This is one of the many passages in Taylor's works which lead me to think that his private opinions were favorable to Socinianism. Observe, to the views of Socinus, not to modern Unitarianism, as taught by Priestley and Belsham. And doubtless Socinianism would much more easily bear a doubt, whether the difference between it and the orthodox faith was not more in words than in the things meant, than the Arian hypothesis. A mere conceptualist, at least, might plausibly ask whether either party, the Athanasian or the Socinian, had a sufficiently distinct conception of what the one meant by the hypostatical union of the Divine Logos with the man Jesus; or the other of his plenary, total, perpetual, and continuous inspiration, to have any well-grounded assurance, that they do not mean the same thing. Moreover, no one knew better than Jeremy Taylor that this apparent soar of the hooded falcon, faith, to the very empyrean of bibliolatry amounted in fact to a truism of which the following syllogism is a fair illustration. All stones are men: all men think: 'ergo', all stones think. The 'major' is taken for granted, the minor no one denies; and then the conclusion is good logic, though a very foolish untruth. Or, if an oval were demonstrated by Euclid to be a circle, it would be a circle; and if it were a demonstrable circle, it would be a circle, though the strait lines drawable from the centre to the circumference are unequal. If we were quite certain that an omniscient Being, incapable of deceiving, or being deceived, had assured us that 5 X 5 = 6 X 3, and that the two sides of a certain triangle were together less than the third, then we should be warranted in setting at nought the science of arithmetic and geometry. On another occasion, as when it was the good Bishop's object to expose the impudent assertions of the Romish Church since the eleventh century, he would have been the first to have replied by a counter syllogism. If we are quite certain that any writing pretending to divine origin contains gross contradictions to demonstrable truths 'in eodem genere', or commands that outrage the clearest principles of right and wrong; then we may be equally certain that the pretence is a blasphemous falsehood, inasmuch as the compatibility of a document with the conclusions of self-evident reason, and with the laws of conscience, is a condition 'a priori' of any evidence adequate to the proof of its having been revealed by God.