Unquestionably the great prophet spoke with the authority which lesser prophets attributed to God. He made claims, very high claims. Was he only an arrogant and blasphemous man? (He might, perhaps, have been deluded, though the dilemma ignores that possibility—as well it may.) Or was he God? There is no half-way house of vital identity between man as person and God as person, any more than there is a half-way house of material identity between a diamond and a pebble off the beach. _Either-or._ So this dilemma goes. It is very simple, all too simple. It applies beautifully to pebbles and diamonds; why not to living persons? Particularly and excellently, why not to man and God?
Now, as a matter of fact, I am trying to communicate to you at this very moment something that is mine. My knowledge (or my ignorant opinion) is written down on the paper before you, and you will or may receive it—to do with it what you choose. Henceforth it is, or may be, yours as well as mine. Again, I try to communicate to you the content of my will for you. You know and feel that I want your will to be brought to coincide with mine, so that my will and yours shall be vitally identical in regard to what I am writing about. In some degree or another you and I may become one in this regard. I shall then have communicated my knowledge (or my ignorant opinion) and my will to you and they will to some extent or another be both yours and mine. This communication and co-operation is a matter of our choosing to enter into it and be and work together. We have it in our own hands. It is quite different from the relation we have to each other as being parts in the universe, or elements in God looked upon as the pantheist looks upon him, which makes him no more than the universe. We can't help that relation. We share it with the stones as well as with each other and with God. It is a purely abstract business and belongs to 'the night in which all cows are black.' Our cows, on the other hand, are of every sort of colour; and we find, we actually do find, that we can pass on our colours to each other, dye the different cow to our tinge and in turn be dyed. We are concrete, not abstract; and our vital identity one with another is concrete too. It may be and might not be. We choose whether it shall be or not. And, happily, we choose that it shall be, up to a point, far more often and more steadily than we choose that it shall not. Hence the existence of a human community in common knowledge and reason and common will—up to a point.