Chapter 2.—In What
Manner This Work Proposes to Discourse Concerning the
Trinity.
4. Wherefore, our Lord God helping,
we will undertake to render, as far as we are able, that very
account which they so importunately demand:
viz
., that the
Trinity is the one and only and true God, and also how the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit are rightly said, believed,
understood, to be of one and the same substance or essence; in such
wise that they may not fancy themselves mocked by excuses on our
part, but may find by actual trial, both that the highest good is
that which is discerned by the most purified minds, and that for
this reason it cannot be discerned or understood by themselves,
because the eye of the human mind, being weak, is dazzled in that
so transcendent light, unless it be invigorated by the nourishment
of the righteousness of faith. First, however, we must demonstrate,
according to the authority of the Holy Scriptures, whether the
faith be so. Then, if God be willing and aid us, we may perhaps at
least so far serve these talkative arguers—more puffed up than
capable, and therefore laboring under the more dangerous
disease—as to enable them to find something which they are not
able to doubt, that so, in that case where they cannot find the
like, they may be led to lay the fault to their own minds, rather
than to the truth itself or to our reasonings; and thus, if there
be anything in them of either love or fear towards God, they may
return and begin from faith in due order: perceiving at length how
healthful a medicine has been provided for the faithful in the holy
Church, whereby a heedful piety, healing the feebleness of the
mind, may render it able to perceive the unchangeable truth, and
hinder it from falling headlong, through disorderly rashness, into
pestilent and false opinion. Neither will I myself shrink from
inquiry, if I am anywhere in doubt; nor be ashamed to learn, if I
am anywhere in error.