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* Guardian, November 19, 1902.
+ Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah p. 376.
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IV
OUR LORD AS THE SECOND ADAM
But we may surely go further than this, and say that, in regard to St. Paul, his language as to the Second Adam seems to necessitate the Virgin-Birth. In St. Paul's view there are, so to speak, only two men: "The first man is of the earth earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven" (1 Cor. xx. 47.)—a new starting-point for humanity. This doctrine of the Second Adam, of this fresh start given to the human race by Jesus Christ, would seem to require His Birth of a Virgin, for the Virgin-Birth is bound up with any really Catholic notion of the Incarnation. For what is the Catholic doctrine of Incarnation? Do we mean by Incarnation that on an already existing human being there descended in an extraordinary measure the Divine Spirit, so that He was by moral association so closely allied to God that He might be called God? Do we mean that some preminent saint, called Jesus, responded with such "signal readiness" to the Divine Voice, "and realized more worthily than any other man 'the Divine idea' of human excellence, so that to Him, by a laxity of phrase not free from profaneness, men might thus ascribe a so-called 'moral Divinity'"? Then, I say quite freely, if that is what we mean, that the Virgin-Birth is, so far as we can see, an altogether gratuitous addition, an unnecessary miracle. That is, so far as I can understand it, the idea of Incarnation entertained by moderns who reject or question the Catholic Faith.
But let me say as clearly as possible that this is not, and never has been, what the Christian Church means by Incarnation. The New Testament does not tell us of a deified man: no, we begin with a Divine Person. "The 'I' in Him, His very self, is Divine, not human; yet has He condescended to take our humanity into union with His Divine Person, to assume it as His own." He who was from all eternity a single Divine Person took upon Him our nature, and was "made man;" and if this be so, what other entrance into our condition is imaginable save that which we confess in the Creed—that He was "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary"? "The Creeds pass immediately from confessing Jesus Christ to be 'the only Son of God' to the fact that He was 'born of the Virgin Mary,' and neither of those articles of the Catholic Faith can be abandoned without disturbing the foundations of the other."*
— * Swete, Church Congress Report (1901), p. 164. —
If Christ was born naturally of human parents, He must, one would think, have taken to Himself a human personality; He must have existed in two persons as well as in two natures. But what we are to insist on in thinking of and teaching this mystery is this truth of the single Divine Personality of our Lord. The old Nestorian heresy (with certain important modifications) is being resuscitated among us. Nestorianism, new and old, begins from below, and speaks of a man who by moral "association" became "Divine;" it speaks, that is to say, of a deified man. The Christian Faith begins from above-it speaks of Him who from all eternity was God, taking upon Him our flesh. He took upon Him our nature, but He did not assume a human personality. He wrapped our human nature round His own Divine Person. On the Nestorian theory, God did but benefit one man by raising him to a unique dignity; on the Catholic theory, He benefitted the race of men, by raising human nature into union with His Divine Person.
Those who speak, somewhat incautiously surely, of Incarnation, while they deny or question the Virgin-Birth, should be asked to consider what they say and to reflect what their words imply. A man born naturally of human parents but taken up, on account of a wonderfully high moral character, into close union with God, can never differ in kind from any saint. He can never benefit the race of men save by way of example. His death can never effect our redemption, for it does not differ in kind from the death of a martyr. Being only a great saint himself, he cannot represent mankind either on the Cross or before the Throne. One man has been assumed into heaven. But this is wholly a different thing from the Faith of Christendom, which is that God has taken human nature into union with His Divine Person, in that nature God died upon the Cross, and in that nature He pleads before the Throne for the race of men. It is because Christ's Person is Divine, that His life means to us Christians what it does.
"No person," says Hooker, "was born of the Virgin but the Son of God, no person but the Son of God baptized, the Son of God condemned, the Son of God and no other person crucified; which one only point of Christian belief, the infinite worth of the Son of God, is the very ground of all things believed concerning life and salvation by that which Christ either did or suffered as man in our behalf."* "That," says Bishop Andrewes, "which setteth the high price upon this sacrifice is this, that He which offereth it to God is God."+
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* Eccl. Pol., v. 52. 3.
+ Second Sermon on the Passion.
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