In this way the vital religious essence of historic Trinitarianism
can be rationally retained for modern thought, and that without
any requirement of subscription to the perplexing dogma of
three eternal and equally divine persons which are nevertheless
not three personal gods, but only one.

Finally among the attributes of God, if we may call it one, is
existence. A reviewer of a recent volume entitled "The Christ-
ian Doctrine of God" felt called upon to remark that while the
author had succeeded in setting forth a picture of the divine
character to which one could feel no moral repugnance, he had
nevertheless failed to mention one very important attribute of
this God, viz., the attribute of non-existence. Now it is true
enough that if we proceed to build up in purely apriori fashion
our notion of God, it becomes exceedingly difficult in the end
to demonstrate that fully-defined God's existence. Moreover,
if we have made even the slightest mistake in our delineation,
then it becomes true that the God of whom all we have asserted
is true does not really exist at all. But if we start with the as-
surance, already achieved in normal religious experience and
critically defensible, to the effect that God is, and if we proceed
inductively to discover ever more completely what God is, an
erroneous conclusion does not invalidate the judgment that
there is an Object of religious dependence which is Source of
deliverance from evil, a Power not identical with the empir-
ical self which makes for righteousness on condition of a cer-
tain discoverable objective religious adjustment, a Being great
enough and good enough to deliver from sin and to enable the
one rightly related thereto to be spiritually prepared for all that
may possibly happen. Indeed, if we have made no mistake in
our attempts to formulate, on the basis of the findings of ex-
perimental religion, the view of God involved in this experience
of moral salvation through religious dependence, then we are
entitled to say that the God who has all these other attributes
has the attribute of existence also. In short, when our idea of
God is scientific enough and our religious experience is what it
ought to be, we shall know that the God of whom we have an
idea exists. This, then, will be the one and only satisfactory
proof of the existence of God, the religio-empirical proof in its
final, consummate form.

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