voice out of the cloud, which said, This is MY BE LOVED SON, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him."

Is it possible, sir, that any man can attend for a moment to the natural import of these words from heaven, and then believe that God meant to be under-“ stood as saying, This Person, who has been baptized, and transfigured, is the self-existent God, co-eternal with myself, and the same Being?

8. The avowed design of St. John, in writing the history of Jesus Christ, is a proof that in his view Jesus was truly the Son of God. At the close of the 20th chapter, he says, "And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written that ye MIGHT BELIEVE that Jesus is the CHRIST, the SON of GOD; and that believing, ye might have life through his name."

You will probably urge, that in the very first verse of his gospel, John says, "The Word was God." This is true; and it is also true, that in the same verse, and in the next, he says, "The Word was WITH God." The Gop whom the Word was with, was doubtless one God; and unless we are to suppose that John meant to affirm a plurality of self-existent Gods, he did not mean to affirm that the WORD was God in a sense which implied personal self-existence. Besides, the title, the WORD, or the WORD of GOD, probably denotes that the Son was the MEDIUM of Divine manifestation; and hence we may easily infer, that it was on the ground of a CONSTITUTED CHARACTER that the Son is called God.

John pro

ceeds to say, that all things were made by him; and Paul tells us how-"that Gon created all things Br JESUS CHRIST.”

But I may
John's gos-

In some future Letters, I shall more particularly show in what sense Christ is called God. here observe, that the general current of pel corresponds with what he says was his object in writing, viz. "That ye might BELIEVE that Jesus is the CHRIST, the Son of God; and that believing, ye might have life through his name."

In my next Letter, you may expect still further evidence that Jesus Christ is truly the Son of God.

LETTER II.

Additional evidence that Christ is truly the Son of
God.

REV. SIR,

AS introductory to the arguments which I am about to urge, I would suggest to your mind the following suppositions.

1. Suppose that God, in giving the ten commandments on tables of stone, instead of writing the word sabbath-day in the fourth commandment, had left a blank; and in giving the fifth, he left a blank instead of writing the terms father and mother.

2. Suppose he wrote a second time, and filled up those blanks with characters or words which had never before been seen or heard by men.

3. Suppose he wrote a third time, and instead of leaving blanks for those words, or filling them with unknown characters or terms, he, for sabbath-day, wrote birth-day; and instead of father and mother, wrote son and daughter: suppose also, that these words had never been understood by men to mean any

thing different from their common acceptation at the present day.

Permit me now to ask, whether either of these modes of writing those commands could be considered as a revelation of the Divine Will? And would not the mode of writing birth-day for sabbath-day, and son and daughter for father and mother, be as likely to mislead the minds of men, as writing in unknown characters, or even as leaving blank spaces to be filled up by conjecture?

But what, you may ask, is the object of these extraordinary statements? My object, sir, is this, to evince, that in his communications to us, God must make use of language in a sense which agrees with some analogy, or his communications can be of no use to mankind, any more than unknown characters, or blanks to be filled by conjecture.

In a connection as deeply interesting as that of giving the law, God has made use of the terms the Son of God, Mr Sox, God's own Son, THE ONLY BEGOTTEN SON of God. He has represented his love to us as being exceedingly great, on the following ground, "God so loved the world, that he gave his ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, that whosoever believeth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life." "He that spared not his owN SON, but delivered him for us all."

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Such, you know, is the common representation in the New Testament. And being well acquainted with the natural import of the terms an owN SON, an ONLY BEGOTTEN SON ; and having an idea of the love of a father to an own and only son; the scriptural representations of the love of God towards us become deepTy interesting and. affecting.

But the Athanasian theory represents the Sox of God as personally the self-existent God, and the very SAME BEING of whom he is abundantly declared to be the SoN. And on this ground, the term SoN is used in a sense foreign to every analogy with which the human mind is acquainted; as foreign as it would be to use birth-day for sabbath-day, or son and daughter for father and mother. On this ground, the representations of God's love, and the scheme of salvation, are involved in unintelligible metaphor; and we need an inspired Daniel to interpret the import of the term SON, as much as Belshazzar did to interpret the enigmatical hand-writing on the wall. And until this in-terpretation be given, we have no definite ground on which to estimate the love of God in the atonement made for the sins of the world.

What has been now exhibited, is viewed as a very weighty argument against your theory, and in favor of the hypothesis that Jesus Christ is truly the Sox of God.

But there is another argument which, if possible,. is still more weighty, to which we may now attend. You cannot be insensible, that it is plainly and abundantly represented, in the Scriptures, that the Son of God did really and personally suffer and die for us. And that on this ground, both the love of God and the love of his Son are represented as having been manifested in a very extraordinary manner. And if the Son of God be truly the Son of God, a derived intelligence, these representations may be strictly and affectingly true. For on this hypothesis, the Son of God may be the same intelligent Being as the soul of the Man Christ Jesus who suffered on the cross.

But your theory will not, I suspect, be found to admit, or support, any thing more than the shadow of the suffering and death of the SON OF GOD.

Writers and preachers on your side of the question, do, indeed, often speak of the abasement, the sufferings, and death, of the Son of God, as though they believed these things to be affecting realities. But, after all, what is the amount of these representations, upon your hypothesis? You do not conceive that the Son of God became united to flesh and blood as the soul of Jesus Christ. So far from this, you suppose the Son of God was personally the self-existent God; and instead of becoming the soul of a human body, you suppose he became mysteriously united to a proper man, who, as distinct from the Son of God, had a true body and reasonable soul. And I think, sir, it will be found, that on this Man your theory lays the iniquities of us all ;-that this Man, and not the Son of God, endured the stripes by which we have healing. For while you maintain that the Son was personally the only living and true God, you very consistently affirm that "he did not suffer in the least in his Divine nature, but altogether in his human nature." And what is this but affirming that he did not suffer at all ́ as the Son of God, but only the Man Jesus suffered, to whom the Son was united ? As, on the Athanasian hypothesis, the Man Christ Jesus and the human nature are the same, so the Son or self-existent God and the Divine nature of Christ are the same. You sup

pose the Son as incapable of suffering as the Father, and that he did not in reality suffer on the cross any more than the Father did; nor any more than either of them suffered while Cranmer was burning at the