Now will is the true principle of identity, of selfness, even in our common language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but the possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the notion expressed by a Trinity of three Persons and one God. There are three Persons eternally coexisting, in whom the one Will is totally all in each; the truth of which mystery we may know in our own minds, but can understand by no analogy. For "the wind ministrant to divers at the same moment"--thence, to aid the fancy--borrows or rather steals from the mind the idea of 'total 'in omni parte',' which alone furnishes the analogy; but that both it and by it a myriad of other material images do enwrap themselves 'in hac veste non sua,' and would be even no objects of conception if they did not; yea, that even the very words, 'conception,' 'comprehension,' and all in all languages that answer to them, suppose this trans-impression from the mind, is an argument better than all analogy. Serm. XXXV. Mat. xii. 31. p. 341. Ib. p. 342. B. First then, for the first term, 'sin,' we use to ask in the school, whether any action of man's can have 'rationem demeriti;' whether it can be said to offend God, or to deserve ill of God? for whatsoever does so, must have some proportion with God. This appears to me to furnish an interesting example of the bad consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the 'cui bono? cui malo?' system of ethics,--that system which places the good and evil of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or passive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure act itself. For, according to this system, God must be either a passible and dependent being,--that is, not God,--or else he must have no interest, arid therefore no motive or impulse, to reward virtue or punish vice. The veil which the Epicureans threw over their atheism was itself an implicit atheism. Nay, the world itself could not have existed; and as it does exist, the origin of evil (for if evil means no more than pain 'in genere', evil has a true being in the order of things) is not only a difficulty of impossible solution, but is a fact necessarily implying the non-existence of an omnipotent and infinite goodness,--that is, of God. For to say that I believe in a God, but not that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good, is as mere a contradiction in terms as to say, I believe in a circle, but not that all the rays from its centre to its circumference are equal. I cannot read the profound truth so clearly expressed by Donne in the next paragraph--"it does not only want that rectitude, but it should have that rectitude, and therefore hath a sinful want"--without an uneasy wonder at its incongruity with the preceding dogmas. Serm. LXXI. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 717. Ib. p.725. A.