must frankly express my
conviction that this philosophy only lives by ignoring the greatest
reality of the spiritual world. There is something in that
world--something with which we can come into intelligible and vital
relations--something which can evince to our minds its truth and
reality, for which this philosophy can make no room: Christ's
consciousness of Himself. It is a theory of the universe which (on
principle) cannot allow Christ to be anything else than an additional
unit in the world's population; but if this were the truth about Him,
no language could be strong enough to express the self-delusion in
which He lived and died. That He was thus self-deluded is a hypothesis
I do not feel called to discuss. One may be accused of subjectivity
again, of course, though a subjective opinion which has the consent of
the Christian centuries behind it need not tremble at hard names; but I
venture to say that there is no reality in the world which more
inevitably and uncompromisingly takes hold of the mind as a reality
than our Lord's consciousness of Himself as it is attested to us in the
Gospels. But when we have taken this reality for all that it is worth,
the idealism just described is shaken to the foundation. What seemed
to us so profound a truth--the essential unity of the human and the
divine--may come to seem a formal and delusive platitude; in what we
once regarded as the formula of the perfect religion--the divinity of
man and the humanity of God--we may find quite as truly the formula of
the first, not to say the final, sin. To see Christ not in the light
of this speculative theorem, but in the light of His own consciousness
of Himself, is to realise not only our kinship to God, but our
remoteness from Him; it is to realise our incapacity for
self-realisation when we are left to ourselves; it is to realise the
need of the Mediator if we would come to the Father; it is to realise,
in principle, the need of the Atonement, the need, and eventually the
fact. When the modern mind therefore presents itself to us in this
mood of philosophical competence, judging Christ from the point of view
of the whole, and showing Him His place, we can only insist that the
place is unequal to His greatness, and that His greatness cannot be
explained away. The mind which is closed to the fact of His unique
claims, and the unique relation to God on which they rest, is closed
inevitably to the mediation of God's forgiveness