And this holds good just as well in regard to religious knowledge. Reason teaches us that there is a God, and it tells something of His Nature; but it speaks to us about Him only in riddles. God is immutable, and yet He is perfectly free: who shall reconcile these together? God is infinite, infinite in Essence, infinite in all His Attributes--try to comprehend infinitude if you can. Again, what a mystery there is in the creation of this world! What a mystery in the union of spirit and matter! Everywhere mystery is the necessary accompaniment of knowledge; and the more we know, the more mysteries will we have. If, then, God reveals to us any thing about Himself additional to that which reason can ascertain, mystery must still be the consequence. The wider the view, the more indistinct and shadowy the outline. {402} It is revealed to us that in God, without injury to His Simplicity, there is a Threefold Relationship--that the Father, contemplating Himself from all eternity, has conceived a perfect Image of Himself, and that this Image is His Son, and that the Father and the Son have loved each other from all eternity, and that this Love is the Holy Ghost--that thus the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are Three distinct, eternal, necessary Subsistences. Do not be surprised at this. Here is nothing contradictory to reason. True, it is wonderful. True, you cannot pierce it through and through. It is full of darkness. No matter. You know, when the moon comes out from behind a cloud, how sharp and well-defined the shadows become. So these darknesses of doctrine come because the light is brighter. Men talk of the _simple doctrines_ of the gospel. There are no such things. The gospel, as a scheme of doctrine at least, is a mystery. St. Paul called it so, and so it is. It is a mystery because it reveals so much. If we did not know that God is both One in substance and Three in the mode of subsistence, our difficulties would be less, but so would our knowledge. Well does the prophet exclaim: "_Verily, Thou art a hidden God, the God of Israel, the Savior!_" [Footnote 139] [Footnote 139: Isai. xlv. 15.]