This one supreme God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, a Trinity in Unity, three Persons and one God.  Now Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, with all their divine attributes and perfections (excepting their personal properties, which the Schools call the ‘modi subsistendi’, that one is the Father, the other the Son, and the other the Holy Ghost, which cannot be communicated to each other) are whole and entire in each Person by a mutual consciousness; each feels the other Persons in himself, all their essential wisdom, power, goodness, justice, as he feels himself, and this makes them essentially one, as I have proved at large.

Will not the Arian object, “You admit the ‘modus subsistendi’ to be a divine perfection, and you affirm that it is incommunicable.  Does it not follow therefore, that there are perfections which the All-perfect does not possess?” This would not apply to Bishop Bull or Waterland.

Sect.  V. p. 102.

St. Austin in his sixth book of the Trinity takes notice of a common argument used by the orthodox fathers against the Arians, to prove the co-eternity of the Son with the Father, that if the Son be the Wisdom and Power of God, as St. Paul teaches (1 ‘Cor’. i.) and God was never without his Wisdom and Power, the Son must he co-eternal with the Father. * * * But this acute Father discovers a great inconvenience in this argument, for it forces us to say that the Father is not wise, but by that Wisdom which he begot, not being himself Wisdom as the Father:  and then we must consider whether the Son himself, as he is God of God, and Light of Light, may be said to be Wisdom of Wisdom, if God the Father be not Wisdom, but only begets Wisdom.

The proper answer to Augustine is, that the Son and Holy Ghost are necessary and essential, not contingent:  and that ‘his’ argument has a still greater inconvenience, as shewn in note p. 98.

Ib. pp. 110-113.

But what makes St. Gregory dispute thus nicely, and oppose the common and ordinary forms of speech?  Did he in good earnest believe that there is but one man in the world?  No, no! he acknowledged as many men as we do; a great multitude who had the same human nature, and that every one who had a human nature was an individual man, distinguished and divided from all other individuals of the same nature.  What makes him so zealous then against saying, that Peter, James and John are three men?  Only this; that he says man is the name of nature, and therefore to say there are three men is the same as to say, there are three human natures of a different kind; for if there are three human natures, they must differ from each other, or they cannot be three; and so you deny Peter, James, and John to be [Greek:  homoousioi], or of the same nature; and for the same reason we must say that though the Father be God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, yet there are not three Gods, but [Greek:  mia theotaes], one Godhead and Divinity.