Errata.

Page 60, 1. 5 from the bottom, supply 1 before "Cor. i. 2." 141, 1. 12, insert the reference to Note 11, at the words "strict Unitarian.”

175, 1. 16, insert the reference to Note 12, at the words "practical holiness."

185, 1. 3, before "xlvii. 1," insert * Isaiah; and dele the asterisk before "John xvii. 3."

Since GOD will be justified with a free obedience, and

there is an obedience of understanding as well as of will and affection; it is of great concernment, as to be willing to believe whatever God says, so also to inquire diligently whether the will of God be só as is pretended. Even our acts of understanding are acts of choice; and therefore it is commanded, as a duty, to "Search the Scriptures; to try the spirits, whether they be of GOD or no; of ourselves to be able to judge what is right; to try all things, and to retain that which is best." For he, that resolves not to consider, resolves not to be careful whether he have truth or no; and therefore hath an affection indifferent to truth or falsehoood. JEREMIAH TAYLOR.

Neither the FATHERS nor the COUNCILS are infallible witnesses of tradition. CHILLINGWORTH.

How the APOSTLES argued for the great excellency and dignity of CHRISTIANITY is not with them the question, so far as I am able to judge from their learned writings: but the Fathers, and our spiritual Superiors, have put upon the

sacred writings the proper explications, and we must receive the truth as they dispense it to us.

What must we do, then, as TRUE CHRISTIANS? I think, for myself, that we ought to form our judgment, in matters of faith, upon a strict, serious, and impartial examination of the Holy Scriptures, without any regard to the judgment of others, or human authority whatever-that we ought to open the sacred records, without minding any systems, and from the revealed word of God learn, that CHRISTIANITY does not consist in a jingle of unintelligible sounds, and new fundamentals, hewn out by craft, enthusiasm, or bigotry, and maintained with an outrage of uncharitable zeal which delivers CHRISTIANS to the flames of an eternal hell; but that the heavenly religion of our Lord consists in looking on the promised MESSIAH as the most consummate blessing which GOD could bestow, or man receive, and that JESUS is that MESSIAH;-in acting according to the rules of the Gospel, and in studying to imitate God, who is the most perfect understanding nature, in all his moral perfections;—in becoming the children of God, by being, according to our capacity, perfect as he is perfect, and holy as he is holy, and merciful as he is merciful. THOMAS AMORY.

APPEAL

ΤΟ

SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION.

Part I.

ON THE

DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY.

DISSERTATION.

As it is a rule in philosophy that we are not to

suppose more causes than are necessary to the production of a given effect, there can be no reason why One God should not have created all things, should not support all things, should not appoint both good and evil for the moral discipline of his creatures, and as instruments of equally beneficent designs.

There is no reason why the same One God should not have within himself both the will and the power to forgive those erring creatures who are "the work of his own hands," without the intervention of another.

There is no reason why the same One God should need the intervention of another being or intelligence like himself, in order to communicate his gracious favour or influence to the minds of men.

But the idea of God, a supreme Governor of the World, existing by a prior necessity, and therefore ONE, the only perfect nature, and the sole proper

B

object of religious worship, however it may approve itself to philosophic inquiry, has ever met with a slow and reluctant assent from the unassisted reason. The people in all parts of the earth, from the earliest recorded times, have made themselves gods with greediness; but it may be doubted whether even the philosophers of Greece, with all their wonder-working powers of intellect, ever approached to a clear and definite conception of one Deity. The purest system of ancient theism, if closely inspected, will be found to contain a mixture of intermediary intelligences, and of subordinate minds in the scale of divinity.This grand truth of ONE GOD would seem of itself to prove the necessity of a revelation; but though the light of revelation has been superadded to the light of nature, the history of ages displays the same process in the human mind, and the same tendency to multiply God by his attributes and agents, and to "give his glory to another." The Jews, until the Babylonish captivity, were continually relapsing into the idolatry of dead men, which was practised, under different celestial or animal emblems, in the neighbouring countries. The Gentile philosophies came early to be engrafted on the simplicity of the Gospel; and though the common people through the three first centuries held fast the apostolical traditions, the "offence of the cross" co-operated with the metaphysics of learned converts in exciting a disposition to magnify the person of Christ; and the growing apostacy from the sole worship of his "God and Father attained at length its maturity, in the great and general "departure from the faith" foretold by Paul the Apostle. Luther extirpated the grosser errors of anti-christianism, but spared a remnant. The restoration of the pure faith of the primitive ages was reserved for the reformers of the Polonian school. The persecution which overturned their