Preach ceaselessly. The Universe is Love- Must by its spirit, Man, be harmonized, Tuned to concordance with the spheral strain, Till thought be like those skies, deeds like those breezes, As clear, as bright, as pure, as musical, And all things have one text of truth and beauty. There is a blessing in a day like this, When sky and earth, are talking busily; The clouds give back the riches they received, O that such hours will pass away! yet oft M. F. ART. IX.-UNITARIAN MORALITY. We have heard it said, time and again, by those that should have known what Unitarians profess to believe, that they root out Religion to put on Morality; lay aside Faith; and in place of principles and purity within, are content with mere good works. All this is false, and those that make the charge might, and should know it to be false; but they, good easy souls!-while they would look, and justly look, with horror on the Socinian that should deny their faith not knowing what it is, are content, themselves, to believe that this same semi-Deist has neither Faith, Religion, or Principle; and they believe so, chiefly because he has not their Faith, nor their views of Religion. We have elsewhere said that the Orthodox does right to deny that Unitarianism is Christianity, and the Unitarian has as little belief that our Lord taught Calvanism; but neither has any excuse for thinking the other without Faith or Principle, unless upon the most ample proof; nor ought for one day, unless upon such proof, to suppose any human being the professor of so monstrous a heresy as that which makes the outer act of all avail, the character within of none. The Unitarian is not without Religion. He believes in One God, his Creator, his Preserver, his Guide, his Father. He looks to Him for light, for strength, for assistance: he seeks to know, and to compass His character as far as man may; and knowing it, seeks to grow up toward His perfection: to Him he bows down in prayer, to Him he lifts his voice in thanksgiving; he seeks for His image in the world without him, and in the greater world within him, and finds it, faintly seen, in both of them: he goes beyond them to that Being that came from God, in the power of God, and full of God; and in that living revelation of the Almighty, he sees the Almighty, not as before through a glass, darkly, but almost face to face. In that Being he has Faith; not mere credence, the faith of the head, nor mere trust, the faith of the heart, but that true faith of Spirit, Will and Life, which is the root of the best morality, and the noblest action. He has that faith which is present everywhere, and at all times, controlling all thoughts, and words, and acts. In the walks of business, in the merry round of pleasure, and in the arena of worldly competition of whatever kind,-the laws of God, the example of Jesus, and his own eternal destiny will be with him and council him. The Unitarian has then, if truly and thoroughly a Unitarian, an inner principle of action derived from the revelations of his Father, made through the visible world without, the conscious world within, and the life of Christ. He has, peculiarly, a principle within, for he, more than other Christians, looks to his own character as influencing his future state: while he knows that of himself he could not save himself, yet he believes that his salvation depends upon himself; even as of himself he could not see, but God having given him the power, it is for him to use or not to use it. He, peculiarly, believes in Free Will; others talk of a will that is diseased, that has lost its power, in part, or wholly, but to the Unita rian Free Will means that which originates and determines its own act, and this it must do entirely or not at all, for if its act be determined in any degree by that which is without (out of) it, that degree of extraneous force, however small, is the true determiner, and the will becomes one link in the chain of cause and effect, and the man is dishumanised, deprived of the very power that makes him man. But while others believe in this naturally diseased will, the Unitarian believes it free; or if bound, bound by its own act: and while others think not only that God gives them the means of salvation, but actually saves them, brings them to Himself, the guiding text of the Unitarian is, "Come unto me, ye that are heavy laden:" he believes that God has placed, and is placing about and within him, those circumstances and influences which must mould and educate his character, but also that He has given him the power,-not of mere choice, which sees the strongest motive, but of will, which makes the strongest motive. By the exercise of that will upon those influences, his character and his fate will be determined: if he use them aright his course will be ever God-ward; it is his instinct, and, we doubt not, the purpose of his being to go on, and his motto may well be that text which bids us be perfect even as our Father in heaven is perfect. The Unitarian therefore, if these things be true, does not believe in the sufficiency of mere outward acts; neither does he believe in mere innocent and worthy motives leading to good works, which is true morality, and which the welldisposed Atheist may possess; he believes that religious faith is a most essential part of the manly character, Faith in God's being and attributes, in Christ's mission, character, and teachings, and in his own destiny, powers, and duties; the Almighty Maker and Father; the God-like, self-sacrificing, and infinitely pure Son; and his own eternal existence, and infinitely pro gressive nature, are ever before him; is he then without religion, without faith, without inner principle? In speaking of "the Unitarian," we of course use the term as when we speak of "the Christian," referring not to what men are, but what they should be. And in saying that the Unitarian has, in a peculiar degree, principle within, we do not mean that living Unitarians are before all others in this point, but that the theory of their faith should make them so. The anti-Unitarian looks to have his inner principles, his new heart implanted in him; the Unitarian feels that he is to plant it in his own breast, to lay hold on, and not be bound with, the cords of righteousness; and we say that he ought therefore to strive the more for pure principles within, as his only hope, while his opponent holding such endeavors of little worth may more consistently with his creed, sit idle. That he does sit idle, we do not, and dare not believe; and one of the strongest evidences against him is, that his life belies his words, for if his words are merely that by himself, man cannot do all, he is on this point no opponent of Unitarianism; the only true anti-Unitarian on the subject of salvation is, as we have said elsewhere, he that denies that man can do anything toward his own final fate; in other words, he that thinks it matters not what life a man leads, nor what faith he holds. Believing, what we have now imperfectly set forth to be true of Unitarianism, we would ask any foe of our sect to whom this may come, to inquire if it be so, and to learn whether it be or not, before he repeats the charge that we are followers of Dead Morality. J. H. P. ART. X.-HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL SIN. Many well-meaning, but uninformed, persons suppose that Unitarianism is but a thing of yesterday, the product of modern speculation, and unknown to the earlier age of the church. From this supposition they reasonably conclude that it must be an unfounded heresy;-for let error go back as far as it may, truth must be a day older, and what is really novel in Christianity can hardly be true. Now, the fact is just the reverse of this supposition. Trinitarianism is the novel heresy engrafted on Christianity. The doctrine of the Trinity did not begin to be heard of till the third century, and was not elaborated into its full and perfect form, until more than a hundred years after that time. It was the slow birth of Oriental philosophy, and vain strifes about words, and successive councils during more than one hundred and fifty years. Unitarianism, taught by the founder of Christianity and his apostles and the faith of all the early Christian Fathers, did not disappear till it was swallowed up in the dark and swelling stream of corruption which ended in the Catholic church. Orthodoxy was the middle stepping stone "the half-way house"-from the Faith as first delivered to the Saints, to Papacy. Instead of being a new thing, Unitarianism is like those works of classical antiquity, written over during the middle ages in some Monk's cell, with histories of Saints and Martyrs, and lost to scholars, till discovered in later times by some more acute eye, the Monkish legend has been erased, and the original writing restored. The Unitarianism of the first centuries faded slowly into errors much resembling those of modern orthodoxy;--but the departure from the true faith having once begun, errors rushed on, like night on a tropical sunset, till the Catholic and Greek Churches supplanted the Primitive Church, and the darkness of the middle ages shrouded Christendom. The worship of the Virgin Mary followed close upon the deification of our Saviour, and it was not long before the first germs of those errors, which terminated in the doctrine of transubstantiation, appeared. During the middle ages, a false philosophy and remutually corrupting each other, formed but a mass of absurdity. With the Reformation, better times began. But it could not be expected that such a mighty system of error, interwoven as it was with the philosophical speculations, the religious faith, and the associations and habits of the Christian world, should be done away at once. Corruptions had been accumulating during 1300 years;-was it to be expected that the world was to stride back over this path of centuries in a single day? It was not to be expected that even the leaders of the Reformation should be entirely emancipated from hereditary What we call the Reformation, was but the beginning of reform-a twilight giving augury of a bright day-but still only a twilight, that in many cases, threw distorting shadows, and left much in dimness, and much more in former darkness. Wickliff, and Luther, and Calvin, are remarkable, not because error. |