The Creed of Jerusalem, preserved by Cyril, (the most ancient perhaps of any now extant,) is very express for the divinity of God the Son, in these words:  “And in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God; true God, begotten of the Father before all ages, by whom all things were made” * *. [Greek:  Kai eis hena Kyrion Iaesoun Christon, ton uhion tou Theou monogenae, ton ek tou patros gennaethenta, Theon alaethinon, pro panton ton aionon, di’ ohu ta panta egeneto].

I regard this, both from its antiquity and from the peculiar character of the Church of Jerusalem, so far removed from the influence of the Pythagoreo-Platonic sects of Paganism, as the most important and convincing mere fact of evidence in the Trinitarian controversy.

Ib. p. 233.

  —­true Son of the Father, ‘invisible’ of invisible, &c.

How is this reconcilable with ‘John’ i. 18—­(’no one hath seen God at any time:  the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him’,—­) or with the ‘express image’, asserted above.  ‘Invisible,’ I suppose, must be taken in the narrowest sense, that is, to bodily eyes.  But then the one ‘invisible’ would not mean the same as the other.

Ib. p. 236.

  ’Symbola certe Ecclesiae ex ipso Ecclesiae sensu, non ex haereticorum
  cerebello, exponenda sunt’.—­Bull.  Judic.  Eccl. v.

The truth of a Creed must be tried by the Holy Scriptures; but the sense of the Creed by the known sentiments and inferred intention of its compilers.

Ib. p. 238.

  The very name of Father, applied in the Creed to the first Person,
  intimates the relation he bears to a Son, &c.

No doubt:  but the most probable solution of the apparent want of distinctness of explication on this article, in my humble judgment, is—­that the so-called Apostles’ Creed was at first the preparatory confession of the catechumens, the admission-ticket, as it were (’symbolum ad Baptismum’), at the gate of the Church, and gradually augmented as heresies started up.  The latest of these seems to have consisted in the doubt respecting the entire death of Jesus on the Cross, as distinguished from suspended animation.  Hence in the fifth or sixth century the clause—­“and he descended into Hades,” was inserted;—­that is, the indissoluble principle of the man Jesus, was separated from, and left, the dissoluble, and subsisted apart in ‘Scheol’, or the abode of separated souls;—­but really meaning no more than ‘vere mortuus est’.  Jesus was taken from the Cross dead in the very same sense in which the Baptist was dead after his beheading.

Nevertheless, well adapted as this Creed was to its purposes, I cannot but regret the high place and precedence which by means of its title, and the fable to which that title gave rise, it has usurped.  It has, as it appears to me, indirectly favoured Arianism and Socinianism.

Ib. p. 250.