Ib.

s. xviii. p. 225.

And now for any danger to men's persons for suffering such a doctrine, this I shall say, that if they who do it are not formally guilty of idolatry, there is no danger that they whom they persuade to it, should be guilty ... When they believe it to be no idolatry, then their so believing it is sufficient security from that crime, which hath so great a tincture and residency in the will, that from thence only it hath its being criminal.

Will not this argument justify all idolaters? For surely they believe themselves worshippers either of the Supreme Being under a permitted form, or of some son of God (as Apollo) to whom he has delegated such and such powers. If this be the case, there is no such crime as idolatry: yet the second commandment expressly makes the worshipping of God in or before a visual image of him not only idolatry, but the most hateful species of it. Now do they not worship God in the visible form of bread, and prostrate themselves before pictures of the Trinity? Are we so mad as to suppose that the pious heathens thought the statue of Jupiter, Jove himself? No; and yet these heathens were idolaters. But there was no such being as Jupiter. No! Was there no King of Kings and Lord of Lords; and does the name Jove instead of Jehovah (perhaps the same word too) make the difference? Were Marcus Antoninus and Epictetus idolaters?

[index p. 2]

[Unum Necessarium; or the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance]

  1. The first great divines among the Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and their compeers and successors, had thrown the darkness of storms on an awful fact of human nature, which in itself had only the darkness of negations. What was certain, but incomprehensible, they rendered contradictory and absurd by a vain attempt at explication. It was a fundamental fact, and of course could not be comprehended; for to comprehend, and thence to explain, is the same as to perceive, and thence to point out, a something before the given fact, and Standing to it in the relation of cause to effect. Thus they perverted original sin into hereditary guilt, and made God act in the spirit of the cruellest laws of jealous governments towards their enemies, upon the principle of treason in the blood. This was brought in to explain their own explanation of God's ways, and then too often God's alleged way in this case was adduced to justify the cruel state law of treason in the blood.
  2. In process of time, good men and of active minds were shocked at this; but, instead of passing back to the incomprehensible fact, with a vault over the unhappy idol forged for its comprehension, they identified the two in name; and while in truth their arguments applied only to a false theory, they rejected the fact for the sake of the mis-solution, and fell into far worse errors. For the mistaken theorist had built upon a foundation, though but a superstructure of chaff and straw; but the opponents built on nothing. Aghast at the superstructure, these latter ran away from that which is the sole foundation of all human religion.
  3. Then came the persecutions of the Arminians in Holland; then the struggle in England against the Arminian Laud and all his party — terrible persecutors in their turn of the Calvinists and systematic divines; then the Civil War and the persecutions of the Church by the Puritans in their turn; and just in this state of heated feelings did Taylor write these Works, which contain dogmas subversive of true Christian faith, namely, his Unum Necessarium, or Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, which reduces the cross of Christ to nothing, especially in the seventh chapter of the same, and the after defences of it in his Letters on Original Sin to a Lady, and to the Bishop of Rochester; and the Liberty of Prophesying, which, putting toleration on a false ground, has left no ground at all for right or wrong in matters of Christian faith.

In the marginal notes, which I have written in these several treatises on Repentance, I appear to myself to have demonstrated that Taylor's system has no one advantage over the Lutheran in respect of God's attributes; that it is

bona fide