just as the practice of courts and the decisions of eminent lawyers are the best comments on an Act of Parliament made in or near their own times, though the obedience of subjects rests solely on the laws of the land as its rule and measure.  To the objection that interpreting Scripture by the ancients is debasing its majesty and throwing Christ out of His throne, Waterland replies in somewhat stately terms, ’We think that Christ never sits more secure or easy on His throne than when He has His most faithful guards about Him, and that none are so likely to strike at His authority or aim at dethroning Him as they that would displace His old servants only to make way for new ones.’  But this respect for the opinion of antiquity in no way involved any compromise of the leading idea of all eighteenth-century theology, that it should follow the guidance of reason.  Reason was by no means to be sacrificed to the authority of the fathers.  Indeed, ‘as to authority,’ he says, ’in a strict and proper sense I do not know that the fathers have any over us; they are all dead men; therefore we urge not their authority but their testimony, their suffrage, their judgment, as carrying great force of reason.  Taking them in here as lights or helps is doing what is reasonable and using our own understandings in the best way.’  ’I follow the fathers,’ he adds, ’as far as reason requires and no further; therefore, this is following our own reason.’  In an age when patristic literature was little read and lightly esteemed this forcible, and at the same time highly reasonable, vindication of its importance had a value beyond its bearing upon the doctrine of the Trinity, in connection with which the subject was introduced by our author.[441]

Here our notice of the points at issue between Dr. Waterland and the modern Arians, so far as they concerned the truth of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, may fitly close.  But there was yet another question closely connected with the above which it concerned the interests of morality, no less than of religion, thoroughly to sift.  It was no easy task which Dr. Clarke and his friends undertook when they essayed to prove from Scripture and antiquity that the Son and Holy Ghost were not one with the supreme God.  But they attempted a yet harder task than this.  They contended that their views were not irreconcilable with the formularies and Liturgy of the Church of England.  The more candid and ingenuous mind of Whiston saw the utter hopelessness of this endeavour.  It was, he says, an endeavour ’to wash the blackmore white,’ and so, like an honest man as he was, he retired from her communion.  Dr. Clarke could not, of course, deny that there was at least an apparent inconsistency between his views and those of the Church to which he belonged.  One of the chapters in his ’Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity’ is devoted to a collection of ’passages in the Liturgy which may seem in some respects to differ from