ized among the inhabitants of Scotch origin (the ScotchIrish) in 1642, and subscription to creeds had never been required. But after Emlyn's trial, and while he was still in prison, in order to guard against the spread of his beliefs in northern Ireland, it was voted in 1705, in face of strong opposition, to require subscription to the Westminster Confession from all ministers seeking ordination.1 The Rev. John Abernethy, who had just declined a call to succeed Emlyn at the Dublin church, now settled at Antrim, and soon gathered about him an association of ministers. Meeting together during some years they came to agree in opposing subscription, and to take open ground against it. In the controversy that followed for six or seven years they were named the "New Lights," and this name clung to the Irish and Scotch liberals for a full century.2 Friction between them and the orthodox increased so much that in 1725 the synod set the non-subscribers apart into a Presbytery of Antrim by themselves, and the next year excluded them from the synod altogether, the ministers in the synod being nearly equally divided, but the elders strongly conservative. It was suspected that many of the non-subscribers were inclined to Arianism; but the issue here was precisely what it had been at Salters' Hall. This victory of the orthodox did little to stop the spread of heresy. Many of the ministers in the Synod of Ulster remained out of sympathy with required subscription, and the feeling against it steadily grew. In the course of the century the practice of subscribing gradually decayed or was evaded more and more even among the orthodox. Arian 1 In the very next year Calvin's old church at Geneva took the opposite step, and abolished subscription. 2 Their influence was much felt in the Church of Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. See Robert Burns's "Kirk's Alarm." views spread correspondingly; and after the law against deniers of the Trinity was repealed in 1817, Unitarian doctrines began to be preached openly. This at length roused the orthodox into action, and after a bitter controversy it was again voted in 1828 to insist upon subscription. The non-subscribers then withdrew and in 1830 formed a Remonstrant synod, suffering considerable persecution in consequence. Presbyterian churches had always been very few in the south of Ireland, but a similar movement went on in the churches there. To anticipate here, and bring the story down to the present day, it may be added that in 1907 the various bodies of Unitarians in the north of Ireland united to form the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, which though Presbyterian in name and form of government is Unitarian in belief, and is associated with the Unitarian churches of Great Britain. The number of congregations is about forty. We have now reached the point where in the third quarter of the eighteenth century a large number of the Dissenting ministers and churches of Great Britain and Ireland had become practically Unitarian. They were no longer bound to accept a particular creed, they had come to a generous tolerance of differences of belief, they had left the doctrine of the Trinity behind, and they were coming to accept the full humanity of Jesus. Still their movement in this direction had been so slow and gradual that they hardly realized how far they had come, or whither they were bound. They were but a loosely connected group of churches, and they had taken no definite step to show just what they stood for; they were conscious of no common body of doctrine; they had no recognized leader or common rallying-point; and they had no clear vision or plan for the future. They were like a stream that has broadened out until it is likely to sink into the ground and be lost unless it can be led together again into a well marked channel. In short, they needed a leader and a spokesman, and a name and a recog nized cause to rally about. needs were now to be supplied, in the persons of the two men of whom the next two chapters will speak. In the fullness of time these two CHAPTER XXXI THE UNITARIAN REVOLT FROM THE CHURCH In the last two chapters we have followed two separate streams of Unitarianism gathering volume, one in the Church of England, the other among the Dissenters. They were to a large degree independent of each other, for the Church and Dissent had, as they still have, little to do with each other. In this and the next chapter we are to find these two streams flowing together and making a channel of their own, which will issue in an organized Unitarian body. We have seen that the ministers in the Church of England who felt ill at ease using the Prayer Book or the Athanasian Creed most of them settled down at last into using these as they found them, but putting their own interpretations on them. After all, this sorely troubled the consciences of those who desired in religion above all things else to be and seem perfectly sincere, and for a generation or more they tried in various ways to get around a difficulty which they had been unable to remove. The Athanasian Creed was their worst stumbling-block. While the more timid kept their thoughts to themselves, others made no secret of them. Several altered the liturgy, and left it to the bishops to take action against them if they thought best. Some got the parish clerk to read for them parts of the service which they were unwilling to read themselves. Some omitted the creed altogether, and suffered prosecution in the ecclesiastical courts for doing so; and when one of these was ordered to restore it to its place in the service, he put it to ridicule by having it sung to the tune of a popular hunting song. Yet another, when he came to the creed, said, "Brethren, this is the creed of St. Athanasius, and God forbid it should be the creed of any other man." Several of the bishops themselves were unsound as to the Trinity, and sympathizing with these evasions did nothing to prevent them; but the situation was notorious, and did nothing to raise the liberal clergy in public respect.1 Their behavior was in sad contrast to that of the 2,500 non-conforming clergy who in 1662 had given up all worldly prospects 2 for a similar principle of conscience. It seemed as though sensitive conscience had deserted from the Church to Dissent. The liberal Dissenters took note of all this, and when the Bishop of Oxford complained of the low state of religion, one of them taking up the subject in a book reminded him 'that among the causes of the prevalent skepticism his Lordship had forgotten that the clergy themselves solemnly subscribed to Articles they did not believe.' Of all the clergy at this time only one, William Robertson of Ireland, "the father of Unitarian Nonconformity," followed his conscience so far as to abandon flattering prospects and, when well beyond middle life, at great cost to himself to resign from the ministry (1764). Though the controversy following Dr. Clarke's book had 1 A prominent clergyman who was in a position to know as well as any one, declared that not over a fifth of the clergy subscribed in the strict sense. 2 See page 329. |