9. (iii) THAT IS WHY THERE IS NO NATION THROUGHOUT THE WORLD POSSESSED OF RELIGION AND SOUND REASON WHICH DOES NOT ACKNOWLEDGE GOD AND THE FACT THAT HE IS ONE.
The consequence of the Divine influence operating on the souls of men as described above is that every man has an inward voice telling him that there is a God, and that He is one. None the less there are those who deny the existence of God, those who recognise nature as a god, and those who worship several gods and also statues as gods. The reason is that these have choked the interiors of their reason or understanding with worldly and bodily thoughts, thus blotting out their original or child-like idea of God, and at the same time throwing religion away over their shoulders. The confession of the creed shows plainly that Christians acknowledge one God, but it also shows how they see Him. It runs:
The catholic faith is that we reverence one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity. There are three Divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and yet there are not three gods, but one God. There is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. They have one Divinity, equal glory and co-eternal majesty. So the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. But as Christian verity compels us to confess each person severally to be God and Lord, so does the catholic religion forbid us to speak of three Gods and three Lords.
Such is the Christian faith on the oneness of God; but it will be seen in the chapter on the Divine Trinity [163-188] that there is a conflict in that confession between the ideas of a Trinity and the oneness of God.
[2] The rest of the nations in the world, who are possessed of religion and sound reason, insist that God is one: all the Mohammedans in their empires, the Africans in many kingdoms of their continent, and the peoples of Asia in several of theirs, not to mention the present-day Jews. The most ancient people of the Golden Age, those who had any religion, worshipped one God whom they named Jehovah. So did the ancients of the following age, before the establishment of empires under a sole monarch. For at this time worldly, and finally bodily, loves began to close up the higher regions of the understanding, which had previously been open; then they had been like temples and shrines for the worship of one God. But the Lord God, in order to re-open them and thus restore the worship of one God, founded a church among the descendants of Jacob, and set at the head of all the commandments of their religion this:
There is to be no other God before my face, Exodus 20:3
[3] Jehovah too, the new name which He gave Himself for them, means the supreme and single Entity from which everything comes which is and comes into being anywhere in the universe. The early gentiles acknowledged as their supreme God Jupiter, 1
perhaps so called from Jehovah; and they endowed with divinity many of the other members of his court. But the philosophers of the following age, such as Plato and Aristotle, admitted that these were not gods, but so many properties, qualities and attributes of the one God, which were called gods on account of the divinity immanent in each of them.
