sage of Scripture against which he was fulminating the charges of falsehood, impiety, and blasphemy. But if he will take the trouble to open his New Testament at the second chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, he will find, at the 17th verse, that the writer affirms that " in all things it "behoved him to be made like unto his brethren." I quite agree with the learned Lecturer, that this doctrine is utterly irreconcileable to that of the Church of England: but for this discrepancy the members of that communion, and not the Unitarians, are responsible.

It would be endless to follow the learned Lecturer through all his trite arguments upon the trite question concerning the Deity of Christ; which, if they were ten times as numerous and as forcible as they are, would all be completely silenced by this single consideration, that it would have been utterly impossible that our Lord's contemporaries, his apostles, his companions and disciples, or that the historians of his life, and miracles, and sufferings, should have written and spoken of him, have conversed with him, and behaved to him with the familiarity which they always manifested, if they believed that the being who appeared to them as a man, with all the accidents and frailties of a human being, was in truth the

very and eternal God. Let us for a moment place ourselves in their situation; and we shall feel at once, that the instant the amazing truth was communicated to them, their faculties would be absorbed in terror and astonishment;-no more free conversation; no more asking of questions; no more attempts to impose upon him, or to rebuke him the greatest awe and distance would instantaneously take place, and all the endearing and familiar relations of master, instructor, companion and friend, would be absorbed in the overwhelming apprehension of their Maker and their God.

And what would be the style and manner of those who, under these impressions, should sit down to write the narrative of his life and his miracles, his discourses and his sufferings? Would three out of four of his historians completely forget the awful fact of his divine nature, and not drop a single hint of it from the beginning to the end of their histories? Would the rest of the sacred writers have insisted upon this circumstance only incidentally and obscurely? Would the most direct evidence of the divinity of Christ have been found chiefly in passages at least suspicious, if not notoriously spurious? Would the great discovery have been left to be spelled out from a text here and another there, which if put together by a pro

found scholar, and especially by one who was critically versed in the niceties of the Greek article, might to men whose minds were fond of mystery, be made to convey some such dark and hidden meaning? Would it be necessary, in order to establish the astonishing doctrine of the proper deity of Christ, to collect twenty or thirty texts, which, some being rightly, and some, wrongly translated, might appear to countenance it; and to repeat these texts over and over, so that ignorant and inattentive persons might imagine that they recurred in every page of the New Testament? If Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John, and Paul, and Peter,' believed "that our Lord Jesus Christ is "the very and eternal God, of one substance with "the Father," could they not have expressed the doctrine in language as plain as that of the learned Lecturer, or any other framer and supporter of creeds and articles whatever? and could they not with equal facility have lavished the charges of falsehood, impiety, and blasphemy, against the impugners of the faith? I am confident that it is impossible for any person, who reflects calmly and seriously upon the subject, to doubt, that if the doctrine of their Lord's equality with God were true, and made known to the apostles and first believers, their minds would have been so deeply and so powerfully

impressed with the subject, that they would be able to think, and speak, and write of nothing else, and that this great and wonderful doctrine would be blazoned from one end of the New Testament to the other: it would flame in every chapter, it would shine in every page, it would dazzle in every line. That it does not so, that not only pages and chapters, but even whole books of the New Testament, yea, that professed histories of our Lord's life and character, and of the progress and success of his doctrine, of what he was and what he taught, and of what his disciples said and taught of him, should have passed over this great discovery in silence as deep and as total as the silence of the grave, is a demonstration clear as light to every human being whose understanding is not veiled by the grossest prejudice, that these writers had never heard of the divinity of Christ, that it never entered into their conception that the master whom they revered and loved, was the very and eternal God whom they adored and worshipped. All arguments and criticisms, however ingenious, however learned, however recondite, which can be produced in reply to considerations and facts like these, are as chaff before the whirlwind; and like Samson's cords, they fall asunder, as a thread of tow when touched by the fire.

I am, &c.

DEAR SIR,

LETTER V.

THE latter part of the learned Lecturer's third Discourse contains a few ad captandum arguments for what is commonly called the doctrine of the atonement, whatever is meant by that mysterious phrase, which those who use it commonly take care not to explain. But as I quite agree with the learned Lecturer (p. 92), that "if we set aside "the Godhead of Christ there is an end at once to "the doctrine of a sacrifice made by him to atone "for the sins of all mankind;" and as I regard the Godhead of Christ as a fundamental error in the popular creed, I consider myself as fully absolved from all concern in the controversy concerning the atonement, and willingly leave it to others who may feel more interest in what the learned Lecturer calls "a most comfortable and important doctrine," but which I would rather style, a most useless and unfounded corruption of the simplicity of the christian faith.

65

In the fourth Sermon the learned Lecturer undertakes to prove the "personality of the Holy "Ghost," as the holy spirit is quaintly styled in