new experience. Their successors were forced by the exigencies of their ecclesiastical situation to limit tliemselves to simple defence of the fact. Later thinkers, with more freedom, and under the impulse of vast movements of philosophy and science, have gone on to unfold and organize its content. There is much that is still obscure. But we may venture to state these convictions, that although (1) the analysis of the forces that have entered into the development of Christian doctrine in the past, popular at present, has by no means vindicated beyond appeal its own presuppositions ; nor (2) has it yet been proved that the predominant impulses of the modern spirit are sufficient ade- quately to mould anew all the facts and truths of the inherited faith ; yet (3) it is indubitable that broad and abiding foundations are being laid for a system of religious thought at once expressive of the religious ideals of the age, and consistent with its historical and scientific temper. In elaborating that system it is already clear that two of its fundamental postulates must be these : (o) the prin- ciple that Christian truth is not the creation of the human intellect, nor are the forces of human reason and emotion sufficient to explain it ; and (/3) the principle of the absolute value of Christ's Person as the norm of all religious experience. The Christological impulse is central. In the moral personality of Christ, men are seeking better answers to the old problems. The past answers are not wrong ; it is that they are not relevant. And this because of the growth, not of science but of conscience. The type of religious experience and emotion has changed, the experience is deeper, the emotion richer. Tlie modern mind stands less awe-struck, perhaps, before the Deity of Christ, but it is more conscience-struck before the perfec- tion of His human character, within the sacred processes of which it wistfully looks for the mystery of His Divinity and the secret of God.
2. Denial of the doctrine of Christ's Divinity. — (a) History and motive. — Christianity has in all the stages of its evolution been accompanied by rationalistic hesitation. Based on experience, it has never commended itself to the reason un- enriched by that experience. A strong under- current of antagonism runs through the centuries. It is possible to indicate special periods when the antagonism becomes more pronounced. Such periods will be found, on the whole, coincident with the points of transition in the advance of the doctrine. It may well be, as modern Unitarians argue, that Christ was regarded at first as a man simply, 'a prophet mighty in deed and word' (Lk 24") ; but their contention tliat this is the point of view of the NT cannot be sustained. The Epistles, even the earliest, start from the Risen Christ, and the Gospel narratives are not to be comprehended apart from the initial experience of His liigher dignity. Both sets of books owe their origin to the new sense as to His Person created by the new sense of power with which He pos- sessed them. Their ostensible design is to set Him forth as 'Christ,' or 'Lord,' or 'Saviour;' or 'Word,' etc., i.e. as something more than man, to whom, as such, worship is paid. They show their authors busied with problems as to tlie constitu- tion of His Person. Those problems emerged from the first, and among Jewish Christians who had to make clear to themselves Christ's true position if, in His lordship over them, they were no longer required strictly to follow the law of Moses, and were now required to conceive of the transcendence of God permitting fellowship with Him. But those were problems which could never have emerged at all unless from the conviction of His
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suprahuman rank. The opposition, Ebionism, was not so much concerned with denial of His superior dignity as directed to affirm the supremacy of the Father. Its protest was immensely strengthened when the conflict with Gnostic theories necessitated an alien apologetic with an unscriptural termin- ology, derived from Greek philosophy, both ob- noxious (and probably bewildering) to the pious Jew.
The second serious outburst of hostility was occasioned by the Nieene theologians. In Ebionism the Jewish temper found vent. In Arianism it was the heathen intellect. Amid Gentile surround- ings christological ideas had never ceased to grow. Tradition, Scripture, experience, combined to deepen the conviction of Christ'.s Divinity, and to enlarge the range of its problems. Hellenic ration- alism confronted tlie Church at every point. It could not tolerate the thought of two Gods ; and it had not yet grasped the unity of God as embracing eternal distinctions facing inward on each other. It revolted from an Incarnation in time and human form. It therefore denied to the Son coequality with the Father. Yet everything short of the full deity it was ready to acknowledge. For the Arian Chnst is no mere man : He is much more than man, only not God, but a kind of demi-god, the loftiest of all creatures, to be imitated and worshipped. The idea, from its wide acceptance in that age, must have embodied certain prevalent mental ten- dencies of the time. Its plausibility depends on the idea of God which it conceives, viz. that of an abstract, otiose Being, beyond interest in human things. It is an idea as far removed from modern modes as from the Gospel facts. It is more beset with difficulty than the conception it opposed. In later times it has been often revived, but never effectively, and mainly in individual opinion.