of God by reason, on the one side, and revelation, on the other, should lock its two hands around the neck of all vice, and throttle whatever would throttle the Christian well-being of the poorest or the highest; and should thus build up in history a state fit to be called at once natural and God's own! When the Jesuits came to the mouth of the St. Lawrence, they intended to found a theocracy. The great dream that lay behind Milton's, and Cromwell's, and Hampden's thoughts and deeds, was that human legislation should be a close copy of the Divine and natural law. At the point of view to which exact research has now brought us we must assert that the fact of the Divine Immanence in matter and mind makes the world and nations a theocracy, and that politics and social life, no less than philosophy, must beware of fragmentary outlooks on the Divine Nature. Richter said: "He who was the Holiest among the Mighty, and the Mightiest among the Holy, has, with his pierced hand, lifted heathenism off its hinges, and turned the dolorous and accursed centuries into new channels, and now governs the ages." History, the illuminated garment of God! The church, Christ's temple! Did you ever hear of the former in the name of science, or of the latter in the name of Christianity? But to your Titanic Richter the two are one. De Tocqueville affirms anxiously that men never so much need to be theocratic as when they are the most democratic. Democracy will save itself by turning into a theocracy, or ruin itself by not doing so. Transfigure society with Richter's thought. Saturate the centuries with the certainty of the Divine Personal Immanence in matter and mind. Do this, and in the name of Science itself the labouring ages will slowly learn not merely admiration, but adoration, of one God incontrovertibly known in external nature, history, and conscience as Creator, as Redeemer, as Sanctifier. When they touch the hem of the garment of a Personal God thus apprehended, and never till then, will they be healed of the measureless evils arising from fragmentariness of outlook upon the Divine Nature. Let the forehead of Science, in the name of Christianity, bow down upon the moral law, as the beloved disciple did upon our Lord's bosom. Let Richter lead, and a time will come when all clear thought, all political action, all individual growth will call out: "Glory be to God revealed in external nature; glory be to God revealed in Christ and the Church; glory be to God revealed in conscience." To this secular voice the Church will answer, in words which have already led eighteen centuries, and Science will add at last her momentous acclaim: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end." THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. BY THE REV. JOSEPH COOK. CHARLES KINGSLEY, poet and philanthropist, friend of the workingman, and chaplain to the Queen of the British Empire, a stalwart and intense soul, not easily cheated, wrote from St. Leonard's, in 1857: My heart demands the Trinity as much as my reason. I want to be sure that God cares for us, that God is our Father, that God has interfered, stooped, sacrificed himself for us. 1 do not merely want to love Christ-a Christ, some creation or emanation of God's, whose will and character, for aught I know, may be different from God s. I want to love and honour the abysmal God himself, and none other will satisfy me. No puzzling texts shall rob me of this rest for my heart, that Christ is the exact counterpart of him in whom we live and move and have our being. I say, boldly, if the doctrine of the Trinity be not in the Bible, it ought to be, for the whole spiritual nature of man cries out for it. Have you read Maurice's essay on the Trinity, in his theological essays addressed to Unitarians ?* If not, you must read it."+ In 1865 Kingsley wrote to Maurice :— "As to the Trinity, I do understand you. You first taught me that the doctrine was a live thing, and not a mere formula to be swallowed by the undigesting reason; and from the time that I learnt from you that a Father meant a real Father, a Son a real Son, a Holy Spirit a real Spirit, who was really good and holy, I have been able to draw all sorts of practical lessons from it in the pulpit, and ground all my morality and a great deal of my natural philosophy upon it, and shall do so more."‡ In 1875 Charles Kingsley, having bidden adieu to Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle, iay dying; and, with the breath of eternity on his cheeks, the central thought of this modern man was that "only in faith and love to the Incarnate God our Saviour can the cleverest, as well as the simplest, find the peace of God which passes understanding." "In this faith," says his wife, "he had lived; and as he had lived, so he died—humble, confident, unbewildered." In the night he was heard murmuring: "No more fighting; no more fighting." Then followed intense, earnest prayers, which were his habit when alone. His warfare was accomplished; he had fought the good fight; and on one of his last nights on earth his daughter heard him exclaim : "How beautiful God is!" The last morning, at five o'clock, just after his eldest daughter and his physician, who had sat up all night, had left him, and he thought himself alone, he was heard, in a clear voice, repeating the words of the Burial Service: "Thou knowest, O Lord, "Theological Essays, pr. 410-441." ↑ Charles Kingsley, "Letters and Memories of his Life," 1877. lbid, p. 357. the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, O Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge Eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, from any pains of death, to fall from thee." He turned on his side after this, and never spoke again.* This modern martyr, who passed hence at the age of fifty-five, died as martyrs have died ever since the apostolic age; and I ask you to gaze with proper awe upon this recently unveiled holy of holies of a brave, late, and adequately cultured life, as a vivid type of what has been happening in the world for eighteen centuries. If you have historic sense, or any other kind of sense, you will not be easily persuaded that teaching which has survived the buffetings of eighteen hundred years, and has been to such crowned multitudes of the acutest and saintliest of the race a source of strength in life and of peace in death, has behind it only philosophical speculation, metaphysical nicety, cold analysis, scholarly precision, without practical application. I affirm in the name of all accredited history : 1. That the doctrine of the Trinity has always been held by Orthodoxy for its practical value. 2. That it was the doctrine of the Trinity which excluded from power in human cultured beliefs the thought of God as fate, and brought in the organizing and redemptive idea of God's fatherhood, and especially of the possibility of the communion of men with God as personal. The scholarship of the Roman Empire shook off its belief in the fatalism of Paganism by learning the doctrine of the Trinity. Incontrovertibly, the divine aroma of communion with God as personal was breathed into history from the lips of that philosophy which speaks of God under a Triune name. Historically, this teaching has borne these fruits; and the law of the survival of the fittest makes me, for one, reverent toward a proposition which, in so many ages, in so many moods of the world's culture, in such different circumstances of individual growth, has exhibited a power ever fresh, and has yet been the same, from the time when the apostolic benediction was pronounced in that Triune Name, to the last anthem that rolled around the world in that same Name. With the goodly company of the prophets and the apostles; with the martyrs of the earliest Christian ages; with the earlier and the later Fathers; with the strong scholars who, differing on much else, are on this truth essentially and persistently at one; with the Continental and English reformers, and the Anglican and Puritan and American divines; with * Charles Kingsley, "Letters and Memories of his Life," 1877, pp. 481, 482. Athanasius and Tholuck; with Fénélon and Knox; with Augustine and Anselm; with Calvin and Wesley; with Luther and Bossuet ; with Bull and Baxter, Horsley and Howe, Pearson, Newman, Pascal, Cudworth, Wolf, Butler, Tauler, and Hopkins, Waterland, Edwards, Sherlock, and Dwight, Park and Neander; with Nice, Trent, Augsburg, Westminster, Edinburg, Leipzig, Berlin, Princeton, New Haven, and Andover, shall not Boston say, "Let the anthem roll on "? It is amazing to me that any one can have considered my definition of the Trinity as Unitarian. A man whom I honour, and whose candour every one honours, is reported to have said publicly that the view presented here two weeks ago is "almost identical" with his own, and is such a view as (( any Unitarian may readily receive."* I am very glad if it is; but, as I understand Mr. Clarke's view, the one presented here and his differ by celestial diameters. What is the definition which this lectureship has presented? 1. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God. 2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others. 3. Neither is God without the others. 4. Each with the others is God. On the street I met, a few days ago, a man whom I suppose to be the best scholar in America in early ecclesiastical history. It is not permitted to me to mention his name; but he has a public position that commands respect from all scholars. Before I had introduced the topic at all, he said to me, with much emphasis: "I have documentary evidence in my possession to prove that your doctrine of the Trinity is the view held in the first four centuries." I also met a theologian whose knowledge of the relations of Christian truth to philosophy seems to me to be unequalled in this country; and he said to me, without any introduction of the topic on my part: "That definition of the Trinity which you have given will stand." He said this twice or thrice over; and, in order to be sure that he had really paid attention enough to this poor lectureship to know what the definition was, I recited the four propositions. And again he said, in effect: "The storm in the past has been borne by that definition, or its equivalent; and you will find that the storm of the future will be.'' It It is not by authority that I desire to buttress up any definition. is not a definition that I wish to give, but a life. In the midst of a hushed atmosphere, where an Unseen Power is revealing itself in the conversion of men, this very Temple, filled not long ago with the commercial business soul of Boston, and Massachusetts likely to be Daily Advertiser, March 26th, "Outline of the Rev. James Freeman Clarke's Discourse March 25th. reverent if she sees that the executive talent of this city is on its knees before Almighty God, we want not merely analysis and discussion. We want no breath of the unsanctified north wind which has too often blighted Eastern Massachusetts on holy themes. Let a fascinating devoutness lock hands with a fascinating clearness, or no discussion can transmute truth into life. Let luminousness of thought and the whole clustered growth of the divine emotions twine around our lives, as the vines wreathed themselves around the thyrsis of Mercury of old; and even then we shall not be ready to study religious science unless we have, as Mercury had, on feet and shoulders, the wings of the Spirit, to enable us to fly whithersoever the Spirit calls. There are seven tests which any definition of the Trinity must mect. It must not be modalistic or unintelligible; it must not be tri-theistic or Unitarian; it must not be a contradiction in terms or unhistorical; and, above all, it must not be unscriptural. The definition given here is not modalistic-that is, it does not represent God as simply three manifestations, nor yet as three modes of being, considered merely as modes. How can it be proved that the definition is not modalistic? 1. It teaches that each subsistence has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others. 2. It asserts that each subsistence, with the others, is God, and that neither, without the others, is God. 3. Therefore, it asserts in strict terms the Deity of our Lord. 4. What is said of Christ in this definition can be said of no human being. If Socrates had never existed, God would yet be God. But if the Holy Spirit had never existed, God would not be God. If Christ had never existed, God would not be God. If the Father had never existed, God would not be God. So, too, Socrates, with the Father and Son, or with the Son and Holy Spirit, or with the Father and Holy Spirit, is not God. But Christ, with the other two subsistences, is God. Is it thought that, according to this definition, God was in Socrates, and in Moses, and in Plato, and in every great, devout soul; and that, therefore, there is a sense in which divinity or deity may be attributed to these loftiest of the human sort? I do not see that; for, according to this definition, Socrates, with the Father and Son, or with the Son and Holy Spirit, or with the Father and Holy Spirit, is not God. Let us perfectly understand ourselves here, once for all. Is Socrates, with any two subsistences which we suppose exist in the Trinity, God? If so, you may say that, according to this definition, as God was in Christ, so he was in Socrates. But in the name of clear thought you |