shortly and plainly, is pantheistic, and against the spirit of it, which breathes an irreverence approaching to blasphemy. Should the reader think the tone of this paragraph is out of keeping with the remarks as yet made, he will see in a little time that Mr. Abbott does not allow one to preserve that didactic or critical air, which is commonly appropriate to a discussion such as the present. To proceed, however, with our immediate subject, the author's views, not of natural, but revealed religion:—
"He is an unseen, universal power, utterly invisible to us, and imperceptible, except so far as He shall act out His attributes in what He does. How shall He act out moral principle? It is easy, by his material creation, to make any impression upon us, which material objects can make; but how shall He exhibit to us the moral beauty of justice and benevolence and mercy between man and man? .... He might declare His moral attributes as He might have declared His power; but if He would bring home to us the one as vividly and distinctly as the other, He must act out His moral principles by a moral manifestation, in a moral scene; and the great beauty of Christianity is, that it represents Him as doing so. He brings out the purity, and spotlessness, and moral glory of the Divinity, through the workings of a human mind, called into existence for this purpose, and stationed in a most conspicuous attitude among men .. Thus the moral perfections of divinity show themselves to us in the only way by which, so far as we can see, it is possible directly to show them, by coming out in action, in the very field of human duty, by a mysterious union with a human intellect and human powers. It is God manifest in the flesh; the visible moral image of an all-pervading moral Deity, Himself for ever invisible." pp. 14, 15.
On this explanation of the Incarnation, now alas, not unpopular even in our own Church, viz. that "God manifest in the flesh" is "the visible moral image" of God, let us hear the judgment of one who was a Trinitarian, and has lately avowed Socinianism. He thus relates the change in his own religious profession:
