useless, and lament in the words, "Woe is me, for I am an unclean man," the angel shall be again commissioned with the symbol of mercy to cleanse our sins; and our purified souls shall be admitted to see the Lord high and lifted up, eye to eye, spirit to spirit, and to join in the seraph song of "Holy, Holy, Holy!"

SERMON V.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY.

(PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY, JUNE 20TH, 1858.)

EPHESIANS ii. 18.

For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.

THE doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which the Apostle implies in these words, is the centre of a group of Christian doctrines which may fairly be said not to have been explicitly known antecedently to the teaching of Our Saviour and his Apostles. More than even other doctrines, this had hardly been guessed at by heathen speculation, hardly understood by Jewish inspiration. It stands in majestic isolation from other truths, a vision of God incomprehensible, the mystery of mysteries. We can find analogies and explanations of other doctrines in the world of nature, physical or moral, but

L

of this we can discover none.1 The existence of sin, the need of superhuman aid, the salvation by mediation, the dignity of sacrifice—all these truths, though heightened and explained by revelation, yet are written in the scheme of nature, and intertwined with the tissue of the visible creation. But when we transcend these, and pass from the work to the agent, from the government of God to the mysterious nature of God Himself, we are lost in mystery; speculation is well-nigh hushed before the overpowering glory of the Eternal. We pass from the earth to the heaven, we enter the shrine of the Divine presence. We contemplate in spirit the mystery hidden of old, the mystery of the trinal existence of Him who is the source of all power, the first cause of all creation; Him who, in the depths of a past eternity, existed in the mysterious solitude of his Divine essence, when there was still universal silence of created life around His throne, and who will exist ever in the future of eternity, from everlasting to everlasting, God.

Speculation is, on such a subject, vain; yet a reverent attention to that which has been made known to us is our fitting duty. And nothing will

It is needless perhaps to remark that attempts have been made to discover trinal analogies in nature, such as the threefold dimension of geometric figure, &c. Such attempts were made in the Neo-Platonic School of Alexandria, and in England in the last century. Most persons very properly reject them as mystical and unreal.

It

more completely prepare us for considering the subject in a proper temper than the reflection that this great doctrine is not revealed to us in the Scripture to gratify our curiosity, but as a practical truth deeply and nearly related to our eternal interests, not in its speculative but in its practical aspects. For you should carefully note that the doctrine admits of these two distinct points of view. may be looked at speculatively, as unfolding the nature of God; and then it becomes the battleground of weary controversy, and men doubt it, or misunderstand it, or add to it in the hard logical formulas which are necessary to give precision to human ideas; or it may be looked at practically, as showing us three distinct relations which God is pleased to sustain toward man, and three corresponding classes of duties which man is under obligation to perform towards God. This latter, or the practical aspect, is the view under which the subject is presented to us in the New Testament; the former, or the theoretical aspect, is that under which it has generally been regarded in the history of the Church. The Bible contains the practical doctrine, the Athanasian Creed the speculative. It is easy to perceive that the practical view is immensely the more useful; and happy should we be if we could lay aside controversy, and simply believe. But we can never hope to do so; and, therefore, it becomes important

to form to ourselves definite views on the speculative controversy. For we cannot, in this age, receive the kingdom of God literally as little children. We cannot, if we would, ignore the controversies which have gathered round Christian doctrines in the course of eighteen centuries; we cannot think of those doctrines apart from the ideas which have crystallised together with them. We cannot think on all subjects of life and science with the healthy, critical, inductive spirit of the nineteenth century, for six days of the week, and lay aside our habits of thought in the church on Sundays, to receive truths with the simplicity of Jewish believers, or the reverence of mediæval mystics. We gaze on the rays of truth which come forth from the eternal source of glory in Christ and from the Pentecostal fire; but those rays come to us piercing through the distance of eighteen centuries, tinged in their passage through the mists of human thought; and we cannot hope to view them in their purity, without using rational means to deprive them of their tinge of colour, and to destroy the width of their refractions.

And, therefore, I should hope that we shall not misemploy our time on the present occasion, if we restrict our attention to the speculative side of this great doctrine. It is possible to make it clear, perhaps also to make it interesting. And we shall be likely to secure both results if we sketch briefly

1