GENERAL PREFACE.

In this Preface, and in all the other contents of this volume, we have occupied the position of an assailed party, lending our best consideration to whatever a leagued body of resolute and unsparing adversaries could say against us. We have stood upon the defensive, not lamenting that such an occasion had occurred of exposing our views of Christianity to so severe a scrutiny, and of displaying to the world whether our position was tenable. We did not provoke this Controversy. It was of our opponents' choosing. They entered into combination, and arranged their method of attack, and invited the public attentively to look on while they performed upon us the work of destruction. With respectful attention, as men whose system of Christianity was about to be subjected to a powerful analysis by those who believed the main ingredients to be poisonous, but with quiet hearts, as men who had no interest in this world but to discover Truth, we have interfered no further than was necessary to make this examination, by carefulness, impar

b

tiality, and accuracy, productive of a true result. We have struck out whatever was untrue, and we have supplied whatever was wanting, to exhibit a full statement of the respective Evidences of Unitarianism and of Trinitarianism. Lecture qualifies Lecture; and Preface corrects Preface. We are satisfied to have thus placed, side by side, the contrasted views of Man and God, and to await the issues.

To return upon the "thirteen Clergymen of the Church of England" the words of their General Preface, (p. xi.)" it is no uncommon practice in modern criticism to neglect the statements" of an opponent's case, as if they never had been made, and the corrections passed upon one's own as if they never had been experienced. It is the policy of the "thirteen Clergymen" to reiterate, nothing daunted, arguments, our careful replies to which are not even noticed, and misrepresentations whose injustice had solemnly been protested against. By these resolute repetitions some are seduced to believe, and attention is withdrawn from the overthrow of an error or a calumny by the hardihood with which it rises from its fall, and reasserts itself. Strike them down; they get up, and coolly offer themselves to be struck down again. Great ought to be the power of Truth; for great is the vitality and the power of effrontery in a popular error. It is only in the long combat of years and generations that the Real manifests at last its imperishable quality. The "General Preface" quietly gathers up all the "disjecta membra" of

error and misstatement, and without a word of answer to our analysis of their character, presents them again to have sentence and execution passed upon them. It is a careful redintegration of the broken particles, which in our simplicity we had hoped would not so readily reunite. We are obliged, therefore, by way at once of Preface and of Protest, to repeat our solemn contradiction of some most strenuous misrepresentations, and to attempt again the exposure of some fallacies most tenacious of life.

I. It was distinctly stated by us in the course of this Controversy, that not upon any grounds of literary evidence did we discredit those prefaces which relate to the miraculous (or as, in insult to the purest and holiest human feelings, our opponents are not ashamed to call it, the immaculate) conception; and that our estimate of them was formed solely upon grounds of inherent incredibility, and of proved inconsistencies both with themselves and with the general statements of the New Testament. Yet in total disregard of this our denial, the Preface (p. xiii.) reasserts the charge, as if it never had been contradicted. We also distinctly stated that the miraculous conception in no way interfered with Unitarianism,-that many Humanitarians believed in it; yet it is the policy of Trinitarianism to repeat, that we pervert these portions of Scripture, for the sake of evading a fact fatal to our system. Unitarianism is so little concerned to evade the fact of a miraculous conception, that many Unitarians them

iv

selves adopt it. It is the "tactics" of the "thirteen Clergymen," their system " of holy war," (see Preface to Mr. Ould's Lecture) to ignore whatever we may say on our own behalf, either in way of correction or of defence, and to reassert the false statement.

II. The "Unitarian Creed" is described by our reverend opponents as "a mere code of unbelief,” (p. xiv.) it being the policy of the "thirteen Clergymen," not only to pay no regard to our most solemn assertion of our faith in Christianity, as God's full and perfect revelation to man, but also to assume to themselves the functions of infallible judges of what is Christianity, and what is not; and so, again to return upon them deify their own fallible" their own language, to " (p. xii.) interpretations and inferences. Yet they can impose upon the simplicity of the world, by charging pride of reason." Infallible themothers with the "pride of reason." selves, to differ from their infallibility can of course be nothing else than the pride of reason.

III. It is stated (p. xv.), that we "utterly deny" "the eternity of punishments," without adding what we have added, that the moral consequences of actions are eternal, and that in its influence on character and progress, the retribution of every evil thought or deed is everlasting. What we do deny, as the blackest misrepresentation that can be conceived of the God of Providence, whose glory it is to lead his children to Himself, is the horribly distinct statement of their own "General Preface"-" that the sufferings of the lost

are not intended for their amendment, but as a satisfaction to divine justice, when the hour of pardon shall have passed away." (p. xv.) Is this the Religion, and this the God of Love? These are the men who make the Unbelief, of which they afterwards so blindly and bitterly complain. If such was Christianity, unbelief would be a virtue, a prompting of devotion, a protest on behalf of God.

IV. Our doubt as to the existence of, or necessity for, an external Devil, permitted by God to ruin the souls of men, has been converted to two uses in this Preface ;-first, as manifesting that we are ourselves under the power of the subtlest device of Satan, who has concealed from us his existence, that he might lead us captive at his will; and, secondly, that though denying the existence of Satan, we are yet ourselves the emissaries of Satan; for that as the Devil tempted Eve, and our Lord himself, by perversions of the Word of God, so Unitarianism, by its interpretations, is his present instrument,-in fact, Satan himself tempting the world by the word of God, as of old he tempted Eve and Christ. (pp. xv. xvi.) We leave this matter to the judgment of men whose sense of propriety and decency has not been borrowed exclusively from the influences of a dogmatic Theology.

V. It is said of us (p. xvi.), contrary to our own most distinct averment in this very Controversy, that "according to the theologians of this unhappy school, it seems to be almost a fundamental rule, that no doc