That St. John wrote his Gospel with a view to confute Cerinthus, among other false teachers, is attested first by Irenaeus, who was a disciple of Polycarp, and who flourished within less than a century of St. John’s time.

I have little trust and no faith in the gossip and hearsay-anecdotes of the early Fathers, Irenaeus not excepted.  “Within less than a century of St. John’s time.”  Alas! a century in the paucity of writers and of men of education in the age succeeding the Apostolic, must be reckoned more than equal to five centuries since the use of printing.  Suppose, however, the truth of the Irenaean tradition;—­that the Creed of Cerinthus was what Irenaeus states it to have been; and that John, at the instance of the Asiatic Bishops, wrote his Gospel as an antidote to the Cerinthian heresy;—­does there not thence arise, in his utter silence, an almost overwhelming argument against the Apostolicity of the ‘Christopaedia’, both that prefixed to Luke, and that concorporated with Matthew?

Ib. p. 257.

‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men’.  The same Word was life, the [Greek:  logos and zoae], both one.  There was no occasion therefore for subtilly distinguishing the Word and Life into two Sons, as some did.

I will not deny the possibility of this interpretation.  It may be,—­nay, it is,—­fairly deducible from the words of the great Evangelist:  but I cannot help thinking that, taken as the primary intention, it degrades this most divine chapter, which unites in itself the three characters of sublime, profound, and pregnant, and alloys its universality by a mixture of time and accident.

Ib.

’And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness cometh not upon it.’  So I render the verse, conformable to the rendering of the same Greek verb, [Greek:  katalambano], by our translators in another place of this same Gospel.  The Apostle, as I conceive, in this 5th verse of his 1st chapter, alludes to the prevailing error of the Gentiles, &c.

O sad, sad!  How must the philosopher have been eclipsed by the shadow of antiquarian erudition, in order that a mind like Waterland’s could have sacrificed the profound universal import of ‘comprehend’ to an allusion to a worthless dream of heretical nonsense, the mushroom of the day!  Had Waterland ever thought of the relation of his own understanding to his reason?  But alas! the identification of these two diversities—­of how many errors has it been ground and occasion!

Ib. p. 259.

  ’And the Word was made flesh’—­became personally united with the man
  Jesus; ’and dwelt among us’,—­resided constantly in the human nature
  so assumed.

Waterland himself did but dimly see the awful import of [Greek:  egeneto sarx],—­the mystery of the alien ground—­and the truth, that as the ground such must be the life.  He caused himself to ‘become flesh’, and therein assumed a mortal life into his own person and unity, in order himself to transubstantiate the corruptible into the incorruptible.