cute Father discovers a great inconvenience in
this argument, for it forces us to say that the Father is not wise,
but by that Wisdom which he begot, not being himself Wisdom as the
Father: and then we must consider whether the Son himself, as he is
God of God, and Light of Light, may be said to be Wisdom of Wisdom, if
God the Father be not Wisdom, but only begets Wisdom.

The proper answer to Augustine is, that the Son and Holy Ghost are
necessary and essential, not contingent: and that 'his' argument has a
still greater inconvenience, as shewn in note p. 98.

Ib. pp. 110-113.

But what makes St. Gregory dispute thus nicely, and oppose the common
and ordinary forms of speech? Did he in good earnest believe that
there is but one man in the world? No, no! he acknowledged as many men
as we do; a great multitude who had the same human nature, and that
every one who had a human nature was an individual man, distinguished
and divided from all other individuals of the same nature. What makes
him so zealous then against saying, that Peter, James and John are
three men? Only this; that he says man is the name of nature, and
therefore to say there are three men is the same as to say, there are
three human natures of a different kind; for if there are three human
natures, they must differ from each other, or they cannot be three;
and so you deny Peter, James, and John to be [Greek: homoousioi], or
of the same nature; and for the same reason we must say that though
the Father be God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, yet there are
not three Gods, but [Greek: mia theotaes], one Godhead and Divinity.

Sherlock struggles in vain, in my opinion at least, to clear these
Fathers of egregious logomachy, whatever may have been the soundness of
their faith, spite of the quibbles by which they endeavoured to evince
its rationality. The very change of the terms is suspicious. "Yes! we
might say three Gods" (it would be answered,) "as we say and ought to
say three men: for man and humanity, [Greek: anthropos] and [Greek:
anthropotaes] are not the same terms;--so if the Father be God, the Son
God, and the Holy Ghost God, there would be three Gods, though not
[Greek: treis theotaetes],--that is, three Godheads."

Ib. p. 115-16.

Gregory Nyssen tells us that [Greek: theos] is [Greek: theataes] and
[Greek: ephoros], the inspector and governor of the world, that is, it
is a name of energy,