Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/188

40 my reason has not only frustrated but punished them. In the last mentioned instance, the devout contrivance would not bear examination. Sabellianism is only Unitarianism disguised in words: and as for the worship of an image in its absence, the idea is most unsatisfactory. In this state, however, I passed five or six years; but the return to the clear and definite Unitarianism in which I had formerly been, was as easy as it was natural."—Heresy and Orthodoxy, p. viii.

This passage proves thus much, not that the philosophising in question leads to Socinianism, but that it is one under which Socinianism may lie hid, even from a man's own consciousness; and this is just the use I wish to make of it against Mr. Abbott. He ends as follows:

In these passages it seems to be clearly maintained that our Lord is a Manifestation of God in precisely that way in which His creatures are, though in a different respect, viz. as regards His moral attributes,—a Manifestation, not having any thing in it essentially peculiar and incommunicable, and therefore "a Manifestation" as he in one passage expresses himself, not the Manifestation of the Father.

Further he expressly disclaims any opinion concerning the essential and superhuman relation, or (as he calls it) the "metaphysical" relation of the Son to the Father, in a passage which involves a slight upon other doctrines of a most important, though not of such a sacred character.

does this mean original sin?