Persons in the Trinity. So long as the Trinitarian idea be regarded as practically final, that is to say, so long as there is no talk or hint of a Divine substance farther back which is revealed in the threefold process, there is nothing to prevent an orthodox sense being given to language like this; but if it be implied that the Trinitarian idea is a mere economy, as it is called technically, a mere concession to human weakness of intellect,—if it be denied that it corresponds with any permanent fact in the Divine nature, it falls under the condemnation of Sabellianism. For the Catholic Church refuses to accept any method of combining the Scripture statements about the three Persons which involves their confusion. It may not be easy to see in what sense They are three and yet also one, but this is the burden of the Christian Creed.

explain so far as may be

We have now considered the problem which the language of Scripture places before the intellect of the Church, and one or two of the ways in which it has been attempted to settle it. The more serious part of our task still remains, viz., to what the Catholic position is and means, and what changes it involves in the use of popular terms. It would be easy to say shortly that the Church has decided that the Holy Spirit is no less consubstantial with the Father than the Son. But this is not all that is necessary. Questions which we postponed in our discussion of the doctrine of the Son of God will arise now. We must not only assert that the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one substance with the Father, but explain what we mean by this; in what sense we talk of the unity of God, in view of the tri-personality, and in what sense we speak of God as personal and the Three as Persons.

First, then let us inquire what is meant by unity as applied to God. We have said that the Christian doctrine of God rises straight out of a most rigid and unbending Monotheism, and that Trinitarianism does not involve any radical change in this. But we must still inquire what particular type of unity is in our minds when we say that God is one.

A. Unity is the name of an idea which does not seem, at first sight, to need investigation-in which it does not seem probable that much variety of meaning will be discovered. It does not, however, come up to the expectations of simplicity which it excites. As a rule when we talk of one thing, we mean to single it out from a number of others of the same class. One man, one horse, etc. are phrases which limit the substantive numerically. They exclude at the moment all plurality whatever, and fix the mind on a numerical idea. In the background of our thought, when we use the word "one" in this manner, lies the possibility of other numbers-a class of substantives, each of them one and individual in itself, but forming in the aggregate a larger number. To put it shortly, one in its ordinary sense means one of a class or lot; it fixes the thought upon a particular individual, and excludes all the others. Now it is plain on the face of it that when we say there is one God we mean much more than this. We mean, it is true, that there are no others, and we say, I believe in one God, on purpose to deny that there is any other God but one. In this case, as before, the word "one" has a generic significance, but its implication in regard of possible others depends upon our knowledge of facts, and our experience. When we say, there is one God, we say it with the implication that there are no more, and this, partly, because we

believe this to be the fact, and partly because some other people do not. If I say, I see one man coming across that field, I say it with the implication that there might be more, but that the others are not present. In one case we exclude possible other ones from existence, in the other we simply deny that they are present

to our senses.

B. Besides this generic sense of unity in which it always has reference to possible others, there is another which has wholly different associations. When we speak of an individual man, and say that he is one, we may either mean, as before, that he is not any of the others, or we may refer to his single and self-contained unity: that is, we may look aside from his place in the class with the others, and note the continuity and sameness of his personal life. We have, then, made an assertion of a wholly new kind, although the transition seems so slight. Instead of remarking upon a merely external and accidental fact, we assert an important philosophical truth. We have turned away our eyes from the mere fact that a given individual is different from all the others, and concentrated our attention upon the difference and its cause. We find that the difference between ourselves and all other men lies in a secret strain of incommunicable unity, which preserves itself so long as we last in being. The experience I have to-day is my experience, just in the same sense as the experience of yesterday, in virtue of my being the same-in virtue of the fact that I am the same person throughout. How and how far this personal identity throughout all experience can be proved, need not concern us here; it is a thorny question, and whatever the result of the theoretical investigation, the practical fact remains the same,

that we must assume the permanence of personal identity if we are to talk intelligently or intelligibly of individual experience. For our purpose it will be enough to inquire what new possibilities are opened to us in the meaning of unity.

It needs but little effort to see that unity in the sense here considered is unity in difference. That is, the variety and complexity of the experiences passed through in no way interfere with the unity of the person. He is one and the same throughout them all, and their variety only serves to fill out and illustrate his own identity and unity. It is difficult to conceive any variety which the unity of the individual is not capable of overmastering. The most monotonous and unvaried life is really full of inconceivable complexities, and when we rise above this level and consider the career of a man of action, it is still more astonishing to reflect upon the chaos of various elements which the unity of his personality threads together into one ordered whole. The real difference between unity in this sense and unity in its generic meaning is, that the former is living and concrete, and the latter dead and abstract. In the latter case unity is an idea, in the former it is a process. We find out the generic unity by abstract thought and classification; we realize personal unity directly, only by incommunicable experience.

It is, however, bounded by two potent limitations— time and space. An individual man can absorb into the unity of his own experience the characteristics of various places and times, but only if he takes them in succession. He imposes the unity of his own life upon all the various events which happen to him; they are bound together in his experience and they are one because they are his.

Even if he knows that various events of which he hears took place simultaneously, he cannot fully realize their simultaneity, he must think of them in succession. And so, to realize what we know to be occurring at another place requires the aid of the constructive imagination, and probably the stored-up experience of the past; it is not matter which can be absorbed into the unity of the single life. No man can be in more than one place at one time he can imagine the occurrence of events other than those he witnesses, and believe that they occupy the same time as his own experience. He can picture scenes in the past which coincided in time and not in place. His direct experience is only of one time and one place.

Within these limits, of which much more might be said, the unity which makes one man to differ from another consists in the absorption into himself of all his own special variety of experience. As such the unity of a man's self is intensely exclusive. No other man, however near to us, has ever the same experience. The same event, witnessed by two separate people, is inevitably transmuted as it passes into their several minds. Each notes in it what he is naturally constituted to note in it puts upon it the interpretation which he is fitted by his special characteristics of mind, temper, and imagination to put upon it. There is no unity so impenetrable as this, so exclusive and so complete. Not only does it admit of no fusion with any other of the same kind, it is not even wholly explicable to another. It goes deep down below the superficiality of language; it can be hinted at, pictured, described, but never reproduced. Buried experiences, half-conscious emotions, and half-forgotten associations go to colour it at any given