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fence. Origen and Eusebius, we are told, argue from the omission of the article in the clause Θεος ἣν ὁ λόγος, that the Xoyos was not one and the same, év xai tauloy, with the Father, the Supreme God. It must be granted that they consider this circumstance as indicating some inferiority or subordination in the nature of the Logos, but it by no means follows, that had they understood English, they would have approved such a rendering as the present, which represents the Word as a separate, distinct God. In common with the other Fathers they regarded the Aoyos as existing in the essence of the Father, and partaking of his undivided Deity.

It is further urged, and we readily concede, that an inferior use of the name God occurs several times in the Old Testament, and in quotations from it in the New: as for instance, "It is written in the law, I said ye are Gods," speaking of rulers: or, again, "Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people," in a like sense. I answer, that such expressions are no more than ancient Hebraisms, occurring only in passages found in or quoted from the Old Testament, and never forming a part of the current style of the New. It is most improbable that a passage of such dignity and gravity as that before us should be couched in such obsolete and fantastic language. It is doing very little in such cases to shew that in some extraordinary instances a word has been used in this or that sense: the question is, what is that ordinary and sober sense in which it was proper to use it in the passage under exami

nation.

It appears to me not a little strange to take the phrase, the Word, merely as a synonym for the name of Jesus Christ. If the writer merely intended to say that Jesus Christ was in the beginning, and was with God, why does he designate him thus abruptly by this singular name, by which he What never calls him afterwards? proof have we that those to whom he wrote were prepared to understand him in this way of speaking? There is not a single instance in the New Testament where this phrase, the Word, passes as a known and distinguishing appellation, or proper name,

VOL. XX.

3 z

of Jesus Christ. He is, indeed, called the Word of God in the Revelation; but only in such a way as he receives various other titles, such as King of kings, Emmanuel, the Lord our righte ousness, and others; but none of these are received and distinguishing appellations, nor would any writer use them as such who wished to be understood. But if, by the Word, we understand with Lardner and Priestley, that principle of light and life which, though essentially inherent in the Deity, emanated from him in due time, and being infused into the person of Jesus, dwelt among us in the form of human nature; this idea, mysterious indeed, but neither unintelligible nor absurd, gives due significance to all the language of the Evangelist, harmonizes with the theological style of the age when the gospel was written, and corresponds in the main with the sense which all the early fathers gave to the passage. These are surely no mean arguments in its favour.

But I think the rock of offence for the Socinian interpretation is yet to come. Ο κοσμος δι' αυτό εγενετο. The world was made by him; so read the orthodox, and so does Socinus; but the Improved Version, inputing to the text a most astonishing ellipsis, makes bold to render it, The world was enlightened by hin. Socinus is obliged to propound that, by the world being made, we must understand that the world was reformed, or that the world means the new creation, which was, no doubt, the work of Christ. Then the difficulty takes a new form, for the question occurs how it could be said that the new creation knew not Christ? The figure ellipsis allows a writer to omit what the sense of a passage already sufficiently suggests. If this is the case with the world enlightened, as here inserted, the reader may omit this word, but will still perceive that it is implied in those which remain. Impartial reader, do this to be so? It is as plain a matter in English as in Greek, although I have most satisfaction in referring you to the original. It has been said, that the word EYEVETO cannot signify was made. I answer, that the word yea

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find.

a signifies to be brought into existence in any form or manner, and is applied in this sense to all sorts of

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SIR,

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may gratify some of your readers, to be informed, that a substantial tomb has just been erected in Bunhill Fields, to the memory of the late Rev. and excellent Theophilus Lindsey. The expense was borne by the Rev. Mr. Belsham and a committee of gentlemen, consisting chiefly of his old friends, who justly admire his truly excellent character and exemplary virtues.

The following are the inscriptions on the tomb:

On the side,

In this vault reposes the Rev. THEOCollege in the University of Cambridge, PHILUS LINDSEY, M. A., late of St. John's and some time Vicar of Catterick, in Yorkshire. Having resigned his preferment in the Church for the sake of Truth and a good Conscience, he became the Founder of the Chapel in Essex Street. This venerable Confessor ended his blameless and exemplary life, 3rd day of November, MDCCCVIII. Aged LXXXVI.

things, as the following quotations will manifest: σeioμss EyeVeto, Matt. viii. 24; par EYEVETO, Mark i. 11; το σαββατόν δια τον ανθρωπον εγενετο, Mark ii. 27; av@pares Taç kal' oμowo O yeyovoras, James iii. 9; us to μ εκ φαινομένων τα βλεπομενα γεγονέναι, Heb. xi. 3. To these phrases, that before us, the KоσμOG EYEVETO, the world was made or came into existence, is perfectly analagous, and this rendering appears to me, in a critical point of view, entirely unobjectionable. But not such is the Socinian rendering of a subsequent verse. Kai Λόγος σαρξ εγενετο. And the word was flesh. The word eyevero is thus taken as merely equivalent to, or, as the logicians term it, it is used simply as the copula of the proposition. Now I call on those who favour this translation to produce a single instance in which this word yevsoba is used in such a manner. It is altogether foreign to its meaning. It always signifies either to come into existence, or to pass from one condition to another. A transition, or change of state, is always implied by this word. Socinus, indeed, flourishes finely, and says, "Nemo qui Græcas literas vel a limine salutaverit, ignorat hæc verba non minus, Et verbum caro fuit, quam Et verbum caro factum est, et bene et proprie verti posse." And to prove this, out of numberless examples, he says, he will only produce one, but I must say I think him not very happy in his choice. It is this, 'O EYEVεTo avηip πgоpnrns, δυνατος εργῳ και λογῳ. Now, certainly if it were necessary that this passage should be rendered, "Who was a prophet," his inference might stand; but as it is just as proper to translate it, "Which man became a prophet, mighty in word and deed," it falls to the ground. I repeat my challenge; let single instance be produced in which eyevero is a mere copula, equi-AM very much at a loss to know

valent only to v. Till that is done I
shall regard the translation, "the Word
was flesh," as false and inadmissible,
and as involving the whole of this
Socinian interpretation in the same
predicament. With your permission,
Mr. Editor, I shall shortly add some
further observations on the same sub-
ject.
T. F. B.

On one end,

Mrs. HANNAH LINDSEY, relict of the late Rev. Theophilus Lindsey, survived her venerable Consort little more than three years, and, full of hope and of good works, expired 18th January, MDCCCXII. aged LXXI.

On the other end,

Mrs. ELIZABETH RAYNER, nearly allied in blood to the illustrious house of Percy, esteemed it a still greater honour to be the friend and fellow-worshiper of Mr. and Mrs. Lindsey, and by her own desire was deposited in the same grave. Mrs. Rayner died aged Lxxxiv.

It is in contemplation to place a marble tablet with a longer inscription to his memory, in the Chapel in Essex Street, by the same gentlemen.

SIR,

E. D.

August 25, 1825.

how to answer the modest demand of your correspondent I., (p. 403,) and to endeavour to set his mind at rest on the somewhat curious point, of a real Christian indulging great doubts of a miraculous agency in many of those facts, which the idiom of the Hebrew language, or rather that style of language which the writer adopted, has delivered to us in the character of miracle. I have been told that some

of your very serious and judicious readers have thought the piece signed W. intended for a burlesque upon Schiller, and not a serious allusion to the facts of the Old Testament: and, in my turn, I am labouring under the suspicion, that your correspondent I. is some infidel in disguise, who has thrown out a bait to catch another, by provoking him to farther remarks, when it is not in his power to call out the more able Schiller himself into the field. For it surely is now too late to use such language seriously, as your correspondent has employed on the subject of the historical parts of the Old Testament. What can he mean by these words, "I am at a loss to understand how those who call themselves Christians can justify such sceptical sentiments," &c.; and again, "inconsistent scepticism"? This is the common cant of ignorance every thing is sceptical which is without the exiguum curriculum” of our creed. I did not expect to see such a sentence in the Repository of General Literature. He must be dreaming when he talks of " striking at the very root of Christianity itself, and denying the divine authority of Moses and the prophets." In every step upwards, from the bare acknowledgment of Jesus as an extraordinary personage, to the belief in him as the everlasting God, the feeble child of dust talks of " the scepticism" of him who is moving one step below him, and "he cannot understand how he can call himself a Christian." I pity him from my heart! Serious as he may be, he will doubtless join in the exclamation of the witty author of the Sentimental Journey, "How I love the man, who will give up the reins into his author's hands, be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore !!"

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While it is not my design "to explain away all that appears miraculous," I have been taught by the example of Joseph Priestley, Henry Moore, and some other bold minds, who made their way of reading the Bible known to the world first in the Theological Repository, and afterwards in sundry works, to feel an anxiety to give an air of probability to all those ancient writings which, for various reasons, I hold in great esteem, and not the less so because there is an important relation acknow

ledged between them and the books of the New Testament; which, in point of fact, are of infinitely greater value than they, and which might stand their ground, although the writings of Moses and the prophets had been trampled in the dust.

I fain would know whether your correspondent I., or whether any Unitarian Christian, is prepared to avow, that all the events of the Old Testament which are related in language that implies miracle, were really su pernatural events? If he does, let him read Josephus's History of the Jews, and he will find that an orthodox Jew shews the natural agent that brought many of them about, and has not the most distant reference to miracle in them; nay, the Scriptures themselves, which in one place describe a transaction as the immediate work of God, in another describe the instrument to be a man or one of the powers of nature. I should fear affronting your biblical readers did I attempt to point them out.

And if I am disposed to assign natural causes for some other of those events which Christians have been pleased to regard as miraculous, am I to be called a sceptic and be bespattered with obloquy, and pointed at as an infidel and no Christian? The bigoted Catholic for that-who reproaches the man of "little faith," because he gives a false turn to the declaration of his Lord, "This is my body." The honest Trinitarian does the same, who denies the character of Christian to him who cannot believe in the personal divinity of the Son and the Spirit. And, if you please, the half-way Arian, who is angry with his younger brother, because he has taken one step beyond him, and denied the pre-existence of his Master.

On the ground of this "scepticism, which requires from your correspondent some farther explanation," let me refer I. to Bellamy's Bible, where I think he may be both amused and instructed, though he may not go all lengths with that erudite and ingenious writer. It is well known that the manner in which facts are spoken of in the Old Testament, has furnished a handle against the entire history of the Hebrews as a divine interference, and surely he cannot be a foe to divide truth who will remove the difficulties

that arise from modes of expression, although the result might be, that there were not so many miracles wrought by the Jewish Lawgiver as had been imagined; any more than he must be thought to do an injustice to the Christian system, who cannot discover a spiritual sense and a Christian meaning in the Song of Solomon. We have long ceased to believe that those infernal spirits, which Milton speaks of, so much like a poet, and so little like a believer, were driven out of the human body into the herd of swine; and that, in the temptation in the Garden of Eden, "Satan squat like a toad" at the ear of Eve, infusing his "wicked wiles," and indeed we make so free with the opinions of our fathers as to be satisfied that he had no concern in that woful temptation by which our first mother fell. We do even more than this, for we deny altogether that this drama of the fall of man, is the relation of a fact. And, whether or not we discern in it, as Schiller does, the first necessary operation of free-will, and regard it as a manifestation of man's independent state, and the almost unavoidable result of the condition in which he was placed, and therefore, in a strictly phifosophical sense, no evil: by denying a fact which is so plainly declared, we certainly prepare the mind for a liberal interpretation of those relations which afterwards present themselves to our notice in the succeeding pages. I might as well believe that a serpent talked with Eve, as, that the wind breathed through the ram's horns, knocked down the walls of Jericho, when I can give a more reasonable account of both; I should have as little difficulty in admitting, that the Omnipresent Governor walked in the garden and met Adam, as one man may meet another, as, that Moses talked face to face with God, as a man may talk with his friend. But while I see in both a beautiful allusion to the agency of God, I admit no personal presence. There is a truth, Sir, in all these declarations; but I shall never believe God to be "altogether such an one as myself," and, therefore, interpret literally all those metaphorical expressions which are found in the Bible. All the powers of nature, and all the skill of man, are instruments in his hands of good and of evil to his crea

tures; they are represented as engaged by him in an especial manner to train up a family for his worship; and a Jewish historian, when giving an account of what befel his people, goes back at once to the original cause, disregarding the minor instruments. Here has been the misfortune; because, although his statement is strictly true, and cannot be denied by him who "looks through nature up to nature's God;" yet they who confine their views to the act itself, may in many cases think the practice an absurd one, to ascribe to the Almighty the minutiæ of laws, intended for so barbarous and wrong-headed a people as was that which left the Egyptian slavery in search of a better fate in some unknown land.

The letter of W. contains an allusion to the pillar of cloud and of fire; and I suspect the intimation that accompanied it terrified and shook the tender nerves of I. (if, as I still suspect, he be not as great a freethinker as myself). Now this is one of those historical facts which are as plain as a clear understanding can make thein; and the very circumstance of such a phraseology being employed to describe what a profane author would give us in a simpler style affords a strong reason for us to carry a similar mode of interpretation into other parts of the Scripture history. For, as it is evident the persons for whom the Gospels were written did not believe that devils were driven out of the lunatics, but that the expression " possessed of demons," was the description of a certain disorder, as St. Vitus's dance and St. Anthony's fire are now among us, so the Jews in the time of Moses, or that in which the Pentateuch was written, whenever it might be, were not themselves deceived by the language of their sacred writers-it was left for Christians in the nineteenth century to add to the Mosaic history miracle upon miracle, and to spiritualize the plainest facts; until the angles of a box cannot be determined on, nor the trimmings of a curtain, without an express authority from Him who sways the sceptre of the universe, and gives laws to ten thousand worlds; and even the cherubims, the figures of two calves, and the space between them, a foot and a half, become the type of that boundless benevolence

and compassion, with which it is our delight to see our heavenly King invested. They who can delight in such puny thoughts are welcome to them; it will give me no concern to be charged by such persons with "inconsistent scepticism," though I think the adjunct might be taken away from this charge; for they only can be consistent who, while they believe the Supreme Being to be infinitely exalted above all blessing and praise, yet will assign him such paltry offices as many of those to which his agency is attained in a style of language chosen to suit the low conceptions of that small race of beings whose whole conduct, from the time they borrowed the jew els from their masters, to their dividing between them the rich land of Canaan, is a compound of ignorance, perverseness and rebellion. Yet they were not ignorant of what had been done for them, as many now seem to be, with all the aids of learning, and the lights which, in these latter days, have been thrown on the history of ancient times.

It is generally admitted among our biblical scholars, and it is a sentiment carried by some of them to a great length, that quotations from the Old Testament are made in the New, in order to shew a similarity of circumstances, and not a necessary connexion between the things spoken of. The respect in which the Christian writers held the Scriptures made them desirous of connecting the days of Christ with those of the earlier prophets; and where there they saw a similarity, or imagined a likeness, it was natural for them to point it out: and I suppose your correspondents are not ignorant that one highly respectable branch of the Unitarian public in England are not willing to admit even that many of those passages in the Old Testament, which have been generally thought to point to the Messiah, have any reference whatever to that great personage; they refuse to admit what to most are palpable prophetic declarations. And, will your correspondent I. refuse them the character of Christians? But I must conclude.

W.

Pastoral Letter of Dr. Doyle's on Public Bible Discussions.

TO THE REVEREND THE CATHOLIC CLERGY IN CARLOW AND ITS VICINITY, WHO WERE HERETOFORE ENGAGED IN DISPUTES WITH CERTAIN MEMBERS OF THE BIBLE SOCIETY.

Reverend and dear Brethren,

HAVE only heard of a challenge to dispute being published in The Dublin Evening Post, wherein certain members of the Bible Society, in Dublin, propose to meet some individuals of our clergy, in the presence of a select portion of the public, in order to discuss some question or questions previously agreed upon, and which are to relate, I suppose, to the religious belief of the parties to be thus enguged.

I need not remind you, dearest Brethren, of what is ruled by the Supreme Authority of the Church, (see Ben. xiv. de Syn. Dioc.,) with regard to individuals, unauthorized thereto by their Bishop, not entering into public disputations with persons maintaining heretical opinions; your own good sense, and the very nature of divine truth, as deposited by Christ with his Apostles and their successors, shew to you, that whatever relates to faith, morals or discipline, should be regulated by those whom the Holy Ghost has appointed to govern the Church. I, therefore, hearing of the above challenge, wishing to inform you, and all those concerned with you, that, having given to this matter, what consideration it deserves, it is my wish that no such disputation as is above mentioned be had by you, or by any of you, with the gentlemen alluded to!!!

As the obedience you owe to me is a reasonable one, it is just that I should state the grounds upon which I require of you to exercise it in this matter, and they are-First, because the character of the Christian religion is peace; and the end of it, to esta blish peace and good-will upon earth, as the means of fitting men for hea ven; this end of our calling was announced by the Angels at Bethlehem, when the humanity and benignity of our Saviour God first appeared; and it was repeated by himself when he was about to leave us and return to

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