the intelligence of educated Christians was fully seen even within
the Anglican Church before the middle of the century. The unstable
Coleridge, who had gone round the whole compass of opinion [1989] when
he began to wield an influence over the more sensitive of the younger
Churchmen, was strenuous in a formal affirmation of the doctrine of
the Trinity, but no less anxious to modify the doctrine of Atonement
on which the conception of the Trinity was historically founded. In
the hands of Maurice the doctrine of sacrifice became one of example to
the end of subjective regeneration of the sinner. This view, which was
developed by John the Scot--perhaps from hints in Origen [1990]--and
again by Bernardino Ochino, [1991] is specially associated with the
teaching of Coleridge; but it was quite independently held in England
before him by the Anglican Dr. Parr (1747-1825), who appears to have
been heterodox upon most points in the orthodox creed, [1992] and who,
like Servetus and Coleridge and Hegel, held by a modal as against a
"personal" Trinity. The advance in ethical sensitiveness which had
latterly marked English thought, and which may perhaps be traced in
equal degrees to the influence of Shelley and to that of Bentham,
counted for much in this shifting of Christian ground. The doctrine of
salvation by faith was by many felt to be morally indefensible. Such
Unitarian accommodations presumably reconciled to Christianity and
the Church many who would otherwise have abandoned them; and the only
orthodox rebuttal seems to have been the old and dangerous resort to
the Butlerian argument, to the effect that the God of Nature shows no
such benign fatherliness as the anti-sacrificial school ascribe to
him. [1993] This could only serve to emphasize the moral bankruptcy
of Butler's philosophy, to which Mansel, in an astonishing passage
of his Bampton Lectures, [1994] had shown himself incredibly blind.
The same pressure of moral argument was doubtless potent in the
development of "Socinian" or other rationalistic views in the
Protestant Churches of Germany, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland, and
France in the first half of the century. Such development had gone
so far that by the middle of the century the Churches in question
were, to the eye of an English evangelical champion, predominantly
rationalistic, and in that sense "infidel." [1995] Reactions have been
claimed before and since; but in our own age there is little to show
for them. In the United States, again, the ethical element probably
predominated in the recoil of Emerson from Christian orthodoxy even of
the Unitarian stamp, as well as in the heresy of Theodore Parker, whose
aversion to the theistic ethic of Jonathan Edwards was so strong as
to make him blind to the reasoning power of that stringent Calvinist.