When it comes to the x, is it not very often a mixture—­an ill-adjusted mixture—­of the Father of Jesus, with the rather negative “beyond all being” of later Greek speculation, and perhaps the Judge of Roman law?  The exact proportions in the mixture will vary with the thinker.  But, in fact, is it not true now that we really only know God through Jesus?  For it is only in and through Jesus that we take the trouble, and have the faith, to explore and test God, to try experiments upon God, to know what he can do and what he will do.  It is only in Jesus that the Love of God (in the New Testament sense), is tenable at all.  It is evanescent apart from Jesus; it rests on the assurance of his words, his work, his personality.  A vague diffused “love of God” for everything in general and nothing in particular, we saw to be a quite different thing from the personal attachment, with which, according to Jesus, God loves the individual man.  That is the centre of the Gospel; it is belief in that, which has done everything in a rational world, as we saw at the beginning; and it is a most impossible belief, never long or very actively held apart from Jesus.  Only in him can we believe it.  Only in him, too, is the new experience of God’s forgiveness and redemption possible, in all its fullness and sureness and power.  “Dieu me pardonnera,” said Heine, “c’est son metier";—­but he had not the Christian sense of what it was that God was to forgive.  It is only in Jesus that we can live the real life of prayer, in the intimate way of Jesus.  All this means that we have to solve our x from Jesus—­not to discover him through it.  The plain fact is that we actually know Jesus a great deal better than we know our x and our y, the elements from which we hoped to reconstruct him.  What does this mean?

It means, bluntly, that we have to re-think our theories of Incarnation on “a posteriori” lines, to begin on facts that we know, and to base ourselves on a continuous exploration and experience of Jesus Christ first.  The simple, homey rule of knowing things before we talk about them holds in every other sphere of study, and it is the rule which Jesus himself inculcated.  We begin, then, with Jesus Christ, and set out to see how far he will take us.  Experience comes first.  “Follow me,” he said.  He chose the twelve men “that they might be with him,” and he let them find out in that intercourse what he had for them; and from what he could give and did give they drew their conclusions as to who and what he is.  There can be no other way of knowing him.  “Luther’s Reformation doctrines,” says Hermann, in his fine book, “The Communion of the Christian with God” (p. 163), “only countenance such a confession of the Deity of Christ as springs naturally to the lips of the man whom Jesus has already made blessed.”  Melanchthon said the same:  “This it is to know Christ—­to receive his benefits—­not to contemplate his natures, or the modes of his incarnation.”  “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”