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"You will wish to know what we read aloud. Chiefly manuscript poems and plays of Mr. Hayley's, and modern publications. One of the former was a sensible, just, and, as he read it, an apparently well-written Epistle to a Socinian friend on the errors of his belief. You know, I suppose, that our friend always read the Bible and Testament before he left his chamber in a morning."
It was asked whether a man who had proclaimed that England was a conquered country, a man whose servile pages the English Commons had ordered to be burned by the hangman, could be a fit instructor for an English Prince. Some reviled the Bishop for being a Socinian, which he was not, and some for being a Scotchman, which he was. His defenders fought his battle gallantly.
Such is the Christian Trinity, whose deepest sense rationalistic deism has scarcely ever succeeded in understanding, that deism, which though more or less impregnated with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or Socinian.
Deacon Dole saith it was such a discourse as a Socinian or a Papist might have preached, for the great stress it laid upon works; and Goodwife Matson, a noisy, talking woman, such an one, no doubt, as those busybodies whom Saint Paul did rebuke for forwardness, and command to keep silence in the church, says the preacher did go out of his way to favor Quakers, Indians, and witches; and that the Devil in Goody Morse's house was no doubt well pleased with the discourse.
For the next three years a fierce controversy raged in every province, pulpit replying to pulpit, and pamphlet to pamphlet. The Contra-Remonstrants roundly accused their adversaries of holding Pelagian and Socinian opinions and of being Papists in disguise.
Of course, Locke was called a 'Socinian'; but the effect of his work remained, and we should remark that if it looked on the one hand toward the orthodox, on the other it looked toward the sceptics and freethinkers who began at that time a long and not ineffectual criticism of the miraculous claims of Christianity.
That he was heterodox all the country vicars and foxhunting squires firmly believed; but as to the nature and extent of his heterodoxy there were many different opinions. He seems to have been a Low Churchman of the school of Tillotson, whom he always loved and honoured; and he was, like Tillotson, called by bigots a Presbyterian, an Arian, a Socinian, a Deist, and an Atheist.
In his intercourse with the ministers of that famous city, he came to the conclusion that their religious opinions were really Socinian, and when he wrote the article on Geneva he stated this.
An extract from a letter which I wrote a few months ago to a sceptical friend, who had been a Socinian, and of course rested all the evidences of christianity on miracles, to the exclusion of grace and inward faith, will perhaps, surprise you, as showing you how much nearer our opinions are than what you must have supposed.
Let us remember that the mercy of God is united with omniscience; and that it is to be found only in the bosom of Him whose empire extends to the utmost bounds of the universe, as well as throughout the endless ages of eternity. In the genuine spirit of Socinian theology, Dr.
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