both of these two persons which causes the
one to be father rather than mother, and the other to be son rather than
daughter. Now who can assert that they are males and not females? But
how should they be rather males than females, as they have neither body,
form, nor face? That is not an imaginable thing, and destroys itself. No
matter, they claim chat these two Persons, without body, form, or face,
and, consequently, without difference of sex, are nevertheless Father
and Son, and that they produced by their mutual love a third person,
whom they called the Holy Ghost, who has, like the other two, no body,
no form, and no face. What abominable nonsense!

As our Christ-worshipers limit the power of God the Father to begetting
but one Son, why do they not desire that this Second person, and the
Third, should have the same power to beget a Son like themselves? If
this power to beget a son is perfection in the First person, it is,
then, a perfection and a power which does not exist in the Second and in
the Third person. Thus these two Persons, lacking a perfection and a
power which is found in the First one, they are consequently not equal
with Him. If, on the contrary, they say that this power to beget a son
is no perfection, they should not attribute it, then, to the First
person any more than to the other two; for we should attribute
perfections only to an absolutely perfect being. Besides, they would not
dare to say that the power to beget a Divine person is not a perfection;
and if they claim that this First person could have begotten several
sons and daughters, but that He desired but this only Son, and that the
two other persons did not desire to beget any others, we could ask them,
firstly, from whence they know this, for we do not see in their
pretended Holy Scriptures that any One of these Divine personages
reveals any such assertions; how, then, can our Christ-worshipers know
anything about it? They speak but according to their ideas and to their
hollow imaginations. Secondly, We could not avoid saying, that if these
pretended Divine personages had the power of begetting several children,
and did not wish to make use of it, the consequence would be that this
Divine power was ineffectual. It would be entirely without effect in the
Third person, who did not beget or produce any, and would be almost
without effect in the two others, because they limited it. Then this
power of begetting or producing an unlimited numb