would have been fatal, not merely to that particular form of orthodox thought, but, what is much more serious, to the religious meaning for which it stood.  Sooner or later men have seen that the whole drift of Hegelianism was to transform religion into intellectualism.  One might say that it was exactly this which the ancient metaphysicians, in the classic doctrine of the trinity, had done.  They had transformed religion into metaphysics.  The matter would not have been remedied by having a modern metaphysician do the same thing in another way.

Hegel was weary of Fichte’s endless discussion of the ego and Schelling’s of the absolute.  It was not the abyss of the unknowable from which things said to come, or that into which they go, which interested Hegel.  It was their process and progress which we can know.  It was that part of their movement which is observable within actual experience, with which he was concerned.  Now one of the laws of the movement of all things, he said, is that by which every thought suggests, and every force tends directly to produce, its opposite.  Nothing stands alone.  Everything exists by the balance and friction of opposing tendencies.  We have the universal contrasts of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of inward and outward, of static and dynamic, of yes and no.  There are two sides to every case, democratic government and absolutism, freedom of religion and authority, the individualistic and the social principles, a materialistic and a spiritual interpretation of the universe.  Only things which are dead have ceased to have this tide and alternation.  Christ is for living religion now a man, now God, revelation now natural, now supernatural.  Religion in the eternal conflict between reason and faith, morals the struggle of good and evil, God now mysterious and now manifest.

Fichte had said:  The essence of the universe is spirit.  Hegel said:  Yes, but the true notion of spirit is that of the resolution of contradiction, of the exhibition of opposites as held together in their unity.  This is the meaning of the trinity.  In the trinity we have God who wills to manifest himself, Jesus in whom he is manifest, and the spirit common to them both.  God’s existence is not static, it is dynamic.  It is motion, not rest.  God is revealer, recipient, and revelation all in one.  The trinity was for Hegel the central doctrine of Christianity.  Popular orthodoxy had drawn near to the assertion of three Gods.  The revolt, however, in asserting the unity of God, had made of God a meaningless absolute as foundation of the universe.  The orthodox, in respect to the person of Christ, had always indeed asserted in laboured way that Jesus was both God and man.  Starting from their own abstract conception of God, and attributing to Jesus the qualities of that abstraction, they had ended in making of the humanity of Jesus a perfectly unreal thing.  On the other hand, those who had set out from Jesus’s real humanity had been unable to see that he was anything more than a mere man, as their phrase was.  On their own assumption of the mutual exclusiveness of the conceptions of God and man, they could not do otherwise.