This visibly ludicrous position can be shown to be an absurdity thus: The Son is by generation, the Spirit by procession, which is a much greater difference between them than there is between the Father and the Son by the Father's being Spirit-emitting and the Son not. Therefore, if this difference between the Father and the Son be sufficient to make them of different substances, how much more shall the Son and the Spirit be of different substances!
Which is absurd.
His characteristic reverence in approaching such subjects is shown in the postscript of this letter, dated from Christ Church, March 26, 1868:
I have a great shrinking from writing or speaking upon this awful matter. But as you wanted it, here it is.
1868, To Russia with Lord Rosebery
In the Long Vacation of this year—his last as an Oxford undergraduate—Bute again spent some weeks in a yachting cruise, not this time in Eastern waters, but in the North Sea and the Baltic, his companion being Lord Rosebery, who was just his own age, and had matriculated at Christ Church in the same term as himself. At the end of August he returned home in view of his impending majority, which was celebrated in September all over his extensive estates with much rejoicing, the principal festivities being held at Cardiff. "It will be a great ordeal," he wrote a few days previously, "and one which I wish it were possible to avoid." It was in truth only the strong sense of duty by which he was ever actuated that enabled him to overcome his natural repugnance to appearing as the principal figure in such demonstrations; but when the time came he enacted his part with dignity and success, and won golden opinions everywhere. His personal appearance, hitherto unknown to thousands of those who acclaimed him in the streets, prepossessed them in his favour. "His well-knit and stalwart form," writes one of those present, "and the combined expression of amiability and decision of character stamped upon his countenance, struck all present." And the same observer commends in the young peer's speeches on this occasion, the "simplicity of style, conciseness of expression and depth of sentiment which showed him to be a man of thought and reflection, and one thoroughly alive to the great responsibility entailed on him by the heritage of wealth." His principal speech was delivered at a great dinner given him by more than three thousand of the tradesmen and workers of Cardiff, and it very favourably impressed all who heard it. In reply to the toast of his health, he said:
I tell you that when I come into this great and growing town, and see the vast number of men who are nourished by its growing prosperity, and when I feel the ties of duty which bind me to them; when I consider the hopes which they fix on me and the affectionate and precious regard with which for my father's sake they look on me; when it comes home to me that I must perforce do great good or great evil to them; and when, on the other hand, my self-knowledge sets before me my own few years, my inexperience, my weakness, my many faults, my limited ability, my loneliness, the weight of responsibility which lies on me seems sometimes absolutely crushing. But it will not do to be crushed by it, and I do not mean to be. I mean to try to do my best for this place to the end of my life, and to do this I would ask you to help me.
