the Lord God in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear, having a good conscience, that whereas they speak evil of you, as of evil doers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ." With sincere good will, and best wishes for your welfare, both temporal and spiritual,-I remain, DEAR SIR, Very truly yours, &c. &c. LETTER II. 66 ON MR. HAMILTON'S USE OF THE TERMS APOstate, DEAR SIR, 66 66 BEFORE I reply to what you have said on the leadiug subjects of my Sermon and Letter, there are one or two other topics on which I wish to offer a few remarks. And in the first place I observe, that you continue to designate as apostates," or renegades,”*—(this last is a fresh addition to your lamentably long catalogue of vituperative terms, or, as you yourself call them "beauties of the vulgar tongue,")+-all who are led, in obedience to the dictates of conscience, and in the exercise of that liberty wherewith Christ hath made them free, to reject your views of the Gospel dispensation, and to adopt ours. No man, it seems, can depart from your standard of orthodoxy, on those points which you are pleased, from your privileged chair, to pronounce essential, without rendering himself liable to have these obnoxious epithets,-" uncomfortable" you call them, I think them in such a connexion uncharit* See Letters, p. 71, 72, which the reader is requested to peruse carefully. + Letters, page 13. } able and unchristian,-applied to him. It is perhaps well * See p. 69 towards the end. D doing. You never meddle with motives,* you say, and yet you are perpetually denouncing those who differ from you as objects of moral aversion and disgust, giving them names which would have no meaning if they did not denote the prevalence of inward principles of action, that is motives, of the very worst kind. Can men be apostates, blasphemers, haters of Jesus Christ, and have no bad motives for being so? If this were possible, these terms would no longer be,-what all regard them, and yourself, if I am not much mistaken, amongst the number, or you would not have employed them as you have done,terms of reproach. You charge 66 no sordid motive," but merely evil ones of some other kind, "in this retrograde movement." We thank you for the concession, small as it is. May I, however, be allowed to inquire, who has given you authority to stigmatise the movement of which you speak, as retrograde, in so very absolute and arrogant a tone? "GOD'S SOUL," you say, 66 HAS NO PLEASURE IN IT, NEITHER HAS OURS.' Are you an infallible expounder of the divine word and will? Are you authorised to say, with the Apostles, "It hath seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us?" Is there no possibility that you may be under a mistake, when you maintain that in the One Mind of God there are three subsistences, which, though not three distinct minds, do yet think, speak, and act, severally and apart, exactly as if they were? Is it not quite conceivable that you may be wrong in imagining that the doctrine of a Trinity of coequal intelligent agents, (for as such you certainly represent them, when you ascribe to them distinct intelligent agency,) can be reconciled with that of the Unity of God? I think that you are under a great mistake,-that you are evidently wrong,—in wrong, in thus imagining. The movement which you pronounce retrograde, seems to me a movement in advance, *See Letters, page 17, 38, also Strictures, page 9: the "Malleus Hæreticorum of Ongar" is more consistent; he denies that the motives of Unitarians can be good, and ranks the drunkard, the liar, the gamester, the adulterer, above the Unitarian in a moral point of view. See Taylor's Balance of Criminality, page 73, and passim; and yet Mr. H. defends this production. See Letters, page 39. a return from the fictions of human error to the plain doctrine of reason and scripture. Who shall decide between us? Neither of us will acquiesce in the decision of the other, or in that of any earthly judge. Let us then, if the arguments which we respectively urge fail to produce conviction, await with modesty and humility the final award of the Allwise. But let us not, in the mean time, denounce each other with papal arrogance as enemies of God and Christ, and maintainers of doctrines in which "God's soul" is dogmatically pronounced to have no more pleasure than our own. From the style of your denunciation it might be concluded that Unitarians have no reasons to give for their peculiar views, but that the doctrines which you maintain, on the contrary, are self-evident and indisputable. Should any of our readers suppose this to be the case, I beg leave to refer them to your own "Strictures" on a sermon of mine already alluded to, where they will find you sometimes candidly admitting the apparent force of our arguments, and, throughout, taking considerable pains to combat and refute them, -with what success I leave it to themselves to judge. Deny the truth of our conclusions as you may, you have yourself placed it upon record, that the reasonings by which they are established are such as you cannot always readily refute. What right, then, have you to assume, that, in yielding to their force, our judgments must, of necessity, be warped by the criminal bias of depraved hearts? To be held up as "poor apostates!" to the mingled scorn and pity of the Christian world,to be told by you in an oracular voice that there will be no more hope for them, if, having once embraced, they should cease at any future time to hold your opinions,—this, doubtless, to persons of weak and timid minds, may seem rather alarming. Let such, however, be reminded, that while Truth labours to convince, Error is often given to dogmatize, and that the disciples of the former have not seldom been denounced as "babblers," and "bringers of strange tidings," and "turners of the * See particularly page 32 of that work. |