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and King, by the unction from above: but in the phraseology of the heretics of the Apostolic age, it was used as a name of that Divine Being with whom we maintain, but they denied, an union with the man Jesus. To deny that Jesus is the Christ was, in their sense of the word "Christ," to deny that he is The Son of God, or God incarnate. He that denieth this, says the Apostle, is a liar, and is Antichrist. Two remarkable sects of these lying Antichrists arose in the Apostles' days the sect of the Cerinthian heretics, who denied the divinity of our Saviour; and the sect of the Docetæ, who denied his manhood, maintaining that the body of Jesus, and every thing he appeared to do and suffer in it, was mere illusion. Thus, both equally denied the incarnation; both, therefore, equally were liars and Antichrists and to give equal and direct contradiction to the lies of both, St. John delivers the truth in these terms, that "Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh."1

Att. Gen. Now, sir, inform us, whether it be true that the primitive Church of Jerusalem was strictly Unitarian, maintaining the simple humanity of Christ?

Witness. It is first necessary for me to state, that the Jews at Jerusalem, who were first converted to Christianity, are designated "the Hebrews," or

1 Horsley's Sermons, vol. i. p. 175.

"they of the Circumcision;" and they, together with James, the brother of our Lord, their bishop, constituted the primitive church of Jerusalem; that original parent church, the mother of us all. When the emperor Adrian drove the Jews from Jerusalem, the descendants of these Hebrew Christians settled in the northern parts of Galilee, and became heretics in one particular, by maintaining the necessity of the observance of the Mosaic law for the attainment of salvation under the Gospel, and were then called Nazarenes. After them arose another sect, called Ebionites. Now, the author of the Corruptions of Christianity confounds these two sects together, and calls them "Hebrew Christians ;" and he says, with respect to them, "You will find no trace in history that they believed Christ to be any thing more than man. "1 It may be true that this author has not been able to discover in history, that the Nazarenes believed Christ any other than a man ; but I affirm, that there is hardly any fact in the early history of the church more clearly established than the distinction between the Nazarenes and Ebionites: both of whom maintained the opinion of the orthodoxy of the proper Nazarenes in the article of our Lord's divinity. It is evident, therefore, that these sects were not the same with the

1 Letters to Dr. Horsley, p. 32.

Hebrew Christians who composed the primitive church of Jerusalem.

Att. Gen. You deny the primitive church of Jerusalem to have been Unitarian: when, and how, do you say that Unitarianism commenced?

Witness. Cerinthus, who was contemporary with St. John, taught, that to Christ born as a man was added an angelic being: that this union was interrupted at the crucifixion and at the time of our Lord's interment, but was restored after the resurrection; and, being restored, it rendered the man Jesus an object of divine honour: and this, Tertullian says, was a heresy, and a heresy it was considered when Cerinthus lived', which proves that the divinity of Christ was the orthodox doctrine. Now Ebion, from whom the Ebionites took their name, is declared by Epiphanius and Irenæus to have held the Cerinthian doctrine or heresy respecting Christ; consequently, he worshipped Christ as a deified man. From the time of Cerinthus to the year 190, the Ebionites do not appear to have gone further than the denial of our Lord's original divinity, when Theodotus the apostate, the tanner of Byzantium, came to Rome and preached the doctrine of Antichrist, and probably first taught the mere humanity of Christ; for there is no evidence to prove that Christ was not worshipped by the

De Præscript. Hæret. c. 48. p. 221.

Ebionites; and as all innovations have a progress, and the divinity of Christ was the belief, and the worship of Christ was the practice, of the first ages, it is probable that presumptuous men would begin to question the ground on which his claim to worship might be thought to stand, before they abandoned the worship to which they had been so long habituated. I would ask, has not this been the progress of the corruption in latter times? Socinus, although he denied the original divinity of our Lord, was nevertheless a worshipper of Christ, and a strenuous asserter of his claim to worship. It was left to others to build upon the foundation which Socinus laid, and to bring the Unitarian doctrine to the goodly form in which the present age beholds it.

Court. Well, well. But was the divinity of Christ the belief of the Apostles? first show that. Att. Gen. That, my Lord, has been proved by what the witness has adduced from St. John.

Court. That is but a solitary instance. The witness has gone no further than to say, that the divinity of Christ was the belief of the primitive church of Jerusalem; but it is necessary to show more than this, that it was the original faith.

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Witness. My Lord, this is a wide field in which the believer in the divinity of Christ may long expatiate, and with delight. St. Peter, in his first sermon on the day of Pentecost, declares publicly

to the people of Israel, that Jesus, whom they had crucified and slain, was raised up from the grave by God; "having loosed the pains of death, for it was not possible that he should be holden of it." And here, let me ask, who was this that it was impossible for the bonds of death to hold? Not the mere man, Jesus of Nazareth, for all men are subject to, and are to be holden of, death; -no, it was Christ the divine Redeemer of mankind,-that divine Being who was superior to all the powers of death and hell: He, who shed forth upon his Apostles on this day the Holy Spirit from the place of his exaltation on the right hand of God, having received the promise of the Holy Ghost from the Father. My Lord, I will also insist that the blessed Stephen died a martyr to the deity of Christ. The accusation which the Defendants say was brought against him, was his "speaking blasphemous words against the Temple and the Law." The accusation which the Jews brought against him, says the Apostle, was also a charge of blasphemy against Moses and against God.' And what was this blasphemy? It was probably a prediction that the Temple was to be destroyed, and the ritual of Law, of course, abolished. The blasphemy against Moses was probably his assertion that the authority of Moses was inferior to

Acts, vi. 11.

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