ty the usual arguments against the
Trinity. These were for the most part published anonymously; for their
publication would have brought their writers within the range of the
law, the Act of 1689 having expressly excluded those who were unsound on
the subject of the Trinity from the tolerated sects. One of the most
famous tracts, however, 'The Naked Gospel,' was discovered to have been
written by Dr. Bury, Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, and was burnt by
order of the Convocation of that University. 'A Historical Vindication
of the Naked Gospel,' was also a work of considerable power, and was
attributed to the famous Le Clerc. But with these exceptions, the
anti-Trinitarians, though they were energetic and prolific in a certain
kind of literature, had not yet produced any writer who had succeeded in
making his mark permanently upon the age.

Thus the question stood at the commencement of the eighteenth century.
In one sense the controversy was at its height; that is to say, some of
the ablest writers in the Church had written or were writing upon the
subject; but the real struggle between the Unitarians (so called) and
the Trinitarians had hardly yet begun, for under the latter term almost
all the disputants of high mark would fairly have come.

The new century found the pen of that doughty champion of the Faith,
Charles Leslie, busy at work on the Socinian controversy. His letters on
this subject had been begun some years before this date; but they were
not finally completed until the eighteenth century was some years old.
Leslie was ever ready to defend what he held to be the Christian faith
against all attacks from whatever quarter they might come. Deists, Jews,
Quakers, Romanists, Erastians, and Socinians, all fell under his lash;
his treatise on the last of these, being the first in order of date, and
by no means the last in order of merit among the eighteenth-century
literature on the subject of the Trinity, now comes under our notice.

Although his dialogue is nominally directed only against the Socinians,
it is full of valuable remarks on the anti-Trinitarians generally; and
he brings out some points more clearly and forcibly than subsequent and
more voluminous writers on the subject have done. For example, he meets
the old objection that the doctrine of the Trinity is incredible as
involving a contradiction, by pointing out that it rests upon the
fallacy of arguing from a nature which we know to quite a diffe