mere codes of rules, for impulses of mercy and pity toward the weak and the ignorant, for gleams of inspiration and illumination, for vision into the unseen. As Christ Himself foretold to His followers, the moment comes when we desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man. What shall it profit if that power of vision shall have perished of atrophy?

C

CHAPTER VI

Christ the Beginning

HRISTIANITY starts from the person of Jesus of Nazareth, "the Christ," as those called Him who were looking for the redemption of Israel, and who discerned in Him the promised deliverer of their nation. But both in Eastern and Western Europe, and at the hands of those who were not of the race of Israel, the Christianity which began with Jesus of Nazareth has developed far beyond its origin, has become a cult, a literature, a tradition, and an organisation, quite other than that of its Founder. Let us leave the developments, for the moment, and consider the origin the incarnation of Divinity in man. "Let us make man in Our image" was the intent attributed in Genesis to the Elohim, when the creation of man was in consideration. It is an unconscious tribute to the conviction that man, as man, shares something of the Divine nature, if only to exist in its image. The same figure recurs in the later biblical writers with respect to Jesus of Nazareth: "Christ who is the image of God” (ös ¿σTIV EiKÒV TOû cov), as St. Paul says in 2 Cor. iv. 4, and in Col. i. 15; "the express image of [His] person (χαρακτὴρ τὴς ὑποστάσεως), as the

author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, chap. i. 3, writes. And again, in 2 Cor. iv. 6, "God hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." With these writers there was no question or hesitation God was in Christ, manifesting the nature and character of the Eternal Father through the person of man. Divinity manifested through humanity may seem a strange notion to those who have been brought up in the theological prejudice that everything human is essentially wicked: but that prejudice is far from the spirit of the gospels. The notion which strikes strangely on the biased ear is strange only because of that bias. "Show us the Father," said Philip to Jesus, "and it sufficeth us." "Have I been so long time with you," was the reply, "and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip?" The human person whom he had known so long was himself the revelation of the Divine. And this is the Divine order-first that which is natural, afterward that which is spiritual. Yet all the theologians have gone the other way, and instead of explaining the Divine things through the human, have essayed to explain the human by the Divine that of which we know little by that of which we know less! What theologian dares to tell the simple fact that the first comprehension which a child attains of Divine love is by loving its mother? Without antecedent pure human love, Divine love were unknowable. What priest dares to acknowledge that while St. Paul uses the similitude of the love of the bridegroom for the bride, in the endeavour to bring home the intensity of the love of Christ for His Church, the compilers of the

Prayer-book have inverted the simile, and represent marital love as being the mere reflexion of the love of the mystical bridegroom for the mystical bride, thus putting the spiritual before the natural ? Has any of the religious philosophers of the world ever offered to mankind a higher, a purer, a truer conception of divinity than was revealed to man "in the face of Jesus Christ"? This is the point precisely missed by those who in their mistaken efforts to exalt the name of Jesus, and to crown Him Lord of all, ignore His human nature, and rob Him of His humanity. Think of all the waste that has resulted from the doctrines of impeccability, virgin-birth, immaculate conception, and the like, which empty the humanity of Jesus of all reality, and make Him a superhuman phantom, whose "temptations" and "sufferings" are thus reduced to a meaningless show. If He had been impeccable-incapable of yielding to the temptations to satisfy the natural impulses of hunger, thirst, sex, acquisition, anger, dominationhow can it be said, as was said of Him by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that "He was tempted in all points like as we are"? Unless the temptations and sufferings of Jesus are to be refined down to a mere mockery, we must hold that He was very man of very man, a son of man indeed, coming in by the gate of non-miraculous human birth, and departing by the gate of corporeal human death; and because of this complete humanity, able to reveal to us, as never before, the nature of the Divine. Any humanity diluted or less complete, any trace of demigodism, lowers the significance of the title by which he described himself, namely the Son of man. The ecclesiastics would virtually

have us exchange this for Son of woman. But the original Aramaic word Bar Nasch bears the meaning of the "son" of man in its representative sense as the man of men, the typical man, the representative of man as man. A Jew carpenter, you will say; a Syrian workman, of whose history from the age of twelve to that of thirty we know nothing; of whose childhood there are innumerable pretty legends told; literally descended, it is true, through His father Joseph' from the royal house of David, but a mere peasant, the associate of fishermen and vine-dressers! Yes, and much more indeed, as who will but follow the recorded doings and sayings of the Son of man, may know. The image of God; the stamp of His manifestation; the fullness of the Divine revealed corporeally. Whether the early tradition be valid or not that it was at the baptism that the divine Sonship was conferred 2 upon Jesus, it is self-evident that to His own associates the humanity of Jesus appealed, long before they had any idea of attributing divinity to Him. When His essential divinity flashed upon them it was because it had been manifested to them through His humanity. Divine and human meeting in Him, the Divine in the human, our knowledge of what

1 The insertion in St. Luke iii., 23-28, of the genealogy through David to Joseph is unintelligible unless intended to prove the royal descent of Jesus through Joseph. Verse 23 as it stands in the Autho rized Version is ambiguous. In the Codex Beze there stands ws instead of worl, and the v is omitted; so that a nearer rendering of the verse would be: And Jesus when He came [to the baptism] was as supposed about thirty years of age, being the son of Joseph.

2 Codex Bezæ, in Luke iii., 22, gives as the voice from heaven : "Thou art My beloved Son; this day I have begotten Thee"; thus agreeing with Justin Martyr's teaching in the primitive Church, before the doctrines of the pre-existent Logos and of the virgin-birth had taken hold.