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Untitled Article
lion . Whether these oracles of our faith thought that it stood out to more advantage alone and aloof , or whether ( but it were to little purpose to guess at their motives )—so beyond all controversy it is that this wonderful mandate seems never afterwards to have made any more impression on the minds of the apostles , than if ,
like good Gyas and Cleanthus , it had merely swelled and closed the aggregate of that rank-and-file host of testimonies to the leading and fundamental dogma of the religion of Moses , which a less industrious investigator than Postellus might in less than half an hour extract from the
sacred records of the Old Covenant . The quite astounding fact really throws conjecture into despair . But our present business happily is not with these inspired messengers of Christianity , but with the fallible delegates or usurpers of their office . Whether or not we can apologize for the
apparent inadvertence of one and ail of the apostles on the particular occasion , we feel perfectly satisfied that an unanswerable apology existed in its circumstances . We bow at once to the implication from tlieir silence , as we should have bowed to the conclusion to have been
derived from their express or only indirect testimony . Not so with tlieir successors . We deal with them as we should deal with any other men , review and sit in judgment on their conduct and opinions . In what manner , then , can we possibly account for their ostensible tenderness and all but extravagant predilection indeed for , and vaunt of , a passage in Scripture , so satisfactorily demonstrated to be in stark staring hostility to their
professed creed ? Whence this reverence for the theorem , this horror at the corollary ? No sooner docs this text come into the bands of these apostolic Christians forsoolb , ( this text , as we have seen , of so little moment in the eyes of the apostles , that they never once thought it worth their while to quote , or so much as incidentally to refer to it in support of their newly modified creed , ) than they , vino ore , cry it up to the skies as the / LLEja , Qavfua , of their mysterious theology , the § o <; 7 th ( ttco of their peculiar faith , the lever with which they
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were to bring" to the ground all the pseudo-Christianity of their own and every succeeding age- They could not surely have thought that the succinct mention of baptism in the Acts of the Apostles so neutralized its evL
dence against them , as scarcely t 0 leare it a leg * to stand upon . So far from it , that they seem always to have been rather perplexed than pleased with the enigmatical brevity of the historian as contrasted with the
luminous parrhesia of the Evangelist . Still less could they have been propitiated to its alarming heterodoxy by the not more satisfactory references to the rite in St . Paul's Epistles . What , then , can have made them so
unanimously enamoured of its fatal evidence ? Let the long-lost truth he at length told , ( adsit reverentia vero !) they did not dare to grapple , at the same perilous moment ,, with two such
decidedly Unitarian texts , but artfully compounded , by the preservation of the less explicit , for the sacrifice of the more galling . A little ayxivoia , and effrontery might dispose of the heresy of St . Matthew , but that of St . John
was too trumpet-tongued to be tolerated . Accordingly , they most magnanimously pressed the one into their own service ! and sent the other to
the ri < rht-about . And the event ha * if proved that they were not unwise in their generation . How well the stratagem succeeded , let the history of the church bear witness . There stands
to the present day the paradoxical text , a monument of apostolic indifference , and of orthodox fondling : arid so long as there it stands , so long , without pretending to the gift of prophecy , might any one venture to predict , in spite of all the palpable
gainsaying of its par nobi / e , now so happily brought to light , and perpetuated beyond the possibility of redemption , will it mock at the sceptical efforts of heretical criticism , and draw , or rather constitute , a triumphant and ineffaceable line between primitive and posterior Christianity .
The jam satis cst ! But decipit exemplar , &c . T . T . CLARKE .
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324 Pate of Matt , xxviii . 18—20 , comparted with 1 John v . 7 > 8 .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1826, page 324, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2549/page/8/
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