involve sequence, which, of course, would mean that the Son was not eternal, and that God became Father.

But our elimination of the idea of procreation, as totally inapplicable to a purely Spiritual Being, eliminates the notion of sequence also. When attention is concentrated on the moral ideas bound up with the words Father and Son, it at once is evident that the two terms are entirely reciprocal and eternally involve each other. Even on earth a man does not become—is not—a father until his son is in being; when a son is born, a father also, so to speak, is born into the world; then and not till then! How much more, then, are Father and Son non-sequent in God, in whose eternal nature there can be no question of becoming! In other words, so far from 'Father' preceding 'Son', the two are necessarily contemporaneous, and in the case of God, co-eternal. Once you grant the possibility of eternal relations of any sort in the Godhead, there is in fact no further difficulty whatsoever in calling them by the purely moral terms Father, Son, and Spirit—the mutual Spirit of Fatherhood and Sonhood.

We pause here to remark: Granting that the foregoing sets the matter in a slightly clearer light than it was before, still undoubtedly this doctrine of Fatherhood and Sonship is an enormous stumblingblock to Muslims. Their repugnance is so instinctive, so engrained in their very constitution, that it may be really questioned whether Christians do well to give such prominence to terms which are

so capable of being misunderstood, and which, were perhaps only used at the first to shadow forth the ineffable substance of eternal truth. If they only succeed in doing the exact reverse of this—namely, suggest error—why not drop terms of so dubious utility and seek fresh ones to shadow forth in a more fruitful way the truth (if so be) which lies beyond? If the whole point of terminology is to facilitate explanation, what is the use of terminology which itself needs so much explanation? Why not drop it?

The answer to this is: Because we have no right to play fast and loose with expressions that God has sanctioned with such tremendous emphasis; because their continued existence in Holy Writ and use by His Church are like the preservation and employment of a standard which we cannot afford to lose. Depend upon it, if this terminology were banished from religious usage to-day, a great deal more would go too. Sooner or later the reality, to which these expressions are a continual witness, would be utterly lost sight of. And, if the idea of the Fatherhood of God were lost to us, many of us would lose interest in all religion.

May it then be used in the purely figurative sense that God loves men and supplies their needs as a father does those of his children? In regard to this, it is curious to observe how the average Muslim dislikes even this figurative use—showing how really different his conception of Allah is from our conception of the Father in heaven. This comes