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cherish every suggestion of good, lest haply we should be found to resist, to grieve, to quench the Holy Spirit and while we add to the confidence that God is our Father, and that God is our Redeemer, the confidence that God is our Sanctifier, we should ever acknowledge the awfulness, as well as the greatness and blessedness, of our Christian privileges, which are brought down to us by the agency of that Person in the ever blessed and glorious Trinity, against whom may be committed the unpardonable sin. Enough surely to make us rejoice with trembling.

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SERMON XIII.

THE TRINITY IN UNITY.

1 JOHN v. 7.-There are three that bear record in Heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are One.

THE doctrine of the Trinity in Unity is confessed only by implication in the Apostles' Creed: but having now, in the course of our exposition of that formulary, stated the sense of the Church therein, in her mention of three divine persons, The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; it is necessary, or at least appropriate, to state her doctrine concerning that unity of the Godhead, from which, if the doctrines already stated be disjoined, they are not orthodoxy but Tritheism; and from which, in fact, they never have been disjoined by any sound branch of the Church of Christ.

But we dare not enter on this subject without the preparation of some remarks, on the way in which revealed mysteries ought to be approached. For when, as in the whole course of these lectures on the Creed, we are making instruction and an appeal to the rea

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sonable faith, rather than to the passions and emotions, our first object; it is plain that the temptation, always too strong, is doubted, rather inquisitively than devotionally, to approach the mysteries of our most holy religion; and in the same proportion the danger is increased, lest we arrive at error rather than truth, and receive destruction rather than salvation as our reward.

In the Temple at Jerusalem was a most Holy Place, the peculiar sanctuary of Jehovah's unapproachable majesty, towards which the Jew looked with reverential awe, and into the precincts of which not even priests and Levites dared to intrude unbidden. Nay, whose sanctity was guarded with such jealousy, and confessed with such fear, that even the High Priest, who was required once in the year to enter it in the discharge of his office, was met at his return by his family and friends, rejoicing that he had come alive and unscathed from the Holy of Holies.*

The Christian, too, hath his Holy of Holies in the high and unsearchable mysteries of his heaven-taught faith; and in all those unrevealed things concerning God himself, which it is needless and impossible for us to know, in our present stage of existence; and which it hath been the good purpose of Jehovah himself to cover with an impenetrable veil. The outer courts of the sanctuary are thrown open to him; and he is not only permitted, he is invited, exhorted, commanded, to press into them: and he finds them crowded Lightfoot.

with whatever is fitted for the exercise of his mind and heart in the study and love of religion; with whatever is adapted to occupy him in the active service of his Lord. But each forbidden step beyond, or rather beside the veil (for through it he can never pass), were a step of presumption and danger, and, however little he might expect it, into darkness.*

For indeed there hath been no more fruitful source of infidelity and of heresy, than an attempt to fathom those depths of theology which it was not intended that we should comprehend, and which we were not, therefore, created with faculties to comprehend. One of three consequences naturally follows such an attempt: either, first, an humble and abashed sense of the shortness and dimness of our intellectual ken; or, secondly, a mad conviction that where we have been unable to discover reason and proportion all is nonsense and imposture; or, thirdly, an attempt to bring all things within the measure of that compass which we have applied to their investigation: the third consequence is heresy in its myriad odious forms; the second is scepticism in its various degrees; and if by the first any be made better, it is so as by fire, or as the sinner arises more holy, not from his fall, but from his penitence.

* Παντες δε όσοι Θεον καταλαβεσθαι. κ. τ. λ. “For all who have rushed forward to apprehend God, have followed their own shadow; and all who have wished to form any adequate definition of the essence of God, have thought to measure the great deep in the hollow of their hand; and whoever have imagined themselves to have gone the deepest in such speculations, have fallen into impious heresies."ATHANASII Quæst. ad Antiochum. I.

Yet fully impressed as we are with these considerations, it will be impossible to preserve such an awful mysteriousness in our statement of the doctrine now before us as we could wish for among the evil consequences of the too bold intrusion into mysteries, this is the worst; that the church, though she hath never been so far affected, even at the times at which such a habit was most freely indulged, as to become herself infidel and heretical; has been obliged to oppose heretics and infidels, by a sacrifice, to some extent, of her own reverential habit of transmitting what she had received as a mystery, in the unpolluted sanctity and shadow of its mysterious announcement in holy writ. And especially on the subject of the doctrine which we are now about to state, the fathers of the primitive church were forced into expressions, so far at least systematic, as to oppose the systematic errors of the Arians: but how sorely against their will, we may learn from their declarations, that they deemed the words of heretics so repugnant to all devotion, that to pronounce them even for the purpose of refutation seemed to involve a pollution; and that the hands and the lips which were forced to this service were in some sort unhallowed. *

The doctrine thus fearlessly attacked and reverently defended, involves the most fundamental truth of all religion, and the deepest and most comprehensive mystery of all revelation. The Lord thy God is ONE

* "Sunt tam superba, ut mihi non modo adfirmari, sed ne refelli quidem sine aliquo piaculo posse videantur."-VINCEN. LIRIN. xiv.

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