^ God could be known in nature, in conscience, in history ; but if He was to be thoroughly known, He must be known in a person. So Christ stands the central fount of personality, who explains, not my gifts, my attainments, my knowledge, my capacities, but me, that which lies beyond these, uses them and gives them meaning and coherence.^
iii. His Divinity. "And the Word was God."
1. The distinction of persons, so strongly emphasized by the second proposition, is in this third resolved into a community of essence : " And the Word was God." And this community of essence is not inconsistent with distinction of persons, but makes the communion of active Love possible; for none could, in the depths of eternity, dwell with and perfectly love and be loved by God, except one who Himself was God.
2. It is now apparent why St. John chooses this title to designate Christ in His pre-existent life. No other title brings out so clearly the identification of Christ with God, and the function of Christ to reveal God. It was a term which made the transition easy from Jewish Monotheism to Christian Trinitarian- ism. Being already used by the strictest Monotheists to denote a spiritual intermediary between God and the world, it is chosen by St .John as the appropriate title of Him through whom all revelation of God in the past had been mediated, and who has at length finished revelation in the person of Jesus Christ.
^ The experience of David Nitschmann, the Moravian, is related in Wesley's Journal, as follows : —
I then fell into doubts of another kind. I believed in God ;
* The Life and Letters of Manddl Creighton, ii. 212.
12 THE WORD
but not in Christ. I opened my heart to Martin Dober, who used many arguments with me, but in vain. For above four years I found no rest by reason of this unbelief ; till one day, as I was sitting in my house, despairing of any relief, those words shot into me, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself." I thought, "Then God and Christ are one." Immediately my heart was filled with joy; and much more at the remembrance of these words which I now felt I did believe : " The Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." ^
III.
The Worth of the Word.
The Apostle's words are practical. What practical use can we make of them ? There are three ways in which they bring us strength.
1. The first way in which this passage helps us is that it assures us that there is communication "between God and His creatures in Christ. We can choose between two theories of the universe and only two. The first is that it is all dumb, blind matter in a process of unconscious evolution. There is no God, for none is needed. All the morality that man has, he has created for himself in his own protection. It is vain to assault those far- reaching shining heavens with prayer— they are empty. Of this theory we are ready to say, with Wordsworth, better all the childish allegory of Greek mythology than this —
Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
If that theory fails there is but one other, it is that God exists, that God has shrined Himself in man, and that God has some means of communicating with man. That is credible — for it explains the grandeur of human life But if God really speaks with man, is it not just to suppose that it will be with unmis- takable clearness and certainty ? Will He not find means to
^ John Wesley's Journal (Staudaid edition), ii. 38.
ST. JOHN I. I 13
make us aware of what His mind is ? And when we find in Jesus, not only thoughts so high and perfect that none else are comparable with them, but a life so lofty and sublime that even the most sceptical of men see in it something Divinely beautiful — may we not say, behold this is God's communication with us ; this is His true Word ; behold the very mind of the Highest is incarnated in Jesus Christ ? "I can only comprehend God, as God is seen in Christ," was the confession of Dr. Arnold and Charles Kingsley. "The acknowledgment of God in Christ, accepted by thy reason, solves in thee all questions in the earth and out of it," said Browning ; but if there had been no Christ, then the assurance that God had communicated His mind to us would be wholly vain.
^ What has been the greatest dread of man since he entered on conscious intelligent life? It has been the dread of God's dumbness. The famous question put by Bonaparte to his atheistic Generals in Egypt, "Sirs, who made all that?" as he pointed to the starry splendour of the midnight sky over the Pyramids, has been a question always weighing heavily upon the heart of man. Man has never yet been wholly able to accom- modate himself to a purely animal existence. He has gazed upon the solid universe with curious eyes, has felt the mystery of depth opening over depth in the blue abyss above and around him ; has gone softly, haunted by the suspicion of a God hidden in stream and wood; has realized that life is an enigma for which there must needs be some answer. I look upon the ruined temples of Egypt, and inscriptions meet me eloquent of man's search for God; I enter the tombs of the old Etruscans, and over the funeral urn is the rising sun — mute witness to a hope which survives death. That strange altar to the unknown God, which St. Paul found at Athens, is discoverable in every land, among all peoples, through all time. " Sirs, who made all this ? " man asks ever and again in painful astonishment. Can it be that the Maker is dumb ? Can it be that He has created children whom He disowns? Is there no voice or language in all that starry immensity, all these vague, unending fields of splendour ? That God should be dumb — that He should sit far from us, He who has made us, silent as a stone amid the rush of worlds — that is the most intolerable of thoughts, that is man's greatest dread, that is the terror which has cast its shadow on his heart from the beginning of the ages.^