Ib. p. 186.

Now a perpetual miracle, considered as the evidence of any thing, is nonsense; because were it at first ever so apparently contrary to the known course of nature, it must in time be taken for the natural effect of some unknown cause, as all physical ‘phaenomena’, if far enough traced, always are; and consequently must fall into a level, as to a capacity of proving any thing, with the most ordinary appearances of nature, which, though all of them miracles, as to the primary cause of their production, can never be applied to the proof of an inspiration, because ordinary and common.

I doubt this, though I have no doubt that it would be pernicious.  The yearly blossoming of Aaron’s rod is against Skelton, who confounds single facts with classes of ‘phaenomena’, and he draws his conclusion from an arbitrary and, as seems to me, senseless definition of a miracle.

Ib. p. 214.  End of Discourse II.

Skelton appears to have confounded two errors very different in kind and in magnitude;—­that of the Infidel, against whom his arguments are with few exceptions irrefragable; and that of the Christian, who, sincerely believing the Law, the Prophecies, the miracles and the doctrines, all in short which in the Scriptures themselves is declared to have been revealed, does not attribute the same immediate divinity to all and every part of the remainder.  It would doubtless be more Christian-like to substitute the views expressed in the next Discourse (III.); but still the latter error is not as the former.

Ib. p. 234.

But why should not the conclusion be given up, since it is possible Christ may have had two natures in him, so as to have been less than the Father in respect to the one, and equal to him in respect to the other.

I understand these words (’My Father is greater than I’) of the divinity—­and of the Filial subordination, which does not in the least encroach on the equality necessary to the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit.  Bishop Bull does the same.  See too Skelton’s own remarks in Discourse V. p. 265.

Ib. p. 251.

  This was necessary, because their Law was ordained by angels.

Now this is an instance of what I cannot help regarding as a superstitious excess of reverence for single texts.  We know that long before the Epistle to the Hebrews was written, the Alexandrian Church, which by its intercourse with Greek philosophers, chiefly Platonists, had become ashamed of the humanities of the Hebrew Scriptures, in defiance of those Scriptures had pretended, that it was not the Supreme Being who gave the Law in person to Moses, but some of his angels.  The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, arguing ‘ad homines’, avails himself of this, in order to prove that on their own grounds the Mosaic was of dignity inferior to the Christian dispensation.  To get rid of this no-difficulty in a single verse or two in the Epistles, Skelton throws an insurmountable difficulty on the whole Mosaic history.