man Christ Jesus: the apostles kept on teaching till they died, what Christ taught them, and they preserved with all imaginable care the unity of God; and with a great deal of reason.—One God was enough for any worshipper, and to add ten thousand would be nothing but idolatry.—But what did the church of Rome do? It threw into the idea of Deity, (Deity signifies Godhead) plurality, which is more than one; and it is a very sensible and just observation of a late protestant writer, "If the reformation had not been brought "about by the providence of God when it was, we "should have had Gods upon Gods, Gods upon “Gods, till we had entirely lost the true God in "the multitude of other Gods."-It was a saying my brethren, of the apostle Paul, and it was the faith of the primitive christian church, to others, to the gentiles, there are Gods many and Lords many, but to us, that is, to us christians, there is but one God the father, and one Lord Jesus Christ. But now it may be said, to papists there are Gods many and Lords many, just as there is in the pagan world, but to us protestants there is -Ah! have not I said too much-There ought to be, but one God and one mediator and Lord, Christ Jesus. And you will ask me, perhaps, how protestants came by this? I will tell you what I think, my brethren. The common, popular notion about a Trinity, is a relic of the old popish idolatry, and the too prevailing gross ideas about the Father, Son, and Spirit, the dividing the Deity into persons, the naming of buildings

and churches, in consequence of such notions, are a species of the same defilement.* What is the transgression of Jacob, is it not Samaria; and what are the high places of Judah, are they not Jerusalem?

Secondly. It was popery that introduced OBSCU RITY INTO REVELATION.-Obscurity is darkness, difficulty, perplexity; a thing is obscure when it is hard to be understood. Do not you think, christians, when Jesus Christ came into the world, that he was a plain man? I say, do you think when Jesus Christ walked up and down the streets of Jerusalem that he looked like a modern academic, wrapped up in all the ensigns of wisdom and science, and looking down with contempt upon all who were not in his habit, as being destitute of knowledge, of which his habit was the badge? No such thing.-Jesus Christ was the plainest man in the world. He would talk to a beggar, and he was too much the man, I say nothing now of his glorious mission, he was too much the man to speak to a beggar about what a beggar could not understand.-He was as plain in his public ministry as he was in his private conversation; he gloried when he stood upon his trial before his iniquitous judges that he had spoke nothing in secret,

* Respecting the time when the words Trinity and Persons, were introduced into the christian church, see Robinson's Ecclesiastical Researches, p. 52. And for the opinions of Luther and Calvin respecting the word Trinity, similar to those expressed by our author, see Memoirs of the Life of Robinson prefixed to his Miscellaneous Works. Vol. I. p. cli. (Note.)

and he charges his apostles thus,-" When I am gone, go ye into all the world, and teach all things whatsoever I have commanded you:-all things:I do not commit any secrets to you;-the private conversation we have had at times under a tree, when eating by ourselves, or in our retirements--Do not hide it; do not conceal it; no:-Publish it upon the house tops: but that would have been an affront to the common people if it had not been level to their capacities. When the apostle Paul in this spirit wrote to the Corinthians declaring his master's doctrine, he spake thus (and yet perhaps they were not so respectable a congregation as you are, for he represents them to be those that had no birth, no learning,-that is the meaning of part of the first chapter of his epistle to that church, God hath chosen the foolish, the weak, and the base things of the world; people of the lowest rank in life; yet he says to that people,) I speak as to wise men, judge ye what I say. He could not mean such wisdom as consists in the knowledge of hard words; but he must mean, what is true wisdom; good, sterling common sense: now he would not have bid this people judge what he said, unless they had powers equal to the subject: and thus the christian world had no notion that they must take and carry the book and pull out their purses and pay a learned man to give them them the sense of it: they had no notion of such a thing: Paul had told them at Corinth, you may all prophecy, by which he meant that any good brother might speak to the rest in their christian

assemblies, the sense of the book, for though there is nothing in it obscure, yet there may be one part of it that might strike me, another part might strike you, a third might affect another christian brother, and that brother might be able to speak upon it at that time, better than you or I could, because he is just then feeling the sense of it. But by and by, my brethren, the bishop of Rome, (from that church we had it,) gave out that the bible was a very obscure, dark, hard book; and what do you think was his pretence? I do not ask that question as if I supposed you did not know how to answer it, but that you may perceive if you once lay that down as a principle, what follows? Why then you must keep the priesthood to explain the book to you, and must not think for yourselves concerning the meaning; and the priest himself must not think, until he has gone through a prescribed course of learning, which all leads up to the grand point, that he understands it, and you do not; and thus protestants have received this strange notion of the New Testament, and groan under the yoke to this day. If you go into some of our villages and ask the shepherd, or the good man at the farm-Do you understand the doctrine of Jesus Christ? Why you will find that he not only does not understand it, but he has never taken it into his head that he ought; and he will point you to the house where the priest lives, and tell you, he understands it.-Forgive the plainness of my speech, and do not let it offend you. Brethren, the truth is, Christ taught a

plain doctrine and you are all of you as good judges of it, without learning, as with learning. Latin, Greek and all the rest of the hard things that cost so many hundred pounds to learn, they are not worth twopence with respect to the essentials of religion; for they that are acquainted with them, know no more of these than the man that understands his mother tongue. Let me make one distinction.When I speak of the bible being easy to be understood, and that learning can do nothing to render it more intelligible, I do not mean that a learned man cannot make out better by a long train of study and expence, what the Old Testament shekel was worth, whether it was worth half a crown, or thirteen pence. I do not say that a learned man may not be able to make out where Jacob's well was better than you or I. I do not say that he cannot tell the reason why the sea that washed the coast of Idumea was called the red sea, better than we can:-but I say

-All these things are not what we mean by the gospel, the doctrine of Jesus Christ; for what signifies the worth of the Jewish shekel, to the pardon of my sins?-What signifies the place where Jacob's well was to sound sentiments about God?

-What signifies it why the sea was called the red sea, rather than the black sea, or the dead sea; what has all this to do with my eternal happiness? But I beg leave to assert that all the truths, that are necessary to salvation, are as plain to the unlearned, as to the wisest scholar; and that the reason why they are not considered so is because