1807.

Letter III. .

They (the Jews) did not deny that to be God’s own Son was to be equal with the Father, nor did they allege that such an equality would destroy the divine unity:  a thought of this kind never seems to have occurred to their minds.

In so truly excellent a book as this is, I regret that this position should rest on an assertion.  The equality of Christ would not, indeed, destroy the unity of God the Father, considered as one Person:  but, unless we presume the Jews in question acquainted with the great truth of the Tri-unity, we must admit that it would be considered as implying Ditheism.  Now that some among the Jews had made very near approaches, though blended with errors, to the doctrine taught in John, c. i., we can prove from the writings of Philo; ­and the Socinians can never prove that these Jews did not know at least of the doctrine of their schools concerning the only-begotten Word ­[Greek:  Logos monogenaes], ­not as an attribute, much less as an abstraction or personification ­but as a distinct ‘Hypostasis’ [Greek:  symphysikae]:-and hence it might be shown that their offence was that the carpenter’s son, the Galilean, should call himself the [Greek:  Theos phaneros].  This might have been rendered more than probable by the concluding sentence of Christ’s answer to the disciples of John; ­’and blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me’ (Luke vi.); which appears to have no adequate or even tolerable meaning, unless in reference to the passage in Isaiah, (lx, 2.) prophesying that Jéhovah himself would come among them, and do the things which our Saviour states himself to have done.  Thus, too, I regret that the answer of our Lord, (John -36.) being one of the imagined strong-holds of the Socinians, should not have been more fully cleared up.  I doubt not that Fuller’s is a true interpretation; and that no other is consistent with our Lord’s various other declarations.  But the words in and by themselves admit a more plausible misinterpretation than is elsewhere the case of Socinian displanations.  In short, I think both passages would have been better deferred to a further part of the work.

Let me add that a mighty and comparatively new argument against the Socinians may be most unanswerably deduced from this reply of our Lord’s, even were it considered as a mere ‘argumentum ad homines’:  ­namely, that it was not his Messiahship that so offended the Jews, but his Sonship; otherwise, our Saviour’s language would have neither force, motive, or object.  “Even were I no more than the Messiah, in your meanest conceptions of that character, yet after what I have done before your eyes, nothing but malignant hearts could have prevented you from adopting a milder interpretation of my words, when in your own Scriptures there exists a precedent that so much more than merely justifies me.”  And this I believe to be the meaning of the words as intended to be understood by the Jews in question; though, doubtless, Fuller’s sense exists ‘implicite’.  No candid person would ever call it an evasion, to prove the injustice and malignity of an accuser even from his own grounds: ­“You charge me falsely; but even were your charge true, namely, that I am a mere man, and yet call myself the Son of God, still it would not follow that I have been guilty of blasphemy.”  But as understood by the modern Unicists, it would verily, verily, be an evasive ambiguity, most unworthy of Christian belief concerning his Saviour.  Common charity would have demanded of him to have said: ­“I am a mere man:  I do not pretend to be more; but I used the words in analogy to the words, ‘Ye are as Gods’; and I have a right to do so:  for though a mere man, I am the great Prophet and Messenger which Moses promised you.”

Letter V. .

If Dr. Priestley had formed his estimate of human virtue by that great standard which requires love to God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves, ­instead of representing men by nature as having “more virtue than vice,” ­he must have acknowledged with the Scripture, that ’the whole world lieth in wickedness ­that every thought and imagination of their heart is only evil continually’ ­and that ’there is none of them that doeth good, no not one’.

To this the Unicists would answer, that by ‘the whole world’ is meant all the worldly-minded; ­no matter in how direct opposition to half a score other texts!  “One text at a time!” sufficient for the day is the evil thereof! ­and in this way they go on pulling out hair by hair from the horse’s tail, (say rather, dreaming that they do so,) and then conclude with a shout that the horse never had a tail!  For why?  This hair is not a tail, nor that, nor the third, and so on to the very last; and how can all do what none of all does? ­Ridiculous as this is, it is a fair image of Socinian logic.  Thank God, their plucking out is a mere fancy; ­and the sole miserable reality is the bare rump which they call their religion; ­but that is the ape’s own growth.

Ib. .

  First, that all punishments are designed for the good of the whole,
  and less or corrective punishments for the good of the offender, is
  admitted. God never inflicts punishment for the sake of punishing.

This is not, [Greek:  hos emoige dokei], sufficiently guarded.  That all punishments work for the good of the whole, and that the good of the whole is included in God’s design, I admit:  but that this is the sole cause, and the sole justification of divine punishment, I cannot, I dare not, concede; ­because I should thus deny the essential evil of guilt, and its inherent incompatibility with the presence of a Being of infinite holiness.  Now, exclusion from God implies the sum and utmost of punishment; and this would follow from the very essence of guilt and holiness, independently of example, consequence, or circumstance.

Letter VI. .

  (The systems compared as to their tendency to promote morality in
  general.)

I have hitherto made no objection to, no remark on, any one part of this Letter; for I object to the whole ­not as Calvinism, but ­as what Calvin would have recoiled from.  How was it that so good and shrewd a man as Andrew Fuller should not have seen, that the difference between a Calvinist and a Priestleyan Materialist-Necessitarian consists in this: ­The former not only believes a will, but that it is equivalent to the ‘ego ipse’, to the actual self, in every moral agent; though he believes that in human nature it is an enslaved, because a corrupt, will.  In denying free will to the unregenerated he no more denies will, than in asserting the poor negroes in the West Indies to be slaves I deny them to be men.  Now the latter, the Priestleyan, uses the word will, ­not for any real, distinct, correspondent power, but, ­for the mere result and aggregate of fibres, motions, and sensations; in short, it is a mere generic term with him, just as when we say, the main current in a river.

Now by not adverting to this, and alas! misled by Jonathan Edwards’s book, Fuller has hidden from himself and his readers the damnable nature of the doctrine ­not of necessity (for that in its highest sense is identical with perfect freedom; they are definitions each of the other); but ­of extraneous compulsion.  O! even this is not adequate to the monstrosity of the thought.  A denial of all agency; ­or an assertion of a world of agents that never act, but are always acted upon, and yet without any one being that acts; ­this is the hybrid of Death and Sin, which throughout this letter is treated so amicably!  Another fearful mistake, and which is the ground of the former, lies in conceding to the Materialist, ‘explicite et implicite’, that the [Greek:  noumenon], the ‘intelligibile’, the ‘ipseitas super sensibilis’, of guilt is in time, and of time, and, consequently, a mechanism of cause and effect; ­in other words, in confounding the [Greek:  phainomena, ta rheonta, ta mae ontos onta], ­all which belong to time, and cannot be even thought of except as effects necessarily predetermined by the precedent causes, (themselves in their turn effects of other causes), ­with the transsensual ground or actual power.

After such admissions, no other possible defence can be made for Calvinism or any other ‘ism’ than the wretched recrimination:  “Why, yours, Dr. Priestley, is just as bad!” ­Yea, and no wonder: ­for in essentials both are the same.  But there was no reason for Fuller’s meddling with the subject at all, ­metaphysically, I mean.

Ib. .

If the unconditionality of election render it unfriendly to virtue, it must be upon the supposition of that view of things, “which attributes more to God, and less to man,” having such ascendancy; which is the very reverse of what Dr. Priestley elsewhere teaches, and that in the same performance.

But in both systems, as Fuller has erroneously stated his own, man is annihilated.  There is neither more nor less; it is all God; all, all are but ’Deus infinite modificatus’: ­in brief, both systems are not Spinosism, for no other reason than that the logic and logical consequency of 10 Fullers + 10 X 10 Dr. Priestleys, piled on each other, would not reach the calf of Spinoza’s leg.  Both systems of necessity lead to Spinosism, nay, to all the horrible consequences attributed to it by Spinoza’s enemies.  O, why did Andrew Fuller quit the high vantage ground of notorious facts, plain durable common sense, and express Scripture, to delve in the dark in order to countermine mines under a spot, on which he had no business to have wall, tent, temple, or even standing-ground!