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well to have bestowed more studious research on the foundations of our own 
faith, which might have enabled him to preface his observations with greater 
accuracy of language, to delineate Christianity more distinctly, and make his 
comparison more thorough. The doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, for 
example, he describes as “ a special result of revelation,” whereas it is the 
very truth revealed. He calls Christ “ a vicarious Deliverer of mankind,” 
as if He were not the Deliverer himself. He refers to the Nicene Creed as 
if it were the primary authority, which of course it cannot be, and calls the 
Athanasian Creed the Commentary on the Nicene, which it certainly is not, 
although both creeds, as I believe, faithfully represent the teaching of Holy 
Scripture. He would not so loosely have described the “ subject ” of these 
creeds as “ one which has formed the foundation of a variety of heretical 
expositions in the first three centuries of our era,” which is much like 
making the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ the foundation of Arianism, 
a conception as incongruous as that of making the Horus myth a foundation 
of Christianity. 
This looseness of language betrays haste, but it introduces the “hypothesis” 
on which Mr. Cooper proceeds to “base his argument,” that long prior to 
the time of Abraham the cardinal dogmas of the Church were known to the 
nations of the world, and that it was reserved to the Father of the Faithful, 
and his descendants, to hold and to transmit to us the whole of those dogmas 
in their integrity ; but that “ even to the Jews themselves the full import of 
their own articles of faith was not fully known, while isolated doctrines, 
which were held in common by them and by other nations, were expanded to a 
degree which the patriarchs never understood, and which iu some points 
anticipated, so far as these expansions arose from the conscious yearnings 
of the soul after God, the tenets of Christian revelation.” 
I apprehend that we have not yet any evidence to show that the cardinal 
doctrines of the Bible — not the Church, for the Church is not the Author of 
Truth, but the custodian and teacher of the truth entrusted to her — were 
known to the nations of the world. Certainly the doctrine of redemption is 
not yet discovered in the records of those nations. What was done by 
Abraham and his descendants to preserve what they knew we cannot tell, for 
we only know that Moses and the prophets, being taught of God, delivered to 
some of the descendants of Abraham what they had not known before. As for 
the expansions, in whatever direction the isolated doctrines said to have been 
held by all nations were expanded, I hesitate to accept the proposition that 
those expansions, even though some of them might haply have arisen from 
conscious yearning of the soul after God, anticipated the tenets of Christian 
revelation. 
We hold in our hands the origines of Christian doctrine, and bating the 
little that was not fully revealed before Christ came into the world, we find 
written in the Old Testament all the doctrine that is the subject of Christian 
faith. To the Old Testament Scriptures our Lord himself referred the people 
of His time for the instruction they needed, saying that Moses and the prophet 
