146 THE REV. PROFESSOR H. M. GWATKIN, M.A., ON 
refinements of the Nicene Creed mean nothing else and nothing 
more than this. 
But common opinion in the early Christian centuries was 
persuaded that God and man are mutually exclusive, so that 
what is divine cannot be human, and what is human cannot be 
divine; and the Christians were apt to think as_ their 
neighbours thought, without clearly seeing that such a position 
is fatal not only to an incarnation, but to religion generally, 
and even to thought itself. So some started from the manhood 
they had seen, and denied or qualified His deity, while others 
insisted on the deity they had spiritually known, and denied or 
qualified His manhood. The history of the doctrine of the 
Person of Christ is made by the conflict of these two 
tendencies. 
Arianism represents the former, though it concedes so much 
to the other that some will be tempted to think it a happy via 
media, though in fact it combines the evils of both systems 
without the advantages of either. Starting then from the 
Lord’s manhood, the Arians were willing to add to it every- 
thing short of proper deity. But there they drew the line. 
He is in some sense divine, said they, and must be worshipped 
as our Creator and Redeemer ; but how can one who is man be 
in the proper sense divine? We cannot make Him a full 
revelation of God or more than a creature. He is not even a 
creature of the highest sort, for His virtue is only the constant 
struggle of imperfect manhood, not the fixed habit of perfect 
free-will, And now that His manhood was a mere difficulty, it 
only remained to say that there was nothing in Him human but 
a body. 
This is the doctrine of the Arians. They establish the Lord’s 
deity by making Him a creature, and end by overthrowing the 
manhood from which they start. But I need not dwell on the 
endless confusions of such teaching, for nobody is an Arian in 
our time. Unitarianism is the most elastic word in theology, 
and covers a prodigious range of doctrines; yet no modern 
form of it, so far as I know, is quite lke Arianism. But the 
thoughts from which Arianism arose are thoughts of all ages; 
and in our own time we can see them plainly, not only in the 
whole range of Unitarianism, but in much catholic and other 
agnosticism, and in many schools of philosophy. Modern 
developments may even have strengthened them in some 
directions, though upon the whole their tendency seems not 
only the other w ay, but more and more the other way. 
The modern developments which most directly bear on 
