others, to think of the significance, or power, of His humanity as limited to His sole individual self-hood, is incompatible with the very existence and meaning of the Church. He alone was not generically but inclusively

man.

The only relation which can at all directly compare with it, is that of Adam; who, in a real-though a primarily external, and therefore inadequate-sense, was Humanity; so that every succeeding instance of humanity is human by direct derivation from him, as very part and parcel of what he was. The reality and directness of our relation with Adam we feel only too cogently. It is useless to argue about it; it is there. It is part of what we begin with. It belongs to that consciousness of the self which is anterior to any analysis or argument. Every pulsation of the blood in our veins, every limitation, or temptation, or disorder, or decay, which, through the avenue of the body has come home to ourselves, and registered itself as part of our own private history and consciousness, is witness only too incontrovertible to the necessity and the absoluteness of our relationship with Adam. The nature, in and through which we live, is the nature which we have received by transmission from him. It is in us what it was in him first. We cannot separate ourselves from him. No indignation, no bewailing, no strenuousness of effort or resolve will avail to alter the underlying fact that our humanity is his humanity. From him it was derived to us; and in us it retains all those natural qualities and tendencies, in which and through which our personality grows to self-consciousness and self-expression; but which themselves, long before any personality of ours, for good or for evil took their stamp, as being what they were, in him.

This is the only instance, actual or possible, with which the relation of Jesus Christ to humanity has been in scripture, or can be, compared. But even in this one case the

comparison is not completely adequate. It is valid as an illustration, but remains on a different, and dissimilar, level. The one is a fleshly relation, the other a spiritual. The one works automatically, materially, mechanically. The other is realized in a different sphere, and depends upon other than material conditions. The one is a natural property of bodily life, and follows, as it were blindly, from the fact that Adam was the original parent. The other is a Spiritual property, so sovereign, so transcendent, that it could only be a property of a Humanity which was not merely the Humanity of a finite creature, but the Humanity of the infinite God.

Not that there is any absolute antithesis between spirit and body. Neither is body without spirit, nor spirit without body. What Adam is to the flesh, and, through the flesh, indirectly to the spirit also; that is Christ to the spirit, and, through the spirit, indirectly also to the flesh, of all those who, as they are partakers, in flesh, of Adam, are made capable of becoming partakers, in Spirit, of Christ. We talk, indeed, ourselves, in a limited sense, of one man speaking or acting in the spirit of another; and so far as it goes the phrase is not untrue; yet it goes but a very little way. That complete indwelling and possessing of even one other, which the yearnings of man towards man imperfectly approach, is only possible, in any fulness of the words, to that Spirit of Man which is the Spirit of God: to the Spirit of God, become, through Incarnation, the Spirit of Man. No mere man indwells, in Spirit, in, or as, the Spirit of another. Whatever near approach there may be seen to be towards this, is really mediated through the Spirit of Christ. If I grow at last towards unity of spirit with my friend: it is not really that I am in him, or he in me; but rather that the grace of indwelling Spirit which indwelt in him, and made him, in his own way, what he was, is not denied even to me. Experience of man with

man, here as elsewhere, gives but a faint analogy of the meaning of the Divine. But, here as elsewhere, it would be a fatal mistake to interpret the meaning of the Divine only in terms of man's experience with man. After all, we do not fully attain to the meaning of anything here. We do but point towards, we do not realize, even that which we first and most claim to possess-self-conscious personality: we do not realize the conditions without which we ourselves should be unthinkable: what wonder if we can but point dimly towards, and cannot realize, the reciprocity of true intercommunion of spirits? But what our limited being points towards, is real in God. If Christ's Humanity were not the Humanity of Deity, it could not stand in the wide, inclusive, consummating relation, in which it stands in fact, to the humanity of all other men. But as it is, the very essence of the Christian religion is the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ. "The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit." "If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His."2

No attempt will be made, in the present context at least, to enlarge further upon the methods or meanings of this mutual inherence, this spiritual indwelling, whereby humankind is summed anew, and included, in Christ.3 Nor need we at this moment attempt to enter into a discussion as to the meaning of the prerogative of free will, or that awful possibility which is inherent in it, whereby we may revolt, and reject, and put ourselves outside the life of Christ. Be that possibility what it may, it is not that that can interpret-for it is utter revolt and contradiction against-the meaning of the atoning work of Christ. The meaning of that work must be found, not in the mystery of the possibility of its being contradicted,

I Cor. xv. 45.

2 Romans viii. 9.

These subjects are further discussed in chapters viii. and ix.

but in the beauty of its unmarred effectiveness. And apart from man's power to revolt from it, which we do not now discuss, it certainly means inclusion within the Body of the Spirit of Christ.

If there be those to whom such language sounds in the least degree either figurative or overstrained, it may, at the present stage, be sufficient to remind them of these three things. First, that its truth, as literal and vital, is absolutely assumed in all that St Paul has to say about the first, and the second, Adam. Secondly that not in one place only, but from end to end, language expressive of this truth is so reiterated and insisted on in the New Testament, that it may fairly be called the characteristic truth of the apostolic Church. If there is one corollary from the Deity of Christ, which, more than another, we may defy any man to eradicate from New Testament theology, without shivering the whole into fragments, it is the truth of the recapitulation and inclusion of the Church, which is, ideally at least, as wide as humanity, in Christ. And thirdly, that this truth is the obvious basis of the entire sacramental system and doctrine, that is, of the divinely distinctive worship, which is the divine expression of the faith and life, of the Church of Christ. What is Baptism, in its truest realization, but our incorporation, as members, into the Body of Christ? What is Holy Communion, but a feeding and living upon the Body and Blood of Christ? The beginning of life in Christ's Church is the free gift of membership in Christ. The crown of the most ideal and unfaltering life of communion is the consummation of personal union with Christ. The whole sacramental system symbolizes, expounds, represents, yes and conveys-not mechanically nor magically, but intelligently, morally and spiritually, -this far more than merely human reality of inclusion with and in Christ.

No doubt all this may be said to be merely preliminary. Nothing has yet been offered in the way of explanation of the nature, or meaning, of the atoning action of our Lord. But perhaps it is not in vain to try and take account even of the more external and pedantic. barriers by which the, often unconscious, perverseness of the natural intellect tries to shut out our moral and spiritual consciousness from that assimilation of the basal truth of atonement, which is, in fact, its deepest necessity. And if perplexities of arithmetical character are to be met in terms of arithmetic; at least, when pressed by the charge of moral injustice in the fact of the vicarious intervention of any mediating third term between God and man, we may point out that there is a necessary, and a very grave, misconception in the terms of the charge: for He can be no intervening "third," who is Himself -not similarly, not generically, but wholly, individually, identically-the "first," and wholly, individually, identically the "second" also; who is Himself, on the one side absolutely, on the other (if we will but have it so), at least with a Divine potentiality, "singularis, unicus, et totus"-et Deus et Homo.