LETTERS, &c. LETTER FIRST. The Archdeacon of St Alban's declines a regular controversy with Dr Priestley.-Produces new instances of Dr Priestley's inaccuracies and misrepresentations. DEAR SIR, WHEN at the request of the clergy of my arch deaconry, I published the discourse, in which I had given them my thoughts of your late attack on the doctrine of the Trinity; it was not at all my intention to open a regular controversy with you upon the subject. I cannot think, that you have read my publication with so little discernment, as not to perceive in it, a design of quite another kind; which yet, I fear, I shall find it difficult to avow in explicit terms, without giving an offence, which, were it possible, I would avoid. But since you challenge me to a contest, in which it is my resolution never to engage; not from any distrust of my own cause, nor from any dread of the abilities by which I should be opposed; but from a persuasion that a controversy, in which so little new is to be said on either side, could not terminate in the satisfaction of either party; it is necessary that both yourself and the public should be made to understand, upon what grounds I conceive myself at liberty to decline a discussion to which you seem to think me pledged: and for this purpose, I must declare in very plain language, what I would rather have left you to collect that my original attack upon your history was such, as to lay me under no obligation to prosecute the argument. My attack was not so much upon the opinions, which you maintain, however I may hold them in abhorrence, as upon the credit of your narrative: and if I have succeeded in overthrowing that, which the judgment of the learned must decide, I am not at all obliged to go into new arguments upon the main question. The objections, which were brought against you in my Charge, all went to the proof of this single proposition.-That, on which ever side the truth may lie in the Trinitarian controversy -I have no doubt on which it lies; but the footing, upon which I put the dispute with you, leaves me at liberty to suppose the matter doubtful ; with whatever metaphysical difficulties the Catholic doctrine may be encumbered-those difficul ties, when the doctrine is rightly apprehended, are in my judgment not great, but I will allow you to say they are insuperable: whatever ambiguity may be pretended in the expressions of holy writ, in which the Divinity of the Son is generally supposed to be asserted-in the greater part of the texts I perceive no ambiguity, but you may assume, if you please, that not one of them renders a certain meaning; whatever variety and disagreement is to be found in the orthodoxy of different ages-for the three first centuries the opinion of the church upon this point was uniform, but I give you leave to suppose it as unstable as the world of Heraclitus: whatever may be the intrinsic difficulty of the doctrine of the Trinity, however deficient the proof of it from holy writ, and however discordant the opinions of different ages, still I affirm, and the proof of this was the whole object of my Charge, that Dr Priestley, great as his attainments are confessed to be in the profane sciences, is altogether unqualified to throw any light upon a question of ecclesiastical antiquity. 2. If the instances, which I have alleged, of misinformation and inaccuracy, are only secondary oversights, such as affect not the main argument, and are incident to the best writers in undertakings of such extent as yours; the attempt to depreciate a work of merit, by unçandid censure, |