servants only to make way for new ones.' But this
respect for the opinion of antiquity in no way involved any compromise
of the leading idea of all eighteenth-century theology, that it should
follow the guidance of reason. Reason was by no means to be sacrificed
to the authority of the fathers. Indeed, 'as to authority,' he says, 'in
a strict and proper sense I do not know that the fathers have any over
us; they are all dead men; therefore we urge not their _authority_ but
their testimony, their suffrage, their judgment, as carrying great force
of reason. Taking them in here as lights or helps _is_ doing what is
_reasonable_ and using our own understandings in the best way.' 'I
follow the fathers,' he adds, 'as far as reason requires and no further;
therefore, this _is_ following our own reason.' In an age when patristic
literature was little read and lightly esteemed this forcible, and at
the same time highly reasonable, vindication of its importance had a
value beyond its bearing upon the doctrine of the Trinity, in connection
with which the subject was introduced by our author.[441]

Here our notice of the points at issue between Dr. Waterland and the
modern Arians, so far as they concerned the truth of the Catholic
doctrine of the Trinity, may fitly close. But there was yet another
question closely connected with the above which it concerned the
interests of morality, no less than of religion, thoroughly to sift. It
was no easy task which Dr. Clarke and his friends undertook when they
essayed to prove from Scripture and antiquity that the Son and Holy
Ghost were not one with the supreme God. But they attempted a yet
harder task than this. They contended that their views were not
irreconcilable with the formularies and Liturgy of the Church of
England. The more candid and ingenuous mind of Whiston saw the utter
hopelessness of this endeavour. It was, he says, an endeavour 'to wash
the blackmore white,' and so, like an honest man as he was, he retired
from her communion. Dr. Clarke could not, of course, deny that there was
at least an apparent inconsistency between his views and those of the
Church to which he belonged. One of the chapters in his 'Scripture
Doctrine of the Trinity' is devoted to a collection of 'passages in the
Liturgy which may seem in some respects to differ from the foregoing
doctrine.' But he and his friends were 'ready to subscribe any test
containing nothing more than is contained in the Thirty-n