system of Socinus was his utter denial of the doctrine of the atonement or satisfaction made by Christ in any sense.  ‘Christ,’ he said, ’is called a mediator not because He made peace between God and man, but because He was sent from God to man to explain the will of God and to make a covenant with them in the name of God.  A mediator (a medio) is a middle person between God and man.’[442] Now there is abundance of evidence that before and at the time of the Evangelical revival in the Church of England, this doctrine of the atonement had been, if not denied, at least practically ignored.  Bishop Horsley, in his Charge in 1790, complains of this; and in the writings of the early Evangelical party we find, of course, constant complaints of the general ignoring of these doctrines.  Now it is probable that the term Socinian was often applied to those who kept these doctrines in the background, and not, indeed, applied altogether improperly; only, if we assume that all those who were termed Socinians disbelieved in the true divinity or personality of the Son and the Holy Ghost, we shall be assuming more than was really the case.

On the other hand, many were called Socinians who really believed far less than Socinus and the foreign Socinians did.  It is true that Socinus ’regarded it as a mere human invention, not agreeable to Scripture and repugnant to reason, that Christ is the only begotten Son of God, because He and no one besides Him was begotten of the divine substance;’[443] but he also held that ’Scripture so plainly attributes a divine and sovereign power to Christ as to leave no room for a figurative sense.’[444] And the early Socinians thought that Christ must not only be obeyed but His assistance implored, and that He ought to be worshipped, that ’invocation of Christ or addressing prayers to Him was a duty necessarily arising from the character He sustained as head of the Church;’ and that ’those who denied the invocation of Christ did not deserve to be called Christians.’[445]

Let us now return to the history of our own Socinians, or, as they preferred to be called, Unitarians; we shall soon see how far short they fell in point of belief of their foreign predecessors.  The heresy naturally spread more widely among Nonconformists than it could in the Church of England.  As the biographer of Socinus remarks, ’The Trinitarian forms of worship which are preserved in the Church of England, and which are so closely incorporated with its services, must furnish an insuperable objection against conformity with all sincere and conscientious Unitarians.’[446] If the common sense and common honesty of Englishmen revolted against the specious attempts of Dr. Clarke and his friends to justify Arian subscription, a much more hopeless task would it have been to reconcile the further development of anti-Trinitarian doctrines with the formularies of the Church.