CHAPTER IV. BIBLICAL ARGUMENT. SECTION I. THE INCARNATION. "The Word became flesh!" In this simple, but sublime enunciation, we have the whole gospel comprehended in a word. From the glorious orb of light which is here made to burst upon our view, all that would else be dark and chaotic becomes at once irradiated with the bright majesty and everlasting harmony of truth itself. The incarnation is the key that unlocks the sense of all God's revelations. It is the key that unlocks the sense of all God's works, and brings to light the true meaning of the universe. The world, and especially Man, who may be said to gather into his person at last all lower forms of existence, himself the summit of the vast organic pyramid, is a mystery that is solved and interpreted finally only in this fact. Nature and Revelation, the world and Christianity, as springing from the same divine Mind, are not two different systems joined together in a merely outward way. They form a single whole, harmonious with itself in all its parts. The sense of the one then is necessarily included and comprehended in the sense of the other. The mystery of the new creation, must involve in the end the mystery of the old; and the key that serves to unlock the meaning of the first, must serve to unlock at the same time the inmost secret of the last. The incarnation forms thus the great central FACT of the world. It is a magnificent thought on which Heinrich Steffens bases his system of Anthropology, that Man is to be viewed, "as the end of a boundless Past, the centre of a boundless Present, and the beginning of a boundless Future." In the most eminent sense may we say this, of Him who is the centre of Humanity itself, the Son of Man, as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. All nature and all previous history unite, to form one grand, universal prophecy of his presence. All becomes significant and complete at last, only in his person. Nature, through all lower forms of existence, looks upwards continually to the idea of man. The inorganic struggles towards the organic; the plant towards the animal; and the animal nature, improving upon itself from one order of life to another, rests not till it is superseded finally by the human. Thus all converge towards the same end; each inferior nature foreshadowing that which is to follow, till the vast system becomes symmetrical and full, in a form of perfection which may be said to include at last and mirror the true sense of the whole.* Without man the entire world would be shorn of its meaning. It is by the medium of his personality only, that it becomes transparent with thought and is made to utter any intelligible sound. The world finds itself, comes to the knowledge of itself, in man. All is dark till it has made its way up to the sphere of human consciousness. There all becomes light. Man is the centre of nature; the key to all its mysteries; the idea, which binds its manifold parts into one, and makes them complete as a single organic whole. But what man is to nature in this way, Christ may be said to be in some sense to man. Humanity itself is never complete, till it reaches his person. It includes in its very constitution a struggle towards the form in which it is here exhibited, which can never rest till this end is attained. Our nature reaches after a true and real union with the nature of God, as the neces *It is hardly necessary to say, that the idea here presented implies no possibility whatever of a regular development, on the part of any lower form of existence, upwards to the sphere of that which stands above it. This thought, which has been exhibited with no small measure of plausibility by the author of the little volume entitled Vestiges of Creation, has been justly repudiated by the Christian world as contrary to all revelation and religion. It contra. dicts, besides, all sound philosophy. The process of growth and historical development can never, as such, evolve from any form of existence more than was actually involved in it from the beginning. But who can imagine at all, that the life of the animal is ever potentially present in the life of the plant. To say that the law of existence in the one case, is made to include at a certain point more than was comprehended in it before, is only to play with words; for the more which appears in that case must be considered in all respects a new creation, and in no intelligible sense whatever the product or birth of what existed previously. The difference between the animal and man, is just as broad as that between the animal and the plant. There is an impassable gulph between the two forms of existence, which nothing short of a new creation can ever surmount in the case of the lower. But all this has nothing to do with the view presented in the text. It is affirmed here, simply, that the lower forms of existence look prophetically towards those which are above them. They cannot be said to carry these in their womb, in any sense; but they foreshadow their presence, and in this way find their own full meaning always in something beyond themselves. The evidence of this is so plain, that the fact will not be called in question by any who have even the most general acquaintance with the actual constitution of the world. sary complement and consummation of its own life. The idea which it embodies can never be fully actualized, under any other form. The incarnation then is the proper completion of humanity. Christ is the true ideal Man. Here is reached ultimately the highest summit of human life, which is at the same time of course the crowning sense of the world, or that in which it finds its last and full signification. Here the human consciousness itself, the medium of order and light for the sphere of mere nature, is raised into a higher sphere, from which a new life is made to pour itself forth again over the whole world. Man finds himself in God, and wakes to the full sense of his own being, in being enabled thus to fall back, in a full, free way, on the absolute ground of his life. The one only medium of such inward, living communication with the divine nature, is the mystery of the incarnation, as exhibited in the man Christ Jesus. This forms accordingly, without a figure, the inmost and last sense of all God's works. The world, from its extreme circumference, looks inward to this fact as its true and proper centre, and presses towards it continually, from every side, as the end of its entire constitution. All is one vast prophecy of the coming of Christ. History too converges, from the beginning, always towards the same point. Not only here and there, have we solitary annunciations, more or less obscure, of the glorious advent of the Messiah. History, like nature, is one vast prophecy of the incarnation, from beginning to end. How could it be otherwise, if the idea of humanity, as we have seen, required from the first such a union with the divine nature, in order that it might be complete? What is history, but the process by which this idea is carried forward, according to the immanent law of its own nature, in the way of a regular development towards its appointed end? The introduction of sin-itself a world-fact, inseparably incorporated with this process almost from its start, and turning all violently into a false direction-only served to add a deeper emphasis to the meaning of life, in the view now noticed. The necessity of a real union with the divine nature, became a necessity at the same time of redemption, the loud cry of suffering humanity after an atonement for sin. The development of this want, might be said to form thus the great burden of history, onward from the fall. All of course, in this view, had a reference prophetically to the coming of Christ. The whole creation groaned and travailed in pain together, reaching forward, as it were, with earnest expectation, to the hour of this deliverance Not only Judaism, but Paganism too, preached beforehand the great event. Both looked, from different sides, in the same direction and towards the same end. Both found their inmost meaning verified at last and explained in Christ.* Paganism must ever be of course essentially false, under all its forms. But all falsehood involves some truth, of which it is the caricature, but from which at the same time it draws its life. The time has been, when a superficial infidelity sought to bring the mysteries of Christianity into discredit, by comparing them with the mythological dreams and speculations of the heathen world. But that time, it may be trusted, has come to an end. Christianity as the absolute religion, must in the nature of the case, take up into itself, and exhibit in a perfect form, the fragments and rudiments of truth contained in all relative religions. It is not a doctrine, but a divine fact, into which all previous religious tendencies and developments are ultimately gathered as their proper end. As in Nature, all lower developments of life, however defective or seemingly monstrous, find their true meaning and value, only as analogies and relative approximations to the nature of man-whose perfection and dignity in this way they serve, not to disparage, but to authenticate and magnify; so do the ancient religions, both of the Orient and West, conspire to bear testimony in favour of Christ, falling down as it were before him, and presenting unto him gifts, "gold and frankincense and myrrh." Brahmanism, Buddhism, Parsism, the religion of Egypt and the religion of Greece, each in its own way, look ever in the same direction, and are heard to utter in the end the same voice. All prophesy of Christ; for all proclaim the inmost want of humanity to be a true union with God, and their character is determined simply by the form in which it is attempted in each case to bring this great life problem to its proper resolution. These attempts of course destroy themselves, and end in gross contradiction. The Trimurti, or pantheistic triad of India, falls immeasurably short of the Christian Trinity. The incarnation of Vischnu goes not beyond the character of a transient phantasm. Mithras, Osiris, the idea of a wrestling, suffering, redeeming god, Apollo among the Greeks, or Hercules, forcing his way to Olympus; all are found to be utterly helpless conceptions, as it regards the purpose they are brought forward to serve. The representation remains always inadequate and disproportionate, in the highest * Unus Christus Jesus dominus noster veniens per universam dispositionem, et omnia in se recapitulans. Irenæus.-Interesting on this point is Dorner, in the Introduction to his "Christologie," or History of the Doctrine of Christ's Person. Also, the Introduction to the Doctrine of the Trinity in its Historical Development, by G. A. Meier-a most able and excellent work, published in 1844; with which may be compared advantageously the Intro. duction to the large, very learned, but less orthodox work of Baur on the same subject. degree, to the idea it struggles to reach. All ends in an insurmountable dualism. An impassable gulph continues still to divide the nature of man from the nature of God. But the significance of all, in the view now considered, becomes thus only the more clear and full. Under all its manifestations, Paganism may be regarded as the unsuccessful effort of humanity, cast upon itself, to solve the problem, whose full solution is revealed at last only in the person of Christ. Christianity is the key that interprets its mysterious sense, and establishes thus its own divine character at the same time. All false religions prepare the way prophetically for the presence of the true, and serve to authenticate its mission when it has come. Judaism, we all know, had respect to the coming of Christ, from the beginning. The preparation which in the case of the heathen world was negative only, assumed here a positive character. The religion of the Old Testament, from the time of Adam down to the time of John the Baptist, stood throughout on the ground of a supernatural revelation that might be said not only to foreshadow the great fact of the incarnation, but directly to open the way also for its manifestation. It is not simply the necessity of a union with God on the part of man, the cry for redemption and salvation, which it is felt can be reached only in this way, that is here made to reveal itself in the world's history; a real approximation to men on the part of God, in the way of a movement to meet this want, is exhibited at the same time. Heathenism might be said to run out in a helpless attempt violently to deify humanity itself; a process that must ever fall back, with new despair, to the point from which it started. In the religion of the Old Testament, God descends towards man, and holds out to his view in this way the promise of a real union of the divine nature with the human, as the end of the gracious economy thus introduced. To such a real union it is true, the dispensation itself never came. By a series of condescensions, that grew always more significant and full of encouragement as the dispensation advanced towards its proper end, God drew continually more and more near to men in an outward way. But to the last it continued to be only in an outward way. The wall of partition that separated the divine from the human, was never fully broken down. The tabernacle of the Most High was among men; but he dwelt notwithstanding beyond them, and out of them, between the cherubim and behind the veil. He spake by dreams, and visions, and clear words of prophecy, that became always more full and distinct; but the revelation to the end, was a revelation of God to man, and not a revelation of God in man-the only form in which it was possible for him to become truly |