[Footnote 1:  A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and ever Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son of God, occasioned by the Brief Notes on the Creed of St Athanasius, and the Brief History of the Unitarians, or Socinians. and containing an answer to both.  By Wm. Sherlock, London. 8vo. 1690.]

[Footnote 2:  The third General Council, that at Ephesus in 431, decreed

  “that it should not be lawful for any man to publish or compose
  another Faith or Creed than that which was defined by the Nicene
  Council.”

Ed.]

* * * * *

NOTES ON WATERLAND’S VINDICATION OF CHRIST’S DIVINITY. [1]

‘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.