"2. That the Son possessed all of the inherent, incommunicable perfections which religion and philosophy appropriate to the supreme God. So that there are in the Godhead three distinct and infinite minds or substances, three co-equal and co-eternal beings, composing the divine essence, three independent Deities as to whom an effort is made to preserve the unity of the first cause by assuming the perpetual concord of their administration, the essential agreement of their will; and this I understand to be the philosophy of Hosius, Alexander, the emperor, and others for whom Athanasius is spokesman. "3. Three beings who, by the self-derived necessity of their existence, possess divine attributes in perfect degree, who are eternal in duration, infinite in space, intimately present to each other and to the universe; and are yet one and the same being, manifesting himself in different forms, and considered in different aspects: so that the Trinity becomes a trinity of names and abstract manifestations existing only in the mind; they are not persons at all, but only attributes. "This is the heresy of Sabellius, which Christian councils have condemned. It differeth from Athanasius in degree, but not, I think, in kind. "Not one of these three opinions satisfieth my mind and heart. The martyr Am-nem-hat taught me when I was a boy that the original faith, which long ages ago preceded the polytheism of Egypt, Assyria, India, China, Greece, Rome, and all other heathen nations, uniformly represented the one God to be a dual, spiritual Being, and that the Divine nature must be a Triad, or Trinity, completed by the birth of a son of this double-natured spiritual God. In the gospels I read that Christ is ’the only-begotten Son of God’: a Father begets. He was ’conceived’ of the Holy Ghost: a Mother conceives. He was ’born’ of a virgin, and for our salvation did live among men. The same holy martyr called my attention to the fact, which I have since carefully verified, that while the Scriptures in no place apply the word ’mother’ to the Holy Ghost, the words ’Holy Ghost’ are used in them two hundred and twelve times, and were uniformly in the Greek neuter gender, which affirmeth nothing as to sex. He also showed me that Moses called the one God by a name which is the plural number of a Hebrew noun. It hath, therefore, appeared to me to be true that, as far as anything concerning Deity can be expressed in human language, the sacred use of the words ’Father,’ ’Son,’ ’Holy Ghost,’ ’begotten,’ ’conceived,’ were intended to convey to our minds the idea that in some spiritual sense of sexhood the nature of Deity is that in the likeness and image whereof man was created; and signify a divine family, so far as earthly things can typify spiritual truth. Hence, as I did set forth in my letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, and to Alexander of Alexandria, as the Church knoweth, I have always taught that the Son is not unoriginate, nor part