proved, and the moral is drawn. In the presence of so much fluctuating
teaching upon the abstruser points of the creeds was it not desirable to
abandon the pretence of a rounded system complete in every detail? Would
it not he better to simplify the faith--in other and familiar words, to
reduce the number of 'essentials'? In order to discover these
essentials, surely the inquirer must turn to the Bible, the record of
that miraculous revelation which was given to deliver man's unassisted
reason from the perils of ignorance and doubt. At the same time, man's
reason itself was a divine gift, and the Bible should be carefully and
rationally studied in order to gather its real message. As the fruit of
such study the Socinians not only propounded an Anti-trinitarian
doctrine derived from Scripture, but in particular emphasized the
arguments against the substitutionary atonement as presented in the
popular Augustinian scheme and philosophically expounded in Anselm's
_Cur Deus Homo_. Socinus himself must be credited with whatever force
belongs to these criticisms on the usual doctrine of the death of
Christ, and it may be fairly said that most of the objections advanced
in modern works on that subject are practically identical with those of
three centuries ago.

Now there is good reason for believing that towards the end of the
seventeenth century this Socinian literature really attracted much
attention in England, and probably with considerable effect. But as a
matter of fact no English translation of any part of it was made before
John Bidle's propagandist activity in the middle of the century, and we
have the explicit testimony of Bidle himself and most of the earlier
Unitarians that they were not led into their heresy by foreign books. It
was the Bible alone that made them unorthodox.

A famous illustration of this is the case of _John Milton_ (1608-74). In