(3) From the same point, we see at once to what double misunderstanding or double attack the Gospel not only may but must be liable. On the one side, it may be refused a hearing as miraculous; it may be understood as violating the natural order which it transcends; it may be regarded and resented as an anomaly in history. On the other side, a consideration of the aptness of its occurrence when and where it did occur, and of its harmonious relations to many lines of tendency will suggest the suspicion that it may be after all only a result, though a supreme and surprising result, of historical forces. In a word, it may be accused at once from separate, possibly from the same, quarters as too supernatural and too natural to be what it claims to be. It is all-important to notice at the outset that liability to this double attack is an inevitable incident of its true character and of that which makes its glory, viz. the presence of true Godhead under truly human conditions.
But to return to the main point.
The importance and interest of the subject of this paper may be inferred, as we have seen, directly from what the Incarnation claims to be. But we are not left to infer it for ourselves. Nothing is clearer or more striking than the place which it occupied from the outset in the declaration of the Gospel. Jesus Himself spoke of the Scribes of the kingdom as 'bringing forth out of their treasure things new and old'; and laid it down as a first principle of His kingdom that He was 'not come to destroy, but to fulfil[150].' While with surprising and commanding clearness He centres men upon Himself, and distinguishes Himself from all who came before Him, from 'the prophets and the law which prophesied until John'; He yet with evident care draws the new out of the old, and fits it on to the old: He delineates His own mission as a climax in a long appeal of God to Israel[151], and the opposition to Him and His, as a chapter of dénouement in the history of an old conflict between God and the ungodly[152]. He sees a 'necessity' for the happening of things to fulfil what had been said of old[153]. The very pith of the disciples' ignorance is their failure to see how the features of His work and character had been traced beforehand, and the supreme teaching which they receive from Him is that which discloses His correspondence to the whole tenor of the Scriptures of the past[154]. The teaching of the Apostles, and of those who followed them, is faithful to these lines. Though they have to convince the world of an Event which works a revolution, which is to turn men from darkness to light: though their perfect confidence in their own truth makes them see the things that went before as elements, 'weak and beggarly elements[155],' and they have moreover battles to fight against these 'elements' set up again as antagonists: though their adherence to the Old Testament was an ever fruitful source of difficulty and attack (of which Judaizing and Gnostic controversies are the record), yet nevertheless they unswervingly maintained the inspiration of the Old Testament, and stood upon it; and we distinguish without hesitation as their normal, primary, characteristic method that of appeal to the correspondence between their Gospel and every hope and word of Israel's faith: the 'revelation of the mystery ... is ... by the scriptures of the prophets ... made known to all nations[156].' The Hebrews who wistfully look back to their temple, law, and ritual, are not taught a stern forgetfulness of what had been, nor led vaguely to spiritualize its meaning, but are led to recognise in each part of the ancient system a line which leads up to Christ. Finally, the disciple who sets the true being of his Master in monumental and awful splendour as the Word who 'was with God and was God' now made manifest in the flesh, in the same breath carries us to the very core and source of all that can be implied in preparation by declaring the same Word to have been 'in the world' before, to have been the author of all things, and the unseen light of men[157].
The relation of Christ to history, or the preparation for the Gospel, is then no afterthought of our own or any recent time. It was Augustine's saying that Christianity was as old as the world[158]: and Tertullian's (one of almost venturesome boldness) that in the previous history Christ was schooling Himself for incarnation[159]. But it is not difficult to see that our own time is one which is specially fitted to appreciate and handle this aspect of the Christian truth. Our cultivation of the historical method, our historical realism or sense of the relation of persons or events to historical setting, our recognition of the part played in forming structure, function, character, by gradual process, by heredity, by evolution, our developed understanding of the links by which the parts and successions in all nature, and not least in what is human, are bound together—all these go to form a habit of mind which in presence of such a Revelation as that of the Gospel will at once busy itself, whether for satisfaction, for edification, for controversy, or for interpretation, with the relation of the Truth to the world into which it came, to all from amongst which it sprung. In such a time it is natural that attack should try to shew that facts which historical criticism has done much to secure, and a Life which it has become impossible to treat as a myth, are simply explicable according to the natural laws of historical causation. It is natural that Christianity should be explained as the flower and bloom of Judaism, or as sprung from the fusion of Greek and Jewish influences in a Galilean medium. Such explanations may not be new, but they are urged with new resources and a more subtle ingenuity. They have the advantage of being the sort of explanations which are naturally most congenial to the time. But out of the very stress of such attacks may come a special corroboration of Christian truth. The experiment is crucial: it can hardly be expected that attack of this kind can ever command greater skill and resource than it does at present. If therefore it should be proved to fail: if we are able to look men in the face and ask whether when all allowance is made for the subtle 'chemistries' of history and for the paradoxical way in which historical results spring from what precedes them, it is possible to think that Jesus Christ and His religion were a mere growth from antecedents—then we have here the prospect of such a confirmation of faith as no age less historically scientific could, in that kind, give and receive.
But this negative result, great as its value may be, can only be part of what Christian science may yield in this sphere for the elucidation and support of faith. It should surely be able to display with greater breadth and delicacy than ever before that correspondence between the Revelation of Christ and what went before it, which was of old indicated by saying that Christ came in the 'fulness of the time.' It should be able to enhance, and not (as men fear) to impair, the evidence of a Divine presence and influence, preparing for that which was to come, moulding the plastic material of history for a 'far-off Divine event.' It may seem as if this was not so. It may seem, for example, as if the severity and activity of historical and linguistic criticism had dimmed the clearness of those correspondences between prophetic utterances spoken centuries before Christ and the points in Him or His work whereby they were fulfilled, which were once so clear. It may seem, it is evidently true, that stricter canons of interpretation forbid for us that unbounded use of the happy expedient of allegory which could make everything in the Old Testament speak of Christ. But even if this were so (and with regard to prophecies we only partially grant it), is there no countervailing gain to reckon? The hand of God may be seen in what is marvellous, startling, exceptional, unexplained. Can it not be seen as distinctly and as persuasively in what is orderly, steadfast, intelligible, and where our reason, made in God's likeness, can follow along in some degree with the how and the why of His working? It was Christ's will to give special signs, yet the curiosity which 'sought after a sign' was not honoured by Christ like that wisdom which 'discerned the signs of the times,' and so could see the force of the special signs that were given because it saw them in their true moral and spiritual context[160]. Have we any reason to hope that our time may be suffered to do (and even be doing) something for the interpretation of the witness of history to Christ which has not been done before, and which is even an advance upon what has been done? Let us consider for a moment (in order to answer this question) what it is which specially engrosses the interest and admiration of all of us in the different branches of modern study and enquiry. It is the beauty of process. The practical men among us watch process in its mechanical forms as contrived by invention. The naturalists and the men of science have to an extraordinary extent developed our perception of it in nature: they shew us its range, and its incredible delicacy, flexibility, and intricacy; they shew us its enormous patience in the unceasing yet age-long movements which by microscopic or less than microscopic changes accumulate the coal, or lessen the mountain; they shew us the wonderful power of adaptation by which it accommodates itself to surroundings, and appropriates and transforms them to its need. The embryologist developes its wonders as it makes 'the bones to grow in the womb of her that is with child.' And the historians in their sphere do the like: it is for them, if not the beginning and end of their work, at least the most powerful of their methods, to shew the processes by which institutions, customs, opinions, rise and decline; to arrange the facts so as to display on their chart the steps of growth, the stages of decay; to shew influences blending to form events, and parting again to destroy or re-shape them.
There is beauty in all this, more than we can, perhaps, altogether analyse or explain. As living beings we sympathise with the life and movement of it all (or, as in the case of intricate machinery, with the imitation of life) compared with what stands stark, solid, unchanging; as intelligent beings we revel and delight in its intricacy, and, further, we are gratified by the way in which it subdues with explanation what would be anomalous, abrupt, motiveless, in the way of change or event. It gives us something like the pleasure which we take in the beauty of the exquisite subtle curves and shaded surfaces of a Raphael figure compared with the rough outline of a Dürer woodcut. But we could not long rest in the admiration of mere process, whether delicate or colossal. There is a rational element present in, or controlling, our sense of beauty, which asks whence and whither, which demands unity in detail; and this finds altogether new and delightful gratification when it can see a relation, a meaning, a grouping, a symmetry, of which processes are the ministers and instruments.
It is, then, this idea of beauty in process that we bring with us as we approach to behold the facts and method of God's Redemptive Work. It is altogether too strong in us to be left behind as we cross the threshold of this region; it is too much connected with all our thinking and experience. It is very possible that there may be exaggeration about it in us: and it is indispensable for us to recognise this, 'le défaut de notre qualité.' But all the same we cannot disown, though we must control, what is so specially our own. And if our love of process is prepared to be critical, it is also prepared to be gratified: and there is opened a prospect of fresh witness to the truth of the unchanging Gospel, if it should be found that its introduction into this world is ushered in by all the beauty of process, with all the grandeur of slow unhasting preparation, the surprises of gradual transformation, the delicacies of combination, which process allows.
Such a sight is much more than wonderful, and has in it, if our ideas of what is Divine are not very narrow, much more evidence of God's hand than any mere wonder can have. But it is as wonderful as anything can be. And if we still plead that our sense of wonder stipulates for exceptionalness, it has its own way of satisfying this—the way of uniqueness. For those features which we admire in process are capable, if combined with a certain degree of grandeur, completeness, and particularity, of conveying to us the impression of a unique thing. We may dismiss as a dialectical refinement the objection which has been made that, as is doubtless true, 'everything is unique.' None the less, there is a meaning in our ordinary language when it applies the epithet 'unique' to certain persons, classes, or things. A man of science may properly speak of a certain uniqueness in the way in which natural conditions are combined so as to make life possible: a historian will certainly miss truth if he does not recognise a special uniqueness in certain historical epoch-making moments. In proportion as we believe in Mind ordering the things of nature and history, such uniqueness will have speaking significance. And as uniqueness has its degrees, and rises according to the scale, quantity, character and completeness, of that which goes to make it up, so its significance will rise proportionately, until at last, arriving at uniqueness, which seems to us absolute, we gain evidence that there is before us a Supreme Thing, a true centre to the world. The evidence is not indeed demonstrative, but it is in a high degree corroborative, and it is the highest which history can offer. It is this evidence of uniqueness which, as it seems to me, we of the present day may with special fitness seek, and shall with special welcome find:
(1) in the shaping of world-history towards the Christian era,
(2) in the special preparation of the Jewish nation.