Even within the sphere of the Church the Unitarian tendency, with or without deistic introduction, was traceable. Archbishop Tillotson (d. 1694) was often accused of Socinianism; and in the next generation was smilingly spoken of by Anthony Collins as a leading Freethinker. The pious Dr. Hickes had in fact declared of the Archbishop that “he caused several to turn atheists and ridicule the priesthood and religion.”[200] The heresy must have been encouraged even within the Church by the scandal which broke out when Dean Sherlock’s Vindication of Trinitarianism (1690), written in reply to a widely-circulated antitrinitarian compilation,[201] was attacked by Dean South[202] as the work of a Tritheist. The plea of Dr. Wallis, Locke’s old teacher, that a doctrine of “three somewhats”—he objected to the term “persons”—in one God was as reasonable as the concept of three dimensions,[203] was of course only a heresy the more. Outside the Church, William Penn, the great Quaker, held a partially Unitarian attitude;[204] and the first of his many imprisonments was on a charge of “blasphemy and heresy” in respect of his treatise The Sandy Foundation Shaken, which denied (1) that there were in the One God “three distinct and separate persons”; (2) the doctrine of the need of “plenary satisfaction”; and (3) the justification of sinners by “an imputative righteousness.” But though many of the early Quakers seem to have shunned the doctrine of the Trinity, Penn really affirmed the divinity of Christ, and was not a Socinian but a Sabellian in his theology. Positive Unitarianism all the while was being pushed by a number of tracts which escaped prosecution, being prudently handled by Locke’s friend, Thomas Firmin.[205] A new impulse had been given to Unitarianism by the learning and critical energy of the Prussian Dr. Zwicker, who had settled in Holland;[206] and among those Englishmen whom his works had found ready for agreement was Gilbert Clerke (b. 1641), who, like several later heretics, was educated at Sidney College, Cambridge. In 1695 he published a Unitarian work entitled Anti-Nicenismus, and two other tracts in Latin, all replying to the orthodox polemic of Dr. Bull, against whom another Unitarian had written Considerations on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity in 1694, bitterly resenting his violence.[207] In 1695 appeared yet another treatise of the same school, The Judgment of the Fathers concerning the Doctrine of the Trinity. Much was thus done on Unitarian lines to prepare an audience for the deists of the next reign.[208] But the most effective influence was probably the ludicrous strife of the orthodox clergy as to what orthodoxy was. The fray over the doctrine of the Trinity waxed so furious, and the discredit cast on orthodoxy was so serious,[209] that in the year 1700 an Act of Parliament was passed forbidding the publication of any more works on the subject.
Meanwhile the so-called Latitudinarians,[210] all the while aiming as they did at a non-dogmatic Christianity, served as a connecting medium for the different forms of liberal thought; and a new element of critical disintegration was introduced by a speculative treatment of Genesis in the Archæologiæ Philosophiæ (1692) of Dr. Thomas Burnet, a professedly orthodox scholar, Master of the Charterhouse and chaplain in ordinary to King William, who nevertheless treated the Creation and Fall stories as allegories, and threw doubt on the Mosaic authorship of parts of the Pentateuch. Though the book was dedicated to the king, it aroused so much clerical hostility that the king was obliged to dismiss him from his post at court.[211] His ideas were partly popularized through a translation of two of his chapters, with a vindicatory letter, in Blount’s Oracles of Reason (1695); and that they had considerable vogue may be gathered from the Essay towards a Vindication of the Vulgar Exposition of the Mosaic History of the Fall of Adam, by John Witty, published in 1705. Burnet, who published three sets of anonymous Remarks on the philosophy of Locke (1697–1699), criticizing its sensationist basis, figured after his death (1715), in posthumous publications, as a heretical theologian in other regards; and then played his part in the general deistic movement; but his allegorical view of Genesis does not seem to have seriously affected speculation in his time, the bulk of the debate turning on his earlier Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681; trans. 1684), to which there were many rejoinders, both scientific and orthodox. On this side he is unimportant, his science being wholly imaginative; and in the competition between his Theory and J. Woodward’s Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695) nothing was achieved for scientific progress.
Much more remarkable, but outside of popular discussion, were the Evangelium medici (1697) of Dr. B. Connor, wherein the gospel miracles were explained away, on lines later associated with German rationalism, as natural phenomena; and the curious treatise of Newton’s friend, John Craig,[212] Theologiæ christianæ principia mathematica (1699), wherein it is argued that all evidence grows progressively less valid in course of time;[213] and that accordingly the Christian religion will cease to be believed about the year 3144, when probably will occur the Second Coming. Connor, when attacked, protested his orthodoxy; Craig held successively two prebends of the Church of England;[214] and both lived and died unmolested, probably because they had the prudence to write in Latin, and maintained gravity of style. About this time, further, the title of “Rationalist” made some fresh headway as a designation, not of unbelievers, but of believers who sought to ground themselves on reason. Such books as those of Clifford and Boyle tell of much discussion as to the efficacy of “reason” in religious things; and in 1686, as above noted, there appears A Rational Catechism,[215] a substantially Unitarian production, notable for its aloofness from evangelical feeling, despite its many references to Biblical texts in support of its propositions. In the Essays Moral and Divine of the Scotch judge, Sir William Anstruther, published in 1701, there is a reference to “those who arrogantly term themselves Rationalists”[216] in the sense of claiming to find Christianity not only, as Locke put it, a reasonable religion, but one making no strain upon faith. Already the term had become potentially one of vituperation, and it is applied by the learned judge to “the wicked reprehended by the Psalmist.”[217] Forty years later, however, it was still applied rather to the Christian who claimed to believe upon rational grounds than to the deist or unbeliever;[218] and it was to have a still longer lease of life in Germany as a name for theologians who believed in “Scripture” on condition that all miracles were explained away.
[1] Jenkin Thomasius in his Historia Atheismi (1692) joins Herbert with Bodin as having five points in common with him (ed. 1709, ch. ix, § 2, pp. 76–77). [↑]
[2] It might have been supposed that he was recalled on account of his book; but it was not so. He was recalled by letter in April, returned home in July, and seems to have sent his book thence to Paris to be printed. [↑]
[3] Autobiography, Sir S. Lee’s 2nd ed. p. 132. [↑]
[4] The book was reprinted at London in Latin in 1633; again at Paris in 1636; and again at London in 1645. It was translated and published in French in 1639, but never in English. [↑]
[5] Compare the verdict of Hamilton in his ed. of Reid, note A, § 6, 35 (p. 781). [↑]
[6] For a good analysis see Pünjer, Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of Religion, Eng. trans. 1887, pp. 292–99; also Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Bern, 1853, i, 17–40; and Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, pp. 36–54. [↑]