THE INTRODUCTION. THE unity of God is a doctrine on which the greatest stress is laid in the whole system of revelation. To guard this most important article was the principal object of the Jewish religion; and, notwithstanding the proneness of the Jews to idolatry, at length it fully answered its purpose in reclaiming them, and in impressing the minds of many persons of other nations in favour of the same fundamental truth.

The Jews were taught by their prophets to expect a Messiah, who was to be descended from the tribe of Judah, and the family of David, -a person in whom themselves and all the nations of the earth should be blessed; but none of their prophets gave them an idea of any other than a man like themselves in that illustrious character, and no other did they ever expect, or do they expect to this day.

Jesus Christ, whose history answers to the description given of the Messiah by the prophets, made no other pretensions; referring all his extraordinary power to God, his Father, who, he expressly says, spake and acted by him, and who raised him from the dead: and it is most evident that the apostles, and

all those who conversed with our Lord before and after his resurrection, considered him in no other light than simply as "a man approved of God, by wonders and signs which God did by him." Acts ii. 22.

Not only do we find no trace of so prodigious a change in the ideas which the apostles entertained concerning Christ, as from that of a man like themselves, (which it must be acknowledged were the first that they entertained,) to that of the most high God, or one who was in any sense their maker or preserver, that when their minds were most fully enlightened, after the descent of the Holy Spirit, and to the latest period of their ministry, they continued to speak of him in the same style; even when it is evident they must have intended to speak of him in a manner suited to his state of greatest exaltation and glory. Peter uses the simple language above quoted, of a man approved of God, immediately after the descent of the Spirit: and the apostle Paul, giving what may be called the Christian creed, says, 1 Tim. ii. 5, "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." He does not say the God, the God-man, or the super

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angelic being, but simply the man Christ Jesus; and nothing can be alleged from the New Testament in favour of any higher nature of Christ, except a few passages interpreted without any regard to the context, or the modes of speech and opinions of the times in which the books were written, and in such a manner, in other respects, as would authorize our proving any doctrine whatever from them.

From this plain doctrine of the Scriptures, a doctrine so consonant to reason and the ancient prophecies, Christians have at length come to believe what they do not pretend to have any conception of, and than which it is not possible to frame a more express contradiction. For, while they consider Christ as the supreme, eternal God, the maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible, they moreover acknowledge the Father and the Holy Spirit to be equally God in the same exalted sense, all three equal in power and glory, and yet all three constituting no more than one God.

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To a person the least interested in the inquiry, it must appear an object of curiosity to trace by what means, and by what steps, so great a change has taken place, and what circumstances in the history of other opinions, and of the world, proved favourable to the successive changes. An opinion, and especially an opinion adopted by great numbers of mankind, is to be considered as any other fact in history, for it can not be produced without an adequate and is therefore a proper object of philosophical inquiry. In this case I think it not difficult to find causes abundantly adequate to the purpose, and it is happily in our power to trace almost every step by which the changes have been successively brought about. If the interest that mankind have generally taken in anything, will at all contribute to interest us in the inquiry concerning it, this history cannot fail to be highly interesting, For, perhaps, in no business whatever have the minds of men been more agitated, and,

speculative as the nature of the thing is, in few cases has the peace of society been so much disturbed. To this very day, of such importance is the subject considered by thousands and tens of thousands, that they cannot write or speak of it without the greatest zeal, and without treating their opponents with the greatest rancour. If good sense and humanity did not interpose to mitigate the rigour of law, thousands would be sacrificed to the cause of orthodoxy in this single article; and the greatest number of sufferers would probably be in this very country, on account of the greater freedom of inquiry which prevails here, in consequence of which we entertain and profess the greatest diversity of opinions.

The various steps in this interesting history it is now my business to point out, and I wish that all my readers may attend me with as much coolness and impartiality as I trust I shall myself preserve through the whole of this investigation.'

1 The following anecdote respecting the History, will show that the spirit of the Synod of Dort, had survived two centuries. "This book in the city of Dort, province of Holland, anno was burnt by the hands of the common hangman 1785:—a piece of intelligence communicated by me to Dr. Priestley in the hotel where I lodged in of having with that extraordinary man, a few Birmingham, in a conversation I had the pleasure weeks after that event. Having asked me with much earnestness, how he would be received in Holland, were he to appear there, I told him I did not exactly know how they might treat the original, but that he himself might be able to determine that point when I had told him that he had been burnt in effigy at Dort, a few weeks before I left Holland-a person's writings being of his Corruptions might be easily considered as often viewed as a picture of his mind, the burning burning himself in effigy. He deplored our ignorance and blindness. A greater philanthropist I never met with." Note by the Rev. Thomas Peirson, D.D. senior minister of the established English church in the city of Amsterdam. Bibliotheca Peirsoniana, p. 211.

"In

This was not the first attempt to confute the author's opinions by the argument of fire. 1782, previous to the sale by auction of the Abbé Needham's library at Bruxelles, the licensers, as

usual, went to burn the prohibited books. They destroyed Cudworth's Intellectual System, Priestley's Hartley, a New Testament, and many others; but Christianity as old as the Creation,' escaped the flames." Mon. Mag. xxxiv. p. 521.

SECTION I.

OF THE OPINION OF THE ANCIENT JEWISH AND GENTILE CHURCHES.

THAT the ancient Jewish church must have held the opinion that Christ was simply a man, and not either God Almighty, or a super-angelic being, may be concluded from its being the clear doctrine of the Scripture, and from the apostles having taught no other; but there is sufficient evidence of the same thing from ecclesiastical history. It is unfortunate, indeed, that there are now extant so few remains of any of the writers who immediately succeeded the apostles, and especially that we have only a few inconsiderable fragments of Hegesippus, a Jewish Christian, who wrote the history of the church in continuation of the Acts of the Apostles, and who travelled to Rome about the year 160; but it is not difficult to collect evidence enough in support of my assertion.

The members of the Jewish church were, in general, in very low circumstances, which may account for their having few persons of learning among them; on which account they were much despised by the richer and more learned gentile Christians, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem, before which event all the Christians in Judea, (warned by our Saviour's prophecies concerning the desolation of that country,) had retired to the northeast of the sea of Galilee. They were likewise despised by the Gentiles for their bigoted adherence to the law of Moses, to the rite of circumcision, and other ceremonies of their ancient religion. And on all these accounts they probably got the name of Ebionites, which signifies poor and mean, in the same manner as many of the early reformers from Popery got the name of Beghards, and other appellations of a similar nature. The fate of these ancient Jewish Christians was, indeed, peculiarly hard. For, besides the neglect of the gentile Christians, they were, as Epiphanius informs us, held

in the greatest abhorrence by the Jews from whom they had separated, and who cursed them in a solemn manner three times, whenever they met for public worship.'

In general these ancient Jewish Christians retained the appellation of Nazarenes, and it may be inferred from Origen, Epiphanius and Eusebius, that the Nazarenes and Ebionites were the same people, and held the same tenets, though some of them supposed that Christ was the son of Joseph as well as of Mary, while others of them held that he had no natural father, but had a miraculous birth. Epiphanius, in his account of the Nazarenes, (and the Jewish Christians never went by any other name,) makes no mention of any of them believing the divinity of Christ, in any sense of the word.

It is particularly remarkable that Hegesippus, in giving an account of the heresies of his time, though he mentions the Carpocratians, Valentinians, and others who were generally termed Gnostics, (and who held that Christ had a pre-existence, and was man only in appearance,) not only makes no mention of this supposed heresy of the Nazarenes or Ebionites, but says that, in his travels to Rome, where he spent some time with Anicetus, and visited the bishops of other sees, he found that they all held the same doctrine that was taught in the law, by the prophets, and by our Lord." What could this be but the proper Unitarian doctrine held by the Jews, and which he himself had been taught?

That Eusebius doth not expressly say what this faith was, is no wonder, considering his prejudice against the Unitarians of his own time. He speaks of the Ebionites, as persons whom a malignant demon had brought into his power; and though he speaks of them as holding that Jesus was the son of 1 Epiphanii Opera, 1682. (Hær. 29.) I. 2 Ibid. pp. 123, 125. (P.)

(P.)

p.

124.

3 Eusebii Ilist. 1720, L. iv. C. xxii. pp. 181,

182. (P.)

4 Ibid. L. iii, C. xxvii. p. 121. (P.)

Joseph as well as of Mary, he speaks with no less virulence of the opinion of those of his time, who believed the miraculous conception, calling their heresy madness. Valesius, the translator of Eusebius, was of opinion that the history of Hegesippus was neglected and lost by the ancients, on account of the errors it contained, and these errors could be no other than the Unitarian doctrine. It is possible also, that it might be less esteemed on account of the very plain, unadorned style in which all the ancients say it was written.

Almost all the ancient writers who speak of what they call the heresies of the two first centuries, say, that they were of two kinds; the first were those that thought that Christ "was man in appearance only," and the other that he was 66 no more than a man." Tertullian calls the former Docetæ, and the latter Ebionites. Austin, speaking of the same two sects, says, that the former believed Christ to be God, but denied that he was man, whereas the latter believed him to be man, but denied that he was God. Of this latter opinion Austin owns that he himself was, till he became acquainted with the writings of Plato, which in his time were translated into Latin, and in which he learned the doctrine of the Logos.

Now that this second heresy, as the later writers called it, was really no heresy at all, but the plain simple truth of the gospel, may be clearly inferred from the apostle John taking no notice at all of it, though he censures the former, who believed Christ to be man only in appearance, in the severest manner. And that this was the only heresy that gave him any alarm, is evident from his first epistle, chap. iv. ver. 2, 3, where he says that " every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (by which he must have meant is truly a man), is of God." On the other hand, he says, every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus

1 Lardner's Hist. of Heretics, p. 17. (P.) Works, IX. pp. 234, 235,

Christ is come in the flesh is not of God, and this is that spirit of Antichrist, whereof you have heard that it should come, and even now already is it in the world." For this was the first corruption of the Christian religion by the maxims of Heathen philosophy, and which proceeded afterwards, till Christianity was brought to a state little better than Paganism.

That Christian writers afterwards should imagine that this apostle alluded to the Unitarian heresy, or that of the Ebionites, in the introduction to his gospel, is not to be wondered at; as nothing is more common than for men to interpret the writings of others according to their own previous ideas and conceptions of things. On the contrary, it seems very evident that, in that introduction, the apostle alludes to the very same system of opinions, which he had censured in his epistle, the fundamental principle of which was that, not the Supreme Being himself, but an emanation from him, to which they gave the name of Logos, and which they supposed to be the Christ, inhabited the body of Jesus, and was the maker of all things; whereas he there affirms, that the Logos by which all things were made, was not a being distinct from God, but God himself, that is, an attribute of God, or the divine power and wisdom. We shall see that the Unitarians of the third, century, charged the orthodox with introducing a new and strange interpretation of the word logos.2

That very system, indeed, which made Christ to have been the eternal reason, or Logos of the Father, did not, probably, exist in the time of the apostle John, but was introduced from the principles of Platonism afterwards. But the Valentinians, who were only a branch of the Gnostics, made great use of the same term, not only denominating by it one of the æons in the

2 See Beausobre "IHistoire Critique de Manichée et du Manichéisme," I. p. 540. (P.) "Les Noetiens reprochoient aux Orthodoxes, d'introduire un langage étrange et nouveau, en appellaut le Verbe, Fils de Dieu." L. iii. Ch. vi. Sect. xi.