Mr. Thomas H. Gill, who is better known as the author of the Papal Drama, the Golden Chain of Praise, etc., has recently issued a little volume, entitled The Triumph of Christ, being Memorials of Franklin Howorth (Hodder & Stoughton). Mr. 'Howorth was originally a Unitarian minister, first at Rochdale, and subsequently at Bury, but retired from the Unitarian ministry and body about thirty years ago, under painful circumstances detailed by Mr. Gill. I wish to put on record the following statement, which is interesting, considering the connection in which it is found. Mr. Gills says (p. 71) that Mr. Howorth mentioned to him 'that Mr. John James Tayler of Manchester had conceded in his hearing that Paul and John believed in the Pre-existence of Christ.' The Mr. Tayler here referred to was for many years the Principal of Manchester New College, and was a man of saintly goodness as well as of exceptional culture, but held the humanitarian theory of Christ's Person.

The Rev. E. H. Sears, an American clergyman, who, strange to say, lived and died in the Unitarian communion, and with the full consent of the members of his congregation, in his Sermons and Songs of the Christian Life has these remarkable words : ‘Only one Mediator, and He is human. And why must He be a man? Simply because God is human, and nothing else than humanity can transmit Him as He is. The grand truth of THE HUMANITY OF GOD, rightly discriminated and apprehended, is one of the most precious and vital in all the treasury of the gospel. It is opposed to two specious and besetting errors, that God is an impassive force somewhere at the centre of things, whence this great mechanism of worlds grew out by spontaneous evolution,—and it is opposed to the more hideous notion that He is an arbitrary Sovereign. In the place of either it brings out the doctrine that God is a Being who like us has feelings, desires, yearnings, yea wants, for He wants to impart His own peace, and gain from His creatures some returns for His infinite love. Open your Bible, and see how directly you are drawn away from the old stoicism that God reposes on the peaks of eternity, cold and serene, leaving the world with its mean affairs to inferior deities. In the Bible we read of Divine humanities, Divine griefs and sorrows, as if the Divine sympathies ran down through all sensitive beings and felt every pulse of woe in His universe. I cannot see the Scripture or the reason of the proposition which some of our theo

logians have striven to make good—that God is incapable of suffering. As if that were perfection! What would you think of a man who sought to become perfect by becoming impassive, and turning himself into stone? As man becomes better and more God-like, he becomes more susceptible to the sorrows of his fellows, and makes their griefs his griefs, and in this very susceptibility he ascends to a bliss altogether more sacred and plenary than these men of wood and granite that never suffer at all. And whence does all this susceptibility come to us? It comes out of the heart of God. It is a trait of the Divine Nature, transcribed into man. It tells us that there are sufferings which are Divine, and that the more our natures become open to them, the more we become changed into the likeness of our glorious original. Thus we speak of the Divine Compassion, and that means suffering with another, so that in our spontaneous speech we belie our wretched pagan theologies. And as if description by words were not enough, St. John in apocalyptic vision looks away up to the Throne of God, and what does he see there? Not an arbitrary sovereign clothed in pomp and terror, not the lightnings out of the storm-clouds, not the show of magnificence affected by earthly sovereigns-but right in the midst of the Throne, as it were getting sight of the Heart of God, a lamb as it had been slain—the wounded love of the Creator Himself, as if there was a Calvary, not in Palestine alone, but away in the Heart of God, where we crucify Him by our disobedience every day. This being so, how plain it becomes that only Humanity can mediate between man and the Divine Essence. Nature is competent to evolve His power and magnificence; we feel that sensibly enough when she crushes us like insects out of her way, or brushes us by the hundred into her great gulf-stream; but in all her gamut she has not a single tone that is human, or which can give us one lisp of the humanity of God. Nature in her impotency and her failure, man in his most urgent wants, point alike to this grand necessity, that there shall be a mediator, and that that mediator shall be a man. And not any or every man but THE MAN CHRIST JESUS; a man whose nature opens both ways—up to God on the Divine side, and down to the lowest of us on the human; not some tall angel talking to us from a distance out of the porches of heaven, but some one clothed in our nature, touching the earth in its lowest place of evil and darkness, and at the same time touching the

inmost heaven where all the Divine scenery lay upon His soul; not sinful humanity, that cuts off the light rather than transmits it, but One supremely perfect, through whose translucency the whole Divine Nature is imaged forth. "Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself, but the Father that dwelleth in me He doeth the works." "I in them, and they im me, that they also may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that Thou hast sent me." "All things are delivered unto me of my Father, and no man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him. Come unto me all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." These proofs and illustrations show yet more openly the Divine burden of truth which the text brings home to us, -one God, and one peacemaker between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.'

Mr. Sears, in his sermons on Christ in the Life, has the following equally remarkable suggestions for us : 'His coming in the flesh, we say, for it was necessary that the Divine Word, as the embodiment of the Divine Nature itself, should be made flesh, and appear before the eyes of men, that they might see it living, acting, moving in a human form, and going forth into a perfect human practice. It was necessary, I say, in order to any adequate disclosure of the Divine Nature to men. And why? Because words alone cannot reveal God. They may tell us about God, and about His power and majesty, but His intrinsic nature they cannot disclose. We call God our Father; but that word reveals no Divine Fatherhood, unless our human relations have been purged of self, and thrill with Divine Love. Till then, those relations are shaped only by the instinct of the natural man. The Jews called Him Father; but that described Him only after their notions of fatherhood; and they were a people who punished their own children with death, and who killed their prisoners of war, even the women and the little ones. What does fatherhood signify among a people whose human relations all have the taint of selfishness? They called Him merciful; but what does mercy mean among people whose mercies are cruel? They called Him good; that meant kind to family and friends, and to nobody beyond. They called Him just; their justice required eye for eye, and tooth for

tooth, and personal retaliation, which had in it the deadly taint of hatred and revenge. Words alone cannot reveal God, simply because all human speech has its roots in human experiences and passions, and therefore has the taint of our human imperfection and depravity. The missionary goes among savage nations. He tries to translate the Divine Law into the savage dialects, and finds they have not scope of meaning enough to take it in. The Christian ideas of forgiveness, love, mercy, compassion, have no equivalent where there has been no corresponding experience; and so they float in the air without any roots to be engrafted on, and to give them a resting-place. Pile up the words as you may, and string out the adjectives to any length you please, in descriptions of the Divine attributes, you cannot make them redolent of the Divine charms and glories, because the words can reach no height above the human nature in which they have their root, and out of which they draw up all their meaning and inspiration. Therefore, language alone, gathered from all the dialects of the earth, could not yield to human thought the immaculate conception of the Godhead. No, nor could any angel from Heaven do it. An angel might have descended, and proclaimed the gospel from the tops of the mountains, and the beautiful vision would have floated in air; but how could it get down to the earth as a fixed and historic reality? What language could the angel have spoken that the earth could understand? What words in which to translate his ideas, and give them complete body and clothing, could he have found in our dialects down here in the flesh and in the dark? His gospel message would have floated over us as a strain of music, and then died away; hovering above the earth like a song, but having no such articulation and form as to give it an abiding-place among our gross and palpable realities. Words again, angelic words; but words untranslatable into our human speech, because they have no roots in our human experience and history. Indeed, angels did come in this way, all along the ages and through all the Old Testament history, giving men dreams of a better state, and prophecies of a more glorious future. And the dreams and the prophecies sank down straightway into carnal conceptions of a temporal Messiah. Never were these conceptions dissipated, and our human thought lifted up to the Divine Idea, until, at last, the angel song floated over Bethlehem, and the star

stood still over the Heavenly Babe lying in a manger. And then the Word was indeed made flesh. Not a humanity corrupt and sinful, and which had tainted the very language of human intercourse, but a humanity without any spot on its disk, became the resplendent image of the Divinity. The Divine Word was made flesh. He not only spake, but He assumed human relations, wants, sufferings, temptations, affections, and joys; wrapped the garment of our infancy about Him, as well as that of our childhood and manhood; put on our mortality, and put it off again, in order to show death as the inverse side of resurrection and eternal life. All those goodly words whereby we describe the Divine attributes,-justice, mercy, forgiveness, and love,-He has filled out with new meaning, lifting up our low and sensuous vocabularies into the Divine Light, and breathing the Divine Life into them. They have the taint of our selfishness taken clean out of them; and humanity, in Christ made perfect and Divine, becomes the complete representation and transparency of the Godhead. And so the historic Christ, standing in the midst of the ages, is a twofold revelation. He is the revelation alike of perfect Divinity and perfect humanity; for one is the image of the other, copied down to us out of heaven. He shows us the God we ought to worship, and brings Him nigh, in order that His attributes, though in finite degree, may be formed in us, and we be made partakers of the Divine Nature, and the image of the Divine Perfections.'