rrection, and glorification by the power of Christ
and the Holy Spirit.'[452] Jones did, perhaps, still more useful if less
pretentious work in publishing two little pamphlets, the one entitled 'A
Letter to the Common People in Answer to some Popular Arguments against
the Trinity,' the other 'A Preservative against the Publications
dispersed by Modern Socinians.' Both of these set forth the truth, as he
held it, in a very clear and sensible manner, and at a time when the
Unitarian doctrines were spreading widely among the multitudes who could
not be supposed to have either the time or the talents requisite to
grapple with long, profound, and elaborate arguments, they were very
seasonable publications.

But the most curious contribution which Jones made to the Trinitarian
controversy was a pamphlet entitled 'A Short Way to Truth, or the
Christian Doctrine of a Trinity in Unity, Illustrated and Confirmed from
an Analogy in the Natural Creation.' He shows that the powers of nature
by which all natural life and motion are preserved are three--air, fire,
and light. That these three thus subsisting together in unity are
applied in Scripture to the Three Persons of the Divine Nature, and that
the manifestations of God are always made under one or other of these
signs. These three agents support the life of man. There is a Trinity in
the body (1) the heart and blood-vessels; (2) the organs of respiration;
(3) the nerves, the instruments of sensation; these three departments
are the three moving principles of nature continually acting for the
support of life. 'Therefore,' he concludes, 'as the life of man is a
Trinity in Unity, and the powers which act upon it are a Trinity in
Unity, the Socinians being, in their natural capacity, formed and
animated as Christians, carry about with them daily a confutation of
their own unbelief.'[453]

In the year 1782, the Trinitarian controversy received a fresh impulse
from the appearance in it of a writer whose eminence in other branches
of knowledge lent an adventitious importance to what he wrote upon this
subject. In that year, Dr. Priestley published his 'History of the
Corruptions of Christianity,' which, as Horsley says, was 'nothing less
than an attack upon the creeds and established discipline of every
church in Christendom.' Foremost among these corruptions were both the
Catholic doctrine of our Lord's divinity and the Arian notion of His
pre-existence in a state far above the huma