Page:The Paraclete.djvu/17

Rh be complete, yet, as far as it goes, it may be true and adequate.

Now, the revelation of God which we have received is a revelation at once of Unity and Trinity. "Our God," says the same great writer, "is One, or rather very Oneness, and mere unity, having nothing but itself in itself, and not consisting (as all things do besides God) of many things. In which essential Unity of God, a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit."

Here, then, is our starting point: the unity of God, the central truth of Holy Scripture and of the Christian Church, and the principle of all true religious worship. That there is one Being above all others, in whom all things subsist, uncreated, self-existent, eternal, infinite, is not only the faith which is consciously held by all who worship the living and true God, but it is a belief which has always been shared, although dimly and indistinctly, even by polytheists and idolaters. It has been remarked that men who professed to believe in "gods many and lords many," have yet in their hours of danger invoked the one God and Lord of all; and one of the greatest minds of the Church of Christ has told us that the heathen had never fallen so