When the expectation of the second advent was abandoned, and a stay on earth after his death was assigned to Christ, the Church’s ideas of the Spirit underwent a further development. As it was the substitute for his presence, it could only have come after his ascension. Just as the ascension had been imagined as a suitable close of Christ’s stay on earth, so now a solemn ceremony was imagined to mark the entrance of the Spirit on its mission. The day of Pentecost, the recognized anniversary of the delivery of the law on Mount Sinai, appeared the fittest time for this ceremony.[101] As the founding of the law was regarded as the true beginning of the life of Israel, the coming of the Spirit seemed to match it and to form the true beginning of the life of the Christian Church. The construction of this tradition, as we have it in the Acts of the Apostles, was one of the last results of the influence of Judaism on Christianity. At about the same time this influence was shown in another doctrine in connection with the belief in the Holy Spirit. I have already said that, when the mainly Pagan dogma of the miraculous conception of Christ was created, Jewish Christianity was able slightly to spiritualize it. By making the Spirit the agent on the divine side of that conception, the dogma was as far as possible purified from its taint of grossness. Until after the time of the Nicene Council, the general belief in the Holy Spirit remained in this vague undefined form. The Church regarded it as a personified influence, and gave it little attention. In the Nicene Creed there is no dogma of the Trinity; only two persons of the Trinity as yet existed. In the fully developed Creed merely vague language is applied to the Spirit; it is spoken of as a distinct being, but its union with the Father and the Son is not asserted. The phrase, “Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son,” shows, as Feuerbach points out,[102] how loose an idea of personality was attached to it, and is very different from the precise terms in which the Creed defines the production of the Son. The subsequent dispute between the Eastern and Western Churches in reference to the “filioque” of the Latin form of this Creed rendered it impossible for Christian theology to remain satisfied with the Nicene definition of the Spirit. Always regarded as divine, there was now a natural tendency to declare it to be God. A mystery of three in one was a puzzle no more perplexing than a mystery of two in one. And so the Holy Spirit was included in the divine Government, and the dogma of the Trinity was complete.