Note 211 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Of the work here noted a considerable amount was done by Unitarians, Evanson being of that persuasion, though at the time of writing his earlier Unitarian works he was an Anglican vicar.211 During the first half of the eighteenth century, despite the movement at the end of the seventeenth, specific anti-Trinitarianism was not much in evidence, the deistic controversy holding the foreground. But gradually Unitarianism made fresh headway. One dissenting clergyman, Martin Tomkyns, who had been dismissed by his congregation at Stoke Newington for his “Arian or Unitarian opinions,” published in 1722 A Sober Appeal to a Turk or an Indian, concerning the plain sense of the Trinity, in reply to the treatise of Dr. Isaac Watts on The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity. A second edition of Tomkyns’s book appeared in 1748, with a further reply to Watts’s Dissertations of 1724. The result seems to have been an unsettlement of the orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There is express testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that Watts in his latter years, “before he was seized with an imbecility of his faculties,” was substantially a Unitarian. His special papers on the subject were suppressed by his executors; but the full text of his Solemn Address to the Great and Blessed God goes far to bear out Lardner’s express assertion.212 Other prominent religionists were more outspoken. The most distinguished names associated with the position were those of Lardner and Priestley, of whom the former, trained as a simple “dissenter,” avowedly reached his conclusions without much reference to Socinian literature;213 and the second, who was similarly educated, no less independently gave up the doctrines of the Atonement and the Trinity, passing later from the Arian to the Socinian position after reading Lardner’s Letter on the Logos.214 As Priestley derived his determinism from Collins,215 it would appear that the deistical movement had set up a general habit of reasoning which thus wrought even on Christians who, like Lardner and Priestley, undertook to rebut the objections of unbelievers to their faith. A generally rationalistic influence is to be noted in the works of the Unitarian Antipædobaptist Dr. Joshua Toulmin, author of lives of Socinus (1777) and Biddle (1789), and many other solid works, including a sermon on “The Injustice of classing Unitarians with Deists and Infidels” (1797). In his case the “classing” was certainly inconvenient. In 1791 the effigy of Paine was burned before his door, and his windows broken. His house was saved by being closely guarded; but his businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be given up. It thus becomes intelligible how, after a period in which Dissent, contemned by the State Church, learned to criticize that Church’s creed, there emerged in England towards the close of the eighteenth century a fresh movement of specific Unitarianism.