Chap.  I. .

It is the property of the Divine Being to be unsearchable; and if he were not so, he would not be divine.  Must we therefore reject the most certain truths concerning the Deity, only because they are incomprehensible, &c.?

It is strange that so sound, so admirable a logician as Waterland, should have thought ‘unsearchable’ and ‘incomprehensible’ synonymous, or at least equivalent terms: ­and this, though St. Paul hath made it the privilege of the full-grown Christian, ’to search out the deep things of God himself’.

Chap.  IV. .

‘The delivering over unto Satan’ seems to have been a form of excommunication, declaring the person reduced to the state of a heathen; and in the Apostolical age it was accompanied with supernatural or miraculous effects upon the bodies of the persons so delivered.

Unless the passage, (’Acts’ -11.) be an authority, I must doubt the truth of this assertion, as tending to destroy the essential spirituality of Christian motives, and, in my judgment, as irreconcilable with our Lord’s declaration, that his kingdom was ’not of this world’.  Let me be once convinced that St. Paul, with the elders of an Apostolic Church, knowingly and intentionally appended a palsy or a consumption to the sentence of excommunication, and I shall be obliged to reconsider my old opinion as to the anti-Christian principle of the Romish Inquisition.

Ib. .

  ’A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition,
  reject; knowing that he that is such, is subverted, and sinneth, being
  condemned of himself’. ­Tit. ii, 11.

This text would be among my minor arguments for doubting the Paulinity of the Epistle to Titus.  It seems to me to breathe the spirit of a later age, and a more established Church power.

Ib.

Not every one that mistakes in judgment, though in matters of great importance, in points fundamental, but he that openly espouses such fundamental error. Dr. Whitby adds to the definition, the espousing it out of disgust, pride, envy, or some worldly principle, and against his conscience.

Whitby went too far; Waterland not far enough.  Every schismatic is not necessarily a heretic; but every heretic is virtually a schismatic.  As to the meaning of [Greek:  autokatakritos], Waterland surely makes too much of a very plain matter.  What was the sentence passed on a heretic?  A public declaration that he was no longer a member of ­that is, of one faith with ­the Church.  This the man himself, after two public notices, admits and involves in the very act of persisting.  However confident as to the truth of the doctrine he has set up, he cannot, after two public admonitions, be ignorant that it is a doctrine contrary to the articles of his communion with the Church that has admitted him; and in regard of his alienation from that communion, he is necessarily [Greek:  autokatakritos], ­though in his pride of heart he might say with the man of old, “And I banish you.”

Ib. .

  ­as soon as the miraculous gifts, or gift of discerning spirits,
  ceased.

No one point in the New Testament perplexes me so much as these (so called) miraculous gifts.  I feel a moral repugnance to the reduction of them to natural and acquired talents, ennobled and made energic by the life and convergency of faith; ­and yet on no other scheme can I reconcile them with the idea of Christianity, or the particular supposed, with the general known, facts.  But, thank God! it is a question which does not in the least degree affect our faith or practice.  I mean, if God permit, to go through the Middletonian controversy, as soon as I can procure the loan of the books, or have health enough to become a reader in the British Museum.

Ib. .

And what if, after all, spiritual censures (for of such only I am speaking,) should happen to fall upon such a person, he may be in some measure hurt in his reputation by it, and that is all.  And possibly hereupon his errors, before invincible through ignorance, may be removed by wholesome instruction and admonition, and so he is befriended in it, &c.

Waterland is quite in the right so far; ­but the penal laws, the temporal inflictions ­would he have called for the repeal of these?  Milton saw this subject with a mastering eye, ­saw that the awful power of excommunication was degraded and weakened even to impotence by any the least connection with the law of the State.

Ib. .

­who are hereby forbidden to receive such heretics into their houses, or to pay them so much as common civilities.  This precept of the Apostle may he further illustrated by his own practice, recorded by Irenaeus, who had the information at second-hand from Polycarp, a disciple of St. John’s, that St. John, once meeting with Cerinthus at the bath, retired instantly without bathing, for fear lest the bath should fall by reason of Cerinthus being there, the enemy to truth.

Psha!  The ’bidding him God speed’, ­[Greek:  legón auto chairein], ­(2 ‘John’, 11,) is a spirituality, not a mere civility.  If St. John knew or suspected that Cerinthus had a cutaneous disease, there would have been some sense in the refusal, or rather, as I correct myself, some probability of truth in this gossip of Irenaeus.

Ib. .

  They corrupted the faith of Christ, and in effect subverted the
  Gospel.  That was enough to render them detestable in the eyes of all
  men who sincerely loved and valued sound faith.

O, no, no, not ‘them!’ ’Error quidem, non tamen homo errans, abominandus’:  or, to pun a little, ‘abhominandus’.  Be bold in denouncing the heresy, but slow and timorous in denouncing the erring brother as a heretic.  The unmistakable passions of a factionary and a schismatic, the ostentatious display, the ambition and dishonest arts of a sect-founder, must be superinduced on the false doctrine, before the heresy makes the man a heretic.

Ib. .

   ­the doctrine of the Nicolaitans.

Were the Nicolaitans a sect, properly so called?  The word is the Greek rendering of ‘the children of Balaam;’ that is, men of grossly immoral and disorderly lives.

Ib. .

  For if he who ’shall break one of the least moral commandments, and
  shall teach men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven’,
  (Mat. ,) it must be a very dangerous experiment, &c.

A sad misinterpretation of our Lord’s words, which from the context most evidently had no reference to any moral, that is, universal commandment as such, but to the national institutions of the Jewish state, as long as that state should be in existence; that is to say, until ‘the Heaven’ or the Government, and ‘the Earth’ or the People or the Governed, as one ‘corpus politicum’, or nation, had ‘passed away’.  Till that time, ­which was fulfilled under Titus, and more thoroughly under Hadrian, ­no Jew was relieved from his duties as a citizen and subject by his having become a Christian.  The text, together with the command implied in the miracle of the tribute-money in the fish’s mouth, might be fairly and powerfully adduced against the Quakers, in respect of their refusal to pay their tithes, or whatever tax they please to consider as having an un-Christian destination.  But are they excluded from the kingdom of heaven, that is, the Christian Church?  No; ­but they must be regarded as weak and injudicious members of it.

Chap.  V. .

Accordingly it may be observed, how the unbelievers caress and compliment those complying gentlemen who meet them half way, while they are perpetually inveighing against the stiff divines, as they call them, whom they can make no advantage of.

Lessing, an honest and frank-hearted Infidel, expresses the same sentiment.  As long as a German Protestant divine keeps himself stiff and stedfast to the Augsburg Confession, to the full Creed of Melancthon, he is impregnable, and may bid defiance to sceptic and philosopher.  But let him quit the citadel, and the Cossacs are upon him.

Ib. .

And therefore it is infallibly certain, as Mr. Chillingworth well argues with respect to Christianity in general, that we ought firmly to believe it; because wisdom and reason require that we should believe those things which are by many degrees more credible and probable than the contrary.

Yes, where there are but two positions, one of which must be true.  When A. is presented to my mind with probability=5, and B. with probability=15, I must think that B. is three times more probable than A. And yet it is very possible that a C. may be found which will supersede both.

Chap.  VI. .

The Creed of Jerusalem, preserved by Cyril, (the most ancient perhaps of any now extant,) is very express for the divinity of God the Son, in these words:  “And in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God; true God, begotten of the Father before all ages, by whom all things were made” . [Greek:  Kai eis hena Kyrion Iaesoun Christon, ton uhion tou Theou monogenae, ton ek tou patros gennaethenta, Theon alaethinon, pro panton ton aionon, di’ ohu ta panta egeneto].

I regard this, both from its antiquity and from the peculiar character of the Church of Jerusalem, so far removed from the influence of the Pythagoreo-Platonic sects of Paganism, as the most important and convincing mere fact of evidence in the Trinitarian controversy.

Ib. .

   ­true Son of the Father, ‘invisible’ of invisible, &c.

How is this reconcilable with ‘John’ ­(’no one hath seen God at any time:  the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him’, ­) or with the ‘express image’, asserted above.  ‘Invisible,’ I suppose, must be taken in the narrowest sense, that is, to bodily eyes.  But then the one ‘invisible’ would not mean the same as the other.

Ib. .

  ’Symbola certe Ecclesiae ex ipso Ecclesiae sensu, non ex haereticorum
  cerebello, exponenda sunt’. ­Bull.  Judic.  Eccl. v.

The truth of a Creed must be tried by the Holy Scriptures; but the sense of the Creed by the known sentiments and inferred intention of its compilers.

Ib. .

  The very name of Father, applied in the Creed to the first Person,
  intimates the relation he bears to a Son, &c.

No doubt:  but the most probable solution of the apparent want of distinctness of explication on this article, in my humble judgment, is ­that the so-called Apostles’ Creed was at first the preparatory confession of the catechumens, the admission-ticket, as it were (’symbolum ad Baptismum’), at the gate of the Church, and gradually augmented as hérésies started up.  The latest of these seems to have consisted in the doubt respecting the entire death of Jesus on the Cross, as distinguished from suspended animation.  Hence in the fifth or sixth century the clause ­“and he descended into Hades,” was inserted; ­that is, the indissoluble principle of the man Jesus, was separated from, and left, the dissoluble, and subsisted apart in ‘Schéol’, or the abode of separated souls; ­but really meaning no more than ‘vere mortuus est’.  Jesus was taken from the Cross dead in the very same sense in which the Baptist was dead after his beheading.

Nevertheless, well adapted as this Creed was to its purposes, I cannot but regret the high place and precedence which by means of its title, and the fable to which that title gave rise, it has usurped.  It has, as it appears to me, indirectly favoured Arianism and Socinianism.

Ib. .

That St. John wrote his Gospel with a view to confute Cerinthus, among other false teachers, is attested first by Irenaeus, who was a disciple of Polycarp, and who flourished within less than a century of St. John’s time.

I have little trust and no faith in the gossip and hearsay-anecdotes of the early Fathers, Irenaeus not excepted.  “Within less than a century of St. John’s time.”  Alas! a century in the paucity of writers and of men of education in the age succeeding the Apostolic, must be reckoned more than equal to five centuries since the use of printing.  Suppose, however, the truth of the Irenaean tradition; ­that the Creed of Cerinthus was what Irenaeus states it to have been; and that John, at the instance of the Asiatic Bishops, wrote his Gospel as an antidote to the Cerinthian heresy; ­does there not thence arise, in his utter silence, an almost overwhelming argument against the Apostolicity of the ‘Christopaedia’, both that prefixed to Luke, and that concorporated with Matthew?

Ib. .

‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men’.  The same Word was life, the [Greek:  logos and zoae], both one.  There was no occasion therefore for subtilly distinguishing the Word and Life into two Sons, as some did.

I will not deny the possibility of this interpretation.  It may be, ­nay, it is, ­fairly deducible from the words of the great Evangelist:  but I cannot help thinking that, taken as the primary intention, it degrades this most divine chapter, which unites in itself the three characters of sublime, profound, and pregnant, and alloys its universality by a mixture of time and accident.

Ib.

’And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness cometh not upon it.’  So I render the verse, conformable to the rendering of the same Greek verb, [Greek:  katalambano], by our translators in another place of this same Gospel.  The Apostle, as I conceive, in this 5th verse of his 1st chapter, alludes to the prevailing error of the Gentiles, &c.

O sad, sad!  How must the philosopher have been eclipsed by the shadow of antiquarian erudition, in order that a mind like Waterland’s could have sacrificed the profound universal import of ‘comprehend’ to an allusion to a worthless dream of heretical nonsense, the mushroom of the day!  Had Waterland ever thought of the relation of his own understanding to his reason?  But alas! the identification of these two diversities ­of how many errors has it been ground and occasion!

Ib. .

  ’And the Word was made flesh’ ­became personally united with the man
  Jesus; ’and dwelt among us’, ­resided constantly in the human nature
  so assumed.

Waterland himself did but dimly see the awful import of [Greek:  egeneto sarx], ­the mystery of the alien ground ­and the truth, that as the ground such must be the life.  He caused himself to ‘become flesh’, and therein assumed a mortal life into his own person and unity, in order himself to transubstantiate the corruptible into the incorruptible.

Waterland’s anxiety to show the anti-heretical force of St. John’s Gospel and Epistles, has caused him to overlook their Catholicity ­their applicability to all countries and all times ­their truth, independently of all temporary accidents and errors; ­which Catholicity alone it is that constitutes their claim to Canonicity, that is, to be Canonical inspired writings.

Ib. .

  Hereupon therefore the Apostle, in defence of Christ’s real humanity,
  says, ‘This is he that came by water and blood’.

‘Water and blood,’ that is ‘serum’ and ‘crassamentum’, mean simply ‘blood,’ the blood of the animal or carnal life, which, saith Moses, ’is the life’.  Hence ‘flesh’ is often taken as, and indeed is a form of, the blood, ­blood formed or organized.  Thus ‘blood’ often includes ‘flesh,’ and ‘flesh’ includes ‘blood.’  ‘Flesh and blood’ is equivalent to blood in its twofold form, or rather as formed and formless.  ‘Water and blood’ has, therefore, two meanings in St. John, but which ’in idem coincidunt’: 

1. true animal human blood, and no celestial ichor or phantom: 

2. the whole sentiently vital body, fixed or flowing, the pipe and the stream.

For the ancients, and especially the Jews, had no distinct apprehension of the use or action of the nerves:  in the Old Testament ‘heart’ is used as we use ‘head.’  ’The fool hath said in his heart’ ­is in English:  “the worthless fellow (’vaurien’) hath taken it into his head,” &c.

Ib. .

  The Apostle having said that the Spirit is truth, or essential truth,
  (which was giving him a title common to God the Father and to Christ,)
  &c.

Is it clear that the distinct ‘hypostasis’ of the Holy Spirit, in the same sense as the only-begotten Son is hypostatically distinguished from the Father, was a truth that formed an immediate object or intention of St. John?  That it is a truth implied in, and fairly deducible from, many texts, both in his Gospel and Epistles, I do not, indeed I cannot, doubt; ­but only whether this article of our faith he was commissioned to declare explicitly?

It grieves me to think that such giant ‘archaspistae’ of the Catholic Faith, as Bull and Waterland, should have clung to the intruded gloss (1 ‘John’ , which, in the opulence and continuity of the evidences, as displayed by their own master-minds, would have been superfluous, had it not been worse than superfluous, that is, senseless in itself, and interruptive of the profound sense of the Apostle.

Ib. .

  He is come, come in the flesh, and not merely to reside for a time, or
  occasionally, and to fly off again, but to abide and dwell with man,
  clothed with humanity.

Incautiously worded at best.  Compare our Lord’s own declaration to his disciples, that he had dwelt a brief while ‘with’ or ‘among’ them, in order to dwell ‘in’ them permanently.

Ib. .

It is very observable, that the Ebionites rejected three of the Gospels, receiving only St. Matthew’s (or what they called so), and that curtailed.  They rejected likewise all St. Paul’s writings, reproaching him as an apostate.  How unlikely is it that Justin should own such reprobates as those were for fellow-Christians!

I dare avow my belief ­or rather I dare not withhold my avowal ­that both Bull and Waterland are here hunting on the trail of an old blunder or figment, concocted by the gross ignorance of the Gentile Christians and their Fathers in all that respected Hebrew literature and the Palestine Christians.  I persist in the belief that, though a refuse of the persecuted and from neglect degenerating Jew-Christians may have sunk into the mean and carnal notions of their unconverted brethren respecting the Messiah, no proper sect of Ebionites ever existed, but those to whom St. Paul travelled with the contributions of the churches, nor any such man as Ebion; unless indeed it was St. Barnabas, who in his humility may have so named himself, while soliciting relief for the distressed Palestine Christians; ­“I am Barnabas the beggar.”  But I will go further, and confess my belief that the (so-called) Ebionites of the first and second centuries, who rejected the ‘Christopaedia’, and whose Gospel commenced with the baptism by John, were orthodox Apostolic Christians, who received Christ as the Lord, that is, as Jéhovah ‘manifested in the flesh’.  As to their rejection of the other Gospels and of Paul’s writings, I might ask: ­“Could they read them?” But the whole notion seems to rest on an anachronical misconception of the ‘Evangelia’.  Every great mother Church, at first, had its own Gospel.

Ib. .

To say nothing here of the truer reading ("men of your nation"), there is no consequence in the argument.  The Ebionites were Christians in a large sense, men of Christian profession, nominal Christians, as Justin allowed the worst of heretics to be.  And this is all he could mean by allowing the Ebionites to be Christians.

I agree with Bull in holding [Greek:  apo tou hymeterou genous] the most probable reading in the passage cited from Justin, and am by no means convinced that the celebrated passage in Josephus is an interpolation.  But I do not believe that such men, as are here described, ever professed themselves Christians, or were, or could have been, baptized.

Ib. .

  Le Clerc would appear to doubt, whether the persons pointed to in
  Justin really denied Christ’s divine nature or no.  It is as plain as
  possible that they did.

Le Clerc is no favourite of mine, and Waterland is a prime favourite.  Nevertheless, in this instance, I too doubt with Le Clerc, and more than doubt.

Ib. .

[Greek:  Phusei de taes phthoras prosgenomenaes, anagkaion aen hoti sosai Boulomenos ae taen phthoropoion ousian aphanisas touto de ouk aen heteros genesthai ei maeper hae kata phusin zoae proseplakae to taen phthoran dexameno, aphanizousa men taen phthoran, athanaton de tou loipou to dexamenon diataerousa. k.t.l.] ­Just.  M.

  Here Justin asserts that it was necessary for essential life, or life
  by nature, to be united with human nature, in order to save it.

Waterland has not mastered the full force of [Greek:  hae kata phusin zoae].  If indeed he had taken in the full force of the whole of this invaluable fragment, he would never have complimented the following extract from Irenaeus, as saying the same thing “in fuller and stronger words.”  Compared with the fragment from Justin, it is but the flat common-place logic of analogy, so common in the early Fathers.

Ib. .

  ‘Qui nude tantum hominem eum dicunt ex Joseph generatum moriuntur.’

’Non nude hominem’ ­not a mere man do I hold Jesus to have been and to be; but a perfect man and, by personal union with the Logos, perfect God.  That his having an earthly father might be requisite to his being a perfect man I can readily suppose; but why the having an earthly father should be more incompatible with his perfect divinity, than his having an earthly mother, I cannot comprehend.  All that John and Paul believed, God forbid that I should not!

Chap.  VII. .

It is a sufficient reason for not receiving either them (’Arian doctrines’), or the interpretations brought to support them, that the ancients, in the best and purest times, either knew nothing of them, or if they did, condemned them.

As excellent means of raising a presumption in the mind of the falsehood of Arianism and Socinianism, and thus of preparing the mind for a docile reception of the great idea itself ­I admit and value the testimonies from the writings of the early Fathers.  But alas! the increasing dimness, ending in the final want of the idea of this all-truths-including truth of the Tetractys eternally manifested in the Triad; ­this, this is the ground and cause of all the main hérésies from Semi-Arianism, recalled by Dr. Samuel Clarke, to the last setting ray of departing faith in the necessitarian Psilanthropism of Dr. Priestley.

Ib. -2, &c.

I cannot but think that Waterland’s defence of the Fathers in these pages against Barbeyrac, is below his great powers and characteristic vigour of judgment.  It is enough that they, the Fathers of the first three centuries, were the lights of their age, and worthy of all reverence for their good gifts.  But it appears to me impossible to deny their credulity; their ignorance, with one or two exceptions, in the interpretation of the Old Testament; or their hardihood in asserting the truth of whatever they thought it for the interest of the Church, and for the good of souls, to have believed as true.  A whale swallowed Jonah; but a believer in all the assertions and narrations of Tertullian and Irenaeus would be more wonder-working than Jonah; for such a one must have swallowed whales.