That Stuart correctly represented the Fathers was clear enough to me; but I nevertheless thought that in this respect the Fathers had honestly made out the doctrine of the Scripture; and I did not at all approve of setting up a battery of modern speculative philosophy against Scriptural doctrine. "How are we to know that the doctrine of Emanations is false? (asked I.) If it is legitimately elicited from Scripture, it is true."--I refused to yield up my creed at this summons. Nevertheless, he left a wound upon me: for I now could not help seeing, that we moderns use the word _God_ in a more limited sense than any ancient nations did. Hebrews and Greeks alike said _Gods_, to mean any superhuman beings; hence _derived God_ did not sound to them absurd; but I could not deny that in good English it is absurd. This was a very disagreeable discovery: for now, if any one were to ask me whether I believed in the divinity of Christ, I saw it would be dishonest to say simply, _Yes_; for the interrogator means to ask, whether I hold Christ to be the eternal and underived Source of life; yet if I said _No_, he would care nothing for my professing to hold the Nicene Creed. Might not then, after all, Sabellianism be the truth? No: I discerned too plainly what Gibbon states, that the Sabellian, if consistent, is only a concealed Ebionite, or us we now say, a Unitarian, Socinian. As we cannot admit that the Father was slain on the cross, or prayed to himself in the garden, he who will not allow the Father and the Son to be separate persons, but only two names for one person, _must divide the Son of God and Jesus into two persons_, and so fall back on the very heresy of Socinus which he is struggling to escape. On the whole, I saw, that however people might call themselves Trinitarians, yet if, like Stuart and all the Evangelicals in Church and Dissent, they turn into a dead letter the _generation_ of the Son of God, and _the procession_ of the Spirit, nothing is possible but Sabellianism or Tritheism: or, indeed, Ditheism, if the Spirit's separate personality is not held. The modern creed is alternately the one or the other, as occasion requires. Sabellians would find themselves out to be mere Unitarians, if they always remained Sabellians: but in fact, they are half their lives Ditheists. They do not _aim_ at consistency; would an upholder of the pseudo-Athanasian creed desire it? Why, that creed teaches, that the height of orthodoxy is to contradict oneself and protest that one does not. Now, however, rose on me the question: Why do I not take the Irish clergyman at his word, and attack him and others as idolaters and worshippers of three Gods? It was unseemly and absurd in him to try to force me into what he must have judged uncharitableness; but it was not the less incumbent on me to find a reply.