grading fear.' He is taught to see in the child which looks downwards the reverence for that which is beneath us. 'This we name the Christian. What a task it was . . . to recognise humility and poverty, mockery and despising, disgrace and wretchedness and suffering to recognise these things as divine.' This is the value of what we call Historical Religion. This is the eternal, never-dying truth of the sacred name of the Son.

3. But there is yet a third manifestation of God. Natural religion may become vague and abstract. Historical religion may become, as it often has become, perverted, distorted, exhausted, formalised; its external proofs may become dubious, its inner meaning may be almost lost. There have been oftentimes Christians who were not like Christ-a Christianity which was not the religion of Christ. But there is yet another aspect of the Divine Nature. Besides the reverence for that which is above us, and the reverence for that which is beneath us, there is also the reverence for that which is within us. There is yet (if we may venture to vary Goethe's parable) another form of Religion, and that is Spiritual Religion. As the name of the Father represents to us God in Nature, as the name of the Son represents to us God in History, so the name of the Holy Ghost represents to us God in our own hearts and spirits and consciences. This is the still, small voice-stillest and smallest, yet loudest and strongest of all-which, even more than the wonders of nature or the wonders of history, brings us into the nearest harmony with Him who is a Spirit-who, when His closest communion with man is described, can only be described as the Spirit pleading with, and dwelling in, our spirit. When Theodore Parker took up a stone to throw at a tortoise in a pond, he felt himself restrained by something within him. He went home and asked his mother what

that something was. She told him that this something was what was commonly called conscience, but she preferred to call it the voice of God within him. This, he said, was the turning-point in his life, and this was his mode of accepting

the truth of the Divinity of the Eternal Spirit that speaks to our spirits. When Arnold entered with all the ardour of a great and generous nature into the beauty of the natural world, he added: If we feel thrilling through us the sense of this natural beauty, what ought to be our sense of moral beauty, of humbleness, and truth, and self-devotion, and love? Much more beautiful, because more truly made after God's image, are the forms and colours of kind and wise and holy thoughts and words and actions-more truly beautiful is one hour of an aged peasant's patient cheerfulness and faith than the most glorious scene which this earth can show. For this moral beauty is actually, so to speak, God Himself, and not merely His work. His living and conscious servants are-it is permitted us to say so the temples of which the light is God Himself."

What is here said of the greatness of the revelation of God in the moral and spiritual sphere over His revelation in the physical world, is true in a measure of its greatness over His revelation in any outward form or fact, or ordinance or word. To enter fully into the significance of what is sometimes called the Dispensation of the Holy Spirit, we must grasp the full conception of what in the Bible is meant by that sacred word, used in varying yet homogeneous senses, and all equally intended by the Sacred Name of which we are speaking. It means the Inspiring Breath,2 without which all mere forms and facts are dead, and by which all intellectual and moral energy lives. It means the inward spirit as opposed to the outward letter. It means the freedom of the spirit, which blows like the air of heaven where it listeth, and which, wherever it prevails, gives liberty. It means the power and energy of the spirit, which rises above the weakness and weariness of the flesh-which, in the great movements of Providence, like a mighty rushing wind,

6

2 Gen. i. 2, vi. 3; Exod. xxxv. 31; Judges xi. 29, xiii. 25, xiv. 6, 19, xv. 14; Isa. lxi. 1; Eph. i. 12, iii. 12, xxxiii. 14; Luke iv. 18; John i. 33.

Psalm li. 10, 11, 12; 2 Cor. iii. 6.

5 Matt. xxvi. 41.

John iii. 8; 2 Cor. iii. 28.

Acts ii. 4, 17.

5

gives life and vigour to the human soul and to the human

race.

One accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world has never lost.

8

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 conscience-to believe that the spirit is above the letter-to believe that the substance is above the form 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 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

Rom. viii. 16, 26; Eph. ii. 18.
Gal. v. 22; Eph. v. 9.

s John iv. 25.

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

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 place2 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 speculations, and takes refuge in abstractions as much withdrawn form 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 ex

21 John v. 7.

pressions 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 3 justly be considered as in the highest sense One?'

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

3 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 'ground-work.'