he also is said to be God, and in all respects equal to the Father; and the Holy Spirit is never considered as having had any concern either in forgiving sin, or in procuring forgiveness. Here then you have, in fact, three divine characters as really distinct from each other as those of any three men: and is not this a horrible degradation of the Godhead, perfection not being found in any one of them? It is true that the regards of Protestant Trinitarians are not so much distracted as those of the Popish ones; but the evil is exactly of the same kind, and differs only in degree; and is certainly of great magnitude and extent.

If there be any religious truth of practical importance, next to that of a future state of rewards and punishments, it is that which leads us to consider all adorable and amiable attributes as centring in one undivided Being, whom we can look up to as our maker, preserver, and benefactor, the author of all good; who has within himself mercy for the penitent, not requiring to be made placable by the sufferings of another, but by the repentance of the sinner only, and whose constant presence with us is sufficient for all the purposes of providential care respecting the mind or body; so that we have not to look to one divine person for one thing, and to another for something else.

The zeal with which the doctrine of the Trinity has in all ages been defended, and the severe penalties with which the belief of it has been guarded, in the laws of this country as well as others, sufficiently prove that it always has been considered as a tenet of the greatest consequence. It has, indeed, been guarded and defended in such a manner as Christianity itself does not require to be, and would be ashamed of. But all that laws and penalties can do is only to impose silence. They cannot enforce conviction. On the contrary, wherever they are employed, a suspicion necessarily arises that the proper instrument of conviction, viz. rational evidence, was not to be had; for no man, in dealing with his fellow-creatures, would ever have recourse to compulsion if he thought that persuasion would be sufficient.

Such being the acknowledged importance of the article of faith now contended for, it has been a subject of controversy from a very early period in the history of the Christian Church to the present time. But I have been led to investigate the true Christian doctrine on this subject in a way which has not been much attended to, but which appears to me to promise a more speedy and decisive determination of the controversy. We all agree to be determined by the sense of scripture; but, on account of our preceding prejudices, we are not agreed what this sense is; and experience shews that, when any controversy is to be decided by an attention to words and phrases only, the decision will long remain in doubt. In matters of religion we see it with respect to all the creeds and articles of faith that have ever been composed by man; and with respect to things of a civil nature in the most explicit acts of parliament, the sense of which is the subject of daily dispute among lawyers.

But, my Lords, there is another, and, as I have said, an easier and surer method of ascertaining the true meaning of the scriptures; and that is, to inquire in what sense they were actually understood by

those persons for whose use they were written, and by whom nobody will say that they could well be misunderstood in an article of so much consequence as this. This task I have undertaken; and I shall, by way of recapitulation, inform you and the public what has been the result of my investigations, and what has been done by the abettors of the doctrine of the Trinity to invalidate what I have advanced. My appeal will then be to the world, and even to your Lordships.

LETTER II.

A Review of the Controversy with the Bishop of St. David's.

MY LORDS,

WHAT I undertook to prove, from what is now extant concerning the state of opinions in early times, was, that the faith of the primitive church was Unitarian. On the contrary, Bishop Horsley said, that it must have been Trinitarian because that doctrine appears in the writings of Barnabas and Ignatius. To this I answered, that admitting the pieces ascribed to them to be genuine in the main, they bear evident marks of interpolation in what relates to this subject, as is acknowledged by the most judicious critics; and, therefore, that his argument can have no weight. To this the bishop has not thought proper to make any reply.

I advanced, in agreement with the general strain of ecclesiastical historians, that the Ebionites and Nazarenes were Jewish Christians of the earliest age, and did not believe the divinity of Christ, but held him to be simply a man inspired of God. On the contrary, Bishop Horsley said, that those who were called Ebionites did not exist in the age of the apostles; and also, that though they believed the simple humanity of Christ, they probably held some mysterious exaltation of his nature after his ascension, which made him the object of prayer to them. This opinion, which I believe is peculiar to himself, I shewed him to be destitute of all evidence or probability; and to this he has made no reply.

As to the Nazarenes, (which I think I have sufficiently proved to have been nothing more than another name for the Ebionites, or the Jewish Christians in general,) Bishop Horsley strangely advanced that they did not exist till after the time of Adrian; and that they had their name from Nazareth, the place where they settled after they were then driven from Jerusalem; and he says, that they were believers in the divinity of Christ. On the contrary, I have clearly shewn that the Nazarenes were believers in the simple humanity of Christ; and that, according to all the writers of antiquity, they certainly existed in the age of the apostles; and that, as to his history of their expulsion from Jerusalem by Adrian, their settling at Nazareth, and deriving their name from that circumstance, they are wholly inventions of his own, without the appearance of authority from any ancient writer; and to this he has made no reply.

Bishop Horsley, to support the orthodoxy of the Jewish Christians, maintains that there was a whole church of them, and speaks of their bishops as existing at Jerusalem after the time of Adrian;

alleging that the body of Jewish Christians, who had till this time adhered to the laws of Moses, abandoned them after the destruction of that place, in order to enjoy the privileges of the Elian colony settled there by Adrian. And because Origen asserts that all the Jewish Christians were Unitarians, and had not abandoned the laws and customs of their ancestors, Bishop Horsley scruples not to say of this great and upright man, that he must have known the contrary, and therefore asserted a wilful falsehood. On the contrary, I have evidently shewn, from every history of that transaction now extant, as they are understood by every modern writer of credit, that Adrian expelled all the Jews, without making any exception in favour of Christians, from Jerusalem; that the Christian church afterwards settled there consisted wholly of Gentiles; and that the testimony of Origen, agreeing with this, is highly worthy of credit. So that the bishop, who has impeached this great man, must be considered by all impartial persons as a falsifier of history, and a defamer of the character of the illustrious dead, in order to serve his purpose. To this charge, so materially affecting his own character, the bishop has made some attempt to reply; but in so weak and ineffectual a manner, that I will venture to say, that henceforth the veracity of Origen will remain unimpeached, and Dr. Horsley's church of Trinitarian Jews at Jerusalein, after the time of Adrian, will be considered as a mere chimæra. Consequently, the Unitarianism of the early Jewish Christians, which, when it is considered, must draw after it the belief of the truth of the Unitarian doctrine, remains fully established.

Bishop Horsley maintains, that though he finds no Unitarians in the apostolic age, they are censured by the apostle John in the phrase of Christ coming in the flesh. This phrase I have shewn to relate to the Gnostics only, notwithstanding the bishop's endeavour in his last publication to support his opinion.

Having proved that the great body of Christians in early times were Unitarians, it follows, that they could not have been considered as heretics, or persons out of communion with the Catholic Church. On the contrary, Bishop Horsley maintained that the Unitarians were always considered as heretics, and that they were by Justin Martyr included among those heretics whom he charges with blasphemy. But I have shewn that, in these passages, Justin most clearly alludes to the Gnostics only; and that, though no Unitarian himself, he spake with great respect of those who were so. On this subject the bishop has not made any defence, and I am confident he will not be able to make any that shall be thought even plausible. I have shewn by a variety of evidence, that the great body of unlearned Christians continued to be Unitarians long after many of the learned Christians adopted the notion of a Trinity, which, as I have clearly shewn, was derived from no other source than the Platonic philosophy, to which they were unhappily attached; that the term heresy was long used as synonymous to Gnosticism; and that, from long use, it even continued to be taken in that sense after the Unitarian doctrine was condemned by public councils.

Having shewn from Tertullian that those whom he calls Idiotæ,

(who he says were the greater part of Christians,) conceived the greatest dread of the doctrine of the Trinity, Bishop Horsley maintains, that by Idiota he only meant such as were so ignorant and stupid as to deserve to be called idiots. On the contrary, I have shewn, with the authority of the learned Dr. Bentley, and every critic of the least eminence, that among the ancients the word Idiota was never used of persons who were stupid, or deficient in point of understanding, but only of unlearned persons, or persons in the common or lower ranks of life. This affecting the Bishop's character as a scholar, he has, in his last publication, greatly laboured his defence; but still without being able to produce a single passage from any ancient writer, in which the word Idiota can be understood in his sense of it. It is, indeed, in the highest degree improbable that Tertullian, or any man, should really mean to assert, concerning the greater part of Christians, or, indeed, of any large body of men, that they were deficient in natural understanding; or, if they had asserted it, it could not have been entitled to credit. Consequently the testimony of Tertullian, reluctantly given no doubt, to the Unitarianism of the great body of unlearned Christians, remains unimpeached.

I quoted a passage from Athanasius, in which he says, that the Jews were so fully persuaded of the simple humanity of their Messiah, that the apostles did not think it prudent to inform them of his pre-existence or divinity, and that the Gentiles receiving Christianity from the Jews, learned the same Unitarian doctrine. By these Jews Bishop Horsley maintains we are to understand unbelieving Jews, and by the Gentiles, such unbelieving Gentiles as learned from the Jews that the Messiah was to be a man. Improbable as this construction is, and the reverse of that of Beausobre and Dr. Lardner, (which, however, it is probable he had never heard of,) he did not scruple to treat my construction of it as a wilful imposition on the public, and expressed himself in such a manner as to excite sentiments of horror and indignation against me. Notwithstanding this, I supported my construction of this passage by such a mass of evidence of Christian writers, both before and after Athanasius, that on this subject he has not ventured to make any defence. And what can we infer from this unanimous acknowledgment of all the ancient Trinitarian writers, that their doctrine was not taught with clearness and effect till it was done by John, after the death of all the other apostles; but that, in their idea, the number of Unitarians in the church was so great, that they could not account for the fact on any other supposition, improbable as it must have appeared even to them? For who can believe that the apostles did not, without reserve, explain the whole counsel of God? And how could such important doctrines as those of the pre-existence and divinity of Christ have been made known to some Christians and have been concealed from the rest, so that there should be no trace of any question or debate on the subject, and that no Jew should have laid hold of it as an objection to the gospel?

All the ancient Christian writers suppose that the apostles had no idea of Christ being any thing more than a man, during all the time of their intercourse with him; and that their knowledge of his pre

existence and divinity was subsequent to the day of Pentecost, the Jews having always been Unitarians, and expecting only a man for their Messiah. On the contrary, Dr. Horsley maintained that the Jews in our Saviour's time were believers in the doctrine of the Trinity; that they expected the second person of it as their Messiah; and, consequently, that the apostles considered Christ as being God from the time they were convinced of his being the Messiah. I have supported the opinion of the ancient Christian writers, by shewing, in concurrence with the learned Basnage, (who has taken the greatest pains to investigate their opinions, and who was himself a Trinitarian,) that the Jews, in every period of their history, were believers in the unity of God in such a sense as to exclude all idea of a Trinity, and in the simple humanity of their Messiah. Conse quently, the apostles must at first have considered Christ as a mere man; and there is no evidence, in their history or their writings, that they ever changed that opinion concerning him. On this subject Bishop Horsley has not thought proper to make any reply.

It is evident to any person the least acquainted with ecclesiastical history, that there was a gradation in the sentiments of learned Christians respecting the Logos, and that the first idea of it, was that of something emitted from the Divine mind similar to the then supposed emission of a beam of light from the sun. But prior to this emission they considered this logos as the same principle with reason, or some other intellectual power necessarily belonging to the Father; so that by the generation of the Son, or the emission of this logos, they certainly meant a change of state, viz. from a mere attribute to a proper person; and in their idea this first took place with a view to the creation of the world. Bishop Horsley, however, asserts, that the Logos was never considered as an attribute of the Deity previous to its assuming a proper personality, but maintains, that by the generation of the Son was meant the display of his powers in the production of material beings. However, this opinion of his is, as far as I know, entirely his own; and such is the evidence that I have produced for the opinion advanced above, in my Letter to him, that he has not thought proper to make any reply. And so full and decisive is the additional evidence that I have brought for it in my "History of Early Opinions concerning Christ," that I am pretty confident it will never be controverted again.

Bishop Horsley is so extremely ignorant of the progress of opinions in early times, that he says there is no difference between the doctrine of the personification of the Logos and the peculiar opinions of the Arians. Whereas I have shewn that the two schemes were always directly opposed to each other, and are so clearly defined by all the ancient writers, that I believe there is no example of their ever having been confounded or mistaken, except by himself. The Arians disclaimed all idea of personification and the doctrine of an uncreated logos, holding that the Son was a proper creature, being an immaterial principle which supplied the place of a human soul in the body of Jesus; while their orthodox opponents always maintained that the Logos, which in its original state had been an uncreated attribute of the Father, was a third principle superadded