speaking as such on some occasions; but, at the same time, the temple of the Ever-living God, whose words flowed from his lips like the answer from the Mercy seat: “Heaven and the heaven of heavens” no doubt “cannot contain” the Infinite; and no true believer will assert that God can be circumscribed in a human body—but, if so mean a comparison may be permitted—as the crater of the volcano is but the mouthpiece of the mighty agents operating within for the fashioning of the earth,—so the manifestation of the Deity in the form, and from the lips of a man, is but that spot of the material creation where the ever blessed Divinity allows himself, as it were, a vent; and gives forth a visible and tangible sign of his existence. “He that has seen me has seen the Father,” says _the Christ_. “I can of my own self do nothing” {41} says _the man_: and this distinction which the Christ who necessarily knew something of the composition of his own nature so frequently asserts, has probably been the groundwork of the mistaken views of this class of Christians, and we may well look with charitable indulgence on the errors of men, who dreading lest they should incur the penalty of giving the incommunicable glory of the Mighty God to another, have not allowed their due weight to the passages, which assert that Mighty God to have undertaken the task of bringing his creature man back to Himself. Having thus given you a fair account of the creed of Socinus, I must next notice the modern Unitarians, who on some points differ from him. Where there is no acknowledged creed or catechism, {42} which may be quoted as authority, it is difficult to give the doctrines of a sect with any precision; but as far as it is possible to judge from the writings most in repute among the Unitarians, they disclaim the notion of the miraculous conception, and believe Christ to have been to all intents and purposes _a mere man_. At the same time they allow him to have been so inspired and guided by God, that it is difficult to see where they draw the line between their own creed and that of the church, which allows the perfect humanity of Jesus, but asserts that “God and man make one Christ,” namely, that the message of peace was that of God speaking by human lips, and that the Anointed prophet who declared it, was, when so anointed, the temple and place of manifestation of the living God. They disclaim the doctrine of atonement, and believe that the mission of Christ had for its object the reform of the world, and the restoration of man to a sense of his true relation towards God, and even here Scripture and the early church speak a language which differs not very greatly from theirs. For the language in which our redemption is spoken of, is that of a master purchasing a slave, as will be seen on a reference to Rom. vi. in the original. The ransom by which man was purchased to be the servant of holiness instead of that of sin, was paid to his former