And this brings new life into the world. Christ is the pro- pitiation for His people through whom they recover their lost place in the Divine favour. But besides this. He is their life, and is made to them a quickening spirit. To Him they are indebted for their new existence; in His likeness they are re- newed ; on Him they depend ; and in Him they find their unity. His own favourite image of the relation is that of a tree : " I am the vine ; ye are the branches." The branches spring from the tree ; they are nourished by it ; they are in union with it ; and so believers have their being from Christ; they live in Him; they are one with Him.
^ The Incarnation of the Son of God has not left human nature where it was, but imported into it a new Divine splendour. Wonderful as man was in his created likeness to God, the entrance of the Son of God into the vital body of humanity has raised human nature to a higher point than it ever attained before. This, like the Incarnation itself, is as difficult to define as it is clearly a fact. When "the Word became flesh, and dwelt among men," the measurements of humanity had to be taken from a new height, even from the glory of the Son of Man.^
So the Lord of all things,
Caring for His own. Even for the small things
Left His golden throne.
* J. Thomas, The Mysteries of Grace, 24.
ST. JOHN I. 14 51
Down the mystic stairway,
To the bourne of earth, Of the womb of Mary,
By a human birth.
Came the Sun of Healing
Above human ken, All His might concealing
From the sons of men.
That He might precede them,
Out of pain and strife, Head them, join them, teach them, lead them
Into fuller life.
For the life diurnal
Waxeth old and dim; Love and life eternal
Eest alone in Him!
All is in the story
How the Christ brought good In a costly crimson glory
Of His Brotherhood.!
IT.
The Human Life.
" And dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."
The Nativity was but the beginning of a long work. The Son of God not only came as man, but He grew as man grows. He passed through the stages of human development, " tempted in all points" even as we are. He consecrated not our nature only, but our life. "He dwelt among us." He shared the transitory joys and griefs — the spirit of righteous anger and the spirit of thankful exultation — which belong to us. "He taber- nacled among us," — to preserve the idea of the original, which carries us back to the time when the people of Israel wandered as pilgrims in the wilderness, and the visible glory of the Lord rested when they should rest and guided their forward path, the sign and type of God's abiding presence. Even so it was
1 John W. Taylor, The Docn-kuperf 6.
52 THE INCARNATION OF THE WORD
with Christ. He tabernacled with us, and the faithful beheld His glory. He marked out the path of life. He hallowed each resting-place upon the way. The material splendour of the fiery pillar was changed into a spiritual beacon ; but it was still clear with the light of heaven — clear to the loving. But even here, as of old time, that which is the light of the Christian is the thick gloom which enwraps the unbelieving — the thick gloom or even the consuming fire.
We know, we feel, we value all that He gave up. We know how He passed through that life of man on earth, which He accepted from its beginning to its close. We know that there is nothing so pinched and hard and trying in man's condition that it was not His will to go through. We know that there is nothing so mean and scorned, so rough and dangerous in what the poor of this world have to put up with that did not fall to His lot when He came among men. That we might not feel Him to be in lot and condition above any of us, He chose to be helow most of us — on a level with the meanest and the most help- less. He asked for no privilege as the Son of God ; He refused nothing appointed to man to go through ; He desired not to be spared any burden of our mortal state. As each thing came in the course of years, He accepted it. He hurried nothing ; He waited till the years should change the babe into the child, and the child into the boy, and the boy into the man. For He came to be among us, not a passing vision, or a strange spectacle, but actually and in earnest to be man with men, to be " flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone," to bind us to Himself in life, and in death, and in resurrection. He came that we might see and know that, being what He was, He had made Himself one of ourselves, living our very life, feeling, suffering, buffeted, tempted like man, but without man's sin.
^ What must it be, only to be a man, when you think what He did to save and to bless mankind ? What must it be, only to be a man, when you think that it is to be what Jesus Christ was once — and is now at the Father's right hand ? Let it be enough, to be of that nature which God cared for so wonderfully, for which He has opened such a road to perfection, for which He has provided such wondrous hopes. It can wot be a small thing to be a man — to be what our God and Maker was pleased to become, that He might be more closely joined to us. It cannot be a small