Of course, if the case were so, we should not be Trinitarian Christians. But it is not so. There are two considerations which refute this objection.

(1) A genus, thus understood, has no absolute, objective, and substantial existence at all. It is a generalization, an abstraction made by the mind from many individuals who or which are observed to have important common features. But God is not a generalization, an abstraction! He is the highest reality, a living entity. Therefore, whatever the mysterious Persons of the Holy Trinity may be, they are not individuals, ranged under an abstraction or generalization called God, and the charge of Tritheism quite falls to the ground.

Philosophical controversies have doubtless raged round the question of what these universals really are. Are they the merest abstractions, expressions to denote common features roughly observed in particulars, mere names to labels given for convenience in classification? Such is the doctrine of the Nominalists. Others agreed with that doctrine as far as the objective existence of the universals is concerned, but tried to preserve to it more reality than was conceded by the Nominalists, by saying that a universal was a real conception of the mind, more than a mere name and rough label. These thinkers were called Conceptualists. But Aristotle emphasized the importance of believing in the objective reality of the universal underlying these—the differences of the particulars—that is to say, that each universal though inseparable from the

individuals it embraces, does really indicate an intrinsic similarity in the things embraced. To finite thought that similarity may be abstract; but to absolute thought it is real. To absolute thought, the forms, which inhere in all members of a species, are absolutely the reallest things of all, being the subject of the contemplation of the thought of God. Hence the Aristotelians were called Realists. But still they totally denied that their doctrine involved attributing to these universal genera (man, animal, etc.) any substantial, or hypostatic, existence, that is, declaring that they are distinct entities. Only Plato found his way to this extreme position, and appeared sometimes to teach that universals, horse, man, etc., are distinct entities; that they inhabit an ideal, heavenly world, that they are as substantial and real as any individual things here on earth—nay, far more so, for they are the sole reality; and in comparison with them horses, men, etc., are mere shadows, owing whatever reality they possess to their partaking in the likeness of their heavenly, ideal counterparts, which he named ideas. Hence his followers were called Idealists.

These are philosophical matters which are rather remote from our thinking to-day, and we may feel the distinctions alluded to are more subtle than is necessary, and not worth much trouble. Nevertheless blood has been shed in the course of working out the controversy, but it would take too long to show why this was. For our present purpose, however, it is enough to say that God, the supreme,