6 GOD AS TRIUNE

out curiously in a tradition preserved in the Musnad of Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (vi. 21) where the version of the Lord's Prayer which the prophet sanctioned is given.1 How significant that the great opening invocation, 'Our Father', which has cheered thousands and changed their whole minds towards God, is sternly suppressed! This supports our contention that if you take away the doctrine of the eternal Fatherhood of God, and play fast and loose with the terms 'Father' and 'Son', you will lose the sense that God is in any case fatherly. Similarly, if you reject the eternal Sonship of Christ, you will sooner or later lose the power and the right of being, in any sense, sonlike. History and sound sense, no less than dogma, teach us this.

The pity is that the Prophet of Islam should have been led to use such unmeasured language as is found in the Qur'an about matters he clearly never understood, for nothing can be more clear from the Qur'an than that he confounded the Christian doctrine of Fatherhood and the timeless relations of

1 In a tradition quoted by Abdullah and traced to Ibn Ubaid El-Ansari the latter says: 'The Prophet (peace be upon him) taught me a charm and allowed me to use it for whomsoever I pleased. He said, Say 'Our Lord which art in heaven! Holy (is) Thy name. As in heaven, so (is) Thy word, Allah! in heaven and on earth. Grant us mercy on earth. Allah! Lord of the good, forgive us our sins and trespasses. And send down, of Thy mercy, mercy, and of Thy healing, healing, upon (so and so) in his complaint that he may be healed." And he (the Prophet) said, "Repeat this thrice, and likewise the two Charms from the Koran".'
CREATOR, INCARNATE, ATONER 7

Divine Father, Son, and Spirit, with the gross ideas of the heathen Mekkans, about Allah having female deities as his daughters, and so forth! Indeed it is more than probable that the words, 'He begetteth not, neither is He begotten,' are a rebuke addressed against these Mekkans and have no Christian reference in them at all. Muhammad, in his attitude to Christianity, may be said either to have totally misunderstood the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, or to have been striking at ignorant forms of misbelief 1 that we also repudiate.

The state of the Jews of the times of the Apostles and that of the Muslims of that day—and every other day—are not completely parallel in the matter before us; for the Jews, monotheists as they were, and deists as they were becoming, had had their ears prepared for the sound of the words 'God the Father', 'The Son of God', as the study of the Taurat shows; for there these expressions are used to denote any peculiarly intense and loving relationship between God and a nation, it might be, a class, or an anointed king, or (finally) The Anointed King, the expected Christ. It was, therefore, easy for the monotheist disciples of Jesus Christ, men like the Twelve, or the learned Saul, to apply these terms in a spiritual transcendent way to the eternal relation between God and His Incarnate Word, a relation with which, from a metaphysical view-point, Philo had already familiarized

1 The Qur'an makes it clear that the Trinity, in his mind, was the Father, the Son and the Virgin Mary!.