of Christ is an essential element in Christianity. "His eternal relation
to God is the only way of conceiving Him which answers to His real
greatness."[4] The Christ was present and active in the creation. John's
use of the word "Logos" is right. "Logos" is not merely a result but a
Force. It is not only the speech, but the speaker. Let us admit once for
all that the fact, much belabored of the critics, is a fact. Let us not
be afraid of the word which expresses it. God must be anthropomorphic if
He exists. We can come nowhere near to thinking out any other kind of
God. Christ has the value of God to devout Christians because in the
fullness of His moral perfections He expresses God so far as we can know
Him and man so far as man can hope and grow.

[Footnote 4: Denney. Studies in Theology.]

[Sidenote: How Son of God.]

Is His Sonship different from ours, or only an expansion of the fullness
and perfection of our sonship? This last seems to me a most important
question. If He was born as we were born--that is, as to the beginning
of His earthly life, there can be no pre-eminent sense in which He was
the Son of God. He was either a happy accident of natural birth or a
"sport" in evolution.

[Sidenote: The Virgin Birth.]

This brings us to that doctrine which is the greatest challenge to the
doubter: "Conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary,"--a
doctrine fiercely fought by Harnack and yet by no means to be dismissed
as he dismisses it. His teaching on this point seems to me the result of
his theory of Christianity. If one seeks to rid Christianity of the