Plainly, the word "person," however analogously applied to God, must contain something of what we mean when we call ourselves "persons," else "we are landed in the unmeaning." When Christ spoke of Himself as "I," the selfness implied by the pronoun must have had some kind of resemblance to our own; just as when He called God His Father He intended to convey something of what fatherhood meant for His then hearers. That He intended to convey what it might come to mean in other conditions and ages seems very doubtful; and so if the word "person" has acquired a fuller and different meaning in modern philosophy, we are not at once justified in applying this fuller conception to the Divine persons, unless we can show that it is a legitimate development of the older sense. He argues that if the Trinity be the ultimate truth, the Unitarian suppositions and conclusions of the "natural theologian" are bound to lead to antinomies and confusions; and he sees in those harmonious interferences and variations of universal import (which are no less an essential factor in the evolution of the world than the groundwork of uniformity and law), evidence of a multi-personal Divine government, of a division of labour between co-operant agencies. This, of course, goes beyond the doctrine of "appropriation;" and amounts to a denial of the singleness of the Divine operation _ad extra_. It seems, in short, to imply a diversity of nature in each of the persons, over and above the principle of personal distinctness. Indeed, while it offers a plausible solution of some minor perplexities, it rather weakens the value of the general argument. For the notion of a superpersonal unity is needed chiefly as suggesting a mode in which many mutually exclusive personalities or "spheres of experience" or lives, may be welded together into a coherent whole. Even could I reproduce most exactly in myself the thoughts and feelings of another, it were but a reproduction or similarity. I can know and feel the like; but I cannot know his knowing and feel his feeling; for this were to be that other and not myself. That God's knowledge of our thoughts and feelings should be of this external, inferential kind is as intolerable to our mental needs of unification as it is to our religious sense, our hope, our confidence, our love. In Him we live and move and think and feel; and He in us. That we can say this of no other personality is what constitutes the burden of our separateness and loneliness. Our experience exists for no other; but at least it is in some mysterious way shared by That which lies behind all otherness, not destroying, but fulfilling. "We know not why it is," says St. Catherine of Genoa, "we feel an internal necessity of using the plural pronoun instead of the singular." Perhaps it was that she saw in a purer and clearer light what we only half feel in the obscurity of our grosser hearts.