all that in them lies to exclude those who adhere to Christian simplicity from the public worship of their common God-which with almost Pagan inconsistency prohibit any one's commemorating with them the death of Christ unless he believe the eternal deity of Christ-which deny not only Christian fellowship, but the Christian name to those who have every scriptural claim to its best privileges, and who have both defended the gospel by their writings, and adorned it by their lives, because they receive not their mysteries-which denounce endless punishment not only against those who may fear God and work righteousness without Christianity, but against those who fear God and work righteousness by the very power of faith in Christ, provided it be not their sort of faith, or their notion of Christ-which reckon for nothing the New-Testament confession of his authority, unless it be followed by the submission of reason or practice to their authority-which eagerly grasp at political influence and national wealth, and become the ready machinery of sion, and raise distinctions, and pronounce exclusions in societies where all have equal rights, and crush the civil liberties of others even if it be by the sale or sacrifice of their own, and change the safeguards of property and freedom into the mere fortresses of a peculiar faith, and make those who differ pay the refuters of their own opinions, and the monopolizers of their own inheritance, and if

oppres

they have abandoned the illustration of the stake, still employ the dark demonstration of the dungeon? Whose image and superscription is this? Cæsar's it may be ; for it is not of Christ. Pagan theology and worldly ambition have too much leavened modern Christianity: but not the whole mass. However other systems may divide among themselves these evils, in them Unitarian Christianity has no portion. Our faith and worship are simple, and not exclusive: we love goodness wherever found, and think that it is loved, and will be rewarded, by the Judge. The apostolic test of Christianity is ours: and perish our defence, perish our hopes of success, should one or the other ever involve any infringe+ ment of the rights of conscience, or of any other rights, or any violation of the dictates of Christian liberty and liberality!

The spirit of Christianity is a spirit of holiness. All the power of its doctrines, prophecies, miracles, precepts, and promises, is directed to the promotion of morality. The Saviour sacrificed himself to redeem us from all iniquity. Unitarianism adopts, without reservation, modification, or addition, the New-Testament accounts of the day of judgment, which uniformly represent men's moral character as deciding their destiny. It holds forth no immunity to that faith in a vicarious satisfaction, which most other systems make the only availing plea in that awful day. It allows none of those excuses for sin

which arise from a supposed total depravity of na ture. It forbids any waiting for supernatural influences to enable men to do their duty. It has no royal road of instantaneous regeneration, from the death-bed of iniquity to the gates of Paradise. I believe there is not, nor ever has been, any religion that so frequently, so decidedly, so powerfully, as Unitarian Christianity, holds up the connexion of happiness with virtue, and of misery with vice, unweakened by any modification about belief or ceremony, and standing alone in broad characters, in all the supremacy of paramount importance.

Philanthropy may be regarded as having dawned upon the world in the instructions of Jesus of Naza reth. He made a common principle of what before was only an occasional sentiment. He bound men to each other's hearts, in spite of national and religious diversities, by a common origin, a common nature, and a common relation to the one God, their Almighty Father. That Father he imitated by feeling and inculcating universal love to man. One of these principles has become a distinguishing tenet of Unitarianism, to which other systems have abandoned the (to us) welcome task of proclaiming that God is, in the same sense, the Father of all, and consequently of putting in the strongest light the brotherhood of the human race.

By whatever doc

trine or hypothesis they limit or abrogate this principle; by his supposed hatred to a portion of his

rational creatures; by his eternal decree predestinating some to endless life, but others to endless misery; by his identifying the children of Adam with their transgressing parent, and therefore involving them (except the elect) in his wrath and curse; by his leaving some to the unaided workings of a nature supposed to be totally depraved, and only capable of producing guilt and wretchedness; by his not including them in the benefits of Christ's satisfaction, or of the regenerating influence of the Holy Spirit; by his seeing in them only fit subjects for the eternal visitations of his justice, and the display of his glory in their final ruin :-whatever modification be adopted, there cannot but result in the heart of man (unless he be driven to abhor, while he believes in, such a character of the Deity) a diminution of brotherly feeling towards some of the human race. But on whatever altar, and to whatever theological idol, bigotry would immolate this glorious truth, it is Unitarianism that rushes in between the priest and the victim, and stays the sacrifice, and saves from pollution the temple of Christianity. We approach not the throne of grace in the mockery of prayers for the salvation of all, which we know cannot and shall not be answered to all eternity we see not, in the wide world, a claimant on our sympathy and love who, as our faith tells us, is unpitied and unloved of our God: we behold not in human nature a loathsome mass of corruption

which makes every thought a sin, and all, except our elect associates in the possession of supernaturally-bestowed holiness, not fit to be loved, and scarcely fit to live: we look not for a heaven for ever exclusive; nor think to hear with delight, or with content, the honours of vindictive justice proclaimed in groans of hopeless anguish; nor expect that, as they burst from the hearts of the objects of our fondest attachment here, or of any fellow-creature, they will minister to the perfection of our happiness, or be consistent with its existence. And therefore we can love mankind with an unreservedness and fulness of emotion, like that which glows in the New Testament; whose production by our system proclaims, that if the tree is judged by its fruit, Unitarianism is at least a scion of Christianity; and whose existence, whenever the happy inconsistency presents itself, in connexion with the theology we have adverted to, has the incongruous appearance of gathering grapes from thorns, and figs from thistles.

Judaism and Christianity were emphatically religions of hope. Their believers were always looking forward to something joyous in futurity: and their predictions had generally an expansive character, which refers their fulfilment not so much to a single event as a series of events, of similar nature, each surpassing in splendour and gladness that which preceded it, till the oracle is fully accomplished in