prophecy of the divine Incarnation and the grounds of its possibility. God can express Himself in His own image, He can express Himself therefore in manhood, He can show Himself as man. And conversely in the occurrence of the Incarnation lies the supreme evidence of the real moral likeness of man to God. We have then in Christ Jesus a real knowledge of God, expressed in terms of humanity."

Dr. Gore makes this plea in considering the title of the Catholic creeds to permanence. "It is necessary that they should be fairly criticised, but also that they should be appreciated before they are criticised." We venture both to appreciate and to criticise the phrase in the Creed "very God of very God."

It is evident that the Council was not satisfied with such expressions as "the Son of God" alone, because human sonship conveys a picture of two individualities entirely separate and distinct, and also independent of each other: the divines of the Nicene age must have felt that the relationship between God and man in his image was of a more interdependent character than such a word picture could give, and so they decided upon the term "very God of very God" to indicate a complete unity and atonement. The phrase is ambiguous, and difficult of right interpretation. Frankly we feel that Christian Science states what they tried to explain and failed! Is not this the meaning that should be properly understood in the relation of God and Christ, and which their expressions were really meant to convey? Says Mrs. Eddy:

"Immortal man was and is God's image or idea, even the infinite expression of infinite Mind, and immortal man is co-existent and co-eternal with that Mind. He has been forever in the eternal Mind,

God;

God and man are not the same, but in the order of divine Science, God and man co-exist and are eternal. God is the parent Mind, and man is God's spiritual offspring."

"Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; the generic term for all that reflects God's image and likeness; the conscious identity of being as found in Science, in which man is the reflection of God, or Mind, and therefore is eternal; that which has no separate mind from God; that which has not a single quality underived from Deity; that which possesses no life, intelligence, nor creative power of his own, but reflects spiritually all that belongs to his Maker." (Science and Health, pp. 336, 475.) Dr. Gore reasons out the question in this manner: "If God is eternal love, there must be an eternal object for His love. Again the life of reason is a relationship of the subject which thinks, to the object thought, and an eternally perfect mind postulates an eternal object for its contemplation. . . . Thus it is that our upward soaring trains of thought lead us to postulate over against God in His eternal being, also an eternal expression of that being which shall be both an object to His thought, a satisfaction to His will, and a repose to His love, and this is St. John's doctrine of the Logos, the eternal expression of God's being in fellowship with Himself: 'The word was with God, and the word was God.' . . . worship I say, is the recognition of God in all things, and also of all things in God."

If thought, feeling the sanity and the beauty of such reasoning, is nevertheless somewhat startled as to whether this view of Christ Jesus may lead to a conclusion which

implies a participation in the divine order of creation which is wholly presumptious for the rest of mankind to hope to share, it must be admitted that every student of the Bible reads of boundless promises. Indeed no sermon has ever been preached at any revival congress which does not proclaim the certainty that a man who is truly willing to renounce sin, and to accept Christ as his Redeemer from all the wickedness and ills of this mortal life, shall be received into the heavenly kingdom, be born again of truth and grace, and become a child of God, and even a "joint-heir with Christ."

And is this not simply a particular way of saying that man, free from sin, sickness, and death, is a child of the loving Father-Mother God, and is truly made in the divine image, and can be found in that state of perfection and holiness from which he has never fallen except in that "mist" and "deep sleep" which characterizes the Adamic sense and version of creation? Furthermore there is abundant proof that this creation is not to be looked upon as real life, since it is obviously a true, righteous, and necessary exposure of the lie of evil, and its entirely false estimate and idea of God.-"as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." (I. Cor. 15: 22.)

"In the after-light of glory,

When we know as we are known,
We shall see that perfect knowledge,
Cometh not till we are grown—
Grown into the perfect likeness
One with Christ eternally,

'Tis this hope that Thou has left us,

Hope we each may make our own,

Christ in God and we made Christ-like,

In a perfect union one."

HOPE FAIRFAX TAYLOR.

Again Dr. Gore sees in this perfect expression of Principle and its idea a proof of the presence of Love, for he continues:

"We are taught by the Incarnation that the equality of the divine personality is love. The thought of the fatherhood of God as that moral sense which implies His love, is so familiar, at least superficially to us, that the less thoughtful among us are apt to assume it as quite self-evident; as if it were a matter of course apart from Christ's revelation. But it does not require much thought to enable us to perceive, or much bitter experience, or much sympathy, to enable us to feel, that the world apart from Christ gives us no adequate assurance that God is Love. That God is love means of course, not merely that there exists such a thing as love in the world, nor merely that it represents something in God. It carries with it also the assurance that love is the motive of creation, and the realization of the purpose of love its certain goal: that love exists in that supreme perfection in which the universality of its range over all creatures diminishes nothing from its particular application to each individual. That love is God's motive; that love is victorious; that love is universal in range and unerringly individual in application, in a word that 'God is love." "

"This," as Dr. Gore affirms, "is the Christian Gospel. It is also the Christian Science Gospel. Under the caption "Love" in Miscellaneous Writings (p. 249), Mrs. Eddy exclaims:

"What a word! I am in awe before it. Over what worlds on worlds it hath range and is sovereign! the underived, the incomparable, the infinite All of Good, the alone God, is Love."