then I will do it, not else! And the proof asked is not one dependent on, or flowing from, his moral nature and moral feelings, but wholly extra-moral, namely, by his outward senses, the subjugation of which to faith, that is, the passive to the actional and self-created belief, is the great object of all religion!

IX. That Socinianism involves the dreadful reflection, that it can establish its probability (its certainty being wholly out of the question and impossible, Priestley himself declaring that his own continuance as a Christian depended on a contingency,) only on the destruction of all the arguments furnished for our permanent and essential distinction from brutes; that it must prove that we have no grounds to obey, but, on the contrary, that in wisdom we ought to reject and declare utterly null, all the commands of conscience, and all that is implied in those commands, reckless of the confusion introduced into our notions of means and ends by the denial of truth, goodness, justice, mercy, and the other fundamental ideas in the idea of God; and all this in order to conduct us to a Mahomet's bridge of a knife's edge, or the breadth of a spear, to salvation. And, should we discover any new documents, or should an acuter logician make plain the sophistry of the deductions drawn from the present documents (and surely a man who has passed from orthodoxy to the loosest Arminianism, and thence to Arianism, and thence to direct Humanism, has

no right from his experience to deny the probability of this)-then to fall off into the hopeless abyss of atheism. For the present life, we know, is governed by fixed laws, which the atheist acknowledges as well as the theist; and if there be no spiritual world, and no spiritual life in a spiritual world, what possible bearing can the admission or rejection of this hypothesis have on our practice or feelings?

Lastly, the Mosaic dispensation was a scheme of national education; the Christian is a worldreligion; and the former was susceptible of evidence and probabilities which do not, and cannot, apply to the latter. A savage people forced, as it were, into a school of circumstances, and gradually in the course of generations taught the unity of God, first and for centuries merely as a practical abstinence from the worship of any other,-how can the principles of such a system apply to Christianity, which goes into all nations and to all men, the most enlightened, even by preference?

Writing several years later than the date of the preceding paragraphs, I commend the modern Unitarians for their candour in giving up the possible worshipability of Christ, if not very God,—a proof that truth will ultimately prevail. The Arians, then existing, against whom Waterland wrote, were not converted; but in the next generation the arguments made their way. This is fame versus reputation.

THE APOSTLES' CREED.

Is it not probable from what is found in the writings of Cyril, Eusebius, Cyprian, Marcellus of Ancyra and others, that our present Apostles' Creed is not the very Symbolum Fidei, which was not to be written, but was always repeated at baptism? For this latter certainly contained the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Logos; and, therefore, it seems likely that the present Apostles' creed was an introductory, and, as it were, alphabetical, creed for young catechumens in their first elementation. Is it to be believed that the Symbolum Fidei contained nothing but the mere history of Jesus, without any of the peculiar doctrines, or that, if it did not contain something more, the great and vehement defenders of the Trinity would speak of it so magnificently as they do, even preferring its authority to that of the scriptures?-Besides, does not Austin positively say that our present Apostles' creed was gathered out of the scriptures? Whereas the Symbolum Fidei was elder than i the Gospels, and probably contained only the three doctrines of the Trinity, the Redemption, and the Unity of the Church. May it not have happened, when baptism was administered so early, and at last even to infants, that the old Symbolum Fidei became gradually

inusitatum, as being appropriated to adult proselytes from Judaism or Paganism? This seems to me even more than probable; for in proportion to the majority of born over converted Christians must the creed of instruction have been more frequent than that of doctrinal profession.

A GOOD HEART.

THERE is in Abbt's Essays an attempt to determine the true sense of this phrase, at least to unfold (auseinandersetzen) what is meant and felt by it. I was much pleased with the remarks, I remember, and with the counterposition of Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandison. Might not Luther and Calvin serve? But it is made less noticeable in these last by its co-existence with, and sometimes real, more often apparent, subordination to fixed conscious principles, and is thus less naturally characteristic. Parson Adams contrasted with Dr. Harrison in Fielding's Amelia would do. Then there is the suppression of the good heart and the substitution of principles or motives for the good heart, as in Laud, and the whole race of conscientious persecutors. Such principles constitute the virtues of the Inquisition. A good heart contrasts with the Pharisaic righteousness. This last contemplation of the Pharisees, the dogmatists, and the rigo

rists in toto genere, serves to reconcile me to the fewness of the men who act on fixed principles. For unless there exist intellectual power to determine aright what are the principia jam fixa et formata, and unless there be the wisdom of love preceding the love of wisdom, and unless to this be added a graciousness of nature, a loving kindness, these rigorists are but bigots often to errors, and active, yea, remorseless in preventing or staying the rise and progress of truth. And even when bigotted adherents to true principles, yet they render truth unamiable, and forbid little children to come thereunto. As human nature now is, it is well, perhaps, that the number should be few, seeing that of the few, the greater part are pre-maturities.

The number of those who act from good hearted impulses, a kindly and cheerful mood, and the play of minute sympathies, continuous in their discontinuity, like the sand-thread of the hour-glass, and from their minuteness and transiency not calculated to stiffen or inflate the individual, and thus remaining unendangered by egotism, and its unhandsome vizard contempt, is far larger: and though these temperamental pro-virtues will too often fail, and are not built to stand the storms of strong temptation; yet on the whole they carry on the benignant scheme of social nature, like the other instincts that rule the animal creation. But of all the most numerous are the men, who