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Postscript.
Since the above Essay was in type, an account of Dr. Schleiermacher's view of the doctrine of the Trinity, as contained in an American Periodical[1], has been put into the writer's hands, and raises very painful feelings.
It seems, indeed, impossible to doubt that a serious doctrinal error is coming as a snare over the whole of the Protestant part of Christendom, (every part, at least, which is not fallen into worse and more avowed heterodoxy,) being the result of an attempt of the intellect to delineate, philosophise, and justify that religion, (so called) of the heart and feelings, which has long prevailed. All over the Protestant world,—among ourselves, in Ireland, in Scotland, in Germany, in British America,—the revival of religious feeling during the last century has taken a peculiar form, difficult to describe or denote by any distinct appellation, but familiarly known to all who ever so little attend to what is going on in the general Church. It has spread, not by talents or learning in its upholders, but by their piety, zeal, and sincerity, and its own incidental and partial truth. At length, as was natural, its professors have been led to a direct contemplation of it, to a reflection upon their own feelings and belief, and the genius of their system; and thence has issued that philosophy of which Mr. Erskine and Mr. Abbott have in the foregoing pages afforded specimens.
The American publication above alluded to, is a melancholy evidence that the learning and genius of Germany are to be made to bear, by the theologians of the United States, in favour of this same (as the writer must call it) spurious Christianity. Some passages from it shall be here extracted, which will be found to tend to one or other of these three objects, all of them more or less professed in the two works above analysed.
1. That the one object of the Christian Revelation, or Dispensation, is to stir the affections, and soothe the heart.
- ↑ The Biblical Repository, Nos. 18 and 19; in which is translated and reviewed "Schleiermacher's Comparigon of the Athanasian and Sabellian views of the Trinity."
