‘In initio’.
It would be no easy matter to find
a tolerably competent individual who more venerates
the writings of Waterland than I do, and long have
done. But still in how many pages do I not see
reason to regret, that the total idea of the 4=3=1, of
the adorable Tetractys, eternally self-manifested
in the Triad, Father, Son, and Spirit, was
never in its cloudless unity present to him.
Hence both he and Bishop Bull too often treat it as
a peculiarity of positive religion, which is to be
cleared of all contradiction to reason, and then,
thus negatively qualified, to be actually received
by an act of the mere will; ’sit pro ratione
voluntas’. Now, on the other hand,
I affirm, that the article of the Trinity is religion,
is reason, and its universal ‘formula’;
and that there neither is, nor can be, any religion,
any reason, but what is, or is an expansion of the
truth of the Trinity; in short, that all other pretended
religions, pagan or ’pseudo’-Christian
(for example, Sabellian, Arian, Socinian), are in
themselves Atheism; though God forbid, that I should
call or even think the men so denominated Atheists.
I affirm a heresy often, but never dare denounce the
holder a heretic.
On this ground only can it be made
comprehensible, how any honest and commonly intelligent
man can withstand the proofs and sound logic of Bull
and Waterland, that they failed in the first place
to present the idea itself of the great doctrine which
they so ably advocated. Take my self, S.T.C.
as a humble instance. I was never so befooled
as to think that the author of the fourth Gospel,
or that St. Paul, ever taught the Priestleyan Psilanthropism,
or that Unitarianisn (presumptuously, nay, absurdly
so called), was the doctrine of the New Testament generally.
But during the sixteen months of my aberration from
the Catholic Faith, I presumed that the tenets of
the divinity of Christ, the Redemption, and the like,
were irrational, and that what was contradictory to
reason could not have been revealed by the Supreme
Reason. As soon as I discovered that these doctrines
were not only consistent with reason, but themselves
very reason, I returned at once to the literal interpretation
of the Scriptures, and to the Faith.
As to Dr. Samuel Clarke, the fact
is, every generation has its one or more over-rated
men. Clarke was such in the reign of George I.;
Dr. Johnson eminently so in that of George III.; Lord
Byron being the star now in the ascendant.
In every religious and moral use of
the word, God, taken absolutely, that is, not as a
God, or the God, but as God, a relativity, a distinction
in kind ‘ab omni quod non est Deus’,
is so essentially implied, that it is a matter of
perfect indifference, whether we assert a world without
God, or make God the world. The one is as truly
Atheism as the other. In fact, for all moral
and practical purposes they are the same position
differently expressed; for whether I say, God is the
world, or the world is God, the inevitable conclusion,
the sense and import is, that there is no other God
than the world, that is, there is no other meaning
to the term God. Whatever you may mean by, or
choose to believe of, the world, that and that alone
you mean by, and believe of, God. Now I very
much question whether in any other sense Atheism, that
is, speculative Atheism, is possible. For even
in the Lucretian, the coarsest and crudest scheme
of the Epicurean doctrine, a hylozism, a potential
life, is clearly implied, as also in the celebrated
’lene clinamen’ becoming actual.
Desperadoes articulating breath into a blasphemy of
nonsense, to which they themselves attach no connected
meaning, and the wickedness of which is alone intelligible,
there may be; but a La Place, or a La Grand, would,
and with justice, resent and repel the imputation
of a belief in chance, or of a denial of law, order,
and self-balancing life and power in the world.
Their error is, that they make them the proper and
underived attributes of the world. It follows
then, that Pantheism is equivalent to Atheism, and
that there is no other Atheism actually existing,
or speculatively conceivable, but Pantheism.
Now I hold it demonstrable that a consistent Socinianism,
following its own consequences, must come to Pantheism,
and in ungodding the Saviour must deify cats and dogs,
fleas and frogs. There is, there can be, no ‘medium’
between the Catholic Faith of Trinal Unity, and Atheism
disguised in the self-contradicting term, Pantheism; for
every thing God, and no God, are identical positions.
Query I. .
’The Word was God’. John
. ’I am the Lord, and there is none
else; there is no God besides me’. Is.
xi, &c.
In all these texts the ‘was’,
or ‘is’, ought to be rendered positively,
or objectively, and not as a mere connective:
‘The Word Is God’, and saith, ‘I
Am the Lord; there is no God besides me’, the
Supreme Being, ‘Deitas objectiva’.
The Father saith, ’I Am in that I am, Deitas
subjectiva’.
Ib. .
Whether all other beings, besides the
one Supreme God, be not excluded by the texts of
Isaiah (to which many more might be added), and consequently,
whether Christ can be God at all, unless He be the
same with the Supreme God?
The sum of your answer to this query is,
that the texts cited from
Isaiah, are spoken of one Person only,
the Person of the Father, &c.
O most unhappy mistranslation of ‘Hypostasis’
by Person! The Word is properly the only Person.
Ib. .
Now, upon your hypothesis, we must add;
that even the Son of God himself, however divine
he may be thought, is really no God at all in any
just and proper sense. He is no more than a nominal
God, and stands excluded with the rest. All
worship of him, and reliance upon him, will be idolatry,
as much as the worship of angels, or men, or of the
gods of the heathen would be. God the Father he
is God, and he only, and ‘him only shall thou
serve’. This I take to be a clear consequence
from your principles, and unavoidable.
Waterland’s argument is absolutely
unanswerable by a worshipper of Christ. The modern
’ultra’-Socinian cuts the knot.
Query II. .
And therefore he might as justly bear
the style and title of ’Lord God, God of Abraham’,
&c. while he acted in that capacity, as he did that
of ‘Mediator, Messiah, Son of the Father’,
&c. after that he condescended to act in another,
and to discover his personal relation.
And why, then, did not Dr. Waterland, why
did not his great predecessor in this glorious controversy,
Bishop Bull, contend for a revisal of our
established version of the Bible, but especially of
the New Testament? Either the unanimous belief
and testimony of the first five or six centuries,
grounded on the reiterated declarations of John and
Paul, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
were erroneous, or at best doubtful; and
then why not wipe them off; why these references to
them? or else they were, as I believe, and
both Bull and Waterland believed, the very truth;
and then why continue the translation of the Hebrew
into English at second-hand through the ‘medium’
of the Septuagint? Have we not adopted the Hebrew
word, Jéhovah,? Is not the [Greek: Kyrios],
or Lord, of the LXX. a Greek substitute, in countless
instances, for the Hebrew Jéhovah? Why not then
restore the original word, and in the Old Testament
religiously render Jéhovah by Jéhovah, and every text
of the New Testament, referring to the Old, by the
Hebrew word in the text referred to? Had this
been done, Socinianism would have been scarcely possible
in England.
Why was not this done? I
will tell you why. Because that great truth,
in which are contained all treasures of all possible
knowledge, was still opaque even to Bull and Waterland; because
the Idea itself that ‘Idea Idearum’,
the one substrative truth which is the form, manner,
and involvent of all truths, was never
present to either of them in its entireness, unity,
and transparency. They most ably vindicated the
doctrine of the Trinity, negatively, against the charge
of positive irrationality. With equal ability
they shewed the contradictions, nay, the absurdities,
involved in the rejection of the same by a professed
Christian. They demonstrated the utterly un-Scriptural
and contra-Scriptural nature of Arianism, and
Sabellianism, and Socinianism. But the self-evidence
of the great Truth, as a universal of the reason, as
the reason itself as a light which revealed
itself by its own essence as light this
they had not had vouchsafed to them.
Query XV. -6.
The pretence is, that we equivocate in
talking of eternal generation.
All generation is necessarily [Greek:
anarchon ti], without dividuous beginning, and herein
contradistinguished from creation.
Ib. .
True, it is not the same with human generation.
Not the same ‘eodem modo’,
certainly; but it is so essentially the same that
the generation of the Son of God is the transcendent,
which gives to human generation its right to be so
called. It is in the most proper, that is, the
fontal, sense of the term, generation.
Ib.
You have not proved that all generation
implies beginning; and what is
more, cannot.
It would be difficult to disprove
the contrary. Generation with a beginning is
not generation, but creation. Hence we may see
how necessary it is that in all important controversies
we should predefine the terms negatively, that is,
exclude and preclude all that is not meant by them;
and then the positive meaning, that is, what is meant
by them, will be the easy result, the post-definition,
which is at once the real definition and impletion,
the circumference and the area.
Ib. -8.
It is a usual thing with many, (moralists
may account for it), when they meet with a difficulty
which they cannot readily answer, immediately to
conclude that the doctrine is false, and to run directly
into the opposite persuasion; not considering
that they may meet with much more weighty objections
there than before; or that they may have reason
sufficient to maintain and believe many things in
philosophy and divinity, though they cannot answer
every question which may be started, or every difficulty
which may be raised against them.
O, if Bull and Waterland had been
first philosophers, and then divines, instead of being
first, manacled, or say articled clerks of a guild; if
the clear free intuition of the truth had led them
to the Article, and not the Article to the defence
of it as not having been proved to be false, how
different would have been the result! Now we feel
only the inconsistency of Arianism, not the truth
of the doctrine attacked. Arianism is confuted,
and in such a manner, that I will not reject the Catholic
Faith upon the Arian’s grounds. It may,
I allow, be still true. But that it is true,
because the Arians have hitherto failed to prove its
falsehood, is no logical conclusion. The Unitarian
may have better luck; or if he fail, the Deist.
Query XVI. .
But God’s ‘thoughts are not
our thoughts’.
That is, as I would interpret the
text; the ideas in and by which God reveals
himself to man are not the same with, and are not to
be judged by, the conceptions which the human understanding
generalizes from the notices of the senses, common
to man and to irrational animals, dogs, elephants,
beavers, and the like, endowed with the same senses.
Therefore I regard this paragraph, -4, as a specimen
of admirable special pleading ‘ad hominem’
in the Court of eristic Logic; but I condemn it as
a wilful resignation or temporary self-deposition of
the reason. I will not suppose what my reason
declares to be no position at all, and therefore an
impossible sub-position.
Ib. .
Let us keep to the terms we began with;
lest by the changing of words
we make a change of ideas, and alter the
very state of the question.
This misuse, or rather this ‘omnium-gatherum’
expansion and consequent extenuation of the word,
Idea and Ideas, may be regarded as a calamity inflicted
by Mr. Locke on the reigns of William III. Queen
Anne, and the first two Georges.
Ib. .
Sacrifice was one instance of worship
required under the Law; and it is said; ’He
that sacrificeth unto any God, save unto the Lord only,
he shall be utterly destroyed’ (Exod. xxi.) Now suppose any person, considering with himself
that only absolute and sovereign sacrifice was appropriated
to God by this law, should have gone and sacrificed
to other Gods, and have been convicted of it before
the judges. The apology he must have made for
it, I suppose, must have run thus: “Gentlemen,
though I have sacrificed to other Gods, yet I hope
you’ll observe, that I did it not absolutely:
I meant not any absolute or supreme sacrifice (which
is all that the Law forbids), but relative and inferior
only. I regulated my intentions with all imaginable
care, and my esteem with the most critical exactness.
I considered the other Gods, whom I sacrificed to,
as inferior only and infinitely so; reserving all
sovereign sacrifice to the supreme God of Israel.”
This, or the like apology must, I presume, have
brought off the criminal with some applause for
his acuteness, if your principles be true. Either
you must allow this, or you must be content to say,
that not only absolute supreme sacrifice (if there
be any sense in that phrase), but all sacrifice
was by the Law appropriate to God only, &c. &c.
How was it possible for an Arian to
answer this? But it was impossible; and Arianism
was extinguished by Waterland, but in order to the
increase of Socinianism; and this, I doubt not, Waterland
foresaw. He was too wise a man to suppose that
the exposure of the folly and falsehood of one form
of Infidelism would cure or prevent Infidelity.
Enough, that he made it more bare-faced I
might say, bare-breeched; for modern Unitarianism
is verily the ‘sans-culotterie’ of religion.
Ib. .
You imagine that acts of religious worship
are to derive their
signification and quality from the intention
and meaning of the
worshippers: whereas the very reverse
of it is the truth.
Truly excellent. Let the Church
of England praise God for her Saints a
more glorious Kalendar than Rome can show!
Ib. .
The sum then of the case is this:
If the Son could be included as being uncreated,
and very God; as Creator, Sustainer, Preserver of all
things, and one with the Father; then he might be
worshipped upon their (the Ante-Nicene Fathers’)
principles, but otherwise could not.
Every where in this invaluable writer
I have to regret the absence of all distinct idea
of the I Am as the proper attribute of the Father;
and hence, the ignorance of the proper Jehovaism of
the Son; and hence, that while we worship the Son
together with the Father, we nevertheless pray to
the Father only through the Son.
Query XVII.
And we may never be able perfectly to
comprehend the relations of the
three persons, ‘ad intra’,
amongst themselves; the ineffable order and
economy of the ever-blessed co-eternal
Trinity.
“Comprehend!” No.
For how can any spiritual truth be comprehended?
Who can comprehend his own will; or his own personeity,
that is, his I-ship (Ichheit’); or his own mind,
that is, his person; or his own life? But we
can distinctly apprehend them. In strictness,
the Idea, God, like all other ideas rightly so called,
and as contradistinguished from conception, is not
so properly above, as alien from, comprehension.
It is like smelling a sound.
Query XVIII. .
From what hath been observed, it may appear
sufficiently that the divine [Greek: Logos]
was our King and our God long before; that he had
the same claim and title to religious worship that
the Father himself had ’only not
so distinctly revealed’.
Here I differ ‘toto orbe’
from Waterland, and say with Luther and Zinzendorf,
that before the Baptism of John the ‘Logos’
alone had been distinctly revealed, and that first
in Christ he declared himself a Son, namely, the co-eternal
only-begotten Son, and thus revealed the Father.
Indeed the want of the Idea of the 1=3 could alone
have prevented Waterland from inferring this from
his own query II. and the texts cited by him pp.
28-38. The Father cannot be revealed except in
and through the Son, his eternal ‘exegesis’.
The contrary position is an absurdity. The Supreme
Will, indeed, the Absolute Good, knoweth himself as
the Father: but the act of self-affirmation,
the I Am in that I Am, is not a manifestation ‘ad
extra’, not an ‘exegesis’.
Ib. .
This point being settled, I might allow
you that, in some sense, distinct worship commenced
with the distinct title of Son or Redeemer: that
is, our blessed Lord was then first worshipped, or
commanded to be worshipped by us, under that distinct
title or character; having before had no other title
or character peculiar and proper to himself, but
only what was common to the Father and him too.
Rather shall I say that the Son and
the Spirit, the Word and the Wisdom, were alone worshipped,
because alone revealed under the Law. See Proverbs,
i. ii.
The passage quoted from Bishop Bull
is very plausible and very eloquent; but only ‘cum
multis granis salis sumend’.
Query XIX. .
That the Father, whose honour had been
sufficiently secured under the
Jewish dispensation, and could not but
be so under the Christian also,
&c.
Here again! This contradiction
of Waterland to his own principles is continually
recurring; yea, and in one place he involves
the very Tritheism, of which he was so victorious
an antagonist, namely, that the Father is Jéhovah,
the Son Jéhovah, and the Spirit Jéhovah; thus
making Jéhovah either a mere synonyme of
God whereas he himself rightly renders
it [Greek: Ho On], which St. John every where,
and St. Paul no less, makes the peculiar name of the
Son, [Greek: monogenaes uhios, ho on eis ton
kolpon tou patros] ; or he affirms the same
absurdity, as if had said: The Father is the
Son, and the Son is the Son, and the Holy Ghost is
the Son, and yet there are not three Sons but one Son.
N. B. [Greek: Ho on] is the verbal noun of [Greek:
hos esti], not of [Greek: ego eimi]. It
is strange how little use has been made of that profound
and most pregnant text, ‘John’ !
Query XX. .
The [Greek: homoousion] itself might
have been spared, at least out of the Creeds, had
not a fraudulent abuse of good words brought matters
to that pass, that the Catholic Faith was in danger
of being lost even under Catholic language.
Most assuredly the very ‘disputable’
rendering of [Greek: homoousion] by consubstantial,
or of one substance with, not only might have been
spared, but should have been superseded. Why not as
is felt to be for the interest of science in all the
physical sciences retain the same term
in all languages? Why not ‘usía’
and homouesial, as well as ‘hypostasis’,
hypostatic, homogeneous, heterogeneous, and the like; or
as Baptism, Eucharist, Liturgy, Epiphany and the rest?
Query XXI. .
The Doctor’s insinuating from the
300 texts, which style the Father God absolutely,
or the one God, that the Son is not strictly and essentially
God, not one God with the Father, is a strained and
remote inference of his own.
Waterland has weakened his argument
by seeming to admit that in all these 300 texts the
Father, ‘distinctive’, is meant.
Ib. -17.
The simplicity of God is another mystery.
When we come to inquire whether all extension,
or all plurality, diversity, composition of substance
and accident, and the like, be consistent with it,
then it is we discover how confused and inadequate
our ideas are. To this head belongs that perplexing
question (beset with difficulties on all sides),
whether the divine substance be extended or no.
Surely, the far larger part of these
assumed difficulties rests on a misapplication either
of the senses to the sense, or of the sense to the
understanding, or of the understanding to the reason; in
short, on an asking for images where only theorems
can be, or requiring theorems for thoughts, that is,
conceptions or notions, or lastly, conceptions for
ideas.
Query XXIII. .
But taking advantage of the ambiguity
of the word ‘hypostasis’,
sometimes used to signify substance, and
sometimes person, you
contrive a fallacy.
And why did not Waterland lift up
his voice against this mischievous abuse of the term
‘hypostasis’, and the perversion of
its Latin rendering, ‘substantia’
as being equivalent to [Greek: ousia]? Why
[Greek: ousia] should not have been rendered by
‘essentia’, I cannot conceive.
‘Est’ seems a contraction of ‘esset’,
and ‘ens’ of ‘essens’:
[Greek: on, ousa, ousia] = ‘essens, essentis,
essentia’.
Ib. .
Let me desire you not to give so great
a loose to your fancy in divine
things: you seem to consider every
thing under the notion of extension
and sensible images.
Very true. The whole delusion
of the Anti-Trinitarians arises out of this, that
they apply the property of imaginable matter in
which A. is, that is, can only be imagined, by exclusion
of B. as the universal predicate of all substantial
being.
Ib. .
And our English Unitarians have been
still refining upon the
Socinian scheme, and have brought
it still nearer to Sabellianism.
The Sabellian and the Unitarian seem
to differ only in this; that what the Sabellian
calls union with, the Unitarian calls full inspiration
by, the Divinity.
Ib. .
It is obvious, at first sight, that the
true Arian or Semi-Arian scheme (which you would
be thought to come up to at least) can never tolerably
support itself without taking in the Catholic principle
of a human soul to join with the Word.
Here comes one of the consequences
of the Cartesian Dualism: as if [Greek:
sarx], the living body, could be or exist without a
soul, or a human living body without a human soul!
[Greek: Sarx] is not Greek for carrion, nor [Greek:
soma] for carcase.
Query XXIV. .
Necessary existence is an essential character,
and belongs equally to
Father and Son.
Subsistent in themselves are Father,
Son and Spirit: the Father only has origin in
himself.
Query XXVI. .
The words [Greek: ouch hos genomenon]
he construes thus: “not as eternally
generated,” as if he had read [Greek: gennomenon],
supplying [Greek: aidios] by imagination.
The sense and meaning of the word [Greek: genomenon],
signifying made, or created, is so fixed and certain
in this author, &c.
This is but one of fifty instances
in which the true Englishing of [Greek: genomenos,
egeneto], &c. would have prevented all mistake.
It is not ‘made’, but ‘became’.
Thus here: begotten eternally, and not as
one that became; that is, as not having been before.
The only-begotten Son never ‘became’;
but all things ‘became’ through him.
I.
’Et nos etiam Sermoni
atque Rationi, itemque Virtuti, per quae omnia
molitum Deum ediximus, propriam substantiam Spiritum
inscribimus; cui et Sermo insit praenuntianti,
et Ratio adsit disponenti, et Virtus perficienti.
Hunc ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione
generatum, et idcirco Filium Dei
et Deum dictum ex unitate substantiae’. Tertull.
Apol. .
How strange and crude the realism
of the Christian Faith appears in Tertullian’s
rugged Latin!
Ib. .
He represents Tertullian as making the
Son, in his highest capacity,
ignorant of the day of judgment.
Of the true sense of the text, Mark
xii., I still remain in doubt; but, though as
zealous and stedfast a Homouesian as Bull and Waterland
themselves, I am inclined to understand it of the Son
in his highest capacity; but I would avoid the inferiorizing
consequences by a stricter rendering of the [Greek:
ei mae ho Pataer]. The [Greek: moñón]
of St. Matthew xxi. is here omitted. I think
Waterland’s a very unsatisfying solution of
this text.
Ib. .
’Exclamans quod se Deus reliquisset,
&c. Habes ipsum exclamantem in passione,
Deus meus, Deus meus, ut quid
me dereliquisti? Sed haec vox
carnis et animae, id est,
hominis; nec Sermonis, nec Spiritus’,
&c. Tertull. Adv. Prax. .
.
The ignorance of the Fathers, and,
Origen excepted, of the Ante-Nicene Fathers in particular,
in all that respects Hebrew learning and the New Testament
references to the Old Testament, is shown in this so
early fantastic misinterpretation grounded on the
fact of our Lord’s reminding, and as it were
giving out aloud to John and Mary the twenty-second
Psalm, the prediction of his present sufferings and
after glory. But the entire passage in Tertullian,
though no proof of his Arianism, is full of proofs
of his want of insight into the true sense of the
Scripture texts. Indeed without detracting from
the inestimable services of the Fathers from Tertullian
to Augustine respecting the fundamental article of
the Christian Faith, yet commencing from the fifth
century, I dare claim for the Reformed Church of England
the honorable name of [Greek: archaspistaes]
of Trinitarianism, and the foremost rank among the
Churches, Roman or Protestant: the learned Romanist
divines themselves admit this, and make a merit of
the reluctance with which they nevertheless admit
it, in respect of Bishop Bull.
Ib. .
It seems to me that if there be not reasons
of conscience obliging a
good man to speak out, there are always
reasons of prudence which
should make a wise man hold his tongue.
True, and as happily expressed.
To this, however, the honest Anti-Trinitarian must
come at last: “Well, well, I admit that
John and Paul thought differently; but this remains
my opinion.”
Query XXVII. .
[Greek: Ton alaethinon kai ontos
onta Theon, ton tou Christou patera].
Athanas. Cont. Gent.
The just and literal rendering of the
passage is this: ’The true God
who in reality is such, namely, the Father
of Christ.’
The passage admits of a somewhat different
interpretation from this of Waterland’s, and
of equal, if not greater, force against the Arian
notion: namely, taking [Greek: ton ontos
onta] distinctively from [Greek: ho on] the
‘Ens omnis entitatis, etiam suae’,
that is, the I Am the Father, in distinction from
the ‘Ens Supremum’, the Son. It cannot,
however, be denied that in changing the ‘formula’
of the ‘Tetractys’ into the ‘Trias’,
by merging the ‘Prothesis’ in the ‘Thesis’,
the Identity in the Ipseity, the Christian Fathers
subjected their exposition to many inconveniences.
Ib. .
[Greek: Ouch ho poiaetaes ton holon
estai Theos ho to Mosei eipon
auton einai Theon Abraam, kai Theon Isaak,
kai Theon Iakob]. Justin
Mart. Dial. .
The meaning is, that that divine Person,
who called himself God, and was God, was not the
Person of the Father, whose ordinary character is
that of maker of all things, but another divine Person,
namely, God the Son. It was Justin’s business
to shew that there was a divine Person, one who
was God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and was not the
Father; and therefore there were two divine Persons.
At all events, it was a very incautious
expression on the part of Justin, though his meaning
was, doubtless, that which Waterland gives. The
same most improper, or at best, most inconvenient because
equivocal phrase, has been, as I think, interpolated
into our Apostles’ Creed.
Ib. .
[Greek: Taeroito d’ an, hos
ho emos logos, ehis men Theos, eis hen
aition kai Ghiou kai Pneumatos anapheromenon.
k.t.l.] Greg. Naz.
Ora.
We may, as I conceive, preserve (the doctrine
of) one God, by
referring both the Son and Holy Ghost
to one cause, &c.
Another instance of the inconvenience
of the Trias compared with the Tetractys.
’Y sino ahi está
el Doctor Jorge Bull Profesor de
Teologia, y Presbítero de la
Iglesia Anglicana, que murio Obispo
de San David el ano de
1716, cuyas obras teologico escolasticas,
en folio, nada deben a las mas
alambicadas que se han estampado en
Salamanca y en Coimbra; y como los puntos
que por la mayor parte trato
en ellas son sobre los misterios
capitales de nuestra Santa Fe, conviene a saber,
sobre el misterio de la
Trinidad, y sobre el de la
Divinidad de Cristo, en los
cuales su Pseudaiglesia Anglicana no se
desvia de la Catolica, en verdad, que
los manejo con tanto nervio
y con tanta delicadeza, que los teologos
ortodojos mas escolastizados, como si dijeramos
electrizados, hacen grande estimación de
dichas obras. Y aún en los
dos Tratados que escribio acerca
de la Justification, que es
punto mas resvaladizo, en los
principios que abrazo, no se separo
de los teologos Catolicos; pero en
algunas consecuencias que infirio, ya
dio bastantemente a entender la mala
lèche que había mamado.’
Fray. Gerundio. i. Ed.]