AN APPEAL TO UNITARIANS.* Tam is a remarkable essay, to

which we regret that the author, who has, if we may judge by internal indications, a con- siderable training in the appreciation of historical evidence,

has not given his name. Nothing could be more simply and genuinely written. It is evidently. rather modesty than any shrinking from the avowal of his hearty faith in the creeds of the Church, which has kept the little book anonymous; and we only hope that in future editions the name may not be wanting. The author is a very clear as well as a very vigorous -thinker. He evidently has grasped fully the intellectual grounds on which all religious belief, even the belief in God himself, must be based. He sees that without some great assumptions, nothing can be believed, and that if nothing is to be believed, nothing could be done except as a man ventures a leap in the dark. This is how he shows us what is the nature of the deepest of all religious assumptions :— "We require mind, surely, to create mind; for if the same necessity by which the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, may have made man and endowed him with the power of thinking—not to talk of the still more marvellous power of observation, which, combined with thought, peers into all the secrets of the universe, from the distant fixed stars to the micro- scopic contents of a drop of water—if, I say, the powers of thought and observation come of mere mathematical necessity, then, verily the dead may beget the living. No, the great First Cause cannot well be Necessity ; it must of necessity be alive. Still, was not the existence of God a mere assumption after all ? Suppose we had no traditional belief to go upon, could we have reasoned the matter out in this fashion, to arrive in the end at a conclusion which was probably accepted in the world before mathematics or astronomy of any kind began ? Assuredly not ; and from a mere philosophical point of view, I am afraid we must admit that God really is an assumption. All our reasoning, in fact, is founded on a petiiio prinmpii. We believe in God because we have been taught to believe in Him ; we absolutely require the aid of traditional belief to start with. Reason is free to criticise, and reason can justify our belief against criticism ; but reason did not give us our belief. That must have come by revelation. A belief which began so many thousand years ago, and which criticism cannot even yet confute, must have been originally revealed to man by the Author of all truth. An assumption ? But is not science itself full of assumptions ? What else is Darwinism but an assumption ? Nay, what else is the attraction of gravitation ? You must assume a theory first before you submit it to the test, otherwise you will hardly come upon it by mere logic. But if you find a theory that stands the test of some thirty years' criticism like that of Darwin, you suspect there is something in it. If it has satisfied the world for two hundred years, like gravitation, you are still more convinced. Why, then, ought you to be afraid to trust yourself to a belief of several thousand years' duration, which seems to harmonise with the experience of the most civilised nations even to this day?"

As Cardinal Newman says in his Grammar of Assent, there is much more prospect of arriving at a true belief by accepting whatever you are taught, and eliminating as a

• An Appeal to Unitarians being a Record of Religious Rrperienees. By Convert from Unitarianism. London Longraans and CO MO.

consequence of the conflict of beliefs so acquired, those which are contradicted by our experience inward and outward, than there is by taking up an attitude of universal distrust, and requiring (what you cannot get) demonstrative proof of the foundations of thought and action.

Our author shows us how his Unitarianism was first under- mined by the new school of Unitarians themselves. He had always been in the habit of explaining St. John's Gospel as a strictly Unitarian production. To his astonishment he found the late accomplished and learned Professor J. J'. Tayler, of Manchester New College, quite against him on that point. Mr. Tayler did not doubt for a moment that the author of the fourth Gospel intended to teach the doctrine of the incarnation of the Divine Word or Wisdom of God in Jesus of Nazareth, but then, instead of accepting that teaching as the teaching of a confidential disciple of our Lord's, Mr. Tayler regarded the fourth Gospel as the product of the second cen- tury, and as being totally without significance in relation to the evidence of those who were directly under our Lord's teaching. Still more oddly, Mr. Tayler regarded it as "the most spiritual of the Gospels," and this double view of it as at once a falsehood, and "the most spiritual and sublime of all the books in the New Testament," gave a knock-down blow to the author's old Unitarianism :—

" The wonder to me was, that Mr. Tayler could still give it that character (elsewhere, too, he calls it the most spiritual and sublime of all the books of the New Testament') and at the same time regard the leading doctrine of the whole treatise as essentially a false one. Where is the sublimity and spirituality of a falsehood ? Admit, if you will, that it was an honest delusion, —admit also, the contention of the new criticism, that the Gospel is of post-Apostolic authorship,—still, how can this book be a source of spiritual enlightenment if the author took an essentially wrong view of the great Personality which he was so anxious to set forth, and put speeches of a peculiarly solemn character into the month of that person in support of his false contention ? To any one who concedes as much as Mr. Taylor concedes, I really cannot understand how it is possible to regard the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation as a fallacy, except merely from his own inability to grasp it. Of course a truth which I cannot see is not a truth to me; but if I still see that a proposition which my own mind cannot harmonise is plainly set forth by a writer of great spiritual insight, and that it has been accepted by a mighty host of thinkers ever since, and if I myself am not prepared to challenge it as absolutely unphilosophical, does not a sort of second-hand belief in it—a belief, at least, that there must be something in it—arise even in my own mind from the very nature of the case? And though this second-hand belief is not, strictly speaking, belief in the doctrine itself, it surely brings a man so very near to actual acceptance of it that it only requires the removal of some particular stumbling-blocks to make way for its cordial and complete acceptance. If the most spiritual of all the Gospels is really so penetrated by a belief in the divinity of Our Lord, then whatever intellectual difficulties I may have about that belief myself, the same Spirit which inspired it in the mind of the writer of the Fourth Gospel may inspire it in my mind also in due time. All truth of this sort comes by inspiration—by direct in- spiration of every one able to receive it."

Evidently our author reached this "second-hand belief" in

the doctrine of the Incarnation, long before he reached abso- lute belief in it. In other words, he saw that it was a belief which it was very difficult to understand except as the outcome of revelation ; that as the outcome of revelation it was hardly more difficult to understand than the belief in God and in Christ, as impressed upon the Gospel narratives ; and that it harmonised and explained a good deal of the Christian life and

doctrine which Unitarianism of the older kind had been com- pelled simply to explain away. Soon he went further, The following short passage states very lucidly in what the great paradox of the Incarnation really consists :—

"A revealed truth could not but be paradoxical ; there is no need of a revelation to teach men what they can find out for themselves. But it must not be supposed that because it is paradoxical it is against reason ; on the contrary, nothing is more reasonable, when once it is fully considered. The only reason why the Incarnation is incredible is because the love of God is an incredible love; but, granted that the love of God, like all His other attributes, is infinite, why should it not have led Him to make a sacrifice for man ? We know that men do sometimes make sacrifices for their fellow-men. Is God incapable of doing as much as we do ? "

The chapter on the significance of the Lord's Supper is a very striking one. If ever there was evidence in this world that any being was more than human, it is the evidence afforded to us by the utter absorption of our Lord's mind in the effect which his death would produce on the lives and characters of his disciples, at the very moment when he was so sure that his crucifixion was at hand, that he instituted the Eucharist as the memorial of his death which he wished them

to preserve and hand down from generation to genera- tion. As our author says, "the most unselfish amongst us, seeing such a thing [an ignominious death of torture] in view, would certainly have had very little thought to bestow on the way he should be remembered by his friends." Yet there is no fact of history, we suppose, more perfectly attested than that our Lord, when his crucifixion was imminent, was wholly absorbed in the effort to strengthen the love and confirm the faith of his Apostles, in the great trial of both which was at hand.

Our author goes on to show how the advanced Unitarians themselves completed his conversion from Unitarianism :—

"I have heard one of the most eminent Unitarians of the new school admit that the Trinity is not an unphilosophical doctrine— that is to say, that it is quite conceivable if only we had satis- factory evidence of its truth. And this admission, when I first heard it, surprised me almost as much as the admission that the Incarnation, as commonly understood, was the real doctrine of the Fourth Gospel. In the face of such admissions, I felt that I could only maintain my Unitarianism at all by disputing both conclusions ; and thus I felt that I was intellectually quite as much opposed to the new school of Unitarians as to the orthodox. But now I had a much greater weight of authority to contend with than before ; for it was not merely old-fashioned conven- tional orthodoxy that was against me, but the freest thinking that I knew. Henceforth it would not do for me to assert in justification of my own opinions that the Trinity was a mere jumble of contradictory statements, or that the Incarnation was a doctrine not really set forth in the New Testament ; at least, I could only say with diffidence that such still appeared to me to be the ease, while I confessed that my view was that of a smaller minority even than I first supposed."

The chapter in which our author shows how he came to the conviction that something like a multiple personality in God is absolutely essential in order that we may conceive him as really the source of all spiritual love, is full of force and very impressively put. But we must pass this over for a passage which is, we think, even more original and striking, a passage in which the author brings out the meaning of a "long- suffering" God, and declares that the expression has a meaning for the Trinitarian which it cannot have for the Unitarian :—

" Sin is not an act, but a state of mind ; and when the state of mind which produced the act has been removed by the influence of God's Spirit the sin itself is gone. But if the state of mind continue, the wages of sin is death. A will set up in opposition to the Eternal Will must of necessity perish. But if a man will only lay aside his perversity, he need not fear that he is any longer lying under the displeasure of God for acts committed when he was in a different frame of mind. He must, no doubt, look the consequences of these acts in the face, and ask God's help to bear his burden; but no expiation is necessary on his part, for God himself has done all that was necessary there—God the Son, who obeyed His Father by consenting to become a sacrifice for us. To look upon God in this light is to believe in Him in a far more real sense than when we regard Him merely as an Almighty and benevolent despot. For from the latter point of view we do not realise half His goodness to us, or half His mercy or long-suffering. Long-suffering indeed? How could an Almighty despot, however benevolent, exhibit anything like long-suffering? And yet that quality is attributed to Him in Scripture, and if nothing of the kind exists in Him, then there is a kind of goodness possessed by some men of which there is nothing to be found in God. But if so, where does this human goodness come from ? How should man exercise anything like forbearance or self-restraint, if there be no such qualities in the Author of all goodness whatever? An Almighty Will must surely execute its designs immediately and at once with irresistible force. But turn to the book of Creation as expounded—and we doubt not, truly—by our latest teachers in science, and what do we find recorded? Designs which, if there be a designing mind at all, it has required thousands and millions of ages to carry out. Designs involving an infinitude of efforts, ending in what to our view looks like failure, to be crowned after a long series of ages with complete success at last. Does not this look something very like patience and long-suffering in God ? His designs are so vast and complex that they can only be realised in the vast sweep of ages ; and one design is subordinated to another without ever being lost sight of until the time has arrived for its complete fulfilment. There is, therefore, subordination in the designs of God; and that is because there is subordination as well as mastery in the nature of God himself. It is an amazing thought, undoubtedly, but still it is the truest explanation of His ways, that God exercises self-restraint, always intent on the ful- filment of great designs which it requires ages to develop, and allowing them to give place in the present to more immediate objects of which He too is the agent."

We have passed over the evidence of a clear historical insight which is chiefly shown in the chapter on the contents of the fourth Gospel, because Bishop Lightfoot and others have pressed hbme the defence of the historical character of St. John's Gospel with even greater force. But few have surpassed the author of this little book in the lucidity and impressiveness with which a mind's transition from less to

more belief has been portrayed, and the steps which one by one led it to this conclusion were taken. We have read with some surprise and a good deal of satisfaction, that that Dis- establishment of the Irish Church which so sadly failed of the effect which was expected from its recognition of the principle of justice in relation to national Establishments of religion, had at least this good consequence, that it finally broke the link which connected the author of this striking little book with the Unitarian Nonconformists. For our own part, we always held that what ought to have been done was to transfer the property taken from the Church of the minority to the Church of the majority, and that the justice of the course actually pursued was grievously impaired by the omission to make this disposition of the property. But perhaps this part of our author's story is less lucidly expounded than the other and deeper parts of it.