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APPENDIX No. II.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE INCARNATION.

I DESIRE to present, in as condensed a form as is consistent with intelligibility, an argument, or rather a series of arguments, in favour of the New Testament doctrine of the Incarnation of the Son of God, in the doing of which it will be my aim to show that there is nothing in the doctrine itself which is not susceptible of a rational defence, if the existence of a personal God, the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth, and the general trustworthiness of the New Testament narratives, are conceded. It may be said that the concessions I now ask for should be first of all proved rather than assumed ; to which I reply that we must start somewhere,—even the mathematician has to do that, and that my contention just now is not with the Atheist, the Pantheist, the Agnostic, or the Secularist, but with those thoughtful and religiously-minded persons who would never dream of questioning the three points which I ask may be conceded.

By the word Incarnation I mean what the ‘Apostles' Creed' and the 'Nicene Creed' mean when they say: 'And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary' (Apostles' Creed); and, ‘And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of light, Very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost, of the Virgin Mary, and was made man' (Nicene Creed).

By the 'Philosophy of the Incarnation,' I mean those truths or principles which relate to God on the one hand and man on the

other, and of which the Incarnation of the Son of God is the only adequate embodiment and expression.

Many who 'profess and call themselves Christians' disbelieve the Incarnation, while modern science and all the anti-Christian isms simply laugh at the doctrine as unproved and unprovable. Let us see what can be said about it by way of exposition and defence.

1. The knowledge most of all needed by man, and especially man considered as a sinner, is the knowledge of what God is. Is God a person or a force? are there more gods than one? what is the essential nature of God? He is our Creator, Proprietor, Sustainer, Judge, Law-giver, and the Supreme Arbiter of our destiny. Why did He create us? what kind of being is He to whom we belong by the absolute right of creation? why does He sustain us in existence? what kind of Judge, Law-giver, and Arbiter is He? My conscience, too, tells me that I have sinned against Him, and I want to know how, in spite of that fact, He feels towards me, what elements my sin has introduced into the relations between myself and Him, and what means are needed to make and keep those relations what they should be, considering what I am and what He is. I find, too, that God and man are both related to the system of nature,-He as independent and I as dependent,—and I ask to be told of the grounds upon which I may repose trust in Him as the Lord of nature, and what the appropriate feelings are which I may cherish not alone towards nature, but also towards nature's Lord. I have another difficulty, and yet another. Looking over the world's history, as far as that history can be known, I find indications of what men have called 'Providence,' in the individual, the nation, and the race; I see, also, that the religious consciousness is, practically, universal, and supremely strong, but distractingly variant in its phenomena, and I am therefore driven to the conclusion that if God is to be known, He must, in some way or ways, reveal Himself, and do so in modes apprehensible by His creatures.

2. We want to know not only THAT God is, but WHAT He is. And the moment we have pronounced the word 'God,' and tried to form reasonable and satisfying conceptions of Him, we are obliged to confess, if we are modest, devout, and truthful, that we are moving in a centre the circumference of which is 'a darkness that may be felt.' For we are trying to understand the nature of a Being who,

from the very necessities of the case, is a self-existent, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise, perfect, infinite, and unseen Spirit. There are familiar, and, I might truly say, flippant ways of talking about God, as if He were not only easily apprehensible, but even tolerably easily comprehensible,- ways which are irreverent and fatally misleading. What are called 'unbelievers' are not the only blasphemers in the world. To hear some men, in the pulpit as well as out of it, talk of God, you might suppose that the problem of God's character was as easy of solution as some trifling problem in Euclid. But it is not so by a very long way. Man is one who derives his existence from a source outside of himself, who began to be within the limits of time, who is limited in power, and knowledge, and wisdom, and resources, who is finite every way, and who lives in a material body, and has only a relative power of disposition over himself and his concerns. What can he, and such as he, know of God? And yet he wants, yea, for ages he has been striving to bridge over the chasm which yawns between the uncreated and the created, to interpret his own nature, to solve the mystery of human life, the mystery of material nature, and to know and not merely conjecture what the moral and spiritual relations between himself and God should be.

3. How is the needed knowledge to be obtained? With the increase of secular knowledge comes the felt deepening of the problem that asks for solution, and we must beware that we do not cheat ourselves or allow others to cheat us. We do not know God because we confess His name, or make formal statements about Him, or wield our weapons of logic strongly and skilfully. No, we know Him as, and only as He is pleased to reveal Himself. This is true of man. If I wish you to know my thought, feeling, desire,—to know me, and not that you should confine your knowledge of me to my body,-I must do something, say something, the 'subjective' or inward must become 'objective' or outward, the unseen must become the seen, the hidden must be revealed. When you see my bodily structure, you do not see me; indeed, it is absolutely true that only as you can get behind and interpret rightly my words and actions, can you be said to understand and know me. Now, if this be true speaking of man, it must be still more true when speaking of God. But I go farther, and say that the revelation which one being makes of him

self to another must be of an apprehensible nature. A Frenchman may talk the most perfect French, and it will be intelligible to those who understand the language, but not to an Englishman who does not. So, too, if I ask the next Christian man I meet whether he believes the words, 'O Theos agape estin,' he may reply that he does not understand them, that they convey no clear ideas to his mind, and that he neither believes nor disbelieves them, that, in fact, his mind is a blank with respect to them, as of course it must be, if the words have not been translated for him into other words which he does understand. But when I tell this Christian man that the words are taken from the Greek Testament, and that they mean 'God is love,' he says at once, the light having dispelled his darkness, that he not only believes them, but that they are the joy and rejoicing of his heart. And so I argue that God, to be known, must reveal Himself; while it is not enough that the revelation be made and be perfect in itself—it must take a form or forms by which the created and finite intelligence of man may take hold on, apprehend, if not comprehend, the things of the uncreated and infinite intelligence of God. I believe that God has done this, but how?

4. One of the Psalmists has said, 'I will hear what God the Lord will speak' (Ps. lxxxv. 8). Evidently he believed that God did really speak, speak to man, and that man could hear if man would but will to do so. But through what media does He speak? To this question I reply.

5. (1) God reveals Himself in and through material nature. Behind force is the Forceful One. Behind the law and the order is the Lawgiver and Orderer. The laws of nature did not make themselves. Nature owes her existence, her activities, her continuity, all that she is and has, not to herself, but to the Being who conceived her, brought her to birth, and moment by moment rules her, and works in and by means of her. When we behold a natural phenomenonpleasant or painful, complex or simple-we behold an embodiment of the thought and will of God; when we trace and verify a law of nature, we have revealed to us a certain method by which God works in the world of matter. (2) God reveals Himself in and through human nature. Our entire constitution is the workmanship of God with this difference between inanimate matter and the 'lower animals' and ourselves, that we have, and they have not, been made

capable of receiving and appreciating a revelation of God. The composition and laws of our physical structure, our whole mental apparatus, that moral power within us to which we give the name of conscience, and, above all, that part of our constitution which St. Paul calls the spirit,' are, one and all, so many expressions of the Divine mind, the Divine nature. And it is very interesting to notice that our Lord has taught us to reason from the human to the Divine, because He knows that any revelation of God addressed to man must address itself to powers in man which can identify and verify it, or the revelation must fail of its purpose. Read the very

But

words of Christ as they are recorded in the four Gospels, or that glorious eighth chapter of Romans, to an elephant, a horse, a dog, or a gorilla, and you would labour in vain, and spend your strength for nought and in vain:' these animals were not made and constituted to receive a revelation from God or a revelation of God. man has been. Man can hear what God the Lord will speak,' for the very powers with which he has been endowed are so many revealers of God, while they are also the very instruments by which he receives other revelations of God. (3) I look upon the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, not indeed as verbally infallible, or as plenarily inspired, but as containing records of revelations made by God to man, through certain inspired servants of His; while I am bound to add my conviction that all the other 'Sacred Books' of the world contain Divine revelations, although the 'vessels' in which the 'treasures' are to be found are often very 'earthen' (2 Cor. iv. 7), and one has to wade through a vast amount of rubbish to get at anything that is manifestly Divine. If there is any book, or collection of books, to which the title 'Word of God' may be applied, although, strictly speaking, Christ, and He only, is the 'Word of God,'-I would give it unhesitatingly to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, because they deserve it as no other collection does, as between what we call 'the Bible' and other 'Sacred Books' the relation is one of contrast, and only in a very slight degree one of comparison. I now go on to say (4) that God revealed Himself in an especial manner through the Jews. Not that they were the only 'chosen people' of God, although evidently they thought they were, but that they were set apart and trained to receive and hand down through the ages the threefold doctrine of

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