Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

CHAP. VIII. Particular Directions for Communion with the Holy Ghost.

Before I name Particular Directions for our Communion with the Holy Ghost, I must premise some Cautions, as §. 1 far as the directions to be given concern his worship.

BEfore I name Particular Directions for our Communion with the Holy Ghost, I must premise some Cautions, as §. 1 farre as the directions to be given concern his worship.

First, The Divine Nature is the Reason, and cause of all worship; so that it is impossible to worship any one person, and not worship the whole Trinity. It is (and that not without ground) denied by the Schoolmen, that the formal Reason and object of divine worship, is in the persons precisely considered; that is under the formally constitutive Reason of their personality, which is their Relation to each other: But this belongs to the Divine Nature, and Essence, and to their distinct persons as they are identified with the Essence it self. Hence is that way of praying to the Trinity, by the repetition of the same Petition, to the several persons (as in the Litany) groundless, if not impious. It supposeth that one person is worshipped, and not another, when each person is worshipped as God, and each person is so. As though we first should desire one thing of the Father, and be heard and granted by him, then ask the same thing of the Son, and so of the Holy Ghost; And so act as to the same thing three distinct acts of worship, and expect to be heard, and have the same thing granted three times distinctly, when all the works of the Trinity ad extra, are indivisible.