vinest of all things is the mystery of
growth. The perfect man is not at the beginning, but far down the
immeasurable series of approaches to perfection. The perfection of other
men is the work of still other ages, in which this extraordinary and
inexplicable moral magnitude which Jesus is, has had its influence, and
conferred upon them power to aid them in the fulfilment of God's intent
for themselves, which is like that intent for himself which Jesus has
fulfilled.

Surely enough has been said to show that what we have here is only the
absorption of even the profoundest religious meanings into the vortex of
an all-dissolving metaphysical system. The most obvious meaning of the
phrase 'Son of God,' its moral and spiritual, its real religious
meaning, is dwelt on, here in Hegel, as little as Hegel claimed that the
Nicene trinitarians had dwelt upon it. Nothing marks more clearly the
distance we have travelled since Hegel than does the general recognition
that his attempted solution does not even lie in the right direction. It
is an attempt within the same area as that of the Nicene Council and the
creeds, namely, the metaphysical area. What is at stake is not the
pre-existence or the two natures. Hegel was right in what he said
concerning these. The pre-existence cannot be thought of except as
ideal. The two natures we assert for every man, only not in such a
manner as to destroy unity in the personality. The heart of the dogma is
not in these. It is the oneness of God and man, a moral and spiritual
oneness, oneness in conduct and consciousness, the presence and
realisation of God, who is spirit, in a real man, the divineness of
Jesus, in a sense which sees no meaning any longer in the old debate as
between his divinity and his deity.

In the light of the new theory of the universe which we have reviewed,
it flashes upon us that both defenders and assailants of the doctrine of
the incarnation, in the age-long debate, have proceeded from the
assumption that God and man are opposites. Men contended for the
divineness of Jesus in terms which by definition shut out his true
humanity. They asserted the identity of a real man, a true historic
personage, with an abstract notion of God which had actually been framed
by the denial of all human qualities. Their opponents with a like
helplessness merely reversed the situation. To admit the deity of Jesus
would have been for them, in all candour and clear-sightedness,
absolutely