n] The Triunity of Man 61 



satisfied by the other. The best human friendship is 

 that between persons who are identical in almost all of 

 their positive qualities and yet supply each other's lack 

 as well a lack perhaps hardly realised. Apply this fact 

 to the relation between man and God, and it is evident 

 that by considering those qualities of man in virtue of 

 which he loves God and those of whose lack in himself 

 he is conscious as a loss or defect, we may arrive at 

 some approximately true idea of the qualities or attri- 

 butes of God. 



But this is not all. Because man persists, transcend- 

 ing time because he is there to experience change, and 

 is not himself simple change his nature has in it some- 

 thing that is timeless. His self-hood is transcendent, 

 and its reaching out towards God is evidence of simili- 

 tude of essential being. Man's attributes are like God's 

 attributes, and so man is drawn to God through know- 

 ledge of Him as a Being external to himself ; but besides 

 this, and evidenced by this, his essential being is like the 

 Essential Being of God, and so he craves union with 

 Him. This of course is the underlying fact in human 

 friendship too. The similarity of attributes, which 

 represent men's external relations, is evidence of an 

 inner similarity which craves satisfaction in union; the 

 immediate experience of the relationship of interpene- 

 tration. But this union or love goes behind change into 

 perdurable realities of existence. We love one another 

 with our real, lasting selves, not with the temporary 

 attraction of our immanent, changing nature, at least 

 such partial affections, if they exist at all without com- 

 mingling of the higher, are not worthy of the name of 

 love and have nothing in common with its true nature. 



Man, then, is drawn to God by the similarity of his 

 own attributes to those of God; by examining the attri- 

 butes of the human personality, the projections of the 

 self towards others, we can gain some insight into the 



