Another deep and inscrutable topic is now to engage our thoughts—­the mystery of a probable Triunity.  While we touch on such high themes, the Christian’s presumption ever is, that he himself approaches them with reverence and prayer; and that, in the case of an unbeliever, any such mind will be courteous enough to his friendly opponent, and wise enough respecting his own interest and safety lest these things be true, to enter upon all such subjects with the seriousness befitting their importance, and with the restraining thought that in fact they may be sacred.

Let us then consider, antecedently to all experience, with what sort of deity pure reason would have been satisfied.  It has already arrived at Unity, and the foregoing attributes.  But what kind of Unity is probable?  Unity of Person, or unity of Essence?  A sterile solitariness, easily understandable, and presumably incommunicative? or an absolute oneness, which yet relatively involves several mysterious phases of its own expansive love?  Will you think it a foregone conclusion, if I assert the superior likelihoods of the latter, and not of the former?  Let us come then to a few of many reasons.  First:  it was by no means probable to be supposed anteriorly, that the God should be clearly comprehensible:  yet he must be one:  and oneness is the idea most easily apprehended of all possible ideas.  The meanest of intellectual creatures could comprehend his Maker, and in so far top his heights, if God, being truly one in one view, were yet only one in every view:  if, that is to say, there existed no mystery incidental to his nature:  nay, if that mystery did not amount to the difficulty of a seeming contradiction.  I judge it likely, and with confidence, that Reason would prerequire for his God, a Being, at once infinitely easy to be apprehended by the lowest of His spiritual children, and infinitely difficult to be comprehended by the highest of His seraphim.  Now, there can be guessed only two ways of compassing such a prerequirement:  one, a moral way; such as inventing a deity who could be at once just and unjust, every where and no where, good and evil, powerful and weak; this is the heathen phase of Numen’s character, and is obviously most objectionable in every point of view:  the other would be a physical way; such as requiring a God who should be at once material and immaterial, abstraction and concretion; or, for a still more confounding paradox to Reason (considered as antagonist to Faith, in lieu of being strictly its ally), an arithmetical contradiction, an algebraic mystery, such as would be included in the idea of Composite Unity; one involving many, and many collapsed into one.  Some such enigma was probable in Reason’s guess at the nature of his God.  It is the Christian way; and one entirely unobjectionable:  because it is the only insuperable difficulty as to His Nature which does not debase the notion of Divinity.  But there are also other considerations.