scripture, so predicated in any unequivocal manner. What we do suggest amounts rather to this, that, as far as nomenclature is concerned, the words "Father" and "Son" express most primarily and most unreservedly the relation between the Eternal and the Incarnate, between God as God and God as man; and analogously rather than primarily, in dim suggestion rather than directly, those eternal relations which are hardly capable of any other than an indirect and analogous expression. If ever, then, they are used expressly of the eternal relations between the Persons of the Trinity, their application is, at all events, so far less direct and more mysterious, that they have to be interpreted, with reservation, guardedly; because as applied to that existence, the words, though not inapplicable or untrue, are yet applicable only through reserves which are not easy to human thought, but without which they inevitably tend to convey, to human thought, what is other, and more, than the truth.

To put it in another way, it may be said that what we suggest is that the title "Son," as direct revelation of unreserved or intelligible truth, begins, so to speak, from the Incarnate side, though capable-more, or less-of being transferred therefrom to that eternal relation of which Incarnation was itself a consequence: rather than that it is primarily revealed of the eternal relation,—though transferable also from the Divine to the Human life.

As to the question of fact, it is very difficult to be certain how far the word "Son" is used directly in Scripture of the pre-Incarnate Logos as such. I have already suggested in the text what seem to me reasonable grounds for doubting whether, in the great Baptismal formula, which is supremely authoritative, "into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," the reference is so much to the preexistent Logos, as to the Incarnate who had triumphed once for all in man.

So again in such a passage as the opening of the Hebrews, when we read "God having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets... hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in [His] Son," it is impossible to doubt, so far, that the word “Son" suggests primarily the Incarnate, as Incarnate. And when the writer goes on "whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds: who being the effulgence of His glory, and the very image of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of His power,' we shall hardly feel that these assertions alter the primary reference of the word "Son" as it stood in the verse before. All these things are true of Him, the Incarnate, though not true of Him primarily as Incarnate. If then they are all in this passage predicated of the Incarnate Son, it is difficult to lay down that they are, in this passage, predicated of Him primarily as Son, any more than they are of Him primarily as Incarnate.

The same is true of Col. i. 13, etc. "Who . . . translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love; in whom we have our redempion, the forgiveness of our sins: who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in Him were all things created," etc. Here the first two clauses so clearly refer to the victory wrought on earth by the Incarnate, that when the later clauses go on to predicate of Him eternal Deity, the work of Creation, etc., it seems impossible to say that these things are, as far as the passage is concerned, predicated of the Son, in any other sense than that in which they are predicated of the Incarnate. They are predicated indeed of Him the Incarnate, yet not primarily of His Incarnation; and therefore also of Him the Son, yet (it may be) not of Him most primarily or directly in respect of the title "Son."

As to any words uttered, of Himself, by the lips of the Incarnate,— "the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing"-"I and the Father are one"-" the Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand"-"Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me,” etc. etc.—it is manifest that they cannot be so taken apart from what He was who uttered them, and when He uttered them, as to warrant our laying down that they, or any of them, ought to be interpreted primarily, without any reference to the Incarnation at all, of His eternal pre-existence.

But though, in one passage after another, it seems impossible to get rid of this uncertainty of exegesis; and though (in spite of any misuse which Marcellus may have tried to make of it) the fact remains that the only passage in the New Testament which goes wholly and obviously behind the fact of Incarnation, drops altogether the words "Father" and "Son"; I must repeat that it is not meant to be suggested that the words should in such sense be referred to the Incarnation only, as though there were, in the Eternal Being of Deity, no truth corresponding with them.

We are not capable of understanding much, in direct terms, about the eternal relations within the Being of Deity. Only if we were capable of this, should we really understand with any fulness, that essential relation borne by the Logos who "in the beginning was with God, and was God," "in whom were all things created," and "in whom all things consist," to creation, and in particular to humanity, which underlies the fact that it was the "Logos" who "became flesh" for the regeneration of man. And in understanding this it is possible that we might understand, a little more, what is that eternal relation between the Logos, who (being God) "was with God," and "God" with whom the Logos (who was God) was; that relation which is shadowed for us to some extent under the metaphor of eternal generation; and to which the "Filial" relation, which Incarnation made,

to our earthly power of conceiving, absolute and literal, does, in some dimmer and more mysterious way, eternally correspond.

I have desired to make it plain that the suggestion made in the text does not really set aside, or deny, anything whatever which has been asserted, whether by Eusebius or others, as a part of the Catholic faith. Its point is not denying or setting aside at all. It does not contradict, it is not inconsistent with, anything which has been really held or taught on these subjects. Its real point is positive not negative: what it is anxious to assert, not what it might have been supposed to disallow. And I cannot but believe that that positive meaning is both true and important: that positive thought which would find—in the mode of the revelation to men of God "the Son," and God "the Holy Ghost," and in the terms and titles under which it has pleased God to designate to us the Father in relation to the Son, and the Son in relation to the Father, and the Holy Spirit in relation to both-a reference primary and dominant, though not therefore simply exclusive, to the One all-dominating fact of the Incarnation of God; God above, and with, and as, and more and more within, man.

CHAPTER IX

THE HOLY SPIRIT IN RELATION TO HUMAN

PERSONALITY

THERE is now another side on which it is important for us to consider the meaning, to ourselves, of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost; in its relation, namely, to our own personal being. What is human personality? And what is the relation of the new Presence or Power, revealed within man at Pentecost, to the realization of man's own personality, the true consummation of himself?

It has been a natural and deep-rooted instinct, on the part of thinking man, not only to start all speculation, or apprehension, from himself,-which is his inevitable and only mode of access to wider truth: but in such wise to start from himself, as if he himself were, by himself, a complete and separate whole, a realization in full of what he meant, or needed to mean, by the word personality: and therefore also a measure by which to gauge the meaning of the word personality, wherever it was to be predicated of any other than himself. Whether he had, in fact, or how far he had, or had not, achieved the completeness of what personality meant, was a question which he hardly paused, or thought it necessary, to raise. That he at least was, anyhow, himself, was a natural assumption to make; and it was naturally made, without adequate scrutiny, as a basis of all further thought. The assumption that I am, anyhow, myself, passes almost

indistinguishably, into the assumption that whatever this "I" may do or suffer, on the right hand or the left, the "I" itself remains a fixed and permanent quantity, of one continuous and essential content and significance.

This assumption that human personality was already fully realized, and therefore remained as an unchanging entity in the midst of all that was done by it, round it, or for it, has conspicuously underlain the greater part of human speculation in respect of the doctrine of the Atonement. It is suggested by the familiar metaphors under which different aspects of the Atonement have been illustrated, from the time of the New Testament itself. Man with a load upon him, or released from his load: man captive or enslaved, or released from his slavery or captivity: man sick or recovered from sickness; is after all the same man. Through all propositions like these, he, the central subject, is unchanged. There is indeed, very much alteration in his conditions and well-being. But parables such as these, however suggestive in their way, certainly do not suggest that the essential heart of the great change is to be found, after all, in the altered content of the meaning of the man's central self. The assumption that the human "he" was unchanged and undeveloped, because he had been, as "he," complete from the first, has led speculative thought to try and find the very heart of the meaning of the great change wrought by atonement, in some direction external to, and independent of, the personality of the man redeemed. Hence it is that most Christian theories explanatory of atonement,-assuming on the one side that "man" was, through all, the same completed and unchanging entity, and that the work of atonement on the other hand, if explained at all, must be explained as a process complete in itself, before its completed process was brought into relation with the personalities of men; have in them, as explanations, a dangerous flaw. They all