At the same time it must be admitted that the cessation or abatement of anti-Trinitarian efforts in the Church after the death of Dr. Clarke is not to be attributed solely to the firmness and earnestness of Churchmen’s convictions on this subject.  It arose, in part at least, from the general indisposition to stir up mooted questions.  Men were disposed to rest satisfied with ’our happy establishment in Church and State;’ and it was quite as much owing to the spiritual torpor which overtook the Church and nation after the third decade of the eighteenth century, as to strength of conviction, that the Trinitarian question was not further agitated.

Among the Nonconformists, and especially among the Presbyterians, the case was different.  The Arianism which led to the Salters’ Hall conference drifted by degrees into Unitarianism pure and simple.  Dr. Lardner was one of the earliest and most distinguished of those who belonged to this latter school.  He passed through the stage of Arianism, but the mind of the author of ‘The Credibility of Gospel History’ was far too clear and logical to allow him to rest there, and he finally came to the conclusion that ’Jesus Christ was a mere man, but a man with whom God was, in a peculiar and extraordinary manner.’  This is not the place to refer to the various Nonconformists, such as Caleb Fleming, Hugh Farmer, James Foster, Robert Robinson, John Taylor, and many others who diverged more or less from the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity.  But the views of one Nonconformist whose name is a household word in the mouth of Churchmen and Dissenters alike, and some of whose hymns will live as long as the English language lives, claim at least a passing notice.

Isaac Watts belonged to the Independents, a sect which in the first half of the eighteenth century was less tainted with Socinianism than any of ‘the three denominations.’  His ’Treatise on the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity,’ and that entitled ’The Arian invited to the Orthodox Faith,’ were professedly written in defence of the Catholic doctrine.  The former, like most of Dr. Watts’s compositions, was essentially a popular work.  ‘I do not,’ he writes, ’pretend to instruct the learned world.  My design here was to write for private and unlearned Christians, and to lead them by the fairest and most obvious sense of Scripture into some acquaintance with the great doctrine of the Trinity.’[447] In some respects his work is very effective.  One point especially he brings out more forcibly than almost any other writer of his day.  It is what he calls ‘the moral argument’ for the Trinity.  There is real eloquence in his appeal to the ’great number of Christians who, since the Apostles, under the influence of a belief in the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit, have paid divine honours to both, after they have sought the knowledge of the truth with the utmost diligence and prayer; when they have been in the holiest and most heavenly frames of spirit, and in their devoutest hours; when