sent from above to preach the gospel, with full power to save those who should believe in him. After quoting Christ's declaration to his disciples, that "all power was given to him," &c., and his promise, that "he would be with them to the end of the world," the learned writer says that St. Luke goes farther, and, in his second treatise, narrates what the apostles did after they had received the Holy Spirit, according to the extract we have made above. In the contents of his Sermon, when referring to these passages, the writer thus expresses the nature of his sentiments: "Little of the Divinity of the Son of God in St. Matthew, pp. 49, 50; St. Mark and St. Luke follow the same method, p. 50." After perusing WOTTON's abstract of the Acts of the Apostles, it would not, we think, be an unfair inference for the reader to draw, that Luke must have represented the first preachers of the gospel as saying very "little" indeed "of the Divinity," or, as we would express it, of the Deity," of the Son of God."

We know how frequently this passage [Matt. xxviii. 19] is quoted as a proof of the doctrine of the Trinity, by many, indeed, who do not believe this doctrine, and wish perhaps to undermine it. I must confess that I cannot see it in this point of view. The eternal Divinity of the Son which is so clearly taught in other passages, particularly John i. 1-14 and Rom. ix. 5 — is here not once mentioned; and it is impossible to understand from this passage, whether the Holy Ghost is a person. The meaning of Jesus may have been this: Those who were baptized should, upon their baptism, confess that they believed in the Father and in the Son, and in all the doctrines inculcated by the Holy Spirit, both those which occur in the Old Testament, as well as those which the apostles were to deliver under the influence of divine inspiration, and which as yet they had not learned; that they were to receive and believe these doctrines, and, in one word, embrace the whole divine revelation. In fact, I do not believe that the words in the form of baptism can signify more, because it was impossible, for the majority of those who believed, to think more upon the subject at the time; for they were not regularly instructed in the mystery of the Trinity before baptism, and only received complete instruction in the doctrines of Christianity after baptism. Read only the second chapter of the Acts, where three thousand were baptized in one day. What did these persons know of the Divinity of Christ, of which Peter, in his discourse, did not say one word? What did they know of the personality of the Holy Ghost? They were not doctrines of the Jewish church, which, in the first instance, might be assumed; and yet they are baptized (presuming the apostles to have fulfilled these commands of Jesus) in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. What could they otherwise think but that

they acknowledged, by baptism, Jesus to be the Son of God and the Christ; the gifts of the Holy Ghost (which, as Peter observed, they both saw and heard) to be no delusion, but to descend from heaven; and the doctrines which the apostles were to teach, under the influence of divine inspiration, to be those which they did, and which they ought to, believe? This is the more striking, where, in Acts xvi. 33, it is not to be supposed that the jailer should have known any thing of the eternal Divinity of Christ, and of the personality of the Holy Ghost; or that Paul, in his very short conversation (ver. 32), should have instructed him in it, as we find no traces of it in his first discourses, contained in the thirteenth and seventeenth chapters. J. D. MICHAELIS: The Burial and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, pp. 325-7.

It may be mentioned, in passing, that the texts referred to by MICHAELIS, as "clearly teaching" the eternal Divinity of the Son of God (John i. 1-14, Rom. ix. 5, and others), are acknowledged by Trinitarians, of as high a standing, to be either obscure or susceptible of a very different interpretation. These acknowledgments it is intended to place under the texts to which they refer, in future volumes of this work.

We read, in the Acts [ii. 41; iv. 4], of three or five thousand souls being converted in one day, and admitted into the church through baptism. Does this fact possibly allow us to imagine that they were all instructed in the detailed mysteries of religion? ...... No more than a general idea of Christianity was given; whereas the important doctrines, and, in some sense, I might say the most important doctrines, . . . of the Trinity, the incarnation, and, above all, that dogma which now-a-days particularly is considered the most vital of all, the atonement on the cross, were not even slightly hinted at, much less communicated, to the new Christian before he was baptized. CARDINAL WISEMAN: Lectures on the Principal Doctrines of the Catholic Church, vol. i. pp. 107, 112.

The claims of Jesus, as advanced by himself, and as first urged by the apostles and the three earlier evangelists, were addressed to Jews, who admitted the authority of the Old Testament, and looked for such a Messiah as it described. Their ignorance, indeed, and their prejudices were very great. It appears from the Gospels, that both the higher orders of the Jews and the mass of the nation had very obscure, and probably inconsistent, notions concerning the Messiah, who was the object of their eager, but generally carnal and worldly, expectation. Yet this expectation rested upon the Holy Scriptures; and it was

proper to remit them to those Scriptures for the rectifying of their errors. It is plain that the immediate object, in the writings of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, was to produce a conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah announced and described in the prophetic writings; and they evidently left the scrutinizing and application of details to the duty and diligence of their readers. A similar course was followed by the apostles and their fellow-laborers in preaching Christianity, as they regularly communicated to the Jews, in the first instance, the word of life. The converts were directed to "search the Scriptures daily;" they were assured that those Scriptures testified of Christ; and it would follow, of course, that all which they could discover in the inspired writings, concerning the characters, office, and dignity of the Messiah, would be transferred to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But this would not be a rapid process; and in proportion as they made progress in this study would their knowledge of the truth, in this respect and in all its other branches and relations, become extensive and accurate. ... I submit to such of my readers as may be competent and inclined to the minute examination of the question, whether this plan of a gradual development, connected with the study and application of the Old Testament, was not, though imperfectly understood and ill expressed, the object really intended by those Christian fathers who maintained that the apostles, in their earlier ministry, refrained from divulging the pre-existence and Divinity of Christ, and that John was the first who advanced this doctrine. Though some of the citations made by Dr. Priestley are by him misconstrued, and others by being detached from their connection appear stronger than they really are, it is undeniable that this opinion was held by ORIGEN, ATHANASIUS, CHRYSOSTOM, and others. — DR. J. P. SMITH: Script. Test. to the Messiah, vol. ii. pp. 152–3, 155–6.

It would appear, then, that, instead of delivering to the Jews the dogma of Christ's Supreme Divinity, the apostles, in their oral discourses, endeavored to persuade their countrymen, by an appeal to their Scriptures, that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah; leaving them to discover, by their own study of these writings, that he constituted one of the persons or self-conscious agents in a Triune Godhead; the comparatively obscure prophecies relating to his character and dignity being supposed, in this case, be plainer and more intelligible than the teachings of the Founder of Christianity himself, and rendering it unnecessary for the apostles to say any thing at all respecting doctrines which have been conceived by many to lie at the very foundation of the gospel, and to form, indeed, its peculiar characteristics!

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In the second section of the present chapter, we showed it to have been the conviction of many Trinitarians, that the mysterious doctrines just referred to are not revealed in the Old Testament; and that, though some of the learned Jews may have filled their imaginations with vagaries as to divine powers and hypostatized attributes, the great body of the people had not the slightest expectation that their Messiah would be in nature any thing more than a human being. If this opinion be well founded, and, so far as the Jews of Palestine are concerned, it seems to be established beyond doubt by the New-Testament records, we would naturally suppose, that, if the apostles had any knowledge of Trinitarian dogmas, they would have preferred inculcating these in clear and express terms, instead of sending their hearers to passages of the Old Testament, where, enveloped in clouds and figures, they can be discovered only by the lights thrown over them of a previously formed faith; and, even with that faith, sometimes not at all. Indeed, had the apostles acted in the way attributed to them, they would have unquestionably failed in their purposes, and produced a contrary effect. If, for instance, with the view of leading the minds of his hearers to a recognition not only of the divine authority, but of the eternally divine nature, of Christ, Peter had adduced, as in Acts iii. 22 he is reported to have adduced, the prediction uttered by Moses, "A Prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you, of your brethren, LIKE UNTO ME: him shall ye hear in all things,' he could not have taken a more decisive mode of confirming the Unitarian views which he had himself set forth in his first sermon to the Jews, chap. ii. 22, "Ye men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, A MAN APPROVED OF GOD among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know." Speaking of the prophecy which Peter quotes from Deut. xviii. 15-19, COLERIDGE, in his "Literary Remains" (Works, vol. v. p. 282), says, "If I could be persuaded that this passage primarily referred to Christ; and that Christ, not Joshua and his successors, was the prophet here promised, - I must either become a Unitarian psilanthropist, and join Priestley and Belsham, or abandon to the Jews their own Messiah as yet to come, and cling to the religion of John and Paul, without further reference to Moses than to Lycurgus, Solon, and Numa; all of whom, in their different spheres, no less prepared the way for the coming of the Lord, 6 the desire of the nations.'"

It has been seen that some of the church fathers were forced to acknowledge the Unitarianism of the Book of Acts. Theophilus Lindsey (Sequel, p. 203) quotes CHRYSOSTOM as saying, in one of his Homilies, that "Paul at Athens flatly calls Christ a man, and nothing more;" and that, in relation to their conduct towards both Jews and Gentiles, "the apostles use a condescending method and management, the economy of compliance;" that is, though they believed in the essential Deity of Christ, the apostles, for prudential reasons, concealed this important truth from those to whom they announced the gospel. ERASMUS, CALMET, and other Roman Catholics, make concessions of a similar kind.

But such acknowledgments are not confined either to the ancient fathers or to members of the Papal Church. In a Sermon on the "Tendencies of Intellectual Preaching," delivered before the General Convention of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts, May 26, 1853, Dr. JOHN TODD, of Pittsfield, says (p. 31) that St. Paul, before the Areopagus, "made a great speech, a great intellectual effort," "but said 'not one word about the cross of Christ;" and that "the results" of that "master's speech" were "oh, how poor!" That is, unless we misunderstand the drift of the remark, by declaring to the Athenians the oneness and paternity of the Divine Being, the sole Originator and Governor of the universe; his goodness and mercy in sending his Son Jesus Christ into the world to awaken all men to repentance and spiritual worship; and his equity in constituting one who shared in all the sinless affections of humanity the Judge of the human race, certifying this appointment by raising his Messenger and Representative from the dead, the great Apostle of the Gentiles, in propounding these sublime and beneficent principles to the idolatrous and the sceptical Athenians, made a sad mistake, because, instead, he did not discourse on innate depravity, a Trinity of persons in the Godhead, the incarnation of the second of these persons, and the modern doctrine of the atonement.

The objection you have made against the doctrine of Christ's divine nature, from its not being more dwelt upon in the Acts of the Apostles, has often presented itself to me; and various are the answers which have occurred to me. Among others, one which I met with a few days since in one of Lord Bolingbroke's Essays seemed reasonable. He thinks it natural (and I like to quote his opinion, as he is a sort of neutral), that St. Paul, when addressing the Gentiles, should have reserved the doctrine of the Trinity for their future instruction, lest he should seem, in any degree, to countenance their favorite polytheism. When they were established in their belief of Christ's divine legation, he would then proceed to unfold this mystery to them. - BISHOP LONGLEY: The Brothers' Controversy, pp. 104-5.

In the three preceding sections, Trinitarians acknowledge that God did not reveal himself to the Hebrews as a Triune Being; that, with all the absurd notions of divine emanations which they derived from their intercourse with the Orientals, they knew nothing of a plurality of persons in the Godhead; that, as regards the nature of the Deity, the instructions which our Lord imparted were not different from those of Moses and the prophets; that he did not reveal the alleged Divinity of his person to his disciples; that the great object of the evangelists was to establish the Messiahship of their Master; and that the apostles, at least in their earlier preaching, divulged not the mysterious doctrines of Trinitarianism. Thus far, according to the showing of the orthodox themselves, is the dogma of the Trinity defective in Scriptural evidence.