"each case, and the silliness of the Christians. For "we do not consider the worker of these miracles to "have been God, but a man highly favoured by the

66

gods: whereas the Christians on account of a few "miracles call Jesus God f." Such is the testimony of an heathen.

The reader is now enabled to draw his own inference concerning the doctrines of Lactantius; and perhaps we must conclude that there are some expressions in the preceding quotations, which it is impossible to reconcile with each other. Thus much however seems certain, concerning the belief of this writer. He believed that Christ was present with God, and assisted Him in the creation of the world; that he was not born of Joseph and Mary, but that he was conceived miraculously by Mary who was a virgin; that he was of one substance with God; and that no persons worship God the Father, unless they worship inclusively God the Son.

We may think that Lactantius was heterodox, or that he did not understand his own opinions concerning the generation of the Son, but still his words are plain and positive concerning the articles of belief just mentioned; and any one of these is fundamentally subversive of the notion of Lactantius being an Unitarian. His assertion, which is twice repeated, that Christ is of one substance with the Father, would also seem to separate him decidedly from the Arian tenets. Some of his expressions might possibly be brought within the verge of Semiarianism; but we must remember, that the illustra

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tion which he uses of the sun and the ray is also used by Origen (N°. 262.) and Dionysius of Alexandria, (No. 302, 303.) as proving that there never was a time when the Son did not exist. Lactantius certainly speaks sometimes as if he believed the Son to have been begotten at some definite period of time: and bishop Bull, as we have seen, conceives him to have spoken of that figurative generation of the Son, when he went forth from the Father to create the world. There is no doubt that some of the Fathers mention more than one generation of the Son, and that they considered this which immediately preceded the creation to have been one of them: but if Lactantius thought that the Son proceeded from the Father, as a ray from the sun, he could hardly have conceived that they were not always coexistent.

CONCLUSION.

WE have now brought the testimonies of the Ante-Nicene Fathers to a close. The catholic church has always appealed to these testimonies, as supporting the doctrine of the eternal and consubstantial divinity of Jesus Christ. The Unitarians appeal to the same authority in proof of what they call the simple humanity of Christ. The reader will draw his own inference, as to which of these two opposite doctrines is most supported by the writings of the three first centuries.

We must remember also, that when the Fathers, who were assembled at Nice in the year 325, appealed to their predecessors as maintaining the same doctrine, which was professed at that council, they had many more documents before them than what we now possess. The works of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, which remain to us, are perhaps not a hundredth part of those, which were extant at the beginning of the fourth century a: and yet with this multitude of evidence before them, which was open to their opponents as well as to themselves, they did not hesitate to declare, that all the Fathers who had preceded them, believed in the divinity of Christ. Where were the Unitarian teachers when this con

* The author of the Synopsis Scriptura, ascribed to Athanasius, after enumerating the books of the New Testament, observes that ὕστερον κατὰ τὴν ἐκείνων ἀκο

λουθίαν καὶ συμφωνίαν ἀλλὰ μυρία καὶ ἀναρίθμητα βίβλια ἐξεπονήθησαν ὑπὸ τῶν κατὰ καιροὺς μεγάλων καὶ σοφωτάτων θεοφόρων πατέρων. vol. II. p. 131.