Christian Sects in the Nineteenth Century

by Caroline Frances Cornwallis

When the first great movement which led to the Reform of a large part of the Christian Churches in Europe, awakened men’s minds from the lethargy in which they had slept whilst learning was confined to the cloister, the questions with regard to the nature of the Deity which had distracted the early church began again to be mooted; and as early as the year 1524, “the divinity of Christ was openly denied by Lewis Hetyer, one of the wandering and fanatical Anabaptists, who was put to death at Constance.” [33a] He was succeeded by Michael Servede or Servetus, a Spanish physician; who, for his wild notions on the same subject, was apprehended on his road through Switzerland at the instigation of Calvin, accused of blasphemy, and condemned to the flames. [33b] But doctrines were never yet crushed by persecution, unless indeed it were so wholesale as to exterminate all who held them; and though these opinions were thus fatal to their professors, the main points were reproduced by others; and finally assumed form as a sect, under the titles above named. The term Socinian was taken from two of its most distinguished promoters, Lælius and Faustus Sozinus, or Socinus. They were of an illustrious family at Siena in Tuscany, and Lælius, the uncle of Faustus, having taken a disgust to popery, travelled into France, England, &c. to examine into their religious creed, in order, if possible, to come at the truth. He was a man distinguished for his genius and learning, no less than for his virtuous life; he settled at last at Zurich, embraced the Helvetic confession of faith, and died at Zurich in 1562, before he had reached his fortieth year. His sentiments, or rather doubts as to certain points, were embodied, and more openly propagated by his nephew Faustus; who, as is supposed, drew up from his papers the religious system afterwards known under the name of Socinianism. There is however a considerable degree of obscurity hanging over the rise of this sect, and no one has given a satisfactory history of it.

The first appearance of Unitarians, as a distinct congregation, was in Poland, where they obtained a settlement in the city of Cracow in the year 1569; and in 1575 they published at Cracow the “Catechism or Confession of the Unitarians;” [35a] but Faustus Socinus having settled among them in the year 1579, soon obtained so much influence as finally to remodel the whole religious system of the sect, and a new form drawn up by Socinus himself, was substituted for the old Catechism.

The following is an abstract of the doctrines taught in this Catechism. After affirming that the Christian religion is “a road for arriving at eternal life, divinely made known,” the pupil is told that the will of God on points essential to salvation was revealed by Jesus Christ. The Catechism then goes on to affirm the entire unity of the Deity; since if he is one essence, then must he also be individually one, [35b] and therefore Christ cannot he truly said to be a separate person or individual, partaking of the essentia of the Deity, since that essentia is necessarily one. That the Spirit of God, being an essential part of the Deity, cannot be a separate individual (for in this sense the Catechism interprets the word persona [36]), any more than his wisdom or his goodness is a separate individual, and that therefore the manifestations of the Spirit of God are manifestations of the Deity himself.

“Christ,” says the Catechism, “is a man, according to Rom. v. 15, conceived by a virgin, through the power of the Divine Spirit, without the intervention of man in the ordinary course of generation. He was first subject to suffering and death—afterwards impassible and immortal, Rom. vi. 9. It is in the sense of his existence derived immediately from God, that he, though man, is called the Son of God—as Adam is so termed from the same cause. Jesus Christ was the immediate instrument of God’s communications to man; and being, whilst on earth, the voice of God, he is now the anointed King, or Christ, over the people of God.”

The passages where he is said to have existed from the beginning: to have created all things, &c. are laboriously explained away, as referring to the regeneration, or new state of things introduced by Christ’s mission on earth: and in this part there is much forced interpretation. I shall annex some of the passages in the language of the original, [37] as a proof that I have given a fair account of the real Socinian doctrine, which is very little understood at present. Writers from whom we might expect greater accuracy, have very generally confounded Socinians and Arians, although Faustus Socinus was at the pains to write a laboured refutation of the Arian doctrine, and although a reference to the doctrines of the two sects would show that they are the antipodes of each other. Arius taught that Christ was not of the same nature (ὁμοούσιος), with the Father, but of a like nature (ὁμοιούσιος) and therefore individually separate—separate in will, and capable of differing. This is a direct assertion of two Gods. Socinus on the contrary strenuously asserts the unity of the Deity to the extent of denying the pre-existence of Christ: which Arius though acknowledging that there was a time when he began to exist, nevertheless refers to a period remote beyond human calculation. Thus upon their characteristic doctrines, the two sects are diametrically opposed to each other.

Having now given you the real opinions of Socinus, from his own works, for the book is lying beside me as I write, I shall pursue my plan of examining how far they accord with what was taught by those who certainly ought to be best informed on the subject, namely, Christ himself, his Apostles, and their immediate successors; as well as with the deductions of reason. The unity of the Deity is so frequently and so decidedly asserted in Scripture, that it is impossible to consider any man as unorthodox who professes to make this the groundwork of his belief—so far therefore the Socinian is in accordance both with Scripture and the general voice of the Christian church, for the early Apologists for Christianity, who had to address polytheists, are full of declarations that they worship One only Deity, who by various manifestations has made himself, at different times, known to mankind. [39a] There is not a writer of the first and second centuries who does not anxiously assert the one-ness of the God whom the Christians worship: but then they as anxiously assert the identity of their Teacher and Lord with that God. From Christ himself, who says, “Before Abraham was, I am;” [39b] “I and the Father are one;” [39c] “He who hath seen me hath seen the Father;” “the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works;” [39d] to St. Paul, who tells us that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself,” [39e] down to the fathers of the early church, to whom I may refer passim for the same doctrine; all have distinctly asserted that the message of peace to man was delivered by God himself, making use of a human form as the mode of communication with his creatures, and dwelling in “the man Christ Jesus,” [39f] as in a temple built up for his especial use; the human nature, to use the expression of the church, “having been taken into God,” not the Godhead circumscribed in man. I will not swell the length of my letter with quotations from the fathers which may be found elsewhere; I think the texts I have quoted with many more of the same purport, which you will readily call to mind, suffice to prove that when Socinus asserted the Christ to be merely a man, he erred; for though Jesus “the Carpenter’s son,” as his contemporaries called him, was to all intents and purposes a man “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;” [40] and though this may be proved from numberless passages in the Scripture, where the man Jesus speaks of his inferiority to the Father and bestower of his human frame and spirit,—yet if we do not entirely distort the meaning of words, that man at times uttered declarations of divine power which could only have proceeded from the indwelling Deity, otherwise they must have been the assertions of imposture, which Socinus by no means teaches to have been the case. I know not, therefore, how the believer in the Gospel can avoid acknowledging that Christ was a compound being:—perfectly a man, and speaking as such on some occasions; but, at the same time, the temple of the Ever-living God, whose words flowed from his lips like the answer from the Mercy seat: “Heaven and the heaven of heavens” no doubt “cannot contain” the Infinite; and no true believer will assert that God can be circumscribed in a human body—but, if so mean a comparison may be permitted—as the crater of the volcano is but the mouthpiece of the mighty agents operating within for the fashioning of the earth,—so the manifestation of the Deity in the form, and from the lips of a man, is but that spot of the material creation where the ever blessed Divinity allows himself, as it were, a vent; and gives forth a visible and tangible sign of his existence.

“He that has seen me has seen the Father,” says the Christ. “I can of my own self do nothing” [41] says the man: and this distinction which the Christ who necessarily knew something of the composition of his own nature so frequently asserts, has probably been the groundwork of the mistaken views of this class of Christians, and we may well look with charitable indulgence on the errors of men, who dreading lest they should incur the penalty of giving the incommunicable glory of the Mighty God to another, have not allowed their due weight to the passages, which assert that Mighty God to have undertaken the task of bringing his creature man back to Himself.

Having thus given you a fair account of the creed of Socinus, I must next notice the modern Unitarians, who on some points differ from him. Where there is no acknowledged creed or catechism, [42] which may be quoted as authority, it is difficult to give the doctrines of a sect with any precision; but as far as it is possible to judge from the writings most in repute among the Unitarians, they disclaim the notion of the miraculous conception, and believe Christ to have been to all intents and purposes a mere man. At the same time they allow him to have been so inspired and guided by God, that it is difficult to see where they draw the line between their own creed and that of the church, which allows the perfect humanity of Jesus, but asserts that “God and man make one Christ,” namely, that the message of peace was that of God speaking by human lips, and that the Anointed prophet who declared it, was, when so anointed, the temple and place of manifestation of the living God. They disclaim the doctrine of atonement, and believe that the mission of Christ had for its object the reform of the world, and the restoration of man to a sense of his true relation towards God, and even here Scripture and the early church speak a language which differs not very greatly from theirs. For the language in which our redemption is spoken of, is that of a master purchasing a slave, as will be seen on a reference to Rom. vi. in the original. The ransom by which man was purchased to be the servant of holiness instead of that of sin, was paid to his former master, sin; by the purchaser; and the purchaser is God. “I speak after the manner of men,” says St. Paul, “because of the infirmity of your flesh.” i.e. I adopt the phraseology of a common transaction because your minds are not sufficiently accustomed to the contemplation of higher things to understand them without a metaphor; but the Unitarian forgets, when asserting that the ransom was not paid to God, that it was paid by God: and that man, the slave, was bought from sin, the master, at no less a price than the condescension of the Deity himself to the infirmity of our flesh, by making himself visibly and tangibly known to his creatures, through the medium of a human form.

I have now endeavoured to give a dispassionate view of the doctrines of these sects, hitherto so much misunderstood, and having marked the points wherein they appear to me to recede from Christian truth, I have the pleasanter task before me, of showing by extracts from their writings, how large a portion of the religion which we all profess, they still retain, and I may say from experience, on most occasions conscientiously act upon.

“If with the Apostle we glory in the cross of Christ, or in that religion which could not have been confirmed without his death, let us not only be careful to govern our lives by the precepts of it in general, but more particularly be prepared to suffer what the strictest profession of it may call us to. Let us remember that our Saviour hath said, if any man will be his disciple he must “take up his cross, and follow him.” That is, he must be ready to do it rather than abandon the profession of the Gospel, or whatever the strictest purity of it may require. A true Christian is no more of this world than his Lord and Master was of it. With him every thing here below is but of secondary consideration, &c.—but this we must remember for our consolation, that if, in time of persecution “He that keepeth his life shall lose it,” “He that loseth his life” for the profession of the Gospel “shall keep it to life eternal.” “If we suffer with Christ, we shall also reign with him and be glorified together.” [47]