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Waterland has given a comprehensive division of "necessity" into four kinds, denominated respectively, the Logical, the Moral, the Physical, and the Metaphysical.
Clarke's fifty-five propositions to which an Arian would refuse to subscribe. These and others did good service on particular points; but it remained for Dr. Waterland to take a comprehensive view of the whole question, and to leave to posterity not only an effective answer to Dr.
How unlikely is it that Justin should own such reprobates as those were for fellow-Christians! I dare avow my belief or rather I dare not withhold my avowal that both Bull and Waterland are here hunting on the trail of an old blunder or figment, concocted by the gross ignorance of the Gentile Christians and their Fathers in all that respected Hebrew literature and the Palestine Christians.
In connection, therefore, with the subject of the Trinity, Waterland clearly points out what is and what is not the true character of the appeal to antiquity. The fathers are certain proofs in many cases of the Church's doctrine in that age, and probable proofs of what that doctrine was from the beginning.
The walls of both rooms are covered with the autographs of visitors, including that of the Emperor of Russia. From this point the tourists were conveyed by the steamer to Waterland, from which they were to proceed by trekschuit to Broek. This peculiar craft is a kind of drag-boat, much used for passengers and light freight on the canals of Holland.
One point on which Waterland insists constantly and strongly is that the scheme of those who would pay divine honours to Christ, and yet deny that He is very God, cannot escape from the charge of polytheism. 'You are tritheists, he urges, 'in the same sense as Pagans are called polytheists. One supreme and two inferior Gods is your avowed doctrine; that is, three Gods.
And possibly hereupon his errors, before invincible through ignorance, may be removed by wholesome instruction and admonition, and so he is befriended in it, &c. Waterland is quite in the right so far; but the penal laws, the temporal inflictions would he have called for the repeal of these?
Nevertheless, the position maintained by Waterland, by Whiston, by Blackburne, and by some of the more ardent Calvinists, was strong, and felt to be so.
To the objection that interpreting Scripture by the ancients is debasing its majesty and throwing Christ out of His throne, Waterland replies in somewhat stately terms, 'We think that Christ never sits more secure or easy on His throne than when He has His most faithful guards about Him, and that none are so likely to strike at His authority or aim at dethroning Him as they that would displace His old servants only to make way for new ones. But this respect for the opinion of antiquity in no way involved any compromise of the leading idea of all eighteenth-century theology, that it should follow the guidance of reason.
Like Waterland, and indeed all defenders of the Catholic doctrine, Horsley fully admits the difficulties and mysteriousness of his subject, 'but, he asks, 'is Christianity clear of difficulties in any of the Unitarian schemes? Hath the Arian hypothesis no difficulty when it ascribes both the first formation and perpetual government of the Universe not to the Deity, but an inferior being?
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