iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 131 



is the progress of its individual members; its hindrances 

 are their hindrances. 



Each individual man, then, bears the burden of the 

 misdirection of the race through sin. If Christ did not 

 bear this same burden, can we say that He was com- 

 pletely identified with fallen humanity? The answer 

 to this question is implicit in two things we have said 

 already. The will has to be reckoned with when we 

 speak of any human being; and Christ's experience of 

 isolation was the experience of the isolation of manhood 

 from Godhead, in time, through the identification of 

 Himself with the manhood of the whole human race. 

 " It was not really His manhood that was isolated, but 

 the manhood of all others with which He had identified 

 Himself." His Will brought about the identification as 

 the necessary consequence of complete interpenetration. 

 In this identification He had the full experience of isola- 

 tion; but as we have already said it was the isolation 

 of the manhood that had failed, not of the manhood 

 that was perfect His own. This point is not ade- 

 quately discussed nor clearly thought out in Evolution 

 and the Need of Atonement (pp. 165 ff.). Indeed on p. 165 

 there is actual misstatement. The sentence "Suppose, 

 sinless Himself, He became in very fact, Man, born into 

 the full consequences of race-failure, living as man, 

 dying as man, suffering complete alienation from free- 

 dom and immortality as man" contains not merely 

 a careless confusion of thought but a definitely untrue 

 statement, so far as I can see, though it does not invali- 

 date the rest of the argument at all. Christ did accept 

 "the full consequences of race-failure"; He did "suffer 

 complete alienation from freedom and immortality as 

 man." But He was not "born into them." He was 

 Himself the perfection of manhood, yet increasingly 

 throughout His life, and fully at the moment of com- 

 plete realisation of His Mission, upon the Cross, He laid 



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