DISSERTATIONVII. 339 It will be replied then, " What has made the christians of all ages so curious to penetrate further into these deep things of God, than was necessary for their own faith and practice in order to salvation ? To answer this let it be observed, that there may be some advantages for the increase of christian knowledge, for personal piety, and for the instructions of others derived from our pursuit of clear ideas in the great doctrines of the gospel. But to lay that consideration aside at present, there is another answer very obvious and easy, and it is this. The primitive christians found perpetual objections against the doctrines of their faith raised by the heathen writers ; this constrained them to enter into a deeper enquiry, and the violent opposition that was made to those doc- trines by the patrons of several errors in the first and following ages, set the christians in every age at work to draw outthe mat- ters of their belief into various human forms ; and they did this in order to defend them against those who attacked them in a variety of methods of human reasoning and artifice. And parti- cularly in the present controversy, when the opposers in all ages have endeavoured to represent the doctrine of the Trinity as ut- terlyinconsistent both with reason and scripture, the believersof this doctrine have found it proper to search out some way and manner in which it is possible this doctrine may be conceived without such inconsistency. For my part, I confess, that my faith, as a christian, bad contented itself with moregeneral ideas of this doctrine, without enquiring, so far at least, into the modus of it, had it not been for the various objections that are raised against the possibilityof it in any form or modus whatsoever. And though I have now taken the freedom to declare, that I prefer the representation which 1 have given in these discourses above any other schemes of explication which I have seen, yet I am not so vain as to ex- pect, that this hypothesis will immediately relieve every difficulty that attends the sacred doctrine of the Trinity. I am well aware of various exceptions that will be made, and I have carefully considered some of the most important of them in papers that lie byme. I have also made experiment, how happily this scheme furnishes out an answer to the chief exceptions of a considerable, but unknown writer, who has attacked my little discourse of the " Christian Doctrine of the Trinity," in a " Sober Appeal to a Turk or an Indian." Part of a reply to that book has been already made in the second and third dissertations printed last year. Several parts more are ready to follow this. But it was necessary to exhibit the schemeon which the solution of difficul- ties is founded, before I could pretend to solve the difficulties themselves: And the printed sheets have swelled to such a bulk already, as renders it very inconvenient to crowd all my design B b3
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