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Osiris, Isis, and Horus, father, mother, and the child. You find that the one God was worshipped under three different relations, so that practically it is a sort of trinitarian, or threefold, worship. You trace this in ancient Egypt.

Among the Hindus were Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Siva, the destroyer. In Assyria you find substantially the same tendency to look at the one God whom they regarded as supreme under different relations. Among the Aryan peoples, the Hindus, Greeks, Romans, the Egyptians, there was this tendency; but you never find it among the Semitic peoples, the Hebrews or the Arabs.

But that which had more influence upon the immediate preparation of the mind of Christendom for trinitarian speculation was the doctrine and teaching of Plato. Plato was held in great reverence among the early Christians, and his philosophy played an important part in determining the lines. of Christianity. After the death of Socrates, Plato went to Egypt. He talks about the one God as first, and then he personifies what he calls the Logos. He is the first to use the word in that sense. Logos means word, or discourse. You can see the distinction. It is God as he is himself and as he is uttered,- the manifestation of him. Plato, in his mystic speculation, talks about this Logos as though it were a second deity, and, in imitation of the Egyptians, he talks about three; but they are only attributes with Plato, a sort of personified attributes of God, God looked at under different relations. There was a tendency about this time among the Hebrews towards personification. In the Book of Proverbs there is a poetical personification of wisdom. She is represented as standing at the street corners, calling to the young men, and saying, “My ways are ways of pleasantness, and all my paths are peace." When you come to the time of the Wisdom of Solomon, one of the apocryphal books, written about one hundred and fifty years before Jesus, you find this wisdom has become a real being, and is spoken of as though it had become such. Meantime, the Old Testament had been translated into the Greek for the

use of the Alexandrian Jews who spoke Greek and had lost the use of their own language. In this Septuagint the Hebrew for Word is translated Logos, so here you find a preparation for this personification of the word of God.

Now comes at last Philo, one of the most distinguished of ancient Hebrews, and one of Plato's followers. He lived in Alexandria, the centre of culture of the ancient world at that time, about twenty-five years before the birth of Jesus. As the result of the conquest of Alexander the Great, the West was flooded with hints and suggestions of Oriental learning and mysticism. Probably they had heard of the Hindu religion, possibly of the Buddhist, and this mysticism. had now become a fashionable cultus. Philo had a great love and reverence for Plato. He was imbued with this mysticism; and he constructed a system in which he attempts to reconcile Plato and the Old Testament. So he uses

Plato's phrase, the Logos, as meaning God manifested or revealed. So in Philo you find a duality,—God in himself, and God as he is manifest in the Logos. Then you find that sometimes he talks about this God who is in himself and of two ancient powers, one of which is might and one is wisdom. But yet in Philo there is always strict subordination of these two other members of the triad to the one infinite, the God who is incommunicable and not to be understood by human thought.

You see, then, that it is at this particular time in the history of the world, here in Alexandria among these Greek theologians, that there was precisely the condition of things. under which a doctrine like this of the trinity would spring up as naturally as grass grows in May. It was simply this outcome of the mystic ideas from the Orient, the Platonic speculations, the Egyptian thought, and the exaltation of the person of Jesus and the attempt to reconcile this new dig nity added to Jesus with the oneness of God. There was not a man of them all in that early day who would have borne for a moment the thought that God was other than one. And this curious speculation of theirs was an attempt to rec

oncile the dignity, the divinity, the deity, of the Holy Spirit and of Jesus with the oneness of God, which all of them held to as strenuously as would any modern Unitarian.

But why was there any need of such speculation at all? Let me see if I can make it clear. The old Hebrews had held to God as one, alone, isolated, separate from his works. It was God and the world, a God away from his world, ruling it by angels or messengers. This was the Semitic thought. On the other hand, the Aryan races, to which we with the European nations belong, have always been ready to deify men. There is nothing approaching the deification of men to be found on the part of any Semitic people. It was a horror to their thought. God was spirit, isolated, apart, as high above men as his heavens are above the earth. But the Aryans had no difficulty in deifying men; and the secret of their feeling probably lies right here, they wished a God not far off, but near, close at hand.

The Semitic peoples, again, held to the essential evil of matter. The Aryans have been inclined to hold, as we do to-day, to the divinity of matter. Now, the problem that they were trying to solve was to keep God from being isolated from his world, and to keep early Christendom from worshipping something else than God. Though Arius was the most famous of ancient Unitarians,- not the kind at all that we are to-day,—it was probably better for Christendom that he was defeated. Supposing Arianism had prevailed, what would it have meant but that for the last fifteen hundred years Christians would have been worshipping a being admitted to be less than God? It would have been idolatry. In other words, no matter if Jesus was older than the world, so long as he was a created being and less than divine, less than deity, it seemed intolerable to the early Church that they should worship a being like that. As they could not give up Jesus and they could not give up the worship of God, they must make him God and save God's unity in that way, and save the Church from idolatry at the same time. So these two things, consciously or unconsciously, inspired the great

struggle in the early Church. It was the attempt on the part of the Church to escape idolatry, and an attempt on the part of the Church to keep God, the great, real, original God, here in his world and among men. Supposing Arianism had prevailed, the original God would have been somewhere off in the eternities, and we should only have had a delegate or sub-deity here among men. They wished to hold to the doctrine that the original, the eternal God is one God, that he is in and through his works and in and through humanity. This was what they were after,- an attempt to bridge this gulf that they had been taught to believe separated God from his humanity and from his world, and an attempt to escape the worship of the subordinate being. I take it that this was the purpose, more or less dimly conceived, which animated the orthodox party, or what came to be that party in that great struggle.

In conclusion, I need only to say the word that I suggested at the outset that all this philosophic, unintelligible speculation is utterly uncalled for now, for the simple reason that there is no gulf to be bridged. It was only in the mistaken fancies of the ancient world that God was away off in the eternity, that matter was supposed to be evil and separate from him. Matter is not evil: matter is divine. Matter is simply one of the manifestations of the divine activity, the garment of the infinite God. So there is no gulf to be bridged. We do not need a trinity. We do not need any special manifestation of God within the sphere of humanity, in order to link him to man. He is linked to humanity, and he has always been. It is very curious to me to note how the world provides useless problems for itself, and then settles them in. an irrational way.

It was objected against Newton's discovery of the law of gravity that it put the universe and the care of it into the power of law, and left God out of the question, as though a law were not a vital manifestation of God. So you find people frightened at Darwinism and the natural origin of things, as though here, again, God were left out of the question.

What the natural origin of anything would be that leaves God out of the question I do not know. God has never been far from his creation. God is in the finest dust particle, in the lowest manifestation of life, in the lower orders of being, climbing and lifting; in the crude human being, leading, guiding, all the way up unto the present hour. God, the one, the eternal, always in the world, always in his humanity, closer to us than the air we breathe. So there needs no trinity to bring him down out of his heavens; for he is here, and he has always been here. There needs no device to get him into relation with his children; for he has always been in closer relation with them than they have been with each other. It only needs that we open our eyes to see, that we train our sensitiveness to feel, and we shall lift our little lives into the divine, because we are in the eternal presence of the eternal God.

Father, we thank Thee that Thou art always with us, that we need not go far to seek Thee; for Thou hast been with the world from the beginning and in humanity from the beginning, and Thou wilt lead us until the victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, is universal and eternal. Amen.

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