tient, intelligent beings, all dependent upon something, all leaning on something, reaching after something not in ourselves, not in the world: thus, we are lifted up and taken out of the world in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye; all things seem to vanish into darkness, all save the soul and the bright glory that draws it upwards. Man seeks God, the source of his inmost life, but in that moment he feels that He is not far off, but near; and in that moment, when this impulse, intuition, consciousness, call it what you will, is upon him, what happens? Why, insensibly, irresistibly, permanently, he frames God after his own likeness. To us intellectually, sympathetically, God is perfect man. We call Him just, pure, mighty, loving; these are said to be His attributes, and these are human attributes. Almost before you have had time to analyse your thoughts then, you conceive God under the limitation of humanity. You cannot conceive of Him related to you in any other way. You may make those limitations as wide as ever you please, they will still be limitations, because your mind is limited, and you cannot intellectually transcend its inexorable limits. Very wide, is not illimitable; very great, is not infinite. You cannot conceive of the infinite, you may have a consciousness, as I have elsewhere shown at great length, but not a conception of it. What do you mean when you speak of the love of God? The magnified love of And when you speak of power? The magnified And when you speak of the intelligence of God? The magnified intelligence of man. And thus

man.

power of man.

God comes before you under a secondary aspect, cast in the form and found in the fashion of a man. I have often said, if we had no historical Christ at all, no one who had ever come forth as an expression of the Divine Mind, and as an expression of God under the limitations of humanity, we should be obliged to make a Christ, because our mind incarnates God in the form of Christ irresistibly and inevitably, whenever we bring definite thought to bear upon the question of a Divine Being in relation to man. And such a Christ, whether ideal or historical, will be God the Son.

But my Christ, where is my Christ? Is He only ideal? is He only in history? Then, in either case, He is far off, He is a conception to my mind; but all this time my soul is athirst for God, for the living God: no clear conception of Him will avail me if I cannot recruit my nature in Him, if I cannot meet with Him face to face, and be refreshed by communion with Him. Ah! in a bodily presence, that cannot be; the gross materialism of the Roman Catholic mass is but a parody of the Divine Presence you seek, and of the Divine Presence which you shall surely find, but how? Whenever you are in despondency, in weakness, in misery; when you are profoundly conscious of your infirmities, how shall you get refreshment from the presence of God? By an effluence, like that of radiance from flame, by the Spirit that comes forth from the Father and the Son-an effluence going into the soul, just as my thought pierces your brain, just as the feeling of human tenderness pierces your heart, subdues you, encircles you, melts you. So His radiant

Spirit-effluence subdues and pierces and melts. And that is the Holy Ghost.

75. Now, what have we arrived at? Let me beg you to observe the stages through which we have passed. I have first read to you a description of the doctrine of the Trinity, which was true to past generations, but which was unpractical to you, because our forms of thought and our ways of thinking about God have somewhat changed; but I have expressed to you substantially the same truth in the language of the nineteenth century. I have put it before you in the sort of shape in which your minds receive subjects every day through magazines, papers, leading articles, or books. I have, in other words, re-stated the doctrine of the Trinity, and brought it home to you in a form which can be tested and tried by the principle of the love of truth. If you use the doctrine as I have re-stated it, you will find it highly consolatory and helpful to you.

Are there not times when you cannot bear to think of God except as the Great formless Unseen? are there not other times when you long to draw near to Him, feeling that He is a man with a human heart, and that He is drawing you with cords of love? are there not other times when your mind revolts even at such a representation of God as that, and you say, 'I will not have a man for my God, but I will be alone with the Spirit'? So there comes to you through this doctrine 'grace for grace,' and God is 'all in all.' In the last spiritual analysis even the Son retires, and is subject to the Father, and God becomes all

in all. Sometimes a creative manifestation, THE FATHER; sometimes an incarnate manifestation, THE SON; sometimes an inspirational manifestation, the HOLY GHOST.

But if this exposition lays me open to the charge of Sabellianism; that is, the heresy of maintaining but one Person under three separate Manifestations, I have no objection to avoid that charge by identifying Manifestation with Personality, and admitting with Mr. Beecher, 'that although the class of beings with which we are familiar exist in unity; unity and diversity, so far as faculty is concerned, but unity without diverse personality; yet we are not to suppose that this exhausts all possible modes of being. . . . in the infinite complexity of the Divine Being, may easily be imagined to be not merely an agglomeration of faculties in one being but a range higher than this. So that beings shall be agglomerated in a Being, and that there shall be Personality grouped into Unity, just as in our own life complexity of faculties are grouped into unity.''

76. But the Church of the Future is not likely to quibble over phrases, or even such subtle distinctions as Mr. Beecher here draws, with a view of evading the heresy of Sabellianism. By-and-bye we shall not be in such a mortal fright of heresy, because we shall gain a clearer insight into the limits of the human mind, and the imperfection of all human language. We shall perceive that the most correct theology can be no more than an approximation to truth, and consequently the most

The Trinity, First Series.

definite language about God only an imperfect and partial attempt to express that which cannot be intellectually apprehended in its height and depth, and length and breadth; and must therefore for ever remain unuttered and unutterable, a consciousness, a life, a spirit. And this will come to us as time rolls on with a growing sense of peace and trust. It is just the attempt to define 'Person' and 'Substance' in relation to the Infinite God which has brought such confusion upon the Church; such terms supply a very poor and meagre expression for the great thought which is in our souls; indeed, they are hardly worth fighting about; we can conjure with them to any extent to evade this heresy and that, but it is poor work after all, merely a concession to dogmatic imbecility.

77. My dear friends, I have only time now to allude to one other Article—the Article on Original Sin. I shall recapitulate the substance of what I have said to-day and dwell further on the doctrinal basis of the Church of the Future in my next discourse.

As with the Trinity so with Original Sin, the words of the Articles have an anti-pathetic ring about them. It will be hardly necessary to read more than the opening sentence of the Article to show this :

'Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk);' I dare say, a good many persons here never heard of the Pelagians before; but of course, if they had to go through a preparatory theological training they would naturally become