52 The Triunity of God [CH. 



Yet in I and Thou, taken alone, unity is lost. Of 

 necessity the Godhead is divided into I and Thou, 

 Father and Son. If this were all, God would suffer com- 

 pulsion, not merely from the impossibility of contra- 

 dicting His own nature, as I and Thou only, and no 

 more and this would involve the impossibility of 

 creation but also by the necessary distinction of 

 Thought and Being. The unity is restored in the Holy 

 Spirit, proceeding equally from Father and Son. Being 

 and Thought are made One again in the Essential Free- 

 dom of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is thus the expression 

 of God's recognition of the Principle of Freedom in Him- 

 self, making the activities of the Godhead glorious in 

 Love 1 . He realises the eternal creative fiat of the Father 

 through which the Godhead is active and self-conscious, 

 making Godhead not pure Thought not merely 

 rational instead of chaotic, but Personal Being also. 

 The Spirit as it were re-unites pure activity with deriva- 

 tive order, as Personal Being, in virtue of the fact 

 that the Holy Spirit Himself is derivative from, and 

 correlative with, Activity and Order, as Freedom. 

 Using abstract words like these in their own meaning 

 such a statement is void of any intelligible signification. 

 The words themselves must be made real, and more, 

 must be hypostatised, before one can begin to apprehend 

 the truth which they signify. I suppose it will always be 

 more difficult to grasp even the fringe of the truth 

 which is expressed in the personification of the Holy 

 Spirit than it is to do so in the case of the Father and 

 the Son. " I " and "Thou " are personal words. " He " 

 implies a relationship more external, which cannot be 

 applicable to the divine Trinity ; and we have no word 

 that implies the perfect relationship of a third person 



1 1 am aware that the principle of Freedom has been often assigned , 

 as by Dorner, to the Logos, but this seems to me to originate in an 

 incomplete appreciation of the melaphysic of Trinitarian doctrine. 



