* J. Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed.
* W. 0. E. Oesterley, in the Encyclopcedm of Religion and Ethics, i. 1.
REVELATION xxii. 13 369
perfect nature there was the image of what the new creation was to be. Already, before man trod the Garden in the high glory of his new Godlikeness, the pattern of the thing he was to be existed in the nature of Him who was to make him. Before the clay was fashioned and the breath was given, this humanity existed in the Divinity; already there was a union of the Divine and the human ; and thus already there was the eternal Christ.
^ The coin of the realm is the creation of the sovereign ; it proceeds from his authority and is called in by his authority, in token of which it bears his image and the inscription of his name. The soul of man is the spiritual creation of God, and, what is incomparably greater, the soul is created for union with God, of which she bears the sign in the image of God and in the inscrip- tion of His law, graved with light upon her spirit. The image and name of the sovereign are cast on perishable metal, but whilst the metal lasts it asserts his sovereign claim. The soul received from God bears His image and His law, the signet of His sovereign claim upon that soul. The coin of the sovereign bears his image on the surface ; the image of God is in the inmost con- stitution of the soul, the soul herself is that image, and the light of God's law sealed therein is the direction of the soul to her Divine Original.^
2. Thus the Incarnation was God's commentary on that verse in Genesis, " In the image of God created he man." Yes, " from the beginning " there had been a second Person in the Trinity — a Christ, whose nature included the man-type. In due time this man-type was copied and incorporated in the special exhibition of a race. There it degenerated and went off into sin. And then the Christ, who had been what He was for ever, came and brought the pattern and set it down beside the degenerate copy, and wrought men's hearts to shame and penitence when they saw the everlasting type of what they had been meant to be, walking among the miserable shows of what they were.
^ In Jesus Christ there is historically presented to us the actual realization of the Divine image in man. The resplendently glorious fact about Christ as man is that in Him we have the perfect realization of the moral image of the Father. Alone of all who have ever lived on earth, Jesus was absolutely and stainlessly holy. No flaw of imperfection marred His character; every
* Bishop Ullathorne, The Endowments of Man, 27. REV. — 24
370 THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA
moral and spiritual excellence existed in Him in the highest con- ceivable degree ; His will was throughout in complete unison with the Father's. While of every other it has to be confessed that out of the heart proceed evil thoughts and desires, the thoughts and affections that issued from His heart were wholly pure. In His spirit shone the light of a perfect knowledge of the Father ; His life was the model of perfect love, trust, obedience, sub- mission to God's Fatherly will; the quality of everything He thought, said, and did, was what we call filial. He was the perfect realization of the spirit of sonship. In Him, therefore, as the central personage of history — the archetypal man, second Adam of the race, its new and saving head — there was given the perfect realization of the Divine image in human nature, and in that the revelation of the capability of humanity to bear that image.^
3. The highest importance of this truth of Christ's past eternity must always be for the great Christian doctrine of the Atonement, which tells us that when man fell from holiness to sin there appeared in the whole universe only one nature which had in itself a fitness to undertake the work of reconciliation and restoration. Only one nature stood forth saying, " Lo, I come ! " Christ, the incarnate God, assumed the work and manifested the one necessary fitness in His union of the Divine and the human natures. Then comes the question, When did that fitness of the Christ begin ? Was it a nature given Him when He was born of Mary ? Was it a new assumption of an element of life which had before been wholly unfamiliar ? If so, the Atonement becomes — what? A late expedient for patching up the breach in God's experiment; a special provision for an unforeseen catastrophe. The precious element of Christ's humanity becomes only the tardy and pitiful consequence of human sin. But take the deeper view. What if this fitness of nature were an everlasting thing in Christ, only coming to special utterance when He was born Jesus, the child of the Hebrew Virgin ? What if He had borne for ever the human element in His Divinity, anointed Christ from all eternity ? What if there had been for ever a Saviourhood in the Deity, an everlasting readiness which made it always certain that, if such a catastrophe as Eden ever came, such a remedy as Calvary must follow ? Does not this deepen all our thoughts of our salvation ?