That is, by the religion contained in, and given in accompaniment with, the universal reason, ’the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world’.

Ib. p. 14.

This Creed (Athanasian) does not pretend to explain how there are three Persons, each of which is God, and yet but One God, (of which more hereafter,) but only asserts the thing, that thus it is, and thus it must be if we believe a Trinity in Unity; which should make all men, who would be thought neither Arians nor Socinians, more cautious how they express the least dislike of the Athanasian Creed, which must either argue, that they condemn it, before they understand it, or that they have some secret dislike to the doctrine of the Trinity.

The dislike commonly felt is not of the doctrine of the Trinity, but of the positive anathematic assertion of the everlasting perdition of all and of each who doubt the same;—­an assertion deduced from Scripture only by a train of captious consequences, and equivocations.  Thus, A.:  “I honour and admire Caius for his great learning.”  B.:  “The knowledge of the Sanscrit is an important article in Caius’s learning.”  A.:  “I have been often in his company, and have found no reason for believing this.”  B.:  “O! then you deny his learning, are envious, and Caius’s enemy.”  A.:  “God forbid!  I love and admire him.  I know him for a transcendant linguist in the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and modern European languages;—­and with or without the Sanscrit, I look up to him, and rely on his erudition in all cases, in which I am concerned.  And it is this perfect trust, this unfeigned respect, that is the appointed criterion of Caius’s friends and disciples, and not their full acquaintance with each and all particulars of his superiority.”  Thus without Christ, or in any other power but that of Christ, and (subjectively) of faith in Christ, no man can be saved; but does it follow, that no man can have Christian faith who is ignorant or erroneous as to any one point of Christian theology?  Will a soul be condemned to everlasting perdition for want of logical ‘acumen’ in the perception of consequences?—­If he verily embrace Christ as his Redeemer, and unfeignedly feel in himself the necessity of Redemption, he implicitly holds the Divinity of Christ, whatever from want or defect of logic may be his notion ‘explicite’.

Ib. p. 18.

‘But the whole three Persons are co-eternal, and co-equal’.  And yet this we must acknowledge to be true, if we acknowledge all three Persons to be eternal, for in eternity there can be no ’afore, or after other’.

It must, however, be considered as a serious defect in a Creed, if excluding subordination, without mentioning any particular form, it gives no hint of any other form in which it admits it.  The only ‘minus’ admitted by the Athanasian Creed is the inferiority of Christ’s Humanity to the Divinity generally; but both Scripture and the Nicene Creed teach a subordination