Note 159 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

On the other hand, however, there was growing up not a little Socinian and other Unitarianism, for some variety of which we have seen two men burned in 1612. Church measures had been taken against the importation of Socinian books as early as 1640. The famous Lord Falkland, slain in the Civil War, is supposed to have leant to that opinion;159 and Chillingworth, whose Religion of Protestants (1637) was already a remarkable application of rational tests to ecclesiastical questions in defiance of patristic authority,160 seems in his old age to have turned Socinian.161 Violent attacks on the Trinity are noted among the heresies of 1646.162 Colonel John Fry, one of the regicides, who in Parliament was accused of rejecting the Trinity, cleared himself by explaining that he simply objected to the terms “persons” and “subsistence,” but was one of those who sought to help the persecuted Unitarian Biddle. In 1652 the Parliament ordered the destruction of a certain Socinian Catechism; and by 1655 the heresy seems to have become common.163 It is now certain that Milton was substantially a Unitarian,164 and that Locke and Newton were at heart no less so.165