In this elementary world, light being (as we hear,) the first visible, all things are seen by it, and it by itself.  Thus is Christ, among spiritual things, in the elect world of his Church; all things are ‘made manifest by the light’, says the Apostle, ‘Eph’. v. 13, speaking of Christ as the following verse doth evidently testify.  It is in his word that he shines, and makes it a directing and convincing light, to discover all things that concern his Church and himself, to be known by its own brightness.  How impertinent then is that question so much tossed by the Romish Church, “How know you the Scriptures (say they) to be the word of God, without the testimony of the Church?” I would ask one of them again, How they can know that it is daylight, except some light a candle to let them see it?  They are little versed in Scripture that know not that it is frequently called light; and they are senseless that know not that light is seen and known by itself.  ‘If our Gospel be hid’, says the Apostle, ’it is hid to them that perish’:  the god of this world having blinded their minds against the light of the glorious Gospel, no wonder if such stand in need of a testimony.  A blind man knows not that it is light at noon-day, but by report:  but to those that have eyes, light is seen by itself.

On the true test of the Scriptures.  Oh! were it not for my manifold infirmities, whereby I am so all unlike the white-robed Leighton, I could almost conceit that my soul had been an emanation from his!  So many and so remarkable are the coincidences, and these in parts of his works that I could not have seen—­and so uniform the congruity of the whole.  As I read, I seem to myself to be only thinking my own thoughts over again, now in the same and now in a different order.

Ib. p. 68.

The Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews calls him (Christ) [Greek:  apaugasma], ’the brightness of his Father’s glory, and the character of his person’, (i. 3.) And under these expressions lies that remarkable mystery of the Son’s eternal relation to the Father, which is rather humbly to be adored, than boldly to be explained, either by God’s perfect understanding of his own essence, or by any other notion.

Certainly not by a transfer of a notion, and this too a notion of a faculty itself but notional and limitary, to the Supreme Reality.  But there are ideas which are of higher origin than the notions of the understanding, and by the irradiation of which the understanding itself becomes a human understanding.  Of such ‘veritates verificae’ Leighton himself in other words speaks often.  Surely, there must have been an intelligible propriety in the terms, ‘Logos’, Word, ’Begotten before all creation’,—­an adequate idea or ‘icon’, or the Evangelists and Apostolic penmen would not have adopted them.  They did not invent the terms; but took them and used them as they were taken and applied by Philo and both the Greek and Oriental sages.