A brief declaration and vindication of the doctrine of the Trinity as also of…

But before we proceed, we may in our way observe a great congruency of success in those who have denied the Deity of the Son, and those who have denied that of the holy Spirit. For as to the Son, after some men began once to dis-believe the Revelation concerning him, and would not acknowledge him to be God and man in one person, they could never settle nor agree, either what, or who he was, or who was his Father, or why he was the Son. Some said he was a Phantasm or appearance; and that he had no real subsistence in this world, ⟨p. 86⟩and that all that was done by him was an appearance, he himself being they know not what elsewhere. That proud beast Paulus Sam•satenus, whose flagitious life, contended for a preeminence in wickedness with his prodigious heresies, was one of the first after the Jews, that positively contended for his being a man and no more, who was followed by Photinus and some others. The Arians perceiving the folly of this opinion, with the odium of it amongst all that bare the name of Christians, and that they had as good deny the whole Scripture as not grant unto him a preexistence in a divine nature antecedent to his Incarnation, they framed a new Deity which God should make before the world, in all things like to himself, but not the same with him in Essence and substance; but to be so like him, that by the writings of some of them, ye can scarce know one from the other; and that this was the Son of God also who was afterwards Incarnate. ⟨p. 87⟩Others in the mean time had more monstrous imaginations; some that he was an Angel, some that he was the Sun, some that he was the Soul of the World, some the light within men. Departing from their proper rest, so have they hovered about, and so have they continued to do, until this day.

But before we proceed, we may in our way observe a great congruency of success in those who have denyed the Deity of the Son, and those who have denyed that of the holy Spirit. For as to the Son, after some men began once to dis-believe the Revelation concerning him, and would not acknowledge him to be God and man in one person, they could never settle nor agree, either what, or who he was, or who was his Father, or why he was the Son. Some said he was a Phantasm or appearance; and that he had no real subsistence in this world, ⟨p. 86⟩