h the disapproval of some
people who think themselves orthodox. They will object to being told
that every man has a higher self than that of which he is immediately
conscious; that fundamentally the individual is one with the whole race
and with God; that no one possesses absolute free will. To them it may
seem an absurdity to maintain these positions. But if they say so,
they will convict themselves of absurdity, for, with the exception of
the last, Christian doctrine already affirms them all of Jesus.
According to the received theology, Jesus was God, and yet He did not
possess the all-controlling consciousness of the universe. He was also
man, and yet He was before all ages. All creation proceeds from and
centres in Him, and yet He was able to limit Himself in such a degree
as to be ignorant of much that was going on in His own universe. If
so-called orthodoxy finds it no difficulty to assert these things as
being true of Jesus, it will not find it easy to show good reason why
the same should not be true of all humanity. For the moment I neither
assert nor deny the uniqueness of Jesus. All I am concerned to show is
that if it is not intellectually _impossible_ to affirm certain things
about the consciousness of Jesus and the limitation of His true being
in His earthly life, it is not impossible to affirm them of mankind.

Some of my critics have contended that this view of the relationship of
man to God hails not from Palestine but from Oxford and is an outcome
of the philosophy of T. H. Green. But I think it can be shown that its
pedigree is considerably longer than that. Whether it hails from
Palestine or not, it is explicitly stated in the fourth gospel: "He
that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew
us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the
Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself:
but the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works. Believe me
that I am in the Father, and the Father in me." Those who object to my
statement of the fundamental identity of God and man will have to
explain away such passages as this, and there are plenty of them. But,
it may be urged, this is meant to apply only to Jesus. That I do not
believe; I think the exceedingly able writer of the fourth gospel knew
better; but for the moment I will not contest the point. Granted that
it does apply only to Jesus, what then? The very things which