Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/40

 Trinity as the true determination. This idea of threefoldness was actually consciously reached, the idea that the One cannot continue to exist as One and has not the true form it ought to have, that the One does not represent the truth except as it appears in the form of movement, of difference in general, and as standing in relation to some other. Trimurti is the rudest form in which this determination appears.

The third is not, however, Spirit, is not true reconciliation, but origination and decay, change in fact, a category which is a unity of these differences, but represents a union of a very subordinate kind.

It is not in immediate Appearance or manifestation, but only when Spirit has taken up its abode in the Church, when it is immediate, believing Spirit, and raises itself to the stage of thought, that the Idea reaches perfection. We are interested in considering the workings or ferment of this Idea, and in learning to recognise what lies at the basis of the marvellous manifestations which occur. The definition of God as the Three-in-One is one which, so far as philosophy is concerned, has quite ceased to be used, and in theology it is no longer seriously adopted. In fact, in certain quarters an attempt has been made to belittle the Christian religion by maintaining that this definition which it employs is already older than Christianity, and that it has got it from somewhere or other. But, to begin with, any such historical statement does not for that matter of it decide anything whatsoever with regard to the inner truth. It must, moreover, be understood, too, that those peoples and individuals of former ages were not themselves conscious of the truth which was in the idea, and did not perceive that it contained the absolute consciousness of the truth; they regarded it as merely one amongst other characteristics, and as different from the others. But it is a point of the greatest importance to determine whether such a characteristic is the first and absolute characteristic which