given birth to other heresies and mistaken beliefs, but we cannot do so now. Only let us be on our guard against them, and, not less, against that bitterness and contentiousness which we have seen not only, alas, in the heretics, but also in those who opposed them, even in the greatest. The history of S. Cyril and even of S. Leo is in this respect often very sad reading: we must thank GOD that we have also the glorious and blessed examples of S. Athanasius and of S. Gregory Nazianzene and of many others. 5. Fifthly, there is one other lesson, perhaps the greatest, which we have dwelt on before, and about which therefore we need not say much now, namely, the bearing of all this controversy upon personal religious life. It is not merely a question of abstract theology: a right faith or a wrong one as to the Person of our LORD must bear upon the life of him who holds it; Redemption and Salvation are practical, personal matters; it must make the whole difference to our manhood whether He has borne it, and bears it now, or not; whether or not He has sanctified all the stages of human life, birth, childhood, manhood, death, by passing through them; whether or not it is One and the SelfSame Who was from all eternity with the Father in the unapproachable glory and inaccessible light, born of a human Mother, and lived a human life, and died the death that we must die, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, and shall come again, He the Self-Same, GoD and Man, to be our judge. 6. Lastly, there is need of one word of warning: 'CHRIST,' it has been said, 'is truer than our Science of Him.' "1 This means, that strive as we may to express rightly the truth as to His Divine and Adorable Person, He remains truer than any words we can say about Him. GOD'S Revelation to us is made in words that we can understand, not in words that can ever really express all that He is. As we have seen, for example, in the Arian controversy, the title Son of GOD expresses as nearly as is possible the relation of the Eternal Son to the Eternal Father, yet it does not and cannot express the whole truth about it. And so with all the language in which by the merciful guidance of the Holy Spirit the Church has been led to express her Faith, we are not diminishing aught from our gratitude for it when we say that, true as the language of Creeds and Councils is, there is something truer still, something behind it all—and that something is the LORD Himself. Behind the explicit language of Creeds and 1 Du Bose, The Ecumenical Councils, p. 321. Councils is the implicit Faith and mind of the Church; behind the mind and consciousness of the Church is the teaching of Apostles and Evangelists in the Holy Gospels; behind the Holy Gospels is the great reality to which they bear witness-the One Divine Person in two Natures, very GoD and very Man, He Whom we worship as co-equal and co-eternal with the Father and the Holy Ghost, in Whom we trust as Saviour from our sins, Whom we follow as our perfect Example, and Whom we look for as our Judge-JESUS CHRIST our LORD, Son of God and Son of Mary, GOD from everlasting, Man for evermore. CHAPTER X THE INCARNATION AND THE ATONEMENT Oblatus est quia Ipse voluit. Isa. liii. 7, Vulg. Vexilla Regis prodeunt, Fulget crucis mysterium, Venantius Fortunatus. In the preceding chapters we have considered the great doctrine of the Incarnation as it has been authoritatively delivered to us by the Church, and as it is set forth in the writings of the Sacred Canon. We may conveniently consider it now in relation to other great doctrines of the Faith and in relation to the practical needs of Christian life. In the present chapter we shall consider the doctrine of the Incarnation as it bears upon and illuminates the doctrine of the Atonement. It is probably not too much to say that no isolation of one doctrine from another has been attended by such disastrous results as the isolation of the Atone ment from the Incarnation, and that for two obvious reasons; first, because, momentous and significant as our LORD's Death was, its full significance cannot be appreciated apart from His Life, and, secondly, because that which He wrought, both in life and death, only appears at its true worth in view of the truth of His Person; we cannot divorce any man's death from his life, nor can we rightly understand what any man does apart from the knowledge of what he is. In the presence of so awful and so mysterious a scene as that which was enacted upon Calvary and clearly set forth before men's eyes by the preaching of the Apostles 1 we almost recoil from any attempt to explain or to comprehend; 'unless it were too vast for our full intellectual comprehension,' as it has been most truly said, it would surely be too narrow for our spiritual needs.' But true as that is, and impossible as it is for us to grasp with our finite intellects the full significance of the Atonement, the difficulty of even accepting it, intellectually, is almost overwhelming without some grasp of the doctrine of the Incarnation. To lose the 'proportion of the faith '3 has ever been fraught with immense danger to the holding of the Truth, yet 1 Gal. iii. I. 6 A. J. Balfour, The Foundations of Belief, p. 259. 8 Rom. xii. 6, τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως. |