The Salters Hall Controversy: 1719
Roy Middleton, Barnoldswick
By the end of the seventeenth century a great change had taken place in the Presbyterian churches of the British Isles. Spiritual blight had cast its withering influence over both the maintenance of Calvinistic doctrine and the practice of vital piety. Thomas M’Crie commenting on this spiritual declension observes “it is difficult to explain in any other way than by supposing a withdrawal of God’s spirit from the churches of the Reformation. . . In England the change was soon apparent, though the process was gradual. The approach of doctrinal laxity was heralded by the loud paeans of praise of what was termed christian charity.”1
Factors for change
Orthodoxy was maintained while the older ministers were alive who had suffered for maintaining a witness for the truth of the Great Ejection of 1662. The change came when this older generation died. Historians have sought to analyse the external circumstances that led to the decline.2. Four main factors can be identified:
Richard Baxter
The influence of Richard Baxter, one of the most respected and influential Presbyterian ministers, in a direction away from Westminster Calvinism was a significant contributory factor for change. The doctrinal cast of English Presbyterianism at the end of the seventeenth century was “Baxterian”.
In 1654 Baxter served on a committee, set up by Oliver Cromwell, which had as its object drawing up a list of fundamental doctrines that would serve as the basis for religious toleration. Baxter suggested to the committee, “The Creed, The Lords Prayer, and the Decalogue alone as our essentials and fundamentals, which at least contain all that is necessary to salvation”. Baxter was criticised for the suggestion on the grounds that such terms were wide enough to include “Papists and Socinians”. Baxter’s reply is reported to have been, “so much the better”.
Baxter further wrote, “Two things have set the Church on fire, and have been the plagues of it above one thousand years. 1. The Enlarging of our creed and making more fundamentals than God ever made. 2. Composing (and so imposing) our creeds and confessions in our own words and phrases . . . Every new article that was added to the creed was a new engine to stretch the brains of believers and in the issue to rend out the bowels of the Church”3. Opinions regarding the validity of confessions that had been dismissed at the time of the Westminster Assembly were becoming dominant by the turn of the century. Richard Baxter had a decisive influence on this change.
Theological Education
A further factor contributing to the change within English Presbyterianism was its system of training theological students. After the Great Ejection the Puritans were excluded from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In order to secure a succession of Gospel ministers they set up “Dissenting Academies”. Whilst these institutions were in the hands of the older ministers4 they were a blessing to the churches. When the institutions passed into the hands of a younger generation they became a significant factor in the growth of Arian and anti-confessional doctrines. The Academies are renowned for liberalising the curriculum of higher education. Their significance from the view point of the history of doctrine is the toleration which many tutors displayed towards divergent opinions.
Philip Doddridge’s tutor was John Jennings of Kibworth. Jennings was against subscriptions to confessions. He insisted “that the Scriptures are the only genuine standard of faith”. Doddridge described Jennings’ teaching as follows: “I have almost finished Mr Jennings’ system of divinity and the better I am acquainted with it the more I admire it. He does not entirely accord with the system of any particular body of men; but is sometimes a Calvinist, sometimes a Remonstrant, sometimes a Baxterian, and sometimes a Socinian, as truth and evidence determine him . . . He furnishes us with all kinds of authors upon every subject, without advising us to skip over the heretical passages for fear of infection. It is evidently his main care to inspire us with sentiments of catholicism, and to arm us against the zeal which is not according to knowledge”5. Doddridge declined a call to an important London congregation due to his views on creedal subscription. He explained his position to a correspondent in these terms, “I thought it very probable that I should be required to subscribe, which I was resolved never to do; for as I had been accustomed, under my dear tutor, to that latitude of expression which the scriptures indulge and recommend, I could not resolve upon tying myself up in trammels, and obliging myself to talk in the phrases of assembly’s catechism which Mr Some told me would been necessary there”6.
Doddridge was later to run an Academy himself, his lectures were transcribed and circulated among his students in shorthand in order to keep them from the eyes of orthodox ministers among whom they had an “evil reputation”. The result of Doddridge’s labours are plain from the following statistics, “. . . of the fifty-nine former pupils of Doddridge known to be in the Dissenting ministry in 1772 no fewer than fifty-three are found among these liberal minded men who in that year signed the petition for the relaxation of subscription to the thirty-nine articles; of the remaining six, four did not sign because they were Unitarians of the Priestleyan school who wanted a much more radical reform, while two remained to champion the cause of Calvinistic and Athanasian orthodoxy”7.
Intellectual Climate
Far reaching intellectual movements came to the fore in the Restoration era. This was the age in which Cambridge Platonists, Latitudinarians and Deists all flourished. If Isaac Newton was the creator of scientific physics, John Locke was the creator of scientific philosophy. Beyond the influence of any other man, John Locke8 was the moving spirit of the eighteenth century. Locke was an empiricist and held that ideas are to be tested by the senses. A proposition is known to be either true or false only by testing it with experience. Locke taught that if a man begins with self evident facts and self evident propositions there is no reason why he should not reach results in the religious sphere as reliable as those in the scientific sphere.
Locke believed he could provide evidence for the existence of God that was equal to mathematical certainty. Unfortunately this idea of God, like the God deduced from Newton’s premises was just the postulate of a series of deductions. He lacked the glory and the lofty splendour of the God of the Puritans.
Locke’s contribution to our narrative is the influence of his treatise The reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures (1695). This book served as a catalyst for the thought of eighteenth century English Presbyterian ministers. Locke believed, as the title of his book made clear, the Christianity that was reasonable was the one “delivered in the scriptures”. This clearly advertised the fact, all apparent from its pages, that the Christianity delivered in the scriptures was very different from the Christianity delivered in the Creeds of the Church. Locke’s book made the point that no more was laid down in scripture than belief in Jesus as the Messiah and that controversy could be allayed by acceptance of this minimum belief which had satisfied the first apostles.
From the Reasonableness of Christianity Locke went on to draw up a series of paraphrases of the Pauline epistles. His central principle is illustrated again by the title, An Essay for the Understanding of St Paul’s Epistles, by consulting St Paul himself. The paraphrases were intended to consign the “Commentators” and the “Puritan lecture” to oblivion by appealing to St Paul himself. Before he died he had worked through the first five Pauline epistles. Locke’s project was completed by two leading minds among the Presbyterians, James Pierce, whose heretical teaching on the Person of Christ sparked the Salters Hall Controversy, and George Benson who was a protege of Edmund Calamy. Locke’s writings, drove a wedge between the Bible and the Creeds and were the staple diet of the more “progressive” Dissenting Academies. Philip Doddridge commenting on the paraphrases says: “I find Locke of far greater service to me than any of the rest. I own I cannot fall in with his exposition of many particular texts; but I have very little to except against his general scheme, and his division of the matter, which seems to me to throw additional light upon the whole”9. The Lockean principle of the sufficiency of Scripture was the basis of the Dissenting stand against subscription of man-made creeds. In the first part of the century Locke’s philosophy was the guiding spirit of the Arians. This is seen in the title of one of the treatises that sought to undermine the doctrine of the Trinity — Samuel Clarke’s, Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity.
In 1709 Edmund Calamy visited the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and sat as an honoured guest next to the Moderator. An item of business that came up was the case of a minister accused by the Synod of Aberdeen of being “deficient in knowledge and unsound in principles”. After a gruelling examination, in which some of his answers were weak, the Assembly were at a loss how to proceed. The Moderator whispered in Calamy’s ears and asked him what his apprehensions were. Calamy responded by saying “. . . we in England should reckon this way of proceeding, the inquisition revived”. Commenting on this incident Roger Thomas observes, “When Calamy disparaged the inquisitorial procedure of the Scottish Assembly it will be noted that he was passing on from the Lockean toleration outside a given worshipping society to the more exciting toleration of differences within the same society. He was not just criticising the Scottish Assembly, he was criticising the traditional Presbyterian discipline of recalcitrant individuals10.
Church discipline
A fourth factor that made the English Presbyterian Church of the early eighteenth century particularly vulnerable to doctrinal error was its practical disuse of Presbyterian church courts and church discipline. The church had no control over the Academies which were responsible for ministerial training. Both tutors and pupils were not directly subject to church courts. The Presbyterian churches at the local level were in the hands of the minister and a few trustees. There were no Church courts outside the individual congregations. Eighteenth century English Presbyterianism had all the disadvantages of the independent system of church government. Outside a congregation there was no check on heterodoxy.
The background to the Salters Hall controversy
The debate that occurred at Salters Hall11 is important as it appears to have been the first instance in which a largely Presbyterian body weakened its commitment to the theology of the Westminster Confession. This was achieved not by the modification of the Confession, but by the refusal of ministers to subscribe to it as the confession of their faith. The decision at Salters Hall did two things; it made clear the changed climate of opinion which had taken place in England and gave an impetus to the non-subscribing movement in Ireland, Scotland and America.
Because of the fragmented state of English Presbyterianism following the Act of Toleration records are not available to chart the shift in theological opinion that was taking place. Details of a few instances have survived and they indicate the transition did not occur without opposition. In 1711, some neighbouring ministers boycotted the ordination of Samuel Bourn the Elder at Crook, near Kendal, because he refused to subscribe to the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Bourn later published his own modification of the Catechism12. In 1716 Daniel Wilcox, the Presbyterian Minister at Monkwell Street, London, dismissed his assistant, Henry Read, for Arminianism. Wilcox demanded his subscription to doctrinal articles; Read refused. The London ministers took up his case and advised Wilcox against dismissing him; advice which Wilcox did not accept. Later in the year Read was ordained by several leading Presbyterian ministers one of which was Edmund Calamy. Wilcox defended his action in an anonymous pamphlet with the title The duty of holding fast a form of sound words (1717). For him the form of sound words was the Westminster Confession, one purpose of which was “to be a test of truth and error”. To the question “Is not the Bible . . . test sufficient?”, his reply was that “a man may be a Protestant or Papist, Calvinist or Arminian, and no discovery made of him”. “The calling any to the Assembly’s Confession of Faith”, he added, “we by no means take to be a calling of them from the scripture but a putting them to trial in what sense they understand scripture”13.
The writings of Locke and Clarke had done their work and by 1716 the time had gone when such arguments would go unchallenged. It was only a matter of time before there would be a serious conflict between the old school Westminster men and those who had imbibed the new principles. When the conflict came it was a conflagration. The spark that set the flame alight came from students at the Exeter Academy. This was a Dissenting Academy maintained by the Exeter Presbyterian Minister Joseph Hallet, a colleague of James Pierce.
In the early part of the century the Trinitarian controversy had been renewed by men whose published works, either leant in an Arian direction or insisted on the subordination of the Son to the Father. Leaders in this movement were, Thomas Emlyn, the Pastor of a dissenting church in Lowestoft who later became Joseph Boyse colleague in the pastorate of the Presbyterian church in Dublin; William Whiston, Professor of mathematics at Cambridge, a Boyle lecturer and successor to Sir Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor, and Samuel Clarke, Rector of St James Piccadilly and the author of The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712). Clarke concluded that though the Bible does reveal a God in Trinity, a supreme worship and honour should be given only to the Father. Locke had taught dissenters to test revelation by reason, not by the theological systems of Athanasius and Calvin. When they did so they not infrequently came up with unorthodox answers.
Among the first Presbyterians to be influenced by the views of Whiston and Clarke was James Pierce. Before going to Exeter, Pierce had held a pastorate in Cambridge, where he became acquainted with Whiston. He was led by reading Clarke’s book to the opinion that he must either “part with some beloved opinions, or else quit my notion of the authority of Holy Scriptures”14. Initially Pierce kept his doubts about the doctrine of the Trinity to himself. Towards the end of 1716 it became known in Exeter that “at the house of a layman who boarded some of Mr Hallets’ pupils, the divinity of Christ was disputed”15. One of the students let it be known he had been converted to Clarke’s views. As a result, Pierce came under suspicion and was asked to preach on the deity of Christ. In order to foil the orthodox in the congregation he delivered the crucial words of his sermon so fast they could not take down his words. In September 1718, the Devon and Cornwall Association of Ministers — the Exeter Assembly — following a stormy debate demanded that every member should declare his position on the Trinity either in the words of the first article of the Church of England or in the words of the answers to the fifth and sixth questions of the Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism16 or, if they preferred it, in words of their own. Hallet made his confession in words selected from Scripture, Pierce stated he believed “the Son and Holy Ghost to be divine persons, but subordinate to the Father”17.
Pierce first excited suspicion when he stopped the practice of singing the doxology after the Psalms had been sung in public worship. The doxology ascribed glory to Father, Son and Holy Ghost as one God. He gave his reason for this omission, not his opposition to the Trinity, but that he objected to singing anything other than the inspired Psalms without human additions. The excitement in Exeter continued to increase. It was reported Hallet’s students were becoming Arians. Members of the Church of England forgetting that fellow Anglicans Whiston and Clarke were leaders in the movement, said to Dissenters whom they met in the streets, “You denied your Church first, and now you are denying your Saviour”18.
In November, the committee of thirteen laymen, responsible for the financial affairs of the Presbyterian meetings in Exeter, asked the city’s four Presbyterian Ministers for a statement confirming their orthodoxy. When they got no satisfaction from three of the four ministers and at a loss what to do next, they appealed to the Presbyterian ministers in London for advice.
Pierce, who could see trouble ahead, wrote to London to try to save the situation. One of the men to whom he wrote was John Shute Barrington MP, afterwards the first Viscount Barrington. Though Barrington’s mother was a daughter of the Puritan Joseph Caryl, he was an advocate of the newer more tolerant ideas. He had been a friend of John Locke and was still a devoted disciple. When the controversy broke in Exeter one of its consequences was to imperil a Bill that Barrington was piloting through Parliament designed to repeal the legislation which prevented Dissenters holding office in central and local government. The opposition to the Bill was led by men who insisted on a provision requiring subscription to Trinitarian orthodoxy. Barrington was, therefore, anxious to keep the dispute in Exeter as quiet as possible. To achieve his objective he drew up and submitted a paper of “Advices” to the London ministers. The central thrust of Barrington’s paper was, that if it became necessary to apply a test of orthodoxy, the test should be adherence to Scripture as the perfect and only rule of faith and not to any formula of merely human composition.
The London ministers met at Salters Hall on the 19th and 24th of February 1719. After protracted debates the issue crystallised into whether a clause19 containing a declaration of the doctrine of the Trinity should be contained in the advice sent to Exeter. The old way of taking a division was for those against the motion to go into the gallery, whilst those in favour stayed in the body of the church. As the division proceeded slogans were bandied about. Those against subscription called out “you that are against persecution come upstairs”, whilst those on the other side cried, “you that are for the doctrine of the Trinity stay below”. When order was restored, it was found that those against the inclusion of a declaration on the doctrine of the Trinity had carried it by 57 votes to 53. The crucial decision had gone against subscription and in favour of the Baxterian concept of scripture sufficiency. Sir Joseph Jekyll, the Master of the Rolls and an interested onlooker, summed up the prevailing views in the words, “The Bible carried it by four”.
The aftermath
As a result of the Salters Hall controversy the London ministers split into two separate bodies over the issue of creedal subscription. R Tudur Jones observes, “In general, the tendency was for the younger ministers to be non-subscribers and the older men subscribers”20. Bishop Hoadly of Bangor, a Church of England liberal, rejoicing at the Salters Hall decision saying “it was the first convocation or assembly of divines, since the time of the apostles, that had carried a question of liberty”21.
The vote had no effect on events in Exeter. The trustees of the Presbyterian meeting houses, on the advice of orthodox local ministers, closed their doors on Pierce and Hallet. The leader and first moderator of the London subscribers was Thomas Bradbury. Among his distinguished supporters were William Tong and Daniel Mayo, both of whom were in the ranks of the thirteen non-conformist divines who completed, after his death, Matthew Henry’s commentary on the Bible. Edmund Calamy, Isaac Watts22 and David Neal did what so many others were to do in later controversies concerning creedal subscriptions, they kept out of the strife and by so doing aided the heterodox party.
Though the crucial division at Salters Hall was over the inclusion of a statement on the Doctrine of the Trinity, the real issue was not Arianism. Few of the London non-subscribers were Arians23. The real issue was that of subscription to creeds. This is made abundantly plain in the non-subscribing advice to Exeter; after condemning Arian doctrine and affirming their belief in the Trinity they go on to assert that no man should be condemned for refusing to sign a human creed as a test of orthodoxy. The underlying difference between the two parties was similar to that in Scotland during the Declaratory Act controversy, it was a semi-Arminian reaction against Calvinism and Calvinistic creeds.
Robert Woodrow, the indefatigable Scottish letter writer, in a letter to a correspondent in Ireland voiced the views of Scottish Calvinists, “I may be mistaken, but could never yet comprehend any plausible reason for non-subscribing, but some real dislike at the doctrine declared in the confession or articles to be subscribed”24.
William Chillingworth’s famous dictum, “The Bible, the Bible only the religion of protestants,” was actually a non-subscribing battle cry. Thomas Bradbury commenting on this so-called protestant principle observes, “… Tis strange that none of the Protestants should ever understand their own principle till now. ‘Tis well enough known how fast a desertion from the Church of Rome drew the nations into it; England, Scotland, France, Ireland, Poland, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and several more. These all agreed upon confessions of faith, that were drawn up by the divines of those different countries … And there was not one of ’em but what had the article of the Trinity, deliver’d in the words they thought the most convenient. So that ’tis very accountable, tho’ they were all Protestants, none of ’em should understand their common principle”25.
It was over the question of subscription to a creed that English Presbyterian began to fragment. The Salters Hall decision was a victory for laxity. Arianism soon got a foothold among the non-subscribers26 and this led to the virtual extinction of English Presbyterianism. The non-subscribers wanted complete freedom of religious inquiry and profession. By the end of the eighteenth century the term “Presbyterian” was equivalent, in England, to speculative liberty27.
The Unitarian view of the importance of Salters Hall is given by their leading historian Alexander Gordon “The rift of Salters Hall will be forever memorable; for then and there the future of the liberties of English Dissent was at high cost secured”. “The Salters Hall decision is viewed by Unitarians as the charter of their liberties; and properly so, for while it permitted a Trinitarian congregation to get rid of an Arian minister, it allowed a Unitarian congregation to exercise a similar right”28.
The drift to Arianism was the consequence of refusing to subscribe to the Westminster Confession and putting liberty of conscience in its place. A. H. Drysdale has described the characteristics of the two parties at Salters Hall, “Those who took the non-subscriber’s side could boast of greater learning, social status and culture in their ranks; but the old fashioned party (the subscribers) as their opponents considered them, included the more saintly and devotional of the ministers and people”29.
1 Thomas M’Crie, Annals of English Presbytery, London, 1872, p297.
2 For the historical background and analysis see: A.H. Drysdale, History of the Presbyterians in England, London, 1889, p345-542; C.G. Bolam, J. Goring, H.L. Short and R. Thomas, The English Presbyterians, London, 1968, p113-174; M.R. Watts, The Dissenters, Oxford, 1978, p263-393; H.W. Clark, The History of English Nonconformity, London, 1913, Vol II, p137-202; A.P.F. Sell, Presbyterianism in Eighteenth Century England: The doctrinal dimension, Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, Vol 4, p352-386.
3 Richard Baxter. Reliquiae Baxterianae Vol II p523 cited in H.R. Jones, The death of Presbyterianism in By Schisms rent asunder, papers read at the Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference, 1969, p37. For a recent assessment of Baxter’s strengths and weaknesses see Iain H. Murray, Richard Baxter — the Reluctant Puritan? in Advancing in Adversity, papers read at the Westminster Conference 1991, p1-24.
4 While tutors were men of the stature of John Flavel, Philip Henry, Thomas Doolittle, Richard Frankland and Theophilus Gale orthodoxy was preserved. The later history of these institutions makes depressing reading. See A.H. Drysdale, op cit p510-511, I. Parker, Dissenting Academies in England, Cambridge, 1914.
5 Philip Doddridge, Correspondence and Diary, Edited by J.D. Humphreys 1829-1831 Vol 1, p198, See Philip Doddridge, 1702-51. His contribution to English Religion, Edited by G.F. Nuttall, London, 1951, p132.
6 Correspondence, op cit, p335.
7 English Presbyterians, op cit, p195.
8 Locke was trained at Oxford whilst it was under Puritan control during the Vice Chancellorship of John Owen. See Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith, London, 1969, p61-64.
9 Correspondence, op cit, p428.
10 English Presbyterians op cit, p133.
11 On the Salters Hall Controversy see: Watt op cit, f371-382; English Presbyterians, op cit, p151-174; Roger Thomas, The Non-Subscription Controversy among Dissenters in 1719; the Salters Hall debate, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, (JEH), London, 1953 Vol IV, p162-186; F.J. Powicke, The Salters Hall Controversy, Congregational Historical Society Transactions, VII, no2, 1916, p110-124. The Salters Hall Synod was a meeting of the General body of protestant dissenting ministers. It was comprised of Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists. The Presbyterians were the largest body.
12 Sell, op cit, p365.
13 English Presbyterians, op cit, p152.
14 Watts, op cit, p374.
15 ibid
16 Article 1 of the Thirty Nine Articles states “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body parts or passions, of infinite power, wisdom and goodness, the Maker and Preserver of all things visible and invisible. And in the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power and eternity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” The answers to the fifth and sixth questions of the Shorter Catechism are, “There is but one only, the living and true God”. “There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same substance, equal in power and glory.”
17 Watts, op cit, p374, R.W. Dale, History of English Congregationalism, London, 1907, p533.
18 Dale, op cit, 533f.
19 The clause read, “That there are some errors in doctrine, that are sufficient foundation for the people to withdraw from the communion of their ministers holding such errors. That the denying of the true and proper divinity of the Son of God, viz that he is one God with the Father, is an error of that nature, contrary to Holy Scriptures and the common faith of the reformed churches”, cited in English Presbyterians, op cit, p160.
20 R. Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in England: 1662-1962, London, 1962, p137.
21 cited in Thomas JEH, op cit, p181.
22 M.R. Watts observes “As for Isaac Watts, he not only reached a Baxterian position in attempting to mitigate the rigours of Calvinism, but spent his last years worrying about the Trinity, praying almost despairingly that God show him “whether he be one pure and simple being or whether thou art a threefold deity”, op cit, p380-381 cf, A.P. Davis, Isaac Watts, London, 1948, p109-126 esp p121; C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, London, 1960, Vol II p423-428.
23 Isaac Watts in a letter to Cotton Mather writes “The subscribing ministers themselves do generally believe there are few of their brethren in London that are chargeable with this (i.e. entering into Dr Samuel Clarke’s scheme); perhaps there may be three or four of which they have suspicions, but there were above eighty (including Watts himself) that refused to subscribe”. Massachusetts Historical Society MS, 11 February 1720 cited in Thomas, JEH, op cit, p175.
24 Robert Woodrow, Correspondence, Edinburgh, 1843, Vol III p39, cited in Thomas, JEH, op cit, p183.
25 Thomas, JEH, op cit, p183.
26 Though Philip Doddridge was a congregationist he was a typical non-subscriber. When his Northampton congregation wish to expel one of its members accused of Arianism, Doddridge strongly protested. Men of this stamp were helpless in the face of heresy. See Nuitall, op cit, p149.
27 Liberty becomes progressively the badge of those Presbyterians who were moving firstly towards Arminianism and then to Arianism. The Presbyterian minister, answerable neither to Bishop or ecclesiastical court on the one hand nor to inquisitorial church meeting on the other, was at liberty to pursue error. He interpreted his commission “to teach whatever Christ commanded in light of the theology of Arminius, Arjus or even Socinius rather than Athanasius or Calvin”. See Watts, op cit, p379-380. For a summary of the latest history, which makes depressing reading see: Drysdale, op cit, p533-542, English Presbyterians, op cit, p169-174.
28 Cited in Sell, op cit, p384. See also Alexander Gordon, Heads of English Unitarian History, London, 1985, p34. Gordon was a major contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography.
29 Drysdale, op cit, p506.