St. John writes: "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father; but he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also." [Footnote 14] "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God." [Footnote 14]
[Footnote 13: 1 John ii. 23.]
[Footnote 14: 1 John iv. 2, 3.]
Such is the language of the Apostles; such are, at the same time, its shades of variance and its harmony. They have all evidently the same conception of Jesus Christ, they have all the same faith in Him. St. Matthew, as well as St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul, alike regard Jesus Christ as at once God and man, the representative of God on earth, and the Mediator between God and men—come from God, and re-ascended unto Him as the source and centre of His being. The dogma of the Incarnation, that is to say, of the divinity of Jesus Christ, pervades the Holy Scriptures—the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of the Apostles, the writings of the first Fathers. It is the common and fixed basis, the source and essence of the Christian faith.
This was affirmed and declared by Jesus Christ himself. What His disciples believed and related of Him, is what He himself told them of himself, as well as what they themselves witnessed and thought of Him: "All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him." [Footnote 15] —"I and my Father are one." [Footnote 16]
[Footnote 15: Matthew xi. 27.]
[Footnote 16: John x. 30.]
And when He approaches the term of His mission, when, after having announced to His disciples that the hour was coming when they would be dispersed, each going his own way, leaving Him alone, Jesus Christ raises His thoughts to God and says, "Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are." [Footnote 17]
[Footnote 17: John xvii. 1-11.]
I might multiply these texts; but these surely suffice to show that the words of Jesus Christ in relation to himself, and those of His Apostles, are in perfect unison; He speaks of himself as they speak of Him; He qualifies himself as they qualify Him; He calls God His "Father," as His disciples call Him "the Son of God." He has the same faith in himself, in His nature, and in His mission, as St. Matthew, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul had in Him.
It is a great source of error, in the study of facts, not to know how to stop at their general and essential features, and, losing sight of these, to give prominence to partial and secondary features. On the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ, that fundamental principle of the Christian religion, the precise meaning and import of such or such a word may be disputed; such or such an expression may be thought an interpolation, and so eliminated in any particular Gospel, in any particular Epistle; nevertheless there will always remain infinitely more than sufficient evidence of the fact that those who at the present day believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, believe simply what the Apostles believed and said, and that the Apostles themselves only believed and said, nearly nineteen centuries ago, what Jesus Christ himself said to them.