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sense of the imposers is fully known; and there is no room left for a subscriber (as such) to put any contrary, or different sense upon the public forms.

6. If words be capable of several meanings, but yet certainly exclude this or that particular meaning; a subscriber cannot honestly take the forms in that meaning which is specially excluded. For this would be subscribing against the sense of the Church at the same time that he professes his agreement with it.

7. It may be certainly known that any Arian sense of our public forms is such a sense as our Church intended to exclude, and has excluded, in as full and strong positive terms as the wit of man is able to devise. And all men of sense must allow, that when compilers and imposers have done the utmost they could, and as far as any words can reach, to express the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity; they may and must be supposed to mean that very doctrine which they have industriously laboured to express,

and none other.

8. And that it may not be pretended by our modern Arians, that their sense is not Arian, (which nevertheless it certainly is,) it is farther evident, and hath been shown, that the main particulars of their scheme (call it what they please) is specially excluded, both by the plain words and undoubted intention of our public forms.

9. Therefore none of the advocates for the new scheme can fairly or honestly subscribe to our Church's forms, though they could invent a sense for them consistent with their own principles; it being evident that any such sense is contrary to our Church's sense, and to the intention of the imposers.

10. The pleas and excuses devised to justify the subscribing in a sense contrary to, or different from, the known sense of the imposers, being founded either on false presumptions or weak reasonings, are of no weight or significancy; but the Arian subscriber must be blameable for going counter to the known sense of the Church, even though the words were capable of another meaning.

11. Yet, upon examination, it appears that many expressions of our public forms are really not capable of any sense consistent with the new scheme. And therefore, if the patrons of it subscribe to their own sense, (as they must be conceived to do,) they subscribe to a sense which is no sense of our public forms at all, on any supposition.

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12. The subscription therefore of those gentlemen, however glossed over with the pretence of subscribing "in "such sense as is agreeable to (what they call) Scrip"ture," really amounts to no more than subscribing "far as is in their opinion agreeable to Scripture." Which way of subscribing not only defeats every end of subscription, and stands condemned by our laws, and by the express resolution of our judges, but is also absurd in itself; as leaving room for any prevarication whatever, in the matter of oaths or tests; and for subscribing the Romish Confession, or even the Alcoran, or any thing; and is moreover explicitly condemned, even by the generality of those who plead for Arian subscription.

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A SUPPLEMENT

ΤΟ

THE CASE

OF

ARIAN SUBSCRIPTION

CONSIDERED:

IN ANSWER TO A LATE PAMPHLET,

ENTITLED

THE CASE OF SUBSCRIPTION TO THE XXXIX ARTICLES

CONSIDERED.

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