Certainly not by a transfer of a notion, and this too a notion of a faculty itself but notional and limitary, to the Supreme Reality. But there are ideas which are of higher origin than the notions of the understanding, and by the irradiation of which the understanding itself becomes a human understanding. Of such 'veritates verificæ' Leighton himself in other words speaks often. Surely, there must have been an intelligible propriety in the terms, 'Logos', Word, 'Begotten before all creation',--an adequate idea or 'icon', or the Evangelists and Apostolic penmen would not have adopted them. They did not invent the terms; but took them and used them as they were taken and applied by Philo and both the Greek and Oriental sages. Nay, the precise and orthodox, yet frequent, use of these terms by Philo, and by the Jewish authors of that traditionalæ wisdom,--degraded in after times, but which in its purest parts existed long before the Christian æra,--is the strongest extrinsic argument against the Arians, Socinians, and Unitarians, in proof that St. John must have meant to deceive his readers, if he did not use them in the known and received sense. To a Materialist indeed, or to those who deny all knowledges not resolvable into notices from the five senses, these terms as applied to spiritual beings must appear inexplicable or senseless. But so must spirit. To me, (why do I say to me?) to Bull, to Waterland, to Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Athanasius, Augustine, the terms, Word and generation, have appeared admirably, yea, most awfully pregnant and appropriate;--but still as the language of those who know that they are placed with their backs to substances--and which therefore they can name only from the correspondent shadows--yet not (God forbid!) as if the substances were the same as the shadows;--which yet Leighton supposed in this his censure,--for if he did not, he then censures himself and a number of his most beautiful passages. These, and two or three other sentences,--slips of human infirmity,--are useful in reminding me that Leighton's works are not inspired Scripture. 'Postscript'. On a second consideration of this passage, and a revisal of my marginal animadversion--yet how dare I apply such a word to a passage written by a minister of Christ so clearly under the especial light of the divine grace as was Archbishop Leighton?--I am inclined to think that Leighton confined his censure to the attempts to "explain" the Trinity,--and this by "notions,"--and not to the assertion of the adorable acts implied in the terms both of the Evangelists and Apostles, and of the Church before as well as after Christ's ascension; nor to the assent of the pure reason to the truths, and more than assent to, the affirmation of the ideas. Ib. p. 73.