aspired to contemplate the economy of the Divine
Nature: and it is the boast of Tertullian, that a Christian mechanic
could readily answer such questions as had perplexed the wisest of
the Grecian sages. Where the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the
difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings
may indeed be calculated as infinitely small; yet the degree of
weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and
dogmatic confidence. These speculations, instead of being treated as
the amusement of a vacant hour, became the most serious business of the
present, and the most useful preparation for a future, life. A theology,
which it was incumbent to believe, which it was impious to doubt, and
which it might be dangerous, and even fatal, to mistake, became the
familiar topic of private meditation and popular discourse. The cold
indifference of philosophy was inflamed by the fervent spirit of
devotion; and even the metaphors of common language suggested the
fallacious prejudices of sense and experience. The Christians, who
abhorred the gross and impure generation of the Greek mythology, were
tempted to argue from the familiar analogy of the filial and
paternal relations. The character of Son seemed to imply a perpetual
subordination to the voluntary author of his existence; but as the
act of generation, in the most spiritual and abstracted sense, must be
supposed to transmit the properties of a common nature, 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. 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 origi