But the doctrine of incarnation unquestionably embodies a great element of truth, which it were our very serious loss to overlook. It supplies us with an admirable illustration of what was asserted in the beginning, namely, that an error is but a truth misstated, either by excess or defect. The Christian, or rather the ancient, orthodox presentation of the dogma errs in both ways. By excess, because it proclaims a man to be the personal Deity, that the flesh and blood of a mortal being is adorable, as is the highest Being, with the supreme offices of religion. It proclaims that Jesus was not a human individual or person at all, but a Divine being energising in two natures, the Divine and the human, so that when he used the pronoun "I," it was the Deity himself, not a man, who spoke. I say this is a gross misstatement by exaggeration, unknown to the prophet himself, unknown to his followers and biographers, and unknown to many Christian writers before the fatal epoch of Athanasius, who emphatically assert that Jesus is not to be worshipped as the Father.[1] The doctrine errs also by defect, because it fails to recognise the divinity of all the sons of the Supreme. Jesus is made to be exclusively Divine, the sole possessor of Divine sonship, and only through him are others put in the way of attaining to the same privilege. "But as many as received him," says the Alexandrian rhapsodist who wrote the prologue to the fourth gospel, "he gave them the power or the faculty to be made the sons of God, as many as believe in his name." This account of the matter we conceive to be immeasurably below the truth. No mediator is needed between the soul and the Soul of our souls; no intercessor or redeemer. This perverse conception originated in the supposition that man was, and is, a fallen and a falling being, owing to the fatal legacy bequeathed by our presumptive parent, Adam; but Genesis being wholly and avowedly mythical in its opening chapters, the Pauline dialectic in the fifth chapter of the Romans falls to the ground, and with it the laborious argumentations of the epistle to the Hebrews, which essays to prove that the most sternly anti-sacerdotal prophet who ever lived was a full-fledged priest; the man who never conducted a ritualistic service in his life set forth as "a high priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedech," the only and eternal redeemer of humanity from the consequences of the misdeeds of an aboriginal parent who had no existence. No; before Agamemnon men were brave, before Aristides they were just, before Jesus they were in their innermost selves divine, and this in essence is the doctrine of the "Over-soul," associated, as far as this expression goes, with the name of the latest of the prophets of ethics, Emerson.