did his parents more than others; but Adam, having fallen from God's favour, this, and other evils, happen in this wretched world." How very different was Christ's reply! how heretical, judged by Church-of-England orthodoxy! but how pious, how like the blessed Son of God!" Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him." Now, this we take as the foundation of our hope in regard to all the evils of life. Some of them we can

evidently trace as working out the will of a benevolent God; and if such a tendency in others is not so obvious, we would rest assured in pious faith, that to God they are known as such, and as such may hereafter be made manifest to our more enlarged understandings and experience.

Certain analogical reasoning is next employed by the orthodox lecturer, in defence of the transmission of guilt from Adam to all his posterity; but plausible as the argumentation is, it is met by Mr. Martineau with a still more acute, and certainly more correct logic, which cuts down without quarter, the Calvinistic sophistry, leaving only its ashes as a memorial of its offensiveness to sound reason. But on this part of the subject we must refer to the lectures themselves.

Man being altogether lost and ruined by the act of Adam, according to Mr. M'Neile's first head of discourse, --he proceeds to show, under the next two heads, that there is no salvation from such a condition, unless God be, as Trinitarianism describes, a three-fold Deity. The total corruption of human nature not being enough as a foundation for his argument, we are, therefore, told further, that sin is infinite, being an offence against an Infinite God; and that, therefore, nothing short of the intervention of God himself, to suffer the infinite punishment due to sin, can procure pardon for man and lead to his salvation. Now, if the Infinite God himself must suffer, that man may be forgiven,-this implies, according to the lecturer, that God must consist of more than one person. The Unitarian's God, according to him, cannot save. He has not sufficient resources. The Trinitarian's God alone has the requisite resources; that is, one person of the Trinity suffers the inevitable punishment due to in

finite transgression, while another receives the penalty, and grants forgiveness; and God's justice being thus manifested in one person, and his mercy in another, both are reconciled, and this is called "the only ground of consistency in the work of redemption"! To establish this, is Mr. M'Neile's object. Speaking of the resources of the God of Trinitarians, he affirms: "His resources are infinite, because they consist in CO-EQUAL AND COETERNAL PERSONALITIES." p. 317.

Since the first time that we considered the Trinitarian controversy, it has ever appeared to us that that is a curious mode of argument by which people arrive at the conclusion that God is threefold; viz. by means of the fact, that there is sin in the world, and by means of the assumption thereto added, that sin is an infinite evil, and cannot be pardoned unless God be Triune; whence it is argued, that he is Triune. Had there been no sin, or no Calvinist to tell us that sin is infinite, the use of a Triune God would have been incomprehensible. The Divine Unity alone would have been believed, had Adam not committed an infinite offence, which made it necessary human salvation that God should be more than one person; whence it is argued that he is more than one person; though, without sin, we might have innocently believed that God is strictly one. So much for the asserted effects of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! The eating of a forbidden apple has metamorphosed our ignorance of God into a knowledge of him-has turned us from Unitarian heretics and infidels into orthodox believers!

for

But a truce to irony; and let us return to the statement on which the Calvinistic argument is founded, viz. that sin is infinite. This is not merely an unproved assumption, but it is false. A finite being cannot produce an infinite effect. Man can no more be an infinite sinner than he can be infinitely righteous. No sophistry can overturn this plain fact; though Mr. M'Neile has attempted to undermine it by an insidious similitude. He represents the nature of offences against God as depending, not on the condition of the offender, but on that of the party offended; as a soldier (to take a case from analogy) would be more severely punished for striking his

captain than for striking his fellow-soldier, and still more severely, were he to assault his sovereign. Mr. Martineau thus answers this plausible illustration: "It is evident, however, that it is not the dignity of the person, but the magnitude of the effect, which determines the severity of the sanction, by which, in such an instance, law enforces order. Insult to a monarch is more sternly treated than injury to a subject, because it incurs the risk of wider and more disastrous consequences, and superadds to the personal injury, a peril to an official power, which, not resting on individual authority, but on conventional arrangement, is always precarious." p. 21. Can this be said of the authority of God? Is it precarious? Must it depend upon such barriers and penalties as the weakness of human law imposes for the defence of its magistrates? The very thought is impious. Yet this supposition is necessary, ere the orthodox analogy, between offences against God and against a human superior, can be maintained. As the infinity of man's sin has not been proved, it must be assumed, in order that the Trinitarian lecturer may proceed with the conclusion to be drawn from it, viz. that the infinite transgressions of men must be atoned for, and erased, by the substitution of an infinite ransom-by the second person of the Trinity becoming a man, and suffering in room of the offenders. This is the great climax of Trinitarian consistency! A moment's reflection will show, however, that it is utterly inconsistent.

"I would inquire," says Mr. Martineau, "what is intended by that other statement, that only Deity can redeem, and that by Deity the sacrifice was made? The union of the divine and human natures in Christ, is said to have made his sufferings meritorious in an infinite degree. Yet we are repeatedly assured, that it was in his manhood only that he endured and died. If the divine nature in our Lord had a joint consciousness with the human, then did God suffer and perish; if not, then did the man only die, Deity being no more affected by his anguish, than by that of the male factors on either side. In the one case, the perfections of God, in the other, the reality of the atonement, must be relinquished. No doubt the popular belief is, that the Creator literally expired;

the hymns in common use declare it; the language of pulpits sanctions it; the consistency of creeds requires it; but professed theologians repudiate the idea with indignation. Yet, by silence or ambiguous speech, they encourage, in those whom they are bound to enlighten, this degrading humanization of Deity, which renders it impossible for common minds to avoid ascribing to him emotions and infirmities, totally irreconcileable with the serene perfections of the Universal Mind. In his influence on the worshipper, He is no spirit who can be invoked by his agony and bloody sweat, his cross and passion. And the piety that is thus taught to bring its incense, however sincere, before the mental image of a being with convulsed features and expiring cry, has little left of that which makes Christian devotion characteristically venerable." p. 21, 22.

The last head of Mr. M'Neile's discourse, is occupied with its practical application, with the moral effects of his theory. Man, according to him, must first be pardoned by the offering of an infinite ramson for his sins, before he can be the subject of moral reformation. Unitarians who invite to moral reformation without the preceding step, are only, he conceives, "like quacks, who cover over the sore, healing the skin, while they leave its mortifying venom beneath." p. 341. "Unitarian preaching," he says, "for the most part, resembles a dissertation on good walking, addressed to congregations who are all lame. Bring in the restoring power of God to remove the lameness-then they will walk with God in holy love." p. 342. Mr. M'Neile deals largely in figures, which he knows will affect his own party, but how can mere figures convince his opponents? Reasoning, however, is added. His is the system, he contends, which at once manifests the hatefulness of sin, by the sacrifice which it required, and the love of God, by the sacrifice which he condescended to offer; and both these considerations are the most powerful motives to virtue-no others are sufficient to eradicate sin, and implant virtue in the corrupt heart of man, alienated from God and holiness. The reasoning here employed is ingenious; but unfortunately for the lecturer, it does not correspond with the facts of human experience. The hatefulness of sin is

known to Unitarians, who believe in no divine sacrifice to atone for it; the character of sin is known by its effects; it is condemned and shunned, as contrary to God's will, to the excellence of man's character, and to his happiness. And the love of God is not less a motive to Unitarians to excel in virtue than to Trinitarians, but much more 80. A Unitarian can love God for his goodness towards him, without anticipating the endless misery of any of his fellow-beings. He can love God for not allowing the world to become accursed, much more consistently than the Trinitarian, whose God is only the partial Saviour of his creation, and of the rest the everlasting tormentor. We agree with Mr. M'Neile in regarding the love of God as our chief motive to virtue; and just so much the more do we rejoice in the Unitarian faith, consistently pleading for and enlarging upon that love, which not only by the gift of the Gospel, but by all its other gifts, teaches us to "love God, because he first loved us"—and that "if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another." So far as the Trinitarian scheme can at all coincide with this, we are glad to perceive its influence. Its loss is, that it is defective in this respect, and that to many even of its own adherents, it presents a very suspicious view of divine excellence, a view little calculated to "provoke unto love and good works." The tendency of several portions of Mr. M'Neile's discourse, is to represent Unitarians as making too light a matter of sin, and consequently countenancing an inefficient reformation.

"If pardon," he says, "may be extended without a sacrifice, it is a light thing; and if pardon be a light thing, so is sin; and the love that lightly pardons a light offence, is a light love. Therefore, it could not have led men either to hate sin or to love God."

Mr. M'Neile may, if he will, thus continue to hold up to contempt the free forgiveness of an all-gracious God, by calling it "a light love which lightly pardons a light offence." In reply to his metaphysical ratiocination we simply maintain, that the free forgiveness of God is the doctrine of the Bible, as the free bounty of Divine providence is what nature teaches us every hour of our lives. If in consequence of the freeness of God's providential bounty, hourly bestowed upon us, we think lightly of it,