to, and might be possessed by, all men: That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us':' That they may be perfect in one, even as We are one.'

On this question of divine and human identity the gospels and epistles are in perfect accord. It was the general sense of this consciousness in the Early Church which made its members so strong in boldly preaching the gospel and in their endurance in its defence. We are afraid that the great power and value of love as the essential element of true thought in clearing the intellectual vision is only recognized to a very limited extent. We cannot be too much impressed with the fact that Christ was, in the highest sense, 'holy, harmless, and separate from sinners, and guile was never found in His mouth.' We need to remember that it was holy men who 'spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.' Even in pagan Greece it was, without doubt, a high moral principle that lay at the root of the intellectual greatness of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This was the case also with Augustine, Anselm, Wycliffe, Luther, George Fox, Knox, Wesley and Hugh Bourne. But in the perfect clearness of intellectual vision in the knowledge of God which holy love gives, Christ, as the Son of Man, had in all things the pre-eminence. He makes no mistakes in judgment. He judged not according to appearance, but always judged righteous judgment. He also makes perfectly clear in His teaching the possibility of all men ultimately attaining to the same true and righteous judgment, if they will, as Paul says, ‘honestly renounce the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, not handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth commending themselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.' Christ makes no allowance for error on

the grounds, now much advanced, that a difference of opinion is necessary. He condemned in His disciples all lack of a right understanding, whether in word or deed. Paul also insisted upon all being perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.' Not that all were expected at the same time to be equal in knowledge: but he insisted that if in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.' Let us first be sure our knowledge is truth before declaring it as such. All men are required to speak the truth in love, for let every man be assured that if he does not do so he has neither attained the truth as it is in Jesus, nor is in the way of truth, for Thought only attains to its highest when it attains to the fullness of perfect love; though reason-thought is the fundamental and substantial element of love.

Now, although the great truths of the Christian Religion can be reduced to and presented in the form of a genuine logical philosophy, yet neither the prophets, nor Christ, nor the Apostles give to us these truths in this form. It does not follow, however, that the writers of the Bible were not sound logical reasoners. The general form of the writings themselves forbid such a supposition. The writers were great and good men who grasped with marvellous clearness the secret root of things, and saw that neither individuals nor nations could become truly great without a true knowledge of God and the practice of righteousness. But the Christian Religion had yet to wait many centuries for its presentation in the form of a logical system of philosophy. The form of logical thought comes to us by way of ancient Greece, for by the Greek philosophers, thought was first given a logical form, that is the form of a syllogism. I know of no writer who has stated this point

so clearly as Dr. Stirling in the words already quoted. He there tells us that Socrates first discovered the abstract Notion, and that Aristotle completed it into the Abstract Logic; that Kant first discovered the Concrete Notion, and Hegel completed it into the Concrete Logic. These statements give us volumes in a nutshell. Hegel saw that if philosophy as a rational explanation of the totality of Being could not be reduced to a genuine logical concrete syllogism or a connected system of syllogisms, philosophy was nothing but an empty and worthless name. But he saw that the Ego being thought in its absolute fullness, embracing every particular in all that is, was properly another name for God, and the logical science was the science of God; that man as a spirit is infinite in thought, as such is Ego and essentially one with God, and that therefore logic is also the science of Man ; that Christ is Ego and that the science of the Ego is equally the science of Christ; that externally, Nature was, in a sense, unsubstantial and transient in its existence, and that therefore its essence, its substantial nature, could only be found in the Ego, God, its Creator. Consequently we cannot have a true science of Nature apart from the science of God; that in fact and in reality the essence of universal gravitation is thought; that thought is essentially a process and as such is a system of categories, the many of which can all be developed dialectically from the unity of self-consciousness, that is, from the Ego, and, finally, he saw that Being was the most abstract, or poorest, notion in the Ego itself, and this, when correctly seen into, involved the notion of Becoming which implicitly contained not only the notion of changeableness, but also the notion of objective creation. Therefore matter is only another name for quality and quantity in external sensible

existence; and further, thought, form and matter exist in such necessary and essential relation to each other that the one cannot be without the other. Thus the categories of thought in their subjective relation are seen to be essentially the real matter of thought-since the matter and the form of thought are equally universal-for the categories in the process of thought are all seen, in the light of intuitive thought, to be the substantial elements of thought, of self-consciousness. Thus with Hegel, Ego, Thought, God, Christ and Nature were in absolute unity in the logical system of the categories. Self-consciousness, then, is the Absolute and Infinite-the logical development of the Concrete Notion. It is the substantial Nature of the Ego, of God, of Christ the God-man, and of man, for Christ was not only sinless but was absolutely free from all error in His teaching. God in His love is perfect, therefore Christ in His love was perfect: the mission of Christ is to bring man as man into the perfect realization and enjoyment of the love of God. As 'perfect love casteth out fear,' so it is only in and through the knowledge of God that man can attain to the full perfection of his nature, and in the words of Paul, 'be filled with all the fullness of God,' just as 'in Christ dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead.' 'Our life is hid with Christ in God.' Then, since the philosophy of the Ego is the philosophy of man and God, it is the philosophy of Christ as the perfect God-man, and of Christianity. As Christ in the supreme Divinity of His Person is the eternal Creator, so this philosophy will be found to be the philosophy of Nature. Consequently, there is no doctrine so important as the God-manhood of Christ.

EGO

CHAPTER X

EGO THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT

GO alone gives the true science of the Witness of the Spirit as taught by Christ and His apostles. It is the I-Me-I.

In the highest sense God is Ego, because Ego is absolute Thought, the First and the Last, Absolute Reason, and infinite self-consciousness. Whatever can be predicated of the Ego can be predicated of God, and whatever can be predicated of God can be predicated of the Ego. The predicate always expresses the substantial nature of the subject. When God says, 'I am that I am,' He begins and ends with 'I'; that is, He begins and ends with the absolute unity of Being and Ego (I am). Thought is light; it shines in and through All that is. In it 'the eternal power and Godhead are clearly seen.' It is eternal and infinite and so omnipresent, which are also essential elements of human Thought. The Divine Thought (self-consciousness) is love, in which alone man can have a true saving knowledge and experience of God and His Christ. 'For he that loveth not knoweth not God,' for God is love.' There is an important sense in which God's thought dwells in all men, even while they do not yet reciprocate God's love.

Hegel very distinctly and clearly recognizes that man is a finite spirit, yet at the same time that he is in thought infinite,' and therefore can only think