The Formation of Christendom, Volume IIAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
The Formation of Christendom, Volume II
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Christianity; Christianity -- Miscellanea
instead of filial fear.
But as the Truth of the Father is beheld and expressed in generating His
Son, His Word, His perfect Image, so truth to man is the resemblance of
created things to the archetypal idea of them in God; the resemblance of
the works of the divine art to the Artificer’s intention. In this long act
of heathenism we see the work of the divine Artificer marred and obscured,
and the marring and obscuration seem to have gone as far as was possible
without touching the essence of the soul. Who, then, should restore, but
He who had first created? Who should give back to the copy the lost
harmony, and reimprint the defaced resemblance, save the perfect Image of
God? Thus, when the corruption had run its course, and the original
disobedience had reproduced itself all over the earth in a harvest of evil
and disorder, the time for the work of reparation was come, and the Divine
Word, the Image of the Father, took flesh.
Magnificent as had been the dower of the First Man, and wonderful the
grace which held his soul in harmony with itself, and his bodily
affections in obedience to his soul, incomparably more magnificent was the
dower of human nature in its reparation, inconceivably grander the grace
which ruled the Soul and Body of the Restorer. For whereas the First Man’s
person had been simply human, the Person of the Second Man was the Divine
Word Himself, the perfect Image of the Father; and whereas the grace of
the First Man was such that he was able not to sin, the grace which had
assumed the nature of the Second Man was a Person who could not sin, the
fountain of grace itself, measureless, absolute, and personal. The Image
of God Himself came to restore the copy of that Image in Man; his
appearance as man among men was the reconveying of the Truth to them,
because He was the Truth Himself. The Truth in all its extent; the Truth
in the whole moral order and every relation which belongs to it; the Truth
by which all the rational creation of God corresponds to the Idea of its
Creator, was the gift which He brought to man in His Incarnation.
But this truth is not merely external to man. In order to be received and
appropriated by him, he must become capable of it. The Restorer works his
restoration by an inward act upon the soul, its intellect and will. The
Image of God sets up His seat within His work, the copy. Man is sealed by
the Holy Spirit with the likeness and resemblance of the Father’s Face,
the Son; and having the Son within him, and giving a home within the soul
to the divine character, and making this his treasure, man is formed after
God.(45) The supreme likeness, which is beyond all others, is impressed on
human souls by the Spirit of the Father and the Son. As the defacing of
the likeness, the result of the original fall, caused the obscuring of the
Truth, so its restoration was itself the recovery of the Truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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