his heart; but he does not draw for us any of
the beautiful gospel pictures of the Jesus in the peasant's dress who
taught on the hillsides of Galilee, went about doing good, was a
welcome guest in the home at Bethany, lived a true human life, and died
a shameful death. Paul always thought of Him, and truly, as the Lord
who came down from heaven, but he does _not_ draw a sharp line of
distinction between Him and the rest of humanity. He calls Jesus "the
first-born among many brethren." He speaks of the summing up of all
things in Christ, and of the final consummation when God shall be all
in all. Here is the New Theology with a vengeance. Paul requires to
be rescued from the inadequate and distorting interpretations his
thought has received in the course of its history. He brought this
conception of the eternal Christ into Christianity from pre-Christian
thought, saw it ideally revealed in Jesus, and then bade mankind
respond to it and realise it to be the true explanation of our own
being. Sometimes he appears to deviate from this view, and to say
things inconsistent with it, but that we need not mind; he saw it, and
that is enough. It forms the foundation of his gospel.

CHAPTER VII

THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD

+Jesus all that Christian devotion has believed Him to be.+--So far we
have seen that the personality of Jesus is central for Christian faith.
We deny nothing about Him that Christian devotion has ever affirmed,
but we affirm the same things of humanity as a whole in a differing
degree. The practical dualism which regards Jesus as coming into
humanity from something that beforehand was not humanity we declare to
be misleading. Our view of the subject does not belittle Jesus but it
exalts human nature. Let this be clearly understood and most of the
objections to it will vanish. Briefly summed up, the position is as
follows: Jesus was God, but so are we. He was God because His life was
the expression of divine love; we too are one with God in so far as our
lives express the same thing. Jesus was not God in the sense that He
possessed an infinite consciousness; no more are we. Jesus expressed
fully and completely, in so far as a finite consciousness ever could,
that aspect of the nature of God which we have called the eternal Son,
or Christ, or ideal Man who is the Soul of the universe, and "the light
that lighteth every man that cometh into the world;" we are expressions
of the sam