16 GOD AS TRIUNE

only in a far higher mode as regards both the distinction and the unity? The degree to which the Divine Being surpasses and transcends the lower modes may be—is indeed—unimaginable, but we claim this transcendent superiority for the distinctions that must constitute His Unity just as much as for the Unity itself. And we say that the real, immutable distinctions of the Persons or Consciousnesses meets this postulate, while the purely abstract differences of the Attributes do not.

(4) But it may be objected, lastly, that when we leave the material, all this category of organism on which we are relying ceases, and with its failure the reasoning fails also.

But why, it may be replied, should this category be objected to any more than those of Being or Life, as applied to the Divine? 'Being' characterizes the very lowest types of things, and 'Life' characterizes low as well as high types. Yet we ascribe both to the Divine nature. Why then not 'organism' (unity-in-difference), which as we have seen increases as the types of living being ascend? This question really leads to a third main objection against the Christian doctrine,

iii. That the Idea of a Trinity makes the Godhead Compound and Divisible

Does Organism as such imply divisibility, since it implies composition? Does not the doctrine of Trinity involve the divisibility of the divine substance?

CREATOR, INCARNATE, ATONER 17

We believe that the following considerations will totally remove this objection.

Properly speaking, a divisible thing is that which can be divided without destroying the thing itself as a stone. A block of stone can be split into two parts without damaging the stone as stone. Or as a machine; the machine can be taken to pieces without destroying the machine, for the pieces can be put together again as before. In differing ways, then, stones and other shapeless metals, and machines, are divisible. But when we come on to substances which possess organic unity (see the last chapter) a very different state of things obtains. You cannot divide them, you can merely divide their material.

What do we mean by this? The meaning is plain when you take a flower and shred it to bits. Can you replace that flower? Certainly not. You have not divided it; you have destroyed it. Those dead parts lying on the table are not the flower, nor do they even make up the flower. The flower, the it itself has been destroyed. You could not divide it, you could only destroy it, or keep it.

A hand when severed from the body is really not a hand at all. It is only a lump of flesh shaped like a hand; for it is of the essence of a hand to be one with the whole body, to communicate through its nerves with the brain, to share the one life of the whole. It is only by an abstraction, which contains as much falsehood as truth, that you say that the hand is a part of the body at all, if by