on, and Spirit,--was never in its
cloudless unity present to him. Hence both he and Bishop Bull too often
treat it as a peculiarity of positive religion, which is to be cleared
of all contradiction to reason, and then, thus negatively qualified, to
be actually received by an act of the mere will; 'sit pro ratione
voluntas'. Now, on the other hand, I affirm, that the article of the
Trinity is religion, is reason, and its universal 'formula'; and that
there neither is, nor can be, any religion, any reason, but what is, or
is an expansion of the truth of the Trinity; in short, that all other
pretended religions, pagan or 'pseudo'-Christian (for example,
Sabellian, Arian, Socinian), are in themselves Atheism; though God
forbid, that I should call or even think the men so denominated
Atheists. I affirm a heresy often, but never dare denounce the holder a
heretic.

On this ground only can it be made comprehensible, how any honest and
commonly intelligent man can withstand the proofs and sound logic of
Bull and Waterland, that they failed in the first place to present the
idea itself of the great doctrine which they so ably advocated. Take my
self, S.T.C. as a humble instance. I was never so befooled as to think
that the author of the fourth Gospel, or that St. Paul, ever taught the
Priestleyan Psilanthropism, or that Unitarianisn (presumptuously, nay,
absurdly so called), was the doctrine of the New Testament generally.
But during the sixteen months of my aberration from the Catholic Faith,
I presumed that the tenets of the divinity of Christ, the Redemption,
and the like, were irrational, and that what was contradictory to reason
could not have been revealed by the Supreme Reason. As soon as I
discovered that these doctrines were not only consistent with reason,
but themselves very reason, I returned at once to the literal
interpretation of the Scriptures, and to the Faith.

As to Dr. Samuel Clarke, the fact is, every generation has its one or
more over-rated men. Clarke was such in the reign of George I.; Dr.
Johnson eminently so in that of George III.; Lord Byron being the star
now in the ascendant.

In every religious and moral use of the word, God, taken absolutely,
that is, not as a God, or the God, but as God, a relativity, a
distinction in kind 'ab omni quod non est Deus', is so essentially
implied, that it is a matter of perfect indifference, whether we assert
a world without God, or make God the world. The one is