be found to contradict a known or revealed truth, that doctrine is inadmissible.

Lindsey. Very well. We can and we do make a difference between things incomprehensible, and which exceed our understandings, and those which are direct contradictions. Is it not then a direct contradiction to say, that God should be man, and that three men should make but one man?

Witness. If by man you mean person, it is a contradiction; but it is none to say that there may be several human persons in the same human nature. One human nature includes many human persons. For what is a contradiction? It is where two opposites are alleged in support of the same thing, in the same respect. We may say, that three men, or three thousand men, make but one company; here is no contradiction: to say that three persons make but one person is a direct contradiction; but to affirm that three persons may be in one nature is

not so.

Lindsey. But every person partaking of this common nature is a distinct man from all other men, and one man cannot be another.

Witness. That one person cannot be another person, I grant: but though we call each person a distinct man, yet that is only with regard to his personality; for one man, though he differs from another in person, does not differ in his nature. Now, though we allow this common way of speak

ing of mankind, to say one, two, or three men, when it is only strictly true of their persons; yet it is not allowable to speak in such terms of one, two, or three Gods, when speaking of the persons in the divine nature.

Lindsey. Allowing the divine nature to be infinitely exalted above the human, yet, surely, what is a contradiction in one nature is so in another.

Witness. I beg your pardon. That which is a contradiction in one nature is not necessarily a contradiction in another.

Lindsey. I don't understand you.

Witness. Let me give you an example. Is it not a contradiction to say, that while I am standing before you in this Court, I am in your society in another place? This is a flat contradiction as respects my person; but it is no contradiction as to my soul, which is at one and the same time present in all the most distant parts of my body. Again, is it not a contradiction that yesterday should be to-day; or that to-day should be tomorrow? That would imply that the same thing should be past and not past, present and not present, at hand and yet not come. But with God all things are present, there is nothing past or to come in eternity.' Hence, what is a contradiction

1 God's infinite duration being accompanied with infinite knowledge and infinite power, he sees all things past and to

to body, is not so to soul; what is a contradiction to time, is none to eternity; and what is a contradiction with men, is not so with God. This arises from the difference in the nature of things; so that a contradiction in one nature, does not infer a contradiction in another.1

Lindsey. Certainly there are many things in the divine nature which infinitely exceed our understandings to comprehend; on which account we ought not to apply to God those terms which are only proper to ourselves: as, for instance, the word person, and to say that there are three persons in the Godhead; because this language raises the contradiction of which we complain, and we do not understand how three persons can be in one

nature.

Witness. But we must use terms suited to our faculties of conception: we do not make three persons into one person, but in one nature. If there were words which could express the nature of God properly, or as he is known to the angels of heaven, they would be as unintelligible to us as the word seeing is to one born blind. The Apostle

come; and they are no more distant from his knowledge, no further removed from his sight, than the present: they all lie under the same view. - Locke on the Human Understanding, vol. i. ch. 15. § 12.

First Dialogue, p. 224.

said, when he was "caught up into Paradise he heard unspeakable words which it was not possible for a man to utter." 1

Lindsey. I readily grant that we are obliged to speak of God in terms and words not strictly and properly adapted to him, but borrowed from those by which we speak of ourselves. When we call God our Father, we mean that we have our being from him, though in a different manner from that in which children are descended from human fathers.

Witness. It is precisely thus that we understand the term Person; as, when Christ is called "the express image of God's person," we mean something of a totally different kind from the person of a human being; but we use it as we do the word Father, because we have no other by which we can express it. Indeed, I do not see how you can object to either word, Father or Person, for they are both Scripture terms, and both used, though incorrectly, in condescension to our weak capacities.

Lindsey. Still, let me ask, is it not a contradiction to say that the Son is as old as the Father, as you do of the persons in the Trinity, when you say that they are co-eternal; for must not cause necessarily precede effect?

Witness. This is again measuring one nature by

1 2 Cor. xii. 4.

another, when we can only speak of one in the finite terms of the other: because it is a contradiction between Father and Son among men, it does not follow that it is so with respect to God. The contradictions you allege are all made as parallels between God and the bodily persons of men on earth: if you cannot make such parallels between the soul and the body, which you allow yourself unable to draw, how can you expect to do so between the divine and human natures? 1

Court. Perhaps, Mr. Leslie, it might assist the Jury and myself in better apprehending your opinions of this high mystery of the Trinity, if you could adapt to our comprehensions some illustration, and illustration only, from something with which we are already acquainted, as an outline or a shadow of the doctrine.

Witness. This it will be easy for me to do, by taking the one which I have inserted in my work; I mean, that respecting the human soul.

Court. What is it?

Witness. The soul of man, though in itself one indivisible substance, consists of three principal faculties, the understanding, the memory, and the will. Of these, though all coeval in time, and equally essential to a rational soul, the under

1 First Dialogue, p. 228.