that nature in the midst of which man lives, in reaction against which he develops his powers, and to which, on one whole side of his nature, he belongs.  Even in respect of that which men reverently took to be thought concerning God, they seem to have been unaware how much of their material was imaginative and poetic symbolism drawn from the experience of man.  The traditional idea of revelation proved a disturbing factor.  Assuming that revelation gave information concerning God, and not rather the religious experience of communion with God himself, men accepted statements of the documents of revelation as if they had been definitions graciously given from out the realm of the unseen.  In reality, they were but fetches from out the world of the known into the world of the unknown.

The point of interest is this:—­In all possible combinations in which, throughout the history of thought, these three objects had been set, the one with the others, they had always remained three objects.  There was no essential relation of the one to the other.  They were like the points of a triangle of which any one stood over against the other two.  God stood over against the man whom he had fashioned, man over against the God to whom he was responsible.  The consequences for theology are evident.  When men wished to describe, for example, Jesus as the Son of God, they laid emphasis upon every quality which he had, or was supposed to have, which was not common to him with other men.  They lost sight of that profound interest of religion which has always claimed that, in some sense, all men are sons of God and Jesus was the son of man.  Jesus was then only truly honoured as divine when every trait of his humanity was ignored.  Similarly, when men spoke of revelation they laid emphasis upon those particulars in which this supposed method of coming by information was unlike all other methods.  Knowledge derived directly from God through revelation was in no sense the parallel of knowledge derived by men in any other way.  So also God stood over against nature.  God was indeed declared to have made nature.  He had, however, but given it, so to say, an original impulse.  That impulse also it had in some strange way lost or perverted, so that the world, though it had been made by God, was not good.  For the most part it moved itself, although God’s sovereignty was evidenced in that he could still supervene upon it, if he chose.  The supernatural was the realm of God.  Natural and supernatural were mutually exclusive terms, just as we saw that divine and human were exclusive terms.  So also, on the third side of our triangle, man stood over against nature.  Nature was to primitive men the realm of caprice, in which they imagined demons, spirits and the like.  These were antagonistic to men, as also hostile to God.  Then, when with the advance of reflexion these spirits, and equally their counterparts, the good genii and angels, had all died, nature became the realm of iron necessity,