the Christian Church which he so much approved of had this name originally bestowed upon them, and because ’tis a name much more proper to them than Arians.’  Whiston formed a sort of society which at first numbered among those who attended its meetings men who afterwards attained to great eminence in the Church; among others, B. Hoadly, successively Bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury and Winchester, Rundle, afterwards Bishop of Derry, and then of Gloucester, and Dr. Samuel Clarke.  But Whiston was a somewhat inconvenient friend for men who desired to stand well with the powers that be.  They all fell off lamentably from the principles of primitive Christianity,—­Hoadly sealing his defection by the crowning enormity of marrying a second wife.

Poor Whiston grievously lamented the triumph of interest over truth, which these defections implied.  Neither the censures of Convocation nor the falling off of his friends had any power to move him.  He still continued for some time a member of the Church of England.  But his character was far too honest and clear-sighted to enable him to shut his eyes to the fact that the Liturgy of the Church was in many points sadly unsound on the principles of primitive Christianity.  To remedy this defect he put forth a Liturgy which he termed ’The Liturgy of the Church of England reduced nearer to the Primitive Standard.’  It was in most respects precisely identical with that in use, only it was purged from all vestiges of the Athanasian heresy.  The principal changes were in the Doxology, which was altered into what he declares was its original form, in the prayer of St. Chrysostom, in the first four petitions of the Litany, and one or two others, and in the collect for Trinity Sunday.  The Established Church was, however, so blind to the truth that she declined to adopt the proposed alterations, and Whiston was obliged to leave her communion.  He found a home, in which, however, he was not altogether comfortable, among the General Baptists.

The real reviver of modern Arianism in England was Whiston’s friend, Dr. Samuel Clarke.  It has been seen that hitherto all theologians of the highest calibre who had taken part in the Trinitarian controversy would come under the denomination of Trinitarians, if we give that term a fairly wide latitude.  In 1712 Dr. Clarke, who had already won a high reputation in the field of theological literature,[437] startled the world by the publication of his ‘Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity.’  This book was long regarded as a sort of text-book of modern Arianism.  The plan of the work was to make an exhaustive collection of all the texts in the New Testament which bear upon the nature of the Godhead—­in itself a most useful work, and one which was calculated to supply a distinct want in theology.  No less than 1,251 texts, all more or less pertinent to the matter in hand, were collected by this industrious writer, and to many of them were appended explanations and criticisms