knowledge of God wish to obtain entire strength, subdue themselves to the Holy Gospel, and taking solace from what they understand, adore with humble and great reverence that which by subtlety they cannot embrace, and faithfully confess with the Doctor Saint Thomas in the ninth article of the 10th question of the book called _De Potentia Dei_, that in God there is one real circle wholly enclosed in a perfect ternary, because He comprehendeth Himself and speaketh and begetteth an Eternal Word in which He vieweth Himself and all things. And from the Father and Son there is breathed forth a tender issue by which the Divine essence is beloved and all that proceedeth from it. And so where was the Commencement of Understanding, there the Loving Will maketh its End. And we have an example of this in ourselves; for, if we consider what we understand, a certain knowledge is generated in the soul, and then the understanding offereth to the will that it may freely take what pleaseth it most; and it, receptive of the tender object, inclineth by affection to that by which the understanding was first moved. In this manner is finished the circle which is super-spiritual and infinite in height, and in itself cannot proceed beyond the ternary in which it endeth. The second circular ternary is that of nature which includeth in it all the creatures, and it may be imagined in this wise: let us take some fountain that never faileth, from which a certain river taketh its birth, and following its course according to the vigour that it received in the commencement, it returneth to that fount at last from which it originally proceeded. And so all things have their commencement in the Lord God, the general cause and continuing in the Life they receive from Him, they have their last end in that from which they had their first beginning. And by this ternary (which is in them of beginning, middle, and final end), saith the Philosopher, in the book that he made in which he discoursed of the Heaven and the World, that the ternary is the number in everything, and that it encloseth in itself the like perfection and middle and certain end, and that from it no creature is exempt. And on this account it was anciently established that God should be praised as a ternary.