understand the means whereby you may worthily receive and fittingly and lastingly entertain so august and so imposing a guest.
What then, Brethren, is the Holy Ghost? He is God, coequal and consubstantial with the other persons of the Trinity, and yet, as the third person of that Trinity, He is really distinct from the Father and the Son. The name " Holy Ghost " or " Holy Spirit " might with equal truth be applied to either the Father or the Son, but because the third person proceeds from them both as from a single principle, because He is common to them both, being the love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father, therefore that name which is common to all three is rightly appropriated by Him who is the link that binds the universe to God and God to God in the bonds of benevolence and love. If one might without irreverence seek to still farther penetrate the secrets of the Divinity, a study of the human mind will afford a shadowy concept of the Blessed Trinity. The soul, the highest type of creature known to us, naturally bears the strongest semblance to the Creator. Now, the mind, in studying an object, produces within itself an image of that object, and around and over that image, if the object be a lovable one, the will fondly hovers and is led on thereby to the pursuit and the enjoyment of the object itself. So it is in a measure with the Divinity. The Father, contemplating His own all-perfect nature, begets an image thereof, and that image being no less a substantial reality than His only-begotten Son, there is
