the willingness to use all means of grace; there must be the opening of the heart in utter selfabandonment to be the abode of God. If the faith of any of you has been shaken, and even dissipated, by the intellectual difficulties inherent in the transcendent conception of God, then I pray you most earnestly first to be stricter than ever in your life, in your rigid adherence to purity and honour and kindness, and next to study those records of Christ as a man, that glorious ideal of humanity, that incarnation of the Spirit of God in all its fulness. And it is through Him and His words that having learnt the truth of the Indwelling God, we go on to learn that God is Transcendent also, apart from man, a Being whom we can worship, a Father of mercies, whom we know and love in His Son. He is the Revelation of God, and not only of one conception of God. Thus it will come to pass that your faith in God will be restored and strengthened, and you will see that your old belief was right and true, though its words were metaphorical and its form unscientific; you will come back to it with new love and faith, and you will once more find joy and peace in believing.

XX

THE TRINITY1

"Hold fast the form of sound words.' -2 TIM. i. 13.

TRINITY SUNDAY is the day on which we are invited to meditate on the threefold revelation of God-in nature, in Jesus Christ, and in conscience; or, as it is expressed in the Apostles' Creed, that form of sound words which has come down to us, the revelation of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

This day, therefore, differs from all other anniversaries in our calendar. Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Day, Whit-Sunday, are anniversaries of historical events. Trinity Sunday is the commemoration of a doctrine. Half the year, from Advent to Whit-Sunday, is set apart for the study of the life of our Lord, and of the historical origins of the Church of Christ. Half the year, from the first Sunday after Trinity to the last, is set apart for the study of Christian life and practice. Trinity Sunday is the link between the two. sums up all that goes

It

before of doctrine; it looks forward to all that follows

of duty.

1 Oxford, 27th May 1888.

It

It is unique also in another respect. The particular expression of the doctrine of the Trinity, which the Church has adopted, is not primitive. does not belong to the Apostolic or the sub-Apostolic age. No one could find the Nicene, still less the Athanasian, Creed in the New Testament, or in the earliest Christian writings. Hence the recurrence of this day is a perpetual reminder to us of the growth and development of Christian doctrine. The Creeds we use are, indeed, themselves a witness of the development of primitive Christianity into theology, and of theology into metaphysics; but Trinity Sunday is pre-eminently a witness to us that revelation. is not stationary, not dead, a thing of the past, but progressive, alive, a thing of the present, that the Holy Spirit is still leading men into truth according to Christ's promise. It suggests to us that the theological student must study the nineteenth century as well as the first four and the sixteenth, and must look in it also for God's message of revelation to the world.

Few, perhaps, would be found to deny this, and yet it does not often meet a cordial and fearless recognition among Churchmen. Few would assert that the revelation of divine truth, at sundry times and in divers manners, ceased at Jerusalem in the first, or at Nicea in the fourth, or in the Church of England in the sixteenth century; but it is difficult to realise as joyfully and hopefully as we ought that God's revelation is continuous and unceasing; and that our own age is witnessing a marvellous revelation to the human reason as to the work of God and the nature of man.

So great a revelation it has been, that our thoughts have not yet had time to adjust themselves to the

new light. We have been perplexed with seeming incompatibilities of the old and new phraseologies, baffled in tracing a continuity; more ready to see, perhaps more anxious to see, contradiction than growth. But all this, we may be sure, is but a passing phase, and we are perhaps now beginning to see that all revelation and knowledge comes, as Christ Himself came, as part of a continuous process, not to destroy but to fulfil—to build up the great edifice of man's knowledge of himself, and his Creator, and his destiny.

The point seems to me of high importance to us all. If we realise that revelation on these profound subjects is progressive, we shall in the first place heartily and genuinely welcome the chief cause of change, and that is the keen scientific and historical spirit that has taken firm root among us. It is learning that advances knowledge and discovery, and discovery is at least one of the ways in which fresh truth is revealed to man. And, in the next place, we shall feel so certain that the theology that is to be will be something better, fuller, truer than what has been, though we may not see it ourselves, that if for a generation or two the effect of new knowledge makes the thought of God seem meaner and poorer, we shall know that this effect will not last. Theology will always absorb knowledge, and not be killed by it.

But it seems to be an invariable rule, that the wrong inference from new knowledge is drawn at first; and that truth is only won by the slow exhaustion of errors. Geocentric theories precede heliocentric; phlogiston precedes oxygen: emission theories precede undulatory; and as in science so,

perhaps, in theology. We may, therefore, take courage. If the new outburst of knowledge has for the present created a distrust of theology, if, for any one here, it has lowered the conception of God, and dissolved into mists and mythology the thought of the Trinity, I bid him be sure that this is but a temporary result. Let him lift up his eyes even now, and he will see the promise of coming light.

Can I venture, in speaking before such an audience, to touch on so vast a theme as the way in which scientific thought is affecting the Christian interpretation of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity? I can but humbly offer a few reflections, but they are full of hope, and it is for you to make your own whatever in them is opportune and true, and find in them, I trust, a fresh impulse to duty.

Our whole attitude towards theology has been profoundly altered by the conviction that we have attained, though perhaps scarcely formulated, of the unity of nature. It is seen in many ways. The remotest ages of the past are now linked with ours in one continuous physical and biological history, and the most distant stars reveal a kinship to our own sun and earth. Our theology has therefore of necessity to be not a theology of this planet alone, or of this age alone, but a theology of the universe and of all time. The earth cannot be for us any longer the one stage on which the divine drama is played. It is this thought more than anything else which has unconsciously, but irresistibly, antiquated for us so much of theological speculation.

The most marked and direct effect on theology of this conception of the unity of nature has, of course, come from the alteration it has made in the