PERSON

(See Trinity .) On the awful subject of the persons in the Trinity we shall merely quote the A than asian Creed. “The Catholic faith is this. That we worship One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the substance. For there is One Person of the Father , another of the Son , and another of the Holy Ghost . “But the Godhead of the Father , of the Son , and of the Holy Ghost , is all One: the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.” The application of the term “Persons” to the sacred Three has been objected to; but it is defensible on the ground of the impo ibility of finding a phrase equally expre ive, and le objectionable. Archbishop Til lots on well says, “Because we find the Father , Son , and Holy Ghost spoken of in Scripture as we should speak of three Persons, therefore we call them Persons; and since the Holy Spirit of God in Scripture hath thought fit, in speaking of these three, to distinguish them from one another, as we use in common speech to distinguish three several persons, I cannot see any reason why, in the explication of this mystery, which purely depends upon Divine revelation, we should not speak of it in the same manner as the Scripture doth.” Precision in speaking of objects of faith seems, beyond this, impo ible. That the Father , Son , and Holy Ghost are three, distinguished from each other in Scripture, is clear; as it is also that there is but one God . Why, then, refuse the word “Persons,” used with due reverence and humility, by which we only understand a peculiar distinction in each, making, in some way, a difference from the other two? Indeed the objection was despised as a bad one by even Socinus himself. But in fact the word “Person” is used by St. Paul as applied both to the Father and the Son ; to the former, Heb. i. 3; to the latter, 2 Cor. ii. 10, and also iv. 6, as it should have been rendered. The word was used, and well applied, against the opinion entertained by the Sabellians, that there was but one real Person in the Godhead with different manifestations; and the notion of three hypostases with an individual unity in the Divine e ence, was generally received in the Church as a proper mean for avoiding the opposite heresies of Sabellius and Arius. The Latin Church understanding “substance” by the term hypostasis , as used by the Greek Church, and denying three substances, would not readily use that term, but adopted the word “Person,” ( Persona ,) to characterize the three distinct subsistencies in the one Divine e ence. And hence has arisen a charge, (the word hypostasis being used for Person in the Greek copies of the Creed,) that the Nicene and A than asian Creeds are in opposition to each other; the former a erting that the Son “is of one substance with the Father ,” while, according to the latter, there is one substance of the Father , another of the Son , . But as the word is rightly translated in our version “Person,” from the original Latin, the objection, which is still repeated, (the pa age being quoted as if it were one “substance”—not one “Person—of the Father ,” .,) is persevered in under a mistake, if it be not a wilful misrepresentation.—See Bull and Water land .