SECTION I

the incarnation of god

THERE is an eternal relation between God and man. From the human stand-point, which is also the stand-point of the spiritual life, we can form no conception of man without God, nor of God without man.

The attempt has indeed often been made to conceive of man without God. But it has always been found necessary to designate that infinite contrast to his nature, that mighty objective power on which he is dependent, by some name. And thus some sort of God has always been given him again-an obscure image of God, indeed, instead of the living God. Perhaps he has been made dependent upon fate, and thus upon a gloomy and inexorable God; or upon nature, and thus upon a dreamy God, a God without freedom; or upon humanity, and thus upon a God full of wants, exposed to danger, and without resources. In any case, it has always been found necessary to give to man another God while seeking to deprive him of his own. And even when unbelief has, as in modern times, advanced to the borders of Atheism, and sought to make man the very ruler of himself and of the universe, it has yet found itself obliged to borrow, or rather to purloin from Faith, the word God. It has committed itself to a logical absurdity, and asserted, God is not God, but man is God; being well aware that the proposition, Man is man! would never be so understood as it must be, if man is to be his own God. A plunder of the disputed belief in God was committed, similar to that which is committed upon the belief in a future life, when this is denied, and the present life exalted. What is a present without a future life? The same as God in man, who is to be everything except God. It is, however, a fact deeply planted in the nature of man, that he cannot be conceived of without God. He loses his human significance so soon as he is viewed independently. He becomes a mythic being, animated at best by a demon, a fantastic monster. The nature of man certainly consists in this, that he is a child of the Spirit, and therefore spiritual; that he has a sense for the universal and the eternal, namely, reason; a standpoint beyond the universal and in presence of the eternal, freedom of will, and a capacity for finding and feeling himself in the universal and the eternal, and the eternal and the whole world in himself; the feeling of love. This capacity is not a mere capacity for the general in humanity. The eye of man hails the eternal Spirit even in Orion. It is not merely a sense for the universal; for in the universal is also ever apparent the variety of the finite, which extends itself by measure and number. The conception of all facilitates the comprehension of number; creation can scarcely be so generally and acutely conceived as when designated by the expression, the world. Reason is rather the capacity of clearly apprehending the eternal Spirit, in which the universal has its foundation from and to eternity, the Spirit which creates and sustains the universal; in a word, God. What is man without God? If his spirit embraces only the sphere of earth, and not also the heaven; if it does not penetrate the heavens, and ascend to that eternal Being in whom time and space are one, or rather in whom they are nothing; if it does not this, what is it but a mere local instinct, like the perceptive powers of brutes? What is man’s righteousness if it is only the revelation of a law which merely holds men together, and if it is not an entrance into that rule of life which pervades all heights and all depths, and is absolutely universal? It is then a civil service, but not a spiritual virtue. And is not the love of man deprived of the greatest part of its glory when he is deprived of his God? Why is a beautiful countenance so mighty to awaken natural love? Because by his countenance man reveals his personality, and in his personality proclaims the Eternal. And why does spiritual love look up with prayer, praise, and adoration towards heaven? Because she would embrace all in which she sees the reflection of the Eternal, who has inspired her, and would also cause everything to vanish before the brightness of His nature. Heaven is the world which stands in the reflection of God, and which vanishes before the majesty of His being. The heavens flee before Him. But if you limit man with his love to earth, if you take from him the ‘enthusiasm’ whereby he loves the enthusiasm of his neighbour, you take from him his humanity. Woe unto him when the human countenance, in its mysterious significance, is no longer lovely in his eyes; when he no longer greets it, in its relation to the Eternal, as the sacred manifestation that he is destined for God!

On the other hand, we cannot conceive of God without man. We come to a mature knowledge of God through acquaintance with His attributes. But His attributes express the relations of His nature to reasonable beings, to beings whose existence must, at least by us, be apprehended through the human type of spiritual creatures. God is righteous. How can His righteousness be manifested, but in relation to spiritual beings who are to be its objects? God is love. How can He be love without calling into existence beings worthy of His love, that is, beings of His own nature? But when the deepest of the divine doctrines, the doctrine of the Trinity, is fully developed, it must be acknowledged that God has from eternity cherished His Son in His nature, and that in His Son He has ever beheld and chosen man. Thus also does holy Scripture conceive the nature of God. He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob. He has an eternal covenant with His elect. He loved and chose them for ever, before the foundation of the world. They who assert that God might very well have left the world uncreated, obscure the eternity of His love; while intending to exalt His freedom. But they obscure not only His freedom by representing it as absolute and arbitrary, but the eternity of His word, and even His very personality, when they transform the eternal reality of His being into a state of uncertainty, or the contemplation of a bare possibility. We cannot conceive of God without Christ, nor of Christ without man; therefore we cannot form a conception of God without manhood.

It lies in the very nature of the love of God that He will not remove from man, and it is equally in the nature of the destiny of man that he cannot remove from God.

When the prophets speak of God’s covenant oath which He swore by Himself, that He would bring man again into union with Himself, they express figuratively, but with the most glorious assurance, the truth that the relation of God to man is an eternal one, and that He will never remove from him. He cannot change His nature. But His nature is love, which has fixed upon its object from eternity. His love is as strong as hell and as death. Even when He punishes man, and casts him down into hell, He manifests, by the jealous zeal of His justice, that He will not remove from him. And if the strongest and hardest words be uttered concerning the separation between God and man in his evil nature, if the eternity of punishment be spoken of, what else is said but that the punishments of hell are divine and heavenly? Is then eternity an infinite number of years, or the endlessness of time? Mutilated theological notions have certainly caused an arithmetical to take the place of a religious idea of eternity. But eternity, as a religious idea, is the infinite, the divine, in time itself. Only where God is, is eternity. Hence the eternity of punishment is the consecration of punishment, in which God is present to the lost in holiest concealment. But where He is present, His whole self is there,1 even as love. God never removes from man.

But neither can man remove from God. He cannot, even if he would. His conscience is the objective religiousness of his nature, and this becomes his torment in proportion as he, by subjectively blinding his nature, converts it into an irreligious one. In proportion to the dislocation of a limb do we experience pain and utter cries for healing; and thus is it also with man’s spiritual perversion. Man cannot free himself from the eternal relation of his being to the being of God: he cannot put off his moral nature and assume a merely physical nature, nor become a pious animal instead of a pious spirit. If he tries to make himself a mere animal, he becomes an evil demon. As, in the mythical primitive slime, the swine and the serpent grew together into a dragon, so man can neither degenerate into the serpent-like diabolic without falling into animal lusts, nor surrender himself to his animal nature without the serpent-like qualities springing up in full malignity.1 Who ever saw a man part with his religion unharmed? The trust in God which he gives up is changed into positive mistrust, peace into rancour, sound judgment into destructive error, good-will into hatred. The wicked have to do with God as well as the good. They almost talk more about Him, though blasphemously, and their very blasphemies terribly show that they cannot leave God alone. Herein lies the proof of the eternity of religion. The strongest defence of Christianity consists in the fact, that such Christians as would unchristianize themselves become bitterly unchristian and fiercely antichristian. If Christianity were but an incident, a kind of fetish, man could part from it peaceably. But because it is religion, in all its spiritual glory, even the history of its opponents affords the strongest proofs that man cannot remove from God.

It is a part, however, of the nature of that love by which God is related to man, and of that religion by which man is related to God, that there should be a perpetual attraction between God and man-an attraction sufficiently powerful to overcome the repulsion whose tendency is to destroy the relation-an attraction whose aim is the establishment of a relation between God and man which should be nothing less than their strictest union, the glorification of God in man and of man in God, the reconciliation through the God-man. The manifestation of this attraction between God and man is celebrated in the history of the elect in the Old Testament God appears as the God of Abraham, making a new covenant with him and with his people. Jacob, the representative of the chosen people, appears as the Israel, the man wrestling with God, to draw Him into his own life. The history of God’s dealings with Israel is the history of a continuous reciprocity of attraction between divinity and humanity terminating in the God-man, Immanuel. In the course of this process God promises His people that He will eternally betroth Himself to, and espouse them (Hos 2:19-20; Isa 25:7). From the people, on the other hand, arises the yearning cry: O that Thou wouldest rend the heavens, that Thou wouldest come down! (Isa 64:1). They are but ill acquainted with the import of the Old Testament religion, who see in it merely the contrast of a commanding God on the one hand, and a people yielding a forced obedience on the other.1 This contrast is only the element, the key-note of the Old Testament series; but from the beginning its cause is the free and covenant transactions between Jehovah and the people. God wooed Israel as a bridegroom his bride. A relation of constraint and terror is absolutely out of the question. The history of this great attraction is moreover the revelation of an eternal and fundamental relation between divinity and humanity. The election of Israel is the type and pledge of the election of the world. So Homer sang, first for the Greeks, then for all people. It is time we ceased to see in the covenant God of Israel merely a heathen national God.

But how can it be maintained that the attraction outweighs the repulsion? For this reason, that the attraction is essential, it is part of the nature; the repulsion accidental, an excrescence of the nature. The justice of God is the eternal rule and form of His love. Hence it can never abolish His love, but only conceal it, and cause it to assume the appearance of its opposite. God, in His justice, is angry with the sinner, but He does not hate Him.2 His wrath is but the zealous burning of a grieved love, as the storm in nature is a manifestation of the impulse of the air to restore the interrupted balance, or as the catastrophe in history is a manifestation of the zeal of retribution, destroying at a blow the long accumulation of guilt. Therefore mercy rejoiceth against judgment (Jam 2:13). But the more man perverts his nature, the more does his nature cry out to heaven, in anguish, torment, and dismay, against its perversion. How long can this state of things endure? It can endure eternally, because man is a child of eternity, because he is free. If we say it can only last a hundred, or only a thousand years, we say man is no genuine spirit, he is not really capable of being a demon. But if he cannot be for ever a wanderer from God, neither can he be for ever united to Him; for the possibility of His eternal happiness is involved in the possibility of his eternal misery. This possibility is the outer circle, in which the love of God, almighty love, strives with the lost child of a divine race. Thousands rush into its embrace at the first glance of its countenance. Daily does it celebrate victories, progressively greater and more universal. The slight preponderance of the attraction between divinity and humanity over the repulsion, becomes ever more and more apparent.

But the end is their union: God purposes to unite Himself completely with humanity, and to develop in it the fulness of His nature, because He has made it the organ of His manifestation, and impressed His own nature upon it; because He stands to it in the relationships of the covenant, of spiritual communion, and of love. It is His Sabbath, when He celebrates His manifestation in human hearts. The position which the Mohammedan believes his God to be maintaining-a position of distance from the world-belies the nature of God. He must break through this covering, the world, to communicate Himself to His child. And equally does the separation between God and the world, which the deist interposes by means of a course of natural laws heterogeneous to the religious spirit, contradict the divine nature; these restraints also must fall. And finally, when the priesthood holds up the Catholic Church as an invisible medium between God and the Christian people, this is also contrary to the nature of His grace, which chooses to be free for the hearts, and in the hearts of men. It is not till God manifests in the Church herself His own nature, His Spirit, and not merely the reflection or terror of His nature in constrained fear and worship-till the Church, therefore, through the glory of His Spirit, testifies, as the priestly bride, of His presence in her midst,-it is not till then, that the attraction in which God offers Himself to man has attained its full purpose.

Man, indeed, may long err and stray from God. He may often pause and decline on his way towards Him. But he does not reach his destination, nor obtain rest, till he has attained to the life of the spirit, in God. We must not be deceived by the strongest, nor even by the most dazzling appearance, in which the constrained religionist (he who is bound to the external temple, to the external sign, to the priest, by natural piety) seems to rest and to worship. A people out of which the priests are taken, cannot, as a laity, have attained its end. A people out of which the theologians are taken, cannot finally rest in undeveloped, unproved, and constrained piety. A people, finally, from which Christ descends according to the flesh, cannot celebrate the festival of its perfection, till it has attained the essential freedom and holiness of the priestly and kingly spirit of Christ. And even should it slumber for a thousand years on the path to its final destiny, it will, it must awaken. The drawing of Christ’s Spirit will leave it no rest. Man has not arrived at his destined end till he knows himself to be entirely apprehended by God, and God to be fully apprehended by his inner nature-till he knows even as he is known (1Co 13:12).

The life at once divine and human, however, which was to proceed from the union of God with man, could, from its very nature, be perfected only in the most exalted individuality standing in mutual action with the highest universality.

God never communicates Himself to mankind simply in its universality. The communication of eternal life, or of the Spirit of God, presupposes a divine race, raised in its inner nature above the relations of time and nature-a race of eternal individualities, of imperishable personalities. The argument employed by Christ against the Sadducees, to prove to them from the law the doctrine of immortality, is in fact the most striking one which can be found. God calls Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; consequently they live eternally, for God is not a God of the dead, but of the living (Luk 20:37). The life of the Spirit of God, then, cannot so be given to humanity as that it should be received by the species only, and not by the individual. For this life does not begin in man till his elevation above the mere life of the species is manifested in the sphere of individual and personal life.1 God communicates His life to man by entrusting it first of all to the elect, to the most susceptible, the deepest, the most faithful individuals. They, however, do not come to God as strangers: He purposes, He loves, and sends them; therefore they appear in the world. In every elect man there is a threefold relation: first, he appears wholly as a being beloved of God; secondly, as a messenger of God, the instrument of a divine blessing to the world; thirdly, as a central point in humanity, enclosing and embracing as many men as his powers and his mission can reach. Thus we see God enter into communion with universal human life by means of individual life. But will He not proceed from the elect to the more elect in His manifestation of Himself, till the most elect appears? Must not the manifestation of the divine purpose, the Beloved of God, at length appear, in whom the whole counsel of His love towards man shall be disclosed? Once, in the fulness of time, the man does appear who, as the well-beloved of God, forms the centre of the community. Thus is He the One, in the sight of God, by reason of the reality which God hath given Him, in that He hath bestowed upon Him the fulness of His gifts and of His Spirit, that He may communicate them to man. The beloved of God is, however, one with this gift; and hence He is all agency-an agency which penetrates to the very foundation of humanity, and embraces its circumference. Thus is He the very image of God, His manifestation in the flesh.

But for the same reason He is also the Son of man. Man turned with yearning towards God, as He turned with blessing towards him. Man’s eye met God’s eye. The sighs of humanity pleaded with the Spirit of God. His chosen ones were human saints; His manifestations were made before human faces; His victories were the sufferings of joyful martyrs. Renowned and holy men of God appeared and prepared His way; but in the long series there was none without spot and blameless. In each, the old schism between the flesh and the spirit was alive, in each there was organic imperfection; in none was there the whole depth of the race, the purity of its origin, the maturity of its aspirations,-till the last descendant of Jesse, the last in the series of the prophets, appeared. On Him was bestowed the anointing with the eternal fulness of God, for He was the God-man. In Him the race of man attained the individual end of its development, its depth, its unity, its approval in the sight of God. By the formation of the divine-human life in the race, its future was prepared; but it was only by the appearance of the matured divine-human life that it could be bestowed upon mankind in general. Yes, He must first be perfected by the completion of His work and destiny, before the Spirit of God could come upon man as the Holy Spirit. For not till this completion was the sin of the world atoned for, outweighed, and abolished by an infinitely perfect righteousness; the sinful nature of man consumed to its very core, and transformed by the Spirit of God; and an agency thus created, which might reach to and change humanity to its foundations, and fill it to the utmost limits of its circumference. Humanity had now, in so far as it was one with Christ, its praise of God in its longing after the righteousness of God, and its Redeemer in Him, according to the whole difference existing between His life and its own. In this glory and redemption of mankind which was manifested in Christ, however, the heart and nature of God Himself were most intimately disclosed to the world-the Son of man is the Son of God. He who was certified as the Holy One in the midst of time, is the chosen One from the depths of eternity. His life is the manifestation of the deep things of God and the deep things of men, in the manifestation of the deep things of His divine-human heart. It is the manifestation of the eternal personality.

───♦───

Notes

1. We cannot conceive of man without God.-The atheist is ever employed in destroying a feigned and gloomy divinity while denying the true God, who, as the Eternal Spirit, is love. The materialist believes in a dark Ahrimanes who has swallowed up Ormuzd. The naturalist makes of the confluence of forces a holy Ganges, which he worships, and in which the personal Being, engulphed and drowned, rushes past him, till he himself plunges into the dark and sacred stream. Feuerbach, in his work Das Wesen des Christenthums, lays down the proposition: ‘Man’s knowledge of God is man’s knowledge of himself. God, as God, is only an object of thought. God is the manifested inner nature, the expressed self of man. So far as thy nature, so far as thine absolute self-consciousness extends, so far thou art God.’ If the idolaters of man desire to be consistent, they must renounce the word God. They must manage to make the word Man produce the same effect, in their circle, as the word God does in the religious sphere. The atheistic anthropology might be expressed somewhat in this fashion: 1. Universal man, the unlimited (called God by believers in God). 2. The individual man, the limited. 3. The man-man, or the unlimited-limited, who leads men to rush with unlimited limitation against the limits of their nature, that, breaking through them into limited illimitability or unlimited limitation, they may keep the festival of their twofold humanity. This would be about the manner in which they might express themselves if they confined themselves to their own materials, and did not borrow from us the word God and all that is involved in it. In any case there is an entirely new logic if divinity is to be denied, in order to ascribe it to Man 1:12. We cannot conceive of God without man.-Holy Scripture is from the beginning raised above Deism, and above the deistic philosophy which seeks to honour the freedom of God by giving it an indeterminate exercise over a field of infinite possibility. Scripture knows that God is love, and that in love, freedom and necessity are one. If God, according to Scripture, made man in His own image, He bestowed upon him also the reflection of His own eternity, and the testimony that He had eternally cherished him in His Spirit. When, according to the prophets, He swore by Himself that He would effect the redemption of man, or announced to the believer, ‘I have loved thee with an everlasting love,’ these words contain plain expressions of the eternal Trinity of the Godhead, and testimony to the election of man. Does not the oath of God denote Him as self-determined in eternal determination? Does not the love of God, set upon its object from all eternity, raise that object as on eagles’ wings above the temporal? The New Testament overflows with this acknowledgment, that believers are chosen before the foundation of the world. It is in accordance with the acknowledged spiritual dignity of the Reformed Church, that she has proclaimed this eternity of the love of God, and of the humanity which it chooses and embraces, though she incurs, indeed, the danger of being mistaken by rude conceptions and obscuring representations of this glorious mystery. The Reformed theologians arrived at this doctrine not by the way of Christian speculation, but by that of Scripture exposition; not in opposition to a presupposed absolute temporariness, but to the doctrine of human merit. This doctrine of election is not fundamentally a doctrine of mere election, but a dim intimation of the order in which God appointed the lot of man, whose existence He had already determined: ‘Paulus, quum docet nos in Christo electors fuisse ante mundi creationem (Eph 1:4), omnem certe dignitatis nostræ respectum tollit; perinde enim est, acsi diceret, quoniam in universo Adæ semine nihil electione sua dignum reperiebat cœlestis pater, in Christum suum oculos convertisse: ut tanquam ex ejus corpore membra eligeret, quos in vitæ consortium sumturus erat’ (Calv. Inst. L. iii. c. 22, 1). Here men are spoken of as already existing in the sight of the electing God; a proof that Calvin had not reached the whole depth of the biblical doctrine of election.1 Hence it arose, that the doctrine of an election to death was connected with the system: ‘Prædestinationem qua deus alios in spem vitæ adoptat, alios adjudicat æternæ morti, nemo, qui velit pius censeri simpliciter negare audet’ (Ibid. L. iii. c. 21, 5). In any case, however, the mind of the Reformed Church was turned towards those infinitely deep things of God, and the doctrine that God had loved believers from eternity was sedulously inculcated by her. Contrasted with this view of eternity, how infinitely imperfect is the speculation which affirms, ‘Hence time appears as the fate, the necessity (Chronos, or Moloch?) of the spirit, which is incomplete in itself.2 This substance which is the spirit is the process by which it becomes that which it is in itself, and it is as this self-reflecting process that it first becomes in itself truly spirit’ (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 605). ‘The end, the absolute knowledge, or the spirit knowing himself to be spirit, has for its means the remembrance of spirits, as they are in themselves, and as they accomplish the organization of their kingdom. Their preservation, viewed from the side of their free existence, appearing in the form of contingency, is history, but viewed from the side of their conceived organization, it is the knowledge of manifested knowledge’ (Id. Phänom., p. 612). If in the Christian doctrine of election the spiritual intelligence is present even from the beginning, and lays the foundations of the world, it does not arise here till the end of the world, as the result of obscure developments; if in the former, spirits, as eternal images of the love of God, are elevated from ideal into eternal existence, in the latter they are degraded from obscure and real ‘contingency’ into the unreal world of memory; if in the former, motion served the Eternal Being, in the latter, the Eternal Being is subject to motion: in the first system, the ruler is the eternal God, in the latter, One developing himself out of time, who remembers as a result, like the pale spirit upon ‘The place of skulls,’ that spirits have been. It is, however, a doubtful gain, if, to disencumber the idea of God from the necessity of Hegel’s system, we so define His freedom in the creation of the world, as to make it appear to exclude His eternal love, predestination, and election. J. Stahl, in his Philosophie des Rechts, vol. i. p. 55, notices the more recent system of Schelling in the following manner: ‘Schelling calls his present, and the Christian system, the historical, in opposition to the logical system of recent philosophy. For according to the latter, the world and every individual thing is necessarily included in the nature of God; according to the former, it arose through His voluntary creation.’ He therefore also calls his system ‘the system of liberty,’ and ‘the positive system.’ For it views all things that exist as existing because they exist, because their almighty Author chose that they should, not as existing because they ‘could not but exist.’ The assertion, that it was possible that all that exists might not have existed, opposes the Christian doctrine of election, and also the idea of a God eternally determined by Himself in Himself. If absolute and mere possibility be attributed to Him, He is made uncertain in Himself, and thereby imperfect; if He is contrasted with such a possibility, it appears as a tempter to that eternal love which is one with Himself. In the glory of that love, all the arbitrariness of freedom on the one hand, and all the constraint of necessity on the other, disappear.

3. God never communicates Himself to mankind in its universality.-Both the mystic and the scholastic pantheist, having but a mutilated notion of human individuality and personality, cannot but mistake the true significance of the historic Christ. The first maintains that Christ becomes individual always and merely in the children of the spirit: I am Christ, says he, and thou art Christ: every man of the spirit is to become a Christ. He misconceives the organization of men, their disposition to catholicity, according to which it would be contradictory to reality, and also to truth, if there were a Christ from house to house, if the one Christ did not live in all Christians (compare Andersen’s Das protestantische Dogma von der sichtbaren und unsichtbaren Kirche, p. 56, &c.) The philosophic pantheist, on the contrary, maintains that Christ cannot become individual, but can only appear in the universality of the human species. ‘If reality is ascribed to the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures, is this equivalent to the admission that this unity must once have been actually manifested, as never before nor since, in an individual? This is not the manner in which the ideal is realized: it is not wont to lavish all its fulness in one specimen, and be niggardly towards all others-to express itself perfectly in that one instance, and imperfectly in all remaining instances; it delights rather in pouring out its abundance among a multiplicity of specimens, mutually completing each other, in an alternation of now appearing, and now again disappearing individuals. And is this no true realization of the idea? Would not the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures be a real one in an infinitely higher sense, if I regard the whole human race as its realization, than if I single out a single individual as such a realization? Is not an incarnation of God from eternity a truer one than an incarnation confined to a definite period of time?’1 (Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. ii. 3rd edit. p. 767). This view of humanity, which deludes itself with the notion that the idea must be niggardly towards all others if it lavishes its fulness upon one specimen, can proceed neither from history, nor philosophy, nor poetry, nor a knowledge of human nature; it is one of those hollow phrases of pantheistic abstraction, which overlooks all the differences of personality in mankind, and can only have meaning in a state of things in which the eternal personality of individuality is dishonoured, and individuals are esteemed mere ‘specimens.’ For does not history teach us that an idea can be generous to others, while lavishing more or less, or even its whole fulness, upon one ‘specimen’? Has, then, the idea of criticism been niggardly towards others, while bestowing its especial favour upon a single individual in our own days? Have the characteristics of the ideal been described by philosophy as such that it must be seized and carefully pocketed, like money, in the presence of others? Does poetry teach, does nature teach us thus to estimate the spiritual relations of humanity? But it may be easily proved that a divine-human, or spiritual life, which is not individual, is a contradiction. All the products of nature are supported by one eternal Spirit, and all unitedly proclaim that Spirit; and yet no natural production, as such, is a partaker of the Spirit, or a spiritual being. But man has the Spirit, and it is this which raises him above the rank of a specimen. Each individual has in truth the Spirit as a person, and not merely a portion of the Spirit. But it does not follow that the measure of the Spirit is not various, that the Spirit does not overflow from some chosen instruments for the enrichment of others. Now that which is true of spirit in its general nature, is specially applicable to the Holy Spirit of the divine-human life. If He were not individually present, He would not be present at all. For such is the nature of the Holy Spirit that He exalts man to the honour of a personality, eternally chosen by God, reconciled to Him, filled with Him, and raised far above the feeling of being a mere exemplar of his species. But if He is to appear in individuality, His outpouring will correspond with the nature of its organ. The most glorious organ, the central organ, the head of mankind, corresponding in the eternal organism of humanity to the fulness of the Godhead, will be the medium through which this fulness is poured out upon humanity. With this agree the following writers: J. Schaller, Der historische Christus und die Philosophie, p. 106, &c., though the usual spiritualistic views of the resurrection of Christ are found, p. 130; Conradi, Christus in der Gegenwart, Vergangenheit und Zukunft; Göschel, Beiträge zur spekulativen Philosophie von Gott und vom Gottmenschen, which is rich in suggestive thoughts; the essay of A. Schweizer, über die Dignität des Religionsstifters in Studien und Kritiken, Jahrg. 1834, iii. and iv.1

4. The higher the nature of the life that is to be diffused among men, the more significant is its concentration in individuals; and the more extensive is the circle of influence proceeding from these individuals. Man first appears in the qualities of his merely natural life. In this respect all are equal. All, e.g. were once children. In these qualities, all are for all. Man next appears in the more distinct quality of sexual life. In this respect one half of mankind is for the other. Man further appears in the still greater distinctness of family life, as manifested in races, in which appear the first foundations of the organization of mankind; and here groups are for groups. The development of this great natural organization forms the nations, which exhibit an organism whose delicate adaptations become ever more apparent as the holiness of Christian nations increases. This scale of natural qualities everywhere points to the region of spiritual life. The sphere of imperishable and spiritual life is announced in the universal appearance of individuality. The individual is plainly an organ of the universal, and of the divine administration of the universal, and not only an organ, but a tone, a peculiarity thereof. Every man is the only one of his kind. If he renounces this uniqueness, as, e.g., in a state of slavery, in partisanship, in a monastic order, this always takes place with the conscious or unconscious reservation, that he will reclaim his peculiarity. And, indeed, he must do so; for each man has his peculiar mission. The Father will not receive him into sabbatic rest in His bosom, till he has delivered His message, till, from his special point of view, he has protested against all that is erroneous in the world. What could even an infinite collection of nullities have to testify? Every individual must, indeed, rise to the universality (catholicity) of the kingdom of God; but this he can only truly attain to by the purest development of his own nature. The region of individual life is everywhere pervaded by a gentle breathing of the Spirit, a gale of eternity. But not until the province of individuality is duly estimated as that spiritual kingdom in which each man variously manifests the Spirit, does unity reappear in the midst of diversity, since the Spirit is always one and the same. And thus, as His instruments, all are for all.

In this general circle, however, special talents appear. These are the comprehensive, the auspicious forms of various kinds, in which are concentrated the blessings poured out upon the race, or even the curse which desolates it As representative forces, as representative spirits, they draw together the scattered operations of human life, and collect them into a unity, to pour them out again in individual freshness on the mass. In special talents, the general capabilities of races are exhibited in happy forms and peculiar groupings; and these talents, when they answer their appointed end, advance the good of the race. Thus the many are for all.

But the men of genius form a still narrower group, and their sphere of operation is greater than that of the men of talent. It is characteristic of their operations that they are, not indeed absolutely, but relatively, of a creative kind. They bring to maturity that which is in process of formation, and introduce something new into the world, a new blessing or a new curse. They make mighty efforts in behalf of their contemporaries. They are in constant danger of being either idolized or persecuted, because the power with which they are filled, flowing from them in wide circles, repels all that is inimical, and moves and shakes to its very depths all that is congenial.

But the men of genius also, within their own circle, present a rich variety, and separate themselves into their special departments, though it is of the nature of genius to exhibit a high degree of generality. It is by decided limitation on one side or the other, that talent obtains its appointed power and brilliancy, while genius, as such, is always more or less universal genius. And yet in most, a special kind of power is prominent, pointing out to each his special field. In consequence, however, of this division, there are but few in each field. There are but few great artists, great poets, great philosophers; still fewer great prophets. Many are called, but few are chosen. Thus the few are for all.

In the tendency, however, of genius to the universal, we already find the striving after the highest unity. The elect were the prophets of the One Elect. The express image of the Divine Being and of humanity was at some time to appear in one personality, in which the creative forces and principles should solemnize their union, and thus exhibit themselves in a new, a second, a higher man. This One is the concentrated expression of the tendency of all mankind towards the Eternal: therefore, the Son of man. Hence His agency extends to the whole race. Thus the One is for all.

From this head, and from His agency, is developed the infinitely rich and marvellous organization of the life of mankind.