n the Father, save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the son willeth to reveal _him_." Here we have in a few words
the true spirit, the true inspiration of the teaching which Christ
proclaimed, that he was not only the Messiah or the son of David, but the
true son of God, the Logos, which God willed when he willed man, the
highest thought of God, the highest revelation of God, which was imparted
in Jesus to blind humanity. We cannot judge of this so correctly as those
who saw and knew Jesus in his corporeal existence, and found in him all
those perfections, particularly in his life and conduct, of which human
nature is capable. We must here rely on the evidence of his contemporaries
who had no motive to discover in him, the son of a carpenter, the
realisation on earth of the divine ideal of man, if this ideal had not
stood realised in him, before their eyes, in the flesh. What is true
Christianity if it be not the belief in the divine sonship of man, as the
Greek philosophers had rightly surmised, but had never seen realised on
earth? Here is the point, where the two great intellectual currents of the
Aryan and Semitic worlds flow together, in that the long-expected Messiah
of the Jews was recognised as the Logos, the true son of God, and that he
opened or revealed to every man the possibility to become what he had
always been, but had never before apprehended, the highest thought, the
Word, the Logos, the Son of God. Knowing here means being. A man may be a
prince, the son of a king, but if he does not know it, he is not so. Even
so from all eternity man was the son of God, but until he really knew it,
he was not so. The reporters in the Synoptic Gospels only occasionally
recognise the divine sonship of man with real clearness, for in their view
the practical element in Christianity was predominant, but in the end
everything practical must be based upon theory or faith. Our duties toward
God and man, our love for God and for man, are as nothing, without the
firm foundation which is formed only by our faith in God, as the Thinker
and Ruler of the world, the Father of the Son, who was revealed through
him as the Father of all sons, of all men. Such sayings are especially
significant in the Synoptic Evangelists, because it might appear as though
they had not recognised the deepest mystery of the revelation of Christ,
but were satisfied with the purely practical parts of his teachings.
Shortly after, when Jesus again proves his h