One point on which Waterland insists constantly and strongly is that the scheme of those who would pay divine honours to Christ, and yet deny that He is very God, cannot escape from the charge of polytheism.  ’You are tritheists,’ he urges, ’in the same sense as Pagans are called polytheists.  One supreme and two inferior Gods is your avowed doctrine; that is, three Gods.  If those texts which exclude all but one God, exclude only supreme deities, and do not exclude any that are not supreme, by such an interpretation you have voided and frustrated every law of the Old Testament against idolatry.’  Dr. Clarke and his friends distinguished between that supreme sovereign worship which was due to the Father only, and the mediate, relative, inferior worship which was due to others.  ‘What authority,’ asks Waterland, ’is there in Scripture for this distinction?  What rules are there to regulate the intention of the worshipper, so as to make worship high, higher, or highest as occasion requires?  All religious worship is determined by Scripture and antiquity to be what you call absolute and sovereign.’  ’Scripture and antiquity generally say nothing of a supreme God, because they acknowledge no inferior God.  Such language was borrowed from the Pagans, and then used by Christian writers.  So, too, was the notion of “mediatorial worship” borrowed from the Pagans, handed on by Arians, and brought down to our own times by Papists.’

But Dr. Clarke and his friends maintained that they were not Arians, for they did not make Christ a creature.  ‘Impossible,’ replies Dr. Waterland; ’you assert, though not directly, yet consequentially, that the Maker and Redeemer of the whole world is no more than a creature, that He is mutable and corruptible; that He depends entirely upon the favour and good pleasure of God; that He has a precarious existence and dependent powers, and is neither so perfect in His nature nor exalted in privileges but that it is in the Father’s power to create another equal or superior.  There is no middle between being essentially God and being a creature.’  Dr. Clarke cannot find a medium between orthodoxy and Arianism.  He has declared against the consubstantiality and proper divinity of Christ as well as His co-eternity.  He cannot be neutral.  In condemning Arians he has condemned himself.  Nay, he has gone further than the Arians.  ’Sober Arians will rise up in judgment and condemn you for founding Christ’s worship so meanly upon I know not what powers given after His resurrection.  They founded it upon reasons antecedent to His incarnation, upon His being God before the world, and Creator of the world of His own power.’

Waterland showed his strength in defence as well as in attack.  He boldly grappled with the difficulties which the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity unquestionably involves, and his method of dealing with these difficulties forms not the least valuable part of his writings on the subject.