But they were right in a deeper sense. If we think of the historical Christ, as I have tried to set forth, as the manifestation of the Divine and the human in a single personal Life then wherever man finds God humanly revealed he properly names the revelation with the historic name. The historic incarnation was no final event. It was the supreme instance of God and man in a single life—the type of continuous Divine-human fellowship. God’s human revelation of Himself is not limited to a single date. As Athanasius so boldly said: He became man that we might become divine. Christ is the prophesy of a new humanity—a humanity penetrated with the life and power of God and this continued personal manifestation of God through men is Christ inwardly and spiritually revealed.
It is a primary truth of Christianity that God reaches man directly. No person is insulated. As ocean floods the inlets, as sunlight environs the plant, so God enfolds and enwreathes the finite spirit. There is this difference, however, inlet and plant are penetrated whether they will or not. Sea and sunshine crowd themselves in a tergo. Not so with God. He can be received only through appreciation and conscious appropriation. He comes only through doors that are purposely opened for Him. A man may live as near God as the bubble is to the ocean and yet not find Him. He may be “closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet,” and still be missed. Historical Christianity is dry and formal when it lacks the immediate and inward response to our Great Companion; but our spirits are trained to know Him, to appreciate Him, by the mediation of historical revelation. A person’s spiritual life is always dwarfed when cut apart from history. Mysticism is empty unless it is enriched by outward and historical revelation. The supreme education of the soul comes through an intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ of history. One who wished to feel the power of beauty would go to some supreme master of color and form who could exhibit them on canvas and not merely lecture about them. One who desired to feel the power of harmony would go, not to the boy with his harmonica, but to the Beethovens or Mozarts of the race who have revealed what an instrument and a human hand can do. So he who wishes to realize and practice the presence of God must inform himself at the source and fount, must come face to face with Him who was the highest human revelation of God. No one of us can interpret his own longings or purposes until he reads them off in the light of some loftier type of personality. That person understands himself best who grows intimate in fellowship with some noble character. And any man who wishes to discover the meaning of the inward voice and to interpret the divine breathings which come to human souls needs to be informed and illuminated by the supreme revelation of the ages.
With perfect fitness, then, we speak of the inward Presence as the spiritual Christ. It is the continuation of the same revelation which was made under the “Syrian blue.”
The procession of the Holy Ghost is a continuous revelation and exhibition of Christ within men. Whether we use the expression Holy Spirit or Christ within or spiritual Christ, we mean God operating upon human spirits and consciously witnessed and appreciated in them. “The Lord is the Spirit,” cries Paul when, with unveiled face, he discovers that he is being transformed into His image from glory to glory. “Joined to the Lord in one Spirit,” is another testimony of the same sort.
Unfortunately the doctrine of the Christ within—“the real presence”—has generally been held vaguely, and it has easily run into error and even fanaticism. The most common error has come from the prevalent view that when the Spirit—the inward Christ—comes in, the man goes out. It has been supposed that the finite is suppressed and the infinite supplants it and operates instead of it. This view is not only contrary to Scripture, but also contrary to psychological possibility. What really happens is that the human spirit through its awakened appreciation appropriates into its own life the divine Life which was always near and was always meant for it. The true view has been well put by August Sabatier[6]: “It is not enough to represent the Spirit of God as coming to the help of man’s spirit, supplying strength which he lacks, an associate or juxtaposed force, a supernatural auxiliary. Paul’s thought has no room for such a moral and psychological dualism, although popular language easily permits it. His thought is quite otherwise profound. There is no simple addition of divine power and human power in the Christian life. The Spirit of God identifies itself with the human me into which it enters and whose life it becomes. If we may so speak, it is individualized in the new moral personality which it creates. A sort of metamorphosis, a transubstantiation, if the word may be permitted, takes place in the human being. Having been carnal it has become spiritual. A ‘new man’ arises from the old man by the creative act of the spirit of God. Paul calls Christians [πνευματικόι], properly speaking, ‘the inspired.’ They are moved and guided by the Spirit of God. The spirit dwells in them as an immanent virtue, whose fruits are organically developed as those of the flesh. Supernatural gifts become natural, or rather, at this mystical height, the antithesis created by scholastic rationalism becomes meaningless and is obliterated.” That is precisely my view and if I had not found it here so well said I should have put the same idea into my own words. There are no known limits to the possible translation of the Spirit of God—the Eternal Christ—into human personality. There are all degrees and varieties of it as there are all degrees and varieties of physical life. One stands looking at a century-old oak tree and he wonders how this marvelous thing ever rose out of the dead earth where its roots are. As a matter of fact it did not. A tree is largely transformed sunlight. There is from first to last an earth element to be sure, but the tree is forever drawing upon the streams of sunlight which flood it and it builds the intangible light energy into leaf and blossom and fibre until there stands the old monarch, actually living on sunshine! But the little daisy at its feet, modest and delicate, is equally consolidated sunshine, though it pushes its face hardly six inches from the soil in which it was born. So one spirit differs from another spirit in glory. Some have but feebly drawn upon the Spiritual Light out of which strong lives are builded, others have raised the unveiled face to the supreme Light and have translated it into a life of spiritual beauty and moral fibre. Thus the revelation of God in the flesh goes on from age to age. The Christ-life propagates itself like all life-types—the last Adam proves to be a life-giving spirit. He is the first born among many brethren. The actual re-creation, the genuine identification of self with Christ may go on until a man may even say—“Christ lives in me;” “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus;” “It has pleased God to reveal His Son in me.”
“See if, for every finger of thy hands,
There be not found, that day the world shall end
Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ’s word,
That He will grow incorporate with all,
With me as Pamphylax, with him as John,