New Testament, but by reason and history, what shall we say of the union of Christ with God? How can we substantiate the claim that God himself was in any sense one with the Jewish teacher whom Pilate condemned to suffer as a revolutionary upon Calvary? The claim cannot be substantiated at all if we are forbidden, as so many would forbid us, to attribute Personality to God. And if Personality means limitation, we cannot of course call God a Person. Nor can persons, if as such they are essentially limited, be ever united to an unlimited being. But our argument has led us to the opposite conclusion. Personality implies inclusiveness; the more completely a man possesses personality, the more surely is limitation precluded.

And further, are we to attribute love, will, thought, to God, or not? Surely we must do so, or God will not be an intelligible being at all; while if we do, we at once give Him what makes Him a person, and, as such, able to communicate Himself, since these qualities of necessity pass outside themselves to others. To say that God is absolutely unlimited, that He is shut out from no living being, and from no person, is to call Him in the highest degree personal. Further, if God is to communicate Himself to a world of personal beings, it must be through a person; for Personality is the highest thing we know; the highest form of creation is life, and Personality is the fullest manifestation of life that is possible; and therefore we can hardly conceive that God should reveal Himself through any impersonal form of being, or in anything lower than a person. And the person which will thus be the medium of communication must be united with God; and yet he must be distinct from Him, or he would not be a person at all.

It may be asked at this point, Why should God reveal Himself? The answer is that if God is personal, He cannot remain out of contact with other persons; He must communicate Himself to them, and draw them to Himself. He may do this in many ways; all men, in all ages, and at all steps in the development of the race, will not be arrested by the same impressions; but sooner or later He will appear as a person in the midst of persons; He must approach them at their own highest level. True, any great quality seen in men, may make us say "that is like God; that helps me to understand God"; but we cannot tell the true nature, either of man or of God, from one great quality or from one great virtue. Men touch one another, not by this or that characteristic, but by the sum, or the resultant, of them all. So with God; if He is to show Himself at all-as He must, unless we are to think of Him as an irrational force or an unknown quantity-He will best show Himself, not as a conquering Messiah, object of mistaken Jewish hopes; nor as a refined and solitary ascetic, nor as a wonder worker, to make people think that the gods are come down in the likeness of men, nor in any special guise of magnificence or wisdom, thus making a part obscure the whole; but He will surely come with the characteristics of true Personality; attracting others, entering into them, making them leave their old selves and enter into life in Him,-and doing this, above all, by suffering, with them, and for them. God can only reveal Himself, in fact, if the conditions we have learnt to look for are fulfilled, by such a supreme personality as we have just been considering. There may indeed be something in God far higher than Personality; there may be some such thing, as yet unsuspected, possible to man; just as there may be a world in which the very

axioms of mathematics are quite different from what we know them to be here. In that case, the ultimate revelation of God may be something hitherto undreamed of; but till that purely hypothetical stage is reached, or guessed at, the revelation by a complete person must be the complete revelation for us. There may be "other heights in other lives, God willing"; yet we may be forgiven if we cannot conceive of a greater or more god-like thing, even in other spheres of life, than the self-abnegating love by which the completest personality is crowned.

VII. We are thus led back to the great act whose necessity to the race has been unfolded to us in the previous chapters. The end of ethics and of religion alike, is righteousness. Righteousness consists in the right relation between persons-that is, righteousness is fully reached when persons act to one another as if united to one another by the closest of known human ties, the ties of the family. But these ties are severed; instead of the sympathy and union of the true family, there is suspicion, hatred, injury, between person and person; between man and man, and between man and God; and consequently misery, self-reproach, helplessness and despair. How can the Reconciliation, the Atonement, be made? When the injured can pass over into the injurer, expelling the latter's evil nature, and instilling his own goodness. This can only be accomplished by mediation, and by suffering; and that is simply to say, by a person, taking the word in its highest and completest sense. It is the strength of Personality to make possible this passing over, this drawing of apparent opposites into one; and it is the glory of Personality to attain this by suffering, by laying down life to take it again, and to bestow it on

others. Personality, the impulse and the power to share the worst that another can bear, and to impart the best that one can oneself possess, is the true ladder which is let down from heaven to earth, and along which we mortals can emulate the angels by passing back and forth; it is the royal road of spiritual communication, by which what is true of one becomes true of another, and what is done to one becomes done to another; even as the supreme person said, "he that receiveth you receiveth me; and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me."

I.

CHAPTER X

ATONEMENT AND THE RACE

WE on which we

E have now found that the end of the path on which we were started by ethics is a doctrine of Atonement. In other words, we have found that the commands of ethics imply a personal relation; that conquest over evil can only be secured by reconciliation; and that reconciliation, in its complete form, is only possible through the suffering of one who is distinct from the wrong-doer and yet has identified himself with him. Here, we might think, we have found a way of uniting morals adequately with religion, each being the necessary completion and supplement of the other. Religion without morality is not worth calling religion at all; religion must go to morality constantly for her codes of rules; while without religion, morality is but a voice crying in the wilderness, with no power to compel passers-by to obey or even to listen. Yet, even supposing that the adherents of "mere morality" and of religion will both go with us so far, there is still the ground for the old disagreement which perplexed us at the beginning of our journey. The moralist will still ask "Has anything which has gone before lessened the worth of a good act in itself, apart from the religious profession or belief of the agent, or the absence thereof?" while the champion of religion will rejoin, "whatever we have said, Christ's words remain, 'I am the door; no man