Counsels to Young Students. Dy C. J. Vaughan, D.D.
This volume contains throe sermons preached by Dr. Vaughan before the University of Cambridge. It is praise enough to say of those dis- courses that they possess the characteristic merits of thoir author, not the least among them being a certain plainness and directness of speech which preachers, at least of the more cultivated sort, such as aro com- monly heard in University pulpits and the like, do not commonly use.
Better and wiser advice, given in a more persuasive manner, the audience more particularly addressed, students entering on their academical
course, could not hoar, Tho one passage which wo have noted with anything like consuro, wo anontion, not for the sake of finding fault with a volume which wo much admire, but because it seems to us to illustrate that failing of timidity which is so strong in orthodox theolo gians, and which often leads them actually astray. Dr. Vaughan writes
"If there be a Person whose very enemies could never say of Him that ho minnod,—yet a Person who was in all points tempted like as wo are . . . who, though sin was most abhorrent to him, yet walked the hospital of Earth, touched its revolting sores and dressed its contagious wounds, that ho might not only know (which he knew as Glocl)'what the disease was, but also make us (which is a different thing) know that he knew all, and yet loved us as he knew."
Is this an adequate view of the purpose and effect of the human ex- perience of Christ ? Did He not actually acquire a sympathy, a fooling with souls that are assailed by sin being part of that sympathy ? Is it enough to say that the subjective effect upon us, of our knowing that He knows, which would follow, indeed, logically from the conception of
God, explains the final cause, on this side at least, of Hie Incarnation ? Theologians often seem so terrified of Booming to impugn the Divinity of our Lord that they explain his humanity away into a figment.
Previous page
