148 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 



ness of this realisation of union would come inevitably 

 the sense of eternal existence without any terminus a quo 

 as far as His transcendent ego was concerned. Even an 

 ordinary man feels at times some sense of union with 

 God, and then his sense of causedness is in abeyance. 

 The feeling of love and union ousts all else but itself. 

 May we not then believe that Christ realised His one- 

 ness with the Father, even to the extent of realising His 

 own eternal existence, without any memory of His own 

 transcendent experience? May we not believe that He 

 knew from this very realisation that He was before 

 Abraham, that He came forth, and must have come 

 forth, from the Father, because of the very perfectness 

 of His manhood ? May we not believe this, and yet hold 

 fast to the fact that He was very Man? Would such a 

 noble expansion of a form of knowledge that is common 

 to all men, make Him any the less man? I think not. It 

 may be said that all we have done is to use another word 

 to describe the same fact. Instead of calling His realisa- 

 tion a memory we now call it an intuition. This is true. 

 Nevertheless the two conceptions which the words in- 

 volve are poles apart. The one implies a consciousness 

 of Godhead that is- incompatible with perfect manhood; 

 the other implies no direct consciousness of Godhead, 

 but simply the completion of the human instinct of 

 union with God, that is in every man in some degree; 

 and from this completion, by a secondary mental pro- 

 cess, the realisation that He Himself was eternally one 

 with God, and not merely united with Him a second- 

 ary mental process in the realm of intellect. 



If this analysis be true, we are driven to deny that 

 the Human Christ had any memory of existence with 

 the Father before His Incarnation, while His intuition of 

 perfect oneness with the Father led Him to the realisa- 

 tion that He must have been eternally one with Him. 

 And this conception is fully consonant with the view, 



