XIII. The eighth passage is, That they may
know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast
sent; Ib. xvii.
3. and There is none good save one, that is,
God. Luke xviii. 19. The solution of this appears to me
very easy. For if you attribute this only to the Father, where
will you place the Very Truth? For if you conceive in this manner
of the meaning of To the only wise God, 1 Tim. i. 17. or
Who only hath Immortality, Dwelling in the light which no man can
approach unto, Ib. vi.
16. or of to the king
of the Ages, immortal, invisible, and only wise God, Ib. i.
17. then the Son has vanished under sentence of
death, or of darkness, or at any rate condemned to be neither wise nor
king, nor invisible, nor God at all, which sums up all these
points. And how will you prevent His Goodness, which especially
belongs to God alone, from perishing with the rest? I, however,
think that the passage That they may know Thee the only true God, was
said to overthrow those gods which are falsely so called, for He would
not have added and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent, if The Only True
God were contrasted with Him, and the sentence did not proceed upon the
basis of a common Godhead. The “None is Good” meets
the tempting Lawyer, who was testifying to His Goodness viewed as
Man. For perfect goodness, He says, is God’s alone, even if
a man is called perfectly good. As for instance, A good man out
of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth good things. Mat. xii. 35. And, I will give the kingdom to one
who is good above Thee. 1 Sam. xv. 28.…Words of God, speaking to
Saul about David. Or again, Do good, O Lord, unto the
good Ps. cxxv. 4.…and all other like
expressions concerning those of us who are praised, upon whom it is a
kind of effluence from the Supreme Good, and has come to them in a
secondary degree. It will be best of all if we can persuade you
of this. But if not, what will you say to the suggestion on the
other side, that on your hypothesis the Son has been called the only
God. In what passage? Why, in this:—This is your God;
no other shall be accounted of in comparison with Him, and a little
further on, after this did He shew Himself upon earth, and conversed
with men. Baruch iii. 35, 37. This addition
proves clearly that the words are not used of the Father, but of the
Son; for it was He Who in bodily form companied with us, and was in
this lower world. Now, if we should determine to take these words
as said in contrast with the Father, and not with the imaginary gods,
we lose the Father by the very terms which we were pressing against the
Son. And what could be more disastrous than such a
victory?