nations from Him by successive generation-INTELLECT proceeding from the ONE GOOD, and operating ENERGY or SPIRIT proceeding from Intellect (Logos) to consummate its Ideas, and then gradually came to be separated from Him, by a very natural process of philosophic deteriorations, and to be fixed down into independent personalities. With these explanations I now quote from Philo. He belonged to the age of Christ, but was born some time anterior to the Christian era: Brucker says twenty years. Philo is allegorizing the appearance of the three angels to Abraham, into a threefold manifestation of the One God: "The FATHER is in the middle of all, who in Holy Scripture is by a peculiar name styled THE BEING [HE WHO IS]: and on each side are [two] most ancient Powers next to THE BEING, whereof one is called the Effective (creative Power) and the other Royal; and the Effective, God, for by this [the Father] made and adorned the Universe; and the Royal, LORD, for it is fit he should rule and govern what he has made. Being therefore attended on both sides with his Powers, to a discerning understanding he appears one while to be ONE, and another while to be THREE. ONE when the mind being in the highest degree purified, and passing over not only a multitude of numbers, but also that which is next to an Unit," (the Monad) "the number of two," (the other two, Logos and Psyche) ❝endeavours after a simple and uncompounded Idea, perfect of itself: and THREE, when not as yet sufficiently exercised in great mysteries, it busies itself about lesser, and is not able to conceive the Being, [He who is,] without any other, of itself, but by his Works, and either as creating or governing." *

Such, then, were the prevalent modes of Conception at the time when the Gospel passed out of the hands of strictly Jewish interpreters, and came to be inspected by the eyes

• Philo de Abrahamo. Le Clerc's Supplement to Hammond, p. 168.

of

Gentile Philosophers. With more or less purity of concep tion, all the Platonists personified the divine Attributes; and some of them represented these personified Attributes as distinct Existences, not hesitating to speak of a second God, though holding him to be derived and dependent. There is no trace among the purer Platonists of any belief of three co-equal Gods, each possessing within himself the fullness of Deity, yet mysteriously united. The second and third persons in the Platonic Trinity were carefully represented as derived, dependent, and subordinate, under the similitudes of the stream and the fountain, the branch and the vine, the sun and its outshining effulgence; the relation between them being like that of three apparent Suns,-" two of them being but the parhelii of the other, and essentially dependent on it: for as much as the second would be but the reflected Image of the first, and the third but the second refracted." *

Now it so happened that the Apostle John, living at Ephesus, "the centre of the mingling opinions of the East and West," made use of this term "Logos" as already familiar to those for whom he wrote, and with the purpose of impressing upon the word the higher and purer meaning attached to it by the Jews of Palestine; wresting it from the philosophical to the strictly Jewish or Christian sense. Nothing could be more natural than that the Apostle should adopt the style of the philosophic schools in the midst of which he wrote, especially since it was not peculiar to them, but already in use among the Jews; and that endeavouring to connect truth with familiar modes of speaking, he should attempt to infuse into the word the more spiritual ideas with which it was already associated in his own language.

"St. John," says Guizot, "was a Jew, born and educated in Palestine; he would naturally, then, attach to the word Logos the sense attached to it by the Jews of Palestine.

Cudworth, p. 590.

Closely examined, the ideas which he gives of the Logos cannot agree with those of Philo and the school of Alexandria; they correspond, on the contrary, with those of the Jews of Palestine. Perhaps St. John, employing a well known term to explain a doctrine which was yet unknown, has slightly altered the sense: it is this alteration which we appear to discover on comparing different passages of his writings. It is worthy of remark, that the Jews of Palestine, who did not perceive this alteration, could find nothing extraordinary in what St. John said of the Logos; at least they comprehended it without difficulty; while the Greeks and Grecising Jews, on their parts, brought to it prejudices and preconceptions easily reconciled with those of the Evangelist, who did not expressly contradict them. This circumstance must have much favoured the progress of Christianity. Thus the fathers of the Church, in the two first centuries and later, formed almost all in the school of Alexandria, gave to the Logos of St. John a sense nearly similar to that which it received from Philo.* Their doctrine approached very near to that which, in the fourth century, the Council of Nice condemned in the person of Arius."+

It would not be possible, within my present limits, to trace, with a minute accuracy, how the Logos of the schools be

"It was in this mode of apprehending the Divine Being that the doctrine of the Trinity had its origin. The Logos of the first four centuries was in the view of the Fathers both an attribute or attributes of God, and a proper person. Their philosophy was, in general, that of the later Platonists, and they transferred from it into Christianity this mode of Conception. In treating of this fact, so strange, and one which will be so new to many of my readers, I will first quote a passage from Origen, the coincidence of which with the conceptions of Philo and the later Platonists is apparent. 'Nor must we omit, that Christ is properly the Wisdom of God; and is therefore so denominated. For the wisdom of the God and Father of All has not its being in bare conceptions, analogous to the conceptions in human minds. But if any one be capable of forming an idea of an incorporeal being of diverse forms of thought, which comprehend the LOGOI [the archetypal forms] of all things, a being indued with life, and having as it were a soul, he will know that the Wisdom of God, who is above every creature, pronounced rightly concerning herself; The Lord created me, the beginning, his way to his works.""-Origen, Opp. iv. 39, 40,-quoted by Norton on the Trinity, p. 271-2.

Milman's Gibbon, vol. iii. p. 313.

came connected with the Logos of the Gospel; and afterwards, under the necessity of adjusting these conceptions with the nominal Unity of God, changed its form into the present theory of the Trinity. It will readily be imagined that the Gentile Christians, accustomed to associate ideas of external power with their Deities, and at the same time to contemplate them in connection with humanity, would shrink from the bare and unclothed conception of the crucified Jesus; would endeavour to throw around their new faith a mystic splendour that might protect it from the ridicule of Heathen scoffers, and naturally seize upon means so obvious, the language offered by St. John, and the ideas offered by their own philosophy, to connect the pre-existent soul of Jesus not with Humanity, but with God. In this way they could remove the shame and odium of the cross, that stumbling block to the Jews, and to the Greeks foolishness. We little realize with what distaste and abhorrence a Hebrew looking for the Messiah, and a Philosopher speculating on the nature of the divine Emanations that were the Mediators between God and men, would contemplate the despised Galilean executed as a malefactor. Neither do we realize, as we ought to do in this connection, the magnanimity of Paul : “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified;" so much has the technical jargon of theology overcast the moral sublimity of the Apostle's spiritual meaning.

I shall now, with as much distinctness as a subject purely literary will admit, attempt to exhibit to you the gradual transformations, by which these Conceptions slowly assumed the present orthodox form of the doctrine of the Trinity. If this had been a doctrine of Revelation, it would, of course, have been perfect at once; but arising out of accidental circumstances and accidental ideas, it naturally required many fresh adjustments to make it consistent with itself, and to protect it, by skilfully chosen words, against all the troublesome attacks of theological ingenuity. This was not the work of a

moment nor of a century,-hundreds of years passed over before the doctrine assumed any fixed form; nor was it until the thirteenth century that the present form of the doctrine of three Gods, numerically one, was authoritatively decreed.* Those who tell us of an "unimproved and unimprovable Revelation," must surely be strangely ignorant of the history of Trinitarian Theology.

There are three Creeds of the Church of England, each of them to be referred to distinct Periods of Ecclesiastical History, and becoming more Unitarian in proportion as we approach the Apostolical times, more Trinitarian in proportion as we recede from those times. These three Creeds I shall make serve as heads under which to introduce my proofs of the rise and progress of the Trinitarian Doctrine.

The first Creed is UNITARIAN. It was the only Creed known to the Church for three hundred and twenty-five

years.

The second Creed is partly TRINITARIAN, fixing the Deity of Christ, but saying nothing of the Deity of the Holy

Spirit.

The third Creed contains Trinitarianism, though not in its final and perfected, yet in its boldest and most extravagant,

forms.

The first Creed is known by the name of the Apostles' Creed. It is not known by whom it was written, nor when it was written; † but though we have no verbatim copy of it until after the Nicene Council, but only more or less of the substance, and some of its clauses are evidently of a later date, it may substantially be regarded as descriptive of the faith of the

• See Cudworth, p. 603, 4.

"The creed which was first adopted, and that perhaps in the very earliest and it was the general opinion, from the fourth century downwards, that it was age, by the Church of Rome, was that which is now called the Apostles' Creed, actually the production of those blessed persons assembled for that purpose. Our evidence is not sufficient to establish that fact, and some writers very confidently reject it. But there is reasonable ground for our assurance that the form of faith

which we still

and inculcate was in use and honour in the very early proreligion."-Waddington's History of the Church, p. 27.

pagation of our repeat