Waterland boldly faces the objection against the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity which was derived from certain texts of Scripture which taken by themselves might seem to favour the Arian view.  How, for example, it was asked, could it be said that all power was given unto Christ (Matt, xxviii. 18), and that all things were put under His feet after His Resurrection (Eph. i. 22), if He was Lord long before?  ’The Logos,’ replies Waterland, ’was from the beginning Lord over all, but the God man ([Greek:  Theanthropos]) was not so till after the Resurrection.  Then He received in that capacity what He had ever enjoyed in another; He received full power in both natures which He had heretofore only in one.’[440] The passage on which the Arians insisted most of all, and which they constantly asserted to be by itself decisive of the whole question, is 1 Corinthians viii. 6.  There, they asserted, the Son is excluded in most express words from being one with the Supreme God.  Dr. Clarke told Waterland in downright terms that ’he should be ashamed when he considered that he falsified St. Paul, who said, “To us there is but one God, the Father."’ ‘But,’ replies Dr. Waterland, ’do we who make the Son essentially the same God with that one, and suppose but one God in all, or you who make two Gods, and in the same relative sense, God to us, falsify St. Paul? We can give a reason why the Son is tacitly included, being so intimately united to the Father as partaker of the same divine nature, but that any creature should not be excluded from being God is strange.’

To turn now from Scripture to antiquity.  The question as to what was the opinion of the ante-Nicene fathers had been so thoroughly handled by Bishop Bull, that Waterland (his legitimate successor) had no need to enter upon it at large over again.  But Bishop Bull had done his work too well to suit the theory of Dr. Clarke and his friends.  Although the latter professed to find in the early fathers a confirmation of their views, yet from a consciousness, perhaps, of the unsatisfactoriness of this confirmation they constantly depreciate the value of patristic evidence.  In connection, therefore, with the subject of the Trinity, Waterland clearly points out what is and what is not the true character of the appeal to antiquity.  The fathers are certain proofs in many cases of the Church’s doctrine in that age, and probable proofs of what that doctrine was from the beginning.  In respect of the latter they are inferior additional proofs when compared with plain Scripture proof; of no moment if Scripture is plainly contrary, but of great moment when Scripture looks the same way, because they help to fix the true interpretation in disputed texts.  Waterland, however, would build no article of faith on the fathers, but on Scripture alone.  If the sense of Scripture be disputed, the concurring sentiments of the fathers in any doctrine will be generally the best and safest comments on Scripture,