veals Him more than the
lower, and above all the actually better man reveals God more than the
worse man. Now, if in the life, teaching, and character of Christ--in
his moral and religious consciousness, and in the life and character
which {181} so completely expressed and illustrated that
consciousness--we can discover the highest revelation of the divine
nature, we can surely attach a real meaning to the language of the
Creeds which singles him out from all the men that ever lived as the
one in whom the ideal relation of man to God is most completely
realized. If God can only be known as revealed in Humanity, and Christ
is the highest representative of Humanity, we can very significantly
say 'Christ is _the_ Son of God, very God of very God, of one substance
with the Father,' though the phrase undoubtedly belongs to a
philosophical dialect which we do not habitually use.

(6) Behind the doctrine of the Incarnation looms the still more
technical doctrine of the Trinity. Yet after all, it is chiefly, I
believe, as a sort of necessary background or presupposition to the
idea of Christ's divine nature that modern religious people, not
professionally interested in Theology, attach importance to that
doctrine. They accept the doctrine in so far as it is implied by the
teaching of Scripture and by the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, but
they are not much attached to the technicalities of the Athanasian
Creed. The great objection to that Creed, apart from the damnatory
clauses, is the certainty that it will be misunderstood by most of
those who think they understand it at all. The {182} best thing we
could do with the Athanasian Creed is to drop it altogether: the next
best thing to it is to explain it, or at least so much of it as really
interests the ordinary layman--the doctrine of three Persons in one
God. And therefore it is important to insist in the strongest possible
way that the word 'Person' which has most unfortunately come to be the
technical term for what the Greeks more obscurely called the three
_huostaseis_ in the Godhead does not, and never did, mean what we
commonly understand by Personality--whether in the language of ordinary
life or of modern Philosophy. I do not deny that at certain periods
Theology did tend to think of the Logos as a distinct being from the
Father, a distinct consciousness with thoughts, will, desires, emotions
not identical with those of God the Father. The distinction was at