CHAPTER I THE INCARNATION THE ANSWER TO MAN'S NEEDS Opportunitate temporis, quando voluit, quando sciebat, tunc natus est.-S. Augustine. SOME words of explanation may perhaps be called for to justify the inclusion of such a subject as that of the Incarnation among the volumes of a library which claims to deal with matters of practical theology. It might perhaps be thought that such a subject was too theological to allow of practical treatment, that it was a question rather for theologians than for men not primarily concerned with questions of theology. If so, the justification is to be found in the title of the present chapter: it is as the answer to man's highest and deepest needs that the union of Godhead and Manhood in the Incarnation becomes a matter of supreme practical interest and importance to all mankind. The great fact of the Incarnation looks both A ways: just as we have come to reckon the years as leading up to it and as dating from it, so too we may look upon man's history: all that came before the coming of CHRIST was gradually preparing for that tremendous and unique consummation, all that has followed after it looks back to it as the point of departure for a new order of things. So we may regard the Incarnation both as the consummation and crown of the past, and as the starting-point of the future. It is rather as the former that we are to consider it in the present chapter. There are three ways chiefly in which we may set ourselves to study the Incarnation as the consummation of the ages of man's history before our LORD came; three ways chiefly in which we may contemplate the Incarnate LORD as Christus Consummator. We may think of the Incarnation as the culmination of God's Revelation, and as the recapitulation of Mankind in the Second Adam, and as alike the answer and the key to the enigmas and the mysteries and the aspirations of man's being. 1. The Incarnation is, firstly, the culmination of GOD's Revelation. 'GOD Who at sundry times and ' in divers manners spake in time past unto the 'fathers by the prophets hath in these last days 'spoken unto us by his Son.'1 Without dwelling 1 Heb. i. I. See Bp. Westcott in loc. now on the contrasts implied in these words-the contrast between what is partial and what is absolute, between temporary and final, between the prophets and the Eternal Son-we may dwell upon the fact that the Author of both revelations was One and the Self-Same. It was GOD Who spoke of old to the fathers by the prophets, it was God Who has spoken, and is speaking, to us at the end of the days of the elder Dispensation in the Person of the Son; both alike, however much in other ways we may contrast them, were the Revelation of GOD to man. Revelation, as distinct from natural religion which it pre-supposes,1 may be said to be concerned with two great subjects-the unveiling of the Being and Character of GOD, and the unfolding of the plan of man's salvation. Through patriarch and lawgiver, through psalmist and prophet, GoD was speaking to man, revealing to him the Divine Being and Character, making known to him the high human destiny and the conditions of its attainment; but this revelation was gradual and progressive; it was in so far as, and up to the point that, man was able to bear it. GOD did not, so to speak, blind man by turning full upon him the rays of the unapproachable light; He led him gradually out of the darkness, both moral and intellectual, in which he was 1 See Paget, Introd. to Hooker Bk. v., pp. 111 ff. |