Increate Godhead

The atoning thing [of the Atonement] was not its amount or acuteness, but its obedience, its sanctity.

These pathetic ways of thinking about Christ regard him too much as a mere individual before God. They do not satisfy if Christ's relation with man was a racial one and he represented humanity. Especially they do not hold good if that relationship was no mere blood relationship, natural relationship, but a supernatural relationship - blood relationship only in the mystic Christian sense. We are blood relations of Christ, but not in the natural sense of that term, only in the supernatural sense, as those who are related to him in his blood, in his death, and his spirit. The value of Christ's unity and sympathy with us was not simply that he was continuous with the race at its head. It was not a relation of identity. The race was not prolonged into him. The value consists in that life-act of self-identification by which Christ the eternal Son of God became man. We hear much about Christ's essential identity with the human race. That is not true in the sense in which other great men, like Shakespeare, for instance, were identical with the human race, gathering up in consummation its natural genius. Christ's identity was not natural or created identity, but the self-identification of the Creator. Everything turns upon this - whether Christ was a created being, however grand, or whether he was of increate Godhead.

P T Forsyth in The Work of Christ, pages 135/6

A Jacobean Age

Coriolanus represents this old, Elizabethan order, and Coriolanus, which was written in 1605-1608, reflects very strongly the move into the Jacobean Age, which was pragmatic without understanding the imaginative romanticism that had gone before....

If there has ever been another Jacobean age since, there is one now: it's Jacobean in the sense that the virtue of heroes, which is the virtue of serving something above and beyond, is no longer fashionable. We've become more and more secular and efficient, and we're not interested in that service at all.  There has been a loss of faith, and to a degree a loss of imagination. We live in a godless society. All our gods have failed us. The golden age of the Elizabethan time has passed, and we are now into the dark age of the Jacobean era. 

pages 216-7 of Living with Shakespeare, edited by Susannah Carson

Self, and Chaucer

I have been talking, penwise, all this about my ugly self.  Is it not strange that in the Christian law we can offer to God the most deformed and diseased thing we have got - ourselves?  I have had a most strange, delightful feeling lately - when disgusted with my own selfishness - of just giving away the self to God - throwing it off me up to heaven - to be forgotten and grow clean, without my smearing it all over with trying to wash out the spot.  

This evening I could relish nothing but a poem of Chaucer's.  We really have never surpassed him.  He was a non-dramatic Shakespeare - not un-dramatic.  There is no greater delight in Coleridge or Keats at hearing the nightingale than old Chaucer manifests.  The man of genius may not be a prophet but he is a prophecy: he forestalls what it will take ages to bring round for the many; but theirs it will be one day.

Two extracts from a letter written by George MacDonald to his wife on March 7th, 1861. Quoted in George MacDonald and His Wife, by Greville MacDonald, pages 326/7