objects which can engage the thought of man. These
are nature and man and God. There is the universe, of which we become
aware through experience from our earliest childhood. Then there is man,
the man given in self-consciousness, primarily the man myself. In this
sense man seems to stand over against nature. Then, as the third
possible object of thought, we have God. Upon the thought of God we
usually come from the point of view of the category of cause. God is the
name which men give to that which lies behind nature and man as the
origin and explanation of both. Plato's chief interest was in man. He
talked much concerning a God who was somehow the speculative postulate
of the spiritual nature in man. Aristotle began a real observation of
nature. But the ancient and, still more, the mediaeval study of nature
was dominated by abstract and theological assumptions. These prevented
any real study of that nature in the midst of which man lives, in
reaction against which he develops his powers, and to which, on one
whole side of his nature, he belongs. Even in respect of that which men
reverently took to be thought concerning God, they seem to have been
unaware how much of their material was imaginative and poetic symbolism
drawn from the experience of man. The traditional idea of revelation
proved a disturbing factor. Assuming that revelation gave information
concerning God, and not rather the religious experience of communion
with God himself, men accepted statements of the documents of revelation
as if they had been definitions graciously given from out the realm of
the unseen. In reality, they were but fetches from out the world of the
known into the world of the unknown.

The point of interest is this:--In all possible combinations in which,
throughout the history of thought, these three objects had been set, the
one with the others, they had always remained three objects. There was
no essential relation of the one to the other. They were like the points
of a triangle of which any one stood over against the other two. God
stood over against the man whom he had fashioned, man over against the
God to whom he was responsible. The consequences for theology are
evident. When men wished to describe, for example, Jesus as the Son of
God, they laid emphasis upon every quality which he had, or was supposed
to have, which was not common to him with other men. They lost sight of
that profound interest of religion which has always c