and incorporeal spiritual essence would be the same error as to strike out the body from the description of a man, and to represent him as essentially like to the angels.

In the Catholic doctrine this relation of the world to God and of God to the world is presented to our faith. To say that one man of our race, born after the manner common to us all, was taken up into unity with God, would be to throw away a glorious truth, and drop to a lame and impotent conclusion. If Jesus Christ had been the son of Joseph and Mary, whatever might have been done for Him at any period of His life would have affected Him and Him only. There is an element of the ludicrous and fantastical in the idea of such an exaltation and glorifying of one particular man out of all that ever lived, for no assignable reason unless "pour encourager les autres;" nor could we, on such a poverty-stricken hypothesis, come to that magnificent conception of the alliance between the universe and its Creator. Not to one human person, not to one exceptionally favored individual of Adam's line, not to a man like Moses or Gautama or Socrates, were divine honor and the dignity of exaltation to equality with God awarded. What God assumed was human nature, and not

a human person. He who is ever with His

creation, entered into His own world in a new way; He became man; and thus a new relationship was formed between Him and that creation which owed its existence to Him, and which, from the beginning, He had governed and controlled.

Let us advance a step. Why did God the Son become incarnate? And how far do the benefits of the Incarnation extend? In answering the first of these questions we are brought face to face with the trouble and sorrow in the world. It is unnecessary to discuss the question whether the Incarnation would have taken place, though man had not fallen; it suffices to take facts as they are, and to note that the work had a remedial and restorative effect. It applied, first, to mankind in a state of depression and decline; and secondly, to the whole creation, of which we are told that it is disastrously affected by the condition of man, its head. Let us take up, next, the statements of Holy Scripture on this mysterious subject.

The late Bishop of Edinburgh, in a work entitled "Does Science aid Faith in regard to Creation? "* says:

* Published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1883.

"There is one part of the Christian faith on the subject of creation to which I think sufficient attention has never been given by theologians. And, instructive as it is in itself, as connected with our faith on redemption, it has become in modern times specially important in its relation to the progress of science; and it is one in which, perhaps, more than in any other direction whatever, science has proved itself the serviceable handmaid of faith instead of being its rival and adversary. I refer to the view of creation which St. Paul sets forth in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, in which chapter he brings to its climax and glorious consummation the argument which he had commenced in the fifth chapter of that epistle, as to the victory through Christ of righteousness over sin, grace over wrath and condemnation, and life over death." (p. 82.)

The subject, in the passage thus referred to, is the creation, in the Greek utíois, in the Latin creatura, in King James' version the creature, in the Revised version (and correctly), the creation. As Bishop Cotterill says: "The word is here used in its ordinary sense, and includes all the material creation, animate and inanimate; it answers as nearly as possible to nature' in our modern use of the word." Now as to the uriois, creation, or nature, St. Paul affirms that something in it is wrong. It was "made subject to vanity," not of its own will, as in the case of Adam when he fell; but by the will of the Creator, who with a purpose, and in

pursuance of a design, "subjected the same to vanity." It is the result of that subjection that "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Yet through that state of depression runs the golden thread of hope: "the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God." The universe, with which we are connected and to which, through the Incarnation, God is allied and personally united, is in trouble, in long and serious trouble, in some strange distress imposed on it in the far-off past; it is expectant; it has a hope; it is looking forward to something; it is waiting for "the redemption of our body."* Some strange, close, and intimate relationship exists between man and what he calls Nature. And this seems to be the reason why, as the Bishop of Durham has observed, the old fathers of the Church so often led their pupils to that lofty and divine and most lovely study of the visible world, and found a basis for their teachings in a rational feeling for the vast grandeur of the external order, "the sacred economy of the universe," as St. Gregory calls it. True, there is

* See Appended Notes, No. I.

"Essays in the Religious Thought of the West:" by Brooke Foss Westcott, D.D., D.C.L., p. 215.

disorder in that universe; its sacred harmonies are marred by discords; there is sorrow on land and sea, and weather casts of trouble are in the skies above us. But relief is expected; it has been promised; it shall surely come. It is coming through the redemption of our body and along with the manifestation of the sons of God. But redemption and sonship in God are gifts to man through the Incarnation of the Eternal Son; so that His work acts beyond us, and finds a field for its beneficent exercise below the circle of His intelligent creation. Christ's work cannot be limited to the human race; it cannot be exhausted in rescuing us from sin and death; there are ranges beyond where He worketh, though in ways not revealed to us; and believing this, we are brought very close to the object of our quest; we have reached the point at which we may confidently look for the basis of the Sacramental System, and find out how the material elements have been made to minister to us in our spiritual and moral life.

For, if man be the summary of creation; if Christ be truly man, and, as such, related to the material universe, through His humanity, as we are to it through ours; if the "creature" is in trouble, not through its own fault, but as if it were bearing our