man.  There is a Trinity in the body (1) the heart and blood-vessels; (2) the organs of respiration; (3) the nerves, the instruments of sensation; these three departments are the three moving principles of nature continually acting for the support of life.  ‘Therefore,’ he concludes, ’as the life of man is a Trinity in Unity, and the powers which act upon it are a Trinity in Unity, the Socinians being, in their natural capacity, formed and animated as Christians, carry about with them daily a confutation of their own unbelief.’[453]

In the year 1782, the Trinitarian controversy received a fresh impulse from the appearance in it of a writer whose eminence in other branches of knowledge lent an adventitious importance to what he wrote upon this subject.  In that year, Dr. Priestley published his ’History of the Corruptions of Christianity,’ which, as Horsley says, was ’nothing less than an attack upon the creeds and established discipline of every church in Christendom.’  Foremost among these corruptions were both the Catholic doctrine of our Lord’s divinity and the Arian notion of His pre-existence in a state far above the human.

The great antagonist of Dr. Priestley was Dr. Horsley, who, first in a Charge to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of St. Albans, and then in a series of letters addressed to Priestley himself, maintained with conspicuous ability the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity.

An able modern writer[454] says that the Unitarian met at the hands of the bishop much the same treatment as Collins had received from Bentley.  But the comparison scarcely does justice either to Horsley or Priestley.  From a purely intellectual point of view it would be a compliment to any man to compare him with ‘Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,’ but the brilliant wit and profound scholarship displayed in Bentley’s remarks on Collins were tarnished by a scurrility and personality which, even artistically speaking, injured the merits of the work, and were quite unworthy of being addressed by one gentleman (not to say clergyman) to another.  Horsley’s strictures are as keen and caustic as Bentley’s; but there is a dignity and composure about him which, while adding to rather than detracting from the pungency of his writings, prevent him from forgetting his position and condescending to offensive invectives.  Priestley, too, was a more formidable opponent than Collins.  He was not only a man who by his scientific researches had made his mark upon his age, but he had set forth Unitarianism far more fully and powerfully than Collins had set forth Deism.  Still he unquestionably laid himself open to attack, and his opponent did not fail to take advantage of this opening.

Horsley distinctly declines to enter into the general controversy as to the truth or possibility of the Christian Trinity.  Everything, he thinks, that can be said on either side has been said long ago.  But he is ready to join issue with Priestley on the historical question.  This he feels it practically necessary to do, for ’the whole energy and learning of the Unitarian party is exerted to wrest from us the argument from tradition.’[455]