The Incarnation and Common Life

The volume before us is abundant proof, if proof were needed, of the wisdom, zeal and energy with which the Bishop of Durham has thrown himself into the arduous duties of the position to which he was called four years ago. It contains a series of sermons and addresses of recent date, on a wide variety of subjects, for the most part of a directly practical kind, which are, as it were, strung on the thread of one underlying truth --the meeting-point of the divine and human in the Incarnation as the centre of history and thought. The greatest problems of the day -- intellectual, social, political -- are taken up and considered in this connection. The special difficulties and trials of the present time are fully exhibited, and the line is shown along which their solution may be hopefully, nay confidently, looked for. The book is thus on the one hand, a contribution to Christian apologetic, of the most effective kind, for "the highest conceivable attestation of a divine revelation lies in its power to meet each new want of man as it arises, and to gain fresh force from the growth of human knowledge;" and on the other hand, a course of practical teaching about every-day life from one who believes that "all the problems of modern life are in the end religious problems." It is evident how singularly fitted the author is to communicate such teaching, first from the "long and busy years as student and teacher," and then from the experience of the last four years since he was "suddenly called at the close of life to the oversight of a Diocese in which the problems of modern life are presented in the most urgent and impressive form." The Incarnation is, in Dr. Westcott's view, "the central event in the life of the world, the central truth in the experience of men, in which the seen and the unseen, the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite, are brought together." "To invoke the name of the Lord Jesus is to recognize the fellowship of Heaven and Earth." Theoretically we confess our belief in this when we acknowledge the true divinity and true humanity of our Lord. But the consequences both for belief and for action are far-reaching, and are often but little apparent. For the Incarnation brings to light the real nature of human relations, the brotherhood which means sharing in the sight of a common ideal and in the exercise of a mutual love. We learn from science itself that "we are not, we cannot be alone. There is a larger life in which we are all bound to an irrevocable past and an immeasurable future.... --The Cambridge Review, Volume 15