The English Church in the Eighteenth CenturyAbbey, Charles J. (Charles John)
History
The English Church in the Eighteenth Century
Abbey, Charles J. (Charles John)
Church of England -- History -- 18th century
And first as to the nomenclature. The name claimed by the
anti-Trinitarians has, for want of a better, been perforce adopted in
the foregoing pages. But in calling them Unitarians, we must do so under
protest. The advocates of the Catholic doctrine might with equal
correctness be termed, from one point of view, Unitarians, as they are
from another point of view termed Trinitarians. For they believe in the
Unity of God as firmly as they believe in the Trinity. And they hold
that there is no real contradiction in combining those two subjects of
belief; because the difficulty of reconciling the Trinity with the Unity
of the Godhead in reality proceeds simply from our human and necessary
incapacity to comprehend the nature of the union. Therefore they cannot
for a moment allow to disbelievers in the Trinity the title of
Unitarians, so as to imply that the latter monopolise the grand truth
that 'the Lord our God is one Lord.' They consent reluctantly to adopt
the term Unitarian because no other name has been invented to describe
the stage at which anti-Trinitarians had arrived before the close of the
eighteenth century. These latter, of course, differed essentially from
the Arians of the earlier part of the century. Neither can they be
properly termed Socinians, for Socinus, as Horsley justly remarks,
'though he denied the original divinity of Our Lord, was nevertheless a
worshipper of Christ, and a strenuous asserter of his right to worship.
It was left to others,' he adds, 'to build upon the foundation which
Socinus laid, and to bring the Unitarian doctrine to the goodly form in
which the present age beholds it.'[467] Indeed, the early Socinians
would have denied to Dr. Priestley and his friends the title of
Christians, and would have excommunicated them from their Society.
'Humanitarians' would be a more correct designation; but as that term is
already appropriated to a very different signification, it is not
available. For convenience' sake, therefore, the name of Unitarians must
be allowed to pass, but with the proviso that so far from its holders
being the sole possessors of the grand truth of the unity of the
Godhead, they really, from the fact of their denying the divinity of two
out of the three Persons in the Godhead, form only a very maimed and
inadequate conception of the one God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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