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 h.o.m.o 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 pa.s.sions 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. p. 129.
--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. p. 130.
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. v. 19,) 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 inst.i.tutions 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 politic.u.m", or nation, had "pa.s.sed away". Till that time,--which was fulfilled under t.i.tus, 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 t.i.thes, 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. p. 140.
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. p. 187.
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. p. 230.
The Creed of Jerusalem, preserved by Cyril, (the most ancient perhaps of any now extant,) is very express for the divinity of G.o.d the Son, in these words: "And in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of G.o.d; true G.o.d, begotten of the Father before all ages, by whom all things were made" * *. [Greek: Ka eis hena Kyrion Iaesoun Christn, tn uhin tou Theou monogenae, tn ek tou patrs gennaethenta, Then alaethinn, pr 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. p. 233.
--true Son of the Father, "invisible" of invisible, &c.
How is this reconcilable with "John" i. 18--("no one hath seen G.o.d at any time: the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him",--) or with the "express image", a.s.serted 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. p. 236.
"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. p. 238.
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 heresies 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 "Scheol", 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 t.i.tle, and the fable to which that t.i.tle gave rise, it has usurped. It has, as it appears to me, indirectly favoured Arianism and Socinianism.
Ib. p. 250.
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. p. 257.
"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. p. 259.
"And the Word was made flesh"--became personally united with the man Jesus; "and dwelt among us",--resided constantly in the human nature so a.s.sumed.
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 a.s.sumed 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 const.i.tutes their claim to Canonicity, that is, to be Canonical inspired writings.
Ib. p. 266.
Hereupon therefore the Apostle, in defence of Christ"s real humanity, says, "This is he that came by water and blood".