Each has his distinct personality: each has his own essence. How, then, can they be one Eternal? How can they be all God? Absurd. The Athanasian Creed says that they are three persons, and still only one God. Absurd; extravagant! This is rejected by Arians, Socinians, Presbyterians, and every man following human reason. The Creed further says that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God and of man, "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God." Now, I ask you, did the Divinity absorb the manhood? He could not be, at the same time, one person and two persons. I have now proved the Trinity opposed to human reason. - JAMES HUGHES, Roman Catholic Priest, of Newport Pratt, county Mayo; apud Bible Christian for January, 1839.

It would be an ungrateful task to collect, and to present to the reader, other definitions and descriptions of the dogma of a Triune God, and other admissions of its unintelligibility or its contradictions; for, so far as we can judge, they are all more or less obscure, inconsistent, or absurd. Enough, then, of such jargon; enough of a confusion which could not well be "worse confounded,” — of “a counsel darkened by words without" the faintest ray of "knowledge." Let those who choose, "pose their apprehension with the involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, and the Incarnation of a "God the Son; " let those who will, "honor," or as we would say dishonor, the bounteous Author of their intellect by believing, if they can believe, what is "absurd and incredible; " let them reason, or rather abuse their rational faculties by arguing, in favor of the propriety and the duty of "prostrating their understandings" before dogmas which are "impossible; " let one, speaking of "the mystery of mysteries, the Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity," exclaim, in the language of superlative nonsense, O luminosissima Tenebræ! and another acknowledge that at the scheme of redemption, of which this is deemed an essential part, "Reason stands aghast, and Faith herself is half confounded." But for us, sickened by such representations and such confessions, - for us, with a Bible in our hands which says nought of divine pluralities, of holy trinities, of ineffable generations and processions, of tripersonal modes and developments; of distinct hypostases, persons, or subsistences; of infinite minds, spirits, or beings; of triune substances, essences, or natures; of perichoreses, circumincessions, or inexistences and permeations, for us, when it is contrasted with the daring speculations of Platonic and Christian Trinitarians, there is a sacred and an inexpressible charm in one plain, simple precept, or in one clear and heavenly aspiration, from the lips of the great Master, "When ye pray, say, OUR FATHER, hallowed be thy name;" "Father, this is life eternal, that they might know THEE THE ONLY TRUE GOD, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent;" or in one out of the many explicit statements of Paul's belief, "There is ONE GOD, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

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SECT. III.— · THEOLOGICAL TERMS EITHER UNINTELLIGIBLE AND USELESS, IF NOT PERNICIOUS; OR EXPRESSIVE OF IDEAS, AND SHOULD THEREFORE BE CLEARLY DEFINED.

What is not intelligible is either untrue or useless. - BUNSEN.

I wonder most, that men, when they have amused and puzzled themselves and others with hard words, should call this explaining things. —TILLOTSON.

The purity of Scripture ought to be preserved, and man should not presume to speak in his own language more perfectly than God spoke in his. . . . Who understands things belonging to God better than God himself? Let wretched mortals give honor to God, and either confess that they do not understand his words, or cease to profane them with their own new and peculiar expressions; so that divine wisdom, lovely in its genuine form, may remain to us pure. MARTIN LUTHER: Confut. Rat. Latom., tom. ii. fol. 240.

In these remarks, the great German Reformer, taking for granted the plenary inspiration of the Bible, refers in particular to the term homoousion, "consubstantial," the introduction of which into the nomenclature of Christian theology has been productive of so much evil.

St. Paul left an excellent precept to the church to avoid profanas vocum novitates, "the profane newness of words;" that is, it is fit that the mysteries revealed in Scripture should be preached and taught in the words of the Scripture, and with that simplicity, openness, easiness, and candor, and not with new and unhallowed words, such as that of "Transubstantiation." JEREMY TAYLOR: A Dissuasive from Popery, part ii. book ii. § 3.

Referring to this passage in his "Notes" (Works, vol. v. p. 244), COLERIDGE asks," Are not, then, Trinity, Triunity, Hypostasis, Perichoresis, Diphysis, and others, excluded?". - a question which we would venture to answer, by asserting that no injury would have been done to the gospel, if unscriptural terms had never been adopted in the formulas of the church.

Great difficulty, I acknowledge, there is in the explication of it [the doctrine of the Trinity], in which the farther we go beyond what God has thought fit to reveal to us in Scripture concerning it, the more we are entangled; and that which men are pleased to call an explaining of it, does, in my apprehension, often make it more obscure, that is, less plain than it was before; which does not so very well agree

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with a pretence of explication. . . . . . . It cannot be denied but that these speculative and very acute men [the schoolmen], who wrought a great part of their divinity out of their own brains, as spiders do cobwebs out of their own bowels, have started a thousand subtleties about this mystery, such as no Christian is bound to trouble his head withal; much less is it necessary for him to understand those niceties which we may reasonably presume that they who talk of them did themselves never thoroughly understand, and least of all is it necessary to believe them. . . . . . . . A man may be “a barbarian" that speaks to people in unknown phrases and metaphors, as well as "he that speaks in an unknown tongue;" and the very same reason that obligeth us to put the Scripture into a known language doth oblige men to explain the doctrines contained in it by such phrases and metaphors as are known and used in that language. If men would but content themselves with those plain and simple descriptions which the Scripture gives us of faith, there could not be any great difference about it. ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON: Sermons 44, 48; in Works, vol. iii. pp. 215, 288, and vol. xi. p. 259.

son,"

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"Essence" and "hypostasis," "substance," "subsistence," "per‚”“existence,” “nature," &c., are terms very differently used by Greek and Latin fathers in this dispute, and have very much obscured this doctrine, instead of explaining it. DR. WILLIAM SHERLOCK: Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, sect. v. p. 101.

We can believe a thing no further than we understand the terms in which it is proposed to us; for faith concerns only the truth and falsehood of propositions, and the terms of which a proposition consists must be first understood before we can pronounce any thing concerning the truth or falsehood of it; which is nothing else but the agreement or disagreement of its terms, or the ideas expressed by them. If I have no knowledge at all of the meaning of the terms used in a proposition, I cannot exercise any act of my understanding about it; I cannot say I believe or disbelieve any thing; ... and if I have but a general, confused notion of the terms, I can only give a general, confused assent to the proposition. . . . . From whence it follows, that terms and simple ideas must be clearly and distinctly understood first, before we can believe any thing particular of the respects and relations they bear to one another, which is the only proper object of faith. . Whatever words we use, whether person," "hypostasis," or any other we can invent, they all signify the same thing; that is, some kind of distinction we do not under

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stand. And we may rack our thoughts, tire our imaginations, and break all the fibres of our brain, and yet never be able to deliver ourselves clearer. — DR. ROBERT SOUTH: Considerations concerning the Trinity, pp. 14–16, 33–4.

Indeed, let any proposition be delivered to us as coming from God or from man, we can believe it no farther than we understand it; and therefore, if we do not understand it at all, we cannot believe it at all, -I mean, explicitly, — but only be persuaded that it contains some truth or other, though we know not what. Again: were any doctrine laid down which we clearly saw to be self-contradictory, or otherwise absurd, that could never be an object of our faith; for there is no possibility of admitting, upon any authority, a thing for true which we evidently perceive to be false. Nor would calling such doctrines "mysterious" mend the matter in the least. For, indeed, there is no mystery in them: they are as plain as any in nature, as plainly contrary to truth as any thing else is agreeable to it. ARCHBISHOP SECKER: Sermons, No. XVIII. vol. iv. p. 384.

Several of the early disputes... took their rise from the affectation of employing high-sounding titles. Hence, in a great measure, the noise that was raised about the terms ὁμοούσιος, ὁμοιούσιος, ὑπόστασις, ὑποστατικὸς, θεοτόκος, Χριστοτόκος, when first introduced into their theology. To these terms the Latins had no single words properly corresponding. AUGUSTINE, one of the most eminent of the Latin fathers, seems to have been so sensible of this defect in discoursing on the Trinity (l. v. c. 9), that he apologizes for his language, and considers the expressions he employs as only preferable to a total silence on the subject, but not as equally adapted with the Greek. “Dictum est,” says he, “tres personæ, non ut illud diceretur, sed ne taceretur." The truth is, so little do the Greek terms and the Latin, on this subject, correspond, that, if you regard the ordinary significations of the words (and I know not whence else we should get a meaning to them), the doctrine of the East was one, and that of the West was another, on this article. In the East, it was "one essence and three substances,” μία οὐσία, τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις : in the West, it was "one substance and three persons," una substantia, tres persona. The phrases rpiа πрóσwяа in Greek, tres substantia in Latin, would both, I imagine, have been exposed to the charge of Tritheism. But which of the two, the Greek or the Latin phraseology, was most suited to the truth of the case, is a question I will not take upon me to determine. I shall only say of Augustine's apology, that it is a very

odd one, and seems to imply, that, on subjects above our comprehension, and to which all human elocution is inadequate, it is better to speak nonsense than be silent. It were to be wished, that, on topics so sublime, men had thought proper to confine themselves to the simple but majestic diction of the Sacred Scriptures. . . . . . . Religion, the Christian religion in particular, has always been understood to require faith in its principles; and faith in principles requires some degree of knowledge or apprehension of those principles. If total ignorance should prevail, how could men be said to believe that of which they knew nothing? The schoolmen have devised an excellent succedaneum to supply the place of real belief; which necessarily implies that the thing believed is, in some sort, apprehended by the understanding. This succedaneum they have denominated "implicit faith;" an ingenious method of reconciling things incompatible, to believe every thing, and to know nothing, not so much as the terms of the propositions which we believe. DR. GEORGE CAMPBELL: Ecclesiastical History, Lect. 14 and 23; or pp. 242–3, 383.

Nothing affords such an endless subject of debate as a doctrine above the reach of human understanding, and expressed in the ambiguous and improper terms of human language, such as “persons," "generation," "substance," &c., which, in this controversy, either convey no ideas at all, or false ones. . . . It is difficult to conceive what our faith gains by being entertained with a certain number of sounds. If a Chinese should explain a term of his language which I did not understand, by another term which he knew beforehand that I understood as little, his conduct would be justly considered as an insult against the rules of conversation and good breeding; and I think it is an equal violation of the equitable principles of candid controversy to offer, as illustrations, propositions or terms that are as unintelligible and obscure as the thing to be illustrated. DR. ARCHIBALD MACLAINE Note in his Translation of Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, cent. xviii. § 27.

The language of Scripture is the language of common sense, - the plain, artless language of nature. Why should writers adopt such language as renders their meaning obscure; and not only obscure, but unintelligible; and not only unintelligible, but utterly lost in the strangeness of their phraseology? — DR. TIMOTHY DWIGHT; apul Morgridge's True Believer's Defence, p. 18.

The superabundance of phrases appropriated by some pious authors to the subject of religion, and never applied to any other purpose, has