Selected quad for the lemma: diversity_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
diversity_n	gift_n	lord_n	operation_n	869	5	8.9503	5	true

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A23822	Animadversions on Mr. Hill's book entituled, A vindication of the primitive fathers, against the imputations of Gilbert, Lord Bishop of Sarum in a letter to a person of quality.	Allix, Pierre, 1641-1717.	1695 (1695)	Wing A1218; ESTC R22827	36,802	72

more he has insinuated by his method that he believes a Tetras in God namely the Essence in abstracto and the three Persons I say this is a very groundless Accusation for it 's true that there are but too many of the Ancients who have gone upon this Hypothesis the Bishop speaks of in explaining the Dogma of the Trinity Mr. Hill may be informed of it by reading amongst others Father Petav. de S. Trinit l. 6. c. 9. The Learned Dr. Cudworth has said as much as the Bishop these are his words Intellect Syst p. 604. However it is evident from hence that these reputed Orthodox Fathers who were not a few were far from thinking the three Hypostases of the Trinity to have the same singular existent Essence they supposing 'em to have no otherwise one and the same Essence of the Godhead in them nor to be one God than three individual men have one common specifical Essence of Manhood in them and are all one Man But as this Trinity came afterwards to be decried for Tritheism so in the room thereof started thereup that other Trinity of Persons numerically the same or having all one and the same singular existent Essence a Doctrine which seeemeth not to have been owned by any publick Authority in the Christian Church save that of the Lateran Council only I know there are some learned men who as Dr. Bull have endeavoured to give a good Sense to their Expressions and by a long compass of Consequences reduce them to the ordinary Notions We cannot but commend their Zeal for Antiquity but after all it were expedient that those who have the Opinions of the Fathers but at the second hand should not be so positive in justifying all their Sentiments Those who are troubled it those failings with which the Fathers may be charged ought to consider First That without examining Questions with great care it is not possible to foresee all the Consequences that may be drawn from them Secondly That these Questions have risen one after another in process of time and of many Disputes Thirdly That it easily happens even to those who handle Matters with the greatest caution to fall into Expressions which being strictly taken have a harsh Sense Fourthly That the Authority of some great men has often gained to them great numbers of Followers concerning things which Posterity has justly condemned Fifthly That almost all the strayings of the Fathers do rise from thence that in combating the Hereticks they departed from the simplicity of Scripture Expressions and undertook to explain this Mystery by human Ideas very remote from the Truth But Mr. Hill tells us The Bishop of Salisbury who imputes to the Fathers a sort of Tritheism by his Explanation falls himself into the same Absurdity nay he establishes a kind of Tetras in the Godhead which is worse than Tritheism This is a great Charge In the Divine Essence says the Bishop there may be Three that may have a diversity of Operations as well as oeconomies Here is the heresy of these words according to Mr. Hill p. 98. Now whatsoever acts by another is distinct from that other by which it acts if prior in the Agency by the order of reason Here we have indeed a special Hunter of Hereticks I shall not answer him that there have been divers Schoolmen who believed an absolute Subsistence of the Divine Essence besides the three Subsistences which make the Personalities without acknowledging that Tetras that Mr. Hill speaks of the Bishop I am sure would not use this Apology But I answer That he offers a manifest violence to the Bishop's words that contains nothing but what is agreeable to the constant way of speaking which Divines use concerning the Operations appropriated to each Person without confounding them with the notional Expressions that serve to distinguish them The Name of God sometimes signifies his Essence sometimes the Three Persons and sometimes it imports but One Person of the Trinity do we therefore acknowledge a Quaternity To draw such consequences as these in order to ascribe Heresies to those who sometimes use the Word GOD in one of these significations and sometimes in another is meer Sophistry We say That the Father is God to denote his Divine Essence We say That God has created the World to express the common Work of the Trinity We say That God is incarnate to signify the Union of the Word with Humanity How many Heresies might be imputed to Writers if one would make such Objections against them and urge upon the word GOD Notions altogether foreign to the Subject in hand But God be thanked that all those who write are not of Mr. Hill's temper Mr. Hill follows his blow after he has reproached the Bishop for representing the Ancients as Tritheists he accuses him of maintaining that those who succeeded them have used Notions that were little better when they made use of that Notion of the Sun with its Light and Heat and of that of the Soul from whence flows the Understanding and the Will to express the Processions of the Trinity Nay he objects to him that those who have supposed different Operations in the Two Persons are according to this System as much Tritheists as the first Mr. Hill affirms on the contrary That these Notions of the Fathers which the Bishop rejects have been used from the beginning so that the Bishop ought not to have said that the using of these Notions was only that the Fathers might get out of Tritheism This is a very pitiful Accusation It seems Mr. Hill did not understand the Bishop's meaning when he says that the Emanation of the Son and Holy Ghost were expressed by the acts of Understanding and Will he does not intend to deny that this Notion was used in ancient Times but only to condemn the boldness of the Schoolmen who would almost make this way of explaining the Procession of the Persons pass for an Article of Faith namely that the Son proceeds by the Understanding and the Holy Ghost by the Will tho very Eminent Divines have rejected these Definitions as Zanchius lib. 5. C. ultimo and Durandus refutes them in 1. Dist 6. q. 2. As to what Mr. Hill fancies that the Bishop is guilty of Tritheism because he ascribes different Operations to the Two Persons the poor man is visibly mistaken Does not all Divines acknowledge different Operations of the Two Persons Are they thereby infected with Tritheism Or was St. Paul infected with Heresy when he said There are diversities of gifts but the same spirit there are differences of administrations but the same Lord there are diversities of operations but it is the same God who worketh all in all 1 Cor. 12.4 5 6. I see what led Mr. Hill into this Error He did imagine that because it is a Maxim in Divinity that the Actions of the Trinity ad extra are common to the Three Persons there are no Actions particularly belonging to One Person according to

the Oeconomy of the Three Persons But doubtless he makes a very ill use of this Maxim which may hold with relation to the Acts that constitute the Three Persons and are proper to every one for instance the Act of Generation which is proper to the Father exclusively of the Son and Holy Ghost but this maxim does not hinder us from being firmly persuaded that it was the Son only who took upon him the form of a Servant in the singularity of his Person and not in the Unity of the Divine Nature in what was proper to the Son and not in that which was common to the whole Trinity This is distinctly expressed by the forged Dyonisius de div Nom. c. 2. c. and approved in the sixth General Council Act 8. where his Authority is made use of and it is also acknowledged by Damasc lib. 3. de fide c. 3. by Elias Cretensis upon the fifth Oration of St. Gregory and by Nicetas de fid Orthod c. 34. M. Hill should have known besides that in the mission of the Persons ad extra the action by which they act upon a particular Subject is proper to them and is common to the three Persons only in respect to the Will the acts of which are common to the three Persons You see Sir how the Bishop has fallen into the hands of a Man who understands things only by halves Mr. Hill is not pleased with the Bishop's way of treating the Fathers but he is yet more offended at the Explication and Notion which the Bishop advances of the Doctrine of the Trinity This is what the Bishop says p. 104. We do plainly perceive in our selves two if not three Principles of Operation that do not only differ as Understanding and Will which are only different modes of Thinking but differ in their Character and way of Operation All our Cogitations and Reasonings are a sort of Acts in which we can reflect on the way how we operate We perceive that we Act freely in them and that we turn our Minds to such Objects and Thoughts as we please But by another Principle of which we perceive nothing and can reflect upon no part of it we live in our bodies we animate and actuate them we receive sensations from them and give motions to them we live and dye and do not know how all this is done It seems to be from some emanation from our Souls in which we do not feel that we have any liberty and so we must conclude that this Principle in us is Natural and Necessary In acts of Memory Imagination and Discourse there seems to be a mixture of both Principles or a third that results out of them For we feel a freedom in one respect but as for those marks that are in our Brain that set things in our Memory or furnish us with words we are necessary Agents they come in our way but we do not know how We cannot call up a figure of things or words at pleasure some disorder in our Mechanism hides or flattens them which when it goes off they start up and serve us but not by any act of our Understanding and Will Thus we see that in this single undivided Essence of ours there are different Principles of Operation so different as Liberty and Necessity are from one another I am far from thinking that this is a proper Explanation or Resemblance of this Mystery yet it may be called in some sort an Illustration of it since it shews us from our own Composition that in one Essence there may be such different Principles which in their proper Character may be brought to the terms of a contradiction of being free and not free So in the Divine Essence which is the simplest and perfectest Unity there may be three that may have a diversity of Operations c. Mr. Hill thinks that this Notion is not less impertinent to explain the Trinity than that of the Fathers Thus he speaks p. 106. This is a worthy Simile indeed to supplant that scouted one of the Ancients in which is no representation of the Logos and its Parent Principle nor of the Spirit of Holiness that is in the Father and the Son nor one of their Co-essentiality Co-eterternity or Order all which are resembled in that Simile which this undermines Then he Examins it particularly and endeavours to shew many absurdities in it One may easily judge that it is not hard for him to do this If all the Similies given of the Trinity ought to express all that we conceive of it what Simile can we use At this rate how can we justifie that resemblance used by Athanasius of the Root and the Branches to give us an Idea of the Co-equality And that other of a Fountain a River and a Vapour That which makes Mr. Hill to be so unfair a Critick is that he does not consider that Similies are used generally for one particular design When a Divine would express the Consubstantiality he brings Resemblances that serve only for his purpose and he does not matter whether they explain the whole Dogma of the Trinity or not The Bishop therefore was in the right to use a Simile which served to prove what he designed to establish namely that in a most simple Substance there may be various Principles of Operations A Man must have but little judgment to think that he was bound to seek for some of another nature It 's very observable that St. Augustine who has advanced more Similies than any of the Ancients as you may see in his Books of the Trinity from the sixth to the fifteenth which is the last declares himself in the 15th Book Chap. 7. that they are very imperfect and unlike and that it 's vain for us to seek in Created things representations of an incomprehensible Mystery If the Bishop has not made use of that Notion of the Logos which signifies the Reason upon which Basil and Gregory of Nazianze have insisted it is because he thinks that that Name is not so much given to the Second Person because he is the Reason of the Father as because according to those Divines who have more accurately Examin'd the Stile of Scripture St. John has respect in that word to the description of the Creation and to the Ministery of the Messias by which God did always express himself according to the Hypothesis of the Ancients But what would Mr. Hill say if by ill luck it appeared that what the Bishop has alledged to illustrate the Trinity were the Notion of St. Augustine himself in his Books of the Trinity And yet this might be easily proved if it were worth our while I confess Mr. Hill will find in the Ninth Book that there for a resemblance of the Trinity he gives us Man Created after God's Image in whom he finds a sort of Trinity namely a Mind a Knowledge of himself and a Love by which Man loves himself But tho' this be Mr. Hill's favourite