*

orphans, and persons who know not how to gain their livelihood, the institution offers an asylum; and to others of fanatical temperament, the tenets may present an attraction.* "Incredible as it may seem," says Dr. Dwight, "one is tempted, from the apparent sincerity of these people in other cases, to believe them sincere in the adoption of those mental vagaries by which they are distinguished as a religious society. They profess and appear to believe, that they are regularly inspired in their worship; that they are enabled to speak and to sing in unknown languages; that they derive their sentiments, their knowledge, their devotion, their unnatural actions, and even their tunes, from the same divine source. . . . In their worship, they practise many contortions of the body and distortions of the countenance. The gesticulations of the women were violent, and had been practised so often as to have made them goggle-eyed.... The power of working miracles they still claim. . . . They declare that they have visions of the invisible world, and that spirits converse with them. They hold all books to be useless."† Natural affection they deem sinful; but the most implicit obedience is exacted to their elders. Their morality appears very questionable, as they have been taught to believe that the end sanctions the means, and that falsehood and perjury are lawful in a good cause. Formerly, their practices were in flagitious violation of decency; but it is believed that the grosser and more ridiculous improprieties are gradually passing away. A sect perpetuated by fanaticism cannot, however, long outlive the pruning down of its extravagancies; and the Shakers probably owe their continued existence at present to the property which has been accumulated. It is curious to find, in the nineteenth century, so extraordinary a combination of the Quaker enthusiasm, the monastic rule and discipline of

* A law of the State of New York enables married persons who wish to join them to become divorced, on condition that the party declining to join them retains the children and the property.

+ Dwight's Travels, vol. iii. pp. 146-152.

Dr. Dwight affirms that, antecedently to 1793, the men and women, on a variety of occasions, danced naked; and flagellations were enjoined upon proselytes, or practised upon them, in a state of nudity.

popery, and the frantic worship of the howling and whirling dervises and fakeers of the East.

Nearly allied in outward manners and discipline to the Shakers, are the Dunkers, (Dippers,) or Tumblers; a small society of German Baptists, founded by Conrad Peysel, a German, at Euphrata, within 50 miles of Philadelphia, in 1724. In 1777, their numbers did not exceed 500; but they have since increased. Their rule is monastic, the men and women having separate habitations and distinct governments; but those who are disposed to marry, are allowed to do so, and to preserve their connexion with the society, but must remove from the settlement. The Dunkers abstain from eating flesh, except upon particular occasions, and observe in other respects a monkish austerity, believing in the expiatory efficacy of penance and mortification of the body. They wear a dress similar to that of the Dominican friars. They are said to hold the leading tenet of the Universalists, and the Quakers' scruples with regard to resistance, war, slavery, and litigation; they practise trine immersion, and their worship and church government resemble those of the Mennonites. Such are the chief characteristics of " the harmless Dunkers."

The Mennonites are still numerous in Pennsylvania. Some years ago, there were supposed to be more than 200 Mennonite churches in the United States, some containing no fewer than 300 members. They are chiefly the descendants of German emigrants.* Many of them, as in Holland, have lapsed into Socinianism or Deism.

Upon the whole, the United States do not exhibit a greater variety of sect than England, Holland, or Russia; nor has unendowed Protestantism any thing to fear from a comparison of the state of things, in respect to religion, in America, under all the disadvantages of a new and thinly peopled country, with the religious condition of any part of the Old Continent.

Ward's Farewell Letters, Lett. 19-22. See above, p. 276.

CHAPTER X.

PROTESTANT CONTROVERSIES.

The Arian and Socinian controversy.-The Calvinistic controversy.-The Antinomian and Sandemanian controversy.-The Baptist, Hutchinsonian, and Millenarian controversies.-The Ecclesiastico-political controversy.

In order to complete our survey of the Christian world, it only remains to take a brief view of those leading diversities of theological opinion which are common to different communions or denominations of Protestantism, and are found, indeed, beyond its pale; which, therefore, are to be regarded as distinct schools, rather than as religious sects. Most of them have already been incidentally referred to; and all that will be attempted in the present Chapter is, to classify them in relation to the controversies out of which they spring, and to take a brief historical review of their rise in connexion with the Protestant faith.

I. Opposite views respecting the Person of Christ, have given rise to the Arian and Socinian controversy; producing the various sects or schools of Arians, Semi-Arians, Sabellians, Socinians, and modern Unitarians or Anti-Trinitarians.

II. Opposite views of the Christian scheme, in relation to the purpose of God, and the actual condition of man, have given rise to the Predestinarian or Calvinistic controversy, in which have originated the denominations of Pelagian and Augustinian, Calvinist and Arminian, Sublapsarian and Supralapsarian, Baxterian, Necessitarian, and various others..

III. Differences of sentiment as to the nature of Justification, of Faith, and of the requirements of the Gospel, have produced the Antinomian, the Sandemanian, and some minor

controversies which have contributed to swell the catalogue of unmeaning distinctions.

IV. Three distinct controversies, the Baptist controversy, the Hutchinsonian, and the Millenarian, are grounded upon differences of Biblical interpretation: the former two are partly philological, while the third involves both criticism and theory.

V. Opposite views of the nature of the Church and the Scriptural form of church government have given rise to the denominations of Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Independent, &c., and to the controversy upon the subject of ecclesiastical establishments.

I. The Arian and Socinian Controversy.-The Arians take their name from Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, who flourished at the beginning of the fourth century. In the fifth century, the proscribed creed of the Arian party found protection under the Christian Vandals and Goths; and after their expulsion from Spain and Italy, it was revived under the dominion of the Lombards and Burgundians. Gradually, the name, if not the heresy, became extinct; and it was not till the sixteenth century, that the controversy respecting the Person of Christ was revived by Lelius and Faustus Socinus, the founders of that modification of the Arian school called Socinian. Shortly after the Reformation, Arian tenets found supporters in this country. Strype, the ecclesiastical historian, speaking of the transactions of 1550, says: "Arianism now shewed itself openly, and was in such danger of spreading further, that it was thought necessary to suppress it by using more rugged methods than seemed agreeable to the merciful principles of the Gospel." An injunction issued by the archbishops and bishops in 1560, directs, that incorrigible Arians, Pelagians, or Free-will-men be imprisoned and kept to hard labour till they repent of their errors. Two Arians suffered under the writ De Hæretico comburendo, so late as the reign of James I.

After this, although opinions approximating to Sabellian or Semi-Arian found their abettors, (and the illustrious Author of Paradise Lost, in his posthumous work on Theology, advo

cates such views,*) we hear little of Arianism as the subject of controversy, till it was revived, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, by the learned and eccentric Whiston, Mr. Emlyn, and Dr. Samuel Clarke, Rector of St. James's. The former two avowed what is called low Arianism, which runs into Socinianism; reducing Our Lord (though without denying his pre-existence) to the scale of angelic beings. The latter was a high or Semi-Arian, his views coming within a shade or two of Nicene orthodoxy. Mr. Whiston was, on account of his avowed Arian principles, deprived of his professorship of mathematics at Cambridge, and banished the university, about the year 1710. His publications subsequently brought upon him the vehement censures of the Convocation; but he was protected by the Court against penal proceedings. Dr. Clarke was also threatened, and manifested less firmness or integrity than Whiston. He found a powerful antagonist in Dr. Waterland, who is chargeable, however, with statements verging upon Tritheism, and with a spirit of unbecoming haughtiness and asperity. The other principal supporters of the Arian hypothesis have been, Dr. Price, Mr. Pierce, Mr. Hallet, Dr. Chandler, Mr. Henry Taylor, Dr. Harwood, Dr. Kippis, and Dr. Carpenter; most of them English Presbyterians. But Arianism has proved itself to be but a transitive heresy, a creed of one generation, becoming Socinianism in the next; being itself but a subtile hypothesis, more staggering to reason than the doctrine it attempts to explain, and showing, by its very gradations from Semi-Arianism down to naked Unitarianism, that it presents nothing settled, or certain, upon which the mind can rest with satisfaction. It is now almost an extinct opinion.

Sabellianism, which is more ancient than Arianism, and older than Sabellius whose name it bears, (who flourished in the third century,) is in like manner too vague and shadowy to

The Right Rev. Editor and Translator of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, remarks, that "the opinions of Milton were in reality nearly Arian, ascribing to the Son as high a share of divinity as was compatible with the denial of his self-existence and eternal generation, but not admitting his co-equality and co-essentiality with the Father." Such is, in fact, the theology of Paradise Lost. But he differed from Arius in maintaining that the Son is "consubstantial with the Father." See Eclec. Rev. vol. xxv. (2d Series), pp. 1, 114.