devoured by an irrational creature; goes into aliment, and grows part of it; then that creature, perchance, is made like food to another: and truly, did we doubt God's power, or not think Him omnipotent, this were a labyrinth we should be lost in. But it were hard, when we see every petty chymick in his little shop bring into one body things of the same kind, though scattered and disordered, that we should not allow the great Maker of all things to do the same in His own Universe.
There remains only the mystery of the Trinity, to the difficulty of which the poverty and narrowness of words have made no small addition.
St. Austin plainly says the word person was taken up by the Church for want of a better. Nature, substance, essence, hypostasis, suppositum, and persona have caused sharp disputes amongst the doctors; at length they are contented to let the three first and three last signify the same thing. By all of them is understood something complete, perfect, and singular; in this only they differ, that nature, substance, essence, are communicable ad quid and ut quo (as they call it). The other are not at all; but enough of this. Those that were the immediate conveyers of it to us wrapt it not up in any of these terms. We then hold God to be one and but one, it being gross to imagine two Omnipotents, for then neither would be so; yet since this good is perfectly good, and perfect goodness cannot be without perfect love, nor perfect love without communication, nor to an unequal or created, for then it must be inordinate, we conclude a Second Coeternal, though Begotten; nor are these contrary (though they seem to be so) even in created substances, that one thing may come from another, and yet that, from whence it comes, not be before that which comes from it, as in the sun and light. But in these high mysteries similitudes may be the best arguments. In metaphysicks they tell us, that to the constituting of every being there is a posse sui esse, from whence there is a sapientia sui esse; and from these two proceedeth an amor sui esse: and though these three be distinct, yet they may make up one perfect being. Again, and more familiarly, there is a hidden original of waters in the earth; from this a spring flows up; and of these proceeds a stream: this is but one essence, which knows neither a before nor an after, but in order—and that, too, according to our considering of it: the head of a spring is not a head but in respect of the spring; for if something flowed not from it, it were not original; nor the spring a spring, if it did not flow from something; nor the stream a stream but in
