Note 486 — LECTURE VII. THE UNSCRIPTURAL ORIGIN AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY. BY REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM.

“It had been the vice of the Christians of the third century, to involve themselves, ‘in certain metaphysical questions which if considered in one light, are too sublime to become the subject of human wit; if in another too trifling to gain the attention of reasonable men.’ (Warburton.) The rage for such disputations had been communicated to religion by the contagion of philosophy; but the manner in which it operated on the one and on the other was essentially different. With the philosopher such questions were objects of the understanding only, subjects of comparatively dispassionate speculation, whereon the versatile ingenuity of a minute mind might employ or waste itself. But with the Christian they were matters of truth or falsehood, of belief or disbelief. Hence arose an intense anxiety respecting the result, and thus the passions were awakened, and presently broke loose and proceeded to every excess. From the moment that the solution of these questions was attempted by any other method than the fair interpretation of the words of Scripture; as soon as the copious language of Greece was eagerly applied to the definition of spiritual things, and the explanation of heavenly mysteries, the field of contention seemed to be removed from earth to air—where the foot found nothing stable to rest upon; where arguments were easily eluded, and where the space to fly and to rally was infinite; so that the contest grew more noisy as it was less decisive, and more angry as it became more prolonged and complicated. Add to this the nature and genius of the disputants: for the origin of these disputes may be traced without any exception to the restless imaginations of the East.” * * *

“We must also mention the loose and unsettled principles of that age, which had prevailed before the appearance of Christianity, and had been to a certain extent adopted by its professors—those, for instance, which justified the means by the end, and admitted fraud and forgery into the service of religion.”—Waddington, Church Hist. p. 89.