brought into view. Adam stands related to the race as a simple generic head; Christ as the true centre and universal basis of humanity itself. Our nature took its start in Adam; it finds its end and last ground only in Christ. It comes not with us to the exercise of a free, full personality, till we are consciously joined to the person of the divine Logos in our nature. In a deep sense thus, Christ is the universal Man. His Person is the root, in the presence and power of which only all other personalities can stand, in the case of his people, whether in time or eternity. They not only spring from him, as we all do from Adam, but continue to stand in him, as an all present, everywhere active personal Life.* In this way, they all have part in his divinity itself; though the hypostatical union, as such, remains limited of course to his own person. The whole Christ lives and works in the Church, supernaturally, gloriously, mysteriously, and yet really and truly, "always, to the end of the world." Glory be to God!

10. The mystical union includes necessarily a participation in the entire HUMANITY of Christ. Will any one pretend to say, that we are joined in real life-unity with the everlasting Logos, apart from Christ's manhood, in the way of direct personal mutual inbeing? This would be to exalt ourselves to the same level with the Son of God himself. The mystical union then would be the hypostatical union itself, repeated in the person of every believer. Such a supposition is monstrous. Those who think of it only impose upon themselves. For the conception

* Personality is constituted by self-consciousness. This includes, in our natural state, no reference whatever to an original progenitor. Adam forms in no sense the centre of our life, the basis of our spiritual being. But the Christian consciousness carries in its very nature, such a reference to the person of Jesus Christ. It consists in the active sense of this relation, as the true and proper life of its subject. The man does not connect with Christ the self-consciousness which he has under a different form, in the way of outward reference merely; but this reference is comprehended in his self-consciousness itself, so far as he has become spiritually renewed. Christ is felt to be the centre of his life; or rather this feeling may be said to be itself his life, the form in which he exists as a self-conscious person. It is with reason, therefore, that Schleiermacher speaks of the communication which Christ makes of himself to believers, as moulding the person; since he imparts, in fact, a new higher consciousness, that forms the basis of a life that was not previously at hand, the true centre of our personality under its most perfect form. In this case the person of Christ is the ground and fountain of all proper Christian personality in the Church. It is only as he is consciously in communication with Christ as his life centre, (which can be only through an actual self-communication-Wesensmittheilung—of Christ's life to him for this purpose,) that the believer can be regarded as a Christian, or new man in Christ Jesus. So Olshausen: "Die Persönlichkeit des Sohnes selbst, als die umfassende, nimmt alle Persönlichkeiten der Seinigen in sich auf, und durchdringt sie wieder mit seinem Leben, gleichsam als der lebendige Mittelpunct eines Organismus, von dem das Leben ausströmt und zu dem es wieder. kehrt." Comm. John xiv., 20,

of a real union, they substitute in their thoughts always one that is moral in fact. The Word became flesh in Christ, for the very purpose of reaching us in a real way. The incarnation constitutes the only medium by which, the only form under which, this divine life of the world can ever find its way over into our persons. Let us beware here of all Gnostic abstractions. Let us not fall practically into the condemnation of Nestorius. But allowing the humanity of Christ to be the indispensable medium of our participation in his person as divine, will any dream only of his human soul as comprehended in the case? Then the whole fact is again converted into a phantom. The life of Christ was one. To enter us at all in a real way, it must enter us in its totality. To divide the humanity of Christ, is to destroy it; to take it away, and lay it no one can tell where. What God has joined together, we have no right thus to put asunder. Christ's humanity is not his soul separately taken; just as little as it is his body separately taken. It is neither soul nor body as such, but the everlasting, indissoluble union of both.

11. As the mystical union embraces the whole Christ, so we too are embraced by it not in a partial but WHOLE way. The very nature of life is, that it lies at the ground of all that may be predicated besides of the subject in which it is found, in the way of quality, attribute, or distinction. It is the whole at once of the nature in which it resides. A new life then, to become truly ours, must extend to us in the totality of our nature. It must fill the understanding, and rule the will, enthrone itself in the soul and extend itself out over the entire body. Besides, the life which is to be conveyed into us in the present case, we have just seen to be in all respects a true human life before it reaches us It is the life of the incarnate Son of God. But as such, how can it be supposed in passing over to us, to lodge itself exclusively in our souls, without regard to our bodies? Is it not a contradiction, to think of a real union with Christ's humanity, which extends at least only to one half of our nature? In the person of Christ himself, we hold with the ancient Church the presence of a true body as well as of a reasonable soul. Shall this same Christ, as formed in his people, be converted into an incorporeal, docetic, Gnostic Christ, as having no real presence except in the abstract soul? Or may his bodily nature continue to hold in this case in the soul simply, separately taken? Incredible! Either Christ's human life is not formed in us at all, or it must be formed in us as a human life; must be corporeal as well as incorporeal; must put on outward form, and project itself in space. And all this is only to say, in other words, that it must enter into us, and become united to us, in our bodies as truly as in our souls. In this way, the mystical

union becomes real. Under any other conception, it ends in a phantasm, or falls back helplessly to the merely moral relation that is talked of by Pelagians and Rationalists.

12. The mystery now affirmed is accomplished, not in the way of two different forms of action, but by one and the same single and undivided process. Much of the difficulty that is felt with regard to this whole subject, arises from the inveterate prejudice, by which so commonly the idea of human life is split for the imagination into two lives, and a veritable dualism thus constituted in our nature in place of the absolute unity that belongs to it in fact. The Bible knows nothing of that abstract separation of soul and body, which has come to be so widely admitted into the religious views of the modern world. It comes from another quarter altogether; and it is as false to all true philosophy, as it is unsound in theology and pernicious for the Christian life. Soul and body, in their ground, are but one life ; identical in their origin; bound together by mutual interpenetration subsequently at every point; and holding for ever in the presence and power of the self-same organic law. We have no right to think of the body as the prison of the soul, in the way of Plato; nor as its garment merely; nor as its shell or hull. We have no right to think of the soul in any way as a form of existence of and by itself, into which the soul as another form of such existence is thrust in a mechanical way. Both form one life. The soul to be complete to develope itself at all as a soul, must externalize itself, throw itself out in space; and this externalization is the body.* All is one process, the action of

*To some, possibly, this representation may seem to be contradicted by what the Scriptures teach of the separate existence of the soul between death and the resurrection; and it must be admitted, that we are met here with a difficulty which it is not easy, at present, to solve. Let us, however, not mistake the true state of the case. The difficulty is not to reconcile Scripture with a psychological theory; but to bring it into harmony with itself. For it is certain, that the Scriptures teach such an identification of soul and body in the proper human personality, as clearly at least as they intimate a continued consciousness on the part of the soul between death and the resurrection. The doctrine of immortality in the Bible, is such as to include always the idea of the resurrection. It is an ἀναστάσις ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν. The whole argument in the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians, as well as the representation 1 Thess. iv., 13-18, proceeds on the assumption that the life of the body, as well as that of the soul, is indispensable to the perfect state of our nature as human. The soul then, during the intermediate state, cannot possibly constitute, in the biblical view, a complete man; and the case requires besides, that we should conceive of its relation to the body as still in force, not absolutely destroyed but only suspended. The whole condition is interimistic, and by no possibility of conception capable of being thought of as complete and final. When the resurrection body appears, it will not be as a new frame abruptly created for the occasion, and brought to the soul in the way of outward addition and supplement. It will be found to hold in strict organic continuity with the body, as it existed before death, as the action of the same law of life; which implies that this law has not been annihilated,

one and the same living organic principle, dividing itself only that its unity may become thus the more free and intensely complete. There is no room to dream then of a bodily communication with Christ on the part of believers, as something distinct from the communication they have with him in their souls. His flesh cannot enter our flesh, under an abstract form, dissevered from the rest of his life, and in no union with our souls as the medium of such translation. This would be the so called Capernaitic communion in full; not mystical, but magical; incredible and useless at the same time. The process by which Christ is formed in his people, is not thus two-fold but single. It lays hold of its subject in each case, not in the periphery of his person, but in its inmost centre, where the whole man, soul and body, is still one undivided life. As in the case of the mind it is neither the understanding, nor the will, that is apprehended by it, so in the case of the person also it is neither the soul nor the body, separately considered, that is so apprehended; it is the totality which includes all; it is the man in the very centre and ground of his personality. Christ's life as a whole is borne over into the person of the believer as a like whole. The communication is central, and central only; from the last ground of Christ's life to the last ground of ours; by the action of a single, invisible, self-identical, spiritual law. The power of Christ's life lodged in the soul begins to work there immediately as the principle of a new creation. In doing so, it works organically according to the law which it includes in its own constitution. That is, it works as a human life; and as such becomes a law of regeneration in the body as truly as in the soul.

13. In all this of course then there is no room for the supposition of any MATERIAL, tactual approach of Christ's body to the persons of his people. It is not necessary, that his flesh and blood, materially considered, should in any way pass over into our life, and become locally present in us under any form, to make us partakers of his humanity. Even in the sphere of mere nature, the continuity of organic existence, as it passes from one indivi dual to another-mounting upwards for instance from the buried seed, and revealing itself at last, through leaves and flowers, in a thousand new seeds after its own kind-is found to hang in

but suspended only in the intermediate state. In this character, however, it must be regarded as resting in some way, (for where else could it rest,) in the separate life, as it is called, of the soul itself; the slumbering power of the resurrection, ready at the proper time, in obedience to Christ's powerful word, to clothe itself with its former actual nature, in full identity with the form it carried before death, though under a far higher order of existence. Only then can the salvation of the soul be considered complete. All at last is one life; the subject of which is the totality of the believer's person, comprehending soul and body alike, from the beginning of the process to its end.

the end, not on the material medium as such through which the process is effected, but on the presence simply of the living force, immaterial altogether and impalpable, that imparts both form and substance to the whole. The presence of the root in the branches of the oak, is not properly speaking either a local or material presence. It is the power simply of a common life. And why then should it be held impossible, for Christ's life to reach over into the persons of his people, whole and entire, even without the intervention of any material medium whatever-belonging as it does pre-eminently to the sphere of the Spirit? Why should it seem extravagant, to believe that the law of this life, apart from all material contact with his person, may be so lodged in the soul of the believer by the power of the Holy Ghost, as to become there the principle of a new moral creation, that shall still hold in unbroken organic continuity with its root, and go on to take full possession of its subject, soul and body, under the same form?

14. Such a relation of Christ to the Church involves no UBIQUITY or idealistic dissipation of his body, and requires no FUSION of his proper personality with the persons of his people. We distinguish between the simple man and the universal man, here joined in the same person. The possibility of such a distinction is clear in the case of Adam. His universality is not indeed of the same order with that of Christ. But still the case has full force, for the point now in hand. Adam was at once an individual and a whole race. All his posterity partake of his life, and grow forth from him as their root. And still his individual person has not been lost on this account. Why then should the life of Christ in the Church, be supposed to conflict with the idea of his separate, distinct personality, under a true human form? Why must we dream of a fusion of persons in the one case, more than in the other? Here is more, it is true, than our relation to Adam. We not only spring from Christ, so far as our new life is concerned, but stand in him perpetually also as our ever living and ever present root. His Person is always thus the actual bearer of our persons. And yet there is no mixture, or flowing of one into the other, as individually viewed. Is not God the last ground of all personality? But does this imply any pantheistic dissipation of his nature, into the general consciousness of the intelligent universe? Just as little does it imply any like dissipation of Christ's personality into the general consciousness of the Church, when we affirm that it forms the ground, out of which and in the power of which only, the whole life of the Church continually subsists.* In this view Christ is

*It is not unusual to hear it objected to the view of such a comprehension of the general Christian life in the life of Christ, as is here maintained, that it