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95 of a low Arian tone, but certainly able, was Peirce and Hallett's Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, which Michaelis translated into German, with notes of his own. In fact, Arian and semi-Socinian publications met with more acceptance than one would have expected. Even Dr. Isaac Watts, in his later years, was thought to be tinctured with similar views of the Person of Christ, not to say that the same was believed of Philip Doddridge, though only in his earlier years. Then came Dr. John Taylor, of Norwich, author of the well-known "Hebrew Concordance," in whose bold "Paraphrase of the Epistle to the Romans, with Key to the Apostolic Writings," the whole apostolic language about redemption, reconciliation, regeneration, and the like, is interpreted as purely figurative, borrowed from the outward privileges common to all Jews under the Old Testament, and simply transferred to Christians in the New Testament to express their standing, and without respect to their personal character. At the Warrington Dissenting Academy, where Taylor was a professor, all opinions about Christ and Christianity were freely discussed, and affirmed or denied, with entire freedom. That classical scholar Gilbert Wakefield, who, on embracing Socinianism, had surrendered his position at Oxford, was received as classical tutor at Warrington, and there it was that Joseph Priestley, who eventually gained a European celebrity by his attainments in Natural Science, first began to attract notice, though not till some time afterwards known as a pronounced Socinian. Still, as a body, the Nonconformists were not prepared for such a descent. the English Church, indeed, Arthur Ashley Sykes was known to be an Arian, and his work on Sacrifice makes the sacrificial character of Christ's work to be all figure. But Dr. Lardner—who laid the Christian world under such lasting obligation by his great work on the Credibility of the Gospel History-was fain to delay for thirty years the publication of his treatise on the Logos of John's Gospel, embodying, as it did, virtual Socinianism. I have said that Joseph Priestley became a pure Socinian, but to the end of his days he was at one with all Protestant Christians up to his time in loyalty to the Scriptures, as the supreme external authority, the final arbiter in all questions of faith and duty. The late devout and candid John James Tayler, the beloved associate of Dr. Martineau in the Man

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chester New College until his death some years ago, thus speaks of Priestley :

"Brought up among the Independents, Priestley inherited through them from the old Puritans a profound sense of the value of revelation and of the authority of Scripture, which through all his changes remained with him unabated to the last. . . Like Faustus Socinus, he was disposed to regard a special revelation as the main source of all positive religious belief; and, I must think, undervalued the natural arguments for a future life. The opinion repeatedly occurs in his writings, and is steadily urged as an argument for Christianity, that the rejection of revelation draws with it, if not logically, yet as a usual consequence, the abandonment of all deep sentiment of natural religion."

Further, in an essay of Priestley's on the Inspiration of Christ, the following striking statement occurs :-

"If there be any truth in history, Christ wrought miracles as a proof of his mission from God; he preached the great doctrine of the resurrection from the dead; he raised several persons from a state of death; and what was more, he himself died and rose again in confirmation of his doctrine. The belief of these facts I call the belief of Christianity."

How different a Christianity this is from that now avowed in the Lecture of Dr. Martineau you will soon see. Mr. Belshamwho, at the close of last century and beginning of this, stood at the head of English Unitarianism, and best known as the author of what he calls An Improved Version of the New Testament-held precisely the same views with Priestley on the authority of Revelation. And as for the eloquent Dr. Channing, on the other side of the Atlantic, so entirely did he coincide with them in this that some of his best theological productions consist of discourses on the "Evidences of Christianity," and in one of the best of these, the evidence for miracles in general, and those of the "Gospel History" in particular—including the resurrection of Christ is put with a terseness, force, and felicity not exceeded by Paley, which made a deep impression upon my own mind while I was yet a student. In fact, up to the time of Theodore Parker, and that beautiful writer but transcendental and pantheistic thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the authority of Revelation was never questioned by transatlantic Unitarians. Professor Andrews Norton's work on the Genuineness of the Gospels is proof enough of this. But far more refreshing is the fact that, while the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel is entirely given up by the new school of English Unitarians, one who stands at the head of transatlantic scholarship in New

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Testament criticism, Dr. Ezra Abbot, of the Boston Unitarian School of Divinity, and, as a member of the American Revision Company is justly looked up to as an authority in that department, has published a small volume in vindication of the Joannean and apostolical authorship of that Gospel, the arguments of which the new English school will never refute.

But, as I said, the old Biblical school is dying out in England, nor could any efforts be expected to succeed in establishing Unitarianism on a Biblical basis. The younger men began to see what forced interpretations the Biblical school required for its support; and getting familiarised with that class of German. critics who freely admit that the New Testament teaches the orthodox view of Christ's Person and death, but sit loose to it, they began to speak pretty freely against the inspiration and authority of the apostolic writings, holding it enough if they believed in Christ Himself, as represented in the Gospel History. But next, since even Christ, if only a mere man, could not have transcended the limits of humanity, and so must have been liable to err-and as a Jew must have had his ideas largely cast in a Jewish mould, little adapted to an advanced state of society-they began to go outside the Gospels themselves, and sit critically upon them; and, applying the verifying faculty which every one possesses, they set themselves to test by it the whole matter of the Gospel History—facts, doctrines, and all—according as the instinctive sense of credibility might or might not set its seal upon them. Some of the elder school of Unitarians shrank from this, as a going out to sea without compass or rudder, and making shipwreck of the faith; but they did little, and the little they did only proved how completely the old faith was gone. About three years ago I was introduced to a venerable retired minister of that body, and on alluding to the two schools, the old and the new, he said, "I belong to the old school. We are called the evangelical Unitarians, because we cling to the written Gospel as the charter of our faith." But what was this gentleman himself? He was the son of an orthodox Presbyterian minister, who seeing how the Presbyterians of England were running into Unitarianism, left them and joined the Independents. But his son had caught the infection of his day, though only in its Biblical form, and now his son has taken the further step, VOL. XXXI.-NO. CXIX.

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and belongs to the new non-Biblical school. Such is the Incline upon which that body necessarily stepped, so soon as they surrendered the key-stone of the arch of revealed truth; and how far down they have descended may be judged from one other fact, before I come to the crowning evidence of it in the Lecture before us. Many years ago, an earnest and popular Unitarian minister, of the old Biblical school, in a large provincial town of England, grieved to observe how all belief in the connection of the Old Testament with the New was dying out among them, and, determined that at least his own faith should be known and marked, caused the new church which was built for him to be named "The Church of the Messiah." And more than that, he moved at the annual meeting of the Unitarian Association, that the term of admission should henceforth be the recognition of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah of the Old Testament; no great stretch, it might seem, since it was precisely the position not only of John Locke but of Joseph Priestley. Being told that such a motion could not be taken up but as a notice of motion that year, he brought it forward the following year, but was supported by no more than himself and the seconder of his motion; the rest holding it enough to recognise in Jesus the best of human teachers. What sort of pulpit work this would produce you may judge for yourselves, and the facts of the case are pretty well known.1

Coming now to the Lecture before us, it takes stock, so to speak, of the "losses" which may be supposed to result from their surrender of all the old beliefs of the body; and over against these are placed the countervailing "gains." The losses, which are startling enough, are expressed with a clearness that leaves no room for doubt as to their meaning, and with that earnestness and elevation of tone which are so characteristic of the Lecturer. At the same time there runs through the whole an unmistakeable consciousness of the deep cut which he was making into every old belief even of his own body, and of the disadvantageous impression this would produce, if not upon his actual hearers, yet upon many still connected with them in

1 I myself happened to see in a Unitarian newspaper not long ago, a letter from a lay member of that body, to this effect:-" Our ministers are calling upon us to subscribe for the building of more chapels; but let me tell them (and I speak for many of my brethren), that if they don't give us more Christianity from the pulpit, they will soon find that we have not too few, but too many chapels."

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religious fellowship. The "losses"--or their "superseded theological beliefs "-are only two, but in their prodigious sweep they embrace the whole field of written Christianity-in fact everything save bare Theism. First, all revealed religion is formally renounced, and with it, of course, all external authority in religion; secondly, and naturally enough, all faith in a promised Messiah is not only given up, but pronounced to be pure mythology. Hear our Lecturer :

"There is a total discharge from our religious conceptions of that central Jewish dream, which was always asking, 'Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?' Consider first (says the Lecturer) the total discharge from our branch of the Reformed Church of all external authority in matters of religion.”

The prediction of the Church of Rome (he says) has at last come true, that those who threw off the yoke of the Church would never rest till they had thrown off the yoke of the Bible too. Yes, he says, we have cast off the yoke of the Bible. Henceforth there is for us "no Canonical literature."

"I need not remind you how innocently and how inevitably this has come about; how completely the conception of a Canonical literature that shall for ever serve as a Divine statute-book belongs to a state of culture that has passed away. It is simply a fact that dictated faith and duty are no longer possible; and that by the way of textual oracle you can carry to the soul no vision of God, no contrition for sin, no sigh for righteousness. The time is past when a doctrine can save itself from criticism by taking refuge under an apostle's words, or a futurity authenticate itself by a prophet's forecast, or a habit become obligatory by evangelical example." You will naturally ask-Did the Lecturer expect such statements to be received quite coolly and accepted quite readily by all his auditors, or, if by them, by the generality of his own body? You shall judge for yourselves when you hear what follows:

"To our function, as witnesses for divine things, this seems at first little short of a loss of both the credentials and the instructions which legitimate our message. We naturally think how easy was the preacher's task when he had only to exhibit the sacred seal, and make clear the sentences it covered, and the Reason of men would accept them as truth, and the Will would bow before them; when doubts of Providence fled from the sufferer at the mere sound of the words, 'The hairs of your head are all numbered,' and the shadows of death vanished before the voice, ‘This mortal must put on immortality,' and the guilty conscience shuddered to hear, 'There shall in no wise enter therein anything that is unclean, or that maketh abomination and a lie.' In our moments of weakness, we may long for some infallible support, etc."