Hoadly,
while he strongly insisted that the laws of the Church and realm most
fully warranted a broad construction of the meaning of the Articles, was
entirely opposed to the abolition of subscription. It would, he feared,
seriously affect the constitution of the National Church. The Bill was
thrown out in three successive years by immense majorities. After the
third defeat Dr. Jebb, Theophilus Lindsey, and some other clergymen
seceded to the Unitarians. The language of the earlier Articles admits
of no interpretation by which Unitarians, in any proper sense of the
word, could with any honesty hold their place in the English Communion.

Thus the attempt to abolish subscription failed, and under circumstances
which showed that the Church had escaped a serious danger. But the
difficulty which had led many orthodox clergymen to join, not without
risk of obloquy, in the petition remained untouched. It was, in fact,
aggravated rather than not; for 'Arian subscription' had naturally
induced a disposition, strongly expressed in some Parliamentary
speeches, to reflect injuriously upon that reasonable and allowed
latitude of construction without which the Reformed Church of England
would in every generation have lost some of its best and ablest men.
Some, therefore, were anxious that the articles and Liturgy should be
revised; and a petition to this effect was presented in 1772 to the
Archbishop of Canterbury. Among the other names attached to it appears
that of Beilby Porteus, afterwards Bishop of London and a principal
supporter of the Evangelical party. Some proposed that the 'orthodox
Articles' only--by which they meant those that relate to the primary
doctrines of the Christian creed--should be subscribed to;[430] some
thought that it would be sufficient to require of the clergy only an
unequivocal assent to the Book of Common Prayer. It seems strange that
while abolition of subscription was proposed by some, revision of the
Articles by others, no one, so far as it appears, proposed the more
obvious alternative of modifying the wording of the terms in which
subscription was made. But nothing of any kind was done. The bishops,
upon consultation, thought it advisable to leave matters alone. They may
have been right. But, throughout the greater part of the century,
leaving alone was too much the wisdom of the leaders and rulers of the
English Church.

In all the course of its long history, before and after the Reformation,
t