The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

The condition, therefore, of Adam and his posterity after his fall differed from the condition which would have been that of simple nature by the whole extent of the guilt incurred by the nature in its fall from sonship.

And herein lies one peculiarity, and one strangely distressing condition of his state, in that while he lost by the fall the grace in which, as an indwelling gift, his whole supernatural state had been rooted, he yet did not lose that condition of being formed and intended for a supernatural end which grace alone could enable him to attain. For the supernatural vision and love of God he had been created, and in his fall he did not sink to be merely a natural man; but his original end was still held out before him as that which he might reach supported by that grace the aids of which were in a different measure promised to him in order to lead a life of penance, and as the earnest of a future restoration.

This, however, is far from being a complete statement of his case, and we must go back to the circumstances of his fall in order to add that further still more peculiar and remarkable condition which, added to the one just described, made up the whole of his fall.

Adam had not disobeyed the divine command, and so broken the covenant of his sonship, by the simple promptings of his own will. Another had intervened; had suggested to the woman doubts against her Maker and Father. She had yielded to these doubts, and disobeyed; and then Adam had suffered himself to be drawn with her in her disobedience. Who was this other? He was the prince and leader of spirits created good, but fallen into enmity with God. Thus, the favourite son of God had listened to the persuasion of God's chief enemy, and his fall from sonship had been, by the judgment of the offended Parent, not a simple fall from his supernatural estate, but a fall likewise into servitude to that enemy. This servitude also, with the guilt of the nature in which he had sinned, Adam transmitted to the members of his body in and by their nature. Adam with his race was the captive taken in war by the enemy of God, and the life which he was allowed to live had the condition of this servitude impressed on it, with this alleviation only, that the assistance of the divine grace offered to him by the mercy of God in his state of penance could protect those who accepted it from the effects of this servitude, and ultimately deliver them.

Here, then, is the condition of Adam's posterity in consequence of his fall; members of a Head who had broken his allegiance to his Creator and Father, and so inheriting with their nature the disinherited state into which he had cast himself; captives, moreover, of that powerful spirit, God's antagonist, who had tempted Adam, seduced him, and led him to his fall.

Now the heathenism which we have been contemplating is the carrying out in time and space of this body of Adam in those who, by their personal fault, fell away from the aids of grace which were accorded to man after his fall – aids given first to Adam for the whole race, and then renewed to Noah for the whole race; and the false worship, so blent and mingled with heathenism, which seemed as if it were the soul of its body, is the sign and stamp of that captivity to the evil spirit which the first man's sin inaugurated.

How powerful was the bond between Adam and his race, how great and influential the headship which the Divine choice had vested in him, we see in that mysterious transmission of guilt which passed from him to his children. And it must be expressly noted that it was not a transmission of punishment alone. Rather, the divine justice cannot punish where there is no guilt; and as in this case Adam's fall, and that of his posterity with him, was not merely a loss but a punishment, so it had the special nature of guilt, not only in him but in his posterity, and was a sin both of the person and of the nature in him, of the nature only in them. We see the force and range of the divine endowment of Adam here, though it be in the tenacity of the calamity which ensued to his race; but it must be remembered that such in this respect as the punishment was, the blessing would have been. Adam was created both an individual and a race. In him were two things – the single man and the head; but of these two things the headship was peculiar to himself, while such as the individual Adam was, his race was to be. He had it in his power to break the covenant of his sonship with God, but not the tie between himself and his race.

And this sheds a light upon the darkest part of that terrible picture which collected heathenism presents to us. Man, as a social animal, is incessant in his action on his fellow-man; the parent and the family form the child; the companion and the neighbourhood lead forth the child into manhood. This work is perpetually going on in all its parts, and society is the joint result. When, therefore, we see this society once fallen into the possession of a false worship, which perverts the very foundations of morality, and instils deadly error into the child with the mother's milk, no thoughtful mind can gaze without horror upon beings involved in such a maze,⁵⁵ yet intended for an eternal duration. Man's nature, as a race, seems turned against him; and in addition to the guilt under which each individual of the race is born, and the nature which each inherits, wherein the internal harmony of peace is broken, and neither the appetites obey the reason nor the reason is obedient to God, comes the force of habit, of education, of culture, of companionship, of man's business and leisure, his play and his earnest, the force of his language, the expression of his thoughts upon himself and others, the whole force, in fact, of man's social being when it is put under possession of an evil power, man's adversary. But this social nature was to have been to him the means of the greatest good. As by his natural descent from Adam unfallen would have come the grace of sonship, so the whole brotherhood of those who shared that gift would have helped and supported each in the maintenance of it. The human family would have had a beauty and a unity of its own as such; an order and a lustre would have rested on the whole body, confirming each member in the possession of his own particular gift. The concatenation of evil in the corrupt society is the most striking contrast to the fellowship of good in the upright; and while it is distinct from that guilt which descends to man as the sin of his nature, yet springs like it from the original constitution of that nature as a race. It is the invasion of evil upon good carried to its utmost point, wherein we discern most plainly “the prince of this world” wielding that “power of darkness” by which the Apostle described the whole state of the world, out of which these nations, which made the empire of Augustus, were a part.

We have thus contemplated four distinct pictures. The first of these was human nature bare and naked by itself, a merely ideal view of man, as a being compounded of soul and body, each possessing only the faculties which belong to them as spiritual and corporeal natures, the result of which is a substantial union, because the spiritual substance becomes the form of the corporeal, not by making the body, when already animated by another principle, to participate of spiritual life, but by becoming itself the principle first animating it. And we set forth this condition of human nature in order to throw light upon our second picture – the first man as he was actually created, possessing, as a gift superadded by the purest divine bounty to this his natural constitution, a divine sonship founded in grace; which transcendant union of the Holy Spirit with his soul kept the soul with all its faculties in a loving obedience to God, and the body in obedience to the soul; and added even to this state the further gratuitous prerogatives of immunity from error, fault, pain, distress, and death. Our third picture was man in this same state, but constituted besides by the divine will, whose good pleasure was the sole source of all this state of sonship, to be father of a race like to himself, receiving from him, with its natural generation, the transmitted gift of sonship; that is, from our view of him as an individual person we went on to consider him as the head of a body – the root of a tree. Fourthly, we have looked on the same man stripped by a fault, personal to himself but natural to his race, of this divine sonship – reduced to a state like that which the first would have been, but altered from it by two grave conditions, one of guilt lying on himself and his race on account of this gratuitous gift of sonship lost, another of captivity to that enemy of his Creator and Father who had seduced him to fall. And this picture included in it the double effect of guilt transmitted through a whole race from its head and father, and of the personal sins of each individual of the race: which, moreover, had a tendency to be perpetually heightened by the social nature of man – that part of his original condition which, as it would have supported his highest good in the state of innocence, so came to make his corruption intense and more complicated in the state of fall. It has not been our purpose in this sketch to dwell upon those who, like Adam himself after his fall, accepted the divine assistance offered to them, and the promise of a future Restorer, and who, living a life of penance, kept their faith in God. Such an assistance was offered not only to Adam but to his whole race, and such a line of men there always was; of whom Abel was the type in the world before the flood; Noah after the flood, as the second father of the whole race; Abraham, the friend of God and father of the faithful, in whose son Isaac a people was to be formed, which, as the nations in their apostasy fell more and more away from the faith and knowledge of the true God, should maintain still the seed of promise out of which the Restorer should spring. But before that Restorer came, the heathenism – of which we have been speaking in the former chapter, and of which we have been giving the solution above – was in possession of all but the whole earth, and the captivity of man to his spiritual foe, on account of which that foe is called “the Ruler” and “the God” “of this world,” which is said “to lie in the malignant one,”⁵⁶ was all but universal. This universality denoted that the fulness of the time⁵⁷ marked out in the providence of God was come.

For Adam, in his first creation, and in the splendour of that robe of sonship⁵⁸ in which he was invested, had been the figure of One to come: his figure as an individual person, his figure as father and head of a race; his figure likewise, when the race itself is viewed as summed up in one, as one body. Let us take each of these in their order.

What was the counterpart of Adam, as an individual person, in the new creation? It was the Eternal Son Himself assuming a human soul and body, and bearing our nature in His divine personality. Over against the creature invested with sonship stood the uncreated Son, invested with a created nature. For the grace of the Holy Spirit given by measure, and depending for its continuance on the obedience of the creature, was the Fountain of Grace Himself ruling the creature by a union indefeasible and eternal; for grace communicated grace immanent in its source. For the son gratuitously adopted was the Son by nature, making, by an inconceivable grace, the created nature assumed to be that not of the adopted but of the natural Son. In a word, the figure was man united to God; the counterpart, the God-man.

What, again, is Adam's counterpart as Father and Head of his race? It was human nature itself, which the Word of God espoused in the bridal chamber of the Virginal Womb, and so is become the Second Adam, the Father of a new race, the Head of a mystical Body, which corresponds to Adam's original Headship, but as far transcends it as the grace of the Incarnate Word transcends the grace bestowed on the first man. As Adam, had he stood in his original state of son, would have transmitted the gift of a like sonship to his whole race – as, falling, he did actually transmit to that race the guilt of adoption lost, so the Second Adam, out of His own uncreated Sonship, but through the nature which He had assumed, bestowed the dower of adopted sons and the gift of justice on his race. From the one there was punishment generating through the flesh;⁵⁹ from the other, grace regenerating through the Spirit. From the one, nature stripped and wounded, yet still bound to its head by an indissoluble tie; by the other, the Spirit of the Head, the Spirit of Truth, Charity, Unity, and Sanctity, ruling his Body and animating it, as the natural soul animates the natural body. Precisely where the mystery was darkest and the misery greatest, the divine grace is most conspicuous, and the divine power most triumphant. The very point which brings out Adam's connection with his race has an exact counterpart in Christ's Headship of His people, and an inscrutable judgment serves to illustrate an unspeakable gift. In exact accordance with the doctrine that the sin of Adam is man's sin, and the guilt of Adam man's guilt, is that boundless and unimaginable grace that the Incarnate Word did not merely assume an individual human nature, but espoused in that assumption the whole nature; that on the cross He paid the debt of the whole nature, whether for original or actual sin; that His resurrection is our collective justification; that the gift of sonship is bestowed on men not as individual persons, but as members of His Body, before they have personally merited anything, just as the guilt came on them, as members of Adam, before they demerited anything personally. Exactly where the obscurity of the fall was the deepest, the light of the restoration is brightest; and where the sentence was most severe, the grace most wonderful. But to deny the first Adam would entail the loss of the Second; and he who declines the inheritance of the father stripped and wounded cannot enter into the Body of the Word made flesh.

But thirdly, as in that terrible corruption of heathenism, wherein immorality was based on false worship, we saw the body of Adam run out through time and space into the most afflicting form which evil can assume in the individual and social life of man, so in that Body which is ruled by the Divine Headship we see the counterpart, the triumph of grace, individual man taken out of that state of fallen nature, and invested with a membership answering to the dignity of the Head. The one great Christian people, the Kingdom of Christ, stands over against that kingdom of violence, disorder, impurity, and false worship. As there is a unity of the fallen Adam, a force of evil which impact only gives, so much more is there a unity of the Second Adam, which is not a collection of individuals, but a Body with its Head. The first unity consists in the reasonable soul, informing the flesh which was moulded once for all from the clay and descended to the whole race; and the race so descending was polluted by a common guilt, on which, as an ever-fertile root, grew the whole trunk of man's personal sins, of falsehood, enmity, corruption of morals, division, having the common quality of egotism. The second unity consists in the Holy Spirit of the Head communicated to the soul and body of the faithful people, both being restored by that grace of which truth and charity, unity and sanctity, are the tokens, the full virtue being planted in the cross of the Head, and from the cross diffusing itself to His Body.

II. And so we are brought again to Him who stood before Pilate to make the good confession, and who declared that the cause of His coming into the world was to bear witness to the truth. In what form was that witness to be made, and how was it to be efficacious? This is that point which we have now to illustrate. Adam's disobedience was a single act, the power of which, springing out of his headship, extended through the whole line of his race; through the consequences of this act the truth was obscured to them, and human life involved in manifold error. What was that action on the part of Christ, the purpose, as He declares, of His Incarnation, which had an equally enduring effect? If the guilt communicated was not transitory, then should the corresponding grace be perpetual. And how was it so? The Son of God, as the Head of His race, does not stand at disadvantage with Adam, but rather, we are told His grace is superabundant in its results over the other's sin: and He Himself declared that He had completely finished the work given Him to do.⁶⁰ But here He describes this work to be the bearing witness to the truth. For, indeed, it was worthy of the eternal wisdom to clothe Himself in flesh⁶¹ in order that truth, the good of the intellect, and the end of the whole universe, might stand forth revealed to His rational creatures: and He who made all things in truth would Himself restore truth, when it had been obscured by the traducer.

1. Let us take the character which He acknowledged and claimed before Pilate: His character of King, and the kingdom in which it is exercised.

The Person of Christ, as that of the eternal Word, is the Truth itself. But He has assumed a body, and in that body He declares that He is a king, and that the exercise of His royalty is the bearing witness to the truth.⁶² His words therefore indicate no less than the creation of a kingdom to which the truth should be the principle of subsistence. But what in the material or temporal kingdom is that by force of which it subsists? Plainly power. A kingdom may be larger or smaller in population, wealth, extent, stronger or weaker in the quality of its people; but as long as it retains in itself that in which power culminates, sovereignty, it will be a kingdom. If this power departs from it, if it falls into subjection to a foreign authority, or if its own subjects successfully rebel against its power, it ceases to be. In the kingdom, therefore, of which Christ speaks, the maintenance of truth corresponds to what the maintenance of power is in a material kingdom.

But power in the material kingdom moves men to the natural end of society; it preserves order, administers justice, allows and assists all natural forces to develop themselves, and it must be in its supreme exercise one and indisputable: that is, it culminates in sovereignty. So in the spiritual kingdom truth, the corresponding power, moves men to the supernatural end, and truth culminates in infallibility. But where is this power seated, and how does the King wield it?

The same who here calls Himself King and declares it to be the function of His royalty to bear witness to the truth, in describing elsewhere the very creation of His kingdom says to His apostles, “You shall receive power by the Holy Ghost coming upon you,” bidding them also to remain in Jerusalem “until they were endued with power from on high.”⁶³ But a few hours before that scene in the hall of Pilate He had told them also that He would send them the Spirit of Truth, who should abide with them for ever, and should lead them into all truth. He creates therefore the kingdom of the truth by sending down the Spirit of the Truth to dwell for ever with those to whom He is sent; and this Spirit of the Truth is His own Spirit, whom He Himself will send as the token of His ascension and session; the Spirit who dwelt in the Body which He had assumed, and in which He spoke before Pilate, should be sent by Him when that Body had taken its place at the right hand of God, should invest with His own power those to whom He was sent, and should never cease to be with them in His character of the Spirit of Truth. Here, then, is that power in the kingdom of the Truth which enables it to bear a true and a perpetual witness. It is the power of the King, for it is His Spirit: it is the power of the kingdom, for it remains in it, is throned in it, and makes it to be what it is.

But to create a kingdom of the truth, and to bear perpetual witness in that kingdom to the truth, is not only to state what is true. These expressions mark out an organisation in and by means of which truth is perpetuated. And further, the spirit in man is both reason and will; and that man may act, the intellect which has truth for its object must work on the will which has good for its object. And so the witness which our Lord speaks of is that action of the truth upon the will which produces a life in accordance with it: it is truth not left to itself, but supported by grace. This power of the Spirit of Truth is therefore double, as intended to work on the two powers of the soul, the reason and the will: it is the double gift of Truth and Grace; as He is the Spirit of Grace no less than the Spirit of Truth, and all grace is His immediate gift.

Thus the Word made flesh being full of Truth and Grace from His own Person communicated that Truth and Grace as the power which should form His kingdom for ever, abide in it, and constitute its being a kingdom; the gift of truth and grace being the very presence of His own Spirit, who took possession of His kingdom on the day of Pentecost and holds it for ever.

This whole possession of Truth and Grace dwelling in a visible body is the work of the eternal Word, who assumed a body for that purpose. It is the counter-creation to the kingdom of falsehood which commenced with the sin of the first man believing a falsehood against his Maker, and which spread itself with his lineage into all lands.⁶⁴ And as in the natural creation He not only created but maintained – for He did not make His creatures and then depart from them, but from that time they exist in Him – so in the supernatural the act of maintaining is equivalent to the act of creating, it is a continued creation. As the guilt had a force which was fruitful, which continued and propagated itself, and produced a widespread reign of falsehood, how much more should that mighty and astonishing grace of a Divine Person assuming a created nature be fruitful, continue, and propagate itself in the maintenance of a visible kingdom, whose distinctive character and its very life should be the possession and communication of the truth. Should the Creator of man in His greatest work be less powerful than His seduced creature in his fall? and if the fall, pregnant with falsehood, bore fruit through ages in a whole race, should not the recovery likewise have its visible dominion, and stand over against the ruin as the kingdom of truth?

It is as King ruling in the kingdom of truth that the Divine Word incarnate redeems man from captivity, which began in a revolt from the truth, and in becoming subject to falsehood. All who are outside His kingdom lie in this captivity;⁶⁵ the life which He gave voluntarily is the price paid for their liberation; and as age after age, so long as the natural body of Adam lasts, the captivity endures, so age after age the liberation takes effect by entering into His kingdom. And this is the most general name, the name of predilection, which both in prophecy marked the time of Messiah the King, and was announced by His precursor, and taken by our Lord to indicate His having come. The eternal duration of this kingdom may be said to be the substance of all prophecy, and it was precisely in the interpretation of a vision describing under the image of a great statue the four world-kingdoms, that is, the whole structure, course, and issue of the heathenism which we have been contemplating, that Daniel contrasts these kingdoms with another. “In the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be delivered to another people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and shall stand itself for ever.” As King in this kingdom through all the generations of men from the moment that He stood in Pilate's hall until He comes to judge the world, our Lord bears witness to the truth, His witness and His royalty being contemporaneous and conterminous to each other.

2. This perpetual possession and announcement of the truth is indicated by another image which is of constant recurrence,⁶⁶ wherein Christ is the Inhabitant, His people the Inhabited, while both are the House or Temple, for that in which God dwells is at once His House and Temple. Thus Moses is said to have been “faithful in all his house as a servant, but Christ as a Son over His own house, whose house are we.” Here the King who bears witness to the truth is the God who sanctifies the faithful people by dwelling in them and building them in the truth. It is not merely the individual believer, but the whole mass of the faithful which grows up to be a holy temple; and the ever-abiding Spirit of truth, whose presence is the guarantee of truth, is the equally abiding Spirit of sanctity, whose presence imparts holiness. The Son dwells in His own house by His Spirit for ever: as He ceases not to be incarnate, He ceases not to dwell in His house, and could falsehood be worshipped in His temple, it would cease to be His. That was the work of heathenism, when a false spirit had caused error to be worshipped for truth; the specific victory of the Word incarnate was to set up a temple in which the truth should be worshipped for ever, “the inhabitation of God in the Spirit.” But living stones make up this temple, that is, individual spirits, endued with their own reason and will, yet no less fitted in and cemented together by His grace, and so forming a structure which has an organic unity of its own, being the House and Temple of One. It is in virtue of this inhabitation that the Church is termed the House of God, the pillar and ground of the truth, inasmuch as it contains, as between walls,⁶⁷ the faith and its announcement and proclamation, that is, the law of the King of Truth declared by His heralds. “We speculate,” says S. Augustine, “that we may attain to vision; yet even the most studious speculation would fall into error unless the Lord inhabited the Church herself that now is.”⁶⁸ And again: “In earthly possessions a benefit is given to the proprietor when he is given possession; not so is the possession which is the Church. The benefit here lies in being possessed by such a one.” – “Christ's Body is both Temple and House and City, and He who is Head of the Body is Inhabiter of the House, and Sanctifier of the Temple, and King of the City. – What can we say more acceptable to Him than this, Possess us?”⁶⁹

3. Again, to take another image, which is the greatest of realities. What a wonderful production of divine skill is the structure of the human body! Even its outward beauty is such as to sway our feelings with a force which reason has at times a hard combat to overcome, so keen is the delight which it conveys. But the inward distribution of its parts is so marvellous that those who have spent their lives in the study of its anatomy can find in a single member, for instance, in the hand, enough out of which to fill a volume with the wise adaptation of means to ends which it reveals. There are parts of it the structure of which is so minute and subtle that the most persevering science has not yet attained fully to unravel their use. In all this arrangement of nerves and muscles, machines of every sort, meeting all manner of difficulties, and supplying all kinds of uses, what an endless storehouse of wisdom and forethought! And all these are permeated by a common life, which binds every part, whatever its several importance, into one whole, and all these, in the state of health, work together with so perfect an ease that the living actor, the bearer of so marvellous a structure, is unconscious of an effort, and exults in the life so simple and yet so manifold poured out on such a multitude of members, a life so tender that the smallest prick is felt over the whole body, and yet so strong that a wound may transfix the whole structure leaving the life untouched. And, in addition to this physical marvel, the incorporeal mind, which has its seat in this material structure, and whose presence is itself its life, rules like an absolute monarch with undisputed sway over his whole dominion, so that the least movement of volition carries with it a willing obedience in the whole frame, and for it instantaneously the eye gazes, the ear listens, the tongue speaks, the feet walk, the hands work, and the brain feels with an incomparable unity. The marvel of the body is that things so many and various by the rule of the artificer impressed upon them are yet one, concur to one end, and produce one whole, from which no part can be taken, and to which none can be added without injury, the least and the greatest replete with one life, which so entirely belongs to the whole body that what is severed from the body at once dies. “Now as the body is one, and has many members, but all the members of this one body, being many, are one body, so also,” says S. Paul, “is Christ,” giving the name of the Head to the whole Body. What the human head is to its own body, that our Lord is to His Church. Perhaps no other image in the whole realm of nature would convey with such force the three relations⁷⁰ which constitute spiritual headship, an inseparable union, by which the head and the body form one whole, an unceasing government, including every sort of provision and care, and a perpetual influx of grace. This is on the part of the head, while as to the body perhaps no other image but this could equally convey the conjunction of many different members with various functions, whose union makes the structure, and whose unity is something entirely distinct from that which all the parts in their several state, or even in their collocation and arrangement, make up, for it is the life which makes them one. Thus it is an unfathomed depth of doctrine, which is conveyed in the words, “God gave Him to be Head over all things to the Church, who is His Body, the fulness of Him who fills all things in all.” For though no language could exhaust or duly exhibit the meaning of the kingdom or the temple in which the abiding work of our Lord is indicated, we have in this title yet more strikingly portrayed the intimate union and common life of His people with Christ, and His tender affection for them, since the King of Truth who redeems and the God of Truth who sanctifies is at the same time the Head who by His own Spirit of the truth rules and vivifies His own Body. If it be possible to dissociate the idea of the King from his kingdom, or that of God from the temple of living souls in whom He is worshipped, and whose worship of Him makes them one, yet in the human frame to dissever the head from the body is to destroy the propriety of both terms, and it is as a whole human body that the apostle represents Christ and His people to us.