adopted in Massachusetts as early as the middle of the last century. In 1756, Emlyn's Humble Inquiry into the Scripture Account of Jesus Christ, was published in Boston, chiefly, it is said, by the agency of doctor Mayhew, of the West church, and came into wide circulation. One of the three Episcopal churches of that city adopted, in 1785, a liturgy excluding the recognition of the Trinitarian doctrine. In 1805, attention was extensively drawn to the subject by several publications, occasioned by the appointment of a distinguished Unitarian to the divinity chair of the university of Cambridge. In 1816, the controversy was revived by a repubfication, in this country, of a chapter from Mr. Belsham's Life of Lindsey, with the title American Unitarianism. Up to this time, the doctrine had been hardly discussed out of New England, though a small society, dating from the visit of doctor Priestley, in 1794, existed in Philadelphia. In 1819, a congregation was gathered in Baltimore; and others now exist in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Charleston, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and other principal cities of the Union. The number of churches organized according to the Congregational form is reckoned at from 170 to 200. Their ministers are chiefly furnished from the divinity college of the university of Cambridge, in Massachusetts. Among the periodical publications which announce their views are the Christian Examiner, the Scriptural Interpreter, and the Unitarian Advocate, printed in Boston; the Unitarian Monitor, at Dover, N. H.; the Christian Monitor, at Brooklyn, Conn.; and the Unitarian Essayist, at Meadville, ⚫ Penn. The annual reports of the American Unitarian Association, the government of which is established in Boston, circulate information respecting the progress of the doctrine. Besides the Congregational Unitarians, the denomination called Christians, which is numerous, particularly in the Western States, reckoning, in 1827, from 700 to 1000 churches (letter of General Christian Conference, in Christian Examiner, vol. iv), maintains Unitarian opinions; and they are understood also to prevail in the large sect of the Reformed Baptists, in the same region of the country.-In France, many of the Protestant clergy reject the Trinitarian scheme of Christian doctrine. The tone of their principal publication, the Revue Protestante, is hostile to it; and the principal sources of supply for the ministry of the French churches, are the

schools of Geneva and Montauban, where the Unitarian system has ascendency. A society was forined last year, at Paris, called the Unitarian Association of France.

In British Asia, a native society of Unitarian Christians has existed, for several years, at Madras, under the care of William Roberts, a native; but a much more remarkable developement of opinion of this kind occurred in the case of the distinguished Bramin, Rammohun Roy, of Calcutta, who, in his publications in English, called the Precepts of Jesus, and First, Second and Final Appeal to the Christian Public, has directed the thoughts of numbers of his countrymen to the subjects therein proposed, and, since 1827, has been associated with conspicuous individuals of the native and European population, in the support of Christian worship according to the Unitarian faith.-Unitarians profess to derive their views from Scripture, and to make it the ultimate arbiter in all religious questions,thus distinguishing themselves from the Rationalists (otherwise called the Anti-supernaturalists) of Germany. They undertake to show that, interpreted according to the settled laws of language, the uniform testimony of the sacred writings is, that the Holy Spirit has no personal existence distinct from the Father, and that the Son is a derived and dependent being, whether, as some believe, created in some remote period of time, or, as others, beginning to live when he appeared on earth. of the passages of the New Testament, which have been relied on to prove the contrary (1 John v, 7; 1 Tim. iii, 16; and Acts xx, 28), they hold, with other critics, to be spurious. Others (as John i, 1, &c.; Romans ix, 5) they maintain to have received an erroneous interpretation. They insist that ecclesiastical history enables them to trace to obsolete systems of heathen philosophy the introduction of the received doctrine into the church, in which, once received, it has been sustained on grounds independent of its merits; and they go so far as to aver that it is satisfactorily refuted by the biblical passages, when rightly understood, which are customarily adduced in its support. According as their distinguishing doctrine has been professed in different times and places, it has been found in connexion with various others, which have been prominent subjects of controversy in the church, as those which respect the manner of baptism, philosophical liberty and necessity, the methods of Christ's inediation, &c. The Unitarians (sometimes

Three

called Socinians) of Poland held to the obligation of invoking Christ-a view which no Unitarians of the present day, out of Transylvania, are believed to entertain. In America, Unitarian opinions are much divided upon the point of Christ's preexistence; while, on the other hand, the rejection of the tenet of his vicarious suffering (or suffering as men's substitute), along with that of his supreme Deity, appears to be universally characteristic of the Bect. (See Bock, Historia Antitrinitari

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orum; Lubieniecius, Historia Reformationis Polonica; Lampe, Historia Ecclesia Hungarica; Benkő, Transylvania; Maimbourg, History of Arianism; L'Amy, History of Socinianism; Rees, Racovian Catechism.)

Unitarians is also sometimes used, in politics, to designate a party in favor of a central government, in contradistinction to one in favor of a federal government. Thus we hear of the Unitarians in Buenos Ayres.