'brought into
existence as well as any other creature, that He was precarious in
existence, ignorant of much more than He knows, capable of change from
strength to weakness, and from weakness to strength; capable of being
made wiser, happier, and better in every respect; having nothing of his
own, nothing but what He owes to the favour of His lord and governor.'
By the arguments which they used to prove all this, they put a most
dangerous weapon into the hands of Atheists, or at least into the hands
of those who denied the existence of such a God as is revealed to us in
Holy Scripture. 'Through your zeal against the divinity of the Son, you
have betrayed the cause to the first bold Marcionite that shall deny the
eternal Godhead of the Father and the Son, and assert some unknown God
above both. The question was, whether a particular Person called the
Father be the Eternal God. His being called God would amount to nothing,
that being no more than a word of office. His being Creator, nothing;
that you could elude. His being Jehovah, of no weight, meaning no more
than a person true and faithful to his promises. Almighty is capable of
a subordinate sense. The texts which speak of eternity are capable of a
subordinate sense. The term "first cause" is not a Scriptural
expression.'

Waterland boldly faces the objection against the Catholic doctrine of
the Trinity which was derived from certain texts of Scripture which
taken by themselves might seem to favour the Arian view. How, for
example, it was asked, could it be said that all power was _given_ unto
Christ (Matt, xxviii. 18), and that all things were put under His feet
after His Resurrection (Eph. i. 22), if He was Lord long before? 'The
Logos,' replies Waterland, 'was from the beginning Lord over all, but
the God man ([Greek: Theanthropos]) was not so till after the
Resurrection. Then He received in that capacity what He had ever enjoyed
in another; He received full power in both natures which He had
heretofore only in _one_.'[440] The passage on which the Arians insisted
most of all, and which they constantly asserted to be by itself decisive
of the whole question, is 1 Corinthians viii. 6. There, they asserted,
the Son is excluded in most express words from being one with the
Supreme God. Dr. Clarke told Waterland in downright terms that 'he
should be ashamed when he considered that he falsified St. Paul, who
said, "To us there is but one God, the Father."' 'But,' replie