The Twofold Life of Jesus Christ

A complete human culture requires the true embodiment of the two great forms or modes of life to which we give the names of Godhead and Manhood. These are everywhere inseparably intertwined in moral and spiritual relations; and no advance can be made in fulfilling the designs of a rational existence except on the basis of a just understanding of what God is and man should be. The ideal type of each must be made actual and visible in the world as the indispensable preliminary of the world’s regeneration.

This demand has found its only adequate satisfaction in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In him “the life was manifested,”— the double life embracing the entire circuit and significance of spiritual being in its normal state. The Son of God and Son of man united in himself these two revelations. On the one side, his character presents the heavenly, the divine likeness in distinct expression. On the other, it portrays, in equal clearness, the perfect man. These two requisites, then, of the reestablishment of our race in the position for which its adaptations assure us it was made, are supplied by Christianity.

That this twofold representation is thus essential to human improvement upon the highest scale, is as undeniable as is the fact that it has never been produced from any other source than the history of Jesus Christ. By a remarkable accord of sentiment, the reflecting minds of all nations have pronounced the culture of the godlike to be the legitimate and noblest business of an intelligent being. It is felt as generally to be true, that the best model of manhood must come from a sphere of life above its own; that no earthly saint or hero has altogether filled out the symmetrical conception of a soul’s progress in the knowledge and the power of goodness. Humanity has always looked to Divinity for its pattern of resemblance, its law of growth. Where its theology has been no better than that of the heathen, “gods many, and lords many,” it has had no other resource from which to draw the form and the motive of its development. Ashamed of their deities, as conscientious idolators must have sometimes been, they could find no worthier models of character elsewhere. If disgusted with the sensualism of the “Immortals,” still the instincts of the heart returned inevitably to their region of a higher, wider, nobler, if not adequately purer, existence, in search of (however unsuccessfully) the perfect in reason, will, emotion, conduct. This may be said, that, defective and vile as the false objects of the world’s worship have generally been, human nature would have sunk to immeasurably deeper abysses of brutality with no conceptions of deity at all. With an utter negation of the thought of God in any shape of personal activity and superintendence, nothing could have restrained the race from fatal and total demoralization. A simple belief in the invisible spiritual realm, though peopled only with the progeny of a Jove or a Brahma, has exerted an incalculable power to hold up mankind from gravitating to the lowest possible degree of mental and moral grossness.

But it is not enough to save men from becoming as bad as they can be. Both religion and philanthropy profess it to be their errand to make society as pure as is practicable with the very best helps to the comprehension and attainment of its right position. These helps centre in Christ as the only competent interpreter of truth upon this subject, the only supplier of aid to realize that truth in actual experience. This is asserted. If it be denied, we then affirm that there is no help in the case; that neither God nor man has ever found a full manifestation; that the life of neither is yet in the world’s possession in its just conception; that, on this ground of the challenger, the world still waits in more than the heart-sickness of hope deferred — in the sombre gloom of a deepening despair — his advent who shall embody to the eye the divine and the human ideals in their perfectness, and shall declare the method through which their spirit shall enter into, and assimilate to itself, the advancing civilization of our earth.

Concerning the Supreme Being it is to be noted, that he is partly revealed to creatures as an object of wonder and adoration; but that another phase is shown us as a subject of intelligible study and hopeful imitation. What are classed as the natural attributes of Deity, can neither be entirely understood, or at all reproduced by the finite. Thus, absolute past eternity, infinite power, knowledge, diffusibility or omnipresence, are facts to be accepted as necessary to a proper Divine existence; and so we find the pagans made their father of the gods almighty. But we vainly grapple with that thought of infinitude in any of its forms; and to think to share it one’s self is the dream of insanity. The moral qualities of God, on the other hand, address us differently. They too, indeed, run into the illimitable; and, on that side of their extension, consequently, far outreach our range of sight. It is no more within our ability fully to conceive what infinite holiness is, than infinite strength. But, on the side nearest us, these perfections present aspects which we rationally grasp and approve; which we can and should reproduce in our lives; which we must, or never really live. The divine purity, benevolence, truthfulness, justice, in a word, goodness, are characteristic of his nature. We know what these terms convey. Our eye takes in their beauty, as we gaze up into the sapphire sky and revel in its mild splendor. We do not pierce that arching vault of light to its deepest source of brilliance; nor do we compass, in spiritual vision, all that is meant by that “goodness “of the Uncreated. But we seize and hold a part of each revelation. We are conscious that our souls are capable of the culture of these virtues which glow down upon us from the celestial throne; that they may be one in their essential temper, if not to the superhuman measure of their full expression. This the spirit within, on which its Author stamped his image in Eden, tells us.

God, thus, is. both incomprehensible and comprehensible. Reason cannot enfold his idea as the infinite; but moral sense can know him as the purely right and good. We shrink from the thought of omniscience as an unresolvable mystery. But we do not ask any one to tell us what love is, when God even calls himself by this benignant name. And so the scriptures are harmonized, in our own consciousness, which demand in bold challenge: “Who, by searching, can find out God? Who can find out the Almighty to perfection?” — and which command in positive terms: “Acquaint, now, thyself with Him and be at peace.”

While the Godhead is beyond our grasp of apprehension, in its infinite capacities of being and acting, these facts of its constitution¹ are indispensable as the ground-work of such a moral development as a true Godhead implies. That is, this must be set up on a basis of unlimited extent. We require the conviction of a God of all power and wisdom and presence to go along with that of a God of all moral excellence. We can conceive of a perfect, that is, a faultless and most amiable angelic being. But though thus perfect, that being does not answer our ideal of the Divine. It lacks the proportions of an uncreated, self-existent, boundless life and energy. Moral completeness, consequently, is not enough, without the accompaniment of natural infinitude, to give us the model of the supreme excellence. And, further, these elements must work in entire concord ever and everywhere; the external or natural strengthening the internal or moral, and these, in turn, regulating, guiding those; thus realizing the spheral harmonies of the highest heavens.

Our purpose does not require a more expanded statement of the divine existence and character. We turn, now, to its representative, the Word made flesh, to find the embodiment of all this spiritual and infinite glory. For if all this be inseparable from the Godhead, it must be discoverable in the Son of God, if he be its express image and likeness to men. Nor do we look in vain. It certainly does a violence to the spontaneous sense of a reader of the gospels, to regard their history as that of a common human being: common, not as to native or acquired virtue, but as to original organization. Every one feels that a mystery of nature hangs around his person; that the phrase so often on his lips: “I came down from heaven,” is full of the intimations of a higher than mortal birth; that Christ was not a son of God, as sharing his whole life with that generation; but that he stood on a unique, an exclusive footing; in one word, as joining the heavenly to the earthly, in an entirely unprecedented way. This persuasion of an unbiassed mind points in the true direction. Nor does the path to which it guides stop until it ascends, beyond the grades of angelic glory, to the height of Christ’s unqualified divineness. For God cannot be shown forth, in just dimensions and adequate relief, save by a divinity which is the unabridged measure of himself. God alone can impersonate God.

To this demand Christ proved his sufficiency in his superhuman insight of men’s hearts, reading their most hidden tablets of motive and purpose with intuitive ease and accuracy; and in his sovereign control of the material world. He thus “manifested forth” the glory of Jehovah, the Creator and Upholder, as he showed himself to possess “the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” This was needful to demonstrate his claim as the Revealer of God. Christ could never have held our faith as the moral representative of the All-perfect, unless he had made good his proprietorship of the natural endowments of the Godhead. This point is considered of fundamental importance. But still it must be kept in mind that the chief purpose of Christ’s supernatural² exhibitions of power and wisdom, was to enforce the authority of right principles of moral government; to put God’s spiritual laws before his creatures in proper strength of command; to bring God into contact with us, influentially, at the points where he would, and ought to, exert the happiest, the weightiest agency in forming our characters and shaping our destinies.

At this point, the two parts of our subject unite and flow onward in a single stream. The moral ideal of the Godhead is the true ideal of Manhood. What the first is, the second should be, in voluntary characteristics. This had its illustration in Christ’s entire life. It shone and still shines in his precepts, his expositions of elementary religious duty, in his pure and benevolent sentiments, in the play of emotion and sensibility, in his firmness of will invincible to temptation, in his holy deeds unstained by an open or a secret sin. It is too late, by many centuries, to open now the issue as to Christ’s absolute sinlessness. The best intellects will not discuss that question, except it may be now and then to demolish summarily the bold blasphemy which here and there may risk an impeachment of the morality of Jesus. It is demonstrable that such impeachment is false from the entire gospel-record of the Son of Mary, and from the influence of the religion which he taught, upon its honest and thorough adherents. Nor can any valid objection lie against this statement from the development of the person of Christ; from the development of the plan of his kingdom; from his temptation, or other facts of his life; or from philosophical and empirical arguments against the possibility of such moral perfection in a human being.³ His existence on earth in mortal form gives us the exact definition of those terms which in God are full-orbed realities — as justice, truthfulness, love, purity, benevolence.

Looking around us at current exhibitions of these qualities, and taking our impressions of their beauty and worth from what we see of their outgrowth in the best specimens of men, we come to have a very deficient conception of their nature as absolute virtues, until they mean to us something quite unlike their normal significance. We think of this or that uncommonly upright, philanthropic, unworldly person; and he becomes to us the standard of what these attributes are in celestial natures, and of what their legitimate culture is able to do for our race. Such virtues or graces, if genuine, are godlike in kind wherever found. But in symmetry, in ripeness, in the rounded fulness and loveliness, and in the exquisite flavor of their possible perfectness, what are these samples of them which we behold? It is as if we should form our conception of the rare flowers and fruits of the tropics from the dwarfed and puny slips which we succeed in keeping alive in a warm window through the winter frosts. This is doubly injurious. It dims to us the resplendence of God, paling his brightness to our vision from that of a spotless sun to the feebleness of a tremulous starlight. And it subtracts immensely from our proper idea of the spiritual elevation, nobleness, and approximative divineness to which humanity can and should attain. This whole habit of forming our judgment of moral traits and capabilities from the finite and the faulty, however conscientious and comparatively correct, is a dwarfing process directly hostile to a true human advancement. Still more is this so, when men go for their models of morality, virtue, piety to the unregenerate world. Carlyle’s “Heroes” would not answer this demand, were all its chapters devoted to the Pauls, and Luthers, and Washingtons, of the ages. But when he puts into the ranks of. the “holy ones,” a Mohammed, a Goethe, a Burns; and even tells us that ‘as a spiritual man James Boswell was one of the first of the age;’ we feel our sense of right not only rudely shocked, but trifled with and outraged. A conception of an ideal manhood derived from references like these, must be radically insufficient; and, if practically followed out, must lead to utter corruption and hopeless perdition, in its ultimate social issues.

The proper corrective of these mistakes is found in the acceptance of the life of Christ as the one, the only impersonation on earth of the divine and the human in their completed proportions. God thus descended to man, that man might thus ascend to God. Imagination may attempt to picture how transcendently beautiful, attractive, blissful, would be a manhood universally and thoroughly moulded after that of Christ; but it has not colors bright enough for the tinting of a world peopled with the pureness and love, the righteousness and compassionateness which that beloved Son of God every day exhibited. Yet this is manliness in the culmination of its honor and greatness. The truest Christian gentleman is the truest hero — the type of the highest chivalry, “without fear and without reproach.” It startles us even to suggest what a different story human history would have been, made up and written out of such materials. But just that kind of record it ought to have been in every period, if the loftiest virtue be always obligatory.

This is, however, to be observed, in speaking of the imitation of Christ, that “it is the spirit of his example that we are to follow, not the letter. We are to endeavor that the principles of our actions may be the same which he manifested in his, but not to cleave servilely to the outward form.” Each age, each individual has a special work to do, or office to fill; but diverse as these may be externally, the internal impulse should be alike, and should be controllingly Christ-like. As the author⁴ just quoted puts this point — because Jesus was not a husband, a father, a statesman, a lawyer, a merchant, an author, it does not prove that there should be no family organization, nor that trade, jurisprudence, science, poetry, philosophy are unchristian. Not at all. “As rationally might it be argued,” he goes on to say, “that, because there are no trees or houses in the sky it is therefore profane and sinful to plant trees and build houses on the earth. Jeremy Taylor, when speaking of the things which Christ did, but which are not ‘imitable by us,’ touches on this very point. ‘We never read (he says) that Jesus laughed, and but once that he rejoiced in spirit; but the declensions of our natures cannot bear the weight of a perpetual grave deportment, without the intervals of refreshment and free alacrity.’” These relations and pursuits, so familiar to us, did not comport with Christ’s peculiar errand here. And so he declined them. They may be the proper calling of others. But if undertaken, they are to draw the motive and the temper of their exercise from the one true fount of spiritual life — the mind and the heart of Jesus. Thus history awaits its regeneration. It will still be the narrative of men, society, political institutions and changes; it will have to deal with the progress of art, legislation, general knowledge and discovery, commerce and manufactures, and material production. But what it ought to depict, as man is rational, accountable, immortal, is the movement of all this enterprise and triumph under the law of the holy, benevolent, honest, unselfish man of Nazareth. His presence must walk our streets, and frequent our marts of business, and sit in our council-halls, and dwell in our homes, and travel with us by land and sea, to give us the spirit and the form, the pattern and the power of that only manhood which is worthy of a man, be he rich or poor, known or unknown to fame. That which cannot endure this test must be expelled from our world. Civilization must become Christianization. Putting words into the lips of those who shall see that day, we may employ the language of the suggestive writer cited last concerning our own superiority to the barbarous brutalities of the past; and suppose those coming men to say: “The praise is not of man but of God. It is only by His light that we see light. If we are at all better than those first men who were of the earth, earthy, it is because the second man was the Lord from heaven.”⁵

This impersonation of the full Deity and humanity in Christ, is to lead on the improvement of the latter towards its perfect type in the former. But it cannot do this without the clear and steady recognition of one other truth, namely, that Christ is not only to be imitated as an example, but also, and as a necessary step to this, that he is to be accepted and trusted as a Redeemer. In the order of his earthly history, the delineation of his example preceded the expiation of his death. But in the order of recovery through his incarnation, the virtues of his death must precede the purifying influences of his life in human experience. That is, no form of goodness can effectually attract a fallen soul until a preparatory work has transpired in it; a work of repentance, a restoration of that soul to harmony with God in affection and purpose. In exhibiting to us the actual God, Christ has given to us the spirit, the conception of the true man. But to whom has he made this matchless revelation of moral beauty? To those who “like not to retain God in their knowledge;” who “are alienated from God by wicked works;” who “love darkness rather than light;” — to persons beclouded, benumbed, petrified, enslaved by selfishness, worldliness, the law of the flesh which worketh in the children of disobedience. It is the revelation of beauty to those who have contracted a morbid preference for deformed sights and shapes. So will the Indian refuse to leave his smoky wigwam for a palace. To him it is the palace. Its want of comfort and taste does not affect him unpleasantly; his nature is educated to nothing higher, more refined; he enjoys that which, to the civilized man, would be unendurable. Nor can he be put out of complacency with his savage customs by merely showing him new and better modes of life, nor by any urgency of eloquent persuasion to adopt them. There is not only a lack of education in the right direction, but a positive and long-continued education in the wrong direction. No more is the problem of the elevation of man and society to their required condition solved by simply unveiling, however vividly, the loveliness, the majesty, of pure goodness. This is a topic upon which history, both individual and general, is entitled to pronounce a decided opinion. It does; and its judgment is an overwhelming denial of the assumption that it is enough to place before mankind the attractions of virtue to secure its transformation into the same image. Statuary, and painting, and summer sun-sets will never unsensualize a sensual heart. Sinless humanity, walking among men in the person of the Son of God, has never won to him a follower by the mere charm of spiritual excellence. Aesthetics may hang ornaments of costly elegance in the temple of holiness, when erected; but cannot put one stone into that temple’s foundation. If there were, therefore, no difficulties on the part of the divine government to the solution of our problem, there are most formidable obstacles to this in the condition, itself, of the human soul. But there are difficulties on that side, as well as this, of the breach between the Creator and the creature, the law-Administrator and the law-transgressor. These facts all conspire to make the chasm fearfully wide and deep. Life is on that side of it, and death on this, until the great Atoner appears to reunite the severed, to build across a way of return to duty and to peace. Without this further manifestation of life in Christ, which is the resultant of his twofold nature, man might have looked off from these earthly shores towards realms of blessedness above, but only as the worldling whose probation was spent, caught glimpses of Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom — a far-away and hopelessly-unattainable rest. Just at this point stands high, between the earth and heaven, the cross of Calvary. Of the wondrous scene of sacrifice there enacted, of its deep significance to the divine glory and to human well-being, it was, that the seraphim, hovering over the spot, communed in strange amazement.

“He dieth. Through the dark,
He still, He only, is discernible —
The naked hands and feet, transfixed stark,

The countenance of patient anguish white,
    Do make themselves a light
More dreadful than the glooms which round them dwell,
And therein do they shine.
                              God! Father God!
Perpetual Radiance on the radiant throne!
Light up this dark, where there is nought to see,
Except the unimagined agony
Upon the sinless forehead of thy Son.
                               No reply,
O unforsaking Father? —
                               Hark!
Instead of downward voice, a cry
Is uttered from beneath!
It is Finished.
                              Hark, again!
Like a victor speaks the Slain —
Finished is the mystic pain!
His deathly forehead at the word
Gleameth like a seraph sword.
Finished is the demon-reign.
His breath, as living God, createth —
His breath, as dying man, completeth.”⁶

To reject, then, that revelation of life which Jesus made in his death, is to vitiate, to nullify, the effect of the impersonations of the divine and the human ideals, which are contained in his history. Before these can work any radical change in society, a redemption from guilt and condemnation must put men right towards God’s resisted government; a regeneration of the spirit of the world must put it in accord with God’s sympathies and purposes. All these designs of benevolence, preliminary and ultimate, belong to the true conception of the mission of the Son of God; and for the accomplishment of what remains of the sublime undertaking, the Spirit of Christ ever dwells among men.

Here is the point of relief to souls in search of security, ennoblement, repose; to society, toiling laboriously after a thorough rectification, an inward tranquillity. If Christianity cannot do all this for our race, it is proved to be, indeed, a failure; it must go to the rubbish-room of all the other worn-out things; its place is wanted for some better instrument of renovating power. We accept the grave issue, as morally and religiously inevitable. But Christianity is equal to this task, with just its present gospel and Saviour; and is doing that task, slowly, as Almighty skill made the universe, through the long geological days. How calmly assuring, to those who are tempted to be impatient, or distrustful of the adequacy of our faith to its whole human mission, are these words of highest inspiration, telling us not to question the perfected result: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life. For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us. That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us,” ye to whom these glad tidings and this grace shall come, in all lands, to the end of time. “And truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.”

Our discussion has not attempted an exhaustive view of this topic, which would require much wider limits than the present; for a like reason, in drawing it to a close, we can indicate but two or three of its lines of special bearing upon our common interests and duties. Beyond the brief mention of these, we must leave the train of investigation now laid down to make its own further suggestions.

If we mistake not, we are on the right track to a better understanding of the nature of a genuine Christian love. Christ is its central object. But not alone as man’s personal Redeemer. This does, indeed, bind the renewed soul to him in bonds which are stronger than death. But Christian love goes beyond this individual relationship of Saviour and saved. It affectionately delights in Jesus Christ as the perfect Revealer of God to us, and of us to ourselves. It is the love of God in Christ, and the love of man in Christ; of God as he is, and of man as be should be actually, and as he is ideally. It is thus impossible for us to love God, and not to love his well-beloved Son and representative. God is no more to be loved, than he is to be approached, save in and through Christ. A right affection for one, is a true complacency in both.

And so of man: to love God and to be indifferent or averse to human well-being, individually and generally, is as great a contradiction. A Christian misanthrope is an un-reality. The heart which fastens upon Christ sympathetically, loves the faultless manhood which shone through him, and kindles with desire that this may become the practical working-draft of every rational soul — the most degraded, even, on earth. Christ discovers to us the moral capabilities of our race: and that which thus survives, in man, the havoc of sin, damaged as it may be, is not a thing to be disesteemed by any one who pretends to fraternize with the world’s Deliverer.

A sound philanthropy, consequently, is a sincere Christianity. Each is essentially and necessarily religious. Each reaches its object through Christ, the life-revealer, divine and human. Hence, the whole law of spiritual obligation is comprised in the love of God and our neighbor — an indivisible emotion or principle, when really exercised, of which Christ is the medium. Therefore no one keeps either part of that commandment without keeping both.

It seems quite impossible, at this point, to avoid confronting a fatal condemnation of all the wrongs and abuses which men inflict on one another, from the petty frauds and thefts of unfair trade, the slanderous words of thoughtless or malicious tongues, to the violences of war and servile oppression. They are, alike, an outrage upon the manhood which Jesus Christ condescended to wear, in its symmetrical beauty and nobleness; the humanity thus glorified which every son and daughter of Adam holds from God as a charter of the rights of a free, a peaceful, an unabridged existence of happiness and progressive spiritual culture. To a mind fully occupying this point of view, Christianity would hardly appear to utter a bolder or a more exterminating decree against slavery, for example, than it now does, were that system rebuked and outlawed, by name, on every page of the New Testament.

We catch a glimpse of the peculiar pleasure which the redeemed in heaven will have in one another’s society. It will not so much consist in the renewal of the associations of time, even in a sinless form, though this may be in reserve as a very delightful feature of the life to come; it will rather be in the perception, the sense, of Christ, the perfect divine-man, reproduced and reflected by his saints, in every conceivable type of spiritual loveliness and attractiveness. Christ’s “members “will then be loved in their immediate connection with Christ the “Head.” We anticipate the destruction or confusion of individual identities. Paul and John, Luther and Melanchthon, will be relatively the same as here, and, as such, will draw to themselves congenial natures. Like variously-colored glasses, souls will transfuse a diversely-tinted light, each beautiful to behold; yet it is the light, and not its particular hue, which will be the real attraction and glory of the heavenly spheres. That light, effulgent and perpetual, is Christ. “The Lamb is the light thereof.” As saints shall be full of it, and shall reflect and transmit its radiance, so will they draw around themselves the admiration, the love of their companions. Natural affections will yield to spiritual; but if both shall draw to the same point, how blissful will be the bond. This teaches us how the law of attraction should operate in the earthly kingdom of God: what centres of power should here be established. As in the kingdom celestial, this twofold ideal of Christ’s nature and life, so far as it is within the limits of finite imitation, is the model of aspiration and the magnet of love; so here should every human energy be tasked to realize its possession, to diffuse its influence; to build up a manhood, universally, which shall be the living representative of the Godlike humanity of the Redeemer of the world.

1) We cannot well avoid using a human phraseology, hut not of course as intimating that Deity was ever constituted, ab extra aut infra.

2) Whately’s Christian Evidences, V. § 2, criticizes this word as of doubtful accuracy: “for if we believe that ‘nature’ is merely another word to signify that state of things, and course of events, which God has appointed, nothing that occurs can be strictly called supernatural” He gives its common use as “something at variance with those laws of nature which we have been accustomed to.” Theologically, a supernatural event is a miracle; so Webster defines the term. Bushnell (Nature and the Supernatural, pp. 37, 38) makes this to be any interruption of the processes, combinations, results of our system of nature, or any varying of them, by the action of God, or angels, or men, so as that shall come to pass which would not come to pass in it by its own internal action, under the laws of mere cause and effect. The supernaturalism claimed for Christ is the highest form of such interruption or variation of the processes of nature.

3) Dr. Ullman’s Treatise on this topic pursues the above general line of reasoning to a triumphant vindication of Christ’s actual impeccability. — Sixth edition, 1853.

4) Archdeacon Hare in “Guesses at Truth,” Series first, pp. 360, 361.

5) F. W. Robertson (Sermons, XVIII. and XIX. Second Series), propounds a theory of Mariolatry and its Cure, which is ingenious and perhaps true. “The only safeguard against the idolatrous error of Virgin-worship, is a full recognition of the perfect humanity of Christ: — for it is only a partial acknowledgment of the meaning of the Incarnation when we think of Him as the Divine man. It was not manhood [distinctively, i.e. masculinity], but humanity that was made divine in him. Humanity has its two sides: one side in the strength and intellect of manhood; the other, in the tenderness, and faith, and submissiveness of womanhood; man and woman — make up human nature. In Christ, not one alone, but both were glorified. Strength and grace — wisdom and love — courage and purity — divine manliness, divine womanliness. In all noble characters you find the two blended in Him, the noblest; blended into one entire and perfect humanity.” — II. 276.

It is the feminine side of this whole humanity, as moulded by Christianity, which the Virgin-worshippers have deified, because Christ has been too exclusively represented as distinctively the model-man. “With a half-thought of Christ, safe you art not.” — “Christianity has in it an awful gap, a void, a want, the inevitable supply and relief to which will be Mariolatry.” And so the Romanists have gone to Mary for the woman’s heart, whereas this is perfect in Jesus as well. His nature is neither man’s nor woman’s, but both in actualized ideal. To this, Mr. Robertson cites Gal. 3:28:”There is neither [in Christ] Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female;’ the reference, if not primary, being considered legitimate. Thus Christ alone furnishes us “the truth which Romanism has marred and perverted into an idolatry pernicious to all; in less spiritual worshippers sensualizing and debasing.”— I. 279. The bearing of these observations upon the present discussion is obvious. Their general truthfulness is unquestionable.

6) Mrs. E. B. Browning’s Poems, Vol. I. “The Seraphim.”