and had not a
single place of worship. It was not till 1779 that it ceased to be
required of Dissenting ministers that they should subscribe to the
Articles of the Church of England previous to taking the benefit of the
Toleration Act, and even this small boon was twice thrown out in the
Upper House by the King's friends and the Bishops. In 1813, however, one
of the most cruelly persecuting statutes which had ever disgraced the
British code received its death-blow, and the Royal assent was given to
an Act repealing all laws passed against those Christians who impugn the
commonly received doctrine of the Trinity. It was no easy matter to get
this act of justice done; the Bishops and the Peers were obstinate. In
1772, we read, the Bishop of Llandaff made a most powerful speech, and
produced from the writings of Dr. Priestley passages which equally
excited the wonder and abhorrence of his hearers, and drew from Lord
Chatham exclamations of "Monstrous! horrible! shocking!" A few years
after we find Lord North contending it to be the duty of the State to
guard against authorizing persons denying the doctrine of the Trinity to
teach. Even as late as 1824, Lord Chancellor Eldon doubted (as he
doubted everything that was tolerant in religion or liberal in politics)
as to the validity of this Act, and hinted that the Unitarians were
liable to punishment at common law for denying the doctrine of the
Trinity. Yet the Unitarians have a remote antiquity. They can trace
their descent to Apostolic times, and undoubtedly were an important
element in the National Church, in the days of William and the Hanoverian
succession.

Dr. Parr, says Mr. Barker, "spoke to me of the latitudinarian divines
with approbation. He agreed with me in thinking that the most brilliant
era of the British Church since the Reformation was when it abounded with
divines of that school;" and certainly Unitarians may claim to be
represented at the present day in Broad Churchmen within the
Establishment, and in divines of a similar way of thinking without. They
have been much helped by their antagonists. No man was less of a
Unitarian than the late Archbishop Whately, yet, in a letter to Blanco
White, he candidly confessed, "Nothing in my opinion tends so much to
dispose an intelligent mind towards anti-Trinitarian views as the
Trinitarian works."

As a sect, the Unitarians are a small body, and at one time were much
given to a display of intelligent