Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of LiverpoolMartineau, James
Religion
Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Liverpool
Martineau, James
Unitarianism
The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament showeth his
handy-work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth
knowledge—and that God is one, is proclaimed in this speech, and
manifested in this knowledge. It gleams in the light, it breathes in the
air, it moves in the life of all created nature; it is the harmony of
creation, and the spirit of providence, the inspiration of reason, and
the consistency of wisdom. The existence of one Supreme Intelligence is
the Testimony of Nature, and to the same import are the testimonies of
Scripture. We are told, and told it in every variety of tone, that to
believe one God in three persons is absolutely needful to Salvation, yet
we may read from Genesis to Revelations without finding such a doctrine
either as a statement of truth, or a means of sanctity: but the simple
and unqualified declaration that God is one, without any of these
dogmatical distinctions which men of later ages have invented, I need
not tell a Bible-reading audience, are interwoven with the whole texture
of revelation. It was that for which Abraham left his home, and went
forth a wanderer from his family and his nation; it was that for which
Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, and for which
he chose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God; it was that
over which he had long thought in his shepherd-life in an Arabian
wilderness; it was that with which he was more deeply inspired in the
solemn retirements of Mount Horeb; it was that to which all his laws and
institutions pointed. Our Saviour took the doctrine as a known maxim—and
in this his disciples followed him. We have then the truth brought down
to us through Scripture, in patriarchal tradition, in Mosaic
legislation, in the poetry of prophets, in the words of Christ, in the
preaching of apostles,—and we have it brought down to us without one of
those distinctions with which it has been since surrounded by
theological ingenuity. We are zealous in the assertion of it, not for
its mere metaphysical correctness, but for its moral power and its moral
consistency. It does not divide our hearts, and it does not confuse our
heads. It leads our minds up to one spirit, infinite in power, infinite
in wisdom, and infinite in goodness. Without confusion or perplexity we
can trace God in all and all in God: in the atom that trembles in a
sunbeam, as in the planet that moves in boundless light, from the blush
of a flower to the glory of the heavens—from the throb of an insect to
the life of an immortal. The Unitarian faith in the universal father is
clear, simple, and defined; inflicting no violence on our
understandings, and raising no conflicts in our affections. One, and one
in the strictest sense, is our parent, one is our sovereign, one is our
highest benefactor, one is our protector and our guide, one is our
deliverer and sanctifier; one has bestowed all we possess, one alone can
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