XVII. These words let everyone who threatens
me to-day concede to me; the rest let whoever will claim. The
Father will not endure to be deprived of the Son, nor the Son of the
Holy Ghost. Yet that must happen if They are confined to time,
and are created Beings…for that which is created is not
God. Neither will I bear to be deprived of my consecration; One
Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. If this be cancelled, from whom
shall I get a second? What say you, you who destroy Baptism or
repeat it? Can a man be spiritual without the Spirit? Has
he a share in the Spirit who does not honour the Spirit? Can he
honour Him who is baptized into a creature and a fellow-servant?
It is not so; it is not so; for all your talk. I will not play
Thee false, O Unoriginate Father, or Thee O Only-begotten Word, or Thee
O Holy Ghost. I know Whom I have confessed, and whom I have
renounced, and to Whom I have joined myself. I will not allow
myself, after having been taught the words of the faithful, to learn
also those of the unfaithful; to confess the truth, and then range
myself with falsehood; to come down for consecration and to go back
even less hallowed; having been baptised that I might live, to be
killed by the water, like infants who die in the very birthpangs, and
receive death simultaneously with birth. Why make me at once
blessed and wretched, newly enlightened and unenlightened, Divine and
godless, that I may make shipwreck even of the hope of
regeneration? A few words will suffice. Remember your
confession. Into what were you baptised? The Father?
Good but Jewish still. The Son?…good…but not yet
perfect. The Holy Ghost?…Very good…this is
perfect. Now was it into these simply, or some common name of
Them? The latter. And what was the common Name? Why,
God. In this common Name believe, and ride on prosperously and
reign, Ps. xlv. 4. and pass on from
hence into the Bliss of Heaven. And that is, as I think, the more
distinct apprehension of These; to which may we all come, in the same
Christ our God, to Whom be the glory and the might, with the
Unoriginate Father, and the Lifegiving Spirit, now and for ever and to
ages of ages. Amen.