certain point, but not wholly so and therefore not permanently so, as we shall soon see. It gives freer scope to the necessary conception of the universality of our Lord's humanity and personality. It makes Him more adequately and comprehensively Immanuel, God with us, and God in us. It better explains at once the perfect humanity and humanness of our Lord and the mystery of the perfection in the humanness or humanity. It furnishes a more sufficient basis for the essential truth of Christianity expressed in the phrases, God our holiness, God our righteousness, God our life. But if we go so far, we must of necessity go further, and even so much of the truth as is won by so much advance finds confirmation and is made secure only by the fuller truth of a yet further progress. XVIII IDEAL PRE-EXISTENCE WHEN Our Lord said of Himself, as reported by St. John, Before Abraham was, I am, it is not impossible that He referred to an ideal pre-existence in the mind of God. He may have meant that the truth embodied in Him, the purport and purpose of His personal presence and His lifework upon earth, was something always in the mind of God, something which the faith of Abraham had foreseen and rejoiced in. At any rate, we shall not for the present go beyond the abundant matter for reflection contained in even this understanding of the words. If we trust ourselves to the mind of the Gospels, the New Testament, and primitive Christianity, we are not as yet making too much, but rather too little, of the truth as it is in Jesus. The eternal significance of that truth, in its relation to God, the whole creation, and more immediately to humanity, fills all minds and finds expression in a variety of independent forms. In our own endeavours endeavours that should not and shall not cease while the world lasts to find new interpretation and new illumination of the divine meaning of our Lord, we find ourselves inevitably moving along the lines of primitive thought and life, for the simple reason that those are the only lines on which the matter itself persists in thinking and living itself out. In view, then, of the impossibility of doing otherwise, I shall adduce and comment upon several of the New Testament statements of the eternal significance of the truth of Jesus Christ. When I speak of the eternal significance, I mean eternal both a parte ante and a parte post. So significant is the truth of Jesus that in God Himself it dominates both the eternity of the past and the eternity of the future. It occupies the divine foreknowledge and determines the divine predestination. We will first consider the meaning of our Lord in His relation to humanity. In Him God is described as having foreknown and predestined or foreordained every man and humanity itself. The purpose and destiny of man from eternity is revealed in Him as being that of sons of God. We were foreordained unto a sonship to God not yet realized in man, but realized in anticipation in that man in whom God has revealed us to ourselves and given us already in faith the inheritance, or destiny of sons, which awaits us in fact. And not only did God in His eternal foreknowledge and purpose foreordain or predestine us to be conformed to the image of His Son, as the firstborn among many brethren, or the first to realize and manifest the divine destiny of all, but in that Son Himself He preordained as also He in time accomplished the whole course and process of human redemption and completion. Every incident or event in the human experience of His Son befell Him by the determinate foreknowledge and counsel of the Father, who before the æons had determined in His wisdom not only man's destiny but the mode and method of it. The way of salvation is expressed in the words, It behoved Him, by whom and for whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings, supplemented and com pleted by these other words, And having been made perfect, He became unto all them that obey Him the author, or cause, of eternal salvation. It will be interesting to follow out the above truth as it is briefly suggested by another writer of the New Testament. God, we are told, having in various measures and manners spoken to the world through prophets, spoke to us at ast in a son. That is to say, in one who bore to Himself the very real and profound relation of son. The form of expression as well as all the succeeding context means to emphasize to the utmost the truth of sonship as being the res or matter of God's selfrevelation to us in Jesus Christ. God's purpose was to lead many sons, humanity — personally, and therefore one by one-to glory through self-attained sonship to Himself. This was to be accomplished through one Himself perfected for ever as son through the things He had suffered in a perfect human experience, and so fitted to impart the truth and grace of perfect sonship to those who could themselves attain it only through such sufferings. Now the point to observe is the manner in which the writer speaks of the double eternity of the truth of that sonship of Jesus, and of humanity in Jesus. God has spoken to us in a Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds. Dropping for the present all question of an eternal pre-human personality ascribed here to our Lord, and interpreting the words only as meaning that there was accomplished and manifested in Jesus Christ a human sonship for which and through which the whole creation of God from eternal beginning to eternal end was brought into being or existed at all—and surely it cannot mean anything less than this — let us reflect for a moment upon the stupendous importance attached by it to the divine-human truth of Jesus Christ. We will throw our appreciation of it into the following statement: The sonship realized and revealed to us in Jesus Christ is at once the final and the first cause of all things, of the whole creation. The universe comes to its majority and enters upon its inheritance in His person. If this seems an exaggerated and preposterous statement, it is nevertheless just what is consistently and persistently maintained in the New Testament as a whole. And not only is it in many places, as we shall see, actually so stated, but the statement itself is in perfect harmony and keeping with the whole mind and truth of the sacred record and the faith of Christianity then and since. The argument of the Epistle to the Hebrews would need a much more detailed exposition to bring out the full force of its bearing upon the matter in hand, and I hope to give it in a separate treatment. Stated now very briefly, the object is to portray the destiny of man as it has been realized in anticipation in the person of Jesus Christ, through His perfect sufferings and sacrifice and His thereby perfected sonship. Jesus Christ is thus revealed as the |