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    df others . * And Wherefore so ? because * that cteature every yeftf changes its kind , and is sometimes male and sometimes fetnale . ' Frotn the words * Lift up your heads , O ye gates ; and b 6 ye lift up , ye everlasting doors t and the King of Glory shall

    Cotrie in , ' Jortin , in' his dialogue with Trypho , a Jew whom he wished to convert , undertakes to prove , what ?—our readers will be astonished—to prove that our Lord ' s ascension to heaven from earth was predicted by David . And to succeed , he does not scruple a little pious fraud , quoting as though the passage Was ' Lift up the gates of heaven . *

    There was a notion prevalent in the primitive age , derived from the Platonic fountain , that the souls of all men were of the same essence as that of God himself , which gave no inconsiderable assistance to the transmutation which the corrupters of the Gospel too thoroughly effected . To assert that Jesus was

    personally united with his Father would , in the minds of believers , in this Platonic dream , excite no feeling of surprise . The same might be asserted of themselves . The basis of corruption was laid . Change but a little the meaning of the term personal—infuse a tincture of quintessential mystery , and the unwary were led into an admission of the essential deity of Christ .

    Add to this another philosophical vision , namely , that the souls of men had existed before they came into this world . Now the deification of Jesus Christ commenced by the assertion of his pre-existence . To deny the alleged doctrine was to deny what Was believed of all men . Surely if all souls pre-existed , Jesus Christ pre-existed . And the superiority , which all Christians concurred

    to ascribe to him , easily gave occasion for interpreting his acknowledged pre-existence in an extraordinary and transcendental manner , and thus from his simple pre-existence to deduce his essential Deity . But mystery gave a more direct and a more efficient aid than we have yet mentioned . It so happened that the meditation , both of Plato and Philo , had been devoted to the

    nature of the medium by which God held intercourse with man . Plato asserted that this medium was an attribute of the divine nature : Philo , while he maintained the same notion , affirmed in addition , that this attribute had on occasions , in the Jewish dispensation , been sent forth frotn God , placed in some visible agent , and again , when the design of its emission was answered , received back into Deity . In these philosophic fictions is the

    germ of the deity of Jesus Christ . The Logos of Philo became the Logos , not of the Testament , but of philosophizing Christians . The mysticism which Christianity would have subverted , grafted itself in the Gospel vine , and brought forth fruit , alas 1 how abundant after its kind . To render the reception of the Philonic Logos more easy , reasoning , such as it was , lent an unwilling aid . Objectors could not doubt that the divine wisdom had been largely imparted to Jesua , to him mote than to arty other member of the

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    f 14 Riie and PtogrtM of the Doctrine t > fike Trinity .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1832, page 114, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1806/page/42/