cles, on which alone * the claim of any religion, professing to be a revelation by God, can be established; and in the course of his reasonings, he appears to exhibit such views of the nature of that God whom he acknowledges, as were admitted even by Spinoza; and constitute indeed that species of atheism, which by the ancients was called Pantheism. Such doctrines, when taught in the language of philosophy, as that language is unintelligible to the mere vulgar, could do them little injury, were there not everywhere sciolists ready and eager to bring it down to the level of their capacity, by turning all reasoning into ridicule, and contending, that we can believe nothing for which we have not the evidence of some of our five senses. Hence it is, that some of the most illiterate of the vulgar have lately avowed themselves to be ATHEISTS, for no other reason but because they had never seen God.

It is not however from the poison administered by Atheists and Deists only that the pastor of a congregation is to guard the flock entrusted to his care. That flock is in equal, perhaps in greater, danger from the writings of professed Christians, who, appealing to the Scriptures, force them by false criticism, and, when they can venture on such barefaced imposture, by false translations, to teach doctrines directly contrary to the truth as it is in

* I have not mentioned the fulfilment of prophecy, because that fulfilment, when obvious, is as direct a miracle as the resurrection of the dead; and because the first revelation must have been attested at the time when the revelation was made.

Jesus. The modern Unitarians, by magnifying the intellectual powers of man, and calling in question the authenticity or inspiration of such passages of Scripture as teach doctrines, which no human-perhaps no created-being can fully comprehend, have brought down Christianity to the level of that species of Deism, which, less revolting than the Pantheism of the present age, admits of the moral attributes of God and of the probability of a future state, in which the souls of men shall be rewarded or punished, according to the deeds done in the body. With these rational Christians, as they very improperly call themselves, moral virtue comprehends the whole of our duty; and, aware of the influence of celebrated names on superficial minds, they have constantly in their mouths the distich of the poetical pupil of Bolingbroke,

For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight,
His can't be wrong, whose life is in the right.

As man seldom knows where to stop when he withdraws himself from the guidance of the unsophisticated word of God, there are other sects, which, in abhorrence of such moral or legal doctrine, as they, not improperly, call this view of Christianity, have run into the opposite extreme, and raised systems of faith on the ruins of virtue! As the Unitarian rejects the doctrine of Christ's dying to atone for the sins of men, the fanatical sects to which I now allude, contend not only that Christ died for our sins, but also that, if we believe

in that atonement as made for us, all our sins will be imputed to him, and all his righteousness imputed to us, and that this will be done by that omniscient and just Being, who cannot mistake one person for another, nor confound the innocent with the guilty!

Which of these views of Christianity is the most erroneous or the most pernicious, it would not perhaps be easy to say; but which of them must be most grateful to the unenlightened part of mankind is very obvious.

In the cold system of the Unitarian, which teaches that man's future happiness must result wholly from his own virtue in this world, and at the same time makes no other provision than repentance for the forgiveness of those manifold sins, of which the best of men must be conscious that they have been guilty, there is nothing attracting-nothing that can shed one ray of comfort on the death-bed of the sinner. The system of the fanatic is very different. The sinner, who really believes, if indeed any one can believe, that all his offenceshowever numerous or however great-will, by the Father of Justice and Mercy, be imputed to Christ, and all Christ's righteousness imputed to him, has, on his death-bed, nothing to dread. His debts have been all paid, and a second payment of them cannot be demanded without injustice!

But it is not on the death-bed of the sinner only that the pernicious consequences of this view of Christianity show themselves. It is indisputably

calculated to induce men to " continue in sin that grace may abound," satisfied, as it teaches them to be, that, as Christ hath done every thing for them, they have nothing to do for themselves, but to lay hold by faith of Christ's righteousness!

As both these views of Christianity have been exhibited by men of very considerable learning and ingenuity, they have been adopted by numbers in different ages of the church, but, I believe, never more generally than at present; and it will be your duty to guard the people committed to your pastoral care from the errors of both sects, as well as from every other deviation from the faith which was once delivered to the saints. In order to this, you will do well, however, to avoid all appearance of controversy in your sermons, unless on points where you know your people to have been already misled; for you could not controvert the dangerous doctrines of Unitarianism on the one hand, or of Fanaticism on the other, without previously stating these doctrines; and, by doing this, you might excite the curiosity of the illiterate part of the congregation to inquire farther about erroneous opinions, of which, but, for your information, they might never have heard. You would thus be the instrument of leading your people into those very errors against which it was your object to guard them.

The most effectual method of keeping them free from error, both in their faith, and in their conduct, is to teach the truth, and the whole truth, as it is in Jesus, in a consecutive course of sermons, esta

blishing that truth, which may always be done, on perspicuous texts of Scripture, without giving them reason to suppose that it has ever been called in question. But should it at any time be impossi◄ ble, as sometimes it may be, to conceal from them the fact, that the truth, which you are teaching, hath been denied, it will still be prudent not to mention the particular author or sect whose objections you are refuting; for that author or sect may teach other doctrines, of which you cannot speak without approbation; and the uninformed part of your audience might think that you are yourself unstable, were they to hear you sometimes praise, and sometimes condemn the same teachers.

To teach the truth, and the whole truth as it is in Jesus, so as to prevent the audience from deviating from it either to the right hand or to the left, cannot be done by any man, who hath not himself a clear and comprehensive view of the origin and object of the Christian religion. Christianity, as it is taught in the New Testament,* was not the earliest dispensation of religion vouchsafed by God to man. It was preceded by the Mosaic law; as that again was by the religion of the earlier Patriarchs, whatever that religion may have been; but if these several dispensations of religion proceeded from the same God,

* I express myself thus, because there is a sense in which Christianity is indeed very near as old as the creation. See on this subject an excellent tract by the Lord President Forbes, whom Warburton justly characterizes (in one of his letters to Hurd) as one of the greatest men that Scotland ever produced.