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The reader, acquainted with the circumstances of the philosopher's life, aware of the extent of his knowledge, the brilliance of his genius, the singular vigor and keenness of his judgment, his love of truth, and indefatigable diligence in the search of it, may now proceed with confidence to the study of the Reasonableness of Christianity. He will find in the language a plainness and simplicity reflected from the Scriptures themselves. No opinion is advanced but what seems based on some text: no fine-spun inferences are drawn from doubtful expressions. The discourses of Christ and his apostles, as far as possible accord

me and another person, who, every day, from the beginning to the end of my search, saw the progress of it, and knew at my first setting out that was ignorant whither it would lead me; and therefore, every day, asked me, what more the Scripture had taught me? So far was I from the thoughts of Socinianism, or an intention to write for that or any other party, or to publish any thing at all. But when I had gone through the whole, and saw what a plain, simple, reasonable thing Christianity was, suited to all conditions and capacities; and in the morality of it now, with divine authority, established into a legible law, so far surpassing all that philosophy and human rea-ing to the order of time, are examined, compared, son had attained to, or could possibly make effectual to all degrees of mankind, I was flattered to think it might be of some use in the world; especially to those who thought either that there was no need of revelation at all, or that the revelation of our Saviour required the belief of such articles for salvation, which the settled notions and their way of reasoning in some, and want of understanding in others, made impossible to them. Upon these two topics the objections seemed to turn, which were with most assurance made by Deists against Christianity; but against Christianity misunderstood. It seemed to me, that there needed no more to show them the weakness of their exceptions, but to lay plainly before them the doctrine of our Saviour and his apostles, as delivered in the Scriptures, and not as taught by the several sects of Christians."

and explained, sometimes from the circumstances under which they were delivered, sometimes from their reference to the general scheme of Christianity, but always without any attempt at straining their meaning, or any of those disingenuous arts common among the framers of systems. Occasionally, indeed, he appears to mistake the intention of Scripture: but, not being sure of our own interpretation, it would be presumption to decide he must every where be wrong where we think him so; though we claim for ourselves the liberty he demanded, to examine his examination, and draw our own conclusions.

London, December, 1835.

J. A. ST. J.

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THE REASONABLENESS OF CHRISTIANITY.

THE little satisfaction and consistency that is to 2. To one that thus unbiassed reads the Scripbe found in most of the systems of divinity I have tures, what Adam fell from, is visible, was the met with, made me betake myself to the sole read-state of perfect obedience, which is called justice ing of the Scripture (to which they all appeal) for the understanding the Christian religion. What from thence, by an attentive and unbiassed search I have received, reader, I here deliver to thee. If by this my labor thou receivest any light or confirmation in the truth, join with me in thanks to the Father of Lights, for his condescension to our understandings. If, upon a fair and unprejudiced examination, thou findest I have mistaken the sense and tenor of the gospel, I beseech thee, as a true Christian, in the spirit of the gospel (which is that of charity) and in the words of sobriety, set me right in the doctrine of salvation.

in the New Testament, though the word which in the original signifies justice, be translated righteousness: and by this fall he lost paradise, wherein was tranquillity and the tree of life; that is, he lost bliss and immortality. The penalty annexed to the breach of the law, with the sentence pronounced by God upon it, shows this. The penalty stands thus: "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." How was this executed? He did eat; but in the day he did eat, he did not actually die, but was turned out of paradise from the tree of life, and shut out for ever from it, lest he should take thereof and live for ever. This shows that the state of paradise was a state of immortality, of life without end, which he lost that very day that he eat.* His life began from thence

*The question here discussed is one upon which the varieties of opinion are almost as numerous as the persons who have treated of it. Milton, whose theoretical notions underwent, in the course of his life, numerous alterations, always tending from the the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, knew not more fanatical to the less, evidently, when he wrote what to think of the state into which Adam fell by his transgression; but, like the erring spirits,

"Reasoned high

Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost."

1. It is obvious to any one who reads the New Testament, that the doctrine of redemption, and consequently of the gospel, is founded upon the supposition of Adam's fall. To understand, therefore, what we are restored to by Jesus Christ, we must consider what the Scripture shows we lost by Adam. This I thought worthy of a diligent and unbiassed search; since I found the two extremes that men run into on this point, either on the one hand shook the foundations of all religion, or on the other made Christianity almost nothing. For whilst some men would have all Adam's posterity doomed to eternal infinite punishment, for the transgression of Adam, whom millions had never heard of, and no one had authorized to transact for him, or be his representative; this seemed to others so little consistent with the justice or goodness of the great and infinite God, which is named of Arminius, are wont to accuse "The Jesuits," he says, “and that sect among us that they thought there was no redemption ne- us," (he was now a Presbyterian,) " of making God cessary, and consequently that there was none, the author of sin, in two degrees especially, not to rather than admit of it upon a supposition so de-speak of his permission: first, because we hold, that rogatory to the honor and attributes of that Infinite Being; and so made Jesus Christ nothing but the restorer and preacher of pure natural religion; thereby doing violence to the whole tenor of the New Testament: and, indeed, both sides will be suspected to have trespassed this way, against the written word of God, by any one who does but take it to be a collection of writings designed by God for the instruction of the illiterate bulk of mankind in the way to salvation; and therefore generally and in necessary points to be understood in the plain direct meaning of the words and phrases, such as they may be supposed to have had in the mouths of the speakers, who used them according to the language of that time and country wherein they lived, without such learned, artificial, and forced senses of them as are sought out, and put upon them in most of the systems of divinity, according to the notions that each one has been bred up in.

he hath decreed some to damnation, and consequently to sin, say they; next, because those means, which are of saving knowledge to others, he makes to them an occasion of greater sin. Yet, considering the perfection wherein man was created, and might have stood, no decree necessitating his free-will, but subsequent, though not in time, yet in order to causes which were in his own power; they might, methinks, be persuaded to absolve both God and us. Whenas the doctrine of Plato and Chrysippus, with their followers, the Academics and the Stoics, knew not what a consummate and most adorned Pandora was bestowed upon Adam to be the nurse and guide of his arbitrary happiness and perseverance; I mean his native innocence and perfection, which might have kept him from being our true Epimetheus; and though they taught of virtue and vice to be both the gift of divine destiny, they could yet give reasons not invalid, to justify the councils of God and fate from the insulsity of mortal tongues: that man's own free-will, self-corrupted, is the adequate and sufficient cause of his disobedience besides fate; as

to shorten and waste, and to have an end; and from thence to his actual death, was but like the time of a prisoner between the sentence passed and the execution, which was in view and certain; death then entered and showed his face, which before was shut out and not known. So St. Paul, "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin;* that is a state of death and mortality and, "in Adam all die ;" that is, by reason of his transgression all men are mortal, and come to die.

man nature in his postsrity it is strange that the New Testament should not any where take notice of it, and tell us, that corruption seized on all because of Adam's transgression, as well as it tells us so of death. But, as I remember, every one's sin is charged upon himself only.

5. Another part of the sentence was, 'Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.' This

as immortality, without toil and without sorrow. But when man was turned out, he was exposed to the toil, anxiety, and frailties of this mortal life, which should end in the dust, out of which he was made, and to which he should return; and then have no more life or sense than the dust had, out of which he was made.

3. This is so clear in these cited places, and so much the current of the New Testament, that no-shows that paradise was a place of bliss as well body can deny, but that the doctrine of the gospel is, that death came on all men by Adam's sin; only they differ about the signification of the word death. For some will have it to be a state of guilt, wherein not only he but all his posterity was so involved, that every one descended of him deserved endless torment in hell-fire. I shall say nothing more here, how far, in the apprehensions of men, this consists with the justice and goodness of God, having mentioned it above: but it seems a strange way of understanding a law which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death should be meant eternal life in misery. Could any one be supposed by a law that says, "for felony thou shalt die," not that he should lose his life, but be kept alive in perpetual exquisite torments? And would any one think himself fairly dealt with, that was so used?

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6. As Adam was turned out of paradise, so all his posterity was born out of it; out of the reach of the tree of life. All, like their father Adam, in a state of mortality, void of the tranquillity and bliss of paradise. By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin." But here will occur the common objection, that so many stumble at:-How doth it consist with the justice and goodness of God, that the posterity of Adam should suffer for his sin; the innocent be punished for the guilty? Very well, if keeping one from 4. To this they would have it be also a state of what he has no right to, be called a punishment. necessary sinning, and provoking God in every The state of immortality in paradise is not due action that men do: a yet harder sense of the to the posterity of Adam more than to any other word death than the other. God says, "That in creature. Nay, if God afford them a temporary the day that thou eatest of the forbidden fruit, mortal life, it is his gift, they owe it to his bounty, thou shalt die;" that is, thou and thy posterity they could not claim it as their right, nor does he shall be ever after incapable of doing any thing, injure them when he takes it from them. Had but what shall be sinful and provoking to me, and he taken from mankind any thing that was their shall justly deserve my wrath and indignation.-right; or did he put men in a state of misery Could a worthy man be supposed to put such terms upon the obedience of his subjects? Much less can the righteous God be supposed, as a punishment of one sin wherewith he is displeased, to put a man under a necessity of sinning continually and so multiplying the provocation. The reason of this strange interpretation we shall perhaps find in some mistaken places of the New Testament. I must confess, by death here I can understand nothing but a ceasing to be, the losing of all actions of life and sense. Such a death came on Adam and all his posterity, by his first disobedience in paradise; under which death they should have lain for ever, had it not been for the redemption by Jesus Christ. If by death threatened to Adam were meant the corruption of hu

Homer also wanted not to express, both in his Iliad and Odyssey. And Manilius the poet, although in his fourth book he tells of some created both to sin and punishment;' yet without murmuring, and with an industrious cheerfulness, he acquits the Deity." Book i. ch. 3. And so Manilius might well do, because the pagan notions of deity and fate were most obscure and confused; for, to those best acquainted with ancient philosophy, it will, I doubt not, appear, that what they called fate, we call God, their revealed separate divinities being only the high ministers of this sovereign power of the universe.-ED.

* Rom. v. 12.

+ 1 Cor. xv. 22.

worse than not being, without any fault or demerit of their own; this, indeed, would be hard to reconcile with the notion we have of justice, and much more with the goodness and other attributes of the Supreme Being, which he has declared of himself, and reason as well as revelation must acknowledge to be in him; unless we will confound good and evil, God and Satan. That such a state of extreme irremediable torment is worse than no being at all, if every one's sense did not determine against the vain philosophy, and foolish metaphysics of some men;* yet our Saviour's

* To what metaphysicians he alludes I am ignorant; but though, once born and conscious of exist ence, we all vehemently abhor to leave "the warm precincts of the cheerful day," and lie for ever in "cold obstruction" and Lethean sleep, we must doubtless humbly acquiesce in the truth and wisdom of our Saviour's decision. Our feelings, however, on the subject, depend greatly on our personal character. Moloch, a fierce and savage spirit, covets annihilation :

"What doubt we to incense
His utmost ire? which to the height enraged,
Will either quite consume us, and reduce
To nothing this essential, happier far
Than miserable to have eternal being:
Or if our substance be indeed divine,
And cannot cease to be, we are at worst
On this side nothing."

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the resurrection. Then they recovered from death, which otherwise all mankind should have continued under, lost for ever, as appears by St. Paul's arguing concerning the resurrection.

9. And thus men are by the second Adam restored to life again; that so by Adam's sin they may none of them lose any thing, which by their own righteousness they might have a title to. For righteousness, or an exact obedience to the law, seems by the Scripture to have a claim of right to eternal life: "To him that worketh," i. e. does the works of the law, "is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt:"* and, "blessed are they who do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God." If any of the posterity of Adam were just, they shall not lose the reward of it,-eternal life and bliss,-by being his mortal issue: Christ will bring them all to life again; and then they shall be put every one upon his own trial, and receive judgment, as he is found to be righteous or not: and the righteous, as our Saviour says,→ "shall go into eternal life." Nor shall any one miss it, who has done what our Saviour directed the lawyer, who asked, "What he should do to inherit eternal life?" "Do this," that is, what is required by the law, "and thou shalt live."

peremptory decision has put it past doubt, that one may be in such an estate, that it had been better for him not to have been born." But that such a temporary life as we now have, with all its frailties and ordinary miseries, is better than no being, is evident by the high value we put upon it ourselves. And therefore though all die in Adam, yet none are truly punished but for their own deeds. God will render to every one-how? according to his deeds. "To those that obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doth evil." "We must appear before the judgmentseat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he has done, whether it be good or bad." And Christ himself, who knew for what he should condemn men at the last day, assures us, in the two places where he describes his proceeding at the great judgment, that the sentence of condemnation passes only on the workers of iniquity, such as neglected to fulfil the law in acts of charity.* And again our Saviour tells the Jews, "that all shall come forth of their graves; they that have done good, to the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation." But here is no condemnation of any one, for what his forefather Adam had done, which 10. On the other side, it seems the unalterable it is not likely should have been omitted, if that purpose of the divine justice, that no unrighteous should have been a cause why any one was ad-person, no one that is guilty of any breach of the judged to the fire with the devil and his angels.-law, should be in paradise; but that the wages of And he tells his disciples, that when he comes again with his angels in the glory of his Father, "that then he will render to every one according to his works."

7. Adam being thus turned out of paradise, and all his posterity born out of it, the consequence of it was, that all men should die, and remain under death for ever, and so be utterly lost.

8. From this estate of death Jesus Christ restores all mankind to life: "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." How this shall be, the same apostle tells us in the foregoing verse: "By man death came, by man also came the resurrection from the dead." Whereby it appears, that the life which Jesus Christ restores to all men, is that life which they receive again at

But Belial, finding, even in the midst of torment, some solace from meditation and conjectures at the endless future, entertains other opinions:

"We must exasperate

Th' Almighty victor to spend all his rage,
And that must end us, that must be our cure
To be no more:-sad cure! For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity!
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion ?"

sin should be to every man, as it was to Adam, an exclusion of him out of that happy state of immortality, and bring death upon him. And this is so conformable to the eternal and established law of right and wrong, that it is spoken of too as if it could not be otherwise. St. James says, "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death," as it were by a natural and necessary production.

11. "Sin entered into the world, and death by sin," says St. Paul; and, "the wages of sin is death." Death is the purchase of any, of every sin. "Cursed is every one who continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them." And of this St. James gives a reason: "Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all: for he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also,Do not kill:" that is, he that offends in any one point, sins against the authority which established

the law.

12. Here then we have the standing and fixed measures of life and death. Immortality and bliss belong to the righteous; those who have lived in an exact conformity to the law of God, are out of the reach of death: but an exclusion from paradise, and loss of immortality, is the portion of sinners; of all those who have any way broke that law, and failed of a complete obedience to it by the guilt of any one transgression. And thus

Byron, in one of his gloomy moods, agrees with mankind, by the law, are put upon the issues of

Moloch:

life or death; as they are righteous or unrighteous, just or unjust; that is, exact performers, or transgressors of the law.

13. But yet “all having sinned, and come short

"Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be."-Euthanasia.

[ED.

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Matt. vii. 23; Luke xiii. 27; Matt. xxv. 42.

+ Gal. iii. 10.

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