burdensome to nature, therefore it will have nothing to do with it;
but to be God in eternity and not man, or to be Christ as He was after
His resurrection, is all easy and pleasant and comfortable to nature,
and so it holdeth it to be best."

These three views of the manner in which we may hope to become
"partakers of the Divine nature," are all aspects of the truth. If we
believe that we were made in the image of God, then in becoming like
Him we are realising our true idea, and entering upon the heritage
which is ours already by the will of God. On the other hand, if we
believe that we have fallen very far from original righteousness, and
have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, then we must believe in
a deliverance from _outside_, an acquisition of a righteousness not
our own, which is either imparted or imputed to us. And, thirdly, if
we are to hope for a real change in our relations to God, there must
be a real change _in_ our personality,--a progressive transmutation,
which without breach of continuity will bring us to be something
different from what we were. The three views are not mutually
exclusive. As Vatke says, "The influence of Divine grace does not
differ from the immanent development of the deepest Divine germ of
life in man, only that it here stands over-against man regarded as a
finite and separate being--as something external to himself. If the
Divine image is the true nature of man, and if it only possesses
reality in virtue of its identity with its type or with the Logos,
then there can be no true self-determination in man which is not at
the same time a self-determination of the type in its image." We
cannot draw a sharp line between the operations of our own personality
and those of God in us. Personality escapes from all attempts to limit
and define it. It is a concept which stretches into the infinite, and
therefore can only be represented to thought symbolically. The
personality must not be identified with the "spark," the "Active
Reason," or whatever we like to call the highest part of our nature.
Nor must we identify it with the changing _Moi_ (as Fenelon calls it).
The personality, as I have said in Lecture I. (p. 33), is both the
end--the ideal self, and the changing _Moi_, and yet neither. If
either thesis is held divorced from its antithesis, the thought ceases
to be mystical. The two ideals of self-assertion and self-sacrifice
are both true and right, and both, separately, unattain