laimed that, in
some sense, all men are sons of God and Jesus was the son of man. Jesus
was then only truly honoured as divine when every trait of his humanity
was ignored. Similarly, when men spoke of revelation they laid emphasis
upon those particulars in which this supposed method of coming by
information was unlike all other methods. Knowledge derived directly
from God through revelation was in no sense the parallel of knowledge
derived by men in any other way. So also God stood over against nature.
God was indeed declared to have made nature. He had, however, but given
it, so to say, an original impulse. That impulse also it had in some
strange way lost or perverted, so that the world, though it had been
made by God, was not good. For the most part it moved itself, although
God's sovereignty was evidenced in that he could still supervene upon
it, if he chose. The supernatural was the realm of God. Natural and
supernatural were mutually exclusive terms, just as we saw that divine
and human were exclusive terms. So also, on the third side of our
triangle, man stood over against nature. Nature was to primitive men the
realm of caprice, in which they imagined demons, spirits and the like.
These were antagonistic to men, as also hostile to God. Then, when with
the advance of reflexion these spirits, and equally their counterparts,
the good genii and angels, had all died, nature became the realm of iron
necessity, of regardless law, of all-destroying force, of cruel and
indifferent fate. From this men took refuge in the thought of a
compassionate God, though they could not withdraw themselves or those
whom they loved from the inexorable laws of nature. They could not see
that God always, or even often, intervened on their behalf. It cannot be
denied that these ideas prevail to some extent in the popular theology
at the present moment. Much of our popular religious language is an
inheritance from a time when they universally prevailed. The religious
intuition even of psalmists and prophets opposed many of these notions.
The pure religious intuition of Jesus opposed almost every one of them.
Mystics in every religion have had, at times, insight into an altogether
different scheme of things. The philosophy, however, even of the
learned, would, in the main, have supported the views above described,
from the dawn of reflexion almost to our own time.

It was Kant who first began the resolution of this three-cornered
difficulty