The Lives of the Saints, Volume 02 (of 16): FebruaryBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
The Lives of the Saints, Volume 02 (of 16): February
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Christian saints
The Incarnation of God was the descent of the Most High to the level
of human necessity. Man had found a difficulty in believing in and
loving the Infinite; human language failed to express the nature of
God save by a multitude of abstractions and negations. He was not
limited, had no localized habitation, was not comprehensible by man;
so the philosophers taught, and so they strove to make men believe;
men made the effort, believed, and in the effort, their devotion
expired. The philosophers had lifted God into the region of an idea,
and in so doing, had divested him of personality; and when His
personality was lost, all interest in Him died away. God was to them
an object of speculation, not an object of worship. God the Father,
knowing man's natural incapacity for realizing the Godhead, sent His
Son into the world clothed in flesh. Man had now a God-Man, whose
nature and personality had been brought vividly before him to believe
in and to love. God was "manifest in the flesh," the visible and the
invisible, the spiritual and the material, the finite and the
infinite, the local and the omnipresent were united in One.
Thenceforth the law of God's dealings with man was to be in accordance
with his natural capacities, the visible was to become the medium of
the invisible, the material the vehicle of the spiritual, the
omnipresent adorable through a local presence, the infinite
discernible through the finite. In Jesus Christ men saw God and lived;
and when He was withdrawn from the eyes of men, He did not leave them
orphans, but perpetuated his presence in the Holy Eucharist, even unto
the end of the world.
In the old heathen world men had been idolaters or philosophers. The
idolater saw in the material image his God; the philosopher declared
that God was everywhere present, and he despised the idol.
Christianity combined in one the truth taught by the philosopher, and
the craving felt by the idolater. Through the sacraments as outward
and visible means, grace was conveyed to man, chiefly through the Holy
Eucharist; and through sacred images and the holy cross, worship was
addressed to God. Through the seen to the unseen, to God; from the
unseen through the seen to man, is the law of the Incarnation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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