LETTER IV.

Of the Damnatory Clause in the Athanasian Creed.

MY LORD,

So ready is your Lordship to charge me with the grossest ignorance, that you most egregiously expose your own, or, which is worse, your disposition to cavil, when you say, "Dr. Priestley, I believe, is the only writer who ever confounded two things so totally distinct as an anathema and an article of faith, which he conceives the damnatory clause in the Athanasian creed to be."

The idle punctilio on which this remark of your Lordship's turns, relates to the acts of those councils in which it was the custom to make a creed, and then to annex anathemas to it. But this creed of Athanasius is no act of any council. You neither know who composed it, when it made its first appearance, or how it came into the public offices of the church. From the structure of it it is evidently a mere creed, containing nothing besides propositions, which were apprehended by the composer to be entitled to the firmest faith; and that this damnatory clause in question is one of those propositions, is evident both from the form and the place of it.

It is not only introduced both at the beginning and at the end of the creed, but, as if that was not sufficient, it has a place in the middle likewise: thus, "Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith; which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly." Thus this

celebrated creed begins. About the middle we find the following clauses: "He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the trinity. Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ." Lastly, it closes with this sentence, "This is the catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved."

Do not these anathemas or damnatory clauses contain real propositions? and does not the person who pronounces them affirm the truth of those proposi tions? Can any person seriously say, that "they who do not believe all the articles of this creed shall without doubt perish everlastingly," without believing that they will perish everlastingly for their disbelief? Could any plainer terms have been contrived for the purpose? How then are these celebrated damnatory clauses, as your Lordship says, no part of the creed, when every person who professes to believe the whole of course receives these parts?

Had the word anathema only been used, it is pos sible that the force of it might not have been attended to by the composer; it being too common to make use of words, especially in learned and foreign languages, without attending to their strict meaning; and your Lordship says it is so used in your Ecclesiastical Ca nons when it is applied to those who speak disrespect fully of the Book of Common Prayer (though I would not answer, as your Lordship does, for the compilers of those canons not intending eternal damnation by it); but where the words perish everlastingly are expressly and repeatedly used, there can be no doubt with respect to the nature of the anathema. The

damnatory clause so expressed is most unquestionably an article of faith, and certainly of a most serious and alarming kind. Indeed, my Lord, it is trifling with your readers, and an insult on common sense, to talk of any real difference between this damnatory clause and the other parts of the Athanasian creed.

Whatever profession, therefore, your Lordship may inconsistently make of your charity, and notwithstanding your idle parade about meeting me in heaven, when I believe you would be sorry to meet me any where, and are not very fond of meeting me in this controversy; unless my everlasting damnation be an article in your creed, you have subscribed the most solemn form of words that can be devised by man without meaning any thing at all by them; and why then may you not have subscribed every thing else with as little truth? Many, no doubt, do subscribe in this light and careless manner; which shows the dreadful effect of the habit of subscribing. It leads to the utter perversion of the plainest meaning of words, and opens a door to every kind of insincerity. By your Lordship's own confession, you yourself no more believe what you have subscribed with respect to this creed, than you do the Koran.

Indeed, your Lordship's account of the trinity is a very different thing from the doctrine of this creed. For you suppose a manifest superiority in the Father, and yet in repeating this creed you can say of the three persons, "that none of them is afore or after the other, none is greater or lesser than another." Were you, my Lord, perfectly ingenuous, and were your mind perfectly unbiassed, you could not but see, and would certainly shudder at, the absurdities and contradictions

in your declarations, and feel the same horror at subscribing, that I do.

If your Lordship defends these damnatory clauses on the principle of meaning nothing at all by them, you vindicate the common cursing and swearing that we every day hear in our streets; where profane persons are continually sending their own souls, and the souls of other people, to hell, with as little meaning as your Lordship pretends to. If the phrase perish everlastingly does not mean perish everlastingly, your Lordship should have informed us what it does mean. It is certainly no blessing, but a curse of some kind or other.

I do not wonder that men of enlightened and ingenuous minds, such as Archbishop Tillotson, should express a wish that they were well rid of this creed. But others, I fear, (now, my Lord, mark my uncha ritableness,) would not be sorry if the language of it was still more harsh, that by the obligation to subscribe it there might be fewer competitors for those emoluments which may be obtained by subscription. For all your subscriptions do not exclude unbelievers in all religion, natural and revealed; persons who, on such terms as you offer, will subscribe any thing that is ten dered to them. If you would have fewer of these, either in the church or out of it, you must throw out every thing from your creeds and subscriptions which any sincere christian, or believer in the divine mission of Christ, cannot conscientiously assent to. Thus, however, you may say, Socinians might enter; and you may prefer the society of unbelievers to theirs, because, whether in or out of the church, they will give you much less trouble.

Indeed, my Lord, the opposers of all reformation will always have trouble from the zealous friends of it. We think it our duty to cry aloud, and not spare, when we see such abominations in the public worship of Almighty God as are to be found in all the civil establishments of christianity in the world; corruptions borrowed from heathen polytheism, and which in their nature and effects are very similar to it.

I am, &c.

LETTER V.

Of the Phrase, Coming in the Flesh.

MY LORD,

YOUR Lordship maintained at large that the phrase coming in the flesh, applied by the apostle John to Christ, necessarily implies a pre-existent state. I think it a sufficient answer, that the Jews, by whom the phrase was used, had no such idea; since it is well known that they characterized the Messiah by the phrase he that is to come; when, at the same time, it is so well known that I shall not trouble myself to repeat the proof of it, that no Jews ever expected any other than a mere man for their Messiah. By him that was to come they meant the person who had been promised them, as to make his appearance in due time.

When, therefore, the Messiah was come, and a question arose concerning his nature, whether he had real flesh, or not, it was certainly not unnatural for a Jew, who believed that Christ, or he that was to come, was