By Very Rev. THOMAS S. PRESTON, V.G.,
II. THE OFFICE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.
1. Within the sacred Trinity each Person may have His office, as each has His place and relations. The Father, who is of none, and who is called by spiritual writers " the root and fountain of the whole Divinity," begets the eternal Son, and is to Him, in the truest sense of our inadequate language, a father. All that this relation involves belongs to Him with the full rights of paternity. He is, in the figures of prophecy, the " Ancient of days." He sits upon the throne, sending forth the streams of light and grace, and holding in His hands the scales of impartial justice, according to the law which is the expression of His will. What He is to the Son eternally begotten by Him, "the brightness of his glory and the figure of His substance," let no one but that Son presume to tell.
If paternity mean anything of strength, and care, and tenderness in our speech, in the divine tongue it must mean much more.
The Son, from all eternity generated by the will of the Father, comes forth, with the fullness of the divine essence, to express the glory of Deity and the power of that Deity within itself. To paternity filiation responds, and the Son gives back the love that He receives in the might of a divine filial affection. God only can know Himself. God only can worthily love Himself. Here all that sonship signifies is real in the immensity of Deity. Its loyalty, its consecration, its expression of likeness are all here, and all heightened to infinity; because the Son begotten is equal to the Father, and the eternal generation presents a coequal and consubstantial Son. He is not only the likeness of His Father ; He is in all things equal to Him, having His whole substance and the whole indivisible divine essence. Oh! what joy is here in the unapproachable felicity of the Trinity: the Father contemplating the Son; the Son contemplating the Father; God loving Himself! Perhaps it may be part of the beatitude of saints to know something of this joy, and to be filled with some faint impulses of this gladness, when they see God as He is, and are borne into the sphere of the attractions of His being.
The spiration of the Holy Ghost is the last of the divine processions. Here, as some of the Fathers reverently say, the Father and the Son, as one principle, by an act of supreme love breathe forth the co-etemal Spirit. It is the act of their mutual love, and the Spirit of Father and Son proceeds from both, the pledge of their mutual affection and the expression of beatitude. This completes, if we may so speak, the circle of the divine productiveness, and the Spirit, being one in substance and equal in power and glory, is, in the words of St. Bernard, "the sacred kiss of the Father and the Son, as their imperturbable peace, their firm co-inherence, their undivided love, their indivisible unity." "The Holy Ghost proceeds from both and embraces both, as the indissoluble bond of charity, the sweetest kiss of peace, the most blessed embrace of mutual love." Thus in the Trinity "there are two origins, the first by the way of knowledge and the other by the way of love. By the first is a Son co-eternal with His Father, who comes forth from the bosom of the Father, but leaves it not; who receives all from Him, but is not dependent on Him. By the second is the Holy Ghost produced like the Son, but not, like Him, begotten. The Son proceeds from the Father as the ray from the sun; the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son as heat from the ray and the sun; the Son as the word, the Holy Ghost as the breath; the Son as the river from the fountain, the Holy Ghost as the lightning from the cloud. These expressions are all good, but all defective. The ray wants equality, the heat substance ; the word wants reality, the breath solidity, the river stability, the lightning duration and life. But here the ray is equal to the sun; the heat consubstantial with its principle; the word says all, and is all that it says ; the breath goes forth unceasingly, and never breathes its last; the river flows continually, and abides ever in its source; the fire of heaven burns always, and never burns away." If the divine Spirit may be called the expression of the eternal mutual love of the Father and the Son, what must be the transport of His being when, in response to the spiration of that love, He gives back the affection by which He proceeds!
