56 The Triunity of God [CH. 



personality which we shall shortly have to discuss. The 

 basis of all that we have said is to be found in the Bible. 

 The right of interpretation has been freely used, with- 

 out, we believe, overstepping legitimate bounds. Chap- 

 ter and verse have not been given ; the task would be a 

 long one and for our present purpose unnecessary, since 

 the scriptural basis is to be found in many theological 

 treatises 1 . The present chapter is simply meant to set 

 out the teaching of the Church ; assuming the Authority 

 of the Bible and the Authority of Tradition. With 

 several other questions on which we have but touched 

 we shall have to deal more in detail. For instance, it is 

 certainly true to say that the hypostasis of the Holy 

 Spirit is far less clearly delineated in the revelation of 

 the Bible than are those of the Father and the Son. 



Again, the whole process of reason which sub-divides 

 the Eternal, Absolute Godhead into three modes, while 

 contending that they are not modes at all, but hypo- 

 stases or persons, seems at first sight artificial and arbi- 

 trary. We can think of the three Persons of the Godhead 

 in relation to the created cosmos, though in doing so, 

 we are very apt to lose sight of the unity of the Godhead 

 in a kind of veiled tritheism, but when we come to try 

 to carry our thought back to the absolute aspect of 

 Godhead, without time or change, or anything but 

 transcendent activity, we cannot help feeling that the 

 three Persons are modes of His relation to the cosmos. 

 Even when it is pointed out that in the realm of the 

 Absolute Pure Unity must be wholly inactive and so 

 indistinguishable from Pure Nothingness, reason gives 



1 In Martensen's Christian Dogmatics, for example, many refer- 

 ences are given in the course of a most able conspectus of the 

 orthodox Christian doctrine in regard to the Trinity, as under- 

 stood by a mind well versed in metaphysic, and the same is 

 true of Mackintosh's The Person of Jesus Christ, Ottley's The 

 Doctrine of the Incarnation, and many other works. 



