between the Three Persons:  in John it became increasingly clear to me that the divine Son is unequal to the Father.  To say that “the Son of God” meant “Jesus as man,” was a preposterous evasion:  for there is no higher title for the Second Person of the Trinity than this very one—­Son of God.  Now, in the 5th chapter, when the Jews accused Jesus “of making himself equal to God,” by calling himself Son of God Jesus even hastens to protest against the inference as a misrepresentation —­beginning with:  “The Son can do nothing of himself:”  and proceeds elaborately to ascribe all his greatness to the Father’s will.  In fact, the Son is emphatically “he who is sent,” and the Father is “he who sent him:”  and all would feel the deep impropriety of trying to exchange these phrases.  The Son who is sent,—­sent, not after he was humbled to become man, but in order to be so humbled,—­was NOT EQUAL TO, but LESS THAN, the Father who sent him.  To this I found the whole Gospel of John to bear witness; and with this conviction, the truth and honour of the Athanasian Creed fell to the ground.  One of its main tenets was proved false; and yet it dared to utter anathemas on all who rejected it!

I afterwards remembered my old thought, that we must surely understand our own words, when we venture to speak at all about divine mysteries.  Having gained boldness to gaze steadily on the topic, I at length saw that the compiler of the Athanasian Creed did not understand his own words.  If any one speaks of three men, all that he means is, “three objects of thought, of whom each separately may be called Man.”  So also, all that could possibly be meant by three gods, is, “three objects of thought, of whom each separately may be called God.”  To avow the last statement, as the Creed does, and yet repudiate Three Gods, is to object to the phrase, yet confess to the only meaning which the phrase can convey.  Thus the Creed really teaches polytheism, but saves orthodoxy by forbidding any one to call it by its true name.  Or to put the matter otherwise:  it teaches three Divine Persons, and denies three Gods; and leaves us to guess what else is a Divine Person but a God, or a God but a Divine Person.  Who, then, can deny that this intolerant creed is a malignant riddle?

That there is nothing in the Scripture about Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity I had long observed; and the total absence of such phraseology had left on me a general persuasion that the Church had systematized too much.  But in my study of John I was now arrested by a text, which showed me how exceedingly far from a Tri-unity was the Trinity of that Gospel,—­if trinity it be.  Namely, in his last prayer, Jesus addresses to his Father the words:  “This is life eternal, that they may know Thee, the only True God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” I became amazed, as I considered these words more and more attentively, and without prejudice; and I began to understand how prejudice, when embalmed with reverence, blinds the mind.  Why had I never before seen what is here so plain, that the One God of Jesus was not a Trinity, but was the First Person, of the ecclesiastical Trinity?