of the article denied?  Or on the moral state of the individual, on the inward source of this denial?  And lastly, who authorized either you, or the pseudo-Athanasius, to interpret Catholic faith by belief, arising out of the apparent predominance of the grounds for, over those against, the truth of the positions asserted; much more, by belief as a mere passive acquiescence of the understanding?  Were all damned who died during the period when ’totus fere mundus factus est Arianus’, as one of the Fathers admits?  Alas! alas! how long will it be ere Christians take the plain middle road between intolerance and indifference, by adopting the literal sense and Scriptural import of heresy, that is, wilful error, or belief originating in some perversion of the will; and of heretics, (for such there are, nay, even orthodox heretics), that is, men wilfully unconscious of their own wilfulness, in their limpet-like adhesion to a favourite tenet?”

Ib. p. 26.

  All Christians must confess, that there is no other name given under
  heaven whereby men can be saved, but only the name of Christ.

Now this is a most awful question, on which depends whether Christ was more than Socrates; for to bring God from heaven to reproclaim the Ten Commandments, is ‘too too’ ridiculous.  Need I say I incline to Sherlock?  But yet I cannot give to faith the meaning he does, though I give it all, and more than all, the power.  But if that Name, as power, saved the Jewish Church before they knew the Name, as name, how much more now, if only the will be not guiltily averse?  Any miracle does in kind as truly bring God from heaven as the Incarnation, which the Socinians wholly forget, as in other points.  They receive without scruple what they have learned without examination, and then transfer to the first article which they do look into, all the difficulties that belong equally to the former:  as the Simonidean doubts concerning God to the Trinity, and the like.

Ib. p. 27.

The Eclectic Neo-Platonists (Sallustius and others,) justified their Polytheism on much the same pretext as is in fact involved in the language of this page; [Greek:  polloi men en de mia theotaeti].  This indeed seems to me decisive in favour of Waterland’s scheme against this of Sherlock’s;—­namely, that in the latter we find no sufficient reason why in the nature of things this intermutual consciousness might not be possessed by thirty instead of three.  It seems a strange confounding [Greek:  heteron geneon] to answer, “True; but the latter only happens to be the fact!”—­just as if we were speaking of the number of persons in the Privy Council.

Ib. p. 28.