demption. The theory involves not merely single biblical texts, but the whole view that is taken of Christ's person, and of its relations to the world both before and since. "Our earthly human life as it now stands is directly and unavoidably subject to suffering; the soteriological view of the incarnation affirms of course that the entrance of the Son of God into this whole form of existence presupposes sin, and by it alone becomes intelligible. The same theory presses the consideration moreover, that in assuming flesh the Logos has been born as a member of the Jewish nation, and in subjection to its law, while the whole Israelitish economy resulted certainly from the fact of the fall. Only in view of sin again, it is urged, does it become intelligible why the incarnation took not place at the beginning of man's history, but at a later time; sin must first ripen, and humanity show what it was able to do of itself after the fall, before the Son of God could appear as the author of redemption and the dispenser of a higher life. And who can doubt, the soteriologi. cal theory is ready to add, but that all this is according to the sense of the Apostles, and particularly of that one among them, who alone has left us in his writings the outline of a general view of the world with Christ for its centre?" The mode too in which we are brought to participate in Christ's life, is such as to involve in its very nature the supposition of sin. Not only is this the case with repentance, but also with faith in the sense of Paul and John. Suppose no opposition between the natural and spiritual, the world of sense and the invisible world, in man's soul, and what room would there be for the idea of faith, as the power that breaks through the one to embrace the other? What room would there be for the conception of that agency of the Holy Ghost, which is represented to be now the medium of Christ's life and work in the world since his return to the Father? But how can we think of any such opposition between the two worlds in question, the soteriological theory asks, without the entrance of the disturbing power of sin into the process of man's life?

As regards the work of Christ again, the soteriological view will not consent of course to hold itself simply to the idea of the priestly office; as though the prophetical and kingly offices were to be properly cared for, as some have pretended, only by the other theory. It finds full scope for both these last in its conception of the kingdom of God, which is based on the fact of the fall and destined to end as a new creation in the glories of the resurrection. The three offices are in truth subordinated throughout to the idea of redemption.

"Thus it is that the theory which finds the cause of the incarnation in sin and the need of salvation, spreads itself out over the entire compass of the fact as it appears in history, over Christ's person and work, beginning and end, mode of revelation time, national sphere, all going before as preparation and all following after as consequence; no room is left anywhere for any other principle to appropriate to itself any part or portion of the fact; the actual incarnation is taken up by its explanatory account at all points, so as completely to thrust aside that other theory of an original general necessity for it as a purely vague and empty abstraction."

The same want of inward agreement between the two views will be felt, if we reverse the order of consideration and start with the opposite principle, that namely which places the christological necessity back of sin in the general nature of man.

The idea is, that if the development of humanity had gone forward in a perfectly normal and sinless way the Logos would still have become flesh. But for what end? Not for show merely, or to please the imagination. It must be thought of under an ethical view, as Liebner himself is careful to allow; it must be regarded as an act of love on the part of God. To whom? Of course to the human race. What would it communicate then; what want of the race would it propose to supply?

Here the ground is taken, that the race could have no true unity or wholeness without the God-man, that if its parts are not to fall asunder. atomistically it must have a personal head, in whom the human nature is joined with the divine. This can not mean merely, that Christ is appointed for all mankind as their ruler, and all mankind for him to submit to his government, that they belong of right to him and he to them; for so much the soteriological view itself allows, which is taken to fall short of the principle here in hand. Christ's headship over the race then must be understood of an actual relation holding between it and himself; as the New Testament also in truth refers the sense of pan only to a relation of this sort. Thus then a predicate, which is used of Jesus Christ commonly in his relation to the Church, is here transferred to the relation he bears to mankind in general, an application it never has in the Scriptures. But what does it signify in the first relation? Nothing less, certainly, than that he is joined in real life union with his Church, so as to be its ruling and actuating principle, filling it with his presence, and using it as the organ of his will, by the power of the Holy Ghost. But now extend this conception to the race as

a whole, and what becomes of the reference of the incarnation in any view to the idea of sin? Humanity then, sin or no sin, as being already in union with the divine-human life, needs no redemption. It has by this real relation all that it requires, and it becomes idle indeed to speak of sin as in any sense a fall from God; since in the midst of it all the race still stands, through its actual head, in full fellowship with God, and in full possession also of eternal life. What room can there be in such circumstances for the idea of redemption, or for making it in any way the object of the incarnation?

Each of the views in question then, it appears, goes actually to exclude the other. They refuse to stand together. It follows, that to maintain itself at all the idealistic theory, which pretends to resolve the mystery into a deeper general ground back of the soteriological view, must quit this abstract position, and come forward as the only sufficient key for the explanation of the whole fact.

In this case however one feature of it at least must still be excepted, the Saviour's death upon the cross. Not to refer this wholly to sin, would be to contradict plainly the whole sense of the Scriptures. But it is not easy to uphold the propitiatory signification of this death, if we are to retain steadily the thought that the God-man is the real head of the whole human race. It seems the most ready course to say, that the intervention of sin made it necessary for the head of the race to appear under such a form as should include, in addition to the requirements of the idea under its normal character, the provision of an atonement for the removal of the guilt belonging to men by means of suffering and death. But to say nothing of the isolated position the atonement is thus made to take in the general revelation of Christ, the force of it as a real condition of reconciliation with God cannot stand, where it is firmly held that Christ is the actual head of all mankind, and so still less of course the necessity of the incarnation for any such end. The death of the Son of God then must be taken as having a declarative value only, suited to assure men that their original and essential relation to their ever living head remains good notwithstanding their sense of guilt. Such a declaration might have been given by word alone; but it is rendered more expressive through the real symbol thus exhibited in the transaction of the cross. How every such view tends to sink the central mystery of faith into the form of a mere accommodation to human fancy and conceit, stripping it of all objective necessity and so of all real inward power, it is not necessary here to prove. It falls in truth into

the sphere of certain well known rationalistic theories, which are fairly exploded on the field of true theology.

Will it be said, to avoid this difficulty, that the idea of Christ's natural headship of the race anticipates and presumes of course a real appropriation of his atonement, on the part of men, by repentance and faith, and so cannot be regarded as having force till this condition is at hand? But if the thought in such form is not to lose itself in the mere conception of Christ's destination for the race at large, which belongs to the other theory, it must imply evidently the restoration of all men to communion with God as the metaphysically necessary end of all human development, and so along with this the overthrow in full of the ideas of freedom, accountability, guilt, punishment and pardon; and what becomes then of the real appropriation of the atonement through repentance and faith?

Or may it be supposed perhaps, that a part of mankind by its wilful resistance to the attraction of the head sunders itself from the body that belongs to it? So Liebner would seem to think, when he speaks of the loss of the wicked as "compensated" by the head, in which is realized the full idea of humanity. But this in one view is plainly to fall back into the scriptural thought, that Christ is the head of the Church; for the system of humanity as such is made to give way in favor of the body of the redeemed, to which only, and not to the race at large, the term oua is applied in the New Testament. In this way the idealistic account of the incarnation would yield in truth to the soteriological. In another view however one cannot see, why the supposed capacity of Christ to compensate for the loss of a part of the race, should not be sufficient also to compensate if need be for the whole-a result certainly as anti-soteriological as possible. Then the last sense of his revelation, would be not his love towards actually existing men, but the perfect realization of the full idea of humanity in himself! But what becomes then of the ethical motive already acknowledged, as lying at the ground of the mystery? The thought besides dialectically destroys itself; for a head in which the whole idea of the body is already realized, so that it can by itself make good any deficiency in this whether partial or total, is by such character raised above the relativity that belongs to the very conception of the head.

Paul found all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge in Jesus Christ crucified. If the theory before us is to be more than an empty abstraction, as before said, it must be able, aside from this idea of the cross, to explain the other aspects and connections of the historical incarnation, as related to the world both

before and since. Can it do this? Liebner seems to think so; for on the ground that the idea of humanity is supposed absolutely to require a perfect realization in one central individual, free from all the onesidedness that must attach to other individuals as such, he bases the conclusion that mankind in any case, that is even without sin, could be righteous before God only by faith in Christ, their divine human head. "But now when Liebner himself expressly says at the same time, that this absolutely universal individual cannot belong originally to humanity, but must proceed from a higher sphere, how shall we understand it in the first place that the race should be found from the start, not by its own apostacy from God but by God's creative act, in a condition of perfect inability to meet the Divine requirement, without the implantation of a new principle higher than the nature of humanity as such? How again is the consequence to be avoided, that God in the first act of creation purposely made the world bad, in order to make it better in the second? And if we attend to it, this unavoidable insufficiency of all human individuals aside from the God-man as their universal centre, this want of righteousness in virtue of which they cannot be the objects of the Divine complacency, rests on no other ground than this, that as abstractions of the true ideal unity which is reached in Christ they are of course onesided and partial representations only of the real generic conception, and so necessarily inadequate examples of humanity. This itself then unfits us to stand before God in our natural state, that we are only individuals in the common metaphysical sense of the term! We have here a questionable mixing of the ethical and the metaphysical, from which it is only a step to the error current among the disciples of the Nature-philosophy of Schelling, that individuality is itself the principle of evil, the original fall from the absolute or God."

All goes indeed to subvert the very idea of sin. For if the abstract singleness of the human person taken by itself is itself evil, since the whole creation besides looks to this as its end, it follows that evil is identical with the conception of a finite creation; or rather in place of a creation the ground of relative existence is made to be, as in the old Gnostic systems, a falling away from God; whereby at last the ethical force of sin is wholly swallowed up in theosophico-metaphysical dreams. Or without this, if it be assumed in any view that the world as it came originally from God could not please him, how must the idea of sin suffer and along with it the whole view of salvation! It can hardly be taken at best to signify more than an aggravation of