if Christ were God and man in the unity of the same person, he chose
rather to deny the unity of Christ's person than to acknowledge his
temerity and rashness in reproving that form of speech, which the use
of the church had anciently received and allowed.

A false charge grounded on a misconception of the Syriac terms.
Nestorius was perfectly justifiable in his rejection of the epithet
[Greek: theotokos], as applied to the mother of Jesus. The Church was
even then only too ripe for the idolatrous 'hyper-dulia' of the
Virgin. Not less weak is Field's defence of the propriety of the term.
Set aside all reference to this holy mystery, and let me ask, I trust
without offence, whether by the same logic a mule's dam might not be
called [Greek: hippotokos], because the horse and ass were united in one
and the same subject. The difference in the perfect God and perfect man
does not remove the objection: for an epithet, which conceals half of a
truth, the power and special concerningness of which, relatively to our
redemption by Christ, depends on our knowledge of the whole, is a
deceptive and a dangerously deceptive epithet.


Ib. c.20. p.110.

Thus, then, the Fathers did sometimes, when they had particular
occasions to remember the Saints, and to speak of them, by way of
'apostrophe', turn themselves unto them, and use words of
doubtful compellation, praying them, if they have any sense of these
inferior things, to be remembrancers to God for them.


The distinct gradations of the process, by which commemoration and