In proportion to the vigour with which these events have developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy.
What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person, he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know, cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself, to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him imperfectly,--where he attempts to carry the torch of human science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action?
I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.
The Divinity of Jesus, God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus God and Man, these are the truths admitted, proclaimed, incessantly repeated in different forms, by the Gospels and the primitive documents of Christianity. I have already said [Footnote 38] that "it is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all theological controversies. To disregard this fact--to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ--is to deny, to overthrow the Christian religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation was its principle, and Jesus Christ--God and Man--its author."
[Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity. Second Meditation, pp. 75, 76.]
But Christians have not confined themselves to the belief of this sublime truth; they have striven to explain it; they have sought to know and to define how, and when, the divine nature and the human nature became united in Jesus Christ, to what extent such union took place, and what effect it produced upon Christ's personality. Hence all the questions, all the controversies, which were raised as to the mode and the consequences of the divine incarnation, by Nestorius and Eutyches, and which in the councils of Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon, divided and agitated the Christian Church, especially in the East.