I cordially wish that the Unitarians of this country would seriously consider, whether they are not treading in a path, whose character and tendency coincides with that against which the German Professor thus raised his faithful protest. There are symptoms, in no small degree alarming, adverse to this desire and discouraging to our hopes. Books have been published in our country with appearances of having flowed out of the fountain to which I have alluded; books boasting of pure ideal Christianity, and of Christian Theism, and pretending to assign an origin Varii Argumenti. 1833.) These and the Synonyms can scarcely be too much recommended to theological students. The same learned and truly Christian scholar has likewise carefully re edited, with an additional Preface, Tittmann's edition of the Greek Testament, which had been twice printed before, but this last by the learned, disinterested, and benevolent publisher, Mr. Tauchnitz (1840), is a book both cheap and of extraordinary beauty as to type and paper. Its luminous page speaks through the eye to the mind, and is thus better than many a comment. Of the two former editions, the unpretending appearance and cheapness have probably contributed to prevent their meeting with their merited attention in our country. The Preface is a fine specimen of criticism, conducted in the spirit of wisdom and cautious judgment; and the Text is constituted in the same spirit, and does not deviate from the commonly received nearly so much as does Griesbach. Dr. Jaumann, a learned Roman Catholic, who published a critical edition of the Greek Testament at Neuburg in 1835, speaks in very respectful terms of Griesbach's and others', but gives the palm to this of Tittmann.

Prof. Moses Stuart says, A somewhat familiar acquaintance with the writings of Professor Tittmann has brought me to regard him as one of the most able, sober, and impartial critics on the language of the New Testament that Germany has of late produced. He has left nothing behind him which I have seen, that will not abundantly repay perusal, and even study; which is more than can be truly said of most writers, in any age or country." American Biblical Repos. Jan. 1835, p. 84.

to Christianity which, perhaps a little disguised, turns out to be merely human. The tendency, indeed the avowal, is to a system of revived Pantheism,-Atheism, in almost its horrid nakedness, for the thin veil is only an insult to the understandings of men :-the system of Hegel and Strauss. The short expression of this folly is, that there is no personal, intellectual, presiding God, but that God is the universe and the universe is God, that the individual man has no conscious existence after death; but that the human nature subsists on an infinite succession of individuals, the particular men indeed dying, but the race ever renewed and therefore possessing the properties of an antecedent eternity and all infinite and finite attributes; "God become man, the infinite renouncing itself to finiteness, and the finite spirit reminding itself of its own infinity it is the child of the visible mother and the invisible father, of spirit and nature:-it is the worker of miracles ;-it is sinless ;-it is the dying, the rising, and the heaven-ascending.— Through faith in this Christ, namely in his death and his resurrection, man becomes righteous before God: that is, through the animation of the idea of humanity in itself, namely in the proportion of the power of the negation of naturalness and sensitiveness, which itself is already the negation of the spirit: thus the negation of the negation is the only way for man to the true spiritual life, [and thus] also the individual becomes a partaker of the God-man life of the [whole] kind.

This alone is the complete substance of the

doctrine concerning Christ." The introductory clause to this passage is, "This is the key to the whole doctrine concerning Christ." Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. ii. p. 767-8; Tübingen, 1839. Also quoted, and commented upon, and REFUTED by Dr. Mill's (Christian Advocate,) Observations on the Pantheistic Principles, &c. Part I. Cambridge, 1840.

And there are men (?) who call this mad wickedness, their transcendental philosophy!!-For this they can renounce "the glorious gospel of the BLESSED GOD."-Did ever upon earth, the words receive a more perfect verification,-"professing themselves to be wise, they have become fools?"

It is proper to add, that there are, among the modern divines on the continent, some of a very different character from that of the Neologists; yet who have accustomed themselves to say that Christ is not properly, but only figuratively, a priest and a king. But with them it is merely a question of words. They simply mean that Christ was not a Levitical priest, serving in the temple at Jerusalem; just as he was not a king of an earthly sovereignty, having the visible insignia and attendants of temporal royalty. In reality, they do not appear to hold any thing different, on this point, from what we regard as scriptural truth. Yet let me be allowed to repeat, that the propriety of language would be more consulted, were we to affirm that the Lord Jesus is the ONLY proper priest that ever was or ever will be; and that all others, to whom that name has been legitimately given, were only shadows and pictures of him.

DISCOURSE III.

ON THE ATONEMENT MADE BY CHRIST.

THE view of the work of Christ as a Saviour which comes under the notion of Expiation, Propitiation, or Atonement, has been adverted to in the two preceding Discourses, as immediately arising from the idea of a Sacrifice; but I conceive that advantage will be gained to the cause of truth, by a more detailed exposition of the principles upon which this mode of representation rests, as they may be deduced by plain reasoning upon the necessary circumstances of accountable creatures.

I. That the AUTHOR and LORD of the universe exercises a perfect Moral Government, consisting in the duly apportioned manifestations of his approbation and disapprobation, over rational creatures, is capable of being demonstrated to any impartial mind, with abundant evidence, from different sources of argument; such, for example, as the necessary

ON THE ATONEMENT OF CHRIST.

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perfections of the Deity; the analogy of his physical government, in which order and law are so wonderfully observed; incipient strivings, as it were, and breakings forth of moral retributions in the present state; the feelings and expectations of men on their own behalf; their conduct towards each other; and that instinctive sense of moral differences, in dispositions and actions, which is invincible and indelible in every human mind.

II. The sum of all that man can obtain of satisfactory knowledge concerning the principles and rules of God's moral government, which hold the same rank in the intellectual system that the laws of matter and motion do in the physical, constitutes the Moral Law.

III. The whole spirit and requirements of the Moral Law lie in the single idea of Justice; that is, rendering to every being that which, in right, he ought to have.

From this one source might be deduced, by a process of plain and undeniable reasoning, all the requirements and prohibitions of the Moral Law. Consequently it is the same as the Law of Nature, or the collection of moral principles which men in general, without any positive revelation, have the power and opportunity of inferring from their own feelings, wants, and wishes, acted upon by the occurrences of individual experience and social life. For, since the Gentiles who have not a [written] law, by nature [pure, instinct, disposition, or moral sentiment,] do [τὰ τοῦ νόμου] the things directed or prohibited by the law, they, though they have not a law [in a

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