for Christ, and he has in view some of those Gnostic 
 imaginations which already proposed to link earth with heaven 
 by a graduated hierarchy of iEons, thus threatening the re- 
 introduction either of virtual polytheism or of conscious creature- 
 worship. Against this mischievous speculation the Apostle 
 utters his protest ; but it issues from his adoring soul upwards 
 
 dass Gott sowohl der Heiden als der Juden Gott sei. Rom. ii. ii, iii. 29, 
 X. 12. Das Christen thurn ist selbst nichts anderes (it is this, but it is 
 a great deal more) als die Aufhebung alles Particularistischen, damit die 
 reine absolute Gottes-Idee in der Menschheit sich verwirkliche, oder in ilir 
 zum Bewusstsein komme.' The Pantheistic touch of the last phrase does 
 not destroy the general truth of the observation. 
 
 o Rom. i. 25 : fjL^rijWa^av t^v a\'f}deiav rov @€ov eV rcf xl/eiSei. 
 
 P Ibid. vers. 18-25; especially 23: ^Wa^av rrjv dS^av rod acpOdprov 
 ©€ou iv oixoiwfjiaTi uk6vos <pdaprov apOpcairov koI iTiTeivSiv koX rerpa-no^uu 
 
 Koi IpTTfTWI/, K.T.A.. 
 
 q Ibid. ver. 24 : irapf^obKcv avrovs 6 Qehs iv ra7s iirtOv/nlais ra>y Kapdiaiv 
 avTfav els aKaQapdiav. Ibid. ver. 26 : us TrdOr} arifiias. Ibid. ver. 28 : els 
 adoKi/JLOv vovv. See the whole context. 
 
 ' I Cor. viii. 5,6: koX yap etirep dal Xeyojxevoi Oeol, e^re eV ovpavo), elrc 
 4ir\ yrjs (the two spheres of polytheistic invention) ilocnrep elal deol ttoAAoI, 
 Koi Kvpioi TToAAoi- dAA' rjfxiy eh 0ebs d UarTjp, i^ ov to. iravra, kol ^/^6?s 
 els avT6v, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Bearing of his monotheis^n 07i his Chris to logy, 309 
 
 to the footstool of the One Supreme and Almighty Being in the 
 richest and most glorious of the doxologies which occur in his 
 Epistles. God is the King of the ages of the world ; He is the 
 imperishable, invisible, only wise Beings. God is the Blessed 
 and Only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords ; He 
 only has from Himself, and originally, immortality ; He dwells 
 in the light which is inaccessible to creatures ; no man has seen 
 Him ; no man can see Him j let honour and power be for 
 ever ascribed to Him*. 
 
 St. Paul is, beyond all question, an earnest monotheist; his faith 
 is sensitively jealous on behalf of the supremacy and the rights 
 of God. What then is the position which he assigns to Jesus 
 Christ in the scale of being ? That he believed Jesus Christ to 
 be merely a man is a paradox which could be maintained by no 
 careful reader of his Epistles. But if, according to St. Paul, 
 Christ is more than man, what is He? Is He still only an Arian 
 Christ ? or is He a Divine Person % In St. Paul's thought this 
 question could not have been an open one. His earnest, sharply- 
 defined faith in the One Most High God must force him to say 
 either that Christ is- a created being, or that He is internal to 
 the Essence of God, Nor is the subject of such a nature as to 
 admit of accommodation or compromise in its treatment. In 
 practical matters, and where the law of God permits, St. Paul 
 may become all things to all men that he may by all means save 
 some ^. But he cannot, as if he were a pagan politician of old, 
 or a modern man of the world, compliment away his deepest 
 faith X. He cannot ascribe Divinity to a fellow-creature by way 
 of panegyrical hyperbole ; his belief in God is too powerful, too 
 exacting, too keen, too real. St. Paul may teach the Athenians 
 that we live and move and have our being in the all-present, all- 
 encompassing Life of God y ; he may bid the Corinthians expect 
 a time when God shall be known and felt by every member of 
 
 " I Tim. i. 1 7 : t^ 5e ^affiX^t tw// aXdovooVi act)6dpT^^ aopdr^ ix6v(f cro^w @€(p, 
 Ti/j.^ Koi 5J|a els Tous aluvas twu alcoucou. Here fidvo) ao(pa> 065, excludes 
 current Gnostic claims on behalf of -^ons; in Rom. xvi. 27, (with which 
 compare St. Jude 25,) it contrasts the Divine Wisdom manifested in the 
 plan of Redemption through Jesus Christ with human schemes and theories, 
 whether Jewish or Gentile. 
 
 * I Tim. vi. 15, 16: 6 fxaKaptos kol fiSvos ^vpdcrrrjs, 6 BaaiXevs tS>v ^a<ri- 
 \^v6vr(tiv, KoX Kvpios rcov KvpuvSvTOJV^ 6 fxovos ^x^v adavaaiay, (pcos oIkuv 
 airpSaiTov^ %v 6?5ei/ ovZiXs avQpwirav^ ohbh ISelv bvvaTaiy ia rifx^ kol KpaTos 
 aloopLoVy afxi}U. 
 
 " I Cor. ix. 22. « 2 Cor. i« 18, ii. 17, y Acts xvii, 28. 
 
 VI] 
 
310 St. Paters devotion to oicr Lord's condescension. 
 
 His great family to be all in all^. But St. Paul cannot merge the 
 Maker and Euler of the universe, so gloriously free in His creative 
 and providential action ^ in any conception which identifies Him 
 with the work of His hands, or which reduces Him to the level 
 of an impersonal quality or force. The Apostle may contemplate 
 the vast hierarchy of the blessed angels, ranging in their various 
 degrees of glory between the throne of God and the children of 
 men b. But no heavenly intelligence, however exalted, is seen 
 in his pages to trench for one moment upon the incommunicable 
 prerogatives of God. St. Paul may describe the regenerate life 
 of Christians in such terms as to warrant us in saying that 
 Christ's true members become divine by spiritual communion 
 with God in His Blessed Son c. But the saintliest of men, the 
 most exalted and majestic of seraphs, are alike removed by an 
 infinite interval from the One Uncreated, Self-existent, Incor- 
 ruptible Essence d. There is no room in St. Paul's thought for 
 an imaginary being like the Arian Christ, hovering indistinctly 
 between created and Uncreated life ; since, where God is be- 
 lieved to be so utterly remote from the highest creatures beneath 
 His throne, Christ must either be conceived of as purely and 
 simply a creature with no other than a creature's nature and 
 rights, or He must be adored as One Who is for ever and neces- 
 sarily internal to the Uncreated Life of the Most High. 
 
 2. It has been well observed by the author of 'Ecce Homo' 
 that ^ the trait in Christ which filled St. Paul's whole mind was 
 His condescension;' and that Hhe charm of that condescension 
 lay in its being voluntary ^! Certainly. But condescension is 
 the act of bending from a higher station to a lower one ; and 
 the question is, from what did Christ condescend % If Christ was 
 merely human, what was the human eminence from which 
 St. Paul believed Him to be stooping? Was it a social emi- 
 nence % But as the favourite of the synagogue, and withal as pro- 
 tected by the majesty of the Koman franchise f, St. Paul occupied 
 a social position not less widely removed from that of a Galilean 
 peasant leading a life of vagrancy, than are your circumstances, 
 my brethren, who belong to the middle and upper classes of this 
 country, removed from the lot of the homeless multitudes who 
 day by day seek relief in our workhouses. Was it an intellec- 
 
 ^ I Cor. XV. 28. * Rom. ix. 11. 
 
 ^ Col. i. 16. These hierarchical distinctions appear to have been pre- 
 served among the fallen angels (Eph. vi. 1 2). 
 
 <= I Cor. iii. 16, 17 ; vi. 19, 20. ^ Eom. xi. 34-36. 
 
 ^ Ecce Homo, p. 49. ^ Acts xxii. 29. 
 
 [ LECiJ. 
 
From what position did Christ condescend? 311 
 
 tual eminence 1 But the Apostle who had sat at the feet of 
 Gamaliel, and had drawn largely from the fountains of Greek 
 thought and culture, had at least enjoyed educational advantages 
 which were utterly denied to the Prophet of Nazareth. Was it 
 then a moral eminence? But, if Jesus was merely Man, was He, I 
 do not say morally perfect, but morally eminent at all? Was not 
 His Self-assertion such as to be inconsistent with any truthful 
 recognition whatever of the real conditions of a created exist- 
 ence % But was the eminence from which Christ condescended 
 angelical as distinct from human? St. Paul has drawn the sharp- 
 est distinction between Christ and the angels ; Christ is related 
 to the angels, in the belief of the Apostle, simply as the Author 
 of their being ? ; while the appointed duties of the angels are to 
 worship) His Person and to serve His servants h. 
 
 What then was the position from which Christ condescended? 
 Two stages of condescension are indeed noted, one within and 
 one beyond the limits of our Lord's Human Life. Being found 
 in fashion as a Man, He voluntarily humbled Himself and became 
 obedient unto deaths But the earlier and the greater act of 
 condescension was that whereby He had become Man out of 
 a state of pre-existent glory ^. St. Paul constantly refers to the 
 pre-existent Life of Jesus Christ. The Second Adam differs 
 from the first in that He is * from heaven 1.' When ancient 
 Israel was wandering in the desert, Christ had been Him- 
 self invisibly present as Guardian and Sustainer of the Lord's 
 people i^. St. Paul is pleading on behalf of the poor Jewish 
 Churches with their wealthier Corinthian brethren ; and he 
 points to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, when He 
 was rich, for our sakes became poor, that we through His 
 poverty might be rich^. Here Christ's eternal wealth is in 
 contrast with His temporal impoverishment. For His poverty 
 began with the manger of Bethlehem ; tie became poor by the 
 
 g Col. i. 16. ^ h Heb. i. 6, 14. 
 
 * Phil. ii. 8 : (T^\iari evpeOels &9 ^vOpwiroSt irairdpuaep eavrhv, y^j/Gficvos 
 vwfiKoos fJi.^XP'- QoLvdroVj Qavarov Sf aravpov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. vers. 6, 7 : eV fJLop(p^ &eov virdpxoov, , . eavrhv iK€t/oo(Te^ iJLop(p^u 
 SovKov Xa^dov. 
 
 ^ I Cor. XV. 47 : 6 Bevrepos ^vOpca-nos [0 Kvpios] i^ ovpavov. Cf. Tert, adv. 
 Marc. V. 10. 
 
 ^ I Cor. X. 4 : y]Z\ nerpa [the irirpa aKoXovdovaa commemorated by Jewish 
 traditions] 9iv 6 XpicrrSs. Ibid. ver. 9 : firjbe iKTveipdCo^iiiev rhy XpiaTbvj Kadchs 
 Kai riv€S avTccv i-mipaaai'. ..^ 
 
 " 2 Cor. viii. 9 : yivdoo-K^re yap rriv x<^P'^ '^^v Kupiov rifxSov 'IrjcroD Xpiq,'7pv^- 
 ^Ti 5i' vfxas iiTTdox^vae nXoixnos $}Uf 'iva v^xus rv e/ceiVov Trrcyp^eta TrKovT^iinl' '" 
 
 VI] A''-: 
 
^iz Christ is ' over all 
 
 act of His Incarnation ; being rich according to the unbegun, 
 unending Life of His Higher Nature, He became poor in time o. 
 When St. Paul says that our Lord was * manifested in the flesh P,' 
 he at least implies that Christ existed before this manifestation ; 
 when St. Paul definitely ascribes to our Lord the function of a 
 Creator Who creates not for a Higher Power but for Himself, we 
 rise from the idea of pre-existence to the idea of a relationship 
 towards the universe, which can belong to One Being alone. 
 This will presently be considered. 
 
 Certainly St. Paul used the terms ' form of God,' * image of 
 God,' when speaking of the Divinity of Jesus Christ Q. But 
 these terms do not imply that Christ's Divinity only resembles 
 or is analogous to the Divinity of tlie Father. They do not 
 mean that as Man, He represents the Divine Perfections in 
 an inferior and partial manner to our finite intelligence 
 which is incapable of raising itself sufficiently to contem- 
 plate the transcendent reality. They are necessary in order to 
 define the personal distinction which exists between the Divine 
 Son and the Eternal Father. Certainly it is no mere human 
 being or seraph Whom St. Paul describes as being *over all, 
 God blessed for everr.' You remind me that these words are 
 
 o Baur suggests that ^TTTcox^vf^f need mean no more than that Christ was 
 poor. (Vorlesungen, p. 193.) But 'der ^o?*ts^ bezeichnet das einst gesche- 
 hene Eintreten des Armseins (denn irrwx^vfiv heisst nicht arm werden, 
 sondern arm sein), nicht das von Christo gefiihrte ganze Lehen in Armuth 
 und Niedrigkeit, wobei er gleichwohl reich an Gnade gewesen sei.' (Meyer 
 in 2 Cor. viii. 9.) 
 
 P I Tim. iii. 16 : i(pap€p(i>dr] eu (rapKl. Cf. Bishop Ellicott in loc. The 
 bishop pronounces hs to be the reading of the Codex A, 'after minute 
 personal inspection/ and has adopted it in his text. Mr. Scrivener however 
 has examined the Codex more recently, and with a different result. ' On hold- 
 ing the leaf/ he says, 'up to the light one singularly bright hour, February 7, 
 1 86 1, and gazing at it with and without a lens, with eyes which have some- 
 thing of the power and too many of the defects of a microscope, I saw clearly 
 the tongue of the 6 through the attenuated vellum, crossing the circle about 
 two thirds up, (much above the thick modern line), the knob at its extremity 
 falling without the circle. On laying down the leaf I saw immediately after 
 (but not at the same moment) the slight shadow of the real ancient diameter, 
 only just above the recent one.* Still, upon a review of the whole mass of 
 external proof, particularly of the verdict of Codex ^<, and of the versions 
 and Fathers, Mr. Scrivener' decides for hs as the probable reading of the text. 
 See the very full statement in his ' Introduction to the Criticism of the New 
 Testament/ pp. 452-455. If then it be admitted that the reading 02 is too 
 doubtful to be absolutely relied on ; in any case our Lord's Pre-existence lies 
 in the icpavepwdrj (i St. John i. 2), which cannot without violence be watered 
 down into the sense of Christ's manifestation in the teaching and belief 
 of the Church, as distinct from His manifestation in history. 
 
 q Phil. ii. 6; Col. i. 15. ^ Rom. ix. 5. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
God blessed for ever, ' 313 
 
 referred by some modern scholars to the Eternal Father. Cer- 
 tainly they are : but on what grounds ? Of scholarship ? What 
 then is St. Paul's general purpose when he uses these words •? 
 He has just been enumerating those eight privileges of the race 
 of Israel, the thought of which kindled in his true Jewish heart 
 the generous and passionate desire to be made even anathema 
 for his rejected countrymen. To these privileges he subjoins a 
 climax. The Israelites were they, i^ hv 6 Xpiaros t6 Kara aapKa, 6 
 a)v em navTcov Qcos evXoyrjTos els rovi alwvas. It was from the 
 blood of Israel that the true Christ had sprung, so far as His 
 Human Nature was concerned ; but Christ's Israelitic descent is, 
 in the Apostle's eyes, so consummate a glory for Israel, because 
 Christ is much more than one of the sons of men, because 
 by reason of His Higher Pre-existent Nature He is * over all, 
 God blessed for ever.' This is the natural » sense of the pas- 
 sage. If the passage occurred in a profane author and there 
 were no anti-theological interest to be promoted, few critics 
 would think of overlooking the antithesis between Xpia-Tos to 
 Kara adpKa and Qcos evXoyrjTos *. Still Icss possible would it be 
 
 •» Reuss, Thdol. Chr^t. ii. 76, note. M. Reuss says that the Catholic inter- 
 pretation of Rom. ix. 5 is * I'expUcation la plus simple et la plus naturelle.' 
 * Man hat hier verschiedene Auswege gesucht, der Nothwendigkeit zu entge- 
 hen, [6] &V iirl Trdvrwv @e6s auf Christum zu beziehen ; aber bei jedem bieten 
 sie solche Schwierigkeiten dar, die immer wieder auf die einfachste und von 
 der Grammatik gebotene Auslegung zuriickfiihren.' (Usteri, Entwickelung 
 des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffes, p. 309.) That the text was understood in 
 the early Church to apply to Jesus Christ will appear from St. Iren. iii. 16, 3 ; 
 Tert. adv. Prax. 13 ; St. Hipp. c. Noet. 6. So Origen; St. Athan. Orat. c. Ar. 
 i. 10; Theodoret ; St. Chrys. de Incompr. Dei Nat. v. 2; in Joan. hom. xxxiii. 
 i; in I Cor. hom. xx. 3. It seems probable that any non-employment of so 
 striking a passage by the Catholics during their earlier controversial struggles 
 with the Arians is to be attributed to their fear of being charged with con- 
 struing it in a Sabellian sense. (Cf. Olsh. in loc; Reiche, Comm. ii. 268, 
 note.) The language of the next age was unhesitating: eiinv avrhv * eVl 
 irdvTuv' . . . *&€hv* ... * evKoyriTov . . . exovres ovv rbv XpicTTOV Koi ovTa Gebv 
 Kal evKoy7)rhvy avrcp TrpoaKw-ficrcc/jLep. St. Procl. ad Arm. (Labbe, iii. 123 1.) 
 Wetstein erroneously assumed that those early fathers who refused to apply 
 d irrl irdvroov ©eos to Christ, would have objected to the predicate actually 
 employed by the Apostle, eVl ttolvtoov @i6s. (Cf. Fritzsche, Comm. in Rom. 
 i. p. 262 sqq.) And indeed Socinus himself (see Tholuck in loc.) had no 
 doubt of the reference of this passage to Christ ; although he explained it of 
 a conferred, not of a 'natural' Divinity. (Cat. Rac. 159 sqq.) See too Dr. 
 Vaughan, Comm. in loc. against the ' harsh, evasive and most needless inter- 
 pretation,' which applies it to the Father. 
 
 * Observe Rom. i. 3, where e/c o-n^pixaros Aaj8l5 Karh. adpKa is in contrast 
 with TioO ©eoO . . . Kara Tli/evfjia 'Ayiuavvrjs^ 
 VI] 
 
314 Christ is ' over all God blessed for ever! 
 
 to destroy this antithesis outright, and to impoverish the climax 
 of the whole passage, by cutting off the doxology from the clause 
 which precedes it, and so erecting it into an independent ascrip- 
 tion of praise to God the Father ". If we should admit that the 
 doctrine of Christ's Godhead is not stated in this precise form 
 elsewhere in St. Paul's writings ^, that admission cannot be held 
 
 " As to the punctuation of this passage the early MSS. themselves of 
 course determine nothing ; but the citations and versions to which Lachmann 
 generally appeals for the formation of his text are decisively in favour of re- 
 ferring b &u to XpiarSs. The Sabellian use of the text to prove that the Father 
 became Man, and the orthodox replies shewing that this was not the sense of 
 the passage, equally assume that the doxological clause refers to Christ. 
 Nothing can with safety be inferred as to the received reading in the Church 
 from the general and of course prejudiced statement of the Emperor Julian, 
 that rhv yovv ^Irjaovy oijre Tlav\os irdXix-ricriv elirelu &€6v. St. Cyril, cont. Jul. 
 X. init., Op. tom. vi. p. 327. Two cursive MSS. of the twelfth century (5 
 and 47, cf. Meyer), are the first which distinctly interpose a punctuation after 
 (rdpKay and so erect the following clause into an independent doxology 
 addressed to God the Father. But the construction which is thus rendered 
 necessary (1) makes the participle S)v altogether superfluous. In 2 Cor. xi. 31, 
 6 &v €v\oy7)Tbs els robs cuMvas is an exactly parallel construction to that of 
 Rom. ix. 5. Nothing but strong anti-theological bias can explain the facility 
 with which the natural force of the passage is at once recognised in the 
 former and denied in the latter case (see Prof. Jowett in loc, and Baur, Vor- 
 lesungen, p. 194, who begs the question, — ' Christus ist noch wesentlich 
 Mensch, nicht Gott'). It need scarcely be added that there is no authority 
 for transposing 6 &v into wv 6, in order to evade the natural force of the 
 participle. (2 ) The construction which the isolation of the clause renders 
 necessary violates the invariable usage of Biblical Greek. * If the Apostle 
 had wished to express ''God, Who is over all, be blessed for ever," he must, 
 according to the unvarying usage of the New Testament and the LXX. 
 (which follows the use of Tfa), have placed cvXoyrjThs first, and written 
 cifXoyTfTos 6 S)v K.T.\. There are about forty places in the Old Testament 
 and five in the New in which this formula of doxology occurs, and in every 
 case the arrangement is the same, " Blessed be the God Who is over all, for 
 ever." ' (Christ. Rem. April 1856, p. 469.) It may be added that in Ps. Ixvii. 
 19, LXX. (cited by Winer, N. T. Gr. Eng. Tr. p. 573), Kvpios 6 ©ehs evKo- 
 ynrbsf evKoyrjThs Kvpios, the first cvKoynros has no corresponding word in 
 the Hebrew text, and appears to be interpolated. Dean Alford observes that 
 I Kings x. 6 ; 2 Chron. ix. 8; Job i. 21 ; Ps. cxii. 2, are not exceptions ; 
 ' since in all of them the verb ef?/ or y4uoiro is expressed, requiring the sub- 
 stantive to follow it closely.' We may be very certain that, if eVt Trdvruu 
 &ebs could be proved to be an unwarranted reading, no scholar, however 
 Socinianizing his bias, would hesitate to say that 6 &v €v\oyr]Ths /c.t.A. 
 should be referred to the proper name which precedes it. 
 
 ^ Our Lord is not, we are reminded, called evXoyTjThs elsewhere in the 
 New Testament. But ^vXoyn^iivos is certainly applied to Him, St. Matt. 
 xxi. 9 ; St. Luke xix. 28 ; and as regards evXaynrhs, the remarkable fewness 
 of doxologies addressed to Him might account for the omission. The predi- 
 cate could only be refused to Him on the ground of His being, in the belief of 
 St. Paul, merely a creature. It is arbitrary to maintain that no word can 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christ is ^ oitr great God and Saviour,^ 315 
 
 to justify us in violently breaking up the passage, in order to 
 escape from its natural meaning, unless we are prepared to deny 
 that St. Paul could possibly have employed an ana^ Xeyo^^vov, 
 Nor in point of fact does St. Paul say more in this famous text 
 than when in writing to Titus he describes Christians as ^ looking 
 for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God 
 and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who gave Himself for us y.' Here the 
 grammar apparently, and the context certainly, oblige us to 
 recognise the identity of ^our Saviour Jesus Christ' and * our 
 Great God.' As a matter of fact, Christians are not waiting for 
 any manifestation of the Father. And He Who gave Himself 
 for us can be none other than our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 Reference has already been made to that most solemn passage 
 in the Epistle to the Philippians, which is read by tlie Church 
 
 possibly be applied to a given subject because there is not a second instance 
 of such application within a limited series of books. Against itrX irdpTooi/ 
 &€hs, besides the foregoing objection, it is further urged that it cannot be 
 applied to our Lord, Who, although consubstantial with, is subordinate to, 
 the Eternal Father, and withal personally distinct from Him ; cf. Eph. iv. 5 ; 
 I Cor. viii. 6, where, however. His Manhood, as being essential to His media- 
 tion, is specially in the Apostle's eye. But St. Paul does not call our Lord 6 
 itrl iravToov Qeos — the article would lay the expression open to a direct Sabel- 
 lian construction ; St. Paul says that Christ is eVi irdvroov ©ebs, where the 
 Father of course is not included among to. irdura, i Cor. xvii. 27 ; and the 
 sense corresponds substantially with Acts x. 36, Rom. x. 12. It asserts that 
 Christ is internal to the Divine Essence, without denying His personal dis- 
 tinctness from, or His filial relation to, the Father. Cf. Alford in loc. ; 
 Usteri, Entwickelung des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffes, p. 309 sqq. ; Olshausen, 
 Comm. in loc. 
 
 y Tit. ii. 13 : TrpocrSexcJ^uevoi tV fJ-dKapiav iXiri^a Kol €Tri(f)dif€iav rrjs d6^r]S 
 Tov fxeydkov &eov koI '^corripos fjixuij/ 'lr]<Tov XpicTTov^ ts e8coK€V kavrhv vircp 
 Tjixccu. ' Nicht Gott und Christus, sondern bloss Christus gemeint ist ; denn 
 es ist von der herrlichen Wiederkunft Christi die Rede, und eine Erscheinung 
 Gottes (of the Father) anzunehmen, wiire ausser aller Analogie ; auch bediirfte 
 Gott der Vater nicht erst des erhebenden und preisenden Epithets ij.4yas, 
 vielmehr deutet auch dieses auf Christum.' (Usteri, LehrbegrifF, p. 310.) 
 To these arguments Bishop EUicott adds that the subsequent allusion to our 
 Lord's profound Self-humiliation accounts for St. Paul's ascribing to Him, by 
 way of reparation, 'a title, otherwise unusual, that specially and antithetically 
 marks His glory,' and that two ante-Nicene writers, Clemens Alexandr. 
 (Protrep. 7) and St. Hippolytus, together with the great bulk of post-Nicene 
 fathers, although not all, concur in this interpretation. And the bishop holds 
 that grammatically there is a presumption in favour of this interpretation, but, 
 on account of the defining genitive ijfMwv, nothing more. Nevertheless, taking 
 the great strength of the exegetical evidence into account, he sees in this text 
 a ' direct, definite, and even studied declaration of the Divinity of the Eternal 
 Son.' See his note, and Wordsworth in loc. ; Middleton, Greek Article, ed. 
 Rose, p. 393. 
 
 VI] ; 
 
31 6 CIuHst 'in the form of^ and ^ equal with^ God. 
 
 in the Communion Service on Palm Sunday z, in order, as it 
 would seem, to remind Christians of the real dignity of their 
 suffering Lord. Our Lord's Divine Nature is here represented 
 as the seat of His Eternal Personality ; His Human Nature is a 
 clothing which He assumed in time. 'Er/ yLop(f)fi Qeov vTrdpxcov, 
 
 . . . eavTov €Keva)(J€y fxopcprjv 8ov\ov \a^a)V \ It is impossible not to 
 
 be struck by the mysterious statement that Christ, being in the 
 form of God, did not look upon equality with God (r6 elvai Jaa 
 Geo)) as a prize to be jealously grasped at ^ (ovk apnayfiou rjyrjcraTo), 
 It has been maintained that St. Paul is here contrasting the 
 apostolic belief in our Lord's condescending love with an early 
 (^ostic speculation respecting an ^on. This ^on desired to 
 compass directly, and by a violent assault, the invisible and in- 
 comprehensible God ; whereas God could only be really known 
 to and contemplated by the Monogenes. The ambition of the 
 fabled ^on is thus said to be in contrast with the ' self-empty- 
 ing' of the Eternal Christ. Such a contrast, if it had been in 
 the Apostle's mind, would have implied the Absolute Pre-existent 
 Divinity of Christ. Christ voluntarily lays aside the glory 
 which was His ; the fabled ^Eon would violently grasp a glory 
 which could not rightfully belong to him. But if this explana- 
 tion of the energetic negative phrase of the Apostle should not 
 be accepted, it is in any case clear that the force of St. Paul's 
 moral lesson in the whole passage must depend upon the real 
 Divinity of the Incarnate and Self-inmiolating Christ. The 
 
 * See Epistle for Sunday next before Easter. 
 
 a Phil. ii. 6, 7. 'Die Gnostiker sprachen von einetn Aeon, welcher das 
 absolute Wesen Gottes auf unraittelbare Weise erfassen wollte, und weil er 
 so das an sich Unraogliche erstrebte aus dem irXr^poofia in das Kevcofxa herabfiel. 
 Dieser Aeon begieng so gleichsam einen Raub, weil er, der in der Qualitat 
 cines gottlichen Wesens an sich die Fahigkeit hatte, sich mit dem Absoluten 
 zu vereinigen, diese Identitat, welche erst durch den ganzen Weltprocess 
 realisirt werden konnte, gleichsam sprungweise, mit Einem Male, durch einen 
 gewaltsamen Act, oder wie durch einen Raub an sich reissen wollte. So 
 erhalt erst die bildliche Vorstellung eines apiraytiSs ihre eigentliche Bedeu- 
 tung.* (Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 266.) Compare, however, Meyer, Philipper- 
 brief, p. 68, Anmerkung. Baur has spun a large web out of St. Irenaeus, 
 Adv. Hser. I. 2. I. 2. The notion that the ^on sought to attain an identity 
 with God, — and this assumption is necessary in order to construct a real 
 parallel with St. Paul's words, — has no foundation in the text of St.Irenseus. 
 
 '' Cf. Bp. Ellicott in loc. ; and in Aids to Faith, p. 436; Dollinger, First Age 
 of the Church, p. 163. E.T. renders apirayixov as 'a spoil which was not His 
 by right, and of which He might be deprived.' apir. is clearly a thing or 
 state, not an action. Thus the description of the glory from which our Lord 
 stooped ends at vrrapxav : the description of His condescension begins with 
 ovX apvayfxhv and dAA' has its full force. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christ * the Image of the Invisible Gob! 317 
 
 point of our Lord's example lies in His emptying Himself of the 
 glory or 'form' of His Eternal Godhead. Worthless indeed 
 would have been the force of His example, had He been in 
 reality a created Being, who only abstained from grasping 
 tenaciously at Divine prerogatives which a creature could not 
 have arrogated to himself without impious folly c. Christians 
 are to have in themselves the Mind of Christ Jesus ; but what 
 that Mind is they can only understand, by considering what His 
 Apostle believed Christ Jesus to have been, before He took on 
 Him the form of a servant and became obedient unto death. 
 
 Perhaps the most exhaustive assertion of our Lord's Godhead 
 which is to be found in the writings of St. Paul, is that which 
 occurs in the Epistle to the Colossians ^. This magnificent dog- 
 matic passage is introduced, after the Apostle's manner, with a 
 strictly practical object. The Colossian Church was exposed to 
 the intellectual attacks of a theosophic doctrine, which degraded 
 Jesus Christ to the rank of one of a long series of inferior beings, 
 supposed to range between mankind and the supreme God. 
 Against this position St. Paul asserts that Christ is the ftVwi/ row 
 GeoO Tov dopdrov — the Image of the Invisible God 6. The ex- 
 pression elKcov TOV 0f ou supplements the title of ' the Son.' As 
 * the Son' Christ is derived eternally from the Father, and He is 
 of One Substance with the Father. As ' the Image,' Christ is, 
 in that One Substance, the exact likeness of the Father, in all 
 things except being the Father. The Son is the Image of the 
 Father, not as the Father, but as God : the Son is ' the Image 
 of God.' The eUcbv is indeed originally God's unbegun, unending 
 reflection of Himself in Himself; but the cIkcov is also the Organ 
 whereby God, in His Essence invisible, reveals Himself to His 
 creatures. Thus the chayv is, so to speak, naturally the Creator, 
 since creation is the first revelation which God has made of 
 Himself. Man is the highest point in the visible universe ; in 
 
 « The Arian gloss upon this text was this : oti 6eds obv kKarroov ovx i^piraa-e 
 rh eJuai Xaa rc^ ©ew rep fxeyaAo} kol fjLei^ovi. St. Chrysostom comments thus : 
 Kal fjLiKphs Kal fx^yas &ehs eVL ; kol ra 'EWtjviko, tu7s rfjs eKKKyjcrias d6yfxa(riu 
 iir€i(TdyeT€ ; . . . Et yap fxiKphs, ttus Kal Qeds ; (Horn. vi. in loc.) The fiopcp^ 
 &€ov is apparently the manifested glory of Deity, implying of course the 
 reality of the Deity so manifested. Compare So|a, St. John xvii. 5. Of this 
 lJiop(pT^ (as distinct from Deity Itself) our Lord iKivooo-^v kavrov. The word 
 virdpxoov points to our Lord's ' original subsistence' in the splendour of the 
 Godhead. The expression eV p.op(pf] &€ov undpxo^v is virtually equivalent to 
 rh ehai Jaa 0€(j5. See Dean Alford's exhaustive note upon this passage. 
 
 ^ Col. i. 15-17. ® Cf. 2 Cor. iv. 4 : os ia-ny dK(i:i/ rod 0€ou. 
 
 VI] 
 
3 1 8 Christ, * Begotten before eve7y creature! 
 
 man, God's attributes ar€ most luminously exhibited ; man is the 
 image and glory of God ^ But Christ is the Adequate Image 
 of God, God's Self-reflection in His Own thought, eternally pre- 
 sent with Himself. As the eiVcoi/, Christ is the TrpwrdroKos ttoo-t;? 
 KTiVecos : that is to say, not the First in rank among created 
 beings, hut begotten before any created beings. That this is a 
 true sense of the expression is etymologically certain s ; but it 
 is also the only sense which is in real harmony with the relation 
 in which, according to the context, Christ is said to stand to the 
 created universe ^i. That relation, according to St. Paul, is 
 threefold. Of all things in earth and lieaven, of things seen and 
 unseen, of the various orders of the angelic hierarchy, of thrones, 
 of dominions, of ])rincipalities, of powers — it is said that they 
 were created in Christ, by Christ, and for Christ. 'Ev amt^, 
 
 ^ I Cor. xi. 7 : tiKhiV /cat ho^a 0€oD. 
 
 8 As eiKcbi/ here defines our Lord's relation to God the Father, so irpcarS- 
 TOKOS defines His relation to the creatures. ^ovXcrai del^ai otl irph irdaris r^js 
 Kricredis iariv 6 TlSs' ttuis Iop ; Sia y^vtrfjaecios' ovkovv koI rwu dyyeAoov Trp6- 
 Tfpos, Koi ovToos, Sjctts Kul avxhs eKTiaev avTovs. (Theophyl. in loc.) Christ 
 is not the first of created spirits; He exists before them, and as One 
 ' begotten not made.* * Der genit. Trd(Tr]s KTiVeccs ist nicht Genit. partitiv. 
 (obwohl diess nocli de Wette fiir unzweifelhaft halt), weil iratra kt'ktis nicht 
 die ganze Sckopfung heisst, mithin nicht die Kaiegorie oder Gesammtheit 
 aussagen kann, zu welcher Christus als ihr erstgebornes Individuum gehore : 
 es heisst J jedwedes GescJwpf; vrgl. z. irarra oiKn^ojar), Eph. ii. 2i.), sondern 
 es ist der Genit. comparat. : der Entgehorne m Vergleicli invit jedem GescJwpf e 
 (s. Bernhardy, p. 139), d. h. eher geboren als jedes Geschopf. Vrgl. 
 Bahr z. St. u. Ernesti Ursprung d. Siinde, p. 241. Anders ist das Ver- 
 haltniss Apoc. i. 5 : TrpcvroTOKos ru/u vcKpcuu, wo Twy j/eKpwu die Kategorie 
 anzeigt, vrgl, TrpcororoKos iv iroX\o7s aficKcpoTs (Rom. viii. 29). Unser Genit. 
 ist ganz zu fassen wie der vergleichende Genit. bei trpwros Joh. i. 15, 30; 
 Winer, p. 218 ; FritzscJie ad Rom. ii. p. 421. Das Vergleichungs-Moment 
 ist das Verhaltniss der Zeit, und zwar in BetrefF des Ursprungs : da aber 
 letzterer bei jeder ktio-is a7iders ist als bei Christo, so ist nicht irpooTOKTia-ros 
 oder irpci}T6n\acrTos gesagt, welches von Christo eine gleiche Art der Entste- 
 hung wie von der Creatur anzeigen -wiirde, sondern TrpuroToxos gewjihlt, 
 welches in der Zeitvergleichung des Ursprungs die absonderliche Art der 
 Entstehung in BetrefF Cliristi anzeigt, dass er namlich von Gott nicht 
 geschaffen sei, wie die anderen Wesen, bei denen diess in der Benennung 
 ktIo-ls liegt, sondern gehoren, aus dera Wesen Gottes gleichartig hervorge- 
 gangen. Richtig Theodoret : ovx ws adeX<priV excoi/ r^v ktio-iv, aX?C ws 
 irpo Trda-rjs KTiaccos yevviqdeis. Wortwidrig ist daher die Arianische Erklii- 
 rung, dass Christus als das erste Geschopf Gottes bezeichnet werde.' Meyer, 
 Kolosserbrief, p. 184. 
 
 b Schleiermacher's desire to apply to the new creation, what is here said 
 of the natural, is alluded to by Auberlen as an illustration of his tendency 
 * to expound the Bible by the verdict of his devout consciousness, instead of 
 permitting his consciousness to be regulated by the Bible.' On the Divine 
 Revelation, pt. 2. iv. 2. a. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christ, the AtttJior and the End of created life, 319 
 
 iKTiadrj . . . . dt qvtgv, kol (Is avrov eKTicrrai i. In Him. There 
 was no creative process external to and independent of Him ; 
 since the archetypal forms after which the creatures are modelled, 
 and the sources of their strength and consistency of being, eter- 
 nally reside in Himk. By Him. The force which has sum- 
 moned the worlds out of nothingness into being, and which 
 upholds them in being, is His ; He wields it j He is the One 
 Producer and Sustainer of all created existence. For Him. 
 He is not, as Arianism afterwards pretended, merely an inferior 
 workman, creating for the glory of a higher Master, for a God 
 superior to Himself. He creates for Himself ; He is the End of 
 created things as well as their immediate Source ; and in living 
 for Him every creature finds at once the explanation and the 
 law of its being. For ^ He is before all things, and by Him all 
 things consist!.' After such a statement it follows naturally 
 that the TiKripwyia, that is to say, the entire cycle of the 
 Divine attributes, considered as a series of powers or forces, 
 dwells in Jesus Christ ; and this, not in any merely ideal or 
 transcendental manner, but with that actual reality which men 
 attach to the presence of material bodies which they can feel 
 and measure through the organs of sense. 'Ei/ alrto KaToiKcl irav to 
 
 ^ Compare Kom. xi. 36 : e| avTov koL Zl avrov Kai ds avrhu r^ irdvra. 
 As in this passage the Apostle is speaking of God, without hinting at any 
 distinction of Persons within the Godhead, he writes 6| avrov, not eV avra. 
 The Eternal Father is the ultimate Source of all life, both intra and extra 
 Deum; while the production of created beings depends immediately upon 
 the Son. The other two prepositions — the last being theologically of most 
 import — correspond in the two passages. 
 
 ^ iKriadr] describes the act of creation ; ^Kricrrai points to creation as 
 a completed and enduring fact. In iu avrw, the preposition signifies that 
 ' in Christo beruhete (ursachlich) der Act der Schopfung, so dass die Vollzie- 
 hung derselben in Seinen Person hegrundet war, und ohne ihn nicht 
 geschehen ware.' Cf. St. John i. 3 : x'^F^^ avrov iyeuero ovde "h, h yeyoi/ev. 
 But although the preposition immediately expresses the dependence of 
 created life upon Christ as its cause, it hints at the reason of this depend- 
 ence, namely, that our Divine Lord is the causi exemplaris of creation, the 
 K6aixos por)rhs, the Archetype of all created thinijs, ' die Dinge ihrer Idee 
 nach, Selbst, er tragt ihre Wesenheit in sich.' (Olshausen in loc.) 
 
 ^ Col. i. I 7 : Kal avr6s icrri irpo iravroov, Ka\ ra iravra iv avrcji avv€(rrr)K€. 
 Meyer in loc. 'Und Er (Er eben), durch welchen und fiir welchen ra 
 irdvra eKricrrai, hat eine friihere Existenz als Alles, und das Sammtliche 
 
 besteht in ihm irph Trdvrcvv wie irpcorSroKos von der Zeit, nicht vom 
 
 Range ; wiederholt und nachdrilchUch betont wird von P. die Praexistenz 
 Christi. Statt ean hatte er ^v sagen konnen (Joli. i. i) ; jenes aber ist 
 gesagt, weil Er die Permanenz des Seins Christi im Auge hat und darstellt, 
 nicht aber historisch liber ihn berichten will, was nur in den Hulfssatzen 
 mit '6ri vers. 16. u. 19. geschieht.' Cf. St. John viii. 58. 
 
320 Chrisfs Divinity in Heb. i. 5-14. 
 
 7r\r)pco[xa rrjs OeoTrjTOs aoifiaTiKciis''^. Although throughout this 
 
 Epistle the word \6yos is never introduced, it is plain that the 
 cIkcou of St. Paul is equivalent in His rank and functions to the 
 Xoyos of St. John. Each exists prior to creation ; each is the 
 one Agent in creation ; each is a Divine Person ; each is equal 
 with God and shares His essential Life ; each is really none 
 other than God. 
 
 Indeed with this passage in the Colossians only two others 
 in the entire compass of the New Testament, can, on the whole, 
 be compared. Allusion has already been made to the prologue 
 of St. John's Gospel ; and it is no less obvious to refer to the 
 opening chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Most of those 
 writers who earnestly reject the Pauline authorship of that 
 Epistle admit that it is of primary canonical authority, and 
 assign to its author the highest place of honour in ^ the school 
 of St. Paul.' There are reasons for believing that, at the utmost, 
 it is not more distantly related to his mind than is the Gospel of 
 St. Luke ; if indeed it does not furnish a crowning instance of 
 the spiritual versatility of the great Apostle, addressing himself 
 to a set of circumstances unlike any other of which the records 
 of his ministry have given us information. Throughout the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews a comparison is instituted between 
 Christianity and Judaism ; and this comparison turns partly on 
 the spiritual advantages which belong to the two systems respec- 
 tively, and partly on the relative dignity of the persons who 
 represent the two dispensations, and who mediate accordingly, 
 in whatever senses, between God and humanity. Thus our 
 Incarnate Lord as the one great High-priest is contrasted with 
 Aaron ^ and his successors. Thus too as the one perfect Ee- 
 vealer of God, He is compared with Moses » and the Jewish 
 
 ™ Col. ii. 9 : irav rh irX'fjpwfj.a. Meyer in loc. * Wird durch ttjj 6€6r7]Tos 
 naher bestimmt, welches angiebt, was seiner ganzen Fulle nach, d. i. nicht 
 
 etwa bios theilweise, sondern in seiner Gesammtheit, in Christo wohne 
 
 7} dedrvs die Gottheit (Lucian, Icarora. 9; Plut. Mor. p. 415, C.) das 
 Abstractum von 6 &€6s, ist zu unterscheiden von r] Oeiorrjs dem Abstractum 
 von delos (Rom. i. 20; Sap. xviii. 9; Lucian de Calumn. 17). Jenes ist 
 Deltas, das GotUein, d. i. die gottliche Wesenheit, Gottheit ; dieses aber 
 die Divinitas, d. i. die gottliche Qualitdt, GottUchlceit.' See too Abp. 
 Trench, Syn. N. T. i. p. 8. Thus in this passage the TrATjpa'^ca must be 
 understood in the metaphysical sense of the Divine Essence, even if in 
 Col. i. 19 it is referred to the fulness of Divine grace. Contrast too the 
 permanent fact involved in the present KaromeT of the one passage with 
 the historical aorist eySoKT/tre of the other. 
 
 °^ Heb. v. 4 ; X. II. ° Ibid. iii. 1-6. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christ obeyed and worshipped by the Angels, 321 
 
 prophets. As the antitype of Melchisedec, Christ is a higher 
 Priest than Aaron P; as a Son reigning over the house of God, 
 Christ is a greater Euler than the legislator whose praise it was 
 that he had been a faithful servant <i. As Author of a final, 
 complete, and unique revelation, Christ stands altogether above 
 the prophets by whom God had revealed His Mind in many 
 modes and in many fragments, in revelations very various as to 
 their forms, and, at certain epochs, almost incessant in their 
 occurrence '^. But if the superiority of Christianity to Judaism 
 was to be completely established, a further comparison was 
 necessary. The later Jewish theologians had laid much stress 
 upon the delivery of the Sinaitic Law through the agency 
 of angels acting as delegates for the Most High God^. The 
 Author of Christianity might be superior to Moses and the 
 prophets, but could He challenge comparison with those pure 
 and mighty spirits compared with whom the greatest of the 
 sons of Israel, as beings of flesh and blood, were insignificant 
 and sinful % The answer is, that if Christ is not the peer of the 
 angels, this is because He is their Lord and Master. The angels 
 are ministers of the Divine Will ; they are engaged in stated 
 services enjoined on them towards creatures lower than them- 
 selves, yet redeemed by Christ *. But He, in His glory above 
 the heavens, is invested with attributes to which the highest 
 angel could never pretend. In His crucified but now enthroned 
 Humanity, He is seated at the right hand of the Majesty on 
 high " ; He is seated there, as being Heir of all things ^ ; 
 
 P Heb. vii. i-?-2. 
 
 *1 Ibid. iii. 5, 6 : /cal Mwtrrys iikv TrKTrhs 4v (i\q> rep oXKcp avrov, ws B^pdtrwv, 
 .... "Kpiffrhs Se, cos vlhs iid rhv oIkov avrov, ov o!k6s iffixev tj/jlcis. The 
 preceding words are yet more noteworthy : Moses and the house of Israel 
 stand to Jesus Christ in the relation of creature to the Creator. irXeiovos 
 yhp ^6^7is ovros irapa. Mcotr^i/ f/|tcoTa/, KaB' '6(Tov ivXeiova rifi^v e^ft rod oXkov 6 
 KaTa<TK€vdaas avrdv. ttSs yap oIkos KaracrKevd^crai viro rivos' 6 Se tcl irdi/Ta 
 KaTa<rK€vd(Tas (sc. Jesus Christ), Q^Ss. So too the airh &€ov C<*}vtos of ver. 12 
 refers most naturally to our Lord, not to the Father. 
 
 "■ Ibid. i. I : TroKv/xepcos Kal TroXvTpStroos irdXai 6 (dehs XaX'fjdas to7s irarpdarLi/ 
 iv roiis irpo(\>i]raLS. 
 
 8 Ibid. ii. 2 : 6 Bl ayy4X(av XaXyjdeU x6yos. Acts vii. 38 : fierb. rod 
 ayyeXov rov XaXovvros avT^ iv rep opei '^iva. Ibid. ver. 53 : oirives eXd^ere 
 rhv vdfxov ets Ziarayas ayyeXav. Gal. iii. 19 : 6 vSfios . . . irpocreredri . . . 
 biarayels dC d776A&Ji/. 
 
 * Heb. i. 14 : XcirovpyiKa irvcvfxara^ els diaKoviav aTro<TTeXX6iieva 5ta rovs 
 fx4xXovras KX'i/]povoix^1v (Tcorrjpiav. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 3 : cKdOicrev 4v de^iq, rTJs fxeyaXcocrvvrjs iv v^7)Xo7s, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 2 : KXripovo/xov irdvruv. 
 VI ] Y 
 
322 How Christ differs from the Angels, 
 
 the angels themselves are T)ut a portion of His vast inheritance. 
 The dignity of His titles is indicative of His essential rank y. 
 Indeed He is expressly addressed as God ^ ; and when He 
 is termed the Son of God, or the Son, the full sense of that 
 term is drawn out in language adopted, as it seems, from the 
 Book of Wisdom a, and not less explicit than that which we 
 have been considering in the Epistle to the Colossians, although 
 of a distinct type. That He is One with God as having 
 streamed forth eternally from the Father's Essence, like a 
 ray of light from the parent fire with which it is unbrokenly 
 joined, is implied in the expression aTravyacrfia Trjs So^t/s ^, That 
 He is both personally distinct from, and yet literally equal 
 to. Him of Whose Essence He is the adequate imprint, is 
 taught us in the phrase x^P^'^'^hp ^5^ vTroo-racrecoy c. By Him, 
 therefore, the universe was made^; and at this moment all 
 things are preserved and upheld in being by the fiat of His 
 almighty word^. What created angel can possibly compare 
 with Him ] In the Name which He bears and which unveils 
 His Nature ^ ; in the honours which the heavenly intelligences 
 themselves may not refuse to pay Him, even when he is enter- 
 ing upon His profound Self-humiliation ? ; in the contrast be- 
 tween their ministerial duties and His Divine and unchanging 
 Royalty ^ ; in His relationship of Creator both to earth and 
 heaven i; and in the majestic certainty of His triumjih over 
 
 y Heb. i. 4: roffovTca Kpelrrccv yevSfxevos tZv ayyeXcov^ offo) ^la^opdorcpov 
 •nap^ avTovs K€K\7]pov6^7}Kev ovoixa. As to yevofievos, it will be borne in mind 
 that the subject of the whole passage is the Word now truly Incarnate, 
 and not, as is sometimes assumed, the pre-existent Logos alone. The 
 yevSfievos would therefore refer to the exaltation of our Lord's Humanity. 
 (See Ebrard, Comm. in loc.) St. Cyril observes that it does not imply 
 that in Christ's superior nature, He could be made superior to angels. 
 Thes. p. 199. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 8: irphs Se rhv Tlhy, ^6 6p6vos (rov, 6 Qehs, els rhv alwva 
 Tov alcovos* Ps. xlv. 6. 
 
 « Wisd. vii. 26 ; cf. p. 62. « Heb. i. 3. 
 
 ^ Ibid. A.V. * Express image of His Person.' So Beza, who dreaded 
 Arianism, and accordingly used 'Person' instead of 'Substance/ from 
 an apprehension that the latter rendering would here imply something 
 inconsistent with the Homoousion. 
 
 * Heb. i. 2 : di ov Koi tovs aloopas iirolTiaeu. 
 
 ® Ibid. ver. 3 : ^epccv re ra irduTa rcf ^rj/xaTi ttjs Svpdfieoos avTov, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 5 : Tl6s fiov el (Tv. 
 
 8 Ibid. ver. 6 : irpoaKwrjo-aTwo-aj/ avr^ irdvT^s dyyeKoi @eov. Psalm 
 xcvii. 7. ^ Heb. i. 7-9, 14. 
 
 ^ Ibid, ver 10 : ch Kar o.px'^s, Kvpie, tV 7V^ i6efji.€\iw(TaSp koI epya rSov 
 XC'pwv (TOV ila\v ol ovpavoi. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Chris fsDeity boundup with St, PatiVs whole mhid. 3 23 
 
 all who shall oppose the advance of His kingdom k, — we recog- 
 nise a Being, for Whose Person, although It be clothed in a 
 finite Human Nature^, there is no real place between humanity 
 and God. While the Epistle to the Hebrews lays even a 
 stronger emphasis than any other book of the New Testament 
 upon Christ's true Humanity^, it is nevertheless certain that 
 no other book more explicitly asserts the reality of His Divine 
 prerogatives. 
 
 3. Enough will have been said, to shew that the Apostle Paul 
 believed in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, not in the moral sense 
 of Socinianism, nor in the ditheistic sense, so to speak, of 
 Arianism, but in the literal, metaphysical, and absolute sense 
 of the Catholic Church. Those passages in his writings which 
 may appear to interfere with this conclusion are certainly to 
 be referred either to his anxiety to insist upon the reality of 
 our Lord's Manhood, or to his recognition of the truth that 
 Christ's Eternal Sonship is Itself derived from the Person 
 of the Father. From the Father Christ eternally receives an 
 equality of life and power, and therefore, as being a recipient, 
 He is so far subordinate to the Father. We have indeed 
 already seen that Christ's eternal derivation from the Father is 
 set forth nowhere more fully than in the Gospel of St. John, 
 and by the mouth of our Lord Himself. But the doctrine 
 before us, as it lies in the writings of St. Paul, is not to be 
 measured only by an analysis of those particular texts which 
 proclaim it in terms. The evidence for this great doctrine 
 is not really in suspense until such time as the critics may 
 have finally decided by their microscopical and chemical ap- 
 paratus, whether the bar of the in a famous passage of 
 St. Paul's first Epistle to Timothy is or is not really discernible 
 in the Alexandrian manuscript. The doctrine lies too deep in the 
 mind of the Apostle, to be affected by such contingencies. It is 
 indeed, as we have seen, asserted by St. Paul with sufficient 
 explicitness ; but it is implied more widely than it is asserted. 
 Just as it is inseparable from the whole didactic activity of 
 our Lord Himself, so is it inextricably interwoven with the 
 central and most vital teaching of His great ambassador. You 
 cannot make St. Paul a preacher of Humanitarianism, without 
 
 ^ Heb. i. 13 : Trpbs riva Se tcDv ojyy^Kwv c^prjKc irore, 'KaOov 6« Be^iccv /xovy 
 ecos "hi/ du Tovs ^x'^povs (Tov vTroTrodiou root/ irodcoi/ aov ; ' 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. 2 : iriarhv oura Tip iroi'ffcravTi avrdv. 
 
 ™ Ibid. ii. 14, 18, iv. 15 ; v. 7. 
 VI] Y 2 
 
324 Chris to logy of St Paters Missionary Sermons. 
 
 warping, mutilating, degrading his whole recorded mind. Par- 
 ticular texts, when duly isolated from the Apostle's general 
 teaching, may be pressed with plausible effect into the service 
 of Arian or Humanitarian theories ; but take St. Paul's doctrine 
 as a whole, and it must be admitted to centre in One Who 
 is at once and truly God as well as Man. 
 
 St. Paul never speaks of Jesus Christ as a pupil of less 
 originality and genius might speak of a master in moral truth, 
 whose ideas he was recommending, expanding, defining, defend- 
 ing, popularizing, among the men of a later generation. St. Paul 
 never professes to be working on the common level of human 
 power and knowledge with a master from whom he differed, as 
 an inferior teacher might differ, only in the degree of his capacity 
 and authority. St. Paul always writes and speaks as becomes 
 the slave of Jesus. He is indeed a most willing and enthusiastic 
 slave, reverently gathering up and passionately enforcing all 
 that touches the work and glory of that Divine Master to Whom 
 he has freely consecrated his liberty and his life. 
 
 In St. Paul's earliest sermons, we do not find the moral 
 precepts of Jesus a more prominent element than the glories 
 of His Person and of His redemptive work. That the reverse 
 is the case is at once apparent from a study of the great dis- 
 course which was pronounced in the synagogue of the Pisidian 
 Antioch. The past history of Israel is first summarized from a 
 point of view which regards it as purely preparatory to the 
 manifestation of the anticipated Saviour "^ ; and then the true 
 Messiahship of Jesus is enforced by an appeal to the testimony 
 of John the Baptist o, to the correspondence of the circumstances 
 of Christ's Death with the prophetic announcements p, and to 
 the historical fact of His Resurrection from the grave % which 
 had been witnessed by the apostles as distinctly ^ as it had been 
 foretold by the prophets s. Thus the Apostle reaches his prac- 
 tical conclusion. To believe in Jesus Christ is the one condition 
 of receiving remission of sins and (how strangely must such 
 words have sounded in Jewish ears !) justification from all 
 things from which men could not be justified by the divinely- 
 given law of Moses *. To deny Jesus Christ is to incur those 
 penalties which the Hebrew Scriptures denounced against scornful 
 
 n Acts xiii. 17-23. o Ibid. vers. -24, 25. p Ibid. vers. 26-30. 
 
 <i Ibid. ver. 30. >• Ibid. ver. 31. » ibid. vers. 32-37. 
 
 * Ibid. vers. 38, 39 : 5ia rovrov v/mv 6.(f)€(ns afxapriCov KarayyeW^TaL' koI 
 awb vavTwv wv ovk r}dvv7}6r]Te iv r^ vSfxcp Mcccecos diKaicadrjvai, iv rovrca Tcas 
 6 iria'Tevccv diKaiovrat. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Discourses at Antioch, Athens, and Miletus, 325 
 
 indifference to the voice of God and to the present tokens of 
 His Love and Power". 
 
 At first sight, St. Paul's sermon from the steps of the Areo- 
 pagus might seem to be rather Theistic than Christian. St. Paul 
 had to gain the ear of a ' philosophical' audience which imagined 
 that ' Jesus and the Resurrection' were two ^ strange demons x/ 
 who might presently be added to the stock of deities already 
 venerated by the Athenian populace. St. Paul is therefore eager 
 to set forth the lofty spirituality of the God of Christendom ; 
 but, although he insists chiefly on those Divine attributes which 
 are observable in nature and Providence, his sermon ends with 
 Jesus. After shewing what God is in Himself y, and what are 
 the natural relations which subsist between God and mankind z^ 
 St. Paul touches the conscience of his Athenian audience by a 
 sharp denunciation of the vulgar idolatry which it despised ^ and 
 he calls men to repent by a reference to the coming judgment, 
 which conscience itself foreshadowed. But the certainty of that 
 judgment has been attested by the historical fact of the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus ; the risen Jesus is the future Judge ^. 
 
 Or, listen to St. Paul as with fatherly authority and tender- 
 ness he is taking his leave of his fellow-labourers in Christ, the 
 presbyters of Ephesus, on the strand of Miletus. Here the 
 Apostle's address moves incessantly round the Person of Jesus. 
 He protests that to lead men to repentance towards God and 
 faith towards the Lord Jesus Christ^, had been the single object 
 of his public and private ministrations at Ephesus. He counts 
 not his life dear to himself, if only he can complete the mission 
 which is so precious to him because he has received it from the 
 Lord Jesus d. The presbyters are bidden to 'shepherd the 
 Church of God which He has purchased with His Own Blood®;' 
 
 '^ Acts xiii. 40 : ^Xeirere odu jul^ iireXOr) i(p>' vfxas to clprifxivov iu rms 
 'trpo(f)r)Tais' '"iSere, ol Kara(ppov7]ra\, koI Qavixdaare Koi acpaviadijTe' oti epyou 
 iytb ipyd^ofiai eV rah r]ix4pais v/nau/ Hab. i. 5. 
 
 * Acts xvii. 18 : ^cvcav ^a^ioviwv 5oKe7 KarayyeXevs clvai. 
 
 y Ibid. vers. 24, 25. ' * Ibid. vers. 26-28. 
 
 a Ibid. vers. 29, 30. ^ Ibid. ver. 31. 
 
 c Ibid. XX. 21 : diafxaprvpSfi^vos .... Wjy els top Qehv fierduoLau, Kal iriariv 
 tV €is rov Kvpiov rjixuy 'Irjaovv Xpi(rr6v, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 24. 
 
 ® Ibid. ver. 28 : iroi}iaiveiv t^u iKKXyjaiaif tov ©eov [Kuptou, Tisch. al.] V 
 'ir€pi€Troi.ri(TaTo 5ia rov aifxaros rod IBlov. See Dr. Wordsworth's note in loo. 
 In the third edition of his Greek Testament, Dean Alford restored the 
 reading rod ©eoG, which he had abandoned for Kvpiou in the two former 
 editions. Nothing can be added to the argument of the note in his fifth 
 edition. For Kvpiov are A, C, D, E ; for Qeov, B, ^?, Syr., Vulg. 
 VI] 
 
3^6 Christology of St, PmcVs apologetic speeches. 
 
 and the Apostle concludes by quoting a saying of the Lord 
 Jesus which has not been recorded in the Gospels, but which 
 was then reverently treasured in the Church, to the effect that 
 ^ it is more blessed to give than to receive ^.' 
 
 In the two apologetic discourses delivered, the one from the 
 stairs of the tower of Antonia before the angry multitude, and 
 the other in the council-chamber at Csesarea before King 
 Agrippa II. of Chalcis, St. Paul justifies his missionary activity 
 by dwelling upon the circumstances which accompanied and 
 immediately followed his conversion. Everything had turned 
 upon a fact which the Apostle abundantly insists upon; — he 
 had received a revelation of Jesus Christ in His heavenly glory. 
 It was Jesus Who had spoken to St. Paul from heaven ? ; it was 
 Jesus Who had revealed Himself as persecuted in His suffering 
 Church 1^ ; it was to Jesus that St. Paul had surrendered his 
 moral liberty ^ ; it was from Jesus that he had received specific 
 orders to go into Damascus ^ \ Jesus had commissioned him to 
 be a minister and witness both of what he had seen, and of the 
 truths which were yet to be disclosed to him ^ ; it was by 
 Jesus that he was sent both to Jews and Gentiles, 'to open 
 their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from 
 the power of Satan unto God, that,' continued the Heavenly 
 Speaker, ' they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance 
 among them which are sanctified by faith that is in Me d^.' It 
 was Jesus Who had appeared to St. Paul when he was in an 
 ecstasy in the Temple, had bidden him leave Jerusalem suddenly, 
 and had sent him to the Gentiles". The revelation of Jesus had 
 been emphatically the turning-point of the Apostle's life ; it had 
 first determined the direction and had then quickened the 
 intensity of his action. He could plead with truth before Agrippa 
 that he had not been disobedient unto the heavenly vision «. 
 But who can fail to see that the Lord Who in His glorified 
 Manhood thus speaks to His servant from the skies, and Who 
 is withal revealed to him in the very centre of his soul p, is no 
 
 ' Acts XX. 35 : \xvt]\xoviv^iv re tZv \6ycap rod Kvplov 'Ir}(rovy on avros eiTre' 
 ^MaKOipidv 4(TTi fxaWov Sidovai ^ Xaix^dvuv^ 
 
 g Ibid. xxii. 7 ; xxvi. 14. ^ Ibid. xxii. 8 : xxvi. 15. ^ Ibid. xxii. 10. 
 
 k Ibid. 1 Ibid. xxvi. 16. ™ Ibid. vers. 17,^ 18. 
 
 n Ibid. xxii. 1 7 : iyevcro Trpotreyxo/xeVou fiov eV tcU Upq}, y^veaQai 
 
 fxe eV iKCTToia-ei, koI i5e7v avrhv Xeyourd fioi, ^-rriva-ov koI e|€A06 tV rdx^i i^ 
 'lepoucaArj/x. Ibid. ver. 2 1 : els eOvt] fxaKpav i^a-rrocrreXco ae. 
 
 o Ibid. xxvi. 19: ovK eyev6^f]v aweidTjs rfj ovpavicp owracric^. 
 
 P Gal. i. 15, 16 : ivd6KT}(Tev 6 Qehs .... airoicaKv^pai rhv Tlbv avrov iv efxoL 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
S^, Paid teaches Christ's Deity i7np licit ly, 327 
 
 created being, is neither saint nor seraph, but in very truth, the 
 Master of consciences, the Monarch Who penetrates, inhabits, 
 and rules the secret life of spirits, the King Who claims the 
 fealty and Who orders the ways of men ] 
 
 St. Paul's popular teaching then is emphatically a * preaching 
 of Jesus Christ^.' Our Lord is always the Apostle's theme ; 
 but the degree in which His Divine glory is unveiled varies with 
 the capacities of the Jewish or heathen listeners for bearing the 
 great discovery. The doctrine is distributed, if we may so speak, 
 in a like varying manner over the whole text of St. Paul's 
 Epistles. It lies in those greetings ^^ by which the Apostle 
 associates Jesus Christ with God the Father, as being the source 
 no less than the channel of the highest spiritual blessings. It is 
 pointedly asserted when the Galatians are warned that St. Paul 
 is ^ an Apostle not from men nor by man, hut by Jesus Christ 
 and God the Father ^.' It is implied in the benedictions which 
 the Apostle pronounces in the Name of Christ without naming 
 the Name of God ^. It underlies those early apostolical hymns, 
 sung, as it would seem, in the Redeemer's honour ^ ; it justifies 
 
 ^ Acts ix. 20 ; xvii. 3, i8 ; xxviii. 31 : ^iMckccv rh Treplrov Kvpiov 'Irjaov. 
 Cf. Ibid. V. 42 ; 2 Cor. iv. 5. 
 
 ^ Rom. i. 7 : x^P*^ ^/^'^ '^«^ up^vrj anh OeoO Uarphs rificov koI Kvpiov ^Itjaov 
 Xpiarov. I Cor. i. 3 ; 2 Cor. i. 2 ; Gal. i. 3 ; Eph. i. 2 ; Phil. i. 2 ; Col. i. 
 2 ; I Thess. i. l ; 2 Thess. i. 2 ; Philemon 3. In i Tim. i. 2 ; 2 Tim. i. 2 ; 
 Tit. i. 4, eAeos is inserted between xap*^ and elpiji/T], probably because the 
 clergy, on account of their great responsibilities, need the pitying mercy of 
 God more than Christian laymen. 
 
 8 Gal. i. I : ovk ciTr' dvOpdiruv ovBe di avdpdoirov, aWa 5ia ^lr](rov XpicTTOv 
 Koi &€ov HaTpds. 
 
 * Rom. xvi. 20, 24 : r] X^P^^ "^ov Kvpiov rjfxZu 'Ir^troO Xpiarrov /uera iravroov 
 vfJiSov. I Cor. xvi. 23 : 2 Cor. xiii. 13. In Gal. vi. 18, fxera rod Trpev/aaTos 
 vfxcav, Phil. iv. 23 ; i Thess. v. 28. 2 Thess. ii. 16: avTos Se b Kvpios rjfiuv 
 *l7]aovs XpitrrhSj koI 6 &ehs Kal Tlar^p rifiuv, 6 ayaTv-fja'as tj/jlcis kuI dovs irapd- 
 K\7]<nv alooviai/ Kal iXiriSa ayad}}i/ iv xaptrz, TrapaKaKeaai vficcv tcls /copSias, Kal 
 (TTTjpi^ai vfxas ip iravrl xSycp koI epycf aya6<p. 
 
 » Such are i Tim. i. 15, from a hymn on redemption. 
 Xpiarhs *l7)(rovs 
 ^Kdev els rov Koa-fiov 
 ajxapTcoXohs awaai. 
 And Ibid. iii. 16, from a hymn on our Lord's Incarnation and triumph. 
 i<pav€pd)Qi] iv crapKi, 
 idiKaidodr] iv irvev^iari, 
 &<pQ7] ayyiXoiSi 
 iKTjpvxOr} iv edvecTiv, 
 iTTia-Tevdr] iv K6(rfi(py 
 aveKijcbdTj iv Bd^rj. 
 VI] 
 
328 Implied Chris to logy of the Epistles 
 
 the thanksgivings and doxologies poured forth to His praise^. 
 It alone can explain the application of passages, which are used 
 in the Old Testament of the Lord Jehovah, to the Person of 
 Jesus Christ y ; such an application would have been impossible 
 unless St. Paul had renounced his belief in the authority and 
 sacred character of the Hebrew Scriptures, or had explicitly 
 recognised the truth that Jesus Christ was Jehovah Himself 
 visiting and redeeming His people. 
 
 Mark too how the truth before us enters into the leading 
 topics of St. Paul's great Epistles ; how it is presupposed even 
 where it is not asserted in terms. Does that picture of the 
 future Judge Whose Second Coming is again and again brought 
 before us in the Epistles to the Thessalonians befit one who is 
 not Divine z ? Is it possible that the Justifier of humanity in 
 the Epistles to the Komans and the Galatians can be only a 
 human martyr after all % Why then is the effect of His Death so 
 distinct in kind from any which has followed upon the martyr- 
 dom of His servants ^ % How comes it that by dying He has 
 
 And 2 Tim. ii. 11-13, from a hymn on the glories of martyrdom, 
 et crvvaTTcddj/ofiey, Koi avC'fl(Topi€V 
 
 €t apvovjjLcdat KaKe^vos apvi](TeTai rj/xas* 
 el airi(rTovfi€Vf iKelvos Tncrhs fiivw 
 apvfjoraarOai kavr6v oh dvi/arai. 
 And Tit. ill. 4-7, from a hymn on the way of salvation; cf. Keble's Sermons 
 Acad, and Occ, p. 182. 
 
 3t€ Se 7} ■xp'no'TSTTjS Koi 7] <f)i\av9pci}iria cTre^aj/Tj rod 'Xcorrjpos rifiuy ©EOT, 
 ovK e| epycov rcav iv diKaioa-vfy wv ^Trovqaafx^v ^jUeZs, 
 ctA-Aa Kara rbv avrov eAeov, eacaa-ev Tj/jLas, 
 dih. \ovTpov TraXiYyevea-las, Kot avaKaivcoareoDS IINEYMATOS 'AnOY, 
 ov i^€X€€v i(p' r]fJLas rrXovaloos, 5ta 'IH20Y XPI^TOT rod ^(aTrjpos Tjfxwi^f 
 %va 5iicaia>6€VTes r-p eKclvov xapiTi, 
 K\ripov6fioi yevdofieda Kar* cATrtSa C^rjs alcoviov. 
 Although in Tit. iii. 4 ':Za}T7Jpo5 Qeov refers to the Father, it is Jesus Christ 
 our Saviour through Whom He has given the Spirit and the sacraments, the 
 grace of justification, and an inheritance of eternal life. Jesus is the more 
 prominent Subject of the hymn. Compare the fragment of a hymn on 
 penitence, based on Isa. Ix. i, and quoted in Eph. v. 14. 
 eycipai 6 Kadevdcop 
 Ka\ avda-ra 4k tuu vcKpuv, 
 KoX iin(f)av(r€i ffoi 6 "KpiffrSs. 
 ^ Rom. ix. 5 ; and perhaps xvi. 27, see 01s. in loc; I Tim. i. 12 : x^P^v excy 
 Tw ivdwa/jidxTauTi fie XpicTTw 'Itjctov r^ Kvpici) rjfxSov k.t.X. 
 
 y e.g. Joel ii. 32 in Rom. x. 13 ; Jer. ix. 23, 24 in i Cor. i. 31, etc. 
 ^ I Thess. iv. 16, 17 ; 2 Thess. i. 7, 8 ; ii. 8. 
 
 a Rom. iii. 25, 26 ; Gal. ii. 16, etc. St. Paul's argument in Gal. iii. 20 
 implies our Lord's Divinity ; since, if Christ is merely human, He would be 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
to the Thessalonians and the Romans, 329 
 
 acliieved that restoration of the rightful relations of man's being 
 towards God and moral truth b, which the law of nature and 
 the Law of Sinai had alike failed to secure % Does not the whole 
 representation of the Second Adam in the Epistle to the Eomans 
 and in the first Epistle to the Corinthians point to a dignity 
 more than human % Can He, Who is not merely a living soul, 
 but a quickening Spirit ; from Whom life radiates throughout 
 renewed humanity ; from Whom there flows a stream of grace 
 more abundant than the inheritance of sin which was bequeathed 
 by our fallen parent, — can He be, in His Apostle's mind, merely 
 one of the race which He thus blesses and saves % And if Jesus 
 Christ be more than man, is it possible to suggest any interme- 
 diate position between humanity and the throne of God, which 
 St. Paul, with his earnest belief in the God of Israel, could have 
 believed Him to occupy ? 
 
 In the Epistles to the Corinthians St. Paul is not especially 
 maintaining any one great truth of revelation ; he is entering 
 with practical versatility into the varied active life and pressing 
 wants of a local Church. Yet tliese Epistles might alone suffice 
 to shew the high and unrivalled honour, paid to Jesus Christ in 
 the Apostle's heart and thought. Is the Apostle contrasting his 
 preaching with the philosophy of the Greek and the hopes of 
 the Jewish world around him] Jesus crucified c is his central 
 subject ; Jesus crucified is his whole philosophy ^ Is he pre- 
 scribing the law of apostolic labours in building up souls or 
 Churches % ' Other foundation can no man lay' than * Jesus 
 Christ ^.' Is he unfolding the nature of the Church % It is not 
 a self-organized multitude of religionists who agree in certain 
 tenets, but ' the Body of Christ ^.' Is he arguing against sins 
 of impurity % Christians have only to remember that they are 
 members of Christ &. Is he deepening a sense of the glory and 
 
 a mediator in the same sense in which Moses was a mediator. Of the two 
 parties, God and Israel, the fiea-iT-qs of the Law could properly represent 
 Israel alone.. The fieairris of i Tim. ii. 5 is altogether higher. 
 
 ^ hLKaiocrvvf). 
 
 c I Cor. i. 23, 24: 7]^iis Se Kif)pv(T(TOfi^v Xpicrhv iffTavpufxivov .... 0€oi; 
 ^vrafJLiv Koi Qeov (To(j>iav. 
 
 ** Ibid. ii. 2 : ov yap €Kpiva rod eldevai ri iv v/x7y, el /x^ 'Irjcrovu Xpia-rhj/, 
 Kot TovTOV e<TTavp(aix4vov. 
 
 ® Ibid. iii. 1 1 : dsfifkiov yap &XXov ovdeh ^vvarai Oiivai Traph rov Keifievov, 
 (is icrriv 'IrjrroOs 6 XpidrSs. Isa. xxviii. 16; Eph. ii. 20. 
 
 ^ I Cor. xii. 27 : v/ieTs Se etrre aoofxa XpiffTov Ka\ fieXr] e/c /u^povs. Thus he 
 even identifies the Church with Christ. Ibid. ver. 12 : KaOdirep yhp rh aujia 
 cV icTTi, Ka\ IJ,4\7] ex^t iroXKa .... ovtu Ka\ 6 Xpitrrds. 
 
 ^ Ibid, vi. 15 : ovk OiSare on to. adofjiara v^iwv fieXr) Xpiarov iaTiif'j 
 VI] 
 
330 Implied Christology of the Epistles 
 
 of the responsibility of being a Christian % Christians are re- 
 minded that Jesus Christ is in them except they be reprobates ^. 
 Is he excommunicating or reconciling a flagrant offender against 
 natural law ] He delivers to Satan in the Name of Christ ; he 
 absolves in the Person of Christ i. Is he rebuking irreverence 
 towards the Holy Eucharist % The broken bread, and the cup of 
 blessing are not picturesque symbols of an absent Teacher, but 
 veils of a gracious yet awful Presence ; the irreverent receiver is 
 guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord Which he does not 
 * discern k.' Is he pointing to the source of the soul's birth 
 and growth in the life of light % It is the ' illumination of the 
 Gospel of the Glory of Christ, Who is the Image of God;' 
 it is the illumination of the knowledge of the glory of God 
 in the Person of Jesus Christ^.' Is he describing the spirit 
 of the Christian life ? It is perpetual self-mortification for the 
 love of Jesus, that the moral life of Jesus may be manifested 
 to the world in our frail human nature^. Is he sketching 
 out the intellectual aim of his ministry? Every thought is 
 to be brought as a captive into submission to Christ ". Is he 
 unveiling the motive which sustained him in his manifold suf- 
 ferings % All was undergone for Christ o. Is he suffering from 
 a severe bodily or spiritual affliction % Thrice he prays to Jesus 
 Christ for relief. And when he is told that the trial will not be 
 removed, since in possessing Christ's grace he has all that he 
 
 *» 2 Cor. xiii. 5 : ^ ovk kTriyij/doaKeT€ iavrohs, Srt 'Irjcrovs Xpiarhs iv v/mj/ 
 iff r IV ; €i fiii ri adSKiixoi icrre, 
 
 * I Cor. V. 4, 5 : it/ rep ovSixari rov Kvplov rjfiuv ^Irjaov, .... ffvv ry 
 Svvdfjici Tuv Kvpiov tj/jluu 'Irjcrov XpiffTov irapa^ovuai rov tolovtov t<^ 'Xarav^. 
 2 Cor. ii. 10 : Kal yap iyib ef n Kexoip^ciJ-at, V K^xcipiffixai, Si vfJLciSf iv Trpoadoncj} 
 XpiffTov, 'iva fJL^ Tr\eov€KTT}6cti]j.€i/ virh rov Sarai/a. 
 
 ^ Ibid. X. 1 6 : rh irorripiov ttjs €v\oyias t €v\oyovfi€i/f ovx^i Koivoovla rov 
 aLfxaros rov Xpiffrov iari ; rhp &prov %v K\a>fieu, ovx) Koivcovia rov ffca/naros 
 rov Xpicrrov iari; Ibid. xi. 27 : ^s h.p iaOir) rov &pTov rovTov ^ irivri rh ttottj- 
 piov rov Kvpiov ava^iccSf evoxos earai rov adofxaros koX aiixaros rov Kvpiov. 
 Ibid. ver. 29 : 6 yap iaOloov /cat trivuv avarices, Kpifia eavr^ iff diet koX Triveiy fi^ 
 SiaKpivcov rh ffufia rov Kvpiov. 
 
 1 2 Cor. iv. 4. The god of this world has blinded the thoughts of the 
 unbelievers, ets to /x^ avydaai avrots rhv (pcorifffihv rod cvayyeXiov r^s 5o|rjs 
 rov Xpiffrov, '6s iariv eiKcav rod Qeov. On the other hand, God, Who bade 
 light shine out of darkness, has shined in the hearts of believing Christians, 
 vphs <p(arifffiov rr^s yvwffeoos rrjs d6^rjs rov ©eoD iv irpoffctiircp 'irjffov Xpiffrov 
 (ver. 6). 
 
 ™ Ibid. ver. 10: tva Koi fj (co^ rov 'Irjffov iv r$ ffdifxari tj/jluv <pav€pco6fj. 
 
 ° Ibid. X. 5 : alxiJ'O.\0i}ri^ovr€s irav v6ri(xa els r)]v vrraKo^v rod Xpiffrov, 
 
 ° Ibid. xii. 10: evdoKM iv affOeveiais, iv ii^piffiv, iv avdyKaiSf iv Sicoy^oTs, 
 iv ffrevox<*}pla.is VTrep Xpiffrov, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
to the Corinthians, 331 
 
 needs, he rejoices in the infirmity against which he had prayed, 
 ' that the power of Christ may tabernacle upon him P.' Would 
 he summarize the relations of the Christian to Christ % To Christ 
 he owes his mental philosophy, his justification before God, his 
 progressive growth in holiness, his redemption from sin and 
 death Q. Would he mark the happiness of instruction in that 
 * hidden philosophy' which was taught in the Church among the 
 perfect, and which was unknown to the rulers of the non- Chris- 
 tian world ] It might have saved them from crucifying the Lord 
 of Glory r. Would he lay down an absolute criterion of moral 
 ruin % ' If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be 
 Anathema Maran-atha s.' Would he impart an apostolical bene- 
 diction % In one Epistle he blesses his readers in the Name of 
 Christ alone*; in the other he names the Three Blessed Persons: 
 but ' the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ' is mentioned, not only 
 before ' the fellowship of the Holy Ghost,' but even before ' the 
 love of God 11.' 
 
 Here are texts, selected almost at random from those two 
 among the longer Epistles of St. Paul, which are most entirely 
 without the form and method of a doctrinal treatise, dealing 
 as they do with the varied contemporary interests and contro- 
 versies of a particular Church. Certainly some of these texts, 
 taken alone, do not assert the Divinity of Jesus Christ. But 
 put them together ; add, as you might add, to their number ; 
 and consider whether the whole body of language before you, 
 however you interpret it, does not imply that Christ held 
 a place in the thought, affections, and teaching of St. Paul, 
 higher than that which a sincere Theist would assign to any 
 creature, and, if Christ be only a creature, obviously inconsistent 
 with the supreme and exacting rights of God. In these Epistles, 
 it is not the teaching, but the Person and work of Jesus Christ, 
 upon which St. Paul's eye appears to rest. Christ Himself is, in 
 St. Paul's mind, the Gospel of Christ ; and if Christ be not God, 
 St. Paul cannot be acquitted of assigning to Him generally a 
 
 P 2 Cor. xii. 7-9 : iZSOt] fioi (TkSXo^ rfj crapKl .... vivlp tovtov rpU rhv 
 KvpLov TrapeKctAecra, 'iva aTroo-rfj ott' ifxov' koI e'lpr^Ke fj-oi, ' 'Ap/cet (Toi r) x^P*^ 
 fxov 7} yap dvi/afMis fiov iv dcrdeyeia TeKcLovTai.' ridiara ovv fxaWop Kavx^orofxai 
 iv TcCis acrdei/eiais fiov, 'iva i-nKTK-nvdxTr) i-n ifxh t} dvpafiis rod Xpiarov. 
 
 1 I Cor. i. 30 : ts iyepridT} tjimp ao(pia airh QeuVj biKaioavvr] re koI ayiaffixhs 
 Ka\ aivoXvrpuxns. 
 
 "" Ibid. ii. 8 : ei yap tyvtaaav, ovk "hv rhv Kvpiop rris d6^r}s ^cnavpcaaav, 
 
 s Ibid. xvi. 22 : €)f rty oh </)tA6? rhv Kvpioy ^Irjcrovv Xpiarhv, ^t« avdOe^a, 
 ^lapav add. * Ibid. ver. 23. ° 2 Cor. xiii. 13. 
 
 TI] 
 
S3^ Implied Chris to logy of the Epistles 
 
 prominence which is inconsistent with serious loyalty to mono- 
 theistic truth. 
 
 Still more remarkably do the Epistles of the First Imprison- 
 ment present us with a picture of our Lord's Work and Person 
 which absolutely presupposes, even where it does not in terms 
 assert, the doctrine of His Divinity. The Epistles to the Ephe- 
 sians and the Colossians are even more intimately related to 
 each other than are those to the Komans and the Galatians. They 
 deal with the same lines of truth ; they differ only in method 
 of treatment. That to the Ephesians is devotional and expository ; 
 that to the Colossians is polemical. In the Colossians the dignity 
 of Christ's Person is put forward most explicitly as against the 
 speculations of a Judaizing theosophy which degraded Christ 
 to the rank of an archangel ^ and which recommended, as a 
 substitute for Christ's redemptive work, ascetic observances, 
 grounded on a trust in the cleansing and hallowing properties 
 and powers of nature y. In the Epistle to the Ephesians our 
 Lord's Personal dignity is asserted more indirectly. It is 
 implied in His reconciliation of Jews and heathens to each 
 other and to God, and still more in His relationship to the pre- 
 destination of the saints z. In both Epistles we encounter two 
 prominent lines of thought, each, in a high degree, pointing to 
 Christ's Divine dignity. The first, the absolute character of 
 the Christian faith as contrasted with the relative character of 
 
 » Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 274: 'Die im Colosserbrief gemeinten Engels- 
 verehrer setzten ohne Zweifel Christus selbst in die Classe der Engel, als 
 %va. tQ}v a.pxo!.yy^\a>v, wie diess Epiphanius als einen Lehrsatz der Ebioniten 
 angibt, wogegen der Colosserbrief mit allem Nachdruck auf ein solches KpareTv 
 T^v Kf<pa\^v dringt, dass alles, was nicht das Haupt selhst ist, nur in einem 
 absoluten AhkdngigJceits-verhdltniss zu Ihm stehend gedacht wird, ii. 19.' 
 
 y Ibid. *Eine Lehre, welche den Menschen in religioser Hinsicht von 
 seinem natiirlichen biirgerlichen Sein, von der raateriellen Natur abhangig 
 machte, und sein religioses Heil durch die reinigende und heiligende Kraft, 
 die man den Elementen und Substanzen der Welt zuschrieb, den Einfluss 
 der Himmels-corper, das natiirlich Reine im Unterschied von dem fiir unrein 
 Gehaltenen vermittelt werden liess, setzte die o'TOLXf7a rov Koaixov an dieselbe 
 Stelle, welche nur Christus als Erloser haben sollte. In diesem Sinne werden 
 V. 8 die aroix^la rov kSo-julov und Christus einander gegeniibergestellt. Das 
 ist die Philosophic in dem Sinne in welchem das Wesen der Philosophic als 
 Weltweisheit bezeichnet wird, als die Wissenschaft, die es mit den (rroix^Ta 
 rod KScTfiov zu thun hat. Als solche ist sie auch nur eine k€v^ aTrdrr], eine 
 blosse irapd^oa-is rtbi/ avOpcairoov/ 
 
 ' Ibid. p. 270 : • Der transcendenten Christologie dieser Briefe und ihrer 
 darauf beruhenden Anschauung von dem alles umfassenden und iiber alles 
 ubergreifenden Charakter des Christenthums ist es ganz gemass, dass sie in 
 der Lehre von der Beseligung der Menschen auf eine uberzeitliche Vorher- 
 bestimmung zuriickgehen, Eph. i. 4, f.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
of the First Imprisonment, 333 
 
 heathenism and Judaism a j the second, the re-creative power 
 of the grace of Christ b. In both Epistles the Church is con- 
 sidered as a vast spiritual society « which, besides embracing as 
 its heritage all races of the world, pierces the veil of the unseen, 
 and includes the families of heaven ^ in its majestic compass. 
 Of this society Christ is the Head e, and it is ' His Body, the 
 fulness of Him That filleth all in all.' Christ is the predestined 
 point of unity in which earth and heaven, Jew and Gentile, 
 ^ meet and are one f. Christ's Death is the triumph of peace in 
 the spiritual world. Peace with God is secured through the 
 taking away of the law of condemnation by the dying Christ, 
 Who nails it to His Cross and openly triumphs over the powers 
 of darkness g. Peace among men is secured, because the Cross 
 is the centre of the regenerated world, as of the moral universe ^. 
 Divided races, religions, nationalities, classes, meet beneath the 
 Cross ; they embrace as brethren ; they are fused into one vast 
 society which is held together by an Indwelling Presence, re- 
 flected in the general sense of boundless indebtedness to a 
 transcendent Lovei. Hence in these Epistles such marked 
 
 a Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 273 : * So ist . . . auch die absolute Erhabenheit 
 des Christenthums liber Judenthum und Heidenthum ausgesprochen. Beide 
 verhalten sich gleich negativ (but by no means in the same degree) zum Chris- 
 tenthum, das ihnen gegeniiber b 'K6'yos ttjs aX-nOeias ist Eph. i. 13, oder (pus 
 im Gegensatz von (tk6tos (v. 8). Die Juden und die Heiden waren wegen der 
 allgemeinen Siiudhaftigkeit dem gottlichen Zorn verfallen, Eph. ii. 3. Der 
 religiose Charakter des Heidenthums wird noch besonders dadurch bezeichnet, 
 dass die Heiden 6.d€oi 4v T(f koct/jl^ sind (ii. 12), iaKOTcofievoi rfj Siavoia ovres 
 (iv. 18), aTTTjWorpicoixivoi ttjs ^corjs tov ©eov ^la t)}v 6,yyoiav t^v ovaav it/ 
 avTOis (iv. 18), -Trepiirarovures Karci rbv alcova tov k6(Tijlov tovtov Kara rhu 
 &pX0VTa TTJs i^ovarias tov aepos (ii. 2). Beiden Religionen gegeniiber ist das 
 Christenthum die absolute Religion. Der absolute Charakter des Christen' 
 thums selhst aher ist bedingt durch die Person Christi.* 
 
 b Col. iii. q; Eph. iv. 21 sqq. ; cf. Ibid. ii. 8-10. Baur, Vorlesungen, 
 p. 270 : ' Die Gnade ist das den Menschen durch den Glauben an Christus 
 neu schafFende Princip. Etwas Neues muss namlich der Mensch durch 
 das Christenthum werden.' 
 
 c Col. i. 5, 6 : TOV evayyekiov, tov irapSvTos els v/jlus, KaOcbi koI iv -KavTl 
 T^ K6(Tfx(t>, KoX eflTTt Kapiro(popovjjt.€voy. Eph. i. 13. ^ Eph. iii. 15. 
 
 « Eph. i. 22, 23 : aiiThp eScofce K€(f)a\^i/ virhp ircivTa tt} iKKhrjaia, t^tis icTl 
 TO GUJjxa. auToG, t^ TrA-^pco/za tov irdvTa iv irao'L Tr\7]povixivov. v. 30. 
 
 f Ibid. ver. 10 : avaKecpaXaicaaaaOai to. iruvTa iv t^ XpiffTW, to, T6 iv to7s 
 ovpavo7s KOI TO. i^rl ttjs yijs' iv avTc^^ iv ^ koL iKKrjpwdrjfJLev. 
 
 g Col. ii. 14, 15. 
 
 ^ Col. i. 20, 21: 8t* avTov airoKaTaWd^ai to, irdvTa els avThVf elprjuoTroL-fjcras 
 dih. TOV aLfiaTos tov (TTavpov avTov, di avTov, etre to. inX t^s 77)^, e^re Tct iv 
 To7s ovpavols. 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. 1 1 : ovk %vi "EAAryv /cat 'loySatos, irepiToix^ Koi dKpo^vcTTLa, ^dp- 
 $apos, ^Kvd7\Sj dov\os, i\evd€pos' aWa t^ rrdvTa koI iv iraai Xpi(TT6s. Ob- 
 
334 Implied Christology of the Epistles 
 
 emphasis is laid upon the unity of the Body of Christ k j since 
 the reunion of moral beings shews forth Christ's Personal Glory. 
 Christ is the Unifier. As Christ in His Passion is the Combiner 
 and Reconciler of all things in earth and heaven \ so He ascends 
 to heaven, He descends to hell on His errand of reconciliation 
 and combination \ He institutes the hierarchy of the Church "^ ; 
 He is the Eoot from which her life springs, the Foundation on 
 which her superstructure rests "^ ; He is the quickening, organ- 
 izing, Catholicizing Principle within her o. The closest of natural 
 ties is the chosen symbol of His relation to her; she is His 
 bride. For her, in His love, He gave Himself to death, that 
 He might sanctify her by the cleansing virtue of His baptism, 
 and might so present her to Himself, her Lord, — blameless, 
 
 serve the moral inferences in vers. 12-14, the measure of charity being 
 ica0cbs Kol b XpKTThs e'xapiVaTo vfuv. Especially Jews and Gentiles are re- 
 conciled beneath the Cross, because the Cross cancelled the obligatoriness of 
 the ceremonial law. Eph. ii. 14-17 : avrhs ydp ia-riv ^ ciprjvTi tjijlmv, 6 TroLrjo-as 
 Ttt aiuLipoTfpa €Vf Kol rh jxeaSroixov rov (ppayfxov \v(ras, r^v ex^pav iv rrj aapKl 
 avTov, rhv v6(xov twv 4vto\wv 4v Bdyfiacri, Karapy-fja-as' 'Iva rovs ^vo Kriar) iv 
 eauT^J €ts €va Kaivhv tSLvQponroVy rroiSiv eipijUTjif, Ka\ airoKaTaWd^r] rovs a.fx<poT4povs 
 iv €v\ (TufxaTi rw 06^ Zih jov (rravpov, airoKreivas r)]v ex^pctv ip avrq:. 
 
 k Baur, Christenthum, p. 119: 'Die Einheit ist das eigentliche Wesen der 
 Kirche, diese Einheit ist mit alien zu ihr gehorenden Momenten durch das 
 Christenthum gegeben, es ist Ein Leib, Ein Geist, Ein Herr, Ein Glaube, Eine 
 Taufe u. s. w. Eph. iv. 4, f. . . . . Von diesem Punkte aus steigt die Anschauung 
 hoher hinauf, bis dahin, wo der Grund aller Einheit liegt. Die einigende, 
 eine allgemeine Gemeinschaft stiftende Kraft des Todes Christi lasst sich nur 
 daraus begreifen, dass Christas ilherhaupt der alles tragende und zusam- 
 
 menhaltende Centralpunkte des ganzen Universums ist Die Christologie 
 
 der Beiden Briefe hangt aufs Innigste zusammen mit dem in der unmittel- 
 baren Gegenwart gegebenen Bediirfniss der Einigung in der Idee der Einen, 
 alle Unterschiede und Gegensatze in sich aufhebenden Kirche. Es ist, wenn 
 wir uns in die Anschauungsweise dieser Briefe hineinversetzen, schon ein 
 acht katholisches Bewusstsein das sich in ihnen ausspricht/ This may be 
 fully admitted without accepting Baur's conclusions 'as to the date and 
 authorship 'of the two Epistles. 
 
 1 Eph. iv. 10 : b Karafias, avrSs icrri Kal b avajS^s virepdvoo Trdvrwv roov 
 ovpavusv, Xva irKiipdoa-r) ra irdura. 
 
 ™ Ibid. vers. 11-13 : ical avrhs eSooKC rovs jxev cnroffroXovs, rovs Se irpo- 
 (p-firaSf rohs Se €vayy€\i(rTas, rovs Se iroifieuas koI SiSacr/caAouy. -rrphs rhv 
 KaraprLcrpibv rS>v ayloov, els epyov SiaKOviaSf eis olKoZofX7]V rov o-d>fxaros rov 
 XpiCTov* fJ'^XP'' Karavriiaasfxev 01 irdvres els r^v kv6T7]ra rris iriareoos Kal 
 rrjs eTriyvua-eois rov Tlov rov ©eov, ets 6.udpa r4\€Lov, els fxirpov 7]KiKLas rov 
 irkrjpdiJLaros rov Xpi(Trov. 
 
 ^ Col. ii. 7 : ippi^co/xivoi Koi iiroiKo'^opLOVfxevoi iv avru. 
 
 o Eph. iv. 15, 16 : b Xpiaros, e| ov irav rh (xCjixa (rvvapjixoXoyovfievov Kal 
 avfi^i^aCSficvov dia irdo-qs aipTJs rrjs iivixopy]y(oLS, Kar ivepyeiav iv fxirpcp 
 kvhs cKdarov fxfpovs, r^v av^r](nv rod (Tca^aros -noiurai els olKodo/x'^v eavrov 
 iv aydTT-p. Col. ii. 19* 
 
 [lect. 
 
of the First Imprisonment, 335 
 
 immaculate, glorious p. And thus He is the Standard of per- 
 fection with which she must struggle to correspond. Her mem- 
 bers must grow up unto Him in all things. Accordingly, not 
 to mention the great passage, already referred to, in the Epistle 
 to the Colossians, Jesus Christ is said in that Epistle to possess 
 the intellectual as well as the other attributes of Deity <i. In 
 the allusions to the Three Most Holy Persons, which so remark- 
 ably underlie the structure and surface-thought of the Epistle 
 to the Ephesians, Jesus Christ is associated most significantly 
 with the Father and the Spirit r. He is the Invisible King, 
 Whose slaves Christians are, and Whose Will is to be obeyed s. 
 The kingdom of God is His kingdom t ; the Church is subject 
 to Him ^. He is the Object of Christian study, and of Christian 
 hope^. In the Epistle to the Philippians it is expressly said 
 that all created beings in heaven, on earth, and in hell, when 
 His triumph is complete, shall acknowledge the majesty even of 
 His Human Nature y. The preaching of the Gospel is described 
 as the preaching Christ z. Death is a blessing for the Christian, 
 since by death he gains the eternal presence of Christ a. The 
 Philippians are specially privileged in being permitted, not 
 merely to believe on Christ, but to suffer for Him t>. The Apostle 
 
 P Eph. V. 25-27 : 6 Xpiarhs rjydTrrjo-e rrjv iKKXyjcrlau, Koi eavrhu irapiZooK^v 
 virep avrrjs' %va avr^v ayidcrr), Kadapiaas rw Kovrpc^ rod vdaros eV p^fiari^ *lva 
 7rapa(TT7}(Tr) avr^v eavr^ 6i/5o|ov, t^v iKKArjciai/f /x^ exovcrai/ (TiriKov ^ ftvri^a 
 ¥1 Tt roov Toiovrui/, dAA.' 'iua ^ ayia kol ^.fxcoixos, 
 
 1 Col. ii. 3 : 61/ (^ elal Trdvres ot dTjo-avpol ttjs aocfylas koI ttjs yvdxTsus 
 airSKpvcpoi. Ibid. i. 19, ii. 9. 
 
 ^ Eph. i. 3 : IlaT^p rov Kvpiov. Ibid. ver. 6: 4v t^ rjyairrnJL&Cf}. Ibid, 
 ver. 13 : i(r(ppayl(rdT]Te tw UvcvfxaTi. Ibid. ii. 18 : St' avrov exo/J-ev t^u irpoir- 
 aycoyrjv ol afKpdrepoi iu evl nueufiaTi irphs rhu Yldrepa. Ibid. iii. 6 : (rvy- 
 KK7)p6voixa, KdX avaaco/uLa, Koi arv/xfieToxa, where the Father Whose heirs we 
 are, the Son of Whose Body we are members, the Spirit of Whose gifts we 
 partake, seem to be glanced at by the adjectives denoting our relationship 
 to the Srrayy€\ia. Cf. Ibid. iii. 14-17. 
 
 8 Ibid. vi. 6 : fi^ ko/t' o<pda\yi.oZovKiiav us apSpooirdpetTKOij dAA' cos dovKoi 
 
 TOV XpiffTOV. 
 
 ' Ibid. V. 5 : iu rfj ^acriX^la, rov Xpiarov kol ©eoO. Col. i. 13 : r^v ^a- 
 criKiiav rov tiov rris dydirrjs avrov. 
 
 " Eph. V. 24 : 7] iKK\7}(T{a vTrorda'a'erai r^ Xpiffr^. 
 
 * Ibid. iv. 20; 1. 12. 
 
 y Phil. ii. 10: 'Iua kv rw ovSfiari *l7)(Tov ttSi/ y6vv Kd/j.\l/r) iirovpavloov Ka\ 
 iTTiyelcov koI Karax^ovioov. Cf. St. Cyril Alex. Thes. p. 128, 
 
 ^ Ibid. i. 16: rhv Xpiarhv KarayyeKKovaiv. Ibid. ver. 18: Xpio'rhs Karay- 
 yeWerai. 
 
 * Ibid. ver. 23 : iiriOvfiiav exaov els rh avaXvtrai, Kal (xvv Xpiarw chat, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 29 : v/mv ixap^fJ'Or} rh virep Xpitrrov, ov fi6i/oi/ rh ils avrhu irKr- 
 r€V€iv, dAA^ Kal rh virep avrov irdaxeiv. 
 VI] 
 
33^ I'^nplied Christology of the 
 
 trusts in Jesus Christ that it will be possible to send Timothy 
 to Philippic. He contrasts the selfishness of ordinary Chris- 
 tians with a disinterestedness that seeks the things (it is not 
 said of God, but) of Christ d. The Christian ^ boast' or ^ glory' 
 centres in Christ, as did the Jewish in the Law ® ; the Apostle 
 had counted all his Jewish privileges as dung that he might win 
 Christ f ; Christ strengthens him to do all things g ; Christ will 
 one day change this body of our humiliation, that it may become 
 of like form with the Body of His glory, according to the energy 
 of His ability even to subdue all things unto Himself l^. In this 
 Epistle, as in those to the Corinthians, the Apostle is far from 
 pursuing any one line of doctrinal statement : moral exhor- 
 tations, interspersed with allusions to persons and matters of 
 interest to himself and to the Philippians, constitute the staple 
 of his letter. And yet how constant are the references to Jesus 
 Christ, and how inconsistent are they, taken as a whole, with 
 any conception of His Person which denies His Divinity ! 
 
 The Pastoral Epistles are distinguished, not merely by the 
 specific directions which they contain respecting the Christian 
 hierarchy and religious societies in the apostolical Church i, 
 but also and especially by the stress which they lay upon the 
 vital distinction between heresy and orthodoxy k. Each of these 
 
 ^ Phil. ii. 19 : IAtti^o) 5e kv Kvpitp 'Irjcrav, TifiSdeou rax^oos irefiipai vfuv. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ver. 21 : 01 Tcivres yap to. eavrwv Qr\Tov(TiVj oh rh rov Xpiarov 
 ^Iriaov. 
 
 ® Ibid. iii. 3 : Kavx^l^^voi kv Xpia-r^ ^Irjaov. 
 
 f Ibid. ver. 8 : St* hu t^ irdvra iCrjfiidodrjv' koX riyov/xai (TK^^oKa eJyaif 'li/a 
 Xpiffrhp Kep5^(rco, Koi evpeOw kv avrQ). 
 
 8 Ibid. iv. 13 : iravTa 1(Txvco kv r^ kv^vvafiovvri /Lte Xpicrr^. 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. 21 : hs )ueTacrx7])uaT((r€t t^ trw/xa Tr)s Taireivdcaecos 7)fxZv, els rh 
 yeveadai avrh av/iifiopcpov rw (rdofiari ttjs dS^rjs avrov, Karh t^v kvepynav rod 
 Svvaadai avrhv koI virord^at eauTw to. Trdvra. 
 
 i I Tim. iii. iv. v. ; Tit. i. 5-9 ; ii. i-io, &c. 
 
 ^ St. Paul's language implies that the true faith is to the soul what the 
 most necessary conditions of health are to the body, vyialvovaa SiSac/caAta 
 (i Tim. i. 10 ; Tit. i. 9; ii. l); so \6yos vyi^s (Tit. ii. 8), \6yoi vyiaivovres 
 (2 Tim. i. 13). Thus the orthodox teaching is styled r} Ka\^ ^idaaKaXia 
 (i Tim. iv. 6), or simply ^ Si5a(r/ca\ia (Ibid. vi. i), as though no other 
 deserved the name. Any deviation (eTepo^idaaKaXi^Vy Ibid. i. 3 ; vi. 3) is 
 self-condemned as being such. The heretic prefers his own self-chosen 
 private way to the universally-received doctrine ; he is to be cut off, after 
 two admonitions, from the communion of the Church (Tit. iii. 10) on the 
 ground that i^ecrrpaTrrai b rotovros, /cat a/jLaprdvei, S}v avroKardKpiros (Ibid.). 
 Heresy is spoken of by turns as a crime and a misfortune, Trtpl r^v iriaTiv 
 ivavdyr}(rav (i Tim. i. 19); aire-nKavr^d-qa-av ajrh Tr\s iria'Teccs (Ibid. vi. 10); 
 irepl tV a.\i)QiLav 7](n6x'n(^o.v {2 Tim. ii. 18). Deeper error is characterized 
 in severer terms, a.irocTT'iicTovTai r^y Trttrreay, Trpocrexovres irvevfiaa-i irKavois 
 
 [ LECT, 
 
Pastoral Epistles. 337 
 
 lines of teaching radiates from a most exalted conception of 
 Christ's Person, whether He is the Source of ministerial power^, 
 or the Sun and Centre-point of orthodox truth ^^i. In stating 
 the doctrine of redemption these Epistles insist strongly upon 
 its universality^. The whole world was redeemed in the inten- 
 tion of Christ, however that intention might be limited in effect 
 by the will of man. As the theories, Judaising and Gnostic, 
 which confined the benefits of Christ's redemptive work to races 
 or classes, were more or less Humanitarian in their estimate 
 of His Person ; so along with the recognition of a world- 
 embracing redemption was found the belief in a Divine Ee- 
 deemer. Accordingly in the Pastoral Epistles the Divinity 
 of our Lord is taught both in express terms o and by tacit 
 implication. His functions as the Awarder of indulgence and 
 mercy P, His living invisible Presence in the Church q. His 
 active providence over His servants, and His ready aid in 
 
 KoX SiBaaKaXlais SaifMovicDV .... KeKavTrjpiao-fJLeucov tV Idlav (rvvei^rjoriv k.t.X, 
 (l Tim. iv. t, 2); ovToi avQicTTavrai. rfj aXrjdeia, &vdpa)Troi Kar^c^yBapiiivoL rhu 
 vovvy adSKifioL Trepl r^v marLv (2 Tim. iii. 8) ; anh rris aKrjdcias r^v ajco^u 
 airoarpexpova-iv, inl Se robs fxvQovs iKrpair'fja-oi'Tai (Ibid. iv. 4). Heresy eats 
 its way into the spiritual body like a gangrene, \6y05 avriav ws ydyypaiva 
 vofji}}u e|et (Ibid. ii. 17). It is observable that throughout these Epistles 
 iria-Tis is not the subjective apprehension, but the objective body of truth ; 
 not fides qud creditur, but the Faith. And the Church is <rru\os koi c^palcofxa 
 TTJs aXrjd^ias (i Tim. iii. 15). This truth, which the Church supports, is 
 already embodied in a vrrorvTrcocns vyiaivdvTcav \6yuv (^2 Tim. i. 13). 
 
 ^ I Tim. i. 12 : Qifi^vos els SiaKOpiai/. 2 Tim. ii. 3 : (npari(ar7\s *l7](rov 
 XpiffTov. So when the young widows who have entered into the Order 
 of widows wish to marry again, this is represented as an offence against 
 Christ, with Whom they have entered into a personal engagement, Hrau 
 yap KaTa(rTpr]vid(Too(n rod Xpio-rov, yaixiiv 64\ov(Tiv, exovtrai Kpifia, '6ri t^v 
 vpcaTTiv iricrriv T)d€Tr](rav (l Tim. v. II, 1 2). 
 
 ^ I Tim. vi. 3, where moral and social truth is specially in question. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 3. Intercession is to be offered for all. rovro yap KaXhu waJ 
 airSdeKTOu evwiriov rod 'Soorrjpos tj/jlcvu &€ov, ts Trdvras avdpdoTTovs d4k€i (rcodrji/ai 
 Kal els iiviyvuffiv a\7]6€ias i\de7v. els yap ©ebs, els Ka\ fxeairris Qeov Kal 
 avdpdoiroov, dudpcoiros Xpiarhs ^Irjaovs, 6 Sovs eavrhv avrikurpov virep irdi/rwy, 
 Cf. Ibid. iv. 10; Tit. ii. 11. 
 
 ° Tit. ii. 13 : rod jxeydKov ®eov Ka\ ^wrripos rj/iiajv 'lr](Tov Xpicrrov. 
 
 P I Tim. i. 16 : hia rovro 7]\ei)Q'r)v, 'Iva iv ifiol Trpdorcp evSei^rfraL ^Irjcrovs 
 Xpiarhs r^u iraarav fiaKpoOvfiiav, Cf. ver. 13. Compare the intercession for 
 the (apparently) deceased Onesiphorus : dcf-q avrcp 6 Kvpios evpe7v eXeos irapa 
 Kvpiov eu eKeivrj rrj rj/jLepa (2 Tim. i. 18) ; where the second Kvpios also must 
 be Jesus Christ the Judge, at Whose Hands St. Paul himself expects to 
 receive the crown of righteousness (Ibid. iv. 8). 
 
 ^ Observe the remarkable adjurations, hiaixaprvpofxai evdoiriov rod &eod koI 
 Kvpiov ^lr}(Tov Xpiffrov Kal rcov eKXeKJWv a77€Awv (l Tim. v. 21); TrapayyeXXco 
 croi evdoiriov rod &eod rod ^cooTToiodvros rb. trdvra, Kal Xpiarod 'Irjaod rod 
 lxap-Tvpi]<javros eVi Ylovriov UiXdrov r^v KaX^v SfioXoylav (Ibid. vi. 13). 
 VI] Z 
 
^^S Why can no hicmaii nmne be substituted for 
 
 trouble J^, are introduced naturally as familiar topics. And if 
 the Manhood of the One Mediator is prominently alluded to 
 as being the instrument of His Mediation s^ His Pre-existence 
 in a Higher Nature is as clearly intimated *. 
 
 After what has already been said on the prominence of the 
 doctrine of Christ's Divinity in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 it may suffice here to remark that the power ^ of His Priestly 
 Mediation as there insisted on, although exhibited in His 
 glorified Humanity, does of itself imply a superhuman Person- 
 ality. This indeed is more than hinted at in the terms of 
 the comparison which is instituted between Melchisedec and 
 His Divine Antitype. History records nothing of the parents, 
 of the descent, of the birth, or of the death of Melchisedec ; 
 he appears in the sacred narrative as if he had no beginning 
 of days or end of life. In this he is ^ made like unto the Son 
 of God,' with His eternal Pre-existence and His endless days v. 
 This Eternal Christ can save to the uttermost, because He 
 has a Priesthood that is unchangeable, since it is based on 
 His Own Everlasting Being ^. 
 
 In short, if we bear in mind that, as the Mediator, Christ is 
 God and Man, St. Paul's language about Him is explained by 
 its twofold drift. On the one hand, the true force of the 
 distinction between ^One God' and 'One Lord' or 'One Mediator' 
 becomes apparent in those passages, where Christ in His as- 
 sumed Manhood is for the moment in contrast with the Un- 
 incai'nate Deity of the Father y. On the other hand, it is 
 only possible to read the great Christological passages of the 
 Apostle without doing violence to the plain force of his lan- 
 guage, when we believe that Christ is God. Doubtless the 
 Christ of St. Paul is shrouded in mystery ; but could any real 
 intercourse between God and man have been re-established 
 which should be wholly unmysterious ? Strip Christ of His 
 
 ' 2 Tim. iv. 1 7 : 6 Se KupttJs /iioi TrapiffTrj, Koi ivedvudfjLucre fi€. Ibid, 
 ver. 1 8 : pixrerai fie 6 Kvpios ciirb Travrhs ipyov trovTipov, 
 
 8 I Tim. ii. 5. 
 
 * Ibid. iii. 16. Baur, Vorlesungen, p. 351 : *Mensch wird zwar Christus 
 ausdriicklich genannt (i Tim. ii. 5) aber von einem menschlichen Subject 
 kann doch eigentlich nicht gesagt werden icpat^epdodrj ei/ aapKi. Es passt 
 diess nur fur ein hoheres libermenschliches Wesen.' 
 
 •1 Heb. vii, 25 : ado^eiv els rh -navTeXes dvparac. 
 
 ^ Heb. vii. 3 : airaTcop, a/jL-qrcop, ayevea\6yT]Tos' fi-fjTe apx^v rjixepuv, fi^jre 
 ^uirjs r€\os ex^^v' a^vofioiooiJLhos Se rc^ Tlcp rod @eov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. vers. 24, 25 : 6 Se, 5ta rb fiipeiv avrhv els rhv alm'a, airapaparop 
 exei tV lep(aavP7)v' oQev Koi ado^eiv els rh -navreKes Zvvajai. 
 
 y I Cor. viii. 6 ; Eph. iv. 5 ; I Tim. ii. 5. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
the Name ofjestis, in the writings of St, Patil? 339 
 
 Godhead that you may denude Him of mystery, and what 
 becomes, I do not say of particular texts, but of all the most 
 characteristic teaching of St. Paul % Substitute, if you can, 
 throughout any one Epistle the name of the first of the saints 
 or of the highest among tlie angels, for the Name of the Divine 
 Kedeemer, and see how it reads. Accept the Apostle's implied 
 challenge. Imagine for a moment that Paul was crucified for 
 you ; that you were baptized in the name of Paul ^ • that 
 wisdom, holiness, redemption, come from an Apostle who, saint 
 .though he be, is only a brother-man. Conceive that the Apostle 
 ascends for a moment his Master's throne ; that he says ana- 
 thema to any who loves not the Apostle Paul ; that he is 
 bent upon bringing every thought captive to the obedience 
 of Paul ; that he announces that in Paul are hid all the treasures 
 of wisdom and knowledge ; that instead of protesting ' We 
 preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves 
 your servants for Jesus' sake,' he could say, *Paul is the end 
 of the law to every one that belie veth.' Can you conceive it % 
 What then is it in the Name of Christ which renders this 
 language, when it is applied to Him, other than unintelligible 
 or intolerable 1 Why is it that when coupled with any 
 other name, however revered and saintly, the words of Paul 
 respecting Jesus Christ must seem not merely strained, but 
 exaggerated and blasphemous] It is not that truth answers 
 to truth, that all through these Epistles, and not merely in 
 particular assertions, there is an underlying idea of Christ's 
 Divinity which is taken for granted, as being the very soul 
 and marrow of the entire series of doctrines 1 that when this 
 is lost sight of, all is misshapen and dislocated ? that when 
 this is recognised, all falls into its place as the exhibition of 
 infinite Power and Mercy, clothed in a vesture of humiliation 
 and sacrifice, and devoted to the succour and .enlightenment 
 of mani 
 
 4. It is with the prominent features of St. Paul's charac- 
 teristic teaching as with the general drift of his great Epistles ; 
 they irresistibly imply a Christ Who is Divine. 
 
 (a) Every reader of the Ncav Testament associates St. Paul 
 with a special advocacy of the necessity of faith as the indis- 
 pensable condition of man's justification before God. What is 
 this ' faith ' of St. Paul ? It is in experience the most simple of 
 
 * I Cor. i. 13: jU^ HqSjKos icrravpudr} virhp vfiwy ; ^ els rh ovoixa HavXov 
 VI ] Z 2 
 
340 A Divine Christ implied 
 
 the movements of the soul ; and yet, if analysed, it turns out 
 to be one of the most complex among the religious ideas in 
 the New Testament. The word ttio-tis implies, first of all, both 
 faithfulness and confidence ^ ; but religious confidence is closely 
 allied to belief, that is to say, to a persuasion that some unseen 
 fact is trueb. And this belief, having for its object the unseen, 
 is opposed by St. Paul to ^ sight c.' It is fed by, or rather 
 it is in itself, a higher intuition than any of which nature is 
 capable ; it is the continuous exercise of a new sense of spiritual 
 truth with which man has been endowed by grace. It is indeed, 
 a spiritual second-sight ; and yet reason has ancillary duties 
 towards it. Reason may prepare the way of faith in the soul 
 by removing intellectual obstacles to its claims ; or she may 
 arrange, digest, explain, systematize, and so express the intui- 
 tions of faith in accordance with the needs of a particular locality 
 or time. This active intellectual appreciation of the object- 
 matter of faith, which analyses, discusses, combines, infers, is 
 by no means necessary to the life of the Christian soul. It is 
 a special grace or accomplishment, which belongs only to a 
 small fraction of the whole body of the faithful. Their faith 
 is supplemented by what St. Paul terms, in this peculiar sense, 
 * knowledge d.* Faith itself, by which the soul lives, is mainly 
 passive, at least in respect of its intellectual ingredients : the 
 believing soul may or may not apprehend with scientific accuracy 
 that which its faith receives. The * word of knowledge,' that is, 
 the power of analysis and statement which is wielded by theo- 
 logical science, is thus a distinct gift, of great value to the 
 Church, although certainly not of absolute necessity for all 
 
 » Rom. ill. 3. iriVrts OeoG is the faithfulness of God in accomplishing 
 His promises. Cf. Tnaths b 0e(^s, I Cor. i. 9 ; I Thess. v. 24. TrtCTis is 
 confidence in God, Rom. iv. 19, 20; as ireirio-Tcvfiat, * I have been entrusted 
 with' (Gal. ii. 7; i Tim. i. ii). 
 
 b The transition is observable in Rom. vi. 8 : el Se aireOdvo/JLCv avv Xpiarc^, 
 Tri(TT€vofiiv '6ti Koi (rvC-nao/jLev avTc^. For belief in the truth of an unseen 
 fact upon human testimony, cf. 1 Cor. xi. 18 : aKovco (rxif^f^ctra iv v/xTv 
 vTvapx^i-Vy KoX fxepos ti irKTrevoo. 
 
 c 2 Cor. V. 7 : Bia TriVrews yap Trepiirarov^eVj ov 5ia e'idovs, 
 
 d I Cor. xii. 8 : 6.\\(p Se [StSorat] \6yos yvaxreocs, Kara rh avrh Ui/evfia. 
 2 Cor. viii. 7 : eV Trai/rl Trepi(r(r€V€T€^ irio-rei, Kal \6yc}), koI yvwcrei. So in 
 I Cor. xiii. 2 iraffa r} yvoxris evidently means intellectual appreciation of 
 the highest revealed truths, of which it is said in ver. 8 that Karapy-qdiiaeTai. 
 Of course this yvooais was from the first capable of being abused ; only, when 
 it is so abused, to the hindrance of Divine truth, the Apostle maintains 
 that it does not deserve the name {avTideaeis rrjs ^^vZwvv^xov yvuxrecas. 
 1 Tim. vi. 20). 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
in St. PattVs acco2int of Faith, 341 
 
 Christians. But ' without faith' itself, ^it is impossible to please 
 God ;' and in its simplest forms, faith pre-supposes a procla- 
 mation of its object by the agency of preaching e. Sometimes 
 indeed the word preached does not profit, *not being mixed 
 with faith in them that hear it f' But when the soul in 
 very truth responds to the message of God, the complete re- 
 sponsive act of faith is threefold. This act proceeds simul- 
 taneously from the intelligence, from the heart, and from the 
 will of the believer. His intelligence recognises the unseen 
 object as a fact ». His heart embraces the object thus present 
 to his understanding ; his heart opens instinctively and un- 
 hesitatingly to receive a ray of heavenly lights And his 
 will too resigns itself to the truth before it \ it places the 
 soul at the disposal of the object which thus rivets its eye 
 and conquers its affections. The believer accordingly merges 
 his personal existence in that of the object of his faith ; he 
 lives, yet not he, but Another lives in him^. He gazes on 
 truth, he loves it, he yields himself to it, he loses himself in it. 
 So true is it, that in its essence, and not merely in its con- 
 sequences, faith has a profoundly moral character. Faith is not 
 merely a perception of the understanding; it is a kindling 
 of the heart, and a resolve of the will ; it is, in short, an act 
 of the whole soul, which, by one simultaneous complex move- 
 ment, sees, feels, and obeys the truth presented to it. 
 
 Now, according to St. Paul, it is Jesus Christ Who is emi- 
 nently the Object of Christian faith. The intelligence, the 
 heart, the will of the Christian unite to embrace Him. How 
 versatile and many-sided a process this believing apprehension 
 of Christ is, might appear from the constantly varied phrase 
 of the Apostle when describing it. Yet of faith in all its aspects 
 Christ is the legitimate and constant Object. Does St. Paul 
 
 ® Rom. X. 14-17: T\ Trio-Tis €| aKorjs, Cf. \6yos aKorjs, i Thess. ii. 13. 
 
 f Heb. iv. 2. 
 
 8 I Thess. iv. 14, Tria-TcveLv is used of recognising two past historical facts ; 
 Rom. vi. 8, of recognising a future fact; 2 Thess. ii. il, of beUeving that 
 to be a fact which is a falsehood. 
 
 ^ Rom. X. 9, 10 : iav d/xoKoy^ffrjs iv ry (TTSfxari <tov Kvpiov *lr](Tovv, koI 
 iria-Tevarjs eu ry KapMa. aov on 6 Qehs avrov ijycipev e/c veKpwv, (Twdiicrri' KapBia. 
 yh,p TricTTe^icTai els Zlkolioo-uviiv. Thus coincidently with the act of faith, rj 
 aydiTTf] rod Qeov eKKexvTai iv Ta7s Kaphiais rjfjLccv (Rom. v. 5). The love of 
 God is infused into the heart at the moment when His truth enters the 
 understanding ; and it is in this co-operation of the moral nature that the 
 essential power of faith resides : hence faith is necessarily di ayair-Qs 
 ivepyovfiivrj. 
 
 ^ Gal. ii. 20 : (<a 5e ovk ert iyth, (y 5e iv ifiol Xpi(n6s, 
 VI] 
 
34^ A Divine Christ implied 
 
 speak as if faith were a movement of the soul towards an end ] 
 That end is Christ K Does he hint that faith is a repose of 
 the soul resting upon a support which guarantees its safety] 
 That support is Christ I Does he seem to imply that by faith 
 the Christian has entered into an atmosphere which encircles 
 and protects, and fosters the growth of his spiritual life % That 
 atmosphere is Christ °i. Thus the expression Hhe faith of 
 Christ' denotes the closest possible union between Christ and 
 the faith which apprehends Him". And this union, effected 
 on man's side by faith, on God's by the instrumentality of 
 the sacraments «, secures man's real justification. The believer 
 is justified by this identification with Christ, Whose perfect 
 obedience and expiatory sufferings are thus transferred to him. 
 St. Paul speaks of belief in Christ as involving belief in the 
 Christian creed p ; Christ has warranted the ventures which 
 faith makes, by assuring the believer that He has guaranteed 
 the truth of the whole object-matter of faiths. Faith then 
 is the starting-point and the strength of the new life; and 
 this faith must be pre-eminently faith in Christ ^ The precious 
 Blood of Christ, not only as representing the obedience of His 
 Will, but as inseparably joined to His Majestic Person, is itself 
 
 '^ This seems to be the force of ety with irKmh^v, Col. ii. 5 : t^ (xrep^cofxa 
 rrjs els Xpia-rhv iriarecos vfiui/. Phil. i. 29; Rom. x. 14. The preposition 
 irphs indicates the direction of the soul's gaze, without necessarily implying 
 the idea of movement in that direction. In Philem. 5 : r^v ttiVtzi/, ^v ex^ts 
 irphs rhv Kvpiov 'lr](rovv. Cf. I Thess. i. 8. 
 
 ^ I Tim. i. 16 : inareviiv eV avrif (sc. Jesus Christ) eis C^h^ aldoviou. 
 Uia-Teviiv €irl is used with the ace. of trust in the Eternal Father. Cf. 
 Rom. iv. 5, 24. 
 
 ™ Gal. iii. 26 : iravres yap vto\ 0eoO i(TT€ 5ia tt)s Trtarecos iv Xpi(TTcp 'iT/troi;. 
 Eph. i. 15 : aKovffas t^v Kaff v/ms iriffTiv iv rS) Kvptcp ^Irjarov. 2 Tim. iii. 15. 
 The Old Testament can make wise unto salvation, Sta iriareus rris iv 
 XpKTT^ 'l7)(rov. 
 
 ^ Rom. iii. 22 : dih, via-Tcias 'iT/troO Xpio-rov. Gal. ii. 16. This genitive 
 seems to have the force of the construct state in Hebrew. 
 
 o Tit. iii. 5; i Cor. x. 16. 
 
 P I Tim. iii. 16 : iTno-Tcvdrj iv k6(tix(^. Christ's Person is here said to have 
 been believed in as being the Centre of the New Dispensation. 
 
 ^ 2 Tim. i. 12: oiZa yap ^ TreTr/o-reu/ca, Ka\ irdireKT/jiai '6ti BvvarSs icrri 
 r^v trapaQ^K-riv fxov (pvXd^ai els iK€LV7)v t^v rj/nepav. 
 
 ' Gal. ii. 16: ^/ueis ds Xpiarbv 'iTjaovv iinffT^vaafxcv, 'Iva ^iKaioadcofx^v ix 
 irla-rccos Xpiarov. So Rom. i. 17: diKaioavvri yap ©eou iv avr^ (Christ's 
 Gospel) aiTOKaKvimTaL iK Tri(rT€cas els iricrriv. In like manner the Christian 
 is termed 6 e/c Tria-recos 'l7)(Tov : his spiritual life dates from, and depends 
 upon his faith. Rom. iii. 26. So, 01 e/c Tria-Tews (Gal. iii. 7) ; and, with 
 an allusion to the Church as the true home of faith, olKeiovs rrys Tricrreoos 
 (Gal. vi. 10). 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
in St. PauVs account of Faith, 343 
 
 an object in which faith finds life and nutriment ; the baptized 
 Christian is bathed in it, and his soul dwells on its pardoning 
 and cleansing power. It is Christ's Blood ; and Christ is 
 the great Object of Christian faith «. For not Christ's teaching 
 alone, not even His redemptive work alone, but emphatically 
 and beyond all else the Person of the Divine Eedeemer is set 
 forth by St. Paul before the eyes of Christians, as being That 
 upon Which their souls are more especially to gaze in an 
 ecstacy of chastened and obedient love. 
 
 Now if our Lord had been, in the belief of His Apostle, only 
 a created being, is it conceivable that He should have been thus 
 put forward as having a right wellnigh to engross the vision, 
 the love, the energy of the human soul? For St. Paul does 
 expressly, as well as by implication, assert that the hope * and 
 the love^ of the soul, no less than its belief, are to centre in 
 Christ. He never tells us that a bare intellectual realization of 
 Christ's existence or of Christ's work will avail to justify the 
 sinner before God. By faith the soul is to be moving ever 
 towards Christ, resting ever upon Christ, living ever in Christ. 
 Christ is to be the end, the support, the very atmosphere of its 
 life. But how is such a relation possible, if Christ be not God % 
 Undoubtedly faith does perceive and apprehend the existence of 
 invisible creatures as well as of the Invisible God. Certainly the 
 angels are discerned by faith ; the Evil One himself is an object 
 of faith. That is to say, the supernatural sense of the soul per- 
 ceives these inhabitants of the unseen world in their different 
 spheres of wretchedness and bliss. But angels and devils are 
 not objects of the faith which saves humanity from sin and 
 death. The blessed spirits command not that loyalty of heart 
 and will which welcomes Christ to the Christian soul. The soul 
 loves them as His ministers, not as its end. No creature can 
 be the legitimate satisfaction of a spiritual activity so compliex 
 in its elements, and so soul-absorbing in its range, as is the 
 faith which justifies. No created form can thus be gazed at, 
 loved, obeyed in that inmost sanctuary of a soul, which is con- 
 secrated to the exclusive glory of the great Creator. If Christ 
 were a creature, we may dare to afiirm that St. Paul's account 
 of faith in Christ ought to have been very different from that 
 
 8 Rom. iii. 25 : ^ih. ttJs irfcTTcws iu r^ avrov aifxari. We might have ex- 
 pected 67rl ; and St. Paul would doubtless have used it, if he had meant to 
 express no more than confidence in the efficacy of Christ's Blood, 
 
 * I Tim. i. I ; I Cor. xv. 193 Col. i. 27. 
 
 " I Cor. xvi. 22, 
 VI] 
 
344 A Divine Christ implied 
 
 which we have been considering. If, in the belief of St. Paul, 
 Christ is only a creature ; then it must be said that St. Paul, 
 by his doctrine of faith in Christ, does lead men to live for the 
 creature rather than for the Creator. In the spiritual teaching 
 of St. Paul, Christ eclipses God if He is not God ; since it is 
 emphatically Christ's Person, as warranting the preciousness of 
 His work, Which is the Object of justifying faith. Nor can it 
 be shewn that the intellect and heart and will of man could 
 conspire to give to God a larger tribute of spiritual homage 
 than they are required by the Apostle to give to Christ. 
 
 (3) Again, how much is implied as to the Person of Christ 
 by the idea of Regeneration, as it is brought before us in the 
 writings of St. Paul ! St. Paul uses the word itself only once x. 
 But the idea recurs continually throughout his writings ; it is 
 not less prominent in them than is the idea of faith. This idea 
 of regeneration is sometimes expressed by the image of a change 
 of vesture y. The regenerate nature has put off the old man, 
 with his deeds of untruthfulness and lust, and has put on the 
 new or ideal man, the Perfect Moral Being, the Christ. Some- 
 times the idea of regeneration is expressed more closely by the 
 image of a change of form^. The regenerate man has been 
 metamorphosed. He is made to correspond to the Form of 
 Christ ; he is renewed in the Image of Christ ; his moral being 
 is reconstructed. Sometimes, however, and most emphatically, 
 regeneration is paralleled with natural birth. Regeneration is 
 a second birth. The regenerate man is a new creature ^ ; he is 
 a work of God ^ \ he has been created according to a Divine 
 standard c. But — and this is of capital importance — he is also 
 said to be created in Christ Jesus d \ Christ is the sphere of the 
 
 X 7ra\try€V€o-fo, Tit. iii. 5. In St. Matt. xix. 28, the word has a much 
 wider and a very distinct sense. 
 
 y Col. iii. 9, 10 : aTre/cSuo-ct/xei/ot rhv TraXaihv IkvOptavov Koi kvdvff' 
 
 dfievoi rhv viov. Eph. iv. 22-24 • aTro64a$ai rhu iraXaibv i.vQpwirov 
 
 rhv <pQf:ip6ix^vov Kara ras inidv/jiias rrjs arrdrrjs' avaveovaOai. Se rca irvevfxari 
 Tov vobs vfjLwv, Kol kv^vcTaffOai rhv Kaivov dudpunov rhv Kara @ehv KTiaOcvra 
 €v diKaLoa-vvr] Kal 6(n6T7iTi rijs aXrjdeias. Gal. iii. 27 : XpKrrhu kj/^dixraadc. 
 Rom. xiii. 14. 
 
 2 Rom. xii. 2 : ficTafiopcpovaOe rfj auaKaLvaxrci rov vohs v^a>v. Ibid. viii. 
 29 : ots irpoeyvQ}, Koi trpowpiae (Tvixfi/tpipovs rr^s cIkovos tov IClov auTov. Cf. 
 Col. iii. 10 : KttT ciKSva rod Kriaavros avr6v. 
 
 * Gal. vi. 15 : Kaiv^ Kricis. 
 
 ^ Eph. ii. 10 : avrov yap [sc. ©eoG] icr/xei/ Troirjfia, 
 
 ^ Ibid. iv. 24 : rhv Kara Qehu Kricrdevra. 
 
 ^ Ibid. ii. 10 : Kri<rd4vr€S iv Xpitrrw 'Irja-ou iir\ epyois aya6o7s» 
 
 [lect. 
 
in St, PatcVs accoimt of Regeneration, 345 
 
 new creation e. The instrument of regeneration on Christ's 
 part, according to St. Paul, is the sacrament of baptism ^ to 
 which the Holy Spirit gives its efficacy, and which, in the case of 
 an adult recipient, must be welcomed to the soul by repentance 
 and faith. Kegeneration thus implies a double process, one 
 destructive, the other constructive ; by it the old life is killed, 
 and the new life forthwith bursts into existence. This double 
 process is effected by the sacramental incorporation of the 
 baptized, first with Christ crucified and dead&, and then with 
 Christ rising from the dead to life ; although the language of 
 the Apostle distinctly intimates that a continued share in the 
 resurrection-life depends upon the co-operation of the will of 
 the Christian li. But the moral realities of the Christian life, 
 to which the grace of baptism originally introduces the Chris- 
 tian, correspond with, and are effects of, Christ's Death and 
 Eesurrection. Eegarded historically, these events belong to the 
 irrevocable past. But for us Christians the Crucifixion and the 
 Resurrection are not merely past events of history ; they are 
 energizing facts from which no lapse of centuries can sever us ; 
 they are perpetuated to the end of time within the kingdom 
 of the Redemption i. The Christian is, to the end of time, 
 
 « 2 Cor. V. 1 7 ; and perhaps i Cor. viii. 6, where ^^e?s means * we re- 
 generate Christians.' 
 
 f Tit. iii. 5 : i(j(a<r^v ^yMs, 5ia Xovrpov iraXiyyevcfflas koX avaKaivcaaccos 
 Uuevfiaros'Ayiov. Gal. iii. 27: '6(roi yap cis Xpiarhj/ i^airTiadrjre, Xpiorrhy 
 ivedva-aade. I Cor. xii. 13. 
 
 s Rom. vi. 3, 4 : ^ ayyoeTre '6ti (icoi ePairTiaOrifxeu els Xpicrhv *l7](Tovv, ets 
 rhv Qavarov avrov i^anTiad-qixev ; <Tvv€rd<p'r]^ev ovv aifTtp 5ta rod fiairrio-fiaTos 
 €ts rhv davarov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. vers. 4, 5 : %va S^crirep rjyepdr) Xpicrrhs e/c vcKpwif dia rrjs S6^7]s rod 
 Uarphs, ovTco koI tj/jlus iv KaipSrrjTi ^twrjs ircpnraT'fja'wiJiev. Ei yap avfKpvroi 
 yeySvafiev rev d/oLOKa/xari rod davdrov avroVy aWh. koI t?)s avaardff^ois iaS/jLida. 
 
 i Reuss, Th^ol. Chrdt. 11. 140 : * La r^g^ndratlon en tant qu'elle comprend 
 ces deux ^l^ments d'une mort et d'une renaissance, est tout naturellement 
 mise en rapport direct avec la mort et la resurrection de J^sus-Christ. Ce 
 rapport a 4t6 compris par quelques th^ologiens comme si le fait histori que 
 dtait un symbole du fait psychologique, pour lequel 11 aurait fourni la ter- 
 minologie figur^e. Mais assur^ment la pensde de Tapdtre va au dela d'un 
 simple rapprochement ideal et nous propose le fait d'une relation objective 
 et reelle. Nous nous trouvons encore une fois sur le terrain du mysticisme 
 ^vangdlique; il est question trbs-positivement d'une identification avec la 
 mort et la vie du Sauveur, et il n'y a id defigurte que I' expression, puisqu'au 
 fond 11 ne s'agit pas de I'existence physique du Chretien. Oui, d'aprfes Paul, 
 le croyant meurt avec Christ, pour ressusciter avec lui ; et cette phrase ne 
 s'explique pas par ce que nous pourrions appeler un jeu de mots spirituel, 
 ou un rapprochement ing^nieux; elle est l' application du grand princiye 
 de Vunion personne/le, d'aprls lequel Vexistence propre de I'homme cesse ■ 
 reellement, pour se confondre avec celle du Christ, qui rdpbte, pour ainsi 
 
34<^ A. Divine Christ i^nplied 
 
 crucified with Christ k ; he dies with Christ 1 ; he is buried with 
 Christ ^ ; he is quickened together with Christ » ; he rises with 
 Christ o ; he lives with Christ p. He is not merely made to sit 
 together in heavenly places as being in Christ Jesus % he is a 
 member of His Body, as out of His Flesh and out of His Bones ^ 
 And of this profound incorporation baptism is the original 
 instrument. The very form of the sacrament of regeneration, 
 as it was administered to the adult multitudes who in the early 
 days of the Church pressed for admittance into her communion, 
 harmonizes with the spiritual results which it effects. As the 
 neophyte is plunged beneath the waters, so the old nature is 
 slain and buried with Christ. As Christ, crucified and entombed, 
 rises with resistless might from the grave which can no longer 
 hold Him, so, to the eye of faith, the Christian is raised from 
 the bath of regeneration radiant with a new and supernatural 
 life. His gaze is to be fixed henceforth on Christ, Who, being 
 raised from the dead, dieth no more. The Christian indeed may 
 fail to persevere ; he may fall from this high grace in which he 
 stands. But he need not do so ; and meanwhile he is bound to 
 account himself as 'dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God 
 through Jesus Christ our Lord s.* 
 
 dire, la sienne, avec ses deux faits capitaux, dans chaque individuality se 
 donnant k lui.' O si sic omnia ! 
 
 ^ Rom. vi. 6 : b iraKaCbs rj/xccv dvdpcoTros (rvuecTTavpcoOTj. Gal. ii. 20 : Xpicrru 
 (TweffTavpcofxai . 
 
 ^ 2 Tim. ii. il : (rvvaireOdpofxev. Rom. vi. 8 : aireOdi/ofxfv crvv Xpicrr^. 
 
 ™ Rom. vi. 4 : (rvveTacp-q/jLep ovv avrif Zih. rod ^anTLa-fiaros. Col. ii. 12: 
 (TVVTa(f>€VT€s auT(f iv Tu ^airTlfffiaTi. 
 
 " Eph. ii. 5 : avv^^coo-noirjae r^ Xpiffr^. Col. ii. 13 : <Tvv€^a)0'jro[r](r€ crvv 
 ahrS). 
 
 o Eph. ii. 6 : ffvvfjy^Lp^ [r^ Xpiar^']. There is no sufficient reason for 
 understanding Eph. ii. 5, 6 of the future resurrection alone ; although in that 
 passage the idea of the future resurrection (cf. ver. 7) is probably combined 
 with that of the spiritual resurrection of souls in the kingdom of grace. 
 We have been raised with Christ here, that we may live with Him hereafter. 
 Col. ii. 12 : 4v (p kcu [sc. kv XpiaToi] (rvi/rjyepBrjT^ dia rrjs Trlffreoos rijs ivep- 
 yeias rod &eov. Ibid. iii. I. 
 
 P Rom. vi. 8 : a-v^-na-o/xeu avrcp. 2 Tim. ii. II : et yap (TvvaireOdpo/xeu, koI 
 av^'fjO'o/j.iP. 
 
 •1 Eph. ii. 6 : <rvv€Kddi(T€u iu rois iirovpavlois 4v XpiCTcp 'Irfffov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. v. 30 : 1x4X7} io-fxev rov (rdofjLaros avrou, eK rrjs crapKhs avrov, Ka\ 6K 
 rSfu 6<rre(i}p avrov. Cf. Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 56, 7 : ' We are of Him and 
 in Him, even as though our very flesh and bones should be made continuate 
 with His.' 
 
 ' Rom. vi. 10, II : t yap aireOave [sc. 6 Xpiffrhs], rfj ajxapria aTrcOauev 
 ecpdira^' t Se 0, Cv '''V ®^V- ^'^'^^ '^"■^ vfiels XoyiC^a-de eavrovs vcKpovs fikv 
 elvai ry a/xaprla, (uuras Se r^ 0e(p ip Xpicrr^ 'It/coD ry Kvpicp 7}/xcop. 
 
 [lect. 
 
in St, Paul's account of Regene7^atio7i, 347 
 
 This regenerate or Christian life is further described by tAvo 
 most remarkable expressions. The Apostle speaks sometimes 
 of Christians being in Christ*; sometimes of Christ being in 
 Christians ^. The most recent criticism refuses to sanction the 
 efforts which in former years have been made to empty these 
 expressions of their literal and natural force. Hooker has ob- 
 served that it is ^ too cold an interpretation whereby some men 
 expound being in Christ to import nothing else but only that 
 the selfsame nature which raaketh us to be men is in Him, and 
 maketh Him man as we are. For what man in the world is 
 there which hath not so far forth communion with Jesus Christ^ 1' 
 Nor will it suffice to say that in such phrases as are here in 
 question, ^Christ' means only the moral teaching of Christ, and 
 that a Christian is Mn Christ' by the force of a mere intellectual 
 loyalty to the Sermon on the Mount. The expression is too 
 energetic to admit of this treatment ; it resists any but a literal 
 explanation. By a vigorous metaphor an enthusiastic Platonist 
 might perhaps speak of his * living in ' Plato, meaning thereby 
 that his whole intellectual activity is absorbed by and occupied 
 with the recorded thought of that philosopher. But he would 
 scarcely say that he is ^ in' Plato ; since such a phrase would 
 imply not merely an intellectual communion with Plato's mind, 
 but an objective inherence in his nature or being. Still less 
 possible would it be to adopt the alternative phrase, and say that 
 Plato is 4n' the student of Plato. When St. Paul uses these 
 expressions to denote a Christian's relation to Christ, he plainly 
 is not recording any subjective impression of the human mind ; 
 he is pointing to an objective and independent fact, strictly pecu- 
 liar to the kingdom of the Incarnation. The regenerate Chris- 
 tian is as really ^ in' Christ, as every member of the human family 
 is 4n' our first parent Adam^. Christ is indeed much more 
 to the Christian than is Adam to his descendants; Christ is the 
 sphere in which the Christian moves and breathes ; but Christ is 
 also the Parent of that new nature in which he shares ; Christ is 
 the Head of a Body, whereof he is really a member ; nay, the Body 
 of which he is a member is itself Christ y. From Christ, risen, 
 
 * Rom. xii. 5 ; I Cor. i. 2 ; xv. 22 ; 2 Cor. ii. 17; v. 17 ; xii. 19; Gal. i. 
 22 ; iii. 26 ; Eph. i. 3, 10 ; iii. 6; Phil. i. i ; i Thess. iv. 16. 
 
 'I Gal. ii. 20 ; Eph. iii. 1752 Cor. xiii. 5 ; Col. i. 27. 
 
 ^ Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 56, 7. 
 
 ^ See Olshausen on the Epistle to the Romans, § 9, * Parallel between 
 Adam and Christ,' chap. v. 12-21, Introductory Remarks. 
 
 y I Cor. xii. 12. 
 VI] 
 
34^ Faith in a Divine Christ the motive of 
 
 ascended, glorified, as from an exhaustless storehouse, there flow 
 powers of unspeakable virtue \ and in this life -stream the believ- 
 ing and baptized Christian is bathed and lives. And conversely, 
 Christ lives in the Christian ; the soul and body of the Chris- 
 tian are the temple of Christ ; the Christian is well assured that 
 Jesus Christ is in him, except he be reprobate z. 
 
 My brethren, what becomes of this language if Jesus Christ be 
 not truly God % No conceivable relationship to a human teacher 
 or to a created being will sustain its weight. If it be not a mass 
 of crude, vapid, worthless, misleading metaphor, it indicates rela- 
 tionship with One Who is altogether higher than the sons of men, 
 altogether higher than the highest archangel. It is true that we 
 are in Him, by being joined to His Human Nature; but what is it 
 which thus makes His Human Nature a re-creative and world- 
 embracing power ] Why is it that if any man be in Christ, there 
 is a new creation a of his moral being? And how can Christ 
 really be in us, if He is not one with the Searcher of hearts] 
 Surely He only Who made the soul can thus sound its depths, 
 and dwell within it, and renew its powers, and enlarge its capa- 
 cities. If Christ be not God, must not this renewal of man's 
 nature rest only on an empty fiction, must not this regeneration 
 of man's soul be but the ecstacy of an enthusiastic dreamer % 
 
 (y) It would, then, be a considerable error to recognise the 
 doctrine of our Lord's Divinity only in those passages of St. Paul's 
 writings which distinctly assert it. The indirect evidence of the 
 Apostle's hold upon the doctrine is much wider and deeper than 
 to admit of being exhibited in a given number of isolated texts ; 
 since the doctrine colours, underlies, interpenetrates the most 
 characteristic features of his thought and teaching. The proof 
 of this might be extended almost indefinitely ; but let it suffice 
 to observe that the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity is the key to 
 the greatest polemical struggle of the Apostle's whole life. Of 
 themselves, neither the importation of Jewish ceremonial, nor 
 even the disposition to sacrifice the Catholicity of the Church to 
 a petty nationalism, would fully account for the Apostle's attitude 
 of earnest hostility to those Judaizing teachers whom he encoun- 
 tered at Corinth, in Galatia, and, in a somewhat altered guise, at 
 Colossae and at Ephesus. For, in point of fact, the Judaizers 
 implied more than they expressly asserted. They implied that 
 Christ's religion was not of so perfect and absolute a character 
 as to make additions to it an irreverent impertinence. They 
 
 « 2 Cor. xiii. 5. • Ibid. v. 17: e)f rts Iv Xpiar^j kolivt] ktI(Tls. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
S^, Paul's opposition to the yudaizers, 349 
 
 implied that they did its Founder no capital wrong, when, instead 
 of recognising Him as the Saviour of the whole human family, 
 they practically purposed to limit the applicability of His work 
 to a narrow section of it. They implied that there was nothing 
 in His majestic Person which should have forbidden them to 
 range those dead rites of the old law, which He had fulfilled 
 and abolished, side by side with the Cross and Sacraments of 
 Redemption. The keen instinct of the Apostle detected the 
 wound thus indirectly but surely aimed at his Master's honour ; 
 and St. Paul's love for Christ was -the exact measure of his 
 determined opposition to the influence and action of the Juda- 
 izers. If the Judaizers had believed in the true Divinity of 
 Jesus, they could not have returned to the ^ weak and beggarly 
 elements' of systems which had paled and died away before the 
 glories of His Advent. If they had fully and clearly believed 
 Jesus to be God, that faith must have opposed an insurmountable 
 barrier to these reactionary yearnings for ^ the things which had 
 been destroyed.' Their attempt to re-introduce circumcision 
 into the Galatian Churches was a reflection upon the glory of 
 Christ's finished work, and so, ultimately, upon the transcendent 
 dignity of His Person. They knew not, or heeded not, that 
 they were members of a kingdom in which circumcision and 
 uncircumcision were insignificant accidents, and in which the 
 new creation of the soul by the atoning and sacramental grace 
 of the Incarnate Saviour was the one matter of vital import ^. 
 Although they had not denied Christ in terms, yet He had 
 become of no eflect to them ; and the Apostle sorrowfully pro- 
 claimed that as many of them as were justified by the law had 
 fallen from grace c. They had practically rejected the plenary 
 efiicacy of Christ's saving and re-creating power; they had 
 implicitly denied that He was a greater than Moses. Their 
 work did not at once perish from among men. For the Juda- 
 izing movement bequeathed to the Churches of the Lesser Asia 
 many of those theological influences which were felt by later 
 ages in the traditional temper of the School of Antioch ; while 
 
 ^ Gal. vi. 15 ' ^v yap XpLcrrcp^Irjaov otjre TreptTOjU"^ rt Icxvei oij^€ aKpo^vaTia^ 
 aAXcii Kaiv^ kt'ktis. Here regeneration is viewed from without, on the side of 
 the Divine Energy Which causes it ; in Gal. v. 6, where it is equally con- 
 trasted with legal circumcision, it is viewed from within the soul, as consisting 
 essentially in irlffTis St' aydinis iv^pyovix4vr\, 
 
 c Gal. V. 4 : KaTTjpyfjdrjTe arrh rod XpicTTov, oirives iv vSfi^ ^iKaiovaOe, rrjs 
 ^dpLTos eleTreVare, Cf. Ibid. v. 2 : iav ircpireixvTjadey XpiffThs vjxas ovdiv 
 
 VI] 
 
350 Contrasts between the Apostles enhance the force 
 
 outside the Church it was echoed in the long series of Humani- 
 tarian mutterings which culminated in the blasphemies of Paulus 
 of Samosata. It must thus be admitted to figure conspicuously 
 in the intellectual ancestry of the Arian heresy ; and St. Paul, 
 not less than St. John, is an apostolical representative of the 
 cause and work of Athanasius. 
 
 Although the foregoing observations may have taxed your 
 indulgent patience somewhat severely, they furnish at best only 
 a sample of the evidence which might be brought to illustrate 
 the point before us. But enough will have been urged to dispose 
 of the suspicion, that St. John's belief and teaching respecting 
 the Divinity of Jesus Christ was only an intellectual or spiritual 
 peculiarity of that Apostle. If the form and clothing of St. John's 
 doctrine was peculiar to him, its substance was common to all 
 the Apostles of Jesus Christ. Just as the titles and position 
 assigned to Jesus Christ in the narrative of tlie fourth Gospel 
 are really in harmony with the powers which He wields and with 
 the rights which He claims in the first three Evangelists, so 
 St. John's doctrine of the Eternal Word is substantially one with 
 St. Paul's doctrine of the * Image of the Father,' and with his 
 whole description of the redemptive work of Christ, and of the 
 attitude of the Christian soul towards Him. St. John's fuller 
 statements do but supply the key to the fervid doxologies of 
 St. Peter, and to the profound and significant reverence of 
 St. James. Indeed from these Apostles he might seem to differ 
 in point of intellectual temper and method, even less than he 
 differs from St. Paul. Between St. Paul and St. John how great 
 is the contrast ! In St. Paul we are struck mainly by the wealth 
 of sacred thought ; in St. John by its simplicity. St. Paul is 
 versatile and discursive ; St. John seems to be fixed in the 
 entranced bliss of a perpetual intuition. St. Paul is a dialectician 
 who teaches us by reasoning ; he refutes, he infers, he makes 
 quotations, he deduces corollaries, he draws out his demonstra- 
 tions more or less at length, he presses impetuously forward, 
 reverently bending before the great dogmas which he proclaims, 
 yet moving in an atmosphere of perpetual conflict. St. John 
 speaks as if the highest life of his soul was the wondering study 
 of one vast Apocalypse : he teaches, not by demonstrating truths, 
 but by exhibiting his contemplations ; he states what he sees ; 
 he repeats the statement, he inverts it, he repeats it once more ; 
 he teaches, as it seems, by the exquisite tact of scarcely disguised 
 but uninterrupted repetition, which is justified because there is 
 no higher attainable truth than the truth which he repeats. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
of their common witness to Chris t^s Divinity, 351 
 
 St. Paul begins with anthropology, St. John with theology ; 
 St. Paul often appeals to theology that he may enforce truths 
 of morals ; St. John finds the highest moral truth in his most 
 abstract theological contemplations. St. Paul usually describes 
 the redemptive gift of Christ as Eighteousness, as the restoration 
 of man to the true law of his being ; St. John more naturally 
 contemplates it as Life, as the outflow of the Self-existent Being 
 of God into His creatures through the quickening Humanity of 
 the Incarnate Word. In St. Paul the ethical element predomi- 
 nates, in St. John the mystical. St. John is more especially the 
 spiritual ancestor of such fathers as was St. Gregory Nazianzen ; 
 St. Paul of such as St. Augustine. It may be said, with some 
 reservations, that St. Paul is the typical Apostle of Western, as 
 St. John is of Eastern Christendom; that the contemplative side 
 of the Christian life finds its pattern in St. John, the active in 
 St. Paul. Yet striking as are such differences of spiritual method 
 and temper, they are found in these great apostles side by side 
 with an entire unity of teaching as to the Person of our Lord. 
 ^ Certainly,' says Neander, with deep truth, * it could be nothing 
 merely accidental which induced men so diff*erently constituted 
 and trained as Paul and John to connect such an idea [as that 
 of Divinity] with the doctrine of the Person of Christ. This 
 must have been the result of a higher necessity, which is founded 
 in the nature of Christianity, in the power of the impression 
 which the Life of Christ had made on the lives of men, in the 
 reciprocal relation between the appearance of Christ and the 
 archetype that presents itself as an inward revelation of God in 
 the depths of the higher self-consciousness. And all this has 
 found its point of connexion and its verification in the manner 
 in which Christ, the Unerring Witness, expressed His conscious- 
 ness of the indwelling of the Divine Essence with Him^. ' 
 
 d Planting and Training, i. 505, Bohn's edit. Neander adds : * Had the 
 doctrine of Christ's Eternal Sonship, when it was first promulgated by Paul, 
 been altogether new and peculiar to himself, it must have excited much 
 opposition as contradicting the common monotheistic belief of the Jews, even 
 among the apostles, to whom, from their previous habits, such a speculative 
 theosophic element must have remained unknown, unless it had found a 
 point of connexion in the lessons received from Christ, and in their Christian 
 knowledge.' Of such opposition, direct and avowed, there is no trace, Cf. 
 Meyer. Ev. Joh. p. 49. Die Materie der Lehre war bei Johannes, ehe er in 
 jener gnostischen Form die entsprechende Darstellung fand, das Fundament 
 seines Glaubens und der Tnhalt seiner Erkenntniss, wie sie bei Paulus und 
 bei alien anderen Aposteln es war, welche nicht, (ausser dem Verf. des He- 
 braerbriefs) von der Logos- Speculation beruhrt warden; diese Materie der 
 VI] 
 
352 Faith in a Divine Christ, the strength of Apostles. 
 
 This is indeed the only reasonable explanation of the re- 
 markable fact before us, namely, that the persecutor who was 
 converted on the road to Damascus, and the disciple who had 
 laid on Christ's breast at supper, were absolutely agreed as to 
 the Divine prerogatives of their Master. And if we, my bre- 
 thren, have ever been tempted to think that a creed like that 
 of St. John befits only a contemplative or mystic life, alien to 
 the habits of our age and to the necessities of our position, let 
 us turn our eyes towards the great Apostle of the Gentiles. It 
 would be difficult, even in this busy day, to rival St. Paul's 
 activity ; and human weakness might well shrink from sharing 
 his burden of pain and care. It is given to few to live 4n 
 joumeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in 
 perils from a man's own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, 
 in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the 
 sea, in perils among false brethren e/ for a purely unselfish object. 
 Few rise to the heroic scope of a life passed ' in weariness and 
 painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings 
 often, in cold and nakedness^.' But this is certain, — that at 
 much lower levels of moral existence, there is much to be done, 
 and much, sooner or later, to be endured, which we can only do 
 manfully and bear meekly in the strength of the Apostle's great 
 conviction. If St. Paul can suffer the loss of all things that at 
 the last he may win Christ, if he can do all things through 
 Christ that strengtheneth him, it is because he is consciously 
 reaching towards or leaning on the arm of a Saviour Who is God 
 as well as Man. And if we, looking onward to the unknown 
 changes and chances of this mortal life, and beyond them, to 
 death, would fain live and die like Christians, we too must see 
 to it that we fold to our inmost souls that central truth of the 
 Christian creed which was the strength and joy of the first 
 servants of Christ. We too must believe and confess, that that 
 Human Friend Whose words enlighten us. Whose Blood cleanses 
 us, Whose Sacraments have renewed and even now sustain us, 
 is in the truth of His Higher Nature none other and no less 
 than the Unerring, the All-merciful, the Almighty God. 
 
 Lehre ist scblechthin auf Christum selbst znrlickzufiihreii, dessen Eroffnun- 
 gen an seine Jiinger und dessen unmittelbarer Eindruck auf diese (Job. i. 14) 
 ibnen den StolF gab, welcber sicb spater die verschiedenen Formen der Dar- 
 stellung dienstbar macbte. 
 
 e 2 Cor. xi. 25, 26. ^ Ibid. ver. 27. Cf. Ibid. vi. 4-10, and xi. 5 sqq. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 THE HOMOOUSION. 
 
 Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may te 
 able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers. 
 
 Tit. i. 9. 
 
 A GEEAT doctrine which claims to rule the thought of men and 
 to leave its mark upon their conduct, must of necessity encounter 
 some rude and probing tests of its vitality as it floats along the 
 stream of time. The common speech of mankind, embodying 
 the verdict of man's experience, lays more emphasis upon the 
 * ravages ' than upon the conservative or constructive efiects of 
 time ; — ■ 
 
 * Tempus edax rerum, tuque invidiosa vetustas. 
 Omnia destruitis, vitiataque dentibus sevi 
 Paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte a,» 
 
 The destructive force of time is no less observable in the sphere 
 of human ideas and doctrines than in that of material and social 
 facts. Time exposes every doctrine or speculation to the action 
 of causes which, if more disguised and subtle, are not less cer- 
 tainly at work than those which threaten political systems or 
 works of art with decay and dissolution. 
 
 A doctrine is liable to suffer with the lapse of time from 
 without and from within. From within it is exposed to the risk 
 of decomposition by analysis. When once it has been launched 
 into the ocean of our public intellectual life, it is forthwith sub- 
 jected, as a condition of its acceptance, to the play and scrutiny 
 of many and variously constituted minds. The several ingre- 
 dients which constitute it, the primary truths to which it appeals 
 
 » Ovid, Met. xv. 234. 
 VII ] A a 
 
354 The vitality of a doctrine, how tested, 
 
 and upon wliicli it ultimately reposes, are separately and con- 
 stantly examined. It may be that certain elements of the doc- 
 trine, essential to its perfect representation, are rejected altogether. 
 It may be that all its constitutive elements are retained, while the 
 proportions in which they are blended are radically altered. It 
 may be that an impulse is given to some active intellectual sol- 
 vent, hitherto dormant, but from the first latent in the constitu- 
 tion of the doctrine, and likely, according to any ordinary human 
 estimate, to break it up. Or some point of attraction between 
 the doctrine and a threatening philosophy outside it is discovered 
 and insisted on ; and the philosophy, in a patronizing spirit, 
 proposes to meet the doctrine half way, and to ratify one half of 
 it if the other may be abandoned. Or some subtle intellectual 
 poison is injected into the doctrine; and while men imagine that 
 they are only adapting it to the temper of an age, or to the 
 demands of a line of thought, its glow and beauty are forfeited, 
 or its very life and heart are eaten out. Then for awhile its 
 shell or its skeleton lies neglected by the side of the great highway 
 of thought ; until at length some one of those adventurers who 
 in every age devote themselves to the manufacture of eclectic 
 systems, assigns to the intellectual fossil a place of honour in his 
 private museum, side by side with the remains of other extinct 
 theories, to which in its lifetime it was fundamentally opposed. 
 
 But even if a doctrine be sufficiently compact and strong to 
 resist internal decomposition, it must in any case be prepared to 
 encounter the shock of opposition from without. To no doctrine 
 is it given to be absolutely inoffensive ; and therefore sooner or 
 later every doctrine is opposed. Every doctrine, however frail 
 and insignificant it may be, provokes attacks by the mere fact of 
 its existence. It challenges a certain measure of attention which 
 is coveted by some other doctrines. It takes up a certain amount 
 of mental room which other doctrines would fain appropriate, if 
 indeed it does not jostle inconveniently against them, or contra- 
 dict them outright. Thus it rouses against itself resentment, or, 
 at any rate, opposition ; and this opposition is reinforced by an 
 appetite which is shared in by those who hold the opposed doc- 
 trine no less than by those who oppose it. The craving for 
 novelty is by no means peculiar to quickwitted races like the Athe- 
 nians of the apostolical age or the French of our own day. It is 
 profoundly and universally human ; and it enters into our appre- 
 ciation of subject-matters the most various. Novelty confers a 
 charm upon high efforts of thought and enquiry as well as upon 
 works of art or of imagination, or even upon fashions in amuse- 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The vitality of a doctrine, how tested, 3^5 
 
 ment or in dress. To treat this yearning for novelty as though it 
 were only a vicious frivolity is to overlook its profound signifi- 
 cance. For, even in its lowest and unloveliest forms, it is a living 
 and perpetual witness to the original nobility of the soul of man. 
 It is the restlessness of a desire which One Being alone can 
 satisfy \ it reminds us that the Infinite One has made us for 
 Himself, and that no object, person, or doctrine that is merely 
 finite and earthly, can take His place in our heart and thought, 
 and bid us finally be still. And therefore as man passes through 
 life on his short and rapid pilgrimage, unless his eye be fixed on 
 that treasure in heaven which '- neither moth nor rust doth cor- 
 rupt,' he is of necessity the very slave of novelty. Each candi- 
 date for his admiration wins from him, it may be, a passing 
 glance of approval ; but, unsatisfied at heart, he is ever seeking 
 for some new stimulant to his evanescent sympathies. He casts 
 to the winds the faded flower which he had but lately stooped to 
 gather with such eager enthusiasm ; he buries beneath the waves 
 the useless pebble which, when his eye first detected it sparkling 
 on the shore, had yielded him a moment of such bright enjoy- 
 ment. Nothing human can insure its life against the attractions 
 of something more recent than itself in point of origin ; no 
 doctrine of earthly mould can hope to escape the sentence of 
 superannuation when it is fairly confronted with the intellectual 
 creations of an age later than its own, A human doctrine may 
 live for a few years, or it may live for centuries. Its duration will 
 depend partly upon the amount of absolute truth which it em- 
 bodies, and partly upon the strength of the rivals with which it 
 is brought into competition. But it cannot always satisfy the 
 appetite for novelty ; its day of extinction can only be deferred. 
 
 tiVK €xo> TTpocrcLKaaaLy 
 
 iravT €7TL(Tra6iiciifi€V0Sf ' i 
 
 irXrjv Atos, el to fxarav dno (fypovTiSos a)(6os 
 Xprj ^aXelv eTTjTVjicoi. 
 ouS' oaTLS TTapoiQev rjv fieyaSy 
 Trafifidxco 6pda€i ^pvcov, 
 ovbev av \e^aL irplv aPj 
 OS 8' eVfir' €0v, Tpia- 
 
 KTTJpO^ X)i)(^Tai TVX^V^' 
 
 So it must ever fare with a religious dogma of purely hu- 
 man authorship. In obedience to the lapse of time it must of 
 
 ^ ^sch. kg. 163-171. 
 VII ] A a 2 
 
^S6 Doctrine of Chris fs Divinity, how tested, 
 
 necessity be modified, corrupted, revolutionized, and then yield 
 to some stronger successor. 
 
 ' Our little systems have their day, 
 They have their day and cease to be/ 
 
 This is the true voice of human speculation on Divine things, 
 conscious that it is human, conscious of its weakness, and mind- 
 ful of its past and ever-accumulating experience. He Only, 
 * with Whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning,' can 
 be the Author of a really unchanging doctrine ; and, as a matter 
 of historical fact, 'His truth endure th from generation to genera- 
 tion.* 
 
 When the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity entered into the 
 world of human thought, it was not screened from the operation 
 of the antagonistic and dissolvent influences which have just 
 been noticed. It was confronted with the passion for novelty 
 beneath the eyes of the apostles themselves. The passion for 
 novelty at Colossse appears to have combined a licentious fertility 
 of the religious imagination with a taste for such cosmical specu- 
 lations as were current in that age ; while in the Galatian 
 Churches it took the form of a return to the discarded cere- 
 monial of the Jewish law. In both cases the novel theory was 
 opposed to the apostolical account of our Lord's personal dig- 
 nity; and in another generatign the wild imaginings of a Basilides 
 or of a Valentinus illustrated the attractive force of a new 
 fashion in Christological speculation still more powerfully. 
 Somewhat later the dialectical method of the Alexandrian 
 writers subjected the doctrine to acute internal analysis, while 
 the neo-Platonic philosophy brought a powerful intellectual 
 sympathy to bear upon it, which, as an absorbing or distorting 
 influence, might well have been fatal to a human dogma. 
 Lastly, the doctrine was directly opposed by a long line of 
 Humanitarian teachers, reaching, with but few intermissions, 
 from the Ebionitic period to the Arian. 
 
 In the history of the doctrine of Christ's Divinity the Arian 
 heresy was the climax of difiiculty and of triumph ; it tested the 
 doctrine at one and the same time in each of the three modes 
 which have been noticed. Arianism was ostentatiously anxious 
 to appear to be an origiual speculation, and accordingly it 
 taunted the Nicene fathers with their intellectual poverty; it 
 branded them as dcjyeXels koI IBicoraL because they adhered to the 
 ground of handing on simply what they had received. Its dia- 
 lectical method was inherited from the Alexandrian eclectic 
 
 [lect. 
 
Effects of Opposition, 357 
 
 school ; and by this method, as well as by the assumption that 
 certain philosophical placita were granted, Arianism endeavoured 
 to kill the doctrine from within by a destructive analysis. And 
 it need scarcely be added that Arianism inherited and intensified 
 the direct opposition which had been offered to the doctrine by 
 earlier heresies ; Arianism is immortalized, however ingloriously, 
 in those sufferings, in those struggles, in those victories of the 
 great Athanasius, of which its own bitter hostility to our Lord's 
 Essential Godhead was the immediate cause. 
 
 That such a doctrine as our Lord's Divinity should be thus 
 opposed was not unnatural. It is in itself so startling, so awful ; 
 it endows the man wlio honestly and intelligently believes it 
 with a conception of the worth and drift of Christianity, so 
 altogether unique ; it is so utterly intolerable if you admit a 
 suspicion of its being false ; it is so necessarily exacting when 
 once you have recognised it as true ; it makes such large and 
 immediate demands, not merely upon the reason and the imagi- 
 nation, but also upon the affections and the will ; that a spe- 
 cific opposition to it, as distinct from a professed general 
 opposition to the religion of which it is the very heart and soul, 
 is only what might have been expected. Certainly, such a doc- 
 trine could not at first bring peace on earth ; rather it could not 
 but bring division. It could not but divide families, cities, 
 nations, continents ; it could not but arm against itself the edge 
 and point of every weapon that might be forged or whetted by 
 the ingenuity of a passionate animosity. It could not but have 
 collapsed utterly and vanished away when confronted with the 
 heat of opposition which it provoked, had it not descended from 
 the Source of Truth, had it not reposed upon an absolute and 
 indestructible basis. The Arian controversy broke upon it as an 
 intellectual storm, the violence of which must have shattered any 
 human theory. But when the storm had spent itself, the doc- 
 trine emerged from the conciliar decisions of the fourth century 
 as luminous and perfect as it had been when it was proclaimed 
 by St. Paul and St. John. Eesistance does but strengthen truth 
 which it cannot overthrow : and when the doctrine had defied 
 the craving for novelty, the disintegrating force of hostile 
 analysis, and the vehement onslaught of passionate denunciation, 
 it was seen to be vitally unlike those philosophical speculations 
 which might have been confused with it by a superficial observer. 
 Its exact area was unaltered; it now involved and excluded pre- 
 cisely what it had excluded and involved from the first. But 
 henceforth it was to be held with a clearer recognition of its real 
 VII ] 
 
^^S Triumph of the Doctrine, The Homootcsion. 
 
 frontier, and with a stronger sense of the necessity for insisting 
 upon that recognition. In the Homoousion, after such hesitation 
 as found expression at Antioch, the Church felt that she had 
 lighted upon a symbol practically adapted to tell forth the truth 
 that never had been absent from her heart and mind, and withal, 
 capable of resisting the intellectual solvents which had seemed to 
 threaten that truth with extinction. The Homoousion did not 
 change, it protected the doctrine. It clothed the doctrine in a 
 vesture of language which rendered it intelligible to a new world 
 of thought while preserving its strict unchanging identity. It 
 translated the apostolical symbols of the Image and the Word of 
 God into a Platonic equivalent ; and it remains with us to this 
 hour, in the very heart of our Creed, as the complete assertion 
 of Christ's absolute oneness with the Essence of Deity, as the 
 monument which records the greatest effort and the greatest 
 defeat of its antagonist error, as the guarantee that the victorious 
 truth maintains and will maintain an unshaken empire over the 
 thought of Christendom. 
 
 We are all sufficiently familiar with the line of criticism to 
 which such a formula as the Homoousion is exposed in our day 
 and generation. A contrast is depicted and insisted upon with 
 more vehemence than accuracy, between the unfixed popular 
 faith of Christians in the first age of the Church and the keen 
 theological temper of the fourth century. It is said that the 
 Church's earliest faith was unformed, simple, vague, too full of 
 childlike wonder to analyse itself, too indeterminate to satisfy 
 the requirements of a formalized theology. It is asserted that at 
 Alexandria the Church learned how to fix her creed in precise, 
 rigid, exclusive moulds ; that she there gradually crystallized 
 what had once been fluid, and cramped and fettered what had 
 before been free. And it is insinuated that in this process, 
 whereby the fresh faith of the infant Church ' was hardened into 
 the creed of the Church of the Councils,' there was some risk, or 
 more than risk, of an alteration or enlargement of the original 
 faith. * How do you know,' men ask, * that the formulary which 
 asserts Christ's Consubstantiality with the Father is really ex- 
 pressive of the simple faith in which the first Christians lived 
 and died % Do not probabilities point the other way ? Is it not 
 likely that when this effort was made to fix the expression of 
 the faith in an unchanging symbol, there was a simultaneous 
 growth, however unsuspected and unrecognised, in the subject- 
 matter of the faith expressed % May not the hopes and feelings 
 of a passionate devotion, as well as the inferential arguments of 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Theworship of Christ awitness to theHomoousion. 359 
 
 an impetuous logic, have contributed something to fill up the 
 outline and to enhance the significance of the original and revealed 
 germ of truth % May not the Creed of Nicsea be thus in reality 
 a creed distinct from, if not indeed more extensive than, the 
 creed of the apostolic age % ' Such is the substance of many a 
 whispered question, or of many a confident assertion, which we 
 hear around us ; and it is necessary to enquire, whether the 
 admitted difference of form between the apostolic and Nicene 
 statements does really, or only in appearance, involve a deeper 
 difference — a difference in the object of faith. 
 
 I. Let it then be considered that a belief may be professed 
 either by stating it in terms, or by acting in a manner which 
 necessarily implies that you hold it. A man may profess a creed 
 with which his life is at variance ; but he may also live a creed, 
 if I may so speak, which he has not the desire or the skill to 
 put into exact words. There is no moral difference between the 
 sincere expression of a conviction in language, and its consistent 
 reflection in action. There is, for example, no difference be- 
 tween my saying that a given person is not to be relied upon 
 when dealing with money matters, and my pointedly declining 
 to act with him on this particular trust, when I am asked to 
 do so. It is not necessary that I should express my complete 
 opinion of his character, until I am obliged to express it. I 
 content myself with acting in the only manner which is prudent 
 under the circumstances. Meanwhile my line of action speaks 
 for itself; its meaning is evident to all who are practically 
 interested in the subject. Until I am challenged for an expla- 
 nation ; until the assumption upon which I act is denied ; there 
 is no necessity for my putting into words an opinion which Jias 
 already been stated in the language of action and with such 
 unmistakeable decision. 
 
 Did then the ante-Mcene Church as a whole — did its con- 
 gregations of worshippers as well as its councils of divines — 
 did its poor, its young, its unlettered multitudes, as well as its 
 saints and doctors, so act and speak as to imply a belief that 
 Jesus Christ is actually God .? 
 
 A question such as this may at first sight seem to be difficult 
 to answer, by reason of the one-sidedness and caprice of history. 
 History for the most part concerns herself with the actions and 
 opinions of the great and the distinguished, that is to say, of 
 the few. Incidentally, or on particular occasions, she may glance 
 at what passes beyond the region of courts and battle-fields ; 
 but it is not her wont to enable us readily to ascertain the real 
 VII ] 
 
360 Jesus Christ not only 'admired^ but 'adored' 
 
 currents of thought and feeling which have swayed the minds of 
 multitudes in a distant age. 
 
 Such at any rate is the rule with secular history ; but the 
 genius of the Church of Christ is of a nature to limit the force 
 of the observation. In her eyes, the interests of the many, the 
 customs, the deeds, the sufferings of the illiterate and of the 
 poor, are, to say the least, not less precious and noteworthy than 
 those of kings and prelates. For the standard of aristocracy 
 within her borders is not an intellectual or a social, but a 
 moral standard; and her Founder has put the highest honour not 
 upon those who rule and are of reputation, but upon those who 
 serve and are unknown. The history of the Christian Church 
 does therefore serve to illustrate the point before us ; and it 
 proves the belief of Christian people in the Godhead of Jesus by 
 its witness to the early and universal practice of adoring Him. 
 
 The early Christian Church did not content herself with 
 'admiring' Jesus Christ. She adored Him. She approached 
 His Glorious Person with that very tribute of prayer, of self- 
 prostration, of self-surrender, by wliich all serious Theists, 
 whether Christian or non-Christian, are accustomed to express 
 their felt relationship as creatures to the Almighty Creator. 
 For as yet it was not supposed that a higher and truer know- 
 ledge of the Infinite God would lead man to abandon the sense 
 and the expression of complete dependence upon Him and of 
 unmeasured indebtedness to Him, which befits a reasonable 
 creature whom God has made, and whom God owns and can 
 dispose of, when such a creature is dealing with God. As yet 
 it was not imagined that this bearing would or could be ex- 
 changed for the more easy demeanour of an equal, or of one 
 deeming himself scarcely less than an equal, who is intelligently 
 appreciating the existence of a remarkably wise and powerful 
 Being, entitled by His activities to a very large share of specu- 
 lative attention^. The Church simply adored God ; and she 
 
 c Cf. Lecky, History of Rationalism, i. 309. Contrasting the Christian 
 belief in a God Who can work miracles with the ' scientific ' belief in a 
 god who is the slave of ' law,' Mr. Lecky remarks, that the former * pre- 
 disposes us most to prayer/ the latter to * reverence and admiration.* 
 Here the antithesis between 'reverence* and 'prayer' seems to imply that 
 the latter word is used in the narrow sense of petition for specific blessings, 
 instead of in the wider sense which embraces the whole compass of the soul's 
 devotional activity, and among other things, adoration. Still, if Mr. Lecky 
 had meant to include under * reverence ' anything higher than we yield to the 
 highest forms of human greatness, he would scarcely have coupled it with 
 'admiration.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
^ Admiratio7i^ and ^Adoration! 361 
 
 adored Jesus Christ, as believing Him to be God. Nor did she 
 destroy the significance of this act by conceiving that admi- 
 ration differs from adoration only in degree ; that a sincere 
 admiration is practically equivalent to adoration ; that adoration 
 after all is only admiration raised to the height of an en- 
 thusiasm. 
 
 You will not deem it altogether unnecessary, under our 
 present intellectual circumstances, to consider for a moment 
 whether this representation of the relationship between admi- 
 ration and adoration be strictly accurate. So far indeed is 
 this from being the case, that adoration and admiration are at 
 one and the same moment and with reference to a single object, 
 mutually exclusive of each other. Certainly, in the strained 
 and exaggerated language of poetry or of passion, you may 
 speak of adoring that on which you lavish an unlimited ad- 
 miration. But the common sense and judgment of men refuses 
 to regard admiration as an embryo form of adoration, or as 
 other than a fundamentally distinct species of spiritual activity. 
 Adoration may be an intensified reverence, but it certainly is 
 not an intensified admiration. The difference between admi- 
 ration and adoration is observable in the difference of their 
 respective objects ; and that difference is immeasurable. For, 
 speaking strictly, we admire the finite ; we adore the Infinite. 
 Why is this ? It is because admiration requires a certain as- 
 sumption of equality with the object admired, an assumption of 
 ideal, if not of literal equality <i. Admiration such as is here 
 in question is not a vague unregulated wonder ; it involves a 
 judgment ; it is a form of criticism. And since it is a criticism, 
 it consists in our internally referring the object which we ad- 
 mire to a criterion. That criterion is an ideal of our own, 
 and the act by which we compare the admired object with the 
 ideal is our own act. We may have borrowed the ideal from 
 another ; and we do not for a moment suppose that we our- 
 selves could give it perfect expression, or even could produce a 
 rival to the object which commands our critical admiration. 
 Yet, after all, the ideal is before us ; it is, by right of possession, 
 our own. We take credit to ourselves for possessing it, and for 
 comparing the object before us with it j nay, we identify our- 
 
 ^ It is on this account that the apotheosis of men involves the capital sin 
 of pride in those who decree or sanction not less than in those who accept it. 
 The worshipper is himself the 'fountain, of honour;* and in 'deifying' a 
 fellow-creature, he deifies human nature, and so by implication himself. 
 "Wisd. xiv. 20; Acts xii. 22, 23 ; xiv. 11-15; xxviii. 6; Rom. i. 23. 
 VII ] 
 
362 ^ Admiration^ and ^Adoration! 
 
 selves more or less with this ideal when we compare it with 
 the object before us. When you, my brethren, express your 
 admiration of a good painting, you do not mean to assert that 
 you yourselves could have painted it. But you do imply that 
 you have before your mind an ideal of what a good painting 
 should be, and that you are able to form an opinion as to the 
 correspondence of a particular work of art with that ideal. 
 Thus it is that, whether justifiably or not, your admiration of the 
 painting has the double character of self-appreciation and of 
 patronage. Indeed it may be questioned whether as art-critics, 
 intent upon the beauty of your ideal, you are not much more 
 disposed secretly to claim for yourselves a share of merit than 
 would have been the case if you had been the artist himself 
 whose success you consent to admire ; since the artist, we may 
 be sure, is at least conscious of some measure of failure, and 
 is humbled, if not depressed, by a sense of the difficulty of trans- 
 lating his ideal into reality, by the anxieties and struggles which 
 always accompany the process of production. 
 
 Now this element of self-esteem, or at any rate of approving 
 reflection upon self, which enters so penetratingly into admira- 
 tion, is utterly incompatible with the existence of genuine 
 adoration. For adoration is no mere prostration of the body ; 
 it is a prostration of the soul. It is reverence carried to the 
 highest point of possible exaggeration. It is mental self-annihil- 
 ation before a Greatness Which utterly transcends all human 
 and finite standards. In That Presence self knows that it has 
 neither plea nor right to any consideration ; it is overwhelmed 
 by the sense of its utter insignificance. The adoring soul bends 
 thought and heart and will before the footstool of the One Self- 
 existing, All-creating, All-upholding Being ; the soul wills to 
 be as nothing before Him, or to exist only that it may recognise 
 His Glory as altogether surpassing its words and thoughts. If 
 any one element of adoration be its most prominent character- 
 istic, it is this heartfelt uncompromising renunciation of the 
 claims of self. 
 
 Certainly admiration may lead up to adoration j but then 
 real admiration dies away when its object is seen to be entitled 
 to something higher than and distinct from it. Admiration 
 ceases when it has perceived that its Object altogether trans- 
 cends any standard of excellence or beauty with which man can 
 compare Him. Admiration may be the ladder by Avhich we 
 mount to adoration ; but it is useless, or rather it is an im- 
 pertinence, when adoration has been reached. Every man of 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Adoration ofjestcs coeval with the Church, 363 
 
 intelligence and modesty meets in life with many objects which 
 call for his free and sincere admiration, and he himself gains 
 both morally and intellectually by answering to such a call. But 
 while the objects of human admiration are as various as the 
 minds and tastes of men, 
 
 ^Denique non omnes eadem mirantur amantque,' 
 
 One Only Being can be rightfully adored. To ^ admire' God 
 would involve an irreverence only equal to the impiety of ador- 
 ing a fellow-creature. It would be as reasonable to pay Divine 
 worship to our every-day associates, as to substitute for that 
 incommunicable honour which is due to the Most High some 
 one of the tranquil and self-satisfied forms of a favourable 
 notice with which we greet accomplishments or excellence in 
 our fellow-men. ^ When I saw Him, ' says St. John, speaking 
 of Jesus in His glory, * I fell at His feet as dead®.' That was 
 something more than admiration, even the most enthusiastic ; 
 it was an act, in which self had no part j it was an act of adoration. 
 If Jesus Christ had been only a morally perfect Man, He 
 would have been entitled to the highest human admiration ; 
 although it may be questioned, as we have seen, whether He can 
 be deemed morally perfect if He is in reality only human. But 
 the historical fact before us is, that from the earliest age of 
 Christianity, Jesus Christ has been adored as God. This adora- 
 tion was not yielded to Him in consequence of the persuasions 
 of theologians who had pronounced Him to be a Divine Person. 
 It had nothing in common with the fulsome and servile insin- 
 cerities which ever and anon rose like incense around the 
 throne of some pagan Caesar who had received the equivocal 
 honour of an apotheosis. It was not the product of a spiritual 
 fascination, too subtle or too strong to be analyzed by those who 
 felt its power, but easy of explanation to a later age. You can- 
 not trace the stages of its progressive development. You cannot 
 name the time at which it was regarded only as a pious custom 
 or luxury, and then mark this off from a later period when it had 
 become, in the judgment of Christians, an imperious Christian 
 duty. Never was the adoration of Jesus protested against in the 
 Church as a novelty, derogatory to the honour and claims of God. 
 Never was there an age when Jesus was only invoked' as if He 
 had been an interceding saint, by those who had not yet learned 
 
 ^ Rev. i. 1 7 *• 07^ eJdov avThif, eTretra irphs rovs irSdas auTov ws V€Kp6s, 
 
 yii] 
 
364 Worship of yestcs durmg His Earthly Life. 
 
 to prostrate themselves before His throne as the throne of the 
 Omnipotent and the Eternal. In vain will you endeavour to 
 establish a parallel between the adoration of Jesus and some 
 modern ' devotion/ unknown to the early days of Christendom, 
 but now popularized largely in portions of the Christian Church ; 
 since the adoration of Jesus is as ancient as Christianity. Jesus 
 has been ever adored on the score of His Divine Personality, 
 of Which this tribute of adoration is not merely a legitimate but 
 a necessary acknowledgment. 
 
 I. During the days of His earthly life our Lord was surrounded 
 by acts of homage, ranging, as it might seem, so far as the 
 intentions of those who offered them were concerned, from the 
 wonted forms of Eastern courtesy up to the most direct and 
 conscious acts of Divine worship. As an Infant, He was * wor- 
 shipped' by the Eastern sages ^; and during His ministry He 
 constantly received and welcomed acts and words expressive of 
 an intense devotion to His Sacred Person on the part of those 
 who sought or who had received from Him some supernatural 
 aid or blessing. The leper worshipped Him, crying out, * Lord, 
 if Thou wilt. Thou canst make me clean ?.' Jairus worshipped 
 Him, saying, *My daughter is even now dead : but come and 
 lay Thy hand upon her, and she shall live^.' The mother 
 of Zebedee's children came near to Him, worshipping Him, 
 and asking Him to bestow upon her sons the first places of 
 honour in His kingdom i. The woman of Canaan, whose 
 daughter was 'grievously vexed with a devil,' 'came and wor- 
 shipped Him, saying, Lord, help me t.' The father of the poor 
 lunatic, who met Jesus as He descended from the Mount of 
 Transfiguration, 'came, kneeling down to Him, and saying. 
 Lord, have mercy on my son 1.' These are instances of worship 
 accompanying prayers for special mercies. And did not the 
 dying thief offer at least a true inward worship to Jesus Cru- 
 cified, along with the words, ' Lord, remember me when Thou 
 comest into Thy kingdom i^f 
 
 ^ St. Matt. ii. 1 1 : ircaSuTes irpocreKVPTja-av aurw. 
 
 K Ibid. viii. 2 : Kvpie, iav OeK-ps, buvaaai fi€ Kadapicrat, 
 
 ^ Ibid. ix. 18: Trpoa€Kvi/€i avrcf^ \4y(i}v, ^"Ori 7) Ovydrrip fiov &pTi ereAev- 
 TTjo-ev aWa i\6ci}v irrides rrjv X^^P^ ^^^ ^^^ aur^v, Kal (rjo-erai* 
 
 ^ Ibid. XX. 20 : TrpoarjKOev avr^ 7] fM-f}T7jp ruv vluv ZejSeSaiou /tiera rcav vlwv 
 ai/TTJs, irpoaKvuovaa koX alrovad ti Trap' avrov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. XV. 25 : rj de iXQovaa TrpoceKvyei avr^, Keyovca, ' Kvpic ^o^Oei fioi* 
 
 * Ibid. xvii. 14, 15: -npoariKQiV ahrcf Mpwiros yovvirerwv avr^, koI K^yooVy 
 * Kupt€, 4\€T)(T6if /JLOv rhv vlov.* 
 
 Ml St. Luke xxiii. 42 : eAeye r^ *lr}(rov, 'MvfjaOrjTi /jlov, Kupte, '6Tau cA^t^s eV 
 ry jScMJxAe/oi <rou.* 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Worship of Jesus dtiring His Earthly Life, 365 
 
 At other times such visible worship of our Saviour was an 
 act of acknowledgment or of thanksgiving for mercies received. 
 Thus it was with the grateful Samaritan leper, who, ' when he 
 saw that he was healed, turned back, and Avith a loud voice 
 glorified God, and fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him 
 thanks n.' Thus it was when Jesus had appeared walking on 
 the sea and had quieted the storm, and ^ they that were in the 
 ship came and worshipped Him, saying. Of a truth Thou art 
 the Son of God/ Thus too was it after the miraculous 
 draught of fishes, that St. Peter, astonished at the greatness of 
 the miracle, ^fell down at Jesus' knees, saying. Depart from me; 
 for I am a sinful man, O Lord 0/ Thus the penitent, 'when 
 she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought 
 an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at His feet behind 
 Him weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and did 
 wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet, and 
 anointed them with the ointment p.' Thus again when the man 
 born blind confesses his faith in ' the Son of God,' he accompa- 
 nies it by an undoubted act of adoration. * And he said, Lord, 
 I believe. And He worshipped Him n.' Thus the holy women, 
 when the Risen ' Jesus met them, saying, " All hail," came . . . , 
 and held Him by the feet, and worshipped Him^.' Thus 
 apparently Mary of Magdala, in her deep devotion, had motioned 
 to embrace His feet in the garden, when Jesus bade her 'Touch 
 Me nots.' Thus the eleven disciples met our Lord by appoint- 
 ment on a mountain in Galilee, and 'when they saw Him,' as it 
 
 "^ St. Luke xvii. 15, l6: efs 5e e^ ai/Tcoj/, Wchv on IdOrj, uTrftTTpe^e, fxerh, 
 (fxavrjs iJ.€yd\7]s 5o|a^coi/ rhv QiOV Koi eireaey iirl TrpSacoirov irapa robs ttJSos 
 ahrov, evxapKrrcou avrcp. 
 
 o St. Matt. xiv. 32, 33: €K6ira(T€v 6 &j/€fxos' ol Se iu r^ ttKo'k^ i\66vT€S 
 irpoff^Kvvnffav avrcf, \4yovT€s, ''AArjOws &eov Tlhs el.* St. Luke v. 8 : tSwi/ 5e 
 ^.i/jLoov TleVpoy irpo(r€Tr€(T€ to7s ydvaai tov 'iTjaoVj K^yoov, ''"'E.^^KQe an ifiov^ Sti 
 av^p afJLaprooXSs ufxi, Kvpi€.^ 
 
 P St. Luke vii. 37, 38 : Kouiaraaa a\d$aaTpou fxvpov, Ka\ ffTuffa traph. rohs 
 vSdas avTov OTrtVco KXaiovcra, ijp^aro ^p^x^iv rous froSas avrov ro7s daKpvci, Kal 
 ra7s dpi^l rrjs KecpaKrjs avTrjs i^efxaao-e, Koi KaT€(pi\€i tovs rrSdas avrov, Kal 
 ^Aei(/>€ Tw iJLvpQ}. These actions were expressive of a passionate devotion ; 
 they had no object beyond expressing it. 
 
 <i St. John ix. 35-38 : ^Kovaep 6 ^l-qaovs '6ri i^e(3a\ov avrhv e^oo' Ka\ cvpchv 
 avrhu^ etirev avrcp, '2u irLareveis els rhv Tlhv rev @€ov ;' 'AneKpidr] eKelvos Kal 
 flire, ^Tis i(rri, Kvpt€, 'Iva iriarivaw eis avrov ;' E?7re Se avrc^ 6 ^iTjarovSf ' Ka2 
 IdopaKas avrhv y Kal 6 \aX(x)v fx^ra (Tov, €Ke7v6s iariv.^ 'O Se e^T/, ' Ilio-Teutw, 
 Kup^e*' Kal irpoa-iKvvrjcrev avrc^. 
 
 "" St. Matt, xxviii. 9 : 6 ^Irjaovs air-fivriqcrep avra7s, Xeywv, ' Xaipere,'' At 5i 
 irpoa-eXdovcrai iKpdrrjcrav avrov rovs TrJSas, Kal TrpooreKvvrjaav avrw, 
 
 « St. John XX. 1 7. 
 VIl] 
 
366 Gradations in the worship offered to yesits. 
 
 would seem, in their joy and fear, 'they worshipped Him*' 
 Thus, pre-eminently, St. Thomas uses the language of adoration, 
 although it is not said to have been accompanied by any corres- 
 ponding outward act. When, in reproof for his scepticism, he had 
 been bidden to probe the Wounds of Jesus, he burst forth into 
 the adoring confession, * My Lord and my God u.' Thus, when 
 the Ascending Jesus was being borne upwards into heaven, the 
 disciples, as if thanking Him for His great glory, worshipped 
 Him ; and then 'returned to Jerusalem with great joy x.' 
 
 It may be that in some of these instances the 'worship' paid 
 to Jesus did not express more than a profound reverence. 
 Sometimes He was worshipped as a Superhuman Person, wield- 
 ing superhuman powers ; sometimes He was worshipped by 
 those who instinctively felt His moral majesty, which forced 
 them, they knew not how, upon their knees. But if He had 
 been only a ' good man,' He must have checked such worship y. 
 He had Himself re-affirmed the foundation-law of the religion 
 of Israel : ' Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him 
 
 * St. IMatt. xxviii. 1 7 : Koi I^Sptcs avThv.t irpoff^Klvriffav avrcp' ol 8e i^liTTa- 
 (Tav. If some doubted, the worship offered by the rest may be presumed to 
 have been a very deliberate act. 
 
 " St. John XX. 28 : koX atr^Kpldri 6 0«juas, Koi difcv avrc^ *'0 KvpiS? fxov 
 KoX 6 QfSs nov," Against the attempt of Theodore of Mopsuestia and others 
 to resolve this into an ejaculation addressed to the Father, see Alford in loc; 
 Pye Smith on Messiah, ii. 53. The aura) is of itself decisive. 
 
 * St. Luke xxiv. 51, 52 : koL ai/€<p4p€To els top ovpav6v. Koi avToi irpoff- 
 Kvv7i(Tavres avrhy, vTrearperpxv els 'Ifpova-aK^fi ixera xapas fieyaK7]s. 
 
 y This consideration is remarkably overlooked by Channing, who might 
 have been expected to feel its force. Channing is 'sure' that *the worship 
 paid to Christ during His public ministry was rendered to Him only as a 
 Divine Messenger.* But prophets and Apostles were messengers from God. 
 Why were they not worshipped ? Channing insists further that such titles 
 as 'Son of David/ shew that those who used them had no thought of Christ's 
 being *the Self-existent Infinite Divinity.' It may be true that the full 
 truth of His Divine Nature was not known to these first worshippers ; but 
 it does not hold good that a particular title employed in prayer exhausts the 
 idea which the petitioner has formed of the Person whom he addresses. 
 Above all Channing urges the indifference of the Jews 'to the frequent 
 prostrations of men before Jesus.' He thinks this indifference unintelligible 
 on the supposition of their believing such prostrations to involve the payment 
 of divine honours. That many of these prostrations were not designed to 
 involve anything so definite is freely conceded. That the Jews suspected 
 the intention to honour Christ's Divinity in none of them would not prove 
 that none of them were designed to honour It. The Jews were not present 
 at the confession of St. Thomas after the Resurrection ; but there is no 
 reasonable room for questioning either the devotional purpose or the theo- 
 logical force of the Apostle's exclamation, ' My Lord and my God.' But 
 see Channing Works, ii. 194. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Adoration of Jesus Glorified. ^6y 
 
 only shalt thou serve z.' Yet lie never hints that danger lurked 
 in this prostration of hearts and v/ills before Himself; He wel- 
 comes, by a tacit approval, this profound homage of which He 
 is the Object. His rebuke to the rich young man implies, not 
 that He himself had no real claim to be called ' Good Master,' 
 but that such a title, in the mouth of the person before Him, 
 was an unmeaning compliment. He seems to invite prayer 
 to Himself, even for the highest spiritual blessings, in such 
 words as those which He addressed to the woman of Samaria : 
 * If thou knewest the gift of God, and Who it is that saith unto 
 thee. Give me to drink ; thou wouldest have asked of Him, and 
 He would have given thee living water a.' He predicts indeed 
 a time when the spiritual curiosity of His disciples would be 
 satisfied in the joy of perfectly possessing Him; but He nowhere 
 hints that He would Himself cease to receive their prayers b. 
 He claims all the varied homage which the sons of men, in 
 their want and fulness, in their joy and sorrow, may rightfully 
 and profitably pay to the Eternal Father ; all men are to 
 'honour the Son even as they honour the Father.' 
 
 2. Certain it is that no sooner had Christ been lifted up from 
 the earth, in death and in glory, than He forthwith began 
 to draw all men unto Him<'. This attraction expressed itself, 
 not merely in an assent to His teaching, but in the worship 
 of His Person. No sooner had He ascended to His throne than 
 there burst upwards from the heart of His Church a tide 
 of adoration which has only become wider and deeper with 
 the lapse of time. In the first days of the Church, Christians 
 were known as Hhose who called upon the Name of Jesus 
 Christ <^.' Prayer to Jesus Christ, so far from being a devotional 
 
 ' St. Matt. iv. 10. 
 
 * St. John iv. 10 : et yi'Seis rrjv Scoped?/ tov 0eoO, Koi rls iariv b Xiywv (Toi, 
 ' A6s fJLOi TTiuVy av av 7JT7)(Tas avrhv^ Koi edcoKev &v aoi vdcop (wv. 
 
 ^ Ibid. xvi. 22 : jraMv Se o^pojULai v/jlus, koi xap'^Jt^f'at vfioov 7} Kap^ia, Kot r^i/ 
 Xapav v/JLcou ouSeis a^pei d(/)' v/awv Koi eV eKeivr] rrj 7]fji€pa efxe ovk ipooriia^T^ 
 ohth. Here ipocTTjaere clearly means ' question.' 
 
 c Ibid. xii. 32. 
 
 d Thus Ananias pleads to our Lord that Saul *hath authority from the 
 chief priests to bind irdvras tovs iiriKaXovfievous rh vvojjlo. cov.' (Acts ix. 14.) 
 On St. Paul's first preaching in Jerusalem, *A11 that heard him were amazed, 
 and said, Is not this he that destroyed in Jerusalem rovs i-KiKaXovixhovs 
 Th ouofxa rovTO'/ (Ibid. ver. 21.) Thus the title was applied to Christians 
 both by themselves and by Jews outside the Church. In after years St. Paul 
 inserts it at the beginning of his first Epistle to the Corinthians, which 
 is addressed to the Church of God at Corinth avi/ Traai to7s eiriKaAovficvois rh 
 6voiJLa rod Kvpiov iifiuj/ 'Irjarov XpicTTOv. (i Cor. i. 2.) The expression is 
 VII ] 
 
368 Early apostolic prayers to Jesus Glorified, 
 
 eccentricity, was the universal practice of Christians ; it was 
 the act of devotion which specially characterized a Christian. 
 It would seem more than probable that the prayer offered 
 by the assembled apostles at the election of St. Matthias, 
 was addressed to Jesus glorified®. A few months later the 
 dying martyr St. Stephen passed to his crown. His last cry 
 was a prayer to our Lord, moulded upon two of the seven 
 sayings which our Lord Himself had uttered on the Cross. 
 Jesus had prayed the Father to forgive His executioners. Jesus 
 had commended His Spirit into the Father's Hands f The 
 words which are addressed by Jesus to the Father, are by 
 St. Stephen addressed to Jesus. To Jesus Stephen turns in 
 that moment of supreme agony \ to Jesus he prays for pardon 
 on his murderers; to Jesus, as to the King of the world of 
 
 illustrated by the dying prayer of St. Stephen, whom his murderers stoned 
 kiriKaXovixivov koL \iyovra<, * Kvpi€ 'iT/troO, Se^ai rh irvev/uid fiov.* (Acts vii. 59.) 
 It cannot be doubted that in Acts xxii. 16, 2 Tim. ii. 22, the Kvpio's Who 
 is addressed is our Lord Jesus Christ. ^ETriKaXuadai is not followed by 
 an accusative except in the sense of appealing to God or man. Its meaning 
 is clear when it is used of prayer to the Eternal Father, i St. Pet. i. 1 7 ; 
 Acts ii. 21 (but cf. Rom. x. 13) ; or of appeal to Him, 2 Cor. i. 23 ; or of 
 appeal to a human judge, Acts xxv. li, 12, 21, 25; xxvi. 32 ; xxviii. 19. 
 Its passive use occurs in texts of a different construction : Acts iv. 36 ; 
 X. 18; xii. 12 ; XV. 17; Heb. xi. 16 ; St. James ii. 7. 
 
 « Acts i. 24 : Kol irpoa-fv^dfifvoi elwoi/^ * Sv Kvpie Kap^ioyvua-ra irduTwv, 
 avd^ei^ov €k tovtuv tuv duo eVa tv i^€\4^c»} * k.t.A. The selection of the twelve 
 apostles is always ascribed to Jesus Christ. Acts i. 2 : ovs e|eA6|aTo. 
 St. Luke vi. 13: Trpoa-^pcvvrja-c rovs fjLaOrjTas avrov' Koi iK\i^d/JLevos aw amwv 
 ZwTiiKay ots Kol avoarSKovs cuvSfxaa-e. St. John vi. 70 : ovk iyci} vfxas rovs 
 5(w5e/fa i^eK^^afXTju ; Ibid. xiii. 18: iyci) oTSa ots i^eXf^dfiTju, Ibid. xv. 16: 
 ovx vfif^s /xe 4^€\€^aa6€, aW* iyw i^eKe^dfxrjt/ v/jlus. Ibid. ver. 1 9 : iyd) 
 i^e\e^dfx€v vfxas iK tov kSciiov. Meyer quotes Acts xv. 7 : 6 &€hs €|eAf^aTo 
 dia TOV (n6}xar6s /xov OLKovcrai ra edvrj rhu x6yov rov ivayyeXlov, in order to 
 shew that the Eternal Father must have been addressed. But this assumes 
 that @€6s can have no reference to our Lord. Moreover St. Peter is clearly 
 referring, not to his original call to the apostolate, but to his being directed 
 to evangelize the Gentiles. St. Paul was indeed accustomed to trace up his 
 apostleship to the Eternal Father as the ultimate Source of all authority 
 (Gal. i. 15 ; 2 Cor. i. i ; Eph. i. i ; 2 Tim. i. i); but this is not inconsistent 
 with the fact that Jesus Christ chose and sent each and all of the apostles. 
 The epithet Kapdioyvd>(TTr}s, and still more the word Kvpios, are equally 
 applicable to the Father and to Jesus Christ. For the former, see St. John 
 i. 50, ii. 25, vi. 64, xxi. 17. It was natural that the apostles should thus 
 apply to Jesus Christ to fill up the vacant chair, unless they had believed 
 Him to be out of the reach of prayer or incapable of helping them. See 
 Alford and Olshausen in loc; Baumgarten's Apost. History in loc. 
 
 ^ Acts vii. 59, 60 : i\i6o^6\ovv rhv ^T4(pavov, eTriKaXovfX€vov koX K^yovra^ 
 *Kvpie 'l7/(rov, Se^ai rh irviv/xd /xoi/.' &els 5e ra ySparttj €Kpa^e (puufj ixeydXy, 
 * Kvpi€f jj.^ (TT'fio-ps avTo7s TTjV a/jLapTiav ravTi/jv,* 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The dyijig prayer of St. Stephen, 369 
 
 spirits, he commends his parting soul. It is suggested that 
 St. Stephen's words were ^ only an ejaculation forced from him 
 in the extremity of his anguish,' and that as such they are 
 ^highly unfitted to be made the premiss of a theological in- 
 ference?' But the question is, whether the earliest apostolical 
 Church did or did not pray to Jesus Christ. And St. Stephen's 
 dying prayer is strictly to the point. An 'ejaculation' may 
 shew more clearly than any set formal prayer the ordinary 
 currents of devotional thought and feeling; an ejaculation is 
 more instinctive, more spontaneous, and therefore a truer index 
 of a man's real mind, than a prayer which has been used for years. 
 And how could the martyr's cry to Jesus have been the product 
 of a thoughtless impulse ]' Dying men do not cling to devotional 
 fancies or to precarious opinions ; the soul in its last agony 
 instinctively falls back upon its deepest certainties. Nor can 
 the unpremeditated ejaculation of a person dying in shame and 
 torture be credited with that element of dramatic artifice which 
 may in rare cases have coloured parting words and actions 
 when, alas ! on the brink of eternity, men have thought more 
 of a ' place in history ' than of the awful Presence into which 
 they were hastening. Is it hinted that St. Stephen was a 
 recent convert, not yet entirely instructed in the complete faith 
 and mind of the apostles, and not unlikely to exaggerate par- 
 ticular features of their teaching ] But St. Stephen is expressly 
 described as a man 'full of faith and of the Holy Ghosts.' 
 As such he had recently been chosen to fill an important office 
 in the Church ; and as a prominent missionary and apologist 
 of the Gospel he might seem almost to have taken rank with the 
 apostles themselves. Is it urged that St. Stephen's prayer was 
 offered under the exceptional circumstances of a vision of Christ 
 vouchsafed in mercy to His dying servant ^ % But it does not 
 enter into the definition of prayer or worship that it must 
 of necessity be addressed to an invisible Person. And the vision 
 of Jesus standing at the right hand of God may have differed 
 in the degree of sensible clearness, but in its general nature it 
 did not differ, from that sight upon which the eye of every dying 
 Christian has rested from the beginning. St. Stephen would 
 not have prayed to Jesus Christ then^ if he had never prayed 
 to Him before; the vision of Jesus would not have tempted 
 him to innovate upon the devotional law of his life ; the sight of 
 
 8 Acts vi. 5 : ^i/5pa TrX-f^prj iritrrews koI Hvev/xaTOs 'Ayiov. 
 
 ^ So apparently Meyer in loc. : ' Das Stephanus Jesum anrief, war hochst 
 natiirlich, da er eben Jesum filr ihn bereit stehend gesehen hatte.* 
 VII ] B b 
 
370 Prayer of Ananias to Jestts Christ, 
 
 Jesus would have only carried him in thought upwards to the 
 Father, if the Father alone had been the Object of the Church's 
 earliest adoration. St. Stephen would never have prayed to 
 Jesus, if he had been taught that such prayer was hostile to 
 the supreme prerogatives of God ; and the apostles, as mono- 
 theists, must have taught him thus, unless they had believed 
 that Jesus is God, who with the Father is worshipped and 
 glorified. 
 
 Indeed St. Stephen's prayer may be illustrated, so far as this 
 point is concerned, by that of Ananias at Damascus. To Ananias 
 Jesus appeared in a vision, and desired him to go to the newly- 
 converted Saul of Tarsus ^ in the street that is called Straight.' 
 The reply of Ananias is an instance of that species of prayer in 
 which the soul trustfully converses with God even to the verge 
 of argument and remonstrance, while yet it is controlled by the 
 deepest sense of God's awful greatness : * Lord, I have heard by 
 many of this man, how much evil he hath done to Thy saints at 
 Jerusalem : and here he hath authority from the chief priests 
 to bind all that call on Thy Name i.' Our Lord overrules the 
 objections of His servant. But what man has not at times 
 prayed for exemption, when God has made it plain that He wills 
 him to undertake some difficult duty, or to embrace some sharp 
 and heavy cross 1 Who has not pleaded with God the claims 
 of His interests and His honour against what appears to be 
 His Will, so long as it has been possible to doubt whether 
 His Will is really what it seems to be % Ananias' ^ remonstrance ' 
 is a prayer ; it is a spiritual colloquy ; it is a form of prayer 
 which implies daily, hourly familiarity with its Object ; it 
 is the language of a soul habituated to constant communion 
 with Jesus. It shews very remarkably how completely Jesus 
 occupies the whole field of vision in the soul of His servant. 
 The * saints' whom Saul of Tarsus has persecuted at Jerusalem, 
 are the ^ saints,' it is not said of God, but of Jesus ; the Name 
 which is called upon by those whom Saul has authority to 
 bind at Damascus, is the Name of Jesus. Ananias does not 
 glance at One higher than Jesus, as if Jesus were lower than 
 God ; Jesus is to Ananias his God, the Recipient of his worship, 
 and yet the Friend before Whom he can plead the secret 
 thoughts of his heart with earnestness and freedom. 
 
 * Acts ix. 13, 14: Ki5pi6, d/c^Koa hnrb itoWSiV vepl rod avdphs roirov, Zaa 
 KaKOL 4Troiri<T€ rois ayiois <tov iv 'l€povaa\i]fi' Koi SSc Ix^* i^ovaiap irapa rcov 
 apx^^p^wv, brjaai iravTas rovs iiTiKa.\ov^4vovs rb opo/xd aov. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
S^. PauVs first prayers to Jesus. 371 
 
 But he to whom, at the crisis of a far greater destiny, Ana- 
 nias brought consolation and relief from Jesus, was himself 
 conspicuous for his devotion to the adorable Person of our Lord. 
 At the very moment of his conversion, Saul of Tarsus sur- 
 rendered himself by a prayer to Christ, as to the lawful Lord 
 of his being. ' Lord,' he cried, * what wilt Thou have me to 
 do k ? ' And when afterwards in the temple our Lord bade 
 St. Paul, ' Make haste and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem,' we 
 find the Apostle, like Ananias, unfolding to Jesus his secret 
 thoughts, his fears, his regrets, his confessions; laying them 
 out before Him, and waiting for an answer from Jesus in the 
 secret chambers of his soul 1. Indeed St. Paul constantly uses 
 language which shews that he habitually thought of Jesus as of 
 Divine Providence in a Human Form, watching over, befriending, 
 consoling, guiding, providing for him and his, with Infinite fore- 
 sight and power, but also with the tenderness of a human sym- 
 pathy. In this sense Jesus is placed on a level with the Father 
 in St. Paul's two earliest Epistles. ' Now God Himself and our 
 Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, direct our way unto you "^ ; ' 
 ^ Now our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and God, even our Father, 
 Which hath loved us, and hath given us everlasting consolation 
 and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts, and stablish you 
 in every good word and work ^^ Thus Jesus is associated with 
 the Father, in one instance as directing the outward movements 
 of the Apostle's life, in another as building up the inward life 
 of the recent converts to Christianity. In other devotional ex- 
 pressions the Name of Jesus stands alone. ' I trust in the Lord 
 Jesus,' so the Apostle writes to the Philippians, ' to send Timo- 
 theus shortly unto you «.' * I thank Christ Jesus our Lord,' so 
 he assures St. Timothy, ' Who hath given me power, for that He 
 
 ^ Acts ix. 6 : Tpiyi(av re koX da/uL^wv cJire, * Kvpie, ri fxe BeXeis Troirja-at ; ' 
 
 ^ Ibid. xxii. 19, 20: Ki^pte, avrol iTriaravrai, on iy^ ¥ifXT]v <pv\aKi(cav koX 
 b^pcou Kara ras (Tui/aywYas tovs ivKmvovras e'lri cr4' Koi '6re e'lexen-o rh al/jLa 
 '2,Te<pdpov Tov fjLapTvpSs (Tov, koI avrbs fjfxriv etpearcbs Kal avv^vhoKMv rfj avai- 
 p^aei avTov, Kal <pv\a.(T(roiV rh l/uLaTia tGjv apaipovproov avrSv. 
 
 ™ I Thess, iii. II : Avrhs Be 6 Sehs Kal IlaT^p -fj/jLuv, Kal 6 Kvpios Tjfxuif 
 *l7}(Tovs Xpiarhs, KanvQvvai, r^v ddhv tjIjlcou trphs v/xas. 
 
 " 2 Thess. ii. 16, 17 : abrhs Se 6 Kvpins rjficau 'Irjtrous Xpiffrhs, Kal 6 @€hs 
 Kal Uar^p Tjfxwi/, 6 ayairiiaas rnxas Kal hovs TrapaKArjcnv alcoviau Kal i\irida 
 ayadrjv eV x^P^"^^^ TrapaKaXiaai vfj-ccv r^s Kapdias, Kal (TTrjpi^ai vfias eV iraprl 
 \6y(f Kal epyca ayaQ<^. 
 
 o Phil. ii. 19 : i\Tri(ca Se eV Kvpica 'Irjcrov, TijuSdeou rax^oos ire/xipai. 'This 
 hope was iv Kvpief> 'Irjaov : it rested and centred in Him ; it arose from no 
 extraneous feelings or expectations, and so would doubtless be fulfilled.' 
 Bp. EUicott in loc. 
 VII ] B b 2 
 
37 2 Prayer to yesus C/u^ist, how recognised 
 
 counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry p.' Is not 
 this the natural language of a soul which is constantly engaged 
 in communion with Jesus, whether it be the communion of 
 praise or the communion of prayer % Jesus is to St. Paul, not 
 a deceased teacher or philanthropist, who has simply done his 
 great work and then has left it as a legacy to the world \ He is 
 God, ever living and ever present, the Giver of temporal and of 
 spiritual blessings, the Guide and Friend of man both in man's 
 outward and in his inward life. If we had no explicit records of 
 prayers offered by St. Paul to Jesus, we might be sure that such 
 prayers were offered, since otherwise the language which he 
 employs could not have been used. But, in point of fact, the 
 Apostle has not left us in doubt as to his faith or his practice 
 in this respect. *If,* he asserts, 'thou shalt confess with 
 thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart 
 that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. 
 For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness ; and with 
 the mouth confession is made to salvation. For the Scripture 
 Baith, Whosoever believeth on Him shall not be ashamed. For 
 there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek : for the 
 Same is Lord over all, rich unto all that call upon Him. For 
 whosoever shall call upon the Name of the Lord shall be 
 saved Q.' The prophet Joel had used these last words of prayer 
 to the Lord Jehovah. St. Paul, as the whole context shews 
 beyond reasonable doubt, understands them of prayer to Jesus r. 
 And what are the Apostle's benedictions in the Name of Christ 
 but indirect prayers offered to Christ that His blessing might be 
 vouchsafed to the Churches which the Apostle is addressing? 
 'Grace be to you from God our Father, and from the Lord 
 
 P I Tim. i. 12 : kox x°V'^ ^X* "^^ hv^waincocTavri fxc Xpiarcf *l7)(rov rep 
 Kvpicfi 7]fx(ioVt 8ti irKTrSu fie Tjyiia-aTo, dejx€:Vos els diaKoviav. 
 
 *i Rom. X. 9-13 : eaj/ SfjLoXoyfjcrrjs eV rep (rrSfxari <tov Kvpiov 'Ii7(rouf, Kot 
 iTKrrevcrrjs iv ry Kapdia aov '6ti 6 &ehs avrhv ijyeipcv iK ueKpoov, (Tud-harf KapZia. 
 yhp iriaT^veTai els SiKaioavvTjv^ (rrS^iari Se b^Ji.o\oyurai iU aooT-qpiav. Aeyet 
 yhp 7] ypa(p^, ' Has 6 irKmvoov in avrca ov KaTai(rxvvdii(T€Tai.' Ov yap iari 
 biacrTo\r] 'louSaiou re Kol "EWrjvos' 6 yap aurhs Kvpios iravroiv, ttXovtwv eis 
 'irdpTas rovs iiriKaXov/JLej/ovs ai/rSv. ' lias yap hs &y iiriKaX^aTjrai to Ofo/na 
 Kvpiov, (Ta}er}(r€Tai.' Cf. Isa. xxviii. 16 ; Joel ii. 32. Here St. Paul applies 
 to Jesus the language which prophets had used of the Lord Jehovah. 
 Cf. Acts ii. 21. 
 
 ' Cf. Meyer in Rom. X., 12 : 6 yap avrhs Kvpios Travrcov. * Dieser Kvpios 
 ist Christus, der avrSs ver. 1 1 und der mit diesem avrSs nothwendig iden- 
 tische Kvpios ver. 13. Ware Gott (i.e. the Father) gemeint, so miisste man 
 grade den christlichen Charakter der Beweisfiihrung erst hinzutragen (wie 
 Olsh. : * Gott in Christo '), was aber willkiirlich ware.* For Kvpios irdvroiVy 
 see Phil. ii. 11. Cf. St. Chrys. in loc. 
 
 [lect. 
 
in St, PaiiVs Epistles, 373 
 
 Jesus Christ s.' * The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be 
 with you all*.' Or what shall we say of St. Paul's entreaties 
 that he might be freed from the mysterious and humiliating 
 infirmity which he terms his Hhorn in the flesh?' He tells 
 us that three times he besought the Lord Jesus Christ that 
 it might depart from him, and that in mercy his prayer was 
 refused^. Are we to imagine that that prayer to Jesus was 
 an isolated act in St. Paul's spiritual life? Does any such 
 religious act stand alone in the spiritual history of an ear- 
 nest and moderately consistent man? Apostles believed that 
 when the First-begotten was brought into the inhabited world, 
 the angels of heaven were bidden to worship Him^. They 
 
 8 I Cor. i. 3. 
 
 * Rom. xvi. 24 ; and almost in the same words, ver. 20. 
 
 " 2 Cor. xii. 8, 9 : ^Trep rovrov rpXs rhv Kvpiov TrapeKaXeara, 'iva aTroa-rf} ctTr' 
 i/iiov' Kal e^pr)K4 /xoi, **ApK€7 aroi 7) X"P'^ f^ov' r) yap dvvafxis fxov ev aada/eia 
 r€\eiovTai.' f/Sio-ra qdu fxaXXou Kavx'haro/Ji.ai iu rdi^ aadeveiais fiov, %va iiri- 
 o-K-nvivat) €7r' ifie 7] bvi/afxis tov Xpia-rov. Meyer in loc. : * rhv Kvpiov^ nicht 
 Gott (the Father), sondern Christum (s. v. 9, t) Svvafxis rod Xpiarov), der 
 
 ja der machtige Bez winger des Satan's ist Wie Paulus die Ant wort, 
 
 den xRVl^o-'^^f^f^^s (Matt. ii. 12 ; Luk. ii. 6; Act. x. 22) von Christo emp- 
 fangen habe, ist uns volh'g unbekannt.' 
 
 * Heb. i. 6 : (irav 8e trdXiv ilffaydyr) rbu TrpurSroKov els r^v olKovixeurjVf 
 Xcyei, ' Kal irpoaKvuTicrdrcoo-ay aura) Trdi/res &yy€\oi ©eoC On this passage 
 see the exhaustive note of Delitzsch, Comm. zum. Br. an die Hebraer, pp. 
 24-29. *Die LXX. libers, hier ganz richtig irpo<TKvj/7](TaT€, denn ^inriK^"n ist 
 ja kein praet. consec, und Augustin macht die den rechten Sinn trefFende 
 schone Bemerkung : "adorate Eum;" cessat igitur adoratio angelorum, qui 
 non adorantur, sed adorant ; mali angeh volunt adorari, boni adorant nee se 
 adorari permittunt, ut vel saltern eorum exemplo idolatrise cessent." Es fragt 
 sich nun aber : mit welchem Rechte oder auch nur auf welchem Grunde 
 bezieht der Verf. eine Stelle, die von Jehova handelt, auf Christum ? ' After 
 discussing some unsatisfactory replies, he proceeds : * Der Grundsatz, von 
 welchem der Verf. ausgeht, ist ... . dieser : Ueberall wo im A. T. von einer 
 endzeitigen letztentscheidenden Zukunft (Parusie), Erscheinung und Erweis- 
 ung Jehova's in seiner zugleich richterlichen und heilwartigen IMacht und 
 Herrlichkeit die Rede ist, von einer gegenbildlich zur mosaischen Zeit sich 
 verhaltenden OfFenbarung Jehova's, von einer Selbstdarstellung Jehova's als 
 Konigs seines Beiches : da ist Jehova = Jesus Christus ; denn dieser ist 
 Jehova, geoffenbaret im Fleisch ; Jehova, eingetreten in die Menscheit und 
 ihre Geschichte; Jehova, aufgegangen als Sonne des Heils iiber seinem 
 Volke. Dieser Grundsatz ist auch unumstosslich wahr ; auf ihm ruht der 
 heilsgeschichtliche Zusammenhang, die tiefinnerste Einheit beider Testa- 
 mente. Alle neutest. Schriftsteller sind dieses Bewusstseins voll, welches 
 sich gleich auf der Schwelle der evangelischen Geschichte ausspricht ; denn 
 dem 'rr DV soil Elia vorausgehn Mai. iii. 23 f. und irpb irpoffdo-nov Kvpiov 
 Johannes Lc. i. 76, vgl. 17. Darum sind auch alle Psalmen in welchen die 
 Verwirklichung des weltiiberwindenden Konigthums Jehova's besungen wird, 
 messianisch und werden von unserem Verf. als solche betrachtet, denn die 
 VII] 
 
374 "SL yohn 07i prayer to the Son of God, 
 
 declared Himy, when His day of humiliation and suffering had 
 ended, to have been so highly exalted that the Name which He 
 had borne on earth, and which is the symbol of His Humanity, 
 was now the very atmosphere and nutriment of all the upward 
 torrents of prayer which rise from the moral world beneath His 
 throne ; that as the God-Man He was worshipped by angels, by 
 men, and by the spirits of the dead. The practice of the Apostles 
 did but illustrate their faith ; and the prayers offered to Jesus 
 by His servants on earth were believed to be but a reflection of 
 that worship which is offered to Him by the Church of heaven. 
 
 If this belief is less clearly traceable in the brief Epistles of 
 St. Peter z, it is especially observable in St. John. St. John is 
 speaking of the Son of God, when he exclaims, ' This is the con- 
 fidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according 
 to His Will, He heareth us : and if we know that He hear us, 
 .... we know that we have the petitions that we desired of 
 Him ^.' These petitions of the earthly Church correspond to the 
 adoration above, where the wounded Humanity of our Lord is 
 throned in the highest heavens. * I beheld, and lo, in the midst 
 of the throne .... stood a Lamb as It had been slain b.' Around 
 
 schliessliche Glorie der Theokratie ist nach heilsgeschichtlichem Plane keine 
 andere als die der Christokratie, das Reich Jehova's und das Reich Christi 
 ist Eines.' 
 
 y Phil. ii. 9, 10 : b ©eby avT}>v vTrfpinpooffc, Koi ix'^P'-^^-'^^ ahrZ ovofxa rh 
 virhp irav opofia' %va 4v t^ ovS/nari *lr]aov irau y6vv Koifi^r] iirovpaviooy Kcd 
 dTTiyeitcv koI KaTaxOovicov koi iracra yXiaatTa i^oixoXoyi\(n]Tcm 6ti Kvpios ^lr}(rovs 
 XpLcnds (is do^av Qcov UarpSs. See Alford in loc. : 'The general aim of 
 the passage is ... . the exaltation of Jesus. The els do^ap &€ov UarpSs 
 below is no deduction from this, but rather an additional reason why we 
 should carry on the exaltation of Jesus until this new particular is in- 
 troduced. This would lead us to infer that the universal prayer is to be 
 to Jesus. And this view is confirmed by the next clause, where every tongue 
 is to confess that Jesus Christ is Kvpios, when we remember the common 
 expression, 4iriKa\€i(rdcu rb ovofxa Kvpiou, for prayer. Rom. x. 12 ; I Cor. 
 i. 2 ; 2 Tim. ii. 22.' 
 
 * Yet I St. Pet. iv. ii is a doxology * framed, as it might seem, for com- 
 mon use on earth and in heaven.' See also 2 St. Pet. iii. 1 8. 
 
 * I St. John V. 13-15 : 'iva rrKrTCinjTe els to ovofxa tov Tlov rod &eov. Kal 
 avTTi iffrlv tj ira^^-qaia ^v exofiev irphs avrbi/, '6ri idv ri alricfxeOa Karh rb 
 6eKy]fxa avTov, dfcouet Tjficoi/' koi iav otoaixev '6ti aKovei rjfiooi/, t hv alroofxeOa, 
 oX^afiev '6ti exo/J-ev to. alri]piara h yT7)KaiuLev Trap' avrov. The natural con- 
 struction of this passage seems to oblige us to refer avrov and to deA-niuLa to 
 the Son of God (ver. 13). The passage I St. John iii. 21,22 does not forbid 
 this ; it only shews how fully, in St. John's mind, the honour and prerogatives 
 of the Son are those of the Father. 
 
 ^ Rev. V. 6 : kcu eldov, koi iSov iu ix4(r(p rov 6p6vov koL rwv reaadptav C<^a)V 
 Kal eV fieccf rSiv irpetrfivrepuVy apviov iffTTjKhs ws iacpayfxeifov, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Adoration of the Lamb, 375 
 
 Him are three concentric circles of adoration. The inmost pro- 
 ceeds from the four mysterious creatures and the four and twenty 
 elders who ^ have harps, and golden vials full of odours, which 
 are the prayers of the saints c.' These are the courtiers who are 
 placed on the very steps of the throne ; they represent more 
 distant worshippers. But they too fall down before the throne, 
 and sing the new song which is addressed to the Lamb slain and 
 glorified d : * Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by 
 Thy Blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and 
 nation \ and hast made us unto our God kings and priests, and 
 we shall reign on the earth e.' Around these, at a greater 
 distance from the Most Holy, there is a countless company of 
 worshippers: ^I heard the voice of many angels round about the 
 throne and the creatures and the elders : and the number of 
 them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of 
 thousands ; saying with a loud voice. Worthy is the Lamb That 
 was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, 
 and honour, and glory, and blessing f' Beyond these again, the 
 entranced Apostle discerns a third sphere in which a perpetual 
 worship is maintained. Lying outside the two inner circles of 
 conscious adoration offered by the heavenly intelligences, there 
 is in St. John's vision an assemblage of all created life, which, 
 whether it wills or not, lives for Christ's as for the Father's 
 glory : * And every creature which is in heaven, and on the 
 earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all 
 that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and 
 glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, 
 and unto the Lamb for ever and ever&.' This is the hymn of 
 the whole visible creation, and to it a response comes from 
 the inmost circle of adoring beings, ratifying and harmonizing 
 this sublime movement of universal life : 'And the four creatures 
 
 ^ Rev. V. 8 : exovres cKaarros KiOdpas, Kol ^id\a5 XP^^^^ yefMovaas 6v- 
 fxia/uLaTwu, ai elaiu at Trpo(revxod rwv aylonu. 
 
 ^ Ibid. : eirecrov fpdoiriov rov apviov .... Koi adovcriv cfd^if Kaivriv, 
 
 ® Ibid. ver. 9 : €(r<pdyT)s, koI ijySpacras rcf) ©e^ rifias iv rep aXfjLaTl crov, e/c 
 irdcrrjs <pv\7Js Kol yXdocraTjs Koi Xaov koi eOi/ovSy koI inol-^cras rjixas r^ &ecf tj/jlcoi/ 
 ^ao'i\€7s Kal Upels' koI PacnXevao/Jiev €ttI ttjs yrj^. 
 
 ^ Ibid. vers. 11, 12 : koI elSox', koi i]Kov(ra (poov^v ayy^Kcov iroWcou kvkK6Q^v 
 
 rov dpovov Kal roov ^wcav koX ru>v Trpecr^vTepoov Kal XiAiCtSes ;(;iA<a5aj^, 
 
 \4yovres (puvrj ^^ydXri^ ^"A^iou icrri rh apviov rh iacpay/xevov Xa^e7v r-iju 
 dwa/iiiv Kal irkovrov Kol <To<piav Kal laxvv Kal ti/jl^v Kal dS^av Kal €v\oyiau.^ 
 
 s Ibid. ver. 13 : Kal irav Kriafia '6 iariu iv rQi ovpavc^, koX iv rij yfj, Kal 
 viroKdrta rris yris, Kal k-rrl t^s QaKd(T(T7]s a i(Tri, Kal ra iv avTo7s irdi/ra, iJKOvaa 
 X^yovras, * To? KaOrj/xevcp eirl rod Qp6vov Kot r(p apvLcp rj evXoyia Kal 7} ri/x^ koi 
 7) ^6^a Kal rh Kpdros els rovs aluyas rS>v alcavoiv,* 
 VII ] 
 
37^ Characteristics of the worship of Jestis in N, T. 
 
 said, Amenli/ And how does the redeemed Church on earth 
 bear her part in this universal chorus of praise ? ^ Unto Him 
 That loved us, and washed us from our sins in His Own Blood, 
 and hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father ; 
 to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen i.' You 
 will not, my brethren, mistake the force and meaning of this 
 representation of the adoration of the Lamb in the Apocalypse. 
 This representation cannot be compared with the Apocalyptic 
 pictures of the future fortunes of the Church, where the imagery 
 employed frequently leaves room for allusions so diverse, that no 
 interpretation can be positively assigned to a particular symbol 
 without a certain intellectual and spiritual immodesty in the 
 interpreter who essays to do so. You may in vain endeavour 
 satisfactorily to solve the questions which encompass such points 
 as the number of the beast or the era of the millennium ; but 
 you cannot doubt for one moment Who is meant by ^ the Lamb,' 
 or what is the character of the worship that is so solemnly 
 offered to Him. 
 
 But upon this worship of Jesus Christ as we meet with it in 
 the apostolical age, let us here make three observations. 
 
 a. First, then, it cannot be accounted for, and so set aside, as 
 being part of an undiscriminating cultus of heavenly or super- 
 human beings in general. Such a cultus finds no place in the 
 New Testament, except when it, or something very much re- 
 sembling it, is expressly discountenanced. By the mouth of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ the New Testament reaffirms the Sinaitic law 
 which restricts worship to the Lord God Himself ^^. St. Peter 
 will not sanction the self -prostrations of the grateful Cornelius, 
 lest Cornelius should think of him as more than human 1. 
 When, at Lystra, the excited populace, with their priest, desired 
 to offer sacrifice to St. Paul and St. Barnabas, as to * deities 
 who had come down to them in the likeness of men,' the 
 Apostles in their unfeigned distress protested that they were but 
 men of like feelings with those whom they were addressing, and 
 claimed for the living God that service which was His exclusive 
 
 ^ Rev. V. 14 ! Koi ra riffffapa ^coa ihcyov, *Kfx-f]V. 
 
 * Ibid. i. 5, 6 : rep ayatr-qaavrL rjfxas Kal \ovaavri riixas hirb roov afMapriwp 
 rjucou eV rtp aifxari avrov' koi iTroi'q(r€V 7}fxas ^acxiX^ls koi tfpels rcf ©ew Koi 
 HaTpl avTov' avTcf rj d6^a koi rh Kpoiros els rovs alcouas ruu alwi'coy. a/xrjv, 
 
 ^ St. Matt. iv. 10; Deut. vi. 13 ; x. 20. 
 
 *Acts X. 25 : (rvvavTT}(ras avr^ 6 Kopv^Xios, ircfffbv eirJ rovs irSdas irpoffe" 
 ic6i/T)aev^ d 5e Tlerpos avrhi^ ijyeipe \4ywPf ' 'AmcTTTjdL' Kaycb avrbs ^.vOpcoTros 
 
 [lect. 
 
{i)No instaiices of secondary worship in the N,T, 377 
 
 rights. When St. John fell at the feet of the angel of the 
 Apocalypse, in profound acknowledgment of the marvellous 
 privileges of sight and sound to which he had been admitted, he 
 was peremptorily checked on the ground that the angel too was 
 only his fellow-slave, and that God was the one true Object of 
 worship^. One of the most salient features of the Gnostico- 
 Jewish theosophy which threatened the faith of the Church of 
 Colossse was the worshipping of angels ; and St. Paul censures 
 it because it tended to loosen men's hold upon the incommu- 
 nicable prerogatives of the great Head of the Church o. Cer- 
 tainly the New Testament does teach that we Christians have 
 close communion with the blessed angels and with the sainted 
 dead, such as would be natural to members of one great and 
 really undivided family. The invisible world is not merely 
 above, it is around us ; we have come into it ; and Christ's 
 kingdom on earth and in heaven P forms one supernatural whole. 
 But the worship claimed for, accepted by, and paid to Jesus, 
 stands out in the New Testament in the sharpest relief. This 
 relief is not softened or shaded off by any instances of an in- 
 ferior homage paid, whether legitimately or not, to created beings. 
 We do not meet with any clear distinction between a primary 
 and a secondary worship, by which the force of the argument 
 might have been more or less seriously weakened. Worship is 
 
 ™ Acts xiv. 14, 15 : diappr)^avTes ra i/ndTia avrcav €lff€7r7jdT](Tav €is tou ox^ov, 
 Kpd^ovT€s Koi XeyovTis, ^"AvdpeSt ti ravra iroture ', kol tjjulu^ ofioioiraOeTs 
 i(rfJL€V v/iuv livdpcoiroi, evayyeM^o/xevoi v/xcis airh tovtwi/ tup ixaraiuv iTriaTpecpeiy 
 iirl rhv 06^1/ rhu ^wi^ra.* 
 
 ^ Rev. xxii. 8 : koi iych 'Icodvyrfs 6 ^Xcttoov ravra kol olkovcjoV Ka\ '6re YjKova-a, 
 KOI 6j8A6;|/a, eirecra irpo(rKvvri(rai e/JLwpoad^u rwv irodcau rov ayyeXov rod Sef/c- 
 vvovros [xoi ravra. kol Xiyei fioi, '"Opa /ult)' awSovXSs Cov yap iljxi Ka\ roSu 
 ad€\(poou crov rcav Trpo^Tjrooi/, kol rwv riqpovuroDV rovs \6yovs rod Pl^Klov roV" 
 roV rep 06(p 'jrpo<TKvvif]crov.^ 
 
 ^ Col. ii. l8 : jx-q^iXs vfxas Kara^paPevera} QeXwv eV rair^ivoeppocrvvr) kolI 
 6pr}(TKiia rCov ayy^Xcov. The Apostle condemns this (i) on the moral ground 
 that the Gnostic teacher here alluded to claimed to be in possession of truths 
 respecting the unseen world of which he really was ignorant, t m^ edopuKev 
 €iJL^ar€voov, clkt} (pvaiovfJievos vnh rov vohs ri^s aapKhs avrov : (2) On the 
 dogmatic ground of a resulting interference with due recognition of the 
 Headship of Jesus Christ, the One Source of the supernatural life of the 
 Church, Kal oh Kparcov rrjt/ K^(paK7]Vj 6| ov irav rh ffcajxa Sza ruv cKpoou koI 
 (Tw^eaficov iTnxoprjyovfjievov Kal avix^i^a^o^^vov^ at^€i rrju av^7]<Ti.v rov 
 
 06OU. 
 
 P Heb. xii. 12 : irpoa-eKrjXvOare ':^ia)v opei, /cat ttSAci &eov C^pto?, *Upov' 
 ffa\)]ix iivovpavicp, Kal fxvpidcnv ayy4\wv, iravnyvpei Kal iKKX-qffia irpoororoKcov "'""" ^ •. 
 
 €1/ ovpavo7s aTToyeypajujuievcau, Kal Kpirrj 0ea5 Trdvroov, Kal Try^vpiaai SiKaiuj/ 
 r€r€\€i(viji€pct)i/, Kal diadrjKjjs veas fjie(rirri 'Irjaov. ^ >. , f^ 
 
37^ (2) Jesus worshipped with adoration due to God, 
 
 claimed for, and is given to, God alone ; and if Jesus is wor- 
 shipped, this is simply because Jesus is God^i. 
 
 /S. The worship paid to Jesus in the apostolic age was cer- 
 tainly in many cases that adoration which is due to the Most 
 High God, and to Him alone, from all His intelligent creatures. 
 God Himself must needs have been, then as ever, the One 
 Object of real worship. But the Eternal Son, when He became 
 Man, ceased not to be God. As God, He received from those 
 who believed in Him the only worship which their faith could 
 render r. This is clear from the representations of heavenly wor- 
 ship in the Apocalypse, which we have been considering, even 
 if we take no other passages into account. The Apocalyptic 
 worship of our glorified Lord is not any mere honorary acknow- 
 ledgment that His redemptive work is complete. Even at the 
 moments of His Incarnation worship is addressed to Christ's 
 Divine and Eternal Person. Doubtless the language of devotion 
 to Him which we find in the Gospels represents many postures 
 of the human soul, ranging between that utter self-prostration 
 which we owe to the Most High, and that trustful familiarity 
 with which we pour our joys and sorrows, our hopes and fears 
 into the ear of a human friend. Such * lower forms' of worship 
 lead up to, and are explained by, the higher. They illustrate 
 the condescension and purpose of the Incarnation. But the 
 
 1 The ' worship * of Buddha has sometimes been compared to that of 
 our Divine l.ord, as if Buddha were regarded as a real divinity by his fol- 
 lowers. But 'le Bouddha reste homme, et ne cherche jamais k depasser les 
 limites de I'humanitd, au deld, de laquelle il ne congoit rien. L'enthousiasme 
 de ses disciples a 6t^ aussi reserve que lui-m6me : dans le culte innocent 
 qu'ils lui rendaient, leur ferveur s'adressait d un souvenir consolateur et 
 fortijiant ; jamais leur superstition interessee ne s'adressait d sa puis- 
 sance . . . . Ni I'orgueil de C^kyamouni, ni le fanatisme des croyants, n'a 
 conga un sacrilege ; le Bouddha, tout grand qu'il se croit, n'a point risque 
 Tapothdose; .... jamais personne n'a songe a en faire un dieu.' Saint- 
 Hilaire, Le Bouddha, p. 168. 
 
 ' Meyer's remarks are very far from satisfactory. * Das Anrufen Christi 
 ist nicht das Anbeten schlechfhin, wie es nur in Betreff des Vaters, als des 
 einigen absoluten Gottes (!) geschieht, wohl aber die Anbetung nach der durch 
 das Verhaltniss Christi zwn Vater (dessen wesensgleicher Sohn, Ebenbild, 
 Throngenosse, Vermittler, und Fiirsprecher fUr die Menschen u. s. w. er ist) 
 bedingten Relativitat im betenden Bewusstsein .... Der Christum Anru- 
 fende ist sich bewusst, er rufe ihn nicht als den schlechthinigen Gott, sondern 
 als den gottmenschlichen Vertreter und Mittler Gottes an.' In Rom. x. 
 1 2 our Lord is represented as being equal with the Father, and as therefore 
 equally entitled to adoration. Adoration is strictly due to the Uncreated 
 Substance of God, and to Jesus Christ as being personally of It. The me- 
 diatorial functions of His Manhood cannot affect the bearings of this truth. 
 
 * Cat. Rac. p. 164. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
{^Adoration of the Sacred Manhood of Jesus. 379 
 
 familiar confidence which the Incarnation invites cannot be 
 pleaded against the rights of the Incarnate God. A free, trust- 
 ful, open-hearted converse with Christ is compatible with the 
 lowliest worship of His Person; Christian confidence even ^ leans 
 upon His breast at supper,' while Christian faith discerns His 
 Glory, and ^ falls at His feet as dead/ 
 
 y. The apostolic worship of Jesus Christ embraced His 
 Manhood no less than it embraced His Godhead*. According to 
 St. Paul His Human Name of Jesus, that is. His Human Nature, 
 is worshipped on earth, in heaven, and among the dead. It 
 is not the Unincarnate Logos, but the wounded Humanity of 
 Jesus, Which is enthroned and adored in the vision of the 
 Apocalypse. To adore Christ's Deity while carefully refusing 
 to adore His Manhood would be to forget that His Manhood 
 is for ever joined to His Divine and Eternal Person, Which is 
 the real Object of our adoration. Since He has taken the 
 Manhood into God, It is an inseparable attribute of His Per- 
 sonal Godhead; every knee must bend before It; henceforth the 
 angels themselves around the throne must adore, not as of yore 
 the Unincarnate Son, but * the Lamb as It had been slain.' 
 
 3. Thus rooted in the doctrine and practice of the apostles, 
 the worship of Jesus Christ was handed down to succeeding ages 
 as an integral and recognised element of the spiritual life of the 
 Church. The early Fathers refer to the worship of our Lord as 
 to a matter beyond dispute. Even before the end of the first 
 century St. Ignatius bids the Eoman Christians 'put up sup- 
 plications to Christ' on his behalf, that he might attain the 
 distinction of martyrdom u. St. Poly carp's Epistle to the 
 
 t Cf. Pearson, Minor Theological Works, vol. i. 307 : ' Christus sive 
 Homo lUe Qui est Mediator, adoratus est. Heb. i. 6; Apoc. v. 11, 12. 
 Hsec est plenissima descriptio adorationis. Et hie Agnus occisus erat Homo 
 ille, Qui est Mediator ; Ergo Homo Ille, Qui est Mediator est adorandus. 
 St. Greg. Nazianzen. Orat. li. : Yatis fx^ irpo(rKvve7 rhv iaravpoDfiivov, avaQ^fxa 
 eCTcoy Kol T^raxOco juera rcou deoKrdpuv.' Cf. also Ibid. p. 308 : ' Christus, 
 qu^ est Mediator, est unica adoratione colendus. Concil. Gen. V. Collat. 
 viii. can. 9. Si quis adorari in duabus naturis dicit Christum, ex quo duas 
 adorationes introducat, semotim Deo Verbo, et semotim Homini : aut si 
 
 quis adorat Christum, sed non una adoratione Deum Verbum Incar- 
 
 natum cum Ejus Carne adorat, extra quod sanctse Dei ecclesise ab initio 
 traditum est ; talis anathema sit.' See the whole of this and the preceding 
 'Determination.' And compare St. Cyril's 8th Anathema; Damasc, iv. 3; 
 Hooker, E. P. v. 54, 9. 
 
 ^ St. Ign. ad Kom. 4 : Xirai/cio-are rhv Xpiarrhp [rhv Kvpiov ed. Dressel, 
 which, however, must here mean our Lord] v-nep ijxov, 'Iva. 5ia rwy opyavoiv 
 To^fToov [06y ed. Dressel] dvaia evpiOa, Cf. ad Magn. 7. 
 VIl] 
 
380 The worship o/yestis in the stibapostolic Fathei^s; 
 
 Philippians opens with a benediction wliich is in fact a prayer 
 to Jesus Christ, as being, together with the Almighty Father, the 
 Giver of peace and mercy ^'. Polycarp prays that ' the God 
 and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Eternal Priest 
 Himself, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Avould build up his 
 readers in faith and truth and in all meekness, . . . and would 
 give them a part and lot among the saints y.' And at a later 
 day, standing bound at the pyre of martyrdom, he cries, ' For all 
 things, God, do I praise and bless and glorify Thee, together 
 with tl>e Eternal and Heavenly Jesus Christ, Thy well-beloved 
 Son, with Whom, to Thee and the Holy Ghost, be glory, both 
 now and for ever. Amen^.' After his death, Nicetas begged 
 the proconsul not to deliver up his body for burial, ^ lest the 
 Christians should dese^-t the Crucified One, and should begin to 
 worship this new martyr a-.' The Jews, it appears, employed an 
 argument which may have been the language of sarcasm or of 
 a real anxiety. * They know not,' continues the encyclical 
 letter of the Church of Smyrna, ' that neither shall we ever be 
 able to desert Christ Who suffered for the salvation of all who 
 are saved in the whole world, nor yet to worship any other. 
 For Him indeed, as being the Son of God, we do adore ; but 
 the martyrs, as disciples and imitators of the Lord, we worthily 
 love by reason of their unsurpassed devotion to Him their own 
 King and Teacher. God grant that we too may be fellow- 
 partakers and fellow-disciples with them^.' The writers of this 
 remarkable passage were not wanting in love and honour to the 
 martyr of Christ. ' Afterward,' say they, * we, having taken 
 up his bones, which were more precious than costly stones, and 
 of more account than gold, placed them where it was fitting c.' 
 
 X St. Polyc. ad Phil. I : cAeos vyTiv kcX eiprjvr] irapa OeoO izavroKpixropos 
 Kcu Kvpiov 'l-qaov Xpiarov rov ^uTTJpos r}piQv irXTjdvpdeir}. 
 
 y Ibid. 12 : ' Deus autem et Pater Domini nostri Jesu Christi, et ipse 
 Sempiternus Pontifex, Dei Filius Jesus Christus, aedificet vos in fide et veri- 
 
 tate et in omni mansuetudine, et det vobis sortem et partem inter 
 
 sanctos suos.' 
 
 « Mart. St. Polyc. c. 14. 
 
 * Ibid. c. 17: fJL^, <}>7](tIv, a.(pivT€S rly karavpooiiivov, rovrov ^plcavrai 
 
 ^ Ibid. : ayvoovvT€S, ^ri ofire rov XpicrSv irore KaTaXnreiv ^vv-qcrSix^Qa rhv 
 vnep TTjs Tov iravrhs KSafxov rail' aojCopi-evoou (roDrrjpias iradSura, ovre €T€p6i/ 
 Ttva (rePeaOai. tovtov juev yap Tlbv ovra rov ©eoG irpoffKvvovfXiV robs Se 
 fidpTvpas, &s iJ.adr]Tas Kol fiifJiriTas rov Kvpiov, ayaircl)/j.€v a^ioos, ev^Ka evpoias 
 avvir€p^Ki]rov rrjs ils rov Xoiov fia<n\€a koI ZibaaKoKoV wy yivoiro Ka\ ijfias 
 cvyKOLVbovovs T6 KoX (TvfxfiaQTiras y^yiadai, 
 
 c Mart. St. Polyc. c. 18. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
in SS, y us tin, IrencEUS, a7id Cle7nent Alex, 381 
 
 But they clraAV the sharpest line between such a tribute of 
 affection and the worship of the Eedeemer ; Jesus was wor- 
 shipped as ^ being the Son of God.' The Apologists point to 
 the adoration of Jesus Christ, as well as to that of the Father, 
 when replying to the heathen charge of atheism. St. Justin 
 protests to the emperors that the Christians worship God 
 alone <i. Yet he also asserts that the Son and the Spirit share in 
 the reverence and worship which is offered to the Father® ; and 
 in controversy with Trypho he especially urges that prophecy 
 foretold the adoration of Messiah^ . St. Irenseus insists that the 
 miracles which were in his day of common occurrence in the 
 Church were not to be ascribed to any invocation of angels, nor 
 yet to magical incantations, nor to any form of evil curiosity. 
 They were simply due to the fact that Christians constantly 
 prayed to God the Maker of all things, and called upon the 
 Name of His Son Jesus Christ ?. Clement of Alexandria has 
 
 d Apol. 1. § 17, p. 44, ed. Otto. After quoting St. Luke xx. 22-25 he 
 proceeds : o06V ©ebi/ [l^v fi6yov irpoffKvvovfXiv^ vuiu dl irphs rh &Wa x«^po»'T6S 
 
 VTr7]peT0VIJL€l/. 
 
 e Ibid. i. § 6, p. 14, ed. Otto. : Kal dfioXoyovfiev tS>v toiovtcov voixi^oixivwv 
 Bewv 6.d€oi eivai, aAA' ovxl rod aKY\QsardTov koL irarphs ZiKaio(Tvvr]s koL aooc^po- 
 avP7}5 Kol roou 6.\\cov ap^rcou, aueirLfxiKTov re KUKias dcov' a\\' eKelvSv re, KaX 
 rbv Trap ahrov Tlhu ihdSvra Kal ^iSd^avra rj/nas ravra Kol rhu rcav ^AAwi/, 
 krroii^voov Kal i^ofxoiovixivoov ayadcot/ aryyeKoov crrparhv, liv^vixd re rh Trpo(p7iTi- 
 Kov (r€^6/j.^da Kal irpocrKvi^ovfiev \6ycf Kal aXrjdeia Tifxcovrcs. With regard to 
 the clause of this passage which has been the subject of so much controversy 
 {Kal rhv Twv olWoov .... ayy€\Q}i/ (rrpaTov), (l) it is impossible to make 
 (TTparhv depend upon o-^fioficda Kal irpoaKwovix^v without involving St. Justin 
 in self-contradiction (cf. the passage quoted above), and Bellarmine's argu- 
 ment based on this construction (de Beatitud. Sanctor. lib. i. c. 13) proves, 
 if anything, too much for his purpose, viz. that the same worship was paid to 
 the angels as to the Persons of the Blessed Trinity. Several moderns (quoted 
 by Otto in loc.) who adopt this construction use it for a very different object. 
 (2) It is difficult to accept Bingham's rendering (Ant. bk. 13, c. 2, § 2) which 
 joins ayy4\wv arparhv and vixas with SiSa^afTa, and makes Christ the Teacher 
 not of men only but of the angel host. This idea, however, seems to have 
 no natural place in the passage, and we should have expected ravra rnxas not 
 Tjixas ravra. (3) It seems better, therefore, with Bull, Chevallier (Transl. 
 p. 152), Mohler (Tubing. Theol. Quartalsch. 1833, Fasc. i. p. 53 sqq., quoted 
 by Otto) to make ayyeXcav crrparbv and ravra together dependent upon 
 hLZdlavra: 'the Son of God taught us not merely about these (viz. evil 
 spirits, cf. § 5) but also concerning the good angels,* &c. ; rhv ayy4x<av 
 arparhv being elliptically put for ra irepl rod . . . ayy^Koov arparov. 
 
 f Dial, cum Tryph. c. 68 : ypacpas, at diapp-f^drjv rbv Xpiarhv Kal iradrirhi^ 
 Kal irpo<TKvv7]rbv Kal ®^hv aiToh€LKVvov(nv. Ibid. c. 76 : Kal Aai;l5 .... 
 ©ebv Icrxvphv koX irpo(TKvv7)rhv, Xpi(rrhv ovra, iS'fiXcca'e. 
 
 S Hser. ii. § 32: ' Ecclesia nomen Domini nostri Jesu Christi 
 
 invocans, virtutes ad utilitates hominura, sed non ad seductionem, perficit.* 
 Observe too the argument which follows. 
 VII ] 
 
382 References to the worship of Jesus in Tertullia7i, 
 
 left us three treatises, designed to form a missionary trilogy. 
 In one he is occupied with converting the heathen from idola- 
 try to the faith of Christ ; in a second he instructs the new 
 convert in the earlier lessons and duties of the Christian faith ; 
 while in his most considerable work he labours to impart the 
 higher knowledge to which the Christian is entitled, and so to 
 render him * the perfect Gnostic.' In each of these treatises, 
 widely different as they are in point of practical aim, Clement 
 bears witness to the Church's worship of our Lord. In the 
 first, his Hortatory Address to the Greeks, he winds up a long 
 argumentative invective against idolatry with a burst of fervid 
 entreaty : * Believe, O man,' he exclaims, *• in Him Who is both 
 Man and God ; believe, O man, in the living God, Who suffered 
 and Who is adored^.' The Psedagogus concludes with a prayer 
 of singular beauty ending in a doxologyi, and in these the Son 
 is worshipped and praised as the Equal of the Father. In the 
 Stromata, as might be expected, prayer to Jesus Christ is rather 
 taken for granted ; the Christian life is to be a continuous 
 worship of the Word, and through Him of the Father^^. Ter- 
 tullian in his Apology grapples with the taunt that the Chris- 
 tians worshipped a Man Who had been condemned by the 
 Jewish tribunals 1. Tertullian does not deny or palliate the 
 charge ; he justifies the Christian practice. Whatever Christ 
 might be in the opinion of the pagan world. Christians knew 
 Him to be of one substance with the Father ^i. The adoration 
 of Christ, then, was not a devotional eccentricity ; it was an 
 absolute duty. In one passage Tertullian argues against mixed 
 marriages with the heathen, because in these cases there could be 
 
 ^ Protrept. c. x. p. 84, ed. Potter : TiffT^vaov, ^vOpcoirc, auOpwircp koI &e£' 
 •Kiar^vaoVj dudpcoTrc, r^ TradSuri Koi TrpocrKWovfieva) &e<^ ^wvti' iricmvaare ol 
 hovXoL r^ viKpo)' iravres &vdp(aTroi, TrKTrevcrare /xSvo} r^ ttolvtuv avQpwirwv &e^' 
 iriffTcvaaTe koI fxiaOhv AdySere (Toorrjpiav k.t.A. 
 
 i Psedagog. lib. iii. c. 7, p. 31 1, ed. Potter: (iirep ovv Xoi-irhu em roiavrrj 
 iraPTjyvpeL rov Aoyov, t<^ Aoycp Trpoaev^cviiLeda' "iKadt rois (Tots, iraibayojylj 
 TraiBiois, TlaTTjp, rjviox^ *lapar]\, Tie koI IlaTrjp, "Ei' ^iicpuo Kvpie. Shs 6e r]jbuu 
 
 TOis trots kirofxevois irapayyehixaffi rh ofioloti/Jia irX'qpwcraL ouvovvras eu- 
 
 Xo.pi(Tr€iv, [evxo-piCTTovvTas^ aivelv, to; jJiSvcp Tlarpl kcu Tio;, Ti<p koI Uarpl, 
 vaL^ayuycc Koi diSacTKaKo} Ylcv, avu kol t^ ayitp Ui/ev/jLaTi, iravra rw 'Ev\, iv ^ 
 ra TTctfTa, 5i' hu to. irdvra tv, . . . ^ t] d6^a Kal vvv koX els aloovas. 
 
 ^ See the fine passage, Stromat. lib. vii. c. 7, ad init. p. 851, ed. Potter. 
 
 1 Apolog. c. 21: ' Sed et valgus jam scit Christum ut hominum aliquem, 
 qualem Judaei judicaverunt, quo facilius quis nos hominis cultores existim- 
 averit. Verum neque de Christo erubescimus, cum sub nomine ejus deputari 
 et damnari juvat.* 
 
 ™ Apolog. c. 21 : • Hunc ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione gene- 
 ratum, et idcirco Filium Dei et Deum dictum, ex unitate Sahstantice.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
References to the worship of Jesus in Origen, 383 
 
 no joint worship of the Redeemer^ j elsewhere he implies that the 
 worship of Jesus was co-extensive with faith in Christianity o. 
 
 Origen's erratic intellect may have at times betrayed him, on 
 this as on other subjects, into language p, more or less incon- 
 sistent with his own general line of teaching, by which it must 
 in fairness be interpreted. Origen often insists upon the worship 
 of Jesus Christ as being a Christian duty ^ ; he illustrates this 
 duty, especially in his Homilies, by his personal example ^ ; he 
 
 "Ad Uxor. lib. ii. c. 6 : * Audiat . . . de ganed. Quae Dei mentio ? quae 
 Christi invocatio V 
 
 o Adv. Jud. c. 7 : ' Ubique creditur, ab omnibus gentibus supra enumer- 
 atis colitur, ubique regnat, ubique adoratur.' 
 
 P Particularly in the treatise, De Oratione, c. 15, vol. i. ed. Ben. p. 223 : 
 irws Se ovK toTi Kara rov elirSpra* * Tt fxe Xeyeis oryaQSv ; ouSels ayadbs d fx^ 
 iXs 6 06OS, 6 TlaTTip'^ ctTTctj/ &v' Ti i/xol irpoaevxv ; MSvip rip Uarpl irpoa- 
 evx^o'Oai XP^> V f^^y^ Trpudevxofiai' cJirep bia r&v aylcov ypa<puy ixapQd.vi'Ti' 
 'Apx^^p^^ yo.p T<p vTrep tj/jlui/ Karaaradevri vtto tov Ilarphs, Koi irapaK\T)r<p 
 virh rov Uarphs ehai Ka^Svri, evx^o'Oai rj/jLas ov 5e?, dAAa Si' apxi^p^c^s Kal 
 7rapaK\'f]rov K.r.X. This indefensible language was a result of the line taken 
 by Origen in opposing the Monarchians. ' As the latter, together with the 
 distinction of substance in the Father and the Son, denied also that of the 
 Person, so it was with Origen a matter of practical moment, on account of the 
 systematic connexion of ideas in his philosophical system of Christianity, to 
 maintain in opposition to them the personal independence of the Logos. 
 Sometimes in this controversy he distinguishes between unity of substance 
 and personal unity or unity of subject, so that it only concerned him to con- 
 trovert the latter. And this certainly was the point of greatest practical 
 moment to him ; and he must have been well aware that many of the 
 Fathers who contended ior a personal distinction held firmly at the same time 
 to a unity of substance. But according to the internal connexion of his own 
 system (Neander means his Platonic doctrine of the to "ov) both fell together; 
 wherever he spoke, therefore, from the position of that system, he affirmed 
 at one and the same time the IrepoTTjs rrjs ovaias and the krep6ry)s rrjs vTro- 
 (rrdtrecos or rov v-kok€iix4vov.^ Neander, Ch. Hist. ii. 311, 312. From this 
 philosophical premiss Origen deduces his practical inference above noticed : 
 6i yap erepoSj ws iv dWois deiKvvrai, Kar ovaiav koI viT0K(:ifxf:v6s icriv 6 Tlds 
 rov Harpos, ijroi irpoffKvvrjreov rip Ti^ kcu ov rep Uarpl, ^ afxcporipois^ ^ rip Tlarpt 
 pi6p<v. De Orat. c. 15, sub init. p. 222. Although, then, Origen expresses 
 his conclusion in Scriptural terminology, it is a conclusion which is traceable 
 to his philosophy as distinct from his strict rehgious belief, and it is entirely 
 contradicted by a large number of other passages in his writings. 
 
 q Contr. Gels. v. 12, sub fin. vol. i. p. 587. Also Ibid. viii. 12, p. 750 : 
 '4va ovv (diov, us anodeddoKafxep, rhv Tlarepa Kal rhv Tihv Oepairevopicv' Kal 
 piivii 7]puv 6 TTpbs rovs 6.Wovs arcv^s \6yos' Kal ov rhv ^vayx^s y€ <pav€vra^ 
 ODS 'Kp6ripov ovK ovra, inrepSpTjcTKevopLiV. Ibid. viii. 26 : pidvcp yap trpoaivKriov 
 rep 67rl iraa-L @^cp, Kal irpocrevKriov ye rip Movoyeve?, /cat UpoororoKip Trdaris 
 Kriaecos, Aoycp Qeov. 
 
 ^ See his prayer on the furniture of the tabernacle, as spiritually explained, 
 Hom. 13 in Exod. xxxv. p. 176: *Domine Jesu, prsesta mihi, ut aliquid 
 monument! habere merear in tabernaculo Tuo. Ego optarem (si fieri 
 VII ] 
 
384 The worship of yesus ifi Origen and Novatian, 
 
 bases it upon tlie great truth which justifies and demands such 
 a practical acknowledgment s. It is in keeping with this that 
 Origen explains the frankincense offered by the wise men to 
 our Infant Saviour as an acknowledgment of His Godhead \ since 
 such an action obviously involved that adoration which is due 
 only to God t. This explanation could not have been put for- 
 ward by any but a devout worshipper of Jesus. In the work on 
 the Trinity^, ascribed to Novatian, in the treatises and letters^ 
 
 posset), esse aliquid meum in illo auro, ex quo propitiatoriura fabricatur, 
 vel ex quo area contegitur, vel ex quo candelabrum fit luminis et lucernse. 
 Aut si aurum non habeo, argentum saltern aliquid inveniar ofFerre, quod 
 
 proficiat in columnas, vel in bases earum. Aut carte vel seris aliquid 
 
 Tantum ne in omnibus jejunus et infecundus inveniar.' Cf. too Horn. i. 
 in Lev., Hom. v. in Lev., quoted by Bingham, Ant. xiii. 2, § 3. 
 
 • Coram, in Rom. x. lib. viii. vol. 4, p. 624, ed. Ben., quoted by Bingham, 
 ubi supra : * [Apostolus] in principio Epistolae quam ad Corinthios scribit, 
 ubi dicit, " Cum omnibus qui invocant nomen Domini nostri Jesu Christi, in 
 omni loco ipsorum et nostro" eum cujus nomen invocatur, Dominum Jesum 
 Christum esse pronuntiat. Si ergo et Enos, et Moyses, et Aaron, et Samuel, 
 *'invocabant Dominum et ipse exaudiebat eos," sine dubio Christum Jesum 
 Dominum invocabant ; et si invocare nomen Domini et orare Dominum 
 unum atque idem est ; sicut invocatur Deus, invocandus est Christus ; et 
 sicut oratur Deus, ita et orandus est Christus ; et sicut ofFerimus Deo Patri 
 primo omnium orationes, ita et Domino Jesu Christo ; et sicut ofFerimus 
 postulationes Patri, ita ofFerimus postulationes et Filio ; et sicut offerimus 
 gratiarum actiones Deo, ita et gratias offerimus Salvatori. Unum namque 
 utrique hoporem deferendum, id est Patri et Filio, divinus edocet sermo, cum 
 dicit : " Ut omnes honorificent Filium, sicut honorificant Patrem." ' 
 
 * Contr. Cels. i. 60, p. 375: (pepovres fiey bcopa, h {'Iv ourcos ovofxdcoo) 
 (TvvddTcp Tivl 4k @€ov Koi avOpwTTov dPTjTov trpocTTiveyKav, avfx^oKa fiev, us 
 fia(ri\€7 Tov xpi'O'^f ? ws 8e T€dv7}^oiJ.€i/cp tV (T/JLvppaVj us Se ©ecfJ rou XL^avur6v' 
 irpoff-fiveyKav Se, fiaOSvTfs rbu roirov ttjs yevefffus avrov. 'AA.A.' iinl &ehs 
 ^v, 6 vTrep rovs ^07]dovvTas apOpcvirois a776Aous ivvirdpxui/ Scwr^p tov y4vovs 
 ruv avdpuTTuVj ^yyeXos T^fieirparo r^v ruv fxayuv hirX irpo(rKvvri(rai rhu 'irjcrovi/ 
 ev(r€^€iav, xP'JMttTio'ay avTols * //^ ^K€iv irpbs rhv 'Hpo657ji/, dw' iiraveAdeTu 
 &\\r] 65^5 els rd oUi^a.* Cf. St. Iren. adv. Hser. iii. 9. 2. 
 
 'I Novat. de Trin. c. 14, quoted by Bingham: 'Si homo tantummodo 
 Christus, quomodo adest ubique invocatus, quum hsec hominis natura non 
 sit, sed Dei, ut adesse omni loco possit?' 
 
 ^ St. Cyprian, de Bono Patientiae, p. 2 20, ed. Fell. : * Pater Deus praecepit 
 Filium suum adorari : et Apostolus Paulus, divini praecepti mem or, ponit et 
 dicit : " Deus exaltavit ilium et donavit illi nomen quod est super omne 
 nomen ; ut in nomine Jesu omne genu flectatur, coelestium, terrestrium, et 
 infernorura :" et in Apocalypsi angelus Joanni volenti adorari se resistit et 
 dicit: "Vide ne feceris, quia conservus tuus sum et fratrum tuorum; Jesum 
 Dominum adora." Qualis Dominus Jesus, et quanta patientia ejus, ut qui 
 in coelis adoratur, necdum vindicetur in terris?' In Rev. xx. 9, St. Cyprian 
 probably read r^ Kvplep instead of r^ ©eoJ. See his language to Lucius, 
 Bishop of Rome, who had recently been a confessor in a sudden persecution 
 of Gallus, A.D. 252 (Ep. 61, p. 145, ed. Fell.): *Has ad vos literas mit- 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Value of Hymns as expressmg Chris tiandoctrike, '7,%^ 
 
 of St. Cyprian, in the apologetic works of Arnobius Y and Lac- 
 tantius^, references to the subject are numerous and decisive. 
 But our limits forbid any serious attempt to deal with the 
 materials which crowd upon us as we advance into the central 
 and later decades of the third century ; and at this point it may 
 be well to glance at the forms with which the primitive Church 
 actually approached the throne of the Redeemer. 
 
 It is clear that Christian hymnody has ever been prized and 
 hated for its services in popularising the worship of Jesus 
 Christ. Hymnody actively educates, while it partially satisfies, 
 the instinct of worship ; it is a less formal and sustained act of 
 worship than prayer, yet it may really involve transient acts 
 of the deepest adoration. But, because it is less formal ; be- 
 cause in using it the soul can pass, as it were, unobserved and 
 at will from mere sympathetic states of feeling to adoration, and 
 from adoration back to passive although reverent sympathy ; — 
 hymnody has always been a popular instrument for the ex- 
 pression of religious feeling. And from the first years of 
 Christianity it seems to have been especially consecrated to the 
 honour of the Redeemer. We have already noted traces of such 
 apostolical hymns in the Pauline Epistles ; but some early 
 Humanitarian teachers did unintentional service, by bringing 
 into prominence the value of hymns as witnesses to Christian 
 doctrine, and as efficient means of popular dogmatic teaching. 
 When the followers of Artemon maintained that the doctrine 
 of Christ's Godhead was only brought into the Church during 
 the episcopate of Zephyrinus, a Catholic writer, quoted by Euse- 
 bius, observed, by way of reply, that * the psalms and hymns 
 of the brethren, which, from the earliest days of Christianity, 
 had been written by the faithful, all celebrate Christ, the Word 
 of God, proclaiming His Divinity a.' Origen pointed out that 
 hymns were addressed only to God and to His Only-begotten 
 
 timus, frater carissime, et reprsesentantes vobis per epistolam gaudium 
 nostrum, fida obsequia caritatis expromimus ; hie quoque in sacrificiis atque 
 in orationibus nostris non cessantes Deo Patri, et Christo Filio Ejus Domino 
 nostro gratias agere, et orare pariter ac petere, ut qui perfectus est atque 
 perficiens, custodiat et perficiat in vobis confessionis vestrse gloriosam 
 coronam.' 
 
 y Arnobius adv. Gentes, i. 36: ^ Quotidianis supplicationibus adoratis.* 
 And Ibid. i. 39: * Neque [Christus] omni illo qui vel maximus potest 
 excogitari divinitatis afficiatur cultu?' [ed. Oehler]. 
 
 2 Lactantius, Div. Inst. iv. 16. 
 
 * Eus. Hist. Eccl. V. 28 : xpaXfJiOi Se Scroi Kal cp^at a^eXtpZu aT apxvs virh 
 irio-Tup ypa<puaai, rov Aoyov rod &€0V rov Xpiarroj/ vfxpovai deoXoyovi^res. 
 VII ] C C 
 
386 ^Christ adored in the Gloria in Excelsis, 
 
 Word, Who is also God^. And the practical value of these hymns 
 as teaching the doctrine of Christ's Deity was illustrated by the 
 conduct of Paulus of Samosata. He banished from his own 
 and neighbouring churches the psalms which were sung to our 
 Lord Jesus Christ ; he spoke of them contemptuously as being 
 merely modern compositions. This was very natural in a 
 prelate who '■ did not wish to confess with the Church that the 
 Son of God had descended from heaven^ ;* but it shews how 
 the hymnody of the primitive Church protected and proclaimed 
 the truths which she taught and cherished. 
 
 Of the early hymns of the Church of Christ some remain to 
 this day among us as witnesses and expressions of her faith in 
 Christ's Divinity. Such are the Tersanctus and the Gloria in 
 Excelsis. Both belong to the second century ; both were intro- 
 duced, it is difficult to say how early, into the Eucharistic Office; 
 both pay Divine honours to our Blessed Lord. As each morning 
 dawned, the Christian of primitive days repeated in private the 
 Gloria in Excelsis ; it was his hymn of supplication and praise 
 to Christ. How wonderfully does it blend the appeal to our 
 Lord's human sympathies with the confession of His Divine 
 prerogatives ! * Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, 
 That takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.' 
 How thrilling is that burst of praise, which at last drowns 
 the plaintive notes of entreaty that have preceded it, and hails 
 Jesus Christ glorified on His throne in the heights of heaven ! 
 * For Thou only art holy ; Thou only art the Lord ; Thou 
 only, Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory 
 of God the Father.' Each evening too, in those early times, the 
 Christian offered another hymn, less known among ourselves, 
 but scarcely less beautiful. It too was addressed to Jesus in 
 His majesty : — 
 
 ^ Contr. Cels. viii. 67 : vfivovs yhp els ixSvov rhv Im naa-i Xeyofiev ©eov, koi 
 rhv /JLoi/oyevrj ai/rov A6yov koI &e6v' Koi vfjLVOVfxep ye &ehy koI rhv Moi^oyevrj 
 avrov. 
 
 c Eus. Hist. Eccl. vii. 30 : y\/a\ixovs Se rovs fiev els rhi/ Kvpiov rjfxcvp *Iv<tovu 
 XpLarhv iraixras, ws 5^ vecorepovs koI veoorepcav avdpMV (Tvyypdixixara. The 
 account continues : els eavrov Se iv fieat] rp eKKX-naia, rf} fieyaAr) rov irdffxo. 
 T)ixepa. ^oKfJicaheLV yvvaiKas irapaaKevd^wv, uv koX OLKovaas &u ris (ppt^eiev. 
 They seem to have sung in this prelate's own presence, and with his appro- 
 bation, odes which greeted him as 'an angel who had descended from 
 heaven/ although Paulus denied our Lord's pre-existence. Vanity and un- 
 belief are naturally and generally found together. The historian adds ex- 
 pressly : rbu ixev yap Tlhv rod ©eoO ov ^ovKerai avvo^ioKoyelv i^ ovpavov 
 KareX-qKvQevai. 
 
 [lect. 
 
and in the Primitive Evening Hymn. 387 
 
 * Hail ! gladdening Light, of His pure glory poured, 
 Who is th' Immortal Father, heavenly, blest, 
 Holiest of Hohes — Jesus Christ our Lord! 
 Now we are come to the sun's hour of rest, 
 The lights of evening round us shine, 
 We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Divine I 
 Worthiest art Thou at all times to be sung 
 
 With undefiled tongue, 
 Son of our God, Giver of life, Alone! 
 Therefore in all the world, Thy glories. Lord, they own*^.' 
 
 A yet earlier illustration is afforded by the ode with which the 
 Alexandrian Clement concludes his Psedagogus. Although its 
 phraseology was strictly adapted to the ^ perfect Gnostic ' at 
 Alexandria in the second century, yet it seems to have been 
 intended for congregational use. It celebrates our Lord, as 
 ^ the Dispenser of wisdom,' * the Support of the suffering,' the 
 *Lord of immortality,' the * Saviour of mortals,' Hhe Mighty 
 Son,' ' the God of peace/ It thrice insists on the ' sincerity ' of 
 the praise thus offered Him. It concludes : — 
 
 ' Sing we sincerely 
 The Mighty Son; 
 We, the peaceful choir, 
 We, the Christ-begotten ones. 
 We, the people of sober life, 
 Sing we together the God of peace®.' 
 
 Nor may we forget a hymn which, in God's good providence, 
 
 ^ Cf. Lyra Apostolica, No. 63. The original is given in Routh's Reliquiae 
 Sacr. ill. p. 5 1 5 : — 
 
 *a>s IXaphu ayias dS^rjs aOavdrov Uarphs 
 ovpaviov, ayiov, jxaKapoSy 
 'Irjcrov XptfTTe, 
 
 €\B6pT€S 67rt TOV 7)\lOV dviTlV, 
 
 l^SvTfs (pa)s ea-iTipivbuj 
 tfivov^ev naT6pa, Koi Tthv, Koi "Ayiov TT^ev/ia 0eoG. 
 d^ios €? €1/ tracri Kaipois vjULV^TaOai <\)(iivais daiaiSt 
 Tie ©eoG, C^h'^ 6 didovs' 
 Bih 6 k6(T^ios ae 5o|a^6t. 
 St. Basil quotes it in part, De Spir. Sanct. 73. It is still the Vesper Hymn 
 of the Greek Church. 
 
 ® Clem. Alex. Psed. iii. 12, fin. p. 313; Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnologicus, 
 tom. iii. p. 3. * Der Ton des Liedes ist . . . . gnostisch versinnlichend.' 
 (Fortlage Gesange Christlicher Vorzeit, p. 357, qu. by Daniel) : — 
 ^iKiroiiiev air\u>s 
 iraida Kparepdv^ 
 X^phs elp'fjv'qs 
 ol xP''(^'^^yovoif 
 \aos <T(a(pp(av, 
 
 T^aKKwiXiV dfiov Seov elpiiVTjs* 
 vn ] C C 2 
 
388 Adoration of Christ in the Te Deum, 
 
 has been endeared to all of us from childhood. In its present 
 form, the Te Deum is clearly Western, whether it belongs to the 
 age of St. Augustine, with whose baptism it is connected by the 
 popular tradition, or, as is probable, to a later period. But we 
 can scarcely doubt that portions of it are of Eastern origin, and 
 that they carry us up wellnigh to the sub-apostolic period. The 
 Te Deum is at once a song of praise, a creed, and a supplication. 
 In each capacity it is addressed to our Lord. In the TeDeum 
 how profound is the adoration offered to Jesus, whether as One 
 of the Most Holy Three, or more specially in His Personal dis- 
 tinctness as the King of Glory, the Father's Everlasting Son ! 
 How touching are the supplications which remind Him that 
 when He became incarnate * He did not abhor the Virgin's 
 womb,' that when His Death-agony was passed He ^ opened the 
 kingdom of heaven to all believers ! ' How passionate are the 
 pleadings that He would ' help His servants whom He has re- 
 deemed with His most precious Blood,' that He would ^ make 
 them to be numbered with His saints in glory everlasting ! ' 
 Much of this language is of the highest antiquity ; all of it is 
 redolent with the fragrance of the earliest Church ; and, as we 
 English Christians use it still in our daily services, we may rejoice 
 to feel that it unites us altogether in spirit, and to a great extent 
 in the letter, with the Church of the first three centuries f. 
 
 The Apostolical Constitutions contain ancient doxologies 
 which associate Jesus Christ with the Father as ' inhabiting the 
 praises of Israel,' after the manner of the Gloria Patrig. And 
 the Kyrie Eleison, that germinal type of supplication, of which 
 the countless litanies of the modern Church are only the varied 
 expansions, is undoubtedly sub-apostolic. Together with the 
 
 * On this subject, see Daniel. Thesanr. Hymnolog. torn. ii. pp. 279-299. 
 
 s Constitutiones, viii. 12 (vol. i. p. 482, ed. Labbe), quoted by Bingham: 
 irapaKaXov/jLCV (re ... . Sttws airavras 7)1x0.9 SiaTT]pr}aa5 iv rfj evo-e^e/a, eVt- 
 avvaydyys iv rfj BafftXela tov XpiaTov aov rov 06oO trda-qs al(rdr]T7J5 Koi votjt^s 
 <pv<T€cos, rov fia(n\€U9 tj/jlcov, arpeirrovs, a/xe/jLirrovs, aveyKK-qrovs' '6ri aoi naaa 
 5o|a, ffi^as koX €i>xap'0'T/a, tijut/ /cat 7rpoaKvpr)(ris r^ Uarpl, Koi ru> Tiw, koI r^ 
 *A.yicp Hvev/jLari koi vvv kol aet Kcl els robs aueWeiirels koi ariXevT-firous aiMvas 
 rwv alctivcov. Ibid. 1 3 (p. 483) : 5ta rod Xpi(rrov aoV fied'ov <roi d6^a, rifir], alvos, 
 
 7)ixiv' 
 ) 0176 V- 
 
 vi\rip ©eo;, kox rw Xpiara avrov Trapadw/xeda. Ibid. 15 (p. 486): rravras rjfias 
 iTTiavvdyaye els r7]v rwv ovpavuv ^aariXeiav, ev Xpiarw 'Irjcrov r^ Kvpica vfia>v' 
 fieO" ov aoi 5o|a, rifi^ koI ae^as KaX rqi 'Aylcfi Uve^/xari els rovs alwvas, afx-fjv.^ 
 Ibid. (p. 487): (in (Toi 5(J|a, ahos, fxeyaXoirpeireict, ae^as, irpoffKvvqcns, KOi t^ 
 (TO) vaibl 'Ivaov rw Xpiar^ (Tov rqi Kvpicp ti/jloov kol 0ea> koI ^aaiAe?, koL r^ 
 'Ayiq> Uvevfiarif vvv kol del Kcd els rovs alwvas rwv ald>vwv, afi^jv, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Eticharistic prayers to Jesus Christ, 389 
 
 Tersanctus and the Gloria in Excelsis it shews very remarkably, 
 by its presence in the Eucharistic Office, how ancient and deeply 
 rooted was the Christian practice of prayer to Jesus Christ. 
 For the Eucharist has a double aspect : it is a gift from heaven 
 to earth, but it is also an offering from earth to heaven. In the 
 Eucharist the Christian Church offers to the Eternal Father the 
 ' merits and Death of His Son Jesus Christ ;' since Christ 
 Himself has said, ' Do this in remembrance of Me.' The 
 canon of Carthage accordingly expresses the more ancient law 
 and instinct of the Church : * Cum altari adsistitur, semper ad 
 Patrem dirigatur oratio^^.' Yet so strong was the impulse to 
 offer prayer to Christ, that this canon is strictly observed by no 
 single liturgy, while some rites violate it with the utmost con- 
 sistency. The Mozarabic rite is a case in point : its collects 
 witness to the Church's long struggle with, and final victory 
 over, the tenacious Arianism of Spaini. It might even appear 
 
 ^> Cone. Carth. iii. c. 23, Labbe, vol. ii. p. 11 70. 
 
 * Taking a small part of the Mozarabic Missal, from Advent Sunday to 
 Epiphany inclusive, we find sixty cases in which prayer is offered, during the 
 altar service, to our Lord. These cases include (1) three ' Illations* or Pre- 
 faces, for the third Sunday in Advent, Circumcision, and Epiphany (and part 
 at least of this Mass for the Epiphany is considered by Dr. Neale in his 
 Essays on Liturgiology, p. 138, to be at least not later ' than the middle of 
 the fourth century') ; also (2) several prayers in which our Lord's agency in 
 sanctifying the Eucharistic sacrifice, or even in receiving it, is implied — e. g. 
 
 *Jesu, bone Pontifex sanctifica banc oblationem;* or, in a * Post 
 
 Pridie ' for fifth Sunday in Advent : ' Hsec oblata Tibi .... benedicenda 
 assume libamina ( . . . . tui Advent<is gloriam, &c.).* (Miss. Moz. p. 17.) 
 So again, on Mid-Lent Sunday : * Ecce, Jesu . . . deferimus Tibi hoc sacri- 
 
 ficium nostrae redemptionis accipe hoc sacrificium ;' on which 
 
 Leslie quotes St. Fulgentius, de Fide, c. 19 : * Cui (i. e. to the Incarnate 
 Son) cum Patre et Spiritu Sancto .... sacrificium panis et vini .... Ec- 
 clesia .... offerre non cessat.' Again, in the Mass for Easter Friday, in 
 an * Alia Oratio ;' * Ecce, Jesu Mediator .... banc Tibi afFerimus victi- 
 mam sacrificii singularis.' From Palm Sunday to Easter Day inclusive, the 
 prayers offered to Christ, according to this Missal, are twenty-nine. The zeal 
 of the Spanish Church for the Divinity of the Holy Spirit is remarkably 
 
 shewn in a ' Post Pridie ' for Whitsunday : * Suscipe Spiritus 
 
 Sancte, omnipotens Deus, sacrificia ;' on which Leslie's note says, ' Ariani 
 negabant sacrificium debere Dei Filio ofFerri, aut Spiritui Sancto .... contra 
 quos Catholici Gotho-Hispani Filio et Spiritui Sancto sacrificium Eucharisti- 
 cum distinct^ offerunt ;' and he proceeds to quote another passage from Ful- 
 gentius that worship and sacrifice were offered alike to all the Three Persons, 
 *hoc est, Sanctse Trinitati.' The Gallican Liturgies, though in a less degree, 
 exhibit the same feature of Eucharistic prayer to our Lord. In the very old 
 series of fragmentary Masses, discovered by Mone, and edited by the Rev. 
 G. H. Forbes and Dr. Neale (in Ancient Liturgies of the GaUican Church, 
 part i.), as the *Missale Richenovense* (from the abbey of Reichenau, 
 VII ] 
 
390 Eucharistic prayers to J^esus Christ, 
 
 to substitute for the rule laid down at Carthage, the distinct 
 but (considering the indivisible relation of the Three Holy- 
 Persons to each other) perfectly consistent principle that the 
 Eucharist is offered to the Holy Trinity. This too would seem 
 to be the mind of the Eastern Church k. It is unnecessary to 
 observe that at this day, both in the Eucharistic Service and 
 elsewhere, prayer to Jesus Christ is as integral a feature of the 
 devotional system of the Church of England, as it was of the 
 
 where they were found), there are four cases of prayer to Christ ; one of 
 them, in the ninth Mass, being in a ' Contestatio ' or Preface. In the 
 •Gothic' (or southern-Gallic) Missal, prayer is made to Him about seventy- 
 six times. Some of these cases are very striking. Thus on Christmas Day, 
 * Suscipe, .... Domine Jesu, omnipotens Deus, sacrificium laudis ob- 
 latum.' (Muratori, Lit. Rom. ii. 52T ; Forbes and Neale, p. 35.) The 
 ' Immolatio * (another term for the Contestatio) of Palm Sunday is ad- 
 dressed to Christ. The * Old Gallican ' Missal, belonging to central Gaul, 
 has sixteen cases of prayer to Him, including the * Immolatio * of Easter 
 Saturday. The * Galilean Sacramentary * (called also the Sacramentarium 
 Bobiense, and by Mr. Forbes, the Missal of Besan9on) has twenty- eight 
 such cases, including three Contestations. The Canon of the Ambrosian Rite 
 has prayers to Christ. 
 
 ^ The principle affirmed in the old Spanish rite, that the Eucharist was to 
 be offered to the whole Trinity, and therefore to the Son, is also affirmed in 
 the daily Liturgy of the Eastern Church. The prayer of the Cherubic 
 Hymn, which indeed was not originally a part of St. Chrysostom's Liturgy, 
 having been inserted in it not earlier than Justinian's reign, has this con- 
 clusion : Su yap el 6 irpoacpepuv Ka\ irpoffcpepofievoSf Koi Trpoffdcx^/J.n'os, Kal 
 haBidS/jLivoSy Xpiarh 6 Qehs Tifxcov, koi aol rrjv b6^av avairifx-KOixev k.t.X. 
 About 1155 a dispute arose as to Trpocr^ix^^icvos, and Soterichus Panteugenus, 
 ^"atriarch- elect of Antioch, who taught that the sacrifice was not offered to the 
 Son, but only to the Father and the Holy Spirit, was condemned in a council 
 at Constantinople, 1 156. 'This,' says Neale (Introd. to East. Church, 
 i. 434), * was the end of the controversy that for more than seven hundred 
 years had vexed the Church on the subject of the Incarnation.' Between 
 this event and the condemnation of Monothelitism, Neale reckons the con- 
 demnation of Adoptionism, in 794. Compare also, in the present Liturgy 
 of St. James, a prayer just before the ' Sancta Sanctis,' addressed to our 
 Lord, in which the phrase occurs, ' Thy holy and bloodless sacrifices.' The 
 same Liturgy has other prayers addressed to Him. In St. Mark's Liturgy, 
 among other prayers to Christ, one runs thus, ' Shew Thy face on this bread 
 and these cups.' After the Lord's Prayer, the Deacon says, * Bow your heads 
 to Jesus,' and the response is, 'To Thee, O Lord.' In fact, the East seems 
 never to have acepted the maxim that Eucharistic prayer was always addressed 
 to the Father. Our * Prayer of St. Chrysostom,' addressed to the Son, is the 
 'prayer of the third Antiphon' in Lit. St. Chrys. ; and the same rite, and the 
 Armenian, have the remarkable prayer, ' Attend, O Lord Jesus Christ our 
 
 God and come to sanctify us,' &c. In the Coptic Liturgy of 
 
 St. Basil, our Lord is besought to send down the Spirit on the elements. 
 The present Roman rite has three prayers to Christ between the ' Agnus Dei' 
 and the * Panem coelestem.' 
 
 [lect. 
 
Pagan observations on the worship of Jestcs, 391 
 
 ancient, or as it is of the contemporary Use of Western 
 Christendom ^ 
 
 Nor was the worship of Jesus Christ by the early Christians 
 an esoteric element of their religious activity, obvious only to 
 those who were within the Church, who cherished her creed, and 
 who took part in her services. It was not an abstract doctrine, 
 but a living and notorious practice, daily observed by, and 
 recommended to, Christians. As such it challenged the ob- 
 servation of the heathen from a very early date. It is probable 
 indeed that the Jews, as notably on the occasion of St. Poly- 
 carp's martyrdom^, drew the attention of pagan magistrates to 
 the worship of Jesus, in order to stir up contempt and hatred 
 against the Christians. But such a worship was of itself calcu- 
 lated to strike the administrative instincts of Roman magistrates 
 as an unauthorized addition to the registered religions of the 
 empire, even before they had discovered it to be irreconcileable 
 with public observance of the established state ceremonies, and 
 specially with any acknowledgment of the divinity of the reign- 
 ing emperor. The younger Pliny is drawing up a report for the 
 eye of his imperial master Trajan ; and he writes with the cold 
 impartiality of a pagan statesman who is permitting himself to 
 take a distant philosophical interest in the superstitions of the 
 lower orders. Some apostates from the Church had been 
 brought before his tribunal, and he had questioned them as to 
 the practices of the Christians in Asia Minor. It appeared that 
 on a stated day the Christians met before daybreak, and sang 
 among themselves, responsively, a hymn to Christ as God". 
 Here it should be noted that Pliny is not recording a vague 
 report, but a definite statement, elicited from several persons in 
 cross-examination, moreover touching a point which, in dealing 
 with a Roman magistrate, they might naturally have desired 
 to keep in the background o. Again, the emperor Adrian, when 
 
 1 See Note F in Appendix. °^ ^Martyr. St. Polyc. c. 1 7. 
 
 " Plin. Ep. lib. x. ep. 97 : * Alii ab indice nominati esse se Christianos 
 dixerunt, et mox negaverunt ; fuisse quidem sed desiisse ; quidam ante 
 triennium, quidam ante plures annos, non nemo etiam ante viginti quoque. 
 Omnes et imaginem tuam, deorumque simulacra venerati sunt, ii et Christo 
 maledixerunt. Adfirmabant autem, banc fuisse summam vel culpse suae vel 
 erroris, quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire, carmenque Christo, 
 quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem, seque sacramento non in scelus aliquod 
 obstringere, sed ne furta, ne latrocinia, ne adulteria committerent.' 
 
 ** That the 'carmen' was an incantation, or that Christ was saluted as a 
 hero, not as a Divine Person, are glosses upon the sense of this passage, rather 
 than its natural meaning. See Augusti, Denkwurdigkeiten, torn. v. p. 33. 
 VII ] 
 
39^ Sarcastic remarks of Lttcian. 
 
 writing to Servian, describes the population of Alexandria as 
 divided between the worship of Christ and the worship of 
 SerapisP. That One Who had been adjudged by the law to 
 death as a criminal should receive Divine honours, must have 
 been sufficiently perplexing to the Eoman official mind ; but it 
 was much less irritating to the statesmen than to the philoso- 
 phers. In his life of the fanatical cynic and apostate Christian, 
 Peregrinus Proteus, whose voluntary self-immolation he himself 
 witnessed at Olympia in a.d. 165, Lucian gives vent to the con- 
 temptuous sarcasm which was roused in him, and in men like 
 him, by the devotions of the Church. 'The Christians,' he 
 says, * are still worshipping that great man who was gibbeted 
 in Palestine q.' He complains that the Christians are taught 
 that they stand to each other in the relation of brethren, as soon 
 as they have broken loose from the prevailing customs, and 
 have denied the gods of Greece, and have taken to the adoration 
 of that impaled Sophist of theirs^. The Celsus with whom we 
 meet in the treatise of Origen may or may not have been the 
 friend of Lucian s. Celsus, it has been remarked, represents 
 a class of intellects which is constantly found among the 
 opponents of Christianity ; Celsus has wit and acuteness without 
 moral earnestness or depth of research ; he looks at things only 
 on the surface, and takes delight in constructing and putting 
 forward difficulties and contradictions*. The worship of our 
 Lord was certain to engage the perverted ingenuity of a mind of 
 this description ; and Celsus attacks the practice upon a variety 
 of grounds which are discussed by Origen. The general position 
 taken up by Celsus is that the Christians had no right to 
 denounce the polytheism of the pagan world, since their own 
 worship of Christ was essentially polytheistic. It was absurd 
 in the Christians, he contends, to point at the heathen gods as 
 idols, whilst they worshipped One Who was in a much more 
 wretched condition than the idols, and indeed was not even an 
 
 P Apud Lamprid. in vitd Alex. Severi : * ab aliis Serapidem, ab aliis adorari 
 Christum.' 
 
 *i De Morte Peregrini, c. 1 1 : rhv jxiyav ovv iKuvov ert ai^ovcnv &i/6pwiroVf 
 Tov iv YlaXaiarivri avaaKoXoTriaOivra. 
 
 ' Ibid. c. 13 : eVeiSai/ aira^ irapa^avres, Ocovs fiev *E\\r)viK0V5 airapV7}(TcoV' 
 rat, rhv S' aviffKoKo-KLffixivov eKuvav (TocpLar^v avrcav irpoaKWcaai. 
 
 B Neander decides in the negative (Ch. Hist. i. 225 sqq.), (i) on the 
 ground of the vehemence of the opponent of Origen, as contrasted with the 
 moderation of the friend of Lucian ; (2) because the friend of Lucian was 
 an Epicurean, the antagonist of Origen a neo-Platonist. 
 
 * See the remarks of Neander, Ch. Hist. vol. i. p. 227, ed. Bohn. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Fierce indignation of Celsus, 393 
 
 idol at all, since He was a mere corpse". The Christians, he 
 urges, worshipped no God, no, not even a demon, but only 
 a dead man^. If the Christians were bent upon religious in- 
 novations ; if Hercules, and ^sculapius, and the gods who had 
 been of old held in honour, were not to their taste ; why could 
 they not have addressed themselves to such distinguished mortals 
 as Orpheus, or Anaxarchus, or Epictetus, or the Sybil % Nay, 
 would it not have been better to have paid their devotions to 
 some of their own prophets, to Jonah under the gourd, or to 
 Daniel in the lion's den, than to a man who had lived an infa- 
 mous life, and had died a miserable death y I In thus honouring 
 a Jew Who had been apprehended and put to death, the Chris- 
 tians were no better than the Getse who worshipped Zamolxis, 
 than the Cilicians who adored Mopsus, than the Acarnanians 
 who prayed to Amphilochus, than the Thebans with their cultus 
 of Amphiaraus, than the Lebadians who were so devoted to 
 Trophonius^. Was it not absurd in the Christians to ridicule 
 the heathen for the devotion which they paid to Jupiter on the 
 score of the exhibition of his sepulchre in Crete, while they 
 themselves adored One Who was Himself only a tenant of the 
 tomb a? Above all, was not the worship of Christ fatal to the 
 Christian doctrine of the Unity of God ? If the Christians 
 really worshipped no God but One, then their reasoning against 
 the heathen might have had force in it. But while they offer an 
 excessive adoration to this Person Who has but lately appeared 
 in the world, how can they think that they commit no offence 
 against God, by giving these Divine honours to His Servant^ % 
 
 " Contr. Cels. "vii. 40, p. 722 : Ivtj. /htj iravToiiracriv ^re KaTayiXaaroi robs 
 
 fJL€U HWOVS, TOVS d€lKVVfx€VOVS d€OVS, CDS CiSojAa ^\aa<J>7]IUL0VPT€S' TOV Se kclL 
 
 avTuv ojs aA7]6oo5 ej'SwAcuj/ aOAidorepop, koi jmrjbe ddcc\op exi, dAA.' ovroos vcKphj/, 
 a€^uVT€5, Kol Uarepa ofiOLOP avTw (-rjTovvres. 
 
 ^ Ibid. vii. 68, p. 742 : 5t6A€7xo^"''«t (racpus ov ©ehv, aAA' ovSe dai/nova 
 aAAa vcKphp ae^opTes. 
 
 y Ibid. vii. 53, p. 732 : irocrcf} 5' -^p vfup 6./n€ivop, iTrcL^r} ye Kaivoro/j-ria-ai 
 Tz inedvfJL'fia'aTe, irepi 6.\Kop tlvo. tup yeppaicvs airodavSproop, Kal 6e7op fxvdov 
 Sf^atrOai dvpa/j-epcop , (nrovf)d(rai ; ^epe, ei /u."^ ijpecrKep 'HpaKArjs, koi 'Aa/cArj- 
 inhs, Kal 01 TraAat Beho^aa/jL€Poi, 'Opcpea ei^ere k.t.A. Cf. 57. 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. 34, p. 469 : illcto. ravra ' irapanX'Tjcriop ^juas' oUrai ^TrevoirjKepai,* 
 TOP (cos (jyriffip 6 KeArros) aXopra Kal airoOapdpra 6p7)(TK€V0PTas/ ro7s rdrais 
 (r4l3ov(n top ZdjxoX^iP, Kal KiA<|i rhp M6\pop, Kal ^AKapvaai rhp 'Ajj.(piAoxoPi 
 Kal &r]Baiois rhp 'Aacpidpecop, Kal Ae^adiois top TpocpdoPLOP.' 
 
 '^ Ibid. iii. 43, p. 475: laera ravra \eyei Trepi tjjulcop * on Karaye\a>iu(p 
 rSop TTpoa-KUPovproop rhp Aia, eVet rd(pos avrov ip Kp'fjrr) deiKPvrai' Kal ov^ep 
 Tjrrop (Tf^ofXiP rhp airo rod rd(l)ov' /c.t.A. 
 
 ^ Ibid. viii. 12, p. 750: 5o|at S' &p ris e|^s ro^rois iriOapSp ri KaO^ ti^cop 
 
 vii] 
 
394 The worsJiip of Christ defended by Origen^ 
 
 In his replies Origen entirely admits the fact upon which 
 Celsus comments in this lively spirit of raillery. He does not 
 merely admit that prayer to Christ was the universal practice of 
 the Church ; he energetically justifies it. When confronting the 
 heathen opponent of his Master's honour, Origen writes as the 
 Christian believer, rather than as the philosophizing Alex- 
 andrian c. He deals with the language of Celsus patiently and 
 in detail. The objects of heathen worship were unworthy of 
 worship ; the Jewish prophets had no claim to it ; Christ was 
 worshipped as the Son of God, as God Himself. * If Celsus,' 
 he says, * had understood the meaning of this, " I and the Father 
 are One," or what the Son of God says in His prayer, " As I and 
 Thou are One," he would never have imagined that we worship 
 any but the God Who is over all ; for Christ says, " The Father 
 is in Me and I in Him<i." ' Origen then proceeds, although by 
 a questionable analogy, to guard this language against a Sabellian 
 construction : the worship addressed to Jesus was addressed to 
 Him as personally distinct from the Father. Origen indeed, in 
 vindicating this worship of our Lord, describes it elsewhere as 
 prayer in an improper sense e, on the ground that true prayer is 
 offered to the Father only. This has been explained to relate 
 only to the mediatorial aspect of His Manhood as our High 
 Priest^; and Bishop Bull further understands him to argue that 
 the Father, as the Source of Deity, is ultimately the Object of 
 all adoration &. But Origen entirely admits the broad fact that 
 Jesus received Divine honours ; and he defends such worship of 
 Jesus as being an integral element of the Church's life^. 
 
 Xiy^iv Iv Tcfy ' Et fi\v 5?) fi-qZlva &\\ov iOepdircvoy ovroi 7r\)]v eVa ©ihv, ^u &t/ 
 Tis avTois iatjcs irpos rous &\\ovs ar^p^s \6yos' vvvi Se rhv %vayxos (pavivTa 
 TovTov vTrfp6p7}(rKevov(rt, Kal H/jlcds ovSkp Tr\7)iJ.iJ.€\uv vcjii^ovai ircpl rhv Q^hv, el 
 Kol vn7]p€TT]s avTOv depav(vdi}(r€Tai.' 
 
 c See however Contr. Cels. v.i i, sub fin. p. 58^, where, nevertheless, the con- 
 clusion of the passage shews his real mind in De Orat. c. 15, quoted above. 
 
 d Contr. Cels. viii. 12, p. 750: (tircp vivo-qKei 6 KeAo-os t6' ''Ejcc kul 6 
 Tlar^p €1/ i(r/JL€V'* /cat rh iv ev^ij ^Iprjfxej/uv virh rov Tlov rov Qeov kv 7^' ' '0.s 
 iycD Kol av eV iaficp,* ovk tiv aiero rj/JLcis Koi 6.KX0V Qepair^veiv, iraph. rhv inX 
 TcaaL Qe6v. ' 'O yap Uar^p,' (f>7}alvj ' 4v ijuo), Kayca iv rcf Uarpi.' 
 
 6 Ibid. V. 4 : r^s nepl trpoa-cvxris Kvpio\€^ias Kal Karaxp'nffews. 
 
 f Ibid. viii. 13, 16. ' Loquitur de Christo/ says Bishop Bull, ' ut Summo 
 Sacerdote.* Def. Fid. Nic. ii. 9, 15. 
 
 e Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. sect. ii. c. 9, n. 15 : * Sin Filium intueamur relate, 
 qua Filius est, et ex Deo Patre trahit originem, turn rursus certum est, 
 cultum et venerationem omnem, quern ipsi deferimus, ad Patrem redundare, 
 in ipsumque, ut irr^y^v deSr-qros ultimo referri.* 
 
 ^ See Reading's note on Orig. de Orat. § 15. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
by Lactantius and Arnobms, 395 
 
 The stress of heathen criticism, however, still continued to 
 be directed against the adoration of our Lord. ' Our gods,' so 
 ran the heathen language of a later day, ^are not displeased 
 with you Christians for worshipping the Almighty God. But 
 you maintain the Deity of One Who was born as a man, and 
 Who was put to death by the punishment of the cross (a mark 
 of infamy reserved for criminals of the worst kind) ; you believe 
 Him to be still alive, and you adore Him with daily suppli- 
 cations i.' ' The heathen," observes Lactantius, * throw in our 
 teeth the Passion of Christ j they say that we worship a Man, 
 and a Man too Who was put to death by men under circum- 
 stances of ignominy and torture'^.' Lactantius and Arnobius 
 reply to the charge in precisely the same manner. They admit 
 the truth of Christ's Humanity, and the shame of His Passion ; 
 but they earnestly assert His literal and absolute Godhead. 
 However the heathen might scorn, the Godhead of Christ was 
 the great certainty upon which the eye of His Church was 
 persistently fixed ; it was the truth by which her practice of 
 adoring Him was necessarily determined ^ 
 
 If the Gospel had only enjoined the intellectual acceptance of 
 some philosophical theistic theory, its popular impotence would 
 have earned the toleration which is easily secured by cold, 
 abstract, passionless religions. In that case it would never 
 have provoked the earnest scorn of a Lucian or of a Celsus. 
 They would have condoned or passed it by, even if they had 
 
 * Arnob. adv. Gentes, i. 36 : * Sed non idcirco Dii vobis infesti sunt, quod 
 omnipotentem colatis Deurn : sed quod hominem natum, et (quod personis 
 infame est vilibus) crucis supplicio interemptum, et Deum fuisse contenditis, 
 et superesse adhuc creditis, et quotidianis supplicationibus adoratis.' 
 
 ^ Lact. Div. Inst. iv. 16: ' Venio nunc ad ipsam Passionem, quae velut 
 opprobrium nobis objectari solet, quod et hominem, et ab hominibus insigni 
 supplicio adfectum et excruciatum colamus : ut doceam earn ipsam Passionem 
 ab Eo cum magna et divini, ratione susceptam, et in ea sol4 et virtutem, et 
 veritatem, et sapientiam contineri.' 
 
 * Arnob. adv. Gentes, i. 42 : 'Natum hominem colimus. Etiamsi esset 
 id verum, locis ut in superioribus dictum est, tamen pro multis et tam liber- 
 alibus donis, quse ab eo profecta in nobis sunt, Deus dici appellarique deberet. 
 Cum vero Deus sit re cert^, et sine uUius rei dubitationis ambiguo, inficiaturos 
 arbitramini nos esse, quam maxime ilium a nobis coli, et prsesidem nostri 
 corporis nuncupari ? Ergone, inquiet aliquis furens, iratus, et percitus, Deus 
 ille est Christus ? Deus, respondebimus, et interiorum potentiarum Deus ; 
 et quod magis infidos acerbissimis doloribus torqueat, rei maximse caus^ 
 a summo Rege ad nos missus.' Lact. Div. Inst. iv. 29 : ' Quum dicimus 
 Deum Patrem et Deum Filium, non diversum dicimus, nee utrumque secer- 
 nimus : siquidem nee Pater sine Filio nuncupari, nee Filius po^st sine Patre 
 generari,' 
 
 yii] 
 
39^ Pcigan caricature of the adoration of yesus, 
 
 not cared to patronize it. But the continuous adoration of 
 Jesus by His Church made the neutrality of such men as these 
 morally impossible. They knew what it meant, this worship of 
 the Crucified ; it was too intelligible, too soul-enthralling, to be 
 ignored or to be tolerated. And the lowest orders of the popu- 
 lace were for many long years, just as intelligently hostile to it 
 as were the philosophers. Witness that remarkable caricature 
 of the adoration of our crucified Lord, which was discovered not 
 long since beneath the ruins of the Palatine palace «*. It is a 
 rough sketch, traced, in all probability, by the hand of some 
 pagan slave in one of the earliest years of the third century of 
 our era ^. A human figure with an ass's head is represented as 
 
 " See * Deux Monuments des Premiers Sibcles de I'Eglise expliquds, par 
 le P. Raphael Garrucci,* Rome, 1862. He describes the discovery and 
 appearance of this ' Graffito Blasfemo' as follows : — ' Comme tant d'autres 
 ruines, le palais des C^sars r^c^lait aussi de nombreuses inscriptions dict^es 
 par le caprice. Aprds avoir recueilli celles qui couvraient les parois de toute 
 nne salle, nous arrivdmes k trouver quelques paroles grecques, inscrites au 
 sommet d'un mur enseveli sous les d^combres. Ce fut Ik un pr^cieux indice 
 qui nous fit poursuivre nos recherches. Bient6t apparut le contour d'une tdte 
 d* animal sur un corps liumain, dont les bras dtaient ^tendus comme ceux des 
 orantes dans les Catacombes. La ddcouverte paraissait avoir un haut intdr^t: 
 aussi Mgr. Milesi, Ministre des travaux publics, nous autorisa-t-il, avec sa 
 bienveillance accoutum^e, k faire enlever la terre et les ddbris qui encom- 
 braient cette chambre, le 11 Novembre, 1857. Nous ne tard^mes point a 
 contempler une image que ces ruines avaient conservde intacte k travers les 
 sifecles, et dont nous piimes relever un caique fidele. 
 
 * Elle r^presente une croix, dont la forme est celle du Tau grec, surmontd 
 
 d'une cheville qui porte une tablette. Un homme est attach^ k cette croix, 
 
 mais la tete de cette figure n'est point humaine, c'est celle du cheval ou 
 
 plut6t de I'onagre. Le crucifix est revetu de la tunique de dessous, que les 
 
 anciens d^signaient sous le nom d'interula, et d'une autre tunique sans 
 
 ceinture ; des bandes appeMes crurales enveloppent la partie infdrieure des 
 
 jambes. A la gauche du spectateur, on voit un autre personnage, qui sous le 
 
 meme v^tement, semble converser avec la monstrueuse image, et ^l^ve vers 
 
 elle sa main gauche, dont les doigts sont separds. A droite, au dessus de la 
 
 croix, se lit la lettre T ; et au dessous, I'inscription suivante : 
 
 AAEHAMEN02 2EBETE (pour 2EBETAI) 
 
 ©EON 
 
 Alexamenos adore son Dieu.' 
 
 For the reference to this interesting paper I am indebted to the kindness 
 of Professor Westwood. See also Archdeacon Wordsworth's Tour in Italy, 
 ii. p. 143. 
 
 n P. Garucci fixes this date on the following grounds : (i) Inscriptions on 
 tiles and other fragments of this part of the Palatine palace shew that it was 
 constructed during the reign of the Emperor Adrian. The dates 123 and 1 26 
 are distinctly ascertained. (Deux Monuments, &c., p. 10.) The inscription 
 therefore is not earlier than this date. (2) The calumny of the worship of 
 the ass's head by the Christians is not mentioned by any of the Apologists 
 
 [ LECT, 
 
The 'graffito blasfemo^ of the Palatine. 397 
 
 fixed to a cross ; while another figure in a tunic stands on one 
 side. This figure is addressing himself to the crucified monster, 
 and is making a gesture which was the customary pagan ex- 
 pression of adoration. Underneath there runs a rude inscrip- 
 tion : Alexamenos adores his God. Here we are face to face with 
 a touching episode of the life of the Koman Church in the days 
 of Severus or of Caracalla. As under Nero, so, a century and a 
 half later, there were worshippers of Christ in the household of 
 the Caesar. But the paganism of the later date was more in- 
 telligently and bitterly hostile to the Church than the paganism 
 which had shed the blood of the Apostles. The Gnostic invec- 
 tive which attributed to the Jews the worship of an ass, was 
 applied by the pagans with facile indifference both to Jews and 
 Christians. Tacitus attributes the custom to a legend respecting 
 services rendered by wild asses to the Israelites in the desert o ; 
 *and so, I suppose,' observes Tertullian, 'it was thence presumed 
 that we, as bordering on the Jewish religion, were taught to 
 worship such a figure p.' A story of this kind once current, was 
 
 who precede Tertullian, nor by any who succeed Minucius Felix ; which may 
 be taken to prove that this misrepresentation of Christian worship was only 
 in vogue among pagan critics in Rome and Africa at the close of the second 
 and at the beginning of the third century. (3) It is certain from Tertullian 
 that there were Christians in the imperial palace during the reign of the 
 Emperor Severus : ' Even Severus himself, the father of Antoninus, was 
 mindful of the Christians ; for he sought out Proculus a Christian, who was 
 surnamed Torpacion, the steward of Euodia, who had once cured him by 
 means of oil, and kept him in his own palace, even to his death : whom also 
 Antoninus very well knew, nursed as he was upon Christian milk.' Ad Scapu- 
 1am, c. 4. Caracalla' s playmate was a Christian boy ; see Dr. Pusey's note 
 on TertuU. p. 148, Oxf. Tr. Libr. Fath. (4) * Rien dans le monument du 
 Palatin ne contredit cette opinion, ni la paldographie, qui trahit la meme 
 epoque, tant d cause de Tusage simultan^ de I'e carre et de Te semicirculaire 
 dans la meme inscription, que par la forme gdndrale des lettres; ni moins 
 encore I'ortographe, car on sait que le changement de I'ai en e a plus d'un 
 exemple -X Rome, meme sur les monuments grecs du regno d'Auguste. Enfin 
 les autres inscriptions grecques de cette chambre, qui sans prejudice pour 
 notre thfese, pourraient etre d'une autre temps, ne font naltre aucune difficult^ 
 serieuse, etant parfaitement semblables a celle dont nous nous occupons.* 
 Garucci, Ibid. p. 13. 
 
 o Tac. Hist. v. c. 4. He had it probably from Apion ; see Josephus, c. 
 Ap. ii. 10. It is repeated by Plutarch, Symp. iv. 5 : rhv ovov avacprivavra 
 avTOLS Tn)y)]v v^aros ri/xcoai. And by Democritus : Xpvarjv ovov KfcpaX^v 
 TTpocT^Kvvovv. Apud Suidas, voc. 'louSds. 
 
 P Apolog. 16. Tertullian refutes Tacitus by referring to his own account 
 of the examination of the Jewish temple by Cn. Pompeius after his capture of 
 Jerusalem ; Pompey ' found no image' in the temple. For proof that the 
 early Christians were constantly identified with the Jews by the pagan world, 
 see Dr. Pusey's note on Tert. ubi supra, in the Oxf. Tr. Libr. Fath. 
 VII ] 
 
398 JesMS Christ adored by early Martyrs. 
 
 easily adapted to the pui-poses of a pagan caricaturist. Whether 
 from ignorance of the forms of Christian worship, or in order to 
 make his parody of it more generally intelligible to the pagan 
 public, the draughtsman has ascribed to Alexamenos the gestures 
 of a heathen devotee ^. But the real object of this coarse cari- 
 cature is too plain to be mistaken. Jesus Christ, we may be sure, 
 had other confessors and worshippers in the imperial palace 
 who knelt side by side with Alexamenos. The moral pressure 
 of the advancing Church was making itself felt throughout 
 all ranks of pagan society ; ridicule was invoked to do the 
 work of argument ; and the social persecution which crowned 
 all true Christian devotion was often only the prelude to a 
 sterner test of that loyalty to a crucified Lord, which could meet 
 heathen scorn with the strength of patient faith, and heathen 
 cruelty with the courage of heroic endurance. 
 
 The death-cry of the martyrs must have familiarized the 
 heathen mind with the honour paid to the Redeemer by Chris- 
 tians. Of the worship offered in the Catacombs, of the stern 
 yet tender discipline whereby the early Church stimulated, 
 guided, moulded the heavenward aspirations of her children, 
 paganism knew, could know, nothing. But the bearing and 
 the exclamations of heroic servants of Christ when arraigned 
 before the tribunals of the empire, or when exposed to a death 
 of torture and shame in the amphitheatres, were matters of 
 public notoriety. The dying prayers of St. Stephen expressed 
 the instinct, if they did not provoke the imitation, of many a 
 martyr of later days. What matters it to Blandina of Lyons 
 that her pagan persecutors have first entangled her limbs in 
 the meshes of a large net, and then have exposed her to the 
 fury of a wild bull ] She is insensible to pain ; she is entranced 
 in a profound communion with Christ r. What matters it to 
 that servant-boy in Palestine, Porphyry, that his mangled body 
 is ' committed to a slow fire % ' He does but call more earnestly 
 in his death-struggle upon Jesus s. Felix, an African bishop, 
 after a long series of persecutions, has been condemned to be 
 beheaded at Venusium for refusing to give up the sacred books 
 
 q Job xxxi. 27. St. Hieronym. in Oseam, c. 13: 'Qui adorant solent 
 deosculari manum suam.' Comp. Minuc. Fel. Oct. c. 2. 
 
 ^ Eus. Hist. Ecc. V. i : ^\% yvpyaBov 0\r]de7(Ta, ravpw irape^ArjOr]' koI LKafcos 
 ava$\7]d^7(ra irpos tov C^ov, fxrjde a^adrjatv en tccu avjajSaivSi^roov exovaa 5ta 
 r))v iXirida kuI kiroxv^' t^^ treirKTrevfXivoiu koX SfxiAiav trphs Xpinrou. 
 
 8 Ibid. Mart. Pal. 1 1 : KaQai^a}xevr]s avTov rrjs (phoyhs aneppq^e (poov^v, rhv 
 Tlhv TOV 0eou ^IricTovy $orjddt/ kiri^oco/iieuos, 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Martyrs pray to Jestts in their agony, 399 
 
 to the proconsul. ^Eaising his eyes to heaven, he said with a 
 clear voice . . . " Lord God of heaven and earth, Jesu Christ, 
 to Thee do I bend my neck by way of sacrifice, Thou Who 
 abidest for ever, to Whom belong glory and majesty, world 
 without end. Amen*." ' Theodotus of Ancyra has been betrayed 
 by the apostate Polychronius, and is joining in a last prayer with 
 the sorrowing Church. 'Lord Jesu Christ,' he cries, 'Thou 
 Hope of the hopeless, grant that I may finish the course of my 
 conflict, and offer the shedding of my blood as a libation and 
 sacrifice, to the relief of all those who suffer for Thee. Do Thou 
 liohten their burden ; and still this tempest of persecution, that 
 all who believe in Thee may enjoy rest and quietness ^.' And 
 afterwards, in the extremity of his torture, he prays thus : ' Lord 
 Jesu Christ, Thou Hope of the hopeless, hear my prayer, and 
 assuage this agony, seeing that for Thy Name's sake I suffer 
 thus ^.' And when the pain had failed to bend his resolution, 
 and the last sentence had been pronounced by the angry judge, 
 ' O Lord Jesu Christ,' the martyr exclaims, ' Thou Maker of 
 heaven and earth. Who forsakest not them that put their hope 
 in Thee, I give Thee thanks for that Thou hast made me meet 
 to be citizen of Thy heavenly city, and to have a share in Thy 
 kingdom. I give Thee thanks, that Thou hast given me strength 
 to conquer the dragon, and to bruise his head. Give rest unto 
 Thy servants, and stay the fierceness of the enemies in my 
 
 * Ruinart, Acta Martyrum Sincera, ed. Veronee, 173I; P* 314- Acta 
 S. Felicis Episcopi, anno 303 : * Felix Episcopus, elevans oculos in coelum, 
 clar^ voce dixit, Dei*s, gratia^ Tibi. Quinquaginta et sex annos haheo in hoc 
 scBculo. Virginitatem custodivi. Evangelia servavi, fidem et veritatem 'prce- 
 dicavi. Domine Deus coeli et terrce, Jesu Christe, Tibi cervicem meam ad 
 victimam flecto, Qui permanes in ceternum ; Cui est claritas et magnificentia 
 in scecula sceculorum. Amen* 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 303, Passio S. Theodoti Ancyrani, et septem virginum : * Theo- 
 dotus, valedicens fratribus, jubensque ne ab oratione cessarent, sed Deum 
 orarent ut corona ipsi obtingeret, prseparavit se ad verbera sustinenda. Simul 
 igitur perstiterunt in oratione cum martyre, qui prolixe precatus, tandem ait : 
 Domine Jesu Christe, spes desperatorum, da mihi certaminis cursum perjicere, 
 et sanguinis effusionem pro sacrificio et libatione offerre, omnium eorum causa 
 qui propter Te affliguntur. A lleva onus eorum ; et compesce tempestatem, ut 
 requie et profunda tranquillitate potiantur omnes qui in Te credunt.' 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 307 : * Videns ergo Prseses se frustra laborare, et fatigatos 
 tortores deficere ; depositum de ligno jussit super ignitas testulas coUocari. 
 Quibus etiam interiora corporis penetrantibus gravissimum dolorem sentiens 
 Theodotus, oravit dicens, Domine Jesu Christe, spes desperatorum, exaudi 
 orationem meam, et cruciatum hunc mitiga j quia propter Nomen Sanctum 
 Tuum ista patior,' 
 VII ] 
 
400 The Martyrs pray to Jesus in their agony, 
 
 person. Give peace unto Thy Church, and set her free from 
 the tyranny of the devil y/ 
 
 Thus it was that the martyrs prayed and died. Their voices 
 reach us across the chasm of intervening centuries ; but time 
 cannot impair the moral majesty, or weaken the accents of their 
 strong and simple conviction. One after another their piercing 
 words, in which the sharpest human agony is so entwined with 
 a superhuman faith, fall upon our ears. * Christ, Thou Son 
 of God, deliver Thy servants z.' ' Lord Jesu Christ, we are 
 Christians ; Thee do we serve ; Thou art our Hope ; Thou art 
 the Hope of Christians ; O God Most Holy, God Most 
 High, O God Almighty^.* '0 Christ,' cries a martyr again 
 and again amidst his agonies, ' Christ, let me not be con- 
 foundedb. * * Help, I pray Thee, Christ, have pity. Pre- 
 serve my soul, guard my spirit, that I be not ashamed. I pray 
 Thee, O Christ, grant me power of endurance <^.' ' I pray Thee, 
 Christ, hear me. I thank Thee, my God ; command that I be 
 
 y Ruinart, Acta, p. 307: 'Cumque ad locum pervenissent, orare coepit 
 Martyr in hsec verba : Domine Jesu CliHste, cceli terrceque conditor, qui non 
 derelinquis sperantes in Te, gratias Tihi ago, quiafecisti me dignum coelestis 
 Tuce Vrbin civem, Tuiqtie regni consortem. Gratias Tihi ago, quia donasti 
 mihi draconem vincere, et caput ejus conterere. Da requiem servis Tuis, atque 
 in me siste violentiam inimicorum. Da Ecclesice Tuce pacem, eruens earn a 
 tyrannide diaholL* 
 
 * Ibid. p. 340 ; Acta SS. Saturnini, Dativi, et aliorum plurimorutn 
 martynim in Afridl, a. 304 : ' Thelica martyr, medi^ de ips4 carnificum rabie 
 hujusmodi preces Domino cum gratiarum actione effundebat : Deo gratias. 
 In Nomine Tuo, Christe Dei Fili, libera servos Tuos.* 
 
 * Ibid.: 'Cum ictibus ungularum concussa fortius latera sulcarentur, proflu- 
 ensque sanguinis unda violentis tractibus emanaret, Proconsulem sibi dicentem 
 audivit : Incipies sentire quse vos pati oporteat. Et adjecit : Ad gloriam. Gra- 
 tias ago Deo regnorum. Apparet regnum ceternum, regnum incorruptum. Do- 
 mine Jesu Christe^ Christiani sumus ; Tibiservimus; Tu es spes nostra ; Tues 
 spes Christianorum ; Deus sanctissime ; Deus altissime ; Deus omnipotens.* 
 
 •> Ibid. p. 341 : ' Advolabant truces manus jussis velocibus leviores, secre- 
 taque pectoris, disruptis cutibus, visceribusque divulsis, nefandis adspectibus 
 profanorum adnex4 crudelitate pandebant. Inter hsec Martyris mens immo- 
 bilis perstat : et licet membra rumpantur, divellantur viscera, latera dissi- 
 pentur, animus tamen martyris integer, inconcussusque perdurat. Denique 
 dignitatis suae memor Dativus, qui et Senator, tali voce preces Domino sub 
 carnifice rabiente fundebat: Christe Domine, non confundarJ Ibid. p. 342 : 
 * At martyr, inter vulnerum cruciatus saevissimos pristinam suam repetens 
 orationem : Rogo, ait, Christe, non confundar.'* 
 
 " Ibid. p. 342 : * Spectabat interea Dativus lanienam corporis sui potius 
 quam dolebat : et cujus ad Dominum mens animusque pendebat, nihil dol- 
 orem corporis aestimabat, sed tantum ad Dominum precabatur, dicens ; Sub' 
 veni, rogo, Chnste, habe pietatem. Serva animam meam ; custodi spiritum 
 meum ut non confundar, Rogo, CJiriste, da sufferentiam.* 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The Martyrs pray to Jesus in their agony. 401 
 
 beheaded. I pray Thee, Christ, have mercy ; help me, Thou 
 Son of God^.' * I pray Thee, O Christ : all praise to Thee. 
 Deliver me, O Christ ; I suffer in Thy Name. I suffer for a 
 short while ; I suffer with a willing mind, O Christ my Lord : 
 let me not be confounded®.' 
 
 Or listen to such an extract from an early document as the 
 following : — ^ Calvisianus, interrupting Euplius, said, " Let Eu- 
 plius, who hath not in compliance with the edict of the emperors 
 given up the sacred writings, but readeth them to the people, be 
 put to the torture." And while he was being racked, Euplius 
 said, " I thank Thee, O Christ. Guard Thou me, who for Thee 
 am suffering thus." Calvisianus the consular said, " Cease, Eu- 
 plius, from this folly. Adore the gods, and thou shalt be set 
 at liberty." Euplius said, " I adore Christ ; I utterly hate the 
 demons. Do what thou wilt : I am a Christian. Long have 
 I desired what now I suffer. Do what thou wilt. Add yet 
 other tortures : I am a Christian." After he had been tortured 
 a long while, the executioners were bidden hold their hands. 
 And Calvisianus said, " Unhappy man, adore the gods. Pay 
 worship to Mars, Apollo, and ^sculapius." Euplius said, 
 " I worship the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. I adore 
 the Holy Trinity, beside Whom there is no God. Perish the 
 gods who did not make heaven and earth, and all that is in 
 them. I am a Christian." Calvisianus the praefect said, " Offer 
 sacrifice, if thou wouldest be set at liberty." Euplius said, " I 
 sacrifice myself only to Christ my God : more than this I can- 
 not do. Thy efforts are to no purpose ; I am a Christian." 
 Calvisianus gave orders that he should be tortured again more 
 severely. And while he was being tortured, Euplius said, 
 " Thanks to Thee, Christ. Help me, O Christ. For Thee do 
 I suffer thus, O Christ." And he said this repeatedly. And as 
 his strength gradually failed him, he went on repeating these 
 or other exclamations, with his lips only — his voice was gone f.' 
 
 d Acta, p. 342 : * Ne inter moras torquentium exclusa anima corpus supplicio 
 pendente desereret, tali voce Dominura presbyter precabatur : Rogo Christen 
 exaudi me. Gratias Tihi ago, Deus : jube me decollari. Rogo Christe, 
 miserere. Dei Fili, subveni.^ 
 
 e Ibid. p. 343 : ' Emeritus martyr ait : Rogo^ Christe, Tihi lau- 
 
 des : libera me Christe, patior in Nomine Tuo. Breviter patior, libenter 
 patior, Christe JDomine ; non confundar.' 
 
 f Ruinart, p. 362 ; Acta S. Euplii Diaconi et Martyris, a. 304 : * Calvisi- 
 anus interlocutus dixit: Euplius qui secundum Edictum Principum non 
 tradidit Scripturas, sed legit populo, torqueatur. Cumque torqueretur, dixit 
 Euplius : Gratias Tibi Christe. Me custodi qui propter Te hcec patior. 
 VII ] D d . 
 
402 Prayers of the martyrs not chance ^ejaculations! 
 
 You cannot, as I have already urged, dismiss from your con- 
 sideration such prayers as these, on the ground of their being 
 
 * mere ejaculations/ Do serious men, who know they are dying, 
 
 * ejaculate ' at random ? Is it at the hour of death that a man 
 would naturally innovate upon the devotional habits of a life- 
 time ? Is it at such an hour that he would make hitherto un- 
 attempted enterprises into the unseen world, and address himself 
 to beings with whom he had not before deemed it lawful or 
 possible to hold spiritual communion "J Is not the reverse of 
 this supposition notoriously the case ? Surely, those of us who 
 have witnessed the last hours of the servants of Christ cannot 
 hesitate as to the answer. As the soul draws nigh to the gate 
 of death, the solemnities of the eternal future are wont to cast 
 their shadows upon the thought and heart ; and whatever is 
 deepest, truest, most assured and precious, thenceforth engrosses 
 every power. At that dread yet blessed hour, the soul clings 
 with a new intensity and deliberation to the most certain truths, 
 to the most prized and familiar words. The mental creations of 
 an intellectual over-subtlety, or of a thoughtless enthusiasm, or 
 of an unbridled imagination, or of a hidden perversity of will, 
 or of an unsuspected unreality of character, fade away or are 
 discarded. To gaze upon the naked truth is the one necessity; 
 to plant the feet upon the Rock Itself, the supreme desire, in 
 that awful, searching, sifting moment. Often, too, at a man's 
 last hour, will habit strangely assert its mysterious power of 
 recovering, as if from the grave, thoughts and memories which 
 seemed to have been lost for ever. Truths which have been 
 half forgotten or quite forgotten since childhood, and prayers 
 which were learned at a mother's knee, return upon the soul 
 with resistless persuasiveness and force, while the accumula- 
 tions of later years disappear and are lost sight of. Depend 
 
 Dixit Calvisianus Consularis : Desiste, Ewpli^ ah insania Jiac. Deos adora 
 et liberaheris. Euplius dixit : Adoro Christum, detestor dcemonia. Fac 
 quod vis, Christianus sum. Hcec diu optavi. Fac quod vis. Adde alia., 
 Christianus sum. Postquam diu tortus esset, jussi sunt cessare carnifices. 
 Et dixit Calvisianus : Miser, adora deos : Martem cole, Apollinem et jEscu- 
 lapium. Dixit Euplius : Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum adoro : 
 Sanctam Trinitatem adwo, prceter quam non est Deus. Pereant dii qui non 
 fecerunt coelum et toTam, et quce in eis sunt. Christianus sum. Calvisi- 
 anus praefectus dixit : Sacrifica, si vis liherari. Euplius dixit : Sacrifico 
 modo CHRISTO DEO me ipsum : quid ultra faciam, non haheo. Frustra 
 conaris: Christianus sum. Calvisianus prsecepit iterum torqueri acrius. 
 Cumque torqueretur, dixit Euplius : Gratias Tibi, Christe. Succurre Christe. 
 Propter Te hcec patior Christe. Et dixit saepius. Et deficientibus viribus, 
 dicebat labiis tantum, absque voce hsec vel alia.* 
 
 [lect. 
 
The Arian invocation of Christ. 403 
 
 upon it, the martyrs prayed to Jesus in their agony because they 
 had prayed to Him long before, many of them from infancy ; 
 because they knew from experience that such prayers were 
 blessed and answered. They had been taught to pray to Him ; 
 they had joined in prayers to Him ; they had been taunted and 
 ridiculed for praying to Him ; they had persevered in praying 
 to Him ; and when at last their hour of trial and of glory came, 
 they had recourse to the prayers which they knew full well to be 
 the secret of their strength, and those prayers carried them on 
 through their agony, to the crown beyond it. 
 
 And, further, you will have remarked that the worship of 
 Jesus by the martyrs was full of the deepest elements of 
 worship. It was made up of trust, of resignation, of self- 
 surrender, of self-oblation. ISTo thing short of a belief in the 
 absolute Godhead of Jesus could justify such worship. The 
 Homoousion was its adequate justification. Certainly the Arians 
 worshipped our Lord, although they rejected the Homoousion. 
 So clear were the statements of Scripture, so strong and so 
 universal was the tradition of Christendom, that Arianism could 
 not resist the claims of a practice which was nevertheless at 
 variance with its true drift and principle. For, as St. Atha- 
 nasius pointed out, the Arians did in reality worship one whom 
 they believed to be a being distinct from the Supreme God. 
 The Arians were creature-worshippers not less than the heathen &. 
 Some later Arians appear to have attempted to retort the charge 
 of creature-worship by pointing to the adoration of our Lord's 
 Humanity in the Catholic Church. But, as St. Athanasius 
 explains, our Lord's Manhood was adored, not as a distinct and 
 individual Being, but only as inseparably joined to the ador- 
 able Person of the Everlasting Word^^. To refuse to adore 
 Christ's Manhood was to imply that after the incarnation men 
 could truly conceive of It as separate from Christ's Eternal 
 Person i. There was no real analogy between this worship and 
 
 g St. Athanas. Epist. ad Adelphium, § 3 : oh Kricfia vpocrKvvoviJ.cv, fj}) 
 yevoiTO, iOi^iKcov yap koI 'Apstavcov r) roiavrri irXdvrj' dWct rhv Kvpiov rrjs Kri- 
 a€oos crapKCDdeuTa rhv rov 0eoG A6yov TTpocrKwov/ufv. 
 
 ^ Ibid. : 6i yap kol t] aap^ avrr] Kaff iavrriv fxepos icrrl rdov KTiffixoLTooVy aAAa 
 06oG ycyove (tcoyua. Kal oijT€ rh roiovrov (Tco/na /ca0' eavrh Biatpovvres anh toC 
 Aoyov TTpoaKvyov/jL^i/, ovt€ rhv A6yop TrpoaKwrjcai OeAovres ixaKpvvojx^v ahrhv 
 cLTrh TTJs crapKos' d\\' eldSres, Kada irpoiivofxeu, rh * 6 A6yos <rap^ iyeveroy 
 TOvTov Kal iu aapKl yev6^€i/ov iiriyivdoaKOfici/ @€6v. 
 
 ^ Ibid. : ris rotyapovv ovroos 6.(ppo}u iffrlu ws \4yciv rcc Kvplca, aTr6(Tra CLTrh 
 Tov (T(aixaros %va 0*6 irpoa-Kvv^a-u} ; k.t.\. Compare Ibid. § 5 : 'Iva Kal to\- 
 fxSxri \4y€iv (sc. Ariani), ov irpocTKvvovfxev rifx^is rov Kvpiov juerd rrjs crapKhs, 
 aAAa ^laipovfjiev rh (TWfxa Kal ii6v(f rovrco \arp€voix€f* 
 VII ] D d 2 
 
404 Early Socinian worship of Christ 
 
 the Arian worship of a being who was in no wise associated 
 with the Essence of God ; and Arianism was either virtually 
 ditheistic or consciously idolatrous. It was idolatrous, if Christ 
 was a created being ; it was ditheistic, if He was conceived of 
 as really Divine, yet distinct in essence from the Essence of the 
 Fatherk. 
 
 The same phenomenon of the vital principle of a heresy being 
 overridden for a while by the strength of the tradition of 
 universal Christendom was reproduced, twelve centuries later, in 
 the case of Socinianism. The earliest Socinians taught that the 
 Son of God was a mere man, who was conceived of the Holy 
 Ghost, and was therefore called the Son of God. But they also 
 maintained that on account of His obedience. He was, after 
 finishing His work of redemption, exalted to Divine dignity and 
 honour 1. Christians were to treat Him as if He were God : 
 they were to trust Him implicitly ; they were to adore Him "i. 
 Faustus Socinusii zealously insisted upon the duty of adoring 
 Jesus Christ ; and the Eacovian Catechism expressly asserts 
 that those who do not call upon or adore Christ are not to be 
 accounted Christians o. But this was only the archaeology, or at 
 
 k St. Athanas. contr. Arian. Orat. ii. § 14, sub fin. p. 482. Orat. iii. § 16, 
 P« 565J €* 7^P y^ oi/TOJS €X€t, aAA.* €| ovk 6uTa)v carl Kria/xa Kal Troirj/jLa 6 
 A6yos, ^ OVK €(TTi 0ebs aKr)6ij/hs, Sia rh (hai avrhv eva tcou Kria-ixaTuv, ^ et 
 ©ebi/ avrhv opofxd^ovffiv ipTp€ir6fji€voi irapa rSov ypacpwv^ avdyKr] Xeyeiu avrovs 
 dvo deovs, eva /xev KT/trrryv, rhv Se erepov KriffrhVy koI S60 Kvpiois Aarpcveiv, 
 
 €v\ IJL€V a7€»/r)T«, T^ §6 €Tfp(p y€vr]T(^ Kal Krifff^aTL ourco Se (ppovovvres 
 
 TrdvTocs Kcu irXciovas (Twd^ovai 6€ovs' tovto yap rcov iKTreaSvToov aith rov kvhs 
 0eoO rh iirix^iprjiJia. biari ovv oi *hpeiavo\ roiavra Koyi^dfjievoi Kal voovvres 
 ov (Tvvapidfxovaiv eavrovs fX€ra fSov 'EW'f^vcov ; 
 
 1 Socin. de Justif. Bibl. Fr. Pol. torn. i. fol. 601, col. i. 
 
 ™ Cat. Racov. : *Qu. 236. Quid prceiered JDominus Jesus Jiuic prcecepto 
 addidit ? Resp. Id quod etiavi Dominum Jesum pro Deo agnoscere tenemur, 
 id est, pro eo, qui in nos potestatem hdbet diuinam, et cui nos divirMin exhibere 
 honorem ohstricti sumus. Qu. 237. In quo is honor divinus Christo debitus con- 
 sistit ? Resp. In eo, quod quemadmodum adoratione divind eum prosequi tene- 
 mur., ita in omnibus necessitatibus nostris ejus opem implorare possumus. 
 Adoramus verb eum propter ipsius sublimem et divinam ejus potestatem.* Cf. 
 Mohler, Symbolik. Mainz. 1864, P- ^^9- 
 
 ^ The tenacity of the Christian practice may be still more remarkably 
 illustrated from the death-cry of Servetus, as given in a MS. account of his 
 execution, cited by Roscoe, Life of Leo X, c. 19. 'Ipse horrend^ voce da- 
 man* ; Jesu, Fill Dei ceterni, miserere mei.' 
 
 o Cat. Racov.: * Qu, 246. Quid verb sentis de lis hominibus, qui Christum non 
 inmeant, neo adorandum censent ? Resp. Prorsus non esse Christianos sentio, 
 cum Christum non habeant. Et licet verbis id negare non audeant, reips^ 
 Degaottamen,* In his sermon on * Satan Transformed/ South quotes Socinus 
 as %^jm^ that • Prsestat Trinitarium esse, quam asserere Christum non esse 
 adorandum.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
abandoned^ as resting on antiquarian feeling, 405 
 
 most the better feeling of Socinianism. Any such mere feeling 
 was destined to yield surely and speedily to the logic of a strong 
 destructive principle. In vain did Blandrata appeal to Faustus 
 Socinus himself P, when endeavouring to persuade the Socinians 
 of Transylvania to adore Jesus Christ : the Transylvanians 
 would not be persuaded to yield an act of adoration to any 
 creature <J. In vain did the Socinian Catechism draw a dis- 
 tinction between a higher and a lower worship, of which the 
 former was reserved for the Father, while the latter was paid to 
 Christ r. Practically this led on to a violation of the one 
 positive fundamental principle of Socinianism ; it obscured the 
 incommunicable prerogatives of the Supreme Being. Accord- 
 ingly, in spite of the texts of Scripture upon which their 
 worship of Christ was rested by the Socinian theologians, such 
 worship was soon abandoned ; and the later practice of So- 
 cinians has illustrated the true doctrinal force and meaning of 
 that adoration which Socinianism refuses, but which the Church 
 unceasingly offers to Jesus, the Son of God made Man. Of 
 this worship the only real justification is that full belief in 
 Christ's Essential Unity with the Father which is expressed by 
 the Homoousion. 
 
 II. But the Homoousion did not merely justify and explain 
 the devotional attitude of the Church towards Jesus Christ : it 
 was, in reality, in keeping with the general drift and sense of 
 her traditional language. 
 
 Keference has already been made to the prayers of the 
 
 P See Socinus' tractates, Bibl. Frat. Pol. ii. p. 709, sqq. 
 
 q Cf. Mohler, Symbolik, p. 609 ; Bp. Pearson, Minor Works, vol. i. p. 300, 
 and note. Coleridge's Table Talk, 2nd ed. p. 304 : * Faustus Socinus wor- 
 shipped Jesus Christ, and said that God had given Him the power of being 
 omnipresent. Davidi, with a little more acuteness, urged that mere audition 
 or creaturely presence could not possibly justify worship from men ; — that 
 a man, how glorified soever, was no nearer God than the most vulgar of the 
 race. Prayer therefore was inapplicable.' For himself Coleridge says (Ibid, 
 p. 50), 'In no proper sense of the term can I call Unitarians and Socinians 
 believers in Christ ; at least not in the only Christ of Whom I have read or 
 know anything.' 
 
 ' Cat. Rac. : ' Qu. 245. "Ergo is honor et cultus ad eiim modum trihuitur, 
 ut nullum sit inter Christum et Deum hoc in genere discrimen ? Resp. Imo, 
 permagnum est. Nam adoramus et colimus Veum, tanquam causam primam 
 salutis nostrce ; Christum tanquam causam secundam ; aut ut cum Paulo 
 loquamur, Deum tanquam Eum ex quo omnia, Christum ut eum per quem 
 omnia.'' Cf. Bibl. Frat. Pol. tom. ii. fol. 466, qu. by Mohler, Symbolik, p. 609. 
 Mohler observes that ' man sieht dass an Christus eine Art von Invocation 
 gerichtet wird, die mit der Katholischen Anrufung der Heiligen einige 
 Aehnlichkeit hat.* 
 VII ] 
 
4c6 Explicit confessions of Christ's Divinity 
 
 primitive martyrs ; but the martyrs professed in terms their 
 belief in Christ's divinity, as frequently as they implied that 
 belief by their adorations of Christ. This is the more observ- 
 able because it is at variance with the suggestions by which 
 those who do not share the faith of the martyrs, sometimes 
 attempt to account for the moral spectacle which martyrdom 
 presents. It has been said that the martyrs did not bear witness 
 to any definite truth or dogma ; that the martyr-temper, so to 
 term it, was composed of two elements, a kind of military en- 
 thusiasm for an unseen Leader, and a strange unnatural desire 
 to brave physical suffering ; that the prayers uttered by the 
 martyrs were the product of this comi)ound feeling, but that 
 such prayers did not imply any defined conceptions respecting 
 the rank and powers of Him to Whom they were addressed. 
 Now, without denying that the martyrs were sustained by 
 a strictly supernatural contempt for pain, or that their devotion 
 to our Lord was of the nature of an intense personal attach- 
 ment which could not brook the least semblance of slight or 
 disloyalty, or that they had not analysed their intellectual appre- 
 hension of the truth before them in the manner of the divines 
 of the Nicene age, I nevertheless affirm that the martyrs did 
 suffer on behalf of a doctrine which was dearer to them than 
 life. The Christ with Whom they held such close and passionate 
 communion, and for Whose honour they shed their blood, was 
 not to them a vague floating idea, or a being of whose rank and 
 powers they imagined themselves to be ignorant. If there be 
 one doctrine of the faith which they especially confessed at 
 death, it is the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity. This truth was 
 not only confessed by bishops and presbyters. Philosophers, 
 like Justin Sj soldiers, such as Maurice*, and Tarachus", and 
 
 * Ruinart, Acta, p. 49 : ' Ego quidem ut homo imhecilUs sum, et longe 
 minor quam ut de infinita illius Deitate aliquid magnum dicere pussim : 
 Prophetarum munus hoc essefateor.^ 
 
 * Ibid. p. 243 : ' Milites sumus, Imperator, tui : sed tamen servi, quod 
 
 liher^ comjitemur, Dei Hahes hie nos confitentes Deum Patrem 
 
 auctorem omnium ; et Filium Ejus Jesum Christum DEUM credimus.' 
 
 " Ibid. p. 377 • Tapaxoy eJirev 'Nvy aXT]6a)S (ppoviixwTepSv fie iirolrjaas, ra7s 
 TT^riyais ivbuyafidoaras /xe, en /jluWov izeiroiQevai fj.e eV tw 61/6/j.ari rod ®€ov Kal 
 rod Xpiarov avrov.' Md^ifios 7)y€ ficau elirev ''AvocricoTare koI rpiaKardpaTe, trees 
 dual 6eo7s Xarpeueis, Kal avrhs dfioXoyuu, rovs 6eovs apvy ;' Tapaxos eJireu' 
 ^'Eycb &ehv dixoXoyS) rhp ovrus ovra.' Ma|tjt40s riyeficbv eJ-jrev ' Kat yiiV Kal 
 XpiffTSp nva ecpTjs elvai @e6v^ Tapaxos eiirei/' ' Ovrcos ex^i' avrhs ydp kariv 
 6 XpLcrrhs 6 Tlhs rod ©eoS tov (wvros, 7} iXms rwv Xpi.<TriavwVi hi hv koX 
 iraaxovres ffu^ofxeda,* 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
by the primitive martyrs, 407 
 
 Theodorus X; young men of personal beauty like Peter of Lamp- 
 sacusy, or literary friends of high mental cultivation as were 
 Epipodius and Alexander z; widows, such as Symphorosa^ ; and 
 poor women like Domninab; and slaves such as Vitalise; and 
 young boys such as Martialis^^; — the learned and the illiterate, 
 
 X Ruinart, Acta, p. 425 : *Yo8 autem erratis qui dcemonas fallaces et impos- 
 tores Dei appellatione honoratis ; mihi vero Deus est Christus, Dei TJnigenitus 
 Filius. Pro pietate igitur atque confessione Istius, et qui vulnerat i7icidat ; 
 et qui verherat laceret ; et qui cremat flammam admoveat ; et qui his wcibus 
 meis offenditur, linguam eximat. * 
 
 y Ibid. p. 135 : ^ Compreherisus est quidam, Petrus nomine, vald^ quidem 
 fortis in fide ; pulcher animo et speciosus corpore. Proconsul dixit : Eahes 
 ante oculos decreta invictissimorum principum. Sacrifica ergo magnce dece 
 Veneri. Petrus respondit: Mir or, si persuades mihi, op)time Proconsul, 
 sacrificare impudiccB mulieri et sordidce, quae talia opera egit ut confusio sit 
 
 enarrare Oportet ergo me magis Deo vivo et vero, Begi sceculorum 
 
 omnium Christo sacrificium offerre orationis deprecationis, compunctionis et 
 laudis. Audiens heeo Proconsul jussit eum adhuc setate adolescentulum tendi 
 in rota, et inter ligna in circuitu posita, vinculis ferreis totum corpus ejus 
 fecit constringi : ut contortus et confractus [?] minutatira ossa ejus commi- 
 nuerentur. Quanto autem plus torquebatur famulus Dei, tanto magis fortior 
 apparebat. Constans vero aspectu, et ridens de ejus stultiti^, conspiciens in 
 coelum ait : Tibi ago gratias, Domine Jesu Christe, qui mihi hanc toleran- 
 tiam dare dignatus es ad vincendum nequissimum tyrannum. Tunc Pro- 
 consul videns tantam ejus perseverantiam, et nee his quidem defecisse 
 tormentis, jussit eum gladio percuti.' 
 
 2 Acta, p. 65, circ. a. 178 ; ' Ita Uteris eruditissimi, concordia crescente, 
 
 adeo provecti sunt : ad hsec beatus Epipodius Sempi- 
 
 ternum vero Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum quern crucifixum memoras, 
 resurrexisse non nosti, qui ineffabili mysterio homo pariter et Deus, famulis 
 
 suis tramitem immortalitatis instituit, Christum cum Patri ac 
 
 Spiritu Sancto Deum esse conjiteor, dignumque est ut illi animam meam 
 refundam, qui mihi et Creator est et Bedemptor.* 
 
 * Ibid. p. 21, a. 120:^ Si pro nomine Christi Dei mei incensa fuero, illos 
 dcemones tuos magis exuro.^ 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 235 : * Ne in ignem ceternam incidam, et tormenta perpetua, 
 Deum colo et Christum ejus, qui fecit coelum et terram." 
 
 c Ibid. p. 410 (cf. St. Ambr. de Exh. Virgin, c. i), circ. a. 304 : 'Martyri 
 nomen Agricola est, cui Vitalis servus fuit ante, nunc consors et collega mar- 
 
 tyrii. Prsecessit servus, ut provideret locum ; secutus est dominus 
 
 cumque sanctus Vitalis cogeretur a persequentibus ut Christum negaret, et 
 ille amplius profiteretur Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, omnia torment- 
 orum genera in eum exercentes, ut non esset in corpore ejus sine vulnere 
 locus, orationem fudit ad Dominum dicens ; Domine Jesu Christe, Sahator 
 meus, et Deus mens ; jube suscipi spiritum meum ; quia jam desidero ut 
 accipiam coronam, quam angelus tuus sanctus mihi ostendit. Et complete 
 oratione emisit spiritum.' 
 
 ^ Ibid., Passio S. Felicitatis et Septem Filiorum Ejus, p. 23 : ' Hoc quoque 
 amoto, jussit septimum Martialem ingredi, eique dixit : Crudelitatis vestrae 
 factores efFecti, Augustorum instituta contemnitis, et in vestra pernicie per- 
 manetis. Respondit Martialis : si nosses quce poence idolorum cultoribus 
 VII ] 
 
4o8 Explicit confessions of Christ s Divinity 
 
 the young and the old, the noble and the lowly, the slave and 
 his master, united in this confession. Sometimes it is wrung 
 from the martyr reluctantly by cross-examination ; sometimes it 
 is proclaimed as a truth with which the Christian heart is full 
 to bursting, and which, out of the heart's abundance, the Chris- 
 tian mouth cannot but speak. Sometimes Christ's Divinity is 
 professed as belonging to the great Christian contradiction of 
 the polytheism of the heathen world around ; sometimes it is 
 explained as involving Christ's Unity with the Father, against 
 the pagan imputation of ditheism ^ ; sometimes it is proclaimed 
 as justifying the worship which, as the heathens knew. Chris- 
 tians paid to Christ. The martyrs look paganism in the face, 
 and maintain that, although Christ was crucified, yet nevertheless 
 Christ is God j, that even while His very Name is cast out as 
 evil, Christ is really Master of the fortunes of Rome and Dis- 
 poser of the events of history ; that the pagan empire itself 
 did but unwittingly subserve His purposes and prepare His 
 triumph f; that He Who is the Creator of heaven and earth, 
 
 paratce sunt I Sed adhuc differt Deus iram suam in vos et idola vestra demon- 
 strare. Omnes enim qui non confitentur Christum verum esse Deum in 
 ignem ceternum mittentar.' 
 
 « Ruinart, Acta, p. 122 : *Post hsec cum adstante haud procul Asclepiade, 
 quis diceretur inquireret [Polemon scilicet] respondit Asclepiades, Christianus, 
 Polemon : Cujus ecclesise ? Asclepiades : Catholicce. Polemon : Quern 
 Deum colis ? Respondit : Christum. Polemon : Quid ergo ? iste alter 
 est? Respondit: Norit sed ipse quern et ipsi pauUo ante confessi sunt* 
 Cf. Prudentius, Peristeph. Hymn. 10. 671 : — 
 
 ' Arrisit infans, nee moratus retulit : 
 Est quidquid illud, quod ferunt homines Deum 
 Unum esse oportet, et quod uni est unicum. 
 Cum Christus hoc sit, Christus est verus Deus. 
 Genera deorum multa nee pueri putant.' 
 ' Prudentius has given a poetical amplification of the last prayer of 
 St. Laurence, which, whatever its historic value, at any rate may be taken to 
 represent the primitive Christian sentiment respecting the relation of Jesus 
 Christ to the pagan empire. It should be noticed that neither St. Ambrose 
 nor St. Augustine, in their accounts of the martyrdom, report anything of 
 this kind ; Prudentius may have followed a distinct and trustworthy tradition. 
 The martyr is interceding for Rome : — 
 
 * O Christe, numen unicum, 
 O splendor, O virtus Patris, 
 O factor orbis et poli, 
 Atque auctor horum mcenium I 
 
 Qui sceptra Romse in vertice 
 Rerum locasti, sanciens 
 Mundum Quirinali togse 
 Servire, et armis cedere 
 
 [lect. 
 
by the primitive martyrs, 409 
 
 can afford to wait, and is certain of the future. This was the 
 faith which made any compromise with paganism impossible s. 
 
 * What God dost thou worship % ' enquired the judges of the 
 Christian Pionius. * I worship/ replied Pionius, * Him Who 
 made the heavens, and Who beautified them with stars, and 
 Who has enriched the earth with flowers and trees.' ^ Dost 
 thou mean,' asked the magistrates, ' Him Who was crucified % ' 
 
 * Certainly,' replied Pionius ; ' Him Whom the Father sent for 
 the salvation of the world \' 
 
 The point before us notoriously admits of the most copious 
 illustration i : and it is impossible to mistake its significance. 
 
 Ut discrepantum gentium 
 Mores, et observantiam, 
 Linguasque et ingenia et sacra 
 Unis domares legibus. 
 
 En omne sub regnum Remi 
 Mortale concessit genus : 
 Idem loquuntur dissoni 
 Kitus, id ipsum sanciunt. 
 
 Hoc destinatum quo magis 
 Jus Christiani nominis, 
 Quodcumque terrarum jacet 
 Uno illigaret vinculo. 
 
 Da, Christe, Romanis tuis 
 Sit Christiana ut civitas : 
 Per quem dedisti, ut cseteris 
 Mens una sacrorum foret.' 
 
 FeristcTph. 2, 413. 
 8 Prud. Peristeph. Hymn. 5. 57 ; qu. by Ruinart, A.cta, p. 330. De S. Vin- 
 centii martyrio : — 
 
 'Vox nostra quae sit accipe. 
 Est Christus et Pater Deus : 
 Servi hujus ac testes sumus ; 
 Extorque si potes fidem. 
 
 Tormenta, career, ungulse 
 Stridensque flammis lamina 
 Atque ipsa poenarum ultima ; 
 Mors Christianis ludus est.' 
 
 ^ Ruinart, p. 125: *Judices interim dixerunt : Quem Deum colitis^ 
 Pionius respondit : Hunc qui coelum feoit, et sideribus ornavit, qui terram 
 statuit, etjlorihus arhoribusque decoravit ; qui ordinavit circum. flaa terrce et 
 maHa, et statuta terminorum vel litorum lege signavit. Turn illi : Ilium 
 dicis qui crucifixus est ? Et Pionius : Illam dico quem pro salute orMs Pater 
 misit.^ 
 
 ^ Ibid., Acta Sincera, p. 210, for the confession of Sapricius, who after- 
 wards fell; p. 235; p. 256 for that of Victor at Marseilles; pp. 274, 314, 
 341, 435^ 438. 439^ 467, 47o» 479> 483. 5o6, 513, 514, 521. 
 VII J 
 
4IO Didthe ^ higher minds accept the faithof the people? 
 
 If the dying words of this or that martyr are misreported, or 
 exaggerated, or coloured by the phraseology of a later age, the 
 general phenomenon cannot but be admitted, as a fact beyond 
 dispute. The martyrs of the primitive Church died, in a great 
 number of cases, expressly for the dogma of Christ's Divinity. 
 The confessions of the martyrs explain and justify the prayexs 
 of the martyrs ; the Homoousion combines, summarizes, fixes 
 the sense of their confessions. The martyrs did not pray to or 
 confess a creature external to the Essence of God, however 
 dignified, however powerful, however august. They prayed to 
 Christ as God, they confessed that Christ is God, they died for 
 Christ as God. They prayed to Him and they spoke of Him as 
 of a distinct Person, Who yet was one with God. Does not this 
 simple faith of the Christian people cover the same area as the 
 more clearly defined faith of the Nicene fathers % Or could it be 
 more fairly or more accurately summarized by any other symbol 
 than it is by the Homoousion % 
 
 But you admit that the Nicene decision did very fairly embody 
 and fix in a symbolical form the popular creed of earlier cen- 
 turies. * This,' you say, * is the very pith of our objection ; it 
 was the popular creed to which the Council gave the sanction of 
 its authority.' You suggest that although a dying martyr may 
 be an interesting ethical study, yet that the moral force which 
 carries him through his sufierings is itself apt to be a form of 
 fanaticism hostile to any severely intellectual conception of the 
 worth and bearings of his creed. You admit that the martyr 
 represents the popular creed ; but then you draw a distinction 
 between a popular creed, as such, and the ideas' of the * thinkers.' 
 * What is any and every creed of the people,' say you, ^ but the 
 child of the wants and yearnings of humanity, fed at the breast 
 of mere heated feeling, and nursed in the lap of an ignorance 
 more or less profound ] ' A popular creed, you admit, may have 
 a restricted interest, as affording an insight into the intellectual 
 condition of the people which holds it ; but you deem it worth- 
 less as a guide to absolute truth. The question, you maintain, 
 is not. What was believed by the primitive Christians at large ] 
 The question is, What was taught by the well-instructed teachers 
 of the early Church % Did the creed of the people, with all its 
 impulsiveness and rhetoric, keep within the lines of the grave, 
 reserved, measured, hesitating, cautious language of the higher 
 minds of primitive Christendom % 
 
 Now here, my brethren, I might fairly take exception to your 
 distinction between a popular and an educated creed, as in fact 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Chrisf s Divinity taught by stib-apostolic Fathers. 41 1 
 
 inapplicable to the genius and circumstances of early Christianity. 
 Are not your criteria really derived from your conceptions of 
 modern societies, political and religious ] It was once said of an 
 ancient state, that each of its citizens was so identified with the 
 corporate spirit and political action of his country, as to be in 
 fact a statesman. And in the primitive Church, it was at least 
 approximately true that every Christian, through the intensity 
 and intelligence of the popular faith, was a sound divine. Men 
 did not then die for rhetorical phrases, any more than they 
 would do so now; and if the martyrs were, as a rule, men of the 
 people, it is also notorious that not a few among them were 
 bishops and theologians of repute. But that we may do justice 
 to the objection, let us enquire briefly what the great Church 
 teachers of the first three centuries have taught respecting the 
 Higher and Eternal Nature of Jesus Christ. 
 
 And here let us remark, first of all, that a chain of representa- 
 tive writers, reaching from the sub-apostolic to the Nicene age, 
 does assert, in strong and explicit language, the belief of the 
 Church that Jesus Christ is God. 
 
 Thus St. Ignatius of Antioch dwells upon our Lord's Divine 
 Nature as a possession of the Church, and of individual Chris- 
 tians ; he calls Jesus Christ *my God,' ^ our God.' ' Jesus Christ 
 our God,' he says, * was carried in the womb of Mary k.' The 
 Blood of Jesus is the Blood of God I Ignatius desires to 
 imitate the sufferings of his God ^. The sub-apostolic author of 
 the Letter to Diognetus teaches that ' the Father hath sent to 
 men, not one of His servants, whether man or angel, but the 
 very Architect and Author of all things, by Whom all has been 
 ordered and settled, and on Whom all depends. . . . He has sent 
 Him as being God ".' And because He is God, His Advent is 
 a real revelation of God; He has shewn Himself to men, and 
 by faith men have seen and known their God o. St. Polycarp 
 
 ^ Ad Eph. 18:0 7ap 06^s i]\xmv ^Ir)(Tovs 6 XpLCTThs ltivO(popi]Q'r] vnh Mapias, 
 Cf. Ibid. 7 : iv aapKl yevSjuevos (deSs. 
 
 1 Eph. i: aj/a^oo7rvp'f)(TavT€s iv aifxari tov 06oO. 
 
 ™ Rom. 6 : iTTLTpe^are (xoi fiiixTjT^j/ ehai rod irddovs rod Qeov fxov. 
 
 ^ Ep. ad Diogn. 7 : ahrhs 6 TravroKpdrap koi iravTOKTiarTis koX aoparos 
 
 06OS ov Kaddirep &v tls elKdaeiev, auOpunois vTnjpcTTju riva 7r6/xv|/ay ^ 
 
 &yys\ou, ^ &pxovTa, ^ nua roov BlsttSvtciop to, iirlyeia, ^ riva rcav TreTriO'Teu/xeVcuz/ 
 Tas ev ovpoLvols dioiKrjaeiSf dAA' avrov rov r^x^'^'^W 'f«^ ^Vf^iovpybu tup '6Kwv 
 ws ®eov eire/xxpev, cos irpbs apOpcoirovs eTre/xv^ez/, cos (rdo^wu ^-n^jx^ev. 
 
 ° Ep. ad Diogn. c. 8 : ris yap oKcos avOpcoircap rjiriffraTo tl ttot' icrrl ©coy, 
 irpLv avrov ihduv . . . . apdpdoircov Se ovBeh ovre eldeu ovre iyvaipicrev, avrhs 5e 
 eavrhy iiridei^eyj inedei^^ 5e 5i^ Tciffrews, y ii6vri 0€Oi/ tSeT;/ (TvyK€X<^pyiTai, 
 VII ] 
 
412 Chrisfs Deity how taught by fathers of 
 
 appeals to Him as to tlie Everlasting Son of God p ; all things on 
 earth and in heaven, all spirits obey Him <i ; He is the Author 
 of our justification; He is the Object of our hoper. Justin 
 Martyr maintains that the Word is the First-born of God, and so 
 God s ; that He appeared in the Old Testament as the God of 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob * ; that He is sometimes called the 
 Glory of the Lord, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Wisdom, 
 sometimes the Angel, sometimes God". St. Justin argues 
 against Tryphon that if the Jews had attentively considered what 
 the prophets have written, they would not have denied that 
 Christ is God, and the Only Son of the Unbegotten God ^, He 
 maintains that the Word is Himself the witness to His own 
 Divine Generation of the Father y ; and that the reality of His 
 Sonship is itself a sufficient evidence of His True Divinity z. 
 Tatian is aware that the Greeks deem the faith of the Church 
 utter folly; but he nevertheless will assert that God has ap- 
 peared on earth in a human form a. Athenagoras proclaims 
 with special emphasis the oneness of the Word with the Father, 
 as Creator and Ruler of the universe ^. Melito of Sardis speaks 
 of Jesus as being both God and Man c : ^ Christians,' he says, 
 * do not worship senseless stones, as do the heathen, but God and 
 
 P Epist. Eccl. Smyrn. de Mart. S. Polyc. n. 14. 
 
 ^ Ad Phil. 2 : '^Vli VTreTdyr] ra Trdura iirovpdvia Kot imyeia' ai na<Ta irvo^ 
 Xarpevei. In Phil. 6 : rov Kvpiov koI 0eo9 apparently refers to Christ. 
 
 ' Ibid. 8 : d5m\€i7rT«s ovi/ irpoffKapTepSofx^p rfj i\irldi Tifiwy Kol t^ appa^wvi 
 TTis biKaioffvpTjs rjiJLcop, '6s e<rTi XpicTThs 'Irjaovs. 
 
 " Apol. i. n. 63 : ts A6yos Koi irptardroKos tov rov ©eou, koX 0eos vvipx^i- 
 
 t Ibid. 
 
 " See the argument of the whole passage, Contr. Tryph. 5 7-61 : apxhv frph 
 vdvrccv riau KTic/xdrap 6 0eos yeyeppriKe Bvpafiip ripa e| eavrov AoyiKr]v, iffTis 
 KaX h6^(x Kvpiov inrh rov Tlpevfiaros rov 'Ayiov Ka\€7Taij irore be Ttos, irorh 5e 
 '2,o<l)ia^ TTore 56 ''A776A0S, Trore Se Qcos. 
 
 * Ibid. 126 : €1 P€PoijKaT€ ra elprjixeva vtto tS>p Trpo(prjTcop, ovk h.p €^it)pv^7adi 
 avTOP dpai &ihp rod julopov koi ay€PP7}rov ©eoD T16p. Cf. Ibid. 63 : TrpoaKVPT}- 
 T(Js — Kol ©etJs. Justin expresses the truth of our Lord's distinct Personality 
 by the phrase ®ehs eVepos apidij.^ aW ov ypdo/xT) (Ibid. 56). 
 
 y Ibid. 61 : fxaprvp'f]a-ei Se jjlol 6 Aoyos rrjs <T0(j)las avrhs &P oTiros 6 Qihs 
 ayrh rov Uarphs rccp SXcop yepprjd^ls. 
 ' Ibid. 126 ; Apolog. i. 63. 
 
 * Adv. Grsec. c. 21 : ou yap fxcopalpoficPy &pbp€S*'E\X7}Pcs, ovSe A^povs airay- 
 ye\\ofjL€P, Qehp ip apdpuTrov fJi-opcpy yey op4pai. Cf. Ibid. n. 13; rov ireTrSp- 
 Boros &€ov. 
 
 ^ Legat. n. 10: irphs avrov yap Kot 81' avrov itdpra iyepero, hhs opros rov 
 Uarphs Kal rov Tlov. 
 
 c See Eus. Hist. Eccl. v. 28. Compare the magnificent passage from St. 
 Melito's treatise on Faith, given in Cureton's Spicilegium Syriacura, pp. 53, 
 54, and quoted by Westcott on the Canon, p. 196. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
the second and third ceiituries. 413 
 
 His Christ, Who is God the Word ^! St. Irenseus perhaps re- 
 presents the purest and deepest stream of apostolic doctrine 
 which flowed from St. John through Polycarp into the Western 
 Church. St. Irenseus speaks of Christ as sharing the Name of 
 the only true God. He maintains against the Yalentinians that 
 the Divine Name in its strictest sense was not given to any 
 angel ; and that when in Scripture the Name of God is given to 
 any other than God Himself there is always some explanatory 
 epithet or clause in order to shew that the full sense of the word 
 is not intended 6. None is directly called God save God the 
 Father of all things and His Son Jesus Christ f. In both Testa- 
 ments Christ is preached as God and Lord, as the King Eternal, 
 as the Only-begotten, as the Word Incarnated. If Christ is 
 worshipped \ if Christ forgives sins i, if Christ is Mediator be- 
 tween God and man^^, this is because He is really a Divine 
 Person. 
 
 And if from Gaul we pass to Africa, and from the second to 
 the third century, the force and number of primitive testimonies 
 to the Divinity of our Lord increase upon us so rapidly as to 
 render it impossible that we should do more than glance at a 
 few of the more prominent. At Alexandria we find Clement 
 speaking of That Living God Who suffered and Who is adored^; 
 of the Word, Who is both God and man, and the Author of all 
 blessings ^ ; of God the Saviour n, Who saves us, as being the 
 
 d Apol. apud Auct. Chron. Pasch. (Gall. torn. i. p. 678) : ovk ia-fiev Xldoov 
 oif^efjLlav aXad7](riu ex^proov dcpaTrevral, aWa fx6vov 0eoD rov -nph irdvroov koX 
 kirX irdvToov, kol en rod Xpiarov avTov ovros ®eov A6yov vph odt&ywi/ iarnhv 
 $p7}(rK€VTai. Routh, Rel. Sacr. i. 118, 133. 
 
 ® Adv. Hser. iii. 6, n. 3. 
 
 f Ibid. iii. 6, n. 2 : ' Nemo igitiir alius Deus nominatur, aut Dominus 
 appellatur nisi qui est omnium Deus et Dominus, qui et Moysi dixit, Ego 
 
 sum Qui sum, et Hujus Filius Jesus Christus.' Cf. iii. 8, n. 3 : ' Deus 
 
 Solus.' 
 
 8 Ibid. iii. 19, n. 2 : ' Quoniam autem Ipse propria prseter omnes qui 
 fuerunt tunc homines, Deus, et Dominus, et Rex ^ternus et Unigenitus, et 
 Verbum Incarnatum praedicatur, et a prophetis omnibus et apostolis, et ab 
 ipso Spiritu, adest videre omnibus qui vel modicum veritatis attigerint.* 
 
 ^ Ibid. iii. 9, 2. *Thus [obtulerunt magi] quoniam Deus.* 
 
 * Ibid. V. 17, n. 3. ^ Ibid. iii. 18, 7. 
 
 * Protrept. 10: iriffrevaov, &v6p(oir€f avOpccirca koi ©ew, t^ iradSvTi Koi Trpoc- 
 Kwovficpcp 0ea; ^wj/t*. 
 
 ™ Ibid. i. : avrhs ovros 6 ASyos, 6 /jlovos &fji<l>(Oy Qeos t€ Kal MpwiroSf 
 airdi/Tup Tjfjuv oXtlos ayaOwv. 
 
 ° Strom, ii. 9: 0€^ t^J Scwtt)^* ; Ibid. v. 6: 6 ®ihs "Xoor^p KCKXrifievos, 7] 
 TcDf '6\cov apx^l, ^Tis aTreiKSvKTTai fxev 4k tov Seov rod aopaTov irpwrr] Kal irph 
 aidvccv, r^TvirwKiv 5e ra /i€0' kavr^v (iiravTa yevSfieva. 
 VII ] 
 
414 Chrisfs Deity taught by Origen, 
 
 Author and Archetype of all existing beings. Clement alludes 
 to our Lord's Divinity as explaining His equality with the 
 Father «, His prescience during His Human Life p, His revela- 
 tion of the Father to men^. Origen maintains Christ's true 
 Divinity against the contemptuous criticisms of Celsus r. Origen 
 more than once uses the expression Hhe God Jesus «.' He 
 teaches that the Word, the Image of God, is God * ; that the 
 Son is as truly Almighty as the Father "^ ; that Christ is the 
 Very Word, the Absolute Wisdom, the Absolute Truth, the 
 Absolute Righteousness Itself^. Christ, according to Origen, 
 possesses all the attributes of Deity y ; God is contemplated in 
 the contemplation of Christ z. Christ's Incarnation is like the 
 economical language of parables which describe Almighty God 
 as if He were a human being. So real is Christ's Deity, that 
 His assumption of our Nature, like the speech of a parable, is 
 to be looked upon as only a condescension to finite intelligences ^ 
 There is no Highest Good in existence which is superior to 
 Christ ^ ; as Very God, Christ is present in all the world ; He 
 is present with every man^, Origen continually closes his 
 
 Protrept. lo: 6 <f)av€p^aros ourcos ©ebs, 6 rep Aca-irSrr} rwv SXwv e^KTooOcis. 
 P Quis Div. Salv. 6 : TrpoeTSe a>s Qibs, & fx^Wei bicpooTrjd'no'iadai. 
 
 1 Paed. i. 8. We know God from our knowledge of Jesus — e'fc Tpvrdj/Tjs 
 tffoffdevovs. 
 
 ' Contr. Cels. ii. 9, 1 6 sqq. ; vii. 53, &c. 
 
 « Qehv 'Irjffovv, Ibid. v. 51; vi. 66. * Select, in Gen. In Gen. ix. 6. 
 
 ^ Princ. T. ii. n. 10: ' Ut autem unam eandemque Omnipotentiam Patris 
 et Filii esse cognoscas, sicut unus atque idem est cum Patre Deus et Domi- 
 nus, audi hoc modo Johannem in Apocalypsi dicentem : Hsec dixit Dominus 
 Deus, qui est et qui erat, et qui venturus est, Omnipotens ; qui enim ven- 
 turus est, quis est alius nisi Christus.' 
 
 » Contr. Gels. iii. 41 : avrSXoyos, avrocrocpla, avroaXrieeia. Ibid. y. 39 ; 
 avTo^LKaioo'vvr}s. 
 
 y In Jerera. Horn. viii. n. 2 : irdpra yap '6(ra rod ©eou, roiavra eV avroj 
 €<TTi, 6 Xptards iari aocpia rod &€ov . . . avrhs air o\vTpao<r is, avrhs (ppovrjaris i(TTi 
 
 &€0V. 
 
 « In Joan. t. xxxii. n. 18 : Oeupurai yap iv ra Aoycp, ovri ©fa Ka\ elKdvi 
 rov 0eoG aopdrov. 
 
 » In Matt. t. xvii. n. 20 : uxnrep b ©ebs avOpdoirovs olKovojxcav Sos iu irapa- 
 j8oAa?s &vepa>Tros Xeyerai, rdxa Se Tra'S Ka\ yiv^Tai' ovrcos Ka\ 6 '^a}T7]p irpo-nyov 
 fifvcas Tihs S}v rod ©eou Ka\ ®e6s eanv, /cal Tlhs ttjs aydirrjs avruv, /cat ei/cwp 
 rov (d^ov rov aopdrov ov /xevci 5e eV ^ eVrt Trpo-nyovfx^vas, aXXci ytverai Kar' 
 olKovon'iav rov iv irapa^oXa7s Xiyojxivov avepdoirov ovras 5e @€0V, tihs avOpcairoy 
 Karh. rb {xifxela-eai, '6rav avepwirovs olKovofifj, rov @ehv XeyS/xcvov eV irapa^oXals 
 KOiL yiv6iJL€V0v 6.v6pooTrov. ^ 
 
 •» In Joan. t. i. n. 11: ov o-iairrirfov . ..rhu fxerh rhv Uar^pa rwv bXwv 
 ©ebi/ ASyoVj ov^cvhs yap eXarrov ayaOuv Kal rovro rh ayaQ6v. 
 
 c Ibid. t. vi. n. 15: ^o^oXoyiav irep'i rrjs irporjyovf^iprjs oiKrias Xpiffrov dirj- 
 
 [ LECT, 
 
Tertullian, St, Cyprian and others, 415 
 
 Homilies with a doxology to our Lord ; and he can only account 
 for refusal to believe in His Divinity by the hypothesis of some 
 kind of mental obliquity <i. Tertullian's language is full of 
 Punic fire, but in speaking of Christ's Divinity he is dealing 
 with opponents who would force him to be accurate, even if 
 there were not a higher motive for accuracy. Tertullian antici- 
 pates the Homoousion in terms : Christ, he says, is called God, 
 by reason of His oneness of substance with God ©. Christ alone 
 is begotten of God f ; He is God and Lord over all men &. Ter- 
 tullian argues at length that an Incarnation of God is possible l^ ; 
 he dwells upon its consequences in language which must appear 
 paradoxical to unbelief or half-belief, but which is natural to a 
 sincere and intelligent faith in its reality. Tertullian speaks of 
 a Crucified God i ; of the Blood of God, as the price of our re- 
 demption k. Christians, he says, believe in a God Who was dead, 
 and Who nevertheless reigns for everl. St. Cyprian argues 
 that those who believe in Christ's power to make a temple of 
 the human soul must needs believe in His Divinity ; nothing 
 but utter blindness or wickedness can account for a refusal to 
 admit this truth i". St. Hippolytus had urged it against Jews 
 and Sabellians 11 j Arnobius determines to indent it upon the 
 
 ^cTTat, ^Tt d6vafJLiv roffavrriv exer, &S Kol aSparos elvai rfl OciSrrjri avrov, 
 irapbjv Travri av9pci>TrCj}, iravrX Se KaX rcf u\(p Kdffficp (TV[jLirap€KT€iv6ix€vos. 
 
 d Contr. Cels. iii. 29. 
 
 ® Apol. c. 21 : 'Hunc ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione genera- 
 tum, et idcirco Filium Dei, et Deum dictum unitate substantice.' Ibid.: 
 
 * Quod de Deo profectum est, Deus est, et Dei Filius, et Unus ambo.' Adv. 
 Prax. 4: ' Filium non aliunde deduco, sed de substantia Patris.' Ibid. 3 : 
 
 * Consortibus [Filio et Spiritu Sancto] substantise Patris.* 
 
 ^ Adv. Prax. 7 : * Solus ex Deo genitus.' 
 
 8 Adv. Jud. 7: 'Christus omnibus Deus et Dominus est.' Cf. c. 12. 
 
 ^ Cf. De Carne Christi, c. 3, 4. 
 
 * Adv. Marc. ii. 27: 'Deum crucifixum.' 
 
 ^ Ad Uxor. ii. 3 : * Non sumus nostri, sed pretio empti, et quali pretio ? 
 Sanguine Dei.' 
 
 1 Adv. Marc. ii. 16: • Christianorum est etiam Deum mortuum credere, et 
 tamen viventem in aevo sevorum.' 
 
 ™ Ep. 73, ad Jubaianum, 12 : * Si peccatorum remissam consecutus est ... . 
 et templum Dei factum est, quaero cujus Dei ? Si Creatoris, non potuit in 
 eum qui non credidit. Si Christi, nee ejus fieri potest templum qui negat 
 Deum Christum.' Cf. Ep. 74, c. 6: 'Quae verb est animge csecitas, quae 
 pravitas, fidei unitatem de Deo Patre, et de Jesu Christi Domini et Dei 
 nostri traditione venientem nolle agnoscere,' &c. 
 
 " Adv. Jud. c. 6: @ehs &v a\7}6ii/us. Contr. Noet. c. 6: ovtos 6 $}v inl 
 irdvroiu ®g6s i(TTiv' \eyei yap ovrca jxeTO, Trapprjirlas' Tlavra jlloi Trapa^edorai 
 virh rod UarpSs, '0 $}V iirl iravroov 0ebs ivKoyrjThsj* yeyei/rjrai, Kal ^vQpwiros 
 VII] 
 
41 6 Various i7idirect testimonies of the third century, 
 
 pagan mind by dint of constant repetition o. Theonas of Alex- 
 andria instructs a candidate for the imperial librarianship how- 
 he may gradually teach it to his pagan master p. Dionysius 
 of Alexandria vehemently repudiates as a cruel scandal the 
 report of his having denied it <i. St. Peter of Alexandria would 
 prove it from an examination of Christ's miracles r. For the 
 rest, St. Methodius of Tyre may represent the faith of western 
 Asia 8 ; the martyred Felix that of the Eoman chair * ; and, 
 to omit other illustrations ", the letter of the council to Paulus 
 of Samosata summarizes the belief both of eastern and western 
 Christendom during the latter half of the third century x. 
 
 This language of the preceding centuries does in effect and 
 substance anticipate the Nicene decision. When once the 
 question of Christ's Divinity had been raised in the metaphysical 
 form which the Homoousion presupposes, no other answer was 
 possible, unless the Nicene fathers had been prepared to renounce 
 
 76i/(J/i€yoy, 06(Js Iffriv fts Tohs alcovas, Apud Routh, Opusc. i. p. 59. And 
 c. 17: ©ebs A6yos dw' ovpavcov KaTr\\div els r^v ayiau irapQevov. Adv. 
 Beron. et Helic. n. 2 : yiyovev &v6p(a7ro5 & rwv 'dkoov ©e^s. So in Eus. v. 28, 
 He is called our 6{/(r7rAa7xi'os Qe6s. 
 
 o Adv. Gent. ii. 60 : * Ideo Christus, licet vobis invitis, Deus ; Deus 
 inquam Christus — hoc enim ssepe dicendum est, ut infidelium dissiliat et 
 disrumpatur auditus — Dei principis jussione loquens sub hominis forma.' 
 Ibid. i. 53 : * Deus ille sublimis fuit ; Deus radice ab intim^, Deus ab incog- 
 nitis regnis, et ab omnium principe Deus sospitator est missus.' 
 
 P Apud Routh, Rel. Sacr. iii. p. 443 ; Ep. ad Lucian. Cubicul. Praepos. c. 
 
 7 : * Interdum et divinas scripturas laudare conabitur laudabitur et 
 
 interim Evangelium Apostolusque pro divinis oraculis : insurgere poterit 
 Christi mentio, explicabitur pauUatim ejus sola Divinitas.' 
 
 <i Ep. ad Dionys. Rom. apud S. Athan. Op. tom. i. p. 255 : Koi St' itAAr/s 
 eiriffToKris eyparpa, ev oh ^jXey^a Koi % irpo(pepovaiv eyKkrjfia /car' i/xoVj ^ptvSos 
 "bvy CDS oh \4yovTos rhv Xpicfrhv SfMOovcriov eluai r^ 06cp. 
 
 ^ Apud Routh, Rel. Sac. iv. 48 : rd Se a-nfie^a iravra h eiroiriffe koX at 
 ^vvdueis deiKuvffLV avrbv @ebu eivai ivai^OpcoTr-qa-apra. ra avvaiJ.(p6T€pa rolvvv 
 beiKwrai' '6ti Qehs ^v (pvffci, koi ykyovev &v6poi}Tros (pvaei. 
 
 " De Symeon. et Ann^, n. 6 : 2u ®ehs irpooros, tfXTrpoffQev (Tov ovk iyewndr) 
 Behs 6.\\os €K 060V Uarphs, Kol fiercL aov ovk effTai &\\os Tlhs r<£ Uarpl 
 ofioova-ios Kol dfiSrifjios. n. 8 : Std tov fjLOVoyevovs Koi aTrapaWaKTOv Koi 
 dfjLOovffiov UaidSs (tov t^u XvTpucriv rjfuv iToi7)<Tdfxevos. n. 14 : (pws a\7]Qivhv e/c 
 (poiThs a\7}Pivov, ®(hs a\rj6ivhs €K &eov a\T]divov. Quoted by Klee. 
 
 t Ep. ad Maximin. Epp. et Cler. Alex.: *De Verbi autem Incarnatione et 
 fide credimus in Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, ex Virgine Mari^ 
 natum, quod Ipse est sempiternus Dei Filius et Verbum, non autem homo a 
 Deo assuraptus, ut alius sit ab lllo ; neque enim hominem assumpsit Dei 
 Filius, ut alius ab ipso exsistat. Sed cum perfectus Deus esset, factus est 
 simul Homo Perfectus ex Virgine Incarnatus.' Labbe et Coss. Cone. iii. 511. 
 
 ^ Cf. more especially St. Greg. Thaumaturgi, Orat. Panegyr. in Origenem, 
 n. 4; Lact. Div. Inst. iv. 22, 29. ^ Labbe, i. 845-850. 
 
 [lect. 
 
Is the language of the Fathers 'mere rhetoric?' 417 
 
 the most characteristic teaching of their predecessors. Certainly 
 it did not occur to them that the Catholic language of earlier 
 writers had been ' mere rhetoric,' and could, as such, be disre- 
 garded. What is the real meaning of this charge of ^ rhetoric' 
 which is brought so freely against the early Christian fathers % 
 It really amounts to saying that a succession of men who were 
 at least intelligent and earnest, were nevertheless, when writing 
 upon the subject which lay nearest to their hearts, wholly unable 
 to command that amount of jealous self-control, and cautious 
 accuracy in the use of language, which might save them from 
 misrepresenting their most fundamental convictions. Let us 
 ask ourselves whether this judgment be morally probable % 
 Doubtless the fathers felt strongly, and, being sincere men, they 
 wrote as they felt. But they were not always exhorting or 
 declaiming or perorating : they wrote, at times, in the temper of 
 cold unimpassioned reasoners, who had to dispute their gi'ound 
 inch by inch with pagan or heretical opponents. Tertullian is 
 not always ^ fervid ; ' St. Chrysostom is not always eloquent ; 
 Origen does not allegorize under all circumstances ; St. Ambrose 
 can interpret Scripture literally and morally as well as mystically. 
 The fathers were not a uniform series of poets or transcend en- 
 talists. Many of them were eminently practical, or, if you will, 
 prosaic ; and they continually wrote in view of hostile criticism, 
 as well as in obedience to strong personal convictions. To men 
 like Justin, Origen, and Cyprian the question of the Divinity of 
 our Lord was one of an interest quite as pressing and practical 
 as any that moves the leaders of political or commercial or scien- 
 tific opinion in the England of to-day. And when men write 
 with their lives in their hands, and moreover believe that the 
 endless happiness of their fellow-creatures depends in no slight 
 degree upon the conscientious accuracy with which they express 
 themselves, they are not likely to yield to the temptation of 
 writing for the miserable object of mere rhythmical effect ; — they 
 may say what others deem strong and startling things without 
 being, in the depreciatory sense of the term, * rhetorical.' 
 
 But, — to be just, — those who insist most eagerly upon the 
 'rhetoricar shortcomings of the fathers, are not accustomed to 
 deny to them under all circumstances the credit of writing with 
 intelligence and upon principle. If, for example, a father uses 
 expressions, however inadvertently or provisionally, which appear 
 to contradict the general current of Church teaching, he is at 
 once welcomed as a serious writer who is entitled to marked and 
 respectful attention. Critics who lay most stress upon the 
 
 VII ] EC 
 
41 8 Doiibtftd statements in ante-Nicene writers, 
 
 charge of unprincipled rhetoric as brought against the fathers 
 are often anxious to take advantage of the argument which 
 screens the fathers and which they themselves reject. ^Give 
 that argument,' they say, 4ts full and honest scope. If the Nicene 
 fathers were not mere rhetoricians, neither were the ante-Nicene. 
 If Athanasius, Basil, and the Gregories are to be taken at their 
 word, so are Justin Martyr, Clement, Origen, and their contem- 
 poraries. If the orthodox language of one period is not rhetoric, 
 then the doubtful or unorthodox language of another period is 
 not rhetoric. If for the moment we admit the principle upon 
 which you are insisting, we claim that it shall be applied impar- 
 tially, — to the second century as to the fourth, to the language 
 which is said to favour Arius, no less than to the language which 
 is insisted upon by the friends of Athanasius.' 
 
 ' Is it not notorious,' men ask, * that some ante-Nicene writers 
 at times use language which falls short of, if it does not contra- 
 dict, the doctrine of the Nicene Council % Does hot St. Justin 
 Martyr, for instance, speak of the Son as subserving the Father's 
 Will y % nay, as being begotten of Him at His Will ^ % Does not 
 Justin even speak of Christ as "another God under the Creatoraf 
 Do not Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus, and St. Hippolytus 
 apply the language of Scripture respecting the generation of the 
 Word to His manifestation at the creation of the world, as a dis- 
 tinct being from God % Do they not so distinguish between the 
 Xoyo^ ivbiddcTos and the Xoyos npocpopiKos as to imply that the 
 Word Avas hypostatized only at the creation^? Does not Clement 
 of Alexandria implicitly style the Word the Second Principle of 
 things^ 1 Does he not permit himself to say that the Nature of 
 the Son is most close to the Sole Almighty One d 1 Although 
 Origen first spoke of the Saviour as being '' ever-begotten e," has 
 he not, amidst much else that is questionable, contrasted the 
 Son, as the immediate Creator of the world, with the Father as 
 the original Creator ^1 Did not Dionysius of Alexandria use 
 
 y Tryph. 126: virrjpfrcop rfj fiovXfj avrov. Cf. Athan. Treat, i. 1 1 8, note n. 
 
 * Ibid. 128. But cf. Athan. Treat, ii. p. 486, note^. 
 
 * Dial, contr. Tryph. c. 56: Sebs crepos virh rhv Tronr]T'r]v. 
 
 ^ Petav. 3. 6; Newman's Arians, p. 106. But see Athan. Treat, i. 1 13, 
 note z ; and Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. iii. 5. 6. 7, 8. 
 
 c Strom, lib. vii. 3,. p. 509, apud Pet,: devr^pou axriov. 
 
 ^ Ibid. 2, p. 504: 7] Tlov <pv(nSy f] Tcp pouu) UavroKp&ropi irpoaex^o'TdTT]. 
 Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. ii. 6,6. 
 
 ® 6 '^.wrrjp del yipvarat. Apud Routh, Rel. Sacr. iv. 354. 
 
 ^ Orig. contr. Cels. vi. 60, apud Petav. de Trin. i. 4, 5 : rhv pXv irpoa^xuis 
 drjfxiovpyhv ^hai rov Tlbv rov Qeov A6yov /cat wcnrepd avTovpyov rod KOffjxov' 
 rhi/ Se ndrepa .... ehai irpwrus hyiynovpydv. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Doubtful statements in ante-Nicene writers, 419 
 
 language which he was obliged to account for, and which is re- 
 pudiated by St. Basil § % Was not Lucian of Antioch excommu- 
 nicated, and, martyr though he was, regarded as the founder of 
 an heterodox sectl^'? Is not Tertullian said to be open to the 
 charge that he combated Praxeas with arguments which did 
 the Avork of Arius i % Has he not, in his anxiety to avoid the 
 Monarchianist confusion of Persons, spoken of the Son as a 
 "derivation from, and portion of, the whole Substance of the 
 Father k^" or even as if once He was not 1 % Does any Catholic 
 writer undertake to apologise for the expressions of Lactantius % 
 Has not recent criticism tended somewhat to enhance the repu- 
 tation of Petavius at the expense of Bishop Bull ^ ] Nay, is not 
 Bull's great work itself an illustration of what is at least the 
 fTimd facie state of the case % Does it not presuppose a consider- 
 able apparent discrepancy between some ante-Nicene and the 
 post-Nicene writers % Is it not throughout explanatory and apo- 
 logetic % Can we deny that out of the long list of writers whom 
 Bull reviews, he has, for one cause or another, to explain the 
 language of nearly one-half % ' 
 
 This line of argument in an earlier guise has been discussed 
 so fully by a distinguished predecessor » in the present Lecture, 
 that it may suffice to notice very summarily the considerations 
 which must be taken into account, if justice is to be done, both* 
 to its real force and to the limits which ought to be, but which 
 are not always, assigned to it. 
 
 (a) Undoubtedly, it should be frankly granted that some of 
 the ante-Nicene writers do at times employ terms which, judged 
 by a Nicene standard, must be pronounced unsatisfactory^ You 
 might add to the illustrations which have already been quoted ; 
 and you might urge that, if they admit of a Catholic interpreta- 
 tion^ they do not always invite one. For in truth these ante- 
 
 g Cf. Pet. de Trin. i. 4, 10; St. Bas. Ep, 9. But cf. Athan. Sent. Dion. 
 
 ^ Alexander ap, Theodoret. Hist. lib. i. c. 4 ; Pet. de Trin. i. 4, 13. 
 
 > Petavius attacks him especially on the score of this treatise. De Trin. i. 
 5, -2 : ' Opinionem explicat suam,' says Petavius, ' quae etiam Arianorum 
 hseresim impietate et absurditate superat.' For a fairer estimate, see Klee, 
 Dogmengeschichte, ii. c. 2. 
 
 "^ Adv. Prax. c. 9 : ' Pater enim tota Substantia est, Filius ver6 derivatio 
 totius et portio.' See the remarks of Baur, Dogmengeschichte, i. 444, to 
 which, however, a study of the context will yield a sufficient answer ; e. g. 
 c. 8 : ' Sermo in Patre semper nunquam separatus a Patre.' 
 
 1 Adv. Hermog. c. 3. See Bull, Def iii. 10. Comp. Ibid. ii. 7. 
 
 ^ The writer himself would on no account be understood to assent to this 
 opinion. Even in criticizing Bull, Dr. Newman admits that he does his 
 work * triumphantly.' Developm. p. 159. "^ Dr. Burton. 
 
 VII ] E e 2 
 
420 Someante-Nicenewriters who held theperfect faith . 
 
 Nicene fathers were feeling their way, not towards the substance 
 of the faith, which they possessed in its fulness, but towards 
 that intellectual mastery both of its relationship to outer forms 
 of thought, and of its own internal harmonies and system, which 
 is obviously a perfectly distinct gift from the simple possession 
 of the faith itself. As Christians they possessed the faith itself. 
 The faith, delivered once for all, had been given to the Church 
 in its completeness by the apostles. But the finished interlectual 
 survey and treatment of the faith is a superadded acquirement ; 
 it is the result of conflict with a hostile criticism, and of devout 
 reflections matured under the guidance of the Spiritual Truth. 
 Knowledge of the drift and scope of particular lines of specula- 
 tion, knowledge of the real force and value of a new terminology, 
 comes, whether to a man or to a society, in the way of education 
 and after the discipline of partial and temporary failure. Heresy 
 indirectly contributed to form the Church's mind : it gave point 
 and sharpness to current conceptions of truth by its mutilations 
 and denials ; it illustrated the fatal tendencies of novel lines of 
 speculation, or even of misleading terms ; it unwittingly forced 
 on an elucidation of the doctrines of the Church by its subtle 
 and varied opposition. But before heresy had thus accomplished 
 its providential work, individual Church teachers might in per- 
 fect good faith attempt to explain difficulties, or to win op- 
 ponents, by enterprising speculations, in this or that direction, 
 which were not yet shewn to be perilous to truth. Not indeed 
 that the Universal Church, in her collective capacity, was ever 
 committed to any of those less perfect statements of doctrine 
 which belong to the ante-Nicene period. Particular fathers or 
 schools of thought within her might use terms and illustrations 
 which she afterwards disavowed ; but then, they had no Divine 
 guarantee of inerrancy, such as had been vouchsafed to the entire 
 body of the faithful. They were in difficult and untried circum- 
 stances ; they were making experiments in unknown regions of 
 thought ; their language was tentative and provisional. Com- 
 pared with the great fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, 
 who spoke when collective Christendom had expressed or was 
 expressing its mind in the (Ecumenical Councils, and who there- 
 fore more nearly represented it, and were in a certain sense its 
 accepted organs, such ante-Nicene writers occupy a position 
 inferior, if not in love and honour, yet certainly in Aveight of 
 authority. If without lack of reverence to such glorious names 
 the illustration is permissible, the Alexandrian teachers of the 
 second and third centuries were, relatively to their successors of 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
had not mastered all its mtellectttal bearings, 421 
 
 the age of the Councils, in the position of young or half-educated 
 persons, who know at bottom what they mean, who know yet 
 more distinctly what they do not mean, but who as yet have not 
 so measured and sounded their thoughts, or so tested the instru- 
 ment by which thought finds expression, as to avoid misrepre- 
 senting their meaning more or less considerably, before they 
 succeed in conveying it with accuracy. When, for example, 
 St. Justin, and after him Tertullian, contrast the visibility of the 
 Son with the invisibiHty of the Father, all that their language is 
 probably intended to convey is that the Son had from everlasting 
 designed to assume a nature which would render Him visible. 
 When again St. Justin speaks of the Son as a Minister of God, 
 this expression connects Him without explanation with the 
 ministering Angel of the Old Testament. Yet it need involve 
 nothing beyond a reference to His humiliation in the days of His 
 Flesh. A like interpretation may fairly be put upon the ultra- 
 subordinationist terms used by Origen and Tertullian in dealing 
 with two forms of heretical Monarchianism ; and upon the mis- 
 construed phrases of the saintly Dionysius which expressed 
 his resistance to a full-blown Sabellianism ^. Language was 
 employed which obviously admitted of being misunderstood. It 
 would not have been used at a later period. * It may be,' says 
 St. Jerome, with reference to some of the ante-Nicene fathers, 
 ' that they simply fell into errors, or that they wrote in a sense 
 distinct from that which lies on the surface of their writings, 
 or that the copyists have gradually corrupted their writings. 
 Or at any rate before that Arius, like " the sickness that de- 
 stroyeth in the noonday," was born in Alexandria, these writers 
 spoke, in terms which meant no harm, and which were less 
 cautious than such as would be used now, and which accord- 
 ingly are open to the unfriendly construction which ill-disposed 
 persons put upon them p.' 
 
 Indeed it is observable that the tentative and perplexing 
 Christological language which was used by earlier fathers, at 
 a time when the quicksands of religious thought had not yet 
 been explored by the shipwrecks of heresy, does not by any 
 
 o Petav. de Trin. i. 4, to. 
 
 P Apolog. adv. Ruffin. ii. Oper. torn. iv. p. ii. p. 409, apud Petav. de Trin. 
 i. I: ' Fieri potest, ut vel simpliciter erraverint, vel alio sensu scripserint, vel 
 a librariis imperitis eorum pauUatim scripta corrupta sint. Vel certb, ante- 
 quam in Alexandria, quasi dsemoniiim meridianum, Arius nasceretur, inno- 
 center quaedam et nimis caut^ locuti sunt, et quae non possint perversorum 
 hominum calumniam declinare.* Cf, St, Athan. contr. Ax, iii. 59. 
 VIl] 
 
42iZ Ante-Nicene subor dinationist language explamed 
 
 ■ ^ ' — — 
 
 means point, as is sometimes assumed, in an Arian direction 
 exclusively. If, for instance, a few phrases in St. Justin may 
 be cited by Arianism with a certain plausibility, a similar appeal 
 to him is open from the opposite direction of Sabellianism. In 
 his anxiety to discountenance Emanatist conceptions of the 
 relation of the Logos to the Father, Justin hastily refers the 
 beginning of the Personal Subsistence of the Word to revelation 
 or to the creation, and he accordingly speaks of the Word as 
 being caused by the Will of God. But Justin did not place the 
 Son on the footing of a creature ; he did not hold a strict 
 subordinationismq ; since he teaches distinctly that the Logos 
 is of the Essence of God, that He is potentially and eternally in 
 Grodr. Thus St. Justin's language at first sight seems to em- 
 brace two opposite and not yet refuted heresies : both can appeal 
 to him with equal justice, or rather with equal want of its. 
 
 (i3) Reflect further that a doctrine may be held in its integrity, 
 and yet be presented to men of two diff'erent periods, under 
 aspects in many ways different. So it was with the doctrine of 
 Christ's Divinity, in the ante-Nicene as compared with the post- 
 Nicene age of its promulgation. While the Gospel was still 
 struggling with paganism throughout the empire, the Church 
 undoubtedly laid the utmost possible stress upon the Unity of 
 the Supreme Being. For this was the primal truth which she 
 had to assert most emphatically in the face of polytheism. In 
 order to do this it was necessary to insist with particular em- 
 phasis upon those relations which secure and explain the Unity 
 of the Divine Persons in the Blessed Trinity. That, in the 
 ineffable mystery of the Divine Life, the Father is the Fount or 
 Source of Godhead, from Whom by eternal Generation and 
 Procession respectively, the Son and the Spirit derive their 
 Personal Being, was the clear meaning of the theological state- 
 ments of the New Testament. When, then, Origen speaks of 
 the Father as the * first God*,' he means what the Apostle meant 
 by the expression, * One God and Father of all, Who is above 
 all.' He implicitly means that, independently of all time and 
 inferiority, the Son's Life was derived from, and, in that sense, 
 subordinate to the Life of the Father. Now it is obvious that 
 to speak with perfect accuracy upon such a subject, so as to 
 
 q Dorner, Person Christi, Erster Theil, p. 426, n. 22. 
 ' Contr. Tryph. c. 61 : 6 &ebs y€yiVvr]Ke dvi^a/xip riva i^ eavrov XoyiK-fjU, 
 8 Dorner, Person Christi, Erster Theil, p. 426. See the whole passage, in 
 which this is very ably argued against Seraisch. 
 t Contr. Cels. vi. 47 : o irpoJTos koI eirl iraat @s6s. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
by the Church! s duties towards Polytheism, 423 
 
 express the ideas of derivation and subordinateness, while avoiding 
 the cognate but false and disturbing ideas of posteriority in 
 time and inferiority of nature, was difficult. For as yet the 
 dogmatic language of the Church was comparatively unfixed, 
 and a large discretion was left to individual teachers. They used 
 material images to express what was in their thoughts. These 
 images, drawn from created things, were of course not adequate 
 to the Uncreated Object Which they were designed to illustrate. 
 Yet they served to introduce an imperfect conception of It". 
 The ftithers who employed them, having certain Emanatist 
 theories in view, repeatedly urged that the Son is derived from 
 the Father in accordance with the Divine attributes of Will and 
 Power. Looking to our human experience, we conceive of will 
 as prior to that which it calls into being; but in God the 
 Eternal Will and the EternaJ Act are coincident; and the 
 phrase of St. Justin which refers the existence of the Logos to 
 the Divine Will is only misunderstood because it is construed in 
 an anthropomorphic sense. In like manner the Alexandrian dis- 
 tinction between the Xoyos ivdiaderos and the \6yos TrpocfiopiKos 
 fell in naturally with the subordinationist teaching in the ante- 
 Nicene Church. It could, in a sense, be said that the Son left the 
 Bosom of the Father when He went forth to create, and the act 
 of creation was thus described as a kind of second generation of 
 the Son. But the expression did not imply, as it has been un- 
 derstood to imply, a denial of His eternal Generation, and of His 
 unbegotten, unending Subsistence in God. This indeed is plain 
 from the very writers who use it^. Generally speaking, the 
 early fathers are bent on insisting on the subordination {Kara 
 rd^Lv) of the Son, as protecting and explaining the doctrine of 
 the Divine Unity. If some of these expressed themselves too 
 incautiously or boldly, the general truth itself was never dis- 
 
 " 'In some instances [of ante-Nicene language] which are urged, it is 
 quite obvious on the surface that the writer is really wishing to express the 
 idea of the Son's generation being absolutely coeval with the Eternal Being 
 of the Father, and is using the examples from the natural world, where 
 the derivation is most immediately consequent upon the existence of the 
 thing derived from, in order broadly to impress that idea of coeval upon 
 the reader's mind. ''The Son," says St. Clement of Alexandria, "issues 
 from the Father quicker than light from the sunv" Here, however, the very 
 aim of the illustration to express simultaneousness is turned against it, and 
 special attention is called to the word " quicker," as if the writer had only 
 degrees of quickness in his mind, and only made the Son's generation from His 
 source ^'quicker" than that of light from its source, and not absolutely coeval.' 
 Christian Remembrancer, Jan. 1847, Art. Newman on Development, p. -237. 
 
 ^ See the examination of passages in Newman's Arians, pp. 215-218. 
 VIl] 
 
424 Real mind of the ante-Nicerie Church declared ^ 
 
 credited in the Church. Subordinationism was indeed allowed 
 to fall somewhat into the shade, when the decline of paganism 
 made it possible, and the activities of Arianism made it 
 necessary, to contemplate Jesus Christ in the absoluteness of 
 His Personal Godhead rather than in that relation of a sub- 
 ordinate, in the sense of an eternally derived subsistence, in 
 which He also stands to the Eternal Father. But Bishop Bull has 
 shewn how earnestly such a doctrine of subordination was also 
 taught in the Nicene period ; and at this day we confess it in 
 the Nicene Creed itself. And the stress which was laid upon it 
 in the second and third centuries, and which goes far to explain 
 much of the language which is sometimes held to be of doubtful 
 orthodoxy, is in reality perfectly consistent with the broad fact 
 that from the first the general current of Church language pro- 
 claims the truth that Jesus Christ is God. 
 
 (y) For that truth was beyond doubt the very central feature 
 of the teaching of the ante-Nicene Church, even when Church 
 teachers had not yet recognised all that it necessarily involved, 
 and had not yet elaborated the accurate statement of its rela- 
 tionship to other truths around it. The writers whose less- 
 considered expressions are brought forward in favour of an 
 opposite conclusion do not sustain it. If, as we have seen, 
 Justin may be quoted by those who push the 'Divinity of Christ 
 to the denial of His Personal distinction from the Father y, no 
 less than by Arianizers ; so also, as Petavius himself admits 2, do 
 both Origen and Tertullian anticipate the very language of the 
 Nicene Creed. Nor, when their expressions are fairly examined, 
 can it be denied that the writers who imported the philo- 
 sophical category of the \6yoi ev^idderos and 7rpo(f)opiKos into 
 Christian theology did really believe with all their hearts in the 
 eternal Generation of the Word. For it should especially be 
 remarked that when the question of our Lord's Divinity was 
 broadly proposed to the mind of the ante-Nicene Church, the 
 answer was not a doubtful or hesitating one. Any recognised 
 assault upon it stirred the heart of the Church to energetic 
 protest. When Victor of Eome excommunicated the Quarto- 
 decimans, his censures were answered either by open remon- 
 strance or by tacit disregard, throughout Gaul and the East a. 
 When he cut off Theodotus from the communion of the Church, 
 the act commanded universal acquiescence ; the Christian heart 
 thrilled with indignation at ^ the God-denying apostasy' of the 
 
 y Petav. de Trin. i. 6, 6. * Ibid. i. 4, 6 ; 5, 3. 
 
 a Eus. Hist. Eccl. V. 24. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
whenever Chris fs Godhead was called in question. 425 
 
 tanner of Byzantium^. When Dionysius of Alexandria, writing 
 with incautious zeal against the Sabellians, was charged with 
 heterodoxy on the subject of our Lord's Divine Nature, he at once 
 addressed to Dionysius of Kome an explanation which is in fact 
 an anticipation of the language of Athanasius^. When Paulus 
 of Samosata appeared in one of the first sees of Christendom, 
 the universal excitement, the emphatic protests, the final, mea- 
 sured, and solemn condemnation which he provoked, proved how 
 deeply the Divinity of Jesus Christ was rooted in the heart of the 
 Church of the third century. Moreover, unless Christ's absolute 
 Godhead had been thus a matter of Catholic belief, the rise 
 of such a heresy as that of Sabellianism would have been im- 
 possible. Sabellianism overstates that which Arianism denies. 
 Sabellianism presupposes the truth of Christ's Godhead, which, 
 if we may so speak, it exaggerates even to the point of rejecting 
 His Personal distinctness from the Father. If the belief of the 
 ante-Nicene Church had been really Arianizing, Noetus could 
 not have appealed to it as he did, while perverting it to a denial 
 of hypostatic distinctions in the Godhead ^ ; and Arius himself 
 might have only passed for a representative of the subordina- 
 tionism of Origen, and of the literalism of Antioch, instead of 
 being condemned as a sophistical dialectician who had broken 
 altogether with the historical tradition of the Church, by 
 daring to oppose a central truth of her unchanging faith. 
 
 The idea that our Lord's Divinity was introduced into the 
 belief and language of the Church at a period subsequent to the 
 death of the apostles, was indeed somewhat adventurously put 
 forward by some early Humanitarians. Eeference has already 
 been made in another connection to an important passage, which 
 is quoted by Eusebius from an anonymous writer who appears 
 to have flourished in the early part of the third century. This 
 passage enables us to observe the temper and method of treat- 
 ment encountered by any such theory in ante-Nicene times. 
 
 The Humanitarian Artemon seems to have been an accom- 
 plished philosopher and mathematician; and he maintained that 
 the Divinity of Christ was imported into the Church during the 
 episcopate of Zephyrinus, who succeeded Victor in the Eoman 
 chair. Now if this story could have been substantiated, it would 
 have been necessary to suppose, either that the Church was the 
 
 ^ Eus. Hist. Eccl. V. 28 : ttJs apvnandeou aTroo-rairias. Epiphan. Hoer. 54. 
 
 c See St. Athan. de Sent. Dionysii, c. 4, sqq. 
 
 ^ St. Hippol. contr. Hser. Noeti, c. i : 6 5e avrio-raro \4yooVy *Tt ovp KOLKhv 
 iroico 5o|afcwj/ rhv Xpiardy;* See also Epiphanius, Hser. 57. 
 VII ] 
 
425 Argument of 'the Little Labyrinth! 
 
 organ of a continuous and not yet completed revelation, or else 
 that the doctrine was a human speculation unwarrantably added 
 to the simpler creed of an earlier age. But the writer to whom 
 I have referred meets the allegation of Artemon by denying 
 it point-blank. * Perchance/ he archly observes, ' what they 
 [the Artemonites] say might be credible, were it not that the 
 Holy Scriptures contradict them ; and then also there are works 
 of certain brethren, older than the days of Victor, works 
 written in defence of the truth, and against the heresies then 
 prevailing. I speak of Justin and Miltiades, and Tatian and 
 Clement, and many others, by all of whom the Divinity of 
 Christ is asserted. For who,' he continues, ^ knows not the 
 works of Irenaeus and Melito, and the rest, in which Christ is 
 announced as God and Man^ f This was the argument upon 
 which the Church of those ages instinctively fell back when she 
 was accused of adding to her creed. Particular writers might 
 have understated truth ; or they might have ventured upon ex- 
 pressions requiring explanation ; or they might have written 
 economically as in view of particular lines of thought, and have 
 been construed by others without the qualifications which were 
 present to their own minds. But there could be no mistake 
 about the continuous drift and meaning of the belief around 
 which they moved, and which was always in the background of 
 their ideas and language. There could be no room for the 
 charge that they had invented a new dogma, when it could be 
 shewn that the Church from the beginning, and the New Testa- 
 ment itself, had taught what they were said to have invented. 
 
 III. Of the objections to which the Homoousion is exposed 
 in the present day, there are two which more particularly 
 demand our attention. 
 
 (a) ^ Is not the Homoousion,' it is said, ' a development % Was 
 it not rejected at the Council of Antioch sixty years before it 
 was received at Nicoea % Is not this fact indicative of a forward 
 movement in the mind of the Church? Does it not shew that the 
 tide of dogmatic belief was rising, and that it covered ground 
 in the Nicene age which it had deliberately left untouched in 
 the age preceding % And, if this be so, if we admit the prin- 
 ciple of a perpetual growth in the Church's creed ; why should 
 we not accept the latest results of such a principle as un- 
 equivocally as we close with its earlier results % If we believe 
 
 e Eus. Hist. Eccl. V. 28. It is probable that St. Hippolytus wrote 'The 
 Little Labyrinth.* 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Was the Homooicsion a 'development?^ 427 
 
 that the Nicene decision is an assertion of the truth of God, 
 why should we hesitate to adopt a similar belief respecting that 
 proclamation of the sinless conception of the Blessed Virgin 
 which startled Christendom twelve years ago, and which has 
 since that date been added to the official creed of the largest 
 section of the Christian Church?' 
 
 Here, the first point to be considered turns on a question of 
 words. What do we mean by a doctrinal development ? Do we 
 mean an explanation of an already existing idea or belief, pre- 
 sumably giving to that belief greater precision and exactness in 
 our own or other minds, but adding nothing whatever to its 
 real area ^% Or do we mean the positive substantial growth of 
 the belief itself, whether through an enlargement from within, 
 just as the acorn developes into the oak, or through an accretion 
 from without of new intellectual matter gathered around it, like 
 the aggrandisements whereby the infant colony developes into 
 the powerful empire % 
 
 ^ In this sense a Development of Doctrine must necessarily be admitted. 
 When the life of the individual soul is vigorous and healthy, there must be 
 a continuously increasing knowledge of Divine Truth. St. Aug. in Joan. Ev. 
 Tract, xiv. c. 3. n. 5 : * Crescat ergo Deus qui semper perfectus est, crescat 
 in te. Quanta enim magis intelligis Deum, et quanto magis capis, videtur in 
 te crescere Deus ; in se autem non crescit, sed semper perfectus est. Intel- 
 ligebas heri modicum; intelligis hodi^ ampliiis, intelliges eras multo amplitis: 
 lumen ipsum Dei crescit in te ; ita velut Deus crescit, qui semper perfectus 
 manet. Quemadmodum si curarentur alicujus oculi ex pristine csecitate, et 
 inciperet videre paululum lucis, et ali^ die plus videret, et terti^ die amplius, 
 vidtretur illi lux crescere : lux tamen perfecta est, sive ipse videat, sive non 
 videat. Sic est et interior homo : proficit quidem in Deo, et Deus in illo 
 videtur crescere ; ipse tamen minuitur, ut a gloria su^ decidat, et in gloriam 
 Dei surgat.' A somewhat analogous progress in the knowledge of Truth, 
 received from Christ and His Apostles, is found in the collective Christian So- 
 ciety. Vincent. Lerinens. Commonit. c. 28 : *Nullusne ergb in Ecclesi^ Dei 
 profectus ? Habeatur planb et maximus : nam quis ille est tam invidus homi- 
 nibus, tam exosus Deo, qui illud prohibere conetur? Crescat igitur oportet, et 
 multum vehementerque proficiat tam singulorum quara omnium, tam unius 
 hominis quam totius ecclesise setatum ac sseculorum gradibus, intelligentia, 
 scienti^, sapienti^.' Not that this increasing apprehension of the true force and 
 bearings of the truth revealed in its fulness once for all involves any addition 
 to or subtraction from that one unchanging body of truth. Commonit. c. 30 : 
 * Fas est enim ut prisca ilia coelestis philosophise dogmata processu temporis 
 excurentur, limentur, poliantur; sed nefas est ut commutentur, nefas ut 
 detruncentur, nefas ut mutilentur. Accipiant licet evidentiam, lucem, dis- 
 tinctionem ; sed retineant necesse est plenitudinem, integritatem, proprieta- 
 tem.' There is then no real increase in the body of truth committed to the 
 Church, but only a clearer perception on the part of the Church of the force 
 and bearings of that truth which she had possessed in its completeness 
 from the first. With some few drawbacks, this is fairly stated by Stauden- 
 maier. Wetzer and Welte's Diction. Encycl.; art Dogme. 
 VII ] 
 
428 Trite sense of the New Testament 
 
 Now if it be asked, which is the natural sense of the word 
 ' development,' I reply that we ordinarily mean by it an actual 
 enlargement of that which is said to be developed. And in that 
 sense I proceed to deny that the Homoousion was a develop- 
 ment. It was not related to the teaching of the apostles as an 
 oak is related to an acorn. Its real relation to their teaching 
 was that of an exact and equivalent translation of the language 
 of one intellectual period into the language of another. The 
 New Testament had taught that Jesus Christ is the Lord of 
 nature & and of men h, of heaven, and of the spiritual world i ; 
 that He is the world's Legislator, its King and its Judge ^^ ; that 
 He is the Searcher of hearts ^, the Pardoner of sins "i, the Well- 
 spring of life " ; that He is Giver of true blessedness and salva- 
 tion o, and the Eaiser of the deadP; it distinctly attributed to 
 Him omnipresence % omnipotence r, omniscience ^ ; eternity *, 
 absolute likeness to the Father^; absolute oneness with the 
 Father^, an equal share in the honour due to the Father y, a like 
 claim upon the trust z, the faith ^, and the love ^ of humanity. 
 The New Testament had spoken of Him as the Creator c and 
 Preserver of the world d^ as the Lord of all things, as the King 
 of kings % the Distributor of all graces ^, the Brightness of the 
 
 K St. John V. 17 ; St. Matt. viii. 3, 13 ; ix. 6, 22, 25, 29 ; St. John iv. 50; 
 V. 8. This power over nature He delegated to others : St. Matt. x. i, 8 ; 
 St. Mark xvi. 17; St. Luke x. 17 ; St. John xiv. 12 ; Acts iii. 6^ 12, 16 ; ix. 
 34; xvi. 18. ^ St. Matt, xxviii. 18-20; St. John v. 21, 22; xvii. 2. 
 
 i St. Matt. vii. 21, 23; xviii. 18 ; xxvi. 64; St. John. i. 51 ; xx. 12, &c. 
 
 ^ St. Matt, v.— vii. ; xi. 29, 30 ; xv. 18 ; xviii. 19 ; xxv. 34, 40; St. John 
 viii. 36 ; xiv. 21 ; xv. 12 ; xx. 23, &c. 
 
 1 St. John i. 47-50 ; ii. 24, 25 ; iv. 17, 18 ; vi. 15, 70 ; xvi. 19, 32 ; Rev. 
 
 ii. 23- 
 
 ™ St. Matt. ix. 2, 6 ; St. Luke v. 20, 24 ; vii. 48 ; xxiv. 47 ; and St. John 
 XX. 23 , where He delegates the absolving power to others. 
 
 n St. John iv. 13, 14; V. 21, 26, 40 ; vi. 47, 51-58; x. 28. 
 
 • St. Matt. vii. 21 sq.; St. John vi. 39, 40 ; x. 28; Acts iv. 12; Heb. ii.10,14. 
 
 P St. John V. 21, 25 ; xi. 25. Christ raises Himself from death : St. John 
 ii. 19 ; X. 18. ^ Ibid. iii. 13 ; St. Matt, xviii. 20. 
 
 «• St. Matt, xxviii. 18 ; Phil. iii. 21 ; Heb. i. 3. 
 
 » St. Matt. xi. 27 ; St. John iii. 11-13 ; vi. 46 ; x. 15 ; Col. ii. 3. 
 
 t St. John viii. 58 ; xvii. 5 ; Rev. i. 8 ; ii. 8 ; xxii. 12, 13. 
 
 1 St. John V. 17, 19, 2T, 26 ; x. 28, 29 ; xiv. 7. 
 
 » Ibid. x. 28, 30; xiv. 10. y Ibid. v. 23. 
 
 z Ibid. xiv. I ; xvi. 33 ; Col. i. 27 ; St. Matt. xii. 21. 
 
 a St. John vi. 27 ; i St. John iii. 23 ; Acts xvi. 31 ; xx. 2T. 
 
 ^ I Cor. xvi. 22 ; St. John xiv. 23. 
 
 c St. John i. 3 ; Col. i. 16: Heb. i. 2, 10. * Col. i. 17; Ileb. i. 3. 
 
 e Acts X. 36 ; Jude 4 ; Rev. xvii. 14 ; xix. 16. 
 
 ^ St. John i. 12, 14, 16, 17; 2 Thess. ii. 16. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
embodied in the Homoozcsion, 429 
 
 Father's Glory and tlie Impress of His Being s ; as being in the 
 form of God \ as containing in Himself all the fulness of the 
 Godhead \ as being God K This and much more to the same 
 purpose had been said in the New Testament. When therefore 
 the question was raised whether Jesus Christ was or was not 
 *of one substance with' the Father, it became clear that of two 
 courses one must be adopted. Either an affirmative answer 
 must be given, or the teaching of the apostles themselves must 
 be explained away I As a matter of fact the Nicene fathers 
 only affirmed, in the philosoiDhical language of the fourth 
 century, what our Lord and the apostles had taught in the 
 popular dialects of the first. If then the Nicene Council 
 developed, it was a development by explanation. It was a deve- 
 lopment which placed the intrinsically unchangeable dogma, 
 committed to the guardianship of the Church, in its true relation 
 to the new intellectual world that had grown up around Chris- 
 tians in the fourth century. Whatever vacillations of thought 
 might have been experienced here or there, whatever doubtful 
 expressions might have escaped from theologians of the inter- 
 vening period, no real doubt could be raised as to the meaning 
 of the original teachers of Christianity, or as to the true drift 
 and main current of the continuous traditional belief of the 
 Church. The Nicene divines interpreted in a new language the 
 belief of their first fathers in the faith. They did not enlarge 
 it ; they vehemently protested that they were simply preserving 
 and handing on what they had received. The very pith of their 
 objection to Arianism was its novelty : it was false because it 
 was of recent origin^. They themselves were forced to say what 
 they meant by their creed, and they said it. Their explanation 
 added to the sum of authoritative ecclesiastical language, but it 
 did not add to the number of articles in the Christian faith : the 
 area of the creed was not enlarged. The Nicene Council did not 
 vote a new honour to Jesus Christ which He had not before 
 
 g Heb. i. 3 ; Col. i. 15 ; 2 Cor. iv. 4. 
 
 h Phil. ii. 6. i Col. ii. 9 ; St. John i. 14, 16. 
 
 ^ St. John i. I ; Acts xx. 28 ; Rom. ix. 5; Titus ii. 13 ; i St. John v. 20. 
 Compare Rom. viii. 9-II with Rom. xiv. 10-12. 
 
 1 Mohler, Symbolik, p. 610: 'Wiiren sie (the Socinians) scharfere Denker 
 gewesen, so mussten sie zur Einsicht gelangen, dass, wenn das Evangelium 
 den Sohn als ein personliches Wesen, und zugleich als Gott darstellt, wie 
 die Socinianer nicht laiigneten (Christ. Relig. institut. bibl. frat. Pol. torn. i. 
 p. 655. Es wird Joh. i. i ; xx. 21 citirt.), kein anderes Verhaltniss zwischen 
 ihm und dem Vater denJcbar sei, als jenes, welches die katholische Kirche von 
 Anfang an geglaubt hatte/ ^ Socr. Hist. Eccl. i. 6. 
 
 VII ] 
 
430 Why the Hoinoousion was rejected 
 
 possessed : it defined more clearly the original and unalterable 
 bases of that supreme place which from the days of the apostles 
 He had held in the thought and heart, in the speculative and 
 active life of Christendom. 
 
 The history of the symbol Homoousion during the third 
 century might, at first sight, seem to favour the position, that 
 its adoption at Nicsea was of the nature of an accretive develop- 
 ment. Already, indeed, Dionysius and others (perhaps Origen) 
 had employed it to express the faith of the Church \ but it had 
 been, so to speak, disparaged and discoloured by the patronage 
 of the Valentinians and the Manichseans. In the Catholic theo- 
 logy the word denoted full participation in the absolute self- 
 existing Individuality of Godn. Besides this, the word suggested 
 the distinct personality of its immediate Subject ; unless it had 
 suggested this, it would have been tautologous. In ordinary 
 language it was applied to things which are only similar to each 
 other, and are considered as one by an abstraction of our minds. 
 No such abstraction was possible in the contemplation of God. 
 His ovfj'ia is Himself, peculiar to Himself, and One ; and there- 
 fore to be b\ioovcTio^ wdth Him is to be internal to that Uncreated 
 Nature Which is utterly and necessarily separate from all created 
 beings. But the Valentinians used the w^ord to denote the 
 relation of their ^ons to the Divine Pleroma ; and the Mani- 
 choeans said that the soul of man was Sfioova-iov tm QeS, in a 
 materialistic sense. When then it was taken into the service of 
 these Emanatist doctrines, the Homoousion implied nothing 
 higher than a generic or specific bond of unity o. These uses of 
 the w^ord implied that ovaia itself was something beyond God, 
 and moreover, as was suggested by its Manichsean associations, 
 something material. Paulus of Samosata availed himself of this 
 depreciation of the word to attack its Catholic use as being really 
 
 n St. Cyril of Alexandria defines ovaia as irpay/xa avOvirapKTov, fxr) deSfi^pov 
 kripov TTpbs T?V havrov avarracnv. Apud Suicer. in voc. ovaia. 
 
 ° 'OjULoovaios properly means of the same nature — i. e. under the same 
 general nature or species. It is applied to things which are but similar to 
 each other, and are considered as one by an abstraction of our minds. Thus 
 Aristotle speaks of the stars being dfxoovaia with each other.' Newman, 
 Arians, p. 203. ' Valentinianism/ he says (p. 206), 'applied the word to 
 the Creator and His creatures in this its original philosophical sense. The 
 Manichees followed .... they too were Emanatists,' &c. But such a usage 
 offends against * the great revealed principle' of ' the incommunicable . . . 
 Individuality of the Divine Essence :' according to which principle dfioovaios, 
 as used of the Son, defined Him as ' necessarily included in That Individuality.' 
 See Dr. Newman's valuable note on St. Athanasius' Treatises, i. 152, note a 
 (Libr. Fath.) ; Ibid. 35, note t; and Soc. i. 8. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
at Antioch and adopted at Niccea, 431 
 
 materialistic. Paulus argued that 'if the Father and the Son 
 were ofioovaioi, there was some common ova-la in which they 
 partook,' higher than, and 'distinct from, the Divine Persons 
 themselves p.' Firmilian and Gregory were bent, not upon the 
 philological object of restoring the word ofioovaios to its real 
 sense, but upon the religious duty of asserting the true relation 
 of the Son to the Father, in language the meaning of which 
 would be plain to their contemporaries. The Nicene Fathers, 
 on the other hand, were able, under altered circumstances, to 
 vindicate for the word its Catholic meaning, unaffected by any 
 Emanatist gloss ; and accordingly, in their hands, it protected 
 the very truth which at Antioch, sixty years earlier, it would 
 have obscured. St. Athanasius tells us that ' the fathers who 
 deposed the Samosatene took the word Homoousion in a 
 corporeal sense. For Paulus sophisticated by saying that if ... . 
 Christ was consubstantial with the Father, there must necessarily 
 be three substances, one which was prior and two others spring- 
 ing from it. Therefore, with reason, to avoid that sophism of 
 Paulus, the fathers said that Christ was not consubstantial, that 
 is, that He was not in that relation to the Father which Paulus 
 had in his mind. On the other hand,' continues St. Athanasius, 
 'those who condemned the Arian heresy saw through the cunning 
 of Paulus, and considered that in things incorporeal, especially 
 in God, " consubstantial" did not mean what he had supposed ; 
 
 so they, knowing the Son to be begotten of the Substance, 
 
 with reason called Him consubstantial <i.' Paulus, as a subtle 
 and hardheaded dialectician, had contrived to impose upon the 
 term a sense, which either made the Son an inferior being or 
 else destroyed the Unity of God. He used the word, as St. 
 Hilary says, as mischievously as the Arians rejected the use of it*"; 
 while the fathers at Antioch set it aside from a motive as loyal 
 
 P Newman, Arians, p. 209. See the whole passage. 
 
 q St. Athan. De Synodis, § 45 ; cf. Cave, Hist. Lit. i. 134. ' Non aliud 
 dicit Athanasius quam Paulum ex detorto Catholicorum vocabulo sophisticum 
 argumentum contra Christi Divinitatem excogitasse ; nempe, nisi confiteremur 
 Christum ex homine Deum factum esse, sequeretur ipsum Patri esse ofioova-ioVy 
 EC proinde tres esse substantias, unam quidem primariam, duas ex ill^ deri- 
 vatas : accfiaTLKcos enim et crasso sensu vocabulum accepit, quasi in essentia 
 diving, perinde ac in rebus corporeis usu venit, ut ab una substantia altera, 
 eaque diversa, derivetur. Quocirca, ne hac voce hseretici ulterii\s abuterentur, 
 silentio supprimendam censuerunt patres Antiocheni : non quod Catholicum 
 voeis sensum damnarent, sed ut omnem sophistice cavillandi occasionem 
 hsereticis prasriperent, ut ex Athanasio, Basilio, aliisque, abunde liquet.* 
 
 ^ St. Hil. de Syn. 86 : ' Male Homoousion Samosatenus confessus est, sed 
 nunquam melius Ariani negaverunt.* 
 VII ] 
 
^'^2 Adoption of the Homooiision not to be paralleled 
 
 to Catholic truth as was that which led to its adoption at Nicseas. 
 Language is worth, after all, just what it means to those who 
 use it. Origen had rejected and Tertullian had defended the 
 TTpo^oXr) from an identical theological motive ; and the opposite 
 lines of action, adopted by the Councils of Antioch and Nicsea 
 respectively, are so far from proving two distinct beliefs respect- 
 ing the higher Nature of Jesus Christ, that when closely examined, 
 they exhibit an absolute identity of creed and purpose brought 
 face to face with two distinct sets of intellectual circumstances. 
 The faith and aim of the Church was one and unchanging. But 
 the question, whether a particular symbol would represent her 
 mind with practical accuracy, received an answer at Antioeh 
 which would have been an error at Nicaea. The Church looked 
 hard at the Homoousion at Antioch, when heresy had perverted 
 its popular sense ; and she set it aside. She examined it yet 
 more penetratingly at Nicsea ; and from then until now it has 
 been the chosen symbol of her unalterable faith in the literal 
 Godhead of her Divine Head. 
 
 Therefore between the imposition of the Homoousion and the 
 recent definition of the Immaculate Conception, there is no real 
 correspondence. It is not merely that the latter is accepted only 
 by a section of the Christian Church, and was promulgated by 
 an authority whose modern claims the fathers of Nicsea would 
 have regarded with sincere astonishment. The difference between 
 the two cases is still more fundamental ; it lies in the substance 
 of the two definitions respectively. The Nicene fathers did but 
 assert a truth which bad been held to be of primary, vital import 
 from the first ; they asserted it in terms which brought it vividly 
 home to the intelligence of their day. Tliey were explaining old 
 truth ; they were not setting forth as truth that which had before 
 been matter of opinion. But the recent definition asserts that an 
 hypothesis, unheard of for centuries after the first promulgation 
 of the Gospel, and then vehemently maintained and as vehe- 
 mently controverted* by theologians of at least equal claims 
 to orthodoxy, is a fact of Divine revelation, to be received by all 
 who would receive the true faith of the Redeemer. In the one 
 case an old truth is vindicated by an explanatory reassertion ; in 
 the other the assertion of a new fact is added to the Creed. The 
 
 8 Routh, Eel. Sacr. iii. 360, ed. 1 846. See too Dr. Newman's note 2, in 
 St. Athanasius' Select Treatises, i. p. 166. (Oxf. Libr. Fath.). 
 
 t Cf. especially the treatise of the Dominican, John de Torquemada, 
 Cardinal de Turrecremata, entitled, Tractatus de Veritate Conceptionis B. 
 Virginis. Romse, 1547, 4to. It is exceedingly rare. Cf. note G in App. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
with the definition of the Im7naculate Conception, 433 
 
 Nicene fathers only maintained in the language of their day 
 the original truth that Jesus Christ is God : but the question 
 whether the Conception of Mary was or was not sinless is a 
 distinct question of fact, standing by itself, with no necessary 
 bearing upon her office in the economy of the Incarnation, and 
 not related in the way of an explanatory vindication to any 
 originally revealed truth beyond it. It is one thing to reassert 
 the revealed Godhead of Jesus ; it is, in principle, a fundament- 
 ally distinct thing to 'decree a new honour' to Mary. The Ni- 
 cene decision is the act of a Church believing itself commissioned 
 to guard a body of truth which had been delivered from heaven 
 in its integrity, once for all. The recent definition appears to 
 presuppose a Church which can do more than guard the ancient 
 faith, which is empowered to make actual additions to the num- 
 ber of revealed certainties, which is the organ no less than the 
 recipient of a continuous revelation ". It is one thing to say 
 that language has changed its value, and that a particular term 
 which was once considered misleading will now serve to vindicate 
 an acknowledged truth ; it is another thing to claim the power of 
 transfiguring a precarious and contradicted opinion, resting on 
 
 ™ I have been reminded that Roman Catholics do not admit this (see the 
 'Month/ Nov. 1867,) and, at the instance of my reviewer, I quote with plea- 
 sure the following language of the Bull Ineffabilis, which is substantially that 
 of Vincent of Lerins, and which will command the assent of English Church- 
 men. The Church of Christ, says the Bull, * sedula depositorum apud se 
 dogmatum custos, et vindex, nihil in his unquam permutat, nihil minuit, 
 nihil addit, sed omni industria vetera fideliter sapienterque tractando si quh. 
 antiquittis informata sunt, et Patrum fides sevit, ita limare expolire studet, 
 ut prisca ilia coelestis doctrinse dogmata accipiant evidentiam, lucem, distinc- 
 tionem, sed retineant plenitudinem, integritatem, proprietatem, ac in suo 
 tantum genere crescant, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque 
 sententi^/ p. 11. But the question is whether, if the principle thus stated 
 had been really adhered to, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin 
 Mary could have been defined to be an article of necessary faith. It is one 
 thing to propose a new and necessary definition or explanation of a truth 
 which has been confessed from the first ; it is another thing to say that a fact, 
 the truth of which has been controverted by a series of writers of the highest 
 authority, is now so certain that it must be received as matter of faith. Should 
 not the 'nihil addit' of the Bull, alone have sufficed to render the definition 
 impossible ? See Observations d'un Theologien sur la BuUe de Pie IX, relative 
 k la Conception de la Sainte Vierge, Paris, 1855, pp. 28-38 ; La Croyance k 
 rimmacul^e Conception de la Sainte Vierge ne peut devenir dogme de foi, 
 par M. I'Abbe Laborde, Paris, 1854, pp. 77-83. Can the assertion that 
 the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed A'irgin is a certainty of faith, be 
 really rested upon any other ground, than an assumption in the modern 
 Church of some power to discern and proclaim truths which were altogether 
 unknown to the Church of the Apostles ? 
 VII 1 F f , 
 
434 ^^^ ^ defi7iition of the Faith really needed? 
 
 no direct scriptural or primitive testimony, and impugned in 
 terms by WTiters of the date and authority of Aquinas x, into a 
 certainty, claiming submission from the faith of Christendom on 
 nothing less than a Divine authority. There is then no real rea- 
 son for the statement that those who now reject the Immaculate 
 Conception would of old have rejected the Homoousion. There 
 is nothing to shew that those who bow with implicit faith before 
 the Nicene decision are bound, as a matter of consistency, to 
 yield the same deference of heart and thought to the most 
 modern development of doctrine within the Latin portion of 
 Catholic Christendom. 
 
 (iS) But it may be rejoined : * Why was a fresh definition 
 deemed needful at Nicoea at all % Why could not the Church of 
 the Nicene age have contented herself with saying that Jesus 
 Christ is God, after the manner of the Church of earlier days % 
 Why was the thought of Christendom to be saddled with a 
 metaphysical sjonbol which at least transcends, if it does not 
 destroy, the simplicity of the Church's first faith in our Lord's 
 Divinity r 
 
 (i) Now the answer is simply as follows. In the Arian age 
 it was not enough to say that Jesus Christ is God, because the 
 Arians had contrived to impoverish and degrade the idea con- 
 veyed by the Name of God so completely as to apply that sacred 
 word to a creature y. Of course, if it had been deemed a matter 
 of sheer indifference whether Jesus Christ is or is not God, it 
 would have been a practical error to have insisted on the truth 
 of His real Divinit}'', and an equivocal expression might have 
 been allowed to stand. If the Church of Christ had been, not 
 the school of revealed truth, in which the soul was to make 
 knowledge the food and stimulant of love, but a world-wide de- 
 bating club, ^ ever seeking and never coming to the knowledge 
 of the truth,' it would then have been desirable to keep this and 
 all other fundamental questions open^. Perhaps in that case 
 
 ^ Sum. Th. iii. a. 27, q. 2 : * B. Virgo contraxit quidem originale peccatum, 
 sed ab eo fuit mundata antequam ex utero nasceretur.' Cf. St. Bernard. Ep. 
 174; Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, vii. 7.4; St. Bonaventur. 
 Sent. iii. Dist. 3, pars i. art. i. qusest. 2. 
 
 y In the same way modern Socinians ' believe in the Divinity of Christ.* 
 Channing, Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered, Works, vol. ii. p. 
 361. Yet they also believe that Christ 'is a Being distinct from the one 
 God.' Ibid. p. 5 10. Such a confession of Christ's 'Divinity' implies of course 
 no more than might be said of St. John, and shews how completely language 
 may be emptied of its original value. 
 
 » See the letter addressed in Constantine's name to St. Alexander and to 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Vital importance of the question at isstce, 435 
 
 the Nicene decision might with truth have been described as the 
 * greatest misfortune that has happened to Christendom.' But 
 the Church believed herself to possess a revelation from God, 
 essential to the eternal well-being of the soul of man. She 
 further believed that the true Godhead of Jesus Christ was a 
 clearly-revealed truth of such fundamental and capital import, 
 that, divorced from it, the creed of Christendom must perish 
 outright. Plainly therefore it was the Church's duty to assert 
 this truth in such language as might be unmistakably expressive 
 of it. Now this result was secured by the Homoousion. It 
 was at the time of its first imposition, and it has been ever since, 
 a perfect criterion of real belief in the Godhead of our Lord. It 
 excluded the Arian sense of the word God, and on this account 
 it was adopted by the orthodox. How much it meant was 
 proved by the resistance which it then encountered, and by the 
 subsequent efforts which have been made to destroy or to evade 
 it. The sneer of Gibbon about the iota which separates the 
 semi-Arian from the Catholic symbol (Homoiousion from Homo- 
 ousion) is naturally repeated by those who believe that nothing 
 was really at stake beyond the emptiest of abstractions, and who 
 can speak of the fourth century as an age of meaningless logo- 
 machies. But to men who are concerned, not with words, but 
 with the truths which they enshrine, not with the mere historic 
 setting of a great struggle, but with the vital question at issue 
 in it, the full importance of the Nicene symbol will be sufficiently 
 obvious. The difference between Homoiousion and Homoousion 
 convulsed the world for the simple reason, that in that difference 
 lay the whole question of the real truth or falsehood of our 
 Lord's actual Divinity. If in His Essence He was only like God, 
 He was still a distinct Being from God, and therefore either 
 created, or (jper impossibile) a second God. In a great engage- 
 ment, when man after man is laid low in defence of the colours 
 of his regiment, it might seem to a bystander, unacquainted with 
 the forms of war, a prodigious absurdity that so great a sacrifice 
 of life should be incurred for a piece of silk or cotton of a parti- 
 cular hue ; and he might make many caustic epigrams at the 
 expense of the struggling and suffering combatants. But a 
 soldier would tell him that the flag is a symbol of the honour 
 and prowess of his country ; and that he is not dying for a few 
 
 Arius (Soc. i. 7), in which the writer — probably Eusebius of Nicomedia — 
 insists ' that the points at issue are minute and trivial/ Bright's Hist. Ch. 
 p. 20. Neale, Hist. Alex. i. 134. 
 VII ] F f 2 
 
43 6 S^. Athmiasius a man of realities not of words, 
 
 yards of coloured material, but for the moral and patriotic idea 
 which the material represents. If ever there was a man who 
 was not the slave of language, who had his eye upon ideas, 
 truths, facts, and who made language submissively do their 
 work, that man was the great St. Athanasius. He advocated 
 the Homoousion at Nicsea, because he was convinced that it was 
 the sufficient and necessary symbol and safeguard of the treasure 
 of truth committed to the Church : but years afterwards, he 
 declined to press it upon such of the semi-Arians as he knew to 
 be at heart sincerely loyal to the truth which it protected ^. 
 And during a period of fifteen centuries experience has not 
 shewn that any large number of real believers in our Saviour's 
 Godhead have objected to the Nicene statement ; while its 
 efficacy in guarding against a lapse into Arian error has amply 
 confirmed the far-sighted wisdom, which, full of jealousy for the 
 rightful honour of Jesus b, and of charity for the souls of men, 
 has incorporated it for ever with the most authoritative profes- 
 sion of faith in the Divinity of Christ which is possessed by 
 Christendom. 
 
 (2) It may indeed be urged that freedom from creeds is 
 ideally and in the abstract the highest state of Christian com- 
 munion. It may be pleaded that a public confession of faith 
 will produce in half-earnest and superficial souls a formal and 
 mechanical devotion ; that the exposure of the most sacred 
 truth in a few condensed expressions to the scepticism and 
 irreverence of those who are strangers to its essence will lead to 
 inevitable ribaldry and scandal. But it is sufficient to reply 
 that these liabilities do not outweigh the necessity for a clear 
 ^forrn of sound words,' since foi;malists will be formal, and 
 sceptics will be irreverent, with or without it. And those who 
 depreciate creeds among us now, do not really mean to recom- 
 mend that truth should be kept hidden, as in the first centuries, 
 in the secret mind of the Church : they have far other purposes 
 
 * De Synod. 41 : ITpos Se rovs airo^exofi^vovs rcc fxkv &\\a irdi^ra rcov iu 
 NtKatoi ypa<p^vT(t}V, irepl 5e fxavov rb 'O^oovaiov afjLrpi^dWovras, XP^ M^ ^^ 
 
 Trphs ix^povs ^laK^laQai dAA.' ws a^€\<pol rrpbs d5€A</)oi/s SiaAeyofjLeda, r^u 
 
 avT^v fihif 7)iMV ^idvoiav exouras^ Trepl Se to 6t/ofjLa fxovoi/ diard^ovras Ov 
 
 IxaKpdv elaiv ano^c^aa-daL Ka\ rrjv rov 'Ofjioovaiou Xi^iv. He repeatedly declares 
 that the Homoousion in its Nicene sense is intended to guard the reality 
 of the Divine Sonship as being uncreated. Ibid. 39, 45, 48, 54. 
 
 *> St. Athanasius' ' zeal for the Consubstantiality had its root in his loyalty 
 to the CoNSUBSTANTiAL. He felt that in the Nicene dogma were involved 
 the worship of Christ and the life of Christianity.' Bright's Hist. Ch. 
 p. 149. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Value of Creeds at the present day, 437 
 
 in view. Eousseau might draw pictures of the superiority of 
 simple primitive savage life to the enervated civilization of 
 Paris j but it would not have been prudent in the Parisians at 
 the end of the last century to have attempted a return to the 
 barbaric life of their ancestors, who had roamed as happy 
 savages in the great forests of Europe. The Latitudinarians 
 who suggest that the Church might dispense with the Catholic 
 creeds, advise us to revert to the defencelessness of ecclesiastical 
 childhood. But, alas ! they cannot guarantee to us its innocence, 
 or its immunities. We could not, if we would, reverse the 
 thought of centuries, and ignore the questions which heresy has 
 opened, and which have been cecumenically decided. We might 
 not thus do despite to the kindly providence of Him, Who, with 
 the temptations to faith that came with the predestined course 
 of history, has in the creeds opened to us such ' a way to escape 
 that we may be able to bear them.' 
 
 Certainly if toil and suffering confer a value on the object 
 which they earn or preserve ; if a country prizes the liberties 
 which were baptized in the blood of her citizens ; if a man 
 rejoices in the honour which he has kept unstained at the risk 
 of life ; then we, who are the heirs of the ages of Christendom, 
 should cling with a peculiar loyalty and love to the great Nicene 
 confession of our Lord's Divinity. For the Nicene definition 
 was wrung from the heart of the agonized Church by a denial of 
 the truth on which was fed, then as now, her inmost life. In 
 the Arian heresy the old enemies of the Gospel converged as for 
 a final and desperate effort to achieve its destruction. The 
 carnal, gross, external, Judaizing spirit, embodied in the frigid 
 literalism of the school of Antioch ; the Alexandrian dialectics, 
 substituting philosophical placita for truths of faith ; nay, 
 Paganism itself, vanquished in the open field, but anxious to 
 take the life of its conqueror by private assassination ; — these 
 were the forces which reappeared in Arianism c. It was no mere 
 exasperation of rhetoric which saw Porphyry in Arius, and 
 which compared Constantius to Diocletian. The life of Athana- 
 sius after the Mcene Council might well have been lived before 
 the Edict of Milan. Arianism was a political force ; it ruled at 
 
 " St. Greg. Nyssa, contr. Eunom. xii. p. 728. Arianism is i) rris 'louSat/c^Jy 
 ctTraTT^s (TvvTjyopoSy ixovad ri KaX ttis 'EWr)viKrjs aOe'ias. So St. Gregory 
 Nazianz. (Orat. i. vol. i. p. 16) describes the Arian conception of the Divine 
 Nature as marked by an 'loySaiVcr? irevla, meaning the hard abstract mono- 
 theism of the later Jewish creed. Quoted by Baur, Lehre von der Dreieinig- 
 keit. i. pp. 352, 353, note. 
 VII ] 
 
43^ Especial claims of the Nicene Creed, 
 
 court. Arianism was a philosophical disputant, and was at 
 home in the schools. Arianism was, moreover, a proselytizer ; 
 it had verses and epigrammatic arguments for the masses of 
 the people ; and St. Gregory of Nyssa, in a passage ^ which is 
 classical, has described its extraordinary success among the 
 lower orders. Never was a heresy stronger, more versatile, 
 more endowed with all' the apparatus of controversy, more sure, 
 as it might have seemed, of the future of the world. It was a 
 long, desperate struggle, by which the original faith of Christ 
 conquered this fierce and hardy antagonist. At this day the 
 Creed of Nicsea is. the living proof of the Church's victory e; and 
 as we confess it we should, methinks, feel somewhat of the fire 
 of our spiritual ancestors, some measure of that fresh glow of 
 thankfulness, wliich is due to God after a great deliverance, 
 although wrouglit out in a distant age. To unbelief this creed 
 may be only an ecclesiastical ' test,' only an additional ' incubus ' 
 weighing down * honest religious thought.' But to the children 
 of faith, the Nicene confession must ever furnish the welcome 
 expression of their most cherished conviction. Let us hence- 
 forth repeat it, at those most solemn moments when the Church 
 puts it into our mouths, with a renewed and deepened sense of 
 gratitude and joy. Not as if it were the mere trophy of a con- 
 troversial victory, or the dry embodiment of an abstract truth 
 in the language of speculation, should we welcome this glorious 
 
 * See Dr. Newman's translation of it in Athan. Treatises, i. 213, note a : 
 * Men of yesterday and the day before, mere mechanics, off-hand dogmatists 
 
 in theology, servants too, and slaves that have been flogged 
 
 are solemn with us and philosophical about things incomprehensible. . . Ask 
 about pence, and he will discuss the Generate and Ingenerate ; inquire 
 the price of bread, he answers, *' Greater is the Father, and the Son is sub- 
 ject; " say that a bath would suit you, and he defines that the Son is out 
 of nothing.' See also St. Athan. Orat. Ari. i. 22, on the profane questions 
 put to boys and women in the Agora; and Ibid. 4 sqq. on the 'Thaha' of 
 Arius. 
 
 « The stress here laid upon the Nicene Creed will not be supposed to 
 imply forgetfulness of the great claims, in its due place, of the symbol 
 Quicanque. Coleridge, indeed, has said that the Athanasian Creed is, in his 
 judgment, * heretical in the omission or implicit denial of the Filial subordina- 
 tion in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed.' (Table-Talk, 
 p. 41.) But when the Athanasian Creed asserts that the Son is * of the 
 Father,' it virtually affirms the Subordination ; and when the Nicene Creed 
 calls the Son 'Very God' and 'Consubstantial,' it emphatically confesses the 
 Coequality. Coleridge's judgment can only be sustained by supposing that 
 ■■he Nicene Creed teaches a doctrine of Subordination in which the Nicene 
 Council would assuredly have detected Arianism. See Bright, Sermons of St. 
 Leo, note, 99. 
 
 [lect. 
 
Especial claims of the Nicene Creed. 439 
 
 creed to our hearts and lips. Kather let us greet it, as the 
 intellectual sentinel which guards the shrine of faith in our in- 
 most souls from the profanation of error; as the good angel 
 who warns us that since the Incarnation we move in the very 
 ante-chamber of a Divine Presence ; as a mother's voice re- 
 minding us of that tribute of heartfelt love and adoration, 
 which is due from all serious Christians to the Lord Jesus 
 Christ our Saviour and our God. 
 
 VII ] 
 
LECTUEE YIIL 
 
 SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE DOCTRINE OF OUR 
 LORD'S DIVINITY. 
 
 He That spared not His Own Son, hut delivered Him up for us all, how 
 shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? — Rom. viii. 32. 
 
 Of late years we have been familiarized with cautions and 
 protests against what has been termed by way of disparagement 
 ' Inferential Theology.' And no one would -deny that in all 
 ages of the Church, the field of theology has been the scene of 
 hasty, unwarrantable, and misleading inferences. False con- 
 clusions have been drawn from true premisses ; and very doubt- 
 ful or false premisses have been occasionally assumed if not 
 asserted to be true. Moreover, some earnest believers have 
 seemed to forget that in a subject-matter such as the creed of 
 Christendom, they are confessedly below truth and not above it. 
 They have forgotten that it is given us here to see a part only, 
 and not the whole. In reality we can but note the outskirts of 
 a vast economy, whose body and substance stretch far away from 
 our gaze into infinitude. Many an intercepting truth, not the 
 less true because unseen and unsuspected, ought to arrest the 
 hardy and confident logic, which insists upon this or that 
 particular conclusion as following necessarily upon these or 
 those premisses of which it is already in possession. But this 
 caution has not always been kept in view. And when once 
 pious affection or devout imagination have seized the reins of 
 religious thought, it is easy for individuals or schools to wander 
 far from the beaten paths of a clear yet sober faith, into some 
 theological wonderland, the airiest creation of the liveliest fancy, 
 where, to the confusion and unsettlement of souls, the wildest 
 fiction and the highest truth may be inextricably intertwined in 
 an entanglement of hopeless and bewildering disorder. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
"^ Infer entiaV Theology. 441 
 
 But if this should be admitted, it would not follow that 
 theology is in no sense ^ inferential.' Within certain limits, and 
 under due guidance, inference' is the movement, it is the life of 
 theology. The primal records of revelation itself, as we find 
 them in Scripture, are continually inferential ; and it is at least 
 the business of theology to observe and marshal these revealed 
 inferences, to draw them out, and to make the most of them. 
 The illuminated reason of the collective Church has for ages 
 been engaged in studying the original materials of the Christian 
 revelation. It thus has shaped, rather than created, the science 
 of theology. What is theology, but a continuous series of ob- 
 served and systematized inferences, respecting God in His 
 Nature and His dealings with mankind, drawn from premisses 
 which rest upon God's authority % Do you say that no * in- 
 ference' is under any circumstances legitimate ; that no one 
 truth in theology necessarily implies another ; that the Christian 
 mind ought to preserve in a jealous and sterile isolation each 
 proposition that can be extracted from Scripture? Do you 
 suppose that the several truths of the Christian creed are so 
 many separate, unfruitful, unsuggestive dogmas, having no 
 traceable relations towards each other? Do you take it for 
 granted that each revealed truth involves nothing that is not 
 seen plainly to lie on the very surface of the terms which 
 express it? Do you, in your inmost thought, regard the doc- 
 trines of the Church as so many barren abstractions, which a 
 merely human speculation on divine things has from age to age 
 drawn out into form and system % If so, of course it is natural 
 that you should deprecate any earnest scrutiny of the worth and 
 consequences of these abstractions ; you deprecate it as in- 
 terfering with moral and practical interests ; you deem an 
 inferential theology alike illusory and mischievous. If here I 
 touch the bottom of your thought, at least, my brethren, I admit 
 its consistency ; but then your original premiss is of a character 
 to put you out of all relations with the Christian Church, except 
 those of fundamental opposition. The Christian Church believes 
 that God has really spoken; and she assumes that no subject 
 can have a higher practical interest for man than a consideration 
 of the worth and drift of what He has said. Of course no one 
 would waste his time upon systematizing what he believed to be 
 only a series of abstract phantoms. And if a man holds a doc- 
 trine with so slight and doubtful a grasp that it illuminates 
 nothing within him, that it moves nothing, that it leads on to 
 nothing beyond itself, he is in a fair way to forfeit it altogether. 
 VIII ] 
 
442 What does faith in Christ's Diviiiity involve? 
 
 We scan anxiously and cross-question keenly only that which we 
 really possess and cherish as solid truth : a living faith is pretty 
 certain to draw inferences. The seed which has not shrivelled 
 up into an empty husk cannot but sprout, if you place it beneath 
 the sod ; the living belief, which has really been implanted in 
 the soil of thought and feeling, cannot but bear its proper flower 
 and fruit in the moral and intellectual life of a thoughtful and 
 earnest man. If you would arrest the growth of the seed, you 
 must cut it oflP from contact with the soil, and so in time you 
 must kill it : you may, for awhile, isolate a religious conviction 
 by some violent moral or intellectual process ; but be sure that 
 the conviction which cannot germinate in your heart and mind 
 is already condemned to deaths. 
 
 If theology is inferential, she infers under guidance and within 
 restricted limits. If the eccentric reasonings of individual minds 
 are to be received with distrust, the consent of many minds, of 
 many ages, of many schools and orders of thought, may com- 
 mand at least a respectful attention. If we reject conclusions 
 drawn professedly from the substance of revelation, but really 
 enlarging instead of explaining it, it does not follow that we 
 should reject inferences which are simply explanatory, or which 
 exhibit the bearing of one revealed truth upon another. This 
 indeed is the most fruitful and legitimate province of inference 
 in theological enquiry. Such ' inference' brings out the meaning 
 of the details of revelation. It raises this feature to pro- 
 minence ; it throws that into the shade. It places language to 
 which a too servile literalism might have attributed the highest 
 force, in the lower rank of metaphor and symbol ; it elicits 
 pregnant and momentous truths from incidents which, in the 
 absence of sufficient guidance or reflection, may have been 
 thought to possess only a secondary degree of significance. 
 
 To-day we reach the term of those narrow limits within which 
 some aspects of a subject in itself exhaustless have been so 
 briefly and imperfectly discussed. And it is natural for any 
 earnest man to ask himself — 'If I beheve in Christ's Divinity, 
 what does this belief involve % Is it possible that such a faith 
 can be for me a dead abstraction, having no real influence upon 
 my daily life of thought and action % If this great doctrine be 
 true, is there not, when I am satisfied of its truth, still some- 
 thing to be done besides proving it % Can it be other than a. 
 
 See, on this point. University Sermons, by Rev. R. Scott, D.D., Master 
 of Balliol College, pp. 174-176. The rejection of 'inferential theology' was 
 a characteristic feature of Sadduceeism. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Frtiitfuhiess of Ike Doctrine of Chris fs Diviitity, 443 
 
 practical folly, to have ascertained the truth that Jesus is God, 
 and then to consign so momentous a conclusion to a respectful 
 oblivion in some obscure corner of my mind, as if it were a well- 
 bound but disused book that could only ornament the shelves of 
 a library ? Must I not rather enshrine it in the very centre of 
 my soul's life 1 Must I not contemplate it, nay, if it may be, 
 penetrate it, feed on it by repeated contemplation, that it may 
 illuminate, sustain, transfigure my whole inward being ? Must 
 I not be reasonably anxious till this great conviction shall have 
 moulded all that it can bear on, or that can bear on it — all that 
 I hold in any degree for religious truth ] Must not such a faith 
 at last radiate through my every thoughts Must it not in- 
 vigorate with a new and deeper motive my every action] If 
 Jesus, Who lived and died and rose for me, be indeed God, can 
 my duties to Him end with a bare confession of His Divinity 1 
 "Will not the greatness of His Life and of His Death, will not 
 the binding force of His commands, will not the nature and 
 reality of His promises and gifts, be felt to have a new and 
 deeper meaning, when I survey them in the light of this glo- 
 rious truth ] Must not all which the Divine Christ blesses and 
 sanctions have in some sense about it, the glory and virtue of 
 His Divinity r 
 
 Undoubtedly, brethren, the doctrine of Christ's Godhead is, 
 both in the sphere of belief and in that of morals, as fruitful and 
 as imperious as you anticipate. St. Paul's question in the text 
 is in substantial harmony with the spirit of your own. St. Paul 
 makes the doctrine of a Divine Christ, given for the sins of men 
 to a Life of humiliation and to a Death of anguish, the premiss 
 of the largest consequences, the warrant of the most unbounded 
 expectations. * He That spared not His Own Son, but gave 
 Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give 
 us all things'?' Let us then hasten to trace this somewhat in 
 detail ; and let us remark, in passing, that on the present oc- 
 casion we shall not be leaving altogether the track of former 
 lectures. For in studying the results of a given belief, we may 
 add to the number of practical evidences in its favour ; we may 
 approach the belief itself under conditions which are more fa- 
 vourable for doing justice to it than those which a direct 
 argument supplies. To contemplate such a truth as the God- 
 head of our Lord in itself, is like gazing with open eyelids at 
 the torturing splendour of the noon-day sun. We can best 
 admire the sun of the natural heavens when we take note of the 
 beauty which he sheds over the face of the world, when we mark 
 VIII ] 
 
444 The doctrine protects Theistic truth, 
 
 the floods of light which stream from him, and the deep 
 shadows which he casts, and the colours and forms which he 
 lights up and displays before us. In like manner, perchance, 
 we may most truly enter into the meaning of the Divinity of the. 
 Sun of Righteousness, by observing the truths which depend 
 more or less directly on that glorious doctrine, — truths on which 
 it sheds a significance so profound, so unspeakably awful, so un- 
 speakably consoling. 
 
 There are three distinct bearings of the doctrine of our Lord's 
 Divinity which it is more especially of importance to consider. 
 This doctrine protects truths prior to itself, and belonging both 
 to natural and to revealed theology. It also illuminates the 
 meaning, it asserts the force of truths which depend upon itself, 
 which are, to speak humanly, below it, and which can only be 
 duly appreciated when they are referred to it as justifying and 
 explaining them. Lastly, it fertilizes the Christian's moral and 
 spiritual life, by supplying a motive to the virtues which are 
 most characteristically Christian, and without which Christian 
 ethics sink down to the level of Pagan morality. 
 
 I. Observe, first, the conservative force of the doctrine. It 
 protects the truths which it presupposes. Placed at the centre 
 of the faith of Christendom, it looks backward as well as 
 forward ; it guards in Christian thought the due apprehension 
 of those fundamental verities without which no religion what- 
 ever is possible, since they are the postulates of all religious 
 thought and activity. 
 
 I. What, let us ask, is the practical relation of the doctrine 
 before us to the primal truth that a Personal God really exists % 
 
 Both in the last century and in our own day, it has been the 
 constant aim of a philosophical Deism to convince the world 
 that the existence of a Supreme Being would be more vividly, 
 constantly, practically realized, if the dogma of His existence 
 were detached from the creed of Christendom. The pure 
 Theistic idea, we are told, if it were only freed from the earthly 
 and material accessories of an Incarnation, if it were not em- 
 barrassed by the ^metaphysical conception' of distinct personal 
 Subsistencies within the Godhead, if it could be left to its native 
 force, to its spirituality of essence, to its simplicity of form, — 
 would exert a prodigious influence on human thought, if not on 
 human conduct. This influence is said to be practically im- 
 possible, so long as Theistic truth is overlaid by the * thick 
 integument' of Christian doctrine. Accordingly a real belief in 
 God is to be deepened and extended, and atheism is to be 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
The idea of God not really gtcarded by Deism. 445 
 
 expelled from the minds of men, by the destruction of dogmatic 
 Christianity. But has any such anticipation as yet been realized 
 by Deism % Is it in the way to be realized at this hour % Need I 
 remind you, that throughout Europe, the most earnest assaults of 
 infidelity upon the Christian creed within the last ten years 
 have been directed against its Theistic, as distinct from its 
 peculiarly Christian elements ] When the possibility of miracle 
 is derided ; when a Providence is scouted as the fond dream of 
 man's exaggerated self-love ; when belief in the power of prayer 
 is treated as a crude superstition, illustrative of man's ignorance 
 of the scientific conception of law 3 when the hypothesis of 
 absolutely invariable law, and the cognate conception of nature 
 as a self-evolved system of self-existent forces and self-existent 
 matter, are advancing with giant strides in large departments of 
 the literature of the day ; — it is not Christianity as such, it is 
 Theism, which is really jeopardized and insulted. Among the 
 forces arrayed against Christianity at this hour, the most for- 
 midable, because the most consistent and the most sanguine, 
 is that pure materialism, which has been intellectually or- 
 ganized in the somewhat pedantic form of Positivism. To the 
 Positivist the most etherealized of deistic theories is just as 
 much an object of pitying scorn as the creed of a St. John and a 
 St. Athanasius. Both are relegated to ^the theological period' 
 of human development. And if we may judge from the present 
 aspect of the controversy between non-Christian spiritualists and 
 the apostles of Positivism, it must be sorrowfully acknowledged 
 that the latter appear to gain steadily and surely on their op- 
 ponents. This fact is more evident on the continent of Europe 
 than in our own country. It cannot be explained by supposing 
 that the spiritualistic writers are intellectually inferior to the 
 advocates of materialism. Still less is an explanation to be 
 sought in the intrinsic indefensibility of the truth which the 
 spiritualists defend ; it is really furnished by the conditions 
 under which they undertake to defend it. A living, energetic, 
 robust faith, a faith, as it has been termed, not of ether, but of 
 flesh and blood, is surely needed, in order to stand the reiterated 
 attacks, the subtle and penetrating misgivings, the manifold 
 wear and tear of a protracted controversy with so brutal an 
 antagonist. Can Deism inspire this faith ? The pretension of 
 deists to refine, to spiritualize, to etherealize the idea of God 
 almost indefinitely, is fatal to the living energy of their one con- 
 viction. Where an abstract deism is not killed out by the 
 violence of atheistic materialism, it is apt, although left to itself, 
 VIII ] 
 
44*^ True idea of God, which Deis7n cannot guard, 
 
 to die by an unperceived process of evaporation. For a living 
 faith in a Supreme Being, the human mind requires motives, 
 corollaries, consequences, supports. These are not supplied by 
 the few abstract considerations which are entertained by the 
 philosophical deists. Whatever may be the intellectual strength 
 of their position against atheism, the practical weakness of that 
 position is a matter of notoriety ; and if this weakness is ap- 
 parent in the case of the philosophers themselves, how much 
 more patent is it when deism attempts to make itself a home in 
 the heart of the people ! That abstract and inaccessible being 
 who is placed at the summit of deistic systems is too subtle for 
 the thought and too cold for the heart of the multitudes of the 
 human family. When God is regarded less as the personal 
 Object of affection and worship than as the necessary term of an 
 intellectual equation, the sentiment of piety is not really satis- 
 fied ; it hungers, it languishes, it dies. And this purely in- 
 tellectual manner of apprehending God, which kills piety, is so 
 predominant in every genuine deistic system as to bring about, 
 in no long lapse of time, its impotence and extinction as a 
 popular religious force. The Supreme Agent, without whom 
 the deist cannot construct an adequate or satisfactory theory of 
 being, is gradually divested of all personal characteristics, and is 
 resolved into a formula expressing only supreme agency. His 
 moral perfections fall into the background of thought, while he 
 is conceived of, more and more exclusively, as the Universal 
 Mind. And his intellectual attributes are in turn discarded, 
 when for the Supreme Mind is substituted the conception of the 
 Mightiest Force. Long before this point is reached, deistic phi- 
 losophy is nervously alarmed, lest its God should still be sup- 
 posed to penetrate as a living Providence down into this human 
 world of suffering and sin. Accordingly, professing much 
 anxiety for his true dignity and repose, deism weaves around 
 his liberty a network of imaginary law ; and if he has not been 
 previously destroyed by the materialistic controversialists, he is 
 at length conducted by the cold respect of deistic thinkers to the 
 utmost frontier of the conceivable universe, where, having been 
 enthroned in a majestic inaction, he is as respectfully abandoned. 
 As suggesting a problem which may rouse a faint spasmodic in- 
 tellectual interest, his name may still be mentioned from time to 
 time in the world of letters. But the interest which he creates 
 is at the best on a level with that of the question whether the 
 planets are or are not inhabited. As an energetic, life-controlling, 
 life-absorbing power, the God of Deism is extinct. 
 
 [lect. 
 
protected by faith in the Divine Incar^iation. 447 
 
 Now the doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is the Incarnate 
 God protects this primal theistic truth which non-Christian 
 deism is so incapable of popularizing, and even of retaining. 
 The Incarnation bridges over the abyss which opens in our 
 thought between earth and heaven ; it brings the Almighty, 
 Allwise, Illimitable Being down to the mind and heart of His 
 reasonable creatures. The Word made Flesh is God con- 
 descending to our finite capacities ; and this condescension has 
 issued in a clear, strong sense of the Being and Attributes of 
 God, such as is not found beyond the bounds of Christendom. 
 The last prayer of Jesus, that His redeemed might know the 
 only true God, has been answered in history. How profound, 
 how varied, how fertile is the idea of God, of His Nature and of 
 His attributes, in St. John, in St. Paul, in St. Gregory Nazianzen, 
 in St. Augustine ! How energetic is this idea, how totally is it 
 removed from the character of an impotent speculation 1 How 
 does this keen, strong sense of God's present and majestic Life 
 leave its mark upon manners, literatures, codes of law, national 
 institutions, national characters ! How utterly does its range of 
 energy transcend any mere employment of the intellect ; how 
 does it, again and again, bend wills, and soften hearts, and change 
 the current and drift of lives, and transfigure the souls of men ! 
 And why is this % It is because the Incarnation rivets the 
 apprehension of God on the thought and heart of the Church, 
 so that within the Church theistic truth bids defiance to those 
 influences which tend perpetually to sap or to volatilize it else- 
 where. Instead of presenting us with some fugitive abstraction, 
 inaccessible to the intellect and disappointing to the heart, the 
 Incarnation points to Jesus. Jesus is the Almighty, restraining 
 His illimitable powers ; Jesus is the Incomprehensible, volun- 
 tarily submitting to bonds ; Jesus is Providence, clothed in our 
 own flesh and blood ; Jesus is the Infinite Charity, tending us 
 with the kindly looks and tender handling of a human love ; 
 Jesus is the Eternal Wisdom, speaking out of the depths of 
 infinite thought in a human language. Jesus is God making 
 Himself, if I may dare so to speak, our tangible possession ; He 
 is God brought ' very nigh to us, in our mouth and in our heart ;' 
 we behold Him, we touch Him, we cling to Him, and lo ! we 
 are Q^'ia^ kolvcovoI (pva^co^^j partakers of the Nature of Deity, 
 through our actual membership in His Body, in His Flesh, and 
 in His Bones c ; we dwell, if we will, evermore in Him, and He 
 in us. 
 
 ^ 2 St. Pet. i. 4. c Eph. V. 30. 
 
 VIII ] 
 
44^ The doctrine a safegtiard against Pantheism, 
 
 This then is the result of the Divine Incarnation : it brings 
 God close to the inmost being of man, yet without forfeiting, 
 nay, rather while guarding most carefully, in man's thought, the 
 spirituality of the Divine Essence. Nowhere is the popular 
 idea of God more refined, more spiritual, than where faith in 
 the Divinity of Jesus is clearest and strongest. No writers 
 have explained and asserted the immateriality, the simplicity, 
 the indivisibility of the Essence of God more earnestly, than 
 those who have most earnestly asserted and explained the 
 doctrines of the Holy Trinity and of the Divine Incarnation. 
 For if we know our happiness in Christ, we Christians are 
 united to God, we possess God, we consciously live, and move, 
 and have our being in God. Our intelHgence and our heart 
 alike apprehend God in His majestic and beautiful Life so truly 
 and constantly, because He has taken possession of our whole 
 nature, intellectual, moral, and corporeal, and has warmed 
 and illuminated and blessed it by the quickening Manhood 
 of Jesus. We cannot reflect upon and rejoice in our union 
 with Jesus, without finding ourselves face to face with the 
 Being and Attributes of Him with Whom in Jesus we are made 
 one. Holy Scripture has traced the failure and misery of all 
 attempts on the part of a philosophical deism to create or to 
 maintain in the soul of man a real communion with our 
 heavenly Parent. * Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath 
 not the Father ^^ And the Christian's practical security against 
 those speculative difficulties to which his faith in a living God 
 may be exposed, lies in that constant contemplation of and 
 communion with Jesus, which is of the essence of the Christian 
 life. * God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, 
 hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of 
 the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ®.' 
 
 2. But if belief in our Saviour's Godhead protects Christian 
 thought against the intellectual dangers which await an arid 
 Deism, does it afford an equally eff*ective safeguard against 
 Pantheism % In conceiving of God, the choice before a pan- 
 theist hes between alternatives from which no genius has as yet 
 devised a real escape. God, the pantheist must assert, is 
 literally everything ; God is the whole material and spiritual 
 universe ; He is humanity in all its manifestations ; He is by 
 inclusion every moral and immoral agent ; and every form and 
 exaggeration of moral evil, no less than every variety of moral 
 
 d I St. John ii. 23. « 2 Cor. iv. 6. 
 
 [ LECT, 
 
The idea of God destroyed by Pantheisvt, 449 
 
 excellence and beauty, is part of the all-pervading, all-compre- 
 hending movement of His Universal Life. If this revolting 
 blasphemy be declined, then the God of pantheism must be the 
 barest abstraction of abstract being ; He must, as with the 
 Alexandrian thinkers, be so exaggerated an abstraction as to 
 transcend existence itself ; He must be conceived of as utterly 
 unreal, lifeless, non-existent ; while the only real beings are 
 these finite and determinate forms of existence whereof * nature' 
 is composed f. This dilemma haunts all the historical transform- 
 ations of pantheism, in Europe as in the East, to-day as two 
 thousand years ago. Pantheism must either assert that its God 
 is the one only existing being whose existence absorbs and is 
 identified with the universe and humanity \ or else it must 
 admit that he is the rarest and most unreal of conceivable ab- 
 stractions ; in plain terms, that he is no being at all. And the 
 question before us is. Does the Incarnation of God, as taught 
 by the Christian doctrine, expose Christian thought to this 
 dilemma? Is God * brought very nigh to us' Christians in 
 such sort, as to bury the Eternal in the temporary, the Infinite 
 in the finite, the Absolute and Self-existent in the transient and 
 the relative, the All-holy in the very sink of moral evil, unless, 
 in order to save His honour in our thought, we are prepared to 
 attenuate our idea of Him into nonentity % 
 
 Now, not merely is there no ground for this apprehension ; 
 but the Christian doctrine of an Incarnate God is our most solid 
 protection against the inroads of pantheistic error. 
 
 The strength of pantheistic systems lies in that craving both 
 of the intellect and of the lieart for union with the Absolute 
 Being, which is the most legitimate and the noblest instinct of 
 our nature. This craving is satisfied by the Christian's union 
 with the Incarnate Son. But while satisfying it, the Incar- 
 nation raises an effective barrier against its abuse after the 
 fashion of pantheism. Against the dogma of an Incarnate God, 
 rooted in the faith of a Christian people, the waves of panthe- 
 istic thought may surge and lash themselves and break in 
 vain. For the Incarnation presupposes that master-truth which 
 pantheism most passionately denies. It presupposes the truth 
 that between the finite and the Infinite, between the Creator 
 and the Cosmos, between God and man, there is of necessity a 
 measureless abyss. On this point its opposition to pantheism 
 is as earnest as that of the most jealous deism ; but the 
 
 f Saisset, Philosophie Religieuse, i. i8i ; ii. 368. 
 VIII ] G g 
 
450 Chrises Divinity the safeguard against Pa7itheis7n . 
 
 Christian creed escapes from the deistic conception of an omni- 
 potent moral being, surveying intelligently the vast accumu- 
 lation of sin and misery which we see on this earth, yet withal 
 remaining unmoved, inactive, indifferent. The Christian creed 
 spans this gulf which yawns between earth and heaven, by pro- 
 claiming that the Everlasting Son has taken our nature upon 
 Him. In His Person a Created Nature is joined to the 
 Uncreated, by a union which is for ever indissoluble. But 
 what is that truth which underlies this transcendent mystery ? 
 What sustains it, what even enhances it, what forbids it to melt 
 away in our thought into a chaotic confusion out of which nei- 
 ther the Divine nor the Human could struggle forth into the 
 light for distinct recognition % It is, I reply, the truth that the 
 Natures thus united in the Person of Jesus are radically, by 
 their essence, and for ever, distinct. It is by reason of this 
 ineffaceable distinctness that the union of the Godhead and 
 Manhood in Jesus is such an object of wondering and thankful 
 contemplation to Christians. Accordingly, at the very heart of 
 the creed of Christendom, we have a guarantee against the 
 cardinal error of pantheism \ while yet by our living fellowship 
 as Christians with the Divine and Incarnate Son, we realize the 
 aspiration which pantheism both fosters and perverts. Chris- 
 tian intellect, so long as it is Christian, can never be betrayed 
 into the admission that God is the universe ; Christian faith 
 can never be reduced to the extremity of choosing between a 
 denial of moral distinctions and an assertion that God is the 
 parent of all immoral action, or to the desperate endeavour to 
 escape this alternative by volatilizing God into non-existence. 
 And yet Christian love, while it is really Christian, cannot for 
 one moment doubt that it enfolds and possesses and is united to 
 its Divine Object. But this intellectual safeguard and this 
 moral satisfaction alike vanish, if the real Deity of Jesus be 
 denied or obscured : since it is the Deity of our truly human 
 Lord which satisfies the Christian heart, while it protects the 
 Christian intellect against fatal aberrations. Certainly a deism 
 which would satisfy the heart, inevitably becomes pantheistic 
 in its awkward attempts to become devotional ; and although 
 pantheism should everywhere breathe the tenderness which 
 almost blinds a reader of Spinosa's ethics to a perception of 
 their real character, still pantheism is at bottom and in its 
 results not other than a graceful atheism. But to partake of 
 the Divine Nature incarnate in Christ is not to bury God in the 
 filth of moral pollution, nor is it to transcendentalize Him into 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Chrisfs Divinity guards mans true dignity, 451 
 
 an abstraction, which mocks us, when we attempt to grasp it, as 
 an unsubstantial phantom?. 
 
 3. One more sample shall be given of this protective efficacy 
 of the doctrine before us. If it guards in our thought the 
 honour, the majesty, the Life of God, it also protects the true 
 dignity and the rights of man. The unsettled spirit of our 
 time, when it has broken with the claims of faith, oscillates, 
 whether from caprice or in bewilderment, between the most 
 inconsistent errors. If at one while its audacity would drive 
 the Great God from His throne in heaven to make way for the 
 lawless intellect and will of His creature, at another it seems 
 possessed by an infatuated passion for the degradation of man- 
 kind. It either ignores such features of the higher side of our 
 complex being as are the powers of reflection and of inference, 
 or it arbitrarily assumes that they are only the products of 
 civilization. It fixes its attention exclusively upon the gradu- 
 ated variety of form perceptible in a long series of crania which 
 it has arranged in its museum, and then it proclaims with 
 enthusiasm that a Newton or a Herschel is after all only the 
 cultivated descendant of a grotesque and irrational ape. It even 
 denies to man the possession of any spiritual nature whatever ; 
 thought is asserted to be inherent in the substance of the brain ; 
 belief in the existence of an immaterial essence is treated as an 
 unscientific and superstitious prejudice ; virtuous and vicious 
 actions are alluded to as alike results of purely physical agen- 
 cies^ ; man is to all intents and purposes a soulless brute. My 
 brethren, you will not suppose that I am desiring to derogate, 
 however indirectly, from the claims of that noble science which 
 patiently investigates the physiology of our animal nature \ I 
 am only protesting against a rash and insulting hypothesis, for 
 which science, if her sons could speak with one voice, would be 
 loath to make herself responsible, since by it her true utterances 
 
 K M. Kenan's frequent mention of ' God' in his * Vie de Jesus' does not 
 imply that he believes in a Supreme Being. ' God' means with M. Renan 
 only ' the category of the ideal/ and not any existing personal being whatever. 
 Questions contemporaines, p. 224 : 'Les sciences historiques ne different en 
 rien par la methode des sciences physiques et mathdmatiques : elles sup- 
 posent qu'aucun agent surnaturel ne vient troubler la marche de I'humanite ; 
 que cette marche est la r^sultante immediate de la liberty qui est dans 
 I'homme et de la fatality qui est dans la nature ; qu'il n'y a pas d'etre libra 
 superieur a I'homme auquel on puisse attribuer une part appreciable dans la 
 conduite morale, non plus que dans la conduite materielle de Funivers.' 
 
 ^ Cf. M. Taine, Histoire de la Littdrature Anglaise, Introduction, p. xy*^ 
 • Le vice et la vertu sent des produits comme le sucre et le vitriol.* /^ "^^ 
 
 vm] Gg2 ^^«''^'^ 
 
4o2 Christ's Divinity guards mans true dignity, 
 
 are piteausly caricatured. It cannot be said that such a theory 
 is a harmless eccentricity of over-eager speculation ; for it 
 destroys that high and legitimate estimate of God's natural 
 gifts to man which is an important element of earnest and 
 healthy morality in the individual, and which is still more 
 essential to the onward march of our social progress. 
 
 But so long as the Christian Church believes in the true 
 Divinity of our Incarnate Lord, it is not probable that theories 
 which deny the higher aspects of human nature will meet with 
 large acceptance. We Christians can bear to be told that the 
 skull of this or that section of the human family bears this or 
 that degree of resemblance to the skull of a gorilla. We know, 
 indeed, that as receivers of the gift of life we are simply on a 
 level with the lowest of the lower creatures ; we owe all that we 
 are and have to God. Do we not thank Him for our creation, 
 preservation, and all the blessings of this life % Might He not 
 have given us less than we have ] Might He not have given us 
 nothing "J What have we, what are we, that we have not 
 received % The question of man's place in the universe touches 
 not any self-achieved dignity of our own, but the extent and 
 the nature of the Divine bounty. But while we believe the 
 creed of Christendom, we cannot view such a question as open, 
 or listen with any other feelings than those of sorrow and 
 repugnance to the arguments of the apostles of human degrada- 
 tion. We cannot consent to suppose ourselves to be mere 
 animal organisms, without any immaterial soul or future des- 
 tiny, parted by no distinctive attribute from the perishing beasts 
 around us. For the true nobility of our nature has received the 
 seal of a recognition, which forbids our intellectual complicity 
 with the physics or the 'psychology' of materialism. Do not 
 we Christians call to mind, often, every day of our lives, that 
 God has put such high and distinctive honour upon our common 
 humanity as to clothe Himself in it, and to bear it to heaven 
 in its glorious and unsullied perfection, that for all eternity 
 it may be the partner of His throne % 
 
 Tremunt videntes angeli 
 Versam vicem mortalium ; 
 Peccat carQ, mundat Caro, 
 Regnat Deus Dei Caro. 
 
 But this exaltation of our human nature would be the wildest 
 dream, unless Jesus were truly God as well as Man. His 
 Divinity is the warrant that in Him our race is ' crowned with 
 glory and honour,' and that in taking upon Him 'not the nature 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Christ, as being God, is infallible, 453 
 
 of angels, but the seed of Abraham/ He was vindicating our 
 individual capacity for the highest greatness. Apart from the 
 phenomena of reflection and reason, the hopes which are raised 
 by the Incarnation utterly forbid speculations that would de- 
 grade man to the level of a brute incapable of any real morality. 
 If we are told that such hopes are not direct replies to the 
 arguments of physiology j we answer that physiology can and 
 does often correct by her scientific demonstrations, the eccen- 
 tricities of those who would force her to take part against 
 man's best hopes and instincts. But, as a practical matter of 
 fact, Christendom maintains its faith in the dignity of man 
 amidst the creatures of God by its faith in the Incarnation of 
 the Divine Son. * Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it 
 doth not yet appear what we shall be : but we know that, 
 when He shall appear, we shall be like Him ; for we shall see 
 Him as He is '\^ 
 
 II. These are but a few out of many illustrations of the 
 protection afforded by the doctrine of Christ's Divinity to sun- 
 dry imperilled truths of natural religion. Let us proceed to 
 consider the illuminative or explanatory relation in which the 
 doctrine stands to truths which are internal to the Christian 
 revelation, and which themselves presuppose some definite belief 
 respecting the Person of Christ. 
 
 Now our Lord's whole Mediatorial work, while it is dis- 
 charged through His assumed Humanity, is efficacious and 
 complete, simply because the Mediator is not merely Man but 
 God. As a Prophet, His utterances are infallible. As a Priest, 
 He offers a prevailing sacrifice. As a King, He wields an autho- 
 rity which has absolute claims upon the conscience, and a power 
 which will ultimately be proved to be resistless. 
 
 (a) A sincere and intelligent belief in the Divinity of Jesus 
 Christ obliges us to believe that Jesus Christ, as a Teacher, is 
 infallible. His infallibility is not a gift, it is an original and 
 necessary endowment of His higher Nature. If indeed Christ 
 had been merely man, He might still have been endowed with 
 an infallibility such as was that of His own apostles. As it is, 
 to charge Him with error is to deny that He is God. Unless 
 God's wisdom can be foolishness, or His veracity can be sullied 
 by the suspicion of deceit ; unless God can Himself succumb to 
 error, or can consent to deceive His reasonable creatures ; a 
 sincere believer in the true Divinity of Jesus Christ will bow 
 before His words in all their possible range of significance, 
 
 * I St. John iii. 2. 
 VIII ] 
 
454 Modern denial of our Lord's Infallibility. 
 
 as before the words of a literally infallible Master. So obvious 
 an inference would only be disputed under circumstances of an 
 essentially transitional character, such as are those which have 
 perplexed the Church of England during the last fcAV years. 
 Deny that Jesus Christ is God, and you may or may not pro- 
 ceed to deny that He is infallible. But confess His Godhead, 
 and the common sense of men of the world will concur with the 
 judgment of divines, in bidding you avoid the irrational as 
 well as blasphemous conception of a fallible Deity. To main- 
 tain, on the one hand, that Jesus Christ is God, and, on the 
 other, that He is a teacher and propagator, not of trivial and 
 unimportant, but of far-reaching and substantial errors ; — this 
 would have appeared to ancient Christendom a paradox so sin- 
 gular as to be absolutely incredible. But we have lived to hear 
 men proclaim the legendar}^ and immoral character of con- 
 siderable portions of those Old Testament Scriptures, upon 
 which our Lord has set the seal of His infallible authority^. 
 And yet, side by side with this rejection of Scriptures so 
 deliberately sanctioned by Christ, there is an unwillingness 
 which, illogical as it is, we must sincerely welcome, to profess 
 any explicit rejection of the Church's belief in Christ's Divinity. 
 Hence arises the endeavour to intercept a conclusion, which 
 might otherwise have seemed so plain as to make arguments in 
 its favour an intellectual impertinence. Hence a series of sin- 
 gular refinements, by which Christ is presented to the modern 
 world as really Divine, yet as subject to fatal error ; as Founder 
 of the true religion, yet as the credulous patron of a volume 
 replete with worthless legends ; as the highest Teacher and 
 Leader of humanity, yet withal as the ignorant victim of the 
 prejudices and follies of an unenlightened age. 
 
 It will be urged by those who impugn the trustworthiness 
 of the Pentateuch without denying in terms the Divinity of 
 Christ, that such a representation as the foregoing does them a 
 certain measure of injustice. They do not wish to deny that 
 
 ^ Colenso on the Pentateucli, vol. iii. p. 623 : ' [In Matt. iv. 4, 7, 10] we 
 have quotations from Deut. viii. 3 ; vi. 16: vi. 13.; x. 20. And it is well 
 known that there are many other passages in the Gospels and Epistles, 
 in which this book is referred to, and in some of which Moses is expressly 
 mentioned as the writer of the words in question, e. g. Acts iii. 22 ; 
 Rom. X. 19. And, though it is true that, in the texts above quoted, the 
 words are not, indeed, ascribed to Moses, but are merely introduced with 
 the phrase 'It is written,' yet in Matt. xix. 7 the Pharisees refer to a passage 
 in Deut. xxiv. i as a law of Moses ; and our Lord in His reply, v. 8, repeats 
 their language, and practically adopts it as correct, and makes it His own.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Otir Lord said to be fallible as Man. 455 
 
 Christ, as the Eternal Son of God, is infallible. But the Christ 
 Who speaks in the Gospels is, they contend, ^a Son of man,' 
 and as such He is subject to the human infirmities of ignorance 
 and error 1. ^ Does He not profess Himself,' they ask, ^ in the 
 plainest words, ignorant of the day of the last judgment % Does 
 not His Evangelist assure us that He increased in " wisdom " as 
 well as in stature % This being so, was not His human know- 
 ledge limited ; and was not error possible, if not inevitable, 
 when He passed beyond the limits of such knowledge as He 
 possessed % Why should He be supposed to speak of the Pen- 
 tateuch with a degree of critical acumen, to which the foremost 
 learning of His day and country had not yet attained % Take 
 care,' so they warn us, * lest in your anxiety to repudiate Arius 
 and Nestoriu&, you deny the reality of Christ's Human Soul, and 
 become the unconscious associate of Apollinaris or of Eutyches. 
 Take care, lest you make Christianity answer with its life for 
 the truth of a " theory " about the historical trustworthiness of 
 the Old Testament, which, although it certainly was sanctioned 
 and put forward by Jesus Christ, yet has been as decidedly con- 
 demned by the " higher criticism " of the present day.' 
 
 Let us remark in this position, first of all, the indirect ad- 
 mission that Christ, as the Eternal Son of God, is strictly 
 infallible. Obvious as such a truth should be to Christians, 
 Arianism, be it remembered, did not confess it. Arianism held 
 that the Word Himself was ignorant of the day of judgment. 
 Such a tenet was perfectly consistent witb the denial that the 
 
 1 Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. i. p. xxxi : * It is perfectly consistent 
 with the most entire and sincere belief in our Lord's Divinity to hold, 
 as many do, that, when He vouchsafed to become a " Son of Man," He 
 took our nature fully, and voluntarily entered into all the conditions of 
 humanity, and, among others, into that which makes our growth in aU 
 ordinary knowledge gradual and limHed. We are expressly told, in Luke 
 ii. 52, that "Jesus increased in ivisdom,'^ as well as in "stature." It is 
 not supposed that, in His human nature. He was acquainted, more than 
 any educated Jew of the age, with the mysteries of all modern sciences ; 
 nor, with St. Luke's expressions before us, can it be seriously maintained 
 that, as an infant or young child, He possessed a knowledge surpassing 
 that of the most pious and learned adults of His nation, upon the subject 
 of the authorship and age of the different portions of the Pentateuch. At 
 what period, then, of His life upon earth, is it to be supposed that He had 
 granted to Him, as the Son of Man, supernaturally , full and accurate 
 information on these points, so that He should be expected to speak about 
 the Pentateuch in other terms than any other devout Jew of that day would 
 have employed? Why should it be thought that He would speak with 
 certain Divine knowledge on this matter, more than upon other matters 
 of ordinary science or history?' 
 VIII ] 
 
45^ St. Luke ii. 52, considered. 
 
 Word was consubstantial with the Omniscient God ; but it 
 was utterly at variance with any pretension honestly to believe 
 in His Divinity °^. Yet it must be recorded with sorrow, that 
 some writers who would desire nothing less than to uphold 
 the name and errors of the opponent of Athanasius, do never- 
 theless seem to speak at times as if it were seriously possible 
 that the Infallible could have erred, or that the boundless 
 knowledge of the Eternal Mind could be really limited. Let 
 us then note and welcome the admission that the Eternal Son 
 of God is literally infallible, even though it be made in quarters 
 where His authority, as the Incarnate Christ, teaching unerringly 
 substantial truth, is directly impugned and repudiated. 
 
 It is of course urged that our Lord's Human Soul is the seat 
 of that * fallibility ' which is insisted upon as being so fatal to 
 His authority as a Teacher. Let us then enquire what the 
 statements of Scripture on this mysterious subject would really 
 appear to affirm. 
 
 I. When St. Luke tells us that our Lord increased in wisdom 
 and stature i^, we can scarcely doubt that an intellectual develop- 
 ment of some kind in Christ's human soul is indicated. This de- 
 velopment, it is implied, corresponded to the growth of His bodily 
 frame. The progress in wisdom was real and not merely apparent, 
 just as the growth of Christ's Human Body was a real growth. If 
 only an increasing manifestation of knowledge had been meant, it 
 might have been meant also that Christ only manifested increase 
 of stature, while His Human Body did not really grow. But 
 on the other hand, St. Luke had previously spoken of the Child 
 
 m St. Athanasius comments as follows upon St. Mark xiii. 32, ou5e b TlSs. 
 Contr. Arian. Or. iii. c. 44 : 5t^ tovto koi ircpl aYY^^^^ Xeywu ovk e^prjKev 
 iTrava^aivoou, ^ti ou5e rh Yluevfia rh ayiov, aAA.' iaidoinjaf, deiKvvs Kara ^vo 
 TaSra, '6ti €t rh IIvevfjLa olSei/, iroWcp jxaWov 6 ASyos 77 Adyos iarlu oi5e, Trap' 
 ou Kal rh IIP€Vfj.a Xaju^dueiy Kol '6ti irepl rod TIuev/uiaTos (Tiooir-naas <pav€phv 
 TreTToirjKeu, '6ri Trepl ttJs dvdpcairivrjs ahrov Xetrovpyias €\€yev' ou5e 6 TiSs' Kal 
 rovrov T€KiJ.-f]piov, on avdpatirlvcos ilp7]Kois, ovhe 6 Tlhs oide, deiKi^vcriv o/ixcos 
 de'iKcos kavrhv ra irdj/ra dbSra. %v yap \4y€i Tthv rrju rjfi^pav fx-^ elSevai, rovrov 
 €iSeVar Aeyet rhu Harepa' ovdcls yo.p, (p7](T\, yipdocTKei. rhv Ilarepa et fx^ 6 Tl6s. 
 was Se tiXtju rcov 'Apeiavoou arvvoixoXoyfjffeicv, ws 6 rbv Uarepa yivcaffKOiV ttoXK^ 
 fxaXKov oJdef ri]s Kricrecas rb (i\op^ iv Se rcfi (iXcp Kal rh rcKos €<ttI ravrTjs. 
 
 Olshausen observes, in Ev. Matt. xxiv. 36, Comm. i. p. 909 : * 1st aber 
 vom Sohne Gottes hier die Rede, so kann das von ihm pradicirte Nichtwissen 
 der fifiepa und ccpa kein absolutes seyn indem die Wesenseinheit des Vaters 
 und des Sohnes das Wissen des Sohnes und des Vaters nicht specifisch zu 
 trennen gestattet ; es muss vielmehr nur von dem Zustande der K^fcocris des 
 Herrn in Stande seiner Niedrigkeit verstanden werden.' 
 
 ° St. Luke ii. 52 : 'Irjcrovs irpoiKoirre (To<pi(^ Kal tjAikI^ 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Our LorcTs 'growth in knowledge! 457 
 
 Jesus as ^ being filled with wisdom «/ and St. John teaches that 
 as the Word Incarnate, Jesus was actually 'full of truth.' St. 
 John means not only that our Lord was veracious, but that He 
 was fully in possession of objective truth p. It is clearly implied 
 that, according to St. John, this fulness of truth was an element 
 of that glory which the first disciples beheld or contemplated Q. 
 This statement appears to be incompatible with the supposition 
 that the Human Soul of Jesus, through spiritual contact with 
 which the disciples ^beheld' the glory of the Eternal Word, 
 was Itself not *full of truth.' St. John's narrative does not 
 admit of our confining this ' fulness of truth ' to the later days 
 of Christ's ministry, or to the period which followed His Re- 
 surrection. There are then two representations before us, one 
 suggesting a limitation of knowledge, the other a fulness of 
 knowledge in the human soul of Christ. In order to harmonize 
 these statements, we need not fall back upon the vulgar ration- 
 alistic expedient of supposing that between St. John's represen- 
 tation of our Lord's Person, and that which is given in the three 
 first Gospels, there is an intrinsic and radical discrepancy. If 
 we take St. John's account together with that of St. Luke, 
 might it not seem that we have here a special instance of that 
 tender condescension, by which our Lord willed to place Him- 
 self in a relation of real sympathy with the various experiences 
 of our finite existence? If by an infused knowledge He was, 
 even as a Child, ^ full of truth,' yet that He might enter with 
 the sympathy of experience into the various conditions of our 
 intellectual life. He would seem to have acquired, by the slow 
 labour of observation and inference, a new mastery over truths 
 which He already, in another sense, possessed. Such a co- 
 existence of growth in knowledge with a possession of all its 
 ultimate results would not be without a parallel in ordinary 
 human life. In moral matters, a living example may teach 
 with a new power some law of conduct, the truth of which we 
 have before recognised intuitively. In another field of know- 
 ledge, the telescope or the theodolite may verify a result of 
 which we have been previously informed by a mathematical 
 calculation!*. We can then conceive that the reality of our 
 
 o St. Luke ii. 40 : irKTipoviJLeuov (To<pias. 
 
 P St. John i. 14 : TrXrjprjs x'^P'-'^'os naX aKrjOeias, 
 
 Q Ibid. : iO^affdfx^Qa ttjv Zo^av avrov. 
 
 ' In the same way, every man's stock of opinions is of a twofold character ; 
 it is partly traditional and partly acquired by personal investigation and 
 thought. The traditionally received element in the mind, may be held, as 
 such, with the utmost tenacity ; and yet there is a real * increase in wis- 
 VIII ] 
 
45^ Ottr Lord^s statement in St. Mark xiii. 32, 
 
 Lord's intellectual development would not necessarily be in- 
 consistent with the simultaneous perfection of His knowledge. 
 As Man, He might have received an infused knowledge of all 
 truth, and yet have taken possession through experience and in 
 detail of that which was latent in His mind, in order to corre- 
 spond with the intellectual conditions of ordinary human life. But, 
 let us suppose that this explanation be rejected s, that St. John's 
 statement be left out of sight, and that St. Luke's words be 
 understood to imply simply that our Lord's Human Soul ac- 
 quired knowledge which It did not in any sense possess before. 
 Does even any such * increase in wisdom ' as this during Christ's 
 early years, warrant our saying that, in the days of His min- 
 istry, our Lord was still ignorant of the real claims and worth 
 of the Jewish Scriptures % Does it enable us to go further, and 
 to maintain that, when He made definite statements on the 
 subject. He was both the victim and the propagator of serious 
 error % Surely such inferences are not less unwarranted by the 
 statements of Scripture than they are destructive of Christ's 
 character and authority as a teacher of truth ! 
 
 2. But it may be pleaded that our Lord, in declaring His 
 ignorance of the day of the last judgment, does positively assign 
 a specified limit to the knowledge actually possessed by His 
 Human Soul during His ministry. * Of that day,' He says, * and 
 that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in 
 heaven, neither the Son, but the Father *.' * If these words/ you 
 
 dom,' when this element is, so to speak, taken possession of a second time 
 by means of personal inquiry and reflection. This is, of course, a very 
 remote analogy to the Sacred Subject discussed in the text, but it may 
 serve to suggest how the facts of an infused knowledge and a real Trpoe/coTrre 
 o-o^/a in our Lord's Human Soul may have been compatible. 
 
 ■ The following remarks of Dr. Klee will be read with interest. Dogmatik, 
 p. 511: *Der Menschheit Christi kann keine absolute VoUendung und 
 Impei-fectibilitat der Erkenntniss von Anfang an zugelegt werden, weil dann 
 Christus im Eingange in seine Glorie in Bezug auf sie unverherrlicht geblie- 
 ben ware, was nicht wohl angenommen werden kann ; weil ferner dann in 
 Christo eine wahrhafte AUwissenheit angenommen werden miisste, was mit 
 der menschlichen Natur und dem menschlichen Willen nicht wohl zu verein- 
 baren ist ; und wenn Einige sich damit helfen zu konnen glaubten, dass 
 diese AUwissenheit immer nur eine aus Gnade mitgetheilte ware, so ist 
 dagegen zu bemerken, dass die Menschheit dann aus Gnade auch die andern 
 gottlichen Attribute, z. B. AUmacht haben konnte, und wenn man dieses mit 
 der Entgegnung aus dem Felde zu schlagen glaubt, dass die Allmacht die 
 Gottheit selbst, mithin absolut incommunicabel ist, so muss erwidert werden, 
 dass die AUwissenheit ebenso Gottes Wesen selbst, somit unmittheilbar ist.* 
 
 t St. Mark xiii. 32 : Trepl 5e Tr\s ^yuepas iKelvvs koL ttjs &pas, ouSeis oldev, 
 ovdh 01 &yy€\oi ol iv ohpav^f ouSe 6 Tlhsj et fi^ d IlaTTjp. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
how tender stood by great Western Fathers, 459 
 
 urge, ^ do not refer to His ignorance as God, they must refer to 
 His ignorance in the only other possible sense, that is to say, to 
 His ignorance as Man.' 
 
 Of what nature then is the ^ ignorance' to which our Lord 
 alludes in this much-controverted text % Is it a real matter-of- 
 fact ignorance, or is it an ignorance which is only ideal and 
 hypothetical % Is it an ignorance to which man, as man, is na- 
 turally subject, but to which the Soul of Christ, the Perfect Man, 
 was not subject, since His human intelligence was always illu- 
 minated by an infused omniscience ^% or is it an economical as 
 distinct from a real ignorance? Is it the ignorance of the 
 Teacher, who withholds from His disciples a knowledge which 
 He actually possesses, but which it is not for their advantage 
 to acquire x ? or is it the ignorance which is compatible with 
 implicit knowledge 1 Does Christ implicitly know the date of 
 the day of judgment, yet, that He may rebuke the forwardness 
 of His disciples, does He refrain from contemplating that which 
 is potentially within the range of His mental vision? Is He 
 deliberately turning away His gaze from the secrets which are 
 open to it, and which a coarse, earthly curiosity would have 
 greedily and quickly investigated y % 
 
 With our eye upon the literal meaning of our Lord's words, 
 must we not hesitate to accept any of these explanations % It is 
 indeed true that to many very thoughtful and saintly minds, 
 the words, ' neither the Son,' have not appeared to imply any 
 
 * ignorance' in the Son, even as Man. But antiquity does not 
 furnish any decisive consent in favour of this belief; and it 
 might seem, however involuntarily, to put a certain force upon 
 the direct sense of the passage. There is no sufficient gTound 
 for questioning the correctness of the text^; and here, as always, 
 
 * if a literal explanation will stand, the furthest from the letter 
 is commonly the worst.' If elsewhere, in the course of these 
 lectures, we have appealed to the literal force of the great texts in 
 
 " St. Greg.Magn. Epist. lib. x. 39. ad Eulog,: ^In naturd quidem humanitatis 
 novit diem et horam judicii, sed tamen hunc non e:criatura humanitatis novit.' 
 
 ^ St. Aug. de Trin. i. 12 : * Hoc enim nescit, quod nescientes facit, id est, 
 quod non ita sciebat ut tunc discipulis indicaret.* St. Ambros. de Fide, v. § 
 222: 'Nostrum assumpsit affectum, ut nostr^ ignoratione nescire se diceret, 
 non quia aliquid ipse nesciret.' St. Hil. de Trin. ix. 62. See the passages 
 accumulated by Dr. Newman, Select Treatises of St. Athanasius, p. 464, note 
 /, Lib. Fath. 
 
 y So Lange, Leben Jesu, ii. 3, p. 1280. 
 
 ^ St. Ambr.de Fid. v. § 193 : * Primum veteres non habent codices Grseci, 
 quia nee Filius scit.' 
 VIII ] 
 
460 Otir Lord's statefjtent in St. Mark xlii. 32, 
 
 St. John and St. Paul, as yielding a witness to the Catholic doc- 
 trine, can we substitute for the literal sense of the passage before 
 us, a sense which, to say the least, is not that suggested by the 
 letter *? If then we should understand that our Lord in His 
 Human Soul was, at the time of His speaking, actually ignorant 
 of the day of the last judgment, we shall find ourselves sheltered 
 by Fathers of unquestioned orthodoxy ». St. Irenseus discovers 
 in our Lord's Human ignorance a moral argument against the 
 intellectual self-assertion of his own Gnostic contemporaries^; 
 while he attributes Omniscience to the Divine Nature of Christ 
 in the clearest terms. St. Athanasius insists that the explanation 
 which he gives, restricting our Lord's ignorance to His Human 
 Soul, is a matter in which the faithful are well instructed c. 
 He is careful to assert again and again our Lord's omniscience 
 as God the Word; he attributes Christ's * ignorance' as Man 
 to the condescending love by which He willed to be like unto 
 us in all things d, and compares it, accordingly, to His hunger 
 
 » Klee says : ' It was impossible, in virtue of the Hypostatic Union, to as- 
 cribe to the Human Soul of Christ an absolute science and a perfect know- 
 ledge. On this subject, however, there is a very marked difference between 
 the Fathers.' Dogmengeschichte, ii. 4. 7. Of the Fathers cited by Klee the 
 majority assert a limitation of knowledge in our Lord's Human Soul. 
 
 *» St. Iren. adv. Hser. ii. 28, 6 : * Irrationabiliter autem inflati, audaciter 
 inenarrabilia Dei mysteria scire vos dicitis ; quandoquidem et Dominus, ipse 
 Filius Dei, ipsum judicii diem et horam concessit scire solum Patrem, mani- 
 festo dicens, " De die autem ill^ et hor^ nemo scit, neque Filius, sed Pater 
 solus." (Marc. xiii. 32.) Si igitur scientiam diei illius Filius non erubuit 
 referre ad Patrem, sed dixit quod verum est ; neque nos erubescamus, quse 
 sunt in quaestionibus majora secundum nos, reservare Deo. Nemo enim super 
 Magistrum est.' That St. Irenaeus is here referring to our Lord's humanity 
 is clear from the appeal to His example. Of His Divinity he says (ii. 28, 7): 
 ' Spiritus Salvatoris, qui in eo est, scrutatur omnia, et altitudines Dei.' Cf. 
 Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. ii. 5, 8. 
 
 c St. Athan. contr. Arian. Orat. iii. c. 45 : 01 Se (piXSxpifTToi koI xP"'"ro- 
 <t)6poL ytvdtXTKoofifv, ws ovK ayvoSov 6 A6yos ^ ASyos icrrh €\€y€V, ' ovk oida,' 
 o?5€ yap, aWa rh avBpwirivov Bcikpvs, '6ri tmu avOpcfjircov Wi6v fcrri rh ayvoeTv, 
 Kol Bti aapKa ayvoovrav ij/edixraro, iv 77 iiv (TapKiKOfs e\€y€V. Dr. Mill resents 
 the suggestion *that when even an Athanasius could speak (with the Scrip- 
 tures) of the limitation of human knowledge in the Incarnate Son, the im- 
 proved theology of later times is entitled to censure the sentiment, as though 
 impeaching His Divine Personality.' On the Nature of Christianity, p. 18. 
 
 ^ Ibid. C. 43 : aix€\€i \4ycov ii/ r^ (vayyeXiep irepl rov Kara rh avdpdoirivou 
 auTov' ndrep, i\-{]\vQcv 7) &pa' dS^aarSv crov rhv tidv 5ri\6s iariv Zri koi t^v 
 Trepi rov iravroov t4\ovs Sopav cos ficv A6yos yivdxTKei^ oos Se 6,vdpcDTros ayvour 
 avdpwTTOv yap t^iov rb ayvoelv, Koi fidXicTTa ravra. aWa Kal rovro rrjs (f)i\av- 
 Bpuirias Xbiov rov licar'qpos, eirci^^ yap yeyovej/ ^.vOpooiros^ ovk iTroAcrx^verai ^ih, 
 rrjv (TapKa ryjv ayvoovaav il-nilv^ ovk ol5a, 'Iva Set|77 'drt ctScbs ws Qehs aypoeT 
 capKiKus* OVK €Xp7]K€ yovi^j ouSe 6 Tibs rod ©eov oJfSev, 'iua fx^ r] deorrj^ ayvo- 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
explained by SS. Athanasms and Cyril Alex. 46 1 
 
 and thirst ®. ^ To whom,' exclaims St. Gregory Nazianzen, ^ can 
 it be a matter of doubt that Christ has a knowledge of that hour 
 as God, but says that He is ignorant of it as Man^ ?' St. Cyril 
 of Alexandria argues that our Lord's * ignorance' as Man is in 
 keeping with the whole economy of the Incarnation. As God, 
 Christ did know the day of judgment ; but it was consistent 
 with the law of self-humiliation prescribed by His infinite love 
 that He should assume all the conditions of real humanity, and 
 therefore, with the rest, a limitation of knowledge. There would 
 be no reasonable ground for offence at that which was only a 
 consequence of the Divine Incarnation s. You will remark, my 
 brethren, the significance of such a judgment when advanced by 
 this great father, the uncompromising opponent of Nestorian 
 error, the strenuous assertor of the Hypostatic Union, the chief 
 inheritor of all that is most characteristic in the theological 
 
 ovao. <f)aip7]Tai,' dAA' cnrKcos, * ovde 6 Tlhs/ 'iva tov e| a.vQpdo'nwv yevofx^uov Ttov 
 7} 6.yvoia 77. 
 
 « St. Athan. contr. Arian. Orat. iii. c. 46 : &(nr€p yhp &v6pwiros y€v6/jL€i/os 
 juera ai/dpwircov ireiv^ Kal di\pa /cat irdax^h ovtcos /uera fxcv rwv apOpdonoov ws 
 &vQpu)iTos ovK olSe, deiKccs Se iu rep Uarpl ^v A6yo5 Kal ^ocpia o?5e, Kal ovdev 
 iariv h ayvoel. Cf. ad Serap. ii. 9. 
 
 ^ St. Greg. Naz. Orat. xxx. 15 : Kalroi ttcos ayj/oe'i ri rSov ovtcjov t] 2o0ia 6 
 iroi7jTr]s rwv alwj/cov, 6 avvreKear^s Kal jUL^raironjr'^^s, rh irepas tuu yevofx^vwv ; 
 , . . . ^ iraaiv cvStjKou, on yivuxTKei /xei/, u>s ©ebs, ayvoe7v 5f cpricriv, cos ^vOpooiros^ 
 
 6.V Tts rh <paiv6jx^vov x^p'^^V "^^^ voov/xevov ; ^(rre ri]u 6.yuoiav viroKafx- 
 
 ^du€iv iirl t6 €va€^€<TT€pou, T(S OLvOpccTripcp^ fXT} T^) Qfio} TavTTjp \oyi(^<ifxei/ovs. 
 
 s St. Cyril. Alex. Thesaurus, Op. torn. v. p. 221: ooo-n-^p ovv (TvyKix^PVKfv 
 cavrhp u)s 'avOpooTvov y^vofxivou /JLera ai/Bpwirwv Kal Tretvau Kal ci\pi]V Kal ra 6.Wa 
 Trdax^iv airep e^prirai rrepl avrov, rov avrhv 5-^ rpoirou olkoXovOov /hi] (TKafSaKi^e- 
 crOai /c&v obi (xvOpoirros K^yri /uera avOpajTrcov ayvo^lv, (in rrjv avrr,v rnxtv ((pSp^rr^ 
 adpKa' ol^i fjilv yap ws ^.ocpia Kal ASyos &u iv UaTpl' /xt] dSevai Se (prjai Sz' rifxas 
 Kal fxid^ Tjfxwv ws ^.vQpwTTos. But see the whole discussion of the bearing of 
 St. Mark xiii. 32, upon the Homoousion (Thesaurus, pp. 217-224). Certainly 
 St. Cyril refers to the oiKouofiia, and he speaks of Christ's ' saying that He 
 did not know, on our account,' and of His professing not to know 'humanly.' 
 But this language does not amount to saying that Christ really did know, as 
 Man, while for reasons of His Own, which were connected with His love and 
 <pi\av9pw7ria, He said He knew not. St. Cyril's mind appears to be, that our 
 Lord did know as God, but in His love He assumed all that belongs to real 
 manhood, and, therefore, actual limitation of knowledge. The word olKovojxia 
 does not seem to mean, here simply a gracious or wise arrangement, but the 
 Incarnation, considered as involving Christ's submission to human limitations. 
 The Latin translator renders it 'administrationi sive Incarnationi.' St. Cyr. 
 Op. V. p. 218. St. Cyril does not say that Christ really did know as Man; he 
 must have said so, considering the bearing of his argument, had he believed 
 it. He thus states the principle which he kept in view : ovrw yap '^Kaarov 
 rwu K€yo[X€vwv iv rfj olK^ia rd^ei Kelaerai,' ovre rwv oaa irpdirei yvfxvc^ rep 
 Aoycf) Kara<pepofxevwv els rh avOpwinvov, ovre fi^v rwv avOpwnivwv avaPaivdvrwv 
 els rhv rrjs deorjjros \6yov. Thes. p. 253. 
 VIII ] 
 
4^2 The heresy of the Agnoetcs. 
 
 mind of St. Athanasius. It is of course true that a different belief 
 was already widely received within the Church : it is enough to 
 point to the * retractation' of Leporius, to which St. Augustine 
 was one of the subscribing bishops \ But although a contrary 
 judgment subsequently predominated in the West, it is certain 
 that the leading opponents of Arianism did not shrink from re- 
 cognising a limitation of knowledge in Christ's Human Soul, and 
 that they appealed to His own words as a warrant for doing soi. 
 * But have we not here,' you ask, * albeit disguised under and 
 recommended by the sanction of great names, the old heresy of 
 the AgnoetseT No. The Agnoetae attributed ignorance not 
 merely to our Lord's Human Soul, but to the Eternal Word. 
 They seem to have imagined a confusion of Natures in Christ, 
 after the Eutychian pattern, and then to have attributed igno- 
 rance to that Divine Nature into which His Human Nature, as 
 they held, was absorbed k. They were thus, on this point, in 
 agreement with the Arians : while Eulogius of Alexandria, who 
 wrote against them, admitted that Catholic fathers before him 
 had taught that, as Man, Christ had been subject to a certain 
 limitation of knowledge \ 
 
 ^ Quoted by Petavius, De Incarn. xi. ; c. l, § 14. Leporius appears to 
 have answered the Arian objections by restricting the ignorance to our Lord's 
 Human Soul, after the manner of St. Athanasius. He retracts as follows : 
 * Ut autem et hinc nihil cuiquam in suspicione derelinquam, tunc dixi, imm6 
 ad objecta respondi, Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum secundum hominem 
 ignorare : sed nunc non solum dicere non praesumo, verum etiam priorem 
 anatliematizo prolatam in hac parte sententiam.' Leporius, however, seems 
 really to have anticipated Nestorius in teaching a complete separation of our 
 Lord's Two Natures. Klee, Dogmengesch. ii. 4. 4. 
 
 i Compare Bishop Forbes on Nic. Creed, p. 146, 2nd ed. And see St. 
 Hil. in Matt. Comm. c. 26, n. 4 ; Theodoret in Ps. xv. § 7, quoted by Klee. 
 
 ^ See Suicer in voc. *A7vo7;Tai, i. p. 65 : ' Hi docebant divinam Christi 
 naturam (banc enim solam post Unionem agnoscebant, tanquam absorpta 
 esset planb humana), quaedam ignor^sse, ut horam extremi judicii.' Eulogius 
 of Alexandria, who wrote against them, denied any actual limitation of 
 knowledge in Christ's Manhood, but admitted that earlier Fathers had taught 
 this, irpbs t\]v t^v 'Apeiavcvv fxaviav avrKpepSfxevot ; but, as he thinks, because 
 olKovofjiiKdoTepov i^oKifxaaav kirX rfjs avOpoonSTriros ravra <p€p€iv fj Trapaxop^tv 
 iKeivovs /JLid4\K€iv ravra Karh t^s B^6rT}Tos. Apud Photium, Cod. 230, ed. 
 Bekker. p. 284, 6, sub fin. Klee distinguishes between the teaching of those 
 Fathers who denied that the Human Soul of Christ possessed unlimited 
 knowledge, and that of the Agnoetse, who ' speaking of the Person of Christ 
 without any limitations,' maintained that He did not know the day of judg- 
 ment. Dogmengeschichte, ii. 4. § 7- 
 
 1 It is remarkable that ' die Ansicht dass Christi Menschheit gleich nach 
 der Vereinigung mit dem Logos Alles wusste, als Irrthum des Arnold von 
 Villanova 1 309 formlich verurtheilt worden.' Klee, Dogmatik, p. 511. Arnold 
 attempted to maintain that his opinion was a necessary consequence of the 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Omniscience and li7nited knowledge, 463 
 
 'At any rate,' you rejoin, * if our Lord's words are to be taken 
 literally, if they are held to mean that the knowledge of His 
 Human Soul is in any degree limited, are we not in danger of 
 Nestorian error 1 Does not this conjunction of "knowledge" and 
 " ignorance " in one Person, and with respect to a single subject, 
 dissolve the unity of the God-man "^X Is not this intellectual 
 dualism inconsistent with any conception we can form of a single 
 personality % Cannot we understand the indisposition of later 
 theologians to accept the language of St. Athanasius and others 
 without an explanation, even although a sense which it does not 
 of itself suggest is thereby forced upon it ?' 
 
 The question to be considered, my brethren, is whether such 
 an objection has not a wider scope than you intend. Is it not 
 equally valid against other and undisputed contrasts between 
 the Divine and Human Natures of the Incarnate Son] For 
 example, as God, Christ is omnipresent ; as Man, He is present 
 at a particular point in space J^. Do you say that this, however 
 mysterious, is more conceivable than the co-existence of igno- 
 rance and knowledge, with respect to a single subject in a single 
 personality % Let me then ask whether this co-existence of igno- 
 rance and knowledge is more mysterious than a co-existence of 
 absolute blessedness and intense suffering % If the Scriptural 
 words which describe the sufferings of Jesus are understood 
 literally, without establishing Nestorianism ; why are we in 
 danger of Nestorianism if we understand Him to be speaking of 
 His Manhood, when He asserts that the Son is ignorant of the 
 day of judgment % If Jesus, as Man, did not enjoy the Divine 
 attribute of perfect blessedness, yet without prejudice to His 
 full possession of it, as God ; why could He not, in like manner, 
 as Man, be without the Divine attribute of perfect knowledge % 
 If as He knelt in Gethsemane, He was in one sphere of existence 
 All-blessed, and in another * sore amazed, very heavy, sorrowful 
 even unto death;' might He not with equal truth be in the 
 one Omniscient, and in the other subject to limitations of know- 
 
 Hypostatic Union. 'Quantum cito anima Christi fuit unita Divinitati, 
 statim ipsa anima scivit omnia, quae Deus scit ; quia alias, ut dicebat, non 
 fuisset cum e^ una persona, praecipue quia scire est circumstantia pertinens 
 ad suppositum individuale, et non ad naturam.' Eimeric. Direct, inquis. ii. 
 qu. II. qu. by Klee, Dogmengesch. ii. 4, 8. 
 
 ™ Stier, Reden Jesu in Matt. xxiv. 36. 
 
 " Scotus Erigena first taught the ubiquity of our Lord's Manhood ; in more 
 recent times it was prominently put forward by Luther, as an explanation of 
 his teaching on the Eucharist. See Hooker, E. P. v. 55. 2-7. 
 VIII ] 
 
464 Superhuman range of our Lord^s knowledge, 
 
 ledge ? The difficulty o is common to all the contrasts of the 
 Divine Incarnation ; but these contrasts, while they enhance our 
 sense of our Lord's love and condescension, do not destroy our 
 apprehension of the Personal Unity of the Incarnate Christ p. 
 His Single Personality has two spheres of existence : in the one 
 It is all-blessed, undying, and omniscient ; in the other It meets 
 with pain of mind and body, with actual death, and with a cor- 
 respondent liability to a limitation of knowledge. No such limi- 
 tation, we may be sure, can interfere with the completeness of His 
 redemptive office. It cannot be supposed to involve any ignorance 
 of that which the Teacher and Saviour of mankind should know; 
 while yet it suffices to place Him as Man in a perfect sympathy 
 with the actual conditions of the mental life of His brethren Q. 
 
 If then this limitation of our Lord's human knowledge be 
 admitted, to what does the admission lead ? It leads, properly 
 speaking, to nothing beyond itself. It amounts to this : that at the 
 particular time of His speaking, the Human Soul of Christ was 
 restricted as to Its range of knowledge in one particular direction. 
 
 For it is certain from Scripture that our Lord was constantly 
 giving proofs, during His earthly life, of an altogether super- 
 human range of knowledge. There was not merely in Him the 
 quick and penetrating discernment of a very holy soul, — not 
 merely *that unction from the Holy One' whereby Christians 
 instinctively *know all things' that concern their salvation. It 
 was emphatically a knowledge of hard matters of fact, not 
 
 o Bishop Ellicott, in Aids to Faith, p. 445 : * Is there really any greater 
 difficulty in such a passage [as St. Mark xiii. 32] than in John xi. ^7,, 35, 
 where we are told that those holy cheeks were still wet with human tears, 
 while the loud Voice was crying, " Lazarus, come forth \'* * 
 
 P See Leibnitz's reply to Wissowatius, quoted by Lessing, Sammtl. Schrift. 
 ix. 277: 'Potest quis ex nostra hypothesi simul esse ille qui nescit diem 
 judicii, nempe homo, et ille qui est Deus Altissimus. Quae hypothesis nostra, 
 quod idem simul possit esse Deus et homo, quamdiu non evertitur, tamdiu 
 contrarium argumentum petit principium.' 
 
 <i See Klee, Dogmatik, p. 5 1 1 : * Auch das kann nicht gesagt werden, dass 
 die menschliche Natur, wenn sie nicht absolut voUkommen und imperfectibel 
 ist, dann mit Unwissenheit behaftet ist ; denn nicht-allwissend ist nicht un- 
 wissend, sonst war Adam vor seinem Falle schon, und sind die Engel und 
 Heiligen in ihrer Glorie immerfort in der Unwissenheit. Unwissenheit ist 
 Negation des nothwendigen und ziemenden Wissens, und solche ist in der 
 Menschheit Christi nicht, in welche die ihr verbundene Gottheit alles zu 
 ihrem Berufe gehorige und durch sie alles zum Heile der Menschheit ge- 
 horige uberstromte. Darum war auch die Steigerung der Wissenschaft der 
 Menschheit keine Erlosung derselben, und fuUt der Einwand, dass, wenn die 
 Menschheit etwas nicht gewusst hatte, sie eine erlosungsbediirftige gewesen 
 ware, was doch nicht angenommen werden konne, weg.' 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Stcperhtmian rmige of Christ's knowledge as Man, 465 
 
 revealed to Him by the senses, and beyond the reach of sense. 
 Thus He knows the exact coin which will be found in the mouth 
 of the first fish which His apostle will presently take^. He 
 bases His discourse on the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, on 
 an accurate knowledge of the secret communings in which His 
 conscience-stricken disciples had indulged on the road to Caper- 
 naum s. He gives particular instructions to the two disciples 
 as to the finding of the ass on which He will make His entry 
 into Jerusalem*. He is perfectly cognizant of the secret plot- 
 tings of the traitor, although no human informant had disclosed 
 them^. Nor is this knowledge supernaturally communicated at 
 the moment ; it is the result of an actual supra-sensuous sight 
 of that which He describes. * Before that Philip called thee/ 
 He says to ISTathanael, ' when thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw 
 thee^.' Do you compare this to the knowledge of secrets 
 ascribed to Elishay, to Daniel z, to St. Peters? In these in- 
 stances, as eminently in that of Daniel, the secret was revealed 
 to the soul of the prophet or apostle. In the case of Christ we 
 hear of no such revelation ; He speaks of the things of heaven 
 with a calm familiarity, which is natural to One Who knows 
 them as beholding them 4n Himself b' 
 
 Indeed, our Lord's knowledge embraced two districts, each 
 of which really lies open only to the Eye of the Most High. 
 We will not dwell on His knowledge of the unsuspected future, 
 a knowledge inherent in Him, as it was imparted to those 
 prophets in whom His Spirit had dwelt. We will not insist on 
 His knowledge of a strictly contingent futurity, such as is 
 involved in His positive assertion that Tyre and Sidon would 
 have repented of their sins, i/they had enjoyed the opportunities 
 of Chorazin and Bethsaida ^ • although such knowledge as this, 
 considering the vast survey of motives and circumstances which 
 it implies, must be strictly proper to God alone. But He knew 
 the secret heart of man, and He knew the hidden thought and 
 purpose of the Most High God. Such a ^discerner' was He 
 * of the thoughts and intents' of human hearts d, so truly did His 
 Apocalyptic title, the 'Searcher of the reins and hearts®,' belong 
 
 ' St. Matt. xvii. 27. 
 
 * St. Luke ix. 47 ' l^oov rbv diaXoyiafihu rrjs Kapdlas avrwv. 
 
 * St. Matt. xxi. 2 ; St. Mark xi. 2 ; St. Luke xix. 30. 
 
 " St. John xiii. ii. ^ Ibid. i. 49. y 2 Kings vi. 9, 32. 
 
 ^ Dan. ii. 19. » Acts v. 3. ^ St. John vi. 61 : eV kavrQ, 
 
 « St. Matt. xi. 21. 
 
 ^ Heb. iv. 12 : KpiriKhs ivOv/jLvcrecov kol ivvoicou KapMas, 
 ® Rev. ii. 23. The message from Jesus to each of the angels of the seven 
 VIII ] H h 
 
^66 Stiperhtiman range of 'Chris fs htowledge, 
 
 to Him in the days of His historical manifestation, that * He 
 needed not that any should testify to Him of men, for He knew 
 what was in man^.' This was not a result of His taking careful 
 note of peculiarities of action and character manifested to the 
 eye by those around Him, but of His * perceiving in His Spirit' 
 and 'knowing in Himself s' the unuttered reasonings and voli- 
 tions which were taking shape, moment by moment, within the 
 secret souls of men, just as clearly as He saw physical facts not 
 ordinarily appreciated except by sensuous perception. This was 
 the conviction of His apostles. * We are sure,' they said, ' that 
 Thou knowest all things h.' 'Lord, Thou knowest all things,' 
 cries St. Peter, * Thou knowest that I love Thee^' Yet more, 
 in the Eternal Father Jesus encounters no impenetrable mys- 
 teries ; for Jesus no clouds and darkness are round about Him, 
 Bor is His way in the sea, nor His path in the deep waters, nor 
 His footsteps unknown. On the contrary, our Lord reciprocates 
 the Father's knowledge of Himself by an equivalent knowledge 
 of the Father. *As the Father knoweth Me, even so know I 
 the Father k' 'No man knoweth Who the Son is, but the 
 Father ; and Who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom 
 the Son will reveal Him 1.' Even if our Lord should be speak- 
 ing, in this passage, primarily at least, of His Divine omniscience, 
 He is also plainly speaking of a knowledge infused into and 
 possessed by His Human Soul, and thus His words supply the 
 true foil to His statement respecting the day of judgment. If 
 that statement be construed literally, it manifestly describes, not 
 the normal condition of His Human Intelligence, but an excep- 
 tional restriction. For the Gospel history implies that the 
 knowledge infused into the Human Soul of Jesus was ordinarily 
 and practically equivalent to omniscience. * We may conjecture,' 
 says Hooker, * how the powers of that Soul are illuminated. 
 Which, being so inward unto God, cannot choose but be privy 
 unto all things which God worketh, and must therefore of 
 necessity be endued with knowledge so far forth universal, 
 though not with infinite knowledge peculiar to Deity Itself i^.' 
 St. Paul's assertion that * in Christ are hidden all the treasures 
 
 Churches begins with the word (^a^ as if in order to remind these bishops 
 of His soul-penetrating omniscience. 
 
 f St. John ii. 25 : oh XP^'^^^ ^^X^^ ^'^" ''"'^ ixaprvpijcrri irfpl rov avdpcairoV 
 avTos yap iyivtca-Ke ri ^v iv rSi audpcoircp. s ISt. Mark ii. 8 ; v. 30. 
 
 ^ St. John xvi. 30 : vvv cX^afXiv 'dri ol^as irdvra. 
 
 * Ibid. xxi. 1 7 : Kupte, cv iravra oTZas' <tv yivuKTKeis '6ri <piXu ce. 
 
 k Ibid. X. 15. i St. Luke x. 22. "» Eccl. Pol. v. 54. 7. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Limitation of knowledge is not fallibility . 467 
 
 of wisdom and knowledge^/ may practically be understood of 
 Christ's earthly life, no less than of His life of glory. If then His 
 Human Intellect, flooded as it was by the infusion of boundless 
 light streaming from His Deity, was denied, at a particular 
 time, knowledge of the date of a particular future event, this 
 may well be compared with that deprivation of the consolations 
 of Deity, to which His Human Affections and Will were 
 exposed when He hung dying on the Cross. If ^ the Divine 
 Wisdom,' as Bishop Bull has said, ^ impressed its effects upon 
 the Human Soul of Christ 'pro temporum ratione, in the degree 
 required by particular occasions or emergencies o,' this would be 
 only one application of the principle recognised by St. Irenseus 
 and Theodoret, and rendered familiar to many of us in the 
 language of Hooker. * As the parts, degrees, and offices of that 
 mystical administration did require, which He voluntarily 
 undertook, the beams of Deity did in operation always accord- 
 ingly restrain or enlarge themselves p.' We may not attempt 
 rashly to specify the exact motive which may have determined 
 our Lord to deny to His Human Soul at one particular date 
 the point of knowledge here in question ; although we may 
 presume generally that it was a part of that condescending love 
 which led Him to becorrie ^ in all things like unto His brethren.' 
 That He was ever completely ignorant of aught else, or that He 
 was ignorant on this point at any other time, are inferences for 
 which we have no warrant, and which we make at our peril. 
 
 But it is not on this account alone that our Lord's Human 
 ignorance of the day of judgment, if admitted, cannot be made 
 the premiss of an argument intended to destroy His authority, 
 when He sanctions the Mosaic authorship and historical trust- 
 worthiness of the Pentateuch. That argument involves a con- 
 fusion between limitation of knowledge and liability to error ; 
 whereas, plainly enough, a limitation of knowledge is one thing, 
 and fallibility is another. St. Paul says that ^ we know in 
 
 " Col. ii. 3 : Iv <^ elci ircivres ol Orjaavpol rrjs crocpias koI rrjs yvcaaecos 
 aTr6Kpv(l)oi, 
 
 o Bull, Def. Fid. Nic. ii. 5, 8 : * Quippe divinam Sapientiam menti humanse 
 Christi effectus suos impressisse po'o temporum oatione^ Cliristumque, qii4 
 Homo fuit, 'npoKo-^ai aocpia, profecisse sapientia (Luc. ii. 52) adeoque pro 
 tempore suae airocnoKris, quo ista scientia opus non habebat (this seems to 
 hint at more than anything which the text of the New Testament warrants) 
 diem judicii universalis ignorare potuisse, nemini sano absurdum videbitur.* 
 
 P Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 54. 6. See Mr. Keble's references from Theodoret 
 (Dial. iii. t. 4, pars. i. 232; and St. Iren. Hser. iii. c. 19. 3. 
 VIII ] H h 2 
 
468 Recent assailants of the Pentateuch make Our 
 
 part^,' and that * we see through a glass darkly r/ Yet St. Paul 
 is so certain of the truth of that which he teaches, as to exclaim, 
 ^ If we or an angel from heaven preach any other Gospel to you 
 than that which we have preached unto you, let him be 
 accursed 8.' St. Paul clearly believed in his own infallibility as 
 a teacher of religious truth ; and the Church of Christ has ever 
 since regarded his Epistles as part of an infallible literature. 
 But it is equally clear that St. Paul believed his knowledge of 
 religious truth to be limited. Infallibility does not imply omni- 
 science, any more than limited knowledge implies error. Infal- 
 libility may be conferred on a human teacher with very limited 
 knowledge, by a special endowment preserving him from error. 
 When we say that a teacher is infallible, we do not mean that his 
 knowledge is encyclopsedaic, but merely that, when he does 
 teach, he is incapable of propounding as truth that which, in 
 point of fact, is not true*. 
 
 Now the argument in question assumes that Christ our Lord, 
 when teaching religious truth, was not merely fallible, but 
 actually in serious error. If indeed our Lord had believed 
 Himself to be ignorant of the authorship or true character of 
 the Book of Deuteronomy, we may presume that He would not 
 have fallen below the natural level of ordinary heathen honesty, 
 by speaking with authority upon a subject with which He was 
 consciously unacquainted. It is admitted tliat He spoke as 
 believing Himself to be teaching truth. But was He, in point 
 of fact, not teaching truth % Was that which He believed to be 
 knowledge nothing better than a servile echo of contemporary 
 ignorance? Was His knowledge really limited on a subject- 
 matter, where He was Himself unsuspicious of the existence of 
 a limitation % Was He then not merely deficient in information, 
 
 <i I Cor. xiii. 9 : !« fi^povs yap yivcaffKofiiv, 
 
 ' Ibid. ver. 1 2 : $\€iroiJiev yap &pTi bi' icrdirrpov iv alviyfiari, 
 
 • Gal. i. 8, 9. 
 
 * Cf. Bishop H. Browne, Pentateuch and Elohistic Psalms, p. 13 : * Igno- 
 rance does not of necessity involve eiTor. Of course in our present state of 
 being, and with our propensity to lean on our wisdom, ignorance is extremely- 
 likely to lead to error. But ignorance is not error : and there is not one 
 word in the Bible which could lead us to suppose that our blessed Lord was 
 liable to error in any sense of the^word or in any department of knowledge. 
 I do not say that we have any distinct statements to tKe contrary, but there 
 is nothing like a hint that there was such a liability : whereas His other 
 human infirmities, weakness, weariness, sorrow, fear, suffering, temptation, 
 ignorance, all these are put forward prominently, and many of them fre- 
 quently.* 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Lord both fallible, and a teacher of achial error, 469 
 
 but fallible ; not merely fallible, but actually in error % and has 
 it been reserved for the criticism of the nineteenth century to 
 set Him right % It must be acknowledged that our Lord's state- 
 ment respecting the day of judgment will not avail to sustain a 
 deduction which supposes, not an admitted limitation of know- 
 ledge, but an unsuspected self-deception of a character and 
 extent which, in the case of a purely human teacher, would be 
 altogether destructive of any serious claim to teach substantial 
 truth u 
 
 Nor is this all. The denial of our Lord's infallibility, in the 
 form in which it has come before us of late years, involves an 
 unfavourable judgment, not merely of His intellectual claims, 
 but of the penetration and delicacy of His moral sense. This is 
 the more observable because it is fatal to a distinction which 
 has been projected, between our Lord's authority as a teacher of 
 spiritual or moral truth, and His authority when dealing with 
 those questions which enter into the province of historical 
 criticism. If in the latter sphere He is said to have been liable 
 and subject to error, in the former, we are sometimes told. His 
 instinct was invariably unerring. But is this the case, if our 
 Lord was really deceived in His estimate of the Book of Deuter- 
 onomy, and if further the account of the origin and composition 
 of that book which is put forward by His censors be accepted as 
 satisfactory % Our Lord quotes Deuteronomy as a work of the 
 highest autliority on the subject of man's relations and duties 
 to God^. Yet we are assured that in point of fact this book 
 was nothing better than a pious forgery of the age of Jeremiah, 
 if indeed it was not a work of that prophet, in which he em- 
 ployed the name and authority of Moses as a restraint upon the 
 increasing polytheism of the later years of king Josiahy. That 
 
 ^ If a human teacher were to decline to speak on a given subject, by say- 
 ing that he did not know enough about it, this would not be a reason for 
 disbelieving him when he proceeded to speak confidently on a totally dis- 
 tinct subject, thereby at least implying that he did know enough to warrant 
 his speaking. On the contrary, his silence in the one case would be a 
 reason for trusting his statements in the other. The argument which is 
 under consideration in the text would have been really sound, if our Saviour 
 had fixed the date of the day of judgment, and the event had shewn Him 
 to have been mistaken. 
 
 ^ St. Matt. iv. 4, Deut. viii. 3 ; St. Matt. iv. 7, Deut. vi. 16 ; St. Matt, 
 iv. 10, Deut. vi. 13, and x. 20. 
 
 y Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. ii. p. 427: 'Supposing (to fix our ideas) 
 that Jeremiah really wrote the book, we must not forget that he was a 
 prophet, and, as such, habitually disposed to regard all the special impulses 
 VIII ] 
 
470 Coidd oicr Lord detect a pious f rated? 
 
 h^-pothesis has been discussed elsewhere and by others on its 
 own critical merits. Here it may suffice to observe, that if it 
 could have been seriously entertained it would involve our Lord 
 in something more than intellectual fallibility. If Deuter- 
 onomy is indeed a forgery, Jesus Christ was not merely ignorant 
 of a fact of literary history. His moral perceptions were at 
 fault. They were not sufficiently fine to miss the consistency, 
 the ring of truth, in a document which professed to have come 
 from the great Lawgiver with a Divine authority ; while, ac- 
 cording to modern writers, it was only the * pious' fiction of a 
 later age, and its falsehood had only not been admitted by its 
 author, lest its ^efiect' should be counteracted z. 
 
 When, in the middle of the ninth century, the pseudo- 
 Isidorian decretals were first brought from beyond the Alps to 
 
 of his mind to religious activity as direct inspirations from the Divine Source 
 of Truth. To us, with our inductive training and scientific habits of mind, 
 the correct statement of fads appears of the first necessity ; and consciously 
 to misstate them, or to state as fact what we do not know or believe from 
 external testimony to be fact, is a crime against truth. But to a man who 
 believed himself to be in immediate communication with the Source of all 
 Truth, this condition must have been reversed. The inner voice, which he 
 believed to be the voice of the Divine Teacher, would become all-powerful — 
 would silence at once all doubts and questionings. What it ordered him to 
 do, he would do without hesitation, as by direct command of God, and all 
 considerations as to morality or immorality would either not be entertained 
 at all, or would only take the form of misgivings as to whether, possibly, in 
 any particular case, the command itself was really Divine. 
 
 'Let us imagine, then, that Jeremiah, or any other contemporary seer, 
 meditating upon the condition of his country, and the means of weaning his 
 people from idolatry, became possessed with the idea of writing to them an 
 address, as in the name of Moses, of the kind which we have just been con- 
 sidering, in which the laws ascribed to him, and handed down from an earlier 
 age, which were now in many respects unsuitable, should be adapted to the 
 present circumstances of the times, and re-enforced with solemn prophetical 
 utterances. This thought, we may believe, would take in the prophet's mind 
 the form of a Divine command. All question of deception or fraus pia would 
 vanish.* 
 
 ^ Colenso on the Pentateuch, vol. ii. p. 429 : * Perhaps, at first, it was 
 felt to be difficult or undesirable to say or do anything which might act as a 
 check upon the zeal and energy which the king himself exhibited, and in 
 which, as it seems, he was generally supported by the people, in putting 
 down by force the gross idolatries which abounded in his kingdom. That im- 
 pulsive effort, which followed immediately the reading of the " Book," might 
 have been arrested, if he had been told at once the true origin of those awful 
 words which had made so strong an impression on him. They were not less 
 awful, indeed, or less true, because uttered in the name of Moses by such a 
 prophet as Jeremiah. But still it is obvious that their effect was likely to be 
 greatly intensified under the idea that they were the last utterances of Moses 
 himself.^ 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
One proved error fatal to Chrisfs aitthority, 471 
 
 Rome, they were almost immediately cited by Nicholas I. in 
 reply to an appeal of Hincmar of Eheims, in order to justify 
 and extend the then advancing claims of the Roman Chair * 
 We must then either suppose that this Pope was really incapable 
 of detecting a forgery, which no Roman Catholic writer would 
 now think of defending^, or else we must imagine that, in order 
 to advance an immediate ecclesiastical object, he could con- 
 descend to quote a document which he knew to have been 
 recently forged, as if it had been of ancient and undoubted 
 authority. The former supposition is undoubtedly most wel- 
 come to the common sense of Christian charity ; but it is of 
 course fatal to any belief in the personal infallibility of Pope 
 Nicholas I. A like dilemma awaits us in the Gospel history, if 
 those unhappy theories respecting the Pentateuch to which I 
 have alluded are seriously adopted. Before us is no mere 
 question as to whether Christ's knowledge was or was not 
 limited ; the question is, whether as a matter of fact He taught 
 or implied the truth of that which is not true, and which a finer 
 moral sense than His might have seen to be false. The question 
 is plainly, whether He was a trustworthy teacher of religious no 
 less than of historical truth. The attempted distinction between 
 a critical judgment of historical or philological facts, and a moral 
 judgment of strictly spiritual and moral truths, is inapplicable 
 to a case in which the moral judgment is no less involved than 
 the intellectual ; and we have really to choose between the in- 
 fallibility, moral no less than intellectual, of Jesus Christ our 
 Lord on the one hand, and the conjectural speculations of critics, 
 of whatever degree of critical eminence, on the other. 
 
 Indeed, as bearing upon this vaunted distinction between 
 spiritual truth, in which our Lord is still, it seems, to be an 
 authority, and historical truth, in which His authority is to be 
 set aside, we have words of His Own which prove how truly He 
 made the acceptance of the lower portions of His teaching a pre- 
 liminary to belief in the higher. ^If I have told you earthly 
 things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of 
 heavenly things^]' How indeed *? If, when He sets the seal 
 of His authority upon the writings of Moses as a whole, and 
 upon the most miraculous incidents which they relate in detail. 
 He is really only the uneducated Jew who ignorantly repeats 
 
 a Dean Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. ii. p. 379. 
 ^ Compare Walter, Lehrbuch des Kirchenrechts, pp. 206-210. 
 c St. John iii. 12. 
 VIII ] 
 
47 2 Christ's Deity illuminates His Passion, 
 
 and reflects the prejudice of a barbarous age ; how shall we be 
 sure that when He reveals the Character of God, or the precepts 
 of the new life, or the reality and nature of the endless world, 
 He is really trustworthy — trustworthy as an Authority to whom 
 we are prepared to cling in life and in deaths You say that 
 here your conscience ratifies His teaching, — that the ^ enthusiasm 
 of humanity' which is in you sets its seal upon this higher 
 teaching of the Redeemer of men. Is then your conscience in 
 very truth the ultimate and only teacher 1 Have you anticipated, 
 and might you dispense with, the teaching of Christ? And 
 what if your conscience, as is surely not impossible, has itself 
 been warped or misled % What if, in surveying even the moral 
 matter of His teaching, you still assume to exercise a * verifying 
 faculty,' and object to this precept as ascetic, and to that 
 command as exacting, and to yonder most merciful revelation of 
 an endless woe as * Tartarology ! ' Alas ! brethren, experience 
 proves it, the descent into the Avernus of unbelief is only too 
 easy. There are broad highways in the life of faith, just as in 
 the life of morality, which a man cannot leave without certain 
 risk of losing his way in a trackless wilderness. To deny our 
 Lord's infallibility, on the precarious ground of a single known 
 limitation of knowledge in His human intellect, is not merely an 
 inconsequence, it is inconsistent with any serious belief in His 
 real Divinity. The common sense of faith assures us that if 
 Christ is really Divine, His infallibility follows as a thing of 
 course. The man who sincerely believes that Jesus Christ is 
 God will not doubt that His every word standeth sure, and that 
 whatever has been sealed and sanctioned by His supreme 
 authority is independent of, and unassailable by, the fallible 
 judgment of His creatures respecting it. 
 
 (/3) If the doctrine of Christ's Divinity implies that as a 
 teacher of truth He is infallible, it also illuminates His suffering 
 death upon the Cross with an extraordinary significance. 
 
 The degrees of importance which are attributed to the several 
 events and stages of our Lord's Life on earth, will naturally vary 
 with the variations of belief respecting His Person. With the 
 Humanitarian, for instance, the dominant, almost the exclusive, 
 interest will be found to centre in Christ's Ministry, as affording 
 the largest illustrations of His Human Character and of His 
 moral teaching. The mysteries which surround His entrance 
 into and His departure from our human world, will have been 
 thrown into the background as belonging to questions of a very 
 inferior degree of importance, or possibly, as at best serving to 
 
 [ LECT, 
 
Huma7iitarian estimate of the Passion, 473 
 
 illustrate the legendary creativeness of a subsequent age. Per- 
 haps a certain historical and chronological value will still be 
 allowed to attach to Christ's Birth. Perhaps, if His Kesurrection 
 be admitted to have been a matter of historical occurrence, a high 
 evidential significance will continue to be assigned to it, such 
 as was recognised by Priestley and by all Socinians of the last 
 generation. And to a Humanitarian, the interest of Christ's 
 Death will be of a yet higher kind. For Christ's Death enters 
 into His moral Self-manifestation ; it is the heroic climax of His 
 devotion to truth ; it is the surest seal which a teacher can set 
 upon his doctrine. Thus a Humanitarian will admit that the 
 dying Christ saves the world by enriching its stock of moral life, 
 by setting before the eyes of men, for all future time, the 
 example of a transcendent sacrifice of self. But in the bare 
 fact that Jesus died, Humanitarianism sees no mystery beyond 
 that which attaches to the death of any ordinary man. The 
 Crucifixion is simply regarded as a practical appendix to the 
 Sermon on the Mount. And thus to the Socinian pilgrim, the 
 mountain of the beatitudes and the shores of the Sea of Galilee 
 will always and naturally appear more worthy of reverence and 
 attention, than the spot on which Mary brought her Son into the 
 world, or than the hill on which Jesus died. 
 
 Far otherwise must it ever be with a sincere believer in our 
 Saviour's Godhead. Not that he can be insensible to the com- 
 manding moral interest which the Life and teaching of the 
 Perfect Man ever rouses in the heart of Christians. That Life 
 and that teaching have indeed for him a meaning into which the 
 Humanitarian cannot enter ; since the believer knows that it is 
 God Who lives and speaks in Jesus. But contemplating Jesus 
 as the Incarnate God, he is necessarily attracted by those points 
 in our Lord's earthly Life, at which the contrast is most vividly 
 marked between His Divine and Eternal Nature and His state 
 of humiliation as Man. 
 
 This attraction is reflected in the believer's religious thought, 
 in his devotions, in the instinctive attitude of his interest towards 
 the Life of Jesus. The creed expresses the thought of the whole 
 company of the faithful. After stating that the Only-begotten 
 Son, consubstantial with the Father, for us men and for our 
 salvation came down from heaven and was made Man, the creed 
 proceeds to speak of His Crucifixion, Sufferings, Burial, Resur- 
 rection, and Ascension. The creed makes no allusion to His 
 example, or to the nature and contents of His doctrine. In an 
 analogous sense the Litany gives utterance to the devotion of the 
 VIII ] 
 
474 Chris fs Person the measure of His Passion, 
 
 collective Church. In the Litany, Jesus, our 'Good Lord,' is 
 entreated to deliver us 'by' the successive mysteries of His 
 earthly Self-manifestation. Dependent on the mystery of His 
 holy Incarnation are His 'holy Nativity and Circumcision,' 
 His 'Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation,' His 'Agony and 
 Bloody Sweat,' His ' Cross and Passion,' His ' precious Death 
 and Burial,' His 'glorious Resurrection and Ascension.' Here 
 again there is no reference to His sinless example, or to His 
 words of power. Why is this % Is it not because the thought 
 of the Church centres most persistently upon the Person of 
 Jesus] His teaching and His example, although they pre- 
 suppose His Divinity, yet in many ways appeal to us indepen- 
 dently of it. But the significance of His birth into the world, 
 of His varied sufferings, of His death, of His rising from the 
 tomb, and of His ascent to heaven, resides chiefly, if not al- 
 together, in the fact that His Person is Divine. That truth 
 illuminates these features of His earthly Self-manifestation, 
 which else might be thrown into the shade by the moral beauty 
 of His example or of His doctrine. The birth and death of a 
 mere man, and even the resurrection and glorification of a mere 
 man, would only be the accessories of a higher interest centring 
 in the range and influence of his ideas, in the force and con- 
 sistency of his conduct, in the whole bearing of his moral and 
 intellectual action upon the men of his time. But when He 
 Who is born, Who suffers. Who dies, Who rises and ascends, is 
 known to be personally and literally God, it is inevitable that 
 the interest of thought and devotion should take a direction in 
 which the 'mystery of godliness' is most directly and urgently 
 felt. Christian devotion necessarily hovers around those critical 
 turning-points in the Self-manifestation of the Infinite and Al- 
 mighty Being, at which His gracious and immeasurable Self- 
 humiliation most powerfully illustrates His boundless love, by 
 the contrast which it yields to the majesty of His Divine and 
 Eternal Person. No one would care for the birthplace or grave 
 of the philosopher, when he could visit the scene of his in- 
 tellectual victories ; but the Christian pilgrim, in all ages of the 
 Church, is less riveted by the lake-side and mountains of Galilee, 
 than by those sacred sites, where his God and Saviour first 
 drew human breath and where He poured forth His Blood upon 
 the Cross of shame. 
 
 Let us imagine, if we can, that our Lord's life had been 
 written, not by the blessed Evangelists, but by some modern 
 Socinian or Humanitarian author. Would not the relative pro- 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
All the Evangelists describe thePassioii in detail 475 
 
 portions assigned to tlie several parts of His life have been very 
 different from those which we find in the New Testament % We 
 should have been presented with an analytical exposition of the 
 moral greatness of Christ, in its several bearings upon the individual 
 and social life of man ; and His teaching would have been in- 
 sisted upon as altogether eclipsing in importance any questions 
 which might be raised as to His ^origin' or His ^ place" in the 
 world of spirits.' As for His Death, it would of course have 
 been introduced as the natural result of His generous conflict 
 with the great evils and corruptions of His day. But this 
 closing episode would have been treated hurriedly and with re- 
 serve. The modern writer would have led us to the foot of 
 Calvary. There he would have left us to our imagination, and 
 all that followed would have been summarized in a couple of 
 sentences. The modern writer would have avoided all semblance 
 of giving prominence to the ^physical aspects' of the tragedy, to 
 the successive insults, cruelties, cries, which indicated so many 
 distinct phases of mental or bodily agony in the sufferer. He 
 would have argued that to dwell intently on these things was 
 unnecessarily harrowing to the feelings, and moreover, that it 
 might distract attention from the general moral interest to which 
 the Death of Jesus was, in his judgment, only subsidiary. Clearly 
 he would not have followed in the track of the Evangelists. 
 For the four Evangelists, while the plan and materials of their 
 several narratives present many points of difference, yet concur 
 in assigning an extraordinary importance, not merely to the 
 general narrative of the Passion, but to its minute details. This 
 is more in harmony with the genius of St. Mark and St. Luke 
 than with that of St. Matthew ; but considering the scope and 
 drift of the fourth Gospel, it is at first sight most remarkable in 
 St. John. For instead of veiling the humiliations of the Word 
 Incarnate, St. John regards them as so many illustrations of His 
 ' glory ;' and, indeed, each of the four evangelical narratives, 
 however condensed may be its earlier portions, expands into the 
 minute particularity of a diary, as it approaches the foot of the 
 Cross. 
 
 Now this concurrent disposition of the four Evangelists is 
 eminently suggestive. It implies that there is a momentous 
 interest attaching, not merely to the Death of Christ as a whole, 
 but to each stage and feature of the great agony in detail. It 
 implies that this interest is not merely moral and human, but of 
 a higher and distinct kind. The moral requirements of the 
 history would have been satisfied, had we been compendiously 
 VIII ] 
 
476 Christ's Divinity explains Apostolical language 
 
 informed that Christ died at last in attestation of the moral 
 truth which He taught ; hut this detailed enumeration of the 
 successive stages and shades of suffering, both physical and 
 mental, leads the devout Christian insensibly to look beneath 
 the varying phases of protracted agony, at the unruffled, august, 
 eternal Person of the insulted Sufferer ; and thus Christian 
 thought rests with more and more of anxious intensity upon 
 the possible or probable results of an event so stupendous as 
 the Death of Christ. 
 
 Upon such a problem, human reason, left to itself, could shed 
 no light whatever. It could only be sure of this : — that much 
 more must be involved in the Death of Christ than in the death 
 of the best of men. Had Christ been merely human, greater 
 love among men, greater enthusiasm for truth as truth, greater 
 devotion to the sublimest of moral teachings and to the Will of 
 the Universal Father, greater contempt for pleasure when plea- 
 sure is in conflict with duty, and for pain when pain is recom- 
 mended by conscience, would certainly have followed upon His 
 Death. These effects follow in varying degrees upon every 
 sincere and costly act of human self-renouncement ; and the 
 moral kingdom of God is a vast treasure-house of saintly and 
 living memories, in which the highest place of honour is for 
 ever assigned to those who exhibit the most perfect sacrifice of 
 self. Nor, most assuredly, is any the least and lowest act of 
 sacrifice destined to perish : it thrills on in its undying force 
 through the ages ; it kindles, first in one and then in another 
 unit of the vast company of moral beings, a new devotion to 
 truth, to duty, to man, to God. But when we know that Jesus 
 Christ is God, we are prepared to hear that something much 
 more stupendous than any moral impulse, however strong and 
 enduring, must have resulted from His Death — something (as 
 yet we know not what) reaching far beyond the sphere and laws 
 of history, beyond the world of sense and of time, of natural 
 moral sequence, and of those ascertainable or hidden influences 
 which pass on from man to man and from age to age. 
 
 Nowhere is the illuminative force of Christ's Divinity more 
 felt than here. The tremendous premiss, that He Who died 
 upon the Cross is truly God, when seriously and firmly believed, 
 avails to carry the believer forward to any representation of the 
 efficacy of His Death which rests upon an adequate authority. 
 
 * No person,' says Hooker d ' was born of -the Virgin but the 
 Son of God, no person but the Son of God baptized, the Son of 
 d Eccl. Pol. T. 52. 3. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
respecting the efficacy of His Death, 477 
 
 God condemned, the Son of God and no other person crucified ; 
 which one only point of Christian belief, the infinite worth of the 
 Son of God, is the very ground of all things believed concerning 
 life and salvation by that which Christ either did or suffered 
 as man in our behalf.' ^That,' says Bishop Andrewes, ^ which 
 setteth the high price upon this Sacrifice is this, that He which 
 ofFereth it to God, is God^.' ^Marvel not,' says St. Cyril of 
 Jerusalem, ^ if the whole world has been redeemed, for He Who 
 has died for us is no mere man, but the Only-begotten Son of 
 God f/ ^ Christ,' says St. Cyril of Alexandria, ^ would not have 
 been equivalent [as a sacrifice] for the whole creation, nor would 
 He have sufficed to redeem the world, nor have laid down His 
 life by way of a price for it, and poured forth for us His precious 
 Blood, if He be not really the Son, and God of God, but a 
 creature ?.' 
 
 This, as has been already noticed, is St. Peter's meaning when 
 he says that we were not redeemed with corruptible things, as 
 silver and gold, but with the precious Blood of Christ, as of a 
 Lamb without blemish and immaculate ^ This underlies St. 
 Paul's contrast between the blood of bulls and goats and the 
 Blood of Christ offering Himself without spot to God \ This 
 is the substance of St. John's announcement that the Blood 
 of Jesus Christ the Son of God cleanseth us from all sin^. 
 Apart from this illuminating doctrine of the Godhead of Jesus 
 Christ crucified, how overstrained and exaggerated are the 
 New Testament representations of the effects of His Death 1 
 
 e Second Sermon on the Passion. For other references, see Rev. "W. 
 Bright's Sermons of St. Leo, p. 80. 
 
 f Catech. 13. 2 : [xt] Oavfid^rj^ et k6(tij,os '6Kos iKvrpdodri, ov yap ^v dvOpcoiros 
 \pL\hs, a\\' Tibs ©eoO iJ.ovoy€V7]s 6 virepairodu-fjaKcov. St. Proclus, Horn, in 
 Incarn. c. 5 : eSet roivvv 5vo7u ddrepov, f} iraa-ip iiraxBrjuai rhv Sk ttjs KaraUKrjS 
 ddvarou, kirei^^ kol ttolvt^s ^jxaprou' ^ toiovtov Sodrji^ai irphs avridocnu riixrifxay 
 ^ TTCiv virripx^ dLKaiooina irphs Trapairrjcriv. "Avdpcoiros /uev ovv auicrai ovk 7}dvi/aT0, 
 vir€K€iTO yap rw XP^^' ''"'5^ afMaprias. "AyyeAos i^ayopaa-aaOai r7]v apBpcoiroT'qTa 
 OVK icTxv^v-) rjTTopei yap roiovrov XvTpov, Aonrhv ovv 6 avafxdpTrjTos Qebs virep 
 Tcov rjuapTTjKSTCDV aivoQavilv ^(p€i\(v' avrt] yap iXelTrero fxovrj rod KaKov rj \v(ris. 
 C. 6 : o) rwv ji^ydXoov irpayixdroov ! iiWois itrpayiJLaTcvaraTO to aBdvarov, ahros 
 yap vTvripx^v aOdvaros. roiovTos yap 6,\\os Kar olKovojxiav ovre yeyovep^ oi^re 
 ^i/, ovT€ ecrrai Trore, ^ fiovos e'/c rrjs irapdevov rex^^ls Qebs Kol &vQpooTros' ovk 
 avrnaXavrevovaav fi6uov ^x^^ "^^^ a^iav rep TtXrjOei tcov virohiKoov, aXKa koI 
 ndcrais \p'f}(pois vTrip4xov(rav. c. 9 : duSpcoiros i//tAos (raJcoi ovk Xaxvc^ Qebs 
 yvixvhs iraQ^lv ovk ijbvpaTo. ri ovv; avros S}v &ehs 6 'Efifiapov^X, y^yoveu 
 Mpooiros. (Labbe, iii. 13 sq.) 
 
 s St. Cyril Alex, de Sancta Trinitate, dial. 4, torn. v. pp. 508, 509. See 
 too Ad Reginas, i. c. 7 ; Labbe, iii. 112. ^ i St. Pet. i. 19. 
 
 » Heb. ix. 13. ^ I St. John i. 7. 
 
 VIII ] 
 
478 Chrisfs Deity explains the power of His Death. 
 
 He has redeemed man from a moral and spiritual slavery 1; 
 He has made a propitiation for our sins^^; He has really recon- 
 ciled God and His creatures ^. But how is such a redemption 
 possible, unless the price be infinitely costly ? How could such 
 a propitiation be offered, save by One Whose intrinsic worth 
 might tender some worthy offering from a boundless Love to a 
 perfect Justice 1 How was a real reconciliation between God 
 and His creatures to be effected, unless the Eeconciler had 
 some natural capacity for mediating, unless He could represent 
 God to man no less truly than man to God % How could He 
 'exchange' Divine glory for human misery, or raise man in 
 his misery to companionship with God, unless He were Him- 
 self Divine ? Alas ! brethren, if Jesus Christ be not God, the 
 promises of redemption to which penitent and dying sinners 
 cling with such thankful tenacity, forthwith dissolve into the 
 evanescent forms of Jewish modes of thought, and unsubstantial 
 misleading metaphors. If Jesus be not God, we stand face to 
 face in the New Testament, not with the unsearchable riches, 
 the boundless mercy of a Divine Saviour, able * to save to the 
 uttermost those that come unto God by Him,' but only with 
 the crude and clinging prejudices of His uneducated or semi- 
 educated followers. But if it be certain that 4n this was mani- 
 fested the love of God towards us, because that God sent His 
 Only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through 
 Him o,* then the disclosures of revelation respecting the efficacy 
 of His Death do not appear to be excessive. Vast as is the con- 
 clusion of a world of sinners redeemed, atoned for, reconciled, the 
 premiss that Jesus Crucified is truly God more than warrants it. 
 And the accompaniments of the Passion are such as might have 
 been anticipated by the faith of the Church. Why those darkened 
 heavens'? Why that rent veil in the temple % Why those shattered 
 
 1 ^ATToXvTpcaa-is presupposes the slavery of humanity, from which Christ 
 our Lord redeems us by the XvTpov of His precious Blood. St. Matt. xx. 28; 
 I Cor. i. 30 ; Eph. i. 7, 14; iv. 30. The idea of purchase out of bondage is 
 vividly expressed by the verb i^ayop&^^iv, Gal. iii. 13 ; iv. 5. 
 
 ™ lXaafx6s presupposes the unexpiated sin of humanity, for which Christ 
 makes a propitiation. I St. John ii. 2; iv. 10; Heb. ii. 17. Our Lord 
 Himself is the Ovaia, the -Kpoatpopd (Eph. v. 2 ; Heb. x. 12); He is the Tratrxa 
 (i Cor. V. 7); He is the sacrificial cLfiv6s (St. John i. 29, 36; i St. Peter i. 
 19); He is the slain apviov (Rev. v. 6, 8, 12, 13 ; vi. l). 
 
 ° KaraKXayi) presupposes the existence of an enmity between God and 
 man, which is done away by Christ's 'exchanging' His glory for our misery 
 and pain, while He gives us His glory. Rom. v. 10 ; 2 Cor. v. 18, 19. 
 
 o I St. John iv. 9. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Beariiig of Christ' s Divinity on the Sacraments. 479 
 
 rocks? Why do those 'bodies of the saints which slept' return 
 from the realms of death to the city of the living % Nature, could 
 she speak, would answer that her Lord is crucified. But her 
 convulsive homage before the Cross of Christ is as nothing when 
 compared to a moral miracle of which the only sensible symp- 
 toms are an entreaty and a promise, uttered alike in human 
 words. ' Not when Christ raised the dead, not when He rebuked 
 the sea and the winds, not when He expelled the devils, — but 
 when He was crucified, pierced with the nails, insulted, spit 
 upon, reproached, reviled, — had He strength to change the evil 
 disposition of the robber, to draw to Himself that soul, harder 
 though it were than tbe rocks around, and to honour it with the 
 promise, 'To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise p.' That 
 promise was a revelation of the depth and height of His redemp- 
 tive power ; it was a flash of His Godhead, illuminating the true 
 meaning of His humiliations as Man. Tf then we believe Him 
 to be God, we bow our heads before His Cross, as in the presence 
 of fathomless mystery, while we listen to His apostles as they 
 unfold the results of His Death. If we are perplexed with some 
 difficulties in contemplating these results, we may remember that 
 we are but hovering, on the outskirts of a vast economy of mercy 
 reaching far away beyond our furthest sight, and that the seen will 
 one day be explained by the unseen. But at least no magnitude of 
 redemptive mercies can possibly surprise us, when the Kedeemer 
 is known to be Divine \ we say to ourselves with St. Paul, ' If 
 God spared not His Own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, 
 how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things ?' 
 
 (7) As our Lord's Divinity is the truth which illuminates and 
 sustains the world-redeeming virtue of His death ; so in like 
 manner it explains and justifies the power of the Christian 
 Sacraments, as actual channels of supernatural grace. 
 
 To those who deny that Jesus Christ is God, the Sacraments 
 are naturally nothing more than ' badges or tokens' of social co- 
 operation ct. The one Sacrament is only ' a sign of profession 
 and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned 
 from others that be not christened r.' The other is at best 'only 
 a sign of the love that Christians ought to have one towards 
 another «.' Thus sacraments are viewed as altogether human 
 acts ; God gives nothing in them ; He has no special relation to 
 
 P St. Chrysost. De Cruce et Latrone, Horn. i. § 2. torn. ii. 404. 
 q Art. XXV. condemns this Zwinglian account of Sacraments generally. 
 ^ Art. XXVII. condemns this Zwinglian account of Baptism. 
 8 Art. XXVIII. condemns this Zwinglian account of the Holy Communion. 
 VIII ] 
 
480 Sacraments not only signs, but means, of Grace. 
 
 them *. They are regarded as purely external ceremonies, which 
 may possibly suggest certain moral ideas by recalling the memory 
 of a Teacher who died many centuries ago ". They help to save 
 His name from dying out among men. Thus they discharge the 
 functions of a public monument, or of a ribbon or medal imply- 
 ing membership in an association, or of an anniversary festival 
 instituted to celebrate the name of sonie departed historical 
 worthy. It cannot be said that in point of effective moral power 
 they rise to the level of a good statue or portrait ; since a merely 
 outward ceremonial cannot recall character and suggest moral 
 sympathy as effectively as an accurate rendering of the human 
 countenance in stone, or colour, or the lines of an engraving. 
 Rites, with a function so purely historical, are not likely to 
 survive any serious changes in human feelings and associations. 
 Men gradually determine to commemorate the object of their 
 regard in some other way, which may perhaps be more in har- 
 mony with their personal tastes ; they do not admit that this 
 particular form of commemoration, although enjoined by the 
 Author of Christianity, binds their consciences with the force of 
 any moral obligation ; they end by deciding that it is just as well 
 to neglect such commeniorations altogether. 
 
 If the Socinian and Zwinglian estimate of the Sacraments had 
 been that of the Church of Christ, the Sacraments would long 
 ago have been abandoned as useless ceremonies. But the 
 Church has always seen in them not mere outward signs 
 addressed to the taste or to the imagination, nor even signs 
 (as Calvinism asserts) which are tokens of grace received inde- 
 pendently of them X, but signs which, through the power of the 
 promise and words of Christ, effect what they signify. They 
 are * effectual signs of grace and God's good-will towards us, by 
 the which He doth work invisibly in usy/ Thus in baptism 
 
 * Cat. Rac. Qu. 202 : ' Quomodo confirmare potest nos in fide id, quod 
 nosipsifacimits, quodque, licet a Domino institutum, opus tamen nostrum est, 
 nihil prorsus miri in se continens V 
 
 " Ibid. Qu. 334: 'Christi institutum ut fideles ipsius panem frangant et 
 comedant, et e calice bibant, mortis ipsius annuntiandse causa.' Ibid. 337 : 
 *Nonne alia causa, ob quam coenam instituit Dominus, superest? Nulla 
 prorsus. Etsi homines multas excogitarint.' 
 
 » See Cartwright, quoted by Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. 60. 3, note. 
 
 y Art. XXV. Cf. P. Lombard, lib. iv. d. i. 2 : ' Sacramentum est invisibilis 
 
 gratise visibilis forma Ita signum est gratise Dei, et invisibilis gratiae 
 
 forma, ut ipsius imaginem gerat et causa existat.' Church Catechism : 'An 
 outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained 
 by Christ Himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to 
 assure us thereof.* See Martensen, Christ. Dogm. p. 418, Clark's Transl. : 
 
 [lect. 
 
Christ' sGodheadwarrants thegraceof Sacraments. \^ i 
 
 the Christian child is made 'a member of Christ, a child of 
 God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven z.' And * the 
 Body and Blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and 
 received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper a.' 
 
 This lofty estimate of the effective power of the Christian 
 Sacraments is intimately connected with belief in the Divinity 
 of the Incarnate Christ. The importance attached to the words 
 in which Christ institutes and explains the Sacraments, varies 
 concomitantly with belief in the Divinity of the Speaker. If 
 the Speaker be held to be only man, then, in order to avoid 
 imputing to him the language of inflated and thoughtless folly, 
 it becomes necessary to empty the words of their natural and 
 literal force by violent exegetical processes which, if applied 
 generally, would equally destroy the witness of the New Testa- 
 ment to the Atonement or to the Divinity of Christ. But if 
 Christ be in very truth believed to be the Eternal Son of God, 
 then the words in which He provides for the communication of 
 His life-giving Humanity in His Church to the end of time may 
 well be allowed to stand in all the force and simplicity of their 
 natural meaning. Baptism will then be the laver of a real 
 regeneration^; the Eucharist will be a real * communion of the 
 Body and Blood' of the Incarnate Jesus c. If, with our eye 
 
 *The essential difference' [between Prayer and Sacraments] ' consists in this: 
 the sacred tokens of the New Covenant contain also an actual communication 
 of the Being and Life of the risen Christ, Who is the Redeemer and Per- 
 fecter, not only of man's spiritual, but of man's corporeal nature. In Prayer 
 there is only a unio mystica, a real, yet only spiritual, psychological union : 
 but in the Sacraments the deepest mystery rests in the truth that in them 
 Christ communicates Himself, not only spiritually, but in His glorified cor- 
 poreity.' 2 Church Catechism. 
 
 * Ibid. Mr. Fisher observes that * out of twenty-five questions of which 
 the Catechism now consists, no less than seventeen relate exclusively to the 
 nature and efficacy of the Sacraments.* Liturgical Purity, p. 293, ist ed. 
 
 ^ Tit. iii. 5 : dia Xovrpov iraKiyyeviffias. Common Prayer-book, Office of 
 Private Baptism : * This child, who being born in original sin and in the 
 wrath of God, is now by the laver of regeneration in Baptism received into 
 the number of the children of God.' For the connection between Baptismal 
 grace and our Lord's Divinity, see St. Cyril Alex, de Rect^ Fide, c. 37 : T/ 
 Spcty, w ouTos, KaraKOfxi^av rj/xcou els yrjv r^t/ iXnida ; ^cfiuTrriafxeda yap ovk els 
 &vdpQ}Trov clttAws, aAA.' ds &€hu ivTjj/dpcoiryjKOTa, Kal avUvra iroipris koX tcou 
 apxodojv alriaixoLTwv rovs rrju ets avrbu iriariv iKdedey/xivovs .... airoXvoov 
 yap a/jLapTtas tov avrcp TrpodKeiixevov^ rep ISiep Xoiirou Karaxp^^ei irvevixari' oTrcp 
 ivi7}(n fx\v avrhs, cos ck 0eoD Uarpos Adyos^ Kal i^ Idias 7]Ixlv avairrjyd^ei (pvaecos. 
 He quotes Rom. viii. 9, 10. 
 
 ^ I Cor. X. 16 : Koivcavia rov aifiaros rod Xpiorrov . . . Koivoovia rod (Tdc- 
 fiaros rov Xpiarov. St. Just. Mart. Apol. i. 66 : Ov yap cos Koivhv &prov oif^e 
 Koivhv TrSfxa. ravra. Xafi^dvofLev' aW* tv rpSirov dib. Adyov ®eov aapKotroi'qBiis 
 
 viii] I i 
 
482 Faith in Chrisfs Divinity forbids 
 
 upon Christ's actual Godhead, we carefully weigh the momen- 
 tous sentences in which He ordained ^ and the still more 
 explicit terms in which He explained e, His institutions ; if we 
 ponder well His earnestly enforced doctrine, that they who 
 would have part in the Eternal Life must be branches of that 
 Living Vine ^ whose trunk is Himself ; if we listen to His 
 Apostle proclaiming that we are members of His Body, from 
 His Flesh and from His Bones? ; then in a sphere, so inacces- 
 sible to the measurements of natural reason, so absolutely 
 controlled by the great axioms of faith, it will not seem incre- 
 dible that * as many as have been baptized into Christ' should 
 really ^have put on Christ^,' or that *the Body of Jesus Christ 
 which was given for us' should now, when received sacramen- 
 tally, * preserve our bodies and souls unto everlasting life i.' In 
 view of our Lord's Divinity, we cannot treat as so much 
 profitless and vapid metaphor the weighty sentences which 
 
 *l7;(roi;s XptCT^s oSwr^p t]ix.o}v kox trapva koL ci^ixa virep (Turrjplas rj/xuv %ax^^> otroiS 
 KoX T^v 81' evxvs \6yov rod Trap' aitrov €vxo.pi(Xri]B€L<Tav rpocp^v, l| i}s oSfxa Koi 
 <rdpK€S Kara fXfTa^o\^u rpctpovTai ^/ucSj/, iKfivov rod aapKoiroirjdivros 'Itjcov koI 
 cdpKu Kol at/xa eSiSctx^T^yuei/ ihai. Cf. Dorner, Person Christi, Erster Theil, 
 p. 435, note 47 : 'Justin denkt sich den ganzen Christus in Verbindung mit 
 dem Abendmahl. Auch so kann er sich diese unter dem Bilde der Incar- 
 nation denken, indem Christus die Elemente zum sichbaren Organ seiner 
 Wirksamkeit und Selbstmittheilung macht, und das durch seine Erhohung 
 verlome Moment der Sichtbarkeit seiner objectiven Erscheinung sich in 
 jedem Abendmahl durch Assumtion der sichtbaren Elemente wieder her- 
 stellt.' For the connection between the Holy Eucharist and our Lord's 
 Divinity, see St. Cjrril Alex. Epist. Synod, ad Nestorium, c. 7 : TV o-vaifxaK- 
 rov iv rails iKKXyjclais reXovfJLcv duciav, irpdcri/xfp re ovtcd TaTs jxvariKcus ehXo- 
 yiais Koi ayia^SfXida, fx^roxoi yeySfxevoi ttjs t6 ayias aapKhs, Koi rod rifilov 
 cdfjMros rov rrdur(t)y riyiuv 1,<aTripos Xpiarov' Kal ovx w$ aapKu koip^v ^ex^f^^voi 
 (/i^ yfvoiro) oiire firji/ us dvdphs rjyiaa/xfvov koI ffvPacpOevros ra> A6yc() Kara 
 rijp kv6r7)ra tt}s d|tay, ^yovv ws diiav ivoiK-qcriv iffxw^'^o^^ d\?C cos ^(oonoibj/ 
 aKrjOcos Kal Idiav aurov rod ASyov. Za>5; yap tiv Kara (pvcriv ws &€os, iireid^ 
 yeyoviv %v irphs r^p cavrov aapKa, ^cooiroibp direcp'qvip aurr^p. This epistle, 
 given in Routh, Scr. Opusc. ii. 17, ed. 3, was written Nov. 430, and read 
 with tacit approval, as it seems, at the General Council of Ephesus in 431. 
 (See Bright's Hist. Ch. pp. 326, 333.) A similar passage is in St. Cyril's 
 Explanatio xii. Capitum, (tom. vi. p. 156,) to the effect that the Body and 
 Blood in the Holy Eucharist are ovx ^'^^^ '^^^ ''"^' rifxas Ka\ apdpdoirov koipov, 
 but tBiop (TUjxa Koi al/xa rod ra irdpra ^ojoyopovvros A6yov' koip^ yap crap^ 
 (woTfoiciP oh dvparai, Kal rovrov fxdprvs avros b ^cor^p, \4ycop, * 'H aap^ ovk 
 u<p€\€7 ovdep, ro Trpev/xd iffri ro ^woiroiovp.' So in his Comm. in Joan. lib. iv. 
 (tom. iv. p. 361) he says that as Christ's Flesh, by union with the Word, 
 Who is essentially Life, ((aoiroibs yiyope, therefore 'drap avrrjs aTroyevaSiuLeda, 
 r6r€ r)]p ^wr/f ^xofx^P ip eavroTs, ^ St. Matt, xxviii. 19 ; xxvi. 26. 
 
 • St. John iii. 5 ; vi. 53 sqq. ^ 1 St. John xv. i sqq. e Eph. v. 30. 
 ^ Gal. iii. 27. * Communion Service. 
 
 [lect. 
 
depreciation of the Christian Sacraments, 483 
 
 Apostles have traced around the Font and the Altar, any more 
 than we can deal thus lightly with the precious hopes and 
 promises that are graven by the Divine Spirit upon the Cross. 
 The Divinity of Christ warrants the realities of sacramental 
 grace as truly as it warrants the cleansing virtue of the Atoning 
 Blood. If it forbids our seeing in the Great Sacrifice for sin, 
 nothing higher than a moral exemplar ; it also forbids our 
 degrading the august institutions of the Divine Redeemer to the 
 level of the dead ceremonies of the ancient law. And con- 
 versely, belief in the reality of sacramental grace protects belief 
 in a Christ Who is really Divine. Sacraments, if fully believed 
 in, furnish outworks in the religious thought and in the daily 
 habits of the Christian, which necessarily and jealously guard 
 the prerogatives and honour of his adorable Lord. 
 
 That depreciation of the Sacraments has often been followed 
 by depreciation of our Lord's Eternal Person is a simple matter 
 of historyj. True, there have been and are earnest believers in 
 our Lord's Divinity who deny the realities of sacramental grace. 
 But experience appears to shew that their position may be only 
 a transitional one. History illustrates the tendency to Huma- 
 nitarian declension even in cases where sacramental belief, al- 
 though imperfect, has been far nearer to the truth than is the 
 bare naturalism of Zwingli^. Many English Presbyterian congre- 
 
 3 Mill, University Sermons, p. 190 ; Gladstone on Church Principles, p. 185. 
 
 ^ Zwingli de Vera et Fals^ Relig. Op. iii. p. 263. n. A: *Est ergo sive 
 eucharistia sive synaxis, sive coena dominica nihil aliud quam commemoratio, 
 qu^ ii, qui se Christi morte et sanguine firmiter credunt patri reconciliatos 
 esse, hanc vitalem mortem annunciant, hoc est laudant, gratulantur et 
 pisedicant. Jam ergo sequitur, quod qui ad hunc usum aut festivitatem 
 conveniunt mortem domini coramemoraturi, hoc est annunciaturi, sese unius 
 
 corporis esse membra, sese unum panem esse ipso facto testentur 
 
 Qui ergo cum Christianis commeat, quum mortem domini annuntiant, qui 
 simul symbolicum panem aut carnem edit, is nimirum postek secundum 
 Christi prsescriptum vivere debet, nam experimentum dedit aliis, quod 
 Christo fidat.' Here God does and gives nothing ; the ceremony described 
 is not a * means of grace' but only and simply an act of man, a human 
 ceremonial action, expressive of certain ideas and convictions, shared by 
 those who take part in it. It is substantially the same account as that 
 which is given in the formal documents of early Socinianism. (Cat. Rac. 
 qu. 334, 335, 337) It would be an extreme injustice to Calvin to identify 
 his belief on the subject with these unspiritual errors. Calvin even says : 
 ' Quicquid ad exprimendam veram substantialemque corporis ac sanguinis 
 Domini communicationem, quae sub sacris coense symbolis fidelibus exhi- 
 betur, lib enter recipio ; atque ita ut non imaginatione duntaxat aut mentis 
 intelligentia percipere, sed ut re ipsa frui in alimentum vitce ceternce intelli- 
 gantur.' Instit. iv. 17, 19. The force of this language was, however, prac- 
 tically destroyed by Calvin's doctrine of Divine decrees, which mad©:: ' 
 VIII ] I i 2 ^j:^^ 
 
 m^: 
 
484 Sacraments preserve faith in Christ's Divinity, 
 
 gations, founded by men who fell away from the Church in the 
 seventeenth century, were, during the eighteenth, absorbed into 
 Arianism or Socinianisml. The pulpit and the chair of Calvin 
 are now filled by teachers who have, alas ! much more in common 
 with the Kacovian Catechism than with the positive elements of 
 the theology of the Institutes'^. The restless mind of man cannot 
 but at last press a principle to the real limit of its application, 
 even although centuries should intervene between the premiss 
 and the conclusion. If we imagine that the Sacraments are only 
 picturesque memorials of an absent Christ, we are already in 
 a fair way to believe that the Christ Who is thus commemorated 
 as absent by a barren ceremony is Himself only and purely 
 human. Certainly if Christ were not Divine, the efficacy of 
 Sacraments as channels of graces that flow from His Manhood 
 would be the wildest of fancies. Certainly if Sacraments are 
 not thus channels of His grace, it is difficult to shew that they 
 have any rightful place in a dispensation, from which the dead 
 forms and profitless shadows of the synagogue have been 
 banished, and where all that is authorized is instinct with the 
 power of a heavenly life. The fact that such institutions as the 
 Sacraments are lawful in such a religion as the Gospel, of itself 
 implies their real efficacy : their efficacy points to the Godhead 
 of their Founder. Instead of only reviving the thought of a 
 distant past, they quicken all the powers of the Christian by 
 
 sacramental grace wholly dependent upon the sense of election, that is to 
 say, upon the subjective state, upon the feelings, of the believer, instead of upon 
 the promise and word of Christ. Thus it happened that humble minds among 
 Calvinists would naturally, in virtue of their very self-distrust, tend to adopt 
 a Zwinglian estimate of the Eucharist : and, historically speaking, Calvinism 
 has in this matter shewn a consistent disposition to degenerate in a 
 Zwinglian direction. Belief in the reality of Sacramental grace is only 
 secured, when men beUeve that such grace depends not on themselves but on 
 the promise and words of their Saviour, in other words, that it is objective. 
 And the objectivity of Sacramental grace implies of necessity an Omnipotent 
 Saviour, Whose grace it is. St. Augustine's famous saying, ' Accedit verbum 
 ad elementum, et fit Sacramentum,' is hopelessly unintelligible, unless He who 
 institutes the Sacrament and warrants its abiding efficacy be indeed Divine. 
 
 1 See Bogue and Bennett's History of Dissenters, iii. 240, 319 ; iv. 319, 
 383 ; and the Law Magazine, vol. xv. (May, 1836,) p. 348. In our own 
 country, other Calvinistic communions have in general been happily preserved 
 from such a fall. But the case of English Presbyterianism finds parallels in 
 Geneva, in Holland, in France, and in America. Such loss of truth by others 
 can never give Churchmen any ' controversial ' satisfaction ; the more truth 
 is held by Dissenters, the better both for them, and for the honour of Christ. 
 But the subject may suggest warnings to ourselves. 
 
 ™ Laing's Notes of a Traveller, pp. 324-5, quoted in Chr. Rem. July, 1863, 
 p. 247. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Priesthood and Royalty of the Divine Christ, 485 
 
 union with a present and living Saviour ; they assure us that 
 Jesus of Nazareth is to us at this moment what He was to 
 His first disciples eighteen centuries ago 3 they make us know 
 and feel that He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, 
 unchanging in His human tenderness, because Himself the 
 unchanging God. It is the doctrine of Christ's Divinity to 
 which they point, and which in turn irradiates the perpetuity 
 and the reality of their power. 
 
 (S) It is unnecessary for us to dwell more at length upon the 
 light which our Lord's Divinity sheds upon His Priestly office. 
 We know that as His promise and presence make poor human 
 words and simple elements the channels of His mercy, by taking 
 them up into His kingdom and giving them a power which of 
 themselves they have not, so it is His Divinity which makes 
 His Intercession in Heaven so omnipotent a force. He inter- 
 cedes above, by His very presence ; He does not bend as a 
 suppliant before the Sanctity of God ; He is a Priest upon His 
 Throne ». Nor may we linger over the bearings of His Divinity 
 upon His Kingly office. The fact that He rules with a bound- 
 less power, may assure us that, whether willingly or by con- 
 straint, yet assuredly in the end, all moral beings shall be put 
 under Him o. But you do not question the legitimacy of this 
 obvious inference. And time forbids us to linger upon the 
 topic, suggestive and interesting as it is. We pass then to 
 consider an objection which will have been taking shape in 
 many minds during the course of the preceding discussion. 
 
 III. You admit that the doctrine of Christ's Godhead illumi- 
 nates the force of other doctrines in the Christian creed, and 
 that it explains the importance attributed to her sacramental 
 ordinances by the Christian Church. But you have the interests 
 of morality at heart ; and you are concerned lest this doctrine 
 should not merely fail to stimulate the moral life of men, but 
 should even deprive mankind of a powerful incentive to moral 
 energy. The Humanitarian Christ is, you contend, the most 
 precious treasure in the moral capital of the world. He is the 
 Perfect Man ; and men can really copy a life which a brother 
 man has lived. But if Christ's Godhead be insisted on, you 
 contend that His Human Life ceases to be of value as an 
 
 " Zech. vi. 13. Christ's perpetual presentatioi;i of Himself before the 
 Father is that which constitutes His Intercession. It lasts until the Judg- 
 ment, as the enduring antitype to the High Priest's presentation of the 
 victim's blood in the Holy of Holies. Heb. viii. 3 ; ix. 24, 
 
 « I Cor. XV. 25 ; Heb. ii. 8. 
 VIIl] 
 
486 Objection to Chris fs Divinity on 7nor at grounds, 
 
 ethical model for humanity. An example must be in some 
 sense upon a level with those who essay to imitate it. A model 
 being, the conditions of whose existence are absolutely distinct 
 from the conditions which surround his imitators, will be 
 deemed to be beyond the reach of any serious imitation. If 
 then the dogma of Christ's Godhead does illuminate and sup- 
 port other doctrines, this result is, in your judgment, purchased 
 at the cost of practical interests. A merely human saviour 
 would at least be imitable ; and he would thus better respond 
 to the immediate moral necessities of man. For man is, after 
 all, the child of common sense ; and before he embarks upon a 
 serious enterprise, he desires to be reasonably satisfied that he 
 is not aiming at the impracticable. 
 
 I. Now this objection is of an essentially h 'priori character. 
 It contends that, if Christ is God, His Manhood must be out of 
 the reach of human imitation. It does not deny the fact that 
 He has been most closely imitated by those who have believed 
 most entirely in His true Divinity. In fact it seems to leave 
 out of sight two very pertinent considerations. 
 
 (a) The objector appears to forget, on the one hand, that 
 according to the terms of the Catholic doctrine, our Lord is 
 truly and literally Man, and that it is His Human Nature which 
 is proposed to our imitation. His Divinity does not destroy 
 the reality of His Manhood, by overshadowing or absorbing it. 
 Certainly the Divine attributes of Jesus are beyond our imita- 
 tion ; we can but adore a boundless Intelligence or a resistless 
 Will. But the province of the imitable in the Life of Jesus is 
 not indistinctly traced. As the Friend of publicans and sinners, 
 as the Consoler of those who suffer, and as the Helper of those 
 who want, Jesus Christ is at home among us. We can copy 
 Him, not merely in the outward activities of charity, but in its 
 inward temper; we can copy the tenderness, the meekness, the 
 patience, the courage, which shine forth from His Perfect 
 Manhood. His Human Perfections constitute indeed a fault- 
 less Ideal of Beauty, which, as moral artists, we are bound to 
 keep in view. What the true and highest model of a human 
 life is, has been decided for us Christians by the appearance of 
 Jesus Christ in the flesh. Others may endeavour to reopen 
 that question. For us it is settled, and settled irrevocably. 
 Nor are Christ's Human Perfections other than human ; they 
 are not, after the manner of Divine attributes, out of our reach ; 
 they are not designed only to remind us of what human nature 
 should, but cannot, be. We can approximate to them, even 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Chris fs Manhoodimitable, but only through Grace.^^'] 
 
 indefinitely. That in our present state of imperfection we 
 should reproduce them in their fulness is indeed impossible ; 
 but it is certain that a close imitation of Jesus of Nazareth is at 
 once our duty and our privilege. For God has ^predestinated 
 us to be conformed' by that which we do, not less than by that 
 which we endure, to the Human Image of His Blessed Son, 
 'that He might be the Firstborn among many brethren p.' 
 
 (i3) Nor, on the other hand, may it be forgotten that if we can 
 thus copy our Lord, it is not in the strength of our fallen nature. 
 Vain indeed would be the effort, if in a spirit of Pelagian self-re- 
 liance, we should endeavour to reproduce in our own lives the like- 
 ness of Christ. Our nature left to itself, enfeebled and depraved, 
 cannot realize the ideal of which it is a wreck, until a higher 
 power has entered into it, and made it what of itself it cannot be. 
 Therefore the power of imitating Jesus comes from Jesus through 
 His Spirit, His Grace, His Presence. Now, as in St. Paul's day, 
 * Jesus Christ is in us' Christians, 'except we be reprobates q.' 
 The ' power that worketh in us' is no mere memory of a distant 
 past. It is not natural force of feeling, nor the strength with 
 which self-discipline may brace the will. It is a living, ener- 
 gizing, transforming influence, inseparable from the presence of a 
 ' quickening Spirit r' such as is in very deed our glorified Lord. 
 If Christ bids us follow Him, it is because He Himself is the 
 enabling principle of our obedience. If He would have us be 
 like unto Himself, this is because He is willing by His indwelling 
 Presence to reproduce His likeness within us. If it is His Will 
 that we should grow up unto Him in all things Who is the Head, 
 even Christ » ; this is because His life-giving and life-sustaining 
 power is really distributed throughout the body of His members*. 
 Of ourselves we are 'miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked u.* 
 But we take counsel of Him, and buy of ' His gold tried in the 
 fire / and forthwith we ' can do all things through Christ That 
 strengtheneth us v.' It is the Spiritual Presence of Christ in the 
 Church and in Christian souls which makes the systematic imi- 
 tation of Christ something else than a waste of energy ^. But if 
 the Christ Whom we imitate be truly human, the Christ Who 
 thus creates and fertilizes moral power within us must be Divine. 
 His Divinity does not disturb the outline of that model which 
 is supplied by His Manhood ; while it does furnish us with a 
 stock of inward force, in the absence of which an imitation of 
 the Perfect moral Being would be a fruitless enterprise. 
 
 P Rom. viii. 29. ^ 2 Cor. xiii. 5. "^ l Cor. xv. 45. « Eph. iv. 15. 
 * Ibid. i. 23 ; iv. 16. " Rev. iii. 17. ^ Phil. iv. 13. ^ Eph. iv. 15-24. 
 VIIl] 
 
488 Moral frtcitfulness of faith in Christ's Godhead, 
 
 2. Indeed, it is precisely this belief in the Divinity of our 
 Lord which has enriched human life with moral virtues such as 
 civilized paganism could scarcely have appreciated, and which it 
 certainly could not have created. The fruitfulness of this great 
 doctrine in the sphere of morals will be more immediately appa- 
 rent, if we consider one or two samples of its productiveness. 
 
 (a) When Greek thought was keenest, and Greek art most 
 triumphantly creative, and Greek political life so organized as 
 to favour in a degree elsewhere unknown among men the play 
 of man s highest natural energies, Greek society was penetrated 
 through and through by an invisible enemy, more fatal in its 
 ravages to thought, to art, to freedom, than the sword of any 
 Persian or Macedonian foe^. And already in the age of the early 
 Caesars, Eome carried in her bosom the secret of her impending 
 decline and fall in the coming centuries. St. Paul detected and 
 exposed it in terms y which are not more explicit than those 
 employed by Tacitus and Juvenal. The life-blood of a race may be 
 drained away less nobly than on the battle-field. Every capacity 
 for high and generous exertion, or for the cheerful endurance of 
 suffering at the bidding of duty, all the stock of moral force on 
 which a country can rely in its hour of trial, may be sapped, 
 destroyed, annihilated by a domestic traitor. So it fared with 
 imperial Rome. The fate of the great empire was not really de- 
 cided on the Rhine or on the Danube. Before the barbarians had 
 as yet begun to muster their savage hordes along the frontiers 
 of ancient civilization, their work had wellnigh been completed, 
 their victory had been won, in the cities, the palaces, nay, in the 
 very temples of the empire. And upon what resources could the 
 old Pagan Society fall back, in its alarm at, and struggle with 
 this formidable foe % It could not depend upon the State. The 
 Emperor was the State by impersonation ; and not unfrequently 
 it happened that the Emperor was the public friend and patron 
 of the State's worst enemy. Nor could any reliance be placed 
 upon philosophy. Doubtless philosophy meant well in some of 
 its phases, in some of its representatives. But philosophy is 
 much too feeble a thing to enter the lists successfully with animal 
 passion \ and, as a matter of fact, philosophy has more than once 
 been* compelled or cajoled into placing her intellectual weapons 
 at the disposal of the sensualist. Nor did religion herself, in 
 her pagan g*uise, supply the needed element of resistance and 
 cure. Her mysteries were the sanction, her temples the scene, 
 
 » Dollinger, Heidentlium und Judenthum, bk. 9. i, 2. p. 684, etc. 
 y Rom. i. 24-32. 
 
 [lect. 
 
Its relation to the grace of Purity. 489 
 
 her priests the ministers of the grossest debaucheries : and the 
 misery of a degraded society might have seemed to be complete, 
 when the institutions which were designed to shed some rays of 
 light and love from a higher sphere upon the woes and brutalities 
 of this lower world, did but consecrate and augment the thick 
 moral darkness which made of earth a very hell 2. 
 
 Now, that Jesus Christ has breasted this evil, is a matter of 
 historical fact. His victory is chronicled, if not in the actual 
 practice, yet in the conventional standard of modern society. 
 Certainly the evil in question has not been fairly driven beyond 
 the frontiers of Christendom ; the tone of our social intercourse, 
 the sympathies of our literature, the proceedings of our law-courts, 
 would remind us from time to time Hhat the Canaanite is yet 
 in the land.' But if he is not yet expelled from our borders, at 
 least he is forced to skulk away from the face of a society which 
 still names the Name of Jesus Christ. The most advanced 
 scepticism among us at the present day does not venture with 
 impunity to advocate habits which were treated as matters of 
 course by the friends of Plato : even the licence of our sensuous 
 poetry does not screen such advocacy from earnest and general 
 indignation. This is because, far beyond the circle of His true 
 worshippers, Jesus Christ has created in modern society a pub- 
 lic opinion, sternly determined to discountenance and condemn 
 moral mischief, which yet it may be unable wholly to prevent. 
 This public opinion is sometimes tempted to disown its real 
 parentage and its undoubted obligations. Instead of rejoicing 
 to confess itself the pupil of Christ, it imagines schemes of 
 independent morality framed altogether by human thinkers, 
 which may relieve it of its sense of indebtedness to our Lord. 
 But as a matter of fact, all that is thus true and wholesome in the 
 national mind is an intellectual radiation from that actual mass 
 of living purity, wherewith the Healer of men has beautified the 
 lives of millions of Christians. And how has Jesus made men 
 pure*? Did He insist upon prudential and hygienic considerations? 
 Did He prove that the laws of the physical world cannot be 
 strained or broken with physical impunity % No. For, at least, 
 He knew human nature well; and experience does not justify the 
 anticipation that scientific demonstrations of the physical con- 
 sequences of sensual indulgence will be equal to the task of check- 
 ing the surging impetuosity of passion. Did Christ, then, call 
 men to purity only by the beauty of His Own example % Did He 
 
 * DoUinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, bk. 9. ii. 4. p. 718 sqq. 
 VIII ] 
 
490 Pttrity created by faith in a Divine Christ, 
 
 only confront them witli a living ideal of purity, so bright and 
 beautiful as to shame them into hatred of animal degradation ? 
 Again I say, Jesus Christ knew human nature well. If He had 
 only offered an example of perfect purity, He would but have 
 repeated the work of the ancient Law ; He would have given us 
 an ideal, without the capacity of realizing it ; He would have at 
 best created a torturing sense of shortcoming and pollution, 
 stimulated by the vision of an unattainable standard of perfection. 
 Therefore He did not merely afford us in a Human form a fault- 
 less example of chaste humanity. He did more. He did that 
 which He could only do as being in truth the Almighty God. 
 He made Himself one with our human nature, that He might 
 heal and bless it through its contact with His Divinity. He 
 folded it around His Eternal Person ; He made it His own ; He 
 made it a power which could quicken and restore us. And then, 
 by the gift of His Spirit, and by sacramental joints and bands, 
 He bound us to it^ j He bound us through it to Himself; nay, 
 He robed us in it j by it He entered into us, and made our 
 members His own. Henceforth, then, the tabernacle of God is 
 with men b j and ' corpus regenerati fit caro Crucifixi.' Hence- 
 forth Christian humanity is to be conscious of a Presence within 
 it^, before which the unclean spirit cannot choose but shrink 
 away discomfited and shamed ^, The Apostle's argument to the 
 Corinthian Christians expresses the language of the Christian 
 conscience in presence of impure temptations, to the end of time. 
 'Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall 
 I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members 
 of an harlot ? God forbid e.' From that day to this, the recoil 
 from an ingratitude which a Christian only can exhibit, the dread 
 of an act of sacrilege which a Christian only can commit, the 
 loving recognition of an inward Presence which a Christian only 
 can possess — these have been the controlling, sustaining, hallowing 
 motives which by God's grace have won the victory. But these 
 motives are -rooted in a doctrine of Christ's sacramental union 
 with His people, which is the veriest fable unless the indwelling 
 Christ be truly God. The power of these motives to sustain us 
 in purity varies with our hold on the master-truth which they so 
 entirely presuppose. Such motives are strong and effective when 
 our faith in a Divine Christ is strong ; they are weak when our 
 faith in His Divinity is weak ; they vanish from our moral life, 
 
 * Col. ii. 19. ^ Rev. xxi. 3. c Col. i. 27 ; 2 Cor. xiii. 5. 
 
 d St. Luke iv. 33. ^ i Cor. vi. 15. 
 
 Flect. 
 
The grace of Humility. 49 1 
 
 and leave us a prey to our enemy, when the Godhead of Jesus is 
 explicitly denied, and when the language which asserts the true 
 incorporation of an Almighty Saviour with our frail humanity is 
 resolved into the fantastic drapery of an empty metaphor. 
 
 (jS) If the civilized pagan was impure, he was also proud and 
 self-asserting. He might perhaps deem overt acts of pride an 
 imprudence, on the ground that they were likely to provoke a 
 Nemesis from some spiteful deity. The fates were against con- 
 tinued prosperity \ and it was unwise to boast of that which 
 they waited to destroy, — 
 
 *Invida fatorum series, summisque negatum 
 Stare diu, nimioque graves sub pondere lapsus f.' 
 
 But when this prudential consideration did not weigh with him, 
 the pagan gave full scope to the assertion of self in thought, 
 word, and act. The sentiment of pride was not in conflict with 
 his higher conscience, as would be the case with Christians. He 
 indulged it without scruple, nay rather upon principle, — 
 
 'Secundas fortunas decent superbise s^.* 
 He was utterly unable to see intrinsic evil in it ; and it pene- 
 trated in a subtle but intense form into the heart of those better 
 ethical systems which, like the later Stoicism, appeared most 
 nearly to rival the moral glories of the Gospel. Pride indeed 
 might seem to have been the misery of paganism rather than its 
 fault. For man cannot detach himself from himself. Man is 
 to himself, under all circumstances, an ever-present subject of 
 thought ; but whether this thought is humbly to correspond to 
 the real conditions of his existence, or is to assume the propor- 
 tions of a turgid and miserable exaggeration, will depend on the 
 question whether man does or does not see constantly and truly 
 that One Being Who alone can reveal to him his true place in 
 the moral and intellectual universe. Paganism was not humble, 
 because to paganism the true God was but a name. The whole 
 life and thought of the pagan world was therefore very naturally 
 based on pride. Its literature, its governments, its religious 
 institutions, its social organization and hierarchy, its doctrines 
 about human life and human duty — all alike were based on the 
 principle of a boundless self-assertion. They were based on that 
 cruel and brutal principle which in the end hands over to the 
 keenest wit and to the strongest arm the sceptre of a tyranny, 
 that knows no bounds, save those of its strongest lust, checked 
 and controlled by the most lively apprehensions of its selfish 
 
 ' Lucan i. 70. » Plaut. Stich. ii. i. 27. 
 
 VIII ] 
 
49^ The grace of Htimility how far a product 
 
 foresight. Now how did Jesus Christ confront this power of 
 pride thus dominant in the old pagan world. By precept % Un- 
 doubtedly. *The kings of the Gentiles/ He said to His followers, 
 
 * exercise lordship over them ; and they that exercise authority 
 upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so^.' 
 
 * Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased ; and he that hum- 
 bleth himself shall be exalted V By example ? Let us listen to 
 Him. * Learn of Me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart : and 
 ye shall find rest unto your souls 1^' ^ If I your Lord and Master 
 have washed your feet, ye ought to wash one another's feci I' 
 
 But why was His example so cogent ? What was it in Jesus 
 Christ which revealed to man the moral beauty and the moral 
 power of the humiliation of self? Was it that being a Man, 
 Who had within His grasp the prizes which are at the command 
 of genius, or the state and luxuries Avhich may be bought by 
 wealth, He put these things from Him ^ If He was only Man, 
 did He really forego wealth and station ? Were they ever — at 
 least on a great scale — within His reach ? Even if it be thought 
 that they were ; was His renunciation of them a measure of 
 *that mind which is in Christ Jesus J^,' to which St. Paul directs 
 the gaze of the practical Christian ? St. Paul, as we have seen, 
 meant something far higher than the refusal of any earthly 
 greatness when he drew attention to the self-renunciation of his 
 Lord and Master. * Being in the form of God, ... He emptied 
 Himself of His glory, and took on Him the form of a slave n.' 
 Historically speaking, it is not Christ's renunciation of earthly 
 advantages which has really availed to make Christians humble. 
 The strongest motives to Christian humility are, first, the nearer 
 sight of God's Purity and Blessedness which we attain through 
 communion with His Blessed Son, and next, or rather especially, 
 as the Apostle points out, the real scope and force of Christ's 
 own example. Christ left the glory which He had with the 
 Father before the world was, to become Man. He ^ took upon 
 Him our flesh, and suffered death upon the Cross, that all man- 
 kind might follow the example of His great humility ».' There- 
 fore the manifestations of humility in Christendom have varied, 
 on the whole, correspondingly with earnestness of belief in that 
 pre-existent glory from which the Redeemer bent so humbly to 
 the Cross of shame. Certainly, in Jesus this deepest of hu- 
 miliations was the fruit of His charity for souls ; whereas, in us, 
 
 ^ St. Luke xxii. 25. * Ibid. xiv. 11. ^ St. Matt. xi. 29. 
 
 1 St. John xiii. 14. "^ Phil. ii. 5. ^ Ibid. 6, 7. 
 
 Collect for Sunday before Easter. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
of faith in the Divinity of Christ. 493 
 
 humble thoughts and deeds are the necessary because the just 
 expression of a true self-knowledge. Yet, nevertheless, the 
 doctrine of Christ's true Godhead, discerned through the 
 voluntary lowliness and sufferings of His Manhood, braces 
 humility, and rebukes pride at the bar of the Christian con- 
 science. Can men really see God put such honour on humility, 
 and be as though they saw it not % Can a creature, who has 
 nothing good in him that he has not received, and whose moral 
 evil is entirely his own, behold the Highest One thus teaching 
 him the truthful attitude of a created life, without emotion, with- 
 out shame, without practical self-abasement? What place is there 
 for great assertions of self in a man who sincerely believes that 
 he has been saved by the Death of the Incarnate Son of God % 
 Who has the heart to vaunt his own opinion, or to parade his 
 accomplishments, or to take secret pleasure in income or station 
 or intellectual power, when he reflects upon the astonishing 
 grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, when He was rich, for our 
 sakes became poorP % It is the Incarnation which has confronted 
 human pride, by revealing God clearly to the conscience of men, 
 but also, and especially, by practically setting the highest possible 
 honour upon extreme self-humiliation. It is the Incarnation 
 which has led men to veil high gifts, and to resign places of in- 
 fluence, and to forego the advantages of wealth and birth, that 
 they might have some part, however fractionally small, in the 
 moral glories of Bethlehem and Calvary. It is the Incarnation 
 which has thus saved society again and again from the revo- 
 lutionary or despotic violence of unbridled ambitions, by bringing 
 into the field of political activity the corrective, compensating 
 force of active self-denial. An enthusiasm for withdrawal from 
 the general struggle to aggrandise self has fascinated those wor- 
 shippers of an Incarnate God, who have learnt from Him the 
 true glory of taking the lowest place at the feast of human life. 
 But the motive for such repression of self is powerful only so 
 far as faith in Christ's Godhead is clear and strong. The culture 
 of humility does not enter into the ordinary schemes of natural 
 ethics ; and Humanitarian doctrines are found, as a rule, to 
 accompany intellectual and social self-assertion. It has been 
 true from the first, it is true at this hour, that a sincere faith 
 which recognises in the Son of Mary, laid in His manger and 
 nailed to His Cross, none other than the Only-begotten Son of 
 God, is the strongest incentive to conquer the natural pride of 
 
 P 2 Cor. viii. 9. 
 VIII ] 
 
494 The grace of charity how far a prodtcct 
 
 the human heart, and to learn the bearing of a little child q — 
 that true note of predestined nobility — in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. 
 
 (7) Let us take one more illustration of the moral fruitfulness 
 of a faith in the Divinity of our Saviour. There is a grace, to 
 which the world itself does homage, and which those who bend 
 neither heart nor knee before the world's Redeemer admit to be 
 the consequence of His appearance among men. 
 
 Heathenism, as being impure and proud, was consistently 
 unloving. For as the one vice eats out the delicacy and heart 
 of all true tenderness, so the other systematically enthrones 
 self upon the ruins of the unselfish affections. Despite the 
 Utopian sketches which have been drawn by the philosophers of 
 the last century, the sentiment of ^humanity' is too feeble a 
 thing to create in us a true love of man as man. Man does not, 
 in his natural state, love his brother man, except it be from 
 motives of interest or blood-relationship. Nay, man regards all 
 who are not thus related to him as forming the great company 
 of his natural rivals and enemies, from whom he has nothing to 
 expect save that which the might or the prudence of self-interest 
 may dictate. 
 
 rh yap oiKeiov ini^ci 
 
 TTOLvd* 6fi6i>s' €v6vs 8' aTTrjiKov Kpabla 
 
 KaBos dfKJ} aXkoTpLOP^, 
 
 Such is the voice of unchristianized nature : man's highest love 
 is the love of self, varied by those subordinate affections which 
 minister to self-love : and society is an agglomeration of self- 
 loving beings, whose ruling instincts are shaped by force or by 
 prudence into a political whole, but who are ever ready, as op- 
 portunity may arise, to break forth into the excesses of an 
 unchecked barbarism. Contempt for and cruelty towards the 
 slave, hatred of the political or literary rival, suspicious aversion 
 for the foreigner, disbelief in the reality of human virtue and of 
 human disinterestedness, were recognised ingredients in the 
 temper of pagan times. The science of life consisted in solving 
 a practical equation between the measure of evil which it was 
 desirable to inflict upon others, and the amount of suffering 
 which it might be necessary to endure at their hands. Love of 
 mankind would have seemed folly to a society, the recognised 
 law of whose life was selfishness, and whose vices culminated in 
 
 4 St. Matt, xviii. 3. ' Find. Nem. i. 82. 
 
 fLECfT. 
 
of faith in the Divinity of Christ, 495 
 
 a mutual hatred between man and man, class and class, race 
 and race, thinly veiled by the hollow conventionalisms which 
 distinguished Pagan civilization from pure barbarisms. 
 
 How did Jesus Christ reform this social corruption % He gave 
 the New Commandment. * This is My commandment, that ye 
 love one another, as I have loved you*.' But was His love merely 
 the love of a holy man for those whose hearts were too dull and 
 earthly to love Him in return % Could such a human love as 
 this have availed to compass a moral revolution, and to change 
 the deepest instincts of mankind % Is it not a fact that Christians 
 have measured the love of Jesus Christ as man measures all love, 
 by observing the degree in which it involves the gift of self? 
 Love is ever the gift of self. It gives that which costs us some- 
 thing, or it is not love. Its spirit may vary in the degree of 
 intensity, but it is ever the same. It is always and everywhere 
 the sacrifice of self. It is the gift of time, or of labour, or of 
 income, or of affection ; it is the surrender of reputation and of 
 honour ; it is the acceptance of sorrow and of pain for others. 
 The warmth of the spirit of love varies with the felt greatness 
 of the sacrifice which expresses it and which is its life. There- 
 fore the love of the Divine Christ is infinite. * He loved me,' 
 says an apostle, 'and gave Himself for me".' The * Self which 
 He gave for man was none other than the Infinite God : the 
 reality of Christ's Godhead is the truth which can alone measure 
 the greatness of His love. The charities of His earthly life are 
 but so many sparks from the central column of flame, which 
 burns in the Self-devotion of the Eternal Son of God. The 
 agonies of His Passion are illuminated each and all with a moral 
 no less than a doctrinal meaning, by the momentous truth that 
 He Who is crucified between two thieves is nevertheless the 
 Lord of Glory. From this faith in the voluntary Self-immolation 
 of the Most Holy, a new power of love has streamed forth into 
 the soul of man. Of this love, before the Incarnation, man not 
 only had no experience ; his moral education would not have 
 trained him even to admire it. But the Infinite Being bowing 
 down to Self-chosen humiliation and agony, that, without violat- 
 ing His essential attributes. He might win to Himself the heart 
 of His erring creatures, has provoked an answer of grateful love, 
 
 * Tit. iii. 3 : ^juer 7ap irore koX 7]\xds avS-nroi, aireiOe??, irXavdoixevoi, 5ou- 
 XeuovTcs iiridvixiais Koi rjdovals Trot/c/Aats, iv Ko/cta Kal <p66i/ci) didyovTsSf 
 CTxryriTol, fxicrovvTes a.X\^\ovs, 
 
 * St. John XV. 12. ^ Gal. ii. 20. 
 
 VIII ] 
 
49^ Charity, a prodtcct of faith in Chris fs Divinity, 
 
 first towards Himself, and then for His sake towards His crea- 
 tures. Thus *with His Own right Hand, and with His holy- 
 Arm, He hath gotten Himself the victory x' over the selfishness 
 as over the sins of man. ' We love Him because He first loved 
 usy.' If human life has been brightened by the thousand 
 courtesies of our Christian civilization ; if human pain has been 
 alleviated by the unnumbered activities of Christian charity ; if 
 the face of Christendom is beautified by institutions which cheer 
 the earthly existence of millions ; these results are due to 
 Christian faith in the Charity of the Eedeemer, which is infinite 
 because the Eedeemer is Divine. And thus the temples of 
 Christendom, visibly perpetuating the worship of Christ from 
 age to age, are not the only visible witnesses among us to His 
 Divine prerogatives. The hospital, in which the bed of anguish 
 is soothed by the hand of science under the guidance of love ; 
 the penitentiary, where the victims of a selfish passion are raised 
 to a new moral life by the care and delicacy of an unmercenary 
 tenderness ; the school, which gathers the ragged outcasts of our 
 great cities, rescuing them from the ignorance and vice of which 
 else they must be the prey ; — what is the fountain-head of these 
 blessed and practical results, but the truth of His Divinity, Who 
 has kindled man into charity by giving Himself for man % The 
 moral results of Calvary are what they are, because Christ is 
 God. He Who stooped from heaven to the humiliations of the 
 Cross has opened in the heart of redeemed man a fountain of 
 love and compassion. No distinctions within the vast circle of 
 the human family can narrow or pervert its course \ nor can it 
 cease to flow while Christians believe, that Christ crucified for 
 men is the Only-begotten Son of God. 
 
 It is therefore an error to suppose that the doctrine of our 
 Lord's Divinity has impoverished the moral life of Christendom 
 *by removing Christ from the category of imitable beings.' For 
 on the one hand, the doctrine leaves His Humanity altogether 
 intact ; on the other, it enhances the force of His example as a 
 model of the graces of humility and love. Thus from age to age 
 this doctrine has in truth fertilized the moral soil of human life, 
 not less than it has guarded and illuminated intellectual truth. 
 How indeed could it be otherwise? 'If God spared not His 
 Own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, how shall He not 
 with Him also freely give us all things ?' Who shall wonder if 
 wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption are 
 
 ^ Ps. xcviii. 2. y I St. John iv. 19. 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
Recapitulation. 497 
 
 given with the gift of the Eternal Son % Who sliall wonder if by 
 this gift, a keen, strong sense of the Personality and Life of God, 
 and withal a true estimate of man's true dignity, of his capacity, 
 through grace, for the highest forms of life, are guarded in the 
 sanctuary of human thought ? Who shall gainsay it, if along 
 with this gift we inherit a body of revealed and certain truth, 
 reposing on the word of an Infallible Teacher ; if we are washed 
 in a stream of cleansing Blood, which flows from an atoning 
 fountain opened on Calvary for the sin and uncleanness of a 
 guilty world ; if we are sustained by sacraments which make us 
 really partakers of the Nature of our God ; if we are capable of 
 virtues which embellish and elevate humanity, yet which, but for 
 the strength and example of our Lord, might have seemed too 
 plainly unattainable ] 
 
 For the Divinity of God's Own Son, freely given for us 
 sinners to suffer and to die, is the very heart of our Christian 
 faith. It cannot be denied without tearing out the vitals of a 
 living Christianity. Its roots are struck far back into the pro- 
 phecy, the typology, the ethics, of the Old Testament. It alone 
 supplies a satisfactory explanation of the moral attitude of Jesus 
 Christ towards His contemporaries. It is the true key to His 
 teaching, to His miracles, to the leading mysteries of His life, to 
 His power of controlling the issues of history. As such, it is 
 put forward by apostles who, differing in much besides, were 
 made one by this faith in His Divinity and in the truths which 
 are bound up with it. It enters into the world of speculative 
 discussion ; it is analysed, criticized, denounced, prgscribed, be- 
 trayed ; yet it emerges from the crucible wherein it has been 
 exposed to the action of every intellectual solvent that hostile 
 ingenuity could devise ; it has lost nothing from, it has added 
 nothing to, its original significance ; it has only been clothed in 
 a symbol which interprets it to new generations, and which lives 
 in the confessions of the grateful Church. Its later history is 
 explained when we remember the basis on which it really rests. 
 The question of Christ's Divinity is the question of the truth or 
 falsehood of Christianity. *If Christ be not God,' it has been 
 truly said, ^He is not so great as Mohammed.' But Christ's 
 moral relation to Mohammed may safely be left to every un- 
 sophisticated conscience ; and if the conscience owns in Him the 
 Moral Chief of humanity, it must take Him at His word when 
 He unveils before it His superhuman glory. 
 
 But the doctrine of Christ's Divinity does not merely bind us 
 to the historic past, and above all to the first records of Chris- 
 VIII ] K k 
 
49^ Christ's Divinity the strength of His Church, 
 
 tianity ; it is at this hour the strength of the Christian Church. 
 There are forces abroad in the world of thought which, if they 
 could be viewed apart from all that counteracts them, might well 
 make a Christian fear for the future of humanity. It is not 
 merely that the Church is threatened with the loss of possessions 
 secured to her by the reverence of centuries, and of a place of 
 honour which may perhaps have guarded civilization more effec- 
 tively than it can be shewn to have strengthened religion. The 
 Faith has once triumphed without these gifts of Providence ; 
 and, if God wills, she can again dispense with them. But never 
 since the first ages of the Gospel was fundamental Christian 
 truth denied and denounced so largely, and with such passionate 
 animosity, as is the case at this moment in each of the most 
 civilized nations of Europe. It may be that God has in store 
 for His Church greater trials to her faith than she has yet 
 experienced ; it may be that along with the revived scorn of the 
 old pagan spirit, the persecuting sword of pagan hatred will yet 
 be unsheathed. Be it so, if so He wills it. The holy city is 
 strong in knowing ' that God is in the midst of her, therefore 
 shall she not be removed ; God shall help her, and that right 
 early. The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are 
 moved; but God hath shewed His Voice, and the earth shall 
 melt away.' When the waters of human opinion rage and swell, 
 and the mountains shake at the tempest of the same, our Divine 
 Lord is not unequal to the defence of His Name and His 
 Honour. If the sky seem dark and the winds contrary ; if ever 
 and anon the strongest intellectual and social currents of our 
 civilization mass themselves threateningly, as if to overwhelm 
 the holy bark as she rides upon the waves ; we know Who is 
 with her, unwearied and vigilant, though He should seem to 
 sleep. His presence forbids despondency ; His presence assures 
 us that a cause which has consistently conquered in its day of 
 apparent failure, cannot but calmly abide the issue. ' Although 
 the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines ; 
 the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no 
 meat ; the flocks shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be 
 no herd in the stalls : yet I will rejoice in the Lord,- 1 will joy 
 in the God of my salvation.' 
 
 Would that these anxieties might in God's good providence 
 work out a remedy for the wounds of His Church ! Would 
 that, in presence of the common foe, and yet more by clinging 
 to the common faith. Christians could learn to understand each 
 other ! Surely it might seem that agreement in so stupendous 
 
 [ LECT. 
 
and a rallymg-point for disunited Christendom. 499 
 
 a belief as the Divinity of our Crucified Lord might avail to 
 overshadow, or rather to force on a reconciliation of the differ- 
 ences which divide those who share it. Is it but the indulgence 
 of a fond dream to hope that a heartier, more meditative, more 
 practical grasp of the Divinity of Jesus will one day again unite 
 His children in the bonds of a restored unity ? Is it altogether 
 chimerical to expect that Christians who believe Christ to be 
 truly God, will see more clearly what is involved in that faith, 
 and what is inconsistent with it ; that they will supply what is 
 wanting or will abandon what is untenable in their creed and 
 practice, so that before men and angels they may openly unite 
 in the adoring confession of their Divine Head? The pulse 
 quickens, and the eyes fill with tears, at the bare thought of 
 this vision of peace, at this distant but blessed prospect of a 
 reunited Christendom. What dark doubts would it not dispel ! 
 What deep consolations would it not shed forth on millions of 
 souls ! What fascination would not the spectacle of concordant 
 prayer and harmonious action among the servants of Christ 
 exert over the hearts of sinners ! With what majestic energy 
 would the reinvigorated Church, * terrible as an army with 
 banners,' address herself forthwith to the heartier promotion of 
 man's best interests, to the richer development of the Christian 
 life, to more energetic labours for the conversion of the world ! 
 But we may not dwell, except in hope and prayer, upon the 
 secrets of Divine Providence. It may be our Lord's purpose to 
 shew to His servants of this generation only His work, and to 
 reserve for their children the vision of His glory. It must be 
 our duty, in view of His revealed Will, and with a simple faith 
 in His Wisdom and His Power, to pray our Lord * that all they 
 that do confess God's Holy Name, may agree in the truth of 
 His Holy Word, and live in unity and godly love.* 
 
 But here we must close this attempt to reassert, against some 
 misapprehensions of modern thought, the great truth which 
 guards the honour of Christ, and which is the most precious 
 feature in the intellectual heritage of Christians. And for you, 
 dear brethren, who by your generous interest .or by your warm 
 sympathies have so accompanied and sustained him, what can 
 the preacher more fittingly or more sincerely desire, than that 
 any clearer sight of the Divine Person of our glorious and living 
 Lord which may have been granted you, may be, by Him, 
 blessed to your present sanctification and to your endless peace ? 
 If you are intellectually persuaded that in confessing the true 
 Godhead of Jesus you have not followed a cunningly-devised 
 viii] K k 2 
 
500 Conclusion. 
 
 liable, or the crude imagination of a semi-barbarous and distant 
 age, then do not allow yourselves to rest content with this intel- 
 lectual persuasion. A truth so sublime, so imperious, has other 
 work to do in you besides shaping into theoretic compactness a 
 certain district of your thought about the goodness of God and 
 the wants of man. The Divine Christ of the Gospel and the 
 Church is no mere actor, though He were the greatest, in the 
 great tragedy of human history; He belongs not exclusively 
 or especially to the past ; He is ^ the Same yesterday, to-day, 
 and for ever.* He is at this moment all that He was 
 eighteen centuries ago, all that He has been to our fathers, 
 all that He will be to our children. He is the Divine and 
 Infallible Teacher, the Healer and Pardoner of sin, the Source 
 of all graces, the Conqueror of Satan and of death— now, as 
 of old, and as in years to come. Now as heretofore. He is 
 'able to save unto the uttermost them that come unto God 
 by Him ;' now, as on the day of His triumph over death, 
 'He opens the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers;' now, 
 as in the first age of the Church, He it is ' that hath the key 
 of David, that openeth, and no man shutteth ; and shutteth, 
 and no man openeth z.' He is ever the Same ; but, as the 
 children of time, whether for good or evil, we move onwards in 
 perpetual change. The hours of life pass, they do not return ; 
 they pass, yet they are not forgotten ; * pereunt et imputantur.' 
 But the present is our own ; we may resolve, if we will, to live 
 as men who live for the glory of an Incarnate God. Brethren, 
 you shall not repent it, if, when life's burdens press heavily, and 
 especially at that solemn hour w^hen human help must fail, you 
 are able to lean with strong confidence on the arm of an 
 Almighty Saviour. May He in deed and truth be with you, 
 alike in your pilgrimage through this world, and when that 
 brief journey is drawing to its close ! May you, sustained by 
 His Presence and aid, so pass through the valley of the shadow 
 of death as to fear no evil, and to find, at the gate of the eternal 
 world, that all the yearnings of faith and hope are to be more 
 than satisfied by the vision of the Divine ' King in His 
 Beauty T 
 
 2 Rev. iii. 7. 
 
 [lECT. VIII ] 
 
NOTES. 
 
 NOTE A, ON Lecture I. 
 
 The works upon the Life of our Lord alluded to in the text are 
 the following. 
 
 I. Das LebenJesu, von Dr. F. D. Strauss. 1835. This work 
 passed through several editions, and in 1864 was followed 
 up by Das Leben Jesu, fur das Deutsche Yolk bearbeitet 
 Leipsig, Brockhaus. 
 
 Strauss' argument is chiefly concerned with the differences 
 between the Evangelists, and with the miraculous features of 
 their narratives. He regards the miracles as ' myths,' that is to 
 say, as pure fictions. His position is, that the speculative ideas 
 about Jesus which were circulating in the first century were 
 dressed up in a traditional form, the substance of which was 
 derived from the Messianic figures of the Old Testament. This 
 violent supposition was really dictated by Strauss' philosophy. 
 Denying the possible existence of miracle, of the supernatural, of 
 the invisible world, and even the existence of a personal living 
 God, Strauss undertakes to explain the Gospel-history as the 
 natural development of germs previously latent in the world of 
 human life and thought. Upon the ground that nothing is 
 absolute, that all is relative, Strauss will not allow that any one 
 man can absolutely have realized the 4dea' of humanity. The 
 sanctity of Jesus was only relative ; and, speaking historically, 
 Jesus fell far below the absolute Idea to which the thought of the 
 Apostolical age endeavoured to elevate Him by the ' mythical' 
 additions to his ^ Life.' Thus Strauss' criticism is in reality the 
 application of Hegel's doctrine of * absolute idealism' to the 
 Gospel narratives. * It is,' observes Dr. Mill, * far more from a 
 
502 Note A, On 'Lives' of Our Lord, 
 
 desire of working out on a historical ground the philosophical 
 principles of his master, than from any attachment to mythical 
 theories on their own account, that we are clearly to deduce the 
 destructive process which Strauss has applied to the Lif^ of 
 Jesus.' (Myth. Interpr. p. ii.) 
 
 Strauss' later work is addressed not to the learned, but to the 
 German people, with a view to destroying the influence of the 
 Lutheran pastors. He observes in his Preface : * Wer die Pfaff'en 
 aus der Kirche schaffen will, der muss erst das Wunder aus der 
 Keligion schaffen.' (Vorrede, p. xix.) With this practical object 
 he sets to work ; and although the results at which he arrives 
 are perhaps more succinctly stated than in his earlier book, the 
 real difference between them is not considerable. He makes 
 little use of the critical speculations on the Gospels which have 
 been produced in Protestant and Eationalistic Germany during 
 the last thirty years. Thus he is broadly at issue with the later 
 Tubingen writers on the subject of St. Mark's Gospel ; he 
 altogether disputes their favourite theory of its * originality,' and 
 views it as only a colourless resume of the narratives of St. Mat- 
 thew and St. Luke. His philosophical theory still, however, 
 controls his religious speculations : Jesus did for religion what 
 Socrates did for philosophy, and Aristotle for science. Although 
 the appearance of Jesus in the world constituted an epoch, He 
 belonged altogether to humanity : He did not rise above it ; 
 He might even be surpassed. The second book, like the first, is 
 an elaboration of the thesis that ^ the idea cannot attain its full 
 development in a single individual of the species ;' and to this 
 elaboration there are added some fierce attacks upon the social 
 and religious institutions of Europe, designed more particularly 
 to promote an anti-Christian social revolution in northern 
 Germany. 
 
 2. 1) as Charahterhild Jesu^ein hihiischer Versuch,von Dr. Daniel 
 SchenkeL 2*®Auflage. Wiesbaden, 1864. 
 
 Dr. Schenkel begins by insisting upon the 'irrational' cha- 
 racter of the Church's doctrine of the Union of two Natures in 
 our Lord's Person. Nothing, he thinks, short of the oppression 
 with which the mediaeval Church treated all attempts at free 
 thought can account for the perpetuation of such a dogma. The 
 Eeformers, although they proclaimed the principle of free enquiry, 
 yet did not venture honestly to apply it to the traditional doc- 
 trine of Christ's Person ; primitive Protestantism was afraid of 
 
Note A, On 'Lives' of Otir Lord. 503 
 
 the consequences of its fundamental principle. The orthodox 
 doctrine accordingly outlived the Reformation ; but the older 
 Eationalism has established a real claim upon our gratitude by in- 
 sisting upon the pure Humanity of Christ, although, Dr. Schenkel 
 thinks, it has too entirely stripped Him of His ' Divinity,' that 
 is to say, of the moral beauty to which we may still apply that 
 designation. As for the Christ of Schleiermacher, he is a pro- 
 duct of the yearnings and aspirations of that earnest and gifted 
 teacher, but he is not, according to Schenkel, the Jesus of 
 history. Strauss does in the main, represent Jesus such as He 
 was in the reality of His historical life ; but Strauss' repre- 
 sentation is too much tinged with modern colourings \ nor are 
 his desolating negations sufficiently counterbalanced by those 
 positive results of this thoroughgoing 'criticism' upon which 
 Dr. Schenkel proposes to dwell. For the future, faith in Christ 
 is to rest on more solid bases than * auf denen des Aberglaubens, 
 der Piiesterherrschaft, und einer mit heiteren oder schreckenden 
 Bildern angefiillten Phantasie.' (p. 11.) 
 
 Dr. Schenkel makes the most of the late Tubingen theory of 
 the 'originality,' as it is called, of St. Mark, and of the non- 
 historical character, as he maintains, of the Gospel of St. John ; 
 although he deals very 'freely' with the materials, which he re- 
 serves as still entitled to historical consideration. Dr. Schenkel 
 does not hold that the Evangelistic account of Christ's miracles 
 is altogether mythical ; it has, he thinks, a certain basis of fact. 
 He admits that our Lord may have possessed what may be 
 termed a miraculous gift, even if this should be rightly explained 
 to be only a rare natural endowment. He had a power of calm- 
 ing persons of deranged mind ; His assurances of the pardon of 
 their sins, acting beneficially on their nervous system, produced 
 these restorative effects. Dr. Schenkel holds it to be utterly 
 impossible that Jesus could have worked any of the ' miracles of 
 nature ;' since this would have proved him to be truly God. All 
 such narratives as His calming the storm in the lake are there- 
 fore part of that 'torrent of legend' with which the historical 
 germ of His real Life has been overlaid by later enthusiasms. 
 The E-esurrection, accordingly, is not a fact of history ; it is a 
 creation of the imaginative devotion of the first disciples. (See 
 p. 314.) Dr. Schenkel considers the appearances of our Risen 
 Lord to have been only so many glorifications of His character 
 in the hearts of those who believed in Him. To them He was 
 manifested as One who lives eternally, in that He has founded 
 His kingdom on earth by His word and His Spirit. 
 
504 Note A. On 'Lives' of Ottr Lord, 
 
 The main idea of Dr. Schenkel's book is to make the Life of 
 Jesus the text of an attack upon those who are Conservatives in 
 politics and orthodox Lutherans in religion. It is not so much 
 a biography, or even a sketch of character, as a polemical 
 pamphlet. The treatment of our Lord's words and actions, and 
 still more the highly-coloured representation of the Pharisees, 
 are throughout intended to express the writer's view of schools 
 and parties in Lutheran Germany. The Pharisees of course are 
 the orthodox Lutherans ; while Jesus Christ is the political 
 demagogue and liberal sceptic. With some few exceptions, the 
 etiquette of history is scrupulously observed \ and yet the really 
 historical interest is as small, as the polemical references are 
 continuous and piquant. The woes which Jesus pronounces 
 against the Pharisees are not directed simply against hypocrisy 
 and formalism ; * the curse of Christ,' we are told, * like the 
 trumpet of the last Judgment, lights for ever upon every church 
 that is based upon tradition and upon the ascendancy of a 
 ])rivileged clergy.' * Der Weheruf Jesu ist noch nicht verklungen. 
 Er trifft noch heute, wie eiiie Posaune des Gerichts, jedes auf die 
 Satzungen der Ueberlieferung und auf die Herrschaft eines mit 
 Vorzugsrechten ausgestatteten Klerus gegriindete Kirchenthum.' 
 (p. 254.) Perhaps the most singular illustration of profane reck- 
 lessness in exegesis that can easily be found in modern literature 
 is Dr. Schenkel's explanation of the sin against the Holy Ghost. 
 This sin, he tells us, does not consist, as we may have mistakenly 
 supposed, in a deliberate relapse from grace into impenitence ; it 
 is not the sin of worldly or unbelieving persons. It is the sin of 
 orthodoxy ; it is a * Theologisch-hierarchischer Verh'artung und 
 Verstockung ;' and those who defend and propagate the ancient 
 faith of Christians, in spite of rationalistic warnings against doing 
 so, are really guilty of it. (Charakt. p. 106.) 
 
 Dr. Schenkel has explained himself more elaborately on some 
 points in his pamphlet ^ Die Protestantische Freiheit, in ihrem 
 gegenwartigen Kampfe mit der kirchlichen Eeaktion.' Wies- 
 baden, 1862. He fiercely demands a Humanitarian Christology 
 (P- 153)- He laments that even Zwingli's thought was still 
 fettered by the formulse of Nicsea and Chalcedon (p. 152), nay, 
 he remarks that St. Paul himself has assigned to Christ a rank 
 which led on naturally to the Church-belief in the Divinity of 
 His Person (p. 148). That belief Dr. Schenkel considers to be 
 a shred of heathen superstition which had found its way into the 
 circle of Christian ideas (ibid.) ; while he sorrowfully protests 
 that the adoration of Jesus, both in the public Services of the 
 
Note A. On 'Lives' of Our Lord. 505 
 
 Church and in the Christian consciousness, has superseded that 
 of God the Father. * Vom funften Jahrhundert bis zur Eeforma- 
 tion (he might have begun four centuries earlier and gone on for 
 three centuries later) wird Jesus Christ durchgangig als der 
 Herrgott verehrt' (p. 149). Indeed, throughout this brochure 
 Dr. Schenkel's positions are simply those of the old Socinianism, 
 resting however upon a Eationalistic method of treatment, which 
 in its more logical phases regards much of what Socinianism 
 itself retains, as the yoke of an intolerable orthodoxy. 
 
 3. Gescldclite Christus' und Seiner Zeit, von Heinrich Ewald. 
 Gottingen, 1857. 2^ Ausgabe. 
 
 This work is on no account to be placed on the level of those 
 of Strauss or Schenkel, to which in some most vital particulars 
 it is opposed. Indeed, Ewald's defence of St. John's Gospel, and 
 his deeper spirituality of tone, must command a religious in- 
 terest, which would be of a high order, if only this writer 
 believed in our Lord's Godhead. That this, unhappily, is not 
 the case, will be apparent upon a careful study of the concluding 
 chapter of this volume on * Die Ewige Verherrlichung,' pp. 496- 
 504, — ^beautiful as are some of the passages which it contains. 
 His explanation of the titles * Son of God' and * Word of God,* 
 p. 502, is altogether inadequate; and his statement that ^nie 
 hat Jesu als der Sohn und das Wort Gottes sich mit der Vater 
 und Gotte Selhst (from whom Ewald accordingly distinguishes 
 our Lord) verwechselt oder vermessen sich selbst diesem gleich- 
 gestellt,' is simply contradicted by St. John v. and x. 
 
 4. Die Menschliche Entivichelung Jesu Christi, von Th. Keim, 
 Zurich, 1 86 1. Die geschichtliche Wiirde Jesu, von Th. Keim, 
 Zurich, 1864. Der geschichtliche Christus, Bine Reihe von 
 Vortrdgen mit Quellenheweis und Chronologic des Lebens 
 Jesu, von Th. Keim, Zurich, 1866. 
 
 Dr. Keim, although rejecting the fourth Gospel, retains too 
 much of the mind of Schleiermacher to be justly associated with 
 Drs. Strauss or Schenkel. Dr. Keim, indeed, sees in our Lord 
 only a Man, but still an eminently mysterious Man of incom- 
 parable grandeur of character. He recognises, although in- 
 adequately, the startling self-assertion of our Lord ; and he 
 differs most emphatically from Strauss, Schenkel, and Eenan in 
 recognising the real sinlessness of Jesus. He admits, too, the 
 historical value of our Lord's eschatological discourses ; he does 
 
go6 Note A, 071 ' Lives^ of Our Lord, 
 
 not regard His miracles ' of nature' as absolutely impossible ; 
 and be beartily believes in tbe reality of Christ's own Eesurrec- 
 tion from the dead. He cannot account for the phenomenon of 
 the Church, if the Resurrection be denied. Altogether he seems 
 to consider that the Life of Jesus as a spiritual, moral, and, in 
 some respects, supernatural fact, is unique ; but an intellectual 
 spectre, the assumed invariability of historical laws, as we con- 
 ceive them, seems to interpose so as to prevent him from 
 drawing the otherwise inevitable inference. Yet for such as 
 he is, let us hope much. 
 
 5. La Vie de Jesus, par E. Renan. Paris, 1863. 
 
 Of this well-known book it may suffice here to say a very few 
 words. Its one and only excellence is its incomparable style. 
 From every other point of view it is deplorable. Historically, it 
 deals most arbitrarily with the data upon which it professes to 
 be based. Thus in the different pictures of Christ's aim and 
 action, during what are termed the second and the third periods 
 of His Ministry, a purely artificial contrast is presented. Theo- 
 logically, this work proceeds throughout on a really atheistic 
 assumption, disguised beneath the thin veil of a j^antheistic 
 phraseology. It assumes that no such being as a personal God 
 exists at all. The ' god ' with whom, according to M. Renan, 
 Jesus has such uninterrupted communion, but from whom he is 
 so entirely distinct, is only the ' category of the ideal.' It is, 
 however, when we look at the ^ Vie de Jesus' from a moral point 
 of view, that its shortcomings are most apparent in their length 
 and breadth. Its hero is a fanatical impostor, who pretends to 
 be and to do that which he knows to be beyond him, but who 
 nevertheless is held up to our admiration as the ideal of hu- 
 manity. In place of the Divine and Human Christ of the 
 Gospels, M. Renan presents us with a character devoid of any 
 real majesty, of any tolerable consistency, and even of the con- 
 stituent elements of moral goodness. If M. Renan himself does 
 not perceive that the object of his enthusiasm is simply an 
 offence to any healthy conscience, this is only an additional 
 proof, if one were needed, of the fatal influence of pantheistic 
 thought upon the most gifted natures. It destroys the sensitive- 
 ness of the moral nerve. Enough to say that M. Renan presents 
 us with a Christ who in his Gethsemane was possibly thinking 
 of ^les jeunes filles qui auraient peut-etre consenti a I'aimer.' 
 (P- 379-) 
 
Note A, On 'Lives' of Our Lord, 507 
 
 It ought perhaps here to be added that M. de Presseiise's 
 work, 'Jesus-Christ, son Temps, sa Yie, son CEuvre,' Paris, 1865, 
 although failing (as might be expected) to do justice to the 
 sacramental side of our Lord's Incarnation and Teaching, is yet 
 on the whole a most noble contribution to the cause of Truth, 
 for which the deep gratitude of all sincere Christians cannot but 
 be due to its accomplished author. 
 
 6. Ecce Homo ; a Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus 
 Christ. London and Cambridge, Macmillan, 1866. 
 
 Every one who reads * Ecce Homo' must heartily admire the 
 generous passion for human improvement which glows through- 
 out the whole volume. And especial acknowledgment is due to 
 the author from Christian believers, for the emphasis with 
 which he has insisted on the following truths : — 
 
 Christ's moral sublimity. 
 
 Christ's claim of supremacy. 
 
 Christ's success in His work. 
 Incidentally, moreover, he has brought out into their true 
 prominence some portions of the truth, which are lost sight of 
 by popular religionists in England. As an example of this, his 
 earnest recognition of the visibility of the Society founded by 
 Christ may be instanced. But, on the other hand, the writer 
 has carefully avoided all reference to the cardinal question of 
 Christ's Person ; and he tells us that he has done this deliber- 
 ately. (Pref. to 5th Ed. p. xx.) The result however is, that his 
 book is pervaded, as it seems to many of his readers, by an es- 
 sential flaw. It is not merely that our Lord's claims cannot be 
 morally estimated apart from a clear estimate of His Person. 
 The author professes to be answering the question, ' What was 
 Christ's object in founding the Society which is called by His 
 Namel' Now to attempt to answer this question, while dis- 
 missing all theological consideration of the dignity of Christ's 
 Person, involves the tacit assumption that the due estimate of 
 His Person is not relevant to the appreciation of His Work ; in 
 other words, the assumption, that so far as the evidence yielded 
 by the work of Christ goes, the Christology of the Nicene Creed is 
 at least uncertain. The author of 'Ecce Homo' is however either 
 a Humanitarian, or he is a believer in our Lord's Divinity, or 
 he is undecided. If he is a Humanitarian, then the assumption 
 is, as far as it goes, in harmony with his personal convictions ; 
 only it should, for various and obvious reasons, have been more 
 
5o8 Note A, On 'Lives' of Our Lord, 
 
 plainly stated, since, inter alia, it embarrasses liis view of our 
 Lord's claims and character with difficulties which he does not 
 recognise. If he believes in Christ's Divinity, then in his forth- 
 coming volume (besides rewriting such chapters as chap. 2, on 
 The Temptation) he Avill have to enlarge very seriously, or 
 rather altogether to recast, the account which he has actually 
 given of Christ's work. If the writer be himself in doubt as to 
 whether Christ is or is not God, then surely he is not in a 
 position to give any account whatever of Christ's Avork, which 
 is within the limits of human capacity on one hypothesis, and as 
 utterly transcends them on the other. In short, it is impossible 
 for a man to profess to give a real answer to the question, what 
 Christ intended to accomplish, until he has told us who and 
 what Christ was. That fragment of Christ's work of which we 
 gather an account from history contributes its share to the 
 solution of the question of Christ's Person ; but our Lord's 
 Personal Rank is too intimately bound up with the moral 
 justification of His language, and with the real nature and range 
 of His action upon humanity, to bear the adjournment which 
 the author of * Ecce Homo' has thought advisable. 
 
 There are several errors in the volume which might seem to 
 shew that the author is himself unfamiliar with the faith of the 
 Church \ as they would not have been natural in a person who 
 believed it, but who was throwing himself for the time being 
 into the mental position of a Humanitarian in order the better 
 to do justice to his arguments. For instance, the author con- 
 founds St. John's Baptism with Christ's. He supposes that 
 Nicodemus came to Jesus by night in order to seek a dispen- 
 sation from being publicly baptized, and so admitted into 
 Christ's Society. He imagines that Christ prayed on the Cross 
 only for the Roman soldiers who actually crucified Him, and 
 not for the Pharisees, against whom (it is a most painful as well 
 as an unwarranted suggestion) He continued to feel fierce 
 indignation. This indeed is an instance of the author's ten- 
 dency to identify his own imaginations with the motives and 
 feelings of Jesus Christ, where Scripture is either silent or 
 points in an opposite direction. The author is apparently 
 carried away by his earnest indignation against certain forms 
 of selfish and insincere vice, such as Pharisaism ; nor is he 
 wholly free from the disposition so to colour the past as to make 
 it express suggestively his own feelings about persons and 
 schools of the present day. The naturalistic tone of his thought 
 is apparent in his formula of ^ enthusiasm/ as the modern equi- 
 
Note A, On ' Lives^ of Ottr Lord. ^og 
 
 valent to inspiration and the gift of the Holy Spirit ; in his 
 general substitution of the conception of anti-social vice for the 
 deeper Scriptural idea of sin ; and in his suggestion that Chris- 
 tians may treat the special precepts of Christ with the same 
 * boldness ' with which He treated those of the law of Moses. 
 
 Of the practical results of his book it is difficult to form an 
 estimate. In some instances it may lead to the contented sub- 
 stitution of a naturalistic instead of a miraculous Christianity, 
 of philanthropic ' enthusiasm' instead of a supernatural life, of 
 loyalty to a moral reforming hero, instead of religious devotion 
 to a Divine Saviour of the world. But let us also trust that so 
 fearless a recognition of the claims of Christ to be the King 
 and Centre of renewed humanity, may assist other minds to 
 grasp and hold the truth which alone makes those claims, taken 
 as a whole, justifiable ; and may recruit the ranks of our Lord's 
 true worshippers from among the many thoughtful but unin- 
 structed persons who have never faced the dilemma which this 
 volume so forcibly, albeit so tacitly, suggests. 
 
 ^ ^ ^ * 
 
 Since these words were written, the volume under discussion 
 has found an apologist, whose opinion on this, as on any other 
 subject, is a matter of national interest^. If the present writer 
 has been guilty of forming and propagating an unjust estimate 
 of a remarkable work, he may at least repair his error by 
 referring his readers to pages, in which genius and orthodoxy 
 have done their best for the Christian honour of ' Ecce Homo.' 
 These pages must indeed of necessity be read with sympathy 
 and admiration, if not with entire assent, by all who do not 
 consider a theological work to have been discredited, when it is 
 asserted to uphold some positive truth. But it may also be a 
 duty to state briefly and respectfully why, after a careful con- 
 sideration of such a criticism, the present writer is unable 
 to recognise any sufficient reason for withdrawing what he 
 has ventured to say upon the subject. Unquestionably, as 
 Mr. Gladstone urges, it is allowable in principle to teach only 
 a portion of revealed truth, under circumstances which would 
 render a larger measure of instruction likely to perplex and 
 repel the learners. But then such teaching must be loyally 
 consistent with the claims of that portion of the truth, which is, 
 provisionally, left untaught ; and this condition does not appear 
 
 a * Ecce Homo/ by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone. Strahan & Co. 
 London, 1868. [Reprinted from ' Good Words.'] 
 
5IO Note A, 071 'Lives' of Otir Lord. 
 
 to be satisfied by '- Ecce Homo,' if it be, as we may hope, only a 
 preparation for a second volume which will assert in plain lan- 
 guage the Deity of our Adorable Lord. The crucial chapter on 
 the Temptation altoo^ether ignores our Lord's true and higher 
 Personality \ as it also appears to ignore the personal presence 
 of the Tempter. 'What is called Christ's Temptation is the 
 excitement of His Mind which was caused by the nascent con- 
 sciousness of supernatural power,' p. 12. Such a description 
 fails altogether to do justice to the real issues involved; it 
 might apply with equal propriety to a struggle in the soul of 
 an apostolic man. Even if this chapter does not imply Christ's 
 inward sympathy with outward solicitations to accept a wrong 
 choice, it could never have been written by a person who kept 
 clearly before his mind the truth of our Lord's Divinity. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone draws out and insists upon an analogy between 
 the original function of the three Synoptic Evangelists in the 
 first propagation of the Faith, and the present function of 'Ecce 
 Homo.' But this analogy would appear to be disturbed by the 
 following considerations. First, there is nothing in 'Ecce Homo' 
 which corresponds to the great Christological texts in the Synop- 
 tists. To these texts Mr. Gladstone has indeed referred, but 
 they do not readily harmonize with his representation of the 
 gradual unveiling of Christ's Person. Indeed they teach a doc- 
 trine of Christ's Person which is virtually identical with that of 
 St. John. Are there any passages in 'Ecce Homo' which, like 
 St. Matt. xi. 27, or St. Luke x. 22, place the Christ olos^ical belief 
 of the writer beyond reach of question % Secondly, the ethical 
 atmosphere of ' Ecce Homo' differs very significantly from that 
 of the Gospels. The Gospels present us with the Scriptural idea 
 of Sin, provoking God's wrath and establishing between God 
 and man a state of enmity: and this idea points very urgently — 
 at least in a moral universe, — to some awful interposition which 
 shall bring relief. But the Biblical idea of sin is a vitally 
 distinct thing from the impoverished modern conception of 
 anti-social vice, in which man and not God is the insulted 
 and offended person, and by which the protection of individual 
 rights and the well-being of society are held to be of more 
 account than the reign of peace and purity within the soul. 
 The idea of sin points to a Divine Redeemer : the idea of anti- 
 social vice points to an improved system of human education.. 
 Thirdly, the first and third Evangelists preface their records of 
 the Ministry with an account of the Nativity. That account 
 clearly attributes a Superhuman Personality to Christ ; and thus 
 
Note B, On the word 'Elohim in the O, T, 511 
 
 it places the subsequent narrative in a light altogether different 
 from that suggested by the opening chapter of ^Ecce Homo.' And 
 the first verse of St. Mark's Gospel is sufficiently explicit to range 
 him as to this matter, side by side with St. Matthew and St. Luke. 
 The real needs of our time are more likely to be known to 
 public men who come in contact with minds of every kind than 
 to private clergymen. But it Avould have appeared to the 
 present writer that an economical treatment of the Faith which 
 might have been possible and natural in the first age of its pro- 
 mulgation, must fail of its effect at the present day. Whether 
 men believe the Gospel or not, its real substance and con- 
 tents are now fairly before the world ; and it is increas- 
 ingly felt that the question whether Christ is or is not God, 
 is really identical with the question of His moral character. 
 On this account the reticence of the author of ^Ecce Homo' still 
 appears to the present writer to be a matter for regret ; 
 although he gratefully admits that Mr. Gladstone's commentary 
 will have gone far to make the work which has suggested it, as 
 useful to the cause of truth, as, with characteristic generosity, 
 Mr. Gladstone believes that work to be, if read without the aid 
 of so happy an interpretation. 
 
 NOTE B, ON Lecture II 
 The word ' Elohim' is used in the Old Testament — 
 
 (i) Of the One True God, as in Deut. iv. 35, i Kings xviii. 
 21, etc., where it has the article ', and without the article. 
 Gen. i. 2, xli. 38 ; Exod. xxxi. 3, xxxv. 31 ; Numb. xxiv. 
 2, etc. 
 
 (2) Of false gods, as Exod. xii. 12 j 2 Chron. xxviii. 23; 
 Josh. xxiv. 15 ; Judg. vi. 10, etc. 
 
 (3) Of judges to whom a person or matter is brought, as 
 representing the Divine Majesty in the theocracy, yet not 
 in the singular, Exod. xxi. 6, xxii. 7, 8, (in Deut. xix. 17 
 it is said in the like case that the parties 'shall stand 
 before the Lord,' mn^) ; and in allusion to the passages in 
 Exodus, Ps. Ixxxii. i, 6, 'Kecte Abarbenel observavit, 
 judices et magistratus nusquam vocari r^rh^ nisi respectu 
 loci judicii, quod ibi Dei judicia exerceant.' (Ges.) 
 
512 Note C. Oil Our Lord's Teinptation, 
 
 (4) There is no case in which the word appears from the 
 context to be certainly applied, even collectively, to super- 
 human beings external to the Divine Essence. ' Nullus 
 exstat locus,' says Gesenius, * in quo hsec significatio vel 
 necessaria vel prse caeteris apta sit.' In Ps. Ixxxii. i, the 
 word is explained by verses 2 and 6 of the ^ sons of God,' 
 i.e. judges \ cf. especially verse 8. Yet in Ps. xcvii. 7, the 
 LXX, Vulg., S}T. translate ' angels j' the Chaldee para- 
 phrases ' the worshippers of idols ;' in Ps. cxxxviii. i, the 
 LXX and Vulg. render ' angels,' the Chald. * judges,' the 
 Syr. 'kings;' in Ps. viii. 2, the Chald. too renders 'angels,' 
 and is followed by Kashi, Kimchi, and Abenezra (who 
 quotes Elahin, Dan. ii. 11), and others. It is possible that 
 the earlier Jewish writers had a traditional knowledge that 
 CDnbb^ might be taken as CD''n!?i^~"'n, Job i. 6 ; ii. 13 xxxviii. 
 17, and tD^bi^->n. 
 
 (5) But, however this may be, it remains certain that Elohim 
 is nowhere used with the singular of any except Almighty 
 God. 
 
 NOTE C, ON Lectuke TV. 
 
 On our Lord's Temptation, viewed in its bearing 
 upon His Person. 
 
 The history of our Lord's temptation has been compared 
 to an open gateway, through which Socinianism may enter 
 at will to take possession of the Gospel History. This language 
 proceeds upon a mistaken idea of what our Lord's temptation 
 really was. 
 
 A. How far could Jesus Christ be ' tempted' % How far 
 could any suggestion of Satan act upon His Manhood % 
 
 I. Here we must distinguish between 
 
 (a) Direct temptation to moral evil, i.e. an appeal to a 
 capacity of self-will which miglit be quickened into 
 active disobedience to the Will of God ; and 
 
 (/3) What may be termed indirect temptation, that is, 
 an appeal to instincts 'per se innocent, as belonging to 
 man in his unfallen state, which can make obedience 
 wear the form of a painful effort or sacrifice. 
 
Note C. On Otcr Lord^s Temptation. 513 
 
 2. Now Jesus Christ, according to the historians of the 
 Temptation, was — 
 
 (a) Emmanuel, St. Matt. i. 23. That this word is used 
 by St. Matthew to mean ^ God is with us,' as a title of 
 Christ, like ^Jehovah nissi,' appears partly from the 
 parallel of Isa. ix. 6, partly from the preceding avro^ 
 (v. 22), used with reference to Jesus. Mary's Son is 
 to be Jesus, not as witnessing to a Divine Saviour 
 
 . external to Himself (as was the case when Joshua bore 
 the name), but as being Himself God the Saviour. 
 
 (iS) Ytos eeoO, St. Luke i. 35. This title is directly con- 
 nected with our Lord's supernatural Birth, and so, al- 
 though applied to His Manhood (to yewMiievov), yet 
 implies a pre-existent superhuman Personality in Him. 
 
 3. This Union of the Divine and Human Natures in Christ 
 was not fatal to the full perfection of either. In particular 
 it did not destroy in Christ's Manhood those limitations which 
 belong properly to creaturely existence. A limitation of know- 
 ledge in Christ's Human Intelligence would correspond to a 
 limitation of power in His Human Will. 
 
 But it was inconsistent with the presence of anything in 
 Christ's Manhood that could contradict however slightly the 
 Essence of the Perfect Moral Being, in other words, the Holi- 
 ness of God. This would have been the case with falsehood in 
 Christ's Human Intelligence, or with any secret undeveloped 
 propensity to self-will, that is (in a creature), to moral evil, in 
 Christ's Human Will. If the Incarnate Christ could have erred 
 or sinned ; the Incarnation, we may dare to say, would have 
 been a phantom. 
 
 The connection between Christ's Personal Godhead, and the 
 complete sinlessness of His Manhood was well understood by 
 Christian antiquity. Thus Tertullian : ^ Solus homo sine pec- 
 cato Christus, quia et Deus Christus' (De An. c. 13). Thus in 
 the sy nodical letter of Dionysius of Alexandria to Paulus of 
 Samosata, it is argued that el firj yap rjv 6 XptcrTO^ avros 6 av Geo? 
 Aoyos", ovK rjdvvaro elvai dpajidpTTjTos . Ovbhs yap dvafjidpTrjTOS el ^rj 
 els 6 Xpio-Tos oos Ka\ 6 Harrfp tov XpLcrrov, Kal to Ayiov Uvevjia 
 (Labbe, Cone. i. p. 855). So St. Augustine, still more explicitly, 
 teaches ; ^ Ut autem Mediator Dei et hominum homo Christus 
 Jesus non faceret propriam, quae Deo adversa est, voluntatem, 
 non erat tantiim homo, sed Deus et homo : per quam mirabilem 
 
 Ll 
 
514 Note C, On Our Lord's Temptation. 
 
 singularemque gratiam humana in illo sine peccato ullo posset 
 esse natura. Propter hoc ergo ait, Descendi de coelo, non ut 
 faciam voluntatem meam, sed voluntatem ejus qui me misit 
 (Joh. vi. 38) : ut ea caussa esset tantse obedientise quae omnino 
 sine ullo peccato esset hominis quae gerebat, quik de coelo de- 
 scenderat ; hoc est, non tantum homo, verum etiam Deus erat' 
 (Contr. Sermon. Arianor., c. vii. c. 6). Again, ^ Ista nativitas 
 profectb gratuita conjunxit in unitate personse hominem Deo, 
 carnem Verbo. . . . Neque enim metuendum erat, ne isto in- 
 efFabili modo in unitatem personse ^ Verbo Deo natura humana 
 suscepta, nullum in se motum malse voluntatis admitteret' (De 
 Correp. et Grat., c. xi. n. 30). Again, he gives as a reason for 
 the Divine Incarnation, * Ut intelligant homines per eandem 
 gratiam se justificari a peccatis, per quam factum est ut homo 
 Christus nullum habere posset peccatuTYi'' (Enchir. ad Laur., 
 c. 36, n, 11; compare Ench. c. 40. See also the passages from 
 St. Athanasius and St. Cyril Alex. qu. by Petav., De Incarnat., 
 lib. xi. CIO, § 6). Theodorus of Mopsuestia was anathematized 
 at the Fifth (Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, a.d. 553, 
 for maintaining among other things that our Lord was virb 
 TrdBav yl^vxr]S Koi rcop rrjs (rapKos €7ndvfxia>p evoxKovfievov, kol twv 
 X^LpopoDV Kara jiiKpop xa>pi^6yL€V0Vj Koi ovrats €K TrporpoTrrjs epyoav 
 ^eXTKadevTQf kol €< TTokiTfias ap.(OfJLov KadlcTTaPTa (Con. Const., ii. 
 
 can. xii. ; Labbe, v. p. 575). The language of Theodorus was 
 felt to ignore the consequences of the Personal Union of the 
 Two Natures : it was practically Nestorianism. 
 
 Our Lord's Manhood then, by the unique conditions of its 
 existence, was believed to be wholly exempt from any pro- 
 pensity to, or capacity of, sinful self-will. When, as in the 
 temptation on the mountain. He was beset by solicitations 
 to evil from without. He met them at once in a manner which 
 shewed that no inward element of His Human Nature even felt 
 their power. For, as St. Athanasius says. He was Si^a crapKiKOiP 
 
 OeXrjixdTcop /cat XoyLcrfiSyp dvOpcoTriPODVj ip cIkopi KaivoTrjTos (Contr. 
 
 Apollinar., lib. ii. c. 10). The sharpest arrows of the tempter 
 struck Him, but, like darts lighting upon a hard polished 
 surface, they glanced aside. Moreover, as it would seem, the 
 Personal Union of the Two Natures in our Lord involved, at 
 least, the sight of the Beatific Vision by our Lord's Humanity : 
 and if we cannot conceive of the blessed as sinning while they 
 worship around the throne, much less can we conceive it in 
 One in Whom 'dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.* 
 Thus to any direct temptation to evil He was simply inaccessible, 
 
Note C, On Our Lord's Temptatio7i. 515 
 
 to Whom alone the words fully belong, ^ I have set God always 
 before Me, for He is on My right Hand, therefore I shall not 
 fall.' 
 
 4. But the Personal Union of our Lord's Manhood with His 
 Godhead did not exempt It from simple human instincts, such 
 as, for example, a shrinking from bodily pain. For, ^As Man's 
 Will, so the Will of Christ hath two several kinds of operation ; 
 the one natural or necessary, whereby it desireth simply what- 
 soever is good in itself, and shunneth as generally all things 
 which hurt ; the other deliberate, when we therefore embrace 
 things as good, because the age of understanding judgeth them 
 good to that end which we simply desire. . . . These different 
 inclinations of the will considered, the reason is easy how 
 in Christ there might grow desires, seeming but being not in 
 deed opposite, either the one of them unto the other or either 
 of them unto the Will of God' (Hooker, E. P. v. 48, 9 ; cf. 
 St. John xii. 27). Upon our Lord's Human Will in its inchoate 
 or rudimentary stage of Desire, uninformed by Keason, an ap- 
 proaching trial might so far act, as a temptation, as, for instance, 
 to produce a wish that obedience might be compatible with 
 escape from suffering. But it could not produce, even for one 
 moment, any wish to be free from the law of obedience itself ; 
 since such a wish could only exist where the capacity for sinful 
 self-will was not absolutely excluded. The utmost that tempta- 
 tion could do with our Lord, was to enhance the sacrificial cha- 
 racter of obedience, by appealing to an innocent human instinct 
 which ran counter to its actual requirements. 
 
 B. This statement of the matter will perhaps suggest some 
 questions. 
 
 I. Is it altogether consistent with the Scripture langiiage 
 which represents our Lord as Kara ndvTa toIs dbeXcpois SiioicoOeU 
 (Heb. ii. 17) j ^S TreTretpa/zeVos Kara jravra Ka6^ SfioLorrjTa (Heb. iv. 
 15) ; as One Who efjcadev d<j> hv enade rrjv VTraKorjv (Heb. V. 7) 1 
 
 Yes. For Holy Scripture qualifies this language by describing 
 
 Him as x^P^^^ dfjiapTias (Heb. iv. 15) i ^S oo-to?, aKUKOs, dixiavros, 
 
 K€x(opL(Tfi€vos aTTo Tcov dfiapTci}\(»)v (Heb. vii. 26) \ and by connect- 
 ing His manifestation as the Saviour with the entire absence of 
 any sinful element within Himself : eKclvos ecpavepaOrj^ Iva rds dpap- 
 Tias Tjpcov (ipT], Ka\ djxapTLa iv avrut ovk eari (l St. John iii. 5). It 
 is clear that Holy Scripture denies the existence, not merely of any 
 sinful thinking or acting, but of any ultimate roots and sources 
 of sin, of any propensities or inclinations, however latent and 
 rudimentary, towards sin, in the Incarnate Christ. When 
 
 L 1 2 
 
5i6 Note C On Oitr Lord's Temptation. 
 
 therefore Scripture speaks of His perfect assimilation to us, 
 to our condition, our trials, our experiences, this language 
 must be understood of physical and mental pain in all their 
 forms. It cannot be understood of any moral assimilation ; 
 He is, according to Scripture, the absolutely Sinless One ; we 
 are, by nature, corrupt. 
 
 2. *Is this account consistent with the exigencies of our 
 Lord's Redemptive Work % ' Did He conquer sin for us, when 
 His victory was won under conditions differing from our own ? 
 
 Certainly. He is not less truly representative of our race, 
 because in Him it has recovered its perfection. His victory is 
 none the less real and precious, because, morally speaking, it 
 was inevitable. Nay, this perfect internal sinlessness, which 
 rendered Christ inaccessible to direct temptation to evil, was 
 itself essential to His redemptive relationship to the human 
 family. It accordingly was dehberately secured to Him by His 
 Virgin-Birth, which cut off the entail of inward corruption. 
 He could not have been the Sinless Victim, offered freely for 
 a sinful world, dUaios vncp ddiKiov (i St. Pet. iii. i8), unless 
 He had been thus superior to the moral infirmities of His 
 brethren. 
 
 3. But does not such an account impair the full form of our 
 Lord's example ? 
 
 Certainly an example is in a sense more powerful when 
 it is set by one who is under exactly the same moral circum- 
 stances as ourselves. And, if Christ our Lord had been a 
 sinner, or at any rate had had sinful dispositions within Him, 
 He would so far have been more entirely what we really 
 are ; although He would have been unable to redeem us. 
 If, like His apostle. He had beheld ^ another law in His 
 members warring against the law of His mind,' He would 
 have come not in * the likeness of sinful flesh,' but in flesh 
 that was actually sinful, and so exactly like our own. But 
 then He took our nature upon Him, precisely in order to 
 expel sin altogether from it, and thus to shew us of what it was 
 capable, by shewing us Himself. The absence of an absolute 
 identity of moral circumstances between Him and ourselves, is 
 more than compensated by our possession of what else we could 
 not have had, a Perfect Model of Humanity. We gain in the 
 perfection of the Moral Ideal thus placed before us, to say 
 nothing of the perfection of the Mediator between God and 
 Man, more than we can lose in moral vigour, upon discovering 
 that His obedience was wrought out in a Nature unlike our 
 
Note D, Unity of the Father and the Son, 517 
 
 own in the one point of absolute purity. And by His grace, 
 we ourselves are supernaturalized, and ' can do all things.' 
 
 4. But does not such an account reflect upon the moral 
 greatness of our Lord ] Is not an obedience ^ which could not 
 but be,' less noble than an obedience which triumphs over 
 pronounced disinclination to obey ? In other words, does not 
 this account practically deny Christ's moral liberty % 
 
 No. The highest liberty does not imply the moral capacity 
 of doing wrong. God is the one perfectly free Being ; yet God 
 cannot sin. The free movement of a moral being, who has not 
 fallen, is not an oscillation between sin and moral truth ; it 
 is a steady adherence to moral truth. To God sin is im- 
 possible. To created natures sin is not impossible ; but it 
 is always, at first, a violation of the law of their being ', they 
 must do violence to themselves in order to sin. So it was in 
 Eden ; so it is, in its degree, with the first lie a man tells now. 
 Our Lord's inaccessibility to sin was the proof and glory of His 
 Moral Perfection. ' Nonne de Spiritu Sancto et Virgine Maria 
 Dei Filius unicus natus est, non carnis concupiscentia sed 
 singulari Dei munere % Numquid metuendum fuit, ne accedente 
 cetate homo ille libero peccaret arbitrio 1 An ideo in illo non 
 libera voluntas erat ; ac non tanto magis erat, quanto magis 
 peccato servire non poterat V (S. Aug., De Prsedestinatione 
 Sanctorum, c. 15, n. 30.) 
 
 The real temptation of a Sinless Christ is not less precious 
 to us than the temptation of a Christ who could have sinned, 
 would be. It forms a much truer and more perfect contrast to 
 the failure of our first parent. It occupies a chief place in that 
 long series of acts of condescension which begins with the 
 Nativity, and which ends on the Cross. It is a lesson for all 
 times as to the true method of resisting the tempter. Finally, 
 it is the source of that strength whereby all later victories over 
 Satan have been won : Christ, the sinless One, has conquered 
 the enemy in His sin-stained members. * By Thy Temptation, 
 good Lord, deliver us.' 
 
 NOTE D, ON Lectuee IV. 
 
 On * Moral' explanations of the Unity of the Father 
 and the Son. 
 
 Eeferring to a passage which is often quoted to destroy the 
 dogmatic significance of St. John x. 30, Professor Bright has well 
 observed that Hhe comparison in St. John xvii. 21, and the 
 
5 1 8 Note E, The Presbyter John and the Apostle, 
 
 unity of Christians with each other in the Son has sometimes 
 been abused in the interests of heresy.' ^ The second unity,' it 
 has been said, * is simply moral ; therefore the first is so.' But 
 the second is not simply moral ; it is, in its basis, essential, for 
 we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones ; it 
 is the mysterious incorporation into His Sacred Manhood which 
 causes the oneness of affections and of will. Thus also in the 
 higher sphere, the Father and the Son are one in purpose, 
 ])ecause They are consubstantial. ^ Those,' says Olshausen on 
 St. John X. 30, * who would entertain the hypothesis — at once 
 Arian, Socinian, and Eationalistic — that tv dvai refers only to 
 unity of will, not of nature, should not forget that true unity of 
 will without unity of nature is something inconceivable. Hence, 
 if Christ speaks of unity of will between Himself and His 
 people, this can subsist only so far as such unity of will has 
 been rendered possible to them by a previous communication 
 of His nature' (Eighteen Sermons of St. Leo, p. 132). 
 
 NOTE E, ON Lectuee V. 
 
 'The Presbyter John' and the Apostle. 
 
 Who was the author of the Second and Third Epistles attri- 
 buted to St. John the Evangelist in the present Canon of the 
 New Testament % 
 
 I. The existence of a 'Presbyter John,' a contemporary of the 
 Apostle, depends on the following evidence : — 
 
 (i.) Papias in Eus. iii. 39 names him with Aristion separately 
 from St. John, as a disciple of the Lord. Eusebius adds 
 that this confirms the report of (a) two Johns in Asia who 
 had been in close relations with our Lord, (f) two tombs 
 at Ephesus both bearing the name of John. 
 
 (ii.) Dionysius of Alexandria, in Eus. vii. 25, ascribes the 
 authorship of the Apocalypse to 'the Presbyter John,' 
 as Eusebius himself was inclined to do. Dionysius repeats 
 the story of the two tombs. 
 
 (iii.) The 'Apostolical Constitutions' (vii. 47) says that a 
 second John was made Bishop of Ephesus by the Apostle 
 St. John. 
 
 (iv.) St. Jerome (Catal. Script, c. 9 and 18) makes a state- 
 ment to the same effect : he says that John the Presbyter's 
 
Note E, The Presbyter John and the Apostle, 519 
 
 tomb is still shewn at Ephesus, although some maintained 
 that both tombs were memorials of St. John the Evan- 
 gelist. 
 
 Dr. Dollinger admits that John Presbyter lived as a contem- 
 porary of the Evangelist, and that his grave could be seen at 
 Ephesus next to St. John's. (First Age of the Church, p. 113, 
 Eng. trans., 2nd edit.) 
 
 II. But this admission would not necessarily involve the 
 further admission that the Presbyter John was the author of 
 the Second and Third Epistles ascribed to the Apostle. All 
 that can be advanced in favour of the Presbyter's authorship is 
 stated by Ebrard (Einleitung) ; the ordinary belief being de- 
 fended by Liicke, Huther, Wordsworth, and Alford. Among 
 reasons for it are the following : — 
 
 i. The argument from style. The differences upon which 
 Ebrard lays such stress may fairly be accounted for by the 
 distinct character and object of the two Epistles ; while their 
 general type of language and thought is unmistakeably Johan- 
 nean. Bretschneider denied that the Apostle had written any 
 one of the three Epistles. Yet he had no doubt of the fact 
 that all three had been written by a single author. 
 
 ii. Church-tradition. 
 
 (a) The great authority, in this matter especially, of St. Ire- 
 naeus ; Hser. i. 16. 3 ; iii. 16. 8. (See Alford.) Neither 
 St. Irenseus nor Poly crates had ever heard, it would ap- 
 pear, of the Presbyter John, which shews at least that 
 he cannot have been an eminent person in the Church. 
 
 (/3) That of Clement and Dionysius of Alexandria (see 
 Alford) ; Aurelius, quoted by St. Cyprian in Cone. 
 Carth. ; St. Jerome, cf. Ep. 2 ad Paulinum, Ep. ad 
 Evagrium. 
 
 (y) On the other hand, Origen was doubtful about the 
 authorship as about many other things. (Eus. vi. 25.) 
 The two Epistles are not even mentioned by Tertullian 
 or Theodoret. They were rejected, together with the 
 other Catholic Epistles, by Theodore of Mopsuestia. 
 
 (b) The late reception of the two Epistles into the canon 
 of so many Churches may be accounted for, according 
 to Ebrard, by (i) their private character; (2) the fact 
 
520 Note F, The Worship of Jestcs Christ 
 
 that one was addressed to a woman ; (3) the amount 
 of matter in them common to the first Epistle (1). The 
 verdict of the Muratorian Fragm. is doubtful. The 
 Peschito probably did not contain either. Eusebius 
 reckons them among the Antilegomena ; yet his own 
 opinion appears in Dem. Ev. iii. 5. (See Alford.) 
 
 iii. Nothing against the apostolic authorship can be inferred 
 from the title 6 npea^vTepos, St. Paul calls himself 6 Trpea^vrrjs 
 (Philem. 9), and St. Peter 6 a-vfiTrpea^vrepos (i Pet. v. i). 
 Probably * the Presbyter ' John did not assume the title until 
 after the death of the Apostle. St. John may have used it 
 in his private correspondence either to hint at his age, or as 
 a formal title the force of which was at once recognized and 
 admitted. Surely the Presbyter would have added to 6 Trpco-- 
 iSuTfpoff, his name ^Icodwrjs. An Apostle could afford to omit 
 his name. The authority too, of which the writer of the third 
 Epistle is conscious in his reference to Diotrephes, seems incon- 
 sistent with the supposition of a non-apostolical authorship. 
 
 NOTE F, ON Lecture VII. 
 
 The worship of Jesus Christ as prescribed by the Authorized 
 Services of the Church of England. 
 
 A. In a letter to the Editor of the ' Times/ dated August 9, 
 and published in that journal on September 26, 1866, Dr. Colenso 
 writes as follows : — 
 
 'I have drawn attention to the fact that out of 180 collects 
 and prayers contained in the Prayer-book, only three or /our at 
 most are addressed to our Lord, the others being all addressed 
 through Christ to Almighty God. I have said that there are 
 also ejaculations in the Litany and elsewhere addressed to 
 Christ. But I have shewn that the whole spirit and the general 
 practice of our Liturgy manifestly tend to discourage such wor- 
 ship and prayer, instead of making it the '^foundation-stone" 
 of common worship.' 
 
 ' It appears,' Dr. Colenso further observes, * that the practice 
 in question is not based on any Scriptural or Apostolical 
 authority, but is the development of a later age, and has very 
 greatly increased within the Church of England during the 
 last century, beyond what (as the Prayer-book shews) was the 
 rule at the time of the Reformation — chiefly, as I believe, 
 through the use of unauthorized hymns.' 
 
in the Services of the Church of England, 521 
 
 1. Now here it is to be observed, first of all, that prayer to 
 our Lord is either riglit or wrong. If it is right, if Jesus Christ 
 does indeed hear and answer prayer, and prayer to Him is 
 agreeable to the Divine Will, then three or four hundred collects 
 addressed to Him (supposing the use of them not to imply a 
 lack of devotion to the Eternal Father and to the Holy Spirit) 
 are quite as justifiable as three or four. If such prayer is wrong, 
 if Jesus Christ does not hear it, and it is opposed to the real 
 Will of God, then a single ejaculation, a single Christe Eleison, 
 carries with it the whole weight of a wrongful act of worship, 
 and is immoral, as involving a violation of the rights of God. 
 
 Dr. Colenso says that prayer to Jesus Christ is ^not based on 
 Scriptural or Apostolical authority, but is the development of a 
 later age.' He does not mean to assert that ^development' is a 
 sufficient justification of a Christian doctrine or practice ; since 
 he is assigning a reason for the discouragement which he feels 
 it to be his duty to offer to the practice of prayer to our Lord. 
 But, if his reason be valid, ought it not to make any one such 
 prayer utterly out of the question ? It is not easy to understand 
 the principle upon which, after admitting that Hhree or four 
 Collects' in the Prayer-book are addressed to our Lord, Dr. Co- 
 lenso adds, * I am prepared to use the Liturgy of the Church of 
 England as it stands.' 
 
 To a clear mind, unembarrassed by the difficulties of an unten- 
 able position, this painful inconsistency would be impossible. 
 Either Jesus Christ is God or He is not ; there is no third 
 alternative. If He is God, then natural piety makes prayer to 
 Him inevitable : to call Him God is to call Him adorable. 
 If He is not God, then one-tenth part of the worship which 
 the Church of England in her authorized formularies offers to 
 Him is just as idolatrous as a hundred litanies, such as ours, 
 would be. Dr. Colenso would not explain his use of * Christ, 
 have mercy upon us' as Koman Catholics explain an ' Ora pro 
 nobis.' If one such ^ejaculation' is right, then prayer to our 
 Lord for an hour together is right also. In short, it is not a 
 question of more or fewer prayers to Christ ; the question is, 
 Can we rightly worship Him at all ] 
 
 2. Dr. Colenso maintains that ^the whole spirit and the 
 general practice of our Liturgy manifestly tend to discourage' 
 prayer to our Lord. 
 
 What is meant by the * whole spirit ' of our Liturgy % If this 
 expression is intended to describe some sublimated essence, 
 altogether distinct from the actual words of the Prayer-book, 
 
522 Note F. The Worship of Jesus Christ 
 
 it is of course very difficult to say what it may or may not 
 ^ tend ' to ^ discourage.' But if tlie ' whole spirit ' of a document 
 be its intellectual drift and purpose as gathered from its actual 
 words, and from the history of its formation, then we may say 
 that Dr. Colenso's assertion is entirely opposed to the facts of 
 the case. 
 
 (n) The devotional addresses to our Lord Jesus Christ alone 
 in the Church Service are as follows : — 
 
 Daily Service, Morning and Uvening — • 
 
 Verses of the Te Deum . 
 
 ' Christ, have mercy upon us ' 
 
 Prayer of St. Chrysostom , 
 
 Litany — 
 
 Invocation, * God the Son ' . 
 ' Remember not, Lord ' . . 
 Deprecations . . . 
 
 Obsecrations 
 
 * In all time of our tribulation ' 
 Petitions .... 
 
 * Son of God, we beseech Thee,' etc 
 ' Lamb of God, That,' etc. . 
 
 * Christ, hear us ' 
 'Christ, have mercy upon us ' 
 Preces, ' From our enemies ' . 
 Prayer of St. Chrysostom 
 
 Collects — 
 
 Third Sunday in Advent 
 St. Stephen's Day . 
 First Sunday in Lent . 
 
 Oormnunion Office — 
 
 Of the three parts of the Gloria in Excelsis 
 
 Solemnization of Matrimony — 
 
 * Christ, have mercy upon us ' . • 
 
 Visitation of the Sick — 
 
 * Remember not, Lord ' . 
 ^ Christ, have mercy upon us ' 
 '0 Saviour of the world, Who by Thy Cross* 
 
 • 
 
 • • 
 
 i6 
 
 • 
 
 • • 
 
 2 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 2 
 
 • 
 
 • « 
 
 I 
 
 • 
 
 • • 
 
 I 
 
 . 
 
 • • 
 
 5 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 2 
 
 • 
 
 • 1 
 
 I 
 
 . 
 
 • 1 
 
 21 
 
 
 , 
 
 I 
 
 • 
 
 • * 
 
 2 
 
 • 
 
 • « 
 
 I 
 
 • 
 
 • < 
 
 I 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 lO 
 
 • 
 
 • 4 
 
 I 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 I 
 
 • 
 
 , 
 
 I 
 
 ■ 
 
 , 
 
 I 
 
in the Services of the Church of England, 
 
 523 
 
 Burial of the Dead — 
 
 
 
 
 * In the midst of life,' etc. 
 
 'Christ, have mercy upon us' • 
 
 • 
 • 
 
 • 
 • 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 Churching of Women — 
 
 * Christ, have mercy upon us' 
 
 • 
 
 « 
 
 I 
 
 Commination — 
 
 
 
 
 * Christ, have mercy upon us' 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 I 
 
 Prayers to he used at Sea — 
 
 ' blessed Saviour, That didst save ' 
 
 * Christ, have mercy upon us ' 
 
 * Christ, hear us ' 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 • 
 
 I 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 83 
 
 (/3) Devotional addresses to our Lord conjointly with the 
 Eternal Father and the Holy Ghost : — 
 
 Daily Morning and Evening Services, not including 
 
 the Psalms — Gloria Patri at least . . 6 
 
 Athanasian Creed — Gloria Patri . 
 
 Litany — 
 
 ' O Holy, Blessed, and Glorious Trinity' 
 Gloria Patri . . , . • 
 
 Collect for Trinity Sunday 
 
 Communion Office — 
 
 Preface for Trinity Sunday , 
 Ter Sanctus ..... 
 Matrimony — Gloria Patri 
 Visitation of the Sick — Gloria Patri 
 Burial of the Dead — Gloria Patri at least 
 Churching 0/ Women — Gloria Patri 
 Commination — Gloria Patri 
 Psalter — Gloria Patri .... 
 
 Prayers to he used at Sea — 
 
 Gloria Patri ..... 
 * God the Father, God the Son,' etc. 
 
 I 
 I 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 I 
 I 
 I 
 I 
 171 
 
 4 
 I 
 
 193 
 
524 Note F, The Worship of Jesus Christ 
 
 Besides this, there are at the end of Collects seven ascriptions 
 of Grlory, addressed to Christ our Lord with the Father and the 
 Holy Spirit. In one Collect (Ordering of Deacons) such an 
 ascription is addressed to Christ alone. 
 
 (y) It should further be added, that in each of the Ordina- 
 tion Services the whole of that large part of the Litany which 
 is addressed to our Lord is repeated, with the exception of 
 the Prayer of St. Chrysostom ; while in the Doxology, twice 
 repeated, at the end of the Veni Creator, Christ is praised with 
 the Father and the Holy Ghost. Nor should the solemn Bene- 
 dictions in the Name of the Three Blessed Persons which occur 
 in the Communion, the Confirmation, and the Marriage Services, 
 be forgotten in estimating the devotional attitude of the Church 
 towards our Lord. For a view of the real amount of change 
 in the Prayer-book which would be necessary in order to expel 
 from it the worship of our Lord, see 'The Book of Common 
 Prayer of tlie Church of England adapted for general use in 
 other Protestant Churches.' London, William Pickering, 1852. 
 This compilation appears to have been the work of a Socinian ; 
 as those Protestant Dissenters who believe in the Godhead of 
 our Lord would regard most of its ' adaptations ' as shocking 
 to their dearest convictions. 
 
 (5) Of the Collects for Sundays or Holy-days now addressed 
 to the Father, only two (those for the Fourth Sunday in Advent 
 and Sunday after Ascension) were, in the old Ritual, prayers to 
 Christ. Yet of these, it happens that the former was, in its 
 original form, as it stood in the Sacraraentary of Gelasius, ad- 
 dressed to the Father (Muratori, Lit. Bom. i. 680) : and the 
 latter was not originally a Collect, but an antiphon for the second 
 vespers of the Ascension, which Ven. Bede sang shortly before 
 his death. Another prayer, beginning ' Hear us,' in the Visita- 
 tion Office, was a prayer to our Lord until 1661. On the other 
 hand, of the three Collects now addressed to our Lord, that for 
 the First Sunday in Lent dates from 1549, that for the Third 
 Sunday in Advent from 1661, while that for St. Stephen's Day, 
 originally a prayer to the Father, became a prayer to the Son 
 in 1549, and was enlarged and intensified, as such, in 1661. 
 The Office for Use at Sea, containing prayers to Christ, also 
 belongs to 1661. 
 
 In order to do justice to the spirit of the Reformers of the 
 sixteenth century on this subject, two facts should be noted. 
 
 1 . Prayers to our Lord abound in the semi-authorized Primers 
 which were put out at that period. In Edward the Sixth's 
 
in the Services of the Church of England. 525 
 
 Primer of 1553 there are sixteen. In Elizabeth's Primer of 
 1559 there are twenty -two. In one portion of the Preces Pri- 
 vatse of 1564 there are twenty-one. In the ^Christian Prayers' 
 of 1578 there are fifty-five. 
 
 2. On tlie other hand, from all of these manuals, as from the 
 public services of the Church, all a^ddresses to any created being 
 were rigorously excluded. And one effect of the expulsion of 
 antiphons and hymns addressed to the Blessed Virgin and other 
 Saints from the Liturgy of the Church of England, has been to 
 throw the praises, prayers, and adorations, which the Church of 
 England publicly addresses to our Lord Jesus Christ, into a 
 sharper prominence than belonged to such prayers in pre- 
 Reformation times, or than belongs to them now in the Church 
 of Home. 
 
 The old Puritanism would have shrunk with horror from 
 the discouragement of prayer to our Lord. Witness the speech 
 of Sir E. Dering in the Long Parliament of 1641, after an order 
 of the House of Commons forbidding men to bow at the Name 
 of Jesus : — 
 
 * Was it ever heard before, that any men of any religion, in 
 any age, did ever cut short or abridge any worship, upon any 
 occasion, to their God % Take heed, Sir, and let us all take heed, 
 whither we are going. If Christ be Jesus, if Jesus be God, all 
 reverence, exterior as w^ell as interior, is too little for Him. 
 I hope we are not going up the back stairs to Socinianism !' 
 (Southey, Book of the Church, p. 462.) 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 B. The worship of Christ our Lord in the Litany has lately 
 been explained by a very popular and accomplished writer », 
 upon principles, which, if they could be admitted, would deny to 
 it the significance assigned to it in these Lectures. After com- 
 menting on the historical origin of Litany-worship in the fifth 
 century, and on the compilation of our own Litany at the 
 Reformation, the Dean of Westminster observes that the Litany 
 forms the most remarkable exception to the ordinary practice 
 of the Church, in respect of addressing prayers to God the 
 Father. The Dean then proceeds : — 
 
 * It is not perhaps certain that all the petitions are addressed 
 to Christ our Saviour b ; but, at any rate, a large portion are so 
 
 » ' The Litany,' by the Dean of Westminster. In ' Good Words* for July, 
 1868, p. 423. 
 
 b ' We beseech thee to hear us, O Lord,' is in the older Litanies addre^^sed 
 to God (Martene, iii. 52), and so it would seem to be in some of the petitions 
 in the English Litany. But perhaps the most natural interpretation is to 
 regard the whole as addressed to Christ. (Note in ' Good Words.') 
 
526 Note F. The Worship of Jestts Christ 
 
 addressed. It stands in this respect almost isolated amidst the 
 rest of the Prayer Book. Now, what is the reason — what is 
 the defence for this % Many excellent persons have at times 
 felt a scruple at such a deviation from the precepts of Scripture 
 and from the practice of ancient Christendom. What are we 
 to say to explain it % The explanation is to be sought in the 
 original circumstances under which the history was introduced. 
 When the soul is overwhelmed with difficulties and distresses, 
 like those which caused the French Christians in the fifth cen- 
 tury to utter their piteous supplications to God — it seems to 
 be placed in a differeut posture from that of common life. The 
 invisible world is brought much nearer — the language, the 
 feelings of the heart become more impassioned, more vehement, 
 more urgent. The inhabitants, so to speak, of the world of 
 spirits seem to become present to our spirits \ the words of 
 common intercourse seem unequal to convey the thoughts which 
 are labouring to express themselves As in poetry, so in sorrow, 
 and for a similar reason, our ordinary forms of speech are 
 changed. So it was in the two exceptions which occur in the 
 New Testament. When Stephen was in the midst of his 
 enemies, and no help for him left on earth, then " the heavens 
 were opened ; and he saw the Son of Man standing on the 
 right hand of God," and thus seeing Him, he addressed his 
 petition straight to him — " Lord Jesus, receive my spirit, — Lord, 
 lay not this sin to their charge." When St. Paul was deeply 
 oppressed by the thorn in the flesh, then again his Lord ap- 
 peared to him (we know not how), and then to Him, present 
 to the eye whether of the body or the spirit (as on the road to 
 Damascus), the Apostle addressed the threefold supplication, 
 " Let this depart from me," and the answer, in like manner, to 
 the ear of the body or spirit, was direct — " My grace is suffi- 
 cient for thee." So is it in the Litany. Those who wrote it, 
 and we who use it, stand for the moment in the place of Stephen 
 and Paul. We knock, as it were, more earnestly at the gates 
 of heaven — we "thrice beseech the Lord" — and the veil is for 
 a moment withdrawn, and the Son of Man is there standing to 
 receive our prayer. In that rude time, when the Litany was 
 first introduced, they who used it would fain have drawn back 
 the veil further still. It was in the Litanies of the Middle 
 Ages that we first find the invocations not only of Christ our 
 Saviour, but of those earthly saints who have departed with 
 him into that other world. These we have now, with a wise 
 caution, ceased to address. But the feeling which induced 
 
in the Services of the Church of England, 527 
 
 men to call upon them is the same in kind as that which runs 
 through this exceptional service ; namely, the endeavour, under 
 the pressure of strong emotion and heavy calamity, to bring 
 ourselves more nearly into the presence of the Invisible. Christ 
 and the saints at such times seemed to come out like stars, 
 which in the daylight cannot be seen, but in the darkness of 
 the night were visible. The saints, like falling stars or passing 
 meteors, have again receded into the darkness. We by increased 
 reflection have been brought to feel that of them and of their 
 state we know not enough to justify this invocation of their 
 help. But Christ, the Lord and King of the Saints, still re- 
 mains — the Bright and Morning Star, more visible than all the 
 rest, more bright and more cheering, as the darkness of the 
 night becomes deeper, as the cold becomes more and more chill. 
 
 ' We justly acquiesce in the practice of our Reformed Church, 
 which has excluded those lesser mediators. But this one 
 remarkable exception of the Litany in favour of addressing our 
 prayers to the one great Divine Mediator may be surely allowed, 
 if we remember that it is an exception, and understand the 
 grounds on which it is made. In the rest of the Prayer Book 
 we follow the ancient rule, and our Saviour's express command, 
 by addressing our Father only. Here in the Litany, when we 
 express our most urgent needs, we may well deviate from that 
 general rule^ and invite the ever-present aid of Jesus Christ, at 
 once the Son of Man and Son of God?.' 
 
 I. Now, first of all, it cannot be admitted that any ^defence' 
 or ^ explanation' of the worship of our Lord in the Litany 
 ought to be required by any person who sincerely believes in 
 Christ's Godhead ; while as to those who do not believe in it, the 
 Dean's explanation does not touch the real point of their objec- 
 tion. If ^ many excellent persons have at times felt a scruple 
 at such a deviation from the precepts of Scripture and from the 
 practice of ancient Christendom/ they ought to have been told 
 that their scruple was based on a misapprehension. As to 
 Scripture, every precept in the Gospel on the subject is in har- 
 mony with and governed by the primal law : ' Thou slialt wor- 
 ship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.' This 
 precept is at once positive and negative : it prescribes the 
 adoration of God, and it excludes the adoration of beings ex- 
 ternal to the Godhead. The one practical question then is whether 
 Jesus Christ is internal to the Divine Essence, or a created 
 
 s ' Good Woi'd?/ p. 432. 
 
528 Note F. The Worship of Jesus Christ 
 
 being outside It. If the former, then not merely may we adore 
 Him : we must. If the latter, then no poetry, no feeling, can 
 relax the rule : we dare not. If Christ is God, the Litany 
 does not require an apology. If He is only a creature, it does 
 not admit of one. 
 
 And as concerns ^the practice of the ancient Church' the 
 scruple in question is very unnecessary. Certainly, in the 
 greatest public act of Christian worship, the Eucharist, the rule 
 was, as defined at Carthage, to address prayer to the Father. 
 This rule however resulted from the specific belief of the ancient 
 Church respecting the Eucharist, namely, that it was a sacrificial 
 presentation of Christ, once for all sacrificed on Calvary, to the 
 Eternal Father. The rule did not govern ancient Christian 
 practice in respect of non-Eucharistic prayer. The Litanies of 
 the fifth century did but repeat and expand devotions which 
 had long been ancient and popular ; such as were the Kyrie 
 Eleison and the Gloria in Excelsis ; — both of them containing 
 prayers to Christ our Lord, and both ultimately finding their 
 way into the Eucharistic Service. Prayer to our Lord had long 
 been the natural resource of the Christian soul. Not to repeat 
 examples which have been cited in the text of these lectures, let 
 two be instanced which shew that prayer to Christ did not first 
 become popular in the ancient Church, when, under the pressure 
 of public calamities, Bishop Mamertus instituted Litanies in the 
 diocese of Vienne. Such prayer was already the common and 
 ancient practice of Christendom. A century earlier St. Athan- 
 asius is vindicating his loyalty to Constantius : * I had only 
 to say,' he observes, ^ Let us pray for the safety of the most 
 religious Emperor, Constantius Augustus ; and all the people 
 immediately cried with one voice, " Christ, send Thy help 
 to Constantius." And they continued praying for some time.* 
 (Apol. ad Constant. § 10.) Again, St. Augustine is describing a 
 spontaneous burst of fervid prayer from the Christian multitude 
 — They exclaimed, ^ Exaudi Christe, Augustino vita :' and he 
 adds — ' dictum est sexties decies.' (Ep. 213.) These great fathers 
 would no more have thought that prayer to our Lord had to be 
 justified before well-informed Christians, than they would have 
 hoped to justify it, let us say, to intelligent but unconverted 
 Jews. 
 
 2. Dean Stanley's ^explanation' of the worship of our Lord 
 in the Litany refers it to ' difficulties and distresses like those 
 which caused the French Christians in the fifth century to utter 
 their piteous supplications to God.' He traces it back to the 
 
ill the Services of the Church of England, 529 
 
 passion, the vehemence, the urgency of a great sorrow ; to * the 
 endeavour, under the pressure of strong emotion and heavy 
 calamity, to bring ourselves more nearly into the presence of the 
 Invisible.' Now there is no doubt that calamities, whether 
 public or private, do very greatly enlarge and intensify the life 
 of prayer in Christian souls. Scripture teaches us, in various 
 ways, that this is one of the providentially-intended results of 
 such calamities ; and upon no point is Scripture more in har- 
 mony with experience. But sorrow, of itself, does not make 
 the prayers which it multiplies or intensifies either lawful or 
 availing. Sorrow may quicken the instincts of superstition not 
 less than those of revealed truth. Sorrow, as such, is not 
 a revelation ; it does not ensure progress in truth ; it may 
 bring a Christian more sensibly into God's Presence ; it may 
 throw pagan multitudes at the feet of a debasing and odious 
 idol. Whether the practices which it leads us, in our agony, 
 to adopt, are wholesome and defensible, must be determined 
 independently of it. If a practice is indefensible, on grounds 
 of faith or grounds of reason, sorrow cannot consecrate it. 
 If it was in any sense or degree wrong to pray to Jesus 
 Christ, St. Stephen's dying agony, and St. Paul's mental dis- 
 tress under the thorn in the flesh, could not justify their 
 prayers to Him ; if they were right in praying to Him then, 
 they were right in praying to Him, as we know St. Paul did 
 pray to Him, at other times. If the prayers to our Lord in 
 the Litany were really a '• deviation from the precepts of Scrip- 
 ture and from the practice of ancient Christendom,' then neither 
 the difficulties and distresses of Southern France in the fifth 
 century, nor the ' extremity of perplexity l^' which men felt at 
 the convulsions of the Keformati on-period, nor any public or 
 private sorrows or emotions of modern times, can avail to justify 
 such a ^deviation.' It is indeed natural for Christians in times 
 of sorrow to appeal in prayer to our Lord's Human sympathies, 
 more earnestly than in the brighter hours of life. But assuredly 
 if such prayers to Christ are wrong, no amount of mental agony 
 can make them right ; and whether they are right or wrong is 
 a point to be determined by Christ's having or not having any 
 solid right to receive human adoration, and any real capacity of 
 hearing and answering the cries of His worshippers. If this 
 right and this capacity are once established ; the duty of ador- 
 ing Jesus Christ is placed on a basis which does not admit of 
 
 h 'Good Words,* p. 421. 
 M m 
 
530 Note F. The Worship of Jestts Christ 
 
 our restricting it to times of sorrow. If they are not established, 
 human sorrow cannot really affect the unseen realities, and 
 St. Stephen and St. Paul did but beat the air. 
 
 If the Psalter teaches us any one great lesson with respect 
 to sorrow, it is that we should be driven by it to renounce all 
 merely human aids and hopes, and to cling more trustfully, 
 exclusively, perseveringly to God as the true help and shield 
 and strength of souls. And the Christian Bishop of the fifth 
 century was not, we may be sure, unmindful of the teaching of 
 David, or rather he was not notoriously false to it. The whole 
 Church of his day, as the Church before him, adored Jesus 
 Christ as Very God, and the Litanies of Vienne only elaborated 
 into a new form, a devotion which was based not on the panic 
 of certain rural Christians, but on the broad and assured faith 
 of Christendom. 
 
 3. But the Dean's expressions respecting the relation of the 
 adoration of our Lord to the cultus of the saints in pre- 
 Reformation times, present the most serious difficulties of this 
 perplexing passage. In times of sorrow, he says, * Christ and 
 the saints seemed to come out like stars, which in the daylight 
 cannot be seen, but in the darkness of the night were visible.' 
 The saints * have again receded into the darkness.' ^ We by 
 increased reflection have been brought to feel that of them and 
 of their state we know not enough to justify this invocation of 
 their help. But Christ, the Lord and King of the Saints, still 
 remains '....* We justly acquiesce in the practice of our re- 
 formed Church, which has excluded these lesser mediators. 
 But this one remarkable exception of the Litany in favour of 
 addressing our prayers to the one great Divine Mediator may 
 be surely allowed, if we remember that it is an exception^ and 
 understand the grounds on which it is made.' 
 
 This language seems to imply that the prayers to our Lord 
 in the Litany are, in principle, identical with the prayers which 
 in mediseval times have been, and in Roman Catholic countries 
 still are, addressed to the saints. There is indeed some confu- 
 sion in speaking of the retention of prayer to the one great 
 Divine Mediator as constituting a ' remarkable exception' to the 
 proscription of prayers to the saints. For if the Great Mediator 
 is * Divine,' in the natural sense of being personally God, and 
 not only in the sense in which good men are said to be ^ divine,' 
 as possessing in a high, the highest known degree, some moral 
 qualities of God ; then the word ^exception' is inapplicable to 
 the case before us. If, on the contrary, Christ is not truly God ] 
 
in the Services of the Church of England. 531 
 
 then, no doubt, the retention of worship addressed to Him is a 
 ' remarkable exception' to the expulsion of all other ^ worship' of 
 the kind from the Prayer-book of the English Church. But it 
 will hardly be contended that the English Keformers retained 
 the old prayers to Christ our Lord, and added new ones of 
 their own, on such a ground as this. Had they done so they 
 would have been false to a principle to which they professed a 
 devoted loyalty, and by means of which, so to speak, they made 
 their way ; — the principle of restricting all prayer to God. 
 They notoriously believed the adoration of Christ to be identical 
 with, inseparable from, the adoration of God ; to be guarded, 
 justified, enforced by the first two commandments of the deca- 
 logue, just as truly as is the adoration of the Father, and of 
 the Holy Ghost, ^ Who with the Father and the Son together, 
 is worshipped and glorified i.' And, whatever may be said of 
 the language used in popular Roman Catholic devotions to 
 the saints, it is certain that no Eoman Catholic divine would 
 for one instant coordinate in word or thought the adoration 
 paid to Jesus, with the ^ relative honour ' paid to His glorified 
 servants. In short, neither Eoman Catholic nor Reformer re- 
 garded the adoration of Christ retained in our Prayer-book, as 
 an ^exception' to the general proscription at the Reformation 
 of the cultus of the saints. Had the Reformers done so, they 
 would have had to reconstruct, not the Litany, but the Nicene 
 Creed; they must also have re-written the second Article in 
 a Socinian sense, and altered a clause of the twenty-second. 
 Had the Roman Catholics done so, they would certainly have 
 availed themselves of a vantage ground which would have en- 
 abled them to deal with the Reformation as with a manifest revolt 
 against the most fundamental truths of the Christian revela- 
 tion. Whether the Roman invocations of the saints did or did 
 not in any way wrong the Divine Prerogatives, was a point 
 upon which the Reformers and their opponents differed seriously ; 
 but they were perfectly agreed in justifying such language as 
 that of our Litany by referring it to a truth which they held 
 at least with equal earnestness ; — the truth that Jesus Christ 
 is God. 
 
 If, in Origen's phrase, ' caro Domini honorem Deitatis assu- 
 mit ;' if, as a consequence of the Hypostatic Union, our Lord's 
 Manhood rightly and necessarily shares in the adoration offered 
 to Deity, this is because His Divine Person is ultimately and in 
 
 > Nicene Creed. 
 M m 2 
 
532 Note G. Cai^dmal de Turrecrematas work 
 
 reality, the object adored. ' God the Son, Redeemer of the 
 world, have mercy upon us miserable sinners.' ' O Lamb of 
 God that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon 
 us.' In either case it is Christ's Eternal Person which claims 
 our adoration ; that Person, with Which His Manhood is noAv 
 for ever joined, as an attribute of It. And Christ's Person is 
 adored, for precisely the same reason as that which leads us to 
 adore the Father ; nor could such adoration be offered to any 
 created personality whatever, without repudiating altogether 
 the first, the most sacred, prerogative of Deity. 
 
 ISrOTE G, 0]sr Lectuee VII. 
 
 Cardinal de Turrecremata's work on the Conception of the 
 Blessed Virgin. 
 
 The only copy of this work which I have seen is in the 
 Mazarine Library at Paris, where it is numbered 12 144. Its 
 full title is, * Tractatus de Veritate Goncejptionis Beatissimce 
 VirginiSf pro faciendd relatione coram patrihus Concilii Ba- 
 sileensis, Anno Dni. M.CCCG.XXX.VII, Mense Julio. Be 
 mandato Sedis Apostolicce Legatorum, eidem sacra Concilio 
 jprcesidentium comjnlatus, Fer Reverendiiim Pafrem, Fratrem 
 Joannem de Turecremata, sacrce TJieologice jprofessorera ordinis 
 Froedicatorum, tunc sacri apostolici Falatii Magistrum, Fasted, 
 Illustrissimum et ReverendissiTnum S. R. Ecclesice Cardinalem, 
 Episcapum Fortuensem, nunc prima impressus, Romce apud 
 Antonium Bladuin Asulanum, M.D.XLVII.^ 
 
 The book opens with a Preface by * Frater A Ihertus Duim,ius 
 de CatJiarOy ordinis proedicatorum, Sacrce Theologice professor : 
 et in Sapientid urhis Romce, divince speculationis interpres,* 
 addressed ' sincerce veritatis amiatoAhusJ After reviewing, 
 chiefly in the language of Scripture itself, the grounds, nature, 
 and obligations of the Christian faith, he proceeds : — 'Est autem 
 prse caeteris a sacris Uteris admodum aliena et Christi evangelio 
 dissona humana qusedam inventio, nostro infelici sevo ita errata, 
 ut posthabitis sacrae scripturse clarissimis testimoniis, spretis 
 etiam ecclesise sanctorumque patrum veterumque ecclesiae doc- 
 torum salutaribus monitis et doctrinis, cujusdam vanse devo- 
 tionis prastextu, sanctissimam Dei gentricem virginem, coeli 
 reginam, angelorum atque hominum dominam, propriis quibus- 
 dam adinventis laudibus celebrare cupiens, eam non fuisse Adse 
 peccato obnoxiam, ac perinde Christi sanguinis pretio non 
 
on the Conception of the Blessed Virgin. 533 
 
 indiguisse, ineptius dogmatizare prwsumpserit, ut liinc liceret 
 aliquibus (qui sacris abuti consuevere) liberius vorare domos 
 viduarum, seducereque cord a slmplicium longa oratione oranti- 
 bus, existimantibusque qusestum esse pietatem. Quorum audacia 
 divus Bernardus abbas, beatae virgin! super omnes devotissimus, 
 acrius reprebeudit dicens : Miramur satis quod visum fiierit 
 hoc tempore quibusdam voluisse mutare colorem ecclesise op- 
 timum, novam inducendo celebritatem, quam ritus ecclesiae 
 nescit, non probat ratio, non commendat antiqua traditio. 
 Numquid patribus doctiores aut devotiores sumus % Periculos^ 
 2)raesumimus quicquid ipsorum prudentia praeterivit. Virgo 
 regia falso non eget honore veris honorum titulis cumulata, et 
 infulis dignitatum. Non enim indiget Deus nostro mendacio. 
 Hanc autem fore sanctorum patrum et ecclesise luminarium 
 doctrinam, quam Augustinus innumeraque antiquorum multi- 
 tudo prsedicavit, quamque posteriores sancti doctrina et moribus 
 probatissimi amplexati sunt, quam Thomas Aquinas sustinet, 
 Divusque Bonaventura Minoritani ordinis, S. R. E. Episcopus 
 Cardinalis, fortissime tueatur, luce clarius patere poterit, opus 
 hoc Christiana mente legentibus. Horum autem sequacium 
 tetigit Deus corda, ut veluti fortissimi mihtes Christi, sacram 
 Scripturam in sui simplicitate et candore tuerentur et con- 
 servarent. Inter alios autem, qui ex sacro Prsedicatorum ordine 
 (patrum imitati vestigia), huic se militiae devoverunt, Reverend- 
 issimus olim sacri Apostolici Palatii Magister, ac postea (sic 
 exigentibus virtutum meritis) S. R. E. Cardinalis Episcopus 
 Portuensis, D. Joanes de Turecremata Hispanus, jussu et man- 
 dato sedis apostolicae, praesenti relatione scripta disseruit. Opus 
 quidem ita sincerum ct christianse pietati conveniens, ut nus- 
 quam, vel humanre inventionis tenebrse, vel propriie opinionis 
 affectus appareant, sed undique evangelicse veritatis candor 
 splendere videatur. Opus inquam, summe necessarium sed 
 hactenus rarissimum, et id quidem scriptorum inscitia in- 
 numeris mendis respersum foedatumque, neglectu penitus habe- 
 batur. Quietior namque erat omnium nostrum mens et animus, 
 et hujusmodi qusestionibus oblitis, necessariora fidei dogmata 
 tueri animo insederat, et temporum opportunitas exigebat. Sed 
 immoderatior quorundam audacia, dum apud doctos et vere 
 Theologos minoris se existimationis advertunt, vulgarem de- 
 biliumque mentium auram jamdiu sepultis novitatibus af- 
 fectantes, in Tridentina synodo, de hujusmodi humani conceptus 
 immunitate verbum facere verita non est. Quo factum est ut 
 Reverendus pater frater Bartholomeus Spina Pisanus ordinis 
 praedicatorum, sacrse Theologise professor, et sacri apostolici 
 
534 Note G. Cardinal de Ttirrecrematds work 
 
 Palatii magister, zelo fidei accensus, opus hoc erroribus ex- 
 purgari, typisque excussum, in publicum prodire, magno labore 
 curaret. Accessit, (Deo favente) sanctissimi D. N. D. Pauli 
 Papse Tertii consensus et favor/ 
 
 For these reasons, and under these auspices, the work was 
 printed at Rome in 1547. Towards the conclusion of his pre- 
 face, the editor contrasts the theological aim and spirit of Tur- 
 recremata with that of his opponents in such terms as these : — 
 
 ^Non enim alio tendit ista disparitas, quam ut hinc sacrse 
 scripturae germana Veritas, et ecclesise sanctorumque patrum et 
 doctorum adprobata doctrina, laudatissima pietas, et vera re- 
 ligio, illinc autem qucedam vulgarium afFectata devotio, sacris 
 literis et doctoribus non admodum consona, quinimo, (ut qui- 
 busdam visum est,) repugnans, et ab antiqu^ ecclesise con- 
 suetudine aliena, defendatur. Hinc Christi universalis re- 
 demptio, et super alios omnes SacrjBHumanitatisEjus excellentise 
 praerogativae, illinc sequalitas virginis sacratissimae et piae Dei 
 genetricis, ad Filium Dei Hominem Deum, et a reatu inimicitiae 
 Dei, et naturali captivitate peccati immunitas, pro pietate de- 
 fenduntur. Illis, quod vulgaribus, quodque muliercularum auri- 
 bus gratum judicaverint pietatem adstruentibus ; nobis e contra 
 nil pium, nil devotum, nilque Christiana celebritate dignum 
 existimantibus, quod non ex sacris literis auctoritatem habere 
 comprobatur.' 
 
 The work itself is divided into thirteen parts. The first 
 deals with the principles which are to govern the discus- 
 sion. In the second, are considered those passages of the Old 
 and New Testament, which, as interpreted by the Gloss and by 
 the explanations of the saints, assert that Christ alone was free 
 in His Conception from the taint of original sin. In the third 
 part. Holy Scripture and the Fathers are quoted to shew that 
 all human beings without exception who descend from Adam by 
 way of natural propagation, are conceived in original sin. The 
 fourth part is devoted to a consideration of the attempts of 
 opponents to set aside the inferences drawn from Rom. iii. 22, 
 V. 12 ; Gal. iii. 22 ; St. Matt. ix. 13 ; St. Luke xix. 10 j i Tim. 
 i. 15, ii. 5; 2 Cor. v. 14. In the fifth part, Scripture, saints, 
 and doctors, are cited to prove that ^ the Blessed Virgin Mary 
 did in fact contract original sin.' St. Luke i. 47 is interpreted 
 as implying this. The subject is pursued in the sixth part ; 
 passages from St. Leo the Great, St. John of Damascus, St. 
 Gregory, St. Anselm, Hugh of St. Victor, and especially St. Ber- 
 nard's Letter to the Canons of Lyons, and the deliberate deci- 
 sion in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose doctrine had 
 
on the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, 535 
 
 been endorsed by the University of Paris, are passed in review. 
 Lest opposition to the doctrine should be supposed to be only 
 a Dominican peculiarity, an appeal is made to Minorite, Augus- 
 tinian, Carmelite, Carthusian, and Cistercian theologians. In 
 the seventh part, the weight of ancient authority is pressed 
 against the opinion of the ' modern doctors ;' the conduct of the 
 Dominican theologians is justified in detail ; and the truth of 
 their doctrine is argued, from an examination of the prerogative 
 glories of our Lord, especially in His Conception, and from the 
 real limits of the ^privileges' commonly ascribed to the Blessed 
 Virgin. The eighth part is an argument from the universality 
 of our Lord's redemption to man's universal need of it ; ^ omnis 
 redemptus per Christum fuit aliquando peccati servitute cap- 
 tivus :' while, in the ninth, our Lord's titles of Mediator, 
 Reconciler, Healer, Justifier, Sanctifier, Cleanser, Shepherd, and 
 Priest of His people are successively expanded in their relation 
 to the doctrine of the absolute universality of human sin. In 
 the tenth, the author attacks the arguments and authorities 
 which were cited to prove the h 'priori position, that God ought 
 to have preserved the Blessed Virgin from original sin ; here 
 too he criticises the Scotist theory of the reason for the Incar- 
 nation. In the eleventh he assails in detail the arguments 
 which were adduced to prove that the Blessed Virgin was in 
 point of fact preserved from the taint of original sin ; in the 
 twelfth, those which were brought forward to shew that she was 
 thus preserved by a prevenient grace of sanctification. The 
 last part of the work recapitulates the disputed propositions ; 
 discusses the opinion that ^ pejus sit stare per unum instans in 
 originali peccato quam eternaliter esse damnatum j' meets the 
 allegation of miracles wrought to prove the Immaculate Concep- 
 tion by alleging miracles wrought to disprove it ; examines 
 the bearing of the established festival of the Conception on the 
 faith of the Church ; and finally insists that between those who 
 asserted and those who denied the Immaculate Conception of 
 the Blessed Virgin there were not less than twenty points of 
 difference. 
 
 At the end of the book, Turrecremata subjoins a personal 
 explanation. He states that on presenting himself at Basle, 
 with a view ' ad faciendam relationem mihi injunctam,' he was 
 told by the Cardinal Legate who presided, that the Fathers were 
 so occupied with the questions raised by the arrival of the 
 Greeks, that he could not be heard. He remained at Basle for 
 some months, but to no purpose. Upon the outbreak of the 
 disagreement between the Legates of Eugenius and ^patres 
 
536 Note G, Cardinal de Ttcrrecre^nata s work 
 
 aliquos Basileae residentes,' Turrecremata returned to Home 
 with his book. He adds with reference to the later proceedings 
 of the Council in the matter of the Immaculate Conception : 
 *Ex his apertissimb intelliget quisque doctus quod vacua et 
 invalid a sit determinatio quam in materia proefata conceptionis 
 beatissimse virginis factam quidam aiunt post recessum meum 
 Basilea. Invalida quidem est veritate, cum facta sit manifest^ 
 contra apertissima sanctorum patrum ecclesise testimonia, ac 
 contra doctrinam expressam principalium doctorum tam divini 
 juris quam humani, sicut ex prsefato opere luce clarius videri 
 potest/ A further reason for this invalidity he finds in the 
 previous departure of the papal legates and the proclamation 
 of the transference of the Council to Bologna. 
 
 Such a work as Turrecremata's has only to be described, and 
 it speaks for itself. Here is an elaborate treatise of between 
 700 and 800 closely-printed pages ; abounding in appeals to 
 authority, the most ancient and the most modern ) full of hard, 
 scholastic argiunent ; scarcely less full, at times, of passionate 
 rhetoric. It shrinks from no encounter with the maintainers of 
 the doctrine which it impugns ; it traverses, with fearless con- 
 fidence, and according to the learning and methods of its day, 
 with exhaustive completeness, the whole field of the controversy. 
 Whether it has been really answered or not by the arguments 
 of Ballerini, of Perrone, of Passaglia, is not here the question. 
 Enough to say that in the year of our Lord 1437, it represented 
 the mind of the reigning Pope, the mind too of the Theologian 
 who in his ^ Apology for Eugenius IV.' most stoutly maintained 
 the extreme papal claims against the superiority of a General 
 Council, as asserted at Basle. Turrecremata had no tinge of 
 what afterwards became * Gallicanism ; ' he was a hearty Ultra- 
 montane, and in the confidence of the Pontiff*. He, if any one, 
 could speak on behalf of the Western Church, of its learning, of 
 its piety, of its central authority, in the middle of the fifteenth 
 century. And his work against the Immaculate Conception is 
 perhaps the most remarkable of the many documents, which 
 make any real parallel between the claims of the truth asserted at 
 Nicsea, and those of the definition of Dec. 8, 1854, impossible. 
 
 A high Roman Catholic authority has said that ' they who 
 ask why the Immaculate Conception has been defined in the 
 nineteenth century, would have asked why the " homoousion" 
 was defined in the fourth c/ If they had done so, they would 
 have received in the fourth century an answer for which in the 
 
 « The Reunion of Christendom, a Pastoral Letter to the Clergy, by Henry 
 Edward, Archbishop of Westminster. London, Longmans, l866, p. 51. 
 
on the Conception of the Blessed Virgin. 537 
 
 nineteenth they must wait in vain. In the fourth century they 
 would have been tokl that the substantial truth defined at Nicsea 
 had always been believed as a fundamental truth of the Gospel; 
 that those who had denied it had been accounted heretics, from 
 the days of the Apostles downwards ; that Arius was accounted 
 a heretic, on first broaching his novel doctrine ; that the cir- 
 cumstances of the time demanded for the old unchanging truth 
 the protection of a new definition ; but that the definition added, 
 could add, nothing to the faith which had been held in its 
 fulness from the first — the faith that Jesus Christ is God. In 
 the nineteenth century they are told that the definition of the 
 Immaculate Conception had the effect of raising to a certainty 
 of faith that which was, before Dec. 8, 1854, only a matter of 
 pious opinion ; that those who, before that date, had denied 
 this opinion were so far from being accounted heretics, that they 
 were expressly protected from censure by the highest authority ; 
 that although the newly-defined truth had been taught to the 
 Church by the Apostles themselves and had all along been latent 
 in her mind, yet that her most representative divines and doctors 
 had again and again, with perfect impunity, nay with the highest 
 sanctions, expressly repudiated and condemned it. 
 
 It will be said that the same authority speaks at Rome which 
 spoke at Nicsea. Upon that most important question we do 
 not here and now enter. But with a book like Turrecremata's 
 before us, we cannot decline the conclusion that in a.d. 325 and 
 1854 two entirely different things were done; unless it can 
 be shewn that some hitherto unknown writer of the highest 
 consideration and of unsuspected orthodoxy in the ante-Nicene 
 period maintained against others who defended the Homoousion, 
 and by an appeal to a vast accumulation of authorities, the precise 
 doctrine for which Arius was condemned. That would be a 
 real counterpart to the position of Cardinal Turrecremata in 
 relation to the recent definition of the Immaculate Conception : 
 as it is, the doctrinal and historical ^ parallel ' upon which 
 some Roman Catholics and many opponents of the Christian 
 Revelation now lay so much stress, is not sufficiently accurate 
 to justify either of the opposite conclusions which it is put 
 forward in order to recommend. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 The numerals refer to the Lectures, the figures to the pages. 
 
 Abraham, promise to, ii. 45 ; Divine 
 manifestations to, 52; 'Seed' of, 
 78 ; his seeing the day of Christ, 
 iv. 187. 
 
 Adam, the first and the Second, vi. 
 304. 
 
 Adoration, distinguished from 'ad- 
 miration,' vii. 361 ; of Christ in 
 the New Testament, v. 236, 243; 
 vii. 364 sq. ; not a * secondary wor- 
 ship,' 376; embraced His Man- 
 hood, 379; referred to by early 
 Fathers, ib. sq. ; embodied in 
 hymns, 385 sq.; offered in the 
 Eucharistic office, 389; noticed 
 by Pagans, 391 sq.; defended by 
 Christian writers, 394 sq. ; carica- 
 tured in 'Graffito blasfemo,' 396; 
 offered by Martyrs, 398 sq.; even 
 by Arians, 403 : and by early So- 
 cinians, 404; in the English Church 
 Service, i. 40 ; viii. 4 74 : Note D. 
 
 Adrian, on worship of Christ, vii. 
 
 391. 392. 
 unions, V. 22 1 ; vi. 308, 309, 316 ; vii. 
 
 430- 
 AgnoetaB, heresy of, viii. 462. 
 'Alexamenos adores his God/ vii. 
 
 397. 
 Alexandria, real function of its 
 
 Theosophy, ii. 70 ; Eclectic school 
 
 of, vii. 356; Christian school of, 
 
 423. 
 Alford, Dean, v. 237, 238; vi. 288, 
 
 290, 314, 317, 325, notes. 
 Alogi, rejected St. John's Gospel, 
 
 V. 208, 217. 
 
 Ambrose, St., as a commentator, ii. 
 45, vii. 417. 
 
 Ananias, prayer of, to Christ, vii. 370. 
 
 Andre wes. Bishop, on Christ's Sacri- 
 fice, viii. 477. 
 
 'Angel of the Lord,' the, ii. 53 sq. 
 
 Angels, the holy, vi. 297, 310, 321, 
 
 343» 377. 
 
 Ante-Nicene Fathers, their testi- 
 mony to Divinity of Christ, vii. 
 411; their language not 'mere 
 rhetoric,' 417; doubtful state- 
 ments alleged from, 418 sq.; ten- 
 tative position of, 420; their real 
 mind shown when the doctrine 
 was questioned, 424. 
 
 Antichrist, the token of, i. 23 ; v. 
 241. 
 
 Anti-dogmatic moralists, i. 37. 
 
 Antinomianism, vi. 285, 286. 
 
 Antioch, Council of, its rejection of 
 the ' Homoousion,' vii. 431; School 
 
 of, 437. 
 Apocalypse, the, at one with St. 
 
 John's Gospel in its Christology, 
 
 V. 243 ; the Lamb adored in, ib.; 
 
 vii. 375 ; probable date of, vi. 277. 
 Apocrypha, the, of second century, v. 
 
 217, 218. 
 Apollinarianism, i. 25; v. 261; viii. 
 
 455- 
 
 ApoUinaris of Hierapolis, v. 213. 
 
 'Apostasy, the God-denying,' vii. 424. 
 
 Apostles, theories as to disagree- 
 ment of, vi. 278 ; with differences 
 of method, preach one Divine 
 Christ, 280, 350, 351 ; all sent by 
 Christ, vii. 368. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 539 
 
 Apotheosis, among Romans, no pa- 
 rallel to worship of Christ, i. 26; 
 V. 267; vii. 363. 
 
 Arianism, its conception of Christ, 
 i. 16, 26, 32; vi. 310; viii. 455; 
 its worship of Him, idolatrous in 
 principle, vii. 405 ; its inference 
 from received belief as to Theo- 
 phanies, ii. 56 ; its view of 'Wis- 
 dom ' as created, 60 ; its connec- 
 tion with early Judaizing move- 
 ment, vi. 349 ; vii. 437 ; and with 
 Greek dialectical method, 356 ; 
 various antichristian forces com- 
 bined in it, 437; its popularity, 
 438. 
 
 Arnobius, on Christ's Divinity, vii. 
 
 415- 
 
 Artemon, his allegation as to doc- 
 trine of Christ's Divinity, vii. 425. 
 
 Articles of Eeligion, the, on the In- 
 carnation, V. 258 ; on the Sacra- 
 ments, viii. 479, 480. 
 
 Athanasian Creed, i. 24; v. 260; 
 vii. 438. 
 
 Athanasius, St., his analysis of Ari- 
 anism, i. 18; his use of avroO^os, 
 iv. 200; on adoration of Christ, 
 vii. 403 ; on limitation of human 
 knowledge in Him, viii. 460 ; on 
 Council of Antioch, vii. 431; why 
 he contended for Homoousion, 
 436 ; on prayers to Christ for the 
 emperor. Note F. 
 
 Athenagoras, on the Logos v. 228 ; 
 vii. 412; on the 'Generation,' 418. 
 
 Atonement, doctrine of, dependent 
 on Christ's Divinity, vii. 472 sq. 
 
 Augustine, St., on doctrinal terms, 
 i. 33 ; on Theophanies, ii. 56 ; on 
 *'Eu io-fxcp, iv. 184; on St. John's 
 Gospel, V. 227 ; on St. Paul's de- 
 scription of a moral dualism, 262 ; 
 on Sacraments, viii. 484. 
 B. 
 
 Balaam, prophecy of, ii. 76. 
 
 Baptism, i. 30; v. 251 ; vi. 345, 346 ; 
 viii. 481. 
 
 Basil, St., vii. 419. 
 
 Basilides, cognizant of St. John's 
 Gospel, V. 216. 
 
 Baur, admissions of, i. 26; iv. 173; 
 V. 226, 235; ignores dogmatic 
 character of Christ's teaching, i. 3; 
 
 on ' Son of Man,' i. 7; on Hebrew 
 
 monotheism, ii. 93; on Fourth 
 
 Gospel, V. 210, 225, note ; on St. 
 
 James and St. Paul, vi. 282; on 
 
 number of Pauline epistles, 306 ; 
 
 on dpirayixov, 3 1 6, note. 
 Beryllus, denies Christ's human 
 
 Soul, i. 25. 
 Blandrata, vii. 405. 
 Boethius, on * Person,' i. 32. 
 Boileau, on phenomenon of the 
 
 Church, iii. 118. 
 Bretschneider, his ' Probabilia,' v. 
 
 209. 
 Browne, Bishop Harold, on human 
 
 limitations in Christ, viii. 468, 
 
 note. 
 Bruno Bauer, v. 227. 
 Buddhism, its spread not parallel to 
 
 that of Christianity, iii. 133, 134 ; 
 
 does not aim at universality, 1 20 ; 
 
 does not deify Buddha, vii. 378. 
 Bull, Bishop, on Subordination, iv. 
 
 200, note ; on St. Paul and St. 
 
 James, vi. 283 : on Origen, vii. 
 
 394; against Petaviiis, 419; on 
 
 Christ's human knowledge, viii. 
 
 467. 
 Bushnell, on boldness of Christ's 
 
 'plan,' iii. 116, note. 
 Butler, Bishop, on the moral obliga- 
 tions created by revealed truth, 
 
 i. 40. 
 
 C. 
 
 Cabbalism, vi. 281. 
 
 Caesarea Philippi, i. i. 
 
 Qakya-Mouni, iii. 134; vii. 378. 
 
 Calixtus, ii. 51. 
 
 Calvinism, Sacramental teaching of, 
 viii. 480; downward progress of, 
 484. 
 
 Canon, of New Testament, its form- 
 ation, V. 213. 
 
 Canticles, the Evangelical, their sig- 
 nificance, V. 248. 
 
 Catechism, Church, Sacramental 
 teaching of the, viii. 480, 481. 
 
 Cave, on Council of Antioch, vii. 
 431, note. 
 
 Celsus, as an opponent of Christi- 
 anity, V. 217; vii. .^'92; on idea 
 of a universal religion, iii. 117; 
 on Christians' worship of Christ, 
 
54C 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 iii. 143; vii. 393, 394; refers to 
 St. John's Gospel, v. 217. 
 Cerinthus, heresy of, v. 221, 226, 239. 
 Chalcedon, Council of, its dogmatic 
 
 language, i. 25; v. 258, note. 
 Channing, why anti-dogmatic, i. 38 ; 
 his position criticised by Renan, 
 iv. 158; his use of the phrase — 
 ' Christ's Divinity,' vii. 434 ; ex- 
 plains away worship paid to Him, 
 vii. 366; on obsecrations in Li- 
 tany, i. 40; on authoritativeness 
 of Christ's teaching, iii. 115; on 
 His 'plan,* 112, note; on His 
 character, iv. 194, 203 sq. 
 Charity, in St. John, v. 242 ; a pro- 
 duct of the Incarnation, viii. 494 
 sq. 
 Christ, His person an object of 
 perpetual interest, i. 1 1 sq. ; how 
 viewed by modern philosophers, 
 13; Lives of, 15, and Note A; 
 His Manhood real, i. 18 sq. ; vi. 
 303 sq.; His condescension, vi. 
 310, 31 1 ; His Nativity, according 
 to Synoptists, v. 247, 248; His 
 early life, iii. 107 sq. ; vi. 310; 
 His Human Will, v. 261 sq. ; His 
 Human Knowledge, i. 22; viii. 
 456 sq. ; Moral perfection of His 
 Character, i. 23; iv. 165, 192 sq.; 
 His sense of Sinlessness, 163 sq.; 
 vastness of His Self-assertion, 167 
 sq.; and of His claims, 173 sq.; 
 V. 251 sq. ; the Messiah of Pro- 
 phecy, ij. 78 sq. ; iii. 115; His 
 Teaching, iv. 162 sq. ; v. 249; its 
 Infallibility, viii. 453 sq. ; His 
 Priesthood and Atonement, viii. 
 476 sq. ; His position as Founder 
 of a Kingdom, iii. 100 ; His * Plan,' 
 105 sq.; and its realization, 118 
 sq.; His Example, i. 25; viii. 486 
 sq. ; His Sympathy, i. 25; His 
 Miracles, iv. 153 sq.; v. 235 ; His 
 Transfiguration, v. 253 ; vi. 300; 
 His Agony, i. 21; v. 263, 273; 
 viii. 463; His Death, i. 22; iv. 
 197; vi. 297; viii. 472 sq.; His 
 Eesurrection, iii. 145 ; iv. 154 sq ; 
 v. 253 ; viii. 473 ; His Ascension, 
 V. 253 ; His Intercession, i. 25 ; 
 viii. 485; His oflBce as Second 
 Adam, vi. 304 ; as Mediator, vi. 
 
 303, 306 ; viii. 453 ; Incorporation 
 into Him, vi. 289, 345; bearing of 
 His Manhood on our inner life, 
 i. 25 ; viii. 481 ; Christianity con- 
 centrated in Him, iii. 127; vi. 331; 
 His living power, i. 35 ; His Pre- 
 sence in and with Christians, vi. 
 337, .^42. 347; viii. 482, 487, 490; 
 His intense hold on souls, iii. 
 125, 126; His moral creative- 
 ness, iii. 129; viii. 488 sq.; His 
 future return as Judge, iv. 173 ; 
 worship paid to Him, in His 
 earthly life and after it, see 
 * Adoration;' His Godhead, the 
 seat of His Single Personality, 
 i. 23, note; v. 222, 257 sq.; 
 implies Co -equality and Con- 
 substantiality, iv. 181 ; co-exist- 
 ent with His perfect Manhood, 
 V. 262 sq. ; viii. 450 ; intimated 
 and affiimed iu Old Testa- 
 ment, ii. 48 sq. ; gradually un- 
 folded, i. 39 ; V. 273 ; implied in 
 much of His language, iv. 173 sq.; 
 explicitly revealed by Him, 177 
 sq. ; titles expressing it, vi. 312 
 sq. ; in fact necessary to His 
 moral excellence, iv. 196 sq., 205 ; 
 vi. 311; attested by Synoptists as 
 by St. John, V. 244 sq.; proclaimed 
 by Apostles, Lect. v. and vi. ; 
 vii. 428 ; not imagined by 'enthu- 
 siasm,' V. 267 ; confessed by the 
 early Church, vii. 406 sq. ; pro- 
 tects truths of natural religion, 
 viii. 444 sq. ; supports other 
 truths of faith, iii. 146 ; vi. 298 ; 
 viii. 453 sq. 
 Christianity, social results of, iii. 
 130 ; viii. 488 sq.; causes of its 
 success, iii. 132 sq. 
 Christian life, the, dependent on 
 
 Christ, iii. 127. 
 Chronology of St. John and the 
 
 Synoptists, v. 224, note, 
 Chrysostom, St., as a commentator, 
 vii. 417; on Arianism, vi. 317, 
 note. 
 Church, the, not a 'republic,' iii. 
 100 ; originality of its conception, 
 no; continuous progress of, 118; 
 present prospects of, 120; viii. 
 498 ; universality of, vi. 333 ; 
 
INDEX. 
 
 541 
 
 losses and divisions of, iii. 121 ; 
 recuperative powers of, 131 ; sus- 
 tained by faith in a Divine Christ, 
 145 ; viii. 498; supernatural life 
 of, vi. 329, 333 sq. 
 
 Cicero, scepticism of, iii. i^g. 
 
 Clarke, Dr., Arianism of, i. )8. 
 
 Clement of Alexandria, St., on 
 St. John's Gospel, v. 212; on 
 worship of Christ, vii 382, 387 ; 
 on His Divinity, 413 ; inaccurate 
 language of, 418, 423. 
 
 Clement of Rome, St., on Nero's 
 persecution, vi. 277. 
 
 Colenso, Dr., rejects Deuteronomy, 
 viii. 469, 470 ; denies Christ's 
 Infallibility, ib. and 454, 455 ; 
 his objections to worship of Christ, 
 Note F. 
 
 Coleridge on Socinian worship of 
 Christ, vii. 405 ; criticises Atha- 
 nasian Creed, 438. 
 
 Colossians, Epistle to, character of, 
 vi. 281, note ; 332. 
 
 Common Prayer, Book of, i. 40 ; 
 viii. 474, 481 ; Note D. 
 
 * Communicatio idiomatum,' v. 258 ; 
 vi. 306, note. 
 
 Comte, his philosophy and ritual, 
 iii. 124. 
 
 Conception, the Immaculate, defini- 
 tion of, not parallel to that of 
 Homoousion, vii. 427 sq. ; im- 
 pugned and on what grounds by 
 Cardinal Turrecremata, Note G. 
 
 Confucianism, spread of, not paral- 
 lel to that of Christianity, iii. 1 34. 
 
 Constitutions,theApostolical,vii.388. 
 
 Coquerel on St. James, vi. 285, note, 
 
 Corinthians, Epistles to, character 
 of, vi. 329 sq. 
 
 Council, Fifth General, vii. 371, note; 
 Sixth General, v. 263, note. 
 
 Councils, i. 25, 37 ; vii. 420. 
 
 Creation, how Incarnation is re- 
 lated to it, V. 265 ; ascribed to 
 Christ, vi. 319. 
 
 Creator, prerogatives of the, i, 29 ; 
 iv. 200 ; V. 233 ; vii. 360. 
 
 Creeds, scope of modern objections 
 to, i. 34 sq. ; lasting necessity of, 
 vii. 436 sq. 
 
 Crucifixion, the, a stumbling-block, 
 iii. 137, 141. 
 
 Cyprian, St., on Christ's Divinity, 
 vii. 415. 
 
 Cyril of Alexandria, St.. on limita- 
 tion of human knowledge in 
 Christ, viii. 461 ; on His Sacrifice, 
 477; o^ Sacraments, 481, 482, 
 notes. 
 
 Cyril of Jerusalem, St., on reality 
 of Christ's Manhood, i. 26 ; on 
 eflScacy of His Death, viii. 477. 
 
 D. 
 
 Daniel, Book of, on • Son of Man,' 
 i. 6; iv. 173, 191; on Christ's 
 dominion, ii. 88 ; iii. iii. 
 
 Davidic period of Prophecy, ii. 79 
 sq. 
 
 Decretals, the False, viii. 470. 
 
 ' Definition,' theological, objected to, 
 
 i-34. 
 
 Deism, unable to guard the idea of 
 God, viii. 444 sq. 
 
 Deutero-canonical books, ii. 61 sq. 
 
 Deuteronomy, recognized by Christ, 
 viii. 447. 
 
 ' Development,* doctrinal, sense of 
 the term, vii. 426 sq. 
 
 Diognetus, letter to, vii. 411. 
 
 Dionysius of Alexandria, St., ortho- 
 dox although misunderstood, vii. 
 416 sq., 425, 430 ; on the Pres- 
 byter John, Note E. 
 
 Dionysius of Rome, St., vii. 425. 
 
 Divinity of our Lord, see ' Christ.' 
 
 Docetism, i. 19, 24, 25; ii. 69; v, 
 221, 247. 
 
 Doctrinal position of the Lectures, 
 
 i- .^4. 
 Doctrine and morals, in Apostolic 
 
 writings, vi. 281, 288. 
 Dogma, modem dislike of, i. 37 ; v. 
 
 267; inseparable from religion, i. 
 
 3, 4 ; the Christ of, identical with 
 
 the Christ of history, iv. 152. See 
 
 * Creeds.' 
 Dollinger, on * apotheoses ' at Rome, 
 
 i. 27, note ; on Stoicism, iii. 144, 
 
 note ; on dpirayfxoi/, vi. 316, note ; 
 
 on John Presbyter, Note E. 
 Dorner, on Schleiermacher, i. 16 ; on 
 
 Jewish Theology, ii. 70 ; on 'Son 
 
 of Man,'v. 250 ; on St. John and 
 
 the Synoptists, 255; on Justin 
 
 Martyr, vii. 422. 
 
542 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 E. 
 
 Ebionitism, i. 15 ; v. 221, 247. 
 'Ecce Homo,' i. 15 ; Note A ; on 
 
 Christ's foundation of a Society, 
 
 iii. no ; on His miracles, iv. 161 ; 
 
 on His humility, 195 ; on His 
 
 condescension, vi. 310. 
 Ecclesiusticus, date of, ii. 64. 
 *El,'ii. 87. 
 Elizabeth, her greeting of Mary, v. 
 
 248. 
 Ellicott, Bishop, on passages in 
 
 St. Paul, vi. 312, 315, notes ; on 
 
 human limitations in Christ, viii. 
 
 463, note. 
 
 * Elohim,' ii. 48 ; Note B. 
 Emanatists, vii. 430. 
 
 • Emmanuel,* ii. 88 ; v. 247. 
 Enoch, Book of, i. 7 ; vi. 302. 
 Enthusiasm, Christ not deified by, 
 
 y. 267. 
 Epbesians, Epistle to, vi. 281, note, 
 
 Ephesus, Council of, v. 258. 
 Eucharist, the Holy, iv. 157 ; v. 253 ; 
 
 vi. 330 ; vii. 389 ; viii. 481. 
 Eulogius, against Agnoetae, viii. 
 
 462. 
 Eutychianism, v. 261 ; viii. 462. 
 Evangelists, fundamentally at one 
 
 in their representations of Christ, 
 
 v. 244 sq. 
 Ewald, his view of Christ, i. 15, 16; 
 
 Note A ; on St. John's Gospel, v. 
 
 218, 268. 
 Ezekiel, sense of ' Son of Man ' in, 
 
 i.8. 
 
 Faith, grace of, as described by 
 
 St. Paul, vi, 340 sq. 
 Faith, the, once delivered, vii. 
 
 427 sq. 
 * Fountain of Deity,' a title of God 
 
 the Father, iv. 181, 200 ; vii. 422. 
 F^lix, on originality, iii. 106. 
 Feuerbach, his view of Christ, i. 13 ; 
 
 his naturalistic theory of religion, 
 
 V. 267. 
 Fichte, his definition of religion, i. 
 
 3 ; his view of Christ, 13. 
 Firmilian, vii. 431. 
 Freewill in man, v. 265, 
 
 G. 
 
 Galatians, Epistle to, vi. 327, 328, 
 
 349- 
 'Generation, Eternal,' of the Son, 
 
 iv. 182 ; vii. 422, 423. 
 Genesis, ii. 48. 
 Gesenius, ii. 61. 
 Gibbon, his 'five causes,' iii. 135; 
 
 his sneer at ' the iota,' vii, 435. 
 Gladstone, on 'Ecce Homo,' 
 
 Note A. 
 'Gloria in excelsis,' the, vii. 386. 
 ♦Glory,' in St. John's Gospel, v. 
 
 230. 
 Gnosticism, ii. 69 ; v, 220, 221, 239 ; 
 
 vi. 2S1, note, 308, 309. 
 God, the true idea of, i. 30 ; viii. 
 
 448 ; not secured by Deism, 444 
 
 sq. ; Pantheistic misuse of the 
 
 Name, i. 29; viii. 451, note. 
 Goethe, on originality, iii. 106 ; his 
 
 admiration of the heathen mind, 
 
 ii. 76. 
 Grace, vi. 233. 
 Gregory of Nazianzen, St., on A- 
 
 rianism, vii. 437, note; on 'ig- 
 norance,' viii. 461. 
 Gregory of Nyssa, St., on Arianism, 
 
 vii. 437, note, 438. 
 Guizot, on originality of Christ's 
 
 *plan,' iii. 112. 
 
 H. 
 
 Hebrews, Epistle to, vi. 281, note, 
 
 320. 
 Hegel, his definition of religion, i. 3; 
 
 his view of Christ, 13. 
 Hengstenberg, ii. 86. 
 Heracleon, v. 216. 
 Herder, on St. John's Gospel, v. 
 
 208. 
 Heresy, how viewed by St. John, 
 
 V. 242 ; by St. Paul, vi. 279, 336. 
 Hilary, St., on Homoousion, vii. 
 
 431, note. 
 Hippolytus,St.,*Philosophumena'of, 
 
 V. 216 ; on Christ's Divinity, vii. 
 
 415; inaccurate language of, 418. 
 Historical sestheticism, its objec- 
 tion to dogma, i. 34 ; * historical 
 
 spirit,' the, iv. 151. 
 ' Homoiousion,* the, vii. 435. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 543 
 
 • Homoousion,' history of the term, 
 i. 32 ; vii. 430 ; see Lect. VII. ; 
 how criticised by modems, 358 ; 
 explains early Church's worship 
 of Christ, 359 sq. ; summarizes 
 her Christology, 405 sq. ; a * de- 
 velopment' only by explanation, 
 426 sq. ; why rejected by Council 
 of Antioch, 431. 
 
 Hooker, on ' being in Christ,' vi. 
 347 ; on human limitations in 
 Christ, viii. 466 ; on Hypostatic 
 Union, 476. 
 
 Hope, its necessity and uses, ii. 72 ; 
 Israel sustained by, 75. 
 
 •Humanity,' era of, iii. 130; idea 
 of, protected by the Incarnation, 
 viii. 451, 494, 
 
 Humanitarianism, i. 15, 25; vi. 292, 
 323> 337 ; vii. 425 ; viii. 473. 
 
 Humanity of our Lord, see ' Christ.' 
 
 Humility, Christ's Incarnation the 
 great motive to, viii. 491 sq. 
 
 Hymns, fragments of, in the Epi- 
 stles, vi. 327, 328; value of, as 
 expressing Christian doctrine, vii. 
 385 sq. ^ 
 
 'Hypostasis,' history of the term, 
 
 i- 33- 
 
 'Hypostatic Union,' i. 17, 23, note, 
 257 sq.; viii. 464, 476. 
 
 Ignatius, St., alludes to St. John, 
 V. 214 ; on worship of Christ, vii. 
 379 ; on His Divinity, 4II. 
 
 'Ignorance' and * error,* not iden- 
 tical, viii. 468. 
 
 'Image of God,' a title of Christ, 
 vi. 317. 
 
 Incarnation, the, illustrated by mys- 
 teries in our present being, v. 
 260 ; how related to Creation, 
 265 ; secures belief in a living 
 God, viii. 447 ; protects dignity 
 of man, 451. See ' Christ.' 
 
 ' Inferential Theology,' viii. 440 sq.; 
 Inspiration, ii. 45 sq. ; v. 219. 
 
 Irenaeus, St., i. 8 ; on the Four 
 Gospels, V. 210; on Christ's Di- 
 vinity, vii. 413 ; on His human 
 ' ignorance,' 459. 
 
 Isaiah, prophecy of, its Messianic 
 
 richness, and its unity, ii. 83 sq. ; 
 his self-abasement, iv. 164. 
 Israel, Messianic hopes of, ii. 74 sq. ; 
 a Theocracy, iii. 99. 
 
 Jackson, Dr., on Hypostatic Union, 
 
 V. 258, 2_:;9, notes. 
 Jacobi, his view of Christ, i. 1 3. 
 James, St., Epistle of, vi. 278, 280, 
 
 282 sq. 
 Jehovah, name of, ii. 88. 
 Jeremiah, prophecy of, ii. 84, 88, 
 
 99. 
 Jerome, St., on Christian society, 
 
 iii. 125, note; on Ante-nicenes, 
 
 vii. 421. 
 Jerusalem, council of, vi. 278, 287. 
 Jesus, Name of, ii. 88 ; v. 247, notes. 
 Jews, their history a witness to 
 
 Christ, iii. 97 ; hostility of, to 
 
 Christianity, 137, 138. 
 Job, 'Wisdom* referred to in, ii. 
 
 59- 
 
 John Baptist, St., iii. iii. 
 
 John Damascene, St., on Hypostatic 
 Union, v. 258, 259, notes; on 
 Two Energies, v. 264, note. 
 
 John the Evangelist, St. , see Lect. 
 v.; life and character of, 240 sq., 
 269, 273 sq. ; compared with St. 
 Paul, vi. 282, 350 ; Gospel of, its 
 authenticity, v. 208 sq. ; its three 
 purposes, 219 sq. ; internal diffi- 
 culties urged against it, 224, 
 note ; its relation to the other 
 Gospels, 244 sq. ; Epistles of, 
 238 sq. ; vii. 374 ; Revelation of, 
 see ' Apocalypse.' 
 
 John Presbyter, Note E. 
 
 Jowett, Prof., on Philo, ii. 67, 68, 
 notes. 
 
 * Joyful Light,' hymn, vii. 387. 
 
 Judaizers, vi. 281, 332, 348, 349. 
 
 Jude, St., Christology of, vi. 301, 
 302. 
 
 Justification, i. 41 ; vi. 342. 
 
 Justin Martyr, St. , on ' the Angel 
 of the Lord,' ii. 55 ; his testimony 
 to St. John's Gospel, v. 214; on 
 worship of Christ, vii. 381 ; on 
 Christ's Divinity, 412 ; difficulties 
 in his language, 418 sq. 
 
 Juvenal, iii, 140 * viii. 488. 
 
544 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 K. 
 
 Kant, his definition of religion, i. 3 ; 
 
 his view of Christ, i. 12. 
 Keble, iii. 129, 130; on 'Son of 
 
 Man,' i. 8, note. 
 Keim, iii. 113, note ; Note A. 
 
 * Kingdom of Heaven,' foundation 
 
 and laws of the, iii. 99 sq. Se6 
 
 * Church.' 
 Klee, on question of * ignorance,' 
 
 viii. 458 sq., notes. 
 Kuhn, ii. 63. 
 
 * Kyrie Eleison,' the, vii. 388. 
 
 L. 
 
 Lactantius, on worship of Christ, 
 vii. 395 ; inaccurate language of, 
 419. 
 
 Latitudinarians. on Creeds, vii. 437. 
 
 Law, Christianity a new, vi 287. 
 
 Lazarus, raising of, iv. 157, 2Cf2 ; v. 
 274. 
 
 Lecky, on originality of Christ's 
 teaching, iii. 110, note; on 'reve- 
 rence,' vii. 360, note. 
 
 Leibnitz, on human 'ignorance' in 
 Christ, viii. 4'^4. note. 
 
 Leo, St., on Hypostatic Union, 
 v. 257, note. 
 
 Litany, the, i. 40 ; viii. 474. 
 
 'Little Labyrinth,' the, vii. 426, 
 note. 
 
 Liturgies, Mozarabic and Eastern, 
 
 vii-^3^9. 390- 
 Logos, the, in Philo, ii. 62 sq. ; in 
 
 St. John, V. 227 sq. ; in St. James, 
 
 vi. 288 ; in St. Peter, 298 ; hSid- 
 
 Oeros and irpocpopiKos, vii. 418. 
 Lucian, scoffs at worship of Christ, 
 
 vii. 392. 
 Lucian of Antioch, vii. 419. 
 Luke, St., his narrative of the 
 
 Nativity, v. 247. 
 Luther, asserts the 'ubiquity' of 
 
 Christ's manhood, viii. 463. 
 
 M. 
 
 Manhood of our Lord, see 'Christ.' 
 
 Manichseans, vii. 430. 
 
 Mansel, Prof., on 'Reason' in Plato, 
 
 ii. 64, note. 
 Marc'.on, v. 211, 216. 
 Marten sen, V. 238, 247, notes ; viii. 
 
 481, note. 
 
 Martyr =!, the, iv. 144, 145 ; pray to 
 
 Christ in their agony, vii. 398 sq., 
 
 406 sq. 
 Mary, the B. V., i. 19; iv. 165; 
 
 V. 247, 248, 257, 258; vii. 433. 
 Materialism, viii. 451. 
 Matthew, St., his narrative of the 
 
 Nativity, v. 247. 
 Melchisedec, vi. 321. 
 Meiito, St., on Christ's Divinity, vii. 
 
 412, 426. 
 ' Memra,' the, ii. 63, 70. 
 Messiah, hope of the, ii. 69, 77 ; its 
 
 debasement, 91. See 'Christ.' 
 
 * Metaphysics,' inseparable from reli- 
 
 gion, i. 41 ; viii. 444. 
 
 Meyer, on (rap^, i. 1 9, note ; on Philo, 
 V. 229, note ; on dignity and pre- 
 existence of Christ, iv. 182, 183, 
 t88; v. 228; vi. 319, notes. 
 
 Mill, Dr., on narratives of Nativity, 
 V. 247, note ; on limitation of 
 Christ's human knowledge, viii. 
 460, note ; on Strauss, note A, p. 
 502. 
 
 * Ministration,' ascribed to Christ, 
 
 vii. 421. 
 Miracles, evidence from, iii. 145 ; of 
 
 Christ, iv. 153 sq. 
 Mohammedanism, based on a dogma, 
 
 i. 4 ; its spread no parallel to that 
 
 of Christianity, iii. 133. 
 Monarchianism, vii. 421. 
 Monophysitism, i. 25. 
 Monotheism, of Israel, ii. 67, 76, 
 
 95 ; of Christianity, v. 2 70 ; vi. 
 
 307 sq. 
 Monothelitism, i. 25 ; v. 261. 
 Montanism, v. 217. 
 Moses, ii. 47, 53. 
 
 Muratorian Fragment, the, v. 212. 
 Mystery no bar to faith, v. 264. 
 Mysticism, iv. 185, 198; in St. John, 
 
 vi. 351. 
 
 N. 
 
 * Name of God,' sense of, ii. 50. 
 Napoleon I. on Christ's Divinity, 
 
 iii. 147, 148. 
 Nathanael, Christ's words to, viii. 
 
 465 ; confession of, i. Ii ; iv. 177 ; 
 
 V. 273. 
 Naturalism, ii. 76, 89 ; iii. 108 ; vi. 
 
 308. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 545 
 
 'Natures' of Christ, the Two, v. 
 256 sq. 
 
 Neander, on Christ as Pattern 
 Man, i. 8, note ; on preparations 
 for Christianity, ii. 71 ; on the 
 
 ' Logos, V. 226; on SS. Paul and 
 John, vi. 351 ; on Celsus, vii. 392, 
 note. 
 
 Neighbour, idea of, vi, 288, note. 
 
 Neo-platonism, vii. 356. 
 
 Nestorianism, iii. 121 ; v. 257 ; viii. 
 463. 
 
 New Testament, Christology o^ 
 summarized, vii. 428. 
 
 Newman, Dr., on ircpixouprjcis, i. 33, 
 note ; on Bp. Bull, vii. 4 [ 9, note ; 
 on Homoousion, 430, note. 
 
 Newman, F. W., his * Phases of 
 Faith,' i. 42 ; denies Christ's moral 
 perfection, i. 23 ; iv. 166, 198, 
 notes ; on His claim to be the 
 Judge, 1 73 ; on His Self-assertion, 
 196, note; on His death, 197, 
 note. 
 
 Nicaea, Council of, ii. 94; vii. 429 
 sq. ; Creed of, i. 18 ; iv. 200, note ; 
 V.256; vii. 359, 410, 432, 434 sq.; 
 viii. 473. 
 
 Nicholas I., his use of False Decre- 
 tals, viii. 471. 
 
 Noetus, i. 15 ; vii. 425. 
 
 Nonconformists, iii. 124. 
 
 Novatian, on progressive revelation, 
 ii. 47 ; on prayer to Christ, vii. 
 
 '''■ o. 
 
 Ollivant, Bp., on Isaiah, ii. 83. 
 Olshausen, i. 6 ; vi. 347, note. 
 Omniscience, in Christ, viii. 456, 
 
 466. 
 'Only-begotten,' the, v. 233. 
 'Operations' in Christ, two, v. 263, 
 
 264, notes. 
 Ophites, the, v. 217. 
 Origen, as a commentator, vii. 417 ; 
 
 on worship of Christ, 385, 392 sq. ; 
 
 on Christ's Divinity, 414, 417, 
 
 418; questionable language of, 
 
 418 sq. 
 Original sin, i. 23. 
 Orthodoxy, vi. 336, 337. 
 
 Paganism, its hostility to Chris- 
 
 tianity, iii. 139 sq. ; St. Paul's 
 judgment of, vi. 308 ; its notice 
 of the worship of Christ, vii. 391 
 sq. ; its moral corruption, i. 2 ; 
 iii. 140; viii. 488 sq. 
 
 Pantheism, i. 26 sq. ; viii. 448 sq. 
 
 Papias, V. 215. 
 
 * Parables of the Kingdom,' iii. 1 03 sq. 
 
 Paraclete, the Montanists', v. 217, 
 note. 
 
 Passion, vast significance of the, 
 viii. 473 sq. ; its virtue de- 
 pendent on Christ's Divinity, vi. 
 298 ; viii. 476 sq. 
 
 Pastoral Epistles, the, vi. 336, 337. 
 
 Patripassianism, i. 15, 16. 
 
 Paul, St., has been called the creator 
 of Christianity, i. 14 ; his conver- 
 sion, iii. 138 ; his interview with 
 the leading apostles, vi. 278 ; 
 characteristics of his style, 281 ; 
 his teaching on Christ's Manhood, 
 303 sq. ; on the Divine Unity, 
 307 sq. ; on Divinity of Christ, 
 explicitly, 311 sq. ; and implicitly, 
 323 sq. ; his account of faith, 
 282, 339 sq. ; of regeneration, 
 344 sq. ; his opposition to Ju- 
 daizers, 348 sq. ; contrast between 
 him and St. John, 350 sq. 
 
 Paulus of Samosata, i. 25 ; vii. 425 ; 
 rejected the worship of Christ, 
 vii. 386 ; his cavil at Homoousion, 
 4.^0, 431. 
 
 Paulus, rationalist, i. 42. 
 
 Peace, secured by Christ, vi. 333. 
 
 Pearson, Bp., on adoration of Christ, 
 vii. 379, note. 
 
 Pelagianism, viii. 487. 
 
 Pentateuch, quoted by Christ, viii. 
 454^sq. 
 
 TlcpixouprjaiSf i. 33, note. 
 
 Persecution, Pagan, iii. 144. 
 
 'Person,' use of the term, i. 32, ^^; 
 of Christ, One and Divine, v. 
 256 sq. 
 
 Personality, idea of, ii. 67, note ; of 
 God, i. 30 ; viii. 444 sq. 
 
 Persons in the Godhead, intimated ^^ 
 in Old Testament, ii. 48 sq. ^^-^^^^^^^ 
 
 Peschito, the, v. 212. '^^^'^.' 
 
 Petavius, ii. 67 ; vii. 419, 424. j v ,. V 
 
 Peter Lombard, v. 261, note; -viuj ■' < 
 480, note. / ^ <x. ': 
 
 
546 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Peter, St., his confession, i. lo, ii ; 
 Christology of his sermons, vi. 
 291 sq. ; of his Epistles, 294 sq. 
 
 Pharisaism, iv. 162. 
 
 Philanthropy, Christian, iii. 130; 
 viii. 494 sq. ; spirit of, in St. John, 
 V. 241, 242. 
 
 Philip the Apostle, St., his question 
 to Christ, iv. 177, 178. 
 
 Philip the Deacon, St., on Isaiah's 
 prophecy, vi. 292. 
 
 Philippians, Epistle to, vi. 335. 
 
 Philo, his theory of the Logos con- 
 trasted with St. John's doctrine, 
 ii. 62 sq. ; V. 229, note ; his indif- 
 ference to Messianic hopes, ii. 
 69, 91 ; on Law of Moses, iii. 137. 
 
 Philosophy, Christianity not a mere, 
 iii. 127 ; Gentile, how far a pre- 
 paration for Christianity, ii. 70 ; 
 moral weakness of, iii. 144, note ; 
 viii. 488 ; language of, how used 
 by the Church, vii. 429. 
 
 Pietism, i. 41, 42. 
 
 *Plan' of Christ, characteristics of 
 the, iii. 115. 
 
 Platonism, ii. 64 ; vi. 347. 
 
 Pliny, the elder, iii. 139. 
 
 Pliny, the younger, testimony of, to 
 worship of Christ, vii. 391. 
 
 Poetry, Greek, a sadness in, ii. 76. 
 
 Polycarp, St., testimony of, to St. 
 John, V. 214; on Divine dignity 
 of, and worship of, Christ, vii. 
 380, 412. 
 
 Polytheism, ii. 48 ; iii. 133. 
 
 Position taken in the Lectures, i. 
 
 ^ 34.. . ... 
 
 Positivism, lu. 135, note ; viii. 445. 
 Practical knowledge of Christ, vi. 
 
 299 ; viii. 464. 
 Praxeas, Monarchianism of, i. 15, 
 
 16 ; vii. 449. 
 Prayer offered by Christ, as man, 
 
 i. 22 ; to Christ, see 'Adoration.' 
 Pre-existence of Christ, iv. 1 86 sq. 
 Presence of God, in souls, i. 31 ; 
 
 iv. 186. 
 Pressens^, Note A, p. 5o7;on Christ's 
 
 'plan,' iii. 113, 115, note ; on St. 
 
 John's Gospel, v. 218, note. 
 Priesthood of Christ, vi. 338 ; viii. 
 
 Priestley, viii. 473. 
 
 Priestly blessing, the, in the Law, 
 
 ii. 50. 
 Prophecy, Messianic, three stages 
 
 of, ii. 78 sq. ; St. Peter's use of, 
 
 vi. 294, 295. 
 Prophet, Christ the great, ii. 79. 
 Prophets, the, ii. 74, 77, 79, 90, 92 ; 
 
 vi. 292 ; their sense of personal 
 
 sinfulness, iv. 164. 
 Protevangelium, the, ii. 78. 
 Proverbs, 'Wisdom' in the, ii. 59, 60. 
 Providence, Divine, iv. 180, 181 ; 
 
 viii. 446. 
 Prudentius, hymns of, vii. 408, 409, 
 
 notes. 
 Psalms, the Messianic, ii. 80 sq. 
 Purity, Christian grace of, viii. 489, 
 
 490. 
 Pusey, Dr., on Book of Enoch, i. 7, 
 
 note ; on Messianic prophecies, 
 
 ii. 80, 81, 87 sq., notes J on Ter- 
 
 tullian, V. 211, note. 
 
 R. 
 
 Rabbi, title of, iii. 109. 
 Rabbinical schools, ii. 75 ; their 
 
 Messianic doctrine, 90 ; their later 
 
 invention of a double Messiah, 
 
 86. 
 Racovian Catechism, vii. 404, 405. 
 Rationalism, the older, i. 12, 14 ; 
 
 Note A, p. 503 J modern, iii. 
 
 122, 123. 
 Recapitulation of the argument, 
 
 viii. 497. 
 Redemption, vi. 298, 311, 337; viii. 
 
 477, 478. 
 
 Regeneration, St. Paul's doctrine 
 of, vi. 344 sq. ; viii. 490. 
 
 Reign of Christ, i. 36 ; ii. 84 ; iii. 
 125. 
 
 Religion, definitions of, i. 3, 4 ; its 
 object a Person, 36. See ' Dog- 
 ma.' 
 
 Renan, Note A ; his view of Christ, 
 i. 15 ; on Hillel, iii. 107 ; on Ga- 
 lilsean influences, 108 ; his expla- 
 nation of Christ's success, 1 36 sq ; 
 how he differs from Strauss, 146, 
 147 ; on the Gospel miracles, iv. 
 161, 202, note ; denies Christ's Re- 
 surrection, 154 ; criticises Chan- 
 ning, 158, note; denies that 
 Christ claimed to be God, 178, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 547 
 
 198, note ; on His Self-assertion, 
 196, 202, notes ; on His 'sincerity,* 
 201 ; on St. John's Gospel, v. 220, 
 note, 271 ; his use of the word 
 * God,' viii 451, note. 
 
 Kesurrection of Christ, the, Christi- 
 anity based on truth of, iv. 154 
 sq. ; preached by SS. Peter and 
 Paul, vi. 293, 324, 325. 
 
 Reuss, on prologue of St. John, v. 
 228, 231, 236, 237, notes; on 6 
 &v , . .- . cuwvat, vi. 313; on re- 
 generation, 345, note. 
 
 Revelation, the Christian, i. 2 ; vii. 
 435 'j belief in, necessitates a the- 
 ology, viii. 441. 
 
 Reverence, necessarily truthful, v. 
 268 ; Lecky's use of the word, 
 vii. 360, note. 
 
 * Rhetoric,* charge of, against the 
 Fathers, vii. 413. 
 
 Richter, J. P., on Christ, iii. 149. 
 
 Ritual, Jewish, impressed a sense 
 of sin, ii. 77. 
 
 Romans, Epistle to, vi. 281, 329. 
 
 Rousseau, on the Gospel history, 
 iii* 133 J V' 271 ; on early propa- 
 gation of Christianity, iii. 149, 
 note ; on possibility of miracles, 
 iv. 155. 
 
 Ruinart, his 'Acta Sincera,* vii. 
 399 sq., notes. 
 
 S. 
 
 Sabbath, Christ's claim to work on, 
 
 iv. 1 79 sq. 
 Sabellianism, L 15, 33, note; iv. 
 
 184; V. 234; vi 314, note; vii. 
 
 422, 425. 
 Sacraments, iii. 128; v. 223; vi. 
 
 30i» 342, 345» 349. 352; viu. 
 
 479 sq., 490, 497. 
 Sacrifice of Christ, viii 477, 478, 
 
 483. 
 
 Salvador, on Christ's claim to for- 
 give sins, iv. 175, note ; to work 
 on Sabbath, 180, note; on His 
 testimony before the High Priest, 
 190, 191. 
 
 SanhedrJn, the, iv. 190, 191. 
 
 Saviour, Christ the Divine, iii. 150 ; 
 V. 249 ; viii. 500. 
 
 Scepticism, in middle ages, iii 123. 
 
 N n 
 
 Schelling, his definition of religion, 
 i 3 ; his view of Christ, 13 ; on 
 Indian * incarnations,* 28. 
 
 Schenkel, Note A; his view of 
 Christ, i 15 ; on Hiliel, iii. 108 ; 
 his theory of a growth in Christ's 
 claims, 115; rejects the Gospel 
 miracles, iv. 153, 154; denies 
 possibility of Hypostatic Union, 
 V. 256. 
 
 Schleiermacher, theological position 
 of, i 16 ; V. 209; vi. 318, note ; 
 his definition of religion, i. 4 ; 
 allows Christ's originality, iii. 108; 
 accepts St. John's Gospel, v. 209. 
 
 Scotists, the, ii. 56. 
 
 Scripture, Holy, its sense often se- 
 cured by non-scriptural terms, i 
 42 ; its organic unity, ii 44 sq. 
 
 Scrivener, on Codex A, vi. 312, 
 note. 
 
 Self-assertion of Christ, i. 5 ; iii 
 126; iv. 163 sq. ; v. 255. 
 
 Semi-Arians, vii. 435, 436. 
 
 Seraphim, the, in Isaiah, ii. 51. 
 
 Sermon on the Mount, the, i 31 ; 
 iii. 100, loi ; iv. 162, 167; vi 
 290, note. 
 
 Sermons, the Apostolical, ii 80; 
 vi 291 sq., 324 sq. 
 
 Servetus, vii. 404, note. 
 
 • Shekinah,' the, v. 235, note. 
 
 • Sluloh,' ii. 78. 
 
 Simeon, ii. 92 ; song of, v. 249. 
 Sin, sense of^ ii 69, 76 ; iv. 164 ; 
 
 Note A, p. 509. 
 Sinlessness of Christ, i 23 ; iv. 165 ; 
 
 V. 263 ; vi 305. 
 Smith, Dr. Payne, on Isaiah, ii. 
 
 81, note. 
 Society, Christ the Founder of a 
 
 spiritual, iii. 99 sq., 131 ; vi. 333. 
 Socanianism, i 15, 26, 30, 40; iv. 
 
 154. 158, note, 181, 189, note; 
 
 V. 237, note ; vii. 404 ; viii. 471, 
 
 480. 
 Socinus, i 15; iv. 188, note; vL 
 
 313, note ; vii 404, 405. 
 Solomon, ii. 81. 
 
 • Son of God,' meaning of the 
 
 title, i 10; ii 80; iv. 190, 191 ; 
 
 V. 233 sq , 246, 247, 250. 
 'Soy op Man,' i 6 sq.; iv. 173, 
 
 191. 
 2 
 
548 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 * Sons of God,* i. lo, note. 
 
 Soul, the human, v. 260; nobility 
 
 of the, vii. 355; in Christ, 1. 21, 
 
 25 ; V. 235, note, 261, 262 ; vi. 
 
 298, note. 
 Spener, i. 42. 
 Spheres of Christ's existence, two, 
 
 V. 258, note ; viii. 463, 464. 
 Spinosa, viii. 450. 
 Spirit, the Holy, office of, iii. 128, 
 
 132 ; V. 270 sq. ; vi. 295. 
 ' Sprout' of David, Christ the, ii. 84; 
 
 vi. 289. 
 Stephen, St., his speech, vi. 292 ; his 
 
 dying prayer to Christ, vii. 368, 
 
 Stier, on * self-restraint' in Christ's 
 
 teaching, iv. 187, note. 
 Stoicism, iii. 117, note, 144; viii. 
 
 491. 
 Strauss, Note A ; his view of Christ, 
 
 i. 13 ; iii. 146 ; cm texts implying 
 
 Christ's pre- existence, iv. 189; on 
 
 Fourth Gospel, v. 209. 
 
 * Subordination' of the ISon, iv. 199; 
 
 vi. 306, note, 323 ; vii. 422 sq., 
 438, note. 
 
 * Subsistences' in the one Godhead, 
 
 Suffering, a note of the Messiah, ii. 
 85, 86 ; ignored by Jews, 91. 
 
 * Supernatural,' the, in life of Christ, 
 
 i. 12 ; iv. 152. 
 
 Sympathy of Christ, i. 25. 
 
 Synoptist Gospels, doctrinal agree- 
 ment of with St. John's, v. 244 sq. 
 
 T. 
 
 Tacitus, iii. 139, 140; vii. 397; viii. 
 
 488. 
 Targums, ii. 78, 80. 
 Tatian, v. 213 ; vii. 418, 426. 
 ' Te Deum,' the, vii. 388. 
 Teacher, ideal of a, iv. 168, 169 ; 
 
 Christ the Infallible, viii. 453 sq., 
 
 500. 
 Temptation, the, of Christ ; its 
 
 bearing upon the doctrine of His 
 
 Person, Note C ; its real limits, 
 
 ib. 
 ' Tersanctus/ the, vii. 386. 
 TertuUian, date of, v. 211, note ; on 
 
 Christ's true Manhood, i. 25, 26 ; 
 
 on martyrdoms, iii. 144, 145 ; on 
 the four Gospels, v. 2 11 ; against 
 Tacitus, vii. 397 ; on Christ's 
 Divinity, 415 ; questionable lan- 
 guage of, 419, 421. 
 
 QeavdpiKTj 'Evipycia, v. 263. 
 
 Theism, i. 15; vi. 331; viii. 444 sq. 
 
 Tlieodoret, viii. 467. 
 
 Theodotus of Byzantium, i. 16 ; vii. 
 424. 
 
 Theology, necessary to religion, i. 
 3 sq. ; viii. 441. 
 
 * Theophanies,' the, in Old Testa-: 
 ment, ii. 51 sq. 
 
 Theophilus on St. John's Gospel, v. 
 203 ; questionable language of, 
 vii. 409. 
 
 Theosophy, Alexandrian, ii. 70 ; Ju- 
 daizing, vi. 332. 
 
 ' Theotokos,' the, v. 257, 258, note. 
 
 Thessalonians, Epistles to, vi. 328. 
 
 Thomas, Apostle, St., his confession, 
 vii. 366. 
 
 Thomas Aquinas, St., on the Incar- 
 nation, v. 259, 261, notes; against 
 Immaculate Conception, vii. 434, 
 note. 
 
 Thomas h. Kempis, teaching of, v. 
 186, note. 
 
 Tischendorf, on St. John's Gospel, 
 V. 214, 218, notes. 
 
 Transfiguration, the, v. 253 ; vi. 300. 
 
 Trench, Abp., on Christ's * works,' 
 V. 235, note. 
 
 Trinitarianism, i. 34, note ; ii. 50. 
 
 Teinity, immanence of the, i. 16; 
 early intimations of the, ii. 50, 51 ; 
 referred to by St. Paul, vi. 335. 
 
 Truth, Christ the, iii. 126, 142. 
 
 Tiibingen School, the, v. 210, 215 ; 
 vi. 278 ; Note A, p. 503. 
 
 Turrecremata, Cardinal, vii. 432, 
 note ; account of his work on 
 the Conception of the Blessed 
 Virgin Mary, Note G. 
 
 U. 
 
 Ullmann, on Christ's sinlessness, iv. 
 
 165 ; on Thomas k Kempis, 186, 
 
 note. 
 Unbelief, modern, strength and 
 
 weakness of, iii. 123, 124; viii. 
 
 498. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 549 
 
 Union of Christ with His people, 
 iii. 127; iv. 185, 186; vi. 334, 
 
 347» 348- 
 
 Unity of Christ's Person, see ' Hy- 
 postatic Union* ; of the Godhead, 
 see * Monotheism ' ; of the Father 
 and the Son, essential, iv. r82 sq. ; 
 on the * moral ' unity, see Note I) ; 
 of Scripture, ii. 44 sq. ; of Christ's 
 members, vi. 333, 334 ; of Christ- 
 endom, iii. 122 ; viii. 499. 
 
 Universality of Christ's work, vi. 
 349- 
 
 Valentinians, v. 216 ; vii. 356, 430, 
 Virginal birth of Christ, i. 15, 23; 
 
 ii. 88, note. 
 Virtues flowing from Christ's Hu- 
 manity, i. 25 ; vi. 348 ; viii. 481. 
 
 W. 
 
 Waterland, i. 18, 42, note. 
 Westcott, on St. John's Gospel, v, 
 212 sq., 224, notes. 
 
 Wetstein, v. 313, note. 
 Will of God, the, i. 30. 
 Wills in Christ, two, v. 261 sq. 
 Wilson, W., on the trial of Christ, 
 iv. 191, note. 
 
 * Wisdom,* in Old Testament, ii. 59 
 
 sq. 
 Wisdom, Book of, ii. 62 ; vi. 322. 
 
 * Word,* see ' Logos.' 
 
 ' Works,' Christ's miracles so called, 
 iv. 156 ; V. 235, note. 
 
 * World,' the, in St. John, v. 238. 
 Worship, see ' Adoration.* 
 
 Young, on Christ's character, iv. 
 192, note. 
 
 Z. 
 
 Zacharias, song of, v. 248. 
 
 Zealots, the, iii. 137. 
 
 Zechariah, Messianic language of, 
 
 ii. 84, 85, 89. 
 Zephyrinus, vii. 425. 
 Zwinglianism, viii. 480 sq. 
 
TEXTS SPECIALLY REFERRED TO. 
 
 Genesis. 
 
 Li ii. 48 
 
 i. 26 ii. 49 
 
 iii. 15 ii. 78 
 
 iii. 22 ii. 50 
 
 vi. 2 i. 10 
 
 xi. 7 ii. 50 
 
 xyi. 10-13 .... ii. 52 
 
 xviii. I, 2 ii. 52 
 
 xix. 24 r ."• 52 
 
 xxii. II, 16, i8..*ii. S5 
 
 xxviii. 13 ii. 53 
 
 xxxi. 13 ii. 53 
 
 xxxii. 24,30 .. ii. 53 
 xlviii. 15, 16 .. ii. S3 
 xlix. 10 ii. 78 
 
 Exodus. 
 iii. 2, 4, 6-14 . . ii. 53 
 
 iv. 22 i' 10 
 
 xxiii. 21 ii. 53 
 
 xxxiii. 2, 3 .... ii. 53 
 
 Numbers. 
 
 vi. 23 ii. 50 
 
 xxiv. 17 ii. 79 
 
 Deuteronomy. 
 
 vi. 4 ii. 93 
 
 xvii. 9 i. 10 
 
 xviii. 15, 18, i9..ii. 79; 
 vi. 291 
 
 Joshua. 
 V. 13 ii. 54 
 
 Judges. 
 
 ii. 1-5 ii- 54 
 
 vi. 11-22 ii. 54 
 
 xiii. 6-22 ii. 55 
 
 2 Samuel. 
 
 vii. 14 i. II. 
 
 vii. 16 ii. 79 
 
 Job. 
 xxviii. 12 ii. 59 
 
 Psalms. 
 
 ii. 2, 7-9 ii. 80 
 
 xxii. I sq ii. 85 
 
 xlv. 3 i. 23 
 
 xlv. 6 ii. 80 sq. 
 
 Ixxii ii. 8 1 sq. 
 
 Ixxxii. 6 i. 10 
 
 xc. 8 iv. 164 
 
 ex ii. 83 
 
 cxviii. 22 . . . . vi. 292 
 
 Proverbs. 
 viii. 22-31 .... ii. 60 
 
 Isaiah. 
 
 vi. 2 sq iv. 1 64 
 
 ix. 6 ii. 87 
 
 xi. I sq ii. 84, 85 
 
 Hi. 14 ii. 86 
 
 liii. 3 sq. . . ii. 85, 86 
 
 Jeremiah. 
 xxiii. 5, 6 ii. 88 
 
 Daniel. 
 
 iii. 25 i. 10 
 
 vii. 13 i. 6 
 
 vii. 14 ii. 88 
 
 HOSEA. 
 
 xi. I i. II 
 
 Haggai. 
 
 ii- 7» 9 "• 89 
 
 Zechariah. 
 
 ix. 9, 10 ii. 85 
 
 xiii. 7 ii. 89 
 
 Malachi. 
 iii. I ii. 89 
 
 Wisdom. 
 vii. 24, 27, 29 .. ii. 62 
 
 ECCLESIASTICUS. 
 
 xxiv. 8-12, 23 ii. 61, 62 
 
 St. Matthew. 
 ii. II vii. 364 
 
 ii. 15 i. II 
 
 iv. 10 vii. 367 
 
 iv. 17 iv. 162 
 
 v-vii iii. 1 00 sq. 
 
 V. 27 iv. 167 
 
 V. 48 iv. 163 
 
 vii. 29 iv. 166 
 
 viii. 2 vii. 364 
 
 viii. 20 i. 8 
 
 ix. 18 vii. 364 
 
 X. 12-15,37 .. iv. 175 
 
 x. 40 iii. 102 
 
 xi. 27, 28.. V. 251, 252 
 
 xi. 29 iv. 195 
 
 xii. 39, 40 .. .. iv. 155 
 xiii. 3 sq. .iii. 103, 104 
 
 xiv. 33 vii. 365 
 
 XV. 25 vii. 364 
 
 xvi. 13 i. sq. I 
 
 xvi. 24 iii. 142 
 
 xvii. 14 vii. 364 
 
 xvii. 25 i. 22 
 
 xviii. 9 iii. 142 
 
 XX. 20 vii. 364 
 
 xxi. 37 V. 250 
 
 xxi. 42 vi. 292 
 
 xxiii. 8 V. 252 
 
 xxiv. 30 i. 7 
 
 xxiv. 35 iii. 116 
 
 xxvi. 64 .. i. 7; iv. 190 
 xxviii. 9, 17.. vii. 365, 
 
 366 
 xxviii. 19, 20.. iii. 117 
 St. Mark. 
 
 i. 35 i- 22 
 
 viii. 34» 35 •• iv. 157 
 
Texts specially referred to. 
 
 551 
 
 X. 18.. 1.23; IV. 193; 
 
 vii. 367 
 siii. 32 . . viii. 458 sq. 
 
 St. Luke. 
 
 i- 35 V. 247 
 
 i. 48 sq. . . V. 248, 249 
 
 ii. 52 viii. 456 
 
 V. 8 .. .. vii. 365 
 
 vii. 37 vii. 365 
 
 ix. 59-62 iv. 176 
 
 X. 22 V. 251 
 
 xii. 51-53 iv. 176 
 
 xiv. 26 iv. 176 
 
 xiv. 28 iv. 193 
 
 xxiii. 34 i. 22 
 
 St. John. 
 
 i. I. sq V. 227 sq. 
 
 i. 14 i. 19 
 
 i. 18 V. 234 
 
 i. 29 vi. 298 
 
 ii. 25 viii. 466 
 
 iii. 13 iv. 188 
 
 iv. 10 vii. 367 
 
 V. 17-19.. iv. 180, 181 
 V. 22, 23 .. iv. 182; V. 
 236; vii. 367 
 
 V. 27 i. 8 
 
 V. 39 ii. 96 
 
 vi. 26-59 iv. 157 
 
 vi. 62 iv. 189 
 
 vii. 15 iii. 109 
 
 viii. 23 iv. 171 
 
 viii. 42 iv. 171 
 
 viii. 46 i. 23 
 
 viii. 52-58. iv. 186, 187 
 
 ix. 38 vii. 366 
 
 X. 15 viii. 466 
 
 X. 29 iv. 177 
 
 X. 30 sq iv. 183 
 
 xi. 25 iv. 171 
 
 xii. 32 iv. 171 
 
 xiii. 4. 5 V. 257 
 
 xiii. 34 iii. 142 
 
 xiv. 6 . . iii. 126, 142 
 xiv. 9, 10 .... iv. 178 
 xiv. 14, 15.. iv. 171,172 
 
 xiv. 23 iv. 178 
 
 xiv. 26 V. 271 
 
 xiv. 28 iv. 199 
 
 XV. 23 iv. 172 
 
 xvi. 14 V. 271 
 
 xvi. 23 vii. 567 
 
 xvi. 28 iv. 189 
 
 xvii. 3 V. 237 
 
 xvii. 5 .. iv. 18), 237 
 
 xviii. 37 iv. 194 
 
 xix. 7 iv. 190 
 
 XX. 28 vii. 366 
 
 XX. 31 V. 225 
 
 xxi. 17 viii. 466 
 
 Acts. 
 
 i. 16-20 vi. 291 
 
 i. 24 vii. 368 
 
 ii. 24-36 vi. 291 
 
 iii. 15 vi. 293 
 
 iii. 18 vi. 291 
 
 iv. II vi. 291 
 
 vii. 37, 51-53.. vi. 2)2 
 
 vii. 59 vii. 368 
 
 viii. 32; 35 vi. 292 
 
 ix. 6 vii. 371 
 
 ix. 14 vii. 367 
 
 X. 25, 26 .... vii. 376 
 xiv. 14, 15... .vii. 377 
 XV. 14-20 .... vi. 287 
 
 xvii. 18 vi. 325 
 
 XX. 28 vi. 325 
 
 XX. 35 vi. 326 
 
 xxii. 19 vii. 371 
 
 xxvi. 17, 18 .. vi. 326 
 
 EOMANS. 
 
 i-4 i. 39 
 
 ii. II vi. 2'^i 
 
 V. 12 sq vi. 305 
 
 vi. 10, II .... vi. 3 6 
 
 viii. 3 i. 23 
 
 ix. 5 vi. 312 sq. 
 
 X. 9 sq vii. 372 
 
 I Corinthians. 
 
 i. 23 iii. 141 
 
 ii. 2 iii. 142 
 
 ii. 8 vi. 331 
 
 iii. II vi. 329 
 
 viii. I vi. 284 
 
 viii. 6 vi. 306 
 
 xi. 29 vi. 330 
 
 xiii. 2 vi. 284 
 
 XV. 9 vi. 280 
 
 XV. 14, 18 iv. 155 
 
 XV. 28 vi. 306 
 
 XV. 45 iii. 1 2 7 
 
 XV. 47.. ..vi. 305, 311 
 xvi.22.. iii. 126; vi. 331 
 
 2 Corinthians, 
 
 iv. 6 viii. 448 
 
 viii. 9 vi. 311 
 
 X. 5 iii. 126 
 
 xii 7sq vi. 331 
 
 xiii. 5 viii. 487 
 
 xiii. 13 vi. 331 
 
 Galatians. 
 
 ii. 9 vi. 278 
 
 iii. 16 ii. 78 
 
 iii. 20 vi. 328 
 
 V. 6 vi. 284 
 
 Ephesians. 
 
 vi. 333 
 
 .... vi. 335 
 
 iii. 6 
 
 Philippians. 
 
 ii. 6 sq iii. 127 
 
 ii. 19 vii. 371 
 
 iii. 21 vi. 304 
 
 iv. 13 iii. 127 
 
 COLOSSIANS. 
 
 i- 15-17 vi. 317 
 
 i. 17 vi. 319 
 
 ii. 9 vi. 320 
 
 ii. 18 vii. 377 
 
 1 Thessalonians. 
 iii. II vii. 371 
 
 2 Thessalonians. 
 ii. 16 vii. 371 
 
 I Timothy. 
 
 i. 12 vii. 372 
 
 ii. 5 vi. 336 
 
 iii. 16 vi. 312 
 
 vi. 15, 16 vi. 309 
 
 Titus. 
 
 ii. 13 vi. 315 
 
 iii. 4-7 vi. 328 
 
 Hebrews. 
 
 i. 3 vi. 322 
 
 i. 6 vii. 373 
 
 iii. 5, 6 vi. 321 
 
 vii. 3 vi. 338 
 
 xii. 22 vii. 377 
 
552 
 
 Texts specially referred to. 
 
 St. James. 
 
 i. i8 vi. 288 
 
 i. 23, 27 .... vi. 286 
 
 i. 25 vi. 287 
 
 ii. I vi. 290 
 
 ii. 8 vi. 288 
 
 ii. 14 sq vi. 2io 
 
 I St. Peter. 
 
 i. 2 vi. 299 
 
 i. II vi. 295 
 
 i. 12 vi. 296 
 
 i. 18, 19 vi. 298 
 
 ii- 9 vi. 295 
 
 ii. 23 vi. 297 
 
 ii. 24 vi. 297 
 
 iii. 18 vi. 297 
 
 111. 22 , 
 iv. II . 
 
 VI. 299 
 vi. 299 
 
 2 St. Peter. 
 
 i. 8 vi. 299 
 
 ii. I vi. 300 
 
 iii. 15 vi. 280 
 
 I St. John. 
 
 i- 1-3 V. 238 
 
 ii. 16 V. 239 
 
 ii. 22 vi. 279 
 
 ii. 23 viii. 448 
 
 iii 5 i- 23 
 
 iv. 2, 3 V. 239 
 
 iv. 15 V. 238 
 
 V. 4,5 V. 239 
 
 V. 13 sq vii. 374 
 
 V. 20 V. 239 
 
 2 St. John. 
 
 7 i. 23 
 
 ^o» II V. 241 
 
 St. Jude. 
 4 vi. 302 
 
 Revelation. 
 
 i- 5j 6 vii. 376 
 
 i- 8 V. 243 
 
 117 vii. 363 
 
 V. 6 sq. .. vii. 374 sq. 
 
 xix. 16 V. 243 
 
 XX. 6 V. 244 
 
 xxii. 9 vii. 377 
 
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