Part 16 (1/2)

What mind planned this process of a nation's growth into a universal religion? What artist dreamed this ethical and spiritual ideal? Who begat this ”holy thing” conceived in Israel and born of her at length in glorious beauty? If Moses was the human parent of this marvellous child, who fathered the ”essential Christ” in Moses? Who is the real father of Jesus Christ?

Our only answer must be that given of old:

When the fulness of the time was come G.o.d sent forth His son.... The true Light, which lighteth every man, was coming on into the world....

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.

If this then be the true interpretation of the evolution of the Christ, we hold, in the doctrine of the Incarnation, the secret of all evolution. We must read the story of every development in the light of the highest life of man, himself the highest life of nature. Nature is in travail with an ideal which rose not in the molten suns, though perchance it did rise through them.

The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of G.o.d.

Man is in travail with an ideal which rose not in the anthropoid apes, though it may have risen through them. A finer, larger, n.o.bler man is growing within the man that is.

The Universal Man is now coming to be a real being in the individual mind.

Mankind, which is one physically and mentally, is one morally and spiritually. All varieties of man are built upon one ethical type. The virtues are cosmopolitan. One human ideal looms above and before all races, though refracted differently in the changing atmospheres of earth.

Within the saints one dream of goodness forms.

Over the seers and sages one vision of the source of human goodness rises. Through the clouds of earth one Infinite and Eternal Form shapes itself to the wise. As men rise they meet. The race-souls are strangely alike. Socrates and Buddha are brothers. Humanity is in travail with one Human Ideal and one Divine Image, and these twain are one. The great Mother sings to herself:

But he, the man-child glorious, Where tarries he the while?

The rainbow s.h.i.+nes his harbinger, The sunset gleams his smile.

My boreal lights leap upward, Forth right my planets roll, And still the man-child is not born, The summit of the Whole.

I travail in pain for him, My creatures travail and wait; His couriers come by squadrons, He comes not to the gate.

Will Humanity come to the birth with her beloved son? Who that reads the story of the coming of the Hebrew Christ can doubt it? What miscarriage can befall her who is nursed by Nature and tended by Providence? What will the Coming Man be like? We have seen his face break through the flesh for a moment. On the shoulders of the race will rest the head of Christ. What shall be said when the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of G.o.d shout for joy that MAN is born upon the earth?

The Holy Ghost hath come upon thee, Humanity, and the power of the Highest hath overshadowed thee; therefore also, that holy thing which is born of thee, shall be called the SON OF G.o.d.

This, at least, is my reading of nature and of history in the light of the completed evolution of the Christ. The normal growth through history of the Ideal Man, is the incarnation of the Divine Man. The mischievous ant.i.thesis between the realms of the natural and the supernatural, that kept the world's thought from crystallizing around the world's soul, disappears in an Order which is at once natural in all its processes, and supernatural in its source and plan and energy.

We hold the key to all earth's problems in the vision of G.o.d which, gleaming through nature and through man, dawns in the face of Jesus Christ. Over Him--in whom the Human Ideal becomes the Divine Image, and the most perfect dream of human goodness is the revelation of earth's G.o.d--the Eternal One breaks silence, whispering to our souls:

This is my Beloved Son: Hear Him!

VII.

The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.