nsive Word, was the utterance, the actualising or
communicating of His subjective divine ideas, which were in Him, and
through the Word passed out of Him into human perception, and thereby into
objective reality. This second reality, inseparable from the first, was
the second Logos, inseparable as cause and effect are inseparable in
essence. As the highest of all Logoi was man, the most perfect man was
recognised as the son of God, the Logos become flesh, the highest thought
and will of God. In this there is nothing miraculous. Everything is
consistently thought out, and in this sense Jesus could have been nothing
else than the Word or the Son of God. All this sounds very strange to us
at first, because we have forgotten the full meaning of the utterance or
the Word, and are not able to transfer the creation of the Word and the
Thought, even though only in the form of a similitude, to that which was
in the beginning. A similitude it is and must remain, like everything that
we say of God; but it is a higher and more spiritual similitude than any
that have been or can be applied to God in the various religions and
philosophies of the world. God has thought the world, and in the act of
thinking has uttered or expressed it; and these thoughts which were in
Him, and were thought and uttered by Him in rational sequence, are the
Logoi, or species, or kinds, which we recognise again by reflection in the
objective world, as rationally developing one from another. Here we have
the true "Origin of Species" long before Darwin's book.

To the philosophers this is all perfectly intelligible. The step taken by
Christ and his disciples (those, namely, who speak to us in the Fourth
Gospel) was this, that they believed they recognised in the historical
Jesus, the son of the carpenter of Nazareth, the highest Logos "Man" in
his complete realisation. It was entirely natural, but it can only have
occurred after overpowering experiences, for it must have signified more
than we understand under the "ideal of a man," although originally both
expressions are derived from the same source. Nor was the designation of
the Saviour as the Word, or, in more human fashion, the Son of God,
intended so much for him conceived purely spiritually, but rather for his
personality as inspired by the highest ideas.

In all these matters we must think of the ever changing medium, in which
these expressions moved. Word and Son in the mouths of the people might
co