We may imitate the method of our master St. Thomas by setting down the opinion from which we differ. Dean Rashdall of Carlisle has given us a full and perhaps final expression of that opinion in his paper read at the Cambridge Conference of Modern Churchmen under the title “Christ as Logos and Son of God.” He writes :

“Jesus did not claim divinity for Himself. He may have called Himself, or more probably allowed Himself to be called, the Messiah or Son of God. But never in any critically well-attested sayings is there anything which suggests that His conscious relation to God was other than that of a man towards God. . . . The speeches of the Fourth Gospel where they go beyond the Synoptic conception cannot be regarded as history, valuable as they may be for theology. The doctrine of our Lord’s divinity must be taken to express the Church’s conception of what Jesus is or should be to His followers and to the world, not His own theory about Himself.

“Note 2. . . .If we accept the Synoptic discourses as substantially correct (though not, of course, in every detail, for there are considerable discrepancies between them), it is impossible to regard the Johannine discourses as equally accurate reports ; and even in this Gospel few sentences (when taken apart from the Preface, which does not pretend to represent the words of Jesus, and other comments of the Evangelist) imply actual Godhead in the sense of post-Nicene theology. . . . The claim to be the Son of God does not necessarily imply Godhead” (The Modern Churchman, Sept., pp. 278, 279)