and reduced to two or three points which are most material; I may perhaps find time hereafter to give you my thoughts upon them in writing. You will consider, in the mean while, that you are as much concerned to answer, I mean to yourself, the reasons which I have given for my persuasion, as to require answers to those reasons, which seem to you to favour your principles. The reasons, for instance, which I have given against the Sabellian construction of the first chapter of St. John, are of equal force against yours. And my arguments to prove Christ to be properly Creator, (not to mention several others to prove his Divinity, drawn from his titles, and attributes, and from the form of baptism,) directly strike at your hypothesis, as much as at the Arian. There are many great objections, as you see, lying against your principles; and there are some, not contemptible, against mine also. Weigh both equally, and balance them one against another this will be the true method to form a right judgment. I believe you to be as sincere and impartial in your inquiries as most men are; making allowance for such prejudices as are often apt to steal upon any of us, without our perceiving it. I wonder a little how one that talks so well about suspending assent where there is not sufficient evidence, can prevail with himself to think that there is any prescription for your scheme of 500 years before the commencement of my scheme. The proof of this fact can never be made good. The contrary is plain and evident. I am in hopes that I have mistook your meaning if I have, I ask your pardon. I shall add nothing more at present, but my thanks to you for your very civil manner of writing to me; assuring you that so far as my leisure, abilities, or opportunities permit, I shall be ever ready to give you the best satisfaction I can in any thing relating to this controversy; being, SIR, Your most humble Servant, Magd. Coll. Aug. 9, 1720. DAN. WATERLAND. SIR, LETTER II. I CAN now acquaint you, that I shall not be in waiting at Kensington before the 16th of September. I intended to be there at the beginning of the month; but my wife being ill, I have wrote to my brother chaplains to take care of the first fortnight: and they will be so kind as to do it. I shall be very glad to see you at Kensington any time after the 16th. There are lodgings provided for the chaplains, as I well know, having so found it the last year. The lodgings are in or near the square: which is all that I remember of them. I thank you for the favour of your last, and again ask your pardon for mistaking your meaning. I shall think my time there very agreeably and usefully spent in friendly debates upon so important a subject. Not that I think either of us shall be able thoroughly to discuss the main question, in a verbal conference, and without books at hand. But we may settle some preliminaries; may throw out several things as agreed on between both; and so prepare the way for a short and clear examination of the matter in debate, to be done afterwards by way of letter. In the interim, I am, with very true and sincere respect, I HAVE had the favour of two letters from you, and am not unmindful of the promise I made to enter into an epistolary correspondence with you, as far as my leisure may permit, and provided the dispute may be brought into a narrow compass. I might reasonably decline all private conference, having sufficiently done my part in this controversy, till some or other shall undertake, in the same public way, to confute what I have publicly asserted. Yet since you have been pleased to apply yourself to me, with much civility, and with an air of strict sincerity, entreating me not to think it too great a task, though in respect of a single soul, to take particular notice of what you have publicly and privately advanced upon the subject; I shall not scruple to comply with your desires, so far as may be sufficient to answer the end intended. The points which, after our conference at Kensington, I promised to go upon, were these: 1. The interpretation of the first of St. John. 2. The question whether Christ be Creator. 3. The point of worship. Under these three is contained all that is material; and upon these the main of the controversy turns. I must insist upon it with you, as a preliminary article, that you confine yourself, for the present at least, within these bounds; avoiding all wanderings and unnecessary diversions, attending to one point only at a time, and contentedly suffering it to be distinctly and fully debated, before we proceed to any new one. You are first to be upon the defensive, and to bear the part of a respondent. You shall have your turn to object afterwards (if we continue our correspondence) what you please to my scheme; but, for the present, you are only to defend your own. These things premised, I shall now begin with your interpretation of St. John. You construe the words Oeds Y ỏ Aóyos, God was reason or wisdom. To which I object as follows: 1. The article ó before Aóyos, and the want of the article • before eòs, make one presumption against your interpretation. Please to observe St. John's manner of expressing himself elsewhere, ó òs áɣáπn ésìv, “God is "love," twice, 1 John iv. 8, 16. ó Œeò's ¶üç és, “God is "light," 1 John i. 5. Now these are just such propo sitions as that of yours, God was wisdom: wherefore had St. John intended it, he would have expressed it thus; Oeds Aoyos v. This observation is of weight, not only because of St. John's manner of expressing himself, but also because the Greek idiom requires it. See Erasmus's comment upon the place, who was a good judge in such matters. 2. Another objection against your interpretation is this, that the Aóyos is the principal subject, the theme which the Apostle took to discourse on. He is there showing what the Aoyos was, not what God the Father was. The Aoyos was in the beginning, the Aóyos was with God, the world was made by the same Aóyos, and so on. The whole first fourteen verses are, in a manner, little else but a description of the several powers and attributes of the Aóyos. Wherefore it is more natural and consonant to understand that the Apostle intended to tell us that the Aoyos was God, than vice versa: since the Apostle was recounting the attributes of the Aóyos, his principal theme, not the attributes of God the Father. 3. I must not forget to add, that all antiquity has construed the words as we do. Now, whether you consider the ancients as the properest judges of the idiom of the language in or near their own times; or whether you consider them as faithful conveyers of the Apostle's meaning, (some having been his immediate disciples, as Ignatius; others having conversed with those that had been,) either way, the verdict of the ancients, especially in so noted and so important a passage of Scripture, ought to be of great weight, and indeed decisive; unless there appeared (as there does none) some plain reason or necessity, in text or context, for another construction. You seem indeed to lay some stress upon this consideration, that, in our way, we construe the words backwards. But this is slight. Would you call it construing backwards, if we rendered the first sentence, (iv ågxÿ ñv ó Aóyos,) “The Word was in the beginning?" It is not construing backwards, to render veuμa ó Oròs, "God is spirit:" John iv. 24. or 66 66 to render μάρτυς γάρ μου ἐστὶν ὁ Θεὸς, " God is my witness : Rom. i. 9. Multitude of like examples may be given, where the different idioms of languages require that the sense should run under a different order of the words. Your other observation, borrowed from Bishop Pearson, that the Evangelist makes "the last word of the former "sentence the first of that which follows," appears to be of very little moment. By this rule, the second verse should have begun with ὁ Λόγος instead of οὗτος. Or if you answer this by saying, that still ouros refers to the last word preceding, then by the same rule di' avrou, in the third verse, should refer to Toy Orov preceding. But enough of fancies: let us rather attend to dry criticism and strict reasoning. I proceed to your construction of di' avtoũ, by it, or according to it, as in or by an exemplar. It is sufficient here to observe, that this construction is ungrammatical. The preposition did cannot bear any such sense. The English particle by is indeed sometimes so used, but I want some example of any such use of the Greek dá. Give me one, at least, out of Scripture: or I shall be content if you can produce me any either in sacred or profane writer. Mr. Norris's speculations upon this head I am well acquainted with. They may pass for pretty fancies, and that is all. Allowing the thing itself be true, yet it neither can be made appear that John has here asserted it, nor was Mr. Norris himself sanguine enough to affirm that he ever intended it. See his preface to part i. p. 14. Add to this, that the ideal world is nobody knows what. Strip it of flight and figure, and there is no more in it than this, that God knew all things before he made them: but the modus of it infinitely surpasses all created understanding. If we come to plain good sense, we can conceive nothing of God, but what is either substance or attribute. The ideal world, in your hypothesis, must either be the substance of God the Father, that is, God himself, or only some attribute of him. You make it to be his reason, or his wisdom, and therefore must of consequence suppose it |