men of virtuous
lives, of earnest and most benevolent purposes, of careful and learned
thought, and of a real reverence for God, or for those theories of the
universe which some of them are inclined to substitute for God, they must
at least be listened to patiently, and answered charitably, as men who,
however faulty their opinions may be, prove, by their virtue and their
desire to do good, that if they have lost sight of Christ, Christ has not
lost sight of them.

To such men the idea of the Incarnation, and still more, that of the
Passion, is derogatory to the very notion of a God. That a God should
suffer, and that a God should die, is shocking--and, to do them justice,
I believe they speak sincerely--to their notions of the absolute majesty,
the undisturbed serenity, of the Author of the universe; of Him in whom
all things live and move and have their being; who dwells in the light to
which none may approach. And therefore they have, in every age, tried
various expedients to escape from a doctrine which seemed repugnant to
that most precious part of them, their moral sense. In the earlier
centuries of the Church they tried to shew that St John and St Paul
spoke, not of one who was Very God of Very God, but of some highest and
most primeval of all creatures, Emanation, AEon, or what not. In these
later times, when the belief in such beings, and even their very names,
have become dim and dead, men have tried to shew that the words of
Scripture apply to a mere man. They have seen in Christ--and they have
reverenced and loved Him for what they have seen in Him--the noblest and
purest, the wisest and the most loving of all human beings; and have
attributed such language as that in the text, which--translate it as you
will--ascribes absolute divinity, and nothing less, to our Lord Jesus
Christ--they have attributed it, I say, to some fondness for Oriental
hyperbole, and mystic Theosophy, in the minds of the Apostles. Others,
again, have gone further, and been, I think, more logically honest. They
have perceived that our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as His words are
reported, attributed divinity to Himself, just as much as did His
Apostles. Such a saying as that one, "Before Abraham was, I am," and
others beside it, could be escaped from only by one of two methods. To
the first of them I shall not allude in this sacred place, popular as a
late work has made it in its native France, and I fear in England
likewise.