as before, independent of them, and very intelligible without them.  So it stood for about 150 years before person was heard of in it, and it was later before being was mentioned.  Therefore, if all the objection be against these, however innocent, expressions, let the objectors drop the name and accept the thing.’  It was no wish of Waterland to argue upon such mysteries at all.  ‘Perhaps,’ he says, ’after all, it would be best for both of us to be silent when we have really nothing to say, but as you have begun, I must go on with the argument....  It is really not reasoning but running riot with fancy and imagination about matters infinitely surpassing human comprehension.  You may go on till you reason, in a manner, God out of His attributes, and yourself out of your faith, and not know at last when to stop.’  These are weighty and wise words, and it would be well if they were borne in mind by disputants on this profound mystery in every age.  But while deprecating all presumptuous prying into the secret nature of God, Waterland is perfectly ready to meet his adversaries on that ground on which alone he thinks the question can be discussed.

Summing up and setting in one compendious view all that the modern Arians taught in depreciation of Christ, Waterland showed that in spite of their indignation at being represented as teaching that Christ was a mere creature, they yet clearly taught that He was ’brought into existence as well as any other creature, that He was precarious in existence, ignorant of much more than He knows, capable of change from strength to weakness, and from weakness to strength; capable of being made wiser, happier, and better in every respect; having nothing of his own, nothing but what He owes to the favour of His lord and governor.’  By the arguments which they used to prove all this, they put a most dangerous weapon into the hands of Atheists, or at least into the hands of those who denied the existence of such a God as is revealed to us in Holy Scripture.  ’Through your zeal against the divinity of the Son, you have betrayed the cause to the first bold Marcionite that shall deny the eternal Godhead of the Father and the Son, and assert some unknown God above both.  The question was, whether a particular Person called the Father be the Eternal God.  His being called God would amount to nothing, that being no more than a word of office.  His being Creator, nothing; that you could elude.  His being Jehovah, of no weight, meaning no more than a person true and faithful to his promises.  Almighty is capable of a subordinate sense.  The texts which speak of eternity are capable of a subordinate sense.  The term “first cause” is not a Scriptural expression.’