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 æons. 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

bodiment of mercy and compassion was gradually obscured, the idea of him as a stern judge taking its place. And what was the result? Why, the human soul could not give up the worship of these divine qualities, and the Virgin Mary was endowed with them, and made the object of the people's adoration. She is represented in paintings of that period as the pure, tender, loving woman, interceding before her Son, just the same as Christ had been before the Father, for the welfare of our lost race. She is now adored in all Roman Catholic countries equally with the Father, Son, and Spirit; is really a fourth person of the Godhead. It is worship which arose in precisely the same way, and on the same grounds, as that of Christ. The only reason why it was not transferred to Protestantism, along with the doctrine of the Trinity, is, that the necessities of Protestant theology have restored Christ to his original place as the embodiment of grace and mercy. It shows how inevitably the soul must have these qualities somehow in its conception of Deity, and is a most striking confirmation that this is, indeed, a vital thing in the doctrine of the Trinity.

Another truth which underlies it is the immediate presence of God in the world and with the soul. It matters not how exalted and pure and immaterial we consider him to be, how far removed from men in the grandeur and holiness of his character, there is one part of his personality, the Holy Spirit, not a dim influence but God himself, that is taught as pervading the world, and dwelling most intimately in the human heart. It is a most glorious truth. There was never any thing in the polytheistic conception of religion, with all the earthly locality which it assigned its gods, no lares or penates presiding over the household, no idol in its shrine, no image carried on the breast, which brought the divine so near, so immediate to the world, as the Church doctrine of the Spirit. We ourselves are his temple. He warns, directs, convinces, comforts. His breath is our inspiration. Our joy is in his touch. And through him we mount up, ever and ever, to the higher life. It is impossible to estimate too highly what the value of this truth has been through all the

Christian ages. It has been the connecting link between the Father, removed far off in dim eternity, and his children here on earth; the only way in which the faith, if not the heart, of the Church could have had a present God. And the intellectual fiction of a divided personality, by which it has been accomplished, has been a slight matter in comparison with the greatness and worth of the truth which has been within it.

It is these facts about the Trinity which suggest the true method of doing our Unitarian work. Two tendencies, each of them towards the unity of God, are now in operation with the Christian Church. One is the concentrating of all the divine attributes in the person of Christ; the words of one of the most popular Orthodox teachers, that the Father is only a dim and shadowy effluence rising up far away behind the deity of the Son, being true very largely of the common heart. The other tendency is to the oneness of the entire godhead in the person of the Father. And it is between these two issues,-not between the authority of Christ and the intuitions of the soul, which is merely a preliminary skirmish,that we believe is to be fought the great battle of the future. It is in the line of this faith, the conception of God the Father as all in all, that our work lies. And there is only a single way in which it can be done. All past experience shows, that to attack the Trinity, or what is now becoming the chief point in the doctrine, the deity of Christ, — on its logical side, is utterly in vain. It is clung to in face of the clearest demonstrations of its untruth. It somehow feeds the soul, gives it the fulness of the Divine nature; and what avails it to prove by argument that food is dust and ashes when millions of beings are using it every day, and finding it give them grandest health and strength? The only way is to make sure, that all the truth which is in their doctrine is furnished likewise in ours. There is nothing in the logical form of the Trinity which its believers care for. There are thousands of them who cannot repeat its terms, and scarcely any two, even of its scholars, who define it the same way. It is the underlying truth which makes them hold it. We need

VOL. LXXXII.-NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. I.

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