on himself the wrath of Whiston, Sykes, and others. In 1719 Clarke, together with Whiston and some people who objected to the Athanasian Creed, drew up a petition to Parliament against it, but we are told that "it was mentioned with disgust by Lord Nottingham," and the matter was dropped. But in this same year a far more important person than any whom Dr. Clarke either before or afterwards met appeared on the scene, in the person of Waterland.

Daniel Waterland (1683-1740) having, in 1704, graduated at Magdalen College, Cambridge, became a Fellow, and in 1713 the Earl of Suffolk, with whom the presentation rested, conferred upon him the Mastership, of the college. In 1715 he was chosen ViceChancellor in succession to Dr. Sherlock, and (although he had published some smaller works) it was not till four years later that he gave to the world his first considerable work, "A Vindication of Christ's Divinity, being a Defence of some Queries relating to Dr. Clarke's scheme of the Holy Trinity, in answer to a Clergyman in the Country." From that time to his death, in 1740, he was engaged in one unending controversy with the Arians and Freethinkers.

The circumstances which led to the publication of this great work were these. A few years previously Dr. Waterland had drawn up certain queries for the

" Whiston's Memoirs of Clarke, p. 78.

purpose of pointing out to a Clergyman living in the country, and personally unknown to him, the errors of Dr. Clarke's notions on the Trinity. This Clergyman, who was Mr. John Jackson, Rector of Rossington and Vicar of Doncaster, after some time announced to Dr. Waterland that he had been persuaded (as it appears principally by Dr. Clarke) to send, although without asking Waterland's consent, these Queries to the press with his own Answers to them. Waterland complained of this treatment, and of being thus forced into a controversy, and determined to revise the Queries, and to give them to the world in a more perfect form. To this circumstance we owe the publication of the Vindication. From the moment that Waterland took the field, Dr. Clarke's reputation sensibly diminished, whilst Dr. Waterland's was raised so high, that he was appointed by Dr. Robinson, Bishop of London, to preach the first course of sermons at the Lecture lately founded by Lady Moyerb, which he afterwards published as a supplement to his "Vindication of Christ's Divinity ."

'Lady Moyer by her will left twenty guineas a year for "an able Minister of God's Word to preach eight Sermons every year on the Trinity and Divinity of our Blessed Saviour... in St. Paul's, if permitted there, if not, elsewhere." As there was no compulsory obligation by the will for perpetuating the Lectures, they seem to have ceased in 1773.

c

Instead, however, of being a mere supplement, it is in itself

To the Vindication Dr. Clarke soon afterwards replied in a short tract entitled "The Modest Plea continued, or a brief and distinct Answer to Dr. Waterland's Queries relating to the Doctrine of the Trinity" In this work Dr. Clarke made a shallow and vain attempt to disguise his Arian principles; whenever he used the word God to signify the Father, he always inserted the word supreme before it, implying thereby the inferiority of the Son; and whenever the word was applied to the Son, he used some qualifying expression to give it a subordinate meaning, thus, in fact, making a supreme and a subordinate God. "I do not charge you," writes Dr. Waterland, "with asserting two supreme Gods, but I do charge you with holding two Gods, one supreme, another inferior e."

Shortly before this time another opponent to Waterland had appeared in the person of Dr. Whitby. Dr. Whitby (1638—1726), who is best known to the world by his "Commentary on the New Testament," brought out, in 1718, a small volume in which he attacked Dr. Bull's "Defence of the Nicene Faith,"

a perfect treatise, and has obtained, perhaps, a more extensive circulation than any of the author's other publications.—Van Mildert's Life of Waterland, p. 53.

d The "Modest Plea," to which this was a continuation, was a work by Dr. Sykes.

• Life of Waterland, p. 49.

Published in 1703.

and which he dedicated to Dr. Clarke.

Bishop Bull

had died in 1709, and the reason why Whitby did not bring out his book before 1718, nine years, that is, after Bull's death, does not appear. In this work Dr. Whitby does not express himself as being entirely satisfied with Dr. Clarke's views, but he maintains that the Trinitarian Controversy could not certainly be decided from the writings of the Fathers, and that Bull had wandered from the truth and laboured in vain, for that many of the opinions which he deduced from the Fathers were not different from those of persons who were adverse to the Faith. Dr. Waterland, in the defence of his 26th Query, comments with some severity on Dr. Whitby's book; he charges him with some general fallacies running through the whole work, and notices defects, misquotations, misconstructions, and misrepresentations. Whitby returned an angry reply; Waterland had charged him with a general fallacy of making no distinction between Essence and Person in the Godhead; Whitby retorts by accusing him of “a perpetual fallacy in using the word hypostasis to signify neither a general essence, that is, an essence common to all the Three, nor an existent, or an individual essence."

In his answer Waterland again notices Whitby's general fallacy of making essence and person signify the same thing, and of raising a dispute, not on what Bishop Bull had himself maintained, but on

what Dr. Whitby presumed to be his opinion. "The question with Bishop Bull," says Waterland, "was whether the Ante-Nicene Fathers believed the Son to be an eternal, uncreated, and strictly divine substance. But with you it is whether they believed him to be the same numerical intellectual essence (that is, as you interpret it, Person) with the Father." Dr. Whitby resumed the contest in "The Second Part of a Reply to Dr. Waterland's Objections, with an Appendix in defence of the First Part of the Reply;" but as this was little more than a repetition of the former Reply, Dr. Waterland, whose attention was now called off to another matter, let it pass.

In the first edition of his "Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity," Dr. Clarke laid it down as a maxim that in subscribing to Protestant formularies or confessions which professed to be guided solely by Scriptureauthority, "every person may reasonably agree to such forms whenever he can, in any sense at all, reconcile them with Scripture." In the second edition he omitted this passage, but “Arian Subscription" became a matter of warm controversy, Whiston and Emlyn indignantly disclaiming it, and Dr. Sykes siding with Clarke in defending it. Under those circumstances Dr. Waterland published his tract, entitled "The case of Arian Subscription considered, and the several Pleas and Excuses for it particularly examined and confuted." The defence of Arian subscription, he says, rests upon two suppositions :