speculation.'[434] Chief among these was Dr. W. Sherlock, Dean of St.
Paul's, who in 1690 published his 'Vindication of the Trinity,' which he
describes as 'a new mode of explaining that great mystery by a
hypothesis which gives an easy and intelligible notion of a Trinity in
Unity, and removes the charge of contradiction.' In this work Sherlock
hazarded assertions which were unquestionably 'new,' but not so
unquestionably sound. He affirmed, among other things, that the Persons
of the Godhead were distinct in the same way as the persons of Peter,
James, and John, or any other men. Such assertions were not unnaturally
suspected of verging perilously near upon Tritheism, and his book was
publicly censured by the Convocation of the University of Oxford. On the
other hand, Dr. Wallis, Professor of Geometry, and the famous Dr. South,
published treatises against Dr. Sherlock, which, while avoiding the
Scylla of Tritheism, ran dangerously near to the Charybdis of
Sabellianism. Like all his writings, South's treatise was racy, but
violently abusive, and such irritation and acrimony were engendered,
that the Royal authority was at last exercised in restraining each party
from introducing novel opinions, and requiring them to adhere to such
explications only as had already received the sanction of the Church.

Chillingworth, in his Intellectual System, propounded a theory on the
Trinity which savoured of Arianism; Burnet and Tillotson called down the
fiercest invectives from that able controversialist Charles Leslie, for
'making the Three Persons of God only three manifestations, or the same
Person of God considered under three different qualifications and
respects as our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier,' while Burnet argued
that the inhabitation of God in Christ made Christ to be God.

Thus at the close of the seventeenth century the subject of the Trinity
was agitating the minds of some of the chief divines of the age. It must
be observed, however, that so far the controversy between theologians of
the first rank had been conducted within the limits of the Catholic
Faith. They disputed, not about the doctrine of the Trinity itself, but
simply about the mode of explaining it.

Still these disputes between English Churchmen strengthened the hands of
the anti-Trinitarians. These latter represented the orthodox as divided
into Tritheists and Nominalists, and the press teemed with pamphlets
setting forth with more or less abili