vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 239 



I self, as far as our freedom offers willing harbourage, 

 with each individual man? Godhead reached the full 

 measure of immanence in Christhood, that is all, and 

 reached it from the same end as man. Christ went 

 through the experience of unconscious life within His 

 mother ; God as Christ emptied Himself even of person- 

 ality, and won it again in human-wise, that He might 

 be one with humanity to the full, through the experience 

 of the gradual dawning of consciousness in a world of 

 'others'; and through the experience of the incorpora- 

 tion of otherness, in the realisation of mediate activities, 

 through immanence. Christ had no dual consciousness, 

 but was as a man in all things. Neither had the Trans- 

 cendent God a dual experience. He plumbed the depths 

 of immanence, but He plumbed them because they were 

 a necessary part of the Eternal Whole which is Reality. 



That God became Christ at a historic period of time 

 is a necessary implication of the fact that the time- 

 sequence is real in the plane of limitation. Time is real 

 for man, and so it is for God, though it does not belong 

 to the plane of absolute Reality. In immanent Christ- 

 hood God subjected Himself to Reality as known to 

 evolving personality, and eternal truth became expressed 

 in the time-series. The Historic Christ was inevitable. 



We find personality to be active fellowship. It is 

 saved from the impenetrable isolation of pure unity 

 through the three-fold nature which substantiates it as 

 itself, and so, as One. Being threefold it can be itself, 

 as fellowship, through internal activity, and is thus self- 

 existent. Nevertheless, because love is in its essence 

 centrifugal, craving that the perfectness of all its ex- 

 perience should be shared, it must ever be externally 

 creative. Though personality is self -existent, the idea of 

 God-before-Creation contains acontradiction, since, with- 

 out being creative, God could not be a Person. Does 

 this seem a paradox that God should be self-existent, 



