THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 PROFESSOR CLARENCE S. JCIRSH
 
 M\\ -
 
 THE PERSON AND PLACE OF 
 JESUS CHRIST
 
 THE PERSON AND PLACE 
 OF JESUS CHRIST 
 
 Wljt Congregational Pinion lUcture 
 for 1909 
 
 BY 
 
 P. T. FORSYTH, M.A., D.D. 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF HACKNEY COLLEGE 
 HAMPSTEAD 
 
 '■*■ Morality is the nature of things.^' — Butler 
 
 CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 
 NEW YORK : RATON & MAINS
 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 By the Committee of the Congregational Union 
 OF England and Wales. 
 
 The Congregational Union Lecture has 
 been established with a view to the promotion of 
 Biblical Science, and Theological and Ecclesiastical 
 Literature. 
 
 It is intended that each Lecture shall consist of 
 a course of Prelections delivered at the Memorial 
 Hall, but when the convenience of the Lecturer shall 
 so require, the oral delivery will be dispensed with. 
 
 The Committee promise to continue it only so 
 long as it seems to be efficiently serving the end for 
 which it was established, or as they have the necessary 
 funds at their disposal. 
 
 For the opinions advanced in any of the Lectures, 
 the Lecturer alone will be responsible. 
 
 Congregational Memorial Hall, 
 
 Farringdon Street, London, 
 
 775405 

 
 PREFACE 
 
 I WILL beg leave to plead that these pages are 
 lectures and not a treatise. The handling rests on a 
 system, but it is less systematic than suggestive in 
 form. Some repetition also may perhaps be tolerated 
 on this ground. The same may, I hope, be borne in 
 mind in regard to the style. Most of the discourses were 
 in part delivered to an audience, which may account 
 for features that would be less in place if only meant for 
 the eye. The spoken style admits for instance of 
 inflections and emphases which made sufficiently clear a 
 sentence that may have to be read twice. It admits also 
 of more ease and intimacy at times, of personal references 
 and spiritual applications foreign to the remoter and more 
 ambitious idea of a treatise. Moreover the position I 
 take up makes the personal religion of the matter the 
 base of the theology. 
 
 I cannot hope to have made every suggestion on 
 such a theme as obvious as it should be in a press 
 article. It is a subject in which the writer must rely 
 much on the co-operative effort of the reader, and 
 must chiefly court the student. The merchan of 
 
 these goodly pearls must be seekers ; and without 
 even divers they cannot be had. 
 
 vU
 
 viii Preface 
 
 If it came to expressing obligations the foot of each 
 page would bristle with notes and references. But 
 that also is foreign to the lecture form, and especially 
 to the form of lectures which made a certain effort to 
 be as popular as the subject and its depth allowed. 
 Besides, an apparatus of the kind would have given to 
 the book an aspect of erudition which its author does 
 not possess. It is not meant for scholars, but largely 
 for ministers of the Word which it seeks in its own way 
 to serve. It does not extend the frontiers of scientific 
 knowledge or thought in its subject. One or two 
 references I have given. But had they been multiplied 
 there are some names that would have incessantly 
 recurred. And especially those of Rothe, Kahler, Seeberg 
 and Griitzmacher — without whom these pages would have 
 been lean indeed. In certain moods, as one traces back 
 the origin of some lines of thought or even phrases of 
 speech, the words come to mind, " What have I that I 
 have not received ? " 
 
 Those who read to the end will find that the writer 
 agrees with the opinion that the British attitude to 
 criticism must be above all critical. The service 
 rendered to Christianity by the great critical movement 
 is almost beyond words. And there is a. vast amount 
 of foreign work which duly and practically recognises 
 the fact, without surrendering the note of a positive 
 Gospel. But it is a misfortune to us, which is also 
 almost beyond reckoning, that most of the translated 
 works are those of a more or less destructive school. 
 For extremes are always easier to grasp and to sell. It 
 should also be added in fairness that many scholars of 
 the negative side possess the art of putting things ; in 
 high contrast with the style of their deeper opponents, so
 
 Preface ix 
 
 amorphous often both in matter and mode. The mis- 
 fortune to the partially educated in this subject, who only 
 read English, is great ; especially as the popular impression 
 is produced (and sometimes pursued) that all the ability 
 and knowledge are on one side. Certain nimble popular 
 journals live on the delusion ; and they have not so much 
 as heard whether there be alongside of brilliants like 
 Wernle or Schmiedel giants like Kahler or Zahn. It 
 would not be too much to say that the latter two are 
 among the most powerful minds of the world in the 
 region — one of theology, and one of scholarship. Yet in 
 this country, and certainly to our preachers, they are 
 almost unknown. 
 
 It may be useful to add that the lectures were under- 
 taken ten years ago, that the lines of treatment were 
 being then laid down in the writer's mind, and that in 
 the choice of his subject he took counsel with none, met 
 no request, and even had to put aside suggestions of 
 subjects which it would have been valuable to follow. 
 The Congregational Union, under whose auspices the 
 lecture stands, simply asked the present writer to be the 
 next to deliver it. The Union neither prescribed nor 
 suggested subject or point of view. And responsibility 
 belongs entirely to the author to whom was given so free 
 a hand. 
 
 B
 
 SCHEME 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A. REVEILLE AND PASSWORD. 
 
 Lecture i. Lay Religion and Apostolic. ... i 
 
 B. RECONNAISSANCE. 
 
 Lecture 2. The Religion of Jesus and the 
 
 Gospel of Christ. ... ... ... ... 33 
 
 Lecture 3. The Greatness of Christ and the 
 
 Interpretations thereof. ... ... ... 61 
 
 C. THE ADVANCE. 
 
 I. First parallel. 
 
 Lecture 4. The Testimony of Christ's Self- 
 Consciousness — Was He a Part of His 
 Own Gospel? ... ... ... ... 99 
 
 Lecture 5. The Testimony of Apostolic In- 
 spiration — in General. ... ... ... 135 
 
 si
 
 xii Scheme 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Lecture 6. The Testimony of Apostolic In- 
 spiration — in Particular. ... ... ... 157 
 
 Lecture 7. The Testimony of Experience in 
 
 the Soul and in the Church. ... ... 185 
 
 n. Second parallel. 
 
 Lecture 8. The Moralising of Dogma, illus- 
 trated by the Omnipotence of God. ... 211 
 
 Lecture g. The same illustrated by the Ab- 
 soluteness of Christ. ... ... ... 237 
 
 D. THE ADVANCE IN FORCE. 
 
 Lecture 10. The Pre-existence of Christ. ... 259 
 
 Lecture 11. The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of 
 
 Christ. ... ... ... ... ... 291 
 
 Lecture 12. The Plerosis or the Self-Fulfilment 
 
 of Christ. ... ... ... ... ... 321
 
 SYNOPSIS
 
 SYNOPSIS 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 LAY RELIGION 
 
 Christianity is a theological religion or nothing. It centres in 
 the person of Christ rather than in the Christian principle, and is 
 the religion of His atoning Incarnation. How does this affect the 
 fact that it is a lay religion ? Our erroneous conception of lay 
 religion — which is not opposed to a religion truly priestly, but to 
 a theology mainly expert. Lay religion means the experimental 
 religion of the conscience. What is meant by theological reaction. 
 Theocentric Christianity and anthropocentric. Here lies the great 
 religious issue of the hour — a God that serves Humanity or a 
 Humanity that serves God? 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 THE RELIGION OF JESUS AND THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST 
 
 What is meant by the 'religion of Jesus' which is offered as 
 simple lay Christianity — the difficulties in the seemingly simple 
 phrase — the great reserves of Jesus. The effect on a 'religion of 
 Jesus' of the new religious-historical school is that there never 
 was in actual history any such thing as is meant by the phrase. 
 Christ was not the first Christian. The real conflict is not between 
 an infallible Bible and a fallible, but between a New Testament 
 Christianity and one which believes it knows better. It is not 
 between inspiration and criticism, but between incarnation and 
 evolution. It is not between no revelation in Christ and n revelation, 
 but between a revelation and the revelation in Him. The great 
 issue is the superhistoric finality of Christ. That is the true value 
 of His Godhead. And finality is a matter neither of thought nor
 
 u 
 
 XV i Synopsis 
 
 power but of life, eternal life in Christ for every age alike. Here 
 the most recent philosophy and evangelical Christianity meet. 
 Christianity is not believing with Christ, but in Christ. Christ 
 does not impress us with a new sense of God, but God in Christ 
 creates us anew. 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST AND THE INTERPRETATIONS THEREOF 
 
 The recent growth in our sense of Christ's greatness developed by 
 critical and historical study. Does it still reach Godhead ? Is 
 Godhead necessary to explain the personality achieved in Jesus 
 Christ ? The real site of Christ's greatness is not in His character 
 but in His action, i.e. in His cross. It is the cross that ethicises, 
 universalises, and therefore laicises, Christianity. The historic 
 attempts to explain Christ are mainly three — Socinian, Arian, and 
 Athanasian — God's prophet. His plenipotentiary, and His very 
 presence as Redeemer. The necessity for some form of the 
 Athanasian answer, with the finality which it alone assigns to 
 Christ. 
 
 / 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST's SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS — 
 WAS HE A PART OF HIS OWN GOSPEL? 
 
 The Christ of the New Testament as a whole certainly was. The 
 issue of the hour is a choice between the New Testament Christ 
 and the academic — between the Christ of the Apostles and of the 
 critics. The "scrapping" of the New Testament. The Christ of 
 the Synoptics with His claims requires a Christology — the Christ of 
 the extreme critics calls only for a psychology — with a type of 
 religion subjective and ineffectual. The extraneous bias in much 
 criticism. Christ's great confession of Himself in Matthew xi. 27 
 and its exposition. Only by his Godhead does he offer himself to 
 the whole lay and laden world. The critical argument and its 
 fallacy. What is our authority for confining ourselves to the words 
 of Jesus for His Christianity ? Or even to the Synoptical record ? 
 Do we have there the whole Christ? We certainly have not the 
 whole Christ of the first Church, of His Apostles. What is the 
 ground for going behind them ? Have we the means ? Can the 
 Christ of the New Testament be got out of the Synoptics ? Or is 
 the Synoptic Christ quite incompatible with the apostolic ? In 
 selecting critically from the Gospels, what is to be the standard ? 
 Christ the Character or Christ the Redeemer? The development 
 of Christ in the gospels— was it ethical or evangelical ? Herrmann's 
 severe verdict on theological liberalism.
 
 Synopsis xvii 
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC INSPIRATION — IN QBNERAL 
 
 Was apostolic inspiration simply a high form of the common 
 faith ? Was it the mark of gifted laymen ? Was it the truest of 
 tentative explanations of Christ, or had it an element of special 
 knowledge ? Was it the continuation of Christ's testimony to him- 
 self? Its place in the evolution of belief, and its relation to 
 Christ's finality. Distinction between the material and the formal 
 element in revelation. Inspiration the necessary and integral close 
 of revelation. The New Testament represents not the first stage 
 of a new evolution, but the last phase of the revelationary fact. 
 Illustration from the acts of a legislature. 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC INSPIRATION — IN PARTICULAR 
 
 "The fact without the word is dumb; the word without the 
 fact is empty." The Apostles' own view of their inspiration as 
 condensed in i Cor. ii. and i Peter i. ii, 12. Their inspiration 
 was the unique and final interpretation of the unique and final 
 revelation — the thought about himself of a Christ living in them. 
 Could the synoptic Christ have produced historic Christianity ? 
 Genius and inspiration. The Bible is the real successor of the 
 Apostolate. The authority of the Bible and the authority in the 
 Bible. A parable. 
 
 LECTURE VII 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF EXPERIENCE IN THE SOUL AND IN THE CHURCH 
 
 The two streams in current Protestanism, Revelation and 
 Illumination. The place of experience in Christianity. As nature 
 is to science so is Christ to faith. The difference between our 
 experience of a Saviour, and our experience of a Saint. Faith and 
 impression. What we experience in Christ is a Saviour for the 
 lay soul and not merely a presence for the mystic adept. That is, 
 we have one whose action is deeper than the certainty of our self- 
 consciousnesa. There is no rational certainty which has a right 
 to challenge moral — and especially the moral certainty of being 
 saved. The enlargement of personal evangelical experience to the 
 historic scale of the Church. The first Church could never have 
 included Christ in his own Gospel unless he had himself done so. 
 We must take the whole New Testament's Christianity, as prolonged 
 in the experience of an Apostolic Church. Otherwise we must 
 think it was a poor Christ who could not protect his followers 
 from idolatry of him.
 
 xviii Synopsis 
 
 LECTURE VIII 
 
 THE MORALISING OF DOGMA — ILLUSTRATED BY THE 
 OMNIPOTENCE OF GOD 
 
 Dogma, the intellectual self-expression of a living Church. It 
 does not exclude but demand criticism — on its own evangelical base. 
 Melanchthons words. Early dogma was too little lay and moral in 
 its nature, and too prominently metaphysical, especially in connexion 
 with Christ's person. We begin here by examining the empirical 
 ideas of divine greatness and omnipotence. In what sense God is 
 not omnipotent. The union of two natures in this light and its 
 unsatisfactory moral results. 
 
 LECTURE IX 
 
 THE SAME ILLUSTRATED BY THE ABSOLUTENESS OF CHRIST 
 
 Let US get at truth whatever happen to tradition, and let us be 
 exact with terms. Neither common sense nor philosophy gives a 
 basis for the Incarnation, but at most only points of attachment. 
 It can only be proved religiously — by the experience of its own action. 
 The true assent to it is the life-act of faith. Application to religion 
 of the idea of the absolute. It is an experience — and one open to 
 all. And an experience of the historic Christ. And of him as final 
 judge and redeemer. The absoluteness of holy love has other 
 methods than the philosophic absolute, however adjustable they 
 may be. " Morality {i.e. experience) the soul of things." 
 
 LECTURE X 
 
 THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST 
 
 As emphasis moves from the Virgin birth, we must go to explain 
 Christ by His pre-existence. The paucity of allusion in the New 
 Testament, and the two ways of explaining it. Was Christ at every 
 hour conscious of all He was ? His pre-existence and its kenotic 
 renunciation are needful to explain the volume and finality of the 
 Church's adoring faith. Had Christ an esoteric teaching, reflected 
 in John ? The pre-existence of Christ cannot be directly verified 
 by experience as His present life may be. But experience, though 
 the mode of faith, is not its measure. A Christ who existed for the 
 first time on earth is not adequate to the classic experience of 
 the New Creation, and especially to the regeneration of the race. 
 The chief object of such a doctrine is not philosophical nor even 
 theological, but religious — to give effect to the depths of the
 
 Synopsis xix 
 
 condescending love of God. Jesus the only man in whom the 
 relation to God constitutes his personality. He embodied not simply 
 the divine idea, nor the divine purpose, but God's presence with us. 
 And this He did not by the acquisition of a divine personality, 
 but by its redintegration through a moral process. 
 
 LECTURE XI 
 
 THE KENOSIS, OR SELF-EMPTYING OF CHRIST 
 
 Some doctrine of kenosis is called for if we hold the pre-existence. 
 There are difficulties, but it is a choice of difficulties. And they 
 are more scientific than religious, as they concern the how and not 
 the what. A series of analogies in the experience of life. Must a 
 complete self-emptying part with holiness and share our sin ? 
 Only temptation, and not sin, is truly human. True freedom 
 possible only to the holy. What then was renounced? Omni- 
 science, etc. ? The attributes of God cannot be parted with ; but 
 they may be retracted into a different mode of being, and from 
 actual become potential. Such a view leaves us untroubled by 
 the limitations and ignorances of Christ. He consented not to 
 know, and was mighty not to do. 
 
 LECTURE XII 
 
 THE PLEROSIS, OR THE SELF-FULFILMENT OF CHRIST V/ 
 
 A Christ merely kenotic would be but negative. And we must be 
 positive. In humbling Himself, Christ must realise Himself. And 
 His self-realisation must mean our redemption. Failure to find this 
 positivity in the Chalcedonian doctrine of the two natures. Persons 
 now count for more than natures in an Ethical Faith. It profits 
 more, therefore, to speak of the involution and fulfilment in Christ 
 of two personal movements — the manward movement of God and 
 the Godward movement of man, each personal, and both meeting 
 and blending in the person of the Son. The growth of Christ's 
 personality was the growth of human redemption. In His person 
 the Agent of creation became such a soul as He was wont to make 
 — for a purpose possible only to Godhead. He was creaturely, but 
 uncreated — all men's creator in a true man's life. What we really 
 mean by the Godhead and manhood of Christ. 
 
 /
 
 LECTURE I 
 LAY RELIGION
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 LAY RELIGION 
 
 The root of all theology is real religion ; of all Christian 
 theology, and even apologetic, it is Christian religion, it 
 is saving faith in Jesus Christ. It is justifying faith, in the 
 sense of faith in a forgiving God through the cross of 
 Jesus Christ. But this religion cannot be stated without 
 theology. If theology can be shewn to be irrelevant to a 
 living and evangelical faith, then the Church can afford 
 to treat it with some indifference, and to leave its pursuit, 
 like philosophy, to the Universities. But the Christian 
 religion is theological or nothing. We are but vaguely 
 and partially right in saying that Christ is the Gospel. 
 Years ago to say that was the needful word ; but it is now 
 outgrown and inadequate. The Gospel is a certain in- 
 terpretation of Christ which is given in the New Testa- 
 ment, a mystic interpretation of a historic fact. It is 
 the loving, redeeming grace of a holy God in Christ and 
 His salvation alone. Theology, it is true, does not deal 
 with thoughts but with facts. That is the great note of 
 modern theology. But the Christian fact is not an 
 historic fact or figure simply; it is a superhistoric fact 
 living on in the new experience which it creates. The 
 fact on which Christian theology works is the Christ of 
 
 i
 
 4 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 faith and not of history only, of inspiration and not 
 mere record, of experience and not of memory. It is 
 the Christ of the Church's saving, justifying faith. 
 
 A Christianity without such faith is not Christianity. 
 Spiritual sensibility is not Christianity, nor is any degree 
 of refined unction. A spirituality without positive, and 
 even dogmatic, content is not Christianity ; nor are 
 gropings when stated as dogmas ; nor is a faith in the 
 broad general truths of religion. Christian faith must 
 surely dogmatise about the goodness of God in Christ, at 
 the least. A conversion which is but a wave of spiritual 
 experience is not the passage from death to life. Religion 
 can only be made more real by a deepened sense of the 
 reality of the salvation. An access of religion which does 
 not mean, first or last, a deeper repentance and a more 
 personal faith in Christ's salvation may be sincere enough, 
 and it is certainly better than worldliness or unconcern ; 
 but it is not believing unto life. It is not New Testa- 
 ment Christianity. And, tender as we should be to it as 
 a stage, we must be very explicit when it is offered as a 
 goal. Gentle as we may be to it as a search, we must be 
 quite plain with those who proclaim it as the great find. 
 If Claverhouse had developed a mystical piety which 
 made him deeply sensitive to the devotions of his Church ; 
 or, if Alva had retired into a monastery and spent his 
 time in sincere devotion on the exercises of Loyola and 
 beatific visions ; if they forswore their old aggression, 
 and melted to their depths at the presence of the sacra- 
 ment; and if it was all unmingled with a repentance still 
 more deep, because they had harried the Church of God, 
 wounded his faithful saints, and crucified Christ afresh, 
 what would there be in that to place them in the same 
 faith as Paul, or the same spiritual company ? I remember
 
 I.] Lay Religion 5 
 
 Bradlaugh and his violent iconoclastic days, so able, 
 ardent and ignorant. And he might stand for a type of 
 others. If such men developed one of those spiritual 
 reactions which lead some of the unbalanced to a religious- 
 ness as extreme as their aggression had been ; had a 
 long-starved soul burst into an Indian summer of mystic 
 sensibility and abstract piety, which all the time was 
 little troubled about the old intellectualist arrogance and 
 ignorant insolence, the rending of Churches, the grief 
 caused to the old disciples, or the shipwreck made of 
 many a young faith ; if the new sense of God brought no 
 humiliation, no crushing, and almost desperate, repent- 
 ance, curable only by a very positive faith and new life of 
 forgiveness in Christ and His Cross ; what were the 
 Christian value of such a piety ? Would such a religion 
 have much more than subjective worth as a phase of 
 religious experience more interesting to the psychologist 
 than precious for the Gospel ? 
 
 The essential thing in a new Testament Christianity 
 is that it came to settle in a final way the issue between 
 a holy God and the guilt of man. All else is secondary. 
 All criticism is a minor matter if that be secure. The 
 only deadly criticism is what makes that incredible ; the 
 only mischievous criticism is what makes that less credible. 
 And all the beauties and charms of a temperamental 
 religion, like Francis Newman's, for instance, or Kenan's, 
 or many a Buddhist's, are insignificant compared with a 
 man's living attitude to that work of God's grace for the 
 world once and for ever in Jesus Christ. 
 
 § § § 
 A faith whose object is not such a Christ is not 
 
 Christianity; at least it is not New Testament Chris- 
 tianity ; and the great battle is now for a New Testament 
 c
 
 6 The Person and Place of Jfsns Christ [lect. 
 
 Christianity. It is not faith in Christ when we rise no 
 higher than " just a man, but what a man ! " You cannot 
 use the word faith in relation to a Christ Hke that. Faith 
 is an attitude we can take only to God. God is the only 
 correlate of faith, if we use words with any con- 
 science. Faith in Christ involves the Godhead of Christ. 
 Faith in Christ, in the positive Christian sense, means 
 much more than a relation to God to which Christ 
 supremely helps us. It is a communion possible not 
 through, but only m Christ and Him crucified. It means 
 that to be in Christ is to be in God. It means the ex- 
 perience that the action of Christ with us is God's action, 
 that Christ does for us and in us what holy God alone can 
 do, and that in meeting with Christ we meet with God. 
 When it comes to revelation, only God could do justice 
 to God. Theologically, faith in Christ means that the 
 person of Christ must be interpreted by what that saving 
 action of God in him requires, that Christ's work is the 
 master key to His person, that His benefits interpret His 
 nature. It means, when theologically put, that Christ- 
 ology is the corollary of Soteriology ; for a Christology 
 vanishes with the reduction of faith to mere religion. It 
 means that the deity of Christ is at the centre of Chris- 
 tian truth for us because it is the postulate of the redemp- 
 tion which is Christianity, because it alone makes the 
 classic Christian experience possible for thought. I am 
 not judging individuals, I speak of types of religion ; and 
 I suggest that the Christian experience, for the Church 
 if not for every individual maturing in it, is the evan- 
 gelical experience, the new creation in atoning forgiveness. 
 It is not mere love and admiration of Jesus, however 
 passionate. It is not simply a hearty conviction of the 
 Christian principle. Nor is it a temper of Christian
 
 I.] Lay Religion 7 
 
 charity. When Paul said he had the mind of Christ 
 he did not mean the temper of Christ ; he meant the 
 theology of Christ. And by that he meant not the 
 theology held by the earthly Christ, but that taught 
 him by Christ in heaven. A reference to i Cor. ii. i6 
 will show this at once. " Who hath known (by a gnosis) 
 the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him ? But 
 we have (by faith) the mind of Christ." That is, of the 
 Lord, the Spirit. 
 
 § § § 
 
 The theology that turns merely on the Christian 
 
 principle (taken as distinct from Christ's perennial person) 
 reduces Christ's character to a far too placid level, which 
 does not correspond to the passionate Christ of Synoptic 
 history. Perhaps a one-sided reading of the Johannine 
 Christ might mislead us to think thus of Him, But his 
 was no Phidian majesty. He was not calmly, massively, 
 and harmoniously filled by a principle of divine sonship, 
 whose peace was as a brimming river ; for a pious sage, a 
 Christian Goethe, might be that. The sinlessness of 
 Jesus was not of that natural, sweet, poised, remote, and 
 aesthetic type. It was not the harmonious development 
 of that principle of sonship through the quietly deepen- 
 ing experiences of life— just as His nightly communion 
 cannot have been simply a blessed and oblivious respite 
 from the task of each day, but its offering, outspreading, 
 and disentangling before the Father who prescribed it. 
 Gethsemane was not the first agony. Each great season 
 was a crisis, and sometimes a stormy crisis, in which the 
 next step became clear. There is much truth in Keim's 
 treatment of Christ's temperament as the choleric. Tiie 
 sinless certainty of Jesus was the result of constant 
 thought, passion, and conllict as to his course and victory.
 
 8 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 crowned by the crisis of all His crises in the decision and 
 triumph of His cross. And His power was not quies- 
 cent, reserved strength alone. It was not monumental. 
 But it was energy put forth in a positive conflict, in 
 mortal moral strife for the overthrow of God's enemy, 
 through the redemption of the race, the forgiveness of its 
 guilt, and its moral re-creation. 
 
 And to such a Christ Christian faith corresponds. It 
 is not a warm sense of sonship as the crowning form of 
 natural religion or of a devout temperament. It is not 
 a frame of reasonable views, benignant charity, patient 
 pity, and strong repose. It is the experience of having 
 in Christ, His crisis, and His victory, that salvation, 
 that pardon, that new life which God alone can give. It 
 is not looking up trustfully to a loving Father, but giving 
 one's self thankfully to a redeeming Saviour and His 
 Father. Again I say I am not speaking of ripening 
 individuals, but of that corporate, central, and classic 
 experience which gives the type of every other, makes 
 the Church the Church, and carries the note of the Gospel. 
 
 § § § 
 One is tempted sometimes to speak to preachers in this 
 
 vein : " Yes, the incarnation is the centre of Christianity, 
 and you must convince people that it is so. But it is an 
 intricate question. Its true solution is beyond the 
 average man. Perhaps you can best accommodate it to 
 your lay hearers if you take it on the experimental side, 
 and bid them believe that Christ was God because He 
 forgives and redeems as God only can. But, of course, 
 for the real grounds of the belief more deep and philo- 
 sophic considerations are involved. And these are 
 beyond you ; they must be left to the Church through 
 its theologians. And lay faith in the incarnation must be
 
 r.] Lay Religion g 
 
 a fides implicita, or the acceptance of something which 
 experience only indicates, but does not found." 
 
 The advice in its first part is good ; but in its second 
 it is bad and dangerous, and it would put Christ at the 
 mercy of theological Erahmans. It is quite true that the 
 scientific treatment of the question leads into regions 
 where the lay believer is not at home. But these regions 
 are only the hinterland of that historic Christ within 
 our personal experience — within an experience where the 
 believer is not only at home, but has his birth and being 
 as a Christian. All Christology exists in the interest of 
 the evangelical faith of the layman who has in Jesus 
 Christ the pardon of his sins and everlasting life. We 
 are all laymen here. It is quite misplaced patronage to 
 condescend to lay experience with the superiority of the 
 academic theologian or the idealist philosopher, and to 
 treat such lay experience of the Gospel as if it were good 
 enough for most, and the only one they are yet fit for, 
 but if they passed through the schools they would be able 
 to put their belief on another and better footing. It is 
 the evangelical experience of every saved soul that is the 
 real foundation of Christological belief anywhere. For 
 Christ was not the epiphany of an idea, nor the epitome 
 of a race, nor the incarnation, the precipitate, of a 
 metaphysic — whatever metaphysic he may imply. The 
 theology of the incarnation is necessary to explain our 
 Christian experience and not our rational nature, nor our 
 religious psychology. It is not a philosophical necessity, 
 nor a metaphysical, but an evangelical. Philosophy, on 
 the whole, is perhaps against it. And the adoption of the 
 tone I deprecate is but a survival of the bad old time when 
 we had to begin with a belief in the incarnation (on the 
 authority of the Ciiurch and its metaphysical theologians
 
 10 Th( Person and Place of Jestis Christ [lect. 
 
 as set out in the creeds) before we could have the benefit 
 of an evangelical faith. It is on the contrary an evan- 
 gelical faith like a converted miner's that makes any 
 belief in the incarnation necessary or possible at last. 
 ""We begin with facts of experience, not with forms of 
 thought. First the Gospel then its theology, first 
 redemption then incarnation — that is the order of experi- 
 ence. That is positive Christianity; which isas distinct 
 from rational orthodoxy on the one hand as it is from 
 rational heresy on the other.' The mighty thing in 
 Christ is his grace and not His constitution — the fact 
 that it is God's grace that we have in Him, and no mere 
 echo of it, no witness to it, or tribute to it. That is our 
 Christian faith. And that certainty of the saved experi- 
 ence is the one foundation of all theology in such 
 Churches as are not stifled in mediaeval methods or bur- J 
 dened by their unconscious survival. . 
 
 § § § 
 It is this unique experience of a unique Saviour who is 
 
 the new Creator that we have to urge in the face of every 
 theory that makes it impossible and of every practice 
 that would make it nugatory. And at the present day 
 we have to make it good both in life and in thought — in 
 life against the mere bustle of progress, and in thought 
 against a mere procession of evolution that has no goal 
 already latent at its centre. 
 
 The evolutionary idea is certainly compatible with 
 Christianity ; but not so long as it claims to be the su- 
 preme idea, to which Christianity must be shaped. 
 Evolution is within Christianity, but Christianity is not 
 within evolution. For evolution means the rule of a 
 levelling relativism, which takes from Christ His absolute 
 value and final place, reduces Him to be but a stage of
 
 I.] Lay Religion ii 
 
 God's revelation, or a phase of it that can be outgrown, 
 and makes Him the less of a Creator as it ranges Him 
 vividly in the scale of the creature. There is no such 
 foe to Christianity in thought to-day as this idea is ; and 
 we can make no terms with it so long as it claims the 
 throne. The danger is the greater as the theory grows 
 more religious, as it becomes sympathetic with a Christ 
 it does not worship, and praises a Christ to whom it does 
 not pray. A book so devout as Bousset's Jesus does for 
 the Saviour what the one-eyed Wotan did so tenderly for 
 Brunnhilde within the touching Feuerzauber, " Ich kiisse 
 die Gottheit dir ab," '• I kiss thy Godhead away." To 
 say that evolution is God's supreme method with the 
 world is to rule out Christ as His final revelation. It is to 
 place Christ but at a point in the series, and to find Him 
 most valuable when he casts our thoughts forward 
 from himself to a greater revelation which is bound to 
 come if evolution go on. But when Christ's finality 
 is gone, Christianity is gone. Yea, and progress 
 itself is gone. For there is no faith in progress perma- 
 nently possible without that standard of progress which 
 we have in Christ, the earnest of the inheritance, the 
 proleptic goal of history, the foregone sum of the whole 
 matter of man. Progress without any certainty of the 
 goal is as impossible in practice as it is senseless in 
 thought. It is mere motion, mere change. We need a 
 standard to determine whether movement be progress. 
 And the only standard is some prevenient form or action 
 of the final goal itself. Our claim is that for religion the 
 standard is God's destiny for man, presented in advance 
 in Christ — presented there, and not merely pictured — 
 presented to man, not achieved by him — given us as a 
 pure present and gift of grace — and presented finally there.
 
 12 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Man has in Christ the reality of his destiny, and not a 
 prophecy of it. 
 
 § § § 
 We are often adjured to go the whole length of our 
 Protestant principle by insisting that Christianity is a lay 
 religion, not a priestly, and by adjusting the form of our 
 Gospel to the lay mind. But this adjustment is coming 
 to mean something which provokes a little doubt whether 
 we have any positive idea of what a lay religion means. 
 It properly means an experienced religion of direct, indi- 
 vidual, and forgiven faith, in which we are not at the 
 mercy of a priestly order of men, a class of sacramental 
 experts. It is certainty of Christ's salvation at first hand, 
 by personal forgiveness through the cross of Christ in the 
 Holy Ghost. It does not mean a non-mediatorial reli- 
 gion, a religion stripped of the priestly order of acts or 
 ideas. New Testament Christianity is a priestly religion 
 or it is nothing. It gathers about a priestly cross on 
 earth and a Great High Priest Eternal in the heavens. 
 It means also the equal priesthood of each believer. But 
 it means much more. That by itself is ruinous indi- 
 vidualism. It means the collective priesthood of the 
 Church as one. The greatest function of the Church 
 in full communion with Him is priestly. It is to 
 confess, to sacrifice, to intercede for the whole human 
 race in Him. The Church, and those who speak in its 
 name, have power and commandment to declare to the 
 world being penitent the absolution and remission of 
 its sins in Him. The Church is to stand thus, with the 
 world's sins for a load, but the word of the atoning cross 
 for the lifting of it. That is apostolic Christianity. 
 That is the Gospel. Evangelical Christianity is media- 
 torial both in faith and function.
 
 I.) Lay Religion 13 
 
 But, in the name of a simplicity which is not Christ's, 
 lay Christianity is ceasing to be even the priesthood of 
 each believer in virtue of the priesthood of Christ. It is 
 coming to be understood as the rejection of apostolic, 
 mediatorial, atoning Christianity and the sanctification 
 of natural piety — sometimes only its refinement. It is 
 more preoccupied with ethical conduct than with moral 
 malady, with the fundamental truths of religion than with 
 the fontal truths of mercy. And whereas we used to be 
 able to appeal to our laymen and their experience against 
 a Socinian and undogmatic and non-mediatorial Chris- 
 tianity, we can now appeal to them only against a 
 sacerdotal and clerical. We used to be able to take 
 refuge from Arianism (to which the ministers of the 
 Church might be tempted by certain philosophies), in 
 the evangelical experience of its members. We used to 
 think that the sense of sin which was lost from the 
 intellectuals or the worldlings would be found among the 
 Christian men who were in lay contact with the world, 
 its temptations, its lapses, and its tragedies. But expe- 
 rience hardly now bears out this hope. Perhaps the 
 general conscience has succumbed to the cheap comforts 
 and varied interests of life ; or the modern stress on the 
 sympathies has muffled the moral note ; or the decency 
 of life has stifled the need of mercy; or Christian liberty 
 has in the liberty lost the Christ. But, whatever the 
 cause, the lay mind becomes only too ready to interpret 
 sin in a softer light than God's, and to see it only under 
 the pity of a Lord to whom judgment is quite a strange 
 work, and who forgives all because He knows all. It is 
 on a broken reed we too often lean when we turn from 
 the theologian's "subtleties" to rely on the layman's 
 faith. For the layman becomes slow to own a faith
 
 14 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 which begins in repentance rather than benevolence. 
 He is slow to confess a sin that is more than backward- 
 ness, untowardness, or ignorance. The number grows 
 of high and clean-living youths who cherish an ideal 
 Christianity but feel no need for a historic and perennial 
 Christ. The tendency of the lay mind is backward 
 to the eighteenth century, to a wise, humane, and urbane 
 religion, only enlarged by all the ideality and fraternity 
 that enlarge Deism to modern Theism. It goes back 
 to a religion of belief in human nature, of spiritual 
 bonhommie, of vague and kindly optimism, of good 
 sense, well-doing, and such a sober estimate of the state 
 of things between God and man as avoids extreme ideas 
 like curse, perdition, mortal vigilance, or any eternally 
 perilous edge of life. It is the type of religion which 
 commends itself to the intelligent, sympathetic, active 
 and well-disposed young Christian, who would like, above 
 all things, for righteousness' sake, to be an active 
 politician, alderman, or member of Parliament. This is 
 an excellent Christian ambition. May it spread ! But it 
 is often the ambition of a type of man who tends to 
 treat positive Christianity as theology, and to regard the 
 theologian of an Atonement as our fathers did the priest, 
 or as the Sicilians regard a sanitary officer — to treat 
 him, at the worst, as a gratuitous sophisticator of things 
 very ancient, simple, and elemental, or as a mere survival, 
 now useless or even mischievous. Or it views him, at 
 the best, as a harmless hobbyist, no better than a philoso- 
 pher. Such lay religion is ceasing to regard the apostles 
 with their priestly Gospel of Christ as laymen. It treats 
 them as theologians, and in so far complicators. It 
 views them as confusing the lay issue. It would eliminate 
 the priestly and atoning element from the nature of the
 
 I.] Lay Religion 15 
 
 Gospel, for a kind of religion which is but a spiritualising 
 of the natural man, or a mystic devoutness. It regards 
 Christ as the most inspired of the prophets of God's 
 love, the most radical of social reformers, and the noblest 
 of elder brothers. Whereas, the Church must stand on 
 Christ the priest, His sacrifice, and His redemption ; 
 and it could not stand, as it did not arise, upon Christ 
 the beneficent prophet or noble martyr. And the 
 condition of our Churches shows that this is so. With 
 an ideal or a fraternal Christ they dwindle and the 
 power goes out of them. 
 
 § § § 
 
 I am trying to avoid the dogmatism of dogma. But I 
 am also striving concisely to sharpen the issue, to be 
 explicit and clear, and to point the choice the Church 
 must make or go under. And the Free Churches the 
 first. 
 
 Revelation did not come in a statement, but in a 
 person ; yet stated it must be. Faith must go on to 
 specify. It must be capable of statement, else it could 
 not be spread ; for it is not an ineffable, incommunicable 
 mysticism. It has its truth, yet it is not a mere truth 
 but a power ; its truth, its statement, its theology, is 
 part of it. There is theology and "theology." There 
 is the theology which is a part of the Word, and the 
 theology which is a product of it. There is a theology 
 which is sacramental and is the body of Christ, so to 
 say ; and there is a theology which is but scientific 
 and descriptive and memorial. There is a theology 
 which quickens, and one which elucidates. There is a 
 theology which is valuable because it is evangelical, and 
 one which is valuable because it is scholastic. It is no 
 Christianity which cannot say : " I believe in God the
 
 i6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Creator, who, in Christ, is my Almighty Father, Judge 
 and Redeemer." That is theology, but not " theology." 
 It is pure religion and undefiled. It is worlds more 
 precious than any freedom that forwandered spirits deify 
 in its place. But our laity has not yet learned to 
 distinguish between these two senses of Christian truth. 
 They are ghost-ridden. They are obsessed by a mere 
 tradition of the long gone days, when the theologians 
 made a hierarchy which only changed the form but not the 
 spirit of the Roman ; when the Reformation succumbed 
 to a theological hierarchy instead of a sacerdotal ; when 
 the laity, who were not professional theologians, had to 
 take an intricate system from the experts, with an 
 implicit faith like that of Rome in the old days, or, in 
 new days, like the implicit faith with which the inexpert 
 readers swallow the expert critics ; when the laity took 
 over this faith provided for them, and only made it their 
 business to see it accepted and carried through into 
 public life by others equally unable to judge it. What 
 the laity is suffering from is the feeble afterwash of the 
 long past days of tests. But the ministry in the main, 
 and the theologians in particular, have for some genera- 
 tions now moved forward into another world of things, 
 another habit of thought, and another kind of authority. 
 And our competent guides know this. But our laity to 
 a large extent do not know it, and they are played upon 
 by those who know just a little more. They are victims 
 to an anachronist suspicion of an obsolete " theology," 
 when they should be confessors of personal faith and its 
 vital theology, if Christianity is not to be lost in the 
 sand. It would be a deadly calamity if we were to relapse 
 to that dogmatocracy, that rule of the professional 
 theologian, that Protestant Catholicism which half-ruined
 
 I.] Lay Religion 17 
 
 Lutheran Protestantism in the seventeenth century. 
 How great a calamity it would be, we are able to mark, 
 when we observe the effects of our subjection to-day to 
 the negative dogmatocracy of the critics, evolutionists, 
 monists, and socialists who take Christianity in hand in 
 the interest of dogma which changes its spots but not 
 its spirit. 
 
 § § § 
 Lay religion tends to be simple, easy, and domestic 
 religion, with a due suspicion not only of a priesthood 
 but even of a ministry. Some sections of it are more 
 interested in the children than in the ministry. They 
 believe in schools, hospitals, temperance, boys' brigades, 
 and all the excellent things the mayor can open ; with 
 sometimes but small insight and distant respect for the 
 deeper things that dawn upon the experts of the Soul, 
 and do not go straight home to business or bosom. It 
 is preoccupied with righteousness as conduct more than 
 with faith as life indeed. It thinks the holiness of God 
 a theological term, because nothing but love appeals to 
 the young people who must be won. If it only knew 
 how the best of the young people turn from such 
 novelistic piety ! And the view taken of sin corresponds. 
 Sin is an offence against righteousness or love instead of 
 against holiness ; and it can be put straight by repentance 
 and amendment without such artifices as atonement. It 
 just means going wrong; it does not mean being guilty. 
 The cross is not a sacrifice for guilt, but a divine object- 
 lesson in self-sacrifice for people or principles. The lay 
 mind tends to associate a sense of sin with the morbid 
 side of human nature, or with the studies of men who 
 are in more contact with a theological past than with a 
 human present. Christ saves from misery, and wrong.
 
 l8 The Person and Place of Je-us Christ [lect. 
 
 and bad habits, and self distrust ; but not from guilt. 
 He reveals a Father who is but rarely a judge, and then 
 only for corrective purposes. The idea of a soul absolutely 
 forfeit, and of its salvation in a new creation, grows 
 foreign to the lay mind. And the deep root of it all is 
 the growing detachment of that mind from the Bible, and 
 its personal disuse. 
 
 And this lay religion the pulpit is occasionally tempted 
 to adopt, partly from wrong education, partly from 
 poverty of nature or belief, partly from a fear of seeming 
 to be behind date or out of touch with the pew. While 
 those preachers who do not thus part with the native 
 language of the Gospel, and to whom its specialities are 
 the true realities, are apt to be disheartened, benumbed, 
 and paralysed in the face of the spiritual self-satisfaction 
 that confronts them, the this-worldiness, the at-homeness 
 in human nature. They find no effective fulcrum in a laity 
 like that for any protest they may make against clerical 
 priestliness. They find but a platform impatience, and 
 irritation, and invective. And they begin to ask if clerical 
 priesthood deserves all the denunciation it gets. They 
 ask if the clerical priest, by the effect he does give to 
 the real and distinctive priestliness of Christianity, will 
 not always be stronger than a lay anti-priestliness of the 
 unspiritual sort. They would rather spend less time and 
 fury upon the denunciation of priesthood, and more upon 
 an effort to make the Churches realise the priestliness 
 they have all but lost. What shall it profit any Church 
 to commit suicide to save itself from slaughter. 
 
 § § § 
 It is probably impossible now to change the lay men- 
 tality of which I speak in those who are its victims. 
 But we can perhaps save the next generation for a true
 
 I.] Lay Religion ig 
 
 Church. We can teach and act as men who really believe 
 that it is only a Church of true priests that can withstand 
 a Church of false ones. It cannot be done by a Church 
 of no priests, which is indeed no Church. A lay religion, 
 alien to apostolic and mediatorial belief, can never 
 make head against the evangelical apostolicity which 
 may lie deep but potent beneath the errors of sacerdotal 
 Catholicism. 
 
 We have laicised the idea of the ministry by treating 
 it simply as one of the departments of Christian work. 
 We have been told that all forms of Christian life are 
 equally sacred, and that just as good work can be done 
 for Christ in the Christian pursuit of other walks of life. 
 And the half-truth there has been so abused and over- 
 driven that the Churches send their most capable youth 
 to these other pursuits (often to make proof how false 
 the notion of their equal sanctity can become) ; and we 
 tend to a ministry of the mentally and spiritually inferior, 
 unable to command the strong and capable personalities. 
 That is one result of the laicising of belief, of the level- 
 ling of the Gospel to life instead of the lifting of life to 
 the Gospel. It is the result of erasing the feature unique 
 in the Gospel, and consequently in the office which 
 preaches it. 
 
 § § § 
 
 In a word, as I say, lay religion is coming to be under- 
 stood as the antithesis, not of sacerdotal religion, but 
 of theological, of atoning religion ; that is to say, 
 really of New Testament Christianity. And so 
 understood, it has neither power nor future. And 
 most thorough Christians will move in the end to join 
 that Church, free or bond, which has most of the
 
 20 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 power, the future, the authority, and the liberty which 
 are in the Christ of the Apostles, and of the Church. 
 
 The greatest of the human race is He who, as the 
 Holy One that came out from the Father, was a priest 
 before all else, and who has for His chief object with 
 the world the ordination of all men in a Church as priests 
 in Him. He was one to whose sacrifice, atonement, and 
 prayer mankind owes, daily and for ever owes, its moral 
 renovation and its divine destiny. Christianity is such 
 priestly religion ; it is not what tends to be known as lay 
 religion, or the religion that arrests the well-disposed 
 man in the street. It is the religion of the common man 
 who lives on the sacrifice of Christ. If the belief in a 
 priestly Christianity came to be confined to the ministry, 
 then spiritual command and influence would, and should, 
 remain with the ministry, amid whatever errors beside, 
 amid the errors even of Rome. But lay religion, in the 
 minimist sense of the word, affectional and ethical 
 religion, will never save us from the perils of priestly rule. 
 For it cannot give us our Great High Priest, eternal in 
 the heavens. And it certainly cannot unite us with Him 
 in the priesthood of a true Church. They are logical 
 enough who say that Incarnation, Atonement, Priesthood, 
 and a Church all hang together ; so that having denounced 
 an Atonement they must go on to denounce a Church. 
 But it is more logical still to extend the chain and go on 
 to say that a Church with all these beliefs is indis- 
 solubly bound up with the consummation of Humanity 
 in a Kingdom of God. 
 
 § § § 
 There is a misunderstanding that is likely enough 
 here. One might easily incur the charge of being a 
 laudator temporis acti, and of lamenting the former days
 
 I.] Lay Religion 2i 
 
 that were better than these. I would, on the contrary, 
 Slate my conviction that there never was a time in the 
 history of the world when there were so many souls bent 
 on seeing and doing the will of God. There was never 
 a time when spiritual sympathies and appetites were so 
 quick and general as to-day, never an age when so 
 many were set upon the Kingdom of God, and certain 
 aspects of it were so clearly and widely seen. 
 
 A slight knowledge of the past can readily mislead us 
 here. We too easily transfer the religious eminence of 
 the historic saints and heroes to the Christian public of 
 their time, which we view in the golden haze which 
 radiates from them. But in the Middle Ages of Anselm 
 and Bernard personal piety was almost confined to the 
 monasteries and convents. The rest were but institutional 
 Christians, and members of the Church without being, 
 or professing to be, members of Christ. Men were religi- 
 ous in the lump, as tribes often are that are converted 
 with their chiefs but unchanged in their hearts. And 
 even when the Reformation substituted personal faith for 
 wholesale religion the change was realised but by few 
 beyond the great leaders. The passionate interest and 
 conflict of the hour was not for personal piety, but for 
 public liberties, for the right of Gospel preaching, for 
 freedom of Confession, or for a national Church. And 
 in all these public ardours there was the greatest danger 
 of the Reformation burning out, and the old Church 
 flowing back over its ashes, as public Christianity is en- 
 dangering us to-day. What saved the Reformation 
 religiously was the rise of Pietism, which rescued faith 
 both from the politicians and the theologians. It was 
 not till then, and but partially then, that the religion of 
 the Reformation penetrated to masses of people. Had 
 D
 
 22 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 it done so before, the counter-Reformation would have 
 been impossible. But before Pietism could fully reach 
 the large Christian public as personal experience, the 
 rationalism of the eighteenth century had begun to give 
 off its widespread chill. 
 
 So I venture to say there are more spiritually-minded 
 people in the world to-day than ever before ; though I 
 cannot stay to trace the renascence of spirituality from 
 the century I have named. It is largely due, in this 
 country at least, to the Evangelical movement, to the 
 romantic or Tractarian movement, and to the idealist 
 movement in philosophy, as these are represented by 
 Low Church, High, and Broad. 
 
 But after this admission I also venture to repeat that 
 Christianity means much more than spiritual appetite or 
 sympathy. Personal faith means much more than ideal 
 religion or romantic. These pieties are too subjective, and 
 they do not contain that which makes Christianity Chris- 
 tian. The thing that marks Christianity is the objective gift 
 of God in Jesus Christ. What is the nature of that gift ? 
 The difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is 
 a very deep and real one, but it does not turn upon greater 
 or less spirituality. It is hard to say on which side of 
 the line you find more of that. They differ upon totally 
 different conceptions of the gift of God in Christ. Both 
 Rome and Reformation start from the supernatural gift 
 in Christ, as every Church must do, else it does not 
 remain a Church. No Church is possible on a basis of 
 religion ; it must be a basis of salvation. Both Churches 
 knew that Christianity must be something more than 
 religious sensibility, ideal aspiration, beautiful prayers, 
 the great general truths of our spiritual nature, or even a 
 passion for the Kingdom of God. Both knew that a
 
 I.J Lay Religion 23 
 
 Church and a faith could rest only on a positive revelation 
 and not a subjective inspiration. They parted when 
 they came to describe the revelation, the gift, the way 
 by which the Kingdom must come. That was also what 
 parted Jesus and Judaism. Both of these lived for the 
 Kingdom. It was their life passion. But they were a 
 world apart in the way they believed it must come ; and 
 the difference was fatal. 
 
 And to measure truly the Christianity of an age we 
 must ask how far it grasps God's true gift, and not how 
 eagerly or finely it seeks it. What is its conception of 
 salvation ? What is it that makes it religious ? What 
 is the object of its religion ? Do not ask, What is its 
 dream ? or, What is its programme or its piety ? but, 
 What is its Gospel ? Do not ask, What is its experience ? 
 Ask what emerges in its experience ? It is not the lack of 
 religiosity that ails the Church, it is the lack of a Gospel 
 and a faith, the lack of a spiritual authority and a 
 response to it. 
 
 For the leaders of the Reformation the gift was not an 
 institution, nor was it vaguely a Christian spirit, but the 
 Holy Spirit as personal life. It was direct personal 
 communion with a gracious and saving God in Jesus 
 Christ. It was direct obedience to his authority. 
 What they presented to us was a Kingdom finally 
 won in Christ, and not one yet to be won by any 
 faith or work of ours. It was what they called "the 
 finished work," and what is now called the absoluteness 
 or the finality of Christ. And it is here that, for the 
 hour, the Church is their inferior. It has fallen from 
 their evangelical height. The world has gone forward 
 in its religion, but the Church has gone back in its faith. 
 Unhappily, the thing in which the world has gone forward
 
 24 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 is of less value than the thing in which the Church has 
 gone back. Religion is secondary, but positive faith is 
 primary. We have more religion than ever before — some- 
 times more than we know what to do with ; do we find 
 more faith on the earth ? We have more sensibility and 
 more seeking, but have we more strength, footing, and 
 command, in proportion ? Have we the old heroes' grasp 
 of the sure and unspeakable gift ? Have we their experi- 
 ence of it ? Have we our fathers' experience of it ? Is 
 it as hard as it should be for us to be patient with those 
 who deny and destroy it ? Our religion understands 
 better some aspects of the Father ; does it understand 
 the only guarantee of His fatherhood — the Redeemer ? 
 The spread of religion has cost us the depth of it. Its 
 modern charm has cost us its power. We have vivid 
 religious interests, but no decisive experiences. We have 
 fine sympathies, but not a more fearless conscience ; a 
 warmer ethic, but a poorer courage ; eloquence about 
 morals, silence about holiness ; much about criticism, 
 little sense of judgment. The religious crowd has little 
 discernment of the spirit of its prophets. Our religion 
 has more moral objects, but less moral interior. It wrestles 
 with many problems between man and man, class and 
 class, nation and nation ; but it does not face the moral 
 problem between the guilty soul and God. It pursues a 
 high righteousness of its own, but it is too alien to the 
 righteousness which is of God by faith. It dwells upon 
 a growing moral adjustment, it does not centre on a 
 foregone and final moral judgment in which God has 
 come for our eternal salvation. In a word, as I have said, 
 we are more concerned with man's religion than with 
 God's salvation. We compare and classify religions 
 more than we grasp the massiveness of grace. And we
 
 I.] Lay Religion 25 
 
 are more tender with the green shoots of the natural 
 soul than we are passionate about the mighty fruits of 
 the supernatural Spirit. 
 
 But all this means that a rich soil is forming for the 
 great new word when it pleases God to send its Apostle. 
 Only let us be sure that when he comes he will be an 
 Apostle and not a Saviour, a preacher of the change- 
 less word to the changed hour, and not a new Christ to 
 make good something lacking in the old. 
 
 Our first business with the Gospel is to understand it. 
 And our first business with the spiritual situation is to 
 understand that. Let us go on to try to do both, to 
 grasp the salvation of God in the religion of man. And 
 here there is great hope. The critical challenge to Faith 
 is drawing out the resources cf faith. 
 
 § § § 
 
 An ultra-liberalism in a historic religion like Chris- 
 tianity has always this danger — that it advance so far 
 from its base as to be cut off from supplies, and 
 spiritually starved into surrender to the world. If it is 
 not then exterminated it is interne i in a region ruled 
 entirely by the laws of the foreign country. Gradually 
 it accommodates itself to the new population, and is 
 slowly absorbed so as to forget the first principles of 
 Christ. It comes to live in a religious syncretism which 
 is too much at home with the natural man to bear the 
 marks of the Lord Jesus. This is what happened to 
 most of the Jews in the Exile. 
 
 But there a remnant remained, gathered the closer 
 round the living word of the Lord, which is so exotic 
 in the world and yet so charged with the true promise 
 and life of the world's future. And this is also the effect
 
 26 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 of the ultra-liberalism of which I speak. It elicits a 
 positive reaction which rallies the Israel of faith. 
 
 When we use the word reaction, let us note its two 
 meanings. It may mean, passively, mere stampede. Or 
 it may mean reacting positively ; as a chemical reagent 
 does, in the way of repelling the effect of something else, 
 and even mastering it. It is often said that the effect of 
 the reds and ultras of undogmatic religion is reaction in 
 the passive sense of retreat, in the negative sense of 
 merely throwing people back in panic to repristinate a 
 stage which is really long outgrown. But what really 
 happens with those who grasp the whole situation is not 
 reaction in the sense of flight to cover ; it is the 
 deploying of reserves. It is a deeper evolution, under 
 stress and crisis, of the resources latent in vital faith. 
 It is a development, adjusted to the new situation, of 
 wealth previously unrealized within our evangelical 
 religion. Our depths are shaken to the top. We 
 discover and work a gold-mine on our hereditary estate. 
 The hidden riches of our secret power are brought to 
 light. A new sense dawns on us of the depth, sweep, 
 and solemnity of the trust God gave us in His Son. 
 And we wake to feel anew, about the Gospel in which 
 we slumbered, that God is in this place and we knew 
 it not. 
 
 The heresy that creates the stampede is incompetent 
 heresy. When the one thing comes lightly the other as 
 lightly goes. But the beneficent function of competent 
 heresy is to correct, nay, it is still more to elicit, to 
 discover the higher truth to itself, and to enhance the 
 Church's sense of power, even when the time is not ripe 
 for scientific adjustment. 
 
 There is another effect — one of sifting and sobering
 
 I.] Lay Religion 27 
 
 within the Church itself. Every crisis has th?j judging, 
 separating, selective, steadying effect. It makes clearer 
 and sharper the line between the real possessors of an 
 evangelical, living, saving faith, and those who are merely 
 spiritual. It clarifies. And it brings to their feet some y 
 
 who may have been but dabbling with belief and toying / 
 with negation. ^. 
 
 When we write off entirely the worldly people who 
 care for none of these things, and the light people who 
 trifle with them, the real strife appears to be what it was 
 in the first century of Christianity in the issue between 
 Jew and Christian. It becomes the issue between the 
 men of religion and the men of faith ; between those who 
 reverence and those who worship Christ ; between those 
 who beatify Him and those who deify Him; between 
 those who honour Him, with a certain discrimination 
 and reserve, and those who trust their whole soul and 
 world to him for ever and ever ; between those who 
 treat Him with admiration or even affection, and those 
 who give him faith — which (I have said) is a thing which 
 can be given to no created being, even were he created 
 before the worlds, but to God alone. It is an issue 
 between those who regard him as the greatest contribu- 
 tion ever made to the human soul, and those who view 
 Him as the one consummation and satisfaction of the 
 holy will of God. We are driven to a vital choice, within 
 Christianity itself, between an ego-centric and a theo- 
 centric religion. It is not clear enough when we talk 
 about a Christo-centric Christianity. Even with Christ 
 in the centre we must go on to ask a question which 
 divides Christianity into two streams, one of which ends 
 in the eternal kingdom of holy God, and the other in the 
 brief sovereignty of spiritual man. We have to ask, in the
 
 28 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Gospel's interest, whether Christ is central to a glorified 
 Humanity or to a glorious God ; whether man's chief 
 end is to develop, by Christ's aid, the innate spiritual 
 resource of a splendid race, or to let the development 
 flow from its reconciliation, redemption, and subjection 
 to God's holy will by Him. What we are developing at 
 the moment is an anthropo-centric Christianity. God and 
 Christ are practically treated as but the means to an end 
 that is nearer to our enthusiasm than anything else — the 
 consummation and perfecting of Humanity, The chief 
 value of religion becomes then not its value to God, but 
 its value for the completing and crowning of life, whether 
 the great life of the race or the personal life of the 
 individual. Love Christ, we are urged, if you would 
 draw out all that is in you to be. Our eye is kept first 
 upon our self-culture, our sanctification, in some form, 
 by realising a divine presence or indwelling, with but a 
 secondary reference to the divine purpose. God waits 
 on man more than man waits on God. God is drawn 
 into the circle of our spiritual interests, the interests 
 of man's spiritual culture, as its mightiest ally and 
 helper. We have many kinds of effort — some genial, 
 some ascetic — for the development and deepening of the 
 soul's life, in some of which the spiritual man is thought 
 to be a stage higher than the Gospel man. Whereas, 
 if we forgot our spiritual life after a wise and godly 
 sort and lived more to God, His finished Gospel, and 
 that purpose of a kingdom for which Christ died, He 
 would take better care of our spiritual life than all our 
 forced culture of it. In a subtle way this tendency is 
 less Christo-centric than ego-centric. It is monastic. 
 It is not theo-centric. For in any theo-centric faith 
 man lives for the worship and glory of God and for
 
 I.] Lay Religion 29 
 
 obedience to His revelation of Himself; which is not in 
 
 man, and not in spirituality, but in Christ, in the historic, 
 
 superhistoric, Christ. Christ is not the revelation of 
 
 man, but of God's will for man ; not of the God 
 
 always in us, but of the God once and for all for us. 
 
 \ Christ did not come in the first instance to satisfy 
 
 the needs and instincts of our diviner self, but to 
 
 honour the claim of a holy God upon us, crush our guilt 
 
 into repentant faith, and create us anew in the act. He 
 
 did not come in the first instance to consecrate human 
 
 nature, but to hallow God's name in it. He came to 
 
 fulfil God's will in the first place, and to fulfil human 
 
 destiny only in the second place and by consequence. 
 
 These two streams may not seem far apart in their 
 origin, but they part widely as they flow on. And one 
 makes glad the City of God and His Kingdom, and the 
 other is lost at length in the desert. The latter makes 
 Christ and Christianity to culminate and be exhausted 
 in the service of man, the former makes their first work 
 always to be the honour and worship of God. In that 
 worship man grows to all his destiny, and warms, and 
 even melts, in perpetual brotherly love and service. 
 The one makes the centre of Christianity to be the 
 ideal or spirit of Christ, the other the Cross of 
 Christ. One makes the Cross the apotheosis of 
 sacrifice with a main effect on man, the other makes it 
 the Atonement with its first effect on God. The result 
 of the latter is a Church ; of the former, a social State 
 more or less spiritualised, and more or less fleeting. 
 The latter postulates the deity of Christ, the other but 
 his relative divinity. 
 
 The Godhead of Christ is a faith that grows out of 
 that saved experience in the Cross which is not only the
 
 30 The Person and Place of Jems Christ [lect. 
 
 mark but the being of a church ; so that undogmatic 
 Christianity is foreign, false, and fatal to any church. 
 J>The deity of Christ is the necessary expression of such a 
 church's sense of what God has done for the soul in 
 Christ. It is the theological expression of the experience 
 which makes Christianity the experience that when we 
 commit ourselves in faith to Christ we enter actual 
 communion with God. God is in us and we in God 
 when we are in Christ, when we are what Christ makes 
 us to be. It is upon this experience that the Church 
 is thrown back in every challenge or crisis. With all its 
 might the Christian Church repudiates the Unitarian 
 position of Wernle, that " there is much Christianity 
 without faith in Christ." Christian men are thus made to 
 ask if they really have Christ in such a way as to have 
 God in Him and Him alone. They are made to examine 
 their personal faith and that of their Church. They are led 
 to ask if Christ has not been ceasing to be the sacrament 
 on earth of God's real presence, and becoming but the 
 prophet or saint of a God remote, however immanent. 
 They are roused to put such questions as these : Would 
 it make a real difference to me if Christ were not God, if 
 in Christ God were not in His world uniquely and once 
 and for all ? Can the old faith live on its new phase ? 
 Can we sustain the old worship ? Can we keep near to 
 a God who is only near to us in an immanent sense ? 
 Can a Christ who only ministers to the world by giving 
 it fresh hope and confidence in itself, cure the awful and 
 growing egoism of the world, or only sublimate it ? Can 
 our souls find rest in a Christ who only says, " Come 
 unto Me, and behold what you may be if you are true 
 to your best self, and true to a divine Humanity, as I 
 am ? " Such questions are forced on us by the hour ; and
 
 I.] Lay Religion 31 
 
 we are driven, by God's grace, to repair a slackness that 
 was coming upon our communion with Christ, a shallow- 
 ness too easily exploited by the plausible ; and we are 
 moved to reduce a distance that was growing between 
 us, and that failed to alarm us because we dreamily took 
 our sympathy with Him for our faith in Him.
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 THE RELIGION OF JESUS AND THE 
 GOSPEL OF CHRIST
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 THE RELIGION OF JESUS AND THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST 
 
 There is nothing we are more often told by those 
 who discard an evangelical faith than this — that we must 
 now do what scholarship has only just enabled us to do 
 and return to the religion of Jesus. We are bidden to go 
 back to practise Jesus's own personal religion, as distinct 
 from the Gospel of Christ, from a gospel which calls him 
 its faith's object, and not its subject, founder, or classic 
 only. We must learn to believe not in Christ, but with 
 Christ, we are told. 
 
 But the innovator has always the burden of proof; 
 and the first question we must ask our adviser here 
 is, what is meant by the religion of Jesus ? Have you 
 in view his popular doctrine or his personal piety ? 
 Was it the religion he presented in his vocation, or 
 that which he cherished in his most private soul ? Do 
 you mean that our religion should lie in following his 
 popular teaching, or should it lie in reproducing his own 
 personal faith ? F^or the word religion is somewhat 
 ambiguous. If you mean the doctrine he taught us, then 
 you treat him as no more than a prophet of the most high 
 and earnest kind. But he was more than teacher and 
 preacher. He was a personality. However lofty that 
 
 35
 
 30 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 treatment of Jesus as a prophet may be, it is, on the whole, 
 a lower spiritual level than is taken when we view him as 
 a saint, whose grand legacy is his inner self, with its per- 
 sonal and intimate faith lying behind the greatest things he 
 said to such audience as he had. It is otherwise with us. 
 All the great Christian teachers impress us with the fact 
 that their teaching is far ahead of their experience, 
 and that they built better than they knew. Even Paul 
 preached a Gospel greater than anything he attained in 
 his own soul. He was apprehended of what he could but 
 imperfectly apprehend. Whereas our impression from 
 Christ is just the converse. His personal experience is 
 far greater than anything he said or could say to his 
 public. All he said rose, indeed, from his own experience ; 
 for he was no lecturer. But also it is all less than his 
 experience. He received from none the Gospel he spoke. 
 He found it in himself. Indeed it was himself. He only 
 preached the true relation between God and man because 
 he incarnated it, and because he established it. But, as 
 we have his teaching, it is only a partial transcript of 
 himself, of his whole self as the Cross and its Apostles 
 revealed him. And therefore you cannot treat him as 
 teacher alone. You cannot do so even if you take his 
 teaching itself. The doctrine carries you beyond a doctor. 
 He was a part of his own Gospel. He could teach nothing 
 without indirectly teaching himself. This is so, apart 
 from the fact that He did directly declare himself to be 
 our Judge, Redeemer and King, the sole determiner of our 
 relation to God ? So that the religion taught by Jesus, 
 brings us face to face with his soul who taught it, as him- 
 self more momentous for our destiny than anything he 
 taught. Jesus the saint, even if he go no higher, is more 
 for us than Jesus the prophet.
 
 ii.J The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 37 
 
 We are thus carried within the doctrine to the saint, 
 from the public message to the private faith. We have 
 to copy that faith, it is said, even more than we have to 
 accept and obey those teachings, and the change repre- 
 sents the great difference between the old rationalism 
 and the new. 
 
 But here, again, great difficulties arise. If by the 
 religion of Jesus, which we are to reproduce in our 
 degree, is meant his most private and intimate relation 
 with the Father, two things must be said. 
 
 (i). We have few data. 
 
 (2). And the data that we have put it beyond us. 
 
 (i). We have few data. We have no information 
 whatever about the form taken by the communion of 
 Father and Son. How far it was what we call a revela- 
 tion from soul to soul, or how far it was the thrill along the 
 line, as it were of a common being — how far it was a God- 
 consciousness and how far a self-consciousness of God — we 
 are not informed. It was the secret of Jesus alone. 
 And he kept it. Not by breaking that reserve must his 
 religion act on men. His innermost experience was 
 certainly engaged in our service, but the steps of the 
 process are inaccessible to us. It is a mystery what took 
 place on the nightly mountain tops, in the far interior of 
 his soul, where his strength was perpetually renewed, his 
 vision cleared, and his decisions made. The religion of 
 Jesus in that sense was absolutely his own. What he 
 was for God it was not for man intimately to know. We 
 are blessed in what he did. 
 
 (2). And this is farther clear from the data we have. 
 Especially from such a passage as Mat. 11, 27. " No 
 man knoweth the son but the father, neither knowcth 
 any man the father but the son, and he to whom the sou 
 
 £
 
 38 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [r,ECT. 
 
 wills to reveal Him." This alone puts our faith, our 
 sonship through Jesus, on a quite different footing from 
 his, which was through none. The data we hive put 
 the personal religion of Jesus beyond us, except in so far 
 as he might reveal it. And the only form in which he 
 revealed it was in the exercise of his public vocation. 
 He had esoterics, perhaps, but no confidants — not even in 
 Gethsemane, where we have but a corner of the veil lifted ; 
 and that not in a confidence, but in a soliloquy indifferent 
 about being understood. Some even think the passage 
 in Matthew xi. 27 a soliloquy rather than an instruction. 
 His inmost experience was not a thing transferable in 
 itself. In so far as Fatherhood should come to us at all it 
 could only come by appropriating the Son, and not by cul- 
 tivating Sonship, not by repeating the Son's experience. 
 For he could not be repeated. " Me ye have not always." 
 Such was the nature of the revelation he had from God — 
 that it could only be man's according as man was in him — 
 not directly, as his own knowledge was, but only through 
 him. No one was for Jesus with the Father what he must 
 be for all, he had a relation with God, he had dealings with 
 God, which were not a part of his vocation with men, 
 but the ground of it, and its condition — ^just as we, his 
 preachers, have dealings with him which are no part of 
 our service of his church, and must not be flung before 
 our public. 
 
 § § § 
 It has been lightly said that there is no sin against God 
 
 but the sin we commit against our brother ; which seems 
 
 to imply that for the soul there is no relation with God, 
 
 and no practical duty owed Him by the soul and refused, 
 
 except that of the love or service of man. It is surely 
 
 forgotten what is the first table of the Christian Law.
 
 n.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel oj Christ 39 
 
 "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
 and soul, and will, and mind." That is the greatest 
 of acts. And the love of our neighbour is but the 
 second thing. Have there been no cases where God was 
 defrauded of his first claim on man, while the second was 
 even more than met ? Have there been no men — are 
 there none — who have loved, served, and helped man with 
 the devotion of a lifetime, while they never were fired or 
 lost in love of God, and never gathered strength from 
 reposing in a complete trust in Him, and leaving men in 
 His hands ? Is our first duty to humanity not to commit 
 it to God ? Are there none to-day, blameless in all the 
 service of their kind, for whom there can be waiting 
 nothing but condemnation in respect of the love and 
 communion they denied to a God Who sought that above 
 all else, and Who had the first right to both trust and 
 worship ? 
 
 There is a devotion to God, and to God in Christ, 
 which calls lor the spikenard of our secret souls at the 
 cost even of some oblivion of the obvious poor. And to 
 refuse that claim, if the claim be good, is surely no light 
 sin ; for it defrauds God of the first of His rights over 
 us, and of our response to His personal and private love. 
 There is a life within the life of service, and within the 
 fellowship of humanity, which is in the long run the 
 condition of all the best human service and the most 
 patient human pity. Without it the enthusiasm of 
 humanity dies. Christianity becomes a fine and fading 
 Positivism ; and Positivism is unable to bear the strain 
 of the world's grief and guilt. The fierce impatience of 
 many who love men not wisely but too well, because they 
 love them more than God, is proof how little the soul can 
 be stayed upon public service, or its spiritual ritual 
 exhausted in bencticeuce.
 
 40 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 So also within the soul of Jesus at its centre, and 
 throughout his whole life, there was an obedience and a 
 communion which was a charge on him, and a joy, prior 
 to all the blessing he shed on men. His first and inmost 
 relation was to his Holy Father whose name he had to 
 hallow before all else. That holiness in its love was his 
 supreme revelation. So much so that the one and only 
 thing he could do at last, even for the men who refused 
 him, was the hallowing of that name, and the perfect 
 honouring and atoning of that supreme sanctity in his 
 steadfast experience even unto death. Nothing he did on 
 man could do so much for man at last as his hallowing and 
 satisfying, as man, of God's holy soul. 
 
 But about that whole region Christ was almost entirely 
 silent. We have it but indirectly. He only said as much 
 as lets us know it was there, and supremely there. And 
 it is so easy, therefore, for those who come to these 
 records with but the critical or the humanitarian tact, to 
 miss it ; and to declare with great plausibility that it was 
 not there, and was only imported by apostles who fixed 
 it upon their master in a way that, had he lived, he would 
 have lived to repel. The secret of the Father was 
 with the Son alone. No man knew why the Father 
 had chosen Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus believed 
 in his sonship for reasons entirely between his Father 
 and himself, for reasons quite past us. We believe 
 in the Father because of Christ ; why he believed 
 in the Father he has not told us. We are here at 
 an ultimate. We may gauge the meaning of his 
 public Messiahship as we can never pierce the sonship 
 that underlay that expression of it. For that sonship 
 there was an inner condition in his nature, a native and 
 unique unity with God, which all Christology is but an
 
 II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 41 
 
 imperfect attempt to pierce. He knew the Father's love, 
 and he was himself pure love, without the alienation, 
 the self-will, the sin, that not only removes us far from God 
 but severs us. For the peculiar revelation of his Father's 
 iawe there was in Christ a peculiar being. But two things 
 here are greatly dark. We cannot trace either the steps 
 by which the Son became incarnate, or those by which 
 Jesus arrived at the consciousness of his unique sonship, 
 and reached that perfect certainty and clarity of it which 
 shines in all he said or did. Neither history nor 
 psychology gives us the means of sounding such mys- 
 teries. The analogy of our own religious experience 
 fails us here; and scientific inquiry is arrested for want 
 of objective material. But when we consider what he is 
 to our practical faith ; when we reflect on his Church's 
 experience of him, and feel how far it is beyond either 
 our analogy or our induction ; when we remember, indeed, 
 how far faith is from having a parallel in any other expe- 
 rience or process of the soul whatever ; we are driven to 
 conclude that that sense of himself, as one who could be 
 neither paralleled or repeated, had a superhuman foun- 
 dation. The last roots of his unique experience lay in a 
 nature as unique; from which it grew in an organic way, 
 with the kind of free necessity which belongs to that 
 spiritual region of things. 
 
 § § § 
 
 Let us observe what is the effect of the most recent views 
 about the origin of Christianity upon this point, upon the 
 plea that the first form of Christianity was the so-called 
 religion of Jesus. I refer to the new religious-historical 
 school of Germany. At the present hour it is not the 
 evolution of the biologists or the anthropologists that 
 need give us much concern. Any fear once entertained
 
 42 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 of these is now outgrown. Our real concern begins when 
 the evolutionary principle is carried into the history of 
 religion ; when it is made to organise the new knowledge 
 drawn from psychology and comparative religion, and 
 to organise it with the same confidence with which, in 
 the levels of biology, the new knowledge was once 
 organised into an evolutionary doctrine declared to 
 be the world's explanation come at last. Religion, 
 it is now said, is evolution which has reached spiritual 
 pitch. The various religions represent various stages 
 in the ascent. Each religion is the best for the social 
 stage it covers. No religion is final. And so, with 
 the end of any absolute or final religion, there is an end of 
 much that troubles the world, for instance of Missions at 
 least. For Christian Missions cannot live upon improving 
 the heathen, but only on passing them from death to life. 
 But the crisis is concentrated when we come to the 
 religions that surrounded Israel, and especially Christ. 
 They really supplied, it is said, those ideal elements that 
 have done most to make Christianity so powerful in his- 
 tory. There is, of course, it is said, no denying the historic 
 reality of some prophetic Christ, of great ethical and spi- 
 ritual power. But the Christ of Paul, of the New Testament 
 generally, the Christ of the first ages of the Church, the 
 incarnate, the atoning, the judging, the redeeming, the 
 adored, the glorified Christ, the Christ of the Apostles, 
 the Sacraments, and the Church is described as a syn- 
 '"*- ^ crgtjsjiL He is not the inner Christ revealed but a 
 - ■a/«. compounded Christ put forward. He is a splendid column 
 of spray sent up by the collision of east and west, of 
 Judaism and the farther East, of prophetism and 
 gnosticism. It is impossible to believe. Relativism will 
 not allow us to believe, that " the Holy God was a con-
 
 II. J The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 43 
 
 temporary of Augustus." The deification of a Roman 
 Emperor or the worship of the Buddha is to religious 
 psychology intelHgible enough. We rate such things at 
 their proper anthropological value. And in the like 
 valuation we must now include the worship of Christ. 
 There was a certain psychological necessity in it — men 
 being what they are — but no theological reality. The 
 dream of a Christ was afloat on the age in various forms. 
 Spiritual history had been conceived by fantastic oriental 
 mysticisms as a redemptive drama. Gnostic notions of 
 strange and heavenly beings created a whole ascending and 
 descending hierarchy of occult redemptive influences. 
 These more or less naturalistic dreams and longings were 
 drawn to Judaism for a stay, with its supernatural genius 
 and its ethical salvation. And they found a fruitful point 
 of attachment for the great aeon in Jesus with his ethic, 
 his healing, his love, his obedience, his religious insight, 
 his spiritual genius, his powerful personality. And so we 
 explain the rise of a whole religion of man's mediated 
 union with the heavenly being; but so, also, we find such 
 a creed impossible as a revelation, however explicable by 
 the laws of historic development in the spiritual region 
 of man's nature. Israel's national spirituality was hypo- 
 statised into a Christ decorated by pagan idealism with 
 cosmic powers. For it is quite impossible, it is said, from 
 the meagre relics about Jesus left us by criticism, to con- 
 struct the kind of Christ that grew out of Jesus, without 
 importations from other sources. Thus Christianity is 
 really a religion of general spiritual truths, developed by 
 man in aspiration, and not of special facts willed by God 
 in revelation. It need hardly be said that such an explana- 
 tion of Christianity is entirely fatal to its survival, except 
 as an old phase of religious development which has its
 
 44 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 uses still, and as a fine but passing product of the 
 spiritual genius of the race now essentially outgrown. 
 
 § § § 
 We shall, however, leave for the present the discussion 
 of these theories in order to exhibit their bearing on the 
 matter we have in hand — the first form of Christianity 
 to which we have access. There is one great service 
 which this religious-historical school has rendered. It 
 has destroyed the fiction of the igth century that there 
 was ever a time in the earliest history of the Church 
 when it cultivated the religion of Jesus as distinct from 
 the Gospel of Christ. The school, of course, may believe 
 itself able to insulate that religion of Jesus and cultivate it, 
 to disengage it from the Gospels by a critical process, and 
 preach it to a world pining for a simple creed rescued 
 from the Apostles. That is another matter which I do 
 not here discuss. But it is a great thing to have it 
 settled that, as far as the face value of our record goes, 
 and apart from elaborate critical constructions of 
 them, such imitation of the faith of Jesus never existed 
 in the very first Church ; but that, as far back as 
 we can go, we find only the belief and worship of a 
 risen, redeeming, and glorified Christ, whom they could 
 wholly trust but only very poorly imitate; and in his 
 relation to God could not imitate at all. It does not of 
 course follow that the first Church was right in this 
 respect. That is not the point at present. They might 
 have been doing Jesus an injustice in regarding him as 
 they did. They might have been, the Apostles in particular 
 might have been, so misled by contact with him, that their 
 mystical enthusiasm could not be quite fair to his more 
 modest claims. They might have been superstitious 
 hero-worshippers. They might, through their very
 
 II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 45 
 
 proximity to Christ, be in a state of faith as inchoate 
 and plastic as their theology ; it would run into any 
 mould their environment might supply; and they might 
 be the victims of a religious crudeness from which we can 
 only escape now, at this remote but enlightened distance 
 of time. They may have been, without knowing it, the 
 prey of beliefs and longings which were floating in the 
 air of the age ; beliefs which, to their poor eyes, seemed 
 to radiate from the master, but which were really only 
 settling down on him, covering and clouding him. And 
 it may be that only now, by the methods of critical 
 science, we are in a position to tell them that they were 
 quite wrong about all that marked him off from the 
 holiest prophet, and about all that went to make the 
 Christian Church and its experience. That may all be 
 so. But it is not the point for the moment ; which is, 
 that this school has made it impossible now to say that 
 the earliest Church had a view of Christ far more simple 
 and more religious than any which makes him the 
 Eternal Son of God, and the centre of the world's drama 
 of redemption. We can no longer say that its faith was 
 a faith in God like that of Jesus, and not a faith in 
 Christ as true God. That plea may, perhaps, be con- 
 sidered to be silenced. We may for ourselves edit the 
 faith of the first Church in that interest of a simple piety, 
 but we cannot now say that the faith so edited (and 
 emptied) was that of the first Church. It is recognised 
 that what we may call Pauline Christianity was the 
 faith of the first Church we know anything about, and 
 even of the Evangelists. All which helps to clear the 
 ground. 
 
 § § § 
 If we were to go to criticism of the position of tiiis
 
 46 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 school we should have to point out that the theological 
 features it rejects were in Christian faith before it be- 
 came acted on by influences definitely gnostic ; that the 
 oriental Gnosis in question did not begin to affect the 
 Church, so far as we know, till the second or third 
 generation ; by which time its faith in Jesus as Messiah 
 and Lord, Redeemer and glorified, sacrifice and Saviour, 
 was well secured — as indeed there never was a time 
 when it was not secured, after the grand recuperation of 
 Easter and Pentecost. It is not as if the apostolic 
 construction of Jesus was a thing of slow growth, 
 gathering in the outside influences of Judaic theology, 
 and gradually changing Jesus into Christ. For it has 
 often been remarked that one of the chief evidences of 
 the resurrection of Jesus was the otherwise quite inex- 
 plicable change which lifted the company of disciples 
 from despair to a faith, hope, and joy the most trium- 
 phant and permanent in history. It is only turning the 
 same fact to another angle to say that the suddenness of 
 the Church's faith in an atoning, redeeming, glorified, 
 eternal Christ is quite unintelligible unless there was that 
 in Jesus which made it inevitable as soon as the whole 
 range of his work was finished, and the total scope of 
 his person realised. It is not credible that the disciples 
 of Jesus should have changed to apostles of Christ without 
 the Resurrection ; nor can it be believed that despair should 
 have turned to joyful worship had they not, by the new light, 
 discovered something in the Jesus they knew which 
 could be confessed in no other way than by worshipping 
 him as the God they had been brought up to know ; 
 which there is no doubt from the New Testament they 
 did. 
 
 § § §
 
 II.] 7' he Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 47 
 
 There is another thing. The Gnostic systems which 
 are regarded as providing the theological material of a 
 supernatural Christ had this common feature. Their 
 spiritual universe was an elaborate provision for an 
 absentee God. Their object was to secure the supreme 
 God as far as possible from contact with the world, or 
 even proximity to it, by providing hosts of intermediary 
 aeons, emanations, and the like. That was the genius of 
 their systems, among whatever variations in detail. I 
 confess that in these systems, so far as I know anything 
 about them, I find much that is attractive, much that is 
 more congenial to the modern and idealist mind than 
 the somewhat stiff mentality of the Apostolic Fathers, 
 or the Christianised philosophy of the Apologists with 
 their logism. The Gnostics had what these had not. 
 They had Geist. They had spiritual imagination and 
 subtlety. And it strikes a more modern, spiritual, and 
 universal note than all the pagan philosophy which was 
 discovered by the Apologists to underlie the Gospel of 
 Christ. The Gnostics were really obsessed with the idea 
 of Redemption — which always tends to vanish when it is 
 the chief business of the Church to produce political 
 apologists, or to commend itself to the State or the 
 public by showing how long men have been Christians 
 without knowing it, and how much more deeply 
 Christian they have been and are than they feel. There 
 is much in the old Gnosticism which comes home to the 
 weary Titan of the modern mind. But one thing there 
 is which does not appeal to us of these Christian days. 
 And it is a thing that we should have expected to find 
 repelling us in the New Testament if its theology had 
 been constructed under gnostic influences. I mean that 
 gnostic effort to keep the divinest in the divine as far as
 
 48 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [i.ect, 
 
 possible from real contact with the world, while his agent 
 at several removes fills the foreground. We find the 
 tendency even in pre-Christian Judaism with its hosts 
 of angels. But it is just the opposite that we discover in 
 the New Testament, and especially in its Pauline and 
 Johannine parts. Its Christ does not come between us 
 and God, either as prophet, teacher, or saint. He brings 
 God. God is in him. He does not darken deity, or 
 push deity away. Whatever may be said of the crimes 
 of some later theologians in that way, it cannot be said 
 that the total effect either of the New Testament or its 
 Christ has been to banish God from humanity. Quite 
 the other way. The immanence of judgment in life (to 
 take no more than that), the moral continuity and 
 sequacity of life here and hereafter, the award for deeds 
 done in the body — the Church's insistence on these 
 things has neutralised the effect of a heaven or 
 hell which it made too remote, and has kept God in 
 man's life. The central object of the systems said 
 to be syncretised into Christian theology has been 
 not only ignored, but defeated by New Testa- 
 ment Christianity. God is brought near both theo- 
 logically and experimentally. And He has been brought 
 near to all. Christ did not enable certain promising 
 classes of men, by escaping from their first gross and 
 hylic condition, to rise to the supreme God and his far 
 country. But this high God was in Christ, not creating 
 Christ, and not emitting Christ at some removes, but 
 present in Him, acting and suffering in him, reconciling 
 the world, making men sons only in this His son, and 
 giving them an intimacy of communion as far from their 
 old alienation at the one end as from mere fusion of 
 being at the other.
 
 1 1. J The Reltgio7i of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 49 
 
 And if it be said that Gnosticism was so modified and 
 made innocuous by passing through the best Judaism on 
 its way to Jesus as to produce this change, one asks 
 whether any syncretism with the effect of a distinctive 
 religion could possibly take place between the work of 
 Jesus, viewed as the lofty ethical imperative of his grand 
 individualism, and the myth of redemption as Gnosticism 
 presents it. 
 
 § § § 
 
 Much that is of permanent value has been done by the 
 religious-historical school. Criticism is our triend and 
 not our enemy in its place. It is a good servant but a 
 deadly master. It becomes our enemy only when it 
 aspires from being an organ of Evangelical faith to be its 
 controller. Now as of old the Church has to listen to 
 the thought, the science, that grew up in it and around it ; 
 but it has to accept or reject it not according to its 
 rational value, but according to its compatibility with 
 the central life and experience of redemption which makes 
 the Church. The school I name takes, indeed, too much 
 on itself when it dissolves into syncretistic myth the 
 version of Christ that has made the Church, and goes 
 behind even the Jesus of the Gospels to reduce him to 
 the limits of a spiritualised rationalism. If the extreme 
 critics are right with the Jesus they construct scientifi- 
 cally from the records, then we know the real Jesus 
 rather in spite of the New Testament than by it. But 
 all the same they have done much fine and new work. 
 They have greatly vivified the New Testament. They 
 have helped to clear up some of the relations between 
 Paul or John and the Gnostic influences these apostles 
 had to deal with. They have made it more clear than 
 before that influences which could not create Christ
 
 50 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 yet prepared for him and formed a calculus to express 
 him ; that he gave voice to much that was tongue- 
 tied in the aspiring world, and revealed the thoughts 
 of many hearts ; that he came in a fulness of time to 
 be the key of a world of which he was not the product, 
 and to answer questions which if he do not answer he 
 only aggravates. For it should be more clear than it 
 is to many that by his fate he does aggravate the problem 
 of life if he do not answer it. 
 
 But we should not avoid the real issue raised by 
 the school — Did the New Testament faith, the apostolic 
 faith, in Christ make Christianity, or was it made by 
 Christianity ? For the answer represents two distinct 
 religions. The evolution, the relativism, that makes us 
 to outgrow the New Testament Christ will also carry 
 us beyond the religion of Jesus, and the cult of Fatherhood. 
 Christianity itself will become but a stage, even on its ethical 
 side. Its Fatherhood of God will be merely a spiritual idea 
 of great but passing value. The Father will come to appear 
 but a shimmering, fleeting, and perhaps credulous symbol 
 of an unknown Hinterland capable of we know not what. 
 It will be a symbol, also, not unmixed with an alloy of illusion 
 for practical purposes. And as these purposes are effec" 
 ted in the moral march of man out of old Judea, and as 
 the illusion can be safely dropped, the idea may pass into 
 another idea which supersedes it ; but an idea which may 
 also round upon it, and destroy it, as it, in its day, de- 
 stroyed the passionate gods of the pagan pantheon. The 
 Father God may go the way of the despot God when the 
 paternal conception has worked out its happy moral 
 effect ; and it may yield its place to the monistic substi- 
 tute which moves altogether if it move at all ; which 
 moves to pessimism, racial suicide, and finally the
 
 II. J The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 51 
 
 suicide of God ; and which meaning to move on the 
 whole to righteousness, moves only to whatever righteous- 
 ness may be made to mean in the absence of an abso- 
 lutely righteous and Holy One who has given a revelation 
 of Himself as final as the problem is universal. 
 
 § § § 
 To imitate the religion of Jesus is to cultivate an order 
 of piety absolutely different from the entire tradition of 
 the Christendom created by the Gospel of Christ, a 
 tradition which became most explicit in evangelical 
 Protestantism. And though tradition may have less 
 weight in systematic theology, (which is a branch of 
 science, and so far progressive in its nature,) in the 
 region of piety we are in the most conservative part 
 of us, where tradition means and ought to mean most. 
 In any faith the type of its religion is far more stable 
 and continuous than its dogmatic form. And a real and 
 great reformation is so much more than a reconstruction 
 according as it affects this type. It is much easier to change 
 a whole theology than to change the type of a religion, to 
 change faith where it appeals to the most permanent 
 elements of the soul. Now in the great Lutheran 
 Reformation, which changed the religious type much 
 more than the theological or even ecclesiastical, there 
 was one thing that was not changed but only deepened, 
 and that was the necessity of repentance for a truly 
 Christian faith. It was on the matter of sin, repentance, 
 confession and absolution that the whole Reformation 
 movement turned. And its effect was to lay a stress 
 unprecedented upon what had always been a central 
 affair of Christianity — a religion of repentance and for- 
 giveness. Roman, Greek and Protestant Christianity 
 are here at one. And the declaration now that
 
 ja The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Christianity consists in imitating at a reverent distance 
 the reh'gion of Jesus only shows that we are in the 
 midst of a movement and an apostacy more serious 
 than anything that has occurred in the Church's history 
 since Gnosticism was overcome. 
 
 For if the religion of Jesus means the state of his own 
 consciousness there is there no trace of repentance, how- 
 ever far we go back in pursuit of his experience. On the 
 other hand, if we take the teaching of Jesus, he was upon 
 this matter of repentance most insistent. Without 
 it all must perish. Was he, then, practising one 
 type and prescribing another ? Can it be doubted ? 
 But if he prescribed a repentance he never 
 felt, and could not feel, then he was destroying 
 in advance any suggestion that our religion was his own 
 at several removes. He was destroying the idea that 
 ours could be a filial and uplooking piety as free of 
 repentance as his own. He was setting up for us a type 
 different from his own, though one which was made 
 possible for us by his own alone. And the whole faith of 
 the Church has recognised the deep and vital distinction. 
 Has there ever been an influential man in the Catholic 
 Church who could say that his type of religion has 
 more in common with that of Christ than with that of 
 Peter, Paul and John ? 
 
 The tendency to ignore this distinction, and to make 
 classic for Christians a type of faith in which sin is 
 converted into immaturity or ignorance, and repentance 
 becomes but regret — that tendency is at the root of all 
 that does most to weaken and secularise the Churches 
 to-day ; and its exponents are moral reactionaries. 
 They teach a paganism which, however refined in them, 
 will not remain refined for long in those they persuade.
 
 II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 53 
 
 Faith is ceasing among many of the rehgious to be peni- 
 tential faith ; and this is a lack that no mere spirituality 
 can fill. It is a mere sympathetic faith, or a faith of heroics, 
 like Peter's ignorant boast that he would never desert 
 his Master. And it will have Peter's end. No mere 
 faith in a Master can ensure that we shall not betray him 
 under sufficient pressure. "Though all men forsake 
 Thee yet will not I." "I know not the man." The 
 boast was sincere enough, sympathetic and shallow 
 enough. From a platform it would have swept the 
 house. But Christ knew men. His deepest insight was 
 into religious sophistication. And he put the avowal by 
 him. He weighed it at its true worth. Then came the 
 days of horror and humiliation, when Peter lay in a 
 deeper grave than Christ. That is the kind of humilia- 
 tion that is being prepared for a slight and facile faith. 
 And the only hope for us then is in the Resurrection 
 light upon the Cross. Our only hope is not simply in a 
 deepened spirituality chastened by error. A chastened 
 piety is not the Christian faith, else Martineau were its 
 great modern prophet. Our only hope is to be rooted in 
 repentance, grounded in forgiveness, established in a 
 redemption, and quickened in a real regeneration. It 
 is that we may be " regenerated to a living hope by the 
 Resurrection of Christ from the dead " (i Peter i. 3). 
 I have used these words not as a mere quotation, but 
 because they are Peter's own account of his experience 
 of what made him a Christian for good. It was the 
 word of the risen Saviour " Tell my disciples and Peter'' 
 that raised him from the lying and perdition of those 
 awful days to a life he never lost. It was this that 
 translated him into a confession deeper than that of his 
 sin, that that same Jesus he had crucified was both 
 
 F
 
 54 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Messiah and God (Acts ii. 36). It was no remembrance 
 of Christ's teaching and no emulation of Christ's 
 religion that brought that to pass. 
 
 Our talk of sin is palpably ceasing to be the talk of 
 broken and contrite men. It has no note of humilia- 
 tion in it. Our pious heart does not meditate terror. 
 We are not frightened at ourselves. We have a softness, 
 but not the sacred tenderness that comes from that 
 humiliation alone. It has not the patience, the love of 
 the brotherhood, the passion to serve the Church instead 
 of correcting and scourging it, which come over the 
 hearts of men taken from the jaws of death, nay 
 raised from its abyss. Our speech of sin has not behind 
 it the note of " my sin, my sin ! " And in consequence 
 our thought and speech of Christ loses the authentic 
 note of " My Lord and My God." We do not know an 
 "eternal sin" and an awful Redemption, and therefore 
 we do not know an Eternal Redeemer in the Christ we 
 praise. That Redeemer must prevail ; but his Kingdom 
 and its service may be taken from us and given to others. 
 
 § § § 
 But, it is said, this is the religion of judaised apostles; 
 it is not the religion of the gospels, which knows repent- 
 ance, to be sure, but does not grow out of it as a native 
 soil. Well, let us ask if that be so. If we turn to 
 the Synoptics with their reflection of the apostles' religion 
 (which is the only religion we can copy) what do we 
 find the type to be ? It is a continuous confession of the 
 sinless Christ by sinful men. Like all the deepest con- 
 fession of Christ, it is a confession not of religion but of 
 sin and salvation. Everything these narratives say is to 
 glorify such a Christ ; and they miss no chance of con- 
 fessing the stupidity and the wickedness of the men who
 
 II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 55 
 
 wrote them (or who were at the writer's ear), stupidity 
 and wickedness not only continued up to the very end, 
 but contributing to the crisis and the catastrophe. These 
 gospels form an apostohc confession of unfaith to all 
 time. They confess their Lord in a form which, like the 
 epistles also, is a confession of faith carrying an unspar- 
 ing confession of sin. The apostles always denounce sin 
 in the spirit of confessors of it — which is a very safe rule 
 for denunciators. It is the confession of men to whom 
 their sin and its forgiveness by Christ was so serious and 
 central that it was a new creation and passage from death 
 to life. It is the confession of men so centrally changed 
 by this forgiveness that, while their sin is blacker than 
 ever, they can write of it almost as if it were not theirs ; 
 so thoroughly are they severed from it by their new 
 Creator. To see in the apostolic expressions about the 
 meaning of Christ's death nothing but dogma, and no 
 tremendous witnesses of an unutterable new life — are we 
 harsh if we say that that is a confession of spiritual 
 trance, if not decadence. 
 
 At least it is no wonder that such eyes should fail to see ^ 
 in the Saviour the Incarnate God. For it is only on the 
 experience of a Redeemer from eternal death into eternal 
 life that the New Testament witness of Christ's Godhead 
 rests. And it is only the same experience that has pro- 
 longed that witness in the Church. The Gospel of Jesus 
 made the " Religion of Jesus" impossible. For it made 
 the first Christians worship in the Holy One of God the/>- 
 very Holiness of God. And for the religion of to-day 
 there is not hope till, by grace or judgment, by repent- 
 ance or calamity, we get over the levity of modern 
 liberalism, and restore repentance to the foundation of 
 our faith. No faith born in true repentance could speak
 
 56 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 of our all being " sons of God " like Christ. Nor can we 
 
 hear without fear and grief such words from Christian 
 
 men. 
 
 § § § 
 
 We come, then, to our communion with God not along 
 with Christ, and in like fashion with Christ, but through 
 Christ, and in him. We do not believe with him, or 
 by his help, but in him. We believe in Him ; and in 
 Him it is that we have our power to believe. He is 
 not only faith's object but also faith's world. He 
 becomes our universe that feels, and knows, and 
 makes us what we are. Deep as the thirst for God lies 
 in the soul, nowhere but in Christ do we have the 
 communion that stills it. The communion, I say, and 
 not merely the union, the fusion, the co-mingling, of 
 which the high mystic dreams. Truly it is a mystic 
 communion. The possession of God is sure for every 
 age and soul only in Jesus Christ as its living ground, 
 and not merely by Christ as its historic medium. The 
 historic prophet is our Eternal priest. All other union 
 is partial, occasional, not for life, but for moods and 
 hours. To live in the love of God is, indeed, a passion, 
 and from time to time an experience, perhaps, of high 
 gifted souls. But only by faith in Christ does it cease to 
 mark certain fitful seasons or favoured groups, and 
 become a public possession and a constant life. It is 
 impossible to live the religion of Jesus, because there are 
 not in us the conditions there were in Jesus for God to 
 reveal Himself directly, completely, and finally. He 
 cannot do this mighty work because of our unbelief. 
 But the belief which makes our sonship possible He gives 
 us in the gift of Christ and Christ's action upon the soul. 
 The superhistoric personality of Jesus was the only human
 
 11.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 57 
 
 personality to whom God could fully reveal himself as 
 the Holy and absolute Father. Therefore that personality, 
 condensed, realised, and pointed in his cross is our only 
 way to the final certainty of such a Father. True, it is 
 not the only thing that makes us crave for a Father in 
 heaven ; nor, perhaps, the only thing that fills us at times 
 with the great surmise and voluminous intuition that it 
 is so. For many experiences in fine lives may raise us 
 to that conviction for the time. But Christ crucified is 
 the only power that makes it for us a life-certainty, a 
 new and sure life, a new life-principle, a new creation, 
 with no more doubt and no more denial for ever. 
 Whatever clouds may dim the radiance of our day from 
 time to time there is no night there. And however the 
 flush of elation may subside, and the sense of God's 
 nearness abate, there is no more dividing and estranging 
 sea. And why ? Because in Christ God not only comes 
 near to us but by an eternal act makes us His own. We 
 hold for ever only because here we are seized and held 
 by the Eternal. God has, by the resurrection of Christ, 
 regenerated us into a living hope; He has not simply 
 given us a living hope that we may one day be 
 regenerate (i P. i. 3). Any living hope we have is the 
 action of Christ's resurrection in us. Prophets, and 
 even men of genius, can by their message bring us 
 near to God, but they cannot permanently keep us there, 
 or cure that rebound and reversion in which our soul 
 gravitates to earth and cleaves to the dust. Nothing can, 
 till we are quickened by that unique, living, and Eternal 
 word wherein God comes near to us in very presence and 
 act, and not in message alone. He comes near and 
 makes us His own. Others can impress us with 
 God; in Christ God creates us anew. Others by their
 
 58 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 very purity may make us doubt whether we have any 
 right to approach a Holy God who is only too sure to us 
 for our peace ; but in Christ such misgivings are 
 submerged in the discovery that He has taken the matter 
 out of our hands into His own, and Himself has come to us 
 and made us His for ever. And then we not only draw near 
 to God and not only have a new relation to Him, but 
 we enter His communion, and share His life, and are 
 marvellously made to partake of His Eternal Love to 
 His Eternal Son. That is done in Christ ; where God 
 did not send but came. Our life is hid with Christ in 
 God. He is the ground, and not only the means, of our 
 salvation. And the ground of our salvation must be the 
 object of our faith, and of our faith in God. The god- 
 head in a Redeemer is the only form of godhead we can 
 bring to the test of experience. Godhead means finality ; 
 and we can have no real God on the lines of either 
 thought or power, because there we can have no finality. 
 Finality is a matter of life, of the Eternal Life given by 
 Christ alone. Here the newest philosophy and the oldest 
 Christianity meet. 
 
 For personal and final union with the Father and 
 His love there is no way for us but that faith in Jesus 
 which his disciples found forced upon them by the 
 compulsion of his grace. And the one compressed 
 channel by which it came was the cross and its 
 redemption. Jesus was for the Apostles and their 
 Churches not the consummation of a God-conscious- 
 ness, labouring up through creation, but the invasive 
 source of forgiveness, new creation, and eternal life. 
 In Christ God did not simply countersign the best 
 intuitions of the heart but He created a new heart 
 within us. There was for the New Testament no way
 
 II.] The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ 59 
 
 to the communion of the Father but by the forgiveness 
 which was Christ's grand and comprehensive gift — 
 at once redemption and eternal life. It was in 
 giving him up unsparingly to the death that God gave 
 us all things, all our destiny, all Eternity. What, 
 it has been asked in many tones of late, what 
 is the essence of Christianity ? The best known 
 answer that of Harnack, is too meagre. He is too much 
 of a devout historian, and too little of a spiritual thinker. 
 The essence of Christianity is Jesus Christ, the historic 
 Redeemer and Lord and God, dwelling in his Church's 
 faith. I have already said that there never was a time, 
 even in the Church's earliest days, when Christianity was 
 but the reproduction of the personal faith of Jesus, or 
 the effort to live his ethic. It was always a faith in 
 Jesus concentric with the Church's faith in God. 
 
 "The Christian religion begins," says Wobbermin, 
 " historically viewed {i.e. apart from faith and so far as 
 documents carry us) it begins, not with the religious self- 
 consciousness of Jesus but with that of the first disciples. 
 We can carry back the line of Christian faith straight to 
 them, but not beyond them to Jesus himself. Beyond 
 the whole chain he stands as the person who first made 
 this form of faith and life possible. And it was not that 
 he extended into his disciples his own religious self- 
 consciousness. Not one of them ever said or thought 
 that. None came to the Father but only the Son, and 
 those to whom it was the Son's will to reveal Him." 
 
 In the first form in which we know it then, the religion 
 of Jesus was the religion of which Jesus was the object 
 and not the subject. He was never regarded as the first 
 Christian. If we reject that objective faith in him, then, 
 we start with something quite different from the
 
 6o The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. ii. 
 
 religion of our only source of information, and if we 
 start with a Jesus different from that of our New 
 Testament sources, a saint rather than a Redeemer, we 
 are beginning with a construction, a manufactured 
 article. And not only is a construction no beginning, 
 but, if it come to construction, why must we prefer the 
 Jesus of critical or speculative construction to the Christ 
 of theological and apostolic construction ? Why prefer a 
 Christ constructed from documents, without their 
 experience, to a Christ constructed from documents 
 whose experience we repeat, and which are themselves 
 a part of the revelation {See Lecture on Inspiration). For 
 upon the central things the apostolic documents are the 
 prolongation of the message of Jesus. They are Christ 
 himself interpreting his finished work, through men in 
 whom not they lived but he lived in them. Christ in the 
 Apostles interpreted his finished work as truly as in his 
 lifetime he interpreted his unfinished work. In both cases 
 he interpreted it as the hour shaped it and as a growing 
 faith could bear it. Many things which they were not 
 able to bear during his life he said, through select lips, to 
 those in whom the finished work had created the soul of 
 insight and understanding. It is men broken by his 
 cross and healed by his Spirit that have the secret of 
 the Lord.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST AND THE 
 INTERPRETATIONS THEREOF
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST AND THE INTERPRETATIONS 
 
 THEREOF 
 
 The sense of the greatness of Christ's character and of 
 his historic influence is higher to-day than ever. What 
 does that mean in regard to his person ? We may note 
 one or two points at the outset. 
 
 1. As to his antecedents in Israel and the Old Testa- 
 ment it must be admitted gratefully to modern scholar- 
 ship that Israel began by sharing with the whole Semitic 
 East, and the nearer East generally, the same religious 
 ideas, ethics, and customs, allowing for their development 
 by each nation on its own lines. So far God was work- 
 ing in them all. Yet only in one people, only in Israel, 
 did God Himself open out, and reveal Himself by a 
 special and redeeming word. But this word for this 
 people gradually revolutionised all, renovated it, sur- 
 mounted it, and either neutralised a great part of the 
 Oriental legacy, or rejected it. So that the difference, 
 on the whole, submerges the affinities between Israel and 
 the Semitic East, between the revelation which finds in 
 Israel and that which seeks in all the rest of Humanity. 
 
 2. So, also, when it came to a point, in regard to 
 Christ. A deeper knowledge of the Judaism of Christ's
 
 64 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 time forces on us the conviction that there was in his 
 mere thought or precept little that was new and original. 
 It can mostly be gathered from contemporary Judaic 
 ideas on such subjects as the Kingdom of Heaven and 
 its ethic, God, Father, Messiah, Resurrection, and the 
 conflict between God and Satan. But the power of 
 Jesus still grows, both in the way of drawing men, sub- 
 duing them, and uniting them ; and no less in the way of 
 dividing them, Where does it lie ? It is something 
 gained to recognise that it does not lie in novel truth, 
 (and that heresy, therefore, is not necessarily loyalty) ; 
 but that it lies in the new divine personality, and the 
 redeeming, consummating act of God effected in it. The 
 religious power of the world is not ideas or truths, 
 powerful as these are, but personalities and their deeds. 
 
 3. And this impression of Christ's greatness is deepened 
 as we turn to account the fine results of recent scholar- 
 ship upon his life; especially if we were to follow those 
 who reduce his public activity to a year. We remark 
 that he entered on life with anything but a passionless 
 simplicity of nature ; yet it was as a complete and 
 finished character, with entire moral adultness and 
 adequacy to each deepening situation. He was perfectly 
 sure and self-sure, knowing his mind and carrying it 
 through with an energy of will unparalleled in the history 
 of the great. The concentration and unity of his 
 character and purpose is the more amazing as he had not 
 a long life, like Goethe's, in which to work out the 
 tremendous contradictions and collisions in his vast 
 soul. " The spiritual power which broke up the old 
 pagan world and founded a new is here compressed into 
 a single volcanic point." What a man ! What a maker 
 of men ! What a master of men and of events ! What
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 65 
 
 a sovereignty was the mien of his self-consciousness ! Lord 
 of himself and all besides ; with an irresistible power to 
 force, and even hurry, events on a world scale ; and yet 
 with the soul that sat among children, and the heart in 
 which children sat. He had an intense reverence for a 
 past that was yet too small for him. It rent him to rend 
 it ; and yet he had to break it up, to the breaking of his 
 own heart, in the greatest revolution the world ever 
 saw. He was an austere man, a severe critic, a born 
 fighter, of choleric wrath and fiery scorn, so that the 
 people thought that he was Elijah or the Baptist; yet he 
 was gentle to the last degree, especially with those 
 ignorant and out of the way. In the thick of life and 
 love he yet stood detached, sympathetic yet aloof, cleav- 
 ing at once both to men and to solitude. He spoke with 
 such power because he loved silence. With an almost 
 sacramental idea of human relations, especially the cen- 
 tral relation of marriage, he yet avoided for himself every 
 bond of property, vocation, or family; and he cut these 
 bonds when they stood between men and himself. Full 
 of biting irony upon men he yet was their healer and 
 Saviour. Of a quick understanding which tore through 
 the pedantry of the Scribes, with a sure dialectic which 
 never failed him, and never left him at the mercy of his 
 hecklers, he had yet a naive nature and a pictorial speech 
 which brought him very near to the simplest — whom 
 next moment some deep paradox would confound, and 
 even wound. Clear, calm, determined, and sure of his 
 mark, he was next hour roused to such impulsive passion 
 as if he were beside himself. But if he let himself go he 
 always knew where he was going. With a royal, and 
 almost proud, sense of himself, he poured out his soul 
 unto God and unto death, and was the friend of publicans
 
 66 i he Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 and sinners. With a superhuman sense of authority he 
 had a superhuman humiaty. When he emptied himself 
 it was done in the fulness of God. He could be bitter, 
 and almost rough in his virility, yet he could pity, obey 
 and sacrifice like a woman. The mightiest of all indi- 
 vidual powers, he has yet set on foot the greatest Socialism 
 and Fraternity the world has known, which is still but 
 in its dawn. " King and beggar. Hero and Child, 
 Prophet and Reformer, Pblemist and Prince of Peace, 
 Ruler and Servant, Revolutionist and Sage, man of 
 action, man of ideas, and man of the Word — he was all 
 these strange things, and more, in one person." * 
 
 And he was all that without being torn asunder as a 
 common man would have been ; for, if his heart broke, 
 his soul never did, nor his will. He was all that, in a 
 unity greater than the unity of the most uncommon men, 
 a unity ruled by his tremendous will. Dwell on the 
 wealth of his person more than its mystery, on his 
 irresistibility rather than his gentleness, on his steadfast 
 energy of concentration upon his one work more even 
 than his elemental force of passion or his depth of suffer- 
 ing — dwell on such things if you would come near the 
 centre and secret of this personality and its root in 
 coequal God. His effect on the human soul is greater 
 than any human cause can explain, whether you think of 
 the extent of his effect in history, or, still more, of the 
 nature of his effect in a Church and its experience. 
 
 § § § 
 We may, perhaps, put the matter thus. If we say there 
 is no limit to the greatness of Christ's personality, where, 
 then, did his limitation lie? 
 
 * For this sentence, and more in this paragraph, cf. Weidel, Jesu 
 Personhchkeit, igo8.
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 67 
 
 It is not relevant to point to the limitation of his 
 knowledge, the absence of political or aesthetic sympathies, 
 or any other result of his being the true son of his age 
 and servant of his special vocation. These things do 
 not constitute moral personality. They are only some 
 of the conditions within which moral personality may 
 reveal or approve itself. Personality is not limitation, 
 nor the negation of limitation, but the surmounting of it. 
 Determination here is not negation, but power. For it 
 is self-determination. Christ, as the moral result of his 
 life's humbled action in death and resurrection, was 
 determined as the Son of God in power. Rom. i. 4. The 
 personality is shown not by the limitations but in them — 
 in their conquest and exploitation. In der Beschrdnkung 
 zeigt sick erst der Meister.'^Mere individuality may be defined 
 by limitations, but personality is expressed within them, 
 by transcending, overflowing, and utilising them. The 
 individual may be a circle or plot walled off from others, but 
 the person is a bubbling spring among them that overflows 
 them. The one is an area, the other is a centre of power 
 The sun is not a measurable round hole in the sky, but a 
 power-centre so active that when we feel him most we 
 cannot see his rim and limit, which we yet know to be 
 there. It is overflowed and irradiated. The limitation 
 is lost in the power. So with the limitations on the glory 
 of Christ. They give it feature and enhance it. On 
 the other hand we may often observe that an excess of 
 such powers as Christ lacked may go along with great 
 poverty of moral power or greatness. Napoleon was 
 one of the greatest elemental geniuses the world has ever 
 seen, yet under his very shadow Wordsworth could still 
 deplore in France the absence of a " master spirit." 
 Greatness of personality is quite compatible with absence
 
 68 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 of genius ; while consummate genius may go with great 
 moral poverty in the personality, and a total lack of per- 
 sonal greatness — as a case like Turner's shows. 
 
 But it will be said that however we magnify the great- 
 ness of Christ's personality we yet cannot reach a Godhead 
 for him. For that is a qualitative difference, and we 
 cannot cross the bar of deity by any mere expansion of 
 human greatness. The remark might be true if by the 
 greatness of personality we meant but its wide vision, 
 its elemental force or its demonic genius. But we are 
 concerned in Christ with something much more than the 
 area, the force, or the velocity of a personality. As the 
 person of Christ is much more than his character, so it 
 is also more than his personality. He was a personality, 
 to be sure, whatever we think of his person. He was a 
 very great personage. But he could never have been for 
 history what he is had he been but a colossal and magnetic 
 personage. The mystery of his person resides in its 
 nature from the beginning, in its quality and not 
 its amount, in its native finality and not its volume 
 or passion. It is in its divine nature and moral 
 quality : in its holy quality more than its infinite 
 compass ; in such a way that we say, if God be not thus 
 He is less than the God we crave for and the world needs, 
 the last reality of soul and conscience. This is the holy 
 love that deserves to be almighty and infinite. Nay, 
 this is the holy love that is infinite. For it is a greatness 
 of love, not only an intensity but an intrinsic greatness 
 of love, a kind and not a degree of love, which shows 
 itself invincible by all the world and all its worst. It is 
 holy, sacrificing, saving love to the uttermost. 
 
 It is infinite love not finite, God's love not man's. God 
 so loved ; not so intensely but so holily. God is in Christ,
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 69 
 
 loving to the uttermost there, and not merely saying or 
 showing by an agent that He loved. There is a quali- 
 tative difference from any natural passion or affection in 
 the love that loves the Holy with entire holiness, loves 
 a world in arms against it, and loves it so invincibly as 
 to save, loves it from death into life eternal. Love that 
 was not overcome of such evil overcame evil as God — 
 overcame it absolutely, finally, with the grace of an infi- 
 nite holy God. To extend what is given us in Christ, 
 therefore, is not to pass into another genus when we are 
 driven to call him God. 
 
 § § § 
 But granting the tremendous differences, and contra- 
 dictions even, between man and God, it is not impossible 
 to find in the reality of a person a union of them which 
 is impossible in a rational scheme. And in this respect 
 modern, philosophical thought is totally different from 
 Hellenic or medieval. It has come to realise the in- 
 adequacy of thought for reality. It has therefore given 
 more room and rank to faith as an organ of knowledge. 
 It has admitted that all real knowledge is not scientific 
 in its form. Indeed it sees that science cannot give us 
 reality (but only method), whereas faith can. And a 
 formula which logic might call contradictory, such as the 
 Godman, becomes less an absurdity than an indication of 
 adequate thought on the greatest matters. It is in the 
 region of moral personality that we find the truth that 
 lies in credo quia absurduui. Ihe absolute claim of pure 
 and logical thought has been reduced. It is not equal to 
 modern life — and especially to the growth of the personal 
 idea, and the pricelessness of the soul. Scholasticism, 
 medieval and modern, has been dethroned. No dogma 
 is adequate to spiritual reality. Things have to be 
 
 G
 
 70 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 reckoned with as real which are quite irrational, and 
 life's whole destiny is risked on them. Those who use 
 rationality as the test of reality, however modernist they 
 may be, are not yet out of the medieval ban ; and when 
 they apply the rational principle destructively they are 
 only the victims of an inverted scholasticism. They are the 
 dogmatists of negation. And in the end they form a bitter 
 disappointment to those who once hoped to find through 
 them an escape from traditional dognia into a grander 
 plerophory of truth, but who really find only that they 
 have exchanged a rich dogma for a lean. Some things 
 irreducible to proof or logic, and some vulnerable to the 
 critic, are among our mightiest forces ; and on the other 
 hand some things logically irresistible are for life totally 
 inapplicable and absurd. The greatest things we believe 
 we cannot comprehend, not only in religion, but in 
 practical life. Nor is it fatal if our statements about 
 them are in flat contradiction. The greatest of realities 
 is the greatest of paradoxes. This is true even of the 
 final quantities handled by science itself, like the atom ; 
 which is extended and yet indivisible for thought ; yet in 
 the paradox we have the most fruitful of beliefs for the 
 development of modern physics. 
 
 But we can rise higher than that. We have the most 
 obstinate of antinomies, we have the most intractable of 
 paradoxes, when a belief so essential to society, action, 
 and character as human freedom and responsibility is 
 conjoined, as it must be, with its incompatibles — scientific 
 causation or divine grace. There is a series of facts 
 explicable only on the one line, and a parallel series, 
 inseparable from it, explicable only on the other. We 
 have to accept both, and to believe for our life that 
 reality is too great to be covered by one of the formulae
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Inierpretatioits thereof 71 
 
 alone, but equally needs the other and opposite. We 
 can daily observe that these two contradictory things 
 have their practical and fruitful union in many a 
 character, which they unite to sustain, develop, and 
 adorn in the maze of life. And we are well aware that 
 human society and history would be impossible without 
 belief in both ; as the government of a free country is 
 carried on only by two irreconcilable yet cooperant 
 parties. 
 
 Kant revealed a whole series of these rational anti- 
 monies. And it was thus that he broke the reign of 
 dogma; it was by no direct criticism of theological loci. 
 For the essence of authoritative dogma is to make faith 
 depend on rational consistency for its being; and the 
 essence of negative dogma is to think belief can be 
 destroyed by being shewn to be rationally inconsistent. 
 Beware of clearness, consistency, and simplicity, espe- 
 cially about Christ. The higher we go the more 
 polygonal the truth is. Thesis and antithesis are both 
 true. But their reconciliation lies, not as Hegel said, 
 with a superfined rationalism, in a higher truth which is 
 also of the reason, but in a supreme and absolute 
 personality, in whom the antinomies work. lis marchont. 
 It is the category of personality that adjusts the con- 
 tradictions of reason ; which, after all, is not abstract 
 thought but a person thinking. 
 
 § § § 
 The application to the Godhead of Christ may be 
 clear. God and man seem to exclude each other ; and 
 the difference certainly is very deep. But to realise 
 the depth of the difference is only the more to realise the 
 greatness of Christ as theGodman. Theology is peculiarly 
 vulnerable to the rationalist, because it is engrossed with
 
 72 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 the last, and therefore the most alogical, realities. And 
 its central doctrine in particular seems offensive to a 
 rapacious logic, to a common sense with an insatiable 
 thirst for empire. But none the less, as the kind of great- 
 ness grows on us which exists in Christ's person, we 
 grow also to feel that the categories of critical thought 
 which are so useful below are no more competent there 
 than feet for the air. To express this greatness we 
 need not two truths lying in a third, but two great 
 powers at least, two personal movements, and these in a 
 surmounted collision within a person. We need man and 
 God, and we need them in a Godman and in a cross. 
 How inadequate it must be to rationalise as doctrine, in 
 even the most constructive way, a revelation which was 
 only possible by the act of the Son of God in the Cross. 
 So true is it that the wisdom of God is folly with men, 
 and the foolishness of men is God's wisdom. Theory 
 indeed we must prosecute. The effort to adjust the great 
 paradox could only cease with the paralysis of thought. 
 But we shall theorise more successfully and modestly on 
 our living and justifying faith if we realise that our 
 theories are but " thrown out." They are but projected 
 at the reality from our experience of it ; they are faith 
 codifying itself; they are not reality, nor competent to 
 reality. After all the centuries of toil upon this doctrine, 
 even with our kenotic efforts, we sometimes ask, have we 
 really done what was not done at Chalcedon, where the 
 two sides were stated against their heresies but not ad- 
 justed, and left lying parallel but not organised ? Only 
 some heresies were repudiated as being incompatible not 
 with logic so much as with the evangelical experience. 
 They were repudiated, but no real solution could be put 
 in their place. And no theories, and no clash of theories.
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 73 
 
 no mere truths.or the incompatibility of truths, can destroy 
 our confidence of faith that the Christ who gave and 
 gives us our redemption is the rock of any reality 
 possible to life at its deepest, to life as one whole, to life 
 eternal, and that he is the human presence of Eternal 
 God. But most of the failure to recognise the divine 
 greatness of Christ arises in the end from a moral failure 
 to appreciate him as personal saviour ; and that failure 
 rises from a defect in the estimate of the sin from which he 
 saves. A lofty ideal is not mighty to save. 
 
 § § § 
 For where is the true site of the greatness of Christ ? 
 Is it in the mere force and volume of the historic figure, 
 or in the nature of his historic work ? 
 
 If we take but two features alone in Christ we find our- 
 selves before elements which it is impossible to combine 
 in any conception except that of personality with its 
 alogical and inconsistent unity ; and in this case it is a 
 personality great and contradictory beyond the mould of 
 any other. Unity of personality does not always go with 
 harmony of qualities. Unity of purpose need not imply 
 aesthetic symmetry of character. And the artists, and 
 aesthetic Christianity generally, have misled us about the 
 harmony and balance of Christ's character. There is 
 something too Mendelssohnian in their moral music, 
 something too well-groomed and habited in their mental 
 type, in their carriage something too much of the 
 Christian gentleman. In Christ there are two features 
 which are to be unified in no fair picture but only in one 
 rnighty person. The severity of judgment in Christ and 
 the tenderness of the pity form a contradiction which 
 seems as final in its own region as the antinomy of the 
 divine sovereignty and human freedom is in another
 
 74 ^^'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 plane. So much so that between these two elements some 
 can never find themselves in Christ, never come to rest in 
 him, so long as they view him as a teacher, a character, 
 or a personality alone. At one time they are drawn to 
 his mercy, at another they are crushed by his severity. 
 Now they run into his shelter, now they are chilled in his 
 austere shadow. Now he is all sympathy, now all 
 judgment. And their whole life in relation to him is an 
 alternation of moods, now trust, now fear — until the per- 
 sonality is consummated for them, and perfectly expressed 
 in his "finished work." It is expressed and consummated 
 in no symmetrical scheme or conception of his character, 
 and in no psychological harmony of his history, but in 
 the deed unspeakable and full of glory, in the final act of 
 the cross, where all is gathered in one for our peace, 
 where the whole Jesus at last takes effect, with the judg- 
 ment, indeed, there, but the grace uppermost, as he bears 
 in himself his own judgment on us. What the cross is 
 for the soul and the race can be put into no theology, 
 adjusted in no philosophy. No thought or form can con- 
 tain the greatness of the personality which it took the 
 eternal act of cross and resurrection fully to express. 
 
 It is the work of the cross that crowns and carries 
 home the greatness of Christ. There the Master 
 becomes our Lord and our God. Impression there 
 becomes faith. And as faith can only have God for its 
 object it is bound to pass, in the cultus at least, into the 
 worship of Christ ; and in theology it passes into the 
 belief in his real deity, however expressed. It cannot be 
 too often recalled that the article of Christ's deity is the 
 theological expression of the evangelical experience of his 
 salvation, apart from which it is little less than absurd, 
 and no wonder it is incredible.
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 75 
 
 § § § 
 
 Some unity of a Christ so great with God is not denied 
 by any with whom we are here concerned. The problem 
 is, how we are to construe it. 
 
 When Jesus says, " I and the Father are one," he 
 uttered an experience which the author of the Fourth 
 Gospel cannot have merely imagined. To think he did , ^ -^ 
 
 IS pure Pyrrhonism ; it is not criticism. If anything is 
 sure to us about the mind of Christ we are sure that such 
 was the relation he cherished and expressed towards his 
 Father. The only question is, what did it mean for 
 him ? 
 
 Now, in asking what was the exact content of Christ's 
 consciousness on such a point we are barred at the outset 
 not merely by the meagreness of our data but by a con- 
 sideration still more serious. It is a psychological im- 
 possibility for us to go very far in reconstituting the 
 consciousness of Christ. To say we can is to beg the 
 question by placing him on a human and penetrable level 
 at the start. He knew what was in man and needed 
 no telling; but does not his own chief account of himself 
 say that no man knoweth the Son but the Father ? 
 The intimate relationship between them is not accessible 
 to us. We can only say, with Lotze, that it is im- 
 possible for us to exaggerate that intimacy. And the 
 most subtle speculations of the Church, when they are 
 interpreted with the insight of a sympathetic intelligence 
 instead of sealed up by the dulness of a scornful, are but 
 the finest efforts of human thought to feel its way into 
 that divinest mystery. 
 
 But yet we do not easily consent to be entirely Agnostic 
 on such a matter. Nor do we believe that such entire 
 ignorance is the decree of Him who wills to be inquired
 
 76 The Person and Plac: of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 of. And Christian effort to advance, to grow in the 
 knowledge of the Son of God has taken three historic 
 stages, all of which survive in modern forms. These we 
 may describe, in ecclesiastical language, as the Ebionite 
 (or Socinian), the Arian, and the Athanasian. Of these 
 the Ebionite or Socinian stage we may perhaps consider 
 to have been outgrown in principle as the result of the 
 more competent and sympathetic attention given by 
 modern thought both to the nature of religion and to the 
 self-consciousness of Jesus. The Athanasian stage, at 
 the other end, is bound up with the existence of a 
 Church, and is alone compatible with that experience of 
 final Redemption in Christ which makes the Church- 
 The Arian stage is that which still fascinates those who 
 have abandoned the lower extreme without having 
 reached the higher, and who, having lost faith, or never 
 having had the historic mind, sit loose to the Church 
 and its experience. It is the conflict of Arianism and 
 Athanasianism, under modern conditions, ideas, and 
 methods, which must engage the concern of Christian 
 people for at least the next generation. 
 
 § § § 
 I. The first or Socinian stage represents what is true 
 enough if it be not called final — the individual saintliness 
 and moral supereminence of Christ. For it is in- 
 dividualist. When he spoke of his unity with the 
 Father, and said they were one, he only meant (it is 
 said) that they were entirely at one. It was an ethical 
 unity. The one will was tuned completely to his vis-a- 
 vis in the other and gave back his note. The son of 
 man had an insight into the Father's will which was 
 only matched by his absorbing desire and moral power 
 to do it. Father and Son confront each other. The
 
 jii.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 77 
 
 ;dea is harmony or congruity rather than condignity ; 
 and the conception of Christ involved is no more than 
 prophetic. He is our rehgious hero, a rehgious genius 
 unsurpassed ; but not '* My Lord and my God." The 
 advantage of such a conception is, first, that, as far as it 
 goes, it is true. And second, that everyone who need 
 be considered is agreed about it. If Christ was no more 
 than moral hero and prophet of the Lord he was that 
 at least. So that if the essence of Christianity were its 
 lowest common denominator, if it were (as it is not) 
 what divides us least, we need go no further than this 
 position to gather the greatest possible number into the 
 Christian pale. But the genius of Christianity is not 
 minimist. And the object of Christianity is not 
 majorities, not the gathering in or as many people as 
 possible in a given time on the simplest base; which 
 would be setting the great pyramid on its moral apex. But 
 it is the glorifying of the Father, the hallowing of his 
 name; and then the enfolding of as many as seek first 
 such a Kingdom as the cross founded in doing so. It is 
 peace among men of such good-will. The Socinian 
 position has attractions for the lay stage or type of 
 mind, which is religious, and rational, and nothing 
 more. But it abolishes certain finite difficulties only to 
 create infinite. It places Christ as it places all the 
 prophets whose series he crowns, among the men to 
 whom God but spake, and who could not but obey that 
 word. And the deep difference, among those who are 
 interested in Christ at all, is that between those who 
 call him " Lord and God " with his first believers, and 
 those who call him hero with his latest admirers — 
 admirers who are yet able to judge him more search- 
 ingly than they were ever judged by him, or expect to be.
 
 78 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 I cannot regard as other than Socinian the idea that 
 in Christ we have the greatest of created personalities 
 completely filled with the Spirit of God. For the centre 
 of gravity must always be where the personality is ; and 
 in this case it is in the created humanity alone. The 
 person concerned is a person in the same created sense 
 as the rest of us, however magnificent in his scale and 
 range, and however filled with the Holy Ghost. His 
 communion with God is in principle the same as ours. 
 He is, like the Church, the habitation of the Spirit, and 
 neither the giver of the Spirit nor his eternal correlate. The 
 Lord is not the Spirit. Such a Christ does not indeed offer 
 to the Spirit the opposition presented by the rest of us, 
 but that is a matter of relative perfection. Like us, he is 
 a creature, only created ad hoc, for a special function, and 
 as a special organ of the Spirit. And he is not even 
 created before the world ; but he is the classic instance 
 of created man. The notion of Jesus as the grand and 
 perfect receptacle of the spirit, its most glorious tenement 
 the most fine and adequate of all its human instruments 
 in history, however generously you construe that notion, 
 does not really rise above the Socinian level. It is 
 certainly below the New Testament idea, whatever 
 countenance it may find in certain inchoate New Testa- 
 ment phrases. For we must oiten remark that in the 
 New Testament we find no complete theory or explicit 
 theology of either Trinity or Incarnation ; but we have 
 the faith and the principle which are impossible other- 
 wise, and which, under the heat of conflict and the 
 growth of Christian mind, revealed at last the invisible 
 writing on its heart of a perfectly triune God. 
 
 2. The second or Arian stage is represented by those 
 who see in Christ not merely the perfect prophet, but a
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 79 
 
 personality unique in his supramundane nature, and not 
 merely in his function and the way he discharged it. 
 They do lay stress not on his message but on his divine 
 person, and the position he took toward men. They 
 recognise not only his spotlessness before men, but his 
 sinlessness before his own conscience and God, rising to 
 such a height that he knows and proclaims himself to be 
 the final judge of mankind. He is not only man's moral 
 model and his spiritual king; and he is so related to God 
 that he declares man's final standing before God to be 
 identical with man's relation to himself.* They own tha 
 Christ has not only a special function but a unique 
 position. He stands with God facing man much 
 more than with man facing God. He is a secondary 
 God. So that our highest possible development of 
 human communion with God could never reach 
 that of Christ. Yet he is not of one nature with God. 
 He is a creation — an intermediary creation. If he is not 
 of Humanity, neither is he of Deity. He was too humble 
 before God to be of God. His subordination is that of 
 a creature, after all, though created before the worlds for 
 a unique task. And it carried with it inferiority.! It is 
 admitted that the highest claims which we find in the 
 
 "♦^ That Christ did make that claim to the divine function of judging and 
 determining the world for eternity is to me so indubitable that I should 
 make the point decisive of sound and guiding criticism. And, in my humble 
 opinion, a scholar so able and sympathetic in many ways as Bousset is 
 here discredited for the higher ranges of the subject as the victim of 
 criticism rather than its master. And this estimate is confirmed by his 
 treatment of the Messianic idea, and the part it played in the mind of 
 Christ. 
 
 t This is a moral position which it is the whole business of the 
 Athancisian position to deny : and it is a position which, from its urgent 
 ethical mischief to-d,iy, might alone condemn it as the theology most 
 fitting to the chaotic time. Service and obedience are not undivine, and 
 not a badge of inferiority.
 
 bo T/ie Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 mouth and the mien of Jesus are claims that he really made. 
 And he was justified in making them. He was sinless. 
 He was, and is, man's Judge, Redeemer, and King. But 
 these functions were conferred and delegated by God, 
 who will one day resume them from His sublime servant. 
 All that is held is an Arian idea of Christ's person, its 
 origin, and nature. He was not a man, but he shared 
 creatureship with man. He was a created being; 
 fashioned before the foundation of the world, indeed, and 
 equipped by his Maker with especial power and place, 
 which took him out of individual Humanity, made him 
 God's corporate representative of Humanity, perhaps the 
 agent of its creation, and enabled him for the exercise of 
 the one grand divine purpose with Humanity; but still a 
 creation, with less than eternity in his own nature, 
 with no more than such endowment as made him the 
 efficient organ for carrying out what was more eternal 
 than himself, namely, God's purpose of self-revelation. 
 Even were he regarded as a personality created for the 
 special purpose of being filled with the Spirit uniquely 
 and entirely — he would still be a created being and 
 therefore more man than God. What he had from God 
 was a plenary commission, in virtue of which he redeemed, 
 judged, and ruled as King. But as a Satrap King still, 
 with a Suzerain who conceivably could dethrone him ; a 
 tributary King, who one day would render his royalty 
 up. He was God's plenipotentiary. His superhuman 
 chancellor, the most private secretary of his eternal 
 praise, and so far invested with His power and prestige. 
 
 They draw this conception of Christ especially from 
 his own consciousness of himself, so far as we can reach 
 it, especially from his humility and sense of depen- 
 dence. But they exclude almost entirely the one
 
 \ 
 
 III.] The Grealiicss of Christ and Infgrprefations thereof 8i 
 
 decisive factor in the modern strife between a lay 
 liberalism and positive faith — his consummatory and final 
 work of the cross, and all that that meant for the soul's 
 destiny in the apostolic gospel. With that exclusion 
 there is no poor case for such an interpretation of Jesus. 
 It is, in some form, the view of most of those who treat 
 the cross as ojtiose and yet cannot settle to a thin ^"^'^ 
 Unilarianism. It is the crypto-unitarianism of many who X/'TT/O^ 
 feed themselves and others on Christian sympathies and ' ' ''j>v 
 
 Christian ethic without Christian redemption. With that 
 omission there is no little to be said for an Arian Jesus. He 
 seems at home in our lay reading of the Synoptics — which 
 forgets the space they give to his priestly passion. Many 
 of his express statements about himself, during that frag- 
 ment of his existence which was covered by the kenosis of « f ^ 
 his earthly life, and was engaged with the national prolego- '" '' ' 
 mena of his universal work, are compatible with such a 
 view. What he knew of his work and Kingdom was 
 taught him of God (Mat. xi. 27). " It is all taught me 
 of my Father." In John he speaks but what he hears 
 from the Father, and does but what he sees the Father 
 do. His miracles, even in the Synoptics, he often does 
 as the orgin of the Father, and often also as the result 
 of answered prayer, and not out of a parallel and 
 autonomous power. John xi. 41, 42, "Father, I know 
 th.'it thou hearest me now as always," said just before 
 calling Lazarus forth, and said in a voice whose 
 loudness revealed the spiritual tension which for him 
 was prevailing prayer. In Luke xi. 20, he casts out 
 devils with the finger of God, or, as Matthew says, by 
 the Spirit of God. And a phrase I used a moment ago, 
 about the surrender of his kingship at last, will recall, by 
 its echo of i Cor. xv. 24-^8, how much could be said for
 
 82 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 this Arian stage from other parts of the New Testa- 
 ment. It is a matter of fair discussion whether the 
 express and formal theology of the New Testament, as 
 distinct from its gospel, faith and worship, is always 
 beyond the Arian stage. I mean what is called the 
 Biblical stage of theology ; remembering that the New 
 Testament has faith and not dogma for its first con- 
 cern, and that the expressly theological passages are 
 incidental to a pastoral purpose and an evangelical 
 effect. They are incidental to the epistle though funda- 
 mental to the subject. Such truth is distinct from the 
 theology latent and necessary to the New Testament 
 gospel, and waiting there to be revealed by the Spirit to 
 the Church's soul, when it became tense in the strain of 
 a mortal crisis, and when its last spiritual reserves had 
 to be called out in the battle for its existence in a pagan 
 world. It is one thing to see but an Arian Christ while 
 the theology of the gospel was but in the making. That is 
 the morning twilight. It is another thing to stand 
 arrested there and denounce an Athanasian Christ now 
 that the providence of the Spirit has revealed, in 
 the tremendous experience of the historic Church, a 
 gospel which is possible on that profound base alone. 
 That is the evening twilight. And when it claims to be 
 the advanced and primitive view it can only be advanced 
 in the sense of being at eventide and verging to sheer 
 oblivion. 
 
 But even if the reported and express statements of 
 Christ carried us no farther than this stage the matter 
 is not closed. Could Christ teach the disciples what he 
 taught Paul ? For if on earth he was always fully con- 
 scious of all he was, where were his real humiliation and 
 his true humanity ? We ourselves are at no moment
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 83 
 
 conscious of all we are or have been, and certainly not 
 of what we shall be (t Jn. iii. 2). Would even a Christ 
 created before the worlds be conscious on earth of all 
 the power and glory that the greatest Arianism would 
 postulate for him in his antenatal life ? I speak of the 
 greatest Arianism, as distinct from the trivial Arianism 
 to which the public mind is apt to turn. 
 
 § § § 
 
 We may perhaps put it thus. If in the first, or Socinian, 
 
 stage Christ appeared as God's perfect prophet, in this 
 
 second, or Arian, stage he appears as God's plenipotentiary , 
 
 What more do we want ? Have we not explained the 
 
 greatness of Christ ? No, not yet. We want in Christ 
 
 God's real presence. 
 
 In the first stage Christ is the man ; in the second he 
 
 is the superman. We must still ascend to the supernal 
 
 man, the Lord from heaven. 
 
 § § § 
 I spoke of a fatal exclusion and renunciation of the 
 
 work of the cross made by those who hold this Arian 
 view on the basis of one part of Christ's self-consciousness 
 alone. I call it fatal because it displaces the centre of 
 gravity, because the last secret of the Saviour is not in 
 his earthly self-consciousness as we know it but in his 
 salvation. They ignore not only other parts of Christ's 
 self-consciousness as I hope to show later (Lect. xi.) but, 
 still more, the Christianity of the Epistles, the Chris- 
 tianity of Redemption, the crisis and crown of Christ 
 and his salvation in the cross. In so doing they raise 
 what is the question of the hour in this subject. It is 
 a question that rose also upon the apostles. And the 
 Epistles are the first stage of the answer, religiously 
 normative, though not theologically finished. It is this
 
 84 The Person and Place of Jcsiis Christ [lect. 
 
 question ; could God's plenipotentiary, for the last purposes 
 of the soul and the last destiny of the race, be a creature ? 
 Could man's King, Judge, and Saviour be other than 
 Godhead itself? Could God's commission, however 
 superhuman, do, for such as we, the work of his presence ? 
 Could God delegate his divinest work of redemption to 
 even the greatest of his creatures, or commit all judgment 
 to one with less than the Godhead of the Eternal Son ? 
 
 This, at least, is the great question within the Church 
 to-day. It is not the question between the Church and 
 the world, which is whether there was in Christ a real 
 revelation. We have settled that, wherever Agnosticism 
 is surmounted. And what is crucial is the farther inquiry 
 whether that revelation in Christ was final ; whether in 
 Christ God sent or went to the world; whether in Christ 
 He announced himself or gave Himself; whether Jesus, 
 who spoke in God's name, really stood in God's place, 
 where the first Church, by its worship of him, put him. 
 The greatest issue for the moment is within the Christian 
 pale; it is not between Christianity and the world. It 
 is the issue between theological liberalism (which is prac- 
 tically unitarian) and a free but positive theology, which 
 is essentially evangelical. 
 
 § § § 
 3. It is a question that demands at last the Athanasian 
 answer. Christ is too great for any smaller answer. For 
 greatness is in the nature of Athanasianism. The first 
 Athanasianism was a grand escape for the soul. And 
 the passion for amplitude and plerophory to the measure 
 of Christ will always send the human mind to some form 
 of Athanasianism, with such metaphysic, whether in the 
 Bible or not, as makes that answer possible, according 
 to the state of contemporary thought at any specified
 
 iii.j The Greatness of Christ and interpretations thereof 85 
 
 time. The question I have described as so crucial in the 
 Church demands the answer of the cross, when the cross 
 is taken as redemption from guilt, and not mere martyr- 
 dom for principle, or sacrifice for love. It demands the 
 faith of such a cross, and the metaphysic arising out of 
 that faith. The sinner's reconcilement with a holy God 
 could only be effected by God. And I press the efieduation 
 of it. The cross did not mean news that God was willing 
 to receive us on terms which another than God should 
 meet ; nor that God sat at home, like the prodigal's father, 
 waiting to be gracious when we came. But with God 
 to will is to do ; and the God who willed man's salvation 
 must himself effect it — not accept it, and not contrive it, 
 but effect it. Only he who had lost us could find us, only 
 he who was wronged could forgive, only the Holy One 
 satisfy His own holiness. To forgive he must redeem. 
 Fully to forgive the guilt he must redeem from the curse. 
 And only the creator knew the creature so as to redeem. 
 And to know mankind He must live in mankind. To 
 offer for man he must be man. Only God Himself with 
 us, and no creature of His, could meet the soul's last 
 need, and restore a creation undone. Christ, the 
 source of the race's new creation, is as divine and 
 as truly creator as the God of the world's beginning. 
 (So with the Spirit, as the source of the new birth of the 
 individual). For the great work needed was to recreate, 
 which is what mere liberalism and its humanism denies. 
 The great task was not to re-inforce but to re-create, and 
 to set us on Eternal rock. But if the Saviour was but 
 an emissary of God and not very God, we are not on 
 rock, even if we are off the sand. There is then no 
 absolute certainty of salvation for the race. And we 
 must have that certainty for faith. Vox Christian faith 
 
 H
 
 86 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 is much more than the sense of a spiritual God : it is the 
 trust of an absolute God. And the note of an Apostle 
 is not spirituality, but the power of a Gospel which passes 
 us from death to life ; passes us not merely through a stage, 
 but through the mortal crisis. This power and certainty of 
 the race's salvation we can only have from God Himself as 
 Saviour, God could not depute redemption. We could not 
 take eternal pardon from a demigod, or commit the soul to 
 him for ever as we do to Christ. No half-God could 
 redeem the soul which it took the whole God to create. 
 God himself must be the immediate doer in what Christ 
 did to save. I shall have to point out, nearer the close of 
 this series, that the effect of Christ upon history could 
 not be explained by any greatness which a created soul 
 could achieve on earth ; and certainly not by the moral 
 action cognisable by us during his brief public life. It 
 is explicable only by an eternal act in Godhead which 
 was the ground of all on earth — only by God acting in 
 him. On any lower ground God but accepted Christ's 
 work, or even commissioned it ; he did not do it. And 
 does it need a God to accept another's sacrifice ? Are 
 not all egoists masters in the un-divine art of arranging 
 for the sacrifice of others and accepting it ? Mere accept- 
 ance of sacrifice by God means that He was really 
 reconciled by a third person neither God nor man. And 
 what is the effect of that on free grace? Ruinous. 
 There is then no such thing. If a created being, however 
 much of a personal splendour, was the real agent either- 
 of revelation or redemption, then grace was procured from 
 God, and not given — which is a contradiction in terms. 
 For then the effectual thing was not done by God but by 
 another. And God was not reconciling in Christ, but at 
 most through him. It all impairs the freedom and
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 87 
 
 monopoly of the jealous God Himself in our salvation. 
 And remember the first charge upon any theology which 
 has gone beyond the rationalist stage of an egotist concern 
 for its own liberty — the first charge on a true and positive 
 theology is regard for the freedom of God. That is the 
 only source and condition of man's freedom. The prime 
 condition of human freedom is a free God, and such faith 
 as seeks first his freedom, and has all other things added 
 unto it. And especially we must regard the freedom of 
 God's grace and of his salvation. If a created will 
 effected our salvation, God's reality in it is one vast stage 
 removed, and His sole grace is impaired. The only real 
 representative or plenipotentiary of a God whose grace 
 is free and all his own must be God. He must be of God 
 not merely from God. He could be no creature, whether 
 that creature had his power as a gift from God, or 
 acquired it by moral effort under God. The absolute 
 nature of the salvation brought to our faith can only be 
 secured by the absolute nature of him who brought it. 
 If it is an eternal salvation, and the gates of hell cannot 
 prevail against it, he who gives it is an eternal saviour. 
 If we have God for our eternal portion, then he is God in 
 whom we have it, and not only through whom. In him, 
 and not through him ! The Christianity which denies 
 that is less " advanced " than that which confesses it — less 
 advanced at least as Christianity, less forward in the faith 
 that makes theology, however it may stand with the 
 rationalist theology that claims to licence faith from 
 some source above it. A salvation only through Christ 
 leaves us with a religion too subjective for use. And the 
 excessive religious subjectivity of the hour is the nemesis 
 of a mere liberalism whose next stage is the destruction 
 of religion altogether.
 
 88 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 § § § 
 And this consideration may be added here. Will 
 
 many not be driven to the alternative of either praying 
 to Christ or praying /o>' him ? Many of those who lean 
 to a positive and liberal theology, and who retain belief 
 in intercessory prayer at all, both believe in prayer 
 for the dead and practise it. And when they pray for 
 the whole of mankind they cannot ignore its majority in 
 the unseen, including both our benefactors and our beloved, 
 We may pray, we do pray, for the whole creation. If 
 that may include the dead, can it exclude a created and 
 departed Christ ? May we, must we, not, if we have 
 leave to pray for the blessed dead at all, pray for the 
 greatest lover and benefactor in our race ? Should not 
 the collective Church pray for its founder ? If he was 
 but a created Christ, to whom we may not pray, would 
 the gratitude of a Church he created not move it to a 
 great bidding prayer for him ? And on great commemor- 
 ative occasions at least, as the sense grows of our spiritual 
 obligations to such a Christ, should we not be driven to 
 lift our soul as Parsifal ends " Redeemed be the 
 Redeemer." 
 
 Lord God, who savest men, save most 
 
 Of men Christ Jesus who saved me. 
 
 § § § 
 
 The two lines of inquiry converge, I said — the work of 
 Christ and the consciousness of Christ ; and they con- 
 verge here. He was conscious of himself as Redeemer. 
 This was a part of his Messianic sense, no less than was 
 his action as Judge and King. He knew he was there 
 not only with God's judgment, but with God's final 
 salvation. And for Israel that had always meant the
 
 III.] Tke Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 89 
 
 presence of God Himself as man's refuge, righteousness, 
 and redeemer. Each of these three features, God's 
 judgment, His salvation, and His presence, is equally 
 prominent in the Messianic idea of the Old Testament 
 and its great good time. The closing era should be so 
 rich in good because God himself would dwell in it. And 
 when Christ knew Himself as the Messiah of man and of 
 God, when he translated the Messianic idea in terms of 
 his own sonship, he lost no one of these features. If the 
 judgment and the salvation of God were incorporated in 
 him, so also, and no less directly, was God's presence. 
 The great Messianic time, like the history it crowned, 
 was God's coming, it was not His sending. God was no 
 more remote. He did not begin where his messenger, 
 his creature ended. He was not removed by the measure 
 of Christ's very existence, nor distant by the diameter of 
 that vast personality. He was that messenger. That 
 greatness was God's greatness. That love was God's 
 love. That grace was God's immediate grace, and no 
 echo, report, or image of it ; it was God's grace as surely 
 as that judgment, or that forgiveness, was God's. 
 
 Jesus did not indeed put all this into words. He did 
 not lecture about his person. He spoke and acted as 
 only such a God with us could. But if he was not theo- 
 logically express about his Godhead was he not conscious 
 of it? Surely he was at least subconscious. It was 
 fundamental to his manner of life, and work, even if we 
 thought a full sense of it was but occasional and in- 
 cidental. Our greatest truths, perhaps, escape from us 
 rather than are preached. If his deity be not express 
 always in the preaching of his lips, it is essential in the 
 gospel of his person and cross. If it is not unmistakable 
 in everything he said it is inevitable in the thing he did.
 
 go The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Had he no sense of that ? How could one of his insight 
 miss all such latent significance as I have indicated in 
 the claims he made ? He knew himself to be among 
 men for certain universal purposes, to be final king, 
 judge, and redeemer. Could it escape him that these 
 were functions which in Israel's ideal were reserved for 
 God alone? He calls himself king in God's kingdom. He 
 is the bridegroom of the true Israel, whose husband, in all 
 the Old Testament, was God alone. He is to sit on the 
 throne of glory, where no Jew could place any but God. 
 The angels he sends forth as his angels. The blessed of 
 the father are his elect. The omnipotence of God is 
 given him in a passage (Mat. xxviii. i8) which it is much 
 easier, with all the tremendous demand it makes on us, 
 to assign to him than to ascribe to the daring of a Church 
 which put it in his mouth. How could disciples of his 
 have made him say anything like that (whether the words 
 are stenographically correct or not) unless it was in tune 
 with his own claim for himself? He knows himself to be 
 the final judge, and there is no appeal, and no revision of 
 his sentence. He takes, in many ways, God's place to 
 the faithful. And all the while he is not obscuring 
 God, or displacing Him, but revealing, mediating, con- 
 veying Him; yet doing it not as a mere transparency, a 
 mere exhibition of God, but as a mighty will and living 
 personality, with a real agency in things. Either in such 
 a case we have the incarnation of God, or we have the 
 deification, and the self-deification, of a man. If we are to 
 talk of mythology, which of these is more mythological? 
 And the latter was especially alien to Israel, with its 
 awful gulf between God and man. 
 
 § § § 
 The tendency of the hour among the more piquant
 
 III. J Tfte Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 91 
 
 expositors of such matters is to regard the greatness of 
 Christ as the incarnation of Humanity rather than of 
 God. On this two remarks only may be made. First, 
 if we use Saxon, and say, for the incarnation of Human- 
 ity, the enfleshment of flesh, we perceive that there is 
 something wrong. And we go on to see that it is not an 
 incarnation of Humanity that is meant, but only a con- 
 densation, or epitome. And second, if we speak of the 
 incarnation of Humanity in any sense that leaves room 
 for God at all, one of two things follows, which are both 
 wrong, (i) Either Christ incarnates a created Humanity 
 dwelling with God in the recesses of premundane time — 
 in which case we are back upon one of the many shades 
 of Arianism. (2) Or he incarnates an increate Human- 
 ity ; which is therefore an eternal integer or factor in 
 Godhead. This gives us not so much an incarnation of 
 God as a deification and idolatry of man, ending practi- 
 cally in his debasement. The finitude, and therefore the 
 reality, of man is gone. 
 
 The Eternal Son of God is then but the Humanity 
 eternal in God. This is a view which is much in keeping 
 with the modern man's keen self-consciousness and his 
 dull ethic which takes no measure of either his race's sin 
 or a holy God. It gives to Humanity what belongs to 
 the only begotten Son. It gives to the Humanity that 
 the Son came to redeem the position which belongs to 
 the Son alone, and alone made redemption possible. 
 Humanism is then simply the old cthnicism, gentilism, 
 or heathenism made universal. It is an enlargement of 
 what is both to Old Testament and New Testament the 
 supreme heresy, that man is enough for himself and has a 
 right in God. Man is referred to his divine self for 
 his destiny. It is paganism with a Christian facing.
 
 92 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Humanity is safe in its own innate resources, its 
 immanent inalienable deity. If redeemed at all it is 
 self-redeemed, to its own endless praise and glory ; 
 which is surely another religion from Christ's. Positiv- 
 ism has been described as Catholicism with the bottom 
 knocked out ; but this is a Positivism with a Trinity 
 forced in. The old beliefs, cults, and phrases are first 
 deflated, and then twisted into modern arabesques. As 
 history goes on the burden of the old ceremonialism is 
 replaced by the officialism of the social state. A church 
 of faith becomes a fraternity of comfort. Theology 
 becomes anthropology. And religion hardens into a 
 service without a trust or a loyalty. Worship vanishes 
 for work, and work descends into an Egyptian corvee. 
 
 § § § 
 Throughout all, the impressive thing about Christ's 
 vast self-consciousness is his sense of finality. It is upon 
 this that so much turns — not on his being a revelation of 
 God but the revelation, the final revelation. It was with 
 Christ's world that God had henceforth to do. There is 
 no thought in Christ (or in the New Testament at all) of 
 another coming from God to complete his work. The 
 Spirit only applied it — especially to individuals. In him 
 God said his last word, and took his inmost and final 
 attitude to men. The Father has only now to do with a 
 kingdom created by the Son. But if the Son were a 
 creature that means that God had to do with a kingdom 
 secured by an inferior, and only presented to Him. And 
 how could God's kingdom be the work of another than 
 God, or only indirectly of God ? Christ's sense of 
 finality we must recognise; which is his faith, however 
 implicit, in his own Godhead. We must acknowledge 
 his sense of his own finality in the last moral issue of th^
 
 iii.J The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 93 
 
 world, the supreme human issue, the issue between God 
 and man, hfe and death. He knew he was decisive in 
 that issue. And who could be final or decisive there 
 but God ? The final revelation could only be God re- 
 vealing Himself, in the sense of God bestowing Himself, 
 and Himself coming to men to restore communion. 
 What remains to be done for finality after that ? A 
 message could never be a final revelation, nor could a 
 messenger. We should then infer God, surmise God, 
 take Him on trust from another, or otherwise have him 
 at one remove, but we should not possess him. He might 
 be God for us, but not God with us, or in us. And 
 unless he were God finally with and in us we should 
 doubt often if he was for us. But we possess God in a 
 Christ who does, and knows he does, things reserved 
 always for God to do. His love was not an echo of God's 
 love; or a declaration of it by one who might have ex- 
 aggerated by temperament. No depth of conviction on 
 the part of a created and prophetic Christ however holy 
 could give us final certainty as to the Grace of God. 
 " God only knows the love of God." God alone can for- 
 give, who is the holiness offended ; God alone judge 
 who is the living law. Was the Great Saviour so dull as 
 not to realise that ? As he felt his own mission alone 
 among all men to save, how did he feel as he read in his 
 Bible words like these: — "I am God, and besides me 
 there is no Saviour" ? How would that strike him as he 
 knew himself to be not the mere herald of salvation but 
 the Saviour, when he not only forgave particular cases 
 but knew that he was there to ransom the world by an 
 offering for its sin ? Cculd he have said " indirectly it is 
 God, but directly it is I " ? Is there any trace of such 
 theologising with him ? Must he not have known himsell
 
 94 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ fLEcx. 
 
 for the incarnation of the Eternal saving Will of God, 
 the Eternal agent of the Eternal purpose? 
 
 § § § 
 If it be said that he must have showed his conscious- 
 ness of his divine nature (and not merely of his divine 
 vocation), by a position of more independence and 
 initiative over against God, the answer is this : His 
 sense of unity with God was too great and intimate for 
 that. It was the unity of the Son — of a perfect obedi- 
 ence ; which is just as divine as perfect authority is. It 
 was not the unity of a second God, a joint God, a God 
 in perpetual alliance with God. I keep asking, is the 
 principle of obedience, which is man's very salvation, not 
 divine, not in Godhead at all ? 
 
 § § § 
 At least, we have seen and shall see, there is nothing in 
 the consciousness of Christ, however reserved about it 
 he had reason to be, which is incompatible with 
 the postulate of his deity as that is demanded by the 
 nature of his work in our saved experience. And it is 
 only to that personal and final faith that it really comes 
 home. The deity of Christ cannot be proved to either 
 the lower or the higher rationalism, either to the deistic 
 or the idealist, the Wolffian or the Hegelian. It cannot 
 be proved either to the man in the street or the sage in 
 the chair — but only to the evangelical experience. It is 
 our pardon that is the foundation of our theology — our 
 eternal pardon for an " eternal sin " (Mark iii. 29). Did 
 Jesus connect this saving effect of his with his person or 
 with his message ? With the work he did, or with the 
 idea he brought? We are here at a most crucial 
 question — indeed the question. He can only be under- 
 stood by those who hold the right relation to him. 1
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 95 
 
 suppose we are all agreed about that. What is that right 
 relation ? Is it our critical relation to an idealist, or our 
 subject relation to a Saviour ? Are we but an aided 
 Church, or are we a purchased people ? Do we chiefly 
 learn from his words, and admire at his character, or do 
 we worship at his feet — which ? It is really the choice 
 between a religion finally cosmic and rational and one 
 finally personal, ethical, and evangelical. The great 
 conflict to-day must be settled in the personal religion of 
 each inquirer. It really is not a question of our con- 
 clusions but of our faith. It calls for decision rather 
 than arbitration, for choice rather than compromise ; 
 because it is the finest form of the deep dilemma between 
 Christianity and the world. And it is this. Is saving 
 faith a Rationalism, i.e. a faith in universal ideas, in- 
 tuitions, or processes, which have no exclusive relation 
 to a fixed point in history ? Or is it gathered to such a 
 fixed point, in the historic Christ, where God, in 
 presence, actually offers himself to man in judgment and 
 for man in Grace ? Do we start from the World or the 
 Word ? Are we to demand that Christ shall submit to 
 the standard of certain principles or ideals which we 
 bring to him from our human nature at its heart's 
 highest and its thought's best ? Or as our new creator 
 is he his own standard, and not only so but both judge, 
 king, and redeemer of human nature, and the fountain of 
 a new life, autonomous in him, and for all the rest derived ? 
 Is he our spiritual hero, or our Eternal Lord and God ? 
 Is he the prophet and champion of man's magnificent 
 resource, or is he the redeemer of man's spiritual poverty 
 and moral wreck ? Did he come to transfigure before 
 men the great religious and ethical ideas, or to infuse 
 into men new power, in the thorough, final, and godlike
 
 96 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 sense of endowing them with a new and ransomed life ? 
 Did he refurbish Humanity, or redeem it? Did he 
 release its best powers, or bestow them ? That is the 
 last issue, however we may blunt its edge, or soften its 
 exigency in particular cases. It is between a rational 
 Christianity and a redemptive. And it is not to be 
 obscured by extenuations which plead that the function 
 of ideas is redemptive, or that redemption is the pro- 
 foundest rationality in the world, the "passion which is 
 highest reason in a soul divine," That was a line that 
 nearly lost Christianity to the pagan public in the old 
 apologists, whose great object was to make their religion 
 stand well with the Universities and the State — a perilous 
 attempt for Christianity. The crisis of society and of the 
 Church is at present such that a clear issue is the first 
 necessity, a clear issue for a final choice. When we are 
 dealing with the last things it is from the lack of choice 
 that we suffer most, not from the lack of compromise. 
 It is lack of decision, it is not lack of an ideal ethic, that 
 is our moral disease at this hour. We avoid decision in 
 a languid liberalism, or in a gentle, genial spirituality. But 
 though we may compromise on measures we may not on 
 faith. We need more of the spirit of compromise in 
 affairs, but we have too much of it in the soul's faith. 
 The real object of Christian research is not the purely 
 historic Christ, the historic residuum, nor is it 
 Humanity's spiritual ideal; but within the historic 
 Christ it is the living God, the Saviour, who chose 
 us to choose Him, and whom we find here, in his history, 
 or not at all. It is not the ideal man we seek, 
 who verifies and glorifies our noblest Humanity, con- 
 vincing us of its inalienable place in God in spite of all 
 our sin; but it is the redeeming God who sets Humanity
 
 III.] The Greatness of Christ and Interpretations thereof 97 
 
 in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. It is not a theological 
 difference which troubles us but a religious. It is lack of 
 personal and positive religion. And it is the attempt to 
 cover with one vague Christian name two different 
 religions, and two distinct and incompatible gods. And 
 when it comes to a choice of religions, what we need is 
 more religion, more searching religion, and not advanced 
 knowledge. And more religion among the religious is 
 the chief need of the hour.
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST'S SELF- 
 CONSCIOUSNESS— WAS HE A PART OF HIS 
 
 OWN GOSPEL?
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST's SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS — 
 WAS HE A PART OF HIS OWN GOSPEL ? 
 
 This is a question that has been stirred into extraordi- 
 nary vitality by Dr. Harnack. And that I may be just 
 to Harnaci<, and dissever him from the extreme critics 
 who have exploited his phrase, let me quote his words. 
 He says : " What belongs to the Gospel as Jesus preached 
 it, is not the Son but the Father alone." In quoting 
 these words it is common to overlook the important 
 qualification, " As Jesus preached it." Now what Jesus 
 preached was but part of the whole Gospel. The whole 
 claim of Jesus for himself is not to be determined by the 
 explicit words he uses about himself, but also, and even 
 more, by the claims set up on us by the whole gospel of 
 his person and work when these had been perfected. The 
 claim of Jesus in his cross and resurrection is even greater 
 than the claim explicit in his mouth. His redemption 
 has been a greater power than his doctrine. In respect 
 of Harnack's meaning, the author puts himself right 
 in the sentence following that I have quoted, where 
 so many stop and do him wrong : He goes on 
 "Jesus belongs to his gospel not as a part of it, but as 
 its embodiment. He is its personal realization and its 
 
 I lOI
 
 102 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 power. And such he will always be felt to be." More- 
 over, adds Harnack in a subsequent publication {Reden und 
 Aufsdtze II. 364), "There is no generic category under 
 which Christ can be placed, whether it be Reformer, 
 Prophet or Founder." Harnack's meaning, therefore, 
 would seem to be that Christ was no part of his own gospel 
 but the whole. He declared a Father who was only to be 
 known in the Son. He did not belong to God's great 
 gift ; he was that Gift. God gave Himself in Christ. 
 Such a belief would seem to be more just to Harnack 
 than the use too often made of his isolated phrase. 
 
 The answer to the question does not lie on the sur- 
 face if we confine ourselves to the Synoptics. But there 
 is no doubt about it if we go by the whole apostolic 
 teaching. From Paul to John it is declared that Jesus 
 was the gospel, and offered himself as such, and that 
 none come to the Father but by him and in him. For 
 the New Testament, taken as a whole, the historical 
 Christ is the Messiah that was coming through the Old 
 Testament ; who appeared in Jesus as the word made 
 flesh, full ot grace, and truth, and power, and signs, and 
 wonders ; who was crucified and rose, making atonement 
 for the sins of the whole world ; who ascended up to 
 heaven, where he now and forever represents us with the 
 Father, sends his Spirit, and rules his Church. He 
 was not a mere Rabbi of the law, but the Messiah of 
 the final promise, and, since his death, the Saviour 
 of the whole world. He was not the Nazarene, 
 the most illustrious figure of the New Testament, 
 and, indeed, of religious history ; but he was the 
 Christ who underlies and carries the whole history of 
 salvation, and therefore the history of the world. He 
 was a Christ with a premundane history of his own. For
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 103 
 
 the New Testament, as a whole, he was the Christ of the 
 gospel— of something which is indeed within .the Bible — 
 but of something which is its soul and not its residuum. 
 He was the Christ of a Gospel within the Bible, and not 
 simply the Jesus of a Bible within the Bible, not simply 
 the Jesus of a Bible reduced by criticism alone to a 
 historical remnant. He was not the Jesus left us by the 
 extreme critics, one whose great action must be wholly 
 compressed between his baptism and his death; but 
 he was the Eternal Son of God, preached by a cloud 
 of witnesses, many nameless, of whom Paul was the 
 chief. He was the Son " with a prologue of eternal 
 history and an epilogue of the same," throned not on 
 the world's history simply, but at God's right hand where 
 all history is judged ; the Son whose earthly life is only 
 intelligible on that background. 
 
 That is the New Testament Christ. And if we re- 
 pudiate that we should be clear what we do. We are 
 making a choice between the New Testament and the 
 modern critical school. It is not as if the whole New Testa- 
 ment when critically handled were on their side. They do 
 not now claim that. What they claim is that the history 
 behind the New Testament is. They claim that apostolic 
 Christianity, being what I have said, misunderstood Jesus. 
 They do not attempt to read modern interpretations into 
 Pauline passages, as our Broad Churchism was apt to do. 
 We should be clear and frank that in adopting the most 
 modern view we repudiate the New Testament as Christ's 
 expositor, in favour oi an exposition totally different, 
 offered by modern criticism working entirely on the 
 Synoptics, or on what is left of them by a certain 
 philosophy of religion. We reduce the New Testament 
 to a piece of tradition ; and in so doing we surrender the
 
 104 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 protestant position to the catholic, as so much modern 
 culture does in effect. 
 
 The question of the hour then, is this — if we 
 keep critically to the Synoptics can the Christ of the 
 New Testament be retained ? The inquiry has changed 
 since the Tubingen days. The historical reality of Jesus 
 is not much challenged. What is challenged is the 
 dogmatic Christ in his finality and absoluteness, which 
 is the apostolic interpretation of his history. And of 
 late the question is even more narrowed. Criticism is 
 being driven to grant that even the Synoptics are 
 written in the interest of this final and apostolic Christ. 
 Can we, may we, go behind that Christ ? Can we shed the 
 apostolic theologisms which are said to distort even the 
 Synoptics, and construct a simple human Jesus to be the 
 delight of the lay type of mind everywhere? You perceive 
 that such teaching does not repudiate evangelical Protes- 
 tantism merely, but the New Testament. And thus the 
 question of the right of such teaching in the Church is 
 more serious than ever. Undogmatic Christianity repu- 
 diates the New Testament interpretation of Christ. It is 
 one thing to claim the right to a free handling of the 
 New Testament, it is another to repudiate the New 
 Testament version of Christ for the critical. One is 
 lawful in a Church, and one is illicit. 
 
 Of course it must at once be recognised that if 
 Christ did preach himself he did not do it in the 
 way of a blunt or naive egotism. That is not how 
 he convinced the disciples that he was the Messiah, 
 yet he made the belief irresistible in them. It is not the 
 way he convinced the apostles of the divinity in him ; yet 
 he so impressed it that they could do no other than 
 worship him. We shall have gained much from questions
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self- Consciousness 105 
 
 like Harnack's if they cure us of the habit of looking for 
 a revelation in statements, for brusque dogmatisms of 
 the kind that satisfies the plain man, with the muzzle of 
 his ' Yes or No ' at our head. Christ always refused 
 satisfaction to the demand that he would tell his critics 
 plainly if he were the Messiah or not. He is not the 
 Christ of the plain-dealer. He always did refuse to 
 be coerced, or have his methods prescribed. There he 
 was masterful and impracticable. He was the sole 
 judge of the situation, as he is of the world. It was for 
 him, as the revealer, both to read the moment and to take 
 the only way in it consistent with the revelation. And 
 that some people should perish upon his refusals con- 
 cerned him less than that he should compromise his 
 Father's way and will for his work — which was not, after 
 all, to save men the trouble of judging and choosing, nor to 
 gather the largest possible number of believers in a 
 given time. 
 
 § § § 
 Let us look at his teaching in the Synoptics then and 
 see where it carries us. Let us see if it do not carry us far 
 beyond a teacher of truth, or even a preacher of the Father ; 
 if we have not in his synoptical proclamation of the 
 Kingdom sufficient points of attachment for the Johannine 
 preaching of himself. 
 
 Surely he preached himself as the Messiah of the 
 Kingdom. It was a Messiahship of burden much more 
 than of elation — even if we do not interpret the burden 
 of it in the sense of Bousset, who reads there not the 
 burden of the Cross but the burden of a misconception in 
 which he was hopelessly entangled. Is it not equally 
 true that he thought of himself as in a category distinct 
 from other men, whether we regard his relation to God
 
 lo6 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 or to the world ? Where he came salvation came — as to 
 Zaccheus by his very presence. He stood between men 
 and God, not with men before God. A word spoken 
 against him was comparable, however different, to a sin 
 against God's Holy Spirit. For both were against God. 
 They were not like sins against men. That is to say, he 
 has to make his historic personality parallel with the Holy 
 Spirit before he can set up the contrast, which is only 
 effectual between beings ejusdem generis. He was greater 
 than the temple, he said — as no prophet could be. In 
 the parable of the vineyard he is the only son, the 
 beloved, distinct from all the messengers besides. He 
 never prays with his disciples, much as he prays for 
 them ; and the Lord's prayer was given by him but not 
 used by him. There is a line between him and them, 
 delicate but firm, " often as fine as a hair but alwavs as 
 hard as a diamond." What he asks is devotion to his 
 person and not simply to his doings, to his soul and not 
 to his words. To trust him is more even than to do his 
 commands. To love God and man in obedience to a 
 commandment is better than to be the slave of ritual, but 
 it is still to be outside the Kingdom of his Gospel. (Mark 
 xii. 34). He has nothing to say about martyrdom for a 
 cause, even for the Gospel ; but he has a supreme blessing 
 for those who lose life for his sake and the Gospel's. 
 There is not a relation of life, however deep or tender, 
 that must not be sacrificed to his claim upon due occa- 
 sion. Here he assumes a right comparable only to that 
 of death, which claims and snatches us from every rela- 
 tion of duty, passion, or interest. He assumes the right 
 belonging to a God who masters us in death if He never 
 did before. Perhaps no age has ever been so qualified to 
 measure the tremendous nature of this claim as our own ;
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 107 
 
 when the natural and family affections are prized and 
 praised as they never were before ; when the whole of 
 literature is dominated by them, through minor poets and 
 novelists; and when the whole of Christianity is often 
 expressed, and taken to be exhaustively expressed, in 
 their terms as a pitiful fatherhood and a loving sonship. 
 Again, what does he say has the blessing at the last ? 
 It is not kindness to children (or to childlike believers), 
 nor to the poor, but their treatment in his name. 
 Philanthropy, indeed, means much in the great judg- 
 ment ; but not for itself, not as humanity, but because 
 it was done to him really, however unwittingly. His 
 reward was to those who made themselves hated, 
 not for their religion but for him. Men's final relation 
 to God would depend not on moral conduct but on 
 whether Jesus owned or disowned them as true confessors 
 of him. But this is surely justification by faith. Or 
 can Jesus have forgotten himself for a moment in the 
 interest of theology ? Or has some Pauline editor put 
 the words into Christ's mouth ? I have never heard that 
 this has been suggested. But I do note that even 
 Johannes Weiss, in his commentary, is carried by such 
 a passage beyond the human personality to its divine 
 content. Such an identification by Jesus of his own 
 work with God's one business with history, of his own 
 world-role with God's, leads Weiss to say that " Jesus is 
 here thinking no longer of his human personality but of 
 the divine content whose vessel he is'' (on Mark viii. 38). 
 We recall the other well known passages where Jesus 
 considers himself the Judge of the world. While his 
 promise of his presence in the midst of any group met in 
 His name was something that a Jew associated only with 
 God. His exercise of forgiveness, again, all the by-
 
 io8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 standers understood, and resented, as infringing the 
 prerogative of God. If it be said that forgiveness for 
 Christ's sake is not in the Gospels, but only a direct for- 
 giveness from God, it must be answered that that is not 
 so. It is true that forgiveness for the sake of Christ 
 crucified is not expressed in the Gospels ; but, apart 
 from all disputes about the meaning of ' Thy sins are 
 forgiven thee,' it is not disputable that it is always for- 
 giveness conditioned by faith in Jesus, and repentance 
 before his great and condescending personality, whose 
 mighty humility the cross did but gather up and con- 
 summate. It was a forgiveness he knew to be guaranteed 
 by something peculiar to himself. The kingdom, more- 
 over, is promised only to those that attach themselves 
 to his person. If it is not expressly forgiveness for 
 the cross's sake, it is forgiveness for Christ's sake. 
 But in the light of after events and experiences we 
 see what that meant. We see the whole Christ. It 
 meant for the sake of one who had the cross latent in his 
 very nature, and that not only as his fate but as his con 
 summation (for the cross did not simply befall Christ). 
 It was for the sake of one whose person never came to 
 its full self, or took full effect, but in the cross— even as 
 he came to earth altogether by a supramundane sacrifice, 
 and in the exercise of a cross assumed before the founda- 
 tion of the world.* Further, He repeals at will parts of the 
 divinest thing they knew— the Mosaic Law (Mat. xix. 3). 
 He declares that the supreme organ of God's will on 
 earth, Israel, — God's Son Israel, will be wrecked upon 
 its attitude to him, and replaced by foreigners. In 
 regard to the Pharisees, again, he uses not so much the 
 
 *See the closing lectures.
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 109 
 
 fierce bitterness of the mere Carlylese critic as the awful 
 severity of the supreme Judge. In the whole region of 
 revelation, indeed, he carries himself in a sovereign and 
 final way. And if it be said that even he always treated 
 his sovereignty as conferred, what is that so long as it was 
 eternally conferred ? What is it but the principle of an 
 Eternal Son in eternal generation from the Father. 
 Neither he nor his have claimed that he was an inde- 
 pendent and rival potentate in heaven, but that he was 
 and is a personal and eternal pole in Godhead. Is it a 
 misuse of the Great Invitation, 'Come unto me, etc' 
 (Mat. xi. 28) to treat it, in the way Christendom has 
 done, as opening for every age alike an eternal refuge 
 in him, and not merely as an appeal to the harassed 
 contemporaries of his earthly life ? Or did he mean, 
 not ' I am the secret,' but only ' the secret is with me' ? 
 Could any man keep himself out of his Gospel of a 
 Father if he had that consciousness of moral and spiritual 
 perfection, of absolute holiness, of room for the race, which 
 never deserted Jesus in his darkest hour? He never did, 
 or felt he did, anything but the will of the Father, which 
 will indeed he was. And he looked forward to his life 
 and all its ministry being consummated in a death which 
 was to open a new relation between God and man, and 
 to set up the new and universal covenant, whose day had 
 long ago been foreseen by Jeremiah, his nearest counter- 
 part in the Old Testament, and the culmination of its 
 content. I venture to think that these are all features 
 which, though they have not all been unchallenged, yet 
 are challenged by a criticism which is not purely historic, 
 but which has made up its mind before on other grounds, 
 on grounds of philosophic, dogmatic, or anti-dogmatic 
 dogmatism.
 
 110 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 § § § 
 But can you possibly explain such a Christ except by 
 
 some Christology ? Can a mere psychology with its 
 subjective type of Christianity explain such a Christ ? Is 
 the absence of a Christology in the Synoptics not the 
 assumption of much ' advanced ' criticism, instead of its 
 result? Can it be that advanced criticism means criti- 
 cism in advance of the facts ? Is it pure historicism that 
 is at work here? Is it strict evidential science? Is it 
 not the philosopher in the historian that does the criticism 
 when we are told that Christ was not essential to his 
 own Gospel ? Not that I object on principle to a parti 
 pris. Pure historical criticism is impossible in the case 
 of Jesus. I would only urge that the prejudice should be 
 faith and not dogma, personal faith and not negative 
 dogma. I would urge that the prejudice should be 
 positive religion and not negative theology. Can such 
 a record be adequately, sympathetically handled with- 
 out faith in the person ? Must you not trust him 
 ere he shall seem worthy of your trust? Can you 
 sift and win the essential thing out of these docu- 
 ments by scientific research alone ? Criticism of such a 
 story is not possible without a side taken, consciously or 
 unconsciously, either in faith, unfaith, or philosophy ? Is 
 not every estimate of Jesus a confession of faith, rich or 
 poor? Does he not reveal every man, judge him, and 
 place him? In the case of a figure like Jesus, with 
 such an appeal to the soul, does an absolutely scientific 
 critic exist, one perfectly disinterested, who has 
 completely succeeded in excluding every ray of light 
 likely to discolour a portrait wholly and solely his- 
 torical ? If the belief of Christendom has been 
 deflected by the apostolic version of Christ, is there
 
 IV,] The Testimony of Chrisfs Self -Consciousness iii 
 
 nothing which deflects, to right or left, the version 
 of the modern critic ? The mischievous work of the 
 apostles on the genuine human Christ has been compared 
 by some critics to that of those speculative monks who 
 thought nothing of covering a priceless Greek classic 
 with a palimpsest of medieval dreams. Is it quite absurd, 
 when we see the work of some of the critics, to recall the 
 treatment of Shakespeare by Colley Gibber, or of 
 " Paradise Lost " by Bentley ? 
 
 § § § 
 
 I have asked if Jesus was in his own doctrine of God, 
 in his supreme revelation of God as Father ? Now it is 
 not well to stake any great doctrine upon a single text, 
 or, indeed, on several. But, nevertheless, there are texts 
 and texts. And a well-assured saying of Christ himself 
 about himself is more than a proof text. As the expres- 
 sion of his own experience it is one of those documents, 
 like an imperial rescript, which are no mere documents, 
 but are themselves part of the history. They are instru- 
 ments and not mere evidences. And there is one text 
 which every critical effort has failed to shake, except for 
 those who come to it with their minds made up so to 
 think of Christ that it could not be true on any 
 evidence. Harnack accepts it in the main. I allude to the 
 familiar passage already named, Mat. xi. 27 : " No man 
 knoweth the son but the father, neither knoweth any 
 man the Father but the son, and he to whom the Son 
 willeth to reveal him." Upon this passage alone I should 
 be ready to base my own conviction that Christ believed 
 his sonship to be unique in kind. And I am driven farther 
 by it — to his prc-existence. I do believe that that idea 
 was in Christ's consciousness here ; though it may be 
 hard, on the one hand, to adjust it to other phases of
 
 112 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 that consciousness, and though we cannot, on the other 
 hand, suppose he had in his thought later trinitarian 
 categories. 
 
 I make no direct use in this connexion of the prior 
 phrase, about all things having been delivered to him of 
 the Father ; because I agree with Wellhausen and others 
 who interpret it not of all power but of all the knowledge, 
 the revelation, needful for his task. "All I need to 
 know for my task has been taught me by the Father." 
 But I would make this use of the words — to show that 
 when he said the unique knowledge of the Father was the 
 great gift that was directly his, his for his Father's 
 work, he believed that it was his alone ; that no one was 
 for him with the Father what he was for all ; and that, 
 therefore, his own word must be the last word on his 
 relation to the Father. Whatever he thought of his 
 relation to the Father and the Father's work with men 
 was, in his judgment, given him of God, and there was 
 no more to be said. 
 
 What, then, did he think of that relation ? What was 
 taught him by the Father about his Sonship ? Surely 
 the Father and the Son here are both absolute terms. 
 Certainly it is so with the Father. The phrases are 
 " the Father " and " the Son." It is not my father. The 
 Father in his holy Eternity is meant. And with such a 
 Father the Son is correlative. Whatever is meant by the 
 Father has its counterpart in the Son. If the one is an 
 eternal Father the other is a co-eternal Son. There is 
 all the fulness in the expression, " the Son," that there 
 is in "the Father." Moreover, it is said here that our 
 human knowledge of the Father, as distinct from sur- 
 mises, analogies, or deductions about a Father — 
 any knowledge which is comparable in certainty to
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Chrisfs Self -Consciousness 113 
 
 Christ's own — is derived from Christ, and is entirely 
 dependent on his will and nature. If we are sons we 
 are sons only in him. There is nothing absolute about 
 our sonship. Is it reading in Paulinism here, except in 
 phrase, when I say we are sons only if we are adopted 
 into sonship ; which Christ does in the Father's name, 
 the passage says, and in no arbitrary way, but on the 
 principles which control his own filial relation to God, 
 and make him the one incarnation of God's holy saving 
 will. The Son is determined in his choice of his illumi- 
 nates by the same principle as guided the Father (v. 25) 
 in his own case. The captain of the elect is the grand 
 Elector. There was an election of men by Christ as 
 of Christ by God ; and Christ's election of men was 
 God's; and some were taught and some left, at Christ's 
 royal choice. He chose the seekers and left the 
 self-contented, filled the hungry with his good things 
 and sent the self-satisfied empty away. He had nothing 
 to teach those who knew all about it, any more than he 
 had healing for those who felt whole. He passed by the 
 philosophers and the healthy-minded, and spoke to the 
 sick waiters for Israel's salvation. And he is himself a 
 like mystery to men with the Father. His person is 
 beyond all psychology, and its key is in God's hands 
 alone. The Son is lighted up, is revealed only by the 
 Father, as the Father by the Son (Mat. xvi. 17). Flesh 
 and blood does not reveal the truth about him, but only 
 the Father in heaven. The son is so unique in his kind 
 that only God's revelation can read him or teach him. 
 At his inmost he is as much of a mystery as the Father 
 is. Yet he gives himself to be known. And this know- 
 ledge of him is a new religion. To know the God in Christ 
 is another religion from that which knows God only
 
 114 ^^'^ Persofi and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 through Christ. It is the new and only way to know 
 God as religion must know him. With the person of 
 Jesus comes a new religion, of which he is the object, 
 and not simply the subject as its saint or sage. 
 
 The son, then, knows the Father with the same know- 
 ledge as the Father has of himself. And it was a 
 knowledge which was not transferable. The power that 
 Christ gave was the power to know the Father in him ; 
 it was not the power to know the Father as he did. 
 It was the power to know the Godhead of the Father 
 by the incarnate Godhead of the Son. 
 
 § § § 
 Do you complain that to speak of the son knowing the 
 
 father with the Father's own knowledge of himself is to 
 
 introduce theological intricacy into a matter of filial 
 
 faith ? Let me venture to answer (after reminding you 
 
 that the words are Christ's), first, that if filial faith 
 
 comes to possess our whole being the theological 
 
 intelligence on such matters will no longer slumber. A 
 
 filial faith is a theological faith. Second, that it is 
 
 Christian teachers that we have in view ; who, for the 
 
 sake of their own certainty and the powerful simplicity 
 
 that goes with certainty, might well be less afraid of faith's 
 
 mental Hinterland than they are. And, third, that they 
 
 should be ready with some answer to those of their flock 
 
 who ask for an interpretation of passages like i Cor. ii., or 
 
 who raise the question of two Gods, Father and Son. 
 
 The chapter I have just named is classic for the 
 
 psychology of inspiration and its value. I have more to 
 
 say about its authority in the next lecture. But I point out 
 
 here that Paul makes a tremendous claim for the Church's 
 
 knowledge of God as concentrated in the knowledge of 
 
 the apostles. He says it does not rest on human
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self-Cunsciotisness 115 
 
 thought — neither upon logical inference, the divination 
 of genius, nor the impressive speculation of philosophy. 
 All these are more or less "thrown out" at God, 
 What we have, he says, is the very truth given of God. 
 Nay, we share in the self certainty of God, It was an 
 immense thing to say — a thing as vast as when it is 
 preached that God by His Grace and His Spirit includes 
 us in His love for His eternal and holy Son. And if it 
 was not true it was a huge and fantastic delusion which 
 must discredit all apostolic witness. How could Paul 
 possibly rise to such a statement ? He did not rise ; he 
 was lifted. He was entered and seized by the Spirit. 
 On these great central matters of faith not he spoke but 
 Christ spoke in him — as, at his height, he knew it was 
 not he that lived his life of faith but Christ that lived in 
 him.* " We have the mind of Christ," the theology of 
 Christ, Christ's theology. We think and know, on these 
 things, as Christ did and does. And Christ ? Christ is a 
 part of the consciousness of God. Follow the passage up. 
 Paul uses the psychological analogy of our self-conscious- 
 ness. Man, he says, made in God's image, has the 
 marvellous power of being at once the thinker and the 
 object of thought, of facing himself, of observing him- 
 self, of understanding his own understanding, of re- 
 porting on himself. And this because he is a living 
 Spirit. Who knoweth a man but the Spirit, the con- 
 sciousness of a man which is in him.f His conscious- 
 ness is a self-consciousness, which is also the only 
 
 •This no more implie'l infallibility in every statement than it did 
 impeccability in every act. I3iit it did imply central truth as it did 
 central and subduin« righteousness 
 
 t Spirit is here used as what makes man man, quite differently from its 
 usual sense with Paul as the specific gift of new life which makes a 
 Christian a Christian.
 
 ii6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 means of our knowing him. So also God knows him- 
 self — by his Spirit. Now the Lord Christ is that 
 Spirit. Christ is part of the consciousness of Godhead. 
 And as no man can read our interior till we utter our- 
 selves, till our own spirit report, so we cannot know 
 God except by his own Spirit— His Word (as John calls 
 it), His Christ (as Paul calls it). God knows Himself by 
 the Spirit. We know God by that Spirit issuing as a 
 Word. We know Him by the Spirit by which he knows 
 himself — by that Spirit living in Christ as its Word, 
 knowing God by God's self-knowledge, and entering us, 
 by Christ, with the same supernatural knowledge. The 
 rest may reason, and welcome ; but we of the Spirit 
 know. Christ witnesses in us of his unity of being with 
 the Father, when we pursue the faith that changes us 
 from death to life. 
 
 So the great passage of Paul must be expounded. So 
 he and his believed. We must then make a choice 
 between the belief that he was profoundly, superhumanly 
 right, or that he was learnedly and speculatively mad, as 
 Festus decided before us. The theology of the extreme 
 critics goes with Festus. So little is it "new." 
 
 I put it, then, that Christ uttered these words of 
 Matthew, and that what they mean is what I have said. 
 
 This is, perhaps, the nearest approach made by Jesus 
 in the synoptics to calling himself directly the Son of 
 God in the special sense. It is the 4th Gospel in mice. 
 The idea of an Eternal Father is unthinkable without an 
 • Eternal Son of equal personal reality and finality. 
 And, little as Jesus troubled himself with what was 
 thinkable or unthinkable, how can we deny that that 
 idea underlies his words and gives their full meaning. An 
 Eternal Father must have an Eternal Son. The Father
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 117 
 
 from before the foundation of the world has his vis-a-vis 
 in a co-eternal Son. And Jesus believed himself to be 
 that Son ; else surely he would have confessed some 
 religious relation to him. If he was not that Son, a 
 relation to such a Son would have been part of his 
 religion. But no Son, apart from himself, had any 
 place in his religious world. So that the passage in 
 Matthew is almost as clear as if Christ had said in 
 words, what he did say in effect often, but never so 
 nearly as here, " I am that Son." He was thus central 
 to his own Gospel. But his was never the egoist's way of 
 saying so. He never said, for instance, in so many words 
 that he was the Messiah ; but he spoke and acted as only 
 Messiah could. And so he taught the one Father as 
 only the one Son could. He taught a Son as unique as 
 the Father. To acknowledge that Christ taught the 
 Eternal Father is, in the presence of such a passage 
 as this, to acknowledge also that he knew himself, in 
 that hour at least, to be the Eternal Son that a real 
 Fatherhood in Eternity demands. In recognising the 
 substantial force of this passage Harnack is far separated 
 from the extreme critics, whom he describes as the 
 victims of their own subjectivity. 
 
 Yet the object of life is not to strive for a belief in the 
 co-eternity of the Son, but to find in Christ, as the 
 living Saviour, that which makes nothing less than such 
 a belief a need, a refuge, and a joy of the soul. 
 
 § § § 
 Observe at another angle the argument that is so freely 
 
 used by many who carry Harnack whither he would not. 
 
 Jesus came chiefly to preach; Wiiat he left on earth 
 
 was doctrine of an impressive kind. It is not made out 
 
 that he was in his own doctrine. Therefore, the apostles
 
 Il8 The Person and Fhice of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 who, without question, put his person in front of his 
 doctrine misrepresented him ; and in their teaching they 
 gave us too Httle of his speech and too much of himself 
 (or their version of him). They gave too little of his 
 historic principles and too much of his super-historic 
 self. That is to say, Jesus was a preacher; He did not 
 put himself in front of his doctrine ; His apostles did 
 put him there ; and in so far they are wrong, and they 
 misrepresent him. That is the argument. 
 
 There is a fallacy somewhere. And it is here. You 
 say that the one legacy of Jesus was a doctrine of the 
 Father, reinforced by the powerful personality of the 
 prophet. Why do you say that ? What entitles you to 
 say that the great thing Jesus brought the world was 
 a doctrine, a doctrine rather than a deed, and that he left 
 as his achievement his principle rather than his person ? 
 You admit that this was not the view of the apostles, nor 
 of the first Church ; it was not the view of those who 
 received whatever legacy he did leave. You are coming 
 to admit that it was not the view of the Synoptists. 
 Why do you say they were all of them wrong ? You 
 take your stand on certain words of Jesus alone. But 
 what entitles you to do that ? You make a huge assumption 
 very silently. You assume that the words were his final 
 or only expression of himself, and gave effect to all that was 
 in him. Does that go without saying? Was it by his 
 recorded words that his life took chief or sole effect ? 
 Were they not, though expressions of his real self, yet of 
 his unfinished self? His work was not half done till he 
 died. Why insulate the words, whose direct reference 
 was but to an incomplete situation, a raw audience, and 
 an inchoate context of events? The synoptics are an 
 apostolic product; why detach them so absolutely from
 
 IV.] The Testimony of ChrisVs Self -Consciousness 119 
 
 the other apostolic products in the New Testament ? 
 Why say that in these you have no commentary from the 
 completed Christ on his own words and work ? When his 
 life was over, and its net action on his world came to be 
 realised, then the apostles had the full expression of the 
 personality, in whose light all that precedes must be 
 read. And in that light it was not his doctrine but his 
 deed that arrested his circle, changed them, and sent them 
 out to change the world. His words are so precious 
 because they are the words of one who proved himself by 
 his work alone to be the great authority on himself. Is 
 it not the issue of his life that gives weight to his words 
 about himself? With your emphasis upon his statements 
 alone, are you not in bondage to the bad old idea of 
 revelation, namely, that it consists of a teaching rather 
 than a person, of statement or precept rather than 
 act, of a complete truth rather than a finished deed, 
 of truth about God rather than of God as truth ? How 
 ineradicable, how subtle, that pagan, catholic orthodox 
 fallacy is! Have we not learned how much greater 
 a person is than a principle or a truth, and by how much 
 Christ's total work was his greatest word, in whose light 
 we read all his words. In the light of his cross we see 
 the most wondrous depths in his law. F'or instance, " I 
 am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of 
 Israel." When the cross broke open Christ's univer- 
 sality these words contain not a final truth but a great 
 providential scheme at a penultimate stage. Do we not 
 yet understand that the nature of true revelation is that 
 it should come by historic facts and deeds rather than by 
 truths, even the truths uttered at a stage by the chief 
 actors in the deed ? Whether Christ taught himself or 
 not he gave himself, in a lifelong act as great as his person
 
 120 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 and ascending to his cross. He left this gift as his legacy 
 to his Church and world. And what was the greatest 
 effect of his gift to the Church? It was to open their 
 eyes to see that his gift of himself to man was so great 
 because of his prior and greater gift of himself to God, 
 his offering of himself for men to God, which was always 
 the supreme giving with him. And hence he was treated 
 by those who first received the complete gift as no mere 
 impressive personality to be remembered with reverence, 
 but as a Saviour to be received by faith, and duly honoured 
 by nothing less than worship. God alone could duly hallow 
 God in man. It was only after his death that the full 
 truth could be told because only then did the full truth 
 exist, because his death was its creation. Only in 
 the completion of the cross did Christ become the object 
 of Gospel preaching, because only there was he perfected 
 and final as Redeemer. It was not till then that his 
 disciples came to worship him. And what one 
 observes is this, that those who have found themselves 
 in his death cannot hear enough about his life ; but 
 those who find their account only in his life are soon 
 satiated with interpretations of his death. And they 
 even sink to the level of Pfleiderer, and those who dilute 
 his statement that, "The permanent thing in the Christian 
 faith of redemption is the moral ideal of the self-redemp- 
 tion of society through the solidarity of the helpful and 
 exalting love of its members." That is, all kind and help- 
 ful people are redeemers in the same sense as Christ. 
 But for us it is his death that makes Christ unique. His 
 death gives us command of the whole Christ as is not 
 given us by his life or his words. He was perfected only 
 in his conquest of death ; and only in that consummation 
 do we see him clear and see him whole. And only when the
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Chrisfs Self -Consciousness 121 
 
 deed was done was it of any use to talk of it, even to his 
 own. His consummation there released the spirit by 
 which alone he could be understood. Like the great- 
 est geniuses, he had to create the spirit that understood 
 him. The Spirit was released for men by the same act 
 as released men for the Spirit. 
 
 § § § 
 We should take more seriously the growth of Jesus. 
 
 We are all agreed that Jesus grew in obedience, learning 
 
 it by the things that he suffered. He was not simply an 
 
 event in history; he had himself a history, which is the 
 
 moral marrow of all history. His natural consciousness 
 
 grew, and the content of it grew, as he grew from child 
 
 to man, and came to know the world. His spiritual 
 
 consciousness, his sense of sonship, also grew, as he 
 
 settled the conflicts that beset him about his Messiahship. 
 
 Is it too much to press into the deeper meaning and 
 
 condition of such growing obedience, and to say that as 
 
 he did the deeper will he knew the deeper doctrine, his 
 
 grasp of sonship also grew. The growing form of his 
 
 obedience must have had for its concomitant a growth in 
 
 the power of reading the meaning of his experiences; 
 
 yea, a growth not only of his consciousness but of 
 
 his personality, (his subjective personality, not his 
 
 objective relation to God) a growth in which his 
 
 deepening will met his deepening fate ? And must we 
 
 not go forward on that line to say that it was only by 
 
 death that he himself took the full measure of his death, 
 
 and conveyed that interpretation to his disciples ? It 
 
 was only in victorious death, (with its obverse of 
 
 resurrection,) that he was perfected, found himself, 
 
 ' arrived,' ripened, and was determined not as Son but 
 
 as Son in power (Rom. i. 4). It was not till he died that
 
 122 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 he possessed his whcle soul, came to his own, entered on 
 all he really was, was exalted to his true heaven, and 
 could teach about himself things impossible before 
 His teaching during life was the teaching appropriate to 
 the national stage of his universal work, to the pro- 
 visional stage of his personal task. It is immaterial at 
 this point to ask whether this great interpretation 
 through death was conveyed by him to his disciples in a 
 "gospel of the 40 days," or by his inspiration, from behind 
 the veil, of men like Paul, in whom he lived more really 
 than they did in themselves. 
 
 The question is often asked, why the idea of the 
 kingdom of God disappears outside the Synoptics ? 
 Have we not here one answer ? Is it not because of the 
 essential change created in the whole situation by the 
 finished work, by the perfecting of Christ, by his coming 
 into his kingdom, by his identification with the kingdom, 
 and its real establishment in his redemptive triumph ? 
 The King is the Kingdom. To be " in Christ " is to be 
 in the Kingdom. The historic idea becomes the mystic 
 reality. The future becomes the present. The apostolic 
 preaching of Christ therefore took the place of Christ's 
 own preaching of the kingdom. He was now identi- 
 fied with the Kingdom. How could that have happened 
 if his teaching or memory had been his real legacy, 
 if he was not more than all he said, and his manner 
 of death more than all his method of address ? 
 Nothing in his life served the kingdom like his manner 
 of leaving it. The Gospel of Christ replaced the Gospel 
 of the Kingdom, because by his death he became the 
 kingdom, because he became all that the kingdom 
 contained, he was the "truth" of the Kingdom, and his per- 
 sonal perfecting was ipso facto and pari passu the securing
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self-Consciousness 123 
 
 ofthe Kingdom. Like " Messiah," the Kingdom was an 
 Old Testament phrase, which served to enclose what he 
 brought in himself; and the pitcher, the phrase, was 
 broken as the true light shone. The testimony of Jesus 
 is the Spirit of the Kingdom. The Kingdom was great 
 with him. The Gospel of the Kingdom was Christ in 
 essence; Christ was the Gospel ofthe Kingdom in power. 
 The Kingdom was Christ in a mystery ; Christ was the 
 publication, the establishment of the Kingdom. To 
 bring the kingdom preach the King. He was the truth 
 of his own greatest Gospel. It is wherever he is. To 
 have him is to ensure it. He sparkles in his Gospel 
 of the Kingdom ; but the Kingdom shines out full and 
 final in his perfecting, in his finished soul and eternal 
 whole. 
 
 § § § 
 There is another way of putting the matter (suggested 
 by Kahler) which does not always have due attention. 
 Why should we insulate the Synoptics as the sole source of 
 our knowledge of what Jesus wished taught as his gospel ? 
 He^eft some bequest; was it his teaching? If it was, 
 did he make the careful provision he ought to have done 
 for the preservation in purity of a gift so supreme ? Or 
 for any correct record of his life's story ? Was it either 
 his life or teaching that was understood to be his grand 
 bequest by those he left ? Did he think of leaving with 
 them anything but himself, as cross and resurrection had 
 made him — himself and his speedy return ? If his words 
 were the treasure, what foresight did he use to anticipate 
 and avert that huge misrepresentation of him and his 
 doctrine which, we are told, began almost at once, and 
 which he would have been very dull as a teacher not to 
 think possible in ordinary conditions? Did he ever erect
 
 124 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [r. ect. 
 
 the Galilean ministry which fills the Synoptics into the 
 touchstone ? If he did, where is it so said ? And why 
 was it not at once put into fixed and authoritative shape 
 to meet the Apostolic doctrine that was doing his memory 
 such mischief ? If he did mean the matter of his ministry 
 to be the test, why was the memory of it such a failure for 
 the purpose of arresting its perversion ? Why did not 
 the very earliest Church in its mission work confine itself 
 to carrying on his sententious style, his moral precepts, 
 and his parabolic form ? Why did they not adhere 
 closely to comment on his words and deeds, as all the 
 pupils of a great master did with his TrapaSoo-ts, or tra- 
 dition, at that day ? Even James, it is remarked, the 
 nearest in tone to the Synoptics, does not repeat their 
 teaching, but he calls for faith in the Lord of Glory, and 
 a life accordingly. What ground have we for saying that 
 if the Apostles had been true to the intention of Jesus 
 they would have prolonged and expanded his teaching 
 and beneficence, instead of going off upon a theological 
 Gospel ? It is more than ever wonderful that they did 
 not prolong his mode of instruction if we follow the view 
 of so many and hold that there was little original in his 
 teaching, little beyond what could be drawn, and was 
 drawn, from the Old Testament, or Judaic tradition. 
 To Jews brought up like the Apostles that fact would 
 only have given the more weight to Christ's words, and 
 deepened their obligation to continue the new impulse he 
 had infused into the old truths. 
 
 Does it not all point to this, that the real legacy of 
 Jesus was himself — the impression of the personality 
 which gave to his * occasional ', and sometimes transitory, 
 teaching its real worth. Nay, impression is not the 
 word. His great legacy was an achievement. The mere
 
 [V.] The Testimony of Christ's Self-Consciousness 125 
 
 impression evaporated as disciples forsook him and fled. 
 It was a new life, a new creation, that he effected. Some- 
 thing happened which rallied them, and converted the 
 fading impression into living and justifying faith — some- 
 thing which had the real gospel, and the real gospel power, 
 in it. Christ rose. A new master made of them new men. 
 A new Christ turned them from disciples into apostles. 
 The Spirit came. The cross opened. These things 
 were what made the Church, and not the teaching oi 
 Jesus. That teaching was only preserved from oblivion 
 by the existence of a Church founded on another base, 
 on an atoning salvation which alone gave the Church its 
 living interest in the records of the Saviour, and gave to 
 his words their authority. The gospels were written by 
 and for people who were made Christian by Christ's 
 death and resurrection and their theological meaning. 
 They were written to edify the converts of the Cross, and 
 not to challenge or correct a theology of incarnation and 
 redemption. 
 
 § § § 
 The inadequacy of the Synoptics alone is shown from 
 
 another point of view, which I suggested a moment 
 ago. It is recognised by most that there was a develop- 
 ment of some kind in the course of Christ's public 
 ministry. And it is admitted by most that such 
 an idea was not in the mind of the Evangelists, that 
 in the gospels it is not set out, and, if it is to be 
 traced, it must be picked out. It is more or less of a 
 construction. It does not lie on the face of the docu- 
 ments. So much so that within my own memory it was 
 thought a heretical and somewhat hazardous suggestion, 
 due to wits more sharp than sound. The Synoptics do 
 not offer it, though they may be made to yield it. But
 
 126 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 how are we to trace it ? I mean, what are we to look for 
 in that way ? What kind of development shall we seek ? 
 What is the ideal scheme of growth which the Gospel 
 material is to fill in, perhaps by some re-arrangement ? 
 The Gospels themselves, I say, offer no such scheme. 
 We mu:t get it elsewhere, and then the Gospels will 
 illustrate it. Where shall we get it ? To what, in what 
 respect, are we to suppose Jesus developed ? 
 
 Now, to these questions the apostles give a certain 
 answer. He grew as Saviour. He developed as Re- 
 deemer. He grew in his vocation rather than in his 
 position, more even than in character. He did not 
 become either the Son or the sinless. As the situation 
 became more vast, grave, and tense, there grew in him 
 not only knowledge but force and grasp in his one work. 
 He learned a redemptive obedience — not indeed to acquire 
 its nature, but to unfold its form as the crisis deepened. 
 Because he was a son (his Sonship he did not learn) he 
 learned obedience. It is not the acquisition of Sonship 
 but the growth of an incarnated Redeemer that the 
 Epistles teach us to look for in the Gospels, the process 
 of Redemption rather than incarnation. The idea is con- 
 densed in Hebrews ii. lo, " to perfect the captain 
 of salvation by sufferings." Not the man Jesus was 
 perfected but the Saviour, not the moral character so 
 much as the work possible only to that character. Here 
 we certainly have moral development, but it is not the 
 increase of a moral nature so much as the deepening 
 mastery of a moral vocation. It is not the aesthetic 
 development of a moral character of symmetry and 
 balance, but the dynamic development of a Redeemer, 
 of a Son of God in power which was at last determined 
 in his resurrection. It is not so much a perfect product
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 127 
 
 of sanctification that we have, but a perfect agent of 
 justification; not perfection of the admirable personality — 
 but perfection of the finished work ; not 
 
 " A soul by force of sorrows high, 
 Uplifted to the purest sky 
 Of undisturbed Humanity " 
 (which is a stoic ideal after all, as Wordsworth's always 
 was a chastened spirituality) but one who was always 
 equal to cope with each mounting antagonism that a 
 Redeemer had to meet. This, of course, could only be 
 done by an ethical personality and its victory ; but it is 
 not the ethical idea that is uppermost, but the evangelical, 
 the theological, the functional, the evolution of the 
 Saviour, rather than the man, in so far as they are separ- 
 able. And it is not I who say they are, but those who 
 lake the man and leave the Saviour. 
 
 But the growth that is traced by those who reject the 
 idea of redemption as being something foisted by the 
 apostles on Jesus, is the growth of such ethical character 
 as a saintly modern man would be expected to achieve by 
 a sympathetic and scholarly biographer. If the Gospel 
 material is to fill up some conception of development, and 
 the development is not that of a redeemer, it must be 
 that of an ethical character of the modern type. Is it 
 hard to choose between the value and authority of the two 
 ideals ? If each is an importation into the Synoptics, 
 which is the more likely to do justice to them — that 
 favoured by the founders and heads of the Churches that 
 produced and used them, or that imposed by laborious 
 scholars living at a date so remote as our own, 
 working often with more psychological acumen than 
 personal faith, and working under a bias against apostolic 
 interpretation. Development is meaningless without a
 
 128 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 standard or principle. And my contention would be that 
 the apostles represent the atmosphere of the evangelists ; 
 that the apostolic ideal is the principle of any development 
 which the evangelists may imply but do not set them- 
 selves to press; and that any construction of the evan- 
 gelists other than this must be more alien and more 
 artificial. To set forth Christ as Redeemer is at least 
 more germane to our data than to exhibit him as the 
 flower of spiritual character, which certainly was not the 
 interest of our sources at all. 
 
 § § § 
 Those who select the Gospels out of the New Testa- 
 ment, and the Synoptics out of the Gospels, you perceive 
 then, do not stop there. They sift the Synoptics and 
 select from them a putative primitive Gospel. They 
 select the essential thing, as they deem it. I have 
 asked what is their test of the essential ? The rest 
 of the New Testament, we have seen, does offer a 
 standard for those narratives. It is the evangelical, 
 the dogmatic, Christ, whom the critics reject ; the 
 Christ who is much more the object of faith than 
 the subject of it. And that is the test that the 
 Church has used throughout its deeply experienced 
 history. Even when the Bible was not accepted en bloc, 
 this was so. It was Luther's test for a canon within the 
 canon. He took what made for that apostolic, saving 
 Christ. And we all do as Luther did, so far. We all 
 make our own canon within the canon. We do not find 
 every part of the Bible equally authoritative or equally 
 valuable. We each select the passages which do most 
 for us, which come most home to our chief need, and 
 the need we find unmet elsewhere. We have many 
 individual ways of making that selection, varying up-
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 129 
 
 wards from literary taste to evangelical experience. But 
 when it has to be done on the scale of a Church, or a 
 science, it must be done under some common guiding prin- 
 ciple. Now for the Church's selection of the canon, the 
 guiding principle was the evangelical principle of 
 Redemption, the apostolic note. It was the witness, 
 direct or indirect, to Christ the Redeemer, and not 
 Christ the personage, the hero, saint, or prophet. And 
 it was the same redemptive principle that the Church 
 applied, in the evolution of its theology, to test the 
 heresies of the right or of the left. All its metaphysics 
 were so many inadequate efforts made, in the greatest 
 language of the period, to secure that substantial and 
 final interest of a real redemption — as our social efforts 
 are made to-day. These are efforts to express redemption 
 in the inadequate forms of social re-arrangement when 
 what we need is social re-generation. We need a re- 
 formed Church more than a re-adjusted state. 
 
 But if that redemptive and apostolic principle be 
 discarded in selecting from the select books the essential 
 Christ, what is to take its place? What is the guiding 
 principle to be? What is the ultimate thing, whose 
 witness in the Synoptics is their permanent thing ? You 
 say it is just spirituality, a deeply humane spirituality? 
 What do you mean by that? Is it the simple, rational, 
 natural, continuous relation that we can now discern 
 between God and Man, the last conditions in thought of 
 God, man, and the world ? But is that not Metaphysics ? 
 At any rate, is it not religious psychology ? It is not a 
 historical test pure and simple that you are making the 
 norm. It is often a metaphysical test, a monistic test, 
 in which we measure religion by its transfiguration of 
 our deep, natural, immanent relation to God and the
 
 130 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 world based on identity of being and nature. Yet we 
 were given to understand that it was just the metaphysic 
 in the old creeds that made the worst burden of them. 
 Can it be that the critic who sends in his card as the 
 representative of the new scientific firm is really the 
 agent of the old metaphysical house, who, after 
 ruining it, is starting the same industry under en- 
 tirely new management, in a fresh place of business ? 
 Is the test for the essential thing in the Gospels 
 composed of certain ideas, movements, or sympathies, 
 rising out of the continuity of rational process in God and 
 man, and either springing up in the human mind as its 
 natural nexus with God, or generalised from the various 
 faiths into a universal philosophy of religion ? Is general 
 religiosity the test of positive rehgion ? Is the amor- 
 phous the standard of the organic ? Is the nebula the 
 measure of the world, or the protoplast of the paragon ? 
 Is what we should naturally expect God to do to be the 
 measure of faith in what he has done ? Is that old 
 apriorism not dead yet ? Are we to begin by admitting 
 only what we consider worthy of Him ? Is that what 
 we are to put in the centre of Christianity, that and not 
 the invasive Word, the spiritual enclave, the actual 
 revelation, the pure gift and person of Christ in its 
 originality and finality, welling up in the soul's history 
 like a quenchless spring of living water in the bottom of 
 the Dead Sea? Is nothing to be credited to the Father 
 of spirits but what is allowed by the instincts of nature's 
 sweetest child ? Everywhere (it is said) you find that a 
 good God forgives upon mere repentance and confession, 
 that he comes in aid to his worshipper's cry. Our hearts 
 say that, the spiritual summary of the world's faiths says 
 that. If there be anything said about Christ, even in
 
 IV.] The Testimony oj Christ's Self -Consciousness 131 
 
 the New Testament itself, which contradicts that, it must 
 out. If a holy judge affright our dreams when we had 
 gone to rest on a kind Father's kiss, it is the nightmare 
 of a stale and indigestible creed. If a mediator, an 
 atonement, is preached, it is a sophistication. If any- 
 thing in the Gospels points that way, disallow it. It is a 
 dishonour to the great and ready heart of God. "But 
 then the textual or other evidence ? " " O, that is lower 
 " criticism. The passage has spoken blasphemy. What 
 "further need have we of witnesses? It is worthy of 
 " death." Is there anything in the Godhead of Christ 
 which is forbidden by modern monism, modern evolution? 
 " Delendum ! Such a Christ is a foreign body intruded 
 " between God and the Soul. Forgiveness is but a 
 "rudimentary way of speaking about the relation of 
 "absolute to finite being; or it is but *a religious 
 "expression for a psychological process,' a divine way of 
 "speaking of the healing and softening effect of spiritual 
 " time and its genial process upon the disturbed moral 
 " consciousness. God is not angry. Ritschl has settled 
 " that. It was all our ignorance. Salvation means 
 "getting rid of the idea that he is angry; it is escaping 
 "from a misconception of him, clearing up a misunder- 
 " standing, Sanctification is the art of learning to soothe 
 "the excessive pertinacity and philistinism of conscience, 
 " putting that bore into his place, and acquiring the 
 " cachet of the cultivated suburbs of the devout soul." O, 
 it is all so able, so genteel, so dull, so morally ordinary, so 
 spiritually banal ! I must allow myself to quote here 
 what one of the noblest Germans of them all, and the 
 most religious, says about the liberal theologians and 
 critics of the hour. Nobody will accuse Herrmann 
 of orthodoxy. He has been pointing out that the liberal
 
 132 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 theologian (what we call the advanced) lacks one thing 
 that orthodoxy had and still has — power. If liberalism, 
 he says, could acquire this it would be far superior to the 
 old creed — if it could meet as effectively as the old did 
 man's need of power and life. It would be better because 
 it would cut adrift much wreckage that the old still 
 drags with it and should lose. And he associates this 
 element of power with the central and supernatural place 
 given to Christ, both in history and in our private experi- 
 ence — Christ as the sole being to whom the soul can and 
 must absolutely submit as unto God. " But," he says, 
 "this is just what in the liberal theology you do not 
 have. Its representatives are accomplished experts in 
 the appreciation of piety outside them, but a piety of 
 their own, a religion of decision, seldom emerges into the 
 light of their consciousness. They are masters in the art 
 of presenting to us the way in which the prophets 
 received the word of God, or the way an apostle's soul 
 was filled with conflict first and then with peace. They 
 can wipe the dust of centuries from the words of Jesus. 
 Nay, they can trace for you, with a high ardour, his 
 incomparable spiritual style. But they seldom show a 
 sign of concern about what Christ means for themselves. 
 They do not betray that a personal life bears down on 
 them out of the page of Scripture, and, full and warm, 
 conquers them for his own. If that were their concern 
 they would at least be silent when others adore him as 
 Lord because he alone compels the worship from their 
 soul. So long as they do not feel that, they cannot do 
 the work of theology, nor lay for ever the ghost of dog- 
 matic controversy when the old creed claims that there is 
 no theology but itself. But in the Churches of the Refor- 
 mation the sleeping sense will yet wake that religion is
 
 IV.] The Testimony of Christ's Self -Consciousness 133 
 
 the veracity of the inmost life to the actual situation of 
 his soul, and that Christian religion can only grow from 
 what a man himself experiences of the present reality of 
 the person of Christ." (Kultur d. Gegenwart I, 630.) 
 
 The final tendency of "advanced theology" is back- 
 wards. Like Moliere's ghost, it has improved very much 
 for the worse. It relapses to the outgrown Deism of the 
 eighteenth century. That was a rationalism which 
 ignored history ; this is a rationalism which deforces it. 
 And its great act of violence is the driving of a fatal 
 wedge between the Synoptics and the Epistles, between 
 the message of Jesus and the Gospel of his Apostles. 
 
 § § § 
 
 I should like to add a point which has often arrested 
 me, and one whose development would carry us far. 
 Jesus loved the Father in entire obedience, humility 
 and trust. He trusted Him when every human and 
 rational reason for trust was gone. But yet neither 
 from himself nor his apostles do we hear any reference 
 to his faith — though faith is the one link between him 
 and them. The evangelists have a rich store of phrases 
 for his relation to God, whom he heard, saw, knew, etc., 
 but they never say he believed in God. And never does 
 he say " Believe in me as I in the Father." The reason 
 is that our faith has to make its way over darkness and 
 distance, both in thought and will, which never troubled 
 him. He no more confesses his faith than his sin. The 
 religious problem for him and us was not the same. He 
 possessed the certainty and communion of the Father in 
 himself. And we believe in the Only Son as he believed 
 in none.
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC 
 INSPIRATION— IN GENERAL
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC INSPIRATION — 
 IN GENERAL 
 
 The line of proof we follow (if we may call it proof, if 
 it is more than movement) is threefold. We began by 
 interrogating the self-consciousness of Christ. But we 
 may have had occasion to find that for some this is 
 bound to be incomplete. For, first, we are exposed to 
 the challenge of the Higher Criticism on the passages 
 concerned. And second, on a kenotic theory, the self- 
 consciousness of the earthly Christ is in comparative 
 occultation. Hence, we push forward the second line of 
 works — the New Testament, its reflection of Christ, and 
 especially its inspiration by him. We are driven to what 
 might be called his self-consciousness in his apostles. 
 And beyond that we have the third line, the line of 
 experience in the soul of the individual or the Church. 
 
 It is with the second parallel of advance that we come 
 now to be concerned — with the value for our subject of 
 the New Testament testimony and its inspiration, 
 meaning by that the apostolic testimony. I do not refer 
 here to the general faith of the first Church, to the faith 
 that wrung from it the confession and worship of Jesus 
 as Christ and Lord. I have more in view than the 
 
 137
 
 138 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 impression Jesus produced on men in numbers. I do 
 not speak of the New Testament as the mirror in which 
 we see the reflected image that Christ made in the 
 Church. I speak now of it as his mouthpiece. I speak 
 of the apostles in chief, and of that special exercise of 
 faith which in them is called inspiration. And I go to 
 ask what is the value of the apostolic inspiration, in 
 order that we may assess the value of the apostles' view 
 of the person and work of Christ. Was their view of 
 him a passing impression, a personal opinion, perhaps an 
 early extravagance that we must leave behind ? The 
 religious-historical school have virtually recognised that 
 views of Incarnation, Atonement, Redemption and 
 Sacrament are not to be explained away out of the New 
 Testament however they may be explained into it. It is 
 an immense admission which I shall often use ; for it 
 concedes that the views developed by the later Church 
 on such subjects are really rooted in the apostolic creed, 
 whether that creed was rooted in the mind of Jesus or 
 not. If the apostles were right about Christ, the Gospel 
 of the whole Catholic and Evangelical Church is right. 
 It is of prime moment, therefore, that we should know if 
 the inspiration of the apostles was anything which gives 
 to their teaching on these heads more than a personal, 
 temporary, or deflected worth. 
 
 § § § 
 Must everything in the New Testament be true ? Is 
 
 everything we find in Jesus revelation ? Was his 
 geocentric view of the world, was his view of the author- 
 ship of a psalm, was his every precept— were these 
 permanent revelation ? Again was everything equally 
 revelation that was believed about Jesus by an apostle ? 
 Or was there not rather a proportion and perspective of
 
 v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 139 
 
 faith ? Do such things not stand at varying distances 
 from the vital centre, and are they not vital accordingly ? 
 Again, were there any extraneous ideas at work 
 from other religions on Judaism, on the Church, on the 
 Apostles, shaping the form of some of their beliefs ? If 
 so, have we not to go on to ask, what in the New 
 Testament is of faith, and what comes either from the 
 mental world of the time or from the idiosyncracy or 
 the education of the writer — like his mode of argument ? 
 What is mere impression, and what is speculative 
 explanation, and what is in the nature of miraculous 
 supernatural insight by special action of the Spirit ? 
 These distinctions and questions are inevitable. 
 
 § § § 
 The Church made a great step forward when it was 
 led to think less of the inspiration of a book and 
 more of the inspiration of the men that wrote it 
 and of the nation that bred them. We learned last 
 century that inspiration was something too warm and 
 vital to belong to a book ; it could only be the state of 
 a living soul. It was personal inspiration and not book 
 inspiration. That is valuable, but it does not end the 
 matter. We must take account, as of the Old Testament 
 nation, so of the corporate consciousness of the Church 
 as a site of inspiration. And not only so but about the 
 man we must ask questions. If it was the man that was 
 inspired, and not the book, was everything the man said 
 or did inspired ? Or did the inspiration only come when 
 he had to speak in public, or take the pen in hand ? It 
 is no necessary guarantee of truth to say it came from an 
 inspired man. Was he inspired when he saw it ? Was 
 he equally inspired when he said it, so that we may be 
 sure that what he said is exactly what he saw ? Which
 
 140 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 acts of apostles were inspired ? Was it inspiration (it 
 has been asked) when Peter decided to take his wife with 
 him on a missionary journey, or when Paul discouraged 
 marriage ? Were such things in inspired men also 
 inspired ? Or had these men but the potentiality of 
 inspiration for use on due occasions ; and did it need 
 some particular historic situation, especially in the 
 consciousness of the Church, or some special divine 
 intervention, to produce the inspired state and insight ? 
 
 § § § 
 Of course, to begin, they had at least such a personal 
 
 relation to history as is implied in saving faith in a 
 historic Saviour. Inspiration had faith for a base. And 
 it was faith positive, faith at a certain practical juncture. 
 Accordingly the New Testament books were mostly 
 occasional, applying fundamental Christianity to par- 
 ticular situations in the believing Church. But how 
 much is to be allowed for the situation ? And where is 
 the permanent element independent of situation, and not 
 only good for all time but creative ? Surely if we ask the 
 writers, the apostles in particular, their answer is that 
 there is such an element, and that it centres about the 
 person, place, and work of Christ, involving a real 
 incarnation and atonement. We escape thereby from 
 Rationalism, orthodox or heterodox ; there is a historic 
 authority claimed. But we cannot remain in mere 
 Biblicism. We cannot believe a certain thing just because 
 it is in the Bible. And our city of refuge is Evangelism. 
 What we really believe is the Gospel which, with the new 
 soul, called the Bible also into being, and for whose sake 
 it exists. It is not the Church. For the books of 
 the Bible were given to the Church, more than by it, and 
 they descended on it rather than rose from it. The canon
 
 V ] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 141 
 
 of the Bible rose from the Church, but not its contents. 
 Bible and Church were collateral products of the Gospel. 
 But we go on. Having fixed in the New Testament 
 on what was held to be of faith and central to faith, we 
 must ask, was it true ? How far is that theological faith 
 a true interpretation of the historical Jesus Christ ? 
 Does it assign to Jesus Christ what he himself claimed, 
 or wished claimed, when we read him as a whole ? Does 
 it express what he compels from us by an examination of 
 his self-consciousness, or, still more, by an experience of 
 his work ? 
 
 § § § 
 
 Now this last, his work, contains the greatest claim of 
 all so far as the New Testament is concerned. It is 
 what the apostles operate with almost entirely. For 
 them Christians are not people who have a Christian 
 character, whatever their beliefs, nor those who cherish 
 ethical ideas about dying to self and living in a larger 
 whole. But Christians are those who partake by 
 experience in Christ's death, resurrection, and eternal 
 life. The apostles do not take our modern line and 
 interpret the self-consciousness of Jesus. If they had, 
 we should have more data in our hands for doing it. 
 The apostolic method was to stake all upon Christ's 
 person and the cross (with its obverse of the Resurrec- 
 tion), upon the cross and Christ's work there, appropri- 
 ated by the Church's faith and experience of the New 
 Creation. 
 
 The question then, is, Is the apostolic method right 
 in this respect ? Is it a true interpretation of Jesus to do 
 as it did, and fix on the cross (with the resurrection) as 
 the key to him and his meaning ? Is this the authentic 
 word in the Bible ? It is now generally felt how true
 
 142 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 was the selective insight of Jesus in respect to the Old 
 Testament, when for his teaching he seized on the 
 prophetic element in it rather than the legal as the fertile 
 core of its revelation and the red line of God's coming. 
 Can we be as sure that the apostles were equally right 
 when, in the prophets, they concentrated on Is. 53, 
 and seized on Christ's atoning death and resurrection 
 among all the features of his activity, as the site of 
 the consummatory and illuminative Word about himself ? 
 Were they wrong when they found the two lines, the 
 prophetic and the priestly, meeting there ? 
 
 § § § 
 
 In approaching the answer to such questions, and 
 assessing the value of New Testament inspiration as real 
 insight into the person and work of Christ, we might 
 clear the ground with a few more interrogatories. 
 
 Could the doctrine of the Atonement, or of the 
 Incarnation, be established for a Church, for the race, 
 on the synoptics alone, historically and critically 
 searched ? I do not think they could. But then neither 
 could the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, or the Church, to 
 say nothing of others. Indeed it is only constructively 
 that we can find there the modern idea of a development 
 of Christ's public character and purpose. I am sure that 
 the Church at least, which was founded on the apostles' 
 atoning interpretation of the cross, could not live upon 
 the Synoptics alone. It could not find itself in them. 
 
 But perhaps these doctrines then are compatible with 
 the Synoptics and latent there, if they are not palpable. 
 Are they ? Yes, some would say ; no, would be said by 
 others. I believe they are. And that is the real 
 question. It is not whether the Synoptics would yield 
 the doctrines, but whether the doctrines, and the doctrines
 
 v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 143 
 
 alone, explain them. And I think critical opinion is 
 growing that the doctrines do explain them ; because 
 the Evangelists wrote in the atmosphere and interest 
 of such doctrines, though not to prove them. They knew 
 nothing of our undogmatic Christianity, however we 
 may revise and edit down what they wrote. They may 
 have, of course, been taking a liberty with the historic 
 Jesus in doing so. They may have been importing 
 the doctrines and imposing them on Jesus. That is 
 not here the question. But critical opinion is on the 
 point of outgrowing the idea that the Synoptics represent 
 undogmatic Christianity. So much the religious 
 historical school has done for us. 
 
 And if it be asked farther whether the apostles, 
 whether Paul, saw these doctrines in the historic Jesus, 
 and were forced on them by his revolutionary action on 
 themselves, of course we must recognise that they did 
 so see them. We are long past any twisting of their 
 meaning which would go to show that they did not, 
 that they meant less than the Reformers thought, and 
 were really Broad Church theologians or ideologues 
 born out of due time. We may treat their views as we 
 think proper once we settle what they were, but the 
 scientific, the purely historic version of their views is as 
 I say. For them the theological interest is fundamental. 
 On such a point Pfleiderer's Paulinism is very valuable. 
 They did believe they found such doctrines, the doctrines 
 of grace, at the centre of the historic Christ, whether 
 you think them fantastics or not for doing so. That is 
 another question. And it is one that wc must go on 
 to discuss. 
 
 § § § 
 The apostles believed Jesus to be the eternal, atoning
 
 144 ^^'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 and redeeming Son of God ; what is the value of their 
 belief? They did not reason it out on a speculative 
 basis, however they may have sometimes used specu- 
 lative ideas as a calculus in the attempt to convey it. 
 It was a matter of their regenerate experience of Christ's 
 historic work, and of their insight into its postulates in 
 terms of current ideas. What is the worth of the 
 apostolic insight ? Was Christ valuable for the sake of 
 certain spiritual ideas, or were the ideas valuable as 
 expositions of Christ ? Was the apostolic insight on 
 the same footing as ours ? Take the insight of reason, 
 what Hegel calls the intuition of thought. Has modern 
 reason as good a right over our faith as the interpretation 
 of Christ which the apostles offered for revelation ? 
 Take faith. Has modern faith an equal validity with 
 theirs, or one even greater by all the long experience 
 through which the Church has since passed ? Can 
 modern Christianity, therefore, correct the apostles upon 
 fundamental truths like the deity or atonement of Christ? 
 
 The answer to this question will depend on the place 
 we assign to the apostles in the economy of revelation ; 
 on their place as uniquely inspired — inspired as much 
 above the ordinary level of Christian faith as that is 
 supernatural to the reason or vision of the world. Let 
 us examine this. 
 
 § § § 
 
 If we start with Christ as giving the revelation of 
 God in nuce, and say that Christendom and Christianity 
 form the evolution of that infinite germ, we take a line 
 which is very welcome to many among us to-day. But 
 they do not measure, perhaps, all it carries. It carries 
 this, that, as in the evolutionary progress we come to 
 know better, the Apostles' Creed is worth more than the
 
 v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 145 
 
 Epistles, the Athanasian Creed worth more than the 
 Nicene, the Augsburg Confession greater than them all, 
 and the modern Christian consciousness the court of 
 final appeal beyond that. Or the Vatican decrees, 
 perhaps, may be the summit — unless you say offhand 
 that the Roman Church is not a Church at all, but 
 totally outside the evolutionary area. 
 
 This is, however, a result which, welcome as it may 
 be to the masterless subjectivity of the time, gives no 
 finality, but makes each age its own spiritual authority. 
 It gives but Protestant Liberalism or Roman Modernism. 
 And it is chiefly due to the error of thinking that a 
 simple conception of evolution, evolution deploying, 
 under spiritual law, in one direction, with a steady swell, 
 will suit history, and especially religious history, as well 
 as it does biology. If that were true, however, I am 
 afraid we should have to reduce Christ to a position no 
 higher essentially than one of his own apostles. He 
 would be Master and they disciples, of course, but they 
 would be ejusdem generis, like Socrates and his circle ; 
 and he could no longer be viewed as the revelationary 
 fact but as its discoverer only — like Darwin. Nay he 
 could discover but a stage of it. For the grand revela- 
 tion, on such a theory, could only be at the end, and 
 not at the beginning of the series, if it ever were 
 attainable at all. 
 
 But if we are dealing with those who do believe in a 
 past fact really revelationary, and no mere germ, the 
 question is, what was that fact ? What was the revelation ? 
 Where did it begin ? And above all where did it end ? 
 For the kinrl of revelation here concerned is one that 
 does not go on unrolling indefinitely, but it has an end. 
 It has a finality, even \i the finality were not allowed.
 
 146 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 § § § 
 May I invite you a little way into the philosophy of 
 the case. Consider the long evolutionary series. The 
 whole process of creation did not develop at large, but 
 developed in man to an end, an interpreting end, an 
 end of infinite value. Man is a close for all the 
 evolution that preceded him in nature. That is true 
 even when we recognise the evolution within man him- 
 self. The evolution in man is a sublimation of the 
 evolution to man. Nature evolves to a close, which is 
 none the less a real close because it has within itself an 
 evolving history. Such closes are what every soul is — 
 ends in themselves (though with a career), and with 
 a value more absolute than any mere stepping-stone 
 to a sequel. When evolution reaches personality and 
 history, it becomes more than simple and onward 
 merely. Its nature and method change. It becomes 
 another thing when it has to do with freedom and 
 purpose — with souls. In the soul we have a spiritual 
 world that does not simply arise and crown the past 
 but invades it and stands over it as the earnest and 
 surety of its future. The end emerges in the means. 
 Evolution becomes quite another thing when it rises 
 to be teleological in this way. It then becomes a 
 " kingdom of ends." Each soul is an end in itself, 
 and not a mere cell, or a mere link. Each great soul 
 stands for a permanent value. And so with each 
 historic crisis. History moves to ends ; and even if 
 these again move to higher ends, they are not mere 
 points of transition. We have a rising series of peaks 
 not of links — peaks of single and standing value against 
 the infinite sky. We progress by a progression of crises, 
 which close, or harvest, each a movement or age, and
 
 ▼.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 147 
 
 garner its permanent value not only to be carried over to 
 the next age but also registered and credited in Eternity. 
 For we grow laterally, vertically, spherically, outward 
 into Eternity as surely as onward into the future. And 
 these peaks make an ascending range. These real 
 closes again postulate a grand end of all ends and 
 crisis of all crises, a harvest of the world and all 
 its ages, and even of eternity ; and one, too, not 
 awaiting history far off, but invading it, pervading it, 
 and mastering it always. For the spiritual world, as 
 Eucken reiterates upon us in all his system, not only 
 accompanies this world but faces it, addresses it, inter- 
 feres with it, dictates to it, judges it and cannot 
 rest till it subdue it. There is a fundamental inroad of 
 a final and autonomous power into the plexus of causal 
 evolution — a repeated and incessant miracle. And the 
 Christian plea is that the nature and reality of this 
 supreme end for the whole soul of man is not only 
 anticipated or asserted but it is secured in advance by 
 revelation ; which is not the process, but something in 
 the process yet not of it, and something that determines 
 it. And it is this final thing that we have in Jesus 
 Christ and his crucial redemption. We have in him a 
 close which is incompatible with a simple evolution, or 
 mere crescendo, of being. We have, midway, a creator, a 
 finality, an authority which no evolution can give. That 
 is what we mean by starting from the revelation in 
 Christ.'' 
 
 § § § 
 The question then becomes this ; what is the place of 
 apostolic inspiration in this finality which we have in 
 
 *I must deal elsewhere more fully with the question whether in Christ 
 we have a revelation or the revelation, an interim report of God or a final.
 
 148 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Christ ? If Christ was final what finality or authority 
 over us is left for his Apostles and their inspiration ? 
 Have we in them but the first crude guesses in the 
 evolution of thought about him, guesses raw in the ore 
 of contemporary notions, which recent thought has 
 smelted down to a small residuum ? Was Christ the 
 whole of the Christian revelation, body and soul of it, its 
 matter and form ? Did Israel, did revelation rise slowly 
 to its full and final height in Jesus only to drop suddenly 
 and sharply to the amateur and tentative level of Paul ? 
 Was Christ removed from the groping thought of Peter, 
 Paul, and John by a greater gulf than that which parted 
 him from the Judaism so fatal to him ? Was the 
 thought of his devotees about him more of a perversion 
 of him than the thought of the foes he hated so well ? 
 Wernle says it was so. And it is an idea which acts on 
 many who never formulate it, never express it, and do 
 not realise how deeply it affects and depresses them. 
 The whole stress is laid upon the historic act or person 
 of Christ. The whole revelation is held to be exhausted 
 there. That is the history as fact ; the writing of the 
 history is a quite secondary matter, and belongs to a 
 much inferior stage. It is a product diluted by 
 reflection and distorted by artificiality — at most a bad 
 photograph of the revelation, and not a part of it ; 
 or it is light turned on Christ instead of issuing from 
 him. In the actual history (it is said) God was at work 
 revealing ; but in the record, or commentary, it was man 
 construing. In the transfer to writing much of the 
 reality has vanished ; and the living plant is even dried 
 between the leaves of the book. So it is said. And thus 
 our very exaltation of the personal revelation in Christ 
 has led to a fatal depreciation and neglect of the Bible, as
 
 v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 149 
 
 being a mere record, which we may use for our satisfac- 
 tion but need not for our life. 
 
 § § § 
 Now on that head there is this to say. Christ certainly 
 
 was the final and complete revelation of God, in every 
 
 material sense. In him the great transaction was done, 
 
 the great Word said. In him we have history's final 
 
 cause and final crown. In him we have the great close. 
 
 All evolution up to him now goes on in him. In Christ 
 
 creation " arrived," attained for good. In every material 
 
 sense that is so. But in a formal sense it is not so. 
 
 The material revelation and consummation in Christ is 
 
 not complete without a formal consummation in its 
 
 interpretation. The finished work of Christ was not 
 
 finished till it was got home. A lesson is not taught, 
 
 say our educationalists, till it is learned. He made the 
 
 victory real, but he had yet to make it actual. He had 
 
 not to gain another victory, but he had to follow up the 
 
 victory he had won, and enter on the kingdom it secured. 
 
 The great close in Christ had itself to be closed, or at 
 
 least clinched, in a close of its own. 
 
 § § § 
 I have spoken of one error that misleads us — the 
 treatment of historic and moral development as if it were 
 a case of simple and continuous evolution ; marred, 
 indeed, by occasional fits of degeneration and reversion, 
 but devoid of those great consummations or " harvests '* 
 which truly end one age and begin another, but are 
 also permanent acts and conquests of the Absolute 
 and Eternal. There is, however, another analogy 
 from nature which is as misleading as it mostly is 
 to carry natural law into the moral world. It is 
 the analogy of the germ. The germ in nature unfolds 
 
 M
 
 150 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 by absorbing the forces of its environment and ex- 
 ploiting them for its own individual growth. It is more 
 concerned to assert and develop its own individu- 
 ality, or that of its species, than to create a new order 
 and establish a new world. But a germ, a source, in a 
 revelation of grace, is different. Its object is not to 
 absorb the world but to act on it. It has to unfold not 
 within itself so much as within an intelligence of itself. 
 Its purpose is not to be but to be understood, to be 
 answered ; it is not to live on its environment but to 
 bless it. A germ of life is one thing, and a germ of 
 revelation or redemption is another. In the one case we 
 have to do with a created fact, in the other with a 
 creative. In the one case we have the fact insulated and 
 self-sufficient, in the other the fact is inert apart from its 
 being understood and interpreted. You have not the 
 whole fact without its interpretation. If human evolution 
 closed in Christ it did not close in a mere Superman, 
 whose genius it was to thrive on a merely tributary race. 
 A gracious close like Christ is one that takes effect in 
 human response and communion, and not in mere contri- 
 bution. His value is not in himself all unknown, but in 
 himself interpreted and assimilated by the race in which 
 he rises. The fact Christ, however complete materially, 
 is not complete formally, or in effect, till he is understood 
 and answered, till he is explained and realised in a 
 Church. That he is complete materially is shown by 
 the fact that his explanation proceeds from himself. He 
 is his own interpreter. It is very properl}' asked con- 
 cerning the synoptic Christ, Why did he not explain 
 himself ? And the answer is that he did, as soon as the 
 whole work was done, and the whole fact accomplished 
 which had to be explained. He interpreted himself in his
 
 V.I The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 151 
 
 Apostles, in the New Testament. If Paul's view of 
 Christ was but a guess, and can now be seen to be a 
 wrong one, the revelation was left by Christ incomplete, 
 and therewith the redemption. The great close, there- 
 fore, ends in bearing witness of itself, and coming to 
 its own in man's soul. And this happened in the 
 Apostles. To close this great close is the work of the 
 New Testament, as something formally, uniquely, integral 
 to the revelation in Christ. 
 
 § § § 
 When we say the revelation is Christ we must 
 take the whole Christ, the whole New Testament Christ, 
 the Christ as his Spirit interpreted him, and not only 
 the Christ as an annalist, a reporter, might record him. 
 To say vaguely that the revelation is Christ, or that 
 Christ is the centre, is the source of most of our 
 confusion. The manifestation had to be closed by the 
 interpretation or inspiration to complete the revelation. 
 The material revelation had to take effect in a formal in- 
 spiration before it could start on the career of its own 
 evolution. It took this formal effect in the New Testa- 
 ment, which is not the mere product of the revelation but 
 part of it, the formal element of it, as Christ was the 
 material. If the only legacy of Christ was the im- 
 pression he left on his followers, of course this could 
 not be so. But impression was not all. Christianity 
 is not an impressionist creed. The faith of the 
 Church, being an act of life's self-committal and 
 worship, is more than the posthumous impression 
 left by Jesus. Had it not been more, like all im- 
 pressions it would have worn off. As an act it 
 answered an act — an eternal act, which gives it its own 
 depth and permanency. It was a new life, a new
 
 152 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 creation. And still greater than the Church's faith is the 
 apostles' inspiration, a life even within the new life. It 
 is not only a response, but that part of Christ's great and 
 final act which is continued by him from the unseen ; 
 it is not a mere echo of it in his survivors. The New 
 Testament is not the first stage of the evolution hut the 
 last phase of the revelationary fact and deed. The revela- 
 tion had to be interpreted for all time in order to act 
 on time — ^just as, on a lower plane, the Church of the 
 early centuries is put into the Athanasian Creed for all 
 time, and the Reformation into the Augsburg Con- 
 fession. But the plane is much lower. For into these 
 documents it was the Church that put itself, whereas 
 into the New Testament it was Christ that put him- 
 self, in a way parallel to his self-projection in the 
 Church. The creeds are not parallel to the Church, 
 but the Bible is. They are products of the Church. 
 The Bible is not. It is a parallel product of the 
 Spirit who produced the Church. The Church was 
 made by faith, the Bible by inspiration. They are two 
 products of one Spirit ; the one is not a product of the 
 other. The Bible was not produced by the Church ; and 
 yet the Church was there before the Bible. Both were 
 there collaterally from the Spirit. 
 
 § § § 
 I may perhaps use another illustration, suggested by 
 Griitzmacher, which I will somewhat enlarge in the 
 application. In a parliamentary discussion, if the 
 subject be very large, the debate may go on indefinitely, 
 as new aspects of the question are unfolded and new 
 lights cast upon it. As the discussion is carried into the 
 press so much the more do new points arise, and again 
 fresh points out of these. If the parliament were
 
 v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 153 
 
 enlarged to the dimensions of the press the evolution and 
 the length of the analytic process might be interminable. 
 And it would become quite interminable if the whole of 
 the population were included in the debate — to say 
 nothing of the population of the world, extended to all the 
 population that had ever existed on the earth. Now 
 such a process would correspond to the simple expansive 
 evolution of the natural world in a. process. But in practi- 
 cal affairs a point comes when the debate must be closed. 
 It really does not exist for its own expansion, but for 
 the sake of its close, in due time, in an act; which act 
 is its end, and has a value and authority relatively final. 
 It is final so far as that debate is concerned, and it is 
 permanent amid all subsequent debates. It registers 
 a real achievement and a point won. Even if it 
 becomes the point of departure for future reform it is 
 more than that. It has a real value for its present. 
 It has added to the permanent. So the evolutionary 
 process culminates from time to time in results which 
 are not mere products of the process but are im- 
 posed on it by a will ; and they have more value 
 than mere points of transition or links of past and future. 
 And if the process were on a world-scale all these ends, 
 with their relative finality, with their permanent contri- 
 bution and eternal value, would be gathered up in an end 
 absolutely final, the end of all ends, their consummation, 
 in which they found themselves when the mere process 
 of their production had faded away with the ink of the 
 cosmic Hansard. The Christian case is that this cosmic 
 end has been anticipated with condensed finality at one 
 point of history, for the sake of all the rest, in the 
 absolute end, act, and personality of Jesus Christ. 
 
 But to go a step further. If parliament simply passed
 
 154 ^'*^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect 
 
 its act and proceeded to a new subject what would the 
 effect be ? It would be nothing. The House would 
 have the satisfaction of having done something, gathered 
 up its discussion, and expressed itself, and, so far, the 
 country behind it, in an act of public will. And it would 
 then go to the moors, leaving behind it an academic 
 resolution. But for public life and the public future that 
 would be perfectly futile. The act of the House's will 
 must by the same will go upon the House's records. It 
 must be printed and circulated in due form. It must 
 be accessible to the nation when the House has risen, 
 and when that parliament has dissolved. It is not 
 enough that an account of it should appear in the papers 
 according to the skill of the stenographer, or the view 
 of some publicist who studied the debates. It must 
 be printed by order of the House. And it must carry 
 the royal seal of finality upon it. That is to say, the 
 form of the act is there by the same will of the Govern- 
 ment as carried the principle of the act. The act as 
 printed and published is an integral though formal part 
 of the material act of will which passed it. Now, 
 with all recognition of the difference between the strict 
 verbiage of an act and the fluidity of much in scripture 
 both as to word and fact, that illustration represents 
 the relation of the New Testament to God's fact and 
 act of Christ. The form is part of the whole act. 
 And the illustration would be still more detailed if 
 we included in the Act of Parliament a provision that 
 it go to the public accompanied by certain schedules 
 of explanation drawn up by order of the Crown. The 
 point is that not only does the evolutionary series 
 exist and work to a positive end, but that that 
 material end has within itself a formal close, expres-
 
 v.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 155 
 
 sion, and interpretation ; which is an integral part of 
 it, essential to its effect, and not simply a first amateur 
 and tentative stage in its interpretation by the casual 
 press and public. The formal expression shares, in its 
 way, in the authority of the material act, and has behind 
 it the royal power. This is the authority in the Bible. 
 It is a factor in the finality of Christ. It is a schedule to 
 the act, and not a mere leader on it. We can no more 
 believe in the infallibility of the Bible, but we must believe 
 in its finality. That is the region of its inspiration. It is 
 a region of religion and faith. For in theology there is no 
 finality. What science requires is evolution, and theology 
 is science. But the one need of religion to-day is 
 finality. And for Christianity that can only be had by 
 an Incarnate Christ as preached in an inspired Bible. 
 
 The point, then, of this lecture is this : When the 
 Apostles spoke as they did upon such central matters as 
 the eternal sonship and due worship of Jesus Christ they 
 did not speak from themselves ; they recorded no mere 
 impression, and ventured no guess to explain the 
 impression left by Christ ; but they spoke as men in 
 whose experience there spoke still more the Christ who 
 lived in them. And, though on matters lying further 
 from the centre, on matters of anthropology rather than 
 theology (like the connection between sin and physical 
 death), they were less authoritative, yet when they spoke 
 of Christ's person or his work, they were the organs of 
 Christ himself, and their truth has a value for all sub- 
 sequent times which partakes of the authority of that 
 revelation whom they interpreted.
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC 
 INSPIRATION— IN PARTICULAR
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC INSPIRATION — 
 IN PARTICULAR 
 
 In positive revelation we have to do with two things. 
 The one fact has two constituents. We have, first, the 
 history or the manifestation, and we have, second, the 
 inspiration or the interpretation of the history. We 
 have, first, God entering the world, and we have, 
 second, this entry of God entering man. We have the 
 fact, and we have the word of the fact. The fact we have 
 in Christ ; but the word of it, the meaning of it, we have 
 in believers and apostles moved by Christ. And especi- 
 ally in the apostles, whose insight becomes itself a fact, 
 in turn, working upon believers from faith to faith. So 
 that we have three things — first the incarnate fact, then, 
 the word or interpretation of it by apostles, and, thereby, 
 the fact again, but the fact enshrined in the soul of the 
 believing Church. To use philosophical terms, we 
 have the thesis, planting itself out in an antithesis, and, 
 then reclaiming, recovering itself in a synthesis. We 
 have first, the fact incarnate, then the fact interpreted, 
 and then the fact enthroned. But we must have the word 
 as well as the fact, if the fact is to do anything with men. 
 The word is an essential part of the fact, or, let us say, an 
 
 "59
 
 i6o The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 essential function of it. It is the fact reacting on itself. 
 It is the vast eternal action of Christ reverberating in the 
 consciousness of his apostles. It went out as power and 
 returns as light, doubling back luminously upon itself, 
 as it were, to search its old track by this inspiration. 
 Only in such a sense is the incarnation prolonged in the 
 Church. The total revelation needs the inspiration as 
 well as the manifestation, the thought no less than the 
 thing, "The fact without the word is dumb; and the 
 word without the fact is empty." 
 
 Now it is only with the interpretation of the fact that 
 inspiration has to do, and not with the fact itself; for we 
 do not speak of Christ the fact as an inspired man. Nor 
 has it directly to do with the establishment of the fact as 
 a fact. Inspiration has not to do with information but 
 with insight- It has to do entirely with the theology of 
 the matter, and not with its historicity. What a pagan 
 or mantic notion of inspiration they must have who use it 
 to discredit theology, who in the name of truth dis- 
 credit interpretation by afflatus. The facts in the 
 Bible were established by the usual means, as in 
 Luke's case (Luke i. i). But the meaning of the fact 
 — that is the field of inspiration. The fact of the 
 cross, for instance, is established by the ordinary 
 historic evidence ; but it was no ordinary means that 
 enabled Paul to see its interior — the atonement, the 
 centrality, and the finality of it for Christ's work. 
 The idea of propitiation, for instance, was in Juda- 
 ism and its ritual. That is something of which we 
 have the due historic evidence. The inspiration of the 
 apostle was not in discovering the idea; it was in seeing 
 its real truth and consummation to be in the fact and act 
 of Christ. The idea had at last become historically and
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration i6l 
 
 finally effective in Christ. The fact of the cross was seen 
 to mean that consummation. Yet the insight was the 
 result of that fact's own peculiar nature, working on 
 Paul's peculiar nature, through the Lord the Spirit. So 
 that the New Testament writings are really a part of that 
 fact ; just as the Old Testament is an essential part of 
 Israel's history, and not merely a description, nor only a 
 product of it. The apostles read God's will in the fact 
 of Christ ; but it was from a height of faith to which 
 that fact had raised them. Christ by his work made 
 them saints, and by the inspiration of his Spirit he 
 made them theologians. The inspiration of the 
 Redeemer gave them that understanding. They saw 
 the deep things in Christ under the moral coercion 
 of the fact and its nature, under its creative and 
 illuminative action on them. It reorganised their whole 
 conceptual world by giving it a new vital centre, and 
 therefore a new reading. They saw a new world because 
 a new king was on its throne. And it was a vital and 
 creative centre. There was new vision, not simply a 
 new point of view, because the eyes that saw it were the 
 eyes of new men. 
 
 § § § 
 But why isolate the apostles and give them a unique 
 authority ? The apostles were not the only contempo- 
 raries of Christ nor his only followers. Yet the rest did 
 not see what they saw. The whole public, the whole 
 Church even, did not rise to Paul's height or John's. 
 How shall we know that the insight and judgment of the 
 apostles was worth more, was more true to the fact, 
 than that of other contemporaries of Jesus who were not 
 so impressed ? Why should they be right, and Judas, 
 Caiaphas, or Pilate wrong — as well as many better men,
 
 i62 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 like Hillel, who did not respond as the disciples did to 
 Christ ? How do we know that the apostle's view of him 
 is the divine truth of him ? How do we know that Paul's 
 Christianity is truer than that of the Judaistic Christians 
 who opposed him as earnestly and sincerely as the 
 rationalists do now ? 
 
 Well, in the first place they were all contemporary but 
 they were not all intimate with Jesus. All had acquain- 
 tance but all had not knowledge. All had met Christ but 
 all had not companied with him. Nor were they selected 
 and taught by him in view of the future. 
 
 But even of those who companied with Jesus all did 
 not see in Him or His cross what John, Paul, and Peter 
 declare that they at last came to see. And Paul and the 
 author of Hebrews did not company with Jesus ; yet 
 they go deeper than any of those that did — for John 
 owed himself in this respect to Paul. How was it ? 
 Were the men who saw deepest more holy personally 
 than the rest ? Was it because they did the will better 
 that they knew of the doctrine ? Will that overworked 
 principle explain inspiration ? Why should we prefer the 
 interpretation of Paul to that of the early chapters of 
 Acts ? Why prefer even the late Peter of the Epistle to 
 the early Peter of the Acts ? 
 
 Let us see what they believed and claimed as to 
 themselves. They did claim special, exceptional know- 
 ledge, quite different from that of natural acumen or 
 religious genius. Of this claim i Cor. ii. 14 is but a 
 sample. The natural man, however brilliant or shrewd, 
 receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they 
 are spiritually discerned. " He that is spiritual " (which 
 for Paul did not mean he that has spirituality, but he 
 that has the miraculous and specific gift of the Spirit,
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 163 
 
 the new life of the New Creation, which makes a man 
 a Christian) "juJgeth all things and is beyond man's 
 judgment." Or again, v. 16, "We have the mind of 
 Christ." The context shows that this has nothing to do 
 with the temper of Christ, or what is now known as the 
 Christian spirit. And the "we" is admitted to mean 
 the Apostles, as distinct from the initiates they were 
 teaching. The meaning is that, by the supernatural 
 gift of the Spirit, possessed only in the Church, Paul 
 h id knowledge of the intention of Christ, Christ's 
 implicit thought, God's meaning in Christ, the theology 
 of Christ and the cross. That is what Paul meant 
 (whether he was right in thus thinking he had Christ's 
 theology or not). So it was not only that the 
 Apostles were in closer historic proximity to Jesus 
 than other men, though that makes them historically 
 unique. Nor was it only that they had the common 
 faith which marked them off from the world by a new 
 creation, as members of the Church. Nor was it 
 only that this faith acted on a natural endowment 
 which tended to religious exaltation, not only that some 
 of them were religious geniuses, flushed with a new en- 
 thusiasm, and kindled to unusual insight. But, by their 
 own account, they were uniquely instructed by the Spirit, 
 and not merely renewed. They had what they called 
 " the gift of knowledge " as a charisma of the Spirit. 
 Truly it was in no ecstatic way, in no trance or such 
 like thing. The spirit did not act merely by exalting their 
 whole nature to a pitch of unique sensibility. Sensibility 
 does not always mean insight. But indeed it is no more 
 possible to describe the inner psychology of inspiration 
 in the apostles than in the prophets. Many Christians 
 had both the Christian facts and the Christian faitli
 
 164 The Person and Place oj Jesus ChrUt [lect. 
 
 who never rose to inspiration. They had only personal 
 religion in the Spirit. But with the Apostles it was a 
 special gift of the Spirit, not enlarging the revelation in 
 matter but certainly opening its interior and pointing 
 its form. It was the action upon them of the ascended 
 and reigning Christ — his instruction. Especially so 
 when the call came to write, when the trying hour and 
 the anointed spirit met. Paul was more inspired in this 
 Corinthian chapter than in the third heaven ; so close is 
 inspiration to history. Besides the living faith and the 
 special chrism their natural possibilities were roused also 
 by the actual junctures in which they found themselves. 
 The occasion of writing was some providential juncture 
 in the affairs of the Church ; and they managed and 
 directed that juncture as men writing of final truths 
 in which they habitually lived, truths given them to 
 see by the indwelling Lord. They claimed to possess 
 absolute certainty about the greatest things of God 
 and the Soul, and the central action of Christ and 
 His cross. They shared the self-certainty of Christ. 
 They do not write as if any interpretation of Christ 
 besides their own was thinkable. And they make a 
 distinction, which was mostly clear to themselves, 
 between what they gave as the mind or intention 
 of Christ and what they did not so give. For some of 
 their words they claimed a like authority with that of 
 Christ. They claimed the obedience that the Church 
 would give to Christ (2 Cor. ii. 9 ; vii. 15, Acts xv. 28). 
 The whole of i Cor. ii. is of classic value for the Apostle's 
 view of his own inspiration ; and it certainly does not 
 allow us to think that he regarded himself as groping 
 after great truths, making great guesses, or feeling about 
 at an inchoate stage in the understanding of Christ and 
 his work.
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 165 
 
 § § § 
 Now was this sense of unique insight and final inter. 
 
 pretation a delusion ? Was it inflation or inspiration ? 
 
 Was it ideal obsession or divine visitation ? Were the 
 
 apostles megalomaniacs ? And yet founded the Church ? 
 
 1. We may note here that their belief in their own 
 position and knowledge was accepted by the Church 
 then, and has been corrobated by the Church ever since. 
 It came home with the demonstration of the Spirit and 
 of power (Rom. i. 16, i Cor. ii. 4, i Th. i. 5, Ep. vi. 17). 
 And it is what has survived. 
 
 2. It had been provided for by Christ, who said that 
 in the great crises not they should speak but the Spirit 
 of God should speak in them. (Mat. x. 20, xvi. 19.) 
 
 3. It was the same note of authority and finality as 
 sounds through all the prophets, who, over and over, 
 speak their words not only in God's name but in the first 
 person, as if, for the hour at least, not they lived but 
 God lived in them. 
 
 4. The apostles claimed for their words, especially on 
 Eternal Truth, a like permanent authority with Christ's. 
 They even ignore his precepts, which they seldom or 
 never quote to their Churches; they make their own, 
 and they expect for them the obedience due to Christ. 
 In their preaching, moreover, they drop his parable style 
 for one of their own. And the homiletic of the Church 
 followed them in this, and did not copy either the 
 synoptic or the Johannine style of address, and certainly 
 not Christ's conversational dialectic. In i Thess. iv. 15 
 we have, " I say unto you by the word of the Lord," as 
 we have it also in i Kings xiii. 17. In Gal. vi. 2 we find 
 " Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of 
 Christ," But there is no such precept from Christ 
 
 N
 
 i66 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 that we know of. The law is fashioned by the apostle 
 out of the Gospel of Christ. Yet how easy it would have 
 been to refer to some such precept of Christ as the new 
 commandment to love one another and to minister to 
 the brethren as he did. So, i Cor. vii. lo, " I give 
 charge, yet not I, but the Lord." On this ground 
 the apostles claimed, for their precept if not their person, 
 the obedience really due to one whom the Church 
 worshipped. (2 Cor. ii. 7, g, 15, 2 Th. ii. 15, Acts xv. 28.) 
 They were not indeed reincarnations of the Incarnate, 
 but they were his organs. The source of their certainty 
 was one quite different from reason and its proof (i 
 Cor. ii. 4, and especially verse 12 ; what they knew was 
 " things given by God "). 
 
 The process of this certainty and authority, the 
 psychology of it they could not explain even to themselves 
 (i Peter i. 10). It was not irrational, but it was alogical. 
 Their central truth was a supernatural gift ; it was not 
 an achievement or a discovery of theirs. 
 
 5. What they saw and said in this way was not for 
 them the revelation but the interpretation of the 
 revelation. It was not given them by a second 
 revelation ; it was given by insight into the one and 
 only revelation ; by the finished revelation filling itself 
 out in them; by the inspiration that distended the 
 material fact, and thus formally completed the revelation. 
 They saw and they said what Christ was, not what an 
 imaginative intelligence surmised. They translated 
 Christ, the text, who without the translation would 
 have been a dead letter so far as history is concerned. 
 They treated their text exegetically, not fantastically, 
 not ingeniously. What they gave was the meaning of 
 Christ; and they gave it in a way that the earthly
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 167 
 
 Christ himself could not— in the light of his finished 
 work. The finishing of that work by the cross was 
 not always perfectly certain in Christ's earthly thought ; 
 even in Gethsemane, I have said, he cherished the hope 
 that there might still open from the Father's will some 
 other way. But for Paul the cross had come and gone 
 — or rather had come to remain as the pivot and key of 
 all. The apostles' inspiration was the interpretation of 
 the cross as being the revelation of all the revelation in 
 Christ. We have in it not only the impression on 
 them from the historic Christ but the tremendous action 
 on them of Christ the glorified, of Christ in the heavenly 
 close and consummation of all that he was (and of all 
 that history was), in his cross, resurrection, and glory. 
 Their inspiration formed the coda of the crowning 
 movement in the total work of Christ. What they 
 spoke was the secret in the cross, the wisdom that 
 God had hidden away from thought in the mystery, or 
 sacrament, of the cross (i Cor. ii. 7). They expounded 
 the sacrament of Godhead, God manifest in the flesh. 
 Their inspiration was to set forth in word and thought 
 the principle and power of that supreme sacrament of 
 the Word, namely Christ ; it was to exhibit formally 
 the truth materially embodied in the manifestation. 
 Their work on it was analytic and not synthetic. Their 
 metier was the knowledge of things already given, i Cor. 
 ii. 12. It was to set forth the inwardness of the historic 
 fact and spectacle. It was the searching of the deep 
 things of God, the exhibition of what was hidden 
 (hidden, possibly, even from the earthly consciousness 
 of Christ himself), interpreting such spiritual things to 
 spiritual men (i Cor. ii. 13). 
 
 And this they do not only through the psychological
 
 i68 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 effect of the manifestation upon their souls, but much 
 more, through the selective, the miraculous action in 
 them of the same Christ who was the manifestation, 
 and is now in them his own interpreter. They did 
 not simply echo the cross ; they were anointed by 
 Christ to decipher it. The apostolic inspiration is the 
 posthumous exposition by Christ of His own work ; 
 and it takes as much precedence of his earthly and 
 (partly) interim teaching as the finished work is more 
 luminous than the work in process. If Paul felt at his 
 vital moments that not he lived but Christ lived in 
 him, then, surely in the great matters of insight and 
 seasons of speech, it was not he that spoke but Christ 
 that spoke in him. And if, as Peter says (i Peter i. 
 lo), the prophets had to study and clarify for themselves, 
 by their inspiration, things that were given them to 
 do or speak more greatly than they knew, so we may 
 venture to say, perhaps {mutatis mutandis), that the 
 spiritual Christ himself, looking back from his glory 
 on the work of his humiliation, and still ministering it to 
 history, opened up his manifestation then by his inspira- 
 tion in the apostles, in whom he dwelt and prolonged 
 his work through its actual to its vocal close. 
 
 § § § 
 So let us aim at some clearness when we say that Chris- 
 tianity is Christ. The essence of Christianity is not in the 
 bare fact, but in the fact and its interpretation. It is not 
 in a mere historic Jesus, evidentially irresistible, but in a 
 Christ evangelically irresistible, a Christ who is the medi- 
 ator of the grace of God. Is this not so in regard to the 
 Old Testament ? Where is our perennial interest there ? 
 Not in the chronicle but in the message, the purpose in it. 
 The Old Testament is valuable neither as a history of Israel,
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 169 
 
 nor as a history of religion, but as a history of revelation, 
 of grace, of redemption. And the new scholarship has 
 done us an unspeakable service in planting us at the outset 
 at the part of the Old Testament which contains that 
 interpretation, in planting us on the prophets. It has 
 moved our starting point from the historic books to the 
 prophetic, from the narrators to the preachers of the 
 Old Testament, from the history to the inspiration. It 
 has made the inspiration of the Apostles of the Old 
 Testament the standpoint from which all the story is 
 to be read and construed. They do not so much give us 
 Israel as what God meant by Israel. And it is only 
 carrying the same method into the New Testament when 
 we fix on the Epistles with their dogmatic element, and 
 make that the view-point from which the fact is to be 
 read and the gospels themselves interpreted. It is in 
 these interpreting books that the inspiration lies rather 
 than in the narrative. There is more inspiration in the 
 Epistles than in the Gospels, as Luther truly said. That 
 is to say, in the total revelation the inspirational element 
 predominates in the Epistles and the exhibitionary 
 element in the gospels. It is in the Epistles that we 
 have the essence of Christianity, what the fact means for 
 God, and grace, and man. It is there the heart of the 
 fact ceases to be dumb. And it is there that we have 
 the fixed point from which to exercise the critical method 
 upon the Gospels with truly religious historic and scien- 
 tific effect. It is the whole Biblical Christ that is the 
 truly and deeply historic Christ. 
 
 § § § 
 What we have, therefore, is results like these. 
 I. God does in Christ the one thing needful for the holy 
 redemption of the race into the kingdom. This thing
 
 170 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 done is the power and action of God unto salvation. It 
 is not merely a source of power to us if we use it, but it 
 is the act of God finished for us in Heavenly places. In 
 Christ God redeemed once for all. 
 
 2. To make this effective in history it must be declared. 
 What is the work for us without its word ? It must be 
 interpreted, unfolded, in thought and speech, else men 
 would not know they were saved. The work alone 
 would be dumb as the word alone would be empty. 
 
 There are some who recognise in Christ's death no action 
 beyond what it had, and has increasingly, upon mankind. 
 It did not act on God but only from Him. Those who 
 so think may be particularly asked what provision Christ 
 made that a work with that sole object should be secured 
 to act on history, and should not go to waste. He wrote 
 nothing himself. If he had it could not well have 
 included the effect of his death — unless he had done with 
 a posthumous pen what my plea is he did by his Apostles. 
 He did not even give instructions for a written account 
 which should be a constant source for the effect on us 
 intended by his life. Nor did he take any precautions 
 against perversions in its tradition. Yet it is hard to 
 think that a mind capable of so great a design on pos- 
 terity should neglect to secure that his deed and its sig- 
 nificance should reach them in some authentic way. He 
 surely could not put himself into so great an enterprise, 
 and then leave it adrift on history, liable to the accidents 
 of time or the idiosyncracy of his followers. He could 
 not be indifferent whether an effective record and inter- 
 pretation of his work should survive or not. He would 
 then have shown himself unable to rear the deed he brought 
 forth. It would have been stillborn unless the close of 
 it in some way secured its action on the posterity which
 
 VI.] The Testimony oj Apostolic Inspiration 171 
 
 we are told was its sole destination, on those whom alone 
 it was to affect or benefit. But that completion of his 
 work he did secure if he inspired its transmission and 
 interpretation in the Bible. If he died to make a Church 
 that Church should continue to be made by some per- 
 manent thing from himself, either by a continuous 
 Apostolate supernaturally secured in the charisma veritatis, 
 as Rome claims, or by a book which should be the real 
 successor of the Apostles, with a real authority on the 
 vital matters of truth and faith. But, we discard the 
 supernatural pope for the supernatural book. And so we 
 come back, enriched by all we have learned from repudi- 
 ating a verbal inspiration and accepting an inspiration of 
 men and souls, to a better way of understanding the 
 authority that there is in the inspiration of a book, a canon. 
 We move from an institutional authority to a biblical ; and 
 then from Biblicism we advance to Evangelism. But it 
 is an Evangelism bound up with a book because bound 
 up with history. The Bible is a historic book in a sense 
 far other than the Koran. There is more in the matter 
 than personal inspiration, just as there is more in the 
 corporate Church than a group of sacred souls. Were 
 personal inspiration all, the end might have been reached 
 by one great hierophant. But we have a group of them, 
 with a central message in common, however complemen- 
 tary its various aspects are, however contradictory even 
 some of its minor aspects might be. And this because, 
 for all the pronounced personality of each Apostle, he 
 was yet the representative of a whole Church, an Eternal 
 Saviour, and a universal salvation. The interpretation of 
 the manifold work of Christ should be a corporate matter. 
 The salvation of the whole Church could not be duly 
 interpreted by one man in it ; one man could not even
 
 172 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 make a liturgy for a Church ; any such man would be 
 too nearly its Saviour or its Intercessor. Therefore in 
 apostles, chosen at his will, the sole Saviour became the 
 sole interpreter, so far as the elements were concerned 
 which made him Saviour. He was the real author of 
 the New Testament (if the image might be pardoned), 
 with the Apostles, as it were, but his staff, though with 
 a very free hand. He rounded off his great work by in- 
 spiring an authoritative account of it, in records which 
 are not mere documents, but are themselves acts within 
 his integral and historic act of salvation. They are 
 spiritual sources and not historic memoranda — sacraments 
 even more than sources. And they have an authority of 
 their own greater than is due to mere proximit}' — how- 
 ever we may be guided by the critics, as subalterns of the 
 same spirit, in adjusting the fabric or cleansing its face. 
 
 There are two classes of historical document. There 
 are those that simply report a transaction as a narrative 
 of it might do, either in a book or a newspaper. 
 And there are documents which are documents in the 
 case, which, like treaties, focus the action, form an 
 integral part of the deed itself, and carry not only the 
 consent which made the act, but the signature which 
 sends it forth, and perhaps codicils of authoritative 
 explanation. The New Testament writings (taken of 
 course out of the ban of verbal inspiration, or of an equal 
 inspiration in every part), belong to the second class. 
 They are part of the whole transaction, integral to the 
 great deed. And we do not get the whole Christ or his 
 work without them. 
 
 The same Christ, the same Spirit * as acted in the 
 
 ♦••Christ, who by the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself unto God." I 
 cannot here enter on the difficult question raised by the phrase " The Lord 
 is the Spirit."
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 173 
 
 redeeming deed acted also in the interpretation ; and 
 with a like novelty, a like originality, a like miraculous, 
 creative, and final power — with a like absolute origin- 
 ality, but in a different form. The New Testament, we 
 have seen, is an integral part of a binary revelation, 
 which consists of the manifestation and the inspiration or 
 interpretation which the manifestation itself creates, and 
 creates both from its historic base and from its home 
 in the unseen. The difference of this inspiration from 
 every other lies in the unique nature of the personal 
 fact, in the generic difference from every other deed 
 of the deed whose spirit was in both — both in the fact 
 and in the interpretation — the deed of the Cross. 
 
 § § § 
 3. I have said that the New Testament writings have 
 
 the originality belonging to the fact and work of Christ, 
 
 though in a form different from what it had in his 
 
 personality. I go on to say that it is in a form different 
 
 also from our apprehension of the fact through them. As 
 
 we have God by the miracle of Christ, so we have Christ 
 
 by the miracle of the apostolic inspiration. (Mat. xi. 27, 
 
 xvi. 17). If the manifested deed is miraculous, so is the 
 
 inspired. The apostles' understanding of the cross is 
 
 miraculous, like the cross itself. It is there by the direct 
 
 and specific action of the same Spirit as that by which 
 
 Christ offered himself to God, though the action took 
 
 another form. So also the form of our illumination 
 
 through the apostles is different from theirs by the very 
 
 fact that they had no apostles to mediate the truth to 
 
 them. As Christ was the direct mediator of the work 
 
 itself, having himself no Saviour, so the apostles are the 
 
 direct mediators of the central truth about it, having 
 
 therein no human revealers. They were untaught by the
 
 174 ^^^ Person and Place of Jems Christ [lect. 
 
 words of any man's wisdom in the great leap of finding 
 in Christ the reality of whatever ideas they had learned 
 from the age around them. 
 
 § § § 
 4. The production, then, of this original and unique 
 
 understanding of Christ in the apostles is inspiration. Of 
 its psychology, as I have said, we know little or nothing. 
 The men may have known little. At least they have 
 left us little. It was quite different from the trances of 
 which Paul had experience, but which he does not treat 
 as sources of inspiration. When he was beside himself 
 the matter was between him and God alone; it was in his 
 personal religion. But when it was a matter of inspira- 
 tion and of interpreting Christ to history, to men, he was 
 sober for their sakes. (2 Cor. v. 13.) His inspiration 
 was more than the originality of genius. In Galatians, 
 you may remember, by a wonderful flash he inverted the 
 values of Old Testament history, and put prophetic 
 gospel before statutory law even in historic order. 
 (Gal. iii. and esp. ver. 17). It was an intuition that 
 arose from no scholarship, but from his powerful grasp 
 of the principle of the Gospel which Christ had revealed 
 to him as so revolutionary for the world. It was his 
 theology that enabled him to divine what criticism has 
 only verified. It was a divination greater than that 
 of the line of scholarly genius which has recently set 
 his inversion upon a scientific base, and critically shown 
 the prophets to precede at least the most legal part of 
 the law. The apostolic inspiration was also more than 
 the originality of a great poet like Milton, who presents 
 life, but not God, under aspects so fresh, new, and deep. 
 It answers the question. What is He going to do with us ? 
 It is concerned with God's whole and final purpose
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 175 
 
 for man and history, and with the inversion of man's 
 thought and action about it by the cross. Through 
 Christ, then, this redemption took place ; through the 
 apostles' interpretation it entered history. He did the 
 thing, they saw its meaning and proclaimed it ; and they 
 knew they were doing so in a final way, though not in a 
 final system. If Christ had not done the thing, but only 
 proclaimed God's doing of it, the apostles would have 
 been but his pupils and successors in the work, instead of 
 his subjects and organs. But He revolutionised man's 
 relation to God, and thus revolutionised human nature; 
 they made the change current and set it afloat in history. 
 But as the act of Christ was one which no genius 
 could do, so the apostles, as integral agents of that 
 act by way of its interpretation, were in a different 
 category from religious genius ; however their native 
 religious sensibility may have been the point of attach- 
 ment for the Spirit's use of them. 
 
 § § § 
 5. It may be asked whether the synoptic Christ, when 
 
 read without the medium of the epistles, could have 
 floated Christianity out into the world. The first answer 
 to that is that the three gospels were written for people 
 living in the theological atmosphere of the epistles. The 
 second answer is No, by themselves they could not have 
 launched the faith, so far as we can see. If we ask 
 farther, could the Synoptics keep Christianity a world 
 power now, with the certain reversion of the world's 
 mastery soon or late? Again, No. It was the interpre- 
 tation in John or in Paul that made Christianity historical 
 for men— though it was Christ's act that made it vital 
 for God and God's treatment of men. The one gathered 
 and impelled the race which the other had redeemed by
 
 176 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 a new creation. The act made the soul, the gospel of it 
 made the Church. Or again, if it is asked whether, with 
 Loisy at one end or Dale at the other, we could dissolve 
 the Gospels and leave their Christianity, the answer 
 must be a very clear. No. You cannot sever the life 
 from the word and keep the Church as a vitality detached 
 from the message of the cross. 
 
 § § § 
 Apostolic inspiration, therefore, is a certain action 
 stirred by the heavenly Christ in the soul, by which his 
 first elect were enabled to see the moral, spiritual, and 
 theological nature of the manifestation with a unique 
 clearness, a clearness and explicitness perhaps not 
 always present to Christ's own mind in doing the act. 
 Inspiration is thus much more than the impression 
 made by Christ's character or personality. It was a 
 special charisma, the charisma distinguished from others 
 by Paul himself as that of wisdom and knowledge, i Cor. 
 xii. 8 ; where it is put first, as if it were the apostolic 
 prerogative. 
 
 § § § 
 
 Of course, any modern theory of inspiration dis- 
 tinguishes between miraculous insight and miraculous 
 dictation, between finality and infallibility of interpreta^ 
 tion. The notion of the writers as being mere penmen is 
 quite incompatible with the great description of inspiration 
 in I Peter i. 10, which at least indicates the psychological 
 and even critical atmosphere in which the supernatural 
 gift worked. We must connect inspiration with the 
 personal and moral experience of the inspired (little as 
 that fact entitles us to bemean the great word inspiration 
 as we do to-day in using it of the personal experience of 
 faith's rank and file, and even of happy suggestions in
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apoatnlic Tmtpiraiion 177 
 
 common affairs). It was not hierophantic. It was not 
 the communication of occult truths quite unapprehended. 
 It was not psychological magic. True, it is of the nature 
 of genius, which is always inexplicable — only it is more 
 so. But genius is an innate predisposition, while this is 
 a positive gift at a later stage, and on the top even of 
 genius. Genius is an election, this is more, it is a special 
 call. Genius is impelled from within, this is moved from 
 without. Genius has its inspiration in the nature of 
 the man's personality, this has its inspiration from the 
 positive nature and action of a manifestation which visits 
 it. Genius works itself out, this works out the fact and 
 the person with whom it is in such causal and organic 
 connexion. It is true that for Paul the Gospel of Christ 
 did not mean the personal religion of Jesus ; it was a 
 faith of which Jesus was the object, and not the subject. 
 And yet he was its subject, in that it came from him — 
 not, however, from his earthly teaching, but from his 
 heavenly glory in his task for ever done. For Paul the 
 Gospel of Christ was not only a Gospel which treated of 
 Christ, but one which proceeded from Christ. It did not 
 come from the teaching and partial Christ (whose teach- 
 ings, if they were to be more relevant than a dreamer's to 
 an incomplete historic situation, must have been also in- 
 complete), but from the whole Christ in his complete per- 
 son and act. To divide up the personality, and detach 
 the heavenly Christ from the earthly Jesus is not a feat 
 of criticism so much as a failure of religion, or an intel- 
 lectual freak and a confession of unfaith. 
 
 Apostolic authority, therefore, is not official but per- 
 sonal, not statutory but experimental, not external but 
 internal, in the sense that it is a thing of the soul and 
 not of a mere society or its heads. The apostles are
 
 178 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 authoritative, not because they were in the Gospel group, 
 not because they formed a college to which Christ had 
 given a charter. For I have said that not all the group 
 of disciples became apostles ; and the greatest apostle 
 was not in the group. But the apostolic authority is 
 that of those who by a spiritual election had a gift of 
 supernatural insight — and insight is always more or less 
 miraculous, whether naturally in a genius or super- 
 naturally in an apostle. Why should we resent it ? We 
 do not resent the authority of the real illuminates else- 
 where. For in its nature it is inward and congenial 
 to the soul, however outward it may be in spatial 
 position or historic sequence, or in its spiritual invasion 
 of our consciousness. 
 
 § § § 
 
 As to the authority of the Bible, especially on a matter 
 like the Godhead of Christ, we may note this. The 
 mere historical aspect of the Bible is a matter of learned 
 inquiry. Its evidence for a mere historical fact must 
 stand at what it is historically worth. The difficulty 
 only begins with facts which are more than merely 
 historical, whose value lies not in their occurrence, but 
 in their nature, meaning, and effect. It is not the 
 crucifixion that matters but the cross. So it is not 
 reanimation but resurrection. And here the authority of 
 the Bible speaks not to the critical faculty that handles 
 evidence but to the soul that makes response. The 
 Bible witness of salvation in Christ is felt immediately to 
 have authority by every soul pining for redemption. It 
 is not so much food for the rationally healthy, but it is 
 medicine for the sick, and life for the dead. All the 
 highest interpretation of the Bible comes from that 
 principle of grace. Even historical criticism, which is a
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration lyg 
 
 real part of theology, should be pursued on that basis. 
 It should be a work of the Church much more than of 
 the schools. And from the Church must come the final 
 correction and appraisement of the criticism of the 
 schools. It is only knowledge with a soul of faith that 
 grasps the full scope of revelationary history. For it is 
 the history of a revelation we have to do with in 
 Christianity, it is not a revelation of history. Mere 
 history does not need to be revealed ; it can look after 
 itself by its own scientific methods. 
 
 The authority in the Bible is more than the authority 
 of the Bible ; and it is the historic and present Christ as 
 Saviour. The Gospel and not the book is the true 
 region of inspiration or infallibility — the discovery of 
 the one Gospel in Christ and His cross. That is the 
 sphere of inspiration. That is where inspiration is 
 infallible. Inspired men have been wrong on points and 
 in modes of argument — just as, even with Christ living in 
 them, they sinned in life. They have not always been 
 right by the event. But they were right in the interpre- 
 tation of the Gospel in Christ as the final work of a 
 holy God for the race. They were not infallible, but 
 they were penetrating and they were final, final as to the 
 nature of the Gospel, of Christ, and of the Church. 
 The true region of Bible authority is therefore saving 
 certainty in man's central and final part — his conscience 
 before God. And all its parts are authoritative in the 
 degree and perspective of their relation to that final 
 salvation. What distinguishes the Bible from other 
 books is not appreciable by those that seek no revelation, 
 no spiritual footing, no other world amid this, and no 
 security in the other world. It is only intelligible in its 
 core to those who are being saved in some positive way.
 
 i8o The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 It is to what the Reformers called justifying faith that 
 the Bible appears most unique and authoritative — to 
 faith in a justifying God. And it has been said that the 
 canon is authoritative so far as this, at least, that we 
 have no writings outside it that could eject one of those 
 within. 
 
 It is by the Bible that Christ chiefly works on history. 
 All the Church's preaching and work is based on it, on 
 what we only know through it. As no man could succeed 
 the apostles in their unique position and work, but their 
 book became their true successor, so no book can replace 
 this. The apostles are gone but the book remains, to 
 prolong their supernatural vision, and exercise their 
 authority in the Church. In so far as the Church pro- 
 longs the manifestation and is Christ's body, the Bible 
 prolongs the inspiration and is Christ's word. The 
 writers were and are the only authentic interpreters of 
 Christ. They said so, under the immediate shadow of 
 Christ's action on them, whether his historic or his 
 heavenly action. They never contemplate being super- 
 seded on the great witness till Christ came. If they are 
 wrong in that, where are they right ? And where are we 
 to turn ? To a critical construction of what they said — 
 they including the evangelists ? But does that not make 
 the critics, the constructors, to be the true Apostolate ? 
 And if it come to construction (as I have already said) I 
 prefer the Apostolic to the critical, if we must be forced 
 on a choice. If the Bible is not inspired but only 
 documentary we are at the critic's mercy. For what 
 does it give us apart from its inspiration ? Nothing 
 of Christ's, but only of the Apostles. In so far as it is a 
 record it is not so much a record or document of Christ 
 but of the apostolic view and message of Christ in his
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration i8i 
 
 salvation. But it is really a document for apostolic 
 inspiration, for the apostolic reading of history, rather 
 than for history as such. It documents not so much the 
 history of the revelation as the revelation in the history, 
 a certain construction of the purpose and meaning of the 
 divine coming and the divine action. If this apostolic 
 view of things be without inspiration, then about Christ 
 and his meaning we must simply guess according to our 
 needs and sympathies. But if it be authoritative any- 
 where it is on the place, person, and work of Christ, and 
 not merely on the facts, sequences, or pragmatisms of 
 his biography. In its substance it is a part of the 
 revelation ; its penumbra ; and it is as authoritative in 
 its way as the manifestation whose vibration it is. It 
 is of eternal moment to the soul whether it take or 
 leave the Christ that this book as a whole preaches to 
 the world. For it does not give us the data for a 
 Christ but Christ's own interpretation of himself. 
 
 § § § 
 From all this what follows ? It follows that the view of 
 
 Christ's place and person which pervades the New Testa- 
 ment is authoritative for us. The Christ it preaches is 
 the Christ God sent. The depth, directness, sureness, 
 and uniqueness of the inspiration guarantee the reality 
 and deity of the manifestation. If God produces a special 
 understanding of the fact he must have produced the fact. 
 If apostles so moved saw in the resurrection of Christ 
 such significance, then the fact itself is not at the mercy of 
 mere historical evidence. The act of faith when it rises 
 to inspiration gives us the reality of its object in giving us 
 its power. If God made men so to read and trust the 
 resurrection power. He could not be misleading them as 
 
 to the creative fact it streamed from. The same spirit 
 o
 
 l82 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 effected both. If inspired knowledge grow out of a 
 certain fact that fact is a part of God's revelation. We 
 cannot take the resurrection gospel and leave the resur- 
 rection fact. So also with the cross ; and so with the 
 person of Christ. If the apostles were right in believing 
 that their interpretation of the central things, the creative 
 things — details and peripherals do not concern us — were 
 given them from the Lord : — if it was Christ who taught 
 them to believe in himself as the Eternal Son, then the 
 fact was so. He was the Eternal Son. If they were 
 right about the source of their knowledge they were right 
 about the object of it ; these were one and the same. It 
 is a great " if," I admit. If they were wrong about their 
 authority and their centre, the outlying pieties of such 
 fanatics have little moral worth, however beautiful. If they 
 were wrong there they were of little value anywhere else, 
 except among the pieties and beauties of faith, which, 
 however, do not need apostles to their warrant, but appeal 
 directly enough to our spiritual aesthetic. Only they do 
 not lift us above an aesthetic religion. Divine love, were 
 it certain, is easily believed to be all that it sounds in the 
 love-song of the Christian Church, in i Cor. xiii. The 
 question is, is it certain ? Was and is Jesus Christ that 
 love for good and all ? And is there anything that can 
 separate us from that love of Christ's ? Could angels or 
 powers or things to come from new heights or depths ? 
 Could a later revelation come, and a more complete, to 
 detach us from it, and to release us from its obsession for 
 some revelation still more divine and more nearly final ? 
 
 § § § 
 A certain nobleman possessed a house in a fine park ; 
 and he owned also a great picture of his late countess, 
 painted by a classic artist in the days when her beauty
 
 VI.] The Testimony of Apostolic Inspiration 183 
 
 was the talk of the town. He was so proud of it that he 
 had it placed on an easel near a large oriel window on 
 the ground floor, so that not only his guests within but 
 the public who were allowed to stroll round the house in 
 the absence of the family might see it. Now a certain 
 stranger was staying at the hotel in the village by the 
 park gate while the family was at home and the domain 
 was closed ; who spent much of his time in rambling 
 about the neighbourhood, and sketching many of its fine 
 points. Of course he turned his glass often upon the 
 mansion with a curious eye ; and one day he fixed it upon 
 the window with the picture. He was much arrested and 
 impressed with the lady he saw there, and could not 
 banish her from his mind. Day after day he stalked the 
 window with his lens; and, though the time of the day 
 and the falling of the lights did not always enable him to 
 see her, yet he did see her so often that, being a highly 
 romantic young artist, he fell deeply in love with her, and 
 neglected his sketching to haunt the most commanding 
 point at the hour when he mostly saw her sit and 
 meditate there. At last the family went to town and he 
 had access to the grounds — only to discover that he had 
 been fooling himself; that his love was silly, and it could 
 never be answered even were all the obstacles he had 
 thought of removed. For she was a work of genius but 
 she had no life. Her beauty was great but she had no 
 heart. She could neither love, nor scorn, nor help, nor 
 speak. 
 
 If the supernatural figure of Christ that we see set out 
 in the New Testament is not real it is but a picture at 
 the great window to fool poor men. With all its beauty 
 and spell it is no more to keen and hungry souls than the 
 magic canvas to the dreaming youth. A far plainer reality
 
 184 The Person and Place 0/ Jesns Christ [lect. vi. 
 
 would better have met his heart. A real prophet would 
 mean far more to us than any Christ if the Christ were 
 but an apostolic phantasy. The apostolic family might 
 surround their picture with all pious care, admiration, and 
 observance. They might set it full in the window, 
 rhapsodise about its beauty, and about the way they felt it. 
 But it is not the mistress of the house. And it cannot do 
 or be for any the thing they need most of all. It can 
 mock them by its very unearthly beauty but it cannot 
 love their love back. It is a world's wonder of a picture, 
 but it is only painted on the window ; and it cannot open 
 the door of its own house to any either to come or to go.
 
 LECTURE VII 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF EXPERIENCE IN THE 
 SOUL AND IN THE CHURCH
 
 LECTURE VII 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF EXPERIENCE IN THE SOUL 
 AND IN THE CHURCH 
 
 Our present Protestantism is historically composed 
 from the union of two streams, which take their rise in 
 two different sources. They still flow alongside with a 
 fusion so far very incomplete ; and they react on each 
 other with an amount of irritation somewhat inexplicable 
 till we perceive that the streams are two, distinct in their 
 origin and direction. They are the Reformation and 
 the Illumination : the Reformation from the sixteenth 
 century, and the diversified movement which marked the 
 eighteenth century, and which is compendiously known 
 as the Illumination or the Aufklarung.* They are the 
 old Protestantism and the new — the one resting on the 
 objectivity of a given revelation, the other on the sub- 
 jectivity of human nature or thought ; the one finding 
 its standard in a divine intervention, the other in im- 
 
 * For a full account of the situation we should really have to recognise 
 three streams. We should have to distinguish within Protestantism the 
 old objective tendency, resting on history as the authoritative source 
 (in the Bible), and the newer subjective tendency, resting on Christian 
 experience, originating in Anabaptism, revisel in Pietism, and rewritten 
 in Schleiermacher. The one represents classic Protestantism, the other 
 romantic. I5ut ff>r the present purpose it will be liettcr to confine our 
 attention mainly to the two currents named in the text. Of course, the 
 subjectivity of human nature, which I mention immediately, becomes in 
 Pietism the subjectivity of Christianised human nature. 
 
 tS7
 
 1 88 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 manent human reason more or less generously con- 
 strued ; the one emphasising a divine redemption, the 
 other human goodness and its substantial sufficiency. 
 The face of the one movement is towards the Church 
 and the Bible, the face of the other is towards civilisa- 
 tion and culture. The one falls back upon historic 
 humanity, upon the history and the revelation there; 
 the other on intrinsic humanity and the revelation there. 
 It is a distinction much more penetrating than the 
 somewhat vulgar antithesis of Orthodoxy and Hetero- 
 doxy. It is not so much two theologies as two methods 
 — if not two religions. And neither is pure. The one, 
 the Reformation stream, carries down with it much of 
 the d6bris of mediaeval doctrine ; because at its source, 
 in the monk Luther, it was mainly a religious and 
 ethical change rather than a theological. The other, the 
 Illumination, carries with it much of the pagan debris 
 of the older Renaissance and of classic antiquity ; since 
 its element was not so much religion as thought, and its 
 achievement is not faith but culture, and especially 
 science. It was really directed at first not against 
 religion, but against what it thought a false basis of 
 religion. It sought to replace imagination by induc- 
 tion as the foundation of our conception of the world. 
 It asserted the intrinsic divinity of nature, and it would 
 make the spiritual life but the highest of natural 
 phenomena. While, therefore, the direct legacy of the 
 Reformation laid fundamental stress upon the sense of 
 guilt, and the action of grace, the legacy of the Illumi- 
 nation laid stress on native goodness, the sense of rational 
 sympathy, and the sufficiency of human love spiritualised. 
 For the one, man was the lost thing in the universe, and 
 the greatness of his ruin was the index of the dignity of
 
 vii.J The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 189 
 
 his nature; for the other, man was the one saving thing 
 in the universe ; and the greatness of his success in sub- 
 duing the world to his thought and will was the badge 
 of his heroic divinity, soiled, perhaps, but indelible. The 
 one lived by redemption and regeneration, the other by 
 evolution and education. For the one forgiveness was 
 essential, and it was identical with the new eternal life; 
 it put life on a quite new track, it was a redemption, a 
 revolution. For the other forgiveness was incidental, 
 and simply removed obstacles or redressed lapses in 
 man's developing career ; it put the train on the old 
 track, after some derailment by accident, or some loop- 
 line by error. It was a restoration. The one cultivated 
 theology and sanctity, the other science and sentiment, 
 criticism and romance. The one saw the new Jerusalem 
 descending out of heaven from God, the other saw it rise 
 " like an exhalation " from earth. The heaven of the one 
 was in the blue sky, for the other it was in the growing 
 grass. For the one the great matter was God's transcen- 
 dence over the world, for the other it was His immanence 
 in it. So the one degenerated to Deism, the other to 
 Pantheism. For the one the Incarnation is nothing 
 but miracle, inexplicable but sure; for the other it is 
 nothing but universal immanence. For the one redemp- 
 tion is an interference, for the other it is an evolution. 
 For the one Christ is absolute, for the other He is 
 but relative to the history from which He arose. For 
 the one He closes the old series totally in the new 
 creation of another, for the other He but mightily pro- 
 longs it. In the one case we believe in Christ, in the 
 other we believe like Christ. For the one Christ is the 
 object of our faith, for the other he is the captain of 
 our faith, its greatest instance. In the one we trust our
 
 igo The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 whole selves to Christ for ever, in the other we imitate 
 him. In the one he is our God, in the other our 
 brother. It is well that the issue should be clear, if 
 our choice is to be as intelligent and effectual as a faith 
 should be. 
 
 These are the two streams whose junction forms 
 current Protestantism, and can you wonder that the 
 situation is complicated and even confused ? We should 
 trivialise the whole subject if we saw in the serious 
 religious differences of the day no more than orthodoxy 
 and heterodoxy — the propriety of certain individuals on 
 the one hand, faced by the perversity of certain others 
 on the other. The conflicting views of Messrs. X and Y 
 are but the points where old opposing forces for the 
 moment emerge and meet. 
 
 And we must own each movement has its relative justifi- 
 cation. The old Protestantism had come to have great 
 need of the Illumination. It was growing cumbrous, 
 hard, and shallow. It needed especially to be trimmed 
 down and cleared up from the critical side of the 
 Illumination, and to be deepened and humanised from 
 its romantic side. In just the same way medisevalism 
 had called for the Renaissance. But all the same it was 
 not the Renaissance that really took Europe in hand at 
 that crisis. It was no Paganism that could save Europe 
 for the true Church, or the Church for Christianity. 
 That was done by the self-recuperative power of 
 Christianity itself. It was done by the self-reformation 
 of the Church, by the restoration of faith, and not the 
 renascence of culture. Remember, the Reformation was 
 not something done to the Church, but by it, and therefore 
 by its faith. It was the vital Element in the Church dis- 
 engaging and asserting itself. And so to-day it is not to the
 
 VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 191 
 
 Illumination, it is not to any culture, theological, aesthetic, 
 or scientific, that we are to look for our salvation from 
 the Protestant scholasticism which choked faith by 
 orthodoxy in the seventeenth century, and still survives 
 in the popular levels. That deliverance can only come 
 by a movement from the interior of faith itself. I know 
 it would be untrue to say that all the liberalising influence 
 in the Protestantism of to-day is due to the direct action 
 of the Reformation spirit of faith or religion. In so far 
 as that liberality is a correction of our views about God 
 in the cosmos, it is due quite as much, if not more, to 
 the Illumination, which was quite independent of the 
 reformers and rose rather from the philosophers. But 
 the real matter is not the correction of views but the 
 correction of real religion, of practical relations between 
 God and the soul. And that is due, not to the action 
 of either reason or romance, but to the renovation of faith 
 by the piety and genius of men like Spener, Francke, 
 Schleiermacher, and Wesley. * 
 
 § § § 
 It is not here a question whether each tendency must 
 ban the other, for we need both ; but it is a question 
 which of them must be dominant for Christianity, and 
 especially for original, essential Christianity. I mean for 
 Christianity as first preached, the Christianity of the 
 Bible and the apostle. In proportion as it ceases to be a 
 K-qpvyim, Christianity ceases to be Christianity, whether it 
 die in the direction of a sacramentalism or a humanism. 
 It seems to me that this is constantly overlooked by the 
 spokesmen of a Christianity which is liberal or nothing. 
 They become as much the doctrinaire victims of a specu- 
 
 * I do not forget the influence of the romantic movement on Schleier- 
 macher, but it was perhaps upon his weaker and less permanent side.
 
 192 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 lative theology as our forefathers were the victims of an 
 orthodox theology. The experimental Gospel in each 
 case ceases to be life, and evaporates to a caput mortuum 
 of certain views broad or narrow. I read a criticism of a 
 positive theologian by a liberal of the academic stamp in 
 which occurred this naive saying: "It looks as if the 
 problems of theology were here confused with the 
 practical declaration of the Gospel by preacher or 
 pastor." There is not one of the apostles that would not 
 be hit by the remark. And it applies with even more 
 force to our Lord Himself. Where are we to go for our 
 Christian theology except to their practical declaration of 
 the Gospel? The New Testament is no collection of 
 theological loci. And how are we to test a theology at 
 last but by its service for the purposes of the Gospel ? 
 Of course, if it is not a theology we are after but a 
 theosophy, if our interest is in the philosophy or psy- 
 chology of religion as a product of the human spirit, the 
 case is altered. But with that the Gospel and the 
 preacher have little directly to do. It is very interesting, 
 but it is not vital. It belongs to the Schools, to the 
 interpretive efforts of man upon the world ; it has little to 
 do with the Church and its interpretive message of man's 
 destiny, and its Gospel of God's reality in His redemptive 
 work. 
 
 When the question is forced, therefore, whether the 
 positive or the liberal movement must rule in a historic 
 Gospel, we have no hesitation about our choice. We 
 take the Reformation side of our Protestantism for a 
 stand, and not the Illuminationist. We may even go so 
 far, when the issue is forced, as to say that Illumi- 
 nationism or Rationalism is not Protestantism. We find 
 our charter in history, and not in human nature ; in the
 
 VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 193 
 
 Word, and not the world. The seat of revelation is in 
 the cross, and not in the heart. The precious thing is 
 something given, and not evolved. Our best goodness is 
 presented to us rather than achieved by us. The King- 
 dom of God is not a final goal, but an initial boon. You 
 will say, perhaps, the one does not exclude the other. 
 But for the practical issue on which all turns (except to a 
 doctrinaire intellectualism), for the last reality, it is more 
 true at this juncture to press the antithesis than to slur 
 it. The Gospel stands with the predominance of inter- 
 vention, and it falls with the predominance of evolution. 
 Grace is essentially miraculous. Christ is more precious 
 to us by what distinguishes Him from us than by what 
 identifies Him with us. The Gospel turns entirely upon 
 redemptive forgiveness ; and if evolution explain all, there 
 is no sin, and therefore no forgiveness. The Gospel turns 
 on the finality of Christ ; but on an evolutionary idea 
 there is no finality except at the close; it is therefore 
 inaccessible, for the end is not yet. There can be no 
 finality on that basis, in anyone who appeared in a middle 
 point of the chain. So far, therefore, Christ is pro- 
 visional and tentative till a greater arise. The positive 
 Gospel, we say, is the dominant thing by which modern 
 thought must be gauged and its permanence tested. We 
 may take from the modern mind and its results so much 
 only as is compatible with a real, historic, redeeming, 
 final Gospel. That Gospel is the preamble, and the 
 subsequent clauses that contradict it must go out. 
 
 We shall not be foolish enough, sectarian enough, to 
 make a sweeping condemnation of modern thought in 
 advance. For one thing, it is very hard to know what is 
 meant by it. Does it mean the mental world of Kant, and 
 Goethe, and Browning, or of Spencer, Fiske, and James,
 
 194 T^he Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 or of Nietzsche, Tolstoi and Ibsen ? Because they are in 
 many respects as incompatible with each other, and 
 hated by each other, as they are opposed to evangelical 
 Christianity. And, for another thing, we have already 
 accepted many of the results of modern civilisation. It 
 has thrust back the frontier of the Church, and given a 
 mandate to the State to take up province after province 
 which the Church used to control, in art, science, phil- 
 anthropy, education, and the like. Well, we largely 
 agree. We accept the emancipation of these from 
 religious dictation. Church discipline gives way to civic 
 rights and police protection. The number of public 
 subjects on which the preacher is entitled to a respectable 
 opinion grows fewer, while at the same time there are 
 more aspects than ever of his own subject open to his 
 study and demanding his official attention. We accept 
 the modern repudiation of an external authority in the 
 forms of belief and uniformity of confession. We accept 
 the essential inwardness of faith even when we press its 
 objective. We accept the modern freedom of the indi- 
 vidual. We accept the modern passion for reality, which 
 owes so much to science. We accept the methods of the 
 Higher Criticism, and only differ as to its results. We 
 accept the modern primacy of the moral, and the modern 
 view of a positive moral destiny for the world. And we 
 repudiate imagination, whether aesthetic or speculative, 
 as the ruling factor in the religious life. We have 
 assigned another place and function to the miraculous in 
 connection with faith. We accept the modern place 
 claimed for experience in connection with truth ; we 
 recognise that the real certainty of Christian truth canj' 
 only come with the experience of personal salvation. 
 In these and other respects we have already accepted
 
 vii.j The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 195 
 
 much which would have scared even the stout re- 
 formers. 
 
 II 
 
 I would single out for particular stress the place now 
 given to experience in religion in consequence of the 
 Reformation view of faith, co-operating with the inductive 
 method of science — our experience of Christ especially. 
 What Nature is to science, that is Christ to positive 
 faith. I would direct notice to the form of the great 
 issue presented in the question : Are we to believe in 
 Christ or like Christ ? Are we to trust ourselves to Him, 
 or to the type of religion He represents ? 
 
 I am struck with the absence of any sign of an experi- 
 ence distinctively Christian in many of those who discuss 
 the sanctuaries of the Christian faith — such as the nature 
 of the Cross, or of the self-consciousness of Christ. To 
 them Christ's first relation is to human power, or love, 
 and not to sin. They cultivate not trust in Christ, but the 
 "religion of Jesus." We are driven from pillar to post, 
 and left with no rest for the sole of our foot. Can we 
 rest on the Gospels ? No. Criticism will not allow that. 
 Can we on the Epistles ? No. Protestantism will not 
 allow that. It would be taking the external authority of 
 an apostle for our base, and that ends in Rome. But is 
 there no such thing any more as the testimonium Sancti 
 Spiritus ? No. Some of these scholars, to judge from their 
 writings alone, do not seem even so much as to have 
 heard of a Holy Ghost. And they have a fatal dread of 
 pietism, and methodism, and most forms of intensely per- 
 sonal evangelical faith. They are, like Haeckel, in their 
 own way, the victims of an intellectualism which means 
 spiritual atrophy to Christianity at last. No, they say.
 
 ig6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ lect. 
 
 if you fall back on your experience, you may land any- 
 where. 
 
 But am I really forbidden to make any use of my 
 personal experience of Christ for the purposes even of 
 scientific theology ? Should it make no difference to the 
 evidence for Christ's resurrection that I have had personal 
 dealings with the risen Christ as my Saviour, nearer and 
 dearer than my own flesh and blood ? Is His personal 
 gift of forgiveness to me, in the central experience of my 
 life, of no value in settling the objective value of His 
 cross and person ? My personal contact with Christ, our 
 commerce together, may I found nothing on these ? 
 "No," it is said, "nothing of scientific objective value. 
 These experiences may be of great personal value to you, 
 but they give you no warrant for stepping outside your 
 own feelings. They may be useful illusions in their 
 place, but you must outgrow them. You can never be 
 quite sure that the Saviour you meet is a personal reality. 
 You can never make it certain to any that He is a con- 
 tinuous personality with the historic Jesus. And it is even 
 laid upon us to make it doubtful for yourself." " In your 
 so-called communion with Christ you have no more real 
 right," we are told, " to build on the objective personal 
 reality of your vis-d-vis than the Roman Catholic girl had 
 to believe in the real presence and speech of the Virgin 
 at Lourdes. If it is Christ who visits you, it was the 
 Virgin that visited her. Of so little worth is the fact of 
 the experience in vouching for the content of experience. 
 If you commune with Christ, do not gird at those who 
 traffic with the saints." 
 
 § § § 
 Now, might I have leave to say that I had to meet that 
 problem for myself several years ago ? And the answer
 
 vii.J The Testimony of Experietice in the Soul 197 
 
 I thought satisfactory was twofold. First, it was personal ; 
 second, it was historical in two ways. 
 
 \\ I take the first first. There is, and can be, nothing so 
 certain to me as that which is involved in the most 
 crucial and classic experience of my moral self, my con- 
 science, my real, surest me. A vision might be a phantom, 
 and a colloquy an hallucination. But if I am not to be 
 an absolute Pyrrhonist, doubt everything, and renounce 
 my own reality, I must find my practical certainty in that 
 which founds my moral life, and especially my new moral 
 life. The test of all philosophy is ethical conviction. 
 That is where we touch reality — in moral action (God as 
 Spirit is God in adit), and especially in that action of the 
 moral nature which renews it in Christ. Now, my con- 
 tention is that my contact with Christ is not merely 
 visionary, it is moral, personal and mutual. - Nor is it 
 merely personal, in the same sense in which I might have 
 personal intercourse from time to time with a man in 
 whom I am little concerned between whiles. Because 
 what I have in Christ is not an impression, but a life 
 change ; not an impression of personal influence, which 
 might evaporate, but a faith of central personal change. 
 I do not merely feel changes ; I am changed. Another 
 becomes my moral life. He has done more than deeply 
 influence me. He has possessed me. I am not his loyal 
 subject, but his absolute property. I have rights against 
 King Edward, however loyal I am, but against Christ I 
 have none. He has not merely passed into my life as 
 even a wife might do, but he has given me a new life, 
 a new moral self, a new consciousness of moral reality. 
 In him alone I have forgiveness, reconciliation, the grace 
 of God, and therefore the very God, (since neither love 
 nor grace is a mere attribute of God). There has been
 
 igS The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 what I can only call a new creation, using the strongest 
 
 word in my reach. I owe him my total self. He has 
 
 not merely healed me, in passing, of an old trouble, but 
 
 He has given me eternal life. He has not only impressed 
 
 me as a vision might — even one projected from my own 
 
 interior — but he has done a permanent work on me at 
 
 my moral centre. He has made a moral change in me 
 
 which, for years and years, has worked outwards from 
 
 the very core of my moral self, and subdued everything 
 
 else to its obedience. In my inmost experience, tested 
 
 by years of life, he has brought me God. It is not 
 
 merely that he spoke to me of God or God's doings, but 
 
 in Him God directly spoke to me ; and more, he did in 
 
 me, and for me, the thing that only God's real presence 
 
 could do. Who can forgive sin but God only, against 
 
 whom it was done ? 
 
 Thus the real Catholic analogy to his action on me 
 and in me is not visions of the Virgin, or the ecstacies 
 of saints, but it is the Sacraments. In the Catholic view 
 these are objective and effective upon the inmost substan- 
 tial self; so is Christ objective, effective, creative, upon 
 my moral, my real self, upon me as a conscience, on 
 sinful me. He is the author not of my piety merely but 
 of my regeneration. My experience of him is that of 
 one who does a vital, revolutionary work in that moral 
 region where the last certainty lies. And in that region 
 it is an experience of a change so total that I could not 
 bring it to pass by any resource of my own. Nor could 
 any man effect it in me. And any faith I have at all is 
 faith in Christ not merely as its content nor merely as 
 its point of origin, but as its creator. The Christ I 
 believe in I believe in as the creator of the belief, and 
 not merely its object. I know him as the author as well
 
 VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul igg 
 
 as object of my faith in God. I know him, therefore, 
 as God. The great change was not a somersault I 
 succeeded in turning, with some divine help ; it was a 
 revolution effected in me and by him, comparable only 
 to my entry on the world. The very fact that in its 
 nature it was forgiveness and regeneration makes it a 
 moral certainty, the kind of certainty that rises from 
 contact with my Judge, with the last moral and personal 
 reality, who has power even to break me, and with my 
 Redeemer, who has power to remake me as his own. 
 
 § § § 
 
 If certainty do not lie there, where can it be found in 
 life ? If he is not real, moral reality has no meaning. 
 There are hallucinations in religious experience, but not 
 here. They might be connected with the affections but 
 not with the conscience at its one life crisis. They might 
 be as impressive as a revenant, but no more morally creative 
 and redemptive. If you claim the right to challenge th6 
 validity of my experience, you must do it on the ground 
 of some experience surer, deeper, getting nearer moral 
 reality than mine. What is it ? Does the last criterion 
 lie in sense, or even in thought ? Is it not in conscience ? 
 If life at its centre is moral, then the supreme certainty 
 lies there. It must be associated, not with a feeling nor 
 with a philosophic process, but with the last moral experi- 
 ence of life, which we find to be a life morally changed 
 from the centre and for ever. To challenge that means 
 rationalism, intellectualism, and the merest theosophy. 
 Do not forget that philosophy is but a method, while 
 faith, which is at the root of theology, presents us with 
 a new datum, a new reality. 
 
 You refuse the mere dictum of an apostle. But if we 
 may not rest upon the mere dictum of an apostle, may
 
 200 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lbct. 
 
 we not upon our own repetition of the apostolic experi- 
 ence, of the experience which made them apostles ? I say 
 repetition, but might I not say prolongation ? We rest 
 on our own participation in the ageless action of the 
 same redemption in the Cross as changed them, after 
 many waverings, for good and all. Is it not the same 
 act, the same spirit, the same real personality acting on 
 us both, in the same moral world ? And, expanding my 
 own experience by the aid of theirs, may I not say this : 
 I am not saved by the apostle or his experience, nor by 
 the Church and its experience, but by what saved the 
 apostle and the Church. When Christ did for me what 
 I have described, was it not the standing crisis of the 
 moral macrocosm acting in its triumphant way at the 
 centre of my microcosm ? Was not the moral crisis of 
 the race's destiny on Christ's cross more than echoed, 
 was it not in some sense re-enacted at my moral centre, 
 and the great conquest reachieved on the outpost scale 
 of my single crisis? The experience has not only a 
 moral nature, as a phase of conscience, but an objective 
 moral content ; as is shown by the absolute rest and 
 decisive finality of its moral effect in my life and conduct. 
 If it be not so, then we are asked to believe that men 
 can produce in themselves these changes which perma- 
 nently break the self in two, or can lift themselves to 
 eternal moral heights by their own waistband. But, if 
 so, what need is there for a God at all ? Do not even 
 the positivists likewise ? 
 
 There is no rational certainty by which this moral cer- 
 tainty of a creator Christ could be challenged ; for there 
 is no rational certainty more sure, or so sure, and none 
 that goes where this goes, to the self-disposing centres 
 of life. This moral certainty is the truly rational certainty.
 
 VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 201 
 
 Christ approves Himself as a divine reality by His revo- 
 lutionary, causal, creative action on that inmost reality 
 whereby man is man. That centre from which I act 
 (and therefore am real), meets, in a way decisive for all 
 life, with Christ in His act on the Cross. If this contact 
 represent no real formative activity on me, if it be but 
 impressionist influence, then the whole and central activity 
 of my life, whereby I confront it in kind, is unreal. If 
 the Saviour be unreal and my communion an unreality, a 
 mere mystic or moody mingling of being, then there is 
 no reality, and everything is dissolved into cloud and 
 darkness and vapour of smoke. 
 
 § § § 
 I do not wish to say anything disrespectful of these 
 
 academic critics to whom we owe so very much in the 
 way of laboratory theology, but they are the second, not 
 the first. A higher hand must make them mild. A deeper 
 insight must enlarge their truth. And I much wish they 
 had more of that ethical realism of Carlyle or Ibsen, only 
 turning it upon the conscience at the Cross. But so 
 often (just as a vast memory may impair the power of 
 judgment) you find the finest critical faculty, and the most 
 powerful scholarly apparatus, conjoined with a moral 
 nature singularly naive, and beautifully simple and unequal 
 to the actual world. Their experience of life and con- 
 science has no record of lapse or shame. Their world 
 is a study of still-life ; it has not the drama, the fury, the 
 pang, the tragedy, the crisis of the actual world at large, 
 with its horrible guilt and its terror of judgment. It 
 opens to them none of the crevasses where glow the 
 nether fires. They inhabit, morally, the West End. 
 They are in no touch with damned souls. They have 
 lived in an unworldly purity, and have never been drawn
 
 202 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 from the jaws of hell, or taken from the fearful pit and 
 its miry clay. They have been reared, many of them, in 
 the sacred and pious atmosphere of the German manse, 
 and cradled in the godliness of the most Christian of 
 homes. The paradox is this, that if purity be the test 
 of truth, and obedience the organ of theological know- 
 ledge, if that be the meaning of "will do, shall know" 
 (as it is not), if they are as right in their views as they 
 are of heart, then evangelical Christianity would be dying 
 of its own moral success. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The second part of my answer to the suggested analogy 
 between communion with a saint and communion with 
 Christ our Lord is this. It would enlarge what I have 
 been saying to the scale of history. Christ has entered 
 actual history, with piercing, crucial, moral effect, in a 
 way the Virgin never has, nor any saint. He has entered 
 it not only profoundly, but centrally and creatively ; she 
 is adjutorial at most. By his effect upon human ex- 
 perience he created that Church within which the 
 worship and contact of the Saints arose. The Church 
 arose as a product of something which Christ produced — 
 namely, saving faith. And it is not only the effect of 
 Christ on the Church that I speak of, but, through the 
 Church, his effect on history at large. Christ affects 
 the moral springs of history as no saint has done. They 
 but colour or turn the stream ; he struck from the rock. 
 I make all allowance for the fact that, by the Church's 
 fault, he has affected history less than he might have 
 done. But it remains true that all we have and hope in 
 the new humanity owes to Christ what it owes to no 
 other. And it owes it to a Christ felt and believed to be
 
 VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 203 
 
 generically different from every rival or every believer. 
 What we owe to Christendom, or to great Christians, 
 they owe to a Christ who owed himself to no man. He~ 
 has entered the history of the Church at least as He has 
 entered my history — not as the mere postulate, nor even 
 as the spring, but as the Creator of the new life, the new 
 self, while he himself needed no new self or new life. I 
 make all allowance for the reasonable results of historic 
 criticism, yet he stands in history as a defined conscious- 
 ness and a creative person, who is powerful not in the 
 degree in which he is appreciated by our experience, but 
 in a way which creates experience, and which can only 
 be appreciated by something greater than our experience 
 — by our faith. "^Ve know him by faith to be much more 
 than he has ever been to our experience. I know him, 
 and the Church knows Him, as a person of infinite power 
 to create fresh experience of himself, which is experience 
 of God. My contact with him by faith is continually 
 deepening my experience of him. And as my experience 
 deepens it brings home a Christ objective in history, and 
 creative of the experience, and the life, and the deeds of 
 a whole vast Church, meant, and moving, to subdue man- 
 kind not to itself, but to the faith of the Gospel. 
 
 § § § 
 But how can an individual experience give an absolute 
 truth ? How can an experience (which is a thing per- 
 sonal to me in, say, my own forgiveness) assure me of 
 the world ? How can my experience, my forgiveness, 
 assure me of the world's redemption ? How can it assure 
 me of the final and absolute establishment of the Kingdom 
 of God ? I may experience my salvation, but how can I 
 experience the salvation of the world — which is for all 
 (and is so felt by some) a greater concern than their own ?
 
 204 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 The answer is this. My experienced salvation is not a 
 passing impression but a life faith. It is not a subjective 
 frame but an objective relation, and even transaction. 
 The peace of God is not glassy calm but mighty con- 
 fidence. My experience here is the consciousness not of 
 an impression on me, but of an act in me, on me, and by 
 me. It is not an afferent but an efferent consciousness, 
 as the psychologists would say, like the muscular sense, 
 the sense not of rheumatism but of energy. And, to go 
 on, it is the sense not only of myself as acting in the 
 experience called faith, but it is the sense that that act is 
 not perfectly spontaneous but evoked, nay, created by its 
 content and object. And, still to go on, it is the sense 
 that it is created by another and parent act — which is the 
 one eternal decisive act of an eternal Person saving a 
 world. I am forgiven and saved by an act which saves 
 the world. For it not only gives me moral power to 
 confront the whole world and surmount it, but it unites 
 me in a new sympathy with all mankind, and it em- 
 powers me not only to face but to hail eternity. And 
 this it does not for me, but for whosoever will. Surely 
 the Christ who re-creates me in that faith in God must 
 be God. This is the report of my faith, and of the 
 Church's faith, upon the act to which it owes its own 
 existence as an act. Is it to be amenable to unfaith ? 
 Actor sequitur forum ret, said Roman law. The venue of 
 criticism is in the court of the challenged faith. That is, 
 the true and fruitful criticism is that within the believing 
 Church under the final standard of grace. It is a part of 
 that self-criticism of the Church whose classic case is the 
 Reformation. 
 
 What Christ has done for me has become possible only 
 by what He did even more powerfully for others whose
 
 VII.] The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 205 
 
 faith and experience have been deeper and richer than 
 mine, but who reflect my experience all the same, even 
 while they diversify and enlarge it mightily. Standing 
 over my experience is the experience of the whole 
 evangelical succession. And standing over that is the 
 historic fact of Christ's own person, and His conscious- 
 ness of Himself ("All things are delivered to me of the 
 Father ") as Lord of the world, Lord of nature in 
 miracle, of the soul in redemption, and of the future in 
 judgment. When I meet Him in my inmost soul I meet 
 one whose own inmost soul felt itself to be all that, and 
 who has convinced the moral flower of the race, in the 
 whole historic Church, that He is what He knew Himself 
 to be. And in that conviction the Church has become 
 the finest product of Humanity, and the mightiest power 
 that ever entered and changed the course of history from 
 its moral centre. 
 
 Our experience of Christ is therefore an absolutely 
 different thing from our experience of saint or Virgin. 
 In their case, granting it were actual, the visitation 
 might be but my experience; in His case it is my faith, 
 which concerns not a phase of me whereof I am con- 
 scious, but the whole of my moral self and racial destiny 
 whereof I am but poorly conscious. Faith is the grand 
 venture in which we commit our whole soul and future 
 to the confidence that Christ is not an illusion but the 
 reality of God. We may respond to a saint, but to 
 Christ we belong. 
 
 IV 
 
 The third part of my answer would expand what I 
 have touched on, a few words back, in regard to the 
 consciousness of Christ.
 
 2o6 The Pet son and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 I have referred to the individual experience, and to its 
 expansion in the experience of the Church. But is this 
 enough to give us the reaUty of a supernatural (or rather 
 a superhistoric) Christ ? If it were, then v^^e should be 
 in this difficulty, that the experience of believers would 
 be the seat of God's revelation to us. And fresh 
 difficulties arise out of that. If it be so, then do we 
 not give the Church (as the collective experience) a 
 prerogative which, even if it does not rise to the claim 
 of Rome, yet puts the individual conscience too much at 
 its mercy, and obtrudes the Church between it and 
 Christ ? And, again, if it be so, what was the seat of 
 God's revelation to the very first Church of all, to the 
 first believers with no Church behind them ? And what 
 place is left for the Bible, the record, at all, except a 
 mere subsidiary one in support of the supreme experience 
 of a Church ? Whereas the Bible, no less than the 
 Church, was a parallel result of the Gospel, and part of 
 the revelationary purpose of God. The gift of the 
 Spirit * to the Apostles was not simply to confirm 
 personal faith but to equip them efficiently for their 
 apostolic, preaching, witnessing work. 
 
 We must pass within the circle of the first Church's 
 experience and testimony, and find a means of stepping 
 off the last verge of its direct documentation on to sure 
 moral ground where the documents cease. We must 
 pass by faith from the field of the first faith certificated 
 in the documents to the historic reality behind the wall 
 of documents, and within the ring fence of the testifying 
 Church. 
 
 * The difficult question as to the relation between Christ and the 
 
 Spirit (especially for St. Paul) is too large for side treatment. I only 
 
 note that our communion is not with the Spirit, but in the Spirit, with 
 Father and Son.
 
 vn.] The Testitnotiy of Experience in the Soul 207 
 
 And we are compelled to do so by the very nature of 
 that faith and those documents themselves. If we are 
 not to stultify the first Church and all its history, we 
 must recognise a point on which critics so antagonistic 
 to each other as Schaeder and Lobstein agree,* that the 
 Gospel about Jesus in the first Church truly reflected 
 Jesus' Gospel of Himself, and grew inevitably out of it. 
 We could not speak of Jesus with any respect if his 
 influence not only could not protect His first followers 
 from idolatry in placing Him where they did — beside 
 God in their worship — but actually promoted that 
 idolatry. If they included Christ in his own Gospel, 
 then he did. It was not in the teeth of him that they 
 made him an object of faith and worship along with the 
 Father. They could never have treated him, those 
 disciples who had been with him, in a way which would 
 have horrified him as much as some apostles were 
 horrified at the attempt to worship them at Lystra. If 
 they found him Saviour through death from sin, found 
 him the Son of God and the Eternal Christ, then he 
 offered himself as such in some form or other. 
 
 Accordingly the question becomes one of the interpre- 
 tation of his self-consciousness as the Gospels offer it 
 upon the whole. We are borne onward by the experi- 
 ence of the Church upon the experience of Christ in so 
 far as he revealed it. The Church's first thought of 
 him was substantially one with his own thought of 
 himself. What was that ? Was it a thought which 
 placed him with men, facing God and moving towards 
 God, or with God facing men and moving to them? 
 Was he not always with men, but from beside God ?^ 
 
 ♦See Die christlichi W$lt, 1907, No. 19, Sp. 529.
 
 2o8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Can our relation to him, if we take his construction of 
 it, be parallel to our relation to any apostle, saint, virgin, 
 or hero ? Into the self-consciousness of Christ I have 
 already gone. I can only refer again to all the passages 
 of the Gospels which have their focus in Mat. xi. 25 ff.,* 
 and which reveal the sense of his complete mastery of 
 the world of nature, of the soul, and of the future. He 
 forgave the soul and claimed to judge it. He determined 
 our eternal lyelation to God. And he used nature at will 
 for the supreme purposes of grace and eternity. 
 
 § § § 
 But we must here take another step which replaces us 
 where we set out, though on a higher plane. This 
 power of which Jesus was so sure was not there simply 
 to make a vast and placid self-consciousness. He was 
 not there simply as a reservoir of moral power instead 
 of its agent. If he had the power it was not as a miser 
 of power, to enjoy the satisfaction of possessing it in 
 self-poised and self-sufficient reserve, not to be a quiescent 
 character reposing in God. He was there to exercise 
 the power in historic action. And as it was moral 
 power, it could only go out in moral achievement. He 
 was there for a task in which the whole of his power 
 should be expended. He was there to do something 
 which only his power could do. If he had power more 
 than all the world's, it was to overcome the world in 
 another than the individualist and ascetic sense. It was 
 to subdue it to himself. The Son was not only to affect 
 it, but to regain it for the Father. He was not simply 
 to rule, but to redeem. He was there for action ; and 
 
 "* Surely the criticism which dissolves this passage leaves us with little 
 but dissolving views of anything.
 
 vn.J The Testimony of Experience in the Soul 209 
 
 it was action commensurate both with his person, and 
 with the world, and with the world's moral extremity. 
 He was there to do that which all the accounts declare 
 was done in the Cross — to conquer for mankind their 
 eternal life. It was not simply to fill men's souls at His 
 as from a fountain, but to achieve for them and in them 
 a victory whose prolonged action (and not mere echo) 
 should be their eternal life. With all his power he 
 was there for one vast eternal deed, which can only be 
 described as the Redemption, the new Creation, of the 
 race. Nothing less could afford scope for the exercise 
 of such power as his, if it was a power that must work 
 to an active head, and could not be held in mere 
 benignant self-possession, in quiescent, massive, brim- 
 ming Goethean calm. The moral personality must all 
 be put into a corresponding deed. What is the deed 
 which gives effect to the whole tremendous moral 
 resource of Jesus ? There is not one except his death. 
 If we reduce that simply to his life's violent and 
 premature close, then we are without any adequate 
 expression in action of so vast a moral personality. 
 That personality becomes a truncated and ineffectual 
 torso; or it becomes but an aesthetic quantity, an object of 
 moral and spiritual admiration, and the source of pro- 
 found religious influences and impressions, but not of 
 living faith and of eternal life. It is a grand piece of 
 still-life, spectacular but not dramatic, with spell but not 
 power. It can refine but not regenerate, cultivate but 
 not recreate. And had Jesus not found in his death 
 the regenerative outlet for the infinite moral power in 
 his person. He would have been rent witii the unrest 
 and distraction of prisoned genius. He would have been 
 no expression of the peace that goes with the saving
 
 2IO The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. vn. 
 
 power of God, peace which he then could neither have 
 nor give. But the finahty of what he did as God on 
 the cross is the source of that unearthly rest which is 
 the peculium of the true Church. And it is lost from 
 all the Churches that are more earnest in bringing a 
 Kingdom than in working out a Kingdom already 
 brought. These Churches and their efforts may have 
 much power, but they lack the divinest power which is 
 also spell; and they fail to attract those that crave 
 from power not only results but peace.
 
 LECTURE VIII 
 
 THE MORALISING OF DOGMA, ILLUSTRATED 
 BY THE OMNIPOTENCE OF GOD
 
 LECTURE VIII 
 
 THE MORALISING OF DOGMA, ILLUSTRATED BY THE 
 OMNIPOTENCE OF GOD 
 
 In all the Churches but those of sheer external 
 authority dogma has succumbed to the solvent of 
 criticism. By which word dogma is not necessarily 
 meant positive truth, but dogma as such, the specific 
 theological constructions from the past which have been 
 sealed with ecclesiastical authority as formally final. A 
 Church must always have a dogma, implicit or explicit. 
 A cohesive Church must have a coherent creed. But it 
 must be a dogma the Church holds, not one that holds 
 the Church. The life is in the body, not in the system. 
 It must be a dogma, revisable from time to time to keep 
 pace with the Church's growth as a living body in a 
 living world. The study of theology must go on and go 
 forward. Solution after solution of the great problems 
 must be both attempted and encouraged by vital faith. 
 First the pursuit and formulation of doctrine by indi- 
 vidual thinkers or groups must be pursued and honoured 
 as an energy inferior to none in the varied lifework of 
 the Church. And then, at certain stages of the process, 
 certain Churches may feel that a point of agreement 
 has been reached, which enables them, if other reasons 
 
 ai3
 
 214 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 make it desirable, to state their common view in a new 
 form, as a breathing place for their mental energy, a 
 salute to other Churches, or a guide for their own 
 catechumens. The idea of a dogma, as the organised 
 declaration or confession by any Church of its collective 
 doctrine, is only the intellectual counterpart of the idea 
 of the organised Church itself. No Church can live 
 without more or less organisation, which must include 
 not its machinery only but its thought. A mere brother- 
 hood needs no theology ; but then it has no stay and no 
 influence in history. It is only a sympathetic group. 
 But a Church must have a creed, either tacit or express, 
 else it is no church. Christianity certainly is more than 
 its truth, but there is no Christianity apart from its 
 truth, A religion of mere affinities is no more a religion 
 than one of mere freedom. There must be a belief, and 
 an entrusted entail of belief. The difficulty begins with 
 the question how far the collective belief is to be pressed 
 upon individual members or ministers — the question of 
 subscription. The two questions are constantly con- 
 fused by thoughtless people. A creed which is but declara- 
 tory, and corporate, and binding on honour is confused 
 with particular and individual subscription to it, binding 
 in right and giving legal status. And the confusion is 
 increased when people jump to the conclusion that 
 dogma, or the collective expression of a Church's belief, 
 must be final in a given form. It is now widely recog- 
 nised that every form of belief must be changeable in 
 proportion to its detailed length, and permanent in 
 proportion to its condensed brevity. And the influences 
 that now recast the great old fabrics of faith, once so 
 new and adequate, are part of the action of the same 
 divine spirit which put them there on a time to serve
 
 VIII. j The Moralising of Dogma 215 
 
 their hour and age. It is now preparing a new synthesis 
 from' the old and positive faith. 
 
 To-day the great fabrics of historic dogma not only 
 succumb to the calm decay of time, but they crumble 
 faster than ever under the acid that now fills the air — 
 under modern criticism. This is a source of grief and 
 fear to many at one extreme, while to some at the other 
 it is a source of almost unholy joy. For the great 
 Churches which have publicly and expressly pinned 
 their existence to specific dogma, patristic or mediaeval, it 
 is of course a most serious thing. The Roman Church 
 appears to be honeycombed with a modernism that may 
 lead either to its disintegration or to a new reformation. 
 On the other hand, for those free lances of the genial 
 heart and sterile mind, who face theology as a bull greets 
 scarlet, and regard positive views as a tramp does four 
 walls, the collapse of the old structure seems as the 
 opening of the prison-house to them that are bound. 
 
 § § § 
 Dogma is the science of faith. Every department of 
 science has its dogma; and in the hierarchy of the 
 sciences these dogmas qualify and supplement each other. 
 In one region we have the dogma of gravitation ; in 
 another that of evolution ; in another that of affinity ; 
 in another (if it be another) the molecular dogma; and 
 so on. Thus in the region of spiritual life we have also 
 a science. We have a science of faith. And the truth 
 of it is accepted for fundamental by the Churches, the 
 living bodies concerned, just as gravitation and the 
 like are accepted by the universities, which do not, for 
 instance, enter discussion with the man who challenges 
 the rotundity of the earth and starts an apostolate of 
 its flatness.
 
 2i6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Dogma is the science which underlies the mentality of 
 those living and moving societies. And it exists upon 
 experienced faith in the holy love of a changeless and 
 saving God in Christ, just as physical science exists 
 upon a faith in the uniformity of His action in Nature. 
 
 But there is an ambiguity which we must realise and 
 avoid in the phrase, a science of faith. There are things 
 it seems to mean and does not. It does not mean a science 
 of thought attached to faith, like Greek metaphysics. It 
 does not mean a metaphysic of Being, or a philosophy of 
 jurisprudence, imported into the Christian faith by the 
 circumstances of its history and growth. Nor on the 
 other hand does it mean a science of the subjective 
 religious acts, a psychology of religion. Far less does 
 it mean that the psychology of religion shall provide 
 the dogmas or " broad general truths of religion," to whose 
 test every belief of faith must submit, as the modern way 
 is. But it means the science of religion when religion 
 rises to the positive faith we have in Christianity, the 
 science of religion as a moral relation, a living and historic 
 relation between two personalities, two consciences ; 
 which in Christianity is a redeeming relation. It is the 
 science of realised redemption. It is a science wherein 
 faith is not so much the observed object as the observing 
 subject. It is faith thinking and not only faith thought 
 of. It is the view of things created by the new man and 
 not discovered by the modern man. And it is upon the 
 lines of such an ethical religion alone that we reach that 
 moralising of dogma which is the demand of many who 
 are not prepared to dismiss it. 
 
 § § § 
 No dogma has been affected by the influences of the 
 age so much as that of the person of Christ. It was the
 
 VIII. J The Moralising of Dogma 217 
 
 doctrine of the Church in the first age, when a united 
 Church laid the lines of its dogma down ; and none has 
 felt like it the dissolving effect of a divided Church. 
 And the Chalcedonian or Athanasian form of the belief, 
 which is embalmed in the current formula of two natures 
 in one person in Christ, may be said to have been 
 seriously shaken wherever modern conditions have been 
 realised. This has occurred the more readily as the 
 creeds in which it was embodied served for their day the 
 purpose rather of repelling errors than of adjusting truths. 
 The truths were not really and inwardly adjusted, but 
 only placed together ; and they are thus the more easily 
 shaken apart. They were married but not wedded, or if 
 wedded not welded ; and though they lived in the same 
 house, it was not without friction. The human 
 mind, the moral experience, were not yet ripe enough. 
 Psychology, and especially religious psychology, had not 
 then come into existence ; and, while the strongest 
 assertions were made about the coexistence of the two 
 natures as a postulate of faith, it was beyond the power 
 of the metaphysic which then prevailed to show how 
 they could cohere in a personal unity. The attempts 
 failed even at a later date, when a doctrine of mutual 
 permeation (or Trf/nxwp/crfj) took the place of a doctrine 
 of conjunction and mutual action (or crvvdijida and 
 dvTiSoo-is). With the modern growth of psychology, 
 and the modern revolution of metaphysic, such formulae 
 were bound to dissolve. They were based on an early 
 metaphysic of natures and a crude science of person- 
 ality. But the metaphysic of history, the modern 
 primacy of personality, and the new stress on experience, 
 coupled with a critical historicism equally modern, have 
 opened a better way ; and they keep Christ and his
 
 2i8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 problem from retiring into the outskirts of thought. 
 No dissolution of the old dogma prevents the Chris- 
 tological question from still being the question of the 
 hour and of the future for religious thought, when we 
 are not monopolised by the modern social problem. 
 The discredit of the dogma has also been increased by 
 the modern return to the Bible and its Gospel. We 
 find the scripture doctrine of the subject, inchoate as 
 it is in form, to be more satisfactory than the 
 ecclesiastical development of it for a starting point. And 
 it is satisfactory for this reason. It remoralises the 
 whole issue by restoring it to personal religion. Yet let 
 it not be thought that the moralising of dogma makes it 
 less urgent, less incumbent, less dogmatic. For what is so 
 insistent, inevitable, and dogmatic as the categorical 
 imperative which is at the moral centre ? 
 
 At the Reformation, with its concentration of religion 
 on the conscience, and on the guilty conscience, Chris- 
 tianity became once more personal and evangelical ; that 
 is, it became predominantly ethical. The key to the 
 religion was found in personal faith. It was not in the 
 institutes of theology or the institutions of the Church. 
 It was in moral and religious experience, in the contact 
 of a historic Redeemer with our living and personal 
 experience of redemption. That was what had really 
 made Christianity in the first century. And it was 
 what was lost in a Church dominated by Chalcedonian 
 metaphysic with an Aristotelian editing ; till the personal 
 faith of the New Testament was rescued from a religion 
 chiefly institutional and creedal at the Reformation. 
 Three centuries later another powerful effort was made 
 by Hegelianism to scholasticise Christianity anew, and to 
 rationalise Christology on the largest lines. The older
 
 VIII. J The Moralising of Dogma 2ig 
 
 and narrower Rationalism had simply abolished Chris- 
 tology by reducing Christ to a mere man, and any science 
 of him to the psychology of genius. And Hegel seemed 
 to restore all by discovering a Christology in the very 
 nature of thought and being. But the capture of Hegel 
 by his extreme left has brought his system to much the 
 same effect as the old rationalism. While the reformed 
 and evangelical spirit has, by its revival, notably in 
 Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and others, discredited all the 
 Hegelian constructions. The Incarnation, being for a 
 moral and not a metaphysical purpose, must be in its 
 nature moral. Its metaphysic should therefore be a 
 metaphysic of ethics, and not of thought as pure being. 
 And we are shut up to the method of experience to 
 explain the act of grace in Christ's coming, and to 
 release it from rational permissions in order to be an 
 autonomous power. Religion is an ultimate in con- 
 sciousness — according to its most recent psychology. 
 And the higher it is, so much the more ultimate, and 
 the less vassal to rational permissions. It is living 
 faith that has the promise of understanding the object 
 of faith. Certainly nothing but faith can decide 
 whether Christ is properly an object of faith or only its 
 chief subject. No historic inquiry can decide that, as we 
 shall see. A religion of moral redemption can only be 
 understood by a Church of the morally redeemed, as 
 rational science, in its area, can only be pursued by 
 rational minds schooled to its method. The theology of 
 such a gospel opens only to a Church of broken and 
 converted men. Only the saved have the real secret of 
 the Saviour. That is the religion of the matter, which 
 carries its theology. The Godhead that became incarnate 
 in Jesus Christ did so not to convince, but to save. God*
 
 220 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 head became incarnate so far and in such fashion as the 
 purpose of redemption prescribed. It became incarnate 
 in the manner the work required. Man's need determined 
 God's deed. Christ was almighty— to save. In a word, 
 the work of Christ, realised in the Church's experience 
 through faith, becomes the avenue and the key to the 
 person of Christ. Soteriology is the way of access to Chris- 
 tology. But where we come down to a bland version of 
 salvation, to the ebbs and flats of religion, to a lay, light, 
 and level sense of holiness, sin, judgment, and grace — 
 when we arrive there (either through lack of " funda- 
 mental brain work," as Rossetti called it, or of radical 
 soul work) then the person of Christ becomes unintel- 
 ligible; impressive, in a sense, but unintelligible. And 
 the effort of the Church's thought to pierce its mystery 
 is dismissed as mere metaphysic, in favour of an aesthetic 
 or a sentimental regard for his character and message. 
 Most elusive of all is the effort to retain the old pass- 
 words, while reducing them to no more than disguises 
 in luminous paint for the subjective processes of a self- 
 saving Humanity. 
 
 § § § 
 In speaking of the moralisation of Christology by the 
 
 Reformation and the modern movements in its train I 
 do not think I can do better than offer here a free 
 translation of a passage in Melanchthon, one sentence of 
 which has recently been much used as the motto for 
 this whole tendency. It is taken from the preface to 
 the Loci of 1521. 
 
 " If a man know nothing of the power of sin, of law, 
 or of grace, I do not see how I can call him a 
 Christian. It is there that Christ is truly known. 
 The knowledge of Christ is to know his benefits.
 
 VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 221 
 
 taste his salvation, and experience his grace; it is not, 
 as the academic people say, to reflect on his natures and 
 the modes of his incarnation. If you do not know 
 the practical purpose for which he took flesh and 
 went to the cross what is the good of knowing his 
 story? Is a doctor but a botanist? Is he content 
 to know the forms and colours of his herbs ? It is 
 their virtue that counts. So with Christ. He is given 
 us as our remedy, or, in Bible phrase, our salvation. 
 And we must know him in another way than the 
 scholars. To know him to purpose is to know the 
 demand of the conscience for holiness, the source 
 of power to meet it, where to seek grace for our 
 sin's failure, how to set up the sinking soul in the 
 face of the world, the flesh, and the devil, how to 
 console the conscience broken. Is that what any of 
 the schools teach, metaphysical, critical, or literary ? 
 Paul in Romans, when he wants to condense Chris- 
 tian doctrine into a compendium, does he philosophise 
 about the mysteries of the Trinity, or the method of 
 incarnation, or an active and a passive creation ? 
 He does nothing of the kind. He speaks of law, 
 sin and grace ; of conscience, guilt and salvation. 
 These are the topics on which a knowledge of Christ 
 turns. You do not know Christ until you know 
 these. How often Paul declares to his believers that 
 he prays for them a rich knowledge of Christ. He 
 foresaw that we should one day leave the saving 
 themes and turn our minds to discussions cold and 
 foreign to Christ. What we propose to do, therefore, 
 is to sketch the inwardness of those passages that com- 
 mend Christ to you, that settle the conscience, and 
 establish the soul against Satan. Most people look
 
 222 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 in the Bible only for classic instruction about goodness 
 and evil. But it is a philosophic more than a Chris- 
 tian quest." 
 
 § § § ^ 
 The modern moralisation of religion thus prescribes a 
 
 new manner of inquiry on such a central subject as the 
 person of Christ. It plants us anew on the standpoint 
 of the Bible, where all human ethic is pointed, trans- 
 figured and reissued in Christ's new creation of the moral 
 soul. This rebirth of the race is not a thing yet to be 
 done, but a thing already done and given into our hands ; 
 " God hath regenerated us in the resurrection of Christ 
 from the dead " (i Peter i. 3) ; and it is prolonged in 
 the Christian experience of many centuries. What, 
 then, does such a tremendous and revolutionary fact 
 involve ? How must we think of him who brought 
 it to pass ? As the incarnation of natural and arbitrary 
 omnipotence? No, but as one who was potent for 
 everything morally required by the one need of sinful 
 Humanity, and the one demand of Holy Eternal Love. 
 
 Was it by a moral way, by moral conquest, that 
 Christ came to his final glory? Then it must 
 have been by a moral way that he left it. Is the end 
 of our salvation a moral glory? Then the origin of it 
 must have issued from moral glory. Is it an eternal 
 salvation? Then its moral glory rose in a moral 
 Eternity. Did the Eternal come by a transcendent 
 moral act ? Then that act began in Eternity. A final 
 salvation means a saving act eternal and absolute. 
 Some metaphysic is here involved, certainly, but it is a 
 metaphysic of the conscience. It starts from the con- 
 viction that for life and history the moral is the real, and 
 that the movements of the Great Reality must be morally
 
 VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 223 
 
 construed as they are morally revealed. The spiritual 
 world is not the world of noetic process or cosmic force, 
 but of holy, i.e. moral, order, act, and power. Now con- 
 cerning the union of the two natures in Christ the old 
 dogma thought in a far too natural and non-moral way. 
 Its categories were too elemental and physical. It con- 
 ceived it as an act of might, of immediate divine power, 
 an act which united the two natures into a person rather 
 than through that person. It united them miraculously 
 rather than morally, into the existence of the incarnate 
 personality rather than by his action. The person was 
 the resultant of the two natures rather than the agent of 
 their union. They were united into a person whose 
 action only began after the union, and did not affect it. 
 It began (according to the dogma) in the miraculous con- 
 ception, which was not an ethical act, rather than in the 
 grace of the eternal son, who, for our sakes, from rich 
 became poor. There can be no unity of spirits like 
 God and man except in a moral way, by personal action 
 which is moral in its method as well as in its aim. As 
 Christians we are united with Christ by a moral, 
 i.e. a personal, process ; and can we think otherwise of 
 the manner of his union with God which is its base? 
 It is only in the way of moral modulation that the 
 divine Logos could become true man. That is where the 
 Christian differs from all pagan notions of incarnation. 
 And the Christian idea is so different, so ethical, because 
 its origin and its seat is in the cross, which is the axis of 
 the racial conscience, and the historic focus of moral 
 mediation. It is the cross and not the cradle that has 
 the secret of the Lord. 
 
 But, indeed, it is ethically misleading to speak of union 
 in such a case. Union is a term too physical, too natural.
 
 224 ^^'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Even terms like permeation or interpenetration are so. 
 And this is the cardinal error of the old dogma. It works 
 upon a spiritual subject with physical instead of moral 
 categories. Its incarnation takes place not by spiritual 
 power but by natural power, however vastly magnified and 
 deified, by a fiat rather than a moral act. The error is 
 very persistent. I admit that some Bible phrases give the 
 wrong lead, as when we read of the Spirit being 
 poured out, and without measure. You find it in some of 
 the recent liberal interpretations of Christ as a human 
 personality completely filled by the Spirit. But that is 
 really docetic, however imposing. It dehumanises, it 
 depersonalises, and therefore it degrades, the human 
 nature to a vessel for the divine. It reduces the human 
 below the personal level by treating it as a mere recep- 
 tacle or tenement of the Godhead. This is a poor and 
 passive idea of humanity instead of a moral, which must 
 be active even in its receptivity. And we are but repeating 
 a form of the old error which construed the human 
 nature as no more than a coat which was put on, 
 while the divine became but a palladium dropped from 
 Heaven in human form, with an action more mechanical 
 than moral. Whatever may be said against the 
 Kenosis doctrine, at least it made the whole Christ 
 on earth the result of a grand moral act in the Heavens. 
 
 § § § 
 "We might, perhaps, put the matter in this way. Let 
 us examine a dogma which underlies so much popular 
 religion and creates so much popular scepticism — the 
 dogma of God's natural omnipotence. Jesus, we say, was 
 the incarnation to the world of the power of Almighty 
 God. But, it is at once objected, we see in Jesus neither 
 omnipotence nor omniscience. He claimed neither. Do
 
 VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 225 
 
 you claim for him, say, divine omnipotence ? The answer 
 to that question must be Yes and No. 
 
 Surely we must distinguish two ideas as to the relation 
 of power and goodness. Must we not distinguish between 
 the power which, though it has another and lower nature, 
 may be put wholly at the service of justice, and the power 
 which in its nature is justice ; between the might that 
 serves right and the might which is right ? Can we not 
 distinguish between a visible thing, like the might of 
 armies employed in a just cause, in the cause, it may be, 
 of universal justice, between that and a spiritual power 
 which is the intrinsic might of justice, the might of 
 holiness, when Truth unarmed uplifts its head, and shows 
 how awful goodness is ? Is there not the power that 
 works for righteousness and the power that is righteous- 
 ness at work? 
 
 All our natural life, of course, starts from the former, 
 from the idea of physical power, which may or may not 
 be brought into the service of justice ; and we have that 
 conception of power fixed upon us by the start. When 
 we begin to examine our notions we find that established 
 in possession. So that justice at best is understood but 
 socially — as natural happiness made general. Socialism 
 is simply the Christianity of the natural man, the Church 
 of the not yet born again. What is the idea, the expecta- 
 tion, by which natural men seek to judge if the course of 
 the world is worthy of God, and the experience of life 
 compatible with His goodness ? Is it not the idea 
 of omnipotence for happiness — the unlimited power to 
 possess and spread happiness. That is the standard of 
 their theodicy. If my life, if multitudes of lives, are 
 lamed or crushed by calamity how can I believe in a just, 
 kind and omnipotent God? This is the question of the
 
 226 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 natural man. The vietier of a God is to use His omni- 
 potence for human happiness of a high and wide sort. 
 When this happiness seems to fail the result is scepti- 
 cism and pessimism, more or less bitter. Think how the 
 Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shattered the rational opti- 
 mism of that thin time to start the deliberate pessimisms 
 of to-day. It is the inevitable result of the attempt to 
 measure the whole of anything so spiritual as life or God 
 by its power to satisfy natural expectations. That is not 
 God's prime object ; it is not His regimen of the world in 
 the final account he gives of Himself, His purpose, and 
 His creature's destiny in the cross of Christ. His is not 
 the omnipotence that natural happiness requires, far 
 less that the natural imagination pictures ; but it is 
 the omnipotence that His own holiness requires. His own 
 purpose not of love simply but of holy love, the 
 omnipotence required by His own perfection, the omnipo- 
 tence required to establish in the world as we find it, 
 in a sinful world, a kingdom of complete communion 
 with His Holy Self and His Eternal blessedness. All 
 power in heaven and earth is delivered to the victorious 
 Holy One, and to Him alone. 
 
 We thus begin with such notions of power as we imbibe 
 from our first contact with it in natural force, elemental 
 instincts, or imperious wills. And we carry that order 
 into our thinking. We construe omnipotence accordingly. 
 We form ideas of omnipotence which are suggested to 
 us by nature, and then we demand that a revelation from 
 God shall begin by accrediting itself to those natural 
 notions — especially by some miracle. But we demand 
 an impossible thing when we look for such a reve- 
 lation in Christ — a human being omnipotent in that 
 sense. A human being with natural omnipotence would
 
 VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 227 
 
 be a monster. Christ did not come with natural omnipo- 
 tence either for his weapon or for his credentials. He 
 did not come with a power of unlimited miracle, with a 
 blank cheque on the universal energy. His omnipo- 
 tence was not of the kingdom of nature but of grace. 
 His power was both held and used under moral 
 conditions, as we see in the cases where it was arrested 
 by unbelief. He came much rather to convert that 
 natural method, nay to invert it. He revealed that 
 holiness was the divine power, and did not wait on 
 power; that the forces of creation had their end, 
 charter, and scope in a moral redemption, and they 
 could not exceed their terms of reference; that holiness, 
 that moral Godhead, could only establish itself in the 
 world by its own nature, and not by natural force ; that 
 his Church could only be established by its Gospel, and 
 not by anything at the disposal of States, or at the 
 command of Empire. His kingdom was not of the world. 
 This principle gave rise to a struggle within Himself, 
 in the temptation He mastered ; as it has done also 
 within His Church, in the temptation to which she 
 succumbed. The power He incarnated was the intrinsic, 
 supreme, and final power of divine conscience, that is, of 
 holy love, for the destiny of the world. This is the 
 true power of God which was incarnated in Christ — 
 this morally irresistible power of holy love. 
 
 In the natural, arbitrary, and unregenerate sense in 
 which we understand the word, God is not omnipotent. 
 All things do not work together for an omnipotent God, 
 but for love's good on God's scale, for an absolutely holy 
 purpose, to them that love God for His holy purpose 
 (Rom. viii. 28). At least the God of Christ is not omnipo- 
 tent in any other sense than that. The God incarnate in
 
 228 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lbct. 
 
 Christ is not. He can do only the things that are con- 
 gruous with His moral, His holy nature and purpose. But 
 in this moral sense is he omnipotent over the world ? 
 Is he in final command of history ? Is he secure of the 
 reversion of time ? Well, what omnipotence is required 
 for that ? Is it not the power of holiness, not to do any- 
 thing and everything suggested by human egoism or 
 fantasy, but to do everything required for its own effectual 
 establishment on the world ? The purpose of a world 
 created by a holy God must be holiness, the reflection 
 and communion of His own holiness. Can God secure 
 it ? What the world actually is we know, if we let our 
 conscience speak its verdict on history. Is it in the 
 power of the Holy God, through the very holiness 
 smitten by our sin, to secure such a world's holy 
 destiny still ? That is the ultimate question in life. 
 That is what, in one form or another, occupies the 
 first-class minds. And to that question Christ and 
 His cross are the answer, or they have no meaning 
 at all. They reveal in their foregone victory the om- 
 nipotence of holiness to subdue all natural powers 
 and forces, all natural omnipotence, to the moral sanctity 
 of the Kingdom of God. And if they do not reveal that 
 we are left without any ground of certainty about a holy 
 ending for the world at all. And our guesses will be 
 hopeful according to our sanguine temperament, our 
 happy circumstances, our small insight, or our low 
 demand. It is a tremendous revelation and achievement 
 in the cross of Christ. " How awful goodness is." 
 The more we know about cosmic forces, antres vast, 
 deserts horrible, Alps of thick ribbed ice, seas, continents, 
 vastitudes of every kind ; of geological ages, stellar 
 spaces, solar storms; of creature agonies, of social
 
 VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 229 
 
 miseries, devilish wickedness, civilised triumphs, historic 
 heroisms, the grandeur of genius and unquenchable love ; 
 of all the passion, for evil on the one hand, or, on the 
 other, for the Eternal, Immortal, and Invisible good — 
 so much the more we must feel how awful is the holy 
 love of God, that has secured the grand issue for ever, 
 that surmounts all principalities and powers, things past, 
 present, and to come, every other omnipotence ; sur- 
 mounts, nay exploits, them all, in the Holy One of God, 
 who by His cross is the same world-conqueror yesterday, 
 to-day, and for ever. It is a tremendous claim. And 
 the improbability of it is either a pious absurdity ; or it 
 is the quiet irony of a God who has it already done in 
 the hollow of His hand. Like every ultimate interpreta- 
 tion of life it is a matter of insight — insight into the 
 world, the Christ, and the Cross. What is lacking 
 to the seers and geniuses of our time, like Swinburne, 
 Meredith, or Hardy, is still lack of insight. They 
 see into "Love in the valley" — and how lovely — what 
 they do not see into is love in excelsis. 
 
 § § § 
 The formula of the union of two natures in one 
 
 person is essentially a metaphysical formula, and the 
 formula of a Hellenic metaphysic, and it is more or less 
 archaic for the modern mind. The term " nature " is a 
 purely metaphysical term, and one which characterises a 
 scholastic metaphysic of being rather than a modern meta- 
 physic of ethic. The metaphysic of being, if not banished 
 from modern science, tends to be retained only in so far 
 as the moral is regarded as the real, and the key to being 
 is found in personality. Even if we do speak at all now of 
 two natures in one person the accent has moved from the 
 term nature to the term person. We start with the 
 
 R
 
 230 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 historic reality and unity of Christ's person. We work 
 with such ethical categories — with ideas like personality, 
 history, and society. These are what command 
 thought, rather than ideas like being, substance, or 
 nature, wherever thought works out its new creation in 
 Kant and comes to close quarters with life. Now the 
 ideas of personality and society, which mean so much for 
 history and religion, are condensed in such an idea as 
 marriage, which is at once the keystone of society and the 
 great symbol of Christ's relation to man. And in 
 marriage the ideal is (however far we may be yet from its 
 general realization) that of two personalities not only 
 united but completely interpenetrating in love, and grow- 
 ing into one dual person. " The two shall be one flesh " 
 — one spiritual personality. This interpenetration is 
 something of which personality alone is capable. Any 
 notion Hke "a nature " is too physical in its origin and 
 action to rise really above the impenetrability of matter, 
 and the mutual externality of each such nature. This is 
 one reason why a union of natures complete enough for 
 personal unity has been so hard to compass with the old 
 metaphysic, which did not rise beyond a finer physic, or 
 pass eis dkXh yevo's. The marriage relation is the brief 
 epitome of the social principle of the kingdom of God, of 
 the unity of Christ, and the kind of unity in a Triune 
 God. It is impossible to keep Trinity from Tritheism if 
 we interpret personality by the categories of being or 
 substance, instead of interpreting being by the categories 
 of personality. A personality is much more than intelli- 
 gent or conscious substance, however refined. In this 
 sense personality has not a nature. We speak at times of 
 Christ as being Himself the Kingdom of God ; and it is 
 not the extravagant phrase that some minds declare it to
 
 VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 231 
 
 be. At least it points to a social plurality in Him in 
 whom His whole Church lives. Which is an idea of the 
 same class as a divine dualism, the complete interpenetra- 
 tion, in that "public person," of human and divine 
 personality. It suggests their interpenetration in a way 
 of which wedlock gives the symbol or ideal, however far 
 short it might fall as yet of being the actual analogy 
 which it will one day become in the Christian evolution 
 of society, and of thought to correspond. As the 
 supreme human interests grow more ethical, as the 
 ethical categories more and more come to dominate 
 thought in a life whose first concern is personal action, 
 by so much the more must the great problems that sur- 
 round the historic Christ be handled on such congenial 
 and fertile lines. The ethical notion of the true unity as 
 the interpenetration of persons by moral action must take 
 the place of the old metaphysic of the union of natures by 
 a tour de force. Unity of being need not be denied, but 
 it will be approached and construed on those ethical 
 lines which alone consist with personal relation and 
 explain it. The Church has worked long on the old 
 lines which were laid down by pagan thought rather 
 than by a final revelation in a person : perhaps, when we 
 have worked in this new and living way as long, then we 
 may expect results for which we are not yet prepared but 
 which we can already forefeel along the line of the true 
 method. The moral and experimental method in 
 theology will give us, from its congeniality with the 
 source of our revelation in a personal Saviour, results as 
 great and commanding in their sphere as did the applica- 
 tion of the other experimental method of induction so 
 appropriate to natural science. 
 
 § § §
 
 232 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Taking this moral method we seem shut up to one of 
 two theories. If the incarnation was the result rather 
 than the cause of Christ's moral action then it was the 
 result either of a great and creative moral decision of his 
 before he entered the world — which preserves his pre- 
 existence, and seems to require some form of kenosis. Or 
 else it was the result of the continuous and ascending 
 moral action in his historic life, wherein his moral growth, 
 always in unbroken union with God, gave but growing 
 effect to God's indwelling ; while the final and absolute 
 union took place when his perfect self-sacrifice in death 
 completed his personal development, and finally identified 
 him with God. So that we then have a progressive 
 incarnation of God and a progressive deification of man 
 in a rising scale of mutual involution ; which requires 
 some form of adoptionism. 
 
 In either of these cases everything turns on moral 
 action (either in the world or before it), whose historic 
 consummation was in the cross and its redemption. 
 Either the cross was the nadir of that self-limitation 
 which flowed from the supramundane self-emptying of 
 the Son, or it was the zenith of that moral exaltation 
 which had been mounting throughout the long sacrifice 
 of his earthly life, it was the consummation of the pro- 
 gressive union of his soul and God. I do not see why 
 we may not combine the two movements, as I shall hope 
 to show. But in either case the supreme moral act of 
 the cross is the key to the nature of the process. There 
 the new moral value was really introduced into Humanity, 
 and if the incarnation did not take place for that purpose 
 it has no sense or end. The new element was intro- 
 duced, it was not evolved. An evolutionary incarnation 
 is none ; it is but blossom. The element of miracle
 
 VIII.] The Moralising of Dogma 233 
 
 must be there. And it was introduced by a moral 
 miracle and not a magical, a miracle corresponding to 
 the nature of moral freedom. A moral end can only be 
 reached by moral means ; and if the nature and end of 
 redemption be moral it means that the incarnation which 
 made it possible must be moral in its nature toOi No 
 moral redemption would be possible if the God who came 
 to do it did not assume his manhood by a moral miracle, 
 a miracle of grace, as real as that which finished it. If 
 Christ began from a magical act, a prodigious act, a 
 mere exercise of power, as I have said the dogma* makes 
 him do, and if emphasis is removed from the atonement to 
 such an incarnation, as Catholicism tends to do, then it is 
 very hard to give real moral effect to his closing work. 
 And history has shown how hard it is. Popular thought 
 at least is diverted from the cross to the cradle. Evan- 
 gelical belief, and especially Catholic belief, has had 
 many unsatisfactory ethical results. Ecclesiastical ethic 
 is not always Christian ethic (to say the least). And the 
 reason lies to a great extent in the incongruity between 
 the moral nature of the Church's Redemption and the 
 non-moral nature of the Incarnation which was offered 
 to explain it. Since the incarnation lay interior and 
 fontal to the redemption, its metaphysical nature over- 
 bore the moral action of redemption, and much was 
 pardoned to the conscience of a man who assented to 
 the dogma. It is often urged among ourselves that the 
 evangelical construction of Christ's death as atonement 
 is not as prolific as it should be of moral results — nay 
 that a certain moral obtuseness has too often gone with 
 
 *I might here beg that the dififcrencc be not overlooked between the 
 dynamic union of the two natures (of whicli I fiave spoken and which I 
 liave chiefly here in view) and the miraculous birth.
 
 234 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 evangelical orthodoxy and zeal. That is not to be 
 roundb' denied. In many quarters it is throwing men 
 of the better (but hastier) sort upon a non-evangelical 
 Christianity. And the reason is that the atonement 
 at the Church's centre is not conceived in truly ethical 
 terms. It is not grasped as the focus and spring of all the 
 divinest ethic of the conscience, and therefore of the world. 
 And the reason why it is not so grasped is that its truly 
 moral and evangelical interpretation, as adjusting the 
 conscience directly with a perfectly holy God, has been 
 alloyed with mediaeval. Catholic, and dynamic notions of 
 incarnation. These being more metaphysical than 
 moral, arrest its ethical effect, and divide the unity of the 
 divine action in Christ. The Reformers, with all their 
 new departure in the religion of Redemption and Justifi- 
 cation, took over the substance of the old theology about 
 the divine nature that gave Christ His redeeming power. 
 With all their moralising of the close of Christ's life they 
 did not duly moralise its beginning, or the heavenly act 
 which preceded and prescribed its beginning. And so 
 we have a paralysing division down the middle of the 
 divine action in Christ. We have the ethical effect of 
 Christ on man crossed by an initiative on God's side, 
 when Christ left heaven, which was more metaphysical 
 or miraculous than it was moral. And the two disparate 
 things much confuse that general Christian mind, or 
 ethos, from which, more than from individual conviction, 
 so much of our Christian ethic proceeds. Christ could 
 only redeem into God's holiness if it were from the act 
 of that holiness that he came : he could only create a 
 holy ethic if it was in the holiest of acts that his creative 
 life and work arose. The moral problem set in our need 
 of salvation can only be solved by a moral movement in
 
 VIII,] The Moralising of Dogma 235 
 
 the God who undertook it. A redemptive work is moral 
 or nothing. But if its first condition is an incarnation 
 made possible only by such an act of power as underlies 
 the union of natures into a composite person, then the 
 redemption is unreal. It is a phantasmagory. If it was 
 the mere possession of a divine nature and a rank worthy 
 to atone that gave Christ His saving power, if it was not 
 the moral quality of his action in the doing of it (either 
 on earth, or in heaven before coming to earth), then his 
 work has a moral discount which is bound to reduce the 
 value of its practical effect, if not to turn it to an 
 unreality. If his conquest of our moral weakness was 
 not a victory of his own moral strength, but merely the 
 power or strategy of a Miltonic omnipotence getting the 
 better of the prince of this world, can we wonder that 
 the moral effect on us of such a trial of strength between 
 two giants is qualified ? Theories of incarnation which 
 make all turn on the natural omnipotence or omniscience 
 of the Redeemer are beside the mark. It was not the 
 rank or power of the Redeemer that made his death 
 precious for redemption, but his worth. It was his 
 moral value as the Holy that gave him power, both with 
 God and man, to prevail. It was his holiness, with 
 which the Holy Father was perfectly pleased and 
 satisfied. That is the only Christian doctrine of satis- 
 faction. If the incarnation was not above all things a 
 moral achievement by God the redemption cannot be a 
 moral conquest of man. The divine coming and action is 
 then magic, however exalted or massive. And revelation 
 becomes not the self-donation of God in sacrifice, but a 
 phantasmagory, a transparency, a placard (Gal. iii.i), which 
 leaves the conscience untouched, though it may move the 
 imagination to the most magnificent ritual in the world, 
 and the intellect to the most architectonic orthodoxy.
 
 LECTURE IX 
 
 THE MORALISING OF DOGMA, ILLUSTRATED 
 BY THE ABSOLUTENESS OF CHRIST
 
 LECTURE IX 
 
 THE MORALISING OF DOGMA, ILLUSTRATED BY THE 
 ABSOLUTENESS OF CHRIST 
 
 I HAVE been speaking of the moralising of dogma. 
 I applied that method by saying that the cross of our 
 redemption was the historic origin of the theology of 
 the incarnation ; that by the cross also it passes 
 back from a theological conviction to a life experi- 
 ence ; and that the practical value of the incarnation 
 lies in its being the necessary foundation of the cross. 
 It is when we are remade at the cross that our 
 eyes are opened to see at its base the door and the 
 stair that lead down to the incarnation at the founda- 
 tion of our moral world. Christ's self-consciousness of 
 His own divine nature must (I have said) be very 
 powerful for our theological conviction. The value of 
 the apostolic inspiration, (I have added), cannot be 
 much less for the same purpose. But it is the new 
 creation in the cross that translates the belief into 
 spiritual life, and indeed makes that life, by making 
 Christ the element of our own final spiritual conscious- 
 ness. I would now farther illustrate the moralising of 
 dogma, first in regard to theological dogma, by con- 
 tinuing to dwell on the cross as the avenue to the 
 
 330
 
 240 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 incarnation and the incarnation as the foundation of 
 the cross ; and second, in regard to philosophic dogma, 
 by translating the doctrine of the absolute into the 
 terms of religious experience. 
 
 § § § 
 
 It does not matter what happens to any creeds or 
 
 orthodoxies on this subject, if we but get at the truth. 
 Let us not resolve beforehand that it is impossible to 
 modify the old confessions, or to resume, after a slack 
 interval, the long movement of the Church's thought 
 to pierce and clarify the mystery of godliness in Christ. 
 Let the doctrine be reconstructed, reinterpreted, re- 
 stated — what you will. Provided two things. First that 
 the task be publicly essayed by competent and reverent 
 people and not by amateurs, with but a natural religion 
 and a poor education or none on the subject; for the 
 worst heresy is quackery. Indeed, the work can really 
 be done only by the collective Church in earnest faith, 
 working on the contributions of individuals intellectually 
 equipped and morally serious. And, second, provided 
 that what is aimed at is religious truth, which is so 
 much more than the results of severe historical criti- 
 cism ; truth as it is in Jesus and not about Jesus; truth 
 which is the Church's supernatural faith giving a 
 rational account of itself; the truth of a faith which is 
 not natural religion, but an invasion of the natural 
 man, and an enclave in the course of history ; the order 
 of truth which has made Christ what he has been to 
 the Church and the soul. That is not necessarily the 
 truth exactly as the Church has formulated it, the 
 truth as stated in the Church's conception, or dogma ; 
 but it is the substantial, distinctive, and evangelical truth 
 of the Church's experience ; the truth, operative however
 
 IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 241 
 
 conceived, which has made Christ for his Church some- 
 thing totally different from what Buddha is for his Church ; 
 the truth of the dogmas in distinction from the dogmas 
 as true. 
 
 § § § 
 
 The Church has always held fast to the formula about 
 " the Eternal Godhead in Jesus Christ." What is 
 under that phrase? Surely it means more than that Jesus 
 himself was but a unique human personality, and that 
 the divine element in him was the presence or Spirit 
 of the Father, dwelling in him as in us, only more so; 
 to whom he was completely sensitive; with whom he 
 was filled, in the affectional sense in which one person- 
 ality may be said to fill another, through love's 
 saturation and obsession ? 
 
 Does the Godhead in Christ mean only that the 
 Father was in the closest communion of affection with 
 Christ's human personality ? Or does it not mean that 
 the personality that met the Father so completely was 
 itself of the nature of Godhead, and always had been 
 a divine vis-a-vis to the personality of the Father? Only 
 in the latter case should we really speak of the deity of 
 Christ ; only if he was the Ego in some form of the 
 Eternal Son ; only if he was increate, and had a share 
 which God could delegate to no creature in the creation 
 of the world, a share in the world's origin as real as 
 his part in its Redemption, Reconciliation, and Con- 
 summation. 
 
 To compare great things with small, that powerful 
 genius Emily Bronte makes the heroine in Wuthering 
 Heights to say, " I avi Pleathcliffe. He is always, always 
 in my mind ; not as a pleasure, any more than I am 
 always a pleasure to myself ; but as my own being." Borne
 
 242 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 on the current of her passion, she goes on to say, " I 
 love him because he is more myself than I am. What- 
 ever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." 
 And did not the insight of the Church go on to say the 
 like sub specie eternitatis of the Son's relation to the 
 Father ? Is unity of being not the postulate of a love so 
 engrossing and complete as the genius of the Church's 
 faith realised that of Father and Son to be ? It is 
 not only in theology that passion gravitates to meta- 
 physic. We need but remember also Shakespeare's 
 sonnets and minor poems to feel that. 
 
 It would be better method (and better ethic as well) 
 if we confined the expression " Christ's Godhead, deity, 
 or even divinity," to the more thorough-going idea. 
 There is nothing so necessary to belief and its moral 
 purposes as more clearness, courage, and conscience in 
 deciding what we mean by terms. The chief plague 
 and heresy of the hour in this region is that with the 
 popularising of religion God tends to become the most 
 fluid of all words. The prime certainty becomes the 
 great haze. The living God becomes but as the ether 
 of life. He pervades, but he does not purpose. He 
 saturates all, but all does not centre in him. Discussion 
 thus becomes impossible, from the fact that the intel- 
 lectual conscience grows damp and limp in the mist. 
 Terms become so liquid that they run into any mould, 
 and are sometimes no more tractable than a cloud that 
 you cannot even mould. The intellectual ethic of 
 some to-day would ruin them if it took a commercial 
 instead of a mental form. Clear, strong and honest 
 heresy is a negative contribution to clear and strong 
 belief. But heresy in rolling cloud is only stifling, 
 depressing, and demoralising.
 
 IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 243 
 
 § § § 
 The Godhead of Christ can only be proved religiously. 
 Indeed, the only true confession of the Incarnation is 
 living faith. It can only be based on what is involved in 
 the idea, the experience, of God that proceeds from Jesus 
 himself. Is He necessary to the being of the God He 
 revealed ? If we do not regard Jesus and his full gospel 
 as God's supreme revelation, as God's ultimate word, 
 there can be no talk of his Godhead. If we do not 
 bring all other religious truth to this test ; if we place 
 above Christ's word those ideas of God which we 
 draw from the world of nature or reason, those con- 
 ceptions of Absoluteness, Omnipotence, and the rest 
 which would be called common-sense notions; if we 
 take from these, and not from Jesus, our notion of 
 what God is — then we shall very likely fail in proving 
 bis Godhead. If we seek in Jesus absolute power, in 
 the natural sense of the word, we shall not find 
 it. If we decree beforehand that God is not present 
 where omniscience is not in evidence we shall drop 
 the question about Godhead in Jesus. But absolute 
 Omnipotence or Omniscience is no direct part of a 
 saving revelation. Absolute power and authority indeed 
 belongs to Godhead, but it is not the whole of it, it is 
 not the outgoing element in it, which is love. And an 
 incarnation may be possible of that element in Godhead 
 which rather represents absolute obedience, and absolute 
 holiness of response. That element of subordination 
 and sacrifice must be there surely. For if there be in 
 Godhead absolute authority it is hard to conceive of it 
 without thinking of absolute obedience as there also ; 
 unless the obedience cease to be correlative with the 
 authority, unless authority once existed without obedi-
 
 244 ^^** Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 ence, unless there could be an Eternal Father with but 
 a temporary son, unless obedience be an undivine thing, 
 and the only divine thing is to lord it, and to wrap one's 
 self in conscious power with no outgoing love. And 
 then where is our Christian ethic, or the real divineness 
 of humility? And then why should Nietzsche not be the 
 true prophet, and a dens humilis a mere figment fostered 
 by the weak majority to strengthen their case and better 
 their lot ? 
 
 The self-consciousness of Jesus I have indicated as 
 being of immense value here ; but how do we know 
 that his God was not a figure in the window and 
 his Father his dream ? His self-consciousness taken 
 alone is only a historic datum. We must have some- 
 thing that turns that past to our perpetual present. We 
 must have the Lord, the Spirit. To the evangelical 
 experience, that Jesus becomes our present Saviour ; and 
 such a Christ, who has become our experienced Salvation, 
 is certainly involved in his own God. Christ can only 
 save if we have God saving in him. A theology of 
 incarnation must be a theology of the saved. The 
 fulcrum of any vital doctrine about the person of Christ 
 must be an experimental faith in him as Redeemer. 
 Christ is very God to me because, and only because, 
 he has been God's saving grace to me a sinner ; He 
 has not simply preached it, or brought it. We cannot 
 convince the man in the street that Jesus is God, nor 
 the man that feeds his soul on modern culture. We do 
 not go to the world of the hearty, alert, interesting, 
 rational man, even when he has developed some religious 
 attention and some theological curiosity ; we do not go 
 to the ordinary able man and propose to convince him by 
 argument, consecutive, cumulative, or convergent, that
 
 nc] The Moralising of Dogma 245 
 
 Jesus was God. That would be to attempt the im- 
 possible. It would mean that we could have no real 
 faith in a moral atonement till we were first convinced 
 of a rational incarnation. And it would mean, as I 
 have said, that we set about proving that Jesus 
 possessed the qualities which the natural man of 
 common-sense, or of common-sense organised into a 
 philosophy, associates with the idea of God — a supreme 
 Being, all-knowing, all-present, all-blessing, capable of 
 all prodigies. No such attempt could succeed. Indeed 
 it can easily seem absurd. And apart from the in- 
 congruity of attaching these qualities to a historic 
 personality, no such claim is made in the New Testament. 
 It does not offer an omnipotent Christ or an intellectual 
 paragon. Its appeal is not to the average rational man. 
 That would be a legalist and not a gospel appeal. To 
 reject the New Testament appeal is not stupid, not 
 irrational, as the cheap apologists are prone to say. 
 The appeal is not made to the shrewd and logical ; it is 
 made to the heart and conscience in a real experience ; 
 and to neither of these acting normally, but to an 
 abnormal and concerned condition of both. It is made 
 to men created for love who yet do not or cannot love, 
 to men created for goodness who are in sin, and who are 
 either uneasy or miserable in it, or too lost to be either. 
 The need to which Christianity appeals is the need of 
 the conscience, its supreme need of grace from the God 
 whose holiness troubles its days or oppresses its nights. 
 And the first condition to be satisfied by any doctrine 
 about Christ's person is that it shall be necessary to the 
 central principle of Christianity that " in Christ we have 
 a gracious God." Not that we have such a God through 
 
 Christ, but that in having Christ we have Him. That 
 s
 
 246 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 is the marrow of Christianit}^ running through Paul, 
 Athanasius, Anselm, Luther, Schleiermacher, Wesley, 
 and indeed all the great evangelic and apostolic succes- 
 sion. The sum of a religion of commandment, of a legal 
 religion, may be the mere love of God and love of man. But 
 Christianity is not a legal religion, and such love, though 
 not far from the Kingdom, was yet outside it (Mk. xii. 34). 
 There is no real faith in the Godhead of Christ apart 
 from the evangelical experience of God's gracious love 
 of us. And that experience has always required behind 
 it, for its full force, a real incarnation. The pre-existence 
 of the Son of God who became incarnate in Jesus has 
 always been considered requisite for the evangelical 
 faith of the Church, the faith that God in the cross 
 really forgave and saved, and that he was not merely 
 believed and declared to have done so, even by the 
 greatest of all prophets and the holiest of all saints, 
 Jesus. We should be clear about the issue. Even a 
 Roman Church that worships Christ, has a social and a 
 spiritual future denied to a rational creed that but 
 admires and honours Him. Christianity is either 
 Evangelical or Socinian at last. And if it is not the 
 latter it must stand on the fact that the God we sinned 
 against was in Christ, really forgiving the sinner at first 
 hand, that Godhead was actually living in Christ and 
 reconciling — not sending, visiting, moving, or inspiring 
 Christ, but living in Him and constituting Him. 
 Certainly more than inspiring Him, for it is a poor 
 response to the history to think of Christ simply as 
 inspired, or visited by a Spirit which came and went. 
 And I have tried to show that we cannot think of Him 
 adequately as tenanted by the Spirit, even in an abiding 
 way — as a created personality quite filled, and always
 
 IX.] The Moralising of Dogma z^y 
 
 filled, with the influence of the Spirit, always and per- 
 fectly answering the Spirit. We may of course reject 
 the apostolic interpretation and follow a different line 
 from the New Testament. And we may justify ourselves 
 in doing so by various considerations — when we do 
 consider. But if we follow the New Testament as a 
 whole and as a Gospel, we must think of the divine 
 element as constituting the historic personality; and we 
 must think of Christ's earthly life itself, with all its 
 passion and choice, as due to a great and critical volition 
 of the same will in a heavenly state. That is a view 
 essential to apostolic Christianity, and one of the facts 
 which it believes to be of first necessity for the redeeming 
 work which is Christianity, and which created the 
 Church. In the Bible men are preoccupied with the 
 reality of an incarnation whereof all the pagan ideas 
 and legends about gods descending and walking the 
 earth were but presentiments, adumbrations, prophecies, 
 and even prayers for it. Those Judaistic notions of 
 Messiah, Redemption, Expiation, and all the train of 
 ideas which the religious historical school use to dissolve 
 Christianity into a very effective syncretism, were really 
 a part of that providential prcparatio cvangelica which 
 fell into place and found itself in Christ. 
 
 So, when we base our belief in the Incarnation on the 
 Evangelical experience that is a case of the moralising 
 of dogma in the theological plane. 
 
 § § § 
 I wish now to illustrate the process of moralising 
 
 dogma by applying it in the Christological interest to 
 
 another dogma than omnipotence, the philosophic dogma 
 
 of the Absolute.* 
 
 * For the moralisinR of such a doctrine as Atonement may I refer to my 
 little book The Cruciality oj the Cross (] ladder & Stoughton, 1909), and 
 especially its last part.
 
 248 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 What is most keenly discussed in many cultured circles 
 at present is the Absoluteness of Christianity. What does 
 that really mean ? Has it any meaning for the Church and 
 its preachers ? It does not, cannot, mean that a philoso- 
 phical Absolute can be proved by the Christian revelation 
 in a systematic way which compels theoretic conviction. 
 It does not mean that Christian theologians profess to have 
 solved the problem in which Hegel failed. They have in- 
 deed a solution to the world ; but not to the same version 
 of its question as the philosophers put. The idea of the 
 Absolute has for us not a philosophic but a religious, 
 practical, experimental value. It really means, in more 
 familiar language, the finality of Christ for the experience 
 of life and reality — the soul's last reality. That is the 
 form which the truth of the incarnation assumes in face 
 of the challenge that marks the present day. The insight 
 this luminous age lacks is insight into the greatest moral 
 fact of history — into Christ. What we need, what 
 preachers of all men need, is not so much affection to 
 Christ but insight into Christ. That is the Church's 
 need, however it may be with individuals. It is not 
 impression but inspiration. Christianity must stand or 
 fall by an insight which discerns the finality of Christ 
 as to life and its destiny. And, from what I have already 
 said as to the place and function of the cross, you will 
 not be surprised if I say now that this finality of Christ is 
 the same thing as used to be described as his " finished 
 work," his transfer of Humanity, for good and all, from 
 death to life in relation to God. It is always the cross 
 that is the offence to the world. It may be the 
 philosophic world of Hegel with its Absolute; or the 
 "gothic" world of Nietzsche, Henley, Shaw, Kipling, 
 Davidson or Wells with its superman, its assertion of the
 
 IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 249 
 
 individual and his instincts, its cult of the violent life, 
 and its protest against humility, sacrifice, poverty, 
 chastity, or obedience. Or it may arrest the natural 
 healthy world of comfort and success. The only authori- 
 tative ethic in the face of these egoisms and subjectiv- 
 isms is one that is based on the finality of the 
 historic Christ and his redemption. We are in a world 
 which has been redeemed; and not in one which is being 
 redeemed at a pace varying with the world's thought and 
 progress, or the Churches' thought and work. To believe 
 that the kingdom has come is another religion from the 
 belief that it is but coming and that we have to bring it. 
 It produces a totally different type of faith and life. And 
 it is the only type that can save Christianity from being 
 politicised, socialised, and secularised out of existence. 
 And I would say three things about this belief, of which 
 that matter of experience is the first." 
 
 § § § 
 (i) For Christianity the Absolute is not in an idea but 
 in an experience. It is a layman's matter. It is the very 
 soul of our universal faith. It is the affair of every man, 
 if his eternal soul is worth more than all the relative 
 world. It has little directly to do with the results of 
 speculation or of comparative religion. Our absolute is 
 not the last common summit of all thought; for we do 
 not rally about a minimal point of light that shines dear in 
 the sky for all quarters, like the pole-star for the sea, or the 
 shining Fusiyama for Japan. Not is it the least common 
 denominator of all faiths ; for we are not united most by 
 the thin thread of belief which divides us least. Of 
 course, a philosophic Absolute cannot be out of relation 
 
 * See Hunziger ProbUme, p. 79, for much that follows.
 
 250 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 to the Christian God ; and there is a metaphysic of faith ; 
 but it is not the Gospel that Christianity brings, nor the 
 claim it makes. The Gospel does not say that all reli- 
 gions are right with their claim to be absolute, right in 
 the sense that they all bring us to contact with the 
 Absolute in differing degrees, though none finally — not 
 even Christianity. That relativism rests on a conception 
 of the Absolute somewhat abstract and formal — too much 
 so for the faith of a living and eternal soul, or for its 
 trust of itself to a living and eternal God. The Chris- 
 tian claim to absoluteness is a thing of more depth, 
 breadth, and volume than that — more simple, vital, and 
 passionate. It has more flesh, blood, content and con- 
 science. For, among faiths, there is in Christianity a 
 difference which is qualitative and not merely gradual, a 
 difference in kind and not in degree only. Christianity 
 does bring us into contact with the Absolute God — like 
 other religions; but (if the phrase were allowed) it does 
 so absolutely and finally. The other religions had a real 
 message ; Christianity has something beyond a message 
 more real still. They all told us truth with whatever 
 error ; Christianity goes beyond a gift of more truth and 
 less error. Christianity takes us out of the formal region 
 of truths more or less true; it takes us out of the region 
 even of absolute truth, truth absolutely true, out of 
 mere theology. Its revelation is the gift of a true 
 God, not of truth about God. So long as truth is 
 propositional or formal, so long as it is any kind of 
 statement, however exalted and kindled, about God, 
 it is below the kind of absolute that the soul re- 
 quires, that life requires, that the world requires. 
 Christianity gives us a new and absolute life, an absolute, 
 not in form or truth, but in content and experience. It
 
 IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 251 
 
 does not give us anything about God, but it gives God 
 Himself — the living God to living men. Its revelation is 
 not doctrinal but sacramental. And in its light — in its 
 psychology if you will — we can interpret all other faiths. 
 We then see that the vital thing in every religion is not an 
 innate evolutionary movement towards an absolute God, 
 but the absolute God breaking in upon the spiritual con- 
 sciousness, breaking up through it in essential miracle. 
 The foundation of the whole world emerges in the moral 
 and religious life of the soul, takes command, and anchors 
 us upon something which Eternity cannot shake. For 
 this is Eternity. 
 
 § § § 
 (2) For the absoluteness of Christianity lies in an ex- 
 perience of the historic and most human Christ as a 
 superhuman visitant, and as the one moral mediator of 
 personal communion with the living, and holy, and eternal 
 God. It is an experience of Christ as the absolute con- 
 science, i.e., as the judge of all, and as the Redeemer, 
 i.e., the saving health of all — in a word, as the God of 
 all. It means that the person and work of Christ alone 
 gives the moral soul to itself. He does for us the ultimate 
 thing of the soul, its one thing needful. He gives it its 
 own ".ternal place and communion with an absolutely holy 
 God. God is the only world in which the soul can find 
 itself. Christ gives us our God and our soul at once. 
 God finds us and we find God. In Christ the end of all 
 makes himself in his love the means to that end. What 
 is there to be done beyond that, when that is done on 
 the scale of the race ? To be in living, loving, holy 
 communion with the living, loving, holy God for ever 
 is the soul's perfect consummation and final bliss. 
 And that is Christ's gift. What do we want, what
 
 252 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lbct. 
 
 can we conceive, in any farther revelation ? We are 
 here at a finality and its rest. Endless discovery, of 
 course, remains, endless explication within the gift un- 
 speakable ; but in the way of revelation what more is pos- 
 sible than that God should in his love give Himself to man 
 completely, though not at any point exhaustively ? What 
 more can we pray than that He should give us his whole 
 and holy self, and so bring us to our true and whole self? 
 And this in Christ, to the classic religious experience 
 of the race, He has done. The point, you perceive, is 
 not that this is what a final revelation would do if we had 
 reached it, but that this is what God in Christ has done 
 and does. That is the real issue of the hour. Not, Is 
 Christ a revelation of God ? but, Is he the revelation, 
 the final and complete revelation, of which all that we 
 may call revelation besides is but a factor? Most whom 
 we need here consider admit that Christ is a revelation 
 of God ; but all do not admit that he is the final revela- 
 tion, that we have in him God Himself, and the whole 
 Eternal God, with His last word, with man's last 
 judgment, his last justification, his last destiny. This 
 is a matter which cannot be settled by proofs or evi- 
 dences of Christ's deity, but only by experience — the 
 soul's experience of eternal Redemption in a Church 
 of souls. There is no basis for a belief in the Incarna- 
 tion but this basis of faith. Nor is there any other basis 
 for certainty of the world's final good. The poet trusts 
 that somehow good will be the final goal of ill; the 
 believer knows that this is how it must be so, for so it is. 
 
 § § § 
 (3) The final thing, the Absolute, in Christianity is the 
 experience not simply of contact with Christ, not simply 
 of a revelation given, nor even of a deliverance wrought.
 
 IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 253 
 
 but of a new creation effected in Christ. The Son is as 
 creative as the Father. What he brings is not a revela- 
 tion which can be tested by the formal tests of truth, and 
 called final by its coincidence with a final philosophy — 
 a philosophy of the Absolute. That was the dangerous 
 method of the early Apologists. It was a dream which 
 misled many a century ago to think that Hegel's 
 philosophy, as the last word of thought, had counter- 
 signed for the moderns Christ's revelation as the word 
 of God ; with such a reference the Gospel was good for 
 any amount for which we might draw on it. But the final 
 thing in Christianity is an experience in which Christ is 
 not simply the ideal nor the channel, but the creator of 
 the new man. He is the real principal, and not a mere 
 intermediary. In his person we have the permanent 
 divine ground of our communion with God, and not 
 merely its divine agent once. The work of Christ is the 
 work of a Christ eternally working for us. If we are 
 brought to God by the historic Christ we go on to find 
 that we remain in God only as we abide in the same 
 Christ as the Eternal Son. It has been so found in the 
 history of the Church. It is on the. ground of Christ 
 that we are forgiven, daily forgiven, it is not simply by 
 means of Christ. He is not the ground of our trust 
 simply but of our salvation — not an Erkentnissgrund but a 
 Rcalgrtind. The means is in him identical with the end. 
 He is God dealing with men directly, though mediatorily. 
 Now I beg you here not to say such words are meaning- 
 less. That they are not ; for the thing has been often 
 said, and by the greatest. And no one is entitled to 
 deny it till he has grasped the meaning, and is sure 
 f n good ground it is wrong, God in Christ deals with 
 men directly but mediatorily. He is the Mediator and
 
 254 ^''^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 not the medium, not the agent. Buddha was a divine 
 agent. Can we refuse to say he had a commission from 
 God ? But Christ is the offended Holiness itself exer- 
 cising forgiveness and salvation ; and doing so in such a 
 way as to set up, not recognition, not belief, not welcome 
 even, but communion — on the scale of the race and of 
 Eternity. To be in Christ is to be in God. He is not 
 the herald of God's will but God's will in action, God's 
 final will in universal action on me; and so acting on 
 me as not simply to impress me but so as to remake 
 me, and thus build every soul into an everlasting king- 
 dom. It is not a new mood, or a new conviction he 
 gives me, but a new life, an Eternal Life, a new world, my 
 Eternity, my own Eternity, destined, forfeit, and restored. 
 There is nothing more left for God to give man, but the 
 appropriation, in experience and in detail, of this one and 
 final gift of Himself in Christ and his Eternal Life. For 
 if there be a Mediator in this sense there can only be one. 
 He can have no successor. 
 
 § § § 
 It is a mighty matter to have to do with, a vast venture 
 and committal to make, when we put our soul in 
 Christ's hands for God and for Eternity, and when we 
 take in him the Almighty and Eternal into our soul. It 
 is a step for good and all. We risk all we have on that 
 pearl. We sell all we have to buy it. It is a tremendous 
 assertion we make when we go to the world with Christ. 
 How true it is that society to day needs nothing so 
 much as the lost sense of God in its midst — holy, 
 judging, amazing, terrifying, comforting, healing us. 
 There are those who while they feel that feel it so poorly 
 and unworthily that they think it can be recovered by 
 literature, or the stage, or some such mop for the Atlantic.
 
 IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 255 
 
 But is there anyway to set God in the midst but His own 
 way of setting Christ there ? It is a tremendous thing to 
 go to the world with our Christ, and to many a pretty wit 
 a thing ridiculous and despicable. 1 do not wonder people 
 do not believe us. Christ Himself was disbelieved, and 
 he grows credible but slowly. I cannot myself claim to 
 have been free born in this faith ; with a great price have 
 I procured its freedom. I have envied those who took 
 naturally and sweetly to Christ — though they have helped 
 m.e little. And I should count a life well spent, and the 
 world well lost, if, after tasting all its experiences, and 
 facing all its problems, I had no more to show at its 
 close, or carry with me to another life, than the acquisi- 
 tion of a real, sure, humble, and grateful faith in the 
 Eternal and Incarnate Son of God. All is still well if the 
 decay of everything else but fertilise the knowledge of him 
 (Phil. iii. 8). Only, let us not increase the difficulty by 
 misunderstanding. It is indeed a tremendous thing to 
 say that the historic Christ outweighs all the world, 
 the race, its possibilities and its development. Think of 
 the range of history, the dimensions of the Cosmos. Tell 
 over in your imagination the whole population of earth, 
 past, present, and to come. Conceive what it is when we 
 learn that it would take an express train 114 millions of 
 years to the nearest star. And Christ outweighs all that 
 cosmic greatness ! It is beyond flesh and blood to believe 
 it. But do not let us misconceive the terms of the 
 demand. Do not let us succumb to mere bigness. 
 There is no religion in an infinite merely extended, 
 but only in an absolutely holy love. We do not weigh 
 Christ against a numerical race, but a fallen. And we do 
 not mean that Christ was as the end of all development ; 
 for the development in Christ is far greater than the
 
 256 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 development to Him. He is God's seventh and last day, 
 in which we men for ever live and grow. No stage, no form 
 is final. As mere history Christianity is not imperfectible. 
 What is final is intra-historic, super-historic. That is the 
 real continuum. It is Eternal Life. But that means much 
 more than an indestructible spiritual energy with endless 
 power to vary. All the variations are on a fixed theme. 
 It is more than the mere spiritual vitality upon which 
 the Catholic Modernists seem to stand as the essence of 
 the Church. It is a positive work, word, and message. 
 It is not the vitality of the Church but the holy will of God 
 in Christ. The Lord is the Spirit. God is Spirit. Yes, 
 but a cognisable spirit with inalienable features — a Holy 
 Spirit. Christ is not a will that might decree anything, 
 but God's holy will in action for our Salvation, His will 
 as His saving self, His will as Himself and not a function 
 of Himself. 
 
 § § § 
 What is meant then is that as (in Butler's great 
 
 saying) " morality is the soul of things," with Christ we 
 
 have all things in principle, that the gift is for ever 
 
 compendious and insuperable. It means that the gift, 
 
 Christ, has a supernatural history not only after it, 
 
 but before it and in it; that it is an eternal act and deed 
 
 in a historic soul ; that it has in it the final power not 
 
 only to enter history mightily but, being there, to 
 
 subdue all things to itself, to compel, monopolise, 
 
 and consummate history, and so to grow to the goal 
 
 latent in its own increate beginning. It is meant that, 
 
 as in creation this world is given in its own plane of 
 
 Time once for all, so, on the second and eternal plane, 
 
 the spiritual and heavenly world is given once for all in 
 
 the New Creation in Christ. Christ works upon man
 
 IX.] The Moralising of Dogma 257 
 
 with the same absolute creative power as the Father 
 does; that is the meaning of the Godhead of Christ. 
 We do not indeed attain once for all, but we are 
 apprehended once for all. We do not mean that our 
 religion is final, but that God's revelation is. The 
 religion must grow ; but its growth is in the power of 
 appropriating its own finality — as Christ himself did, 
 in becoming what he always was. We have an absolute 
 revelation but not an absolute religion. We have in 
 Christ an absolute grace, crucial for God, which we meet 
 with an appropriate faith, crucial for the soul. God's gift 
 is the Eternal Act ; our taking or refusmg it is our 
 eternal doom. It is the issue of Eternal Life or Death. 
 Yet we only gradually become conscious how final, how 
 crucial for Eternity, the faith is that meets a grace so 
 free. But that slowness matters less ; because it is our 
 revelation we have to preach and not our religion, it is 
 our Christ and not our faith, our word and not our 
 sermons. We have to preach God and not advertise 
 Him. The gospel still means far more for God than the 
 martyrs do; and the redeeming Christ is more than the 
 confessing Church. In Christ we have the whole of God, 
 but not everything about God, the whole heart of God but 
 not the whole range of God. We have the final kind of 
 God but not the final compass of God, the kind and will of 
 God that history cannot supersede ; the whole counsel of 
 God but not all his counsels ; all God but not yet all good. 
 But with even that qualification it is a mighty matter 
 to believe. Magna ars est conversari cum Deo. It is the 
 greatest thing in the world. And in two ways it is this 
 vital thing. It is vital in the sense of being a matter of 
 life and experience. And it is vital in the sense of being 
 essential to the life of Christianity in the world, and 
 decisive for the destiny of the soul.
 
 LECTURE X 
 THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST
 
 LECTURE X 
 
 THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST 
 
 To explain Christ and his final work there were two 
 ideas current in the early Church — his Virgin Birth and 
 his Pre-existence. 
 
 It is possible, of course, to hold both of these. But 
 the temper and tendency of our time is against the old 
 emphasis on the former, especially on critical grounds ; 
 and more particularly because of its absence in cases 
 where, as in St. Paul, all turns on the uniqueness of 
 Christ's nature and origin. It is to be noted also that 
 were the Virgin birth beyond historic criticism it might 
 not by itself give us a pre-existent Christ, and it need 
 not give us more than an Arian. It might indicate no 
 more than a supreme son of God created then or before 
 through the Holy Ghost for the special purpose of a 
 sinless redemption. 
 
 If, however, we relax the emphasis on the Virgin Birth 
 we must increase it upon the pre-existcnce, as St. Paul 
 did. 
 
 And we are the more moved to this since, while Jesus 
 makes no sort of reference to his human birth, sat very 
 loose to family ties, and rebuked, and even renounced, 
 
 a6i
 
 262 The Person and Place of Jems Christ [lect. 
 
 his mother in a way (Mk. iii. 21, 31) hard to adjust to 
 the current hypothesis, yet it is difficult to remove from 
 him entirely all reference to his pre-existence. Were 
 these ample and explicit, of course, were his own con- 
 sciousness of an antenatal life put beyond doubt, any 
 difficulties of ours would be quite minor as to how such 
 a life became possible in human conditions. Questions 
 as to the psychology of the kenotic act could well wait, 
 if we were perfectly sure from such a source as Christ's 
 own words about its reality. 
 
 But the pre-existence of Jesus is one of those points 
 where, in the present state of opinion about the fourth 
 gospel, modern thought is apt to feel insecure from lack of 
 express data and from distrust of theological venture. 
 Faith is too timid to-day to stray far from the shore lights 
 of explicit statement, to launch out into the deep things of 
 God, and sail by observation of the heavens. It asks, 
 where are we told this or that ? Such non-theological 
 religion can do but a coasting trade. You have the same 
 textual habit of mind both in the hard believers and the 
 hard critics. A verbal Scripturalism has gone, but it has 
 given way to another kind, which has not ceased to be 
 narrow by becoming critical, and has not become really 
 liberal just by ceasing to be literal. There is a mental 
 cramp, and certainly an imaginative, which too easily 
 besets the meticulous scholar. And it is a poor exchange 
 to fall out of the hands of the theologian, narrow as his 
 imagination could be, into those of the critic, narrow as 
 he can be for lack of any imagination at all. There is 
 an amplitude and an atmosphere about the great dogma- 
 tists of theology which is absent from the dogmatists 
 of research. These have the great way with them. 
 The great theologies are epics, with a fascination for
 
 X.] The Pre- existence of Christ 263 
 
 Miltonic minds. In their sphere they have the scientific 
 imagination so praised by Tyndall, and the cosmic 
 emotion which W. K. Clifford pursued. And in matters 
 of the soul it is better to have the dogma of the tele- 
 scope than that of the microscope. It is better to 
 have the dogma of Melanchthon, or even Calvin, than of 
 Wellhausen or Schmiedel (whom I name with due respect 
 for the great work they represent). The one has the 
 positivity of infinite revelation, the other the positivism 
 of the present age. The one descends from the great 
 sky like a bride adorned, the other struggles from the dust, 
 with clipped wings and short strokes, to meet a Lord 
 too much in the air. Each is a dogmatism ; but the one 
 dogmatism represents, in forms now partly obsolete, the 
 spacious consciousness of a whole living and believing 
 Church, gathering up the best thought of its age; the 
 other betrays the straitened and esurient air of a 
 scientific school whose thought does not feed its soul. 
 There is much in the old dogmatism that needs correc- 
 tion, and there is much in the new mind to correct it. 
 But how much needs chastening in the new may be 
 exemplified in the warped and rash acumen of those 
 critics who venture to assure us, for instance, that it is 
 now proved that Jesus never claimed to be the judge of 
 mankind. And this is done in face of the patent fact 
 that among critics quite as competent there is an equally 
 decided conviction the other way. In several such cases 
 we feel how much truth there is in the observation made 
 by a liberal theologian. " It is remarkable how often 
 men who can set out admirably the thought of the past 
 show themselves quite incapable of understanding the 
 features of their present." The scholar, the historian, 
 submerges the thinker. Harnack, for instance, is much
 
 264 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 more happy in dealing with the history of Christianity 
 than with its essence. He is a great historian, and a 
 valuable apologist ; but as a theologian he is — not so 
 great. And yet the half-taught mind concludes that 
 eminence in the one direction makes a man an authority 
 in the other. It really takes a great deal of theology 
 to revolutionise theology. 
 
 § § § 
 
 I may illustrate what I mean by the treatment of a 
 passage which is of great moment for the question that 
 engages us. The allusion by St. Paul to the pre-existence 
 and kenosisof the Son in Phil. 2, is almost a aira^ Xeyofxevov, 
 (except 2 Cor. viii. 9.) Now what is the interpretation put 
 on that fact, that singularity, by the extreme critics ? 
 
 There are two possible. We may think that such an 
 allusion is but a brilliant flash that looked in upon the 
 writer's mind only to be mentioned and then to vanish 
 without settling in his thought. It is a mere happy 
 thought, an injected parenthesis, a jewel dropped on the 
 way by a rich and lavish mind, too urgent in his spiritual 
 flight to stop and recover it up for further use. The 
 rarity of reference is then interpreted as a sign of 
 the comparative eccentricity of the idea in the writer's 
 mind. Or, on the other hand, we may be more impressed 
 by the weight of the reference than by its rarity. We 
 may think that the isolation and length of the passage in 
 a practical book is due to its greatness. We may recall 
 that the whole New Testament (and especially the 
 Epistles) is occasional in its nature, much of it pastoral, 
 edificatory, intending Church business and not theological 
 system. St. Paul was not what orthodoxy made 
 Luther — a professor of Dogmatics. The theology comes 
 in by the way, as the ground of the religious or moral
 
 X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 265 
 
 appeal. However fundamental, it is allusive and 
 incidental ; it is not dwelt upon in that proportion to 
 its intrinsic value which it would have if the writer kept 
 chiefly in view the majesty and proportion of Christian 
 truth. 
 
 Now of these two possible views about rarity of 
 reference, the tendency of mere criticism is to prefer the 
 former. The latter requires a finer, ampler, literary 
 instinct, a more imaginative psychology, a judgment 
 more sympathetic and flexible, with more spiritual 
 savoir /aire. The critical tendency is to say that the 
 idea in question counts for little in St. Paul because it 
 is a passing allusion. This is an inference the more 
 strange from men who otherwise depreciate the Apostle 
 as a systematiser, and find his greatness in the suggestive 
 wealth, the vistas, of his experiential thought. 
 
 There are other instances. It is held to be a mere 
 theologoumenon, for instance, to say that in his death 
 Christ really judged and executed the sinful principle, 
 paralysed it at the core of human nature and history, 
 and broke the heart of its objective power ; on the 
 ground that St. Paul, the great expositor of his death, 
 seems only to allude to it in a parenthetic reference 
 to the action of his sacrifice as " condemning sin in 
 the flesh." The development of the idea in the fourth 
 Gospel seems overlooked — the destroying of the prince 
 of this world. 
 
 And the tendency I am speaking of, this quantitative 
 criticism, this concordance criticism, reaches a climax 
 when it is applied to Christ's own references to his 
 pre-cxistcnce or his atoning death in the Synoptics. 
 Because they are few, therefore they are comparatively 
 insignificant. They are few, it is said, because the matter
 
 266 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 did not bulk in Christ's own consciousness. But a 
 criticism with some psychological imagination may sug- 
 gest another interpretation. They may be few just because 
 they bulked unspeakably in Christ's mind. His thoughts 
 about his death were unutterable, except in an act ; just 
 as in the Last Supper, when all his teaching had failed, 
 he resorts to what Keim so finely calls " his last 
 parable," the object lesson, the enacted revelation, 
 finished in the supreme aira^ Aeydjuevov of the cross, 
 (which is also ignored by much criticism). These 
 thoughts were too great and engrossing to be spoken of, 
 especially to his dull entourage. " How am I straitened." 
 Too straitened in doing the thing, when it came to a head, 
 to be other than silent about it. The captain is not 
 loquacious in the rapids. He does not talk about sea- 
 manship in the storm. The pilot does not teach naviga- 
 tion in shooting a savage bar. Remember, moreover, 
 that the first bearing of Christ's great and crowning 
 action was upon God and not man. He was adjusting 
 the relation between God and man, and not impressing 
 individuals, or doing a thing calculated to impress 
 posterity with a religious message in a religious way. 
 He was dealing with God for the race. Hence, as the 
 crisis deepened, his words and thoughts were oblivious of 
 men and their reception of Him, and engrossed with 
 what he was doing with God. If his supreme object was 
 to act on men, the aTra^ Acyd/zcva on the inmost matters 
 are not intelligible. They are inadequate for the 
 purpose. 
 
 The more rare the reference the more seminal it may 
 be, and often has been. Isaiah 53 is quite unique in the 
 Old Testament. Yet one might venture to say it is the 
 passage in the Old Testament which is the link with the
 
 X.] The Pre-exisience of Christ 267 
 
 New, yea, the germ of it, and the passage, which has most 
 affected the conception of the most unique thing in the 
 New Testament — the cross — both with the Saviour, the 
 Church, and the world. And so also the kenotic passage 
 in Philippians ii. has had an effect upon Christian 
 thought, faith, and adoration out of all proportion to the 
 space the New Testament gives to the idea ; as it must 
 have had a power in a mind like Paul's far larger than 
 the space it covers in his letters. 
 
 § § § 
 Criticism, in its vigorous and rigorous reaction from 
 
 the Teutonic extreme of Idealism, has sometimes about 
 it, if not a narrowness, yet an exility, not to say a 
 stridency, a want of atmosphere and of space, which is 
 unfortunate in dealing with a reality like Christian faith, 
 or a book like the New Testament. There is what 
 might be called a Synoptic positivism ; which corre- 
 sponds, in its sphere, to the Comtist empiricism in 
 philosophy ; and it makes criticism, in its present phase, 
 too much the victim of its own age to be the final 
 interpreter of History. It applies religious psy- 
 chology ; but the critical science of religions cannot 
 give us the psychology of religion. A mere objective 
 psychology of religion, we are told by an authority 
 so great as Troeltsch, does not avail without a field 
 of observation in the living faith of the inquirer. So 
 that in religion a scientific impartiality and personal 
 disinterestedness is impossible; and at the root of all we 
 have a venture of faith and the dogmatic method. No 
 mere Historicism has the key to history, especially 
 religious history ; it only cleans the wards of the lock. 
 The weighing of evidence seems at times even to impair 
 the power to weigh ideas, to divine personality, or to
 
 268 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 assess faith. Great lawyers are often poor theologians. 
 There is a realism which bars the way to reality; and 
 to-day we are much straitened by it. The religion of the 
 chair may not lack scenery, but it does often lack 
 horizon, and even sky. It has hues but not atmosphere. 
 It has detail, but not distance. The place is strait and 
 the light is poor. It is of Ruysdael and not of Turner. 
 Or it has genre, but not style. 
 
 § § § 
 
 In nothing are these features more apparent than in 
 
 our attitude to such a question as the pre-existence of 
 Christ. Except in the 4th Gospel he says nothing 
 directly about it, therefore, we are told, it cannot be real. 
 It seems to be forgotten that the consciousness is in- 
 separable from the great ^ira^ Aeyo/xevovof Matthew xi., 27, 
 which is treated in the way I have just described. It 
 seems even to be forgotten that the kenotic explanation 
 of his limited knowledge in certain other respects should 
 apply here, and should suggest an oblivion in Christ of 
 his eternal past indispensable both to the reality of his 
 human life and to the efficiency of his divine work for 
 us. Such oblivion may have been necessary to Christ 
 himself in the doing of that work, however impossible it 
 was to those to whom he spoke when the work was done, 
 and made them think out the explanation of it, and 
 of his glory who did it. The apostles could not evade 
 the idea of a pre-existence which may have come home to 
 Christ himself only in the uplifted hours and the great 
 crises. For his Godhead cannot mean that at every 
 hour he was fully conscious of all he was. Probably St. 
 Paul's belief in the pre-existence of Christ was mainly 
 reached by the way of inspired, and I would say guided, 
 inference. It did not rest on Christ's words. It was an
 
 X.] The Pre-cxistencc of Christ 269 
 
 inevitable rebound of spiritual logic under his faith's 
 obsession by the Christ in glory. Such glory, such 
 Godhead, could not be acquired by any moral victory 
 of a created being within the limits of a life so brief 
 as that of Jesus. In a similar application he worked 
 back from the faith that all things were made for Christ 
 to the conviction that, as the end was in the beginning, 
 all things were made by Christ ; and by a Christ as 
 personal as the Christ who was their goal. And so, 
 from the exalted glory of Christ, Paul's thought was cast 
 back, by the very working of that Christ in him and in the 
 whole consciousness of the Church's faith, to the same 
 Christ from all Eternity by the Father's side. 
 
 § § § 
 
 I do not think that to-day we can evade this same 
 
 retrospective pressure of our faith, when its tide is full, 
 any more than the apostles could. 
 
 First we consider this. Such a relation as we believe 
 our Saviour now bears to the Father could not have 
 arisen at a point of time. It could not have been 
 created by his earthly life. The power to exercise God's 
 prerogative of forgiveness, judgment, and redemption 
 could never have been acquired by the moral excellence 
 or religious achievement of any created being, however 
 endowed by the spirit of God. I confess (if I may 
 descend so far) I had long this difficulty, which 
 lowered the roof of my faith, and arrested the flight 
 of devotion. And I am afraid from the state of our 
 public worship, I was not alone in that difficulty. I 
 could not get the plentitude of New Testament worship 
 or Catholic faith out of the mere self-sacrifice of the 
 liuman Christ even unto death. Nor could I rise to 
 it from that level. I was too little moved by his earthly
 
 270 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [f^ect. 
 
 renunciations to rise to the dimensions of the Church's 
 faith, for I am not speaking of its creed, which was my 
 own. The cross of such a Christ, who was the mere 
 martyr of his revelation, or the paragon of self-sacrifice, 
 was not adequate to produce the absolute devotion 
 which made a proud Pharisee, yea a proud apostle, 
 glory in being Christ's entire slave, and which drove 
 the whole Church to call Christ Lord and God, in a 
 devotion the most magnificent the soul has ever known. 
 Such worship seemed too large a response to anything 
 which Jesus, with all his unique greatness, did or 
 determined in the course of His earthly life alone. 
 The Synoptic record alone would not account for the 
 Christian religion, nor produce the plerophory of 
 Christian faith. Christ's earthly humiliation had to 
 have its foundation laid in Heaven, and to be viewed 
 but as the working out of a renunciation before the 
 world was. The awful volume and power of the will- 
 warfare in which He here redeemed the world, and 
 turned for Eternity the history of the race, was but 
 the exercise in historic conditions of an eternal resolve 
 taken in heavenly places. He could never be king of 
 the eternal future if he was not also king from the 
 eternal past. No human being was capable of such 
 will. It was Godhead that willed and won that victory 
 in Him. If it was God loving when he loved it was 
 God willing as He overcame. The cross was the 
 reflection (or say rather the historic pole) of an act 
 within Godhead. The historic victory was the index 
 and the correlate of a choice and a conquest in Godhead 
 itself. Nothing less will carry the fulness of faith, the 
 swelling soul, and the Church's organ voice of liturgy in 
 every land and age. If our thought do not allow that
 
 X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 271 
 
 belief we must reduce the pitch of faith to something 
 plain, laic, and songless, and, in making it more homely, 
 make it less holy, less absolute, less adoring. The adora- 
 tion of Christ can only go with this view of Him in the 
 long run. Nothing lower takes with due seriousness the 
 superhuman value of the soul, the unearthliness of our 
 salvation, and its last conquest of the whole world. It 
 would reduce the unworldlv value of the soul if it 
 could be saved by anything less than a Christ before 
 the worlds. It came upon me, as upon many at the 
 first it must have mightily done, that His whole life 
 was not simply occupied with a series of decisions 
 crucial for our race, or filled with a great deed then 
 first done; but that that life of His was itself the 
 obverse of a heavenly eternal deed, and the result of 
 a timeless decision before it here began. His emer- 
 gence on earth was as it were the swelling in of heaven. 
 His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and 
 his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world's 
 foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the 
 mother of it all. His obedience, however impressive, 
 does not take divine magnitude if it first rose upon earth, 
 nor has it the due compelling power upon ours. His 
 obedience as man was but the detail of the supreme 
 obedience which made him man. His love transcends all 
 human measure only if, out of love, he renounced the 
 glory of heavenly being for all he here became. Only 
 then could one grasp the full stay and comfort of words 
 like these " Who shall separate us from the love of 
 Christ?" Unlike us, he chose the oblivion of birth and 
 the humiliation of life. He consented not only to die but 
 to be born. His life here, like His death which pointed 
 it, was the result of his free will. It was all one death for
 
 272 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 him. It was all one obedience. And it was free. He 
 was rich and for our sakes became poor. What he gave 
 up was the fulness, power, and immunity of a heavenly 
 life. He became " a man from heaven." When Paul 
 spoke so he was not thrusting upon his Churches the 
 rabbinical notion of an Adam Kadmon, or ideal man, in 
 heaven, in the same sense as Judaism spoke of an ideal 
 existence of the Temple itself, or the Law, or the 
 Mother Jerusalem from above, or the heavenly city 
 which came down out of heaven from God. Probably 
 enough he knew the notion, but only to transcend 
 it, to use it freely as a suggestion and not succumb 
 to it merely as a dogma. God sent his Son, he did 
 not emit him, he did not think him. The heavenly side 
 of salvation was not ideal simply but historic, though 
 it was premundane history. It was an eternal and 
 immutable transaction. Things were done there. God 
 sent ; the Son came. And he came consenting to 
 earn a glory he was entitled to claim. In all most 
 precious things must we not erwerhen what we ererben, 
 and appropriate our greatest rights? Godhead came 
 in Him, only not in force but in virtue, not gross 
 and palpable but in moral power. He could have had his 
 legions of angels. He could have come and taken posses- 
 sion of the world as a apTrayfxov, as an Alexander seized a 
 country. He could have come as an Apollo King, and 
 taken the world as a prize of war, by moral storm, 
 manly beauty, and heroic action. But, though he came 
 as God, he came to win the world as his Father's gift, 
 and by the Father's way of the cross as part of the gift. 
 The self-determination to be man went the whole divine 
 length to the self-humiliation of the cross. The Son ex- 
 pressed his true nature as a servant; but it was glorious
 
 X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 273 
 
 as the service of the Eternal Son. He was son before he 
 became man ; even as in his earthly life it was his sense 
 of Sonship that gave him his sense of Messiahship. 
 It is what he did in becoming man, more even than what 
 he did as man, that makes the glory of his achievement 
 so divine that nothing short of absolute worship from a 
 whole redeemed humanity can meet it. Nothing short 
 of that heavenly deed can stir the absolute worship which 
 is the genius and the glory of his kingdom. Nothing else 
 can enable us to measure the love of God, the thorough- 
 ness, the finality, the eternity of it. When God spared 
 not his own Son, and yielded not even to the prayer of 
 Gethsemane, it was a piece of Himself that he forswore ; 
 and in the grief of Christ he cut off His own right hand 
 for the sake of the Kingdom of His Holiness. What 
 God felt and did then was not through some relation 
 to us that came into being with Christ's earthly life, but 
 it was through something that underlay it. For had it 
 came into being then, to see and judge the world in Christ 
 would have been a step so new as to affect the unchange- 
 ableness of God. Grace would have begun, and so been 
 finite. But it was a step which lay in the nature of 
 Godhead for ever, in the eternal, personal, holy, and 
 obedient relation of the Son to the Father, and in the 
 act of renunciation outside the walls of the world. 
 
 Of course, when we come to discuss the precise mode 
 of the son's pre-existence with the father, or the psycho- 
 logical process of the kenosis, we are entirely beyond 
 knowledge. The act is a postulate of saving faith, but 
 the mode of action is insoluble. Logical difficulties may 
 be raised against any view. Hut a kenotic theory so far 
 has less than some, as I hope we shall see. 
 
 § § §
 
 274 ^^"^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 It is a fact well recognised that Christ's references to 
 his pre-existencc are much more explicit in the fourth 
 Gospel than in the Synoptics. And when we consider, it 
 is not so strange as it seems. If we take those Johannine 
 references, and couple them with the indubitable preva- 
 lence of the belief both in Paul, in Hebrews, and the 
 Apocalypse; if we notice, farther, that the writers treat 
 the belief not as a new idea which they have to insert 
 but as a current faith which they would enhance ; we 
 are driven to conclude that it was a view early common 
 in almost all sections of the young Church. Is it pos- 
 sible to think that that could have been the case if the 
 belief had no point of attachment in the words of Christ 
 himself? It was a belief whose challenge went to the 
 heart of Jewish Monotheism. So much so, that, when 
 Paul had broken with Judaism, the result is expressed 
 most pointedly in the fact that he went about preaching 
 Jesus as Lord — as the Kvpios by whom, for an Israelite, 
 Jehovah alone was meant. Is it possible, then, that the 
 fourth Gospel especially should have placed such a belief 
 in the mouth of Jesus himself if there had been nothing 
 in any of his sayings to j ustify it ? There is much loose tal k 
 about what his first believers put in the mouth of Jesus; 
 and too much of it among amateurs who have never 
 framed any scientific canon to regulate the principles or 
 limits of such ascriptions, but who simply remove what 
 does not fit their views. 
 
 § § § 
 Of course that does not solve the problem created by 
 the comparative absence from the Synoptics of the 
 express statements we find in John. But I find as little 
 difficulty in believing that Jesus had an esoteric teaching 
 on some subjects as that there were large areas of his
 
 X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 275 
 
 consciousness on which he was entirely reserved — such as 
 his most intimate communion with his Father. I say 
 nothing here of regions where he was for the most part 
 kenotically ignorant. And it may well have been that it 
 was these esoteric hints that were expanded in the fourth 
 Gospel. Traces of them appear in the Synoptics — especi- 
 ally in the well known Mat. xi. 27, that embryonic fourth 
 Gospel to which I so often allude. But we can hardly 
 be surprised if, in documents for general use in Churches 
 that were but working their way to a public largely 
 Jewish, there should be little use made at first of an idea 
 so startling to a Jew and so blasphemous in effect. For 
 its effect was to set another personality than the Father 
 alongside of Him on his throne. It is quite true, as I 
 said, that the Jews were not all unfamiliar with the 
 notion of the pre-existence of their Great Sanctities. But 
 it was quite another thing to assign a pre-existence to a 
 personal Messiah ; and both Bousset and Dalman, who 
 are among our chief authorities on the theology of 
 Judaism, are at one against the view that it cherished 
 the idea of a pre-existent Messiah. Judaism certainly 
 could not tolerate the pre-existence of a Messiah invested 
 with those functions and titles of Jehovah which the New 
 Testament ascribes to Jesus. Recall the method of Jesus 
 with his public in the less serious matter of his Messiah- 
 ship. For most of his life he was reserved about it ; and 
 he bore it home, even to his disciples, only in an indirect 
 way that made them seem to discover rather than accept 
 it. It dawned but slowly, and it shone so briefly that 
 they lost it at the end. Mow much more need for reserve 
 on a matter so much more grave? If he bad been ex- 
 plicit and categorical about his pre-existent life it would 
 have been to invite from a Jewish crowd a death as
 
 276 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 certain as Rome's suppression of him would have been 
 had he raised the Messiah's flag. When his end did come 
 it was on the charge of making himself equal with God. 
 But if the thought was in his mind it would be sure to 
 look out at some side window even if it did not call'into 
 the street. And there are such glimpses. Return to the 
 passage I quote Mat. xi. 27, "No man knoweth the 
 Father but the Son." I deal with that at more length 
 elsewhere. I only ask here whether, if question about 
 the pre-existence did not arise from other sources, 
 that idea would not be the first to occur in explanation 
 of these words. If they appeared in John we should all 
 say at once that it was by the notion of the pre-existence 
 they were to be explained, whether the writer was foisting 
 it on Jesus or not. The Eternal Father would demand 
 for correlative the Eternal Son, to explain, by solidarity 
 of being, the Son's exclusive and adequate knowledge of 
 such a Father. 
 
 But the truth which Christ could not hope to impress 
 by his words he impressed by his crowning act of death 
 and resurrection. There at last he came into his own. 
 To these add his expository work in the Church by his 
 Spirit. It was such things that forced on the Church its 
 belief in his pre-existence. It was slowly forced, more 
 slowly than his Messiahship. It could not be otherwise. 
 But it was inevitable, as the scope and depth of that final 
 revelation made its way into the mind of faith. 
 
 § § § 
 It is important at a time like the present that we 
 
 should keep clearly in view the interest which is served 
 by our belief in the pre-existence of Christ. Why should 
 we press it ? Why was it pressed in the New Testa- 
 ment? Was it in the interest of some scheme, either of
 
 X.] The Pre-existence of Christ 277 
 
 philosophy or theology, which aimed at making more 
 definite God's relation to the created world ? Was it to 
 provide some explanation for Christ's miraculous power, 
 and especially for his resurrection ? Was it to provide a 
 large system of dogma with a celestial warrant ? Was it 
 to equip a religion with a central figure calculated to im- 
 press and command the imagination ? Was it because the 
 impression made by the historic Christ was so weak that it 
 succumbed to the current notions of pre-existence which 
 floated in from the surrounding air and settled down to 
 germinate in the warm soil of faith ? It was for none of 
 these reasons that the idea took the place it did, and has 
 kept it. It was not in the dogmatic interest that it 
 arose or survived, but in the religious. It was to give 
 full and infinite effect to the condescending love of 
 God, and to give range to the soul's greatness by display- 
 ing the vast postulates of its redemption. Tantae moUs 
 erat divinam condere gentem. If we feed on Christ 
 it is on bread which came down from Heaven. The 
 soul's saviour could be no less a power than the soul's 
 creator. It all arose from a sense of soul-greatness, from 
 a direct, intimate, and intense relation between the soul 
 and the Saviour, to which we grow daily more strange. 
 It arose out of that experience ; and not from the neces- 
 sities of a system, or the infection from systems around 
 These would have been easily ignored had they given no 
 means of expressing the experience that worked so 
 mif^litily. It points in the same way when we note that 
 Paul, in Philippians ii., uses the idea, as it \\as forced on 
 living faith, for the purposes of that faith's moral culture 
 To protnote a self-renouncing love he dwells on the 
 act of self-renunciation which gave them for a Saviour 
 
 God himself in a life of humiliation, and no middle 
 u
 
 278 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 being who was a mere emanation from God in a world 
 process. 
 
 § § § 
 
 What, we may ask, has experience to say on our question ? 
 Can it have anything to say on the pre-existence of Christ 
 when it cannot even speak of our own ? Let us see. 
 Is our experience of Christ parallel with our expe- 
 rience of ourselves ? To experience ourselves is a piece 
 of psychology ; is that all we have in the Church's 
 experience of Christ. 
 
 It seems plausible enough to say that the pre-existence 
 of Christ is not verifiable by our Christian experience. 
 But everything depends on the experience to which you 
 appeal. Is it that of the critic ? Or of his age ? Is it 
 simply the experience of a mystic mood, a pious frame, a 
 sympathetic religiosity ? Or is it the classic experience 
 of the regenerate, of the Church within the Church, the 
 really significant elite of faith ? Is it the experience of 
 the average Christian who "loves Jesus," or that of the 
 elect who show what the average Christian means and 
 must rise to be by his New Creation ? Is the experience 
 of the ordinary Christian normative for faith ? It is 
 certain that the spiritual riches of Christ, as understood 
 and realised by the Apostolic succession of the fit and 
 few, especially in relation to sin, means what lay 
 Christianity is too ready to pooh-pooh as theology, and 
 to ban as metaphysic. 
 
 It is indeed one of the most great and fertile of modern 
 principles that our faith has much more directly to do 
 with the benefits of Christ than with the nature of Christ. 
 * It is by what the Saviour has done for me that I know 
 what he is for me ; it is through the work of redemption 
 that I know the person of the Redeemer ; it is the work
 
 X.] The Pre- existence of Christ 279 
 
 which reveals to me the worker.' But it would be an 
 abuse of this principle if it were made to mean that 
 Christ is no more, either to me or to the Church, than 
 he is felt at any point of time to be. If I am deeply 
 moved by the example or the ideal he has stamped on 
 me, I am not therefore justified in saying that he is no 
 more than ideal or example. If I am touched, humbled, 
 and cheered by the way in which he reconciles me to 
 God, I am not therefore warranted in declaring that his 
 one work for me and for mankind was in this reconciling 
 way alone, and that it was a work with no action upon 
 God, and no relation to judgment. I am not entitled to 
 say that the reconciling effect upon men exhausts the 
 whole personality of Christ. The work does not reveal 
 the whole of the workman — directly, at least. And there 
 is always the question how far our sense of the work is 
 entitled to prescribe the compass of it ; that is, whether 
 experience is to be the measure as well as the organ of 
 faith. The apostles at least were driven by their expe- 
 rience into a cosmic interpretation of his work who 
 produced it, far transcending individual experience ; and 
 they have carried the greatest with them. If the effect 
 of Christ on us be but our reconciliation, if the benefits 
 be construed but in that subjective sense, if they do not 
 extend to redemption from some thing more objective 
 than our own frowardness with God, that is an effect 
 that might have been produced by a prophet and martyr 
 of unparalleled sanctity and unquenchable love. Such a 
 subjective construction of the benefits of Christ would 
 not call for the life, death, and resurrection of the ver}' 
 Son of God. And we need feel no surprise that to-day, 
 when Christ's work is thought to be exhausted with the 
 reconciliation of men, the men affected by it should be
 
 28o The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 very unsteady, not to say light, in their views of his 
 divine person and its range of being. There would be 
 no necessity, in such a subjective construction of Christ's 
 work, for the belief to which the early Church was driven 
 by the apostolic sense of what they had in Christ — the 
 belief in his pre-existence. 
 
 § § § 
 
 The reconciling and redeeming work of Christ is, 
 indeed, our grand avenue to his person in its fulness ; but 
 it does not exhaust it, unless that work be interpreted 
 as the new creation in mice. And certainly if (like so 
 many good but bornees souls to-day) we reduce the 
 reconciling work of Christ to his earthly life, character, 
 and teaching, apart from their consummation in a death 
 which was more than worth them all, if we cherish a 
 ' simple ' sermon-on-the-mount Christianity, it is quite 
 impossible to erect on that basis a personality so great as 
 its advocates really revere. The greater the personality 
 the more impossible it is to give it full expresssion in 
 life. We have already seen how large a part of the 
 activity of his person Christ reserved in the secrecy of his 
 private and personal contact with the Father. And we 
 may also observe that, as the crisis of his death drew on, 
 it was this hidden life that overspread his soul. He 
 became less and less engrossed with his prophetic effect 
 on man, and more and more with such priestly gift to 
 God as God alone could offer, and no man. 
 
 By all the deepest experience of the Church the benefit 
 from Christ is not exhausted in the satisfying of the 
 heart or in the pacifying of the conscience. Christ does 
 more than fill or fortify us; he sanctifies. His work, 
 consummated on the Cross, is yet larger than a deliver- 
 ance at a historic point. It is the energy of the whole
 
 X.] The Prc-existcnce of Christ 281 
 
 eternal person who culminated in that act. He does 
 more than release us ; he has to uplift and transform us. 
 He does more than inspire the race, he completes it. He 
 brings it to the glory for which it was destined by God. 
 And for this no saintliest man could be enough. Nothing 
 lower than the Holy God could re-hallow the guilty 
 human soul. Only the creator of our destiny could 
 achieve it. Of course, the extent at any one time of the 
 Church's response to Christ, or the soul's, may be 
 limited. The horizon of its experience may be partial 
 and confined. But what is of more moment is the nature 
 of that experience. It is not psychological, but theologi- 
 cal. It is not an experience of the soul's old past, nor 
 even so much of its new self, but of its new creator and 
 king, its Lord and its God. That changes the nature 
 of the experience from a subjective to an objective, from 
 me to one who makes me. It is not simply the experi- 
 ence of an immense impulse, a vast promotion in good- 
 ness, a change of sentiment towards God, the clearing 
 up of misunderstandings, and the wiping of the slate. 
 What is cured is not merely distance, nor merely estrange- 
 ment from a loving God, but the obsession by hostility to 
 a holy God, and the guilt of it all. The forgiveness is 
 an absolute gift, but it is not an amnesty ; nor is it a 
 revival ; but in its nature it is a new creation. Christ 
 does not bring us mere absolution, he is the giver of a 
 new Eternal life. His charge is the second creation, and 
 the divine consummation of humanity. 
 
 Now for this creative work no mere man is sufficient. 
 The creators of the greatest works of genius are quite 
 unable to create the new heart within us, tlie new com- 
 munion, and to put us beyond all cavil as to our final 
 destiny in God, They cannot make themselves the
 
 282 The Person and Place oj Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 guarantee and surety of that destiny. But Christ does 
 do this. And he has never ceased to do it. Through- 
 out the ages there is a ceaseless succession of confessors 
 of such a theological salvation and not only a psy- 
 chological only, of a new act of creation and not a 
 quickened process. 
 
 If, then, such be the benefit begun and assured, the 
 agent of that blessing no more began his work when he 
 appeared on the earth, than he ceased it when he left the 
 earth, as man's way is. A man might reconcile me to 
 God ; but could any greatest man so keep me as to ensure 
 that we did not fall out again ; or that if we did the due 
 reconciler would again appear ? A man might reconcile 
 us to God but he could not unite us for ever with God in 
 the way that an eternal holiness requires. He could do 
 no finished work. The greatest thought and passion of 
 the Church, its experience, and not its philosophy or its 
 theology alone, has been driven to postulate behind all 
 the acts of Christ's will on the earth, behind all his pity 
 and power, an act of his (not merely of his God and ours), 
 eternal in the heavens, an act which held all these earthly 
 acts within it. His person has been felt to be greater 
 than these earthly acts could express. They had all a 
 volitional foundation in the heavens, which, because it 
 was action and not mere substance, did not impair their 
 reality but enhanced it. They had a moral substratum 
 in the act of his premundane personality, whose power 
 was not exhausted in our rescue alone — unless that rescue 
 be viewed as the first stage of a New Creation which had 
 all the consummation of humanity in its scope. 
 
 § § § 
 We are thus driven, by the real existence of an Eternal 
 Father and our experience of his grace, to demand the
 
 X,] The Pre-exhtence of Christ 283 
 
 existence of an equally real eternal Son — both being 
 equally personal and divine. The question, then, is what 
 is the relation between the Godhead of the Eternal Son 
 and the man Jesus Christ, and how did it come to pass. 
 Such questions at once arose among believers ; and they 
 engrossed the Church's thought during the early centuries 
 in the many Christological systems that succeeded the 
 Trinitarian strife. There was a teeming variety of 
 opinions on the subject in the redeemed community — 
 as indeed there must always be ; and room must be 
 made for them. Christian faith insists on the reality 
 of the incarnation as a fact if we take in all its 
 seriousness the experience that we have in Christ a 
 gracious and holy God truly with us ; but the mode of 
 its process is an open question, on which it cannot be 
 hoped, and hardly wished, that all the Church should 
 think alike. And we may have occasion to note that 
 many who reject the incarnation do so not only because 
 they wrongly require from it the satisfaction of a 
 philosophic rather than a religious demand, but, even 
 more, because they cannot see how such a process could 
 take place. Which is much as if we refused to act on a 
 cable from America because we do not understand the 
 modes of electric action and transformation. 
 
 § § § 
 
 It is impossible with due reverence to speak in any but 
 
 the most careful and tentative way of the relations within 
 the Godhead. It has not pleased God to make these 
 matter of revelation. As we know of Christ only what 
 he chose to reveal in his vocation and work, so we really 
 know of God only what He chose to reveal in His Christ. 
 We practice ourselves a reserve about our inmost experi- 
 ences and relations which may make intelligible, at least
 
 284 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect 
 
 in some measure, God's own reserve with the sons of 
 Time. On the other hand He wills to be inquired of. 
 It is not the questions that are intrusive. We are not 
 called on to sacrifice our intellect, if only we do not 
 idolise it. And we are not debarred in advance from all 
 inquiry as to the conditions of Christ's supramundane 
 existence. St. Paul did not feel so hampered. We are 
 surely free at least to say some things which it could not 
 be — could not be consistently with such an idea of God 
 as Christ himself revealed. There was that in the 
 earthly personality of Christ which in the heavenly could 
 not be. For instance, in the earthly personality there 
 was growth ; in the heavenly there could be none — unless 
 perhaps he were an Arian Son, a being created prior to 
 the world's creation. What is of Godhead does not 
 grow : it is from Eternity to Eternity. The indubitable 
 movement and change in the living personality of God 
 does not take the form of growth. Growth belongs only 
 to corporeal personality ; and in his incarnation the Son 
 of God did not become for the first time personal but only 
 corporeally personal, personal under the limited condi- 
 tion which involve growth. He did not enter personal 
 conditions but historic. If growth be essential to person- 
 ality in every form there can be no personal God ; and 
 our question then becomes of a quite different kind. 
 There may therefore be in Eternity a personal Being that 
 does not come to Himself and His perfection by growth. 
 Whether two or more such can cohere in the one God is 
 again another question, with its own methods of discus- 
 sion. But the growth of a divine personality in Eternity 
 is a much more impossible thing than the co-existence of 
 three. 
 
 § § §
 
 X.] The Pre-cxistence of Christ 285 
 
 In Jesus Christ we have one who was conscious of 
 standing in an entirely unique relation to the living God. 
 It is the prophet's prophecy that reveals God, but it is 
 Christ's person ; and as the Son it reveals Him as the 
 Father. If His Father be the Father, his Sonship is the 
 Sonship. He held a relation to God as Father that never 
 existed in any man before. Nay more, it was one that 
 no man can ever reach again. Geniuses are repeated, but 
 Christ never, the Son never. For this relation constituted 
 his personality. He was not a person who became a son, 
 or was destined to be a son, but his whole personality 
 was absolute sonship. This is not true of us. We are 
 not sons and nothing else. The relation made the 
 personality in Christ's case. I do not mean that the 
 relation made Jesus grow into a personality, but it made up 
 his personality, made the essential thing in it. That is 
 not so with us. His personalty had another foundation 
 in God than ours. His person is born of God, ours is 
 created. We are indeed related to a personal God, as 
 his offspring, in a way that necessitates our being persons 
 too. But not such persons. We can reach and develop 
 personality without reference to God ; he could not. 
 Destroy his sonship and you destroy his personality. 
 His personality shaped his work, our work shapes our 
 personality. Indeed his work was identical with his 
 personality. Not so with us, whose work is always 
 less than our personality. Our work is a means for 
 our personality, his personality was the means of his 
 work. Of no man can it be said that his relation to God 
 constitutes the whole personality. But in the case of 
 Jesus the whole relation to the Father, namely, sonship. 
 did constitute that personality. Think it away and 
 nothing is left. His whole relation to the Father would
 
 286 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 be an abstract phrase were it not embodied in an actual 
 personal Sonship, corelate with the living Father, knowing 
 the Eternal Father as the Father knows him, and at 
 every point in Eternity, therefore, so knowing because so 
 known. 
 
 § § § 
 
 There are various views among those who try to 
 justify in thought their belief, or their effort to believe, 
 that a great gulf divides Christ from all other men. 
 
 There are those for instance who view him as the 
 realisation of the divine idea, whether of Humanity or of 
 the Church. The only pre-existence Jesus had was of 
 that nature. It was not personal but ideal. I shall 
 have occasion to refer to this view more than once ; and I 
 will only say here that it seems to me quite inadequate 
 either to the New Testament or to Christian experience. 
 Such a faith could have produced neither. It is too 
 remote and pale to be the source of such a passion as 
 evangelical faith has been in the history of the Church. 
 If you reduce the Eternal Sonship to an idea you will 
 reduce the Eternal Fatherhood to the same tenuity. 
 And all history follows. 
 
 There are others who come nearer reahty by conceiv- 
 ing Christ as the realisation of the divine purpose. This 
 is so far an improvement that it brings Christ into 
 immediate relation with God's will and action rather than 
 with his thought. He is due to the act of God. He is 
 the supreme object of the divine election, " the captain 
 of the elect," the object, though not the eternal object, 
 of an eternal election — just as human souls are, though 
 in a pre-eminent and even collective way. He has no 
 personal pre-existence. His election is thus paralleled to 
 that of the Church; and we are not taught the actual
 
 X.] The Pre-fxistence of Christ 287 
 
 pre-existence of the Church. It is not denied that 
 an element in Godhead passes from ideaUty into personal 
 reality ; what is said is that its passage is due to no 
 movement or process of thought, but to a personal act 
 and purpose of the Father. 
 
 That is the advantage of the view. It has a more 
 ethical note. But its defect is three-fold. F'irst, it does 
 not recognise the difference between a Church chosen 
 like him and a Church chosen in Him. Second, if he 
 owed his personal existence to God's choice, he was 
 but one of many choice men, and so we do not rise 
 above the Socinian idea; it reduces Christ from the 
 assessor of God's throne to the organ of God's purpose. 
 And, third, it leaves no room for the consenting act on 
 the part of the Son. But it is not enough for 
 Christian purposes that the Father should send ; it is 
 equally necessary that the Son should come, and that 
 the one will should be as original and spontaneous 
 as the other. A fourth defect is that sufficient room 
 is not left for the mystical element so essential to 
 Christian faith. 
 
 Besides, there is a criticism which applies to both 
 these views. They come too near the notion that, when the 
 idea, or the purpose, was at last realised in Christ's 
 moral achievement of his full personality, there was a 
 real addition to the riches of Godhead ; that Godhead 
 at last fully found itself in Christ ; and had attained by 
 development that which it had not the full consciousness 
 of being before. What I said a little ago about divine 
 growth in Godhead may be applied here. 
 
 § § § 
 Instead of speaking of the realisation of a divine idea 
 
 or purpose it meets the case better if we speak of the
 
 288 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 redintegration of a divine person. This will be more 
 clear I hope when we come to discuss kenotic theories 
 in the next lecture. The whole moral history of Jesus 
 on earth was the ethical resumption of such personality 
 as he laid down by an act equally ethical in its nature. 
 The advantage here is a very great one. We have the 
 act of the Son correlative with that of the Father. 
 We have the Son acting from love as truly and creatively 
 as the Father. Otherwise it need not be that Jesus, 
 as the agent of God's purpose and his great gift to 
 man, should really himself love them, if only he so 
 loved the Father as to carry out loyally and effectually 
 His great behest. It need not follow that we are 
 inseparable from the love of Christ; who might con- 
 ceivably retire from active and direct concern with us 
 when he had done his task, handed us over to the 
 Father, and restored us to a love like his own, the 
 Father's will. But the Christian love of God is not 
 a love like Christ's, but a love for ever to Christ and in 
 Christ. The love of one so creative as Jesus could not 
 have been without spontaneous initiative at the heavenly 
 outset of his work. If he came as love it was love that 
 moved him to come, and not a suggestion or a precept, 
 far less an emanation, from the Father's love. If he 
 love to the endless end, he loved from the timeless 
 beginning, and in no mere passive obedience. His 
 dependence on the Father was no mere passivity. 
 Christ's receptivity of God is the mightiest act in human 
 history ; and a personality so mighty and creative 
 could never have come there as a mere created product, 
 or passive precipitate, of the divine purpose. He could 
 be no mere intelligent means or organ of that purpose. 
 The whole New Testament conception of him as a
 
 X.] Thg Pre-existence of Christ 289 
 
 worshipped being is that of an end and not a means, for 
 whom God's judgment is his judgment, God's kingdom 
 his own, and on personal relation to whom turns our 
 eternal relation to God. His was a sovereign spontaneity ; 
 which is not affected by the fact that he prayed the 
 Father for power ; unless we deny all analogy in the 
 region of the increate to the real causality in created will, 
 or to the true initiative of inspired prayer. 
 
 § § § 
 
 I am afraid that the effort to compress into one dis- 
 course each of the great themes to which the last three 
 lectures are devoted involves considerable cost in the way 
 of clearness. May I point out, as I close this lecture and 
 prepare for the next, that I have in the rear of my mind 
 throughout one question which I yet try to keep more or 
 less in view. It is this. If we hold to the personal pre- 
 existence of Christ do we not render His life as the 
 historical Jesus unreal ? We shall see how pointed the 
 question grows when we come to sharpen it to the issue 
 involved in the principle non potuit peccare. And in that 
 form an answer will be suggested to it shortly. But what 
 I have been trying to do in the present lecture is to 
 answer it in the more general form shaped by the pre- 
 existence alone. Could a pre-existent Christ be a real 
 man? Could he have the effect upon history of a real 
 personality if he was believed to have existed before 
 entering history? 
 
 And by way of answer let us close this lecture by 
 clearing our minds of d priori notions of what a real 
 personality might be presumed to require, a character 
 that would strike us as aesthetically true if we found it 
 in a work of imagination. If the whole Christ that fills 
 the faith, worship, and conquest of the long Church
 
 ago The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. x. 
 
 could have been imagined and presented in a work of 
 literary art beforehand, every Aristotle, Longinus or 
 Quintilian would have joined to declare it an unreal and 
 impossible conception. Such a miracle and inversion of 
 values was effected by Christ, such an extension of the 
 ideal and resource of personality. Let us here observe 
 that the reality of a historic influence is not to be 
 measured simply by what may appear to be the psycho- 
 logical postulates of a character aesthetically complete, 
 but by the magnitude, reality, and permanence of his 
 effects in history. These must be our first standard of 
 personal reality. A personal unreality could never be- 
 come the first personal influence in history that the 
 Christ from heaven has become. The Christ that has 
 become such is not the humane and residual Christ of 
 much current religion, but the whole New Testament 
 Christ. It is a Christ who had not to be stripped by 
 early criticism of his heavenly life in order to become a 
 real power ; but on the contrary one whom the faith he 
 created had to place in partnership with the Creator's 
 Eternity in order to account for itself. The more the 
 Church felt the reality of his influence on it, the more it 
 acted with him upon present history, the more it found 
 through him an even greater reality in the future than the 
 present, so much the more has it been driven to construe 
 his total reality as including his personal action in the 
 infinite past. His pre-existence, that is to say, has not 
 robbed him of the reality that is shown in vast historic 
 effect. And it may be observed in conclusion that if the 
 influence of the Church upon the world is less to-day 
 than it once was, that loss of effect is at least concurrent 
 with an unprecedented weakening of belief within the 
 Church itself in his life before life and his ante-natal will.
 
 LECTURE XI 
 
 THE KENOSIS OR SELF-EMPTYING 
 OF CHRIST
 
 LECTURE XI 
 
 THE KENOSIS OR SELF-EMPTYING OF CHRIST 
 
 It is all but impossible to discuss a question like the 
 Kenosis without entering a region which seems forbid- 
 ding to the lay mind, and is certainly more or less 
 technical. And yet some appeal may perhaps be made 
 to the ministry, among those Churches where the educa- 
 tion of the ministry has been taken seriously and theo- 
 logically. It is only when the ministry despises theology 
 and sacrifices it to a slight and individualist idea of 
 religion, that the Church immolates intelligence and 
 finally commits suicide. It parts with staying power in 
 order to capture a hearing, and surrenders faith to gain 
 sympathy. The minds that are trained enough to ask 
 relevant questions on such a subject are also trained 
 enough to know that they cannot be answered without 
 considerable effort on both sides — effort both to present 
 and to grasp. And such earnest minds are in possession 
 of some at least of the postulates here involved, the ideas 
 handled, or the methods used. The real difiiculty is with 
 those who will neither qualify to understand such 
 questions nor let them alone. 
 
 If there was a personal pre-existence in the case of 
 
 X 2g3
 
 294 ^^'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 Christ it does not seem possible to adjust it to the his- 
 toric Jesus without some doctrine of Kenosis. We face 
 in Christ a Godhead self-reduced but real, whose infinite 
 power took effect in self-humiliation, whose strength was 
 perfected in weakness, who consented not to know with 
 an ignorance divinely wise, and who emptied himself in 
 virtue of his divine fulness. The alternative to a Kenosis 
 used to be a Krypsis, or conscious concealment of the 
 active divine glory for practical or strategic purposes. But 
 that is now an impossible idea. While on the other hand 
 an acquired Godhead would really be none. It would be 
 but deification. And at bottom it is a contradiction. No 
 creature could become God. 
 
 I am aware of the kind of objection raised to the 
 kenotic theory. Many difficulties arise readily in one's 
 own mind. It is a choice of difficulties. On the one 
 hand living faith finds it difficult to believe that the 
 Christ who created it was not God. And on the other 
 thought finds it hard to realise how God should become 
 Christ. But it is something gained to note that the 
 chief difficulties arise on the latter head, in connexion 
 with the way in which the fact came to pass rather than 
 with the fact itseU. That is, they are scientific and not 
 religious. When we are not so much questioning the 
 fact as discussing the manner of it — not the what but the 
 how — it is a matter of theological science not of religious 
 faith. And the science of it can wait, but the religion of 
 it cannot. 
 
 § § § 
 
 We cannot form any scientific conception of the precise 
 
 process by which a complete and eternal being could 
 enter on a process of becoming, how Godhead could 
 accept growth, how a divine consciousness could reduce
 
 XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 295 
 
 its own consciousness by volition. If we knew and 
 could follow that secret we should be God and not man. 
 It is a difficulty partly ethical, partly psychological. Even 
 if we admit psychologically that certain attributes could 
 be laid aside — the less ethical attributes like omniscience, 
 omnipotence, or ubiquity — could self-consciousness be thus 
 impaired and a love still remain which was fully divine ? 
 And how can an infinite consciousness be thought of as 
 reducing itself to a finite? God's infinite consciousness 
 might indeed determine itself so as to pervade, sustain, 
 and bind a variety of finite detail without losing consci- 
 ousness. An immanent God, we believe, does so in 
 creation. But if He parted with His self-consciousness 
 as infinite would it not come as near to suicide as 
 infinite could ? 
 
 That, indeed, is what Ed. von Hartmann says is the 
 very thing the transcendent God must do. His task is 
 self-redemption from the blunder and impasse of a world. 
 He must retract himself, retrace his excursion into a 
 cosmos, and restore himself by a universal negation of 
 will from a condition of wretched actuality to the set, 
 grey, apathetic state of mere potentiality. By that self- 
 renunciation he recovers the true deity out of which he 
 stumbled and fell into a conscious and actual world. The 
 divine Sinner becomes the divine Redeemer — and first of 
 himself. In redeeming the world from its immanent 
 misery he redeems himself from his transcendent misery 
 of egoistic consciousness and desire. {Relig. d. Geistes p. 
 266). This seems a resurrection of the Gnosticism of the 
 second century, as so much of our modern speculation is. 
 And it is only a philosophic parody of the kenotic pro- 
 cess ; which does not think of the divine self-conscious- 
 ness as going out of existence, but only of its retraction,
 
 296 TJie Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 concentration, or occultation, in one constituent of the 
 Godhead. The suicide of God is no part of the kenotic 
 idea, which turns but on self-divestment as a moral 
 power of the eternal Son ; who retains his consciousness 
 but renounces the conditions of infinity and its precreate 
 form. 
 
 § § § 
 
 But leaving the metaphysical psychology of the matter 
 for a moment, have we any analogy in our experience 
 that would make this intelligible or even credible ? 
 
 I am not sure that we have not. 
 
 (i.) I will first allude to the familiar experience of 
 reducing or obscuring the self-consciousness by a drug 
 voluntarily taken. Here the really effective cause is not 
 (■he drug but the will to use it. Let us put a case. 
 Suppose an Oriental court, a foolish young Sultan, and a 
 venerable vizier, wise, vigilant and devoted, amidst a 
 ring of plotting pachas. As the vizier sits next to his 
 master at a feast he observes a pinch of poison stealthil}' 
 dropped into the imperial cup. He has heard some 
 Tumour of a conspiracy ; and he knows that poison. It 
 means slow paralysis and lingering death. In a moment 
 he must decide ; and he takes the resolve. There is no 
 other way. He challenges the king to a pledge in ex- 
 changed cups. And in due course he feels the conse- 
 quence in the impaired powers with which he drags 
 through a year or two of life. He lives thus till the ruler 
 at last learns of his devotion, is stung to his feet by the 
 sacrifice, and show his gratitude by such a change of life 
 and a growth in royal worth as rewards his saviour's 
 love for all it had borne. Now what was it that really 
 eclipsed the good statesman's powers ? It was not the 
 drug, but the love, the will, the decision to take it with
 
 XI.] The Kenosis or S el/- Emptying of Christ 297 
 
 open eyes, and to part with all that made his high place 
 and peace, when no other course could save the youth 
 he loved. 
 
 (2.) Again, are there no cases where, by an early act 
 of choice and duty, a man commits himself to a line of 
 life which entails an almost complete extinction of his 
 native genius, tastes and delights. Could no story be 
 made of a great musical genius, say in Russia, who, 
 being as full of pity as of genius, was also a passionate 
 sympathiser with the people ; who deliberately committed 
 himself, while young and in the flood of artistic success 
 to certain democratic associations and enterprises, well 
 knowing what would happen upon discovery; who was 
 discovered, and deported to Siberia, to an exile both 
 rigorous and remote, where the violin and all it stood for 
 was denied to him and all his comrades for the rest of 
 their life. He must spend his whole heart in loving 
 fellowship with the commonest toils and needs, and in 
 patient ministrations to a society which prison debased. 
 After a lifetime of this the first brief years of artistic joy 
 and fame might well seem to him at moments almost to 
 belong to another life, and the aesthetic glory and power 
 be felt to have turned entirely to social love and service. 
 And all as the consequence neither of a spiritual process, 
 nor of a mere indiscretion, nor of a martyrdom only 
 forced on him, but of a resolve taken clearly and gravely 
 at a point in his spiritual life. 
 
 (3.) Or again. A student at the University develops 
 an unusual faculty and delight in philosophic study, and 
 even shows clear metaphysical genius. He is not only at 
 home in those great matters which live next door to the 
 very greatest, but he offers promise of real, not to say 
 striking, contribution to the historic development of that
 
 2g8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 high discipline. Or his gift may be in poetic or plastic 
 art, to the like high degree. But he is the only son in a 
 large family ; and, at a critical period in the family affairs, 
 the father's death makes it his duty to leave study, learn 
 an unpleasant business, pull things round, and devote 
 himself to them for the rest of his life with the absorption 
 demanded by modern industrial conditions. He has to 
 resign his intellectual delights, call in his speculative 
 powers, unlearn his native tastes and associations, and 
 give himself up to active conflict with a vexatious world 
 doubly galling to him. And in due course he comes to 
 forget most of what it was once his joy to know. He 
 becomes subdued (in no ignoble way, in a way of duty) 
 to the element in which he has to work, and he is 
 acclimatised to a world both alien anl contemptuous 
 towards his congenial treatment of the greatest realities. 
 His contact with reality must now be by the way of faith 
 and action, and not by the way of thought. He becomes 
 at his best a practical mystic and amateur, who might have 
 been a leading genius. Economic, social and ethical 
 interests, even to drudgery and heart sickness, come to 
 take the place of the more solemn and unearthly concerns 
 at the divine call. And the old high joy of thinking, or 
 art's old calm, must be postponed until another life ; with 
 many an hour of longing, and many a homesick retro- 
 spect to what is, after all, the native land of his suppressed 
 powers. He loses a life but he finds his soul. Is this 
 not a case where a moral and sympathetic volition leads 
 to a certain contraction of the consciousness ; not indeed 
 by a single violent and direct act of will, but by a 
 decision whose effect is the same when it is spread over 
 a life ? He has put himself {sich gesetzt) in a position 
 where he is put upon {gesetzt sein). And, in applying the
 
 XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 299 
 
 illustration to the theology of a kenosis in Eternity, 
 where a thousand years are but as one day, the element 
 of time between choice and result in the earthly case 
 is negligible. 
 
 (4.) Speaking more generally, is there not often in our 
 experience a connection between the resolutions and the 
 limitations of our personality ? By certain deliberate and 
 early acts of freedom, love, and duty we so mortgage and 
 limit ourselves that in due course, as we follow them 
 up, the moral consciousness ripens. We come to a 
 spirituality which is really ethical and not merely 
 instinctive, a thing of moral discipline and not naive nature, 
 something which comes to itself by way of challenge 
 and conflict, and is not mere legacy. We become men of 
 faith and not mere religion, men of moral sagacity and 
 not mere honest impulse. By voluntary discipline we 
 may come to love truth for truth's sake and not for our 
 own ; we learn to hold by habit and not mere heredity 
 to the " ought " of conscience ; we lose self in the love 
 and worship of God, or in the service of man. But for 
 the most part these conscious heights are touched but in 
 rare hours — though they may be the hours of decision 
 and committal that fashion life. We may soon grow 
 weary in the course we have taken up. The very 
 physical, or psychical, nature which was the organ of 
 our first free resolve, asserts itself, and makes us feel its 
 clouding power as we pursue the path to which only our 
 freedom, our supernatural self, committed us. By our 
 will we have come where our will is itself often obscured 
 and hampered ; and our first estate, where the choice 
 was made, is recalled but in a dream. So also Godhead, 
 by the same free and creative will which gave His 
 creation freedom, may pass into a state where He is not
 
 300 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 only acted on by that creation but even submerged in the 
 human part of it ; and where He is victimised, indeed, 
 for a time by the perverse freedom He created, and is 
 imprisoned in its death ; by consenting to which death, 
 however, He gives the supreme and saving expression to his 
 divine will and life. He lives out a moral plerosis by the 
 very completeness of his kenosis ; and he achieves the 
 plerosis in resurrection and ascension. And thus He 
 freely subdues to Himself the freedom which in His 
 creative freedom He made. 
 
 § § § 
 The more moral the original power is, so much the 
 more strength there is to sacrifice glory to service, and 
 enjoyment to benediction. So that were the moral 
 power that of deity itself, the power of self-disglorification 
 would be enhanced accordingly. Just because He was 
 holy God, the Son would be morally capable of a self- 
 dispowering more complete than anything that could be 
 described by human analogy. As God, the Son in 
 his freedom would have a kenotic power over Himself 
 corresponding to the infinite power of self-determination 
 which belongs to deity. His divine energy and mobility 
 would have a power even to pass into a successive and 
 developing state of being, wherein the consciousness of 
 perfect fulness and changelessness should retire, and 
 become but subliminal or rare. The world of souls was 
 made by Him ; and its power to grow must reflect some 
 kindred mobile power in him whose image it is. The 
 infinite mobility of the changeless God in becoming 
 human growth only assumes a special phase of itself. 
 Had the myriad-minded creator of souls no power to 
 live perfectly in the personal and growing form of the 
 souls he made ?
 
 XI. The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 301 
 
 But sin ? There, indeed, we do reach a limit. Nan 
 potuit peccare. 
 
 But, then, it is at once said, his personality and man- 
 hood were not real. 
 
 But what if it were thus ? What if his kenosis went so 
 far that though the impossibility was there he did not 
 know of it? The limitation of his knowledge is indubitable — 
 even about himself. He was not perfectly sure that the 
 cross was his Father's will till the very last. " If it be 
 possible let it pass." Did that nescience not extend to 
 the area of his own moral nature, and so provide for him 
 the temptable conditions which put him in line with our 
 dark conflict, and which truly moralise and humanise his 
 victory when potuit non peccare ? He knew he came 
 sinless out of each crisis ; did he know he never could be 
 anything else ? How could he ? Would it have been 
 moral conflict if he had known this? I am, however, well 
 aware how relevant and how effective is the question 
 whether even then, whether if that foregone immunity were 
 there, known or unknown, the battle could have been moral 
 conflict like our own ; whether he could have been 
 tempted in every respect like us; whether the victory 
 could be real. And in reply one might go into the well- 
 known distinction between physical and moral omnipo- 
 tence, between formal and moral peccability. I could 
 remind you how possible it is for you to steal some 
 article from a shop on your way home, and yet how 
 impossible. You could, but you simply could not. 
 Leaving that, however, I would rather answer by an 
 analogy from the Saviour's own work in his Church. 
 It is the business of the believing Church to urge on its 
 members the most real and mortal moral conflict for the 
 world — for a world, that is, whose redemption our faith
 
 302 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 yet knows to be already achieved and secured by all the 
 power of God. " Work for the Kingdom ; for it is the 
 God, who has already secured the Kingdom, that 
 worketh in you." He cannot fail, but it would be our 
 worst sin to fold our hands upon that foregone impossi- 
 bility. We have sometimes even to act as if it were not 
 so, as if we never knew it was so, and as if all turned on 
 our moral effort and success alone. And from work we 
 pass to prayer and remind ourselves how essential to 
 the soul it is to lay our needs before the Heavenly Father 
 who knoweth what we need before we ask Him. 
 
 § § § 
 But there are also farther answers to be made. The 
 question, remember, is, whether a complete kenosis 
 would not involve such a renunciation of divine immunity, 
 such a self-identification with man, as involved a personal 
 experience of man's sin ? And the farther answer is two- 
 fold. First, every touch of personal guilt would have 
 impaired the moral power required for such sympathy. 
 That is an axiom of modern experience. The guilty 
 cannot escape from himself, cannot empty himself. And 
 the incarnation was a moral act so supreme and complete 
 as to be possible only to a conscience at the pitch of the 
 perfectly holy. And the second answer is that what is 
 truly human is not sin. Sin is no factor of the true 
 humanit}', but only a feature of empirical humanity 
 which is absolutely fatal to the true. What is truly 
 human is not sin, but the power to be tempted to sin. 
 It is not perdition but freedom. Because Christ was 
 true man he could be truly tempted ; because he was 
 true God he could not truly sin ; but he was not less 
 true man for that. Among all his potentialities that of 
 sin was not there ; because potentiality is only actuality
 
 XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 303 
 
 powerfully condensed ; and had potential sin been there 
 its actuality would have been but a matter of time and 
 trial. But temptation was potential ; and it became 
 actual in due course. He could be tempted because he 
 loved ; he could not sin because he loved so deeply, 
 widely, infinitely, holily, because it was God he loved — 
 God more than man. Thus the only temptation with 
 real power for him was a temptation to good — to inferior 
 forms of good. It was not the temptation to forsake the 
 righteousness of God, but to seek it by other paths, less 
 moral and less patient paths, than God's highway of the 
 holy cross. It was not salvation that brought Christ 
 to the Cross. All Israel was set upon the faith of a 
 salvation in God's righteousness. The collision arose 
 upon God's way of righteousness. What more plausible 
 to a man of such power and of such ideas as Christ 
 than to organise and lead his zealot nation in an irresis- 
 tible crusade against pagan empire for a new order of 
 society wherein should dwell the righteousness of God ? 
 That was the Puritan dream. But even a parliamentarian 
 army was still an army ; and a Cromwell ruled for God 
 by the sword — as many of us who are his admirers to-day 
 would seek the kingdom by the vote, that is, by our politi- 
 cal tactics instead of by his military. It was what still 
 makes, and always has made, the chief temptation of his 
 Church — the reformation of society by every beneficent 
 means except the evangelical ; by amelioration, by re- 
 organisation, by programmes, and policies, instead of by 
 the soul's new creation, and its total conversion from the 
 passion for justice to the faith of grace, from what makes 
 men just with each other to what makes them just with 
 God. It was the temptation to save men by rallying 
 their goodness without routing their evil, by re-organising
 
 304 The Penon and Place of Jesus Christ [i.ect. 
 
 virtue instead of redeeming guilt. To fleer at the Church's 
 anomalies and enormities needs no great insight or 
 courage now; the lads do it. But it does need more 
 than common insight, it needs more than shallow scorn, 
 to realise that it is not there that the Church's peril lies ; 
 and that these palpable things are but the graver 
 symptoms of a far subtler error in which many of the 
 critics themselves are tied and bound. It is the error in 
 a Church which preoccupies men with their rights rather 
 than their mercies, with redress rather than redemption, 
 with social change where it is men that must be changed 
 if society is to be saved, with their brotherhood to 
 each other when the thing lacking is sonship to God, 
 with goodness rather than grace, with religion rather 
 than faith. It is the error which leads men to think 
 that we can have a new Church or Humanity upon any 
 other condition than the renovation in the soul of the 
 new covenant which Christ founded in his last hours, 
 before the very Church was founded, and which is the 
 Church's one foundation in his most precious blood. 
 
 So when it is asked, If He was so holy that he could 
 not sin what becomes of that moral freedom which 
 identifies him with man? the answer is that absolute 
 holiness is the true freedom and the only divine 
 freedom. Impeccable holiness is the only power by 
 which the divinest things are finally done. A complete 
 incarnation into a free humanity is possible only to 
 the absolute holiness which created the freedom. And 
 only a soul by its nature identified with God's holiest 
 will could fully use or impart that freedom which is 
 the ideal of a true humanity. And such a soul must 
 
 do it. 
 
 I am well aware how supersubtle this must seem to
 
 XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 305 
 
 some : but it is not possible to breathe the air of a region 
 so high without some subtlety. And without breathing 
 that air the Church stifles in the tasks of a world. She 
 must come up here often to breathe, when her very 
 stalwarts are foreign to the saving secret, heavy with 
 spiritual sleep, and slow of heart to understand heavenly 
 things. 
 
 § § § 
 The difficulty of conceiving psychologically the kenotic 
 process in the divine consciousness is certainly an 
 impediment, but it is not an obstacle. * It is out of 
 reason ' is the complaint. ' We cannot think together 
 the perfect God and the growing man in one person.' 
 No, we cannot think them together. But also we cannot 
 realise them apart. It is only by a paradox of thought 
 that we possess our own souls and their reality. The 
 central things of the soul are thus alogical. Life trans- 
 cends thought. Personality itself is thus alogical ; and it 
 forms the unity in which truths cohere with practical 
 effect which will not harmonise and co-operate, which 
 refuse to be systematised. Faith is not rational in the 
 coherent, the scientific, the systematic sense of the word 
 rational. It would be impossible to believe in a God at 
 all if we insisted on such rationality as His supreme 
 norm. That insistence is the root of much atheism, at 
 least in regard to a personal God. Personality and its 
 movements are alogical — especially on an infinite scale. 
 For instance, if there be an infinite personal God He is 
 self-caused. But a self-caused being is as great a blow to 
 rational conception, and as deep a mystery, as the passage 
 of the Son from his eternal being to a life of limitation 
 and growth. Yet the mystery of a self-caused Being 
 is indispensable to our belief in the divine origin of the
 
 3o6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 world. And certainly (to take another case) to personal 
 religion absolute Grace is as indispensable as our freedom 
 and responsibility. So essential for our faith in the 
 divine nature of Christ also may be the mystery of the 
 Kenosis, and the inconceivability of the self-dispowering 
 of the Eternal Son, and the self-retraction of his glory. 
 
 § § § 
 
 Most theories which attempt to deal with the Kenosis 
 have set themselves to answer the question, What did the 
 Son renounce in becoming man ? What attributes of 
 Godhead had to be surrendered for incarnation ? And the 
 replies have been various. Some have begun by a dis- 
 tinction between the relative and the immanent attributes 
 of God. They have said that the relative attributes are 
 those that were set up with the creation of a world, such 
 as omnipotence, omniscience, and the like, which would 
 have no meaning before a discrete creation was there; 
 while the immanent attributes are those ethical and 
 spiritual qualities, such as absolute love or holiness, without 
 which God would not be God at all. And such thinkers 
 have gone on to say that the Kenosis meant the renuncia- 
 tion of the former and the retention of the latter. God- 
 head in Christ parted with omniscience, and omnipotence, 
 as with omnipresence ; but it did not, and could not, part 
 with absolute holiness or infinite love. Other theories 
 have gone farther, and have seen in the Kenosis a renun- 
 ciation of even such immanent attributes as a divine 
 self-consciousness and absolute will. 
 
 In regard to the former class of theories the criticism is 
 that even the relative attributes could not be parted with 
 entirely. At most they must be thought of as latent and 
 potential even were no created world there. They were 
 ready when creation arose. They are equally necessary
 
 XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 307 
 
 to Godhead with the immanent qualities which, again, 
 cannot be wholly immanent, but must have a real relation 
 to any world created by the Will of the absolute love. 
 
 In regard to the second class of theories, if the renun- 
 ciation is carried so far as to part with a divine self- 
 consciousness and will, it is not clear what is left in the 
 way of identity or continuity at all. What is there, then, 
 in common between the Eternal Son and the man Jesus ? 
 What remains of the divine nature when we extinguish 
 the immanent ethical and personal qualities in any abso- 
 lute sense ? 
 
 § § § 
 To get over those difficulties we may perhaps take a 
 
 happier course. Let us cease speaking of a nature as if 
 
 it were an entity ; of two natures as two independent 
 
 entities; and let us think and speak of two modes of 
 
 being, like quantitative and qualitative, or physical and 
 
 moral. Instead of speaking of certain attributes as 
 
 renounced may we not speak of a new mode of their 
 
 being ? The Son, by an act of love's omnipotence, set 
 
 aside the style of a God, and took the style of a servant, 
 
 the mental manner of a man, and the mode of moral 
 
 action that marks human nature. (For morality, holiness, 
 
 is surely not confined to the infinite mode alone.) He 
 
 took the manner that marks a humanity not illustrious, 
 
 not exceptional, but sheer and pure, where pomp has 
 
 taken physic, and exposed itself to feel what wretches feel 
 
 in life's awful storm. Take the attribute of omniscience, 
 
 for instance. In its eternal form, it is an intuitive and 
 
 simultaneous knowledge of all things ; but when the 
 
 Eternal enters time it becomes a discursive and successive 
 
 knowledge, with the power to know all things only 
 
 potential, and enlarging to become actual under the moral
 
 3o8 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 conditions that govern human growth and the extension 
 of human knowledge. Here we have not so much the 
 renunciation of attributes, nor their conscious possession 
 and concealment, as the retraction of their mode of being 
 from actual to potential. The stress falls on the mode of 
 existence of these qualities, and not on their presence or 
 absence. And the history of Christ's growth is then a 
 history of moral redintegration, the history of his 
 recovery, by gradual moral conquest, of the mode of being 
 from which, by a tremendous moral act, he came. It is 
 reconquest. He learned the taste of an acquired divinity 
 who had eternally known it as his possession. He won 
 by duty what was his own by right. As he grew in 
 personal consciousness he became conscious of himself as 
 the Eternal Son of God, who had dispowered himself to 
 be the son of man by a compendious moral act whereby 
 a God conscious of humanity became a man equally con- 
 scious of deity. And by a compendious moral act I mean 
 a prevenient act including in principle all those moral 
 sacrifices and victories which worked it out in an actual 
 and historic life. 
 
 The attributes of God, like omniscience, are not de- 
 stroyed when they are reduced to a potentiality. They are 
 only concentrated. The self-reduction, or self-retraction, 
 of God might be a better phrase than the self-emptying. 
 And it is only thus, indeed, that growth is made possible, 
 and evolution started on its career. No evolution is 
 possible on other terms, none unless the goal is in the 
 start. All we have otherwise is only movement and 
 variety. So far is growth, then, from being incompatible 
 with, the infinite, eternal, and almighty that it is de- 
 manded by ij:. Evolution is a mode of the self-limiting 
 power innate in a personal infinite. And only so is it
 
 XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 309 
 
 possible. The conditions of time must lie within the 
 possibilities of Eternity, the growth of man within the 
 infinite mobility of the changeless God. Finitwn non 
 capax infiniti is the principle of Deism ; the principle of 
 Christian theism is infinitum capax finiti. If the finite 
 lies beyond the infinite and outside it then the infinite is 
 reduced to be but a larger finite ; the infinite can only 
 remain so if it have the power of the finite as well. 
 
 § § § 
 These points deserve, and need, perhaps, closer atten- 
 tion. An attribute cannot be laid down, for it is only 
 the Being himself in a certain angle and relation. But 
 there are accidental relations, relations, for instance, 
 contingent on human freedom, which determine the form 
 in which the attribute exists. They determine its mode of 
 being, according to the particular position in which the 
 subject finds himself. Thus omniscience and the rest 
 are not so much attributes as functions of attributes, or 
 their modifications. Omnipotence means not that God 
 should be able to do anything and everything that fancy 
 may suggest ; but that, in working his will of love, God 
 is, from his own free resource, equal to all it involves, 
 and is really determined by nothing outside himself. 
 Omnipresence, as absolute independence of space, means 
 that God is not hampered by space, but can enter 
 spatial relations without being tied by them, can exist in 
 limits without being un free, or ceasing to be God. And 
 so on with omniscience and the rest. And the following 
 illustration has been given from the spectrum. A dis- 
 persion into colours is not essential to sunlight, which is 
 light without it. It was hailed and used as light before 
 such a breaking up was known. Therefore the disper- 
 sion is not a quality or attribute of light. But it is 
 
 Y
 
 310 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 potential in light all the same. As soon as the prism is 
 there this relative property of light appears necessarily. 
 Suspend the relation, remove the prism, and the disper- 
 sion ceases. So it is with the divine omniscience. Omnis- 
 cience is only a detailed aspect of God's absoluteness, 
 incidental to the existence of a creation. Before the 
 prism of creation was actually there God was, and God 
 was light. He had absolute and simultaneous intelli- 
 gence as a necessary feature of his being. But since he 
 created, the absolute intelligence of God in relation to the 
 world becomes in its form omniscience, which could only 
 cease with the removal of the world, but even then would 
 only retire into another absolute form. 
 
 God's knowledge, therefore, may be discrete in actual 
 (shall I say empirical ? ) omniscience, or it may be 
 retracted and concentrated into potentiality. In the 
 Kenosis it is contended it did so retire. This happens 
 in a measure even with ourselves. I am not at every 
 moment in full consciousness of all the knowledge I 
 possess. In ordinary life I know much that I am not 
 conscious of, that never occurs to me, that is as though it 
 were not, it is in petto and potential till some crisis arrive. 
 I do not become conscious of it till certain circumstances 
 arise, and a situation is created that changes it from 
 potential to actual and active. Meantime, where is that 
 knowledge? Does it exist? Has it a real existence 
 before it emerge in that situation ? And so it may have 
 been when Christ at the world's crisis became man — not 
 a brilliant man, but true man, normal man. In the matter 
 of knowledge Christ, as God, Christ in his eternal form, 
 had an intuitive and simultaneous knowledge of all ; but 
 when he put aside that eternal form of the Godhead, and 
 entered time, his knowledge became discursive, succes-
 
 xi.j The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 311 
 
 sive, and progressive. The omniscience (or the omni- 
 potence) of God does not mean that it is incapable of 
 limitation but rather that with more power than finitude 
 has it is also more capable of limitation. Only it is self- 
 limitation ; He limits himself in the freedom of holiness 
 for the purposes of His own end of infinite love. The 
 divine omniscience, morally retracted and potential in 
 Christ, developed by his exercise in a life-series of moral 
 crises and victories ; till, culminating in the cross and 
 its consummatory victory, it emerged into actual con- 
 sciousness and use in the Glorified, to whom all things 
 were delivered of the Father, all power given in heaven 
 and earth — when he was determined by the resurrection 
 so as to be the Son of God with power. What he 
 achieved was not the realisation of an old ideal but the 
 redintegration of an old state, He became what he was, 
 and not merely what it was in him possibly to be. He 
 reconquered by moral conflict, under the conditions of 
 human rebellion, a province, even within himself, which 
 was always his by right. In finding the sheep that were 
 lost he gradually finds the self, the mode of self, the con- 
 sciousness, he had renounced. Even for himself the 
 losing of his life was the regaining of it. The dimin- 
 uendo of the Kenosis went on parallel with the crescendo 
 of a vaster Plerosis. He died to live. And his post- 
 resurrection power is other in form than that of his 
 earthly life. The form of a servant gives place again to 
 the form of God. There is a sentence of Milton, in a 
 letter to Bigot, on his loss of sight which occurs to my 
 mind. " It is not so much lost as revoked and retracted 
 inward for the sharpening rather than the blunting of 
 my mental edge." 
 
 § § §
 
 312 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 It is fruitless to discuss these matters if we come to 
 their consideration with only physical or material ideas 
 of what is meant by words like omnipotence. A friend 
 once told me that her little boy posed her by discovering 
 that there was one thing God could not do — he could 
 not see the back of his own head. That is only an 
 absurd case of the popular and childish order of difficulty 
 which is the working capital of popular scepticism as 
 well as of popular apologetic. It starts with the maxims 
 of common sense to explore the region of eternal spirit 
 and holy immutable morality. And the object of educa- 
 tion is not to provide us with ready-made solutions to 
 such crude questions, but to raise people to putting the 
 proper questions and to get them into schools that will 
 exercise them in good and evil. I am thinking, of course, 
 chiefly of the higher education ; and I mean the schooling 
 in moral ideas, and in the methods appropriate to moral 
 ideas, in modern times. It would mean worlds for our 
 Christian faith, which brought such an inversion of moral 
 values, if the ethic of Kant and its developments came to 
 receive as much attention as the universities have given 
 to the great pagan ethic of Aristotle. I mean such an 
 escape from the physicists, biologists, and psychologists, 
 however refined, as shall discipline the mind in the 
 elements, at least, of ethical method, the genius of ethical 
 ideas, and the sense of ethical terms; and shall make 
 proper answers possible by enabling people to put the 
 proper questions. The bulk of the questions with which 
 the amateur critic poses faith, and the illiterate heretic 
 delights the public, are as unanswerable as if it were 
 asked — what is the difference between London Bridge 
 and four o'clock ?
 
 XI.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 313 
 
 With this in mind I would return to point out that God 
 is God not physically but morally, not by power but by 
 love. That is the Christian revelation. The nature of 
 Godhead is Holy Love. There lies the region, the nature, 
 and the norm of its omnipotence. It is no arbitrary or 
 casual omnipotence, which puts out power just for the 
 sake of doing it or showing it. It can do, not everything 
 conceivable to freakish fancy, but everything that is 
 prescribed by Holy Love. To a physical omnipotence 
 it is indifferent. Such being its nature, its object with 
 Humanity is a kingdom of such holy love. But, con- 
 sidering man's actual sinful state, this can only be effected 
 by redemption. To this end the Son of God sympa- 
 thetically renounces the glory of his Heavenly state. He 
 does it for God's sake more than for man's, for love 
 of the Holy more even than of the sinner, to glorify the 
 Holy through the sinner, and to hallow His name. And 
 nothing can hallow Holiness but Holiness, nothing else 
 can satisfy it, nothing else can save. God's holy name 
 must be saved that the sinner may be — and saved by an 
 all-holy peer. And Christ does it by the holy way, by a 
 moral act of love, and not by a tour de force. It is an 
 exercise of sanctity, and not an exertion of strength. 
 That is his satisfaction to God. He presents God with 
 a perfectly holy Humanity. He does it because he is 
 holy infinite love ; he can do it because he is almighty 
 for that love. It is not a love which might itself be 
 finite, only with a miraculous physical omnipresence; 
 but it is an almighty love in the sense that it is capable 
 of limiting itself, and, while an end, becoming also a 
 means, to an extent adequate to all love's infinite ends. 
 This self-renouncing, self-retracting act of the Son's will, 
 this reduction of Himself from the supreme end to be
 
 314 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 the supreme means for the soul, is no negation of his 
 nature ; it is the opposite, it is the last assertion of his 
 nature as love. It is no negation of his freedom ; it is 
 rather the freest energy of his whole will. He never 
 willed anything so mightily and freely as the subjection, 
 the renunciation of self-will to the holy requirement of 
 God. It is the concentrated omnipotence of love, and 
 not of mere power, that underlies his limited earthly 
 existence. And it is incessant obedience. The whole 
 detail of that earthly existence is the expression of the 
 act of will by which, in his omnipotent love, he entered 
 the world. " The act of a great spirit is to be always in 
 action." All his decisions taken on earth, all his several 
 volitions are integrated in the one foregone act that brought 
 him to earth, the one premundane act of pregnant self- 
 concentration for the carrying out of love's saving purpose 
 with the world. It is a concentrated and seminal 
 omnipotence we meet here, a concentration even of that 
 self-concentration wherein the world was created and 
 God became immanent in it. If the Creator could not 
 have become immanent in creation His infinity would 
 have been curtailed by all the powers and dimensions of 
 space. And if immanence could not pass by a new act 
 into mcarnation then God would have been lost in his 
 world, and the world lost to God. 
 
 In love we were created and endowed with freedom by 
 an act of God wherein he limited his own freedom by the 
 area of ours. His omnipotence received a restriction — 
 but it was from an exercise of His own loving power and 
 freedom ; and an exercise of it greater than could be 
 rivalled by all the freedom man received. The freedom 
 that limits itself to create freedom is true omnipotence, as 
 the love that can humble itself to save is truly almighty.
 
 xr.] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 315 
 
 God in his vast act of creative love laid a limit upon 
 himself to give room to the freeborn to live. He drew 
 in his universal energy and causation to that extent. 
 But any limit laid upon power by such love is an exercise 
 of omnipotence. And when God in his creative love gave 
 man freedom, it was a mightier exercise of His own free 
 power than could be matched by all the power man 
 might exert or fancy in the use of his freedom. So 
 it was also with the new Creation. There was 
 more omnipotence (if we can so speak) concentrated 
 in the person of Christ than was spread in all 
 creation. To appear and act as Redeemer, to be born, 
 suffer, and die, was a mightier act of Godhead than lay 
 in all the creation, preservation, and blessing of the 
 world. It was only in the exercise of a perfect divine 
 fulness (and therefore power) that Christ could empty 
 and humble himself to the servant he became. As the 
 humiliation grew so grew the exaltation of the power 
 and person that achieved it. It was an act of such 
 might that it was bound to break through the servant form, 
 and take at last for all men's worship the lordly name. 
 
 Let us escape, then, from crude notions of finite and 
 infinite, of weakness and omnipotence. If the infinite 
 God was so constituted that he could not live also as a 
 finite man then he was not infinite. There was a 
 limitation to that extent on His power's infinity, and one 
 which he Himself did not impose. Hut if He did live as 
 finite man, then so far was it from being a limitation of 
 His freedom (except externally and formally) that it was 
 the greatest exercise of it. It was the greatest act of 
 moral freedom ever done. The Godhead that freely 
 made man was never so free as in becoming man. His 
 self-limitation was so far from impairing his being that
 
 3i6 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 it became the mightiest act of it that we know. It was 
 not limitation so much as concentration. Was Christ 
 less mighty for his work when he was straitened till it 
 should be accomplished ? It was rather His intensest con- 
 centration for the carrying out of His final purpose with 
 the world. It was the most condensed expression of holy 
 love. It was holy love acting at a point once for all. And 
 holy love (may I repeat) is the supreme category of the 
 Almighty. It is the object for which all God's omni- 
 potence exists. To achieve that object is His true 
 omnipotence. How, then, could omnipotence be impaired 
 by its own supreme act ? Such divine immanence as is 
 implied in Creation rises by a farther and mightier limi- 
 tation to incarnation. But it is by a new creative act — 
 not by prolonging the old process ; not by a culmination 
 in Christ of the soul of the world, not as the summit of 
 God's identity with the world ; but by a unique, crowning, 
 and moral act of self-identification. Immanence cannot 
 explain incarnation, which is a new departure of more 
 moral nature. The incarnation is not God's identity 
 with the world prolonged, but a new self-identification, 
 which is yet older than the world. The self-limitation 
 became more severe, but it also rose to a new and a 
 mightier exertion of divine power. If one may use a 
 figure from physics, the structure, the nature, of His 
 action on the world changed under the increased pressure. 
 By his own will God in Christ reduced his intelligence 
 from being actual to being potential, within the kingdom 
 of power or nature ; while from that potentiality, as 
 Christ grew in grace, it developed and regained actual 
 omniscience by living it back, by the moral way of the 
 kingdom of Grace, till he left the world behind, to be 
 determinei as the Son of God in power.
 
 xi.J The Kenosis or Self- Emptying of Christ 317 
 
 § § § 
 It need hardly be pointed out how free such views 
 
 leave us in regard to those ignorances and limitations in 
 Christ which make so much more trouble to us than they 
 did to the evangelists ; those errors, in respect of the 
 form of the future no less than the history of the past, 
 which he shared with his time and race. If a young 
 critic tells us that Christ was ignorant of many things 
 which the modern schoolboy knows, we may wish the 
 fact put more reverently, and less like a school-boy, but 
 we have no vital interest in challenging it. If we are 
 reminded that there were miracles, and even teachings, 
 which were impossible to all his power and knowledge 
 (" greater things than these ") because he was, like most 
 preachers, dependent on his audience, and could do 
 nothing mighty amid unbelief — there is little to trouble 
 us in that. If he did not know it was because he con- 
 sented not to know. And whatever he did not know, at 
 least he did know that which is the root, and key, and 
 goal of all knowledge. He knew to its foundation that 
 fear, and obedience, and communion of God which is the 
 beginning of all wisdom that is not self-destructive. And 
 whatever he could not do — and he could not invent print- 
 ing — he could do the one thing needful for God, the one 
 thing which chanj^ed our relations to God, the one thing 
 needful to give man the power of doing at last what he 
 was made for, and of achieving through His redemption, 
 the eternal kingdom of God, in which telegrams and air- 
 ships arc forgotten among the potsherds of the earth. He 
 did the central deed in which all man's great and final 
 doing lies potential. He secured for ever the moral 
 realm without which our engineers are but building sand 
 and organising catastrophe. He did the work of God ;
 
 3i8 The Person and Place of Jesii^ Christ [lect. 
 
 and he did it in the sense that his doing was God at His 
 supreme work. It is here that we find our safe seat amid 
 the inevitable results of criticism. And it is here we find 
 a far lar^^er Saviour than the humane Jesus of mere 
 religions liberalism. It is no way to deal with so great a 
 blessing as criticism arbitrarily to challenge or curb its 
 rights. The way is to fix our faith beyond its reach. It 
 is to return to the Epistles for the key of the Gospels, for 
 the evangelical secret, and the principle of the Highest 
 Criticism of all. The judgment of the cross criticises all 
 criticism, and the finality of its felt salvation is the rock 
 
 impregnable. 
 
 § § § 
 
 To recapitulate. The Church has always taught an 
 earthly renunciation on the part of Christ, which takes 
 its eternal value from the premundane renunciation 
 that made him Christ. We have to make our re- 
 nunciations in life alone; but he made his before life. 
 We have no choice as to our birth ; he had. His will 
 to die was also his will to be born. It is only by 
 such a moral act, and not in the course of some ideal 
 process, that we can think of his entry from a world 
 of power and glory upon the conditions of earthly life. 
 Only by a moral act could he incarnate himself in human 
 life, which is in its nature a grand act, choice, and venture, 
 which is moral at its core, moral in its issues, and moral 
 in its crown. If it was a real and universal human life 
 he lived, that could only be by virtue of a moral act 
 which is at least on the scale of the race ; and if he was 
 to master the race his act must be on an even greater scale, 
 greater than the whole race's best, and as great as Holy 
 God. The act that consented to become man was a 
 superhuman act, an act of God. He did become crea-
 
 XI,] The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ 319 
 
 turely. He did not simply enter a creature prepared for 
 him. When he was born human nature was not trans- 
 formed by a special creation into some superhuman thing 
 for the spirit of God to enter — as a foreign palace might, 
 by great furnishing effort and outlay, be transformed into 
 an English home to honour a visit from our king. Nor 
 were the two streams parallel while unmingled. There 
 could not be two wills, or two consciousnesses, in the 
 same personality, by any psychological possibility now 
 credible. We could not have in the same person both 
 knowledge and ignorance of the same thing. If he did not 
 know it he was altogether ignorant of it. But the ever- 
 during Sun in heaven was focussed in Christ — condensed 
 to burn the evil out of man. The divine energy was 
 concentrated for the special work to be done. The ful- 
 ness of the Son's Godhead was still the essence of Christ. 
 That Godhead lost nothing in the saving act. It took 
 the whole power of Godhead to save ; it was not the Son's 
 work alone ; far less then was it the work of any impaired 
 Son. It was not the work of a God minorum gentium, as 
 the Arian Christ is. It could not be the work of any 
 created being, however great. The value of the soul 
 would slowly and surely sink if we believed it salvable by 
 any creature. It would lower the soul that the most 
 High made for Himself were it saved by a second-class 
 God. Such is the ethical effect on society of a false 
 theology. The divine nature must belong to the universal 
 and final Redeemer, however its mode and action might be 
 conditioned by the work it had to do. The divine 
 qualities were there ; though their action was at once 
 reduced, concentrated, intensified within the conditions 
 of the saving work. The divine qualities were kept, but 
 only in the mode that salvation made necessary. Jesus
 
 320 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. xi. 
 
 did not know everything actually, empirically, but only 
 what was needful for that work. But, as that is the 
 central final work in human nature, the knowledge 
 required for it contains the promise and potency of all 
 knowledge. And, as to the exercise of power, he did 
 what God alone could do in forgiving human sin, a salva- 
 tion which is the nucleus and germ of all worthy power 
 beside. His knowledge, his power, his presence were all 
 adjusted to his vocation. His vocation was not to apply 
 or exhibit omnipotence, but to effect the will of infinite 
 love, and master all that set itself against that. And that 
 divine vocation was only possible to one who had a 
 divine position. The world's Redeemer must be the Son 
 of God. 
 
 § § § 
 If we ask how Eternal Godhead could make the actual 
 condition of human nature His own, we must answer, as 
 I have already said, that we do not know. We cannot 
 follow the steps of the process, or make a psychological 
 sketch. There is something presumptuous in certain 
 kenotic efforts to body forth just what the Son must have 
 gone through in such an experience. God has done 
 things for his own which it has not entered into the 
 heart of man to conceive. It is the miracle behind all 
 miracle. All detailed miracle was but its expression. It 
 is the miracle of grace. And it can be realised (little as 
 it can be conceived) only by the faith that grace creates, 
 that answers grace, and works by love. Let us not be 
 impatient of the secret. Love would not remain love if 
 it had no impenetrable reserves. Love alone has any key 
 to those renunciations which do not mean the suicide but 
 the finding of the Soul.
 
 LECTURE XII 
 
 THE PLEROSIS OR THE 
 SELF-FULFILMENT OF CHRIST
 
 LECTURE XII 
 
 THE PLEROSIS OR THE SELF-FULFILMENT OF CHRIST 
 
 The closeness of the Church's bond with Christ will 
 always go hand in hand with its belief in his deity. 
 And the more it realises his salvation the more it will 
 know the roots of it to be in the great act of a Christ 
 before the worlds. The whole faith of the Church has 
 turned upon a conception of Christ which sees in him 
 the act of God, and worships in him God's immediate 
 revelation, God's personal guarantee of His holy saving 
 love, and the eternal mediator of our communion with 
 Him. Christ is much more than the personal reali2a- 
 tion of the idea of Humanity and the guarantee of its 
 universal attainment. That is to say, in the Church's 
 history a faith in the God in Christ underlay a faith in 
 the man in him. The disciples indeed began with the 
 divine prophetic man, in the order of knowledge ; but with 
 the apostles and the Church it was otherwise. They came 
 to read him in the order of value, not from the man up- 
 wards but from the God downwards. That was after 
 the great finale which made disciples into apostles and 
 a group into a Church. What did this, what made 
 apostles, and made a Church, was not the humane side
 
 324 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 or function of Jesus, but the redeeming God in Jesus. 
 A Church and a theology must be inseparable always. 
 The saving faith that makes a Church lays hold of 
 Christ theologically, in his deity. It does not view 
 him as the pledge of our human future, but as the 
 foundation of our new communion with a holy God who 
 will make Humanity's future just what his Kingdom 
 demands. Living faith knows nothing of an undogmatic 
 Christ. An undogmatic Christ is the advertisement of a 
 dying faith. Christ's permanent relation to the world is 
 dependent on something that can only be dogmatically 
 expressed — on his eternal relation to the Father. His 
 effect in ensuring its final destiny depends on his eternal 
 relation to the Father, on his sonship before the world 
 was. He is the final Saviour of men, and the surety of 
 man's future, only as the Eternal Son of God. No 
 created agent of God could give us that certainty of the 
 Kingdom of God which faith must have for the King- 
 dom's sake. It must come in a constant and living 
 mediator who is no mere medium ; in a historic person 
 who is not a mere historic link between the ages; in the 
 only begotten Son who declares the Father from His 
 bosom, and who is the revelation he brings. For only 
 God can reveal God. And the King of God's Kingdom 
 must be God. 
 
 Hence, if faith be not saving faith but only sym- 
 pathetic; if it be but an illumination, or an inspiration, 
 and not a new creation ; if it be a spiritual culture and 
 not a spiritual conversion ; if it is first concerned to be 
 liberal and not evangelical, progressive and not positive, 
 not regenerative; then there is no foundation and no 
 future for any belief in the Godhead of Christ, however we 
 may play with old terms.
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 325 
 
 _ § § § 
 
 Such a belief is an experience which breaks into two 
 
 orders of inquiry. It opens up questions about the 
 
 threefold nature of God, or a Trinity as deep as 
 
 Godhead, and questions about Christ's historic person — 
 
 how the humanity of Jesus is related to his Godhead, 
 
 how the nature of his personality fits his function 
 
 as the direct visitation of God. It is this latter 
 
 question, the Christological rather than the Trinitarian 
 
 question, that is of such lively interest to-day. But 
 
 any belief in either a Trinity or an Incarnation can 
 
 only flow from a final experience of grace by the sinful 
 
 soul. And it belongs solely to a Church which confesses 
 
 the sin of the world only because it confesses still more 
 
 humbly and gladly the absolute holiness of the Saviour. 
 
 The Godhead of Christ is an interest of religion before 
 
 it is an interest of theology. It is the spring of that 
 
 worship of Christ, which in the history of the Church 
 
 preceded and inspire 1 thought about him. When we 
 
 worship Christ the living Lord and the organ of our 
 
 communion with God (as the Church has steadily done), 
 
 or when we give him absolute obedience as the King of 
 
 the Kingdom of God and the living guide of all history to 
 
 that consummation, then we give him a place that can be 
 
 held by no mere part of creation, and no mere unit of 
 
 history. Is the Kingdom of God the consummation of 
 
 creation ? Then surely the Saviour and King of the 
 
 Kingdom must be one with the Creator of creation. 
 
 The world which was made for such a Christ must have 
 
 been made by him. The largest conception of creation is 
 
 much more than cosmic in range ; it is also redemptive 
 
 in power. It thinks of the cosmos as the arena or the 
 
 base of God's salvation. The ground plan of creation — 
 
 z
 
 326 The Person and Place of Jcsu^ Christ [lbct. 
 
 what is it if it be not found in the final plan of salvation ? 
 Has creation any ground plan else ? Plenty of process, 
 but what plan, what goal ? The goal to which the whole 
 creation moves — is it not that Eternal Redemption ? 
 Does it not all wait and work to the manifestation of the 
 Sons of God ? The whole cosmos is great with the re- 
 deemed Kingdom. But if so, surely then the Kingdom's 
 Saviour and King is Creation's Maker and Humanity's 
 God. Christ as the soul's living Lord must be the 
 Eternal Son. 
 
 I know that this is a logic more spiritual than rational. 
 The problem is not philosophic. It is certainly not to 
 find a reasoned adjustment of the finite and the infinite 
 of an absolute and created life. Nor is it a question of 
 deifying Humanity, as the Church's earlier creeds were 
 apt to construe it, and the positivist mind tends to 
 construe it still. The question is this — when we begin 
 with the Gospel, when we begin with God's holy and 
 loving will for the world in Christ — how are we to secure 
 its realization in man ? How are we to establish in man 
 as a race Christ's mutual, personal, and loving com- 
 munion with such a God? That is something which no 
 prophet was ever able to do. Prophetism was a failure 
 for such a Kingdom ; it could not establish a national, 
 to say nothing of a racial, communion with God ; how 
 could a Christ merely prophetic succeed ? Did Christ 
 succeed by that part of his life which was chiefly 
 prophetic — the part prior to his death ? The result 
 of his life and teaching was that they all forsook him 
 and fled ; but the result of his cross, resurrection, and glory 
 was to rally them and create the Church in which he 
 dwells. Is not the creation of God's Kingdom a task 
 beyond the power of any instrument, any creature ? Is
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 327 
 
 it not God's own work ? Whoever did it must be God 
 himself. Godhead must directly perform and sustain 
 the great act that set up such communion. God must 
 do it in person. Only one who incarnated God's holiest 
 will as His son alone did could produce and establish in 
 men for ever the due response to that will — the response 
 of their whole and holy selves. Holiness alone answers 
 holiness ; and only the Holy God could make men holy ; 
 it could be done by no emissary of His. We cannot be 
 sanctified by commission or deputy. No intimation of 
 Himself by God (through the holiest of creatures) 
 could effect such an end. His news of Himself must rise 
 to His sacrifice of Himself; His self-sacrifice must further 
 be his self-vindication as holy ; and from that it 
 must go on rising to His self-communication. The Father 
 who spoke by his prophets must come to save in the Son 
 and must occupy in the Spirit. He offers, gives, Himself 
 in the Son and conveys Himself in the Spirit. He 
 who is the end of all, humbles himself to be the 
 means, that he may win all. God in Christ asserts 
 Himself in his absolute freedom (" I, even I, am 
 he"); He limits Himself for His creature's freedom 
 ("that blotteth out thy transgressions"); and bestows 
 Himself to make that freedom communion (" For I am 
 with thee, saith the Lord, to save thee "). It is all one 
 holy love and grace, in this Eternal threefold action, 
 both within God and upon man. Only on this Trini- 
 tarian conception of God can we think of such a salvation 
 as ours. Only so can we think of Christ as God with us. 
 But then also we must follow on to ask how such a 
 Christ is related to this eternal and invisible God. 
 
 § § § 
 We have no call to-day to prove the real manhood
 
 328 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 of Jesus. For that is universally owned ; and it is all 
 that many can own. Things were otherwise in New 
 Testament times, when it was freely held that the man- 
 hood was phantasmal and unreal. It is against such a 
 notion that the writings of John are directed, and 
 especially his Epistles— a fact which makes them some- 
 what irrelevant when used against the Socinian position 
 in our own time. They were directed on people who 
 were more ready to admit the divinity of Christ than 
 his humanity. And with such people we have at the 
 moment little to do. 
 
 Nor are we always called to convince people of the 
 uniqueness of the man Jesus. That is, in some sense, 
 freely owned by most who consider the matter seriously 
 at all. Everything turns on what is meant by unique, 
 whether he is unique in degree or in kind, whether it is 
 the difference between the created and the increate. I 
 have more than once pointed out that what is denied to-day 
 is not a superior revelation in Christ but the absolute 
 finality of that revelation. What we have to stand by is 
 that finality — not of course in the sense that evolution 
 has come to an end, but in the sense that all evolution 
 is now within God's final word and not up to it. It is 
 unfolding the Christ and not producing him. Christ is 
 God's seventh and last day in which we now forever 
 live and labour in rest. That is to say, the divine reve- 
 lation is final but the human religion which answers it is 
 not final. The word is final, but the response is pro- 
 gressive. The finality is as to the kind of God revealed 
 and not as to the compass, which always enlarges upon us 
 as culture enlarges our grasp. It is a question of the 
 explication of God's last gift of Himself. And what we 
 have chiefly to keep in view is the sort of uniqueness in
 
 xii.j The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 329 
 
 the man Jesus which is required for the final and per- 
 sonal gift of Godhead in him. 
 
 Now for such a purpose a Christ merely kenotic is in- 
 adequate. We have already seen that all revelation is 
 God's self-determination. For any real revelation we must 
 have a loving self-determination of God with a view to 
 His self-assertion and self-communication; and this 
 self-determination must take effect in some manner of 
 self-divestment. We have examined the kenotic, or self- 
 emptying theories of such an act, and we have found 
 them either more helpful or less. But whether we take 
 a kenotic theory or not, we must have some doctrine 
 of God's self-divestment, or His reduction to our 
 human case. Yet, if we go no farther than that, 
 it only carries us half-way, it only leads us to the 
 spectacle of a humbled God, and not to the experi- 
 ence of a redeeming and royal God. For re- 
 demption we need someting more positive. It is a 
 defect in kenotic theories, however sound, that they turn 
 only on one side of the experience of Christ, viz., his 
 descent and humiliation. It is a defect because that 
 renunciatory element is negative after all; and to dwell 
 on it, as modern views of Christ do, is to end in a 
 Christian ethic somewhat weak, and tending to ascetic 
 and self-occupied piety. For we can be very self-occupied 
 with self-denial ; it is the feminine fallacy in ethics. We 
 must keep in view, and keep uppermost, the more positive 
 process, the effective, ascending, and mastering process 
 which went alongside of the renunciation in Christ, nay, 
 was interwoven with it, as its ruling coefficient. I mean 
 that, besides the subjective renunciation, we must note 
 the growth, the exaltation, of his objective achievement, 
 culminating in the perfecting at once of his soul and our
 
 330 Thi Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 salvation in the cross, resurrection, and glory. I should 
 not decline to speak carefully of a progressive in- 
 carnation. We must have some view, which may be 
 kenotic indeed, but must also be more positive than 
 kenoticism alone. 
 
 § § § 
 Now, the whole Christology of the Church, I keep 
 saying, has been its effort to conceive by thought the 
 reality it lived on in its faith of Christ's saving work and 
 presence for good and all. For the most part, we have 
 seen, the Church has tried to solve the problem by the 
 doctrine of two distinct natures inseparably coexisting in 
 the person of Jesus. Sometimes, indeed, it has gone so 
 far as to speak of two personalities coexisting within that 
 single historic life. But no creed (we have seen) has ever 
 been able to do more on such a basis than to place the two 
 natures or persons alongside each other, to say that each 
 must be believed as a postulate of Christian faith and ex- 
 perience, and to repel attacks or heresies which threatened 
 to destroy either, or to enhance the one at the expense of 
 the other. No systematic reconciliation, far less a 
 psychological, has ever yet been effected. And the 
 attempts at adjustment have always have tended to im- 
 pair one side or other of the antinomy. One nature lost 
 a piece of itself to the other, and so really lost its indis- 
 cerptible self; or else one was swallowed up by the other. 
 Either an injury was done to the nature of human 
 personality, by ignoring its necessary law of growth and 
 making Jesus a mechanical prodigy of abstract revelation, 
 without a moral interior (as in By^antinism) ; or damage 
 was done to the unity and changelessness of the triune 
 God (as in Arianism, or in some extreme kenotic theories). 
 
 § § §
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 331 
 
 Most of those theories were fastened on the Church 
 in the interests, indeed, of a true redemption, but at a 
 time when the theology of redemption, was apt to be 
 conceived in terms of substance rather than subject, of 
 metaphysic rather than ethic, of things rather than per- 
 sons. The terms were, however finely material, yet too 
 material to be duly personal and ethical. The object of 
 redemption in the creed-making age was less to forgive 
 man than to immortalise him, less to convert him than 
 to deify him. It was not a work of grace in the sense of 
 mercy, in the sense of destroying mortal guilt, but in the 
 sense of destroying a fatal disease. Grace was the in- 
 fusion of an incorruptible divine nature or substance into 
 corruptible human nature. It was antiseptic. It was 
 the inoculation of the one nature by the other, and the 
 consequent gift of dcfidapa-ta rather than forgiveness and 
 communion. It gave life rather than moral peace. It 
 was not the restoration of unclouded personal relations 
 so much as the deification of human nature by trans- 
 fusion of the divine. It was more a communication of 
 properties than a communion of hearts and wills. And 
 it is easy to see the result of such a theory in the Roman 
 doctrine of the sacraments, the kind of virtue they convey, 
 and the ethic with which they may co-exist. 
 
 But we have come to a time in the growth of Christian 
 moral culture when personal relations and personal 
 movements count for much more than the relations of 
 the most rare and etherial substances. The conscience 
 has come to be the locus of faith, especially since the 
 Reformation turned grace from subsidy, or antidote, to 
 mercy. It is a question of the holy conscience of God in 
 relation to the guilty conscience of man. We are con- 
 cerned with a relation of wills, of the holy will and the
 
 332 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lfxt. 
 
 unholy. Redemption is moral regeneration, and not 
 mere cure, not mere rescue from an entail of spiritual 
 disease and death. We are not to blame for a mere 
 disease, but redemption is rescue from what does leave 
 us culpable. Sin is more than a disease; and it is 
 curable by no magical infusion, but only by moral action 
 on the part of God ; wherein person deals with person, 
 and soul with soul, in a mutual act of Grace and Faith. 
 Faith is man's greatest moral act, as Grace is God's. 
 It becomes the serious acceptance of God's mercy and 
 not the reception of Christ's body. Regeneration is the 
 result of faith and not of baptism. Death is banished 
 by new living. Such faith is what makes Christianity ; 
 and its experience is the material of all theology. Thus 
 religion, salvation, gives the law to theology, and not 
 theology to salvation. This is especially the case with 
 Christology. Forgive me if I repeat so often that the 
 principle from which we must set out to understand the 
 person of Christ is the soteriological principle. Any 
 metaphysic must follow that and not precede it; it must 
 be a metaphysic of history and not of being, of soul and 
 not of substance, of the moral soul and not the noetic 
 substance, of ethic and not of thought — and especially of 
 the Christian ethic condensed in faith as the new life. 
 All Christology must rest on a moral salvation, spiritually 
 and personally realised. And any metaphysic involved 
 must be the metaphysic of redemption, which is only the 
 superlative of a metaphysic of ethics. We believe and 
 therefore we speak. We believe and then we think. 
 We explore the New Creation. It is from the experi- 
 ence of Christ's salvation that the Church proceeds to 
 the interpretation of the Saviour's person. 
 
 § § §
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 333 
 
 Starting, then, from the canon that the Incarnate is 
 immediately known to us only as the Saviour, it might be 
 better, it might save us much confusion and collision, if 
 we were less concerned to speak or think of the two 
 natures within the life of Christ, as we have long ceased 
 to think of two persons, or two consciousnesses. Neither 
 does justice to the interest of salvation. As that interest is 
 the interest of personal communion, and not of human 
 deification, it might be better to describe the union of God and 
 man in Christ as the mutual involution of two personal move- 
 ments raised to the whole scale of the human soul and the 
 divine. 
 
 § § § 
 This is what I would venture (with more heart than 
 
 hope) to expound. 
 
 There is a certain fascination at present in the idea of 
 Christ as the apex of that spiritual evolution which 
 emerges to a divine height in man. He is viewed as the 
 consummation of a grand spiritual process construed on 
 scientific lines, as if all the series, from the nebula to 
 man, were a vast pneumatic biology. And doubtless if 
 the human process in history were simply one of teeming 
 movement onward and upward, there would be no difficulty 
 but much propriety in speaking of Christ as the divine 
 blossom of the race, or its " heaven-kissing hill." But 
 then I have more than once said that if such evolution 
 were the law and scheme of life, its crown and bloom 
 must be at the close of the series, and not in the far 
 past. We could have no Christ till we had evolved into 
 the Kingdom of God. But the historic Christ is there 
 to act on man and save him, and not simply to consum- 
 mate him. He is there to bring about man's consum- 
 mation and not simply exhibit it. He is not a product
 
 334 ^/'^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 of man's spiritual evolution but its grand source. If 
 ever we attain to Christ it is by Christ. The King 
 makes the Kingdom and not the Kingdom the King. 
 
 Moreover we have seen that moral experience and the 
 psychology of faith will not let us think of man's spiritual 
 history as a process of simple progress, even on the wide 
 whole. (See Lecture V.) There is much more than that 
 allows for, more that is mystic, resolute, dogmatic, more 
 of a passion, a collision, and a tragedy in life ; in life, note, 
 and not only in some lives. Man does not simply unfold 
 to God but God descends and enters man. With this 
 invasion religion has much more to do than with evolution. 
 The immanent consciousness of the divine becomes posi- 
 tive religion only when the leap, the choice, the resolve of 
 faith treats it as the upheaval of a transcendent reality. 
 
 For what is the verdict of religious psychology ? How 
 does it interpret the spiritual experience of the race as 
 shown in its supreme form of faith ? Life and progress, 
 especially on the religious plane, show that at least a two- 
 fold movement goes to make up the spirituality in human 
 history, two movements whose opposite directions pro- 
 duce much friction. And I do not allude by that to the 
 twofold process within history, wherein degeneration is at 
 constant war with development, decay with life, and lapse 
 with progress. That might all go on on what I would call 
 the horizontal plane of movement — the onward movement 
 and the backward. But I allude rather to the vertical 
 action, so to say, in which man is constantly seeking 
 unto a God and God is constantly passing into man. 
 Christianity is a religion of depth before it is a religion 
 of breadth. It spreads to all souls because it pierces 
 the whole soul. It is so catholic because so radical, so 
 liberal because so searching. Its God the heaven of
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 335 
 
 heavens cannot contain ; and he does not shrink from 
 descending into hell. Its kingdom does not grow up 
 through the ground like the grass ; it descends out of 
 heaven from God. Its prayer that ascends there is moved 
 by a spirit which comes down from there. Man's word 
 to God is interlocked with God's word to man. To 
 conceive history as the field of those two movements on 
 the upright plane of spirit — the upward movement of 
 man's quest for God, and the downward of God's con- 
 quest of man — is far more congenial to the mystery, 
 grandeur, and tragedy of the soul than the simple, 
 evolutionary, and culminating process on the level plane 
 of Time alone. We grow laterally every way, so to 
 speak, and not only on a plane. The soul dilates into its 
 circumambient eternity, as it were ; it does not merely 
 proceed. The city of God is foursquare every way. So 
 that we have this advantage, that, while we allow its place 
 to the progressive process which fascinates so many, we 
 yet supplement it with another which gives history a far 
 more massive interest, a more vivid, dramatic, and crucial 
 interest, a far more moral interest than an ordered pro- 
 cess can yield. We grow in substance and power, and 
 not merely in range and vision. One would like to do 
 justice to the evolutionary idea, the progressive idea; 
 but one would like still more to do justice to the redemp- 
 tive idea, the regenerative, the deepening idea. For 
 Christ came to do more to deepen men than to broaden 
 them. He came as the fulness and not simply as the 
 ideal, the form to be filled. He came as a life, and not 
 simply as a line of life. 
 
 These movements are both at work in the growth of 
 the God-led historic soul as prayer and answer, as evolu- 
 tion and inspiration. Religiously {i.e. supremely) they are
 
 336 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 the two movements that make the world, if we interpret it 
 from its spiritual height. And they give us the categories 
 in which God and man meet. They meet in action rather 
 than in being ; and the unity of being is just such as is 
 required for mutual action and communion. God and 
 man meet in humanity, not as two entities or natures 
 which coexist, but as two movements in mutual interplay, 
 mutual struggle, and reciprocal communion. On the one 
 hand we have an initiative, creative, productive action, 
 clear and sure, on the part of eternal and absolute God ; 
 on the other we have the seeking, receptive, appropria- 
 tive action of groping, erring, growing man. God finds 
 a man who did not find Him, man finds a God who did 
 find Him. We have the self-complete God who cannot 
 grow, in whom all things are already, Yea and Amen ; 
 and we have the inchoate man who must grow, and 
 stumbles as he grows ; and we have movement in each. 
 We have on the one hand the perfect God who cannot 
 grow ; and yet, as the living God, he has in his change- 
 less nature an eternal movement which He implanted as 
 growth in the creature He made in his image. And on 
 the other hand we have this waxing man, who only grows 
 into the personality that communes with God. He 
 grows through the moral exercise of that passion for the 
 Absolute and Eternal which is so much more than God's 
 return upon Himself because He does not return void but 
 laden with free souls for His sheaves. We have these 
 two movements permeating the whole life of historic 
 humanity, and founding its spiritual psychology. If we 
 leave Christ out of view for the moment, we recognise 
 such a strife, such a " Lord's controversy," not in Israel 
 only but in the great psychology of the race. All 
 spiritual existence is action. History is action, and
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self-Fulfilment of Christ 337 
 
 reciprocal action. It is commerce, and even conflict, 
 with the transcendent. Its sense of God is not that of 
 subjective immanence but of living contact with a living 
 spiritual reality. A true psychology of religion leaves 
 you at the last face to face with a choice and a venture ; 
 not an experience in the sense of an impression, but, more 
 actively, in the sense of a decision ; the decision, namely, 
 that what we feel facing us, urging us, dominating us, is 
 not an illusion but the presence and action of a transcen- 
 dent reality. That is the sure venture of faith. The 
 divine thing in the soul is not a mystic subjectivity 
 but objective truth acting upon us at closest quarters, 
 as a finer, fuller soul in soul. 
 
 The vast issue in our personal Humanity, therefore, 
 is not the still conjunction of two natures in the soul, 
 but the crisis of two permanent and fundamental move- 
 ments in it; it is not the union of two entities but the 
 action of two powers, one passing one way and one 
 another. If the whole drama of the soul of man 
 could be compressed into one narrow neck and one 
 strait gate, that is what we should have — the tremendous 
 friction (so to say) of these two currents within a 
 personal experience, And if we could widen that neck 
 at one part, what we should have would be a whirlpool* 
 in which the two currents become mutually and crucially 
 involved, forming a centre of perfect rest. 
 
 § § § 
 Rudely speaking, that may be used as an image of 
 what we have in ('hrist. At his central place we have 
 what we might f:all the node at which the two move- 
 ments, being compressed, meet, rotate, and cast a line 
 
 * What the old theologians would have called a 7rc/)iY(i)^»/<ri?
 
 338 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 column to heaven. The calm is the calm of intense 
 victory. If life be a comedy to those that think, and 
 a tragedy to those that feel, it is a victory to those 
 who believe. But, however it may fare with our imagery, 
 in Christ, we have two things, the two grand actions of 
 spiritual being, in final peace and eternal power. We 
 have the whole perfect action of Godhead concentrated 
 through one factor or hypostasis within it * and directed 
 manward both to create and redeem ; and we have also the 
 growing moral appropriation by man's soul moving God- 
 ward of that action as its own, as its initial divine nature 
 and content. In Christ's life and work we have that divine 
 mobility t in which the living Son eternally was — we have, 
 that coming historically, and psychologically, and ethically 
 to be. He came to be what he always vitally was, by what 
 I have called a process of moral redintegration. He moved 
 by his history to a supernal world that he moved in by his 
 nature. We have that divine Son, by whose agency the 
 world of souls was made, not now creating another soul for 
 his purpose, but himself becoming such a soul. Surely, as 
 I have said, if he had it in him to make souls in the divine 
 image it was in him to become one. On the one side we 
 have a personality, originally existing under those 
 spiritual and discarnate conditions (for which our indi- 
 vidualist ideas of person are so inadequate and misleading) 
 — we have that personality taking the form and con- 
 ditions of a corporeal life, in order to be the arena and the 
 organ of God's revelation and man's redemption. (You 
 may observe that what we are dealing with is not a contrast 
 
 * By what theologians used to call an apotelesma in the Son. 
 
 •f I ask leave to use the word mobility to express that uncaused self- 
 contained vitaUty, that changeless change, in God which is the ground of 
 the manward movement of which I speak.
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 339 
 
 of finite and infinite natures, but of corporeal and dis- 
 carnate spirituality or personality.) And, on the other 
 side, we have him growing in this corporeal personality, 
 this increate but creaturely life. We have his eternal 
 person living under the conditions of corporeal personality ; 
 we have his divine mobility, therefore, translated into 
 human growth. We have together within one historic hfe 
 the gradual descent and the growing ascent, by a moral 
 process in each case. We have them on a world scale, 
 an eternal scale, the scale and manner of spiritual being 
 in so far as experience tells us of spiritual being. And we 
 have them in the unity of one historic person, to show 
 that, however inadequate earthly personality is to 
 heavenly, they are not incompatible, and they are capable 
 of the supreme mutual act of love and grace. In the 
 person of Christ we have the crisis and sacrament of 
 divine and human love. Do not let us speak here of 
 impossible contradictions in logic. Let us rather 
 remember here again that the reconciliation of such 
 rational antinomies as God's sovereignty and man's 
 freedom only takes [)lace in the unity of one active 
 person which has erjiial need of both for full personal 
 effect. § § § 
 
 Christ thus embodies the two movements of spiritual 
 reality in which man and God meet. Such move- 
 ments are at bottom acts. For the world is not so 
 much the abode of God as the act of God ; and man's 
 function in the world is not so much to settle immanently 
 into it. even into its growth, as to overcome it, subdue it, 
 and find himself for a transcendently active God in it. 
 In either case the movement is a vast act, and the goal is 
 a personal communion of acts. On either side the 
 personality is put into a dual act and consummated there.
 
 340 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 So nuich must be allowed to the idea of immanence; 
 which is a very fertile idea if it is construed ethically as 
 action, and not ontologically as mere presence or mere 
 movement ; if it is viewed as the personal action within 
 the world of a Person who needs other persons and their 
 free acts for the communion which in Christ He found 
 absolute and eternal. 
 
 Creation is only maintained by the standing act of the 
 one God in his grace ; who is, therefore, duly answered 
 only by a whole devoted life as the standing act of man 
 in his faith. God is active in his work as its incessant cre- 
 ator, just as in His kingdom He is incessant redeemer ; and 
 man, too, subsists in action, and becomes what his action 
 makes him ; and he attains the kingdom by the constant 
 act of faith which integrates him into the act of grace. 
 Life, history, at its highest may be figured as a wire 
 traversed in opposite directions by these two great 
 spiritual currents, movements or acts. 
 
 § § § 
 
 Let us mark still more carefully their co-existence in 
 
 Christ. 
 
 First, we have man's movement to God, or man's action 
 on God, either in the way of aspiration and prayer, or in the 
 way of acquiring from God moral personality. 
 
 It should here be remembered that human personality 
 is not a ready-made thing, but it has to grow by moral 
 exercise, and chiefly, in the kingdom of God, by prayer. 
 The living soul has to grow into moral personality. And 
 this should not be ignored in connection with the moral 
 psjchology of Christ. He no more than we came into 
 the world with a completed personality — which would be 
 not so much a miracle but a magic and a prodigy. 
 
 What he brought with him (if some repetition be
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self •Fulfilment of Christ 341 
 
 pardoned in a series of lectures) was such a soul as was 
 bound morally (and not by a fated necessity) to grow, 
 under his life's vocation, to the personality that was the 
 complete and final revelation of God, the agent of man's 
 redemption, and the locus of man's communion with 
 God. A soul of Godhead is the necessary postulate of 
 the redeeming personality ; it is the necessary foundation 
 for the growth of that personality ; and it is the necessary 
 condition of the finality of his work. It was a personality 
 that differed from all others by finding its growth to lie 
 in the unaided and sinless appropriation of that which it 
 already was. The potuit non peccare rests (but in no fated 
 or mechanical way) on the non potuit peccare. The ground 
 of his inability to sin did not lie in the immunity, and 
 almost necessity, of a nature or rank, but in the moral 
 entail, the moral reverberation, of his great, initial, and 
 inclusive act eternal in the heavens. His renunciations 
 on earth had behind them all the power of that com- 
 pendious renunciation by which he came to earth ; even 
 as his earthly acts of individual forgiveness, before lie 
 came to the universal forgiveness of Calvary, had behind 
 them that cross which he took up when the Lamb was slain 
 before the foundation of the world. His relation to God 
 was immediate from the first, and perfect; but that did 
 not give him any immunity from the moral law that we 
 must earn our greatest legacies, and appropriate by toil 
 and conflict our best gifts. We have to serve ourselves, 
 heirs to the greatness of our fathers. Non potuit peccare, 
 nevertheless. The intimacy of his connection with 
 Humanity was in that respect but qualified. Yet to his own 
 experience the moral conflict was entirely real, because 
 his self-emptying included an oblivion of that impossibility 
 of sin. As consciousness arose he 'was unwittingly pro-
 
 342 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 tected from those deflections incident to inexperience 
 which would have damaged his moral judgment and 
 development when maturity came. And this was only 
 possible if he had, to begin with, a unique, central, and 
 powerful relation to the being of God apart from his own 
 earthly decisions. So that his growth was growth in 
 what he was, and not simply to what he might be. It was 
 not acquiring what he had not, but appropriating and 
 realising what he had. It was coming to his own unique 
 self. I have already said that I am alive to the criticism 
 to which such a position has been exposed, in that it 
 seems to take him out of a real moral conflict like our 
 own. And the answer, you have noted, is three-fold. 
 First, that our Redeemer must save us by his difference 
 from us, however the salvation get home by his parity 
 with us. He saves because he is God and not man. 
 Second, the reality of his conflict is secured by his 
 kenotic ignorance of his inability to sin. And third, his 
 unique relation to God was a relation to a free God and 
 not to a mechanical or physical fate, or to an invincible 
 bias to good. 
 
 § § § 
 The second movement is God's movement to man. 
 
 In this connection we note, first, that God by his 
 nature does so move. 
 
 He is no Deistic God. His changeless nature is not 
 stock-stiff and apart. It has an absolute mobility. It 
 has in it the power and secret of all change, all out-going, 
 without going out of Himself. It is part of his self- 
 assertion as the absolute God that he should determine 
 Himself into communicating Himself. He moves, he was 
 not moved, to give Himself in revelation to man. But 
 was man, then, eternal in God, if in His gift to man He
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 343 
 
 do not go out of Himself in this act ? That cannot be ; 
 for man is His creature and the creature is not eternal. 
 But He went out always to His increate Son, in whom 
 and through whom all creation is and all Humanity ; in 
 and through whom alone we have the revelation and 
 actual gift of Himself ; who was coming, and not merely 
 prophesied, in the Old Testament, and in a less degree 
 in other faiths. 
 
 Second, He moves to save. 
 
 The coming of Christ in the long course of history is 
 the coming of God the Redeemer. Man's hunger for 
 deliverance is the greatest movement in all the soul's life 
 except one — God's passion to save, and his ceaseless 
 action in saving. It is here alone that we grasp God's 
 real presence and rest on it for ever. Valuable as 
 speculative versions of the Incarnation may be, we only 
 really have it and believe in it when we sit inside it, by 
 the saving action which sets us in Christ, and assures us 
 of the incredible fact that we are included by God's 
 strange grace in the same love wherewith he loves his 
 only begotten Son. We are sure of the Incarnation only 
 as those who taste the benefit of Christ's death in union 
 with him. 
 
 § § § 
 What we have in Christ, therefore, is more than the 
 co-existence of two natures, or even their interpene- 
 tration. We have within this single increate person the 
 mutual involution of the two personal acts or movements 
 supreme in spiritual being, the one distinctive of man, 
 the" other distinctive of God; the one actively productive 
 from the side of Eternal God, the other actively receptive 
 from the side of growing man ; the one being the pointing, 
 in a corporeal person, of God's long action in entering
 
 344 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 history, the other the pointing of man's moral growth in 
 the growing appropriation by Jesus of his divine content 
 as he becomes a fuller organ for God's full action on 
 man. The two supreme movements of spiritual being, 
 redemption and religion, are revealed as being so personal 
 that they can take harmonious, complete, and final effect 
 within one historic person, increate but corporeal. 
 
 We seem, viewing it in this light, to have something 
 that comes nearer to our experience, something we can 
 verify, and something, therefore, that is of more religious 
 value to us, than if we speak too much about a con- 
 junction of natures. That is not within our experience; 
 and therein it shares with such theories as a metaphysical 
 Trinity, or the adjustment of mercy and justice in God, 
 a certain spiritual impotence as it works to its results. 
 
 § § § 
 When we set to consider the nature of God's union 
 
 with man in Christ we must give proper effect to each 
 side. In the first place nothing must be done to imperil 
 the absoluteness, the freedom, of God, His creative 
 initiative on grounds entirely within Himself. Accord- 
 ingly, the union in a corporeal Christ can only be an 
 exalted form of God's relation to those finite con- 
 ditions which underlay the existence of a created world, 
 and made it at the same time a finished world. That is 
 to say, it was a relation that had its roots in Eternity, a 
 relation within the absolute God, an immanence of the 
 world in the Transcendent, of the corporeal personality 
 in the spiritual. 
 
 But, in the second place, nothing must be done to 
 impair the reality of human life, the conditions of its 
 finitude, the necessity of growth within the course of 
 time. It does not begin as a finished article. It begins
 
 xii.J The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment oj Christ 345 
 
 with certain possibilities, with a destiny engrained in 
 the protoplast ; but it only passes from a destiny into a 
 perfection through a career. 
 
 But, having given due effect to each side, how can 
 we have those apparent contradictions united in one 
 historic personality — absolute God and relative man, 
 absolute finality and growing attainment, absolute Grace 
 and growth in Grace, the victory won and yet the victory 
 to be won, the Kingdom come and the Kingdom coming ? 
 How are we to adjust the contradiction between the 
 absolute and the evolutionary in this concrete and crucial 
 case ? On the threshold of such inquiry let me remind 
 you once more that it is only in the alogical unity of a 
 person for whose action and growth they are necessary 
 that we find the harmony of several antinomies that defy 
 rational adjustment. 
 
 § § § 
 We may take a step by remembering the form in which 
 the union is expressed. It is not in a monumental person 
 but in an active, not in a quiescent personality, statuesque 
 and ideal, but in one who exists in a vast movement and 
 is consummated in a crucial act. The union means that 
 this act or movement is twofold. In a sense, but in 
 no monistic sense, we have one nature, in two modes of 
 action; for moral reality must be in heaven what it is on 
 earth. It is a polar movement, the reconciliation of 
 two directions, two tendencies, and not the fusion of 
 two quantities, and certainly not of two forces. It 
 is wills that are concerned ; and wills are not forces so 
 much as elective and directive powers over forces. If 
 will be a force, it is a force that differs from all 
 others in choosing them, aiming them, coordinating, 
 and concentrating them. It lays the guns, so to say.
 
 346 The Person and Place of Jesiis Christ [lect. 
 
 As the union of wills we have in Christ, therefore, the 
 union of two moral movements or directions, and not 
 merely of two forces or things; and we have their reconcilia- 
 tion and not merely their confluence, their mutual living 
 involution and not simply their inert conjunction. Much 
 that may seem obscure would vanish if we could but 
 cease to think in terms of material substance or force, 
 however fine, and learn to think in terms of personal 
 subjects and their kind of union ; if our minds gave up 
 handling quantities in these high matters and took up 
 kinds. It is the long and engrained habit of thinking in 
 masses or entities that makes so unfamiliar and dark the 
 higher habit of thinking in acts. 
 
 § § § 
 And the next step we take is to note that it is a union 
 
 whose object is above all religious. It is not to provide 
 us with a scheme of things, or a ground of ethic. It is to 
 save. It is to restore. It is to restore the soul's com- 
 munion with God. It is to regain true religion by a new 
 birth. The nature of the union must be given us by the 
 nature of the purpose to be served and the work to be 
 done. The canon for the Incarnation, I have said, is 
 soteriological. It is the work of Christ that gives us the 
 key to the nature of Christ. It is the experience of faith 
 in his work that alone opens to us the person and the 
 deity of Christ as the creator of the new life with God. 
 And difference of experience here, the difference between 
 saving and sympathetic faith, covers a difference in the 
 type of religion, which a few generations always reveal as 
 really another religion. What we have to ask about 
 Christ then, is this, what account of him is demanded by 
 that work, that new creation of us, that real bringing of 
 us to God, not simply in nearness but in likeness ? We
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 347 
 
 are to think about Christ whatever is required to 
 explain the most certain thing in the soul's experience — 
 namely, that he has given it the new life of God and 
 mercy, and saved it from the old life of guilt, self, and 
 the world. We ask what is required in one who not only 
 opens communications but restores to such as we are real 
 and complete communion with God, one who does not 
 pass us on but keeps us in himself, to keep us in God ? 
 What is required in one who is himself our reconciliation 
 and our holiness before God ; one who is God's holiness 
 in human form ; who unites the receptivity which is 
 religion with the creativeness which is revelation ; in 
 whom revelation and religion are completely one on the 
 whole historic scale ? The union of God and man in 
 Christ was of the nature required by that saving work, 
 and not by the idea of a paragon Godman. It is the 
 union in one kenotic person of God's distinctive action 
 and man's. We have God as a Trinity, i.e. as a personal 
 God who, without going out of Himself, can move, 
 love, communicate, in a perfectly spontaneous way, with- 
 out being moved by any power outside, who has in His 
 holy self both the ground and object of his outgoing love. 
 And we have man as a person, but as a creaturely person, 
 with a twofold disposition — first, to receive rather than to 
 create, and second by this receptivity to grow as a person, 
 from the living soul in which he begins, to its own latent 
 quality and destiny. Is it quite impossible* to unite in 
 
 * Here let us once more remember that, when we speak of the possible 
 or impossible, we arc not appealing to the licence of a psychology merely 
 scientific or phenomenal, but to a sympathetic and spiritual psychology ; 
 to a psychology which comes not by the detached observation of 
 religion as a historic fact, but either experiences religion in that per- 
 sonal and mystic feature which makes it faith, or at least pursues with 
 sympathetic imagination the spiritual process of those who are the classics 
 of tne evangelical exjierience as the summit of religion. Troeltsch is 
 perhaps the greatest of f»ur authorities on the psychology of religion ; 
 and he has done valuable service in the stand he has made on this point.
 
 348 The Person and Place of Jestis Christ [lect. 
 
 one person — not omnipotence and feebleness; that is 
 impossible — but the absolute outgoing love of God and 
 the perfect but growing reception of it by man ? Is it 
 impossible to have, in one saving man, perfect revelation 
 and perfect religion perfectly interpenetrating ? Is it 
 impossible to have, in one mighty person, salvation 
 already guaranteed and salvation in course of being 
 wrought ? Did he not himstlf preach of a kingdom that 
 was coming because it was come ? Is it impossible to 
 have in that person's very constitution a salvation which 
 is only worked out by his own appropriation of the deep 
 content of his own saving soul ? His was a soul framed 
 for saving, so to say, as the others were framed for being 
 saved ; and when he came to himself it was to a Saviour, 
 he came, as we come to ourselves as his saints. His 
 growth in grace was the history of the world's moral 
 crisis, it was, in the same act, the growth of our salva- 
 tion ; for the atoning cross was the principle and the 
 achievement of his whole moral life. But it was the 
 working out of a salvation which was already there, in 
 virtue of the great renunciation whereby the Creator of 
 souls came in fashion as a soul he made. In a sense, we 
 were saved by Christ before he was born ; and he was 
 born because we were thus saved. Could the agent of 
 creation in Godhead not appear among the persons he 
 created ? Could the Creator Son not become a creaturely 
 soul, however increate ? 
 
 § § § 
 What we have, then, is this. The union of God and 
 man in Christ is so far like the Creation. On the one 
 side it is a finished work of God, on the other it is a 
 progressive work of man. It is a finished work of God 
 in so far as this; the exceptional, the increate person
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self- Fulfilment of Christ 349 
 
 of the historic Jesus, as the kenotic incarnation of 
 the eternal Son by his own act and movement, con- 
 tained the Godhead in its whole fulness of holy love. 
 So that that person by his holy constitution, whether 
 he knew it at every moment or not, guaranteed 
 the perfect consummation of salvation in the ever 
 perfect sinlessness of the Saviour. But the union has 
 another side — the appropriative ascent and the pro- 
 gressive deepening of the man Jesus in this sinless 
 life and holy work ; his enlarging sense of the work 
 to be done, his rising sense of the power to do it, and 
 his expanding sanctity in the doing of it. We may 
 speak of a progressive incarnation within his life, if we 
 give it a kenotic basis. He grew in the grace in which 
 he always was, and in the knowledge of it. As his 
 personal history enlarged and ripened by every experi- 
 ence, and as he was always found equal to each moral 
 crisis, the latent Godhead became more and more 
 mighty as his life's interior, and asserted itself with the 
 more power as the personality grew in depth and scope. 
 Every step he victoriously took into the dark and 
 hostile land was an ascending movement also of the 
 Godhead which was his base. This ascent into Hell 
 went on, from His temptation to His tomb, in gathering 
 power. Alongside his growing humiliation to the con- 
 ditions of evil moved his growing exaltation to holy 
 power. Alongside the Kenosis and its negations there 
 went a corresponding Plerosis, without which the 
 Kenosis is a one-sided idea. Er starb und wurde. The 
 more he laid down his personal life the more he gained 
 his divine soul. Thr; more his divine soul renounced his 
 immunities the more he acquired of glory. The more he 
 discarded his privilege the more he appropriated his
 
 350 The Person and Place of Jeans Christ [lect. 
 
 dignity. The less he thought of prerogative the more he 
 grew in power. More and more, as he laid by what he 
 eternally was, he came to be what he began by being. 
 The eternal son learned by suffering the sonship he 
 had never forgotten. And this was the positive process 
 of the long act of our salvation. Our redemption was 
 the achieving also of his old incarnation. The growing 
 involution of those two movements of descent and ascent 
 was the procession also of the reconciliation of God and 
 the world. Then the consummation came, and it was 
 all secured where it could never be undone. But it must 
 be for ever unfolded for what it is, and not to what it 
 might be made to become. 
 
 Thus the sinless growth of Christ's character is in the 
 very act growth also of his objective achievement for us. 
 It is the moral process of man's salvation, and the gradual 
 act of God. Christ's perfect progress to perfection, his 
 finished style of achieving his finished work, is only 
 the obverse and detail of God's act of our redemption, 
 already absolute in His holy love and His holy Son. His 
 self-sanctification was ours also. Christ worked out 
 the Salvation he was. It was only in history and its 
 conditions that he could realise all that was superhistoric 
 within him. He was exercised unto the godliness he 
 brought with him. The deepening of his faithfulness 
 was the emergence of his deity. He was not acquiring 
 deity, he was unfolding it. And in his lowest limits his 
 divinest mastery shows. 
 
 § § § 
 When we are asked, then, what we mean by the God- 
 head of Christ we may begin by disowning certain 
 things which we do not mean. We do not mean that 
 the whole Godhead and its omnipotence was packed, as
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self-Fulfilment of Christ 351 
 
 it were, into conditions of space and time in that historic 
 person (though the whole Godhead was involved in him 
 and his work). We do not mean that ** the baby Jesus 
 was the Lord of Hosts," except in some sense that would 
 take much explaining. We do not mean that Jesus 
 himself ever so felt. Nor need we mean that at ever)' 
 moment of his life he had an equal sense of what he 
 was. Nor do we even mean that at any moment of his 
 humiliation he necessarily had the full sense of all he 
 was. But we do mean that as the Eternal Son he was 
 the complete and final action of the holy and gracious 
 love of God our Saviour ; that his holy Humanity went 
 up always as an absolute satisfaction and joy "to God ; 
 that God saw in him the travail of His Own Soul and 
 was satisfied ; that in Christ's historic person God 
 offered himself in his saving fulness to and for mankind 
 with the omnipotence required for his saving work. 
 
 § § § 
 And when we are asked what we mean by the manhood 
 of such a Christ, we do not mean some stalwart dignity 
 with which he faced and owned God in self-respecting 
 godliness. The "manliness of Christ," like his " bravery," 
 is an unpleasant phrase. Nor do we mean an elemental 
 force and passion which linked the natural side of his 
 personality to the world with the fervour of a Titan's 
 blood — as if but for the grace of God he could have been 
 an antedated Mirabeau. We mean much more than his 
 intimate and sympathetic humanness. For the essence 
 of Humanity is conscience. It is man's moral relation to 
 a holy God. And Christ's manhood, therefore, consists 
 in the moral reality of his experience, his conflict, and his 
 growth. It means his true ethical personality growing in 
 an actual historic situation. It means that he counted in
 
 352 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 the public of his age, and really inhabited its spiritual 
 milieu. It means that he filled a mighty place in the 
 social situation of his land and time, and that the 
 immediate reference of all he said and did was to that 
 situation, however vast, and even infinite, the total 
 horizon was, the total bearing of his action or speech. 
 And above all it means that his action arose ethically 
 out of what he was, that his carriage expressed his 
 soul, that his vocation rested on his position, that his 
 receptivity is the greatest human activity, that he was, 
 first and foremost, the ever receptive Son of the 
 holy Father, and that he only did the things which 
 were shown him of God. His manhood was in his 
 perfectly active receptivity. His subordination was no 
 inferiority. His obedience was his divinest achievement. 
 And out of that obedience grew his vast creative, com- 
 manding, and even coercive, effect upon the world. His 
 kingly rule is but the upper side of his filial sacrifice, of 
 the obedience which put him by man's side while he was 
 on God's. His human person was not the most 
 illustrious of the many spiritual and providential 
 personalities that had appeared on earth from God. It 
 was in its nature exceptional and miraculous. It was a 
 new departure — more above other men than the first 
 man was above the nature from which he rose ; yet as 
 truly of man as man is of nature. He was all men's 
 creator in a true man's life. And his identity with 
 Humanity lies not in prolonging, as it were, to the sky 
 the rarest matter of the race, but in his own voluntary 
 act of self-identification with it. His identity with man 
 lay in no mere continuity of substance, nor even in 
 participating in personality, but in his assumption of 
 man's conditions of personality, and his renunciation of
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the Self -Fulfilment of Christ 353 
 
 God's. It lay in his active acceptance of the human 
 and sin-laden conditions of communion with God in such 
 victorious and sinless way as to make that communion 
 possible and real for every other personal soul. And 
 amid all that we recognise in him of human conditions 
 and human growth, even his growth in the consciousness 
 of what he was, we shall be most careful to note that any 
 growth in his sense of his Godhead was not the growth 
 or acquisition of that Godhead itself. 
 
 What man has in common with God, altogether, is 
 not the kind of identity which is claimed in various 
 theories of continuity and immanence. The immanence 
 of God is indeed the true unity of Creation ; but it is not 
 the principle of the communion of God and man. It is 
 too little ethical for that. Man's identity with God is 
 formally, personality ; and, materially, it is a mutual 
 spiritual act possible only to persons. It consists in the 
 personal nature, and especially the personal action, which 
 alone make communion possible. So much of parity 
 there is, else communion were impossible. On each side 
 is a spiritual person. But in the case of Christ, and in 
 view of his work to restore communion, the personality 
 was no created gift, but the Creator himself in a bodily 
 eclipse instead of heavenly glory. The soul's Redeemer 
 was the soul's Creator, divested of everything but the 
 holy love in which he created, and raised by the deep 
 and long renunciation to a power in which lies the 
 salvation for ever and ever of the whole created race and 
 world. Man is indeed incomparable with God, but 
 incompatible he is not. And in Christ the compatibility 
 becomes full communion. In Christ the living God is, 
 to the extent he lives, the giving God. In Christ we 
 were neither made nor saved to eke out some lack in
 
 354 ^^^ Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 God, nor to meet some hunger in his being ; but of his 
 fulness have we all received. And we are here as the 
 fulness and overflow of his creative love, to his praise 
 and glory in our faith's receptive and sympathetic love. 
 
 God in Christ is the maker of his own revelation. It 
 was God himself that came to us in Christ ; it was 
 nothing about God, even about his eternal essence or 
 his excellent glory. It is God that is our salvation, and 
 not the truth about God. And what Christ came to do 
 was not to convince us even that God is love, but to be 
 with us and in us as the loving God forever and ever. 
 He came not to preach the living God but to be God our 
 life ; yes, not to preach even the loving God but to be the 
 love that God forever is. 
 
 In Mr. Glover's fine book recently published on The 
 Conflict of Religions within the Roman Empire (Methuen, 
 7s. 6d.) he has naturally much to say on the historic 
 figure and effect of Jesus Christ — so much that it involves 
 more beyond concerning his person that he does not say. 
 Mr. Glover gathers up his belief about Jesus in the 
 following compressed sentence. " Jesus of Nazareth 
 does stand in the centre of human history; he has 
 brought God and man into a new relation ; and he is the 
 personal concern of every one of us." That is really a 
 tremendous thing to be able to say, as the conclusion of 
 a true historian. It has the note if not the fulness of 
 the true Christian faith. And it offers a welcome contrast 
 to much of the religiosity of slashing litterateurs who 
 are iconoclasts destitute of the historic sense, as well as 
 of moral delicacy, and the inward light, and whose moral 
 ideal is not the loyal but the rebel. But it is a conclusion 
 that carries us farther than the writer goes, farther, of 
 course, than he may say he was entitled to go by the
 
 XII.] The Plerosis or the SelJ-Fulfiltnent of Christ 355 
 
 scope and compass of his book. At any rate it carries 
 the mind into a region which we may call metaphysic or 
 not but which is certainly metempyric, and compels 
 conclusions much beyond those of moral aesthetic or 
 religious impressionism. It may be quite true that 
 Christianity was early captured by Greek and other 
 metaphysics, and that their bond remains upon Christian 
 thought to this day. It may be that some who take a 
 position as decided as Mr. Glover's towards Christ as 
 " One who brought God and man into a new relation, 
 and who is the personal concern of each one of us," are 
 yet unable to use with entire heartiness the language 
 of the current creeds about the conditions in Christ's 
 person which underlie such a function and place. But 
 what is the real explanation of that capture of Chris- 
 tianity by the metaphysic of the early centuries ? Is it 
 not here, that the work of Christ, the position of Christ 
 — his work and place as Mr. Glover states it, his 
 redeeming, reconciling work as the early Church ex- 
 perienced it— that these are not intelligible to faith's own 
 tliought without some metaphysic. A metaphysic of 
 some kind is bound up with a Christ of this kind. 
 Without some metaphysic you have not a base for that 
 mystic adoration of Christ which is so much more than 
 divine ethic, and which a whole class of churches has 
 lost. It is impossible to believe in one who changed 
 the whole relation between the race and God without a 
 metaphysic of the relation between that one and God. 
 It is impossible to think of Christ as the personal concern 
 of every person without a relation between his person 
 and every other which it is not an absurdity to conceive 
 in the theological way which makes Christ the agent of 
 their creation. Such a relation between Christ and other
 
 356 The Person and Place of Jesus Christ [lect. 
 
 men carries us, as soon as we reflect and ask about it, into 
 a Christ supra-historic, supra-human, and premundane. 
 Some metaphysic of personality is inevitable— except to 
 such minds as have a native nescience, a positive endow- 
 ment as negative poles in all that region. Only it must 
 not be a metaphysic of mere thought, brought up to faith 
 and imposed on it — injected as it were into its tissue 
 as a preservative which hardens it, or, if not hardening 
 it, then soaking it in an inspissated gloom. It must be 
 a metaphysic of faith itself. It must be some form of the 
 post-kantian metaphysic of ethic ; a metaphysic of the 
 ethic which culminates in God's supreme moral act of 
 redemption and in man's supreme moral act of faith. 
 It is on such lines that a modern Christology must 
 be shaped — slowly as the rebuilding may come. A faith in 
 metaphysic is one thing, and the metaphysic of faith is 
 another. The former dominated too much the theology 
 and the religion of the past ; to the latter belongs the 
 future. It belongs to the metaphysic which is demanded 
 by the psychology of the distinctive experience of faith. 
 It is only the Christ of the reconciled conscience that 
 promises us a Messiah of the intelligible world. It is only 
 the Christ of the New Creation that can be the Christ of 
 a complete Weltanschauung, and wear the crown of a new 
 world wherein dwelleth the righteousness of a holy God. 
 
 § § § 
 I hope, in these too compressed and tense but not 
 unmeaning words of mine, that the Lord in some 
 measure has been transfigured before us. I hope the 
 atmosphere has been luminous even if every thought 
 is not lucid, and that it has been good to be here even 
 if not knowing all we said. The glory of the Lord 
 is something more than lucid when it breaks out upon
 
 XII.] The PUrosis or the Self-Fulfilment of Christ 357 
 
 waiting, watching, praying, bemazed men. And there 
 is laid upon us, as we go down from the Mount, the 
 command of silence in the form of an incapacity for 
 due speech. We cannot see for the glory of that light, 
 and what we do see is as yet beyond a man to utter. 
 Still I trust we have felt some of the depth of that 
 Glory which with unveiled faces we shall one day 
 behold, and rejoicing in it shall be made like it. Let 
 us, as we descend, go down with a secret which we 
 cannot perhaps expound but which we cherish, and smile 
 to each other like silent lovers in a crowd, and thus in a 
 true Church of faith-adepts overcome the world. Let 
 us go down to know that there is nothing in all the 
 raging valley — neither the devilry of the world nor the 
 impotence of the Church — that can destroy our con- 
 fidence, quench our power, or derange our peace. Let 
 us go down to know that the meanest or the most 
 terrible things of life now move beneath the eternal 
 mastery and triumphant composure of an almighty 
 Saviour and a final salvation which is assured in 
 heavenly places in Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 § § § 
 And now may he who so emptied himself that he was 
 filled with all the fulness of God dwell fully in us ; may 
 he raise, rule, and perfect us in all holiness; to the end 
 that, bowing before him with every knee both in heaven 
 and upon earth, and ever more calling Him Holy, Holy, 
 Holy Lord, we may be, in Him, to the praise and glory 
 of the Father's Grace Who made us acceptable in the 
 Eternal S(;n, world without end. Amen. 
 
 B B
 
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