Invoked! Surely a pious wish is not an invocation. "May good angels
attend you!" is no invocation or worship of angels. The essence of
religions adoration consists in the attributing, by an act of prayer or
praise, a necessary presence to an object--which not being
distinguishable, if the object be sensuously present, we may safely
define adoration as an acknowledgement of the actual and necessary
presence of an intelligent being not present to our senses. "May lucky
stars shoot influence on you!" would be a very foolish superstition,
--but to say in earnest! "O ye stars, I pray to you, shoot influences on
me," would be idolatry. Christ was visually present to Stephen; his
invocation therefore was not perforce an act of religious adoration, an
acknowledgment of Christ's deity.
[Footnote 1: The Origin of Arianism Disclosed. By John Whitaker, B.D.
London, 1791.]
* * * * *
NOTES ON OXLEE ON THE TRINITY AND INCARNATION. [1] 1827
Strange--yet from the date of the book of the Celestial Hierarchies of
the pretended Dionysius the Areopagite to that of its translation by
Joannes Scotus Erigena, the contemporary of Alfred, and from Scotus to
the Rev. John Oxlee in 1815, not unfrequent--delusion of mistaking
Pantheism, disguised in a fancy dress of pious phrases, for a more
spiritual and philosophic form of Christian Faith! Nay, stranger
still:--to imagine with Scotus and Mr. Oxlee that in a scheme which more
directly than even the grosser species of Atheism, precludes all moral
responsibility and subverts all essential difference of right and wrong,
they have found the means of proving and explaining, "the Christian
doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation," that is, the great and only
sufficient antidotes of the right faith against this insidious poison.
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