all framers of peculiar systems. The Jew denies the truth of the whole of the New Testament, not because he can disprove any part of it, but because it treats of the actions and teachings of a Messiah, such as his nation will not receive. His Scriptures, he declares, and we readily admit, to be unquestionably canonical and true. They announce the time when Christ was to come, at which time he did appear, although they affirm that his advent is delayed. Now this denial has no effect upon the rest of the religious world, because it is known and seen to spring from obstinacy of belief and a judicial blindness; and, moreover, in this case, the conduct of the Jews is observed to fulfil their own accepted Scriptures. But the Jew and the Unitarian are the only parties who bring against our Scriptures the charge of untruth, if we except, perhaps, one passage blotted out to form the creed of the Romanist, and which the Jew satisfactorily proves to be both genuine and authentic; I mean, the Second Commandment, the rejection of which is admitted by none professing to believe the Bible but the Romanist; because it is seen that a "fond conceit," and a leading doctrine and practice, of the Romish Church is forbidden by this pretended addition. I must not forget that, with respect to the New Testament, words are falsely rendered, and the sense of some passages is wrested to a peculiar meaning, also, by the Romanists, in order that they

may establish or enforce their particular practices and belief: and thus it is that the Jew, the Unitarian, and the Romanist, alter and amend, and regard as spurious or interpolated, only what militates against their own respective, peculiar, systems. Now, of the Holy Volume, as of the chain of universal being, it may be said,

"Whatever link you strike, Tenth, or ten-thousandth part, divides the chain alike.” We have shown, then, this day, by the evidence of witnesses whose testimony is as valuable as sound learning and piety, fair character and calm judgment can make it, that our Scriptures divulge the high and mysterious doctrine of a Trinity in Unity; and nothing that the witnesses have adduced in its support has been so much as shaken by all the sifting, shifting, and subterfuge which has been employed to render any part of their evidence doubtful. They prove, and they support their proof by the unanimous sanction of all the Christian world, (for I will maintain that the Defendants exclude themselves from that religious community,) that the doctrine of the Trinity, that is, of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, three persons in one divine nature, is the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, the belief of which is required of us all on the faith of the word of God. This doctrine has been admirably illustrated

by the witness Leslie, in an example taken from our own nature, where the understanding, the memory, and the will, three distinct faculties are seen to constitute the one soul of man; that mysterious part of us of which we know no more than that it exists. Where or how it so exists, is altogether hid from us; and as we cannot unravel a plain circumstance thus mysteriously attached to our own earthly, much less can we expect to comprehend what belongs to an infinitely higher, and divine nature, beyond what God has been graciously pleased faintly to trace, and shadow out to us in his revelation. The doctrine, however, is not confined to Christianity, although it is there more clearly manifested than in any of the previous dispensations. There can be no doubt that it was known to the

"The three persons in the Trinity," says Tertullian, "stand to each other in the relation of the root, the shrub, and the fruit; of the fountain, the river, and the cut from the river; of the sun, the ray, and the terminating point of the ray." For these illustrations he professes himself indebted to the revelations of the Paraclete. In later times, divines have occasionally resorted to similar illustrations, for the purpose of familiarising the doctrine of the Trinity to the mind; nor can any danger arise from the proceeding, so long as we recollect that they are illustrations, and not arguments; that we must not draw conclusions from them, or think that whatever may be truly predicated of the illustration, may be predicated with equal truth of that which it was designed to illustrate. Bishop Kaye's Eccl. Hist. of Second and Third Centuries, p. 534.

Patriarchs, and that, after the flood, Noah and his descendants preserved so much of the knowledge of what had been vouchsafed to the antediluvian world, that the tradition of it was transferred from age to age, faintly marked indeed, but still sufficient to be traced; until, at length, it was adopted by the philosophers of antiquity, and grafted into their system of a divine Triad: and thus, as Dryden says, "What Socrates said of God, what Plato wrote, and the rest of the heathen philosophers of several nations spoke, is all no more than the twilight of revelation, after the sun of it was set in the race of Noah." 1 This knowledge of a Trinity further appears from the accounts given of the cavern of Elephanta, thought to be the most ancient temple of the world, in which is rudely but distinctly carved, in the solid rock, a colossal representation of the Hindoo deity, with one body and three heads,

1 Pref. to Religio Laici.

2 At the upper end of the principal cave, which is in the form of a cross, and exceedingly resembles the plan of an ancient basilica, is an enormous bust with three faces, reaching from the pavement to the ceiling of the temple. It has generally been supposed, and is so even by Mr. Erskine, a representation of the Trimurti, or Hindoo Trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. But more recent discoveries have ascertained that Siva himself, to whose worship and adventures most of the ornaments of the cave refer, is sometimes represented with three faces, so that the temple is evidently one to the popular deity of the modern Hindoos alone. - Bishop Heber's “Narrative of a Journey," vol. iii. p. 81.

adorned with the oldest symbols of Indian theology, and avowed, by the sacerdotal tribe of India, to indicate the Creator, the Preserver, and the Regenerator of mankind. That this may be affirmed to be their triune divinity, seems certain from the testimony of a Sanscreet inscription upon a stone found in a cave near the ancient city of Gyre in the East Indies, in which the three persons, Brahma, Veeshnoo, and Mahesa, the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer of Evil, make one great divinity, whose name (AUM) is forbidden to be uttered aloud.1 A triad of deity may be traced in the

The Deity who is the Lord, the possessor of all, appeared in the ocean of natural beings at the beginning of the Kalee Yoog (the age of contention and baseness). He who is omnipresent, and everlastingly to be "contemplated, the Supreme Being, the Eternal One, the Divinity worthy to be adored, appeared here with a portion of his divine nature. Reverence be unto Thee in the form of Bood-dha (author of happiness). Reverence be unto the Lord of the Earth! Reverence be unto Thee, an INCARNATION of the Deity and the Eternal One. Reverence be unto Thee, O God! in the form of the God of Mercy! the dispeller of pain and trouble; the Lord of all things; the Deity who overcometh the sins of the Kalee Yoog; the guardian of the universe; the emblem of mercy towards those who serve thee! O-M (the unutterable title of the Deity)! The possessor of all things in vital form! Thou art Brahma, Veeshnoo, Mahesa! Thou art Lord of the universe! Thou art under the form of all things, moveable and immoveable, the possessor of the whole! And thus I adore thee! Reverence be unto the Bestower of salvation, and the Ruler of the faculties. Reverence be unto