IT is the fundamental assumption of these Lectures that the central point in the Christian view of God and the world is the acknowledgment of Jesus Christ as a truly Divine Person--the Son of God made flesh. How is this assumption to be vindicated? I do not conceal from myself that the issues involved in such an assertion are very stupendous. The belief in Jesus as the Son of God is not one to be lightly taken up, but when it is taken up, it practically determines, as has already been said, a man's views on everything else in Christianity. No one will dispute that, if Jesus Christ is what the creeds declare Him to be--an Incarnation of the Divine--His Person is necessarily central in His own religion, nay, in the universe. Christianity, on this assumption, is correctly described as the religion of the Incarnation.

On the other hand, this is precisely the view of the Person of Christ which, we are told, the modern view of the world compels us to reject. No doctrine stumbles the modern mind so completely as this. It is flatly pronounced incredible and absurd. That Jesus was the holiest of men--the Divinest of the race, the most perfect exhibition of the god-like in humanity--may well be conceded; but of literal Incarnation it is not permitted to the modern intelligence to speak. Science has to investigate the origin of the dogma; to show how it arose from the powerful impression made by Jesus on His followers; how it was shaped by Hebrew and Hellenic modes of thought; but it cannot for a moment entertain the possibility that the idea which it represents is true. As strenuously is our right resisted to speak of this doctrine as an essential and integral part of Christianity. Short of this conception, it is said, there are many grades of belief in Christ, and we are not entitled to unchristianise any of them To identify the essence of Christianity with the Incarnation is, it is held, to make a particular dogmatic interpretation of Christianity equivalent to Christianity itself. It is not, indeed, among the extremer sceptics that we find any difficulty in getting the acknowledgment that the Incarnation is central in Christianity. "It is," says Strauss, "certainly the central dogma in Christianity. Here the Founder is at the same time the most prominent object of worship; the system based on Him loses its support as soon as He is shown to be lacking in the qualities appropriate to an object of religious worship."1 "In Him alone," says Feuerbach, "is concentrated the Christian religion."2 Quite logically, from his point of view, Strauss draws the conclusion that, since the Incarnation is untenable, Christianity falls to the ground with it. But others will not go thus far. They distinguish between Christianity and its accidents, and put this doctrine in the category of the accidents. Nay, it is ostensibly in the interests of what is supposed to be a purer and more primitive form of Christianity that in many quarters the demand for the surrender of this doctrine is made. The cry is, " Back from Christianity to Christ"--back from the Christianity of the creeds, from the Christianity even of Paul and John--to the Christ of the simple Galilean gospel, who never dreamt of making himself God. As Lessing, in a famous passage, distinguishes between " the religion of Christ" and "the Christian religion," meaning by the former the religion which Christ Himself professed and practised, and by the latter the superstructure of dogma subsequently reared on this,3 so an analogous distinction is drawn between the Pauline and Johannine Christ, with His halo of supernatural attributes, and the meek and lowly Jesus, so intensely human, of the Synoptic Gospels.

Nevertheless, the ablest theology of the century will sustain me in the general assertion, that the central principle of Christianity is the Person of its Founder. Whatever may be thought of the great speculative movement in the beginning of the century, connected with the names of Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, it cannot be denied that at least it rendered an essential service to theology in overcoming the shallow rationalism of the preceding period, and in restoring to its place of honour in the Christian system the doctrine of Christ's Person, which it had become customary to put in the background. Still more influential in this direction was the powerful impulse given to theology by Schleiermacher. Since that time all the best theology in Germany may be said to be Christological. That Christ sustains a different relation to His religion from that of ordinary founders of religion to the faiths they have founded; that in Him there was a peculiar union of the Divine and human; that His appearance and work were of decisive importance for the Church and for humanity--these are thoughts which may be said to be common to all the greater systems, irrespective of schools. They are found among theologians as widely separated in dogmatic standpoint tendency as Rothe and Dorner, Biedermann and Lipsius, Beyschlag and Ritschl, Luthardt and Frank. It is only outside the circles of really influential theology that we find a reversion to the loose deistic conception of Christ as simply a Prophet or moral Teacher, like Moses or Confucius or Buddha.1 It is indeed a powerful proof of the view that the Person of Christ is of unique importance in His religion, that whenever a new breath of life passes over theology, and an attempt is made to gain a profounder apprehension of Christianity, there is a recurrence to this idea, and the necessity is felt of doing justice to it; thus testifying to the truth of Dorner's remark, "A Christian system which is unable to make Christology an integral part of itself, has pronounced its own judgment; it has really given up the claim to the title of Christian."2

At the same time, this acknowledgment of the central and unique place of time Founder of Christianity in His religion does not settle the question of the precise estimate we are to take of His Person. Is He merely human, or is He Divine as well? Or if Divine, in what sense do we attach this predicate to Him? Is it, as with the Hegelians, the mere expression of a metaphysical idea--of that identity of the Divine and the human which is as true of all men as it is of Christ, only that it came first to clear consciousness in Him? Or is it, as with Ritschl, the mere expression of a value judgment of the believer--a predicate denoting the worth which Christ has for the believing soul as the supreme Revealer of God's character and purpose? Or is it, as with others, an ethical Divinity that is ascribed to Christ--such participation in the Divine nature and life of Sonship as may be experienced also by the believer?1 Or shall we hold, in agreement with the general faith of the Church, that Christ is more than all this--that in Him the Divine pre-existing Word truly and personally became incarnate, and made our nature His own--that therefore He is the Son of God, not simply as we are, but in a high and transcendental sense, in which we cannot compare ourselves with Him? This question, in the present state of controversy, is not so easily settled as might at first sight appear. It is vain, of course, to appeal to the great ecclesiastical creeds, for it is they which are in dispute. It is vain also, at this stage, to attempt to settle the question by the simple method of citation of proof texts. The facts of Christ's self-revelation, and His witness to His own Person, must indeed, in the last resort, be the ground on which our faith in Him rests, and it will be necessary at a later stage to examine this self-witness of Christ, as well as the apostolic doctrine, with considerable care.2 But at the outset this method is attended by obvious disadvantages. It is easy to say--the original documents of Christianity are before us; let us examine them. But, for one thing, some of these documents--the Fourth Gospel, e.g., and some of the Pauline epistles--are themselves in dispute among our opponents; and, even if genuine, their authority is not accepted as decisive. In the next place, there is the question, whether there are not traces of development in the doctrine of the Person of Christ even within the New Testament--whether all the sacred writers teach the same view. There are many, as I have already said, who will admit that Christ's Divinity is taught by Paul and John, who would deny that it is taught by Christ Himself. These are difficulties which cannot be satisfactorily met by mere assertion, and the question recurs, whether--as a provisional expedient at least--any other course is open to us?

There is another method which I propose to apply in this Lecture, one which appears to me to have the advantage of dealing with all these issues at once, and at the same time deals with issues of a wider character. It is the method of appeal to history. The individual judgment may err in the opinions it forms, and in the conclusions it deduces from them. It is not given to any man to see all the consequences that follow from his own thinking. He may quite conceivably hold in the scheme of his beliefs propositions that are inconsistent with each other, and, if logically carried out, would destroy each other, and not be aware of the fact. In history things get beaten out to their true issues. The strands of thought that are incompatible with each other get separated; conflicting tendencies, at first unperceived, are brought to light; opposite one-sidednesses correct each other; and the true consequences of theories reveal themselves with inexorable necessity. As Socrates, in Plato's Republic,1 investigating the nature of Justice, proposes to study it first as "writ large" in the collective magnitude of the State, that thereafter he may return with better knowledge to the study of it in the individual, so the movements of thought are best studied on the broad scale in which they present themselves over large periods of time. It is to this test I propose to bring the great question of Christianity--the same that was proposed by Jesus to the Pharisees eighteen hundred years ago--"What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He?"2 I shall ask what aid history affords us in determining the true estimate to be put upon the Person of Christ, and the place held in the Christian system by the doctrine of the Incarnation.

It is one advantage of this method, that, as I have said, it brings all the issues into court at once. The verdict of history is at once a judgment on the answers which have been given to the theological question; on their agreement with the sum-total of the facts of Christianity; on the methods of exegesis and New Testament criticism by which they have been supported; on their power to maintain themselves against rival views; on how far the existence of Christianity is dependent on them, or bound up with them.

I. History a series of alternatives--the downward movement.

I. History, then, as it seems to me, presents us with a series of alternatives of a deeply interesting character, by studying which we may find our bearings on t his question, "What think ye of Christ?" as we can in no other way.

1. First alternative--A Divine Christ or humanitarianism.

1. The first essential service which history has rendered us has been in the elimination of intermediate views--in making it clear as a first alternative that the real issue on this question is between a truly Divine Christ and pure humanitarianism. Intermediate views on Christ's Person have from time to time arisen, and still go on arising, in the Church; but, like the intermediate species of plants and animals Mr. Darwin tells us of, which are invariably driven to the wall in the struggle for existence, they have never been able to survive. There is, e.g., the Arian view, which has appeared again and again in the history of the Church in times of spiritual decadence. To find a place for the high attributes ascribed to Christ in Scripture, a lofty supernatural dignity is in this view assigned to Him. He was a sort of supreme angel, God's First-born, His instrument in the creation of the world, etc. But He was not eternal; He was not of Divine essence. It is safe to say that this view is now practically extinct. It would be a shallow reading of history to attribute the defeat of Arianism in the early Church to the anathemas of councils, the influence of court favour, or any other accidental circumstances. It perished through its own inherent weakness.1 If the Arians admit all they profess to do about Christ--that He was pre-existent, God's agent in the creation of the world, etc.--there need be little difficulty in admitting the rest. On the other hand, if they stop short of the higher view to which the Scriptures seem to point, they entangle themselves in difficulties and contradictions, exegetical and other, which make it impossible for them to remain where they are. In reality, these high-sounding attributes which they ascribe to Christ are an excrescence on the system; for on this theory no work remains for Christ to do which could not have been accomplished equally well by a highly endowed man. Historically, therefore, Arianism has always tended to work round to the Socinian or strictly Unitarian view of Christ, where it has not gone upwards, through semi-Arianism, to the recognition of His full Divinity.

But this Socinian or Unitarian view of the Person of Christ--I refer to the older Unitarianism of the Priestley and Channing type--is another of those intermediate views which history also may now be said to have eliminated. Christ, on this view, is the greatest of inspired teachers, a true Prophet. He had a divine mission; He wrought miracles in confirmation of His doctrine; He rose from the dead on the third day; He is expected to return to judge the world. Here also there is a great deal of the halo of the supernatural about Christ. He is supernatural in history, if not in nature, and men saw again that they must either believe more or believe less. The rationalistic leaven, which was already working in the rejection of the higher aspects of Christ's Person and work, made itself increasingly felt. As the miraculous adjuncts were retained only in deference to the representations of Scripture, they were readily abandoned when criticism professed to show how they might be stripped off without detriment to Christ's moral image. Be the cause what it may, it is undeniable that Unitarianism of this kind has not been able to maintain itself. It has constantly tended to purge itself of the remaining supernatural features in the portrait of Christ, and to descend to the level of simple humanitarianism, i.e., to the belief in Christ as simply a great man, a religious genius of the first rank, one in whom the light which shines in all men shone in an eminent degree--but still a mere man, without anything supernatural in His origin, nature, or history.1

A further example of the difficulty of maintaining an intermediate position on the doctrine of the Person of Christ, may be taken from the long series of intermediate views which have sprung up on the soil of Germany as the result of the great intellectual and theological movement inaugurated by Hegel and Schleiermacher in the beginning of the century. Passing by the speculative Christologies--in which, when the veil was stripped off, it was found that the idea was every thing, the historical Christ nothing--I may refer here to the Christology of Schleiermacher and his school. Schleiermacher recognises to the full "a peculiar being of God in Christ."1 He affirms Christ's perfect sinlessness, and the unique significance of His Personality for the Church and for the race. He is the Head, Archetype, Representative, and Redeemer of mankind. Only through Him is redemption from sin and fellowship of life with God possible. But when we come to inquire wherein consists this "peculiar being of God" in Christ, it proves, after all, to be only an exceptionally constant and energetic form of that God-consciousness which exists germinally in all men, and indeed lies at the root of religious experience generally. The difference between Christ and other men is thus in degree, not in kind. In Him this Divine element had the ascendency, in us it has not. He is a miracle, in so far as the Divine dwelt in Him in this unique and exceptional fulness and power, constituting Him the Redeemer and second Adam of the race; but there is no entrance of God into humanity such as we associate with the idea of Incarnation. When, further, we investigate the nature of Christ's saving activity, we find that the exalted, high-priestly functions which Schleiermacher ascribes to Christ shrink, on inspection, into very meagre dimensions. Christ's continued saving activity in His Church is presupposed, but it is not the activity of One who still lives and reigns on high, but rather the perpetuation of a posthumous influence, through the preservation of His image in the Gospels, and the fellowship of the Christian society.2 Ultimately, therefore, Christ's saving activity is reduced to example and teaching; at most, to the spiritual influence of a great and unique historic Personality.3 "When we have got this length, we are clearly back on the road to simple humanitarianism. Accordingly, none of Schleiermacher's followers have been able to stop exactly where he did. They have felt the inexorable compulsion of the less or more; and while some have gone back to rationalism, the great majority, as Rothe acknowledges,1 have pressed on to more positive views, and have come into substantial harmony with confessional orthodoxy. A new wave of mediating theology has recently arisen in the school of Ritschl; but the fundamental principle of this school--the denial of the right of the theoretic reason to have anything to do with religion or theology--is not one that can permanently be approved of, and would, if followed out, end in boundless subjectivity. In this school also, accordingly, the necessity of less or more is asserting itself. Already the members of the school have begun to move off on different and irreconcilable lines--some in a more negative, the greater number in a more positive direction. The attempt of Ritschl to bar off all inquiry into the nature of Christ's Person, by resolving His "Godhead" into a mere value-judgment of the believer, is felt not to be satisfactory; and the admission is increasingly made that consistency of Christian thinking demands the acknowledgment of a transcendental basis.2

2. Second alternative--A Divine Christ or Agnosticism.

2. The first alternative is between a Divine Christ and a purely human one--the second is between a Divine Christ and pure Agnosticism. Many of those who take the humanitarian view of Christ's Person are very far from wishing to deny that a great deal of what Christ taught was true. They do not wish to deny the existence of God, or the fact of a future life, or the essentials of Christian morality. In not a few cases they strongly uphold these truths--maintain them to be the true natural religion, in opposition to revealed. They account it Christ's greatest glory that He saw so clearly, and announced so unambiguously, the Fatherhood of God, the dignity of the soul, the certainty of immortality, and the dependence of happiness here and hereafter on virtue. It is a plausible view to take, for it seems to secure to those who hold it all that they take to be essential in Christianity, while at the same time it leaves them unbounded liberty to accept or reject what they like in modern "advanced" views--to get rid of miracles, go in with progressive theories of science, accept the newest criticism of the Gospels, etc. It is a plausible view, but it is an illusive one; for if there is one thing more than another which the logic of events makes evident, it is, that with the humanitarian view of Christ we cannot stop at simple, abstract Theism, but must go on to pure Agnosticism. This is indeed what the larger number of the more logical minds which leave rejected supernatural Christianity in our own day are doing. Nor is the process which heads to this result difficult to follow. The Deism of the last century rejected Christianity, and sought to establish in its place what it called "Natural Religion," i.e. a belief in God, in the future life, in a state of rewards and punishments, etc., based on reason alone. But however congruous with reason these doctrines may be in the place which they hold in the religion of Jesus, it was not really reason which had discovered them, or which gave assurance about them; nor did it follow that reason could successfully vindicate them, when torn from their context, and presented in the meagre, abstract form in which they appeared in the writings of the deists. What the deists did was to pick these doctrines out of the New Testament, separating them from the rest of the doctrines with which they were associated, and denuding them of everything which could make them real and vital to the minds and consciences of men; then to baptise this caput mortuum with the name of "Natural Religion." They were doctrines that had their roots in the Christian system, and the arguments from reason with which they were sup ported wore not the real grounds of belief in them. In the present century men are not so easily satisfied.1 against the God of Revelation tell just as powerfully against the God of nature; that to admit Christ's doctrine of a Heavenly Father, of a soul made in God's image, of a special providence, of prayer, of forgiveness of sins, of a future life of happiness and misery, is already to have crossed the line which separates a merely natural from a supernatural view of things; and that to reject Christ's doctrines on these great questions makes it difficult to retain a Theism of any kind.1 This is not because a theistic view of tine world is ion itself less reasonable than a non-theistic view--to admit this would be to give up the whole case on behalf of Christianity. But it is because the kind of Theism that remains after the Christian element has been removed out of it, is not one fitted to satisfy either the reason or the heart. It is a pale, emasculated conception, which, finding no support in the facts or experiences of the spiritual life, can never stand against the assaults made on it from without. It is here that Pantheism has its advantage over Deism. It is indeed more reasonable to believe in a living personal God, who created and who controls the universe, than in the "One and All" of the pantheist; but it does not follow that it is more reasonable to believe in an abstract Deity--a mere figment of the intellect--who stands in separation from the world, and yields no satisfaction to the religious life. Theism is a reasonable view of the universe, but it must be a living Theism, not a barren and notional one.

If, to avoid this bankruptcy, the attempt is made to deal in earnest with the conception of a personal God, and to reclothe the Deity with the warm, gracious attributes which belong to the Father-God of Christ, then we have indeed a Being whom the soul can love, trust, and hold communion with, but the difficulty recurs of believing Him to be a God who remains self-enclosed, impassive, uncommunicative, towards creatures whom He has dowered with a share of His own rational and moral excellences, who has so shut Himself out by natural law from direct contact with the spirits that seek Him, that He can neither speak to them, answer their prayers, help them in trouble nor or even reach them by inward succours--a silent God, who can no more enter into personal relations with His creatures than if He were impersonal. Such a conception is self-contradictory, and cannot maintain itself. One feels this incongruity very powerfully in dealing with the Theism of such writers as the late Mr. Rathbone Greg, or Dr. Martineau, or the authoress of Robert Elsmere. None of these writers will admit the possibility of miracle; logically, therefore, they shut out the possibility of direct communication between God and man. Yet none of them can rest with the cold abstract God of Deism; or with the immanent impersonal spirit of Pantheism; or with the comfortless negation of Agnosticism. God is with them a personal Being; His will is ethical; communion with Him is longed after and believed in. Let Mr. Greg's own pathetic words tell how insecure is the Theism thus cut off from positive Revelation. "My own conception," he says, "perhaps from early mental habit, perhaps from incurable and very conscious metaphysical inaptitude, approaches far nearer to the old current image of a personal God than to any of the sublimated substitutes of modern thought. Strauss's Universum, Comte's Humanity, even Mr. Arnold's Stream of Tendency that makes for Righteousness, excite in me no enthusiasm, command from me no worship. I cannot pray to the 'Immensities' and the 'Eternities' of Carlyle; they proffer me no help; they vouchsafe me no sympathy; they suggest no comfort. It may be that such a personal God is a mere anthropomorphic creation. It may be--as philosophers with far finer instruments of thought than mine affirm--that the conception of such a Being, duly analysed, is demonstrably a self-contradictory one. But, at least in resting in it, I rest in something I almost seem to realise; at least, I share the view which Jesus indisputably held of the Father whom He obeyed, communed with, and worshipped."1 Surely it need hardly be said that a view which, even while holding it, one doubts may be only a result of "early mental habit," "a mere anthropomorphic creation," a "self-contradictory" conception, cannot long stand as a basis for life; nor will the trust which Jesus had help much, when one has already rejected as delusion His doctrine of prayer, of special providence, of forgiveness of sins, and His own Messianic claims and expectations. Already we tremble on the verge of Agnosticism, if we have not actually passed its bound.

I think, accordingly, I am justified in saying that when the ground of Divine Revelation is once left behind, we have no logical halting-place short of Agnosticism; not because a theistic view of the world is unreasonable, but because a living Theism requires as its complement belief in Revelation. We have these alternatives: either to revivify our Theism till it approaches in the humane and loving attributes it ascribes to God, the Christian conception of the Heavenly Father--in which case we are back to a supernatural view of the universe; or, if this is thought baseless, to dispense with the idea of God altogether, and try to explain the world without reason, without final cause, without spiritual assumptions of any kind.

3. Third alternative--A Divine Christ or Pessimism.

3. Agnosticism is, however, far from representing the end of this road along which we had begun to travel in rejecting the Divine in Christ. The final alternative--one which we may trust the world at large will never be called upon to face--is a Divine Christ or Pessimism. Agnosticism is not a state in which the mind of an intelligent being can permanently rest. It is essentially a condition of suspense--a confession of ignorance--an abdication of thought on the highest subjects.1 It is not, in the nature of things, possible for the mind to remain persistently in this neutral, passive attitude. It will press on perforce to one or other of the views which present themselves as alternatives--either to Theism, or to Materialism and dogmatic Atheism.2 I do not speak, of course, of the individual mind, but of the general historical development. But even Agnosticism has brought with it a train of baleful results. With the loss of certainty on the highest questions of existence there comes inevitably a lowering of the pulse of human endeavour all round--a loosening of certainty about morals, for why should these remain unaffected when every thing else is going?--and as we see to-day, in much of the speculative thought of France and Germany, a hopelessness about the future. For, obviously, when this point is reached, the rational ground is taken away even from belief in progress.1 When the idea of God, which is equivalent to the idea of a reason at the foundation of things, is surrendered--whether in Agnosticism, or in some form of dogmatic denial, makes little difference--it becomes a wholly unwarranted assumption that things must certainly go on from better to better. The opposite may quite as well be the case, and progress, now that a given height is reached, may rather be from better to worse. The analogy of nature shows that this is the law in regard to natural life. The plant blooms, reaches its acme, and dies. So, it may be plausibly argued, it will be with humanity. The fact that some progress has been made in the past does not guarantee that this progress will go on indefinitely; rather, the spur to this progress consisted in what we are now told are illusions, and when these are exploded the motives to progress are gone. A more highly evolved society may lead to an increase of misery rather than of happiness; the growth of enlightenment, instead of adding to men's enjoyments, may result in stripping them successively of the illusions that remain, and may leave them at last sad, weary, disappointed, with an intolerable consciousness of the burden and wretchedness of existence.2 All this is not fancy. The despairing, pessimistic spirit I am speaking of has already taken hold of extensive sections of society, and is giving startling evidences of its presence. For the first time on European soil we see large and influential systems springing up, and gaining for themselves wide popularity and acceptance, which have for their root-idea exactly this conception of the inherent irrationality and misery of existence. There have always been individual thinkers with a tendency to take a prejudiced and hopeless view of life, but their reveries have not been much regarded. But here, strange to say, under the very shadow of this boasted progress of the nineteenth century--in the very midst of its enlightenment and civilisation and wealth--we see Pessimism raising its head as a serious, carefully thought-out philosophy of existence, and, instead of being scouted and laughed at as an idle dream, it meets with passionate acceptance from multitudes.1 The same spirit will be found reflected by those who care to note its symptoms in much of our current literature, in the serious raising and discussion, for example, of the question already familiar to us--Is life worth living? Specially noticeable is the tone of sadness which pervades much of the nobler sceptical thinking of the present day--the tone of men who do not think lightly of parting with religion, but feel that with it has gone the hope and gladness of earlier days. This Pessimism of scepticism is to me one of the saddest and most significant phenomena of modern times.2 And, granting the premises it starts from, what other conclusion is possible? Deprive the world of God, and everything becomes an insoluble mystery, history a scene of wrecked illusions, belief in a superstition, and life in general "A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."3