The English Church in the Eighteenth CenturyAbbey, Charles J. (Charles John)
History
The English Church in the Eighteenth Century
Abbey, Charles J. (Charles John)
Church of England -- History -- 18th century
But there are other passages of a very different tendency, in which Dr.
Watts virtually gives up the whole point at issue, and apparently
without being conscious that he is doing so. On the worship of the Holy
Ghost, for example, he writes. 'There is great silence in Scripture of
precepts or patterns of prayer and praise to the Holy Spirit.'
'Therefore,' he thinks, 'we should not bind it on our own consciences or
on others as a piece of necessary worship, but rather practise it
occasionally as prudence and expediency may require.'[448] On the famous
question of the Homoousion, he thinks 'it is hard to suppose that the
eternal generation of the Son of God as a distinct person, yet co-equal
and consubstantial or of the same essence with the Father, should be
made a fundamental article of faith in the dawn of the Gospel.' He is
persuaded therefore 'that faith in Him as a divine Messiah or
all-sufficient and appointed Saviour is the thing required in those very
texts where He is called the Son of God and proposed as such for the
object of our belief; and that a belief of the natural and eternal and
consubstantial sonship of Christ to God as Father was not made the
necessary term or requisite of salvation;' neither can he 'find it
asserted or revealed with so much evidence in any part of the Word of
God as is necessary to make it a fundamental article of faith.'[449] And
once more, on the Personality of the Holy Ghost, he writes: 'The general
and constant language of Scripture speaks of the Holy Ghost as a power
or medium of divine operation.' Some places may speak of him as
personal, but 'it was the frequent custom of Jews and Oriental nations
to speak of powers and qualities under personal characters.' He can find
'no plain and express instance in Holy Scripture of a doxology directly
and distinctly addressed to the Holy Spirit,' and he thinks the reason
of this may be 'perhaps because he is only personalised by idioms of
speech.'[450]
Now anyone who has studied the course of the Trinitarian controversy
will see at once that an anti-Trinitarian would require no further
concessions than these to prove his point quite unanswerably. The
amiable design of Dr. Watts's second treatise was 'to lead an Arian by
soft and easy steps into a belief of the divinity of Christ,'[451] but
if he granted what he did, the Arian would have led him, if the
controversy had been pushed to its logical results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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