FUNCTIONS OF THE HUMAN FORM. 325 



But lastly, to shut out unreality, and bolt its door, if we are in 

 the image of God, Who — not what — is that God whose image we 

 are to wear ? The answer in fact is Christ. Of other gods we 

 speculate, but none other do we know. It is his love, wisdom, 

 works and body that clothe us with our second forms, and enable 

 us to fulfil the end of our being in making our lives and acts co- 

 human with our shapes. Christianity, it is obvious, is the only 

 human religion : other religions are mineral, vegetable, animal, or 

 anthropomorphic ; but this is theomorphic ; the revelation of no 

 Man- God, but of the God-Man. Henceforth, therefore, there are 

 no problems of God, but a history of Christ. Christianity ac- 

 cordingly works to the redemption of the physical man and hum in 

 body, that it may be like to his glorious body. And among its 

 other miracles is the connection of grace with nature, or of divinity 

 with physiology } so that by the harmonies of this connection, 

 Christ is to be Lord of the sciences, as well as High Priest of the 

 churches. For it is very obvious that the laws of love, wisdom, 

 and use, which are the health or functions of the body, are the 

 obedience of its atoms to His new commandment, and that in this 

 way the formulas of Christianity are all prevalent in physics. From 

 the moment that this is seen, the modern polytheism is ended, for 

 the Creator and Redeemer are the same, and the God of nature is 

 also the God of revelation.* For be it remembered that the divine 

 empire and pressure of Christ upon his subjects takes place by 

 revelation : it is not left to straggle down through history, through 

 journalists and scribes, but the book which is God's with us, is the 

 continuation of the Man who is God with us. Whence -again our 

 human form is according to our correspondence with the Word of 

 God. 



All this belongs strictly to the sciences, and especially to those 

 that relate to the body as the casket of the life of man. For the 

 great Incarnation is the model of the rest. And moreover it is not 

 this or that man that concerns physiology, but the problems of cor- 

 poreal humanity in its scope. But this matter of religion, in which 

 Christ's incarnation is part of experience, necessarily takes rank in 



* See these points considered in my " Address on a late work on the Philoso- 

 phy of Religion." 1849. 



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