OPENING AND CLOSING ADDRESSES 
 
 TO THE 
 
 $k& College CijeolDstcal Soctctg, 
 
 Session 1882-83. 
 
 PRINTED BY BEQUEST. 
 
Scs ^>a£J 
 
 
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CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDER MARTIN, M.A. 
 
 UNION TO CHRIST THE GROUND OF 
 JUSTIFICATION. 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS GREGORY, M.A. 
 
 BEING THE 
 
 Opening ano Closing lotoses 
 
 TO THE 
 
 NEW COLLEGE THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY, 
 
 Session 1882-83. 
 
 PRINTED BY REQUEST. 
 
 IStittt&urgJ); 
 
 PRINTED BY LORIMER & GILLIES, 31 ST. ANDREW SQUARE. 
 
 MDCCCLXXXII 
 
EDINBURGH : 
 
 PRINTED BY LORIMER AND GILLIES, 
 
 31 ST. ANDREW SQUARE. 
 
©jwthtg &fctam 
 
 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 By Alexander Martin, M.A. 
 
 H ENTLEMEN, — 
 
 ****** 
 
 I propose to address to you now a few remarks on " The 
 Personal Christ as the Centre of Christianity." Amidst much 
 in our day which cannot but cause deep anxiety to all who 
 would seriously hold fast the faith, one hails gladly the 
 increasingly great interest shown in the determination and 
 representation of the historical person Christ. The " clank 
 of machinery," which was hinted at in our hearing the other 
 day, has indeed been too long heard, or at least a mode of 
 regarding religious matters which tended that way, has been 
 more than enough insisted upon ; and theology and religion 
 must alike be benefited by the growing emphasis now laid 
 upon the imperial Personality, which gives unity and life to 
 both. But, unhappily, the misuse of benefits is not un- 
 common. History, in the Church as well as elsewhere, 
 moves, as a rule, between extremes ; reaction from a 
 mechanical way of exhibiting and applying truths may be 
 in danger of leading through truth to error; and the com- 
 pensations and adjustments which in the long run eliminate 
 this are often long in coming. At present, as it seems to me, 
 we run a risk of this kind. And the following remarks have 
 
4 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 been written under the very deep conviction of two things — 
 viz., first, that the theological and, so far, religious gain 
 referred to is a very real and solid one ; and second, that in 
 proving and applying it, we have need to be very careful that 
 we take no narrow view of this wonderful Person — that we 
 reduce Him to no mere human limits, however high or wide, 
 — but in all our theological apprehensions and speculations, 
 as well as in a more practical reference, hold fast by the 
 catholic doctrine and confessedly great mystery of God mani- 
 fest in the flesh. The most comprehensive and effective 
 method of establishing such a position is, probably, to show 
 Christ's unique and manifold relation to the various elements 
 and aspects of that specific dealing of God with His world 
 which we name Redemption, and what follows is intended to 
 furnish a few suggestions in this direction. I should say, 
 however, that my aim is expository rather than apologetic, 
 and that throughout I shall make assumptions which, to 
 another audience, would have to be proved, but which, in the 
 circumstances, may perhaps pass. Without further preface, 
 then, I remark — 
 
 1. That Christ is the centre of Christian Revelation. 
 I do not here purpose entering upon the speculative aspects 
 of the truth this proposition contains. These, no doubt, are 
 many and important. It would be highly interesting, e.g., 
 to discuss how, since the whole plan and process of creation 
 lead up to man, and the elements of human nature to what 
 is ethical, the aim of Revelation is fittingly, though partially, 
 attained in the appearance of a perfect man sent forth from 
 God ; and how, further, since no man stands alone but 
 humanity is essentially organic, Revelation's end is so far 
 reached in the establishment by Him of an organic Church 
 in vital union with its Head. It being admitted also that 
 man is, by some means or other, estranged from his God, it 
 might be argued that the Revelation which sought the 
 removal of such estrangement included as a necessary factor 
 in it the manifestation of one in whom the reconciliation of 
 God and humanity should be actually effected, and in and 
 from whom, therefore, the individual might start as from the 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. O 
 
 properly religious standpoint. God, too, it might be said, 
 from His very nature, seeks to communicate Himself to His 
 creatures, and to make them fully — to the fulness, i.e., of 
 their measure — recipient of Him : what more befitting, then, 
 than that in making this purpose known and in carrying it 
 through He should make the crowning feature of it all a 
 God-man ? But, meanwhile, to this high a priori road let 
 us prefer the humbler track of history — of the actual facts of 
 God's revelation of grace, — marking how they all lead up to 
 and are centred in the Christ. 
 
 The Divine-historical agency named "Revelation" may be 
 said to have a two-fold aim : to reveal God and to redeem man. 
 It would not be difficult to unify these — perhaps it is some- 
 what rude treatment to disjoin them — but, as merely pro- 
 visional, and for the purpose in hand, the analysis may be 
 allowed. 
 
 As to the former, then, God's self-revelation, the method 
 He adopted was the historical method, and the process was 
 intricate and long. God had taken to do with man concern- 
 ing this matter for some 2000 years before He could satis- 
 factorily, and in a way suitable both to Him and to us, attain 
 His end. The stretch of events which meantime transpired 
 was complex and varied. It included the growth of a family 
 into a nation, the institution and free play of the manifold 
 relations, domestic and foreign, of the people so formed, the 
 rise and decay of their successive modes of government, their 
 repeated domination by alien powers, their final dissolution 
 and ruin. But while thus on the human side national events 
 were allowed to develop themselves according to ordinary 
 human law, the history contains other features which only 
 carelessness or perversity can refuse to acknowledge as quite 
 peculiar and unique, and which evidently bear a high spiritual 
 import. Israel was nothing if not religious. She embodied 
 in her life and institutions and carried forward in her pro- 
 gress a great redemptive purpose, exhibited broad Divine 
 principles of truth, bore within her powerful forces making 
 for salvation. In her methods of government, in her social 
 organisation, in her moral legislation, in her religious arrange- 
 
6 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 ments, she testified to a self-revealing God, and progressively 
 made Him known. She did this in perfectly historical 
 fashion, and with her face to the future; in a way, i.e., which 
 always left it to be understood that further revelations 
 had yet to be made, the gift or attainment which at any 
 stage satisfied her most pressing need still leaving her highly 
 expectant. That the great God had once for all definitively 
 taken up the religious concern of man, and was practically 
 dealing with it with a view to perfect settlement, so much 
 was clearly understood and accepted ; but how and by what 
 methods and appliances this should be effected, was left in 
 large measure uncertain and obscure. His utter hatred 
 of sin, e.g., was rendered by manifold experiences indubit- 
 able ; but how He was finally — finally, i.e., so far as man 
 was concerned — to dispose of it, did by no means appear. 
 And so the Coming One, whom many things suggested and 
 even made sure, was looked for wistfully, undoubtingly — now 
 one feature of Him being descried through the darkness and 
 now another, the ear ever strained to catch the far-off foot- 
 step, and the far-off voice saying, " Lo, I come." 
 
 Now the point to be insisted on here is, that the spiritual 
 and natural phenomena in Israel's history did not just flow 
 onward side by side ; they overflowed into each other, or 
 became inextricably immeshed with each other, and together 
 formed one indissoluble whole. God, that is to say, in all His 
 dealings with His people, took ordinary facts, events, and 
 relations as His starting-point, and gave them spiritual 
 significance. The securing of a suitable territory, the 
 gaining of a battle, are facts earthly enough in themselves, but 
 it is just in such facts as these that God based His redeeming 
 truth and power. He transfigured and glorified the elements 
 of this world in making them subserve His purpose of grace 
 — they became for the time being the concrete embodiment 
 of those everlasting principles of truth and grace which 
 finally came in their purity and fulness by Jesus Christ. In 
 other words, when God would save men and progressively 
 exhibit to them how He did so, He accomplished His 
 purpose, not by words, but by deeds ; not by directly teaching 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 7 
 
 them theoretical principles of truth, but by exercising within 
 them and on their behalf gracious redemptive energies, 
 which interwove themselves with their common human 
 experience and history, and in which, therefore, theoretical 
 principles could be afterwards discerned. But what, now, is 
 this but to say, that, apart from that solidarity of matter in 
 the Old Testament and in the New, which secures (in 
 Calvinistic phraseology) sameness of " substance " under 
 difference of " administration," the form also in which the 
 matter is moulded is the same ? If the special note of the 
 New Testament revelation be, that in it God so fully enters 
 into our history that He becomes veritably man — truly 
 Immanuel — then the Old Testament can be shown to lead 
 up to it and without it to be incomplete. For the implica- 
 tion of its entire process was that God Himself was coming 
 into relation with the course of human events ; was Himself 
 personally and actually becoming historical. His method of 
 self-revelation was indeed historical, for it was a progressive 
 insertion of His own activity and His own personality into 
 the course of the world's affairs ; and what possible ultimate 
 issue could this have but in His becoming finally true man ? 
 In Israel's history God, if one might say so, gradually edged 
 Himself into the course of the world's life, and, even on its 
 formal side,* it was but the natural consummation of the 
 process which was reached when He at last stood up in that 
 wonderful and unique Personality who proclaimed Himself 
 God as well as man. In short, historicity in the method of 
 revelation is implicitly and by way of promise Incarnation. 
 
 Looking now more specially to the aspect which revelation 
 bears towards man, one is again impressed with the alone 
 importance of the Person Christ. For revelation is emphati- 
 cally redemption, has that for one great motive and aim, and 
 
 * The substantial unity of revelation as effected in Christ is too large a 
 matter to be more than noted here. To show how the revealing doctrines 
 and redeeming agencies treated in both Old and New Testaments are alike 
 completed in Him, or first have justice done them in His living Personality, 
 would require a separate paper ; while this, as it stands, is too long. Besides, 
 these points are more or less directly referred to, pp. 15-19. 
 
8 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 in this respect also may be seen as consummated in the 
 living Person of the Redeemer. 
 
 And here let us not take too narrow a view of what 
 redemption implies. It may be true, perhaps, for most men 
 that the prime necessity of redemption for them lies in their 
 sin ; they are at variance with the world's law, and no 
 individual striving can heal the breach. But the matter 
 concerned, — though covering this, and indeed holding this, in 
 one sense, for its main issue, — is wider than any such experi- 
 ence ; the problem of redemption is the problem of human 
 life ; and Christ is the Redeemer that suits us, because life in 
 Him is solved. 
 
 That certainly cannot be said of others ; of Christ alone 
 can it be said that life was to the liver a conquered thing. 
 Other men wonder at life, they fear it, are overwhelmed by 
 it. Many things in it^they cannot master, — chiefly, perhaps, 
 three. Thus, they do not grasp its meaning. By which 
 I intend, not that they fail to seize the significance of this or 
 that circumstance or fact which presents itself at any time, 
 of any single phenomenon or event, or even of any one force 
 of wide action and influence. They do so fail, and fre- 
 quently ; in a strict sense, always. But more than that, 
 what have they to say to the meaning of life as a whole ? 
 By what conception shall they take in its entire reach ? 
 Its mysterious origin — its strangely complex and surely 
 meaningful present — the little sleep that rounds it — the 
 purport and drift of it — what can men say to all this ? how 
 shall they conceive it ? Is it not the case that they stumble 
 helplessly, and are bewildered and baffled, content in the 
 long run perforce with a bare probability here and a leap into 
 the dark hereafter ? 
 
 Failing to solve the sphinx's riddle of the meaning of life, 
 they are not likely to attain to its mission. For a mission 
 of some sort it also surely does present, a practical purpose to 
 be effected, an end to be gained, a work to be done. But 
 what shall we say that is ? We may live to ourselves ; but 
 does it satisfy us ? — or to others ; but is it worth while ? — or to 
 whatever is higher than us; but again, cut bono? The 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 9 
 
 world passeth away and its works, as well as the lust thereof, 
 and is not anything abiding unsure ? 
 
 Lastly, had we the meaning of life at our feet and its 
 mission well in hand, what shall we say of our mastery of 
 life's forces ? Great forces there are in life, heaving and 
 palpitating on all sides of us, pulsing throughout our being ; 
 high intellectual forces of thought and feeling, mighty moral 
 forces of action and destiny. They play about us and in 
 us, these forces, and their plaything is ourselves. They 
 sway and impel us, and toss us to and fro ; we are their 
 slaves, and not their masters ; they scorn us and our puny 
 power " as the tempest scorns the chain." For is it not in 
 dealing practically and from day to day with the active 
 elements of life that we come to know our human limita- 
 tion, our infirmity, above all, our sin ? And the discovery 
 is overwhelming when a man takes in its truth ; when it 
 came to the noble Paul at least, he " died" Insignificance 
 reaching to nothingness, helplessness become paralysis, and 
 utter guilt — what can humanity bent under such a burden 
 do but cry with him, " Who shall deliver me ? " 
 
 It is here now that Revelation, in this aspect of it, meets 
 us and is consummated in the life and death of the God-man. 
 For in Christ God actually and personally enters into human 
 life, and conquers it once for all. He takes no half measures 
 with it ; He deals with it and all its responsibilities fairly 
 and honestly. He shrinks from no element of it which is 
 truly human, despises no task because it is humble, shirks 
 no experience because it brings pain. Rather does He 
 straighten Himself to the uttermost and submit to its weari- 
 est condition, that, having sounded the depths of human 
 life as well as scaled its heights, He may know and conquer it 
 throughout. And so God becomes flesh, and the Son is made 
 in all things like unto His brethren. Yet, how unlike ! For 
 His experiences are far beyond ours in point of difficulty and 
 distress, and still He is King throughout them all. The 
 difficulties He had to face were more and more fearful than 
 we can know, but they none of them hindered His onward 
 march. His sorrows we cannot understand, yet He was not 
 
10 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 overborne, nor was His faith shaken. His work was simply 
 infinite — fully to reveal God, perfectly to redeem a world, to 
 establish a kingdom which should be universal and eternal ; 
 and all within the limits of a brief human life ! But He 
 could kneel to His Father before He left the earth, and say, 
 " I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do." 
 Intellectual inquiries and speculative problems as such He 
 indeed left untouched ; their practical bearings constituted 
 His problem, while for the rest, He was content to take them 
 as He found them. But surely the practical meaning of life 
 was solved to Him who knew whence He came and whither 
 He went, and whose fellowship with the Father was un- 
 broken. Its mission was realised by Him who could say 
 His contribution to the working out of the One abiding 
 Will — which through all the world's effort spreads deep and 
 wide — was completed ; and all life's forces were mastered by 
 Him who laid His strong hand upon them that they might 
 minister to His work, and who, in especial, not only knew no 
 sin, but wrestled with it and slew it. Life, then, was to Christ 
 a conquered thing ; human life was by Him purified, glori- 
 fied, redeemed. Hence the great meaning of His con- 
 stant severance of Himself from the world : " I have over- 
 come the world, — the prince of it cometh, and hath nothing 
 in Me." Not with calm ease, as we know, was the victory 
 won ; indeed, it would not have been won had not suffering 
 beyond what we can appreciate been present. And so He 
 always is bowed with sorrow, and passes on before us as con- 
 sistently and par excellence the Man of Sorrows. His fear- 
 ful " hour " looms on Him from the time He begins His 
 work, weighs on Him, increases till it becomes a fierce bap- 
 tism which He must be baptised with, and finally costs Him 
 an agony with which we hardly dare even to sympathise. But 
 from the struggle He rises victor, and from the scene of it 
 He passes to meet His dread " hour " in kingly self-conquest 
 and self-possession. The experience of the " hour " itself, 
 in which eternal purposes were realised and eternal destinies 
 were fixed, the inmost nature of Godhead was educed and 
 the world's meaning was consummated, who shall attempt to 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 11 
 
 describe ? Our experience is as nothing here, and the most 
 reverent thinking fails. But one thing concerning it we do 
 know. For, from the midst of the darkness that wrapped 
 around His solitary Divinity throughout its awful moments, 
 when justice was done for human guilt and human sin was 
 slain, there came the cry that "it was finished" — a cry 
 which, though the last faint sigh of a broken heart, was a 
 very paean of triumph rising from earth to heaven. For it 
 signified that men were no longer to be awed and over- 
 whelmed by human life, but made its masters. Life once 
 for all had been " finished " by the God-man, and now was 
 " theirs " in Him. He had not lived alone, nor did He die 
 alone. Neither He Himself nor those who knew His mean- 
 ing most intimately, ever regarded Him so. He lived and 
 died in a very special sense for others, for His Church ; or 
 better, His Church, in idea and Divine intention, in prin- 
 ciple and effect, lived and died in Him. Hence, I repeat, 
 life was now the conquest of men — theirs, namely, in Him. 
 All others it had met and overthrown, now itself had met its 
 conqueror. For He who had devised it and made it, had 
 now Himself entered into it and fulfilled it. Constantly, 
 toilsomely, woefully, in the house and by the way, by day and 
 by night, in health and in weakness, in the full vigour of life 
 and in the very article of death, He, the Prince of Life, had 
 overcome life and its death too, rifling it of its secret, pluck- 
 ing from it its sting, till at last there came the supreme 
 moment when His " hour " had struck, and the world rose 
 up redeemed. 
 
 This view of Revelation as consummated in the living Person 
 of the Redeemer — in what, as Incarnate and grappling with 
 all the responsibilities of human life, He is and does — has its 
 own light to throw upon the absoluteness of our Christian 
 religion in one aspect of that great fact. The religion of 
 Christ, viz., is founded in the depths of human nature and 
 life, and cannot therefore be surpassed in suitability or 
 adequacy for human need. That is, it cannot be superseded. 
 Other religions may appeal to this or that element of man's 
 
12 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 nature or experience, to man so and so constituted and cir- 
 cumstanced, and may flourish wherever and so long as this or 
 that interest is uppermost. But Christ founds His religion in 
 the basal elements of human nature and history. His charac- 
 ter embraces every true religious element of humanity. His 
 life is a supreme victory amidst the poorest and basest condi- 
 tions. Just because He is the Son of God, He is, and can 
 afford to be, the Son of man. Hence the power of Christian- 
 ity to appeal to all races and classes of men, and to every 
 shade of man's experience. Christ's work rises from every- 
 thing external and accidental to the essential man, is a thing 
 accomplished once for all, is absolute and universal. Once 
 He was rejected for the thief and murderer, "wherefore" — 
 on strict argumentative and necessary grounds — " wherefore 
 " also God hath highly exalted Him and given Him the name 
 " which is above every name." The same result naturally 
 follows from the perfection of the self-revelation of God in 
 Christ, perfection in manner as well as in matter — from God's 
 making Himself personally historical in Him who could say, 
 " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." But this by 
 the way. 
 
 In both aspects of the Revelation, then — whether you con- 
 sider it as God's manifestation of Himself to man, or as His 
 perfect redemption of man and his life — the Personal Christ 
 is seen to be its centre and stay. You cannot take Him 
 from it and leave anything worth having. In that case 
 indeed, you have what is without meaning, and to the eye of 
 reason a sheer wreck. At best you have but a fragment, an 
 inception, a hint. All the lines of revelation converge on 
 Christ ; its network of principles and forces is gathered up in 
 and upon Him ; nothing else can bring them (as will be seen 
 more fully immediately) to order and unity, nor do they seek 
 anything greater than He. Christ, I repeat, is the centre 
 of revelation. 
 
 One can hardly omit here a reference to the bearing all 
 this has upon Scripture, and its essential meaning for us. 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 13 
 
 If the personal Christ is the centre of the Revelation, this 
 fact must intimately concern its Record; for the latter is 
 itself really not to be separated from the former, but being 
 its living reflex, is its lasting continuation. 
 
 In the Old Testament, e.g., you have as the burden of the 
 whole, Christ. That is its one notion and purpose; and, 
 apart from Him, it is at best a thing of fair kaleidoscopic 
 fragments. And the reason is, that He Himself is in it 
 personally superintending and directing its course. Its 
 writers do not speak of themselves merely; its remarkable 
 spiritual unity, to say nothing more, could not thus have 
 been secured. They differ in time and circumstances, in 
 character and whole outlook; while it, the book, is in its 
 grand spiritual features one, and in this, as in other respects, 
 unique. It is not easy to see what adequate explanation of 
 this an opponent of Revelation can give ; to us, who believe 
 in Revelation, the difficulty does not occur. For Revelation 
 is revelation of the one, unchanging God, and its historical 
 exponents maintain at once its unity and progressiveness, 
 inasmuch as it is not they who speak, but the Spirit of 
 Christ, the Revealer, who is in them. Christ, it is to be 
 remembered, on the one hand, is the organ of revelation ; it 
 is His varied activity that the different writers record. And, 
 on the other hand, " holy men of old spake as they were 
 moved by the Holy Spirit ; " and this Spirit was the Spirit 
 of Christ. So that Christ is not only both the Agent and 
 the Substance of Revelation, but indirectly, if the expres- 
 sion may be allowed, the Author of its Record also, thus in 
 Old Testament and in New alike consistently, and through 
 the ages, preaching Himself. In the gospels, again, you have 
 Himself speaking ; speaking not as one man to another, but 
 as man never spake; speaking a revealing Word, which, 
 because it is revealing, abides. And the later writings — 
 what are they but the continued self-revelation of the Christ 
 in the unfolding of His nature and position, His past work 
 and present ceaseless energising, and the infinite, everlast- 
 ing worth of it all to men ? — the revelation here also being- 
 mediated by the same Spirit which was given without 
 
14 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 measure to Him.* Take, then, this view of Scripture as the 
 living reflex of the self-revelation of Christ, as the actual 
 Word of the Spirit of Christ, who spoke in prophets and 
 apostles, and most of all in Himself, together with the 
 Christian doctrine of the needed aid of that same Spirit in 
 order to the understanding of spiritual things, and you have 
 this wonderful result : That Scripture is to the Spirit- 
 enlightened man no mere dead letter, but the living voice 
 of the living God, for in it he does not just possess an ancient 
 and authentic record of his Master's ways with men, but 
 through the Spirit comes face to face with the self-revealing 
 Christ. An ordinary memoir, or, better, a portrait, brings 
 before you a likeness of the friend you have lost, good enough, 
 perhaps, but only a likeness still. The picture may be 
 faithful and even happy, recalling to you vividly the features 
 and suggesting the character of him who was dear to you. 
 It meets your eye continually ; you look at it fondly and 
 often ; it seems to welcome your entrance into the room, to 
 follow your departure wistfully ; your picture is very pleasant 
 to you, and you prize it. But it is only a picture still — an 
 image, a simulacrum. It really has no voice for you, no ear 
 to hear your confidence. But in the picture Scripture paints 
 for you your friend lives again. Your picture here is a 
 
 * It might fairly be questioned whether the Church at present lays sufficient 
 emphasis upon the doctrine of the Spirit. Of course, one thing at a time ; 
 and if a fresh realisation of the personal, living Christ is the Church's latest 
 gain, time must be allowed for its consolidation. But once you have set 
 Christ — living, pitying, redeeming, reigning — full in the Church's view, using 
 doctrine mainly to interpret the Person, glorifying "the system " by vivifying 
 it, and reinstating His own order of ''' Me and My words," the question rises 
 how all this is mediated to the Church and the individual. Instead of my 
 acceptance being asked for a creed, a gracious Person offers Himself to my 
 trust. But not just immediately : a certain process is involved here, — a pro- 
 cess which becomes, perhaps, even more interesting to me when it covers my 
 active response to the appeal. How does all this, especially this latter, come 
 about ? We may, no doubt, pass through the process unconscious of how it 
 is effected ; but so far as is possible, we would naturally like to see into its 
 nature and ongoing. And the answer begins to appear when we read that 
 "no man calleth Jesus Lord but by the Holy Ghost." Hence, though pro- 
 phecy is "one of the most gratuitous forms of error," one may venture to 
 surmise that we shall see before long a new insistance on the doctrine of the 
 Spirit, accompanied surely by many good things for the Church. 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 15 
 
 living likeness, a speaking likeness. For in and by the 
 Gospel Christ being dead yet speaketh ; livingly, actually, 
 presently speaketh, since, though He was dead, yet is He 
 now alive, and behold He liveth for evermore. And so he 
 who in faith approaches the sacred page with that Spirit 
 within him whose function it is to take Christ and reveal 
 His riches to men's hearts, as he looks on what is to others a 
 mere dead picture, and perhaps untrue, finds his picture, by 
 a blessed transformation, pass quite away, to leave in its room 
 the wounded but glorious Person of his living and loving 
 Redeemer. 
 
 2. I remark now, in the second place, that Christ is the 
 centre of Christian Theology ; and here I must be very brief. 
 
 This, of course, follows naturally from the former remark, 
 for Christian Theology is just the science of Christian revela- 
 tion, or such revelation seen into its principles and principle. 
 Only to Christian theology do I wish at present to refer. 
 That is to say, for my present purpose what is termed 
 natural theology may be ignored. True enough, it is not to 
 be wholly separated from Christ ; He, as the all-pervading, 
 everywhere active life and light of men, takes to do with it 
 as with all human interests and industries, and with it, 
 indeed, in an especial way, since it forms the logical and, so 
 far, historical preparation for that revelation of which He is 
 peculiarly the burden. Still its main character is that of 
 presupposition for the more definite and detailed truth which 
 from Abraham onwards was revealed, and the latter may, 
 certainly, legitimately enough be considered per se. But of 
 this latter, as just said, Christ is the burden ; all its elements 
 are focussed in Him, and the science of it all is not so much 
 Theology as Christology. That the Person of Christ is 
 the living centre here may be seen both in general and in 
 detail. 
 
 Christian Theology is emphatically a science. Its object is 
 a great complex, — a whole world of spiritual truths, — whose 
 separate principles it has precisely to define, whose inner 
 correlations it has to exhibit, and whose entire contents it 
 
16 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 has livingly to unify. Moreover it is an historical science, — 
 i.e., it is concerned with principles which ruled and were 
 embedded in a long and varied course of historical pheno- 
 mena. Thus it may be termed a branch of the Philosophy 
 of History. For this really is the task of the philosophy of 
 history. It fixes upon, say, one particular section of human 
 history as the object of its study. It takes with it one pre- 
 supposition, which you may term a primary faith or a neces- 
 sity of thought, as you please, — viz., that there is a Providence 
 that shapes all ends ; that the development of man and the 
 progress of events are orderly ; that the whole came from 
 Reason, and is for Reason. This presupposition it seeks to 
 prove by exhibiting it as active in the facts. It takes these, 
 therefore, in the fullest and most accurate representation 
 obtainable, and these it settles down upon, and broods over. 
 Gradually what is accidental and of only passing worth shows 
 itself in its true nature, and is allowed to fall away ; incidental 
 phenomena and insignificant persons fall into the background ; 
 glimpses here and there are caught of what is essential and 
 abiding, which develop as contemplation is continued and 
 concentrated into views of principles of truth and lasting 
 forces of action, until finally, everything which was external 
 and fortuituous merely having passed quite out of sight, the 
 secret which is open to Reason is disclosed, and the period 
 concerned stands out before the mind's eye in its inner notion 
 and meaning. In this way the presupposition of the investi- 
 gation is verified, and the blank formula of mere indefinite 
 reasonableness, with which the student set out, is filled in 
 with a complex of particular principles which he can define 
 and concatenate. 
 
 So with the gigantic stretch of human history which covers 
 the process of God's self-revelation. It, too, forms an unmis- 
 takable unity, and not only may, but in order to fair study 
 must, be studied by itself. What a wealth, now, of spiritual 
 principles it presents, principles crossing and recrossing in 
 whole and in part, yet always blending into unity again. All 
 the great matters of our life and destiny are dealt with here ; 
 the Moral constitution and ruling of our world, God its 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 17 
 
 Maker and Ruler, Sin and Redemption, Judgment and 
 Eternity, — what vast and far-reaching truths concerning all 
 these great factors of existence are intertwined with each 
 other in and around the ordinary historical phenomena of 
 this long period. Unlike other periods, too, this cannot but 
 suggest the burden of meaning it bears. It all lies on the 
 surface ; hardly an incident is preserved but is luminous with 
 a Divine purpose. Hence it is easy to see what the plan and 
 main object of science here must be. Theology has to dis- 
 entangle the principles referred to from the historical accretion 
 in which they are exhibited and preserved, and hold up the 
 fibrous net-work of them to the light of spiritual reason ; and 
 as the full force of Divine revelation rose to its height in 
 Christ, so theology finds its centre and rest in Him who not 
 only speaks the full truth, and does the truth, but Himself 
 personally and livingly is it. 
 
 In the New Testament, of course, you have much more 
 that is definitely doctrinal and theological than in the Old, 
 and also much more definite employment of scientific method 
 and statement. Positions are laid down and argued, con- 
 nections are traced, a working body of divinity is attained. 
 Yet even here what was said above holds, though in a more 
 circumscribed sense. Science proper is not reached ; doctrine, 
 only in compacter masses, is still embodied in history, — the 
 history of the growing Church, and especially of the apostles' 
 experience. Doctrine in the New Testament, as in the Old, 
 is present, on the whole, not as such, but as living and sup- 
 porting life, and aglow with the faith and hope of men who 
 are staking their destiny upon its truth ; or, when not con- 
 cerned with matters of so exclusively personal an interest, 
 the measure of truth at any time given is still regulated by 
 the rule of circumstance and occasion. The New Testament, 
 e.g., presents a complete philosophy of the Old Testament 
 dispensation ; yet not just at a stroke, and in logical com- 
 pleteness, but in fragments, and as the need in actual circum- 
 stances appears. The new science of Biblical Theology, 
 indeed (new, qua science), is just a specially interesting 
 department in the Philosophy of History. Here too, as else- 
 
 B 
 
18 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 where, Christ is everything. No one can with any attention 
 read the New Testament writings, or piece together the 
 different views and principles of the various writers with- 
 out perceiving that to each and all of them Christ is the 
 one solution of the world and of life ; that they owe every- 
 thing to Him, and commit their all to Him. Not only for 
 human life either, but for the universe, He is of unique 
 importance : Christ is to them He absolutely " in whom all 
 things consist." 
 
 So much in general ; the merest word now more in detail. 
 It is easy to see why the doctrine of the personal Christ 
 should be accorded the central place in the theological 
 system ; it follows, indeed, from the very fact that His person 
 has doctrinal significance at all. In no other system is it the 
 case that its founder is doctrinally important. But the 
 cardinal notion of Christianity is mediation ; and moreover, 
 mediation as a fact accomplished in a living mediator. 
 Redemption is not merely stated by Christ, it is given in 
 Him. God reconciles a guilty world to Himself in Him, and 
 a general reconciliation of all things in Him is one day to be 
 effected. He is, accordingly, the solution and harmony of the 
 great opposites. He is the ideal become real, the eternal 
 compressed into the form of time. The whole breadth of 
 Deity collapses into apprehensibility in Him ; the unsearch- 
 able resource of Godhead, being in Him " bodily/'" becomes in 
 Him available for us. Human guilt disappears in Him, human 
 poverty is swallowed up ; at last the stature of perfect man- 
 hood is reached — viz., in Christ Jesus. In short, in Him, in 
 Him personally and as living Head of His body, the Church 
 God is freely and fully communicated to man, while man be- 
 comes, up to the extreme limit of his being, partaker of the 
 Divine nature. No wonder, then, that it should be an easy 
 and natural thiog to give the doctrine of the personal Christ 
 a central place in the theory of how all this is brought about. 
 The other doctrines, greater and less, almost spontaneously 
 arrange themselves around this. The doctrines of Godhead, 
 of the World and Man, and the ruin brought on both by Sin, 
 are evidently presupposition to the doctrine of Christ, and 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 19 
 
 together form the situation which calls it forth. The doctrines 
 of the "offices," and their corollaries; the doctrines respectively 
 of the Spirit by whom, and the Church in whom, the mediation 
 is effected ; and the doctrines, finally, of Eschatology, which 
 exhibit how it is ultimately to be consummated — all these, 
 together with their various implications, clearly lean upon the 
 doctrine of the Mediator Himself. The roughest arrange- 
 ment of the doctrines serves to group them around Him, and 
 the most scientific can find no exacter or more truthful 
 method. They lead to Him or return upon Him. In a word, 
 Christian Theology is Christology. 
 
 3. I remark, thirdly, that Christ is the centre' of Christian 
 Apologetic. 
 
 We are all familiar with the fact that Apologetic has become 
 in our days a somewhat different thing from what it was to 
 our fathers. The old argument from prophecy has, in great 
 part, taken on a different character ; while, at the same time, 
 to the man who is at all imbued with the historic sense, and 
 has any perception of the universal power and presence of 
 gradual evolution in the world and history around him, the 
 argument so modified has become a more sure and lasting 
 bulwark to faith. Miracles, again, meanwhile constitute to 
 many an objection to Revelation rather than an attestation, 
 though I cannot, for my own part, but believe that they are so 
 inextricably knit up with Revelation that it cannot live if 
 they be removed ; that the notion of miracle is given in 
 that of revelation as Divine personal interference with the 
 ordinary world-process for special ends; that not only is 
 miracle, therefore, a necessary implication of revelation in 
 general, but that the particular miracles we find are entirely 
 congruous to the nature of the dispensation in which they 
 occur, and, when viewed not as outward seals to revelation so 
 much as an integral part of it and as indicating its greater 
 meanings, will be felt to have once more all their old 
 convincing power. This mil not be, however, till history 
 come to its rights as it has not yet come ; and when that 
 change of attitude towards those questions has arrived, it 
 
20 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 will not be the matter of miracles which will be first affected, 
 but rather the conception to be formed of the historical 
 person Christ. 
 
 For, I maintain, we are not at liberty to treat the historical 
 questions connected with the appearance of Christ, and the 
 apostolic representation of Him, with that indifference with 
 which they are too commonly regarded. Strauss, indeed, no 
 longer satisfies any one, and Baur's reading of the facts is 
 coming to be recognised by all who are not frivolous as a gross 
 exaggeration which one must very largely discount in form- 
 ing an estimate of what actually was said and done by Christ 
 and in His Church during the first and second centuries. But 
 the evil effects of a false theory may survive after itself is 
 disposed of, and in this case these are seen in the wide-spread 
 disinclination to entertain any very firm or clear opinions 
 concerning anything which took place, or has been said to 
 have taken place in those early times. Hence, e.g. (not to 
 speak of Schleiermacher), Ritschl's incontinent readiness to 
 disconnect Christianity, and especially Christ ology, from 
 everything scientific or historical, and to abandon all that to 
 criticism. Christ's person, he maintains, is not to be deter- 
 mined by what He said or (in detail) did — which may, 
 perhaps must, be uncertain to us, — but by what, on the whole, 
 he effected, of which we have ample proof to this day. It is 
 the general issue of the work that throws light upon the 
 person, and only thus is the person to be reached. The forces 
 Christ set in motion, and the results he accomplished, are 
 supposed to imply certain qualifications, powers, and courses 
 of action, and from their existing outcome he is to be deter- 
 mined. In this way we may conclude that Christ embodied 
 in his life and work the holy and loving will of God, and 
 drew men into fellowship with himself therein, thus founding 
 the blessed kingdom of God, and fully realising God's purpose of 
 grace (and therefore His genera) purpose) with the world. Now, 
 this is only a definite example of a method of treating Christ's 
 person which, in itself, is common, though often indefinite. 
 And it is, I contend, on the whole a false method. Though 
 interesting in itself, and capable of being turned to good 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 21 
 
 apologetic purpose, it would not appear to yield any very 
 reliable conclusions as to Christ's bearing or character, while 
 besides, and chiefly, it is nothing short of preposterous to 
 think of giving history the go-by in this cavalier fashion. 
 History is history. It lies before us in ascertained or ascer- 
 tainable form, containing certain confusions and complications 
 no doubt, but few, if any, which patient research cannot 
 unravel, and it is nothing less than a sacred responsibility that 
 lies upon us to use all diligence to find what actually and re 
 vera it has to say to us. We cannot afford to despise history, 
 and it will not say* much for our intelligence or be well for 
 our faith if we do so. 
 
 If history, then, be honestly dealt with, no doubt prophecy and 
 miracles will again come to be installed as Christian evidences 
 — in modified form perhaps, and by so much the more power- 
 fully evidential ; yet only as subordinate to the prime 
 argument of all, the historical person, Christ. For, after all, 
 all other lines of Christian evidence lead up to and are con- 
 summated in Him. He is His own best evidence ; shining 
 in His own light, being as He claimed to be — and never more 
 clearly than when He claimed to be — the Light of the World ; 
 and if the representation given of Him by tradition be 
 vindicated at the bar of criticism, Apologetic will continue to 
 lean on the position that certain facts in the world's history 
 are inexplicable except on the theory that they disclose a 
 self-revealing God manifest in the flesh. In this connection 
 I would make three observations, premising that I have no 
 intention of constructing an apologetic argument, but merely 
 of indicating a three-fold method of construction : — 
 
 (1.) In speaking of Christ as the summation and consum- 
 mation of Divine revelation, the point emphasised was that 
 the latter culminated in a definite historical person, and this, 
 as it seems to me, can fairly be made to serve an apologetic 
 end. For what does it imply ? This ; that the grand 
 redemptive purpose of God, embodying broad principles of 
 Divine truth and large Divine activities, taking to do with 
 man and man's affairs and all his life, becoming progressively 
 connected and interlaced with veritable human history, at 
 
22 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 length did, after some 2000 years of increasing manifestation 
 of God and entanglement with the world, come by its perfec- 
 tion and full realisation in a single historical individual. Two 
 thousand years of history would have been meaningless but for 
 this man ! Robbed of their fulfilment, they would have been 
 bereft also of the notion which gave them unity and a purpose. 
 He Himself says so; "Think not that I am come to destroy the 
 law and the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil; " 
 and His followers' main contention is that at last Israel's 
 hopes are gratified and Messiah has appeared. Not that this 
 is a mere national thing. Israel, in notion at least, always 
 occupied a prophetic relation to the whole world ; and the 
 Christ whom the Jew expected was absolutely " He that 
 should come," "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
 world," of universal significance and permanent, absolute 
 value for faith. The apostles contemplate no further revela- 
 tion, none at least unto salvation ; so far as that is concerned, 
 they always recur to the historically manifested Christ. 
 Hence one is left with this, that one grand section of the 
 world's history, the unity and nobility of whose purpose can 
 escape no serious student, has its vital and meaningful centre 
 in a single individual ; what is prior to him reaches forward 
 to him, what is subsequent recurs to him ; he is its Alpha 
 and Omega, its beginning and its end ; its be-all and end-all 
 lies in him. The apologetic presumption which this suggests 
 is plain. 
 
 (2.) Christ's character, especially in its self-assertiveness, 
 has just been referred to; but it may be emphasised separately, 
 and one or two points noted by way of recalling the impres- 
 sion of the common argument. Not to speak of His direct 
 claim to Divinity, observe, for example, His sublime egoism; how 
 He does not point men to the truth, but, assuring them that 
 He is the Truth, calls them to Himself, makes belief on Him- 
 self to be the great thing for a man, consistently preaches not 
 principles of human living merely, but above all Himself. 
 His unselfishness, no doubt, is perfect, the reference to others 
 being so strong with Him as almost to place Him outside the 
 human struggle; yet this no way interferes with, indeed 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 23 
 
 it is the very basis of, an infinite self-consciousness which 
 makes it a more critical thing for others than for Himself that 
 He is here at all. Note, too, His absolute self-confidence. 
 His is the most stupendous programme man ever set himself 
 — He is, once for all, to reveal God, to save man, and amongst 
 men to found God's everlasting kingdom ; yet He goes about 
 it all with most complete assurance, not for a moment 
 betraying a hesitant or tentative air, and at the end declares 
 His work to be " finished." Indeed, there is that about Christ's 
 proclamation of Himself in face of which it is hard to resist 
 the impulse to own Him Lord. Just think of the majesty 
 that surges through the oft-repeated, simple words, " I am 
 come." " I am come " to show men the Father, — to save 
 the lost, — that perishing men might have life. The quiet 
 words are throbbing with Divinity; their voice is as the 
 voice of many waters. They are unique, and explicable 
 surely in only one way; what other man ever announced 
 himself as " come " into our life for this or that ? Consider, 
 for example, His great words, " I am come not to destroy the 
 law and the prophets, but to fulfil" — how, surveying the 
 entire stretch and compass of God's revelation of grace so far 
 as it had gone, He calmly gathers up all its meaning upon 
 Himself, and, clad in the hoary purpose of two thousand years, 
 announces Himself as the Son sent in the fulness of the times, 
 — and say whether anything short of the centurion's admission 
 will suffice. And if declarations so plain need any further 
 demonstration that more than humanity is in this man, let 
 them find it in those fugitive utterances and suggestive 
 implications which, because so evidently unintentional, are all 
 the more demonstrative ; as when, for example, He turns to 
 the Father with the words, " All Thine are mine; " or again, to 
 us men, " If a man love Me he will keep My word : and My 
 Father will love him, and We — Jehovah and I — We will come 
 unto him, and make our abode with him." Can you believe 
 that He who utters these words is only a Jewish carpenter 
 'prentice, who died young ? 
 
 (3.) Reference has also been made to the apostles' claim 
 on Christ's behalf, and it may be dismissed in a single sen- 
 
24 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 tence. Its importance, however, must not be under-rated. 
 It is identical with Christ's own claim, and with what 
 Judaism demanded. There is no feature of their Christ- 
 ology which is not implied in the gospels, and very little of 
 it which is not implied in the Synoptists, even apart from 
 John. Their several systems of thought hinge alike upon 
 Christ, and their various views of Christ are in essence one. 
 From the first moment when with persuasive voice He 
 called them from their nets or their tax-gathering, their 
 notions of Him grew in a quite singular and wonderful 
 way ; developing and expanding as He discovered His un- 
 searchable nature and infinite energising before their minds, 
 until their apprehension swelled to the proportions of His 
 being, and He stood before them as Godhead revealed, men's 
 Maker and Providence, Redeemer and Judge. This can 
 only be stated here, but the statement is easily verifiable. 
 And if it be true, then we have either to accept their repre- 
 sentation of Christ as correct, or to accuse the apostles, and 
 with them the Christian Church generally, not merely of a 
 serious misunderstanding, which would be quite possible, but 
 of a blasphemous folly, which is less credible. 
 
 Biblical Christology, therefore, I would conclude, is the 
 central apologetic argument ; essentially so at all times, 
 especially so at present. From first to last Christ is the 
 Bible's sum and substance, its very heart of hearts, the 
 consistent outcome of the whole course of Divine transac- 
 tion with men known as Revelation, and thereby He is His 
 own best evidence. To see somewhat into Christ's character 
 and meaning, and His manifold relation to that entire section 
 of history in which God has dealt with men in grace, is, 
 I conceive, to stand upon apologetic ground from which 
 neither philosophy nor criticism can drive one. 
 
 4. Lastly, I remark that Christ is the centre of the 
 Christian life. 
 
 Here it would be natural to speak of Christ as the Head 
 of the Church, which is His body. For the religious life is 
 not to Christianity an individual, isolated thing, but organic ; 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 9.^ 
 
 those whom Christ redeems form a great living whole, each 
 in fellowship with each, because all in fellowship with Him. 
 Hence, I say, it would be natural to consider Christ here as 
 the centre and life of His Church, the Blesser of all her 
 arrangements and ordinances and sacraments, the Guardian 
 of all her interests, the Guide of her progress, the Maker of 
 her destiny, causing the whole meaning of things to centre 
 in her, and the issue of things to minister to her good ; as, 
 in short, Head over all things for the Church's sake, which is 
 His body, the fulness of Him that fllleth all in all. But 
 I do not attempt here to be systematic, and meanwhile 
 I wish rather to make one or two observations upon the per- 
 sonal aspect of the case, with the view of emphasising the 
 fact that Christianity professes not only to give to men, for 
 the sustaining of their religious life, and so of all their life, 
 a gracious and powerful influence, but to make that life 
 only one long course of free intercourse and interchange 
 between them and a gracious and powerful Person. 
 
 The theory of the Christian life is probably best expressed 
 by the old definition, " Union and communion with Christ in 
 grace and glory." Christian life, that is, is life in Christ ; 
 a real fellowship and joint-inheritance with Christ as regards 
 His spiritual knowledge and holiness and blessedness, made 
 good in the actual history and experience of each man, but 
 based upon a prior ideal, even eternal relationship to Christ, 
 in virtue of which each man, in principle and in effect (or 
 as before God), passed through Christ's life and death, and 
 was involved in their meaning as He was. The doctrine of 
 the unio mystica, however, is treated at length, in one of its 
 aspects, in the following paper, and the simple point here to 
 be referred to may be indicated without its help. 
 
 That point is, that the Christian life derives solely from 
 Christ, is originated and maintained solely by Him, and 
 apart from Him does, specifically as such, cease to be. Take 
 the critical doctrine of conversion. Conversion, so far, has 
 its analogues in common experience. It not uncommonly 
 happens that, apart from properly spiritual matters,, a man 
 breaks with an old way of life and adopts a new ; is startled 
 
2b CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 by the discovery of a new faculty within him, and the open- 
 ing up of a new prospect without; is caught for a new enthu- 
 siasm and fired with a new hope ; — and this, so far as it goes, 
 may be covered by the term " conversion." In true spiritual 
 conversion the mind is subdued by the inherent authority of 
 the truth, the heart is irresistibly fired with a new passion, 
 the whole man is seized and mastered by a new conception 
 and purpose of life and destiny. But this is not the whole 
 matter. To speak of it so is only to describe the process by 
 its effects, not to define it by its causes ; this is a passing 
 " from darkness to marvellous light," but how is the trans- 
 ition accomplished ? Scripture is not silent here. A 
 man's first apprehension of the truth, it says, is not a mere 
 act of his mind going out to lay hold on what will bring 
 light and peace to his spirit; nor is it a mere apprehension 
 of him by the truth, as if it with invisible hands could seize 
 his mind and mould his belief. It is an apprehension of 
 him at the hand of Him who is the Truth ; an apprehension 
 of the whole man of him — his intellect and imagination, his 
 belief and emotion and will, his whole being and self — by the 
 risen and living Christ. This is Paul's philosophy of con- 
 version. His case was a strangely complex and sudden one, 
 and not, surely, to be explained by merely natural causes — 
 as witness the attempts which have been made in that 
 direction. At the time, probably, he could not definitely 
 have explained to himself what the spiritual revolution that 
 had happened him meant. But thirty years later, when the 
 fact of his conversion had been confirmed to him, and the 
 meaning of it had grown upon him, he theorised the whole 
 matter thus: I was apprehended by Christ Jesus. A 
 blasphemer, a persecutor and injurious, I breathed out 
 threat enings and slaughters against the Church of Christ ! 
 in a fatally mistaken religious fanaticism I rushed on blindly 
 and madly against the Christ, hurling myself upon Him 
 with all the weight of Judaism, as I thought, behind me. 
 And then, in the full tide of my hideous opposition, I was 
 arrested ; a strong Hand was laid upon me ; suddenly and 
 once for all I was grasped by Christ Jesus. 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 27 
 
 Conversion, then, indicates the instituting of a new rela- 
 tionship between God and man, a relationship which is 
 consciously mutual. Other phrases relative to conversion 
 imply the same thing — e.g., " ye must be born again," " it 
 pleased God to reveal His Son in Me." Man, in conversion, 
 takes up a new attitude toward God, but only because God 
 has taken up a new attitude toward him, and set a new 
 agency at work upon him. But God here acts in Christ ; all 
 His redeeming activities are realised in and operate through 
 Him. In other words, the Christian life in its very beginning 
 proves Christ's present, living power to redeem by the 
 personal exercise of it upon a man's spirit. 
 
 And it is nowise different with all the various gifts and 
 graces of the Christian life. These are not just in the air, 
 dropping somehow into a man's conviction and emotion. 
 They are definitely and truly gifts, gifts of a gracious Lord 
 who knows His own personally, and deals with them indi- 
 vidually according to their need. Faith, penitence, forgive- 
 ness, righteousness, life, knowledge, security, joy, — in short, 
 all furtherance whatsoever in things spiritual comes by way 
 of gift from Him who is exalted for that end, and who metes 
 out grace as occasion requires. They come one and all directly 
 from Him, and bring into relation to Him ; they multiply 
 and complicate the relation between His follower and Him- 
 self, making their fellowship to become more full, complete, 
 blessed. Indeed, they just serve to make Christ more to 
 the Christian, and to develop the latter's apprehension and 
 reception of Him. What the Christian is enriched with 
 when he makes any advance, say in spiritual knowledge, is 
 really a richer, more determinate knowledge of Christ. To 
 him truth is living and personal ; the whole system of it has 
 taken shape and life and voice, announcing itself in the great 
 words, "I am the Truth." So, when a deeper, stronger 
 religious life is called forth in him in any way, this but 
 means that he has partaken more fully of the Divine 
 nature of Him who is the Life, and now commands greater 
 ability than before to adopt Paul's "I live, yet not I, but 
 Christ liveth in me." In none of the heaven-given experi- 
 
28 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 ences of the Christian life can you view the gift as apart from 
 Christ ; rather in each does He give Himself in this or that 
 character, for this or that end ; making Himself " wisdom " 
 or " righteousness," or ought else that is needed, and acquir- 
 ing thereby His right to the name of "the gift of God," 
 " His unspeakable gift." 
 
 So that, perhaps, the matter might be expressed thus : 
 that the whole grand fact and process of redemption is a 
 great sphere of gifts, the elements of which are many. The 
 experiences in grace of the believer presently under discipline 
 and working out his salvation go to make up this solid 
 sphere of spiritual benefit ; but the chief and central element 
 of all is the unspeakable gift, Christ Jesus. It is here they 
 all come to unity, here they all are vitalised ; apart from Him 
 they could not be ; their one function is to bring into 
 fellowship with Him and apprehension of Him, or rather to 
 be that fellowship and apprehension. To sever the Christian 
 life from Christ, then, is impossible. You have, say, a 
 flower in your hands which you have plucked up by the roots 
 and carefully preserved entire. You have broken no fibre, 
 crushed no petal, torn no leaf; it lies before your eye 
 complete, a living fragment of beauty. But you destroy 
 your flower ; you break its slender stalk, rend the fibres of 
 its roots, tear its leaves to shreds, crush its fragrant blossom, 
 and again you have your flower before you. But not the 
 flower it was. You may have lost no leaf or fibre, may have 
 preserved its every petal, but the life that vitalised it all is 
 gone, and with it its unity and fragrance and beauty. So 
 with the Christian life, the gifts of it, and the gift. They all 
 lead up to Him, He fulfils and vitalises them. The whole 
 spiritual life brings us directly face to face with a personal 
 Redeemer; all we have in this respect, as in others, comes 
 from Him, and is to be returned with usury ; in every 
 element and experience of it we have personal contact and 
 dealing with Him ; through all His gifts and graces, through 
 all our worship and effort we reach Him ; life, i.e., to the 
 Christian, is definite, true, actual fellowship with God-in- 
 Christ. 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 29 
 
 I make this remark, familiar as it must be to us all, and 
 over-practical as it may seem to some, because I am deepty 
 impressed with the necessity we are under in our own life, 
 and therefore in our endeavours as Christian ministers to 
 help the lives of others, of holding fast by and clearly 
 proclaiming a risen and living and present Lord. At a time 
 like the present, when the interrogative mood is so largely 
 dominant, and the tendency is so strong to leave all the great 
 questions open, men come to content themselves though a 
 query be put to all their faiths, and to consider that the 
 highest virtue attainable for them is to hope for the time 
 when solid and solemn conviction shall once again have 
 possession, and meanwhile to possess their soul in patience. 
 And if any too serious for such dilettantism strive to attain 
 something substantial which, with assured peace, they can rest 
 their heart upon, the temptation is natural and strong not to 
 aim at great things in this respect, but to be satisfied with a 
 a minimum. Studying the life and character of Christ, e.g., 
 such men may not be content with a shallow rationalism, 
 but neither will they allow themselves to be persuaded that 
 here is veritably a God-man. They probably do not once 
 definitely face the grand question in its various bearings, 
 whether this be or be not God come into human life to help 
 them. That possibility they prejudge, and for the rest they 
 take up a middle position : Christ is to them a phenomenon, 
 not supernatural, but quite extraordinary. He was not God, 
 but he certainly was the first to expound — and he did it 
 with fulness, and force, and beauty — how man ought to stand 
 related to his God, and on what lines generally his life should 
 go. As teaching the true doctrine of man's life, and embody- 
 ing it in an eminent degree in his own, they will accept 
 him ; they will take the great lessons which by word and 
 deed he taught, gladly and thankfully ; but beyond that 
 they will leave all in uncertainty and haze. 
 
 Now, it is no part of my business here to argue with such 
 persons. For myself, I believe that if reason and moral 
 earnestness be allowed full play, and the actual facts be 
 honestly dealt with, no halting-place will be found till we 
 
30 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 and in Peter's admission, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of 
 the living God." And those whom I now address presumably 
 agree with me. But what I wish with all emphasis to say is, 
 that such a view as the above, though it has much truth in 
 it, and may be found helpful and even sufficient by some, 
 does not rise to the height of the Christian assurance. It is 
 not the account which Christianity, de facto, gives of itself. 
 Christianity gives us no dead Christ to be redeemed by and 
 to live for, one whose word and influence perhaps have 
 lasted and come down even to our own day, but who 
 himself is for ever gone. It says that God was and still is 
 this Christ, for ever reconciling the world unto Himself. It 
 says that its Founder lives, lives here and now, and ever 
 lives to save and make intercession — personally to speak the 
 word of life to the dead in sins, to scatter the darkness of 
 uncertainty, to strengthen and cheer in sorrow. So that the 
 Christian life is one into which a real Divine personal power 
 has entered ; one which is hid with the living Christ in the 
 living God. And what in preaching we have to aim at is, 
 not to lay before men's eyes mere general principles of 
 human living, however right, nor yet, in the first instance at 
 least, to puzzle them with complex metaphysics or minute 
 doctrine, however true, but to persuade them, on grounds of 
 common history and a common religious experience bearing 
 fruit all around, that their Maker and Judge having loved 
 them and died for them still loves them and lives for them, 
 longing with a grave, unspeakable tenderness that they 
 should take Him unto their broken, meagre, failing lives, 
 that so He might take them unto His. 
 
 If it be true, as I have roughly tried to show, that the 
 personal, living Christ is the centre of Christianity — the 
 unifying, vitalising, and commanding centre of its Revelation, 
 its Theology, its Apologetic, and its Life — then many things 
 would seem to follow. May I be pardoned if, in conclusion, 
 I draw attention to two of the more practical of these. 
 
 (1.) We must live Christ. We must live, i.e., as men whose 
 life derives from Christ, and whose entire view of life is 
 
CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 31 
 
 founded on His and guaranteed by Him. We must be His 
 disciples and His followers, eager to learn of Him, waiting 
 on His will. We must live as men who have been redeemed 
 by Christ, who have had the meaning of life solved and the 
 adverse forces of life broken for them by God come in the 
 flesh, and whose hearts are filled with the high hope of a 
 great destiny, for that we have been called by the faithful 
 God unto the fellowship of His Son. We must show our 
 unbounded confidence in Him, our strong assurance. We 
 must make it clear that in all the elements of our life He 
 has the mastery ; that our past is all atoned by Him, the 
 present maintained and gladdened, the future well assured. 
 In all things we must serve Him, and everywhere give Him 
 the pre-eminence. Self-seeking is infinitely unworthy in a 
 world where grace reigns, and it strikes at the root of the life 
 of faith — " How can ye believe if ye seek honour from men and 
 not from God ?" Life here and hereafter, and through and 
 through, must be so permeated with Christ, that apart from 
 Him it would to us be meaningless, full only of mystery and 
 pain. In short, our definition and description of it must be the 
 apostle's — to us to live, that must be Christ. We must be and 
 do all this as Christian men, as Jesus Christ's men; we must be 
 and do this also as His ministers, and more especially as such 
 (2.) We must preach Christ. We must preach Him as a 
 living, present, powerful Redeemer, eminently fitted to lighten 
 all darkness, and break all bondage, and relieve all trouble. 
 We must, following apostolic example and His own, preach 
 Himself; in the manifold meaning, of course, of His nature 
 and work, but above all Himself — the living, loving, mighty 
 Person, able and willing to the uttermost. We must preach 
 Him in strength of faith and with enthusiasm. What our 
 day needs, gentlemen, is convictions — assured, honest, heart- 
 felt convictions — to take the place of open questions and 
 frigid opinions, and be something in men which they could 
 live by and might die for. Let us help our generation to 
 them ; tenderly, and with the sympathy of men who have 
 felt, perhaps, the strain and distress of their time, but with 
 strong earnestness too, and the high confidence of those in 
 
32 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 whom God has been pleased to reveal His Son, who is the 
 Truth. Let us labour in this great matter strenuously while 
 our little day lasts ; and at the end it may be — rather it 
 must be — that we also shall receive the crown of life. 
 
Closing Hbbress. 
 
 UNION TO CHRIST THE GROUND OF 
 JUSTIFICATION. 
 
 By Thomas Gregory, M.A. 
 
 IT has always been acknowledged by all Christians that 
 some connection with Christ is necessary to the entering 
 into the enjoyment of His redemption, and it is commonly 
 held that the consummation of redemption depends upon a 
 union with Christ which takes effect in sanctification. The 
 name Unio Mystica has its usual application rather to the 
 consummation than to the initiation of redemption ; St. Paul's 
 phrase, " This is a great mystery," is understood of the relation 
 of Christ to the glorified Church. But the name ought not 
 to be so limited, for, even in the passage referred to, Christ's 
 redemptive work for the Church is given as an evidence of 
 His oneness with it, so that this mystical union of believers 
 into one body with their Lord has an application extending 
 far beyond the conscious derivation of life from Him which 
 is begun in regeneration. It is the object of this essay to 
 show how necessary the idea is to a satisfactory statement of 
 the doctrine of Justification. 
 
 Union with Christ, or, rather, union with God, was the 
 leading aim of mediaeval mystics. This was no doctrine of 
 the grounds on which we are made partakers of Christ's 
 benefits ; their seeking of it was rather a practical rule for 
 attaining happiness. They regarded it as equivalent to the 
 full enjoyment of redemption, not as the way of getting 
 access to redemption. The Catholic Church, on the other 
 
34 UNION TO CHRIST 
 
 hand, offered to her obedient children the very embodiment 
 of redemptive union with Christ, both in the entering into it 
 and in progressive growth to perfection. Here was the body 
 of Christ on earth ; baptism admitted men to the privilege of 
 membership ; the Sacraments maintained constantly the 
 vital union thus formed. And equally, though in a different 
 way, the Reformation Churches offered as their Gospel both 
 admission into a saving relation to Christ and realisation of 
 union with Him in spiritual life, — the one by faith, the other 
 by the gift of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 Again, the union that mystics spoke of was one which did 
 not take into account the nature of the things to be united. 
 Self-determining wills cannot be united as material substances 
 are, not even as particles of liquid, which lose themselves in 
 the whole, nor yet chemically, nor as forces are combined. 
 And the mystics thought of a union with God which should 
 be a getting rid of individuality. Not only the great mystics 
 of the fourteenth century, Eckart and Tauler and Nicholas of 
 Basle, but those also who founded the Sect of the Free Spirit 
 a hundred and fifty years earlier, and the later Quietists, — 
 different in other respects, the Quietists as remarkable for 
 their piety as the Sect of the Free Spirit for their impiety, — 
 all, so far as they tried to express their religious ideas, had 
 this in common, that they made absorption into God their 
 aim, and failed to solve the problem of man's relation to God 
 because they ignored its conditions. They supposed an 
 identity of the Divine will and the human that would make 
 man no longer responsible for his actions ; they would have 
 secured a union of the two by destroying one of the factors, 
 for will would cease to be will if it were not self-determined. 
 
 The Roman Church had a real interest of true religion on 
 its side when it condemned mysticism. However imperfectly, 
 and even if from bad motives, it always maintained human 
 individuality and responsibility over against the necessity 
 which it equally maintained of some sort of union with 
 Christ and with God. Side by side with its almost 
 mechanical arrangements for giving men the benefits of 
 grace, the Roman Church gave even a semi-pelagian import- 
 
THE GEOUND OF JUSTIFICATION. 35 
 
 ance to human freedom. It required obedience, at least, of 
 its children ; it required a good state of the will for the 
 effectual reception of the ordinances which at once related 
 men to Christ and entitled them to His salvation. The 
 Church of Rome, then, has three important elements of the 
 doctrine of union to Christ where mysticism has only one : 
 first, a distinct way of forming the tie with Christ which 
 entitles to salvation ; second, arrangements for the continuous 
 derivation of life from Christ in virtue of the union formed 
 and perpetuated ; third, doctrinal provision for the mainten- 
 ance of a real personal responsibility within this relation to 
 Christ. Mysticism attends only to the second. 
 
 Now the Reformers equally insisted on the necessity of a 
 relation to Christ, but this must be spiritual in the first 
 instance and not external through the Church. They laid 
 the foundation of conscious partaking of Christ's benefits in 
 the uniting act of faith ; they taught a continuous union to 
 Him by the operation of the Holy Spirit ; and that faith 
 also issued in a voluntary holiness of life, so that the union 
 which entitled to redemption was a real free union of man's 
 will to God's. Yet the appearance of Antinomianism along- 
 side of the Reformation showed how essential this last 
 characteristic was, and how it required even more emphasis 
 than it got, namely, that man's union to God must be a free 
 union, or it is no union at all. Especially when men were 
 lately emancipated from the supporting shackles of Church 
 obedience, and were trying to walk alone, it was necessary 
 that they should understand that they could not have a 
 relation to Christ that would save their souls while their 
 wills — the distinguishing feature of the soul — were thrown 
 overboard to shift for themselves as of no importance. And 
 a right conception of what this saving union involved was 
 the more necessary, because free grace as opposed to merit, 
 and irresistible grace as opposed to an initiative on man's 
 part in receiving it, were positions which had to be made 
 much of at that time. Since, therefore, faith had to serve 
 in the Reformed scheme instead of visible Church fellowship, 
 on a right apprehension of what faith meant it depended 
 
3G UNION TO CHRIST 
 
 that men should see the impossibility of accepting the 
 advantages of a Christian's state without its responsibilities. 
 Thus the idea of faith, as it is the means of forming the tie 
 of conscious union, a union which must be in the region of 
 the will, is very important for the present inquiry. 
 
 Different views have also been taken of the manner in 
 which this union is brought about from the Divine side. 
 It was held by Fathers of the Alexandrian school, in a philo- 
 sophical rather than a theological interest, that the Eternal 
 Word, who was in a manner present in all rational creation, 
 had by his incarnation brought a reinforcement, as it were, 
 of reason into the world, and set a number of spiritual forces 
 a- working which influenced and regenerated those whom they 
 reached — the Logos uniting itself to them. This line of 
 thought was taken up by Realists in the Middle Ages, who, 
 according to their system, attributed a real entity to the 
 principles of Christ's religion, and conceived them to be 
 present and producing their effects since He brought them 
 into existence.* And Schwenkfeld, a mystic of Reformation 
 times, gave a similar account of actual physical influences 
 that effect, since the time of Christ, a real connection between 
 Him and His people. The Roman Church, on the other 
 hand, needs no such ideal bonds to bridge the distance in 
 time between Christ and us. It is itself the body of Christ, 
 itself wields the influence that draws men to Christ, and 
 itself admits them into union with Him, and visibly nourishes 
 the union when formed. The Reformed Church offers the 
 Holy Spirit, conveying a direct spiritual influence from Christ 
 to individuals, as its only explanation of the manner of this 
 union : Providence, and the Scripture, and preaching, and 
 Christian fellowship have a certain value in promoting it ; 
 faith on our part is the means ; but the only set-off that 
 we have against the obstacles which distance in time and 
 absence in space oppose to direct connection with Christ 
 is, that by His Holy Spirit He is present to each man here, 
 and present now. 
 
 We are bound to begin an account of the teaching of the 
 
 * Hodge, vol. ii. 582, and reff. 
 
THE GROUND OF J TSTIFICATION. 37 
 
 Reformers with Anselm and Abe lard, for to these and their 
 successors, after Augustine, it is due that the reasonableness 
 of salvation was so brought out as to enable men of strong 
 convictions, when they came, to take their stand upon it and 
 defy the dominant superstition. Anselm proved elaborately 
 that there was salvation in Christ, but he did not show how 
 we were to get it. He said Christ gives it to His kinsmen. 
 Again, the partakers of redemption are those who imitate 
 Christ. We must remember that Anselm was a churchman, 
 and so long as a man obeys the Roman Church the question 
 never rises whether he is one of Christ's. Then Abelard 
 described the union with Christ which makes a saving con- 
 nection with Him as one of love produced in us by God. In 
 reply, Bernard did not deny the union, but denied that its 
 realisation in love on our part was at all a ground of our for- 
 giveness. Emphasising Christ's work, he asserts our connection 
 with it and benefit from it by reason of our oneness with 
 Christ in God's eyes : " The satisfaction of one is reckoned 
 to all, since that one bore the sins of all ; and he who offended 
 is no longer different from him who made satisfaction, because 
 the one Christ is both head and body ; satisfecit ergo caput 
 pro membris, corpus pro visceribus suis."* The language 
 of Thomas Aquinas is very similar : "As a natural body is 
 a unity, so is the Church, the mystical body of Christ, 
 reckoned, along with Christ her Head, as one person." f 
 Both of these explain the work of Christ by asserting His 
 oneness with His Church, but they neither give an intel- 
 ligible account of that oneness, nor indicate the condition of 
 our entering into it. There was nothing to suggest such an 
 elaboration of the doctrine, when the Church was there 
 making union with Christ both visible and attainable. 
 
 When Luther opposed a spiritual relation to Christ to the 
 Romish mechanism of grace, one sees how the demand must 
 arise for a representation of the reality of that relation which 
 would be manifest to the intellect, if no longer, as of old, to 
 the senses. Luther could only offer the promises of the 
 Word to the reception of faith, backing them with his per- 
 
 * Quoted in Ritschl's " Justification," p. 54. t Ibid. 
 
38 UNION TO CHRIST 
 
 sonal testimony. To have insisted on union with the body 
 of Christ as the condition of receiving God's favour would 
 have been simply to point men back to Rome. His whole 
 contention was that we must first receive forgiveness as a 
 free justifying of the ungodly, and that interest would lead 
 him to affirm the very opposite of union with Christ, — the 
 very greatest separation from Christ, in the self-conscious- 
 ness of a man on the point of conversion. And yet Luther 
 taught that faith was the work of God's Spirit ; that in it a 
 union to Christ was being formed ; and that it was to the 
 subject of it a personal and spiritual receiving of Christ* 
 and the very condition of his forgiveness. Ritschl quotes 
 two passages in which union with Christ is dwelt upon : 
 " Faith in Christ brings it about that He lives and works in 
 me, just as a healing salve works on a sick body. Thus 
 there is made with Christ one flesh and one body by a 
 hidden unspeakable transformation of our sins into His 
 righteousness." * " Christ says, I am the way, the truth, 
 and the life ; He says not, I give thee the way, the truth, 
 and the life, as though He stood outside of me. He must be 
 these things in me, and abide and live in me." •(• 
 
 Faith brings about union, and only through union to 
 Christ is there forgiveness, — this was underlying all Luther's 
 teaching. There was salvation in Christ, and only by receiv- 
 ing, by joining Christ could we have it. But he laid the 
 weight of justification always on Christ, and never on the 
 union, the transition seemed so dangerously easy to resting 
 on the fruits of union in ourselves as part ground of justi- 
 fication. Thus we have substitution and imputation for 
 Luther's final doctrinal expression of our justifying connection 
 with Christ. 
 
 Ritschl gives a quotation from Zwingli,J in which he 
 speaks of our share in Christ as His members at our first 
 coming to God for justification ; but we may pass at once to 
 Calvin for the fullest statement in Reformation times of the 
 importance of union with Christ to the doctrine of justifica- 
 tion. He says : " When Christ enlightens us to faith by His 
 
 * Page 174. t Page 176. t Page 151. 
 
THE GROUND OF JUSTIFICATION. 39 
 
 Spirit's power, He at the same time joins us to His body, 
 so that we become sharers of all His benefits." * Again : 
 " Joined to the body of Christ, believers are reckoned right- 
 eous freely. For as to justification, faith is a purely passive 
 thing, bringing nothing of ours to win God's favour, but 
 receiving from Christ what we have not." f " Why do you 
 put forgiveness of sins after the Church ?" it is asked in the 
 Geneva Catechism. " Because no one obtains forgiveness 
 unless he has been also before joined to the people of God, 
 and continually preserves to the end oneness with the body 
 of Christ, and so is a true member of the Church." J Thus 
 Calvin makes faith consist in union, and union the ground of 
 forgiveness. In opposition, again, to Osiander's doctrine, 
 that this justifying union was the sanctifying indwelling of 
 Christ, Calvin gives his fullest and final account of the real 
 nature of it : " Christ becoming ours makes us sharers in 
 the gifts that He brings with Him. Therefore, we do not 
 look at Him far off outside of us, that His righteousness 
 may be reckoned to us, but because we are clothed with 
 Him, and engrafted into His body ; because He has deigned 
 to make us one with Himself; therefore we enjoy a partner- 
 ship of righteousness with Him." § But when this oneness 
 of the believer with Christ is to be particularly described, 
 we still get only substitution and imputation as its whole 
 contents, and, of course, a clear and constant denial that the 
 union of the will to Christ, as realised through the Spirit in 
 sanctification, is in« any sense the ground of forgiveness. 
 And so justification is left to depend on merely the asserted 
 oneness of Christ and His people, without the connection 
 being developed. Union is dated to begin when faith begins ; 
 but it is not explained on what ground this beginning is 
 made ; on what ground faith itself, as the gift of God, is given 
 to sinners. 
 
 As the Reformers had given little attention to the analysis 
 of the tie that connects Christ's people to Him, being content 
 to call it faith and define negatively what it was not, so the 
 
 * Inst. iii. 2, 35. t Inst. iii. 13, 5 
 
 t Q. 104. § iii. 11, ]0. 
 
40 UNION TO CHRIST 
 
 Church symbols give it no central theological place, though 
 the fact that there is a tie is of course the underlying vital 
 thought of every system. Lutheran symbols, as we might 
 expect, make less use of it than those which derive from 
 Calvin. In the Lutheran Form of Concord there is a visible 
 struggle to express that union to Christ is of the essence of 
 faith ; " confiding in Christ," u laying hold of Christ," for 
 instance, are given as equivalent to faith. But there is no 
 attempt made to relate this to the other parts of the 
 doctrine of justification. In the Calvinistic Second Helvetic 
 Confession we find : " Faith receives Christ our righteousness ; 
 — the Lord shows abundantly in John vi. that we receive 
 Christ by faith, when He puts eating for believing, and 
 believing for eating ; for as we receive food by eating, so we 
 participate in Christ by believing." Again, in the Calvinistic 
 Heidelberg Catechism we have it said that those who are 
 saved are engrafted into Christ by true faith; in another 
 place, " the Holy Spirit makes me partaker of Christ " ; and 
 in the well-known first question, " In soul and body, whether 
 I live or die, I am not mine own, but belong unto my most 
 faithful Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." 
 
 But in none of these has the thought so important a 
 place as in the old Scotch Catechisms. Thus in Craig's 
 Catechism : — 
 
 " Q. What thing doth faith work ? — A. Our perpetual 
 and inseparable union with Christ. 
 Q. What worketh this union with Christ. — A. A mutual 
 
 communion with Him and His graces. 
 Q. What worketh this communion ? — A. Remission of 
 sins and imputation of justice." 
 And in another place : — 
 " Q. What need is there of union with Christ ? — A. 
 Otherwise we cannot enjoy His benefits." 
 In Davidson's Catechism, used at " Salt Prestoun " from 
 the year 1580, faith is described : " It is the hearty receiving 
 of Christ, . . . whereby He becomes one with us, and we one 
 with Him ; He our Head, and we His members. — Can we 
 have no salvation except we have participation and be con- 
 
THE GROUND OF JUSTIFICATION. 41 
 
 joined with Christ; so that we must be His and He ours ? — 
 None at all ; for, seeing the cause of our salvation is in the 
 person of Christ only, and never in ourselves, but by partici- 
 pation of Him, we can never be partakers of salvation but by 
 our conjunction and union with Him, whereby He becoming- 
 one with us and we one with Him we get through Him the 
 full right of salvation and life everlasting." After speaking 
 of Christ's taking our sins and our getting His righteousness, 
 it is asked, " Whereof cometh this communion and mutual 
 fellowship between Christ crucified and us ? — Of the union 
 and strait conjunction between us, as of the head with the 
 body. For we are one with Him, and He is ours, and we are 
 His." If Craig and Davidson did not much analyse this 
 oneness, they were at all events never tired of asserting it ; 
 and they saw the importance of it as the ground of that 
 participation in Christ which is so often based on imputation 
 only. The following again shows how clear they were in 
 attributing to Christ alone what is proper to Him : " Then 
 there is no part of our righteousness left without the appre- 
 hension or grip of faith, seeing it is all wholly in the person 
 of Christ apprehended by faith ? — It is so ; and so we are 
 perfectly saved by the works which Christ did for us in His 
 own person, and no ways by the good works which He works 
 in us with and after faith." There is added in the margin, 
 " Here is the main point and ground of our disagreement 
 with the papists." The writers of these Scotch Catechisms 
 seem to have kept the balance between insistence on Christ's 
 work and insistence on union to Him better than it is done 
 in any other Reformation document. 
 
 If our Confession of Faith had been drawn up in Scotland 
 it would probably have given a more prominent place than 
 it does to this element in the doctrine of justification. The 
 Headship of Christ is little dwelt on except in regard to 
 Church government. Our fellowship with Him is stated only 
 in the 26th chapter as the ground of the Communion of 
 Saints, and hinted at in treating of the Sacraments. Of 
 course, the thought of union to Christ on the part of His 
 people underlies the whole ; but it is not given its place in 
 
42 UNION TO CHRIST 
 
 the scheme of doctrine. Christians are referred to as Christ's 
 people, His seed, those whom God has given Him ; but when 
 in the 26th chapter real oneness with Christ is mentioned, 
 this thought which our Scotch Catechisms were so fond of is 
 immediately repressed by a caution that it must not be 
 understood as making us partakers of His Godhead. The 
 idea is treated as if it needed to be checked rather than 
 that men should be encouraged to centre their thoughts 
 upon it. 
 
 The Larger Catechism, however, makes amends by the 
 position and value which it gives to union. From the 65th 
 to the 90th question, the whole appropriation of the benefits 
 of redemption is made to depend expressly on union to 
 Christ, and the communion or communication of grace that 
 results from it. It is described (Q. QQ), " The union which 
 the elect have with Christ is the work of God's grace, 
 whereby they are spiritually and mystically, yet really and 
 inseparably, joined to Christ as their Head and Husband." 
 And justification is said to " manifest " it, so that the union 
 is prior ; still, this is the conscious union of regeneration that 
 is spoken of, which has its beginning in time, and the idea is 
 not brought in at all to explain the justice of Christ's suffer- 
 ings, nor yet to connect the beginning of the new life with 
 forgiveness. 
 
 It remains to show more positively that this union is a 
 theological postulate, a Scripture doctrine, and a real thing. 
 
 The theological importance of the idea, then, is that it 
 solves the contradiction that there is on the one hand in the 
 suffering of the innocent, and on the other in the acquittal of 
 the guilty, and that it gives a ground in reason for the co- 
 temporaneousness of forgiveness and regeneration, — we need 
 no longer simply assert that they go together, we can connect 
 them by showing their common source ; at the same time the 
 place of faith in the work of the Spirit is made more clear. 
 
 Professor Laidlaw has quoted the opinion of the late Dr. 
 Candlish, that "if we think of justification as external, it 
 seems a mere legal fiction." Certainly the excessive use of 
 
THE GROUND OF JUSTIFICATION. 43 
 
 the word " imputation " in describing our justifying connection 
 with Christ cannot be said to have reduced the element of 
 externality. The true line of defence of the doctrine must 
 be to demonstrate the reality of the connection in virtue of 
 which the transfer takes place of our guilt to Christ, of His 
 possession of God's favour to us. It is in this interest that Dr. 
 Cunningham says : " The righteousness of Christ, including 
 the whole of His perfect and meritorious obedience to the 
 law, as well as His suffering, was a great and infinitely 
 important reality. It was intended to effect and secure the 
 salvation of all those whom God had chosen in Christ before 
 the foundation of the world. It is in due time . . . bestowed 
 upon each of them, through his union to Christ by faith, not 
 in any mere fiction of law, but in actual deed ; and being thus 
 really bestowed upon them, it is of course held or reckoned 
 as theirs, and thus becomes the ground of forgiveness." * 
 The unreality that associated itself with imputation is 
 here fortified by resting it upon bestowal ; and just so this 
 conception of bestowal in turn needs to rest upon a real 
 union with Christ, in whom, and not outside of whom, we 
 have redemption. 
 
 And similarly we do not conceive rightly, nor with stability, 
 of Christ's sufferings, unless we hold to His union with His 
 people. Conscience is not satisfied otherwise ; " make me so 
 thoroughly one with Him that I cannot possibly take guilt 
 to Him without taking it to myself, and then, and not till 
 then, shall my soul return into her rest." *f- And reason will 
 have objections to the suffering of one for many, unless he is 
 in a real way identified with them. 
 
 The difficulty about relating faith, and forgiveness, and 
 regeneration is also solved by using this conception. Faith 
 seems to precede forgiveness, and forgiveness to precede the 
 bestowal of the Spirit and the birth of the new nature ; and 
 yet faith, the first term in the series, is a gift of God, a work 
 of the Spirit, and so presupposes the last. But when we 
 think of a real union between Christ and those who have 
 
 * Hist. Theol. ii. 55 ; cf. "In Christ," by Dr. A. J. Gordon, pp. 18, 19. 
 t Dr. H. Martin's " Atonement," p. 187, quoted by Gordon. 
 
44 UNION TO CHRIST 
 
 been, are, and shall be His people, we understand that His 
 favour to them, — that God's favour to them in virtue of their 
 oneness with Christ, — is not hindered from working before 
 their faith, and in their faith, as well as after. They are not 
 forgiven till they believe, because forgiveness requires two 
 conscious parties, but as far as God is concerned they are 
 forgiven eternally. Besides, it is only then that the law of 
 faith can exclude boasting when all the conditions of the 
 new life in a man are explicitly or implicitly recognised to 
 be of God, and only so can we have confidence before Him. 
 " God does not work upon the soul by itself; bringing to bear 
 upon it, while yet in its alienation and isolation from Him, 
 such discipline as shall gradually render it fit to be reunited 
 to Him. He begins rather by reuniting it to Himself, that 
 through this union He may communicate to it that divine 
 life and energy without which all discipline were utterly 
 futile." * Thus our prior union to Christ works faith in due 
 time, and faith is a conscious entering into the union, and so 
 is the beginning of conscious union and the condition of 
 conscious enjoyment of God's favour. And because faith is 
 itself the work of God's Spirit, we can see how it is the 
 beginning of regeneration and a joining of the will to Christ. 
 To be in Christ quo ad reconciliation, and not to be in Him 
 quo ad newness of life would be, in the language of the 
 Genevan Catechism, to divide Christ's person. This is made 
 clear when a saving relation to Christ is expressed as union 
 to Him. 
 
 Now, some part of this purpose has been served in our 
 theology by the so-called federal union. In virtue of this 
 Christ fully took His people's place ; in virtue of it these His 
 people are one by one made participators in faith and forgive- 
 ness and actual union. The use of it in theology has, how- 
 ever, these two drawbacks : First, that it is apt to be opposed 
 to actual union as a separate thing ; and second, that it has 
 
 * Gordon, p 11. Although this statement of the matter seems to make the 
 union objective, and so not answering the requirement that it should be a 
 relation of will, the contradiction is apparent only, for the union is wrought in 
 the region of will. 
 
THE GROUND OF JUSTIFICATION. 45 
 
 ]/ 
 
 an association of unreality about it ; whether that is because 
 it is not sufficiently insisted on and brought forward as a real 
 thing, or whether its vague unsubstantiality is the reason 
 why we cannot with confidence bring it forward. We must 
 be sure of this in our theology — that the thing we base 
 justification upon is a real thing; and we find that the 
 Westminster Confession, for instance, which holds the fede- 
 ral union, does not use it much to base our salvation upon, 
 but, keeping it in the back ground, puts forward imputation 
 as the most real and tangible thing it can offer, feeling a 
 certain security in that, because it is a Scriptural idea, and 
 not able to grasp the equally Scriptural and far stronger and 
 broader and more real thought of union, oneness with Christ. 
 There would be no objection to calling our relation to Christ 
 before it becomes conscious a federal union, provided we kept 
 in mind that it is not a different union but the same, and 
 that it is not less real but more real than the actual conscious- 
 ness of union which is founded upon it, and than the com- 
 munication of grace and glory that results from it, as the 
 cause is more certainly real than the effect. 
 
 Thus we have seen that there is a theological and religious 
 postulate for the existence of a real oneness of Christ's people 
 with him prior to all manifestations of it on Christ's part or 
 in their conscious experience. It will make our theological 
 statement of justification more complete, and it will relate it 
 better to the doctrine of regeneration, if such a union can be 
 established. It would also, as some think, be a more satis- 
 factory way of stating to ourselves devotionally our relation 
 to Christ and His to us — that we receive Him with His 
 benefits rather than His benefits from Him. We are to 
 establish that this union exists by showing that it is a Scrip- 
 ture doctrine, and then that it is verified in its historical effects. 
 
 That the life of believers after conversion consists in a 
 spiritual union to Christ there is no need to prove ; it is as 
 plainly taught in Scripture as it is fully recognised in theo- 
 logy. Of all the figures by which it is set forth, that of the 
 bodv and its members is the favourite. Believers are stones 
 
46 UNION TO CHRIST 
 
 built on Christ, the corner-stone, to make a temple. They 
 are branches grafted into Him, the vine ; but Christ had 
 taught, too, that His people partook of His flesh and blood, 
 and Paul comes back again and again to the organic unity of 
 the body with its parts that have an individual life, and yet 
 have that only in virtue of their union to the whole. It is 
 this which best exhibits the complex interdependence of 
 the spiritual structure, which he uses it to illustrate. 
 
 That is undoubted. But we have to show that it is of the 
 essence of faith to be an entering into this union, into fellow- 
 ship of life as well as of redemption ; and then that there is 
 a real union of Christ's people to Him, which precedes and 
 accounts for the gift of faith. 
 
 In Philippians iii. 9, Paul makes his having the righteous- 
 ness of faith equivalent to his being found in Christ, and this 
 (ver. 12) he ever "follows after to apprehend." Faith is a 
 taking hold of and joining Christ. Further, his early preach- 
 ing, recorded in the Acts and reflected in the Epistle to the 
 Thessalonians, exhibits Christ chiefly, if not solely, in the 
 light of a King and God-appointed Judge, in whom there was 
 refuge, by taking and joining whom as their Lord men might 
 be saved.* But most clearly we can see that faith consists in 
 joining Christ, from our Lord's invitation, " Come unto Me," 
 and from His explanation of coming by believing, and of both 
 by eating of His flesh. 
 
 Again, this coining to Christ depends on a previous rela- 
 tion to Him. " In God we live and move and have our 
 being" (Acts xvii. 28) ; " When we were yet sinners Christ 
 died for us " (Rom. v. 8) ; " For His great love wherewith 
 He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, God hath 
 quickened us together with Christ " (Eph. ii. 5). So also the 
 words of Jesus, " No man can come to Me except the Father 
 which hath sent Me, draw him" ; and again, " All that the 
 Father giveth Me shall come to Me," declare a gracious action 
 of God and a responsible attitude of Christ towards those 
 who are sinners. It is all " according to His purpose and 
 grace which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world 
 
 * Weiss, "N. T. Theol." § 61. Pfleiderer, vol. i. p. 167. 
 
THE GROUND OF JUSTIFICATION. 47 
 
 began " (2 Tim. i. 9), for u He hath chosen us in Him before 
 the foundation of the world " (Eph. i. 4) ; on which Goodwin 
 says it is not that we are chosen to be in Christ, nor yet that 
 we are chosen conditionally on believing, but the covenant 
 was really made with us, Christ standing for us ; and faith 
 itself is one of the blessings wherewith " He hath blessed us 
 in Christ." " There must therefore be some sense intended 
 whereby we are in Christ before we have faith."* 
 
 We now come to consider the manifestations of this union 
 in actual experience which combine with the proof from 
 Scripture to give us a certainty of its objective reality that 
 will answer to the craving of religious feeling for a firm 
 ground outside of ourselves on which to rest our salvation. 
 
 There is an attitude of mind in which it is very difficult 
 for us to exhibit to ourselves spiritual things as at all real in 
 the way in which objects of sense are real. In this mood we 
 prefer to think of ourselves as individuals, influenced through 
 our actual faculties to the ordering of our actual life. Christ 
 is the Christ of history, gone from this scene 1800 years 
 ago; we are persons living now; and there seems an 
 element of unreality about a formula that pretends to bridge 
 all time and unite every individual Christian in an actual 
 way with the actual personal Christ. If we want such a 
 union, let us seek it in the continuous self-identity of the 
 Roman Church and its sacraments, — there is, at least, a 
 visible embodiment of union that we can admit to be real. Or, 
 if this external connection with Christ seems to have counter- 
 balancing spiritual disadvantages, let us be content to admit 
 the distance in time and space between Christ and us ; we 
 can still take Him for our Master so long as His teaching is 
 handed down to us. As to how God looks at us, or under 
 what forms He thinks of us, it is hard to say, and dangerous 
 to be dogmatic. And the spiritual influence which the risen 
 Christ may send to us — let us call that mysterious gift the 
 Holy Spirit, whose action is like the wind, — we cannot tell 
 whence it comes nor whither it goes. 
 * Vol. i. p. 66. 
 
48 UNION TO CHRIST 
 
 These fundamental thoughts of discipleship to Christ and 
 dependence upon His Spirit are sufficient, one would think, 
 for a simple and healthy moral life. But since the School- 
 men and the Reformation — whether it be a blessing or a 
 curse — not theologians only, but men at large have been 
 introspective and self-torturing, and their unrest of conscience 
 and an intellect foolishly at war with wiser emotion have 
 urged them to exhaust the Scripture in search of all the 
 rationality of the action of God, and Christ, and the Holy 
 Spirit in our redemption — the question is, What is my 
 tenure of life, and is it stable ? Driven in upon itself and its 
 creaturehood the human spirit can find no standing ground, 
 — no warrant for the existence which ordinary language 
 attributes to it over against God. It has accountability 
 without the possibility of merit ; it is distinct without being 
 independent. Thus the conceptions of substitution and 
 imputation and love and discipleship fail to give rest 
 to the spirit, because they allow and encourage it to hold 
 itself off from God, as if independent as well as distinct. On 
 the other hand, the assertion that union with Christ is the 
 condition of man's true life, denies his independence in the 
 inmost retreat of his being, and therefore satisfies. 
 
 It does not interfere with his individuality, responsibility, 
 and self-identity. But it recognises that he is more than 
 an individual, and that he is not a complete man unless his 
 spirit and his will enter into relationships with other beings 
 and wills. A man is not fully realised unless his life goes 
 out to and is wrapped up in other lives. That does not 
 mean losing his personality ; it means losing his selfishness 
 and finding his true life. It means, in regard to union with 
 Christ, that he is like a unit of organism in an organised body; 
 that he lives his own life, yet lives that even by the life of the 
 whole ; that in his weakness the whole body suffers, and in 
 the soundness and health of the body he shares. 
 
 But this is not the union which we undertook to prove. 
 A new regenerate life in common with Christ is conceivable, 
 but what of the prior union before we became Christ's con- 
 sciously ? This, that the realised sharing in the life of Christ 
 
THE GROUND OF JUSTIFICATION. 49 
 
 proves an underlying union; there is a deeper oneness, of 
 which this is the outcome. We may see it in the experience 
 of Christ, and in the history of our own development. Christ 
 suffered for His people when many of them were not born ; 
 was He then one with them ? He was ; His life cannot be 
 explained otherwise. He did not live as an individual, He 
 was not guilty as an individual, He did not suffer the dark- 
 ness of desertion as an individual. He and His Church were 
 one ; He would not be apart from His people ; their names 
 were written on His hands. For as a man is perfected and 
 his manhood realised by his spiritual relationships to others, 
 so Christ's nature could not be perfected without His union 
 to all His people. When He took our nature He came under 
 the law of human solidarity, of human brotherhood, and 
 obligation, and love. His body, the Church, is the " fulness," 
 the necessary complement, " of Him that- filleth all in all." 
 
 And not only so, but to us too, this union has borne fruit 
 before we were able consciously to enter into it. The lives 
 of all of us were in great part moulded centuries before we 
 were born. Our spiritual lives as well as our physical lives 
 depend for their determinate character on influences that 
 began with the beginning of time, and that were in Christ's 
 hand all the while. And in our own life-time, the prepara- 
 tion of grace before we believed and in believing was given 
 us in Christ, — in virtue of our being His. If these things are 
 so, we must look for the ground of Christ's suffering for us 
 and of our receiving life from Him in a real and spiritual and 
 eternal union of Christ to His people.* 
 
 This truth has important bearings on our conception of 
 Providence, and so upon the form of the offer of the Gospel. 
 Since all men receive some favour from God, and all this only 
 in Christ — no good coming to our guilty world otherwise, — 
 
 * The connection between Christ and His people which is thus proved is 
 better expressed as oneness than as substitution : for the allowance of substi- 
 tution in the case of sinners itself needs explanation, while the oneness of 
 Christ's people with Him is beyond the sphere of sin. Cf. Goodwin, vol. i. 
 p. 66/.; and Gordon, p. 122, 1. 12. Further, this union is not objective and 
 external only, though its existence is pi-oved by things which are matters of 
 history. The whole effects of it are of account as they influence our conscious 
 life afterwards to be developed. 
 
 D 
 
50 UNION TO CHRIST THE GROUND OF JUSTIFICATION. 
 
 there is a sense in which all men have a part in Christ ; 
 and as, in looking back on the way by which we were our- 
 selves led, we can there recognise God's goodness to us in 
 Christ before we were consciously united to Him, so we can 
 look forward to the fields where the wheat is still mingled 
 with tares, out of which, though it seems to us all tares, we 
 yet trust that God will call a people for Himself, and we can 
 think of all men and speak to them as under God's discipline, 
 receiving, in Christ, and with some sort of relation to Him, 
 the kindness of God meant to lead them to repentance. 
 They are not iD Christ consciously ; they are all of them to 
 some extent within the benefit of a real though still external 
 participation in Him. " The kingdom of God has come near 
 them." We can invite them to a more intimate union ; and 
 as in their present state they have life for Christ's sake, so 
 they may have in Christ life eternal. 
 
 Finally, there is no cause for fear that in making more of 
 Christ we shall make less of His work. Rather, it is impos- 
 sible that His work should be appreciated till He Himself is 
 so. So long as Christ is nothing to men, they will not take 
 much real interest in anything about Him. The most 
 cogent proof of the efficacy of His sacrifice for His i^eople 
 does not affect them. But, once aware of a relation in which 
 we stand to Christ, — in which we already stand to Him for 
 our advantage, — and being persuaded to enter into closer 
 union with Him, all that is His becomes significant and 
 interesting to us, for it has become ours. 
 
 PRINTED BY LORIMER AND GILLIES, 31 ST. ANDREW SOLA RE, EDINBURGH.