of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." (Phil. ii. 5-8.) This is a simple statement that Jesus, a Divine Person, brought his nature into the human body, and was subject to all its laws and conditions. No one can extract from this the notion of two intermixed souls in one nature.

The same form of statement appears in Romans viii. 3: "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh." There is no hint here of joining a human soul to the divine. In not a single passage of the New Testament is such an idea even suggested. The language which is used on this subject is such as could not have been employed by one who had in his mind the notion of two souls in coexistence.

As it is unsafe to depart from the obvious teaching of the sacred Scriptures on a theme so far removed from all human knowledge, we shall not, in this Life of our Lord, render ourselves subject to the hopeless confusions of the theories of the schools, but shall cling to the simple and intelligible representations of the Word. "Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." (1 Tim. iii. 16.)

The Divine Spirit came into the world, in the person of Jesus, not bearing the attributes of Deity in their full disclosure and power. He came into the world to subject his spirit to that whole discipline and experience through which every man must pass. He veiled his royalty; he folded back, as it were, within himself those ineffable powers which belonged to him as a free spirit in heaven. He went into captivity to himself, wrapping in weakness and forgetfulness his divine energies, while he was a babe. "Being found in fashion as a man," he was subject to that gradual unfolding of his buried powers which belongs to infancy and childhood. "And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit." He was subject to the restrictions which hold and hinder common men. He was to come back to himself little

by little. Who shall say that God cannot put himself into finite conditions? Though as a free spirit God cannot grow, yet as fettered in the flesh he may. Breaking out at times with amazing power, in single directions, yet at other times feeling the mist of humanity resting upon his eyes, he declares, "Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." This is just the experience which we should expect in a being whose problem of life was, not the disclosure of the full power and glory of God's natural attributes, but the manifestation of the love of God, and of the extremities of self-renunciation to which the Divine heart would submit, in the rearing up from animalism and passion his family of children. The incessant looking for the signs of divine power and of infinite attributes, in the earthly life of Jesus, whose mission it was to bring the Divine Spirit within the conditions of feeble humanity, is as if one should search a dethroned king, in exile, for his crown and his sceptre. We are not to look for a glorified, an enthroned Jesus, but for God manifest in the flesh; and in this view the very limitations and seeming discrepancies in a Divine life become congruous parts of the whole sublime problem.

We are to remember that, whatever view of the mystery be taken, there will be difficulties which no ingenuity can solve. But we are to distinguish between difficulties which are inherent in the nature of the Infinite, and those which are but the imperfections of our own philosophy. In the one case, the perplexity lies in the weakness of our reason; in the other, in the weakness of our reasoning. The former will always be burdensome enough, without adding to it the pressure of that extraordinary theory of the Incarnation, which, without a single express Scriptural statement in its support, works out a compound divine nature, without analogue or parallel in human mental philosophy.

Early theologians believed suffering to be inconsistent with the Divine perfection. Impassivity was essential to true divinity. With such ideas of the Divine nature, how could they believe that Jesus, a man of suffering, and acquainted with grief, was divine? A human soul was therefore conjoined to the divine, and to that human element were ascribed all the phenomena of weakness and suffering which they shrank from

imputing to the Deity. This disordered reverence was corroborated by imperfect notions of what constitutes a true manhood. If God became a true man, they argued, he must have had a human soul. As if the Divine nature clothed in flesh did not constitute the most absolute manhood, and fill up the whole ideal!

Man's nature and God's nature do not differ in kind, but in degree of the same attributes. Love in God is love in man. Justice, mercy, benevolence, are not different in nature, but only in degree of power and excellence. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." (Gen. i. 26.) "In him we live, and move, and have our being. . . . . Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God," etc. (Acts xvii. 28, 29.)

This identification of the divine and the human nature was one of the grand results of the Incarnation. The beauty and preciousness of Christ's earthly life consist in its being a true divine life, a presentation to us, in forms that we can comprehend, of the very thoughts, feelings, and actions of God when placed in our condition in this mortal life. To insert two natures is to dissolve the charm.

Christ was very God. Yet, when clothed with a human body, and made subject through that body to physical laws, he was then a man, of the same moral faculties as man, of the same mental nature, subject to precisely the same trials and temptations, only without the weakness of sin. A human soul is not something other and different from the Divine soul. It is as like it as the son is like his father. God is father, man is son. As God in our place becomes human, -such being the similarity of the essential natures, so man in God becomes divine. Thus we learn not only to what our manhood is coming, but when the Divine Spirit takes our whole condition upon himself, we see the thoughts, the feelings, and, if we may so say, the private and domestic inclinations of God. What he was on earth, in his sympathies, tastes, friendships, generous familiarities, gentle condescensions, we shall find him to be in heaven, only in a profusion and amplitude of disclosure far beyond the earthly hints and glimpses.

The tears of Christ were born of the flesh, but the tender

sympathy which showed itself by those precious tokens dwells unwasted and forever in the nature of God. The gentleness, the compassion, the patience, the loving habit, the truth and equity, which were displayed in the daily life of the Saviour, were not so many experiences of a human soul mated with the Divine, but were the proper expressions of the very Divine soul itself, that men might see, in God, a true and perfect manhood. When Jesus, standing before his disciples as a full man, was asked to reveal God the Father, he answered, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Manhood is nearer to godhood than we have been wont to believe.

6

CHAPTER

IV.

CHILDHOOD AND RESIDENCE AT NAZARETH.

HE parents of Jesus returned to Nazareth, and there for

THE

many years they and their child were to dwell.

There was nothing that we know of, to distinguish this child from any other that ever was born. It passed through the twilight of infancy as helpless and dependent as all other children must ever be. If we had dwelt at Nazareth and daily seen the child Jesus, we should have seen the cradle-life of other children. This was no prodigy. He did not speak wonderful wisdom in his infancy. He slept or waked upon his mother's bosom, as all children do. He unfolded, first the perceptive reason, afterwards the voluntary powers. He was nourished and he grew under the same laws which govern infant life now. This then was not a divinity coming through the clouds into human life, full-orbed, triumphing with the undiminished strength of a heavenly nature over those conditions which men must bear. If this was a divine person, it was a divine child, and childhood meant latent power, undeveloped faculty, unripe organs; a being without habits, without character, without experience; a cluster of germs, a branch full of unblossomed buds, a mere seed of manhood. Except his mother's arms, there was no circle of light about his head, fondly as artists have loved to paint it. But for the after-record of Scriptures, we should have no reason to suppose that this child differed in any respect from ordinary children. Yet this was the Son of God! This was that Word of whom John spake: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God!"

It was natural that Joseph and Mary should desire to settle in Judæa. Not alone because here was the home of their father David, but especially because, when once they believed.