to stir up mooted questions. Men were
disposed to rest satisfied with 'our happy establishment in Church and
State;' and it was quite as much owing to the spiritual torpor which
overtook the Church and nation after the third decade of the eighteenth
century, as to strength of conviction, that the Trinitarian question was
not further agitated.

Among the Nonconformists, and especially among the Presbyterians, the
case was different. The Arianism which led to the Salters' Hall
conference drifted by degrees into Unitarianism pure and simple. Dr.
Lardner was one of the earliest and most distinguished of those who
belonged to this latter school. He passed through the stage of Arianism,
but the mind of the author of 'The Credibility of Gospel History' was
far too clear and logical to allow him to rest there, and he finally
came to the conclusion that 'Jesus Christ was a mere man, but a man with
whom God was, in a peculiar and extraordinary manner.' This is not the
place to refer to the various Nonconformists, such as Caleb Fleming,
Hugh Farmer, James Foster, Robert Robinson, John Taylor, and many others
who diverged more or less from the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. But
the views of one Nonconformist whose name is a household word in the
mouth of Churchmen and Dissenters alike, and some of whose hymns will
live as long as the English language lives, claim at least a passing
notice.

Isaac Watts belonged to the Independents, a sect which in the first half
of the eighteenth century was less tainted with Socinianism than any of
'the three denominations.' His 'Treatise on the Christian Doctrine of
the Trinity,' and that entitled 'The Arian invited to the Orthodox
Faith,' were professedly written in defence of the Catholic doctrine.
The former, like most of Dr. Watts's compositions, was essentially a
popular work. 'I do not,' he writes, 'pretend to instruct the learned
world. My design here was to write for private and unlearned Christians,
and to lead them by the fairest and most obvious sense of Scripture into
some acquaintance with the great doctrine of the Trinity.'[447] In some
respects his work is very effective. One point especially he brings out
more forcibly than almost any other writer of his day. It is what he
calls 'the moral argument' for the Trinity. There is real eloquence in
his appeal to the 'great number of Christians who, since the Apostles,
under the influence of a belief in the Divinity of the Son and t