Page:A Compendium of the Chief Doctrines of the True Christian Religion.djvu/193

Rh And when reason is laid asleep, what are the words of the mouth but lifeless and inanimate things? Or when the mouth speaketh what the reason contradicteth, what are such words but the offspring of folly and infatuation? At this day, with respect to the divine trinity, human reason is bound, like a man tied hand and foot in a prison, and may be compared to a vestal virgin buried alive, for letting out the sacred fire; when nevertheless a divine trinity ought to shine like a lamp in the mind of every member of the church, since God in his trinity, and in his unity, is all in all in every thing that is holy either in heaven or the church. But to make one God of the soul, another of the body, and a third of the operation, what is this but like forming three distinct parts out of the three essentials of one man, which is to behead, and murder him?

In the Christian church, at this day, a divine trinity is acknowledged as existing before the creation of the world, according to which acknowledgment it is supposed, that Jehovah God begat a son from eternity, and that at the same time the holy ghost proceeded from both, and that each of these three singly, or by himself, is God, inasmuch as each is one person subsisting of himself. But this belief, being incomprehensible to reason, is called a mystery, to which there is no other key save this, that those three partake of one divine essence, by which is understood eternity, immensity, omnipotence, and in consequence thereof an equality of divinity, glory, and majesty. That this