Ib. p. 133.
As for the Holy Ghost, whose nature is represented to be love, I do not indeed find in Scripture that it is any where said, that the Holy Ghost is that mutual love, wherewith Father and Son love each other: but this we know, that there is a mutual love between Father and Son: ’the Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hands’.—John iii. 35. ’And the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth’.-John v. 20; and our Saviour himself tells us, ’I love the Father’.—John xiv. 31. And I shewed before, that love is a distinct act, ’and therefore in God must be a person: for there are no accidents nor faculties in God.’
This most important, nay, fundamental truth, so familiar to the elder philosophy, and so strongly and distinctly enunciated by Philo Judaeus, the senior and contemporary of the Evangelists, is to our modern divines darkness and a sound.
Sect. VI. pp. 147-8.
Yes; you’ll say, that there should
be three Persons, each of which is
God, and yet but one God, is a contradiction:
but what principle of
natural reason does it contradict?
Surely never did argument vertiginate more! I had just acceded to Sherlock’s exposition of the Trinity, as the Supreme Being, his reflex act of self-consciousness and his love, all forming one supreme mind; and now he tells me, that each is the whole Supreme Mind, and denies that three, each ‘per se’ the whole God, are not the same as three Gods! I grant that division and separation are terms inapplicable, yet surely three distinct though undivided Gods, are three Gods. That the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are the one true God, I fully believe; but not Sherlock’s exposition of the doctrine. Nay, I think it would have been far better to have worded the mystery thus:—The Father together with his Son and Spirit, is the one true God.
“Each ‘per se’ God.” This is the [Greek: proton mega pseudos] of Sherlock’s scheme. Each of the three is whole God, because neither is, or can be ‘per se’; the Father himself being ‘a se’, but not ‘per se’.
Ib. p. 149.
For it is demonstrable that if there be three Persons and one God, each Person must be God, and yet there cannot be three distinct Gods, but one. For if each Person be not God, all three cannot be God, unless the Godhead have Persons in it which are not God.
Three persons having the same nature are three persons;—and if to possess without limitation the divine nature, as opposed to the human, is what we mean by God, why then three such persons are three Gods, and will bethought so, till Gregory Nyssen can persuade us that John, James, and Peter, each possessing the human nature, are not three men. John is a man, James is a man, and Peter is a man: but they are not three men, but one man!
Ib. p. 150.