and the Father are one." '' He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." (John xiv. 9—11; John x. 30.) Let us be fully- persuaded t^i at the Father and the Son are two distinct Per- sons in the Trinity, co-equal and co-eternal, — and yet that they are one in substance and inseparably united and undivided. Let us p^rasp firmly the words of the Athanasian Creed, " Neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the substance." But here let us stop.
Musculus remarks on this sentence, how carefully St. John writes that " the Word was with God," and not " God was with God." He would have us remember that there are not two Gods but one. And yet " the Word was with God, and was God."
[The Word was God.] This sentence means that the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Word, was in nature, essence, and sub- stance very God, and that "as the Father is God, so also the Son is God." It seems impossible to assert Christ's divinity more distinctly than it is here asserted. The sentence cannot possibly mean that the Father is God, since no one ever thought of dis- puting that. Nor yet can it possibly mean that the title ctf God was conferred on some being inferior to God and uncreated, as the princes of this world are called " gods." He who is here called God, is the same who was uncreated and eternal. There is no inferiority in the Word to God the Father. The Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one. To maintain in the face of such a text, as some so-called Ciiristians do, that our Lord Jesus Christ was only a man, is a mournful proof of the perversity of the human heart.
The whole verse, honestly and impartially interpreted, is an unanswerable argument against three classes of heretics. It confutes the Arians, who regard Christ as a Being inferior to God. — It confutes the Sabelhans, who deny any distinction of Persons in the Trinity, and say that God sometimes manifested Himself as the Father, sometimes as the Son, and sometimes as the Spirit, and that the Father and the Spirit suffered on the cross! — Above all it confutes the Socinians and Unitarians who say that Jesus Christ was not God but man, a most holy and perfect man, but only a man.
In leaving this verse, it is useless to deny that there are deep mysteries in it which man has no mind to comprehend, and no language to express. How there can be a plurahty in unity, and a unity in plurahty, three Persons in the Trinity and One God in essence, — how Christ can be at the same time iji the Father, as regards the unity of the essence, and with the Father, as regards tiie distinction of his Person, — these are matters far beyond our feeble understanding. Happy are we, if we can
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