173. The reason why the idea of three Gods cannot be banished by a verbal confession of belief in one God is that this idea has been planted in the memory from childhood up, and what the memory contains is the source of everyone's thought. The memory with human beings resembles the ruminatory stomach of birds and animals. They put food into it, and then they live on it bit by bit, taking it out from time to time and swallowing it into the stomach proper, where the food is digested and circulated to provide for the body's needs. The human understanding is the stomach proper, as the memory is the first stomach. Anyone can see that the idea of three Divine persons from eternity, being the same as the idea of three Gods, cannot be banished by the verbal confession of belief in one God, merely from the fact that it has still not been banished, and is still current with famous people who resist its banishment. For they insist that the three Divine persons are one God, but are so obstinate as to deny that, because God is one, He is also one person. But surely everyone who is wise thinks in his heart that 'person' cannot really be understood as person, but as a predication of some quality? But no one knows what quality, and because of this ignorance the idea remains implanted in the memory from childhood up, like the root of a tree in the ground, which even if the tree is cut down will still send up a shoot.
[2] Do not, my friend, just cut down the tree, but dig up the root, and then plant your garden with trees that bear good fruit. Take care therefore that your mind is not beset by the idea of three Gods, while your mouth, being totally devoid of ideas, rings with the sound of 'one God.' If so, then the understanding up above the memory thinking of three Gods, and the understanding underneath the memory which enables the mouth to say the words 'one God', are, taken together, like a clown on the stage, who can play two parts scuttling from one side to the other, saying one thing on one side and the opposite on the other, so that he has a quarrel with himself, calling himself wise on one side and crazy on the other. The result of this must surely be that, when he stands in the middle and looks in either direction, he thinks neither to be of any consequence, and so perhaps that, since there is neither one God nor three Gods, there cannot be a God at all. The nature-worship so prevalent to-day comes from no other source.
[3] No one in heaven can utter the words 'A Trinity of persons, each of whom singly is God.' For the very aura of heaven, the medium through which the waves of their thoughts are transmitted, as sounds are through air, offers strong resistance. The only person who can do this in heaven is a hypocrite; but the sound of his voice grates in the aura of heaven like teeth grinding together, or screeches like a crow trying to sing like a song-bird. I have also been told from heaven that it is as impossible to banish a belief in a Trinity of Gods, once it is implanted in the mind by finding proofs of it, by merely making oral confession of one God, as it is to pass a tree through its own seed, or a man's chin through a hair of his beard.
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