thinkers. Yet Muslims also have had a sort of metaphysical propaedeutic in the conception of the eternity and uncreateness of the Qur'an, the 'Word of Allah'. And this is a hint which Christian may well take for their study and preaching.

We may now sum up the answer to the first objection. When you have eliminated the idea of procreation as inapplicable to a spiritual being, nothing remains in the ideas 'Father' and 'Son', save purely moral ideas that are perfectly worthy of Godhead; and, that the same consideration solves the difficulty of sequence in time, for 'Father' and 'Son' are now shown to be co-relatives and therefore co-eternals.

There is now the prior difficulty of plurality within the Godhead still remaining. This therefore we treat of next.

ii. That Unity and Plurality are Incompatible Ideas

It may be said: Does not the very idea of distinction contradict identity? And does not the very idea of plurality contradict unity?

We boldly reply: On the contrary! There is no such thing as identity without distinction in the world of realities; no unity without plurality. There is nothing a priori inconceivable in a Unity in Trinity. On the contrary, all the best philosophic thought of ancient and modern times distinctly facilitates and points to some such conception if we desire to believe in a real God.

In modern philosophic thought, particularly, it

has become more and more clear that relations, relatedness, are the very soul of being. And what are relations save distinctions, a plurality within a unity? The more highly related a thing is, the more reality it has; I mean, the higher is its type of unity. On the other hand, if we try to conceive of unity without difference we find ourselves reduced to mere abstractions of the mind—like the mathematical points without parts or magnitude, which have no real existence except as an abstraction of the mind, or in other words are really equal to zero. And so Being of this abstract sort (as Hegel, one of the greatest of the moderns, saw) is literally equivalent to Not-being.

Are we then going to apply to God the poorest, barest, and most abstract of the categories, unrelated Being, undifferentiated Unity, as if it were the sole possible and the highest one? Or also the richest, fullest and most significant? Surely the latter! Then, somehow or other there must be relatedness ascribed to God essentially—not with the finite created universe, or anything beyond His own being, for that would raise that created being to the rank of a second god. This essential relatedness must, then, be within, within the circle of the Unity of the living God. The Godhead must Itself be the centre and home of some extraordinarily varied distinctions and relations if It is to be living and real, and not fulfil merely some abstract demand of thought, as for example the demand for an unconditioned First Cause—which seems the