Page:Introduction to the Assyrian church.djvu/134

128 It is, however, necessary to pause for a moment to discuss the problem, "How was it that questions so abstract and, as many men say, so unpractical roused passions so very concrete and mundane?"

Of course it is not really justifiable to call the point at issue "unpractical." The question (for though it is convenient to divide the great Christological controversy into minor heresies, yet it is essentially one question that is discussed throughout, and to which various solutions are propounded) is of supreme importance both theologically and practically. The answer given to it, however little the fact may be perceived, is bound to colour the whole of human life. Broadly, it may be stated thus: Admitting the full and proper Deity of "the Word," how is this Divine Being also man?

The question is most practical, for all its seeming remoteness. A man's conception of religion, and hence of worldly duty, is bound to be affected, in the long run, according as the object of his highest reverence is a Gnostic's Unknowable, or a God Incarnate; and this is not the less true because men who have turned their backs on the Star of Bethlehem may for a generation or two be able to walk by the light that streams from it, though they know not whence it comes. In the long run, the answer to the question whether a man is or is not bound to frame his daily life after the model left us by the Carpenter of Nazareth depends upon the answer to the question that He Himself set men asking, "Whom say ye that I am?" The connection between the highest problems of theology and the practice of daily life is as real and as strong as the force of gravitation which links the sun to every stone on earth's surface, and binds the universe in one. Neither is less real for being unperceived by the ordinary man.

Still, it was not because the supreme importance