In the light of the new theory of the universe which we have reviewed, it flashes upon us that both defenders and assailants of the doctrine of the incarnation, in the age-long debate, have proceeded from the assumption that God and man are opposites.  Men contended for the divineness of Jesus in terms which by definition shut out his true humanity.  They asserted the identity of a real man, a true historic personage, with an abstract notion of God which had actually been framed by the denial of all human qualities.  Their opponents with a like helplessness merely reversed the situation.  To admit the deity of Jesus would have been for them, in all candour and clear-sightedness, absolutely impossible, because the admission would have shut out his true humanity.  On the old definitions we cannot wonder that the struggle was a bitter one.  Each party was on its own terms right.  If God is by definition other than man, and man the opposite of God, then it is not surprising that the attempt to say that Jesus of Nazareth was both, remained mysticism to the one and seemed folly to the other.

Now, within the area of the philosophy which begins with Kant this old antinomy has been resolved.  An actual circle of clear relations joins the points of the old hopeless triangle.  Men are men because of God indwelling in them, working through them.  The phrase ‘mere man’ is seen to be a mere phrase.  To say that the Nazarene, in some way not genetically to be explained, but which is hidden within the recesses of his own personality, shows forth in incomparable fulness that relation of God and man which is the ideal for us all, seems only to be saying over again what Jesus said when he proclaimed:  ’I and My Father are one.’  That Jesus actualised, not absolutely in the sense that he stood out of relation to history, but still perfectly within his relation to history, that which in us and for us is potential, the sonship of God—­that seems a very simple and intelligible assertion.  It certainly makes a large part of the debate of ages seem remote from us.  It brings home to us that we live in a new world.

Interesting and fruitful is Hegel’s expansion of the idea of redemption beyond that of the individual to that of the whole humanity, and in every aspect of its life.  In my relation to the world are given my duties.  The renunciation of outward duty makes the inward life barren.  The principle which is to transform the world wears an aspect very different from that of stoicism, of asceticism or even of the individualism which has sought soul-salvation.  In the midst of unworthiness and helplessness there springs up the consciousness of reconciliation.  Man, with all his imperfections, becomes aware that he is the object of the loving purpose of God.  Still this redemption of a man is something which is to be worked out, in the individual life and on the stage of universal history.  The first step beyond the individual life is that of the Church.