an abrupt departure
from previous methods, but is the culminating expression of methods and
principles which have ever governed the activity of God. Jesus Christ,
who reveals the Father now in human nature, is the same Agent as has
ever been expressing and giving effect to the Father's will in the
creation and government of all things. The same Word who now utters God
in and through human nature, has ever been uttering Him in all His
works.

All that God has done is to be found in the universe, partly visible and
partly known to us. There God may be found, because there He has uttered
Himself. But science tells us that in this universe there has been a
gradual development from lower to higher, from imperfect towards perfect
worlds; and it tells us that man is the last result of this process. In
man the creature at last becomes intelligent, self-conscious, endowed
with will, capable to some extent of meeting and understanding its
Creator. Man is the last and fullest expression of God's thought, for in
man and man's history God finds room for the utterance not merely of His
wisdom and power, but of what is most profoundly spiritual and moral in
His nature. In man God finds a creature who can sympathise with His
purposes, who can respond to His love, who can give exercise to the
whole fulness of God.

But in saying that "the Word become flesh" John says much more than that
God through the Word created man, and found thus a more perfect means
of revealing Himself. The Word created the visible world, but He did not
become the visible world. The Word created all men, but He did not
become the human race, but one Man, Christ Jesus. No doubt it is true
that all men in their measure reveal God, and it is conceivable that
some individual should fully illustrate all that God meant to reveal by
human nature. It is conceivable that God should so sway a man's will and
purify his character that the human will should be from first to last in
perfect harmony with the Divine, and that the human character should
exhibit the character of God. An ideal man might have been created,
God's ideal of man might have been realized, and still we should have
had no incarnation. For a perfect man is not all we have in Christ. A
perfect man is one thing, the Word Incarnate is another. In the one the
personality, the "I" that uses the human nature, is human; in the other,
the personality, the "I," is Divine.

By becoming flesh the Word submitted to