primitive believers, were occasionally inspired to foretel future events. But they believe that supernatural inspiration was limited to these cases alone; and that when Jesus or his apostles deliver opinions upon subjects unconnected with the object of their mission, such opinions, and their reasonings upon them, are to be received with the same attention and caution with those of other persons in similar circumstances, of similar education, and with similar habits of thinking.

The Unitarians admit, that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and especially the latter, contain authentic records of facts, and of divine interpositions; but they utterly deny the universal inspiration of the writers of those compositions, as a qualification to which indeed they make no pretension, and of which they offer no proof; and the assertion of which tends only to embarrass the evidences of revelation, and to give advantage to its enemies. And they judge of the genuineness, of the mean. ing, and of the credibility of these works, exactly in the same way as they judge of any other ancient writings.

Many of the Unitarians believe that Jesus continued to maintain, occasionally at least, some personal and sensible connexion with the church during the apostolic age, which he expressly promised to do (Matt. xxviii. 20); and in this way they account for the continuance of those miraculous gifts and powers which were exercised in his name while the apostles lived, and also for occasional personal appearances and interpositions which have never occurred since but it is believed that he is now withdrawn from all sensible intercourse with this world, though some have conjectured that he may still be actually present in it, and attentive to its concerns.

The Unitarians believe, that Christ is appointed to raise the dead and to judge the world. With regard to the former, it is believed that he will be the instrument of his

Father's

Father's power. With respect to the latter, whether the declarations concerning it are to be understood literally or figuratively, whether Jesus will be personally invested with some high official character, or whether nothing more is intended than that the final states of men shall be awarded agreeably to the declarations of his Gospel, cannot, they think, at present be ascertained. Probably, as is usual with prophetic language, the event will be very different from what the literal sense of the words would lead us to expect. But whatever be the meaning of the declaration, the part which Jesus will bear in it will, they are confident, be no more than what may properly be allotted to a human being, (John v. 27;) and in the execution of which his apostles and disciples will, it is said, be associated with him. Matt. xix. 28. 1 Cor. vi. 2, 3.

The Unitarians, while they bow to the authority of Jesus as the great Prophet of the Most High, and receive with implicit submission whatever appears to them to have the sanction of divine authority; while they regard the character of Christ as the most complete and the most interesting that was ever exhibited to the world; while they feel themselves under indispensabie obligation to obey the precepts of his Gospel, and, after his example, to diffuse to the utmost of their ability the knowledge of truth and the practice of virtue; disavow all those personal regards to Christ, and direct addresses to him, either of prayer or praise, which properly fall under the definition of religious worship, as unfounded in reason, unauthorized by Scripture, derogatory from the honour of the Supreme Being, the only proper object of religious homage, and as in a strict and proper sense polytheistical and idolatrous. And in this case, the Unitarians, so far from being conscious of any wilful derogation from the honour due to Christ, whom they acknowledge and venerate as their Lord and Master, are fully persuaded that they act in perfect con

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formity to his authority and example, and in a manner of which he would himself testify the most entire approbation if he were to appear in person upon earth.

They who believe in the proper humanity of Jesus Christ claim the title of Unitarians, not only because custom, the arbiter of language, has ever since the Reformation annexed, and till very lately limited, the appellation to that denomination of christians, but more especially, because they conceive that they are almost the only body of christians who practically maintain the important doctrine of the divine Unity in its full and just extent, and who exclude every creature, without exception, from every degree of participation in those ATTRIBUTES, WORKs, and HONOURS, which reason and revelation ascribe and appropriate to the ONLY GOD.

The Unitarians think it superfluous to produce any ar: guments to prove that a person who is repeatedly called a man, who had every appearance of a human being, who was born, who grew, who lived, who conversed, who felt, who acted, who suffered, and who died like other men, who was universally believed to be a man by all who saw and conversed with him, and was addressed and spoken of as a human being by all his contemporaries, whether friends or enemies, was really what he appeared and affirmed himself to be, truly and properly a man, and nothing more than a man. This is a fact which must be admitted without hesitation, unless the most unequivocal and decisive evidence can be produced to the contrary. And they think that a fact so astonishing, and so contrary to experience and analogy, as the incarnation of a superior spirit, is not to be received upon the authority of oblique hints, or of obscure, figurative, and ambiguous phraseology, but that it is reasonable to expect that the evidence

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of such a fact should be clear and decisive in proportion to its antecedent improbability.

Now the Unitarians profess, that after having carefully consulted and examined the Scriptures, they can find no such clear and satisfactory evidence. They observe, that there is no allusion at all to the supposed pre-existent state. and superior nature of Jesus Christ, in three of the evangelists, or in the history of the Apostles' preaching, and of the first plantation of the Gospel contained in the Acts of the apostles; and that John is a very mystical writer, abounding in harsh metaphors and symbolical phraseology, very different from the simplicity which characterizes the other evangelists. Nor can they discern any traces of that surprise and astonishment which must have seized the minds of the disciples and companions of Jesus when it was first revealed to them that the master with whom they had so frequently and familiarly conversed, was the Lord their Maker, or at least a great celestial spirit in a human shape.

The Unitarians also plead, that by a diligent investigation of the Scripture language, by examining the connexion in which particular phrases occur, by a careful comparison of different passages, and by making Scripture its own interpreter, it is not difficult to show that the few phrases which, in contradiction to the general current of the Sacred Writings, are supposed to teach the superior nature and pre-existent state of Christ, if such texts are genuine, may justly be understood, and, by the established rules of fair and liberal criticism, ought to be interpreted in a sense consistent with his proper humanity.

Particularly, they profess to prove that those passages in which Jesus represents himself as having descended from heaven, signify nothing more than the divine origi nal of his doctrine: that where he is represented as the maker of all things, the new creation only is intended, that

that is, the new state of things which he was commissioned to introduce into the moral world; and that the creation of natural objects is no where attributed to Christ. Also, that if the title God be ever applied to Christ in the New Testament (which some deny), it is only in the sense in which Moses is said to have been a god to Pharaoh, that is, as being invested with a divine commission, and a power of working miracles in proof of it. They also observe, that the same, or even stronger expressions are applied to christians in general than those from which the deity of Christ is usual 1 inferred. They maintain that the creation and support of the natural world and its inhabitants is uniformly ascribed to God; and that there is no evidence whatever to prove that Christ was personally concerned in any of the former dispensations of God to mankind, either to the patriarchs or to the Jews, but that the contrary is explicitly and repeatedly asserted in the Scriptures.

The Unitarians maintain that those peculiar expressions, from which, what is called the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son is inferred, may be clearly proved to signify nothing more than the superior dignity of his prophetical character as the promised Messiah, and the chief of the prophets of God.

They also remark, that the apostles, when speaking of Christ after his resurrection and ascension, use a kind of unqualified language concerning his person, which no Arian or Trinitarian would now adopt without much explanation and caution: such as, no doubt, the apostles themselves would have used, had they believed in the preexistence or deity of Christ.

Lastly, it has been stated by Dr. Priestley with irresistible evidence, that the Jewish christians almost universally, and a very great majority of the Gentile christians in the two first centuries, were believers in the proper humanity

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