These are the two affirmations, equally immediate and equally essential, of every Christian consciousness. Now, the whole theological problem is how to reconcile the two. How can that which is ideal and perfect be realised in history? How can that which is historical be held to be ideal and eternal? Does it not seem as if these attributes were contradictory and exclusive of each other, and that Christianity could not become an ideal religion without severing all its links with a particular history, or that if it would remain an historical religion it must renounce all pretensions to absolute perfection? On the other hand, these two attributes, are they not equally necessary to it? How can it subsist if it obeys the formal and summary logic which summons us to choose between them? Will it be anything more than a speculative philosophy if cut off from its historic tradition? Will it continue to inspire me with confidence, will it place me in security, if it ceases to appear to me to be the perfect and definitive religion?
Theology, from the beginning, has had no other task; at all events, it has had no task more arduous or pressing than that of reconciling these two data. There have always been two tendencies amongst theologians corresponding to two families of minds: the _Idealist_ tendency--that of Origen and his emulators, which puts the emphasis en ideas and constructs a religious metaphysic or gnosis, which of necessity rationalises dogma, and for which history is but a temporary envelope, a sort of external and sensible illustration; and the _Realist_ tendency, represented by the genius of Tertullian, which, obeying an opposite instinct, materialises ideas, gives an anthropomorphic body to everything, even to God, deifies phenomena, and changes contingent history into an eternal metaphysic. From these two tendencies, perpetual and parallel, have issued the two solutions given by Rationalism and by Orthodoxy to the problem as to the essence of Christianity.
The first finds that essence in a few simple truths of reason or of consciousness, which are of all time and all lands, and which impose themselves on every man by their own natural evidence. Jesus of Nazareth was the preacher and the martyr of these truths; but it is clear that His personality is no more essential to Christianity than that of Plato is to his philosophy. Only, mind, in thus severing itself from Christ the Christian Religion ceases to be positive and becomes an abstract and dead doctrine; it loses its religious pith and power.