man it is otherwise.”  “Therefore the false light thinketh and declareth itself to be above all works, words, customs, laws, and order, and above that life which Christ led in the body which He possessed in His holy human nature.  So likewise it professeth to remain unmoved by any of the creature’s works; whether they be good or evil, against God or not, is all alike to it; and it keepeth itself apart from all things, like God in eternity; and all that belongeth to God and to no creature it taketh to itself, and vainly dreameth that this belongeth to it.”  “It doth not set up to be Christ, but the eternal God.  And this is because Christ’s life is distasteful and burdensome to nature, therefore it will have nothing to do with it; but to be God in eternity and not man, or to be Christ as He was after His resurrection, is all easy and pleasant and comfortable to nature, and so it holdeth it to be best.”

These three views of the manner in which we may hope to become “partakers of the Divine nature,” are all aspects of the truth.  If we believe that we were made in the image of God, then in becoming like Him we are realising our true idea, and entering upon the heritage which is ours already by the will of God.  On the other hand, if we believe that we have fallen very far from original righteousness, and have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, then we must believe in a deliverance from outside, an acquisition of a righteousness not our own, which is either imparted or imputed to us.  And, thirdly, if we are to hope for a real change in our relations to God, there must be a real change in our personality,—­a progressive transmutation, which without breach of continuity will bring us to be something different from what we were.  The three views are not mutually exclusive.  As Vatke says, “The influence of Divine grace does not differ from the immanent development of the deepest Divine germ of life in man, only that it here stands over-against man regarded as a finite and separate being—­as something external to himself.  If the Divine image is the true nature of man, and if it only possesses reality in virtue of its identity with its type or with the Logos, then there can be no true self-determination in man which is not at the same time a self-determination of the type in its image.”  We cannot draw a sharp line between the operations of our own personality and those of God in us.  Personality escapes from all attempts to limit and define it.  It is a concept which stretches into the infinite, and therefore can only be represented to thought symbolically.  The personality must not be identified with the “spark,” the “Active Reason,” or whatever we like to call the highest part of our nature.  Nor must we identify it with the changing Moi (as Fenelon calls it).  The personality, as I have said in Lecture I. (p. 33), is both the end—­the ideal self, and the changing Moi, and yet neither.  If either thesis is held divorced from its antithesis,