Now, that is only half the truth. But if I may use a paradox, it is
the important half, the primary half. And it is just that essential
element in the Christian experience of Jesus that modern preaching,
under the humanistic impulse, is neglecting. Indeed, liberal preachers
have largely ceased to sermonize about Him, just because it has become
so easy! Humanism has made Jesus obvious, hence, relatively impotent.
With its unified cosmos, its immanent God, its exalted humanity, the
whole Christological problem has become trivial. It drops the cosmic
approach to the person of Jesus in favor of the ethical. It does not
approach Him from the side of God; we approach nothing from that
side now; but from the side of man. Thus He is not so much a divine
revelation as He is a human achievement. Humanity and divinity are
one in essence. The Creator is distinguished from His creatures in
multifarious differences of degree but not in kind. We do not see,
then, in Christ, a perfect isolated God, joined to a perfect isolated
man, in what were indeed the incredible terms of the older and
superseded Christologies. But rather, He is the perfect revelation of
the moral being, the character of God, in all those ways capable of
expression or comprehension in human life, just because he is the
highest manifestation of a humanity through which God has been forever
expressing Himself in the world. For man is, so to speak, his own
cosmic center; the greatest divine manifestation which we know.
Granted, then, an ideal man, a complete moral being, and _ipso facto_
we have our supreme revelation of God.

So runs the thrice familiar argument. Of course, we have gained
something by it. We may drop gladly the old dualistic philosophy, and
we must drop it, though I doubt if it is so easy to drop the dualistic
experience which created it. But I beg to point out that, on the
whole, we have lost more religiously than we have gained. For we have
made Jesus easy to understand, not as He brings us up to His level,
but as we have reduced Him to ours. Can we afford to do that?
Bernard's mystical line, "The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His
loved ones know," has small meaning here. The argument is very good
humanism but it drops the word "Saviour" out of the vocabulary
of faith. Oh, how many sermons since, let us say, 1890, have been
preached on the text, "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father."
And how uniformly the sermons have explained that t