ere expedient to get rid
of sin, but the historic revelation of what was latent in the Word from
all eternity. Had man not sinned, the Word must still have come among
us, albeit not through shame and death. It was his nature that he should
come. If he was man from eternity, it was his nature to become in time
like men on earth, and it is his nature to remain for ever man. And as
the Word looked down on mankind, so mankind looked upward to the Word.
The spirit in man is a frail and shadowy thing apart from Christ, and
men are not true men till they have found in him their immutable and
sovereign guide. Thus the Word and man do not confront each other as
alien beings. They are joined together in their inmost nature, and (may
we say it?) each receives completion from the other.

[Footnote 16: Gal. v. 19-21.]

[Sidenote: Criticism of Apollinarianism.]

The system of Apollinarius is a mighty outline whose details we can
hardly even now fill in; yet as a system it is certainly a failure. His
own contemporaries may have done him something less than justice, but
they could not follow his daring flights of thought when they saw plain
errors in his teaching. After all, Apollinarius reaches no true
incarnation. The Lord is something very like us, but he is not one of
us. The spirit is surely an essential part of man, and without a true
human spirit he could have no true human choice or growth or life; and
indeed Apollinarius could not allow him any. His work is curtailed also
like his manhood, for (so Gregory of Nyssa put it) the spirit which the
Lord did not assume is not redeemed. Apollinarius understood even better
than Athanasius the kinship of true human nature to its Lord, and
applied it with admirable skill to explain the incarnation as the
expression of the eternal divine nature. But he did not see so well as
Athanasius that sin is a mere intruder among men. It was not a hopeful
age in which he lived. The world had gone a long way downhill since
young Athanasius had sung his song of triumph over fallen heathenism.
Roman vice and Syrian frivolity, Eastern asceticism and Western
legalism, combined to preach, in spite of Christianity, that the
sinfulness of mankind is essential. So instead of following out the
pregnant hint of Athanasius that sin is no true part of human nature
(else were God the author of evil), Apollinarius cut the knot by
refusing the Son of Man a human spirit as a thing of necessity sinful.
Too thought