The truth that there is an immediate connection between human personality and the life of God, is not taught by the New Testament in explicit terms; by the fact of the incarnation it is implicitly given. It is logically involved in the personality of Jesus who was the Son of God; involved also in all words spoken by our Lord respecting His Person and mission. If we deny the divine factor in the constitution of the Adamic race, deny the capacity of humanity for vital fellowship with God, then Christ as represented by the New Testament and as affirmed by the Christian Creed, becomes a logical impossibility. Instead of an incarnation we should get an oriental avatar, or a Nestorian dualism, or a gnostic phantasm.

6. The force of the argument derived from the incarnation is completed by the glorification. Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, not only rises from the dead, but He also ascends up far above all heavens, and enters into the realm of the divine glory.' He sits on the right hand of God. This figurative language, common to nearly all the writers of the New Testament, can mean nothing less than that Jesus shares the dignity of divine existence and the authority of divine sovereignty.

Should the objection be made that the exaltation of our Lord is a predicate only of His divine sonship, the reply is twofold: 1. Throughout the New Testament the exaltation of Christ is affirmed, not of the Son of God, but of the incarnate Son; 2. The Son of God as trinitarian Person being co-equal with the Father excludes the idea of exaltation. Session at the right hand of God is eternally His prerogative. Being in the form of God,

'Eph. i. 20-23; iv. 10; Phil. ii. 9-10; 1 Pet. iii. 22.

He counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God.1

The exaltation affirmed by the Christian Creed is the predicate of the manhood of Jesus Christ, of the manhood in vital union with the Logos. The finite being of man assumed into God in the person of His Son, this finite manhood is translated from the mundane to the heavenly sphere, and becomes a partaker of the glory of the Godhead.

Like the nativity of our Lord, so His glorification justifies the postulate that in man's original constitution there is the intrinsic capability of such translation and exaltation. The logic of Christian thought requires us to assume that the session of Jesus of Nazareth at the right hand of His Father in heaven is the final actualization of that divine principle of life which at his creation man received from the inbreathing of God. That enthronement must be the perfection of finite human being as constituted in the beginning. On no other presupposition can Christian thought consistently maintain the truth of the record respecting the ascension and glorification of the Son of Man.

7. The teaching of Genesis and the postulate of the incarnation are illustrated by experience. In all ages and in every stage of civilization, even the lowest plane of moral and social degradation not excepted, the 'natural man' affirms the existence of a divine world; affirms a direct connection of the gods or of supernal spirits with men, of men with the gods; affirms also in some form the Divine to be the complement of human life. So intense does the affirmation of the close connection between the

1 Phil. ii. 6.

divine nature and human nature become, that both belief and philosophic thought identify the two worlds. God and man become the same. Either God descends to man, or man ascends to God; either the Divine takes possession of man, or man is transformed and deified.

Now, although ethnic religions are defective, and pantheistic systems of philosophy are false, neverthelss philosophy and ethnic religions are the exponents of a profound spiritual reality. Error prevalent in forms of religious. belief and metaphysical speculation is the perversion of fundamental truth. The truth of the close objective connection between divine personality and human personality is dimly perceived and continually felt. It is this that sustains perverse tendencies of sentiment and false methods of apprehension. Being as to his essential nature really bound to God and to the material world, the Adamic man can no more separate his existence from the one than he can from the other. If we suppose that pagan nations. sustain no such vital, indissoluble connection with God, it must follow that these phenomena of religion and philosophy, than which no phenomena are more original, more universal, more permanent and controlling, have no corresponding basis.

We have accordingly the undesigned testimony of all nations, whether civilized or savage, to the truth that in the human constitution there is a divine factor, or at least a principle other than mundane and material. In his own way Professor Höffding, an evolutionist, bears witness to this truth:

"Even though the individual organism, which in spite of its completeness and relative independence is still a republic of cells, were to be explained as compounded out of elements, and its origin made intelligi

ble through the law of the persistence of energy, this would not explain individual consciousness, the formation of a special centre of memory, of action and of suffering. That it is possible for such an inner centre to come into being is the fundamental problem of all our knowledge. Each individual trait, each individual property, might perhaps be explained by the power of heredity and the influence of experience; but the inner unity, to which all elements refer, and by virtue of which the individual is a psychical individuality, remains for us an eternal riddle. As was observed in an earlier connection, it is impossible to apply to the mental province anything analogous to the persistence of energy.”1

Man is to himself an inexplicable mystery, a mystery just because a profound and inalienable sentiment that he sustains an indissoluble connection with a spiritual world is ever stirring in his bosom. To determine the quality

of this connection has been the problem of the ages.

8. The solution of the problem is given by the advent of Jesus Christ. His history is the concrete exposition of humanity. From His glorification we learn the truth hidden in pantheism.

The Mosaic record of man's creation interprets the intuitions and aspirations of his spirit. Inasmuch as the life of his soul proceeds by a direct afflatus from the bosom of the Divine, it is no more than a legitimate manifestation of such inbreathed life that, though apostate and sinful, man should feel the presence of Spirit on every side, should even discern the existence of Deity and affirm a vital and abiding fellowship between Deity and himself.

Whilst the Mosaic record explains the religious phenomena of mankind, this record in turn is illumined and explained by the glorification of Jesus Christ. The full import of that picture may be seen when by a new creation

Outlines of Psychology, by Herold Höffding, Professor in the University of Copenhagen, pp. 353, 354.

humanity is made partaker of the divine nature' and the divine glory. When God adopts man into union with Himself in the person of the incarnate Son and translates man from present cosmical connections to His own right hand in heaven, then the significance of the breath of life proceeding from God is developed and finally manifested. It may be seen that the divine factor of the human constitution is not an incidental condition, but an element of its very essence. Then too we may perceive the true ground and deep meaning of the wonderful phenomena appearing in the religious history of all nations.

The glorification of human nature in the person of Jesus Christ completes the argument for the twofold life of man. Taking His exaltation as the point of view, and surveying the religious phenomena of every age and every nation, we may observe running through the entire history of the world, pagan, Jewish and Christian, manifestations of the profound truth that man is the organic union of two original principles, of a divine law and a cosmic law, a law connecting him with the infinite being of God, a law also connecting him with the nature and development of all sub-human kingdoms.

12 Pet. i. 4.

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