As to Dr. Samuel Clarke, the fact is, every generation has its one or more over-rated men.  Clarke was such in the reign of George I.; Dr. Johnson eminently so in that of George III.; Lord Byron being the star now in the ascendant.

In every religious and moral use of the word, God, taken absolutely, that is, not as a God, or the God, but as God, a relativity, a distinction in kind ‘ab omni quod non est Deus’, is so essentially implied, that it is a matter of perfect indifference, whether we assert a world without God, or make God the world.  The one is as truly Atheism as the other.  In fact, for all moral and practical purposes they are the same position differently expressed; for whether I say, God is the world, or the world is God, the inevitable conclusion, the sense and import is, that there is no other God than the world, that is, there is no other meaning to the term God.  Whatever you may mean by, or choose to believe of, the world, that and that alone you mean by, and believe of, God.  Now I very much question whether in any other sense Atheism, that is, speculative Atheism, is possible.  For even in the Lucretian, the coarsest and crudest scheme of the Epicurean doctrine, a hylozism, a potential life, is clearly implied, as also in the celebrated ’lene clinamen’ becoming actual.  Desperadoes articulating breath into a blasphemy of nonsense, to which they themselves attach no connected meaning, and the wickedness of which is alone intelligible, there may be; but a La Place, or a La Grand, would, and with justice, resent and repel the imputation of a belief in chance, or of a denial of law, order, and self-balancing life and power in the world.  Their error is, that they make them the proper and underived attributes of the world.  It follows then, that Pantheism is equivalent to Atheism, and that there is no other Atheism actually existing, or speculatively conceivable, but Pantheism.  Now I hold it demonstrable that a consistent Socinianism, following its own consequences, must come to Pantheism, and in ungodding the Saviour must deify cats and dogs, fleas and frogs.  There is, there can be, no ‘medium’ between the Catholic Faith of Trinal Unity, and Atheism disguised in the self-contradicting term, Pantheism;—­for every thing God, and no God, are identical positions.

Query I. p. 1.

  ’The Word was God’.—­John i. 1.  ’I am the Lord, and there is none
  else; there is no God besides me’.—­Is. xiv. 5, &c.

In all these texts the ‘was’, or ‘is’, ought to be rendered positively, or objectively, and not as a mere connective:  ‘The Word Is God’, and saith, ‘I Am the Lord; there is no God besides me’, the Supreme Being, ‘Deitas objectiva’.  The Father saith, ’I Am in that I am,—­Deitas subjectiva’.

Ib. p. 2.

Whether all other beings, besides the one Supreme God, be not excluded by the texts of Isaiah (to which many more might be added), and consequently, whether Christ can be God at all, unless He be the same with the Supreme God?

  The sum of your answer to this query is, that the texts cited from
  Isaiah, are spoken of one Person only, the Person of the Father, &c.