urged them to explore the
secrets of the abyss; and the pride of the professors, and of their
disciples, was satisfied with the sciences of words. But the most
sagacious of the Christian theologians, the great Athanasius himself,
has candidly confessed, [32] that whenever he forced his understanding
to meditate on the divinity of the Logos, his toilsome and unavailing
efforts recoiled on themselves; that the more he thought, the less
he comprehended; and the more he wrote, the less capable was he of
expressing his thoughts. In every step of the inquiry, we are compelled
to feel and acknowledge the immeasurable disproportion between the
size of the object and the capacity of the human mind. We may strive to
abstract the notions of time, of space, and of matter, which so closely
adhere to all the perceptions of our experimental knowledge. But as soon
as we presume to reason of infinite substance, of spiritual generation;
as often as we deduce any positive conclusions from a negative idea, we
are involved in darkness, perplexity, and inevitable contradiction. As
these difficulties arise from the nature of the subject, they oppress,
with the same insuperable weight, the philosophic and the theological
disputant; but we may observe two essential and peculiar circumstances,
which discriminated the doctrines of the Catholic church from the
opinions of the Platonic school.

[Footnote 29: Some proofs of the respect which the Christians
entertained for the person and doctrine of Plato may be found in De la
Mothe le Vayer, tom. v. p. 135, &c., edit. 1757; and Basnage, Hist. des
Juifs tom. iv. p. 29, 79, &c.]

[Footnote 30: Doleo bona fide, Platonem omnium heraeticorum
condimentarium factum. Tertullian. de Anima, c. 23. Petavius (Dogm.
Theolog. tom. iii. proleg. 2) shows that this was a general complaint.
Beausobre (tom. i. l. iii. c. 9, 10) has deduced the Gnostic errors
from Platonic principles; and as, in the school of Alexandria, those
principles were blended with the Oriental philosophy, (Brucker, tom. i.
p. 1356,) the sentiment of Beausobre may be reconciled with the opinion
of Mosheim, (General History of the Church, vol. i. p. 37.)]

[Footnote 31: If Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, (see Dupin, Bibliotheque
Ecclesiastique, tom. i. p. 66,) was the first who employed the word
Triad, Trinity, that abstract term, which was already familiar to the
schools of philosophy, must have been introduced into the theology of
the Christi