the practice of the apostles themselves, we find the advocates of that council much perplexed how to save its credit in making such an unfortunate determination. But they soon found out this curious solution of the difficulty: the nameChrist, they said, i. e. the Anointed,* was itself a declaration of the whole Trinity, as it implied God the Father by whom the Son was anointed, the Son himself who was anointed, and the Spirit by which he was anointed according to Acts x. 38: "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost." And thus indeed they made it out, that baptizing in the name of Christ might imply a declaration of the whole Trinity, as they called it; but not of such a Trinity as they contended for, nor did they thereby clear the Nicene fathers of setting up their wisdom against that of the apostles.

But it is argued, that the Son and Holy Ghost being thus named together with the Father, and baptism being commanded to be celebrated alike in the name of all the three, the strict equality of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to each other, may be thence inferred, and that therefore they are each of them equally God, and equally to be worshiped.

The weakness of this inference is obvious from many parallel passages in the Scriptures. 1 Tim.

* Whitby, Strict. Patrum in Act. Apostol, pp. 231, 232.

v. 21, "I charge thee, saith the apostle, before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things." The angels being here named along with God and Christ, shews, that when God is joined with other beings in the most solemn manner, no equality can be inferred from such a conjunction. So Sam. xii. 18, "All the people feared greatly the Lord and Samuel." 1 Chron. xxix. 20, “And all the congregation blessed the Lord God of their fathers, and bowed down their heads, and worshiped the Lord and the king." See also Exod. xiv. 31, Judges vii. 18, 20, 2 Chron. xx,

20.

And 1 Cor. i. 15, with other like places, shews, that baptizing into or in the name of any one does not itself imply any divinity in the person in whose name baptism is made.

In short, nothing can be concluded from the Son and Holy Ghost being here joined with the Father, more than what the Scriptures elsewhere teach us concerning them; and in accord with what those Scriptures teach us, we cannot better express the full meaning of baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, than in the paraphrase of Dr. Clarke, that it is "receiving to a profession of the belief, and an obligation to the practice, of that religion, which God the Father has revealed and taught by the Son, and confirmed by the Holy Ghost,"

This interpretation of the baptismal form is confirmed by those summaries of Christian faith drawn up in the first ages after Christ, particularly that called the Apostles' Creed; which, although not composed by them, is acknowledged, the greatest part of it, to be of very early times.

The Apostles' Creed censured by some as an Arian or Photinian Creed.

Well had it been for our common Christianity, if these models, left us by the first believers, had been copied by those that came after them; and we had been content in our creeds and liturgies to speak of God, of Christ and the Holy Ghost, with that modest reserve and regard for holy scripture, of which the compilers of those creeds and abstracts of our holy faith have set us the example. This Creed of the Apostles, however, did not escape censure in after times, but has been aspersed in most outrageous sort, as favouring the Photinian, or what is now called the Socinian heresy. And it must be owned, it does not favour the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity, and approaches too near the holy scriptures to content those who are not satisfied to express their faith in scripture language.

Alphonsus de Vargas, a Spaniard, has given us at large the angry criticism, which some English and Spanish Jesuits passed upon this creed, and

made public. As the book is rare, and the piece very curious in its way, I shall produce a few sentences from the conclusion, and give the original in the margin.

"I believe in the Holy Ghost."*

* Credo in Spiritum Sanctum.

Hæc propositio malignè proposita est, et ex affectata brevitate merito suspecta haberi potest. Subdole enim Spiritus Sancti divinitatem, ejusque à Patre et Filio processionem tacet. Proinde Arianam hæresin redolet, schismati Græcorum oblique favet, individuamque Trinitatem dissolvit.

Itemque tota explicatio divinæ atque individuæ Trinitatis, octo istis articulis comprehensa, manca et periculosa est, avertitque fidelem populum à cultu et reverentiâ tribus divinis personis indivise atque inseparabiliter debita, et sub prætextu brevitatis et non necessariæ explicationis subdole totum Trinitatis mysterium evertit, cum tamen perfecta cjus et explicata fides medium sit ad salutem necessarium. Vixque tota hæc doctrina excusari potest à dolo, quod nullam de Filii aut Spiritûs Sancti divinitate, aut etiam æternitate mentionem faciat, sed contrarium de Filio in articulo tertio insinuet.-Alphonsi de Vargas, Toletani, Relatio de Stratagematis Jesuitarum, pp. 148, 149. 1642.

But these Jesuits were modest men compared with a brother of theirs, Father Harduin, almost in our own times.. For he, by one bold, crafty blow, annihilates at once the original Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and all the authors and records of Pagan and Christian antiquity, six authors excepted, viz. Plautus, Pliny the elder, Virgil's nine Eclogues and Georgics, Horace's Satires and Epistles, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the nine books of Herodotus; and reduces all faith and knowledge to the Vulgate Latin

"This proposition is put with a bad design, and is deservedly to be suspected for its affected brevity. For it craftily passes over in silence the divinity of the Holy Ghost, and his proceeding from the Father and the Son. Moreover it smells grievously of Arian heresy, covertly favoureth the schism of the Greeks, and destroys the undivided Trinity."

"And the whole of this exposition of the divine and undivided Trinity, contained in these eight articles, [viz. the Apostles' Creed so divided] is defective and dangerous. For it takes the faithful off from the worship and reverence undividedly and inseparably to be paid to the three, Divine Persons; and under a pretence of brevity

translation of the Bible, and the supposed constant, living, and oral tradition of his church. All other writings he maintains to have been forged by a set of Atheists in the fourteenth century.

His society were forced publicly to disavow him, but he was to the last privately encouraged by them. They well knew that ignorance was the mother of such devotion as they taught, and that the Roman Catholic church, as they have modelled it, would better stand on the foot of tradition among themselves, than on the testimony of the original Scriptures and fathers. And it must be owned, it was a noble atheistical effort to prop the tottering fabric of Popery and in an age less enlightened, and before the invention of printing, might have caused infinite mischief and confusion. See Joannis Harduini Jesuitæ ad censuram scriptorum veterum prolegomena with a learned preface. For Vaillant, 1776.