genius of no common size who can infer from religion not interfering with the rights of mankind, that they cease to be, or that the patrimony over which our Lord declined to exercise any authority he has scattered and destroyed.

3d. Similar to the last I have considered is that pretence for excluding Christians from any concern in political affairs, taken from the conduct of our Saviour. Mr. tells us, that Christ uniformly waived interesting himself in the concerns of the then existing government; and to the same purpose he afterward remarks, he always declined the functions of a civil magistrate.

The most careless reader will remark, the whole weight of this argument rests upon a supposition that it is unlawful for a Christian to sustain any other character in civil life than that in which our Saviour literally appeared; a notion as extravagant as was ever nourished in the brain of the wildest fanatic. Upon this principle he must have gone through such a succession of offices, and engaged in such an endless variety of undertakings, that in place of thirty-three years, he needed to have lived thirty-three centuries. On this ground the profession of physic is unlawful for a Christian, because our Lord never set up a dispensary; and that of law, because he never pleaded at the bar. Next to the weakness of advancing such absurdity is that of confuting it.

4th. The author, in proof of his political tenets, appeals to the devotional feelings of his hearers. "I ask you," says he, "who make conscience of entering into your closets, and shutting your doors, and praying to your Father which seeth in secret; what subjects interest you most then? Are not factious passions hushed; the undue heat you felt in political disputation remembered with sorrow?" He must be at a great loss for argument who will have recourse to such loose and flimsy declamation. When engaged in devout admiration of the Supreme Being, every other object will be lost in the comparison; but this, though the noblest employment of the mind, was never intended to shut out all other concerns. The affections which unite us to the world have a large demand upon us, and must succeed in their turn. If every thing is to be deemed criminal that does not interest the attention in the very moment of worship, political concerns are not the only ones to be abandoned, but every undertaking of a temporal nature, all labour and ingenuity must cease. Science herself must shroud her light. These are notions rather to be laughed at than confuted, for their extravagance will correct itself. Every attempt that has been made to rear religion on the ruins of nature, or to render it subversive of the economy of life, has hitherto proved unsuccessful, while the institutions that have flowed from it are now scarcely regarded in any other light than as humiliating monuments of human weakness and folly. The natural vigour of the mind, when it has once been opened by knowledge, and turned towards great and interesting objects, will always overpower the illusions of fanaticism; or, could Mr. principles be carried into effect, we should soon behold men returning again to the state of a savage, and a more than monkish barbarity and

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ignorance would overspread the earth. That abstraction from the world it is his purpose to recommend is in truth as inconsistent with the nature of religion as with the state and condition of man; for Christianity does not propose to take us out of the world, but to preserve us from the pollutions which are in it.

It is easy to brand a passion for liberty with the odious epithet of faction; no two things, however, can be more opposite. Faction is a combination of a few to oppress the liberties of many; the love of freedom is the impulse of an enlightened and presiding spirit, ever intent upon the welfare of the community or body to which it belongs, and ready to give the alarm when it beholds any unlawful conspiracy formed, whether it be of rulers or of subjects, with a design to oppress it. Every tory upholds a faction; every whig, as far as he is sincere and well-informed, is a friend to the equal liberties of mankind. Absurd as the preacher's appeal must appear on such an occasion to the devout feelings of his hearers, we have no need to decline it. In those solemn moments factious passions cannot indeed be too much hushed, but that warmth which animates the patriot, which glowed in the breast of a Sidney or a Hampden, was never chilled or diminished, we may venture to affirm, in its nearest approaches to the uncreated splendour; and if it mingled with their devotion at all, could not fail to infuse into it a fresh force and vigour by drawing them into a closer assimilation to that great Being who appears under the character of the avenger of the oppressed and the friend and protector of the human race.

5th. Lastly, the author endeavours to discredit the principles of freedom by holding them up as intimately connected with the Unitarian heresy. "We are not to be surprised," he says, "if men who vacate the rule of faith in Jesus Christ should be defective in deference and in obedient regards to men who arc raised to offices of superior influence for the purposes of civil order and public good." The persons he has in view are the Unitarians, and that my reader may be in full possession of this most curious argument, it may be proper to inform him that a Unitarian is a person who believes Jesus Christ had no existence till he appeared on our earth, while a trinitarian maintains that he existed with the Father from all eternity. What possible connexion can he discern between these opinions and the subject of government?

In order to determine whether the supreme power should be vested in king, lords, and commons as in England, in an assembly of nobles as in Venice, or in a house of representatives as in America or France, must we first decide upon the person of Christ? I should imagine we might as well apply to astronomy first, to learn whether the earth flattens at the poles. He explains what he means by vacating the rule of faith in Christ when he charges the Unitarians with a partial denial at least of the inspiration of the Scripture, particularly the epistles of St. Paul. But, however clear the inspiration of the Scriptures may be, as no one pleads for the inspiration of civil governors, the deference which is due to the first, as coming from God, can be no reason for an unlimited submission to the latter. Yet this is Mr. -'s argument,

and it runs thus: Every opposition to Scripture is criminal, because it is inspired, and therefore every resistance to temporal rulers is criminal, though they are not inspired.

The number of passages in Paul's epistles which treat of civil government is small, the principal of them have been examined, and whether they are inspired or not has not the remotest relation to the question before us. The inspiration of an author adds weight to his sentiments, but makes no alteration in his meaning, and unless Mr.

can show that Paul inculcates unlimited submission, the belief of his inspiration can yield no advantage to his cause. Among those parties of Christians who have maintained the inspiration of the Scriptures in its utmost extent, the number of such as have inferred from them the doctrine of passive obedience has been extremely small; it is therefore ridiculous to impute the rejection of this tenet by Unitarians to a disbelief of plenary inspiration. It behooves Mr. point out, if he is able, any one of the Unitarians who ever imagined that Paul means to recommend unlimited obedience; for till that is the case it is plain their political opinions cannot have arisen from any contempt of that apostle's authority.

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As there is no foundation in the nature of things for imagining any alliance between heretical tenets and the principles of freedom, this notion is equally void of support from fact or history. Were the socinian sentiments, in particular, productive of any peculiar impatience under the restraints of government, this effect could not fail of having made its appearance on their first rise in Poland, while their influence was fresh and vigorous; but nothing of this nature occurred, nor was any such reproach cast upon them. That sect in England which has been always most conspicuous for the love of freedom have for the most part held sentiments at the greatest remove from socinianism that can be imagined. The seeds of those political principles which broke out with such vigour in the reign of Charles the First, and have since given rise to the denomination of whigs, were sown in the latter end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth by the hand of the puritans, among whom the unitarian doctrine was then utterly unknown. The dissenters, descended from those illustrious ancestors, and inheriting their spirit, have been foremost in defence of liberty, not only or chiefly of late, since the spread of the socinian doctrine, but before that system had gained any footing among us.

The knowledge and study of the Scriptures, far from favouring the pretensions of despotism, have almost ever diminished it, and been attended with a proportional increase of freedom. The union of Protestant princes preserved the liberties of the Germanic body, when they were in danger of being overwhelmed by the victorious arm of Charles the Fifth; yet a veneration for the Scriptures, at a time when they had almost fallen into oblivion, and an appeal to their decisions in all points, was the grand characteristic of the new religion. If we look into Turkey we shall find the least of that impatience under restraints which Mr. laments of any place in the world, though Paul and his epistles are not much studied there.

There are not wanting reasons which at first view might induce us to conclude unitarianism was less favourable to the love of freedom than almost any other system of religious belief. If any party of Christians were ever free from the least tincture of enthusiasm, it is the Unitarian: yet that passion has by every philosopher been judged friendly to liberty; and to its influence, though perhaps improperly, some of its most distinguished exertions have been ascribed. Hume and Bolingbroke, who were atheists, leaned towards arbitrary power. Owen, Howe, Milton, Baxter, some of the most devout and venerable characters that ever appeared, were warmly attached to liberty, and held sentiments on the subject of government as free and unfettered as Dr. Priestley. Thus every pretence for confounding the attachment to freedom with the sentiments of a religious party is most abundantly confuted both from reason and from fact. The zeal Unitarians have displayed in defence of civil and religious liberty is the spirit natural to a minority who are well aware they are viewed by the ecclesiastical powers with an unparalleled malignity and rancour. Let the dissenters at large remember they too are a minority, a great minority, and that they must look for their security from the same quarter, not from the compliments of bishops or presents from maids of honour.*

To abandon principles which the best and most enlightened men have in all ages held sacred, which the dissenters in particular have rendered themselves illustrious by defending, which have been sealed and consecrated by the blood of our ancestors, for no other reason than that the Unitarians chance to maintain them, would be a weakness of which a child might be ashamed! Whoever may think fit to take up the gauntlet in the socinian controversy will have my warmest good wishes; but let us not employ those arms against each other which were given us for our common defence.

SECTION IV.

On the Test Act.

AMID all the wild eccentricities which, abounding in every part of this extraordinary publication, naturally diminish our wonder at any thing such a writer may advance, I confess I am surprised at his declaring his wish for the continuance of the Test Act. This law, enacted in the latter end of the reign of Charles the Second to secure the nation from popery when it stood upon the brink of that precipice, is continued, now that the danger no longer exists which first occasioned it, for the express purpose of preserving the church from the inroads of dissenters. That church, it must be remembered, existed for ages before it received any such protection; yet it is now the vogue to mag

* Some of my readers perhaps need to be informed that I here allude to Mr. Martin, who, for similar services to those Mr. is now performing, has been considerably caressed by certain bishops, who have condescended to notice and to visit him. I think we do not read that Judas had any acquaintance with the high-priests till he came to transact business with them.

nify its importance to that degree that one would imagine it was its sole prop, whose removal would draw the whole fabric after it, or at least make it totter to its base. Whether these apprehensions were really entertained by the clergy who gave the signal for the commencement of hostilities on a late occasion, or whether they were only impelled by that illiberal tincture and fixed antipathy to all who differ from them which hath ever marked their character, may be doubted; but to behold a dissenting minister joining with them in an unnatural warfare against his brethren is a phenomenon so curious that it prompts us to inquire into its cause. Let us hear his reasons. He and many others were convinced, he tells us, "that some of the persons who applied for the repeal were influenced by enmity against the doctrinal articles of the established church, and they could not sacrifice their pious regard to truth, though in a church they had separated from, to the policy of men who with respect to God our Saviour only consult how they may cast him down from his excellency." When we hear the clergy exclaim that their church is in danger, we pretty well understand what they mean; they speak broad, as Mr. Burke says, and intend no more than that its emoluments are endangered; but when a serious dissenter expresses his pious regard to the doctrines of the church, it is the truth of those articles he must be supposed to have in view. Let us consider for a moment what advantage the Test Act is capable of yielding them. All those who qualify for civil offices by a submission to this law consist of two classes of people: they are either persons who are attached to the articles of the church, from whom therefore no danger could accrue, or they are persons who have signified their assent to doctrines which they inwardly disapprove, and who have qualified themselves for trust by a solemn act of religious deception. It is this latter class alone, it should be remembered, whom the Test Act can at all influence, and thus the only security this celebrated law can afford the articles of the church is founded in a flagrant violation of truth in the persons who become their guarantees. Every attempt that has been made to uphold religion by the civil arm has reflected disgrace upon its authors; but of all that are recorded in the history of the world, perhaps this is the most absurd in its principle and the least effectual in its operation. For the truth of sacred mysteries in religion, it appeals to the corruptest principles of the human heart, and to those only; for no one can be tempted by the Test Act to profess an attachment to the doctrines of the church till he has been already allured by the dignity or emolument of a civil office. By compelling all who exercise any function in the state, from the person who aspires to its highest distinctions to those who fill the meanest offices in it, to profess that concurrence in religious opinions which is known never to exist, it is adapted beyond any other human invention to spread among all orders of men a contempt for sacred institutions, to enthrone hypocrisy, and reduce deception to a system! The truth of any set of opinions can only be perceived by evidence; but what evidence can any one derive from the mere mechanical action of receiving bread and wine at the hands of a parish priest? He who believes them VOL. II.-C