136 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 



One point of difficulty however remains. If Christ 

 was purely human in His Manhood; if upon earth His 

 was the divinity of manhood, not of Godhead; if He 

 laid aside His Godhead for a time, He could have no 

 memory of His Being in the Transcendent unity of the 

 Godhead. 



If this be so, how are we to interpret His constant 

 references to His pre-existence : " Before Abraham was, 

 I am"; "I came forth from the Father, and again I go 

 to the Father"? Before we begin to consider this we 

 must clear our ideas of what we mean by the laying 

 aside of Godhead, as far as we may. 



It is abundantly clear that the Holy Trinity cannot 

 have ceased to exist during the period of the Incarna- 

 tion. To believe that the perfect Being of God can ever 

 have been imperfect, is not merely inconceivable to 

 human reason, but contradicts the very fundamentals 

 of the idea of Godhead, making ultimate theistic thought 

 impossible. It is in flat opposition alike to intuition and 

 to intellectual belief. That the mediating Logos should 

 ever have ceased to coexist with the Father and the 

 Holy Spirit is impossible. The transcendent Godhead 

 was never anything but perfect and complete. 



But creation itself involved in the very nature of 

 Godhead involved the immanence of the Godhead; 

 a self-limitation in determined conditions for the sake 

 of the freedom that was to be in the creature. Further- 

 more, immanence must be postulated of all the Persons 

 of the Holy Trinity. For consider. The creative Will 

 of the Father is mediated by the Logos. "Without 

 Him (the Logos) was not anything made that was 

 made." Although we state this in the phraseology of 

 revelation, the fact itself is implicit in the nature of 

 personality, as we have seen. But once the cosmos is 

 created, the Will of the Father is limited in regard to it, 

 by the very conditions of cosmical existence. Yet there 





