of God, they should
think of it as the expression of that side of His being which can only
be described as the ideal or archetypal manhood. The infinite being of
God is utterly incomprehensible to a finite mind, and in regard to it
the most devout saint is as much an agnostic as the most convinced
materialist. But we are justified in holding that whatever else He may
be God is essentially man, that is, He is the fount of humanity. There
must be one side, so to speak, of the infinitely complex being of God
in which humanity is eternally contained and which finds expression in
the finite universe. Humanity is not a vague term; we have already
seen something of what it is. We ought not to interpret it in terms of
the primeval savage, or even of average human nature to-day, but in
terms of what we have come to feel is its highest expression, and that
is Jesus. If we think therefore of the archetypal eternal divine Man,
the source and sustenance of the universe, and yet transcending the
universe, we cannot do better than think of Him in terms of Jesus;
Jesus is the fullest expression of that eternal divine Man on the field
of human history. Here, then, we have the first and second factors in
the doctrine of the Trinity morally and spiritually construed.

+The divine Man.+--The idea of a divine Man, the emanation of the
infinite, the soul of the universe, the source and goal of all
humanity, is ages older than Christian theology. It can be traced in
Babylonian religious literature, for instance, at a period older even
than the Old Testament. It played a not unimportant part in Greek
thought, and Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, works it out
in some detail in his religio-philosophic system, which aimed to
combine the wide outlook of Greek culture with the high seriousness of
Hebrew religion. It is a true, indeed an inevitable, conception, if we
hold anything like a consistent view of the immanence of God in His
universe. With what God have we to do except the God who is eternally
man? This aspect of the nature of God has been variously described in
the course of its history. It has been called the Word, the Son, and,
as we have seen, the second person in the Trinity. For various reasons
I prefer to call it--or rather Him--the eternal Christ. I do this
because, for one thing, the word "Christ" is a living word with a
clearly marked ethical content and a great religious value.
Originally, of course,