VIII.

OBITER DICTA.

O one is more conscious than I am of the obstinate questionings that must from time to time have arisen in the reader's mind as he perused the first portion of this volume.

Questions press for solution at every point. Although I cannot hope to discuss them here, I may fitly close this volume by suggesting a few of them, together with hints for answers to be worked out by the reader, or left as food for future discussion. Even to state the difficulties that we may not be able to answer often relieves the overburdened mind, and helps us to see more clear.

THE NATURE OF COMMUNION.

323. The nature of communion between God the Oversoul, immanent in the universe, and man the soul, immanent in the body.Every new revelation of science, showing the subtle effects of light, heat, electricity, magnetism; every new study in psychology, revealing the strange mental affinities by which brain affects brain, and thought-waves pass to and fro; nay, the common mystery which shrouds the transmission of thought by speech, or the invisible contact of air-waves through space upon the tympanum of the ear, will supply us with analogies, helping us to understand how a Divine Power may use means to control the telegraph-wires of the brain, and transmit messages which are holy thoughts and impulses.

How doubly secure will be our feelings in prayer, how safe our religious consciousness, if the rationale of Divine communion is seen to be not more difficult to conceive than that of human speech, or the silent converse so often realised of mind en rapport with mind.

THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST.

324. I should like to dwell once more upon

the authoritative nature of the revelation of supreme love and righteousness made to man in Jesus Christ.

I think it so important for those who are driven from Christianity by the hard and bald statement, unexplained and unqualified, that Jesus Christ is the Almighty God, made man and then crucified, to remember in what sense alone such a statement is at all intelligible in the present day. I have always explained the Divinity of Christ thus.

There must be infinite ranges in the Divine Being's relations to our world, aspects and energies of Him that can never be comprehended under the limitations of humanity. But there is in Him a human aspect, like the bright side of a planet: that side is turned towards man, expressed outwardly to man-in man, and fully expressed in the Man Jesus Christ. In Him we had a true inflowing of God into human nature. As true God as the sea is true sea when it flows into a limited gulf. Not all God was in Jesus, yet all that was in Jesus was God, under the necessary human limitations. As He said, "My Father is greater than I.”

As I do not know what the human spirit is, neither do I know what the Divine Spirit is. Both can be felt, but neither can be defined, except very vaguely and generally as Power guiding Force, to act upon matter.

I am unable therefore to define like the schoolmen the way in which a human body was used by God in Christ; but I accept His account of Himself, as far as I can gather it, as the Son of God. I accept the impression of Divine life and mind which He has left upon the stream of history, as far as I can see it, as authoritative, because it seems to me that Christianity is the revelation of those ultimate moral and spiritual principles, incarnated in a Divine and human life, which alone bind human society together, whilst they secure the progress of mind and body, and satisfy the unconquerable instincts and aspirations of the spirit.

In the above statements it is quite possible that all the various heresies which have from time to time exercised the Church have not been successfully avoided; but it is after all a poor ambition to steer within the smooth waters of orthodox theology, whilst the vessel