dity. It is evident, if there exists only a single God,
there cannot be three. We may, it is true, contemplate the Deity after
the manner of Plato, who, before the birth of Christianity, exhibited
him under three different points of view, that is to say, as all-wise,
as all-powerful, as full of reason, and as infinite in goodness; but
it was verily the excess of delirium to personify these three divine
qualities, or transform them into real beings. We can readily imagine
these moral attributes to be united in the same God, but it is
egregious folly to fashion them into three different Gods; nor will it
remedy this metaphysical polytheism to assert that these three are
one. Besides, this revery never entered the head of the Hebrew
legislator. The Eternal, in revealing himself to Moses, did not
announce himself as triple. There is not one syllable in the Old
Testament about this Trinity, although a notion so _bizarre_, so
marvellous, and so little consonant with our ideas of a divine being,
deserved to have been formally announced, especially as it is the
foundation and corner stone of the Christian religion, which was from
all eternity an object of the divine solicitude, and on the
establishment of which, if we may credit our sapient priests, God
seems to have entertained serious thoughts long before the creation of
the world.

Nevertheless, the second person, or the second God of the Trinity, is
revealed in flesh; the Son of God is made man. But how could the pure
Spirit who presides over the universe beget a son? How could this son,
who before his incarnation was only a pure spirit, combine that
ethereal essence with a material body, and envelop himself with it?
How could the divine nature amalgamate itself with the imperfect
nature of man, and how could an immense and infinite being, as the
Deity is represented, be formed in the womb of a virgin? After what
manner could a pure spirit fecundate this favorite virgin? Did the Son
of God enjoy in the womb of his mother the faculties of omnipotence,
or was he like other children during his infancy,--weak, liable to
infirmities, sickness, and intellectual imbecility, so conspicuous in
the years of childhood; and if so, what, during this period, became of
the divine wisdom and power? In fine, how could God suffer and die?
How could a just God consent that a God exempt from all sin should
endure the chastisements which are due to sinners? Why did he not
appease himself witho