The whole tone of the Harbinger, the undertone and the overtone, is that of devotion to Jesus Christ. He is the sun out of which all Christian light comes; he is the light, the life; he is the full glory of the New Testament dispensation. There is no symmetrical formal treatment of the character of the Christ or of the especial work of Christ in the Harbinger, but the Harbinger is saturated with the Christ Spirit. "For forty years," Mr. Campbell says in 1852, "we have preached Jesus Christ, the only Lord, our Saviour and our King." In 1862 [sic] there is an article as follows on the

      Come now, all ye that tell us in your wisdom of the mere natural humanity of Jesus, and help us to find out how it is that he is only a natural development of the human. Select your best and wisest character; take the range, if you will, of all the great philosophers and saints, and choose out one that is most competent; or if, perchance, some one of you may imagine that he is himself about on a level with Jesus, (as we hear that some of you do,) let him come forward in this trial and say, "Follow me! be worthy of me! I am the Light of the world! Ye are from beneath, I am from above! Behold, a greater than Solomon is here! " Take on all these transcendent assumptions, and see how soon your glory will be sifted out of you by the detective gaze and darkened by the contempt of mankind! Why not? Is not the challenge fair? Do you not tell us that you can say as divine things as he? Is it not in you, too, of course, to do what is human? Are you not in the front rank of human development? Do you not rejoice in the power to rectify many mistakes and errors in the words of Jesus? Give us, then, this one experiment, and see if it does not prove to you a truth that is of some consequence; viz.: that you are a man, and that Jesus Christ is more?

[HORACE BUSHNELL.]      

Source:

Horace Bushnell. "Christ Divine." The Millennial Harbinger 36 (August 1865): 372.

[MHA1 53]