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have any uneasiness in regard to their condition in a future life. It seems also, if I may judge from the experience of my own mind, to connect the very idea of Deity with cruelty and injustice. Where the persuasion is strong, and the apprehension acute, religion must degenerate into fear and hatred, instead of being exalted and refined into confidence and love; and, however the pious, but too credulous Christian may conceal from himself his own feelings, must rather extort from him the servile worship, which is paid to the tyrant, than draw forth the spontaneous and grateful homage that is due to a father.

With these few reflections upon the too general estimate of the character and government of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with my apology for their being rather directed to disprove his austerity than to establish his benignity (a line of argument to which I am compelled by the necessity of conciseness), I subscribe myself again, With sincere affection, Yours, &c.

LETTER VI.

DEAR FRIENDS;

ONE cannot take a dispassionate and impartial review of the Trinitarian scheme (in which term I mean to include, generally, those doctrines of which I have exhibited a chain and connexion in my preceding Letters), without feeling some surprise, that Christians, with the sacred volume in their hands, in which the Supreme Being is so evidently held up to the admiration and love of his creatures, as their common father, guardian, and friend, should have ever been prevailed on to marshal some of their strongest prejudices on the side of theories, which not only deny, in every material point, that relationship, but strike at the root of every stable and cheering hope in the prospect of immortality.

I will not attempt to inquire into the causes of this easy acquiescence, but only remark, that whatever indifference is observable as to the benevolent features of the general providence of God seems to arise from the constant prevalence of good over evil,

which happiness and plenty appear to be the settled order of nature, misery and want to be only

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occasional exceptions. The attention is ever most forcibly arrested by disastrous circumstances; and the feelings, excited by the apprehension of danger, give to it a present importance, which it would never have if compared only with the whole chain of events, of which it forms a link. Certain it is, that of almost all religions but the avowed object, rather to avert some great apprehended evil, than to make the most of that boundless profusion of good, which the author of nature has lavished upon his creatures; rather to conciliate an austere, and court a neglectful deity, than to offer to God, as the giver of all good, an homage expressive of a thankful dependence and confidence. How much of the gloom, that overspreads the orthodox exposition of Christianity, is attributable to this natural bias of the mind, I will not pretend to determine. The Trinitarian corruption has certainly afforded ample scope for it's indulgence; while it's spirit and tendency are as decidedly opposed to those of the genuine gospel as fear and affection can be. A single observation will show, as clearly as a whole volume, the nature and reality of this diversity; for, whereas the gospel of Jesus is founded upon the broad and immovable basis of one undivided Jehovah, and authorises us to expect the production, in the human race, of the greatest sum of virtue and happiness that infinite power, wisdom, and goodness can produce; the scheme of which I speak sets out with a divided or compounded Godhead, and is content to produce partial happiness and imperfect

virtue, at the expense of wide-wasting evil, and never-ending woe.

The tendency of a corrupt or perverted religion to produce a superstitious and even cruel worship of the Supreme Being is strikingly exemplified in the history of the Jewish nation. In proportion as they declined from the belief in one undivided Deity, the sole creator and governor of the world, through their intercourse with their pagan neighbours, their religious worship degenerated into rites expressive solely of dread and suspicion. To the divinities, whom they set up in his stead, they no longer brought the free-will offerings of affection and gratitude, but sought to appease their anger by the infliction of pain and suffering upon themselves or others. When pressed by danger or labouring under misfortune, the service of their false gods acquired even a character of ferocity; and when hundreds of animals were thought insufficient to atone for the sins, which seemed to have drawn upon them the indignation of offended heaven, their children's blood, or their own, was poured out as a libation of peace and reconciliation.

The corruptions of the Christian religion bear a strong resemblance in this respect to those of the Jewish, in casting a shade over the character and government of Deity, by allotting, in that division which is it's peculiar vice, a very unequal portion of the benevolent affections to the principal object of it's religious adoration. In the division of offices, which is peculiar to the Christian polytheism, the

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Father, indeed, is accounted the creator of the world, the original projector and mechanist of this beautiful and happy constitution of nature; but is denied the honour of being the immediate cause of those felicitous purposes, for which it is evidently created, the happiness of man; this being reserved exclusively for the Son, who, by the abolition of the Father's curse, and the averting of his wrath, has for ever secured to himself the gratitude and affection of mankind. This allotment of offices, Trinitarians in general are content to admit as an article of faith, and care not how little they are called upon to examine or defend it; but a numerous class, and those not the least zealous, in their anxiety to repay the obligations they presume themselves to lie under to the second person of the Trinity, render to him, without reserve, the homage which solely belongs to that person, who has determined his own sense of that right, by assuming to himself the title of FATHER. In their zeal to requite the benignity of the Son, they scruple not to institute a marked, and, as I cannot but think, highly indecorous comparison between the two persons, entirely to the disparagement of the Father. In his stern unrelenting anger is found an inexhaustible fund of impassioned declamation, of which the efficacy is too well known, in exciting the fears of the weak, by working upon their sensibility to gloomy impressions. Not only are the present punishments of moral delinquency (which are graciously appointed as admonitions to repentance) ascribed to a deadly hatred of corrupted man, but

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