one of the blackest sins in the entire catalogue of crime.” The Unitarians must, to be consistent, charge all of us, who worship Christ, with being idolaters. Now idolatry is a sin of the most heinous character; it is not an offence against men it is true, but it is an intolerable offence against the majesty of God. We are ranked by Unitarians, if they are consistent, with the Hottentots. “No,” they say, “we believe that you are sincere in your worship.” So is the Hottentot; he bows down before his fetish, {a} his block of wood or stone, and he is an idolater; and although you charge us with bowing before a man, yet we do hold that you have laid at our door a sin insufferably gross, and we are obliged to repel your accusation with some severity. You have so insulted us by denying the Godhead of Christ, you have charged us with so great a crime, that you cannot expect us to sit coolly down and blandly smile at the accusation. It does not matter what a man worships, if it is not God, he is an idolater. There is no distinction in principle between worship to a god of mud and a god of gold, indeed further, there is no distinction between the worship of an onion and the worship of the sun, moon, and stars. These are all idolatries. And though Christ is confessed by the Socinian to be the best of men, perfection’s own self; yet if he is nothing more, the vast mass of the Christian world is deliberately assailed with the impudent accusation of being idolaters. Yet those who charge us with idolatry, expect us to receive them with cordial kindness. It is not in flesh and blood for us to do so, if we take the low ground of reason; it is not in grace or truth to do so, if we take the high ground of revelation. As men, we are willing to show them respect, we regard them, we pray for them, we have no anger or enmity against them. But when we come to the point of theology, we cannot, since we profess to be followers of Christ, tamely see ourselves charged with an offence so dreadful and so heinous as that of idol worship.
5. I confess I would almost rather be charged with a religion that extenuated murder, than with one that justified idolatry. Murder, great as the offence is, is only the slaying of man; but idolatry is in its essence the killing of God; it is the attempt to thrust the Eternal Jehovah out of his seat, and to foist into his place the work of his own hand, or the creature of my own conceit. Shall a man charge me with being so besotted as to worship a mere man? shall he tell me I am so low and grovelling in my intellect, that I should stoop down to worship my own fellow creature? and yet does he expect me after that to receive him as a brother professing the same faith? I cannot understand his presumption. The charge against our sanctity of heart is so tremendous, the accusation is so frightful, that if there have been some severity and bitterness of temper in the controversy, the sin lies upon our opponent, and not on us. For he has charged us with a crime so dreadful, that an upright man must repel it as an insult. But to go further; if Jesus Christ is not a divine person; if I could once imagine that he was no more than a mere man, I should prefer Mohammed to Christ; and if you ask me why, I think I could clearly prove beyond a doubt, that Mohammed was a greater prophet than Christ. If Jesus Christ is not the Son of God, coequal, co-eternal with the Father, he so spoke as to induce that belief in the minds of his own disciples, and also his adversaries. Mohammed, with regard to the unity of the Godhead, is so clear and so distinct, that there is no Mohammedan to this day, that has ever fallen into idolatry. You will find that throughout the whole of the Mohammedan world the cry is still sternly uttered and faithfully believed, “There is only one God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” Now, if Christ were only a good man and a prophet, why did he not speak more decisively? Why has he not left on record a war cry for the Christian, which would be as explicit and decisive as that of Mohammed? If Christ did not mean to teach that he himself is God, at least he was not very clear and definite in his denial and he has left his disciples extremely in the dark, the proof of which is to be found in the fact, that to the present day, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of all the professed followers of Christ, do receive him, and bow down before him, as being the very God. And if he is not God, I deny his right to be esteemed as a prophet. If he is not God, he was an impostor, the grandest, the greatest of deceivers who ever existed. This, of course, is no argument to the man who denies the faith, and does not avow himself to be a follower of Christ. But to the man who is Christ’s follower, I do hold that the argument is irresistible, that Christ could not have been a good and great prophet, if he was not what he certainly led us to believe himself to be, the Son of God, who thought it not robbery to be equal with God, — the very God, by whom all things were made, and without whom was not anything made that is made.
6. I will say yet another thing, which may startle the believer, but which is intended rather to reduce the heterodox doctrine of Christ not being God, to an absurdity. If Christ was not the Son of God, his death, so far from being a satisfaction for sin, was a death most richly and righteously deserved. The Sanhedrin before which he was tried was the recognised and authorised legislature of the country. He was brought before that Sanhedrin, charged with blasphemy, and it was upon that charge that they condemned him to die, because he made himself to be the Son of God. Now, I do not hesitate honestly to aver, that if I had been called on to plead in that case, I should have pleaded an acknowledgement, and that moreover, I should have stood up, and said and felt, that I had a clear case before me, which nothing except lying and perjury could ever have put aside, if Jesus of Nazareth had been charged with having declared himself to be the Son of God. Why, his whole preaching seemed to derive from there its unrivalled authority. There was continually in his actions and in his words, a claim to be something more than man ever could lay claim to. And when he was brought before the Sanhedrin, witnesses enough might have been found, to prove that he had made himself the Son of God; if he was not so, his condemnation for blasphemy was the most just sentence that ever was pronounced, and his crucifixion on Calvary, was absolutely the most righteous execution that ever was performed by the hand of the government. It is his being truly God, that frees him from the charge of blasphemy. It is the fact that he is God, and that his Godhead is not to be denied, that makes his death an unrighteous deicide at the hand of apostate man, and renders it, as before God, an acceptable sacrifice for the sins of all the people whom he redeemed with his most precious blood. But if he is not God, I do repeat, that there is no reason whatever, why we should have had a New Testament written; for there would be then nothing in the sublime central fact of that New Testament but the righteous execution of one, who certainly deserved to die.
7. Do you remember, my dear friends, when the apostle Paul was preaching on the resurrection of the dead, in his letter to the Corinthians, how he uses an ex post facto argument, to show, the natural consequences, if it were possible to overturn the truth? He says, “If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain, and you are still in your sins.” Now, I may fairly use the apostle’s line of argument in reference to the Godhead and Sonship of Christ, of which his resurrection gave such a palpable demonstration: “If Christ is not the Son of God, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain, and you are still in your sins”: all our visions of heaven are blasted; and withered; the brightness of our hope is quenched for ever; that rock on which our trust is built, turns out to be nothing better than mere sand if the divinity of Christ is not proven. All the joy and consolation we ever had in this world, is our belief that his blood was sufficient to atone for sin, has been only a dream of fancy and a “figment of idle brains”; all the communion we have ever had with him has been only an illusion and a trance, and all the hopes we have of beholding his face in glory, and of being satisfied when we awake in his likeness, are only the foulest delusions that ever cheated the hopes of man. Oh, my brethren, and can any of you believe that the blood of all the martyrs has been shed as a witness to a lie? Have all those who have rotted in Roman dungeons, or have been burned at the stake because they witnessed that Christ was God, died in vain? Truly, if Christ is not God, we are of all men the most miserable. To what purpose is the calumny and abuse that we have had to endure day after day; to what purpose are our repentance, our sighs, our tears; to what purpose is our faith; to what purpose have our fears and bodings been supplanted by our hope and confidence; to what purpose our joy and our rejoicing, if Christ is not the Son of God? Will you put yourselves all down for fools; can you imagine that God’s Word has misguided you; that prophets and apostles, and martyrs and saints, have all leagued together to lead you into a trap and to delude your souls? God forbid that we should think such a thing. There is no folly in the world that has in it so much as a cent of madness, compared with the folly of denying
