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Untitled Article
on the heart , and direct the life , are the points on whidh the German preachers dwell , to the exclusion of the metaphysical swbttlties of creeds and confessions , und without varnisiiing tiie piirity of their teachings with the technical phraseology of what is mistermed orthodoxy , or attempting , as do some in this kingdom ,
who , howevei \ heterodl 5 xrWcTuitl ^ ¥ ^ to supply the deficiencies of the sermon by the plenitude of antiscriptural ascription in the doxology . Some few of the clergy , it is true , have been , and still are endeavouring to carry the public mind back into the darkness of the middle ages ; 'but their success has not been so great , but that we are able to declare that the great mass of those who are Christians , from a gener-al
approbation of the tendency of Ghristianity- ^ -fehe greater part that is of the flock—entertain opinions nearly coincident with those of the English Unitarians . In Germany , Christianity is professed , as well as felt , much moreextensively than in France , andwith by far the major part that Christianity k not the religion M Jcthaiia ^ sius , nor of obsolete symbols of faith * but of the W&w TestaiEtient > in other words , it is Unitarianism under another name .
What we have now remarked of France and Germany may be extended , allowance being made for diversities of inanners , civilizaMonvand intellectual-free ^ lie and Protestant communities throughout the world . One exception we must make , and that of a gratifying kind . The Protestant church of Geneva , the cradle of the Calvinisfcie doctrines , and the once desecrated place of Servetus' martyrdom , ay , and of other martyrdoms recorded , if no where else , in the
martyrology of heaven , is with a few exceptions wholly A ^ ntitrinitarian . Such is the majority of the pastors , such is the majority of the flock . There , too , efforts have been , and are made to stay the onward progress of the human mind , and to rebind it with the worn-out shackles of mystic creeds ; but with such success as has prod uced -regret in stead of triumph- ^ t least thirty ministers , with their flocks , constituting the mass of the ^ Genevan population , have divested themselves for ever of the narrowing and ¦ mystifying influence of the Athanasian fictions .
Let us then look at the extensive change which little more than a century has wrought . Above two thousand congregations seceded from the Trinitarian communion , and meeting in separate houses for the worship -of- the only - ~© od . ;_ the , rosyQii , p . aKJL ^ Jte | 6 ! . ligent men , both in Protestant and Catholic countries , freed from the anilities , and with them the intolerance of former ages ,
worshipping , though in diversified forms and language , the one God of heaven and earth , instead of a being , three one and one three , whom heathen fancies introduced , and Christian credulity acknowledged . We say , then , that the Trinitarian church has been shaken to its very base , that it is deprived of the favourite argument which it has deduced from the number of its adherents ;
Untitled Article
338 THE TRUTH TEL-LUtt .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 1, 1833, page 338, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2625/page/18/
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