His sense of the value of Scripture is heightened by his belief in the sacredness of language. Names belong inseparably to the things which they signify; words are themselves a revelation. This is a lesson learnt from Origen; and the false antithesis between the nature and the name of God, of which, according to the Arians, Christ had the latter only, made it of special use to Hilary E g. Trin. vii. 13; and cf. the argument which is also Athanasian, of vii. 31.. But if this high dignity belongs to every statement of truth, there is the less need for technical terms of theology. The rarity of their occurrence in the pages of Hilary has already been mentioned. ‘Trinity’ Beside the passages mentioned on p. xxx., it only occurs in Instructio Psalmorum § 13. is almost absent, and ‘Person’ The translation of the De Trinitate in this volume may give a somewhat false impression in this respect. For the sake of conciseness the word Person has been often used in the English where it is absent, and absent designedly in the Latin. The word occurs Trin. iii. 23 in., iv. 42, v. 10, 26, vii. 39, 40, and in a few other places. hardly more common, he prefers, by a turn of language which would scarcely be seemly in English, to speak of the ‘embodied’ Christ and of His ‘Embodiment,’ though Latin theology was already familiar with the ‘Incarnation Concorporatio, Comm. in Matt. vi. 1; corporatio, Tr. in Ps. i. 14, ii. 3, and often; corporatus Deus, Comm. in Matt. iv. 14, Tr. in Ps. li. 16; corporalitas, Comm. in Matt. iv. 14 (twice), Instr. Ps. vi. In the De Trinitate he usually prefers a periphrasis;—assumpta caro, assumpsit carnem. Corporatiois used of man’s dwelling in a body in Trin. xi. 15, and De Mysteriis, ed. Gamurrini, p. 5..’ In fact, it would seem that he had resolved to make himself independent of technical terms and of such lines of thought as would require them. But he is never guilty of confusion caused by an inadequate vocabulary. He has the literary skill to express in ordinary words ideas which are very remote from ordinary thought, and this at no inordinate length. No one, for instance, has developed the idea of the mutual indwelling of Father and Son more fully and clearly than he; yet he has not found it necessary to employ or devise the monstrous ‘circuminsession’ or ‘perichoresis’ of later theology. And where he does use terms of current theology, or rather metaphysic, he shews that he is their master, not their slave. The most important idea of this kind which he had to express was that of the Divine substance. The word ‘essence’ is entirely rejected It occurs in the De Synodis 69, but in that work Hilary is writing as an advocate in defence of language used by others, not as the exponent of his own thoughts. It also occurs once or twice in translations from the Greek, probably by another hand than Hilary’s; but from his own authorship it is completely absent.; ‘substance’ and ‘nature’ are freely used as synonyms, but in such alternation that both of them still obviously belong to the sphere of literature, and not of science. They are twice used as exact alternatives, for the avoidance of monotony, in parallel clauses of Trin. vi. 18, 19. So also the nature of fire in vii. 29 is not an abstraction; and in ix. 36 fin. the Divine substance and nature are equivalents. These are only a few of many instances Trin. v. 10,Syn. 69, ‘God is One not in Person, but in nature,’ Trin. iv. 42, ‘Not by oneness of Person but by unity of substance;’ vi. 35, ‘the birth of a living Nature from a living Nature.’ Often enough the substance or nature of God or Christ is simply a periphrasis. The two natures in the Incarnate Christ are also mentioned, though, as we shall see, Hilary here also avoids a precise nomenclature.. Here, as always, there is an abstention from abstract thoughts and terms, which indicates, on the part of a student of philosophy and of philosophical theology, a deliberate narrowing of his range of speculation. We may illustrate the purpose of Hilary by comparing his method with that of the author of a treatise on Astronomy without Mathematics. But some part of his caution is probably due to his sense of the inadequacy of the terms with which Latin theology was as yet equipped, and of the danger, not only to his readers’ faith, but to his own reputation for orthodoxy, which might result from ingenuity in the employment or invention of technical language.