disapproved of.  Archdeacon Blackburne himself, the great promoter of it, held no heretical opinions on the subject of the Trinity.  There was a great deal in the doctrine, discipline, and ritual of the Church of England which he thought exceptionable, but his objections seem to have been entirely those which were commonly brought forward by ultra-Protestants.  His vehement opposition to subscription rested on wholly general grounds.  He could not, he said, accept the view that the Articles could be signed with a latitude of interpretation or as articles of peace.  They were evidently meant to be received in one strictly literal sense.  This, no Church had a right to impose upon any of its members; it was wholly wrong to attempt to settle religion once for all in an uncontrollable form.[428] The petition, however, had not the smallest chance of success.  The Evangelicals—­a body fast rising in numbers and activity—­and the Methodists[429] were strongly opposed.  So were all the High Churchmen; so also were a great number of the Latitudinarians.  Dr. Balguy, for instance, after the example of Hoadly, while he strongly insisted that the laws of the Church and realm most fully warranted a broad construction of the meaning of the Articles, was entirely opposed to the abolition of subscription.  It would, he feared, seriously affect the constitution of the National Church.  The Bill was thrown out in three successive years by immense majorities.  After the third defeat Dr. Jebb, Theophilus Lindsey, and some other clergymen seceded to the Unitarians.  The language of the earlier Articles admits of no interpretation by which Unitarians, in any proper sense of the word, could with any honesty hold their place in the English Communion.

Thus the attempt to abolish subscription failed, and under circumstances which showed that the Church had escaped a serious danger.  But the difficulty which had led many orthodox clergymen to join, not without risk of obloquy, in the petition remained untouched.  It was, in fact, aggravated rather than not; for ‘Arian subscription’ had naturally induced a disposition, strongly expressed in some Parliamentary speeches, to reflect injuriously upon that reasonable and allowed latitude of construction without which the Reformed Church of England would in every generation have lost some of its best and ablest men.  Some, therefore, were anxious that the articles and Liturgy should be revised; and a petition to this effect was presented in 1772 to the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Among the other names attached to it appears that of Beilby Porteus, afterwards Bishop of London and a principal supporter of the Evangelical party.  Some proposed that the ’orthodox Articles’ only—­by which they meant those that relate to the primary doctrines of the Christian creed—­should be subscribed to;[430] some thought that it would be sufficient to require of the clergy only an unequivocal assent to the Book of Common Prayer.  It seems strange that while