God in Christ is as to its efficacy as effectually denied by it, as a system, as it could be by Socinianism itself. We are enabled in this case to speak of the full and awful maturity of this abiding corruption of the enemy; but those most conversant with history, and most spiritual, know how much spirituality it requires to detect its commencement and early growth: and that it sprung really from the best persons, and most apparently godly principles that appear after the record of Scripture; so that, though there were counteracting principles which Protestants can justly cite, yet, full-grown Popery can quote the earliest fathers to establish in principle her claims, and support her pretensions. The blessed and perfect word of God reveals in one word this history. They began in the Spirit, and ended in the flesh. If you enquire who were the persons who laid the basis of this amazing evil, it will be found that it was those who insisted on good order and unity, but it was not in the power of the Holy Ghost, (God is not the author of confusion, but of order in the Churches,) but in arrangements which attached to office the authority necessary to maintain it. There may have been fleshly workings which gave occasion to it, but the remedy was not spiritual acting on the conscience and affections of those astray, for this is what we see in the epistles, but the authoritative arrangement of order, because power was so much gone, and spiritual discernment to know it. Hence, the effect produced by the power, the institution itself, the Church as an ordered system, (not the Church as redeemed by Christ) became the object presented, and was made the guard as an institution, instead of being guarded by spiritual care. Hence when the outward institution became the positive enemy of Christ and of His people, it retained its claims, and used its power as His.
Now, however subtilly at first, so that none scarce perceived it, if any, we now know what a work of Satan this was. It has so to speak usurped the world.
I feel satisfied that, as to the principle of it, a similar work has been going on at Plymouth. It will be ever
