IV. The position then which is before us in these lectures is

briefly the following: Our Lord Jesus Christ, being truly and perfectly Man, is also, according to His Higher Pre-existent Nature, Very and Eternal God; since it was the Second Person of the Ever Blessed Trinity, Who, at the Incarnation, robed Himself with a Human Body and a Human Soul. Such explicit language will of course encounter objections in more than one quarter of the modern world; and if of these objections one or two prominent samples be rapidly noticed, it is possible that, at least in the case of certain minds, the path of our future discus- sion will be cleared of difficulties which are at present more or less distinctly supposed to obstruct it.
(a) One objection to our attempt in these lectures may be expected to proceed from that graceful species of literary activity which may be termed, without our discrediting it, Historical Aistheticism. The protest will take the form of an appeal to the sense of beauty. True beauty, it will be argued, is a creation of nature; it is not improved by being meddled with. The rocky hill-side is no longer beautiful when it has been quarried ; nor is the river-course, when it has been straightened aud deepened for purposes of navigation; nor is the forest which
¢ Cf. Wilberforce on the Incarnation, p. 152.
{ ‘Subsistentix, relationes subsistentes.’ Sum. Th. 18. qu. 29. a. 2; and qu. 40. ἃ. 2.
& This compatibility is expressed by the doctrine of the repixdépno1s—the safeguard and witness of the Divine Unity; St. John xiv. 11; 1 Cor. ii. 11: the force of which is not impaired by St. John xiv. 20, xvii. 21, 23; 1 St. John iv. 15, 16, v. 20. This doctrine, as ‘protecting the Unity of God, without entrenching on the perfections of the Son and the Spirit, may even be called the characteristic of Catholic Trinitarianism, as opposed to all counterfeits, whether philosophical, Arian, or oriental.’ Newman’s ‘ Arians,’ Ρ. 190, sted, Cf, Athan. Treatises, ii. 403, note i.
[LEcT.
The esthetic historians. 35
has been fenced and planted, and made to assume the disciplined air of a symmetrical plantation. In like manner, you urge, that incomparable Figure whom we meet in the pages of the New Testament, has suffered in the apprehensions of orthodox Christians, from the officious handling of a too inquisitive Scholasticism. As cultivation robs wild nature of its beauty, even so, you maintain, is ‘definition’ the enemy of the fairest creations of our sacred literature. You represent ‘definition’ as ruthlessly invading regions which have been beautified by the freshness and originality of the moral sentiment, and as sub- stituting for the indefinable graces of a living movement, the grim and stiff aitificialities of a heartless logic. You wonder at the bad taste of men who can bring the decisions of Nicea and . Chalcedon into contact with the story of the Gospels. What is there in common, you ask, between these dead metaphysical formule and the ever-living tenderness of that matchless Life ἢ You protest that you would as readily essay to throw the text of Homer or of Milton into a series of syllogisms, that you would with as little scruple scratch the paint from a masterpiece of Raffaelle with the intention of subjecting it to a chemical analysis, as go hand in hand with those Church-doctors who force Jesus of Nazareth into rude juxtaposition with a world of formal thought, from which, as you conceive, He is severed by the intervention of three centuries of disputation, and still more by all which raises the highest forms of natural beauty above the awkward pedantry of debased art.
Well, my brethren, if the object of the Gospel be attained when it has added one more chapter to the poetry of human history, when it has contributed one more Figure to the world’s gallery of historical portraits, upon which a few educated persons may periodically expend some spare thought and feeling ;—if this be so, you are probably right. Plainly you are in pursuit of that which may nourish sentiment, rather than of that which can support moral vigour or permanently satisfy the instinct of truth. Certainly your sentiment of beauty may be occasionally shocked by those direct questions and rude processes, which are necessary to the investigation of intellectual truth and to the sustenance of moral life. You would repress these processes ; you would silence these questions; or at least you would not explicitly state your own answer to them. Whether, for instance, the stupendous miracle of the Resurrection be or be not as cer- tain as any event of public interest which has taken place in = during the present year, is a point which does not affect, 1. D2
36 Where and What is Our Lord now?
as it seems, the worth or the completeness of your Christology. Your Christ is an Epic; and you will suffer no prosaic scholiast to try his hand upon its pages. Your Christ is a portrait; and, as we are all agreed, a portrait is a thing to admire, and not to
touch. But there is a solemn question which must be asked, and which, if a man is in earnest, he will inevitably ask; and that question will at once carry him beyond the narrow horizon of a literary estheticism in his treatment of the matter before us. ..» My brethren, where is Jesus Christ now? and what is He? Does He only speak to us from the pages which were traced by His followers eighteen centuries ago? Is He no more than the first of the shadows of the past, the first of memories, the first of biographies, the most perfect of human ideals? Is He only an Ideal, after all? Does He reign, only in virtue of a mighty tradition of human thought and feeling in His favour, which creates and supports His imaginary throne? Is He at this moment a really living Being? And if living, is He a human ghost, flitting we know not where in the unseen world, and Himself awaiting an award at the hands of the Everlasting? or is He a super-angelic Intelligence, sinless and invested with judicial and creative powers, but as far separated from the inaccessible Life of God as must be even the first of creatures from the everlasting Creator? Does He reign, in any true sense, either on earth or in heaven? or is His Regal Government in any degree independent of the submission or the resistance which His subjects may offer to it? Is He present personally as a living Power in this our world? Has He any certain relations to you? Does He think of you, care for you, act upon you? Can He help you? Can He save you from your sins, can He blot out their stains and crush their power, can He deliver you in your death- agony from the terrors of dissolution, and bid you live with Him in a brighter world for ever? Can you approach Him now, commune with Him now, cling to Him now, become one with Him now, not by an unsubstantial act of your own imaginations, but by an actual objective transaction, making you incorporate with His Life? Or is the Christian answer to these most press- ing questions a weakly delusion, or at any rate too definite a statement; and must we content ourselves with the analysis of an historical Character, while we confess that the Living Per- sonality which once created and animated It may or may not be God, may or may not be able to hear us and help us, may or may not be in distinct conscious existence at this moment, ἮΝ or LECT.
Objectors. (2) The antt-doctrinal moralists. 37
may not have been altogether annihilated some eighteen hundred years ago? Do you urge that it is idle to ask these questions, since we have no adequate materials at hand for dealing with them? That is a point which it is hoped may be more or less cleared up during the progress of our present enquiry. But if such questions are to remain unanswered, do not shut your eyes to the certain consequence. A Christ who is conceived of as only pictured in an ancient literature may indeed furnish you with the theme of a magnificent poetry, but he cannot be the present object of your religious life. A religion must have for its object an actually Living Person: and the purpose of the definitions which you deprecate, is to exhibit and assert the exact force of the revealed statements respecting the Eternal Life of Christ, and so to place Him as a Living Person in all His Divine Majesty and all His Human Tenderness before the eye of the soul which seeks Him. When you fairly commit yourself to the assertion that Christ is at this moment living at all, you leave the strictly historical and esthetical treatment of the Gos- pel record of His Life and character, and you enter, whether it be in a Catholic or in an heretical spirit, upon the territory of Church definitions. In your little private sphere, you bow to that practical necessity which obliged great Fathers and Coun- cils, often much against their will, to take counsel of the Spirit Who illuminated the collective Church, and to give point and strength to Christian faith by authoritative elucidations of Chris- tian doctrine. Nor are you therefore rendered insensible to the beauty of the Gospel narrative, because you have discovered that thus to ascertain and bear in mind, so far as Revelation warrants your effort, what is the exact Personal dignity and what the enduring prerogatives of Him in Whom you have be- lieved, is in truth a matter of the utmost practical importance to your religious life.
(8) But the present enquiry may be objected to, on higher grounds than those of literary and esthetic taste. ‘Are there not,’ it will be pleaded, ‘moral reasons for deprecating such dis- cussions? Surely the dogmatic and theological temper is suf- ficiently distinct from the temper which aims, beyond everything else, at moral improvement. Surely good men may be indifferent divines, while accomplished divines may be false or impure at heart. Nay more, are not morality and theology, not mérely distinct, but also more or less antagonistic interests? Does not the enthusiastic consideration of dogmatic problems tend to divert men’s minds from that attention which is due to the
1]
48 Channing on the study of Christ's character.
practical obligations of life? Is not the dogmatic temper, you ask, rightly regarded as a species of “intellectual ritualism” which lulls men into the belief that they have true religion at heart, when in point of fact they are merely gratifying a private taste and losing sight of honesty and sober living in the in- toxicating study of the abstractions of controversy? On the other hand, will not a high morality shrink with an instinctive reverence from the clamorous and positive assertions of the theo- logians? In particular, did Jesus Christ Himself require at the hands of His disciples a dogmatic confession of belief in His Divinity»? Was He not content if they acted upon His moral teaching, if they embraced that particular aspect of moral obli- gations which is of the highest importance to the well-being of society, and which we have lately termed the Enthusiasm of Humanity?’ This is what is urged; and then it is added, ‘Shall we not best succeed in doing our duty if we try better to understand Christ’s Human Character, while we are careful to keep clear of those abstract and transcendental questions about Him, which at any rate have not promoted the cause of moral progress Ὁ
This language is notoriously popular in our day; but the sub- stantial objection which it embodies has been already stated by a writer whom it is impossible to name without mingled admi- ration and sorrow,—admiration for his pure and lofty humanity, —sorrow for the profound errors which parted him in life and in death from the Church of Jesus Christ. ‘Love to Jesus Christ,’ says William Channing, ‘depends very little on our con- ception of His rank in the scale of being. On no other topic have Christians contended so earnestly, and yet it is of secondary importance. To know Jesus Christ is not to know the precise place He occupies in the Universe; it is something more: it is to look into His mind; it is to approach His soul; to comprehend His spirit, to see how He thought and felt and purposed and loved. . . I am persuaded,’ he continues, ‘that controversies about Christ’s Person have in one way done great injury. They have turned attention from His character. Suppose that, as Americans, we should employ ourselves in debating the questions, where Washington was born, and from what spot he came when he appeared at the head of our armies; and that in the fervour of these contentions we should overlook the character of his mind, the spirit that moved within
h Ecce Homo, p. 69, sqq. [ LECT,
Moral obligation of facing the dogmatic question. 39
him,... how unprofitably should we be employed? Who is it that understands Washington? Is it he that can settle his rank in the creation, his early history, his present condition? or he to whom the soul of that good man is laid open, who com- prehends and sympathizes with his generous purposes! ?”
Channing’s illustration of his position in this passage is im- portant. It unconsciously but irresistibly suggests that indif- ference to the clear statement of our Lord’s Divinity is linked to a fundamental assumption of its falsehood. Doubtless Wash- ington’s birthplace and present destiny is for the Americans an altogether unpractical consideration, when placed side by side with the study of his character. But the question had never been raised whether the first of religious duties which a creature should pay to the Author and End of his existence was or was not due to Washington. Nobody has ever asserted that mankind owes to the founder of the American Republic the tribute of a prostrate adoration in spirit and in truth. Had it occurred to Channing’s mind as even possible that Jesus Christ was more than a mere man who lived and died eighteen cen- turies ago, he could not have permitted himself to make use of such an illustration. To do justice to Channing, he had much too clear and fine an intellect to imagine that the fundamental question of Christianity could be ignored on moral grounds. Those who know anything of his works are aware that his own opinion on the subject was a very definite one, and that he has stated the usual arguments on behalf of the Socinian heresy with characteristic earnestness and precision.
My brethren, all are agreed as to the importance of studying and copying the Human Character of Jesus Christ. Whether it be really possible to have a sincere admiration for the Character of Jesus Christ without believing in His Divinity, is a question which I shall not shrink from considering hereafterj. Whether a true morality does not embrace, as one part of it, an honest acceptance and profession of all attainable religious Truth, is a question which men can decide without being theologians. As for reverence, there is a time to keep silence, and a time to spenk. Reverence will assuredly speak, and that plainly, when silence would dishonour its Object: the reverence which is always silent as to matters of belief may be but the drapery of a profound scepticism, which lacks the courage to unveil itself before the eyes of men. Certainly our Lord did not
1 Works, vol. ii. p. 145. 2 See Lecture IV.
40 Moral relations of belief and worship.
Himself exact from His first followers, as an indispensable condition of discipleship, any profession of belief in His God- head. But why? Simply because His requirements are pro- portioned to the opportunities of mankind. He had taught as men were able to bear His teaching*k. Although His precepts, His miracles, His character, His express language, all pointed to the Truth of His Godhead, the conscience of mankind was not laid under a formal obligation to acknow- ledge It until at length He had been ‘defined’! to be ‘the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of Holiness, by the Resurrection from the dead.’ Our present moral relation, then, to the truth of Christ’s Divinity differs altogether from that in which His first disciples were placed. It is a simple matter of history that Christendom has believed the doctrine for eighteen centuries; but, besides this, the doctrine chal- lenges at our hands, as I have already intimated, a moral duty as its necessary expression both in the sanctuary of our own thought and before the eyes of men.
Let us face this aspect of the subject in its concrete and every-day form. Those whom I now see around me are without exception, or almost without exception, members of the Church of England. If any here have not the happiness to be commu- nicants, yet, at least, my brethren, you all attend the ordinary Sunday morning service of our Church. In the course of doing so, you sing the Te Deum, you repeat several times the Gloria Tatri; but you also kneel down, or profess to kneel down, as joining before God and man in the Litany. Now the second petition in the Litany runs thus: ‘O God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy upon us miserable sinners.’ What do you seriously mean to do when you join in that petition? Whom are you really addressing? What is the basis and ground of your act? What is its morality? If Jesus Christ is merely a creature, is He in a position to have mercy upon you? Are you doing dishonour to the Most High by addressing Christ in these terms at all? Channing has said that the petition, ‘By Thine agony and bloody sweat, by Thy cross and passion, Good Lord, deliver us,’ is appalling™,. On the Socinian hy- pothesis, Channing’s language is no exaggeration: the Litany is an ‘appalling’ prayer, as the Gloria Patri is an ‘appalling’ doxology. Nor would you escape from this moral difficulty,
& St. John xvi. 12. 1 Rom. i. 4: τοῦ δρισθέντος υἱοῦ Θεοῦ. ™ Unitarian Christianity, Works, vol. ii. p. 541. [ LECT.
Odjectors. (3) The unreflecting pietists. 41
if unhappily you should refuse to join in the services of the Church. Your conscience cannot decline to decide in favour of the general duty of adoring Jesus Christ, or against it. And this decision presupposes the resolution, in one sense or the other, of the dogmatic question on which it depends. Christ either is, or He is not Gop. The worship which is paid to Christ either ought to be paid to Him, or it ought to be, not merely withheld, but denounced. It is either rigorously due from all Christians to our Lord, or it is an outrage on the rights of God. In any case to take part in a service which, like our Litany, involves the prostrate adora- tion of Jesus Christ, without explicitly recognising His right to receive such adoration, is itself immoral. If to be true and honest in our dealings with each other is a part of mere natural virtue, surely to mean what we say when we are dealing with Heaven is not less an integral part of morality”. I say nothing of that vast unseen world of thought and feeling which in the soul of a Christian believer has our Blessed Saviour for its Object, and the whole moral justification of which depends upon the conception which we form of Christ’s ‘rank in the scale of being. It is enough to point out to you that the discussion in hand has ἃ practical, present, and eminently a moral interest, unless it be consistent with morality to use in the presence of God and man, a language which we do not believe, or as to the meaning of which we are content to be indifferent.
(y) Once more. It may be urged, from a widely different quarter, that our enquiry is dangerous, if not to literary or moral interests, yet to the spirit of simple Christian piety. ‘Take care,’ so the warning may run, ‘lest, instead of preaching the Gospel, you should be merely building up ἃ theological pyramid. Beware of sacrificing spiritual objects to intellectual ones. Surely the great question for a sinner to consider is whether or not he be justified before God: do not then let us bury the simple Gospel beneath a heap of metaphysics.’
Now the matter to be considered is whether this absolute
» Bp. Butler, Analogy, ii. 1. p.157. ‘Christianity, even what is pecu- liarly so called, as distinguished from natural religion, has yet somewhat very important, even of a moral nature. For, the office of our Lord being made known, and the relation He stands in to us, the obligation of reli- gious regards to Him is plainly moral, as much as charity to mankind is; since this obligation arises, before external commands, immediately out of that His office and relation itself,’
1
42. Chrestian prety requires a definite Christology.
separation between what is assumed to be the ‘simple Gospel’ and what is called ‘metaphysics’ is really possible. In point of fact the simple Gospel, when we come to examine it, is neces- sarily on one side metaphysical. Educated men, at least, will not be scared by a term, which a scarcely pardonable ignorance may suppose to denote nothing more than the trackless region of intellectual failure. If the Gospel is real to you; if you believe it to be true, and possess it spiritually and intel- lectually ; you cannot but see that it leads you on to the frontier of a world of thought which you may yourselves shrink from entering, but which it is not prudent to de- preciate. You say that the main question is to know that you are justified? Very well; but, omitting all other con- siderations, let me ask you one question: Who is the Justifier ? Can He really justify if He is only Man? Does not His power to ‘save to the uttermost those that come unto God by Him’ depend upon the fact that He is Himself Divine? Yet when, with St. John, you confess that He is the Eternal Logos, you are dealing quite as distinctly with a question of ‘meta- physics,’ as if you should discuss the value of οὐσία and ὑπό- στασις in primitive Christian Theology. It is true that such discussions will carry you beyond the region of Scripture terminology; but, at least to a sober and thoughtful mind, can it really matter whether a term, such as ‘Trinity,’ be or be not in Scripture, if the area of thought which it covers be identical with that contained in the Scripture statements 9 7 And, to undervalue those portions of truth which cannot be made rhetorically or privately available to excite religious feeling, is to accept a principle which, in the long run, is destructive of the Faith. In Germany, Spener the Pietist held no mean place among the intellectual ancestors of Paulus and of Strauss. In England, a gifted intellect has traced the ‘ phases’ of its progressive disbelief; and if, in its downward course, it has gone so far as to deny that Jesus Christ was even a morally righteous Man, its starting-point was as nearly as possible that of the earnest but shortsighted piety, which ima- gines that it can dare actively to exercise thought on the Christian Revelation, and withal to ignore those ripe decisions which we owe to the illuminated mind of Primitive Christendom.
ο Sum. Th. 1%. qu. 29. a. 3. Waterland, Works, iii. 652. Importance of Doctrine of H. Trin. c. 7. ‘The sense of Scripture is Scripture.’ Dr. Mill’s Letter on Dr. Hampden’s Bampton Lectures, p.14. See Lect. ἽΕΙ
LECT,
Warnings and hopes. 43
There is no question between us, my brethren, as to the supreme importance of a personal understanding and contract between the single soul and the Eternal Being Who made and Who has redeemed it. But this understanding must depend upon ascertained Truths, foremost among which is that of the Godhead of Jesus Christ. And in these lectures an attempt will be made to lay bare and to re-assert some few of the bases upon which that cardinal Truth itself reposes in the consciousness of the Church, and to kindle perchance, in some souls, a fresh sense of its unspeakable importance. It will be our object to examine such anticipations of this doctrine as are found in the Old Testament ?, to note how it is implied in the work of Jesus Christ 4, and how inseparable it is from His recorded Consciousness of His Personality and Mission *, to trace its distinct, although varying assertion in the writings of His great Apostles’, and in the earliest ages of His Church ἢ, and finally to shew how intimate and important are its relations to all that is dearest to the heart and faith of a Christian ἃ,
It must be a ground of rejoicing that throughout these lectures we shall keep thus close to the Sacred Person of our Lord Himself. And if, indeed, none of us as yet believed in His Godhead, it might be an impertinence on the part of the preacher to suggest any spiritual advice which takes for granted the conclusion of his argument. But you who, thank God, are Christians by living conviction as well as by baptismal privilege, must already possess too strong and too clear a faith in the truth before us, to be in any sense de- pendent on the success or the failure of a feeble human effort to exhibit it. You at least will endeavour, as we proceed, to bear steadily in mind, that He of Whom we speak and think is no mere tale or portrait of the ancient world, no dead abstraction of modern or of medieval thought, but a living Being, Who is an observant witness alike of the words spoken in His Name and of the mental and moral response which they elicit. If we must needs pass in review the erring thoughts and words of men, let us be sure that our final object is not a criticism of error, but the clearer apprehension and possession of truth. They who believe, may by reason of the very loyalty and fervour of their devotion, so anxiously
P Lect. IT. 4 Lect. ITT. τ Lect. IV. ® Lect. V, VI. ὁ Lect. VII. » Lect VIII.
1]
44 Warnings and hopes.
and eagerly watch the fleeting, earth-born mists which for a moment have threatened to veil the Face of the Sun of Righteousness, as to forget that the true weal and safety of the soul is only assured while her eye is persistently fixed on His imperishable glory. They who have known the aching misery of earnest doubt, may perchance be encouraged, like the once sceptical Apostle, to probe the wounds with which from age to age error has lacerated Christ’s sacred form, and thus to draw from a nearer contact with the Divine Redeemer the springs of a fresh and deathless faith, that shall win and own in Him to all eternity the unclouded Presence of its Lord
and God.
[ Lect.
LECTURE IL.
ANTICIPATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT,
The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the Gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.—GAL. iii. 8,
Ir we endeavour to discover how often, and by what modes of statement, such a doctrine as that of our Lord’s Divinity is anticipated in the Old Testament, our conclusion will be materially affected by the belief which we entertain respecting the nature and the structure of Scripture itself. At first sight, and judged by an ordinary literary estimate, the Bible pre- sents an appearance of being merely a large collection of hete- rogeneous writings. Historical records, ranging over many centuries, biographies, dialogues, anecdotes, catalogues of moral maxims, and accounts of social experiences, poetry, the most touchingly plaintive and the most buoyantly triumphant, pre- dictions, exhortations, warnings, varying in style, in authorship, in date, in dialect, are thrown, as it seems, somewhat arbi- trarily into a single volume. No stronger tie is supposed to have bound together materials so various and so ill-assorted, than the interested or the too credulous industry of some clerical caste in a distant antiquity, or at best than such uniformity in the general type of thought, and feeling as may naturally be expected to characterize the literature of a nation or of a race. But beneath the differences of style, of language, and of method, which are undeniably prominent in the Sacred Books, and which appear so entirely to absorb the attention of a merely literary observer, a deeper insight will discover in Scripture such manifest unity of drift and purpose, both moral and intellectual, as to imply the continuous action of a Single Mind. To this unity Scripture itself bears witness, and no- where more emphatically than in the text before us. Observe that St. Paul does not treat the Old Testament as being to
π]
46 Principle of an organic unity in Holy Scripture.
him what Hesiod, for instance, became to the later Greek world. He does not regard it as a great repertorium or store- house of quotations, which might be accidentally or fancifully employed to illustrate the events or the theories of a later age, and to which accordingly he had recourse for purposes of literary ornamentation. On the contrary, St. Paul’s is the exact inverse of this point of view. According to St. Paul, the great doctrines and events of the Gospel dispensation were directly anticipated in the Old Testament. If the sense of the Old Testament became patent in the New, it was be- cause the New Testament was already latent in the Old®. Προϊδοῦσα δὲ ἡ γραφὴ ὅτι ἐκ πίστεως δικαιοῖ τὰ ἔθνη ὁ Θεὸς, mpoevny- γελίσατο τῷ ᾿Αβραάμ. Scripture is thus boldly identified with the Mind Which inspires it; Scripture is a living Providence. The Promise to Abraham anticipates the work of the Apostle ; the earliest of the Books of Moses determines the argument of the Epistle to the Galatians. Such a position is only intelligible when placed in the light of a belief in the fundamental Unity of all Revelation, underlying, and strictly compatible with its superficial variety. And this true, internal Unity of Scripture, even when the exact canonical limits of Scripture were still unfixed, was a common article of belief to all Christian an- tiquity. It was common ground to the sub-apostolic and to the Nicene age; to the East and to the West; to the School of Antioch and to the School of Alexandria; to mystical in- terpreters like St. Ambrose, and to literalists like St. Chry- sostom; to cold reasoners, such as Theodoret, and to fervid poets such as Ephrem the Syrian; to those who, with Origen, conceded much to reason, and to those who, with St. Cyril or St. Leo, claimed much for faith. Nay, this belief in the organic oneness of Scripture was not merely shared by schools and writers of divergent tendencies within the Church; it was shared by the Church herself with her most vehement heretical opponents. Between St. Athanasius and the Arians there was no question as to the relevancy of the reference in the book of Proverbs» to the pre-existent Person of our Lord, although there was a vital difference between them as to the true sense and force of that reference. Scripture was believed to contain an harmonious and integral body of Sacred Truth, and each
® St. Aug. Quest. in Ex. qu. 73: ‘quanquam et in Vetere Novum lateat, et in Novo Vetus pateat.’ > Prov, viii, 22, Cf. St.Athan. Orat. c. Arian. ii. 44. p. 113, ed. Bright, [ LECT.
Principle of an organic unity in Holy Scripture. 47
part of that body was treated as being more or less directly, more or less ascertainably, in correspondence with the rest. This belief expressed itself in the world-wide practice of quoting from any one book of Scripture in illustration of the mind of any other book. Instead of illustrating the sense of each writer only from other passages in his own works, the existence of a sense common to all the Sacred Writers was recognised, and each writer was accordingly interpreted by the language of the others. To a modern naturalistic critic it might seem a culpable, or at least an undiscriminating procedure, when a Father illustrates the Apostolical Epistles by a reference to the Pentateuch, or even one Evangelist by another, or the dogmatic sense of St. Paul by that of St. John. And un- questionably, in a merely human literature, such attempts at illustration would be misleading. The different intellectual horizons, modes of thought, shades and turns of feeling, which constitute the peculiarities of different writers, debar us from ascertaining, under ordinary circumstances, the exact sense of any one writer, except from himself. In an uninspired lite- rature, such as the Greek or the English, it would be absurd to appeal to a primitive annalist or poet with a view to de- termining the meaning of an author of some later age. We do not suppose that Hesiod ‘foresaw’ the political doctrines of Thucydides, or the moral speculations of Aristotle. We do not expect to find in Chaucer or in Clarendon a clue to or a forecast of the true sense of Macaulay or of Tennyson. No one has ever imagined that either the Greek or the English literature is a whole in such sense that any common purpose runs persistently throughout it, or that we can presume upon the existence of a common responsibility to some one line of thought in the several authors who have created it, or that each portion is under any kind of obligation to be in some profound moral and intellectual conformity with the rest. But the Church of Christ has ever believed her Bible to be throughout and so emphatically the handiwork of the Eternal Spirit, that it is no absurdity in Christians to cite Moses as foreshadowing the teaching of St. Paul and of St. John. According to the tenor of Christian belief, Moses, St. Paul, and St. John are severally regarded as free yet docile organs of One Infallible Intelligence, Who places them at different points along the line of His action in human history; Who through them and others, as the ages pass before Him, slowly unveils His Mind; Who anticipates the fulness of later revelations
u]
48 Scripture one,yetarecord of successive Revelations.
by the hints contained in His earlier disclosures; Who in the compass of His boundless Wisdom ‘reacheth from one end to another mightily, and sweetly ordereth all things ὁ.
Such a belief in the arganic unity of Scripture is not fatal to a recognition of those differences between its several por- tions, upon which some modern critics would lay an exaggerated emphasis. When St. Paul recognises an organic connection be- tween the distant extremities of the records of Revelation, he does not debar himself from recognising differences in form, in matter, in immediate purpose, which part the Law of Moses from the writings of the New Testament4. The unlikeness which subsists between the head and the lower limbs of an animal is not fatal to their common share in its nervous system and in the circulation of its blood. Nay more, this oneness of Scripture is a truth compatible with the existence within its compass of different measures and levels of Revela- tion. The unity of consciousness in a human life is not forfeited by growth of knowledge, or by difference of circum- stances, or by varieties of experience. Novatian compares the unfolding of the mind of God in Revelation to the gradual breaking of the dawn, attempered as it is to the human eye, which after long hours of darkness could not endure a sudden outflash of noonday sunlight®. The Fathers trace in detail the application of this principle to successive revelations in Scrip- ture, first, of the absolute Unity of God, and afterwards, of Persons internal to that Unityf. The Sermon on the Mount contrasts its own higher moral level with that of the earlier dispensation’. Ethically and dogmatically the New Testament is an advance upon the Old, yet both are within the Unity of Inspiration. Different degrees of light do not imply any intrinsic contrariety. If the Epistle to the Galatians points out the moral incapacity of the Mosaic Law, the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches us its typical and unfailing significance. If Christian converts from Judaism had been ‘called out of
4 Wisd. viii. 1.
4 e.g. cf. Gal. iii. 23-25; Rom. x. 4; Heb. viii. 13.
9 Novatian, de Trin. c. 26: ‘Gradatim enim et per incrementa fragilitas humana nutriri debet, . . periculosa enim sunt que magna sunt, si repentina sunt. Nam etiam lux solis subita post tenebras splendore nimio insuetis oculis non ostendet diem, sed potius faciet cecitatem.’
t St. Epiphanius, Heres. 74. 10; St. Gregor. Nazianzen, Orat. xxxi. n. 26: ἐκήρυσσε φανερῶς ἣ Παλαιὰ τὸν Πατέρα, τὸν Tidy ἀμυδρότερον. Cf. Kuhn, Dogmatik, Band ii. p. 5.
ε St. Matt. v. 21, 22, 27, 28, 33, 34; comp. Ibid. xii. 5-8.
[LEcT.
Earliest hints respecting the Divine nature. 49
darkness into God’s marvellous light}, yet still ‘whatsoever things were written aforetime,’ in the Jewish Scriptures, ‘ were written for the learning’ of Christians i,
You will have anticipated, my brethren, the bearing of these remarks upon the question before us. There are explicit refer- ences to the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity in the Old Testa- ment, which we can only deny by discrediting the historical value of the documents which contain them. But there are also occult references to this doctrine which we are not likely to detect, unless, while seeking them, we are furnished with an exegetical principle, such as was that of the organic unity of Scripture, as understood by the Ancient Church. The geologist can inform us from surface indications, where and at what depths to find the coal-field or the granite; but we can all recognise granite or coal when we see them in the sunlight. Let us then first place ourselves under the guidance of the great minds of antiquity, with a view to discovering some of those more hidden allusions to the doctrine which are found in earlier portions of the Old Testament Scriptures; and let us afterwards trace, however hastily, those clearer intimations of it which abound in the later Messianic prophecies, and which are indeed so plain, that ‘whoso runs may read them.’