shown
that their offence was that the carpenter's son, the Galilean, should
call himself the [Greek: Theos phaneros]. This might have been rendered
more than probable by the concluding sentence of Christ's answer to the
disciples of John;--'and blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended
in me' (Luke vii. 23.); which appears to have no adequate or even
tolerable meaning, unless in reference to the passage in Isaiah, (lxi.
1, 2.) prophesying that Jehovah himself would come among them, and do
the things which our Saviour states himself to have done. Thus, too, I
regret that the answer of our Lord, (John x. 34-36.) being one of the
imagined strong-holds of the Socinians, should not have been more fully
cleared up. I doubt not that Fuller's is a true interpretation; and that
no other is consistent with our Lord's various other declarations. But
the words in and by themselves admit a more plausible misinterpretation
than is elsewhere the case of Socinian displanations. In short, I think
both passages would have been better deferred to a further part of the
work.

Let me add that a mighty and comparatively new argument against the
Socinians may be most unanswerably deduced from this reply of our
Lord's, even were it considered as a mere 'argumentum ad homines':
--namely, that it was not his Messiahship that so offended the Jews, but
his Sonship; otherwise, our Saviour's language would have neither force,
motive, or object. "Even were I no more than the Messiah, in your
meanest conceptions of that character, yet after what I have done before
your eyes, nothing but malignant hearts could have prevented you from
adopting a milder interpretation of my words, when in your own
Scriptures there exists a precedent that so much more than merely
justifies me." And this I believe to be the meaning of the words as
intended to be understood by the Jews in question; though, doubtless,
Fuller's sense exists 'implicite'. No candid person would ever call it
an evasion, to prove the injustice and malignity of an accuser even from
his own grounds:--"You charge me falsely; but even were your charge
true, namely, that I am a mere man, and yet call myself the Son of God,
still it would not follow that I have been guilty of blasphemy." But as
understood by the modern Unicists, it would verily, verily, be an
evasive ambiguity, most unworthy of Christian belief concerning his
Saviour. Common charity would have demanded of him to have said:--"I am