in ourselves; and then we should perfectly know Christ, for Christ is the self-fulfilment of the divine love in the world and in ourselves. But, in our finite

apprehension, we proceed, not a priori from the knowledge of God to that of love and of Christ, but a posteriori from the knowledge of Christ to that of love and so of God. Let us in that order endeavour to construe for ourselves the exact method and operation of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Perfect love in order to fulfil itself needs to know its object from the beginning and to the end. Not to speak in abstractions, let perfect love be God, and its object be man, or the creation as fulfilled in man. We begin then necessarily with the divine foreknowledge and predestination. Man must be the object of the eternal love-disposition and love-purpose of God. Love can will for its object nothing else or less than its own supreme good, and that can mean only its own completion or perfection. God, in willing for man his own or proper good, the good for which he is constituted and which is necessary to constitute him, wills for him not only natural good, the good of outward condition, — but moral good and spiritual good - the good of his own good-will and his own right spirit. In other words, what God wills for man is not a good of environment, but the good of his own personal attitude toward and reaction with environment. There is a sense in which we may even say that the worst environment is the best, since it demands and elicits the best reaction in order to overcome it. God, then, in willing for man his own highest good spiritual, must necessarily will for him the condi

tions necessary to the origination, exercise, and completest development of that good. The divine love will spare man nothing of the need, the effort, the pain, the trial, which are the awful cost of becoming his own highest and divinest self. The necessity laid upon man to so become himself is a necessity laid upon God to let him so become himself. What then shall love do for man? It shall certainly not save him from the supreme necessity of becoming all himself; but it shall be with him in so doing, in the way and in the degree the most perfectly conducive to the end of love which is also the end of the man. God is to us, then, first of all, divinest sympathy. He does not exempt us from, but He shares and endures with us and in us, all the extremest conditions and experiences of human life and destiny. His eternal love becomes infinite grace, which in turn develops itself in us in perfect participation or fellowship. Man is not saved from the necessity of being man, nor yet from the extremest conditions of his being so, but he has with him in all the necessary need, effort, pain, of becoming himself the divine sympathy which means, not only God with him and in him, but God suffering with him and in him. The real sympathy even of man is not only a sentiment in him who gives it, but a grace or something imparted, a fellowship or self-communicated, an actual help and strength, to him who receives it. What shall we say of him who not only by right but by act of possession has made his own the eternal love, the infinite grace, the self-imparting fellowship of God. All this is just what Jesus Christ not only means but is, is not merely

the symbol of but the reality. It is not enough to see all ourselves in Him, unless we equally see all God in Him. It is the actuality of that consummated relation between God and us that is the truth as it is in Jesus. But God imparts, communicates Himself, is with and in us, in a manner and degree of which the most perfect human sympathy is a very faint image. If we would see all the meaning of God with us and in us, we must see it in the human fulness of what Christ is. In Him, from what outward condition to which humanity is exposed was humanity exempt? Through what weakness or want or pain or effort or trial or sorrow through which human perfection must be attained was He not perfected? Yet what more could God be in man, or could He have been so much in him, otherwise than through the conditions and activities of his own manhood?

But — and this is the point to which our present argument brings us - when man through the perfect love and grace and fellowship of God in Christ has at last become himself in all the fulness of his divine predestination, has not also God in the consummated act of His own love and grace and self-fulfilment in man realized that in which in the highest His selfhood consists, and by that fact become His own highest Self in the world and in us? We speak of the incredible and impossible self-lowering or self-emptying of God in becoming man or in undergoing the death of the cross. Is the act in which love becomes perfect a contradiction or a compromise of the divine nature? Is God not God or least God in the moment in which He is

most love? Where before Christ, or otherwise than in Christ, in whom He humbled Himself to become man, and then humbled Himself with and in man to suffer what man must needs suffer in order to become what God would fain make him and the highest and best that even God can make him I say where before Christ, or where now otherwise than in Christ and in the cross of the divine suffering together with and for man, where in all the story of the universe was or is love so love, or God so God!

XXII

THE TRINITY

THE truth takes its own forms and expresses itself in its own ways. Our efforts at defining, proving, or establishing it are all acts after the event. It is what it is, and not what we make it. Christianity prevails in the world in a fact which we have called Trinity, and which is Trinity, however inadequate and unsatisfactory our explanations of the term or our analyses of the thing may be. I would describe Christianity in its largest sense to be the fulfilment of God in the world through the fulfilment of the world in God. This assumes that the world is completed in man, in whom also God is completed in the world. And so, God, the world, and man are at once completed in Jesus Christ—who, as He was the logos or thought of all in the divine foreknowledge of the past, so also is He the telos or end of all in the predestination of the future. That is to say, the perfect psychical, moral, and spiritual manhood of which Jesus Christ is to us the realization and the expression is the end of God in creation, or in evolution. I hold that neither science, philosophy, nor religion can come to any higher or other, either conjecture or conclusion, than that. But now, when we come to the actual terms or elements of God's self