DISSERTATION V. 353 our present times, equal to theirs. But when I enquire of my own heart whether ever I could form any ideas of all this sort of language, while I was taught it in my younger days, and firmly assented to these sounds, I must honestly confess, I could not. Sometimes I was ready to enquire further ; but then I satisfied all my inquisitive thoughts with this general notion, thatit was incomprehensible. I found it sufficiently evident in scripture, that the Father was God, that the Son was God, and the Holy Spirit was God ; and that they were usually represented in scrip- ture as three persons : And ,though I had no distinct idea of the modus of it, yet I thought myself sufficiently' defended, and in- trenched in the forms of scholastic language, and armed with that set of phrases which make up this part of the common, or orthodox explication, without,being too solicitous about conceiv- ing that which was asserted to be utterly inconceivable. I humbly adore the sacred Three, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, as one God, inconceivably glorious, beyond, and above, all the thoughts and reasonings of men : And therefore I wouldnot willingly indulge an unreasonable, and ambitious curi- osity, in any of the mysterious things of God. Yet where, after my laborious enquiry, and daily prayer, I think I have dis- covered some mistake in my former opinions, not as to the doc- trine itself, but as to the mode of explaining it, I humbly hope I may be permitted to part with a set of phrases which scripture never uses, which the popish schools composed, and which 1 never could understand, without the censure of heresy, or de- parting from the faith. . Let it be observed here, that the ancient Athanasian expli, cation of the sacred doctrine of the Trinity, is a very different thing from this scholastic scheme, as I havemanifested elsewhere. And though in the last century there were but few Trinitarians who knew and believed the ancient Athanasian doctrine, because they generally went into the scholastic hypothesis, yet in the pre- sent age this scholastic explication, of the generation and pro- cession of the Son and Spirit, derived from the popish schools, is supposed to be indefensible, even by some of the most learned and zealous defenders of the deity of the sacred Three. But to returnto the objection. If it were needful to main- tain the eternal generation of the Son in his divine nature, and the eternal procession of the Spirit, in a way of derivation from the Father, there is scarce any scheme of explication that might be construed into a more rational and intelligible idea of it, than the hypothesis which I now propose : For if we suppose the eternal Word, and the eternal Spirit, to be two essential powers of the divine nature, they may he said to flow, at least in a logi- cal sense, fromthe very essence of God the Father, as I have described in other parts of these dissertations. VOL. vi. Z
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