1. The problem of the world, the more or less conscious and articulate demand of the human spirit, is, as we noted at the outset, union with God. This union is, primarily, personal— nil ethical fellowship, in which God shall fully disclose His character, and impart Himself, to man ; in which man shall freely open his being to the communications of God, and find in God his life and development. Such personal union, however, carries with it cosmical union also, or the harmonizing of all those differences from God which are implied in the existence of the created universe, and find their most acute expres- sion in the self-assertion of man against God. The reconciling of man is the reconciling of all things. I'he solution of a problem, thus fundamentally personal, must be itself personal. Christianity, accordingly, met the problem of the early centuries, a.s it meets the same problem in the twentieth cen- tui-y, by the preaching of the personal Christ. He is the Son of God ; and therefore, also. He is the Son of Man. In Christ, God is fully present ; through Him, God is perfectly known ; with Him, God is one. In Chnst, human nature is fully realized in all that it was meant to be, both in respect of its complete dependence upon God and of its complete fulfilment of spiritual function. In Christ, accord- ingly, the history of creation is complete. He stands at the head of a universe reconciled to God. He is its reconciliation. Wherever the problem of union with God takes expression in concrete facts — in the sense of guilt in the individual con- science ; in death, whicli closes human life with a pall of impenetrable darkness ; in the antagonism of man to man, manifested in personal animosities, or the war of nation with nation and class mth class — in facts whose gloom no pessimism can ex- aggerate : there, the knowledge of Christ supplies the solution. To know Christ is to be at one with God and -ndth man. Christianity is thus both reli- gion and ethic. It is an intense individual experi- ence, which is the impulse of boundless social service.
And when the same problem finds the precision and articulateness of philosophical expression— as it did, for instance, in that Neo-Platonism whicli had such strange affinities to Christianity while it was also its bitterest opponent ; or as it does to-day,
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in that Absolute Idealism which, in some aspects, is the noblest ally of the Christian faith, and, in others, its proudest and least sympathetic rival — the key to its solution will still be found in the conception of a Personality at once Divine and human, a life lived under iiistoric conditions, which was at once the life of God in man and the life of man in and through God. The words of the Master of Balliol apply to the present as well as to the primitive position of Christianity :
*It contained implicitly the key to all the antagonisms of thought that had been developed in Greek philosophy — the antagonism of the materia! and the spiritual, the antagonism of the phenomenal and the ideal or intelligible world, the antagonism of the finite and the infinite, the antagonism of the temporal and the eternal. In a word, it contained in itself the principle of an optimism which faces and overcomes the deepest pessimism, of an idealism which has room in itself for the most realistic consciousness of all the distinctions and relations of the finite ' (Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, vol. ii. p. 351).
2. The Incarnation of the Son of God is therefore the article of a standing Church. It is, at the same time, the abiding problem of a living Church. It is not, however, a problem which is suggested by one faculty to be handed over to another for solution. Faith does not receive Christ, and then appeal to intellect to tell us who He is, and how His Person is constituted. It has been the profound error of Scholasticism, both before and since the Reformation, to suppose that faith supplies a mass of crude amorphous facts and experiences, upon which the intellect exercises its analytic, system- atizing genius, distinguishiii"-, detining, separating, and then tying into bundles Tiy ine.-uis of formula;. The re.sult of such a mi'tlii.d', a]>|.li(il to tlie pro- blem of the Person of (liiisl, is .-i ( 'hristology in whose dogmatic constructinn tin' ]i\ing Christ of history and experience is wholly unrecognizable. The Reformation was the protest of Christian faith against this attempt to rob it of the personal Saviour, whom it ajipropriates, whom the believer knows directly and tnilj;. Ritschlianism, however incomplete its constructive work may be, is never- thele.ss, as a protest against formalism, in harmony with the &™rit of the Reformation.
The value of such a protest, however, will be greatly lessened if it lend colour to the supposition that our knowledge of Christ is confined to His benefits, while He Himself, in the secret of His being, belongs to some supposed noumenal sphere, inaccessible to human knowledge, so that it is impossible either to affirm or deny His Divinity. ' Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia ejus cog- noscere' is a proposition true if it mean that no one can know Christ who is not vitally one with Him, and therefore a partaker of His benehts ; but certainly false if it mean that, beyond His benefits, there is a supposed substratum of being, about which nothing can be known, which may or may not be Divine (cf. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 63). Thus doos the nii>aiiiili(>d category of sub- stance take roNTiij.' i)|".ii lln' critical method, which, while (UMi\iiii: ii- xaliility, retains it as a kind of metapl'iysiml plianlimi'. To know the benefits of Christ, to live in fellowship ^^•ith Him, to carry out His commission, is to know Himself. No shadow of unreality lies upon that knowledge, any more than it lies upon the knowledat; we liave of the friend whom we know better (haii \vi' l<iiiiw ourselves. This does not mean, ol ..,in:,,., thai any believer, or the whole comm\inii\- oi liilir\ eis, now knows, or ever will know, ail aliuui ( luist. Personality, even human |"T-unaliiy, i~ a jir.at