position is no longer adequate to English circumstances, and there is
not yet in existence a thoroughly satisfactory new and original
position for a Broad Church student to occupy. Shall we, then, desert
the old historic Church in which we were christened and educated? It
would certainly be a loss, and not only to ourselves. Or shall we wait
with drooping head to be driven out of the Church? Such a cowardly
solution may be at once dismissed. Happily we have in the Anglican
Church virtually no excommunication. Our only course as students is
to go forward, and endeavour to expand our too narrow Church
boundaries. Modernists we are; modernists we will remain; let our only
object be to be worthy of this noble name.

But we cannot be surprised that our Church rulers are perplexed. For
consider the embarrassing state of critical investigation. Critical
study of the Gospels has shown that very little of the traditional
material can be regarded as historical; it is even very uncertain
whether the Galilean prophet really paid the supreme penalty as a
supposed enemy of Rome on the shameful cross. Even apart from the
problem referred to, it is more than doubtful whether critics have
left us enough stones standing in the life of Jesus to serve as the
basis of a christology or doctrine of the divine Redeemer. And yet one
feels that a theology without a theophany is both dry and difficult to
defend. We want an avatar, i.e. a 'descent' of God in human
form; indeed, we seem to need several such 'descents,' appropriate to
the changing circumstances of the ages. Did not the author of the
Fourth Gospel recognize this? Certainly his portrait of Jesus is so
widely different from that of the Synoptists that a genuine
reconciliation seems impossible. I would not infer from this that the
Jesus of the Fourth Gospel belonged to a different age from the Jesus
of the Synoptists, but I would venture to say that the Fourth