able. They are
opposites which are really necessary to each other. I have quoted from
Vatke's attempt to reconcile grace and free-will: another extract from
a writer of the same school may perhaps be helpful. "In the growth of
our experience," says Green, "an animal organism, which has its
history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally
complete consciousness. What we call our mental history is not a
history of this consciousness, which in itself can have no history,
but a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes its
vehicle. 'Our consciousness' may mean either of two things: either a
function of the animal organism, which is being made, gradually and
with interruptions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness; or that
eternal consciousness itself, as making the animal organism its
vehicle and subject to certain limitations in so doing, but retaining
its essential characteristic as independent of time, as the
determinant of becoming, which has not and does not itself become. The
consciousness which varies from moment to moment ... is consciousness
in the former sense. It consists in what may properly be called
phenomena.... The latter consciousness ... constitutes our knowledge"
(_Prolegomena to Ethics_, pp. 72, 73). Analogous is our _moral_
history. But no Christian can believe that our life, mental or moral,
is or ever can be _necessary_ to God in the same sense in which He is
necessary to our existence. For practical religion, the symbol which
we shall find most helpful is that of a progressive transformation of
our nature after the pattern of God revealed in Christ; a process
which has as its end a real union with God, though this end is, from
the nature of things, unrealisable in time. It is, as I have said in
the body of the Lectures, a _progessus ad infinitum_, the consummation
of which we are nevertheless entitled to claim as already ours in a
transcendental sense, in virtue of the eternal purpose of God made
known to us in Christ.

APPENDIX D

The Mystical Interpretation Of The Song Of Solomon

The headings to the chapters in the Authorised Version give a sort of
authority to the "mystical" interpretation of Solomon's Song, a poem
which was no doubt intended by its author to be simply a romance of
true love. According to our translators, the Lover of the story is
meant for Christ, and the Maiden for the Church. But the tendency of
Catholic Mysticism has been to make