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Whether Arian Subscription was Lawful; he completely answered the Professor, Dr. James, who was bound to oppose him; and he was also happy in his other temporary opponent for the occasion, Dr. Sherlock, afterwards Bishop of London. "There were several members of the University of Oxford there, who remember the great applauses he received, and the uncommon satisfaction which he gave."

The men of the eighteenth century, whose leading principle was reasonableness, naturally entered into many and protracted religious controversies. There was the Deistical campaign, on the means of Revelation, the nature and authority of Holy Scripture, and the evidence of God's existence and dealings, in which the leading figures were Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Toland, Lord Shaftesbury, Collins, Woolston, Tindal, Chubb, and Bolingbroke. These were answered by Butler in his Analogy, Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, and Leland's View

the Deistical Writers. This was followed, as might be expected, by the Trinitarian controversy; and it was in reference to this that Waterland entered the field of public disputation. There are four principal heads under which

views on the mysterious subject of the Trinity may be ranged.

1. Christ is merely human: Socinianism.

2. Denial of the distinct personality of the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity: Sabellianism.

3. Christ more than man, but less than God: Arianism.

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4. "There is but one living and true God," but in the Unity of this Godhead there are Three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity-the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost" Catholicism-called by its opponents Athanasianism.

After the suppression of Arianism by Theodosius in the East, by Clovis in Gaul, and by Justinian in Africa and Italy, this great question remained substantially at rest till the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Faustus Socinus in Poland revived the heresy of the Ebionites and Cerinthians in the time of the Apostles, that Christ had no pre-existence before He was born of Mary. Towards the end of the century these opinions found their way into England by means of foreigners; but at first their English representatives were men of little note. They produced Bishop Bull's great work Defensio

Fidei Nicæna, a learned and powerful historical treatise in Latin, followed by his Judicium Ecclesia Catholicæ and Primitiva et Apostolica Traditio.

Dr. Sherlock, Dean of St. Paul's, entered on the same difficult ground, but with less success; his treatise was opposed by Dr. Wallis, Savilian Professor at Oxford, a most profound scholar, and censured by the University of Oxford as savouring of Tritheism. Dr. South, the famous preacher, as well as Dr. Wallis, criticised Dr. Sherlock; but they were both charged with leaning to Sabellianism. So much heat was imported into the controversy, that each party was restrained by Royal Authority from using new terms, and confined to those already sanctioned by the Church.

Cudworth's Intellectual System was held to favour Arianism. Stillingfleet, in his Vindication of the Trinity, kept to safe and solid ground. The real reviver of modern Arianism in England was Dr. Samuel Clarke, whose Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity was long a text-book of the Arians. He collected 1,251 texts bearing on the nature of the Godhead, and explained them on the principle that the Father alone is the one supreme God; the Son is a Divine

being as far as divinity is communicable by this supreme God; and the Holy Ghost is inferior both to the Father and to the Son, not in order only, but in dominion and authority.

As Dr. Clarke had been a theologian of repute, these positions were indeed startling. Dr. Wells complained that he had neglected the Old Testament, failed to show how the true sense of Scripture was to be obtained, and disparaged alike creeds, confessions of faith, and fathers. Mr. Nelson, Founder of the S.P.C.K., justly criticised his unfair treatment of Bishop Bull. Dr. Gastrell, afterwards Bishop of Chester, pointed out that, out of Dr. Clarke's fifty-one propositions, there was only one that an Arian would refuse to subscribe.

With reference to the Liturgy of the Church of England, and to public formularies of faith in general, Clarke had assumed as a maxim "That every person may reasonably agree to such forms, whenever he can in any sense at all reconcile them with Scripture." It was in reference to this dangerous and subversive position that Waterland propounded his thesis for his B.D. degree, Whether Arian Subscription was Lawful.

On November 14th, 1715, he was elected

Vice-Chancellor according to the usual rotation, when he was only in his thirty-third year. During his tenure of office he had the pleasure of receiving from King George I., for the University collection, Bishop Moore's library of thirty thousand volumes, for which £6,000 had been paid by the Crown. In the housing and arrangement of the books he took great personal interest. He also protected the University graduates in medicine from being required, to obtain a licence from the College of Physicians before practising in London. The conflict between Whigs and Tories, Hanoverians and Jacobites, found loud echo in the University. On King George's birthday, in 1715, the undergraduates had made great disturbances; the preceding Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Sherlock, a Tory, was supposed rather to connive; but Waterland, a staunch Hanoverian, took measures to allay these troubles. On the day after his election, November 5th, 1715, Dr. Bentley preached his celebrated sermon against Popery at St. Mary's. Another sermon on the same subject in January next year was printed by desire of the Vice Chancellor. In the same year an address of congratulation to the King was carried through the Senate on the suppression of the Rebellion

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