Fas est et ab hoste doceri. Surely the complacency felt by the avowed enemies of the Christian religion for a particular modification of it, is not without its instruction or its warning; since, allowing them the ordinary sagacity necessary to discern their own interests, we may be sure they perceive in the object of their predilection the seeds of ruin to the Christian cause; that they plainly see that Unitarianism is a stepping-stone to infidelity, and that the first stage of the progress facilitates and almost secures the next.

III. A third feature in the Unitarian system is the unfavourable influence it exerts on the spirit of devotion. It appears to have little or no connexion with the religion of the heart. Of all high and raised affections to God proudly ignorant; love to Christ, involving that ardent attachment which enthrones him in the soul, and subordinates to him every created object, it systematically explodes, under the pretence of its being either enthusiastic or impossible. Mr. Belsham, in a recent work, argues at large against indulging, or pretending to indulge, any particular attachment to the person of the Saviour, such as he acknowledges his immediate disciples felt, but which, according to him, is no longer the duty of Christians of the present day. The only reason he assigns for this bold assault on the most vital part of practical Christianity is the invisibility of our Saviour,- —a reason urged in open contempt of the sentiments of an inspired apostle, "whom," said he, "having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."*

By parity of reason, God, who is essentially invisible, must cease to be the object of our affections; and the obligation of loving him with all our heart and all our strength is at once cancelled and destroyed.

The devotional feelings inculcated in the Bible are intimately and inseparably interwoven with humility and gratitude-the humility and gratitude of a penitent and redeemed sinner. That he who is forgiven much will love much, is the decision of our Lord; while he to whom little is forgiven will love little. But the perpetual tendency of the Socinian system extenuates the evil of sin, and the magnitude of the danger to which it exposes the sinner, and is calculated to weaken, beyond expression, the force of the motives [they supply.]

By asserting the intrinsic efficacy of repentance, to the exclusion of the merits of the Redeemer, it makes every man his own Saviour; it directs his attention to himself, as the source to which he ascribes the removal of guilt, and the renovation of hope; nor will it permit him to adopt, in any obvious and intelligible sense, the rapturous language of the redeemed, "To him who loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood." Taught to consider the Lord Jesus Christ in no other light than as the most perfect example and the most enlightened of teachers, and believing that he has already bestowed all the benefits he is empowered to bestow, it is in vain to look for that consecration of the heart to his love, and of all the faculties of body and mind to his service, which may reasonably be expected from him who looks

upon himself as a trophy of his power, and as the purchase of his blood. Not viewing himself as at any time exposed to condemnation, you must not expect him to celebrate, with elevated emotion, the riches of Divine grace, much less that he should be transported with gratitude to God for the inestimable love evinced in the gift of his Son; when he considers it a high attainment to have learned that this Son is a mere man, on a level with himself. The unhappy disciple of this system is necessarily separated and cut off from the objects most adapted to touch the springs of religious sensibility. He knows nothing of a transition "from death unto life;" nothing of the anxieties of a wounded and awakened conscience, followed by "joy and peace in believing;" nothing of that "love of Christ which passeth knowledge;" nothing of the refreshing aids and consolations of that Holy Spirit whose existence he denies, whose agency he ridicules; nothing of that ineffable communion of spirit with God and the Redeemer, the true element of life and peace; nothing of the earnests and foretastes of that heaven which his system covers with a dense and impenetrable veil. Facts on this subject concur with theory: for no sooner is a minister of the gospel transformed into a Socinian, than he relinquishes the practice of extempore prayer, and has recourse to a written form. We are far from condemning the use of forms, where they are adopted from a conscientious preference; nor can we doubt that many members of the establishment, whose habits have combined with them the most devout associations and feelings, find them useful helps to piety. But, that those who have never used them before should find them necessary the moment they have embraced a particular system,-that they should feel, as some of the most eminent have confessed, an absolute incapacity, from that time, of praying without the aid of a book, affords a portentous indication of the spirit of that system. To be smitten dumb and silent in the presence of that heavenly Father whom they approached before with filial freedom and confidence, to be unable or indisposed to utter a word without artificial aids, where they were wont to pour out all their hearts, evinces the visitation of a new spirit, but most assuredly not that Spirit "whereby we cry, Abba, Father." Correct, elegant, spiritless-replete with acknowledgments of the general goodness of God, the bounties of his providence, and his benign interposition in the arrangements of society, and the success of the arts and sciences which embellish and adorn the present stateseldom will you hear any mention of the forgiveness of sins, of the love of the Saviour; few or no acknowledgments of the blessings of redemption. An earthly, unsanctified tincture pervades their devotions, calculated to remind you of any thing rather than of a penitent pleading for mercy, "with groanings that cannot be uttered."

In all other dissenting communities, there are meetings for the express purpose of prayer; but has any thing of that nature ever been heard of among Socinians? If they have any meetings out of the usual seasons of worship, they are debating clubs, several of which have been established among them in the metropolis on the Lord's day. Among other dissenters, the religious observance of the Lord's day VOL. III.-C

is considered as of the first importance, and he who made light of it would forfeit with them all credit for piety. Among the Unitarians it is the reverse. Mr. Belsham, who seems to affect the character of their leader, has written vehemently against the observance of a Sabbath, denouncing it as one of the most pernicious of popular errors; and has lost no reputation by it.

Another of their principal writers has denounced public worship. In short, it is not easy to conjecture where these attacks will end, and whether they will suffer any of the institutions of Christianity to remain unassailed.

IV. But it is time to advert to another part of the system of modern Unitarianism, which, in my humble opinion, is pregnant with more mischief and danger than any of those we have just mentioned. I mean the fatalism and materialism with which, since Dr. Priestley's time, it is almost universally incorporated. The first Socinians were so jealous of every opinion which might seem to infringe on the freedom of the human will and man's accountability, that they denied that the foreknowledge of God extended to human volition and contingent events. They carried Pelagianism to its utmost length. The modern Socinians have been betrayed into the contrary extreme. They assert, not only that the foreknowledge of the Deity is extended to every sort of events, but that he has connected the whole series of them in an indissoluble chain of necessity; that the Deity is the efficient cause of all that takes place, of evil volitions as well as good; that he is, properly speaking, the only agent in the universe; that moral evil is his production, and his only; and that, strictly speaking, no one can be said to be accountable for any of his actions, since they were the inevitable result of necessary laws, and could not possibly have been otherwise than they were; that the human mind is a machine governed by principles to whose operations it is perfectly passive.

Who does not see, that upon this theory the distinction between virtue and vice, innocence and guilt, is annihilated, and the foundation of rewards and punishments in a future world completely subverted? Agreeably to this, Dr. Priestley declares, in his treatise on this subject, that a perfect necessitarian in other words, a philosopher of his own stamp, has nothing to do with repentance or remorse. Let these views of human nature prevail universally, and a frightful dissoluteness of manners, and a consequent subversion of the whole fabric of society, must infallibly ensue.

Alarming as these principles are, they form but one portion of the perilous innovations introduced by the sect of modern Unitarians. With the dangerous speculations already recited they connect the following:-that the nature of man is single and homogeneous, not consisting of two component parts or principles, body and soul, matter and spirit, but of matter only; that the soul is the brain, and the brain is the soul; that nothing survives the stroke of dissolution, but that at the moment the thinking powers of man are extinguished, all the elements of his frame are dissolved, his consciousness ceases, to be restored only at the period of the final resurrection.

From these premises it seems to be a necessary inference, that the nope of a future state of existence is entirely delusive; for, if the whole man perishes, if all that composes what I call myself is dissipated and scattered, and I cease to exist for ages as a sentient and intelligent being, personal identity is lost, and being once lost, it is impossible to conceive it ever restored without the greatest absurdity.

Thus the very subject of a future life, the very thing of which it is affirmed, perishes from under us, on the Unitarian hypothesis; and a future state can be predicated of any man only in a lax and figurative

sense.

Matter is incessantly liable to mutation; the matter of which our bodies are composed is so eminently so, that it is generally thought by physiologists that every particle of which it is constituted disappears, and is replaced by fresh accession in the course of about seven years. Let it be admitted, then, that the constitution of human nature is homogeneous, or, in other words, that it consists of matter only, and it will necessarily follow, that in the course of forty-nine years the personal identity has been extinguished seven times, and that seven different persons have succeeded each other under the same name. Which of these, let me now ask, will be rewarded or punished in another life?

Such are the moral prodigies which disfigure the system of modern Unitarianism; such the hopelessness of reconciling it with human accountability, and the dispensation of rewards and punishments in the world to come.

V. The unexampled deference it displays to human authority. This may excite surprise, because there is nothing which its abetters proclaim [with] such loud and lofty pretensions as their unfettered freedom of thought, their emancipation from prejudice, and their disdain of human prescription. They, and they only, if we believe them, have unfurled the banners of mental independence, have purged off the slough of obsolete opinion and implicit faith, and shine forth in all the freshness, vigour, and splendour of intellectual prowess.

VI. Their rage for proselytism, difficult to be accounted for on their principles.

VI.

ON ANGELS.

HEB. i. 14.—Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?

In this part of the Epistle, St. Paul is engaged in establishing the superiority of our Lord Jesus Christ to angels: of this he adduces various proofs out of the ancient Scriptures: the title of Son, by which

he [God] addresses the Messiah; the command he issues, when he brings him into the world, that all the angels of God should worship him: "He maketh his angels spirits, his ministers a flame of fire: but of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever." Nor did he ever say to the most exalted of these, "Sit on my right until I make thine enemies thy footstool." He then brings in the words of the text, "Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?"

As this is one of the most clear and precise accounts we meet with in the sacred volume of the nature and offices of angels, it may form a proper basis for a few reflections on that subject. This account embraces two particulars :

I. They are ministering spirits.

II. They are sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation.

I. They are spirits. They have not those gross and earthly bodies which we possess; sluggish, inactive, and incapable of keeping pace with the nimble and more rapid movements of the mind." Who maketh his angels spirits: his ministers a flame of fire." They resemble fire in the refined subtilty of its parts, and the quickness and rapidity of its operations. They move with an inconceivable velocity, and execute their commission with a despatch of which we are incapable of forming any [adequate] apprehension.

St. Paul styles them angels of light, probably not without a view to the ease with which they transport themselves to the greatest distances, and appear and disappear in a moment. From their being called spirits, it is not necessary to conclude that they have no body, no material frame at all: to be entirely immaterial is probably peculiar to the Father of spirits, to whom we cannot attribute a body without impiety, and involving ourselves in absurdities. When the term spirit is employed to denote the angelic nature, it is most natural to take it in a lower sense, to denote their exemption from those gross and earthly bodies which the inhabitants of this world possess. Their bodies are spiritual bodies, "for there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body;" the latter of which the righteous are to receive at the resurrection, who are then to be made equal to the angels.

The passage just before adduced seems to exclude the idea of the utter absence of matter: "who maketh his angels spirits: his ministers a flame of fire."

2. These spirits are very glorious. They occupy a very exalted rank in the scale of being, and are possessed of wonderful powers. They are celebrated by the Psalmist as "those who excel in strength." To this it may be objected, that David in describing man, represents him as made a little lower than the angels: it should, I apprehend, be rendered, “for a little time lower than the angels," that is, during the time he [the Son of God] condescended to become incarnate. Their great power is sufficiently manifest from the works they have performed by divine commission:--the destruction of the first-born of Egypt; the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah; the