358 Triumph of the Doctrine. The Homoousion.

frontier, and with a stronger sense of the necessity for insisting upon that recognition. In the Homoousion, after such hesitation as found expression at Antioch, the Church felt that she had lighted upon a symbol practically adapted to tell forth the truth that never had been absent from her heart and mind, and withal, capable of resisting the intellectual solvents which had seemed to threaten that truth with extinction. The Homoousion did not change, it protected the doctrine. It clothed the doctrine in a vesture of language which rendered it intelligible to a new world of thought while preserving its strict unchanging identity. It translated the apostolical symbols of the Image and the Word of God into a Platonic equivalent; and it remains with us to this hour, in the very heart of our Creed, as the complete assertion of Christ's absolute oneness with the Essence of Deity, as the monument which records the greatest effort and the greatest defeat of its antagonist error, as the guarantee that the victorious truth maintains and will maintain an unshaken empire over the thought of Christendom.

We are all sufficiently familiar with the line of criticism to which such a formula as the Homoousion is exposed in our day and generation. A contrast is depicted and insisted upon with more vehemence than accuracy, between the unfixed popular faith of Christians in the first age of the Church and the keen theological temper of the fourth century. It is said that the Church's earliest faith was unformed, simple, vague, too full of childlike wonder to analyse itself, too indeterminate to satisfy the requirements of a formalized theology. It is asserted that at Alexandria the Church learned how to fix her creed in precise, rigid, exclusive moulds; that she there gradually crystallized what had once been fluid, and cramped and fettered what had before been free. And it is insinuated that in this process, whereby the fresh faith of the infant Church was hardened into the creed of the Church of the Councils,' there was some risk, or more than risk, of an alteration or enlargement of the original faith. 'How do you know,' men ask, 'that the formulary which asserts Christ's Consubstantiality with the Father is really expressive of the simple faith in which the first Christians lived and died? Do not probabilities point the other way? Is it not likely that when this effort was made to fix the expression of the faith in an unchanging symbol, there was a simultaneous growth, however unsuspected and unrecognised, in the subjectmatter of the faith expressed? May not the hopes and feelings of a passionate devotion, as well as the inferential arguments of

The worship of Christ a witness to the Homoousion. 359

an impetuous logic, have contributed something to fill up the outline and to enhance the significance of the original and revealed germ of truth? May not the Creed of Nicea be thus in reality a creed distinct from, if not indeed more extensive than, the creed of the apostolic age?' Such is the substance of many a whispered question, or of many a confident assertion, which we hear around us; and it is necessary to enquire, whether the admitted difference of form between the apostolic and Nicene statements does really, or only in appearance, involve a deeper difference—a difference in the object of faith.

I. Let it then be considered that a belief may be professed either by stating it in terms, or by acting in a manner which necessarily implies that you hold it. A man may profess a creed with which his life is at variance; but he may also live a creed, if I may so speak, which he has not the desire or the skill to put into exact words. There is no moral difference between the sincere expression of a conviction in language, and its consistent reflection in action. There is, for example, no difference between my saying that a given person is not to be relied upon when dealing with money matters, and my pointedly declining to act with him on this particular trust, when I am asked to do so. It is not necessary that I should express my complete opinion of his character, until I am obliged to express it. I content myself with acting in the only manner which is prudent under the circumstances. Meanwhile my line of action speaks for itself; its meaning is evident to all who are practically interested in the subject. Until I am challenged for an explanation ; until the assumption upon which I act is denied; there is no necessity for my putting into words an opinion which has already been stated in the language of action and with such unmistakeable decision.

Did then the ante-Nicene Church as a whole-did its congregations of worshippers as well as its councils of divinesdid its poor, its young, its unlettered multitudes, as well as its saints and doctors, so act and speak as to imply a belief that Jesus Christ is actually God?

A question such as this may at first sight seem to be difficult to answer, by reason of the one-sidedness and caprice of history. History for the most part concerns herself with the actions and opinions of the great and the distinguished, that is to say, of the few. Incidentally, or on particular occasions, she may glance at what passes beyond the region of courts and battle-fields but it is not her wont to enable us readily to ascertain the real

360 Jesus Christ not only admired' but 'adored.

currents of thought and feeling which have swayed the minds of multitudes in a distant age.

Such at any rate is the rule with secular history; but the genius of the Church of Christ is of a nature to limit the force of the observation. In her eyes, the interests of the many, the customs, the deeds, the sufferings of the illiterate and of the poor, are, to say the least, not less precious and noteworthy than those of kings and prelates. For the standard of aristocracy within her borders is not an intellectual or a social, but a moral standard; and her Founder has put the highest honour not upon those who rule and are of reputation, but upon those who serve and are unknown. The history of the Christian Church does therefore serve to illustrate the point before us; and it proves the belief of Christian people in the Godhead of Jesus by its witness to the early and universal practice of adoring Him.

The early Christian Church did not content herself with admiring' Jesus Christ. She adored Him. She approached His Glorious Person with that very tribute of prayer, of selfprostration, of self-surrender, by which all serious Theists, whether Christian or non-Christian, are accustomed to express their felt relationship as creatures to the Almighty Creator. For as yet it was not supposed that a higher and truer knowledge of the Infinite God would lead man to abandon the sense and the expression of complete dependence upon Him and of unmeasured indebtedness to Him, which befits a reasonable creature whom God has made, and whom God owns and can dispose of, when such a creature is dealing with God. As yet it was not imagined that this bearing would or could be exchanged for the more easy demeanour of an equal, or of one deeming himself scarcely less than an equal, who is intelligently appreciating the existence of a remarkably wise and powerful Being, entitled by His activities to a very large share of speculative attention. The Church simply adored God; and she

c Cf. Lecky, History of Rationalism, i. 309. Contrasting the Christian belief in a God Who can work miracles with the scientific' belief in a god who is the slave of law,' Mr. Lecky remarks, that the former 'predisposes us most to prayer,' the latter to reverence and admiration.' Here the antithesis between 'reverence' and 'prayer' seems to imply that the latter word is used in the narrow sense of petition for specific blessings, instead of in the wider sense which embraces the whole compass of the soul's devotional activity, and among other things, adoration. Still, if Mr. Lecky had meant to include under reverence' anything higher than we yield to the highest forms of human greatness, he would scarcely have coupled it with 'admiration.'

'Admiration' and 'Adoration.

361 adored Jesus Christ, as believing Him to be God. Nor did she destroy the significance of this act by conceiving that admiration differs from adoration only in degree; that a sincere admiration is practically equivalent to adoration; that adoration after all is only admiration raised to the height of an enthusiasm.

You will not deem it altogether unnecessary, under our present intellectual circumstances, to consider for a moment whether this representation of the relationship between admiration and adoration be strictly accurate. So far indeed is this from being the case, that adoration and admiration are at one and the same moment and with reference to a single object, mutually exclusive of each other. Certainly, in the strained and exaggerated language of poetry or of passion, you may speak of adoring that on which you lavish an unlimited admiration. But the common sense and judgment of men refuses to regard admiration as an embryo form of adoration, or as other than a fundamentally distinct species of spiritual activity. Adoration may be an intensified reverence, but it certainly is not an intensified admiration. The difference between admiration and adoration is observable in the difference of their respective objects; and that difference is immeasurable. For, speaking strictly, we admire the finite; we adore the Infinite. Why is this? It is because admiration requires a certain assumption of equality with the object admired, an assumption of ideal, if not of literal equality d. Admiration such as is here in question is not a vague unregulated wonder; it involves a judgment; it is a form of criticism. And since it is a criticism, it consists in our internally referring the object which we admire to a criterion. That criterion is an ideal of our own, and the act by which we compare the admired object with the ideal is our own act. We may have borrowed the ideal from another; and we do not for a moment suppose that we ourselves could give it perfect expression, or even could produce a rival to the object which commands our critical admiration. Yet, after all, the ideal is before us; it is, by right of possession, our own. We take credit to ourselves for possessing it, and for comparing the object before us with it; nay, we identify our

d It is on this account that the apotheosis of men involves the capital sin of pride in those who decree or sanction not less than in those who accept it. The worshipper is himself the 'fountain of honour;' and in 'deifying' a fellow-creature, he deifies human nature, and so by implication himself. Wisd. xiv. 20; Acts xii. 22, 23; xiv. 11-15; xxviii. 6; Rom. i. 23.

362

'Admiration' and 'Adoration.

selves more or less with this ideal when we compare it with the object before us. When you, my brethren, express your admiration of a good painting, you do not mean to assert that you yourselves could have painted it. But you do imply that you have before your mind an ideal of what a good painting should be, and that you are able to form an opinion as to the correspondence of a particular work of art with that ideal. Thus it is that, whether justifiably or not, your admiration of the painting has the double character of self-appreciation and of patronage. Indeed it may be questioned whether as art-critics, intent upon the beauty of your ideal, you are not much more disposed secretly to claim for yourselves a share of merit than would have been the case if you had been the artist himself whose success you consent to admire; since the artist, we may be sure, is at least conscious of some measure of failure, and is humbled, if not depressed, by a sense of the difficulty of translating his ideal into reality, by the anxieties and struggles which always accompany the process of production.

Now this element of self-esteem, or at any rate of approving reflection upon self, which enters so penetratingly into admiration, is utterly incompatible with the existence of genuine adoration. For adoration is no mere prostration of the body; it is a prostration of the soul. It is reverence carried to the highest point of possible exaggeration. It is mental self-annihilation before a Greatness Which utterly transcends all human and finite standards. In That Presence self knows that it has neither plea nor right to any consideration; it is overwhelmed by the sense of its utter insignificance. The adoring soul bends thought and heart and will before the footstool of the One Selfexisting, All-creating, All-upholding Being; the soul wills to be as nothing before Him, or to exist only that it may recognise His Glory as altogether surpassing its words and thoughts. If any one element of adoration be its most prominent characteristic, it is this heartfelt uncompromising renunciation of the claims of self.

Certainly admiration may lead up to adoration; but then real admiration dies away when its object is seen to be entitled to something higher than and distinct from it. Admiration ceases when it has perceived that its Object altogether transcends any standard of excellence or beauty with which man can compare Him. Admiration may be the ladder by which we mount to adoration; but it is useless, or rather it is an impertinence, when adoration has been reached. Every man of