A MAP OF LIFE own internal activity, of that activity which remains within His own nature and does not directly affect the beings He has created. But it is a property of love that it wants not only to know but also to be known by the person loved. God loving us, wants us to know Him in His deepest and most secret life, and so gives us here upon earth a glimpse of that truth which it is man’s proper destiny to spend eternity in contemplating. And, apart from that desire of God’s to be known by man, the distinction of Persons has in fact a direct bearing on man’s life since it was the Second Person, and not God in His threefold Personality, who became man for our salvation. It is the supreme mystery in a double sense: it deals with the highest truth: and it is most inaccessible to the created mind. Yet certain elements of it can be grasped by us. In the first place it states that in the one Divine nature there are three Persons. The distinction between nature and person has already been discussed in Chapter V, and the reader might very well return to it before proceeding here. Summarizing what is there said : Nature and Person are both principles of action but in different senses — the Person being that which acts, the Nature being that by which he acts. In man, nature and person coaleice' in one concrete living being: but the attempt to analyse these two principles which in us are fused into one has two results: (i) it makes clear that we 82