I. Observe, first, the conservative force of the doctrine. It

protects the truths which it presupposes. Placed at the centre of the faith of Christendom, it looks backward as well as forward; it guards in Christian thought the due apprehension of those fundamental verities without which no religion what- ever is possible, since they are the postulates of all religious thought and activity.
1. What, let us ask, is the practical relation of the doctrine before us to the primal truth that a Personal God really exists ἢ
(a) Both in the last century and in our own day, it has been the constant aim of a philosophical deism to convince the world that the existence of a Supreme Being would be more vividly, constantly, practically realized, if the dogma of His existence were detached from the creed of Christendom. The pure Theistic idea, we are told, if it were only freed from the earthly and material accessories of an Incarnation, if it were not em- barrassed by the ‘metaphysical conception’ of distinct personal Subsistencies within the Godhead, if it could be left to its native force, to its spirituality of essence, to its simplicity of form,— would exert a prodigious influence on human thought, if not on human conduct. This influence is said to be practically im- possible, so long as Theistic truth is overlaid by the ‘thick integument’ of Christian doctrine. Accordingly a real belief in God is to be deepened and extended, and atheism Ἧ to be
LECT,
™ pa hag tenia τὰ
The tdea of Gon not really guarded by Deism. 453
expelled from the minds of men, by the destruction of dogmatic Christianity. But has any such anticipation as yet been realized by deism? Is it in the way to be realized at this hour? Need I remind you, that throughout Europe, the most earnest assaults of infidelity upon the Christian creed within the last ten years have been directed against its Theistic, as distinct from its peculiarly Christian elements? When the possibility of miracle is derided ; when a Providence is scouted as the fond dream of man’s exaggerated self-love ; when belief in the power of prayer is treated as a crude superstition, illustrative of man’s ignorance of the scientific conception of law; when the hypothesis of absolutely invariable law, and the cognate conception of nature as a self-evolved system of self-existent forces and self-existent matter, are advancing with giant strides in large departments of the literature of the day ;—it is not Christianity as such, it is Theism, which is really jeopardized and insulted. Among the forces arrayed against Christianity at this hour, the most for- midable, because the most consistent and the most sanguine, is that pure materialism, which has been intellectually or- ganized in the somewhat pedantic form of Positivism. To the Positivist the most etherealized of deistic theories is just as much an object of pitying scorn as the creed of a St. John and a St. Athanasius. Both are relegated to ‘ the theological period’ of human development. And if we may judge from the present aspect of the controversy between non-Christian spiritualists and the apostles of Positivism, it must be sorrowfully acknowledged that the latter appear to gain steadily and surely on their op- ponents. ‘This fact is more evident on the continent of Europe than in our own country. It cannot be explained by supposing that the spiritualistic writers are intellectually inferior to the advocates of materialism. Still less is an explanation to be sought in the intrinsic indefensibility of the truth which the spiritualists defend; it is really furnished by the conditions under which they undertake to defend it. A living, energetic, robust faith, a faith, as it has been termed, not of ether, but of flesh and blood, is surely needed, in order to stand the reiterated attacks, the subtle and penetrating misgivings, the manifold wear and tear of a protracted controversy with so brutal an antagonist. Can deism inspire this faith? The pretension of deists to refine, to spiritualize, to etherealize the idea of God almost indefinitely, is fatal to the living energy of their one con- viction. Where an abstract deism is not killed out by the ae of atheistic materialism, it is apt, although left to itself, Vi
454 True tdea of Gon, which Deism cannot guard,
to die by an unperceived process of evaporation. For a living faith in a Supreme Being, the human mind requires motives, corollaries, consequences, supports. These are not supplied by the few abstract considerations which are entertained by the philosophical deists. Whatever may be the intellectual strength of their position against atheism, the practical weakness of that position is a matter of notoriety; and if this weakness is ap- parent in the case of the philosophers themselves, how much more patent is it when deism attempts to make itself a home in the heart of the people! That abstract and inaccessible being who is placed at the summit of deistic systems is too subtle for the thought and too cold for the heart of the multitudes of the human family. When God is regarded less as the personal Object of affection and worship than as the necessary term of an intellectual equation, the sentiment of piety is not really satis- fied; it hungers, it languishes, it dies. And this purely in- tellectual manner of apprehending God, which kills piety, is so predominant in every genuine deistic system as to bring about, in no long lapse of time, its impotence and extinction as a popular religious force. The Supreme Agent, without whom the deist cannot construct an adequate or satisfactory theory of being, is gradually divested of all personal characteristics, and is resolved into a formula expressing only supreme agency. His moral perfections fall into the background of thought, while he is conceived of, more and more exclusively, as the Universal Mind. And his intellectual attributes are in turn discarded, when for the Supreme Mind is substituted the conception of the Mightiest Force. Long before this point is reached, deistic philosophy is nervously alarmed, lest its God should still be sup- posed to penetrate as a living Providence down into this human world of suffering and sin. Accordingly, professing much anxiety for his true dignity and repose, deism weaves around his liberty a network of imaginary law; and if he has not been previously destroyed by the materialistic controversialists, he is at length conducted by the cold respect of deistic thinkers to the utmost frontier of the conceivable universe, where, having been enthroned in a majestic inaction, he is as respectfully abandoned. As suggesting a problem which may rouse a faint spasmodic in- tellectual instinct, his name may still be mentioned from time to time in the world of letters. But the interest which he creates is at the best on a level with that of the question whether the planets are or are not inhabited. As an energetic, life-controlling, life-absorbing power, the God of deism is extinct. LECT.
protected by faith in the Divine Incarnation. 455
Now the doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is the Incarnate God protects this primal theistic truth which non-Christian deism is so incapable of popularizing, and even of retaining. The Incarnation bridges over the abyss which opens in our thought between earth and heaven; it brings the Almighty, Allwise, Ilimitable Being down to the mind and heart of His reasonable creatures. The Word made Flesh is God con- descending to our finite capacities; and this condescension has issued in a clear, strong sense of the Being and Attributes of God, such as is not found beyond the bounds of Christendom. The last prayer of Jesus, that His redeemed might know the only true God, has been answered in history. How profound, how varied, how fertile is the idea of God, of His Nature and of His attributes, in St. John, in St. Paul, in St. Gregory Nazianzen, in St. Augustine! How energetic is this idea, how totally is it removed from the character of an impotent speculation! How does this keen, strong sense of God’s present and majestic Life leave its mark upon manners, literatures, codes of law, national institutions, national characters! How utterly does its range of energy transcend any mere employment of the intellect ; how does it, again and again, bend wills, and soften hearts, and change the current and drift of lives, and transfigure the souls of men! And why is this? It is because the Incarnation rivets the apprehension of God on the thought and heart of the Church, so that within the Church theistic truth bids defiance to those influences which tend perpetually to sap or to volatilize it else- where. Instead of presenting us with some fugitive abstraction, inaccessible to the intellect and disappointing to the heart, the Incarnation points to Jesus. Jesus is the Almighty, restraining H's illimitable powers; Jesus is the Incomprehensible, volun- tarily submitting to bonds; Jesus is Providence, clothed in our own flesh and blood; Jesus is the Infinite Charity, tending us with the kindly looks and tender handling of a human love ; Jesus is the Eternal Wisdom, speaking out of the depths of infinite thought in a human language. Jesus is God making Himself, if I may dare so to speak, our tangible possession; He is God brought ‘very nigh to us, in our mouth and in our heart ;’ we behold Him, we touch Him, we cling to Him, and lo! we are θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως Ὁ, partakers of the Nature of Deity through our actual membership in His Body*; we dwell, if we will, evermore in Him, and He in us.
> 2 St. Pet. i. 4. © 1 Cor. xii. 27. vir |
456 Lhe doctrine a safeguard against Pantheism.
‘This then is the result of the Divine Incarnation: it brings God close to the inmost being of man, yet without forfeiting, nay, rather while guarding most carefully, in man’s thought, the spirituality of the Divine Essence. Nowhere is the popular idea of God more refined, more spiritual, than where faith in the Divinity of Jesus is clearest and strongest. No writers have explained and asserted the immateriality, the simplicity, the indivisibility of the Essence of God more earnestly, than those who have most earnestly asserted and explained the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and of the Divine Incarnation. For if we know our happiness in Christ, we Christians are united to God, we possess God, we consciously live, and move, and have our being in God. Our intelligence and our heart alike apprehend God in His majestic and beautiful Life so truly and constantly, because He has taken possession of our whole nature, intellectual, moral, and corporeal, and has warmed
and illuminated and blessed it by the quickening Manhood
of Jesus. We cannot reflect upon and rejoice in our union with Jesus, without finding ourselves face to face with the Being and Attributes of Him with Whom in.Jesus we are made one. Holy Scripture has traced the failure and misery of all attempts on the part of a philosophical deism to create or to maintain in the soul of man a real communion with our heavenly Parent. ‘ Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father 4” And the Christian’s practical security against those speculative difficulties to which his faith in a living God may be exposed, lies in that constant contemplation of and communion with Jesus, which is of the essence of the Christian life. ‘God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ ὁ.
(8) But if belief in our Saviour’s Godhead protects Christian thought against the intellectual dangers which await an arid Deism, does it afford an equally effective safeguard against Pantheism ? In conceiving of God, the choice before a pan- theist lies between alternatives from which no genius has as yet devised a real escape. God, the pantheist must assert, is literally everything ; God is the whole material and spiritual universe; He is humanity in all its manifestations; He is by inclusion every moral and immoral agent; and every form and exaggeration of moral evil, no less than every variety of moral
4 χ St. John ii, 23. © 2 Cor. iv. 6. [ LECT.
a ὃ 4
|
Bs at Σ τ 5
The idea of Gop destroyed by Pantheism. 457
excellence and beauty, is part of the all-pervading, all-compre- hending movement of His Universal Life. If this revolting blasphemy be declined, then the God of pantheism must be the barest abstraction of abstract being; He must, as with the Alexandrian thinkers, be so exaggerated an abstraction as to transcend existence itself; He must be conceived of as utterly unreal, lifeless, non-existent; while the only real beings are these finite and determinate forms of existence whereof ‘ nature’ is composed f. This dilemma haunts all the historical transform- ations of pantheism, in Europe as in the East, to-day as two thousand years ago. Pantheism must either assert that its God is the one only existing being whose existence absorbs and is identified with the universe and humanity; or else it must admit that he is the rarest and most unreal of conceivable ab- stractions; in plain terms, that he is no being at all. And the question before us is, Does the Incarnation of God, as taught by the Christian doctrine, expose Christian thought to this dilemma? Is God ‘brought very nigh to us’ Christians in such sort, as to bury the Eternal in the temporary, the Infinite | in the finite, the Absolute and Self-existent in the transient and the relative, the All-holy in the very sink of moral evil, unless, in order to save His honour in our thought, we are prepared to attenuate our idea of Him into nonentity ?
Now, not merely is there no ground for this apprehension, but the Christian doctrine of an Incarnate God is our most solid protection against the inroads of pantheistic error. .
The strength of pantheistic systems lies in that craving both of the intellect and of the heart for union with the Absolute Being, which is the most legitimate and the noblest instinct of our nature. ‘This craving is satisfied by the Christian’s union with the Incarnate One. But while satisfying it, the Incar- nation raises an effective barrier against its abuse after the fashion of pantheism. Against the dogma of an Incarnate God, rooted in the faith of a Christian people, the waves of panthe- istic thought may surge and lash themselves and break in vain. For the Incarnation presupposes that master-truth which pantheism most passionately denies. It presupposes the truth that between the finite and the Infinite, between the Creator and the Cosmos, between God and man, there is of necessity a measureless abyss. On this point its opposition to pantheism is as earnest as that of the most jealous deism; but the
1 Saisset, Philosophie Religieuse, i. 181; ii. 368. vil }
458Christ’sDivinitythesafeguardagainst Pantheism.
Christian creed escapes from the deistic conception of an omni- potent moral being, surveying intelligently the vast accumu- lation of sin and misery which we see on this earth, yet withal remaining unmoved, inactive, indifferent. The Christian creed spans this gulf which yawns between earth and heaven, by pro- claiming that the Everlasting Son has taken our nature upon Him. In His Person a Created Nature is joined to the Uncreated, by a union which is for ever indissoluble. But what is that truth which underlies this transcendent mystery ? What sustains it, what even enhances it, what forbids it to melt away in our thought into a chaotic confusion out of which neither the Divine nor the Human could struggle forth into the light for distinct recognition? It is, I reply, the truth that the Natures thus united in the Person of Jesus are radically, by their essence, and for ever, distinct. It is by reason of this ineffaceable distinctness that the union of the Godhead and Manhood in Jesus is such an object of wondering and thankful contemplation to Christians. Accordingly, at the very heart of the creed of Christendom, we have a guarantee against the cardinal error of pantheism ; while yet by our living fellowship as Christians with the Divine and Incarnate Son, we realize the aspiration which pantheism both fosters and perverts. Chris- tian intellect, so long as it is Christian, can never be betrayed into the admission that God is the universe; Christian faith can never be reduced to the extremity of choosing between a denial of moral distinctions and an assertion that God is the parent of all immoral action, or to the desperate endeavour to escape this alternative by volatilizing God into non-existence. And yet Christian love, while it is really Christian, cannot for one moment doubt that it enfolds and possesses and is united to its Divine Object. But this intellectual safeguard and this moral satisfaction alike vanish, if the real Deity of Jesus be denied or obscured : since it is the Deity of our truly human Lord which satisfies the Christian heart, while it protects the Christian intellect against fatal aberrations. Certainly a deism which would satisfy the heart, inevitably becomes pantheistic in its awkward attempts to become devotional; and although pantheism should everywhere breathe the tenderness which almost blinds a reader of Spinosa’s ethics to a perception of their real character, still pantheism is at bottom and in its results not other than a graceful atheism. But to partake of the Divine Nature incarnate in Christ is not to bury God in the filth of moral pollution, nor is it to transcendentalize a? into
LECT. ~
Christ’s Divinity guards man's true dignity. 459
an abstraction, which mocks us, when we attempt ' grasp it, as an unsubstantial phantom 8.
2. One more sample shall be given of this ΓΞ efficacy of the doctrine before us. If it guards in our thought the honour, the majesty, the Life of God, it also protects the true dignity and the rights of man. The unsettled spirit of our time, when it has broken with the claims of faith, oscillates, whether from caprice or in bewilderment, between the most inconsistent errors. If at one while its audacity would drive the Great God from His throne in heaven to make way for the lawless intellect and will of His creature, at another it seems possessed by an infatuated passion for the degradation of man- kind. It either ignores such features of the higher side of our complex being as are the powers of reflection and of inference, or it arbitrarily assumes that they are only the products of civilization. It fixes its attention exclusively upon the gradu- ated variety of form perceptible in a long series of crania which it has arranged in its museum, and then it proclaims with enthusiasm that a Newton or a Herschel is after all only the cultivated descendant of a grotesque and irrational ape. It even denies to man the possession of any spiritual nature whatever ; thought is asserted to be inherent in the substance of the brain ; belief in the existence of an immaterial essence is treated as an unscientific and superstitious prejudice; virtuous and vicious actions are alluded to as alike results of purely physical agen- ciesh; man is to all intents and purposes a soulless brute. My brethren, you will not suppose that I am desiring to derogate, however indirectly, from the claims of that noble science which patiently investigates the physiology of our animal nature; I am only protesting against a rash and insulting hypothesis, for which science, if her sons could speak with one voice, would be loath to make herself responsible, since by it her true utterances
& M. Renan’s frequent mention of ‘God’ in his ‘ Vie de Jésus’ does not imply that he believes in a Supreme Being. ‘God’ means with M. Renan only ‘the category of the ideal,’ and not any existing personal being what- ever. Questions contemporaines, p. 224: 98 sciences historiques ne dif- férent en rien par la méthode des sciences physiques et mathématiques: elles supposent qu’aucun agent surnaturel ne vient troubler la marche de Vhumanité; que cette marche est la résultante immédiate de la liberté qui est dans homme et de la fatalité qui est dans la nature; qu'il n’y a pas d’étre libre supérieur ἃ homme auquel on puisse attribuer une part ap- préciable dans la conduite morale, non plus que dans la conduite matérielle de lunivers.’
5 Cf, M. Taine, Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise, Introduction, p. xv: ‘Le vice et la vertu sont des produits comme le sucre et le vitriol.’
Vu ]
460 Christ's Divinity guards man’s true dignity.
are piteously caricatured. It cannot be said that such a theory is a harmless eccentricity of over-eager speculation; for it destroys that high and legitimate estimate of God’s natural gifts to man which is an important element of earnest and healthy morality in the individual, and which is still more essential to the onward march of our social progress.
But so long as the Christian Church believes in the true
Divinity of our Incarnate Lord, it is not probable that theories =
which deny the higher aspects of human nature will meet with large acceptance. We Christians can bear to be told that the skull of this or that section of the human family bears this or that degree of resemblance to the skull of a gorilla. We know, indeed, that as receivers of the gift of life we are simply ona level with the lowest of the lower creatures; we owe all that we are and have to God. Do we not thank Him for our creation, preservition, and all the blessings of this life? Might He not have given us less than we have? Might He not have given us nothing? What have we, what are we, that we have not received? The question of man’s place in the universe touches not any self-achieved dignity of our own, but the extent and the nature of the Divine bounty. But while we believe the creed of Christendom, we cannot view such a question as open, or listen with any other feelings than those of sorrow and repugnance to the arguments of the apostles of human degrada- tion. We cannot consent to suppose ourselves to be mere animal organisms, without any immaterial soul or future des- tiny, parted by no distinctive attribute from the perishing beasts around us. For the true nobility of our nature has received the seal of a recognition, which forbids our intellectual complicity with the physics or the ‘ psychology’ of materialism. Do not we Christians call to mind, often, every day of our lives, that God has put such high and distinctive honour upon our common humanity as to clothe Himself in it, and to bear it to heaven in its glorious and unsullied perfection, that for all eternity it may be the partner of His throne?
Tremunt videntes angeli
Versam vicem mortalium;
Peccat caro, mundat Caro,
Regnat Deus Dei Caro.
But this exaltation of our human nature would be the wildest dream, unless Jesus were truly God as well as Man. His Divinity is the warrant that in Him our race is ‘crowned with glory and honour,’ and that in taking upon Him ‘not the ΠΩΣ
LECT.
Christ, as being Gon, ts infallible. 461
of angels, but the seed of Abraham,’ He was vindicating our individual capacity for the highest greatness. Apart from the phenomena of reflection and reason, the hopes which are raised by the Incarnation utterly forbid speculations that would de- grade man to the level of a brute incapable of any real morality. If we are told that such hopes are not direct replies to the arguments of physiology, we answer that physiology can and does often correct by her scientific demonstrations, the eccen- tricities of those who would force her to take part against man’s best hopes and instincts. But, as a practical matter of fact, Christendom maintains its faith in the dignity of man amidst the creatures of God by its faith in the Incarnation of the Divine Son. ‘ Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He isi