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life. And so we may ask ourselves: What is this eternal spirit through which Jesus Christ has realized forever for us the true meaning and end of humanity? Let us try briefly to answer this question. Science more and more recognizes the universe as one, and as a universe of order. Now what is the unity and the order that constitute the reality of the universe? In the order in which it appears to us, it is first material or physical, and then moral, and then spiritual. Which of these is the real? In the actual evolution of our individual selves, we are first purely physical, and then psychical, and finally spiritual or personal. Which of these is we? Do we find the reality of ourselves in the physical, the psychical, or the personal — the spiritual and moral-self? Man is not what he is in process, but what he is when complete. He is, as Aristotle teaches us, his highest part. Everything is to be defined by its end, by what it will be when its becoming is completed and it is perfect. If we are to interpret this universe as a whole, in the light of that which is its manifest direction and logical end, we cannot but conclude that the natural order exists as the necessary condition of a higher moral order, which in turn has no meaning or possibility except as the form or expression of a yet higher spiritual or personal order. It is absurd to object to this that the moral and spiritual orders are still so far from existence. There is nothing contradictory or impossible in the immediate existence of a material order, and yet even that was a matter of inconceivably slow evolution. An immediate moral or spiritual order is impossible,

because by its very nature it must evolve or constitute itself. As surely as gravitation or evolution are laws of the universe, is righteousness a law of the universe, and behind and before them all is that spirit of which alone righteousness is the law, the ultimate truth and reality of the universe. Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of nature and the realization of humanity because He is the embodiment of the moral and spiritual order, not only the infinite law but the eternal spirit of the universe.

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But we have not yet given a real definition of the eternal spirit which Jesus Christ embodied and revealed. His contribution to life was the truth which is at once first and last, that there is no human good but goodness. We can know good first only as our own. That existence itself, that life or anything pertaining to life, is a good, we can only know as we experience the pleasure, the value, or worth of them for ourselves. But the good which as such we can first know only as our own we can then, by necessary inference, know and will to others as theirs. And this is the origin and essence of goodness. Man is never from the first an individual but always a social being. He has his existence in, with, and through others. He lives and becomes all that constitutes himself only in concrete relationships and in actual personal exchanges between himself and them. A man can be a good man only by fulfilling his natural relations, by being a good son, brother, husband, father, friend, neighbour, citizen. And as this is his only impersonal goodness, so is it his only personal

good. He cannot realize himself except in, with, and through others. His universe is so constructed, his life is so constituted, that there is no good for him except goodness. He cannot love himself except as he loves others as himself. He cannot find himself except as he loses himself in others. Jesus saw and not only perfectly expressed but perfectly embodied the fact that goodness or love is the secret and the essence of human life. And of human only because of all life. It is the beginning and the end of all reality. As the natural exists only for the moral, so the moral is only the outward expression, the law, of the spiritual. And the spiritual, which is the real, is infinite and eternal goodness. The real law of the universe is the law of righteousness, and the true soul and life of righteousness is the spirit of love, whom the world calls God.

It follows not only naturally but necessarily from the above that Jesus, calling Himself always Son of Man, that is, true, essential manhood, should speak of Himself as having come into the world not to be served but to serve, to be the servant of all, even to the point of giving His life for all. Love, service, sacrifice, — these He has, not made, but revealed in His person and human life to be the spirit and law and reality of the universe.

II

THE GROWTH AND PREPARATION
OF JESUS

We have been considering our Lord's earthly life from the standpoint of conceptions of life in general. We come back now to study it from the point of view and in terms of the distinctively Christian records. If our Gospels are to be supposed to include properly only the report of the public ministry (as defined in Acts 1:21, 22), we must remember that Jesus appears in that ministry at the age of thirty, with full qualification and authority to discharge its functions. There was no apparent question within Himself of Himself, and no questioning of Him on the part of those capable of feeling the force of His authority. It is to the records so limited as though He had come into the world fully equipped for His part in it. But if Jesus was human, He was so not only in what He was at His height, but in the process by which He attained that height and became what He was. If we are to know Him, without which it is impossible to know His life or His lifework, we are obliged to take into account the contribution of the thirty years of preparation for His ministry.

The traditions of our Lord's youth later prefixed to the records, brief as they are, are, when we consider

them carefully, singularly probable in matter and exact and illuminating in expression. The child Jesus, we are told in St. Luke, after the circumstances of His birth and the formalities of His circumcision, presentation, etc., have been narrated, grew and waxed strong, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him. The general terms are practically identical with those just before applied to John the Baptist: The child grew and waxed strong in spirit. They are in either case descriptive of a normal, purely human, not only physical but spiritual, youthful development. But in the case of Jesus the description is more explicit, as doubtless the growth described was fuller and more complete. In the first place, the child grew and matured pari passu in all the elements or parts of a complete human development, physical, intellectual, spiritual. It is added: Filled, or properly filling, becoming more and more full, of wisdom. Emphasis is naturally, perhaps unconsciously, laid upon the inward and outward means and process by which we shall see the wisdom was acquired, and the necessary progress of its accumulation. Wisdom is in itself, as Aristotle defines it, the product only of time and experience. And then, most significantly of all, come the words: And the grace of God was upon him. It in no way militates against the perfect humanness of Jesus to know that from the first, in a more complete way than through the prophets or John the Baptist before or St. Paul afterwards (who believed in his separation from his mother's womb), God was preparing to reveal or express Himself through Him. That, as we have

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