and love was always active in Him. And there is no type of activity more active than love. In creating, therefore, God was not becoming actively active after being only potentially active. He was simply acting in accord with His own overactive nature. Creation itself was an outcome of love; it was love willing the existence and the happiness of other beings. It was an overflow of love more than an outcome of power; for love is concerned with the end, power with the means. Here is a very great difference between the Islamic and the Christian conceptions of God: Islam makes Will and Power the two sole qualities of God to which all His relations with man and the world can be reduced; Christianity says God is Love; it makes Will simply the articulate expression of Love, and power simply the handmaid of Love. Even the glory of God is simply the triumph of His nature of Love. To all of these ideas Islam is completely strange. It cannot advance beyond the conception of an irresponsible Ruler. Such a conception is for ever lost in the royal Fatherhood of God through Christ.

(b) The doctrine of the Triune God shows that creation did not mean for God the beginning of relations; for God Himself is eternally related in the highest possible way—in a way that infinitely transcends the most highly organized and intro-related being on earth. The creation of a world of relations is simply the reflex of the essentially relational nature of God.

(c) The conception of the Triune God removes the difficulty of ascribing reaction, limitation, passivity, and emotion to God, which is so fatal to pure transcendence, and which, nevertheless, is inevitable as soon as you have ascribed to Him creation. The difficulty has for us lost its terror, for as we have seen that relatedness is the very soul of God, we see also that limitation is simply another way of expressing relatedness. All relations are limitations; they all involve action and reaction, activity and passivity. God who is Father, Son, and Spirit, is the home of all these things. Why should we be afraid of them then? True love and true freedom are not absence of all limitations. But freedom and love are expressed in self-limitation, and blessedness is seen in the free play of action and reaction. All these things were found eternally in the bosom of the one Godhead, who is love, being Father, Son, and Spirit.

In the same way passivity is now shown not to be a thing that degraded God; in God is both activity and passivity. Blessedness needs both; love needs both.

So also emotion. The conscience, heart, and moral needs of men cry out for a God who stands not coldly aloof, but for one with feeling; yet the intellect of man has feared to yield on this point, and attempts to figure God as totally unaffected by anything that man can do or suffer. But the doctrine of the Triune God who is Love shows that such fears are groundless; for love is the highest