Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not[338].
And this principle does not stop short of religious influences Conscience is itself a witness to it, as it implies that all parts of our nature are not sufficient guides to themselves, but that God has gifted one special faculty with power to control the rest. 'Men of character,' it has been said, 'are the conscience of the society to which they belong.' In the Jewish nation itself, the prophets were the circle of Jehovah's friends; they knew His secrets, they kept alive the ideal of the nation. 'What the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world' was the parallel claim of an early apologist[339]. Analogies crowd in, then, on every side, to shew how rational is this claim on the part of Judaism.
Revelation only accepts this fact, and adds to it the assertion that it is no accident but a part of the Divine Purpose. It is the result of God's election. The Jewish nation, and subsequently the Christian Church, is not only a blessing to the rest of the world, but it is conscious that it is a blessing. This truth has been revealed to it partly to keep it ever mindful of its sense of dependence upon the Giver of all good gifts, partly to give it tenacity and courage to cling to a gift which it knows to be of inestimable value for all mankind. 'The election was simply a method of procedure adopted by God in His wisdom by which He designed to fit the few for blessing the many, one for blessing all[340].'
It must be from considerations such as these that we approach the foundation of the Christian Church and the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ on which it rests. We approach it with the expectation that we shall find these principles embodied in it, for Christianity sprang directly out of Judaism, and so would naturally inherit its principles: and to go deeper still, the very essence of the Incarnation lies in the consecration of human life and human means. He who before had been acting invisibly upon the world as the Word, implanting life and light in man, now entered visibly into human flesh. All tendencies which made for the fulness of life and truth before His coming, all that tended to enlighten, elevate, combine men, had been His unknown working: now they are known to be His. The Infinite appears in finite form; the spiritual takes the material in which to express itself; human media are consecrated to deeper ends, and charged with a fuller meaning than before: so that, in Hooker's words, 'We cannot now conceive how God should, without man, exercise Divine power or receive the glory of Divine praise[341].' 'What you do now even after the flesh, that is spiritual' is the bold paradox of S. Ignatius; and he adds the reason, 'for you do all in Christ Jesus[342].' Thus—
In this twofold sphere, the twofold man
Holds firmly to the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it....
The whole temporal show related royally
And built up to eterne significance