THEOLOGY.

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visible and unextended substance, is conceived as consisting ofthree principal faculties, the understanding, the memory, and thewill. Of these, though they are all coeval in time, and equallyessential to a rational soul, the understanding is in the order of na-ture obviously the first, and the memory the second; for it isabsolutely necessary that things must he perceived before they canbe remembered, and they must be remembered and comparedtogether before they can excite volitions, from being, some agree-able, and others disagreeable. The memory therefore may hesaid to spring from the understanding, and the will from both; andas these three faculties are conceived to constitute one soul, so mayThree Divine Persons partaking of the same individual nature oressence constitute one God . 1 hese parallels or analogies are byno means brought forward as proofs of the Trinity , of which theevidence is to be gathered wholly from the word of God ; neitherare they to he considered as perfect, but rather as very distant andincomplete analogies, for we can have no perfect resemblanceto the Godhead; however they may serve perhaps to help our la-bouring minds to form the justest notions of that adorable mys-tery which it is possible for us to form in the present state of our ex-istence; and they seem to rescue the doctrine sufficiently fromthe charge of contradiction, which has been so often urged againstit by Socinian writers. To the last analogy we are aware it hasoften been objected, that the soul may as well be said to consist often or twenty faculties as of three, since the passions are equallyessential to it with the understanding, the memory, and the will,and are as different from one another as these three faculties are.this, however, is probably a mistake; for the best philosophyseems to teach us, that the passions are not innate; that a manWight exist through a long life a stranger to many of them ; andthat there are probably no two minds in which are generated allthe passions; but understanding, memory, and will, are absolutelyand equally necessary to every rational being. But whatever beW this, if the human mind can be conceived to be one indivisible•substance, consisting of different faculties, whether many or few,"'hy should it be thought an impossibility for the infinite and eter-nal nature of God to be communicated to Three Persons acting dif-ferent parts in the creation and government of the world, and in thegreat scheme of man’s redemption. To the doctrine of theTrinitymany objections have been' made, as it implies the divinity of theSon and the Holy ; Ghost; of whom the former assumed our na-ture, and in it died for the redemption of man. These we shallnotice when we come to examine the revelations more peculiarlyChristian; but there is one objection which, as it respects the“doctrine in general, may be properly noticed here. It is said that ;t^e first Christians borrowed the notion of a Tri-une God from lhe :J ater Platonists; and that we hear not of a Trinity in the churchtill converts were made from the-school of Alexandria. But if'this be the case, wc may properly ask, whence had those Platonists 'the doctrine themselves? It is not surely so simple or so obviousas to be likely to have occurred to the reasoning mind of a Pagan ,Philosopher ; or if it be, why do Socinianssuppose it to involve aContradiction ? The Platonic and Pythagorean Trinities neverQ °uld have occurred to the mind of him who, merely, from theJJWrks of creation, endeavoured to discover the' being and attri-butes of the Creator; and therefore as those philosophers travelled;ln tq Egypt and in the East in quest of knowledge, it appears to :J 15 in the highest degree probable, that they picked up this mys-orious and sublime doctrine in those regions where it had been, l, nded down as a dogma from the remotest ages, and where we'u<3w that .science was not taught systematically, but detailed inCollections of sententious maxims and traditionay opinions. Ifhis be so, we cannot doubt but that the Pagan Trinities had their° n gin in some primeval revelation. Nothing else indeed can ac-C°unt. for the general prevalence of a doctrine so remote from( ' u wun imagination, and of which we find vestiges in the sacred°oks of almost every civilized people of antiquity. The corrupt? ate in which it 'is viewed in the writings of Plato and others, is* le ) natural consequence of its descent through a long course of1X11 tradition; and then falling into the hands of men who bentVe ry opinion as much as possible to a conformity with their ownPeculations. As the one God, to whom Moses gives the pluralJ? ni e Elohim, thus comprehends Three Persons; let us inquire 1, J' at power this Tri-une God exerted, when, as the same sacredinforms us, he created the heavens and the earth. Thata the heaven and the earth is here meant the whole universe, vi-’ Vo I- iv.— KO. 200.

sible and invisible, is known to every person acquainted with thephraseology of Scripture: and we need inform no man conversantwith English writers, that by creation, in its proper sense, ismeant bringing into being, or making that to exist which existednot before. It must, however, be acknowledged, that the Pie-brew word tPU does not always imply the production of substance,but very often the forming of particular organized bodies out ofpre-existing matter. Thus when it is said that “ God createdgreat whales, and every 1 iving creature that movelb, which thewaters brought forth abundantly after their kind,” and again, that“ he created man male and female;” though the word tns is usedon both occasions, we are not to conceive that the bodies of thefirst human pair, and of these animals, were brought into beingfrom non-entity, but only that they were formed by a proper or-ganization being given to pre-existent matter. But when Moses says, “ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”lie cannot be supposed to mean that “ in the beginning God onlygave form to matter already existing of itself;” for in the verynext verse we are assured that after this act of creation was over,“ the earth was still without form and void;” or, in other words,in a chaotic state. The Jews , before the coining of our Saviour,undoubtedly understood their lawgiver to teach a proper creation,as is plain from that passage in the second book of the Maccabees ,in which a mother, to persuade her son to suffer the cruellest tor-tures rather than forsake the law of his God , uses the followingargument: “ I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven andthe earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made themof things that were not.” To the same purpose the inspired au-thor of the epistle to the Hebrews, when magnifying the excel-lence of faith, says, “ Through faith we understand that the worldswere framed by the word of God , so that things which are seenwere not made of things which do appear;” where, as bishop Pear-son has ably proved, the phrase pi ixp*ivpm>» is equivalent to ovxij.orimv, in the quotation from the Maccabees . From the firstverse, therefore, of the book of Genesis, we learn a most import-ant truth, which all the uninspired wisdom of antiquity could notdiscover. It assures ys, that as nothing exists by chance, sonothing is necessarily existing but the Three Divine Persons in theone Godhead. Every thing else, whether material or immaterial,derives its substance, as well as its form or qualities, from the fiat ofthat self-existent Being, “ who was, and is, and is to come.” Itdoes r.ot, however, follow from this verse, or from any other pas-sage in the sacred Scriptures, that the whole universe was calledinto existence at the same instant; neither is it by any means evi-dent that the chaos of our world was brought into being on thefirst, of those six days .during which it was gradually reduced intoform. From a passage in the book of Job , in which we are toldby God himself, that when the “ foundation of the earth was laid,the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shoutedfor joy,” it appears extremely probable that worlds had been cre-ated, formed, and inhabited, long before our earth had any ex-istence. Nor is this opinion at all contrary to what Moses savsof the creation of the stars: for though they are mentioned in thesame verse with the sun and moon, yet the manner in which, ac-cording to the original, they are introduced, by no means indi-cates that all the stars were formed at the same time with the lu-minaries of our system. Most of them may have been createdlong before, and some of them since our world was brought intobeing ; for that clause (verse 16,) “ lie made the stars also,” is inthe Hebrew no more than “ and the stars;” the words “ he made”being inserted by the translators. I lie whole verse thereforeought to be rendered thus, “ and God made two great lights; thegreater light to rule the day, and the lesser light with thestars to rule the night;” where nothing is intimated withrespect to the time when the stars were formed, any more than inthat verse of the Psalms (cxxxvi. 9,) which exhorts us to givethanks to God who made the moon and stars to rule by night; forhismerev endureth “■forever.” The first verse of the hook ofGenesis 'informs us, that all things spiritual and corporeal derive(heir existence from. God ; but it is no where said that all matterwas created at the same time; and the generations of men affordsufficient evidence of a successive and continual creation of spirits.That the whole corporeal universe may have been created at oncemust be granted; but if so, we have reason to believe that thisearth, with the sun and all the planets of the system, were sufferedto remain for ages in a state of chaos “ without foim, and void ;”

.8 X because