^ James Hamilton, Works, iii. 249,
40 THE INCARNATION OF THE WORD
in the Epistle to the Philippians (ii. 6, 7) : " Who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross."
So, too, St. Peter declares that long before Jesus came into the world, the Spirit of Jesus was moving and working in the prophets of the Hebrew people : " Concerning which salvation the prophets sought and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Clirist, and the glories that should follow them" (1 Pet. i. 10, 11).^
ii. His Humanity.
1. Very early in the history of the Christian Church, and even before all the original Apostles had passed away, there were persons who had received Christian baptism and professed to be Christians to whom it seemed incredible that our Lord was really man — that according to the vigorous statement of St. John in the text, He " became flesh." The form in which St. John affirms the truth was, no doubt, suggested by the heresies which denied it. There was a very common belief in the ancient world that human sin has its origin and roots in the flesh and blood of the body, and that all matter is necessarily evil; to disengage and separate the higher and spiritual life of man from his physical nature was therefore supposed to be the true discipline of moral and spiritual perfection. There were teachers in the Church, claiming to speak in the power of the Spirit of God, who taught this doctrine, and to whom it was inconceivable that our Lord could have had a body like our own. St. John was thinking of these teachers when he said in his Epistle, " Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God ; and every spirit which confesseth not Jesus is not of God : and this is the spirit of the antichrist." r ^ Earnest belief in Christ's divinity has a difficulty in / allowing His real humanity. The idea, for example, of Christ's growing, as a man, in wisdom as well as in stature, is repugnant to some minds; and, despite the teaching of Scripture, there are
^ G. S. Barrett, The Earliest Christian Hymn, 32.
ST. JOHN I. 14 41
those who refuse to think of His being subject to any ordinary human limitations, whether of power or of knowledge. This idea of Christ, too common among believers in His divinity, finds expression in Shelley's fine but misleading figure —
A mortal shape to him Was like the vapour dim, Which the orient planet animates with light.
The same poet makes Him' tread the thorns of death and shame, like a triumphal path, of which He never truly felt the sharpness. One of our hymns falls into this heresy when it speaks of the "seeming infant of a day." This is exactly to reduce His humanity to a mere appearance. He was not the "seeming infant," but the real " infant of a day." I have myself met people to whom Christ's patience and suffering, for example, could offer
. no consolation, because they said, " He was God all the time, and
/ it was easy for Him." ^
^ " I believe," cries Irving with the deepest emotion, " that my Lord did come down and toil, and sweat, and travail, in exceeding great sorrow, in this mass of temptation, with which I and every sinful man am oppressed ; did bring His Divine presence into death-possessed humanity, into the one substance of manhood created in Adam, and by the Fall brought into a state of resistance and alienation from God, of condemnation and proclivity to evil, of subjection to the devil ; and bearing it all upon His shoulders in that very state into which God put it after Adam had sinned, did suiTer its sorrows and pains, and swimming anguish, its darkness, wasteness, disconsolateness, and hiddenness from the countenance of God ; and by His faith and patience did win for Himself the name of the Man of Sorrows and the author and finisher of our faith."
This was the very essence of his belief. And when from unexpected quarters, everywhere round him, he discovered that other men, that his fathers and brethren in his own Church, disowned this central truth which gave life and reality to the gospel, it went to his heart like a personal affliction. It was not that they differed with him on a controverted subject ; the matter was different to his grieved and wondering perception. To him it appeared that they denied the Lord. The deepest heart of Divine grace and pity, the real unspeakable redemption, seemed to Irving overlooked and despised when this wonderful identity of nature was disputed. He stood wondering and sorrowful, always in the
^ A. Ualliday Douglas.
42 THE INCARNATION OF THE WORD