Prefatory Note
Sir Ropert ANDERSON kindly invites me, as an old friend, to prefix these few lines to his book on THE Deity or Curist. I count it an honour to do so.
On the supreme greatness and significance of the subject I need not dwell. ‘To Christianity, if it is the Christianity of original fact, and not of late and arbitrary theory, the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, true, proper, absolute, 1s vital. It was an insight into that vitality which, in the fourth Christian century, made Athanasius strong contra mundum — against the world,” at least against a vast proportion of the then professing Church, backed in some stages of the struggle by the nominally Christian State. He saw that no compromise was possible, if man’s salvation was to be proclaimed and received in its divine fulness. His opponents were prepared to say practically anything of the greatness of the Christ short of this — that without reserve, without compromise, sans phrase, He is God.
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And the victory was won, for the Church and for the world, on two grounds, which have everything to do with each other. On the one hand, it was shewn that the Gospel record of the Lord cannot be fairly explained, just as it stands, without the recognition of His true Deity — manifested in true Manhood, but true Deity none the less. On the other hand, the human soul, then as now, once fully awakened to itself and to its needs, to its mysterious greatness and to its mysterious but awfully real sinfulness, can find rest only in a Saviour who is, in equal truth, one with man and one with God. Such a Saviour bridges, as with living adamant, the gulf of doom and sin, which severs creature from Maker. A Saviour not guite God is a bridge broken at the farther end.
The author handles his great theme with a penetration and force all his own, and at the same time with worshipping reverence, and with whole-hearted reliance on the Written Word. I pray our Master’s blessing on this close study of the witnesses for the glory of Christ, done not by an official advocate of the Faith, but by one long versed in weighty and difficult duties of civil law and order, accustomed through his
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whole life to the keenest quest of facts, and to the ruthless exposure of fallacy.
Just here and there, upon details which do not touch the real argument, my personal opinion may vary somewhat from the author’s. But I say this only to accentuate my sense of the value of the whole work, its reverence, its penetration, its suggestiveness, its witness to the glory of the Christ of God.
HANDLEY DUNELM.