H4 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 



We have called the functions of the three fatherhood, 

 sonship, spirithood ; we will call the persons themselves 

 father, son, and spirit. The terms are convenient, be- 

 cause Christianity has rendered them familiar, and, 

 besides, they serve to remind us that, because man and 

 God alike are personal, what we say of the personality 

 of the perfect man is a fortiori true of God. 



Fatherhood is creative. But because it is essentially 

 and always related to sonship and spirithood, it is 

 personal itself, and not merely part of a person. In 

 fatherhood the stress is upon will, but its function is 

 achieved by thought and love, This creative will is out- 

 wardly directed towards others which it calls into being 

 from the necessity of its own internal determination 

 towards creation ; but it is also inwardly directed upon 

 the self, as determining the nature of its self-experience. 

 A person is internally, as well as externally, active. 



Sonship is mediating. It mediates the relation of 

 creator to created externally in the reasonable order of 

 experience, and it also mediates the internal relation of 

 the person to himself in thought, making the person his 

 own other. A person knows himself, as well as others. 

 Nevertheless the self-thought is willed, and it is vivified 

 by the emotion of love. But the stress is upon thought, 

 mediating relationship. 



Spirithood is, as we have seen, harder to realise, for 

 7 and thou are closely related, but we have no word 

 for which means we have no articulate thought of 

 a third relationship between persons equally close 1 . 



1 Mackintosh even goes so far as to say "Moreover, the argu- 

 ment for a vital duality can never yield a trinity ; it gives no help 

 in conceiving the third Person of the Godhead, thus failing at a 

 crucial point. One feels that the last part of this objection is un- 

 answerable, and must be accepted frankly. No speculative 

 argument known to the present writer has the slightest value 

 as proving a third divine distinction which is either 'Holy* or 



