DISCOURSE III. 815 dignity of godhead when they speak of his temporal generation and derivation from God as the author and cause of his being, from which the Arian writers have taken occasion to suppose they were engaged on their side. Now as this doctrine of the pre- existent soul of Christ united to true. godhead, happily recon- ciles many difficult places of scripture, so perhaps if it were wisely applied upon a diligent review of the writings of some of the fathers, this saine doctrine might reconcile some of their strange expressions which seemcontradictory and inconsistent : at least I am sure it would have secured them from someof the ab- surdities which they seem to have fallen into. It is worthy of'our notice, that many if not most of the ancient antenicene fathers, when they spake of the generation of the Son, understand byit a voluntary generation or manifestation some time before the world began, in order to create that world ; though they suppose the divine Logos or Word to exist in God, or in and with the Father from all eternity. That great andzea- lous defender of the Athanasian faith, the learned Doctor Water- land, allows this in his citation from several of those fathers ; see " Second Defence of the Queries," pages 104, 107, 283- 292. and his Third Defence, page 25. Particularly Ignatius had this lipea of the generation of the Son. Justin Martyr speaks of nogeneration higher than that voluntary antemundane generation otherwise called manifestation. The Logos became a Son according to Justin, by voluntary appointment ; it is the procession makes him a Son, and that was voluntary. The Son proceeded light of light in time according to Justin, and accord- ing to many more beside him, particularly Hippolytus, and per- haps even the nicene fathers. Tatian who was Justin's scholar, speaks only of a temporal generation or procession. And Athe- nagoras and Theophilus speak of no higher generation than this. Clemens of Alexandria and Tertullian may be both allowed to go upon the same hypothesis, and Hippolitus was undoubtedly of the same mind, for he says, " The Father begat the Son when he willed and as he willed," that is, sent or shewed him to the world. Tertullian supposes the 't sonship properly to commence with his procession, so that the Logos became a Son in time, and wasnot yet a Son until he came out to create." We might ask here now, whether all these expressions may not be reconciled, if we suppose the deity of the second person of the trinity, as some persons have done, to be an eternal divine principle in godhead, which is represented in scripture as aperson called his Logos or sophia, his word or his wisdom : And that sometime before the creation of the world, God created, genera- ted, or caused to exist the human soul of Jesus Christ in an immediate union with this word or divine principle, and gave the whole complexum thesane name, viz. The Logos or Word, and ordained this glorious Being, viz. his own divine Word or it -0 3
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