On The Incarnation

by Athanasius of Alexandria

much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it.

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.

Measured against the ages “mere Christianity” turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible.

You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct

which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.

In this age his need for knowledge is particularly pressing.

For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

“Athanasian Creed.” I will not labour the point that that work is not exactly a creed and was not by St. Athanasius, for I think it is a very fine piece of writing.

His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world.”

when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into

only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity.

the very operations one would expect of Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to “borrow death from others.”

St. Athanasius himself approached the mystery of Christ “not as a theologian, but as a believing soul in need of a Saviour”;

February 303 saw the beginning of the last and greatest persecution, after forty years of peace; and this, both in its inception under Diocletian and in its recrudescence under Maximin, was particularly severe in Egypt.

The persecution ended in Egypt in 311; Athanasius from his fifth year to his fourteenth had lived in the

midst of it.

Arius began to teach concerning the Word of God that “once He was not.”

Though he was present at the Council of Nicaea in 325 only as a voteless deacon,