and profanely (though in borrowed language) of an hereafter: "What you seem most to apprehend is not a subject of horror to me. I think about it as I do about death; 'tis not that I fear, but 'tis the way to it; 'tis the struggles, the last convulsions that I dread; for when once they are over, I don't question but to rise to a new and better life. Dr. Garth, I remember, used to say, I vow to God, Madam, I take this to be hell, purgatory at least; we shall certainly be better off in any other world. I think I am of his opinion.”—Pp. 330, 331. Like the greater part of the fashionable world, this lady had no conception of religion but as an instrument of human policy, legitimated by parliamentary or royal authority. She expresses in one place her approbation of the Reformation conducted by that Christian Reformer Henry the Eighth, but at the same time her great doubts of the right of Luther and Calvin to go so far as they did in opposition to ecclesiastical usage! Here she had forgotten her preceptor, Dr. Middleton. The fanatical admiration of Frederic the Great (as he is styled by courtesy), King of Prussia, which has been exposed in our IXth Volume, p. 548, infected Lady Hervey, who ridiculously describes the heartless monarch as something in the great scale of beings between man and a deity!" (P. 235.) We meet occasionally with lively descriptions of Lady Hervey's French acquaintances; the picture of Foutenelle in the letter from Paris, before referred to, of Jan. 5, 1751, is very pleasing: "I dine sometimes with a set of beaux esprits, among which old Fontenelle presides. He has no mark of age but wrinkles and a degree of deafness; but when, by sitting near him, you make him hear you, he never fails to understand you, and always answers with that liveliness, and a sort of prettiness peculiar to himself. He often repeats and applies his own and other people's poetry very agreeably; but only occasionally, as it is proper and applicable to the subject. He has still a great deal of gallantry in his turn and in his discourse. He is ninetytwo, and has the cheerfulness, liveliness, and even the taste and appetite of twenty two."-P. 183. VOL. XVII. P "I hear the distemper among the cattle breaks out in many new places. The town is sickly; and nothing seems prosperous but gaming and gamesters. "Tis really prodigious to see how deep the ladies play; but in spite of all these irregularities, the Prince's family is an example of innocent and cheerful amusements. All this last summer they played abroad; and now, in the winter, in a large room, they divert themselves at base-ball, a play all who are or have been schoolboys are well acquainted with. ladies, as well as gentlemen, join in this compliment in the evening, by playing for an hour at the old and innocent game of push-pin, at which they chiefly excel, (if they are not flattered,) who ought in every thing to precede. This innocence and excellence must needs give great joy, as well as great hopes, to all real lovers of their country and posterity.”—Pp. 139, 140. The amusement; and the latter return the 1748. This extract was written, Nov. 14, On the 1st of the next February, she returns to the Prince of Wales, whom she denominates Sosia: "As for the Sosia, I agree with you, and firmly believe the prologue and epilogue are both his own; at least they are (as Lord Paulet, when he was Lord Hinton, once told him, on being asked his opinion of some of his poetical performances) worthy of his Royal Highness." P. 147. It is not a part of the court religion to praise princes long dead, especially princes that were never perfected by becoming kings, and therefore the Editor gives us, in a note on this passage, (pp. 147, 148,) the following scarcely decorous intelligence and halfdisloyal reflection : "Why Frederic Prince of Wales is here called Sosia, I do not see; but the rest of the allusion is to the play of Cato, performed on Wednesday the 4th of Jauary, at Leicester House, by his Royal Highness' children, and some other boys; a copy of the cast of characters may, perhaps, amuse the reader. Cato, Master Nugent. Prince George (George III.). Sempronius,Master Evelyn. Portius, Juba, Lucius, Decius, Lord Milsington. Syphax, Master North. Marcus, Master Madden. Marcia, Lucia, Master Montague. terly pen we are indebted for the va luable work, so largely reviewed in a former volume (XIV. 431 and 500), entitled, "An Appeal to Scripture and Tradition on behalf of the Unitarian Faith." Servetus discusses and refutes the arguments, exposes the Princess Augusta (Duchess unwarrantable assumptions, chastises of Brunswick). Princess Elizabeth. "The Prologue, spoken by Prince George, and Epilogue, by Princess Augusta and Prince Edward, were but indifferent compositions, particularly the latter; which may indeed have been written by the Prince himself. As a specimen I shall copy the concluding lines: "Prince Edward. "In England born, my inclination, Indeed, I wish to serve this land; "And all this mummery and doggrel was intended less to amuse the children, than to vex their grandfather, and make the father popular in his opposition to the King," Pp. 147, 148. We cannot make any further use of this interesting volume; interesting to all readers, but especially to those in the circles of fashion and power, whom it admonishes, in effect, to take care what letters they write, lest on the turn of the next century their great grand-children should shew the public of that age, by their secret correspondence, what are their real opinions of personages, whom, as in duty bound and as interest prompts, they now praise and extol in the high places. the bigotry and repels the calumnies of the anonymous Reviewer. This fanatical Trinitarian preaches up a new crusade against the infidel Unitariaus, and calls upon all believers of every orthodox denomination to unite under the tri-une standard. The Unitarian is emphatically "The Enemy." What can the reverend Reviewer mean? Already the orthodox are united in refusing the name of Christian to a sect of which Lardner was the ornament and the champion. They cannot go further in abusive and scandalous language. Nothing would seem to remain for the zeal of true believers to accomplish, but some measure of personal violence or secular injury. This, however, is not yet avowed, and is not likely, we humbly think, to be carried into effect. But we leave the author of the mysterious project to the lash of Servetus, who retorts upon him the charge of heresy, and proves, again and again, that his doctrine is as anti-evangelical as his temper. The anonymous accuser draws up his indictment in the spirit, and almost in the language, of that enlightened statesman, Haman (Esther iii. 8,9) : in behalf of the sect who are not to be suffered, because they are diverse from all people," Servetus thus pleads: "The assumption that Unitarians worship a different God from that worshiped by the general church is (I might say unjust to the general church, but I will rians. They who acknowledge the Fasay, if you please) unjust to the Unitather to be the sole, self-existent being, the root of Deity and the fountain of love, worship, with the Unitarian, the Father as properly and supremely God. They indivisible being, assuming towards his who worship a sole, eternal, infinite and creatures the offices or relations of Fa ther, Son and Spirit, worship, with the Unitarian, a common God: but it must be owned that we do not worship the * It is reported that the writer is a clergyman. Popish God: that we do not worship the God of the Athanasian Evangelians: that we have not a common object of worship with the Anthropomorphite Trinitarians, who, denying that the Father of Israel is their Saviour, and the Most High God their Redeemer, bow the knee to the HUMANITY of GOD in the person of his CRUCIFIED SON."-P. 27. Servetus examines some of the Reviewer's criticisms on former Unitarian writers, and hesitates not to avow ⚫his dissent from some of their arguments and conclusions. "In another place you seize hold on what you regard as a concession of Mr. Yates, fatal to the Unitarian cause: that he is unable to form a very decided opinion on the meaning of the phrase calling on the name of the Lord: Acts ix. 14-21; 1 Cor. i. 2. I do not wonder at your seizing this advantage: I only wonder that it should have been given you and I must again remind you that your bringing forward the opinion of an individual proves nothing, unless you can prove that the general body of Unitarians hold the same: but so far from being able to prove this, you must in the present instance be fully aware of the contrary. Mr. Yates, and not the Unitarians, is responsible for the doubt and the difficulty. Wakefield, a competent scholar, I presume, thought the proper rendering of the words was being called by the name of the Lord,' or taking his name upon them.' What, then, is to be done? We must step out of the ⚫ single text,' and take our stand on the broad analogy of Scripture. We there find that the apostles bowed the knees to the FATHER of our Lord Jesus Christ.' It happens, however, that there can be no doubt, and that there is no difficulty. The phrase is neither more nor less than a Hebraism (for, strange to say, though you and Bishop Horsley imagine that the apostles were inspired to write modern idioms for the express use of the English nation, they actually employed the language of their age and country); the calling on the name, or calling a name upon them, implies no more than the being enrolled as the followers of him by whose name they are called. therefore they invoked Christ as himself the object of prayer. The word. ɛadspai is the same that occurs in the passage of Acts, I appeal unto Cæsar Acts xxiv. 11. It has, therefore, no necessary and inseparable connexion with religious invocation."-Pp. 72-74. "The next charge is more serious : you really appear, for once, to be in the right, in so far as the individual is concerned. Mr. Worsley, as well as Mr. Yates, must bear his own burthen.' I have not the book before me, and I cannot, therefore, tell whether you have garbled the extracts or stated them fairly: but his allusion to the Magi, which you, of course, hold up to your readers as a specimen of the way in which Unitarians treat Scripture, is probably connected with a doubt whether this much-canvassed narrative be Scripture or no. But your chief charge respects the name of the LORD OF HOSTS. That political preachers have perverted this title, to consecrate the unhallowed ambition of statesmen delighting in war, is a fact that requires no proof: but it seems strange that Mr. Worsley should both have countenanced this false interpretation by regarding it as the sense of the Hebrew nation, and that he should have overlooked the occurrence of the name in passages of unequivocal inspiration. By describing the writer, with mock gravity of information, asno Deist, but a minister of a Dissenting congregation, who dedicates his work to the Unitarian Fund,' you wish to convey the impression that the identity of the Hebrew title Lord of Hosts with that of the God of Battles of the northern nations, is the familiar and approved construction of Unitarians. Your malice shall be disappointed. I shall simply refer the reader to a Sermon, entitled The name Lord of Hosts explained and improved, by JOSHUA TOULMIN, D. D.' It is there expounded as implying dominion over the hosts of heaven, the moon and the stars which he had made :' thus involving at once a reproof and refutation of the Gentile worship of the planetary idols. I mention the definition, because though smelling blasphemy afar off,' in Mr. Worsley's mistaken irreverence for the term, I suspect you lie under the same mistake as to its import. The blunder was originally Voltaire's.* You will not be able to make much of this discovery. Mr. Worsley is in orthodox company."-Pp. 81–83. "I dissent, as much as you can do, from the supposition of Mr. Yates, that this passage is purposely left as a trial of our humility; for if idiomatical usage did not authorise the construction of 'calling his name upon them,' or 'being named by his name,' still it would not follow that, because praying in Christ's name and being baptized into Christ's name, they were said to call on Christ's name, p. 108." Charges of various kinds are pre * "Dictionnaire Philosophique, Guerre, ferred by the Reviewer against the Unitarians; one extract will shew how well-prepared Servetus is to meet them. "Our preaching is political. This reproach does really exceed all that I could have conceived of the powers of face. You happen to light on a sermon of a political cast by Mr. Madge, of Norwich, (a young minister singularly distinguished by the spiritual fervour of his general pulpit eloquence,) and you observe, This is what we must look for from Unitarians. When we find contro versy substituted for religion, [Paul's disputing at Athens was, it seems, no religion,] we may naturally expect faction for politics. Meaning by faction, as appears from the rest of your quotation, a disapprobation of what are called Holy Alliances. Perhaps, Sir, you will inform me what occasion of political preaching has ever been let slip by the ministers of your schism? What address or petition to the King or the National Council has ever been agitated without Your pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, Being beat with fist instead of a stick? Is it not a fact as palpable as the sun is visible at noon-day,' that you have absolutely thinned your churches, and disgusted both the rich and the poor of your congregations, who, when hungering after the bread of life,' have been dieted ou the froth of your whipt loyalty and the cream of your time-serving adulation? The hustings of Westminster,' indeed! Do you know how many fathers of families have stayed at home, and read Secker or Paley to their children, that they might escape the Sibylline furor of your party spirit, sucked from the leaves of the Courier newspaper? The hypocrisy of your charge is only equalled by its diverting simplicity. You have no dislike to political preaching in itself; but the politics must be of your own dictation. It consists with the duties of a preacher to palliate and uphold the art and mystery of governing by a systematic violation of the laws of the constitution, or to brand Dissenters (whom, though you court them with a fawning show of liberality to serve a purpose of persecution, you yet both fear and hate) as turbulent schismatics and sowers of sedition; but he must not say a word of those great cardinal maxims of civil and religious freedom, which speak unto us from the ashes of English martyrs, or the 'gory bed' of patriots who died for liberty. The former is to inculcate the fearing God and honouring the King;' the latter is to preach faction. "The secret is, that the preachers of your school have adopted with approbation as an axiom the inference of Rousseau, which so many other infidels have echoed, and which, perhaps, has been, and still is, a principal cause of their being infidels, that the spirit of the gospel is favourable to tyrants, and that true Christians are formed for slaves. How utterly repugnant such a notion is to the genius of that religion of which the earliest promulgators were distinguished by their boldness,' is satisfactorily shewn by Dr. Leechman, in his Discourse on the Excellency_of_the As a Presbytespirit of Christianity.' rian he had, indeed, some fond notions of liberty, incompatible with the notions it to be a mistake that God, by the proof a true Episcopalian; and his alleging pitiation through Christ, was rendered merciful and placable when he was otherwise before, for that it is so far from being the cause of the divine mercy that his authority to you in other matters; it is the effect of it,' will not recommend but, as he comes within the pale of your 'general church,' which differs on these all-important points,' and is yet a true church, though the Nazareans, so differing, stand convicted of being a false church, I shall press on your consideration an extract from the above discourse: Whenever this superiority to the fear of man and the fear of temporal evils and dangers flows from the principles of the gospel, it is accompanied with a noble freedom and independence of soul that can never dwell with mean and slavish principles.'"-Pp. 85-90. into the character and merits of BiThe Reviewer has provoked inquiry shop Horsley. "It may seem extraordinary that you, Sir, who seldom speak of the actual church without a hint at slumbering prelacy, or at spiritual wickedness in high. places,' should bestow such pompous eulogies on the high-church bishop, the great Goliath of Gath, Dr. Horsley. I cau easily. perceive why you do this. He is held up (partly from error, partly policy) as the champion of the Church of England. Any. defence of any Trinity was thought to call for gratitude. But the Athanasianism of the Bishop is directly opposed to the Oxford decree, as it is to the private opinions of the regular church, which fluctuate between this decree and the 'Scripture doctrine' of Samuel Clarke. Again, Dr. Horsley's damnatory dogma, that the MORAL GOOD of Unitarians is SIN,' stands contradicted by all the sound divines of the Establishment, living or dead; by all, in short, (and they are still many,) who hold with the Apostle John, that he who DOETH righteousness is righteous.' This creed-and-article theologian combats, therefore, under false colours: he is, in fact, your proper leader. You are fighting your own cause, while contending under his shield; and, at the same time, you gain credit for your fealty to the church. "After being introduced to the real learning and rational piety of the old church-divines; (whose doctrinal creed neither constituted their whole of religion, nor narrowed the expansiveness of their Christian affection)—after witnessing their profound and practical knowledge of the human heart-their milk of human kindness-their zeal for things pertaining to salvation, not for strifes of words and oppositions of science-their language and their thoughts alike tinc tured with the study of their Bibles, we seem dropping from the pure empyrean' to a region of fen and fog, when we light on this supercilious Doctor of school-divinity (tout hérissé de Grec, tout bouffi d'arrogance'); this proud, secular, intolerant, and intermeddling priest; this minion of a court and theologian of a college. "Every thing in Bishop Horsley is bigoted and pedantic: he is no less wanting in comprehension of mind than in enlargement of heart. His proficiency in the mathematics is unquestioned; but, generally speaking, his knowledge, compounded of academical erudition and ecclesiastical theology, with a strong infusion of the reveries of the schoolmen and the abstractions of Platonism, was of that kind which puffeth up,' rather than that which is made available to the elucidation of truth. His posthumous work on the Psalms is a continued burlesque on the sacred oracles."-Pp. 91–95. We are tempted to give a specimen of Servetus's critical acumen. “ I shall add only one more example of your docility to the ' simple teachings of Scripture,' which is furnished me by the established version and orthodox interpretation of 1 Tim. vi. 15-' Until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which in his times he shall shew, who is the blessed and ouly Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords: who only hath immortality; dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see : to whom be honour and power everlasting.' STAND OR FALL THE ATHANASIAN TRINITY; for if the Father be intended by the blessed and only Potentate, and if the Father alone hath immortality, then Jesus, the Son of God, is not God supreme. Disregarding, therefore, the exclusion of THE FATHER from blessedness, supremacy and immortality, which must follow if Christ be the agent (and it must be confessed the Father is that person of the Trinity whom, as you could most easily dispense with, you treat with least ceremony); and finding that Christ having, in Revelations, the title of the Word of God, which dwelled in him, has also the title of the King of kings and Lord of lords, whose ambassador and representative he was (though he is, therefore, no more the Supreme Being than the faithful servant, on whom he promises to write the name of HIS GOD,' would therefore be God); seeing and reasoning thus, you do not read the words as even in their present position they would be most naturally read, which he, who is the blessed and only Potentate, will shew;' but you make who refer to Jesus Christ, who is thus identified at once with the only Potentate; and though, in Revelations, he describes himself as he that liveth and was dead,' is declared alone to have immortality:' and though John proclaims him to the disciples as having been 'seen with their eyes,' as the medium of the word of life, is asserted' never to have been seen, and to be incapable of being seen by any man;' and yet he is to appear, or to shew his own appearing, and all eyes shall see him.' Of all these contradictions the Scripture is guiltless. * "John i. 18, Jesus tells the Jews, Ye have not seen his shape:' v. 37, it was the glory of the Lord,' or a symbol of his local presence, which the Israelites saw: Ex. xvi. 7, and thus we must explain the elders seeing the God of Israel: Ex. xxiv. 10. When Jesus says, He who hath seen me hath seen the Father,' (a text strangely urged in proof of his deity, by those who affirm that he "Though you are children of light,' was God the Son,) he explains his own Sir, you are, at the same time, wise in allusion by the works which the Father your generation.' You have the sagacity did through him.-John xiv. 9, 10, 5 to see that BY THIS SINGle text muST as also xv. 24." |