Churchman to be at all events perfectly legitimate.  Had his opponents been content to point out serious deficiencies in the general tendency of his teaching, they would have held a thoroughly tenable position.  When they attempted to attach to his name the stigma of specific heresies, they failed.  He thought for himself, and sometimes very differently from them, but never wandered far from the paths of orthodoxy.  Accusations of Socinianism were freely circulated both against him and Burnet, on grounds which chiefly serve to show within what narrow grooves religious thought would have been confined by the objectors.  Burnet, whose theological discourses received Tillotson’s hearty commendation, has fully stated what appears to have been the less clearly conceived opinion of the archbishop.  There was no tincture of Arianism in it; he showed on the contrary, with much power, the utter untenability of that hypothesis.  The worship of Christ, he said, is so plainly set forth in the New Testament, that not even the opposers of His divinity deny it; yet nothing is so much condemned in Scripture as worshipping a creature.[242] ’We may well and safely determine that Christ was truly both God and Man.’[243] But he held that this true Divinity of Christ consisted in ‘the indwelling of the Eternal Word in Christ,’ which ’became united to His human nature, as our souls dwell in our bodies and are united to them.’[244] As Leslie said, he did in effect explain the doctrine of the Trinity as three manifestations of the Divine nature.  ’By the first, God may be supposed to have made and to govern all things; by the second, to have been most perfectly united to the humanity of Christ; and by the third, to have inspired the penmen of the Scriptures and the workers of miracles, and still to renew and fortify all good minds.  But though we cannot explain how they are Three and have a true diversity from one another, so that they are not barely different names and modes; yet we firmly believe that there is but one God.’[245] A jealous and disputatious orthodoxy might be correct in affirming that this exposition of the Trinity was a form of Sabellianism, and one which might perhaps be accepted by some of the Unitarians.  It is stated here rather to show on what scanty grounds the opponents of the ‘Latitudinarian bishops’ founded one of their chief accusations of Socinian heresy.

But this was only part of the general charge.  It was also said that Tillotson was a ‘rank Socinian’ in regard of his views upon the doctrine of the satisfaction made by Christ for the sins of men.  The ground of offence lay in his great dislike for anything which seemed to savour less of Scripture than of scholastic refinements in theology.  He thought it great rashness to prescribe limits, as it were, to infinite wisdom, and to affirm that man’s salvation could not possibly have been wrought in any other way than by the incarnation and satisfaction of the Son of God.[246] A Christian reasoner may well