Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DISCOURSE III. THE TRINITY. TO US THERE IS BUT ONE GOD, THE FATHER. OF WHOM ARE ALL Things, And We In Him. – 1 Corinthians viii. 6. In the two preceding Discourses, I have exhibited the scheme of Orthodoxy as a whole, in the form in which I suppose it to be held and taught generally; and have also stated my general objections to it, as fully and distinctly as the nature of my plan would permit. I pass now to another department of my course, namely, the special doctrines included in that scheme, the nature of the evidence brought to sustain them, and my own reasons for rejecting them. And let me say briefly, in anticipation, that I do not consider a public assembly a fit place for weighing and estimating duly the whole mass of argument that bears upon the several points. Where the discussion takes the form of debate or oral controversy, the advantage will be-on the side of the nimble tongue and quick retort. And even in the more deliberate and grave method of a lecture or discourse, time cannot be given for that study and meditation which a subject of this naturedemands. I do not ask you to listen as if it were possible for me to meet every question, answer every scruple, and take up every doubtful point of proof. I fairly warn you, that volumes and libraries of controversy have been written, of which I cannot pretend to give you so much as the faintest outline; that laborious and thoughtful men have spent often the best of a lifetime in profound investigation relative to some single one of these very points; and that the transition from one mode of belief to another has often been one of the most earnest and solemn forms of personal experience, involving weeks or years of painful study and self-scrutiny, the sacrifice of dear friendships, the perilling of s…