sity of
lonely goodness, man's alienation from God in a helpless fallen estate.
For the bridging of the gulf between God and His world Christianity
offers the incarnation; for the saving of man from his lost estate
Christianity offers the Cross. The incarnation is the reentry of God
into a world from which, indeed, according to the Christian way of
thinking, He has never been entirely separate, but from which He has,
none the less, been so remote that if ever it were to be rescued from
its ruined condition there was needed a new revelation of God in
humanity; and the Atonement is just the saving operation of God thus
incarnated.

Eastern Christianity has made most of the incarnation. The great Greek
theologies were built around that. They exhausted the resources of a
language particularly fitted for subtle definition in their endeavour to
explain the mystery of it, and, after more than a century of bitter
debate about the nature and person of Christ, contented themselves with
affirming the reality both of the human and divine in His nature,
neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeed
making clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they so
sought to define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. But
though their keen dialectic broke down under the burden they laid upon
it, they did, nevertheless, keep alive just that confidence in God as
one come into human life and sharing it and using it, without which
there would have been in all the faith and thinking of the West for more
than a thousand years an unbridged and unbridgeable gulf between God and
man.

Indeed, when we turn back again to the great Greek symbols with that
conception of the immanence of God which the truer insights of our own
time have done so much to supply, we find these old forms and phrases
unexpectedly hospitable to our own interpretations. If the Western
Church had been more strongly influenced by the philosophical insight of
the early Eastern Church, Western Christendom might have been saved from
a good deal of that theological hardness from which great numbers are
just now reacting.

But Western Christendom took the Cross for the central symbol of its
faith. What would have happened to Western Christendom without Augustine
we do not know, and it is idle to try to guess, but Europe in its
religious thinking followed for a thousand years the direction he gave
it. His theology is only the travail o