The crisis in the Christian Church is now so acute that we may well seek for some mode of escape from its pressure. The Old Broad Church position is no longer adequate to English circumstances, and there is not yet in existence a thoroughly satisfactory new and original position for a Broad Church student to occupy. Shall we, then, desert the old historic Church in which we were christened and educated? It would certainly be a loss, and not only to ourselves. Or shall we wait with drooping head to be driven out of the Church? Such a cowardly solution may be at once dismissed. Happily we have in the Anglican Church virtually no excommunication. Our only course as students is to go forward, and endeavour to expand our too narrow Church boundaries. Modernists we are; modernists we will remain; let our only object be to be worthy of this noble name. But we cannot be surprised that our Church rulers are perplexed. For consider the embarrassing state of critical investigation. Critical study of the Gospels has shown that very little of the traditional material can be regarded as historical; it is even very uncertain whether the Galilean prophet really paid the supreme penalty as a supposed enemy of Rome on the shameful cross. Even apart from the problem referred to, it is more than doubtful whether critics have left us enough stones standing in the life of Jesus to serve as the basis of a christology or doctrine of the divine Redeemer. And yet one feels that a theology without a theophany is both dry and difficult to defend. We want an avatâr, i.e. a 'descent' of God in human form; indeed, we seem to need several such 'descents,' appropriate to the changing circumstances of the ages. Did not the author of the Fourth Gospel recognize this? Certainly his portrait of Jesus is so widely different from that of the Synoptists that a genuine reconciliation seems impossible. I would not infer from this that the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel belonged to a different age from the Jesus of the Synoptists, but I would venture to say that the Fourth Evangelist would be easier to defend if he held this theory. The Johannine Jesus ought to have belonged to a different aeon. ANOTHER IMAGE OF GOD