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the pastorship of a congregation in London, agreeing with him in sentiment, and which would have been to his pecuniary advantage. Two of his immediate connections, however, Theophilus Lindsey, who married his daughter-in-law, and Dr. Disney, who married his daughter, acted with greater consistency. Both surrendered church preferments, because they had imbibed notions adverse to a belief in the Trinity. The former opened a large room for public worship, according to his opinions in Essex Street, London, in 1774. As his theology had been excepted in the Toleration Act, some difficulties were, at first, made by the magistrates upon the registration of this room; but the age was adverse to any strict interpretation of such statutes, and he not only then carried his point, but also, in 1778, he was enabled to supersede his licensed room by a commodious chapel. His followers have repudiated the appellation of Socinians, by which most other Christians have distinguished people of their opinions, and call themselves Unitarians, —a name which seems to insinuate a charge of polytheism upon the Christian world generally. The Essex Street congregation, which proved the parent of a numerous progeny, adopted a liturgy professedly altered from that of the national church according to a plan of Dr. Samuel Clarke, rector of St. James's, Westminster. The party has also published a New Testament, claiming freedom from interpolation, and greater accuracy of interpretation, than is to be found in the authorised version; but the great mass of scholars has neither admitted its charges of interpolation, nor considered its claims to superior fidelity as worthy of any reliance. The most distinguished Englishman of this school was Dr. Joseph Priestley, son of a Leeds manufacturer, and born near that place in 1733. His parents were Calvinistic dissenters, and they meant him for a minister among that class of Christians. He became, however, an Arian, when quite a young man, but soon changed that belief for one in the simple humanity of Christ. In the defence and propagation of this doctrine, his industry was unwearied, though his scholarship appeared highly questionable; and he had the honour of no less a scholar than Samuel Horsley (successively Bishop of St. David's, Rochester, and St. Asaph1,) for an antagonist. By

2 Rees's Cyclopædia, art. Blackburne.This compilation, having been conducted by an editor of similar opinions, is full upon questions connected with Socinianism.

3 Rees's Cyclopædia, art. Lindsey.

"In the year 1782, an open and vehement attack was made by Dr. Priestley upon the creeds and established discipline of every church in Christendom, in a work in 2 vols. 8vo,

the world in general, however, he has been more noticed as a chemist; important discoveries in the nature and properties of gases having been made by him. Unhappily for his repose, he could not content himself with science and theology, but became an ardent politician of the French revolutionary school. This rendered him obnoxious to a large portion of the people in Birmingham, where he was fixed as minister of a dissenting congregation. A celebration, accordingly, of the capture of the Bastile, fixed for the anniversary of that event, in 1791, caused a great ferment among those inhabitants of Birmingham who deprecated revolutionary politics. Priestley did not choose to join the festal party, but his name was identified with its prinentitled, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity. At the head of these the author placed both the catholic doctrine of our Lord's divinity, and the Arian notion of his pre-existence in a nature far superior to the human, representing the Socinian doctrine of his mere humanity, as the unanimous faith of the first Christians. It seemed that the most effectual preservative against the intended mischief would be to destroy the writer's credit and the authority of his name, which the fame of certain lucky discoveries in the prosecution of physical experiments had set high in popular esteem, by proofs of his incompetency in every branch of Literature connected with his present subject, of which the work itself afforded evident specimens in great abundance. For this declared purpose, a review of the imperfections of his work, in the first part relating to our Lord's divinity, was made the subject of a charge delivered to the clergy of the archdeaconry of St. Alban's, the spring next following Dr. Priestley's publication. The specimens alleged of the imperfections of the work, and the incompetency of its author, may be reduced to six general classes: instances of reasoning in a circle; instances of quotations misapplied through ignorance of the writer's subject; instances of testimonies perverted by artful and forced constructions; instances of passages in the Greek fathers misinterpreted through ignorance of the Greek language; instances of passages misinterpreted through the same ignorance, and driven farther out of the way by an ignorance of the Platonic philosophy: instances of ignorance of the phraseology of the earliest ecclesiastical writers." (Preface to Bp. Hors

ley's Tracts in Controversy with Dr. Priestley, v. Dundee, 1812.) This volume, which was edited by the bishop's son, contains the St. Alban's charge, together with the various letters and disquisitions to which it gave rise, including a sermon on the Incarnation. Dr. Priestley's "Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion may be considered as a Socinian body of divinity, though it is professedly not polemical. It controverts, however, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the separate state of the soul, and the eternity of future punishments: and as the former part is a mere speculation on what the light of nature might teach, which the doctor confesses to be very little; in the latter, the same speculative turn prevails concerning the contents of Scripture. Of this most able and best written work of the Socinian Coryphæus, it may be said, that what is good is borrowed, and what is original is good for nothing. The controversial supplement to the Institutes is Dr. Priestley's celebrated History of the Corruptions of Christianity. Viewed as an historical defence of Socinianism, or rather as a death-stroke to the deity and atonement of Christ, an nounced with some parade, it must strike every intelligent reader as the ridiculous birth of a parturient mountain. One short section of a work that extends through two thick volumes, contains all the polemical history to prove the earliest Christians Socinians; but which proves that Dr. Priestley, unable to find historic documents, could substitute for them mere suppositions, or the modest assumption that the primitive Christians must have believed what the doctor believes." Bogue and Bennett, ii. 511.

ciples; and, in the riot excited by popular detestation of them, his house with its valuable scientific apparatus, and library, perished by fire. He now removed to Hackney, near London; but his political views were too much disliked by the great majority of Englishmen, to render him easy in any part of the kingdom. Hence he emigrated to the United States of America, in 1794; and within ten years afterwards he died at Northumberland, in Pennsylvania, highly respected in all quarters for purity of morals and scientific eminence; and venerated also among the admirers of his theology, now grown a numerous body, for the bulk and presumed erudition of his polemical writings.5

§ 20. Blackburne's movements towards Socinianism aroused kindred spirits among his brethren to seek release from the terms on which they took and held preferment. In 1772, a petition, hastily prepared, but signed by two hundred and fifty clergymen, was presented to the House of Commons, praying relief from subscription to the articles and liturgy." The clerical petitioners were associated with others, chiefly lawyers and physicians, who complained of the necessity to subscribe on matriculation in the two universities, as being a compliance generally exacted at an age quite incompetent for the due understanding of recondite questions. The supporters of the petition displayed its presumed merits in specious generalities, such as the honour and advantage of toleration. They also, but with less discretion, attacked the articles themselves, declaring them to be contradictory in some parts, and indefensible in others. An additional reason for concession was found in

5 Rees's Cyclopædia, art. Priestley. It is there said of him, "In his intellectual frame were combined quickness, activity, acuteness, and that inventive faculty, which is the characteristic of genius. These qualities were less suited to the laborious investigation of what is called erudition, than the argumentative deductions of metaphysics, and the experimental researches of natural philosophy. Assiduous study had, however, given him a familiarity with the learned languages, sufficient in general to render the sense of the authors clear to him, and he aimed at nothing more." This is a very unsatisfactory account of one who sought to unsettle, and did really unsettle, the faith of others, by a show of erudition. The theological questions with which Priestley grappled, are es

sentially learned, and can only be mastered by the patient industry of a deep scholar. Priestley's friends, however, are driven to admit his incompetence to make a satisfactory array of learned evidence, both from the unfitness of his mind for the labour of such a task, and a want of sound scholarship.

"The petition was drawn up with such haste, and the arguments adduced were so ill selected and applied, that its enemies had little trouble in refuting them." (Collins, 373.) "They were blamed by many for not maturing their plan with sufficient wisdom, for acting with precipitation, and especially for not consulting the bishops, and ensuring their patronage." Bogue and Bennett, ii. 464.

the dissenters themselves, who were said to be likely to conform in great numbers, if there no longer existed any articles to repel them. By those who valued a sound protestant faith, and feared to throw open the national endowments that supported it, to every one able to obtain a benefice, this proposition was firmly resisted. Great stress was laid on the recent boldness of heterodoxy; old attacks upon the Church of England having now been backed with arguments against our Saviour's divinity, with blasphemous assaults, therefore, upon the very vitals of Christianity. Clerical complaints of hardship in subscription were very fairly derided. None need keep or take a benefice who felt pinched in conscience by the articles or liturgy: while it was of great importance, that national funds for the teaching of religion should not be diverted into a number of irreconcileable channels. Even lawyers and physicians, with other members of the universities who had entered without an eye to orders, were spoken of as under no necessity to seek education in those seminaries. If they, or their friends, had any invincible repugnance to the doctrinal tests required of students, they might qualify for their several professions in other places. One point, however, urged by the friends of the petition, was conceded by some on the other side. Dissenting ministers were liable to be called upon, by the Act of Toleration, to subscribe the doctrinal articles of the church; and this was represented as no great hardship, while such divines were generally Calvinists, although it might be rather unreasonable to demand even this approbation for a system from which the subscribers did not wish, and could not receive, either honour or emolument. Within the last two reigns, it was remarked, nonconformity had taken a much wider range; Arian and Socinian tenets having rendered many of its adherents incapable of subscribing even to the doctrinal portion of the thirty-nine articles. These arguments would have had even still greater weight, if the statutable subscriptions had been then regularly enforced. But, in reality, subscription had become rare among dissenting ministers; and attempts to enforce it, still more so. Nor did such of them as held opinions excepted out of the Act of Toleration, fail of finding sufficient shelter under the prevailing indisposition to interfere with religious belief in any case. When, accordingly, it came to a division, the petition found only seventy-one supporters against it were two hundred and seventeen.7

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§ 21. This disappointment was, however, somewhat lightened to the dissenting body, by the admission that it was hard upon their ministers even to be under a statutable liability to subscription, notwithstanding the practical exemption usually enjoyed. No time, accordingly, was lost in petitioning for the abolition of such liability. Sir Henry Houghton, the representative of a very old and respectable dissenting family in Lancashire, brought this petition into parliament. It was resisted, as coming with a very ill grace from a body of men who habitually disregarded the law of subscription, and with impunity, just after a similar application had been refused from another class of petitioners, who were kept strictly within the law. Much was also said upon the danger of leaving a door legally open for the dissemination of opinions, not only hostile to the church, but also to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, especially at a time when such impiety had become alarmingly prevalent. The Commons, however, passed the bill by a great majority but the bishops opposed it most strenuously, and hence it was lost in the Lords, by a majority of a hundred and two against twenty-nine. The measure had, however, gained such an advantage in the lower house, that its friends were naturally sanguine of ultimate success. Hence, in the next year, it was introduced again, but with the same results,- favourable reception by the Commons, rejection by the Lords." The question now slumbered in Parliament for a time, but the press resounded with it; Socinian pens taking the lead. Writers of this class, however, gave offence to those dissenters who had no quarrel with the doctrinal articles, but only with an authoritative call to affirm them, by the prominence given to their peculiar opinions, and by the contumelious treatment of orthodox dissent as the blind prejudice of unenlightened minds. In return for this insulting assumption of superiority, some of the Dissenters became unwilling to make further application for relief, feeling themselves practically under no grievance, and considering the desired indulgence as likely to be abused by

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s Bogue and Bennett, ii. 465.

Upon this occasion it was, that the great Earl of Chatham, answering Drummond, archbishop of York, who had attacked the Dissenters with more zeal than discretion, uttered the language often cited since. "We have a Calvin

istic creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy." If political orators came to religious discussion with more accuracy of preparation than they commonly use, the temptation to utter this, and many other things equally effective, would have been resisted.

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