When they compared the derivation of the Son of God from, the Father to the rays of light which ever flow from the natural sun, and argued that if that sun had been eternal, its emanations would be co-eternal, they showed that their true doctrine required the formula--"always being begotten, and as instantly perishing, in order to be rebegotten perpetually." They showed a real disbelief in our English statement "begotten, not made." I overruled the objection, that in the Greek it was not a participle, but a verbal adjective; for it was manifest to me, that a religion which could not be proclaimed in English could not be true; and the very idea of a Creed announcing that Christ was "_not begotten, yet begettive_," roused in me an unspeakable loathing. Yet surely this would have been Athanasius's most legitimate form of denying Semi-Arianism. In short, the Scriptural phrase, _Son of God_, conveyed to us either a literal fact, or a metaphor. If literal, the Semi-Arians were clearly right, in saying that sonship implied a beginning of existence. If it was a metaphor, the Athanasians forfeited all right to press the literal sense in proof that the Son must be "of the same substance" as the Father.--Seeing that the Athanasians, in zeal to magnify the Son, had so confounded their good sense, I was certainly startled to find a man of Dr. Olinthus Gregory's moral wisdom treat the Nicenists as in obvious error for not having magnified Christ _enough_. On so many other sides, however, I met with the new and short creed, "Jesus is Jehovah," that I began to discern Sabellianism to be the prevalent view. A little later, I fell in with a book of an American Professor, Moses Stuart of Andover, on the subject of the Trinity. Professor Stuart is a very learned man, and thinks for himself. It was a great novelty to me, to find him not only deny the orthodoxy of all the Fathers, (which was little more than Dr. Olinthus Gregory had done,) but avow that _from the change in speculative philosophy_ it was simply impossible for any modern to hold the views prevalent in the third and fourth centuries. Nothing (said he) WAS clearer, than that with us the essential point in Deity is, to be unoriginated, underived; hence with us, _a derived God_ is a self-contradiction, and the very sound of the phrase profane. On the other hand, it is certain that the doctrine of Athanasius, equally as of Arius, was, that the Father is the underived or self-existent God, but the Son is the derived subordinate God. This (argued Stuart) turned upon their belief in the doctrine of Emanations; but as _we_ hold no such philosophical doctrine, the religious theory founded on it is necessarily inadmissible. Professor Stuart then develops his own creed, which appeared to me simple and undeniable Sabellianism.