order to command these feelings God must reveal Himself through human qualities that express our highest conceptions of worth in character, and through the medium of acts that satisfy our highest expectations of what may be experienced from the energy of the Divine Will. And Christ is the proper object of worship, because in Him God comes to us, appeals to us, works upon us in these ways. How Paul's monotheism is to be reconciled with this practical acknowledgment of Christ as Divine,--for monotheist he remained, as we see from the distinction he observed in speaking of the Father as God and Christ as Lord, is a matter on which we expect some light to be thrown by those passages in his Epistles that suggest a transcendent relation of Christ to God over and above that in which He stood to Him as the Man exalted to be, in the faith of His people, One with the Father and with the Spirit. The passages referred to will fall to be considered as we proceed in our inquiry. Meanwhile, it is to be repeated that the Divinity in Christ on which Paul based his faith in Him as Lord was a truth to which his own conscious experience of Christ, and of the effects of His working on his inner life, bore witness. And we learn from this that in order to know Him to be the Son of God, and to justify our faith in Him as truly Divine, we do not need more than the evidence of experience which flows from the practical acknowledgment of Him as Supreme. I conclude with the words of the late Dr. Dale, which seem to me fairly to represent the Pauline view: "It may be that some of you who have constructed for yourselves imposing conceptions of God as the Creator of all things, the Infinite, the Absolute, the Almighty, the Unchangeable, the Omnipresent, the Omniscient, a God of your own making, an hypothesis to render the universe intelligible, may be perplexed and confounded when you attempt to find this God in Christ. But if you have found in Christ the supreme and ultimate authority over your moral and religious life, you have found God in Him. If you have found in Christ the Infinite Mercy through which your sins are forgiven, you have found God in Him. If you have found in Christ the Giver and Source and perpetual support and defence of that Divine life which renders righteousness and saintliness possible in this world, and is the beginning of immortal power, you have found God in Him. Even if your lips falter when you are asked to confess that He is God, He is of a truth God to you. These realms of moral and spiritual truth, in which for you Christ is supreme, lie far above the realm of material things. He who is supreme in the spiritual order cannot hold any secondary place in the physical; you have already confessed, even if you meant it not, that Christ is eternally one with the Highest."1 1 Christian Doctrine, pp. 120, 121. It is well known with what emphasis Luther insisted on the truth that the Man Jesus is the proper revelation of God, and that all speculations are unprofitable that relate to the Divine nature outside of Him. "See to it," he says in his Table Talk, "that thou know of no God and pay homage to no God except the Man Jesus Christ, but lay hold of Him alone, and continue hanging with thy whole heart on Him, and let all thoughts and speculations about the Majesty go their own way! In this business look straight at the Man alone, who presents Himself to us as Mediator, and says, 'Come to Me all ye that are weary and heavy laden.'" V LATER DEVELOPMENTS: CHRIST THE THE CHURCH AND OF ALL PRIN- |