— not as an attribute, much less as an abstraction or personification—but as a distinct
Hypostasis
:-and hence it might be shown that their offence was that the carpenter's son, the Galilean, should call himself the
This might have been rendered more than probable by the concluding sentence of Christ's answer to the disciples of John;—
and blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me
(Luke vii. 23.); which appears to have no adequate or even tolerable meaning, unless in reference to the passage in Isaiah, (lxi. 1, 2.) prophesying that Jehovah himself would come among them, and do the things which our Saviour states himself to have done. Thus, too, I regret that the answer of our Lord, (John x. 34-36.) being one of the imagined strong-holds of the Socinians, should not have been more fully cleared up. I doubt not that Fuller's is a true interpretation; and that no other is consistent with our Lord's various other declarations. But the words in and by themselves admit a more plausible misinterpretation than is elsewhere the case of Socinian displanations. In short, I think both passages would have been better deferred to a further part of the work.
Let me add that a mighty and comparatively new argument against the Socinians may be most unanswerably deduced from this reply of our Lord's, even were it considered as a mere