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Updated: May 26, 2025
Yet surely this would have been Athanasius's most legitimate form of denying Semi-Arianism. In short, the Scriptural phrase, Son of God, conveyed to us either a literal fact, or a metaphor. If literal, the Semi-Arians were clearly right, in saying that sonship implied a beginning of existence.
And that excellent freethinking prelate, Bishop Taylor, observes, that Athanasius's example was followed with too much greediness; by which means it has happened, that the greater number of our priests are in that sentiment, and think it necessary to believe the Trinity, and incarnation of Christ. The reference by Swift is to his controversy with Sherlock on the doctrine of the Trinity.
For the same reason, if the Canons before us can be shown to have existed as one book in Athanasius's time, it is natural to conceive that they are the very book to which he and others refer. All depends on this.
It is a solemn and pregnant fact, that two of the most zealous and forward of Athanasius's companions in the good fight against Arianism, Marcellus and Apollinaris, fell away into heresies of their own; nor did the Church spare them, for all their past services. "Alas, my brother! round thy tomb, In sorrow kneeling, and in fear, We read the pastor's doom, Who speaks and will not hear.
Its ruggedness and awkwardness, its ambition and affectation, contrasted with the graceful simplicity of Athanasius's "Life of Antony," mark well the difference between the cultivated Greek and the ungraceful and half-barbarous Roman of the later Empire.
Whether it existed in Athanasius's time, or was formed afterwards, and formed by friend or foe, heretic or Catholic, seems to me immaterial, as I shall by-and-by show. First, however, I will state, as candidly as I can, the arguments for and against its antiquity as a Collection.
Thus they were as unwilling to impute to him heresy, as he to confess it. Nay, even when he had lost shame, attacked the Catholics with violence, and formed his disciples into a sect, not even then was he himself publicly animadverted on, though his creed was anathematized. His first condemnation was at Rome, several years after Athanasius's death, in company with Timotheus, his disciple.
Do not, my dear son, for one moment imagine that I wish to inculcate the idea that, as I approach my Maker, I profess to believe all those mummeries that I have hitherto dared to disbelieve and dispute. You know that I never joined in Saint Athanasius's Creed. All such unchristian denunciations I ever held, and I still hold, to be blasphemous impositions.
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