the kingdom of heaven. But from some of those with which he was conversant, he adopted the dreadful notion, that measures man's offences by the immeasurable power of the Almighty, and aggravates them in proportion as that is great. Eternal punishment, he says, would not so plainly and evidently seem just and reasonable, "unless upon a supposition that all offences committed against the infinite majesty of God, have a sort of infinite demerit in them! and the offence partaking thus of infinity, the punishment must therefore be eternal." Yet when he declared his belief in this doctrine, he proclaimed that "whosoever sincerely confesses and repents of sin, and trusts in the allsufficient atonement and sacrifice of Christ, to remove the guilt of it, has abundant assurance from Scripture that the blood of Christ will cleanse him from all sin, and that the Son of God has been, and will be his High-priest to reconcile him to God the Father."

There is however a remarkable passage in the preface to the second volume of his Discourses on the World to Come:"Were he," he said, "to pursue his inquiries into the doctrine of eternal punishment, merely by the aids of the light of nature and reason, he feared that his natural tenderness might warp him aside from the rules and the demands of strict justice, and the wise and holy government of the great God. But he was constrained to follow the unerring word of God, wherein the everlasting punishment of sinners in hell is asserted in the plainest and strongest manner, and that by all the methods of expression which are used in Scripture to signify an everlasting continuance.

"I must confess here," he adds, "if it were possible for the great and blessed God any other way to vindicate his own eternal and unchangeable hatred of sin, the inflexible justice of his government, the wisdom of his severe threatenings, and the veracity of his predictions,-if it were also possible for him, without this terrible execution, to vindicate the veracity, sincerity, and wisdom of the prophets and

apostles, and of Jesus Christ his Son, the greatest and chiefest of his divine messengers; and then, if the blessed God should at any time in a consistence with his glorious and incomprehensible perfections, release those wretched creatures from their acute pains and long imprisonment in hell, either with a design of the utter destruction of their beings by annihilation, or to put them into some unknown world upon a new foot of trial, I ought cheerfully and joyfully to accept this appointment of God for the good of millions of my fellow-creatures, and add my joys and praises to all the songs and triumphs of the heavenly world, in the day of such a divine and glorious release of these prisoners.

"But I feel myself under a necessity of confessing, that I am utterly unable to solve these difficulties according to the discoveries of the New Testament, which must be my constant rule of faith, and hope, and expectation, with regard to myself and others. I have read the strongest and best writers on the other side; yet, after all my studies, I have not been able to find any way how these difficulties may be removed, and how the divine perfections, and the conduct of God in his word, may be fairly vindicated, without the establishment of this doctrine, awful and formidable as it is.

"The ways, indeed, of the great God, and his thoughts, are above our thoughts and our ways, as the heavens are above the earth. Yet I must rest and acquiesce where our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father's chief Minister both of his wrath and his love, has left me in the divine revelations of Scripture; and I am constrained therefore to leave these unhappy creatures under the chains of everlasting darkness, into which they have cast themselves by their wilful iniquities-till the blessed God shall see fit to release them.

"This would be indeed such a new, such an astonishing and universal jubilee, both for devils and wicked men, as must fill heaven, earth, and hell with hallelujahs and joy. In the meantime it is my ardent wish, that the awful

sense of the terrors of the Almighty, and his everlasting anger, which the word of the great God denounces, may awaken some souls timely to bethink themselves of the dreadful danger into which they are running, before those terrors seize them at death, and begin to be executed upon. them without release and without hope."

This is a most curious passage. While on the one hand it expresses, in the strongest and most unequivocal terms, that the writer believed the doctrine of eternal punishment, because he found it plainly to his understanding declared in Scripture, it implies on the other, as obviously as words can imply a meaning, an opinion that the Almighty has some secret and mitigating decree alt mente reportum, and that Watts himself agreed, in his latent belief, with Origen and the Universalists.

But there is another point, and of the highest importance on which Dr. Watts has been supposed to have modified or changed his creed. I know not on what authority the story rests, that an Unitarian lady, once in conversation with Johnson, claimed Dr. Watts as a convert to her sect, and said, that although he had defended the Trinitarian doctrine in his works, he opened his eyes at his death. "Did he, madam?" Johnson is said to have replied; "then the first thing he saw was the devil." The speech is such as Johnson might have let fly on such an occasion, the more readily because he did not believe the assertion that provoked it. He has praised Watts as being "pure from all the heresies of an age to which every opinion had become a favourite that the universal church has hitherto detested." This was peculiarly the case with the dissenters. Thus their own recent historians say that during this period error was the destroying angel of dissenting congregations; and they trace the cause to their academies, saying, it is by the principles of religion which a tutor instils into his students, that they become a blessing or a curse to the human race; assassins of souls, or instruments

of salvation. Arminianism, they say, was the first stage of the disease, Arianism the second; and "when it filled the pulpit it invariably emptied the pews. This was the case, not only where a part of the congregation, alarmed by the sound of heresy, fled from the polluted house to a separate society; but where no opposition was made, and all remained without a murmur in the original place. In numerous instances the preacher, full of the wisdom of the serpent, sought, by hiding the monster from their view, to draw them over by stealth to the new theology, and unveiled his sentiments only as the people were able to bear them without a frown. Though at last his wishes were crowned with success, yet the decay began, and gradually consumed the growth, the strength, and the life of the society, till a large congregation was reduced to a handful. Where Socinianism found an entrance, its operations were quicker than those of the Arian creed, and more effectual: flourishing societies were reduced to a few families, which, being animated with zeal for the new opinions, or indifferent about any, chose to continue to support the mode of worship to which, from education or use, they were attached. In many places Socinianism was the abomination of desolation, and consigned what had been formerly the house of prayer and of the assemblies of the saints, an undisturbed abode to the spiders and the bats."

Watts had inherited a large share of the original temptation, that inward and spiritual temptation whereby man is incited to pluck the forbidden fruit. He approached too near the veil; and confiding in his own natural and culti vated acuteness, endeavourel, sometimes strictly, to define what the Scriptures have left indefinite, as if he were possessed of an intellectual prism with which he could decompose the Light of Light. There were times when he was conscious of this. Upon publishing some sermons, many years after they were written, in which he had expatiated on the nature of the Trinity, he confessed in a

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note that these were "warmer efforts of imagination than riper years could indulge, on a theme so sublime and abstruse. Since I have searched more studiously," he says, "into the mystery of late, I have learned more of my own ignorance; so that when I speak of these unsearchables, I abate much of my younger assurance, nor do my later thoughts venture so far into the particular modes of explaining the sacred distinctions in the Godhead."

Yet he continued to search into the unsearchable. In the preface to the second part of his Dissertation on this. awful subject, he says, "Perhaps it may be charged upon me, that I have not, in these Dissertations, exactly confined myself, in every punctilio, to the same sentiments which I had published some years ago, with relation to the doctrine of the Trinity; and particularly, that though I continue to maintain the supreme Deity of the Son and Spirit, yet that I have described the doctrine of their personality in stronger and more unlimited terms heretofore than I have done in these papers. Here let me give one general answer. When I apply myself with diligence to make further inquiries into the great doctrines of the Gospel, I would never make my own former opinions the standard of truth, and the rule by which to determine my future judgment. My work is always to lay the Bible before me, to consult that sacred and infallible guide, and to square and adjust all my sentiments by that certain and unerring rule. It is to the supreme Judge of controversies that I pay an unreserved submission, and would desire all further light from this fountain. I thank God that I have learned to retract my former sentiments and change them, when, upon stricter search and review, they appear less agreeable to the divine standard of faith. Though a sentence or two from any man's former writings may be able, perhaps, to confront his later thoughts, yet that is not sufficient to refute them. All that it will prove is this, that that man keeps his mind ever open to conviction, and that he is willing