[ p. 192 ]
THE line of thought which we have been pursuing leads us on to the Incarnation[1], as the adequate and final revelation of the personality of God. Of course the Incarnation presupposes that personality, and cannot, therefore, be adduced as an independent argument in its favour. But in the accumulation of probabilities it has nevertheless an important place, as fulfilling the natural anticipation, to which belief in a personal God gives rise, and thus rendering our doctrine harmonious, selfconsistent, complete.
Now there can be no question that the most serious objections raised against the Incarnation are really of an a priori character. It seems too strange, too paradoxical, too utterly stupendous to be true. Men are staggered as they try to realize it, and half inclined to doubt whether the majority of its professed believers have ever actually thought it out. Thus there is a tendency to approach its [ p. 193 ] evidence, as contained in the New Testament, with a negative bias, which insensibly necessitates the deduction of negative conclusions. The case is more or less unconsciously prejudged.
But if we ask wherein the intrinsic improbability of the Incarnation consists, we find that it rests upon the open or disguised assumption, that man’s rank in nature is determined by the size and situation of his abode in space. We no longer view our planet as the centre of the universe, and our cosmical insignificance is supposed to argue our personal unimportance. It seems inconceivable that amid the limitless immensity of space, and the endless possibilities of time, our earth should have been the scene, and our race the witness, of an unique divine event.
The effect of this line of thought upon the imagination is undoubtedly great, and impairs the faith of many whom it does not explicitly convince. Nevertheless, upon analysis, it may easily be seen to be essentially imaginative, as distinct from rational; and further, it can only be maintained on materialistic grounds, for it makes magnitude, material magnitude, the sole criterion of worth. Whereas, ‘ If the entire physical universe conspired to crush a man, as Pascal says, ‘the man would still be nobler than the entire physical universe, for he would know that he was crushed[2].’ Man, as we [ p. 194 ] have already seen, knows himself to be spiritual. His thought out-soars space; his love overcomes time ; his freedom transcends the laws of merely material existence. He moves in another world than that of sight and sound—a world wherein he feels himself to be still but a beginner ; quick with aspirations and faculties and powers, that claim for their due development an illimitable life. The home which he now inhabits may be but one of many mansions that he is ultimately destined to possess.
But if this, which is man’s instinctive judgement of himself be true, the attempt to estimate his value by material modes of measurement, or criticize his history by material calculations, is manifestly absurd. If materialism, as we have seen once for all, cannot explain the origin of personality, neither can it forecast or prejudge its destiny, or the events which the course of that destiny may possibly involve. Nor is this all. For in the act of declining to be thus mechanically weighed, our personality lays claim to a loftier method of appreciation ; based upon its infelt capacity for intercourse with God, and the consequent conviction that life in that intercourse is its appointed end. The sense of divine nearness, it will have been already noticed, is no invention of Christianity. We have found it in every stage of human development, in every form of human religion, It is rudely conceived by [ p. 195 ] the savage, refinedly by the saint. At times it is a welcome thought, at times overwhelmingly oppressive. But it is persistent enough to be called a characteristic feature of humanity. The gods of Epicurus, lying beside their nectar, are products of abstract reflection, not of unsophisticated instinct. And when all due allowance has been made for the intermittent operation of this mode of thought, it remains historically true that, on the average, man has regarded his gods as near. Sacrifices, tribal communions, systems of taboo, oracles, sacred mysteries with awful rites; the union with Osiris of the Egyptian soul, the avatars of India, the theophanies of Greece, even the blasphemous apotheoses of imperial Rome, are indications of this widespread feeling, which may be separately criticized, but cannot be collectively despised. And in the face of these things it is impossible to say that such an approximation between God and man, as the Incarnation implies, is at all an unnatural thought. If astronomy raises an imaginary presumption against it, psychology bears powerful witness on its behalf, as lying at the very root of the personality of man. The most familiar things seem strange when we pause to make them objects of reflection, from the spelling of a word to the existence of the world. And in this way the Incarnation is surpassingly strange, but not in the sense of contradicting any fundamental necessity of [ p. 196 ] thought. If it be replied that this is only true of the earlier world, and that in fact it does contradict our modern notion of the uniformity of law, we answer, that, waiving the question of the precise value of that notion, the Incarnation is in reality the most consummate exhibition that we can conceive, of God’s own obedience to the laws of His creation.
So far, therefore, from admitting any presumption against the Incarnation a priori, we contend that the natural human presumption points the other way. For we find the desire for union with God to lie at the very basis of our being, and when once the story of the Incarnation has dawned upon our horizon, we recognize that under the conditions of the world of sin in which we live, nothing else could have so adequately satisfied this inmost aspiration. It must be true we say, because it so incomparably meets our need.
This, however, leads us from a priori to evidential considerations; and though we cannot, of course, enter upon Christian evidence in detail, it will be necessary to point out, briefly, its general bearing upon our present inquiry. And in so doing, the first position which it is of importance to maintain is that the Christian religion is one phenomenon, a totality, a whole, of which the New Testament is only a part. We of to-day are in actual contact with a living Christianity, which has persisted [ p. 197 ] through nineteen centuries of human chance and change; and though hindered, now as ever, by schism, treachery, hate, flattery, contempt, presents the same essential features which it presented nineteen centuries ago; miracles of penitence, miracles of purity, miracles of spiritual power; weakness strengthened, fierceness chastened, passion calmed and pride subdued ; plain men and philosophers, cottagers and courtiers, living a new life through the faith that Jesus Christ is God. Further, when we have distinguished the Christian spirit from its human corruptions—a distinction which is perfectly legitimate and plain—the verdict of impartial history is unquestionably with us, in asserting that Christianity has justified its claim to be the salt.of the earth. For it, and it alone, gave men the ideal and the impulse, which once and for all made progress possible, and parted the modern from the ancient world. Abstract thinkers may say otherwise, but few, who have studied the lives of men, are prepared to deny that Christianity has been the greatest fact in human history.
Yet if this be so it must be obviously impossible to appreciate the New Testament apart from its result —its result in the lives, and deaths, and deeds of Christian men. The New Testament asserts the advent of a fresh power into life; and there are countless Christians now alive who profess experience of that power. The founder of [ p. 198 ] Christianity is reported to have said, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ And serious, sober-minded men may still be found, the whole world over, who say they are conscious of this presence as a fact; while, as a result of this power and presence, the same things are being done and suffered, which were done and suffered in the apostolic and every after-age. The Epistles and Gospels are thus intimately, indissolubly linked with the whole vast movement whose beginning they describe. And any criticism which would radically invalidate their worth, would render the greatest event in history an effect without a cause. Now to construct out of the Gospels an imaginary portrait, of One who neither worked wonders nor claimed to be divine, is to invalidate their worth, for it is to tear them literally into shreds. The conception of Christ, as superhuman, is too completely incorporate in their substance, too subtly inwoven into their tissues, too intimately present in their every line, to be removed by any process short of their destruction as a whole. Moreover, if there were an unknown Christ behind the New Testament, a Christ whom its writers unanimously misrepresented or misunderstood, it would not be on this unknown Person, but on His misrepresentation that Christianity is built. For the absolutely central doctrine round which Christianity has always moved, and which has been [ p. 199 ] the secret of its unique hold upon the hearts and consciences of men, is not simply the loving Fatherhood of God, but the proof that He has given of His loving Fatherhood, by sending His onlybegotten Son into the world. Faith in the Incarnation, with all that it involved, has been the sole and exclusive source of our historic Christianity. Yet if Christ were merely man, this was precisely the one point, on which either He or His reporters were profoundly wrong. The case therefore is narrowed to a simple issue. Christianity cannot be due to the goodness and wisdom of a man, marred by a pardonable element of error ; for it is simply and solely on the supposed element of error that it rests; and its missionaries, its martyrs, its holy and humble men of heart, all of strongest that human souls have done, all of saintliest that human eyes have seen, will have derived their inspiration either from folly or from fraud.
But if the world is a rational order, as scientific predictions conclusively prove, and a rational order which makes for righteousness, as philosophy and history attest, we cannot attribute the chief episode in its moral development to chance. A cosmos cannot have a chaos for its crown.
Thus we approach the life of Christ, with its deeds of wonder and its words of power—the writings which relate it, themselves a literary marvel —the Jewish expectation which in disappointing [ p. 200 ] it fulfilled—the pagan aspirations which it unexpectedly answered—the secular preparation for its effective appearance—its apposite occurrence—its paradoxical success—and all the various arguments that multiply each other in its behalf, with an antecedent presumption that they must be true. This process is strictly scientific. We have present experience of an unique fact, the Christian life; and we infer an unique cause for its production. The nature of a thing, as Aristotle truly says, is that which it has become, when its process of development is over. And whenever we forget the vital connexion between the present and the past, and study origins without a reference to the things which they originate, our historic method at once degenerates into pedantic antiquarianism. The fact of what man now is proves that his ancestor, however appearing, must really have been more than an ape.’ The fact of what conscience now feels and does proves that its source, however obscure, was really something other than mere pleasure.or utility. And so, the fact of Christian experience is sufficient to convince the Christian, that the founder of his faith was more than man.
We find, then, that Jesus Christ, as depicted in the pages of the New Testament, threw a totally new light upon the personality of man. He took love as His point of departure, the central principle [ p. 201 ] in our nature, which gathers all its other faculties and functions into one; our absolutely fundamental and universal characteristic. He taught us that virtues and graces are only thorough when they flow from love; and further, that love alone can reconcile the opposite phases of our life—action and passion, doing and suffering, energy and pain, since love inevitably leads to sacrifice, and perfect sacrifice is perfect love. It may be granted that previous teachers had said somewhat kindred things. But Jesus Christ carried His precepts home by practice, as none had ever done before. He lived and died the life and death of love; and men saw, as they had never seen, what human nature meant. Here at last was its true ideal, and its true ideal realized. Now the content of man’s own personality is, as we have seen, the necessary standard by which he judges all things, human or divine ; his final court of critical appeal. Consequently one effect of the life of Christ upon our race was- to provide us, if the phrase may be allowed, with a new criterion of God. Man had learned that love was the one thing needful, and had looked into the depths of love, as he had never looked before. And thenceforth love became the only category under which he could be content to think of God.
Religious minds of every race had long been accustomed to conceive of God as possessing in an [ p. 202 ] eminent degree the attributes which they valued most among themselves, and thus as being wiser, mightier, holier than man; and as soon as they saw that love was the true source of all these attributes, men were ready to recognize that God must possess transcendent love. And how could such love be proved except by sacrifice. This thought, however, did not at first arise from abstract reflection; it stole over men’s minds unconsciously as they watched and followed Jesus Christ, and was accompanied by the conviction, the slow, gradual, progressive conviction, that Jesus Christ was more than human; was the Son of God; was God, offering Himself in sacrifice for man. The revelation, and the education of mankind to understand it, were inseparable aspects of the selfsame fact.
To estimate or criticize the power of the evidence, which first led men to accept this stupendous belief, is in the present, far later, age impossible. Signs and wonders were plainly a part of it, but signs and wonders can only be conclusive to contemporary eyes; the time, the place, the surroundings, the state of the beholder’s mind, are a necessary part of this convincing power. And obviously this context cannot now be reconstructed, either in the interests of proof or doubt. For this reason the miracles in question can never be disproved, except by the assumption of a priori premisses which [ p. 203 ] Christians do not grant. While we who believe them, as rooted in our records and congruous with our creeds, still do not rest our faith upon them, or feel serious concern when they are attacked. For, once brought home to the minds of men, the Incarnation is its own evidence. It is there; and how did it come there, and why has it remained there, except by being true? Power was the watchword of its earliest preaching, power over the hearts and consciences of men; and the efforts of nineteen centuries to explain it, to crush it, to corrupt it, have left that mysterious power unimpaired to-day. Even its opponents cannot quietly ignore it, so strangely does it fascinate alike both friend and foe.
We cannot now attempt even to summarize the arguments which converge upon the Incarnation with cumulative force ; but we have indicated the framework into which they fit, the map of the region whose details they supply. On the one hand there is the expectation of a personal revelation, historically founded on our religious instincts, and philosophically justified by our analysis of personality. There is the gradual refinement of this expectation till it culminates in the demand for a God of love. And then, at the precise moment when the expectation culminates, and through the same instrumentality by which its final refinement is affected, a revelation purports to come; which, [ p. 204 ] if true, miraculously fits the facts, and in virtue of so doing has moulded history ever since ; and which, if in any degree or form untrue, falls hopelessly to pieces, crumbles into fragments, vanishes in air; and yet despite of so doing continues the while to mould mankind, and to mould them for their progress, and their good.
The weight of this dilemma must obviously rest upon the value of man’s verdict on himself. Are his religious instincts to be trusted? Are his rational deductions from them true? Are his moral judgements of their issues just? Is he, in fine, that spiritual being, which from ages immemorial he has thought himself to be? We have indicated the reasons for answering this question in ’ the affirmative ; nor are they obsolete because they are old. Resting mainly as they do upon introspective analysis, they have been always within reach of philosophic minds; and though perhaps clearer to us than they were to Plato, were yet as convincing to Plato as they are to us. Physical science cannot affect them, for they are essentially metaphysical; but inasmuch as physical science relies upon the validity and veracity of thought, and issues, in virtue of that reliance, in calculations that are daily verified, and predictions that are constantly fulfilled, it bears witness indirectly to all the phenomena of consciousness with which thought is inseparably bound.
[ p. 205 ]
But if once we accept what may fairly be called man’s natural self-estimate as true, the series of inferences that we have traced begins to follow. His religious instinct points to a Person informing and sustaining material things. His reason and conscience justify this instinct, by demanding a first and final cause and moral governor. He anticipates that this Person will reveal Himself to man, in proportion to man’s capacity for receiving His revelation. And when faced by an event which claims to be that revelation, and which, while baffling his every forecast more than fulfills his every hope, he is prepared to accept it as true; and if true, as the final vindication of all his previous processes of thought.
Thus the Incarnation is the crown and climax of all that has gone before ; and a Christian cannot possibly separate his creed from the other arguments for a personal God. The validity of those arguments is, of course, unaffected by disbelief in the Incarnation. But they raise, as we have seen, an expectation, which, apart from the Incarnation, is not adequately met; while the Incarnation so completely meets it as to clinch the entire circle of proof. .
This, then, is the main outline of our reasons for believing in a personal God; and it suggests two or three reflections. In the first place, these reasons are concrete and not abstract. They rest upon [ p. 206 ] countless and complex facts, which must be known by experience to be judged aright. The moral argument, for example, or the teleological argument, or the value of universal consent, must be realized in imagination before their weight can be felt. And this is a work of patience and of time. Again, these separate arguments unite in one cumulative proof, and what is true of them apart is doubly true of them together: for to appreciate a cumulative argument we must not only realize its elements, but we must further realize the peculiar force of their combination; the way in which each fresh factor makes it harder to reject the rest, till at last they coalesce into one immediate, indissoluble whole. Further, the argument in question is of immense antiquity; and, to feel the strength of its appeal, we must remember the minds that it has satisfied; not merely their number, but their philosophic ability and moral worth; together with the searching controversies, which have modified its statement, while leaving its substantial identity untouched. It is thus no mere chain of reasoning with which we are concerned; it is our whole attitude towards the world; the historic attitude of mankind ; a thing which countless currents, from countless sources, through countless ages, have imperceptibly gone to form; brooks flowing into streams, streams swelling into rivers, rivers meeting in oceans, till the earth has become [ p. 207 ] ‘full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’
But what abstract logic has not created, abstract logic cannot destroy. The ease with which we criticize a picture, or a statue, or a building which we should never have had the genius to construct, may bring home to us the immeasurable distance between abstract and concrete thought. So here, we have before us a theory of the universe ; timehonoured, coherent, concrete, positive, august; and abstract criticism is powerless against it. The mere suggestion of a doubt here, and a difficulty there, an uncertainty in this place, or an obscurity in that, is futile, unless supported by some positive hypothesis, to take the place of what it seeks to remove; seeing that, after all, the universe is a fact, and some account of it must needs be true. What, then, are the positive hypotheses which are offered us as substitutes for a personal God? There is Hegel’s Idea, as understood—though some of us think misunderstood—by the Hegelians of the left, and misunderstood at the cost of charging their master either with intellectual or moral error. There is the blind Will, which Schopenhauer sought to substitute for the Hegelian Idea, There is the Supra-conscious Unconscious, with which Hartmann sought to improve on Schopenhauer’s Will. There is the Moral Order of Fichte, Matthew Arnold’s Eternal Not-ourselves, that makes for righteousness. [ p. 208 ] Now, we have shown above that not one of these notions is conceivable apart from personality. They are derived by abstraction from the various functions of personality, and when severed from their source they become not merely hypothetical, but absolutely meaningless ; ‘words, mere words; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ To say this is not to depreciate the brilliant insight, and suggestive thought, which accompanies the exposition of the theories in question. They are undoubtedly works of genius, but of genius which at times recalls the cynical epigram, that ‘ metaphysicians are poets run mad.’ For, however logically deduced and systematically arranged, they cannot really be called systems, since the central principles, on which they hang, are mere imaginary fictions, unsupported in mid-air; while we feel as we peruse them, that their authors, and adherents alike, have unconsciously personified these cardinal abstractions; and that to this surreptitious reintroduction of personality all their plausibility is really due.
Materialism looks at first sight more solid. But materialism, as we have also seen, is in precisely similar case; since matter regarded by itself is another meaningless abstraction. We only know matter at first hand in our own bodies; there and there alone we are inside it, and can view it from within. But matter in our own bodies is in [ p. 209 ] intimate union with personality. And we have no reason therefore to suppose that matter ever exists or can exist, or that there is such a thing as matter, unsustained by spirit. And what is true of matter is even more obviously true of energy and force.
Thus no positive hypothesis can be offered as a substitute for a personal God, which is not either an abstraction from personality, and therefore demonstrably unreal, or an abstraction inconsistently personified, and therefore demonstrably untrue.
Hence the attraction of Agnosticism, which includes a wide range of opinion, from hypothetical atheism to hypothetical theism ; being in fact compatible with any tendency, so long as the tendency in question does not issue in dogmatic belief. The term has been several times defined with an attempt at precision; but its negative nature eludes definition, and it may best therefore be taken in its widest extent. Now the last thing in the world with which Agnosticism desires to be identified is Pyrrhonism, that is the thorough-going scepticism which even doubts that it doubts. On the contrary, it draws a sharp distinction between the known and the unknown, rejecting the latter and accepting the former; as being respectively incapable and capable of proof.
But if there is any truth in the whole course of [ p. 210 ] our previous thought, this distinction is untenable, and the logical Agnostic cannot in the end escape from Pyrrhonism. For Agnosticism professes to rest upon physical science; but physical science makes two assumptions which, after what has been said before, may be very briefly summarized, and which are incompatible with the Agnostic position. In the first place it takes for granted that the universe can be known, or in other words is intelligible. This assumption or conviction is so obvious and universal that it may easily escape notice altogether. But it involves the important conclusion that the universe is a work of mind, since we cannot attribute intelligibility to any source except intelligence. Thus the initial presupposition of physical science is metaphysical, and catries us at once beyond the region which the Agnostic calls ‘the known. Again, physical science assumes that our reasoning faculties are trustworthy. But our reasoning faculties do not stand alone. They are inseparably bound up with our emotions and our will, as part and parcel of our one personality; and the conviction of their veracity must by consequence imply that our other faculties are equally veracious. But our other faculties as inevitably lead us to see moral purpose in the universe, as our reason to see rational arrangement ; and here again we are beyond the limits of what the Agnostic ‘knows.’ To accept [ p. 211 ] these conclusions is to abandon Agnosticism, to reject them is to make any kind of certainty impossible, and reduce all knowledge to mere opinion; in other words to abandon science. In fact to deny divine, is to deny human personality, and this is what the Agnostic really does. He ignores or explains away the elements in man which point to God; and thus while professing to trust experience invalidates its very source, by discrediting the primary instincts, and natural operations of the mind through which experience comes [3].
There remains the hypothesis of a personal God, a Being whose mode of existence is indeed beyond our power to conceive ; but who, in however transcendent a manner, thinks, wills, loves, and holds personal intercourse with persons. If our human personality were a fixed and finite thing, it would supply us with no analogue for conceiving such a Being; but we have seen that it is not a fixed and finite thing, but a seed, a germ, a potency, a ‘herald of itself in higher place.’ We can imagine it existing, almost infinitely magnified, in capacity and character, in intensity and scope; and we have a presage that such existence is its destined goal. Thus while all else around us is | rigorously finite, personality alone suggests infini\ tude of life; and however much, when applied to [ p. 212 ] God, it out-soars the field of our vision, we feel that in using the term we are using words. that havea meaning. We are thinking, not refusing to think; in other words, that a Personal God is a positive conception. Further, we have seen that personality is triune, and is met by the revelation of a ttiune God. Of the first point there can be no question. The relation of a subject to an object is absolutely fundamental to the notion of a person, and thus lands us in triunity at once. The only question that can plausibly be raised is, not whether human personality is triune, but whether that triunity gave rise to our triune conception of God; so that the latter is in fact an invention, not a revelation. The answer to this is that beyond question we can trace the process by which the doctrine of the Trinity took theological form, It started in the concrete, with the baptismal formula of the Christian Church, a practical provision for a practical need, emanating from Jesus Christ. And throughout the history of its dogmatic formulation, we are confronted with this fact. It was regarded as a revelation by the men who shaped its intellectual expression; and it was only in the process, the very gradual process of that expression, that its congruity with human psychology came out; that psychology in fact being distinctly developed in the effort to give it utterance. No one contributed more to this [ p. 213 ] philosophical work than St. Augustine; yet the: words of the prayer with which he concludes his treatise on the Trinity show plainly what he believed to be its source.
‘O Lord our God, we believe in Thee, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. For the truth would not say, Go, baptize all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, unless Thou wast a Trinity. Nor wouldest Thou, O Lord God, bid us be baptized in the name of Him who is not the Lord God[4].’
The same is the case with Origen, Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, and the Gregories. They did not accommodate Christian religion to their philosophy, but philosophy to their Christian religion. Thus we are met by what claims to be the selfrevelation of the Personal God. It appeals first to elemental humanity in the hearts of unsophisticated men; far removed from Alexandria or Athens ; yet the very words in which it does so, turn out, upon analysis, to involve a view of personality which the world had not attained, but which, once stated, is seen to be profoundly, philosophically true. But ifa view of God which is so consonant with philosophical analysis, as often to have been mistaken for a product of philosophy, can be shown to have entered the world, among the fishermen of Galilee, in wholly unphilosophical disguise, its [ p. 214 ] claim to revelation is immensely strengthened by the fact. Moreover there was a sufficient reason for such a revelation. For the truth which is revealed was what made the Incarnation possible, and gave entirely new meaning to the thought that God is Love. Since love is of two kinds: the love of inferiors, and the love of equals; the love of condescension, and the love of mutual affection. And however much in pre-Christian ages men had thought of the love of God, they could not regard it otherwise than as the love of condescension; of the infinitely greater for the infinitely less; in technical terms, an accident contingent on creation ; not the essence of God Himself. But a God, within whose Being are personal distinctions, can at once be conceived as essentially, eternally, absolutely Love; love of which the human analogue is passion and not pity; the intensest, mightiest, holiest thing we know.
And this new insight into the divine nature, threw a new light upon the destiny of man, as capable, through the Incarnation, of being made holy in the Beloved, and so raised from the level of pity to be partaker of the eternal love of God. Thus the actual Trinity of God explains the potential trinity of man ; and our anthropomorphic language follows from our theomorphic minds [5].
These. considerations bring us round again to [ p. 215 ] the point from which we started, and from which we will briefly resume.
Human personality has attributes, self-consciousness and freedom, which distinguish it in kind from the world of mere animals and things, and relate it to a spiritual order, of whose eminent reality it is itself at once the witness and the proof. With this conviction in his mind, man looks at the universe outside him, and divines there, with an instinct which age or argument cannot eradicate, the presence of a Person, whom he feels, but may not see. On reflection this grows more certain; for the world is rational, harmonious, beautiful ; it works out moral purposes; and must therefore have a spiritual cause; and these are notes of personality, and of personality alone. When he asks why, if this be so, God has not made Himself more manifest, he is met by the analogy of human intercourse, and the restriction which sin imposes, even on the knowledge of a saintly friend. This qualifies the views with which he enters upon history; and history presents the picture that he is led to expect; ignorant ages dimly aware of deity around them; national progress answered by national enlightenment ; increase of personal insight met by increase of inspiration; the race that is eminent in desire of holiness selected for eminence in degree of revelation. At length, as is meet, from the holy race, [ p. 216 ] comes forth the Holy One; guiding man into the life of love, wherein his true perfection lies ; and revealing God as the source of love, and Himself as God incarnate; in union with Whom our finite, imperfect personality, shall find, in the far eternity, its archetype and end.