would hardly have been unknown, or have passed unrecorded; much less when the history is so full and circumstantial as it is.

Had there been any pretence for imagining that the Jews in our Saviour's time had any knowledge of the doctrine of the trinity, and that they expected the second person in it in the character of their Messiah, the question I propose to you would have been needless. But nothing can be more evident than that, whatever you may fancy with respect to more ancient times, every notion of the trinity was obliterated from the minds of the Jews in our Saviour's time. It is, therefore, not only a curious but a serious and important question, When was it introduced, and by what steps? I have answered it on my hypothesis of its being an innovation and a corruption of the christian doctrine; do you the same on your idea of its being an essential part of it. I am, &c.

LETTER VI.

Of the Personification of the Logos. DEAR SIR,

HAVING considered all that you have advanced concerning the antiquity of the unitarian doctrine, I proceed to attend to what you observe concerning the personification of the Logos by the platonizing christians: for, that many of them did platonize you are far from denying. "If," you say, p. 50, "he hath succeeded no better in the proof of his third assertion,

concerning the platonic christians of the second age, the inventors, as he would have it, of our Lord's divinity; that the divinity which they set up was only of the secondary sort, which was admitted by the Arians, including neither eternity nor any proper necessity of existence; having the mere name of divinity, without any thing of the real form: if the proof of this third assertion should be found to be equally infirm with that of the other two, his notion of the gradual progress of opinions from the mere Unitarian doctrine to the Arian, and from the Arian doctrine to the Athanasian faith, must be deemed a mere dream or fiction in every part."

In the first place. I must set you right with respect to my own idea, which you have totally misconceived, though you have undertaken to refute it, and this strange mistake of yours runs through the whole of your work. Those platonizing christians who personified the Logos were not Arians; for their Logos was an attribute of the Father, and not any thing that was created of nothing, as the Arians held Christ to have been. It is well known, as Beausobre observes, that they were not Arians, but the orthodox, that platonized. Constantine, as I have observed, vol. ii. p. 488, in his oration to the fathers of the council of Nice, speaks in commendation of Plato, as having taught the doctrine of a second God, derived from the supreme God, and subservient to his will.

Among the proofs of the origin of the Son, according to the early orthodox writers, I first quoted a passage in Athenagoras, which you translate somewhat differently from me; but not so as to affect my conclusion from it. For he evidently asserts that the Lo

gos was eternal in God, only because God was always Xoymnos, rational, which entirely excludes proper personification. See Athenagoras, p. 82. Can reason, as it exists in man, be called a person, merely because man is a rational being?

Besides, this is the only one of all my authorities that you have thought proper to examine; whereas there are others which you have overlooked so plain and determinate, that it is impossible for you to interpret them otherwise than I have done; as they evidently imply that it depended upon the Father's will that the Logos should have a proper personification, and become a Son, with respect to him. The passages which I have quoted from Tertullian and Lactantius, vol. i. p. 28, whose orthodoxy you cannot question, I call upon you particularly to consider.

There is a passage in Tertullian which shows how ready the platonizing Christians were to revert to the idea of an attribute of God in their use of the word Logos. "We have said that God made the universe by his word, reason, and power; and it appears that among your philosophers also, the Logos, that is, speech and reason, was the maker of the universe.. For this Zeno supposed to be the maker and disposer of all things, that the same is called fate, and God, and the mind of Jupiter, and the necessity of all things." The Platonic trinity, at least the second person in it,

* Jam ediximus Deum universitatem hanc mundi verbo, et ratione, et virtute molitum. Apud vestros quoque sapientes, λcyov, id est sermonem, atque rationem, constat artificem videri universitatis. Hunc enim Zeno determinat factitatorem, qui cuncta in dispositione formaverit; eundem et fatum vocari, et deum, et animum Jovis, et necessitatem omnium rerum. Apologeticus, sect. xxi. p. 19.

probably had its origin in personification; and in this the Christians were too ready to follow them, by converting the Logos of St. John into a proper person.

You acknowledge, p. 56, that these writers platonized, and this you say was common to Athenagoras and them all. "If any thing," you say, p. 56, "be justly reprehensible in the notions of the platonic christians, it is this conceit, which seems to be common to Athenagoras, with them all, and is a key to the meaning of many obscure passages in their writings; that the external display of the powers of the Son in the business of creation, is the thing intended in the scripture language under the figure of his generation; a conceit which seems to have no certain foundation in holy writ, and no authority in the opinions and the doctrines of the preceding age; and it seems to have betrayed some of those who were the most wedded to it into the use of a very improper language; as if a new relation had taken place be tweer he first and the second person, when the creative powers were first exerted."

You add, after apologizing for the conduct of the platonizing fathers, "the conversion of an attribute into a person, whatever Dr. Priestley may imagine, is a notion to which they were entire strangers." I answer that it is not possible, either by the use of plain words, or figures, to express this notion, to which you say they were entire strangers, more clearly than they do. For, according to the most definite language a man can use, the Logos, as existing in the Father, prior to the creation, was, according to them, the same thing in him that reason is in man, which is certainly no proper person distinguishable from the man himself. Will

you say that the man is one person or thing, and his reason another, not comprehended in the man? In like manner it is impossible not to infer from the uniform language of these writers, that, according to their ideas, there was nothing in or belonging to the Son, originally, but what was necessarily contained in what they express by the term Father. I will add, that if this was not the orthodoxy of the age, there was no orthodoxy in it.

That the Logos of the Father, the same that constituted the second person in the trinity, exactly corresponded to the Logos, or reason, or word of man, was the idea of Athanasius himself. Having spoken of the Father, as called the only God, because he only is unbegotten, aysτcs, and the fountain of deity, nyn GEOTηTOs, and of the Son as only God of God, Jeos en 9ɛov, he says, in answer to the question how this Logos can become a person in God when it does not so in man, "The word conceived in the mind of man does not become man of man, since it does not live or subsist, but is only the motion of a living and subsisting heart. When it is pronounced it has no continuance, and being often uttered, does not remain. Whereas the psalmist says the Word of the Lord remaineth for ever, and the evangelist agrees with him, &c.*"

"On this subject," you say, p. 58, "it is but jus

* Ου γαρ ο λογος του ανθρωπου ανθρωπος εστι προς ανθρωπον επει μητέ ζων εστι, μητε ύφεστως, αλλά ζωσης καρδιας καὶ ὑφεσα τωσης κινημα μονον. και λέγεται παρα χρήμα, και ουκ εστι. και πολλακις καλουμενος, ούδε ποτε διαμένει το δε του Θεου λογον ανωθεν, ὁ ψαλμωδος κεκραγει λεγων, Εις τον αιώνα ὁλογος σου δια μενει εν τω ουρανῳ. και σύμφωνος αυτῷ ὁ θεον ειναι τον λογον ὁμο λόγων Ευαγγελιστης, &c. De Eterna Substantia Filii, &c. contra Sabellii Gregales, Opera, vol. i. p. 651.