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"See now, cousin," cried the talkative Barbara, turning towards him, "as I told you, our Sam-Rocious, as the old gentleman called him, a short time ago, is again seized with a vertigo, a real vagabond, as they call such deserters; who asks here in the village after such and such an one, after a coach and strange travellers, and immediately our dealer in herbs there brings him to our house, because he has something to cure, which is once for all his greatest passibility."

Unwillingness to attribute passibility to God, coupled with the desire to remain in some sort trinitarians, forced many of the monophysites into the Sabellian position. Deity, they said in effect, did not suffer in the second person of the trinity, because there is no such person. The persons of the trinity are simply characters assumed by the monadic essence, or aspects under which men view it.

This belief, firmly held in all that it involves, would have kept them from attributing passibility to the Godhead, and ultimately have neutralised the errors of their Christology. But their Christology corrupted their theology. Abandoning all vital relation between God and man in Christ, they abandoned the relation in the Godhead.

How can I judge otherwise, when I hear a man talking, as he did, of God in terms which, every one of them involved what we call the essential properties of matter-space, time, passibility, motion; setting forth phrenology and mesmerism as the great organs of education, even of the regeneration of mankind; apologising for the earlier ravings of the Poughkeepsie seer, and considering his later eclectico-pantheist farragos as great utterances: while, whenever he talked of Nature, he showed the most credulous craving after everything which we, the countrymen of Bacon, have been taught to consider unscientific-Homoeopathy, Electro-biology, Loves of the Plants a la Darwin, Vestiges of Creation, Vegetarianisms, Teetotalisms-never mind what, provided it was unaccredited or condemned by regularly educated men of science?"