They advocate the most perfect toleration. They regard CHARITY as the crowning Christian grace,—the end of the commandment of God. They consider a pure and lofty morality as not only inseparable from true religion, but the most acceptable service that man can render to his Maker, and the only indubitable evidence of a believing heart. They believe that sin is its own punishment, and virtue its own rewarder; that the moral consequences of a man’s good or evil conduct go with him into the future life, to afford him remorse or satisfaction; that God will be influenced in all his dealings with the soul by mercy and justice, punishing no more severely than the sinner deserves, and always for a benevolent end. Indeed, the greater part of the denomination are Restorationists. Unitarians consider that, besides the Bible, all the Ante-Nicene fathers—that is, all Christian writers for three centuries after the birth of Christ—give testimony in their favor, against the modern popular doctrine of the Trinity. As for _antiquity_, it is their belief that it is really on their side. In the _First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians_, which was written towards the close of the first century,—and the evidence for the genuineness of which is stronger than for that of any other of the productions attributed to the apostolical fathers,—the supremacy of the Father is asserted or implied throughout, and Jesus is spoken of in terms mostly borrowed from the Scriptures. He is once called the “sceptre of the majesty of God;” and this highly-figurative expression is the most exalted applied to him in the whole Epistle. Justin Martyr, the most distinguished of the ancient fathers of the church, who flourished in the former part of the second century, and whose writings (with the exception of those attributed to the _apostolic_ fathers) are the earliest Christian records next to the New Testament, expressly says, “We worship God, the Maker of the universe, offering up to him prayers and thanks. But, assigning to Jesus, who came to teach us these things, and for this end was born, the ‘_second place_’ after God, we not without reason honor him.” The germ and origin of the doctrine of the Trinity, the Unitarians find in the speculations of those Christianized philosophers of the second century, whose minds were strongly tinctured with the Platonic philosophy, combined with the _emanation system_, as taught at Alexandria, and held by Philo. From this time they trace the gradual formation of the doctrine through successive ages down to Athanasius and Augustine; the former of whom, A. D. 362, was the first to insist upon the equality of the Holy Ghost with the Father and the Son; and the latter, about half a century afterwards, was the first to insist upon their numerical unity.