into the dogma was the true meaning which the Church Fathers had been
seeking all the while. In the light of two generations of sober dealing,
as historians, with such problems, we can but view his solution in a
manner very different from that which he indulged. He was even disposed
mildly to censure the professional theologians for leaving the defence
of the doctrine of the trinity to the philosophers. There were then, and
have since been, defenders of the doctrine who have thought that Hegel
tendered them great aid. As a matter of fact, despite his own utter
seriousness and reverent desire, his solution was a complete dissolution
of the doctrine and of much else besides. His view would have been
fatal, not merely to that particular form of orthodox thought, but, what
is much more serious, to the religious meaning for which it stood.
Sooner or later men have seen that the whole drift of Hegelianism was to
transform religion into intellectualism. One might say that it was
exactly this which the ancient metaphysicians, in the classic doctrine
of the trinity, had done. They had transformed religion into
metaphysics. The matter would not have been remedied by having a modern
metaphysician do the same thing in another way.

Hegel was weary of Fichte's endless discussion of the ego and
Schelling's of the absolute. It was not the abyss of the unknowable from
which things said to come, or that into which they go, which interested
Hegel. It was their process and progress which we can know. It was that
part of their movement which is observable within actual experience,
with which he was concerned. Now one of the laws of the movement of all
things, he said, is that by which every thought suggests, and every
force tends directly to produce, its opposite. Nothing stands alone.
Everything exists by the balance and friction of opposing tendencies. We
have the universal contrasts of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of
inward and outward, of static and dynamic, of yes and no. There are two