"Once you have made your ideas your own," she mused, "you will have the
power of convincing people."

"And yet--"

"And yet"--she seized his unfinished sentence, "you are not at all
positive of convincing me. I'll give you the credit of forbearing to
make proselytes." She smiled at him.

Thus she read him again.

"If you call making proselytes a desire to communicate a view of life
which gives satisfaction--" he began, in his serious way.

"Oh, I want to be convinced!" she exclaimed, penitently, "I'd give
anything to feel as you feel. There's something lacking in me, there
must be, and I have only seen the disillusionizing side. You infer that
the issue of the Creeds will crumble,--preach the new, and the old will
fall away of itself. But what is the new? How, practically, do you deal
with the Creeds? We have got off that subject."

"You wish to know?" he asked.

"Yes--I wish to know."

"The test of any doctrine is whether it can be translated into life,
whether it will make any difference to the individual who accepts it.
The doctrines expressed in the Creeds must stand or fall by the test.
Consider, for instance, the fundamental doctrine in the Creeds, that of
the Trinity, which has been much scoffed at. A belief in God, you will
admit, has an influence on conduct, and the Trinity defines the three
chief aspects of the God in whom Christians believe. Of what use to
quarrel with the word Person if God be conscious? And the character of
God has an influence on conduct. The ancients deemed him wrathful,
jealous, arbitrary, and hence flung themselves before him and propitiated
him. If the conscious God of the universe be good, he is spoken of as a
Father. He is as once, in this belief, Father and Creator. And inasmuch
as it is known that the divine qualities enter into man, and that one
Man, Jesus, whose composite portrait--it is agreed--could not have been
factitiously invented, was filled with them, we speak of God in man as
the Son. And the Spirit of God that enters into the soul of man,
transforming, inspiring, and driving him, is the Third Person, so-called.
There is no difficulty so far, granted the initial belief in a beneficent
God.

"If we agree that life has a meaning, and, in order to conform to the
purpose of the Spirit of the Universe, must be lived in one way, we
certainly cannot object to calling that right way of living, that decree
of the Spirit, the Word.

"The Incarnate Word, therefore, is