The answer is easy.

There cannot be found any

where even one poor hint that he ever did. The distinction which he saw so clearly was not that between a divine nature and will and a human nature and will in himself, but that between himself in his entirety and his Father. To that Father and never to his own divinity he continually rendered his worship and service. It is to him we owe that teaching concerning the Holy Spirit upon which the doctrine of the Trinity has been erected. When at the time of his baptism Jesus came up from the water praying, we are told that "the heavens opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending, like a dove, and alighting upon him." Yet we have no hint that he ever prayed to the Holy Spirit any more than that he prayed to himself. The Father was his sole object of adoration, and to him alone he fled from his human ignorance, weakness and awful distresses. Nor did he ever instruct his disciples to pray to any other but this same Father in heaven.

It may be well for me to do no more here than simply point out these facts. It cannot, however, prove otherwise than helpful for us to maintain the viewpoint from which we can distinguish clearly between the doctrines which have arisen directly out of the consciousness of Jesus, and the ones which have sprung from those of sinful men like ourselves. Praying in the name, or as the agents, representatives and brothers of Jesus, is a thing clearly enjoined by himself, but out of

his consciousness there never flowed to any man the command to pray either to himself or the Holy Spirit. He simply taught his disciples to call upon and adore "My Father and your Father, and my God and your God." (Jno. 20:17.)

From all this it can be easily seen that the doctrine of the Trinity can never be truly taught till full account has been taken of the fact that a human consciousness is bound up with the divine consciousness in the working out of God's plan of redemption, the vicegerent of the Father in the realization of the Kingdom of God being the man Christ Jesus the divine Logos, the Son of God, who became this man. He who gives final form to this doctrine must do all his thinking in full view of the life history of God, which is indissolubly bound up with the life history of the Son of God, who is now known to us as the man Jesus Christ. This history must be written in four periods, the first dealing with conditions as they existed prior to the Incarnation, the second with conditions as they obtained during the life of Jesus in the flesh, the third with conditions as they have existed since his ascension to glory, and will exist until he surrenders the completed kingdom to his God and Father, and the fourth with those higher conditions which must prevail from that moment onward.

And what of the human consciousness of Jesus, when, the kingdom completed at last, he "surren

ders it to his God and Father, and places himself under God who placed all things under him, that God may be all in all?" Will that human consciousness then disappear through absorption in the divine? That condition would be Nirvana. But it must either do that or persist forever. Our hearts surely incline us to the latter alternative, but is there any man who can speak here with final authority?

VI

JESUS AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

Waiving entirely all direct discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity, I may introduce this subject with a general word touching the offices assigned by the New Testament writers to "the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit," or, as Paul names them together, "the Lord Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit."

God and

(Matt. 28:19; 2nd Cor. 13:14.)

The Father is God universally transcendent and universally governing in righteousness and love, that is, in the exercise constantly of due consideration for the interests of all his creatures and all his worlds. The Son is God confining himself to the limits of a human personality, including for a time its physical frailties, its ignorance, and even its extreme temptableness, and working out under all these disabilities a career so beneficent and praiseworthy that it must at length fill the whole universe with adoring wonder and gratitude. And the Holy Spirit is God universally immanent, pervading and interpenetrating all things and all persons, and carrying forward everywhere in all its details an infinite divine plan for the bringing into existence and the per

fecting of a vast variety of things and beings, including our human race itself. The Son is brought before us not only as "the man Christ Jesus," but also as the archetypal man, "the First-born and Head or Lord of all Creation" (Col. 1:15; Rev. 3:14); and the Holy Spirit may in the name of correct scientific philosophy, as well as of sound New Testament exegesis, be identified as the one basal, organizing and perfecting Life of all that is, and author of that infinite variety in unity which exhibits itself on every hand-the Son the Norm and the Holy Spirit the Operator in one evolutionary process of illimitable scope (Jno. 1: 1-5).

If the First-born of all creation was the Archetypal Man and he stood as the norm for the whole process, then clearly the goal of all must find itself in a race resplendent with the various glories of the Archetypal Man himself. But the race found itself allied to the brute and so poorly seized of its high destiny, that it required some one who could both point out the goal and lead in the way to it. Who could possibly do this but this same Archetypal Man? And how could he do it excepting through a full entrance into the life of the race, as he would experience it, if he should be born and grow up and act and suffer, in the flesh, as a genuine member of it? Such seems to be the philosophy underlying the New Testament story of the incarnation. But here also the Norm calls for the Operator, and the Son