Theological Essays/VI

The Sons of the gods in Greek mythology can scarcely be separated from human forms, from actual flesh and blood. Those mysterious emanations from the Divinity which the Oriental spoke of, and which became closely connected with the later Greek philosophy, shrank from this contact. But the hearts of the people, as much in the East as in the West, demanded Incarnations; no efforts of the more spiritual and abstracted priests could resist the demand. If you consider the passages in the Old Testament which speak of Angels or Sons of God, you will be struck with a resemblance to both these conceptions, and a difference from both. They are persons, not abstractions; they converse with human beings as if they were of the same kind; no clear or deep line is drawn between them. On the other hand, they are never spoken of as assuming flesh, as putting on any vesture of mortality. You know not how, but they leave on you an impression of spirituality all the more strong, because no pains are taken to produce it. Yet it is not an impression made at our cost; we feel ourselves to be raised by what is told us of them; if they are spiritual, we must ​be so likewise. For this reason, the Jew had no difficulty in acknowledging one higher Angel, one Son of God, above all the rest; who yet was in more direct and continued communication with human creatures than they were; a Word who spoke to prophets and holy men, drew them away from the phantoms of sense, taught them that they were spirits, inspired them with cravings for the knowledge of God. Such a Person they traced through their Scriptures. Those perceived Him most who entered into the Scriptures most, and whose own minds were most alive. The formal Scribes, who were busy in framing a religion about God from the Bible and the Elders, might never discern Him, though they might expect, some day or other, the coming of a great King and Messiah. But those who believed that God was speaking and ruling, who had some vision of His awfulness and absolute perfection, who yet felt that He had made men in His image, and meant them to know Him, could inquire earnestly how and in whom He governed and spake, how that awfulness and perfection could come into relation with creatures, and be apprehended by them. They did not confine the illuminations of this mysterious Teacher to the wise of their own land, but they believed that the Law and the Prophets interpreted His relation to God and to the souls of men as no other books did, and that their nation was.chosen to be an especial witness of His presence.

But when the voice went from a band of despised men, "The Word, or the Son of God, has been made flesh, and has dwelt among us,"—each of these classes, the Oriental, the Greek sage, the learned and devout Jew, as well as the popular idolater, had his own reason to be offended. Was not flesh the very seat of all evil, ​if not its cause? Was not the great effort of the wise man to disengage himself from fleshly appetites and fleshly illusions? Had not the Divine Word especially chosen out a band of spiritual men to apprehend secrets, which the multitude, given up to the pursuits of the flesh and the world, must remain ignorant of? These were arguments of prodigious weight for all who had pursued the deeper wisdom. The traditional worshippers, Jew or Gentile, did not need arguments. The force of habit and prescription was strong enough without them. The love of what was fleshly and external was as mighty a motive with these for reject- ing the new message, as the dread of it was with the others. They were told to turn from their dumb idols—and the Jew was given to understand that the rites in which he trusted had become his idols—to the Living God. The Son of God was said to have taken flesh that He might reclaim all for the servants of His invisible Father.

Accordingly, the chief struggle of all minds in the first centuries after the Church had established itself in the world was against this belief. I say emphatically and deliberately, in all minds, for the conflict was just as apparent among those who had been baptized as among their opponents. As they became less alive to their own personal necessities, they had leisure to contemplate the many sides which the Gospel presented to the student and to the world—the points of contact between it and surrounding opinions. Then this and that teacher arose to show how possible it was to regard Christ as one of the emanations from the unseen and absolute Essence, one of the stars which had penetrated from the world of light into a world of darkness, one of the agents of ​a good Being, who had come to recover elect souls from fleshly corruption, and to make them capable of the highest knowledge. Then more accomplished teachers traced an order and scheme of emanations; assigning to Christ a place amidst a multitude of qualities, energies, intellectual or physical principles. Then the modes of attaining the higher intuitions were duly set down and distinguished by each school for its own initiated disciples. But in every one it was necessary to account for the appearance of our Lord in the world, without supposing Him to have been actually endowed with a human body. The connection, it was said, was not real, but fantastic; the Christ, or the Son of God, had descended for a while into the body of Jesus at His baptism, leaving it before His passion, not actually participating in any of its infirmities. By some means or other, it must be explained how a deliverer could come among men without being one of themselves, without being associated with that in which lay, as these teachers held, all defilement.

I have expressed what I believe were the three maxims common to these various and dissentient schools. They held, first, that it was possible to know God without an Incarnation; secondly, that it is not right or possible that a perfectly good Being should be tempted as men are tempted; thirdly, that all we have to look for is a deliverer of some choice spirits out of the corruption and ruin of humanity, not a deliverer of man himself, of his spirit, his soul, and his body.

These being the three cardinal dogmas of the teachers who departed from the general creed of the Church, the convictions which have sustained that creed cannot, perhaps, be expressed better than by reversing these propositions. First, We accept the ​fact of the Incarnation, because we feel that it is impossible to know the Absolute and Invisible God as man needs to know Him, and craves to know Him, without an Incarnation. Secondly, We receive the fact of an Incarnation, not perceiving how we can recognise a perfect Son of God and Son of Man, such as man needs and craves for, unless He were, in all points, tempted like as we are. Thirdly, We receive the fact of an Incarnation, because we ask of God a Redemption, not for a few persons, from certain evil tendencies, but for humanity from all the plagues by which it is tormented. I will take these points in their order.

1. Rapt devotees, who have lived in perfect abstraction, have obtained a vision of a cloudless essence, of that which they felt was awful and infinite, and which they could adore in silence. Thoughtful and earnest seekers after wisdom, by careful study of all common things which are presented to them, by honest meditation upon the words which they use, by diligent efforts to escape from the appearances of the senses and the prejudices of the intellect, have been enabled to confess, and confidently to believe, that there is an Absolute and Eternal substance at the ground of all things. Suffering men, tormented by pain of body and anguish of spirit, have perceived that there must be a health deeper than their sickness, a righteousness beneath their evil. Are we to slight any of these discoveries, or not to reckon them true and divine? Certainly not. Their worth is, I believe, unspeakable. But why were not those who obtained them satisfied with them? Why did Heathen sages turn back with a look, half of longing, half of loathing, to the popular legends? They saw that there was in them a witness of the presence of Guardians, Brothers, Fathers, which ​they could not part with. To accept these, clothed in all the tempers and tendencies which they felt to be imperfect and distorted in themselves, was impossible for their reason. But their reason demanded a standard for acts; the grace and righteousness which they saw in different divided human images; a foundation for the relations upon the preservation and purity of which society depends; an absolute Truth, which should not be merely dry existence, merely an ultimate Hercules' Pillar of the Universe, but living—such as truth is when it comes forth in a guileless person.

St. John says, "We beheld His glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." Am I to believe this, asks the objector, on the testimony of a Galilean fisherman, or, for aught we know, of some later doctor assuming that guise? I answer, You are not to believe—you cannot believe—either fisherman or doctor, if the assertion itself is contrary to truth, to the laws of your being, to the order and constitution of the Universe in which you are living. They may repeat it till doomsday. It may come, as it did, with no authority, against the weight of all opinion, breaking through the customs and prescriptions of centuries, defying the rulers of the world; or it may come clad with authority, with the prescription of centuries, with the help of rulers and public opinion; it is all the same;—you cannot believe the words, however habitual and familiar they may be to you, if there is that in them which contradicts the spirit of a man that is in you, which does not address that with demonstration and power. What we say is, that these words have not contradicted that spirit, but have entered it with the demonstration of the spirit and of power. Men have declared, "The actual ​creatures of our race do tell us of something which must belong to us, must be most needful for us. A gentle human being does give us the hint of a higher gentleness; a brave man makes us think of a courage far greater than he can exhibit. Friendships, sadly and continually interrupted, suggest the belief of an unalterable friendship. Every brother awakens the hope of a love stronger than any affinity in nature; and disappoints it. Every father demands a love, and reverence, and obedience, which we know is his due, and which something in him as well as in us hinders us from paying. Every man who suffers and dies rather than lie, bears witness of a truth beyond his life and death, of which he has a glimpse." Men have asked, "Are all these delusions? Is this goodness we have dreamed of all a dream? this Truth a fiction of ours? Is there no Brother, no Father beneath those, who have taught us to believe there must be such? Who will tell us?"

What St. John answers is this: "No, they are not delusions. It has pleased the Father to show us what He is. A man did dwell among us,—an actual man like ourselves, who told us that He had come from this Father, that He knew Him. And we believed Him. We could not help believing Him. There did shine forth in His words, looks, acts, that which we felt to be the grace and the truth we were wanting to see. We were sure they were not of this earth; that they did not spring from that body which was such as ours is. We should have been ready enough to call them His. But He did not—He said they were His Father's, that He could do nothing of Himself, only what He saw His Father do. That was the most wonderful token to us of all. We never saw any ​man before who took nothing to Himself, who would glorify himself in nothing. Therefore, when we be- held Him, we felt that He was a Son, an Only- Begotten Son, and that the glory of One whom no man had seen or could see was shining forth in Him, and through Him upon us."

But why must we think that this person was more than a shrine of the Holiest? why should we speak of Him as the One? why should this name of "the Only-Begotten" be bestowed upon Him? Again I say, Withhold it if your heart and conscience bid you do so. But do not deceive yourselves. The question is not any longer, whether there should be an Incarnation, whether God can manifest Himself in human flesh; but what the Incarnation should be, in what kind of person we are to expect such a manifestation, or whether He will diffuse His glory through many persons, never gathering it into one. With respect to the former question, the Church has always admitted, the Apostles eagerly asserted, that the demand which they made upon human faith was enormous. The glory of God revealing itself, not in a leader of armies, a philosopher, a poet, but in a carpenter,—could anything be more revolting? There was no shrinking from the shameful confession. It was put forward prominently; it was part of the Gospel which was preached to Jews, Greeks, Romans. And it was received as a Gospel, a message of good, not of ill, because the heart of man answered, "We want to see, not some side of earthly power elevated till it becomes celestial; we want not to see the qualities which distinguish one man from another dressed out and expanded till they become utterly unlike anything which we can apprehend or attain to. We want to ​see absolute Goodness and Truth. We want to know whether they can bend to meet us. That which cannot do this is not what we mean by Goodness. It is not what we should call goodness in any man. That truth which belongs to a few and not to all is not what we mean by Truth. The truest man we know has a voice which commends itself to all, which reaches even the untrue, if it be but to frighten and incense him. The goodness which can stoop most, which be- comes, in the largest sense, grace,—the truth which can speak to the inmost heart of the dullest human creature, is that which has for us the surest stamp of divinity."

And here lies also the answer to the other question, "Why should not the Glory of God be diffused through many images? why must it be concentrated in one?" The practical reply which Christendom has made is: "That it may be diffused through many, it must be concentrated in One. That there may be sons of God in human flesh; men shining with the glory of God, reflecting His grace and truth; there must be One Son who has taken human flesh, in whom that full glory dwelt, who was full of grace and truth." He, so we have proclaimed, who could say, My Father, could say, Your Father; he who could say, He has sent me, could say, So send I you. And Christendom has not merely put this doctrine forth in a proposition. She has been able to establish it by the experience of other men's truths; still more by the experience of her own errors. She can say, She can say, "Take away the belief of the one incarnate Son of God and Son of Man, and all the heroes of the old world and of the new become merely so many men who have earned a right, by their superiority to the mass of their fellow-creatures, to despise them and trample upon them. Admit Him to ​be the centre of them, and they all fall into their places; each has had his separate protest to bear, his appointed work to do. Though he may not have known in whose name he was ministering, his ministry, so far as it was one of help and blessing to mankind, so far as it implied any surrender of self-glory, may be referred to the man, may be hailed as proceeding from Him who took upon Him the form of a servant." On the other hand, the Church can say, and should say, with the deepest humiliation, "Look what miserable creatures the saints whom I have boasted of have become, when, through their own crime, or the crime of those who have magnified them, it has been supposed that they had some independent merits, that their souls or their flesh had some sacredness of their own. Look through my whole history, and see whether the greatest confusions I have wrought in the world, the cruellest oppressions of which I have been guilty, have not been caused by my desire to exalt individual men into the place of the Christ; by my efforts to accomplish the very object which you hope to attain, when you have emancipated yourselves from my Creed."

2. But I pass to the second point, upon which the teachers who deny an Incarnation are at variance with the Apostles, and, I think, with the conscience of man- kind. They say, "It destroys the idea of a Son of God to suppose Him in contact with the temptations of ordinary men." We say, "We cannot know Him to be the sinless Son of God, except He was in all points tempted like as we are." This is that side of Christian divinity which presented itself in all its power to Milton; Paradise was, according to him, regained by the endurance of temptation. His strict ​adherence to that one idea has given a unity to his second poem, as a work of art, which is wanting to its more magnificent predecessor. And this unity it would not have received if the soul of the writer had not been penetrated and absorbed by the principle which it embodies. In it lay the strength and vitality of the age which he represented, especially of the Puritan part of it. Men felt then that they had a battle with principalities and powers; the test of the Son of God was, that he had entered into that battle, and had overcome in it. This thought might become too exclusive in their minds; when it was separated from the one we have just been considering, it was liable to various perversions; but I can scarcely conceive of any which has stood men in greater stead, or which we can less afford to dispense with. In fact, as I said in a former Essay, it seems to me that our actual forgetfulness of it, our effeminate timidity in acknowledging the existence of an Evil Spirit, our desire to represent all temptations as arising out of our nature, has been the cause of more superstitions, and more dishonourable thoughts of ourselves and of God, than any other of our popular religious habits. But it is inevitable while there is the least reluctance to adopt the language of the New Testament respecting our Lord's temptation. We cannot and dare not think that there is an actual spirit striking at the deepest root of our being, striving to separate us from what is good and true, if we do not believe that righteousness is mightier, or if we suppose it has only a distant abstract superiority; not one which has been ascertained in an actual trial. If we suppose that the Son of God had any advantage in that trial, any power save that which came from simple trust in His Father, ​from the refusal to make or prove Himself His Son instead of depending on His word and pledge, we shall not feel that a real victory has been won. And thence will come (alas! have come), the consequences of supposing our flesh to be accursed in itself, our bodies or our souls to be subject to a necessary evil, and not to be holy creatures of God, made for all good. It is needful to repeat these maxims often; for the habits and maxims which contradict them are presenting themselves in every variety of form and application, and are, I think, disturbing all our lives. I recur to them now, because I wish to put that doctrine of the Incarnation, which is so often denounced as an outrage upon reason, conscience, and experience, to every possible test of reason, conscience, and experience. If there are any tests besides these, I do not ask that it should be tried by them; these should not be declined by those who are continually appealing to them. Let them fairly and manfully ask themselves whether they do not evade either some great fact of daily experience, some evidence of actual misery and evil, or else some sure and authentic testimony of the heart, that nothing in its principle and constitution can be evil, if they deny that there has been One, who, in our condition, was tempted by the Devil; and that it was no imaginary temptation, but the real one,—that which makes others real. Either I shall resort to some subterfuge to conceal my own evil, or I shall shrink from acknowledging my relation in hope and in sorrow to all human beings, or I shall invent some wretched substitute for the Friend whom I have lost, if I am too refined to believe that there is one who showed himself in my flesh, to be a sharer of all God's truth and of all my danger.

​3. This refinement in the Gnostical teachers had the closest connection with that third characteristic of theirs to which I alluded,—their belief that Christ descended from some pure and ethereal world, to save certain elect souls from the pollutions of the flesh and the death which was consequent upon them; not to save the human race; above all, not to save that which was designated as the poor, ignoble, accursed body.

The whole Gospel history was a most cruel insult to the feelings which this opinion denoted. Christ is represented as addressing Himself to multitudes. Those selected out of these multitudes to be His disciples, are ignorant men, not better, not more spiritual, than their fellows. Those who gather about Him are publicans and sinners. He heals their bodies. He speaks of their bodies as bound by Satan. Pain, disease, death, are treated not as portions of a divine scheme, but as proofs that it has been violated; as witnesses of the presence of a destroyer, who is to be resisted and cast out. These are the startling phenomena of the Gospels, subversive of their credit and character with all persons who, on any grounds whatever, religious or philosophical, are maintaining an exclusive position, striving to separate themselves from other human beings, or wishing to disparage animal existence as the only way of exalting that which is intellectual or spiritual. The traditions of their country may induce some of these to suspend their condemnation of the documents,—nay, even to express unlimited belief in them. Some may hesitate, from sympathy with that in them which their hearts acknowledge as beautiful and divine. But when the chain of authority is broken for the one, when the ​other find books appealing more directly to their tastes and temper, as being dressed in the fashion of their own time, it will be seen how gladly they will welcome any mode of accounting for the Gospel narratives, which shall not compel them to accept what they do not like to think divine because it is so human. And here again it is to the great human heart that theology must make its appeal. That has found a witness for the Gospels and for the fact of an Incarnation in these offensive passages. That has clung to them because it demands one who comes into contact with its actual condition; who relieves it of its actual woes; who recognises not the exceptions from the race, but the lowest types of it, as brethren with Himself, and as the children of His Father; who proves man to be a spiritual being, not by scorning his animal nature and his animal wants, but by entering into them, bearing them, suffering from them, and then showing how all the evils which affect man as an animal have a spiritual ground, how he must become a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, that everything on earth may be pure and blessed to him. "The Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil;" this is St. John's summary of the whole matter. He revealed the Father, and so in human flesh He destroyed the great calumny of the devil, that man has not a Father in heaven, that He is not altogether good, that He does not care for His creatures: He submits to all temptations in human flesh, and so proves that man is not the subject and thrall of the tempter. He in human flesh delivered spirits, souls, and bodies out of bondage, so affirming that the state into which the devil would draw them is not the state which is meant for them; that His own humanity ​is the standard of that which each man bears, and is that to which man shall be raised.

The evangelists say that when the Son of God was to be manifested to men, there did not come a great prophet to argue and prove the probability of an Incarnation; but there came a prophet preaching in the wilderness, and saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." I have said already that I believe such a call to repentance is the true way of bringing evidence for any one of the articles of Christian theology When the hearts of the fathers are turned to the children, when the doctor or Pharisee feels himself on the level of the publican and the harlot, then these articles come forth in their own native and divine might; then the objections, which are merely the creatures of fancy or of. pride, are scattered as chaff before the wind; then those deeper objections which touch the heart and reason are seen to affect not the principles themselves, but only some earthly additions to them, which have weakened and subverted them. While we are frivolous, exclusive, heartless, no arguments ought to convince us of Christ's Incarnation; they would carry their own condemnation with them, if they did. When we are aroused to think earnestly what we are, what our relation to our fellow- men is, what God is,—the voice which says, "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us," "The Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil," will no more be thought of as the voice of an apostle. We shall know that He is speaking to us Himself, and that He is the Christ that should come into the world.

Let no Unitarian suppose that these last words are pointed at him,—that I suppose he has greater need of ​repentance than we have, because some special moral obliquity has prevented him from recognising the truth of the Incarnation. I had no such meaning; I was thinking much more of the orthodox. I was considering how many causes hinder us from confessing with our hearts as well as our lips, that Christ has come in the flesh. The conceit of our orthodoxy is one cause. Whatever sets us in any wise above our fellow-men is an obstacle to a hearty belief in the Man; it must be taken from us before we shall really bow our knees to Him. I know not that if He were now walking visibly among us, He might not say that many a Unitarian was far nearer the kingdom of heaven than many of us; less choked with prejudice, less self-confident, more capable of recognising the great helper of the wounded man who has fallen among thieves, than we priests or Levites are, because more ready to go and do likewise. I cannot say that this might not be so; I often suspect that it would be so; and therefore I certainly did not intend to convey the impression that the moral disease at the root of their most vehement intellectual denials is necessarily a malignant one.

But though I did not think that such a call as we are told went forth from the lips of John the Baptist, to prepare the way for Christ, is less needful for us than for them, I should be far indeed from wishing to shut them out from so great a benefit. We all want it, I think, for the same reason. When St. John explains the object of the Baptist's mission, he does not use the language of the other evangelists. He says "He came to bear witness of the LIGHT, that all men through Him might believe." This is not a mere equivalent for the words, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand;" but it gives us the innermost force of ​those words; it takes away their vagueness; it shows why one person, as much as another, had need to hear them. "There is a light within you, close to you. Do you know it? Are you coming to it? Are you desiring that it should penetrate you through and through? Oh, turn to it! Turn from these idols that are surrounding you,—from the confused, dark world of thoughts within you! It will reveal yourself to you! It will reveal the world to you!" "What do you mean?" asks the well-instructed, formally, habitually religious man: my conscience, I suppose." "Call it that, or what you please; but in God's name, my friend, do not cheat yourself with a phrase. I mean a reality; I mean that which has to do with your innermost being; I mean something which does not proceed from you or belong to you; but which is there, searching you and judging you. Nay! stay a moment. I mean that this light comes from a Person,—from the King and Lord of your heart and spirit,—from the Word,—the Son of God. When I say, Repent: I say, Turn and confess His presence. You have always had it with you. You have been unmindful of it."

Such words would startle some Unitarians, but not more than they would startle those who are settled on the lees of a comfortable orthodoxy. The cries of "Mysticism," "Lore imported from the Alexandrian fathers," "Utterly inconsistent with all sound modern philosophy," "Derived from our own conceits, not from the Bible," "Fénélon, Madame Guion, Jacob Böhme," etc., would rise just as loudly from one as from the other. The teacher, if he happens to know anything of the persons he is accused of copying, may tell what he knows; but he will do better if he delivers his message simply to those who have need of it. They will dis​cover in themselves whether it is a poor plagiarism, they will know whether it fills them with mystical conceits, or scatters those conceits. If he has courage to go on, he will find a response, not only in those who have been told, from their youth upward, that the voice of conscience is Christ's voice, but from a number who are nominally and in profession materialists; who cannot conceive of any spiritual communication whatsoever, who think that the testimonies of conscience are the echoes of words addressed to the ear. For theories signify little when the question is one of fact and moral demonstration. They disappear, as they do before any great and decisive experiment in physics, and adjust them- selves, not at once but gradually, to the law which has been brought to light. And a materialist who has been honest with himself, has sought to do right, and has not used phrases which for him had no meaning, is quite as likely as another man to yield to such evidence.

It is necessary for my present purpose to make this statement; for I cannot disguise from myself the truth that there are many, not only among Unitarians, but among us, who would be simply bewildered by the pro- position, "Christ took flesh." What Christ? they would ask, if they were not withheld by some fear. "Is not Jesus of Nazareth the Christ? " And this difficulty is not relieved, but increased, by the emphasis with which the ablest, most devout, and most learned divines, both here and in Germany, are dwelling on the words, "God manifest in the flesh." I do not mean that these divines care whether or not that precise expression occurs in the Epistle to Timothy; whether the line in the O can be detected with the aid of spectacles or not; they are far too manly and too well grounded in their faith, to make it depend upon this or any other philological crux. ​They take these words as expressing the very sense of the Gospel and of the new Testament. I do not think they can be stronger in that persuasion than I am; but I cannot help perceiving,—and a consideration of Unitarian difficulties has especially led me to this conclusion,—that if in their eagerness to set forth the manifestation they take no pains to declare who is the manifester, they will leave an impression on a number of minds the very opposite to that which they seek to produce. They will lead people to suppose that the Image of the Holy One had no reality till it was presented through a human body to men, or at least that till then this Image had no relation to the creature who is said in Scripture to be formed in it. By this means the whole of the Old Testament economy, instead of being fulfilled in the revelation of the Son of God, becomes hopelessly divided from it. But what is worse still, by this means the heart and conscience of human beings become separated from that revelation. It stands outside, as if it were presented to the eye, not to them; as if those who saw Christ in the flesh must really have known Him for that reason; whereas every sentence of the Gospels is telling us that they did not.

I conceive the method of St. John is far more scientific, and also far more human and practical. He declares to us the Word as God, and also as with God; as Him by whom all things were created; as Him whose Life was the Light of men; whose Light was shining in the darkness, and the darkness did not take it down into itself; whose Light was witnessed by the visible teacher, that all men might believe; who was in the world, though the world knew Him not; who came to His own house, and its inmates did not receive Him; who gave those who did receive ​Him power to become sons of God, being born not of flesh nor of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God; who at last was made flesh and dwelt among men, and in whom the glory of the Only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, was seen. Quite aware how strange this method must seem to many of ourselves, still stranger to the Unitarian, I have yet tried to follow it, because it appeals, I think, both to the reason and to the conscience, and because I should be very inconsistent if I supposed that the Light which lighteth every man did not light the Unitarian, or that he may not come to it and discover whence it flows. Nor do I think that any one of the grounds upon which I have rested my defence of our creed concerning the Incarnation will be entirely unintelligible to him.

1. I have told him before that I think he is exposed to a danger of which he least dreams,—that of honouring the Son, not as he honours the Father, but above Him. I would now ask him seriously to consider whether the best part of the honour he ever has paid to the Father, that which has been most real and akin to his heart, has not been derived from the image which was presented to him in Christ? He may have used some large phrases about Omnipotence, or Omnipresence. I do not say that they conveyed no meaning to his mind. But was it such a meaning, so deep, so penetrating, so satisfactory to his moral instincts,—as that which was brought to him by the story of a person actually, thoroughly, inwardly and outwardly righteous? If the quality of mere power became more sacred and venerable in his mind than that of righteousness, or mercy, or truth, will he not have suspected himself? will he not have said, "I am yielding to a disease; I am borrowing my notions ​from the phantoms of greatness and glory, which the world worships; I am forgetting the moral standard which I profess to set up?" And if (as I think), power is intended to command a reverence, and must always command it, though in subordination to that which determines its ends, have not the instances of calm power, recorded in the Gospel,—of Christ ruling the waves, for instance, or feeding the multitude,―appealed more directly to the faculty which receives that impression, and bows to it, than any such mere abstraction as this of Omnipotence? These are hints which I should like any Unitarian who wishes to give a fair account to himself of his own emotions and convictions, steadily to follow out, not minding whither they lead him. They may not lead him at once, or for a long time, to accept our language, "of one substance with the Father;" he may make a great many attempts to avoid it, by speaking of a Unity of purpose or of will. But if he once comes to understand himself about Unity of purpose and will, and carefully to consider what that involves, I have no fear but that he will by degrees understand thoroughly what the Church intends by Unity of Substance.

2. Nor do I fear that the younger Unitarian, especially, will discard what I have said of Christ entering into our temptations as worthless and unmeaning. What I do fear for him, as I have told him already, is, that he may adopt a kind of sentimental talk, very prevalent in our day, about struggles and conflicts of the spirit,—as if these were striking phenomena to observe in men of other ages, who are entitled to our patronage, and in a qualified sense to our admiration, for having passed through tempests, which we can contemplate and criticise from a calm ​and secure height. I know this temptation; I do not warn them of it as if I were on a calm height out of its reach. It assaults us all continually; I cannot tell how often I may have yielded to it while writing this book. But I can testify that the only escape I have ever found from it is in the belief that a real and strong" Son of God encountered the enemy of me, and of all the men who are living now, or ever have lived. While I hold fast that confidence, I cannot suppose that the fight which our fathers had to fight is a different one from ours. I cannot fancy that I have acquired any position or any skill, which gives me the slightest advantage over them, or, on the other hand, that our circumstances are the least to be deplored; that the former days were better than these. I must believe that the struggle becomes intenser as it approaches nearer to the final decision; but the thought of that decision, and that it will be for, not against, the race whose nature Christ took, ought to make us more trusting, not more self-confident, than those were who have finished their course.

3. If I dared to indulge in a mere argumentum ad hominem, I might hope to make much of my third proposition in discoursing with a Unitarian. He is pledged to hostility against the Calvinistical theory of election; he has often fraternised with Churchmen on that ground. But I think that he and the Arminians of my own communion have been equally to blame for the course which they have taken in this controversy. They have complained of the Calvinist partly for his exclusions, partly for his zeal in proclaiming the will of God as the sole cause of man's redemption and salvation. Because I dislike and repudiate his exclusions, I would follow him with all ​my heart and soul in that proclamation. If man is held to choose God, and not God to choose man, I see no deliverance from the darkest views of his character and of our destiny. Some of the Unitarians appear to be making this discovery; at least I judge so, from a very impressive sermon by Mr. Martineau, on the words: "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you."

Before, then, we enter into any alliance, offensive or defensive, against Calvinism, it must be clearly understood that we do not mean this side of Calvinism; for that is as much presumed in the doctrine that God redeems mankind, as in the doctrine that He redeems certain elect souls out of mankind. Every redeemed person must, according to me, as much as according to the Calvinist, refer every good that is in him, that he does, that befalls him, to the Father of Lights,—must consider his will as freed by Him from a bondage, and as freed, that it may become truly a servant. Nay, so strongly do I feel this that I see no refuge from the exclusiveness of some of those who consider themselves very moderate Calvinists,—especially from those favourite divisions of theirs which seem to make the "believer" something different from a man, and so to take from him the very truth which he has to believe,—but by recalling the strong and energetic statements of the earlier Calvinists, respecting the one root and origin of faith, as well as of right acts. But this is not all. I have no right to denounce the exclusiveness of the Calvinists, unless I am willing to renounce all that may cleave to myself. The Unitarian may fairly say to me, "Give up your Anglican exclusiveness if you wish me to think you sincere in your complaints of them. And I, if I am striving to do so, may turn upon him and say, "Give ​up your Gnostical exclusiveness, your Emersonian exclusiveness, your notions of a high intellectual election, if you wish me to think you sincere in your complaints of Calvinists or of Anglicans." I do not believe that we shall any of us comply with these demands, each of which is perfectly reasonable and righteous, unless we heartily and unfeignedly acknowledge that Christ, the Son of God, has taken the nature of every man. With that faith, when it has possessed our whole being, exclusiveness of any kind cannot dwell.

To conclude. I should be content to put the whole cause on this issue. Let it be considered earnestly what has made the difference between the belief concerning God and concerning Man which has prevailed in Christendom, and that which exists in any part of heathendom. To understand the difference, study as carefully the resemblances,—all the dark and horrible thoughts respecting our Father in heaven, and our fellow-creatures on earth, which exist among us, and which we have adopted from Heathenism. Let all allowance you please be made for varieties of races, and for progress of civilisation, on condition that you are not satisfied with these formulas, but are willing to regard them as indications of facts, which need to 'be explained. And then let it be seen whether the belief that the Jesus Christ set forth in the Gospels is the express Image of God, and the image after which man is formed, has not been the secret of all that is confessedly high, pure, moral in our convictions; the departure from that belief, and the attempt to deduce the nature of God from some philosophical generalisation, or from some heroical man, or from a number of men, or from ourselves, has not been at the root of all that is cruel in our doctrine, as well as of that which is most feeble and base in our practice.