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according to St. Paul, is the end and consummation of the whole creation. In Him is made manifest the hidden wisdom of God, foreordained before the world unto our glory. Christ is the God-appointed heir of all things. The divine idea of a creation from eternity is the idea of a creation which is to be consummated in and through the Son of Man. "He is before all things, and by Him all things consist."1 The world, as a moral work, is to be regarded as made for the Redeemer, and as having its fulfilment in Him. In 1 Cor. xv. 47 Paul suggests that God's idea of a moral creation is not finished in Adam, but in the second man, who is of heaven. The ascent of life, as it is now recognized by science, from the rudest material beginnings up to the spiritual nature of man, involves the presence and potentiality from the very earliest of the Christ-germ. Christ brings to perfect fruition the capacities of a higher spiritual life which lie in all men.

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All creation is indeed prophetic. "The earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God." 2 Creation is a book of prophecy containing foreshadowings of future glory. The prophetic element is specially discernible in man. "Man awakens for himself," says Nietzsche, "an interest, a response, a hope, almost a confidence, that something important is about to happen, that something is in preparation." the one hand he is but a part of the world of nature, but on the other, he is the vehicle of something above nature. He is the partaker of the divine essence, the sharer of the life of God. Man's history is a spiritual drama, the unfolding of which becomes gradually more wondrous, and from whose past and present a mystic finger points towards something greater yet to come. Paul's argument

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seems to be that Christ, by taking human form and manifesting Himself in our midst, awakens the sleeping ideals of our souls and kindles there dormant yearnings for Sonship to which our very creation bears witness. "Were not the eye itself a sun

No sun for it could ever shine,

By nothing Godlike could the heart be won
Were not the heart itself divine."

Man is not simply what he now is, but all he is yet to be. Paul compels us from the very beginning to an attitude of expectancy. With all the seeming pessimism which Wernle ascribes to the apostle in his description of man's history, there is far more of optimism. He sees man in the light of his future. Christ is the consummation to which his whole being points. A race that includes a Christ and needs a Christ for its explanation and fulfilment need not despair. As Schleiermacher says, "Christ's work is the completion of the creation of human nature, for which all that went before was a preparation." On every side man's life witnesses to its supernatural origin and eternal destiny. The natural enfolds the spiritual-the human has within it the potency and promise of the divine. Body, soul, spirit, mind, heart, conscience, attest a life that transcends the finite and bears the signature of Him in whose image man has been created.

1 Göthe, Zenien.

PART II

IDEALS AND PRINCIPLES

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