The Socinians believed in a ‘scrupulous and vigorous Biblicism and the right to reason in religion’.7 As there is no reference to the Blessed or Holy Trinity in the Scriptures, Socinians believed in only one God and did not regard Jesus as God but as a moral, human, teacher. They refused to believe in anything they could not understand. Socinus wrote in favour of the separation of Church and State and declared himself against civil punishment of heretics by exile, prison or execution. He was writing at a time when many of the states of Europe, Catholic and Protestant alike, used the stake, the executioner’s block, inquisitions, torture and forced mass exile of populations to punish such crimes as believing in, or refusing to believe in, transubstantiation.
Socinus died in 1604 and thirty-four years later, in 1638, the Socinians were forced to leave Poland or to conform to Roman Catholicism. Many fled to Transylvania, East Prussia and the Palatinate, while others found asylum in Holland, in Amsterdam and Leyden. Their printing press moved to Holland and an imposing series of volumes containing all the main Socinian writings was printed in Amsterdam in 1665–6.8
The lapse of the Licensing Laws in England in 1695 gave Locke and Toland the opportunity to publish their controversial views. Locke published The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures and Toland published his Christianity not Mysterious. Both books promoted similar ideas though they were written in somewhat different styles. Locke was careful and prudent whereas Toland loved to provoke. Both works were an explicit attack on orthodox Christian priest-craft and advocated a return to a simple moral Christianity. Each Christian should be free to come to their own views without persecution by Church or State. Locke denounced those who would try to enforce religious orthodoxy: the Protestant Reformation challenged not only Roman orthodoxy but also the very idea of orthodoxy. From its beginning, the principal goal was to transform Christianity from a religion of priestly orthodoxy to one of freedom of conscience.9
Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises on Government in 1690. He had published his Letter on Toleration the previous year. In his Letter he said: ‘The heads and leaders of the Church, moved by avarice and an insatiable desire for dominion, making use of the immoderate ambition of magistrates and the credulous superstition of the giddy multitude, have incensed and animated them against those that dissent from themselves, by preaching … that schismatics and heretics … are to be destroyed.’10
Orthodox churchmen grasped instinctively that many of Locke’s ideas were Socinian. Locke denied this, declaring that there was ‘not one word of Socinianism in his work’.11 Yet this did not cut much ice with his contemporaries, some of whom argued that Locke ‘might pass for the Socinus of his age or that he was Socinianized all over’.12 One modern historian has taken his cue from Locke’s detractors and branded him with the title ‘the Socinian John Locke’.13 Whether this is fair or not, it was grossly unfair for Locke’s contemporary Edward Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worchester, to attack Locke for what John Toland had written. The bishop alleged that Locke held Unitarian views because he believed him to be the source of the ideas expressed in Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious.
Toland was born in Donegal in 1670. He was probably the son of a Roman Catholic priest and his first language was Gaelic. In his early years, he became a Presbyterian and was educated at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leyden and Utrecht.14 His education in Holland was paid for by Reverend Daniel Williams (1643–1716) who, for twenty years, ministered to the Dublin Wood Street congregation, until 1687.
During his studies and travels Toland acquired nine languages. He was a strident spokesperson for republican virtue and, in his lifetime, he published over one hundred books.15 Christianity not Mysterious was published between December 1695 and June 1696. Draft papers for the work ‘had possibly been sent to John Locke in late March 1695’.16 In Christianity not Mysterious Toland: ‘applied the Lockean theory of the meaning of religious mystery, arguing that since mysteries such as the Holy Trinity do not stand for distinct ideas, Christianity must either employ meaningless doctrines, or else be non-mysterious … for’, writes Toland, ‘if we have no idea of a thing, it is … lost labour for us to trouble ourselves about it’.17
Shortly after his book was published, Toland arrived in Dublin to find that a great clamour had been raised against him and it. He was attacked from the pulpits and in the press. His book was arraigned by a Dublin Grand Jury none of whom had read one word of his work. Finally, it was declared heretical by the Irish House of Commons. It was to be burnt twice (once before Parliament and once before the civic buildings).18 Toland claimed that one member of Parliament suggested that the author should be burnt along with his book.19 This was no small matter as Thomas Akenhead, an eighteen-year-old student at Toland’s alma mater at Edinburgh had been hanged the previous January for mocking the doctrine of the Trinity. Akenhead had retracted but to no avail. All copies of Toland’s book were seized and further imports banned. Toland fled Dublin to avoid arrest and was never to return to his native land.
Toland rescued the works of the English Commonwealth republicans such as John Milton, Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney and James Harrington and ‘fashioned them so they would be acceptable to a later generation’.20 The first edition of Harrington’s republican classic Oceana was published in 1656 and dedicated by the author to Oliver Cromwell. Toland republished it in 1702 with an account of Harrington’s life. Harrington was always a great favourite of Francis Hutcheson who, in his lectures to students, endorsed many of Harrington’s suggestions. When William Bruce was preparing a reprint of Toland’s Life of Harrington in Dublin in 1737, he wrote to Reverend Thomas Drennan: ‘Our subscription to Harrington goes on apace. It will be the prettiest and cheapest book that will be printed in Ireland.’21 When the book appeared, the subscription list included the names of Reverend Haliday, Reverend Abernethy and Professor Francis Hutcheson.
The prosecution of Thomas Emlyn
In June 1702, less than four years after Toland left Dublin, Reverend Joseph Boyse, who was then the Minister in charge at Wood Street, with one of the elders, approached his assistant minister Thomas Emlyn at his home. Although Emlyn had never expressed any anti-Trinitarian views, the elder was correct in suspecting that his friend had indeed lost his belief in the Trinity. When Emlyn confirmed the suspicion, he offered to leave the congregation, which he had served for eleven years, for the sake of peace. He was forced to leave for England but while there, he heard that he was being denounced from the same pulpits which had attacked Toland a few years previously. He published a defence of his position which left him vulnerable to charges of blasphemy. He returned to Dublin to settle his affairs and was promptly arrested.
His trial began on 10 June 1703 and before the court sat, Emlyn claimed that he had been ‘informed by an eminent gentleman of the Long Robe’ that he would not be permitted to speak freely but it was designed to run him down like a wolf without law or game.22 That was how the trial was conducted. There were seven or eight bishops present of whom two, Dublin and Armagh, took the bench. Emlyn observed that a jury of tradesmen was being asked to decide on ‘abstruse points of divinity of which there were many disputes among the learned of the age’. The Queen’s Counsel behaved with ‘great heat and fury’ and when he made the ludicrous assertion that ‘presumption is as good as evidence he was seconded in this by the Chief Justice’. Emlyn’s Counsels were intimidated and were ‘interrupted, contradicted and so brow beaten that they eventually withdrew’.23 When Emlyn tried to speak for himself, the Chief Justice cried ‘speak by your Counsel’ even though by this time he had none. The Chief Justice warned the jury that if they were of a mind to acquit the defendant ‘my Lord bishops are here’.24
After his inevitable conviction, Emlyn was asked to retract his opinions and when he refused, he was sentenced to a year in prison and a £2,000 fine. This was so beyond Emlyn’s means that it amounted to an indefinite prison sentence. Emlyn was to spend two years and