not
employed himself, like Kingsley and others of the Broad Church, in
publishing his theological sentiments in the form of religious novels,
but has had the commendable frankness to state his opinions without
circumlocution, and to furnish us with his creed in a single volume of
essays.[155]

Maurice's notion of an ideal creation betrays the media through which he
has received it,--from Coleridge to Neo-Platonism, and thence to Plato.
The creation of herbs, flowers, beasts, birds, and fishes, as recorded
in the first chapter of Genesis, was the bringing forth of kinds and
orders, such as they were according to the mind of God, not of actual
separate phenomenal existences, such as they present themselves to the
senses of man.[156] The creation of man is disposed of in the same ideal
way; so that we are inclined to ask the critic if man is not, after all,
only a Platonic idea? "What I wish you particularly to notice," says he,
"is that the part of the record which speaks of man ideally, according
to his place with reference to God, is the part which expressly belongs
to the history of CREATION; that the bringing forth of man in _this_
sense, is the work of the sixth day.... Extend this thought, which seems
to rise inevitably out of the story of the creation of _man_, as Moses
delivers it, to the seat of that universe of which he regards man as the
climax, and we are forced to the conclusion that in the one case, as in
the other, it is not the visible, material thing of which the historian
is speaking, but that which lies below the visible material thing, and
constitutes the substance which it shows forth."[157]

Maurice assumes also, with Neo-Platonism, that Christ is the archetype
of every human being, and that when a man becomes pure, he is only
developing the Christ who was within him already. "The Son was really in
Saul of Tarsus, and he only became Paul the converted when that Son was
revealed in him.... Christ is in every man.... All may call upon God as
a reconciled Father. Human beings are redeemed, not in consequence of
any act they have done, of any faith they have exercised; their faith is
to be grounded on a foregone conclusion; their acts are to be the fruits
of a state they already possess."[158]

From this premise alone the theological system of Maurice may be
accurately determined. Sin is an evil from which we should strive to
effect an escape, but it is nothing more, neither guilt nor
responsibility,