is born among men.  This has been the order of development in history.  Men felt the Divine Power and Presence ages before they had learned so much of theology as to say—­God.  The feeling of God—­religion—­always keeps, in healthy natures, far ahead of theology—­the thought about Him.  The deepest religion finds no word for the mystery before which it bows.  Its only thought may be that no thought is sufficient.

   “In that high hour thought was not.”

Theology, then, as man’s thought about God, is necessarily conditioned by man’s mind.  It is under the general limitations of the human intellect, and the special limitations of thought in each race and age and individuality.  It cannot escape these limitations, expand as they may.  A flooding of the mind from on high may overflow these embankments but they still stand, shaping the flow of the fullest tides.  The individuality of a great writer asserts itself most strongly in his greatest works.  His deepest inspiration brings out most plainly his mental form, just as the drawing of a full breath shows the real shape of a man.  No possible theory of inspiration should lead us to look for the submergences of the dykes of thought cast up by race and age and individuality.

As a matter of fact, we find no uniformity in the theologies of the New Testament writers.  Men have tried hard to make it appear that there was such a unity of thought.  Never was more ingenious joiner-work done than in the “harmonies” of the New Testament writers.  But facts are stubborn things, and in this case have resisted even the omnipotence of human ingenuity; as open minds have seen, despite the doctors.

St. Paul’s Epistles reveal a theology by no means as precise and fixed as is popularly imagined, undergoing rapid changes, growing with his growth, always suffused from the soul with emotions which struggled against the prison bars of thought and speech.  His intensely speculative mind had furnished a system of thought into which he built such ideas as these:  The pre-existence of Christ, as, in some mystic, undefined way, the Head of Humanity; the sacrificial nature of His death; the justification of the sinner through faith; the life of Christ within the soul, as the Human Ideal; the speedy return of Christ in person to reign on earth (at least in the early part of his career); the resurrection of the pious dead; the translation of living believers; the final victory of goodness over evil; and the ending of the mediatorship of Christ, God then becoming all in all.

This was the form which the mystery of God’s relationship to man took in the mind of this great genius, and around which the fiery passion of his hunger after righteousness shaped itself.

In the Epistle of St. James, assuming the traditional authorship, how much of this theology can you find?  The incarnation is nowhere clearly stated.  The name of Christ occurs but twice.  His atonement is scarcely mentioned.  The prophets are held up as examples of patience, under suffering without any reference to Christ.  Paul’s especial doctrine of justification by faith is explicitly denied.  Of his fellowship with the Gentiles and his broad human sympathies, there is nothing whatever.  All is intensely Jewish.  If Paul’s theology is orthodoxy, James is dreadfully unsound.[33] “The fundamentals” are all lacking.