of reason and interest had doubtless convinced him that his passions and prejudices had led him into a great error.  That error he determined to recant; and it cost him less to say that his opinion had been changed by newly discovered evidence, than that he had formed a wrong judgment with all the materials for the forming of a right judgment before him.  The popular belief was that his retractation was the effect of the tears, expostulations and reproaches of his wife.  The lady’s spirit was high; her authority in the family was great; and she cared much more about her house and her carriage, the plenty of her table and the prospects of her children, than about the patriarchal origin of government or the meaning of the word Abdication.  She had, it was asserted, given her husband no peace by day or by night till he had got over his scruples.  In letters, fables, songs, dialogues without number, her powers of seduction and intimidation were malignantly extolled.  She was Xanthippe pouring water on the head of Socrates.  She was Dalilah shearing Samson.  She was Eve forcing the forbidden fruit into Adam’s mouth.  She was Job’s wife, imploring her ruined lord, who sate scraping himself among the ashes, not to curse and die, but to swear and live.  While the ballad makers celebrated the victory of Mrs. Sherlock, another class of assailants fell on the theological reputation of her spouse.  Till he took the oaths, he had always been considered as the most orthodox of divines.  But the captious and malignant criticism to which his writings were now subjected would have found heresy in the Sermon on the Mount; and he, unfortunately, was rash enough to publish, at the very moment when the outcry against his political tergiversation was loudest, his thoughts on the mystery of the Trinity.  It is probable that, at another time, his work would have been hailed by good Churchmen as a triumphant answer to the Socinians and Sabellians.  But, unhappily, in his zeal against Socinians and Sabellians, he used expressions which might be construed into Tritheism.  Candid judges would have remembered that the true path was closely pressed on the right and on the left by error, and that it was scarcely possible to keep far enough from danger on one side without going very close to danger on the other.  But candid judges Sherlock was not likely to find among the Jacobites.  His old allies affirmed that he had incurred all the fearful penalties denounced in the Athanasian Creed against those who divide the substance.  Bulky quartos were written to prove that he held the existence of three distinct Deities; and some facetious malecontents, who troubled themselves very little about the Catholic verity, amused the town by lampoons in English and Latin on his heterodoxy.  “We,” said one of these jesters, “plight our faith to one King, and call one God to attest our promise.  We cannot think it strange that there should be more than one King to whom the Doctor has sworn allegiance, when we consider that the Doctor has more Gods than one to swear by."61