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of Christianity, that we did not know the authorship of a single book of the New Testament, still there would remain a noble moral system and grand spiritual ideals, which we might take to our hearts, and use as the nutriment of noble lives; or, as it is sometimes put, Christianity is the religion of Jesus, and we might have this religion though we were ignorant of Jesus himself.

I would speak with all respect of this view, and not call in question for a moment the genuine Christianity of those who hold it; for we all have imperfect experiences and imperfect thoughts, and the defect is now on this side and now on that. Nevertheless, I am sure that the great mass of believers would feel that it gave a very inadequate account, I do not say of ecclesiastical dogmas, which have been handed down for centuries, and do not always correspond to the present state of living conviction, but of what passed in their own souls when Christianity first took possession of them, and gave shape and colour to their lives, or of what has remained with them as its unrivalled and unique power. To them a Christianity without Christ would be something fundamentally different from that by which they have lived. He is

bound up in their religious affections, and his is the quickening breath which turns into living creatures the cold forms of truth. He is more to them than all his teaching; his love has taken captive their hearts, and led them to the throne of God, and constrained them to all that is not unworthy and selfish in their conduct. Nor have they seen in him only Man ascending to the pinnacle of human goodness, but the grace and love of God coming down to reconcile and save an estranged and sorrowful world.

This experience is the spiritual root of the doctrine of Christ's person which slowly grew up and took shape under the influence of controversies which extended through several centuries. We enter here on the ground of polemical theology, and numerous questions start into view which it is impossible for me to discuss. It is commonly assumed that the ecclesiastical dogma, as it is found in the so-called Athanasian Creed, existed from the first, and that the very foundations of Christianity are the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Deity of Christ. This appears to me quite contrary to the historical evidence, and to the plain statements of the earliest documents. Generations had passed away before the very terms which were

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needed to express these doctrines were invented or adopted; and theology was wrought into clear and precise forms of thought and language only through the application of Greek metaphysics to interpret the deliverances of religious experience. But that, quite independently of erroneous Messianic ideas inherited from Jewish teaching, the disciples looked upon Jesus as much more than a sage, who happened to arise in Palestine, and had some good and useful things to communicate to the world, appears indisputable. "No man cometh unto the Father but by me;" "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father"-these words give utterance to a profound experience in the hearts of disciples; and, whatever view may be taken of the Gospel in which they are found, they seem fairly to express the general sentiment. They do not, however, lay down any doctrine of Christ's ontological rank, or the mode of his relation to the Father. They furnish rather the spiritual material out of which doctrines are fabricated; and it is quite possible that to one who held the later dogma, and boasted of his orthodoxy, they might be blank of meaning, while to another who did not care to push his imperfect reasoning into these transcendent realms, or to assert what

he could not prove, they might be fraught with power and blessing. Nevertheless, in the highest order of mind, spirit and thought work harmoniously together; and the intellect, starting from the philosophy and vocabulary of the age, produces a system which serves, at least for the time being, to incorporate and explain the hidden life of the soul. Thus there inevitably arose, at an early period in the Church's history, a doctrine of Christ's person which placed him outside of all known categories of humanity, and sought to trace the source of that divine impression which he made upon the responsive heart, even while it insisted on the reality of his human nature, and made him the first in a new category of the sons of God. For this purpose the Greek doctrine of the Logos, falling in, as it did, with many expressions and descriptions in the Old Testament, appeared suitable; and it will not be without profit if I endeavour to illustrate the beginnings of Christian theology by sketching the salient features of a doctrine which has had such a remarkable development, and which contains truths that we cannot afford to lose.

The English student is placed at some disadvantage in this inquiry, not only in consequence of our com

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plete departure from Greek modes of thinking, which makes it difficult to recover the exact point of view from which metaphysical questions were regarded, but owing to the want of any precise equivalent to the Greek term "Logos." The usual translation, "the Word," probably leaves most readers entirely in the dark as to its meaning, and they look upon it as a sort of proper name for the second Person in the Trinity. But in the ancient theology the term was never thus emptied of its proper signification; and indeed on this signification was based one of the most telling arguments of the orthodox writers. It was impossible to imagine a time when God was without thought, and therefore thought, although a product of the Divine Mind, must be eternal as God himself. This word "thought" is the best English representative of the Greek term; for it denotes, on the one hand, the faculty of reason, or the thought inwardly conceived in the mind, and, on the other hand, the thought as expressed outwardly through the vehicle of language. In the former sense, too, it has the same ambiguity as the Greek; for we may use it of reason in general, as when we speak of a man of thought, or of a single conception, as when we say, "That is a strange thought."