(4) _The Passibility of God._--It would seem, also, that any vital defense of the Fatherhood of God, required by the social consciousness, involves further the frank admission of the passibility of God, whether it has the look of an ancient heresy or not. We must unhesitatingly admit that, without which God can be no real God to us. "Theology has no falser idea than that of the impassibility of God. If he is capable of sorrow, he is capable of suffering, and were he without the capacity for either he would be without any feeling of the evil of sin or the misery of man. The very truth that comes by Jesus Christ may be said to be summed up in the passibility of God."[110] With the growing sensitiveness of the social consciousness, the problem of suffering and of sin presses increasingly, and itself almost compels the assertion of the passibility of God. Nothing less can satisfy our hearts, nor indeed allow us to keep our reverence for God. Certainly, with the increasingly clear vision, which the social consciousness is giving us, of sympathetic, unselfish, definitely self-sacrificing, loving leadership even among men, we shall not rest satisfied with less in God. We must have a suffering, seeking, loving God; because our Father, suffering in our sin, bearing as a burden the sin of each, and not satisfied while one child turns away; no mere on-looker, but in all our afflictions, himself afflicted. The cross of Christ, then, is only an honest showing of the actual facts of God's seeking, suffering love. 4. _As to the Doctrine of a Social Trinity._--One inference for theology widely drawn from the social consciousness, it ought in fairness, perhaps, to be said, seems to me unjustified,--the doctrine of a so-called "Social Trinity." One must question the constant cool assumption made in these discussions of a social Trinity, that this view is the only alternative to what is called an "abstract simplicity." In any case, one would suppose, we must have in God all the richness and complexity of a complete personal life, freed from the limitations of finite personality. Something of the much that that involves we have been trying to point out. Here certainly is no "abstract simplicity." Moreover, the conception of a social Trinity, so far as the writer can see, carries us inevitably to a tritheism of the most unmistakable kind. "Social" involves full personality. Nothing requires more complete personality than love, which the view affirms to exist between the persons of the immanent Trinity, between the distinctions in the very Godhead. The relations of Christ to God were, of course, distinctly and definitely personal; but it must not be forgotten that we are not permitted, on any careful theological view, to transfer these directly to the immanent relations of the Godhead.