awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is opposed to this
idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer would
suggest that the great outline of the theological struggles of that
phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a
persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas
of God into one focus. It was an attempt to make the God of Nature
accessible and the God of the Heart invincible, to bring the former into
a conception of love and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and
flowers and the dignity of inexorable justice. There could be no finer
metaphor for such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship. But the
trouble is that it seems impossible to most people to continue to
regard the relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical
metaphor. Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment of
intellectual carelessness back to the idea of sexual filiation.

And it may further be suggested that the extreme aloofness and
inhumanity, which is logically necessary in the idea of a Creator God,
of an Infinite God, was the reason, so to speak, for the invention of a
Holy Spirit, as something proceeding from him, as something bridging the
great gulf, a Comforter, a mediator descending into the sphere of the
human understanding. That, and the suggestive influence of the Egyptian
Trinity that was then being worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had
saturated the thought of Alexandria with the conception of a trinity in
unity, are probably the realities that account for the Third Person of
the Christian Trinity. At any rate the present writer believes that the
discussions that shaped the Christian theology we know were dominated
by such natural and fundamental thoughts. These discussions were,
of course, complicated from the outset; and particularly were they
complicated by the identification of the man Jesus with the theological
Christ, by materialistic expectations of his second coming, by