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UNITY OF GOD

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through the stages of human life, there is no reason for conceiving that He thereby adopted a separate Godhead. He had before spoken to man from the burning bush, and in the still small voice that followed the fire on Carmel; He now spoke from the lips of a man, yet still it was the same God. Nor is this in any degree hard to understand if we only remember that God is not, like humanity, confined to one place at one time. We believe that He is everywhere; wide as the spheres extend He is there; in every assemblage of worshippers He is there; the sparrow falls not to the ground without Him. Why, then, can we not conceive that He was in the human body of Christ, while at the same moment He was still pervading and controlling the universe?

These conceptions bring us to the true understanding of what theologians have made difficult in the creeds by the invention of the threefold Persons. That word and that idea are not found in the Gospel. Jesus Christ was God, dwelling for a brief space in human form, in order that thus He might reach the understanding and the heart of human beings. He called Himself in this capacity sometimes the Son of God, sometimes the Son of Man, expressing that He was God as

He was man. The additional words 'only begotten,' which are introduced in some of the creeds to indicate a certain nature of connection different from creation, occur in the Gospels only in the first chapter of St. John, and seem to be used simply to state that Jesus was the single instance in which the union of God and man took place, or in which God assumed human form. Christ as man spoke of His Father in heaven when it was needful to speak of God exercising functions different from those which He Himself was exercising on earth. Or when He speaks of sitting in judgment on the right hand of the Father it is to convey that He then will be clothed with the whole attributes of God, some of which He had laid aside when He assumed the form of man. So when He prayed to the Father it was as man, to show men how they ought to pray to their Father.

In like manner the Holy Spirit (or Ghost) is but one other manifestation of God in His special function of teaching, inspiring, and strengthening man. In that form God promised He would come to the disciples after, in the form of Christ, He had left them. In that form He will still come to us

1

if we pray for His aid and presence. If ye then, 2 John xvi. 7.

1 See p. 82.

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being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?'1 And again, I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.' If a man love Me, he will keep My words: and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make our abode with him.' 3

The three persons' are therefore only to be taken as three manifestations of God, in the different stages of the work of the redemption of mankind from sin. The infinite God, Who had before sent His prophets and teachers, came at last Himself in the form of Christ. When Christ passed from earth He came in the name of the Holy Spirit. The three are not different persons, but the one God performing the different acts which His Love suggested and still carries on. Man was dead, that is severed from God, by his disobedience to God's law, and since he would not return to Life, Christ, Who is the Life, came to earth to bring back Life to men. In what manner and by what means will be considered in the next chapter.

1 Luke xi. 13. 2 John xiv. 18. 3 Ibid. xiv. 23.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GOSPEL

GOD in the person of Jesus Christ, taking on Himself the names of the Son of God and of the Son of Man to describe His double nature, came into the world to redeem it from the rebellion of sin, and from the death which was the penalty incurred for sin. By so coming He showed them His wondrous unimaginable Love, for what else than Love supreme could have led the infinite Creator to bear the human pain, the toil, the weariness of a mortal life, the scornful reviling, and at last the agonising death inflicted on Him by His creatures? What were the means, then, by which He hoped that He might thus win them back from death to life?

They were, firstly, the declaration and exhibition of that Love Divine, shown in the human. form which men could understand. For the spirit of man, though created in the likeness of God, is

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so much bound up with the flesh, and so burdened with its imperfection, that it has difficulty in understanding the existence and the attributes of a Spirit invisible and intangible. Partly for this reason man turned to graven images and idols, as even at this day Roman Catholics attribute to the Virgin some Divine qualities that seem to bring her nearer to them than her Son. So God condescended to meet our imperfect apprehension in the way most suited to it, by assuming the form of man, while He taught as God.

The second purpose of Christ's life was to bring man back, not only by oral teaching but by example -the most convincing method of teaching. For here before the eyes of men then on earth, and before the eyes of all men since whose spiritual eyes are not blinded, was set forth a man living in ordinary human circumstances up to middle age, and thereafter for a few years conspicuous as one sent from God, yet still subject to all human weakness and pain, who in private and in public lived the life which God commands all to live. Tried in every way, tempted by all Satan's wiles, acclaimed at one moment by popular adoration, at another reviled by authority and trampled on by