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especially from Gregory the Great'; and that he deemed it his duty to admonish the reader of this fact. To the above statement of Oudinus, Griesbach, adds another corroborative proof to the same effect; that in the Liber Quæstionum, which he shews to be a genuine work of the same Father, the eighth verse is quoted in the same pure and unadulterated manner as in the first edition of the Liber Formularum; so that there remains not the shadow of a doubt as to what may be the genuine testimony of the venerable Eucherins. This lucid and convincing de tail of Griesbach, Mr. Nolan appears to possess neither the ability nor the inclination to controvert; but reasoning on the case before him more like a lunatic than a critic, requires of the objector, first to reconcile Eucherius with himself; as though nothing had been already done to determine that important question, and, as if no solid testi timony could be drawn from an author, so long as an interpolated edition of one of his works should happen to be in circulation.

I have already noticed one demonstrative proof of the spurious verse being wanted in the Bible of Eucherius. There is a second to be deduced from the manner in which he quotes the eighth verse in the Liber Quastionum, that is to say, without the addition of the words, In terra. For if the seventh verse, whether with or without the words, In cælo, should be prefixed to the eighth as furnished by Eucherius, the result would be such nonsense as would be insufferable for any man to write, but much more so for an apostle. I therefore hence deduce another general rule; that whoever with Eucherius, Dionysius Alexan drinus, Pope Eusebius, Pope Leo the Great, and St. Austin, cites the eighth verse, without the spurious addition, gives evidence at the same time that the seventh verse was not at all in his copy.

To the above is to be subjoined a third demonstration, already urged by Griesbach; that in his answer to the question, From what texts of Scripture can the Trinity be proved? Eucherius omits all mention of the Heavenly Witnesses. To this sturdy argument my opponent replies; that, as he has taken no notice of the Heavenly Witnesses, so neither has he taken any notice of his own man ner of applying the earthly witnesses as though there were any simi larity between the two cases; the one being a plain and literal testimony of three divine persons of one substance, and containing the whole mystery of the Trinity in Unity, expressed in a nut-shell; the other being but a gloss, admitted by somè of the orthodox, but disallowed by others; and wholly unknown to the Gallican Church before the times of St. Austin.

Before I proceed to the further vindication of what I have affirmed of Vigilius, I must correct a most wilful misrepresentation of my means ing in relation to the Confession of Faith, of which he is made the author. In stating, then, that he drew up that confession of Faith in the name of the African Bishops, I intended nothing more than that he composed it by the direction and with the concurrence of those prelates; whereas the ingenuity of my opponent has contrived to make me say, that he had actually forged the confession, together with the subscrip tions of all the Bishops. So far from implicating either Vigilius or any other of those Latin Fathers, who first began to express in their works the sense of the seventh verse, I in a great measure acquit them of all blame whatever; and transfer the whole villany of the transaction on those, who, after the invention of printing, wickedly presumed to thrust it into the Greek original, into the Syriac, Armenian, and most of the modern versions; and on such as at this day, in defiance of the meridian sunshine

of sacred criticism, have still the effrontery to contend for its authenticity.

In assigning spurious and anonymous productions to their real authors, there must always be much room left for cavil and disputation. Whether I am right or wrong in ascribing to Vigilius the tracts which contain the spurious passage, cannot contribute in the slightest degree towards establishing its authenticity; for, if Vigilius was not the author of them, then his testimony is lost to the cause of the Heavenly Witnesses. Since, however, my oppo. ment has had the arrogance to assert that my charge of Vigilius putting forth tracts under the name of Athanasius, with the verse inserted, is wholly destitute of foundation; and has dwelt at great length on this point for the purpose, if possible, of exposing my ignorance; I beg to have the opportunity of vindicating my own character, and of making manifest to your readers on which side of the dispute the ignorance lies. First of all, then, let me state, that the Athanasii Opera which I have, is the Latin version only, printed at Paris in 1608. In this edition of his works, and, I believe, in all others, there are extant certain Books, ad Theophilum, expressly ascribed to the pen of Athanasius; in the first and ninth of which the spurious verse is cited in the very same words; and, therefore, we may be sure, by the very same author. This author, according to the judg. ment both of Porson and Griesbach, was the same who composed the confession of Faith for the African Prelates; and the author of that confession of Faith is thought by Bengelius, Griesbach, and others, if not by my opponent himself, to have been no other person than Vigilius Tapsensis. This will be amply sufficient to shew, on what grounds I have charged Vigilius with having compose certain tracts under the name of Athanasius. But as to the

Disputatio Athanasii cum Ario, the long tract with which my antagonist has so highly diverted himself, and which, after having once made himself master of the judgment of the Benedictine editors, he rises up like a scholar armed fully prepared to vindicate as the production of Vigilius; I certainly am bound to congratulate him on the possession of a treasure to which both I and the editor of my Athanasius ap pear equally strangers; and hope, it may be of some future service in extricating him from some of those difficulties and perplexities in which the precipitancy of his conduct has already involved him.

Inext proceed to the consideration of what he is pleased to call his plea on record; and on the strength of which he bars all the pretensions of the African Fathers, as well from deriving the contested verse from St. Cyprian, as from fabricating it themselves. The differences, we are told, that set the parties at variance which divided this Church, as they are stated by Facundus, and confirmed by Vigilius, were these; while the orthodox contended for the Son of God in two natures; the heretics disputed for the Word of God in one simple nature; that is, with the good leave of my opponent, in one simple substance; for with the Latin Fathers, when discoursing of the Godhead, nature and substance were equivalent terms. The plea being thus put on record, he continues to point out how well such a verse as that of the Heavenly Witnesses, must have served the purpose of the heretics; and how absurd it must be in any critic at this day to imagine, that any of those African Prelates should fabricate a passage which would be ruinous to their own cause in a conflict with their adversaries.

To most readers of the Remembrancer, I should think, this extraordinary definition of heresy, coming as it does, from the pen of an Ox

ford divine, must have occasioned some little perturbation of spirits, whether in this case they themselves must not always have been heretics; without being conscious, that any such poison had been lurking in their tenets. For what heresy, I pray, can there be in maintaining the one simple nature or substance of the divine Word; or what orthodox professor ever contended for two natures in the Word any more than those heretics described by my opponent? I regret being obliged to say, that I have not at present by me a copy of Facundus to ascertain by what fatality he has been led to hazard so ignorant and garbled a statement of the heresy in question; but I have ample means of demonstrating, that he must have reported a falsehood. What those heretics really asserted was, that the Word subsisted in one simple nature or substance not only before, but after be beame flesh. They made no proper distinction between the Word simply considered, and the Word incarnate. To them the orthodox, in asserting two natures in Christ, appeared to maintain not a trinity, but a quarternity in unity; as they were either unable or unwilling to comprehend, how the Word inearnate, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, could be declared in the creed to be consubstantial and one God; unless the human nature should have been so far swallowed up and lost in the divine, as to leave the Son still of the same simple and uncompound substance with the Father and the Spirit. Nay to such a pitch did Eutyches carry his contradiction to orthodoxy, that he asserted in Christ two natures before his incarnation, but only one after it; a dogma at once so perverse as to render the account almost incredible, were it not too well corroborated as well by other vouchers, as by Pope Leo the Great in his celebrated Epistle to Flavian of Constantinople. Such, I affirm, was the REMEMBRANCER, No. 42.

heresy with which the orthodox of that age had to contend respecting the mystery of the Word incarnate; and if any of your readers will look into the Epistle of Athanasius to Epictetus of Corinth, into a short tract or two, falsely ascribed to the same pen, and headed with the words, Quod duæ naturæ in Christo ; and into the conclusion of the ninth book to Theophilus; he will be able to trace it, in the Western Church, from Auxentius, the metropolitan of Milan, down to the very times in which Facundus himself flourished.

The nature of the heresy in question being thus fully developed, the necessity and expediency of using the term, Verbum, rather than the term, Filius, in expressing the Trinity in Unity, must be apparent to the least discerning. The term, Filius, being generally used for the Christ in two natures; or for the Word, after he became flesh; might have afforded to the Arian and Eutychetian heretics a ready pretence to cavil, had it been incautiously adopted by the orthodox in affirming of the three divine persons an identity of substance; but to the term, Verbum, there lay no such. exception, it fully explaining itself. Hence in the beginning of the ninth book to Theophilus, ascribed by Griesbach and others to the pen of Vigilius, the heretic is made to ask, what was meant by God and the Son? To which Athanasius is made to reply, God and the Word; being well aware of the infinite trouble he must have had with his Arian disputant, had he simply and absolutely designated the second person of the ever blessed Trinity by any other term than, Verbum. What my opponent means by the heretical term Verbum, I know not; but this I will say, that he himself ought to be denounced a heretic for having asserted and maintained in the Remembrancer so heretical a distinction.

But, perhaps, a regard to the
X X

heresies of the day was not the only reason for preferring Verbum to Filius in expressing the Heavenly Witnesses. If we well consider the context of this part of the Epistle, we shall instantly perceive, that the divine testimony here afforded, is to Jesus Christ being the Son of God; but if one of these three witnesses were absolutely to be expounded of the Son incarnate, that would he making Christ bear testimony to himself; a consequence easily to be avoided by introducing the term, Verbum; for then it must needs be the divinity, to the exclusion of the humanity of his person, that will furnish the testimony to the divine mission of our Lord; and of this testimony we have the record in the Gospel, when he suffered upon the

cross.

Nor is this all. There can be little doubt, that our African Fathers, in the framing and wording of the Heavenly Witnesses, had a particular eye to the eighth verse as expounded by St. Austin. But if we attend to St. Austin, in his third book against Maximinus, we shall immediately see, that when he proceeds to shew on Scriptural grounds, in what manner the Son, the second person of the Trinity, may be signified or denoted by Blood; he contents himself with that testimony of St. John, The Word became flesh: that, as the Spirit might well designate the Father, in that God is called a spirit; and the water the Holy Ghost, in that water in the Gospel is figuratively used and expounded of the Holy Spirit; so the blood might very well designate the Son, in that the Word became flesh; where it is observable, that unless the Word may be substituted for the Son, and the flesh for the blood, the parallel must fail in respect of the second witness. For this reason, and no other, it is, that the forger of the two Epistles of Popes Hyginus and Joannes II. in which the Heavenly Witnesses are expressed,

has not only taken care to have the term Verbum, in the seventh verse; but has fairly thrust out sanguis, and substituted caro instead of it in the eighth verse, in order that this illustrated text of St. John might be more consonant to the rest of Scripture, and wholly conformable to the language of St. Austin.

The tables being thus turned against my antagonist, and a clear road made on which to advance, I find myself at full liberty to dismiss three or four of his arguments with very little ceremony. First of all I deny, that there is any absurdity in deriving the allegation of Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus Sanctus, from that of Pater, Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus; because in every expres sion of the Trinity in Unity, the Fibius of the one, must of necessity be expounded by the Verbum of the other. I deny, moreover, that Fulgentius, in confronting Cyprian with St. John, marks any distinction or difference whatever, between their words. He alleges, indeed, the seventh verse in due form; and by bottoming it on the cited testimony of St. Cyprian, affords an opportu nity to my opponent to mark out to the readers of the Remembrancer the verbal difference between the two terms; but he takes no notice of any such discrepancy himself: nor did he so much as suspect, that there was any real difference between them.

There is much stupidity in charging either on myself or on the African Fathers the absurd consequence of being obliged to make the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, three persons of one substance; as from the manner in which I suppose St. Cyprian to have construed the Greek, and from the way in which St. Austin has unquestionably expounded the Latin, we all equally declare, that the three witnesses of the eighth verse are not the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood; but the three divine witnesses of Christian

baptism, of whom it may be truly
said, that the three are one. It was
doubtless the peculiarities of its
grammatical construction, which
first led these two Fathers to a
theological exposition of the eighth
verse; but by thrusting in the Stonegrave, May 9th.
seventh, and leaving the other to
shift for itself, we do nothing but
interpolate the Scripture for the
purpose of confusing it.

over in silence, in that he had the
civility to represent my own short
paragraphs as trying your patience.
I beg to remain,
Your obedient Servant,
JOHN OXLEE.

was

In one instance, however, your correspondent has kindly seized me by the hand, where I was by no means prepared for his friendly grasp. That Vigilius, says he, thoroughly acquainted with the disputed passage, and has expressly quoted it, is a point on which we are mutually agreed. Now, if by quoting it he means, that the author took it from any manuscript of the Epistle of St. John, we are by no means agreed: as the tenor of my argument is, that both Vigilius and Fulgentius, and every other author, who first began to express in due form the Heavenly Witnesses, had the verse to make as they wrote; or, what amounts to the same thing, were content to repeat it from those by whom it had been already made and fitted to their hands. That they actually framed it from the exposition of St. Austin, and, that they have even signified so much, I shall abundantly prove in the next letter which I may have the honour to transmit.

In the mean time, I would intreat your critical correspondent to write as intelligibly as he can; there being some passages in his communica tions which I have not as yet, been so fortunate as to comprehend; and it is far from my wish to pervert the sense of his language. In his last paper, which exhibits a finer specimen of critical mummery than I have beheld for some time, he has occupied, I see, not less than sixteen or seventeen columns of the Remembrancer on the authenticity of the Prologue to the Canonical Epistles; a circumstance not to be passed

To the Editor of the Remembrancer.

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Before I venture to lay hand on the gauntlet of so redoubtable a champion, I entreat a few minutes parley, while I proceed with the defence of a cause, which it may be rashness to contest, but would be weakness to abandon without a struggle.

After determining the order of the Epistles, according to the Greek canons, the first point which is discussed in the Prologue respects the unfaithfulness of the Latin interpreters, " particularly in that part of St. John's Epistle, where the unity of the Trinity is mentioned." In this place, as it proceeds to observe, "the variety of the expression impugned itself;" and by the observation at once identifies the real author, in specifying St. Jerome's mode of proceeding in the correction of the Latin version. His plan, as

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