.1101,` 3I4 THE ARIAN INVITED TO ORTHODOX FAITH.. stronger than the Father, but inferior or weaker, so Origen, ax sxuport,oe arrw vrruSttrepoe. That the Father is stronger, more powerful, more sublime, than the Son. So Tertullian. Innatum nato fortius ; infectum facto validius ;, quod, ut, esset, nullius, eguit autoris, multo sublimius Brit eo, quad, ut esset, aliquem habuit autorem. Contra Harmogenem, capite xviii. That the Son is the second God, or the next power after the first God ; that he pays due honour to the Father by calling him " The only true God ; John xvii. 3. owning the Father to be greater thanhe ; John xiv. 28. andall this with regard to his pre-existent nature before his incarnation. The learned Bishop Bull, that excellent defender of the deity of Christ, in his defence of the Nicene faith," section iv. chapter 3. acknowledges that " almost all the chatholics before thedays of Arius seem not to have known the invisible and im- mense nature of the Son of God, and they spake sometimes of him as though, even according to his divine nature, he were finite, visible, included in a certain place, and circumscribed in certain limits, while they, at the same time assert, and prove the Father to be immense, to fill all places, and to be included in none. Thence they infer, that it is not the Father that appeared as God and Jehovah to the patriarchs, but the Son." For this he cites Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatian, and mentions also Theophilus, Irenus, Origen, and six other bishops, as speak- ing the same sort of language.* I confess, Bishop Bull attempts a solution of this difficulty, both in that treatise, and in his re- markson Gilbert Clerk, and excuses the fathers, by " assigning invisibility to the real nature of the Son, but visibility to Iris economical character ; it being condecent and agreeable that the Son should exhibit sensible tokens of his presence in certain places rather than the Father; because he had undertaken, even from the fall of man, to be a Mediator, and thus gave some pre- significations of his incarnate state, being sent by the Father to appearamongst men." Butthe various manners of solving these difficulties shall beconsidered more particularly in the following section ; I insert this account of the writings of the ancients in this place, only as an intimation, that it is possible the ancients might have some confused idea of an inferior nature belonging to the Son before his incarnation. IV. Another circumstance that would lead one to think, that some of the primitive ancients might have some intimations of a Logos inferior to God is, that they assert the very Lo- gos himself to be made passible, and to suffer upon the cross ; and that in a real and proper manner the Logos, or Word, was * It is worthy our notice, that Philo the Jew, in his book "De somnii,," speaks the same language too, asserting that the " true God cannot he seen," but when he appeared to men it was in the form of an angel, of his most ancient and sacred word, who is his deputy.
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