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."-Age of Reason, Part I.

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, 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 1,500 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."―(Note to Whateley's "Treatise on Logic.") 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 charactersmy 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 paralleled 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.

4. Each with the others is such solar radiance.

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

1. 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 color, and solar color a property incommunicable to solar light, and solar light a property incommunicable to either solar color 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 color are one solar radiance, so the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God.

9. As neither solar heat, light, nor color 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 color are each solar radiance, so the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are each God.

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

ent.

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 a while 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 lake district, and read there the "Ode on Immortality," which your Emerson calls the highest water-mark of modern poetry and philosophy. While my eyes were fastened on the page, the sun was setting behind the gnarled, inaccessible English cliffs, not far away to the west, and a colossal rainbow was spread over the azure of the sky and the glowing purple and brown of the heathered hills in the east. A light rain fell on me, and, with my own tears, wet the pages of the poet. What now, if some one, as I worshiped there, had come to me, in a holy of holies in my life, and had said roughly, in Thomas Paine's way: "You believe in five Gods. You are not scientific”? Or what if some one had said, in Parker's way: "The perfection of God has never been accepted by any sect in the Christian world. In the ecclesiastic conception of deity there is a fourth person, the devil, as much a part of deity as either Son or Holy Ghost"?-Weiss's Life of Parker, Vol. II, p. 470.

"Vicarious atonement teaches salvation without morality only by belief in absurd teaching."-Ibid, p. 497.

"According to the popular theology, there are three acknowledged persons in the Godhead. God the Father is made to appear remarkable for three things-great power, great selfishness and great destructiveness. The Father is the grimmest object in the universe."-("Sermons on Theism," p. 101.) "He, the Draco of the universe-more cruel than Odin or Baal-the author of sin, but its unforgiving avenger. Men rush from the Father; they flee to the Son." "The popular theo!ogy makes Jesus a God, and does not tell us of God now near at hand. Science must lay his kingly head in the dust; Reason veil her majestic countenance; Conscience bow him to the earth; Affection keep silence, when the priest uplifts the Bible."-Discourses on Religion, pp. 425-427.)

How would all that speech of the Parkers and the Paines have jarred upon my soul if, standing there alone in a strange land and at the grave of Wordsworth, I had heard the profane collision of their accusations with the holy sentences of this seer, fed from the cradle to the tomb upon Christian truth! What, if at Wordsworth's grave, disturbed by such ghoulish attack, I had needed a spell to disperse the accusations-what better Procul, procul, este profani could I have chosen than these words, once uttered in this city by a renowned teacher of this accused theology—a man of whom it might be said, as he once said of Jonathan Edwards that he might have been the first poet of his nation if he had not chosen to be it first theologian?

A majestic discourse delivered at the installation of the revered pastor of the Old South Church yonder says: "Other men may be alone; but the Christian, wherever he moves, is near to his Master. Every effect is the result of some free will. But many effects within and without us are not produced by a created will. Therefore, they are produced by an uncreated. On the deep sea, under the venerable oak, in the pure air of the mountain-top, the Christian communes with the Father of Spirits, who is the Saviour of men. All ethical axioms, are Iis revelation of Himself to His children. Their innocent joys are His words of good cheer. Their deserved sorrows are His loud rebukes."

In these words of Professor Park, a benighted believer in three Gods, as you say, is God afar off? Are there three Gods here? Does Science bow her head, Affection grow dumb, Reason muffle her face, as this priest lifts up the Bible?

As the rainbow shows the inner structure of the light, so the character of our Lord shows the inner moral nature of God, so far as that can be known to man. A rainbow is unraveled light; is it not? It was assuredly better for me at Wordsworth's grave to look on the bow I saw in the east, than to gaze on the white radiance that fell on the poet's page when I wished to behold the fullest glory of the light. So assuredly it is better for us to gaze on God's character as revealed in Christ than on God's character as revealed in his works merely, if we would understand God's nature. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God. At Wordsworth's grave I heard these hoarse voices from the Paines and the Parkers, and these softer and I think more penetratingly human ones from the Wordsworths and the Parks, and, in the name of the scientific method, it was impossible not to assert in my soul that the God who was revealed in Christ was and is, and is to come; for there is but one God, and He was and is, and is to come. Therefore, when the bow faded from the east, I did not think that it had ceased to be. It had not been annihilated; it had been revealed for awhile; and, disappearing, it was received back into the bosom of the general radiance, and yet continued to fall upon the earth. In every beam of white light there is potentially all the color which we find unraveled in the rainbow; and so in all the pulsations in the will of God the Father in his works exist the pulsations of the heart of Him who wept over Jerusalem, and on whose bosom once the beloved disciple leaned; for there is but one God, who was, and is, and is to come; and on that same bosom we bow our heads whenever we bow our foreheads upon that Sinai within us which we call the moral law. The Holy Spirit to me is Christ's continued life.

But you say, my friends, that this may be philosophical; but that it is not biblical truth. You affirm that I teach my

self this by science, rather than by Scripture. Gentlemen, under the noon of New England philosophical and biblical culture, and in presence I know not of how many who dissent, I ask you to decide for yourselves what the Scriptures really teach as to the unity of the three subsistences in that Divine Nature which was, and is, and is to come. Assuredly, you will be ready, in the name of literary science, to cast at least one searching glance upon this whole theme from the point of view of exclusively biblical statement.

"It is expedient for you that I go away. I have yet many things to say unto you. I will not leave you orphans. I am coming to you. A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a little while and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father." They who heard these sentences said: "A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a little while and ye shall see me, and because I go to the Father? What is this that he saith? We cannot tell what he saith." But there came a later day, when he who had made that promise breathed upon them, and said: "Receive ye the gift of the Holy Ghost." We shall not be here. All of us will be mute, and most of us forgotten, when in a better age the meaning of that symbolic act of the Author of Chistianity is fathomed.

Next there came a day when there was a sound as of a rushing, mighty wind, and this filled all the house where they who had witnessed that act were sitting. This is but the experience of many nations since then-the rushing sound of a new influence in human history, quickening human consciences, transforming bad lives into good; but until that time never felt in the world in deluges, although it had appeared in streams. When that influence came, what was the interpretation put upon it by the scriptural writers? Peter, standing up, said: "We heard from Him, whom we know that God has raised from the dead, the promise of the Holy Ghost. He hath shed forth this; therefore, let Jerusalem know assuredly that God hath made him Lord." I call that Peter's colossal "therefore." It is the strongest word in the first oration delivered in the defense of Christianity. The Holy Spirit was promised; it has been poured out; therefore, let those who receive it know that the power behind natural law-our Lord, who was, and is, and is to come-is now breathing upon the centuries as he breathed upon us symbolically. He hath shed forth this; therefore, let all men know assuredly that God hath made him Lord. When they who were assembled in Jerusalem at that time heard this "therefore," they were pricked in the heart.

I affirm that it is incontrovertible that the New Testament writers everywhere, with Stephen, gaze steadfastly into Heaven. and behold our Lord-not in Galilee, not on the Mount of