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OBSERVATIONS

ON

HERESY AND ORTHODOXY.

BY

JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE, M.A.

Nunquam autem invenietur (quod quæritur) si contenti fuerimus inventis.
Præterea qui alium sequitur, nihil invenit, immo nec quærit. Quid ergo? non
ibo per priorum vestigia? ego vero utar via veteri: sed si propiorem planiorem-
que invenero, hanc muniam. Qui ante nos ista moverunt, non domini nostri, sed
duces sunt. Patet omnibus veritas, nondum est occupata: multum ex illa etiam
futuris relictum est.-SENECA, Ep. 33.

Reprinted from the Second Edition,

WITH A SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR'S LIFE,
From the Christian Teacher, 1841,

BY JOHN HAMILTON THOM;

THE FUNERAL ADDRESS, BY JAMES MARTINEAU;

AND

PART OF A LETTER FROM MR. BLANCO WHITE ON

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BRITISH AND FOREIGN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION,

37, NORFOLK STREET, STRAND, W.C.

C1391.49

L

HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

1882, March 22.
lift of

The Imer Unit. Essoc.
Boston.

The British and Foreign Unitarian Association, in accordance with its First Rule, gives publicity to works calculated "to promote Unitarian Christianity by the diffusion of biblical, theological and literary knowledge, or topics connected with it," but does not hold itself responsible for every statement, opinion or expression of the writers.

OUTLINES

• OF THE

LIFE OF JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE.

From the CHRISTIAN TEACHER, 1841.

THE love of Truth is the highest form of the love of God. The religious affections may mislead, or they may arise from causes of a physical nature; but a pure devotion to Truth is the submission of all that is in Man to the eternal Source of Thought, the sublime reliance of the Soul, unbribed by interest or passion, upon whatever it believes to have proceeded from that infinite Intelligence who is the Fountain of our spirits. There is no surrender to God so complete as that which is made by him who worships the Father in spirit and in truth,— whose God is Reality,-who uses no artificial means to keep up fluctuating and fluttering feelings that have no basis in his Reason, but casts all idols out of his heart, and, like Abraham stripped of his household gods, goes forth in faith to meet the untried future, knowing only that the great God has shewn him of his spirit, and that to trust in Truth is to take refuge with the Father of Lights.

The love of God in the form of the love of Truth

ensures the most genuine products of the devotional spirit; the hope of progress, which is the root of all true humility; the practical fidelity of the conscience; and, what results from these, the trusting and childlike quiet of the heart. Christ himself has connected the sentiment of Immortality, of indefinite progress for the soul, with the worship that identifies God with Truth: "Whosoever shall drink of this water, it shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." Immortality necessarily suggests ideas of Progress; and to love and obey the Truth are the only means by which our feeble Reason can approach to the Thoughts of God. These, too, are the sources of fidelity in temptation, of sublime peace in life and death. Who steers his course so direct towards arduous Duty as he who believes that he has no safe guide but Principle,—and, when this is clear, puts away from him, as false and unfilial, all deceitful reasonings about uncertain consequences, and feels that in following a moral Truth he is committing himself to the Love of an All-wise God? Who in the hour of agitation or death is so free from alarm of soul, as he whose peace with Heaven depends not on the vehemence of his belief in abstract propositions, or the chance temperature of unstable feelings, but on the sincerity with which his inward being cleaves to a spiritual God? Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose Comforter and God was the Spirit of Truth, and who described it as his mission in the world, "to bear witness to the Truth that he knew," is the one example of perfect fidelity in diffi

cult duty, and of heavenly peace of soul in all times of trial. In the midst of a religion of prescription, and of authority, and of ritual, and of enthusiasm, and of all other substitutes for the inner communion of the soul with God, he alone, who trusted to the Truth to make him free, was established on the Rock, and could meet every crisis of his life with the strength of one supported by God-"Not my will, but thine, be done,”—and close his martyr death with the childlike trust, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

Whosoever has not the spirit of Christ is none of his. And there is no spirit so worthy to be called "the spirit of Christ" as this practical trust, this committal of ourselves to the convictions of our Reason and the monitions of our Conscience, identifying them with God who is their Source. There are causes connected with the individual mind, and altogether independent of the undue influences of society, that render unfailing devotion to Truth the most arduous form of the true worship of God, -causes arising out of the infirmities and even the tenderness of our nature,-the surrender of the mind to the prejudices of education; the natural sloth of the intellect; and the lingering residency of the affections amid the sentiments and images where faith first found a home. And society-which, alas! is but collective man, with all the faults of the individual reduced to system and sanctioned by numbers-society lashes us in the direction of the very tendencies which it ought to restrain, and adds the whole weight of its bribes and terrors to

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