own professions if we desert them. For what is the profession of him who calls himself a Christian? What is its real value, if, at the same time that he so calls himself, he deny and reject the Godhead of Him from whom we derive that name.

What the faith of Christians is has long since been known and established. It acknowledges, that our Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, is God and man. God, in identity with the Godhead of the Father, united with the manhood inherited from his mother. The Christian faith does not barely admit, that there was once a person called Jesus Christ upon earth, a teacher of righteousness sent from God, and now rewarded with a high degree of exaltation in heaven; but still, with all this, no more than a creature. A Christian is not at liberty to take so much of the faith as he may think proper, and to reject the rest; to embrace the morality and refuse the doctrine, nor to adhere to the doctrine and reject the morality of the Gospel. No man can be called a Christian, even in profession, unless he hold, not only that

Christ existed as the man Jesus here on earth, but that he was very God at that very time; that his Godhead had existed, in identity with the Father as to being and power, from all eternity, though with distinction as to person; and that he shall so exist till time shall be no more. This we hold to have been the faith of Christians as to the Person of our blessed Saviour from the beginning, and this the Unitarians deny. Whether the truth rest with them or with us will be matter for future discussion, but that such a faith is of necessity attached to the name of Christian can hardly be disputed. Let all who are captivated by the sound of freedom in opinion, and the boast of those which some call exclusively rational principles, consider to what those principles are leading them; even to the denial of him whom God has declared to be our Lord, our Saviour, and our God. Let them not rely on the sound of a name superadded, in order to affix an opposite and arbitrary sense to the appellation by which that sect distinguishes itself, which absolutely denies

the Godhead of Christ, and the personality of the Holy Ghost. The same has formerly been done by unbelievers, who affected to talk of Christian Deists, and Christian Jews.

.

The name of Unitarian Christians, if to the term Unitarian that sense be attached which they affix to it, is a contradiction in terms. It confounds believers in Christ's Godhead with those who absolutely deny that Godhead. It professes that they who bear that name are hoping for salvation through his sacrifice of atonement, and his mediation, as consequent and dependant thereon; while they are denying the efficacy of that sacrifice, and reducing his mediation to nothing more than the prayers of a prophet and righteous man. Even Mahomet allowed as much as this, for he professed that he requested Christ's prayers for himself, and he ascribed to him preeminence above Moses and all the prophets. And what do modern Unitarians more than this? The man Jesus, as a mere man, who had no manner of existence before his birth at Bethlehem, who was not

the Saviour who purchased us by his blood, who was not the appointed sacrifice to atone for sins, who was not the eternal Son of the Most High: such is the person whose existence they acknowledge!

They grant indeed that Jesus Christ bore a special mission from God, and that he is now miraculously exalted to preeminent honour at God's right hand. But where does it appear in the Gospel that this is all which his disciples are required to believe? What great preeminence does this assign to him, above others whom we know to have been taken up into the presence of God? Such pretences are mere deception; and the addition of a highly respected name is but too much like a shield to cover their real tenets, and a snare to draw in the unguarded to the destructive errors of their communion.

Even the heresy of Arius came nearer to the true faith than this. For it allowed the Godhead of our Saviour, and his existence before his incarnation, though not from all eternity. But the Unitarians deny both. Yet did the general assembly of

the whole Christian Church condemn his doctrine, and stigmatize it with their anathema. I do not urge the sentence of that Council as of equal authority with the holy Scriptures, by which the measures of that, and of every other assembly of frail and fallible men must be judged. But it distinctly proves what was the sense of the great body of believers, at a time when corruptions were not so common but that they were examined and censured; and so near to the Christian era, as to be comparatively but little removed from the age of the Apostles themselves.

At that period human presumption had not become so fertile as in these days, in inventing corruptions of the Christian faith; and in that Council those Fathers of the Church assisted, who were most likely to know what had been the teaching of the Apostles themselves; whose opinions therefore, though not infallible, have ever been accounted as entitled to the highest respect.

Against the judgment then of the primitive Church, and, what is much more, against the express words of Scripture,