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 Polytheism, he says that "though there be to the heathen many that are called Gods, yet to us there is but _One God_, the Father, _of_ whom are all things; and _One Lord_, Jesus Christ, _by_ whom are all things." Thus he defines Monotheism to consist in holding the person of the Father to be the One God; although this, if any, should have been the place for a "Trinity in Unity." But did I proceed to deny the Divinity of the Son?
By no means: I conceived of him as in the highest and fullest sense divine, short of being Father and not Son.