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 the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one;” i.e., they are distinct persons, but without distinction of substance. The personality, therefore, arises purely in the relation of the Fatherhood; i.e., the idea of the person is here only a relative idea, the idea of a relation. Man as a father is dependent, he is essentially the correlative of the son; he is not a father without the son; by fatherhood man reduces himself to a relative, dependent, impersonal being. It is before all things necessary not to allow oneself to be deceived by these relations as they exist in reality, in men. The human father is, over and above his paternity, an independent personal being; he has at least a formal existence for himself, an existence apart from his son; he is not merely a father, with the exclusion of all the other predicates of a real personal being. Fatherhood is a relation which the bad man can make quite an external one, not touching his personal being. But in God the Father, there is no distinction between God the Father and God the Son as God; the abstract fatherhood alone constitutes his personality, his distinction from the Son, whose personality likewise is founded only on the abstract sonship.

But at the same time these relations, as has been said, are maintained to be not mere relations, but real persons, beings, substances. Thus the truth of the plural, the truth of polytheism is again affirmed, and the truth of monotheism is denied. To require the reality of the persons is to require the unreality of the unity, and conversely, to require the reality of the unity is to require the unreality of the persons. Thus in the holy mystery of the Trinity,—that is to say, so far as it is supposed to represent a truth distinct from human nature,—all resolves itself into delusions, phantasms, contradictions, and sophisms.