All through my soul that praised, as the wish flowed visibly forth.”
The spirit of Beethoven is incarnate in his music; and he that hath heard the Fifth Symphony hath heard Beethoven.
The Incarnation of the Divine Spirit in man is the central feature of Terrestrial History. It is through man, and the highest man, that the revelation of what is meant by Godhead must necessarily come. The world—even the common everyday world—has accepted this, and is able to perceive its appropriateness and truth; and the traditional song of the angels, at the epoch of the Birth—
“Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace, goodwill among men,”
is still heard in the land. Whenever there is war at Christmas-time it is universally felt to be incongruous. Goodwill among men is conspicuous in cessation of private feuds, in overladen postbags, in family reunions and Christmas hampers and all manner of homely frivolities.
The Incarnation doctrine is the glorification of human effort, and the sanctification of childhood and simplicity of life; but it is a pity to reduce it to a dogma. It is well to leave something to intuitive apprehension, and to let the life and death of Christ gradually teach their own eloquent lesson without premature dogmatic assistance.
From that event we date our history, and the strongest believer in immanent Godhead can admit that the life of Jesus was an explicit and clear-voiced message of love to this planet from the Father of all. Naturally our conception of Godhead is still only indistinct and partial, but, so far as we are as yet able to grasp it, we must reach it through recognition of the extent and intricacy of the Cosmos, and more particularly through the highest type and loftiest spiritual development of man himself.
The most essential element in Christianity is its conception of a human God; of a God, in the first place, not apart from the Universe, not outside it and distinct from it, but immanent in it; yet not immanent only, but actually incarnate, incarnate in it and revealed in the Incarnation. The nature of God is displayed in part by everything, to those who have eyes to see, but is displayed most clearly and fully by the highest type of existence, the highest experience to which the process of evolution has so far opened our senses.
“’Tis the sublime of man,
Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves