i] Tke Triunity of God 49 



nature from His attributes. He must know God Him- 

 self as one person knows another. And the beginning 

 and ending of this knowledge can be found only in love. 



(3) In the end of the last section we foreshadowed 

 the method by which we propose to approach the pro- 

 blems of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Personality 

 and Love are the wards of the key by which we shall 

 try to unlock one of the doors of our understanding of 

 this central mystery of Godhead. For the moment, how- 

 ever, we will rest content with offering a brief resum 

 of the doctrine as usually held by the Church. This is 

 generally assumed to be based mainly on revelation. 

 How far this assumption is true, and what the nature of 

 that revelation is, we shall have briefly to consider later. 



The Christian doctrine of the Godhead is, then, that 

 It is Three in One and One in Three. The One God 

 exists in the Unity of perfect Love, yet there are three 

 hypostases in Him. These hypostases are not attributes, 

 nor varying manifestations of activity; for alike in 

 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all the divine attributes 

 are present in relation to the Cosmos, and of each is it 

 equally true that God is Love, where the three words 

 receive each one the signification we have already given 

 to them. Neither are they personae, masks, for each 

 reveals, not hides, the Godhead. Nor are they aspects, 

 for each reveals the complete Godhead, at any rate by 

 implication. In fact.the word hypostasis has undergone 

 many changes in the exact shade of its meaning. Origin- 

 ally it denoted simply the idea of reality. In the Stoic 

 Philosophy it was equivalent to ov<ria l . At the time of 

 the council of Nicaea it lay rather more than midway 

 between mode and person, inclining to the latter. 

 Dorner, one of the protagonists of the Kenotic theory, 

 definitely states that a distinction must be drawn be- 

 tween hypostasis and person tending in this to the 

 1 Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, p. 576. 



