pposites had yielded, as nearly thinkable as
possible. It has been said that the trinitarian doctrine is not in the
New Testament, that it was later elaborated by a different kind of mind.
This is not true. But the inference is precisely the contrary of that
which defenders of the dogma would formerly have drawn from this
concession. The same kind of mind, or rather the same two kinds of mind,
are at work in the New Testament. Both of the religious elements above
suggested are in the Gospels and Epistles. The New Testament presents
attempts at their combination. Either form may be found in the
literature of the later age. If we ask ourselves, What is that in Jesus
which gives us the sense of redemption, surely we should answer, It is
his glad and confident resting in the love of God the Father. It is his
courage, his faith in men, which becomes our faith in ourselves. It is
his wonderful mingling of purity and love of righteousness with love of
those who have sinned. You may find this in the ancient literature, as
the Fathers describe that to which their souls cling. But this is not
the point of view from which the dogma is organised. The Nicene
Christology is not to be understood from this approach. The cry of a
dying civilisation after power and light and life, the feeling that
these might come to it, streaming down as it were, from above, as a
physical, a mechanical, a magical deliverance, this is the frame within
which is set what is here said of the help and redemption wrought by
Christ. The resurrection and the incarnation are the points at which
this streaming in of the divine light and power upon a darkened world is
felt.

That religion seemed the highest, that interpretation of Christianity
the truest, the absolute one, which could boast that it possessed the
power of the Almighty through his physical union with men. He who
contended that Jesus was God, contended therewith for a power which
could come upon men and make them in some sense one with God. This is
the view which has been almost exclusively held in the Greek Church. It
is the view which has run under and through and around the other
conception in the Roman and Protestant Churches. The sense that
salvation is inward, moral, spiritual, has rarely indeed been absent
from Christendom. It would be preposterous to allege that it had. Yet
this sense has been overlaid and underrun and shot through with that
other and disparate idea of salvation, as of a pure