Note 200 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

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 South202 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.