It is not my purpose at present to retell the story, or to point out how much criticism has left unshaken. I want rather to show how the historical Christ, as a revelation of God, fits into a cosmic system of evolution and how He is related to the Spirit that witnesses with our spirits and is the inward life of the Saints of all ages and lands.
I shall not use the language or the methods of theology. I shall feel my way along the great arteries of human experience and try to throw light and suggestion rather than to establish some final and complete dogma. To begin at once with the problem before us, how shall we think of Christ? Was He man? Was He God? Was He some miraculous union of two essentially unrelated natures? Here are the questions which have split the Christian world up into camps and which have busied schoolmen in all the centuries.
The difficulty in almost all the theological discussions on the subject has been that they started with God and man isolated, separated, unrelated. No true revelation of such a God ever could be made through a human life, for divinity and humanity on this theory are conceived as two totally diverse natures. Modern psychology and recent studies of social life have made us familiar with a deeper view of human personality and have prepared for a more adequate study of Divine personality than was possible when the historic creeds were formulated. We know that God and man are conjunct and that neither can be separated absolutely from the other. There never has been any doubt of man’s need of God, but we now know that God also needs us and that our lives are mutually organic. Every clew which leads us to God shows Him to us as a spiritual and social Being—in no sense solitary and self-sufficient. Our own self-consciousness, our own ideals, our passion for the unrealized, imply and involve more than an impersonal energy at the heart of things. There must be a spiritual matrix for this living, throbbing, growing social organism in which personal life is formed. Our own experience carries in itself the implication of a genuinely spiritual Person at the heart of the universe of whom we all partake. The spiritual history of the race has forever settled this elemental fact, at least for all who feel the full significance of life. It is not an assumption, it is not a mere belief—it is involved in all we feel and know and are. But a spiritual, personal Being must reveal Himself. An unmanifested God—unknown and unknowable—is no God at all. He would be abstract and unreal. The least human person who poured his life out into those about him—who loved and suffered for the sake of another—would be a higher being than an infinite God shut up in the closed circle of His own self life. It is a law as old as the morning star that one must lose himself to find himself, must give to get, must go forth bearing precious seed in order to come again with sheaves of harvest. The moment it is settled that there is a divine Person as the ultimate reality of the universe, it is also settled that He will reveal Himself, that He will put His Life into manifold manifestations and that He will find His joy in “working all things up to better,” to use Clement’s phrase.
So long as the processes of evolution were confined to the plant and brute there could be no revelation of anything but force; or at most there could be only dawnings of anything higher. The forms of life which won in the struggle and survived were manifestations of power—they hardly implied anything more. The tough spine and the strong jaw and the sharp claw were all that mattered. Everything that appeared was pushed into existence by a force from behind. There was no sign or hint of freedom, or of life formed under the sway of a vision or an ideal. Things moved “for a million aeons through the vast, waste dawn” toward a goal, but the goal was never in sight and it played no part in the process.
John Fiske has, somewhere, denied the truth of the proverb that “nature abhors leaps,” and he has given a beautiful illustration from the cutting of a cone. If you pass a plane parallel to the base of a cone you cut a circle. If you tilt the plane slightly the curve becomes an ellipse. The ellipse grows more eccentric as the tilting increases and finally without any warning your plane cuts a parabola whose sides curve off into infinity and never touch ends again. Some such mighty leap appears in the process of evolution. Up to a certain point life evolved by forces working a tergo.[2] There is a slight tilt in the system and a being appears capable of selecting a goal for himself and of acting to attain it, a being who could live in some degree for a world as it ought to be.[3]
This is what in America we call “the great divide”—the watershed which determines the streams of a continent. As soon as there was a being who could select ideals and live for conscious ends a new kind of evolution began. The other side of “the divide,” evolution had been physical,—body, and body function had been the goal. This side “the divide,” it was spiritual and social, and the goal was the evolution of the man within man. The things which mattered now were love, sacrifice, service, goodwill rather than “tooth and claw.” Before, nature’s goal had been along the line of least resistance. Now, the line of march set straight against instinct and along the line of greatest resistance. There could be advance on this side “the divide,” only as the ideal became clearer and its sway more coercive.
Ever since man was man he has transcended the actual and lived by vision, which means, I think, that finite and infinite are not sundered and that we always partake of more than just ourselves. Beyond the edge of what we are there is always dawning a farther possibility—that which we ought to be—the a fronte compulsion.[4] This is one of God’s ways of revealing Himself. It is a man’s chief glory—the glory of the imperfect.
“Growth came when, looking your last on them all
You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day
And cried with a start—what if we so small