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have rifled his heart! Whither, ah! whither shall he go? It is not for him to be just before God; it is not for him to lift up even his eyes to heaven. Without a sacrifice for sin; without a medium of access-without an intercessor on High, he mourns in solitude over the wreck of hope which was radiant with immortality ;-he is tossed on an ocean of doubt, and darkness, and despair;-he lives, he dies, the conscious victim of God's wrath and curse!

ART. VII. THOUGHTS ON THE NEW-HAVEN THEOLOGY. By the EDITOR.

WHENEVER any serious errour has been introduced to the Church, a long previous process has been found necessary to prepare the public mind for its reception. A torrent of ridicule has been poured upon those who have been disposed to contend for the truth: a firm attachment to one's sentiments has been denounced as bigotry: an indolent indifference to all opinions extolled as the mark of a noble and ingenuous mind. In communities where errour has prepared for a triumph, no vice whatever is censured with such zeal and warmth as that charity which rejoiceth in the truth, and no virtue, however pure, so highly extolled as that counterfeit charity which denies or betrays it. The advocates of new doctrines are aware that if they efface from men's minds all respect for truth, the passions alone will secure the admission of errour, and the multitude is at last brought to consider it of little consequence what they believe; to place truth and errour on the same level, and, as to all practical purposes, to confound them.

In communities where the word of God continues to be honoured, revealed truth is regarded one of the greatest gifts which God has bestowed on mankind. Numerous martyrs have demonstrated to the world that they regarded it as dearer than life, and all the truly wise prize it beyond all

worldly good. They have, spared no labour nor study to obtain it; they have sacrificed their pride of reason, their preconceived opinions and their dearest inclinations to embrace it. But now we begin to be told that it is no matter whether we have it or not; that it is bigotry to suppose that we have it; that it is the very height of presumption to believe in our belief, or to suppose that the opposite can be errour. The very essence of charity is made to consist in believing all others to be right, and it seems now to be a settled policy to divide truth equally among opposing denominations. The pretended mother who came to Solomon, seemed to make a very equitable proposal; she desired that, as the child was claimed by both parties, it might be cut in two and divided equally between them; but the unnatural offer detected the falseness of her claims. And so it is at the present day. Cut truth in two, divide it any way, you cannot fail to suit them. Men cheerfully part with that which they have ceased to value. We may readily form an estimate of the motives which have animated these innovators in their search after truth, when they begin by attempting to confound the distinction between truth and errour, and assure us that the opinions they would introduce are no more important than those they would supplant. Themselves being judges, neither they nor their opinions are entitled to a hearing.

Notwithstanding all the artifice, ambiguity, apparent retractions and real contradictions with which errourists introduce their opinions, they are sure to be suspected, to be detected by a few, and to become the subject of censure; and every artifice is put in requisition to turn the honest warnings. of the friends of truth against themselves; and to shelter these innovators, they are represented as the objects of a cruel persecution; the orthodox are stigmatised as bigoted, cruel, ambitious, and vindictive. Great efforts are making at present to enlist sympathy for a certain class, and excite odium against the friends of what has hitherto been regarded as truth. Now we appeal to any man whether his sympathies are due to those who reverence the word of God, or to those who he believes would corrupt it: whether as a member of Christ he should feel sympathy for his suffering members, whom errour would delude, or for those who would delude them; whether he should have his compassion direct

ed towards those immortal beings who will feel the effects of this errour through eternity, or to those who would undo. them?

We shall notice the inventors and abettors of the new doctrines only as the propagators of what we believe to be dangerous errour; we are willing to concede to them all, and even more than their friends would be ready to claim for them; but still, whatever be the dignity, talents, or learning of those who would withdraw us from the truth, our course is plainly marked out in the word of God. "Though we," says the Apostle Paul," though we or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you, than that we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. If there come unto you any and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed-for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds." Whatever a counterfeit charity may pretend, we have the authority of the Bible, that it is an evil deed to corrupt the gospel of Christ.

Even supposing that the Church had no concern with the faith of its members, and that it may innocently bid God speed to them who are bringing in another gospel, still what shall we say of the ingenuousness of those who retain their connection with a church when they have rejected its fundamental doctrines, more who maintain this connection in order to subvert these doctrines. We concede to them the right as freemen to receive and teach what they please, but we deny that they can innocently use the confidence which the Church reposes in them in order to betray it; or profess a creed in order to overthrow it; or use the power, influence, and credit which they enjoy as bers and pastors in the Church in order to sap its founda

tions.

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Christians can innocently give their countenance to those who are introducing fundamental errour, only while they do it ignorantly. He that biddeth them God speed, knowing their true designs, is partaker of their evil deeds. The Church itself may extensively share the guilt and punishment of those who are introducing heresy. Bare silence alone is the most that these persons wish. Let them pursue their course of proselytism, of agitation and proscription upon those who are ignorant of their plans, unmolested, and they are sure of final success. By keeping silence only, the

Church would give them the whole weight of her authority. She would speak, and, in terms not to be misunderstood, say, that nothing is to be feared from these men. It is not necessary that the Church actually patronize such persons; she gives them actual countenance, if she do not make unceasing opposition to their works.

But it is said that before Christians can be justified in withdrawing confidence, errour must have been taught and acknowledged in the most plain and unequivocal manner. Now this is precisely that which will never be done. Where truth continues to be reverenced, fundamental errour can enter only secretly and in disguise. A plain disclosure would be its immediate ruin; it is always veiled in ambiguous language sure to be understood by the initiated, and misunderstood by the orthodox. Its abettors well know that they must use the sacred authority and influence of the Church to spread their opinions, and they have little scruple to use its confidence to undermine it. Hence they always begin by asserting that the difference is so slight, that on coming to definitions, it almost vanishes, that all alarm is groundless and ridiculous, and excited only from interested motives.

When those Pelagians who held the form of Arminianism in New-England, were preparing to introduce Socinianism into Massachusetts, did they give notice of their doings, 'did they themselves sound the alarm? On the contrary, the thing was conducted with such secrecy, that the defection was known in England sooner than in this country, and the news came to us only by accident, and from the other side of the Atlantic. How would any alarm have been received from the friends of truth at that time? Even after the defection had become extensive, all apprehension on the part of serious people was treated with ridicule. While Socinians were pouring ridicule and contempt upon the orthodox doctrines in one circle, asserting that none but the bigoted, ignorant, weak, and superstitious could receive such absurdities as the doctrines of the Reformation, in others they were giving assurances that the differences were slight, and mostly verbal, and that it would be criminal in the highest degree to allow them to interrupt the harmony, peace, and union which heretofore had prevailed. Doubtless every truth that is given up, is first deemed unimportant by those that surrender it. But did the Church bid them God speed, and by

countenancing them in their labours, become a partner in their guilt? No. Without the formality of a trial, or even of a citation, she did not indeed exscind them from all ecclesiastical connexion, but she did more. She withdrew from their communion, and thus, as it were, passed upon them the sentence of excommunication; and justly. For the other party must have despised them yet more in their hearts had they done less. They would justly have considered them insincere either in their creed or in their professions of union, should they continue communion with those who ridiculed, despised, and blasphemed what they believed to be the gospel of Christ. So far from preserving harmony, the only feelings such an union could produce, would be suspicion on one part and contempt on the other. It could only have given a wider spread to the corruption, and made a subsequent division more extensive.

Now who was it that caused this division? Was it those who continued to maintain the gospel which both parties had held in common, or those who introduced another gospel, and required their brethren to bid them God speed in spreading it? The other party had left the orthodox no alternative but that of abusing the patronage and the authority of the Church for the dissemination of heresy, or of dissolving communion. By taking the other course, not only must they have given their influence to the spread of dangerous errour, but even brought their own integrity into suspicion. What confidence could he claim, who on one occasion should teach one thing, and on another the reverse; in words that one thing was the gospel, in actions that the opposite was equally so? This course must have ruined them, and perhaps their churches.

At the present time we hear some of the great doctrines of the Reformation treated with ridicule, and accused of the most licentious tendency, and the very same persons elsewhere claiming to hold them with differences merely verbal. We hear Pelagianism advanced with some degree of boldness, and then apparently retracted and denied. We remember hearing a distinguished Unitarian clergyman remark that, in general he found little to censure in the statements of the New-Haven divines on depravity, regeneration and imputation, but when they undertake to prove their orthodoxy on these points to their brethren, we see not much to choose between them. Now to whom do men VOL. V. 20

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