Our distinctions often but obscure the issue, and make us richer in verbal terms, but not in real thought. Whether we have a life beyond or not, it is pretty sure that we have no definite and authentic knowledge about our previous existence. Suppose we assume a succession of incarnations, and the question looms up: organic or not? Our present life is one with that of the race; how afterward? If similar, how can personal identity be squared with the organic life of the human race, and in what respect has it an individual existence? If not similar, how can we feel any relation to unknown conditions? Or will our knowledge be also transplanted? and how? What is then the relation between our knowledge and our brain, or between matter and spirit?

It is evident that all inquiry after immortality brings up more problems than it solves. It has become plain, meanwhile, that we are now in possession of an intensive immortality-a life of the highest possible significance, and, further, that all investigation in this direction must start from the organic life of mankind. In the human racial life lies the key to the question of, and the demand for, an immortality also extensive. We have, nevertheless, a stronger reason for believing in a continuance of personal life than the former position allowed: the principal proof is deduced from the transcendence of God, which guarantees the liberty as well as the immortality of man. As was seen we connected the freedom of man with the transcendence of God: just as God is transcendent above and immanent in creation, thus is man part and parcel of Nature, and yet her lord and master, has he his freedom in, although not from, creation. Even so it is with immortality; if God is really transcendent, then the image of God can also have a transcendent existence, and overcome the limitation of this earthly life through a successive life. From a pantheistic standpoint there would be no necessity for an immortality of man, as every personal existence would be little more than a wave of the All, a becoming conscious of the Unconscious; from a theistic point of view the question of immortality is a necessary postulate, which cannot easily be gainsaid.

The absolute transcendence of God must find its counterpart in the relative transcendence of man. Hence if consciousness is simply organic, a function of the body, and if it flows away with the death

of the body, then the image of God in man would merely have a temporal character, and not be a full, if finite, expression of the majesty of God. Creation would have lost its chief purpose, if the consciousness of man were not indestructible, and if the precious powers and talents given to the human race did not survive death. The whole desire after further life, the inextinguishable life-energy, would be inexplainable and useless, and a mere mockery. The glory of God demands the continuance of personally conscious beings and their maintenance even with changed conditions.

To recapitulate: If the world has a real existence, then the transcendence of God follows as a necessary deduction, unless we are to believe in a logically absurd pantheism. Further, if the consciousness of man is a real entity, then the freedom of man follows as a necessary consequence from the transcendence of God, the same element being involved in the freedom of man as in the transcendence of God. For the freedom of man is not merely an immanent, functional freedom, but also a transcendent, metaphysical freedom. It is a freedom which transcends any given experience; "Man reflectively surveys the process of the world," as Professor George B. Foster would have it. Finally, the same element in freedom which proves the autonomy of the human mind, proves also that we have through and by reason of this autonomy an intensive immortality, while the transcendence of God moreover assures us that, even as we are now in possession of immortal life, so in the future there will be no break, but a continuity of life, consequently, life eternal or an extensive immortality, forever and ever.

CRITICAL NOTES

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NICENE CREED: A REPLY TO PROFESSOR FAULKNER

In the January number of the American Journal of Theology, Professor Faulkner discusses the creed of Nicaea with apparently two interests in view. He regards the formulation and enforcement of the creed of Nicaea as necessary in order to preserve Christianity in the world. He aims also to see the Arian view of the fourth century as a kind of sideshoot from the main growth of doctrine as we find it in the second and third centuries. The argument seems to be that to combat the Modalist's denial of an independent personality of Christ, Origen and other Fathers had declared the subordination of the Son and that Lucian of Antioch and Arius thereupon seize upon this defective phase of Origen's thought and develop it logically into a Christology with the intention of denying the deity of Christ. This presentation views Arianism as a kind of aberration from a true historical development. In this argument Dr. Faulkner makes use of historical data which for the most part need not be called in question, though I am unable to see a justification for some of his estimates of character and motive. It is not clear that Athanasius and Dr. Faulkner are justified in pronouncing the Arians slippery. If there is one party whose theological view is sharply defined and stoutly defended it is theirs. What Athanasius counted craftiness (Ad Afros 5) was the Arian willingness to assent to scriptural expressions while they rebelled at the term homoousios which to him, though not to them, was the necessary meaning of the scriptural language. But while I do not share the suspicions of Athanasius about the integrity of the Arians and count it a blemish when he attributes low cunning to them or styles them men born of a dunghill, my sympathy is very naturally with Athanasius as a theologian and against the Arians for a reason that may surprise Dr. Faulkner. The reason is that I am a Unitarian. Dr. Channing, of blessed memory, began his life with a somewhat indistinct Arian view of Christ; but, with improved knowledge of the history of Christian thought, Unitarians soon passed from that position, and, while far from being disciples of Athanasius, rejoiced in the failure of Arianism. I consider that an effort to make this clear may promote a I Professor John Alfred Faulkner, "The First Great Christian Creed."

good understanding among men and assist in the comprehension of the whole matter under discussion. Why Arius does not satisfy us is apparent. We are all dealing with an interpretation of the being known to us in the gospels, and Arius had arrived at a view which substitutes for the man Jesus a being who is neither God nor man, a semi-deity who had nothing human about him except the physical body needed for activity on earth. Man's knowledge of God is thus derived from a finite, created, superhuman being who himself had no complete knowledge of God. The conception not only sacrifices the humanity of Jesus but banishes God himself from the universe in which we live. It would be absurd for a modern Unitarian to espouse the conception of Arius.

Dr. Faulkner alludes to a view that Jesus "was a mere man in the recent Unitarian sense," but possibly he has forgotten or failed to grasp what Unitarians may mean by man. There are occasional rebels against orthodoxy who rest content with the disclaimer of orthodoxy, but the Unitarianism with which I am familiar has a very positive and affirmative tradition of thought. What Channing meant by his "one sublime idea" of the dignity of human nature has usually been carried to a more metaphysical expression. Not content with a mere repudiation of Augustine's or Calvin's doctrine of human depravity; not content with the proclamation that the moral sentiment is integral to man, and that with all their varying degrees of infirmity men are reflexes of the divine character, becoming men in the truest and most essential sense in proportion as they mirror the character of God; not content with this the Unitarian has sought to affirm a sufficient ground for his estimate of man by the view that human personalities are concretions of the universal divine consciousness, so that in a metaphysical sense and not in a mere sense of moral responsiveness, men are the children of God. One illustrative utterance is Dr. Martineau's: "God plants out self-conscious and self-directing minds, infinitesimal repetitions of himself with the divine characteristics of spiritual being" (letter to Rev. W. H. Fish in Carpenter's James Martineau, Theologiau and Teacher, p. 593). That Unitarians have not carried this belief out into a sharply expressed formula is because of some doubt as to the success of any such effort on the part of any. That the human personality is rooted and grounded in God is a faith held on the compulsion of religious experience. The exact intellectual formulation of it is less important. Should anyone object that the faith cannot avail without the formula he may well bethink himself that the Christian church had protracted difficulties in finding a formula for the same relationship of human and divine in the case of Christ and that the formula of Chalcedon is not so much a

real statement of the relationship as a correction of divergent extreme tendencies which would sacrifice either the human or the divine. If Dr. Faulkner were speaking of Aloys Biedermann's correction of GottMensch in the interest of Gotteskindschaft he would avoid crediting to Biedermann the notion that Jesus was "a mere man." By the same token I am puzzled by the allusion to "a recent Unitarian" attitude.

We are now able to consider the Christology of the Fathers. All Christians believed that there was a divine background to the life and personality of Jesus. The dynamist spoke of the heavenly power of spirit given Jesus for his work. The Modalist made all but the material body identical with the one only God. The first seems to have been coolly and empirically accounting for superhuman marvels. The second seems to have been using the analogy of pagan myths of divine apparitions on earth, with a fatal sacrifice of the humanity of the being presented in our gospels. A third party which may be called the Hypostatic party considered Jesus as uniting his humanity with a Hypostasis or agent of deity. The Trinitarian controversy was about the relation of this divine Hypostasis to God the Father. It is enough to say that Athanasius so defined the relation as to preserve the full deity of the divine brought near in Jesus, repudiating any semi-polytheistic Arian notion of a Hypostasis finite and lower than God, and affirming a unity of Word and God so complete that his critics complained of a loss of numerical distinction. The critics spoke for a philosophy or science which needed the separation of the Hypostasis or Logos in order to solve the metaphysical enigma of a manifold world sprung from an absolute unity. They needed to think of a creative agent who mediated absolute unity and the manifold creation. Athanasius was less concerned about science and metaphysics. The pressure in him was a religious motive, and though he did not express the religious interest in a manner congenial to modern times, he rendered a service by clamoring in the name of religion for the faith that the divine seen in the companionship of Jesus was no "second God" but a divine identical in essence with the Father. In his address on The Trinity and Modern Thought, Dr. William Adams Brown justly says, "The Deity of Christ, as Athanasius conceived it, meant the substitution of the present God of Christian faith for the abstract and transcendent God of philosophy." It is true that for Athanasius there still remained a puzzling discrimination of Logos and Father and that the religious apprehension of God was expressed as an apprehension of the Logos rather than of the Father. This was due to the doctrinal history that lay back of him. Nevertheless I hope now to have made it evident why a Unitarian sympathizes with Athanasius rather