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Updated: May 4, 2025
I grant that the theory requires another to complement it; namely, that those men and women, who do not even approximately fulfil the conditions of their elevated rank, who will not endeavour after the great human-divine idea, striving to ascend, are sent away back down to that stage of development, say of fish or insect or reptile, beyond which their moral nature has refused to advance.
Now although I have said that we never rightly understand our Lord's actions if we are always looking for dogmatic or doctrinal purposes, and thinking of them rather as being lectures, and sometimes rebukes in act, than as being the outgush of His emotions and His human-divine nature, yet we have also to take into account their moral and spiritual lessons.
That is to say, we have not only the whole riches of the divine glory as the measure to which we may lift our hopes, but lest that celestial brightness should seem too high above us, and too far from us, we have Christ in His human-divine manifestation, and especially in the great fact of the Resurrection, set before us, that by Him we may learn what God wills we should become.
Peter, as confessor of his Lord's human-divine nature, wields the keys of the kingdom of heaven, like a steward of a great house; and that too was fulfilled in his apostolic activity in his admitting Jews at Pentecost, and Gentiles in the house of Cornelius. But the same power attends all who share his faith and avowal, for the preaching of that faith is the opening of heaven's door to men.
And on the other hand to suppose this marvellous and universal consent of belief to have sprung by mere contagion from one accidental source would seem equally far-fetched and unlikely. But almost more remarkable than the world-encircling belief in human-divine Saviours is the equally widespread legend of their birth from Virgin-mothers.
From the consideration of the world-wide belief in a past Golden Age, and the world-wide practice of the Eucharist, in the sense indicated in the last chapter, to that of the equally widespread belief in a human-divine Saviour, is a brief and easy step.
But whatever changes or advances may come, the Divine reality still survives, independent of Jesus it is true, but as the world knows him still better, it will give to him its supreme gratitude and praise, in that he was the most perfect revealer of God to man, of God in man, and the most concrete in that he embodied and lived this truth in his own matchless human-divine life; and stands as the God-man to which the world is gradually approaching.
In Jesus this expanded into the Kingdom of God among men, that is, the perfect reign of goodness, love, and the human-divine relation of son and father. He looked for its realization by miracle, and when that failed said, "Thy will be done," and died, trusting all to the Father.
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