Page:Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent Buckley.djvu/428

Rh But we consider two matters to be especially noted, which dropped from the synod, if not with an evil intention, at least rather imprudently, regarding the most august mystery of the most holy Trinity (§ 2, Decreti de Fide), which may readily drive into mischief, the ignorant more especially, and the incautious. First, whilst, after it duly premised that God in Himself is one and most simple, immediately after adding that God Himself is distinguished in three persons, erroneously abandons the common and approved formula in the institutions of the Christian doctrine, by which God is said to be one indeed in three distinct persons, not distinct in three persons; by the change of which formula, this danger of error creeps in by force of the words, that the divine essence is supposed distinct in persons, which Catholic faith confesses to do one in distinct persons, so that it professes it at the same time wholly indistinct in itself.

The other is that which it states regarding the three divine persons themselves, that they, according to their personal and incommunicable properties, more strictly speaking, are expressed or called the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, as though the appellation of Son, consecrated by so many passages of Scripture, would be less proper and exact, which by the very voice of the Father came down from the heavens and from the cloud, as well in the formula of baptism prescribed by Christ, as also in that illustrious confession in which Peter was pronounced blessed by Christ himself, and that should not rather be retained which the angelic preceptor, having been taught by Augustine, taught in his own turn, that "in the name of the Word the same property was conveyed as in the name of the Son," Augustine saying, for instance, "For the same thing is He called Word as Son."

Nor is that signal temerity of the synod, full of fraud, to be passed over in silence, which dares not only to set off with the highest encomiums the declaration of 1682, some time since disapproved by the Apostolic See, but in order to establish for it greater weight, insidiously to include it in the decree inscribed de Fide, openly to adopt the articles contained in it, and to seal with a public and solemn