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council of Constantinople, A. D. 381, condemned the opinions of Macedonius with regard to the Spirit. The council of Nice testified. their disapprobation of the opinions of Arius, and guarded those who should be received into the Christian church against his errors, by the additions which they made to the second article of the ancient creeds; and the council of Constantinople, in like manner, entered their testimony against the errors of Macedonius by the following change upon that creed which had been used in the church of Jerusalem, and which appears to have been the same in substance with that used throughout the Christian world. The third article of the ancient creed had run thus, εις το άγιον πνευμα, το παρακλητον, το λαλήσαν δια των προφητών. Instead of to ragazλntov, which might be conceived to convey a notice of inferiority and ministration in the Holy Ghost, the council of Constantinople introduced the following expressions: Και εις το πνεύμα το άγιον, το κυριον το ζωοποιούν, το εκ του πατζος εκπορευομενον, το συν πατςι και υἱῳ προσκινούμενον και συνδοξαζόμενον, το λαλήσαν δια των προφητών.

The expressions inserted instead of to ragazλntov, were intended to declare, what the natural import of the words very strongly conveys, that majesty of character in the Holy Ghost, and that equality with the Father and the Son in worship and glory, which those who are admitted to Christian baptism after being catechumens had been taught, in the application of the original form, to believe, and which it does not appear that the great body of the church, till the time of Macedonius, had ever thought of questioning.

When, in the sixteenth century, opinions concerning the Son, much bolder than those which had been held by Arius, or any of his followers, were avowed and published by Socinus, it was not possible that he could acquiesce in the received creed concerning the Spirit : and the opinion which he adopted upon this subject was the same with that refined system which has been ascribed by some to Macedonius. Socinus did not say that the Holy Ghost is a creature; he said that it is the power and energy of God sent from heaven to men; that by its being given without measure, as the Scriptures speak, to Jesus Christ, this great Prophet was sanctified, and led, and raised above all the other messengers of heaven; that by the extraordinary measure in which it was given to his apostles, they were qualified for executing their commission; and that it is still communicated in such manner and such degree as is necessary for the comfort and sanctification of the disciples of Jesus.

This is the system of the modern Socinians, which Lardner has brought forward in some pieces that are published in the tenth and eleventh volumes of his works, and which is found often recurring in the writings of Priestly and Lindsey. The arguments upon which this system rests are of the following kind. An attempt is made to reconcile with this system all those passages of Scripture which seem to imply that the Holy Ghost is a distinct person; it is said that the Spirit of God sometimes denotes the power or wisdom of God, as they are communicated to men, i. e. spiritual gifts; that it is sometimes merely a circumlocution for God himself; and that when the Spirit of God appears to be spoken of as a person, we are to understand that there is a figure of speech, the same kind of prosopopoeia by which it is said that charity is kind and envieth not-that sin

deceives and slays us-and that the law speaks. It is allowed that the figure is variously used in different places; but it is alleged, that, by a moderate exercise of critical sagacity, all those passages of the New Testament, in which the Spirit of God is mentioned, may be explained without our being obliged to suppose that a person is denoted by that expression,

This is the Socinian mode of arguing with regard to the Holy Ghost. Upon the other side, it is argued by Bishop Pearson, who has treated the subject very fully and distinctly in his Exposition of the Creed; by Dr. Barrow, in one of his Sermons on the Creed; by Bishop Burnet, on the Thirty-nine Articles, and by others, that numberless actions and operations which unavoidably convey the idea of a person are ascribed to the Holy Ghost-that there are many places in which neither prosopopoeia nor any other figure of speech can account for this manner of speaking-and that the attributes, and names, and description of this person, are such as clearly imply that he is no creature, but truly God.

The subject, it may be seen, from this general account of the argument upon both sides, runs out into a long detail of minute criticism. Without attempting to enter into this, I will only suggest four general observations, which it is proper to carry along with you when you examine those passages which Dr. Clarke has fairly collected in his Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity, and upon which the other writers argue.

1. In many places of Scripture," the Spirit of God" may be a circumlocution for God himself, or for the power and wisdom of God. Thus, when we read," whither shall I go from thy spirit, and whither shall I flee from thy presence?"-" they vexed his holy spirit"-" by his spirit he hath garnished the heavens ;" or when Jesus says, "If I by the Spirit of God;" in another gospel it is, "if I by the finger of God cast out devils," it is not more reasonable to infer from these expressions that the Spirit of God is a person distinct from God, than it would be to suppose that, when we speak of the spirit of a man, we mean a person distinct from the man himself. You will not think that, because the circumlocution, for which the Socinians contend, does not give the true explication of all the passages to which they wish to apply it, there is no instance of its being used in Scripture: and you will always carry along with you this general rule of scripture criticism, that it is most unbecoming those, who profess to derive all their knowledge of theology from the Scriptures, to strain texts in order to make them appear to support particular doctrines, and that there never can be any danger to truth, in adopting that interpretation of Scripture which is the most natural and rational.

2. There are many passages in which "the Spirit of God" means gifts or powers communicated to men, and from which we are not warranted to infer that there is a person who is the fountain and distributer of these gifts. So we read often in the Old Testament," the Spirit of the Lord came upon him," when nothing more is necessarily implied under the expression, than that the person spoken of was endowed with an extraordinary degree of skill, or might or wisdom. So the promises of the Old Testament, "I will pour out my Spirit upon you," were fulfilled under the New Testament, by what are

there called "the gifts of the Holy Ghost;" in reference to which we read, "that Christians received the Holy Ghost"-" that the Holy Ghost was given to them"-" that they were filled with the Spirit." Neither the words of the promise, nor the words that relate the fulfilment of it, suggest the personality of the Spirit; and if we knew nothing more than what such passages suggest, the Socinian system upon this subject would exhaust the meaning of Scripture, and the Spirit would appear to be merely a virtue or energy proceeding from God.

3. But my third observation is, that if there are passages in which the Holy Ghost is clearly and unequivocally described as a person, then, however numerous the passages may be in which "the Spirit of God" appears to be a phrase meaning gifts and powers communicated to men, this does not in the least invalidate the evidence of the personality of the Spirit, because it is a most natural and intelligible figure to express the gifts and powers by the name of that person who is represented as the distributer of them. The true method, then, of stating the question upon this subject between the Socinians and other Christians, is not, whether it be possible to interpret a great number of passages that speak of the Spirit of God, without being obliged to suppose that there is a distinct Person to whom this name is given, but whether there are not some passages by which the personality of the Spirit may be clearly ascertained.

There are two passages of this last kind to which I would direct your attention. The first is, the long discourse of our Lord, in chaps. xiv. xv. and xvi. of John's Gospel, where, in promising the Holy Ghost to the apostles, he describes him as a person who was to be sent and to come, who hears, and speaks, and reproves, and instructs; as a person different from Jesus, because he was to come after Jesus departed, because he was to be sent by Christ, and to receive of Christ, and to glorify Christ; as a person different from the Father, because he was to be sent by the Father, and because he was not to speak of himself, but to speak what he should hear. The second passage is a discourse of the Apostle Paul, 1 Cor. xii. 1-13, where the apostle, in speaking of the diversities of spiritual gifts, represents them as under the administration of one Spirit. It is impossible to conceive words which can mark more strongly than the 11th verse does, that there is a Person who is the author of all spiritual gifts, and who distributes them according to his discretion.

You will meet, in the collection of texts upon this subject, with many other passages which show that the apostles considered the Spirit as a person: and to the inference obviously suggested by all these passages, you are to add this general consideration, that as the prosopopoeia, to which the Socinians have recourse in order to evade the evidence of the personality of the Spirit, appears to be forced and unnatural, when it is applied to the long discourse recorded by John, so the supposition of any such prosopopoeia being there intended, is rendered incredible by our Lord's introducing, after that discourse, the Holy Ghost in the form of baptism, and thus conjoining the Holy Ghost, whom he had described as a person, with the Father and the Son, who are certainly known to be persons. There is, in all this, a continued train of argument, so much fitted to impress our minds with

a conviction of the personality of the Spirit, that, if the Socinian system on this subject be true, it will be hard to fix upon any inference from the language of Scripture in which our minds may safely acquiesce.

4. My fourth observation is, that if the Spirit of God be a person, it follows of course that he is God. I do not say that the Spirit is anywhere in Scripture directly called God: and although the writers on this subject have repeatedly said that this name is given him by implication, because, Acts v. 3, 4, lying to the Holy Ghost is stated as the same as lying to God; and our bodies are called, 1 Cor. vi. 19, the temple of the Holy Ghost, and 1 Cor. iii. 16, the temple of God, yet I would not rest so important an article of faith upon this kind of verbal criticism. The clear proof of the divinity of the Holy Ghost may in my opinion be thus shortly stated. Since all spiritual gifts are represented as being placed under the administration of this person; since blasphemy against him is declared to be an unpardonable sin; since our Lord commands Christians to be baptized into the name of this person as well as into the name of the Father and the Son; and since the apostle Paul prays or wishes for the communion of the Holy Ghost as for the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, it is plain that the Scriptures teach us to honour and worship this person as we honour the Father and the Son; and it is not to be supposed that if he bore to these two persons the relation of a creature to the Creator, we should be in this manner led to consider all the three as of the same nature.

So much force is there in this argument, that the supposition of the Spirit's being a creature has long been abandoned. It has not even that support which the Socinian opinion concerning Jesus Christ appears to derive from the expressions relating to his humanity. The Spirit is nowhere spoken of in those humble terms which belong to the man Christ Jesus: and they who are not disposed to admit his divinity, finding no warrant for affixing to him any lower character, are obliged to deny his existence, by resolving all that is said of him into a figure of speech.

Your business, therefore, in studying the controversy concerning the Spirit, is to examine whether this figure of speech, which is natural in some passages, can be admitted as the explication of all; or whether the impropriety of attempting to introduce it into some places where the Spirit is described, be not so glaring as to leave a conviction upon the mind of every candid inquirer, that the Scriptures reveal to us a third person, whose agency is exerted in accomplishing the purposes of the Gospel and if your minds are satisfied of the personality of the Spirit, you have next to examine whether the descriptions of this person, being incompatible with the notion of that inferiority of character which belongs to a creature, do not lead you to consider him as truly and properly God.

CHAPTER X.

DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY.

FROM the information which is given us concerning the two persons whom the Gospel reveals, it appears to follow that both the Son and the Holy Ghost are truly and essentially God. But this communication of the attributes, the names, and the honours which belong to God the Father, implies that these two persons have an intimate connexion with him, and with one another: and we are thus led, after considering the two persons singly, to attend to the manner in which they are united with the Father. For when reason is able to deduce from Scripture that there are three persons, each of whom is God, that curiosity, which is inseparable from the exercise of our powers, renders her solicitous to investigate the connexion that subsists amongst the three: and it is not till after she has made many unsuccessful attempts, that she is forced to acquiesce in a consciousness of her inability to form a clear apprehension of the subject.

I am now therefore to subjoin to the Scripture account of the Son and the Holy Ghost, a view of the opinions that have been held concerning the manner in which they are united with the Father; a subject which is known in theology by the name of the Doctrine of the Trinity. In stating these opinions, I shall not recite a great deal that I have read without being able to penetrate its meaning; nor shall I attempt to go minutely through all the shades of difference that may be traced; but I shall produce the fruit which I gathered from a wearisome perusal of many authors, by marking the great outlines of the three systems upon this subject, which stand forth most clearly distinguished from one another. I shall give them the names of the Sabellian, the Arian, and the Catholic systems. I call the third the Catholic system, because it is the opinion concerning the Trinity which has generally obtained in the Christian Church.

SECTION I.

THE point, from which a simple distinct exposition of opinions concerning the Trinity sets out, is that fundamental doctrine of natural religion, the unity of God. Although the heathens multiplied gods, yet, even in their popular mythology, a wide distinction was made between the subordinate deities and that Supreme Being from whom they were derived, and by whom they were controlled; and the more enlightened that the mind of any philosopher became, he rose the nearer to an apprehension of the divine unity. Our notions of

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