of faith in the Divinity of Christ. 493 humble thoughts and deeds are the necessary because the just expression of a true self-knowledge. Yet, nevertheless, the doctrine of Christ's true Godhead, discerned through the voluntary lowliness and sufferings of His Manhood, braces humility, and rebukes pride at the bar of the Christian conscience. Can men really see God put such honour on humility, and be as though they saw it not? Can a creature, who has nothing good in him that he has not received,, and whose moral evil is entirely his own, behold the Highest One thus teaching him the truthful attitude of a created life, without emotion, without shame, without practical self-abasement? What place is there for great assertions of self in a man who sincerely believes that he has been saved by the Death of the Incarnate Son of God? Who has the heart to vaunt his own opinion, or to parade his accomplishments, or to take secret pleasure in income or station or intellectual power, when he reflects upon the astonishing grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, when He was rich, for our sakes became poorp? It is the Incarnation which has confronted human pride, by revealing God clearly to the conscience of men, but also, and especially, by practically setting the highest possible honour upon extreme self-humiliation. It is the Incarnation which has led men to veil high gifts, and to resign places of influence, and to forego the advantages of wealth and birth, that they might have some part, however fractionally small, in the moral glories of Bethlehem and Calvary. It is the Incarnation which has thus saved society again and again from the revolutionary or despotic violence of unbridled ambitions, by bringing into the field of political activity the corrective, compensating force of active self-denial. An enthusiasm for withdrawal from the general struggle to aggrandise self has fascinated those worshippers of an Incarnate God, who have learnt from Him the true glory of taking the lowest place at the feast of human life. But the motive for such repression of self is powerful only so far as faith in Christ's Godhead is clear and strong. The culture of humility does not enter into the ordinary schemes of natural ethics; and Humanitarian doctrines are found, as a rule, to accompany intellectual and social self-assertion. It has been true from the first, it is true at this hour, that a sincere faith which recognises in the Son of Mary, laid in His manger and nailed to His Cross, none other than the Only-begotten Son of God, is the strongest incentive to conquer the natural pride of P 2 Cor. viii. 9. 494 The grace of charity how far a product the human heart, and to learn the bearing of a little child a that true note of predestined nobility in the Kingdom of Heaven. (7) Let us take one more illustration of the moral fruitfulness of a faith in the Divinity of our Saviour. There is a grace, to which the world itself does homage, and which those who bend neither heart nor knee before the world's Redeemer admit to be the consequence of His appearance among men. Heathenism, as being impure and proud, was consistently unloving. For as the one vice eats out the delicacy and heart of all true tenderness, so the other systematically enthrones self upon the ruins of the unselfish affections. Despite the Utopian sketches which have been drawn by the philosophers of the last century, the sentiment of 'humanity' is too feeble a thing to create in us a true love of man as man. Man does not, in his natural state, love his brother man, except it be from motives of interest or blood-relationship. Nay, man regards all who are not thus related to him as forming the great company of his natural rivals and enemies, from whom he has nothing to expect save that which the might or the prudence of self-interest may dictate. τὸ γὰρ οἰκεῖον πιέζει πάνθ ̓ ὁμῶς· εὐθὺς δ ̓ ἀπήμων κραδία Such is the voice of unchristianized nature: man's highest love is the love of self, varied by those subordinate affections which minister to self-love: and society is an agglomeration of selfloving beings, whose ruling instincts are shaped by force or by prudence into a political whole, but who are ever ready, as opportunity may arise, to break forth into the excesses of an unchecked barbarism. Contempt for and cruelty towards the slave, hatred of the political or literary rival, suspicious aversion for the foreigner, disbelief in the reality of human virtue and of human disinterestedness, were recognised ingredients in the temper of pagan times. The science of life consisted in solving a practical equation between the measure of evil which it was desirable to inflict upon others, and the amount of suffering which it might be necessary to endure at their hands. Love of mankind would have seemed folly to a society, the recognised law of whose life was selfishness, and whose vices culminated in q St. Matt. xviii. 3. r Pind. Nem. i. 82. of faith in the Divinity of Christ. 495 a mutual hatred between man and man, class and class, race and race, thinly veiled by the hollow conventionalisms which distinguished Pagan civilization from pure barbarisms. How did Jesus Christ reform this social corruption? He gave the New Commandment. This is My commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved yout.' But was His love merely the love of a holy man for those whose hearts were too dull and earthly to love Him in return? Could such a human love as this have availed to compass a moral revolution, and to change the deepest instincts of mankind? Is it not a fact that Christians have measured the love of Jesus Christ as man measures all love, by observing the degree in which it involves the gift of self? Love is ever the gift of self. It gives that which costs us something, or it is not love. Its spirit may vary in the degree of intensity, but it is ever the same. It is always and everywhere the sacrifice of self. It is the gift of time, or of labour, or of income, or of affection; it is the surrender of reputation and of honour; it is the acceptance of sorrow and of pain for others. The warmth of the spirit of love varies with the felt greatness of the sacrifice which expresses it and which is its life. Therefore the love of the Divine Christ is infinite. 'He loved me,' says an apostle, 'and gave Himself for me".' The 'Self' which He gave for man was none other than the Infinite God: the reality of Christ's Godhead is the truth which can alone measure the greatness of His love. The charities of His earthly life are but so many sparks from the central column of flame, which burns in the Self-devotion of the Eternal Son of God. The agonies of His Passion are illuminated each and all with a moral no less than a doctrinal meaning, by the momentous truth that He Who is crucified between two thieves is nevertheless the Lord of Glory. From this faith in the voluntary Self-immolation of the Most Holy, a new power of love has streamed forth into the soul of man. Of this love, before the Incarnation, man not only had no experience; his moral education would not have trained him even to admire it. But the Infinite Being bowing down to Self-chosen humiliation and agony, that, without violating His essential attributes, He might win to Himself the heart of His erring creatures, has provoked an answer of grateful love, s Tit. iii. 3 : ἦμεν γάρ ποτε καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀνόητοι, ἀπειθεῖς, πλανώμενοι, δουλεύοντες ἐπιθυμίαις καὶ ἡδοναῖς ποικίλαις, ἐν κακίᾳ καὶ φθόνῳ διάγοντες, στυγητοί, μισοῦντες ἀλλήλους. u ■ Gal, ii. 20. t St. John xv. 12. 496 Charity, a product of faith in Christ's Divinity. first towards Himself, and then for His sake towards His creatures. Thus 'with His Own right Hand, and with His holy Arm, He hath gotten Himself the victory' over the selfishness as over the sins of man. 'We love Him because He first loved usy.' If human life has been brightened by the thousand courtesies of our Christian civilization; if human pain has been alleviated by the unnumbered activities of Christian charity; if the face of Christendom is beautified by institutions which cheer the earthly existence of millions; these results are due to Christian faith in the Charity of the Redeemer, which is infinite because the Redeemer is Divine. And thus the temples of Christendom, visibly perpetuating the worship of Christ from age to age, are not the only visible witnesses among us to His Divine prerogatives. The hospital, in which the bed of anguish is soothed by the hand of science under the guidance of love; the penitentiary, where the victims of a selfish passion are raised to a new moral life by the care and delicacy of an unmercenary tenderness; the school, which gathers the ragged outcasts of our great cities, rescuing them from the ignorance and vice of which else they must be the prey ;-what is the fountain-head of these blessed and practical results, but the truth of His Divinity, Who has kindled man into charity by giving Himself for man? The moral results of Calvary are what they are, because Christ is God. He Who stooped from heaven to the humiliations of the Cross has opened in the heart of redeemed man a fountain of love and compassion. No distinctions within the vast circle of the human family can narrow or pervert its course; nor can it cease to flow while Christians believe, that Christ crucified for men is the Only-begotten Son of God. It is therefore an error to suppose that the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity has impoverished the moral life of Christendom 'by removing Christ from the category of imitable beings.' For on the one hand, the doctrine leaves His Humanity altogether intact; on the other, it enhances the force of His example as a model of the graces of humility and love. Thus from age to age this doctrine has in truth fertilized the moral soil of human life, not less than it has guarded and illuminated intellectual truth. How indeed could it be otherwise? If God spared not His Own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?' Who shall wonder if wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption are * Ps. xcviii. 2. y I St. John iv. 19. given with the gift of the Eternal Son? Who shall wonder if by this gift, a keen, strong sense of the Personality and Life of God, and withal a true estimate of man's true dignity, of his capacity, through grace, for the highest forms of life, are guarded in the sanctuary of human thought? Who shall gainsay it, if along with this gift we inherit a body of revealed and certain truth, reposing on the word of an Infallible Teacher; if we are washed in a stream of cleansing Blood, which flows from an atoning fountain opened on Calvary for the sin and uncleanness of a guilty world; if we are sustained by sacraments which make us really partakers of the Nature of our God; if we are capable of virtues which embellish and elevate humanity, yet which, but for the strength and example of our Lord, might have seemed too plainly unattainable ? For the Divinity of God's Own Son, freely given for us sinners to suffer and to die, is the very heart of our Christian faith. It cannot be denied without tearing out the vitals of a living Christianity. Its roots are struck far back into the prophecy, the typology, the ethics, of the Old Testament. It alone supplies a satisfactory explanation of the moral attitude of Jesus Christ towards His contemporaries. It is the true key to His teaching, to His miracles, to the leading mysteries of His life, to His power of controlling the issues of history. As such, it is put forward by apostles who, differing in much besides, were made one by this faith in His Divinity and in the truths which are bound up with it. It enters into the world of speculative discussion; it is analysed, criticized, denounced, proscribed, betrayed; yet it emerges from the crucible wherein it has been exposed to the action of every intellectual solvent that hostile ingenuity could devise; it has lost nothing from, it has added nothing to, its original significance; it has only been clothed in a symbol which interprets it to new generations, and which lives in the confessions of the grateful Church. Its later history is explained when we remember the basis on which it really rests. The question of Christ's Divinity is the question of the truth or falsehood of Christianity. 'If Christ be not God,' it has been truly said, 'He is not so great as Mohammed.' But Christ's moral relation to Mohammed may safely be left to every unsophisticated conscience; and if the conscience owns in Him the Moral Chief of humanity, it must take Him at His word when He unveils before it His superhuman glory. But the doctrine of Christ's Divinity does not merely bind us to the historic past, and above all to the first records of Chris |