1 24 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 



But if we accept His Manhood in the fullest possible 

 sense, not only do we find the key which unlocks the 

 mysteries of atonement, but we find light shed upon all 

 the processes of the tangled past. The windings of the 

 thread of consciousness end in comparative simplicity 

 when self -consciousness is reached. There is meaning 

 even in the tangle. 



Let us take the physical side first, in. the conventional 

 way, though it is in fact impossible really to separate 

 the physical and the spiritual. 



If Christ went through the ordinary stages of human 

 development, recapitulating the ancestral history of 

 the race, He became identified not merely with the 

 human race as it was then, but with all it had been in 

 the dim ages before consciousness became self-con- 

 sciousness. He took into His own Nature all the history 

 of past struggle, all the stages of groping blindly amid the 

 overwhelming press of a determined environment. He 

 was identified with the whole process of evolving spirit 1 . 



And this was not a mere matter of outward, physical 

 form. He was very man, of the substance of His 

 Mother. Through His Mother the continuity of the 

 germ-plasm was preserved inviolate. The question of 

 the Virgin Birth does not enter into this. His substance, 

 and His Manhood's potentialities, were in fact the very 

 substance and the very potentialities that had run 

 through the whole chain of living organisms from the 

 first simple beginning of life. This is, of course, only 

 true, if the theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm, 

 generally upheld by biologists, is itself true, either in 



1 This is at least suggestive in relation to the problem of the 

 lower animals. Whatever the truth as to their destiny and this 

 apparently we cannot know in the present life ; at any rate there 

 is no sign nor hope of progress in knowledge as yet we can at 

 least feel that Christ is linked with the whole evolutionary process, 

 and so with every creature that has borne its part therein. 



