The truth is that we are learning, as we never learnt before, to question the manner of our own thinking about these high matters. We have become aware, as we were not, of the insidious materialism of our instruments of thought. We have learnt that to apply a logic of things and their qualities to problems of the nature of God and man is to ensure misunderstanding. So when Christians tell us that the person of Jesus Christ is divine and that he had, or was, or is, a human nature and a divine nature, and a human will and a divine will conjoined in the divine person, we see plainly that they are applying to the truth of him that logic of things and their qualities which they have acquired through dealing easily and habitually with things. They are trying to explain him by taking human nature as one thing or set of qualities, and divine nature as another, and they are joining them by a third. You see two vertical stones and one across the top. And if the stones are alive and the top one 'hypostatically' effects the union between the other two, stones they still are; or sets of qualities conceived as things, which is all the same.
The mighty consciousness of Jesus escaped entanglement by these logical, spatial, materialistic nets. He knew by experience the activity of a will in which the will of God and the will of man were united and engaged at once in one purpose. He knew, felt, lived, God and man as one in himself. And in the fulness of this he differed from all other prophets, for whom it was at best, and that but rarely, an unrealized ideal.
Shall we say, then, that for us and for Christians it is well not to reason about the problems he presents to thought? Even if we do, we shall reason and so will they. Neither we nor they can help it. But we may put our reasoning together, and learn each from the other. There is a meeting-place here, inviting us to join hands.
Where Love is the Lover, Love streaming from the Lover is the Lover; the Lover streaming from himself, and existing in another Person. _Traherne._
_Aut Deus aut homo non bonus_—so Christians have said and believed. The dilemma, though comfortable for not a few among them, and having about it a certain truth, often involves a false conception of both man and God. The truth it holds is not their comfort; they do not know that. What most people mean when they use the dilemma is that the prophet of Nazareth was either as a person God and not as a person man, or he was as a person man and a bad one. It seems conclusive, this either-or. But there is no logical weapon more fatal to our discovery of the truth of spirit and life. 'Either-or' comes from a field of interest where things stand out conspicuous and apart, and cannot be thought of as communicating virtue and riches and themselves one to another. It brings with it an insinuating suggestion, if not assertion, that the affairs of spirit and life are in the same case. Personality, which is an affair of spirit and life, seems no more to admit of such intercommunication than does materiality. Two persons can no more communicate themselves to each other than two stones. Which, on the crude exposed face of it, is nonsense. They can, they do; and we know it.