." If there was an
"emptying," there was also a "filling," so that we see in Him the
fulness of God. How He alone of all mankind came so to receive the
Self-giving Father remains for us, as for our predecessors, the ultimate
riddle, a riddle akin to that which makes each of us "indescribably
himself." And as for the origin of His unique Person, we have no better
explanations to substitute for those of the First Century; the mystery
of our Lord's singular personality remains unsolved.

While our reflections almost necessarily end in guesses, or in
impenetrable obscurities, our experience of Christ's worth can advance
to ever greater certainty. We follow Him, and find Him the Way, the
Truth and the Life. We trust Him and prove His power to save unto the
uttermost. We come to feel that no phrase applied to Him in the New
Testament is an exaggeration; our own language, like St. Paul's, admits
its inadequacy by calling Him God's "_unspeakable_ gift." We see the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in His face; He is to us the
Light of life; and we live and strive to make Him the Light of the
world. Though we may never be able to reason out to our satisfaction how
God and man unite in Him, we discover in Him the God who redeems us and
the Man we aspire to be. Jesus is to us (to borrow a saying of Lancelot
Andrewes') "God's as much as He can send; ours as much as we can
desire."

CHAPTER IV

GOD

The word "God" is often employed as though it had a fixed meaning. His
part in an event or His relation to a movement is discussed with the
assumption that all who speak have in mind the same Being. "God" is the
name a man gives to his highest inspiration, and men vary greatly in
that which inspires them. One man's god is his belly, another's his
reputation, a third's cleverness. Napoleon reintroduced the cult of the
God of authority, by establishing the Concordat with Rome, because as he
bluntly put it, "men require to be kept in order." A number of socially
minded thinkers, of whom the best known is George Eliot, deified
humanity and gave themselves to worship and serve it. "Whatever thy
heart clings to and relies on," wrote Luther, "that is properly thy
God." A Christian is one who clings to Him in whom Jesus trusted, one
who responds to the highest inspirations of Jesus of Nazareth. And a
glance over Church history leaves one feeling that few Christians, even
among careful thinkers, have had thoroughly Christian