[192] S. Matt. xii. 38; S. John vi. 30, 31, in each case following some of our Lord's own signs.
[193] This comes before us vividly in Justin Martyr's account of his own conversion. Dial. c. Tryph. 3 ff. 'Thus and for this reason I am a philosopher.'
[194] S. Matt. xvi. 16.
V.
THE INCARNATION AND DEVELOPMENT.
J. R. ILLINGWORTH.
I. The last few years have witnessed the gradual acceptance by Christian thinkers of the great scientific generalization of our age, which is briefly, if somewhat vaguely, described as the Theory of Evolution. History has repeated itself, and another of the 'oppositions of science' to theology has proved upon inquiry to be no opposition at all. Such oppositions and reconciliations are older than Christianity, and are part of what is often called the dialectical movement; the movement, that is to say, by question and answer, out of which all progress comes. But the result of such a process is something more than the mere repetition of a twice-told tale. It is an advance in our theological thinking; a definite increase of insight; a fresh and fuller appreciation of those 'many ways' in which 'God fulfils Himself.' For great scientific discoveries, like the heliocentric astronomy, are not merely new facts to be assimilated; they involve new ways of looking at things. And this has been pre-eminently the case with the law of evolution; which, once observed, has rapidly extended to every department of thought and history, and altered our attitude towards all knowledge. Organisms, nations, languages, institutions, customs, creeds, have all come to be regarded in the light of their development, and we feel that to understand what a thing really is, we must examine how it came to be. Evolution is in the air. It is the category of the age; a 'partus temporis'; a necessary consequence of our wider field of comparison. We cannot place ourselves outside it, or limit the scope of its operation. And our religious opinions, like all things else that have come down on the current of development, must justify their existence by an appeal to the past.
It is the object of the following pages to consider what popular misconceptions of the central doctrine of our religion, the Incarnation, have been remedied; what more or less forgotten aspects of it have been restored to their due place; what new lights have been thrown upon the fulness of its meaning, in the course of our discussion of the various views of evolution.
In face of the historical spirit of the age, the study of past theology can never again be regarded as merely a piece of religious antiquarianism. And there are two classes of mind to which it should be of especial service. Many an earnest worker in the Christian cause, conscious how little the refinements of philosophy can influence for good or evil the majority of men, and generously impatient of all labour wasted, when the labourers are so few, is apt to under-estimate what he considers the less practical departments of theology; forgetful that there are souls, and those among the noblest, to whom the primary avenue of access is the intellect, and who can only be led homeward by the illuminative way. The Christian of this type may be materially helped towards welcoming wider views, by being convinced that what he has been too easily apt to regard as metaphysical subtleties, or as dangerous innovations, or as questionable accommodations of the Gospel to the exigencies of passing controversy, are after all an integral part of the great Catholic tradition. On the other hand, many plausible attacks upon the Christian creed are due to the inadequate methods of its professed interpreters. Fragments of doctrine, torn from their context and deprived of their due proportions, are brandished in the eyes of men by well-meaning but ignorant apologists as containing the sum total of the Christian faith, with the lamentable consequence that even earnest seekers after truth, and much more its unearnest and merely factious adversaries, mislead themselves and others into thinking Christianity discredited, when in reality they have all along been only criticising its caricature. Such men need reminding that Christianity is greater than its isolated interpreters or misinterpreters in any age; that in the course of its long history it has accumulated answers to many an objection which they in their ignorance think new; and that, in the confidence of its universal mission and the memory of its many victories, it still claims to be sympathetic, adequate, adaptable to the problems and perplexities of each successive age.
The general tendency of thought since the Reformation has been in the direction of these partial presentations of Christianity. The Reformers, from various causes, were so occupied with what is now called Soteriology, or the scheme of salvation, that they paid but scant attention to the other aspects of the Gospel. And the consequence was that a whole side of the great Christian tradition, and one on which many of its greatest thinkers had lavished the labours of a lifetime, was allowed almost unconsciously to lapse into comparative oblivion; and the religion of the Incarnation was narrowed into the religion of the Atonement. Men's views of the faith dwindled and became subjective and self-regarding, while the gulf was daily widened between things sacred and things secular; among which latter, art and science, and the whole political and social order, gradually came to be classed.