PROPOSITION XIV. Igo the word of Goda. Several remarks with which the reverend ministers of London bave prefaced their late " Harmony of con- fessions" on this article, are well worth notice here, see pages Al-47. PROP. XIV.Though the Sacred Three are evidently and plainly discovered in Scripture, to be one and the same God, and three distinct personal Agents or Persons, yet the Scripture hath not in plain and evident Language ex- plained and precisely determined the particular Way and Manner, how these Three Persons are one God, or how this one Godhead is in Three Persons. The truth of this doctrine, that " there are three divine persons and one God, is abundantly more evident in the scripture, than any particular explication of this sacred doctrine : And though learned men have endeavoured to explain the Trinity by reason, to determine the " modus" or manner how three are one, and one three, to defend their schemes by human argu- ments, and to illustrate them 'by several similitudes, yet these illustrations, these explainings and reasonings, with the human terms that belong to them, are not to be esteemed, as they have teo often been, the matter of divine revelation, any farther than they are by evident and irresistible consequence drawn from the word of God. Among these explications, some of them seem to me to be evidently false and insufficient. Such is the Arian scheme, which supposes the Father only to be the true God, and that the two other persons have not true, proper and eternal godhead belonging to them : And such is the Sabellian scheme, which supposes the Father, Son, and Spirit, not to be distinct persons, but mere different names, modes, and appearances of the one God. One of these denies the true godhead, the other the personality. Other schemes have been multiplied in the christian world, which do indeed secure and maintain the substance of the scrip- tural doctrine of the Trinity, as the Athanasian, the scholastic scheme, &c. Yet they have such various difficulties attending them, that I do not think it necessary to trouble the private christian with a long detail of them here, And indeed to speak my own sentiments freely, I must say, * How the particular explications of this doctrine came to be so various, both in the writings of she primitive and modern Christians, will be easily accounted for in the following proposition, viz. " because scripture has not clearly explained it." And if the bulk of the Christian world, hag at any time for some ages together followed one and the same scheme of explication, it io because they found undeniably theplain doctrineof three persons, and one God revealed in scripture, andihey knew noother way to give a tolerableetplicattoa of it all that time. rr 3.
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