any person whatever." I am therefore unwilling to charge it on you or Mr. Badcock, notwithstanding some appearances might seem to justify me in it.

I am the most puzzled to account for the strange and improbable history that you, Sir, have given of a church of orthodox Jews at Jerusalem after the time of Adrian, and the series of historical facts, as you have the assurance to call them, for which it is not possible that you should have any authority in ancient or even in modern writers; and yet had you yourself been present at the surrender of the place, and had drawn up the terms of capitulation, you could not have given a more distinct and positive account. But the fact, I believe, was, that, without any examination of your own, you took it for granted from the authority of Mosheim, (who had no authority for it himself,) that one leading circumstance was true, and then concluded that the other circumstances which you have added, and therefore knew that you added, must have been so too. On this you have not hesitated to relate the whole in one continued narrative, just as if you had been copying from some historian of the time; and Origen, who lived in those times, and in the very country, and whose veracity was never questioned before, is treated without ceremony as a wilful liar, because he has given a different account of things".

* The learned writer is under a mistake in supposing that Dr. Horsley invented the circumstances relating to the church at Elia. The fact is, and the Archdeacon confesses it in his Reply to these Letters, part ii. chap. 2. that he did copy these circumstances from the note in Mosheim's Commentaries, &c. to which he refers. But Dr. Priestley at that time not having access to this work, consulted only Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, in which Mosheim had with great discretion omitted many of those circumstances which he had introduced into his Commentaries, and which had no foundation but

As it has been very much my object to trace effects to their causes, and I consider the human mind, and consequently all human actions, to be subject to laws as regular as those which operate in my laboratory, (for want of knowing or attending to which Mr. Gibbon has egregiously failed in his account of the causes of the spread of christianity, and you in this controversy,) I had framed an hypothesis to account for Mr. Badcock's censure of what I said concerning Eusebius; but not being quite satisfied with it I rejected it. However, notwithstanding strong appearances, I am still willing to hope that the misrepresentation, though exceedingly gross, was not directly wilful.

I am, &c.

LETTER XIX.

Miscellaneous Articles, and the Conclusion. REV. SIR,

DISPOSED as you are to make the most of every trifling oversight that you can discover in my History, and of every concession that I make to you, I still have no objection to acknowledge any real mistake that I have fallen into, important or unimportant; and I shall certainly correct all such in any future edition of my work; and likewise, as far as I am able, in the trans

in his own imagination, as the Archdeacon afterwards found to his great disappointment and chagrin. And the remainder of this controversy is occupied chiefly in elaborate and ingenious but unsuccessful efforts to extricate himself from the difficulties in which he had involved himself by hastily adopting the unfounded positions and calumnies of Mosheim.-ED.

lations that are making of it into foreign languages. I shall now make two acknowledgements, and let our readers judge of their importance; and how little my History loses for want of being perfectly correct in those particulars.

I had said that "Valesius was of opinion that the history of Hegesippus was neglected and lost, because it was observed to favour the unitarian doctrine;" whereas I should have said, "on account of the errors which it contained, and that those errors could not be supposed to be any other than those of the unitarians;" and if I had consulted the passage at the time, I certainly should have expressed myself in that more cautious manner. But of what consequence is this circumstance to my great argument? Mr. Badcock, having looked for the passage to which I refer, and not being able to find it, seems to have imagined that I had no such passage to produce. He therefore, after his insolent manner, challenges me to produce it, and to put him to shame. That I believe to be impossible, otherwise it would have been effectually done in my Remarks on the Monthly Review; at least, by my notice of his most shameful conduct with respect to my censure of Eusebius, p. 21, of which he says nothing at all in his Letter to me. I suppose he thought it not to be regarded. However the passage which I refer to, and which sufficiently answers my purpose, is as follows: "Moreover, those books of Clement contained a short and compendious exposition of both the testaments, as Photius, in his Bibliotheca witnesses; but on account of the errors with which they abounded being negligently kept, they were at length lost; nor was there any other reason, in my opinion, why the

books of Papias, Hegesippus, and others of the ancients are now lost*."

You, Sir, however, have observed this passage, and you say, p. 4, “ Valesius has indeed expressed an opinion that the work of Hegesippus was neglected by the ancients on account of errors which it contained. But what the errors might be which might occasion this neglect is a point upon which Valesius is silent. And what right have you to suppose that the unitarian doctrine was the error which Valesius ascribed to Hegesippus more than to Clemens Alexandrinus, upon whose last work of the Hypotyposes he passes the same judgement?"

I answer, that there were no errors of any consequence ascribed to that early age besides those of the Gnostics and of the unitarians. The former certainly were not those that Valesius could allude to with respect to Hegesippus, because this writer mentions the Gnostics very particularly as heretics, but makes no mention of unitarians at all; though they certainly existed, and I doubt not constituted the great body of unlearned christians in his time, which is one circumstance that, together with his being a Jewish christian, (all of whom are expressly said to have been Ebionites, and none of them to have believed the divinity of Christ,) leads me to conclude that he was an unitarian himself. Though Clemens Alexandrinus was not an unitarian, yet he never calls unitarians heretics; and

* Porro i Clementis libri continebant brevem et compendiariam utriusque testamenti expositionem, ut testatur Photius in Bibliotheca. Ob errores autem quibus scatebant, negligentius habiti, tandem perierunt. Nec aiia, meo quidem judicio, causa est, cur Papiæ et Hegesippi, aliorumque veterum libri, interciderint. In Euseb. Hist. lib. v. cap. 11.

་

since in his accounts of heretics in general, which are pretty frequent in his works, he evidently means the Gnostics only, and therefore virtually excludes unitarians from that description of men; it is by no means improbable but that, in those writings of his which are lost, he might have said things directly in favour of unitarians.

In this passage Valesius also mentions the writings of Papias as having, in his opinion, been lost for the same reason. Now Papias has certainly been supposed to be an Ebionite. Mr. Whiston has made this very probable from a variety of circumstances. See his Account of the Ceasing of Miracles, p. 18. In the same tract he gives his reasons for supposing Hegesippus to have been an Ebionite, and he expresses his wonder, "that he should have had the good fortune to be so long esteemed by the learned for a catholic," p. 21, &c. In this Mr. Whiston may be supposed to have been sufficiently impartial, as he was an Arian, and expresses great dislike of the Ebionites; as, indeed, Arians always have done.

I also acknowledge that I ought not to have exempted Epiphanius (as you have observed, p. 4, though with more severity than the case required) from the impropriety of charging Noetus with being a Patripassian. But this also is a circumstance of as little consequence to the main argument as the former, though my negli gence with respect to it, I frankly own, was greater. I had myself discovered the mistake, and should have corrected it, if your Letters to me had never appeared. That the Patripassian notion was injuriously charged upon the unitarians of antiquity is sufficiently shown by Beausobre, who was himself a trinitarian and a man of