crime, shall that mental intoxication which pride and prejudice conspire to produce, pass uncensured for its consequences? According to Mr. Belsham's definition of infidelity, he alone is an infidel who rejects what he acknowledges to be true. If then he does not acknowledge that the doctrine is taught by Christ, he is no infidel. But let us pursue this principle one step farther.. If he does not acknowledge the authority of Christ to teach, according to this principle, he is still no infidel. He rejects the divine legation of Christ, because he can see no reason sufficient to support it; his rejection, therefore, is to be imputed to ignorance, not infidelity: he may even be regarded as an implicit believer; for the moment he can be persuaded that the legation is divine, he will receive it with his cordial assent. When the Almighty has given us reason to examine, and judgment to determine upon questions of such high import, we stand answerable for their abuse. There are laws which by the common consent of mankind are enacted, to settle, enough for all practical and moral purposes, how far we are guilty of such abuse; and if our pride and prejudice are still contumacious, it is to be remembered that there is a higher tribunal, whose sentence we can neither dispute nor evade,

"Your Lordship adds, and great must be the force of that prejudice, which can overlook the inconsistency of arbitrarily imposing a meaning unwarranted by the uses of language, on a book to which all parties appeal as the standard and rule of faith.'

is me

To this proposition, thus expressed in general terms, the Unitarians yield their unqualified assent; and where the censure rited there let it fall. But to us, my Lord, we are bold to say, that the imputation does not justly apply." P. 35.

To this, Mr. Belsham has subjoined a particular defence of a few interpretations, and a general one of the whole mass, To this it is not our purpose at present to reply; it is sufficient for us to observe, that the exposure which has taken place of the unwarrantable omissions, bold interpolations, and wilful perversions, with which the Unitarian version of the New Testament abounds, is fully sufficient to justify a much more severe censure than the mildness and charity of the Bishop has consented to pass. The Editors of that version have been convicted at the bar, both of Greek criticism and of common sense, of such offences against the integrity and the interpretation of the sacred text as make both scholarship and reason stand aghast. The convictions have been publicly recorded; but no answer has been rendered, no defence has been instituted. Yet upon any point which will bear even the slightest contest, Mr. Belsham is ever ready to come forward as a bold and a plausible advocate. Tt

The

VOL. III. JUNE, 1815.

The charges remain yet unanswered, and the version itself con tinues to be read and admired in Mr. Belsham's chapel.

"There are three of the criteria which your Lordship mentions, of which, to whomsoever they may apply, I should without hesitation admit that they are certain marks of unbelief in the christian revelation. These are, bold, and your Lordship must no doubt mean wilful, perversions of the christian scriptures'-' indecent insinuations against the veracity of the inspired writers'-and, disrespectful reflections on the person and actions of their Saviour.' Persons who are really liable to these charges, and against whom they may be proved, are not christians." P. 56.

Let us take Mr. Belsham upon his grounds. Our readers, from what we have already brought forward, will be enabled to form an ample judgment, how far the two latter criteria are applicable to the modern Unitarians; the voice of criticism, schoJarship, and common sense has already declared, that they stand convicted by the first; and in this condition we shall now take our leave of their cause.

The following is a specimen of Mr. Belsham's mode of attack, and of the subsidiaries which he forces into his ranks.

"Whoever believes the truth of Christianity,' says Mr. Hume at the close of his celebrated Essay upon Miracles, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to reason and experience.'

"Your Lordship may see by this quotation from the works of a renowned sceptic, that the confines of orthodoxy and of infidelity' approach more nearly than your Lordship perhaps recollected; and that, if we were disposed to retort the charge that the line between the contiguous systems is sometimes indiscernible or but faintly marked, we should not be at a loss for a plausible pretext." P. 74.

Mr. Belsham is not perhaps aware, that these expressions of Hume are applied to miracles in general, in which Mr. B. has professed his belief. He therefore must either resign this article of creed, or plead guilty to the accusation of Hume. Mr. B. is here placed in rather an awkward predicament; he has professed his belief in the miracles of Christ, and particularly in his resurrection, and yet he has pledged himself to reject with disdain every doctrine which requires, as the Bishop terms it, a prostration of the understanding. But let us again hear Mr. B. himself upou this point.

"To recriminate, however, is not our wish, but rather to conciliate. We do, my Lord, frankly acknowledge, that with the most ardent desire after proficiency in Christian instruction, and with

the

the humblest docility of spirit to which our minds can be disciplined, we do not affect to approach the oracles of truth with any prostration of the understanding. Prostration of the understanding! God forbid! No, my Lord; if any one had charged us with admitting as a revealed truth, as an oracle of God, as a doctrine of Jesus, a proposition which previously to its reception required a prostration of the understanding, we should have regarded it not only as more unfounded and irrevelant than any of those miscon ceptions under which our profession unfortunately lies in your Lordship's mind, but as a calumny more absurd and more injurious than any which the ingenuity and malignity of our bitterest adversaries have ever yet invented. If the Christian religion itself were to require this debasement of the intellect, this prostration of the understanding, in those who approach it, I, for one, would reject it with disdain." P. 75.

Will Mr. Belsham be good enough to explain to us, so as by any means to approximate it to our understandings, the mode by which Christ reanimated the body of Lazarus, (we will not say "recalled the soul," as Mr. B. is a materialist) or how his own was raised, after the lapse of so many hours, from actual death; will be inform us how and in what manner the Apostles were endowed with the gift of speaking divers languages, without being previously instructed; and when he has done this, we pledge ourselves to approximate to his mind with equal precision the mode of existence of the Trinity in Unity. In the one or two articles of Christianity which Mr. Belsham retains, there is as much pros tration of the understanding required, as in the whole system which we maintain. He must either receive them with submission, or reject them with disdain.

But here is the source of all that wretched infatuation, which, at different times, and in various forms, has darkened and enslaved the soul of mau. It is the feverish irritation of a captious and a conceited mind; it is the self-sufficiency of short-sighted, halfinstructed ignorance, which plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as makes the calm and thinking part of mankind to shudder. It is the same spirit of intellectual licentiousness, which taught Hobbes and Mandeville, Vanini and Hume, to deprive the Deity of his attributes, and even of his existence, which taught Bolingbroke and Tindal to reject revelation as a fable, has now descended upon the Unitarians of modern days, teaching them. salvation without a Saviour, and redemption without a Redeemer. It is not that the Deists are gone over in a regular body to the chapel of the Unitarians; but it is, that the same train of thought, the same mode of argument, the same turn of mind, leading to conclusions almost the same, are observable to the commonest суе in both systems.

Mr. Belsham seems astonished that such a spirit should form a prominent point of attack to the Clergy of a Christian Church. The legislature having emancipated the Unitarians from the penalties once attached to the publication of their opi nions, it becomes still more imperiously necessary that those evils, which the arm of public justice refuses to redress, should be checked and opposed by a private hand. Most unworthy would the clergy of this nation prove themselves of the sacred cause in which they were engaged, were they to witness their Saviour and their God stripped of every attribute, degraded to the level of frail and fallible humanity, and clad, as in scorn, with the mock robe of a divine mission, without raising one voice to viudicate his insulted majesty, or to defend his injured glory. There are still those among us who refuse, in the spirit of modern liberality, to compliment away the cause which they are entrusted to defend, who still hope, by a vigorous collision with the enemies of their faith, to rekindle the dying embers of a temperate and holy zeal in the interests of all which is dear to them as Christians and as men. Their contest with the Unitarians is not for a metaphysical distinction, a trifling dereliction, or a perverse separation, est inter nos non de terminis, sed de totâ possessione contentio. There can be no connection or composition between us: if they are Christians, we are idolaters; if we are Christians, they are infidels in disguise.

Mr. Belsham expresses his displeasure at being ranked among the enemies of the establishment, to which on the part of himself and the Unitarians he professes no feelings of hostility. He informs the Bishop, however, "that a reform, a liberal reform, adapted to the improvements of an enlightened age, and sanctioned by the legislature is all that the majority of Unitarians desire," or in other words, that all the fundamental principles of faith should be discarded, and all confessions of faith abolished, and that then the majority of Unitarians will support the establishment. We have great reason to suspect that Mr. Belsham himself, notwithstanding all his professions, is not even in such a majority; we remember to have read in his review of Mr. Wilberforce the following sentences, which express sentiments which our readers will consider of a very oppo. site tendency:

"The immediate tendency of a civil establishment of religion is to obstruct the progress of christian principles, and of sound morals. When a system, whether true or false, is once established, and the profession of it is paid for out of the public purse, all in

9

quiry

quiry is at an end. Integrity, and the love of truth, yield to indolence, pride, and bitter zeal, against those who attack, not the doctrines of religion, but those of the public creed. An established priesthood is, in its very nature, a persecuting order. There has been no exception to this rule. Heathen and christian, jew and mahometan, papist and protestant, episcopalian and presbyterian, when in power, have all breathed the same fiery, intemperate spirit; a few enlightened individuals only excepted. Men who are engaged to defend an established system are, from that very circumstance, engaged to discourage inquiry, and to oppose truth, unless (which is not often the case) truth should happen to be the established doctrine." P. 154.

In taking our leave of Mr. Belsham, we shall offer him our sincere thanks for giving us so fair an opportunity of laying before the public the true Unitarian creed, not tricked out in the garb of ambiguous verbosity, but stripped of all its meretricious ornaments, naked and undisguised. We are also happy that he has enabled us to call such testimony forth, as shall not also most fully acquit the Bishop of the charges brought against him, but shall also confirm the wisdom and establish the justice of those wide and commanding views which his Lordship has taken of the subjects under discussion.

BRITISH CATALOGUE.

DIVINITY.

ART. VII. The Claims of the Established Church, considered as an Apostolical Institution, and especially as an Authorized Interpreter of Holy Scripture. Svo. pp. 128. 3s. 6d. Rivingtons. 1815.

HOWEVER various have been the attacks to which the Church of England has been of late exposed, both by the virulence of open enemies, and the artifices of designing friends, one good effect at least has resulted from the very dangers with which she has been threatened, that a host of her faithful sons among the Laity as well as the Clergy, have rallied under her banners, and presented a phalanx of defenders, which would have done honour even to her best ages. Among these we shall consider the author of the treatise before us, be he who he may, even in the first rank a place to which the soundness of his arguments, the spirit of his defence, and the charity of his zeal, so justly entitle him.