sons," else
"we are landed in the unmeaning." When Christ spoke of Himself as "I,"
the selfness implied by the pronoun must have had some kind of
resemblance to our own; just as when He called God His Father He
intended to convey something of what fatherhood meant for His then
hearers. That He intended to convey what it might come to mean in other
conditions and ages seems very doubtful; and so if the word "person" has
acquired a fuller and different meaning in modern philosophy, we are not
at once justified in applying this fuller conception to the Divine
persons, unless we can show that it is a legitimate development of the
older sense.

He argues that if the Trinity be the ultimate truth, the Unitarian
suppositions and conclusions of the "natural theologian" are bound to
lead to antinomies and confusions; and he sees in those harmonious
interferences and variations of universal import (which are no less an
essential factor in the evolution of the world than the groundwork of
uniformity and law), evidence of a multi-personal Divine government, of
a division of labour between co-operant agencies. This, of course, goes
beyond the doctrine of "appropriation;" and amounts to a denial of the
singleness of the Divine operation _ad extra_. It seems, in short, to
imply a diversity of nature in each of the persons, over and above the
principle of personal distinctness. Indeed, while it offers a plausible
solution of some minor perplexities, it rather weakens the value of the
general argument. For the notion of a superpersonal unity is needed
chiefly as suggesting a mode in which many mutually exclusive
personalities or "spheres of experience" or lives, may be welded
together into a coherent whole. Even could I reproduce most exactly in
myself the thoughts and feelings of another, it were but a reproduction
or similarity. I can know and feel the like; but I cannot know his
knowing and feel his feeling; for this were to be that other and not
myself.

That God's knowledge of our thoughts and feelings should be of this
external, inferential kind is as intolerable to our mental needs of
unification as it is to our religious sense, our hope, our confidence,
our love. In Him we live and move and think and feel; and He in us. That
we can say this of no other personality is what constitutes the burden
of our separateness and loneliness. Our experience exists for no other;
but at least it is in some mysterious way shared by That which