Egyptian allegory, judiciously selected by Moses, to enable him to account for the introduction of evil into the world; although that objection destroys, so to speak, the cementing principle of the Bible, and quite disintegrates the otherwise close adhesion and harmony of its parts.

To this end the eternity of punishment, righteously awarded to the impenitent and unbelieving, is utterly denied; although the sufferings of the lost are not intended for their amendment, but as a satisfaction to divine justice, when the hour of pardon shall have passed away; or in disregard of the alternative, into which such denial carries those who urge it, of admitting either a Papal or a Mahometan purgatory, where offenders may expiate their crimes by their sufferings, and where repentance and amendment may be followed by pardon and release.

To this end, the existence and agency of the Tempter, as Satan is emphatically styled, by way of bad pre-eminence, is regarded as merely allegorical and visionary, by men, unthinking that it is one of the depths of Satan, one of his most subtle devices, to make them deny or ridicule the idea of his existence; that he may thus throw a dreaming and deluded world off its guard,

greatly modified and altered from the times of Socinus to our own, that it is difficult to ascertain what is acknowledged, and what is disavowed; so that in an endeavour to disprove any of their tenets, we may unintentionally hurt the feelings of some, who have not altogether been carried away by those muddy inundations, which the unhappy dexterity of philosophy, falsely so called, has let loose upon the Christian world.

Much of the great mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh, with all the firmament of saving truth and love, whereof it is the radiant centre, must remain inexplicable to our present capacities. But to argue from thence that this mystery is a cunningly devised fable, is as illogical, as it would be to maintain that there is no bottom to the sea, because we have no plumb-line with which it may be fathomed. A first Cause without a beginning— a Being which neither made itself, nor was made by any other-infinite without extension-inhabiting every place, yet circumscribed in no placeeternally and perpetually existing, without any succession of time a present, without any past or future :*—these and many other inexplicable secrets of the divine nature, hinder not from our

* Leslie's Works, II. 31. 8vo.

belief in a God. Our inability, therefore, to explain the Triunity of his Essence, can be no reason for rejecting the revelation of it contained in his Word; even if we were deprived of those shadows and resemblances of this divine truth, which may be seen in the one nature of man, communicating itself to many individuals of the species. There is one human nature, but many human persons.

It is an old and hackneyed artifice of Unitarians to represent the doctrines of our Catholic faith, not as furnished forth by the plain and simple declarations of Scripture, but as a distortion or transformation of those statements, into the orthodox code of belief, by the magic wand of a scholastic theology, waved over them by men, who brought the subtilties of Gentile philosophy within the Church of Christ. These objectors continually declare, that in all interpretations of Scripture, clearness and simplicity must be the great aims of the expositor; no regard being paid to logical subtilties and nice refinements. It had been well if this useful canon, so fitly proposed, had been practically obeyed. But we need only take a very cursory view of the many laborious defences of Unitarianism, to observe that this pretended simplicity is, in effect,

and lead it captive at his will.

He has th while, no instrument for the destruction of sou more mischievous than THE WORD OF GOD i self, adulterated and perverted, according to h "methodism of error," as we see in the cases Eve, of our blessed Lord Himself, and of the inte pretations of Unitarianism. There are, unque tionably, some parts of Scripture hard to be under stood, which they that are unlearned and unstabl wrest, as they do other parts also to their own de struction, and to the misguiding of thoughtles followers into the same fatal gulf of error. Th Word of God is indeed the Sword of the Spirit and therewith the Head and Captain of our Salva tion fought and foiled the common enemy. But t the man over whom Satan prevails to use it unlaw fully, it is a sword without a handle-a sword al blade, which deeply, and it may be, mortally wound his own hand when he strikes with it, in the delu sive self-confidence of intellectual pride.

According to the theologians of this unhappy school, it seems to be almost a fundamental rule, that no doctrine ought to be acknowledged as true in its nature, or divine in its origin, of which all the parts are not level to human understanding and that whatever the Scriptures teach concerning

the counsels of Jehovah, and the plan of his salvation, must be modified, curtailed, and attenuated, in such a manner, by the transforming power of art and argument, as to correspond with the poor and narrow capacities of our intelligence. Such a system must tend, in reality, to make the number of religions almost equal to the number of individuals who embrace them. For, as the powers of mind vary in different persons, some must adopt as portions of divine truth, what by others, more slow and superficial, will be regarded as unintelligible and contradictory. Accordingly, we do observe these amiable differences of sentiment upon the great doctrines of the Bible, from the highest semiArianism, through all the gradations of descent, to the dark and chilly depths of modern Unitarianism.* Indeed, the belief of Unitarians, "if form it may be called that form hath none," has been so

* Arianism was alike the parent of Mahometanism and Unitarianism, each differing from the other in some particular features, yet manifesting their common origin.

Facies non omnibus una,

Nec diversa tamen ; qualem decet esse sororum.

Accordingly a very favourable opinion of Islamism was expressed by the Socinians of England, in an address to the Ambassador of Morocco, published by Leslie, vol. ii. pp. 17, &c. The authority of this epistle seems to have been clearly proved by Bishop Horsley, from documents in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth.