they have been under the most sensible impressions of the love of the Father and the Son, and under the most quickening influences of the Blessed Spirit himself; in the devotions of a death-bed, and in the songs and doxologies of martyrdom.’  ’Now can we,’ he asks, ’suppose that in such devout and glorious seasons as these, God the Father should ever thus manifest His own love to souls that are degrading Him by worshipping another God?  That Christ Jesus should reveal Himself in His dying love to souls that are practising idolatry and worshipping Himself instead of the true God?’

But there are other passages of a very different tendency, in which Dr. Watts virtually gives up the whole point at issue, and apparently without being conscious that he is doing so.  On the worship of the Holy Ghost, for example, he writes.  ’There is great silence in Scripture of precepts or patterns of prayer and praise to the Holy Spirit.’  ‘Therefore,’ he thinks, ’we should not bind it on our own consciences or on others as a piece of necessary worship, but rather practise it occasionally as prudence and expediency may require.’[448] On the famous question of the Homoousion, he thinks ’it is hard to suppose that the eternal generation of the Son of God as a distinct person, yet co-equal and consubstantial or of the same essence with the Father, should be made a fundamental article of faith in the dawn of the Gospel.’  He is persuaded therefore ’that faith in Him as a divine Messiah or all-sufficient and appointed Saviour is the thing required in those very texts where He is called the Son of God and proposed as such for the object of our belief; and that a belief of the natural and eternal and consubstantial sonship of Christ to God as Father was not made the necessary term or requisite of salvation;’ neither can he ’find it asserted or revealed with so much evidence in any part of the Word of God as is necessary to make it a fundamental article of faith.’[449] And once more, on the Personality of the Holy Ghost, he writes:  ’The general and constant language of Scripture speaks of the Holy Ghost as a power or medium of divine operation.’  Some places may speak of him as personal, but ’it was the frequent custom of Jews and Oriental nations to speak of powers and qualities under personal characters.’  He can find ’no plain and express instance in Holy Scripture of a doxology directly and distinctly addressed to the Holy Spirit,’ and he thinks the reason of this may be ’perhaps because he is only personalised by idioms of speech.’[450]

Now anyone who has studied the course of the Trinitarian controversy will see at once that an anti-Trinitarian would require no further concessions than these to prove his point quite unanswerably.  The amiable design of Dr. Watts’s second treatise was ’to lead an Arian by soft and easy steps into a belief of the divinity of Christ,’[451] but if he granted what he did, the Arian would have led him, if the controversy had been pushed to its logical results.