olution--_What think ye of
Christ? Whose Son is He_?

II. (i) The Catholic teaching alone, of course, offers a key to these
questions; yet it is a key that is itself, like all keys, as complicated
as the wards which it alone can unlock. Heretic after heretic has sought
for simplification, and heretic after heretic has therefore come to
confusion. Christ is God, cried the Docetic; therefore cut out from the
Gospels all that speaks of the reality of His Manhood! God cannot bleed
and suffer and die; God cannot weary; God cannot feel the sorrows of
man. Christ is Man, cries the modern critic; therefore tear out from the
Gospels His Virgin Birth and His Resurrection! For none but a Catholic
can receive the Gospels as they were written; none but a man who
believes that Christ is both God and Man, who is content to believe that
and to bow before the Paradox of paradoxes that we call the Incarnation,
to accept the blinding mystery that Infinite and Finite Natures were
united in one Person, that the Eternal expresses Himself in Time, and
that the Uncreated Creator united to Himself Creation--none but a
Catholic, in a word, can meet, without exception, the mysterious
phenomena of Christ's Life.

(ii) Turn now again to the mysteries of our own limited life and, as in
a far-off phantom parallel, we begin to understand.

For we too, in our measure, have a double nature. _As God and Man make
one Christ, so soul and body make one man_: and, as the two natures of
Christ--as His Perfect Godhead united to His Perfect Manhood--lie at the
heart of the problems which His Life presents, so too our affinities
with the clay from which our bodies came, and with the Father of Spirits
Who inbreathed into us living souls, explain the contradictions of our
own experience.

If we were but irrational beasts, we could be as happy as the beasts;
if we were but discarnate spirits that look on God, the joy of the
angels would be ours. Yet if we assume either of these two truths as if
it were the only truth, we come certainly to confusion. If we live as
the beasts, we cannot sink to their contentment, for our immortal part
will not let us be; if we neglect or dispute the rightful claims of the
body, that very outraged body drags our immortal spirit down. The
acceptance of the two natures of Christ alone solves the problems of the
Gospel; the acceptance of the two parts of our own nature alone enables
us to live as God intends. Our spiritual and physic