9. My fifth specimen was your misrepresentation of Eusebius; whom you charge with inconsistency, because another writer, who is quoted by him, speaks of Theodotus, who appeared about the year 190, as the first who held that our Saviour was a mere man; when in refuting the pretensions of the Unitarians to antiquity, he goes no further back than to Irenæus and Justin Martyr; although the writings of Eusebius himself afford a refutation of the assertion. But although the assertion, as you choose to understand it, would be liable to refutation from the writings of Eusebius, it admits an interpretation, by which the seeming inconsistency is entirely removed. The pretensions to antiquity, which it was incumbent upon Eusebius, or the author quoted by him, to refute, were not simply pretensions to antiquity, but to a prior antiquity: and in refuting these, the author quoted by Eusebius, goes back to the apostolic age.

10. Your objection to the doctrine of the church, drawn from the resemblance which you find between the Christian and the Platonic doctrine, furnished my sixth specimen of insufficient proof. I acknowledge the resemblance; but I insist, that it leads to an inquiry into the sentiments of heathen antiquity, which, pursued to its just consequences, rather corroborates, than invalidates, the traditional evidence of the Catholic faith.

11. Your proofs of your second assertion, that the doctrine of our Lord's divinity was an innovation of the second age, are all of an oblique and secondary kind: such as, were they liable to no other objection, would lead to no conclusion, without a distinct previous proof, that the faith of the first age was Unitarian. One of these arguments furnished my seventh specimen of insufficient proof. It is an instance, in which you cite the testimony of a Greek writer, to prove the very reverse of what he says. It is alleged by me as an instance of your competency in the Greek language in general, and of your particular acquaintance with the phraseology of the early fathers.

12. My eighth specimen was taken from your attempt to translate a passage of Athenagoras, at which an abler philologer, than you have shewn yourself to be, unread in the Platonists, might be allowed to stumble. I produced it, to convict you of incompetency in the language of the Platonists; and to confirm a suspicion, which the very tenor of your third assertion might create, that you are ignorant of the genuine doctrines of the Platonic school. Thence it is to be inferred, that you are little to be trusted, when you take upon you to compare the opinions of the first Christians, in which you are not learned, with Platonism, in which you are a child.

13. My ninth specimen was another instance of your skill in the Greek language. A passage of Theophilus, in which he expounds the word Trinity, by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, is produced by you, to prove that the use of the word Trinity, to denote Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was unknown to Theophilus. Theophilus's words are so very clear, that the sense was hardly to be missed, at first sight, by a school boy in his second year of Greek.

14. These are the nine specimens, by which I support my general Charge of the inaccuracy of your narrative, and in these subjects, the insufficiency of its author. To all of them, except the seventh and the ninth, you have attempted to reply. With what success is to be considered.

I am, &c.

LETTER THIRD.

In Reply to Dr Priestley's introductory, and to part of his First Letter. His defence of his argument from the clear sense of Scripture confuted. Of the argument against our Lord's preexistence to be drawn from the materiality of man. Of the Greek pronoun έτος.

DEAR SIR,

To remove the imputation of having argued in a circle, when alleging your own sense of Scripture as the clear sense, you infer, that the faith of the first ages was exactly conformable to your own opinions; you tell me, that the clear sense of Scripture and the historical evidence, are collateral proofs* of the early prevalence of the Unitarian faith. I shall admit this, and shall retract all that I have written, when once you shall have proved to the satisfaction of the Christian world, that the Unitarian doctrine is delivered in the holy Scriptures, taken in their plain and obvious meaning. But while your sense of Scripture is disallowed by the majority of Christians, I must still contend, that you have no right to call it the clear sense; and that any argument built on a supposition, that

the Scriptures speak a sense not generally perceived in them, rests at best upon a gratuitous assumption. I confess, that an argument drawn from a gratuitous assumption is not necessarily an argument running in a circle, unless the only means of reducing the assumption to a certainty, be a previous proof of the conclusion to be drawn. But this I affirm to be the case in the instance under consideration. When we speak of the clear sense of any piece of writing, this very expression admits a twofold interpretation. The clear sense, may be either that which is clearly conveyed in the words; or a sense, which though it be not clearly conveyed in the words, may be clearly proved, from the context, or from other considerations, to be the sense which was really present to the mind of the writer. If you allege the clear sense of the Scriptures, in the first sense of the expression, in proof that the primitive faith was Unitarian; I ask, whether it be not the sole end and purpose of the inquiry into the primitive faith, to settle the differences of Christians upon points in which the Scriptures, if there be any ground in them for the disputes which have arisen, are not clear? You now assume a sense, which you call their clear sense, upon those very points, in order to ascertain the primitive faith. This is to reason in a circle.

2. But in truth the Unitarian doctrine will

H