b. God is the eternal Subject who knows the eternal Object who is known, and the Love who unites the two. Endeavour to eliminate from your life all faith in the Father, or in the Son, or in the Holy Ghost, and you will find your life distinctly poorer and less charged with motive, clearness, and hope. God conceived of as love, is energy, action. Action must result in somewhat, and of eternal action the result is eternal. What is that eternal result? Philosophy from Hellas to Hindustan responded that it was the world. But observation denied that a finite and changing world could be eternal. Consequently, God as love must love someone instead of somewhat. In one there can be no circulation of that love which is the life, which is the being and substance of God. Nothing without an object can become manifest itself, because it would proceed out from self forever. It is because of this fact that mathematical monotheism invariably becomes either pantheism or atheism, worship of the divine nothing. Action within one, I say, is impossible. That is why Brahm appears to be sunken in a slumber. Action in two is incomplete. That is why Ormuzd and Ahriman appear in the firmament of a Persian dualism, engaged in a struggle which can never end. Action in three is complete circulation; the infinite turn and return of that Life which is Love. Fitly with this idea ends the high strain of Dante's mediæval miracle of song, at the summit of celestial paradise, in the deep heart of the

aureole rose of the elect saints and angelic hierarchy. Through the radiant medium of the Divine Humanity,

"In the profound and clear subsistence

Of the lofty light appeared to me three gyres

Of colours three and single continuity;

And one from other seemed to be reflected,

As rainbow is from rainbow,

While the third appeared a fire

Which from the one and from the other equally

is exhaled." 1

Let me put this thought again: the Eternal Mind, conscious to Himself, eternally produces a Logos like Himself. Because of this likeness the Logos conscious to Himself and the originating Mind together produce also a Principle which is imperfect like Himself, but because the being of the Logos is derived, what He together with Mind originates is a procession, which is a process, always going on, but since it is infinite, always complete. Why, asks one, should not the third divine principle produce a fourth, and so on? This was the crux of Gnosticism, and it

1 Nella profonda e chiara sussistenza

Dell' alto lume parvemi tre giri
Di tre colori e d' una continenza;
El' un dall' altro, come Iri da Iri,

Parea riflesso, e il terzo parea fuoco
Che quinci e quindi egualmente si spiri.

Paradiso, xxxiii. 115-121.

2 Not having what theologians term aseity.

produced the theory of emanations. The right answer is that the third principle does not produce a fourth, because the subject and object being linked, the three are complete in one subsistence and "continuity," as Dante suggests. The Holy Ghost is the life of the world, and the return of imperfection to perfection through the Church. It is by this doctrine of the double procession that the Latin Church preserved itself from the vagaries of a Gnosticism, with its endless processions of æons from a father god and a mother god, which modern Mormonism has revived, making them with Adam to constitute the Trinity. The tendency in early ages towards this speculation was strong. In the Old Testament the Wisdom is feminine. Origen speaks of the Holy Ghost as a woman.2 To the mind of the early Church the Holy Spirit was the feminine principle in God, but a desire to cut away the ground from under the Gnostics and to remove from religion that which always imports into life moral degradation, suppressed the development of this idea. Nevertheless, as Goethe says in his Chorus Mysticus at the close of Faust, "It is the deathless ideal of womanhood which is always uplifting humanity,"

"Das Ewig Weibliche

Zieht uns hinan,"

1 W. T. Harris, Hegel's Logic, 14.

2 ἄρτι ἔλαβε με ἡ μήτήρ μου τὸ ἅγιον Πνεῦμα ἐν μιᾷ τῶν τριχῶν μου K.T.A., Comm. St. John, II. 7. 58. Cf. Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, 15. n. 1.

and to supply the want of such an ideal in old days they had Montanistic incarnation of the Holy Ghost in a woman, and in modern days we have the pious opinion of the Assumption and enthronisation of St. Mary the Virgin, "Our tainted nature's solitary boast"; to whom, Wordsworth believed that perhaps, "Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend.”1

c. Traditional Theology is right when, upon the basis of the New Testament, it insists that the Holy Ghost is person. That which substantially proceeds forth from out of person is person.2 We, as conscious persons, argue thence that God, our Source or Cause, the All-Father, is person. Thus the circle of reasoning is completed. Spiritual existence is found to imply personality as inseparable from it. The Holy Ghost is more than a pervasive spiritual current, or atmosphere, or aura, or subtle substance of some imaginary sort. He is something more than an effluence from God, a stream from the fountain-head of Deity; something more than the influence of Jesus, either as personally near us by His ascension into the plane of omnipresence, or by reason of the effect of the example of His historic career. The

1 Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, c. vi., sees in human nature necessity for the divine motherhood.

2 The notion that the term persona, person, signifies in theology a rôle is an error arisen from not considering that the ancient theologians were not etymologists; they employed words in their actual sense. Persona = · ὑπόστασις in Greek Theology.

Holy Spirit is not a zeitgeist, nor a stream of tendency, nor the psychic course of nature. Or if He be these, He is something more. He is a Person, the Lord of personal spirits. If God the Father be immanent in the souls of men, then by virtue of the circuminsession of the Persons of the Holy Trinity the Holy Ghost is also immanent. Therefore there must be some sense in which the Holy Ghost is personally and substantially the human soul's indwelling source of life and thought. An apocalypse of this came to prophet Ezekiel in the Vision of the Holy Waters. Through the personal Spirit the reason of the eternal Logos is imparted to men, as Jesus said, "He shall receive of Mine and shall show it unto you," and as St. John commented, "The Life was the light of men."

Somehow thus the Christian consciousness conceives of God as triune in His subsistence. His life and existence are complete within Himself. Consequently creation is not necessary to His consciousness and life. Therefore He is not the ground of evil. Thus at one and the same time, in removing a necessity of an eternal world, the dilemma, atheism, God, or pantheism, no world, is avoided. God still remains absolute and yet personal, since His limitations are within Himself. I regret the necessity of appearing in this lecture somewhat transcendental. The topic is profound. Thus much on the rational Theology of the Idea of God. In order to

no