Ib.

Which shows that the Son in St. Matthew is included in the [Greek:  oudeis] none, or no man, and therefore concerns him only as a man:  for the Father ‘includes the whole Trinity’, and therefore includes the Son, who seeth whatever his Father doth.

This is an ‘argumentum in circulo’, and ‘petitio rei sub lite’.  Why is he called the Son in ‘antithesis’ to the Father, if it meant, “no not the Christ, except in his character of the co-eternal Son, included in the Father?” If it “concerned him only as a man,” why is he placed after the angels?  Why called the ‘Son’ simply, instead of the Son of Man, or the Messiah?

Ib.

  [Greek:  Oudeis] is not [Greek:  oudeis anthropon], but, ‘no one’:  as in
  John i. 18.  ‘No one hath seen God at any time’; that is, he is by
  essence invisible.

This most difficult text I have not seen explained satisfactorily.  I have thought that the [Greek:  aggeloi] must here be taken in the primary sense of the word, namely, as messengers, or missionary Prophets:  Of this day knoweth no one, not the messengers or revealers of God’s purposes now in heaven, no, not the Son, the greatest of Prophets,—­that is, he in that character promised to declare all that in that character it was given to him to know.

Ib. p. 186.

When St. Paul calls the Father the One God, he expressly opposes it to the many gods of the heathens.  ’For though there be that are called gods, &c. but to us, there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him’:  where the ‘one God’ and ‘one Lord and Mediator’ is opposed to the many gods and many lords or mediators which were worshipped by the heathens.

But surely the ‘one Lord’ is as much distinguished from the ‘one God’, as both are contradistinguished from the ‘gods many and lords many’ of the heathens.  Besides ‘the Father’ is not the term used in that age in distinction from the gods that are no gods; but [Greek:  Ho epi panton theos].

Ib. p. 222.

  ‘The Word was with God’; that is, it was not yet in the world, or not
  yet made flesh; but with God.—­’John’ i. 1.  So that to be ‘with God’,
  signifies nothing but not to be in the world.

’The Word was with God.’

Grotius does say, that this was opposed to the Word’s being made flesh, and appearing in the world:  but he was far enough from thinking that these words have only a negative sense:  * * * for he tells us what the positive sense is, that with God is [Greek:  para to patri], with the Father, * * and explains it by what Wisdom says, ‘Prov’. vii. 30.  ‘Then I was by him, &c.’ which he does not think a ‘prosopopoeia’, but spoken of a subsisting person.

But even this is scarcely tenable even as Greek.  Had this been St. John’s meaning, surely he would have said, [Greek:  en theo], not [Greek:  pros ton theon], in the nearest proximity that is not confusion.  But it is strange, that Sherlock should not have seen that Grotius had a hankering toward Socinianism, but, like a ‘shy cock’, and a man of the world, was always ready to unsay what he had said.