INTRODUCTION.-A GENERAL STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES. CHAPTER I. GOD'S REVELATION OF HIMSELF TO MEN. WE begin our inquiry, which embraces past, present, and future, with the fact the central one in all God's actings of the Incarnation. This fact we do not attempt to prove: we assume it. The Church believes and proclaims in all her creeds, that her Head, Jesus Christ, is the God-Man, and that He abides the GodMan forever. From this present fact, as from a high mountain peak, we look backward and forward: from its elevation we trace the winding pathway of Divine history as it leads onward from Eden to Bethlehem, and the pathway of prophecy, till it is lost to view in the splendors of the new heaven and the new earth. In the Incarnate Son is the key to all that God has said or done as recorded in the Scriptures, and we must read them in His light. "Search the Scriptures and they are they which testify of Me." To those who see in the Incarnate Son the centre of all God's works, "for whom all things were made," and "by whom all things consist," the biblical records will present such unity of purpose, and harmony of utter ance, that they will recognize everywhere the one inspiring Spirit of Him who is "the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End." We thus assume as the teaching of the Scriptures, and the faith of the Church, that the Divine purpose in the creation of man looked forward to the perfect manifestation of God in the person of the Incarnate Son, and that this manifestation is the goal of human history. As preparatory to this manifestation, we find three great stages of Divine actings; and we have to consider first these actings prior to the Incarnation. God creates the heavens and the earth: He makes man in His own image, and places him in Eden. But how shall man, the finite creature, know God, his infinite and invisible Creator? The basis of such knowledge must be laid in the nature of man as preconfigured to the Divine image. As made in God's likeness he is able to know Him, and to have communion with Him, and this in ever enlarging degree. But, however great the spiritual capacity of man, we are to remember that the relation between God and men is a personal one, and that, to be known, He must make Himself known. What communion with Him any creature may have, must depend both on its constitution and on His will. It is not enough that man has a religious nature — a faculty to apprehend the Infinite or even an intuitive belief in His existence as Creator and supreme moral Governor; God must by His own acts enter into personal intercourse with men, must reveal Himself to them, ere they can truly know Him. The possibility of intercourse is not actual intercourse. Likeness to his Creator is the basis and condition of God's personal revelation of Himself to man, but not the revelation itself. |