How deeply are the minds of Trinitarians penetrated with a sense of the grandeur, sublimity, and importance, of their favourite doctrine! How seldom, how slightly, do they think and speak of Jesus as a man, in comparison with the frequency and earnestness with which they think and speak of him as God! But how much more deeply must the minds of the primitive disciples have been impressed with the stupendous discovery! It must have seized and kept possession of every faculty of their souls. In the present age the doctrine of a Trinity of persons in the Deity, and of an incarnate and crucified God, are so common and familiar that they almost cease to shock the mind. But to the primitive believers it must have had all the freshness and the force of novelty; it was an idea which would never be out of their thoughts; it must have occupied and filled the imagination, and must have been the constant topic of their meditation, their conversation, and their correspondence. And in sitting down to write the history of Jesus, his high dignity, his divine nature, his condescension in becoming incarnate, must have been their darling theme, in comparison with which all other topics must have been frivolous and nugatory; and if they were under the necessity of touching upon them for a time, they would constantly recur to that astonishing

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fact, which could never be forgotten for a moment, and must have been uppermost in their thoughts.

But how stands the fact? Observe and wonder! Matthew, Mark, and Luke, professing to write a history which should contain all that would be necessary to know and believe concerning their venerated master, absolutely forgot to mention the stupendous fact, that Jesus Christ was the living and true God, and they take no more notice of this awful distinction, than if he were a man like themselves. And one of these sacred historians (Luke) continues his history for thirty years after the ascension of Christ, and relates the travels, the labours, the doctrine, and the success of the Apostles and first teachers of the Gospel; but not a syllable does he mention of the divinity of Christ, or the doctrine of the Trinity, and no one would know or suspect from Luke's history that the Apostles had ever heard of any such doctrine. Is this credible, is it even possible, if the doctrine itself were true? Certainly not. Let every Trinitarian lay his hand upon his heart, and declare upon his honour and in the presence of God, whether he could himself have been guilty of such an unpardonable omission. How then can they believe that the Evangelists would have been so unfaithful to their trust, if they really had it in charge to record, or even if they were apprised of this extraordinary event?

Again, the witnesses affirm that Jesus Christ was the Creator, Preserver, and Governor, of this and of all worlds. This also would be a most novel and astonishing doctrine, especially to Jews, who had never heard of any Creator but God. This then is a doctrine which we might expect to be blazoned in every page of the New Testament. But what is the fact? It is omitted by Matthew, Mark, Luke, James, Peter, and Jude, and by the Apostle Paul in ten out of fourteen epistles. Is it possible, then, that these writers should have given credit to this doctrine?-no, no; the thought of it never entered into their minds, and if it had been proposed, they would have rejected it with horror.

And what, let me ask, is there, with King James's version before us, to rebut these weighty considerations, and to command our assent to these astonishing and most improbable propositions, so contrary to all just conceptions of the Unity of God, so contrary to the most explicit declarations of the Jewish Scriptures, and to the main and avowed object of the Mosaic dispensation, and so inconsistent with the general tenour of the Evangelical and Apostolic writings themselves, viz. that Jesus Christ is the true God, the Creator of all things, equal with the Father, and that the Father, Son, and Spirit, being three distinct persons, are only one Being, one God! The witnesses have,

indeed, referred us to one passage here, and to another there, in which it is said that Jesus Christ is called God, equal to or one with the Father; and to two or three more, in which he is supposed to be represented as the Maker of the world; and to a few other texts, in which it is thought that divine attributes are ascribed to Christ. And when we ask for the texts which prove the Trinity, they refer us to the form of baptism; as if baptizing into the name of a person, of Paul or Moses, for example, was an acknowledgment of their divinity: or, they send us to St. Paul's valediction to the Corinthians that the grace of Christ,

that is, that the blessings of the Gospel, the love of God, and a plentiful participation of spiritual gifts, may be communicated to his Corinthian friends. Upon evidence so feeble and unsatisfactory, rest the amazing doctrines of the divinity of Christ and of the holy Trinity! And these detached texts, being frequently cited by the advocates of these mysterious doctrines, are for that reason believed to be of frequent occurrence in the Scriptures; and, in contradiction to the most notorious fact, though not to their sincere persuasion, they represent the New Testament as full of these mysteries from beginning to end: though it is plain, that not a shadow of them exists in many of the books, and particularly in those in which we should most naturally expect to find them, in the history of

our Lord's ministry, and of the preaching of the Apostles. We conclude, therefore, that these passages, which only occur incidentally, and which pass without comment, in whatever way they are to be accounted for or explained, were not, and could not possibly be, understood or intended by the sacred writers in the sense in which believers in the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity now understand and explain them; because these doctrines did not make that impression upon their minds, nor produce that visible effect in their teaching and writings which they now do in all who receive them, and which they necessarily must and would have done in the Apostles and Evangelists, and their readers and hearers, if they had believed these doctrines, and if their language had been originally understood in the sense in which they are now received by those who profess the popular creed.

We, who are armed with such considerations as these, considerations which must find a way to the hearts and bosoms of all who seriously and impartially seek after truth, we are little affected by the curious disquisitions of learned men upon the niceties of grammatical construction and the force of Greek particles. We will never be persuaded that it can be necessary for us to study the bulky volumes of Hoogveen, or the more moderate subtleties of Middleton, in order to learn the essen