those of former days; yet even then Attica drew its chief supplies from Pontus. Peloponnesus is not mentioned as sending corn to a market so ready and so near.' Is it not enough to suppose that 110,000 Greeks, when assembled in Bœotia, drew their supplies from Peloponnesus by means which any other nation would have found inadequate, without supposing also that the moneyless 50,000 troops of Sparta were, without delay, provisioned from the neighborhood of the Isthmus? That they were supplied from its neighborhood, if they were supplied at all, seems clear from what is now passing before our eyes. The high price of corn in England is drawing corn from the inland parts of Spain; and the blockade of the Dardanelles has obliged the Turks to get corn by land-carriage. The harvest in Spain has been abundant, and the price of corn is very low in the inland parts; but the expense of land-carriage will be very great, and the corn very dear to us : the expense will be very great in Turkey also.

In defiance of our own experience, shall we maintain that the Peloponnesians exerted themselves to collect corn for those who had no money to pay for it?

It is true that in his first expedition Don Quixote thought that knight-errants were to travel scot-free; but he was convinced by the reasoning of the inn-keeper, and provided himself with money when he next sallied forth. We have allowed the Lacedæmonians to march to Tempe and back, and to maintain a navy without any visible means of defraying the expense: let us he content with this romancing, lest in our liberality to the Lacedæmonians we should starve the Athenians, who, crowded as they are in the little isle of Salamis, and driven a second time from their own country, must also procure their supplies from Peloponnesus.

66

Herodotus is consistent in his extravagance: there is so far method in his madness, that a campaign which began with wonders is continued and finished in like manner. Mardonius," says Mitford, seems to have been naturally disposed to extraordinary things." His conduct on the present occasion was indeed most extraordinary. As the son-in-law of the warlike Darius, and as commander of the army which subdued the Brygian Thracians,

1 "For you well know that of all places we are the most dependent on foreign supplies of corn. Now the corn which is imported from Pontus equals, or rather exceeds in quantity, all that comes to us from other markets." Demosthenes against Leptines. The translation is taken from the Museum Criticum.-"Some ships, carrying corn from the Euxine for Ægina and Peloponnesus, were stopped by the Persian officers in the Hellespont. Xerxes directed that they should be suffered to proceed on their voyage: For,' said he, we are going to the same country, and the corn may be useful to us.'" Mitford from Herodotus, lib. vii. c. 147.

·

and as brother-in-law to the monarch who subdued Egypt, Mardonius must have acquired some little experience before the battle of Marathon; and the loss of that battle, and the defence of Thermopylæ, would have taught the most prejudiced and ignorant Persians the length of the Grecian spears ; although Hippias and Demaratus should have forgotten to notice a circumstance on which so much depended. The Persians 2 readily adopted the institutions of other nations; shall we maintain that they were backward in this instance? Can we reasonably doubt that Mardonius, who had now passed ten months in Greece-who had selected his 300,000 men from the armed multitudes of Xerxes-who was well supplied with money-who had 50,000 Greek allies, and who was to retrieve the honor of the Persian arms, was as eager for battle now as he showed himself at Platæa, when he challenged the Lacedæmonians to let the business be decided by an engagement not between the two armies, but between the Lacedæmoniaus and Persians, and when he at last attacked the Greeks against the advice and without the co-operation of Artabazus? But there is a difference between Mardonius at Platæa and Mardonius at Athens.

1 "At dinner,” said Madame Geoffrin, "one should use long knives and short stories." Had Herodotus given the Persians long spears, his stories would have been shortened.

* Herodotus, lib. i. c. 135.

ΤΟ

MR. ARCHDEACON TRAVIS,

IN ANSWER TO HIS

DEFENCE

OF THE

THREE HEAVENLY WITNESSES,

1 JOHN V. 7.

BY R. PORSON.

LONDON:-1790.

--

LETTER XI.

Of the later Latin writers that are quoted in favor of the verse.
Sir,

Augustine and Jerome you have thought fit to number in your own party. "Thus like an experienced officer, by a false musterroll of authorities, you gain the pay and credit of forces you cannot produce." Let us therefore examine your claim to these testimonies. Augustine says of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, 'They are one,' "These three are one," which words, according to you, bespeak their derivation from this verse too clearly to require any comment. They would have been too clear to require any, if you had first quoted the passage from his treatise against Maximin, where he explains the spirit, the water, and the blood, into an allegory signifying the three persons of the Trinity. "If we examine," says he, "how this passage ought to be interpreted, it will not be absurd to expound it of the Trinity, of which it may be truly said, "There are three that bear witness," and, "the three are one." If you had first produced this sentence, the reader would have seen, that when Augustine elsewhere says of the Trinity, "These three are one," even allowing that the phrase is borrowed from scripture, it is only his own exposition of the eighth verse. Could Augustine, writing on the Trinity, and quoting the very next verse to the seventh, be ignorant of it, if it were then commonly known, or refrain from using it in some part or other of his treatise? You will not object that Augustine might think the word unum signified unity of consent, not of

' Middleton, Farther Remarks on Bentley, vol. iii. p. 456.

VOL. XXXIX.

CI. JI.

essence, 1. because you affirm that he has twice quoted the seventh verse to prove the unity of essence, and, 2. because, to defend his own absurd hypothesis, that unum is always meant of essence, he explains away the eighth verse into an allegory.

But in truth, Sir, this way of quoting Augustine is a mockery of reason. We ask for a passage, where Augustine has formally appealed to scripture for the three heavenly witnesses. You produce a sentence, in which Augustine says of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," these three are one," in his own words, without any reference to scripture, or mark of a quotation. In the mean time you cautiously keep back the argument from Augustine's allegory, and bring scraps of quotations that can only amuse the most ignorant readers. Bengelius is much more consistent. He thinks, that the verse was withdrawn from the public copies by the Disciplina Arcani. Allow him his premises, and his conclusions will easily follow: 1. that no argument can be drawn from the silence of the ancient writers; and, 2. that in these short sentences they might covertly allude to the disputed text. I shall only observe, that if we suppose the first Christians to have treated the scriptures in this manner, we at once destroy the certainty and authority of our present canon. But whoever supposes, as I think every defender of the text ought to suppose, that it was extant and publicly known from the beginning, cannot, with the smallest appearance of reason, pretend that it ought not to be formally and directly cited in almost every treatise on the Trinity.

Indeed the argument from Augustine's allegory is so plain and strong, that Beza fairly says, "Non legit Augustinus:" Bengelius avoids it by the Disciplina Arcani; and Martin himself sinks under the weight of the objection, and only not yields the point in his dissertation. In his Examen he makes a faint defence; but when Emlyn replied, he quitted the untenable post. And it is self-evident, that no man who had before him a clear passage for the doctrine of the Trinity, a passage where the three persons are distinctly named, would quote the adjacent sentence, and explain it mystically of the same doctrine, unless he were determined to turn the scripture into needless tautology, and weaken the force of his own reasoning.

But "in Jerome's testament this verse is read without any doubt of its authenticity." Without any doubt of its authenticity! You inform us elsewhere, that all the present Latin Mss. are copies of Jerome's version. But many of the oldest of these Mss. totally omit the heavenly witnesses, and many retain them in a suspicious manner. I have said enough on this subject in my sixth letter, and shall not repeat it here. The question is, which of these copies preserves the genuine reading; and therefore, when you say, that the verse is read in Jerome's testament, you assume the very thing which you ought to prove.

But

to help out this lame argument you produce two quotations. The first is, "In essence therefore they are one." "Itaque substantia unum sunt." You translate it, these [three] are one. Why add, these without warrant from your original? Or why add three, though, I own, you distinguish it from the words of your author? Is it necessary to the sense? Or must the words unum sunt, whenever and wherever they are applied to the Trinity, be always meant for a direct quotation of 1 John v. 7.? You are then blamably negligent in not increasing your orthodox witnesses with Marius Victorinus, whom you might have found quoted by Bengelius in the same paragraph with Marcus Celedensis. The second testimony of Jerome you produce from his explanation of faith to Cyrillus: "To us there is one Father, one Son-and one Holy Ghost-and these three are one." But after reading a page, we find, that the quotation of which you here make a present to Jerome, belongs to Marcus Celedensis. Whether it belongs to him, I know not. It is only a conjecture of the learned from an epistle of Jerome's to Marcus Celedensis, in which he uses these words: "De fide, quam dignatus es scribere sancto Cyrillo, dedi conscriptam fidem." Hence you argue, p. 168, that Jerome approved of Marcus's creed, and wrote another of his own. Let it be supposed, to save trouble, that Marcus is the real author of this creed, and that Jerome intends the same. How could Jerome suspect, that these words were meant for a quotation of scripture, without his friend's dropping the least hint of it? Marcus Celedensis only explains his own doctrine; which he does not profess to do in the words of scripture. Besides, your argument takes for granted that Jerome examined all the quotations with scrupulous minuteness; a task to which, I believe, very few friends or readers submit. But when Jerome came to this passage, which bears no mark of a quotation, he must have been the prince of conjurers to have divined his correspondent's intention. In short, Sir, the creed addressed to Damasus is universally acknowleged not to be Jerome's; and if it were his, our verse is not quoted in it. The creed ascribed to Marcus Celedensis does not refer to the verse, and, if it did, would signify nothing in the dispute about Jerome. However, you are perfectly consistent in defending a spurious reading by spurious authorities.

But the weightiest evidence remains, the Prologue to the Canonical Epistles. At the request or command of Pope Damasus, Jerome revised the Latin translation, and corrected it on the faith of the Greek Mss. Did he therefore replace the three beavenly witnesses at this revision, or not? If he did, why did he not then write his preface to inform the world of his recovered reading? But after Damasus was dead, Eustochium, it seems, a young lady, at once devout, handsome, and learned, requests him once more to revise the Catholic epistles and correct them from the