All work of man, yet, like all work of man,
A beauty with defect—till That which knows,
And is not known, but felt thro’ what we feel
Within ourselves is highest, shall descend
On this half-deed, and shape it at the last
According to the Highest in the Highest.”
Christianity is a planetary and human religion: being the revelation of those aspects of Godhead which are most intelligible and helpful to us in our present stage of development. But it is more than a revelation, it is a manifestation of some of the attributes of Godhead in the form of humanity.
The statement that Christ and God are one, is not really a statement concerning Christ, but a statement concerning what we understand by God. It is useless, and in the literal sense preposterous, to explain the known in terms of the unknown: the converse is the right method. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Every son of man is potentially also a son of God, but the union was deepest and completest in the Galilean.
The ideas of incarnation and revelation are not confined to the domain of religion; they are common to music and letters and science: in all we recognise “a flash of the will that can,”
“All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,