posed method of attaining information was unlike all other methods. The knowledge derived from God was in no sense parallel to the knowledge derived by man in any other way. So also God stood over against nature and nature against God. The supernatural was the realm of God. The natural was a realm which, however much it might be supposed to have had its origin in God, was not now the realm of his activity, save as he exercised his power to intervene in it. The natural and the supernatural were mutually exclusive conceptions just as before the divine and human. So also, on the third side of our triangle, man stood over against nature and nature against man. Nature was the realm of capricious or malevolent spirits, and then of an iron necessity, of all-destroying forces, of cruel and indifferent fate. A real bond between man and nature did not exist, least of all at the point of his religious experience. The antithesis of nature and grace was as absolute as those others which we named above.

It is as easy to say that much of the utterance of the religious intuition of Jesus ran counter to this dualistic view of the universe. We may say that without attributing to Jesus any knowledge of the philosophizing of his day or any interest in it. But the accepted interpretation of the religious intuition of Jesus which hardened into dogma and was imposed as the very essence of faith upon fifty generations of Christians was all run in this dualistic mould. It was only toward the end of the 18th century that the philosophical movement began in Europe which furnished us with quite another mode

of reflection. It was far on toward the middle of the 19th century before that movement began to make itself felt in great force in America.

Upon this ancient basis the trinitarian dogma may be viewed as the assertion of this quality of Jesus by which he is one with God and separate from man, or, as the extreme statement has it, he is God, and yet, in the mystery of his unique personality, does not cease to be man. He is god-man, says the popular language, two distinct natures yet one person forever, says the creed, struggling to say something which can never perfectly be said, to rid of contradiction a notion which yet consists, to say the least, in a conjunction of opposites. There has always been a protest to the effect that the antinomy was insoluble. Clear thinking, it was alleged, obliged us to say that the opposites were irreconcilable, that Jesus, if. he were God, was not man, and if he were true man he was not God.

It is obvious that defenders and assailants of the doctrine, alike, proceeded from the assumption that God and man are mutually exclusive conceptions. Men contended for the divineness of Jesus in terms which by definition shut out his true humanity, not perceiving that in the measure in which real humanity is excluded, true trinitarianism is sacrificed. They made of Jesus' humanity a semblance. If, for example, it was by conception impossible that Jesus should sin, it is clear that Jesus was not a character at all, in the sense in which we speak of the moral character of man as an achievement in righteousness through struggle and suffering. Or again, when men attributed to

the man of Nazareth the omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence of God, they made of his life a mere spectacle and play of self-restraint.

On the other hand, there is something almost pathetic in the way in which the men of the opposite party came near to a great discovery, and yet fatally shut themselves out from it. They rested in the purely imaginary distinction between divinity and deity. Impressed by the transcendent greatness of Jesus, they were willing to concede the divinity of Jesus. They meant by that so much of God as a man may hold without ceasing to be a mere man. Any length they were willing to go, short of giving up of the fact that he was a mere man. To admit the deity of Jesus seemed to them impossible, because it seemed to shut out his true humanity. But similarly, on the other side, to concede the real humanity of Jesus, seemed to shut out his deity. They had not reckoned with the fact which I am told the late Dean Everett used so pungently to phrase:"Mere man? There is no such thing as mere man." Man is always participant in the life of God, and Jesus is only that one among men in whom that participation in the life of God was complete.

With the old definitions I do not think that we can wonder that the struggle was a bitter one. The bitterness of the controversy arose from the fact that, from their own points of view, both parties were right. People who are fond of epigrams say sometimes that each party was right in that which it asserted and wrong in that which it denied. The point with which I am here concerned is this, that the one party, as truly as the other, had operated with

philosophical distinctions which had reigned from Plato to Kant. The doing away with those distine tions was never more than vaguely felt in this country until after the unitarian schism had been long a matter of history.

If man is by definition other than God, and God the antithesis of man, then the attempt to say that Jesus was both must remain mysticism to the one party and folly to the other. But if the points of our triangle no longer stand the one over against the others, but a perfect circle joins them, if character human and divine differ only in degree, if nature is supernatural to the core, and the supernatural natural to its limit, if Jesus merely shows forth in incomparable fulness that relation to God which is the ideal for every man, then the common postulates from which our fathers set out would seem to have been at the bottom of their differences. And equally, with the fading of those postulates from the minds of us all, we would seem to have left those differences far behind.

We seem, in the idealistic philosophy, in the new view of Scripture, in the change which has come over our view of nature, to be furnished with the means of being just to the contentions of both parties, or rather, to a larger truth than either party then perceived. We seem to gain ground for the combination of some truths for which the true men of both parties were striving. We seem to be able to escape some errors into which true thinkers of both parties fell. It cannot be said that either of the ancient contentions has triumphed. It can hardly be said that either of them has survived. It

is certain that no compromise has taken place. With the ancient definitions no compromise was possible. It is the definitions which have been done away. The premises are so altered that a large part of the classical argument is put out of court. It interests us only as history. It is significant for us only as having once interested very able and earnest men. But it has no reality for us.

When one considers the orthodox formulas which scemed sometimes to have been almost willfully put forth, as if men rejoiced to prostrate themselves before the mystery which they could never hope to solve, one must stand amazed before the fact that so large part of the human race which has ever professed Christianity at all has been unwilling to relinquish its contention that in some way Jesus was both divine and human. No phenomenon of the magnitude and permanence of this one can be without its explanation. It can be accounted for only by the indefeasible instinct that he who was to do for men that which Christianity alleges that Christ does, must be, in some sense, both human and divine, both son of Man and son of God. That the orthodox were not fortunate in discovering in what sense this could be alleged, we must admit. But we must honor men who held fast to the great mystery rather than submit to a trivial resolution of it. We must honor, not less, the men who insisted, on the other hand, that there must be a real and worthy solution of the mystery. We must bow before the true protest on behalf of the humanity of Jesus, without which his divineness, as we now see it, would be a meaningless superstition. In the sharp contention of