regard to their context or to the general scope and drift of Scripture.

[Footnote 3: Prov. viii. 22, LXX mistranslation.]

[Footnote 4: John xiv. 28.]

[Sidenote: (2.) To thoughtful men.]

Nor was even this all. The Lord's divinity was a real difficulty to
thoughtful men. They were still endeavouring to reconcile the
philosophical idea of God with the fact of the incarnation. In point of
fact, the two things are incompatible, and one or the other would have
to be abandoned. The absolute simplicity of the divine nature is
consistent with a merely external Trinity, or with a merely economic
Trinity, with an Arian Trinity of one increate and two created beings,
or with a Sabellian Trinity of three temporal aspects of the one God
revealed in history; but not with a Christian Trinity of three eternal
aspects of the divine nature, facing inward on each other as well as
outward on the world. But this was not yet fully understood. The problem
was to explain the Lord's distinction from the Father without destroying
the unity of God. Sabellianism did it at the cost of his premundane and
real personality, and therefore by common consent was out of the
question. The Easterns were more inclined to theories of subordination,
to distinctions of the derivatively from the absolutely divine, and to
views of Christ as a sort of secondary God. Such theories do not really
meet the difficulty. A secondary God is necessarily a second God. Thus
heathenism still held the key of the position, and constantly threatened
to convict them of polytheism. They could not sit still, yet they could
not advance without remodelling their central doctrine of the divine
nature to agree with revelation. Nothing could be done till the Trinity