a way of talking, that I can scarce persuade myself it would be of credit to your lordship, to think it worth your while to answer a man, whom you could suppose to vent such gross jargon.

This therefore containing none of my notions of nature and person, nor indeed any thing that I understand; whether your lordship rightly deduces from it this consequence, viz. " and so one nature and three persons can be no more;" is what I neither know nor am concerned to examine.

Your lordship has been pleased to take my Essay of Human Understanding to task, in your Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity: because the doctrine of it will not furnish your lordship " with clear and distinct apprehensions concerning nature and person, and the grounds of identity and distinction. For, says your lordship, we must talk unintelligibly about this point [of the Trinity] unless we have clear and distinct ap prehensions of nature and person," &c.

Whether, by my way of ideas, one can have clear and distinct apprehensions of nature and person, I shall not now dispute, how much soever I am of the mind one may. Nor shall I question the reasonableness of this principle your lordship goes upon, viz. that my book is to be disputed against, as opposite to the doctrine of the Trinity, because it fails to furnish your lordship "with clear and distinct apprehensions of nature and person, and the distinction between them;" though I promised no such clear and distinct apprehensions, nor have treated in my book any where of nature at all. But upon this occasion I cannot but observe, that your lordship yourself, in that place, makes "clear and distinct ideas necessary to that certainty of faith," which your lordship thinks requisite, though it be that very thing for which you blame the men of the new way of reasoning, and is the very ground of your disputing against the Unitarians, the author of Christianity not mysterious, and me, jointly under that title.

Your lordship, to supply that defect in my book, of clear and distinct apprehensions of nature and person, for the vindication of the doctrine of the Trinity, without which it cannot be talked of intelligibly nor de

1

fended, undertook to clear the distinction between nature and person. This, I told your lordship, gave me hopes of getting farther insight into these matters, and more clear and distinct apprehensions concerning nature and person, than was to be had by ideas; but that after all the attention and application I could use, in reading what your lordship had writ of it, I found myself so little enlightened concerning nature and person, by what your lordship had said, that I found no other remedy, but that I must be content with the condemned way by ideas.

This, which I thought not only an innocent, but a respectful answer, to what your lordship had said about nature and person, has drawn upon me a more severe reflection than I thought it deserved. Scepticism is a pretty hard word, which I find dropt in more places than one; but I shall refer the consideration of that to another place. All that I shall do now, shall be to mark out (since your lordship forces me to it) more particularly than I did before, what I think very hard to be understood, in that which your lordship has said to clear the distinction between nature and person; which I shall do, for these two ends:

First, as an excuse for my saying, " that I had learnt nothing out of your lordship's elaborate discourse of them, but this; that I must content myself with my condemned way by ideas."

And next to show, why not only I, but several others, think that if my book deserved to be brought in, and taken notice of among the anti-Trinitarian writers, for want of clear and distinct ideas of nature and person; what your lordship has said upon these subjects will more justly deserve, by him that writes next in defence of the doctrine of the Trinity, to be brought in among the opposers of the doctrine of the Trinity, as of dangerous consequence to it; for want of giving clear and distinct apprehensions of nature and person; unless the same thing ranks one man among the Unitarians, and another amongst the Trinitarians.

What your lordship had said, for clearing of the distinction of nature and person, having surpassed my understanding, as I told your lordship in my former letter;

I was resolved not to incur your lordship's displeasure a second time, by confessing I found not myself enlightened by it, till I had taken all the help I could imagine, to find out these clear and distinct apprehensions of nature and person, which your lordship had so much declared for. To this purpose, I consulted others upon what you had said, and desired to find somebody, who, understanding it himself, would help me out, where my own application and endeavours had been used to no purpose. But my misfortune has been, my lord, that among several whom I have desired to tell me their sense of what your lordship has said, for clearing the notions of nature and person, there has not been one who owned, that he understood your lordship's meaning; but confessed, the farther he looked into what your lordship had there said about nature and person, the more he was at a loss about them.

One said, your lordship began with giving two significations of the word nature. One of them, as it stood for properties, he said he understood: but the other, wherein "nature was taken for the thing itself, wherein those properties were," he said, he did not understand. But that, he added, I was not to wonder at, in a man who was not very well acquainted with Greek; and therefore might well be allowed not to have learning enough not to understand an English word that Aristotle was brought to explain and settle the sense of. Besides, he added, that which puzzled him the more in it, was the very explication which was brought of it out of Aristotle, viz. that "nature was a corporeal substance, which had the principles of motion in itself;" because he could not conceive a corporeal substance, having the principles of motion in itself. And if nature were a corporeal substance, having the principles of motion in itself; it must be good sense to say, that a corporeal substance, or, which is the same thing, a body having the principles of motion in itself, is nature; which he confessed, if anybody should say to him, he could not understand.

Another thing, he said, that perplexed him, in this explication of nature, was, that if nature was a cor

66

poreal substance, which had the principles of motion in itself," he thought it might happen that there might be no nature at all. For corporeal substances having all equally principles, or no principles of motion in themselves; and all men who do not make matter and motion eternal, being positive in it, that a body, at rest, has no principle of motion in it; must conclude, that corporeal substance has no principle of motion in itself: from hence it will follow, that to all those who admit not matter and motion to be eternal, no nature, in that sense, will be left at all, since nature is said to be a corporeal substance, which hath the principles of motion in itself; but such a sort of corporeal substance those men have no notion of at all, and consequently none of nature, which is such a corporeal substance. Now, said he, if this be that clear and distinct apprehension of nature, which is so necessary to the doctrine of the Trinity; they who have found it out for that purpose, and find it clear and distinct, have reason to be satisfied with it upon that account: but how they will reconcile it to the creation of matter, I cannot tell. I, for my part, said he, can make it consist neither with the creation of the world, nor with any other notions; and so plainly cannot understand it.

He farther said, in the following words, which are these, "but nature and substance are of an equal extent; and so that which is the subject of powers and properties is nature, whether it be meant of bodily or spiritual substances;" he neither understood the connexion nor sense. First, he understood not, he said, that "nature and substance were of the same extent.' Nature, he said, in his notion of it, extended to things that were not substances; as he thought it might properly be said, the nature of a rectangular triangle was, that the square of the hypothenuse was equal to the square of the two other sides; or, it is the nature of sin to offend God: though it be certain, that neither sin nor a rectangular triangle, to which nature is attributed in these propositions, are either of them substances.

Farther, he said, that he did not see how the particle "but" connects this to the preceding words. But

least of all, could he comprehend the inference from hence: " and so that which is the subject of powers and properties is nature, whether it be meant of bodily or spiritual substances." Which deduction, said he, stands thus: "Aristotle takes nature for a corporeal substance, which has the principle of motion in itself; therefore nature and substance are of an equal extent, and so both corporeal and incorporeal substances are nature." This is the very connexion, said he, of the whole deduction in the foregoing words; which I understand not, if I understand the words; and if I understand not the words, I am yet farther from understanding any thing of this explication of nature, whereby we are to come to clear and distinct apprehensions of it.

Methinks, said he, going on, I understand how by making nature and substance one and the same thing, that may serve to bring substance into this dispute; but for all that, I cannot, for my life, understand nature to be substance, nor substance to be nature.

There is another inference, said he, in the close of this paragraph, which both for its connexion and expression, seems to me very hard to be understood, it being set down in these words: "so that the nature of things properly belongs to our reason, and not to mere ideas." For when a man knows what it is for the nature of things properly to belong to reason, and not to mere ideas, there will, I guess, some difficulty remain, in what sense soever he shall understand that expression, to deduce this proposition as an inference from the foregoing words, which are these: "I grant, that by sensation and reflection, we come to know the powers and properties of things; but our reason is satisfied that there must be something beyond those, because it is impossible that they should subsist by themselves so that the nature of things properly belongs to our reason, and not to mere ideas."

It is true, said I; but his lordship, upon my taking reason in that place for the power of reasoning, hath, in his answer, with a little kind of warmth, corrected my mistake in these words: " still you are at it, that you can find no opposition between ideas and reason: but