It is the property of the Divine Being to be unsearchable; and if he were not so, he would not be divine.  Must we therefore reject the most certain truths concerning the Deity, only because they are incomprehensible, &c.?

It is strange that so sound, so admirable a logician as Waterland, should have thought ‘unsearchable’ and ‘incomprehensible’ synonymous, or at least equivalent terms:—­and this, though St. Paul hath made it the privilege of the full-grown Christian, ’to search out the deep things of God himself’.

Chap.  IV. p. 111.

‘The delivering over unto Satan’ seems to have been a form of excommunication, declaring the person reduced to the state of a heathen; and in the Apostolical age it was accompanied with supernatural or miraculous effects upon the bodies of the persons so delivered.

Unless the passage, (’Acts’ v. 1-11.) be an authority, I must doubt the truth of this assertion, as tending to destroy the essential spirituality of Christian motives, and, in my judgment, as irreconcilable with our Lord’s declaration, that his kingdom was ’not of this world’.  Let me be once convinced that St. Paul, with the elders of an Apostolic Church, knowingly and intentionally appended a palsy or a consumption to the sentence of excommunication, and I shall be obliged to reconsider my old opinion as to the anti-Christian principle of the Romish Inquisition.

Ib. p. 114.

  ’A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition,
  reject; knowing that he that is such, is subverted, and sinneth, being
  condemned of himself’.—­Tit. iii. 10, 11.

This text would be among my minor arguments for doubting the Paulinity of the Epistle to Titus.  It seems to me to breathe the spirit of a later age, and a more established Church power.

Ib.

Not every one that mistakes in judgment, though in matters of great importance, in points fundamental, but he that openly espouses such fundamental error. * * Dr. Whitby adds to the definition, the espousing it out of disgust, pride, envy, or some worldly principle, and against his conscience.

Whitby went too far; Waterland not far enough.  Every schismatic is not necessarily a heretic; but every heretic is virtually a schismatic.  As to the meaning of [Greek:  autokatakritos], Waterland surely makes too much of a very plain matter.  What was the sentence passed on a heretic?  A public declaration that he was no longer a member of—­that is, of one faith with—­the Church.  This the man himself, after two public notices, admits and involves in the very act of persisting.  However confident as to the truth of the doctrine he has set up, he cannot, after two public admonitions, be ignorant that it is a doctrine contrary to the articles of his communion with the Church that has admitted him; and in regard of his alienation from that communion, he is necessarily [Greek:  autokatakritos],—­though in his pride of heart he might say with the man of old, “And I banish you.”