eternal destiny of men depends, every man's interest would be concentrated on the future world, and this present world with all its interests would be reduced to comparative insignificance. Thus the tendency would be to shut the man up in egoism, to isolate him from his fellow-men and drive him to monastic seclusion and asceticism. Comte says: "The Christian type of life was never fully realized except by the hermits of the Thebaid. These men by narrowing their wants to the lowest standard were able to concentrate their thoughts without remorse or distraction on the attainment of salvation." He says that Paul, "the real founder of Catholicism," selected Christ from the "army of prophets," "the many adventurers who would at that time be constantly making efforts to inaugurate monotheism, aspiring, like their Greek forerunners, to the honors of apotheosis." He also teaches that Paul and his successors, in what Comte calls the priesthood, developed the doctrines of the God in Christ, of the Trinity, of salvation by grace, of the antagonism of nature and grace, and thus transformed the naked monotheism into Christianity. He teaches that they did this in order to eliminate from monotheism its tendencies to a spiritualistic egoism, to provide recognition of man's altruistic tendencies, and so to make it harmonize with a safe and healthy constitution of society. he insists that these additions and emendations were not a legitimate development of monotheism and could not remove the evil tendencies inherent in it. Hence he concludes that the altruistic affections can never find their full development till humanity itself is made the supreme object of reverence and devotion.1

But

The extravagance and groundlessness of this theory are sufficiently obvious. But we have in it Comte's testimony to his own conviction that the Christianity actually introduced into the world in the name of Christ by Paul, his coadjutors, and successors, comprised the doctrines of the Trinity, of the God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, of the sinfulness of man and the necessity of his renewal from the life of nature to the spiritual life of faith and love, and of salvation by faith through God's grace; and that these doctrines were taught in the belief that they would bring man out from his egoism and organize society under the law of love. His objection is not that they do not

1 Positive Polity, vol. iii. pp. 365, 376, 348, 383, 346, 347, 378, 384, 387; Trans. London, 1876.

have this tendency, but that they are incompatible with the monotheism of Christianity, of which they claim, falsely as he says, to be the legitimate development. And it is the doctrine of the church that the Trinity revealed in Christ is the revelation of God, not shut up in his own absolute Ego, but opening out in creation, ennobling humanity by revealing the essential elements of human personality eternal in himself, in Christ identifying himself with man, bearing his sins, his sorrow, and his death, in order to save men from their egoism and bring them back to the life of universal love. The secret of Jesus, "he that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it," is the revelation that obedience to the law of self-sacrificing love is the only way of blessedness, that a life of egoism is spiritual death, and the death of egoism is the true spiritual life of faith and love and blessedness; and this is the "life of God in the soul of man."

In the Trinity as revealed in Christ, we see God, Father, Son, and Spirit, reconciling the world unto himself. The reconciliation of man with God is the only effective reconciliation of man with man. Here, then, in the revelation of God in the Trinity, we have the principle of universal reconciliation, of universal harmony and love, to be realized in the kingdom of Christ. This principle is to be realized in the world, not by rules and statutes prescribing the details of duty and forbidding the details of wrongdoing, and contending, perhaps with violence and blood, for their enforcement, but by the spirit of Christ's self-sacrificing love to sinners, taking possession of human hearts, and uniting them with God and with one another through their faith in him, the mediator between God and man. Under his seeking and drawing, men are to return as prodigals to their Father's house and dwell together as brethren. And this principle of reconciliation is to continue working until it brings into harmony under the law of love all customs, laws, and institutions, and society is transformed into the kingdom of Christ.

3. The conclusion is, therefore, alike from the essential elements of the doctrine and from history, that the Trinity as revealed in Christ is the only worthy conception of God, satisfying the demands of reason. A true definition of God must set forth both his absoluteness and his personality, his oneness and his manifoldness, his transcendence and his immanence, his inde

pendence and his communicableness. It is the endeavor of all religions to find God communicating himself to man, and to bring man into communion and union with God. But it must be the real God, in both sides of his being as the absolute Spirit. The danger is, as history shows, that in grasping one of these, men lose their hold on the other. Hence God is lost in agnosticism,

or set apart from man in deism, Mohammedism, or Epicureanism; or he is identified with the universe in materialistic or pantheistic monism; or he is divided and belittled in polytheism; or in recognizing his personality as the one only God, the man loses sight of his absoluteness, and exposes himself to the divine rebuke, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself." Christianity presents precisely that representation of God which compels us in the very act of taking it into our minds to hold both aspects of his being, as the absolute Being and as the personal Spirit. It illuminates God in his personality and communicableness as Spirit, as no other representation of God does; but it equally illuminates him in the absoluteness of his being, as lightning reveals the cloud on which it crinkles. The mystery in God brought to notice in the Trinity is itself a revelation of him. It reveals his absoluteness and transcendence. The mystery in the doctrine is thus a revelation of reality in God and an element of power in bringing men to reconciliation with him. Thus the very difficulty which the doctrine at first presents to the intellect becomes on further thought a revelation of God and an evidence of the truth of the doctrine itself. And the Trinity as revealed in Christ presents, as no other conception of God does, the full-orbed idea of God as at once the absolute and the personal Spirit. Let it be noted, however, that it is not the mysteriousness in itself which is the power, but the absoluteness and transcendence of God revealed in it, as the background of God's clearest and fullest revelation of himself as personal Spirit, and of his communication of himself to men and of his intimacy with them in love. On the contrary, the very simplicity and clearness of the so-called simple theism, which are urged so confidently as proofs of its truth, are found on further thought to be proofs of its falsity and elements of its practical weakness. It strips God of his majesty, and man of his awe before him. Already in literature some writers are speaking flippantly of the gods, instead of reverently of God. As Dr. Bushnell says, we cannot decoct the whole

mass of God's revelation of himself, "and draw off the extract into pitchers of our own; fine, consistent, nicely-rounded pitchers, which, so far from setting out anywhere towards infinity, we can carry at pleasure by the handle and definitely measure by the eye." Because the revelation of God in Christ is the largest revelation of God, for that very reason it must be the largest revelation of the mystery of his absoluteness and transcendence. Always the larger the area of clear vision, the larger the bounding horizon of the unknown.

1 God in Christ, p. 69.

IN presenting the practical significance of the Trinity I do not refer to the human speculations respecting it, but to the conception of the one only God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as revealed in the redemption of men through God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, and in the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, and taking of the things of Christ and showing them unto men, as set forth in the Bible. I shall not attempt to define the full practical significance and application of this scriptural revelation of God, because it sheds its own peculiar light on the significance, and penetrates with its own peculiar and vitalizing influence the practical application, of every truth, precept, and historical fact in God's revelation of himself. Therefore I must confine myself to a few points showing its practical power.

I. Christ presents the Trinity as central in the organization, worship, doctrine, and work of his church. A little while before. his ascension Jesus came to his disciples and, in a parting charge, gave to them their great commission. He was never given to speculative theorizing, but his instructions had always been intensely practical. Most of all, in these parting moments, when he is committing to them the work of gathering all men into his kingdom, and of organizing, instructing, and building up his church, he will give them in their commission what is essential to the work in its most condensed and comprehensive form. What he does give them is the Trinity. "Go ye and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost"; and this he gives them as central in the organization, the worship, the teaching, and the work of his church. The only reasonable explanation is that this formula of