by an Archbishop of Canterbury to teach the Bishops their duty.

In the same month in which these Injunctions were issued, certain Directions were also published for the "preserving Unity in the Church and the purity of the Christian faith concerning the Holy Trinity;" but these Directions will be more fitly described in the relation of the Controversy which called them forth.

Church and State seemed now to be playing into each other's hands. In former times Bishops had held the highest offices of State; but since the days of Juxon, at that time Bishop of London, who in 1635 was appointed Lord Treasurer, no Ecclesiastic had held any high civil appointment. William, however, placed such confidence in Tenison, that when he was about to leave the kingdom in 1695 he revived the custom, and appointed him one of the Lords Justices for the Administration of Public Affairs during his absence.

CHAPTER V.

THE EARLY TRINITARIAN AND THE CONVOCATION

CONTROVERSIES.

OON after the passing of the Act of Toleration

SOON

a wave of scepticism and infidelity broke over the land. When the mind became unfettered by authority, and as soon as the spirit, fostered by Latitudinarians, got abroad, of every one forming his own judgment on points of doctrine, then a Rationalizing spirit sprang up, and the Church was challenged to prove the very elements of religion and the fundamentals of the Christian Faith. And this Rationalizing spirit manifested itself in two ways: firstly, in the denial of the Divine Nature of our Saviour, which developed itself into Unitarianism; and secondly, in the denial of a revealed (as distinct from natural) religion, and consequently of the truth and authority of the Bible, which acquired the name of Deism. Under one or both of these heads may be placed the various controversies which agitated the Church during the last quarter of the seventeenth and throughout a great part of the eighteenth centuries.

During the latter part of the seventeenth century the peace of the Church was disturbed by a recur

rence of the heresies which troubled the Church in the Nicene Age. Anti-Trinitarian and Arian doctrines came once more in vogue. John Biddle (1615 -1662), the founder of the Society which, from his name, were called Bidellians, may be considered as the Father of Socinianism in England. Biddle died in prison in 1662, but the spread of his heresy was owing to the republication in 1691 of his Tracts, and the zealous support which they received from his disciple, Thomas Firmin (1632-1697). Firmin was a rich linendraper in Leadenhall Street, who devoted his immense wealth to works of charity, but he was an Arian, and spent his money freely in propagating his opinion and in distributing publications in denial of our Lord's Divinity. "Profane wits," writes Burnet, "were much delighted with this; all mysteries in religion came to be talked about as the controversies of Priests; Priestcraft grew to a word in fashion, under cover of which the enemies of religion vented their impieties "."

The men who at this early stage of the heresy advocated anti-Trinitarian opinions in England were not generally men of intellectual eminence; but a

He was, says Burnet, "called a Socinian but was really an Arian."

Է O. T., iii. 292.

And yet this same author says that "Archbishop Tillotson and some of the Bishops had lived in great friendship with Mr. Firmin."

case occurred at Oxford which, owing to a curious point of law which arose out of it, requires a passing notice. In 1690 Dr. Bury, Rector of Exeter College, was deprived by the Visitor, Dr. Trelawney, for publishing a work entitled "The Naked Truth," which contained heterodox doctrine on the Trinity. The King's Bench reversed the Bishop's decision, on the ground that the Visitor's jurisdiction could not exclude the Common Law. The Lord Chief Justice decided, in opposition to this judgment, that "by the Common Law the office of Visitor is to judge according to the Statutes of the College, to expel and deprive upon just occasions, and to hear all appeals of course; and that from him, and him only, the party grieved ought to have redress; the Founder having reposed in him so entire a confidence that he will administer justice impartially; and his determinations are final, and examinable in no court whatever." In this opinion the House of Lords concurred, and to this leading case all subsequent judgments have been conformable d.

Unhappily Controversy begets Controversy, and now Churchmen, with the best possible intentions, but the most unfortunate results, set themselves to explain the doctrine of the Trinity (a doctrine necessarily mysterious) by hypothesis rather than proof,

d Blackstone's Comm., i. 18. Lord Mansfield declared that "the Jurisdiction of a Visitor is summary and without appeal from it."

and were so led on into the dark recesses of metaphysical speculation as to overstep the boundaries of scriptural and historical testimony; the enemies of the Church were only too glad to follow them, and the controversy was thus carried on with such acrimony as to lead the Archbishop to think that the interposition of the King was necessary.

In 1690 Dr. Wallis (1616-1703), a better Mathematician than Theologian, who having graduated at Cambridge, was in 1649 appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, published a Pamphlet entitled "The Doctrine of the Ever-blessed Trinity explained in a Letter to a Friend." He endeavoured to explain the greatest of all mysteries by Mathematical terms, and compared the Trinity in Unity to the length, breadth, and height of a Cube, the three equal sides of one substance. This absurd definition would have been supposed, but for the character and piety of the writer, to have been adopted by him for the purpose of bringing the doctrine into contempt; such, however, was not the case, but the work called forth many writers, and was the fruitful source of attacks on the Trinity.

In 1693 Dr. William Sherlock, Dean of St. Paul's, who in the previous reign had gained a high reputation by his writings against Romanism, wrote against a Socinian work lately published, "A Vindication

"A brief History of the Unitarians, called also Socinians, in a letter to a Friend."