Invoked! Surely a pious wish is not an invocation. "May good angels attend you!" is no invocation or worship of angels. The essence of religions adoration consists in the attributing, by an act of prayer or praise, a necessary presence to an object--which not being distinguishable, if the object be sensuously present, we may safely define adoration as an acknowledgement of the actual and necessary presence of an intelligent being not present to our senses. "May lucky stars shoot influence on you!" would be a very foolish superstition, --but to say in earnest! "O ye stars, I pray to you, shoot influences on me," would be idolatry. Christ was visually present to Stephen; his invocation therefore was not perforce an act of religious adoration, an acknowledgment of Christ's deity. [Footnote 1: The Origin of Arianism Disclosed. By John Whitaker, B.D. London, 1791.] * * * * * NOTES ON OXLEE ON THE TRINITY AND INCARNATION. [1] 1827 Strange--yet from the date of the book of the Celestial Hierarchies of the pretended Dionysius the Areopagite to that of its translation by Joannes Scotus Erigena, the contemporary of Alfred, and from Scotus to the Rev. John Oxlee in 1815, not unfrequent--delusion of mistaking Pantheism, disguised in a fancy dress of pious phrases, for a more spiritual and philosophic form of Christian Faith! Nay, stranger still:--to imagine with Scotus and Mr. Oxlee that in a scheme which more directly than even the grosser species of Atheism, precludes all moral responsibility and subverts all essential difference of right and wrong, they have found the means of proving and explaining, "the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation," that is, the great and only sufficient antidotes of the right faith against this insidious poison. For Pantheism--trick it up as you will--is but a painted Atheism. A mask of perverted Scriptures may hide its ugly face, but cannot change a single feature. Introduction, p. 4. In the infancy of the Christian Church, and immediately after the general dispersion which necessarily followed the sacking of Jerusalem and Bither, the Greek and Latin Fathers had the fairest opportunity of disputing with the Jews, and of evincing the truth of the Gospel dispensation; but unfortunately for the success of so noble a design, they were totally ignorant of the Hebrew Scriptures, and so wanted in every argument that stamp of authority, which was equally necessary to sanction the principles of Christianity, and to command the respect of their Jewish antagonists. For the confirmation of this remark I may appeal to the Fathers themselves, but especially to Barnabas, Justin, and Irenæus, who in their several attempts at Hebrew learning betray such portentous signs of ignorance and stupidity, that we are covered with shame at the sight of their criticisms.