Having now given you the real opinions of Socinus, from his own works, for the book is lying beside me as I write, I shall pursue my plan of examining how far they accord with what was taught by those who certainly ought to be best informed on the subject, namely, Christ himself, his Apostles, and their immediate successors; as well as with the deductions of reason. The unity of the Deity is so frequently and so decidedly asserted in Scripture, that it is impossible to consider any man as unorthodox who professes to make this the groundwork of his belief—so far therefore the Socinian is in accordance both with Scripture and the general voice of the Christian church, for the early Apologists for Christianity, who had to address polytheists, are full of declarations that they worship One only Deity, who by various manifestations has made himself, at different times, known to mankind. {39a} There is not a writer of the first and second centuries who does not anxiously assert the one-ness of the God whom the Christians worship: but then they as anxiously assert the identity of their Teacher and Lord with that God. From Christ himself, who says, “Before Abraham was, I am;” {39b} “I and the Father are one;” {39c} “He who hath seen me hath seen the Father;” “the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works;” {39d} to St. Paul, who tells us that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself,” {39e} down to the fathers of the early church, to whom I may refer _passim_ for the same doctrine; all have distinctly asserted that the message of peace to man was delivered by God himself, making use of a human form as the mode of communication with his creatures, and dwelling in “the man Christ Jesus,” {39f} as in a temple built up for his especial use; the human nature, to use the expression of the church, “having been taken into God,” not the Godhead circumscribed in man. I will not swell the length of my letter with quotations from the fathers which may be found elsewhere; I think the texts I have quoted with many more of the same purport, which you will readily call to mind, suffice to prove that when Socinus asserted the Christ to be _merely_ a man, he erred; for though Jesus “the Carpenter’s son,” as his contemporaries called him, was to all intents and purposes a man “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;” {40} and though this may be proved from numberless passages in the Scripture, where the man Jesus speaks of his inferiority to the Father and bestower of his human frame and spirit,—yet if we do not entirely distort the meaning of words, _that man_ at times uttered declarations of divine power which could only have proceeded from the indwelling Deity, otherwise they must have been the assertions of imposture, which Socinus by no means teaches to have been the case. I know not, therefore, how the believer in the Gospel can avoid acknowledging that Christ was a compound being:—perfectly a man, and