Let me add that a mighty and comparatively new argument against the Socinians may be most unanswerably deduced from this reply of our Lord’s, even were it considered as a mere ‘argumentum ad homines’:  —­namely, that it was not his Messiahship that so offended the Jews, but his Sonship; otherwise, our Saviour’s language would have neither force, motive, or object.  “Even were I no more than the Messiah, in your meanest conceptions of that character, yet after what I have done before your eyes, nothing but malignant hearts could have prevented you from adopting a milder interpretation of my words, when in your own Scriptures there exists a precedent that so much more than merely justifies me.”  And this I believe to be the meaning of the words as intended to be understood by the Jews in question; though, doubtless, Fuller’s sense exists ‘implicite’.  No candid person would ever call it an evasion, to prove the injustice and malignity of an accuser even from his own grounds:—­“You charge me falsely; but even were your charge true, namely, that I am a mere man, and yet call myself the Son of God, still it would not follow that I have been guilty of blasphemy.”  But as understood by the modern Unicists, it would verily, verily, be an evasive ambiguity, most unworthy of Christian belief concerning his Saviour.  Common charity would have demanded of him to have said:—­“I am a mere man:  I do not pretend to be more; but I used the words in analogy to the words, ‘Ye are as Gods’; and I have a right to do so:  for though a mere man, I am the great Prophet and Messenger which Moses promised you.”

Letter V. p. 72.

If Dr. Priestley had formed his estimate of human virtue by that great standard which requires love to God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves,—­instead of representing men by nature as having “more virtue than vice,”—­he must have acknowledged with the Scripture, that ’the whole world lieth in wickedness—­that every thought and imagination of their heart is only evil continually’—­and that ’there is none of them that doeth good, no not one’.

To this the Unicists would answer, that by ‘the whole world’ is meant all the worldly-minded;—­no matter in how direct opposition to half a score other texts!  “One text at a time!” sufficient for the day is the evil thereof!—­and in this way they go on pulling out hair by hair from the horse’s tail, (say rather, dreaming that they do so,) and then conclude with a shout that the horse never had a tail!  For why?  This hair is not a tail, nor that, nor the third, and so on to the very last; and how can all do what none of all does?—­Ridiculous as this is, it is a fair image of Socinian logic.  Thank God, their plucking out is a mere fancy;—­and the sole miserable reality is the bare rump which they call their religion;—­but that is the ape’s own growth.

Ib. p. 77.