Here the sketch of this famous controversy, which was certainly a marked feature of the eighteenth century, may fitly close.  But a few general remarks in conclusion seem requisite.

And first as to the nomenclature.  The name claimed by the anti-Trinitarians has, for want of a better, been perforce adopted in the foregoing pages.  But in calling them Unitarians, we must do so under protest.  The advocates of the Catholic doctrine might with equal correctness be termed, from one point of view, Unitarians, as they are from another point of view termed Trinitarians.  For they believe in the Unity of God as firmly as they believe in the Trinity.  And they hold that there is no real contradiction in combining those two subjects of belief; because the difficulty of reconciling the Trinity with the Unity of the Godhead in reality proceeds simply from our human and necessary incapacity to comprehend the nature of the union.  Therefore they cannot for a moment allow to disbelievers in the Trinity the title of Unitarians, so as to imply that the latter monopolise the grand truth that ‘the Lord our God is one Lord.’  They consent reluctantly to adopt the term Unitarian because no other name has been invented to describe the stage at which anti-Trinitarians had arrived before the close of the eighteenth century.  These latter, of course, differed essentially from the Arians of the earlier part of the century.  Neither can they be properly termed Socinians, for Socinus, as Horsley justly remarks, ’though he denied the original divinity of Our Lord, was nevertheless a worshipper of Christ, and a strenuous asserter of his right to worship.  It was left to others,’ he adds, ’to build upon the foundation which Socinus laid, and to bring the Unitarian doctrine to the goodly form in which the present age beholds it.’[467] Indeed, the early Socinians would have denied to Dr. Priestley and his friends the title of Christians, and would have excommunicated them from their Society.  ‘Humanitarians’ would be a more correct designation; but as that term is already appropriated to a very different signification, it is not available.  For convenience’ sake, therefore, the name of Unitarians must be allowed to pass, but with the proviso that so far from its holders being the sole possessors of the grand truth of the unity of the Godhead, they really, from the fact of their denying the divinity of two out of the three Persons in the Godhead, form only a very maimed and inadequate conception of the one God.

The outcry against all mystery, or, to use a modern phrase, the spirit of rationalism, which in a good or bad sense pervaded the whole domain of religious thought, orthodox and unorthodox alike during the eighteenth century, found its expression in one class of minds in Deism, in another in anti-Trinitarianism.  But though both disavowed any opposition to real Christianity, yet both in reality allow no scope for what have been from the very earliest times to the present day considered