God-consciousness. The diversity of forms of the Idea of God is due to the differences of degree of receptiveness, as through the "soul's east window of divine surprise," stained and figured, the light enters coloured and shaped, while outside abideth always the pure white Light.

"The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity."

h. Now this very receptiveness in its incompleteness of growth is the condition of endless development, for receptivity of the Infinite implies infinite receptivity. So it is a God-like potency in man, the potency of an endless growth, of an approximation unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, of sanctification, and of the dominance of the spirit unto eternal life. For God-consciousness is this, first of all, -to know1 the true God; not to know about God, but to know Him without intervention of a minor premise, to know Him also because He is (if I may use the phrase) lived. A holy life is a Catholic Creed, and orthodox theology is the intuition of the pure in heart. Perhaps perfect receptiveness implies apotheosis. This bold corollary Athanasius dared to accept, saying,2 "He (the

1 St. John xvii. 3.

2 De Incarn. c. liv.

Word of God) became humanified in order that we might become deified." The end is by and by.

i. A survey of the growth of the religious idea in human consciousness makes us aware of another syllable, so to say, of the Word-made-Flesh; another thought, which is of deep and wide import. There is revelation and there is revealment. God reveals Himself to man in man. God in man as in the world external to man, God in man, a life ever pressing against the soul's barriers, crying, "Lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in." Or, as our Lord Himself says, "Behold I stand at the door [of the heart] and knock, if any will hear my voice, and open the door1 my Father will love him

and we will come unto him and make our abode with him."2 God in man, Emmanuel, a light ever shining and waxing brighter and brighter through the earthen vase, in divers rites, customs, folk-faith and myths, as in the liturgic drama of history the Self-revelation of God outrolls.

j. The advent of our Lord Jesus Christ was not an arrival from a journey,3 but a manifestation of the

1 Rev. iii. 20.

2 St. John xiv. 23.

For

3 When Jesus is called ò èpxóuevos, it is always in the sense which the Rabbinic schools gave the idiom, i.e. the Messiah. The coming age, the world to come, meant the epoch of the Messiah. the use of φανέρωσις, παρουσία, αἰὼν ὁ μέλλων, ἀποκάλυψις, see Weiss, Bibl. Theol.

Presence in which we had always been, a parousia, as Blake symbolises the nearness of that Presence in his wonderful Inventions to the Book of Job. When Jesus appeared He made apparent God.1 He was God, personally acting as man, enabling us to

"Correct the portrait by the living face;

Man's God, by God's God in the mind of man.”

I do not feel called upon to enter into an examination of the Biblical Theology of the Idea of the Triune God, and of the expansion of human receptiveness in relation to that Idea. The manner in which that has already been done by one of your own Faculty 2 leaves nothing further for you to desire. The doctrine of the Trinity now belongs to the content of Christian thought and life, however much the Aufklärung may be flippant over "a celestial committee of Three." Into the Biblical Theology of the Immanence of the Triune God we ought to attempt some little inquiry, for the reason that it is a doctrine which Christian consciousness has not fully and universally accepted.

k. Take first the Johannine writings. In Revelation 3 the writer takes up the symbol of the ancient tabernacle of Israel, and shows its fulfilment in the lives of God's saints. Upon their spirits, says he,

1 ǹ Zwǹ épaveρwen, 1 St. John i. 2.

2 P. H. Steenstra, D.D., The Being of God as Unity and Trinity. 8 vii. 15, σκηνώσει ἐπ ̓ αὐτούς.

1

God shall rest as He rested upon the Mercy-seat; and in the same book 1 there cries a voice from the unseen realm, "Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and He shall tabernacle with them, and God shall be with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them." As a result of the erosion of metaphysics and poetry, the word Truth has come to correspond to a vague abstraction. To the average mind it connotes little that is clear. But translate aλýleia by actuality or reality, and therewith read the first Epistle to St. John, and you will find that the fact of the divine indwelling will come to be sharply and distinctly focussed out to your mental vision.2 In the Fourth Gospel it is seen that the thought is clearly consonant with the teachings of Jesus. For therein our Lord is recorded as saying that while on earth He remained in Heaven,3 because He is in the Father and the Father in Him. As the Father dwelleth in Him, so shall the Christians have God, the Spirit, dwell in them and, be in them,5 and as a result Christian consciousness will know that Christ is in the Father, and He in Christ, and Christ in us.6 In consequence, a perfect divinehuman unity will come to pass. From this divine

human unity and indwelling of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the prologue of the Fourth Gospel passes to the further thought of the cosmic indwelling. "That which was made was life in Him," we find in the best reading, signifying that through the immanence of the Logos the universe is alive.

In a word the Johannine thought is that Life (1) is the manifestation of Rational (2) Will (3); Life (1) is the Spirit, Reason (2) is the Son, and Will (3) is the Father, and in cosmic relation, Life (1) is the condition of the world, Reason (2) is the form of the world, and Will (3) is the substance of the world. Harmonious was this Idea of God with the gnosis of St. Paul. We are not surprised, therefore, to find in his Areopagite Sermon,2 "God is not far from every one of us"; or to put the matter in very literal language, "Even though God be subsistent, not distant (or apart) from each one of us, for it is in Him that we live and move and exist." 3 In that most wonderfully profound letter to the Romans, St. Paul expounds on this basis the philosophy of the world, guarding against the Buddhist myth of the Veil of Maya, the world as an illusion, which, nursed in the cell of the Nitrian monk, and by the mystics of the Abbey of St. Victor, still survives in many a staunch Protestant hymn, "This world's a vain and fleeting show," and other words to like effect. Against such

1 St. John i. 4.

2 Acts xxvii. 27, 28.

3 Cf. Rom. xi. 36; 2 Cor. vi. 18; Eph. i. 23; iv. 6.