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hast sent me." This then, according to his solemn address to God, was the point and substance of faith in him, that God had sent him, and that all that he had taught in the name of God was true. This was the faith which had sanctified his disciples. "I have given them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me." To believe that Jesus was sent by God, gives him the highest of all possible authority, for it makes his words the words of God. Obedience to the words of Christ is necessarily salvation. “If a man keep my saying," said he, "he shall never see death." "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but hath passed from death unto life." You perceive then, that it does not make the least difference as to saving faith in Christ, what his metaphysical rank and nature was, for he does not teach on his own authority, but on the authority of God. He does not claim the belief and obedience of mankind because he was this or that, but because God sent him. Nothing whatever is gained by defining his nature and rank at all. That is an opinion about Christ, not faith in Christ. For if you could prove him to hold any rank whatever in the universe, it would not prove him to have any relation to us, except you proved at the same

time that God sent him to be our teacher and Saviour. He himself has declared in substance, that his physical relations to the universe are of no importance. It is his doctrines which regenerate the world. "The flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." The faith in Christ then, which sanctifies the soul of the Christian, is not the belief that he is this or that metaphysically, that is an opinion about Christ, but that which confides in him, whatever he might have been, as having been sent by God to instruct and save the world. And it is fallaciously thought by some, that only assume a certain metaphysical rank for Jesus, and the truth of all he said follows of course, and the easiest way to prove Christianity, is to assume a certain metaphysical rank for Jesus, and any other view of the matter, is the half-way house to infidelity. But such people do not reflect, that instead of facilitating the proof of the truth of Christianity, they throw that proof one step farther back. For in order to make that metaphysical rank prove the truth of Christianity, it is necessary to prove that metaphysical rank itself. That is not a subject of direct teaching, but only of remote, incidental inference. He did not claim the faith of mankind on that ground. The credentials which he brought with him did not bear on that point. They did not prove him to be this or that metaphysically, but they did

prove that God had sent him, "for no man could do the miracles which he did, except God were with him." Miracles were the appropriate proof of what he was officially, but no proof of what he was by nature. If Christ is to be believed on account of his nature, and his miracles have no bearing on his nature, then his nature, even if it could be shown that he made any assertion about it, must be taken to be this or that, on his own assertion, and his assertion must rest at last on miracles, the same authority as his teaching about other things; "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works." Nothing is gained then by asserting any peculiar nature as the basis of belief in Christ, but rather a new link is added to the chain of proof, which only makes it longer, without adding to its strength, as it must be fastened on miracles at last. The miracles prove him to be sent of God, let him be what he might, and we have God's authority for all that he taught in the name of God. We could have no more, let him be proved to be any thing whatever.

There is another view which has been taken of this matter, to which I cannot forbear here to advert, which says, in effect, that Christ is to be believed, not for what he was by nature, nor for the miracles which God wrought by him, but because what he taught strikes our minds as true. This, in my judg

ment, is a much greater and more dangerous mistake than that to which I have already adverted. To my mind it abases Christianity from a religion into a philosophy, and the doctrines of Christ from the heavenauthenticated standard of religious truth, into the opinions of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus sinks from the son or sent of God, and Saviour of the world, into the great philosopher of the Jews. His claim to a divine mission, and the institutions which he established to perpetuate his teaching, must, on this hypothesis, be regarded as a well intentioned and pious fraud, but still a fraud, to give what he thought to be truth more universal reception and more lasting influence then it could have had, had it rested on mere human authority. His whole enterprise will rest on the same ground with the attempt of Numa to introduce his laws, which he believed would be salutary to the Romans, on pretence of divine revelation from the nymph Egeria in the grove of Aricia.

This discussion, which has sprung up in our own day, carries us back to the form of baptism, which was the creed of the early Christians, and shows us the propriety of that form which seems at first sight somewhat enigmatical and mysterious. They were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, in a profession of belief in one God, the Father Almighty, and into a belief in the Son, Son, we have already seen to be an official

title, expressing a belief in Jesus therefore, as the sent of God, still this profession of faith would be imperfect, in a Christian sense, because a man might profess all this, and yet say that he meant that Jesus was sent of God, just as Socrates and Plato were sent to propagate what they thought true. The third article therefore, was necessary to complete the Christian creed: "I believe in the Holy Ghost," that Jesus was miraculously sent to establish a religion, to teach and to save mankind. The third article, therefore, establishes a connexion between the first and second, which clothes Jesus with the authority of God, gives us full confidence in all that he taught, and in the obedience which that faith produces, makes him "able to save to the uttermost, all that come unto God through him.”

Such was the faith, which was the bond of unity, and the instrument of salvation to the Christian Church. As long as the church confined itself to the simple testimony of the Apostles as to the office of Jesus, that he was the sent or anointed of God, and let opinion and speculation wander where they might as to his nature, so long the universal church had peace and unity. But soon speculative minds, with an infatuated and perverted ingenuity, began to turn their attention to the nature instead of the office of Jesus, to take the expression "Son of God," in a metaphysical instead of an official sense. When the

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