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LETTER X

HAVING proceeded thus far in discussion of the doctrine of eternal generation,' it seems high time for us to enquire, how the very term, which (although I acknowledge the adoption of it into theological language from the period of the 4th century) I still do affirm, has no warrant in Scripture, came to be first introduced, and thus, either by natural or imposed consequence, to have given birth to those woeful divisions which, on the subject of our Saviour's Deity, have rent the christian church to this very day.

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Without farther preamble, there appear, opinion, to be three causes, to which the introduction of the term ⚫ eternal generation' may be more or less assigned.

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I. One great cause, and, it may be, the parent of the two other causes, I believe to be the Platonic philo'sophy.' I know it to have been a contendible point, whether, at first, the Platonic philosophy had not some influence on christianity itself. The anti-trinitarians all maintain the affirmative; and hesitate

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not to say, that Justin Martyr, who confessed himself to have been a Platonist, was the first who taught the doctrine of what is termed a " TRINITY." Nay, they go so far as even to allege, that the evangelist St John borrowed his Logos from the philosopher Plato. An allegation this, in the face of all probability. For it is hardly to be imagined, much less believed, that a poor fisherman of Judea should have been, either by education, or by inspiration, made acquainted with the philosophical refinements of Plato, or his followers. With much more apparent strength of argument, it has therefore been maintained, that Plato himself stole his Logos' from the Hebrew Scriptures, where we frequently find it used as the appellation of a subsisting person. One thing is certain, that in this sense the Chaldean paraphrasts do explain the 7, or Logos of the Old Testament, as Rittangelius, in his translation of the Old Jewish work, Jetzirah,' clearly proves. It is not material to this hypothesis, that we are ignorant of the way in which Plato should have found access to the Hebrew Scriptures. He might have scen a Greek translation of them prior to the septuagint ara, as Ludovicus Vives, and some others conceive or having travelled into Phoenicia and Egypt, in search of knowledge, and having resided in the latter country, where there was, even in his time, a great concourse of Jews, Piato might have derived information from such as understood the Hebrew writings, and thus have picked up what seemed to him to suit his purpose. But be this as it

may,

may, it is a point in which all the modern biographers of this celebrated philosopher concur, and which his own frequent allusions to the “Zugio μubo”. →Syrian mysteries, have proved, that Plato was acquainted with the Jewish records, and that he made great use of them.

This being premised, it is well known that a fundamental part of the theological system of Plato is the application, in some respect or another, of 'generation' to Deity. Nor can it be denied, but that a man of his talent and discernment might have found, in the Hebrew scriptures, what, in his estimation, might amount to authority sufficient for this application.

The first revelation with which we are blessed, after the fall, (for what happened before that woeful event is lost to us), is contained in the divine promise," that the seed of the woman should bruise "the serpent's head'." These words undeniably have an aspect to generation' without the intervention of man. Yet how obscure will this aspect appear, when the joyful declaration of the mother of all flesh, on the birth of her first-born Son, is taken literally in the construction of the Hebrew language, without the gloss which our translators have given it—" And Adum knew his wife Eve, and "she conceived, and bare Cain, and said ♫

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I Gen. iii, 15.

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", I have gotten a man the very Jehovah !" The promise however given to the woman, containing, as it does, the source of all our faith, and of all our hopes, is, after the flood, renewed to the patriarch Abraham, and his descendants, who are expressly informed, "that in a seed of theirs all na"tions should be blessed";" towards the fulfilment of which promise, the faithful of those days would reasonably conclude, that some divine and supernatural act was necessary.

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Accordingly, upon the first deviation of man from revealed truth, when recourse was had to the most natural, and, in fact, most plausible of all systems of idolatrous worship, viz. the worshipping the material host of heaven; and when, in process of time, even this species of idolatry had been swallowed up in the abyss of later, and consequently grosser corruptions, we find "the seed" described, in the divine promise, laid hold of by the heathen world; and, with all the impure mixtures of a polluted imagination, grafted into their systems of theology; in all of which, the terin " generation of

Deity" makes a very prominent figure. This is visible from the Orphaic verses, whether genuine or not, from Homer, the very Moses, as I may term him, of heathen antiquity, from Hesiod's Theogony, and indeed from the whole theological systems of the civilized idolaters of Greece and Rome.

In

1 See Gen. iv. 1. in the original.

2 Gen. xxii. 18.

In the Grecian school, however, and in the far famed seat of Grecian literature, the city of Athens, was the renowned Plato born and bred. But dissatisfied with the multiplicity of "generated” deities who were introduced to his acquaintance, Plato, it would seem, did boldly undertake to abridge the number, and to bring the current creed to what he conceived a more philosophical standard. With this design, it was, that he sought in foreign countries what he could not find at home, -until having collected a store of Hebrew and of heathen science, and having artfully compounded these, he wrought up a new and more sublime system of theology, founded upon a Teas or Trinity, (although he no where uses the vocable), and which, being no invention of his own, he well knew had been the basis of all the theological structures, true or false, that had ever appeared in the world.

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Thus Plato's system embraces a το αγαθόν, α λογο, or ' νους, and a ' ψυχη κόσμε! The * το αγαθόν, or supreme good, this philosopher, and all his followers call το ον, : το οντως ον, ov,' το αυτο ον, that is, the being, the very being, the self-being-and they say, το οντως ον εσιν το αίδιον, αγέννητον, και αφθαρτον—the very “being is eternal, UNBEGOTTEN, or rather (if I may "be forgiven for coining a new term) INGENER

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ABLE and incorruptible;" according to the maxim of the philosophy, then received, that generation ' and corruption are correlates;' which in fact is the

case,

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