God's unity, holiness, and spirituality, as against the lords many and gods many of the Gentile nations, the horrible evils inseparable from idolatry, and the idols of man's own handicraft, or other material and sensible objects of worship. Say that the Jews were brutal, ignorant, cruel, narrow of mind and heart,—say what you will of them that can be proved to be true, and the fact will be all the more wonderful that a handful of slaves, so low in the scale of civilization, were Monotheists in creed if not always in practice, and believers in the one God as holy and unseen. The heavier the indictment you can frame against the Jews, the more steadily are you confronted with their place in the world's history, and the work which as religious teachers and reformers they succeeded in doing. The hypothesis which assumes that the peculiar mission of the Jewish people was that of revealing the character of God as it had not been revealed to other people, seems to me to be the only one that covers all facts of the case. It remains for me to add, in this connection, my belief that (5) all miracles, (6) all portions of the administrations of the Divine Providence, (7) all the eminently good and true of all ages and countries, (8) all things true, and right, and wise,— literally, all such things, and wheresoever found,-are but so many translations of the thoughts of God, outcomes of His disposition and will, revelations of Himself.

6. But all these modes by which Deity comes out of Himself and draws near to man, good and useful as they are and must necessarily be, are not enough. After all it is man himself who has to interpret the universe of matter, his own world of humanity, and all other manifestations of the Divine to the human. But man is a sinner and he knows it. What shall we do then? Shall we ask that God unveiled, God as He is in His own absoluteness, shall reveal Himself to us, not mediately, but immediately? Shall the limited, conditioned, imperfect, weak, and erring, ask for that which, even if it were granted, could not be realized and borne for a moment? 'Whom no man hath seen, or can see,' says St. Paul; and the apostle is a true witness. Shall we ask for man? But man feels quite difficulty enough in making self-revelations, as the deepest natures know only too well,-while the awful fact of his sinnership precludes him from being a transparent medium. The varieties of the workings of man's reason, and the changing modes and colours

of his passions and volitions, make him, not indeed incapable of revealing God, for I have already consented to the very contrary, but of being an absolutely trustworthy medium for the Divine. We want, yes, we want, not things alone, useful as they may be and are, but the Personal. We want also some one in whom is to be found the Divine and the human, the human and the Divine. We want one who shares the very nature of God, as we do not,—for only the Divine can adequately reveal the Divine,--and we want the human, for only through the human can man adequately apprehend the Divine. We want a Personality-a Divinely human Personality-Divine on the side of God, human on the side of man. We want the 'God-Man, to reveal to man's intelligence, his conscience, and the spiritual within him, that Being whom man 'seeks after, if haply he may feel after Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being' (Acts xvii. 27, 28). Does the Christ of the New Testament-and it is with the New Testament Christ only that I am here dealing-supply us with what we want? I think He does. Let us read for ourselves what the New Testament says of Him. It tells us of what the writers themselves, and others, believed about Jesus of Nazareth; and, still better, it records what He Himself said about Himself. I think we are here on solid ground. Let us stand upon it awhile.

7. Of what are we in search? the existence, or otherwise, of God? No, we are not Atheists. We are in search of the facts concerning the character of God. What kind of being is He? There are relations between God and man which make it a matter of immeasurable importance to us to answer this last question. But we have already seen some of the difficulties in arriving at a true answer, and have come to the conclusion that God Himself must be His own revealer. We have glanced at some of the modes by which God has revealed Himself, and these, as far as they have gone, have been fairly satisfactory. But they have not gone far enough. The personal element has been absent, or only imperfectly presented. It now remains for us to go, with open minds and pure and earnest hearts, to the New Testament, in which are contained four brief, but, on the whole, trustworthy biographies or memoirs of Him, and a number of epistles or letters written by the chief apostles and teachers of His gospel, and written at a time when the facts were fresh in the memories of the writers,

and the new life which Christ had brought into the world was being felt with an intensity which it is sometimes hard for us at this distance of time to realize. What do these books of the New Testament say about Him, and what do they record of what He said about Himself? If we can answer these two questions, we shall know what Christ and His inspired apostles did really say and believe about the Incarnation.

8. The books of the New Testament all assume our Lord's humanity. He had a human body; He ate and drank, He was athirst and weary; He walked, and talked, and slept; He lived a true human life, and 6 was found in fashion as a man.' About all this there is and can be no difference of opinion as between humanitarians and believers in our Lord's Personal Divinity. But while these books emphasize the humanity of our Lord, do they teach His Divinity also? I think they do, and I will now tell you why I think so. As for His humanity, they teach that it was a perfectly sinless one, and, equally strange, that it was an assumed one. You may search, but you will search in vain, throughout the whole of the New Testament for one particle of evidence that Jesus was a sinner, in thought, or word, or deed. 'Without sin;' 'He knew no sin;' He was 'holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.' Clearly it never occurred to the New Testament writers or the apostles to connect sin with their Lord. The entire strain of their teachings uniformly points in exactly the contrary direction. They also thought of His humanity as an assumed one. 'God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh;' 'He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor;' 'But emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, being found in fashion as a man ;' 'Since, then, the children are sharers in flesh and blood, He also Himself in like manner partook of the same;' 'Wherefore it behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren.' These words, and such as these, refuse to be interpreted by any independent exegesis on any other hypothesis than that of an assumed humanity. They cannot be fairly made to yield any other doctrine. But St. Paul and St. John1 say other and still more wonderful things about Him. Listen

1 I confine myself to the writings of these two apostles, not because I think the other New Testament writers contradict them, but purely to keep the statement within bounds.

to what St. Paul says: 'Seeing it is God that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ;' 'And gave Him to be head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all;' 'Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers, all things have been created through Him, and unto Him, and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist, and He is the head of the body, the Church. Who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He might have the pre-eminence, for it was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell;' 'For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in Him ye are made full, who is the head of all principality and power;' 'His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds (or ages), who being the effulgence of His glory, and the very image (or impress) of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of His power.' These are some of the statements which the great Apostle to the Gentiles makes respecting Jesus Christ—statements which are intelligible and wonderfully impressive if taken to teach our Lord's Personal Divinity, His oneness of nature with the Father, but which are bombastic and unreal if so explained as to teach that our Lord was human, and only human. Let us now hear some words of St. John, 'the disciple whom Jesus loved,' a man who appears to me to have entered by sympathy into our Lord's inner life and consciousness as not even St. Paul did. Read the first eighteen verses of St. John's Gospel, especially as they are presented in the Revised Version, and do they not tell of one of whom it was simply impossible for the writer to think as of a simply human being, greatly endowed, greatly inspired, but still human, and that only? True, some of the phraseology is Alexandrian, and irresistibly reminds the student of Plato, Philo, and the Gnostics. But St. John has here taken the terms in use among the Gentile philosophers of his day, and, disengaging the truths from the errors with which they were associated, has taught us that only to Jesus Christ can the terms themselves be appropriately referred, but that they can be to Him. 'And the Word became flesh, and dwelt

among us (and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth. No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son (or God only-begotten), which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.' If such words as these do not teach the Personal Divinity and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, by what terms could the doctrine be taught more plainly? The doctrine itself, in its entirety, but with slightly varying phraseology, is laid down in the first two verses of St. John's First Epistle. I confidently affirm that these two apostles, St. John and St. Paul, did really and truly hold, not the humanitarian theory of our Lord's Personality, but the doctrine of His Personal Divinity and Incarnation, and this, too, without in the least degree ignoring, and still less denying, the Lord's humanity. I cannot pass on to our Lord's actual words concerning Himself, without referring to one very suggestive fact. St. Paul had not known our Lord in His mortal life, but St. John, St. Peter, and St. James had had that inestimable privilege. They had seen Him, heard Him, walked and talked with Him, been the witnesses of His private as well as public life, had formed part of the number of that 'inner circle' of disciples which He gathered, and the members of which He loved so utterly. Now, on the supposition that they believed our Lord to be human, and human only, and making all fair allowances for the added and purified love which we give to our lost ones, and for the fact that they were Orientals, is the language they use about Christ, their selfabasement and His exaltation, their dependence upon Him and His independence of them, their reverent, and obedient, and trustful, and prayerful worship (yes, prayerful) of Him, consistent with their belief in His being only an exceptionally endowed man, to whom an exceptional mission had been given? I cannot think so. Say that they were wrong in the views of Him which they held. I understand you, although I do not agree with you; but it is too much to be asked to admit that these New Testament writers, and especially the writers of the epistles, were humanitarians, and that through all these centuries a vast majority of Christian believers and students of the New Testament have utterly misinterpreted the New Testament doctrine of our Lord's Personality.

9. But it is time to turn from the servants to the Master, from the disciples to the Teacher, from the subjects to the Sovereign.

I

We