Some of his enemies denounced Samuell Gorton as an atheist. He was as remote as possible from atheistic leanings. He was not even affiliated with the deism of his own and the succeeding century. His theology was profoundly Christian. It was as Christocentric as that of Swedenborg, with which it has sometimes been compared. Like Swedenborg, he regarded the Infinite and Absolute as _per se_ unknowable. Here both Gorton and Swedenborg are in touch with the modern philosophical agnostic. For both, however, Christianity solved the agnostic problem. In Christ they found a perfect expression of the divine nature, and the only rational object of worship.[69] With regard to the nature of Christ, however, Gorton and Swedenborg were widely separated. Swedenborg’s theology is boldly anthropomorphic; Gorton’s was monistic and impersonal. “The word ‘person’,” he says, “is only borrowed from men and translated to God. * * That doctrine which ties the death of Christ to one perticuler man in one time and age of the world, as being the scope and intent of God’s will concerninge the death of his son in the salvation of the world, that doctrine falsifies the death of Jesus Christ, and sets men upon the law of workes in the ground and matter of their salvation, by which law no man is justified.”[70] Here, too, is another radical distinction between his doctrine and that of Swedenborg. The latter turns his most powerful batteries upon Paul’s doctrine of “justification by faith,” while Gorton stands with Luther in its defence. The “law of works” by which Gorton says no man is justified, he rightly interprets as the conception of salvation through ceremonial observances; not merely the ritual of Pharisaic Judaism denounced by the Master, but the ritual and ordinances as well of his own day and generation. Here he stands with the Friends, as he also did in his opposition to a “hireling ministry.” Worship, he taught, is natural to man. Every man is called to seek communion with the divine in Christ directly, and not through priestly mediations. “Prophesie, prayer, and interpretation of the word of God are one,” he says: “where one is there is the other; they are co-insident and co-aparant.” All men are naturally moved to prayer; all men, therefore, may rightfully exhort and interpret. To the conventional interpretations of churches, universities and schools, he preferred “the universitie of humane reason, and reading of the great volume of visible creation.” Mr. Gorton defined prayer as “nothing else but the true breath and spirit of the eternall word, according to God’s intent taken and rained into the soule, concocted and digested in the cauldron of man’s necessities, breathing out it selfe unto the fountaine and originall of all suply.”