he grand truth
that 'the Lord our God is one Lord.' They consent reluctantly to adopt
the term Unitarian because no other name has been invented to describe
the stage at which anti-Trinitarians had arrived before the close of the
eighteenth century. These latter, of course, differed essentially from
the Arians of the earlier part of the century. Neither can they be
properly termed Socinians, for Socinus, as Horsley justly remarks,
'though he denied the original divinity of Our Lord, was nevertheless a
worshipper of Christ, and a strenuous asserter of his right to worship.
It was left to others,' he adds, 'to build upon the foundation which
Socinus laid, and to bring the Unitarian doctrine to the goodly form in
which the present age beholds it.'[467] Indeed, the early Socinians
would have denied to Dr. Priestley and his friends the title of
Christians, and would have excommunicated them from their Society.
'Humanitarians' would be a more correct designation; but as that term is
already appropriated to a very different signification, it is not
available. For convenience' sake, therefore, the name of Unitarians must
be allowed to pass, but with the proviso that so far from its holders
being the sole possessors of the grand truth of the unity of the
Godhead, they really, from the fact of their denying the divinity of two
out of the three Persons in the Godhead, form only a very maimed and
inadequate conception of the one God.

The outcry against all mystery, or, to use a modern phrase, the spirit
of rationalism, which in a good or bad sense pervaded the whole domain
of religious thought, orthodox and unorthodox alike during the
eighteenth century, found its expression in one class of minds in Deism,
in another in anti-Trinitarianism. But though both disavowed any
opposition to real Christianity, yet both in reality allow no scope for
what have been from the very earliest times to the present day
considered essential doctrines of the Gospel. If the Deist strikes at
the very root of Christianity by questioning the evidence on which it
rests, no less does the Unitarian divest it of everything
distinctive--of the divine condescension shown in God taking our nature
upon Him, of the divine love shown in God's unseen presence even now in
His Church by His Holy Spirit. Take away these doctrines, and there will
be left indeed a residuum of ethical teaching, which some may please to
call Christianity if they will; but it differs as w