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the fathers are visited on the lives of the children. If the new life was to bear the sins of the world, it could only be by so identifying itself with the world as it actually was, as to become itself a sharer in the law of its being. Hence it is that when St Paul would describe the conditions preliminary to the great work of Christian redemption, he places in the foreground the bold announcement that Christ was made under the law. That law of Judaism of which he speaks, was in reality only part of the wider and yet more stringent principle by which the conditions of the past are reproduced in the life of the present, and the consequences of the deed done by our ancestors are reaped in the experience of their descendants. The law to which the second Adam became subject was that law of mental evolution which had brought humanity to the fulness of the time.

More pronouncedly than even the first Adam, is the second represented as the child of development. We do not allude to the fact that the first Adam is described as having had no infancy. We have already more than hinted that there is room for doubt as to whether this is the representation which the Book of Genesis designs to convey it is quite possible that the humanity formed from the dust of the ground may have been the infancy of that humanity which was inspired by the Spirit of God. But waiving this question, it still remains

true that the relation of the Divine life to the normal development of the first Adam is described as much less intimate than the relation of the Divine life to the normal development of the second. The former was, after all, only an outward connection; the breath of God was breathed simply into the nostrils, and did not penetrate the heart. There was no real union, no moral identification, no actually existing reciprocity; the Spirit of the Divine was unable yet to bear the sins of the human. But in the second Adam all this is changed; here we have not only contact but union, not merely inbreathing but incarnation. The aim of the Divine life is to identify itself with the life of the creature; and in the prosecution of this aim it submits to the law of the creature's life. It begins at the lowest stage of human development, and it expands progressively from sphere to sphere. It passes through infancy, through childhood, through youth, to the measure of the stature of the perfect man. It grows in human wisdom and in human knowledge, it learns obedience by the things which it suffers. Its incarnation in humanity is in truth rather a process than an act; it is itself an order of evolution. It is perfect in each stage, but it is not perfect in all stages at once; it adds perfection to perfection. It grows from less to more, from great to greatest. It appropriates one by one the spheres

of humanity, and vanquishes one by one the old forces by which each of these spheres has been at once environed and confined; and it finds its culminating stage in the overcoming of that force which is the last and highest penalty of the human soul--the power of death.

Nevertheless, as we said at the close of the last chapter, it is clear that such a life could not be lived on earth without an experience of the most poignant sorrow. The life of the new man was by very reason of its newness in advance of its environment, and that which morally was its glory became physically its pain. The Son of Man, because He was the Son of Man, because He was the prophetic representation of that ideal which humanity should reach in the far future, was necessarily in a state of solitude. He was divorced from His surroundings by the very fact of His greatness; in the treading of the winepress there was and could be none with Him. It was not simply that He was not understood; He was misunderstood. He occupied to humanity a relation of seeming antagonism, nay, to the present state of humanity a relation of real antagonism. That which made Him solitary was not merely a possession on His part of something which the world had not; it was a possession on the world's part of something which He had not-the nature of sin. That which made Him in advance of His

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environment was the transcendence of that animal life, the subjection to which constituted the sin of the human race; and that which caused His life to be solitary and alone, was just the inability of the human race to look beyond the limits of their animal nature. They could see no beauty which they desired in Him. Prophecy itself had foretold that it must be so,-had foreseen that whenever the perfect Servant of God should appear, He must, through the very perfection of His service, be despised and rejected of men. If men could have seen His beauty, they would have been already beautiful, already in germ on a level with Himself. The fact that they were not on such a level, the fact that as yet He was but the harbinger of the coming race, was itself sufficient to necessitate His treading of the winepress alone. The forces of the old life were in antagonism to Him-and for a time it seemed as if these forces would be the survivors. It appeared for a moment as if in the battle between the old life and the new, the new would be vanquished by the old. The force of death obtained a temporary victory, and the Son of Man was crucified by the world's sin. But the victory was only temporary and only apparent. According to the sacred record, the Son of Man vanquished death, and ascended a conqueror from the grave. What is more to the present purpose, according to that record He

vanquished death by the great principle of evolution-the survival of the strongest; or as the writer of the Acts expresses it, "because it was not possible that He should be holden of it."

Perhaps it may be thought that on this latter point we ought to have preserved a judicious silence that here, if anywhere, the narrative of the Christian record is at variance with the principle of evolution. On the contrary, we have no hesitation in saying that whatever difficulties attach to the doctrine of Christ's resurrection, they are not difficulties unshared by the belief in evolution. The animation of dead matter by the Spirit of life is no unprecedented occurrence in the history of evolution. Every evolutionist will admit that it occurred once, in that day when the first germ-cell began to live. It is true, the conditions of life must have been present beforehand; but we do not know what the conditions of life were, and we do know, on the authority of Mr Herbert Spencer, that the real agent in the process was the Force which he calls inscrutable. Let us remember that it is this and no other agency to which Christianity appeals as the source of her central miracle. To produce the resurrection of the Son of Man, she calls in the aid of no other principle than that which Mr Spencer admits to be the prime agent in every process of evolution. If it be so, we cannot say that the doctrine of

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