as Platonic principles, but as Christian doctrines: and their notion of Christ, as a pre-existent attribute of God, the creative Logos, was immediately derived from what might have seemed to them inspired authority. That Irenæus, and others after Justin's time, suffered martyrdom, as did Justin himself, under a persuasion that this was the Christian faith, proves their sincerity only. That the earlier martyrs died for their belief in Christ as God is a mere assumption: the taking the name of Christ upon them was in itself deemed worthy of death; and "are you a Christian?" was the simple form of interrogation.

:

It is pretended that as Irenæus, when a youth, was a hearer of Polycarp, he must have learned from him the doctrine of Christ condescending to be born of a virgin, from the singular love which he bore to the work of his own hands; and as, though the word of God, becoming man.' But Irenæus wrote half a century after Justin who, as we have seen, introduced this doctrine as a special revelation to himself, and not as an apostolic tradition. If what Irenæus says of all the Christian world being animated with one faith refer to this specific doctrine, and not rather to the general belief in the mission and resurrection of Christ, which was deemed by the Apostles a sufficient qualification for baptism,-how came the Christian world within a few years to have abandoned it? Tertullian, a little later than the time of Irenæus, complains that "the simple, not to call them ignorant and illiterate, who form always the greater part of believers, since the rule of faith itself transfers worship from the many gods of the age to the ONE ONLY true God; not understanding that he is to be believed in as One indeed, but with his economy, ARE AFFRIGHTED. at the economy. They suppose that the number and division of a trinity is a division of the unity.

They therefore throw out that two, nay three Gods, are affirmed by us, and conceive that they truly are the worshippers of ONE God. We, say they, hold the monarchy. The LATINS affect to cry up this monarchy, and EVEN THE GREEKS WILL NOT UNDERSTAND the economy." Origen, at a still later period, asks, "Does the number of Trinity still scandalize you to this degree?" and he acknowledges that "to the carnal they preached Christ and him crucified; but to those who are further advanced, and burning with love of the celestial wisdom, they communicated the Logos."

"To the poor the Gospel was preached." No initiations into preparatory degrees of learning, or philosophic theology, were judged necessary by the Apostles; and all this reluctance to receive a Trinity (a term invented in the second century, by Theophilus, bishop of Antioch), all this reserve in avowing that Christ, instead of having a portion of the WISDOM communicated to him, was himself the very wisdom incarnate, is quite inexplicable (especially when we consider that it must have been the natural disposition, both of the Jew and the Gentile, to elevate the character of their commissioned Saviour in the eyes of men), if the Trinity were the veritable tradition, and if the deity of Christ had been preached by those very Apostles who founded the Jewish and Gentile Christian churches. It is among the common people, who are always the slowest to change received opinions and alter traditions, that the transmitted apostolic faith would naturally be looked for: they would naturally cling to the opinions of their fathers; and it is with them, with those identical "simple and unlearned" persons, that the Trinity and the deity of Christ, if traditionary apostolic doctrines, might be expected to be found; but they startle at it as a novelty, and are shocked and scandalized by the very proposition of what they conceive to be a

division of the proper unity of the One supreme God, the "God and Father" of their crucified Lord.

The same reserve which Origen felt himself obliged to practise, at a time when the Christian apostolic church had long and diffusively been established, is by several of the Fathers ascribed to the prophets, to the apostles, and to Jesus himself. They admit that the Trinity is only obscurely revealed in the Old Testament, lest the Jews should relapse into polytheism! They admit that Christ did not teach his own divinity, lest the Jews should be staggered at his rivalship or identity with their Jehovah! Chrysostom, Theodoret, and others, explain the silence of the Apostles by the same necessity of prudence! Yet Paul expressly says, Acts xx. 27, "I have not shunned to declare to you the whole counsel of God."

These Fathers acknowledge that the Apostles were ignorant of Christ's divinity till the day of Pentecost. Yet, on the day of Pentecost, Peter, while filled with the holy ghost, spoke openly to the people of "Jesus of Nazareth, A MAN approved of GoD among them, by miracles, and wonders, and signs, which GOD DID BY HIM in the midst of them." Acts ii. 22. It is then said, that Peter concealed the divinity of Christ on the same principle of prudence, lest he should offend the Jews by teaching polytheism !

The same Fathers say, that three of the Evangelists withheld the great secret of Christ's divinity; and that it was reserved for the last of the evangelists, John, who wrote his Gospel after the destruction of Jerusalem, to reveal it. So that, had the three first Evangelists only come down to us, the world would have remained in ignorance of what is considered a chief fundamental in Christianity! Yet, before the publication of the Gospel of John, many Christian churches had been planted by the

Apostles; who, we are to believe, planted them in a state of imperfect knowledge, which John was to rectify and enlarge; and this revelation of Christ's proper divinity, which the Apostles had forborne to teach while propagating the Gospel at their Master's command, and the spirit of God working with them, is to be sought in titles and forms of expression familiar to the Jews from time immemorial, as designating the commissioned servants of the Most High God: so that the Hebrew converts at least, who had equally an interest in this momentous revelation, instead of being enlightened by a new truth, would have apprehended nothing of the discovery! and we find, from the indirect admissions of the Fathers themselves, that the supposed revelation was in fact ineffectual; and that a body of Jews, converts to Christ, existed in the apostolic age, who believed in him as a man in "all respects like his brethren," the "Son of God" by adoption, God only by virtue of his high office, and the manifestation of the power of the Father which wrought by him. This body of Jews were the Nazarenes, the most ancient Hebrew proselytes; and the disciples of Antioch, first called Christians, held the same faith as they, and worshipped the same God.

Though modern theologists define the three hypostases in the Godhead with mathematical precision, the Fathers of the Trinitarian church were neither so positive, nor so free from doubt and uncertainty, nor so agreed in their opinions. The very councils summoned to determine these points of faith were agitated by divisions. The post-Nicene theologists successively refined on the previously decreed dogmas, till they had completed a Trinity which should be proof against the objections of those who worshipped the "One God, the Father." The Trinity finally adjusted, and a belief in which to the very letter is declared with anathemas, introduced as points of faith into a

public symbol of Christian profession, to be the absolute condition of salvation, is not the ancient Trinity.

Many passages of Justin, Irenæus, Theophilus, and others, show that they thought THE WORD an attribute of the Father, which assumed distinct personality in the beginning of the creation; and this they called the Generation of the Son; and there were disputes whether this impersonation took place in time, or before time.

Though they thought that the Son, before his projection from the essence of Deity, was the proper wisdom of God, all the ante-Nicene Fathers consistently supposed his inferiority to the Father, as to his cause or source. By this they did not mean the inferiority of his nature in respect to manhood, which could never have been a question at all; but the inferiority of his whole being, as emanating from the supreme and self-existent God: they who carried the Son's divinity to the greatest height going no further than a perfect identity of nature, and conceiving of him, in respect to the Father, as of a ray of light emitted from the Sun.

They defined the Father, God of himself, or Self-God, avrofeos; and unbegotten, or unproduced, ayevηTos, to distinguish him from the Son. They denoted the Father also by the title THE God, ios; and they called the Son, God, without the definite article, sos; which, according to the Greek idiom, answers to our use of the word with the article indefinite, a God. With regard to the Holy Spirit, several considered it as a gift or power only; they who held its personality conceived of it as a

creature.

Arius objected to Christ's being called God in a proper sense, as infringing on the original and supreme Deity of the Father: he argued, that if there was a time when the Son was produced, there must have been a time when he was not;