impossible, because the admission would have shut out his
true humanity. On the old definitions we cannot wonder that the struggle
was a bitter one. Each party was on its own terms right. If God is by
definition other than man, and man the opposite of God, then it is not
surprising that the attempt to say that Jesus of Nazareth was both,
remained mysticism to the one and seemed folly to the other.

Now, within the area of the philosophy which begins with Kant this old
antinomy has been resolved. An actual circle of clear relations joins
the points of the old hopeless triangle. Men are men because of God
indwelling in them, working through them. The phrase 'mere man' is seen
to be a mere phrase. To say that the Nazarene, in some way not
genetically to be explained, but which is hidden within the recesses of
his own personality, shows forth in incomparable fulness that relation
of God and man which is the ideal for us all, seems only to be saying
over again what Jesus said when he proclaimed: 'I and My Father are
one.' That Jesus actualised, not absolutely in the sense that he stood
out of relation to history, but still perfectly within his relation to
history, that which in us and for us is potential, the sonship of
God--that seems a very simple and intelligible assertion. It certainly
makes a large part of the debate of ages seem remote from us. It brings
home to us that we live in a new world.

Interesting and fruitful is Hegel's expansion of the idea of redemption
beyond that of the individual to that of the whole humanity, and in
every aspect of its life. In my relation to the world are given my
duties. The renunciation of outward duty makes the inward life barren.
The principle which is to transform the world wears an aspect very
different from that of stoicism, of asceticism or even of the
individualism which has sought soul-salvation. In the midst of
unworthiness and helplessness there springs up the consciousness of
reconciliation. Man, with all his imperfections, becomes aware that he
is the object of the loving purpose of God. Still this redemption of a
man is something which is to be worked out, in the individual life and
on the stage of universal history. The first step beyond the individual
life is that of the Church. It is from within this community of
believers that men, in the rule, receive the impulse to the good. The
community is, in its idea, a society in which the conquest of evil is
already being ac