A MAP OF LIFE contain God in our minds so as totally to comprehend Him. But by His loving kindness we are endowed with a nature that can know something of Him — some little by its own powers, vastly more by what He tells us of Himself in the mysteries He has revealed. But a mystery is not merely a truth about God which we cannot discover for ourselves and can know only if God reveals it. If it were only that, the subject would present no difficulties. There is the further fact already suggested : that, even when God has revealed it to us, it remains a truth about an infinite being and is therefore not fully comprehensible by us. And the trouble is that it first presents itself to the mind as an apparent contradiction in terms. Thus the mystery of the Trinity appears as a statement that there are three Persons, each of them God, yet not three Gods. Transubstantiation appears as a statement that what, by every test known to man, is bread is yet the Body of Christ. And so with the others. Now contradiction is the enemy of thought. If any article of belief presented for the mind’s acceptance appears to contain a contradiction within itself,, then the mind cannot be at ease with it. So that a mystery of religion presents itself first to the mind rather as a burden than as a light. Now in some cases the sense of contradiction arises from a sheer misunderstanding of the doctrine and can be removed instantly by a correct statement. 78