•f[ " One may deal with things without love, one may cut down trees, make bricks, and hammer iron without love, but one cannot deal with men without love." 2
T[ Paracelsus believed that knowledge is power, and it was that that kindled and kept alive for a time his transcendent ambition. And when he was defeated, when his mistake had become clear to him, it was natural that he should say :
What wonder if I saw no way to shun
Despair? The power I sought for man, seemed God's.
But he had learned a deeper lesson than that. He had come to
see that there is a force surpassing in its majesty and might any
1 J. G. Bowran. 2 Leo Tolstoi.
376 LAW OR LOVE
that could possibly accrue from the acquisition of boundless stores of learning :
I saw Aprile — my Aprile there !
And as the poor melodious wretch disburthened
His heart, and moaned his weakness in my ear,
I learned my own deep error ; love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power, always much more love;
Love still too straitened in his present means,
And earnest for new power to set love free.1
II.
The Method of Love.
i. God sent His own Son.
1. The words imply that the Divine Sonshjp of Jesus was not a relationship built up in the course of His life upon earth by acts of obedience and spiritual fellowship. A king can only send as his messenger and representative one who has already grown into such ripe wisdom and proved loyalty that he can fulfil the trust imposed upon him. To be sent implies an antecedent character and personality which qualify for the special mission.
■[J We cannot feel the power of God's condemnation of sin by the Cross till we have a just conception and realization of the truth of the person of Him who endured the Cross and despized the shame. Then the thought becomes overwhelming. Whether God has any other way by which He can more forcibly and solemnly express His sense of the evil and demerit of sin to others of His creatures, we do not know ; but we can conceive of no way in which He could have more forcibly and solemnly expressed it to us than the way He has chosen — through the voluntary death of His own Divine Son on the malefactor's cross.
2. God sent Him. For the condemnation of sin by Christ God owed to Himself as the righteous God who hates sin ; and He owed it also to us, whom He is anxious to save from sin ; and instead of dispensing with it in the fulness of His Fatherhood, as some would tell us, His Fatherhood made it the more obligatory.
1 J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 14G.
ROMANS vm. 3, 4 377
The doctrine of the Fatherhood of God can in no way conflict with the true doctrine of the Atonement, but confirms it ; for the true father must ever have a regard to what may affect the welfare of his children ; and what could have more to do with our welfare than the conveyance to us of the heavenly Father's own sense and estimate of sin ?
T[ There was more fatherhood in the Cross (where holiness met guilt) than in the prodigal's father (where love met shame). There was more fatherhood for our souls in the desertion of the Cross than in that which melts our hearts in the prodigal's embrace. It is not a father's sensitive love only that we have wounded, but His holy law. Man is not a mere runaway, but a rebel ; not a pitiful coward, but a bold and bitter mutineer. Does not Kant confess as a moralist the radical evil in man, and Carlyle speak of his " infinite damnability " ? 1
ii. In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh.
Christ was sent " in likeness of sinful flesh," not as if He had taken on Him the " likeness of flesh " in the sense of a semblance of body instead of its reality : but St. Paul means us to understand likeness to the flesh which sinned, because the flesh of Christ, which committed no sin itself, was like that which had sinned — like it in its nature, but not in the corruption it received from Adam : whence we also affirm that there was in Christ the same flesh as that whose nature in man is sinful.2
1. The phrase, " the likeness of the flesh of sin," implies the real humanity of Jesus, and His perfect sinlessness ; and suggests the first way in which He condemns sin in the flesh. In His life He repeats the law in a higher fashion. What the one spoke in words the other realized in " loveliness of perfect deeds " ; and all men own that example is the mightiest preacher of righteousness, and that active goodness draws to itself reverence and sways men to imitate. But His life lived in human nature gives a new hope of the possibilities of that nature even in us. The dream of perfect beauty " in the flesh " has been realized. What the Man Christ Jesus was, He was that we may become. In the very flesh in which the tyrant rules, Jesus shows the possibility and the loveliness of a holy life.