A calm and sober enquiry concerning the possibility of a Trinity in the Godhead…

XXIII. However, let the whole of what hath been hitherto proposed be taken together, and to me, it appears our conception of the sacred Trinunity will be so remote from any shadow of inconsistency or repugnancy, that no necessity can remain upon us of torturing Wit, and racking Invention to the uttermost, to do a laboured and artificial violence (by I know not what screws and engines) to so numerous plain Texts of Scripture, only to undeify our glorious Redeemer, and do the utmost despite ⟨p. 60⟩to the Spirit of grace! We may be content to let the word of God (or what we pretend to own for a divine revelation) stand as it is, and undistorted, speak its own sense. And when we find the Former of all things speaking as WE or US. When we find ¹another [I] possessed by the Lord, ²in the beginning of his way, before his works of old; so as that he says of himself (as distinct from the other) I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the Earth was—And when he prepared the Heavens I was there, &c. When we find the Child born for us, the Son given to us, called also the mighty ³God, and (as in reference to us he fitly might) the Everlasting Father. When we are told of the Ruler that was to come out of Bethlehem-Ephrata, ⁴that his goings forth were from everlasting. That the Word was in the beginning with God, and was God—That all things were made by him, ⁵and without him nothing was made, that was ⟨p. 61⟩made. That this Word was made flesh—That His glory was beheld as the glory of the only begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. Even that same he that above was said to have been in the beginning with God, and to be God. That when he who was said to have come down from Heaven, was, ⁶