to continue to
regard the relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical
metaphor. Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment of
intellectual carelessness back to the idea of sexual filiation.

And it may further be suggested that the extreme aloofness and
inhumanity, which is logically necessary in the idea of a Creator God,
of an Infinite God, was the reason, so to speak, for the invention of a
Holy Spirit, as something proceeding from him, as something bridging the
great gulf, a Comforter, a mediator descending into the sphere of the
human understanding. That, and the suggestive influence of the Egyptian
Trinity that was then being worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had
saturated the thought of Alexandria with the conception of a trinity in
unity, are probably the realities that account for the Third Person of
the Christian Trinity. At any rate the present writer believes that the
discussions that shaped the Christian theology we know were dominated
by such natural and fundamental thoughts. These discussions were,
of course, complicated from the outset; and particularly were they
complicated by the identification of the man Jesus with the theological
Christ, by materialistic expectations of his second coming, by
materialistic inventions about his "miraculous" begetting, and by the
morbid speculations about virginity and the like that arose out of
such grossness. They were still further complicated by the idea of the
textual inspiration of the scriptures, which presently swamped thought
in textual interpretation. That swamping came very early in the
development of Christianity. The writer of St. John's gospel appears
still to be thinking with a considerable freedom, but Origen is already
hopelessly in the net of the texts. The writer of St. John's gospel
was a free man, but Origen was a superstitious man. He was emasculated
mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry. He quotes; his
predecessor thinks.

But the writer throws out these guesses at the probable intentions of
early Christian thought in passing. His business here is the definition
of a position. The writer's position here in this book is, firstly,
complete Agnosticism in the matter of God the Creator, and secondly,
entire faith in the matter of God the Redeemer. That, so to speak, is
the key of his book. He cannot bring the two ideas under the same term
God. He uses the word God therefore for the God in our hearts o