We must therefore be content if we can verify a few particulars. We must not from the outset expect to be able to do more. And we must be still more content if these particulars show by their character that they are fragments from a much larger wreckage, that they are what we might call chance survivals of what had once existed on a much larger scale. We concluded our sketch of the Christology of the Fourth Gospel by speaking of the data which it contained for the doctrine of the Trinity. These however are only data. It is perhaps a little surprising that the only approach to a formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity occurs not in St. John but at the end of the Gospel of St. Matthew (xxviii. 19). I am of course well aware that this part of the First Gospel is vigorously questioned by the critics. I am prepared to believe myself that the passage is a late incorporation in the Gospel; and antecedently I should not say that we had strong guarantees for its literal accuracy. But then—this is an old story, so far as I am concerned, and I must apologize for introducing it, but I cannot leave the point unnoticed—how are we to explain that other remarkable verse that occurs at the end of the second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 Cor. xiii. 14)? This familiar three-fold benediction must have had antecedents; it must, I should say, have had a long train of antecedents. The most adequate explanation of it seems to me to be that the train of antecedents started from something corresponding, something said at some time or other, in the teaching of our Lord[67]. I fully believe that the hints and intimations of a Trinity that we find scattered about the New Testament have their origin ultimately in the teaching of Christ. Apart from this, how could the conception have been reached at so early a date? For 2 Corinthians must in any case fall between 53-57 A.D.[68] Let us work our way backwards through another of the hints. We have seen that the coming of the Paraclete is described in the Fourth Gospel as a return of Christ to His own. Are there any parallels for this in the Synoptic Gospels? Not exactly, because the two things are not brought into combination. But we have on the one hand distinct predictions of the activity of the Holy Spirit after the departure of Christ. For instance: ‘When they deliver you up, be not anxious how or what ye shall speak.... For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you’ (Matt. x. 19, 20). And in St. Luke’s version of the promise as to answers to prayer, the Holy Spirit is spoken of as imparted to the believer: ‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?’ (Luke xi. 13).