him to escape the reproach of heathenism, although such worship, on his own showing, is mere idolatry.  He makes the Lord’s manhood his primary fact, and overthrows that too by refusing the Son of Man a human soul.  The Lord is neither truly God nor truly man, and therefore is no true mediator.  Heathenism may dream of a true communion with the Supreme, but for us there neither is nor ever can be any.  Between our Father and ourselves there is a great gulf fixed, which neither he nor we can pass.  Now that we have heard the message of the Lord, we know the final certainty that God is darkness, and in him is no light at all.  If this be the sum of the whole matter, then revelation is a mockery, and Christ is dead in vain.

[Sidenote:  Athanasius de Incarnatione.]

Arius was but one of many who were measuring the heights of heaven with their puny logic, and sounding the deeps of Wisdom with the plummet of the schools.  Men who agreed in nothing else agreed in this practical subordination of revelation to philosophy.  Sabellius, for example, had reduced the Trinity to three successive manifestations of the one God in the Law, the Gospel, and the Church; yet even he agreed with Arius in a philosophical doctrine of the unity of God which was inconsistent with a real incarnation.  Even the noble work of Origen had helped to strengthen the philosophical influences which were threatening to overwhelm the definite historic revelation.  Tertullian had long since warned the churches of the danger; but a greater than Tertullian was needed now to free them from their bondage to philosophy.  Are we to worship the Father of our spirits or the Supreme of the philosophers?  Arius put the question:  the answer came from Athanasius.  Though his De Incarnatione Verbi Dei was written in early manhood, before the rise of Arianism, we can already see in it the firm grasp of fundamental principles which enabled him so thoroughly to master the controversy when it came before him.  He starts from the beginning, with the doctrine that God is good and not envious, and that His goodness is shown in the creation, and more especially by the creation of man in the image of God, whereby he was to remain in bliss and live the true life, the life of the saints in Paradise.  But when man sinned, he not only died, but fell into the entire corruption summed up in death; for this is the full meaning of the threat ’ye shall die with death.’[1] So things went on from bad to worse on earth.  The image of God was disappearing, and the whole creation going to destruction.  What then was God to do?  He could not take back his sentence that death should follow sin, and yet he could not allow the creatures of his love to perish.  Mere repentance on man’s side could not touch the law of sin; a word from God forbidding the approach of death would not reach the inner corruption.  Angels could not help, for it was not in the image of angels that man was made.  Only he who is himself