churches, and dispersed their disciples, scattered into distant countries the seed of the uncorrupted Gospel. "Many have run to and fro, and knowledge has been increased." The church of Geneva has abjured the dogmas of her founder; and the FATHER is worshipped within the very walls that witnessed the martyrdom of Servetus. Men are swayed by sounds. The term Socinian is considered as in itself a term of reproach; but the name of Lælius Socinus (the proper author of the reform which Faustus promoted) "weighs as heavy" in the balance as that of Martin Luther. In learning he was his superior; in zeal for scriptural truth and holiness of life, at least his equal. The title is now used to stigmatize the proper Unitarians, though they are not strict Socinians; as Socinus admitted of worship to Jesus after his exaltation. Unitarians take not their faith from Socinus; for "one is their master, even Christ." They can hear therefore, with a smile, the reproach of defection from their imaginary patriarch; and they compassionate the ignorance or despise the hypocrisy of those, who affect to consider a scheme of doctrine, which, be it apostolical or not, was coeval with the apostolic age, as the heresy of modern speculation. But though Socinus be falsely styled the founder of Unitarianism, he may at least claim an equality with those who are regarded as the fathers of Protestantism; until it can be shown that they, who are called, for the sake of eminence, the Reformers, were visited in what they did with an outpouring of the Spirit of God. Luther left untouched the fundamental error of the great apostacy, except in so far as respected the worship of the virgin, the host, and the sainted ghosts of the dead. Το Catholic polytheism has succeeded what may be called the polytheism of Protestants, who worship the Son of God and the attribute of God's spirit as equally perfect Gods; and who, overlooking the orientalism of the Judaical writings, add to their religious metaphysics the belief in a personal Evil Being,' the almost omniscient, almost omnipotent, and omnipresent rival and adversary of God, and in a host of evil Angels, his agents and ministers. There have not wanted erudite and thinking men, exclusive of the Unitarian writers on churchhistory and Jewish philosophy, who, disregarding the letter of their particular creed, have discussed with freedom points of popular orthodoxy; and there seems ground to believe that God is working by means of the "liberty of prophesying," to sift the systems of merely human theology, and bring back the churches, in his own good time, to the faith of the first ages. It is by mea- . suring back their way to the times of the Apostles, and entering in at the simple porch of the primitive church, that men must enable themselves to unlearn the wisdom of systems, and be brought again to the true knowledge of the "ONE GOD and FATHER of all," the maker of heaven and earth; and of JESUS CHRIST, the SENT of GOD, and, under GOD, our spiritual creator. It appears from Justin's dialogue with Trypho the Jew, that the Jews expected their Messiah to be a man "in all respects like his brethren:" Moses had said of him that "their Lord God should raise up to them a prophet like unto himself:" the divine titles applied to him by their prophets were by them understood in a titular and derivative sense, as applied to the prophets themselves, and to their anointed princes or judges. Miraculous agency, the being raised from the dead, and the ascension into heaven, carried with them no necessary proofs to the mind of a Jew, that his Messiah was in any other sense divine, than in that of being the agent of divinity. Elijah had worked miracles, and had been caught up to heaven in a whirlwind of fire. The Jews had no idea of Jehovah other than of a uni-personal being. The plural forms used by the Hebrews in names or terms of dignity are vainly urged in proof of several intelligences in the one God; for the Jews, to this day, like the early Christians, regard such a notion of the God of Abraham as making more Gods than one; and this is one great obstacle, and perhaps the greatest, to their conversion, in the present state of Christianity. Though so much stress is laid by modern theologists on the Hebrew name of God, ELOHIM, as designating a plurality of essence, Tertullian was of opinion that the Trinity was not revealed to the Jews. in their scriptures, but was reserved for the Gospel; though he found the Christians of his age abhorrent from this imaginary revelation. Basnage, in his history of the Jews, though himself a Trinitarian, explodes as chimerical the idea of Jewish trinitarianism. The evidence of the Acts and Epistles is entirely in favour of the Apostles entertaining the same notion of the Father, as the Jews did of God, under his more awful title of Jehovah; as himself alone God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the Saviour, and as distinct altogether and superior to his Son, or the Christ (for the terms are synonymous in scripture-phraseology); who is represented by them as A MAN chosen of God, his anointed child or servant, as raised from the dead by God, as our moral creator and our future judge, by authority delegated to him from God his father; and we have evidence that the first converts to the apostolic preaching had no other ideas of God, or of his "righteous servant," or son; so that without the pre-conceived hypothesis of this tri-unity in the Godhead used as a key to the scripture, the scripture itself could never convey any such idea; and this inference is confirmed by the incontestable historic fact of a church existing in the apostolic age, in which the doctrine of the deity of Christ was unknown; his divinity, in a derived sense, being alone understood. It will be seen hereafter that his co-equal deity was not even thought of till after several centuries. What the state of early Christian opinions was may be collected from the admissions and indirect eonfessions of the Fathers of the Catholic Church. Athanasius says that the Jewish Christians of the Apostolic Age disbelieved the deity of Christ, and drew the Gentiles into their error; these Jewish Christians were called Nazarenes and Ebionites. They differed among themselves as to the miraculous conception, and as to retaining Judaic observances; but they agreed in believing the simple humanity of Christ. It is attempted to throw on them the stigma of heresy, as followers of one Ebion; but Ebion was an honourable term of reproach, implying poverty. How a Jewish convert church, believing only in the crucified Jesus as a man anointed of God, came to exist at all, when it was the obvious interest of the Jews to grasp at his deity, if there were a pretence for it, in order to screen the humiliation of their martyred Messiah, neither Athanasius explains, nor can it be explained by any other. The Nazarenes were in fact the first Jewish Christians; and PAUL, in Acts xxiv. 5, is styled by Tertullus, "a ring-leader of the sect of NAZARENES." We find that John the Evangelist rebuked a particular heresy; and it so happens that this heresy is in direct opposition to the humanity of Christ. It was brought in by certain professors of oriental metaphysics, who believed Christ's miraculous powers, but held matter to be impure; and supposed, with the Eastern and certain of the Greek philosophers, the separate being and indestructible nature of the human thinking faculty or soul, and its pre-existence before its union with a mortal body. Their founder is thought to have been Simon Magus. They styled themselves Gnostics, or the knowing; they had notions of successive Eons or emanations from the deity, of which they fancied Christ one: and as to his manhood, they were phantomists; they thought it an illusion. Thence they were also called Docetæ. John condemns this heresy by asserting that "Christ is come in the flesh:" or that he, who was commissioned as the Messiah, is a proper human being. Cerinthus was one of the latter Gnostics. He allowed the human reality, and believed the emanation, or the Christ, as he supposed it, to enter the body of Jesus at his baptism, and leave it before his crucifixion. This was in process of time improved into a union of the divine and human natures at the moment either of conception or of birth. That the Gnostic philosophy was the only heresy of the first age, though there then existed a body of converts regarding Christ as only a man anointed with power, appears, (1) from John making no express allusion to any other, though the passage which speaks of Christ as God, in so far as he was the word, which no Jew could for a moment have interpreted of original and underived deity, is brought forward as if aimed at the Nazarenes, who were actually the most ancient Jewish Christians; (2) from the term Gnosticism being used synonymously with heresy, during a considerable part of the first ages; (3) from the Unitarians not forming any separate church, but mixing undisturbed with general congregational meetings for worship, long after the notion of Christ's pre-existence as a personal efflux from divinity and a secondary yet coessential God had been maintained and professedby the learned, in opposition, as is shown by the indisputable evidence of their own admissions, to commonly received tradition and to the faith of the people. The Unitarians were not then, as 2 |