and the different departments of nature and life, the ocean, heavens and under-world, commerce, art, learning, and agriculture, are regarded as having special divinities, who preside over them, and take their interests in direct control. This multiplication of gods, especially as we find it in the mythologies of Greece and Rome and Northern Europe, is apt at first glance to seem absurd, the mere vagaries of the imagination, a useless burden placed on the religious nature. But, as we look deeper, there is seen to be a method about it. It results inevitably from the desire within us for the full circle of divine perfections. The human mind has not yet arrived at the sublime conception, that one Being is able to unite all excellencies, and to be present everywhere at once. Minerva has only wisdom; but a man wishes to adore something else than wisdom. Diana has purity; but purity alone cannot satisfy the soul. Venus has beauty and love; Apollo, grace and strength; Mars, force: but with each of these there is wanting all the rest. And so, by the very necessity of our nature, when man once starts with the idea that one person can have only a part of the divine attributes, there must be persons enough to supply them all. The same principle holds in regard to the multiplication of local divinities. Jupiter can be only in one place at once, Neptune in another, Pluto in another. But man wants to find Deity in every place, wants his care and help in every interest of life. And so, when one was localized, it became necessary to have enough for all possible localities. A pantheon, which united all the parts, was the logical result of a partition which separated the divine nature among different persons. And the truth which lies at the centre of all polytheism, is that the Divine somehow must embrace every possible perfection, and be present everywhere. It The step from polytheism to the belief in one God, perfect and omnipresent, was too long to be taken all at once. had to be made by various stages. The work began with the Hebrews, whose great teachers, far back, spirit-taught, proclaimed the simple unity of the Divine nature, "Hear, O Israel! the Lord our God is one Lord." But the mere doc trine of God's unity was not enough, could not satisfy all the spirit's wants. The Hebrew conception of him was narrow. He was self-existence, power, purity, justice; but the God only of one people, and without those sweeter and gentler attributes which are revealed to us in the Christian Father. Hence, inevitably, the Israelites, seeking after more of God, fell into the worship of the heathen divinities around them, Bell, Dagon, Astarte, Moloch, some of whom represented those very qualities which they had failed to get in their idea of Jehovah. It was an idolatry, paradoxical as it may seem, that in one sense was divine, - a going away from the true God only to seek more of him. There was no kind of punishment - earthquake, pestilence, famine, subjugation - that was ever able to cure them of it. And it is a notable fact, that only when the sweet singers and the later prophets of Israel had enlarged the conception of Jehovah, representing him as grace and mercy and tenderness, do we find the people settling down quietly into the permanent condition of monotheism. But with the process of combining the divine attributes into one Person, not only among the Jews but among all nations, there was another and backward movement almost inevitable, going on at the same time. The original conception of their deities, with all religions, seems to have been that of their immediate presence. Jehovah went with the Hebrews in all their wanderings, a cloud by day and pillar of fire by night: he abode in their ark, led them to battle, and governed their state. Olympus and Asgard, the dwellingplaces of Jupiter and Odin, were parts of the earth. And the hosts of divinities which gathered around them - Apollo, Mercury, Venus and Minerva, Thor, Freir, Balder-were conceived of as mingling daily in the affairs of mankind. But with the doctrine of God's unity, with the conception of him as one mighty Being, embracing all the attributes which had been divided among countless divinities, the tendency was to remove him away from earth and earthly things. It was a more terrible thing to hold communion with such a Being. He could be gone to only on great occasions. A set order of men was necessary to deal with him, and his favor could be gained only by costly offerings and sacrifices. And this process of exaltation continued in the East, until he was considered not only to have no present connection with the world, but to be too great and holy even to have made it with his own hands. But a deity like this could not long satisfy the human heart. It wanted a being, not only perfect and infinite as an object of adoration, but near and genial, to hold communion with. And out of this want we have the cons - Mind, Reason, Wisdom, Truth, Power, Life - of Gnosticism, the innumerable Buddhas of Buddhism, and the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, that we find in the religion of the Brahmans. They are the media by which the Deity, far removed from earth, was supposed to make it and control its affairs, not separate persons from Deity, nor yet God himself, but emanations from him, as light from the sun, the stream from its fountain, the branches from the tree. They were incarnated in earthly forms; and it was only through them that men could know anything of the divine nature. These religions are vast heaps of superstitions, philosophic subtilties, and the wildest speculation. It is not possible for any human mind, in the present age of the world, to comprehend their full meaning, or enter into their spirit. And yet, beneath all their crudity and extravagance, the one great truth is recognized, that, however great and far away God may be, he is present likewise somehow in human affairs, and to be communed with by the human soul. With the exaltation of the Divine attributes into one perfect Being, there came also another doctrine which has had a vast influence in the world, - that of dualism. The deities of polytheism had a mixed character, had human passions, desires, and weakness, side by side with their divine powers; and it was easy, with such aid, to explain the origin of evil. But when the Deity was conceived of as one infinite Being, the centre of all goodness, wisdom, power, the questions at once arose, What is the source of the wickedness, the imperfection, the pain, of which the world is so full? Would a good Being have created these? Could they have come into existence of themselves? Surely not. Whence, then, could they have been derived, but from another being, the embodiment of all evil qualities, and powerful enough to match God? Hence the belief in two principles, beginning far back among the sages of ancient Persia, taking, in the third century, the form of Manicheism, and descending to our own time in the popular doctrine of Satan, the prince of darkness, as opposed to God, the Father of Light. And with the common idea of evil, - as an essence and not an incident in the universe, a part of the final consummation of all things and not a stage of imperfection through which we are to pass on, with the idea that an evil place and some evil souls are to be eternal, -there is no escape from dualism. Its logic is unanswerable. An omnipotent and all-wise Deity, so good as to hate evil, would not create it to be an ultimate part of his universe. And it is this truth, too great and precious to be slurred over, that lies at the base of the dualistic philosophy. And now we are prepared to see how these principles, running through so many other doctrines, are carried out in the origin and meaning of the Church doctrine of the Trinity. With the Hebrews themselves, the idea of God, which had come to them finished from the later prophets as one exalted Being, was enough, especially when combined with their anticipation of the Messiah and his reign on earth, to satisfy their wants. But not so with the Greeks and Romans, when Christianity, and with it, in spite of our Saviour's revelation of the Father, the old Hebrew idea of the Divine nature, went forth among them. They wanted him as a present Deity, and wanted somehow to incorporate in their worship those larger and grander conceptions of the Divine which had come to them through Christ, - justice and mercy, hatred of sin and love of the sinner. A Deity dwelling in the heaven of heavens, and yet present everywhere on earth, they had not yet learned to conceive of as possible in one person. They were qualities which, it seemed to them, could not dwell together, yet which were all divine, and all what they could not help adoring. And hence, what more natural than that, with the unity of God's being, they should strive to unite the conception of three persons, one in the heavens, just, wise, mighty, the eternal Father, whom no man had seen or could see; one in Christ, loving, merciful, tender, supplementing what they thought was impossible in the character of the first; and a third, the spirit of God descending on earth, operating directly on the souls of men, and with whom they held communion? It was not done all at once, not done consciously at first. The three persons seem to have been made divine separately to begin with, and then afterwards, from logical necessity, united in one; the process being helped by the subtilties of Greek philosophy, and the result apparently sanctioned by some things in the phraseology of Scripture. But, however this may be, the thing itself was no work of human ingenuity, no exceptional development, but a legitimate growth, the inevitable continuation, if not culmination, of a process which had been going on from the very dawn of religious thought. And from that time, yea, and all down through the ages, it has been the only form, under existing conditions, in which the highest truth about God could show itself. We find, then, two vital elements of truth in the Church doctrine of the Trinity. The first is its placing before us all the attributes of divinity as objects of adoration, the gentler ones of mercy, love, sympathy, as well as the sterner ones of justice, power, wisdom, and holiness. It is all of these which the soul needs. It is better that we should have them in two persons, rather than to have only a part of them in one; the error of form being of slight moment as compared with that in substance. The real question is, how much of the Divine nature do we get before the soul, not in what ways do we get it. And the mere unity of God in that age of the world would have been a bald, unsatisfying faith. Then, too, with the richer, deeper aspirations which Christianity aroused in the human soul, it was inevitable, that, if Christ had not been deified, some other and lower being must have been. It is a curious fact, mentioned by Mrs. Jameson, that in the Middle Ages the conception of Christ as the em i : |