Scations here and in chap. v. 3. Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image,) and if God habitually assign to himself the members and form of man, why should we be afraid of attributing to him what he attributes to himself, so long as what is imperfection and weakness when viewed in reference to ourselves be considered as most complete and excellent whenever it is imputed to God. Questionless the glory and majesty of the Deity must have been so dear to him, that he would never say any thing of himself which could be humiliating or degrading, and would ascribe to himself no personal attribute which he would not willingly have ascribed to him by his creatures. Let us be convinced that those have acquired the truest apprehension of the nature of God who submit their understandings to his word; inasmuch as he has accommodated his word to their understandings, and has shown what he wishes their notion of the Deity should be.

To speak summarily, God either is, or is not, such as he represents himself to be. If he be really such, why should we think otherwise of him? If he be not such, on what authority do we say what God has not said? If at least it be his will that we should thus think of him, why does our imagination wander into some other conception? Why should we hesitate to conceive of God according to what he has not hesitated to declare explicitly respecting himself? For such knowledge of the Deity as was necessary for the salvation of man, he has himself of his goodness been pleased to reveal abundantly. Deut. xxix. 29. The secret things belong unto Jehovah, but those things which are revealed belong unto us......that we may do them.

In arguing thus, we do not say that God is in fashion like unto man in all his parts and members, but that as far as we are concerned to know, he is of that form which he attributes to himself in the sacred writings. If therefore we persist in entertaining a different conception of the Deity than that which it is to be presumed he desires should be 'cherished, inasmuch as he has himself disclosed it to us, we frustrate the purposes of God instead of rendering him submissive obedience. As if, forsooth, we wished to show that it was not we who had thought too meanly of God, but God who had thought too meanly of us.'

In Paradise Lost he had already made Raphael hint that this visible world of ours resembled the invisible:

"Though what if earth

Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?" an idea which he might have caught from Cicero. Atque si pulcher est hic mundus, si probus ejus artifex, profecto speciem æternitatis imitari maluit. . . . . Ex quo efficitur ut sit necesse, hunc, quem cernimus, mundum simulacrum esse alicujus æterni. He here, we see, stretches it even farther; and the Swedenborgians, we believe, have carried the idea to the utmost limits of absurdity.

The

The attributes of God are the next consideration; and they are laid down to be, truth, spirituality, immensity, infinity, eternity, immutability, incorruptibility, omnipresence, omnipotence, and thence (i. e. from the effect of all these forementioned attributes,) unity, which, however, is besides directly provable from Scripture. With respect to the attributes depending on his will he is infinitely pure and holy; most gracious, true, faithful, and just. Therefore, on the whole, it follows that he is to us wonderful and incomprehensible. Such are the nature and attributes of God. His efficiency follows of course in the process of argument, and it is divided into internal and external:internal, that which is independent of all extraneous agency, viz. his decrees: - external, the execution of those decrees, of course, on other beings. The decrees of God, then, are general or special. His general decree is that, whereby he has decreed from all eternity of his own most free and wise and holy purpose, whatever he willed, or whatever he was about to do. In this part of Milton's work he is not a little puzzled by the consideration of that question which, we fear, will never be thoroughly clear to us in this state of existence -how the foreknowlege of God is consistent with the free will of man. He asserts the entire and free existence of both, and endeavors to trim his bark between the ultra doctrines of the Necessitarians and the lax ideas of the followers of Epicurus. In reading this and some other similar passages, it is impossible not to recollect his own verses, where his devils are debating on

"Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute And found no end in wandering mazes lost?"

for it is evident that he is himself pretty much in the same situation. He sums up the whole argument in a manner which will not be new to our theological readers.

To comprehend the whole matter in a few words, the sum of the argument may be thus stated in strict conformity with reason. God of his wisdom determined to create men and angels reasonable beings, and therefore free agents; at the same time he foresaw which way the bias of their will would incline, in the exercise of their own uncontrouled liberty. What then? shall we say that this foresight or foreknowledge on the part of God imposed on them the necessity of acting in any definite way? No more than if the future event had been foreseen by any human being. For what any human being has foreseen as certain to hap pen, will not less certainly happen than what God himself has pre

dicted.

dicted. Thus Elisha foresaw how much evil Hazael would bring upon the children of Israel in the course of a few years, 2 Kings, viii. 12. Yet no one would affirm that the evil took place necessarily on account of the foreknowledge of Elisha; for had he never foreknown it, the event would have occurred with equal certainty, through the free will of the agent. So neither does any thing happen because God has foreseen it; but he foresees the event of every action, because he is acquainted with their natural causes, which, in pursuance of his own decree, are left at liberty to exert their legitimate influence. Consequently the issue does not depend on God who foresees it, but on him alone who is the object of his foresight. Since, therefore, as has before been shown, there can be no absolute decree of God regarding free agents, undoubtedly the prescience of the Deity (which can no more bias free agents than the prescience of man, that is, not at all, since the action in both cases is intransitive, and has no external influence,) can neither impose any necessity of itself, nor can it be considered at all the cause of free actions. If it be so considered, the very name of liberty must be altogether abolished as an unmeaning sound; and that not only in matters of religion, but even in questions of morality and indifferent things. There can be nothing but what will happen necessarily, since there is nothing but what is foreknown by God.'

The special decrees of God regard his Son, angels, and mankind. The first is the begetting of his Son - of the second the existence is only implied not expressed - and the third, which regards us, is predestination. Foreseeing that men of their own accord would fall, God, before the foundations of the world were laid, predestined to eternal salvation those who should believe and continue in the faith. Predestination, therefore, only concerns election, not reprobation, which is incautiously (temere) introduced into discussion on the subject. He argues at great length on the necessity to salvation of belief, and continuance in the faith, contending against those who hold that a person once elect cannot fall away. Peter, he observes, is not saved because he is Peter, nor John as John, but so far as he believes and continues to believe. Those who do not believe are reprobate, not from the decree of God, but their own fault, and as it were per accidens, all having grace sufficient unto salvation granted them. There is nothing in his argument on the subject, or the illustrations with which he enforces it, or the objections which he meets, which are not well known to all who have studied the Calvinistic controversy. The passage Acts, xiii. 48., which he acknowleges to be a very difficult one, he interprets as Hammond and Whitby do. The 28th, 29th, and 30th verses of Rom. viii. (which are of course cited,) he treats as of inferior difficulty.

REV. JULY, 1825.

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So far for the internal efficiency of God. The execution of his decrees may be comprized under the heads of Generation, Creation, and the Government of the Universe. We are sure that the doctrine first taught under this head will startle most of his readers, for he commences by denying the divinity of Christ. He holds that Christ existed before the world was made, under the name of the Logos, or Word; that he was the first of the whole creation, by whom all other things in heaven and earth were made, (quoting the opening verses of St. John's Gospel, Rev. iii. 14., 1 Cor. viii. 6. Heb. i. 2, &c. &c.) but still a creature. From the consideration of the second Psalm, it is evident, he says, that his generation was not of necessity but a spontaneous decree of God. To him the Father imparted a portion of his divine power (Heb. i. 2, 3.): but it is not wise for us to inquire farther than what is revealed to us on the subject. His arguments against the divinity of our Saviour are not very ingenious. He represents the Trinitarians as being chiefly moved to support their creed by the circumstance of the title of God being sometimes applied to Christ in the Scriptures. This, he says, is of itself an insufficient ground, as that title is also applied to others, as to kings and princes; (a point which farther on he labors more carefully;) and we believe few Trinitarians will contest the position. The first objection he makes against the divinity of Christ is drawn from the absurdity of confounding unity and duality. "If one divine essence," he says, "be common to two persons, that essence or divinity will either be in the relation of a whole to its several parts, or of a genus to its several species, or, lastly, of a common subject to its accidents." These suppositions being absurd, the doctrine founded on them must be so. We own he would have stated this objection plainer if, dismissing this learned jargon, he had said that one could not be two, and the argument would just go as far towards confuting his antagonists. Soon waving, however, considerations drawn from reason he proceeds to Scripture.* Here he finds that the unity of God is taught in numberless places of the Old and New Testament, by Christ himself, (Mark, xii. 28, &c.) and by Saint

In this place Milton's language is rather too light for his subject. "Expectet igitur nemo dum hic longum ex metaphysica apparatum præmittam, et personalitatum illud totum drama [rather freely rendered by Sumner, "all that commonly received drama of the personalities of the Godhead] advocem." If the doctrine of the Trinity be true, these words are not far from blasphemy. Be it true or untrue, they are not becoming.

Paul so clearly and perspicuously that one would think the inculcation of this truth had been his sole object. (He cites several passages from the Epistles to prove this assertion: some of them, it must be allowed, rather pressed into the service.) In commenting on 1 Cor. viii. 4-6. he again refers to the argument against the Trinity to be drawn from the consideration of number. Besides, since a numerical difference originates in difference of essence, those who are two numerically, must also be two essentially;' on which Mr. Sumner has the following very curious note, which reflects credit on the carefulness of his research: he extracts from Milton's Logic:

"Res etiam singulæ, sive individua, quæ vulgo vocant, singulas sibique proprias formas habent; differunt quippe numero inter se, quod nemo non fatetur. Quid autem est aliud numero inter se, nisi singulis formis differre? Numerus enim, ut recte Scaliger, est affectio essentiam consequens. Quæ igitur numero, essentia quoque differunt; et nequaquam numero, nisi essentia, differrent. Evigilent hic theologi. Quod si quæcunque numero, essentia quoque differunt, nec tamen materia, necesse est formis inter se differant; non autem communibus, ergo propriis." Artis Logica plenior Institutio. Prose works, vi. 214. The hint thrown out to the theologians in this passage is very remarkable; but I am not aware that it has ever been noticed as affording a clew to the opinion of Milton on the important subject alluded to, which could scarcely have been expected to be found in a treatise on logick.'

Having brought all the texts he thought necessary in support of his own doctrines, he next turns to those which are adduced on the other side, John, x. 30., which is interpreted as usually by anti-Trinitarian writers, and 1 John, v.7. the celebrated text, the authenticity of which has been so much disputed. Its spuriousness is, we believe, now pretty. well agreed on by scholars of all sides: but Milton was not in possession of all that could be said on his own view of the question. He, in fact, makes two or three mistakes, but that is not to be wondered at. The other less direct texts he oppugns with the reasoning which is familiar to all disputants in this branch of polemics. But the whole has been, on both sides, so infinitely better argued since Milton's time, and so much more erudition, and sensible criticism, brought forward to meet the question, that it would be waste of time to analyze his arguments, particularly as they contain nothing very striking; the scriptural illustrations being trite, and the reasoning generally a wearisome repetition of scholastic distinctions, which might have been very attractive in Milton's day, but certainly would pass for any thing but philosophy: og

common sense in ours.

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