" The fall of Atlam was the fall of the race; not simply because he represented the race, but because the race was comprehended in his person. Sin in him was sin incor porated with the inmost life of humanity, and became from this point onward an insur mountable law in the progress of its development." It was " an organic ruin, the ruin of our nature; not simply because all men are sinners, but as making all men to be sin ners. The human race is not a sand heap; it is the power of a single life. Adam's sin is therefore our sin. It is imputed to us, indeed, but only because it is ours. A fallen life in the first place, and on the ground of this only, imputed guilt and condemnation. In order then that the race might be saved, it was necessary that a work should be wrought not beyond it, but in it. Our nature, humanity, must be healed, the power of sin, incorporated in that nature, must be destroyed. For this purpose the logos, the divine word, took our humanity into personal union with himself. As the bearer of a fallen humanity he must descend with it to the lowest depths of sorrow anti pain. He triumphed over the evil; his passion was the world's spiritual crisis in which the princi ple of health came to its last struggle with the principle of disease and gained the vic tory. This was the atonement. When Christ died and rose, humanity died and rose in his person. Our nature was thus restored and elevated, and by receiving this renovated nature we are saved. Christ's merits are inseparable from his nature; they cannot be imputed to us, except so far as they are immanent in us. As in the case of Adam, we have his nature, and therefore his sin; so we have the nature of Cbrist, and therefore his righteousness. The nature we receive from Christ is a theanthropie nature. For as he is one person, his life is one. His divine nature is at the same time human, in the fullest sense. All that is included in him as a person—divinity, soul, and body—is embraced in his life. It is not the life of the logos, separately ta-ken, but the life of the word made flesh, the divinity joined in personal union with our humanity, which is thus exalted to an imperishable divine life. It is a divine human life.
IV. Concerning the church. This being so, " the divine human nature as it exists in the person of Christ passes over to his people, thus constituting the church which is his body, the fullness of hint that filleth all in all. The process is not mechanical, but organic. It takes place in the way of history, growth, regular living development."
The supernatural becomes natural, and as thus made permanent and historical in the church, must, in the nature of the case, correspond with the form of the supernatural 36 it appeared in Christ himself. The church must have a true theanthropic character throw_rhout. The union of the divine and hutnan in her constitution must be inward and real, a continuous revelation of God in the flesh, exalting this last continuously into the sphere of the Spirit. The incarnation being thus progressive in the way of ?anal human development in the church, the church is, in very deed, the depository and con tinuation of the Savior's theanthropic life itself, in which powers and resources are con tinually at hand, involving a real intercommunion and interpenetration of the human and divine.
V. Concerning the sacraments. A part, at least, of these powers and resources is lodged in the sacraments of the church, which have a real objective force contained in themselves. Our faith is needed only to make room for that force in our souls. The things signified are bound to the signs by the force of a divine appointment; so that the grace goes inseparably along with the signs, and is truly present for all who are prepared to make it their own. And while union with Christ is by regeneration, regeneration is by the church. It is by the ministrations of this living church, in which the incarnation of Christ is progressive, and by her grace-bearing sacraments that the theanthropic life of Christ is continually carried over to new individuals. The sacraments, therefore, convey and sustain tile life of Christ—his divine human life. We partake not of his divinity only, but also of his trne and proper humanity; not of his humanity in a sepa rate form, nor of his flesh and blood alone, but of his whole life, as an undivided form of existence. Consequently in the Lord's supper he is present in a peculiar way, as to his entire theanthropic life; the sign and the thing signified, the visible and invisible, form one invisible presence. Unbelievers receive only the outward sign, because they have not the organ of reception for the inward grace. Yet the inward grace is there, and believers receive both—the outward sign and the one undivided theanthropic life of Christ. This gives the eucharist a peculiar and altogether extraordinary power, as providing a mode of receiving Christ to be had nowhere else. Where the way is open for it to take effect, the sacrament serves in itself to convey the life of Christ into the psxsou of a believer.