The Formation of Christendom, Volume II. Allies Thomas William

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ