Let me, however, prove the above dilemma.
His Lordship has asserted, that the uninspiration of “the author” will admit of no dispute:[546] and yet that “author,” whom the Archbishop himself acknowledges to have written, at the very lowest, antecedently to the Advent, speaks of the Messiah as the “Son of Man” and the “Son of Woman.”[547]
Either, therefore, the author was inspired, speaking prospectively of an occurrence not then consummated! or else, uninspired, he historically transmits the record of an incarnation vouchsafed before his time.
I feel perfectly indifferent as to which horn of this alternative you may patronise. They both equally make for me. Nor do I want either, otherwise than to show, that else the Archbishop is already of my way of thinking, and restrained from avowing it, or unwillingly involved in a contradictory nodus, from a partial succumbing to education!
With this I leave Enoch! I have hitherto done without him! I shall continue still to do so! But while bidding adieu, I must disburthen myself of the sentiments which his merits have inspired, and that after a very short personal familiarity.
Thou art, then, a GOODLY and a WISE book, Enoch, stored with many and recondite truths, but “few they be who find” them. Better for thee it were, however, that thou hadst slept a little longer in thy tranquil retirement, than obtrude thyself, unappreciated, upon an ungenial world—a cold, a calculating, an adamantine world—who fancy they know everything, but who, in truth, know nothing—to meet with nothing but their scorn! It is true, Enoch, that thy face hath been tarnished by many a blemish! And that the hand of time hath dealt with thee, as it doth with the other works of man! Yet, despite of the curtailments thus sustained, and the exotics incorporated, thy magnificent ruin still holds within it some gleams, which to the initiated and the sympathetic afford delight and gratification.
———“Sweet as the ecstatic bliss
Of souls that by intelligence converse!”
Doubtless, reader, you are acquainted with the Gospel of St. John?—and you have a heart?—and you have emotions?—and you have sensibilities?—and you have intellect? Well, then, tell me frankly, have not these all been brought into requisition, at the metaphysical sublimity and the oriental pathos of the opening part of that production?
“He was in the world, and the world was made by Him; and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.”[548]
You surely cannot suppose this said in reference to the late incarnation! Were it so, why should the Evangelist deliver himself in terms so pointedly allusive to distant times? The interval between Christ’s disappearance and St. John’s registration was but as yesterday, and therefore the latter, when inculcating the divinity of the former, upon the belief of his countrymen, who were all contemporaries, as well of one as of the other, need not advertise them of an addition, of which they were themselves cognisant.