Egyptian and Persian mythology, all emanating from the same source, the original tradition given to the early race of Adam, and preserved, though gradually fainter and fainter, through the post-diluvian world, until the embers of it, blown upon and excited into flame, broke out in the advent of Christ, the incarnate Deity himself.

In every dispute concerning the apostolicity of any point of Christian discipline or doctrine, it is obviously of the highest importance to ascertain what was the belief or practice of those Christians who lived in the first ages of the Church. They, who, like Hermas, Clement, and Ignatius, were con- temporaries with the Apostles, and fellow-labourers with them, could not possibly be ignorant of the › doctrines which they taught, or of the discipline which they established in their respective churches;> and we may be sure they would religiously hand down to their successors that doctrine and that form of government which they themselves had received from the Apostles. Yet the witnesses having produced a multitude of extracts from the writings of these and other fathers of the primitive Church, to establish the certainty that the belief of the

Thee, the Destroyer of the Evil Spirit! O Damordara (Indian God of Virtue) show me favour! I adore Thee who art celebrated by a thousand names, and under various forms, in the shape of Bood-dha, the God of mercy! Be propitious, O Most High God!· Asiatic Researches, vol. i. p. 284.

Trinity prevailed in the apostolical and immediately succeeding ages; and although the Defendant Priestley in his writings admits that "it was an unanswerable argument à priori, against any particular doctrine being contained in the Scriptures, that it was never understood to be so by those persons for whose immediate use the Scriptures were written, and who must have been much better qualified to understand them, in that respect at least, than we can pretend to be at this day'; "— notwithstanding this admission, the Defendant, Belsham, to get rid of all such testimony, declares the epistles of Clement to be spurious, treats the writings of Hermas and Barnabas with contempt, charges the epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp as being filled with interpolations, and stamps the Clementine Homilies as a romance: still, in spite of all this, he arrives at this logical and impartial conclusion:-"At any rate, they are good evidence of the existence of Unitarianism in the second century." Then comes the Defendant Lindsey,

1 History of Early Opinions, p. 15.

2 Reply to the Bishop of St. David's, p. 96.

When Dr. Priestley was once pressed by the clear sense of a scriptural text, which was too stubborn to bend to his schemes, he declared that, sooner than admit the received sense, he would suppose the whole verse to be an interpolation, or the amanuensis of the Apostle to have committed an error in taking down his words. - See Quarterly Review, vol. xv. p. 46.

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and with one stroke of his pen, he dashes out the testimony of the Fathers altogether. He must have a clear and open space for the manoeuvring of his system, and therefore cuts down root and branch to make way for it, and cries out, "The authorities of men are nothing!"-an assertion, Gentlemen, which I hardly think he would have made had their testimony been in favour of his views. Now, to reject the evidence of the Fathers in the interpretation of Christian doctrine and belief, would be as absurd as for us to reject the opinions of all contemporary lawyers, and the uniform decision of the judges, if the true meaning of some ancient statute were in dispute. This we should consider to amount to an abandonment of the question. On this account it is that all parties involved in doctrinal controversy are anxious to obtain the support of the early Fathers; justly looking upon them as ancient receptacles of primitive articles of belief, and good expositors of the Christian faith. It must, I believe, be admitted, that these holy men have been treated at one time with a deference bordering upon enthusiasm, at another with a negligence nearly allied to contempt; neither of which, in the judgment of the learned, they deserved, — extremes from both of which, I am led to think, the sober learning of the present day bids fair to emancipate them. And here I must be permitted to remark, with respect to the writings of the early Fathers, that, of such

as remain to us, there is not one hundredth part of those which were extant at the beginning of the fourth century; and yet, with all this quantity of evidence before the Fathers of the council at Nice, and which was open to their opponents as well as to themselves, they did not hesitate to declare that all their predecessors, all the Fathers who had preceded them, believed in the divinity of Christ. Where were the Unitarian teachers when this confident assertion was made? If the writers of the three first centuries believed, as we are repeatedly told, in the simple humanity of Jesus, why was not a whisper of this belief heard at the council of Nice? There is not the smallest particle of

1 In the year 325, a numerous and celebrated assembly was convened at Nice in Bithynia, to extinguish, by their final sentence, the subtle disputes which had arisen in Egypt on the subject of the Trinity. Three hundred and eighteen bishops obeyed the summons of their indulgent master; the ecclesiastics of every rank, and sect, and denomination, have been computed at two thousand and forty-eight persons; the Greeks appeared in person; and the consent of the Latins was expressed by the legates of the Roman pontiff. The session, which lasted about two months, was frequently honoured by the presence of the Emperor. Leaving his guards at the door, he seated himself (with the permission of the council) on a low stool in the midst of the hall. Constantine listened with patience, and spoke with modesty: and while The influenced the debates, he humbly professed that he was the minister, not the judge, of the successors of the Apostles. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. iii.

p. 304.

evidence to show that the Unitarian or Socinian doctrines were so much as thought of at that council. It is true, indeed, that those who were inclined to Arianism appealed to the early Fathers in support of their opinions. Marcion, Valentinus, and others of the same school, were so convinced of Jesus Christ being God, that they could not believe him to be man; they held that his body was an illusion: which surely makes it extremely improbable that the majority of Christians in those days believed in the simple humanity of Christ. The same conviction led, in the third century, to the Patripassian and Sabellian heresies.1 The leaders of these sects could not persuade themselves that Christ was a man; and one taught that he was actually God the Father, the other maintained that he was an emanation from God. I repeat, therefore, that the total absence of all mention of Unitarianism at the Council of Nice is a very strong argument against the notion that the early Fathers were Unitarians. We might believe, perhaps, though

1 The Patripassians were the disciples of Praxeas, of the third century, who held that it was God the Father who suffered in the person of Jesus Christ. The Sabellians were so called from Sabellius, a bishop of Upper Egypt, who flourished near the fourth century. He was a disciple of Noëtus, and taught that the Deity appeared in the Old Dispensation as the Father, in the New as the Son; and that he descended on the Apostles as the Holy Ghost: that is, that he was one God with three names.