+True of all higher human experience.+—The same thing holds good in a lesser degree of everything worthy of Jesus in human experience. We do not account for any man's goodness or greatness by pointing to his ancestry. Heredity may account for a great deal, but it is inadequate as an explanation of genius or high moral achievement. If we go back far enough, we shall find that our ancestry was barbarous, and, judging from its tendencies, not at all likely to produce the Christ-man of future ages. Wherever the Christ-man appears, we have to acknowledge that the principal factor in his evolution is the incoming of the divine spirit. It is only another way of stating what has already been stated above, that the true man or higher self is divine and eternal, integral to the being of God, and that this divine manhood is gradually but surely manifesting on the physical plane. The lower cannot produce the higher, but the higher is shaping and transforming the lower; every moral and spiritual advance is therefore of the nature of a virgin birth—a quickening from above. The spiritual birth described in the conversation between our Lord and Nicodemus as given in the third of John is, properly speaking, a virgin birth. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit." "Ye must be born anew," or, literally, "quickened from above." Every man who deliberately faces towards the highest, and feels himself reënforced by the Spirit of God in so doing, is quickened from above; the divinely human Christ is born in him, the Word has become flesh and is manifested to the world.
+Human history one long incarnation.+—If now we can turn our thoughts away for a moment from the individual to the race and think of humanity as one being, or the expression of one being, we shall read this truth on a larger scale. All human history represents the incarnation or manifesting of the eternal Son or Christ of God. The incarnation cannot be limited to one life only, however great that life may be. It is quite a false idea to think of Jesus and no one else as the Son of God incarnate. It is easy to understand the loving reverence for Jesus which would lead men to regard Him as being and expressing something to which none of the rest of us can ever attain, but in affirming this we actually rob Him of a glory He ought to receive. We make Him unreal, reduce His earthly life to a sort of drama, and effect a drastic distinction in kind between Him and ourselves. If He came from the farther side of the gulf and we only from the hither; if we are humanity without divinity, and He divinity that has only assumed humanity,—perfect fellowship between Him and ourselves is impossible. But it is untrue to say that any such distinction exists. Let us go on thinking of Jesus as Christ, the very Christ of glory, but let us realise that that same Christ is seeking expression through every human soul. He is incarnate in the race in order that by means of limitation He may manifest the innermost of God, the life and love eternal. To say this does not dethrone Jesus; it lends significance to His life and work. He is on the throne and the sceptre is in His hand. We can rise toward Him by trusting, loving, and serving Him; and by so doing we shall demonstrate that we too are Christ the eternal Son.
To think of all human life as a manifestation of the eternal Son, renders it sacred. Our very struggles and sufferings become full of meaning. Sin is but the failure to realise it; it is being false to ourselves and our divine origin; it is the centrifugal tendency in human nature just as love is the centripetal. There is no life, however depraved, which does not occasionally emit some sign of its kinship to Jesus and its eternal sonship to God. Wherever you see self-sacrifice at work you see the very spirit of Jesus, the spirit of the Christ incarnate. I find it everywhere, and it interprets life for me as nothing else can. Take up any work of fiction, no matter what, and you will find the author instinctively preaching this truth. Look into any commonplace, everyday life, no matter whose, and you will find it exemplified. Many a selfish bad man has one tender spot in his nature, his affection for his child, and for the sake of that child he will deny himself as he has never dreamed of doing for anything else; so far as that one influence is concerned he actually reverses the principle which governs the rest of his life. I have read of an African negress who on one occasion was beaten nearly to death by the brute to whom she was slave and paramour. Her murderer, for such he was, was arrested and placed on trial for his misdemeanour, in accordance with the rough justice of the white man in his dealings with the native. In the night the poor dying woman crawled painfully to the tree against which the ruffian lay bound, cut his cords, and set him free. It was her last act in this life; in the morning she was found lying dead on the spot whence the prisoner had fled. This particular story may or may not be true, but the same kind of thing has been true a million times in human history. What was the spirit in this benighted woman of the African wilds but the Christ spirit, the self-giving spirit seen with such unique sublimity in the life of Jesus?
Look abroad all through the world, look back upon the slow, upward progress of humanity to its home in God, and you will read the story of the incarnation of the eternal Son. Never has there been an hour so dark but that some gleams of this eternal light have pierced the murky pall of human ignorance and sin; never have bitter hate and fiendish cruelty gone altogether unrelieved by the human tenderness and self-devotion that testify of God. Indeed without the limitation, the struggle, and the pain, how would this Christ spirit ever have known itself? Granted that self-surrender had never been called for by the conditions of life, granted that our resources had always known themselves infinite, and that which is worthiest and sublimest in the nature of God and man alike could never have been revealed. This is why the eternal Son has become incarnate; this is what we are here to do, and upon the faithful doing of it depends our experience of the joy that the world can neither give nor take away. The life and death of Jesus are the central expression and ideal embodiment of this age-long process, a process the consummation of which will be the glorious return and triumphant ingathering of a redeemed and perfectly unified humanity to God. "And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all."
CHAPTER VIII
THE ATONEMENT
+I. Association of the Doctrine with Jesus+
+Importance of the subject.+—This brings us to a subject, which, more than any other, with the exception of that of the person of Jesus, has come under discussion at the present time. In the course of Christian history it has created a more extensive literature than probably any other doctrine. I mean the subject variously known as Salvation, Redemption, Atonement, and with which the terms Forgiveness, Expiation, Reconciliation, Ransom, Justification, Propitiation, Satisfaction, Sanctification, and such like have been commonly associated. The Christian doctrine of Atonement, as we may call it for convenience, bulks so large in Christian thought that all others may be held to be dependent upon it, even that of the person of Jesus; for, according to the received theology, Jesus became incarnate for our redemption, and that redemption can only be accomplished by one who is very God.
+The need for an adequate explanation.+—But there is no subject upon which modern Christian thought is less coherent than this. We are constantly hearing the statement that a rational theory of the Atonement is badly wanted, or that it is our duty to preach the fact without a theory, or that the Atonement is such a mystery that no theory is possible and we must just accept it on faith. This confession of helplessness shows that there is something seriously wrong with the conventional presentation of the doctrine. But I do not think the Atonement is such a very great mystery after all, and it ought to be possible to get at the heart of it without stultifying the intellect. Anyhow, let us try.
+The usual theological method of expounding it.+—As a rule treatises on the Atonement begin with an examination of the Scripture passages which are supposed to have a bearing upon it. Then follows a careful examination and criticism of the various theories of it which have successively held the field during its history; the author concludes by giving us his own. I do not propose to follow that method, for it does not possess a living interest for the mind of to-day; the psychological should take precedence of the historical. I do not feel called upon to take the doctrine of Atonement for granted and then proceed to try to find a place for it in Christian experience. On the contrary, I prefer to take human nature for granted and inquire whether it needs anything like a doctrine of Atonement. If it does not, let the doctrine go; if it does, let us see that the doctrine is presented in a reasonable fashion. If it cannot be presented reasonably, it is not wanted. But I think it is wanted, and more than wanted; it is already taken for granted by everyone who thinks seriously about life, whether it is called by its theological name or not.