by A. A. Hodge
WE are to discuss this afternoon the revelation which God has made of himself in his inspired Word as three Persons. This we must do with bowed heads and reverent hearts, for the ground on which we stand is holy. The subject is transcendently sacred: it is the infinitely righteous and majestic God. It is immeasurably important as the foundation of all knowledge and faith. And for all our knowledge relating to it we are absolutely shut up to the matter which God himself has given us in his self-revelation in his Word. Consciousness, experience, observation or speculation cannot in this exalted sphere advance our knowledge one scintilla. We can know only just as much of this subject of the Trinity as is definitely set forth in the Bible, and no more. Our office here is that, simply, of humble disciples—to observe and interpret the self-exhibition of the Triune God in Scripture.
This doctrine is properly a "mystery," and it is often by people not fully learned disparaged as such. These mistakenly understand by "mystery" some fact or principle of which we can have only a very vague notion—a sphere of assumption or of half-perceived shadow, in relation to which certainty is impossible, and which has no logical or practical relation to the great solid continent of human knowledge and of real life. But, on the other hand, the true meaning of the word "mystery" is that which cannot be known through the processes of discovery or invention, or of speculation, but which can be made known only by revelation, and so far forth only as unveiled. Such were the secrets of the Greek societies, which were known only as they were discovered to the initiated, as the Eleusinian Mysteries, and those of the Masonic fraternity and of all the modern secret societies.
But when these otherwise undiscoverable secrets are once revealed, then just so far forth as they have been disclosed they become part of the real knowledge of those to whom the revelation has been made; as much so as any other knowledge whatsoever which they possess, howsoever it may have been attained.
It is plain that as God is the Creator of all things, he must be the ultimate ground and centre of all things. Therefore our knowledge of God, no matter how we have gained it, must be fundamental and central to all our other knowledge of every kind. The fundamental questions in all science and philosophy, as well as in all religion, must always be—(1) Is there a God? (2) What is God? (3) What relations does he sustain to the universe? The biblical answer to the second question includes two grand divisions: The nature of God is in the Scriptures revealed (1) through the attributes or energies, the perfections, of his essence as an infinite, rational and righteous Spirit; (2) as eternally existing as three Persons, one in substance, in the most intimate unity of thought and purpose. It is evident that if it is true that God does eternally exist as three Persons, that fact must underlie and give shape to all his counsels and to all his works in their execution. It must control his method of working in all spheres of creation and of providence and of grace; so that this doctrine, if true, is a necessary postulate of all philosophy and of all science, as well as of all religion.
We affirm that, instead of this threefold personality of God as taught in Scripture being a burden to our faith and a mere puzzle to our understanding, it is, of all views of God ever presented to human consciousness, the most symmetrical and harmonious, the most satisfactory to the reason, the one which renders the moral perfections of God the most comprehensible, the one which brings him most nearly within the sphere of human sympathy; which is the most profound and fruitful in important consequences; which is the most practical in its applications within the sphere of man's religious experience and duty.
I. In maintaining that the doctrine of the Trinity, as held in common by the entire historical Christian Church, is conformable to right reason we are mindful of the limited sphere of reason in relation to such questions, and of its liability to be abused. The frequent and disastrous abuse of reason has arisen (1) from its being made the source of all knowledge in relation to things concerning which we are entirely dependent upon a direct divine revelation; and (2) from its being made the measure and standard of that which transcends its measure, and which rests alone upon the authority of God. On the other hand, the important and necessary use of reason in such a study is (1) to apprehend the truth as the eye apprehends light; (2) to study and judge of the evidences or credentials of the revelation claiming to be divine; and (3) to judge of contradictions if any such are involved. There is an evident difference between that which is against reason or irrational, which can never be rightly believed, and that which is above reason, which all men do believe every day. The doctrine of the Trinity is above reason in respect to the facts (1) that it never could have been discovered, but rests entirely upon the authority of revelation; (2) that it cannot be fully understood or explained; (3) that, like other data of revelation, it leads out into the region which transcends our knowledge on every side. But, on the other hand, this doctrine involves no element which contradicts reason. On the contrary, when received as presented in Scripture it is eminently agreeable to reason. It is found to coalesce harmoniously with all other known truths, and, above all, it is found to harmonize with the most profound and fruitful religious experience. Truly our fellowship is not only "with the Father," but equally with "his Son Jesus Christ" and with the Holy Ghost. And every experienced Christian has an experimental knowledge of his relations to each divine Person.
II. The Scriptural Presentation of this Doctrine.—The entire Old and New Testaments are throughout perfectly in agreement as to the view which they present of the threefold personality of God. This disclosure is gradual and cumulative. The earlier instructions were so vague that, taken by themselves, they would never have suggested what we now signify by the term "trinity of persons in the unity of the Godhead." But when the testimony of the Gospels and of the Epistles is gathered, and the light furnished is thrown back over the previous records of revelation, the obscure hint in the Old Testament is found to coincide fully with the fuller delineation in the New. It is one subject disclosed through a gradual process, unfolding itself continuously in the ever-increasing light. Taking the sum of these completed revelations together, we find Scripture clearly establishing the following points:
1st. There is only one God. The testimony of Scripture here absolutely accords with the witness of our consciences, and with the obvious unity of the universe in all its provinces and successions. There is but one plan, and but a single administration—but one sovereign authority either over consciences or worlds. There is but one infinite, self-existent Spirit, who reveals himself as the I AM, from whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things. The three Persons are declared to be ONE, identical in substance, one in the depths of a common consciousness, one in thought and purpose, and equal in power and glory. This is a Trinitarian unity, which is moral and full of life, not a barren, non-ethical Unitarian oneness, which has no significance to our understandings nor attraction to our hearts.
2d. The Scriptures teach with equal clearness that "Father," "Son" and "Holy Ghost" are that one God. In the case of the Father no one doubts that he is that one God. In the case of the Son it is taught throughout the Scriptures in every possible form of suggestion and of assertion. Divine names and titles, attributes, prerogatives, works and worship are ascribed to him constantly. He is declared to be God, and from eternity to have been with God—to be one with the Father, and to be in the Father and the Father in him, so that he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father. In the case of the Holy Ghost the fact that he is divine is not questioned; the only point of doubt with any is as to his distinct personality. But Christ applies to him the pronouns "he" and "him," and ascribes to him distinct personal will, sensibility, relations and agency, and the inspired apostles enroll his name with that of the Father and the Son as a distinct and equal constituent with them of the one Godhead.
3d. But these titles, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, all applied equally to the one God, are not mere differing titles of the same subject, as when God is called alternately Creator, Preserver or Father, but they are the several titles of three different subjects or distinct persons. We can know God only as his self-revelation presents him in his inspired Word. This Word is a history in which God is set forth as acting in the creation of the world and of men, in the providential and moral government of the world and of men, and especially in the redemption of sinful men. In all these spheres of action God is represented as acting, speaking, hearing, judging. He stands before man face to face; he speaks to us, and we hear him; we speak to him, and he hears us. We regard him as an object of reverence and love, and he regards us with affections determined by our characters and personal relations to him.
In precisely the same manner the Father stands face to face with the Son as another person having distinct self-consciousness. They each look upon the other as a distinct object of love and thought. They each act upon the other as distinct agents. They use in reference to each other all cases of the personal pronouns. The Father loves the Son, speaks to him, speaks of him, gives him commandment, promises a reward for action, sends him and receives him when he returns. The Son loves the Father, speaks to him, receives his commission, returns to him and claims his reward. The Holy Ghost is sent by the Father and by the Son, acts for them as their agent, speaking of them, not of himself, and distributing their grace to men severally as he wills. The several functions of the divinity in relation to the universe in creation, providence and redemption are distributed severally between these three as between separate though perfectly united and sympathizing agents.
4th. As to their mutual relations, of course we can know only the surface. There must be infinite depths in the conscious being of God to which no created thought can penetrate. It is plain, in the revelation God has made of himself in the history of redemption and in the record of it, that he exists eternally and constitutionally as three self-conscious Persons. But for aught we can know, in the depths of this infinite Being there may be a common consciousness which includes the whole Godhead, and a common personality. This may all be true; but what belongs to us to deal with is the sure and obvious fact of revelation, that God exists from eternity as three self-conscious Persons, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and that these sustain the following relations:
(1.) They all are modes of existence of one indivisible spiritual substance. "They are the same in substance."
(2.) Hence they must be essentially equal in power and dignity and glory. There can be no temporal pre-existence, no dependence of one upon the will of the other, no superior authority to which the others are subject. Therefore they are to be regarded and treated by all their creatures with equal love, gratitude, reverence, confidence and obedience.
(3.) Nevertheless, the Bible discovers a fixed order of existence and of operation between them. As to existence, the Father is first, the Son second, and the Spirit third. This order is of course not chronological, since all are alike eternal, but one of origin and consequence.
The Father eternally "begets" the Son, and the Spirit eternally "proceeds from" the Father and the Son. Hence the second Person is eternally the "Son" of the Father, who begets him, and the third Person is eternally "the Spirit," or breath of the Father and of the Son, from whom he proceeds. The order of operation also from God outward on his creatures is the same. The Father is the source of all movement. To him the decrees are principally referred in Scripture. He sends the Son, and the Father and the Son send the Spirit. In creation and providence all movement is habitually represented in Scripture as from the Father, through the Son and by the Spirit. And in the return of man to God through the method of redemption it is always to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit (Eph. 2:18).
(4.) The terms "Father" and "Son" are reciprocal. We know these divine Persons in their personal distinctions and relations only so far as these are signified by these relative terms. The distinction of the personality of the first Person is that he is eternally the Father of the second Person; and the personal distinction of the second Person is that he is eternally the Son of the first. The personal titles of the second Person mutually throw light on one another. These are: ὁ λόγος, the Word; ὁ υἱός, the Son; ὁ μονογενής, the Only-begotten; εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου, πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως, the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, the radiancy of his glory; and χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ, the very image of his substance.
This divine Person, so designated as to his eternal and essential personal relations to the Father, has become incarnate by taking into his personality a germinant human nature in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Thus an eternal divine Person embraces in the unity of the one person a perfect human nature, so that he is both God and man in two distinct natures, and one person for ever. This seems impossible. Nevertheless, it is an historical fact. We know that the one individual person, Jesus of Nazareth, was, and ever continues to be, at once perfect God and perfect man.
There is no more contrariety between the essential properties of the two natures than between matter and spirit. In our own persons—which we are certain are one and indivisible—we embrace both of these opposite substances in one. No act of consciousness, no analysis by microscope or chemical reagents, nor by knife, can penetrate to the dividing-line between soul and spirit. Both substances spontaneously conspire in one energy and coalesce in one consciousness. In some way like this the divine Spirit has penetrated the human nature and made it the obedient organ of its central personality. And everything done by him in execution of his mediatorial offices is due to the co-operating energies of both natures, divine and human.
There is no fourth Person added to the Trinity. The eternal second Person remains the same. On the inner side, that he presents to the Father and to the Holy Ghost, he is the same immutable divine Person. On the outer side, that he presents to mankind, the eternal Word has come down into time and space, and become visible and audible and tangible to us in the human nature he has taken into his Person. In him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, so that the apostles "heard it," and "saw it with their eyes," and "handled it with their hands" (1 John 1:1; Col. 2:9).
(5.) The eternal third Person of the Trinity is always third in order. He proceeds from the Father and from the Son. He is eternally the "Spirit of the Father," and equally "the Spirit of the Son." He is the Author of beauty in the physical world and of holiness in the moral and spiritual world. Wherever he is, there the Father and the Son are. He is in all spheres of action, whether of creation or of providence or of redemption, the executive of God.
III. That these three are really distinct Persons is thus manifested and illustrated in Scripture in the most definite and indubitable manner possible. No words or terms of definition could make the facts so clear and certain as they are made by the simple narratives of the mutual discourses and relative attitudes and actions of these three Persons in the Scriptures. We know nothing except through these scriptural representations. If these are delusive, we know nothing. And if these three are not distinct, self-conscious Persons, then these evangelical narratives are utterly untrustworthy romances.
Moreover, we are the more ready to accept them as accurate inasmuch as they make the nature of God infinitely more intelligible to us. The condition of our knowing God at all is wholly that we were created in his image. Science, apart from our self-consciousness, which reveals to us person and cause and end, does not give us God. Except as illumined by the reflected light of our own self-consciousness the immeasurable machine of the material world gives no sign of God. We are spirits, persons and causes; therefore we know God to be a personal spirit and first cause. But we are no less essentially social beings, and to us all life and character, intellect, moral or practical, is conceivable only under social conditions. A unitarian, one-personed God might possibly have existed, and if revealed as such it would have been our duty to have acknowledged his lordship. But, nevertheless, he would have always remained utterly inconceivable to us—one lone, fellowless, conscious being; subject without object; conscious person without environment; righteous being without fellowship or moral relation or sphere of right action. Where would there be to him a sphere of love, truth, trust; of sympathetic feeling? Before creation, eternal darkness; after creation, only an endless game of solitaire, with worlds for pawns. But the Scriptures declare that love is not only a possibility to God or an occasional mood, but his very essence. If love be of the essence of God, he must always love; and, being eternal, he must have possessed an eternal object of love; and, being infinite, he must have eternally possessed an infinite object of love. This of course the eternal Persons find mutually in each other. Nothing but this gives us a God and Father whose nature we can comprehend and with whom we can sympathize. A God essentially active—and active in the forms of infinite intelligence and righteousness and love—can be found nowhere except in the mutual society of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
The least rational and moral of all theistic systems is that of a bare, bald unitarianism. The least intelligent and spiritual of all heretical perversions of catholic truth is the pale fallacy which substitutes the phenomenal and superficial distinctions of a modal trinity in the place of the three self-conscious, loving, counseling Persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, eternally one, yet eternally several and threefold. The most rational, illuminated, genial and spiritually fruitful conception of God known among men is that conveyed by his self-revelation in the actual history of redemption as three Persons eternally loving and thinking and acting in the unity of one eternal Godhead.
IV. This catholic doctrine of the trinity of Persons in the one Godhead, moreover, fulfills another criterion of catholic truth in that it embraces, combines and reconciles all the half-truths of all the heresies which have ever attained to currency or power among thinking men, Christian or heathen.
The false systems of religion which have prevailed among men may in a general way be grouped under the general heads of Deism, Pantheism, Polytheism. These have various grades of merit, yet they all alike embrace some elements of important truth, and yet are all, upon the whole, false and injurious.
1st. The deistic view of God regards him as an exalted Person, who has created the universe, and now in a general and distant way governs it, but who exists essentially outside of the world, and acts upon it only from without, and almost exclusively through second causes and the utterly inflexible sequences of natural law. The world is a machine which is wholly inexorable in all its movements, shutting in the struggling souls of men, separating them from their absent Father and holding them fast in the toils of fate.
2d. The pantheistic view regards God as the omnipresent substance of which all things consist, the irresistible current of force which flows through all movement and all life. He is not a Person who knows and loves us, for he has no existence except as he exists in the things continually coming and going which constitute the phenomenal world. His only thought is the sum of the thoughts of all finite things, his only life the sum of all creature life. He works in all things from within, and he reveals himself to us only as he emerges in our own consciences and reveals himself in us as essentially one with himself.
3d. Even the gross fictions of Polytheism have a tincture of truth to give them power over the human mind. If God is moral, there must be a personal distinction and a social basis in his essential nature. If the infinite and the absolute One is to exert a moral and educating influence on human life, he will appear to us self-limited under the conditions of time and space: "all the fullness of the Godhead" must appear to us "bodily."
It is easily seen how wonderfully the revealed doctrine of the Trinity comprehends in a harmonious and pure form all of the straggling and apparently conflicting rays of light preserved in these human systems of false religion. The Father sits apart as the distant and incommunicable God, the Origin and End of all things, the ultimate Source of all authority and power, but beyond all human thought and touch, separate on his eternal throne in the highest heavens. The truth of Pantheism is realized in the Holy Ghost, who, while of the same substance as the Father, is revealed to us as immanent in all things, the basis of all existence, the tide of all life, springing up like a well of water from within us, giving form to chaos and inspiration to reason, the ever-present executive of God, the Author of all beauty in the physical world, of all true philosophy, science and theology in the world of thought, and of all holiness in the world of spirit. The eternal Son has stooped to a real and permanent incarnation, and has done sublimely what the incarnations of the heathen mythology have only caricatured. We have what the polytheists merely dreamed of, and never really saw—the unfolding of the ethical constitution of the Godhead, revealing his existence in a plurality of persons, the actual and permanent dwelling of the absolute God in the form of human flesh.
V. This perfect self-revelation of God as a trinity of coequal Persons, moreover, completely fulfills, as none other can, all the demands of the highest philosophy and of the last suggestions of science. In the first lecture of this course we saw that when God was diligently sought, he was found in different directions and in different forms. These might be found to be mutually irreconcilable to human reason alone, while it was none the less the dictate of sound reason to persevere in the faith that in some higher region all these various aspects of the one God would be found to have a common ground. This common ground is evidently set before us by the revealed doctrine of the Trinity. Philosophy, natural religion and science together give us God as the unfathomable Abyss, as the transcendent and ineffable extramundane Person, and as the omnipresent immanent Spirit who is the ground of all being and the source of all life. The inspired Word and the incarnate Christ of God give us the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Father is the unknown and unknowable Source from which all things issue, and End to which all things tend. The Son is the personal Jehovah who reveals the whole Godhead in himself—in whom we see and worship the Father, and through whom all things consist. The Holy Ghost is the God within us, whose movement in space gives us the order of the suns and stars, and whose inspiration within us unveils the moral law and the glory of the spiritual world.
VI. This transcendent truth can never be understood and can never be proved; but when once received as truth on the ground of the testimony of the divine Word, it may be made clearer by felicitous illustration. I therefore ask you now to follow me while I present the PARABLE OF LIGHT.
Before this is presented I want to make two introductory remarks: First, it would be foolish as well as irreverent for mortals under our limited conditions to attempt to penetrate the awful secrets of the divine Being, and to throw the rushlight of our poor understandings over the impenetrable secrets of the interrelations of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as they exist together eternally in the bosom of the one Godhead. It is of course very different when we come to what God has himself condescended to reveal to us as to the relations each divine Person severally sustains to the universe external to the Godhead, and as to the work which they each perform in their co-operative agency in the economies of creation, providence and redemption. Our illustration is confined to this distinctly-revealed region of the external relations of the different Persons of the one Godhead to the universe.
In the second place, we claim that our right to illustrate the revealed facts of the spiritual world by analogies drawn from the physical creation is founded upon a right view of the relation of the material and physical worlds as constituted by God. The object of God in all his works has been the manifestation of his own glorious perfections through the medium of his works. The heavens and the earth and the whole course of providence are a veil through which the perfections, designs and methods of the several Persons of the Godhead are more or less clearly shadowed forth to us. Hence our Saviour himself spoke in parables and metaphors. Both Old and New Testaments combine in making all nature a mirror reflecting the face and activities of God, the inmost operations of his grace being represented by such natural agencies as water, oil, salt, leaven, wind, fire, a hammer, a sword, and fullers' soap.
1st. Let it, then, be marked that light in its essence is absolutely invisible and passes all apprehension. Philosophers assume by hypothesis a great interstellar ocean of highly rarefied elastic matter called the ethereal medium, which no man has seen or can see. They tell us that light is a peculiar mode of motion transmitted in all directions illimitably in this ethereal medium. But whence comes this infinite throbbing whose restless waves, traversing the celestial spaces, break ceaselessly on the revolving worlds? They flow down upon us from measureless space through measureless time, and no genius can imagine whence they come and whither they go. Light makes manifest all things from which it is radiated or upon which it is reflected, but is itself utterly invisible and unknown.
Thus it is with God the Father. Through infinite time he fills infinite space, and he is the Abyss from which all things flow and into which all things tend; yet no man hath or can see God at any time: the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.
2d. Light itself makes all things visible on which it falls and from which it is reflected, but it becomes itself visible only in a radiant point or disk, like that of the insufferable sun from which it floods the world. Suppose some angel or other inhabitant of an outlying province of creation, who had often heard of the wonders and splendors of light, though he had never seen them,—suppose him to wander far afield through the nether darkness in search of this hitherto unseen wonder. If such an one suddenly should rise beyond the crest of some eclipsing shadow, and without transition stand face to face with our central sun, would he not with rapt wonder naturally hail the sun with language similar to that used in Scripture to express the essential relation of the eternal Word to God?—"All hail! thou art the very light I seek; thou art the Word of light, its uttered form; thou art its express image in which this invisible source of all life and knowledge may be beheld; thou art the radiancy of its inexhaustible glory. All its fullness dwells in thee bodily." Thus God the Father is never known except as he is seen in the Person of the Son. He that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father, and never otherwise or otherwhere is the Father ever seen. Angels and archangels and all the other sons of God who, impelled by a native aspiration, seek to know their Father, hear his voice only as it is uttered in his eternal Word, and see his image only as it is rendered visible in his express Image and is projected forth as the radiance or effulgence of his glory.
3d. That which makes the energy and influence of the sun omnipresent is the inexhaustible volume of its rays flooding space in all directions. The rays of distant constellations come down to us through millenniums and centuries and years. The rays of our own sun flood the successive sides of the earth as it revolves daily on its axis, bearing down over the mountain-tops to the lowest valley and over the broadest plains heat, light and actinic energy, the source of all life and movement. If these rays should by any reason cease, or if they should be cut off by the interposition of an opaque mass, the sun would as to us virtually cease to exist. It would be utterly withdrawn from our consciousness, and it would entirely cease to be to us any more the source of light and life.
Thus the immanent Holy Ghost makes God the Father and God the Son, and so Christ the God-man, now glorified in heaven, omnipresent to all the Church in heaven and on earth. If the Holy Ghost were withdrawn, the Christ would be absent and of none effect to us. But if the Holy Ghost is present and active in us, we dwell in the full flood of the light and of the life of God and of his Christ.
4th. The rays of light radiated or reflected from any surface to another never reveal themselves; they only make manifest or reproduce by reflection the surface from which they come. Thus every one sees by means of the rays radiated or reflected the very image of the sun and moon in the water and all the features of the landscape in the mirror. So it is always in the work of the Holy Ghost. He never speaks of himself, but he always receives of Christ and shows and communicates to us the Christ and his redemptive grace. The rays of light never picture themselves, but the stars from which they come. So the Holy Ghost never excites in our consciousness thoughts and emotions relating to himself, but always those which relate to the Godhead and to the incarnate Christ. Therefore it is that, although the Holy Ghost inspired the Scriptures, and although he is the immediately present and the constantly active Person of the Godhead in our hearts and lives, yet there is comparatively so little conspicuity given in Scripture and in Christian thought to the personality of the Holy Ghost. He is ever speaking, yet not of himself, but of Christ.
5th. All the fullness of light is exhibited and conveyed in the sun bodily; so all the fullness of the Godhead is exhibited and conveyed in the Person of the God-man bodily. The form is human, but all of God is here. The Infinite has kept back nothing, but has given us THE ALL in giving us his Son.
6th. The sun conveys his fullness to the attendant spheres only ray by ray in successive periods of time. So we live only as we continue to live in God and receive from him our life "grace for grace." But the immeasurable ocean of the interstellar ether ever contains in its depths, latent yet potential, the infinite stores of historic light and heat. Looking up athwart the evening sky, we see the inflowing streams of radiance which have been invisibly pulsing in the bosom of that ocean for years or centuries or millenniums. All the secrets of the worlds from creation downward through the æons, all the heat or light or life-force they have ever received or shed forth, are beating in the depths of that impenetrable ether across the black bosom of which we look out at night. So is the eternal and infinite Holy Ghost an absolutely measureless and inexhaustible source of light and life. In him all the sources of our life lie latent as in the being of God; from him all the elements of the creature's life, and pre-eminently of the Christian's life, spring in spontaneous freeness and in transcendent perfection.
7th. The fullness of the sun, brought out into the circle of the dependent worlds by radiation, is brought into the knowledge of the creature only by the refractions and reflections to which this radiance is subjected in the worlds themselves. If we could place ourselves beyond the atmosphere in the interplanetary space, we would on every side except that toward the sun itself behold the whole hemisphere absolutely black, with the stars simply as points without size—themselves visible, but spreading no light around. If we should turn and face the sun itself, we should see only a dull blue disk of lambent flame. It is only after we have descended within the volume of the atmosphere, and come to the surface of the earth itself, that the hitherto latent myriad-hued beauties of the sun first come out to view. Refracted by every successive stratum of the earth's atmosphere and by the vapors of various densities which canopy our hills and streams, this hitherto latent radiance is broken and expanded into the infinitely varied hues of the rainbow and of the imperial retinue of clouds which attend the alternate rising and setting of the sun. And the whole earth, its hills and vales and plains, and all its innumerable tribes of plants and flowers and birds and beasts, reflect each one a separate color or shade or tone of light, and by their infinite variety collectively articulate the incalculable beauties latent in the sun's radiance, which could not otherwise be known.
Thus it is that the radiance of the effulgent Image of the invisible God—that is, the ever-present Spirit of the Son of the Father—exhibits to us the infinite fullness and variety of his grace, not immediately in himself, but by refractions and reflections through the intelligent spirits in which he dwells, in no single Church or person, but in all the endlessly varied spiritual beauties and graces of all the saints of all nations and ages, and in the angels of all ranks. Thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, circle the throne and reflect the first gush of the white light. But all down the lines of vision, in interminable perspective, poets and philosophers, artists and musicians, prophets and priests, and all the saints of very various shade and tone, analyze and reflect all the perfections of their Lord, which otherwise no eye hath seen nor can see.
8th. But the sun of our physical system is the inexhaustible source of all life as well as all light. When he moves southward toward the winter solstice he leaves all our northern hemisphere comfortless and dead. The leaves wither and fall, the birds depart for the genial south, the springing fountains are sealed up, the whole earth freezes into solid, obdurate stone, and death reigns supreme. When again, at the vernal equinox, the sun returns and pours his warm rays over the world, then all nature is quickened to life and wakes, the fountains are unsealed, the softened mould is impregnated, and every germ unfolds, and the singing birds come back, and the trees blossom, and all the earth rejoices and bears fruit.
So when the Holy Spirit is withdrawn from our midst, and consequently God and Christ are absent, the fountains of our spirits close, our minds are darkened, our strength withers, and the winter of our souls enfolds us, and the whole Church with us, in death. But when the Holy Ghost returns again and sets for us once more the returning sun in our sky, new life from on high thrills through our veins, our hearts sing, our eyes take the heavenly light, our hands are made strong, and the work of the Lord prospers everywhere.
9th. Once again, it belongs to the mystery of light that each ray tends to reproduce everywhere in the object upon which it falls the image of that from which it radiates. This general secret of photography was known ages before the time of Daguerre. Engravings reproduce themselves upon the blank paper which shades them from the light. The sun, striking the wind-ruffled river or lake with its radiance, reproduces on every one of the myriad wavelets a perfect image of himself. As we stand face to face the image of each is reproduced on the eye and face of the other. This energy of light in the long run cuts deeper than the surface: in the sunny side of hospital wards it moulds anew the shriveled limbs of the palsied, and like a sculptor fashions them after the forgotten ideal. So after long lives of mutual contemplation husbands and wives and familiar friends, however dissimilar at the first, come to look, as well as to think, alike under the plastic and assimilating power of light. Often has the mountain-traveler seen this miracle wrought in a lake between the forest-clad hills. The sky is cloudless; the air as clear as crystal, and windless; the water lying like glass, pure and placid as a mirror, under the bending skies. There you see the very heavens, the vast spaces, the great depths, the brilliant stars in their celestial perspective, all reproduced in the bosom of the lake. So when our souls lie in holy contemplation under the rays of Christ the heavenly Sun, our passions stilled, our hearts calm and purified from their lower springs, "we also with open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory unto glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor. 3:18).
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From the book Popular Lectures on Theological Themes by Archibald Alexander Hodge