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