But now we ask, What substantial truth underlies this formal error? What truth of life underlies this error of doctrine? Let us remember how empty the world was of God at the time of Christ’s coming. The wisest men could speak thus with Pliny: “All religion is the offspring of necessity, weakness, and fear. What God is,—if in truth he be anything distinct from the world,—it is beyond the power of man’s understanding to know.” All intelligent men agreed that if God existed he could not possibly take any interest in the affairs of the world or of individuals. Phariseeism on the one hand, and Sadduceeism on the other,—a religion hardened into forms, and an empty scepticism, cold and dead,—divided the world between them. But men cannot live without God, and be satisfied. They were feeling after him, if haply they might find him, who is not far from any one of us. Then Christ came; and in all that he said and did, he spoke from the knowledge of God; he acted from the life of God. Here was one, then, at last, to whom God was not an opinion, but a reality; through whose life flowed the life of God in a steady current. We see that all sincere souls who came near Jesus received from him the same sight of God which he possessed; for faith in a living and present God is so congenial to the nature of man, that it carries conviction with it wherever it is not a mere opinion, but a state of the soul. Those, therefore, who could find God nowhere else, found him in Christ. Those who saw _him_, saw the Father. As when through a window we behold the heavens, as when in a mirror we see an image of the sun, we do not speak of the window or the mirror, but say that we see the sun and the heavens, so those who looked at Christ said that they saw God. The apostle said that God was in Christ; and this was wholly true. Christians afterwards said that Christ was God; and they thought they were only saying the same thing. They said that Christ had a divine nature as well as a human nature; and in this also there was no essential falsehood, for when we speak of our nature, we intend merely by it those elements of character which are original and permanent, which are not acquired, do not alter, and are never lost. God dwelt in the soul of Christ thus constantly, thus permanently. The Word thus “became flesh, and dwelt among us.” The word of the Lord _came_ to the prophets, but it _dwelt_ in Christ. He and his Father were one. The vital truth of all this was that men were now able to see God manifested in man as a living, present reality. “_Here_,” they said, “is God. We have found God. He is in Christ. We can see him there.”