PRINTED FOR F. C. AND J, RIVINGTON, By R. and R. Gilbert, St. John's Square, Olerkenwell. 1816. THE BRITISH CRITIC, FOR JULY, 1816. ART. I. Three Sermons on the Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, preached at the Cathedral Church of Salisbury, on Trinity Sunday, in the Years 1813, 1814, and 1815. By Robert Morres, M.A. Prebendary of Salisbury. 8vo. 52 pp. 2s. Parker, Oxford; Rivingtons, London. 1816. NOVELTY is always attractive; but on theological subjects it should be examined with care, and admitted with reserve. In these highly ingenious discourses there is certainly a striking degree of novelty; but as it does not regard the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, nor, strictly speaking, the evidence of the doctrine, but merely the mode in which, as it is here suggested, that evidence was communicated to the world, whether the reader is or is not satisfied with the hypothesis proposed, he needs not to be alarmed with it. The doctrine itself remains as it was before, irrefragably founded, as has been often shewn and seldom with greater ability than in these sermons, on the clear and infallible word of God. The principle laid down by Mr. Morres is briefly this: that utility to man being the motive by which the Almighty has regulated all his communications to mankind, therefore the declaratious of his will, and particularly the revelations of his own Divine nature, were gradual, as men were prepared and were able to receive them; that, consequently, in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, intimations of a plurality of persons in the Godhead, rather than explicit declarations of the doctrine of the Trinity in unity, were to be expected; and that in the promulgation of the Gospel, the mysteries of the Divine nature would in like manner be revealed gradually, intimated in general, rather than asserted, by our Lord and the first writers and first preachers of the Gos pel, but explicitly declared by the latest, as by St. John in the VOL. VI. JULY, 1816. preface B |