any being, or part of their being, which they are invested with by means of themselves. All they are, they are by the will and intent of God; their most peculiar being consists in that which God has meant or intended with them, in their significance as to the unity of the great scheme of Life. To fathom this scheme is not what Faith claims, but its idea of God is full of different rays beaming upon one another, as it were, which cast their illumining lights also upon the world created below. The idea of an immutable and just God harmonizes with the rigorous laws of the phenomenal world; the infinite fulness of His beatific Being conforms to the beauty of the latter-His sanctity with the order of events in the world of morality. To trace back to these creative attributes of God all particular incidents of Reality, was neither attempted, nor was it considered possible; it was sufficient to believe, despite the contradiction of numerous perceptions, in the verity of these attributes in general, and to derive anew in particular instances, from a selection of preferred phenomena, the vivid feeling of their efficiency prevailing throughout the universe.

In two respects philosophical Idealism sought to transcend this belief. It first took exception to the loose manner in which Religion spoke of a personal God, in which it permitted Him to evoke things from naught into reality, and to place Himself in a state of reciprocation with these realized nullities; the metaphysical import of all these proceedings was to be discovered and raised into the light of comprehension. None of these efforts, upon the purport of which the conclusion of our considerations invites us to enter more fully, have been successful; whilst criticising all ideas which Faith had anthropomorphosed of the relation of God to the world, they have left remaining in forms of speech generally artificially obscured, as a final outcoming, the assertion merely, that a single highest Idea permeates all phenomena of the actual world with its formative and authoritative principles, without explaining how. And for the very reason that Idealism could at most but seize upon the import of the world and not furnish the proof of its reality, everything that pointed to this enigma was eliminated from its consideration. There was no longer any mention of God, for this name sig

nifies naught without the predicates of actual power and efficiency; there could only be mention of the Idea whose content, whether in this or that manner alike incomprehensible, actually constituted the very being and import of the world. But for that very reason the hope was entertained of being able to express fully and systematically the whole tenor of this Idea in thoughts, and by this second effort greatly to surpass Faith, which knew but in general terms the intent of God-this remaining, in its particulars, inscrutable. This promise, likewise, could be realized only by abstracting from the nature of the subject what remained inconceivable to Thought. For, as a matter of course, the living forces which Faith had contemplated as resident in God, presented themselves to Thought in a manner just as inconceivable as the sensuous impressions furnished by perception. For them, too, we invent names; their content we merely experience, and do not seize by means of Thought. What is good or bad remains just as inconceivable as what is blue or sweet; only after an immediate feeling has taught us the presence of merit and demerit in the world, and the difficulty of distinguishing them, Thought may develop from out of that which we thus experience, certain criteria which afterwards assist us in subordinating anything particular in the one or the other of those two general intuitions. Is it possible to find in concepts the peculiar vivifying nerve of Justice? We may talk much of a balance of powers, of a conformity among active and passive states, of weal or woe falling back upon him who has caused them; but what process of Thought explains the interest we exhibit in these phenomena only when they signify that which we call a Retribution? Love and hatred, are they thinkable? can their quiddity be exhausted in concepts? In whatever process of transforming duality into unity, or in whatever mode of separating what might be one, we should be desirous of perceiving their significance: we shall forever announce but an enigma. For the enigma is the pointing out of criteria, from which the full, living content to which they belong does not spontaneously flow, but must be devined, as it does not lie in them. Now, this whole, living content which Faith apprehended in the personal being of God, Philosophy not

only expected to reproduce in Thought; it imagined that it conferred upon Him, who is more than all that may be called Idea, an honorable distinction by raising Him from the obscurity of that which is experienced and felt with all the eneies of heart and soul to the dignity of a concept as an object of pure Thought.

Nature and Humanity are alike subject to this treatment, which reduces the true import of all things and events to the formal manner of their appearance, and which looks upon things and events themselves merely as being designed for the realization of these forms. The creatures of nature exist, according to this view, in order to take rank in a system of classification, and to secure to the logical categories of the General, Particular, and Individual, an abundance of phenomena; their living actions and their reciprocation take place in order to celebrate the mysteries of the Differential, the Opposite, of Polarity, and Unity,― to perform a rhythm in whose oscillations Affirmation, Negation, and mutual Limitation, succeed one another. Man, engaged in the contemplation of the Spiritual world, would at one time, under the influence of Realism, view Thought and all spiritual life simply as the highest forms in which those mysterious powers, Affirmation, Negation, Contrariety and its extinction, would become manifest; and at another time, more given to Idealism, he would consider Thought to be the true being and object of all things, looking upon those forms wherein that which merely exists and transpires is presented to him as the faint prelude to the more potent theme of thought. But he went not beyond the attempt at recognizing Thought as the most essential attribute of mind-as the acme of Thought, the thinking of Thought, the pure self-reflection of the logical activity of the mind. Existence and the dignity of the moral world were, of course, not forgotten; but the Imperative in the moral nature of man had also to submit to this procedure by which everything was reduced to formal relations; it seemed as if it ought to be only to the extent it repeated, in the forms of its realization, those esteemed relations which stood for the true nature of Being.

Right here, in pointing out these errors, we drop this subject. Tacitly passing by much that is considered great and

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momentous by the disciples of this school, this brief sketch shows a spirit of partiality in merely pointing out what was apt to serve as an introduction to the object we had in view in these disquisitions. Philosophy is at present neither exclusively controlled by the false Idealism we have been last opposing, nor is it possible to avoid the mistake into which it has fallen; but we do not deem it proper as yet to set forth the conviction we desire to hold as our ultimatum. Only, as a preliminary enunciation we may say: The Essential of things does not consist in thoughts, and Thought is not capable of apprehending it; but the whole Mind may nevertheless experience, in other forms of its activity and its affections, the necessary import of all Being and activity, and then Thought serves as a means of placing what was experienced in that connection which its nature requires, and in experiencing it more intensely as the mind succeeds in controlling that connection. Very old errors they are which oppose this insight.

It was long before the vivid imagination of man recognized in Thought the rein which secures to its course steadiness, certainty, and truth; it may take just as long before it will be known that the rein cannot generate the motion it is to control. The shadow of Antiquity, its mischievous over-estimation of the Logos, hangs still over us, and does not permit us to perceive either in the Real or the Ideal that by dint of which both are more than all Reason.

THE TRINITY AND THE DOUBLE PROCESSION.

By FRANCIS A. HENRY.

If it be admitted that truths concerning what we call the Infinite, the Absolute, and the Divine, supply a key to the comprehension of this mysterious universe in which, we know not how, we find ourselves, supply an explanation of this life which each of us is somehow living without memory of its beginning or foresight of its end, then it follows that the science which treats of these truths has a right to its old name of scientia scientiarum, and may fairly be considered the

most important study which can occupy mankind. But nowadays very few will make this admission or accept this consequence. Men's intellects are ruled by a philosophy of relativity and nescience which denies the reality or cognizability of the Infinite and Absolute, and by a physical science which declares all supra-mundane concerns to be "essentially questions of lunar politics," and conceives that it only "shows a proper regard for the economy of time" when it "declines to trouble itself about them at all." These are dark days certainly for Speculative Theology, and embittered too by that memory of happier things which is the crown of sorrows. For time was when she herself sat upon the throne of intellectual despotism, and Physical Science hid its face, and worked in holes and corners, and Free Thought was brought to the scaffold and the stake. But if while Theology wanders unregarded and uncared for now, she is brought to see that her own tyranny over men provoked their rebellion and explains their contempt, adversity will not be without its uses; and when she acknowledges that perfect liberty is due to thought, and perfect charity to error, she may regain, for she will then deserve, her old ascendancy. Meantime whoever writes upon theological subjects must content himself with the fit audience though few, and to such an audience it may not be uninteresting to consider briefly the fundamental question of all Theology, namely, the essential constitution of the Divine existence.

This is expressed in the Christian religion by the doctrine of the Trinity, a doctrine which is taught from Scripture as a mystery, and which is not explained because not understood philosophically nor sought to be so understood. The doctrine as contained in the Catholic formularies is briefly this: The one GOD is three Persons; the three Persons are co-eternal and in every respect co-equal, so that each Person is in the full sense GOD, and yet there are not three GODS, but one GOD; GOD is one and singular, yet that Singular is not one Person but three Persons. Thus expressed the doctrine is the closest contradiction, for the gist of every statement of it is that there is a unity of One and Three taken in the same The unity and the plurality are the same thing, in the same respect, and from the same point of view. It is true

sense.