es to a form of speculation concerning
the exalted Christ, which in recent years has had some currency.
According to this doctrine, there is ascribed to the risen and ascended
Jesus an existence with God which is thought of in terms different from
those which we associate with the idea of immortality. In other words,
this continued existence of Christ as God is a counterpart of that
existence before the incarnation, which the doctrine of the
pre-existence alleged. But surely this speculation can have no better
standing than that of the pre-existence.

Sin in the language of religion is defection from the law of God. It is
the transgression of the divine command. In what measure, therefore, the
life of man can be thought of as sinful, depends upon his knowledge of
the will of God. In Scripture, as in the legends of the early history of
the race, this knowledge stands in intimate connexion with the witness
to a primitive revelation. This thought has had a curious history. The
ideas of mankind concerning God and his will have grown and changed as
much as have any other ideas. The rudimentary idea of the good is
probably of social origin. It first emerges in the conflict of men one
with another. As the personalised ideal of conduct, the god then reacts
upon conduct, as the conduct reacts upon the notion of the god. Only
slowly has the ideal of the good been clarified. Only slowly have the
gods been ethicised. 'An honest God is the noblest work of man.' The
moralising and spiritualising of the idea of Jahve lies right upon the
face of the Old Testament. The ascent of man on his ethical and
spiritual side is as certain as is that on his physical side. Long
struggle upward through ignorance, weakness, sin, gradual elevating of
the standard of what ought to he, growingly successful effort to conform
to that standard--this is what the history of the race has seen.

Athwart this lies the traditional dogma. The dogma took up into itself a
legend of the childhood of the world. It elaborated that which in
Genesis is vague and poetic into a vast scheme which has passed as a
sacred philosophy of history. It postulated an original revelation. It
affirmed the created state of man as one of holiness before a fall. To
the framers of the dogma, if sin is the transgression of God's will,
then it must be in light of a revelation of that will. In the Scriptures
we have vague intimations concerning God's will, growingly clearer
knowledge of t