[Greek:  Phusei de taes phthoras prosgenomenaes, anagkaion aen hoti sosai Boulomenos ae taen phthoropoion ousian aphanisas touto de ouk aen heteros genesthai ei maeper hae kata phusin zoae proseplakae to taen phthoran dexameno, aphanizousa men taen phthoran, athanaton de tou loipou to dexamenon diataerousa. k.t.l.]—­Just.  M.

  Here Justin asserts that it was necessary for essential life, or life
  by nature, to be united with human nature, in order to save it.

Waterland has not mastered the full force of [Greek:  hae kata phusin zoae].  If indeed he had taken in the full force of the whole of this invaluable fragment, he would never have complimented the following extract from Irenaeus, as saying the same thing “in fuller and stronger words.”  Compared with the fragment from Justin, it is but the flat common-place logic of analogy, so common in the early Fathers.

Ib. p. 340.

  ‘Qui nude tantum hominem eum dicunt ex Joseph generatum * * moriuntur.’

’Non nude hominem’—­not a mere man do I hold Jesus to have been and to be; but a perfect man and, by personal union with the Logos, perfect God.  That his having an earthly father might be requisite to his being a perfect man I can readily suppose; but why the having an earthly father should be more incompatible with his perfect divinity, than his having an earthly mother, I cannot comprehend.  All that John and Paul believed, God forbid that I should not!

Chap.  VII. p. 389.

It is a sufficient reason for not receiving either them (’Arian doctrines’), or the interpretations brought to support them, that the ancients, in the best and purest times, either knew nothing of them, or if they did, condemned them.

As excellent means of raising a presumption in the mind of the falsehood of Arianism and Socinianism, and thus of preparing the mind for a docile reception of the great idea itself—­I admit and value the testimonies from the writings of the early Fathers.  But alas! the increasing dimness, ending in the final want of the idea of this all-truths-including truth of the Tetractys eternally manifested in the Triad; —­this, this is the ground and cause of all the main heresies from Semi-Arianism, recalled by Dr. Samuel Clarke, to the last setting ray of departing faith in the necessitarian Psilanthropism of Dr. Priestley.

Ib. p. 41-2, &c.

I cannot but think that Waterland’s defence of the Fathers in these pages against Barbeyrac, is below his great powers and characteristic vigour of judgment.  It is enough that they, the Fathers of the first three centuries, were the lights of their age, and worthy of all reverence for their good gifts.  But it appears to me impossible to deny their credulity; their ignorance, with one or two exceptions, in the interpretation of the Old Testament; or their hardihood in asserting the truth of whatever they thought it for the interest of the Church, and for the good of souls, to have believed as true.  A whale swallowed Jonah; but a believer in all the assertions and narrations of Tertullian and Irenaeus would be more wonder-working than Jonah; for such a one must have swallowed whales.