nism is not dissimilar. It
is only sectarian Unitarians who would try to claim it for their own
denomination; the best and most outstanding exponents of Unitarianism
would not wish to do anything of the kind, for they know well enough
that historically speaking they have not consistently stood for it any
more than any other denomination. The New Theology does not belong to
any one church but to all. For my own part I would not even take the
trouble to try to turn a Roman Catholic into a Protestant. Let every
man stay in the church whose spiritual atmosphere and modes of worship
best accord with his temperament, but let him recognise the deeper
unity that lies below the formal creeds. The old issue between
Unitarianism and Trinitarianism vanishes in the New Theology; the
bottom is knocked out of the controversy. Unitarianism used to declare
that Jesus was man _not_ God; Trinitarianism maintained that He was God
_and_ man; the oldest Christian thought, as well as the youngest,
regards Him as God _in_ man--God manifest in the flesh. But here
emerges a great point of difference between the New Theology on the one
hand and traditional orthodoxy on the other. The latter would restrict
the description "God manifest in the flesh" to Jesus alone; the New
Theology would extend it in a lesser degree to all humanity, and would
maintain that in the end it will be as true of every individual soul as
ever it was of Jesus. Indeed, it is this belief that gives value and
significance to the earthly mission of Jesus; He came to show us what
we potentially are. This is a great and important issue, which
requires to be treated in a separate chapter.

CHAPTER VI

THE ETERNAL CHRIST

In the course of Christian history a good deal of time has been
occupied in the discussion of the metaphysical question of the complex
unity of the divine nature; and the result has been the doctrine of the
Trinity, a conception which, it has been claimed, at once satisfies and
transcends the operations of the human intellect. Most non-theological
modern minds are, however, somewhat suspicious of the doctrine of the
Trinity; it seems rather too speculative and too remote from ordinary
ways of thinking to possess much real value. But this is quite a
mistake. We cannot dispense with the doctrine of the Trinity, for it,
or something like it, is implied in the very structure of the mind. It
belongs to philosophy even more than to religion, and