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manifesta

Jesus of
Nazareth;

6. Second, In what God calls the fulness of times, He added to second, by these suggestive names of relationship another completing reve- tion in lation of His connection with man. He the race not merely gave to imagine His relationship to them by the help of similitudes, but to see it with their eyes, as a man could behold and know the face of his brother man. He became Himself " manifest in their flesh," bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; as much taking their likeness and making it his own, as He originally made them in His likeness and gave them His nature. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him" (John i. 18). In the affections and conduct of Jesus of Nazareth mankind had opportunity to actually see the love of God to man, and thenceforth they could understand and appreciate it as well as they could understand and appreciate one another's love. From that time the nearness of God's declared, promised, assured connection with man became a thing that had been visible to the world, a distinct matter of human recollection, a fact exactly as well known as any recorded fact respecting any individual character of history. To the personal attendants of Jesus, and ever after to all "who should believe through their word," the moral nature of God and His saving love to mankind became, not things to be reasoned of, but facts to be remembered, facts living for ever in the records of personal memory, or of history, the memory of the race. The holiness of God, His goodness, His truth, His abhorrence of sin, His desire to save fallen mankind, His sympathy with man's troubles, His self-sacrifice for man's sake, became not merely doctrines demonstrated by clearest reasoning from God's Word, and fortified by His most solemn assurances, but facts of human knowledge, things seen, things experienced, recollected, narrated, and possessed by the mind, as largely and as surely as a child could recollect a father's moral habits, and his descendants could confidently read of them.

the meta

7. The visible life of Jesus of Nazareth also, as has been realising noticed, perfected the force of persuasion conveyed by the phors of metaphors of human relationship under which God of old and relationto the end bade mankind think of and appreciate His love.

ship.

Manner of

the revelation-a history.

If the similitudes of a father, a mother, a husband, a brother, a nurse, a comforter, a teacher, a healer, a defender, &c., could have been thought of before as in any degree merely figurative expressions, setting forth the boundless largeness of His love, but not, perhaps, promising such correspondent sympathy and special helpfulness as the love given by the human relationships known by these names, then the reality of the human life of Jesus-His "manifest" partaking of all our nature, His visibly perfect fellow-feeling of our infirmities-gave assurance that the divine love promised in these names is the very kind of help and faithfulness, the same manner of goodness and loving-kindness, that is looked for by needy human beings from such nearest human friends, only perfected in tenderness and trustworthiness and power by the guarantee of God's perfectness. The father and husband and friend and helper become eternal, all-wise, all-powerful, unchangeable, but still near and united, as if he were only human.

The historical progress of God's unveiling His love to man will be the subject of the next chapter.

8. Inseparable from the subject of thought revealed to religious faith is the MANNER OF THE REVELATION. The form employed by God of making His love known to mankind is essentially a HISTORY of what it has done, and in being so is in exact accordance with what He tells us, that His nature is above our investigation. The history of religion shows that, universally, mankind must have an object of worship that is visible, or conceivable in terms of visible things. Every known people, except those expressly taught by God himself not to do so, has worshipped Him by visible images, meant to be typically or actually representative. When He made the great historical provision for checking the down-going of mankind's thoughts respecting Him through their own imaginations of a visible likeness to Him, and placed among the nations in a central position a people who, under His guidance, should serve Him in their sight without misleading images of Him, He gave that people an object of thought which should be visible, though not to their eyes, yet to their most common habits of thinking, the eyes of their mind — that is, their faith. He

bade them think of Him not as God, but as a father, a shepherd, a healer, a rock of salvation, &c. When in the end, the fulness of times, He completed His designed help to their "seeing Him who is invisible," it was by becoming a distinct historical person who had dwelt among them, and whose glory they had been "eyewitnesses of, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." It corroborates this view of faith being recognised by God as needing a visible hold for its thoughts, to find that He helped the earliest faith by some recognisable “ presence of the Lord" (Gen. iii. 8, iv. 16); and gave a similar support to the faith of the Hebrew Church by appropriate visible associations with His concealed presence the pillar of cloud; the tabernacle, made after a pattern shown to Moses in the mount; the temple, afterwards built according to divine description; and in both the miraculous cloud visible to the high priest upon the mercy-seat in the holy place. Even in the "spiritual" (John iv. 24) worship of the Christian Church, the Lord's Supper continues the same kind of help to faith. Since "the night on which He was betrayed," certain visible symbols, congruous to the fact which they commemorate, have by His appointment been used by the Church as a continual help to "remember " a visible, recognisable, historical person who is to dwell in our hearts by that faith which "endures as seeing Him who is invisible." The most distant future to which faith is to look is one of equally recognisable features-those of home, communion with known persons, health from known ills, &c.

form of

from the

9. This historical manner of God's revealing Himself, asso- Historical ciating man's religious thoughts of Him with objects visible or faith's imaginable in terms of visible things, was pointedly the man- thoughts ner of revelation from the beginning. The revelation was of first. a person assuring them of His love, but a person declared not by attributes, but by actions; the description of whose love was not a philosophical connection of it with His essential nature, but a history of its manifested care over individuals or peoples. Antediluvian knowledge of God was knowledge not of attributes but of transactions. Abraham's faith was associated with a long series of sensible manifestations of God to

Convincing

torical

him in visions, actions, and promises. The first faith of the exodus was to be in the history of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That of the Church in the wilderness added the striking history called up by the words, "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Ex. xx. 2). The Book of Deuteronomy, bringing down the history of Israel to the end of the forty years' singular experience, and comprehending declarations of the attributes of Jehovah only as they were made apparent in historical connection with His deliverance of His people, was the larger creed dictated by Moses for the settled Hebrew nation. In the condensed form of the Song of Moses, its historical thoughts of Jehovah were to be perpetually a part of the religious services of the Church. The later confessions of Hebrew faith, the Psalms, known to have been in regular use as solemn confessions to the end, such as the Passover Psalms (Ps. cxiii.-cxviii.), guided the people to distinct historical thinking; or where to generalisations approaching what we would call attributes, to generalisations always immediately inferred from or explained by specified history. The thought of specific transactions was the faith quoted of the examples of believing, enumerated in Hebrews xi., examples spread over all pre-Christian times. Entirely such was the faith of the Hebrew Church after the captivity (Neh. ix.) In the Christian Church the Messiah at His coming was to be looked for, recognised, and thought of, by the signs of certain definite proceedings (Luke iv. 18-21). To believers to the end of time the name of Jesus is to be a word calling up not attributes, but a specific history, the centre portion of which is a human biography. Such a faith the apostles called Jews and heathens alike to, and that by divine direction, their argument being prescribed to them-" Jesus Christ, and Him crucified."

10. The historical form of the truth contemplated by force of his- religious faith carries most important consequences with it above that into the questions of religious study and teaching. Looking for the natural or non-miraculous causes to which the first successes of revealed faiths are to be attributed, and to

of philoso

phical faiths.

which we are to look for the future success of Christianity, the history of those successes obliges us to give the chief place to this that the patriarchal faith and Judaism and Christianity have all had as the matter of their thoughts and ground of their inferences, an actual history of God's holy love of man, a body of facts which every individual believer could bring as distinctly before his mind as he could his own family history, of which, indeed, in the case of some of the patriarchs, the facts of their faith formed a great part. The character of the heathen faiths over which revealed religion triumphed in the judgment of mankind was very distinctly a contrast to this. They consisted of opinions instead of knowledge. The highest philosophical systems of heathenism which have been preserved were purely theories as to what the nature of God might be, considering what the nature of man is, but comprehending in their reasonings no known fact respecting God's government of mankind, no history of any connection ever shown to exist between them. In recent technical phrase, their theology was purely subjective, a construction out of the heathen's spiritual consciousness including no objective facts known of God's nature or His disposition towards man. Having no objective known to them, they supplied the human necessity for a visible or imaginable subject of faith by imagining a history, or rather innumerable histories, expository of how their imagined divinities would or might act among themselves or towards man. They constructed myths properly so called, pictorial representations of their own intellectual powers and moral feelings and habits attributed to supposed overruling deities. Those heathen myths affiliate themselves unmistakably to a corrupt origin, the state of society in which they arose, by marks of which no trace can be found by modern sceptics in the grandly pure and true and exalted objective representations of revealed theology which they would assign to a like origin. In the most religious times of Greece the popular theology was purely a personification of the observed attributes of human life, bad and good alike—as love pure and impure, wrath just and unjust, beneficence and greed, intelligence, taste, &c.; and of the observed

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