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called in question the chief are the Virgin birth of our Lord, His bodily resurrection from the dead on the third day, His real Presence in the Holy Communion, the necessity of Episcopal ordination to a valid ministry. These doctrines are no doubt denied from the pulpits of the Church and in the writings of certain of her ministers. But it must be perfectly clear to the plain man that the grammatical meaning of the Book of Common Prayer asserts all these things. If he chooses to go beyond this position and follow theological controversy in these high matters, he ceases to be a plain man and puts himself in the place of the scholar with all the scholar's responsibilities. He will have the scholar's problems to deal with. The questions raised and the methods suggested for their solution have a certain difficulty, it is true, but the difficulty is not one that is peculiar to theological discussions. The same sort of difficulty inheres in the process of arriving at conclusions in any department of human knowledge. Those who want conclusions of this sort must be content to work for them. The ancients had a way of consulting an oracle when they wanted guidance in any department of life, but the answers of the oracles which have come down to us do not suggest that the results of the method were altogether satisfactory. There is

one part of the Christian Church which still adheres to the oracular method, but again, the results are not convincing. It remains for the plain man to take the teaching the Church gives him in its obvious sense or to resort to the methods of the scholars. Whether you want to know the meaning of a passage of S. Paul or the meaning of a passage of Shakespeare; whether you want to know the constant teaching of the Church on the real Presence or the varying teaching of science on the constitution of the material universe, you must work. The Church offers you the method of simple acceptance or the method of patient research; each method has its advantages - and its penalties.

VIII

THE INCARNATION AS THE MEANS OF

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UNION WITH GOD

HAT think ye of Christ?" is a question that must be faced by every religious teacher to-day. To this question two radically different answers are being given by teachers who call themselves Christians.

The first answer is what we may call the answer of natural religion. Jesus Christ was the best man that ever lived; the greatest of all the saints. After waiting for centuries God finally found in him a man after His own heart, so godlike in character that he might even be called divine. In that sense, that he was so godlike in character, he manifested God to the world. But he was entirely human like the rest of us: he was born in the natural way of a human father and mother; he lived a perfectly natural life; there was nothing miraculous about him at all; he went through all the same experiences through which we must pass, only he withstood all temptation and came forth triumphant without a scar and

without a stain. His life was terminated by his death upon the cross. That was the end. Among his devoted followers fanciful stories soon developed, about his conception and nativity, his infancy and childhood, a ministry teeming with miracles, and his resurrection and ascension. His disciples could not believe that this man whom they had loved so deeply could have come into the world like other men, or that death had been the end. So they invented the stories which make up the greater part of the gospel narrative.

Now this view of Christ is not only the Unitarian view; it is the view of what has been called "the wide church," which admirably describes the popular religion of the average man in the street. Perhaps one of the best representatives of "the wide church" is the editor of The Outlook, Dr. Lyman Abbott. In one of his later books called "My Four Anchors," he describes the character of our Lord, and then goes on to say: That is a character worth having, that is a life worth living. And that is what I mean by the divinity of Jesus Christ. There is not a great deal, now, of debate between Unitarians and Trinitarians." Then further on he says: "I do not need to decide whether he rose from the dead. I do not need to decide whether he made water into wine, or fed five thousand with two loaves

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and five little fishes. still he stands the one transcendent figure toward whom the world has been steadily growing, and whom the world has not yet overtaken even in his teachings." A little later he says: "I do not know what is his metaphysical relation to the Infinite. I say it reverently—I do not care.” ("My Four Anchors," pp. 24, 27, 32.)

Take all that away, and

This answer would no doubt be given in substantially the same way by some men in the Protestant Episcopal Church to-day: not by all, of course, but by many of the men who call themselves Broad Churchmen. Not long ago the Dean of the Cambridge Theological School, Dr. Hodges, brought out a book called “Everyman's Religion." In that book he quotes something that Dr. Everett of Harvard wrote about our Lord: His divinity is not that of one who has come down from above; it is that of the life in which the divine element that has been working in the world comes at last to its consummation." The comment of Dean Hodges upon these words is, "This may not satisfy all the requirements of the Nicene theology, but it touches the heart of the truth."

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The other answer to the question, "What think ye of Christ?" is a radically different answer. It is the answer of the Catholic religion. Jesus

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