tended to produce an effect on God to remove any obstacle in him or in his law, that obstacle has been removed. The only fact, in which practical faith can be at all interested, is the fact, that God is now ready to pardon sin on sincere repentance. The practical point is the readiness, not the manner in which it has been brought about. There is no greater inducement to repentance and obedience, on the supposition that Christ died to produce that readiness, than on the supposition that he died to give mankind assurance of it. And, even admitting the sacrificial and expiatory nature of Christ's death to be true, it cannot be proved that even those who fail to recognise it as such, are to be shut out from the benefits of it, unless it can be shown from the Scriptures that God has specified this element of faith in Christ, that his death was sacrificial and propitiatory, as indispensable, superadded to all other requirements. The matter then is reduced to a question of fact, Has he made such a requirement? We affirm that he has not. And instead of running over all the texts of Scripture on this subject, we shall recur to the author's own view of atonement and saving faith, which he has formally summed up, a mode of proceeding which ought certainly to be satisfactory to him. If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Here is the fundamental and all-comprehending article of Christian faith according to our author, but not one word in it of the sacrificial and expiatory nature of the death of Christ. We do not say too much, then, when we affirm, that he is not only narrowly bigoted, but grossly inconsistent, in condemning Unitarians as lost. 66 But the ambiguities of this unsparing condemnation are not yet exhausted. A sentence of so grave a nature as inevitable perdition, one would suppose, ought to rest on charges most specific in their statement, and most explicitly made out. "To reject the mode that God has appointed leaves no alternative and no hope." The most natural meaning of reject, is to refuse to accept, to refuse to act upon or avail one's self of any thing. Now it does not appear, according to our author's own showing, that the death of Christ, as far as it was sacrificial, has ever been offered to man either for his acceptance or rejection. God, to whom it was addressed, has already accepted it. Man can accept or reject only what is offered to him. Not the alternative of believing or not believing, that the death of Christ was sacrificial, is offered to man, but of accepting or not accepting the mercy of God thus procured, on condition of true repentance and sincere obedience. And do Unitarians reject the mode which God has appointed in this sense? As far as human judgment is concerned, their lives and characters must answer. If their lives and characters will not suffer by a comparison with the mass of their fellow Christians of other denominations, if their faith in Christ, evinced by their reception of his revelation as the word of God, and worshipping the Father in his name, and, in the midst of persecution and reproach, building temples for the inculcation of his religion, has the power to purify the heart and overcome the world, we know of no sense, except one of the most narrow and irrational bigotry, in which they can be said to reject the mode of salvation which God has offered. Of all men, we should suppose, that our Author ought to beware of wholesale denunciations for mere shades of faith, after such tremendous departures from Orthodoxy as he avows in this book. He must be aware that he "but teaches Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return He must be aware, that, if he establishes the principle that a precisely accurate faith as to the nature of the Atonement be necessary to salvation, the great mass of Christians may mourn over him as quite as liable to damnation, quite as guilty of "rejecting the only mode that God has offered," in failing to recognise the infinite nature of the Victim, as the Unitarians are in failing to perceive that the death of Christ was literally an expiatory sacrifice. Further and more enlarged investigations, we are sure, would convince him that the nature of the Atonement is such, that, among those who believe the fundamental proposition, which he himself has laid down as the corner-stone, the resurrection of Christ, the only fatal heresy is a wicked, irreligious life; that Atonement is a practical, not a speculative subject, reconciliation to God by repentance and reformation, "when by wicked works we were enemies to him;" and that every man receives the benefits of it just so far as he, by a religious life, enjoys peace with God, and the testimony of a good conscience. His violent prejudices against the Unitarians seem principally to have been excited, not by the general doctrines of the sect, but by some particular passages or statements of some of their champions, such as Priestley, Evanson, and Belsham. He ought to be sure, that the whole denomination participate in those obnoxious sentiments, before he condemns them in a body. Priestley, though one of the greatest men, and one of the sincerest and humblest Christians, who have ever lived, mingled with his religious opinions some philosophical dogmas, which have no more connexion with those opinions than with any other creed, materialism and philosophical necessity, — dogmas, which, whether true or false, cannot but be chilling and revolting to the great mass of mankind, and would be sufficient, we fear, to sink any religious system, however true, to which they might be attached. He has, besides, on religious topics, advanced some sentiments, and adopted some modes of expression, for which it would be altogether unjust to make all who are denominated Unitarians responsible. The head and front of Evanson's offending consists in having collected and arranged the facts, that altogether annihilate the doctrine of verbal inspiration, which was so long and so obstinately maintained, but which all, who have any tolerable acquaintance with the subject, now perceive it to be necessary to abandon, in order to sustain the divine authority of the Scriptures. And we are sorry to see men, high in place, disingenuous enough, in order to excite horror against the sect among the common people, to criminate the Unitarians, and join in the outcry against them for advocating a theory which they know to be true, and without which they know that inspiration of any kind cannot be sustained for a moment. Mr. Belsham may have been unfortunate in his modes of expression, and extravagant in some of his positions, and may have shocked some even of his own denomination, as well as many out of it; but we believe, that those, who follow in his steps of patient, careful, learned investigation, will always find it more easy to be shocked with his presumption, than to answer his arguments. One word more on the use of names. It is a standing maxim of the low morality of the world, that "all is fair in politics." Would that we could say that the same principle is not acted upon, though not avowed, in polemical discussion, and in the tactics of sectarian struggle. Here we have a gen tleman, who maintains the character of high moral worth, and who would scorn to utter a slander or a base insinuation of any kind; and yet we find him applying the name "Socinian" to a large body of professed disciples of Christ, without even, according to his own confession, having read the works of Socinus, or knowing of course, what his peculiar opinions were, or whether there was any coincidence between them and the opinions of modern Unitarians. But he did know, that the Unitarians of the present day disclaim that name, and that the word Socinian has been for centuries a nucleus of all evil and hateful associations, which, in the minds of many, may be said instantly to defile and pollute any thing to which it is applied. To use our author's language, there is nothing with which we are so apt to lose patience, as with the moral obliquity and fraud, which are exhibited in the pulpits of this land every Sabbath day. We see men stand up there as the advocates of justice and righteousness, truth and honesty, and, in the same breath, couple together, in one sweeping anathema, Atheists, Infidels, and Unitarians. Do they not know, that the impression they make upon their uninformed hearers is slanderous and false? Do they not know, that they are doing what in civil affairs would be an indictable offence, and be followed by prosecution, and the loss of moral character and all honorable reputation? Do they not feel the gross injustice, the cruel wrong, which they do their brethren, when, to excite odium against them, they class them with the deniers of a God, and the rejecters of all revelation;- men, who worship God and revere the Saviour, and who labor, according to their own views of truth and duty, to build up his cause? However the Unitarians may fall behind their opponents in professions of piety, we hope that they may never be left to fall so low in point of morality, as to endeavour to throw odium on their adversaries by invidious names and slanderous classifications. G. W. B. [For the Christian Examiner.] ART. IV. The "Angel of Jehovah," mentioned in the Old Testament, not identical with the Messiah; being the Conclusion of the Article on the "Deity of the Messiah not a Doctrine of the Old Testament."* WE have seen, in the last Number of this journal, that there is no evidence, that the Angel of Jehovah was represented in the Old Testament as a person distinct from Jehovah, and yet the same being with him; and that there is no evidence that any of the Jews at any period ever entertained such a notion. We now come to the second proposition, which is necessary to be established before any one can prove the Deity of the Messiah from the manner in which the Angel of Jehovah is spoken of in the Old Testament, even though the first had been proved to be true. The Deity of the Messiah cannot be proved from those passages unless his identity with the Angel of Jehovah be also established, even though the view of Hengstenberg in regard to the relation of the Angel to Jehovah be right, and ours wrong. What then is the evidence that the Angel of Jehovah was regarded as identical with the Messiah? In regard to this point, Hengstenberg is supported by some Unitarian writers; by some who regard the angel in question as a created or derived angel; especially by Henry Taylor in his celebrated "Ben Mordecai's Letters.' And here, too, we must remark, in regard to the evidence which might be expected for the second proposition, if it were true,It is a strange proposition. That the Messiah, whom the prophets set forth as a child, that was to be born, and that was to grow up from small beginnings, that was to be a descendant of David, &c., was the very angel, that appeared to Abraham, Moses, Gideon, &c., is so very extraordinary a proposition, that it is reasonable to require very substantial evidence in its favor, before we can put faith in it. If the prophets had had any knowledge of so remarkable a fact, it must have occupied an important space in their minds. In speaking of the glory of the Messiah, the brightest feature of * Christian Examiner, Number LXXIV., for May, 1836, p. 240. VOL. XX. - 3D S. VOL. II. NO. III. 42 |