1. See McNeill, John T., The History and Character of Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967; first edition, 1954), p. 370Google Scholar: Bogue, David and Bennett, James. History of Dissenters from the Revolution to the Year 1808. 4 vols. (London: 1808-1812), 2, p. 343Google Scholar; Drysdale, A. H., History of the Presbyterians in England (London: Publication Committee of the Presbyterian Church of England, 1889), p. 549Google Scholar: and Wilson, Walter, The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses in London, Westminster, and Southwark. 4 vols. (London: 1808-1814), 4, pp. 554–555 (hereafter cited as Wilson, Dissenting Churches).Google Scholar

2. M'Crie, Thomas, Annals of English Presbytery (London: James Nisbet, 1872), pp. 297–98.Google Scholar

3. Drysdale, , History of the Presbyterians, p. 550.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., p. 520.

5. Ibid., p. 550.

6. Ibid., p. 508.

7. Ibid., pp. 509–514. I have here summarized eight causes of “Insidious Tendency to Arianism,” which Drysdale outlines. This summary and Drysdale's points should be compared with the analysis in James, T. S., The History of the Litigation and Legislation respecting Presbyterian Chapels and Charities in England and Ireland between 1816 and 1894 (London: Hamilton Adas. & Co., 1867), pp. 41ff., upon which Drysdale seems to have depended.Google Scholar

8. See “The Demise of English Presbyterians, 1660–1760,” by Splding, J. C., Church History, 28, (1959), pp. 63–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 81.

10. Wilson, , Dissenting Churches, 4, p. 555.Google Scholar

11. 2 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965, First edition, London, 1913).

12. Ibid., 2, pp. 159–60.

13. Ibid., 2, p. 127. Clark's emphasis on the central role of the Spirit has been confirmed by Morgan, Edmund in Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: University Press, 1963)Google Scholar and Nuttall, Geoffrey F. in The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience. Second edition. (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1947)Google Scholar. His insistence on the disjunction between Puritanism and modern democratic forms is echoed by Walzer, Michael in The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. Walzer sees the Puritans' eschatology and their desire to purify England as the prologue to the ideology and practice of modern radicalism, not to bourgeois democracy. He thus rejects the argument, made by Gooch, George Peabody in English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century. Second edition with notes and appendices by Laski, H. J.. (New York: Harper & Row, 1959)Google Scholar; by Lindsay, A. D. in “The Modern Democratic State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945)Google Scholar; and by Woodhouse, A. S. P. in Puritanism and Liberty (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1938)Google Scholar, that Puritanism and Independency in particular were early heralds of the democratic process.

14. Clark, , English Nonconformity, 2, pp. 162, 197.Google Scholar

15. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1968).

16. Hadfield, George, The Manchester Socinian Controversy (London, 1825), p. xGoogle Scholar. For discussion of this controversy and the literature produced on both Orthodox and Unitarian sides see T. S. James, The History of the Litigation and Legislation respecting Presbyterian Chapels and Charities in England and Ireland between 1816 and 1849; Wilbur, , A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England and America pp. 344–362Google Scholar; and Lloyd, Walter, The Story of Protestant Dissent and English Unitarianism (London: Philip Green, 1899), pp. 83–98.Google Scholar

17. The force of the argument rested on the fact of possession. The Unitarians were in possession of many formerly-Presbyterian properties. They had to demonstrate the legitimacy of their possession and counter the orthodox contention that the properties and trusts had been established in the interest of orthodoxy. Both sides appealed to the spirit of the ancestors. The Unitarians invoked the open-trust myth which even Unitarians today recognize as specious. Noting that many of their trust deeds contained no creedal tests, the Unitarians insisted that their Presbyterian ancestors, unlike the Independents, had put their property in open trust in anticipation that their children by the advance of truth and liberty would progress to new opinions. James in 1867 called this anachronistic (Litigation and Legislation pp. 49–50, 65–66, 70–71). The Unitarians, Alexander Gordon, William Whitaker, Walter Lloyd and Earl Morse Wilbur, have denounced this myth (Whitaker, William, “The Open-Trust Myth,” Unitarian Historical Society Transactions (Hereafter UHST), 1 (1916-1918), pp. 303–314Google Scholar; Lloyd, , Protestant Dissent, pp. 28, 191ff.Google Scholar; and Wilbur, , A History of Unitarianism pp. 358ff.).Google Scholar

18. A position similar to that advanced here, namely that Unitarianism evolved out of Dissent rather than Presbyterianism, was put forward by Halley, Robert in Lancashire: Its Puritanism and Nonconformity. 2 vols. (Manchester: Tubbs and Brook, 1869)Google Scholar and by Walter Lloyd in The Story of Protestant Dissent and English Unitarianism.

19. Drysdale, , History of the Presbyterians, pp. 531–532Google Scholar. Drysdale used the Evans and Thompson figures, which combine Independents and Presbyterians. Employing ratios for the denominations used to determine representation in the Dissenting Deputies, he came to these conclusions. These figures should be used with caution. Thomas, Roger in “The Evans List: The Hidden Neal List,” Congregational Historical Society Transactions (Hereafter CHST), 19 (1961), pp. 72–74Google Scholar, argues that the composite upon which Drysdale worked was a conflation of surveys of Dissent by John Evans for the Three Denominations and Daniel Neal for the Independents made by Josiah Thompson in 1773. The Thompson List with county.by-county figures of congregations from the Evans List is reproduced in “A View of English Nonconformity in 1773,” CHST, 5 (1911-1912), pp. 205–222, 261–77 and 372–85Google Scholar. Uninterpolated the statistics are: 1715–1716 1,182 congregations of which 283 were Baptist 1773 1,080 congregations (1,052 ministers) of which 374 were Baptist (353 ministers) Bebb, B. D. in Nonconformity and Social and Economic Life, 1660–1800 (London: Epworth Press, 1935), pp. 30–57Google Scholar, used these lists and other material to assess the position of Dissent. He found a general decline of Dissent with some significant regional and denominational countertrends. The general decline was also a subject of contemporary discussion: Gough, Strickland, Enquiry into the State of the Dissenting Interest (1730)Google Scholar, Doddridge, Philip, Free Thoughts on the Most Probable Means of Reviving the Dissenting Interest (1730)Google Scholar, Neal, Nathaniel, A Free and Serious Remonstrance to Protestant Dissenting Ministers, on Occasion of the Decay of Religion (1746)Google Scholar and Job Orton, Letters to Dissenting Ministers (written in the eighteenth century but published in 1805), all concerned themselves with the decline.

20. These included in addition to those cited in the preceding footnote: “A List of all the Meeting Houses … within the Cities of London and Westminster,” (1723), “An Account of the Presbyterian and Independent Ministers in London about the year 1730,” and Walter Wilson, The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses in London, Westminster, and Southwark, four volumes of London Dissenting history.

21. The best guide is the four volumes of Wilson's Dissenting Churches.

22. Ibid., 2, pp. 75 ff.

23. Ibid., 2, p. 213.

24. Ibid., 1, pp. 84 ff.

25. Ibid., 2, pp. 225–26. Among other examples is John Fuller, who had been educated at the strictly Calvinist King's Head Academy at Mile-End, who had served an Independent congregation at Kettering, who had been for a time a sub-tutor at the Independent academy at Daventry, and who became an assistant at Presbyterian Carter-Lane, London, from 1778 to 1783 (Ibid., 2, p. 163). Samuel Morton Savage, who studied with the Independent tutor John Eames, who served as tutor with Dr. David Jennings in the same academy and later with Abraham Rees and Andrew Kippis in the orthodox Coward's academy of Hoxton, and who assisted the Independent Samuel Price, was afternoon preacher from 1759 to 1766 and Thursday lecturer from 1760 to 1767 in the Presbyterian congregation in Hanover-Street (Ibid., 1, pp. 320ff). Hugh Farmer, immensely popular afternoon preacher at Salters' Hall (Presbyterian) during 1761 to 1762, remained an Independent all his life (Ibid., 2, pp. 60–61).

26. Gordon, Alexander, Philip Doddridge and the Catholicity of the Old Dissent (London: Lindsey Press, 1951), pp. 34–35Google Scholar. He continued: “Where they had any real meaning they referred … to differences of internal management; the Independents maintaining among themselves the cohesion of autonomous church association, while the Presbyterians were rather in the position of subscribers to a lectureship, leaving matters of business in the hands of a self-elected body of trustees, or a lay committee of management. The denominational names were revived at a later date, and without much reference to the history of congregations, in the interest of that redistribution into doctrinal parties which Doddridge … deprecated as a suicidal policy.”

27. Thomas, Roger in The English Presbyterians, p. 163nGoogle Scholar. For account of the sets of advice subsequently sent to Exeter and lists of those who took subscriber, non-subscriber and abstaining positions, see James, , Litigation and Legislation, pp. 26–28, 111–18, 705–09.Google Scholar

28. “An Account of the Presbyterian and Independent Ministers in London about the year 1730, by a Gentleman who Removed Thither from Northampton,” in James, , Litigation and Legislation, 696–704Google Scholar. Also in Dr. Williams' library, London, MS 38.18. The observer found thirteen Presbyterians to be Arminians and twelve to be Middle Way Men. The Independents were all classified as Calvinist. Of the Baptists he said: “Both ministers and people are much divided in their sentiments, though it may be allowed plunging under water has a cementing quality” (p. 703). Whether his perception of such a low incidence of heresy among the Independents and such a mild variety among the Presbyterians (Arminianism) is to be ascribed to the author's charity or to misjudgment is not clear. See the discussion by Goring, Jeremy in The English Presbyterians, p. 180Google Scholar. It is true that the London picture was just then becoming more murky.

29. There is some warrant for this in that events in London and initiatives taken by London Dissenters did have their impact on Dissent as a whole. Without explicit “denominational” or theological sanction London Dissenters did arrogate to themselves the right to represent Dissent as a whole. The access of the London Dissenters to Parliament and Court and the precarious legal state of Dissent made this inevitable. The Londoners created institutions like the funds and the Dissenting Deputies, and undertook actions in relation to the Corporation and Test Acts which were for the good of all Dissent. Their representation of Dissent was never formalized and was the source of some discontent.

30. See Thomas, Roger, An Essay of Accommodation, Dr. Williams' Library Occasional Paper No. 6 (1957)Google Scholar. The list of associations comes from pp. 15–16. A different list of surviving associations is given by James, , Litigation and Legislation, p. 19Google Scholar. Bogue, and Bennett, in History of Dissenters, 3, p. 360Google Scholar, suggest that for the period from the death of Anne to the accession of George III, the associations were in decline except in Exeter, Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmorelad, Norfolk and Suffolk and Northamptonshire. For the record and interpretation of one assembly see Brockett, Allan, Nonconformity in Exeter 1650–1875 (Manchester: Published on behalf of the University of Exeter by Manchester University Press, 1962)Google Scholar and The Exeter Assembly 1691–1717, ed. by Brockett, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, New Series, Vol. 6, 1963.Google Scholar

31. See Tibbutt, H. G., “Pattern of Change,” CHST, 20, No. 5 (1967), p. 170Google Scholar and MeLachian, H., “Diary of a Leeds Layman 1733–1768,” UHST, 4 (1927-1930), p. 248.Google Scholar

32. Montgomery, R. Mortimer, “The Deeds of Westgate Chapel, Lewes,” UHST, 1 (1916-1918), pp. 181–82.Google Scholar

33. See the discussion above on statistics. The separate figures for Presbyterians and Independents are inferred from supposed ratios of the two denominations. It should be noted that Thompson's division might be related to the fact that he was a Baptist and followed the Baptist penchant for dividing Christians into Paedobaptists and Baptists. But it should be further noted that he did offer a breakdown for the London scene into Presbyterian, Independent and Baptist.

34. Warren, John Crosby, “From Puritanism to Unitarianism at Lincoln,” UHST, 2 (1919-1922), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 16.

36. Amey, Alfred, ‘“The Old Meeting,’ Framlingham,” UHST, 1 (1916-1918), p. 88Google Scholar. Deeds for the chapel in Hapton, Norfolk, for Angel Street, Worcester, and for Marshfield, Gloucestershire, also referred to “Presbyterian and Congregational” persuasion (James, , Litigation and Legislation, p. 61).Google Scholar

37. James, , Litigation and Legislation, pp. 61–62Google Scholar. James cited other similar examples. There were to be sure many chapels whose deeds contained denominational language. For instance, that of Banbury referred to a building as a “Meetinghouse or place for publick worship for the Society or Congregation of Protestant Dissenters called Presbyterians.” Tyssen, Amherst D., “The Old Meeting House, Banbury,” UHST, 1 (1916-1918), p. 300.Google Scholar

38. See his Memoirs edited by John T. Rutt in volume one, part one, p. 29, of The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestly, edited by Rutt, 25 vols. (Hackney, 1817-1831).Google Scholar

39. Wilson, , Dissenting Churches, 1, p. 174Google Scholar. The congregation was one whose experience of the Salters' Hall controversy was traumatic. The assistant aligned himself with the Nonsubseribers while the minister took side with the Subscribers. The assistant appeared to be unsound on the Trinity. He was dismissed causing dissension within the congregation.

40. James, , Litigation and Legislation, p. 89.Google Scholar

41. For discussion of these factors see Richey, Russell E., The Origins of English Unitarianism (Unpublished dissertation, Princeton University, 1970).Google Scholar

42. On the Middle Way see the several excellent works by Nuttall, Geoffrey, Richard Barter (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965)Google Scholar, The Puritan Spirit: Essays and Addresses (London: Epworth Press, 1967)Google Scholar, Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge, A Study in Tradition, (London: Dr. Williams' Library, Fifth Lecture, 1951)Google Scholar. his edited volume, Philip Doddridge, 1702–51 (London: Independent Press, 1951)Google Scholar and “Philip Doddridge and ‘the Care of all the Churches’: A Study in Oversight,” CHST, 20, No. 4 (1966), pp. 126–138Google Scholar. See also Gordon, Alexander, Philip Doddridge and the Catholicity of the Old Dissent (London: Lindsey Press, 1951).Google Scholar

43. Doddridge, Philip, “Christian Candour and Unanimity… A sermon preached at a meeting of ministers at Creation in Northamptonshire, January 12, 1749–50,” The Works of the Rev. P. Doddridge, D.D., eds. Williams, Edward and Parsons, Edward. 10 vols. (Leeds: 1802-1810), 3, pp. 278–79.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., pp. 271–72, 277–78.

45. Wilson, , Dissenting Churches, 1, p. 70Google Scholar. Benjamin Grosvenor (1676–1758) was a moderate Calvinist, lecturer at Old Jewery and Salters' Hall and political spokesman for Dissent. He contributed to The Occasional Papers (1716–1719) and to The Old Whig (1735–1738). Harris was minister of Poor Jewry Lane from 1698 to 1740.

46. Holt, Raymond V., “Strata in the Formation of the Unitarian Church Tradition,” UHST, 3. (1923-1926), p. 9.Google Scholar

47. There was, to be sure, a Congregational Fund Academy which, under Isaac Chaunev at Moorfields from 1701 to 1712. was scrupulously orthodox. And John Jennings' academy at Kibworth from 1715 to 1723 and its successor. that of Philip Doddridge at Northampton, were Congregational. For their fate see the text below. It should be noted that the two most important studies of the academies, Smith's, J. W. AshleyThe Birth of Modern Education: The Contribution of the Dissenting Academies, 1600–1808 (London: Independent Press, 1954)Google Scholar and McLachlan's, H.English Education under the Test Acts: Being the History of the Nonconformist Academies, 1662–1828 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931)Google Scholar, do not attempt denominational classification of the academies. Smith addresses this matter explicitly and insists that denominational classification of the academies, except in the case of the Baptists, is “doomed to failure” (p. 3). Neither study attributes any significant role to denominational factors in the early history of the academies. Griffiths, Olive M., Religion and Learning, A Study in English Presbyterian Thought from the Bartholomew Ejections (1662) to the Foundation of the Unitarian Movement (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1935)Google Scholar, does confine her attention to the Presbyterian academies. But in so doing she gives the mistaken impression that the currents of thought she so ably treats impinged Only on Presbyterianism.

48. Doddridge's academy produced nine, and Daventry seventeen. See Smith, , The Birth of Modern Education, pp. 147ffGoogle Scholar. and McLachlan, , English Education, pp. 149–52Google Scholar. Of course, some of Doddridge's students became orthodox tutors. But this does not gainsay his role in moving Dissent towards Unitarianism.