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    chief functionaries become Gods upon earth I how readily have the people transferred the sacredness which belongs to religion to those by whom its solemnities were observed ! An instance of the undue esteem , which , even in the second century , Christians were wont to feel towards superior men of their Own Community , is found in some facts connected with that excellent martyr Folycarp . So excessive , as we learn from Eusebius , was the reverence of the Christians towards him , that he was

    obliged constantl y to keep his body covered in order to prevent them from touching his skin , as they eagerly strove to do ! How anxious , too , were his flock to procure his dead body after his martyrdom , that they might deposit it in a place of resort common to them all , and make it a bond of religious amity . The Greeks , and especially the Jews , endeavoured to frustrate their design , under the alleged fear that the Christians might desert Him that was crucified , and worship Polycarp . Notwithstanding the opposition of their enemies , the believers succeeded , however , in

    " gathering up his bones , more highly to be prized than precious gems , and more refined than the purest gold ; " those they buried , and where they laid them there they assembled every year , in order to celebrate the anniversary of Poly carp ' s death . Men , then , do not degrade but extol their benefactors . The process of corruption is not to bring down the great to their own level , but to raise them above the sphere of humanity . We thus can easily

    understand how it happened that the man Christ Jesus came to be worshipped as a component part of the Godhead . Such an elevation is in the natural course of things . Well might we have wondered if nothing of this nature had taken place . Strenuous must have been the exertions of any who could have stayed the progress of corruption . And where were the persons supposed to acquire principles such as to induce them to oppose the propensity

    of their contemporaries ? Being men they would have like passions with their fellows—would feel the same gratitude to their Saviour —experience the same prompting to extol his character , and to amplify his merits—and be , alike with others , delighted in encouraging those feelings of complacency , which , when duly regulated , are the appropriate tribute to the memory of Christbut which unchecked and misdirected lead the mind to ascribe to

    his person the dignity that properly belongs to his character . Nor is it easy to see how persons with such sentiments of the nature of Christ as those of the Ebionites could have existed , as it is beyond a doubt they did exist in the earliest age of the Church , had Jesus been revealed to man as God incarnate . What an

    overpowering sense of awe and gratitude would each convert have experienced on learning the astounding fact ! How was it possible for any one , made a partaker of the blessings brought by God Jiimself to earth , —how was it possible for any one , to undeify hii Saviour and degrade him to a man ? No person could have

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    g £ Htse and Progress of the Doctri ? ie of the Trinity .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1832, page 22, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1804/page/22/