t seemed to be a most unworthy shuffling
with words, to say that the Son _was begotten, but was never
begotten_. The very form of our past participle is invented to
indicate an event in past time. If the Athanasians alleged that the
phrase does not allude to "a coming forth" completed at a definite
time, but indicates a process at no time begun and at no time
complete, their doctrine could not be expressed by our past-perfect
tense _begotten_. When they compared the derivation of the Son of God
from, the Father to the rays of light which ever flow from the natural
sun, and argued that if that sun had been eternal, its emanations
would be co-eternal, they showed that their true doctrine required the
formula--"always being begotten, and as instantly perishing, in order
to be rebegotten perpetually." They showed a real disbelief in our
English statement "begotten, not made." I overruled the objection,
that in the Greek it was not a participle, but a verbal adjective; for
it was manifest to me, that a religion which could not be proclaimed
in English could not be true; and the very idea of a Creed announcing
that Christ was "_not begotten, yet begettive_," roused in me an
unspeakable loathing. Yet surely this would have been Athanasius's
most legitimate form of denying Semi-Arianism. In short, the
Scriptural phrase, _Son of God_, conveyed to us either a literal fact,
or a metaphor. If literal, the Semi-Arians were clearly right, in
saying that sonship implied a beginning of existence. If it was a
metaphor, the Athanasians forfeited all right to press the literal
sense in proof that the Son must be "of the same substance" as the
Father.--Seeing that the Athanasians, in zeal to magnify the Son, had
so confounded their good sense, I was certainly startled to find a
man of Dr. Olinthus Gregory's moral wisdom treat the Nicenists as in
obvious error for not having magnified Christ _enough_. On so many
other sides, however, I met with the new and short creed, "Jesus is
Jehovah," that I began to discern Sabellianism to be the prevalent
view.

A little later, I fell in with a book of an American Professor, Moses
Stuart of Andover, on the subject of the Trinity. Professor Stuart is
a very learned man, and thinks for himself. It was a great novelty to
me, to find him not only deny the orthodoxy of all the Fathers, (which
was little more than Dr. Olinthus Gregory had done,) but avow that
_from the change in speculative philosophy_ it