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" It is , I think , " says a late correspondent in the Monthly Repository , "the essence of the new dispensation that it is a revelation of God in the person of his Son ; hence the importance which the Scripture attaches to the just knowledge of the Son , inasmuch as it is only in a knowledge of the Son that we can have a true and saving knowledge of the Father , and receive the peculiar blessings of the new covenant . " The remark may startle some
readers , and lead them to infer otherwise of the writer ' s views than he perhaps intended ; but it will be read with pleasure and interest by many , as a symptom of more deep and more profitable reflection upon a grand scripture truth than the controversialist has often time to make . It seems to shew , too , that the time for the extreme dread of terms which have once been used by the orthodox , is passing away , and that even an Unitarian dares to talk of the divinity of Christ without fear of misinterpretation . And surely among the
truths that gain ground upon us every time we allow them to be fairly put before us , none is more capable of practical proof than this , that the real believers in the divinity of Christ are those who see , in all he did and said , the Father ' s presence ; who trace a complete unison between God and Jesus ; who can scarcely think of the one without thinking of the other : —they have no idea of separate views , separate minds , separate feelings . Christ is , indeed , the effect—God the cause . —Circumscribed by the limits in which he
moved on his earthly course , our views of the Son are finite and limited . — There is exactly that proportion of dependence , of reference to a higher will , which is inseparable from our conception of a derived being ; but , this allowed , and I see no bounds which can be assigned to his moral perfections . As the express image of God , there must have been a loveliness and majesty of which our minds can form no full conception ; and , more beautiful as it doubtless appears the more we contemplate it , we have no reason to
suppose that our highest views can reach it . Hence it is , that to him who has been accustomed so to view it , it is always painful to hear the question of our Lord ' s humanity handled in the dry and barren way it often is . The consequence of our rejection of the common ideas respecting his divinity is , in many minds , the practical rejection of his divinity altogether . We seem unable to correct one error without falling into another ; but , of the two , I confess the error of the mere Humanitarian appears to me the greatest . I
can forgive the mistake and account him no gross idolater , as he is too often called , who , beholding the " glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus , " departs a step from the severe simplicity of the letter of the commandment , and gives a portion of his religious homage to the divinity in Christ ; it is a noble impulse , and the error , if an error , may surely be pardoned ; but I cannot sympathize with him who has received the facts of the Christian religion , without feeling in his inmost heart the divine character of its Founder .
And why should he dread to acknowledge , in this sense , the divinity of Christ ? If he had fixed upon a character differing essentially from that of the Great Supreme , —if vengeance were the characteristic of the Father , and mercy of the Son , and holiness of the Spirit , and yet " there were not three Gods but one God" in his creed , we might rightly object to the inconsistency , to the idolatry ; hut , under the present view , there is no room for this objection . The Father reveals himself in the Son . For the comfort and the exaltation of humanity , all that is perfect in virtue and holiness is invested
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C 325 )
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THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1829, page 325, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2572/page/29/
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