will not hold him guiltless, that taketh His Name in vain. Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbathday. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all that thou hast to do; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt do no manner of work, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, thy manservant, and thy maidservant, thy cattle, and the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his. "HEAR, O Israel; The Lord our God is One Lord and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength." This First, "the Great," Commandment is characterised by unity. Whatever else we find in it, this is one of its essential features, if not its leading feature. And, in fact, within this unity is bound up the entire multitude of our duties; out of this one supreme commandment have to be developed all the details of every one of our unnumbered obligations. "Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is One Lord." While "the Christian verity" declares to us the Mystery of the All-Holy Trinity, "the Catholic religion" asserts the inviolable Unity of the Godhead [Athanasian Creed]. And touching these two Mysteries, it seems that to grasp, hold fast, adore the Catholic Mystery leads up to man's obligation to grasp, hold fast, adore the Christian Mystery; rather than this to the other. What is Catholic underlies what is Christian: on the Catholic basis alone can the Christian structure be raised; even while to raise that superstructure on that foundation is the bounden duty of every soul within reach of the full Divine Revelation. In God's inscrutable Providence it has pleased Him that millions of the human race should live in unavoidable ignorance of Christian doctrine: to that fundamental doctrine of God's Unity, from which the other is developed, He has graciously vouchsafed a freer currency; so that while the Jewish Church knew it by revelation, multitudes of the Gentile world knew or at least surmised it by intellectual or spiritual enlightenment. Let us thank God that this main point of knowledge we hold in common with so vast a number of our dear human brothers and sisters, children along with ourselves of the all-loving Father; let us thank Him through Jesus Christ that we Christians are instructed how thus acceptably to thank Him; let us beseech Him in that allprevailing Name to add to each of us, whatsoever we be, every lacking gift and grace. Whilst Unity appears the sole existence essential to be conceived, our conceiving it as separate from ourself attests at once our likeness and our unlikeness to it. That which we conceive is on our own showing other than ourselves who conceive it: yet to conceive that which has no existence is (I reverently assume) the exclusive attribute of Almighty God, Who out of nothing created all things. To modify by a boundless licence of imagination the Voice of Revelation, or of tradition, or our own perceptions, concerning the universe, its Ruler, inhabitants, features, origin, destinies, falls within the range of human faculties. And thus may not light be thrown on that mass of bewildering error (whose name is legion) which at every turn meeting us as man's invention, is after all a more or less close travestie of truth? So like in detail, so unlike as a whole, to the truth it simulates, that alternately we incline to ask: If so much is known without immediate revelation, wherefore reveal? If truth pervades such errors, if such errors can be grafted upon truth, is truth itself distinguishable, or is it worth distinguishing? At first sight and apparently the easiest of all conceptions to realise, I yet suppose that there may in the long run be no conception more difficult for ourselves to clench and retain than this of absolute Unity; this Oneness at all times, in all connexions, for all purposes. Even if we consider Attributes, they seem to clash : while if we ascend to contemplate the Trinity in Unity, Three Persons, One God, immediately we must confer not with flesh and blood, but walk by faith in lieu of sight. Opposite errors invite us; and well will it be for us if trembling between them our magnet yet points aright: if while not tampering with the Unity, and while fully persuaded that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are Three distinct Persons in the One Only Godhead, we yet set Them not practically one against another, producing in our vain imaginations a "Trinity in dis-Unity." Nor is it possible that either error should, so to say, lie fallow: each cannot but bear its |