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Updated: July 5, 2025
The Roman Controversialists of the seventeenth century used to go further still, and boldly assert that to leave Rome was to go to Socinianism; and the Calvinists, on their side, would sometimes argue that 'Arminianism was a shoeing horn to draw on Socinianism. A great number of the Unitarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were themselves scarcely distinguishable from the orthodox.
This man was a Professor in the university of Francker: he wrote against Worstius, who was suspected of Socinianism; and insinuated that the States of Holland favoured that heresy. He also complained of their renewing the law of 1591, concerning the election of ministers, and their opposing the convocation of a National Synod.
His political creed was, paradoxical as this may seem, the outcome of his religious education. He had long since given up the actual faith in which he was born and trained; after going through successive stages of Sandemanianism, Deism, and Socinianism, he had, in 1787, become a "complete unbeliever;" but he never entirely outlived its influence. This was of a twofold nature.
He bore with the idolatry of Rome, tolerated even the infidelity of Socinianism, and was hand and glove with the Presbyterian Synods of Scotland and Ulster. Such a man at such a time was found to be useful, and Dr Proudie's name began to appear in the newspapers.
He mentions that in 1698, thirty-four French refugee ministers residing in London addressed a letter to the synod, then sitting at Amsterdam, in which they declared, that Socinianism had spread so rapidly, that, if the ecclesiastical assemblies supplied no means for checking their growth, or used palliatives only, the mischief would be incurable.
Gladstone think that a religious system which he considers as false, Socinianism for example, was submitted to his free choice, if it were submitted in these terms? "If you obstinately adhere to the faith of the Nicene fathers, you shall not be burned in Smithfield; you shall not be sent to Dorchester gaol; you shall not even pay double land-tax.
For, unlike Luther and Calvin, the Socinians conceded such a wide room to individual judgment in the interpretation of Scripture that to impose Socinianism would have been inconsistent with its principles. In other words, there was a strong rationalistic element which was lacking in the Trinitarian creeds.
To subject the Bible to free inquiry, to exercise upon it the criticism of the individual judgment where might not such methods lead? Who could say that they would not end in Socinianism? nay, in Atheism itself? If the text of Scripture was to be submitted to the searchings of human reason, how could the question of its inspiration escape the same tribunal?
But call it, if you like, Laudism, or Lambethism in temporalities and ceremonials, and of Socinianism in doctrine, that is, a retaining of the word but a rejecting or interpreting away of the sense and substance of the Scriptural Mysteries.
It was often loosely and improperly applied on the one hand to many who really believed more than he did, and on the other to many who believed less. In fact, the stigma of Socinianism was tossed about as a vague, general term of reproach in the eighteenth century, much in the same way as 'Puseyite, 'Ritualist, and 'Rationalist' have been in our own day.
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