III. (1.) Is then our expectation realized, of finding somewhere within the limits of the Bible, a plain, unequivocal statement of these doctrines? Confessedly not; and notions which, in one breath, are pronounced to be indispensable to salvation, are in another admitted to be no matters of revelation at all, but rather left to be gathered by human deduction from the sacred writings. “The doctrine of the Trinity,” says a respectable Calvinistic writer, Mr. Carlile of Dublin, “is rather _a doctrine of inference and of indirect intimation_, deduced from what is revealed respecting the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and intimated in the notices of a plurality of persons in the Godhead, than a doctrine directly and explicitly declared.” And elsewhere the same author says, “_A doctrine of inference ought never to be placed on a footing of equality with a doctrine of direct and explicit revelation._”[173] If this be so (and the method of successive steps by which it is attempted, in this very controversy, to establish the doctrine of the Trinity, proves Mr. Carlile to be right), then to deny this mere _inference_ is not to deny a _revelation_. But why, we may be permitted to enquire, this shyness and hesitancy in the scriptures in communicating such cardinal truths? Whence this reserve in the Holy Spirit about matters so momentous?[174] What is the source of this strange contrast between the formularies of the Church of England, and those of the primitive Church of Christ? The Prayer-book would seem to have greatly the advantage over the Bible; for it removes all doubts at once, and makes the essentials most satisfactorily plain; compensating, shall we say, by “frequent repetitions,” for the defects and ambiguities of Holy Writ? Nay, it is a singular fact, that in the original languages of the Old and New Testaments, _no phraseology exists in which it is possible to express the creeds of the Church_. We give to the most learned of our opponents the whole vocabulary of the Hebrew and the Greek Scriptures, and we say, “with these materials translate for us into either language, or any mixture of both, your own Athanasian Creed,” They well know, that it cannot be done: and ought not then this question to be well weighed? if the terms _indispensable_ for the expression of certain ideas are absent from the Bible, how can the ideas themselves be present? Scarcely can men _have_ any important notions without the corresponding words,—which the mind coins as fast as it feels the need; and most assuredly they cannot _reveal_ them. Let us hear no more the rash assertion that these tenets may be proved from any page of scripture; we frankly offer every page, with unrestricted liberty to rewrite the whole; and we say, with all this, they cannot be expressed.