Christ, the Christian and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and Its Consequences

"I have attempted in this book to exhibit the Incarnation of the Son of God as the foundation and the unifying principle of the life and thought of both the individual Christian and the Church of which he is a member. That in Jesus of Nazareth human nature is permanently and inseparably united to the Person of the Eternal Word, that by Baptism men and women are re-created by incorporation into the human nature of Jesus and receive thereby a real communication of the benefits of his Passion, that sanctification is the progressive realization in the moral realm of the change that was made in the ontological realm by Baptism, that incorporation into Christ is incorporation into the Church, since the Church is in its essence simply the human nature of Christ made appropriable by men, that all the thought, prayer and activity of Christians, in so far as it is brought within the sphere of redemption, is the act of Christ himself in and through the Church which is his Body -- these are the ideas that I have tried to expound; and the thread that unites them all is the doctrine of the permanence of the manhood of the glorified and ascended Christ." -- Preface.