e. We find something like this in human personalities under the
influence of love. Each single personality is not {286} self-contained
and exclusive. Love, to a real degree, fuses persons; and thus the
husband and wife and child (to take the highest example) may be said to
live and act in one another and through one another's influence. But
this is only to a limited extent. We are also mutually exclusive. Our
responsibility and actions remain individual and impermeable. What I
am doing, I am doing, and not another. But with God the mutual
interpenetration of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is represented in the
inspired language as far more complete. The Godhead is a fellowship
and relationship of perfect love 'in three persons.' But God is not
three separate individuals. What each 'person' does the others do.
The action of one involves all. God is inseparably one in His being
and in His action. If the Father creates, He creates through the Son
and by the Spirit. If the Son redeems, the redemption proceeds from
the Father and is effected in the Spirit. If the Spirit sanctifies, it
is from and in the Father and the Son. Thus when the Spirit came forth
at Pentecost out of the uplifted manhood of the Son to impart to us all
His richness, He came not merely to supply His absence, but to
accomplish His presence. He makes Christ present within us, and also
the {287} Father: so that God, three in one, dwells in the hearts of
His people.

5. 'The requirement of the law is to be fulfilled in us.' Do we ask
how we are to keep the whole of that terrible law? It is by obeying
the commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves, in which the whole
law is 'briefly comprehended[11].'

6. If in the last verse of this passage we read 'through His Spirit,'
and not (as the margin) 'because of His Spirit,' then the Holy Spirit
is expressly spoken of as the agent of our resurrection and, by
implication, of the resurrection of Christ. And this is the natural
function for the 'Giver of Life': indeed 'Spirit' means nothing else
than 'breath'--the 'breath of life from God[12].'

[1] The passage in brackets expands the sense in which St. Paul
conceives the Father to have passed sentence of condemnation on sin, in
the person and through the sacrifice of Christ, in accordance with such
passages as vers. 21-24; iv. 25; Phil. ii. 8-10; Eph. i. 15 ff.

[2] Phil. ii. 7.

[3] 2 Cor. v. 21.

[4] See Heb. x. 6, cf. 18, 26;