Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Prop. ii, pp. 35, 36. Footnote 20: Ibid. Prop. x. p. 296. Footnote 21: Discourses, No. 10, Hughes’s edition, vol. i. p. 197. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE UNITARIAN CONTROVERSY. An attempt has been made, in a preface to the Lecture to which the following pages are a reply, to break the force, by anticipation, of the statements they contain. The Answerer, however, evidently did not hear the statements; and the preface proceeds upon some rumour of what was said. If Clergymen are conscientiously prevented from going to hear Unitarians, they ought also to be conscientiously prevented from answering what they did not hear. I am represented as saying that Trinitarians do not gather, but _lecture_: I said Trinitarianism does not gather, but _scatters_. I am represented as arguing the tendency of Trinitarianism to Popery from the recent movement of the Oxford Tract divines in that direction: I argued the tendency of Trinitarianism to Popery _from its fundamental principles_, and I referred to the Oxford movement as one of the visible manifestations of the demonstrated tendency. I shall notice the instances in which the Preface proceeds upon anything like a true apprehension of what was said— 1. Page vii. viii.—“When men tell us that Jesus did not weep over _errors of opinion_, we maintain that it was the ‘error of opinion’ which led them to reject him as the Messiah over which he lamented.” Now, 1. Is the unbelief of the Jews in the Christ, when he was exhibiting his divine credentials in his Character and in his Miracles before their eyes and to their hearts, in any respect similar to our unbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity, which we, accepting both the Scriptures and Christ, declare we cannot find to be authorized by either? And 2. Is it not evident that Jesus attributed the unbelief of the Jews to _Moral_ Causes, and that therefore, and _only_ therefore, he condemned it? “This is the Condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, _because their deeds were evil_.” John iii. 19.