The Church in Danger!

Abstract

The drive to enlarge the toleration of Protestant Dissenters beyond the boundaries of the 1689 Act encountered little success in the late 1780s and the 1790s. The struggle was important chiefly for the impact that it made on the character of the contestants. To the Anglican side it imparted a deeper theological colouring. Because the challenge to the confessional state was spearheaded by Socinianism, a radically different doctrinal system to that of the Established Church, the question at issue quickly extended from how much freedom men should enjoy to the truth of what they believed. The attacks mounted by the more extreme Unitarians, not only upon the doctrine of the Trinity, but on the broad foundations of the Anglican type of Protestantism, rebounded in the Church of England in a retreat of some of its members from the loose accommodating liberalism of the 1760s and 1770s into a distinctive Prayer Book Anglicanism that enjoined subscription to the Articles, and trod the via media between arid Latitudinarianism and Methodist exuberance. This was the note struck by the British Critic in the 1790s. Though moderate and restrained, it was a step in the High Church direction.