The day is coming in which our dogmatic Churches, formal Churches, sentimentally pious Churches, and professedly liberal Churches, shall be all taken up into something higher and better. The very discontent which prevails everywhere announces it. It is the working of the leaven—mind agitating the mass. In Protestant countries there is a tendency to Rome; but in Roman Catholic countries an equal or greater tendency to Protestantism. Orthodoxy tends to Liberal Christianity. Liberal Christianity tends to Orthodoxy. Each longs for its opposite, its supplement, its counterpart. It is a movement towards a larger liberty and a deeper life. CHAPTER XVI. THE TRINITY. § 1. Definition of the Church Doctrine. “The fundamental formula for the doctrine of the Trinity, as defined by the Church,” says Twesten,(72) “is, that in one divine essence or nature there are three persons, distinguished from each other by certain characteristics, and indivisibly participating in that one nature.” The “Augsburg Confession,” says, in like manner, “three persons in one essence.”(73) So the “Gallic Confession,” and other Church Confessions, which say almost the same thing in the same words.(74) The explanations given to these phrases vary indefinitely. Nitzsch (System d. Christ. Lehre, § 80) says, “We stand related in such a way, with all our Christian experience (Gewerdensein und Werden), to the one, eternal, divine essence, who is love, that in the Son we adore love as mediating and speaking, in the spirit as fellowship and life, in the Father as source and origin.” Schleiermacher considers this doctrine as not any immediate expression of the Christian consciousness, and declares that “our communion with Christ might be just the same if we knew nothing at all of this transcendent mystery.” Hase says,(75) “This Church dogma always has floated between Unitarianism, Tritheism, and Sabellianism, asserting the premises of all three, and denying their conclusions only by maintaining the opposite.”