Two great texts of scripture have supplied the thought of Christianity with words in which to clothe the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God. The first is that saying of St. John which we know so well from its association both with Christmas Day and with the Holy Eucharist-"the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory." The second is an even more mysterious saying of St. Paul: "Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of man." Far-reaching though these sayings are, it is nevertheless strange that the Church should have fastened upon them so exclusively as almost to neglect a third; for this third text has been handed down to us not as the commentary of apostles, but as a word of the Lord himself. "For their sakes" he says-meaning thereby his disciples and those who through their words shall believe on him-"for their sakes I sanctify myself." The word "sanctify" here we must take not in the later sense of "becoming holy" given to it, partly but not exclusively by St. Paul; but rather in its ordinary Old Testament meaning of "becoming a priest." "For their sakes I became a priest," our Lord asserts. We are apt to interpret the sentence as referring exclusively to the period of the Passions, partly because of its intimate connexion in the text with the closing hours of our Lord's earthly life (it occurs in the great High Priestly prayer of Maundy Thursday); party because superficially at least, the Epistle to the Hebrews suggests that his priesthood was won through the sufferings of the days of his flesh. and these associations have led us to overlook what is the manifest intention of the Fourth Gospel and the deeper meaning of Hebrews alike-the truth, namely, that the whole of Christ's human life was the exercise of a priesthood, because by and in the Incarnation he became humanity's high-priest.

For as early as the tenth chapter of St. John, Christ speaks of himself as "Him whom the Father hath sanctified"-"hath made a priest"-and here the reference is to an event in the past; an event which can surely be none other than the Incarnation-unless it be that eternal fore-ordination of the Son in the purposes of the timeless Trinity, to human manifestation, of which the Incarnation of the seal and outcome. And while it is true that the Epistle to the Hebrews lays special emphasis on our Lord's progress in human experience, yet we must not forget that his priesthood is compared with that of Melchizedek-it is "without beginning of years" as well as "without end of days." Philo, again,-that strange Jew who, quite apart from the Christian revelation, meditated much upon the pre-existent Word of God,-did not hesitate to give to that Word the title of "High Priest" though he knew nothing of any passion or suffering which the Word had undergone. May we not then say, on the basis of scripture, that the eternal function of the Son in the Godhead, in so far as men are concerned, is to stand as priest between man and God; and that at his incarnation he entered upon the actual and visible realisation of his priesthood? At all events we can confidently assert that no other name of the names given to Jesus-neither Lord, nor Christ, nor Son of God, nor even Word itself-evoked from the Apostolic Church such an outburst of exalted hymnody and theology alike as that which surrounds the presentation of him as the great High Priest in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

And very significant is this thought of the Incarnation as the setting apart of the son of God to his priesthood. It enhances, first of all, the solemn mystery of the Act itself. Most of us, I suppose, have witnessed in some great cathedral the ordination of young men-perhaps friends of our own-to the ministry of the church. At such a time the dignity of pillar and arch, the beauty of windows and carving, the solemn appeal of music, have all contributed to deepen the sense of holiness with which the rite itself must always be surrounded. but the most wonderful of earthly ordinations bears only the feeblest possible resemblance to the glorious and awful moment when the Son of God was consecrated to his earthly ministry. The Old Masters who loved to paint the Babe in the crib at Bethlehem, would sometimes add to their picture, through a rift in the clouds above, a glimpse of the rejoicing in Heaven at the new hope of salvation going forth from God to man. But suppose the veil which conceals the processes of eternity from human eyes to have been wholly torn away at such a time-what a scene of angelic wonder and adoration would then have been revealed, as heralding the Nativity of Christ! We speak lightly and almost casually of "the Incarnation," as though of some scientific or political theory; but could we realise only a fraction of the love and holiness from which issued that Act of self-consecration, we could scarcely speak of it at all. it would move us to prayer and wonder and worship; but not to words.

Think next, of what this phrase-"For their sakes I make myself a priest"-tells us of the manner of our Lord's earthly life. There are those to-day ho doubt that God ever came to earth in the flesh, just as Jew and Greek alike doubted in the first age of the Church. Is the union of God and man in one person possible or thinkable? "No," said the Jew, "God is too remote, too Holy, to endure the limitations of human flesh and consciousness." "No," said the Greek, "the gods may indeed come down among us in the likeness of men, but it is at best a likeness, and appearance, a temporary veil and concealment; no real union of Godhead and manhood in a single person is possible." Here we have the problem of the two natures, as it is called-how can two separate natures, those of Godhead and manhood, be fully and forever present in a single person? Theology has wrestled with the problem throughout the ages; and it has presented us with two formulæ as its solution-the first, that in Christ the two natures were united "without fusion, without change, without division, without separation"; the second, that in this union the manhood is "impersonal." Modern thinkers tell us that these formulæ are either misleading or meaningless; that the conception they express (if they can be said to express anything coherent at all) is unbelievable. What I ask you to-day to consider is just this:-does our Lord's great phrase about the Incarnation-"I make myself a priest"-help us in any way to understand these formulæ better: still more to accept the truth which they enshrine?

Surely we may say that it does. The new thing which was manifested when the Son of God became man for us, was like the new thing that is manifested when a young man becomes a priest in the Church of God. As priesthood stands to the man who bears it, so the manhood stands to the Godhead in Christ. Let us see how far this picture carries us. The man who is ordained does not assume a merely temporary function; he is thenceforward priest as much as man; he is, further, fully priest as well as fully man. Nor does he cease to be a man because he has become a priest; rather it is in priesthood-his vocation-that he actualises the possibilities of his manhood. Yet he was man before he became priest; and if he had not been a man he could not have been a priest at all. In that sense his priesthood, we may say, is impersonal: what happened was not that two persons-man and priest-were conjoined; but that a person who was formerly man is now both man and priest. If we speak of manhood and priesthood as two "natures," we may say first that he bore the nature of manhood before that of priesthood; secondly, that he now bears both without confusion or conflict, indivisibly conjoined, eternally co-existent; and further that of these two natures the priesthood may be called originally impersonal, in so far as it was not a priest who became a man, but a man who became priest.

It would be absurd to erect so frail an analogy into a theory of the Incarnation. Yet imperfect and limited though it is, it has nevertheless a certain value. It means that we have an example, in human life, of the union of two natures, of which we can predicate just those terms which the Church after four centuries and a half of intellectual struggle affirmed to be true of the union of two natures in Christ. Our Lord's parallel, if we may so call it, makes it clear that such a union of natures is not merely possible, but is continually occurring every time a youth is ordained to the ministry of the Church. May we not fairly turn to the critics of traditional orthodoxy, and ask them what other terms would more fitly express the union of manhood and priesthood in a single priest? And if the terms are appropriate and intelligible in that relation, why deny their appropriateness and intelligibility in the infinitely more perfect and sacred union of Godhead and manhood in Christ?

Let us think then of the Incarnation in terms of a human ordination. As a man is ordained priest, thenceforward to be both fully man and fully priest, without any conflict of will between his old nature and his new, so the Son of God was "sanctified" or "consecrated" as man-to be fully God and fully man, yet one undivided person in the two natures. He is not less God than man, nor less man than God; he does not act now as man, now as God; there is no conscious opposition between his Godhead and his manhood; he is two and yet utterly one. Even so, however, the critic may not be entirely satisfied. He will perhaps admit that such an indivisible conjunction of natures is possible in certain instances, as for example in that of manhood and priesthood which we have been considering; but in other cases he will deny its possibility, and particularly in the crucial case of manhood and Godhead. there are some pairs of natures which can never be wholly united in a single person, because they are mutually incompatible, and "Godhead" and "manhood" (it is alleged) form such a pair. We can conceive of a being at once "fully man" and "fully priest," because manhood and priesthood are compatible; but we cannot conceive of a being at once fully English and fully French, because these two nature are mutually exclusive or incompatible. In a similar though more absolute way, our critic will say, "Godhead" and "manhood" are mutually exclusive-God is infinite omniscient, perfect, beyond all suffering; man is limited in power and knowledge, imperfect, and subject to every kind of ill-physical, mental and moral. How then can these two be joined in one?

I do not linger over this difficulty, for (real though it is) I doubt if it is very pressing at the present day; the most recent tendencies in liberal thought are, on the contrary, so imbued with a belief in the compatibility of Godhead and manhood as almost to suggest that every man, as he is in his imperfection, is a Christ Incarnate. But this at least must be said-men did not come to believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God because they had already framed an idea of God as capable of incarnation; they gradually and with the utmost difficulty came to think Godhead compatible with manhood, because they had seen and confessed that God and man were one in Christ. There have been (as we have already said) in the history of the world's though, many conception of God as so remote from man that it would be impossible to predicate an incarnation of him. but the witness of Christ's own person shewed those conception to be untrue; God and man were one in Christ Jesus; therefore God must be such as to be capable of incarnation in the flesh.

So our train of thought leads us straight back to the Gospel story-to the question, "Whom say ye that I the Son of Man am?" And that is as it should be. If this Congress of ours is to avail anything, it will-perhaps before all else-send us back to our Bibles, and especially to the Gospels. There we shall read once again, and please God shall re-read to our lives' end, the story of the earthly life of Jesus. I cannot attempt to picture that life for you to-day: but this at least I can say:-the more you read the story the more convinced will you be that he who is there depicted is both man-in-God and God-in-man. In him is manifested the fulness of the Godhead bodily, the final and unique revelation of perfect union between Godhead and manhood. And if you shrink from this conclusion, and begin, as many critics do, to cut out of the record here an incident, and there a saying, and elsewhere a miracle, so as to have left at the last no more than a human figure, one of two things will happen. Either your resultant picture of the Christ will be such that no sane man or woman will care to call his Lord; or you will be left, in spite of all your pains, with a Person no less inexplicable than before--a Person of whom you can only say that in him, as in no other, God and man are one.

He lived on earth, we say, the life of man in perfect and eternal communion with God; and that will serve to introduce our last consideration. What did the Incarnation effect for man? Once again the thought of Christ's priesthood, taken in conjunction with the Gospel story, gives us an answer. Priesthood attempts to bring God and man together, to mediate between them, to reconcile and atone. The priest brings sinful man to God with such sacrifices as may be offered for his sin; and so our Lord presents men to the Father after paying for them the debt of sin which none but he could pay. Of that I say no more, for the subject is allowed to another speaker: and there is a second aspect of priesthood for us to notice now. Priesthood not only brings man near to God; it also brings God near again to sinful man. It restores to man that like of the Spirit, of communion with the father, which we have broken and lost through sin. For be certain of this-sin is no passing cloud on a summer's day; it is a devastating tempest. It is no transient faintness; but a disease that brings spiritual death in its train. By sin each of us loses God. By sin we become atheists indeed,-"without God in the world." But the priesthood of Christ Incarnate means that he has brought back and bestowed upon man once more the life of communion of spiritual fulness, which should be ours by virtue of god's creative love. As Melchizedek and Moses, those two priestly types of the Son of God, brought meat and drink-the one to Abraham, weary of his fighting: the other to the children of Israel in the desert-so Christ Himself brings spiritual food, a new infusion of the life of God, to men. So much at least the Gospel story witnesses of his earthly life. He laid his hands upon those who came to him in faith, and they were restored in body and soul. He spake the word to them, and they became men and women of spiritual power. He breathed upon them, and they received the Holy Spirit. The fulness of the spirit was not only present in Christ; it was poured out upon all those who turned to him for help.

But what of us, you may say, who read the story centuries later, but cannot see or touch the earthly form of Jesus? How can that Incarnate life of so long ago avail for us as well as for the first followers of Christ? It is the purpose of this whole Congress to give once more the answer to that question, but here the answer begins. In the Church and her Sacraments the work of the Incarnation is continued; the royal priesthood of Christ has been handed on to that royal priesthood which is his body. there are those who doubt whether the Church on earth, a community of frail and sinful men, can be the vehicle and means by which the life of God, the holy spirit, is poured into men's souls. But if so, they doubt the very truth of which, as we have seen, the Incarnation itself makes us secure-the truth namely that God is capable of working through human nature, and that human nature can manifest and transmit the divine. For the Incarnation is the greatest of all sacraments, a visible sign of grace invisible; and on that sacrament the Church and all her Sacraments depend.

This then is the central truth of our religion, that in Christ God and man, sundered by man's sin, were brought together again, never to be separated. it is the meaning of that claim to priesthood for our Lord form which we started this morning. And it is, no less, the whole of the Gospel. On the one hand-"ye who were afar off have been brought near,"-on the other hand, "He is not far from any one of us" ; " Before we call he will answer and while we are yet speaking he will hear." Believe this, and you have the whole truth and purpose of the Incarnation; experience it, and you cannot doubt that God and man are one Christ. Having therefore brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest through the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say his flesh, and having an high priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart ion full assurance of faith.

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