DISSERTATIOisI IV. : 321 properties of reason and vegetation is composed of body and spirit ; -so they lead us to suppose, that the pre-existent nature of Christ, which is called the Logos, is composed, or constitutedof God and a creature, or an inferior spirit, personally inhabitedby the divine Word, to which the distinct properties of God and a creature may be attributed. SECT. VIII. Considerations which tend to support this Con- struction of the Primitive Fathers. I. The ancient Jews, viz. the targumists, or commentators, and Philo, give us these descriptions, both of a divine and an in- ferior Logos, and they seem to have borrowed them from the bible, and their old traditional expositions of it. Let it be ob- served now, that these persons lived near the time when the New Testament was written, and that the apostles themselves were Jews, and used the phrases of their country, and that the primitive christians learned their notions of theology from the apostles, and from othersof the first christians, who werethem selves converted Jews. Thence we may naturally and easily suppose, that those phrases, idioms, sentiments, and manners of thinking and speaking, which were borrowed by the Jews from their traditionalsense of the Old Testament, might be the com- mon and most natural language and sentiments of the first chris- tians. The phrases and notions of both of them concerning the Logos, have something a-kio, and the strain of their expressions are plainly tinctured by similar and correspondent ideas. II. It is evident, from what we have said before, that the holy scripture gives the naine of Logos, or Word of God, to a certain powerof the divine nature, whereby all things were cre- ated; Ps. xxiü. 6. and 2. Pet. iii. 5. It gives the same name also to our blessed Savior in his incarnate state ; 1 John i. I. ' ->. and Rev. xix. 13. So that here is a Logos who is true. God, and a Logos who is a man. It is also manifest, that our Savi- our, since his incarnation is a complex person :, He is the child born, and the mighty God; Is. ix. Q.. He is God manifest in the flesh; 1 Tim. iii. 16. He is a man of the seed of David, and God over all, blessed for ever ; Rom, ix. 5. It is generally agreed also, that before his incarnation, he was the angel of the Lord, and also the almighty God : He was the God who fed Jacob, and the angel who redeemed him: Gen. xlviii. 15, 16, Ile was the man who wrestled with Jacob, and God, the Lord of hosts, whose name and memorial is. Jehovah ; Gen. xxxii. 24. and Ho.s. xii. 5. which seem to imply a complex nature, as I have manifested at large in another discourse, of the glory of Christ as God -man.. "* Now since the scripture has revealed to us a superior and inferior nature in Christ, to # -This Discourse was published in 1746. Vol. vI. X
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