v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 1 69 



can have distorted His mind; for He knew and faced 

 everything, He sublimated everything, making it true 

 and perfect. His love was pure and perfect. His anger 

 had no taint of self, but was a burning jealousy for the 

 goodness and nobility of man's spirit; a hatred of its 

 degradation. His ambition was for the salvation of men. 

 and their perfecting. His pride was the pride of humble 

 desire to do good. His knowledge was the knowledge 

 of man's great destiny. On all the foundation of His 

 sinless past was built His human character. All the past 

 abode with Him, and abides for ever. Therefore He can 

 enter into every phase of man's becoming with perfect 

 sympathy and understanding. Therefore He is as near 

 to us in childhood as in manhood. Therefore He is as 

 near to those whose brains have ceased to develope at 

 an early stage whom, because of their arrested de- 

 velopment, we call idiots as to those who have gone a 

 long way, as men count distance, along the stony path 

 of knowledge. In very truth He has taken the Manhood 

 into God. He is Perfect God; but superadded is His 

 perfect Manhood. 



As the Athanasian Creed expresses it, He is equal to 

 the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the 

 Father as touching His Manhood. Yet inferior only in 

 a sense. He has Himself experienced the knowledge of 

 being caused. He has Himself become, in the conditions 

 of full Human limitation. Because He is Man, no experi- 

 ence of that becoming can ever die away. It lives in the 

 present of transcendent being. Christ is man as well as 

 God; He still experiences manhood, though manhood 

 perfected to its ultimate completion. And the manhood 

 He knows is the manhood He won for Himself, and the 

 manhood won for Him by the struggle of past ages. 



"It behoved him in all things to be made like unto 

 His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful 

 high-priest in all things pertaining to God, to make 



