THE UNITY OF GOD, OR THAT THERE IS ONE GOD

1. The recognition and acknowledgement that God is One is the highest and innermost, consequently the universal, of all the doctrinal things of the Church. 2. Unless there were one God, the universe could not have been created and preserved. 3. In a man who does not acknowledge God, there is not the Church, and so there is not heaven. 4. In a man who acknowledges not one God but several, nothing of the Church holds together. 5. From God, and out of the angelic heaven, there is a universal influx into man's soul, that there is a God, and that He is One. 6. Human reason can, if it will, perceive from many things in the world that there is a God and also that He is One. 7. It is due to this that there is not a nation in the whole world having religion and sound reason that does not acknowledge and confess One God. 8. Scripture, and therefrom the doctrines of the Churches in Christendom, teach that there is One God. 9. But as regards what kind of God this One is, peoples and nations have deviated and do deviate into different opinions. 10. There are several reasons for past and present deviation into different opinions about God and about His unity.