the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy
Ghost, be with you all.' Such a prayer would be unintelligible to those
Christians to whom the epistle was in the first instance written, had they not
been taught the doctrine of the Trinity before they were baptized, and had they
not believed that doctrine as an essential part of the Christian faith.
As has been said above, since the Deity of the Son of God has already been
proved, it remains for us now to show clearly that the holy Scriptures teach the
Deity of the Holy Spirit of God also; quite apart from this doctrine being
necessarily deduced from the verses already quoted.
The holy Scriptures teach the Deity of the Holy Spirit in two ways: (1) by
ascribing to Him divine attributes and operations, and (2) by speaking of Him as
God. This we proceed to show.
In the Taurat, when the prophet Moses by divine inspiration
(الهام) relates how
God created the world, he says: 'In 1 the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth. And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.'
Here it is clearly taught not only that God's Holy Spirit existed when the earth
was being created, but also that the same Holy Spirit brooded over the face of
the waters and thereby
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