to him and certain Socinians; where and how does he part company with them?

With a view of illustrating this point, it may be well to quote the words of one who, starting from the very theory maintained by Dr. Hampden, has recently become a convert to Socinianism. Had the writer of these pages that author's works at hand, he might quote still more apposite passages.

"You must frequently have observed the hopelessness of the attempts which are constantly made to establish various points of Christian doctrine by logical arguments, founded on detached texts of Scripture. You must have seen regular collections of passages, selected with the utmost patience, and arranged into classes with the greatest ingenuity. Most works on controversial divinity are attempts of this kind to draw some abstract proposition as the unquestionable result of the various expressions of Scripture upon the given subject. You cannot but have observed, moreover, how short all such attempts fall of the intended object," &c.-Mr. Blanco White on Heresy.

"As we cannot approach the objective truth of such convictions [i. e. of things beyond the reach of our senses] beyond or out of our intellect, all our moral duties to truth, (where moral duties are concerned, as is the case with religious truths,) are due to the only truth we can reach, i. e. the conviction of our own minds. But it is here that the fatal mistake takes place. The pride of the religious enthusiast takes up his subjective truth as the divine objective truth itself. On other subjects, if contradiction made him angry and impatient, he would be more or less ashamed of showing it. Not so in the present case. He indulges his most violent passions under the character of zeal for God and His truth; his natural desire of ruling over others appears in

the shape of a vehement concern in the preservation of the assent of the mass of the people to the orthodox, i. e. his own opinions. Because he is sure he is right, he positively denies that those who contradict him can be sure they are right, &c."—Mr. Blanco White, Law of Libel.

Or take again the parallel words of Hoadley, who died indeed in the communion, nay, in the high places, of our Church, yet on the present Bishop of London's authority", must be considered a Socinian.

"Though many persons may mistake in their different apprehensions concerning the sense of these words,” [those in which the faith was once delivered,]" yet we may be sure, whilst we retain these words, that we retain what God himself has seen fit should be delivered and transmitted to us as the best conveyance, all things considered, of the faith required of us. This I mean particularly with regard to those articles of belief which are properly Christian. . . . . By contending for the faith as it was once delivered to the saints in the New Testament, we shall only press upon men the receiving what it has pleased God to deliver, but shall avoid a great evil of enforcing upon them the consequences which we ourselves see, or think we see, to follow from the doctrines first delivered. . . . . The just consequences from any truth are certainly equally true with that truth from which they follow; and it is as certain that to him who sees them to follow, or thinks he sees them, they are as truths, and may justly be maintained as such. But they are not so to others who see them not in the same light. Nor can they be made necessary to be believed by others, till those others themselves discover their relation to the primitive truths of Religion.”— Sermon on Contending for the Faith, vol. iii. p. 714.

a Answer to Butler, p. 31.

2. Doctrine of the Trinity.

As to the doctrine of the Trinity, Dr. H. holds that Scripture contains certain phenomena concerning the dealings of the Supreme Being with man, which, when compared together, are remarkable and startling, and irresistibly force upon the mind that there is some mystery in the divine nature; but what that mystery is, or that it is the very mystery which the catholic doctrine of the Trinity expresses, is, he considers, not revealed. The catholic doctrine is one out of the infinite theories which may be raised upon the facts of Scripture, and the Athanasian Creed is in its origin the view of a party in the church. Again: it is not scriptural or necessary to insist upon the numerical or real unity of the Supreme Being; since He is not revealed as one in Himself, but as one contrasted with the gods of polytheism. On the whole, that it is an abuse of Scripture to attempt thus to deduce a theology at all, i. e. a knowledge of God in respect of His nature, attributes, &c.

1. "One fact is clear through all this labyrinth of variations which theological creeds have exhibited; that there is some extraordinary communication concerning the Divine Being, in those Scriptural notices of God, which have called forth the curiosity of thinking men in all ages. To me it matters little what opinion on the subject has been prior, has been advocated by the shrewdest wit or deepest learning, has been most popular, most extensive in its reception. All differences

of this kind belong to the history of the human mind, as much as to theology, and affect not the broad basement of fact on which the manifold forms of speculation have taken their rise. The only ancient, only catholic truth is the scriptural fact. Let us hold that fast in its depth and breadth . . . and we can neither be Sabellians, or Tritheists, or Socinians."-B. L. p. 149.

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Historically regarded, they [Dr. H.'s discussions] evidence the reality of those sacred facts of Divine Providence, which we comprehensively denote by the doctrine of a Trinity in Unity. But let us not identify this reality with the theories couched under a logical phraseology. I firmly and devoutly believe that word, which has declared the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. But who can pretend to that exactness of thought on the subject, on which our technical language is based ?"-B. L. p. 150.

2. "When I look at the reception by the Unitarians both of the Old and New Testament, I cannot, for my part, strongly as I dislike their theology, deny to those who acknowledge this basis of divine facts, the name of Christians."-Observ. p. 20.

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"Thus, again, to the Trinitarian, the consequences of rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity must consistently be regarded as dangerous. But he has no right to extend his anathema beyond himself to one who has unhappily not embraced the same view of Scripture truth."-Observ. p. 27. 3. "It appears to me that the silence respecting the individual author" [of the Athanasian Creed] was designed, or at least his name was forgotten, in the wish to give a higher authority to the document; and that its reception by us in its present form....is an evidence of the triumph of a party in the Church, thus declaring their authoritative judgment under the sanction of a name, which expressed in itself every thing hostile to Arianism."-B. L. p. 105.

4. "No one can be more convinced than I am, that there is a

real mystery of God revealed in the Christian dispensation; and that no scheme of Unitarianism can solve the whole of the phenomena which Scripture records. But I am also as fully sensible, that there is a mystery attached to the subject, which is not a mystery of God. Take, for instance, the notion of the Divine Unity. We are apt to conceive that the Unity must be understood numerically; that we may reason from the notion of Unity to the properties of the Divine Being. But is this a just notion of the Unity of God?.... Surely the revelation of the Divine Unity was not meant to convey to Israel any speculative notion of the oneness of the Deity, but practically to influence their minds in regard to the superstitions from which they had been brought out. . . Now were this view of the revelation of the Divine Unity strictly maintained, would it not greatly abate the repugnance often felt at the admission of a Trinity in Unity? . . . . To deny a Trinity would then be felt the same as to assert that, because polytheism was false, therefore no new manifestation of God, not resulting from the negation of polytheism, can be true."B. L. p. 146.

...

5. "To the Christian speculator, under such a method" [the scholastic], "these principles would of course be sought no where else but in the Divine Being himself... His nature and attributes, so far as they were explained by the light of reason or revealed by the illumination of Scripture, would alone present to the inquirer that immobility and eternity, and absolute priority of truth, of which he was in quest."-B. L.

p. 78. "Its [the scholastic system's] principles... were to be drawn from the nature of the Divine Being, as the only sure ground on which a divine and universal philosophy could fix its first steps."-B. L. p. 79.

"If now we regard the Scriptures in the way of the Schoolmen, as having God for their proper subject, instead of reading them as a divine history of man, we naturally neglect the analogies of time and circumstances. The immutability