United States or Eswatini ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The society which was instituted at the Feathers Tavern, to agitate for the abolition of subscription, in favour of a simple acknowledgment of belief in Scripture, and which petitioned Parliament to this effect in 1772, was a very mixed company. Undoubtedly there were many Deists, Socinians, and Arians in it.
For it is acknowledged everywhere that the Word is holy and that the Lord possesses the divine, and these two are essentials of the church. Those, therefore, who deny the Divine of the Lord and are called Socinians have been excommunicated from the church, and those who deny the holiness of the Word are not regarded as Christians.
This justice has its foundation only in the fitness of things, which demands a certain satisfaction for the expiation of an evil action. The Socinians, Hobbes and some others do not admit this punitive justice, which properly speaking is avenging justice.
They say, worthy Colonel, that looking on such things foretells, or causes, speedy death I know not if it be true; but if so, I only depart like the tired sentinel when his officer releases him from his post; and glad shall I be to close these wearied eyes against the sight, and shut these harassed ears against the croaking, as of frogs, of Antinomians, and Pelagians, and Socinians, and Arminians, and Arians, and Nullifidians, which have come up into our England, like those filthy reptiles into the house of Pharaoh."
Williams, who is now an aged man, more than fourscore, was the founder of the Province, and is held in great esteem by the people, who be of all sects and persuasions, as the Government doth not molest any in worshipping according to conscience; and hence you will see in the same neighborhood Anabaptists, Quakers, New Lights, Brownists, Antinomians, and Socinians, nay, I am told there be Papists also.
He is set before us as a copy and pattern, that we "should walk even as he walked," 1 John ii. 6. "He left us an example that we should follow his steps," 1 Pet. ii. 21. But we should beware to separate this consideration from the preceding, as antichristian Socinians do, who will have Christ only to be a copy. He hath overcome Satan, our arch enemy, and hath destroyed his works, 1 John iii. 8.
The sound of the words of Scripture is too often mistaken for the sense. This is a notable example. From the words of our Divine Redeemer, "My Father is greater than I, Socinians infer the essential inferiority of the Son to the Father. So in the preceding instance. The inference is, that the Antichrist is to be known by a doctrinal denial of deity.
A new edition of White's 'Diatessaron', with a running comment the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writers before Christ, and those after him who, it is morally certain, drew no aids from the New Testament, is a grand 'desideratum'; and if anything could open the eyes of Socinians, this would do it. Ib. p. 24.
Bossuet was able to say, we fear with too much truth, that on one point all Christians had long been unanimous, the right of the civil magistrate to propagate truth by the sword; that even heretics had been orthodox as to this right, and that the Anabaptists and Socinians were the first who called it in question.
Deists, Jews, Quakers, Romanists, Erastians, and Socinians, all fell under his lash; his treatise on the last of these, being the first in order of date, and by no means the last in order of merit among the eighteenth-century literature on the subject of the Trinity, now comes under our notice.
Word Of The Day