Preface

Preface

The Rev. D. James commences the Preface to his Lecture with these words: “Modern Unitarianism is a compound of Infidelity and Heresy.” It would be very easy for me to say what modern Trinitarianism is, and to attach to it two epithets which Mr. James would relish no more than I do Infidelity and Heresy. It is evident, however, that this calling of names proves nothing but the unfitness of the mind which so indulges its temper and feeling to be engaged in intellectual and argumentative controversy. Does Mr. James expect to convince or persuade any Unitarians, by calling them Infidels and Heretics? The Christ Church method of Conversion is very well for Infallibles, who have only to denounce, and for “ordained Clergymen,” who, with a simplicity of extravagance approaching the sublime, shrink from no consequences of their first principles, and boldly assert that the Holy Spirit is their Interpreter of Scripture,—but it displays a strange ignorance or contempt of the only avenues by which the minds of their fellow Christians can be approached, and of the moral and argumentative means by which alone conviction can be produced.

In what sense does Mr. James use the word ‘Heresy,’ in the sentence quoted? If in the sense of error, then is he of the infallible Church that he decides authoritatively on such points? If in the sense of schism and division, who does not know that the Creed-making Church is the Mother of the Sects, the fomentor of our religious strifes? With what grace or justice does that man call another an infidel, who is himself an infidel in respect to the primal and universal Revelation, and applies himself to blot out the divine signatures from the soul of man, and the material works of God? There is no infidelity so bad as this. The Apostle speaks of the law written on the heart, and of the Gentiles who had not the Jewish Law, being yet a Law unto themselves, and the Psalmist speaks of the moral fidelity and constancy of God being shadowed forth by the unfailingness of His material Laws,—but Mr. James, who makes strange work with scripture, maintains in opposition to both Scripture and Philosophy, “the moral character and unity of God not discoverable from the works of Creation.” I have been long prepared for this. Those who must maintain Trinitarianism have no other resource than to blot out the lights of the ORIGINAL REVELATION.[453] NATURE and the SOUL must be discredited if the Trinitarian Theology is to hold its place. This has been long evident to all who have watched the progress of knowledge, and the signs of the times. The works of God, and the oracles of the Soul, must be insulted, that the CHURCH, the CREED, and the PRIEST may remain.

I have referred but slightly to Mr. James’s Lecture in the following pages, because I wished to build up an independent argument of great importance, and would not be led out of my way to answer reasonings and statements which, being answered, would leave the real controversy unaffected, and without a step of advancement. Nor could it be of much moment to discuss the CRITICISM that finds the Trinity in a Hebrew plural—the REASONING that, (in violation of one of the maxims of Philosophy, to attribute no more Causes than are adequate to the effects,) in the Works of an Omnipotent Creator finds in unity of Design no proof of Unity of Being—the SCRIPTURAL ARGUMENTATION that lays down the Mosaic Law of Vengeance, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” expressly condemned by Christ, as unworthy even of men, as the morality of God himself, “the principle of eternal right, and the law of his own government”[454]—the transcendental METAPHYSICS that sees no difficulty in the infinite and omnipresent Deity becoming incarnate in a human frame, on the ground that “spirits occupy no space, and that thousands of them might be within a thimble, and the thimble on the finger of the seamstress, and her finger touch none of them.”[455]

There are, however, some statements in the Preface to Mr. James’s Lecture, professing to be testimonies from Antiquity to the Trinitarian Doctrine, which demand some notice. To establish his inaccuracy I shall simply oppose to his statements the statements of Professor Burton.

1. “[The word Trinity] is found in the writings of Justin Martyr, who was converted to the Christian faith about the year of our Lord 140.”—p. v. Mr. James mentions in a note that some divines dispute the authenticity of the work in which the word is found: but Mr. James is not one of those divines, for he proceeds to assert, that the passage in Justin Martyr “brings the use of the word within half a century of the apostolic age.”

Now let us hear Dr. Burton.—“‘Theophili ad Autolycum, lib. ii. c. 15.’ I quote this passage, not on account of the sentiment which it contains, (for the allusion is sufficiently puerile,) but because it is the earliest passage (A. D. 180) in the works of any of the fathers, where we find the Greek word Τριας, Trinity: and we can thus prove that the term was applied to the three persons of the Trinity as early as toward the end of the second century.

“Theophilus had been giving an account of the creation, as described by Moses in the book of Genesis; and following that allegorical method of interpretation, which the fathers borrowed too freely from the schools of Alexandria, he extracts a hidden meaning from the fact of the heavenly bodies being created on the fourth day. ‘In like manner also the three days, which preceded the luminaries, are types of the Trinity, of God, and his Word, and his Wisdom.’” Burton adds in a note—“This passage is overlooked by Suicer in his Thesaurus, v. Τριὰς, who very properly observes, that the Expositio rectæ confessionis, in which the word occurs, and which has been ascribed to Justin Martyr, is later than that writer by some centuries.”—Theol. Works, vol. ii. 2nd part, p. 34.

2. “The next who makes use of the word in his writings is Theophilus, a Gentile convert.”—p. vi. Let us hear what Burton says of this Theophilus, and of his use of the word Trinity, the first who used it in such connection.

“Some doubts have been raised concerning the identity and date of Theophilus: but it seems to be generally agreed, that the person whose works have come down to us was the sixth bishop of Antioch, and was appointed to that see about the year 168. He tells us himself that he had been bred up in heathenism, and it is plain that his language and thoughts retained a lasting impression from the Platonic philosophy.”—p. 33.

“We perhaps ought not to infer from the words of Theophilus that the term Τριας had come in his day to bear the signification of a trinity in unity. He may have used it merely to express three things; and the three days, which he compares with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, might have been spoken of by him as τριὰς τῶν ἡμερῶν, a triad, or trinity of days. In this sense Clement of Alexandria speaks of ‘the holy triad, or trinity, faith, hope, and charity;’ and Origen uses the terms τριὰς and τετρὰς for periods of three and four years respectively. Tertullian also, at the end of the second century, used the term trinitas in the same ordinary sense, for any three things.

“I would not therefore argue from the mere occurrence of the word in the writings of Theophilus, that τριας contained a signification of unity, as well as of trinity: but this much is at least evident, that Theophilus must have considered some resemblance, if not equality, to have existed between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or he would not have included them in the same type”—p. 38.

3. “Polycarp, a disciple of St. John, when at the stake, addressed a prayer to God, which he concluded in this manner:—‘For all things I praise thee, I bless thee, I glorify thee, together with the eternal and heavenly Jesus Christ: with whom, unto thee, and the Holy Spirit, be glory, both now and for ever, world without end. Amen.’”—p. vii.

Professor Burton:—“Such are the concluding words of the prayer in the edition of Archbishop Usher: but Eusebius has quoted them differently, ‘I glorify thee, through the eternal High Priest, Jesus Christ, thy beloved Son, through whom be glory to thee, with him in the Holy Ghost, both now and for evermore. Amen.’”

“The early orthodox writers,” as Bishop Bull goes on to remark, “while they glorified the Father through the Son, intended to express the subordination of the Son, in his relation of Son, and the pre-eminence of the Father, in his relation of Father: but by adoring the Son together with the Father, they intended to express his being of one substance, and his existing in the same divine essence and nature with the Father.”—“Theodoret informs us, that in the middle of the fourth century the clergy and people of Antioch were divided, some using the conjunction and, when they glorified the Son, (i. e., saying and to the Son,) and others applying the preposition through to the Son, and in to the Holy Ghost. This was the period when the dispute concerning the form of doxology became general: and Philistorgius, the Arian historian, is speaking of the same time and place, when he says, ‘Flavianus was the first person who used the words Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, for before his time some had said, Glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Ghost, which was the expression in most general use: and others Glory to the Father in the Son and Holy Ghost.’”—pp. 7, 8, 9.

“It is true that Eusebius appears to have found a different reading in his copy of Polycarp’s prayer: and a critical question like this can never be demonstrably settled.”—p. 13.

4. “[Justin Martyr] says—‘HIM (the Father) and that SON who hath proceeded from him, and the PROPHETICAL SPIRIT, we worship and adore.’”—p. vii.

Where did Mr. James find this quotation? I shall supply some words which he has omitted, coming in between two clauses, which he has printed as continuous parts of the sentence. The omitted words supply a good test for a fundamental principle of Trinitarian interpretation, that of equalizing all persons joined together by the conjunctive conjunction. I shall give the omitted words in italics.

“Justin is answering the charge of atheism, which was brought against the Christians, and observes, that they were punished for not worshipping evil demons, which were not really gods. ‘Hence it is that we are called atheists: and we confess that we are atheists with respect to such reputed Gods as these: but not with respect to the true God, the Father of justice, temperance, and every other virtue, with whom is no mixture of evil. But Him, and the Son who came from him, and gave us this instruction, and the host of the other good angels which attend upon and resemble them, and the prophetic spirit, we worship and adore, paying them a reasonable and true honour, and not refusing to deliver to any one else, who wishes to be taught, what we ourselves have learnt.’”

After such careless quotations, to say the best of them, I am not surprised to find Mr. James, with singular self-devotion, placing himself beside Mr. Byrth, to share the condemnation that falls upon injurious representations, not only unproved, but disproved. Mr. James speaks of the Unitarian crime of distorted representations, as proved by Mr. Byrth. Mr. James may make common cause with Mr. Byrth, if he is unwise enough to do so; but I can assure him that his own burden is heavy enough to bear, without encumbering himself with any portion of another’s.

To the greatest part of his quotations Mr. James has given no reference, so that it is impossible to verify them. If he is correct, he has been more fortunate in some cases than Professor Burton. I should be glad to have the means of testing his extracts from Origen. He ought to have stated, that both Bishop Bull and Dr. Priestley, when speaking of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, never confounded the Trinity of these Fathers with the Post-Nicene Trinity, or with modern Orthodoxy.

Nothing can be more unphilosophical than the manner in which testimonies to modern opinions have been found in the Fathers. Any words that will bear the sense have been pushed forward as authorities. No distinction has been made between the ideas suggested by the words to modern readers, and the ideas of the writers originally suggesting the words. The suggested and the suggesting ideas would be found strangely different. Whoever wishes to have clear ideas on this question, the opinions of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and the origin of the Trinity, should read the portions of Cudworth’s Intellectual System that bear upon the subject.

---------------------

LECTURE VII.

THE UNSCRIPTURAL ORIGIN AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY.

BY REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM.

“THE FATHER THAT DWELLETH IN ME, HE DOETH THE WORKS.”—John xiv. 10.

It is a profound observation of Professor Dugald Stewart, that you never destroy an error until you have traced it to its sources, until you have accounted for its origin. A popular doctrine, full of life in the strong faith of those who hold it, cannot be encountered at the height of its power, and struck down at once by an argument; the world is apt to take for granted that whatever is widely believed must have some roots in truth, and you must go up the stream of opinion, if you would gradually remove this idea so supporting to error, of its strength and fulness, stripping away the impressions of magnitude as you ascend, until at last you have left all the strength behind you, and have come to where you can contemplate, undeceived, the weak and miserable beginnings of the turbid flood. Were some Grecian idolater to have followed the gliding steps of his river God, until his majestic movements were shortened into the tricklings of the mountain spring, if the deity did not entirely disappear, it would at least have changed its form, and melted into the minor nymph of the Fountain.

Whenever we encounter the doctrine of the Trinity, as it is received at the present day, and attempt to arrest it by the strength of Reason and the strength of Scripture, the flood is too strong for us, the faith of the world flows upon the current, and we are swept aside as things that had vainly interposed to intercept the rushings of some mighty tide. We must travel up to the first droppings if we would demonstrate the derived nature of this now full stream of faith. If the ascent terminates before it reaches Christ and the Apostles, then its origin is not Scriptural but Ecclesiastical; its fountain is not in the depths of the nature of God, but in the airy speculations of the vain philosophy of man.

My subject is entitled “The unscriptural Origin and Ecclesiastical History of the Doctrine of the Trinity.” I shall invert the order of these topics. I shall show first where it has its origin, that we may be saved the unnecessary toil of straining and distorting our vision, in searching for it where it is not to be found. If I can exhibit its birth in Ecclesiastical history, this will so far be a proof that it had no previous birth in Evangelical History. If I can cut it off from the living fountain of Revelation, and show it proceeding from other springs, this will so far be a proof that it is human and not divine. The positive assertion contained in my title, if established, will establish also the negative portion of it:—for the Ecclesiastical rise and progress of the Trinity are the negation of its Scriptural origin.

Christianity was originally delivered to Jews; and the question naturally arises, how could their pure theism ever assume the Trinitarian modification of Unity; how, to use the early language of this Controversy, could the MONARCHY ever be diluted into the ECONOMY, if it had not been constrained to adopt this form by the overpowering distinctness of a Revelation? Now we are able to prove that the Jewish Christians never did accept the doctrine of the deity of Christ; that on this account they are classed with Heretics by the Greek and Latin Fathers, under the names of Nazarenes and Ebionites; and that not until after the Gospel passed out of the keeping of the Apostles, and, cut off from its Jewish spring, was cast into the midst of the Gentile world, to modify and to be modified, did it come into contact with Heathen Philosophy, and slowly take the impress of its spirit.

There were two very marked divisions of the Jewish people, under widely different influences of Religion and Philosophy, and not acquainted, perhaps, with the same language,—the Jews of Palestine, and the Jews of Egypt. The Jews of Palestine, sheltered from commerce with the world, more by their unsocial Faith, than by the deep and quiet vallies of their sequestered land, partook little of the spirit of the Times, and imparted to it nothing; and though after the Babylonish Captivity, Gentile Philosophy had tinctured and in some sense expanded their religious views, yet when they returned again to their homes that influence was cut off, the living connection was no longer maintained, and its effects were rather traditionary mixtures, than seeds of progress.

In contrast with the insulated life of the Jews of Palestine, the Jews of Alexandria lived in the very centre of the world’s freshest ideas—their dwelling was the mart of nations—and Grecian and Oriental Philosophy met together in their far-famed Schools, and mingled their Wisdom. “The arms of the Macedonians,” says Gibbon, “diffused over Asia and Egypt the language and learning of Greece; and the theological system of Plato (before Christ, 360) was taught, with less reserve, and perhaps with some improvements, in the celebrated School of Alexandria. A numerous colony of Jews had been invited, by the favour of the Ptolemies, to settle in their new capital. While the bulk of the nation practised their legal ceremonies, and pursued the lucrative operations of Commerce, a few Hebrews, of a more liberal spirit, devoted their lives to religious and philosophical contemplation. They cultivated with diligence, and embraced with ardour, the theological system of the Athenian Sage. But their national pride would have been mortified by a fair confession of their former poverty: and they boldly marked, as the sacred inheritance of their ancestors, the gold and jewels which they had so lately stolen from their Egyptian masters. One hundred years before the birth of Christ, a philosophical treatise, which manifestly betrays the style and sentiments of the School of Plato, was produced by the Alexandrian Jews, and unanimously received as a genuine and valuable relic of the inspired Wisdom of Solomon. A similar union of the Mosaic faith and the Grecian philosophy, distinguishes the works of Philo, which were composed for the most part under the reign of Augustus. The material soul of the Universe might offend the piety of the Hebrews: but they applied the character of the LOGOS to the Jehovah of Moses and the patriarchs; and the Son of God was introduced upon earth under a visible, and even human appearance, to perform those familiar offices which seem incompatible with the nature and attributes of the Universal cause.”[456]

It is not necessary that I should inquire here with great accuracy into the nature of the Trinity as taught by Plato. I think it is most probable that Plato’s Trinity was a Trinity of Attributes rather than a Trinity of Persons; that it corresponded rather with Sabellianism than with the Orthodox form of the Doctrine. This is a question, however, on which it is impossible to speak with certainty, owing, partly, to the nature of the ideas which constitute this compound conception of Deity, and partly to the gorgeous style of the imaginative metaphysician, whose figures we hardly know whether we are to harden into Realities, or to fuse into Ideas. Authorities are divided upon this point—and we have the name of Cudworth upon the one side, and the scarcely less illustrious one of Guizot upon the other. Whatever may have been the view of Plato himself,[457] it is certain that before Christ, his followers, some of the purer of the later Platonists, as they are called, taught a doctrine of the Trinity exactly corresponding to the form in which it was established nearly three hundred years after the death of our Saviour, by the first General Council of the Christian Church. The Platonists contemplated one original fountain of being, a simple unity, “which virtually containeth all things,” from whence all other things, whether temporal or eternal, whether created or uncreated, were altogether derived. This Monad or Unity the Platonists considered as the only absolute or perfect existence, superior to intellect or wisdom, (Logos) for these two reasons—first, because Intellect being concerned with ideas, implies numbers and multiplicity; whereas the Supreme is UNITY; and secondly, that because “Knowledge is not the highest good, there must be some substantial thing in order of Nature superior to Intellect.” In the same way that GOODNESS and UNITY, the properties of the self-existent God, were supposed to be superior to Mind or Wisdom, the second principle, so in its turn Intellect was supposed to be superior to the moving spirit or energy which carried ideas (the ideas of the Logos) into Action. The Monad, or Supreme Unity, generated Intellect, and Intellect as containing the intelligible ideas or archetypes of all sensible things, generated Soul or the spirit of Action. Hence the Platonic Trinity: THE ONE GOOD; Intellect (LOGOS OR NOUS); PSYCHE, or operating energy.[458] In Platonic language, the FIRST in this Trinity is said to be All things Unitively; the SECOND, All things intellectually; and the THIRD, All things actively or productively. I shall give one example of the style of the Platonists in expressing these Trinitarian conceptions. It is exactly that which the earlier Fathers would have used when speaking of the Christian Trinity. “That which is always perfect generates what is Eternal, and that which it generates is always less than itself. What shall we say therefore of the most absolutely perfect Being of all? Does that produce nothing from itself? Or rather, does it not produce the greatest of all things after it? Now the greatest of all things after the most absolutely perfect Being is Mind or Intellect; and this is Second to it. For Mind beholdeth this as its Father, and standeth in need of nothing else besides it; whereas that First Principle standeth in need of no (Logos) Mind or Intellect. What is generated from that which is better than Mind, must needs be Mind or Intellect, because Mind is better than all other things, they being all in order of nature after it, and junior to it; as PSYCHE itself, or the First Soul; for this is also the Word or Energy of Mind (Logos), as that is the Word or Energy of the First Good.[459] Perfect Intellect,” (Logos, the second in the Trinity,) “generates Soul” (Psyche, or Moving Spirit, the third in the Platonic Trinity), “and it being perfect must needs generate, for so great a Power could not remain steril. But that which is here begotten also, cannot be greater than its Begetter; but must needs be Inferior to it, as being the Image thereof.”—(Plotinus. Cudworth, p. 580.)

Now to connect such speculations as these with Gentile Christianity we have the intermediate link of the Platonizing or Alexandrian Jews. About two hundred years before Christ the Hebrew Scriptures were made accessible to Grecian curiosity through the medium of the Septuagint Translation: and when comparison came to be instituted between the wisdom of their Sacred Books, and the wisdom of the Schools, a strong temptation came into force upon the Jewish Platonists, by a system of allegory and fanciful interpretation to make their Scriptures divulge recondite doctrines, and by such imaginative means to metamorphose its simplest statements into the likeness of the deep and mysterious teachings of Philosophy. Hence arose the whole system of allegorizing which prevailed so extensively among the Jews of Alexandria. They were under two sets of influences, an affection for the Platonic or Eclectic Philosophy of their Schools, and a jealousy for their Religion that made them shrink from the idea that any Philosophy should contain secrets not there divulged.[460] They combined these two affections, and made their Scriptures speak the language of the Schools by means of the transforming process of allegorical interpretation. Examples without end might be given of the most extravagant transfigurations of the events of Hebrew History.

As a preparation for the manner of speaking on these subjects afterwards adopted by the earlier Christian Trinitarians, I will extract one passage, which perhaps most faithfully represents the purer views of Philo of Alexandria, the most eminent of the Jewish Platonizers, and whose influence operating upon Christianity through the minds of the Gentile philosophical believers, is to this day felt upon the popular forms of our faith. I have only to premise that he is speaking of the Attributes of God abstractly from God himself; and though it is more than probable that Philo as well as Plato never separated these Attributes from the Supreme Deity, still it was the necessary tendency of such personifications to harden into distinct persons, and with common minds personified Attributes very soon came to be considered as Real Beings. This then was the original source of the Christian Trinity. To keep the lofty and retired Essence of God apart from all contact with matter which was looked upon as evil, and from number which was looked upon as imperfect, the Powers of God were first considered as Emanations from Him by successive generation—INTELLECT proceeding from the ONE GOOD, and operating ENERGY or SPIRIT proceeding from Intellect (Logos) to consummate its Ideas, and then gradually came to be separated from Him, by a very natural process of philosophic deteriorations, and to be fixed down into independent personalities. With these explanations I now quote from Philo. He belonged to the age of Christ, but was born some time anterior to the Christian era: Brucker says twenty years. Philo is allegorizing the appearance of the three angels to Abraham, into a threefold manifestation of the One God: “The FATHER is in the middle of all, who in Holy Scripture is by a peculiar name styled THE BEING [HE WHO IS]: and on each side are [two] most ancient Powers next to THE BEING, whereof one is called the Effective (creative Power) and the other Royal; and the Effective, GOD, for by this [the Father] made and adorned the Universe; and the Royal, LORD, for it is fit he should rule and govern what he has made. Being therefore attended on both sides with his Powers, to a discerning understanding he appears one while to be ONE, and another while to be THREE. ONE when the mind being in the highest degree purified, and passing over not only a multitude of numbers, but also that which is next to an Unit,” (the Monad) “the number of two,” (the other two, Logos and Psyche) “endeavours after a simple and uncompounded Idea, perfect of itself: and THREE, when not as yet sufficiently exercised in great mysteries, it busies itself about lesser, and is not able to conceive THE BEING, [HE WHO IS,] without any other, of itself, but by his Works, and either as creating or governing.”[461]

Such, then, were the prevalent modes of Conception at the time when the Gospel passed out of the hands of strictly Jewish interpreters, and came to be inspected by the eyes of Gentile Philosophers. With more or less purity of conception, all the Platonists personified the divine Attributes; and some of them represented these personified Attributes as distinct Existences, not hesitating to speak of a second God, though holding him to be derived and dependent. There is no trace among the purer Platonists of any belief of three co-equal Gods, each possessing within himself the fullness of Deity, yet mysteriously united. The second and third persons in the Platonic Trinity were carefully represented as derived, dependent, and subordinate, under the similitudes of the stream and the fountain, the branch and the vine, the sun and its outshining effulgence; the relation between them being like that of three apparent Suns,—“two of them being but the parhelii of the other, and essentially dependent on it: for as much as the second would be but the reflected Image of the first, and the third but the second refracted.”[462]

Now it so happened that the Apostle John, living at Ephesus, “the centre of the mingling opinions of the East and West,” made use of this term “Logos” as already familiar to those for whom he wrote, and with the purpose of impressing upon the word the higher and purer meaning attached to it by the Jews of Palestine; wresting it from the philosophical to the strictly Jewish or Christian sense. Nothing could be more natural than that the Apostle should adopt the style of the philosophic schools in the midst of which he wrote, especially since it was not peculiar to them, but already in use among the Jews; and that endeavouring to connect truth with familiar modes of speaking, he should attempt to infuse into the word the more spiritual ideas with which it was already associated in his own language.

“St. John,” says Guizot, “was a Jew, born and educated in Palestine; he would naturally, then, attach to the word Logos the sense attached to it by the Jews of Palestine. Closely examined, the ideas which he gives of the Logos cannot agree with those of Philo and the school of Alexandria; they correspond, on the contrary, with those of the Jews of Palestine. Perhaps St. John, employing a well known term to explain a doctrine which was yet unknown, has slightly altered the sense: it is this alteration which we appear to discover on comparing different passages of his writings. It is worthy of remark, that the Jews of Palestine, who did not perceive this alteration, could find nothing extraordinary in what St. John said of the Logos; at least they comprehended it without difficulty; while the Greeks and Grecising Jews, on their parts, brought to it prejudices and preconceptions easily reconciled with those of the Evangelist, who did not expressly contradict them. This circumstance must have much favoured the progress of Christianity. Thus the fathers of the Church, in the two first centuries and later, formed almost all in the school of Alexandria, gave to the Logos of St. John a sense nearly similar to that which it received from Philo.[463] Their doctrine approached very near to that which, in the fourth century, the Council of Nice condemned in the person of Arius.”[464]

It would not be possible, within my present limits, to trace, with a minute accuracy, how the Logos of the schools became connected with the Logos of the Gospel; and afterwards, under the necessity of adjusting these conceptions with the nominal Unity of God, changed its form into the present theory of the Trinity. It will readily be imagined that the Gentile Christians, accustomed to associate ideas of external power with their Deities, and at the same time to contemplate them in connection with humanity, would shrink from the bare and unclothed conception of the crucified Jesus; would endeavour to throw around their new faith a mystic splendour that might protect it from the ridicule of Heathen scoffers, and naturally seize upon means so obvious, the language offered by St. John, and the ideas offered by their own philosophy, to connect the pre-existent soul of Jesus not with Humanity, but with God. In this way they could remove the shame and odium of the cross, that stumbling block to the Jews, and to the Greeks foolishness. We little realize with what distaste and abhorrence a Hebrew looking for the Messiah, and a Philosopher speculating on the nature of the divine Emanations that were the Mediators between God and men, would contemplate the despised Galilean executed as a malefactor. Neither do we realize, as we ought to do in this connection, the magnanimity of Paul: “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified;” so much has the technical jargon of theology overcast the moral sublimity of the Apostle’s spiritual meaning.

I shall now, with as much distinctness as a subject purely literary will admit, attempt to exhibit to you the gradual transformations, by which these Conceptions slowly assumed the present orthodox form of the doctrine of the Trinity. If this had been a doctrine of Revelation, it would, of course, have been perfect at once; but arising out of accidental circumstances and accidental ideas, it naturally required many fresh adjustments to make it consistent with itself, and to protect it, by skilfully chosen words, against all the troublesome attacks of theological ingenuity. This was not the work of a moment nor of a century,—hundreds of years passed over before the doctrine assumed any fixed form; nor was it until the thirteenth century that the present form of the doctrine of three Gods, numerically one, was authoritatively decreed.[465] Those who tell us of an “unimproved and unimprovable Revelation,” must surely be strangely ignorant of the history of Trinitarian Theology.

There are three Creeds of the Church of England, each of them to be referred to distinct Periods of Ecclesiastical History, and becoming more Unitarian in proportion as we approach the Apostolical times, more Trinitarian in proportion as we recede from those times. These three Creeds I shall make serve as heads under which to introduce my proofs of the rise and progress of the Trinitarian Doctrine.

The first Creed is UNITARIAN. It was the only Creed known to the Church for three hundred and twenty-five years.

The second Creed is partly TRINITARIAN, fixing the Deity of Christ, but saying nothing of the Deity of the Holy Spirit.

The third Creed contains Trinitarianism, though not in its final and perfected, yet in its boldest and most extravagant, forms.

The first Creed is known by the name of the Apostles’ Creed. It is not known by whom it was written, nor when it was written;[466] but though we have no verbatim copy of it until after the Nicene Council, but only more or less of the substance, and some of its clauses are evidently of a later date, it may substantially be regarded as descriptive of the faith of the Church at an early age.[467] “The Christian system,” says Mosheim, “as it was hitherto taught, preserved its native and beautiful simplicity, and was comprehended in a small number of articles. The public teachers inculcated no other doctrines than those that are contained in what is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed; and in the method of illustrating them, all vain subtleties, all mysterious researches, everything that was beyond the reach of common capacities, was carefully avoided. This will by no means appear surprising to those who consider that, at this time, there was not the least controversy about those capital doctrines of Christianity which were afterwards so keenly debated in the Church; and who reflect that the bishops of those primitive times were, for the most part, plain and illiterate men, remarkable rather for their piety and zeal than for their learning and eloquence.”—(Eccles. Hist. cent. ii. p. 11. ch. 3.)

Here, then, is the FIRST CREED of the Church, long reverenced as a formula drawn up by the Apostles themselves, and perhaps still by some unwittingly honoured as such. It contains some departures from the simplicity of Gospel language, as in creed-making must necessarily happen; for creeds are required only by those for whom the Scriptures are not sufficiently definite or sufficiently safe. So far as it is a Confession of faith, it demonstrates that the belief of the primitive Church was strictly UNITARIAN.

The Apostles’ Creed.

I believe in GOD (or, as the earlier notices of this Creed have it, “in one God,” also, “one only God the Father Almighty”) the FATHER ALMIGHTY, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried: he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of GOD, the FATHER ALMIGHTY: from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead: I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholic Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.

* * * * *

From the various transformations of this Creed in the pages of Ecclesiastical writers, it is evident that it was not a fixed but a growing formula, and that additions were freely made to it according as the heresies of the time might seem to require the introduction of a new clause. One thing, however, is plain, that the Ages which had their faith stated in this creed had not yet confounded Jesus with God; that he who is simply and solely described as the Son of God, crucified and dying, rising from the grave, and sitting now on the right hand of the Father Almighty, was not yet exalted into the Second Person of the Trinity, equal to God in all things.

Now it is not a little remarkable, that many orthodox writers perceived and deplored the lamentable deficiency of this faith of the primitive Church; and some of them boldly declare, that the Christian Fathers were not yet initiated in these high mysteries. “M. Jurieu,” quoted by Jortin, “whose zeal against heresy is well known, assures us that the fundamental articles of Christianity were not understood by the Fathers of the three first centuries; that the true system began to be modelled into some shape by the Nicene bishops, and was afterwards immensely improved and beautified by the following synods and councils.”[468]

Bishop Bull declares, “that almost all the Catholic writers before Arius’ time seem not to have known any thing of the invisibility and immensity of the Son of God; and that they often speak of him in such a manner as if, even in respect of his divine nature, he was finite, visible, and circumscribed in place.” Such sentiments are only to be paralleled by some passages from these Fathers themselves, who declare that such notions as they had of the divinity of Christ they had derived solely from the Gospel of St. John, and that the other Evangelists had but an obscure knowledge of this subject. “None of them,” says Origen, “disclosed his divinity so purely as John.”[469] “John,” says Eusebius, “commenced with the doctrine of the divinity, that having been reserved by the divine Spirit for him as the most worthy.”[470] And, later, Chrysostom declares that the other Evangelists were like “little children, who hear, but do not understand what they hear, being occupied with cakes and childish playthings;” but John taught, “what the angels themselves did not know before he declared it.” “This doctrine was not published at first, for the world was not advanced to it. Matthew, Mark, and Luke did not state what was suitable to his dignity, but what was fitting for their hearers. John, the Son of Thunder, advanced at last to the doctrine of the divinity.”[471]

I shall now cite some proofs from the Christian writers of the three first centuries, to show that though, in correspondence with Platonic doctrines, a derived and subordinate divinity was ascribed to Jesus, nothing like the present orthodox faith was dreamed of, and that the highest authorities on these subjects, Cudworth for instance, are fully aware that, for nearly four hundred years, the Creeds of the Church embraced nothing more than the Platonic Trinity.

And, first, I shall give one distinct testimony from Origen, to which others might be added from Irenæus and Tertullian, of the Unitarianism of the Jewish Christians:

“And when you consider the faith concerning our Saviour of those of the Jews who believe in Jesus, some thinking him to be the son of Joseph and Mary, and others of Mary only, and the divine Spirit, but still without any belief in his divinity.”[472] “And they of the Jews who have received Jesus as the Christ, go by the name of Ebionites.”[473]

* * * * *

I am next to cite evidence that, for the first three hundred years, the Christian writers acknowledged the inferiority of Jesus to his FATHER, though ascribing to him a derived divinity. It is not until A. D. 140 that we find any very distinct mention even of this description of divinity as belonging to Jesus.[474]

Justin Martyr, A.D. 140.

“I will endeavour to show that he who appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, and who is called God, is different from the God that made all things,—numerically different, though not in will; for I say that he never did any thing but what that GOD WHO MADE ALL THINGS, and above whom there is no god, willed that he should do and say.”[475]

Irenæus, A.D. 178.

“We hold the Rule of Truth, that there is ONE GOD ALMIGHTY, who created all things by his Logos.” ... “This is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; and of Him it is that Paul declared, There is ONE GOD, even the FATHER, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.”[476]

Clemens Alexandrinus, A.D. 194.

“There is one unbegotten almighty FATHER, and one first begotten, by whom all things were, and without whom nothing was made. For one is truly God, who made the beginning of all things, meaning his first-begotten son.”[477]

Tertullian, A.D. 200.

“I do not speak of Gods and Lords; but I follow the Apostle; so that if the Father and the Son are to be named together, I call the Father God, and Jesus Christ Lord: though I can call Christ God when speaking of himself alone.” And he goes on to explain this by declaring, that a ray of the sun may, with sufficient propriety, be called the sun.[478]

Origen, A.D. 230.

“We may by this means solve the doubts which terrify many men, who pretend to great piety, and who are afraid of making two Gods, and, through this, fall into vain and impious opinions; denying that the nature of the Son is different from that of the Father, and who acknowledge that he is God in name only; or denying the divinity of the Son, and then maintaining that his nature and essence is different from that of the Father. For we must tell them that he who is God of himself, is THE God, as the Saviour states in his prayer to the Father, ‘that they may know thee, THE only true God;’ but that whosoever becomes divine by partaking of his divinity, cannot be styled THE God, but a God, among whom especially is the first born of all creatures.”[479]

Novatian, A.D. 251.

“He, although he was in the form of God, did not think of the robbery of being equal with God. For though he knew that he was God, from God the Father, he never likened or compared himself with God the Father, remembering that he was from the Father, and that he had what he had because the Father had given it to him.”[480]

Lactantius, A.D. 310.

“He showed his fidelity to God, in that he taught that there is ONE GOD, and that he alone ought to be worshipped. Nor did he ever say that he himself was God. For he would not have preserved his fidelity if, being sent to take away a number of gods, and to assert ONE GOD, he had introduced another besides that one. Wherefore, because he was so faithful, because he arrogated nothing to himself, that he might fulfil the commands of Him who sent him, he received the dignity of perpetual priest, and the honour of Supreme King, the power of a judge, and the title of God.”[481]

And not inconveniently to multiply evidence, let us come at once to the very orthodox Athanasius himself, and we shall find how little this Father knew of the nice adjustments of that Creed which now passes under his name.

Athanasius, A.D. 325.

“For there is one God, and there is not another besides Him. When it is said that the Father is the only God, that he is one God, ‘I am the FIRST,’ and ‘I am the LAST,’ it is well said. This is not said, however, to take away from the Son; for he also is in THE ONE, FIRST, and ONLY ONE, as being the only Logos, Wisdom, and Effulgence of him who is THE ONE, and THE ALONE, and THE SUPREME.”[482]

“And Athanasius himself, who is commonly accounted the very Rule of Orthodoxality in this point, when he doth so often resemble the Father to the Sun, or the original Light; and the Son to the splendour or brightness of it, (as likewise doth the Nicene Council and the Scripture itself,) he seems hereby to imply some dependence of the Second upon the First, and subordination to it. Especially when he declareth, that the Three Persons of the Trinity are not to be looked upon as Three Principles, nor to be resembled to Three Suns, but to the Sun, and its splendour, and its derivative light.”[483]

Now I may sum up the impression of these passages in the words of the very learned Cudworth:—“But particularly as to their gradual subordination of the Second Hypostasis to the First, and of the Third to the First and Second, our Platonick Christian doubtless would therefore plead them the more excusable, because the generality of Christian Doctors, for the first three hundred years after the Apostles’ times, plainly asserted the same; as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatianus, Irenæus, the Author of the Recognitions, Tertullian, Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, Gregorius Thaumaturgus, Dionysius of Alexandria, Lactantius, and many others. All whose testimonies, because it would be too tedious to set down here, we shall content ourselves with one of the last mentioned;—‘Both the Father and Son is God: but he as it were an exuberant fountain, this as a stream derived from him: He like to the sun, this like to a ray extended from the sun.’ And though it be true, that Athanasius, writing against the Arians, does appeal to the tradition of the antient Church, and amongst others cites Origen’s testimony too; yet this was only for the Eternity and Divinity of the Son of God, but not at all for such an absolute co-equality of him with the Father as would exclude all dependence, subordination, and inferiority;[484] those antients so unanimously agreeing therein, that they are by Petavius therefore taxed for Platonism, and having by that means corrupted the purity of the Christian Faith, in this article of the Trinity. Which how it can be reconciled with those other opinions, of Ecclesiastic Tradition being a Rule of Faith, and impossibility of the visible Churches erring in any fundamental point, cannot easily be understood. However, this general Tradition, or Consent of the Christian Church, for three hundred years together after the Apostles’ times, though it cannot justify the Platonists in anything discrepant from the Scripture, yet may it in some measure doubtless plead their excuse, who had no Scripture Revelation at all to guide them herein; and so at least make their error more tolerable or pardonable.”[485]

We come now to a time when these floating and indefinite conceptions were to assume more fixed forms. It is apparent that so far the Christian Fathers fluctuated between their desire to exalt Jesus into the Logos of God, and the restraining fear of adopting ideas or expressions not reconcilable with the strict unity of the Deity. “The suspense and fluctuation,” says Gibbon, “produced in the minds of the Christians by these opposite tendencies, may be observed in the writings of the theologians who flourished after the end of the apostolic age, and before the origin of the Arian controversy. Their suffrage is claimed with equal confidence by the orthodox and by the heretical parties; and the most inquisitive critics have fairly allowed that if they had the good fortune of possessing the Catholic Verity, they have delivered their conceptions in loose, inaccurate, and sometimes contradictory language.” Ideas so naturally irreconcilable, as Jesus when contemplated as the Son of God, and Jesus when contemplated as the Wisdom of God (Logos), with personality attached to it, were certain sooner or later to betray their inconsistency, and to stand out from one another in opposing attitudes. They could be held in combination only so long as two very strong but opposite influences, (a desire to meet the conceptions of the prevalent Philosophy, and a desire at the same time to preserve unviolated the Jewish and Christian doctrine of the Unity of God,) operated together to prevent theologians looking too closely into their Faith, or attempting too strictly to harmonize its elements.

The elements of a necessary separation existed in that confused system by which the earlier Fathers brought together Jesus the Christ, and the Logos of the purer Platonists, into the same conception; some of them inclining to the idea of the Son of God being an eternal emanation from the Father, like light from the sun, veiling the difficulty of a Son being co-eternal with his Father under the unmeaning phrase, ‘everlasting generation’—and some adopting the lower view that he was only the highest emanation from the origin of all Spirits, the first of created Beings, and the instrument of God in all the other works of Creation. “These speculations,” says Gibbon, “became the most serious business of the present, and most useful preparation for a future life. A theology which it was incumbent to believe, which it was impious to doubt, and which it might be dangerous and even fatal to mistake, became the familiar topic of private meditation and popular discourse.[486] The cold indifference of philosophy was inflamed by the fervent spirit of devotion; and even the metaphors of common language suggested the fallacious prejudices of sense and experience. The Christians, who abhorred the gross and impure generation of the Greek mythology, were tempted to argue from the familiar analogy of the filial and paternal relations. The character of Son seemed to imply a perpetual subordination to the voluntary author of his existence; but as the act of generation in the most spiritual and abstracted sense, must be supposed to transmit the properties of a common nature, they durst not presume to circumscribe the powers or the duration of the Son of an eternal and omnipotent Father.—Their tender reverence for the memory of Christ, and their horror for the profane worship of any created being, would have engaged them to assert the equal and absolute divinity of the Logos, if their rapid ascent toward the throne of heaven had not been imperceptibly checked by the apprehension of violating the unity and sole supremacy of the great Father of Christ and of the Universe.”

Christ, when viewed as the Wisdom or Logos of God, was by a natural transition of thought placed within the effulgence of the divine glory; but when viewed not as an Attribute but as a Person, the Son and Messiah of the Father, this dim idea would pass away, and the distinction between God and Christ become too visible to be confused. In this state of opinion two parties naturally appeared, separating the two ideas that entered into the prevalent conception of Christ, each taking up one of them as representing the whole truth respecting his nature and person. The Arians, alarmed at the idea of two Gods, inclined to that part of the conception which represented Jesus as the Son and Messenger of the Father, but at the same time elevating him above all other created beings, and giving him an existence before the worlds were. The Athanasians, on the other hand, inclined to that part of the conception which represented him as the Logos of the Deity, and under the reaction, and the necessity for more strictly defining the hidden sense of doctrines, produced by the Arian Creed, attempted to conquer the difficulty of his Sonship by representing him as an eternal emanation from the very substance of the Deity, and exalted him into an equality with God, though at the same time they described it as a derived and subordinate equality. It is unavoidable in describing these views to make use of contradictory words. The ideas are irreconcilable, and were only saved from plainly appearing so by being involved in a cloud of mystical or rather no meaning words; for words must either be significant of ideas, or no-sense. This then was the subject of the great Arian and Trinitarian Controversy, which in the fourth Century shook the peace of the world. It turned upon this point, whether Christ was of the same essence as the Father, and therefore not created but begotten or emanating; or whether he was as the Arians thought, made out of nothing, and therefore a created Being. Neither of them contemplated him as independent of the Supreme Deity, but the Athanasians regarded him as a con-substantial and co-eternal emanation; the Arians, though assigning him the highest rank, regarded him as created like other beings. Such are the great questions of a metaphysical and dogmatical religion. Such are the mysteries on which Synods and Councils have legislated. Such are the subjects in which Ecclesiastics have shown more interest than in the spirit of the life of Christ, and the moral hopes and preparations of Immortality. Such are the subject matter of Creeds, the dry husks of doctrine, the spiritless formulas on which souls are starved, the bread of Christ converted into a stone, and yet in the eyes of many, superior to practical discipleship, to Charity and the Love of God, to the spirit of Brotherhood and the trustful faith of Duty.

It was to settle this dispute that the first general Council of the Church was assembled at Nice A. D. 325. The Emperor Constantine attended in person. He had previously remonstrated with the contending parties, and entreated them not to disturb the peace of the Empire and of the Church, for matters the most insignificant and small.[487] But he did not know the temper of Controversialists; nor what things become important in their eyes.[488] The Athanasians prevailed, and “the con-substantiality of the Father and the Son was established by the Council of Nice.” Under this word however lurked future Controversies, and by con-substantiality the Council of Nice meant, not the present doctrine of three persons in one God, but merely sameness of nature or kind, such a sameness as three men may possess who are generically the same but numerically different; and this is openly admitted by the highest authorities, Petavius, Cudworth, Le Clerc, Jortin. “The majority,” says Gibbon, “was divided into two parties, distinguished by a contrary tendency to the sentiments of the Tritheists, and of the Sabellians. But as those opposite extremes seemed to overthrow the foundations either of natural or revealed religion, they mutually agreed to qualify the rigour of their principles; and to disavow the just, but invidious, consequences which might be urged by their antagonists. The interest of the common cause inclined them to join their numbers, and to conceal their differences; their animosities were softened by the healing counsels of toleration, and their disputes were suspended by the use of the mysterious Homoousion (Consubstantial), which either party was free to interpret according to their peculiar tenets. The Sabellian sense, which about fifty years before had obliged the Council of Antioch to prohibit this celebrated term, had endeared it to those theologians who entertained a secret but partial affection for a nominal Trinity. But the more fashionable saints of the Arian times, the intrepid Athanasius, the learned Gregory Nazianzen, and the other pillars of the Church, who supported with ability and success the Nicene doctrine, appeared to consider the expression of substance as if it had been synonymous with that of nature; and they ventured to illustrate their meaning, by affirming that three men, as they belong to the same common species, are con-substantial or homoousian to each other. This pure and distinct equality was tempered on the one hand by the internal connection, and spiritual penetration, which indissolubly unites the divine persons, and on the other by the pre-eminence of the Father, which was acknowledged as far as it is compatible with the independence of the son. Within these limits the almost invisible and tremulous ball of Orthodoxy was allowed securely to vibrate. On either side beyond this consecrated ground the heretics and the dæmons lurked in ambush to surprise and devour the unhappy wanderer. But as the degrees of theological hatred depend on the Spirit of the war, rather than on the importance of the Controversy, the heretics who degraded, were treated with more severity than those who annihilated the person of the Son.”[489]

We are now arrived at that great period in the faith of the Church, when the dignity of the Son was authoritatively settled by the Nicene Council. Here is a brief account of its proceedings. “The Bishops began by much personal dissension, and presented to the Emperor a variety of written accusations against each other; the Emperor burnt all their libels and exhorted them to peace and unity. They then proceeded to examine the momentous question proposed to them. It was soon discovered that the differences which it was intended to reconcile might in their principle be reduced to one point, and that point might be expressed by one word, and thus the question appears to have been speedily simplified (as indeed was necessary that so many persons might come to one conclusion on so mysterious a subject) and reduced to this—whether the Son was or was not consubstantial with the Father. Then arose subtile disceptations respecting the meaning of the word, ‘about which some conflicted with each other, dwelling on the term and minutely dissecting it; it was like a battle fought in the dark; for neither party seemed at all to understand on what ground they vilified each other.’ However the result was perfectly conclusive; they finally decided against the Arian opinions, and established respecting the two first persons in the Trinity, the doctrine which the Church still professes in the Nicene Creed.”[490]

This doctrine is as follows:—you will perceive that it is partly Trinitarian, and only partly, a derived deity being attributed to the Son, and no deity whatsoever attributed to the Holy Spirit. Changes were afterwards introduced into this Creed to adapt it to the growing orthodoxy of the times. I shall mention these in their proper places; meanwhile I give the Nicene Creed of the Nicene Council:—

The Nicene Creed, A.D. 325.

“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten and only begotten of the Father; that is of the substance of the Father, God of (out of) God, Light of (from) Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father, by whom all things were made both in heaven and in earth: who for us men, and for our salvation, descended and was incarnate, and was made man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead. (We believe) also in the Holy Ghost.

“The holy Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes those who say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, and that before he was begotten he was not, and that he was made out of nothing, or out of another substance or essence, and is created, changeable, or alterable.”

“Such,” says Jortin, “was the Nicene Creed, as it stood originally and before it was interpolated by subsequent Councils. Our church hath dropped the anathematizing clauses at the end, and one cannot help wishing that the Nicene Fathers had done the same. The Christians in times following were perpetually making anathematisms, even upon the slightest and poorest occasions; and it is really a wonder that they did not at last insert in their Litanies, ‘We beseech Thee to curse and confound the Pelagians, Semi-pelagians, Nestorians, Eutychians, Monothelites, Jacobites, Iconoclasts, and all heretics and schismatics.’”[491]

The history of the fourth century is almost entirely taken up with the persecutions of Consubstantialists against Arians, Arians against Consubstantialists, and the minor strifes of the subdivisions of these sects. After the death of Constantine, the Emperor Constantius sided with the Arians, and then the persecuted became the persecutors, for wherever a dogmatical Religion is held, wherever Creeds are the Essentials of Salvation, of course no Charity can be learned in the School of Suffering. There is an admirable passage contained in Archdeacon Jortin’s most instructive remarks on Ecclesiastical History. It extorts a smile to observe with what unconsciousness dogmatic Theologians of all ages insult their fellow-disciples, in the name and for the love of God, and close their acts of persecution with the words of affection and blessing:—

“In the fourth century were held thirteen Councils against Arius, fifteen for him, and seventeen for the Semiarians; in all forty-five.[492]

“How could the Arians, in the time of Constantius and Valens, bring themselves to such an un-christian persecuting temper? How could they oppress their fellow-Christians, the Consubstantialists, who, supposing them to have been in error, fell into it through a religious fear of ascribing too little to their Redeemer, and of not paying him sufficient honour? Can a man love his saviour, and hate his brother for a mistake of this kind?

“And how could the Consubstantialists persuade themselves that an Arian, who perhaps had suffered for professing Christianity in times of distress, who believed Christ to be his Maker, his Saviour, his King, and his Judge, would choose to detract from his dignity, and to offend him in whom he placed all his hopes of salvation? Human nature is not capable of this folly; and if the man were in an error, yet in such a person the error must have been involuntary, a mere defect of the understanding, and not a fault of the will.

“A Christian and a lover of peace, who lived in obscurity, and whose name I cannot tell, stood up and said:—‘My brethren, the things to be believed are few, the things to be done are many: but you behave yourselves as if the reverse of this were true. St. Paul tells you, “The grace of God that bringeth Salvation hath appeared to all men; teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world, looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearance of the great God, and (of) our Saviour, Jesus Christ.” Concerning the nature of Jesus you can dispute incessantly, and concerning the word Grace, you will probably dispute no less; but the rest of the sentence you disregard as of small consequence or importance. What, I beseech you, must the Jews and the Pagans conceive of you and of your religion? And what do the holy angels think, who look down upon your contentions? Those blessed and compassionate spirits pity you, and think you mere children. But when from contending you proceed to beating your fellow-servants, to persecuting and destroying, they consider you as most malicious and wicked children; their pity is changed into indignation, and they would strike you dead, if the Supreme Governor did not stay their hand, and remind them that such disorders must needs arise, and shall one day be rectified.’

“So said this Unknown; but behold the consequence! The Consubstantialists called him an Arian, and the Arians called him a Consubstantialist.

“The Nicene Fathers having anathematized the Arians, the Emperor seconded them, and banished Arius and the bishops who sided with him, and ordered the books of Arius to be burnt; and added, ‘If any man be found to have concealed a copy of those books, and not to have instantly produced it and thrown it into the fire, he shall be put to death. The Lord be with you all!’”[493]—(Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 205.)

I shall now summon two authorities, the one Cudworth, the other Jortin, to prove that the Nicene Fathers had no knowledge of the present doctrine of the Trinity, and that they believed Christ to be the same with God, not numerically, but as partaking of the same nature, belonging to the same class of beings:—“Wherefore it seemeth to be unquestionably evident, that when the ancient orthodox Fathers of the Christian Church maintained against Arius, the Son to be Co-essential or Consubstantial with the Father, though the word be thus interpreted, of the same essence or substance, yet they universally understood thereby, not a sameness of singular and numerical, but of common or universal essence only; that is the generical or specifical Essence of the Godhead; that the Son was no Creature, but truly and properly God.” * * *

“We have now given a full account of the true and genuine Platonic Trinity; from which it may clearly appear, how far it either agreeth or disagreeth with the Christian. First, therefore, though some of the later Platonists have partly misunderstood, and partly adulterated that ancient Cabala of the Trinity, as was before declared, confounding therein the differences between God and the Creature, and thereby laying a foundation for infinite Polytheism; yet did Plato himself and some of his genuine followers, (though living before Christianity,) approach so near to the doctrine thereof, as in some manner to correspond therewith.” ... “From whence it may be concluded, that as Arianism is commonly supposed to approach nearer to the truth of Christianity than Photinianism, so is Platonism undoubtedly more agreeable thereunto than Arianism, it being a certain middle thing, betwixt that and Sabellianism, which in general was that mark that the Nicene Council also aimed at.”

This is more fully explained in the next extract:—

“Athanasius in sundry places still further supposes those three divine hypostases to make up one entire divinity, after the same manner as the Fountain and the Stream make up one entire river; or the root, and the stock, and the branches, one entire tree. And in this sense also is the whole Trinity said by him to be one Divinity, and one Nature, and one Essence, and one God. And accordingly, the word Homoousios (Consubstantial) seems here to be taken by Athanasius in a further sense besides that before mentioned; not only for things agreeing in one common and general essence, as Three individual men are co-essential with one another; but also for such as concurrently together, make up one entire thing, and are therefore jointly essential thereunto.—In all which doctrine of his there is nothing but what a true and genuine Platonist would readily subscribe to. From whence it may be concluded, that the right Platonic Trinity differs not so much from the doctrine of the Ancient Church, as some late writers have supposed.”—(Intellec. Sys. p. 591, 608, 619-20.)[494]

“But here it will be asked, perhaps, what was the doctrine of the Nicene Fathers, and what did they mean by Consubstantiality. It is impossible to answer this question without using logical and metaphysical terms.

“By the word Consubstantial, they meant not of the same numerical, or individual substance, but of the same generical substance or subsistence. As, amongst men, a son is consubstantial with his father; so, in their opinion, the Son of God is consubstantial with the Father, that is, of the same divine nature.

“By this word therefore they intended to express the same kind of nature, and so far, a natural equality. But according to them, this natural equality excluded not a relative inequality; a majority and minority, founded upon the everlasting difference between giving and receiving, causing, and being caused.

“They had no notion of distinguishing between person and being, between an intelligent agent, and an intelligent active substance, subsistence, or entity.

“When they said that the Father was God, they meant that he was God of himself, originally, and underived.

“When they said that the Son was God, they meant that he was God by generation or derivation.

“The Unity of God they maintained, and they defended it, first, by considering the Father as the First Cause, the only underived and self-existing; secondly, by supposing an intimate, inseparable, and incomprehensible union, connection, indwelling, and co-existence, by which the Father was in the Son, and the Son in the Father; and thirdly, by saying that in the Father and the Son there was an unity of will, design, and consent, and one divine power and dominion, originally in the Father, and derivatively in the Son.

“In process of time, Christians went into a notion that the Son was ‘of the same individual substance with the Father, and with the Holy Spirit,’ and they seem to have done this with a view to secure the doctrine of the Unity.

“The schoolmen took up the subject, and treated it in their way, which they call explaining, and which men of sense call impenetrable jargon.”—(Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 202.)

You will observe, that so far no mention had been made of the separate deity of the Holy Spirit. The original Nicene Creed is silent upon the subject. It was a question that grew out of the deity of Christ. The philosophy of the times, no less than the reluctance to be deemed the followers of a crucified man, led to the deification of Jesus, and afterwards, from the personifications of the Holy Spirit, in such expressions as “I will send unto you the Comforter, even the Spirit of Truth,” and from its frequent connection with the name and mission of Christ, arose the idea of a separate divinity, a third person in the Trinity. The Platonic Trinity would indeed have naturally led the early Fathers to the conception of a third principle, and in some of the Anti-Nicene Writers this conception appears; but the Controversy was carried on with almost exclusive reference to the deity of Christ, which independent of the general burden of their writings, clearly appears from the fact, that when defending themselves against the charge of violating the Unity of God, they always state the objection, so as to show that the accusation against them was that they were “introducing a second God.”

Accordingly it was after the Council at Nice, when the deity of the Son was established, that orthodoxy took a second and consequent step, and proceeded to establish the deity of the third person in the Trinity.[495]

This was effected towards the close of the fourth century, A.D. 381, by the Second General Council, that of Constantinople, when the following addition was made to the previously deficient orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed had simply stated, “We believe in the Holy Ghost.” The Council of Constantinople rectified the error thus: “We believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life; who proceedeth from the Father; who with the Father and Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spake by the prophets.” Still, however, the adjustments were not correct, nor the formula of perfect orthodoxy. It occurred to the Church, centuries after, that the Holy Spirit was described in the Scriptures as being dependent not upon the Father alone, but as being “sent” by the Son; and that therefore the Third Person must hold that relation to the Second which the Second did to the Third, and must therefore be derived not from the Father alone, but from the Father and Son together.[496] Accordingly this new idea, essential to Salvation, was included in the formula so long in this respect defective, with what fatal consequences we are not told; and at last, in the ninth century, a perfectly accurate and saving description of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son was embodied in the Nicene Creed, some five hundred years after its first construction. So slowly did the “unimproved and unimprovable revelation” of dogmatic divines advance to its perfection. Yet we are gravely told of the faith of the Church,—a faith human all over; and of the traditions of Christian antiquity,—traditions whose origin we can trace at a great distance from apostolic times, and whose constant increase, in proportion as we recede from those times, would seem to imply that the further Councils of the Church were removed from the Apostles the more they knew about them—the accuracy of inspired Tradition differing, as of course it should, from common Memory and common History, by being in an inverse ratio to the distance. This is no subject for ridicule; but only the sacred feelings and high themes that are necessarily associated with such extravagance, have so long saved it from the most merciless exposure. Those solemn themes, the awe and loveliness of which Ecclesiastical History has done its best to lower and degrade, have yet repaid the disservice by dropping something of their own solemnity on its unworthy pages, and by taking every thing that is associated with God and Christ within the protection of the sentiment of reverence, have shielded Ecclesiastical History from that unsparing criticism which perhaps would have been more serviceable to Truth, and productive of a reverence higher and more profitable towards both Christ and God.

In the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, the settlement of one Controversy always gave birth to another, in the progressive attempt to make mysteries intelligible. The deity of Christ naturally gave rise to some curiosity respecting the humanity of Christ. Hitherto all parties, Arians, Athanasians, and Unitarians, according to their respective views, had for the most part agreed that the Christ consisted of one body and one spirit; and their controversies related simply to the rank and nature of that spirit. The Arians believed the soul of Jesus to be the first of created intelligences, the highest Emanation from God. The Platonic Christians thought that the Logos used instrumentally the body of Jesus, and supplied the place of a human soul. When the Council of Nice, however, established that the spirit of Jesus was consubstantial with that of God, the idea naturally presented itself that, since Jesus expired upon the cross, this was to represent the divine nature as capable of suffering and death. Now those who were the most orthodox, whose views and language receded to the extremest distance from those of the heretical Arians, would necessarily fall into modes of conception and expression which implied this revolting extravagance. Accordingly Apollinaris, one of the most zealous Athanasians, and the bitter enemy of Arius, freely, and unconscious of heresy, followed out his principles with perverse consistency, and openly spoke of the Logos of God supplying the place of a human soul in the body of Christ; and, of course, undergoing all that a spirit, so situated, could suffer.[497] But so narrow is the way of orthodoxy, that the zealous Father was made quickly to discover that by starting aside from one heresy, only a little too sharply, he had immediately fallen into another; for the pitfalls of damnable error lie upon each side of the hair-breadth way of Salvation. By pursuing too exclusively the deity of Christ, Apollinaris overlooked his humanity, and taught the heresy of “one incarnate nature,” and the consequent sufferings and death of God. This impious extreme, being condemned by the Asiatic Church, though popular in Egypt, orthodoxy naturally took a rebound; and Apollinaris, having confused the two natures into one, Nestorius separated them into two, to such an extent, as virtually to destroy the mystical union. Here was another and an opposite heresy equally fatal to the orthodoxy of the Church and the salvation of mankind; for if such was the loose connection of the two natures, then, God being incapable of suffering, only the human nature of Jesus underwent crucifixion and death. But, on the other hand, if this was so, then the sufferings of Christ were only those of a man; and all the mystery of the Incarnation was dissipated, and became ineffectual for any theological purpose.

A new controversy consequently arose, respecting the right adjustments of these saving connections between the humanity and the deity of the Christ. “Before this time,” says Mosheim, “it had been settled by the decrees of former Councils, that Christ was truly God and truly man; but there had as yet been no controversy, and no decision of any council, concerning the mode and effect of the union of the two natures in Christ. In consequence, there was a want of agreement among the Christian Teachers in their language concerning this mystery.” This controversy, which, for some time had been carried on without attracting towards it definitively the public authorities of the Church, drew at last the eager notice of all Christendom; when Nestorius, the Prelate of Constantinople, carried the distinction between the two natures to so definite a point as to deny that the Virgin Mary could, with any propriety, be denominated the “Mother of God;” and that her titles should be limited to that of “Mother of Christ” or “Mother of Man.” This was regarded, by the orthodox, as reducing the death of Christ to that of a mere man, and the mystery of the Incarnation to little better than a trick of words. It was no easy matter in those times to avoid, on the one hand, confounding the two natures; and, on the other, separating them so distinctly as to destroy the whole theological value of the mystical combination: nor have modern Theologians been more successful in adjusting this puzzle than their perplexed and perplexing predecessors.

The chief alarmist upon this occasion of the heresy of Nestorius was Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, an arrogant and aspiring man, who gladly seized upon a tempting opportunity to humble his rival, the bishop of Constantinople. “Some jealousy which at that time subsisted respecting the relative dignity of the two sees, probably heightened the contention, and is believed by some to have caused it. Whether that be or not, the two Patriarchs anathematized each other with mutual violence; and such troubles were raised that the Emperor (Theodosius the younger) deemed it necessary to convoke a General Council for the purpose of appeasing them. It was assembled at Ephesus A.D. 431, and stands in the annals of the Church as the THIRD GENERAL COUNCIL. Cyril was appointed to preside, and consequently to judge the cause of his adversary: and he carried into this office such little show of impartiality, that he refused even to wait for the arrival of the bishop of Antioch and others, who were held friendly to Nestorius, and proceeded to pronounce sentence, while the meeting was yet incomplete. To secure or prosecute his advantages, he had brought with him from Egypt a number of robust and daring fanatics, who acted as his soldiery; and it had been skilfully arranged that Ephesus should be chosen for the decision of a difference respecting the dignity of the Virgin; since popular tradition had buried her in that city, and the imperfect Christianity of its inhabitants had readily transferred to her the worship which their ancestors had offered to Diana.”[498]

Such are the assemblies from which our Creeds date their birth; by whose authority the Rule of Faith was determined; and whose character is described in the words of the Emperor Theodosius when dismissing this very Council of Ephesus—“God is my witness, that I am not the author of this confusion. His providence will discern and punish the guilty. Return to your provinces; and may your private virtues repair the mischief and scandal of your meeting.” At this council it was decreed, by bishops who could not write their own names,[499] that the Union of the human and divine nature in Christ was so intimate that Mary might properly be called the Mother of God. The influence of Cyril prevailed chiefly by intimidating the bishops and bribing the imperial household. “Thanks to the purse of St. Cyril,” says Le Clerc, “the Romish Church which regards Councils as infallible, is not, at the present day, Nestorian.” “The Creeds of Protestants are equally indebted to St. Cyril for their purity.”[500]

The triumphant opponents of Nestorius, as is invariably found in the history of Church Controversies, pushed their triumph to such an excess, as to fall into the opposite error, and revived the formerly condemned heresy of Apollinaris, of the incarnation of but one nature. Eutyches the friend of St. Cyril and the bitter enemy of Nestorius, openly preached “that in Christ there was but one nature, that of the incarnate Word.” The Church was again in a blaze, and again the Emperor summoned a Council at Ephesus, A.D. 449, over which presided Dioscorus, the successor of St. Cyril as Patriarch of Alexandria. Here the sentence of the last Council was reversed, and Orthodoxy was pronounced to be the doctrine of one divine nature in Christ, and only one. This Council, however, owing principally to the opposition made to it by the Bishop of Rome, was never authoritatively recognized by the Church, and such was its character for tumult and brutality that it is marked in Ecclesiastical History by the expressive name of the Assembly of Banditti.

Speedily then was this heresy, inconveniently sanctioned by a Council of the Church, of only one nature in Christ, which in effect represented God as subject to suffering and death, replaced by the orthodoxy of two natures in one person, which was attended, however, with the opposite difficulty of so separating the God from the Man as to nullify the mystical efficacy of his sufferings.[501] But who will devise a form of words in which irreconcilable ideas shall be reconciled, and no weak point be exposed in the skilful statement of a fiction? THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL of the Church was held at Chalcedon, A.D. 451. There are two things most remarkable respecting this Council; first—that it declared Jesus to be of the same essence with God as to his divine nature, only in the sense in which he was of the same essence with other men as to his human nature, thus denying his numerical oneness with God, and merely referring him to the same class of Beings, making him generically one, as two men are;[502] and secondly—that though the majority of the Bishops favoured the doctrine of one nature, they were obliged by the obstinacy of the Emperor Marcian, in conjunction with the Bishop of Rome, to reverse at one of their sittings their decision at a former, and finally to decree that orthodoxy consisted in believing “Jesus Christ to be one person in two distinct natures, without any confusion or mixture.” “It was in vain,” says Gibbon, “that a multitude of episcopal voices (the advocates for only one nature) repeated in chorus ‘The definition of the Fathers is orthodox and immutable! The heretics are now discovered! Anathema to the Nestorians! Let them depart from the synod! Let them repair to Rome!’ The Legates threatened, the Emperor was absolute, and a committee of eighteen bishops prepared a new decree, which was imposed on the reluctant assembly. In the name of the fourth general Council, the Christ in one person, but in two natures, was announced to the Catholic world: an invisible line was drawn between the heresy of Apollinaris and the faith of St. Cyril; and the road to paradise, a bridge as sharp as a razor, was suspended over the abyss by the master hand of the theological artist. During ten centuries of blindness and servitude, Europe received her religious opinions from the Oracle of the Vatican; and the same doctrine, already varnished with the rust of antiquity, was admitted without dispute into the creed of the Reformers, who disclaimed the supremacy of the Roman pontiff. The synod of Chalcedon still triumphs in the Protestant churches; but the ferment of controversy has subsided, and the most pious Christians of the present day are ignorant, or careless, of their own belief concerning the mystery of the incarnation.”[503]

Still the great difficulty pressed upon this decision, that the God was so separable from the man as to destroy the mystical value of the incarnation with respect to the sufferings of Jesus. A resource was found, (for when are Theologians without resources?) in what has been called the doctrine of the Communication of Properties, which meant that though God was incapable of sufferings or death, yet that through the mystical union of the human and divine, there might be a transmission of qualities from the one to the other, so as to attach an infinite efficacy to the sufferings and death of the human part of the compound Christ. “The doctrine of the Communication of Properties,” says Le Clerc, “is as intelligible as if one were to say, that there is a circle which is so united with a triangle, that the circle has the properties of the triangle, and the triangle those of the circle.” “What sense those who have asserted the sufferings of God have fancied that the words might have, is a question which, after all that has been written upon the subject, is left very much to conjecture. I imagine that it is at the present day, the gross conception of some who think themselves orthodox on this point, that the divine and human natures being united in Christ as the Mediator, a compound nature different from either, capable of suffering, was thus formed.”[504]

I have now detailed the progress of the doctrine of the Trinity, as it gained accessions from the various controversies that arose out of the Nicene Creed. We come now to the THIRD CREED of the English Church, that of Athanasius. Orthodoxy in this creed approaches to its perfection of precise, if not intelligible, statements; though, strange to say, we shall find that even here something of completeness is wanting, and that the later schemes of the Trinity have corrected the Athanasian formula, as dwelling too much upon the derived nature of the Son, and not asserting with sufficient force his independent identity.

No general Council of the Church established the Athanasian creed; nor does any one know who wrote it, nor when it was first introduced. From one of its clauses, the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and Son, which secret was not made known to the Church until the eighth century, it becomes evident that this theological paradox proceeded from the ingenuity of some monk of the dark ages. The whole force of this Creed depends upon two distinctions, which I presume no one can perceive, between “created” and “begotten,” and between “begotten” and “proceeding.” The Son is not created but begotten—and the Holy Ghost is not begotten but proceeding. And this is saving truth! food for the Soul! the heavenly light sent from God to refresh man’s inner spirit, and to fill him with the aspirations after perfection, which in this world of temptation are to keep him true to his immortal destinies, to connect him with his Example and Fore-runner, once tried upon the Earth, now peaceful amid the skies! To one asking, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” the answer of Jesus addressed itself to the spiritual life of the disciple, but the answer of the Church of England addresses itself to a perception of certain metaphysical distinctions, and is contained in that creed which “unless a man keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.”

The Athanasian Creed. (A.D. 500-800.)

Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith.

Which Faith, except every one do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

And the Catholick Faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;

Neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance.

For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost.

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.

Such as the Father is, such is the Son: and such is the Holy Ghost.

The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate: and the Holy Ghost uncreate.

The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible: and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.

The Father eternal, the Son eternal: and the Holy Ghost eternal.

And yet they are not three eternals: but one eternal.

As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated: but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.

So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty: and the Holy Ghost Almighty.

And yet they are not three Almighties: but one Almighty.

So the Father is God, the Son is God: and the Holy Ghost is God.

And yet they are not three Gods: but one God.

So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord: and the Holy Ghost Lord.

And yet not three Lords: but one Lord.

For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity: to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord;

So are we forbidden by the Catholick Religion: to say, There be three Gods, or three Lords.

The Father is made of none: neither created, nor begotten.

The Son is of the Father alone: not made, nor created, but begotten.

The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son: neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.

So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons: one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.

And in this Trinity none is afore, or after other: none is greater, or less than another;

But the whole three Persons are co-eternal together: and co-equal.

So that in all things, as is aforesaid: the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity, is to be worshipped.

He therefore that will be saved: must thus think of the Trinity.

Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation: that he also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;

God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world;

Perfect God, and perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;

Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.

Who although he be God and Man: yet he is not two, but one Christ;

One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God;

One altogether; not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person.

For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man: so God and Man is one Christ;

Who suffered for our salvation: descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead.

He ascended into heaven, he sitteth on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty: from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies: and shall give account for their own works.

And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.

This is the Catholick Faith: which, except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.

I shall now give you the history and character of this Athanasian Creed in the words of Waddington, one of the ablest Ecclesiastical Historians, I might say the ablest, for Jortin did not pretend to write a History, that the Church of England has produced. You will recollect that one of the Lectures, to be delivered at Christ Church, announces “the Athanasian Creed to be explained and defended.” Without wishing to anticipate that Lecture, hear now, and recollect then, the opposing voices of the Church.

“Before we take leave of this period, (from A.D. 600, to A.D. 800,) it is proper to mention, that the first appearance of the Creed, commonly called Athanasian, is ascribed to it with great probability. There can be no doubt that this exposition of faith was composed in the West, and in Latin; but the exact date of its composition has been the subject of much difference. The very definite terms, in which it expresses the Church doctrine of the Incarnation, are sufficient to prove it posterior to the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, or later than the middle of the fifth century.[505] Again, if we are to consider the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit, as being expressly declared in it, since that mystery was scarcely made matter of public controversy until the eighth century, it might seem difficult to refer a creed, positively asserting the more recent doctrine, to an earlier age. But the historical monuments of the Church do not quite support this supposition; the Creed, such probably as it now exists, is mentioned by the Council of Autun, in the year 670, and its faithful repetition by the Clergy enjoined; and we find the same injunction repeated in the beginning of the ninth age. Thus it gradually gained ground; nevertheless there seems to be great reason for the opinion, that it was not universally received even in the western church until nearly two centuries afterwards.

“Considered as an exposition of doctrine, the Athanasian Creed contains a faithful summary of the high mysteries of Christianity as interpreted by the Church of Rome. Considered as a rule of necessary faith enforced by the penalty of Eternal Condemnation, the same Creed again expresses one of the most rigid principles of the same Church. The Unity of the Church comprehended Unity of belief: there could be no salvation out of it; nor any hope for those who deviated even from the most mysterious among its tenets. And thus, by constant familiarity with the declarations of an exclusive faith, the heart of many a Romish priest may have been closed against the sufferings of the heretic, rescued (as he might think) by the merciful chastisement of the Church from the flames which are never quenched!

“It would be irrelevant in this work, and wholly unprofitable, to inquire how far any temporary circumstances may have justified the introduction of the Athanasian Creed into the Liturgy of our own Church—constructed as that Church is on the very opposite principle of Universal Charity. But we cannot forbear to offer one remark naturally suggested by the character and history of this Creed, that if at any future time, it should be judged expedient to expunge it, there is no reason, there is scarcely any prejudice which could be offended by such erasure.[506] The sublime truths which it contains are not expressed in the language of Holy Scripture; nor could they possibly have been so expressed, since the inspired writers were not studious minutely to expound inscrutable mysteries, neither can it plead any sanction from high antiquity, or even traditional authority; since it was composed many centuries after the times of the Apostles, in a very corrupt age of a corrupt Church, and composed in so much obscurity, that the very pen from which it proceeded is not certainly known to us. The inventions of men, when they have been associated for ages with the exercises of religion, should indeed be touched with respect and discretion; but it is a dangerous error to treat them as inviolable; and it is something worse than error to confound them in holiness and reverence with the words and things of God.”[507]

In reading these words the wish involuntarily arises that the temper, as well as the sound learning and philosophical spirit, of the able writer was shared by all his brethren. Yet it does sound strange to hear a dignitary of the Church of England describe a Creed of his own Church, as having its only use, during the days of Romish intolerance, in shutting up, through familiarity with its persecuting spirit, the avenues of relenting mercy in the hard hearts of priests; and now in the milder Church of England, constructed, we are told, though we had not discovered it, on the “principle of Universal Charity,” of absolutely no use whatever, so that there hardly exists even a prejudice which its erasure would offend. Yet this is the very Creed which, in the course of this controversy is to be explained and defended. If the Church of England is, indeed, founded in the principle of Universal Charity, some of its Ministers are very heretical interpreters of its spirit, and yet we must do them the justice of confessing that the Creeds and Articles of the Church are equally unfortunate expounders of the spirit of Universal Charity. Men of Christian and gentle temper interpret Articles of Faith through their own gentle spirit; but fanatics read hard formulas with different eyes. We can only wish that the religion of this excellent historian was the religion of his Church, and that his Creed was as Christian as his heart.

I have now only to mention the more modern and final form of the doctrine of the Trinity. It arose out of the still unsettled meaning of the long used word Consubstantial, which, as I have before stated, was used by many of the later Fathers, and those considered pre-eminently orthodox, as Cyril, to signify not a numerical sameness, but merely a sameness of species or nature, and so the Trinity virtually taught the doctrine of three Gods. And this conception was prevalent not only after the Council of Nice, A.D. 325, but after the later Councils of Constantinople, A.D. 381, and of Ephesus, A.D. 431. I give the history of the last transformation of the Trinity in the words, and with the authority of Cudworth:—

“It is certain that not a few of those Ancient Fathers, who were therefore reputed orthodox, because they zealously opposed Arianism, did entertain this opinion, that the three hypostases or Persons of the Trinity had not only one General and Universal Essence of the Godhead, belonging to them all, they being all God; but were also Three Individuals, under one and the same ultimate species, or specific essence and substance of the Godhead; just as three individual men, (Thomas, Peter, and John,) under that ultimate species of Man, or that specific essence of Humanity, which have only a numerical difference from one another.” ... “And because it seems plainly to follow from hence, that therefore they must needs be as much three Gods as there are Three Men, these learned Fathers endeavoured with their logic to prove, that Three Men are but abusively and improperly so called Three; they being really and truly but One, because there is but one and the same Specific Essence or Substance of human nature in them all; and seriously persuaded men to lay aside all that kind of language. By which same logic of theirs, they might as well prove also, that all the men in the world are but One Man, and that all Epicurus’s Gods were but one God neither. But not to urge here that, according to this hypothesis, there cannot possibly be any reason given why there should be as many as Three such individuals in the species of God which differ only numerically from one another, they being but the very same thing thrice repeated; and yet that there should be no more than Three such neither, and not Three Hundred, or Three Thousand, or as many as there are individuals in the species of Man; we say not to urge this, it seems plain that this Trinity, is no other than a kind of Tritheism, and that of Gods independent and co-ordinate too. And, therefore, some would think that the ancient and genuine Platonic Trinity, taken with all its faults, is to be preferred before this Trinity of St. Cyril, and St. Gregory Nyssen, and several other reputed orthodox Fathers; and more agreeable to the principles both of Christianity and of Reason. However, it is evident from hence, that these reputed orthodox Fathers, who were not a few, were far from thinking the three hypostases of the Trinity to have the same singular existent essence; they supposing them to have no otherwise, one and the same essence of the Godhead in them, nor to be one God, than three individual Men, have one common specifical essence of Manhood in them, and are all One Man. But as this Trinity came afterwards to be decried for Tritheistic, so, in the room thereof, started up that other Trinity of Persons numerically the same, or having all one and the same singular existent essence; a doctrine which seemeth not to have been owned by any public authority in the Christian Church, save that of the Lateran Council only.”[508]

Such is the close of the Ecclesiastical History of the doctrine of the Trinity. The fourth general Lateran Council, A.D. 1215, which established the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the growth of the dark ages, passed also out of the hands of theological artists, in its perfected and orthodox form, this singular evidence of the fixed and primitive faith of those who taunt Unitarianism with its want of fixedness, and describe their own creeds as the “unimproved and unimprovable revelation.” It is this workmanship of Councils which is so confidently referred to the inspiration of Apostles. No wonder that they who preach orthodoxy as saving Faith, revealed from the first by God in a perfect form, say so little to their hearers of the history of their creeds. There is good reason why Ecclesiastical History should be little encouraged by the divines of the English, or of any other dogmatical Church. It is with good reason that the Universities show about the same degree of favour to Ecclesiastical History and to Moral Philosophy. They have an instinct that tells them of their enemies.

Let me now summarily restate the obligations of the doctrine of the Trinity to the human and erring sources of OPINION.

I. Oriental philosophy led the Jews of Alexandria, before the time of Christ, to allegorize the Old Testament Scriptures.

II. The Jews of Alexandria formed the connecting link between Christianity and Grecian Philosophy.

III. Platonic Theology put its own mythological meanings on the expressions Logos, and Son of God.[509]

IV. At the beginning of the fourth century this mythological conception had gained such ground that, with a severe struggle, and a controversy that shook the world, a general Council decreed that Christ in his divine nature belonged to the same class of Beings with God.

V. In a second general Council, the third Person in the Platonic Trinity found, by public authority, a parallel in the Christian Trinity, and became, for the first time, the faith of the Church.

VI. A third general Council, A.D. 431, distinguished, for theological purposes, the deity from the humanity of Christ.

VII. A fourth general Council, A.D. 451, found it necessary, for theological purposes, to unite the deity and humanity in one person.

VIII. The fourth general Lateran Council, A.D. 1215, consummated the Trinity and prepared the way for the Inquisition. Having established such a faith, it became necessary to take means to enforce it. Persecution is the first-born of Dogmatism. In the phrase of Robert Hall, quoted with approbation in Christ Church as a felicitous expression, orthodoxy is “necessitated” to be a Persecutor, to treat as a Dæmon and Enemy of Souls every form of Christianity but her own. It is a necessity of her nature, she pleads,—a simple consistency with her own principles. True,—the reasoning is without a flaw;—but then a question arises, does a Nature of which these are the “necessities” breathe the spirit of Jesus? Who can think of Jesus as being necessitated to condemn any thing but sin?

Having shown how much the doctrine of the Trinity has to do with Ecclesiastical History, I have now to show how little it has to do with Scripture.

II. It is admitted by all, Trinitarian and Unitarian alike, that a belief in ONE GOD is the first principle of a pure religion. The slightest departure from this truth involves polytheism and idolatry. One Creator, one Father, one object for our worship and our love, is the plain and broad distinction between an idolatrous religion, and the Supreme Veneration of that spiritual God who claims an undivided empire throughout the vastness of creation. A perception of this truth does not require an advanced state of Society or Mind: nor can it be proved that even in the thickness of pagan darkness it was ever doubted. Heathen Philosophy, though it might associate with the One Spirit, too pure and immoveably serene to come in contact with matter, subordinate agents of creation (which does not differ much from the Trinitarian conception[510]), yet could read the glory of one Mind upon the outward universe, and see one Intelligence, one Power, one Will of love diffused through Nature: Judaism had this idea for its soul: and the Gospel has republished it in such distinct and resplendent light, that it is the universal faith of Christendom. So overpowering is the evidence, so clear is Nature’s testimony to the existence of one God, so conspicuously has Revelation set it forth in the centre of her splendours, that Trinitarianism, with what consistency we shall presently inquire, claims to be received as a believer in the Unity of Deity. It is a most triumphant acknowledgment of the brightness with which the great truth, that God is One, shines out from his Works[511] and from his Word, that even the Trinitarian perceives the necessity of reconciling his views with this fundamental principle; and rather than depart from it, he prefers to maintain that three may be one, and one may be three;—though the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, have each separately all that constitute an infinite and all-perfect God, and have distinct offices, and appear in distinct, if not directly opposed characters, yet that there may be a mysterious unity in the essence of a tri-personal Deity.

I am relieved then from the necessity of proving that God is One. It is a truth which no one explicitly denies; which the Trinitarian professes to hold as firmly as the Unitarian; and therefore as the undisputed doctrine of the Bible we take it as the admitted groundwork of our argument. We might call upon Nature to multiply proofs of the Unity of the designing Mind, which the universe reveals; we might appeal to the regularity of her silent movements and to the sublime order that reigns throughout her gliding worlds, to attest the Oneness of that Intelligence whose volitions she obeys: we might ask Philosophy whether ONE INFINITE CAUSE was not sufficient for the finite or infinite wonders of creation; whether in all her discoveries she has ever perceived a single evidence of a divided government; and whether eternal Laws holding immutable dominion throughout all worlds that Science has explored, are not sublimest proofs of the fidelity of the one presiding SPIRIT who trifles not with the feeble intellect of man, but reveals himself consistently to the seeking minds of His children: we might go to our own hearts, and feel the pressure of one divine hand upon its tumultuous affections, and ask whether in our sorrows or our joys, our wants or our aspirations, we resorted to more than one God, or needed other shelter than that of one all-sufficing Father and Friend; and, finally, we might open the volume of Revelation, and read to you the testimony of Prophets from Moses to Christ, that the Lord our God is one Lord, and there is none other but He:—but it appears it would be a needless task to prove a doctrine which no one doubts, or to treat as a question of controversy the universal faith of the Christian world.

We stand at once then upon the undisputed truth of the Oneness of Deity, and taking this as our uncontested vantage ground, we proceed to inquire how much is involved in the admission. What are we to understand by this sublime and unquestioned, and apparently simple truth, that God is One? There are two answers to this question, and the statement of each of them will introduce us to the Controversy. The Unitarian answers, that the words are human words, and of course used in a human sense; that the revelation was to man, and that no caution was given to him that he was not to attach human ideas to the language in which it is conveyed; that God is too tender and too faithful to sport with the understandings of His children, to involve their frail intelligence in inextricable perplexities; and that, therefore, when He publishes to the World, without explanation, the Unity of his own nature, he intends men to affix to the words the ideas always associated with them; he does not use language to mislead, but asserts the simplest and most intelligible of truths, that God is one Mind, one Person, one undivided and indivisible Spirit, to whom alone belong underived existence, and infinite perfections, and unshared dominion. These are the only ideas our minds ordinarily attach to such language,—this is the only experience we have of Unity; and if the words, when applied to God, bear a different meaning, and so have a tendency to deceive us, some caution, we think, would have been given by a God who was delivering a Revelation to his Children. The Unitarian believes that a revelation from God is a revelation of light; and without any temptation to pervert the meaning of words, he receives, in the simple and ordinary import of the language, the plain and reiterated announcement that “God is one.” If God used human words, he surely used them for the purpose of conveying ideas to human minds; for language is not necessary to Him, much less would human language be the vehicle of His infinite thought. If, then, He used the words in a sense not human, and therefore unknown to us, instead of instructing, it would betray and mislead.

The Trinitarian answers, that though he believes in the Unity of God, yet that Unity is totally different from the unity of all other beings. He believes that in the One God there are three distinct and infinite persons, presenting themselves to human contemplation in different characters, and as the objects of different affections; the first reigning in Heaven, the second in intimate and inseparable connection with a dying man upon the Earth; the first immutable in his immensity, the other coming down from his eternal throne to wrap his infinite essence in a covering of human flesh; the Father sending the Son, and the Son satisfying the demands of the Father; the Father the cause and origin of all things, but holding himself loftily apart, whilst the Holy Spirit takes the office of communion with men, and becomes the Comforter, Teacher, and spiritual Friend of the human souls, whom the Father’s creative energies, acting through the Son, have called into existence. This, then, is the doctrine of the Trinity: three equal Persons, each Supreme, each a perfect and infinite Deity, and yet so united as to constitute but one undivided God.

We are tauntingly told of the vague statements of Unitarian Doctrine. Now nothing can be more unjust than this, or farther from the facts. “Controversially described,” Unitarianism is the most definite thing imaginable. It simply says, No, to every one of the allegations of Trinitarianism. There are, at the very least, five different forms in which the doctrine of the Trinity has been explained and defended; and to every one of these five shifting modifications, we repeat our definite negative. There is the widest difference among Trinitarian Theologians as to their method of stating and explaining the influence of Atonement and of Original Sin; and to every one of these varieties we equally repeat our simple negative. Where, then, is the superior definiteness of Trinitarian statements? We affirm, of all its characteristic doctrines, that they are untenable in any form whatever. This, surely, is definite enough.

I am not aware that I have stated the doctrine of the Trinity in a way which any Trinitarian could disown; and the first observation I make upon it is this, that in this view of the oneness of God, in connecting the deity of the Father, and the deity of the Son, and the deity of the Holy Spirit, with a strict unity in the godhead, the Trinitarian has at least departed from the ordinary acceptation of language. We will not assert the absolute impossibility of his retaining a belief in the Unity of God, because we have no right to question his own solemn assertion of the fact, or to set limits to the powers of another’s faith; but he will not deny that he believes God to be one, in a sense totally different from that in which he believes himself to be one; that it is a unity of three minds, each a perfect God, and capable of acting separately,—in so much that it is a warning of the Creeds,—not to confound the Persons. It is not a unity of Mind, nor a unity of Will, nor a unity of Agency, nor a unity of Person, which the Trinitarian regards as constituting the Unity of God, but three Minds, three Wills, three Agents, three Persons, mysteriously making one Deity. I ask, were it not for the overpowering brightness with which the Bible reveals the doctrine of one God, would the Trinitarian encumber himself with the difficulty of combining it with his other views; would he not rather simply confess that three persons made three beings, and not one being; and represent the world as under the threefold, but harmonious, government of a Creator, a Saviour, and a sanctifying Spirit?

We have thus, then, two admissions on the part of the Trinitarian, which I ask you distinctly to bear in mind. He admits the Unity of God; and he admits that when he attempts to combine that Unity with a Trinity, he uses the word in an unintelligible sense, and understands, or rather marks, by it something entirely different from the oneness of any other being,—a oneness in short of which he himself is capable of forming no conception. That is, he retains the form of words that God is one; but these words convey to him no distinct idea,—and yet words are the signs of human ideas;—he confesses that God is not one in any sense of that word that he can comprehend; and that, therefore, when he professes his faith in the Unity of God, he is using language which is unintelligible even to himself. This he must acknowledge, for he calls the Trinity a mystery; but the mystery he will admit is in the Unity, not in the Trinity: the mystery (that is, the no-meaningness to man, for this is the only meaning the word will here bear, the difficulty being not in the vastness or spirituality of the Conceptions, but in their irreconcilableness,) is not that there are three Persons, but that the three are one. Now this is the confession of every Trinitarian: he can form very distinct notions of the Trinity, but he admits that he cannot reconcile these notions with any human idea of unity; it is unintelligible, it is inconceivable, it is an apparent contradiction to all other men, to him only a paradox; it is an unfathomable mystery (a sad desecration of that solemn word); but still he professes to believe it,—he maintains that he can hold “the form of sound words;” and as to thoughts, it is his duty to have none upon the subject. He knows that it is revealed that God is One; and he thinks it is revealed that God is in Three; and without any attempt to harmonize these two statements, he professes to believe them both.

Now taking our stand on the conceded truth that God is revealed to be one, we ask for equal evidence that He is revealed to be Three Persons. We ask throughout the Bible for one plain assertion of this doctrine. We shall be satisfied with even one, and we think it is not asking much. We ask but for a single text in which it is declared that there are three infinite Minds in the Unity of but one infinite God.

It is admitted that there is no distinct statement of this doctrine in any part of the Scriptures; and here again we rest upon another confession of all instructed Trinitarians,[512] that this mystery is nowhere found in express terms; that if taught at all it is taught by implication; that it is no part of the direct revelation, but merely an inference which may be collected from certain appearances, certain verbal phenomena. Now I ask if this doctrine was intended to be revealed, could it have been so left? If the Trinity is as strictly true as the Unity, could the one have had the witness of Prophets and Apostles, and shine forth as the clearest light on the revealed page, whilst the other was left to be gathered from some obscure and incidental intimations which the most gifted minds have not been able to perceive? Is it credible that if the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, were three Persons in one God, there should be nowhere in the Bible a single statement of that truth;[513] and ought not this extraordinary fact make us very cautious to try the soundness of the inferences, human and erring modes of reasoning, upon which, as upon its foundation, this stupendous doctrine is laid?

There are two passages in the Bible, and only two, in which God, and Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are mentioned together. It is recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel as the last words of the risen Jesus, that he ascended to his Father, leaving to the world the legacy of his truth—“Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name (properly into the name) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”—baptizing them into a belief of God, and of Christ, and of the power and comfort of the Holy Spirit accompanying the truth, and witnessing to it in the hearts of all who receive it purely.[514] The Apostle declares of the Jews that they were baptized into Moses, and the Evangelist declares of Christians that they were baptized into Christ, (see also Rom. vi. 3; Gal. iii. 27,) and the plain meaning of such language is that they were baptized into the Truth which God had revealed through Moses and through Christ. What support then is there here for the doctrine of a Trinity? Is this indeed the strongest scriptural evidence that Trinitarianism can boast of—that because three distinctions follow one another—God, and his Prophet, and his Spirit witnessing to his truth in the hearts and before the eyes of His children—therefore the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God in communication with man, must be a person, distinct from God, because the other two words express persons—and therefore these three are co-equal and are one. Such is the Interpretation that produces Trinitarianism. Is there a single hint in this passage of three persons in one God? What can be made out of it more than the Saviour’s last injunction to his followers, to carry through the world that glorious and sanctifying truth, which the one God manifested through his well-beloved Son, and accompanied with the energy of his spirit. The Holy Spirit is a Scripture expression for God in communication with man, naturally or supernaturally.

The only other passage in which Jesus Christ, and God, and the Holy Spirit, are mentioned in the same sentence, must receive a precisely similar explanation. St. Paul concludes the Second Epistle to the Corinthians in these words—“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.” Now what is this but a beautiful and affectionate prayer that the Corinthians might be partakers of the grace of God that was in Jesus Christ, of the love of their Heavenly Father, and of the gifts and influences of his holy spirit? Indeed this passage, like all others brought to prove the Trinity, is of itself quite sufficient to overthrow that doctrine. The name God in it, is not applied to Jesus Christ nor to the holy spirit: and to prove that holy spirit does not mean a person, but the spiritual energies of God in communication with man, the word communion is used:—a participation or communion of a person is without meaning—a communion in holy and heavenly influences is beautiful and everlasting truth. Such are the only pretences that Trinitarianism puts forth, that it is openly taught in Scripture! We ask for no other passages scripturally to disprove the doctrine.

Let us now attend to that inferential reasoning by which it is attempted to be proved that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are united with the Father, to form three persons in one God. There are some texts in which divine attributes are supposed to be ascribed to Jesus, and the same mode of reasoning being applied to the Holy Spirit, it is inferred that Christ is God, and that the Holy Spirit is God—and that to preserve the consistency of Scripture, it is necessary to maintain both that God is One, and that God is Three. Now I ask, does not this look like a seeking of evidence for the doctrine after Ecclesiastical History had introduced it, under the influences and motives already described, rather than like the natural way in which such a doctrine would break from Revelation itself upon the notice of the world? Had not the doctrine its true origin in human and worldly influences, and then was not an origin sought for it in the Orientalisms of Scripture language? This then is the method of reasoning by which this doctrine, so vast, so awful, if it be true, is attempted to be proved; and upon the soundness of this inferential process does Trinitarianism depend. So that Orthodoxy after all its sneers against the pride of Human Reason, depends for its own life upon the correctness of human reasonings,—and then erects the results of this process of fallible reasoning into the Essentials of Salvation.

There are several passages in which Christ is supposed to be called God, though there is not, I think, one clear instance of such an application of the word; and even if there was, we have Christ’s own interpretation of the only sense in which such language could be applied to him. “Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said ye are gods? if he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken; say ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, ‘Thou blasphemest;’ because I said I am the Son of God?”[515]

There are only two passages in the whole gospels, in which the title has ever been supposed to be given to Christ, and these both occurring in the same gospel, so that three of the gospels never were even supposed to have a trace of such language. One of these passages in the Proem of St. John’s Gospel has already been explained in the course of the present Controversy, and the other is the expression of Thomas, who, the moment before he made the exclamation, knew so little of Christ and of Christianity that he would not believe that Jesus was risen from the dead. It is from the lips of the unbeliever of one moment, and the inspired of the next, that we are to receive the high mystery of the Trinity. But in truth the exclamation of Thomas will not bear to be sobered down into a revelation of doctrines—“My Lord, and my God!” The first of these clauses was an exclamation of surprise, a sudden and passionate recognition of Jesus; the second was the natural and immediate transference (common in cases of supernatural impression, with all minds, pious or profane,) of the thoughts of Thomas to that awful and wonder-working God, whose power and presence were so visibly manifested in the resurrection of his Christ. There is no evidence, in the remainder of the gospel, or in the book of the Acts, or throughout the New Testament, that Thomas, or the rest of the Apostles, for a moment believed that Jesus was God. Now, since this was a doctrine that they certainly had no conception of, previous to the death of Christ, there must have been an occasion, when, if true, it broke for the first time on the astonished minds of the disciples. Now is it possible to believe that such an occasion could have passed unmarked—that no amazement, no awe would be expressed—and that as we follow them in their course, we should be unable to distinguish between the moments when they did not, and the moments when they did understand, that the being with whom they had been living in familiar intercourse was the everlasting God? Could such a discovery burst upon any human mind, and that mind manifest no emotion—not a ripple on the current of sentiment and feeling to show when it was that these disciples first began to know that they had been the familiar friends of the living God? I confidently state that the thing is not credible nor possible. The disciples would not have been human, if such things could be. We know that after the ascension, as before, they always speak of him as “the man approved by God, by signs and miracles which God did by him, and whom God raised from the dead?” Do such things admit of explanation from the known course of human sentiments and emotions, if Trinitarianism is true? We think not.

There is another passage in the Gospels supposed to teach the deity of Christ—and hence so far used as an inferential proof of the doctrine of the Trinity:—“I and my Father are one.” Beautiful expression of the soul of Christ, excelled in beauty only by that life which yet more spiritually declared that He and his Father were one, for “what the Son seeth the Father do, these also doeth the Son likewise!” Why are we compelled to examine coldly, or turn an instant from the deep religious meaning of this perfect filial utterance of the Son of God? It expresses that harmony of purpose with God which is the result and peace of the spirit of true religion, and which was perfect in the mind of Jesus, because in him was perfect the spirit of faith in Providence, of trustful submission to his Father’s will. “The cup that my Father hath given me, shall I not drink of it?” Well might he say, and yet how wondrous it is that any being could say, and yet retain his intense humanity, “I and my Father are one!” Clear proof of the inspiration of the Christ! But how the beauty fades away if this very being was God himself, and all his submission of will is but an artifice of words! How hard, artificial, and unlovely, does the ever fresh gospel become when submitted to the tortures of systems, and system-makers! What a difference in genuine spiritual power on the heart of man between Jesus living and dying in the peace of faith, in the trust that a holy God will keep the destinies of a holy mind, that his Providence will recompense the Right—and Jesus not living and dying in the strength of the moral elements of faith, but actually associated with the omniscient mind of God, so as to be an inseparable person! Such should be the difference between the genuine spiritual energy of Unitarian and Trinitarian representations of Christianity.

Jesus, in the context, explains in what sense he uses this beautiful expression, “I and my Father are one,” and he there positively denies that the employment of it implies any claim of equality with God. Let our Lord be his own interpreter, and let the solemn and affecting words I am about to quote, silence for ever the vain plea, that this exquisite expression of the moral sentiment and spirit of Jesus, was intended to be doctrinal and Trinitarian. If so, there is equal proof for all Christians being portions of the Godhead. “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou Father art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us:—and the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one; I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as thou hast loved me.”[516]

The only other passage of any force in which deity is supposed to be accorded to Jesus,[517] I do not notice here, because it has already been abundantly examined in the present Controversy.

I would now call your attention to the precise state of the argument so far as we have advanced in it. We have taken for granted the Unity of God, which no Christian denies. We have found that the belief of three persons in one God is not reconcilable with any human conception of that admitted unity: we have found that there was no direct evidence in the Bible for the doctrine of the Trinity: and lastly, we have examined some of the very strongest passages of Scripture, on which that doctrine is attempted to be established, through an inferential mode of reasoning.

I might stop here then, and without looking at the Scripture evidence against the doctrine, but only the evidence in its favour, declare that such a doctrine could not possibly have such an insufficient publication. The very passages brought forward to sustain it, disprove it. They all speak of derived powers, and of glory communicated. They are all in the strain,—“Therefore God, even his God, hath highly exalted him, and given him a name that is above every name.” Nay, take that passage, than which there is none in which dominion is more emphatically ascribed to Christ, and see how it closes:—“and when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that did put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”—1 Cor. xv. 28. We shall not, however, treat Trinitarianism so lightly as to dismiss it, unproved upon its own showing; we shall not rest satisfied with pointing out the insufficiency of its Scriptural authority, but bring against it the overpowering force of opposing Scripture; and as we have given specimens of the biblical evidence for, advance something of the biblical evidence against, the Trinity.

In the first place, then, this doctrine cannot be true, because there are some passages in which it is expressly and plainly declared that the Father alone is the one God, not the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit, but the FATHER. “Father!—this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” “But to us there is but ONE GOD, the FATHER, of whom are all things, and we in Him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.”

“There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

“Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no not the angels which are in Heaven; neither the Son, but the Father.”

These declarations are surely sufficient to protect Unitarianism from having no warrant in Scripture. They contain direct, positive, definite assertions; they assert that there is one God, and that Jesus Christ is not that God. It is not possible for human language to express more clearly or more guardedly the simple faith of Unitarian Christianity. Yet we are told that only the ingenuity of heretics has obliged Trinitarians to have recourse to unscriptural language. Strange, certainly, that Holy Writ should have itself expressed the creeds of heresy and damnable error, and rendered it impossible to express in its sacred words the Creeds of Truth!

I quote, in the second place, some passages out of a multitude, in which ideas are connected with Christ which are utterly inconsistent with the supposition of his deity. “I came not to do mine own will.” “I can of myself do nothing.” “If I honour myself, my honour is nothing; it is my Father that honoureth me.”—John viii. 54. “For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.”—John v. 26. “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father.”—John vi. 57. “I have not spoken of myself, but the Father who sent me, He gave me a commandment what I should say, and what I should speak.”—John xii. 49, 50.

“The word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me.”—John xiv. 24.

“I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God.”—John xx. 17.

“When ye have lifted up the Son of man on high, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me I speak these things”—John viii. 28.

Ecclesiastical History has already acquainted us with the device that sets aside the plain meaning of these passages. It is said that Jesus Christ had two natures, was composed of two minds, that he was both man and God; and thus does Trinitarianism openly assert mysteries of an opposite character. Three Persons in one Essence is unintelligible enough; but no sooner is this propounded to us, than we are called off to a directly opposite mystery of two Essences in one Person. And here we cannot be put off with the metaphysical sophistry that we do not know the nature of God, for we do know something of the nature of man; and we do say that never was there a greater abuse of the moral meanings of the word Faith, than to set forth, that God’s nature and man’s nature so united together as to form one inseparable person, may be embraced as an object of Faith. The true nature and office of Faith is to carry us from the seen to the unseen,—to give us moral confidence in that world which we do not see, from our moral experience in this world which we do see,—and in that portion of God’s ways which the future conceals, from what we know of that portion of them which the present unfolds. Faith is moral, not metaphysical; and, above all, finds no merit and no efficacy in assenting to unmeaning words.

As before, of the doctrine of the Trinity, so now of this doctrine of the Hypostatic Union, as it is called, I ask for a single hint throughout the New Testament of the inconceivable fact that, in the body of Jesus, resided the mind of God and the mind of man,—two natures, the one finite, the other infinite, yet making but one person,—a difficulty you will perceive the very opposite of that of the Trinity; for whereas it teaches three persons in one nature, this teaches two natures in one person. But we have already traced, in Ecclesiastical History, the origin of this view, and the necessity of its appearance, in subservience to the doctrine of the Trinity.

I will only apply one scriptural test to this theory of the two natures in Christ. And it is one from which Trinitarians cannot escape by their ordinary refuge of avoiding one set of statements by referring them to the humanity of Jesus, and another set of statements by referring them to his deity. It is God the Son, whom Trinitarians represent as becoming incarnate in the body of Jesus; it was God the Son who took humanity into union with deity; therefore whenever Jesus, in his human nature, speaks of the divinity that dwelt within him, inspired him, and wrought through him, it must be God the Son to whom he refers. But this is never the case: Scripture does not know this doctrine, nor support its requisitions. It is always, “the Father who dwelleth in me, He doeth the works.”

It was asserted in Christ Church, that if there is not a plurality of persons in the godhead, the oriental style, “let us make man in our own image,” and the use of the plural where we use the singular, made the word of God an agent of deception, and affected the morality of the divine mind. This is bold language; and, considering the evidence, as unscholarlike as bold. We refrain from a retort in the same spirit. We look with unaffected wonder upon the mind that is reckless enough, and ignorant enough of the sources of error within itself, to dare to say, “if I am not right in my interpretation of Scripture, God is a deceiver.” Yet such men can charge others with making themselves judges of revelation, and saying what God must mean.

I have not taken up that other thread of supposed scriptural intimations, which is thought to connect the Holy Spirit as a third Person in the unity of the godhead. This portion of the argument, strangely neglected by Trinitarians, who generally take for granted the deity and personality of the Holy Ghost as following without debate from the deity of Christ, since three not two is the favourite mythological and theological number, is however to form the subject of a separate Lecture in Christ Church, not yet delivered. Why there should be any necessity, on Trinitarian principles of theology, for a third person in the Godhead to perform “the work,” as it is called, of the spirit of God in communication with man, after the sacrifice of Christ had left the Father’s love free to operate, we cannot perceive, except upon the Platonic principle, that the Supreme One in the Trinity is an Essence perfectly abstracted, immoveable, and without action. Not wishing, however, to anticipate the argument, I shall only adduce one remarkable passage, in proof that the Holy Spirit could not, in the first age of the Gospel, have a deity and personality ascribed to it distinct from the deity and personality of God the Father. When Paul came to Ephesus, he found there some disciples, of whom he inquired,—“Have you received the Holy Ghost since you believed?” The answer is remarkable: “We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost.” Now is it possible that the Holy Ghost should be the third person of the Trinity, a constituent person in the Christian God, and that these “believers,” though only disciples of John, should have been uninstructed in the doctrine? The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, God himself in communication with man, naturally or supernaturally, the enlightening influence of the Spiritual Father revealing Himself to the spiritual nature of His children.

I do not know what may appear convincing to other minds, but to me the Ecclesiastical History of the doctrine of the Trinity, with its rise in human sources of Philosophy and Motive, and not in Revelation, seems a fact capable of being most clearly traced. Rarely indeed does the origin of an error so conspicuously disclose itself: rarely is its course so open to observation. On the other hand, if there is not decisive proof in Scripture of the strict and personal Unity of God, I must think that it is vain to prove any doctrine from the words of the Bible—for sure I am that there is no doctrine more distinctly, more guardedly, more simply, more repeatedly stated, than the great doctrine, that there is One God, and that the FATHER is that God.

We are told that the “invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead.” Yet the Universe reveals no Trinity. Reason knows and requires no Trinity. Natural Religion is not Trinitarian. Scripture speaks of One God the Father, and of One Lord Jesus Christ. Gentile Philosophy and Ecclesiastical History are Trinitarian. In their pages we find this subject. Ecclesiastical History has narrated the rise and progress of these doctrines—and to Ecclesiastical History shall they finally be referred,—when another chapter is added, a chapter that unhappily yet remains to be written, the history of their decline and fall.

------------------------------------

Footnotes for Lecture VII.

Footnote 453:

Locke.

Footnote 454:

Mr. James’s Lecture, p. 410.

Footnote 455:

Spoken, not printed.

Footnote 456:

Milman’s Edition, vol. iii. p. 311.

Footnote 457:

“That this Trinity (Monad or Good, Wisdom, Spirit or Energy) was not first of all a mere invention of Plato’s, but much ancienter than him, is plainly affirmed by Plotinus in these words,—‘That these doctrines are not new nor of yesterday, but have been very anciently delivered, though obscurely (the discourses now extant being but Explications of them) appears from PLATO’S own writings; PARMENIDES before having insisted on them.’” Cudworth. Intel. Syst. p. 546.—See also Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, sections 341-365.

Footnote 458:

“The principle of every thing is more simple than the thing itself. Wherefore the sensible world was made from Intellect, or the intelligible; and before this must there needs be something more simple still. For many did not proceed from many, but this multiform thing Intellect proceeded from that which is not multiform but simple; as Number from Unity. If that which understands be many, or contain multitude in it, then that which contains no multitude, does not properly understand; and this is the first thing;—to understand is not the First; neither in Essence nor in Dignity; but the Second; a thing in order of nature, after the First Good, and springing up from thence, as that which is moved with desire towards it.”—Plotinus. Cudworth, p. 584.

Footnote 459:

“The FIRST is above all manner of action: neither is it fit to attribute the architecture of the world to the First God, but rather to account him the Father of that God, who is the Artificer. The SECOND, to whom the energy of Intellection is attributed, is therefore properly called the Demiurgus, as the contriving Architect, in whom the Archetypal World is contained, and the First Pattern, or Paradigm of the Whole Universe. The THIRD is that which moveth about Mind or Intellect, the Light or Effulgency thereof, and its Print or Signature, which always dependeth upon it, and acteth according to it. This is that which reduces both the Fecundity of the First Simple Good, and the Architectonick Contrivance of the Second into Act and Energy. This is the Immediate and as it were Manuary Opificer of the whole world, that which actually Governs, Rules, and Presideth over all.”—Plotinus. ap. Cudw. p. 583.

Footnote 460:

“Since the introduction of the Greek or Chaldean Philosophy, the Jews were persuaded of the pre-existence, transmigration, and immortality of souls; and Providence was justified by a supposition, that they were confined in their earthly prisons to expiate the stains which they had contracted in a former state. But the degrees of purity and corruption are almost immeasurable. It might be fairly presumed that the most sublime and virtuous of human spirits was infused into the offspring of Mary and the Holy Ghost; that his abasement was the result of his voluntary choice; and that the object of his mission was to purify, not his own, but the sins of the world. On his return to his native skies he received the immense reward of his obedience; the everlasting kingdom of the Messiah, which had been darkly foretold by the prophets, under the carnal images of peace, of conquest, and of dominion. Omnipotence could enlarge the human faculties of Christ to the extent of his celestial office. In the language of antiquity, the title of God has not been severely confined to the first parent; and his incomparable minister, his only begotten son, might claim, without presumption, the religious, though secondary worship of a subject world.

“The seeds of the faith, which had slowly arisen in the rocky and ungrateful soil of Judea, were transplanted, in full maturity, to the happier climes of the Gentiles; and the strangers of Rome or Asia, who never beheld the manhood, were the more readily disposed to embrace the divinity of Christ. The polytheist and the philosopher, the Greek and the Barbarian, were alike accustomed to conceive a long succession, an infinite chain of angels or dæmons, or deities, or æons, or emanations, issuing from the throne of light. Nor could it seem strange or incredible, that the first of these æons, the Logos, or word of God, of the same substance with the Father, should descend upon earth, to deliver the human race from vice and error, and to conduct them in the path of life and immortality.”—Gibbon, vol. viii. p. 271.

Footnote 461:

Philo de Abrahamo. Le Clerc’s Supplement to Hammond, p. 168.

Footnote 462:

Cudworth, p. 590.

Footnote 463:

“It was in this mode of apprehending the Divine Being that the doctrine of the Trinity had its origin. The Logos of the first four centuries was in the view of the Fathers both an attribute or attributes of God, and a proper person. Their philosophy was, in general, that of the later Platonists, and they transferred from it into Christianity this mode of Conception. In treating of this fact, so strange, and one which will be so new to many of my readers, I will first quote a passage from Origen, the coincidence of which with the conceptions of Philo and the later Platonists is apparent. ‘Nor must we omit, that Christ is properly the Wisdom of God; and is therefore so denominated. For the wisdom of the God and Father of All has not its being in bare conceptions, analogous to the conceptions in human minds. But if any one be capable of forming an idea of an incorporeal being of diverse forms of thought, which comprehend the LOGOI [the archetypal forms] of all things, a being indued with life, and having as it were a soul, he will know that the Wisdom of God, who is above every creature, pronounced rightly concerning herself; The Lord created me, the beginning, his way to his works.’”—Origen, Opp. iv. 39, 40,—quoted by Norton on the Trinity, p. 271-2.

Footnote 464:

Milman’s Gibbon, vol. iii. p. 313.

Footnote 465:

See Cudworth, p. 603, 4.

Footnote 466:

“The creed which was first adopted, and that perhaps in the very earliest age, by the Church of Rome, was that which is now called the Apostles’ Creed, and it was the general opinion, from the fourth century downwards, that it was actually the production of those blessed persons assembled for that purpose. Our evidence is not sufficient to establish that fact, and some writers very confidently reject it. But there is reasonable ground for our assurance that the form of faith which we still repeat and inculcate was in use and honour in the very early propagation of our religion.”—Waddington’s History of the Church, p. 27.

Footnote 467:

“Ignatius, Justin, and Irenæus make no mention of it, but they occasionally repeat some words contained in it, which is held as proof that they knew it by heart.”—Waddington.

Footnote 468:

Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 180.

Footnote 469:

Comment. in Johan. vol. ii. p. 5.

Footnote 470:

Hist. lib. iii. c. 24.

Footnote 471:

Chrys. Op. vol. vi. p. 171; viii. p. 2.

Footnote 472:

Comm. in Matt. sec. 161.

Footnote 473:

In Celsum. lib. ii. p. 56.

Footnote 474:

Professor Burton gives some instances of the use of the word God by Ignatius, A. D. 107, in connection with Christ. Nothing can be more slender and insufficient than his other evidences of the recognition of these doctrines by the Apostolical Fathers.

Footnote 475:

Dial. cum Tryph. p. 252.

Footnote 476:

Lib. i. cap. 19; ii. cap. 3.

Footnote 477:

Strom. lib. vi. p. 644. Priestley’s Hist. Early Opinions.

Footnote 478:

Advers. Prax. c. 13.

Footnote 479:

Comment. vol. ii. p. 47.

Footnote 480:

Cap. ii. p. 84.

Footnote 481:

Lib. iv. sec. 14.

Footnote 482:

Orat. iii. con. Arian.

Footnote 483:

Cudworth. Intel. Sys. p. 599.

Footnote 484:

Inattention to this distinction vitiates the whole reasonings of Dr. Burton’s learned work on the Anti-Nicene Fathers. There is no doubt that the deity of the Son and even of the Holy Ghost is spoken of before the Council of Nice, but always in the Platonic or derived sense, never in the present orthodox sense of co-equal and independent. The word con-substantial proves nothing to the contrary, for a Platonist would not have objected to the application of the word to the second and third persons in his Trinity, as partaking of, or derived from the Essence of the one Supreme. See Cudworth’s argument to this effect (Intel. Sys. p. 597), who contends that by co-essential and consubstantial, the Nicene Council meant nothing more than that the Son was generically God, of the same nature, but numerically different, having his own distinct Essence. See also Dr. Burton on a passage similar to one from Tertullian already quoted, where he is misled by not attending to this distinction.—Theol. Works, vol. ii. p. 89.

Footnote 485:

Cudworth. Intell. Sys. p. 595.

Footnote 486:

“It had been the vice of the Christians of the third century, to involve themselves, ‘in certain metaphysical questions which if considered in one light, are too sublime to become the subject of human wit; if in another too trifling to gain the attention of reasonable men.’ (Warburton.) The rage for such disputations had been communicated to religion by the contagion of philosophy; but the manner in which it operated on the one and on the other was essentially different. With the philosopher such questions were objects of the understanding only, subjects of comparatively dispassionate speculation, whereon the versatile ingenuity of a minute mind might employ or waste itself. But with the Christian they were matters of truth or falsehood, of belief or disbelief. Hence arose an intense anxiety respecting the result, and thus the passions were awakened, and presently broke loose and proceeded to every excess. From the moment that the solution of these questions was attempted by any other method than the fair interpretation of the words of Scripture; as soon as the copious language of Greece was eagerly applied to the definition of spiritual things, and the explanation of heavenly mysteries, the field of contention seemed to be removed from earth to air—where the foot found nothing stable to rest upon; where arguments were easily eluded, and where the space to fly and to rally was infinite; so that the contest grew more noisy as it was less decisive, and more angry as it became more prolonged and complicated. Add to this the nature and genius of the disputants: for the origin of these disputes may be traced without any exception to the restless imaginations of the East.” * * *

“We must also mention the loose and unsettled principles of that age, which had prevailed before the appearance of Christianity, and had been to a certain extent adopted by its professors—those, for instance, which justified the means by the end, and admitted fraud and forgery into the service of religion.”—Waddington, Church Hist. p. 89.

Footnote 487:

ὑπὲρ μικρῶν καὶ λίαν ἐλαχίστων.

Footnote 488:

“Let us imagine, then, a council called by a Christian Emperor, by a Constantine, a Constantius, a Theodosius, a Justinian, and three, or four, or five hundred prelates, assembled from all quarters, to decide a theological debate.”

“Let us consider a little by what various motives these various men may be influenced, as by reverence to the emperor, or to his councillors and favourites, his slaves and eunuchs; by fear of offending some great prelate, as a Bishop of Rome or of Alexandria, who had it in his power to insult, vex, and plague all the bishops within and without his jurisdiction; by the dread of passing for heretics, and of being calumniated, reviled, hated, anathematized, excommunicated, imprisoned, banished, fined, beggared, starved, if they refused to submit; by compliance with some active, leading, and imperious spirits, by a deference to a majority, by a love dictating and domineering, of applause and respect, by vanity and ambition, by a total ignorance of the question in debate, or a total indifference about it, by private friendships, by enmity and resentment, by old prejudices, by hopes of gain, by an indolent disposition, by good nature, by the fatigue of attending, and a desire to be at home, by the love of peace and quiet, and a hatred of contention, &c.

“Whosoever takes these things into due consideration, will not be disposed to pay a blind deference to the authority of general Councils, and will rather be inclined to judge that ‘the Council held by the Apostles was the first and the last in which the Holy Spirit may be affirmed to have presided.’

“Thus far we may safely go, and submit to an Apostolical Synod; but if once we proceed one step beyond this, we go we know not whither. If we admit the infallibility of one General Council, why not of another? And where shall we stop? At the first Nicene Council, A. D. 325, or at the second Nicene Council, A. D. 787? They who disclaim private judgment, and believe the infallibility of the Church, act consistently in holding the infallibility of Councils; but they who take their faith from the Scriptures, and not from the Church, should be careful not to require nor to yield too much regard to such assemblies, how numerous soever. Numbers, in this case, go for little, and to them the old Proverb may be applied;—

‘Est turba semper argumentum pessimi.’

“If such Councils make righteous decrees, it must have been by strange good luck.”—Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 183-4.

Footnote 489:

Milman’s Ed. vol. iii. p. 331.

Footnote 490:

Waddington, Church Hist. p. 93.

Footnote 491:

Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 210.

Footnote 492:

“The Christian Religion, which in itself is plain and simple, he (Constantius) confounded by the dotage of superstition. Instead of reconciling the parties by the weight of his authority, he cherished and propagated, by verbal disputes, the differences which his vain curiosity had excited. The highways were covered with troops of bishops, galloping from every side to the Assemblies, which they call synods; and while they laboured to reduce the whole sect to their own particular opinions, the public establishment of the posts was almost ruined by their hasty and repeated journeys.”—Ammianus, as quoted by Gibbon, vol. iii. p. 347.

Footnote 493:

“Constantine’s conduct was variable afterwards, for he certainly understood not this perplexed and obscure controversy, and he acted as he was influenced at different times by the ecclesiastics of each party, who accused one another, not only of heterodoxy, but of being enemies to the Emperor, and of other faults and misdemeanors.”—Jortin.

Footnote 494:

“Notwithstanding all which it must be granted, that though this co-essentiality of the three persons in the Trinity does imply them to be all God, yet does it not follow from thence of necessity that they are therefore One God.”—Cudworth, p. 596.

Footnote 495:

“That little is said concerning the separate divinity of the Spirit of God in the Scripture is evident to every body; but the reason that Epiphanius gives for it, will not be easily imagined. In order to account for the Apostles saying so little concerning the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and omitting the mention of him after that of the Father and the Son, (as when Paul says, ‘there is one God and Father of all, of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things,’) he says that ‘the Apostles writing by the inspiration of the Spirit, He did not choose to introduce much commendation of Himself, lest it should give us an example of commending ourselves.’”—Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity, p. 60.

Footnote 496:

“The Holy Spirit, if he be God, as the objection is stated by Basil, must either be begotten or unbegotten. If he be unbegotten, he is the Father; if begotten, the Son; and if he is neither begotten nor unbegotten, he is a creature.”—Priestley’s Hist. Early Opinions, vol. ii. 331.

This is the least offensive specimen I could find of the common objections made to the separate deity of the Holy Ghost at the time the doctrine was first proposed. The plainer and coarser forms of the objection, unhesitatingly handled by the Fathers, I withhold from reverence. But let the reader consult the Ecclesiastical History of the Period. The difficulty stated by Athanasius, Basil, and others, was overcome by establishing a certain mysterious or rather no-meaning difference between begotten and proceeding. Such is always the easy refuge of mystics. The line is a faint one between unintelligible ideas and no ideas at all. “The nativity of the Son,” says Austin, “differs from the procession of the Spirit, otherwise they would be brothers.” I doubt whether it is right to disclose to all eyes the morbid anatomy of Theology; but I assure my readers that I am reverentially forbearing.

Footnote 497:

“In the age of religious freedom, which was determined by the Council of Nice, the dignity of Christ was measured by private judgment, according to the indefinite rule of Scripture, or reason, or tradition. But when his pure and proper divinity had been established on the ruins of Arianism, the faith of the Catholics trembled on the edge of a precipice, where it was impossible to recede, dangerous to stand, dreadful to fall; and the manifold inconveniences of this creed were aggravated by the sublime character of their theology. They hesitated to pronounce; that God himself, the second person of an equal and consubstantial Trinity, was manifested in the flesh; that a being who pervades the universe, had been confined in the womb of Mary; that his eternal duration had been marked by the days, and months, and years of human existence; that the Almighty had been scourged and crucified; that his impassible essence had felt pain and anguish; that his omniscience was not exempt from ignorance; and that the source of life and immortality expired on Mount Calvary. These alarming consequences were affirmed with unblushing simplicity by Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicea, and one of the luminaries of the church. The son of a learned grammarian, he was skilled in all the sciences of Greece; eloquence, erudition, and philosophy, conspicuous in the volumes of Apollinaris, were humbly devoted to the service of religion. The worthy friend of Athanasius, the worthy antagonist of Julian, he bravely wrestled with the Arians and Polytheists, and though he affected the rigour of geometrical demonstration, his Commentaries revealed the literal and allegorical sense of the Scriptures. A mystery which had long floated in the looseness of popular belief, was defined by his perverse diligence in a technical form; and he first proclaimed the memorable words, “One incarnate nature of Christ,” which are still re-echoed with hostile clamours in the churches of Asia, Egypt, and Æthiopia. He taught that the Godhead was united or mingled with the body of a man; and that the Logos, the eternal wisdom, supplied in the flesh the place and office of a human soul.”—Gibbon, vol. viii. p. 279.

Footnote 498:

Waddington, Hist. of the Church, p. 182.

Footnote 499:

Jortin, vol. iii. p. 116.

Footnote 500:

Norton on the Trinity.

Footnote 501:

“Hence many questions arose, which gave rise to as many controversies. For example, it was debated, Whether the two natures in Christ were so united as to become one; or whether they remained distinct? Whether, since Christ was born, and died, and rose again, it could be said that God was born and died, and rose again?

“Whether the Virgin Mary, who was the Mother of Christ, could be called the Mother of God?

“Whether Christ were two persons, or only one?

“Whether Christ was everywhere present, in his human, as in his divine nature?

“Whether one person of the Trinity could be said to suffer for us?

“Whether the whole Trinity could be said to suffer for us?

“Whether in Christ there were three substances, or only two?

“These questions produced altercation and strife, and then anathematisms, and then fightings and murders.”—Jortin, vol. iii. p. 117.

To these might be added the question proposed by the Emperor Heraclius, A.D. 629, to his Bishops—“Whether Christ, of one person but two natures, was actuated by a single or a double will?” This gave rise to what was called the Monothelite (one will) Controversy, as that respecting the single nature was called the Monophysite (one nature) Controversy.

Footnote 502:

Jortin, vol. iii. p. 124.

Footnote 503:

Milman’s Edit. vol. viii. p. 312.

Footnote 504:

Norton on the Trinity, p. 78.

Footnote 505:

“Vigilius Tapsensis hath been supposed, by many, to have been the Maker of the Athanasian Creed about this time (the close of the fifth century). Others are of a different opinion. But it matters little by whom, or where, or when it was composed.”—Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. iii. p. 131.

Footnote 506:

“The opinions of some of our own Churchmen on this subject are collected by Clarke in his book on the Trinity. The expression of Bishop Tomline cannot be too generally known. ‘We know,’ he says, ‘that different persons have deduced different, and even opposite doctrines from the words of Scripture, and consequently there must be many errors among Christians; but since the Gospel no where informs us what degree of error will exclude from eternal happiness, I am ready to acknowledge that in my judgment, notwithstanding the authority of former times, our church would have acted more wisely and more consistently with its general principles of mildness and toleration, if it had not adopted the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed. Though I firmly believe that the doctrines themselves of this creed are all founded in Scripture, I cannot but conceive it both unnecessary and presumptuous to say, that except every one do keep them whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’”—Exposition, part iii. art. viii.

Footnote 507:

Church History, p. 220.

Footnote 508:

Intel. Sys. p. 602, 4.

Footnote 509:

“It must be acknowledged that the first converts from the Platonic school took advantage of the resemblance between Evangelic and Platonic doctrine on the subject of the Godhead, to apply the principles of their old philosophy to the explication and confirmation of the articles of their faith. They defended it by arguments drawn from Platonic principles, and even propounded it in Platonic language.”—Bishop Horsley.

Footnote 510:

See the Rev. D. James’s acknowledgment of the Subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father—of their official inferiority: and the illustrations of the King and the Duke of Wellington, which Trinitarian Theology thinks apposite.

Footnote 511:

We were told, indeed, in Christ Church, by the Rev. D. James, that there might exist any number of persons in the divine Essence, three thousand as well as three, and that only because Scripture had revealed no more had Christians fixed upon that number as making up the divine Unity. And this is so clear a consequence of the principles of Trinitarian Theology, that the view must be ascribed to all Trinitarians. Scripture, however, though it has only revealed three, has not declared that there are no more persons in the Godhead—so that it is being wise above what is written to limit the divine MONARCHY to the ECONOMY of three Persons.

But farther than this it was declared by the Rev. D. James that nature contained no evidence of One God, not even in the Trinitarian sense of Oneness, for that many Gods might unite to build the world, as many men had united to build the Liverpool Custom House. What would the Architect of that building say to this invasion of the unity of his designing mind? Mr. James repeatedly informed his audience that he always appealed to reason! Such is Trinitarianism when it reasons. But I suppose this view must be considered as a peculiarity of the individual preacher.

Footnote 512:

Who are the competent Critics, of whom Mr. Byrth speaks as retaining the text of the three Heavenly Witnesses? The Bishop of Salisbury, I suppose. If this had been Unitarian Criticism, Mr. Byrth would have called it defective Scholarship or dishonesty. He can discriminate in favour of those who err upon his own side. See a curious statement of the external evidence affecting this text, 1 John v. 7, in the second volume of Burton’s Theological Works, p. 114, 2nd part.

Footnote 513:

“It is reasonable to expect, that those doctrines, which form the leading articles of any system, should be plainly stated in the book which professes to make that system known.”—Wardlaw.

Footnote 514:

“‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’ That is, ‘Go ye therefore into all the world, and teach or disciple all nations, baptizing them into the profession of faith in, and an obligation to obey the doctrine taught by Christ, with authority from God the Father, and confirmed by the Holy Ghost.’”—Lardner.

Footnote 515:

John x. 34.

Footnote 516:

John xvii. 20, 23.

Footnote 517:

Rom. ix. 5.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

LECTURE VIII.

MAN, THE IMAGE OF GOD.

BY REV. HENRY GILES.

“FOR A MAN INDEED OUGHT NOT TO COVER HIS HEAD, FORASMUCH AS HE IS THE IMAGE AND GLORY OF GOD.”—1 Cor. xi. 7.

“AND WHEN HE CAME TO HIMSELF, HE SAID—HOW MANY HIRED SERVANTS OF MY FATHER’S HAVE BREAD ENOUGH AND TO SPARE, AND I PERISH WITH HUNGER. I WILL ARISE, AND GO TO MY FATHER, AND WILL SAY UNTO HIM,—FATHER, I HAVE SINNED AGAINST HEAVEN AND BEFORE THEE, AND AM NO MORE WORTHY TO BE CALLED THY SON; MAKE ME AS ONE OF THY HIRED SERVANTS.”—Luke xv. 17-19.

We are often told that man was originally created in the image of his Maker; and, in the same connection, we are told that, in his fall, he lost it. If this be true, we might expect that Scripture writers, in alluding to fallen man, would never ascribe to him so holy a resemblance. Paul, however, does it in one of the texts I have quoted; and Paul is not alone in this ascription. In an ordinance to Noah, immediately after the deluge, we find the same truth made the foundation of a most solemn injunction. “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.”[518] Had the resemblance of God been effaced from the soul of man in the fall of Adam, there had been in this ordinance neither meaning nor solemnity. Since, therefore, the sacred writer uses the fact of man’s likeness to God to stamp deeper guilt on the crime of murder; since, moreover, that fact is alleged after the narration of the fall,—we are justified by Scripture in claiming this high and glorious distinction for our universal nature.

I have quoted the second text, because the principle implied in it is identical with that which I stand here to maintain, namely, that sin is not of our nature, but against it; that it is not consistent with it, but contradictory to it; that to be sinful, is not to be natural, but unnatural. Sin, properly speaking, is moral delirium; and the progress towards that last paroxysm which, by revulsion, arouses the soul from its madness, is eloquently symbolised in the parable from which my second text is taken. Having tried all that sin could offer him; having sunk to the very husks of carnal appetites, and vainly sought thus to satisfy the hunger of an immortal soul, wearied, disappointed, and disgusted; satiated, but not satisfied, the prodigal arises from his torpor; he awakens from his wildering dream; the delirium that so long beset him is dispersed; with a calm and clear brain he finds himself in open day-light, and discerns the empty and unsubstantial vanities for which, in a false hope, he spent his labour and his strength, to reap at last, in the bitterness of a repentant heart, nothing but grief, tribulation, and anguish.

Sin is not a following of nature, but a violence on it; not conformity, but contradiction to it. And so, as when returning life beats in the palsied heart, or the dawn of reason bursts again on the madman’s brain, the prodigal is said “to come to himself;” when the spirit of moral renovation opens on him with compunctuous visitings of nature, and reveals to him a full sense of his condition. In his guilt he was at variance with all the moral instincts of humanity; and, in the sorrow of repentance, he needed as much to be at peace with himself as with his father. It is universally thus. God has established a certain order and harmony in our nature, appointed to each faculty a place and a purpose; and, in disturbing this arrangement, we become transgressors. We cannot sin against God without also sinning against our own souls, for in them is the primitive revelation of God; and in thus sinning against our own souls, we may practically resist all the divine attributes of which our weak faculties are the dim reflection; God’s wisdom in the abuse of our intellect; his greatness in the loss of our moral dignity; his goodness in the destruction of our charities; his purity in the corruption of our hearts. Unitarians are accused of making sin a light matter. We protest against the justice of the accusation. We hold sin to be the greatest of evils, and the most dire of miseries. We hold it not as a mere social impropriety, but we regard it as a dark disloyalty against conscience and against God. Much suffering, we know, it inflicts on society; but slight, indeed, is it compared with the ruin and devastation it works in our own souls. Here, at first, God impressed his image; here, at last, he fixes his tribunal: it is here his voice was heard in kindness, it is here it shall be also heard in judgment. God’s government is, like himself, spiritual. Man rules by outward power, God by inward inspiration; and it is the peculiarity of the divine legislation that, in the same individual, it attaches the condemnation to the crime; forces transgression, to pronounce its own sentence, and to inflict its own punishment. Human society has set up various bulwarks to guard its security; human law-givers have accompanied their enactments with fiercest penalties; and before Draco, and since, millions upon millions of God’s erring creatures have been offered, a sanguinary sacrifice to justice: superstition has personified all hideous evil in Satan,—the mighty sinner of creation,—the minister of eternal vengeance,—the great executioner of the universe; superstition has spread the limitless prisons of hell, and filled them with tortures, and lit those flames which it asserts are kept burning by the breath of an angry God, and are never to be quenched during his everlasting existence; but we assert, there is no scorn of society, there is no torture of most cruel laws, there is no hell of superstition, deep, burning, and eternal as it may be, that can equal the agonies which man’s own sense of wrong and degradation heap upon his overwhelmed and sunken spirit. The glory of an immortal soul is beyond all outward glories; the majesty of empires and crowns, the splendour of the sun, the beauty of the firmament, the riches of the universe, are nothing in comparison. We say to those to whom it is our privilege to minister, though you were stripped of all that constitute your frail and present happiness; though saddest reverses became your lot; though God laid his hand heavily upon you and your family, tore you from that rank and station that now make your glory; though your children and friends were one by one snatched from you, until you stood in the world-wilderness like a branchless and a blasted tree; though all illness of body and grief of mind were yours,—having an upright soul, it is but a light affliction compared with a guilty conscience, which could wield over earth a universal sceptre. The wages of sin is death,—death in the most tremendous meaning of that tremendous word,—death of purity, death of holy confidence, death of self-respect, death of inward and outward peace. Sin is misery, and the worst of miseries,—one that carries with it its own vengeance, is self-punished and self-cursed. True, we recognize no omnipresent and invisible tempter; true, we hold no gross and eternal punishment; we preach no original malediction, and no inherent depravity; we proclaim no sin which blots out all light and hope around the mercy-seat of God, and scathes the heart of man with everlasting despair. True, we show you no maniac penitents, bewildered in the madness of remorse, shrieking on the death-bed which conscience peoples with furies. We announce no deity coming from heaven, putting on the frail existence of humanity, and expiating on the cross the sin which had closed all access to peace. We cannot, and if we could we would not, freeze your hearts with ideas of torture, nor appal you with threatenings, nor echo on your ears the groans that never cease, the weepings, the wailings, the knashing of teeth, the sighs and hopeless complainings that swell for ever and ever a thickening smoke of torment. Independently of these things, there are other considerations more solemn,—more solemn, because more true,—there is our conscience; there is our peace; there is the dignity of our whole spiritual nature; there is reverence for duty; there is the power to enjoy what is pure and beautiful; there is fitness for communion with God, with all the righteous and the excellent,—these may be lost, or clouded by sin; and they may be so lost as never fully to be recovered. We count sin no slight evil, either as to its inward spirit or outward influence: as I have stated, so we preach. And here, once for all, I enter my protest against the impeachment which charges us with stripping guilt of its danger and its awfulness.

I. Human nature, according to the point from which we regard it, has a good or an evil aspect, each perfectly distinct, and each perfectly true. The whole truth is then in neither separately, but in both conjointly. Fixing too intently on either, and carrying our ideas to extremes, we may, on the one side, flatter human nature above its merits; or, on the other, be guilty towards it of injustice: on the one side see in it all possible good, and on the other nothing but incorrigible evil: on the one side soar into Utopianism, and on the other descend into Calvinism. The Calvinistic view we hold to be false, the Utopian impossible. We have no idea of any perfect goodness or perfect happiness in this world, either possessed or to be attained. Whilst we pace our way in this earthly pilgrimage, sin and suffering must more or less track our steps; the prodigal’s confession, and the publican’s prayer, must still be ours; the most favoured of God’s children have to meet, and bear their allotted griefs,—to see their glory grow dim, the desire of their eyes vanish, and to look onward and backward through the mist of tears. Sufficient of stern realities press upon us to crush at once the vision of a painless and sinless beatitude. Physical wants and sufferings, the inevitable condition of our mortal nature, were there no other, are of themselves equal to the purpose. While an hospital exists among men, breathing with groans and sickly in its very look; while a death-bed is found, steeped in the weepings of affliction; whilst a stone marks and commemorates a spot where the dust is sacred to affection and to sorrow; the wildest dreamer has enough to rebuke his enthusiasm, and to cool it into soberness. And extreme or exaggerated expectations of our nature, are in still stronger contradiction to our moral constitution than our physical. In every individual, however humble his grade, and however sluggish his faculties, there is abundance to make him aware that perfection here is neither his condition nor his destiny,—numberless desires, passions, hopes, fears, expectancies; and no one imagines that all his desires are to be gratified, all his passions fulfilled, all his hopes accomplished, all his fears removed, all his expectancies realized. Want and wish pursue their strife to the end. As it is with the individual, so is it with society: for as society is an aggregate of individual persons, social character is an aggregate of individual characters. Evils, sins, and sorrows, must always, we fear, exist, both in the depths and on the surface of the great community: we look for no period in future time, when those antagonist passions and rivalries shall be extinct—which place man into resisting contact to man, when riches, and fame, and power, shall not be sought for with avidity and strife, and create the throng of passions which spring from their desire and their abuse: we look for no period when the strong universally will use their strength in righteousness and mercy, when the poor and the weak shall cease to be victims, and have full justice done to them: we dare scarcely hope for a period when the massive throne of tyranny, whether political or sacerdotal, should be swept away upon the flood of emancipated progression; and, with equal fear, we think of the tyrannies of caste and creed, not less dark or obstinate; and although not entirely in despair, we look forward with timid anticipation to a time when the war of opinion shall be changed for Christian peace, and the fierce cry of bigotry give place to the hymn with which the angels sung our Saviour’s birth. We see no prospect that men shall lay aside their selfishness, and act in the spirit of universal charity, or that they shall so curb it as to harmonize it with the good of others! that they shall become universally disinterested, forbearing, candid, and generous; that the proud man will put off his scorn, and the oppressor break or throw away his sceptre. Moral and social evils will unquestionably be mitigated, but the sources of them lie too deep for extinction,—were extinction desirable, which it is not: for these elements of our nature are wrong only accidentally; while, essentially, they are right. Knowing that an argument gains nothing by concealing the objections to it, I have thus far been liberal in admissions: I will make one admission more. I acknowledge that an over-estimate of the actual condition and prospects of human nature, as well as their undue depreciation, is likely to have injurious consequences. One of the worst is this: that, creating vivid and unreal hopes, they rebound with harsh and cruel disappointments; the fervour of expectation turns into despair; the glow of generous, but blasted enthusiasm, cools down into apathy, if it does not wither into cynicism; exstacy that was too intense to last, and too extravagant to be well founded, either renounces altogether its early faith, or, casting away its hope, complains through life in grief and despondency. Desires, bright and beautiful, are broken, and their light scattered in the dust. Aspirations, once too big for utterance, turn back to the bosom that nourished them,—hitherto their palace, now their prison,—and there waste away in hopeless thinking, or die in the echoes of unavailing murmurs. Such mistakes are to be lamented, but not to be scorned; for that suffering is not to be despised which has its foundation in profound and extensive sympathy. And it is not in the power of minds more obtuse and slow to measure or conceive the pain of those who, with a moral imagination that goes out to the very limits of humanity, and a piercing sensibility that enters into the hidden places where suffering weeps unnoted, and sin lies down unredeemed, that in the spirit of unselfish love feels the woe and guilt of a race, as though they were personal afflictions, it is not easy, I say, to estimate the pain such men undergo: when some conjuncture of events, which seemed the dawn of virtue, of liberty, of peace, of brotherhood, turns out a mockery and a contradiction; when they live to see that their noblest aspirings were but as the babblings of vanity; that the circumstances of which they augured most hopefully, proved as empty as shapes of vapour painted by the rising sun; that changes, of which they prophesied in most exulting strains, reversed all their calculations. This is no vague speculation; there have been many instances in fact, and we can imagine many more. Had Luther been defeated in his attempt for religious reformation; had Howard departed to his rest with the sorrowful conviction that he left cells as dark, and prisoners as hopeless, as he found them; had Wilberforce closed his life in despair of all redemption for the slave; had Washington fought in vain the fight for independence, seeing no prospect for his country, but submissively to bear the yoke for ever; we have no doubt that each would have experienced a more oppressive anguish than from the keenest of personal afflictions. In such cases there were, of course, the soundness of conception and wisdom of execution which ensure success; but in others, it often happens that the disappointment is not the less bitter because the expectations were baseless.

Opposed to this scheme is that of rigid Calvinism. By the latter system the whole nature is described as hopelessly corrupt, and language affords no colouring which can give shades deep enough for the theological picture. Minutest analysis is used to prove man such a being, that when considered you find him to be a compound of fiend and brute—such a being that you wonder God would allow him to disgrace existence, to pollute creation, and not annihilate, and blot him out from the universe, such a being that if correctly described the very continuance of society becomes a miracle and a marvel. His intellect, we are told, is utterly and spiritually darkened, his will the slave of sin, set to work iniquity greedily, his imagination corrupt, his passions rebellious, his affections perverted, incapable of good in thought, word, or deed, and completely devoted to evil. Taking this view as correct, we might suppose the prime use of man’s understanding was to devise wickedness, of his memory to prolong the thoughts of it, of his will to form only guilty resolves, and of his passions to riot in all that is vile and ungodly. We have thus the whole spiritual and moral man steeped in black and hateful infamy. To sustain these assertions, appeal is made to experience; and proof is found of entire and universal depravity in history, laws, and literature. Any conclusion drawn from these goes but to testify what we are ready to concede, that man is an imperfect being, and that the evidence of his imperfection is stamped upon most of his actions and productions. But the testimony is partially and unjustly quoted. Another estimate of the same evidence would argue as strongly, and even more so, for the inherent goodness of man. If we take the instance of human laws it will at once illustrate and confirm my assertion. If laws prove the existence and universality of crime, they prove also the existence and universality of the sense of justice, for laws, so far as they embody general principles, are the expression of common and collective sentiments. Indirectly, they prove yet more: for, after all, the great mass of truth and rectitude exists independently of laws, is such as no law could reach, is in fact such that without it no laws could have a moment’s force. In the effort to make good an indictment against human nature, an industry and labour are expended, as perverse as they are pertinacious; the lowest purlieus of depravity are raked, the deepest mines of wickedness are worked with a zeal as ardent as the veriest miser would seek for hidden treasure, the blackest evils of the worst times are adduced, the pages of history that are the most darkly stained, are torn out and severed from the context; and for what purpose is all this? Why, to make the noblest work of God odious; to vilify that nature which was glorified in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. If human nature is so thoroughly depraved and vile, as so frequently asserted, the scheme of orthodoxy is most improbable, and a fallen humanity, as it paints humanity, instead of giving Christianity consistency, renders it the most perplexing of paradoxes. For if man be thus naturally vile and depraved—corrupted in every faculty, whence these high counsels in heaven concerning him; whence the union of three infinite and co-eternal persons to save a wretch, the extinction of whom would have been mercy to the universe; whence the counsels of the Father, the incarnation of the Son, and that death of a God-man on Calvary, at which we are told the angels trembled and creation stood aghast; along with all, the constant and supernatural agency of the Holy Spirit? If man be really as worthless and as wicked as we are often told he is, all this, (with reverence I speak it,) seems a want of wisdom and a waste of strength. Though it may be considered over bold I will go a step further. If the one sin of Adam was to work such complete ruin in all his countless posterity; if it was to be the source of such an irremediable wickedness, and unrelieved misery, if notwithstanding the united work of three infinite agents, there was still to be a bottomless pit and an everlasting smoke of torment, a black and boundless ocean of guilt and pain, swelled by gloomy streams ever and ever flowing in from earth, for which infants were sealed in their birth, to which the lost are consigned in their death—if this be the lot to which the great mass of our species is destined—of which the first tear is a symbol, and the last sigh a passport,—if hell still is more peopled than heaven, then the infinite agencies of redemption might have been spared, this hopeless and illimitable anguish might have been extinguished, and the annihilation of our first parents would have been the greater mercy and the greater salvation.

Appeal is made to scripture with still greater confidence than to experience. There is one to whom reference is never made for testimony to this doctrine, and that is our Lord Jesus Christ; and if such doctrine were true, it is strange that he who needeth not that any should testify of man, because he knew what was in man, did not reveal it, and stamp it with all the solemnity of his authority. It may with confidence be asserted that such a dogma as the inherent and universal corruption of human nature is neither asserted nor justified by any Scripture from Genesis to Revelations. The Bible, I admit to be a moral, and also a providential history; and in this relation, I admit also, that it contains many strong statements of human wickedness; but they all refer to periods of peculiar degeneracy, and a fair study of the context will plainly show they have defined limitations. In the appendix to this lecture I will subjoin a list of texts usually pleaded for this doctrine, the mere exhibition of which is sufficient to expose its utter want of a Scriptural foundation.[519] On the present occasion I shall confine my remarks to the proofs alleged from Paul to the Romans. Stripping the subject of all the mysticism with which it has been encumbered, and identifying ourselves with the mind and times of the apostle, let us clearly see what was his object, and then we shall truly apprehend the nature of his argument. Paul’s object was twofold: first, to show that the Gospel was universal. This was opposed to the circumscribed nationality of Judaism. Secondly, that it was inward and spiritual. This was again opposed to the ritual and legal exactitude of Judaism. The General course, therefore, of the argument is directed against Jewish thoughts and Jewish prejudices, and to maintain the admissibility of the Gentiles to the Christian church. He has then to make good two propositions:—namely, “that God is impartially and equally the God of all men; and that fidelity of heart is the essence of all true religion.” We might sum up the whole system of the Apostle in two simple sentences of his letter: “Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.” The other assertion is, that “with the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” Proving these two principles, he utterly demolishes all Jewish claims. The Apostle proceeds to open the new aspect which Jesus presented of the character of God—that of grace or mercy. Moses proclaimed Jehovah as a God of law, Jesus revealed him as a God of grace. Paul cautiously, but with power, argues most convincingly that in this relation only can men confidently approach him, but in this relation there is free access for all. None have a claim from merit, for all are guilty. With remarkable prudence, he takes, first, the case of the Gentile, and the state of the world in his own time supplied him examples in melancholy abundance. There was, therefore, no ground for Gentile exultation or Jewish jealousy, for the gospel was offered to the Heathens, not as a thing of merit but of favour, not as reward for their holiness, but as a remedy for their sin. To the Jews, who looked with bitter contempt on all men but themselves, who imagined every spiritual advantage was for them alone, this would be most offensive. The next question which thence arose was this:—As the Gentiles obviously were accepted before God, only on the ground of his mercy, whether the Jews could claim acceptance on any other ground? The Apostle had most convincingly shown that the Gentiles had violated the sense of duty inscribed upon their hearts, with equal force of reasoning he proves that the Jews had violated the precepts written in their law; one, therefore, had no right to accuse the other—both were guilty in the sight of God, and both had equal need of his mercy.—But, the Jews were not only wrong in their ideas on the extent of the Creator’s goodness, but also on the true nature of human virtue. As they considered his special providence confined to themselves, so they imagined the only acceptable obedience was in the rigid observance of their own minute precepts and ceremonies. In opposition to this Paul contends that justification is by faith, and not by the works of the law—not a faith which implies a mere assent to a series of scholastic propositions, but a faith which consists in a trusting and confiding spirit. The Apostle places saving holiness, not in outward and measured precepts, but in living and inward principles—in allegiance to God and Christ, in the loyalty of a true and pure heart—in the spirit that makes obedience more a life than a law. To say then that God holds man sternly to a code of inevitable condemnation, to say that any one transgression, however slight, sets at naught the whole tendency of the character and life, not only leaves Paul’s reasoning without force, but subverts the gospel to its very foundations. Our Lord in the parable represents a master as thus addressing his unforgiving servant, “O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt because thou desiredst me—shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?” The character of God as described by orthodoxy is the contradictory of this. But we are informed that God is a Judge, and, analogous to human judges, on the tribunal of the universe, lays aside all private considerations. The assimilation is at once low and false. God has no evidence to examine, no probabilities to balance, no decision to arrive at, no formal sentence to pronounce—there is no distinction in the case between God and man, analogous to that between an earthly judge, and his accused fellow-mortal; there is no such distinction with God as a personal relation and a public one, for God is the same in all relations. His dominion is in the spirit; there he rewards, and there he punishes; there is no reward separate from the direct results of righteousness itself issuing in blessedness, and no penalty separate from the results of sin itself issuing suffering, and each in the proportion in which the character is sanctified or depraved. Forgiveness of sin then, is peace of conscience, springing from a regenerated heart, and when man with a thoughtful and enlightened spirit can forgive himself, God forgives him. We, at least those of us personally engaged in this controversy, maintain no such doctrine as the pardon of sin on condition of repentance—as if repentance were something offered and remission an equivalent received instead. On the contrary, we see in repentance but the painful revulsion of a soul from a moral state found by sad experience to be unworthy of it: a struggle upward in many sighs and fears to the high estate from which it has fallen, in repentance itself we see but an additional instance of the anguish which sin never fails to entail. We regard it not as a merit, but a penalty. We grant the universality of sin, as fully as any can assert it. We know it is written, “all men have sinned and come short of the glory of God”—and we admit the truth of the assertion. Wherever man is, there will be sin, for we expect in no place—no, not in heaven itself—to find in man the perfection of a deity. It has been asserted, that every man has an ideal in his soul above his actual conduct. This has been used for condemnation of our nature, we take it as the glory of it—as an evidence that the spirit of God is extinguished in no man. We are ready to concede, not that the open transgressor comes short of the glory of God, but the best men come far short of the glory of their own ideal, and the sense of that short coming is acute, in the degree that their apprehensions of moral loveliness are clear and purified. Every man with his conscience in a right state laments with more heart-felt sorrow the sins which are inward than those which are outward, not those which have been exposed to the world, but those which only God has seen. We desire in no sense to mitigate the deep injury of sinfulness; but when we are told, that God, in vindication of his holy law, must subject man to an unsparing standard of judgment, orthodoxy to be consistent should have the unmitigated penalty inflicted on every personal transgressor. We are unable to conceive how the righteousness of any law can be vindicated by contriving an escape for the guilty by the suffering of the innocent. We do not make void the law—nay, we establish it, for we hold, and we preach it also, that transgression vindicates in the person of the sinner the claims of holiness, righteously and completely, in anguish and tribulation. I here close the polemical division of this lecture, and now for the remaining time I shall dwell on views more positive.

II. Having elucidated two extreme and false systems of human nature, I shall now adduce some of these essentials which properly entitle it to be considered in the likeness of God. I shall pass over the faculties of mere intellect and taste, for these are not denied. I do this for the sake of brevity, for it would be easy to prove that without sense of moral beauty in the soul, even these could have no high developement, philosophy would lose its wisdom, science its uses, painting its glow, architecture its majesty, sculpture its grace, poetry and eloquence their inspiration. It would be easy, I maintain, to show, that without conceptions of the divine, the true, the right, and the beautiful, there would be neither power nor materials in human nature from which to create a single great work of mind, nothing to evince the might of genius or the immortality of thought. I shall, however, in all my subsequent remarks, confine myself to what without dispute is strictly moral. We contend not for an infallibility in man’s reason, neither do we assert impeccability in his will; as we admit error in the one, we can admit sin in the other. But when we speak of the moral nature of man, we regard it not partially, but as a whole, not in its accidental exceptions, but in its essential constitution. Of this constitution we assert that virtue and goodness are the true and native attributes. For the position that sin is not natural but unnatural, not in accordance with humanity but contrary to it, we have the testimony of the great bishop Butler.[520]—“Every work,” he says, “of nature and art is a system; and as every particular thing, both natural and artificial, is for some use or purpose, out of or beyond itself, one may add to what has already been brought into the true idea of a system, its conduciveness to this or more ends. Let us instance in a watch: Suppose the several parts taken to pieces and placed apart from each other; let a man have ever so exact a notion of these several parts, unless he considers the respect and relations which they have to each other, he will not have any thing like the idea of a watch. Suppose these several parts brought together, and any how united, neither will he yet, be the union ever so close, have an idea which will bear any resemblance to that of a watch. But let him view these several parts put together, or consider them as to be put together in the manner of a watch—let him form a notion of the relation which these several parts have to each other, all conducive in their several ways to this purpose, showing the hour of the day,—and then he has the idea of a watch. Thus it is with the inward nature of man. Appetites, passions, affections, and the principle of reflection, conscience, considered severally as the inward parts of our inward nature, do not at all give us an idea of the system of this nature. And this our nature is adapted to virtue, as from the idea of a watch it appears, that its nature, that is, constitution or system, is adapted to measure time. What in fact commonly happens is nothing to the question. Every work of art is apt to be out of order: but this is so far from being according to its system, that let the disorder increase, and it will destroy it.” The author then goes on to say, that—“Nothing can possibly be more contrary to our nature than vice, meaning by nature not only the several parts of our internal frame, but also the constitution of it. Poverty and disgrace, tortures and death, are not so contrary to it. Misery and injustice are indeed equally contrary to some different parts of our nature taken singly, but injustice is moreover contrary to the whole constitution of the nature.” And here I will repeat a fine remark from the same noble thinker, used already, in a note by one of my fellow-labourers in this discussion.—“We should learn,” says the philosophical prelate, “to be cautious lest we charge God foolishly, by ascribing that to him, or the nature he has given us, which is wholly owing to its abuse. Men may speak of the degeneracy and corruption of the world, according to the experience they have had of it, but human nature considered as the divine workmanship should, methinks, be treated as sacred: for in the image of God made he man.”[521]

In human nature, under all its forms, we recognize two eternal moral elements; which, though frequently perverted, can never be destroyed. I mean sympathy and conscience, the feeling of a common nature, and the sense of right and wrong. If we consider the truth, the power, and extent of sympathy, though nothing else remained in man, this alone would prove his assimilation to God; would prove, to use the language of the Apostle, that he was still a partaker of the divine nature. In what numberless forms is it manifested!—rising from instinct to godliness. We see it in family affections. Wherever we meet a home, however rude the beings that it shelters, whether it be scooped in the snow, or be a tent on the desert, wherever the loves of parents and children, of brothers and sisters, are interchanged within the sphere of its operation, we have the spirit of a common heart. We see it also in love of country. From those who surround him in his dwelling, man enlarges the compass of his affections, until they embrace those who, with himself, tread the same soil, and speak the same tongue. The general glory, honour, and prosperity of his country, become dear to him; and from habits of loving association, there, more than any where else, the heavens have a brighter smile, and nature wears a kinder face. Every nation has had its patriots; and, whether successful or not, whether victorious in the field or bleeding on the scaffold, they evince the power with which the sentiment of common good can overcome the force of selfish interests. We see the strength of sympathy in the love of man generally, and especially in that species of it which assumes the form of compassion. Whence else the mass of goodness which proves that humanity, with all its evils and its errors, is a most merciful nature. Misery, in any form, is an appeal that is rarely disregarded. The stranger, whose face we never saw before, if it be seamed and marred by suffering, in his misfortune becomes a brother; and what is yet harder, our foe, in his sorrow, seems once more a friend. Men find it hard to pardon a prosperous enemy; but there are few so callous whom a fallen one would not disarm of hatred. Hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness, desertion, orphanage, imprisonment, sickness—every want that afflict the wretched—have their provision in human mercy, not only from individual hands, but from collective hearts. When man is maligned as utterly corrupt—as at enmity with God and his kind, we may point to thousands occupied in works of beneficence, and to refugees for misery in every land, and claim as witnesses against the accusers. And we stop not with the woes that fall directly under the senses;—sufferers who wasted their sighs and their tears in darkness, have been thought of with grief by those whom they knew not, and visited with glad tidings when they least expected. The piercing supplication of wretchedness has been sometimes wafted across continents and oceans without failing, or being weakened by the distance; and the cry of anguish, uttered at one extreme of earth, has fallen with power on human hearts at the other. We speak not of bodily wants alone, but equally of the soul’s wants. The ignorant have those who feel and work for them, and there are some who do not scorn the most guilty; there are many pure souls who never themselves knew contamination, who can turn with mercy to the despised, and bleed with sorrow that the work of God should lie so deep in ruin. And, whether with right or wrong principles, whether by right or wrong agencies, whether in right or wrong methods, this sentiment can have no illustration so sublime as the various exertions here, and throughout the globe, for the religious regeneration of mankind. Is there, then, nothing godlike in the spirit which gives unity and love to home; nothing godlike in the spirit which, with unselfish devotion, causes a man to sacrifice his own interests in his nation’s good; nothing godlike in the spirit which makes the sufferer a brother, whether stranger or enemy; which can pierce the haunts of loathsome want; which can feel for the body and the soul, and draw near, in generous pity, both to distress and crime; which dreams, with tortured imagination, of the unseen tribulation of the dungeon, and rests not until the fresh breeze is on the prisoner’s brow, and the bright and cheerful sunshine on his eye; which stretches forth its ample charity to the utmost regions of earth; and, wherever there is a complaint of physical or spiritual need, admits it is a brother’s cry, and hears it not in vain?

The very passions, which might seemingly be urged against this reasoning, are but so many confirmations of it. Men have sometimes tried to be independent of others; they failed. Men have tried to live apart from others, and to dispense with the general affections of life; they failed. Men have tried to set opinion at defiance, and to disregard esteem; they also failed. And, in the few rare and extreme cases in which men have been more than usually sordid, selfish, and anti-social, the isolation to which they have been abandoned evinced their conduct to be averse to nature; and, whilst it proved their folly, inflicted their chastisement. Emulation, envy, jealousy, vanity, ambition, and various other passions, afford evidence to the same purpose: for, what is emulation, but the struggle for the greatest share of appreciation; and envy, but the malignity of disappointment; and jealousy, but the suspicion of not possessing it,—perchance, of not deserving it; and vanity, but the puny desire to attain, or the timid hope that it already has it; and ambition, but the strong effort of a strong nature to have a lasting life in the admiration and memory of men: all, in their several ways, converging in evidence of one truth, namely, that community of feeling is amongst the greatest distinctions of our nature. In truth, it is only by this that man understands man. It is this that opens to man the heart of man; that, from the first human being to the last, forms a chain of common emotion, which indissolubly links mankind of all generations into one brotherhood. Without this, history would be a dead letter; laws and customs, but puzzles; arts, confused and shapeless; past languages and literature, but empty babble; and by-gone religions and philosophy, but unintelligible names. This common sympathy is that by which we know the meaning of history; by which we know the force of laws and customs; by which we know the beauty and immortality of art; by which we are enabled to interpret language, literature, philosophy, and religion; by which we are made one with our race, and identified in kindred with all that have ever ennobled or adorned it.

A second characteristic I have mentioned, in man, is the sense of duty, the sense of right and wrong. In this more than in any other quality he bears the impress of his divine original. The sense of duty is an essential part of human nature. A man might as well endeavour to lay aside the consciousness of his rational existence as to get rid of the idea of an immoveable distinction between good and evil, between virtue and vice. I know that, in the operations of the moral sense, there have been apparent contradictions; but if we were to deny it on this ground, we should deny the existence even of reason itself, for many of its conclusions are apparently contradictory. We assert the reality of the rational faculty, but not its infallibility; in like manner, we assert the reality of the moral faculty, but not its infallibility. I know that it seems various in its operation, not only from national and religious differences, but also from individual sophistries. Men pronounce just judgment on the sins of others; but when they come to pass sentence on their own, they invent a thousand excuses for justification or leniency: but these excuses do not satisfy themselves. And when they are alone with their own hearts, in silent and sober thought, the deception will not bear to be scrutinized, and truth is justified by conscience. The sense of duty is universal. Wherever we meet man, we meet one who, in some way or other, is the creature of moral feeling; and although the moral sentiment may be superstitiously or fanatically directed, there are essential ideas in which it never changes. Wild actions and awful evils may, I know, be perpetrated under a mistaken sense of duty, and done with the fiercer zeal because they are considered to be duty. Under its influence, men can not only sacrifice others but themselves: in one age or country, a man can lacerate himself before an image or an idol, or look calmly on the rack on which a tortured fellow creature shivers, or he can come from his retreat of self-infliction to the place where he persecutes; and, if the case compelled, he could go himself from that to the stake of martyrdom. The sentiment is true to itself, and the misdirection of it lies in other sources: yet with all its diversities, justice, mercy, and truth, have ever the instinctive approval of conscience, whilst wrong, cruelty, and falsehood, under whatever forms disguised, are abhorrent to it. The sense of duty presents man to us in the most glorious aspects of his nature; and that sentiment is not always misdirected. By its power in the soul, we observe appetites governed, passions subjected, and temptation overcome; by its inspiration, when necessity calls, we observe men devoting themselves in the spirit of martyrdom to truth and right, casting pleasure aside, forsaking whatever was dear to them, and despising life itself. Whatever change for good has occurred in the history of man, is a witness for the force of duty, for it has been worked out in much travail and self-denial; whatever we have most precious in our spiritual or social blessings, whether our liberties or our religion, we owe to the spirit of duty; it is enshrined in the memory of all our benefactors; it is consecrated in the blood of martyrs. Signal instances of this kind may strike more forcibly from their distinctness and saliency; but the mightiest energy of duty is in the economy of general life. Go into the open mart of the world, and, in all the astonishing complexities that are spread over that wide scene, consider to what an extent man trusts man, and is trusted in return, mutual confidence forming the immutable foundation of the vast social structure. It is base injustice to human nature to assert that all this is the effect of interest or fear; without pervading conscience, mere interest or fear would be as powerless to sustain society as the arm of man to move the orbs of heaven; without conscience, human laws could either have no existence or no power,—mere ropes of sand, that a touch could sever; passion would have no scruple, desire no limit, but power; and selfishness no control, but a superior opposing force: the strong would prostrate the weak by violence, and the weak would in turn overreach the strong by guile, deceit, and fraud.

I am willing to admit, as I have before admitted, that social man is encompassed with many injurious influences, and I know that he does not always escape guiltless: I know that many vices are generated in society, and nourished by its corruptions; that pride, both worldly and religious, walks through life with anti-social heart and clouded brow, wrapped up in its own miserable importance, exulting in vanities, self-worshipping and self-enslaved; that covetousness, surfeited with acquisition, still works on, and still cries “more;” that licentiousness goes its way in darkness, and leaves destruction in its path; that envy broods over its own solitary and unacknowledged malice, sickens at the pleasure or the fame it cannot reach; that gospel charity is often slain in the collision of creeds and passions, and Christian zeal heated into bigotry; but these, I repeat again, are not our nature, and judgment against it on such grounds is quite as unjust, as if we should seek out the hospitals to test the health of a community, visit but prisons to decide on its morals, and pass only through asylums for lunatics to form an opinion of its intelligence. But even in its sins, humanity loses not the evidence of its divine relationship. The image of God may be darkened, but the impress is deep as ever. The capacity of sin equally implies the capacity of holiness; transgression implies the knowledge of a law, inspired or revealed; the violation, therefore, of moral injunctions includes the high capability of moral perception. Whence but from the greatness of our nature is the deep misery of sin—whence, I might say, but from its holiness?—whence but from its adaptation to goodness, are the ruin and the dislocation which guilt can work in our whole inward frame and constitution? Thence it is, that it is that the conscience, dethroned and humiliated, is torn by remorse, worse incomparably than bodily torture: thence it is, that the affections either become a total and disorganized wreck, or, wounded by a sense of shame and lost dignity, bow down with sorrow or wither in despair. Thence it is, that the good and pure are shunned, and the evil sought, for the one cause a feeling of contrast too painful to be borne, the other afford a refuge by their moral assimilation, and the spirit needs support wherever it can be found. Thence it is, that when the guilty have utterly lost their own respect, and the approbation of the virtuous, that crime becomes desperation and remorse madness,—that conscience is silenced in delirious self-defence, and that plunge after plunge sinks them lower and lower in the gulf of spiritual perdition. And yet human character is rarely ever such a wreck as not to have some remnant to justify its origin and parentage; some embers of the sacred fire smouldering in the sanctuary,—some gleams of affection,—some dawnings of memory, that open to the weary spirit the quiet and happiness of better days,—some touches of mercy that has yet a sigh for wretchedness,—some visitings of compunction,—some unconscious desires to be good once more,—some timid hopes of pardon,—some secret prayers to be made better. The human soul is a great mystery, and so indeed is human life; we observe a few palpable and external manifestations, but how little know we of the secret and unseen workings! That the good in every human being, even such as strikes us as the worst, preponderates over the evil, is, I am persuaded, not the imagination of a fanciful charity, but a fact and a reality.

But though more crime existed in actual life than has ever been alleged, our doctrine would yet be true. We enter on no defence of man in the whole of his conduct. We contend for his inherent capacities, and in arguing for these, we are entitled to select our illustrations from the highest specimens of nature, and not from the lowest. We contend for its capacity to subjugate passion to principle—to sacrifice present desires to progressive good—to resign selfish interests to human ones—to give the spiritual and eternal a predominance over the sensual and the temporal: and we contend for this, not as a thing possible, but a thing proved: we contend for what has its evidence in abundance of examples. If we could point to one patriot, to one philanthropist, to one martyr, to one holy man, in each of these the fact would have sufficient attestation: but humanity has its armies of patriots, and philanthropists, and martyrs, and saints. With these the lowest of us are united in a kindred nature, and dignified by a common brotherhood. But passing from characters of this magnitude, come we to the ordinary existence that is common to us all. Every life, from the palace to the cottage, is one more or less of self-denial and labour—one in which we must continually defer to others and work for them. Cast your imagination over the vast throng of this busy world: consider the countless modes in which they are all toiling with head and hand, from the man of genius to the labourer of field or factory,—from the proudest merchant to his meanest servant,—scarcely a movement in it all that has not a reference to others beyond the agent,—scarcely a movement that has not some connection with a human love or a human duty. Retire from the crowd to their dwellings, and, except in cases of last degradation, they are, on the whole, retreats of mutual kindness. If there be grief, there is compassion,—if there be illness, there is unwearied tenderness,—if there be death, there is sorrow. It will perhaps be said, that all this may very well consist with a reprobate state. If so, it only proves that no state is so reprobate, as not to be consistent with a great mass of excellence. If to confer happiness and show mercy be not goodness, we are at a loss to explain the goodness of God or of Christ. And as we descend in the scale of society, we discover human nature with peculiar trials, and also with peculiar virtues. Amongst the poor and laborious classes we may find some grossness, but we find much goodness; and to a considerate mind the wonder will be, that their grossness is not more, and their goodness less. We behold them often patient under manifold oppressions, forbearing against many wrongs; uncomplaining in the midst of afflictions, toiling on from youth to age in the same routine of laborious monotony; resigned in illness, though it takes that strength from them which is their only refuge, merciful to each other, giving aid to want out of want; all divine evidence that there is in humanity a godlike spirit, which nothing can suppress, not sin, ignorance, poverty, nor any ill of life.

I have spoken of our divine affinity chiefly in the goodness that unites us to our species, but there is a tendency towards God himself in which that affinity is still more clearly seen. It is made manifest in our capacity to know God. God is a spirit, and must be spiritually apprehended. We must therefore have some attributes in common. If there be not some qualities in our souls corresponding to the nature of God, he would be to us a nonentity, and we could neither know him nor love him. The knowledge of God is a spiritual revelation, and by that which is within us we interpret the revelation and give to it a meaning—his power in the movement of our will—his intelligence in the rectitude of our reason—his goodness in the sympathies of our affections—his holiness in the law of our conscience. It is made manifest in our capacity to imitate God. The apostle says, “Be ye followers of God as dear children;” and our Saviour himself exhorts us to “be merciful even as he is merciful,” and to be “perfect even as he is perfect.” To imitate any being with whom we had no assimilation of nature, it requires no argument to prove an utter impossibility. But this principle has a moral value far beyond its theological import—in breaking down the distance which we usually place between our hearts and God; in drawing him within the circle of our nearest affections; in uniting us to him in a more filial trust, in taking fear from our love and inspiring life in our obedience—proving to us that God is verily and indeed our Father, as Christ is our brother; that God our Father is imitable by his children; that Christ our brother by a perfect conformity to his will has revealed and proved its truth. That we have affinity with God is further made manifest by our need of him. Consciously or unconsciously every man is seeking after God, or after what God alone can give him. Whether blindly or otherwise, we all feel the want of him in our souls, for in whatever direction we turn our desires, we are yearning after the perfect and the infinite: we have the proof of it in our disgust, our dissatisfactions, and discontents. Who does not hear of the insufficiency of the world? And what does that mean? The vanity of pleasure. But why is pleasure vain? why does he who tries it in all its enchantments, weary at last even to repugnance? The vexations of wealth? But why are riches vexatious? Why do they disappoint the hope that longed so deeply for them, and leave complaints still in all the fullness of success? The fatigues of power? But, why again is power fatiguing, when no sacrifices were too painful, and no toils too harrassing in the career for its attainment? It is simply because pleasure, wealth, or power, can never fully occupy the human soul, unlimited in capacity and desire, perishable things bring it only chagrin, when in lavish expectation it looks for complete fruition. Nor is it alone that we call the world, which proves insufficient, but still higher, the pursuits of knowledge, and the creations of genius; the greatest sage feels himself at last a child, and the most inspired poet wishes for things more beautiful than he has ever conceived, and scenes brighter than he has ever imagined. Even in truest religion this sentiment may be discerned in operation, in alternations between fear and faith, between despondency and hope. A longing for the invisible and the boundless may be traced in all the higher forms of superstition—in every effort to overcome the thraldom of the body and to achieve the spiritual emancipation, from the ascetics that in the first centuries peopled the deserts of Asia to the flagellants that in the middle centuries overran the continent of Europe; from the penitent that scorches himself on an Indian plain, to the monk that lashes himself in a Spanish cloister. Now to what do all these, some true and some mistaken, refer, to what do they point? Evidently to something which the soul cannot find on earth, to God, perfect and infinite, in whom at last it will attain repose and fullness. And thus we have two great truths intimated at the same time; for the conscious want that tells us of our need of God reveals also our immortality, and the one is the glory of the other.

Now, in conclusion, let me ask to what purpose is all this blackening of human nature? It cannot promote humility; for to be humble is not to be degraded. If a sense of degradation corresponded with humility, we should be more humble as we descended to the level of the brutes. It cannot inspire a poignant sense of guilt, nor a true feeling of confession, for as it takes away natural dignity it leaves nothing from which a man can fall; and as it denies personal capacity, it must in the same degree weaken the feeling of personal accountability. He whose moral sorrow will ever lie most profoundly is one that has the consciousness of having abused high and great capacities; of having, by his own sins, become unworthy of his nature; of having done despite to the spirit of God within him, the light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world; of having apostatised from his godlike destiny. But to tell a man, as orthodoxy does, first that he is morally imbecile, and then that he is personally guilty, is an absolute derangement and confusion of all our moral ideas. It is well that essentially the sources of our conduct in general, are beyond the reach of theology; or doctrines like these, would stop all motives to exertion, would destroy the hopes of the good, and strike dead the efforts of the penitent. As it is they are not without great and serious evils. They take from virtue that which is its most noble distinction. when rightly understood, a sense of individual and independent action:—they attach a slavish spirit to religion, which, to a great extent, stifles the free and voluntary service of the heart. Yet worse still, to maintain an extreme theory, men are driven to malign their nature, and to seek for all manner of blame against it—to deny the excellence and reality of virtues—of which an unsophisticated observer could not entertain a doubt, to invent all motives for goodness but the true ones. It is a sad necessity in which men place themselves when they are compelled to violence to their own hearts, and injustice to those of others, when their system forces them to repress their rising pleasure in the beauty of virtue, and to change their unbidden admiration into qualified condemnation. If the man called heretical, or one called unregenerate, visit the sick, clothe the naked, do in fact every work of mercy, have a heart of love and a hand of bounty—revere his God in all sincerity, and worship him in truth, the evangelical moralist must assert, that it is all worthless, and is, in fact, of the nature of sin. Though one who is called regenerate should do no more, and to all evidence, not in a better spirit, he is esteemed a most godly and pious Christian. The man who cannot believe as the creeds or a party require, may do every work which Christ will judge him by, and be refused his name; but if he has the blessing of his master in heaven, he may care little for the anathema of men upon earth. If Unitarianism delivered us from nothing else than this spiritual injustice, it is a great redemption.

If I am asked, in turn, why I maintain the doctrine of human dignity, I answer, first, because it raises my homage to God. I understand him no otherwise than as he is emblemed in the human soul, exalted and purified: without this creation is a blank to me, and the scripture a dead letter. Regarding it also as his work, I revere him through his work, the more profoundly, the more I believe it worthy of him. I cannot conceive it an honour to God, that the only being here who has capacity to know him, the only being who reflects his attributes, the only being who admires his universe and discerns him in it, should be wholly corrupt: I cannot think that such a doctrine gives him glory. I answer secondly—because it teaches me to hope for man; teaches me to hope for him in this world and the next: while I have faith in the capacity, I can never lose hope in the developement, but if man be powerless as well as depressed, I have no proper ground for expectation, and the difficulties of the present are softened by no light from the future. But as it is, believing that man has great inherent capabilities, for knowledge, for liberty, for virtue, and for happiness—I lose not my confidence, I observe him as in the struggle of discipline, and in preparation for the period of redemption; and wherever I see ignorance, or slavery, or vice, or misery, I do not despair of a time, when these heavenly faculties shall have achieved their emancipation. I answer, lastly, I maintain the doctrine because it teaches me to honour man. I feel how necessary it is for us in this world of outward show, and where outward show has so much power, that we should have some strong sentiment by which to give our appreciation to those who have no external dazzle with which to attach us: in this world of grades and inequalities, where rank and wealth, and genius, so continually throw their enchantments about us, we need a sentiment before which rank and wealth and genius are nothing, in regarding those who have them not, and also those who have: and no sentiment can be more powerful, more holy, or more sublime than this, that they are the immortal children of God, destined for his presence, and made after his likeness. Having this faith, then, ignorance, sin, poverty, may come safely before us, without any fear of that infidel contempt with which they are too often treated. Show me then a man, and no matter what his condition, if I be true to this faith, you point me to an object of most solemn interest. Show me the red man of the American forests, or the black man of tropical deserts, and untame and ferocious though he be, he has within him an indelible title to my reverence. His rude and unclothed form enshrines a soul in the image of God, as well as the most polished of his civilized brethren. Show me the veriest serf or slave who seems chained to the soil—the gospel which is equal to bond and free, tells me to behold in him the heir of a glorious inheritance; his title is his nature; it burns in his blood, and it is stamped upon his brow, its appeal is in the fire or moisture of his eye—no power can efface it, for the hand of God has impressed it:—show me even the criminal who seems all but lost to every sense of duty, I am not justified in despairing, much less have I any title to scorn. We dare not despise in the lowest state the child whom God regards—we dare not cast off whom Christ has not rejected, nor disown the brother for whom he died. If we be right-minded, and have any sympathy with the spirit of Jesus, his moral wretchedness should be his most eloquent appeal. We never know the whole power of Christianity until we have interest in man as the child of God, and revere him as God’s image, until we behold the throng around us in relation to their mighty and improvable capacities—until we see in the lowest and the worst, objects of hope and moral influence, with undying souls which no vice or passion should conceal. In this faith the messenger of God may go with confidence to guilt and suffering, and bring with him no mocking offers of blessedness and peace: then may he call on souls to rejoice which were ready to perish in despair, pour the dews of heaven on many a closing hour, and silence the doubts of many a fearing spirit. Thus, believing we should have trust unshaken, look forward to the consummation, when that humanity which here has only its trials, shall be hallowed with the infinity and eternity of its maker.

NOTES.

Note 1. See page 13.

Having in the Appendix of my former lecture stated from sources of authority the doctrines of Calvinism on the nature of man, I here enumerate some of the principal texts on which those doctrines are said to be founded. The question, it is to be kept in mind, is not whether man is or is not capable of great depravity, whether sin of various degrees and extent has not existed in all ages, and does not exist at present in all places. That sin has entered into the world is a fact undisputed, no matter when or how; that sin is universal is a point also, upon which we are on both sides agreed. The true subject of dispute between us is, simply, this. Is human nature a nature of radical and inherent depravity? or is not goodness more properly its characteristic than evil? Now we maintain that all its essential tendencies establish the latter question in the affirmative, and no Scriptures prove the former. I shall take those quoted in the most approved Calvinistic formularies.

Gen. iii. is alleged as giving an account of the origin of sin: “And the Lord said to the woman, what is this thou hast done? And the woman said, the serpent beguiled me and I did eat.” There we have the account of Adam’s temptation and transgression, with the penalties pronounced upon the beguiler and his dupes. Now in whatever light we regard this passage, whether as a mythos, an allegory, or a literal narrative, it implies nothing of the doctrine asserted, or the consequences attributed to it; namely, the loss of all original righteousness, and entire defilement in all the faculties and parts of the soul and body: the imputation of their sin to mankind, burdened with the penalty of eternal death. When we find these ideas extracted out of one obscure passage, we may well ask is it Unitarianism or orthodoxy which adds to the Scriptures? These ideas are not in the passage itself, nor in any other supposed to be co-relative, nor in any number of passages fairly conjoined and fairly interpreted.

Gen. vi. 5. “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth.” This states merely a general fact, that of an evil condition of society, for which judgment of God is represented as poured out from heaven. But it is alleged, that in the same connection we read “that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually.” This clause only expresses the original idea with more impressive force. No one in the worst state of an individual or a nation will attempt to maintain that such words can have a rigid and literal application. Besides, in that very time, Noah is made an express exception; for we read that “the Lord said unto Noah, come thou and all thy house into the ark, for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.”[522] But though the literal meaning were insisted on, it could but literally extend to men of that time; and the rule of interpretation by which our opponents define the character of man, we are entitled in the next verse to apply to the character of God. “It repented him,” we are told, “that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”[523] If on the literal principle we are to conclude man wicked in every thought and imagination, on the same principle we are to conclude that God can repent, and that he can be grieved at the heart.

Jer. xvii. 9. “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” is an exaggeration of the same kind with that we are considering. It was uttered when the Jewish nation was in a state of sad corruption, and the prophet’s feelings were passionate against his countrymen in grief and indignation. If we are to take all the prophet’s words as coolly and deliberately uttered, then what shall we say to the tremendous language in which he curses his existence and his birth.

Eccl. vii. 29. “God hath made man upright, but they have sought many inventions.” This expression contains no matter of controversy; the first part states our view, and the latter clause of the verse, by no torture of criticism can be made to imply inherent and entire depravity.

Psalm li. 5. “Behold I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” The import of this expression is to be judged of from the general tone of the Psalm, which is most passionate and penetential, inspired by the deepest spirit of remorse. David uttered these complainings in profoundest self-accusation; but there would be little for repentance to deplore, if he could remove the blame from himself to his nature, and bury individual guilt in a corruption to which he was subjected in common with all men. The force and meaning—the piercing and eloquent deprecation of the whole composition, combine to show it is one of individual experience, the idea of original sin leaves it vapid and pointless, makes it, not the anguish of a convicted sinner, but the sophistry of a deluded hypocrite; not a lamentation for vice, but an excuse for it. These passages are the few which can be found in the Old Testament that have any direct reference to a tenet said to be inculcated throughout the whole of Scripture. If we turn to the New Testament we find the evidence quite as scanty, and quite as inconclusive. The texts advanced are commonly taken from the epistles, principally from those of Paul, and of Paul’s, mostly from the Romans. Few or none can be advanced from the gospel histories, and the discourses of Christ have no reference to such a doctrine.

Rom. iii. 10. “There is none righteous, no not one: there is none that understandeth,” &c., &c. Correspondent to this passage is the 14th Psalm. Both David and Paul refer to the peculiar depravity of their times. But, in the sense of absolute and guiltless perfection, unquestionably, the general assertion may be made of all men.

Rom. v. 12-19, and 1 Cor. xv. 21, 22, 45, 49. The apostle, I apprehend, institutes a comparison between the imperfect man, symbolized in Adam, and the perfect man revealed in Christ; between the earthly and the heavenly, the mortal and the immortal; death shown forth in the one—life manifested in the other.

Rom. vii. 18. “For I know that in me, (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good, I find not.” Ver. 25. “So then with my mind, I serve the law of God, but with my flesh the law of sin.” And the apostle had said in the preceding verses, “I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I find a law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” This is an eloquent and fervent out-pouring of individual experience, no more intended as a universal description than any passage in the journal of John Wesley or Thomas Scott. Involving as human nature does, a twofold constitution, a struggle between desire and conscience is a necessary condition of its moral existence. This is inevitable, unless a being is above or beneath temptation; but the very struggle implies the power of the moral sense; the possession of the moral sense is an element of human dignity even in defeat, how much more in triumph. Without the power of transgression or the danger of falling, there is of course no trial, and in the human sense no virtue. But there are some expressions of Paul’s more general and comprehensive, and to these I shall devote one or two remarks.

Rom. viii. 7. “The carnal mind (τὸ φρονημα τῆς σαρκος—the mind of the flesh) is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.”

Gal. v. 17. “For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, (Ἡ γὰρ σὰρξ ἐπιθυμεῖ κατα του πνευματος) and the spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other.” The scriptural use of the word “flesh” (σαρξ) implies two meanings; first, the excess of the inferior desires, which is in reality contrary to God, and therefore sin; for God, though he has implanted these subordinate desires, has subjected them to certain laws, beyond which they are at variance with his will and with his providence. In this view the carnal mind is properly at enmity with God, and is not subject to the law of God. Secondly, the inferior desires, parenthetically not actually sin, but in general the causes of sin. When St. Paul says money is the root of all evil, we do not surely understand him to mean that the pursuit of gain is in all cases a root of wickedness; for we may conceive innumerable instances in which the struggle for money is connected with the sublimest of virtues. We merely conclude that it is a very dangerous desire, and liable to very dangerous abuses. Under the designation, therefore, of earthly or fleshly, may be classed three orders of desire—that of gain, that of pleasure, and that of power. These are essentially evil in themselves or they are not. If we conclude they are, we must then charge the fault on God who has given them, or we must become Manachees, and suppose the existence of two principles, one good, and the other evil; if they are not, the sin is in their abuse, and not in their existence, and though the criminal be condemned the nature is absolved. I shall mention but a very few more texts advanced in favour of this doctrine.

Eph. ii. 1-3. “And you hath he quickened,” &c. A mere description this, of the age, answerable both to Jews and Gentiles: and to the same purpose is the passage from the same epistle, (c. ix. v. 18.) “having the understanding darkened—being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts.” Such is the scriptural evidence for one of the most appalling and destructive doctrines that ever clouded humanity; a doctrine which impugns the best and truest affections, and destroys at one fell stroke the idea of spontaneous virtue,—which is compelled to classify the most beautiful and most base, if devoid of certain doctrinal distinctions, under one appellative,—which debases human nature—gives man the vileness of a slave, but does not honour God with the glory of a sovereign. To exhort man to have the perfection of an angel, and to tell him he has the nature of a fiend, to tell him that he is “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil,” amidst absurd pranks of theology, is surely the most absurd. And between believing this, or rejecting it, the only alternative left us, is to be at one side or the other of the gulf which separated Lazarus from Abraham.

See Drummond’s excellent Essay on Original Sin, and a very admirable tract on the same subject, by the late Dr. Cogan, entitled “A Layman’s Letters to Mr. Wilberforce.”

Note 2. See page 19.

There is no writer in modern times to whom we owe so much for a true and elevated Philosophy on Human nature as to Bishop Butler, the most profound and accurate analyst of the moral faculties of man that has ever illustrated the principles of Christian ethics. He was not a man to take wholesale assertions; he subjected our moral nature to the exact and rigid test of philosophical anatomy, and one deliberate sentence of his, is worth ten thousand disquisitions from traditional theologians, who, parrot-like, repeat and repeat again the jargon, that has grown as stale from mouth to mouth, as the starling’s “let me out, let me out”—many of whom have no other reason than that they have heard it so cried out before them. Bishop Butler has examined human nature, and he has given testimony in its favour—he has vindicated its dignity, and he has by a deep philosophy, which seemed to be little comprehended by those who would debase humanity demonstrated its essential excellence. He has proved by irrefutable arguments, its natural disinterestedness, its goodness, its necessary conformity with truth and virtue. These are to be sure but its general tendencies, with many exceptions—yet, why such a line of argument should be deemed insufficient in moral philosophy, and be admitted as cogent in natural theology, it is difficult to conceive.—Take for instance—in the body the case of the eye or the ear: no one questions, that the eye is admirably adapted for seeing, and the ear for hearing; and though the one may grow dim or the other become deaf, it is never asserted that the constitution or nature of each—on the whole—is contradictory to that for which it was intended. There are, it is true, various evil manifestations in human nature; but there are others good—at least, in seeming. Cynical Philosophers and Calvinistic Theologians concur in making the evil substantial, and the good factitious. The answer which this profound reasoner gives to the philosophical opponents of human nature will be a sufficient reply to both. “Suppose,” he says, “a man of learning to be writing a grave book upon human nature—and to show in several parts of it, that he had an insight into the subject he was considering. Amongst other things the following one would require to be accounted for; the appearance of benevolence or good-will in men towards each other in the instances of natural relation and in others. Cautious of being deceived with outward show, he retires within himself, to see exactly what that is in the mind of man from whence this appearance proceeds; and upon deep reflection asserts the principle in the mind to be only the love of power and delight in the exercise of it. Would not everybody think here was a mistake of one word for another? That the philosopher was contemplating and accounting for some other human actions, some other behaviour of man to man? And could any one be thoroughly satisfied, that what is commonly called benevolence or good-will was really the affection meant, but only by being made to understand that this learned person had a general hypothesis, to which the appearance of good-will could no otherwise be reconciled? That what has this appearance is often nothing but ambition; that delight in superiority—often (suppose always) mixes itself with benevolence, only makes it more specious to call it ambition than hunger of the two; but in reality that passion does no more account for the whole appearances of good-will, than this appetite does. Is there not often the appearance of one man’s wishing that good to another, which he knows himself unable to procure him; and rejoicing in it, though procured by a third person? And, can love of power any way possibly come into account for this desire or delight? Is there not often the appearance of men’s distinguishing between two or more persons, preferring one before another, to do good to, in cases where the love of power cannot in the least account for the distinction or preference? For this principle can no otherwise distinguish between objects, than as it is a greater instance and exertion of power to do good to one rather than to another. Again, suppose good-will in the mind of man be nothing but delight in the exercise of power; men might indeed be restrained by distant and accidental considerations, but these restraints being removed, they would have a disposition to, and a delight in mischief as an exercise and proof of power; and this disposition and delight would arise from the same principle in the mind, as a disposition to, and a delight in charity. Thus cruelty as distinct from resentment, would be exactly the same in the mind of man as good-will; that one tends to the happiness, the other to the misery of our fellow-creatures, is, it seems, merely an accidental circumstance, which the mind has not the least regard to. These are absurdities which even men of capacity run into, when they have occasion to belie their nature; and will perversely disclaim that image of God which was originally stamped upon it: the traces of which, however faint, are plainly discernible upon the mind of man.” Many passages might be quoted from this great writer in vindication of humanity, but I shall adduce but one other: it is from the same discourse, (The first sermon on Human Nature,) as that I have already extracted—and much to the same purpose. “Mankind,” he says, “have ungoverned passions, which they will gratify at any rate, as well to the injury of others as in contradiction to known private interests, but as there is no such thing as self-hatred, so neither is there any such thing as ill-will in one man towards another, emulation or resentment being away: whereas there is plainly benevolence or good-will: there is no such thing as love of injustice, oppression, treachery, ingratitude; but only eager desire after such and such external goods, which, according to a very ancient observation, the most abandoned would choose to obtain by innocent means, if they were as easy and effectual to their end: even emulation and resentment by any who will consider what these passions really are in nature, will be found nothing to the purpose of this objection, and the principles and passions in the mind of man which are distinct both from self-love and benevolence, primarily and most directly lead to right behaviour with regard to others as well as to himself, and only secondarily and accidentally to what is evil. Thus though men to avoid the shame of one villany are often guilty of a greater, yet it is easy to see that the original tendency of shame is to prevent the doing of shameful actions; and its leading men to conceal such actions when done, is only the consequence of their being done, that is, of the passions not having answered its first end.”—(See also the acute and original Essay of Mr. Hazlitt’s, on The Principles of Human Actions, in which the leading idea of Butler’s Philosophy is rigidly examined and illustrated.)

* * * * *

Pascal vindicates the dignity of Human nature in some of his most beautiful thoughts. Those who are acquainted with the theology of Pascal (and who are not?) will scarcely suspect him of leaning too partially to the brighter side of our nature. I quote a few passages from his writings, as much for the pleasure of copying them, as for the support they afford to my general argument.

“L’homme est si grand,” he observes, “que, sa grandeur parait même en ce qu’il se connaît misérable. Un arbre ne se connaît pas misérable: il est vrai que c’est être misérable que de se connaître, qu’on misérable; mais aussi c’est grand que de connaître qu’on est misérable. Ainsi toutes misères prouvent sa grandeur:—ce sont miseres de grand seigneur, miseres d’un roi dépossédé.

“Nous avons si grande idée de l’ame de l’homme que nous ne pouvons souffrir d’en être méprisé, et d’ n’être pas dans l’esteme d’une âme: et toute la félicité des hommes consiste dans cette estime.

“Si d’un côté cette fausse gloire que les hommes cherchent est une grande marque de leur misère et de leur bassesse, c’en une aussi de leur excellence; car quelque possessions qu’il ait sur la terre, de quelque santé et commodité essentielle qu’il jouisse il n’est pas satisfait, s’il n’est pas dans l’estime des hommes. Il estime si grande la raison de l’homme que quelque avantage, qu’il ait dans le monde, il se croit malheureux s’il n’est placé aussi avantegeusement dans la raison de l’homme c’est la plus belle place du monde: rien ne peut le détourner de ce désir, et c’est la qualité la plus ineffacable du cœur de l’homme: jusque-là que ceux que méprisent le plus les hommes, et qui les égalent aux bêtes veulent encore en être admirés, et contradisent á eux-mêmes par leur propre sentiment: la nature, qui est plus puisante que toute leur raison, les convainquant plus fortement de la grandeur de l’homme que la raison ne les convainc de sa baissesse.”—“L’homme n’est qu’un roseau le plus faíble de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’écraser. Une vapeur, une goutte d’eau suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt, et l’avantage que l’univers a sur lui, l’univers n’en sait rien. Ainsi toute notre dignité consiste dans la pensée c’est de la qu’il faut nous relever, non de l’espace et de la durée.” “Il est dangereux de trop voir l’homme combien il est égal aux bêtes sans lui montrer sa grandeur. Il est encore dangereux de lui fair trop voir sa grandeur sans sa bassesse. Il est plus dangereux de lui laisser ignorer l’un et l’autre: mais est tres avantegeux de lui representer l’un et l’autre.” (Pensées de Pascal.)

I have adduced the testimony of Bishop Butler as to the soundness of our views on human nature: I shall here transcribe a few passages from a writer, in whose language a kindred philosophy becomes most eloquent and inspiring—I mean Doctor Channing.—“I repeat it,” he says, “showing the moral power of faith in the divine capacities of man, to resemble our Maker we need not quarrel with our nature or our lot. Our present state, made up as it is, of aids and trials, is worthy of God, and may be used throughout to assimilate us to him. For example: our domestic ties, the relations of neighbourhood and country, the daily interchanges of thoughts and feelings, the daily occasions of kindness, the daily claims of want and suffering, these and other circumstances of our social state, form the best sphere and school for that benevolence which is God’s brightest attribute; and we should make a sad exchange by substituting for these natural aids any self-invented artificial means of sanctity. Christianity, our great guide to God, never leads us away from the path of nature, and never wars with the unsophisticated dictates of conscience. We approach our Creator by every right exercise of the powers he gives us. Whenever we invigorate the understanding by honestly and resolutely seeking truth, and by withstanding whatever might warp the judgment; whenever we invigorate the conscience by following it in opposition to the passions; whenever we receive a blessing gratefully, bear a trial patiently, or encounter peril or scorn with moral courage; whenever we perform a disinterested deed; whenever we lift up the heart in true adoration to God; whenever we war against a habit or desire which is strengthening itself against our higher principles; whenever we think, speak or act with moral energy, and devotion to duty, be the occasion ever so humble or familiar; then the divinity is growing within us, and we are ascending towards our Author. The religion thus blends with common life. We thus draw nigh to God without forsaking men. We are thus without parting with our human nature, to clothe ourselves with the divine.” (Discourse at the ordination of the Rev. F. A. Farley.) Honour is due to all men on the ground of the worth and dignity of their nature, and of this the eloquent writer shows Christianity a proof and an illustration. “The whole of this religion is a testimony to the worth of man in the sight of God—to the importance of human nature—to the infinite purposes for which we were framed. God is there set forth as sending, to the succour of his human family, his beloved Son, the bright image and representative of his own perfections; and sending him, not simply to roll away a burden of pain and punishment, (for this, however magnified in systems of theology is not his highest work) but to create man after that divine image which he himself bears, to purify the soul from every stain, to communicate to it new power over evil, and to open before it immortality as its aim and destination—immortality by which we are to understand, not merely a perpetual, but an ever-improving and celestial being. Such are the views of Christianity. And these blessings it proffers, not to a few, not to the educated, not to the eminent, but to all human beings, to the poorest and the most fallen; and we know that through the power of its promises, it has, in not a few instances, raised the fallen to true greatness, and given them in their present virtue and peace, an earnest of the heaven which it unfolds. Such is Christianity. Men viewed in the light of this religion, are beings cared for by God, to whom he has given his Son, on whom he pours forth his spirit; and whom he has created for the highest good in the universe, the participation of his own perfections and happiness. Such is Christianity. Our scepticism in our own nature cannot quench the bright light which religion sheds on the soul and on the prospects of mankind; and just so far as we receive its truth we shall honour all men.” (Discourse on “Honour due to All Men.”)

“Theologians,” remarks a powerful writer, “say, that the very infant comes into the world under the wrath and curse of the Deity. They never learned that by observing the glory of God in the face of Christ. No such withering frown ever sat on his benignant countenance. Think of Christ’s wrath with a child! Think of Christ cursing a child! I must read in the Gospel that he did so, before I believe that God does so, and that the Calvinistic doctrine of original sin is true. In the strong horror of the human heart at the monstrous combination of such a person with such an action, I read the condemnation of that gloomiest article of a gloomy creed; and if it be a foul calumny on Christ, it must, exalted as he was, be a yet fouler calumny on God. I would sooner believe the one than the other. I would sooner imagine some Jesus of Nazareth encountering some fond father and fonder mother, in the first freshness of their parental feelings, as they pass beneath ‘the gate of the temple which was called the Beautiful;’ less beautiful in the sculptured forms of marble on which its gorgeous architecture rested than in the living human group which were there bearing the babe to the altar to dedicate it to the God of its fathers; and encountering them with that solemn malediction which would sink into their souls and corrode their lives; than I would imagine Omniscience, which witnesses each man’s birth, life, and death, to be in all earth’s scenes of parental anxiousness and fondness over helpless infancy, the all-pervading presence of an Almighty curse. Yet this is the doctrine into which thousands upon thousands of children are catechised. Why will not parents and teachers lead them, not to Calvin, but to Christ? So should they receive a blessing, even as did those children, notwithstanding that there were not wanting, even then, erring disciples to intercept their approach and forbid their coming. As his blessing was on them, so is that of his and our God. His doctrine, his conduct. ‘Their angels,’ he says, ‘do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven;’ they are the peculiar objects of the providential care which, by the number, and swiftness, and power of those supposed winged messengers, was pictorial typified; and again, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come to me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven!’”—Christ and Christianity, a series of Sermons, by the Rev. W. J. Fox: which for energy of thought, richness and beauty of imagery, truth of moral analysis and description, force and eloquence of language, may be placed in the very highest class of pulpit oratory, and even in that class be ranged with its rarest specimens. The taint of heresy has robbed them of their due fame, for in those days, without the proper admixture of orthodoxy, logic only beats the air, and eloquence speaks to the deaf adder that will not hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so sweetly.

I quote with great pleasure one or two passages from Mr. Dewey, as illustrative of our common doctrine on human nature:

“The theologian says that human nature is bad and corrupt. Now taking this language in the practical and popular sense, I find no difficulty in agreeing with the theologian. And indeed, if he would confine himself—leaving vague and general declamation and technical phraseology—if he would confine himself to facts; if he would confine himself to a description of actual bad qualities and dispositions in men, I think he could not well go too far. Nay more, I am not certain that any theologian’s description, so far as it is of this nature, has gone deep enough into the frightful mass of human depravity. For it requires an acute perception that is rarely possessed, and a higher and holier conscience, perhaps than belongs to any, to discover and declare how bad, and degraded, and unworthy a being a bad man is. I confess that nothing would beget in me a higher respect for man, a real—not a theological and factitious—but a real and deep sense of human sinfulness and unworthiness—of the mighty wrong which man does to himself, to his religion, and his God, when he yields to the evil and accursed inclinations that find place in him. This moral indignation is not half strong enough in those who profess to talk the most about human depravity. And the objection to them is, not that they feel too much or speak too strongly, the actual wickedness, the actual and distinct sins of the wicked; but they speak too vaguely and generally of human wickedness; that they speak with too little discrimination to every man as if he were a murderer or a monster; that they speak, in fine, too argumentatively, and too much (if I may say so) with a sort of argumentative satisfaction, as if they were glad that they could make this point so strong.”

The next extract is in advocacy of human nature, eloquently pleading for it in a low and guilty condition.

“The very pirate that dyes the ocean wave with the blood of his fellow-beings; that meets his defenceless victims in some lonely sea where no cry for help can be heard, and plunges his dagger to the heart that is pleading for life, which is calling upon him by all means of kindred, of children, and of home, to spare—yes, the very pirate is such a man as you or I might have been. Orphanage and childhood; an unfriended youth; an evil companion; a resort to sinful pleasure; familiarity with vice; a scorned and blighted name; seared and crushed affections; desperate fortunes—these are the steps that might have led any one amongst us to unfurl on the high seas the bloody flag of universal defiance; to have waged war with our kind; to have put on the terrific attributes; to have done the dreadful deeds; and to have died the awful death of the ocean robber. How many affecting relationships of humanity plead with us to pity him! That head that is doomed to pay the price of blood once rested upon a mother’s bosom. The hand that did that accursed work, and shall soon be stretched cold and nerveless in the felon’s grave, was once taken and cherished by a father’s hand, and led in the ways of sportive childhood and innocent pleasure. The dreaded monster of crime has once been the object of sisterly love and all domestic endearment. Pity him, then. Pity his blighted hope and his crushed heart. It is a wholesome sensibility, it is meet for frail and sinning creatures like us to cherish. It forgoes no moral discrimination. It feels the crime, but feels it as a weak, tempted, and rescued creature should. It imitates the great Master; and looks with indignation upon the offender, and yet is grieved for him.”—Dewey.

Additional Remarks, &c.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ,” says Mr. Buddicom, “hath solemnly and emphatically said, ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but that believeth not shall be damned.’” (Yes, but is this to believe what our opponents tell us, and to be baptized into the faith of Athanasius?) “Unitarians,” he continues, “assert that they fulfil the requirement, and therefore are safe from the penalty. We, on the other hand, are assured, that as it would be treason against the sovereign of these realms, to acknowledge her claim only to a part of her dominions, while her royalty over the remainder was utterly denied; so the Unitarian scheme which would give unto the Saviour the honours of a prophet and a witness, while it would unsphere him from that full-orbed glory wherein He shines through the revelation of his grace, is treason against him and against the Majesty of God, who willeth ‘that all men should honour the son, even as they honour the father.’ Thus convinced, we deem the professors of that system to be under sentence of spiritual outlawry, which if it be not reversed, will end in the terrors of the second death.”—Lect. 8. pp. 438, 439.

The tone in which we have often been spoken of in this controversy appears to assume that we in some degree doubt the sincerity or charity of our opponents. We deny them neither. We know the history of religion well enough to be aware that as severe things have been done in sincerity as to pronounce that men dishonour Christ and God, that they are under sentence of spiritual outlawry, and if they repent not (i.e. do not turn to the opinion of their antagonists) shall surely endure the second death; we can easily believe that men say these things sincerely; for except from the necessity of conviction, we do not imagine they would reiterate perdition and denunciation as often as they do. We deny not the sincerity in which an opponent may hold an opinion or resist one: but though the motive may not be impeachable, the quality of the opinion itself may be in the last degree anti-social and pernicious. The men who built the Inquisition did it in perfect sincerity: the men who sat on its judgment-seats were for the most part sincere, so were those who dragged the heretic from his home to the dungeon, and from the dungeon to the stake. And so are those who tell us that our faith is damnable. Men may on account of belief consign antagonists to hell-fire for eternity; but unless the evidence be most clear, to pronounce the judgment requires a goodly quantity of courage. As little willing are we to refuse our opponents the charity they claim, if by that be meant a desire to promote good in their idea of it: but we may very fairly doubt the justness of that idea. Believing that heretics, such as we, are in the way to eternal destruction, it is neither inconsistent with candour or charity to tell us so, in the hope of reclaiming us; and if theologians imagined that inflicting bodily suffering might have a similar effect, we are compelled to admit them to the same merit. The worst effect of harsh and austere doctrines is that they produce harsh and austere feelings; and the professors of them, under their indurating process, can do deeds from principle which even bad men would rarely do from passion. One perverted motive is worse than a thousand evil actions. Charity in her own native sweetness is meek and gentle as the dove, and yet theology has often made her ravenous as the vulture; charity as she came from heaven marked her way in tears of mercy, but theology could so pervert her as to cause her wade to the lips in blood. The charity of the heart is very different from the charity of creeds; and when we hear English clergymen condemn the Romish Church as uncharitable, we naturally ask on what ground? Is it because she condemned heretics? So do you. Is it because she has a wrong test of heresy? Her test is substantially the same as your own. You assume that we do not believe in Christ, because we do not believe in your creed: she assumes that you do not believe in Christ because you do not believe in her councils: you denounce eternal torments on us for want of your faith; and she delivers you to the same destiny for want of her faith: the tabooed ground of heresy and orthodoxy may be circumscribed or extensive—the points may be few or many, the principle is the same, or if there be any difference, it is but breaking the big end or the little end of the egg. We are accused as traitors against God and Christ, and to make the indictment clear against us, it is illustrated by the instance of rebellion against a sovereign. This is a heavy charge, but one both unjust and false. It is evil intention that constitutes crime: a traitor opposes his sovereign and intends his dethronement; but though we should even mistake the nature of Christ, can any one who thinks for a moment venture to say our intention is for his dethronement? Let us suppose the case, no uncommon one, of an Eastern monarch who should disguise himself, and that some of his subjects failed, in their ignorance of his rank, to pay him the customary honours; what should we think of his justice, if he should call this treason, and impale the wretches who were unconscious of having offended him. It is too monstrous even for Eastern despotism. Or take the case in our own history; what should we think of Alfred’s rectitude and clemency, if when he ascended the throne from his poverty, he should have thrown the shepherd’s wife into a dungeon and chains, because, in his disguise, she uttered against him a surly rebuke. The instance is not entirely parallel, but the analogy goes far enough for my purpose. Now, though Christ were in reality the Deity which orthodoxy proclaims him, the circumstances of his earthly life, and the concealment of his infinite nature, were certainly sufficient to excuse some in ignorance for taking him to be that which he appeared; and to punish them for so natural an error, would not be a vindication of majesty, but a capricious exhibition of cruelty.

The legal and political mode of illustration is a favourite with the reverend lecturer. P. 450, we have a quotation from Blackstone, and the distinction very admirably elucidated of private wrongs and public wrongs, civil injuries, crimes and misdemeanours, &c. Sir William Blackstone never, I imagine, anticipated the honour that his Commentaries would be used to illustrate the principles of the divine government; and one of the last ideas, I apprehend, that entered his brain in delivering his lectures, was, that he was giving expositions on the ways of Providence. The Preacher in the order of illustration, gave a passing blow “at those wretched and guilty disturbers of the public peace in one of our own colonies who lately crossed the borders of a friendly state to slay and ruin and destroy, under the name of sympathizers.” An allusion, doubtless, extremely loyal; but in the present case not very logical. (Lect. p. 452.) In this part of the discourse we have other distinctions, showing that man is a public offender, that God is not a person but a sovereign, in relation to guilty man, and that a sovereign is different from a person; that God is not a creditor but a judge, and that a judge is different from a creditor. All this may be very acute, very legal, but, theologically, it has one imperfection, that of mistaking entirely the relation between God and man, of turning false analogies into false premises, and, of course, deducing from them false conclusions: of properly having nothing to do with the true matter in hand, and leaving the question precisely where it was before. “Our opponents,” says the Preacher, “assert that sins are to be regarded as debts, and as debts only.” We assert no such thing, have never asserted it, but all the contrary, and to such an idea the whole tone of our argument and of our system is in most perfect contradiction. We have no such low view of God as to think that man could owe him anything, nor any such presumptuous view of man as to imagine he could make payment to his God. Yet upon this poor assumption whole pages of declamation are wasted, for if it serves any purpose it is but to beat down the man of straw which the lecturer himself had fashioned. We hold no such view, and therefore we have never defended any such. We do our best to maintain what we assert; if others assert doctrines for us, we leave them the pleasure of the refutation; although it is only when men invent opinions for opponents that they have the double enjoyment of first building up and then pulling down. We do not regard sins as debts for which payment can be made to God; but we may fairly assert that on this principle rests the whole scheme of orthodoxy. What are the atonement and righteousness of Christ but a payment or equivalent to God for the salvation of the elect?—the very nature of the system implies this idea, and in truth it is the only idea that gives it even the appearance of consistency; for crime as such cannot be punished in the person of another, but a debt can be fairly paid by the money of another. If I commit high treason against the sovereign—to borrow an analogy from the Preacher—it would be sad work to lay the head of some one else on the block for it—but if I owe a severe creditor a thousand pounds, a rich and generous friend may pay it in my stead, and no social principle is violated by the substitute.

Mr. Buddicom makes the following modest apology for the presumed infallibility of himself and brethren, and their right to attack all heretical deniers of it. “While, however,” he observes, “we are prepared to contend for the lawfulness and duty of an affectionate inroad upon the regions of spiritual error, we remember that our movement is not purely and primarily aggressive. A volume of Lectures, preached expressly on the controverted doctrines of Christianity (as the lecturer denominated his subjects), in a chapel now occupied by one of our respected opponents, has been before the world. In these and other similar measures, the fortress of true Christianity, the only safe munition of rocks for the souls of men, hath been attacked by mine, and sap, and open assault. And shall there be no attempt to countermine, no sally made, no arm raised, in a forward movement for the truth as it is in Jesus? Our regret is rather due to the culpable silence of the past, than to the proceeding of the present time.” (Lect. p. 440.) The reverend and respected Preacher refers to a volume of Lectures, by the Rev. George Harris, delivered in this town some years ago: those Lectures, unfortunately, I do not possess; but I have read them with much pleasure, and many passages of them I should wish to quote in support of my own general arguments. But the Lecturer greatly mistakes if he imagines that we complain of orthodox aggression. Controversy, political and religious, is the fair expression of civilised and progressive opinion. We do not blame those who oppose us,—we have never done it,—we have not complained that war was made on us, but we did most righteously complain that the fair laws of warfare were denied us. Our people were invited to go to Christ Church to listen to wise and learned men, to be converted, by hearing their religion spoken of as blasphemy and outlawry—to hear themselves designated as enemies to their God, and dethroners of their Saviour, and the spiritual slayers of their kind. They were denied any religious equality. They were abused, and vituperated, and denounced; but they were not listened to—their condemnation was sternly uttered—but their defence had not even the poor tribute of a hearing. Nay, grave clergymen pleaded that they could not have their religious sensibilities disturbed or hurt by Unitarian roughness, as if manly controversialists were to shrink from opposition with the fastidious delicacy of timid devotees. We neither complained of controversy, nor avoided it; on the contrary, we met it promptly, sincerely, and willingly—with ability, it is possible, inferior to our opponents—but not with less zeal, less alacrity, or less honesty. When our respected opponents challenged our attendance, it was not as antagonists on the opposite sides of a subject open to discussion, but as accused to give in their confession of repentance, or as criminals to hear their last sentence of punishment. We, however, blame not the Lecturer, nor his party—we rather agree with him and them. We have received a lesson which we needed; Unitarians have stood too long on the defensive, when they should have been on the aggressive: had they been faithful to their trust, it may be that the degrading dogma of original sin, and the atrocious doctrines of election and reprobation could not now, in this country, be matters of dispute. “Our regret (to use the words of the Lecturer) is rather due to the culpable silence of the past than to the proceedings of the present time.” It is a remarkable fact in the history of religion, that all the doctrines which have been most generally condemned as heresy, have been pure or benignant ones; and all persecutions and religious hatreds, bodily or social, have been directed against their professors. Not to mention the Christians, who burned Jerome and Huss; we might refer even to the heathens who poisoned Socrates—to uphold the personality of Satan—the reality of his existence, and the malignity of his nature,—to declaim upon hell’s torments and to announce eternal perdition on the great mass of God’s family—to create excitement by the grossest pictures of vice and misery is the certain way to popularity. The popular taste, as it has yet been developed or nurtured, has been coarse and ferocious, and if any thing could prove to me the doctrine of universal depravity, it would be the toleration of the horrors of Calvinistic orthodoxy.

------------------------------------

Footnotes for Lecture VIII.

Footnote 518:

Gen. ix. 6.

Footnote 519:

See Appendix, Note 1.

Footnote 520:

Pref. to Sermons.

Footnote 521:

See Note 2.

Footnote 522:

Gen. vii. 1.

Footnote 523:

Gen. vi. 6.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us