On Gen. xviii ch. 1st, 2d and 3d v. " And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and lo! three men stood by him; and when he saw them he ran to meet them from the tent door and bowed himself toward the ground, and said, my Lord if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant."

Philo says, this whole passage contains a latent mystical meaning, not to be communicated to every one, and that according to this mystical sense, here was denoted, the great Jehovah, with his two Avvauus, of which one is called oss, and the other

Δυνάμεις,

Κυριος.

*

The same author, in his Dissertation de Cherubbim, page 86, speaking of the eternal Ens, or är, asserts, that "in the one true God there are two supreme and primary Avvaμs, or powers, whom he denominates goodness and authority; that there is a third and mediatorial power between the two former, who is the logos or word.

The word Jehovah indicates the unity of the essence: Elohim points out, that in this unity there is a plurality existing, in a manner of which we can at present have no clear conception, no more than we have of other parts of the mysterious economy of the invisible world.†

The letter or Jod, which is the first letter of the sacred name, denotes the thought-the idea of God. It is the ray of light, say the enraptured Ca

* Philo judæis de sacrificiis abelis et Caini 108. † Ibid 559.

balists, which darts a lustre too transcendent to be contemplated by mortal eye; it is a point at which thought pauses, and imagination itself grows giddy and confounded.---" Man," says Basnage citing the rabbies, " may lawfully roll his thoughts from one end of heaven to the other, but they cannot approach that inaccessible light, that primitive existence, contained in the letter Jod."*

From what other reason could the Gentiles have given such names to their pretended Gods. Mercury was called Triceps; Bacchus, Triambus; Diana, Triformis; and Hecate, Tergimina; Jupiter had his three-forked thunder; Neptune his trident, and Pluto his three-headed Cerberus. Hence the triangle and the pyramid came to be numbered among the most frequent and esteemed symbols of Deity.†

It is my humble, but decided opinion, that the original and sublime dogma inculcated in the true religion, of a Trinity of hypostases in the divine nature, delivered traditionally down from the ancestors of the human race, and the Hebrew patriarchs, being in time misapprehended, or gradually forgotten, is the fountain of all the similar conceptions in the debased systems of theology, prevailing in every other religion of the earth; of a doctrine thus extensively diffused through all nations; a doctrine established at once in regions distant as Japan and Peru; immemorially acknowledged throughout the whole extent of Egypt and India; and flourishing with equal vigor amidst the snowy mountains of Thibet, and the vast deserts of Siberia. There is no other rational mode

of explaining the allusion, or accounting for the origin.*

In the Oracles of Zoroaster the first, (supposed to be the grandson of Ham and great grandson of Noah,) though many of them are forgeries; yet many of them bear the marks of the genuine remains of Chaldaic theology; that theology which, according to Proclus, as cited by Mr. Stanley, was revealed to man by the awful voice of the Deity himself. In these oracles we find such singular expressions as these: "Where the paternal monad is, that paternal monad amplifies itself, and generates a duality." After declaring that the duad thus generated sits by the monad, and shining forth with intellectual beams, governs all things; this remarkable passage occurs, "for a triad of Deity shines forth throughout the whole world, of which a monad is the head." In a succeeding verse of this section we are informed, "for the mind of the Father said, that all things should be divided into three, whose will assented, and all things were divided." Immediately after follows a passage, in which the three persons in the Divine essence are expressly pointed out by appellations," and there appeared in this triad, virtue, and Wisdom, and Truth, that know all things." This is answerable to the Kather (virtue), the Cochma (wisdom), and Binah (intelligence, or Spirit of truth), of the Hebrews.t

In the next section, under the title "The Father and the Mind," it is expressly said, the Father perfects all things, and delivers them over to the second

Mind, that second Mind whom the nations of men commonly take for the first.Under two minds is contained the life-generating fountain of souls, and the artificer who, self-operating, formed the world; He who sprang first out of that mind. In order next to the eternal mind, I Pysche dwell, warming and animating all things.*

Kircher gives the following extract from Hermes Trismegistus' books, "There hath ever been one great intellectual light, which has always illuminated the mind; and their union is nothing else but the Spirit, which is the bond of all things."

Orpheus asserts, (as is abridged by Timotheus, a Christian writer) the existence of an eternal incomprehensible Being; the Creator of all things, even of the æther itself, and of all things below that ætherThat this supreme Demiurgos is called Light, Counsel and Life.

Timotheus concludes his account by affirming, that Orpheus in his book declared, that all things were made by one God-head in three names, and that this God is all things.

It is remarkable through all antiquity, the humor of dividing every thing into three, displayed itself; and whence, except from the source of revelation, could this general but mutilated tradition of a triuneGod have originated. The Fates, those relentless sisters, who weave the web of human life, and fix its inevitable doom, were three-the Furies, the dire dispensers of the vengeance of Heaven, for crimes com

* Ibid 636, 638.

† Ibid. 690, and cites Oedep Egypt, tom iii. 576. Ibid. 701. 702.

mitted upon earth, were three-the Graces were three, and the celestial Muses, according to Varro, were originally only three.*

I have not undertaken so much to account for the perversion of this doctrine, as to record and ascertain the fact, of this notion of a triad of Deity, being radically interwoven in the theological codes adopted in almost every region of Asia-Asia, where the sublime system of the true religion was first revealed; where the pure precepts it inculcates were first practised, and where unhappily its leading principles were earliest adulterated. The Almighty hath not left himself without a witness, amidst the degrading superstitions and the false philosophy of the degenerate Asiatics. In the Persian triad, the character of Mithra, the middle god, is called the mediator: Now, the idea of a mediator, could alone originate in a consciousness of committed crimes, as well as in a dread of merited punishment.†

Plutarch, an enemy to a triad of Deity says, "Zoroaster is said to have made a three-fold distri. bution of things; to have assigned the first and highest rank to Oromasdes, who in the oracles, is called the Father; the lowest to Ahrimenes, and the middle to Mithras, who, in the same oracles, is called Ton Deuteron Nou, the second mind.”||

Of exquisite workmanship and of stupendous antiquity.-Antiquity to which neither the page of history, nor human traditions can ascend; that magnificent piece of sculpture, so often alluded to, in the cavern of Elephanta, decidedly establishes the solemn fact,

#Ibid. 712.

† Ibid. 713.

Plutarch de Iside et Osiride, page 370.