times pushed to a point which meant either sheer Tritheism, or
something which is incapable of being distinctly realized in thought at
all. But that is scarcely true of the Theology which was finally
accepted either by East or West. This is most distinctly seen in the
Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: and I would remind you that you
cannot be more orthodox than St. Thomas--the source not only of the
Theology professed by the Pope and taught in every Roman Seminary but
of the Theology embodied in our own Articles. St. Thomas' explanation
of the Trinity {183} is that God is at one and the same time Power or
Cause[3] (Father), Wisdom (Son), Will (Holy Ghost); or, since the Will
of God is always a loving Will, Love (Amor) is sometimes substituted
for Will (Voluntas) in explanation of the Holy Spirit.[4] How little
{184} St. Thomas thought of the 'Persons' as separate consciousnesses,
is best seen from his doctrine (taken from Augustine) that the love of
the Father for the Son is the Holy Spirit. The love of one Being for
himself or for another is not a Person in the natural, normal, modern
sense of the word: and it would be quite unorthodox to attribute
Personality to the Son in any other sense than that in which it is
attributed to the Holy Ghost. I do not myself attach any great
importance to these technical phrases. I do not {185} deny that the
supremely important truth that God has received His fullest revelation
in the historical Christ, and that He goes on revealing Himself in the
hearts of men, might have been otherwise, more simply, to modern minds
more intelligibly, expressed. There are detailed features of the
patristic or the scholastic version of the doctrine which involve
conceptions to which the most accomplished Professors of Theology would
find it difficult or impossible to give a modern meaning. I do not
know for instance that much would have been lost had Theology (with the
all but canonical writers Clement of Rome and Hermas, with Ignatius,
with Justin, with the philosophic Clement of Alexandria) continued to
speak indifferently of the Word and the Spirit. Yet taken by itself
this Thomist doctrine of the Trinity is one to which it is quite
possible to give a perfectly rational meaning, and a meaning probably
very much nearer to that which was really intended by its author than
the meaning which is usually put upon the Trinitarian formula by
popular religious thought. That God is Power, an