Part 1

UNITARIANISM DEFENDED:

A SERIES OF LECTURES

BY

THREE PROTESTANT DISSENTING MINISTERS OF LIVERPOOL:

IN REPLY TO

A COURSE OF LECTURES, ENTITLED “UNITARIANISM CONFUTED,” BY THIRTEEN CLERGYMEN OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

Would to Heaven that Christians had their own ‘vail’ of orthodox words taken away from their minds; that, limiting Orthodoxy to the acceptance of the Christ as the SPIRIT (‘the Lord is that Spirit,’ says St. Paul), _i.e._, the meaning, the end of all revelation, they would not allow a new _letter_, consisting of abstract doctrines, to involve their minds in a ‘vail’ which obstructs the view of the Gospel, even more than the old letter, which kept the Jews in “bondage.”—_Heresy and Orthodoxy by Rev. J. Blanco White_, p. 53, 2nd edition.

LIVERPOOL: WILLMER AND SMITH, 32, CHURCH STREET.

LONDON: JOHN GREEN, 121, NEWGATE STREET.

1839.

LONDON: PRINTED BY RICHARD KINDER, GREEN ARBOUR COURT, OLD BAILEY.

GENERAL PREFACE.

In this Preface, and in all the other contents of this volume, we have occupied the position of an assailed party, lending our best consideration to whatever a leagued body of resolute and unsparing adversaries could say against us. We have stood upon the defensive, not lamenting that such an occasion had occurred of exposing our views of Christianity to so severe a scrutiny, and of displaying to the world whether our position was tenable. We did not provoke this Controversy. It was of our opponents’ choosing. They entered into combination, and arranged their method of attack, and invited the public attentively to look on while they performed upon us the work of destruction. With respectful attention, as men whose system of Christianity was about to be subjected to a powerful analysis by those who believed the main ingredients to be poisonous,—but with quiet hearts, as men who had no interest in this world but to discover Truth,—we have interfered no further than was necessary to make this examination, by carefulness, impartiality, and accuracy, productive of a true result. We have struck out whatever was untrue, and we have supplied whatever was wanting, to exhibit a full statement of the respective Evidences of Unitarianism and of Trinitarianism. Lecture qualifies lecture; and Preface corrects Preface. We are satisfied to have thus placed, side by side, the contrasted views of Man and God, and to await the issues.

To return upon the “thirteen Clergymen of the Church of England” the words of their General Preface, (p. xi.) “_it is no uncommon practice in modern criticism to neglect the statements_” of an opponent’s case, as if they never had been made, and the corrections passed upon one’s own as if they never had been experienced. It is the policy of the “thirteen Clergymen” to _reiterate_, nothing daunted, arguments, our careful replies to which are not even noticed, and misrepresentations whose injustice had solemnly been protested against. By these resolute repetitions some are seduced to believe, and attention is withdrawn from the overthrow of an error or a calumny by the hardihood with which it rises from its fall, and reasserts itself. Strike them down;—they get up, and coolly offer themselves to be struck down again. Great ought to be the power of Truth; for great is the vitality and the power of effrontery in a popular error. It is only in the long combat of years and generations that the _Real_ manifests at last its imperishable quality. The “General Preface” quietly gathers up all the “_disjecta membra_” of error and misstatement, and without a word of answer to our analysis of their character, presents them again to have sentence and execution passed upon them. It is a careful redintegration of the broken particles, which in our simplicity we had hoped would not so readily reunite. We are obliged, therefore, by way at once of Preface and of Protest, to repeat our solemn contradiction of some most strenuous misrepresentations, and to attempt again the exposure of some fallacies most tenacious of life.

I. It was distinctly stated by us in the course of this Controversy, that not upon any grounds of _literary evidence_ did we discredit those prefaces which relate to the miraculous (or as, in insult to the purest and holiest human feelings, our opponents are not ashamed to call it, the _immaculate_) conception; and that our estimate of them was formed solely upon grounds of inherent incredibility, and of proved inconsistencies both with themselves and with the general statements of the New Testament. Yet in total disregard of this our denial, the Preface (p. xiii.) reasserts the charge, as if it never had been contradicted. We also distinctly stated that the miraculous conception _in no way interfered with Unitarianism_,—that many Humanitarians believed in it; yet it is _the policy_ of Trinitarianism to _repeat_, that we pervert these portions of Scripture, for the sake of evading a fact fatal to our system. Unitarianism is so little concerned to evade the fact of a miraculous conception, that many Unitarians themselves adopt it. It is the “tactics” of the “thirteen Clergymen,” their system “of holy war,” (_see Preface to Mr. Ould’s Lecture_) to ignore whatever we may say on our own behalf, either in way of correction or of defence, and to reassert the false statement.

II. The “Unitarian Creed” is described by our reverend opponents as “_a mere code of unbelief_” (p. xiv.) it being the policy of the “thirteen Clergymen,” not only to pay no regard to our most solemn assertion of our faith in Christianity, as God’s full and perfect revelation to man, but also to assume to themselves the functions of infallible judges of what is Christianity, and what is not; and so, again to return upon them their own language, to “deify their own fallible” (p. xii.) interpretations and inferences. Yet they can impose upon the simplicity of the world, by charging others with the “pride of reason.” Infallible themselves, to differ from their infallibility can of course be nothing else than the _pride_ of reason.

III. It is stated (p. xv.), that we “utterly deny” “the eternity of punishments,” without adding _what we have added_, that the moral consequences of actions _are eternal_, and that in its influence on character and progress, the retribution of every evil thought or deed _is everlasting_. What we _do_ deny, as the blackest misrepresentation that can be conceived of the God of Providence, whose glory it is to lead his children to Himself, is the horribly distinct statement of their own “General Preface”—“_that 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_.” (p. xv.) Is this the Religion, and this the God, of Love? These are the men who make the Unbelief of which they afterwards so blindly and bitterly complain. If such was Christianity, unbelief would be a virtue, a prompting of devotion, a protest on behalf of God.

IV. Our doubt as to the existence of, or necessity for, an external Devil, permitted by God to ruin the souls of men, has been converted to two uses in this Preface;—first, as manifesting that we are ourselves under the power of the subtlest device of Satan, who has concealed from us his existence, that he might lead us captive at his will; and, secondly, that though denying the existence of Satan, we are yet ourselves the emissaries of Satan; for that as the Devil tempted Eve, and our Lord himself, by perversions of the Word of God, so Unitarianism, by its interpretations, is his present instrument,—in fact, Satan himself tempting the world by the word of God, as of old he tempted Eve and Christ. (pp. xv. xvi.) We leave this matter to the judgment of men whose sense of propriety and decency has not been borrowed exclusively from the influences of a dogmatic Theology.

V. It is said of us (p. xvi.), contrary to our own most distinct averment in this very Controversy, that “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.”

Where are the simplicity, the sincerity, the love of Truth, which alone can make Controversy fruitful of good results, when such a representation of the spirit of our Theology _can_ be given by “thirteen Clergymen” _after_ we had published the following words in our fifth Lecture (p. 9), for their special instruction:—“Let me guard myself from the imputation of rejecting this doctrine _because it is mysterious_; or of supporting a system which insists on banishing all mysteries from religion. On any such system I should look with unqualified aversion, as excluding from faith one of its primary elements; as obliterating the distinction between logic and devotion, and tending only to produce an irreverent and narrow-minded dogmatism. ‘Religion without mystery’ is a combination of terms, than which the Athanasian Creed contains nothing more contradictory; and the sentiment of which it is the motto, I take to be a fatal caricature of rationalism, tending to bring all piety into contempt. Until we touch upon the mysterious, we are not in contact with religion; nor are any objects reverently regarded by us, except such as, from their nature or their vastness, are felt to transcend our comprehension.” Nay, it is not a little remarkable, that the very illustration employed by the “thirteen Clergymen” to exhibit our absurdity in rejecting the incomprehensible, had been previously employed by ourselves to exhibit the necessity of admitting the incomprehensible:—

_Trinitarian Preface_, p. xviii. _Unitarian Lecture_, No. V. p. 9.

“Much of the great mystery of “The sense of what we do not know godliness, God manifest in the is as essential to our religion, flesh, with all the firmament of as the impression of what we do saving truth and love, whereof know; the thought of the it is the radiant centre, must boundless, the incomprehensible, remain inexplicable to our must blend in our mind with the present capacities. But to argue perception of the clear and true; from thence, that this mystery the little knowledge we have must is a cunningly-devised fable, is be clung to, as the margin of an as illogical as it would be to invisible immensity; _and all our maintain _that there is no positive ideas be regarded as the bottom to the sea, because we mere float to show the surface of have no plumb-line with which it the infinite deep_.” may be fathomed_.”

This is bold misrepresentation; a consistent hardihood in the “tactics of holy war.” To persevere, against all remonstrance, in the repetition of a misstatement injurious to an opponent, and to do this so coolly as to use almost his own words in imputing to him the very opposite of what he has said, is at least a convenient, if not an honourable nor yet a formidable policy.

In the same spirit of neither honourable nor yet formidable policy, is the attempt (p. xvii.) to identify Mahometanism and Unitarianism, by the help of a literary forgery, which even if it was authentic, would prove nothing except that the early Unitarians of England, in the reign of Charles the Second, amid the corruptions of Christianity, rejoiced in the testimony borne by Mahometanism to the great doctrine of revealed religion, the Unity of God. It is said that there is, among the MSS. in the Lambeth Library, a “Socinian Epistle (to this effect) to Ameth Ben Ameth, Ambassador from the Emperor of Morocco to Charles II.” Leslie, in the Preface to his “Socinian Controversy Discussed,” was the first who made use of this supposed letter, and not without the suspicion, that he had first forged it himself.[1] “I will here,” says Leslie, “present the reader with a rarity, which I take to be so, because of the difficulty I had to obtain it.” “It is in my mind,” says Mr. Aspland, “decisive of the question, that immediately after Leslie had published the Epistle, Emlyn, who answered the tract to which it was prefixed, stated it as his belief, upon inquiry, that no such epistle had ever been presented by any one ‘deputed’ from the Unitarians, and insinuated that no credit was to be given to a document published by Leslie, unless vouched by some other authority than his own; and that Leslie, in replying to this answer, though he dwells, for pages, upon the passages before and after this, relating to the epistle, says not a syllable about his ‘rarity’ or in defence of his veracity.” “Leslie,” continues Mr. Aspland, “is convicted (by Emlyn) of quoting passages from Archbishop Tillotson’s Sermons, which had been published in the name of their eminent author, as if they were the work of an avowed ‘Socinian.’ And if you will consult his reply, you will find this theological braggart completely humbled, and reduced to the necessity of using the wretched plea, that he had omitted the name of the ‘great Prelate,’ out of _tenderness_.—Is it uncharitable to suspect, under all these circumstances, that he who was proved to have resorted to one trick, might have had recourse to another?”

“As to your ‘rarity,’” says Emlyn in his reply to Leslie, “of the address to the _Morocco_ ambassador, I see not what it amounts to, more than a complaint of the corruption of the Christian faith, in the article of one God, which the _Mahometans_ have kept, by consent of all sides. Yet, forasmuch as I can learn nothing from any _Unitarians_ of any such address from them, nor do you produce any subscribers’ names,[2] I conclude no such address was ever made, by any _deputed_ from them, whatever any single person might do. I suppose you conclude from the matter of it, that it must be from some _Unitarian_, and perhaps so; yet you may remember that so you concluded from the matter of Dr. _Tillotson’s_ Sermons, that they were a _Socinian’s_.”[3]

For our own part, when we read this amusing attempt to identify us with Mahometans, by the help of an unknown letter, bearing no subscription, and addressed, by nobody knows whom, to the _Ambassador of Morocco_, in the reign of Charles II., we were forcibly reminded of two passages in Ecclesiastical History, in whose pages all tricks and absurdities can be paralleled, and whose exhibition of gratuitous follies and distortions has left the possibility of “nothing new under the sun,” of this description, for our modern days. Hildebrand himself, yes, GREGORY THE SEVENTH, like our poor selves, was suspected of a leaning to “_Islamism_,” (_General Preface_, p. xvii.) because he wrote a letter, not to the Ambassador, as in our case but, as became his greater dignity, to the _Emperor_ of Morocco, thanking him for the liberation of some Christian captives, and expressing his conviction, so much was there of the spirit of God and goodness in this act, “that they both worshipped the same spirit, though the modes of their adoration and faith were different.” It also appears that the Emperor Manuel Comnenus exposed himself to the same imputation of “_Islamism_,” because he wished to correct an error in the ritual of the Greek Church, which by a laughable misunderstanding of an Arabic word, signifying _eternal_, “contained a standing anathema against the God of Mahomet,” as being “_solid_ and _spherical_.”

“Solventur risu tabulæ; tu missus abibis.”

We confess our unmixed astonishment at finding the “thirteen Clergymen” avowing the most undisguised Tritheism. We do not recollect in modern times so bold and unwary an admission of Polytheism as the following: “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._” (p. xix.) Is this then the _Unity_ of God which the “thirteen” maintain, viz., such a unity as subsists between three individual men? Is it their meaning that the Divine Nature is a Species containing under it three Individuals, as human nature is a species containing under it as many individuals as there are men? Do they mean to contend, with some of the Fathers, that three men are only “_abusively_” called _three_, being in reality only _one_? What mercy would Dr. Whately have for such unskilful controversialists? Is this however the deliberate view of the whole thirteen, or is it only the rashness of one of them?—for it is very important to have so definite a statement of what is meant by the Trinity in Unity.

VI. It is most incorrectly stated (_Preface_, p. xx.) that “Dr. Priestley, Mr. Lindsey, Mr. Belsham, not to mention earlier writers, have laboured hard to show that the Fathers of the first three centuries were Unitarians, _and believers in the simple humanity of Jesus Christ_.” Such a labour was never undertaken by these writers, nor by any one else. It is capable of proof that the Fathers of the three first centuries were _not_ Trinitarian in the Athanasian sense; but that they were believers in the simple _humanity_ of the Christ, no one maintains, from the time that Platonism first began to transform Christianity into harmony with its own peculiar ideas. That Unitarians have supported this view by “hardy misquotations,” is, to say the least of it, an unwise provocation from men who have in the course of this Controversy been convicted of the most careless misquotations both in their own case (_see especially preface to the Seventh Unitarian Lecture_), and in that of their favourite Champion (_see the Appendix to the Sixth Unitarian Lecture_). That the substantial statements of Unitarians as to the Unitarianism of the primitive Church have been overturned by Bull, &c., (_Trinitarian preface_, p. xxi.) is a hardy assertion in the face of the following quotations from Bull himself: “In the FIRST and BEST ages, the Churches of Christ directed all their prayers ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURES, TO GOD ONLY, _through_ the alone mediation of Jesus Christ.”—_Answer to a Query of the Bishop of Meaux_, p. 295.

“The Father is rightly styled THE WHOLE, as he is the fountain of divinity: For the divinity which is in the _Son_ and in the _Holy Ghost_, is the _Father’s_, because it is DERIVED FROM THE FATHER.”—_Defence_, sect. ii. 8.

For another quotation from Bishop Bull, see also preface, p. vi., to the Seventh Unitarian Lecture.

VII. The “thirteen Clergymen,” finding that Mr. Belsham’s “Improved Version” was not a STANDARD with us, and knowing perhaps that in our rejection of it as such we have been borne out by the Unitarian Association at its recent general meeting in London, yet determined to find a standard for us somewhere, have (p. xxvi.) put into our mouths, with marvellous naïveté, an appeal to Mr. Belsham’s Translation of St. Paul’s Epistles. We have already given up the Mr. Belsham of the Improved Version, and they, for their own easy purposes, represent us as making an appeal to the Mr. Belsham of “the Epistles.” We will yield to our reverend opponents whatever consolation they may be able to derive from their _imaginary_ triumph, in case we made this _imaginary_ appeal. The Trinitarians cannot divest their minds of the idea that we must have an Authority _somewhere_. They cannot understand what is meant by deferring to principles alone; by having no external judge of Controversies, no shorter road to conclusions, than to submit every question to the fullest light that Knowledge and Inquiry have provided, or may yet provide. The Cæsar to whom we appeal from Mr. Belsham is not some other Mr. Belsham, or the same man in a different book, but the great principles of Criticism and of Interpretation, as recognized by competent judges of all parties.

VIII. For the faith of the Church of England, the “thirteen Clergymen” declare, that “it is alike their privilege and obligation to contend in that spirit of charity which becomes a believer in Jesus.” (_Preface_, p. xxviii.) We shall not open former wounds, but look simply to some of their last manifestations of “Charity” in their General Preface.

1. They say of us (p. xxiii.), that “Unitarians have borne some such proportion to the Christian Church, as monsters bear to the species of which they are unhappy distortions.”

2. They “_decline to receive us as brethren, and to give us the right hand of fellowship_” partly because our doctrinal views of Christianity are different from their own, and partly because, as they aver, we maintain our views in _dishonesty_, using language _hypocritically_. We “cannot be Christian brethren,” say they, “for we cannot tread the same road, even for an instant. They use the _language_ of Christianity, without believing its _mysteries_. How, then, can we bid them God speed, while they are influenced by this spirit of unfairness? ‘The words of their mouth are smoother than butter, but war is in their heart: their words are softer than oil, yet are they drawn swords.’” (pp. xxiv. xxv.)

3. We are charged with deliberately opposing our own minds to the mind of God. “That such unwearied hostility,” say they, “is waged by Unitarians _against the mind of God_, as expressed in his word, all their publications unequivocally and mournfully attest.” (p. xxv.)

4. They describe us as “blasphemers against the Son of Man,” and they close this peculiar exhibition of “Charity” by offering up for us the following prayer:—

“_O merciful God, who hast made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted, and live, have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word_,” &c. (p. xxix.)

If such is their “Charity,” may we be permitted to ask, what form would their _uncharitableness_ take?

Such is the “General Preface,” which the “thirteen Clergymen” are deliberately of opinion that the issues of this Controversy, and our mutual relations to each other, justified them in writing. We confess that we had prepared ourselves for a careful attempt, on their part, at repairing whatever further inquiry, and, we may say without presumption, the close scrutiny of an opponent, had shown to be weak or imperfect in their previous labours,—a last effort to present again the edifice of their faith in what they deemed its most favourable lights, accompanied by a corresponding attempt to shake the foundations of Unitarian Christianity. They have thought themselves, however, sufficiently strong already to be able to throw away this last opportunity. They deem the work already done, and that they have earned the right, without further addition or defence, to entitle their Lectures “_Unitarianism Confuted_.”