VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the Key to all other Doctrines.

[pg 344]VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the Key to all other Doctrines.1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable.It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent it;(a) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist (Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic, luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar Hieroglyphics, 34).Luther:“When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say;‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’”Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”(1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.Joseph Cook:“Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ's continued life.”Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer's illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.(b) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object (Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).Augustine:“Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence....“Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.”Calvin speaks of Augustine's view as“a speculation far from solid.”But Augustine himself had said:“If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.”John of Damascus:“All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.”By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precisemodeof God's triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this[pg 345]otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.”Hegel calls God“the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel's general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both.Zweifelcomes fromZwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon“ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.”Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of“the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.”Ruskin speaks of it as“pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.”On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy“The Secret of Hegel,”and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry.“Ah, well,”replied the poet,“if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.”When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said:“It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.”A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter's writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.”Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says:“I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.”When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel's doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man's invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man's personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen's characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three[pg 346]with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she“unanimously consented.”“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”(Luke 10:27).Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden:“Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate‘temperance’or‘self-control’is better expressed by‘whole-mindedness.’”Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.”Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the[pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability.“TheZeitgeist,”he says,“is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.”We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton:“A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.A. It is essential to any proper theism.Neither God's independence nor God's blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God's perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism.“Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.”Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find aperfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is:‘a perfect intelligence.’”The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows:“There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God,viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with thedivine cause, and thematerial conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.”See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existentcauses. A self-existence which isnota cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence whichisa cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.”Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald:‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son:‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’”Dr. Johnson adds:“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of[pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.”After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following:“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes,viz.,to get ridof the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that“both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christhomoousioswith the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57;Col. 2:9).Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this“facilis descensus Averno,”this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.“We take refuge in the term‘Godhead.’The literati find relief in speaking of‘the gods.’”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.”Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks:“The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divineUnityis a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divinePersonality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.”Bp. Phillips Brooks:“Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.”Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that“Nature and God are the same.”It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For“Nature”includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that“there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.”William Adams Brown:“If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.”But Dr. Brown wrongly adds:“Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is[pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.”Similarly P. S. Moxom:“I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.”But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, ornatura naturansandnatura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.B. It is essential to any proper revelation.If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit.“As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.”In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. SeeRom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts[i. e., God]knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”See also Godet onJohn 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I:“Christianity says with simplicity,‘No man hath seen God, except God.’”John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, onJohn 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God's will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only“one of the day's works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind.“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass[pg 350]away”(Mat. 24:35).The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be“the wrath of the Lamb”(Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.C. It is essential to any proper redemption.If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.“God is the way to himself.”“Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.”The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.”In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men's views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44;Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said:‘In thy light shall we see light’(Ps. 36:9).”We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one's back on God:John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”;Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin... [for him]who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer's wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen's dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says:“I regard Smith's conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.”Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ's divinity could not hold their own against the confession:“Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.”Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul:“None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!”Only in a divine Christ—Christ[pg 351]forus upon the Cross, and Christinus by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life:“When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he isto us, but what he isin himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.”Hence1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words‘God is love’(1 John 4:8)become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in thisreceptivelife; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. SeeGal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’”Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.”Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.”On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’”The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllableOm, orAum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The[pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams:“In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.”There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus.“These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to‘agree in one’”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are“residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea.‘There is but one,’they say,‘though the poets call him by different names.’The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things‘under the form of eternity.’All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.”See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor:“He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

[pg 344]VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the Key to all other Doctrines.1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable.It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent it;(a) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist (Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic, luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar Hieroglyphics, 34).Luther:“When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say;‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’”Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”(1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.Joseph Cook:“Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ's continued life.”Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer's illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.(b) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object (Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).Augustine:“Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence....“Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.”Calvin speaks of Augustine's view as“a speculation far from solid.”But Augustine himself had said:“If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.”John of Damascus:“All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.”By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precisemodeof God's triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this[pg 345]otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.”Hegel calls God“the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel's general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both.Zweifelcomes fromZwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon“ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.”Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of“the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.”Ruskin speaks of it as“pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.”On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy“The Secret of Hegel,”and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry.“Ah, well,”replied the poet,“if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.”When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said:“It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.”A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter's writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.”Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says:“I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.”When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel's doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man's invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man's personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen's characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three[pg 346]with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she“unanimously consented.”“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”(Luke 10:27).Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden:“Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate‘temperance’or‘self-control’is better expressed by‘whole-mindedness.’”Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.”Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the[pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability.“TheZeitgeist,”he says,“is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.”We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton:“A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.A. It is essential to any proper theism.Neither God's independence nor God's blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God's perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism.“Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.”Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find aperfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is:‘a perfect intelligence.’”The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows:“There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God,viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with thedivine cause, and thematerial conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.”See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existentcauses. A self-existence which isnota cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence whichisa cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.”Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald:‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son:‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’”Dr. Johnson adds:“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of[pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.”After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following:“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes,viz.,to get ridof the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that“both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christhomoousioswith the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57;Col. 2:9).Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this“facilis descensus Averno,”this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.“We take refuge in the term‘Godhead.’The literati find relief in speaking of‘the gods.’”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.”Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks:“The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divineUnityis a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divinePersonality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.”Bp. Phillips Brooks:“Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.”Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that“Nature and God are the same.”It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For“Nature”includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that“there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.”William Adams Brown:“If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.”But Dr. Brown wrongly adds:“Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is[pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.”Similarly P. S. Moxom:“I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.”But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, ornatura naturansandnatura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.B. It is essential to any proper revelation.If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit.“As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.”In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. SeeRom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts[i. e., God]knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”See also Godet onJohn 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I:“Christianity says with simplicity,‘No man hath seen God, except God.’”John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, onJohn 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God's will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only“one of the day's works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind.“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass[pg 350]away”(Mat. 24:35).The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be“the wrath of the Lamb”(Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.C. It is essential to any proper redemption.If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.“God is the way to himself.”“Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.”The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.”In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men's views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44;Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said:‘In thy light shall we see light’(Ps. 36:9).”We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one's back on God:John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”;Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin... [for him]who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer's wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen's dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says:“I regard Smith's conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.”Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ's divinity could not hold their own against the confession:“Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.”Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul:“None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!”Only in a divine Christ—Christ[pg 351]forus upon the Cross, and Christinus by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life:“When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he isto us, but what he isin himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.”Hence1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words‘God is love’(1 John 4:8)become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in thisreceptivelife; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. SeeGal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’”Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.”Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.”On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’”The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllableOm, orAum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The[pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams:“In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.”There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus.“These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to‘agree in one’”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are“residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea.‘There is but one,’they say,‘though the poets call him by different names.’The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things‘under the form of eternity.’All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.”See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor:“He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

[pg 344]VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the Key to all other Doctrines.1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable.It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent it;(a) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist (Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic, luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar Hieroglyphics, 34).Luther:“When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say;‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’”Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”(1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.Joseph Cook:“Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ's continued life.”Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer's illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.(b) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object (Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).Augustine:“Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence....“Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.”Calvin speaks of Augustine's view as“a speculation far from solid.”But Augustine himself had said:“If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.”John of Damascus:“All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.”By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precisemodeof God's triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this[pg 345]otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.”Hegel calls God“the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel's general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both.Zweifelcomes fromZwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon“ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.”Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of“the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.”Ruskin speaks of it as“pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.”On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy“The Secret of Hegel,”and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry.“Ah, well,”replied the poet,“if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.”When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said:“It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.”A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter's writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.”Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says:“I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.”When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel's doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man's invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man's personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen's characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three[pg 346]with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she“unanimously consented.”“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”(Luke 10:27).Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden:“Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate‘temperance’or‘self-control’is better expressed by‘whole-mindedness.’”Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.”Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the[pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability.“TheZeitgeist,”he says,“is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.”We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton:“A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.A. It is essential to any proper theism.Neither God's independence nor God's blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God's perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism.“Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.”Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find aperfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is:‘a perfect intelligence.’”The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows:“There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God,viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with thedivine cause, and thematerial conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.”See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existentcauses. A self-existence which isnota cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence whichisa cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.”Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald:‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son:‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’”Dr. Johnson adds:“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of[pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.”After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following:“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes,viz.,to get ridof the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that“both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christhomoousioswith the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57;Col. 2:9).Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this“facilis descensus Averno,”this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.“We take refuge in the term‘Godhead.’The literati find relief in speaking of‘the gods.’”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.”Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks:“The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divineUnityis a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divinePersonality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.”Bp. Phillips Brooks:“Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.”Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that“Nature and God are the same.”It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For“Nature”includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that“there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.”William Adams Brown:“If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.”But Dr. Brown wrongly adds:“Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is[pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.”Similarly P. S. Moxom:“I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.”But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, ornatura naturansandnatura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.B. It is essential to any proper revelation.If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit.“As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.”In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. SeeRom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts[i. e., God]knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”See also Godet onJohn 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I:“Christianity says with simplicity,‘No man hath seen God, except God.’”John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, onJohn 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God's will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only“one of the day's works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind.“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass[pg 350]away”(Mat. 24:35).The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be“the wrath of the Lamb”(Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.C. It is essential to any proper redemption.If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.“God is the way to himself.”“Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.”The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.”In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men's views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44;Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said:‘In thy light shall we see light’(Ps. 36:9).”We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one's back on God:John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”;Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin... [for him]who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer's wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen's dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says:“I regard Smith's conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.”Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ's divinity could not hold their own against the confession:“Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.”Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul:“None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!”Only in a divine Christ—Christ[pg 351]forus upon the Cross, and Christinus by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life:“When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he isto us, but what he isin himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.”Hence1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words‘God is love’(1 John 4:8)become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in thisreceptivelife; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. SeeGal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’”Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.”Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.”On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’”The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllableOm, orAum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The[pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams:“In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.”There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus.“These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to‘agree in one’”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are“residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea.‘There is but one,’they say,‘though the poets call him by different names.’The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things‘under the form of eternity.’All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.”See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor:“He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

[pg 344]VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the Key to all other Doctrines.1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable.It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent it;(a) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist (Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic, luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar Hieroglyphics, 34).Luther:“When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say;‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’”Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”(1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.Joseph Cook:“Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ's continued life.”Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer's illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.(b) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object (Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).Augustine:“Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence....“Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.”Calvin speaks of Augustine's view as“a speculation far from solid.”But Augustine himself had said:“If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.”John of Damascus:“All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.”By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precisemodeof God's triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this[pg 345]otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.”Hegel calls God“the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel's general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both.Zweifelcomes fromZwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon“ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.”Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of“the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.”Ruskin speaks of it as“pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.”On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy“The Secret of Hegel,”and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry.“Ah, well,”replied the poet,“if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.”When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said:“It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.”A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter's writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.”Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says:“I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.”When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel's doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man's invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man's personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen's characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three[pg 346]with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she“unanimously consented.”“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”(Luke 10:27).Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden:“Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate‘temperance’or‘self-control’is better expressed by‘whole-mindedness.’”Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.”Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the[pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability.“TheZeitgeist,”he says,“is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.”We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton:“A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.A. It is essential to any proper theism.Neither God's independence nor God's blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God's perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism.“Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.”Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find aperfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is:‘a perfect intelligence.’”The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows:“There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God,viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with thedivine cause, and thematerial conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.”See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existentcauses. A self-existence which isnota cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence whichisa cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.”Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald:‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son:‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’”Dr. Johnson adds:“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of[pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.”After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following:“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes,viz.,to get ridof the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that“both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christhomoousioswith the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57;Col. 2:9).Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this“facilis descensus Averno,”this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.“We take refuge in the term‘Godhead.’The literati find relief in speaking of‘the gods.’”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.”Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks:“The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divineUnityis a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divinePersonality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.”Bp. Phillips Brooks:“Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.”Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that“Nature and God are the same.”It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For“Nature”includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that“there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.”William Adams Brown:“If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.”But Dr. Brown wrongly adds:“Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is[pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.”Similarly P. S. Moxom:“I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.”But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, ornatura naturansandnatura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.B. It is essential to any proper revelation.If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit.“As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.”In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. SeeRom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts[i. e., God]knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”See also Godet onJohn 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I:“Christianity says with simplicity,‘No man hath seen God, except God.’”John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, onJohn 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God's will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only“one of the day's works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind.“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass[pg 350]away”(Mat. 24:35).The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be“the wrath of the Lamb”(Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.C. It is essential to any proper redemption.If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.“God is the way to himself.”“Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.”The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.”In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men's views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44;Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said:‘In thy light shall we see light’(Ps. 36:9).”We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one's back on God:John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”;Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin... [for him]who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer's wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen's dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says:“I regard Smith's conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.”Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ's divinity could not hold their own against the confession:“Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.”Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul:“None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!”Only in a divine Christ—Christ[pg 351]forus upon the Cross, and Christinus by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life:“When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he isto us, but what he isin himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.”Hence1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words‘God is love’(1 John 4:8)become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in thisreceptivelife; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. SeeGal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’”Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.”Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.”On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’”The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllableOm, orAum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The[pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams:“In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.”There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus.“These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to‘agree in one’”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are“residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea.‘There is but one,’they say,‘though the poets call him by different names.’The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things‘under the form of eternity.’All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.”See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor:“He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the Key to all other Doctrines.1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable.It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent it;(a) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist (Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic, luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar Hieroglyphics, 34).Luther:“When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say;‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’”Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”(1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.Joseph Cook:“Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ's continued life.”Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer's illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.(b) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object (Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).Augustine:“Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence....“Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.”Calvin speaks of Augustine's view as“a speculation far from solid.”But Augustine himself had said:“If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.”John of Damascus:“All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.”By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precisemodeof God's triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this[pg 345]otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.”Hegel calls God“the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel's general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both.Zweifelcomes fromZwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon“ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.”Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of“the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.”Ruskin speaks of it as“pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.”On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy“The Secret of Hegel,”and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry.“Ah, well,”replied the poet,“if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.”When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said:“It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.”A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter's writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.”Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says:“I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.”When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel's doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man's invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man's personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen's characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three[pg 346]with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she“unanimously consented.”“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”(Luke 10:27).Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden:“Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate‘temperance’or‘self-control’is better expressed by‘whole-mindedness.’”Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.”Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the[pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability.“TheZeitgeist,”he says,“is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.”We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton:“A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.A. It is essential to any proper theism.Neither God's independence nor God's blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God's perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism.“Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.”Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find aperfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is:‘a perfect intelligence.’”The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows:“There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God,viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with thedivine cause, and thematerial conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.”See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existentcauses. A self-existence which isnota cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence whichisa cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.”Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald:‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son:‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’”Dr. Johnson adds:“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of[pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.”After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following:“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes,viz.,to get ridof the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that“both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christhomoousioswith the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57;Col. 2:9).Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this“facilis descensus Averno,”this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.“We take refuge in the term‘Godhead.’The literati find relief in speaking of‘the gods.’”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.”Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks:“The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divineUnityis a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divinePersonality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.”Bp. Phillips Brooks:“Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.”Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that“Nature and God are the same.”It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For“Nature”includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that“there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.”William Adams Brown:“If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.”But Dr. Brown wrongly adds:“Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is[pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.”Similarly P. S. Moxom:“I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.”But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, ornatura naturansandnatura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.B. It is essential to any proper revelation.If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit.“As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.”In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. SeeRom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts[i. e., God]knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”See also Godet onJohn 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I:“Christianity says with simplicity,‘No man hath seen God, except God.’”John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, onJohn 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God's will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only“one of the day's works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind.“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass[pg 350]away”(Mat. 24:35).The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be“the wrath of the Lamb”(Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.C. It is essential to any proper redemption.If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.“God is the way to himself.”“Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.”The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.”In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men's views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44;Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said:‘In thy light shall we see light’(Ps. 36:9).”We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one's back on God:John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”;Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin... [for him]who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer's wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen's dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says:“I regard Smith's conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.”Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ's divinity could not hold their own against the confession:“Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.”Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul:“None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!”Only in a divine Christ—Christ[pg 351]forus upon the Cross, and Christinus by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life:“When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he isto us, but what he isin himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.”Hence1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words‘God is love’(1 John 4:8)become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in thisreceptivelife; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. SeeGal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’”Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.”Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.”On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’”The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllableOm, orAum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The[pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams:“In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.”There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus.“These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to‘agree in one’”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are“residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea.‘There is but one,’they say,‘though the poets call him by different names.’The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things‘under the form of eternity.’All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.”See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor:“He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable.It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent it;(a) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist (Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic, luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar Hieroglyphics, 34).Luther:“When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say;‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’”Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”(1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.Joseph Cook:“Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ's continued life.”Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer's illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.(b) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object (Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).Augustine:“Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence....“Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.”Calvin speaks of Augustine's view as“a speculation far from solid.”But Augustine himself had said:“If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.”John of Damascus:“All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.”By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precisemodeof God's triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this[pg 345]otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.”Hegel calls God“the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel's general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both.Zweifelcomes fromZwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon“ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.”Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of“the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.”Ruskin speaks of it as“pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.”On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy“The Secret of Hegel,”and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry.“Ah, well,”replied the poet,“if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.”When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said:“It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.”A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter's writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.”Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says:“I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.”When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel's doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man's invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man's personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen's characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.

It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent it;

(a) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist (Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic, luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar Hieroglyphics, 34).

Luther:“When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say;‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’”Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”(1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.Joseph Cook:“Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ's continued life.”Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer's illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.

Luther:“When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say;‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’”Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”(1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.

Joseph Cook:“Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ's continued life.”Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer's illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.

(b) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object (Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).

Augustine:“Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence....“Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.”Calvin speaks of Augustine's view as“a speculation far from solid.”But Augustine himself had said:“If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.”John of Damascus:“All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.”By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precisemodeof God's triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this[pg 345]otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.”Hegel calls God“the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel's general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both.Zweifelcomes fromZwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon“ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.”Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of“the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.”Ruskin speaks of it as“pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.”On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy“The Secret of Hegel,”and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry.“Ah, well,”replied the poet,“if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.”When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said:“It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.”A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter's writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.”Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says:“I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.”When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel's doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man's invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man's personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen's characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.

Augustine:“Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence....“Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.”Calvin speaks of Augustine's view as“a speculation far from solid.”But Augustine himself had said:“If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.”John of Damascus:“All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.”By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precisemodeof God's triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.

Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this[pg 345]otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.”Hegel calls God“the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel's general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both.Zweifelcomes fromZwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon“ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.”Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of“the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.”Ruskin speaks of it as“pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.”On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy“The Secret of Hegel,”and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.

Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry.“Ah, well,”replied the poet,“if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.”When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said:“It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.”A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter's writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.”Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says:“I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.”When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel's doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.

The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man's invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man's personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen's characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.

No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.

2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three[pg 346]with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she“unanimously consented.”“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”(Luke 10:27).Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden:“Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate‘temperance’or‘self-control’is better expressed by‘whole-mindedness.’”Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.”Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the[pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability.“TheZeitgeist,”he says,“is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.”We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton:“A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”

This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three[pg 346]with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.

The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.

Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she“unanimously consented.”“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”(Luke 10:27).Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden:“Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate‘temperance’or‘self-control’is better expressed by‘whole-mindedness.’”Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.”Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the[pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability.“TheZeitgeist,”he says,“is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.”We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton:“A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”

Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.

Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she“unanimously consented.”“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”(Luke 10:27).Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden:“Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate‘temperance’or‘self-control’is better expressed by‘whole-mindedness.’”

Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”

John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.”Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”

The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the[pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability.“TheZeitgeist,”he says,“is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.”We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton:“A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”

3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.A. It is essential to any proper theism.Neither God's independence nor God's blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God's perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism.“Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.”Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find aperfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is:‘a perfect intelligence.’”The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows:“There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God,viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with thedivine cause, and thematerial conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.”See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existentcauses. A self-existence which isnota cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence whichisa cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.”Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald:‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son:‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’”Dr. Johnson adds:“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of[pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.”After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following:“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes,viz.,to get ridof the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that“both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christhomoousioswith the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57;Col. 2:9).Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this“facilis descensus Averno,”this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.“We take refuge in the term‘Godhead.’The literati find relief in speaking of‘the gods.’”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.”Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks:“The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divineUnityis a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divinePersonality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.”Bp. Phillips Brooks:“Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.”Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that“Nature and God are the same.”It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For“Nature”includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that“there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.”William Adams Brown:“If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.”But Dr. Brown wrongly adds:“Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is[pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.”Similarly P. S. Moxom:“I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.”But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, ornatura naturansandnatura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.B. It is essential to any proper revelation.If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit.“As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.”In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. SeeRom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts[i. e., God]knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”See also Godet onJohn 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I:“Christianity says with simplicity,‘No man hath seen God, except God.’”John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, onJohn 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God's will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only“one of the day's works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind.“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass[pg 350]away”(Mat. 24:35).The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be“the wrath of the Lamb”(Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.C. It is essential to any proper redemption.If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.“God is the way to himself.”“Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.”The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.”In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men's views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44;Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said:‘In thy light shall we see light’(Ps. 36:9).”We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one's back on God:John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”;Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin... [for him]who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer's wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen's dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says:“I regard Smith's conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.”Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ's divinity could not hold their own against the confession:“Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.”Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul:“None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!”Only in a divine Christ—Christ[pg 351]forus upon the Cross, and Christinus by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life:“When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he isto us, but what he isin himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.”Hence1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words‘God is love’(1 John 4:8)become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in thisreceptivelife; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. SeeGal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’”Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.”Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.”On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’”The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllableOm, orAum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The[pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams:“In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.”There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus.“These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to‘agree in one’”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are“residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea.‘There is but one,’they say,‘though the poets call him by different names.’The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things‘under the form of eternity.’All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.”See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor:“He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

A. It is essential to any proper theism.

Neither God's independence nor God's blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God's perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism.“Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.”Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.

Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find aperfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is:‘a perfect intelligence.’”The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows:“There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God,viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with thedivine cause, and thematerial conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.”See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existentcauses. A self-existence which isnota cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence whichisa cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.”Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald:‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son:‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’”Dr. Johnson adds:“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of[pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.”After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following:“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes,viz.,to get ridof the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that“both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christhomoousioswith the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57;Col. 2:9).Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this“facilis descensus Averno,”this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.“We take refuge in the term‘Godhead.’The literati find relief in speaking of‘the gods.’”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.”Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks:“The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divineUnityis a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divinePersonality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.”Bp. Phillips Brooks:“Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.”Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that“Nature and God are the same.”It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For“Nature”includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that“there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.”William Adams Brown:“If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.”But Dr. Brown wrongly adds:“Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is[pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.”Similarly P. S. Moxom:“I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.”But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, ornatura naturansandnatura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.

Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find aperfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is:‘a perfect intelligence.’”The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows:“There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God,viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with thedivine cause, and thematerial conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.”See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existentcauses. A self-existence which isnota cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence whichisa cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.”Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.

E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald:‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son:‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’”Dr. Johnson adds:“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of[pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.”After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.

H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following:“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes,viz.,to get ridof the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that“both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christhomoousioswith the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57;Col. 2:9).

Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this“facilis descensus Averno,”this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.“We take refuge in the term‘Godhead.’The literati find relief in speaking of‘the gods.’”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.”Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks:“The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divineUnityis a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divinePersonality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.”Bp. Phillips Brooks:“Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.”Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that“Nature and God are the same.”It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For“Nature”includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.

Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that“there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.”William Adams Brown:“If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.”But Dr. Brown wrongly adds:“Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is[pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.”Similarly P. S. Moxom:“I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.”But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.

W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, ornatura naturansandnatura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.

B. It is essential to any proper revelation.

If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit.“As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.”In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.

Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. SeeRom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts[i. e., God]knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”See also Godet onJohn 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I:“Christianity says with simplicity,‘No man hath seen God, except God.’”John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, onJohn 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God's will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only“one of the day's works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind.“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass[pg 350]away”(Mat. 24:35).The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be“the wrath of the Lamb”(Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.

Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. SeeRom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts[i. e., God]knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”See also Godet onJohn 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I:“Christianity says with simplicity,‘No man hath seen God, except God.’”John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, onJohn 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”

The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God's will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only“one of the day's works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind.“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass[pg 350]away”(Mat. 24:35).The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be“the wrath of the Lamb”(Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.

C. It is essential to any proper redemption.

If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.

“God is the way to himself.”“Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.”The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.”In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men's views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44;Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said:‘In thy light shall we see light’(Ps. 36:9).”We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one's back on God:John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”;Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin... [for him]who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer's wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen's dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says:“I regard Smith's conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.”Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ's divinity could not hold their own against the confession:“Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.”Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul:“None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!”Only in a divine Christ—Christ[pg 351]forus upon the Cross, and Christinus by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life:“When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”

“God is the way to himself.”“Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.”The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.”In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men's views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44;Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said:‘In thy light shall we see light’(Ps. 36:9).”We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one's back on God:John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”;Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin... [for him]who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”

In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer's wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen's dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”

Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says:“I regard Smith's conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.”Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ's divinity could not hold their own against the confession:“Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.”Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul:“None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!”Only in a divine Christ—Christ[pg 351]forus upon the Cross, and Christinus by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life:“When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”

D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.

If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.

See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he isto us, but what he isin himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.”Hence1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words‘God is love’(1 John 4:8)become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in thisreceptivelife; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. SeeGal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’”Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.”Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.”On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’”The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllableOm, orAum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The[pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams:“In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.”There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus.“These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to‘agree in one’”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are“residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea.‘There is but one,’they say,‘though the poets call him by different names.’The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things‘under the form of eternity.’All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.”See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor:“He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he isto us, but what he isin himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.”Hence1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words‘God is love’(1 John 4:8)become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”

Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in thisreceptivelife; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. SeeGal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’”Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.”Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.”On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.

On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’”The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?

The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllableOm, orAum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The[pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams:“In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.”There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.

The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus.“These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to‘agree in one’”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.

Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are“residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea.‘There is but one,’they say,‘though the poets call him by different names.’The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things‘under the form of eternity.’All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.”See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.

The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor:“He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

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