Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/194

 degrees, in proportion to its unfolding and strengthening, and receptivity. ‘It was not without danger,’ reasons St. Gregory the Divine, ‘before professing the Divinity to preach clearly the Son, and before the Son had been called (I shall express myself rather boldly) to weigh us down with the sermon about the Holy Ghost, and to subject us to danger and make us lose our last strength, as is the case with people who are burdened with food which is not taken in measure, or who direct their feeble vision to the sun’s light; it was necessary for the treble light to shine on the illuminated by progressive additions, as David says, by ascensions (Psalm lxxxiv. 5), progressions from glory to glory, and advancements.’ (b) Another cause lay in the quality and weaknesses of the Jewish nation, to whom the Old Testament revelation was made: ‘God, in his infinite wisdom,’ says the blessed Theodoret, ‘was not pleased to communicate to the Jews any clear idea of the Holy Trinity, in order that they might not find in this a good cause for worshipping many gods,—since they had been so prone to follow the Egyptian abomination; this is the reason why, after the Babylonian captivity, when the Jews felt such a distinct leathing for polytheism, we meet in their sacred and even profane books many more passages than before in which the divine persons are mentioned.’ We must observe, at last, that, in picking out the places from the Old Testament, which contain references to the Most Holy Trinity, we had in view mainly to prove that the teaching about this mystery is by no means so new in the New Testament, as the later Jews say, and that the pious men of the Old Testament believed in the same tri-hypostatic God, in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in whom we believe—But the foundations of this most important of all the Christian dogmas is, beyond doubt, contained in the Books (Art. 27—b) of the New Testament.” (pp. 173 and 174.)