264 A RATIONAL DEFENCE OF TILE GOSPEL. [SEEM. XV. Three, whom the scripture describes as persons, who have some glorious communion in one godhead ! and the mystery of two natures united in one person. Now, though the way and manner how the three per- sons, Father, Son, and Spirit, should be one God, and how two natures, human and divine, should be one person in Christ Jesus; I say, though the way and man- ner how these things are; is not so easy to be explained and unfolded by us, and above our own present capacity to comprehend and fully to explain, yet I could never find these things proved impossible to be. If I must re- fuse to believe a thing that I know not the manner and nature of, there are many things in the worldof nature, and in natural religion, that I must disbelieve. Let them explain to me in natural religion what is the eternity of God, what ideas they can have of a being that never be- gan to be; and then perhaps I may be able to explain to them how three persons can have communion in one god- head, and how two natures canbe one in person. I am well assured, there are some doctrines in natural religion as difficult to be explained, and hard to be understood, and the manner of them is as mysterious, as these doc- trines of revealed religion, which are also rendered more offensive to the thinking mind, by some men's attempts to explain them in an unhappy manner. But we may go a step lower to meet this objection, and confound it. In the world of nature there are mysteries of this kind, which are as unaccountable and as hard to be unfolded as the mysteries of grace. It is the doctrine of unions both in the trinity and the incarnation, which renders them so mysterious. Now this doctrine of unions in natural philosophy bath been hitherto insolv- able. We know that spirit and body are united to make a man : But themanner how they are united, remains still a most difficult question. We know that some bodies are hard, and some are soft ; but what it is that ties or unites hard bodies so closely together, and makes them so diffi- cult to be separated, is a riddle to the best philosophers, which they cannot solve ; or what it is that renders the parts ofsoft bodies so easily separable. And many other things there are in nature as mysterious as this. Besides, if it were possible for us to explain all things in nature, and to write a perfect bookof natural philo-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=