I.
As man is essentially spirit, he can never come to unity, only as he comes to it in himself as a spirit. As long as he abandons himself to mere bread, or power, or knowledge, or law, or beauty, there is contradiction. Not in any one of these can he find full-orbed life. These all bring nutriment to him, as a spirit, from the several spheres to which they are variously correlated. But provision is made not only for the sides and faculties of himself, but for the essential nature of himself. We have seen how hunger was met by bread, the needs of the social nature by power, intellect by truth, will by law, and the æsthetic sense by beauty; but here we come to life, and find that love, timeless and illimitable love, alone corresponds to it. But love can only find its embodiment and its expression in life. Therefore, love has taken the form of life to meet the needs of man as a spirit.
We do not propose to discuss this subject dogmatically. The writer believes in dogmatism; but in this work the attempt has been to treat man, and the things provided for him, scientifically. We have taken nothing for granted, and have intended to say nothing but what was warranted by the facts. That man is a spirit, and related to an unseen realm, is attested by the fact that all round this world temples and mosques, and synagogues and churches lift themselves sublimely, or modestly, to the sky. That there is something in man that seeks provision from beyond the range of sense and sight, no one in his senses can deny. This deep and fundamental and irrepressible need of man’s nature finds its correlate in love. Speaking out of the depths of his life, it is an everlasting call for sympathy, for reconciliation, for pardon, for peace. Love gives sympathy, insures reconciliation, grants pardon, and secures peace. But love can only come from the unseen and eternal in the form of life. Let us see how the love expressed in the life and sacrifice and death of Jesus Christ, as the embodiment of divine love, is set over against the spiritual nature of man, as its correlate; as completely as bread is set over against hunger, or the truth against the intellect, or as beauty is set over against the æsthetic sense. We believe this is so in the nature of things, and will finally be taught as truth, as absolute and unfailing as the multiplication table. Men will come to it, after a while, not only as a dogmatic doctrine taught by the churches, but also as absolute doctrine, taught by the constitution and needs of human nature. The time will come when to doubt this will not simply be to write one’s self down as mean, but as mentally unbalanced. If Jesus Christ, as love, is the correlate of the spiritual needs of the human race, then his life is peculiar and unique. It cannot be classed with any other life. It cannot be measured by any rule used to measure other things or other lives. We propose to test this life by a principle said, by scientific men, to have universal application in this time.