Query XV. p. 225-6.

  The pretence is, that we equivocate in talking of eternal generation.

All generation is necessarily [Greek:  anarchon ti], without dividuous beginning, and herein contradistinguished from creation.

Ib. p. 226.

  True, it is not the same with human generation.

Not the same ‘eodem modo’, certainly; but it is so essentially the same that the generation of the Son of God is the transcendent, which gives to human generation its right to be so called.  It is in the most proper, that is, the fontal, sense of the term, generation.

Ib.

  You have not proved that all generation implies beginning; and what is
  more, cannot.

It would be difficult to disprove the contrary.  Generation with a beginning is not generation, but creation.  Hence we may see how necessary it is that in all important controversies we should predefine the terms negatively, that is, exclude and preclude all that is not meant by them; and then the positive meaning, that is, what is meant by them, will be the easy result,—­the post-definition, which is at once the real definition and impletion, the circumference and the area.

Ib. p. 227-8.

It is a usual thing with many, (moralists may account for it), when they meet with a difficulty which they cannot readily answer, immediately to conclude that the doctrine is false, and to run directly into the opposite persuasion;—­not considering that they may meet with much more weighty objections there than before; or that they may have reason sufficient to maintain and believe many things in philosophy and divinity, though they cannot answer every question which may be started, or every difficulty which may be raised against them.

O, if Bull and Waterland had been first philosophers, and then divines, instead of being first, manacled, or say articled clerks of a guild;—­if the clear free intuition of the truth had led them to the Article, and not the Article to the defence of it as not having been proved to be false,—­how different would have been the result!  Now we feel only the inconsistency of Arianism, not the truth of the doctrine attacked.  Arianism is confuted, and in such a manner, that I will not reject the Catholic Faith upon the Arian’s grounds.  It may, I allow, be still true.  But that it is true, because the Arians have hitherto failed to prove its falsehood, is no logical conclusion.  The Unitarian may have better luck; or if he fail, the Deist.

Query XVI. p. 234.

  But God’s ‘thoughts are not our thoughts’.

That is, as I would interpret the text;—­the ideas in and by which God reveals himself to man are not the same with, and are not to be judged by, the conceptions which the human understanding generalizes from the notices of the senses, common to man and to irrational animals, dogs, elephants, beavers, and the like, endowed with the same senses.  Therefore I regard this paragraph, p. 223-4, as a specimen of admirable special pleading ‘ad hominem’ in the Court of eristic Logic; but I condemn it as a wilful resignation or temporary self-deposition of the reason.  I will not suppose what my reason declares to be no position at all, and therefore an impossible sub-position.