No doubt there is much force in some of his arguments, and he completely demolished the theory of mutual consciousness. But he was much stronger as a destructive than as an architect. When he attempted to define a positive notion of the Trinity, he failed, as all did who went before him, as all have who followed after him. Nor could he escape the infection of a most infelicitous, if not a decidedly irreverent, habit of illustrating theological mysteries. Wallis had written of _three somewhats_, and of a _Divine cube_ of infinite dimensions. Sherlock had propounded a theory of Divine _mutual-consciousness_; and now South came forward with the idea, that the distinctions in the Godhead are _modes, habitudes, and affections_ of the Divine substance--they are _postures_--such in spiritual and immaterial beings, as _posture_ is to the human body.[261] Passing over South’s coarse scurrility, I cannot conceive how any inquirer after truth can be helped on his way by this clever and brilliant companion, who never misses an opportunity of cracking a joke in his reader’s ear. Even when South’s reasoning is forcible, he is ever interrupting it with flashes of wit; and throughout one feels, what is fatal to all religious instruction, that the polemic is more anxious about victory than truth. No doubt his attack on Sherlock was deemed by contemporaries a decided success; he drove his antagonist from the field and spoiled him of his armour. But when he charged him with Tritheism, he charged him with what Sherlock utterly denied. That Sherlock’s theory is Tritheistic was a mere inference, and what may seem a logical deduction to others did not appear so to himself. In like manner Sabellianism, in the eyes of some, lurked under the folds of South’s argument, though he indignantly repelled the idea. The fact is, no man can attempt a logical explanation of the Godhead without being in danger of falling into Tritheism on the one side, or Sabellianism on the other. In such controversies we notice the frequent use of some word not in Scripture, but considered to be an equivalent for what is Scripture--a term conceived to be a concentration of diffused truth--the quintessence of a doctrine previously in a state of solution. Unfortunately such words are differently understood by different parties. One person refuses to take them in the sense affixed to them by another, and will employ a meaning of his own. The same proposition thus becomes to two different minds entirely different things, and the utmost confusion is the consequence. Theories to explain facts are confounded with the facts themselves, and a man who only denies a particular theory, is charged with denying the fact to which the theory relates. Hence, whilst Sherlock and South were really contending for the doctrine of the Trinity, each regarded the other as giving it up. It should be added that in the end, Sherlock’s statements were more cautious than at the beginning; for he came to admit that the