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Untitled Article
tions . At all events , the fact that recourse was had to the notion of Christ being a ni&h namely in appearance , in order to avoid the scandal of the cross , shows the possibility , not to say the probability , of a less unreasonable fiction being ventured on in drder to Secure the same , and what was deemed a desirable , end .
That the early Christians were capable of thus straining a point iii order to rebut the objections of adversaries is beyond a question . Out of several , we choose one instance in proof . Those without the pale of Christianity charged it with being a novel system . The Fathers of the Church , instead of admitting the allegation , and putting the objector on the proof of the
imputation which he held it to involve , thought proper to maintain in effect , though not in words , that * Christianity was as old as the creation . And how did they prove it ?—Christianity enjoins the love of God ; therefore , all who loVed God in all past ages were Christians . Men who could thus argue would easily be led , in striving to remove the scandal of the cross , to hit on the idea , and then to discover cortoborations of it , and then to
publish it , and then strenuously to maintain it , —that Jesus , as Well as his religion , was &s old as the creation- —nay , was the instrument of * God in the creation ^ and still further , was a constituent patt of the divine essence . The metamorphosis of which we have spoken was greatly facilitated by the prevalence of a mystical philosophy . All the Greciari teachers , with the exception of Socrates , and his
influence was comparatively small , with touch pretence at explanation made nothing plain . ' Moral science was little to their taste . In the abstruse questions 6 f the existence and nature of imagined superior intelligences—^ their functions , orders , and gradations ; of the essence of beauty , honour , and virtue ;^ -in these and Kindred questions , they spent their time , seeking rather topics of disputation and the excitement of novelty , than what was true disputation and the excitement of novelty , than what was true
and useful . The sublime genius of Plato led him to soar into the very empyrean of mystery , and , aided by a poetical and Creative fancy , he disclosed , in the tone of a master , the discoveries which he fancied he had made in the world of spirits . By his followers , through many atl age , his philosophic dreams wefre augmented in number and in obscurity , till , mingling their own darkness with the darkness of the oriental philosophy—a
darkness tvhich had for ages been accumulating- —they constituted a system , a parallel to which can be found nowhere but in the writings of Baron Swedenborg , and which could not fail to extend thte eitipire atod the love of mysticism , and to fender tho $ e notions
respecting the person of Jesus Christ most acceptable which were the . most remote from the simple realities of fact and experience . We shall form a ifeost errbneous judgment , if we imagine that thb mystical spirit ^ as restricted in its influehfcfc to the p hiio-Sbphic few . Setting aside the fact , that the miscalted science of
Untitled Article
110 Rise and Progress of tM Doctrine of the Trinity .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1832, page 110, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1806/page/38/
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