the Rev. W. Turner , Jun. , MA., Lives of the eminent Unitarians

[21] of lands, and shall suffer three years imprisonment without bail. Happily this statute seems to have been found from the first to be a step beyond what the improving spirit of the times would bear. Though there were many, both obscure and distinguished, who notoriously came within its danger, it does not appear to have been put in force against those whose only crime was speaking or writing against the doctrine of the Trinity, and it remained nearly a dead letter, till long after it had been actually swept from the statute book, when it occurred to the promoters of a recent attack on Presbyterian endowments to make it the basis of an argument not less inconclusive than it was illiberal and unjust.

The writers of these anonymous tracts approached most nearly to the system of Socinus; but in the succeeding age, the learning and high reputation of Clarke and Whiston in the Church of England, and of Emlyn and Peirce among the Dissenters, led the greater part of those who quitted the standard of orthodoxy to embrace the Arian hypothesis. This accordingly appears to have been the system generally adopted by most of the eminent lights of the rational dissenters who are commemorated in this volume. In the larger, and perhaps the juster, sense of the word, however, we include them all under the denomination of Unitarians, inasmuch as they agreed in the great principle of acknowledging one, and but one, object of supreme worship,—namely, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We may add, that, on whatever minor points they may have differed (as in fact it is scarcely possible that those who truly inquire and think for theme