XVII

THE MYSTERY OF THE BIRTH

If we should arrange the subject-matter of the Gospels in the order, not so much of the inherent relative importance of the different parts or topics, as of their actual influence in the production of these records, it would probably run as follows: (1) The death and resurrection. Without these, it is a great question how much of either Gospels or Gospel there would have been at all. There is no doubt that these are the content that mainly determined both, as they are. (2) The report of the public ministry. However incomplete and undecisive this would have been without the death and resurrection, these too would be meaningless except as the natural sequence and logical consequence of the life, the teaching and acts, that had gone before. (3) The baptism and its attendant circumstances. The manifest though somewhat implicit purpose of this part of the story is to account for and explain the spiritual endowment with which Jesus entered upon and discharged His ministry, the divine authority and power that manifestly attended His words and acts. (4) Latest of all arose the question of the point which even though first in reality would naturally come last in apprehension or investigation.

While the order of things in themselves is always forward, the order of thought about things is backward, so that our last knowledge is that of adequate or sufficient causes. So Christianity may have rested for a moment upon the spiritual endowment of Jesus, as covered by His baptism or anointing with the Holy Ghost from heaven. But not for long; the explanation was inadequate; it was impossible to see in Jesus only a man approved of God by mighty works and wonders and signs. The deeper question of His person could not but follow after the others and gradually work its way to the front. As the record of the life had found it necessary to find a starting point for the ministry in the acts and facts of the baptism, so it was not long in going back, behind St. Mark for example, to find a yet earlier beginning for itself in the account of the birth. St. John, we shall see, finds it necessary to go yet further back into the origin of things for sufficient antecedent and cause of the Gospel.

It says nothing against the Gospel of the Infancy as a direct naive record of facts, to recognize a more or less conscious or unconscious reason or motive for its introduction. It answered the immediate direct purpose of denying the human paternity of Jesus, and affirming for Him a divine paternity. When we speak, as we shall, of the motive or purpose in this, it is unnecessary to think of an explicit conscious intention on the part of the writers or of the Church. The truth shapes itself instinctively in the mind and expression of men, so that we often do not know why or how we say the things that are truest. There is no

part of the Gospels that has quite the poetic elevation of the Gospel of the Infancy. And yet what, at the last, one is most impressed with is its spiritual truth; if there is not the true instinct of the spirit there, in thought and language, it is nowhere to be found. Now, what instinct of truth was it that in this effective way shaped the faith of the Gospel to the affirmation of not a human but a divine paternity of our Lord? I venture to say, that at any living point or period of Christianity the Christian consciousness concerning Jesus Christ would instinctively and necessarily have come to the practical conclusion embodied in the artless and poetical stories of the birth and infancy of Jesus. The profound speculative question really though invisibly at issue in and decided by them is this: Who and What is Jesus Christ, in His real and essential personality? The answer which this artless, and yet most profoundly artful, so-called nursery myth forestalls and excludes is this, He was no mere natural offspring of Joseph and Mary. Why not? Because the product of every such natural union is an individual human person. Viewing Jesus Christ in that light it is impossible to construe Him otherwise than as a human individual, exceptionally favored by unique relations with God. The question for the Church then, as for the Church now or at any time, is, Can we, in the light of all that Jesus Christ is to the Church and to humanity, His universality, sufficiency, and ubiquity, can we, I say, be fully and finally satisfied to see in Him only one of the sons of men peculiarly favored and most highly endowed? I must confess for one, that however con

fronted and impressed with the rational and natural difficulties which we are about to meet in the opposite view, it is equally impossible for me not to be a Christian, or to be one under the conception of such a manhood of Jesus as the above. And I believe that in so saying I am expressing the normal Christian instinct and experience of the world. Now let us try to analyze this instinct or conviction.

I shall not, I am sure, after what has gone before, be charged with neglect or diminution of the human side. or aspect of the work or the person of our Lord. I believe very thoroughly that the purpose of His being in the world, and the work He accomplished for humanity, is all to be seen only in what He Himself was as man. I believe that humanity in His person realized all itself and attained all its end. But while I believe that there was nothing revealed or manifested to us in Jesus Christ, save the perfection of His humanity, yet I equally believe that in that perfection there was infinitely more than the humanity so perfected. In other words, I see in Jesus not only the supreme act of humanity in God, but the supreme act also of God in humanity. The dilemma to which for a time at the beginning the Church seemed to be shut up, in the seeming impossibility of holding together both sides of so great a truth, was the necessity either of so holding the deity of our Lord as that the humanity amounted to nothing and was quite incapable of playing the important part belonging to it in the work of its redemption and completion, or else of so holding the reality of the humanity as that the act and work

of God in it fell too far short of what was actually accomplished and manifested in Jesus Christ. The need of Christianity is a conception large enough and comprehensive enough to transcend this dilemma by satisfying the demands on both sides.

There are different right ways of looking at a thing. With regard to the account contained in the story of the birth of the relation between the divine and the human in the person of our Lord, we may view the story either as determining the truth of the matter or as determined by the truth of the matter. We may accept it as an authoritative account declaring to us from heaven the respective parts of the divine and the human in the joint act of the appearance of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Or, on the other hand, we may view the act or fact itself as the essential and real thing, and the human account of it as only a more or less adequate expression of the impression produced by it. For reasons controlling us in our present purpose, we are now occupying the second point of view. We are regarding our Lord Himself as God's word or revelation, and the mere record of Him as the human effort (more or less divinely guided and assisted) to convey the effect of His manifestation in fullest accordance with the truth and meaning of it. Viewed in this light, I think we shall find the story of the birth an expression as true as it is beautiful of the permanent and final Christian conception of the origin of Jesus Christ consistent with the truth of His person. To test this aright, we must try to put ourselves in the place of, to embody in ourselves, the universal, ade