visitor, but everywhere and always active; its conception of evolution brings home to us the patient and long-suffering labor of a Father who worketh even until now; its stress upon law reminds us that He is never capricious but reliable; its practical mastery of forces, like those which enable men to use the air or to navigate under the water, recalls to us the old command to subdue the earth as sons of God, and adds the new responsibility to use our control, as the Son of God always did, in love’s cause.

Philosophy, too, which Professor James has described as “our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means,” helps us to make clear our idea of God.  A philosopher is just a thoughtful person who takes the discoveries that his religious, moral, aesthetic, scientific experiences have brought home, and tries to set in order all he knows of truth, beauty, right, God.

In attempting to philosophize upon their discoveries of God, Christian thinkers have arrived at the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity.  It was, first, an attempt to hold fast to the great foundation truth of the Old Testament that God is One.  The world in which Christianity found itself had a host of deities—­a god for the sea and another for the wind, a god of the hearth and a god of the empire, and so on.  Today it is only too easy to obey one motive in the home and another in one’s business, to follow one principle in private life and another in national life, and to be polytheists again.  Christian faith insists that “there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things and we unto Him.”  We adore One who is Christlike love, and we will serve no other.  We trust Christlike love as the divine basis for a happy family life, and also for successful commerce, for statesmanlike international dealings, for the effective treatment of every political and social question.  The inspirations that come to us from a glorious piece of music or from an heroic act of self-sacrifice, from some new discovery or from a novel sensitiveness of conscience, are all inspirations from the one God.  At every moment and in every situation we must keep the same fundamental attitude towards life—­trustful, hopeful, serving—­because in every experience, bitter or sweet, we are always in touch with the one Lord of all, our Christlike Father.

In this Unity Christians have spoken of a Trinity.  Paul summing up the blessing of God, speaks of “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit.”  He says, “through Jesus we have our access in one Spirit unto the Father.”  He and his fellow believers had been redeemed from selfishness to love, from slavery to freedom; and they accounted for their new life by saying that, through the grace of Jesus, they had come to experience the fatherly love of God, and to find His Spirit binding them in a brotherhood of service for one another and the world.  The New Testament goes no further:  it states these