higher or deeper theology than that of fifteen hundred years ago, but rather the reverse. This progress appears to me, not to take as its starting-point the first fact in the New Testament, and not to set before itself as its goal the one hope of the Apostles and Primitive Saints. It does not start from the Incarnation, and does not reach forth towards the Second Coming of Christ, and the Resurrection of the Body. One raised up by God, more than fourteen hundred years ago, to defend the truth of His Son's Incarnation wrote thus: "Christ is shown to be the bond of unity between us and the Divine Nature, binding us to Himself as man, but as God, being by nature in God His own Father. For in no other way could the nature, subject to corruption, rise aloft to incorruption, unless the nature, superior to all corruption and change, had descended to it, lightening in a manner that which ever sunk downwards, and raising it to its own excellencies, and by communion and commingling with itself, ALL BUT UPLIFTING IT FROM THE CONDITIONS CONFORMABLE TO CREATED NATURE, and reforming, according to itself, that which is not so of itself. "We are perfected into unity with God the Father through Christ the Mediator. For, having received into ourselves, bodily and spiritually, Him who is by nature and truly the Son, who hath an essential oneness with Him [the Father], we, becoming partakers of the nature which is above all, are glorified.1 In these words of St. Cyril I recognise "free thought," but then it is thought "free" to mount up. It takes hold of Scripture truths, not to pull them down to its own level, but to rise, by their help, to the top of that ladder 1 Cyril of Alexandria, quoted in notes to Pusey's Sermon on "Real Presence," p. 644. which reaches from earth to heaven; and that ladder is the human nature of Christ, in us, and upon the very throne of the Most High God. If the Church has progressed beyond these thoughts and words of Cyril, that progress is assuredly not to be discovered in the leading writers of our present 66 freethought" school. Their higher criticism has led them, I doubt not, to avoid certain mistakes about types and prophecies into which Cyril may have fallen, but they have it not in them to say what he says about the exaltation of human nature in that Second Adam, in Whom all His brethren who adhere to Him by a living faith are raised up and made to sit together in heavenly places. Their "free thought" may bring out well the touches of human nature with which God's word abounds-sweet these touches are, and unaccountably have they been missed by those who have professed to draw out the fulness of Scripture truth—but to reveal these is not the great purpose of God in Scripture; and our free thought does not take to, and is not at home in, the revelation of Divine nature, to reveal which is the purpose of God in the inspiration of Holy Scripture. In writers of this school I find, as a rule, an unaccountable reticence respecting the essential Deity and Incarnation of the Son of God. Now "free thought," employing itself upon the things contained in God's word, and not taking the Incarnation into account at every turn, seems to me to be as absurd as it would be for "free thought" to busy itself upon the system of the universe, and not to take into account the attraction of gravitation. If the Humiliation of the Eternal Son of God, in the way in winch it is revealed to us in the first chapters of SS. Matthew, Luke, and John, be a fact, if it actually took place under the circumstances there recorded, then the whole economy of which it is the beginning and root is raised up from earth to heaven. It seems to me drivelling folly to rationalize on, and insist upon giving some commonplace meaning to Church or Sacramental doctrine, whilst you accept the Incarnation as stated in the creeds. For if the manhood be actually taken into the Godhead in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, and if this Jesus founded a Church, then it is only in harmony with such a beginning that this Church should have some mysterious relationship to its Divine Head. If Christ were a mere man, full of God's grace, but not the Second Person of the Eternal Trinity, then such statements as "I am the vine, ye are the branches,” “ Ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular," "We are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones," would seem highly coloured, and so not to be taken as setting forth any supernatural or mystical union. They would be, in point of fact, exaggerations. They must be diluted, if they are to accord with the prosaic reality that Christ is a divinely-gifted Socrates, and that, after all, our relationship to Him can be only that of scholars to a teacher, or of subjects to a king. But if Christ be, in very deed, God's Only Begotten Son in our nature, then, with reverence be it spoken, no grace towards man can be too great after such a channel of grace is opened. If the Only Begotten Son took our nature that, through that nature, He might convey grace to us, then such grace cannot well be small, soon told, and its fulness easily apprehended. Then, in all reason, that Church which Christ has so closely associated with Himself in word, must in very deed be mystically joined to Him; and those statements which imply some extraordinary union with Him, must be understood as if they set forth high realities which human reason cannot grasp, and human speech cannot utter, rather than commonplace matters which our reason is not only well able to grasp, but also to embody in more intelligible terms. And as with the Church, so with the Sacraments by which the mystical union of the whole body with the Redeemer is inaugurated or cemented. It seems to me in the highest degree irrational to tone down the words in which Christ or His Spirit set forth the mysterious functions of Sacraments, whilst we hold the infinite mystery of the Person of Him who ordained them, and whilst we are forced to admit that His words, on the face of them, seem to set before us some strange and unearthly bonds betwixt us and Him. Those words of His which have to do with His Church, and His Ministry and His Sacraments, mysterious and startling though they seem, are yet in harmony with the first fact of His economy, and with the last. The first fact, that when the King of Glory took upon Him to deliver man He did not abhor the Virgin's womb, and the last, that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. THE END. R CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, LONDON, Third Edition, greatly enlarged, fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. THE SECOND ADAM, AND THE NEW BIRTH; OR, THE DOCTRINE OF BAPTISM AS CONTAINED "We commend the little volume. . . . most earnestly to clergy and laity as containing in a small compass, and at a trifling cost, a body of sound and Scriptural doctrine respecting the New Birth which cannot be too widely circulated."-Guardian. "There is this peculiarity about it, that the reasoning is almost exclusively derived from Scripture, and this is likely to make it the more convincing to those who impugn the sacramental system." -Ecclesiastic. "They are eminently straightforward in dealing with their subjects-practical and thoroughgoing in their applications-unpretending and yet effective in their style-and of a sound Church type in their theology."-Guardian. "Of great vigour and sense."-Christian Remembrancer. Sixth Edition 6d. THE SACRAMENT OF RESPONSIBILITY; OR, TESTIMONY OF THE SCRIPTURE TO THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH ON HOLY BAPTISM, With especial reference to the Cases of Infants, and Answers to Objections. LONDON: BELL AND DALDY, 186, FLEET STREET. |