St. Philip and other anxious and sorrowing spirits need no longer go about groping for guidance and crying mournfully, " Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." Jesus has already shown us the Father. Those who have really seen Him have seen the Father so far as it is possible or necessary that we should see Him in this life. God has fulfilled to man that old gladdening promise, " I will make all my goodness pass before thee."
^ Christ is the ladder between God and man. In His humanity He touches the earth ; in His Divinity He touches the heaven, and on Jesus Christ as a ladder God comes down from heaven to earth and makes Himself known to man; on Jesus Christ as a ladder man climbs up from earth to heaven and is joined to God. Wonderful is the comprehensiveness of this short creed which Jesus Christ taught us: "Believe in God," — that
ST. JOHN XIV. i 4^
solves all the problems of creation ; " Believe in me " — that solves all the problems of redemption.^
2. Christ is Himself Divine. — Not only is Jesus Christ the Eevealer of God, but He Himself is God. Light shines through a vnndow, but the light and the glass that makes it visible have nothing in common vs^ith one another. The Godhead shines through Christ, but Se is not a mere transparent medium. It is Himself that He is showing us v^hen He is showing us God. " He that hath seen me hath seen " — not the light that streams through Me — but "hath seen," in Me, "the Father." And because He is Himself Divine and the Divine Eevealer, therefore the faith that grasps Him is inseparably one with the faith that grasps God. Men could look upon a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Paul, and in them recognize the irradiation of the divinity that imparted itself through them, but the medium was forgotten in proportion as that which it revealed was beheld. You cannot forget Christ in order to see God more clearly; to behold Him is to behold God.
^ This was reached at a very early stage of Christian thought by a writer of inspired insight who seized his pen and, without argument or explanation, wrote : the Word was God. The critical penetrativeness of that writer is too little recognized. He overleapt centuries of controversy. He saw at the first glance, what all history has abundantly demonstrated, that all inter- mediate compromises, such as the Arian, were neither historically nor logically tenable, and that, therefore, the issue was clean and clear between mere humanity and very Deity. With that issue before him, he wrote, not so much the best or highest but the only description of Jesus that he could write. As a Christian, he could not describe Christ as mere man ; nor can we. As a thinker he could not describe Him as an intermediate divinity ; nor can we. If then he was to write at all he coiild write but one thing, and if we are to say at all what Christ is, we can say but that one thing too. It is saved from being quite incredible only by being quite inevitable.^
3. All imperfect revelation of God is prophetic of, and leads up towards, the perfect revelation in Jesus Christ. — The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews gives that truth in a very striking fashion.
* A. T. Pierson, The Hopes of the Gospel, 130. 2 P. C. Simpson, The Fact of Christ, 111. ST. JOHN (2) — 4
50 SECRET OF THE UNTROUBLED HEART
He compares all other means of knowing God to fragmentary syllables of a great word, of which one was given to one man and another to another. God " spoke at sundry times and in manifold portions to the fathers by the prophets " ; but the whole word is articulately uttered by the Son, in whom He has " spoken unto us in these last times." The imperfect revelation, by means of those who were merely mediums for the revelation, leads up to Him who is Himself the Kevelation, the Eevealer, and the Eevealed. And in like manner, all the imperfect faith that, laying hold of other fragmentary means of knowing God, has tremulously tried to trust Him, finds its climax and consummate flower in the full-blossomed faith that lays hold upon Jesus Christ. The unconscious prophecies of heathendom; the trust that select souls up and down the world have put in One whom they dimly apprehended ; the faith of the Old Testament saints ; the rudimentary beginnings of a knowledge of God and of a trust in Him which are found in men to-day, and amongst us, outside of the circle of Christianity — all these things are as manifestly incomplete as a building reared half its height, and waiting for the corner-stone to be brought forth, the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the intelligent and full acceptance of Him and faith in Him.
As ideas, the central points of Christian faith — such as a trust in the Divine Fatherhood and a hope beyond the grave — are not altogether new. Many earnest and noble souls have stretched out their minds towards them. What, then, was lacking for faith ? Just that, after all, there were but ideas, speculations, yearnings; and our thoughts on these matters are not the sure measure of what really is. Before the stern un- yielding facts of life and especially before life's final fact of death, how easily such thoughts falter and fail.