Query II. p. 43.
And therefore he might as justly bear the style and title of Lord God, God of Abraham, &c. while he acted in that capacity, as he did that of Mediator, Messiah, Son of the Father, &c. after that he condescended to act in another, and to discover his personal relation.
And why, then, did not Dr. Waterland,— why did not his great predecessor in this glorious controversy, Bishop Bull,—contend for a revisal of our established version of the Bible, but especially of the New Testament? Either the unanimous belief and testimony of the first five or six centuries, grounded on the reiterated declarations of John and Paul, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, were erroneous, or at best doubtful;—and then why not wipe them off; why these references to them?—or else they were, as I believe, and both Bull and Waterland believed, the very truth; and then why continue the translation of the Hebrew into English at second-hand through the
medium
of the Septuagint? Have we not adopted the Hebrew word, Jehovah,? Is not the
, or Lord, of the LXX. a Greek substitute, in countless instances, for the Hebrew Jehovah? Why not then restore the original word, and in the Old Testament religiously render Jehovah by Jehovah, and every text of the New Testament, referring to the Old, by the Hebrew word in the text referred to? Had this been done, Socinianism would have been scarcely possible in England.
Why was not this done?—I will tell you why. Because that great truth, in which are contained all treasures of all possible knowledge, was still opaque even to Bull and Waterland; —because the Idea itself—that
Idea Idearum
, the one substrative truth which is the form, manner, and involvent of all truths,— was never present to either of them in its entireness, unity, and transparency. They most ably vindicated the doctrine of the Trinity, negatively, against the charge of positive irrationality. With equal ability they shewed the contradictions, nay, the absurdities, involved in the rejection of the same by a professed Christian. They demonstrated the utterly un-Scriptural and contra-Scriptural nature of Arianism, and Sabellianism, and Socinianism. But the self-evidence of the great Truth, as a universal of the reason,—as the reason itself—as a light which revealed itself by its own essence as light—this they had not had vouchsafed to them.