That three Beings are each individually Almighty is a self-evident contradiction. If the Son be almighty in the original sense, THE FATHER is not all-mighty; and so of the Father as regards the Son, and of both as respects the Spirit, if a distinct infinite agent or intelligence. The might which is participated with another cannot be all of might. Neither can the Father be all-good, allmerciful, or all-just; for if these attributes be divided with the Son and Spirit, he cannot possess them in totality. So it is equally a contradiction to say that each is by himself perfect God: divided perfection is not perfection. Perhaps they who appoint, in their solemn sacramental formulary, that on TRINITY-Sunday (terms equally anti-scriptural, though not of equal moment) the name of THE HOLY FATHER is to be erased, will concede, in their zeal for the Trinity, that he is neither by himself all-mighty, nor by himself perfect God. They have indeed a pretext of including Son and Spirit in the Father; but the Father, if they be included, is still almighty and perfect God only through their co-essentiality.

If the Son were perfect God and co-equal with the Father, he could not be sent from the Father; he would have spoken and acted from himself, and not from the Father; he would have "taken his life again" without "commandment from the Father;" he would have raised Lazarus without praying to the Father; he would not have said "I will pray the Father, and he will send you another comforter." For the subterfuge of a double nature and subordinate humanity will not here avail: it is spoken, not of his human state on earth, but of his after-state in glory; and if in that state he prayed to the Father, he was not coequal with him, nor of himself perfect God.

If the Spirit be a distinct intelligence in the Godhead, and equal in might and omniscience

with the Father, he could not be sent by the Father; and the Son could not by prayer to the Father obtain power to send him; nor would the Son have prayed to the Father, but to the holy Spirit himself; yet Christ, who prays to the Father, never prays to the Spirit. If the Father, Son, and Spirit, be only modes and qualities of which God is the substance or substratum, and if the same being who was the Son was also the Father and the Spirit, then Christ must have been sent by himself, must have prayed to himself, have received commandment from himself, have invocated himself on being by himself forsaken, have ascended to himself, have received from himself commandment to execute judgment, have been exalted by himself to be a Prince and a Saviour: when he sent the promise of his Father upon the disciples, he sent himself from himself; and when he shall become subject to him who put all things under him, he will only resign to himself the authority which he had from himself received.

There is no single Gospel instance of prayer addressed to the Spirit, or of glory directly ascribed to it, either separately or conjointly; and it rests on repeated scripture evidence, that the Spirit was the "spirit of the Father," "the spirit of our God," an energy which he "shed forth," a power which is said to fall upon the Apostles, a gift which could be imparted, as it was from Jesus to his disciples, and from them to Christian converts. It rests on the same evidence, that the term GOD, in the few instances where the title is accommodated to Jesus, could not have conveyed to the Jewish disciples and proselytes any impression of original deity in Jesus; because the Jews were deeply impressed with the unipersonality of their God JEHOYAH: Zechariah xiv. 9, "In that day shall there be ONE Lord, and his name ONE;" and Jesus confirmed their belief: Mark xii. 29, "Hear, O

Israel! the LORD our GOD is ONE LORD;" and because, in Jewish usage, it had ever borne a titular or derivative sense, as designating commissioned prophets or anointed princes, and could not therefore be consistently withheld from him who was in the higher and more particular sense the "elect or "anointed" of God. And it is demonstrable from the same evidence, that Jesus never arrogated any such dignity of nature to himself, but spoke of all his powers, and his very commission itself, as originating with God; who, as having adopted him for a Son, was in an emphatical sense HIS FATHER; and that, though he speaks of "he and his Father being one," nothing can be inferred from this expression relative to unity of essence, but it must be interpreted of will and operation; since the same one-ness with THE FATHER is by JESUS prophesied of his own Apostles; and "the Father being seen in him" plainly interprets itself by his doing whatever he seeth the Father do," or by being the medium of the will of his Father.

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The passage, John xiv. 28, "My Father is greater than I," is said by Trinitarians to prove indirectly that Christ was God; since no human prophet or even supra-angelic messenger would have thought it necessary to make such a declaration. Yet the declaration is reduced to the same sort of unmeaning truism, by the very gloss which they themselves put upon it, as it is by them affirmed that Jesus spoke with reference merely to his human nature; and his hearers could certainly not require to be told that he, as man, was inferior to God; though the author of the spurious Athanasian creed, pressed probably by this text, affirms in the same manner that Jesus is inferior to THE FATHER as touching his manhood." The objection therefore returns upon the hands of those who make it. Jesus could not mean to speak of

himself as the man Jesus merely, but as the man Jesus Christ. It was not the man Jesus merely who had been with them and was to be taken from *them, but the man Jesus Christ. It was not the loss of the man Jesus merely which the power of the Father was to supply, but the loss of Jesus who was the Christ. It was of himself, then, absolutely as Jesus Christ, that Jesus, while comforting his disciples, spoke; it was as the Christ that he referred them for aid and support to the mightier support of the Father who sent him. If the power of Christ were co-equal, why should he have consoled them by saying that he went to the Father? The expression, tried by the standard of common sense, cannot be referred to the human inferiority of Jesus; and though it may consist with the deity of Jesus in the ante-Nicene economy of the Trinity, it is directly contradictory to the modern scholastic Trinity, and totally destructive of the co-eternity and co-equality of the three persons in the Godhead.

Some, however, are of opinion that Christ, when he entered the form of man or became incarnate, laid aside his divinity; and that "My Father is greater than I," may mean "he is now greater than I;" which may be paraphrased, "I am now," in this form of a servant, "inferior to myself;" or "Myself is greater than I," with reference, not to the mere distinction of the human and divine natures, but to a voluntary divestment of deity. Yet it is still said that by his own proper divinity he wrought, miracles, read the thoughts of men, and raised himself from the dead. How, then, had he laid it aside? and, if he had, where was the necessity of a God coming in the nature of man at all? For if all of that nature which constituted him God were laid aside, he was as a common man altogether; though the orthodox doctrine is, that he was "perfect God and perfect

man," and had not emptied himself of his divinity, or of any portion of it. A common man, then, would have answered the design of his mission as well; and this holds equally with regard to the plea that it was necessary for the second person of God, or for God under a new aspect or relation, to die, in order to make an infinite satisfaction to the first person of God, or to himself under a different aspect or relation, for the infinite sin of the first man, whom God had notwithstanding created with the fore-knowledge that he would sin; this being also the infinite sin of all Adam's posterity, who had sinned in their first father without their consent. For if this God of God, or God of himself, laid aside his infinite deity in order to make this satisfaction, the satisfaction was not infinite, nor made by divinity at all; and if it had been so made, God impassive and immortal must have died; and if the human nature only suffered, the end would here also have been answered by mon man. If it be urged that he did not lay aside his divinity, then, regarding the man Christ Jesus as also properly God, both the modal Trinity and the co-equal tripersonal Trinity are set aside: for, by the assertion "My Father is greater than I," there is a distinction of persons; unless Christ be made to say "I am greater in one relation than in another," or "I am sometimes greater than myself." If it be not God under three aspects, but God of three infinite minds made one by community of essence and consciousness, then there is a distinction of order or dignity: "My Father is greater than I."

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If the Trinitarian consider the words as referring to Christ's manhood, or to the fact that God as God is greater than man as man, he falls into the same absurdity as that with which he reproaches the Unitarian believer in Christ's simple humanity, the putting a truism in the mouth of Jesus. If he