Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/197

 Fifth: The words, I came out from God, I came forth from the Father (John xvi. 27, 28), which cannot signify anything but the filial relation of any man to God, precisely what Jesus Christ has preached, are taken as a proof that “here with new force is expressed the idea of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father.”

In the second series of proofs from the New Testament there appear first the concluding words of St. Matthew: Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Matt. xxviii. 19), which Jesus Christ said, when he appeared to his disciples after the resurrection.

Without saying anything about the meaning and the especial character in general of the whole Gospel after the resurrection, of which mention will be made later, these words serve only as a proof,—as which even the church understands it,—that in accepting Christianity it was necessary to acknowledge the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, as the foundations of the teaching. But from this does not follow by any means that God consists of three persons, and so the demands that the words “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” be used can by no means have anything in common with the arguments about the existence of God in three persons.

The Theology itself admits that the customary formula of baptism can by no means be regarded as a proof of the Trinity of God, and so, on pp. 177 and 178, it explains why it is necessary to understand God in three persons by this. The explanations are as follows:

“The Saviour had before explained to the apostles more than once that under the appellation of the Father was to be understood God the Father who had sent him into the world (John vi. 38—40; vii. 16, 18, 28; xi. 42, and elsewhere) and who is another that beareth witness of him (John v. 32); under the name of the Son he understood himself, whom the apostles indeed professed as the Son of