Secondly, the consideration that the relations manifested in the Incarnation in terms of our experience between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, express transcendent and eternal relations, led the Church to speak of the Holy Ghost as proceeding from the Father, as the unique fount of Godhead, through the Son: or in somewhat less nicely discriminated language 'from the Father and the Son[289].' In the fifth century there is a tendency to use in the East the former, in the West the latter mode of expression, but without any essential difference. Nor can it be said that the causes which were at work later to divide the Eastern and the Western Churches on the subject of the procession of the Holy Ghost, were so much really theological as ecclesiastical and political.
Thirdly, the accurate consideration of the language in which is expressed the relation of Christ to the Holy Spirit, helped the Church to guard the doctrine of the Trinity from the associations of Tritheism. For the coming of the Holy Spirit is clearly spoken of in Holy Scripture as coincident with and involving the coming of Christ. 'While we are illuminated by the Holy Spirit, it is Christ who illuminates us: when we drink in the Spirit, it is Christ we drink.' The Spirit is distinct from Christ—'another Paraclete'—yet in His coming, Christ comes: in His indwelling is the indwelling of the Father and the Son[290]. How can this be? Because the 'Persons' of the Holy Trinity are not to be thought of as distinct individuals, as three Gods. No doubt in our ordinary language, persons are understood to be separate, and mutually exclusive beings. Even in regard to ourselves deeper reflection shews us that our personalities are very far from being as separate as they appear to be on the surface: and with regard to God, it was only with an expressed apology for the imperfection of human language that the Church spoke of the Divine Three, as Three Persons at all. But 'we have no celestial language,' and the word is the only one which will express what Christ's language implies about Himself, the Father, and the Spirit. Only while we use it, it must be understood to express mutual inclusion, not mutual exclusion.
Wherever the Father works, He works essentially and inevitably through the Son and the Spirit; whenever the Son acts, He acts from the Father by the Holy Spirit; whenever the Holy Spirit comes, He brings with Him in His coming the Son and the Father. Thus when an image was necessary to interpret in part the Divine relationships, the Fathers sought it nowhere so much as in the three distinct yet inseparable elements of man's spiritual nature; the triune character of which Plato had already brought into notice, and which is in fact an earthly image, however inadequate, of the Triune God[291].
III. Hitherto nothing has been said about that part of the Holy Spirit's work which is called the inspiration of Scripture. It has been kept to the last because of the great importance of putting it in context with less familiar truths. The Scriptures have, it is a commonplace to say, suffered greatly from being isolated. This is as true whether we are considering them as a source of evidence or as the sphere of inspiration.
As a source of evidence they contain the record of historical facts with some of which at any rate the Creed of Christendom is inseparably interwoven. Thus it is impossible for Christians who know what they are about, to depreciate the importance of the historical evidence for those facts at least of which the Creed contains a summary. But the tendency with books of historical evidence has been, at least till recently, to exaggerate the extent to which the mere evidence of remote facts can compel belief. What we should make of the New Testament record, what estimate we should be able to form of the Person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of His life and work, if it was contained simply in some old manuscripts, or unearthed in some way by antiquaries out of the Syrian sand, it is impossible to say. In order to have grounds for believing the facts, in order to be susceptible of their evidence, we require an antecedent state of conception and expectation. A whole set of presuppositions about God, about the slavery of sin, about the reasonableness of redemption, must be present with us. So only can the facts presented to us in the Gospel come to us as credible things, or as parts of an intelligible universe, correlated elements in a rational whole. Now the work of the Spirit in the Church has been to keep alive and real these presuppositions, this frame of mind. He convinces of sin, of righteousness, of judgment. He does this not merely in isolated individuals however numerous, but in an organized continuous society. The spiritual life of the Church assures me that in desiring union with God, in feeling the burden of sin, in hungering for redemption, I am not doing an eccentric, abnormal thing. I am doing only what belongs to the best and richest movement of humanity. More than this, it assures me that assent to the claims and promises of Jesus Christ satisfies these spiritual needs in such a way as to produce the strongest, the most lasting, the most catholic sort of human character. The historical life of the Church thus in every age 'setting to its seal' that God's offer in Christ is true, reproduces the original 'witness,' commends it to conscience and reason, spans the gulf of the ages, and brings down remote and alien incidents into close and intelligible familiarity. Lotze speaks of revelation as 'either contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or continually repeated in men's hearts[292].' But in fact the antithesis is not an alternative. The strength of the Christian Creed is that it is both. It is a revelation continuously renewed in men's hearts by an organized and systematic operation of the Spirit in the Church, while at the same time it finds its guarantee and security in certain Divine acts of historic occurrence.
Once more, the belief in the Holy Scriptures as inspired requires to be held in context by the belief in the general action of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian society and the individual soul. It is, we may perhaps say, becoming more and more difficult to believe in the Bible without believing in the Church. The Apostles, indeed,—and the New Testament canon consists largely of the words of Apostles—have an authority which, reasonably considered, is unique, and stands by itself as that of the accredited witnesses of Christ; but when we find them appealing to members of the Church, they appeal not as the possessors of an absolute authority or of a Spirit in which others do not share. They are the ministers of a 'tradition' to which they themselves are subject, a tradition 'once for all delivered[293]:' they appeal to those who hear them as men 'who have an unction from the Holy One and know all things.' The tone in fact of the apostolic writers forces us to regard the spirit in which the Church lives, as co-operating with, and in a real sense limiting, the spirit in which they themselves speak and write. Thus in fact the apostolic writings were written as occasion required, within the Church, and for the Church. They presuppose membership in it and familiarity with its tradition. They are secondary, not primary, instructors; for edification, not for initiation. Nor, in fact, can a hard and fast line be drawn between what lies within and what lies without the canon. For example, Protestantism of an unecclesiastical sort has built upon the Epistle to the Hebrews as much as upon any book of the New Testament. This book is of unknown authorship. If 'Pauline' it is pretty certainty not S. Paul's. In large part it is the judgment of the Church which enables us to draw a line between it and S. Clement's 'scripture.' The line indeed our own judgment approves. The Epistle to the Hebrews and S. Clement's letter are closely linked together, but the latter depends on the former: it is secondary and the other is primary. Yet how narrow is the historical interval between them. How impossible to tear the one from the other. How seemingly irrational to attribute absolute authority to the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews which represents apostolic teaching at second hand[294], and then to interpret it in a sense hostile to the Epistle of Clement, which represents exactly the same stream of apostolic teaching only one short stage lower down. For Clement interprets the high priesthood of Christ in a sense which, instead of excluding, makes it the basis of, the ministerial hierarchy of the Church. Or to put the matter more broadly, how irrational it is, considering the intimate links by which the New Testament canon is bound up with the historic Church, not to accept the mind of the Church, especially when we have its consent down independent lines of tradition, as interpreting the mind of the apostolic writers. Most rational surely is the attitude of the early Church towards Scripture. The Scripture was regarded as the highest utterance of the Spirit, the unique and constant test of the Church's life and teaching. But the Spirit in the Church interpreted the meaning of Scripture. Thus the Church taught and the Scripture tested and verified or corrected her teaching: and this because all was of one piece, the life of the Church including the Scriptures, the inspired writers themselves appealing to the Spirit in the Churches[295].
And now, what is to be said about this, at present, much controverted subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture? What does the doctrine imply, and what attitude does belief in it involve towards the modern critical treatment of the inspired literature?
1. Let us bear carefully in mind the place which the doctrine holds in the building up of a Christian faith. It is in fact an important part of the superstructure, but it is not among the bases of the Christian belief. The Christian creed asserts the reality of certain historical facts. To these facts, in the Church's name, we claim assent: but we do so on grounds which, so far, are quite independent of the inspiration of the evangelic records. All that we claim to shew at this stage is that they are historical: not historical so as to be absolutely without error, but historical in the general sense, so as to be trustworthy. All that is necessary for faith in Christ is to be found in the moral dispositions which predispose to belief, and make intelligible and credible the thing to be believed: coupled with such acceptance of the generally historical character of the Gospels, and of the trustworthiness of the other apostolic documents, as justifies belief that our Lord was actually born of the Virgin Mary, manifested as the Son of God 'with power according to a spirit of holiness,' crucified, raised again the third day from the dead, exalted to the right hand of the Father, the founder of the Church and the source to it of the informing Spirit.
In all this no claim is made for any special belief as to the method of the Spirit's work in the Scripture or in the Church. Logically such belief follows, does not precede, belief in Christ. Indeed, in the past, Christian apologists have made a great mistake in allowing opponents to advance as objections against the historical character of the Gospel narrative, what are really objections not against its historical character—not such as could tell against the substantially historical character of secular documents—but against a certain view of the meaning of inspiration. Let it be laid down then that Christianity brings with it indeed a doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Scriptures, but is not based upon it[296].
2. But such a doctrine it does bring with it. Our Lord and His Apostles are clearly found to believe and to teach that the Scriptures of the Old Testament were given by inspiration of God; and the Christian Church from the earliest days postulated the same belief about the Scriptures of the New Testament. To disbelieve that 'the Scriptures were spoken by the Holy Ghost,' was equivalent to being 'an unbeliever[297].'