v] Some Implications of I he Incarnation 173 



extraordinary vitality. Our difficulty rests on the fact 

 that the eternal policy and plan of God enters into time, 

 and that God Himself enters info time. Here as else- 

 where, it is really the old spectre of clock-time that 

 haunts us. What we find trouble in believing is that 

 Christ should have come in a certain year of the Roman 

 Empire to redeem the world. And the difficulty would 

 have been the same in whatever year of whatever em- 

 pire He had come. Yet if He came as man at all He 

 must have come in some place and year, as we compute 

 space and time. We must not forget, however, that we 

 compute space and time in this way solely as a matter 

 of convenience, and that they have no absolute exist- 

 ence as we picture them, but are merely practical repre- 

 sentations of a reality that is quite different. That 

 reality is the fact that we experience change in duration. 

 And one of the two most certain facts of our experience 

 is change ; the very essence of our belief, and the central 

 moment of our thinking, is that the change is purposive, 

 not meaningless ; is directed towards an end. (The other 

 certain fact, of course, is that we are there to experience 

 the change, and ourselves endure in change.) There is no 

 more difficulty really in believing in the Incarnation as 

 an historic episode than there is in believing in the 

 immanence of God, which belief is a necessary of the- 

 istic thought. The trouble is that we cannot or will not 

 think clearly. True, immanence is an enduring process, 

 while the Incarnation was but for a short time; but that 

 only leads us back to the question whether the coming 

 of God as man was really necessary to the scheme of 

 creation. If it was, He could not have come in any 

 other way than this and yet been truly man. I cannot 

 help thinking that much of our difficulty lies in taking 

 the temporal series as being purely temporal. Time is, 

 after all, the medium in which we perceive the unfolding 

 sequence of real activity, but the sequence itself is not 



