these three wills, in their discrimination, are three persons in their own conscious activities, and can be recognized in nothing so appropriate as respective personalities. And yet are the three not so many beings, for the being of all is in the one Absolute Reason. And the personality incarnated in the Redeemer is the second, known as Logos, or Word, i. e., the expresser, or outward manifester of the unseen Ideal. This Word originally was "with God," and

was God," and here is "made flesh;" entering truly into humanity. This complexity, as One in Jesus Christ the Redeemer, reconciles the many apparent paradoxical representations given of him in the Gospels. Thus," he came down from heaven," and while on earth talking with his disciples he was also "in heaven." He says also of himself, "I and my Father are one;" and then again, "My Father is greater than I;" and also, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."4 And so, also, we have the representation, that this assuming of a human body and dwelling with men was a humbling condescension, involving much personal sacrifice. "He made himself of no reputation; "he humbled himself, and became obedient." 5 "He became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich."6 His perfection, as Redeemer of men, is through suffering. There must needs be occasion for speaking of the Redeemer

John iii. 13. 4 John xiv. 9. ? Heb. ii. 10.

in all the phases of his complex being, viz., as God in Trinity, as man in the flesh, and as both God and man in his mediation. It would be impossible to fill out his record in redemption without giving more or less such paradoxical exhibitions of him. As Redeemer of men he is one, and yet not complete in his oneness, except as the divine takes up in its unity the animal sense and the human spirit, and makes them a unit in its absolute unity. This one virgin-birth raised humanity into the sphere of God-consciousness, and brought Deity into the sphere of human experience. While in the man-Jesus "dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily," in the Jehovah-Jesus was the susceptibility to be "touched with the feeling of our infirmities." So incarnated, Deity can be tempted; so exalted, humanity can endure any temptation with

out sin.

2

4. THIS ONE REDEEMER IS IN HIMSELF PROPHET, PRIEST, AND KING.- Not as offices conferred upon him, and into which he has been inaugurated by some separate authority, but in his own essence such offices already belong to him in the mode of his existence.

He is Prophet in the acceptation that the message he brings from above needs not to be first delivered to him, but stands already in his own omniscient consciousness. What Jesus communicates is just what God himself is. His truth is the truth in God. His

exhibited feeling is God's feeling; his will is God's will. He says of himself, "I do always those things. that please the Father." And the Father says of him, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."2 His pleasure is God's pleasure, and seen through its expression in his life and daily action and conversation, we see directly into the heart and purpose of God. "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Jesus has Divinity; he is Deity; and in himself he expresses what the Godhead is.

And so, moreover, he is mediating High Priest, not as taking commissioned authority from superior sovereignty, and delegated representation from assenting subjects, and so acting by consent and sufferance of parties; but in what he is he already touches both parties, and has within himself the interests both of man and God. Essentially he is Mediator between the two, and he can no more renounce the wants of man than the claims of God. His intercession is humanity interceding, just as his pardoning and accepting is the valid justification by God. "I knew that thou hearest me always."3

His mediatorial Reign also is his essential prerogative. To be so born of a virgin gives inheritance to the sceptre of humanity. It is a dominion to which mere man could not be exalted, and one which, out of the flesh, God could not condescend to take. But the humbling of himself to be born of woman, and become obedient to the death of the cross, makes it

John viii. 29.

2 Matt. iii. 17.

3 John xi. 42.

his right to be highly exalted as "King in Zion,” and "head over all things to his church." His triumphant resurrection gives into his hand the "keys of Hell and of Death," and sets him on "the right hand of the Throne of Majesty in the Heavens."

In all these offices he bears, it is in virtue of what is essential in him that he determines how to execute them. It is his to say what he will reveal as Prophet, when he will intercede and when pronounce absolution as High Priest, and how legislate, and judge, and execute as Mediatorial Sovereign; and all he so does stands forever in the validity of Absolute Authority. The Absolute Reason, in redeeming a lost race, requires a second person for the manifestation of his secret plan and counsel, just as in the eternal Ideal of created worlds there must be the manifesting will that fixes them in objective steadfastness; and it is by the same second Person, as Son, God redeems humanity, that it was by whom also in the beginning "he made the worlds."1

1 Heb. i. 2.

SECTION II

THE REDEMPTIVE WORK AS WROUGHT IN HUMAN FLESH.

THE coming of Christ in the flesh, and so taking humanity, was the great redeeming-work of God. This has in it all the virtue for salvation that any subsequent manifestation can bring out of it, and in itself, to the divine comprehension, expresses the length and breadth, the height and depth, of the love of God; and has in it, too, all the purpose and promise of the first announcement of redemption after the fall, when God said of the enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, "It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." But to finite spirits, and especially to human reason, this "mystery of godliness" will not have its hidden truth unfolded but through a life-and-death-experience, which shall carry out before them the very work of self-sacrifice which is essentially in the very incarnation itself. This has already been prefigured as plainly as ritual representations could effect it, in the sacrifice of the paschal lamb, and the sin-offering of the slain goat, and bearing-away-iniquity of the scape goat; but though as clearly as humanity