صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

from their brethren by a variety of names and opinions in this matter, in which they disagreed as well amongst themselves, as with the orthodox. Hence, generally, after the names of their several leaders, they were called Aetians, Eusebians, Eunomians, Anome ans, Eudoxians, Acacians, Semi-arians, and the like. The most prevailing sect of these, and the nearest to the orthodox, were the Semi-arians, who maintained that the Son was ours, but not opsies, i. e. that he was of like substance with the Father, but not of the same substance; that he was like the Father also, in will and operation, but really different from him in nature or essence. The same they believed, for the most part, concerning the Spirit. Consequently, they must hold, either, that there is but one person in the Godhead, called the Father, and so the Son and Spirit are absolutely creatures; or, that there are three Gods, of three different substances, who have only the relation of a likeness to each other. The wit of man cannot devise a medium between these two: And let a man take either of the two, he will be sure of equally contradicting the Scriptures, and of finding himself, one time or other, in the

wrong.

Photinus, bishop of Sirmium, from whom came the Photinians, asserted (about 20 years after Arius( that Christ was a mereman, without any being till he was produced of the virgin Mary, and that the Holy Spirit was neither God, nor a person in the Godhead. He also asserted, that the names of Father, Son, and Spirit, belonged to one and the same individual being, and that the same numerical person took those names only to signify some particular operations. In this opinion, he followed the Sabellians. He wrote elegantly and ably against all heresies but his own, and is said to have been a learned and eloquent man.

About the same time, lived also Macedonius, patriarch of Constantinople; a worthless character, and fit to oppose that gracious Spirit, whose divinity he denied, and whose influences (to say nothing of his principles,) his whole condnet proved, he never felt. He was one of those worldly priests, who aim at nothing but riches and rank, and who stick at nothing to obtain them. If men were to follow Jerom's advice they would avoid such clerical tradesmen, and scanda

* See Eunomius's confession of Faith in Cave's Hist. Lit. In this confession, he says, " the Father begat the Son, not according to his own substance, but according to his will, and that, afterwards,wom he made the Holy Spirit by his own proper authority and command, and yet by the energy and active power of the Son." A little below, he calls the Holy Spirit" the first and greatest of all the works of the only begotten."

lous money-hunters, as they would the pestilence. Macedonius was at first a Semi-arian, asserting that the Son was of the like substance but not of the same substance with the Father, and yet not creature. When the pure Arians, who advanced him to the chair upon the murder of Paul the good, found he was not purely their own; they drove him from it: And then, to draw away disciples after himself, he set up a new heresy, or rather new-modelled an old one. Agreeing with the Semi-arians concerning the Son, he opposed himself particularly against the Holy Ghost, and denied him to be God, or a divine person, or even to have any person or substance at all; maintaining, that the Spirit was a mere created energy, imparted to the Son, and divided among all other animated beings. Hence he and his followers were called Пvevμalopaxo. Fighters against the Spirit; for the censure of whom the second general council was convened at Constantinople, in the year 384; as the first general council was at Nice, 60 years before, for the condemnation of Arius.†

*Negotiatorem clericum & exinope divitem, ex ignobili gloriosum, quasi quandam pestem fuge. Ignominia omnium sacerdotem est, propriis studere divitiis.- Delicatus magisier est, qui pleno ventre de jejuniis disputat. Sacerdotis Christi os, mens, manusque concordent. HrERON. ad Nepot. But Christianity is "improved" (say some) since the days of Jerom. Perhaps others will ask, in what? And, perhaps, others again will take up the complaint, sung 400 years ago, as not quite inapplicable now:

A maximis ad minimum,
Vix habet unum filium
Religio tam sacrum,
Qui pure propter Dominum
Religionis habitum

Portare videatur.

This doggrel, to the extent of 51 stanzas, is entitled Planctus ́ Bernhardi Westerrodis; and, if it hath no other merit, it has the merit of being a witness for truth in that dark age, the 14th century. It is mentioned by Fl. Illyricus the author of the Catalogus testium veritatis, and preserved at full length by BASELIUS in his Sulpitius Belgicus. p. 150.

† See the sum of these and other councils, digested by Bartholo mew Carranza, formerly archbishop of Toledo. Of his work, it may be said, that it will give a protestant reader a sufficient idea of the several councils; and of the author, that, being suspected of inclining to protestanism, he was imprisoned by the inquisition, and his archiepiscopal revenues were confiscated to the king of Spain. By appealing, indeed, to Rome, he saved his life, but not his see; for he died many years after in a private station. Thuanus says,

he knew him; and that his learning, integrity, and the holiness of his conversation were such, as made him worthy of his dignity.

In the fifth century, another sect was raised against the doctrine of the trinity, which proceeded, in a great measure, upon the notion of Sabellius. The professors of it were called Theopaschitae, "God sufferers," or Fullonians, from Peter Fullo, bishop of Antioch, their leader. This tribe asserted, that the whole trinity suffered upon the cross; and therefore, they addressed the trisagion or doxology to Christ alone, as the representative of the trinity, or the man in whom the trinity was. With respect to the person of Christ, they came very near, if not quite, to the Eutychians or Monopbysite, who so confounded his two natures, as to represent the buman to be absorbed in the divine, and to lose thereby its own proper existence.,

About the end of the same century, or (according to Cave) at the very beginning of the next, appeared the celebrated Jobannes Grammaticus, called Philoponus from his constant study; a man, who for his shining talents as a philosopher was certainly respectable, but who, too little like a professor of Christianity, abused those talents to the mean purpose of his own applause. "Tertullian (says Cave) long ago justly "observed, that philosophers in the church have, for the most part, been the patriarchs of heretics." He had studied Aristotle and Plato; and, like Origen with many others, he endeavoured to corrupt the simplicity. of divine truth, with the dogmas of the schools and the language of error. Thus, the scholar is as liable to be befooled in divine things by the subtleties and jargon of human science, as the unlettered man by the wrong apprehensions of ignorance. Neither the one nor the other can be safe, one moment, from delusion, but by a wisdom and direction very superior to their own. Philopenus was cheated by his philosophy to believe, that person and nature are the same which was the common confusion of the heretical depravers of the trinity; and he was hardened in that cheat by a concern for his own glory, and the pride of not yielding to an adversary. His heresy consisted in maintaining, that in the trinity there are three substances or natures; and yet he inconsistently enough urged, that there are not three Deities or Gods. But this consequence is unavoidable upon his hypothesis; and, therefore, he and his abettors were not unjustly called Tritheists, or maintainers of the doctrine of three Gods.

See Sleidan's Com. App. p. 48. The reader, however, should be cautioned of a flagrant error, committed in the acts of the Laodicean council, c. 35. which the papists have entitled, De his qui ANGULOS colunt, instead of ANCELOS, and which would otherwise have directly opposed their creature-worship. Carranza has followed them in his Sum, printed in 1552. Theodoret exposed this mistake, according to Gomar. v. opera. p. 565.

Joachimus of Calabria, an abbot, who flourished about the year 1200, was condemned by the Lateran council, 1215, for accusing Peter Lombard, the famous master of the sentences, of asserting, that there was a quaternity rather than a trinity in the Godhead; because, beside the three persons, of whom one begat, the other was begotten, and the third proceeding, he held, that there was a common essence, neither begetting nor begotten, nor proceeding, and so was distinct from the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."*

Nothing more, respecting the trinity, appears to have been started in this dark and barbarous age of the world, immersed in Romish superstition and ruled by Papal tyranny; till Gregory Palamas, archbishop of Thessalonica, about the year 1354, was accused of believing in two Gods, because he distinguished between the divine essence, and its energy or act. Palamas was a Greek, and hated by some Latin monks, who determined to find, or say, whatever they could against him. Men, thus happily disposed, may possibly obtain credit among themselves; but it must be through an excess of liberality indeed, if they gain any thing better than pity elsewhere.

With the much-needed reformation came in a world of errors, some of which arose from the most glaring impiety and licentiousness. There seemed an endeavour among many, not only to shake off those fetters which had been so long unjustly imposed upon men's consciences, but to shew that men's consciences were to have no bounds at all, and that the word of God himself, instead of being a test for all men, was now to submit to those tribunals of reason or fancy, which every man might presume he had a right to set up for himself. And as most of these judges had a law of their own, or made one for themselves; it is not at all miraculous, that there have been almost as many determinations as men, and that, upon this ground, no two men should have thought alike. They not only invented, therefore, a thousand new opinions, but industriously revived many of the old, which either suited, or, by lopping off some excrescences, might be made to suit, the genius of the times. The Papists had covered every thing with mystery, and crammed it down by force: In opposition to all this, which was bad and impious enough, there arose a set of men, who, pretending to join with the wise and pious reformers, and taking advantage of the general liberty, endeavoured to subvert the Christian religion itself, by laying it down for a principle, that all true religion was not mysterious, or that there ought to be no mys

*SPANH. hist. Christ. sæc. xiii. p. 1693. CARRANZE Summa conoil. fol. 421.

X x

tery in religion, or that whatever was mysterious in religion was altogether wrong. This foundation turns the Bible out of its place, and sets up reason, the reason of every man, and consequently the different and jarring reasons* of all men, to be the infallible judge in spiritual controversies. Under this usurpation of reason, it is no wonder, that the Mosaic account of the creation, the fall of man, the prophetic rites of the Jews, (for all their institutions had the voice of prophecy) the doctrine of the trinity, the incarnation of Christ, the sa. tisfaction and atonement of Christ, the descent of the Holy Ghost, his communion with his people, and the other doctrines of the gospel dependent upon these, were altogether exploded. Reason could not understand these things; "therefore, says reason, they are false.” If faith would urge, "that they are the things of God, which no man can know but the Spirit of God," reason answers, "I will take no evidence, but what comes to my own proper sense, and will believe the attestations of no man, not even of God himself, unless the same miracles are set before me, as are stated to have happened unto them." Thus reason very modestly proposes, that God shall continue to interrupt the laws of nature constantly (for every man to the end of time may plead this) for her satisfaction; and then she will do him the honor to believe, that the Almighty can tell no lie; but, not before. She will, upon this, condescend to own, that possibly he may be right in some other assertions concerning his own divine nature, and that the gospel, though it may be rather mysterious to her after all, shall have leave to be credited a little in the world. But as God never meant, that his gospel should be a subject of depraved reason, but of gracious faith; there is no hope, but that, as it ever hath been, so it ever will be, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to them, who stumble at the word, being disobedient, whereunto also they were appointed. 1 Pet. ii. 8." I cannot understand all this," says reason: To which the best answer is; "It would not be true, if you could. You perfectly understand nothing: How then can you presume to comprehend the infinite cause of all things?"+

* Austin quotes from Varro, that there were no less than 288 dif ferent opinions of philosophers upon one single question. "What is the summum bonum, or chief good?" Le civit dei. 1. xix. c. 1.

If it be objected, that this method of disclaiming the agency of reason in religious matters, tends to open a door to enthusiasm and all manner of nonsense; it may be answered liberally, that to the religion of Jesus Christ there can properly belong no nonsense, which is a ridiculous repugnance to truth, nor enthusiasm, which is a serious abuse of it; so that a wild profession is not a true one.

« السابقةمتابعة »