ion, in the most spiritual and abstracted sense, must be
supposed to transmit the properties of a common nature, [37] they durst
not presume to circumscribe the powers or the duration of the Son of
an eternal and omnipotent Father. Fourscore years after the death of
Christ, the Christians of Bithynia, declared before the tribunal of
Pliny, that they invoked him as a god: and his divine honors have been
perpetuated in every age and country, by the various sects who assume
the name of his disciples. [38] Their tender reverence for the memory of
Christ, and their horror for the profane worship of any created being,
would have engaged them to assert the equal and absolute divinity of the
Logos, if their rapid ascent towards the throne of heaven had not been
imperceptibly checked by the apprehension of violating the unity and
sole supremacy of the great Father of Christ and of the Universe. The
suspense and fluctuation produced in the minds of the Christians by
these opposite tendencies, may be observed in the writings of the
theologians who flourished after the end of the apostolic age, and
before the origin of the Arian controversy. Their suffrage is claimed,
with equal confidence, by the orthodox and by the heretical parties; and
the most inquisitive critics have fairly allowed, that if they had the
good fortune of possessing the Catholic verity, they have delivered
their conceptions in loose, inaccurate, and sometimes contradictory
language. [39]

[Footnote 33: In a treatise, which professed to explain the opinions
of the ancient philosophers concerning the nature of the gods we might
expect to discover the theological Trinity of Plato. But Cicero very
honestly confessed, that although he had translated the Timaeus, he
could never understand that mysterious dialogue. See Hieronym. praef. ad
l. xii. in Isaiam, tom. v. p. 154.]

[Footnote 34: Tertullian. in Apolog. c. 46. See Bayle, Dictionnaire, au
mot Simonide. His remarks on the presumption of Tertullian are profound
and interesting.]

[Footnote 35: Lactantius, iv. 8. Yet the Probole, or Prolatio, which the
most orthodox divines borrowed without scruple from the Valentinians,
and illustrated by the comparisons of a fountain and stream, the sun and
its rays, &c., either meant nothing, or favored a material idea of the
divine generation. See Beausobre, tom. i. l. iii. c. 7, p. 548.]

[Footnote 36: Many of the primitive writers have frankly confessed, that
the Son owed