Our Divine Saviour

Bishop Hedley says: The question, Who is Jesus Christ? requires very many words to answer it completely. But there is a. short answer which may serve us for the present. Jesus Christ is He in whom the fulness of the Godhead dwelleth corporally." Jesus Christ is the Gad-man. He is man, having body and soul, senses and organs, like other men. He is God-God in the flesh, God possessing a human dwelling, God not restricted nor localised, yet capable of being seen by the eye and pointed to with the finger. This is our subject. It is a matter which is vital to the world; for the revelation of 'Jesus Christ' is the central truth of God's dispensation for man's eternal well-being. To deny it is to cut oneself away from the shelter of the harbour, and to drift out into the measureless ocean." Of Antichrists Hedley says: "They began to speculate and teach before the New Testament was complete. They aggravated the troubles of the Church in the days of the heathen persecutions. They were the chief occasion of her first great Council. They disturbed the times of her early triumph, and desolated wide territories that she had once called her own. In the religious convulsions of later times they have always hovered near, and now, in the days in which we are, they are an army, and they have a discipline, and it would seem as if they were the advanced guard of the great and final Anti-Christ, whose fatal triumph it will be, for a brief space, to drive the worship and the love of Jesus from the earth. It will be our object in the remarks which follow to make use of the 'contradictions' of gainsayers in order to grasp more firmly what the Incarnation is." Monsignor has the following to say on sanctification: "it is true, nevertheless, that the Rationalistic criticism which is now so common has had a great effect even on the multitudes of those who consider themselves believers. Belief which does not rest on definite teaching cannot be very steady. Those who profess that they take their religion from the Scripture alone, really take it from the preachers, the writers, the newspapers, who comment on the Scripture; and as the Scripture cannot speak and contradict those who put their own interpretations on the Scripture, it is evident that the talk of clever and plausible men will have its effect by degrees. You can hardly note when the autumn begins; but when the leaves begin to fall by twos and threes, and the tree to look dry and unlovely, you know that the first great blast that comes to herald the winter will strew the ground with wreck and leave the forest bare. So, it is to be feared, religious opinion in this country is not so far from a denial of Jesus Christ as it was thirty years ago. And one proof of this is the undoubted fact that Jesus Christ is coming to be looked upon more and more as a past event and not as a living fact. We reverence Him; we speculatively admit His claims to Divine worship; we write plaintive books about Him; we travel to the Holy Land and sketch the cities or the spots where He lived and suffered; but do we pray to Him? Do we study His life with a view to imitation? Do we weep over His Passion? Do we believe in the existence of .. Grace, actually at our hands, and really efficacious through His Headship? An Eastern people possess, or possessed till lately, a sovereign secluded in a palace, powerless, without influence on the nation, but reverenced with almost God-like honour. And the tone of popular Christianity in Protestant countries is-to say everything reverent and honourable about our Lord, to speak of Him with the vague magniloquence with which one speaks of heroic ages and mythical heroes, and all the time to live as if His memory were all He had left behind, and His example all that He had given to man."