ates the relation he bears to a Son, &c.

No doubt: but the most probable solution of the apparent want of
distinctness of explication on this article, in my humble judgment,
is--that the so-called Apostles' Creed was at first the preparatory
confession of the catechumens, the admission-ticket, as it were
('symbolum ad Baptismum'), at the gate of the Church, and gradually
augmented as heresies started up. The latest of these seems to have
consisted in the doubt respecting the entire death of Jesus on the
Cross, as distinguished from suspended animation. Hence in the fifth or
sixth century the clause--"and he descended into Hades," was
inserted;--that is, the indissoluble principle of the man Jesus, was
separated from, and left, the dissoluble, and subsisted apart in
'Scheol', or the abode of separated souls;--but really meaning no more
than 'vere mortuus est'. Jesus was taken from the Cross dead in the very
same sense in which the Baptist was dead after his beheading.

Nevertheless, well adapted as this Creed was to its purposes, I cannot
but regret the high place and precedence which by means of its title,
and the fable to which that title gave rise, it has usurped. It has, as
it appears to me, indirectly favoured Arianism and Socinianism.

Ib. p. 250.

That St. John wrote his Gospel with a view to confute Cerinthus, among
other false teachers, is attested first by Irenaeus, who was a
disciple of Polycarp, and who flourished within less than a century of
St. John's time.

I have little trust and no faith in the gossip and hearsay-anecdotes of
the early Fathers, Irenaeus not excepted. "Within less than a century of
St. John's time." Alas! a century in the paucity of writers and of men
of education in the age succeeding the Apostolic, must be reckoned more
than equal to five centuries since the use of printing. Suppose,
however, the truth of the Irenaean tradition;--that the Creed of
Cerinthus was what Irenaeus states it to have been; and that John, at the
instance of the Asiatic Bishops, wrote his Gospel as an antidote to the
Cerinthian heresy;--does there not thence arise, in his utter silence,
an almost overwhelming argument against the Apostolicity of the
'Christopaedia', both that prefixed to Luke, and that concorporated with
Matthew?

Ib. p. 257.

'In him was life, and the life was the light of men'. The same Word
was life, the [Greek: logos and zoae], both one. There was no occasion
ther