It is a common proverb that all things happen in threes, and indeed many stages of life happen in combinations of threes. There is the triple concept of body, mind and spirit, which includes the physical, mental and spiritual structure of a human being. There is the fact that we live first as a child, then as an adult and finally as an elderly woman and there are three phases of a woman's life, that of a girl, that of a mother and that of old age. There is also the aspect of time such as past, present and future. There are the three acts of birth, life and death. Some people believe in the combination of birth, death and rebirth (meaning life after death), and in the Christian faith tradition, the number three, symbolized by the Trinity (Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer), has come to mean wholeness. Looking at sections of the poem "The Epic" and the book Idylls of the King, particularly "The Passing of Arthur", we find that there is a surprising amount of Trinitarian symbolism found in Tennyson's works. Three times Arthur must ask Sir Bedivere to throw the sword Excalibur into the lake. This is in fact a test of faith, which includes body, mind and spirit, which means that it is tested physically, mentally and then spiritually. After being mortally wounded, King Arthur tells Sir Bedivere to "take Excalibur, / And hurl it far into the midst: / See what thou seest, and bring it lightly to me" (Norton, 1298, 204-6). When he brings the sword near the water's edge for the first time, he is unable to throw it due to the blinding beauty of the Excalibur. Tennyson describes the Excalibur as "brilliant," "glittering," "glittering with sparkles of diamonds, / Myriad lights of topaz..." Bedivere "gazed so long / That both eyes were dazzled" (Norton, 1298, 222-7). He returns to Arthur, who sends him back to complete his mission. Thus Sir Bedivere fails his first test, that of the physical realm. In the second trial he faces a mental challenge, while the second time Bedivere determines that if he throws the Excalibur into the water, "a precious thing, noteworthy, / They should thus disappear forever from the earth... What use would this be, if that happened?" (Norton, 1299, 257-60). His own intelligence gets in the way of what he knows to be true, and he has a lack of faith in his king and mortality, as he does not want Arthur to be forgotten..