The aim of the high church agitation in the 1690s for a convocation was to establish doctrinal discipline within the anglican church. When convocation met in 1701 the lower house produced censures on Toland's Christianity not mysterious and Burnet's Exposition of the thirty-nine articles.It was Francis Atterbury who insisted that Burnet's Exposition was heretical. He had long been critical of Burnet's views on the trinity and his erastian interpretation of English church history in his History of the reformation. And if Burnet's History was an attempt re-write English church history from the perspective of a latitudinarian, then his Exposition was its theological counterpart.It was assumed that the charges against Burnet were lost. But a copy of them has surfaced and it confirms that it was the connection between latitudinarians and dissent which led to the attack on Burnet. In his zeal to heal divisions within anglicanism and between anglicans and other protestants Burnet had introduced a ‘latitude and diversity of opinions’ which misrepresented true anglican doctrine. This was dangerous, because Burnet intended his Exposition as ‘a platform laid for Comprehension’ with the dissenters and other ‘Adversaries of our Church’. These included obvious heretics like socinians and the deist Toland.
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In the course of the 1690s and into the early eighteenth century a number of English divines and laymen became embroiled in a pamphlet war on the doctrine of the Trinity. It was a wide-ranging debate and its participants included Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Socinians, deists and Arians. Until recently, however, this controversy had received scant attention from historians. It is only within the last few years that an interest in the trinitarian controversy has emerged: a number of works have appeared on the more notable of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century anti-trinitarian thinkers, and J. C. D. Clark has pointed out the political implications of anti-trinitarian views. There is, nevertheless, one aspect of the trinitarian controversy which has remained relatively untouched, and that is the debate on the Trinity which raged within the Established Church.
Since 1689 two factions, the Latitudinarians and the High Church party, had been fighting an occasionally vicious war for control of the Church of England. The main sources of friction between them, which were connected, were orthodoxy and the place of the Protestant Dissenters in English religious life: the High Church party accused the Latitudinarians of heterodoxy and of downplaying the doctrinal differences between Anglicans and Dissenters in order to achieve a comprehension with the Dissenters. The occasional conformity controversy arose out of this ongoing feud. Between 1702 and 1704 three bills were introduced into the English House of Commons to prevent Dissenters from taking communion in an Anglican church often enough to qualify for public office. None of these bills passed in the House of Lords. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, and the other Latitudinarian bishops, were crucial to the failure of these bills and opposed them because they represented an attack on both comprehension and toleration, which they believed together formed the traditional policy of the Church of England towards Dissenters.
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