Still these disputes between English Churchmen strengthened the hands of the anti-Trinitarians.  These latter represented the orthodox as divided into Tritheists and Nominalists, and the press teemed with pamphlets setting forth with more or less ability the usual arguments against the Trinity.  These were for the most part published anonymously; for their publication would have brought their writers within the range of the law, the Act of 1689 having expressly excluded those who were unsound on the subject of the Trinity from the tolerated sects.  One of the most famous tracts, however, ‘The Naked Gospel,’ was discovered to have been written by Dr. Bury, Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, and was burnt by order of the Convocation of that University.  ’A Historical Vindication of the Naked Gospel,’ was also a work of considerable power, and was attributed to the famous Le Clerc.  But with these exceptions, the anti-Trinitarians, though they were energetic and prolific in a certain kind of literature, had not yet produced any writer who had succeeded in making his mark permanently upon the age.

Thus the question stood at the commencement of the eighteenth century.  In one sense the controversy was at its height; that is to say, some of the ablest writers in the Church had written or were writing upon the subject; but the real struggle between the Unitarians (so called) and the Trinitarians had hardly yet begun, for under the latter term almost all the disputants of high mark would fairly have come.

The new century found the pen of that doughty champion of the Faith, Charles Leslie, busy at work on the Socinian controversy.  His letters on this subject had been begun some years before this date; but they were not finally completed until the eighteenth century was some years old.  Leslie was ever ready to defend what he held to be the Christian faith against all attacks from whatever quarter they might come.  Deists, Jews, Quakers, Romanists, Erastians, and Socinians, all fell under his lash; his treatise on the last of these, being the first in order of date, and by no means the last in order of merit among the eighteenth-century literature on the subject of the Trinity, now comes under our notice.

Although his dialogue is nominally directed only against the Socinians, it is full of valuable remarks on the anti-Trinitarians generally; and he brings out some points more clearly and forcibly than subsequent and more voluminous writers on the subject have done.  For example, he meets the old objection that the doctrine of the Trinity is incredible as involving a contradiction, by pointing out that it rests upon the fallacy of arguing from a nature which we know to quite a different nature of which we know little or nothing.[435] The objection that the Christian Trinity was borrowed from the Platonists he turns against the objectors by asking, ’What is become of the master argument of the Socinians that the Trinity is contradictory to common sense and reason?—­Yet now they would make it the invention of the principal and most celebrated philosophers, men of the most refined reason.’[436]