language, present themselves to human understanding, as a metaphor borrowed from human experience.

It is worth while to justify, for a moment, the use of the word metaphor, because the word has been abused and is justly suspected: and the use and abuse need to be carefully and accurately distinguished. If, for example, our Lord's words in the third or sixth of St John, are explained as "metaphor"; this often means that they are explained away, as having a certain resemblance or analogy to truth, instead of being really true themselves. This of course is wholly illegitimate. The mistake arises as a result of a tacit (but false) assumption that a metaphorical truth is ipso facto "less true" than what we call a literal one. The fact is that almost every word of deep spiritual import is a metaphor: that is to say, is expressed in terms of a likeness drawn immediately from material things. It is so with "sin"; it is so with 'grace"; it is so with "justification." "Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness" is a metaphor or analogy from material starvation. But it is a disastrous, though deeply ingrained error, to assume that the material experiences are absolutely, and the spiritual only relatively, and less really, true: or that the meaning of the words in a material context is the true gauge and measure of their meaning when spiritually applied. This instinct is nearly the precise reverse of truth. The material experience is as a sort of parable or hint which serves to suggest a term for describing the spiritual. But the term, as borrowed for spiritual use, means something not less, but far more, than ever it meant in the material sphere: the spiritual significance outruns the material, not only in width of content, but in profoundness of truth. Spiritual hunger may be rarer than material among men who are still largely animal: but spiritual hunger, where realized, is more

overwhelming, more intense, more real, as hunger, than physical decay for lack of food. And it would be obviously fatuous to measure the awful significance of such metaphorical words as sin, or judgment, or grace, or spirit, by the meaning which the words once bore in material experience; though the words were borrowed from material experience, and their material meaning served as the first suggestion by which some expression was given to the spiritual idea.

It is plain, then, that in the legitimate sense of the word, the correlative terms "Father" and "Son" are words of metaphor; that is to say, that the words, in human use, have their primary significance in the region of human experience: and that all other uses are based upon, and borrowed from, however completely they may transcend, this. And the same of course is obviously true of the word IIveûua, Spirit, or Breath. It follows from this that however illuminating, on some sides, may be the revelation which the words contain: it is true also that men's minds have always to be on their guard against being misled by the words. They are clearly capable of being interpreted amiss. And it is notorious that, as a matter of fact, men's minds have found very considerable difficulty in guarding adequately against some misconceptions, which have been chiefly suggested by the words. It was an old problem to find illustrative instances which would show how an effect might be neither later, nor lesser, than its cause. But however complete may have been the success of theological teachers in this direction, it can hardly be doubted that the problem was caused by the extreme difficulty, to human thought, of using the terms "Father" and "Son" at all, without projecting too materially, across the conception of the Eternal Being of God, the shadow of the associations of these human words; without (that is to

say) carrying both the distinction which the words imply between the two, and the inferiority and posteriority of the one to the other, much further than they ought to be carried.

Now I cannot but suggest that this difficulty, which has been felt in all ages of the Church, is materially lightened, if we are willing to recognize that the terms themselves, as applied to the Persons of the Godhead, have their primary reference rather to the manifestation of God in the Incarnation and its outflowing consequences, than to the Eternal relations regarded in themselves. I say their primary reference; because it would seem impossible for a Christian to doubt that there must be that in the Eternal relations of the First and the Second Persons of the Trinity, with which the words "Father" and "Son" have a real and legitimate correspondence; even if it be true that these words, being primarily occasioned by the conditions which the fact of Incarnation established, might seem by themselves to overstate to our imaginations that Eternal relation with which they nevertheless profoundly correspond. For the most part it is difficult to test such a suggestion as this by the language of the New Testament; because the mighty fact of the Incarnation so absolutely dominates the entire revelation of the New Testament, and characterizes and shapes all its thought and language; that it is comparatively rarely that we can, in the New Testament, stand aside (so to speak) in thought or even in phrase, from that one dominating conception. But it is certainly very significant, that in the one passage which, more clearly than any other, goes back behind the fact of the Incarnation, or the consciousness of the Incarnate, to speak of the eternal relations, as such, within the eternal existence of Deity,—that is to say, the first fourteen verses of the Gospel of St John,-the word "Son" (and with it the correlative word "Father ") does drop out altogether,

and another word takes its place. It will be recognized at once that the title Aóyos, or Word, while it is full indeed of its own mysterious significance, is wholly without the strong suggestions-of sharp distinction and emphatic subordination—which it is so hard to separate from the words Father and Son, so long as they are thought of as descriptive primarily of the Eternal, rather than of the Incarnate, relations.

But what is it that is practically meant, in the many familiar contexts of the New Testament which will occur to our minds, by emphasizing this prominence of the idea of Incarnation, as that to which the words primarily refer, and in which they find their directest and most unqualified fulness of significance? It is that the Fatherhood of God is, in the most unqualified directness and inclusiveness of that word, towards man; and that Sonship, as predicated of God, is predicated most absolutely and unreservedly of God qua Incarnate. If then we should venture to paraphrase the great Name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,-describing the Threefoldness thus; viz. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in His Infinity, as Himself; God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man, body, soul, and spirit, the consummation, and interpretation, and revelation, of what true Manhood means and is, in its very truth, that is, in its true relation to God; God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness-the Beauty and Holiness which are Himself-present in things created animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their Divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities, the full reality of their personal response: we should be expressing, not indeed the whole truth of the Being of God, which no words of ours can express, but at least a conception which is absolutely true as far as it goes; and moreover the sort of conception which is probably most intelligible to us,—and intelligible exactly

along the lines suggested by the Three Names selected, in human language, to constitute an intelligible revelation to human thought.1

The important thing to observe, for our present practical purpose, is that to speak, in one phrase, of God in His eternal self-existence, and of God Incarnate as mana revelation to man at once of God's nature and of man's relation to God-is by no means altogether the same thing as to speak of the First Person in the eternal relation of Divine Being, and of the Second Person in the eternal relation of Divine Being: and moreover that the correlative phrases Father and Son, whatever analogy they may have with the eternal distinctions of Deity, do not correspond with, or give expression to, these eternal distinctions, quite so directly, or closely, or unreservedly, as to the relations between God the Eternal and God the Incarnate, between God as God, and God as Man.

And if this is true, or even partly true, of the terms in which the Divine Name is revealed to the Church, to be its formula, on earth, of Baptismal admission and distinctively Christian blessing: still more is this thought true, and emphasized as true, when the phrase used is not so much "from God the Father, and from God the Son," as rather "from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ." Here it is unmistakably the Human designation,— with whatever august associations of awe and worship-upon which the emphasis is laid. And as a matter of fact, it is this form, which, with comparatively few exceptions, is the characteristic formula of the of the New Testament. This emphasis upon the Incarnation is sufficiently marked, when the formula is threefold, as in the familiar words of benediction "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be

1 See Note B. at the end of the Chapter.