XV. THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST.* It is the question of the ages. Propounded eighteen centuries ago, it has been a living question ever since, and it was never agitated so much as now. Every year the press brings forth its new life of Christ. The term "Christology" is a coinage of our own generation, and it indicates that the study of Christ's person has become a science by itself. The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ wins more readers to-day than any other book in the world. The character of Christ is the standard of all excellence, even by the confession of those who are enemies to his gospel; and he himself declares that by our attitude toward him we shall be judged. The question "What think ye of the Christ?" is asked of each one of us to-night; it will be asked of us when we stand at last before God; and the answer will determine our eternal destiny. I am glad that the Scriptures enable us to answer it aright. They point us to the two natures of our Lord which united constitute him the ladder from earth to heaven. On the one hand, he is the Son of Man; on the other hand, he is the Son of God. It is my purpose, first, to show what these phrases mean; and then, secondly, to draw from them certain important practical lessons. Observe then that Christ is Son of Man. This can mean nothing less than that Christ is true man. It means much more besides, but let us first grasp and insist upon this. Christ is man. The ancient docetic view which held so strongly to his divinity that it left no room for his humanity - the view that in the incarnation Deity passed through the body of the Virgin as water through a reed, taking up into itself nothing of the human nature through which it passed — this was all an ignoring and a contradiction of Scripture. When the New Testament assures us that Jesus Christ was the Son of David and of the stock of Israel, when it describes him as sitting weary upon Jacob's well, as sleeping upon the rower's cushion, as suffering upon the cross, and as breathing out his soul in death, there is one thing which we cannot mistake and that is that this Son of Man is man. And that not simply as respects the reality of his human body. He had a human mind also, and that mind was subject to the ordinary laws of human development. He grew in wisdom, as well as in stature and in favor with God and man. In his mother's arms he was not the omniscient babe that some have supposed. In his later years he suffered, being tempted, as he could not have suffered, if all things had been open to his gaze. Even to the last, it would seem that he was ignorant of the day of the end, for "of that day," he tells us, "knoweth no man, neither the angels of God, neither the Son, but the * Preached in Sage Chapel, Cornell University, May 25, 1884, as a sermon on the text. Mat. 22: 42- "What think ye of the Christ? Whose son is he?" Father." Not till his twelfth year, at his interview with the doctors in the temple, does he apparently become fully conscious that he is the Sent of God, the Son of God; and even then he must learn obedience to parents, and prepare for his public ministry by the gradual growth of mind and heart and will, amid the humble duties of son, brother, citizen, and member of the Jewish Synagogue. There are two pictures by modern artists, the one of which illustrates the false, and the other the true view of Jesus' human development. The first is by Overbeck, the celebrated German painter. It represents the child Jesus at play in Joseph's work-shop. Child as he is, his great future sacrifice looms up before him continually, and even in his play he is fashioning sticks and blocks into the shape of a cross, and so is rehearsing in his infancy the tragedy of Calvary. I see no indication in Scripture that this conception is true, or that the great future experiences of our Lord were ever thus early anticipated. The second picture is by Holman Hunt, the Englishman. It is entitled "The Shadow of the Cross." It also represents the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. At the close of a weary day, when the level rays of the setting sun are streaming through the door, Jesus, the carpenter, turns from his toil and stretches out his arms in sheer fatigue. The shadow of those outstretched arms, and of that relaxed and tired form, is thrown upon the opposite wall. There the long upright saw, and the smaller tools ranged transversely, make the rude semblance of a cross, and the shadow of the Savior falls upon it. At one side, Mary, the mother of Jesus, weary of the long delay in the manifestation of her Son, has been trying to revive her faith in those old promises that had accompanied his birth, by opening the casket in which had been kept the gold, frankincense and myrrh, which the wise men from the east had brought. The sudden stopping of Jesus' work startles the mother, and turning to look at the Savior, her eye falls upon that prophetic cross upon the wall and the shadowy form of her Son stretched upon it, and the sword pierces her own heart also. But Jesus does not see the cross; his face is turned from it. His is still a countenance of youthful energy, weariness and sadness, if you please, but still, not yet of anguish ; his hour is not yet come. Holman Hunt's picture is truer to the gospel narrative than Overbeck's. Instead of fashioning crosses, Jesus was far more probably, as Justin Martyr, the old church Father, tells us, making ploughs and yokes, and so by hard manual toil supporting the widowed mother whom Joseph's death had left dependent upon his care. Jesus walked by faith, not by sight. His knowledge was a growing knowledge. His prayers were real prayers - full of strong crying and tears. He was made perfect through suffering. And all this testifies that he was one of us-a veritable man like ourselves. But was there nothing peculiar about the humanity of Jesus? Ah yes, he was not only man he was the ideal man. When he is called Son of man, it is intimated that he is man in the highest possible sense, the central, typical man, in whom is realized the perfect idea of humanity as it existed in the mind of God. By this I do not mean that in all respects this glory belonged to him in the days of his flesh. Those were days of humiliation. I do not know that the man Christ Jesus was surpassingly beautiful in his physical form. At first sight, it might seem strange that we have no authen tic description of Jesus' person. Whether he was great or small of stature, we know not. The passage in Josephus with respect to his appearance is unquestionably spurious, and the portrait said to have been presented to King Abgarus does not date back further than to the seventh century. Was our Lord exceptionally noble, or exceptionally mean, in person? We cannot say with certainty. Scripture has been cited to sustain each hypothesis. In the synagogue of Nazareth, the "gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth" would almost seem to betoken the noble presence and winning manner of the natural orator; while, on his way to Jerusalem to suffer, there was a majesty of mien which so deeply impressed the disciples that they were amazed and afraid. But then we read in the prophets, that "his visage is more marred than any man; " "he hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him." So the Byzantine painters conceived that they had full warrant for representing Christ as emaciated, and aged before his time,-did not the people say to this young man: “Thou art not yet fifty years old?" But on the other hand, the Italian painters represented him as the model of all manly beauty,—did not the Psalmist say: "Thou art fairer than the children of men?" Perhaps the truth is midway between the two. Christ joined himself to our average humanity; so far as personal advantages were concerned, taking that which is neither exceptionally mean nor exceptionally noble. But just as there are persons, undistinguished from the rest, who in times of sorrow seem positively ugly, but through whose plain features at other times of spiritual exaltation the rapt soul seems to shine so gloriously that the poor earthly investiture is transfigured, and you wonder that you ever thought of them as other than beautiful, so it may be that the Son of man, in his common, every-day, working garb of humanity, appeared only as the man of sorrows, while to little children there was a smile that drew them to his arms, to earnest seekers of salvation he was full of grace and truth, and to his trusted followers upon the mountain-top there was the flashing forth of a supernatural majesty and glory. So he teaches us that mere physical endowments are not the noblest, but that if we seek first the kingdom of God even these things shall be added to us, as "the head that once was covered with thorns, is crowned with glory now." Of what temperament was Jesus? Mercurial or saturnine, lymphatic or phlegmatic, nervous or equable, sanguine or calm? Who does not perceive, the moment the question is asked, that none of these temperaments predominated in him? The story of his life gives us illustrations of the best features of them all. He can be swift and direct as the thunderbolt against hypocrisy; he can be deep and calm as the summer sea, when he comforts his disciples. Who ever thinks of Christ as a Jew? There was no Jewish grasping or bigotry in him. All the free spirit and aesthetic insight of the Greek, all the Roman reverence for law, all the Hebrew worship of holiness, all the love that breaks down the barriers of the nations and makes all races one - all these were in Christ. What woman, though she were the tenderest and most delicate of all, ever thought that Jesus would be more able to sympathize with her if he were woman instead of man? Chaucer wrote long ago: "Christ was a maid, though shapen as a man." All the spiritual excellences of both the sexes were in him, he possessed the feminine as well as the masculine virtues. Indeed, without gentleness and sympathy no high manhood is possible. True manhood is something more than mere masculinity. Plato says that each human being is but a moiety of the perfect creature, wandering through the wide and barren earth to find its other half. Shakspeare echoes the thought when he declares that: "He is the half part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such as she; And so Tennyson says: "Yet in long years liker must they grow: He gain in sweetness and in moral light, Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world." And the same poet addresses Christ and says: "Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood, thou; Have we ever reflected that all the qualities which attract our love in men, aye, even in the dearest object of our earthly affection, exist in Christ in infinitely greater degree and abundance? All true and noble souls, whether regenerate or unregenerate, are but faint reflections of this glory of him who is original and only light of the world. All the excellencies of character that appear in John, Paul, Augustine, Luther; the intellectual acumen, the emotional fervor, the power of conscience, the energy of will, that make great thinkers, great friends, great reformers, great men, are only scattered rays, which find their focus in the humanity of Christ. He is no still Thomas a Kempis-seraphic in devotion, but holding himself aloft from his age and making little impression on it; he is no fiery John Knox-stern and hard in all his indignant righteousness; but he has all the good in both of these, with none of their defects,—aye, all the good of a thousand others like them melted into one. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship, so that love him as we may we never can love too much, but must ever come infinitely short of his desert. He includes in himself all the possible perfections of humanity-all the perfections needful to make him our eternal model - all the perfections which finite humanity is progressively to realize through the ages that are to come. I have said that Christ is man, and that he is the ideal man. But I must lead you further. Christ is the life-giving man. He not only has humanity, and perfect humanity, but he gives it to others. He is not simply the bright, consummate flower of the race, the noblest fruit from this human stem, but he is a new beginning and fountain-head of humanity, the second Adam, in whom the race that had been despoiled of its inheritance in the first Adam finds its true source of spiritual life. So absolutely new is this beginning, this inauguration of a fresh and pure humanity within the bounds of the old race, that skeptics have denied the possibility of it, and have called it an effect without a cause. But we are persuaded that the same God who created humanity at the first was perfectly capable of recreating it, when it had apostatized and rebelled. God is a sufficient cause. We do not need. to explain Christ by his natural antecedents. We grant that the absence of narrow individuality, the ideal universal manhood which we find in Christ, could never have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation. Much less, without taking into account a recreating act of God, could we explain the existence of man without sin. Here is one, holy, harmless, undefiled, separated from sinners; one who never prays for forgiveness, but who imparts it to others; one who challenges his bitterest enemies to convince him of the least sin; one who alone of all mankind can say: "The prince of the world cometh; and he hath nothing in me"-nothing of evil desire or tendency on which his subtlest temptations can lay hold. Now the very idea of such a man as this surpasses all human powers of invention, for men invent characters like their own. The source of it can only be in a real life once lived here upon the earth; and if that life once was lived, it must have come from God. Corrupted human nature cannot produce that which is uncorrupt. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." "Had Christ been only human nature," says Julius Müller, "he could not have been without sin; but life can draw even out of the putrescent clod materials for its own living." The new science recognizes more than one method of propagation even in the same species; and while the supernatural conception of Christ is a mystery to us, it is a mystery that well nigh explains every other mystery. The only explanation of such a humanity as Christ's is that it came from God by a new impulse of that power which created man at the beginning. And so Christ becomes not only the embodiment of all that is noble in the old humanity, but also the fountain-head and beginning of a new humanity - a new source of life for the race. Here is a new vine, whose roots are in heaven, not on earth, a vine into which the degenerate, half-withered branches of the old humanity may be grafted, so that they may have life divine. "The first Adam was made a living soul; this last Adam a life-giving Spirit." A new race takes its origin from Christ, as the old race took its start from Adam. "He shall see his seed," he shall be the centre and source of a new humanity. The relation of the Christian to Christ supersedes all other relationships, so that "he that loveth father or mother more than me"- that is, values more highly his natural ancestry than he values his new spiritual descent and relationship,-" is not worthy of me." Christ's human nature is a human nature that is germinal and capable of self-communication, and it constitutes him the spiritual head and beginning of a new and holy race. O, thou wonderful Savior, who hast not only life in thyself but the power of an endless life, that thou mightest be the first born among many brethren, the founder of a new city and kingdom of God, help us to see how great a thing is that humanity which thou hast taken to thyself, and the glorious possibilities of which thou hast undertaken to set forth before the universe! Thus we have seen that the phrase "Son of man" intimates that Jesus is man, possessed of all the powers of a normal and developed humanity; that he is the ideal man, furnishing in himself the pattern which humanity is progressively to realize; and that he is the self-propagating man, who in the power of the Spirit raises up for himself a new race which shall answer to the idea of humanity as it first existed in the mind of God. But there is more than this in the phrase "Son of man." That phrase intimates also |