for it, or acquitted himself so wretchedly in it.

Such

strange paradoxes as those which I have recited, I will venture to say, were never before advanced by any person who made the least pretension to a knowledge of ecclesiastical history; and yet this is the man who has voluntarily stepped forth, not as deigning to enter into a regular discussion of the question, but only to show my incompetency in the subject; when, to repeat his own phraseology, no man ever appeared to be more incompetent in any thing than he is in this business. There are judges of this kind of literature in Europe. Before them I deliberately advance this; and whatever my credit and the authority of my name, of which he speaks preface p. 4, and which he there declares it to be his object to destroy, (and without any vanity I may say I have something more at stake in this respect than the Bishop of St. David's) I willingly risque it on the truth of this assertion.

be

LETTER III.

A General View of what has been done by other Writers in this Controversy in Defence of the Doctrine of the Trinity.

MY LORDS,

As this controversy engaged a considerable degree of attention, other persons soon appeared in defence of the doctrine which I undertook to oppugn, and among the rest Mr. Howes, a learned member of your church; but he appeared to be as little prepared for the discus

sion as Bishop Horsley himself. By another prescriptive argument, more curious than that of the Bishop, he undertook to demonstrate the futility of the Unitarian.doctrine, by showing that it is not more ancient than Photinus, if indeed it be truly older than Socinus. According to Mr. Howes, the Ebionites, the Nazarenes, and all those in the church or out of it, who, by all ecclesiastical historians, Trinitarians as well as others, have been considered as Unitarians, were really believers in the divinity of Christ. He proceeded half way in an attempt at a proof of his paradox, and I replied to him. Since this, some years have elapsed without hearing any thing further from him, and the remainder of his argument has not appeared.

Dr. Knowles, a Prebendary of Ely, is another champion belonging to your church in this controversy. But his performance, I imagine, will be acknowledged to be the production of zeal rather than of knowledge; his object being to prove the orthodoxy of the ancient christian writers, which I can allow him without any injury to my argument. For what I have undertaken to prove is, that the common people among christians retained the Unitarian doctrine, which they had received from the apostles, while the learned christians were misled by the principles of Platonism, of which they were great admirers, and from the three Platonic principles got the idea of three persons in the Trinity. Dr. Knowles, however, has greatly mistaken and misrepresented the opinions of the early christian writers. For, according to them, a great superiority was left to the Father, which is inconsistent with that equality which the post-Nicene fathers insisted upon, and which

is the professed doctrine of your church. This Prebendary appears also to be ignorant of the state of the ancient writings which he has quoted; not distinguishing those which are universally acknowledged to be spurious from those that are genuine.

The Dean of Canterbury *, in an early period of the controversy, besides publishing two sermons, promised a large work on the doctrine of the Trinity; but as it has not yet made its appearance, he must be ranked among the crowd of writers, almost without number, and altogether without name, who have stepped forth to show their zeal for the cause; but, conscious of their inability to assail with success the only argument that I have professed to maintain, viz. that which arises from the state of opinions in early times, have contented themselves with urging arguments from the scriptures, to which replies have been so often made that it is needless to repeat them. In the course of the controversy, however, I have not failed to notice every thing even of this kind that appeared particularly deserving of it.

In aid of the members of your church there have appeared two writers of the Catholic persuasion, superior in learning, and greatly superior in point of candour, to the Bishop of St. David's, I mean Dr. Geddes and Mr. Barnard. The former, not thinking it necessary to discuss the argument at large, thought by one prescriptive argument, as he called it, to defeat my whole object, maintaining that the decision of the Council of Nice was a sufficient proof that the faith of the primitive church was Trinitarian. But besides that the Trinity of the fathers assembled at Nice was

* Dr. Horne, afterwards Bishop of Norwich.

a very different thing from that of a later age, which has been adopted by the churches of Rome and England, I have shown by a variety of arguments, that the real opinion of the fathers who were assembled at Nice is far from being a sure guide to that of the unlearned christians even in that age, and much less in that of the apostles.

Mr. Barnard took a larger scope, but still left the most important articles of the controversy untouched. He has also made but a very weak defence of Dr. Geddes's prescriptive argument; and his ignorance of the state of ancient writings appears to be much the same with that of Dr. Knowles.

These, my Lords, are all the writers who have come to my knowledge of the established churches of England or Rome, who have controverted what I have advanced with respect to the state of opinions concerning Christ in early times. The only piece supposed to be written by a Dissenter in this branch of the controversy, is one that is entitled Primitive Candour, in which the writer does not, like Mr. Howes, deny that there were Unitarians in very early times; but he says that their tenets were considered as so much more innocent than those of the Gnostics, that they passed without censure. This I showed to be a hypothesis unsupported by fact or probability. But the piece is written with a degree of candour that does the greatest credit to the writer *.

*Dr. Benjamin Davies, then Tutor of the Dissenters' College at Homerton,

LETTER IV.

Of Subscription, and a Proposal for a Change in the Forms of Public Worship.

MY LORDS,

SUPPOSING that a revolution in favour of Unitarianism should not take place, it greatly behoves your Lordships to consider how far you are partakers in the guilt of those Unitarians who, in consequence of subscriptions countenanced and enforced by you, are daily tempted to violate their consciences in complying with them. You need not be told that the immediate offender is not the only person who will be answerable for his guilt at the tribunal of God. All are more or less guilty who are voluntarily the means of drawing others into sin; and one of these means is our not removing every temptation which it is in our power to remove to the commission of sin. In like manner we are chargeable with all evils of any other kind that we are the means of bringing upon others.

Not only, therefore, are your Lordships answerable to God for every temporal inconvenience incurred by those worthy clergymen who have resigned their livings, or who have been prevented from entering the church, and for the want of the useful services which they would have rendered it, but for the much greater evil (viz. evil of a moral nature) both of those who have subscribed when they knew that they did wrong in so doing, and of those who, by any improper consideration, have persuaded themselves that they might safely subscribe, when, strictly and honestly