temptation to reject one as incompatible with the other. We must devote an equal attention to each, and believe without hesitation that both are true. The interest of the De Trinitate is greatly heightened by the skill and courage with which Hilary will handle some seeming paradox, and make the antithesis of opposed infinities conduce to reverence for Him of Whom they are aspects. And he never allows his reader to forget the immensity of his theme; and here again the skill is manifest with which he casts upon the reader the same awe with which he is himself impressed.

Of God as Father Hilary has little that is new to say. He is called Father in Scripture; therefore He is Father and necessarily has a Son. And conversely the fact that Scripture speaks of God the Son is proof of the fatherhood. In fact, the name 'Son' contains a revelation so necessary for the times that it has practically banished that of 'the Word,' which we should have expected Hilary, as a disciple of Origen, to employ by preference. But since faith in the Father alone is insufficient for salvation 5, and is, indeed, not only insufficient but actually false, because it denies His fatherhood in ignoring the consubstantial Son, Hilary's attention is concentrated upon the relation between these two Persons. This relation is one of eternal mutual indwelling, or 'perichoresis,' as it has been called, rendered possible by Their oneness of nature and by the infinity of Both. The thought is worked out from such passages as Isaiah xlv. 14, St. John xiv. 11, with great cogency and completeness, yet always with due stress laid on the incapacity of man to comprehend its immensity. Hilary advances from this scriptural position to the profound conception of the divine self-consciousness as consisting in Their mutual recognition. Each sees Himself in His perfect image, which must be coeternal with Himself. In Hilary this is only a hint, one of the many thoughts which the urgency of the conflict with Arianism forbade him to expand. But Dorner justly sees in it ‘a kind of speculative construction of the doctrine of the Trinity, out of the idea of the divine selfconsciousness".'

The Arian controversy was chiefly waged over the question of the eternal generation of the Son. By the time that Hilary began to write, every text of Scripture which could be made applicable to the point in dispute had been used to the utmost. There was little or nothing that remained to be done in the discovery or combination of passages. Of that controversy Athanasius was the hero; the arguments which he used and those which he refuted are admirably set forth in the introduction to the translation of his writings in this series. In writing the De Trinitate, so far as it dealt directly with the original controversy, it was neither possible nor desirable that Hilary should leave the beaten path. His object was to provide his readers with a compendious statement of ascertained truth for their own guidance, and with an armoury of weapons which had been tried and found effective in the conflicts of the day. It would, therefore, be superfluous to give in this place a detailed account of his reasonings concerning the generation of the Son, nor would such an account be of any assistance to those who have his writings in their hands. Hilary's treatment of the Scriptural evidence is very complete, as was, indeed, necessary in a work which was intended as a handbook for practical use. The Father alone is unbegotten; the Son is truly the Son, neither created nor adopted. The Son is the Creator of the worlds, the Wisdom of God, Who alone knows the Father, Who manifested God to man in the various Theophanies of the Old Testament. His birth is without parallel, inasmuch as other births imply a previous non-existence, while that of the Son is from eternity. For the generation on the part of the Father and the birth on the part of the Son are not connected as by

4 Deus Verbum often; Verbum alone rarely, if ever. Dorner, with his iteration of 'Logos,' gives an altogether false impression of Hilary's vocabulary.

5 Trin. i. 17 and often

6 Doctrine of the Person of Christ, I. ii. p. 302, English translation. The passages to which he refers are Comm. in Matt, xi. 12; Tr. in Ps. xci. 6; Trin. ii. 3. ix. 69. There is a good, though brief, statement of this view in Mason's Faith of the Gospel, p. 56.

a temporal sequence of cause and effect, but exactly coincide in a timeless eternity 7. Hilary repudiates the possibility of illustrating this divine birth by sensible analogies; it is beyond our understanding as it is beyond time. Nor can we wonder at this, seeing that our own birth is to us an insoluble mystery. The eternal birth of the Son is the expression of the eternal nature of God. It is the nature of the One that He should be Father, of the Other that He should be Son; this nature is co-eternal with Themselves, and therefore the One is co-eternal with the Other. Hence Athanasius had drawn the conclusion that the Son is by nature and not by will; not that the will of God is contrary to His nature, but that (if the words may be used) there was no scope for its exercise in the generation of the Son, which came to pass as a direct consequence of the Divine nature. Such language was a natural protest against an Arian abuse; but it was a departure from earlier precedent and was not accepted by that Cappadocian school, more true to Alexandrian tradition than Athanasius himself, with which Hilary was in closest sympathy. In their eyes the generation of the Son must be an act of God's will, if the freedom of Omnipotence, for which they were jealous, was to be respected; and Hilary shared their scruples. Not only in the De Synodis but in the De Trinitate 9 he assigns the birth of the Son to the omnipotence, the counsel and will of God acting in co-operation with His nature. This two-fold cause of birth is peculiar to the Son; all other beings owe their existence simply to the power and will, not to the nature of God'. Such being the relation between Father and Son, it is obvious that They cannot differ in nature. The word birth," by which the relation is described, indicates the transmission of nature from parent to offspring; and this word is, like 'Father' and 'Son,' an essential part of the revelation. The same divine nature or substance exists eternally and in equal perfection in Both, unbegotten in the Father, begotten in the Son. In fact, the expression, 'Only-begotten God," may be called Hilary's watchword, with such peculiar abundance 2' does it occur in his writings, as in those of his Cappadocian friends. But, though the Son is the Image of the Father, Hilary in his maturer thought, when free from the influence of his Asiatic allies, is careful to avoid using the inadequate and perilous term 'likeness' to describe the relation 3. Such being the birth, and such the unity of nature, the Son must be very God. This is proved by all the usual passages of the Old Testament, from the Creation: onwards. These are used, as by the other Fathers, to prove that the Son has not the name only, but the reality, of Godhead; the reality corresponding to the nature. All things, were made through Him out of nothing; therefore He is Almighty as the Father is Almighty.. If man is made in the image of Both, if one Spirit belongs to Both, there can be no difference of nature between the Two. But They are not Two as possessing one nature,. like human father and son, while living separate lives. God is One, with a Divinity undivided and indivisible; and Hilary is never weary of denying the Arian charge that his creed involved the worship of two Gods. No analogies from created things can explain this unity. Tree and branch, fire and heat, source and stream can only illustrate Their inseparable co-existence; such comparisons, if pressed, lead inevitably to error. The true unity of Father and Son is deeper than this; deeper also than any unity, however perfect, of will with will. For it is an eternal mutual indwelling, Each perfectly corresponding with and comprehending and containing the Other, and Himself in the Other;

7 Trin. xii. 21, 'the birth is in the generation and the generation in the birth.'

8 Discourses against the Arians, iii. 58 ff.; see Robertson's notes in the Athanasius volume of this series. p. 426.

9 E.g. Syn. 35. 37, 59, Trin. iii. 4, vi. 21, viii. 54.

Cf. Baltzer, Theologie d. hl. Hil. p. 19 f.

2 Hort, Two Dissertations, p. 21, and cf. p. xvi., above. VOL. IX.

f

3 It constantly appears, though with all due safeguards, in the De Synodis, where sympathy as well as policy impelled him to approximate to the language used by his friends. Similarly in Trin. iii. 23, he argues, from the admitted likeness, that there can be no difference. But, as we saw, this part of the De Trinitate is probably an early work, and does not represent Hilary's later thought. 4 Trin. v. 38.

and this not after the manner of earthly commingling of substances or exchange of pro perties. The only true comparison that can be made is with the union between Christ, in virtue of His humanity, and the believer 5; such is the union, in virtue of the Godhead, between Father and Son. And this unity extends inevitably to will and action. Since the Father is acting in all that the Son does, the Son is acting in all that the Father does; 'he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.' This doctrine reconciles all our Lord's statements in the Gospel of St. John concerning His own and His Father's work.

But, notwithstanding this unity, there is a true numerical duality of Person. Sabellius, we must remember, had held for two generations the pre-eminence among heretics. the Greek-speaking world outside Egypt the error which he and Paul of Samosata had taught, that God is one Person, was still the most dangerous of falsehoods; the supreme victory of truth had not been won in their eyes when Arius was condemned at Nicæa, but when Paul was deposed at Antioch. The Nicene leaders had certainly counted the cost when they adopted as the test of orthodoxy the same word which Paul had used for the inculcation of error. But the homoousion, however great its value as a permanent safeguard of truth, was the immediate cause of alienation and suspicion. And not only did it make the East misunderstand the West, but it furnished the Arians with the most effective of instruments for widening the breach between the two forces opposed to them. They had an excuse for calling their opponents in Egypt and the West by the name of Sabellians, the very name most likely to engender distrust in Asia 6. Hilary, who could enter with sympathy into the Eastern mind and had learnt from his own treatment at Seleucia how strong the feeling was, labours with untiring patience to dissipate the prejudice. There is no Arian plea against which he argues at greater length. The names 'Father' and 'Son,' being parts of the revelation, are convincing proofs of distinction of Person as well as of unity of nature. They prove that the nature is the same, but possessed after a different manner by Each of the Two; by the One as ingenerate, by the Other as begotten. The word Image,' also a part of the revelation, is another proof of the distinction; an object and its reflection in a mirror are obviously not one thing. Again, the distinct existence of the Son is proved by the fact that He has free volition of His own; and by a multitude of passages of Scripture, many of them absolutely convincing, as for instance, those from the Gospel of St. John. But these two Persons, though one in nature, are not equal in dignity. The Father is greater than the Son; greater not merely as compared to the incarnate Christ, but as compared to the Son, begotten from eternity. This is not simply by the prerogative inherent in all paternity; it is because the Father is self-existent, Himself the Source of all being?. With one of his happy phrases Hilary describes it as an inferiority generatione, non genere; the Son is one in kind or nature with the Father, though inferior, as the Begotten, to the Unbegotten. But this inferiority is not to be so construed as to lessen our belief in His divine attributes. For instance, when He addresses the Father in prayer, this is not because He is subordinate, but because He wishes to honour the Fatherhood 9; and, as Hilary argues at great length, the end, when God shall be all in all, is not to be regarded as a surrender of the Son's power, in the sense of loss. It is a mysterious final state of permanent, willing submission to the Father's will, into which He enters by the supreme expression of an obedience which has never failed. Again, our Lord's language in St. Mark xiii. 32, must not be taken as signifying ignorance on the part of the Son of His Father's purpose. For, according to St. Paul (Col. ii. 3), in Him are hid all the

5 Trin. viii. 13 ff.

6 Ci. Sulp Ser., Chron. ii. 42 for the Eastern suspicion that the West held a trionyma unio;-one Person under three names. Sulpicius ascribes it to Arian slander, but its causes lay deeper than this.

7 This was the doctrine of all the earlier theologians, soon

to be displaced in the stress of controversy by the opinion that the inferiority concerns the Son only as united with inan. See the citations in Westcott's Gospel of St. John, additional note to xiv. 28.

8 Tr. in Ps. cxxxviii. 17.

I Trin. xi. 21 ff., on 1 Cor. xv. 21 ff.

9 Ib. cxli. 6.

treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and therefore He must know the day and hour of judg ment. He is ignorant relatively to us, in the sense that He will not betray His Father's secret. Whether or no it be possible in calmer times to maintain that the knowledge and the ignorance are complementary truths which finite minds cannot reconcile, we cannot wonder that Hilary, ever on the watch against apparent concessions to Arianism, should in this instance have abandoned his usual method of balancing against each other the apparent contraries. His reasoning is, in any case, a striking proof of his intense conviction of the co-equal Godhead of the Son.

Such is Hilary's argument, very briefly stated. We may read almost all of it, where Hilary himself had certainly read it, in the Discourses against the Arians and elsewhere in the writings of Athanasius. How far, however, he was borrowing from the latter must. remain doubtful, as must the question as to the originality of Athanasius. For the controversy was universal, and both of these great writers had the practical purpose of collecting the best arguments out of the multitude which were suggested in ephemeral literature or verbal debate. Their victory, intellectual as well as moral, over their adversaries was decisive, and the more striking because it was the Arians who had made the attack on ground chosen by themselves. The authority of Scripture as the final court of appeal was their premiss as well as that of their opponents; and they had selected the texts on which the verdict of Scripture was to be based. Out of their own mouth they were condemned, and the work done in the fourth century can never need to be repeated. It was, of course, an unfinished work. As we have seen, Hilary concerns himself with two Persons, not with three; and since he states the contrasted truths of plurality and unity without such explanation of the mystery as the speculative genius of Augustine was to supply, he leaves, in spite of all his efforts, a certain impression of excessive dualism. But these defects do not lessen the permanent value of his work. Indeed, we may even

assert that they, together with some strange speculations and many instances of wild interpretation, which are, however, no part of the structure of his argument and do not affect its solidity, actually enhance its human and historical interest. The De Trinitate remains 'the most perfect literary achievement called forth by the Arian controversy 3.'

Hitherto we have been considering the relations within the Godhead of Father and Son, together with certain characters which belong to the Son in virtue of His eternal birth. We now come to the more original part of Hilary's teaching, which must be treated in greater detail. Till now he has spoken only of the Son; he now comes to speak of Christ, the name which the Son bears in relation to the world. We have seen that Hilary regards the Son as the Creator. This was proved for him, as for Athanasius, by the passage, Proverbs viii. 22, which they read according to the Septuagint, The Lord hath created Me for the beginning of His ways for His Works 5.' These words, round which the controversy raged, were interpreted by the orthodox as implying that at the time, and for the purpose, of creation the Father assigned new functions to the Son as His representative. The gift of these functions, the exercise of which called into existence orders of being inferior to God, marked in Hilary's eyes a change so definite and important in the activity of the Son that it deserved to be called a second birth, not ineffable like the eternal birth, but strictly analogous to the Incarnation. This last was a creation, which brought Him within the sphere of created humanity; the creation of Wisdom for the beginning of God's ways had brought Him, though less closely, into the same relation 6, and

a Trin. ix. 58 ff. 3 Bardenhewer, Patrologie, p. 377. 4 This is one of Hilary's many reminiscences of Origen. Athanasius brought the Father into direct connection with the world; cf. Harnack, Dogmengesch. ii. 206 (ed. 3).

5 Trin. xii. 35 ff. The passage is treated at much greater

length in Athanasius' Discourses against the Arians, ii. 18 fi., where see Robertson's notes.

6 Trin. xii. 45: at the Lacarnation Christ is created in the body,' and this is connected with His creation for the beginning of the ways of God.

the Incarnation is the completion of what was begun in preparation for the creation of the world. Creation is the mode by which finite being begins, and the beginning of each stage in the connection between the infinite Son and His creatures is called, from the one point of view, a creation, from the other, a birth. We cannot fail to see here an anticipation of the opinion that the true Protevangelium is the revelation of Creation, or in other words that the Incarnation was independent of the Fall 7,' for the Incarnation is a step in the one continuous divine progress from the Creation to the final consummation of all things, and has not sin for its cause, but is part of the original counsel of God 8. Together with this new office the Son receives a new name. Henceforth Hilary calls Him Christ; He is Christ in relation to the world, as He is Son in relation to the Father. From the beginning of time, then, the Son becomes Christ and stands in immediate relation to the world; it is in and through Christ that God is the Author of all things 9, and the title of Creator strictly belongs to the Son. This beginning of time, we must remember, is hidden in no remote antiquity. The world had no mysterious past; it came into existence suddenly at a date which could be fixed with much precision, some 5,600 years before Hilary's day ', and had undergone no change since then. Before that date there had been nothing outside the Godhead; from that time forth the Son has stood in constant relation to the created world.

Christ, for so we must henceforth call Him, has not only sustained in being the universe which He created, but has also imparted to men a steadily increasing knowledge. of God. For such knowledge, we remember, man was made, and his salvation depends upon its possession. All the Theophanies of the Old Testament are such revelations by Him of Himself; and it was He that spoke by the mouth of Moses and the Prophets. But however significant and valuable this Divine teaching and manifestation might be, it was not complete in itself, but was designed to prepare men's minds to expect its fulfilment in the Incarnation. Just as the Law was preliminary to the Gospel, so the appearances of Christ in human form to Abraham and to others were a foreshadowing of the true humanity which He was to assume. They were true revelations, as far as they went; but their purpose was not simply to impart so much knowledge as they explicitly conveyed, but also to lead men on to expect more, and to expect it in the very form in which it ultimately came 2. For His self-revelation in the Incarnation was but the treading again of a familiar path. He had often appeared, and had often spoken, by His own mouth or by that of men whom He had inspired; and in all this contact with the world His one object had been to bestow upon mankind the knowledge of God. With the same object He became incarnate; the full revelation was to impart the perfect knowledge. He became man, Hilary says, in order that we might believe Him;-'to be a Witness from among us to the things of God, and by means of weak flesh to proclaim God the Father to our weak and carnal selves 3.' Here again we see the continuity of the Divine purpose, the fulfilment of the counsel which dates back to the beginning of tine. If man had not sinned, he would still have needed the progressive revelation; sin has certainly modified Christ's course upon earth, but was not the determining cause of the Incarnation.

The doctrine of the Incarnation, or Embodiment as Hilary prefers to call it, is presented very fully in the De Trinitate, and with much originality. The Godhead of Christ is secured by His identity with the eternal Son and by the fact that at the very time of His humilia

7 Westcott, essay on 'The Gospel of Creation,' in his edition, probably accept without dispute, there were 5,228 years from of St. John's Epistles, where, however, Hilary is not mentioned.

8 Cf. Trin. xi. 49.

9 Trin. ii. 6, xii. 4, &c. He is also often named Jesus Christ

in this connection, e.g. Trin. iv. 6.

According to Eusebius' computation, which Hilary would

the Creation to our Lord's commencement of His mission in the 15th year of Tiberius, A.D. 29.

2 E.g. Trin. iv. 27; Tr. in Ps. lxviii. 19

3 Trin. iii. 9; cf. St. John xvii. 3