Later Unitarians in Christianity 227and if we consider the natural use of words, we become
satisfied that this would not have been the case, if the
former could have been predicated of the latter, that is,
if Christ had been God.
We say 'the prince and the king', because the prince
is not a king. If he had been, we should have had re
course to sorne other distinction, as that of 'greater and
less', 'senior and junior', 'father and son', etc. When
therefore, the apostle Paul said that the Church at Cor
inth was Christ's, and that Christ was God's, and that
manner of distinguishing them is recurrent in the New
Testament, it is evident that he could have no idea of
Christ being God, in any meaningful sense of the word.
ln like manner, Clemens Romanus, calling Christ the
'sceptre of the Majesty of God', sufficiently proves that
in his idea the sceptre was one thing, and the God whose
sceptre it was, another. This, 1 say, must have been the
case when this language was first adopted.
Having shown that the general tenor of the Scrlptures,
and severaI considerations that obviously may be de
duced from them are highly unfavourable to the doc
trine of the trinity, or to those of the divinity or pre-ex
istence of Christ, there arises another consideration,
which has been little attended to, but which seems very
strongly to go against either of these doctrines having
been known in the time of the apostles, and therefore
against their being the doctrine of the Scriptures. That
Jesus was even the Messiah, was divulged with the
greatest caution, both to the apostles and to the body of
the Jews. For a long time our Lord said nothing explicit
on this subject, but left his disciples, as well as the Jews
at large, to judge him from what they saw. In this man
ner only he replied to the messengers that John the Bap
tist sent to him.
If the high-priest expressed ms horror, by rending his
clothes, on Jesus avowing himself to be the Messiah,
what would he have done if he had heard or suspected,
that he had made any higher pretensions? And if he had
made them, they must have transpired. When the peo
ple in generaI saw his miraculous works, they only won
dered that God should have given such power to a man,