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
dismissed it from the body;—the trifler in his levity, the drunkard with
his idiot look, the murderer with the blood-stains on his soul—and the
sainted spirit passing on the breath of prayer from the outer to the
inner Court of God’s presence;—these, the solemn distinctions of that
awful world, are all lost, because of that common Hell into whose abyss
unawed Conscience hurls her fears, and then forgets the infinite
gradations of punishment that still remain to pour dread recompense on
evil at the award of a retributive God.
There are some objections urged against these views of the practical
importance of Unitarianism to which I must now give brief and emphatic
answer.
1. It is said that Unitarianism generates no love to Christ: and the
reason assigned is, that as we reject the primal curse of original sin,
we have not so much to be forgiven, and consequently not equal
obligation to love; for to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth
little. Now in our view forgiveness is of God, in whom Trinitarians find
no forgiveness, and Christ is the image of our Father in Heaven, and we
love _him_ who leads us into that pure and blissful presence, and in
whose face we have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, full
of grace and truth. We love Jesus for what he is to our souls, and not
for the theological fiction, that he took off a disqualification which
our God laid on. We love all holy and good beings for the same reasons,
that they strengthen in our own nature the springs of goodness and
unselfish love, and lift us into fellowship with themselves; and
therefore we love God supremely, _and next to God_, _him_ who through
self-devotion and perfect filial trust preserved the moral lineaments of
Heaven, of a mind harmonized with providence, against the weaknesses and
through the temptations of this humanity, whose tremblings we know so
well, and whose fallings away in ourselves from the higher impulses of
God have taught us the love of veneration for him who made it bear the
likeness of Heaven, and, through its trials and its shrinkings, realized
perfection. The moral estimate that would proportion our love to Christ,
not to his own fitness to inspire love, to the heavenly benevolence that
breathed through his own life and death, but to the selfish measure of
the outward benefits received, can be equalled in the confusion and
impurity of its moral ideas only by another moral judgment pronounced
upon the same occasion—that the guilt of the Jews, when they crucified
Jesus, must be estimated and measured in proportion as Jesus was man or
God. This certainly is quite consistent with the Trinitarian scheme,
that guilt can be contracted unknowingly; but who will set right this
utter ignorance of the primitive ideas of morality? What spectres of the
thirteenth century rise before us when we listen to these conceptions—of
God dying under the hands of his creatures; and of their guilt, by some
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