dence whatever, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, to prove that Christ was personally concerned in any of the former dispensations of God to mankind, either to the patriarchs or to the Jews, but that the contrary is explicitly and repeatedly asserted in the Scriptures.1

Upon these grounds we rest our pretensions to be received as members of the great Christian community. And while we faithfully adhere to these doctrines, and the principles of action springing from them, though our misjudging brethren may disown and condemn them, though many who have a high conceit of their own attainments may despise and revile them, though Churches, which arrogate to themselves the lofty titles of orthodox and infallible, may excommunicate and anathematise us, and though persecutors and men of a persecuting spirit, may vent their impotent execrations upon us, or visit us with pains and penalties horrible to humanity, none of these things can move us; and from the sentence of these erring and censorious brethren we appeal to Him who knows our integrity, and with humble confidence will we rely upon deliverance from the evils which now beset us, by his power, in the instrumentality of a verdict in our favour. With this hope, as the reward of our sincerity, and this

: Calm Inquiry, p. 447458.4

expectation, as the proof of your liberality, I now

the defence set up by the Defendants, my first object will be, to direct your attention to that peculiar species of argument which is made use of to repel the charge upon the record, and to show that the Unitarians pretend not only that their tenets are not censurable, but that they are more rational, and more consistent with truth, than a very considerable portion of the Scriptures themselves. We argue that, "all Scripture being given by the inspiration of God," whatever it discloses demands our belief; but the Defendants take another and an opposite course, and say, "Whatever those Scriptures reveal we will not believe, unless the revelation be approved of by our understanding and the faculties of our reason; nor will we admit that to be Scripture, which is not conformable with our rational conceptions." Hence it is, that vast and most important parts of Holy Writ are wholly set aside; and, under pretence of their being of doubtful authority,' or contrary to human conjecture, are reckoned as a dead letter; and all who object to this arbitrary

1 See Reply to the Bishop of St. David's, p. 63.

excision are marked as bigots,

men devoid of reason, and of illiberal minds and principles; and their motto is, Stat pro ratione voluntas. The Sacred Volume thus mangled, and afterwards, in all its essential parts, distorted and disfigured, they call the Scripture: and now mark how they make use of it. "The Attorney-General knows that the Unitarians, professing, and truly professing, to admit the Scriptures as the rule of their faith and practice, maintain that no such doctrine as that of the divinity of Christ, or that of the Trinity, are to be found in the New Testament from one end to the other; and therefore he has no right to disgrace them by classing them with Deists and Infidels." Gentlemen, the time of the Court has been wantonly wasted, if we have not shown you, to satiety, that the Scriptures every where abound with declarations of the divinity of the Son,— that they declare Christ to have claimed that divinity, and that his Apostles duly acknowledged it. "But then," say the Defendants, "your Scriptures are not ours; and if you persist in guiding your faith and practice by yours, we do the same by ours." Be it so: but then, what saith the Law of the land? "I lay no restraint upon the conscience, but I am the conservator of the volume of the canonical Scriptures." Now, the Law knows no other volume of Holy Writ save that which is now before us; the Law protects all the several books composing

this Sacred Volume, which we call the Bible; it ac knowledges and it preserves the whole entire, without addition or diminution of its parts; it permits of no arbitrary excisions, to suit persons of every different complexion and character; and, what is more, in discharging the duties of this guardianship, it will not suffer what is therein written to be evil spoken of, much less will it bear with impunity that its sacred doctrines be charged with falsehood. The Deists may come forward, and slash from its sacred pages whatever they conceive to be contrary to reason and to their tenets; and say, in the language of the Defendants, "We admit the Scriptures (thus garbled) to be the rule of our faith and practice; but we maintain, that no doctrines are to be found, nor can the similitude of any such be discovered in the whole volume, which call upon us to believe and act according to your system:" and thus, on the same principle, may any inflict wounds that would engender diseases and death to the souls of men.

Our Scriptures explicitly declare Jesus Christ to be both God and man; God from all eternity, and one with the Father, who assumed our nature that, as man, he might redeem and save us. They tell us this fact, and they tell us no more; but this, our reason convinces us, is sufficient, because we have full assurance that those " Scriptures were given by inspiration of God," and that,

as they treat not even of the nature of man, how his body and his soul are brought into such an union as to form one living rational being, so neither do they disclose any thing of the nature of God, a subject infinitely more incomprehensible; and if they did develop the particulars of either nature, such a discovery in the present constitution of our minds would be useless, because the mental faculties of man are wholly insufficient for the comprehension of these things; and, supposing it were otherwise, and that what was thus revealed were all clear to our comprehension, what room would then be left for the exercise of that faith and piety, to which the Gospel makes so many promises of great reward? Looking, therefore, at the fact as we find it, we receive it with implicit confidence on the faith of God's word: and hence, on subjects of Revelation, we dare not bring our reason to deny what is so much above its province to estimate; because what thus comes from heaven cannot be measured by the limited scale of human comprehension; and because we know, in matters of a spiritual nature revealed by God, the ground of our certainty lies not in the evidence of the things, but in the undoubted veracity of God, who has revealed them. We maintain that we derive our doctrines from the most rational consideration of the true meaning of Scripture, from understanding its words in their most usual sense, - from