man, but _in order to_ be so humbled,--was NOT EQUAL
TO, but LESS THAN, the Father who sent him. To this I found the whole
Gospel of John to bear witness; and with this conviction, the truth
and honour of the Athanasian Creed fell to the ground. One of its main
tenets was proved false; and yet it dared to utter anathemas on all
who rejected it!

I afterwards remembered my old thought, that we must surely understand
_our own words_, when we venture to speak at all about divine
mysteries. Having gained boldness to gaze steadily on the topic, I
at length saw that the compiler of the Athanasian Creed did _not_
understand his own words. If any one speaks of _three men_, all that
he means is, "three objects of thought, of whom each separately may
be called Man." So also, all that could possibly be meant by _three
gods_, is, "three objects of thought, of whom each separately may be
called God." To avow the last statement, as the Creed does, and yet
repudiate Three Gods, is to object to the phrase, yet confess to
the only meaning which the phrase can convey. Thus the Creed really
teaches polytheism, but saves orthodoxy by forbidding any one to call
it by its true name. Or to put the matter otherwise: it teaches three
Divine Persons, and denies three Gods; and leaves us to guess what
else is a Divine Person but a God, or a God but a Divine Person. Who,
then, can deny that this intolerant creed is a malignant riddle?

That there is nothing in the Scripture about Trinity in Unity and
Unity in Trinity I had long observed; and the total absence of such
phraseology had left on me a general persuasion that the Church had
systematized too much. But in my study of John I was now arrested by
a text, which showed me how exceedingly far from a _Tri-unity_ was the
Trinity of that Gospel,--if trinity it be. Namely, in his last prayer,
Jesus addresses to his Father the words: "This is life eternal, that
they may know _Thee, the only True God_, and Jesus Christ, whom thou
hast sent" I became amazed, as I considered these words more and more
attentively, and without prejudice; and I began to understand how
prejudice, when embalmed with reverence, blinds the mind. Why had I
never before seen what is here so plain, that the _One God_ of Jesus
was not a Trinity, but was _the First Person_, of the ecclesiastical
Trinity?

But on a fuller search, I found this to be Paul's doctrine also: for
in 1 Corinth, viii., when discussing the subject of Poly