"By such reasonings as these, if reasonings are needed, the preacher may expect to win the assent of his hearers to the truth that God is.

"He must tell them, then, that the voice within them which continually admonishes them, saying to each, 'Thou oughtest to choose the right,' is the very voice of God himself.

"He must tell them, also, that the retributive laws working themselves out in their own natures when they disobey this voice, causing each to reap corruption where he sows sin, producing moral infirmity, and decay, and misery, as the sure penalty of conscious wrong-doing, are God's laws, holy and just and good, that can never be repealed or suspended or evaded.

"Every sin of man, the preacher must testify, is primarily a sin against God, and the penalties of sin are penalties which God himself has ordained." (Washington Gladden.)

GOD INTUITIVELY RECOGNIZED.

"1. I recognize the obvious fact that my rational and moral intuitions, and the information they afford, are as valid as my sense perceptions and the discoveries they make of the material world. Personality, freedom, moral responsibility-the eternal, ultimate, universal, and supreme obligation of the right, are to me the first and most sure of realities.

"2. The light of my own personality, will, intelligence, and conscience, cast upon external nature, and upon the human society which surrounds me, reveals God. He is manifested in the exercise of my own consciousness, and in the phenomena of external nature, as the invisible spirits of our fellow men are visible in their persons and actions; and I spontaneously recognize him as certainly as I recognize them. Intelligence, choice, and therefore personality, are everywhere visible in the successions of external nature; and the presence of a presiding moral personality is witnessed to by the sense of responsibility and of guilt never absent from my own consciousness. To the extent to which science renders nature intelligible is the latter proved to be the product of an ever-present and acting intelligence. This God is discerned to be immanent in the external and internal world, as distributed through space and time, just as clearly as the phenomena themselves through the medium of which he is manifested. At the same time he is just as clearly and as certainly discerned as a moral and providential Governor objective to ourselves, transcend

ing all phenomena, and speaking to us, and acting upon us from without.

"3. As thus revealed, it is evident that this God has created me in his own image. Instincts, also, which can not be denied, testify that he is my Father. As a child of God, unassuageable instinct cries for union with him. As a subject of his moral government, I know myself to be justly exposed to his wrath because of sin, and that I must have a Mediator to make my peace, else I die. His treatment of the race historically, and of me personally, affords strong presumption that he will some time reveal himself to me, and redeem me from the ruin effected by my sin." (Pres. A. A. Hodge, D. D.)

CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD.

"I am conscious of the being of God, just as I am conscious of the being of the external world; and, living and acting in this consciousness, the being of God comes to me with even greater force. The cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments help me toward the knowledge of an all-wise, powerful, and righteous One, who made and rules the worlds; but it is in Jesus Christ alone that I find the God who fills my heart. The largest and fullest word in that revelation which Christ brings to us of God I believe to be that word which is so continually upon his lips-the word Father. This conception of God as a Father, in whom are perfectly combined the reason and authority, the righteousness and love, the power and the pattern of goodness and life, I believe to be the highest and truest conception of the Divine character which we are capable of receiving, absorbing and replacing all earlier and lesser revelations of himself." (J. N. McIlvaine.)

THE ATHEIST AN ORPHAN.

"It would cause me less pain to deny immortality than to deny God's existence. In the former case, what I lose is but a world hidden by clouds; but in the latter, I lose this present world, that is to say, its sun. The whole spiritual universe is shattered and shivered by the hand of atheism into innumerable glittering quicksilver globules of individual personalities, running hither and thither at random, coalescing, and parting asunder without unity, coherence, or consistency. In all this wide universe there is none so utterly solitary and alone as a denier of God. With orphaned heart-a heart which has

lost the Great Father-he mourns beside the immeasurable corpse of Nature, a corpse no longer animated or held together by the Great Spirit of the universe-a corpse which grows in its grave; and by this corpse he mourns until he himself crumbles and falls away from it into nothingness. The wide earth lies before such a one like the great Egyptian sphinx of stone, half buried in the desert sand; the immeasurable universe has become for him but the cold iron mask upon an eternity which is without form and void. (Richter.)

THE TRINITY.

"We venerate one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity, neither confounding persons nor separating substance; for there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and a third of the Holy Ghost. But of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, unique is the divinity, equal the glory, and coeternal the majesty. Amen."

Such is the faith of Christendom, and such it ever has been. And not Christendom alone. The theological systems of nearly all pagan nations of antiquity acknowledged a kind of Trinity in the Divine nature. Among the Gentile kingdoms also the doctrine was universally prevalent. Bishop Tomline says, that "the doctrine itself bears such striking internal marks of a Divine original, and is so very unlikely to have been the invention of mere human reason, that there is no way of accounting for the general adoption of so singular a belief, but by supposing that it was revealed by God to the early patriarchs, and that it was transmitted by them to posterity."

The idea of the Trinity includes three subordinate ideas, viz.:

1. That there is only one God. 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord." (Deut. vi, 4.) "There is none other God but one." (1 Cor. viii, 4.) "The unity of God is as necessary as his existence, since he is and must be infinite, and infinity excludes the idea of rivalry. There can be but one Supreme Governor, and he is so perfectly one that no unity like his can be found outside of himself. All these points are patent, or yield to the researches of an inquiring intellect." "The doctrine that there is one living God is that to which thought has brought thinkers; but the strange pre-eminence of the Bible lies in this being from the first unto the last the doctrine of which its whole teaching is full." (Charteris.)

2. That in this unity there are three personalities, to wit: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. These three are coequal, consubstantial, and eternal-the Father, who receives from none; the Son,

who is eternally begotten of the Father; and the Holy Ghost, who eternally proceedeth from the Father and the Son. This is the nature of the Infinite Being, that essential unity is shared by an essential Trinity. Each person is distinct, and endowed with all the attributes of personality. Each has in himself the whole Divine essence, so that there is neither superiority nor subjection, nor want of harmony.

3. That there are yet not three Gods, but one God-God the Father communicating the whole Divine essence in an eternal generation to the Son; and the Father and the Son communicating the same essence in one act and by an eternal procession to the Holy Ghost. "This," says St. Bernard, "is a vast mystery. To scrutinize it is temerity; to believe it, piety; to know it, the way and the life eternal."

"The Divine element," remarks Rev. Dr. John McEldowney, "includes God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. These three persons are essentially and inseparably one in all their infinite, eternal nature and being; hence in the Scriptures the work of one is often in a very proper sense ascribed to another. Creation is ascribed by Moses to God the Father; by John to the Son or Word; by Moses and Job and David to the Holy Ghost. The manifested presence of one person of the Divine Trinity necessarily implies the real presence of the entire Trinity in its essential unity; and yet for the purposes of man's salvation this distinction of persons is definitely maintained: God the Father, the Creator and Governor, whom no man hath seen or can see; God the Son, the Redeemer and Savior, the Word made flesh, who dwelt among us, who became the man of sorrows, who died for our sins, rose for our justification, ascended on high, led captivity captive, and received gifts for man, who ever liveth to make intercession for us; God the Holy Ghost, the Sanctifier and Comforter, the Spirit of Truth which proceedeth from the Father and the Son, the present abiding Deity of the Church."

The emblems of the Trinity have been often designated. None of them are complete, but some of them are suggestive and helpful. "You believe there is such a thing as light, whether flowing from the sun or any other luminous body; but you can not comprehend its nature, or the manner wherein it flows. How does it move from Jupiter to the earth in eight minutes; two hundred thousand miles in a moment? How do the rays of three lamps blend together and make one light? Explain this so I can comprehend it, and I will explain the Trinity."

Take the sun itself, and you find three in one. "There is the

round orb, the light, and the heat. Each of these we call the sun. When you say the sun is almost nine hundred thousand miles in diameter, you mean the round orb. When you say the sun is bright, you mean its light. When you say it is warm, you refer to its heat. The orb is the sun, the light is the sun, the heat is the sun." Three elements but one sun.

sun, the light of the same light. In sub

moon, and the light of the air, are one and the

The light of the sun

stance they are one, yet in manifestation three. being of itself, and from none other, may represent the Father; the light of the moon, being from the sun, may represent the Divine Son; and the light of the air being from them both, may represent the Spirit. The analogy is by no means perfect; yet it shows what can be.

"Say not, then, senseless man, that in this doctrine there is impossibility. You are not qualified thus to pronounce judgment. To affirm that any thing is impossible we must have a clear and complete conception of the subject and as adequate a comprehension of the attribute, and a palpable evidence that this can not be predicated of that. Now the mystery of the Trinity is comprised in this: That there be one indivisible essence terminated in three persons instead of in one. So, tell me, mighty mind, you who so boldly prate of impossibilities and seem so little loath to charge a kindred intellect with belief in absurdities; tell me, I say, what is essence or substance? What is that which remains unchanged and invariable in every being, amidst all the modifications it may and can undergo, that which constitutes it what it is, and distinguishes it eternally from all other things? Define ultimately substance; acquaint me with its properties; show me that you understand it clearly so as to be able to pronounce what is predicable of it and what is not? After all, then, it is not so clear. But when you have solved this question, which the wisdom of the world has never safely mastered, a still more perplexing query awaits you before you can give yourself the least credence as a witness against the Trinity; viz., what a person is. A complete nature only constitutes a complete nature; but what is that peculiar degree of completion which superadds to this principle of action and passion, that we conceive requisite to constitute a subsistency or a personality? Answer me these two questions: What is a substance and what is a person? Thou canst not, little one; and so it seems that far from understanding perfectly both the subject and the attribute of the proposition you call absurd and impossible, you understand neither.