there to intercede for us; and is exalted by the Father tothe kingdom, in order to govern the world and the church.

The holy Spirit, in the sacred economy of our salvation, is sent from the Father by the Son, to lead sinners into the knowledge of the truth, to change their natures, to sanctify or make them holy, to comfort and conduct them to glory, as well as to work miracles in the world, for the confirmation of this gospel.

Now all these are so many several offices, characters and actions, which cannot be promiscuously applied to one another, in the same manner as they are attributed distinctly to each of the sacred Three in scripture; and therefore they must be accounted distinct personal actions, &c. I know not how it is possible for any one to read these following texts of scripture, wherein all the blessed Three are mentioned together, without supposing them to be three distinct personal agents.

Is. xlii. 1.. Where God the Father says, "Behold my servant whom I uphold, I will put my Spirit upon him." Is. lxi. 1. Where the Son of God in prophecy says, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me." Luke iii. 22. "And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape, 1ke a dove upon him, that is Christ, and a voice came from heaven, which said, thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased." Here are the three persons of the blessed Trinity, manifesting themselves in a sensible manner at the baptism of Christ. The Son like a man, the holy Spirit as a dove, and the Father speaking from heaven. Mat. xxviii. 19. "Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." John xiv. 16, 17. "And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, even the Spirit of truth." John xiv. 26. "The Comforter which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, and he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your rememberance, whatsoever I have said unto you." The little word he in the greek is Ex which is always used for a person. John xv. 26. "I will send unto you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceedeth from the Father, he shall bear witness of me." Where this personal word exis again used.

EXAY

Rom. viii. 11. "The Spirit of him, that is, the Father, who raised up Jesus from the dead." Rom. xv. 30. "I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me, in your prayers to God for me." 2 Cor. xiii. 14. "The grace of the

Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all, amen." Epfi. ii. 18. "Through him, that is, Christ, we both have an access by one Spirit unto the Father." Eph. iv. 4, 5, 6. "There is one Spirit, one Lord,

one God and Father of all." 1 Pet. 1. 2. "Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience, and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. Jude verses 20, 21. "Praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life."

I think the plain and express scripture contained in these citations, sufficiently distinguishes three personal agents, without any further comment upon them. A Turk, or an Indian, that reads them without any prepossession, would certainly understand most of them so.

PROP. XIII.-Therefore it has been the Custom of the Christian Church in almost all Ages, to use the Word Person, in Order to describe these Three Distinctions of Father, Son, and Spirit; and to call them Three distinct Persons.

The word person signifies, in the common language of mankind, one single intelligent voluntary agent, or a principle of action that has understanding and will. So three men, or three angels, are properly called three distinct persons; and the Father, the Son and Spirit, who are all one God, yet having three such distinct sort of actions and characters attributed to them, as may properly be ascribed to three distinct intelligent agents, we make no scruple to call them three persons. For it is sufficiently evident, that three mere names, three attributes, three modes or manners of being, three relations, or three sorts of conception of one and the same single or individual being, are not sufficient to sustain the three different offices, or to perform the three different sorts of actions, which are attributed to Father, Son, and Spirit Nor can we account for them, without supposing three distinct intelligent agents.

It might be also mentioned to confirm this proposition, that the scripture itself used the word person, in one or more places, to distinguish the Father from the Son. Heb. i. 3. Christ is called the express image of his Father's person. And though the Greek word "hypostasis," which we well render person, sometimes signifies substance, as it is translated Heb. xi. 1. yet in that very place the word seems to intimate a distinction from the Father, strong enough to answer the word person in our language. Again in 2 Cor. iv. 6. "The knowledge of the glory of God shines forth in the person of Jesus Christ;" which perhaps is a better translation of the Greek word wowo "prosopon," then when we render it the face of Christ.

Though the word person be fitly used and applied in this case, yet we generally suppose it is not to be taken exactly in the same sense, as when we apply the word to three men, or or three angels, and call them three distinct persons; for they

have not such real communion in one nature, as these three sacred persons have in one godhead. But since these things are so difficult to determine, I will never contend with my brother, or fellow-christian, who scruples to use the word person in this doctrine; provided he will but allow such a distinction between the sacred three, as is sufficient to support their distinct characters and offices assigned to them in scripture: And this is all that I mean by using this word. Yet since the word person is the best word that we know, and comes nearest to the ideas or conceptions, which the scripture seems to give us of the distinction between Father, Son, and Spirit; I use it still with great freedom and satisfaction, in a sense near a-kin to the common sense of the word.

A MORAL ARGUMENT.

As I have used one moral argument at the end of the tenth proposition, to prove the true and proper Deity of Father, Son, and Spirit: so I shall propose another of the same kind under this proposition, to confirm both the doctrine of their Deity and distinct personality together: And it is this,

This great article of belief, that "Father, Son, and Spirit are three persons, and yet one God," is so sublime in its nature, so impossible to be found out by human reason if it had not been revealed; it carries in it such an appearance of contradiction at first, it is so exceeding hard to explain and reconcile, even when it is well considered by us; and it is so shocking and offensive in the most usual explications of it to the great pretenders to reason, that it can hardly be supposed how it should enter into the minds of men at first; and how it should have been so generally believed in the christian church in almost all ages of christianity, if it had not been very plainly revealed, and strongly confirmed in scripture so that those honest and conscientious men could not wink against the light and strength of evidence, nor turn the scripture to any other sense.

It is not to be imagined that such a doctrine of the Trinity, which has no countenance from the light of nature nor any man-ner of allurement in it to gratify the lusts or fancies of men, nor flatter the pride of human reason, should ever have come, without most forcible evidence, into the heads of such multitudes of great and wise men, who thought and searched with freedom for themselves, and who read the bible with a honest enquiry after truth; I say it is not to be imagined that such a strange article should ever have been believed by these men, and brought into the church, or subsisted there so many hundred years, and especially since the reformation, were it not for the plain, strong, over-bearing light, and resistless proofs of it that are found in

the word of God*. Several remarks with which the reverend ministers of London have prefaced their late " Harmony of confessions" on this article, are well worth notice here, see pages 41-47.

PROP. XIV. Though the Sacred Three are evidently and plainly discovered in Scripture, to be one and the same God, and three distinct personal Agents or Persons, yet the Scripture hath not in plain and evident Language explained and precisely determined the particular Way and Manner, how these Three Persons are one God, or how this one Godhead is in Three Persons.

The truth of this doctrine, that "there are three divine persons and one God, is abundantly more evident in the scripture, than any particular explication of this sacred doctrine: And though learned men have endeavoured to explain the Trinity by reason, to determine the " modus" or manner how three are one, and one three, to defend their schemes by human arguments, and to illustrate them by several similitudes, yet these illustrations, these explainings and reasonings, with the human terms that belong to them, are not to be esteemed, as they have too often been, the matter of divine revelation, any farther than they are by evident and irresistible consequence drawn from the word of God.

Among these explications, some of them seem to me to be evidently false and insufficient.

Such is the Arian scheme, which supposes the Father only to be the true God, and that the two other persons have not true, proper and eternal godhead belonging to them: And such is the Sabellian scheme, which supposes the Father, Son, and Spirit, not to be distinct persons, but mere different names, modes, and appearances of the one God. One of these denies the true godhead, the other the personality.

Other schemes have been multiplied in the christian world, which do indeed secure and maintain the substance of the scriptural doctrine of the Trinity, as the Athanasian, the scholastic scheme, &c. Yet they have such various difficulties attending them, that I do not think it necessary to trouble the private christian with a long detail of them here.

And indeed to speak my own sentiments freely, I must say,

How the particular explications of this doctrine came to be so various, both in the writings of the primitive and modern christians, will be easily accounted for in the following proposition, viz. "because scripture has not clearly explained it." And if the bulk of the christian world, has at any time for some ages together followed one and the same scheme of explication, it is because they found undeniably the plain doctrine of three persons, and one God revealed in scripture, and they knew no other way to give a tolerable explication of it all that time,

that upon a fresh and unbiassed search of matters a mature and deliberate view of the scriptural doctrine of the Trinity, as I find it in the bible, and a new survey of the several schemes found out to explain it, I am more firmly established than ever in this doctrine, that Father, Son, and Spirit, are the one true God, yet subsisting in three persons: But as to the various schemes of explication, there is not any of them can prevail upon me any farther now, than to receive them as possible or probable explications of a very deep and difficult doctrine of scripture.

But suppose the professors of any of the best of these schemes should find sufficient arguments from the word of God, to demonstrate the truth of their own scheme, and could prove it beyond all contradiction, that their particular explication of the Trinity, is the very doctrine that is revealed in the Holy Scripture, yet I am sure they can never prove that it is clearly and plainly revealed there. But it still requires much skill and labour of reasoning to draw it out from scripture, and set it in an evident light.

PROP. XV.-Thence I infer, that it can never be necessary to Salvation, to know the precise Way and Manner how one God subsists in three Personal Agents, or how these Three Persons are one God.

The reasons of this proposition are very evident :

1. Though the doctrine of the Trinity seems to be a fundamental article of christianity, yet the particular explication of this sacred doctrine, as we have hinted before, cannot be a fundamental, because it is not any where revealed to us in scripture, in so plain and manifest language, as the fundamental articles of our religion are and must be:" For the scriptures were written to make the meanest of men wise to salvation; even the babes in Christ, and the weak, and the unlearned, the "base and the foolish things of this world, whom God hath chosen and called;" 1 Cor. i. 27, Now that it is not so plainly revealed, appears, because learned and pious men, who have made a honest search after truth, derive their several explications of this doctrine by long and difficult trains of reasoning, and are often ready to commit mistakes, and to run counter to the most established principles of natural reason, and sometimes contra, dict themselves too in this work.

I will not deny but there may be several truths both of natural and revealed religion that are merely drawn by reasoning and consequence, which may yet be necessary to salvation. But then these are such as are open and obvious to the first view of reason, and such as lie very near the surface of scripture, if I may so express it, and may be inferred with the greatest ease by men of the lowest rank of understanding. Such easy and obvious consequences may contain fundamental doctrines. But