the divine Word. He was in all things, clothing Himself with His creatures; imaging Himself forth in wisdom, goodness, and power. All orders of being, visible and invisible, had their life in Him who was "the Life," the sustaining bond of their life and unity. This is one, and the first, sense of this divine title. 2. Again, He is the beginning of the creation of God, as the first cause or principle of its restoration. After the world had fallen from Him, and was at war with Him, the same power of endless life, out of which in the beginning they first arose into being, became a power of healing and restoration. There is a mysterious law which pervades the creatures of this fallen world, healing over and smoothing out even the scars of their wounds. So is He in the creation of God. He is the power of health and restoration, renewing all things. Before the fall of man, this mystery of restoration was conceived in heaven, though the voice was not heard for long ages upon earth: "Behold, I make all things new." The beginning of the new creation was even then at work. "Known unto God are all His works from the beginning." Time is not, with Him. Though His divine purposes are unfolded and fulfilled in time, with Him they are already perfect in order and fulness. In the first four thousand years of the world the Son of God was preparing all things to unfold the great mystery of the new creation. He spake with man by the ministry of angels, and intermingled with the earthly life of His chosen people. He spake with Abraham when the burning lamp passed between the sacrifices, and with Moses at the unconsuming bush in Horeb; He journeyed in the midst of Israel in the wilderness; He put His Spirit on prophets and seers, until the fulness of time came, that the Word should be made flesh and dwell among us, and that men should behold His glory. This was the first act of the new creation. By the mystery of the Incarnation it began to be, and the Word made flesh is "the Beginning." As the first Adam, who was by creation the son of God, was made of the virgin earth, so the second Adam, the only-begotten Son of the Father, was made man of a virgin mother. The first miraculous birth of the dust of the earth was a shadow of the second miraculous birth of the substance of the woman. Our manhood, which in the fall of the first man was marred and sullied, He took in all its sinless infirmities in will, conscience, and affections; and He bare it in all its measures and ages, of childhood, youth, and manhood. He hallowed it, and filled it with the Divine presence, and reconsecrated it to God. In it He died, and laid it in the rock, and bare it through the valley of the shadow of death; raised it from the dead; exalted it above the conditions of matter; of a natural body, made it to be a spiritual body; carried it upward to the holiest of all, and arrayed it in glory at the right hand of God. Such is the mystery of the Incarnation, as now perfected in the kingdom of heaven. It is the restoration of our manhood to God in the Person of Jesus Christ. But as the first creation was not a single and final, but a sustained and continuous act, so also is the second. As in the first was contained the multiplication and increase of all germs of nature and the perpetual preservation of the whole order of life, so in the new, which is the mystical pody of the Son, He began a new family of man upon the earth. In the mystery of the Incarnation is contained, therefore, the mystery of our renewal, in body, soul, and spirit, to the image of God. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the principle and power, and, as it were, the root of the new creation. We are so united to His incarnate nature, as to be incorporated and summed up in Him: we are made one with Him, as by our natural lineage we are one with the first Adam, the father of all flesh. When He ascended up on high, the virtues of His glorified manhood were shed abroad upon His Church. Through His holy Sacraments began a new line of spiritual generation. We are newborn, or regenerated. We were made partakers of that manhood which is sinless, immortal; we are incorporated in that new creation, of which the second Adam is the head, the source, and the beginning. Therefore the Apostle calls the font of baptism "the laver of regeneration." We can be born into this fallen world but once; and into the new world, which is the Church, but once. As, then, there is no second birth in nature, so no second regeneration. There is but "one baptism for the remission of sins." And as our birth is an isolated event, shut up within the narrow boundaries of the moment in which we enter into this fallen world; and therefore our after existence is not still called birth, but life, or living; so is our new birth perfected at the font; and therefore our after life of faith is not called regeneration, as if spiritual birth were a continuous fact, as if we could be always entering for the first time into the new creation of God, but our renewal. We are thenceforward under the continual transforming and restoring power of Him who in Himself hath made all things new. The work of our renewal, indeed, is not perfected in regeneration, but only begun. All our life long we must grow into the perfection and ripeness of the new manhood we have received from Christ. Our renewal shall never be perfect until we shall be made like Him, in that day when "we shall see Him as He is.” We must pass to Him by the gate of death; for the death of the body is a witness of God's justice and of our sin. Our body of earth is a partaker of the new creation, but its time is not yet. It must die, turn into dust, be changed, and raised again. This is a great and wonderful mystery of God's love and of our humiliation. But death is no longer an enemy; it is a minister of the resurrection. As the mystery of the Incarnation was not complete till Christ rose from the grave, and the new man, the first-born of the dead, came forth into the world, having destroyed death for ever, so neither shall our renewal be fulfilled until the morning of the resurrection. Then the mystery of baptism shall be completed. What was begun in the soul shall be made perfect also in the body. The whole outline of the restoration shadowed forth in that holy sacrament shall be fulfilled. The whole family of God shall be renewed, every one in the perfect likeness of the Son of God; and the Word or Wisdom of the Father shall manifest Himself afresh through a new creation. "The Beginning" shall once more reveal Himself in the unity and the perfection of a world, not restored only, but raised to more than its original |