concealing natural powers and laws. They were open as sunshine, bright as
noon, a fair company of men and women idealized and gracious, just a
little way off, a little way up. It was humanity projected upon the skies,
divine creatures of more than mortal beauty, but thrilling with human life
and human sympathies. Has Christianity anything to offer in the place of
this charming system of human gods and goddesses?

We answer that the fundamental doctrine of Christianity is the
incarnation, the word made flesh. It is God revealed in man. Under some
doctrinal type this has always been believed. The common Trinitarian
doctrine states it in a somewhat crude and illogical form. Yet somehow the
man Christ Jesus has always been seen to be the best revelation of God.
But unless there were some human element in the Deity, he could not reveal
himself so in a human life. The doctrine of the incarnation, therefore,
repeats the Mosaic statement that "man was made in the image of God."
Jewish and Mohammedan monotheism separate God entirely from the world.
Philosophic monotheism, in our day, separates God from man, by teaching
that there is nothing in common between the two by which God can be
mediated, and so makes him wholly incomprehensible. Christianity gives us
Emmanuel, God with us, equally removed from the stern despotic omnipotence
of the Semitic monotheism and the finite and imperfect humanities of
Olympus. We see God in Christ, as full of sympathy with man, God "in us
all"; and yet we see him in nature, providence, history, as "above all"
and "through all." The Roman Catholic Church has, perhaps, humanized
religion too far. For every god and goddess of Greece she has given us, on
some immortal canvas, an archangel or a saint to be adored and loved.
Instead of Apollo and the Python we have Guido's St. Michael and the
Dragon; in place of the light, airy Mercury she provides a St. Sebastian;
instead of the "untouched" Diana, some heavenly Agnes or Cecilia. The
Catholic heaven is peopled, all the way up, with beautiful human forms;