Arian or Arminian complexion, may find the larger part of this book
acceptable to them if they will read "the Christ God" where the writer
has written "God." They will then differ from him upon little more than
the question whether there is an essential identity in aim and quality
between the Christ God and the Veiled Being, who answer to their
Creator God. This the orthodox post Nicaean Christians assert, and many
pre-Nicaeans and many heretics (as the Cathars) contradicted with its
exact contrary. The Cathars, Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held, with
the Manichaeans, that the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil. The
Christ God was his antagonist. This was the idea of the poet Shelley.
And passing beyond Christian theology altogether a clue can still be
found to many problems in comparative theology in this distinction
between the Being of Nature (cf. Kant's "starry vault above") and the
God of the heart (Kant's "moral law within"). The idea of an antagonism
seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the
Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism. So, too, Buddhism seems to
be "antagonistic." On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and modern
Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God the creator
is altogether and without distinction also God the King of Mankind.
Christianity stands somewhere between such complete identification and
complete antagonism. It admits a difference in attitude between Father
and Son in its distinction between the Old Dispensation (of the Old
Testament) and the New. Every possible change is rung in the great
religions of the world between identification, complete separation,
equality, and disproportion of these Beings; but it will be found that
these two ideas are, so to speak, the basal elements of all theology in
the world. The writer is chary of assertion or denial in these
matters. He believes that they are speculations not at all necessary to
salvation. He believes that men may differ profoundly in their opinions
upon these points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials