CHEISTUS CONSUMMATOK.
 
 CHKISTUS CONSUMMATOB 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF THE WORK AND 
 
 PERSON OF CHRIST IN RELATION 
 
 TO MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 BROOKE FOSS WESTCOTT, D.D., D.C.L., 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF DURHAM 
 SOMETIME CANON OF WESTMINSTER 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 Honfcon : 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YOBK 
 1890 
 
 [The Right of Translation is reserved.]
 
 AYTH ecriN H AIOONIOC ZOOM FNA riNcocKOOci ce TON 
 
 MONON AAH6INON 66ON, KAI ON AHeCTElAAC 
 XplCTON. 
 
 ST JOHN xvn. 3. 
 
 First Edition 1886 
 Second Edition 1887 
 Third Edition 1890 
 
 CAMBttIl>GE : I'RI.NTJiD BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 rriHE Sermons in the present volume, with 
 -*- the exception of the last, were preached in 
 Westminster Abbey during my residence in 
 August 1885 and January 1886. I have en- 
 deavoured in them to guide others to lines of 
 thought which I have myself found to lead to 
 that sure hope which we can reach through 
 patience and through comfort of the Scriptures. 
 I have added as an Appendix a Sermon preached 
 at Cambridge, which was designed to give a 
 practical application of this teaching. 
 
 The broad lessons of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews appear to me to shew how much that 
 seems to be loss in regard to our religious circum- 
 stances proves to be gain by turning our minds 
 from things temporal and provisional to Christ 
 Himself. I sought therefore first to indicate 
 these in a general outline, and then afterwards 
 to point out a little more in detail some special 
 aspects of the Person and Work of Christ which 
 correspond with the wants of our own position. 
 
 1 C66557
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 The delays, the failures, the sorrows which 
 beset the great life of humanity can be borne 
 gladly if we are allowed even from afar to 
 recognise the Presence of CHRISTUS CONSUMMA- 
 TOR. The things of time are transfigured in the 
 light of eternity. 
 
 The last words of the Founder of the Abbey 
 express with pathetic force one side of the Truth. 
 ' Weep not,' he said to the Queen sobbing by his 
 side, ' Weep not my daughter. For I shall not 
 die but live ; and as I leave the land of the dying, 
 I trust to see the blessings of the Lord in the 
 land of the living.' The vision of that unchang- 
 ing order is given to us even here in the Gospel. 
 Father. . ., the Lord said of His disciples, This is the 
 life eternal, that they know Thee the only true 
 God, and Him Whom Thou didst send, even Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 B. F. W. 
 
 DIVINITY SCHOOL, 
 CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 May 24th, 1886.
 
 NOTICE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 TN this Edition I have corrected one or two 
 misprints, altered a few words, and endea- 
 voured to make the sense of some passages more 
 clear by a fuller punctuation. In other respects 
 the Book is unchanged. 
 
 I cannot but add that the wide welcome which 
 the Book has received has been to me 'a cause of 
 great thankfulness. The thoughts which I have 
 myself found helpful have proved it has been my 
 joy to learn helpful to many others. Some indeed 
 seem to have wholly misunderstood my purpose 
 and meaning. But this was not surprising; for 
 they had evidently not felt the difficulties which 
 I sought to meet. Happy are they who have not 
 felt them ; but happier, I think, are they who, 
 feeling them, are led, by a discipline which is at
 
 viii Notice to the Second Edition. 
 
 first painful, to a wider, deeper, fuller view of Him 
 in Whom are all the treasures of wisdom and 
 knowledge, hidden hidden in order that they 
 may be revealed in due season according to the 
 needs of men. 
 
 B. F. W. 
 
 DIVINITY SCHOOL, 
 CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 March 30th, 1887. 
 
 NOTICE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 f I^HE third Edition is simply a reprint of the 
 
 second. 
 
 Perhaps I may add that the first experience 
 of new work briDgs a fresh assurance that the 
 solution of our Social Problems will be found 
 in Him Who is the Son of man, as He is the 
 Son of God, Christus Consummator. 
 
 B. F. D. 
 
 AUCKLAND CASTLE, 
 
 BISHOP AUCKLAND. 
 
 August 26th, 1890.
 
 CHEISTUS CONSUMMATOR 
 I. 
 
 LESSONS FROM AN EPOCH OF CHANGE. 
 
 I. The trials of a new age. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The trials of the Hebrews 4 
 
 Their consolation in wider views of Christ's Person and 
 
 Work . 6 
 
 Corresponding trials among ourselves from problems of 
 
 criticism, of history, of life 7 
 
 Their fruits 
 
 The revelation of Christus Comummator a revelation for 
 
 our needs 11 
 
 The necessity and blessing of progress in religious thought 13 
 
 II. The destiny of man fulfilled by Christ through suffering. 
 
 Contrasts of man's destiny and condition ... 20 
 
 These contrasts deepened by experience .... 21 
 
 dealt with by the Gospel 23 
 
 Christ in His humanity made perfect through sufferings . 24 
 
 His Life the revelation of the virtue of suffering . . 25 
 
 the pattern and support of sufferers .... 27 
 
 Transfiguration of suffering through love ... 28 
 
 The power of suffering 29
 
 x Contents. 
 
 III. The King Priest. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Man's need of forgiveness and strengthening ... 35 
 
 A priesthood instituted to offer sacrifices and gifts . . 36 
 
 Levitical institutions 37 
 
 The Day of Atonement id. 
 
 What was implied in the loss of its consolation . . 38 
 
 How this loss was repaired by Christ .... 39 
 
 He is in heaven King and Priest 40 
 
 The power of the double office 41 
 
 Authority 42 
 
 Compassion 43 
 
 The temptation to cling to earthly symbols ... 45 
 
 The call addressed to us 46 
 
 IV. The Universal Society. 
 
 One symbol of the Day of Atonement unfulfilled . . 51 
 We wait for the return of our High Priest from the 
 
 Presence of God 52 
 
 We are in an attitude of expectancy . . . .id. 
 
 But we have attained also 53 
 
 We have entered into a manifold spiritual fellowship . 54 
 
 The consolation for the Hebrews 55 
 
 Corresponding help to us id. 
 
 The order to which we are admitted heavenly and gracious 58 
 
 The power of the spiritual 60 
 
 The graciousness of the revelation of Christ . . .id. 
 
 Christus Consummator ....... 61 
 
 V. The New Covenant. 
 
 The conditions of personal service 67 
 
 The Old Covenant and the New . . \ -. . 68 
 
 The Sacraments of Incorporation and Support . . 69 
 Peculiarities of the treatment of the Sacraments in the 
 
 Epistle id.
 
 Contents. xi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Two passages bring out characteristic thoughts . . 70 
 
 Christians are priests id. 
 
 Christ who was our Sin-offering is our Support . . 71 
 
 The Christian's sacrifice fulfilled in Christ ... 72 
 
 The Christian's failures redeemed by Christ ... 74 
 
 Summary 75 
 
 The victory of the early Christians a pattern for our 
 
 warfare .... 77 
 
 II. 
 
 ASPECTS OF THE INCARNATION. 
 
 I. The Incarnation a subject for devout study. 
 
 Plato's Vision of Truth ....... 83 
 
 The Vision realised in the Gospel ..... 84 
 
 The Truth by which we live must be continuously studied id. 
 
 The example of the Mother of the Lord .... 85 
 
 The Eevelatiqn of Godliness an infinite subject of thought 87 
 
 1. The spirit in which we study it . . .88 
 
 Love quickened by Faith id. 
 
 Unreconciled antitheses 89 
 
 The Truth belongs to two worlds .... id. 
 
 The sight of the pure in heart id. 
 
 2. The aim of study vital not purely intellectual. . 90 
 
 3. The blessing of study 91 
 
 Sense of the spiritual quickened by meditation on 
 
 the Incarnation 92 
 
 External evils can be borne id. 
 
 The power of wonder given back with the sense of 
 
 the dignity of life 93 
 
 The temporal touched by the eternal . . . id. 
 A long discipline . . . . . .94 
 
 Grace for grace ....... 95
 
 Contents. 
 
 II. The Incarnation and. the Creation. 
 
 PAGE 
 The Christian conception of God determined by the 
 
 Incarnation, a fact of infinite meaning ... 99 
 
 Difficulties mark the direction of progress . . . 100 
 
 The tendencies of an age Divine signs .... 101 
 
 Prevalent striving after unity id. 
 
 False unities move us towards the true .... 102 
 Imperfect views of the Incarnation . . . . .id. 
 The breadth of the view in Holy Scripture . . .103 
 The Incarnation involved in Creation, not dependent on 
 
 the Fall 104 
 
 This Truth illuminates our conception of God . . 106 
 
 of human life id. 
 
 of personality 107 
 
 of the world id. 
 
 of the future id. 
 
 the Atonement 108 
 
 It brings a true unity to all things 109 
 
 Our system of Theology becomes Theocentric . . . id. 
 
 In that assurance lies strength for work . . . 110 
 
 III. The Incarnation and the Fall. 
 
 The original Gospel of Creation ..... 115 
 
 Human development interrupted 116 
 
 Two-fold consciousness of a fall id. 
 
 Is there then a fulfilment of man's destiny ? . . . 117 
 
 The answer of St Paul 118 
 
 The answer in part intelligible id. 
 
 But how can suffering be vicarious and just ? . . . 119 
 The idea of solidarity : the social life of the family, the 
 
 nation, the race 120 
 
 Revelation of the value of suffering 122 
 
 of self-sacrifice . 123
 
 Contents. xiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Human experience enables us to understand the suffering 
 
 of Christ . .124 
 
 The perfection of the Lord's humanity .... id. 
 In Him forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation . . 125 
 
 The Gospel answers to the Fall 126 
 
 The will of God . .127 
 
 IV. The Incarnation and Nature. 
 
 Consequences of the solidarity of humanity . . . 131 
 
 The connexion of Man with Nature .... 132 
 
 This truth fully recognised in Scripture .... 133 
 
 A double use has been made of it . . . . 134 
 
 Tendency towards a recognition of a larger life . . id. 
 
 Nature waits for man's redemption sharing in his pain . 135 
 
 1. A common life in creation 136 
 
 2. This life fulfilled in pain, waste, conflict, incom- 
 
 pleteness 137 
 
 3. This pain the travail-pain of a new order . .138 
 Observed progress of humanity . -. . . 139 
 
 of nature 140 
 
 The thought of the Incarnation in this connexion most 
 
 natural 142 
 
 Our responsibility id. 
 
 V. The Incarnation and Life. 
 
 The results gained 147 
 
 The widest visions of Truth are for use . . . . 148 
 
 Thought is crowned by action ...... id. 
 
 The lessons of the Incarnation reach to the individual . 149 
 In Christ is the perfection of every possible attainment 
 
 of men . . . . . . . . . 150 
 
 Each man receives from Him according to his capacity . id. 
 The perfect humanity of Christ . . . . .151 
 
 No relief from lowering our ideal 152
 
 xiv Contents. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The believer gains the mind of Christ .... 153 
 
 ' Grace for grace ' the law of revelation .... 154 
 
 So the Incarnation leads us to realise the unseen . . 155 
 Thus the individual life gains in importance both as a 
 
 whole and in its parts id. 
 
 and we are enabled to bear the burden of its issues . 156 
 
 The Incarnation not an event only but a Truth . . 157 
 The Incarnation reconciles the antitheses of current 
 
 opinion id. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 The vision of God the call of the Prophet. 
 
 The Festival of the Holy Trinity 163 
 
 1. The vision of God the call of the prophet . . 164 
 
 The call of Isaiah id. 
 
 Its significance for us 166 
 
 Our need of the lesson 167 
 
 The mystery of God . . . . .- .169 
 
 2. The vision of God the message of the prophet . 170 
 The Incarnation a growing message . . . 171 
 It has new meaning for us 172 
 
 3. The vision of God the chastening of the prophet . 174 
 
 Dangers of boldness id. 
 
 Our duty 176
 
 CHRISTUS CONSUMMATOR I. 
 
 LESSONS FROM AN EPOCH OF CHANGE. 
 
 I. The trials of a new age. 
 
 II. The destiny of man fulfilled by Christ through 
 uffering. 
 
 III. The King Priest. 
 
 IV. The universal Society. 
 V. The New Covenant. 
 
 \V.
 
 This word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of 
 those things that are shaken, as of things that have been 
 made, that those things which are not shaken may remain. 
 
 HEBR. xii. 27.
 
 THE TRIALS OF A NEW AGE. 
 
 EVERY age which is moved by the Spirit of i. 
 God feels keenly the searching, chastening 
 power of that Divine Presence. " He that is near Didym. 
 Me," the Lord is reported to have said, " is near ixxSiii. 8. 
 fire." And we cannot hope to enjoy the splendour 
 of a fuller, purer light without enduring the pain 
 which necessarily comes from the removal of the 
 veils by which it was obscured. Gain 
 
 through apparent loss; victory through moment- 
 ary defeat ; the energy of a new life through John xvi. 
 pangs of travail ; such has ever been the law of 21 ' 
 spiritual progress. This law has been fulfilled in 
 every crisis of reformation ; and it is illustrated 
 for our learning in every page of the New Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 But in no apostolic writing is the truth un- 
 folded with such pathetic force as in the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews. And so it is, I think, that that 
 mysterious " word of consolation " appeals to us Hebr. xiii. 
 with a voice of thrilling power in our time of ' 
 
 12
 
 4 Christus Comummator. 
 
 i. trial, when the law of progress, the law of fruit- 
 fulness through death, seems to be hastening to a 
 fresh fulfilment. The student of that 
 
 Epistle cannot but observe that no men were 
 ever called upon to endure greater sacrifices, to 
 surrender more precious hopes, to bear deeper 
 disappointments, than those to whom it was 
 first addressed. Men who had lived in the light 
 of the Old Testament, men who had known the 
 joy of a noble ritual, men who had habitually 
 drawn near to God in intelligible ways, men who 
 had but lately welcomed Him in Whom they 
 believed that the glory of Israel should be con- 
 summated, were most unexpectedly required to 
 face what seemed to them to be the forfeiture of 
 all that they held dearest. The letter of 
 
 Scripture, the worship of the temple, the expect- 
 ations of national triumph, had to be abandoned. 
 The heirs of the patriarchs, when they first felt 
 that they were entering on their inheritance, 
 were compelled, if they remained Christians, to 
 accept the position of outcasts from the ancient 
 commonwealth of God, and to confess themselves 
 followers of One crucified and rejected, Who 
 delayed to assume His throne. 
 
 And what then ? They could not but begin 
 
 to reckon up their loss and gain. The fresh 
 
 32 ff. enthusiasm of their early faith had died away in
 
 The trials of a new age. 5 
 
 the weary waiting of a lifetime. They had in i. 
 part degenerated because they had not grown. Hebr. vi. 
 But they were not uncared for in the crisis of 
 their peril. Out of the darkness of the gathering 
 storm, in which the Holy Place was to be for ever 
 swept away, came a voice which interpreted the 
 sad riddles of their fate. Under the 
 
 guidance of a nameless apostle, the Hebrews were 
 enabled to see how the sufferings of Christ were 
 not a difficulty in the way of His Messiahship, to 
 be compensated by a visible triumph, but the 
 very pledge of the fulfilment of the destiny of 
 man in spite of sin; to see how the unbelief of 
 Israel opened the way for the larger unfolding of 
 the world-wide counsels of God ; to see how in 
 giving up type and shadow they secured the real- 
 ities which these signified; to see how things 
 visible and transitory were replaced by things 
 unseen and eternal ; to see how above the vanish- 
 ing grace of the Levitical service rose in supreme 
 and sovereign majesty the figure of the ascended 
 Christ, Priest and King for ever, seated at the 
 right hand of God, infinite in sympathy and 
 power. 
 
 Now when we read the apostolic words, and 
 picture to ourselves the sorrows which they illu- 
 minated when we feel that in the portraiture of 
 the perils of early believers we have the record
 
 6 Christus Consummator. 
 
 i. of true human struggles, and know that the 
 essential elements of human discipline must al- 
 ways be the same we cannot, I think, fail to 
 recognise in the trials of the Hebrews of the first 
 age an image of the peculiar trials by which we 
 are beset ; and so by their experience we may 
 gain the assurance that for us also there is the 
 promise of larger wisdom where they found it in 
 Hebr. xii. wider views of Christ's Person and Work, that the 
 
 27 
 
 removal of those things that are shaken is brought 
 about in order that those things which are not 
 shaken may remain in serener and simpler beauty. 
 If we look at the circumstances of the Hebrews 
 a little more closely we shall notice that the 
 severity of their trials came in a great degree 
 from mistaken devoutness. They had 
 
 determined, in obedience to traditional opinion, 
 what Scripture should mean, and they found it hard 
 to enter into its wider teaching. They 
 
 had determined that institutions which were of 
 Divine appointment must be permanent, and 
 they found it hard to grasp the realities by 
 which the forms of the older worship were re- 
 placed. They had determined that Christ's 
 sovereignty should be openly vindicated by the 
 victorious faith of God's people, and they found it 
 hard to hold their belief firm against the general 
 unbelief of their fellow-countrymen.
 
 The trials of a new age. 7 
 
 Now in these respects, we cannot, as I said, 
 fail to recognise that the difficulties of the 
 Hebrews correspond with our own. For I am 
 speaking now of the difficulties of those who 
 hold to their first faith, and are yet conscious 
 of shakings, changes, losses, of the removing 
 of much which they formerly identified with 
 it. Many among us, for example, tremble 
 
 with a vague fear when they find that that 
 " Divine Library," in the noble language of 
 Jerome, which we call the Bible " the Books " 
 " the Book " cannot be summarily separated by 
 a sharp, unquestionable line from the other liter- 
 ature with which it is connected; that the text 
 and the interpretation of the constituent parts 
 have not been kept free from corruptions and 
 ambiguities which require the closest exercise of 
 critical skill; that deductions have been habit- 
 ually drawn from incidental modes of expression 
 in Scripture which cannot be maintained in the 
 light of that fuller knowledge of God's working 
 which He has given us. 
 
 Others again find the historical problems 
 raised by the study of the Bible carried into a 
 wider region. They learn in the turmoil of action, 
 and they learn in the silence of their own souls, 
 that the Faith can no longer be isolated and 
 fenced off from rude questionings as something
 
 8 Christus Consummator. 
 
 i. separate from common life. They perceive that 
 they must bear, as they can, to see the deepest 
 foundations of truth laid open and tested by im- 
 petuous inquirers; bear, as they can, to acknow- 
 ledge once and again that formulas which, in 
 earlier times, seemed to declare the Gospel ade- 
 quately, no longer cover the facts of the world as 
 they have been revealed to us in these later days. 
 And others have a more grievous trial still. 
 As their view of the world is widened ; as they 
 come to understand better the capacities of 
 humanity and the claims of Christ ; as they are 
 driven to compare the promises of the kingdom of 
 God with the present fruits of its sway ; as they 
 feel that they cannot separate themselves from 
 the race of which they are heirs ; as they look 
 upon the light, still after eighteen centuries 
 
 John i. 5. struggling (as it appears) against eclipse, their 
 heart may well sink within them. We cannot 
 wonder if such are tempted to ask with those of 
 
 2 Pet. iii. old times, Where is the promise of His coming ? 
 or to listen with little more than the sad protest 
 of a lonely trust to the bold assertions of those 
 who say that the Faith has exhausted its power in 
 dealing with the facts of an earlier and simpler 
 civilization. 
 
 There is not, I believe, one who reads these 
 words -not one who looks with calm, open eyes
 
 The trials of a new age. 9 
 
 upon the spectacle of the world and the nearer i. 
 vision of his own nature who has not been stirred 
 by the anxious thoughts which I have indicated, 
 and asked how they shall be met, met not by a 
 strong effort of overmastering will, but with that 
 quiet confidence which is able to welcome every 
 lesson of the discipline of God. And what then 
 shall we say ? How shall we escape the double 
 danger which besets us, of hastily surrendering 
 every position which is boldly challenged, or of 
 rigidly refusing to consider arguments which tend 
 to modify traditional opinion ? 
 
 I do not doubt for one moment as to my 
 answer. I bid those who are tempted to accept 
 their trials with the frankest trust, as the condi- 
 tions through which they will be brought to 
 know God better. I have been forced by 
 
 the peculiar circumstances of my work to regard 
 from many sides the difficulties which beset our 
 historic Faith. If I know by experience their 
 significance and their gravity ; if I readily allow 
 that on many points I wish for fuller light ; then 
 I claim to be heard, when I say without reserve 
 that I have found each region of anxious trial 
 fruitful in blessing : that I have found my devout 
 reverence for every word of the Bible quickened 
 and deepened, when I have acknowledged that it 
 demands the exercise of every faculty with which
 
 10 Christus Consummator. 
 
 I have been endowed, and, that as it touches the 
 life of man at every point, it welcomes, for its 
 fuller understanding, the help which comes from 
 every gain of human knowledge ; that I have 
 found my absolute trust in the Gospel of the 
 Word Incarnate confirmed with living power, 
 when I have seen with growing clearness that no 
 phrases of the schools can adequately express its 
 substance, or do more than help men provisionally 
 to realise some part of its relation to thought and 
 action ; when I have learnt through the researches 
 of students in other fields to extend the famous 
 words of the Roman dramatist, and say " Christi- 
 anus sum : nihil in rerum natura a me alienum 
 puto " " I am a Christian ; and therefore nothing 
 in man and nothing in nature can fail to command 
 the devotion of my reverent study " ; that I 
 have found, even in the slow and fitful progress 
 of the Church, which still does move forward, a 
 spring of hope, when I turn, as I must turn from 
 time to time, to take count of the unutterable 
 evils of great cities, and great nations, and whole 
 continents, which wait for atonement and re- 
 demption in the longsuffering and wisdom of 
 God. Yes, if, as I have endeavoured to 
 
 shew, our trials, the trials of a new age, correspond 
 with those of the Hebrews, the consolation which 
 availed for them, avails for us also. We shall find
 
 The trials of a new age. 11 
 
 in due course, as they found, that all we are L 
 required to surrender child-like prepossessions, 
 venerable types of opinion, partial and impatient 
 hopes is given back to us in a new revelation of 
 Christ ; that He is being brought nearer to us, 
 and shewn in fresh glory, through the " fallings 
 from us, vanishings of sense and earthly things " 
 which we had been inclined to identify with 
 Himself. 
 
 There is a picture with which we are all 
 familiar, in which Christ seated in glory is repre- 
 sented as dispensing His gifts to the representa- 
 tives of suffering humanity. From His hands the 
 slave receives freedom and the sick health: the 
 mourner finds rest in His sympathy, old men 
 peace, children joy. " Christus Consolator" is 
 indeed an image which touches every heart. But 
 it is not the whole Gospel ; it is not, I venture to 
 think, the particular aspect of the Gospel which is 
 offered by the Spirit of God to us now for our 
 acknowledgment. Sin, suffering, sorrow, are not 
 the ultimate facts of life. These are the work of 
 an enemy ; and the work of our God and Saviour 
 lies deeper. The Creation stands behind Gen. i. 27. 
 
 the Fall, the counsel of the Father's love behind 
 the self-assertion of man's wilfulness. And I 
 believe that if we are to do our work we must 
 learn to think, not only of the redemption of man,
 
 12 Christus Consummator. 
 
 i. but also of the accomplishment of the Divine 
 purpose for all that God made. We must learn to 
 Eph. i. 10. think of that summing up of all things in Christ, 
 in the phrase of St Paul, which crowns the last 
 aspirations of physicist and historian with a final 
 benediction. We must dare, in other words, to 
 look beyond Christ the Consoler to Christ the 
 Fulfiller. Christus Consolator let us thank God 
 for the revelation which leaves no trial of man 
 unnoticed and unsoothed leads us to Christus 
 Consummator. 
 
 This thought of " Christ the Fulfiller " is, as it 
 seems to me, the characteristic teaching of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews. The author of that 
 marvellous book, speaking to the heart with a 
 pathos to which the prophecy of Jeremiah offers 
 the only parallel in the Bible, shews us in many 
 ways how He through whom God made the world 
 in all the rich variety of its growing life, has been 
 c. i. 2. appointed heir of all things ; how He has fulfilled 
 c. ii. 9. the destiny of men in spite of the inroad of sin, 
 and borne humanity to the throne of the Father ; 
 cc.iv.Hff.; how in the plenitude of royal majesty He appears 
 before God for those whose nature He has taken 
 cc. x. 19; to Himself; how in Him we have present access 
 MI. 22 ff. ^ o a g pi r itual society, in which earth and heaven, 
 men and angels, are united in a glorious fellow- 
 ship ; how He has given us for our daily support
 
 The trials of a new age. 13 
 
 a covenant and a service, which transfigure the i. 
 
 conditions of our conflict into sacraments of a cc - viii - 6 ; 
 
 xiii. 10. 
 higher order. 
 
 These, then, are the four thoughts which I 
 wish to follow out in due succession. They meet 
 our difficulties, as far as I can judge, with 
 messages of widened hope, as they met the 
 difficulties of the Hebrews. They enable us to 
 realise with a personal and present conviction, 
 that the Spirit of God is even now taking of the John xvi. 
 things of Christ, and shewing them unto us ; that ' 
 we too are living in an age of revelation, and 
 called to listen to a Divine voice. 
 
 And if the thoughts seem strange to any, and 
 removed from the familiar circle of religious 
 reflection; if they require devout patience for 
 their mastering; if they add an element of infinite 
 interest to the commonest details of life, and 
 therefore claim the tribute of complete self- 
 surrender ; let us remember that progress is still, 
 as in the first age, the essence of our faith. We 
 have to gather little by little the fruits of a 
 victory in which Christ has overcome the John xvi. 
 
 qq 
 
 world. The Hebrews were, as we have 
 
 seen, in danger of apostasy, because they failed to 
 go forward. And that we may be shielded from 
 the like peril, the words which were spoken to 
 them are spoken also to us: let us be borne on to Hebr.vi. 1.
 
 14 Christus Consummator. 
 
 !. perfection, not simply " let us go on," or even " let 
 us press on," as if the advance depended on the 
 vigour of our own effort, but "let us be borne on," 
 " borne on " with that mighty influence which 
 waits only for the acceptance of faith, that it may 
 exert its sovereign sway, " borne on " by Him 
 whose unseen arms are outstretched beneath the 
 most weary and the weakest, " borne on " by Him 
 who is the Way and the End of all human 
 endeavour. 
 
 And as we are thus " borne on," as we yield 
 
 ourselves, yield every gift of mind and body, of 
 
 place and circumstance, yield all that we cherish 
 
 Bom. viii. mos t tenderly, to the service of Him in Whom we 
 
 37 - are made more than conquerors, let us not fear 
 
 that we shall lose the sense of the vastness of the 
 
 Divine life in our glad consciousness of its 
 
 immediate power. We assuredly shall 
 
 not fail in reverent gratitude to our fathers for the 
 
 inheritance which they have bequeathed to us, 
 
 while we acknowledge that it is our duty to 
 
 improve it. We shall not disparage the 
 
 past, while we accept the inspiring responsibility 
 
 of using to the uttermost the opportunities of the 
 
 present. We shall cling with the simplest 
 
 devotion to every article of our ancient Creed, 
 
 John xvii. while we believe, and act as believing, that this is 
 
 v/20. eternal life, that we may know know, as the
 
 The trials of a new age. 15 
 
 original word implies, with a knowledge which is 
 extended from generation to generation, and from 
 day to day, the only true God and Jesus Christ. 
 
 By the pursuit of this knowledge we come to 
 recognise that the difficulties which press us most 
 sorely are really the discipline through which 
 God is teaching us: veiled promises of coming 
 wisdom. We learn through the living lessons of 
 our own experience that the eternal Gospel 
 covers the facts of life, its sorrows, its needs, its 
 joys, its wealth. Through every conflict the 
 Truth is seen in the majesty of its growing 
 vigour. Shakings, shakings not of the earth only 
 but of the heaven, will come ; but what then ? 
 We know this, that all that falls is taken away, 
 that those things which are not shaken may remain.
 
 II. 
 
 THE DESTINY OF MAN FULFILLED BY 
 CHRIST THROUGH SUFFERING. 
 
 If.
 
 Not unto anyels did he subject the world to come, ' 
 we speak. But one hath somewhere testified, saying, What 
 is man, that thou art mindful of him ? Or the son of man, 
 that thou visitest him ? Thou madest him a little lower than 
 the angels ; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and 
 didst set him over the works of thy hands: thou didst put all 
 things in subjection under his feet. For in that he subjected 
 all things unto him, he left nothing that is not subject to 
 him. But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. 
 But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than 
 the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death 
 crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God he 
 should taste death for every man. For it became him, for 
 whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in 
 bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their 
 salvation perfect through sufferings. 
 
 HEBE. ii. 510.
 
 THE DESTINY OF MAN FULFILLED BY 
 CHRIST THROUGH SUFFERING. 
 
 HE form of the Epistle to the Hebrews is n. 
 unique among the writings of the New Tes- 
 tament. Without preface and without salutation 
 the Apostolic author opens the innermost treasury 
 of God, and brings out things new and old. He Matt. xiii. 
 boldly re-affirms, with abrupt and majestic elo- 
 quence, the glory of the Christian Faith, by dis- 
 closing a fuller prospect of the person and the 
 work of Christ. He shews how the manifold Hebr. i. 
 lessons of earlier revelation were crowned by the 
 coming of Him who was not servant but Son, the 
 Maker and Heir of the world. He shews how the Hebr. i. 
 angels, through whose ministry the Law was 
 given, waited to do homage to Him, proclaimed 
 King of the renovated order. He shews how our Hebr. ii. 
 responsibility as Christians corresponds with the ~~ ' 
 grandeur of the Truth which is placed within our 
 reach. He shews how nothing is taken from the Hebr. ii. 
 universal range of man's dominion, but and this 
 
 22
 
 20 Christus Consummator. 
 
 ii. is his peculiar message that it must be reached, 
 that it has been reached, through suffering. 
 
 So the writer of the Epistle met at once the 
 central difficulty of the Hebrews. The Hebrews 
 since they believed had been doomed outwardly 
 to the bitterest disappointment. They had looked 
 for a national welcome and they found themselves 
 outcasts ; for sovereignty, and they were the 
 victims of popular outrage ; for visible triumph, 
 and, as the years went on, they were required to 
 
 Hebr. xi. endure as seeing, through the thicker gathering 
 gloom, Him who is invisible. 
 
 And he meets the difficulty by facing it in its 
 fullest form. He passes from the sorrows of 
 Israel to the sorrows of humanity. He quotes 
 from the Psalter a description of the destiny, the 
 position, the hope of man, which answers alike 
 to the noblest aspiration and to the saddest ex- 
 perience. He sets forth the purpose of God 
 in creation, and the failure of the creature, and 
 then the triumph of Christ through suffering. 
 In doing this he places in sharpest contrast 
 what was promised to humanity and the actual 
 condition of things. He abates nothing of the 
 inspired estimate of man's nature, and honour, 
 and sovereignty ; but at the same time he claims 
 no premature accomplishment of the promise as- 
 
 8 f. sured to him. We see not yet, he confesses,
 
 Man's destiny fulfilled through suffering. 21 
 
 all things subjected to him. So far there is failure, n. 
 failure though the Christ has come. But we do 
 behold . . . Jesus the Son of man because 
 of the suffering of death crowned with glory and 
 honour. There is the spring and the pattern of 
 attainment, the interpretation of the shame and 
 of the Passion of the Christ, which is for all time 
 the interpretation of every grief that clouds the 
 world, the pledge that the Divine counsel of love 
 will not fail of fulfilment. 
 
 For, as we have already seen, the writer of the 
 Epistle, when he met the difficulties of the 
 Hebrews, meets difficulties which press sorely 
 upon us. Time has not softened the sharpness of 
 the impression which is made upon thoughtful 
 spectators by the sight of the sorrows of life. If 
 the contrast between man made a little lower than 
 
 anqels nay literally a little less than God and Ps. viii. 5 
 
 CR V ) 
 man as man has made him, was startling at the 
 
 time when the Apostle wrote, it has not grown 
 less impressive since. Larger knowledge 
 
 of man's capacities and of his growth, of his 
 endowments and of his conquests, has only given 
 intensity to the colours in which poets and 
 moralists have portrayed the conflict in his nature 
 and in his life. Whether we look within or 
 without, we cannot refuse to acknowledge both the 
 element of nobility in man which bears witness to
 
 22 Christus Consummator. 
 
 n. his Divine origin, and also the element of selfish- 
 ness which betrays his falls. Every philosophy of 
 humanity which leaves out of account the one or 
 the other is shattered by experience. The 
 
 loftiest enthusiasm leaves a place in its reconstruc- 
 tion of society where superstition may attach 
 itself. Out of the darkest depths of crime not 
 seldom flashes a light of self-sacrifice, like the 
 Luke xvi. prayer of the rich man for his brethren when he 
 was in torments, which shews that all is not 
 lost. We cannot accept the theory of 
 
 those who see around them nothing but the signs 
 of unlimited progress towards perfection, or the 
 theory of those who write a sentence of despair 
 over the chequered scenes of life. We look, as 
 the Psalmist looked, at the sun and the stars, with 
 a sense which he could not have of the awful 
 mysteries of the depths of night, but we refuse to 
 accept space as a measure of being. We trace 
 back, till thought fails, the long line of ages 
 through which the earth was prepared to be our 
 dwelling-place, but we refuse to accept time as a 
 measure of the soul. We recognise with- 
 
 out reserve the influence upon us of our ancestry 
 and our environment, but we refuse to distrust the 
 immediate consciousness of our personal responsi- 
 bility. We do not hide from ourselves any of the 
 evils which darken the face of the world, but we
 
 Mans destiny fulfilled through suffering. 23 
 
 do not dissemble our kindred with the worst and n. 
 
 lowest, whose life enters into our lives at a 
 
 thousand points. We acknowledge that 
 
 the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain Bom. viii. 
 
 together until now, but we believe also that these ' 
 
 travail pains prepare the joy of a new birth. We 
 
 make no effort to cast off the riddles or the 
 
 burdens of our earthly state, but we cling all the 
 
 while to the highest thoughts which we have 
 
 known as the signs of God's purpose for ourselves 
 
 and for our fellow-men. We allow that man and 
 
 men are uncrowned or discrowned in the midst of 
 
 their domain, but we hold that they cannot put 
 
 off the prerogatives of their birth. We 
 
 ask, as prophet and apostle asked : What, Lord, 
 
 is man that Thou art mindful of him ? or the son 
 
 of man that Thou visitest him? without any 
 
 expectation that we shall find an answer to 
 
 the questions; but none the less we proclaim 
 
 what we know, and confess that He is mindful of 
 
 us, that He has visited us, that the Word became John i. 14. 
 
 flesh and tabernacled among us, full of grace and 
 
 truth. 
 
 And indeed this Gospel reconciles the antago- 
 nisms of life. The fact of the Incarnation shews 
 the possibilities of our nature as God made it. 
 The fact of the Passion shews the issues of sin, 
 which came from the self-assertion of the creature.
 
 24 Christus Consummator. 
 
 n. The fact of the Resurrection shews the triumph of 
 
 love through death. Christ, in a word, 
 
 fulfilled man's destiny, fellowship with God, by 
 
 the way of sorrow ; and the Divine voice appeals 
 
 Hebr. ii. to us to recognise the fitness of the road. It 
 
 G. vii.2^' became Him most marvellous phrase It became 
 
 Him for whom are all things, and through whom 
 
 are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory to 
 
 make the Author of their salvation perfect through 
 
 sufferings. 
 
 When we ponder these words we shall all 
 come to feel, I think, that they have a message 
 for us on which we have not yet dwelt with the 
 patient thought that it requires, though we greatly 
 need its teaching. The currents of theo- 
 
 logical speculation have led us to consider the 
 sufferings of Christ in relation to God as a pro- 
 pitiation for sin, rather than in relation to man 
 as a discipline, a consummation of humanity. The 
 two lines of reflection may be indeed, as I believe 
 they are, more closely connected than we have at 
 present been brought to acknowledge. I do not 
 however wish now to discuss the propitiatory 
 aspect of the sacrifice of Christ's life. It is 
 enough for us to remember with devout thankful- 
 l John ii. ness that Christ is the propitiation not for our sins 
 only, but for the whole world, without further 
 attempting to define how His sacrifice was effi-
 
 Mans destiny fulfilled through suffering. 25 
 
 cacious. And we move on surer ground, n. 
 
 when we endeavour to regard that perfect sacrifice 
 from the other side, as the hallowing of every 
 power of man under the circumstances of a sin- 
 stained world, as the revelation of the mystery of 
 sorrow and pain. Of this truth the writer of the 
 Epistle assumes that we are competent judges. 
 He appeals to our natural sense of its 'fitness.' 
 Again and again he presents the thought as the 
 motive and the issue of the Incarnation. He 
 shews that the Advent fulfilled the words of the 
 Psalm : " Lo ! I am come to do Thy will, Lord," c. x. 5 ff. 
 . ..." a body didst Thou prepare for me " ; and he 
 describes the whole sum of the Lord's earthly 
 work in a phrase which, if we can take it to our 
 hearts, must become a transfiguring of life : though c. v. 8 f. 
 He was Son, He yet learned obedience by the things 
 which He suffered, and having been made perfect 
 perfect by suffering He became to all that obey 
 Him the Author of eternal salvation. 
 
 Yes, Christ, though He was Son, and therefore 
 endowed with right of access for Himself to the 
 Father, being of one essence with the Father, for 
 man's sake, as man, won the right of access to the 
 throne of God for perfected humanity. He learnt 
 obedience, not as if the lesson were forced upon 
 Him by stern necessity, but by choosing, through 
 insight into the Father's will, that self-surrender
 
 26 Gkristus Consummator. 
 
 ii. even to the death upon the Cross which was 
 required for the complete reconciliation of man 
 with God. And so the absolute union of human 
 nature, in its fullest maturity, with the Divine in 
 the one Person of our Creator and Redeemer, was 
 wrought out in the very school of life in which 
 we are trained. 
 
 When once we grasp this truth the records of 
 the Evangelists are filled with a new light. Every 
 work of Christ is seen to be a sacrifice and a 
 victory. The long years of obscure silence, the 
 short season of conflict, are found to be alike a 
 
 John xvii. commentary on the Lord's words, " For their sakes 
 19 
 
 I sanctify myself." And we come to 
 
 understand how His deeds of power were deeds 
 of sovereign sympathy; how the words in which 
 Isaiah spoke of the Servant of the Lord, as 
 Is. liii. 4 ; " taking our infirmities and bearing our sick- 
 17. ' ' nesses," were indeed fulfilled when the Son of 
 29 man nea l e cl the sick who came to Him, healed 
 them not by dispensing from His opulence a bless- 
 ing which cost Him nothing, but by making His 
 own the ill which He removed. 
 
 Dimly, feebly, imperfectly we can see in this 
 way how it became God to make the Author of our 
 salvation perfect through sufferings; how every 
 pain which answered to the Father's will, became 
 to Him the occasion of a triumph, the disciplining
 
 Mans destiny fulfilled through suffering. 27 
 
 of some human power which needed to be brought n. 
 into God's service, the advance one degree farther 
 towards the Divine likeness to gain which man Gen. i. 26. 
 was made; how, in the actual condition of the 
 world, His love and His righteousness were 
 displayed in tenderer grace and grander authority 
 through the gainsaying of enemies ; how, in this 
 sense, even within the range of our imagination, 
 He saw of the travail of His soul and was satisfied. Is. liii. il. 
 
 Dimly, feebly, imperfectly we can see also how 
 Christ, Himself perfected through suffering, has 
 made known to us once for all the meaning, and 
 the value of suffering ; how He has interpreted it 
 as a Divine discipline, the provision of a Father's 
 love ; how He has enabled us to perceive that at 
 each step in the progress of life it is an oppor- 
 tunity ; how He has left to us to realise " in Him " 
 little by little the virtue of His work ; to Jill up Col. i. 24. 
 on our part, in the language of St Paul, that which 
 is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in our own 
 sufferings, not as if His work were incomplete 
 or our efforts meritorious, but as being living 
 members of His Body through which He is 
 pleased to manifest that which He has wrought 
 for men. 
 
 For we shall observe that it was because He 
 brought many sons to glory, that it became God to 
 make perfect through sufferings the Author of their
 
 28 Christus Consummator. 
 
 n. salvation. The fitness lay in the correspondence 
 between the outward circumstances of His life 
 and of their lives. The way of the Lord is the way 
 of His servants. He enlightened the path which 
 they must tread, and shewed its end. And 
 
 so it is that whenever the example of Christ is 
 offered to us in Scripture for our imitation, it is 
 e. g. 1 Pet. His example in suffering. So far, in His strength, 
 we can follow Him, learning obedience as He 
 learned it, bringing our wills into conformity with 
 the Father's will, and thereby attaining to a 
 wider view of His counsel in which we can find 
 rest and joy. 
 
 We must dare to face this solemn fact. For 
 the most part we are tempted to look to the 
 Gospel for the remission of the punishment of 
 sins, and not for the remission of sins. But such 
 a Gospel would be illusory. If the sin remains, 
 punishment is the one hope of the sinner ; if the 
 sin is forgiven and the light of the Father's love 
 falls upon the penitent, the punishment, which is 
 seen as the expression of His righteous wisdom, is 
 borne with gladness. Responsive love 
 
 transfigures that which it bears. Pain loses its 
 sting when it is mastered by a stronger passion. 
 The true secret of happiness is not to escape toil 
 and affliction, but to meet them with the faith 
 that through them the destiny of man is fulfilled,
 
 Mans destiny fulfilled through suffering. 29 
 
 that through them we can even now reflect the n. 
 image of our Lord and be transformed into His 2 Cor - 
 likeness. 
 
 For the power of love is not limited by its 
 personal effects. It goes out upon others with a 
 healing virtue. Not only does the mother know 
 no weariness in ministering to her child, but the 
 sympathy of a friend can change the sorrow which 
 it shares. So love kindles love ; and, in the world 
 such as we see it, suffering feeds the purifying 
 flame. Was I not right then when I said 
 
 that the thought of Christ perfected through 
 suffering, does indeed bring light into the dark- 
 est places of the earth ? In that light, suffer- 
 ing, if I may so speak, appears as the fuel of 
 love. Up to a certain point we can 
 
 clearly perceive how the vicissitudes, the sadnesses, 
 the trials of life, become the springs of its tender- 
 ness and strength and beauty ; how the stress of 
 the campaign calls out the devotion of him whom 
 we had only known as a self-indulgent lounger; 
 how a cry of wrong stirs the spirit of a nation 
 with one resolve ; how a cry of agony is answered 
 by the spontaneous confession of human kins- 
 manship ; how the truest joys which we have 
 experienced have come when we have had grace 
 to enter most entirely into a sorrow not our own. 
 And even where sight fails, the virtue of the
 
 30 Christus Consummator. 
 
 ii. Lord's life made perfect through suffering guides 
 us still. We know that not one day of His 
 hidden discipline was fruitless. Each had its 
 lesson of obedience ; each marked a fresh advance 
 in the consummation of manhood. So 
 
 taught, we can feel how the lonely sufferer is still 
 a fellow-worker with Him ; how in the stillness 
 of the night-watches a sleepless voice of inter- 
 cession, unheard by man, but borne to God by 
 a "surrendered soul," may bring strength to 
 combatants wearied with a doubtful conflict ; how 
 John iv. the word " one soweth and another reapeth," may 
 find a larger application than we have dreamed 
 of, so that when we wake up we may be allowed 
 to see that not one pang in the innumerable woes 
 of men has been fruitless in purifying energy. 
 
 Looking then to Christ, Born, Crucified, Risen, 
 Ascended, we can look also on the chequered 
 scene of human life without dissembling one 
 dark trait or abandoning one hope, and claim, in 
 spite of every sign of present disorder, the promise 
 of man's universal dominion as the watchword 
 of our labour. We see not yet all things sub- 
 jected to Him; but we behold . . . Jesus because 
 of the suffering of death crowned with glory and 
 honour . . . And again looking at the 
 
 conditions of our own life, we can confess through 
 the experience of quickened love that the Gospel
 
 destiny fulfilled through suffering. 31 
 
 justifies itself: that it became Him, for whom are 
 all things, and through whom are all things, in 
 bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Author 
 of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
 
 III. 
 
 THE KING PRIEST.
 
 Having then a great high priest, who hath passed 
 through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast 
 our confession. For we have not a high priest that cannot 
 be touched with the feeling of our infirmities ; but one that 
 hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet witJiout 
 sin. Let us tlierefore draw near with boldness unto the 
 throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find 
 grace to help us in time of need. 
 
 HEBR. iv. 1416. 
 
 For such a high priest became us, holy, guileless, unde- 
 Jiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the 
 heavens. 
 
 HEBR. vn. 26. 
 
 Now in the, things which we are saying the chief point is 
 this : We have such a high priest, ivho sat down on the right 
 hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens. 
 
 HEBR. vm. 1.
 
 THE KING PRIEST. 
 
 1VTO thoughtful person can seriously regard the ni. 
 -*-^ circumstances of his life without feeling the 
 need of forgiveness and the need of strengthening. 
 He looks back upon the past and he sees not only 
 failures, but unnecessary failures. " He has done 
 what he ought not to have done, and he has not 
 done what he ought to have done." He looks 
 forward to the future, and he sees that while the 
 difficulties of duty do not grow less with added 
 years, the freshness of enthusiasm fades away, and 
 the temptation to accept a lower standard of 
 action grows more powerful. Perhaps in the 
 words of Hood's most touching lyric, he thinks 
 " he's farther off from heaven Than when he was 
 a boy." At any rate, he does feel that in himself 
 he has not reached and cannot reach that for 
 which he was born, that which the spirit of divine 
 discontent within him, a discontent made keener 
 by temporal success, still marks as his one goal of 
 
 32
 
 36 Christus Consummator. 
 
 in. peace. For when Augustine said, Tu nos 
 
 fecisti ad te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum 
 donee requiescat in te, " Thou, Lord, hast made 
 us for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it 
 find rest in Thee" he proclaimed a fact to 
 which every soul bears witness in the silence of 
 its self-communings. We know that we were 
 made for God ; we know that we have been 
 separated from God ; we know that we cannot 
 acquiesce in the desolation of that divorce. 
 
 We know, I say, that we have been separated 
 from God. The sense of this separation makes itself 
 felt in two ways. When we reflect what God is and 
 what we are, we shrink from His presence, and we 
 confess that we are unworthy to do Him service. 
 At the same time, by a splendid contradiction, we 
 still seek instinctively for some way of access by 
 which we may draw near to Him, and for some 
 channel of grace through which our sin-stained 
 tribute may be brought before His throne. 
 
 So it has been that men in every age have 
 made priests for themselves, to stand between 
 them and their God, to offer in some acceptable 
 form the sacrifices which are the acknowledgment 
 of sin, and the gifts which are the symbol of 
 devotion. The institution of the. priesthood has 
 been misused, degraded, overlaid with terrible 
 superstitions, but in its essence it corresponds
 
 The King Priest 37 
 
 with the necessities of our nature. Therefore it in. 
 
 has been interpreted and fulfilled in the Bible. 
 
 And we can yet learn much from the figures of 
 
 the Levitical system in which the priesthood of this Hebr. ix. 
 
 world was fashioned by the Spirit of God in a form 
 
 of marvellous significance and beauty. The 
 
 law of the priestly service in the Old Testament 
 
 is indeed a vivid parable of the needs, the aim, 
 
 the benediction of human life. Day by day, Num. 
 
 ., i T , c . xxviii. 3ff. 
 
 morning and evening, the broad lessons of atone- 
 ment and consecration were read with simple and 
 solemn emphasis ; and once in the year, on the 
 Great Day of Atonement, " the Day," as it was Lev. xvi. 
 called, the lessons were set forth in detail with 
 every accessory of majestic ritual, so that the 
 simplest worshipper could hardly fail to take to 
 himself with intelligent faith the warnings and 
 the consolations of the august ceremonial. On 
 that day, as will be remembered, the High Priest, 
 after elaborate cleansings, for himself, for his 
 family, and for the people, arrayed in white robes, 
 entered, in the virtue of a surrendered life, into 
 the dark chamber, which God was pleased to 
 make His dwelling place, and offered incense in 
 the golden censer, and sprinkled the blood, and 
 uttered aloud, according to tradition, on that 
 occasion only, the most sacred Name ; and then, 
 after completing the purification of the whole
 
 38 Christus Consummator. 
 
 m. Temple, he dismissed into the wilderness the 
 scape-goat on which he had laid the sins of the 
 people. On that day, though but for a 
 
 passing moment, Israel in their representative 
 appeared before the revealed presence of the Lord 
 their God. On that day they received from Him 
 most directly the assurance of forgiveness and 
 Hebr. iv. blessing mercy and grace to help in time of 
 need. 
 
 Now we can, I think, all understand what 
 must have been the consolation, the strength, the 
 joy, with which that service inspired the faithful 
 Jew ; how it must have spoken peace in the name 
 of Jehovah to the troubled conscience, and 
 brought vigour to the trembling ; how, as the 
 passing weeks added weight to the burden of 
 remembered sins, the people must have looked 
 forward to the message brought again from the 
 innermost sanctuary of Truth, that the divine 
 compassion was as vast as their distress ; how in 
 the power of that visible pardon they would, 
 within a few days, join in the Feast of Taber- 
 nacles, "the holiest and greatest" of all their 
 festivals, and shew for a brief space the gladness 
 of social life fulfilled by the gift and in the sight 
 of God. 
 
 We can understand all this ; and therefore, 
 when we make the effort, we can understand what
 
 The King Priest. 39 
 
 the Hebrew Christians must have felt when they in. 
 found themselves at last excluded from all share 
 in this consolation, this strength, this joy, which 
 they had known from their childhood. 
 
 Here was a trial which reached to the very 
 foundation of their spiritual life. It was not only 
 that they were condemned to suffering; that 
 might be a beneficent chastening of sons. But 
 they seemed to be bereft of the appointed 
 assurance, given in a form suited to the conditions 
 of earth, that God was accessible to man. 
 
 This was a distress which called for a deep- 
 reaching remedy; and the writer of the Epistle 
 meets it as he meets all distress. He does not 
 direct his readers as he might have done, and the 
 fact calls for careful thought, to the outward 
 institutions of the Christian society ; he does not 
 shew how provision had been made by the love of 
 God to bring the power of the Gospel to bear on 
 the whole range of human life, outward and 
 inward ; he does not point out how sacraments as 
 revelations of the eternal go immeasurably beyond 
 types which are prophecies of the future. He leads 
 the Hebrews in their forlorn loneliness at once 
 to Christ, to Jesus, the Son of God. He Hebr. iv. 
 
 14 
 
 recognises with tender sympathy, he alone we 
 
 must notice of the apostolic writers, the grace and 
 the splendour of the old order; he dwells with
 
 40 Christus Consummator. 
 
 in. reverent memory on the significance of the ritual 
 which he had known ; and then he shews how to 
 the Christian every symbol had become a truth, 
 every shadow a reality, every imaged hope a 
 fact in a perfect human life; he shews how the 
 sacrifice of Christ was efficacious for ever, " one 
 act at once ; " how the humanity of Christ was a 
 new and living way to the Father; how on the 
 divine throne placed above the opened heavens, 
 Hebr. vii. was seated One who was Priest according to the 
 
 1 P 
 
 power of an indissoluble life. 
 
 In doing this he carries forward the line of 
 revelation which we have already considered. 
 The work of Christ on earth was the preparation 
 for His work in heaven. 
 
 He who fulfilled the destiny of man, under the 
 conditions of the present world; He who inter- 
 preted the discipline of suffering; He who bore 
 humanity through death to the presence of God 
 not as one man of men, but as the Head of the 
 
 Hebr. ii. whole race did all this that He might be a merci- 
 ful and faithful High Priest, and that He might 
 
 Hebr. ii. apply to those whom He was not ashamed to call 
 brethren, the virtue of His Life and Passion, and 
 reconcile in a final harmony the inexorable claims 
 of law, and the infinite yearnings of love, a Priest 
 and yet a King. 
 
 For indeed at. first and at last the kingly and
 
 The King Priest. 41 
 
 priestly offices cannot be kept apart. The com- in. 
 bi nation which meets us in the simplest forms of 
 society meets us again when humanity is seen to 
 have reached its goal. The truth which is thus 
 expressed lies deep in the facts of life. It answers 
 to the connexion of the seen and the unseen. 
 He who makes atonement must direct action. 
 He who demands the complete service of every 
 power must hallow the powers of which He claims 
 the ministry. The ruler who consecrates, the 
 priest who rules, must, in the words already 
 quoted, be merciful and faithful ; He must have 
 absolute authority and perfect sympathy ; autho- 
 rity that He may represent God to man, sympathy 
 that He may represent man to God. And such 
 is Christ made known to us, King and Priest, 
 Priest after the order of Melchizedek, in whose Hebr.v.lO; 
 mysterious person the old world on the edge of a vl> ' 
 new dispensation met and blessed the father of Hebr. vii. 
 the faithful. Therefore the writer of the 
 
 Epistle once again is able to appeal to the human 
 conscience to justify the Gospel. Therefore he 
 can say, when he has shewn what Christ is, able Hebr. vii. 
 to save to the uttermost with royal power, ever 
 living to make intercession with priestly com- 
 passion ; such a High Priest became us we with 
 our poor faculties can see how He answers to our 
 wants holy in Himself, guileless among men,
 
 42 Ghristus Consummator. 
 
 in. undefiled in a corrupt world, separated from 
 Sinners in the conflicts of this visible order, and 
 made higher than the heavens.,. a Son perfected for 
 evermore. 
 
 Yes : the apostolic words are true for us, true 
 while there is one sin to vex the overburdened 
 conscience, one struggle to strain the feeble will, 
 such a High Priest became us. And it is well for 
 us to turn again and again with reverent devotion 
 to Him as we know, and that we may know better, 
 our faults and our weakness. 
 
 We need not dwell long upon His authority.. 
 Son of God in His own essential nature, He 
 vindicated His Sonship among men. He brought 
 humanity at each stage of His advancing life into 
 perfect fellowship with God, offering a perfect 
 service as well as a perfect sacrifice, and then at 
 
 John xix. last most marvellous paradox He offered Him- 
 self in death upon the cross, and living through 
 death, His earthly work ended, He entered on the 
 
 Hebr. viii. glory of His eternal priesthood, and sat down on 
 the right hand of God. 
 
 cc.i. 3, 13; That single phrase "sat down on the right hand 
 
 12" xii. ^. f God," on which the writer of the Epistle dwells 
 with solemn emphasis, marks the unique dignity 
 of the ascended Christ. Priests stand in their 
 ministry ; angels stand or fall prostrate before the 
 Divine Majesty ; but the Son shares the Father's
 
 The King Priest. 43 
 
 throne. As Priest, as Intercessor, He reigns still, in. 
 reigns in His glorified manhood. 
 
 There is our reassurance. Our Priest is King, 
 and our King is Priest. The Son of God is also 
 Jesus, the Son of man. His tender compassion is 
 infinite even as His authority. We know now 
 that what Ezekiel saw in a vision has become for Ezek. i. 26. 
 us a fact. We see by faith upon the sapphire 
 throne not the shadowy likeness of a man, but 
 One who is true man ; One who was made in all Hebr. ii. 
 things like unto His brethren; One who was 
 tempted in all things after our likeness ; One who Hebr. iv. 
 has known the bitterness of every human trial, 
 and who knows the secret of their use ; One 
 whose sympathy goes out to every suffering 
 creature as if he were alone the object of His 
 regard ; One whose love kindles to responsive 
 warmth the faintest spark of faith. 
 
 We can feel then how the Hebrews through 
 their apparent loss were brought to an immeasur- 
 able gain, and how we may learn a little better 
 through their example what our King- Priest is for 
 us. 
 
 If human priests compassed 'with infirmity 
 could inspire confidence in the worshipper, then 
 Christ, if we will lift our eyes to Him, a thousand- 
 fold more. Their compassion was necessarily Hebr. v. 
 limited by their experience, but His experience
 
 44 Christus Consummator. 
 
 in. covers the whole field of life ; their gentle bearing 
 was tempered by the consciousness of personal 
 failure, but His breathes the invigorating spirit of 
 perfect holiness. They knew the power of tempta- 
 tion in part by the sad lessons of failure ; He knew 
 it to the uttermost by perfect victory. They 
 could see dimly through earth-born mists some- 
 thing of the real hideousness of evil ; He 
 saw it in the undimmed light of the Divine 
 purity. And He is tenderest, not who 
 
 has sinned, as is sometimes vainly thought, but 
 who has known best the power of sin by over- 
 coming it. His love is most watchful who has 
 seen what wrong is in the eyes of God. 
 
 Can we not then boldly proclaim that here 
 also the Gospel covers the facts of life, of our life ? 
 that in the prospect of the conflicts and defeats 
 which sadden us, and which we dare not disguise 
 or extenuate, such a High Priest became us, strong 
 with the strength of God, compassionate with the 
 affection of a friend ? 
 
 Gen.xxxii. We must cling to both these truths, and 
 wrestle with them, and win their blessing from 
 them. We need the revelation of Christ's Majesty, 
 and we need the revelation of Christ's Tenderness. 
 We need more, I think, than we know, to come 
 each one of us into the presence of the glorified 
 Lord and rest in His light.
 
 The King Priest. ' 45 
 
 In this individual approach to the throne of in. 
 grace lies for us severally the promise of the ful- 
 filment of our destiny ; But " earth's children 
 cling to earth," and there are many among us who 
 feel keenly the very trials which the Hebrews 
 felt ; who long for some visible system which 
 shall "bring all heaven before their eyes," for 
 some path to the divine presence along which 
 they can walk by sight, for recurrent words of 
 personal absolution from some human minister, 
 for that which shall localise their centre of wor- 
 ship ; who labour, often unconsciously, to make 
 the earthly the measure of the spiritual ; who 
 shrink from the ennobling responsibility of striving 
 with untiring effort to hold communion with the 
 unseen and eternal ; who turn back with regretful 
 looks to the discipline and the helps of a childly 
 age, when they are required to accept the graver 
 duties of maturity ; required to listen, as it were, 
 like Elijah on the lonely mountain, when the l K. xix. 
 thunder of the earthquake is stilled and the 
 violence of the fire is spent, for the still small 
 voice. 
 
 These are not, I know, imaginary temptations ; 
 but if we are tried and disquieted by their assaults, 
 the writer of the Epistle enables us to face them. 
 He brings Christ near to us and he brings us near 
 to Christ. He discloses the privileges to which
 
 46 Christus Consummator. 
 
 in. we are all admitted by the ascended Saviour. 
 He gives an abiding application to the Lord's 
 
 John xiv. words, He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
 Father. And he does this without hiding 
 
 one dark trait in the prospect of life. The con- 
 nexion in which the text stands gives it a startling 
 force. The apostolic author has recalled without 
 reserve, the sad history of Israel's failure. He 
 has painted a vivid picture of the penetrating 
 severity of the Divine judgment, and then, draw- 
 ing an unexpected conclusion from this revelation 
 of unbelief and weakness and retribution, he con- 
 
 Hebr. iv. tinues : Having therefore a great High Priest who 
 katk passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of 
 God, let us hold fast our confession. For we have 
 not a High Priest that cannot be touched with the 
 feeling of our infirmities ; but one that hath been in 
 all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. 
 Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the 
 throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and 
 may find grace to help in time of need. 
 
 Every word must go to the heart of those who 
 have known what life is, an inexorable order 
 capable of being transfigured by love. Every 
 word has a practical force. Never was the charge 
 to hold fast our confession more urgently needed. 
 Never was the encouragement to come directly to 
 Christ more fitted to still the griefs of failure, and
 
 The King Priest. 47 
 
 to nerve the misgivings of weakness. Never was 
 the twofold necessity of rising out of themselves 
 without losing themselves more impressively forced 
 upon men by the contrast between their ideal and 
 their attainment, their destiny and their position ; 
 never was the Spirit more openly claiming accept- 
 ance for growing Truth. 
 
 As then we have known a little of the power 
 of our Faith ; as we have felt the want of forgive- 
 ness and the want of support ; as we have learnt 
 a little more clearly with advancing years the 
 grievousness of sin and the perils of life, let us, 
 each in our place, hold fast our confession. 
 
 Let us draw near with boldness to the throne of 
 grace giving utterance to every feeling and every 
 wish that we may receive mercy receive it as 
 humble suppliants from the Lord's free love and 
 may find find as unwearied searchers grace to 
 lielp in time of need. 
 
 That access is ever open to the foot of faith. 
 That mercy is unfailing to the cry of penitence. 
 That grace is inexhaustible to the servant who 
 offers himself wholly to the Master's use.
 
 IV. 
 THE UNIVERSAL SOCIETY.
 
 Ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city of 
 the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable 
 hosts of angels, to the general assembly and church of the 
 firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the Judge 
 of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to 
 Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of 
 sprinkling that speaketh better than that of Abel. 
 
 HEBR. xn. 22 24.
 
 THE UNIVERSAL SOCIETY. 
 
 TX7E have seen that the solemn and consolatory iv. 
 
 lessons of the priestly service of the Old 
 Testament, which were brought together in their 
 highest form on the Day of Atonement, obtained 
 their fulfilment in the work of Christ. We have 
 seen that Christ realised in the victorious progress 
 of a perfect life that absolute holiness, of which 
 ceremonial cleansings were a figure ; that He, 
 uniting in one Person the offices of priest and 
 victim, through the eternal Spirit, offered the Hebr. ix. 
 humanity which He had taken to Himself, a j .' " 
 sacrifice well-pleasing to God upon the altar of 
 the Cross, not for the nation only, but for the John xi. 
 world ; that through the grave, and through the Hebr. iv. 
 heavens, He bore His own blood, the virtue of 14 ' 
 His Manhood given for men, to the immediate 
 presence of God, pleading on our behalf for ever ; 
 that going infinitely beyond the privilege of 
 intercession by that one entrance, He sat down 
 
 42
 
 52 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. as Divine King on the Father's throne, crowning 
 the ministry of priestly compassion with the glory 
 of universal sovereignty. 
 
 So far the types of the Day of Atonement 
 have been fulfilled, and far more than fulfilled ; 
 but the last scene in the august ceremonial of the 
 day has not at present found its counterpart. 
 Our High Priest has not yet returned from the 
 heavenly sanctuary to reveal on earth the complete- 
 ness of His work in visible triumph. Our 
 position therefore is, in one sense, like that of the 
 congregation of Israel gathered round the Holy 
 Place, waiting with eager and beating hearts till 
 their representative should come forth to bring 
 again before their sight the fact of forgiveness 
 and acceptance. We too are in an attitude of 
 
 Hebr.ii.8. expectancy. We see not yet all things subjected 
 to our Redeemer. Clouds and darkness are over 
 the world which is His inheritance ; and we look 
 for Him, in the words of the Epistle, when He 
 
 Hebr. ix. shall appear a second time apart from sin, to them 
 that wait for Him, unto salvation. 
 
 This, I say, is one aspect of our position. We 
 are in an attitude of expectancy; and in this 
 respect it is of the utmost importance that we 
 should keep our brightest hopes fresh, and neither 
 dissemble the sorrows of life, nor surrender the 
 
 2Cor.iv.7. least of the Divine promises. We walk by faith,
 
 The Universal Society. 53 
 
 not by sight. But the reality, the inten- iv. 
 
 sity, of our expectancy must not hide from us the 
 
 reality of our attainment. If the appearance of 
 
 Christ is future, fellowship with Him and with 
 
 His people is present. Ye are come, the author Hebr. xi 
 
 of the Epistle writes, to men troubled by doubts, 
 
 by divisions, by losses, by sufferings, as grievous 
 
 as any which we have to bear, by shamelessness 
 
 of triumphant vice to which Christendom offers 
 
 no parallel, Ye are come and not, "Ye shall come" 
 
 unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living 
 
 God, the heavenly Jerusalem and to Jesus the 
 
 Mediator of a new covenant He writes, I 
 
 repeat, " Ye are come," and not, " Ye shall come," 
 and no blindness, no faithlessness, can alter the 
 fact. 
 
 The Hebrews were, as we remember, in danger 
 of forgetting the grandeur of their privilege 
 under the stress of temporal affliction, and so the 
 Apostle recalls the most memorable scene in their 
 sacred history. He contrasts the beginnings of 
 Judaism, and the beginnings of .Christianity ; the 
 character of the old kingdom of God imaged in the 
 circumstances of its foundation, and the character 
 of the new kingdom made clear in its spiritual 
 glory through tribulations and chastenings, that 
 they might see what the Gospel was not as well 
 as what it was. Ye are not come, he says, unto
 
 54 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. a palpable and kindled fire, and unto blackness, 
 and darkness, and tempest, and the sound of a 
 
 trumpet, and the voice of words Ye are not 
 
 come, that is, like your forefathers, to an outward, 
 earthly, elemental manifestation of the Divine 
 Majesty, which appealed to the senses, and even 
 where it was most intelligible and most human, 
 struck those to whom it was given with over- 
 whelming dread; but ye are come unto mount Zion, 
 and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly 
 Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts of angels, to 
 the general assembly and church of the firstborn 
 who are enrolled in heaven. . . . Ye are come, come 
 already, come even if God seems to hide Himself, 
 to a Divine Presence nearer and more pervading 
 than Moses knew, to an abiding communion 
 realised in vital energy and not to a passing vision 
 shewn in material forces, to a revelation marked, 
 as the Apostle goes on to shew, not by threatening 
 commands, but by means of reconciliation, inspiring 
 not fear but love. 
 
 Now when we reflect upon the contrast, we 
 shall be led to perceive that it could not fail to 
 suggest thoughts of reassurance to the Hebrews. 
 They were, it is true, shut out, irrevocably shut 
 out, from the courts of the Temple, deprived of 
 the friendship of those who claimed to be the 
 children of the patriarchs and the prophets,
 
 The Universal Society. 55 
 
 outcasts from the visible commonwealth of God. iv. 
 But what then ? When they lost these 
 
 earthly privileges which gave a transient satisfac- 
 tion to their souls, they were taught even through 
 their grief to gain a larger vision of the Divine 
 action and of the Divine presence ; to see through 
 the typical splendours of the vanishing sanctuary, 
 the city that hath the foundations, of which every Hebr. xi. 
 institution of earth is a partial shadow ; to see ^ br ^j 
 about them the great cloud of witnesses who 1 f - 
 proclaim that not one aspiration of faith has ever 
 failed of attainment ; to see on the right hand of 
 the Father that right hand which is every- 
 where Him in whom all creation finds its unity 
 and its life, Jesus, Son of man and Son of God, 
 accessible to each believer; to see that Christianity 
 is not an etherialised Judaism, but its spiritual 
 antitype ; that the heavenly Jerusalem is no 
 material locality, but the realm of eternal truth; 
 that the Christian society is not in essence an 
 external organization, but a manifestation of the 
 powers of the new life. 
 
 And for us this teaching has, I think, a still 
 wider application. The spectacle of divided and 
 rival Churches is as sad and far vaster than the 
 spectacle of unbelieving Israel. It is hard 
 
 for us to bear the prospect of Christendom rent 
 into hostile fragments as it was hard for the
 
 56 Ghristus Consummator. 
 
 iv. Hebrews to bear the anathema of their country- 
 men. It is hard to look for peace, and to find a 
 sword ; to look for the concentration of every force 
 of those who bear Christ's name in a common 
 assault upon evil, and to find energies of thought 
 and feeling and action weakened and wasted in 
 misunderstandings, jealousies, and schisms ; to 
 look for the beauty of a visible unity of the 
 John xvii. faithful which shall strike even those who are 
 
 21 
 
 without with reverent awe, and to find our 
 divisions a commonplace with mocking adver- 
 saries. It is hard ; and if what we see 
 were all, the trial would be intolerable. But 
 what we see is not all : what we see is not even 
 the dim image of that which is. The life which 
 we feel, the life which we share, is more than 
 the earthly materials by which it is at present 
 sustained, more than the earthly vestures through 
 which it is at present manifested. That is not 
 most real which can be touched and measured, but 
 that which struggles, as it were, to find imperfect 
 expression through the veil of sense : that which 
 to the All-seeing Eye gilds with the light of 
 self-devotion acts that to us appear self-willed 
 and miscalculated ; that which to the All-hearing 
 Ear joins in a full harmony words that to us 
 sound fretful and impatient ; that which fills our 
 poor dull hearts with a love and sympathy
 
 The Universal Society. 57 
 
 towards all the creatures of God, deeper than iv. 
 just hatred of sin, deeper than right condemnation 
 of error, deeper than the circumstances of birth 
 and place and temperament which kindle the 
 friendships and sharpen the animosities of human 
 intercourse. 
 
 Yes, the unseen and the eternal is for all of us 
 who confess Christ come, Christ coming in flesh, i John iv. 
 the ruling thought of life. To us also the words 7 ' " 
 are spoken Ye are come unto mount Zion, and 
 unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jeru- 
 salem, and to innumerable hosts of angels, to the 
 general assembly and church of the firstborn who 
 are enrolled in heaven ; and to the God of all as 
 Judge, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, 
 and to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant, and to 
 the blood of sprinkling which speaketh better than 
 that of Abel. 
 
 Ye are come, that is, come though your way 
 seems to be barred by inevitable obstacles, though 
 your prospect seems to be closed by impenetrable 
 gloom, to a scene of worship and a company of 
 fellow-worshippers which no eye hath seen nor 
 can see ; ye are come to powers of the spiritual 
 order which are able to bring assurance in the 
 midst of the confusions, the uncertainties, the 
 failures, by which you are wearied and perplexed ; 
 ye are come, in a word, to a dispensation, not
 
 58 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. earthly but heavenly, to a dispensation not of 
 terror but of grace. 
 
 Each of these two characteristics of the Divine 
 order to which we are admitted, that it is heavenly, 
 and that it is gracious, has for us, as for the 
 Hebrews, a message of encouragement. 
 
 If the outward were the measure of the Church 
 
 of Christ, we might, as we have seen, well despair. 
 
 But side by side with us, when we fondly think, 
 
 1 K. xix. like Elijah or Elisha's servant, that we stand 
 
 14 18 
 
 2 K. vi. 17. alone, are countless multitudes whom we know 
 not, angels whom we have no power to discern, 
 children of God whom we have not learnt to 
 recognise. We have come to the kingdom of God, 
 peopled with armies of angels and men working 
 for us and with us because they are working 
 for Him. And though we cannot grasp 
 
 the fulness of the truth, and free ourselves from 
 the fetters of sense, yet we can, in'the light of the 
 Incarnation, feel the fact of this unseen fellowship ; 
 we can feel that heaven has been re-opened to us 
 by Christ ; that the hosts who were separated 
 from Israel at Sinai by the fire and the darkness 
 are now joined with us under our Saviour King, 
 
 John i. 51. ascending and descending upon the Son of man; 
 that no external tests are final in spiritual things; 
 that while we are separated one from another by 
 barriers which we dare not overpass, by differences
 
 The Universal Society. 59 
 
 of opinion which we dare not conceal or extenuate, iv. 
 there still may be a deeper-lying bond in righteous- Bom. xiv. 
 ness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, the apostolic 
 notes of the kingdom of God, which nothing that 
 is of earth can for ever overpower. 
 
 Such convictions are sufficient to bring a calm 
 to the believer in the sad conflicts of a restless age, 
 widely different from the blind complacency which 
 is able to forget the larger sorrows of the world 
 in the confidence of selfish security, and from the 
 superficial indifference which regards diversities as 
 trivial which for good or evil modify the temporal 
 workings of faith. They enable us to 
 
 preserve a true balance between the elements of our 
 life. They teach us to maintain the grave, 
 
 if limited, issues of the forms in which men receive 
 the truth, and to vindicate for the Spirit perfect 
 freedom and absolute sovereignty. They 
 
 guard us from that deceitful impatience which is 
 eager to anticipate the last results of the discipline 
 of the world and gain outward unity by com- 
 promise, which is hasty to abandon treasures of 
 our inheritance because we have forgotten or 
 misunderstood their use. They inspire 
 
 us with the ennobling hope that in the wisdom 
 of God we shall become one, not by narrowing 
 and defining the Faith which is committed to 
 us, but by rising, through the help of the
 
 60 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. Spirit, to a worthier sense of its immeasurable 
 grandeur. 
 
 And yet more than this : they quicken our 
 common life with a vital apprehension of the 
 powers of the unseen order; they break the 
 tyranny of a one-sided materialism; they proclaim 
 that a belief in natural law is essentially a belief in 
 a present God ; they take possession of a region of 
 being which answers to the capacities of the soul ; 
 they encourage us to bring our ordinary thoughts 
 and feelings into the light of our eternal destiny, 
 and add to them that idea of incalculable issues 
 which must belong to all that is human. 
 
 At the same time there is an element of awe in 
 this revelation of the fulness of spiritual force 
 active about us, of this association with invisible 
 fellow- workers, of this communion with Him who 
 Hebr. xii. is a consuming fire. And the writer of the Epistle 
 does not shrink from dwelling on the sterner 
 aspect of his teaching. He insists on the heavier 
 responsibility which attaches to those who have 
 larger knowledge. He calls for the exertion, the 
 courage, the thoughtful endurance, the watchful 
 purity, which correspond with the truths that he 
 has laid open. 
 
 Life indeed is filled with awe. Its solemnity 
 grows upon us. We may wish to remain children 
 always, but we cannot. And here the Gospel
 
 The Universal Society. 61 
 
 meets the fears which spring out of the larger iv. 
 vision of our state. It is heavenly, and it is 
 gracious too. We have come not only to 
 
 an order glorious with spiritual realities, but also 
 to an order rich in provisions of mercy : to the Hebr. xii. 
 God of all as Judge, and to the spirits of just men 
 made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of a new 
 covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling which 
 speaketh better than that of Abel. The words 
 teach us to look backward and to look forward, and 
 to draw from the past and from the present the 
 inspiration of faith. We look to those 
 
 whose work is over, we see that judgment is a 
 deliverance for 'surrendered souls,' and that the 
 work of Christ has brought perfection to His 
 servants through the sufferings of earth. We 
 look to those who are still pressed in the fight, and 
 we see with them Jesus the Son of man, shewing 
 in His own Person that God is their support, and 
 applying to each the virtue of His own life. 
 
 Once again then we are brought to Him, when 
 our thoughts are turned to the widest mysteries 
 of life. When we behold the depths of heaven 
 opened about us, and the veil lifted from the 
 living fulness of earth, He stands before our face 
 stands as He appeared to His first martyr to Acts vii. 
 welcome those who follow Him in hope within the 
 sanctuary of the Divine Presence.
 
 62 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. Once again He is revealed to us as bringing the 
 
 help which we need in view of the questions which 
 are forced upon us by the circumstances in which 
 we are placed. We have seen already that He 
 has transfigured suffering, by shewing that it is 
 through suffering humanity is perfected. We 
 Hebr. x. have seen that He has consecrated a new and 
 living way for us to God, by bearing our manhood 
 to the throne of heaven. We see now that, when 
 we regard the innumerable forms of being which 
 crowd the spiritual temple, He is with us still, to 
 assure us that there is a place for us in that 
 august company and to prepare us for taking it. 
 
 Once again He is revealed to us as communi- 
 cating to His people of His own glory for the 
 accomplishment of their destiny. He is the First- 
 born, and He gathers round Him a Church of the 
 firstborn, in which Divine family each member 
 shares the highest privilege. " Cum pluribus," 
 wrote an early commentator from the solitude of 
 his French convent, "major erit beatitude; ubi 
 unusquisque de alio gaudebit sicut de seipso." 
 Yes ; " The bliss will be greater when more share 
 it. In heaven each one will rejoice for his fellow 
 as for himself." 
 
 Once again He is revealed to us as the Fulfiller 
 Christus Consummator gathering into one and 
 reconciling all things by the will of God.
 
 The Universal Society. 63 
 
 And let no one think that such a revelation is 
 fitted only to fill the fancy with splendid dreams. 
 It is, I believe, intensely practical. He who leaves 
 the unseen out of account deals as it were with a 
 soulless world, with a mechanical structure of 
 matter and force. But for the Christian all is law, 
 and life, and love. He has come unto mount Zion, 
 and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly 
 Jerusalem,, and to innumerable hosts of angels, to 
 the general assembly and Church of the firstborn 
 who are enrolled in heaven . . . and to Jesus the 
 Mediator of a new covenant. . . . 
 
 For him the wilderness, desolate to the bodily 
 eye, is thronged with joyous ministers of God's 
 will. For him no differences of earth can destroy 
 the sense of kindred which springs from a common 
 spiritual destiny. 
 
 What then, we are constrained to ask, is this 
 revelation, what are these facts to us ? Do they 
 not meet the loneliness which has depressed us, 
 the weakness which has often marred our efforts ? 
 
 It must be so if God, in His love, open our eyes 
 to behold the armies of light by which we are 
 encircled ; if He open our hearts to feel the 
 strength of fellowship with every citizen of His 
 kingdom.
 
 V. 
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 w.
 
 But now hath he obtained a ministry the more excellent, 
 by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, 
 which hath been enacted upon better promises. 
 
 HEBR. vin. 6. 
 
 We have an altar, whereof they have no right to eat which 
 serve the tabernacle. 
 
 HEBK. xin. 10.
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 E attitude of a Christian is, as we have seen, v. 
 twofold. It is an attitude of attainment, and 
 an attitude of expectancy. He has been admitted 
 to fellowship with the unseen order in the fulness 
 of its infinite grandeur ; and he is looking for the 
 open manifestation of the victorious Presence of 
 his Lord. This inspiring faith, this far- 
 
 reaching hope, are bound together for each one of 
 us by the obligation of personal duty. Each one 
 of us has a work to do in that infinite kingdom of 
 God which is opened to our entrance. Each one 
 of us is charged in his measure to hasten the full 2 Pet. iii. 
 revelation of its glory. We look through the 
 temporal to the eternal. But for the 
 
 present we have to live our little lives under the 
 conditions of earth. We strive to gain the largest 
 vision of the Divine counsels, to feel the intense 
 reality of our connexion with the world about us, 
 to watch in thought the stream of consequence 
 
 52
 
 68 Ghristus Consummator. 
 
 v. which flows from our actions ; and then strength- 
 ened and humbled we go back as it were into 
 the shrine of our own souls, and know that in 
 that last depth of being we are alone with 
 God. We are alone, and yet not alone, 
 
 for there also Christ is with us, Christ the Ful- 
 filler, to bring to its true perfection the fragment 
 of service which answers to our powers. He not 
 Hebr. ix. only bore His blood, the virtue of His offered life, 
 
 12 * xii 24 
 
 ' into heaven for the salvation of the nature which 
 He had taken to Himself, but He applies it 
 personally to each believer on earth, to purify and 
 to sustain, to begin and to complete that union 
 with Himself for which man was made. 
 
 As the Hebrews grasped this truth which the 
 
 Apostle set before them, they could not fail to 
 
 find that what they had lost by their exclusion 
 
 from the commonwealth of Israel was given back 
 
 to them in fact, and not in figure. As 
 
 Israelites they had rejoiced from early youth to 
 
 enter the court of God's house ; as Israelites, they 
 
 had known in maturer age every consolation of 
 
 the appointed sacrifices. But now, when they 
 
 entered little by little into the meaning of the 
 
 Gospel, they saw that they were become partakers 
 
 Hebr. viii. in a better covenant than that made with their 
 
 H br iii ^ a ^ ners ' m a better sacrifice than those which the 
 
 14 ; vi. 4. Law established, " partakers in Christ," " partakers
 
 The New Covenant. 69 
 
 in the Holy Ghost." They were indeed, what v. 
 Israel was designed to be, a nation of priests. Heb. xiii. 
 The offering for the people's sin was for them 
 given back as the support of life. 
 
 The lessons which were thus taught, taught 
 most impressively through the symbols of the Old 
 Testament, to men tried by the sorrows of the 
 first age, are for us also. The individual 
 
 soul as it turns to God requires to be assured of 
 the personal right of approach to Him, and then 
 of the power of continuous fellowship with Him. 
 This assurance is given to us, in a form suited to 
 the circumstances of our life, in the two Sacra- 
 ments of the Gospel the Sacrament of Incor- 
 poration, and the Sacrament of Support. In these 
 we have, according to our need, the revelation of 
 our union with Christ and the revelation of His 
 impartment of Himself to us. 
 
 But we cannot fail to be struck by the way in 
 which the writer of the Epistle deals with these 
 Sacraments. We should have expected that he 
 would contrast them in their significant forms 
 with the typical Levitical rites to which they 
 answered ; that he would shew how even out- 
 wardly the Christian has in them far more sure 
 seals of God's grace than the Jew ; that he would 
 point out that what was necessarily limited and 
 local in the old dispensation had been made
 
 70 Christus Consummator. 
 
 v. universal in the new. As it is, he barely touches 
 on the external element of the Christian Sacra- 
 ments. The external element lies behind 
 his teaching; but he strives above all things to 
 fix the thoughts of his readers upon the ascended 
 Christ who works through the Sacraments, lest 
 they should rest in ritual observances, and faint 
 or fail in the effort to gain a closer personal fel- 
 lowship with Him. 
 
 There are, however, two remarkable passages 
 which enable the student to perceive, as I have 
 already indicated, the deep meaning of the 
 Mystical Washing, and of the festal meal of the 
 
 Hebr. x. Eucharist. Let us draw near near to the Holy 
 22 
 
 place the Apostle writes, with a true heart in 
 
 fulness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from 
 an evil conscience, and our body washed with pure 
 Hebr. xiii. water. And again, We have an altar, whereof 
 they have no right to eat which serve the taber- 
 nacle. 
 
 The first passage shews that by our covenant 
 rite we are made not only a people of God, but 
 also priests of God. 
 
 The second passage shews that while the sin- 
 offering on the Day of Atonement was wholly 
 consumed by fire, our common sin-offering is made 
 our common peace-offering, our Eucharist, a Feast 
 upon a Sacrifice.
 
 The New Covenant. 71 
 
 Twice only in the Pentateuch is mention made v. 
 of the sprinkling of the blood of sacrifices upon 
 men ; once at the solemn ratification of the Ex. xxiv. 
 covenant, when the people were united to the Jj ey viii 
 Lord; and once when Aaron and his sons were 23f ; 3 ; 
 hallowed for the priesthood. In the latter case 
 the sprinkling with blood was united with a 
 washing with water. Here then we have 
 
 the complete parallel with the words of the 
 Epistle. To a Jew familiar with the Mosaic 
 record, their meaning was distinct and decisive. 
 They set forth that the Christian is made, as I 
 said, not only a citizen of the Divine kingdom, 
 but also a priest of God ; that for him access to 
 heaven is open ; that he has boldness to offer the Hebr. xiii. 
 sacrifices of word and deed ; that he accepts the 
 duty of consecration. 
 
 The interpretation of the second passage which 
 I have quoted has been disputed, but I think that 
 the general sense is clear. The writer is meeting 
 a difficulty found in the supposition that Christians 
 had not what the Jews had. We have, he replies, 
 an altar, an altar with a victim, for the two are 
 not separated, whereof they have no right to eat 
 who serve the tabernacle. We have, that is, more, 
 infinitely more, than the Law allowed to those 
 who ministered to figures of the eternal truth. 
 We have Christ crucified, Christ upon the Cross,
 
 72 Christus Consummator. 
 
 v. a victim and an altar, a victim who suffered 
 for the world without the camp, and who then, 
 marvel of marvels, gave and gives Himself for 
 ever as the support of His people in a Holy 
 Eucharist. No priest in old time ever 
 
 tasted such an offering. But He who died for us 
 lives for us. He who bore our sins gives us of 
 the fulness of His strength. And, to go one step 
 further, on Him and in Him we can bring to God 
 the sacrifice of ourselves. 
 
 So then, we repeat, our covenant rite, our 
 Baptism, brings us into a personal relation to 
 Christ. No one stands between the believer and 
 the Lord. Our Sacrificial Feast, our 
 
 Eucharist, offers to us the virtue of Christ's life 
 and death, His Flesh and Blood, for the strength- 
 ening and cleansing of our bodies and souls. 
 
 Let us look at these thoughts a little more 
 closely. 
 
 As baptized, confirmed Christians, priests of 
 God, we can come directly to the Father. No 
 earthly symbol, no mortal representative, inter- 
 venes any longer as the necessary means through 
 which we may draw near. 
 
 As baptized, confirmed Christians, priests of 
 
 God, we can offer up to Him a sacrifice of praise 
 
 and active love, the natural fruit of hearts touched 
 
 John xv. 7. with His grace. No fear checks the thanksgiving
 
 The New Covenant. 73 
 
 which is the echo of His word. No weakness v. 
 stays the effort which is the answer to His 
 summons. 
 
 As baptized, confirmed Christians, priests of 
 God, we acknowledge that we are holy, partakers Hebr. iii. 
 of a heavenly calling, dedicated to God without 
 reserve, bearing branded upon us, in St Paul's Gal. vi. 17. 
 vivid image, the marks of Jesus, as bondmen 
 devoted to His perpetual service. 
 
 But while this is so ; while nothing can alter 
 the responsibility which is laid upon each soul, 
 and which we have voluntarily acknowledged; 
 while we must severally, as if there were none 
 other, draw near to God and bring Him the offer- 
 ing of ourselves, and acknowledge the debt which 
 is as large as life ; our approach, our sacrifice, our 
 dedication, are all in Christ. Not one step, not 
 one act, not one confession, can be made without 
 Him. We are become partakers of Christ. Hebr. iii. 
 
 This is the gift of God. And while the Epistle 
 recognises, as we have seen, the , priesthood of 
 Christians, this human priesthood falls almost out 
 of sight before the supreme fact of the priesthood 
 of Christ. Our common priestly work is done 
 only through Him. Through Him we offer up a Hebr. xiii. 
 sacrifice of praise to God continually. Our will 
 makes it our own. His co-operation makes it 
 acceptable.
 
 74 Ghristus Consummator. 
 
 v. We are become partakers of Christ, if, it is 
 
 Hebr. iii. added, we hold fast the beginning of our confidence 
 firm unto the end. A Divine fact, such is the 
 paradox of life, is made dependent on human 
 endeavour. We can see then how the 
 
 institution of the Eucharist meets the sad sense 
 of infirmity and failure. Our covenant rite cannot 
 from its nature ever be repeated. But we know 
 how often and how grievously we have fallen 
 short of our obligation. Is the covenant then, 
 we are driven to ask, fatally broken ? When the 
 fear rises before us, we recall, almost regretfully, 
 the provisions which men have made, with or 
 without the sanction of God, to bring, through 
 sacrifice, peace to the troubled conscience. While 
 we do so, the Apostle lifts up our thoughts to 
 the Lord, Crucified, Risen, Seated at the right 
 hand of the Father, and in the light of that 
 Hebr. xiii. vision of Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and 
 to-day, yea, and for ever, we can say triumphantly, 
 We have an altar. All that the consolatory 
 
 ceremonial of the Old Dispensation accomplished 
 for Israel, all that men have sought to make clear 
 to themselves by vain speculations and worldly 
 forms, is ours in spiritual and abiding simplicity. 
 We Jiave an altar wherein the truths which were 
 represented by the sacrificial system of the Law 
 are realised in a living verity. We liave an altar,
 
 The New Covenant. 75 
 
 whereon we can lay "ourselves, our souls and 
 bodies," a reasonable service. 
 
 Once again then we are brought to Christ the 
 Fulfiller Christus Consummator in whom each 
 believer finds the root and the accomplishment 
 of his individual destiny. 
 
 So, we have reached the limit which we set to 
 ourselves. We have dared to look upon great 
 trials in the light of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 and we have seen that the help which availed the 
 Hebrews in the first age is sufficient for us. 
 
 We have looked upon suffering ; and we have 
 seen that by the will of God suffering is for fallen 
 man the way to perfection. We cannot indeed, 
 with our feeble sight, discern how this or that 
 sorrow and shame contributes to the end ; but 
 disciplined in patience, we can leave in the Father's 
 hands the fulfilment of His own law which we 
 have recognised, and for our part labour to hasten 
 that issue. 
 
 We have looked upon failure and weakness; 
 and we have seen that Christ, as He accomplished 
 the destiny of man on earth, pleads the cause of 
 man in heaven with unfailing compassion and 
 absolute sovereignty, uniting the offices of priest 
 and king, perfect man and perfect God. 
 
 We have looked upon the sad spectacle of
 
 76 Ghristus Consummator. 
 
 divided Christendom ; and we have seen that by 
 the Ascension of Christ we are brought into a 
 spiritual fellowship, in which the powers of heaven 
 and earth are united, a fellowship transcending 
 every test of sense ; and from the contemplation 
 of the notes of that universal communion, we have 
 learnt to keep hope fresh while we guard with 
 watchful reverence the convictions which separate 
 us in the sphere of visible work. 
 
 We have looked upon the chequered course of 
 the individual life ; and we have seen that for each 
 one of us is provided that objective assurance 
 of our right of approach to God which is the solid 
 foundation of religion, that objective assurance of 
 the renewed gift of Christ's flesh and blood, which 
 is able to sustain and to purify us in the effort to 
 reach His likeness. 
 
 At every prospect of great trial, as we dwelt 
 patiently upon it, we have seen the figure of 
 Christ to rise above the darkness of Christ the 
 Fulfiller not only to give comfort, but to enlarge 
 hope ; not only to support the sufferer under the 
 pressure of transitory affliction, but to shew to the 
 believing soul that, in a world such as this, 
 
 "Failure is but a triumph's evidence 
 For the fulness of the days." 
 
 And we have seen all this, so far as we have 
 been allowed to see it, by entering a little more
 
 The New Covenant 77 
 
 closely than is commonly done into the difficulties v. 
 of a troubled congregation of the apostolic 
 times. Thus we have found that the 
 
 words of the inspired writer who guided the 
 Hebrews to higher things, speak to us with the 
 directness and the power of life. We 
 
 have found on a narrow field of inquiry what the 
 Bible is : an interpretation of the eternal, intelli- 
 gible to every man through all time in the Actsii.5ff. 
 language in which he was born. We 
 
 have found that nothing has befallen us which our 
 fathers have not borne victoriously in other shapes 
 and made fruitful in blessing. We have 
 
 found, I think, that to those who will raise their 
 eyes to Christ the Fulfiller, the Revelation of the John xiv. 
 Father, made known to us more completely from j ohn xiv 
 generation to generation by the Holy Spirit, 26 - 
 nothing in human experience can come as an 
 unwelcome surprise. He, Son of man, Son of 
 God, will bear, He has borne, though we see it not 
 through the mist of days and years, all things to 
 their goal, Christus Consummator. 
 
 Such thoughts carry with them a grave, a 
 noble responsibility. The character of a genera- 
 tion is moulded by personal character. And if we 
 have considered some of the temptations of the 
 first Christians ; if we know a little of the terrible 
 environment of evil by which they were encircled ;
 
 78 Christus Consummator. 
 
 v. we must not, as we too often do, forget how they 
 conquered the world. It was not by any 
 
 despairing withdrawal from city and market ; not 
 by any proud isolation in selfish security ; not by 
 any impatient violence ; but by the winning 
 influence of gracious faith, they mastered the 
 family, the school, the empire. They were a 
 living Gospel, a message of God's good-will to those 
 with whom they toiled and suffered. Pure 
 
 among the self-indulgent, loving among the 
 factious, tender among the ruthless, meek among 
 the vainglorious, firm in faith amidst the shaking 
 of nations, joyous in hope amidst the sorrows of 
 a corrupt society, they revealed to men their true 
 destiny and shewed that it could be attained. 
 They appealed boldly to the awakened conscience 
 as the advocate of their claims. They taught as 
 believing that He who had stirred their heart 
 with a great desire would assuredly satisfy it. 
 
 They offered not in word but in deed, the ideal 
 of spiritual devotion, and "the soul naturally 
 Christian," turned to it, as the flower turns to the 
 light, drew from it, as the flower draws from the 
 light, the richness of perfect beauty. 
 
 Yes ; that was the secret of their success ; and 
 it is the secret of our success. The words are true 
 now as they were when addressed by Zechariah to 
 the poor remnant of Jews struggling to rebuild
 
 The New Covenant. 79 
 
 their outward temple : Not by might, nor by power, v. 
 but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. Not Zech.iv.6. 
 first by material change, not by intellectual culture, 
 but by spiritual sympathy will our work be done. 
 Let us take to ourselves the charge of our Epistle, 
 the counsel of Divine fellowship fellowship with 
 God and man, fellowship with man in God. Let Hebr. iv. 
 us draw near unto the throne of grace. . . . Let us Hebr. x. 
 hold fast the confession of our hope. . . . Let us ^ - b 
 consider one another to provoke unto love and good 24. 
 works, and it shall not be long said that the 
 victories of faith are ended.
 
 CHRISTUS CONSUMMATOR II. 
 
 ASPECTS OF THE INCARNATION. 
 
 I. The Incarnation a subject for devout study. 
 
 II. The Incarnation and the Creation. 
 
 III. The Incarnation and the Fall 
 
 IV. The Incarnation and Nature. 
 V. The Incarnation and Life. 
 
 W.
 
 But Mary kept all these sayings, pondering them in her 
 heart. 
 
 ST LUKE ii. 19.
 
 THE INCARNATION A SUBJECT FOR 
 DEVOUT STUDY. 
 
 T^HERE is no grander passage in Greek litera- i. 
 -*- ture than that in which Plato describes how 
 the contemplation of absolute justice, temperance, 
 and knowledge is the sustenance of the divine 
 nature. There are times of high festival, he says, 
 in the world above, when the gods in solemn PJuedr. 
 procession mount to the topmost vault of heaven, p ' 
 and taking their place upon its dome, gaze over 
 the infinite depths of perfect Truth. This 
 spectacle supports the fulness of their being. 
 Nor are they, he continues, alone in the enjoy- 
 ment of the magnificent vision : all the souls 
 that can and will follow in their train. Such of 
 these as are able to gain the fair prospect and 
 keep it before their eyes, while the spheres revolve, 
 remain in the possession of supreme joy. The 
 rest baffled, wearied, maimed, sink down to earth 
 and are embodied as men. Henceforward 
 
 he adds, their condition in this lower life depends 
 
 62
 
 84 Christus Consummator. 
 
 i. upon their past apprehension of the Truth. Their 
 human existence is a striving upwards toward the 
 glory which they have once seen. They live still, 
 so far as they really live, by the recollection of 
 that which has filled them with a noble passion. 
 
 The life of man is thus according to the high- 
 est thought of Greek philosophy remembered 
 Truth. Such an intuition of noble souls found 
 its confirmation and fulfilment in the Presence 
 John xvii. and in the word of the Lord : Thin is, He 
 says, the life eternal This is the life, and not 
 This is its condition, or its foundation, or its 
 portal, or its preparation This is t/ie life eternal, 
 tliat they may know know, such is the force of 
 the word, with a knowledge widening from hour to 
 hour under the discipline of experience and oppor- 
 tunity Thee the only true God, and Him whom 
 Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ. 
 
 Yes : the life of man is the knowledge of God, 
 the contemplation of Him Who is the Truth. 
 That is the message of Christ. But this know- 
 ledge lives and moves. It is not a dead thing 
 embalmed once for all in phrases of the school 
 which can be committed to memory. It is offered 
 ever fresh as time advances for reverent study in 
 the Person of the Word Incarnate. The 
 
 surest knowledge once gained cannot supersede 
 the necessity of unwearied, unceasing, inquiry.
 
 The Incarnation a subject for devout study. 85 
 
 No one can absolve himself from the duty of i. 
 spiritual thought. 
 
 The words which I have chosen for a text 
 present the duty to us with almost startling force. 
 The Mother of the Lord had received that direct, 
 personal, living, revelation of the purpose and the 
 working of God which none other could have : she 
 had acknowledged in the familiar strain of the 
 Magnificat the salvation which He had prepared Luke i. 
 through her for His people : she might well seem 
 to have been lifted far above the necessity of any 
 later teaching; but when the simple shepherds 
 told their story, a faint echo as we might think of 
 what she knew, she kept all these things pondering Lukeii. 19. 
 them in her heart, if haply they might shew a 
 little more of the great mystery of which she was 
 the minister : she kept them waiting and learning 
 during that long thirty years of silence, waiting Luke Hi. 
 and learning during that brief time of open labour, 
 from the first words at the Marriage Feast to the John ii. 
 last words from the Cross. 
 
 And shall we, brethren, when we think on 
 such an example, we with our restless and dis- 
 tracted lives, with our feeble and imperfect grasp 
 on Truth, be contented to repeat with indolent 
 assent a traditional confession ? Can we suppose 
 that the highest knowledge and the highest know- 
 ledge alone is to be gained without effort, without
 
 86 Christus Consummator. 
 
 i. preparation, without discipline, and by a simple 
 act of memory? Must the eye and the hand of 
 the artist be trained through long years to discern 
 and to portray subtle harmonies of form and 
 colour while that spiritual faculty by which we 
 enter on the unseen may be safely left unexercised 
 till some sudden emergency calls it into play? Is 
 it credible that the law of our nature, which adds 
 capacity to experience and joy to quest, is suddenly 
 suspended when we reach the loftiest field of man's 
 activity ? 
 
 To ask such questions, as if the answer could 
 be doubtful, is a reproach to our intelligence. To 
 ask them in the silence of the soul, as seeking to 
 feel their application, is a salutary discipline. We 
 lose more than we know because we do not 
 habitually ' meditate on the grandeur of our 
 Creed. True it is that the vision which 
 
 Plato imagined has been given to us as an abiding 
 possession under the conditions of earth. But 
 that the divine revelation may become the master 
 force of our whole being we must dwell upon it. 
 We must regard that most solemn Presence of the 
 John xiv. Father in Christ with lingering, loving, gaze till 
 each detail grows significant to us according to 
 the place which we occupy in the order of Provi- 
 dence. We must see it with our own eyes and 
 not another's, thankful for every help to better in-
 
 The Incarnation a subject for devout study. 87 
 
 sight which we have inherited or enjoyed, but rest- i. 
 ing neither in the treasure of truth which we have 
 received nor in our own past gains. The 
 
 sum of human experience grows visibly from age to 
 age ; the sum of personal experience grows visibly 
 from year to year; and the Truth ought to find 
 fresh fulfilment in every fact of life. 
 
 In this respect we must, I fear, condemn our- 
 selves of negligence. For if, as I assume, the 
 Gospel touches us, yet we do not labour further to 
 trace the lines of its infinite expansion. So it 
 comes to pass that we fail to gain a growing sense 
 of the obligations which it imposes, of the pre- 
 rogatives which it confirms, of the strength which it 
 brings, strength, prerogatives, obligations, limited 
 only by our capacity to apprehend and appropriate 
 them, for without controversy great is the mystery l Tim. Hi. 
 the revelation of godliness not a formula or a 
 statement but a living Person, even He Who was 
 manifested in tJie flesh, justified in tfte spirit, seen 
 of angels, preached among the nations, believed on 
 in the world, received up in glory. 
 
 Yes : great, inexpressibly great, is the mystery 
 of our faith ; and at this season when the trans- 
 cendent mystery, the transcendent revelation, is 
 once again specially brought before us, I desire, as I 
 may be enabled, to touch upon some points in 
 which it appears to me to concern us most nearly
 
 88 Christus Conmmmator. 
 
 i. as men, as fallen men, as men placed in a world of 
 marvellous complexity, as men busied with a life 
 of endless issues, to shew in other words a little 
 more fully how, as indicated last summer, a patient 
 contemplation of the Person and work of Christ 
 will enable us to meet with confidence and joy 
 the trials of a new age. 
 
 But before we enter on the consideration of 
 these four aspects of the Incarnation I wish by 
 way of introduction to indicate now the spirit, the 
 aim, the blessing of the work in which I invite 
 you to help me by your thoughts, your sympathy, 
 your prayers. 
 
 1. The spirit. In all that concerns the soul 
 we know only when we love, and we know as we 
 
 Hebr.xi.6. love. He who comes to God, we read, must believe 
 tlmt He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that 
 diligently seek Him. And more than this : he 
 must believe that every thought of tender service 
 and self-surrender, every aspiration towards a con- 
 scious fellowship with all created things, every 
 striving towards a truer unity, by which we are 
 stirred, corresponds in its essence with the infi- 
 nite perfection of Him in Whose image we are 
 made. He must interpret all that is noblest 
 in the soul as a foreshadowing of Divine reali- 
 ties. Thus Love springs out of Faith, 
 
 Hebr.xi.i. and is supported by it. Faith enables us to enter
 
 The Incarnation a subject for devout study. 89 
 
 on the unseen, to give reality to the fabrics of i. 
 hope. And Love, borne by faith, dimly sensible 
 of its power under the limitations of earth, rises 
 into that spiritual realm, and knows that all 
 things are possible to the love of God. 
 
 We shall then contemplate the signs of this 
 immeasurable love with the humblest reverence, 
 untroubled if we are unable to fit them together 
 perfectly under the forms of human thought. Nay 
 rather we shall rejoice that we cannot do so. Un- 
 reconciled antitheses are prophecies and promises 
 of a larger future : ' our failure is but a triumph's 
 evidence for the fulness of the days.' If 
 
 our Faith could find a complete and consistent 
 expression here it would be condemned. It 
 would not cover all the facts of life. The forms 
 of thought belong to this world only. The truth 
 of life, like man, like Christ Who is Himself 
 the Truth, belongs to two worlds. It is not 
 simply the determination of physical phenomena, 
 but the interpretation of the relation of man to 
 nature and to God. The heart has its own office 
 in the search for it. Not with the under- Bom. x. 
 
 standing, not with the reason, but with the heart 10 ' 
 man believeth ; and if ever our view becomes 
 clouded : if a thick darkness hides Him towards 
 Whom we strain our eyes : we shall recall for our 
 warning and for our chastening, humbled and yet
 
 90 Christus Consummator. 
 
 i. sustained by hope, the benediction which tells us 
 Matt. v. 8. that the pure in heart shall see God. 
 
 2. This then will be our spirit, love illumi- 
 nated by faith, attested by the heart. And it 
 follows at once that our aim will be vital and 
 not merely intellectual. We shall not strive to 
 gain any completeness of technical definition on 
 the doctrine of the Incarnation. We acknow- 
 ledge indeed that outlines are a necessity for 
 man's representation of the truth of things ; but 
 they are a concession to his weakness and a 
 symbol of it. There is no outline in nature, and 
 no form of words can adequately express a 
 spiritual reality. The soul uses the out- 
 
 line, the formula, as an occasion, an impulse, a 
 help ; but it brings from its own- treasure that 
 which quickens them. And in this work the soul 
 of the simplest, the most untutored, is at no 
 disadvantage. Its- chief instrument of spiritual 
 progress is not knowledge but love. 
 
 So we shall look upon the Incarnation, the 
 greatest conceivable thought, the greatest con- 
 ceivable fact, not that we may bring it within the 
 range of our present powers, not that we may 
 measure it by standards of this world, but that we 
 may learn from it a little more of the awful 
 grandeur of life, that by its help we may behold 
 once again that halo of infinity about common
 
 The Incarnation a subject for devout study. 91 
 
 things which seems to have vanished away, that i. 
 thinking on the phrase the Word became flesh we John i. 14. 
 may feel that in, beneath, beyond, the objects 
 which we see and taste and handle is a Divine 
 Presence, that lifting up our eyes to the Lord in 
 glory we may know that phenomena are not ends, 
 but signs only of that which is spiritually dis- 
 cerned. And, while we confess that clearness of 
 vision cannot be gained when we turn towards 
 such an object except by the loss of that which is 
 characteristic of it, as we look at the sun shorn 
 of its glory through a darkened glass or through 
 the thick mists of earth, it will be our joy to 
 place ourselves in that atmosphere of light which 
 transfigures all that it falls upon. 
 
 3. This will be our aim ; and no one can 
 have watched the tendencies of modern thought 
 without seeing that it answers to one of our sorest 
 needs. We are on the point of losing the sense of 
 the spiritual, the eternal, as a present reality, as 
 the only reality. Thought is not all : conduct is 
 not all : life is unspeakably impoverished if it is 
 unhallowed by the sanctities of reverence and 
 worship. 
 
 And, if we have felt one touch of the spirit 
 which should animate our contemplation of Christ 
 Born, Crucified, Ascended, for us ; if we have 
 realised one least fragment of the end to which
 
 92 Christus Consummator. 
 
 i. our work is directed, we shall know what the 
 blessing is : know what it is to see with faint and 
 trembling eyes depth below depth opening in the 
 poor and dull surface of the earth ; to see flashes 
 of great hope shoot across the weary trivialities 
 of business and pleasure ; to see active about us, 
 in the face of every scheme of selfish ambition, 
 
 Hebr. vi. powers of the age to come ; to see in the struggles 
 of the forlorn and distressed fragments of the life 
 which ' the poor man ' Christ Jesus lived ; to see 
 over all the inequalities of the world, its terrible 
 contrasts, its desolating crimes, its pride, its lust, 
 its cruelty, one overarching sign of God's purpose 
 
 Gen. x. 13. of redemption, broad as the sky and bright as the 
 sunshine ; to see in the Gospel a revelation of 
 love powerful even now to give a foretaste of the 
 unity of creation, powerful hereafter to realise it. 
 
 But, some will say, this blessing of faith, 
 even in its fullest power, still leaves unremoved 
 the evil, the sorrow, the suffering, the sin : the 
 sordid cares of want, the reckless indulgence of 
 wealth. True : but it leaves them only 
 
 as one element in life, the most obvious, the most 
 oppressive, but not the most enduring or the most 
 powerful. It is when the physical order is held 
 to be all, that life appears and must appear to be 
 hopeless. As it is we can wait. We have found 
 God in the world; found Him not in an Eden from
 
 The Incarnation a subject for devout study. 93 
 
 which we are banished, but in our world, taking i. 
 to Himself our infirmities and sicknesses ; and it Matt. viii. 
 is enough to remember that we have found Him. 
 We see little : but He sees all. 
 
 We can therefore as we reflect on the Incar- 
 nation discern again ' the glory which hath passed 
 from earth ' without disguising one dark trait. 
 We can recover with more than its first freshness 
 a sense of Divine beauty about us. And we need 
 the lesson in many ways. We need it, as I have 
 said, from the dominant forms of current thought, 
 and we need it from the conditions of life. As 
 
 years go on there is great danger lest we should 
 lose the ennobling faculty of wonder. We are 
 occupied with small cares and they become the 
 measure of our universe. Failures depress our 
 faith ; and disappointments dull our hope. Then 
 this great spectacle of sovereign love rises before 
 us, and the common things of earth are again 
 touched with a heavenly light and become to us 
 figures of the divine. Then wonder grows with 
 knowledge ; and though knowledge itself cannot 
 satisfy, it can lift the soul to God by disclosing 
 the infinite unknown. 
 
 At the same time the vision which elevates, 
 soothes and calms. Differences of earth vanish in 
 its presence. And if it be true that great duties 
 and little souls do not go well together ; it is no
 
 94 Christ us Consummator. 
 
 i. less true that little thoughts do not suit little 
 duties. It is in the fulfilment of simple routine 
 that we need more than anywhere the quickening 
 influence of the highest thought : and this the 
 truth of the Incarnation, an eternal, an abiding 
 truth, is able to bring to every Christian. Life 
 may for a moment seem to be poor, and mean 
 and commonplace, but when the reflection of this 
 glory falls upon it, our wavering faith can alone 
 dim its brightness. 
 
 So it is that we gain the final sense of the 
 correspondence of the Gospel with the powers, the 
 circumstances, the needs of man : so we rejoice to 
 recognise the truth which we could not have 
 discovered : so we find that our human language 
 is not false, and our human aspirations are not 
 illusory : so we place over all that is fleeting in 
 form and transitory in its presentment the con- 
 secration of an eternal destiny. 
 
 The issue will not be gained at once. But 
 each effort to interpret the signs of the Divine 
 working will leave us stronger for new endeavours. 
 Each space of quiet thought will bring us power 
 of deeper vision. ' We have ourselves,' as it has 
 been well said, ' as we use ourselves.' And just as 
 our minds wither and waste if they are engrossed 
 by sordid cares, so the thought of God in Christ 
 enlarges and purifies every faculty which is
 
 The Incarnation a subject for devout study. 95 
 
 occupied with it and lends something of its own i. 
 nobility to the poorest heart which gives it a 
 welcome. 
 
 But we must never forget the inexorable law of 
 God's love. He gives grace for grace. He gives John i. 16. 
 as His gifts are turned to service. He claims that 
 we should be His fellow- workers. We could 1 Cor. iii. 
 
 q 
 
 imagine no loftier title ; and no lower title would 
 answer to the purpose of our creation. We were 
 made to attain to the Divine likeness : made, that Gen. i. 26. 
 is, as we can now see, to realise each in the narrow 
 sphere of our fragmentary lives, each according to 
 the measure of our ability, the fact of the Incar- 
 nation, to live in the light of that vision of 
 absolute truth which has been opened to us, to 
 live by the growth of that knowledge of God 
 which He places within our reach through the 
 fulfilment of daily duties. 
 
 To us also the Christ has been given. Luke ii. 
 
 To us also the message of the angels has 
 been made known. 
 
 To us also the sign of the Saviour has been 
 fulfilled. 
 
 Happy are we then only happy if we 
 keep all these things and ponder them in our 
 hearts.
 
 II. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND THE 
 CREATION. 
 
 w.
 
 [He] made known unto us the mystery of his will, 
 according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him 
 unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all 
 things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things 
 upon the earth. EPH. i. 9.
 
 THE INCARNATION AND THE 
 CREATION. 
 
 rriHE conception which we form of God neces- n. 
 -*- sarily determines the view which we form of 
 the world and of life. This principle 
 
 holds true even when we recognise most fully that 
 our growing knowledge of the world and of life 
 quickens and enlarges our conception of God. 
 What then we ask characterises the Christian 
 conception of God ? To such a question we answer 
 at once that it is determined by the fact of the 
 Incarnation. In the beginning was the Word, and John i. l, 
 the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . 
 and the Word became flesh. This great 
 
 mystery, this great revelation, is for us the light p s. xxxvi. 
 in which we shall see light. It is evidently 
 inexhaustible in its teachings. It cannot be 
 completely interpreted by any one race, or by any 
 one age. As a fact of life it must become more 
 and more intelligible as experience and inquiry 
 reveal to us more completely the circumstances 
 and conditions of life. Each fresh result won 
 
 72
 
 100 Ghristus Gonsummator. 
 
 n. by patient research into the constitution of our 
 finite nature and of our sensible environment, 
 helps us to understand a little better that truth 
 which we have received, and therefore to apply it 
 with a little greater force to the problems of the 
 world. 
 
 In this respect it falls out that we can draw 
 strength and instruction from our very trials. 
 It is through difficulties fearlessly met that we are 
 led to wider knowledge. We condemn ourselves 
 to dead ignorance if we refuse to take account of 
 them. In the order of Providence it comes to 
 pass (may I not say it comes to pass by neces- 
 sity ?) that difficulties mark the direction of 
 progress. It is obvious that the answer 
 
 cannot be understood or effectively shaped till the 
 question has been sharply put. A new require- 
 ment evokes unexpectedly a latent force. Hence 
 it has happened in former times that the Truth 
 has been found to satisfy needs which had made 
 themselves felt in sadness and fear. The Faith 
 which is in a Life, which is a Life, has been proved 
 again and again to live itself, and to bring within 
 its range larger fields of thought and larger 
 promises of hope. And as it has been, 
 
 so it will be still. The feelings, the desires, the 
 movements of an age of our own age are not 
 wholly in error. They are the manifestations.
 
 The Incarnation and the Creation. 101 
 
 often troubled and obscured by man's selfishness, n. 
 
 of a Divine will. Through these, as we believe, 
 
 God is leading us by His Spirit, sent in the Name John xiv. 
 
 of His Son, to find a fuller meaning in the 26< 
 
 Creed which our fathers have transmitted to us to 
 
 use in the busy fields of action and not to hide in Luke xix. 
 
 20 
 
 the barren security of a treasure-house. 
 
 We inquire therefore without mistrust whether 
 there is any tendency of our own times which 
 seems likely to suggest to us fruitful question- 
 ings. For my own part I find such a 
 tendency in that striving after some kind of 
 unity which has been stirred in many directions 
 by a novel sense of our connexion one with 
 another, and of our connexion with the material 
 world. No one can doubt the power of this 
 fascinating and generous impulse. No one can 
 overlook its perils. Influential teachers 
 persuade us on the one side to follow after the 
 unity of Naturalism, which limits all knowledge 
 to phenomena bound together by an inexorable 
 'sequence: on the other side, to lull ourselves to 
 rest in the unity of Pantheism, which presents all 
 things indifferently as the manifestation of one 
 essence alone truly existent. 
 
 Such fictitious unities, however, can never bring 
 peace. They take no account of our consciousness 
 of responsibility, incompleteness, disharmony :
 
 adv.Lef. 
 
 102 Christus Gonsummator. 
 
 they take no real account of death. But 
 
 if they are in themselves illusory, they do, I 
 believe, fulfil the office which I have assigned to 
 the spirit of the age. They direct us to aspects of 
 the Incarnation which have not yet become the 
 heritage of the Church, to visions of great hope 
 through which we shall be enabled to meet the 
 temper of doubt among us, which is at once for- 
 midable by its sincerity and significant by its form. 
 They direct us, I repeat, to unrecognised 
 aspects of the Incarnation. For it is no disloyalty 
 to the past to maintain that the view of the 
 Incarnation which was gained in the 4th or 5th 
 or 13th or 16th century was not final. Our 
 fathers by the teaching of the Holy Spirit saw the 
 Truth, but they did not see all the Truth. And 
 it is, I think, impossible to look at modern 
 writings without perceiving that the teaching on 
 Christ's Person which is current in the most 
 reverent schools falls short in many ways of the 
 living fulness of the Bible. At one time 
 
 the logical development of His true divinity 
 leaves room only for a shadow of manhood, as 
 unsubstantial as the phantom which already 
 H'aZ. usurped His place when in a familiar phrase His 
 
 another time the loving portraiture of His true 
 humanity places Him before us as a man among
 
 The Incarnation and the Creation. 103 
 
 men, as one of many, as a part among parts ; and n. 
 not, according to His own self-chosen title, as the 
 Son of man in Whom all the separate endowments 
 of sex, and race and age co-exist in absolute 
 harmony. In both ways we fail to grasp 
 
 the promise of unity which lies in the true view 
 of His Person. For in Holy Scripture He is 
 shewn to stand essentially in some ineffable yet 
 real connexion with all finite being. In Him, and Col. i. 16. 
 through Him, and unto Him were all things made. 
 He is the ' first-born,' ' the beginning ' of all crea- 
 tion. Man was formed in His image; and in 
 Him men find their consummation. The 
 
 forces of Nature, so to speak, are revealed to us in 
 the Bible as gathered together and crowned in 
 man, and the diversities of men as gathered 
 together and crowned in the Son of man ; and so 
 we are encouraged to look forward to the end, to a 
 unity of which every imaginary unity on earth is 
 a phantom or a symbol, when the will of the 
 Father shall be accomplished and He shall sum up 
 all things in Christ all things and not simply all Eph. i. 10. 
 persons both the things in the heavens and the 
 things upon the earth. 
 
 If now we endeavour to determine the ultimate 
 cause of the defectiveness of the modern teaching 
 on the Person of Christ of which I have spoken, 
 we shall find it, I believe, most plainly shewn in
 
 104 Christus Consummator. 
 
 ii. the prevalent opinion as to the ground of the 
 Incarnation. The Incarnation is commonly made 
 to depend upon the Fall. And the whole tenour 
 of revelation, as I conceive, leads us to regard 
 the Incarnation as inherently involved in the 
 Creation. The first Gospel is not the word of 
 Gen. iii. consolation : The seed of the woman shall bruise 
 the serpent's head, but the word of the Divine 
 Gen. i. counsel : Let us make man in our image, after our 
 2 1? ' likeness, followed by the word of its initial accom- 
 plishment, So God created man in His own image : 
 in the image of God created He him. 
 
 In this august declaration of God's purpose 
 and God's work we have set before us, clear beyond 
 controversy, the primal endowment and the final 
 goal of humanity. We are taught that man 
 received, received inalienably as man, a fitness for 
 gaining, through growth and discipline and con- 
 tinuous benediction, union with God. God's 
 image was given to him that he might gain God's 
 likeness. This original capacity of man 
 
 was the measure of the love of God for His 
 creature. Sin could not increase it : nothing less 
 than personal union with God could fulfil it. The 
 fitness and the necessity of the Incarnation exist 
 therefore from the moment when man was 
 made. The Incarnation, in other words, 
 
 when we use the term in the most general sense,
 
 The Incarnation and the Creation. 105 
 
 apart from every thought of suffering and hu- n. 
 miliation, corresponds with the perfection of man 
 as he was constituted at first, and not merely 
 with the restoration of man who had missed his 
 end. Homo particeps Dei Man made partaker 
 of God is the satisfaction, 'the only possible 
 satisfaction, of Homo capax Dei Man capable of 
 receiving God. The marvel is that the purpose of 
 creation was wrought out in spite of that wilful 
 self-assertion of the creature which might have 
 seemed to have fatally thwarted it. 
 
 Brethren, if you have in any degree followed 
 me and the thoughts which I have desired to 
 suggest are rather strange and unfamiliar than 
 intrinsically difficult if you have felt, however 
 dimly, what this Gospel of Creation is, I do not 
 fear that you will think that I have directed your 
 attention to fantastic or idle speculations. When a 
 thousand hearts wait for some voice of encourage- 
 ment, who would dare to beguile them with subtle 
 fancies ? Nay, rather, it is because the truth on 
 which I have touched, the truth on which I pray 
 you to meditate, seems to me to be intensely 
 practical that I have striven to set it before you. 
 For me at least the thought of the predestined 
 humanity of the Eternal Word, the Son of God, as 
 the archetype of humanity, throws light, growing 
 light, upon some of those points of the Faith,
 
 106 Christus Consummator. 
 
 n. where many of us feel the darkness to be most 
 oppressive. 
 
 It throws light upon the most solemn mystery 
 of the Being of God. It helps us to understand 
 how finite being was so ordered as to convey to a 
 creature formed in the image of God a knowledge 
 of God's nature and will, and thus to fit him to 
 become a living and conscious shrine of His glory. 
 It keeps God near to us in the fulness of our 
 whole constitution. It teaches us to 
 
 welcome and to use the imperfect conclusions of 
 that Naturalism which offers a partial homage to 
 the majestic progress of the physical order. It 
 confirms the splendid visions which lend an 
 unreal beauty to Pantheism by pointing to the 
 
 l Cor. xv. end when God shall be all in all. 
 
 It throws light upon the broken and chequered 
 sum of human existence. It helps us to under- 
 stand how the scattered fragments in which man's 
 potential endowments have hitherto been realised 
 combine to form a whole. There is a law, there is 
 a Head from the first. There is no absolute 
 separation of men in the complex variety of their 
 functions. Men, so to speak, furnish the 
 
 manifold elements through which (in the language 
 
 Eph. i. 23. of St Paul) a body of Christ is shaped; just as the 
 world furnishes the elements through which man 
 himself finds expression for his character.
 
 The Incarnation and the Creation. 107 
 
 It throws light on the conception of personality. n. 
 It helps us to understand how the self-assertion of 
 the finite is sin and death ; and how the complete 
 self-surrender of love preserves and fulfils that 
 which is truly individual, by delivering it from 
 the weakness of isolation, by consecrating it to 
 common service, by incorporating it in Him Who 
 is the Life. Thus directed we can see John xi\ 
 
 /> 
 
 that all the differences of men, so far as they 
 correspond with a true growth, contribute to the 
 manifestation of the infinite perfection of the 
 Son of man. 
 
 It throws light upon the connexion of man and 
 nature. It helps us to understand how every 
 discovery which encourages us to see an order in 
 the unfolding of all things confirms the teaching 
 of revelation on the Divine method and the 
 Divine end : how the division, the differentiation 
 of parts call it as we will, which culminates in 
 man, points forward to a unity as well as backward : 
 how the restoration of unity to mankind carries 
 with it the restoration of unity to finite being. 
 
 It throws light, yet once again, upon the 
 mystery of the future. It helps us to understand 
 how that existence to which we look forward is 
 not a mere indefinite continuance of divided lives, 
 in which each one dwells apart, but some higher 
 type of a common life : a life in Christ : a life felt ^ g al - m -
 
 108 Christus Consummator. 
 
 . in the fulness of personal fruition to be His life to 
 which all in due measure offer that which is 
 theirs : a life which thrills through each least 
 member of the spiritual body with the intense and 
 untiring joy of an absolute harmony. 
 
 It throws light, as I hope to shew next Sunday, 
 upon the deep truths of the Atonement, upon the 
 fulfilment of the destiny of man fallen. But not 
 to enter on this subject now, I cannot but 
 think that the idea of ' the Gospel of Creation ' 
 has already been shewn to be fruitful in great 
 thoughts in relation to man as he was made by 
 God. We welcome it, we keep it in our 
 
 hearts, we ponder it; and little by little there takes 
 shape before us a vision of the unity of nature in 
 man, and of the unity of men in Christ, which 
 satisfies desires that at present shew themselves 
 importunately urgent. As we look and look, send- 
 ing our souls with unwearied, unsatisfied delight 
 through the infinities of time and space, there is, 
 if I may so express myself, offered for our con- 
 templation first an unfolding through the Divine 
 creative love, and then an ingathering, an infolding, 
 through the Divine perfective (or, as it is in fact, 
 redemptive) love. We see, inscribed upon 
 
 the age-long annals in which the prophetic history 
 of the world and of humanity has been written, 
 
 X1> the . sentence of inextinguishable hope, ' From
 
 The Incarnation and the Creation. 109 
 
 God unto God.' We see when we look back upon n. 
 the manifestation of the Divine plan that the 
 order which we trace nature, humanity, Christ 
 corresponds inversely with our earnest expecta- 
 tion of its fulfilment Christ, the sons of God, Rom. viii. 
 nature. We see, in short, while we thus 
 
 regard the universe, as we must do, under the 
 limitation of succession, from first to last a 
 supreme harmony underlying all things which 
 even sin cannot destroy. As yet, it is true, we 
 see only in part, through a glass, in a riddle, but l Cor. xiii. 
 under this aspect we do see enough to make 
 labour hopeful, to make thought consistent, and to 
 bring every object which we perceive or feel 
 within the scope of love. 
 
 How can it be otherwise ? We all know how 
 the astronomers of the middle ages were baffled 
 by continually increasing perplexities as long as 
 they endeavoured to refer the motions of the 
 heavenly bodies to a central earth. When once 
 the sun was taken for the centre all became 
 clear, and the irregularities which remained proved 
 the fertile source of later discoveries. So it is 
 with Theology. Looking to the Incarnation as 
 the crown of Creation we have found the true 
 centre of the system in which we are set to work, 
 even God and not man, love and not sin, the 
 Creation which was the expression of the Father's
 
 110 Christus Consummator. 
 
 n. will, and not the Fall which was alien from 
 it. Under the action of that central 
 
 force of the Divine love the Incarnation reveals 
 to us the essential possibilities and endowments 
 of each separate life. It lifts us out of ourselves, 
 above ourselves, that so we may find our truest 
 selves in Him, Who has come to us that we may 
 Col. i. 16. come to Him, for Whom we were made and Who 
 for us became flesh. In this double truth, 
 
 which is one truth, we have in the face of things 
 seen and temporal the test and the pledge of the 
 eternal. All that truly is is the gift of God, 
 summed up in His first and last gift of Himself. 
 
 With bowed heads and open hearts may we 
 offer ourselves we can do no more and we dare 
 do no less to the action of His love in and for 
 which He created us. For us the nobility of 
 freedom lies in the sense of dependence. For 
 us the fulness of strength lies in the simplicity of 
 Faith. We gaze for an instant on the 
 
 Majesty within the veil that we may go forth 
 
 Ps. civ. 23. again into the world, to our work and to our 
 labour, and still bear about with us the strong 
 
 Heb. vi. 5; assurance that the powers of the heavenly order 
 are placed within our reach ; that above the clouds 
 and darkness which beset our path He is throned 
 Who has borne our nature to the right hand of
 
 The Incarnation and the Creation. Ill 
 
 God ; that in many parts and in many fashions, n. 
 through sufferings and chastisements, the Divine Heb< * 
 purpose is being fulfilled ; that behind the veils of 
 sense, which perplex and distract us, burns the 
 serene glory of the Divine Presence ; that beyond 
 the spectacle of failures and conflicts which flow 
 from selfishness, glows the prospect of a holy 
 unity passing knowledge a holy unity which 
 shall hereafter crown and fulfil creation as one 
 revelation of Infinite Love, when the Father's 
 will is accomplished and He has summed up 
 all things in Christ, the things in the heavens 
 and the things upon earth.
 
 III. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND THE FALL.
 
 It was the good pleasure of t/ie FatJier that in Him 
 should all the fulness dwell ; and through Him to reconcile 
 all things unto Himself, having made peace through the 
 blood of His Cross ; through Him., I say, whether things upon 
 the earth, or things in the heavens. 
 
 COL. i. 19, 20.
 
 THE INCARNATION AND THE FALL. 
 
 ~\\ T^E have seen already that the Divine record in. 
 
 * of Creation is indeed a Gospel, a revelation 
 of the purpose of God's love for humanity. We have 
 seen that the order of finite being is, as it is made 
 known to us, fitted to be a manifestation of points 
 in the character of God, leading up to the mani- 
 festation of Himself. We have seen that man was 
 made capable of union with God, and that the 
 possession of that capacity as a Divine endowment 
 implies a promise of its satisfaction. We 
 
 have seen that if, with our weak and disordered 
 powers, we endeavour now to imagine what would 
 have been the normal course of unfallen humanity 
 towards its glorious goal, we must think of the 
 happy and complete realisation of every potential 
 energy of our nature through the discipline of a 
 life relatively perfect, though fragmentary ; for so 
 the Divine likeness would have found fulfilment in 
 
 82
 
 116 Christus Consummator. 
 
 m. many parts: so at last the parts would have 
 found unity in Him in Whose image man was 
 made. We have seen that the conceiv- 
 
 ableness of the Incarnation lies in the thought of 
 what man was originally made, and not in what he 
 became through his self-assertion. We have seen 
 that this Gospel of Creation is able to illuminate 
 dark mysteries of the present and of the future, 
 to disclose new depths for our contemplation in 
 the nature of God and in the nature of man, to 
 open dim foregleams of a unity which passes all 
 understanding. 
 
 But while our eyes rest on the splendid vision, 
 we are forced to ask whether it is indeed for us : 
 whether we have not lost our birthright and our 
 blessing beyond recall : whether the destiny of 
 man can still be accomplished when he instinc- 
 tively shrinks from Him in Whose Presence is 
 life? 
 
 We all, I say, ask such questions when we 
 regard the contradictions in our souls. 
 
 For everyone recognises in himself the two 
 conflicting truths which are expressed in the narra- 
 tive of the Fall : the power of evil and the prero- 
 gative of personal responsibility. There 
 is we feel a ' baseness in our blood,' and we feel 
 also that we have embodied the corruption ' by our 
 fault, by our own fault, by our own great fault.'
 
 The Incarnation and the Fall. 117 
 
 The tendency indeed is our inheritance, but we in. 
 have made the issues our own by deed, we are 
 actually, and we know ourselves to be, guilty, 
 enthralled, alienated from God. We look 
 
 around us, and we see the double sentence of our 
 own consciences written on a larger scale in the 
 crimes and judgments of classes and nations, in 
 the deeds of selfish violence which betray a com- 
 mon taint, and in the clear, unquestioning appeal 
 of suffering souls to the majesty of a violated 
 law. 
 
 What shall we say then ? Is there for sinful 
 men, for sinful humanity, forgiveness, redemption, 
 reconciliation : a forgiveness which not only remits 
 the debt but also removes the consequences which 
 the debt has impressed upon the character: a 
 redemption which not only rescues the captive 
 from his oppressor but also inspires him with the 
 vigour of freedom : a reconciliation which not only 
 withdraws the barrier against the outflow of the 
 love of God, but also opens the frozen springs of 
 love in man ? Or, is the evil which we see and 
 feel irremediable ? 
 
 We have heard indeed and we have dwelt with 
 wonder on the primal purpose of God to sum up Eph. i. 10. 
 all things in Christ. But is that all ? if so, we ask 
 again, how can this purpose apply to us, being 
 what we are? St Paul seems to have
 
 118 Christus Consummator. 
 
 in. asked himself the same question ; and he has 
 answered it for us. It was, he says, the good 
 
 Col. i. 19 f. pleasure of the Father through [The Son of His Love] 
 to reconcile all things unto Himself, having made 
 peace through the blood of His cross. It was the 
 purpose of God ' to reconcile ' and not only ' to 
 sum up '; ' to reconcile all things through Christ ', 
 by the efficacy of His action, and not only 'to sum 
 up all things in Christ ' by the embracing energy 
 of His Nature ; to make peace where confusion 
 and conflict had found entrance ; to make peace 
 by blood, by the outpouring of a consecrated life 
 given for the life of the world. Sin, in 
 
 other words, did not alter the Divine purpose, 
 but it modified the mode of its fulfilment. 
 
 In part we can understand this. Man did not 
 
 Gen. ix. 9. lose the image of God by the Fall. His essential 
 nature still remained capable of union with God, 
 but it was burdened and hampered. The Word 
 therefore could still become flesh, but if in His 
 infinite compassion He was pleased to realise this 
 fellowship of the Divine and human, He took to 
 Himself naturally, if we may so speak, humanity 
 with its immeasurable obligations, life with its 
 untold temptations and sorrows. In this 
 
 there is nothing arbitrary, nothing which is not 
 illustrated by universal experience, nothing which 
 is not in accordance with the actual constitution
 
 The Incarnation and the Fall. 119 
 
 of the world. By becoming man the Word ac- in. 
 cepted the uttermost consequences of human exist- 
 ence : by becoming the Son of man, the Head, the 
 representative of the race, He embraced them in 
 their widest range. 
 
 In part, I repeat, we can understand this. We 
 can understand how Christ the Word become 
 flesh could suffer. 
 
 But some one will say, ' True : but if we allow 
 that Christ could and did suffer : if we allow that 
 men are bound one to another by the consequences 
 of descent and the effects of intercourse : that 
 they were so made as to rejoice and to weep 
 together : that this is true socially and individually, 
 true of states and of citizens : if we allow that 
 Christ, by becoming man, entered on the accumu- 
 lated heritage of human woes of His own will ; 
 yet my chief difficulty is untouched. How can 
 another's suffering avail for my offence ? How 
 can punishment be at once vicarious and just ? 
 And perhaps he will add, 'I fairly claim an 
 answer to my question. God did not refuse to 
 accept the pleading of Abraham, which was based 
 upon the human apprehension of righteousness ; 
 and He will not refuse to listen to our inquiry 
 to-day ; when we too say, Shall not the Judge of Gen. xviii. 
 all the earth do right?' 
 
 Yes, brethren, I at once admit that this, which
 
 120 Christus Consummator. 
 
 in. is indeed the question of questions for us, ought to 
 be met. And when I said last Sunday that it is 
 through our difficulties honestly stated and faced 
 that God is pleased to guide us to fuller truth : 
 when I said that under this aspect the character- 
 istic thoughts of an age become articulate voices 
 through the living interpretation of the Spirit ; I 
 was thinking not least of this question. For of 
 all the directions in which the tendency towards 
 unity, of which I spoke, has found expression, that 
 which has led to the apprehension of social unity 
 is perhaps the most fertile in suggestions for our 
 own needs. Fifty years ago the term 
 
 'solidarity' and the idea which it conveys were 
 alike strange or unknown. We had not appre- 
 hended in any living way that we are, as St Paul 
 Bom. xii. says, literally members one of another, as men and 
 nations. It was then fashionable to regard a 
 state as an aggregation of individuals bound to- 
 gether by considerations of interest or pleasure. 
 But we have now learnt in some degree, and 
 we are learning better from year to year, that 
 the family and not the individual is the unit of 
 human life : that the nation is a larger family : 
 that humanity is the ultimate family : that in all 
 these the fundamental relations represented by 
 parents, brothers and sisters, children, repeat 
 themselves on different scales and offer final types
 
 The Incarnation and the Fall. 121 
 
 of order and progress : that we and our fathers and in. 
 our posterity have been and must be born sons 
 and citizens, heirs and stewards of wealth, physical, 
 moral, spiritual, which no isolated effort could 
 have accumulated ; that the family, the nation, 
 the race, are living wholes which cannot be broken 
 up by any effort of individual will. We 
 
 have learnt, in some degree, and we are learning 
 better from year to year, to keep at the same time 
 the humblest sense of our dependence and the 
 liveliest sense of our liberty : to realise as a moral 
 power the feeling of the unbroken continuity of 
 life through the past and the present and the 
 future : to acknowledge not only the necessity but 
 also the blessing of suffering for others: to feel 
 that St Paul has revealed the power and the 
 limit of sympathy when he tells us in the same 
 paragraph: Bear ye one another's burdens... and Gal. vi. 
 each man shall bear his own load. Yes : love can ' ' 
 lighten the weight of the suffering which it can- 
 not remove : it can transform what it cannot 
 destroy. We have learnt, that is, in some 
 
 degree, and are learning better from year to year, 
 the one thought which, as far as I can see, makes 
 it possible to believe the Gospel in its fulness, and 
 not to close the eyes upon the facts of the world, 
 the miseries of an African war, the burden of an 
 Indian Empire.
 
 122 Christus Consiimmator. 
 
 m. Taught in this great school of domestic, 
 
 national, human fellowship, we are coming to 
 understand, as we could not do before, that sin 
 affects not the individual only but the race, and 
 that the just consequences of sin in every form 
 answer to a law of holy love, that they include, as 
 we regard them in parts, the ideas of reparation, 
 of chastisement, of cleansing, which to our eyes 
 are realised in parts slowly and in unexpected 
 ways : to understand that in the conduct of our 
 disordered life suffering contributes to the hallow- 
 ing of man and of men : to understand that to 
 noble and pure souls some imperfect yet real 
 power of restoration is given, proportioned to 
 their knowledge and their sympathy, and their 
 
 Hebr. v. 2. holiness to their capacity for entering into the 
 hearts of the ignorant, the weak and the erring, 
 and for calling out in them the response of peni- 
 tent devotion : to understand that in the unity of 
 
 Matt. viii. the body it is possible for one member to take 
 away the infirmity and disease of another by 
 taking them to himself. 
 
 Taught in this great school we are coming to 
 understand why the human instinct has always 
 rejoiced in the stories of uncalculating self-devotion 
 which brighten the annals of every people : why 
 our hearts respond to the words of a Chinese king, 
 contemporary with Jacob, who said to his people,
 
 The Incarnation and the Fall 123 
 
 ' When guilt is found anywhere in you who occupy in. 
 ' the myriad regions, let it rest on me the One 
 'man'; and faithful to his prayer said again, when 
 a human victim was demanded to avert a drought, 
 ' If a man must be the victim, I will be he: 1 ' why 
 we do not think lives wasted which are offered in 
 heroic prodigality to witness to a great principle : 
 why the blood of martyrs is indeed seed, not idly 
 spilt upon the ground, but made the vital source 
 of a teeming harvest : we are coming to under- 
 stand, in a word, what is the true meaning of that 
 phrase ' vicarious suffering ' which has brought at 
 other times sad perplexity to anxious minds ; how 
 it excludes everything that is arbitrary, fictitious, 
 unnatural, external in human relationships : how 
 it expresses the highest energy of love which 
 takes a friend's sorrows into the loving heart and 
 taking them by God's grace transfigures them, 
 satisfying every claim of righteousness, justifying 
 every instinct of hope, quickening the spirit of 
 self-surrender, offering within the sphere of com- 
 mon life a faint image of forgiveness, of redemp- 
 tion, of reconciliation. 
 
 So we are brought back to our great question, 
 Can there be just forgiveness, redemption, recon- 
 ciliation for sin ? So I think we are prepared to 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East : The Shu king : The announce- 
 ment of Thang, p, 91, and note.
 
 124 Christus Consummator. 
 
 m. answer it. We have found that the idea of the 
 unity of humanity which underlies the Bible is 
 brought home to us in daily intercourse : we have 
 found that ' suffering is the fuel of love ', the means 
 of its perfecting, purifying action alike on him 
 who suffers and on him for whom the suffering is 
 borne : we have found that the measure of love's 
 restorative efficacy in common human intercourse 
 lies in knowledge, sympathy, holiness. Let 
 
 then the knowledge be complete: let the sympathy 
 reach to every creature : let the holiness be abso- 
 lute : and there is provision for the atonement of 
 fallen humanity ; there is a propitiation for sins 
 co-extensive with their presence ; there is a force 
 of all most prevailing to kindle the activity of 
 Faith. 
 
 Each of these conditions was satisfied when the 
 John i. 14. Word became flesh ; and now we can see how the 
 Gospel of Creation meets our misgivings. Christ 
 the Son of God, the Son of man, took to Him- 
 self a nature which from the first it was His 
 good pleasure to crown. In Him every scattered 
 fragment of manhood found its proper Head. Not 
 one wrong through all its sad development was 
 outside His penetrating knowledge. Not one 
 least sorrow was alien from His spontaneous 
 sympathy. Not one proud boast of self-sufficiency 
 could maintain itself in the burning light of His
 
 The Incarnation and the Fall. 125 
 
 holiness. In Him men were able to recognise the in. 
 harmonious maturity of every human endowment. 
 In Him each man was able to recognise the 
 consecration of his peculiar gift. In Him every 
 single personality finds its true self. 
 
 Thus we can see, even if it be in a riddle, 
 a little more of the meaning of the Incarna- 
 tion. Christ fulfilled perfectly the destiny 
 of man, fulfilled through suffering the destiny of 
 man fallen, realising at every stage and through 
 death itself union with God : there lies for the 
 whole race in Him the promise of forgive- 
 ness. Christ bore to the uttermost, even 
 to the Cross, the consequences of human sin, and 
 gave His blood to men as the power of a new life : 
 there lies for the whole race the means of redemp- 
 tion. Christ shewed the Father's love 
 with such persuasiveness of tender mercy as to 
 move every awakened conscience to glad self-sur- 
 render : there lies for the whole race the potency 
 of reconciliation. 
 
 And in all this there is nothing which offends 
 the most delicate susceptibility of natural right- Heb. ii. 10 
 eousness ; nothing which does not find an antici- ( pvn 
 pating welcome in the homage which is joyously 
 rendered to self-sacrifice ; nothing which does not 
 find prophetic foreshadowing in the beneficent 
 influence which the devotion of one man exer-
 
 126 Christus Consummator. 
 
 in. cises over the hearts of others, to inspire and to 
 chasten. 
 
 Now therefore at last we can see how the 
 mystery of Redemption corresponds to the mystery 
 Bom. v. of the Fall. If by the trespass of the one the 
 many died, much more 'much more' did the 
 grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one 
 man Jesus Christ abound unto the many. On the 
 one side we deplore our corruption, and we confess 
 our guilt. On the other side we see in Christ 
 the perfection of that towards which we strain, a 
 perfection which He offers to us. God grant that 
 we may take it by the faith which realises our 
 fellowship with Him. For forgiveness, redemption, 
 reconciliation, are not blessings which Christ 
 bestows apart from Himself, but in Himself: in 
 the humanity which He has created afresh and 
 cleanses by His blood. 
 
 Oh, my friends, what an inexhaustible motive 
 for labour lies in the revelation of one humanity, 
 one in Creation, one in Redemption, one poten- 
 tially in Christ. We cannot, if we would, gain 
 our happiness alone : we cannot be saved 
 alone. There is a wonderful Indian le- 
 
 gend which tells how a Buddhist saint had reach- 
 ed by successive lives of sacrifice the stage next 
 to Nirvana. At that point he could by one effort
 
 The Incarnation and the Fall. 127 
 
 of will obtain for himself eternal and untroubled in. 
 calm. But when the decision had to be made he set 
 aside the tempting prize, and chose rather to live 
 again in the world while conflict could bear fruit. 
 ' Not,' he said, ' till the last soul on every earth 
 and in every hell has found peace can I enter on 
 my rest.' 
 
 Do we not feel the Christian truth, which is 
 enshrined in the splendid story? Not for our- 
 selves only, as some peculiar and private blessing, 
 is the Gospel given, the Gospel of Creation, the 
 Gospel of the Word Incarnate. It is for the world; 
 and it is laid upon us, upon each one of us, to 
 realise what Christ has wrought for men, to claim 
 for Him the fruits of His victory. We John xvi. 
 
 look upon the terrible spectacle of remediable ' 
 evils thronging about us on every side: we look 
 upon the Cross which has been made before our Gal. iii. l : 
 eyes an altar and a throne : we look upon the 10 e . j^' 
 apostolic words which interpret the Father's pur- *" 32 - 
 pose to reconcile all things unto Himself through 
 the Son of His love. And our hearts accept the 
 message of the will of God, as when from the 
 great host at Clermont one voice welcomed the 
 call to the first Crusade, and we too say, welcoming 
 the call to fulfil Christ's triumph, ' It is the will 
 of God.' That old call was to win by force of arms, 
 through violence and desolation and slaughter, an
 
 128 Christus Consummator. 
 
 m. empty sepulchre: the call which we hear is to win 
 by patience and love, through self-devotion and 
 sacrifice, the living Body of Christ, the Church of 
 redeemed humanity which He has purchased 
 
 Acts xx. with His own blood. ' Deus vult ! Deus 
 
 28 ' vult.' 'It is the will of God.'
 
 IV. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND NATURE. 
 
 w.
 
 For the earliest expectation of the creation waiteth for 
 the revealing of the sons of God.... For we know that tlie 
 lohole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together 
 until noiv. 
 
 ROM. VIIL 19, 22.
 
 THE INCARNATION AND NATURE. 
 
 TT was my object last Sunday to shew how one iv. 
 -*- of the most characteristic thoughts of our age, 
 that of the living membership of man with man 
 and of nation with nation, the thought of the 
 solidarity of humanity, which we have ourselves 
 seen to take shape among us and to enter into 
 popular aspirations, illuminates two of the greatest 
 mysteries of our Faith, the mystery of the Fall 
 and the mystery of the Atonement : how it throws 
 light upon the meaning of suffering and upon the 
 power of love : how it reconciles the instinct 
 which affirms the absolute supremacy of righte- 
 ousness, and the instinct which rejoices in the 
 triumphs of self-devotion : how it gives to us in a 
 form which the heart can embrace that con- 
 ception of a common human life, in which the 
 sense of corruption and the sense of responsibility, 
 the acknowledgment of the fulfilment of man's 
 
 92
 
 132 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. destiny and the power of personally appropriating 
 the virtue of Christ's work, are brought together 
 in a vital harmony : how it offers to us a motive 
 for labour which is able to consecrate every faculty 
 and a spring of encouragement which is sufficient 
 to refresh every fainting heart : how it inspires us 
 to write over the wavering expression of the 
 noblest ambition by which we have ever been 
 stirred, of the loftiest hope to which we have ever 
 reached forward, the sentence of Divine assurance, 
 ' It is the will of God.' 
 
 All this seems to me to follow, to follow neces- 
 sarily, from bringing the truth of the union 
 of man with man, which great modern teachers 
 have made known to us, into connexion with the 
 central fact of the Incarnation. But the 
 
 same masters have taught us also another truth. 
 They have enabled us to realise, with a vividness 
 impossible in earlier times, not only our union one 
 with another but also our common union with 
 nature. By this work they have doubled 
 
 our debt to them, though for a time they seemed 
 to have effaced the landmarks of man's heritage. 
 They have in the end moved us to enter with 
 surer trust a little further into the depths of 
 the Scriptural doctrine of Creation, to welcome 
 as sober truth the language which claims the 
 9. ' service of life from mountains and all hills,
 
 The Incarnation and Nature. 133 
 
 fruitful trees and all cedars, to find that in all iv. 
 that is truly human, in all that is eternal, the 
 thoughts of the written Word, if we go back to it 
 with faithful, loving, humble, hearts, are ever 
 beyond and before us, quickening us with grander 
 aspirations, strengthening us with larger hopes, 
 embracing in their wider range the last results 
 which have been won by others from the study of 
 the world. 
 
 Man then, I assume, is bound as closely on 
 one side to earth and the creatures of earth as 
 he is bound on the other side to heaven. So 
 he appears in the Bible as the crown and king 
 of Nature. He is neither above nor separated 
 from the other works of God. Like a true 
 king he delights in fellowship with his subjects. 
 His isolation from the realm committed to him 
 is a doctrine of heathen philosophy and not of 
 Judaism or of Christianity. In revelation 
 
 no less than in science man is the representative 
 of Creation, who gathers up into himself and 
 combines in the most perfect form the various 
 manifestations of life and being which are seen 
 dispersed tentatively, as it were, through other 
 orders. 
 
 This fact, when once it is admitted, can be 
 used and has been used in two opposite ways. 
 Some have found in it the occasion for degrading
 
 134 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. man to the level of their superficial estimate of 
 the material world. Others, with a wider hope, 
 have seen in the relation of matter to man indi- 
 cations, prophecies, promises, of some larger life 
 than we have yet been able to conceive. 
 
 There can be no doubt to which alternative 
 observation and inquiry are rapidly converging. 
 'Under one of its aspects,' writes Mr Herbert 
 Spencer in his most recent volume, 'scientific 
 progress is a gradual transfiguration of Nature. 
 Where ordinary perception saw perfect simplicity 
 it reveals great complexity ; where there appeared 
 absolute inertness it discloses intense activity; 
 and in what appears mere vacancy it finds a 
 marvellous play of forces... The conception to 
 which [the explorer of Nature] tends is much less 
 that of a Universe of dead matter than that of a 
 Universe everywhere alive...' 
 
 Such a calm and solemn summary of the 
 latest results of unbiassed research helps us, I 
 repeat, to understand the words of St Paul in 
 Rom. viii. which he tells us that the earnest expectation of 
 the Creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons 
 of God., for we know that the whole Creation, 
 groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now, 
 words which stand alone in the Bible as a plain 
 enunciation of facts of overwhelming magni- 
 ficence : words which now at length are becoming
 
 The Incarnation and Nature. 135 
 
 intelligible to us in their vast import : words iv. 
 which distinctly lay down as elements of our 
 spiritual consolation the dependence of Creation 
 upon man both in his fall and in his restoration, 
 the vital unity of the whole visible order which 
 we are at present able to contemplate, the Divine 
 law of progress by which all that is imperfect 
 moves towards a second birth. 
 
 The expression of these truths is indeed, as I 
 have said, unique, but the truths themselves fall 
 in with the entire scope of Scripture ; and the first 
 lesson this afternoon (Is. Ixv.) has reminded us 
 that the renovation of the world forms as con- 
 spicuous a subject of the prophetic gospel as the 
 renovation of society. It could not be otherwise ; 
 for the sympathy of Nature with man is written 
 on the first page of the Bible and on the last. In 
 the spiritual history of Genesis the earth is said Gen. iii. 
 to have been cursed for man's sake. In the ' 
 spiritual vision of the Apocalypse new heavens Apoc. x 
 and a new earth are prepared for redeemed 
 humanity. Meanwhile the necessity of anxious 
 toil, imposed upon us by the conditions of life in 
 this season of our conflict, is designed by a 
 Father's love for salutary discipline; and on the 
 other hand we are encouraged to believe that the 
 earnest expectation of the Creation waiteth for the 
 revealing of the sons of God, waiteth, in due season,
 
 136 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. to reflect their glory even as they will reflect the 
 1 John iii. glory of their Saviour at His Coming : waiteth, 
 and yet not in mere idle and passive expectancy, 
 but to receive a blessing towards which it has 
 striven through a discipline of fruitful suffering. 
 For the whole Creation groaneth and travaileth in 
 pain together until now. 
 
 The whole Creation groaneth and travaileth in 
 pain together until now. Not at once, and, in 
 their fulness, not at last, can we grasp the teaching 
 of these wonderful words. But three points are 
 sufficiently clear in them. They set before us the 
 thoughts of a common life in Creation, of a life of 
 pain, of a life of pain leading to a new birth. 
 
 1. There is a common life in Creation. Our own 
 little life is for each one of us of such absorbing 
 interest that we often use it to measure the idea 
 of life itself. We can apply the standard success- 
 fully to those forms of life with which we are 
 most familiar and which we can readily embrace 
 in what appears to be their completeness. But, 
 as we have already seen, the life of a nation, the 
 life of humanity, the life of the Body of Christ, 
 transcends its application. And now 
 
 St Paul carries us beyond the ultimate societies 
 of men. He leads us to see the functions of a 
 common life in all Nature, in things irrational, 
 and in things, as we speak, inanimate. He bids
 
 The Incarnation and Nature. 137 
 
 us regard them as truly united in the circum- iv. 
 stances of their present condition and of their 
 future consummation. 
 
 We observe so little and for so short a time : 
 the play of forces around us is so complicated and 
 so distracting : our point of sight is so completely 
 immersed in the movement which we wish to 
 calculate ; that it is hopeless for us to seek for 
 more than a dim sense of the immeasurable life 
 which is thus suggested. But that sense alone, 
 vague and fleeting as it may be, is inestimably 
 precious. He who has gained it, he who 
 
 has gained it and used it to give reality to his 
 belief that it was the good pleasure of God to sum Eph. i. 10. 
 up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens 
 and the things upon the earth, has gained that 
 which is able to transfigure the aspect of the 
 world. 
 
 2. For this life of the Universe is for the 
 present manifested to us in pain. The whole Cre- 
 ation groaneth together. Through all its parts 
 there are to our sight marks of failure, of 
 imperfection, of suffering; and these St Paul 
 describes in the language of consciousness because 
 that in which they are found is a living whole; 
 and man cannot but express ideas of life in terms 
 of his own life. But the language is no 
 
 utterance, as has been most falsely said, of a
 
 138 Ghristus Consummator. 
 
 iv. ' pathetic fallacy.' It witnesses with commanding 
 power, even in its sadness, to that kinsmanship 
 of being which lies in a common divine origin. 
 'A world which God made dead?' Nay rather, 
 death comes from sin, and we communicate the 
 semblance of our deadness to our environment. 
 
 We communicate to our environment the sem- 
 blance of our deadness, as we have communicated 
 to it once for all the issues of our Fall. For no 
 one, I suppose, can fail to have been struck with the 
 inexpressibly sombre aspect which nature offers to 
 our human sight. There is, as it must seem, a 
 prodigal waste of life. A gust of wind sweeping 
 along an avenue scatters over the ground seeds 
 which might give birth to a forest, and not one 
 of them is fruitful. There is a fierce 
 
 struggle for existence, type against type, class 
 against class, unit against unit ; and the balance 
 of parts in the organisation of life is so delicate 
 that a small change in one of them is sufficient to 
 bring destruction to a whole race. There 
 
 is the inherent incompleteness of life, which is 
 such that no individual ever reaches the full 
 measure of its characteristic energy or beauty. 
 Everywhere we seem to read the same sad tale. 
 Thousands are sacrificed to one; and that one fails. 
 3. It would be easy to pursue in detail the 
 terrible indictment : easy to shew that, if, according
 
 The Incarnation and Nature. 139 
 
 to the beautiful Greek fancy, the clay of which iv. 
 man was moulded was moistened not with water 
 but with tears, every strain of natural music as it 
 strikes upon our senses dies away into a dirge: 
 easy to paint the ashy tint of death which follows 
 the glow of burning purple on the mountain side 
 when the sun has set : easy to round all in gloom, 
 if we pause in our first experience. But we may 
 not pause here. St Paul recognises the 
 
 deep voice of grief in the Creation but he does not 
 rest in it. The whole Creation, he says, groaneth 
 and travaileth together until now. The sorrow is John xvi. 
 unto joy at last. Out of that which appears to us 
 to be a confused struggle shall come a new and 
 more perfect life. The pains which we witness 
 are the very conditions of the birth of the new 
 order. In this case also, as with man, the 
 
 passage to life is through suffering. But we 
 believe that not one agony is wasted, and in part 
 we can justify our faith. The same facts which 
 are full of sadness when referred to the in- 
 dividual are full of hope when referred to the 
 whole. Constant rivalry under the actual con- 
 ditions of earth conditions which express the 
 will of God provides for a gradual eleva- 
 tion of type, and in the long run that form 
 survives which is best fitted for the work to be 
 done. Under this aspect the largest
 
 140 Christus Consummator. 
 
 iv. lessons of human life are reassuring. Races, king- 
 doms, societies, like individuals, pass away when 
 they have fulfilled their part. They pass away, 
 and yet they live on in the greater order which 
 they have prepared ; so that we already rejoice in 
 the assurance that descendants better and nobler 
 than ourselves will carry on and perfect that 
 which we have rudely prepared. Nor do 
 
 we stay here. We are constrained to think that 
 this joy may find a place also in the larger realm 
 of Nature. The prospect may be obscure in the 
 present, from the imperfection of our powers, but 
 at least what we do see justifies the picture which 
 we draw. As far as we can look back the earth 
 was slowly prepared through many changes, by fire 
 and frost, by flood and earthquake, to be the scene 
 of man's discipline ; and since the time came 
 for man to enter on his kingdom, his advance 
 may fairly be taken as the measure of advance in 
 all below him. 
 
 So far Nature alone guides us with lights 
 fitful and scattered, yet kindled at a heavenly 
 source. But now let the thought of the Incarna- 
 tion come in, the thought that it was the Father's 
 good pleasure from the first to rear through the 
 ages a living shrine for His Word which became 
 conscious in man : the thought that the eternal 
 Son has taken to Himself the firstfruits of our
 
 Tlue Incarnation and Nature. 141 
 
 terrestrial order in His Body through the grave to 
 the throne of God: the thought that as in Him 
 were all things created so in Him all things consist, 
 and it is for us, I will dare to say, a new creation 
 of the world. Every token of inner and 
 
 manifold life in all things in the heavens and 
 upon the earth assumes a fresh significance. 
 The seed wasted, the feebler being swept away, 
 the effort marred, have each their proper value and 
 contribute to the fulness of the whole. In 
 
 the tender love of that all-embracing Presence 
 every unit stands out in clear distinctness from 
 the innumerable host in which its sensible action 
 is absorbed. The limits of the activity of finite 
 being are not circumscribed by human experi- 
 ence. The world is not a great museum of 
 specimens to be arranged with exhaustive know- 
 ledge, but a revelation of life, where knowledge 
 is the herald of reverence and the minister of 
 love. The progress of the past is the 
 
 sign and not the measure of that which shall 
 be when the glory of the sons of God shall be 
 reflected by the scene of their finished labour ; 
 or rather when we, with pure and opened eyes, 
 shall see the world as God made it. 
 
 "0 world, as God has made it! All is beauty: 
 And knowing this is love, and love is duty. 
 
 What further may be sought for, or declared?"
 
 142 Christus Consummator. 
 
 For even now, as I must think, faint, frag- 
 mentary traces of the splendid vision are being 
 disclosed to us. There is (who does not know it ?) 
 much in the peculiar circumstances of our life and 
 thought to disquiet and distress, but there is 
 much also, much which is offered to us first by 
 the Spirit of God, to compensate and calm our 
 anxieties ; much above all in those larger views of 
 life which tend to make the fact of the Incarna- 
 tion, I will venture to say, the most natural of all 
 facts. 
 
 It may be that in our day of trial we shall 
 fail to apprehend the new messages of widening 
 wisdom : that we shall cling blindly to fixed 
 traditional forms of opinion which do not cor- 
 respond with the requirements of our spiritual 
 position : that we shall seek to confine within 
 artificial limits, through timorous distrust, that 
 which is a power of infinite growth. 
 
 It may be : but innumerable voices fill us 
 with a better hope. As yet indeed they are not 
 blended into one prayer, one confession, one 
 thanksgiving. But beneath their accidental and 
 temporary discordances there is one ruling thought 
 expressed in many ways, now with trembling 
 pathos and now with unchastened boldness, the 
 thought of one life, one Spirit, one Lord and 
 Saviour, one God and Father of all. And
 
 The Incarnation and Nature. 143 
 
 the Gospel of Creation fulfilled in the Gospel of iv. 
 the Word made flesh is able to unite them. Not 
 one secret won from Nature by unconscious 
 interpreters of the Divine will, not one fact 
 shewn to have been realised in history by the 
 students of human progress, not one cry of 
 penitence, or one aspiration of faith, which rises 
 from the solitary soul, fails to find a place in the 
 majestic range of that Gospel, fails, if we look 
 aright, to shew it in more sovereign grace. 
 
 The characteristic sign of the Messianic Pre- 
 sence on which the prophets dwelt, was ' the Is. xxxv. 
 opening of the eyes of the blind ' : so may God in 
 His mercy open the eyes of our hearts that we Eph. i. 18. 
 may behold the King Who comes to us in His is. xxxiii. 
 beauty. More hangs upon our faith than mind 
 can imagine or embrace. The work which through 
 our ministry embodies the grace of Christ 
 affects, by His will, not ourselves only, not our 
 fellow-men only, but all things in heaven and on 
 earth, all things which He has made as the image 
 of His love. Even now, in the sight of our over- 
 mastering self-absorption, our faint endeavours, 
 the earnest expectation of tJie Creation waiteth for 
 the revealing of the Sons of God.
 
 V. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND LIFE. 
 
 w. JO
 
 For of his fulness we all received, and grace for grace. 
 
 ST JOHN i. 16.
 
 THE INCARNATION AND LIFE. 
 
 TT 7"E have hitherto considered the Incarnation 
 in relation to the widest thoughts of life 
 and being, as the crown of the original purpose of 
 Creation, as the fulfilment of the destiny of man in 
 spite of sin, the fruit of self-assertion, as the revela- 
 tion of the vital unity of Nature. The 
 vision which is thus opened to devout contempla- 
 tion is of such transcending splendour that there 
 is a danger lest we should allow ourselves to be 
 occupied with it, to be absorbed by it, to be lost 
 in it, as it were, in a kind of indolent optimism. 
 We are tempted to say when we gain a faint 
 impression of the magnificent range of the divine 
 order, and of the unexpected ways in which the 
 divine counsel is accomplished, ' It is enough : the 
 will of God will be fulfilled. What can we do ?' 
 
 True, most true. The will of God will be 
 fulfilled. Its execution does not depend upon our 
 
 102
 
 148 Christus Consummate. 
 
 endeavour. But O the difference for each one of 
 us, if we behold it, if we enter into it, if, in our 
 poor measure, we make it our own, if we offer our- 
 selves without reserve for its service. And 
 it is for this reason, we must believe, we are 
 allowed to discern a little of its course. For the 
 noblest truths are not given us for an intellectual 
 luxury, still less for a moral opiate or a spiritual 
 charm. They are for the inspiration of our whole 
 being, for the hallowing and for the bracing of 
 every power outward and inward with which we 
 are endowed, for use in the busy fields of common 
 duty. 
 
 Truth, in a word, cannot remain as a posses- 
 sion of one part of our nature. If the deed is 
 precious for the sake of the thought of which it is 
 the fruit, the thought must vindicate its power by 
 the corresponding deed. Man, as he is, is not 
 fully revealed till thought is embodied in deed. 
 And when Descartes had said ' I think, therefore I 
 am,' I cannot but rejoice that our own Whichcote 
 silently corrected the famous sentence by the 
 more memorable phrase ' I act, therefore I am.' 
 
 And so the greatest of all truths, the truth of 
 the Incarnation, reaches to the innermost recesses 
 of the single life, that it may rouse and guide and 
 sustain him who has welcomed it. It is, as we 
 have seen, a revelation of love, of sin, of attain-
 
 The Incarnation and Life. 149 
 
 ment, of sympathy: and it is all this to the v. 
 individual soul. It is a revelation of humility, 
 of suffering, of faith, issuing in exceeding glory, 
 and it is all this to the solitary believer, self- 
 surrendered, cast down, straining in unwearied 
 effort towards the end which will not disap- 
 point. 
 
 St John sets this reflection before us in the 
 Introduction to his Gospel with sublime simplicity. 
 We can hardly miss it if we follow only his main 
 statements, and pass over the parenthetic illustra- 
 tions with which he explains and enforces them : 
 
 In the beginning, we read, was the Word and John i. 1, 
 the Word was with God and the Word was God. U > 16> 
 
 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among 
 us full of grace and truth. 
 
 Because out of His fulness all we received and 
 grace for grace. 
 
 The Evangelist passes, we see, without one 
 break from the contemplation of the eternal 
 Majesty of God to the common experience of his 
 fellow Christians. They all had, he assumes, 
 direct personal knowledge of the power of Christ, 
 answering to His Nature, no less than Apostles 
 who had beheld His glory. The Word, as he 
 teaches, finds a place naturally on the throne of 
 the Father and in the heart of man. 
 
 Out of His fulness all we received and grace for John i. 16.
 
 1 50 Christus Consummator, 
 
 v. grace. The words express two main thoughts. 
 The absolute perfection of all divine power and 
 grace as it can be expressed through humanity 
 is in Christ ; in that fact lies the assurance of 
 faith. And, again, the believer draws 
 
 from Christ, as from an inexhaustible source, so 
 much vital force as former effort has made him 
 able to use : in that fact lies the law of the activity 
 of faith. All that any man ever can be 
 
 is already realised in the Son of man : each man 
 as he puts to use one gift grows capable of 
 receiving a greater. 
 
 These thoughts, full of encouragement and of 
 warning, find a typical foreshadowing in a beautiful 
 Jewish legend. It is said that when the Lord 
 spoke from Sinai the voice was heard by the 
 people as they turned this way and that, from 
 North and South from East and West, from earth 
 and heaven. The voice went forth throughout 
 the world and each nation heard it in their own 
 tongue. But they who heard heard it according to 
 their capacity ; old men and youths and boys and 
 sucklings and women ; and the voice was to each 
 one as each one had power to receive it. 
 
 So men pictured to themselves the giving of 
 the Law; and when the Word was manifested 
 that which they had thus fancied became reality. 
 From all sides, in every heart of man, His Message
 
 The Incarnation and Life. 151 
 
 which is Himself found, as it still finds, expres- v. 
 sion and welcome according to the power of love. 
 
 Out of His fulness all we received. The per- 
 fect assurance of faith rests, I say, in this con- 
 viction. In Christ the Word Incarnate, the 
 divine, the eternal, shines through the forms of 
 earth unclouded and undimmed. If there 
 
 were found in Him one trait which belonged to 
 some transitory phase of human growth, to a sect, 
 a class, a nation, an age, if there were wanting in 
 Him one characteristic which belongs to the 
 essence of humanity; one virtue which is the 
 peculiar glory of man or woman ; we might then 
 look for another to fulfil the higher type which we Matt.xi.3. 
 should be able to imagine. But, as it is, there 
 is nothing which we can remove from His 
 portraiture, nothing which we can add to it, with- 
 out marring the ideal in which each soul can. find 
 the satisfaction of every desire that it would lay 
 open in the light of heaven. We believe 
 
 it is a belief to ponder that our highest con- 
 ceivable has been realised by the Word become 
 flesh under the conditions of earth. We believe 
 not that one man by the cultivation of natural 
 powers has striven upwards to fellowship with 
 God, but that the Son of God has taken humanity 
 to Himself and gained that for the race which 
 each member can find for himself in Him. We
 
 152 Ghristus Consummator. 
 
 believe that that Life of Jesus of Nazareth 
 matured in silent obscurity and closed in open 
 shame, that life gladdened only by the joys which 
 are open to the least of the children of men, the 
 glories of the sky and field, and the response of 
 loyal hearts, is the life in which our destiny has 
 been reached once for all. We believe 
 
 this, and in our impatient stragglings, in our 
 grasping at shadows, in our sad murmurings, the 
 belief seems to be on the point of vanishing ; but 
 if it vanishes for a time it is only to reappear in 
 the darkness, like stars in the night to witness of 
 other worlds when the sun has set. 
 
 The belief the belief in the divine fulness of 
 Christ is indeed one which it is not easy to keep 
 in the freshness of its energy. The ideal which 
 it proposes is ever escaping from us under the 
 pressure of sordid cares and fears. But we gain 
 no relief from labour by lowering our standard. 
 We do not rid ourselves of enigmas by abridging 
 our hopes. We cast away the Faith ; 
 
 and what then ? The sufferings of earth remain, 
 but they are emptied of their redemptive potency. 
 The questionings of practical knowledge remain, 
 but no response comes with a Gospel of grace and 
 truth. The mysteries of the finite remain, but 
 they are not lightened by the assurance that the 
 human conceptions by which we live as to things
 
 The Incarnation and Life. 153 
 
 of sense may be trusted no less as to things un- v. 
 seen. 
 
 Not one difficulty, one pain, one contradiction of 
 life is removed by the spirit of denial. Only the 
 treasury of heaven is closed at its bidding ; and 
 we are charged to stand resigned with our faces 
 turned towards an impenetrable gloom, through 
 which the Christian sees a pathway of light, even 
 the glorified humanity of Christ, leading to the Hebr. 
 throne of God. 
 
 Out of His fulness we all received : 'out of His 
 fulness:' not from ourselves though in ourselves is 
 the spring of strength. For Christ's gift, as it 
 has free course, must stir us with the impulse of a 
 great devotion. Conscious of our own sins and of 
 our own forgiveness we shall have learnt to see 
 the world in a new light. Touched by the love of 
 Christ we shall feel love. Compassion will gain 
 for us again its true meaning. We shall minister 
 to the weak and the erring not in condescending 
 pity but as enabled to share evils which 
 are indeed our own. The power of our 
 
 action, as we look to the Son of God Incarnate, 
 will be not fear or sorrow, not even the sense of 
 right, but reverence for the divine in man. 
 
 Out of His fulness we all received and grace for 
 grace. ' Grace for grace :' that is the inexorable 
 law of the Spirit, the law of the activity of faith.
 
 154 Christus Consummator. 
 
 v. The higher, nobler, fuller, comes to men only as 
 the fruit of the lower and the less. 
 
 'Light after light well-used they shall attain.' 
 
 And in this condition lies for us the promise of 
 joy growing with growing life. As each successive 
 lesson of the Incarnation is learnt, the spirit yet 
 
 John xvi. again takes of that which is Christ's, and shews it 
 to the believer. There can be no repetition and 
 no rest in His teaching. At the same 
 
 time we need to be reminded continually of the 
 learner's obligation and of the blessing which the 
 obligation carries. For of all the perils of ad- 
 vancing age none, as I have said before, is greater 
 than that of losing the faculty of wonder. We 
 become familiar with the sequence of phenomena 
 and we think that we understand them. They 
 move us no longer with the surprise of freshness. 
 But for the thoughtful the increase of such 
 knowledge as we can gain adds to the mysteries 
 of life. That which is commonest is in- 
 
 deed the most real cause for wonder. In this 
 sense the materials of wonder are continually 
 gathered about us. And when the Lord said to 
 the Jews who were perplexed by His works and 
 
 John v. 20. His claims greater works than these will [the 
 Father] shew [the Son], that ye may marvel, He 
 declared the manner of His revelation. From age
 
 The Incarnation and Life. 155 
 
 to age He offers to us grace for grace. He dis- v. 
 closes in the ordinary conditions of life to those 
 who have their senses exercised by use ' greater Hebr. v. 
 works ' than their fathers saw, more far-reaching 
 connexions, subtler harmonies, deeper beauties of 
 life, ' that they may marvel ' not in idle astonish- 
 ment or in vacant curiosity, but as looking beyond 
 the signs to the spiritual forces which they 
 
 Yes : that is one of the main lessons of the 
 Incarnation. It is ever leading us through the 
 seen to the unseen, offering in this way grace for 
 grace ; and so it is that Christianity in considera- 
 tion of our natures is essentially Sacramental. 
 So it is that God is pleased to take the outward 
 as the channel of His working : that He uses the 
 commonest things for the highest ends : that He 
 binds together the material and the spiritual, in a 
 union of life : even in order that we may extend 
 the revelation to all parts of the order in which we 
 are placed, that we may feel that we are at every 
 point in contact with unseen powers, that rever- 
 ence may rest wherever knowledge enters. 
 
 At the same time this revelation of the 
 spiritual grandeur of all life enhances the import- 
 ance of the single life. Each single life is seen 
 in the Incarnation to be in the divine plan an 
 element in the Body of Christ; and we come
 
 156 Christus Consummator. 
 
 v. to understand, when we meditate on the depen- 
 dences of things, how in the vast chorus of Creation 
 one voice of ' little human praise ' is missed. 
 
 And not only does each life gain this solemn 
 significance from its relation to the vaster life in 
 which it is included, but each least part of the 
 individual life assumes a proportionate value. 
 Nothing can be of the man only : nothing can 
 be of the body only. The deed of the member, 
 of the member of the society, of the member of 
 the family, reaches as far as the life reaches, even 
 if we have at present no powers to measure its 
 effects. 
 
 This conviction of the illimitable consequences 
 of action would be of overwhelming awfulness if 
 we were not able to lift our eyes when the burden 
 is heaviest to the Son of man ; if we were not able 
 to bring to Him the stained and fragmentary 
 offering of ourselves and to find in Him that 
 which is needed to cleanse and to complete it. We 
 look back indeed for a moment upon the long line 
 
 John iv. of witnesses whose works, on which we have entered, 
 attest the efficacy of His unfailing Presence, but 
 
 Heb. xii. then we look away from all else (dfyopwvres) to 
 Jesus the leader and perfecter of faith, Who in His 
 humanity met every temptation which can assail 
 us and crowned with sovereign victory the force 
 which He offers for our support.
 
 The Incarnation and Life. 157 
 
 By such experience, such efforts, such reflec- 
 tions we learn in the stress of life, receiving grace 
 for grace, that the Incarnation is more than an 
 event : that it is a Truth. We learn that it is a 
 fact not in the sense that it is past but that it is 
 eternal. We learn that the fulfilment of 
 
 the Incarnation in time is the revelation of that 
 which is beyond time : the absolute, may we not 
 say the necessary, seal to us men of the certainty 
 of the ideas which we are led to fashion under 
 human conditions of the righteousness and love 
 of God, of the grandeur of the heritage for which 
 we were born, of the melancholy sentence of 
 failure which is written against us, of the hope 
 which we cannot forego that we shall yet see 
 God see God and live. 
 
 We meditate on these conclusions ; and while 
 we do so we recognise that the Incarnation 
 reconciles the last terms of that contradiction in 
 life to which our greatest poets and some of the 
 most influential teachers of the time bear witness. 
 For in our noblest literature we find on the one 
 side a stern and pitiless description of dominant 
 evil and sorrow, of duty to be sadly if resolutely 
 followed, of multitudes who can only be dealt 
 with by some crushing force : and on the other side 
 we hear a confident appeal to the instinct of beauty 
 and goodness, to the triumphs of natural heroism,
 
 158 Ghristus Consummator. 
 
 v. to the soul of man which struggles through freedom 
 to the light. We are met, that is, on the 
 
 one side by the thought of law without the reality 
 of redemption : and on the other side by the thought 
 of love without the reality of the fall. 
 
 There is the contradiction from which Nature 
 opens no escape ; but in the Incarnation, as a fact, 
 nay, as the fact of human life, the fall and the 
 redemption both find complete expression. In 
 the Incarnation law and love are seen in their 
 final harmony. 
 
 Brethren, we have touched upon great 
 mysteries, mysteries to be ' kept and pondered in 
 our hearts.' In dealing with them words and 
 thoughts are alike inadequate. So far as these 
 become definite they tend to limit that which is 
 infinite. But their imperfection is not unavailing 
 if it encourages us to strive by the help of the 
 Holy Spirit and it is a hard task to know that 
 the revelation of God given to us in the Incarnation 
 is given by a living fact, not in a speculation or in 
 a dogma. Forms of thought change, but this Fact 
 vivifies and transcends all. 
 
 As a Fact the Incarnation presents intelligibly 
 before our eyes an aim towards which we can bend 
 every energy of our nature.
 
 The Incarnation and Life. 159 
 
 As a Fact it supplies a motive which stirs v. 
 us to devout exertion with an energy propor- 
 tioned to the faith with which we apprehend its 
 essence. 
 
 As a Fact it is of infinite meaning and able to 
 minister all that is needed for the hallowing of 
 toil and study. 
 
 As a Fact it is of infinite power and sufficient 
 to assure help to the weakest servant of God. 
 
 As a Fact it shews us how that unity to which 
 physics and history point is not to be found only 
 in a dispersive connexion of multitudinous parts, 
 but is summed up finally in One Who is God. 
 
 As a Fact it supplies a solid foundation for the 
 loftiest aspirations which man ever fashioned for 
 himself in the personal consciousness of unsatisfied 
 longings. 
 
 As a Fact, an eternal Fact, realised in time, 
 may we receive it, hold it, reflect upon it. So 
 shall we know day by day a little more what it 
 involves, what it promises, what it enforces, what 
 it inspires. So shall we draw strength and wisdom 
 from the very speculations which at first sight 
 appear to be fraught with danger. So shall we do 
 the part to which we are called in the building up 
 of the Church. So shall we offer our little lives, 
 marred and broken as they are, to Him Who is 
 able to bring them into fellowship with Him-
 
 160 Christus Consummator. 
 
 self. Let us hear once again the Gospel 
 
 on which we have been allowed to meditate. In 
 the beginning was the Word, and the Word was 
 with God, and the Word was God... And the Word 
 became flesh and dwelt among us... full of grace 
 and truth... because out of His fulness we all 
 received, and grace for grace.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 THE VISION OF GOD THE CALL 
 OF THE PROPHET. 
 
 w. 11
 
 Holy, holy, Iwly, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is 
 full of His glory. 
 
 Is. vi. 3.
 
 n^WO years ago it was my duty to speak here APPENDIX. 
 -*- as on this day; and now, when I am 
 unexpectedly called to fulfil the same office, my 
 thoughts necessarily go back to the words of 
 the angelic hymn on which I dwelt then. In 
 some form or other the feelings which they 
 express must fill all our hearts. As often as the 
 Festival of the Holy Trinity the Festival of 
 Revelation comes round, we are encouraged to 
 lift up our eyes to the manifestation of the divine 
 glory. And through this reverent effort we learn 
 with growing assurance that the contemplation of 
 the majesty of God is the source of the largest 
 hope for all His creatures. We come to under- 
 stand how for beings pure and holy that vision is 
 the call to unfaltering adoration and limitless 
 faith ; how for men " of unclean lips," sin-stained 
 and labouring in a sin-stained world, it is the call, 
 the reassuring call, to the prophet's work. 
 
 This, then, is the thought which I wish to 
 
 112
 
 164 The vision of God 
 
 APPENDIX, welcome for myself from the services of the day. 
 This is the thought which I wish to commend to 
 those who hear me : that the vision of God is the 
 call of the prophet ; that the vision of God given 
 to us to-day in the Triune Name is our call, our 
 message, our chastening. 
 
 1. The vision of God is, I say, the call of the 
 prophet. Nowhere is the thought presented to 
 us in the Bible with more moving force than in 
 
 Is.vi.1-10. the record of Isaiah's mission which we heard 
 again this morning. The very mark of time by 
 which the history is introduced has a pathetic 
 significance. It places together in sharp contrast 
 the hasty presumption of man and the unchanging 
 love of God. The prophet was called in the year 
 
 2 Chron. that King Uzziah died. The king died an outcast 
 ' and a leper because he had ventured to take to 
 himself the function of a priest in the house of 
 God; and in close connexion with that tragic 
 catastrophe an access to God, far closer than that 
 which the successful monarch had prematurely 
 claimed, was foreshewn to the prophet in a 
 heavenly figure. Isaiah, a layman, as you re- 
 member, was, it appears, in the temple court, and 
 he saw in a trance the way into the holiest place 
 laid open. The veils were removed from sanctuary 
 and shrine, and he beheld more than met the 
 
 Lev. xvi. eyes of the high priest, the one representative of 
 the people, on the one day on which he was
 
 the call of the prophet. 165 
 
 admitted year by year to the dark chamber which APPENDIX. 
 shrouded the divine presence. He beheld not the 
 glory resting upon the symbolic ark, but the Lord 
 sitting upon the throne high and lifted up ; not 
 the carved figures of angels, but the seraphim 
 standing with outstretched wings, ready for swift 
 service ; not the vapour of earthly incense, but 
 the cloud of smoke which witnessed to the Majesty 
 which it hid. This opening of " the eyes of his 
 heart " was God's gift, God's call to him. Other 
 worshippers about the young prophet saw, as we 
 must suppose, nothing but " the light of common 
 day," the ordinary sights of the habitual service, 
 the great sea of brass, and the altar of burnt- 
 offering, and the stately portal of the holy place, 
 and Priests and Levites busy with their familiar 
 work. But for. an eternal moment Isaiah's senses 
 were unsealed. He saw that which is and not 
 that which appears. For him the symbol of God 
 dwelling in light unapproachable, was transformed 
 into a personal presence ; for him the chequered 
 scene of human labour and worship was filled 
 with the train of God ; for him the marvels of 
 human skill were instinct with the life of God. 
 The spot which God had chosen was disclosed to 
 his gaze as the centre of the divine revelation ; 
 but at the same time he was taught to acknow- 
 ledge that the Divine Presence is not limited by 
 any bounds or excluded by any blindness, when
 
 166 The vision of God 
 
 APPENDIX, he heard from the lips of angels that the fulness 
 
 Is. vi. 3. of the whole earth is His glory. 
 
 Now when we recall what Judaism was at the 
 time, local, rigid, exclusive, we can at once under- 
 stand that such a vision, such a revelation taken 
 into the soul, was for Isaiah an illumination of the 
 world. He could at last see all creation in its 
 true nature through the light of God. So to have 
 looked upon it was to have gained that which the 
 seer, cleansed by the sacred fire, was constrained 
 to declare. Humbled, and purified in his humilia- 
 tion, he could have but one answer when the 
 voice of the Lord required a messenger, " Here am 
 I : send me." 
 
 And as it was then it is now. If that 
 response of Isaiah seems to us, as it must do, to 
 be natural or even necessary when we realise his 
 position, let us not shrink from the confession 
 that Isaiah's vision, Isaiah's call, are for us also, 
 and that they await from us a like response. 
 When the prophet Isaiah looked upon that 
 
 John xii. august sight he saw, as St John tells us, Christ's 
 glory ; he saw in figures and far off that which 
 we have been allowed to contemplate more nearly 
 and with the power of closer apprehension. He 
 saw in transitory shadows that which we have 
 received in a historic Presence. By the Incarna- 
 tion God has entered, and empowered us to feel 
 that He has entered, into fellowship with humanity
 
 the call of the prophet. 167 
 
 and men. As often as that truth rises before our APPENDIX. 
 eyes, all heaven is indeed rent open, and all earth 
 is displayed as God made it. For us, then, the 
 vision and the call of Isaiah find a fuller form, a 
 more sovereign voice in the Gospel than the 
 Jewish prophet could know. And I will dare to 
 believe that there is not one among us who has 
 not been quickened to see here, in this home of 
 generous enthusiasm, glimpses of the prophet's 
 vision, when he has pondered in some quiet space 
 of thought the need of the prophet's work in 
 England or in India ; to see disclosed before him 
 the inner sanctuary of Truth and Love ; to see on 
 the Father's throne, high and lifted up, the Lord 
 who had lived and died and risen again for him ; 
 to see the folds of His imperial vesture spread 
 over the whole world, which is His dwelling-place; ^ 
 to see innumerable hosts of ministering spirits 
 fulfilling His word in the wide realm of nature; 
 to see the signs of His Presence,- half-splendour 
 and half-cloud, made known through all the works 
 of men; to see messengers sent "with live coals 
 from off the altar " to purify and to kindle those 
 who shall bear the Gospel to the nations. 
 
 Brethren, if, as I believe, you have seen this, 
 dimly, it may be, and but for a brief moment, and 
 you above all before whom the work of life is 
 opening with the fresh fulness of promise in the 
 purpose of God's grace, be sure that there is
 
 168 The vision of God 
 
 APPENDIX, nothing in life more real than such a vision. It 
 is the pure light of heaven so broken by the 
 shadows of earth that we can bear it. Do not 
 then turn from it, or dismiss it as a dream. Meet 
 it with the response of glad devotion. It is easy, 
 alas, to question the authority of the greatest 
 thoughts which God sends to us. It is easy to 
 darken them and to lose them. But it is not 
 easy to live on to the end without them. There 
 is, happily, a noble discontent which disturbs all 
 self-centred pleasure. And, on the other hand, 
 you must have been allowed to feel that you are 
 stirred with the truest joy, and braced to labour 
 best at your little tasks, while you welcome and 
 keep before you the loftiest ideal of the method 
 and the aim of work and being which God has 
 made known to you. That is, indeed, His revela- 
 tion, the vision of Himself. So He declares what 
 He would have you to do, what He will enable 
 you. to do. So He calls you to be prophets. 
 
 Yes : for us the vision of God, the vision of 
 this day is a prophet's call. And let us gratefully 
 recognise the divine order in which it is presented 
 to us. The Festival of Revelation follows the 
 Festival of the Spirit. The Festival of the Spirit 
 closes the cycle of the historic festivals of the 
 Church. And now all the facts of the historic 
 Gospel are crowned by the thought of God in 
 Himself; and that thought, summed up in the
 
 the call of the prophet. 169 
 
 Triune Name into which we were baptised, is APPENDIX. 
 
 offered to us afresh to-day for calm study. We 
 
 are called upon to use the " power from on high Luke xxiv. 
 
 with which we have been clothed," to regard yet 
 
 once again with questioning devotion the secret 
 
 of the eternal life which has been made known to 
 
 us for the use of earth in the Person of Christ. 
 
 And what, therefore, we ask, does the mys- 
 tery, the revelation of God, even Christ, mean for Col. ii. 2. 
 us, the mystery of which we are ministers and 
 prophets, the mystery which brings the eternal 
 within the forms of time, the mystery which shews 
 to us absolute love made visible in the Incarnate 
 Word ? It means it must mean if only we 
 think patiently and calmly that the outward, 
 the transitory, is a veil woyen by the necessities 
 of our weakness which half hides and half reveals 
 the realities with which it corresponds ; it means 
 that the changing forms in which spiritual aspira- 
 tions are clothed from generation to generation 
 and from life to life, are illuminated, quickened, 
 harmonised in one supreme fact; it means that 
 beyond the temples in which it is our blessing to 
 worship and beyond the phrases which it is our . 
 joy to affirm, there is an infinite glory which can 
 have no local circumscription, and an infinite 
 Truth which cannot be grasped by any human 
 thought ; it means that man, bruised and bur- 
 dened by sorrows and sins, was made for God, and
 
 170 The vision of God 
 
 APPENDIX, that through His holy love he shall not fail of his 
 destiny; it means that all creation is an expres- 
 sion of God's thought of wisdom brought within 
 
 John xiv. the reach of human intelligence ; it means that 
 God's Spirit sent in His Son's name will interpret 
 little by little, as we can read the lesson, all things 
 as contributory to His praise ; it means that we 
 also, compassed with infirmities and burdened with 
 sins, may take up the song of the redeemed 
 creation, the song of the unfallen angels, and say, 
 " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts : the 
 fulness of the earth is His glory." It means this, 
 and more than this, more than mind can shape 
 and tongue can utter, and as the light streams in 
 upon us we cannot refuse to acknowledge the 
 obligation by which we are bound to make known 
 that which is made plain by its brightness; to 
 interpret to others according to the teaching of 
 our own experience the truth which has been 
 disclosed to our souls. 
 
 2. For even as the vision of God is the call 
 of the prophet, so it is this vision which the 
 prophet has to proclaim and to interpret to his 
 fellow-men, not as an intellectual theory, but as 
 an inspiration of life. The prophet's teaching 
 must be the translation of his experience. He 
 bears witness of that which he has seen. His 
 words are not an echo but a living testimony. 
 The heart alone can speak to the heart. But he
 
 the call of the prophet. 171 
 
 who has beheld the least fragment of the divine APPENDIX. 
 glory, he who has spelt out in letters of light on 
 the face of the world one syllable of the Triune 
 Name, will have a confidence and a power which 
 nothing else can bring. Only let him trust what 
 he has seen, and it will become to him a guid- 
 ing-star till he rests in the unveiled Presence of 
 Christ. 
 
 And so let us all thank God, on this Festival 
 of Revelation, that He has called us in the fulfil- 
 ment of our prophet's office to unfold a growing 
 message and not to rehearse a stereotyped tradi- 
 tion. The Gospel of Christ Incarnate, the Gospel 
 of the Holy Trinity in the terms of human life, 
 which we have to announce, covers every imagin- 
 able fact of life to the end of time, and is new 
 now as it has been new in all the past, as it will 
 be new, new in its power and new in its meaning, 
 while the world lasts. It was new when St John 
 at Ephesus w r as enabled to express its fundamental 
 truth in the doctrine of the Word ; new when 
 Athanasius at Nicaea affirmed through it the 
 living unity of the Godhead without derogating 
 from the Lord's Deity ; new when Anselm at Bee 
 sought in it, however partially and inadequately, 
 a solution of the problem of eternal justice ; new 
 when Luther at Wittenberg found in it the ground 
 of personal communion with God; new in our 
 own generation, new with an untold message,
 
 172 The vision of God 
 
 APPENDIX, when we are bidden to acknowledge in it the 
 pledge of that ultimate fellowship of created 
 things which the latest researches in nature and 
 in history offer for consecration. 
 
 For this supreme unity, which is neither 
 monotonous nor barren, and nothing less than 
 this, answers, as I have already indicated, to that 
 
 John xvii. vision of God in Christ, " the true God," " the God 
 
 xv I3 m f hope," which is presented to this age. And we 
 therefore, as we behold the Divine Image under 
 the light of our own day, must labour to bring to 
 our view of " the world " the order for a time 
 separated from God that thought of God which 
 
 John iii. makes it again a fit object of our love as it is the 
 object of the love of God : to bring to our view of 
 society that conviction of dependence and con- 
 nexion which is at once a safeguard and a motive 
 force : to bring to our view of the present that 
 sense of eternity which transfigures our estimate 
 of great and small, of success and failure. 
 
 The transformation of life requires no more : 
 it is possible with no less. And to us as Christians 
 the charge is given to bear this prophetic message 
 to men. 
 
 True it is that such a vision of God Creator, 
 Redeemer, Sanctifier entering into fellowship 
 
 Col. i. 20. with the beings whom He has made, " reconciling 
 all things unto Himself, having made peace through 
 the blood of the Cross," shews life to us, as
 
 the call of the prophet. 173 
 
 Isaiah saw it, in a most solemn aspect : that it APPENDIX. 
 must fill us, as it filled Isaiah, with the sense 
 of our immeasurable unworthiness in the face 
 of Christ's majesty and Christ's love : that it 
 must touch us also with something of a clean- 
 sing power. And because it is so we can take 
 heart again. 
 
 For such emotion, such purification of soul, 
 is the beginning of abiding strength. "He that 
 wonders shall reign" "He that is near me is 
 near fire" are among the few traditional sayings 
 attributed to the Lord which seem to be stamped 
 as divine. Awe, awe the lowliest and the most 
 self-suppressing, is a sign not of littleness, but of 
 nobility. Our power of reverence is a measure of 
 our power of rising. As we bow in intelligent 
 worship before the face of our King, His Spirit 
 a Spirit of fire enters into us. We feel that we 
 are made partakers of the Divine nature because 
 we can acknowledge with a true faith its spiritual 
 glories, and lay ourselves 
 
 Passive and still before the awful Throne . . . 
 
 Consumed, yet quickened, by the glance of God. 
 
 3. So we come to the last consideration which 
 I desire to suggest. The vision of God is, as we 
 have seen, the call of the prophet, and the message 
 of the prophet. It is also the chastening of the 
 prophet. 
 
 And in the fulfilment of our prophetic work
 
 174 The vision of God 
 
 APPENDIX, we need, I think, more than we know the abasing 
 and elevating influences which the vision of 
 Isaiah and the thoughts of to-day are fitted to 
 create or deepen. In the stress of restless occu- 
 pation we are tempted to leave too much out of 
 sight the inevitable mysteries of life. We deal 
 lightly with the greatest questions. We are 
 peremptory in defining details of dogma beyond 
 the teaching of Scripture. We are familiar 
 beyond apostolic precedent in our approaches to 
 God. We fashion heavenly things after the 
 fashion of earth. We are like Mary Magdalene, 
 who in her mistaken love would have kept her 
 
 John xx. Lord as she had first known Him, when as yet the 
 Ascension had not revealed the nature of an 
 eternal fellowship, and made such fellowship 
 possible ; and once more Christ, as we recognise 
 Him at first under the conditions of earth, seems 
 to be saying to us, " ' Cling not to Me,' not with 
 the hand but with the soul must you hold Me if 
 you would enjoy My abiding presence." 
 
 In all these respects then, for our strengthen- 
 ing and for our purifying, we must seek for our- 
 selves and strive to spread about us, the sense of 
 the awfulness of being, as those who have seen 
 
 Apoc. iv. God at Bethlehem, Calvary, Olivet, and on the 
 throne encircled by a rainbow as an emerald : the 
 sense, vague and imperfect at the best, of the 
 illimitable range .of the courses and issues of
 
 the call of the prophet. 175 
 
 action : the sense of the untold vastness of that APPENDIX. 
 life which we are bold to measure by our feeble 
 powers : the sense of the Majesty of Him before 
 Whom the angels veil their faces. If we are cast 
 down by the meannesses, the sorrows, the sins of 
 the world, it is because we dwell on some little 
 part of which we see little ; but let the thought 
 of God in Christ come in, and we can rest in that 
 holy splendour. At the same time let us not 
 dare to confine at our will the action of the light. 
 It is our own irreparable loss if in our conceptions 
 of doctrine we gain clearness of definition by 
 following out the human conditions of appre- 
 hending the divine, and forget that every outline 
 is the expression in terms of a lower order of that 
 which is many sided ; if in our methods of devotion 
 we single out the human nature of the Lord, or 
 rather the manifestation of His unascended man- 
 hood, as the object of our thoughts, and forget 
 that He leads us to the Father; if we rest in 
 things visible and do not rather strive to read 
 ever more clearly the spiritual lessons to which 
 they point ; if we concentrate our worship in 
 isolated rites and fail to bear to the world of daily 
 thought and action the teaching and the promises 
 of Sacraments. 
 
 Brethren, the thoughts on which we have 
 touched open unfathomable depths of duty. But 
 it is good for us to reflect on the. greatness of God
 
 176 The vision of God the call of the prophet. 
 
 APPENDIX, which is as immeasurable as His love. And may 
 He in His great mercy cleanse our dull eyes, 
 and check our hasty tongues, and calm our 
 impetuous reasonings ; and so, in the solemn calm, 
 the vision of Him Father, Son, and Holy Ghost 
 will take shape slowly before us. So we shall still 
 recognise in it our call, our message, our spirit, as 
 prophets touched by His fire. We shall say with 
 the lowliest confession of our un worthiness, " our 
 eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts." 
 We shall reply with the most absolute self- 
 surrender to the voice which asks in our hearts 
 for messengers to make truth known, each accord- 
 ing to our ability : " Here am I : send me." And 
 in the lifelong fulfilment of our work, undismayed 
 by the darkness which we cannot penetrate, unde- 
 terred by the weakness which we cannot overcome, 
 we shall repeat the song of heaven, which the 
 Incarnation has fitted for the lips of men, " Holy, 
 holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts, the fulness of the 
 earth is His glory." 
 
 ST MABY'S, CAMBRIDGE. 
 Trinity Sunday, 1885. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY. M.A. A SONS, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS