rience. Monophysitism is blind to the
difference between person and nature because it places all psychic
experiences on the one level. Determined to find unity in its ideal,
it seeks an inappropriate unity, the mathematical unity, the unity that
excludes plurality. To the monophysite the major part of the gospels
is a sealed book, because the major part of the facts there recorded
about Christ could not possibly have happened to a one-natured Christ.
His human knowledge, normal, limited, progressive, His human will,
natural, adequate to the human, inadequate to the superhuman task, his
human feelings, his body consubstantial with ours are to the
monophysite merely shadows or symbols or aspects of something greater.
They are dwarfed into nothingness. They are lost in the divine
omniscience, omnipotence and transcendent love.

CHAPTER VI

MONOPHYSITISM IN THE PRESENT DAY

"To believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ" is an
ideal that the thoughtful Christian strives to attain. He expects to
find the solution of high moral and speculative problems in that union
of divine and human. The right faith is not easily reached. It is an
elusive prize. There are conditions moral and intellectual attaching
to its possession. The moral conditions may take a lifetime to fulfil.
Even on its intellectual side faith is a long process. No sudden
mental grasp of the whole truth can be attained. It dawns on the mind
gradually. The discipline of faith in the incarnation consists in a
gradual and laborious advance from stage to stage. The various stages
are half-truths or inadequate conceptions of Christ. They are
objectified in the Christological heresies. These heresies arrange
themselves in a sequence so strict and so logical that one could almost
say that they are deducible _a priori_ from the concept "divine-human."
Certainly the subjective fancies of the heresiarchs do not provide the
whole account. There is something of the universal in these heresies.
They are in the main current of religious thought. As the chief
historic systems of philosophy repeat themselves in each generation and
in the intellectual development of individual thinkers, so do the
Christological heresies recur. There is considerable truth in Hegel's
contentions that the development of a man's mind is one with that of
the general consciousness, that the individual reason is a miniature of
the universal reason, that in fact t