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REVIEW.
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Untitled Article
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Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Review.
REVIEW .
Untitled Article
Art . I . —AsuTspa * Q povTiSeq . Second Thoughts on the Person of Christ , on Human Sin , and on the Atonement ; containing Reasons for the Author ' s Secession from the Unitarian Communion ^ and his Adherence to that of the Established Church . By Charles A . Elton , &c . Bristol , 1827 . Unitarianism Abandoned ; or Reasons assigned for ceasing to be connected with that description of Religious Professors who designate themselves Unitarians . By James Gilchrist . London , 1827 *
( Concluded from p . 583 . ) If Mr . Elton , now a deserter from the Unitarian camp , be to be credited as a competent and faithful reporter , the Unitarians are ignorant , crafty , and dishonest men , who are either incapable of understanding the original languages , and comprehending the obvious sense , of the Scriptures , or else deterred by no reverence for the truth , by no sense of shame , by no regard to religious or moral principle , from wilfully perverting their meaning , and
publicly professing opinions which they know to be in opposition to their genuine declarations . In his present judgment of them , they are ever ready to resort to the basest artifices to serve their own ends ; they scruple not to reject any doctrine which , from whatever cause , they may be disinclined to admit , and to embrace tenets which they believe to be false , merely because
they wish them to be true ; they have in no case any higher aim than to defend the system which it suits them to adopt , with an utter disregard of the moral character of the means , that , for this purpose , they may find it necessary to employ ; they are , in short , if his estimate of them be correct , men who stick at nothing provided only they can succeed in their object , and bring over proselytes to their cause .
We will yield to no provocation to question Mr . Elton ' s motives in submitting to the change that has taken place in his religious sentiments ; but we are utterly at a Toss to comprehend by what intellectual or moral discipline he has brought his mind to conceive and his pen to record such " Thoughts" of a body of religious professors , with whose principles and conduct he cannot be unacquainted , and whom , he ought to know , he grossly calumniates . When did this new light break in upon his
understanding , and disclose to his astonished vision the dark and foul recesses of the Unitarian character , with all its disgusting appendages of craft , and fraud , and hypdcricy ? Had it but just flashed upon his eyes from the portals of heaven , when he sat down to proclaim the important revelation ? Or , had he this knowledge when his " intimacy of some standing with Unitarians , " as an associate and a brother , might have taught him what they were ? And does his conscience now , for the first time , accuse him of
having partaken their turpitude and merited their condemnation ? In the very first page of his " Second Thoughts , " Mr . Elton betrays his anxiety to commence hostilities against the Unitarians . Because , in their controversies with Trinitarians , they have argued that the Athanasian scheme , as held by Dr . Sherlock and others , which alone they recognize as proper Trinitarianism , maintains in effect three objects of worship , they are accused ( p . 9 ) with " a hundred times preferring , " with " unwearied perti-
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1827, page 664, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1800/page/32/
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