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Page 28
Shelley, while insistently denying or defying all the gods of accepted
religion, finds himself adoring
that Beauty
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world,
Scarce visible for extreme loveliness.
Surely the God Christians adore is in these experiences, though men know
it not. St. Augustine believed that "all that is beautiful comes from
the highest Beauty, which is God." They who begin with the cult of
Beauty may have a conception of the Divine that has nothing to do with,
or is even opposed to, the God and Father of Jesus; but when His God is
supreme, inspirations from all things lovely may vastly supplement our
thought of Him. "Music on earth much light upon heaven has thrown."
Science, too, has its contribution to offer to our thought of Him who is
over all and through all and in all. Truth is one, and scientific
investigation and religious experience are two avenues that lead to the
one Reality faith names God. Science of itself can never lead us beyond
visible and tangible facts; but its array of facts may suggest to faith
many things about the invisible Father, the Lord of all. Present-day
science with its emphasis upon continuity makes us think of a God who is
no occasional visitor, but everywhere and always active; its conception
of evolution brings home to us the patient and long-suffering labor of a
Father who worketh even until now; its stress upon law reminds us that
He is never capricious but reliable; its practical mastery of forces,
like those which enable men to use the air or to navigate under the
water, recalls to us the old command to subdue the earth as sons of God,
and adds the new responsibility to use our control, as the Son of God
always did, in love's cause.
Philosophy, too, which Professor James has described as "our more or
less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means," helps us to
make clear our idea of God. A philosopher is just a thoughtful person
who takes the discoveries that his religious, moral, �sthetic,
scientific experiences have brought home, and tries to set in order all
he knows of truth, beauty, right, God.
In attempting to philosophize upon their discoveries of God, Christian
thinkers have arrived at the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. It was,
first, an attempt to hold fast to the great foundation truth of the Old
Testament that God is One. The world in which Christianity found itself
had a host of deities--a god for the sea and another for the wind, a god
of the hearth and a god of the empire, and so on. Today it is only too
easy to obey one motive in the home and another in one's business, to
follow one principle in private life and another in national life, and
to be polytheists again. Christian faith insists that "there is one God,
the Father, of whom are all things and we unto Him." We adore One who is
Christlike love, and we will serve no other. We trust Christlike love as
the divine basis for a happy family life, and also for successful
commerce, for statesmanlike international dealings, for the effective
treatment of every political and social question. The inspirations that
come to us from a glorious piece of music or from an heroic act of
self-sacrifice, from some new discovery or from a novel sensitiveness of
conscience, are all inspirations from the one God. At every moment and
in every situation we must keep the same fundamental attitude towards
life--trustful, hopeful, serving--because in every experience, bitter or
sweet, we are always in touch with the one Lord of all, our Christlike
Father.
In this Unity Christians have spoken of a Trinity. Paul summing up the
blessing of God, speaks of "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the
love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit." He says, "through
Jesus we have our access in one Spirit unto the Father." He and his
fellow believers had been redeemed from selfishness to love, from
slavery to freedom; and they accounted for their new life by saying
that, through the grace of Jesus, they had come to experience the
fatherly love of God, and to find His Spirit binding them in a
brotherhood of service for one another and the world. The New Testament
goes no further: it states these experiences of Jesus, of God, of the
Spirit; but it does not tell us the exact relations of the Three--how
God is related to the Spirit, or Jesus distinct and at the same time one
with the Father. So acute a thinker as Paul never seems to have worked
this out. At one time he compares God's relation to His Spirit to man's
relation to his spirit ("Who among men knoweth the things of a man, save
the spirit of the man which is in him? even so the things of God none
knoweth, save the Spirit of God"); and once he identifies the Spirit
with the glorified Christ ("The Lord is the Spirit").
But while Paul and other New Testament writers did not feel the need of
thinking out what their threefold experience of God implied as to His
Being, later Christians did; and using the terms of the current Greek
philosophy, they elaborated the conception of three "Persons" in one
Godhead. We have no exact equivalent in English for the Greek word which
is translated "person" in this definition. It is not the same as "a
person" for that would give us three gods; nor is it something
impersonal, a mode or aspect of God. It is something in between a
personality and a personification.
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