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A Calm Inquiry Into the Scripture Doctrine Concerning the Person of Christ
A Calm Inquiry Into the Scripture Doctrine Concerning the Person of Christ Author:Thomas Belsham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. 1 o those who interest themselves in the subject of this Inquiry, the order pursued in the following investigation may appear not altogether natural ... more »; and the Analytic method might perhaps be thought preferable to the Synthetic. And that method would unquestionably have been adopted, had the original design with which this Inquiry was instituted been to disprove the commonly- received doctrine concerning the deity of Jesus Christ. But the truth is, that at the time when this Inquiry was begun the author was himself a firm believer in the pre-existence of Christ; and was fully persuaded that the spirit which animated the body of Christ was the eternal Logos asserted by Dr. Clarke; nor had he then altogether renounced the plausible hypothesis of Dr. T. Bur- net and Dr. Doddridge, that the Son is God by the indwelling deity of the Father. He had been at that time, A. D. 1781, recently appointed to the Theological chair in Mr. Coward's Academy at Daventry, and Unitarianism being then " the great controversy of the age," he was dissatisfied with the slight notice taken of this controversyin Dr. Doddridge's Lectures, which was the textbook of the Institution, and regarded it as an imperative professional duty to enter more fully into this important discussion, which had of late risen into increased celebrity, partly, by the controversial writings of Dr. Priestley, but chiefly, by the meritorious sacrifice which the venerable Theophilus Lindsey had made not many years before to the dictates of an enlightened conscience, and by the new and singular phenomenon of a flourishing congregation of Christians, avowedly Unitarian, having been formed under his auspices in Essex Street. Now the plan, which to the author appeared most eligible for conducting the minds of his pupils...« less