Trinity,
which doubtless has been preached at Westminster. We shall examine its
peculiarities and try to reach its meaning; a task by no means easy, and
one which we could pardon anyone for putting aside with Lamb's remark,
"It's only his fun."

Dean Stanley has a new theory of the Trinity, partly deduced from other
mystics, and partly constructed on the plan of the negro who explained
that his wooden doll was made "all by myself, out of my own head." God
the Father, in this as in other theories, comes first: not that he is
older or greater than the other persons, for they are all three coequal
and coeternal; but because you must have a first for the sake of
enumeration, or else the most blessed Trinity would be like the
Irishman's little pig who ran about so that there was no counting him.
There is also another reason. God the Father corresponds to _Natural_
Religion, which of course has priority in the religious development
of mankind; coming before _Revealed_ Religion, to which God the Son
corresponds, and still more before _Spiritual_ Religion to which
corresponds the Holy Ghost.

"We look round the physical world; we see indications of order, design,
and good will towards the living creatures which animate it. _Often,
it is true, we cannot trace any such design_; but, whenever we can, the
impression upon us is the sense of a Single, Wise, Beneficent Mind,
the same now that it was ages before the appearance of man--the same in
other parts of the Universe as it is in our own. And in our own hearts
and consciences we feel an instinct corresponding to this--a voice, a
faculty, that seems to refer us to a higher power than ourselves, and
to point to some Invisible Sovereign Will, like to that which we see
impressed on the natural world. And further, the more we think of the
Supreme, the more we try to imagine what his feelings are towards
us, the more our idea of him becomes fixed as in the one simple,
all-embracing word that he is _Our Father_."

The words we have italicised say that design cannot _always_ be traced
in nature. We should like to know where it can _ever_ be. Evolution
shows that the design argument puts the cart before the horse. Natural
Selection, as Dr. Schmidt appositely remarks, accounts for adaptation as
a _result_ without requiring the supposition of design as a _cause_. And
if you cannot deduce God from the animate world, you are not likely
to deduce him from the inanimate. Dean Stanley himself