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Untitled Article
« Unitarianism Abandoned . " This is the superscription which he has placed over the portal of his work to announce to the curious what may be found within . We think it tight to apprize our readers , that the words are deceptive * They awaken expectations which must end in disappointment . Jle ; who may be drawn by them to enter the inclosure will find , indeed , Mr . ( jrilchrist ' s " reasons for ceasing to be connected with that description of
reli g ious professors who designate themselves Unitarians ; " but he will also soon discover , from the author ' s own explicit declarations , that he never held the doctrines of Unitarianism , and , therefore , could not have " abandoned " them . He distinctly affirms ( p . 19 ) , that he " never was in unison" with Unitarians : he " was always a sort of Nonconformist in opinion among them , a heretic among heretics , and a disbeliever of those very things which are received by them almost with universal consent . " The plain fact is , and he is not at all solicitous to conceal it , that through the greater part of life he has been more of an unbeliever than of a Christian of any class or
denomination . Throughout his work he takes great pains to shew , that from an early period , when he read " Sandeman ' s Letters , " his mind was painfully agitated by conflicting tendencies to orthodoxy and infidelity : not to the infidelity of the common herd of shallow reasoners , such as Hume , Gibbon , and Voltaire , ( pp . 29 , 30 , ) but to Atheism , the Atheism of that " intellectual Leviathan , " Hobbes . His " great difficulty , " the reader will observe , was not as to Trinitarianism and Unitarianism , but " concerning
the divine origin of Christianity , or the credibility of the Gospel . " " There was , " he openly avers , " a considerable tendency to the rejection of Christianity in his habits of thinking and reasoning . " " His mind was often so unsettled that he knew not what to think , and it was frequently so reckless that he cared not what he said or wrote . " ( Pp . 14 , 15 . ) Thus wavering and , as he writes it , skeptical , was the state of his mind when he first assumed the external profession of Unitarianism , and became an Unitarian minister at Chatham ! After this statement , the confession that follows ,
strange and humiliating as it is , need not , perhaps , excite surprise : "Chatham was the grave of my piety . It had been declining and dying before , but now it might be considered as dead and buried ! " ( P . 11 . ) At Chatham he made no progress in the acquisition of Unitarian sentiments . The Unitarian books which he now read served only to inspire him with contempt for the authors , and to " shake his confidence yet more in the word of God . " ( P . 13 . ) Yet , with his faith thus tottering , and his piety entombed , he accepted an invitation to be the minister of the Unitarian Baptist
congregation meeting in Worship Street ! He had now " rejected Trinitarianism , " but had not " made up his mind to reject Christianity . " ( P . 14 . ) Being placed in the " focus of unitarianism , " he " could not but act ; with the Unitarians , without taking a position for which he was not then prepared : "—that is , we suppose , without acting upon his honest convictions , and ceasing to be the minister of a religion which he all but disbelieved , " His discourses and writing were , " however , " for some time Unitarian , "
but " merely as Unitarianism is a system of negation . " U p to this period , then , it is quite clear from his own account that he was not actually an . Unitarian : and , though professedly an Unitarian minister , could preach Unitarianism no , further than it was " a system of negation" or just as he might have preached Mahometanism , or his favourite Atheism of Hobbes ,. In 1814 , Mr . Qilchrist preached at Southampton , before the South of England Unitarian Society . The discourse delivered on that occasion is now before us . Were we to judge of his creed from its contents , we should
Untitled Article
& 7 Z ; Review . *—Secession from Unitarianism ,
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1827, page 672, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1800/page/40/
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