Note 178 — Chapter II · ToC

Symbolism of Masonry, by Dr. Mackey (chap. i) and other books too many to name. It need hardly be said that the truth of the trinity, whereof the triangle is an emblem—though with Pythagoras it was a symbol of holiness, of health—was never meant to contradict the unity of God, but to make it more vivid. As too often interpreted, it is little more than a crude tri-theism, but at its best it is not so. "God thrice, not three Gods," was the word of St. Augustine (Essay on the Trinity), meaning three aspects of God—not the mathematics of His nature, but its manifoldness, its variety in unity. The late W.N. Clarke—who put more common sense into theology than any other man of his day—pointed out that, in our time, the old debate about the trinity is as dead as Caesar; the truth of God as a Father having taken up into itself the warmth, color, and tenderness of the truth of the trinity—which, as said on an earlier page, was a vision of God through the family (Christian Doctrine of God).