TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM.

BY THE REV. JOSEPH COOK.

THERE is a dim twilight of religious experience in which the soul easily mistakes Ossa and Parnassus for Sinai and Calvary. My feeling is that orthodoxy itself lives much of the time in this undispersed twilight; and that the unscientific and lawless liberalism of many half-educated people who have lost the Master's whip of small cords, believe in æsthetic but not in moral law, and proclaim that in the last analysis there is in this universe nothing to be fearedDr. Bartol says so-and, therefore, we must add, nothing to be loved! is always in an earlier and deeper shadow of that misleading haze. The gray, brindled dawn is better than night; but the risen sun is better than the gray, brindled dawn. We must startle mere æsthetics and literary religiosity out of its dream that it is religion, by exhibiting before it the difference between the admiration and the adoration of the attributes of the Holy Person the moral law reveals. If any who are orthodox in their thoughts worship in their imagination three different beings, they, too, must be startled from this remnant of paganism by a stern use of the scientific method.

As Carlyle says of America, so I of this hushed, reverent discussion: Do not judge of the structure while the scaffolding is up. A glimpse only of the opening of the unfathomable theme which the distinction between the Triunity of the Divine Nature and Tritheism suggests can be given here and now; and more than this will be expected by no scholar. Reserving qualifications for later occasions, I purposely present only an outline, unobscured by detail. I know what I venture in definition and illustration; but I am asking no one to take my opinions. Nevertheless, in order yet further to save time, I am to cast myself abruptly into the heart of this topic, and to give you personal conviction. After all, that is what serious men want from each other, and the utterance of it is not egotism in you or in me. It is the shortest way of coming at men's hearts, and it is sometimes the shortest way in which to come at men's heads, to tell what you personally are willing to take the leap into the Unseen depending upon. What is the definition of the Trinity?

1. The Father, the Son, and the 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.

That I suppose to be the standard definition: and if you will examine it you will find it describing neither three separate individualities nor yet three mere modes of manifestation; that is, neither tritheism nor modalism. In God are not three wills, three consciences, three intellects, three sets of affections. The first of all the religious truth of exact research is that the Lord our God is one God. It is the immemorial doctrine of the Christian ages that there are not three gods, but only one God. He is one substance; and in that one substance are three subsistences. But the subsistences are not individualities. All the great symbols teach decisively that we must not unify the subsistences; but, with equal decisiveness, they affirm that we must not divide the substance. In our present low estate as human we find, by the experience of centuries that we do well to heed both these injunctions, and to look on the Divine Nature on all the sides on which it has revealed itself, if we would not fall into the narrowness of materialism on the one hand, or into the vague ways of tritheism or pantheism on the other.

How shall we make clear in our intellectual and emotional experiences the truth of the Trinity, and at the same time keep ourselves in the attitude of those who worship one God, and who, therefore, do not break or wish to break with science, and yet in the position of those who in the one substance worship three subsistences, and therefore do not break or wish to break with the very significant record of the most fruitful portion of the Church through eighteen hundred years? For one, accepting the definition of the Trinity which I have now given as neither tritheistic nor modalistic, I, personally, find no difficulty in this doctrine in the shape of self-contradiction in either thought or terms; and I find infinite advantages in it when I wish to conjoin biblical and scientific truth as a transfiguration for life.

It is sometimes despairingly said that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be illustrated. And this is true. It is the proverb of philosophy that no comparison walks on four feet; and what I am about to say you will take as intended by me to exhibit only the parallelisms which I point out. I am responsible for no unmentioned point in a comparison. No doubt you can find as many places where the illustration 1 am to use will not agree with the definition as I can places where it does agree. Nevertheless, after dwelling on perhaps a hundred other illustrations, my own thoughts oftenest and with most of reverence come back to this.

Take the mysterious, palpitating radiance which at this instant streams through the solar windows of this temple, and may we not

Athanasian Creed,

say, for the sake of illustration, that it is one substance? Can you not affirm, however, that there are in it three subsistences? It would be possible for me by a prism to produce the colours seven on a screen. I should have colour there, and heat here, and there would be luminousness everywhere. But in colour is a property incommunicable to mere luminousness or to heat. In luminousness is a property incommunicable to mere heat or to colour. In heat is a property incommunicable to mere colour or to luminousness. These three-luminousness, colour, heat-are, however, one solar radiance. Heat subsists in the solar radiance; and colour subsists in the solar radiance; and light subsists in the solar radiance. The three are one; but they are not one in the same sense in which they are three.

It is one of the inexcusable mistakes of a silly kind of scepticism that there are in the Trinity three persons, in the literal or colloquial sense of that word. Sometimes with tears and sometimes with laughter, one pauses over this astounding passage, printed in his manhood by Thomas Paine, in his "Age of Reason"; and yet what he heard read was, I presume, an atrociously careless orthodox discussion.

"I well remember, when about seven or eight years ago, hearing a sermon read by a relation of mine, who was a great devotee of the Church, upon the subject of what is called redemption by the death of the Son of God. After the sermon was ended I went into the garden, and as I was going down the garden-steps (for I perfectly recollect the spot), I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son, when he could not revenge himself any other way; and, as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what purpose they preached such sermons. This was not one of those kind of thoughts that had anything in it of childish levity; it was to me a serious reflection, arising from the idea I had that God was too good to do such an action, and also too almighty to be under any necessity of doing it. I believe in the same manner at this moment. The Christian mythology has five deities: there is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, the God Providence, and the Goddess Nature. But the Christian story of God the Father putting his Son to death, or employing people to do it (for that is the plain language of the story), cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse, as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder."*

There is nothing in Paine's "Age of Reason" worth glancing at now except this curious paragraph in which he details the circumstances of the life-long unconscious obtuseness and ignorance out of which arose his opposition to Christianity. Possibly, if he had understood the distinction between the Trinity in God's nature and tritheism,

"Age of Reason," Part I.

this sharp and crackling pamphleteer for freedom, in spite of his narrow brow and coarse fibre, would not have fallen into this amazing error, which, according to his own account, underlay all his subsequent career as an infidel. Three separate beings, he thought, Christianity teaches us to believe exist in one God; and one enraged person of these three had murdered another person.

But scholars, as a mass, following St. Augustine centuries before poor Paine's day, copiously affirmed that the word "person" in the discussion of the Trinity does not mean what it does in colloquial speech. The word in its technical use is one thousand five hundred years old, and it means in that use now what it meant at first.

How commonplace is St. Augustine's remark, repeated by Calvin, that this term was adopted because of the poverty of the Latin tongue! Everybody of authority tells us, if you care for scholarly statement, that three persons never meant, in the standard discussions of this truth, three personalities, for these would be three gods. This Latin term persons is incalculably misleading in popular use on this theme. For one, I never employ it, although willing to use it if it is understood as it was by those who invented the term. Let us use Archbishop Whateley's word "subsistence," for that is the equivalent of the carefully-chosen, sharply-cut Greek term "hypostasis."* We had better say there are in one substance three subsistences, and not mislead our generation, with its heads in newspapers and ledgers, by using a phrase that was meant to be current only among scholars. All these scholars will tell you that it is no evasion of the difficulties of this theme for me to throw out of this discussion at once the word "persons," as misleading; for that word had originally no such meaning in the Latin tongue as the word person has in our own. Cicero says, "Ego unus, sustineo tres personas: I being one, sustain three characters-my own, that of my client, and that of the judge." Our English language at this point is, as the Latin was not, rich enough to match the old Greek. With Liddon's "Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of our Lord"-the best English book on this theme, though not exhaustive of it—let us say "One substance and three subsistences," and thus go back to the Greek phrase, and be clear.

Can the four propositions of the definition I have given be paralelled by an illustration?

1. Sunlight, the rainbow, and the heat of sunlight, are one solar radiance.

2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others.

3. Neither is full solar radiance without the others.

* Note to Whateley's "Treatise on Logic."

4. Each with the others is such solar radiance.

Sunlight, rainbow, heat-one solar radiance. Father, Son, Holy Ghost-one God.

I. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God.

2. As all of the rainbow is sunlight, so all of Christ's divine soul is God.

3. As the rainbow was when the light was, or from eternity, so Christ was when the Father was, or from eternity.

4. As the bow may be on the earth and the sun in the sky, and yet the solar radiance remain undivided, so God may remain in Heaven and appear on earth as Christ, and his oneness not be divided.

5. As the perishable raindrop is used in the revelation of the rainbow, so was Christ's body in the revelation to men of God in Christ.

6. As at the same instant the sunlight is itself and also the rainbow and heat, so at the same moment Christ is both himself and the Father, and both the Father and the Holy Ghost.

7. As solar heat has a property incommunicable to solar colour, and solar colour a property incommunicable to solar light, and solar light a property incommunicable to either solar colour or solar heat, so each of the three, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, has a property incommunicable to either of the others.

8. But as solar light, heat, and colour are one solar radiance, so the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God.

9. As neither solar heat, light, or colour is itself without the aid of the others, so neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost is God without the others.

10. As solar heat, light, and colour are each solar radiance, so Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each God.

11. As the solar rainbow fades from sight and its light continues to exist, so Christ ceases to be manifest and yet is present.

12. As the rainbow issues from sunlight and returns to the general bosom of the radiance of the sky, so Christ comes from the Father, appears for awhile, and returns, and yet is not absent from the earth.

13. As the influence of the heat is that of the light of the sun, so are the operations of the Holy Spirit Christ's continued life.

14. As is the relation of all vegetable growths to solar light and heat, so is the relation of all religious growths in general history, in the Church, and in the individual, to the Holy Spirit, a present Christ.

It was my fortune once, on an October Sabbath evening, to stand alone at the grave of Wordsworth, in green Grassmere, in the English