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tact with religion; nor are any objects reverently regarded by us, except such as, from their nature or their vastness, are felt to transcend our comprehension." Nay, it is not a little remarkable, that the very illustration employed by the "thirteen Clergymen >> to exhibit our absurdity in rejecting the incomprehen sible, had been previously employed by ourselves to exhibit the necessity of admitting the incomprehen

sible:

Trinitarian Preface, p. xviii. "Much of the great mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh, with all the firmament of saving truth and love, whereof it is the radiant centre, must remain inexplicable to our present capacities. But to argue from thence, that this mystery is a cunningly-devised fable, is as illogical maintain that there is no bottom to the sea, because we have no

as it would be to

plumb-line with which it may

fathomed."

be

Unitarian Lecture, No. V. p. 9.

“The sense of what we do not know is as essential to our religion, as the impression of what we do know: the thought of the boundless, the incomprehensible, must blend in our mind with the perception of the clear and true; the little knowledge we have must be clung to, as the margin of an invisible immensity; and all our positive ideas be regarded as the mere float to show the surface of the infinite deep."

This is bold misrepresentation; a consistent hardihood in the "tactics of holy war." To persevere, against all remonstrance, in the repetition of a misstatement injurious to an opponent, and to do this so

coolly as to use almost his own words in imputing to him the very opposite of what he has said, is at least a convenient, if not an honourable nor yet a formi

dable policy.

"So

In the same spirit of neither honourable nor yet formidable policy, is the attempt (p. xvii.) to identify Mahometanism and Unitarianism, by the help of a literary forgery, which even if it was authentic, would prove nothing except that the early Unitarians of England, in the reign of Charles the Second, amid the corruptions of Christianity, rejoiced in the testimony borne by Mahometanism to the great doctrine of revealed religion, the Unity of God. It is said that there is, among the MSS. in the Lambeth Library, a cinian Epistle (to this effect) to Ameth Ben Ameth, Ambassador from the Emperor of Morocco to Charles II." Leslie, in the Preface to his "Socinian Controversy Discussed," was the first who made use of this supposed letter, and not without the suspicion, that he had first forged it himself.* "I will here," says Leslie, present the reader with a rarity, which I take to be so, because of the difficulty I had to obtain it." is in my mind," says Mr. Aspland, "decisive of the question, that immediately after Leslie had published the Epistle, Emlyn, who answered the tract to which it was prefixed, stated it as his belief, upon inquiry, that no such epistle had ever been presented by any one deputed' from the Unitarians, and insinuated

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* See “A Plea for Unitarian Dissenters," pp. 88-9, published in 1813, by the Rev. Robert Aspland, from whom we take the exposure of this forgery now brought forth again; for in Trinitarian Controversy falsehood seems immortal, and there is no work for us modern advocates, except to "slay the slain."

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GENERAL PREFACE.

that no credit was to be given to a document published by Leslie, unless vouched by some other authority than his own; and that Leslie, in replying to this answer, though he dwells, for pages, upon the passages before and after this, relating to the epistle, says not a syllable about his rarity' or in defence of his veracity." "Leslie," continues Mr. Aspland," is convicted (by Emlyn) of quoting passages from Archbishop Tillotson's Sermons, which had been published in the name of their eminent author, as if they were the work of an avowed Socinian.' And if you will consult his reply, you will find this theological braggart completely humbled, and reduced to the necessity of using the wretched plea, that he had omitted the name of the great Prelate,' out of tenderness.-Is it uncharitable to suspect, under all these circumstances, that he proved to have resorted to one trick, might

who was

have had recourse to another?"

As to your rarity,'" says Emlyn in his reply to

Leslie, "of the address to the Morocco ambassador, I see not what it amounts to, more than a complaint of the corruption of the Christian faith, in the article of one God, which the Mahometans have kept, by consent of all sides. Yet, forasmuch as I can learn nothing from any Unitarians of any such address from them, nor do produce any subscribers' names,* I conclude no such

you

of ban

There is internal evidence of its being written in the way ter. No subscription appears to it, and no person is named as concerned in it, but a Monsieur Verze, a Frenchman, who might be employed as an agent, and yet not be a Socinian' agent."-ASPLAND.

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address was ever made, by any deputed from them, whatever any single person might do. I suppose you conclude from the matter of it, that it must be from some Unitarian, and perhaps so; yet you may remember that so you concluded from the matter of Dr. Tillotson's Sermons, that they were a Socinian's."*

For our own part, when we read this amusing attempt to identify us with Mahometans, by the help of an unknown letter, bearing no subscription, and addressed, by nobody knows whom, to the Ambassador of Morocco, in the reign of Charles II., we were forcibly reminded of two passages in Ecclesiastical History, in whose pages all tricks and absurdities can be paralleled, and whose exhibition of gratuitous follies and distortions has left the possibility of “ nothing new under the sun," of this description, for our modern days. Hildebrand himself, yes, GREGORY THE SEVENTH, like our poor selves, was suspected of a leaning to "Islamism," (General Preface, p. xvii.) because he wrote a letter, not to the Ambassador, as in our case, but, as became his greater dignity, to the Emperor of Morocco, thanking him for the liberation of some Christian cap

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* Plea for Unitarian Dissenters, p. 137.

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I

My Lords, if your Lordships attended to the manner in which that quotation is introduced into Leslie, you might see that it bore internal evidence of being something of the nature of a jeu d'esprit. My Lords, this Leslie was a general maligner. really think that this is raking into a dunghill to produce this address to the Ambassador of the Emperor of Morocco."-The AttorneyGeneral before THE HOUSE OF LORDS in the Lady Hewley Appeal, June 28th, 1839.

tives, and expressing his conviction, so much was there of the spirit of God and goodness in this act, "that they both worshipped the same spirit, though the modes of their adoration and faith were different." It also ap pears that the Emperor Manuel Comnenus exposed himself to the same imputation of " Islamism," because he wished to correct an error in the ritual of the Greek Church, which by a laughable misunderstanding of an Arabic word, signifying eternal,"contained a standing anathema against the God of Mahomet," as being "solid and spherical."

the "

Solventur risu tabulæ ; tu missus abibis."

We confess our unmixed astonishment at finding thirteen Clergymen" avowing the most undisguised Tritheism. We do not recollect in modern times

so bold and unwary an admission of Polytheism as the following: "Our inability, therefore, to explain the Triunity of his Essence, can be no reason for rejecting the revelation of it contained in his Word; even if we were deprived of those shadows and resem. blances of this divine truth, which may be seen in the one nature of man, communicating itself to many individuals of the species. There is one human nature,

but many human persons." (p. xix.) Is this then the Unity of God which the "thirteen" maintain, viz., such a unity as subsists between three individual men? it their meaning that the Divine Nature is a Species containing under it three Individuals, as human nature

Is

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