Before this Third Period of my creed was completed, I made my first acquaintance with a Unitarian.  This gentleman showed much sweetness of mind, largeness of charity, and a timid devoutness which I had not expected in such a quarter.  His mixture of credulity and incredulity seemed to me capricious, and wholly incoherent.  First, as to his incredulity, or rather, boldness of thought.  Eternal punishment was a notion, which nothing could make him believe, and for which it would be useless to quote Scripture to him; for the doctrine (he said) darkened the moral character of God, and produced malignity in man.  That Christ had any higher nature than we all have, was a tenet essentially inadmissible; first, because it destroyed all moral benefit from his example and sympathy, and next, because no one has yet succeeded in even stating the doctrine of the Incarnation without contradicting himself.  If Christ was but one person, one mind, then that one mind could not be simultaneously finite and infinite, nor therefore simultaneously God and man.  But when I came to hear more from this same gentleman, I found him to avow that no Trinitarian could have a higher conception than he of the present power and glory of Christ.  He believed that the man Jesus is at the head of the whole moral creation of God; that all power in heaven and earth is given to him:  that he will be Judge of all men, and is himself raised above all judgment.  This was to me unimaginable from his point of view.  Could he really think Jesus to be a mere man, and yet believe him to be sinless?  On what did that belief rest?  Two texts were quoted in proof, 1 Pet. ii. 21, and Heb. iv. 15.  Of these, the former did not necessarily mean anything more than that Jesus was unjustly put to death; and the latter belonged to an Epistle, which my new friend had already rejected as unapostolic and not of first-rate authority, when speaking of the Atonement.  Indeed, that the Epistle to the Hebrews is not from the hand of Paul, had very long seemed to me an obvious certainty,—­as long as I had had any delicate feeling of Greek style.

That a human child, born with the nature of other children, and having to learn wisdom and win virtue through the same process, should grow up sinless, appeared to me an event so paradoxical, as to need the most amply decisive proof.  Yet what kind of proof was possible?  Neither Apollos, (if he was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrew,) nor yet Peter, had any power of attesting the sinlessness of Jesus, as a fact known to themselves personally:  they could only learn it by some preternatural communication, to which, nevertheless, the passages before us implied no pretension whatever.  To me it appeared an axiom,[3] that if Jesus was in physical origin a mere man, he was, like myself, a sinful man, and therefore certainly not my Judge, certainly not an omniscient reader of all hearts; nor on any account to be bowed down to as Lord.  To exercise hope, faith, trust in him, seemed then an impiety.  I did not mean to impute impiety to Unitarians; still I distinctly believed that English Unitarianism could never afford me a half hour’s resting-place.