Read Ebook: Some Christian Convictions A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking by Coffin Henry Sloane

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Look at the generations of old, and see: Who did ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed? Or who did abide in His fear, and was forsaken? Or who did call upon Him, and He despised him?

And its witness comes from today as certainly, and more widely, than from any believing yesterday. Ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, out of every kindred and tongue and nation, throughout the world, testify what the God and Father of Jesus Christ means to them. Are we all self-deceived?

Nor are we limited to the experiences of those who at best impress us as partially religious. For the final confirmation of our faith we look to the ideal Believer, who not only has an ampler religious experience than any other, but also possesses more power to create faith, and to take us farther into the Unseen; we look unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of faith. His life and death, His character and influence, remain the world's most priceless possession. Was the faith which produced them, the faith which inspired Him, an hallucination? There is contained in that life more proof that God is, than in all other approach of God to man, or of man to God.

Nor are we confined to the witness of our personal discoveries. There is a social attestation of the workableness of faith. The surest way of establishing the worth of our religious experience is to share it with another; the strongest confirmation of the objective existence of Him with whom we have to do is to lead another to see Him. The most effective defender of the faith is the missionary. "It requires," as David Livingstone said, "perpetual propagation to attest its genuineness." Not they who sit and study and discuss it, however cleverly and learnedly, discover its truth; but they who spend and are spent in attempting to bring a whole world to know the redeeming love of One who is, and who rewards with indubitable sonship with Himself those who prove wholeheartedly loyal.

For our final assurance we appeal confidently to the future. The glory of the Lord will only be fully revealed when all flesh see it together. But with personal certainty, based on our own experience, corroborated by the testimony of all the saints, we both wait hopefully and work tirelessly for the day when our God through Christ shall be all in all.

THE BIBLE

In terms of the definition of religion given in the last chapter, we may describe the Bible as the record of the progressive religious experience of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ, a record selected by the experience of the Jewish and Christian Church, and approving itself to Christian experience today as the Self-revelation of the living God.

The divine revelation which is in the experience has been at times identified with the thought that interprets it, or even with the words which attempt to describe it. "Faith in the thing grows faith in the report"; and fantastic doctrines of the verbal inerrancy of the Bible have been held by numbers of earnest Christians. Certain recent scholars, acknowledging that no version of the Bible now existing is free from error, have put forward the theory that the original manuscripts of these books, as they came from their authors' hands, were so completely controlled by God as to be without mistake. Since no man can ever hope to have access to these autographs, and would not be sure that he had them in his hands if he actually found them, this theory amounts to saying with the nursery rhyme:

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grows, Where you, nor I, nor nobody knows.

We have not only to collate the manuscripts we possess and try to reconstruct the likeliest text, but when we know what the authors probably wrote, we must press back of their language and ideas to the religious experience they attempt to express.

As writers the Biblical authors do not claim a special divine assistance. Luke, in his preface to his gospel, merely asserts that he has taken the pains of a careful historian, and Paul and his various amanuenses did their best with a language in which they were not literary experts. The Bible reader often has the impression that its authors' religious experience, like Milton's sculptured lion, half appears "pawing to get free his hinder parts." Or, to change the metaphor, now one portion of their communion with God is brought to view and now another, as one might stand before a sea that was illuminated from moment to moment by flashes of lightning.

Nor does mere chronological rearrangement of the material do justice to the progress; there was loss as well as gain. All mountain roads on their way to the summit go down as well as up; and their advance must be judged not from their elevation at any particular point, but from their successful approach towards their destination. The experiences of Israel reach their apex in the faith of Jesus and of His immediate followers; and they find their explanation and unity in Him. In form the Jewish Bible, unlike the Christian, has no climax; it stops, ours ends. Christians judge the progress in the religious experience of Israel by its approximation to the faith and purpose of Jesus.

The first Christians found the Jewish Bible in use as containing "the oracles of God"; and as it had been their Lord's Bible it became theirs. No one of the first generation of Christians thought of adding other Scriptures. In that age the Coming of the Messiah and His Kingdom in power were daily expected, and there seemed no need of writing anything for succeeding times. Paul's letters were penned to meet current needs in the churches, and were naturally kept, reread and passed from church to church. As the years went by and disciples were added who had never known the Lord in the days of His flesh, a demand arose for collections of His sayings. Then gospels were written, and the New Testament literature came into existence, although no one yet thought of these writings as Holy Scripture.

JESUS CHRIST

Three elements enter into every Christian's conception of his Lord--history, experience and reflection. Jesus is to him a figure out of the past, a force in the present, and a fact in his view of the universe. Whether we be discussing the Christ of Paul, or of the Nicene theologians, or of some thoughtful believer today, we must allow for the memory of the Man of Nazareth handed down from those who knew Him in the flesh, the acquaintance with the Lord of life resulting from personal loyalty to His will, and the explanation of this Lord reached by the mind, as, using the intellectual methods of its age, it tries to set His figure in its mental world.

Two diametrically opposed classes of scholars have denied that in the Christ of the gospels we possess such a trustworthy report. A very few have held that the evangelists do not record an historic life at all, but describe a Saviour-God who existed in the faith of the Church of the First Century. The allusions, however, in the letters of Paul alone to definite historical associations connected with Jesus are sufficient to confute this view. There undoubtedly was a Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, the divine redeemers of mythology, of whom this theory makes so much, are most unlike the Jesus of the gospels in moral character and religious power; and the old argument is still pertinent that it would have required a Jesus to have imagined the Jesus of the evangelists' story.

A much larger number of scholars, determined beforehand by their philosophic views to reject all elements in the records which transcend usual human experience, have for several generations sought to reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis. Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man, Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist, who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They fail to do justice to Jesus' consciousness of Himself, of His unique relation to God, of His all-important mission to men, as the critically investigated documents disclose it. Historically, they do not give us a Figure sufficiently significant for faith to account for the Christian Church; scientifically, their portraits do not long prove satisfactory, and are soon discarded on further investigation of the facts; and religiously, they do not appeal to Christian believers as adequate to explain their own life in Christ.

Each age seems to have its own way of phrasing its religious needs; and various elements in the picture of Jesus have been prized by the succeeding ages as of special worth. Our generation finds itself religiously most interested in three outstanding features in the record of His life:

His consciousness of God was not something wholly new; He was not "a lonely mountain tarn unvisited by any stream," but received into His soul the great river of a nation's spiritual life. He was the heir of the faith of His people, and regarded Himself as completing that which a long line of predecessors had begun. He did not find it necessary to invent new terms to express His thought; but as He passed the old words through the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning. His originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power. Madame de Sta?l said that Rousseau "invented nothing, but set everything on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire, with a few thousands of proselytes here and there in the larger towns about the Mediterranean, became in a generation a force which entirely supplanted the Jewish missionary movement and rapidly spread throughout the world.

Jesus believed in and proclaimed a new order of things in the world--the Kingdom of God--in which His Father's will should be realized. It was an order in which men should live in love with one another and with God, in which justice, kindness and faithfulness should prevail in all relationships, and in which all God's children's needs should be supplied, their maladies healed, their wrongs righted, their lives made full. This Kingdom was already in the earth in Himself and in the new life He succeeded in creating in those who followed Him. It found itself opposed by physical forces that were injurious to humanity; and these He met fearlessly, sleeping in a storm so violent as to terrify His fisherman companions; and, what is more, He commanded these forces for His Father's purpose in a way that amazed His first followers and is still amazing to us. The reports of His mighty works have to be carefully scrutinized by historical scholars, and no doubt the historicity of some of them is much more fully attested than that of others; but when every allowance is made for the ideas of a prescientific age in which miracles were relatively frequent, and for the possible growth of the marvellous elements in the tradition, enough remains to show that here was a Personality whose power cannot be limited by our usual standards of human ability. Judged by past or present conceptions of what is natural, His works were supernatural; He Himself regarded them as the breaking into the world through Him of the new order that was to be. He discouraged men's craving for the physically miraculous, and thought little of the faith in Him produced by its display; but there can be no question of His extraordinary control of physical forces for the aims of His Kingdom. It was, however, in the moral conflict between the Divine Order and things as they were, that He saw the decisive collision, and faced it with heroic faith in His Father's victory. When the dominant authorities in Church and State were about to crush Him, He looked forward undismayed, and in the glowing pictures of fervent Jewish men of hope He imaged the Divine Rule He proclaimed coming in power.

He was to His followers the Conqueror of sin. He went forth to wage war with evil in the world, because He was conscious that He had first bound the strong man, and could spoil his house. In an autobiographical parable He seems to have told them something of His own battle with temptation and of His victory. They found in Him One who both shamed and transformed them; they saw Him forgiving and altering sinners; and, above all, His cross, from the earliest days when they began to ask themselves what it meant, had for them redemptive force.

He was to them the Victor of death. However the historian may deal with the details of the narratives of the appearances of the risen Jesus to His disciples, he cannot fail to recognize the conviction of Jesus' followers that their Lord had returned to them and was alive with power. We must remember that it was to faith alone that the risen Jesus showed Himself, and that no one outside the circle of believers saw Him after His death. Historical research, independent of Christian faith, may not be able positively to affirm the correctness of the Easter faith of the disciples, for the data lie, in part at least, outside the range of such research. But the historian must leave the door open for faith; and he may go further and point out that faith's explanation best fits the facts. Present faith finds itself prepared to receive the witness of the men of faith centuries ago. The attempt to banish Jesus from our world signally failed; He was a more living and potent force in it after, than before, His death.

This singular religious experience, character and victory we ascribe to the Jesus of history through the tradition which preserves for us His religious impression upon His immediate followers. There are some who lay little stress upon the events of the past; like Shelley's Skylark, they are "scorners of the ground." Why, they ask, should we care what took place in Palestine centuries ago? The answer is that it is the roots which go down into historic fact which give the whole tree of Christian faith its stability and vigor. A tree gathers nourishment and grows by its leaves; and Christianity has undoubtedly taken into itself many enriching elements from the life about it in every age; but a tree without roots is neither sturdy nor alive. A Christianity which disregards its origin in the Jesus of genuine memory may label anything "Christian" that it fancies, and end by losing its own identity; and a Christianity which does not constantly keep learning of the Jesus of the New Testament, and renewing its convictions, ideals and purposes from Him, ceases to be vital. We do not think of Christianity as a fixed quantity or an unchanging essence, but as a life; and life is ever growing and changing. But with all its growth and change it keeps true to type, and the type is Jesus Christ. The gospels, which conserve the impress of that Life upon men of faith, are anchors in the actual amid windy storms of speculation. We are not constructing a Christ out of our spiritual experiences, but letting Him who gave life to these early followers, through their memories of Him, recreate us into His and their fellowship with God and man.

Their spiritual experiences are the sensitive plate which caught and kept for all time the image of the historic Jesus; but their experience is a memory, and there must be a further experience in us upon which this memory throws and fixes His image before we know Jesus Christ for ourselves. Unless a man's soul is unimpressionable, he cannot be faced with the Christ of the New Testament without being deeply affected. "We needs must love the highest when we see it," and to millions throughout the earth Jesus is their highest inspiration. For them He ceases to belong to the past and becomes their most significant Contemporary. They do not look back to Him; they look up to Him as their present Comrade and Lord; and in loyalty to Him they find themselves possessed of a new life.

In a previous chapter, we used the phrase "man's response to his highest inspirations" as a description of religious experience; and in responding to the appeal of Jesus, His followers pass into the characteristically Christian experience of the Divine--an experience which involves two main elements: communion through Jesus with God, and communion with Jesus in God.

He imparts His faith in the coming of the Divine Order in the world. His followers share His fearless and masterful attitude towards physical forces; when they appear opposed to God's purpose of love, the Christian is confident that they are not inherently antagonistic to it: "to them that love God all things work together for good." What is called "nature" is not something fixed, but plastic; something which can be conformed to the will of the God and Father of Jesus. A pestilential Panama, for instance, is not natural, but subnatural, and must be brought up to its divine nature, when it will serve the children of God. The Rule of God in nature, like the Kingdom in Jesus' parables, must both be awaited patiently--for it will require advances in men's consciences and knowledge to control physical forces in the interest of love--and striven for believingly. And even when bitter circumstances seem, whether only for the present or permanently, inescapable, when pain and disaster and death must be borne, the Christian accepts them as part of the loving and wise will of God, as his Lord acquiesced in His own suffering: "The cup which the Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?" And Jesus confers His confidence in the alterability of the world of human relations. Christians believe in the superiority of moral over material forces, in the wisdom and might of love. A life like Christ's is pronounced in every generation unpractical, until under His inspiration some follower lives it; and slowly, as in His own case, its success is acclaimed. His principles, as applied to an economic institution such as slavery, or to the treatment of the criminal, are counted visionary, until, constrained by His Spirit, men put them into practice, and their results gradually speak for themselves. His followers in every age have seemed fools to many, if not to most, of their judicious contemporaries; but cheered by His confidence, they venture on apparently hopeless undertakings, and find that He has overcome the world.

Jesus' conquest of death is to His followers the vindication of His faith in God, and God's attestation of Him; and with such a God Lord of heaven and earth, death has neither sting nor victory; it cannot separate from God's love; and it is itemized among a Christian's assets. The face of death has been transfigured. Aristides, explaining the Christian faith about the year 125 A.D., writes, "And if any righteous man among them passes from the world, they rejoice and offer thanks to God; and they escort his body as if he were setting out from one place to another near." Christians speak of their dead as "in Christ"--under His all-sufficient control.

We cannot say that we have an experience of communion with Jesus which is distinguishable from our experience of communion with God; we respond through Jesus to God. But if our God be the God of Jesus, we cannot think of Jesus as anywhere in the universe out of fellowship with Him. His God would not be Himself, nor would Jesus be Himself, were the fellowship between Them interrupted; and we cannot think of ourselves as in touch with the One, without being at the same time in touch with the Other. It is an apparently inevitable inference from our Christian experience, when we attempt to rationalize it, that "our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." In communion with God we are in a society which includes the Father and all His true sons and daughters, the living here and the living yonder, for all live unto Him. They are ours in God; and Jesus supremely, because He is the Mediator of our life with God, is ours in His and our Father.

The first of these questions faced the disciples when Jesus was no longer with them in the flesh. When a cloud received Him out of their sight, it did not take Him out of their fancy; finding themselves still in communion with Him, they had to imagine His present existence with God and with them. They used their current symbol for God--the Most High enthroned above His world--and they pictured Jesus as seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Or they took some vivid metaphor of personal friendship--a figure knocking at the door and entering to eat with them--and found that a fitting interpretation of their experience. These were picturesque ways of saying that Jesus shares God's life and ours. While our current modes of representing the Divine do not localize heaven, the symbolic language of the Bible has so entered into our literature, that in worship and in devout thought we find the New Testament metaphors most satisfactory to express our faith.

The third question, How are we to conceive of the union of Deity and humanity in Him? is a problem which exercised the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries of the Christian Church to the exclusion of almost all others. The theologians of those times worked out the theory of the union of two "natures" in one "Person," which remains the official statement of the Church's interpretation of Christ in Greek, Roman and Protestant creeds. But the philosophy which dealt in "natures" and "persons" is no longer the mode of thought of educated people; and while we may admire the mental skill of these earlier theologians, and may recognize that an Athanasius and his orthodox allies were contending for a vital element in Christian experience, their formulations do not satisfy our minds.

Still later in the century, Albrecht Ritschl gave another interpretation of Christ's Person. He began with the completely human Figure of history, and pointed out that it is through Him we experience communion with God, so that to His followers Jesus is divine; His humanity is the medium through which God reveals Himself to us. This affirmation of His Deity is an estimate, made by believers, of Jesus' worth to them; they cannot prove it to any who are without a sense of Christ's value as their Saviour. Any further explanation of how the human and the Divine are joined in Jesus, he deemed beyond the sphere of religious knowledge.

Our modern thought of God as immanent in His world and in men enables us, perhaps more easily than some of our predecessors, to fit the figure of Christ into our minds. The discovery of the Divine in the human does not surprise us. We think of God as everywhere manifesting Himself, but His presence is limited by the medium in which it is recognized. He reveals as much of Himself through nature as nature can disclose; as much through any man as he can contain; as much through the complete Man as He is capable of manifesting. Nor does this Self-revelation of God in Jesus do away for us with Jesus' own attainment of His character. Immanent Deity does not submerge the human personality. Jesus was no merely passive medium through which God worked, but an active Will who by constant co?peration with the Father "was perfected." If there was an "emptying," there was also a "filling," so that we see in Him the fulness of God. How He alone of all mankind came so to receive the Self-giving Father remains for us, as for our predecessors, the ultimate riddle, a riddle akin to that which makes each of us "indescribably himself." And as for the origin of His unique Person, we have no better explanations to substitute for those of the First Century; the mystery of our Lord's singular personality remains unsolved.

GOD

The word "God" is often employed as though it had a fixed meaning. His part in an event or His relation to a movement is discussed with the assumption that all who speak have in mind the same Being. "God" is the name a man gives to his highest inspiration, and men vary greatly in that which inspires them. One man's god is his belly, another's his reputation, a third's cleverness. Napoleon reintroduced the cult of the God of authority, by establishing the Concordat with Rome, because as he bluntly put it, "men require to be kept in order." A number of socially minded thinkers, of whom the best known is George Eliot, deified humanity and gave themselves to worship and serve it. "Whatever thy heart clings to and relies on," wrote Luther, "that is properly thy God." A Christian is one who clings to Him in whom Jesus trusted, one who responds to the highest inspirations of Jesus of Nazareth. And a glance over Church history leaves one feeling that few Christians, even among careful thinkers, have had thoroughly Christian ideas of God.

A principal fault has been the method used in arriving at the thought of God. Men began with what was termed "Natural Religion." They studied the universe and inferred the sort of Deity who made and ruled it. It was intricately and wisely designed; its God must be omniscient. It was vast; He must be omnipotent. It displayed the same orderliness everywhere; He must be omnipresent. In epochs when men emphasized the beneficence of nature--its beauty, its usefulness, its wisdom--they concluded that its Creator was good. In an epoch, like the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, they drew a very different conclusion. Charles Darwin wrote, "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature."

Loyalty to Jesus compels us to begin with Him. If He is the Way, we are not justified in taking half a dozen other roads, and using Him as one path among many. We ask ourselves what was the highest inspiration of Jesus, what was the Being to whom He responded with His obedient trust and with whom He communed. We are eager not to fashion an image of Divinity for ourselves, which is idolatry as truly when our minds grave it in thought as when our hands shape it in stone; but to receive God's disclosure of Himself with a whole-hearted response, and interpret, as faithfully as we can, the impression He makes upon us. "God," writes Tyndal, the martyr translator of our English New Testament, "is not man's imagination, but that only which He saith of Himself." Our highest inspirations come to us from Jesus, and He is, therefore, God's Self-unveiling to us, God's "Frankness," His Word made flesh.

Responding to God through Jesus, Christians discover:

First, that God is their Christlike Father, and that He is love as Jesus experienced His love and Himself was love.

Second, that God is the Lord of heaven and earth. We do not know whether He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; there is much that leads us to think that He is limited. He can do no more than Love can do with His children, and Love has its defeats, and crosses, and tragedies. But trusting the Christlike Father we more and more discover that He is sufficiently in control over all things to accomplish through them His will. He needs us to help Him master nature, and transform it into the servant of man,--to control disease, to harness electricity, to understand earthquakes; and He needs us to help Him conquer human nature and conform it to the likeness of His Son. God's complete lordship waits until His will is done in earth as it is in heaven; but for the present we believe that He is wise and strong enough not to let nature or men defeat His purpose; that He is controlling all things so that they work together for good unto them that love Him.

And third, that God is the indwelling Spirit. The Christlike Father Lord, whom we find outside ourselves through the faith and character of Jesus, becomes as we enter into fellowship with Him, a Force within us. He is the Conscience of our consciences, the Wellspring of motives and impulses and sympathies. We repeat, today, in some degree, the experience of the first disciples at Pentecost; we recognize within ourselves the inspiring, guiding and energizing Spirit of love.

While we find God primarily through Jesus, He reveals Himself to us in many other ways: in the Scriptures, where the generations before us have garnered their experiences of Him; in living epistles in Christian men and women, and in some who do not call themselves by the Christian name, but whose lives disclose the Spirit of God who was in Jesus; in non-Christian faiths, where God has always given some glimpse of Himself in answer to men's search. Christ is not for us confining but defining; He gives us in Himself the test to assay the Divine.

Again, our perception of beauty affords us a glimpse of God. The Greeks embodied loveliness in their statues of the Divine, because through the satisfaction which came to them from such exquisite figures their souls were soothed and uplifted. They have left on record how the calm and majestic expression of a face carved by a Phidias quieted, charmed, strengthened them. Dion Chrysostom says of the figure of the Olympian Zeus, "Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life." The Greek Christian fathers often tell us that the same sense of the infinitely Fair, which was roused in them by such sights, recurred in a higher degree when their thoughts dwelt upon the life and character of Jesus. Clement of Alexandria says, "He is so lovely as to be alone loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true beauty." Our aesthetic and our religious experiences often merge; our response to beauty, whether in nature, or music, or a painting, becomes a response to God. Wordsworth says of a lovely landscape that had stamped its views upon his memory:

Oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:--feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.

Shelley, while insistently denying or defying all the gods of accepted religion, finds himself adoring

that Beauty Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world, Scarce visible for extreme loveliness.

Surely the God Christians adore is in these experiences, though men know it not. St. Augustine believed that "all that is beautiful comes from the highest Beauty, which is God." They who begin with the cult of Beauty may have a conception of the Divine that has nothing to do with, or is even opposed to, the God and Father of Jesus; but when His God is supreme, inspirations from all things lovely may vastly supplement our thought of Him. "Music on earth much light upon heaven has thrown."

Science, too, has its contribution to offer to our thought of Him who is over all and through all and in all. Truth is one, and scientific investigation and religious experience are two avenues that lead to the one Reality faith names God. Science of itself can never lead us beyond visible and tangible facts; but its array of facts may suggest to faith many things about the invisible Father, the Lord of all. Present-day science with its emphasis upon continuity makes us think of a God who is no occasional visitor, but everywhere and always active; its conception of evolution brings home to us the patient and long-suffering labor of a Father who worketh even until now; its stress upon law reminds us that He is never capricious but reliable; its practical mastery of forces, like those which enable men to use the air or to navigate under the water, recalls to us the old command to subdue the earth as sons of God, and adds the new responsibility to use our control, as the Son of God always did, in love's cause.

Philosophy, too, which Professor James has described as "our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means," helps us to make clear our idea of God. A philosopher is just a thoughtful person who takes the discoveries that his religious, moral, aesthetic, scientific experiences have brought home, and tries to set in order all he knows of truth, beauty, right, God.

In attempting to philosophize upon their discoveries of God, Christian thinkers have arrived at the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. It was, first, an attempt to hold fast to the great foundation truth of the Old Testament that God is One. The world in which Christianity found itself had a host of deities--a god for the sea and another for the wind, a god of the hearth and a god of the empire, and so on. Today it is only too easy to obey one motive in the home and another in one's business, to follow one principle in private life and another in national life, and to be polytheists again. Christian faith insists that "there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things and we unto Him." We adore One who is Christlike love, and we will serve no other. We trust Christlike love as the divine basis for a happy family life, and also for successful commerce, for statesmanlike international dealings, for the effective treatment of every political and social question. The inspirations that come to us from a glorious piece of music or from an heroic act of self-sacrifice, from some new discovery or from a novel sensitiveness of conscience, are all inspirations from the one God. At every moment and in every situation we must keep the same fundamental attitude towards life--trustful, hopeful, serving--because in every experience, bitter or sweet, we are always in touch with the one Lord of all, our Christlike Father.

In this Unity Christians have spoken of a Trinity. Paul summing up the blessing of God, speaks of "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit." He says, "through Jesus we have our access in one Spirit unto the Father." He and his fellow believers had been redeemed from selfishness to love, from slavery to freedom; and they accounted for their new life by saying that, through the grace of Jesus, they had come to experience the fatherly love of God, and to find His Spirit binding them in a brotherhood of service for one another and the world. The New Testament goes no further: it states these experiences of Jesus, of God, of the Spirit; but it does not tell us the exact relations of the Three--how God is related to the Spirit, or Jesus distinct and at the same time one with the Father. So acute a thinker as Paul never seems to have worked this out. At one time he compares God's relation to His Spirit to man's relation to his spirit ; and once he identifies the Spirit with the glorified Christ .

But while Paul and other New Testament writers did not feel the need of thinking out what their threefold experience of God implied as to His Being, later Christians did; and using the terms of the current Greek philosophy, they elaborated the conception of three "Persons" in one Godhead. We have no exact equivalent in English for the Greek word which is translated "person" in this definition. It is not the same as "a person" for that would give us three gods; nor is it something impersonal, a mode or aspect of God. It is something in between a personality and a personification.

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