LOCKE'S "REASONABLENESS"; THOMAS EMLYN. 143

immediate prelude to the Deistical Controversy, which engaged the more radical thinkers of England for the next fifty years.1

The name of one other Unitarian witness interests us, from the influence it had in the discussion that sprang up a little later in America. Thomas Emlyn (1663-1741) -a man of serious, sweet, and candid temper, a devoted pastor, especially tender and comforting in prayer-began his career among the Nonconformists, preaching at the early age of nineteen, in London. He was an eye-witness, the next year, of the execution of Lord William Russell, which no doubt helped confirm him in the faith of freedom. At twenty-one he went to Belfast, in the household of a family of rank. In the revolutionary year, 1688, we find him preaching "with pistols in his pocket" in the disturbed district of the north of Ireland. In discussion with a friend on Sherlock's "Vindication," he held to the Arian view against the Socinian. But he never carried the argument into the pulpit, where his teaching was always grave, tender, and practical. After a ten years' ministry in Dublin, while in his fresh grief at the loss of his admirable wife, he was called to account for his private opinions. His aged colleague was put on the stand to testify of his intimate conversations. Narrow Nonconformists appealed to church and state against him, and he was punished by a year's imprisonment, with a fine of a thousand pounds. The witness of his later life in England is found in a volume of sermons and one of essays in defense of his opinions, introduced by a biography warm from a friendly hand.

One pitiful tragedy completes the tale of the period we have been reviewing. In January, 1697, one Thomas Aikenhead, a boy of eighteen, a student in the University of Edinburgh, "not vicious, and extremely studious," was 1 See the author's "Christian History," vol. iii., pp. 176-181.

executed for blasphemy. The Scottish capital, apparently, had not caught the cosmopolitan temper which would have made such an act impossible in London. Within two years, an old statute inflicting the penalty of death for blasphemy had-to the horror of such minds as Locke'sbeen furbished up afresh. The boy Aikenhead was convicted, by testimony of his college-mates, of such offenses as saying, in the warmth of debate, that to him the phrase "god-man" was as meaningless as if one should say "goat-stag," or "square-round," with other expressions which were construed to signify contempt of the Bible or of the Divine name. He was tried, without counsel to cross-examine the witnesses (college boys like himself) or explain to them what their testimony might imply as to the fate before him. The most important part of the evidence he explicitly denied. Three years later, or a little more, the Act of Union between England and Scotland would probably have made this shocking act impossible.

Heresy could no longer be punished by death in England. But, to propitiate such bigotry as still suvived, an act was passed, in 1698, "for the more effectual suppressing of blasphemy and profaneness." It contained the following terms, which are an essential sequel to the review that has now been taken: namely, that "if any person having been educated in, or at any time having made profession of, the Christian religion, within this realm, shall by writing, printing, teaching, or advised speaking, deny any one of the Persons of the Holy Trinity to be God; or shall assert or maintain that there are more Gods than one, or shall deny the Christian religion to be true, or the holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be of Divine authority, and shall be thereof lawfully convicted by the oath of two or more credible witnesses, such person shall for the first offense be adjudged incapable and disabled in

LAST ACTS OF INTOLERANCE.

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law to have and enjoy any office or employment, civil or military" the penalty for repeating the offense being total loss of all civil rights-such as right to inherit or defense at law-with three years' imprisonment. This supremely wicked statute-wicked because passed by men without conscience or conviction on the subject, and made intentionally a dead letter except when it might serve for malicious prosecution-was not repealed till 1813. Unitarians in England were not reinvested with their full civil rights until the passage of the "Dissenters' Chapels Act" in 1844.1

1 See below, p. 153.

CHAPTER VII.

UNITARIAN DISSENT IN ENGLAND.

THE discussion which filled so large a space at the close of the seventeenth century gave to the Unitarian doctrine, more or less disguised, a certain recognized standing both in the Established Church and among the more educated of the Nonconformists. Two names, in particular, show this result. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), eminent alike as a scholar, a mathematician, and a churchman, the best known defender at that day of a philosophical theism, held a position frankly Arian; and his revised liturgy was adopted, almost without change, in the earlier Unitarian congregations. Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768), the most learned theologian among the Presbyterians, and far the most eminent defender of historical Christianity against the Deists, confessed a Unitarianism more and more pronounced, during a career distinguished as much for candor and thought as for laborious erudition. Thus, for more than half a century, there was a complete lull in a dispute that a little while before had looked so implacable and vindictive.

To explain this change, we note that the Deistical controversy following from the argument of Locke's "Reasonableness," and occupying almost exactly the first half of the eighteenth century (1696–1748)—had opened up a new issue, that of Rationalism pure and simple. In that debate the Unitarians ranked themselves, with strong conviction, among the defenders of a miraculous revelation. For considerably more than a hundred years not one of any note among them wavered in this position. And,

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while the stress of that controversy lasted, questions of doctrinal interpretation were dwarfed, if not forgotten.

The body of English Dissenters had been drawn together by the common and deep wrong they suffered under, through the series of execrable acts passed by the government of the Restoration.1 From time to time attempts were made to give them unity and strength under some form of confession that might embrace them all. But the pressure was lightened by the Act of Toleration (1689); and the Dissenting body, which had come together from widely different sources, fell again into its natural groups. The Presbyterians-as nobly shown in the case of Baxter-had inherited something of the mental breadth, the pliancy of organization, and the comparative easiness as to doctrine, that belong to a great secular Establishment, like that from which they had withdrawn against their will. The Independents, who had voluntarily forsaken the National Church for conviction's sake, held more rigidly to their points of faith, and became forerunners of the stricter Evangelical bodies of a later day. Individuals among them, however, held that faith loosely, as Watts (1674-1748), who is understood to have died a Unitarian; 2 and Doddridge (1702-51), whose vague "in-dwelling scheme" was hardly less heretical. The Baptists had never been bound by a formal creed, and their theology, sharply individualized, had proved the germ or the ally of various heresies; but they were more closely held by their strict requirement of adult baptism, which defined them sharply as a sect, tending also to divide into sub

1 The Act of Uniformity, 1662; the Conventicle Act, 1664; the Five-Mile Act, 1665; the Test and Corporation Acts, 1673 (abolished, 1718). Under the operation of these it is stated that, from first to last, nearly eight thousand persons perished in various prisons.

2 "I have sometimes carried reason," he says, Socinus; but then Saint John gives my soul a twitch.”

even to the camp of