My  Lord,

So  ready  is  your  Lordship  to  charge  me  with  the
grossest  ignorance,  that  you  most  egregiously  expose
vour  own,  or,  which  is  worse,  your  disposition  to  cavil,
when  you  say,  "  Dr.  Priestley,  I  believe,  is  the  only
writer  who  ever  confounded  two  things  so  totally  di-
stinct as  an  anathema  and  an  article  of  faith,  which
he  conceives  the  damnatory  clause  in  the  Athanasian
creed  to  be.'*

The  idle  punctilio  on  which  this  remark  of  your
Lordship's  turns,  relates  to  the  acts  of  those  councils  in
which  it  w^as  the  custom  to  make  a  creed,  and  then  to
annex  anathemas  to  it.  But  this  creed  of  Athanasius
is  no  act  of  any  council.  You  neither  know  who  com-
posed it,  when  it  made  its  first  appearance,  or  how  it
came  into  the  public  offices  of  the  church.  From  the
structure  of  it  it  is  evidently  a  mere  creed,  containing
nothing  besides  propositions,  which  were  apprehended
by  the  composer  to  be  entitled  to  the  firmest  faith  j
and  that  this  damnatory  clause  in  question  is  one  of
those  propositions,  is  evident  both  from  \.\\eform  and
the  place  of  it.
