And, lastly, the New Testament not only tells us what never was told
before of man's nature as a spiritual being and of his destiny
hereafter; it tells also what was never told elsewhere of the nature of
God and of the relations between Him and His creature man. The unity and
spirituality of the Godhead so strenuously insisted on in the Old
Testament, is no less insisted on in the New. But the mysterious
complexity embraced within that unity, though darkly hinted at in the
older teaching, is nowhere clearly set forth, but in the latter. We may
find anticipations of the teaching of St. Paul and St. John, and of our
Lord Himself as recorded by St. John, in the Book of Proverbs, in the
Prophets, in the Rabbinical writers between the Prophets and the New
Testament, and we can see in Philo to what this finally came unaided by
Revelation. But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature and on the
Incarnation is distinct from all this. And it is in the Christian form,
and only in that form, that the doctrine has satisfied the spiritual
needs of the great mass of believers.
Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold which this teaching has had
upon mankind has depended entirely on the extraordinary degree in which
the teaching of the Bible has satisfied the conscience.
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