Love, because it saw no excellence in sacrifice; and while all else submitted to the Supreme Principle, this merely directed, but never submitted itself to, the good of its subordinates. No one dared to attribute self-sacrifice to Absolute Godhead until Christ died upon the Cross. Yet it is just this that is needed to make sense of all experience, and to set forth God as veritably All-mighty, King not only of conduct but of hearts and wills.

1

Sacrifice is not always painful; that depends on the response. The form of sacrifice is that one chooses for love's sake to do or to suffer what apart from love one would not have chosen to do or to suffer. This is painful when the choice of love is made in the face of some recalcitrant selfishness that still lingers in the soul; and it is painful when the love that prompts it is ignored or repulsed. Sometimes, too, it is painful by accident, as when a man deliberately faces pain to save some one else from pain. But sacrifice expressing a love that is returned can be such joy as is not otherwise known to men. Sacrifice is, in our experience, the noblest of spiritual qualities and the highest of known joys; and sacrifice is, for Christians, the open secret of the heart of God.

So God vindicates His own Deity. Only such a God can be the God of the world we know. For the Name of God signifies the union of perfect goodness and absolute power. We should have to deny the one or the other if we could not believe in God as revealed in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus. He reigns from the Tree. Because, and only because, His goodness is so perfect as to include self-sacrifice, His power is known to be supreme and all-controlling.

1 Cf. p. 221 and footnote there.

T

CHAPTER XV

LOVE DIVINE: THE BLESSED TRINITY

"The Living and True God was from all Eternity, and from all Eternity wanted like a God. He wanted the communication of His divine essence, and persons to enjoy it. He wanted Worlds, He wanted spectators, He wanted Joys, He wanted Treasures. He wanted, yet He wanted not, for He had them."-TRAHERNE.

OUR argument led us to a belief in God as Creative Will, originating and sustaining all that is. As such, He has His being apart from all else, and in no way depends on the created universe for His existence. He is not merely the spiritual aspect of the universe, nor the sum of its values, nor even its totality, except in the sense that He is the ground of its totality which therefore falls within the scope of His will. This is what is represented in classical theology by the doctrine that the universe is not of the divine substance but proceeds from the divine will. If God ceased to be, the universe would immediately cease also; but if the universe ceased to be, God would still be God. His existence is independent of all else; He is absolutely.

This does not mean that creation is capricious, as represented in the words attributed to the Almighty by the youthful Shelley.

From an eternity of idleness

I, God, awoke; in seven days' toil made earth.1

On the contrary, the Love which prompts creation is the very nature of God. Because He is Love, He is

1 Shelley, Queen Mab.

and must be self-communicating; in principle (ev ȧpx?) there is, and always was, the Word, eternally in close relation with God, eternally God. In this sense the universe is necessary to God. Being God He must create. But there is no reciprocal interdependence. The way in which God is necessary to the universe is utterly different from the way in which the universe is necessary to God; for in each case the ground of the necessity is in God. God is necessary to the universe in the sense that apart from God the universe would not exist: the universe is not necessary to God in that sense at all; it is necessary to God only in the sense that, being what He is, His nature leads to its creation.

It is this essential self-utterance of God which St. John calls the Word, and the necessity of it, grounded in the moral character and being of God, is called the eternal generation of the Son. The reasons for attributing to the Word a distinctness sufficient to warrant such an expression will appear later. At present the point to notice is that what is rooted in the moral character of a spiritual being is that being's act; so that to say the generation of the Word is the act of the Father and to say that God is such that He must give Himself in love is to say one and the same thing. The love in which He gives Himself is known to Christians by the name of Holy Ghost. Father, Son, Holy Ghost-each name stands for the divine love in one of its necessary aspects.

But these are not only aspects. The Father is the ground or fountain of all being, and in Him all is implicit; to Him all is present. But " present" is here a misleading term, used only because the limitations of human experience and language prevent the discovery of a better. "Present is distinguished from past and future; and when we say that to God the Father all is present, we inevitably suggest to our

1 St. John i. 1.

"

minds the thought of One who now comprehends the future. But that is precisely what is not intended. Now means not then; then means not now; but it is neither then nor now that God comprehends all time; it is eternally. This is something altogether beyond our apprehension, but our experience is not so utterly lacking in analogues that we can attach no meaning to the words. When we watch a play of which we know the plot already, we have an artificial imitation of an eternal comprehension; we see each episode and action in the light not only of its occasion, but of its consequences. Now imagine that the play is being acted by the children of the dramatist, and even composed by them as they act it, according to gifts of which he as their father is the source, and that he knows them well enough to be sure of the general course they will take

-then his experience, as he watches, is something still nearer to the eternal comprehension. Christ taught us to think of God as Father, and we can conceive an ideal father who is a perfect artist in the living material of his children, so that, never infringing their freedom, he yet can guide them to a harmonious exercise of it. So we come still closer. It is true that all analogies fail; they ought to fail. If we had a conception of God which made His mode of being perfectly comprehensible to the finite mind, we should know for that reason alone that it was false. But we have in our experience indications of a superiority to Time which show us the intelligible possibility of an eternal comprehension, though such comprehension is itself for ever beyond our reach.2

The difficulty of apprehending the divine comprehension of the world would be greater if it were an act

1 Cf. Oh, if indeed that eye foresee

Or see (in Him is no before).

TENNYSON, In Memoriam.

2 Coleridge says that the only safe form of the doctrine of Omnipresence is, not that God is present to all things, but that all things are present to God.

This, perhaps, helps us further to see what is meant by an eternal comprehension.

of contemplation only. But it is not this. God, we have found, is Himself active in the process which He comprehends. That process is His own self-manifestation, wherein He Himself is active. Israel had learnt to trace His activity in the events of the nation's history; Christians have learnt supremely to find His positive act in the Birth, Life, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ, and the subsequent gift of spiritual power to His disciples. But in that supreme act of self-revelation we do not find One remote from all forms of trouble or exempt from disappointment. We see Him pleading, sometimes in vain; loaded with the weight of disappointment; amazed at the path marked out for Him; overwhelmed with despair. God, who eternally grasps the whole universe that He has created in all its extent of space and time, also acts at a particular part of space under the conditions of time, and so acting His struggle and effort are profoundly real-so real that in time and for a time they are sometimes genuinely frustrated; if any soul is ultimately lost, then God's purpose for that soul is finally frustrated.

Now we must use human language and human thoughts, because we have no other; and it is clear at once that while God, as we have been led to conceive Him, is certainly personal, He is as certainly not a Person. To attribute to a Person at once the eternal comprehension of the universe and the disappointment of Jesus Christ over Jerusalem or His cry of desolation on the Cross is to talk nonsense. It is one God; but it is two Persons-so far as human terms have any applicability at all. Here we find the ground for that degree of distinctness in the divine Word or selfmanifestation of God in time, which makes it appropriate to speak of Him as begotten of the Father rather than as merely emanating from the Father. Before all worlds, or eternally, He is the Father. Into this world He was born.

begotten of

It was no