sion of divine love and not otherwise. But He was not
God manifest in the flesh in any way which would cut Him off from the
rest of human kind. According to the received theology, Jesus and
Jesus only, out of all the beings who have ever trodden the road which
humanity has to travel, existed before all ages. We live our
threescore years and ten and then pass on into eternity; He was eternal
to begin with. He comes to earth with a hoary antiquity behind Him, a
timeless life to look back upon; we have just fluttered into existence.
Surely any ordinary intelligence can see that this kind of theologising
puts an impassable gulf at once between Jesus and every other person
who has ever been born of an earthly mother. Certainly it does, the
theologian may declare, and rightly so, for that gulf exists; He
assumed human nature, but He was eternally divine before He did so, and
we are not. I do not need to refute this argument; the trend of modern
thought is already doing so most effectually. It is a gratuitous
assumption without a shred of evidence to support it. Besides,
unfortunately for this kind of statement, the scientific investigation
of Christian origins, and the application of the scientific method to
the history of Christian doctrine have shown us how the dogma of the
Deity of Jesus grew up. It was a comparatively late development in
Christianity, and its practical implications never have been accepted,
although at one time there was a danger that the winsome figure of
Jesus would be removed altogether from the field of human interest and
regard. The Jesus of Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" is a terrifying
figure without a trace of the lowly Nazarene about Him, and yet this
was the Jesus of the conventional Christianity of the time. It was
through this dehumanising of Jesus in Christian thought and experience
that Mariolatry arose in the Roman church. Could anything be more
grotesque than the suggestion that the mother of Jesus should need to
plead with her son to be merciful with frail humanity? And yet this is
what it came to; the figure of Mary was introduced in order to preserve
a real humanity in our relations with the Godhead. All honour to those
who have called us back to the real Jesus, the Jesus of Galilee and
Jerusalem, the Jesus with the prophet's fire, the Jesus who was so
gentle with little children and erring women, and yet before whom
canting hypocrites and truculent ecclesiastics slunk awa