164 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 



that repressions exist and that censorship exists cannot 

 for a moment be questioned by anyone who possesses 

 the slightest practical acquaintance with the facts. But 

 I cannot help suspecting that the censor, in Freud's sense, 

 has no real existence. It seems to me to be far more in 

 accordance with the evidence to say that, in any given 

 constellation of ideas, the censor is simply a second idea, 

 or a second potential idea, belonging to a 'higher' level 

 than that which it seeks to repress. In a hate-complex 

 the lower idea may suggest murder: the censor is the 

 higher, social, idea that murder is wrong in itself, or the 

 still higher, spiritual, idea that hatred is wrong. In a 

 man's sex-complex the lower idea is repressed by a 

 higher idea of the status and nobility of womanhood, 

 and so on. To say that the censor is a definite entity 

 seems to me wholly unjustifiable. It is far more reason- 

 able to contend that there are as many censors as there are 

 impulses to be repressed : that the censor represents the 

 mechanism of an unconscious judgment of each low im- 

 pulse by the whole organism as it opposes a noble impulse 

 to each ignoble one. For convenience, however, we will 

 retain Freud's term, while giving it this fresh meaning. 



Let us now apply what we have said to the mind of 

 man in a more general way, in order that we may see 

 how to apply it to the mind of the Man Christ Jesus. 



All a man's past exists; and existence means persist- 

 ence in the present. Nothing not the least, trivial 

 happening can fail of its effect, or be obliterated. Not 

 only does the man live over again in brief the whole 

 history of his evolution, the past which has been created 

 for him by his forbears: not only does that past enter 

 into the present during his unconscious life, and persist 

 as the foundation on which his being is erected ; but the 

 past which he himself has created for himself persists, 

 though, to a large extent, not in consciousness. Yet 

 alike in the past created for him and in the past he 



