Ib. p. 64.

St. Paul tells us, 1 Cor. ii. 10.  ’That the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God’.  So that the Holy Spirit knows all that is in God, even his most deep and secret counsels, which is an argument that he is very intimate with him; but this is not all:  it is the manner of knowing, which must prove this consciousness of which I speak:  and that the Apostle adds in the next verse, that the Spirit of God knows all that is in God, just as the spirit of a man knows all that is in man:  that is, not by external revelation or communication of this knowledge, but by self-consciousness, by an internal sensation, which is owing to an essential unity.  ’For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of a man which is in him; even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God.’

It would be interesting, if it were feasible, to point out the epoch at which the text mode of arguing in polemic controversy became predominant; I mean by single texts without any modification by the context.  I suspect that it commenced, or rather that it first became the fashion, under the Dort or systematic theologians, and during the so called Quinquarticular Controversy.  This quotation from St. Paul is a striking instance:—­for St. Paul is speaking of the holy spirit of which true spiritual Christians are partakers, and by which or in which those Christians are enabled to search all things, even the deep things of God.  No person is here spoken of, but reference is made to the philosophic principle, that can only act immediately, that is, interpenetratively, as two globules of quicksilver, and co-adunatively.  Now, perceiving and knowing were considered as immediate acts relatively to the objects perceived and known:—­’ergo’, the ‘principium sciendi’ must be one (that is, homogeneous or consubstantial) with the ‘principium essendi quoad objectum cognitum’.  In order therefore for a man to understand, or even to know of, God, he must have a god-like spirit communicated to him, wherewith, as with an inward eye, which is both eye and light, he sees the spiritual truths.  Now I have no objection to his calling this spirit a ‘person,’ if only the term ‘person’ be so understood as to permit of its being partaken of by all spiritual creatures, as light and the power of vision are partaken of by all seeing ones.  But it is too evident that Sherlock supposes the Father, as Father, to possess a spirit, that is, an intellective faculty, by which he knows the Spirit, that is, the third co-equal Person; and that this Spirit, the Person, has a spirit, that is, an intellective faculty, by which he knows the Father; and the ‘Logos’ in like manner relatively to both.  So too, the Father has a ‘logos’ with which he distinguishes the ’Logos’;—­and the ‘Logos’ has a ‘logos’, and so on:  that is to say, there are three several though not severed triune Gods, each being the same position three times ‘realiter positum’, as three guineas from the same mint, supposing them to differ no more than they appear to us to differ;—­but whether a difference wholly and exclusively numerical is a conceivable notion, except under the predicament of space and time; whether it be not absurd to affirm it, where interspace and interval cannot be affirmed without absurdity—­this is the question; or rather it is no question.