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striven to express universal divine presence by multiplying their gods. This at least had the effect of giving life to every part of nature. The imaginative Greek had grown familiar with the thought of gods innumerable. Every stream, each grove, the caves, the fields, the clouds, suggested some divine person. It would be almost impossible to strip such a one of those fertile suggestions and tie him to the simple doctrine of One God, without producing a sense of cheerlessness and solitude. Angels come in to make for him an easy transition from polytheism to monotheism. The air might still be populous, his imagination. yet be full of teeming suggestions, but no longer with false gods. Now there was to him but one God, but He was served by multitudes of blessed spirits, children of light and glory. Instead of a realm of conflicting divinities there was a household, the Father looking in benignity upon his radiant family. Thus, again, to the Greek, as to the Patriarch, angels ascended and descended the steps that lead from earth to heaven.

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CHAPTER III.

THE DOCTRINAL BASIS.

EFORE we enter upon the childhood of Jesus, and, with

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still more reason, before we enter upon his adult life, it is necessary to form some idea of his original nature. No one conversant with the ideas on this point which fill the Christian world can avoid taking sides with one or another of the philosophical views which have divided the Church. Even mere readers, who seem to themselves uncommitted to any doctrine of the nature of Christ, are unconsciously in sympathy with some theory. But to draw up a history of Christ without some pilot-idea is impossible. Every fact in the narrative will take its color and form from the philosophy around which it is grouped.

Was Jesus, then, one of those gifted men who have from time. to time arisen in the world, differing from their fellows only in pre-eminence of earthly power, in a fortunate temperament, and a happy balance of faculties? Was he Was he simply and only an extraordinary MAN? This view was early taken, and as soon vehemently combated. But it has never ceased to be held. It reappears in every age. And it has special hold upon thoughtful minds to-day; at least, upon such thoughtful minds as are imbued with the present spirit of material science. The physical laws of nature, we are told, are invariable and constant, and all true knowledge is the product of the observation of such laws. This view will exclude, not only miracles, the divine inspiration of holy men of old, and the divinity of Jesus Christ; but, if honestly followed to its proper consequences, it will destroy the grounds on which stand the belief of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of angels and spirits; and, finally and fatally, it will deny the validity of all evidences of the existence and government of God. And we accordingly find that, on the European continent and in England, the men

of some recent schools of science, without denying the existence of an intelligent, personal God, deny that there is, or can be, any human knowledge of the fact. The nature of the human mind, and the laws under which all knowledge is gained, it is taught, prevent our knowing with certainty anything beyond the reach of the senses and of personal consciousness. God is the Unknown, and the life beyond this the Unknowable. There are many inclining to this position who would be shocked at the results to which it logically leads. But it is difficult to see how one can reject miracles, as philosophically impossible, except upon grounds of materialistic science which lead irresistibly to

veiled or overt atheism.

The Lives of Christ which have been written from the purely humanitarian view have not been without their benefits. They have brought the historical elements of his life into clearer light, have called back the mind from speculative and imaginative efforts in spiritual directions, and have given to a dim and distant idea the clearness and reality of a fact. Like some old picture of the masters, the Gospels, exposed to the dust and smoke of superstition, to revarnishing glosses and retouching philosophies, in the sight of many had lost their original brightness and beauty. The rationalistic school has done much to remove these false surfaces, and to bring back to the eye the original picture as it was laid upon the canvas.

But, this work ended, every step beyond has been mischievous. The genius of the Gospels has been crucified to a theory of Christ's humanity. The canons of historical criticism. have been adopted or laid aside as the exigencies of the special theory required. The most lawless fancy has been called in to correct the alleged fancifulness of the evangelists. Not only has the picture been "restored," but the pigments have been taken off, reground, and laid on again by modern hands. A new head, a different countenance, appears. They found a God: they have left a feeble man!

Dissatisfied with the barrenness of this school, which leaves nothing upon which devotion may fasten, another class of thinkers have represented Jesus as more than human, but as less than divine. What that being is to whose kind Jesus belongs, they cannot tell. Theirs is a theory of compromise. It adopts

the obscure as a means of hiding definite difficulties. It admits the grandeur of Christ's nature, and the sublimity of his life and teachings. It exalts him above angels, but not to the level of the Throne. It leaves him in that wide and mysterious space that lies between the finite and the infinite.

The theological difficulties which inhere in such a theory are many. It may enable reasoners to elude pursuit, but it will not give them any vantage-ground for a conflict with philosophical objections. And yet, as the pilot-idea of a Life of Christ, it is far less mischievous than the strictly humanitarian view; it does less violence to recorded facts. But it cannot create an ideal on which the soul may feed. After the last touch is given to the canvas, we see only a Creature. The soul admires; but it must go elsewhere to bestow its utmost love and reverence.

A third view is held, which may be called the doctrine of the Church, at least since the fourth century. It attributes to Jesus a double nature, - a human soul and a divine soul in one body. It is not held that these two souls existed separately and in juxtaposition, two separate tenants, as it were, of a common dwelling. Neither is it taught that either soul absorbed the other, so that the divine lapsed into the human, or the human expanded into the divine. But it is held that, by the union of a human and a divine nature, the one person Jesus Christ became God-Man; a being carrying in himself both natures, inseparably blended, and never again to be dissevered. This new theanthropic being, of blended divinity and humanity, will occasion no surprise in those who are familiar with modes of thought which belonged to the early theologians of the Church. It is only when, in our day, this doctrine is supposed to be found in the New Testament, that one is inclined to surprise.

For, as in a hot campaign the nature of the lines of intrenchment is determined by the assaults of the enemy, so this doctrine took its shape, not from Scripture statements, but from the exigencies of controversy. It was thrown up to meet the assaults upon the true divinity of Christ; and, although cumbrous and involved, it saved Christianity. For, the truth of the proper divinity of Christ is the marrow of the sacred Scriptures. It is the only point at which natural and revealed religion can be reconciled.

But if by another and better statement the divinity of Christ can be exhibited in equal eminence and with greater simplicity, and if such exhibition shall be found in more obvious accord with the language of the New Testament, and with what we now know of mental philosophy, it will be wise, in constructing a life of Christ, to leave the antiquated theory of the mediæval Church, and return to the simple and more philosophical views of the sacred Scriptures.

We must bear in mind that many questions which have profoundly excited the curiosity of thinkers, and agitated the Church, had not even entered into the conceptions of men at the time when the writings of the New Testament were framed. They are medieval or modern. The Romish doctrine of the Virgin Mary could hardly have been understood even, by the apostles. The speculations which have absorbed the thoughts of men for ages are not only not found in the sacred record, but would have been incongruous with its whole spirit. The evangelists never reason upon any question; they simply state what they saw or heard. They never deduce inferences and principles from facts. They frame their narrations without any apparent consciousness of the philosophical relations of the facts contained in them to each other or to any system. It is probable that the mystery of the Incarnation never entered their minds as it exists in ours. It was to them a moral fact, and not a philosophical problem.

How Jesus was Son of God, and yet Son of Man, is nowhere spoken of in those simple records. The evangelists and the apostles content themselves with simply declaring that God came into the world in the form of a man. "The WORD was God." "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." This is all the explanation given by the disciple who was most in sympathy with Jesus. Jesus was God; and he was made flesh. The simplest rendering of these words would seem to be, that the Divine Spirit had enveloped himself with the human body, and in that condition pensable limitations of material laws. a direct historical narrative of facts. which was also in Christ Jesus: who, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself

been subject to the indisPaul's statement is almost "Let this mind be in you being in the form of God,

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