natural subordination (distinguished from economical) are plainer, stronger, or fuller than the proofs of the essential Divinity. Here, I conceive, he will have the advantage very evidently, both in the number and the strength of his proofs. Your pretended voluntary generation he will reject as an unscriptural dream of human invention: your Scripture proofs of the necessary existence of the Father will stand upon no better a foot than his Scripture proofs of the necessary existence of the Son. Your pretences from the prepositions of, by, through, or in, he will resolve into economical order: and you will not be able to prove from I Cor. viii. 6. that God the Son is included in the all things which are of the Father. Metaphysics you will be ashamed to offer, having so often pretended to condemn them in us. All your little quibbles about derived and underived, about cause and effect, about acts of the will, about identical substance, identical lives, and the like, will drop at once. In short, when antiquity is set aside, you will find it extremely difficult to make it appear that the Scripture account of subordination necessarily infers any natural subordination, or may not possibly be understood of economical only; as some writers of note seem to have understood, as high as the sixth century b, if not higher.

As to antiquity, you will be able to prove a natural subordination, very plainly, from the earliest Fathers : but not more plainly than Dr. Calamy will be able to prove the consubstantiality, coeternity, omnipresence, omniscience, and other Divine attributes of God the Son: not more plainly than he will prove from the ancients, that the Father and Son are one God, (one God most high,) that creature worship is idolatry, that no inferior God must be admitted, and the like. The question then will be, (since the ancients, upon the present hypothesis, must be said to have contradicted themselves and each other,) I say, the question will be, whether you have more and

b See Jobius apud Photium Cod. ccxxii. p. 624, 625.

stronger testimonies for one part of the contradiction, than the Doctor will have for the other part. Here again he will manifestly have the advantage over you, in the number and strength of his testimonies: and he may justly plead, either to have the evidence of antiquity set aside as null; or that the many tenets, wherein the Fathers agree with his scheme, be admitted as more considerable than the few tenets wherein they agree with you. Thus, so far as I apprehend, you and your friends will be really no gainers by Dr. Calamy's concessions; or by throwing off the subordination, as impossible and contradictory on both sides.

Nevertheless, I am fully and unalterably persuaded, that the true and right way is, to admit the subordination, and to assert the essential Divinity of all the three Persons together with it. Both parts appear to be founded in Scripture, and were undoubtedly believed by the ancients in general and there is no repugnancy between them, more than what lies in mistaken fancy or imagination. I know not whether Dr. Calamy might not pay too great a regard to Dr. Clarke's partial representation of this matter; and so take Bp. Pearson's and Bp. Bull's sentiments something otherwise than they intended them. I observe, that he admits eternal generation, necessary emanation, and natural order; which is, in other words, admitting all that is intended by priority of order or subordination. The Son proceeds from the Father; the Father from none: this is the difference of natural order which the ancients, and after them those two excellent moderns, speak of; viz. that the Son is referred up to the Father as to a Head or Fountain, and not vice versa. This reference or relation of the Son to the Father, we call subordination: and this is all that is natural, the rest is economical. If Dr. Clarke has represented subordination otherwise, pretending Bp. Pearson's or Bp. Bull's authority for it, he has done unfairly and perhaps Dr. Calamy intended no more than to

:

c Sermons, p. 20, 49, 263.

condemn the notion so represented d. Which is not condemning either Bp. Pearson's, or Bp. Bull's, or my doctrine; but something else which others have invented for us.

I know not indeed whether you will allow me to put myself in; because I am represented as teaching a real coordination, and a verbal subordination only. But I am very certain that the same objection, or rather cavil, lies equally against Bp. Pearson or Bp. Bull; and you are very sensible of it: only you are disposed to serve a turn by making some use of those great names. They both asserted a coequality, in as full and strong terms as I any where do which coequality you are pleased to miscall, in me, coordination; assuming a strange liberty of altering the sense of words, and affecting to speak a new language, to make way for a new faith.

To conclude; if Dr. Calamy and I really differ, (as I think we do not,) we agree however in the main points, and much better than our late revivers of Arianism agree among themselves. And I doubt not but that by the united labours of the true friends of our common faith, (with God's blessing upon them,) the vain attempts of our new Arians and Eunomians will be defeated and baffled, (as were formerly those of their predecessors,) and that the Catholic doctrine of the ever blessed Trinity, that sacred depositum of the Church of Christ, will be preserved whole and entire, and handed down, as to us, so to our latest posterity, through all generations.

"Whosoever will be at the pains to compare the several passages cited " by Dr. Clarke, as they stand in the places whence they are taken, with "other clear and express passages of our learned author, (Bishop Bull,) and " with the whole scope and purport of his reasonings for the truth of the Nicene doctrine, must evidently perceive that these are all placed in quite an"other light than in the book referred to: that some are directly contrary "to the author's true meaning, and to his design in writing; and most of "the rest inconsistent, at least, with the same, as the Doctor very well "knew." Nelson's Life of Bull, p. 326, 327.

END OF VOL. III.