LETTER I

REPLY TO SOME OF THOSE PASSAGES IN THE REV. R. W.

HAMILTON'S WORK, WHICH ARE ADDRESSED TO THE

AUTHOR PERSONALLY.

DEAR SIR,

I HAVE attentively read the letters which you have addressed to me, not without admiration of the controversial ingenuity, the liveliness of imagination, and the copious and easy flow of words, which prove them to be the genuine productions of your pen; but with sincere regret to find them breathing so little of the meek and lowly spirit of Him, of whom you affirm yourself, and deny me, to be a true disciple. I shall endeavour to reply to them calmly and candidly, as well as honestly, and shall be disappointed if I cannot succeed somewhat better than you have done in your late work, in transfusing into my answer the good temper and mildness of spirit which, I gladly acknowledge, distinguished a former production of yours, to which you have referred. Of your Strictures on my sermon, entitled "Omniscience the attribute of the Father only," I have always thought and spoken with pleasure, as a convincing proof that even a Calvinist might write of Unitarianism and to a Unitarian without asperity. If I found any fault with the tone of your Strictures, it was one which I of course could readily pardon, namely, that you spoke of me personally in a much more complimentary strain than I was conscious of deserving. If I did not reply to them, my silence most assuredly could not have been truly

B

ascribed, as you seem to ascribe it in your advertisement, to pride or contempt. Gratitude and regard, on the contrary, were the sentiments which your treatment of me on that occasion inspired, and which, in my subsequent intercourse with you I thought, erroneously, as it now appears, and I am sorry to perceive it, that I had frequently and clearly expressed. I confess that I did not then, nor do I now, regard your work as a refutation of mine. On some points I felt inclined to repel your objections, but nothing less than strong necessity ever drives me to the press or even to the writing-desk, and on the whole I was willing, as I still continue to be, to allow my Sermon and your Strictures upon it to go together, and to leave it to the judicious reader to form his own impartial estimate of the comparative value of the arguments which they contain. I pretend to no "superiority" over you; I feel no "scorn" of your interference. Your friendly aid or opposition I hope I shall always receive in a friendly spirit; but I claim the privilege of being silent or otherwise, of answering or forbearing to answer, as my own inclinations and views of duty dictate. You complain (p. 2) that I have not treated you on the late occasion as you formerly treated me, that I did not courteously forewarn you of my intention to comment on your Address, or convey the copy of which I requested your acceptance by my "domestic messenger." Fully sensible of the kindness and courtesy of your conduct on that occasion, I can only excuse myself by pleading that, in circumstances altogether different, I could not reasonably be expected to act as you did. Had my letter been a reply to your "Strictures," or to a temperate defence of your own sentiments, or even to a fair and friendly attack upon mine, I should have been ashamed to have been outdone by you in courtesy. But you well know that this was not the case. It was a reply to what I could not but deem a gross libel, expressed in most unfriendly and offensive terms, on the religious and moral character of the sect to which I belong, and my relation to which I shall always rejoice to acknowledge. You never forewarned me of your forthcoming notes to the Airedale Address, nor did you send me a copy of them when printed. I blame you not for this: to have done so would have been to offer me a personal insult, of which I do not think you capable: but surely you cannot imagine that I was bound to preface my repulse of a most unceremonious, and, in my opinion, unchristian attack, by compliments which, in such a case, could have been no other than hollow and unmeaning. I am not in the habit of professing what I do not feel : what I felt was sufficiently expressed in the letter itself; and I therefore requested the printer to send you, with my respects, the first copy that should be printed.

You express displeasure (p. 39, 47) that I should have quoted a passage from your Address in my Sermon. In making that quotation I have since thought that it would have been friendly in me, and what I should have approved in my own case, to omit an expression or two which, on second thoughts, you might not have retained, and which perhaps, gave somewhat of the air of a caricature to your picture of orthodoxy, and I regret therefore that I did not do so, even at the risk of being charged with garbling what you had written. Otherwise I know not why you should be displeased; the passage in question is quoted faithfully, and contains nothing more than your enumeration of what appear to you, and not to you only, but to the greater number of those who are for cutting us off from the body of the Church, the essential doctrines of "Catholic Christianity." In my Sermon, for I did not of course preach the notes to it, I said nothing of the offensive parts of your Address; nothing that was intended to have a merely personal application: My observations were designed to repel the assertions, and answer the arguments, of all those who have lately denied to us the Christian name. You say that you have never, in the course of all your ministry, alluded, directly, or indirectly, to any thing that I have said or written, in occupying your pulpit, and addressing your congregation. Probably you have not thought it worth while to do so. Should you, however, at any future time find in my published writings any thing worthy of your congregation's notice, in the way either of praise or censure, I give you free liberty to avail yourself of it, as you would of the matter of any other publication; and if you will only take care to cite faithfully, and to comment impartially, I shall deem myself rather honoured than disgraced, rather benefited than injured, by your thus calling the attention of your people to what I have written. I seldom quote from authors for whom I do not feel some degree of respect; and to be quoted, therefore, I have been in the habit of considering rather as a compliment than otherwise. "Meet me," you say, "where I meet you, by the press and before the public at once; and not having referred to me before your own partizans, some of whom I have been encouraged to hope were my personal friends, allow three weeks to elapse before any of your reported allegations could be canvassed or disproved." This is written in a high strain, and sounds well when delivered " ore rotundo," but it will not bear examination, for I had made no allegations at all respecting you personally, and so far are you from having any wish to disprove what I had said generally respecting those who deny to Unitarians the Christian name, that you admit fully the correctness of my statement of the fact, and do your very best to vindicate the doctrine and conduct that I had impugned. I cannot accuse myself of having acted on this, or on any former occasion of the like kind, otherwise than " openly and manfully;" though I might perhaps have had some misgivings on this subject if I had addressed to a Unitarian congregation observations directly implicating the moral character and conduct of the whole Calvinistic body. I know not whether there were any Unitarians present when you delivered your address at Airedale; but this I know, that more than three weeks-some months-had elapsed before I heard of it from a gentleman of your own denomination, and that it was not published at Leeds, where it was most likely to have attracted the notice of our body, till my intention to comment upon it had been announced. You may have known that there were Unitarians amongst your Airedale audience; the non-publication at Leeds may have been the printer's omission; I have not the slightest wish