rushing wind, gives life and vigor to the human soul and to the human race.

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"One accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world has never lost."

To believe in a Presence within us pleading with our prayers, groaning with our groans, aspiring with our aspirations to believe in the Divine supremacy of conto believe that the spirit is above the letter to believe that the substance is above the form 2. to believe that the meaning is more important than the words to believe that truth is greater than authority or fashion or imagination, and will at last prevail to believe that goodness and justice and love are the bonds of perfectness, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead though he live, and which bind together those who are divided in all other things whatsoever this, according to the Biblical uses of the word, is involved in the expression: "I believe in the Holy Ghost." In this sense there is a close connection between the later additions of the Creeds and the original article on which they depend. The Universal Church, the Forgiveness of Sins, are direct results of the influence of the Divine Spirit on the heart of man. The hope of "the Resurrection of the Dead and of the Life of the World to Come," as expressed in the Eastern Creed, are the best expressions of its vitality. The Communion of Saints in the Western Creed is a beautiful expression of its pervasive force. Even the untoward expression, "the Resurrection of the flesh," may be taken as an awkward indication of the same aspiration for the triumph of mind over matter.

II. Such is the significance of these three Sacred Names as we consider them apart. Let us now consider

1 Rom. viii. 16, 26; Eph. ii. 18.

2 John iv. 25.

8 Gal. v. 22; Eph. v. 9.

4 John xiv. 17, 26; xv. 26; xvi. 13.

what is to be learned from their being thus made the summary of Religion.

1. First it may be observed that there is this in common between the Biblical and the scholastic representations of the doctrine of the Trinity. They express to us the comprehensiveness and diversity of the Divine Essence. We might perhaps have thought that as God is One, so there could be only one mode of conceiving Him, one mode of approaching Him. But the Bible, when taken from first to last and in all its parts, tells us that there is yet a greater, wider view. The nature of God is vaster and more complex than can be embraced in any single formula. As in His dealings with men generally, it has been truly said that

"God doth fulfil Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world,"

so out of these many ways and many names we learn from the Bible that there are especially these three great revelations, these three ways in which He can be approached. None of them is to be set aside. It is true that the threefold name of which we are speaking is never in the Bible brought forward in the form of an unintelligible mystery. It is certain that the only place where it is put before us as an arithmetical enigma is now known to be spurious. Yet it is still the fact that the indefinite description of the Power that governs all things is a wholesome rebuke to that readiness to dispose of the whole question of the Divine nature, as if God were a man, a person like ourselves. The hymn of Reginald Heber, which is one of the few in which the feeling of the poet and the scholar is interwoven with the strains of simple devotion

"Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty'

refuses to lend itself to any anthropomorphic specula tions, and takes refuge in abstractions as much with

1 1 John v. 7.

drawn from the ordinary figures of human speech and metaphor, as if it had been composed by Kant or Hegel. To acknowledge this triple form of revelation, to acknowledge this complex aspect of the Deity, as it runs through the multiform expressions of the Bible — saves, as it were, the awe, the reverence due to the Almighty Ruler of the universe, tends to preserve the balance of truth from any partial or polemical bias, presents to us not a meagre, fragmentary view of only one part of the Divine Mind, but a wide, catholic summary of the whole, so far as nature, history, and experience permit. If we cease to think of the Universal Father, we become narrow and exclusive. If we cease to think of the Founder of Christianity and of the grandeur of Christendom, we lose our hold on the great historic events which have swayed the hopes and affections of man in the highest moments of human progress. If we cease to think of the Spirit, we lose the inmost meaning of Creed and Prayer, of Church and Bible, of human character, and of vital religion. In that apologue of Goethe before quoted, when the inquiring student asks his guides who have shown him the three forms of reverence, "To which of these religions do you adhere?" "To all the three," they reply, "for in their union they produce the true religion, which has been adopted, though unconsciously, by a great part of the world." "How, then, and where?" exclaimed the inquirer. "In the Creed," replied they. "For the first article is ethnic, and belongs to all nations. The second is Christian, and belongs to those struggling with affliction, glorified in affliction. The third teaches us an inspired communion of saints. And should not the three Divine Persons 1 justly be considered as in the highest sense One?'

1 Goethe probably used this expression as the one that came nearest to hand. To make it correct, it must be taken, not in the modern sense of individual beings, but in the ancient sense of "Hypostasis," or 'groundwork."

2. And yet on the other hand, when we pursue each of these sacred words into its own recesses, we may be thankful that we are thus allowed at times to look upon each as though each for the moment were the whole and entire name of which we are in search. There are in the sanctuaries of the old churches of the East on Mount Athos sacred pictures intended to represent the doctrine of the Trinity, in which, as the spectator stands at one side, he sees only the figure of Our Saviour on the Cross, as he stands on the other side he sees only the Heavenly Dove, as he stands in the front he sees only the Ancient of Days, the Eternal Father. So it is with the representations of this truth in the Bible, and, we may add, in the experiences of religious life.

Sometimes, as in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms, we are alone with God, we trust in Him, we are His and He is ours. The feeling that He is our Father, and that we are His children, is all-sufficing. We need not be afraid so to think of Him. Whatever other disclosures He has made of Himself are but the filling up of this vast outline. Whatever other belief we have or have not, cling to this. By this faith lived many in Jewish times, who obtained a good report, even when they had not received the promise. By this faith have lived many a devout sage and hero of the ancient would, whom He assuredly will not reject. So long as we have a hope that this Supreme Existence watches over the human so long as this great Ideal remains before us, the material world has not absorbed our whole being, has not obscured the whole horizon.

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Sometimes, again, as in the Gospels or in particular moments of life, we see no revelation of God except in the world of history. There are those to whom science is dumb, to whom nature is dark, but who find in the life of Jesus Christ all that they need. He is to them the all

The er

in all, the True, the Holy, the express image of the Highest. We need not fear to trust Him. The danger hitherto has been not that we can venerate Him too much, or that we can think of Him too much. ror of Christendom has far more usually been that it has not thought of him half enough—that it has put aside the mind of Christ, and taken in place thereof the mind of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, great in their way, - but not the mind of Him of whom we read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Or if we should combine with the thought of Him the thought of others foremost in the religious history of mankind, we have His own command to do so, so far as they are the likenesses of Himself, or so far as they convey to us any sense of the unseen world, or any lofty conception of human character. With the early Christian writers, we may believe that the Word, the Wisdom of God which appeared in its perfection in Jesus of Nazareth, had appeared in a measure in the examples of virtue and wisdom which had been seen before His coming. On the same principle we may apply this to those who have appeared since. He has Himself told us that in His true followers He is with mankind to the end of the world. In the holy life, in the courageous act, in the just law, is the Real Presence of Christ. Where these are, in proportion as they recall to us His divine excellence, there, far more than in any consecrated form or symbol, is the true worship due from a Christian to his Master.

• Sometimes, again, as in the Epistles, or in our own solitary communing with ourselves, all outward manifestations of the Father and of the Son, of outward nature and of Christian communion, seem to be withdrawn, and the eye of our mind is fixed on the Spirit alone. Our light then seems to come not from without but from within, not from external evidence but from inward conviction.