* * * * *

Before this Third Period of my creed was completed, I made my first
acquaintance with a Unitarian. This gentleman showed much sweetness
of mind, largeness of charity, and a timid devoutness which I had not
expected in such a quarter. His mixture of credulity and incredulity
seemed to me capricious, and wholly incoherent. First, as to his
incredulity, or rather, boldness of thought. Eternal punishment was a
notion, which nothing could make him believe, and for which it would
be useless to quote Scripture to him; for the doctrine (he said)
darkened the moral character of God, and produced malignity in man.
That Christ had any higher nature than we all have, was a tenet
essentially inadmissible; first, because it destroyed all moral
benefit from his example and sympathy, and next, because no one has
yet succeeded in even stating the doctrine of the Incarnation without
contradicting himself. If Christ was but one person, one mind, then
that one mind could not be simultaneously finite and infinite, nor
therefore simultaneously God and man. But when I came to hear more
from this same gentleman, I found him to avow that no Trinitarian
could have a higher conception than he of the present power and glory
of Christ. He believed that the man Jesus is at the head of the whole
moral creation of God; that all power in heaven and earth is given to
him: that he will be Judge of all men, and is himself raised above all
judgment. This was to me unimaginable from his point of view. Could
he really think Jesus to be a mere man, and yet believe him to be
sinless? On what did that belief rest? Two texts were quoted in
proof, 1 Pet. ii. 21, and Heb. iv. 15. Of these, the former did not
necessarily mean anything more than that Jesus was unjustly put to
death; and the latter belonged to an Epistle, which my new friend had
already rejected as unapostolic and not of first-rate authority, when