was with God.
And this is the same which our Lord Jesus asserts concerning himself, John iii. 13, " And no man," saith he, " hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." And so in other places he affirms his being in heaven,— that is, with God,— at the same time when he was on the earth- whereby he declares the immensity of his nature, and the dis- tinction of his person; and his coming down from heaven before he was incarnate on the earth, declaring his pre-existence ; by both manifesting the meaning of this expression, that "in the begmnmg he was with God." But hereunto they have invented a notable eva- sion For although they know not well what to make of the last clause of the words, that says, then he was in heaven when he spake on earth — " The Son of man which is in heaven," answerable to the description of God's immensity, "Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord," Jer. xxiii. 24, but say that he was there by heavenly meditation, as another man may be ; yet they give a very clear answer to what must of necessity be included in his descendmg from heaven, —namely, his pre-existence to his incarnation: for they tell us that, before his public ministry, he was in his human nature (which is all they allow unto him) taken up into heaven, and there taught the gospel, as the great impostor Mohammed pretended he was taught his Alkoran. If you ask them who told them so, they cannot tell; but they can tell when it was,— namely, when he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days after his baptism. But yet
392 THE DOCTRINE OF THE
this instance is subject to another misadventure; in that one of the evangehsts plainly affirms that he was " those forty days in the wil- derness with the wild beasts," Mark i. 13, and so, surely, not in heaven in the same nature, by his bodily presence, Avith God and his holy angels.
And let me add this, by the way, that the interpretation of this place, John i. 1, to be mentioned afterward, and those of the two places before mentioned, John viii. 58, iii. 13, Faustus Socinus^ learned out of his uncle Lselius' papers, as he confesseth; and doth more than intimate that he believed he had them as it were by reve- lation. And it may be so; they are indeed so forced, absurd, and irrational, that no man could ever fix upon them by any reasonable investigation ; but the author of this revelation, if we may judge of the parent by the child, could be no other but the spirit of eiTor and darkness. I suppose, therefore, that notwithstanding these excep- tions, Christians will believe "that in the beginning the Word was with God;" that is, that the Son was with the Father, as is fre- quently elsewhere declared.
But who was this Word ? Saith the apostle, He luas God. He was so with God (that is, the Father), as that he himself was God also; — God, in that notion of God which both nature and the Scripture do represent; not a god by office, one exalted to that dignity (which can- not well be pretended before the creation of the world), but as Thomas confessed him, " Our Lord and our God," John xx. 28 ; or as Paul expresses it, " Over all, God blessed for ever;" or the most high God;
' The two Sozzinl were descended from an honourable family, and were both born at Siena, — Lailiiis, the uncle, in 1525, and his nephew, Faustus, in 1539. The former became addicted to the careful study of the 8crij)tures, forsaking the legal profession, for which he had undergone some training; and acquiring, in furtherance of his favourite pursuit, the Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic languages. He is said to have been one of forty individuals who held meetings foi- conference on religious topics, chiefly at Vicenza, and who sought to establish a jnirer creed, by the rejection of certain doctrines on which all the divines of the Kcformation strenuously insisted. To these Vicentine " colleges," as the meetings were termed, Socinians have been accustomed to trace the origin of their peculiar tenets. Dr M'Crie, in his " History of the Keformatiou in Italy" (p. 154), assigns strong reasons for discarding this account of the origin of Socinianism as unworthy of credit. L.X'lius never committed himself during his life to a direct avowal of his senti- ments, and was on terms of intercourse and corresiwndence with the leading Re- formers; intimating, however, his scruples and doubts to such an extent, that his soundness in the faith was questioned, and he received an admonition from Calvin. He left Italy in 1547, travelled extensively, and at length settled in Zurich, where he died in 1502, leaving behind him some manuscripts, to which Dr Owen alludes, and of which his nephew availed himself, in reducing the errors held in comniou bv uncle and nephew to the form of a theological system.
The nej)hew, Faustus, had rather a chc(iu(red life. Tainted at an early age with the heresy of his uncle, he was under the necessity of quitting Siena; and after having held for twelve years some honourable offices in the court of the Duke of Tuscany, he repaired to IJasle, aiul for tlirce years devoted himself to theological study. The doubts of the uncle rose to the importance of convictions in the mind of the nephew. In consequence of divisions among the reformers of