fire. The Jews had no idea of Jehovah other than of a uni-personal being. The plural forms used by the Hebrews in names or terms of dignity are vainly urged in proof of several intelligences in the one God; for the Jews, to this day, like the early Christians, regard such a notion of the God of Abraham as making more Gods than one; and this is one great obstacle, and perhaps the greatest, to their conversion, in the present state of Christianity. Though so much stress is laid by modern theologists on the Hebrew name of God, ELOHIM, as designating a plurality of essence, Tertullian was of opinion that the Trinity was not revealed to the Jews in their scriptures, but was reserved for the Gospel; though he found the Christians of his age abhorrent from this imaginary revelation. Basnage, in his history of the Jews, though himself a Trinitarian, explodes as chimerical the idea of Jewish trinitarianism.

The evidence of the Acts and Epistles is entirely. in favour of the Apostles entertaining the same notion of the Father, as the Jews did of God, under his more awful title of Jehovah; as himself alone God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the Saviour, and as distinct altogether and superior to his Son, or the Christ (for the terms are synonymous in scripture-phraseology); who is represented by them as A MAN chosen of God, his anointed child or servant, as raised from the dead by God, as our moral creator and our future judge, by authority delegated to him from God his father; and we have evidence that the first converts to the apostolic preaching had no other ideas of God, or of his righteous servant," or son; so that without the pre-conceived hypothesis of this tri-unity in the Godhead used as a key to the scripture, the scripture itself could never convey any such idea; and this inference is confirmed by the incontestable historic fact of a church existing in the apostolic

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age, in which the doctrine of the deity of Christ was unknown; his divinity, in a derived sense, being alone understood. It will be seen hereafter that his co-equal deity was not even thought of till after several centuries.

What the state of early Christian opinions was may be collected from the admissions and indirect éonfessions of the Fathers of the Catholic Church. Athanasius says that the Jewish Christians of the Apostolie Age disbelieved the deity of Christ, and drew the Gentiles into their error; these Jewish Christians were called Nazarenes and Ebionites. They differed among themselves as to the miraculous conception, and as to retaining Judaic observances; but they agreed in believing the simple humanity of Christ. It is attempted to throw on them the stigma of heresy, as followers of one Ebion; but Ebion was an honourable term of reproach, implying poverty. How a Jewish convert church, believing only in the crucified Jesus as a man anointed of God, came to exist at all, when it was the obvious interest of the Jews to grasp at his deity, if there were a pretence for it, in order to screen the humiliation of their martyred Messiah, neither Athanasius explains, nor can it be explained by any other. The Nazarenes were in fact the first Jewish Christians; and PAUL, in Acts xxiv. 5, is styled by Tertullus, "a ring-leader of the sect of NAZARENES."

We find that John the Evangelist rebuked a particular heresy; and it so happens that this heresy is in direct opposition to the humanity of Christ. It was brought in by certain professors of oriental metaphysics, who believed Christ's miraculous powers, but held matter to be impure; and supposed, with the Eastern and certain of the Greek philosophers, the separate being and indestructible nature of the human thinking faculty or soul, and its pre-existence before its union with a mortal body.

Their founder is thought to have been Simon Magus. They styled themselves Gnostics, or the knowing; they had notions of successive Eons or emanations from the deity, of which they fancied Christ one: and as to his manhood, they were phantomists; they thought it an illusion. Thence they were also called Docetæ. John condemns this heresy by asserting that "Christ is come in the flesh:" or that he, who was commissioned as the Messiah, is a proper human being. Cerinthus was one of the latter Gnostics. He allowed the human reality, and believed the emanation, or the Christ, as he supposed it, to enter the body of Jesus at his baptism, and leave it before his crucifixion. This was in process of time improved into a union of the divine and human natures at the moment either of conception or of birth.

That the Gnostic philosophy was the only heresy of the first age, though there then existed a body of converts regarding Christ as only a man anointed with power, appears, (1) from John making no express allusion to any other, though the passage which speaks of Christ as God, in so far as he was the word, which no Jew could for a moment have interpreted of original and underived deity, is brought forward as if aimed at the Nazarenes, who were actually the most ancient Jewish Christians; (2) from the term Gnosticism being used synonymously with heresy, during a considerable part of the first ages; (3) from the Unitarians not forming any separate church, but mixing undisturbed with general congregational meetings for worship, long after the notion of Christ's pre-existence as a personal efflux from divinity and a secondary yet coessential God had been maintained and professed by the learned, in opposition, as is shown by the indisputable evidence of their own admissions, to commonly received tradition and to the faith of the people. The Unitarians 2 were not then, as

now, an odious, calumniated, and proscribed society. They formed the community of Christians; they comprehended the general body of the simple and illiterate; and included in their number bishops, or pastors, "who had not made the word of God of none effect by the traditions which they delivered.” It appears then, that the minds of Christian men were already agitated, if they were not unsettled, by speculative refinements on the person and nature of Christ, before John wrote his Gospel; and if we regard the aversion of the Jews to a suffering Messiah, and the repugnance of the Gentiles to accept as a messenger from God one who had suffered as a malefactor, the opening was prepared by these metaphysical subtleties, even if they were not actually adopted, for an exaltation of the nature of Christ, and his investment with attributes as peculiarly his own, which belonged to him only from the favour of God. The Gnostics were indeed condemned as heretics by apostolical authority; but they had paved the way for the Platonizing Christians. The Platonic converts to Christianity, impressed with their Father-God, and his intelligible idea, or Son, projected from him in order to create and conduct the physical universe, which in itselfor the soul or vital power of it-formed a third principle, began to trace anti-types in THE FATHER of the Gospel revelation; & his anointed Son, the moral creator, and the Spirit of the Father, which dwelt in him, and wrought by him.

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Justin Martyr, a Christian convert from the Platonic school, about the middle of the second century, promulgated an opinion that the Son of God was the second principle in the Deity, and the creator of all things. He is the earliest writer to whom this opinion can be traced; and there is also internal evidence that he was the originator of it: for he ascribes this knowledge to the special favour of God; and he calls upon others to partake of

this great gift and benefit, lest, in hesitating to impart it, he should come under condemnation. He fancied that he discovered the agency of the second or inferior God in Christ throughout the Old Testament, under angelical forms, or in apparitions of the divine glory. But his belief in a special illumination is quite sufficient to set the question at rest, as to the fact whether these opinions were or were not the received traditions; and it is evident, from his own words, that the body of the Christian church were neither Trinitarians nor Arians; that they neither held the Godhead nor the pre-existent nature of Christ; but were, as to his person, humanitarians, and believed only in his legatarian and elective office, as the representative and organ of the Divinity. He further says, "Jesus may still be the Christ of God, though I should not be able to prove his pre-existence as the Son of God who made all things; for though I should not prove that he had pre-existed, it will be right to say that in this respect only I have been deceived, and not to deny that he is the Christ, if he appear to be a man born of men, and to have become Christ by election." Such, then, was in fact the general belief.

To the evidence of the pre-existence and the divinity of Christ being borrowed from the metaphysics of Platonism, it is objected that other Fathers who held the same doctrine were unacquainted with Platonism. But it is sufficient that Justin, who was a Platonist, propounds the doctrine in a manner which plainly shows that no preceding writer had affirmed it; that he believes the idea to originate with himself, and that he is inclined to ascribe it to inspiration. There can be no question of inspiration in respect to that which is already known and received. The martyrdom of Justin gave a sanction to his opinions. The Fathers who paid a deference to these opinions did not defer to them