vict the present Latin version of fraud and imposture, either by furnishing the context without the interpolation, or by citing and expounding the eighth verse in such a manner as to render it wholly incompatible with the existence of the seventh. To these fathers must be added the author of the prologue to the canonical epistles; the clear amount of whose testimony is, that the verse, indeed, should have been in the Latin copies, but was not: and, if contrary to my belief, he actually presumed to thrust it in, he must have done it on the authority only, and in imitation of those by whom it was first framed. Nay, so far am I from paying no deference to the testimony of the Latin Church, that, if this passage, like any other important text of Scripture, could be alleged from the received and genuine works of the principal Latin fathers, I should immediately desist from opposing its authenticity. Such a task, how ever, I know to be vain and impracticable, and what neither of my opponents can so much as pretend to achieve. view, that the sense of the passage on which your correspondent had ventured to establish his position, has been strangely perverted by him; and that it admits of no such construction as that which he has put on it. Valesius, whose opinion. may well be balanced against that of Mr. Nolan, in alluding to this order of the Emperor Constantine, speaks of it merely as a request to write out a few copies of the Scriptures for the use of the new churches. erected at Constantinople. Besides we have the information on the authority of Jerome, that long before this occurrence Eusebius and Pamphilus both had been engaged in an edition of the Greek Scriptures, which was generally received in the provinces of Palestine; so that' unless your correspondent should be prepared to prove, that Pamphilus no less than Eusebius, was an Arian in his heart, and was likely to be ready to participate in the guilt of expunging it at the time; he will find it a difficult matter to persuade your readers, that Eusebius could have had any subsequent opportunity of putting such a design into actual execution. Independently, however, of these considerations, I shall briefly undertake to demons strate, that Eusebius of Cæsarea had neither the will nor the power to effect what by your correspondent has been so criminally and so rashly laid to his charge. Before I proceed to contrast his arguments in defence of the passage with those which I have advanced against it, and to wind up the controversy, I must take some notice of the two fresh suppositions which he has broached; that Euse bius of Cæsarea had both the will and the power to expunge it from First of all I cannot but think, the Greek; and that the true Je- that if Sir Isaac Newton had at rome, the author of the prologue to once denied the possibility of any the canonical epistles, had both the one man or set of men expunging will and the power to replace it in from the whole Greek text the disthe Latin version. Of his attempt puted passage; he would have acted to prove, that Jerome was the aumore agreeably to his known pruthor of the disputed prologue, I dence and great sense than in movhave already expressed my opinion ing the question, by whom it was in no very flattering terms; and done. The problem, however, being with your permission shall brush once proposed, it requires but little down the cobweb in some future penetration to discover, that Mr. communication. In respect of Eu- Nolan, with his peculiar conceit sebius, it has been pretty clearly about the heretical term, verbum, shewn by the writer of a very sen- floating in his head, would have resible article in the Quarterly Replied, that the Nicene council had ordered it to be expunged, rather than the problem of Sir Isaac should wait for a solution. Indeed, what he has asserted falls very little short of that extravagant position. Eusebius, it is well known, was a highly distinguished prelate at the Nicene Synod; and though he might have entertained some little scruple about the right application of the term Homousion; yet, if we look into his theological productions, as well before as after the sitting of that council, and especially into his Demonstratio Evangelica; we shall find no repugnance in his Creed to the expression of the Heavenly Witnesses; but on the contrary a great many reasons for concluding, that if the passage had been extant in the copies of his time, he would have been happy to avail himself of its support in establishing his doctrine of the divinity of the Word. In the fifth book of his Demonstratio Evangelica he every where expounds the God and Lord of the Old Testament, who appeared and communed with the Jewish patriarchs of Christ, the only begotten Son of God; calling bin the essential or substantial Word of God, the second cause of the whole universe, the intellectual essence and first begotten operative nature of God, the eternally divine and allefficacious energy, the intellectual image of the unbegotten nature: and though in the opening of the sixth book he denominates him a second essence next to the Father; yet by a second essence he means no more than a second divine subsistency; for with the same breath he pronounces him God of God, and on another occasion even the God of gods; so that I am at a loss where to find more accumulated proofs from Scripture of the divinity of Christ than in this very work of Eusebius of Cæsarea. Surely, then, it is not to be borne, that so celebrated a Greek father, of whom the true Jerome never speaks except in terms of unqualified praise, and REMEMBRANCER, No. 43. whom on one occasion he styles Custos Novi Testamenti, the Guardian of the New Testament, should, without any probable cause, and by a theologue of the nineteenth century, be branded with the charge of having mutilated the sacred text; and that too, for the sole purpose of upholding a forgery. That Eusebius had the power to remove it from the Greek text, is a still greater outrage on common sense than the supposition that he had the will to do it. Since my opponent appears to cherish some respect for the authority of Jerome, I will remind him of what that father has stated in his epistle to Pope Damasus. "I pass over," says he, "those copies which the unruly contention of a few men maintain as the Lucianian and the Hesychian, for whom truly it was not lawful in the Old Testament to have corrected any thing after the Septuagint interpreters; nor was it of any avail to have corrected any thing in the New Testament, since the Scripture having been previously translated into the languages of many nations, can inform us, that those parts are false which have since been added." Here we see Jerome, to determine the ge nuineness of the sacred text, like a sober and intelligent critic, but very unlike such men as I have got to contend with, imposes a parti cular stress on the authority and testimony of the ancient versions. Neither Lucianus nor Hesychius, he3 tells us, could make the least alteration in the Greek text of the New Testament without being immedi- ? ately detected by the testimony of the versions into which it had been s translated. But if such a thing! were wholly impracticable in the days of Lucianus and Hesychius, ita would be still more so in the times" of Eusebius, when not only the b Latin and the Syriac, but the Aro menian and Coptic versions likewise had been made and circulated ;' and' copies of the Scriptures were now 3 F multiplied in every corner of Christendom. In proceeding to recapitulate his newly broached arguments for our Heavenly Witnesses, I have in the first place to assure the gentleman, that if he had leapt into the crater of Vesuvius, he could not have earned a fairer title to perpetuity of fame than by the distinction which he has discovered and asserted between the orthodox term filius, and the heretical term verbum. This certainly is the distinguishing feature of his criticism, and cuts a very prominent figure in each of his paragraphs. On this ground we are to account for the fact why Vigilius has cited the testimony on one occasion, but designedly omitted it on another; why Facundus and the rest of the Latin Fathers have purposely kept it out of sight, where, in the opinion of such simple theologians as myself not initiated into the secret of the heretical term verbum, it ought particularly to have been brought forward: nay even to demand its production at any given time in which the Trinitarian controversy was maintained, is on this very ground pronounced by Mr. Nolan a most unreasonable requisition. I cannot, therefore, forbear expressing my sorrowful concern at the simplicity and infatuation of so many of our English prelates and sacred critics, who, as it now seems, since the wonderful secret has transpired, are exerting their pains only to preserve what at any future time may be effectually turned against themselves as a weapon of annoyance on the side of the heretics. To say that it is capable of an or. thodox interpretation will be nothing to the purpose; for if it be capable now it was capable then of adding support to the orthodox cause; and the fathers of the fifth and sixth centuries were as competent to apply it with effect as the sons of the nineteenth. In the name then of all that is sacred, let those who have any authority in directing the canon of Scripture, endeavour, if possible, Let us, however, compare with the head the tail of his argument, and see whether in the track which he has selected for his stately walk, he be not waddling like a goose, and hitting one leg against the other every step that he takes. First of all Eusebius, who by his enemies was suspected of leaning towards Arianism, is supposed to expunge this Arian-looking text from the Greek; whilst Jerome, whose me mory was never branded with Arianism, is supposed to replace it in the Latin; and what the African fathers were afraid to quote as too much favouring the cause of heresy, he, from the stupidity of his understanding, loudly calls for as a prop to orthodoxy. Secondly, in all the conflicts of the orthodox with the heretics, the latter, so far as can be collected, never so much as once had the sense to allege this testimony in their own support; but wherever it shews itself, it is always in some argumentative tract or other on the side of the orthodox; a circumstance to be accounted for only on the supposition that the orthodox exercised the two-fold privilege of either alleging or withholding what Scriptures they pleased; and yet methinks, when once the passage had appeared in the general confession of faith of the African Church, the heretics might then surely have belaboured the backs of their opponents with the weapon of their own choice. Why they did not your correspondent is the only man in the universe competent to explain. Thirdly, bottomed on the newly discovered fact of the term verbum being heretical and favour. ing the Arian cause, we are kindly furnished with a clue, which at once resolves the paradox, why Facundus should have cherished such an antipathy to one part of the passage, but so strong an affection for the other; and why Vigilius should have voluntarily alleged it in one, but designedly omitted it in another of his works. Here we are particularly invited by your correspondent to admire as well the natural frailty of Facundus as the profound subtlety of Vigilius; and on these two circumstances to found one of the very strongest arguments for the authenticity of the Heavenly Witnesses. Let us see, then, how the case stands with Vigilius. In one of his tracts, we are told, where he thought himself secure from the eye of the Arian, he has cunningly quoted the verse; but in the Disputatio Athanasii cum Ario, where the orthodox and the heretic are brought face to face, he with equal cunning has purposely omitted it. To what tract, however, containing the passage, does your correspondent allude? The several books put forth under the names of Athanasius and Idatius, in which the text appears, he denies to be the productions of the pen of Vigilius; so that there is nothing left of which he can be supposed the author, except the Confession of Faith subscribed by the African prelates. But surely in this public confession, which was composed with the view of being presented to the Arian heretics, there was far less chance of the heretical term verbum escaping detection, than in an argumentative tract, which but few of the Arians could have possessed either the opportunity or the inclination to read. Following, therefore, the clue of this gentleman, we eventually discover, that the disputed passage ought to have been withheld where it is brought for ward, and brought forward where it is withheld; so that either Vigilius or the clue must instantly be thrown away. Such, Mr. Editor, are the inconsistencies and the contradictions attending the system of defence adopted by my opponent. I have indulged, perhaps, in a strain of levity neither fitted to my own hu mour, nor becoming in itself; but in attempting to review the purport of his arguments, dressed up, as they are, in a finely wrought style of criticism; but equally destitute of all solid learning and sober judgment, it was impossible to refrain from turning them into derision. The heretical tendency of the verse itself, the villainy of Eusebius, the simplicity of Jerome, the antipath of Facundus, the vile cunning of Vigilius, and the want of common sense in the heretics, are all so many fundamental stones on which the critical superstructure is attempted to be built; and yet, notwithstanding the boldness of the materials, there never was surely a more crazy fabric erected by the hand of any man professing to be a director and a master in Israel. Though I shall not trouble the gentleman with the question why, at the close of his first paper, and before I had had the opportunity once again of opening my mouth, he should be so extremely eager to sing his pæan and to proclaim his own victory; yet I may reasonably ask him, what those other arguments are whereby the old objec tions to the authenticity of the Heavenly Witnesses have for nearly seven years been set aside: as on looking into the last Quarterly Review I find the prejudices against the verse to be as strong as ever; and if my information be correct, the learned Bishop of Peterborough, in his Divinity Lectures at Cambridge, has very recently denounced it a manifest interpolation; so that I am not the only person on whom the laboured inductions of his pen have failed to make any sensible im pression. In reviewing my last letter I perceive I have committed an error in affirming of the forger of the two Your obedient servant, Stonegrove, June 8th, 1822. To the Editor of the Remembrancer. SIR, MR. OXLEE appears to be disappointed that he has not been attacked by the "nest of wasps" which he mentions in his last letter. Instead of crushing the whole swarm, as he confidently expected, he will find sufficient employment in answering the only individual of the swarm that has attacked him. My only object was to afford him an opportunity of retracting the harsh language, which he had used respecting the controverted verse of St. Johu, and which, as I conceive, very ill becomes any Clergyman of the Church to apply to the authorized Version of the Scriptures. Though he has not retracted the offensive, and, as I think, very unjustifiable terms, I am perfectly content to understand his concession in his own sense of it, namely, "If the advocates of the verse can point out any one authentic and important passage of the New Testament, which had been equally passed over in silence by all the Greek and Latin Fathers, he would admit the reasonableness of allowing the verse to remain in the sacred Canon.” I have produced two authentic and important passages (1 John v. 20, and 1 Tim. iii. 16.) passed over in silence by all the Greek and Latin Fathers of the first three Centuries. These passages are adduced by the Fathers of the fourth and fifth Centuries, as testimonies to the Divinity of Christ. But how does Mr. Oxlee evade the only right consequence of his concession? By opposing his opinion of those passages to the judgment of the ancient Fathers, and demonstrating, as he thinks, that they do not strictly and exclusively apply to the Divinity of Christ. Mr. Oxlee's opinion of the passages is nothing to the present purpose. They were applied to the Divinity of Christ by the Fathers of the fourth and fifth Centuries, and yet were wholly passed over in silence by the Fathers of the first three Centuries. It follows therefore, from Mr. Oxlee's concession, that it is "reasonable to do, what the Church of England has done, in allowing 1 John v. 7. to remain in the sacred Canon." if it be reasonable to retain the passage, it is most unreasonable to call it "a foul and scandalous interpolation." Such language (I repeat) very ill becomes any Clergyman of the Church of England to apply to a passage, which was admitted to be genuine by Bishop Pearson, and defended, as such, by Selden, Hammond, Stillingfleet, Bull, Mill, &c. &c. June 17. But T. M. |