respect of both. Now, all these three are but one water, and though one is not the other, yet they can hardly be considered one without the other. Now, though I know this is so far from a demonstration, that it is but an imperfect instance (perfect being impossible of infinite by finite things), yet there is a resemblance great enough to let us see the possibility. And here the eye of reason needed no more the spectacles of faith, than for these things of which we make sympathy the cause, as in the load-stone, or antipathy, of which every man almost gives instance from his own nature; nor is it here so great a wonder that we should be ignorant; for this is distant and removed from sense, these near and subject to it; and it were stranger for me to conclude that God did not work ad extra, thus one and distinct within Himself, because I cannot conceive how begotten, how proceeding, than if a clown should say the hand of a watch did not move because he could not give an account of the wheels within. So far is it from being unreasonable, because I do not understand it, that it would be unreasonable I should. For why should a created substance comprehend an uncreated; a circumscribed and limited, an uncircumscribed and unlimited? And this I observe in those great lovers and lords of reason, quoted by the fathers, Zoroastres, Trismegistus, Plato, Numenius, Plotinus, Proclus, Amelius, and Avicen, that when they spoke of this mystery of the Trinity, of which all writ something, and some almost as plainly as Christians themselves, that they discussed it not as they did other things, but delivered them as oracles which they had received themselves, without dispute.
Thus much of Christian profession compared with others. I should now shew which (compared within itself) ought to be preferred; but this is the work of every pen, perhaps to the prejudice of religion itself. This excuse (though) it has, that (like the chief empire), having nothing to conquer, no other religion to oppose or dispute against, it hath been forced to admit of civil wars, and suffer under its own excellency.
