‘Notes’.  By keeping this faith ‘whole and undefiled’, must be meant that a man should believe and profess it without adding to it or taking from it. * * * First, for adding.  What if an honest plain man, because he is a Christian and a Protestant, should think it necessary to add this article to the Athanasian Creed;—­’I believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be a divine, infallible and complete rule both for faith and manners’.  I hope no Protestant would think a man damned for such addition; and if so, then this Creed of Athanasius is at least an unnecessary rule of faith.

‘Answer’.  That is to say, it is an addition to the Catholic Faith to own the Scriptures to be the rule of faith; as if it were an addition to the laws of England to own the original records of them in the Tower.

This Notary manages his cause most weakly, and Sherlock ‘fibs’ him like a scientific pugilist.  But he himself exposes weak parts, as in p. 27.  The objection to the Athanasian Creed urged by better men than the Notary, yea, by divines not less orthodox than Sherlock himself, is this:  not that this Creed adds to the Scriptures, but that it adds to the original ‘Symbolum Fidei’, the ‘Regula’, the ‘Canon’, by which, according to the greater number of the ’ante’-Nicene Fathers, the books of the New Testament were themselves tried and determined to be Scripture.  Now this ‘Symbolum’ was to bring together all that must be believed, even by the babes in faith, or to what purpose was it made?  Now, say they, the Nicene Creed is really nothing more than a verbal explication of the common Creed, but the clause in the Athanasian (’which faith’, &c.), however fairly deduced from Scripture, is not contained in the Creed, or selection of certain articles of Faith from the Scriptures, or not at least from those preachings and narrations, of which the New Testament Scriptures are the repository.  Might not a Papist plead equally in support of the Creed of Pope Pius:  “The new articles are deduced from Scripture; that is, in our opinion, and that most expressly in our Lord’s several and solemn addresses to St. Peter.”  So again Sherlock’s answer to this paragraph from the Notes is evasive,—­for it is very possible, nay, it is, and has been the case, that a man may believe in the facts and doctrines contained in the New Testament, and yet not believe the Holy Scripture to be either divine, infallible, or complete.

Sect.  IV. p. 50.

We know not what the substance of an infinite mind is, nor how such substances as have no parts or extension can touch each other, or be thus externally united; but we know the unity of a mind or spirit reaches as far as its self-consciousness does, for that is one spirit, which knows and feels itself, and its own thoughts and motions, and if we mean this by ‘circum-incession’, three persons thus intimate to each other are numerically one.

The question still returns; have these three infinite minds, at once self-conscious and conscious of each other’s consciousness, always the very same thoughts?  If so, this mutual consciousness is unmeaning, or derivative; and the three do not cease to be three because they are three sames.  If not, then there is Tritheism evidently.