hung their wings in moody sorrow; some few pigeons, that were on the wing, were afraid of being benight ed even in the morn, alighted and took shelter in the houses. The heat went away by degrees with the light. But when the rays of the sun broke out afresh, the joy and the thanks that were in me, that God made to us these signs and marks of

his power before he exercised it, were exquisite, and such as never worked upon me so sensibly before. With my own ears I heard a cock crow as at the dawn of day, and he welcomed with a strange gladness, which was plainly discoverable by the cheerful notes of his voice, the sun at its second rising and the returning light,"

SIR, IN my second letter I had given it as my opinion, that one cause of Vigilius and Fulgentius adventuring to express the Heavenly Witnesses in due form, was their conscientious belief, that the words, Tres unum sunt, had been absolutely affirmed of the three persons in the Godhead in the copy of St. Cyprian. This statement of my opinion of the manner in which the disputed passage first found its way into existence, my opponent has pronounced a reproduction of the old objection of Griesbach; accompanied with a few improvements, which that diligent critic would not have willingly acknowledged. How far that learn. ed and sober critic would have assented to my opinion, I pretend not to conjecture; but this I certainly do think, that of all others those who have the assurance to declare, that the verse, is expressly quoted by Cyprian, ought to be the very last to object to the probability of so

deed they should be disposed to argue, that what may well pass for sound critical judgment in themselves, would have been gross ignorance and stupidity in the two African prelates.

But, whether I am correct or not in putting so favourable a construction on their motives, I am at least prepared to shew, that in furnishing the seventh verse, neither Vigilius nor Fulgentius professed to do any thing more than to express and il lustrate what they conceived to be fully implied in the eighth verse; and that in so doing they were guided chiefly, if not entirely, by the joint authorities of St. Cyprian and St. Austin. In his third book against Maximinus, the Arian, St. Austin commences his allegorical exposition of the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, of the eighth verse, with the following sentence: For these are mysteries, in which is always considered, not what they are, but, quid ostendent, what they de monstrate: for they are the signs of

things; being actually one thing, but signifying another. In the first of the books to Theophilus, ascribed, for the want of a better owner, to the pen of Vigilius, the passage containing the mention of the Hea venly Witnesses, literally translated, is as follows: Therefore, although in the preceding examples of the Scriptures, the names of the persons are, tacita, unexpressed; yet the one common name of the divinity is every where demonstrated in them: as it is also in this example of the truth, in which the names of the persons, evidenter sunt ostensa, are evidently demonstrated; and the common, natural, or substantial name, secretly declared; the evangelist St. John saying, in his Epistle, There are three who bear testimony in heaven, the Father, and the Word, and the Spirit; and in Christ Jesus they are one; not, however, one individual, as their person is not one.' In this extract, the passage of the Heavenly Witnesses is classed with those testimonies of the Trinity taken out of the Old Testament, in which the names of the three divine persons and the one common appellation of the divinity are declared to be, not expressed, but only implied and demonstrated: and in the passage of St. John itself, the names of the Trinity are said to be, not expressly mentioned, but only, evidenter ostensa, evidently demonstrated; the very same verb, ostendere, being here used of the three divine persons which is employed by St. Austin, in applying to them the eighth verse; that they are demon. strated, or signified. There cannot, therefore, from the language of any author, arise a more manifest deduction than that, in the extract before us, Vigilius professes only to give utterance and expression to the implied sense of the eighth verse: and since, in his first book, he has fairly informed us of the manner in which he fetches this testimony from St. John, we have the less reason to find fault with him for having sim

ply inserted it without any accompanying remark whatever, in the ninth book of the same work.

In approaching the testimony of Fulgentius, I begin to entertain some doubts, whether the real Fulgentius himself, or only somebody for him, has so repeatedly cited these Heavenly Witnesses. Three places there are generally brought forward, in which Fulgentius is believed to have alleged the passage; in his Responsio contra Arrianos; in his Liber de Trinitate ad Felicem; and in the Fragmenta contra Fabianum. In the first edition of his works, by Cochlaeus, printed in 1520, and the only sort of copy to which I have access, there is neither the Liber ad Felicem, nor the Fragmenta contra Fabianum; so that I have no means of forming any judgment, either from the style or from other circumstances, how far these last mentioned works, in which the verse is contained, may have been rightly assigned to the pen of Fulgentius. I shall consider them, however, among his genuine productions. In his Responsio contra Arrianos, the verse is thus alleged: "In the Father, therefore, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost, we admit the unity of substance; but we dare not confound the persons. For the blessed apostle, St. John, testifieth, saying: There are three who bear testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit; and the three are one. Which likewise the most blessed martyr, St. Cyprian, in his Epistle on the Unity of the Church, confesses, saying: He who violates the peace and concord of Christ, acts against Christ; and he who gathers in any other place besides the Church, scatters the Church of Christ. And to demonstrate, that there is one Church of one God, he hath immediately inserted these testimonies from the Scriptures: The Lord saith, I and the Father are one. And again: Of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is written, And the three

are one.' That in this place something more is added to the testimony of St. John, than could ever have entered into the head of Fulgentius, must be apparent to the least discerning. If the whole of the testimony here recorded were absolutely the words of St. John, what in the world was there for St. Cyprian to confess about; as though in the allegation of one of the plainest passages of Scripture, it were necessary to bring along with it the confession of St. Cyprian? But what is it, I pray, that St. Cyprian confesses? Does he confess or cite any such testimony from St. John, as the very words: There are three who bear record in heaven, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and the three are one? No such thing. The most adventurous of the advocates of the Heavenly Wit. Besses have never dared to say this. The whole of what St. Cyprian affirms, and for which alone Fulgen. tius alleges his authority, is, that the final clause of the eighth verse, Et tres unum sunt, is to be ex. pounded of the Trinity in Unity: a gloss for which, seeing that the clause appears literally to refer to something else, it was highly necessary in Fulgentius, in order to make any impression on the minds of his opponents, to adduce the confession and authority of that glorious martyr. Hence this argument, depending more on the exposition of the Father than on the plain words of the Apostle, is thrown by the author into a back corner of his reply, and coupled to another argument of St. Cyprian's for the Trinity, taken from a certain custom of Daniel and the three children; a very unequal testimony, surely, to be yoked with that of the Heavenly Witnesses, had there been any such words of St. John in the Bible of Fulgentius.

By this time your readers will be gin to perceive, that I entertain strong suspicions of some foul play having been practised in the origi

nal editing of this part of our author. To me, certainly, the whole of the words, Tres sunt qui testimonium perhibent in cœlo, Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus; not a single particle of which is ether necessary to the argument, or alluded to in the context, appear to have been inserted by Cochlaeus to complete the verse ; and in this suspicion I am further confirmed from what he himself has acknowledged, that if the passages of Scripture cited in the manuscript, being taken out of a different Latin version from the present, he was often content to search out, not the words, but the sense of the allegation: whilst nothing can be more manifest than that, wherever the context would admit of it, he has constantly accommodated the passages to the text of the Vulgate. Indeed, that Fulgentius should know any thing at all of these Heavenly Witnesses, except as a gloss on the Scripture, is a supposition wholly incredible, and beyond measure ridiculous. In the last of his three books to Monimus, in his three books to king Trasimund, in his book to Donatus, and in his Sermon on the Twofold Nativity of Christ, works amounting to five times the bulk of his Reply to the Arians, and which are wholly occupied in deve loping and asserting the great mysteries of the Trinity and the Incar nation, there is not the slightest allusion to the disputed passage, nor even to the gloss of St. Cyprian. This is the more observable with respect to his third book to Monimus, in which he undertakes to confute the Arian distinction between the Word being with God and in God; as if God and his Word were not of the same substance. For though he has admirably succeeded in detecting the sophistry of the distinction between in and with; yet, as the whole cavil was instituted for the purpose of demonstrating, that God and the Word were not of one and the same substance; the author, by bringing to bear on the question +

the testimony of the Heavenly Wit nesses, would have finished the dis. pute at one stroke: but this he certainly has not done; and, therefore, we may rest perfectly satisfied, that he was ignorant of its existence.

I have already observed, that of the two references to the passage in the book to Felix, and in the Fragments against Fabian, I admit Fulgentius to be the author on the report of others. In the book to Felix, the verse appears to be cited absolutely as the testimony of St. John, without any accompanying remark whatever, and as it stands in the Latin Version. But in the Fragments against Fabian, it is clearly referred to, and explained as a gloss on the eighth verse, to the following effect. John evidently says; And the three are one; which is spoken of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as we have before, demonstrated, when you demauded a reason for it.' Here we see the verb, ostendere, to demonstrate, again lets the cat out of the bag, and deranges the whole farce of seriously maintaining the disputed passage on the authority of Fulgentius: for if, as Griesbach has well observed, there had been in the Epistle itself any such words as the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, there could be no need for the author to demonstrate, that the clause, And the three are one, was meant and spoken of the three persons of the Trinity.

I am perfectly aware, that by some good critics the African Confession of Faith which we now have, is denied to have been the one composed on that memorable occasion; but I must see something more than mere surmises before I can be induced to reject it as a spurious production. If not drawn up either by Vigilius or Eugenius, it was doubtless composed by one of their contemporary brother prelates; and of what they knew as to the Heavenly Witnesses, I have already adduced suflicient proof in the several cases

of Vigilius, Fulgentius, and Facundus. The passage under dispute was put into the Confession as the clearly implied sense and demonstrated testimony of St. John; and that so many bishops should at once have acquiesced in the justness of the quotation, is by no means a matter of wonder. The authority of St. Austin, with them, was equal to that of an oracle; and nothing can be more decisive than the tone which that venerable father has adopted in his application of the eighth verse to the Trinity in Unity. But if,' says he, that profundity, which is read in the Epistle of St. John, of so great a mystery, can be otherwise expounded and understood according to the catholic faith, which neither confounds nor separates the Trinity; neither denies the three persons, nor believes that there are different substances; it is by no means to be rejected. For that which is obscurely put in the Holy Scriptures for the purpose of exercising the minds of the faithful, affords matter for congratulation, if it may be variously yet wisely expounded. Here, we see, the faithful are permitted by St. Austin to take different ways in their exposition of the great mystery contained in the eighth verse; but it was at the peril of their orthodoxy, if they did not apply it in such a manner as to make it an irrefragable testimony of the three persons of the Godhead subsisting in the same substance. With so many reasons, then, arising from the mystical construction of the verse itself, and with such authorities before them as those of St. Cyprian and St. Austin, there would not, I am confident, be so much as one out of the four hundred prelates, unprepared to shed the last drop of his blood, rather than deny the veracity of the apostolic testimony, thus illustrated and expressed and had it been my own lot to have borne a part of that glorious struggle which they triumphantly sustained against the

Arian heretics, with the exception of a few points not necessary to the full developement of the mystical sense, I should have been eager to bave united with them, hand and heart in the allegation of their Heavenly Witnesses.

The foregoing authorities of the African Church are unquestionably the most ancient vouchers for the text under dispute; and, as we plainly perceive, that they quoted it as a gloss on the words, and not as the very words themselves of the divine Apostle; it becomes a matter of little or no consequence, by how many writers the same testimony may have since been cited, in nearly the same terms, during the ninth, and tenth, and subsequent centuries. To such, however, as may still be inclined to believe, that they did not themselves construct the verse, but actually cited it from their manuscript copies, I would here put the question, whether they are likewise inclined to maintain, that those various additions of, One in Christ Jesus, and Three in one, were equally in their manuscripts with the rest of the passage. If they think that they were, then they must have been a pretty kind of manuscripts on which to bottom at this day any solid and incontrovertible evidence for the genuineness of the sacred text. But if otherwise; and if, without any hesitation, they could presume, in the name of the Apostle, to add three words more than were warranted by their manuscripts, why not six: if a part, why not the whole of a verse? Let this question, if it can, be satisfactorily answered.

What gave the first rise to the production of the Heavenly Witnesses was, doubtless, the insuperable difficulty of expounding literally, and to any tolerable sense, the clause, Et tres unum sunt, of the spirit, the water, and the blood: and if the names of the three divine persons could in any manner have been introduced alone, without de

triment to the construction, we should never at this day have be held two verses, where one might have served. But understanding, as they did, the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, to be grammatically the subjects to the attribute of bearing testimony, and not being able to separate the subjects from their given attribute, in order to make room for the admission of the names

of the divine persons, they were compelled to repeat the same attribute in the same words, There are three that bear testimony; and when this was done, seeing that the result would be nonsense of itself, they were again obliged to mark the distinction between the Heavenly and the Earthly Witnesses; but, as there was an option left, whether the Heavenly Witnesses should succeed or take the lead of the others, with a repetition of the final clause, And the three are one; so accordingly we find it making its first appearance in all that possible variety of ways in which the circumstances of the context would allow it to be produced.

I have now earnestly to intreat Mr. Nolan to desist from imposing on the simplicity of the Christian world by his statement, that the authenticity of the Heavenly Witnesses is a question merely between the comparative testimonies of the Greek and Latin Churches. It is not a mere balancing of the testimony of the whole Greek Church against that of the whole. Latin Church; but it is the testimony of the ancient Latin Church itself, for the first seven hundred years of its existence, together with that of the Greek and of all the other Churches in Christendom, against the testimony of the modern Latin Church only; as cannot but appear from the authorities of Pope Eusebius, Leo Magnus, St. Austin, Eucherius, Vigilius, Fulgentius, and Facundus, who being all fathers of the Latin Church, conspire with one mouth, in this instance, to con