the Father's contemplation of his perfections neces sarily produced a Son, this Son, being in all respects equal to the Father, and consequently having the same perfections to contemplate, and of course the same power of contemplation, must have produced another

Son.

That you may the more distinctly perceive the force of this reasoning, I shall repeat concerning the Son what you say of the Father; since you must allow that, mutatis mutandis, it must be equally just in one case as the other. "As the Son ever was, his perfections have ever been; and his intellect has been ever active. But perfections which have ever been the ever active intellect must ever have contemplated; and the contemplation which has ever been must ever have been accompanied with its just effect, the personal existence of a Son," which in this case will be a grandson.

The same reasoning will equally apply to the Holy Spirit; so that this divine person also, by the contemplation of his perfections, must produce a son; and the same being true of all the sons, and grandsons, and great grandsons, &c. &c. &c. of these divine persons, (to say nothing of the necessary repetition of the same process with respect to them all,) we have here a source of multiplication of divine persons ad infinitum; and what expedient you can apply to stop the progress of this wonderful fecundity, when there is danger of its exceeding its just bounds, your Lordship does not say. This, you will say, is burlesquing a grave subject. But, my Lord, it is yourself who have burlesqued it, and not I; and your Lordship alone is answerable for all the ridicule which your officious explanation has brought upon the doctrine, and upon yourself. If a man will

say ridiculous things, he must be content to be the subject of ridicule. This I hope will be a caution to you in future, especially if you should feel yourself tempted to enter into any similar explanation of the miraculous conception.

Your Lordship had done much better to have kept to the original idea of the Platonic fathers, which was, not that the generation of the Son was the necessary, or voluntary, effect of any exertion of the Father's in tellect, but that he was that intellect, or his reason itself. This appears to have been very nearly the idea of Bishop Sherlock, who says that the Son is the Fa ther's reflex knowledge; so that he understood the doctrine of the Platonic fathers much better than your Lordship. To this, however, one of his answerers in the Unitarian Tracts, vol. i. makes a very pertinent reply, similar to what I have just observed with respect to your Lordship's peculiar idea. "But the Son," says he, being an infinite and most perfect mind, is un doubtedly able to reflect upon his own wisdom and knowledge; and thus, as well as the Father, to beget a son; and this second son in the trinity may, by the same means and reason, beget another, and so onwards, to infinity. Thus, according to this maxim, that what are faculties in us are persons in God, there may nay there must be, an infinite number of God. Apage!" A Defence of the brief History of the Unitarians against Dr. Sherlock's Answer in his Vindication of the Holy Trinity, p. 28.

66

persons

be

If I could suppose that your Lordship had ever looked into such books as these Unitarian Tracts,

which have been published about a century, I could, almost think that you had borrowed your idea from

in

this anonymous answerer of Bishop Sherlock, who puts that construction upon his words, though they do. not appear to me necessarily to imply what he deduces from them. For he supposes, with your Lordship, that the Son was produced by a reflection upon the. Father's knowledge; whereas the Bishop makes him to be his reflex knowledge itself.

As to what your Lordship says of my rash defiance, which I have again the rashness to repeat, let our readers now judge. "Dr. Priestley's rash defiance, p. 476, I may place among the specimens with which his History, and his Letters to me abound, of his incompetency in this subject, and of the effrontery of that incurable ignorance, which is ignorant even of its. own want of knowledge." Many persons will be of opinion that the ignorance (which your Lordship describes as itself ignorant) and also that the effrontery: (or boldness, which I suppose is itself bold,) of which you here speak are, indeed, to their great surprise, to be found somewhere: but it will now be evident that they are not with me.

As this letter relates to a subject which many persons will not be able to contemplate with much gravity, I shall subjoin to it another article of a similar nature.

This controversy affords many instances of different persons being very differently affected by the same representation of things. Your Lordship says in your Note, p. 49, That God saying Let us make man, Gen. i. 26. " describes a consultation between the persons of the Godhead," and that "this is shown with great brevity, but with the highest degree of evidence and perspicuity, by Dr. Kennicott." Now, my Lord, had any person besides a Trinitarian suggested the idea

of any thing that could be called a consultation, being held by the three persons in the Godhead, you would have said that it was blasphemous; since a consultation among different persons implies a previous ignorance of each other's sentiments, and something like debate; and consequently difference of opinion; and that in a consultation among three persons, if a proposal did not please any one of them, the other two would carry it by a majority. But, the idea being suggested by your. selves, you see nothing absurd in what is most obviously and most ridiculously so.

I would further observe, that a consultation among the persons of the trinity clearly supposes the same distinction in these persons as that which subsists in any three men, each of whom has a train of thinking peculiar to himself, and independent of those trains that are going on in the minds of the other two; so that, whatever they be called, they must in reality be three Gods. If, however, such a consultation may, "with the highest degree of evidence, and even perspicuity," as your Lordship says, be inferred from this phraseology of Moses, is it not a little extraordinary that no Jew ever made the same inference from the passage? I am, &c.

LETTER IX.

Of the Church of Orthodox Jewish Christians at Jerusalem, and of the Veracity of Origen.

MY LORD,

To make it appear at all probable that the doctrine of the trinity was taught by the apostles, your Lordship

has very justly thought it necessary to find it among the Jewish converts, who cannot be supposed to have altogether abandoned the faith which they received from them. That many of them were so far from receiving this doctrine that they held it in abhorrence, you cannot deny; but your Lordship maintains that, notwithstanding this, there was a church of Trinitarian Jews at Jerusalem even subsequent to the time of Adrian; and because what Origen, who must have known the fact, says concerning the Jewish christians is inconsistent with such a supposition, you scruple not to call him a wilful liar. To silence "an adversary," you say, (Letters, p. 260) " he had recourse to the wilful and deliberate allegation of a notorious falsehood*."

Origen evidently makes all the Jewish christians to have been Ebionites, and the Ebionites to have been of two kinds, viz. those who held the doctrine of the miraculous conception, and those who denied it; but he says that neither of them admitted the divinity of Christ. So positive a testimony as this, from so respectable a character, (the most so, I will venture to say, that his age, or that any age can boast,) one would have thought could not have failed to have some weight with persons who had not entirely bid farewell to shame, and who were not determined to support a hypothesis at any rate. It is not only the testimony of a man of the greatest purity of character in all respects, but delivered in the face of all the world, who could not but have known it to be a falsehood if it had

As this is nothing less than the lie direct, it may be well for his Lordship of St. David's that Origen is not now living, and actuated by the modern notions of honour.