Might not then, after all, Sabellianism be the truth?  No:  I discerned too plainly what Gibbon states, that the Sabellian, if consistent, is only a concealed Ebionite, or us we now say, a Unitarian, Socinian.  As we cannot admit that the Father was slain on the cross, or prayed to himself in the garden, he who will not allow the Father and the Son to be separate persons, but only two names for one person, must divide the Son of God and Jesus into two persons, and so fall back on the very heresy of Socinus which he is struggling to escape.

On the whole, I saw, that however people might call themselves Trinitarians, yet if, like Stuart and all the Evangelicals in Church and Dissent, they turn into a dead letter the generation of the Son of God, and the procession of the Spirit, nothing is possible but Sabellianism or Tritheism:  or, indeed, Ditheism, if the Spirit’s separate personality is not held.  The modern creed is alternately the one or the other, as occasion requires.  Sabellians would find themselves out to be mere Unitarians, if they always remained Sabellians:  but in fact, they are half their lives Ditheists.  They do not aim at consistency; would an upholder of the pseudo-Athanasian creed desire it?  Why, that creed teaches, that the height of orthodoxy is to contradict oneself and protest that one does not.  Now, however, rose on me the question:  Why do I not take the Irish clergyman at his word, and attack him and others as idolaters and worshippers of three Gods?  It was unseemly and absurd in him to try to force me into what he must have judged uncharitableness; but it was not the less incumbent on me to find a reply.

I remembered that in past years I had expressly disowned, as obviously unscriptural and absurd, prayers to the Holy Spirit, on the ground that the Spirit is evidently God in the hearts of the faithful, and nothing else:  and it did not appear to me that any but a few extreme and rather fanatical persons could be charged with making the Spirit a third God or object of distinct worship.  On the other hand, I could not deny that the Son and the Father were thus distinguished to the mind.  So indeed John expressly avowed—­“truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.”  I myself also had prayed sometimes to God and sometimes to Christ, alternately and confusedly.  Now, indeed, I was better taught! now I was more logical and consistent!  I had found a triumphant answer to the charge of Ditheism, in that I believed the Son to be derived from the Father, and not to be the Unoriginated—­No doubt! yet, after all, could I seriously think that morally and spiritually I was either better or worse for this discovery?  I could not pretend that I was.