Chapter 1.
professors of the Christian faith, and settle the thoughts of candid inquirers after truth. It will at least give me an opportunity of thanking you for the service you have done to religion, by taking the part of revelation against some classes of unbelievers; and of testifying my esteem for you as a humane moralist, and a wise, indefatigable inquirer into the secrets of nature. And although I greatly differ from you with regard to the fundamental principles of Christianity, yet as I hope that, like Saul of Tarsus, you sin against the Son and Holy Ghost out of a well-meant, but dreadfully mistaken zeal for the Majesty of the Father, I am glad of an opportunity to assure you publicly, that, till we meet in the fulness and unity of the faith taught by our Lord; in reference to that part of it which you have defended against some bare-faced infidels, I have the honour to be, with great truth, reverend sir, your affectionate brother, and obedient servant,
A RATIONAL VINDICATION OF THE
CATHOLIC FAITH.
CHAPTER 1.
A general view of the Catholic faith concerning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and of the great question in debate, between the Catholics and the Deists of every description. THAT there is a supreme, infinite, and eternal Mind, by which the world was made, is evident from the works of creation and providence. Those works every where confirm David’s observation, “The heavens declare the glory [the glorious existence] of God.” The firmament magnificently displays his wisdom, power, and love. Every leaf of the trees, which cover a thousand hills; every spire of the grass, which clothes a thousand vales, echoes back the same ravishing truth, “There is a God!” But the peculiar mode of his existence is far above our reach. Of this we only know what he plainly reveals to us, and what we may infer from what he hath plainly revealed. For sooner shall the vilest insect find out the nature of man, than the brightest man shall, of himself, discover the nature of God. But if this adorable Being hath been pleased to declare something concerning himself, it is arrogancy in the most exalted creatures to quarrel with such a declaration, under a pretence that, in their conception, he must have a different mode of existence. For common sense tells us, that God hath a clearer knowledge of himself, than the deepest philosophers, and the highest angels, can possibly have.
It is agreed on all hands that the Supreme Being, compared with all other beings, is one. One Creator over numberless creatures: one infinite Being over myriads of finite beings: one eternal Intelligence over millions of temporary intelligences. The distance between the things made, and him that made them, being boundless, the living God must stand for ever, far higher above all that lives, than the sun stands superior to all the beams it emits, and to all the tapers lighted at its fire. In this sense, true Christians are all Unitarians. God having plainly revealed his unity by the prophets, by the apostles, and by our Lord himself, there is no doubt about this point. And may the hand which writes these sheets, wither a thousand times over, rather than it should designedly write one word against this glorious and ever adorable unity.
But although the Supreme Being is one, when he is compared to all created beings, shall we quarrel with him, when he informs us, that, notwithstanding he hath no second in the universe of creatures, yet, in himself, he exists after a wonderful manner, insomuch that his one eternal and perfect essence subsists, without division or separation, under three adorable distinctions, which are called sometimes the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and sometimes the Father, the Word, and the Spirit? “Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” or, Why dost thou exist after such a manner?
According to the catholic faith, three sorts of people in our day capitally err in this matter.
1. TRI-THEISTS, or the worshippers of three gods, who so unscripturally distinguish the Divine persons, as to divide and separate them into three Deities; and who, by these means, run into Polytheism, or the belief of many gods.
2. DI-THEISTS, or the worshippers of two gods. They are generally called Arians from Arius, their chief leader, who maintained, that there is one eternal God; namely, the Father, and one who is not eternal; namely, the Son, who was made some time or other before the foundation of the world. Thus they worshipped two gods, a great god and a little god; the former uncreated, the latter created; the former, God by nature; and the latter, only by courtesy.
3. DEISTS, who so unscripturally maintain the unity of the Divine essence, as to admit but one Divine subsistence; namely, that of the Father; thus excluding both the Word and the Holy Ghost from their place in the Divine nature.
There are three sorts of these Deists, beside the Mohammedans.
(1.) Those who reject and scoff at all the Bible, as Voltaire, Hume, and the like infidels.
(2.) Those who reject the New Testament, and explain away those parts of the Old which do not suit their notions of the Messiah, as the modern Jews: and
(3.) Those who profess to receive the New Testament, but reject or explain away what they dislike of it.
Of this sort are the Socinians, so called from Socinus, an Italian, who, at the time of the Reformation, revived the ancient heresy of some Judaizing Christians, concerning the mere humanity of our Lord. And to this class belongs the learned Dr. Priestley, who says, in his letters to Dr. Horsley, “I have frequently avowed myself not to be a believer in the inspiration of the evangelists and apostles, as writers: I therefore hold the subject of the miraculous conception to be one, with respect to which any person is fully at liberty to think as the evidence shall appear to him.” And, consistently with this profession, he does not scruple to say in his History of Corruptions, vol. ii, p. 370, “The Apostle Paul often reasons inconclusively, and therefore wrote as any other person, of his turn of mind and thinking, and in his situation, would have written, without any particular inspiration.”
Detesting the Di-theism of the Arians, and equally distant from the error of Deists, and that of Tri-theists, the faithful maintainers of the catholic faith worship the one Supreme Being, according to the threefold display which he hath made of himself. Did we worship three gods, as some Deists suppose we do, we should worship three separate beings. But, abhorring Polytheism, we say with the Scripture, Although “there are three that bear record in heaven,” yet outoi oi treiv en eisi, Hi tres Unum sunt, “These three [Divine subsistences] are one” substance. These three Divine persons are one Jehovah. And we believe and affirm it, for the solid reasons which shall soon be produced.
Never did we say or think, either that three persons are one person, or three gods are one God. These contradictions never disgraced our creeds. We only maintain, that the one Divine essence manifests itself to us in three Divine subsistences most intimately joined and absolutely inseparable. With the Scripture, we assert, that, as these subsistences bore each a particular part in our creation, so they are particularly engaged in the securing of our eternal happiness; the Father chiefly planning, the Son chiefly executing, and the Holy Ghost chiefly perfecting, the great work of our new creation. All the difficulty, with regard to this mystery, consists, then, in believing a plain matter of fact; namely, that we are commanded to “be baptized in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” or, to take for our one God, the one Supreme Being, manifesting himself to us as our Friend and Father, in and through the Son, and by the Spirit; Jehovah, who is perfectly acquainted with his own nature, our wants, and our dispositions, having seen, that, to win our love, and to inflame our zeal for his service, it was proper to inform us, that, in his adorable essence, there is a trinity of subsistences; each of whom is specially concerned in the stupendous work of our salvation, and each of whom now bears the most endearing relation to mankind in general, and to the Church in particular.
These Divine subsistences, (for so we beg leave to call them, according to the most literal meaning of the word upostasiv, used by St. Paul, Hebrews 1:3,) were soon called persons by the Latin fathers, as appears from Tertullian, a writer of the second century, who, in his book against Praxeas, frequently mentions the person of the Son, and the Divine Persons, (Personam Filii, divinas Personas, &c.)
The primitive Christians, finding it inconvenient to repeat always at full length the names of the three Divine subsistences, as our Lord enumerates them in his charge of baptizing all nations, began about the same time, both for brevity and variety’s sake, to call them the TRINITY, and if, by renouncing that comprehensive word, we could remove the prejudices of Deists against the truth contended for, we would give it up, and always say, “The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” which is what we mean by the trinity.
In the meantime, if to worship the Son and the Spirit, as comprehended in the unity of the Father’s Godhead, be to deserve the name of Trinitarian, we glory in the appellation, provided it do not exclude that of Unitarian; for we do not less worship the unity in mysterious trinity, than the trinity in the most perfect and unfathomable unity.
Hence it appears, that, if the word Unitarian mean a maintainer of the Divine unity against idolaters of every description, there are two sorts of Unitarians, who differ as widely, as the catholic faith differs from Socinianism.
1. The Christian, or Catholic Unitarians, who maintain the Divine unity against all sorts of Polytheists, the Arians themselves not excepted; but who, at the same time, assert, that this unity necessarily includes the Father, the Word, and the Spirit; it being far more unevangelical to suppose, that the Father is the one Supreme Being in the universe, exclusively of his Word and Spirit, than it is unconstitutional to say, that the king is the one supreme legislative power in England, exclusive of the lords and commons.
2. The Jewish, or Socinian Unitarians, who not only confine the Father to a barren, lonesome unity, but, so far as their influence reaches, tear from him his beloved Son, and even despoil him of his paternity. Nor is it surprising, that when we consider them in this light, far from giving them the name of Unitarians, we are tempted to call them disuniters, dividers of God, and manglers of the Divine nature.
Judge, candid reader, between these Unitarians, so called, and us. Like the false mother, who, to deceive Solomon, gave up to the dividing sword, the child she claimed as her own; do not these dividers betray their want of love to the true Scriptural unity? And when they try to disunite God the Father from his beloved Son, with the sword they borrow from Caiaphas and Mohammed, do they not, before the judicious, attack the Divine unity defended by St. John? And is not their attempt far more absurd and unnatural than that of making a rent between the sun and its glorious effulgence?
Man is not only prone to leave the narrow way of truth, but to run from one extreme to the other. When the Divine unity was chiefly revealed, mankind madly ran into idolatry. The Creator was forgotten; almost every creature was deemed a god. But since the Creator has revealed, that, in the unity of the Divine essence, there are three Divine subsistences, human perverseness starts back from that glorious discovery, and the philosophers of this world, under pretence of standing up for the Divine unity, and for the dignity of the Father, refuse Divine honours to the second and to the third subsistence, without which the Deity cannot exist, and the Father can be no Father.
Hence it appears that idolatry and impiety are the two precipices between which the Christian’s road lies all the way to heaven. Dr. Priestley supposes that we are fallen into the former; and we fear that he and his admirers rush into the latter. Let us see who are mistaken. It is one of the most important questions that was ever debated. Either we are idolaters in worshipping that which by nature is not God, or the Socinians are impious in refusing Divine worship to that which is really God; and what is more dreadful still, they worship a mangled notion of Deity, and not the God revealed to us in the sacred Scriptures.
Not to worship the Word and the Spirit, when they were not explicitly and directly revealed, was more excusable; but what can be said for the baptized people who set at naught the Deity of two of the Divine hypostases so clearly revealed to them? If the Word and the Spirit partake of Godhead jointly with the Father, can those who deny them Divine honours trust in them for salvation? Do they not take large strides to meet the danger which our Lord describes in these words, “Whosoever shall deny ME before men, him will I also deny before my Father?” And does not a punishment, peculiarly aggravated, await those who perversely and finally “sin against the Holy Ghost;” as, we fear, all baptized people do when they deny his influences upon the soul, as well as his vitality and rationality? For it is evident, that if the Word and the Spirit have an essential place in the Divine nature, by which we were created, to treat them as mere creatures is far worse than not to render unto Cesar the things which are Cesar’s; for it is refusing unto God that which is God’s—it is slighting the proper Son of God on account of that very humiliation by which he came to overcome our pride; and it is resisting and grieving that Holy Spirit which is to comfort us on earth, and to glorify us in heaven.
Having thus taken a general view of the catholic faith, let us now consider the arguments which the wise men of this world bring to make us ashamed of calling upon our Redeemer and our Sanctifier.