them birth, or who begot them, and it is necessary also that the First person of the Divinity, who gave birth to the two other persons, should have existed before them; because that which does not exist can not beget anything.  Nevertheless, it is repugnant as well as absurd to claim that anything could be begotten or born without having had a beginning.  Now, according to our Christ-worshipers, the Second and Third persons of Divinity were begotten and born; then they had a beginning, and the First person had none, not being begotten by another; it therefore follows necessarily that one existed before the other.

Our Christ-worshipers, who feel these absurdities and can not avoid them by any good reasoning, have no other resource than to say that we must ignore human reason and humbly adore these sublime mysteries without wishing to understand them; but that which they call faith is refuted when they tell us that we must submit; it is telling us that we must blindly believe that which we do not believe.  Our Christ-worshipers condemn the blindness of the ancient Pagans, who worshiped several Gods; they deride the genealogy of those Gods, their birth, their marriages, and the generating of their children; yet they do not observe that they themselves say things which are much more ridiculous and absurd.

If the Pagans believed that there were Goddesses as well as Gods, that these Gods and Goddesses married and begat children, they thought of nothing, then, but what is natural; for they did not believe yet that the Gods were without body or feeling; they believed they were similar to men.  Why should there not be females as well as males?  It is not more reasonable to deny or to recognize the one than the other; and supposing there were Gods and Goddesses, why should they not beget children in the ordinary way?  There would be certainly nothing ridiculous or absurd in this doc trine, if it were true that their Gods existed.  But in the doctrine of our Christ-worshipers there is something absolutely ridiculous and absurd; for besides claiming that one God forms Three, and that these Three form but One, they pretend that this Triple and Unique God has neither body, form, nor face; that the First person of this Triple and Unique God, whom they call the Father, begot of Himself a Second person, which they call the Son, and which is the same as His Father, being, like Him, without body, form, or face.  If this is true, why is it that the First one is called Father rather than mother, or the Second called Son rather than daughter?  For if the First one is really father instead of mother, and if the Second is son instead of daughter, there must be something in both of these two persons which causes the one to be father rather than mother, and the other to be son rather than daughter.  Now who can assert that they are males and not females?  But how should they be rather males than females, as they have neither body, form, nor face?  That is not an imaginable thing, and destroys itself.  No matter, they claim chat these two Persons, without body, form, or face, and, consequently, without difference of sex, are nevertheless Father and Son, and that they produced by their mutual love a third person, whom they called the Holy Ghost, who has, like the other two, no body, no form, and no face.  What abominable nonsense!