“In fullness of time God sent forth His Son.” How shall we think of Jesus that is called the Christ? Speaking first in the terms of evolution, _I_ think of Him as the type and goal of the race--the new Adam, the spiritual norm and pattern, the Son of Man who is a revelation of what man at his height and full stature is meant to be; and this is the way Paul thought of Him: “Till _we all_ come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” Eph. IV, 13. “Whom he did foreknow, he did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son that _He_ might be the first born among many brethren.” Rom. VIII, 29. “The expectation of the whole creation is waiting for the manifestation of sons of God.” Rom. VIII, 19.
The actual fact is that this Life has, profoundly or remotely, touched every personal life in Europe for a thousand years and has been the goal and standard for all aspiring souls. He is the pattern in the mount, the _a fronte_ force which has drawn the individual and the race steadily up to their higher destiny. On the spiritual side of “the great divide” the goal is in sight and the goal is an efficient factor in the process of the evolution of the man within man.
But this pattern-aspect of the Christ life is only one aspect, and we must not raise it out of due balance and perspective. _Christ is God humanly revealed._ As soon as we realize that personality is always a revelation of the ultimate reality of the universe there are no metaphysical difficulties in the way of an actual incarnation of God. It is rather what one would expect. There is no other conceivable way in which God could be revealed to man. If He is a personal being; if He is love and tenderness and sympathy, and not mere force, only a Person can show Him. And if we are not kindred in nature, if we have not something in common, in a word if we are not _conjunct_, then it is hard to see how any revelation of Him could be made which would mean anything to us. But if we are _conjunct_, as our own self-consciousness implies, then an incarnation, a complete manifestation in Personality, or as Paul puts it, “in the face of Jesus Christ,” is merely the crown and pinnacle of the whole divine process.