Now, that is only half the truth.  But if I may use a paradox, it is the important half, the primary half.  And it is just that essential element in the Christian experience of Jesus that modern preaching, under the humanistic impulse, is neglecting.  Indeed, liberal preachers have largely ceased to sermonize about Him, just because it has become so easy!  Humanism has made Jesus obvious, hence, relatively impotent.  With its unified cosmos, its immanent God, its exalted humanity, the whole Christological problem has become trivial.  It drops the cosmic approach to the person of Jesus in favor of the ethical.  It does not approach Him from the side of God; we approach nothing from that side now; but from the side of man.  Thus He is not so much a divine revelation as He is a human achievement.  Humanity and divinity are one in essence.  The Creator is distinguished from His creatures in multifarious differences of degree but not in kind.  We do not see, then, in Christ, a perfect isolated God, joined to a perfect isolated man, in what were indeed the incredible terms of the older and superseded Christologies.  But rather, He is the perfect revelation of the moral being, the character of God, in all those ways capable of expression or comprehension in human life, just because he is the highest manifestation of a humanity through which God has been forever expressing Himself in the world.  For man is, so to speak, his own cosmic center; the greatest divine manifestation which we know.  Granted, then, an ideal man, a complete moral being, and ipso facto we have our supreme revelation of God.

So runs the thrice familiar argument.  Of course, we have gained something by it.  We may drop gladly the old dualistic philosophy, and we must drop it, though I doubt if it is so easy to drop the dualistic experience which created it.  But I beg to point out that, on the whole, we have lost more religiously than we have gained.  For we have made Jesus easy to understand, not as He brings us up to His level, but as we have reduced Him to ours.  Can we afford to do that?  Bernard’s mystical line, “The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His loved ones know,” has small meaning here.  The argument is very good humanism but it drops the word “Saviour” out of the vocabulary of faith.  Oh, how many sermons since, let us say, 1890, have been preached on the text, “He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.”  And how uniformly the sermons have explained that the text means not that Jesus is like God, but that God is like Jesus—­and we have already seen that Jesus is like us!  One only has to state it all to see beneath its superficial reasonableness its appalling profanity!