The publication of A friendly debate betwixt two neighbours late in 1668 or early in 1669 was a shock for English Dissenters. The timing, the mocking and abusive tone, and the assumed authorship all caused offence. Samuel Rolle argued that the book was a deliberate attempt to scupper moves towards an accommodation between conformists and Nonconformists, protested against ‘your traducing and slandering of a great body of men’, and admitted that ‘It almost astonisheth me that a man reputed so sober and modest as you have formerly been should commit such outrages’.Footnote ² But worst of all was Simon Patrick's assault on Nonconformist divinity: ‘your ministers may be antinomians and yet not know it’. He had claimed that Nonconformist insistence on justification by faith alone led them to denigrate good works, and their failure to preach moral obligations was the root of disobedience in Church and State. In Patrick's dialogue, ‘Nonconformist’ distinguishes the spiritual preaching of dissenting ministers from ‘legal preaching among you’ and ‘moral teaching’ – to which ‘Conformist’ responds,

Dissenting ministers had led people astray: ‘For they taught men first to despise sober and plain doctrine which teaches them their duty toward God and their neighbour, entertaining them with finer speculations of pretended gospel-mysteries and manifestations.’Footnote ³

A friendly debate caused a furore, in churches, conventicles, coffee-houses and colleges – ‘where they say they may be better without Aristotle than without your book’: it was reprinted four times in 1669, and Patrick had to defend himself against accusations of Socinianism.Footnote ⁴ The charge that solifidianism might be antinomian and lead to sectarian excess was not new,Footnote ⁵ but Patrick had reworked it into a thunderous attack on Nonconformist religion in general. It had to be refuted. The most acute and effective of the responses to Patrick was by Samuel Rolle, who focused on clearing Dissenters from the dangerous allegation of antinomianism, linking them to the extremism of civil war sects: ‘The generality of N[on] C[onformist] divines are not antinomians, whatsoever you think of them.’ They taught that justifying faith was accompanied by good works, and ‘They preach morality as well as you, as namely the necessity of living justly and soberly, only it may be they say more to men about living also godlily.’ Rolle contested what he rightly took to be Patrick's polemical strategy:

A humble apology for non-conformists similarly denied the charge of antinomianism: ‘the Presbyterians and others used to declare against antinomianism and to preach repentance towards God as well as faith in our Lord Jesus Christ’. They teach justification by faith, ‘yet are they not antinomians’. Like Rolle, this author too asserted that ‘The Presbyterian and Congregational Nonconformists do profess to agree in the main doctrine with the Church of England contained in her articles of religion.’Footnote ⁷ They were not dangerous radicals, but mainstream English Protestants.

The Congregationalist guru John Owen himself objected to Patrick's sneering tone, but especially to his damaging claim ‘that the Nonconformists under pretence of teaching mysteries and grace do neglect the pressing of moral duties’. ‘For any man to pretend, to write, plead that this they do not, but indeed do discountenance morality and the duties of it, is to take a liberty of saying what he pleases for his own purpose, when thousands are ready from the highest experience to contradict him.’Footnote ⁸ Patrick retorted with the standard conformist charges of hypocrisy and disloyalty: ‘if they were such friends to morality as he would have us believe’, he snapped, they would repent of their disloyalty.Footnote ⁹

Why had Simon Patrick mounted such an intemperate attack on Dissenters? The author of An humble apology asked

Rolle knew it was deliberate: ‘A purpose of union and accommodation betwixt C. [sic] and N. C. seemed to be as it were in the publishing, who thought that you of all men would have stepped in to have forbidden the banns and to have showed cause to the contrary.’ And in a new preface to the sixth edition of A friendly debate in 1684, Patrick admitted that he had written to oppose ‘that project of comprehension’ and his book ‘came in the way of that and lay cross to it’.Footnote ¹¹ When both politicians and churchmen were discussing possible concessions to Dissenters, as they had been in 1668, Patrick had tried to scotch such proposals. But why had he particularly assailed Nonconformist religion? Why had he argued that their divinity itself was distinctive and dangerous? Several writers had argued against comprehension or toleration for Nonconformists, but they had cited other objections: Dissenters were disobedient and untrustworthy; comprehension would bring division into the Church of England; toleration threatened social cohesion; and Nonconformists had only recently been rebels: ‘these men of God are in truth but men of war’.Footnote ¹²

Patrick's claim that Nonconformists had a different theology was surely a calculated response to their assertion of a shared Protestant identity with the Church of England. A key argument in the Dissenting campaign for comprehension and toleration was that they believed the same doctrines as conformists, so they should not be penalised because of scruples over inessentials. Owen protested against any refusal of toleration: ‘What though they are every way sound in the faith and cordially embrace all the doctrine taught formerly in the Church of England?’ Was the Church of God still to be shattered over minor matters? ‘We have no new faith to declare, no new doctrine to teach, no private opinions to divulge, no point or truth do we profess, no not one, which hath not been delivered, taught, divulged and esteemed as the common doctrine of the Church of England ever since the Reformation.’Footnote ¹³ John Corbet insisted that ‘The doctrine of faith and sacraments by law established is heartily received by the Nonconformists.’Footnote ¹⁴ A few sober queries asserted that some conformist clergy were Arminians, Pelagians, Socinians and Erastians, but ‘the Nonconformists differ in nothing from the 39 Articles of the Church of England but in ceremonies and discipline’.Footnote ¹⁵

The Presbyterian John Humfrey wanted ‘a bridge, not for any to depart enemies from us but for those who are brethren (of the same religion, differing only in some circumstances) to come over to you into union and concord with you’.Footnote ¹⁶ But conformists (or rather some conformists) countered this seductive proposition by denying that Dissenters were ‘of the same religion’, claiming that their divinity led to disobedience, as had been proved in the 1640s and 1650s. Prominent among them was Samuel Parker, one of Archbishop Sheldon's chaplains, and his vitriolic Discourse of ecclesiastical politie caused even more fuss than Patrick's Friendly debate: ‘insolence and impudence’, ‘envy and fury’, ‘malice and madness’, ‘intemperate railings and profane satires’ cried Nonconformists in disgust.Footnote ¹⁷

After nearly four hundred pages of argument, Parker's conclusion is succinct: ‘I have proved the absolute necessity of governing men's consciences and persuasions in matters of religion and the unavoidable dangers of tolerating or keeping up religious differences.’Footnote ¹⁸ Much of his reasoning is general, but it is buttressed in chapter ii by an account of the particular danger arising from the religion of ‘our dissenting zealots'. He claimed that true religion was the practice of moral virtue, which was identical with divine grace, but that Dissenters emphasised grace above (or even against) virtue, and so undermined morality and threatened social order. ‘So destructive of all true and real goodness is the very religion of those men that are wont to set grace at odds with virtue, and are so far from making them the same that they make them inconsistent.’ This was, in essence, a more sophisticated version of Patrick's case, that conformists taught Christians their duty but Nonconformists confused them with spiritual speculation: ‘we express the precepts and duties of the gospel in plain and intelligible terms, whilst they trifle them away by childish metaphors and allegories’. In short, ‘all religion must of necessity be resolved into enthusiasm or morality’: Dissent was for enthusiasm, the Church for morality.Footnote ¹⁹

One Nonconformist writer saw exactly what Parker and others were up to: to forestall concessions to Dissenters, they ‘bestir themselves, preach, print invectives against their Christian brethren, heap slanders, calumnies and reproaches upon them, and not content to brand them as very fools, sots and madmen they represent them all in general enemies to government, anti-monarchists and whatnot’.Footnote ²⁰ Owen too protested against this sort of attack, and against Parker's reduction of religion to the promotion of moral virtue – ‘there is nothing in it that is constitutive of Christian religion as such at all’. The original doctrine of the Church of England, ‘the glory of the English Reformation’, had been abandoned by men like Parker, and ‘I cannot but grieve continually to see the acknowledged doctrine of it deserted, its ancient principles and practices derided, its pristine zeal despised by some who make advantage of its outward constitution.’ Owen repeated the charge later, contrasting the apostasy of churchmen with the Protestant orthodoxy of Dissenters: ‘we cannot conform to Arminianism, Socinianism on the one hand or popery on the other, with what new or specious pretences soever they may be blended.’Footnote ²¹

Owen had published anonymously, but his authorship was immediately spotted (as that of Patrick and of Parker had been), and George Vernon, a Gloucestershire rector, mounted a vituperative personal strike against ‘this Cromwellian doctor’ and his record in politics and religion. Owen remained a danger, he claimed, citing his theology of justification, imputed righteousness and the perseverance of justified saints: ‘Now pray Sir, tell me whether at the bottom of this doctrine does not lie all the confusion and blood, persecution and wars which we have seen and might again have seen in this nation had not authority secured itself and us against the spreading of it?’ The ‘enthusiastic Owenistical spirit’ was a threat to the nation, and ‘the Owenists’ had to be bridled by law. Owen was defended in An expostulatory letter, to which Owen himself added an explanation of his doctrine of the imputation of Christ's righteousness to sinners: ‘This principle I own, and despise his impotent, ignorant and ridiculous defamation of it.’Footnote ²² Parker responded to Owen's assault on his Discourse with further slights on Owen's career as ‘the great bell-whether of disturbance and sedition’ and condemnation of ‘this naughty godliness’ that made ‘moral goodness the greatest let to conversion’, ‘Than which, I affirm, there is no blasphemy more grossly false and wicked.’Footnote ²³ His refutation of Owen's accusation of Socinianism and popery was firm: ‘Do we but press to an imitation of the life of Christ, that is enough to brand us for Socinians. Do we urge the absolute necessity of good works or an holy life (for that is the same thing) as an indispensible condition of our acceptance with God, what can we be but a papist?’Footnote ²⁴

The charges to which Parker had objected were given some substance by Owen's ally Robert Ferguson, in an even-tempered and scholarly consideration of grace and virtue. He compared assertions by Parker with the words of Socinian writers, to show ‘from whom such notions are derived that are with so much confidence obtruded of late upon us’. He did not specifically accuse Parker of Socinianism, but the point was clear enough. ‘I shall irritate no man, only recommend those who desire further confirmation in this matter to such who have debated the Socinian controversies.’ As Owen before him, Ferguson contended that ‘Morality doth not comprehend the whole of practical religion’ and ‘to swallow up the whole of religion in morality seems a plain renouncing of the gospel’.Footnote ²⁵

Meanwhile, one of the most substantial critiques of Dissenting divinity came not from a conformist but a (reluctant) Nonconformist. Richard Baxter had first strayed from Reformed orthodoxy in his Aphorismes of justification in 1649, and he had defended his views through the 1650s. After a decade of silence on the issue, Baxter stepped into the new dispute in 1670 with his substantial exposition of The life of faith. Embedded in this practical account of the Christian's life of faith was an assault on the version of justification, imputation and free grace taught by Owen and the high Calvinists, characterised by Baxter as antinomianism. He listed fifty-eight ‘pernicious or dangerous errors’: ‘Take heed of all the antinomian doctrines before recited which, to extol the empty name and image of free grace, do destroy the true principles and motives of holiness and obedience.’ Baxter had, in effect, provided theological detail for the case that Simon Patrick had outlined, that preaching solifidianism undervalued good works and undermined Christ's law – ‘This antinomian fancy destroyeth religion.’Footnote ²⁶

Further theological argument came in a Latin treatise by the young George Bull, which itself became a cause célèbre as the most explicit rejection so far of justification by faith alone by a conformist. His ‘timely antidote against this solifidianism or rather libertinism’ argued that from the version of justification taught by Luther ‘and most of our own divines after his time’ came ‘by strict and regular deduction the execrable tenets of the antinomians, libertines, Familists and others of the same class, which those good men perhaps never dreamed of’. Bull conceded that most Protestant divines held a version of justification by faith alone, but he claimed that his view was compatible with Reformed confessions and the Thirty-Nine Articles as interpreted through the Homilies: ‘that henceforth no man of the refuse of the antinomians may seek patronage for his dreadful heresy in the most holy teaching of our Church’.Footnote ²⁷ For Calvinists, conformist or Nonconformist, this was an outrageous perversion of the truths of the English Reformation: it was met by angry denunciations in print, in sermons and in university lectures, and Bishop Morley of Winchester issued a pastoral charge forbidding his clergy to read or preach on Bull's Harmonia.Footnote ²⁸

For our consideration of the polemical war, the most interesting immediate responses to Bull came from Charles Gataker, rector of Hoggeston in Buckinghamshire and son of the great Thomas Gataker. Charles Gataker circulated a manuscript to the bishops decrying Bull's book as ‘pernicious, heretical and contrary to the decrees of the Church of England and of all other reformed Churches’, and sent a critical commentary to Bishop Nicholson, accusing Bull of Socinianism. He then published his late father's Antidote against error, with his own additional material. As a Calvinist conformist, Gataker was concerned not only to uphold solifidian theology as a central tenet of the reformed Church of England, but also to free the doctrine from any alleged association with antinomian and sectarian radicalism. It was unreasonable, he declared, that ‘the defence of an important point of Christianity, common to men of different persuasions’ should be suspected, ‘as if he that defends the justification of a sinner by faith only must needs be confederate with rebels and schismatics in denying obedience and submission to the sacred power in Church and state, which are God's immediate ordinances’.Footnote ²⁹

Gataker's intervention had revealed the complexity of the ‘theological wars’. Patrick, Parker, Vernon and Bull had between them elided solifidianism, antinomianism and nonconformity, suggesting that the doctrine was dangerous and held only by schismatics. Gataker and, behind the scenes, Calvinist bishops and academics contested this. It had seemed that the attack on justification by faith alone had official backing. Rolle had complained of difficulty in getting his Sober answer published, whereas Patrick had ‘so formidable a second as public authority to back and countenance you in what you write’.Footnote ³⁰ A friendly debate was licensed by Thomas Tomkins, one of Archbishop Sheldon's chaplains, Parker himself was a chaplain, and Bull's Harmonia was also licensed by Tomkins – having been refused a licence by the vice-chancellor of Oxford. Gataker's book, however, was licensed by Robert Grove, chaplain to Bishop Henchman of London. But Gataker had not named Bull, and thereafter attacks on Bull from within the Church of England were confined to the decent obscurity of a learned language. Rather, the public assertion of justification by faith alone continued to come from Nonconformists – Obadiah Grew, William Bridge and Peter Sterry.Footnote ³¹

The next significant assault on Dissenting divinity came from Edward Fowler, at this point a Bedfordshire curate. In The principles and practices of certain moderate divines, Fowler declared the doctrine of imputed righteousness ‘antinomian’, defended those conformists ‘accused of preaching up only a moral righteousness’, and advanced a version of justification that combined faith and works.Footnote ³² More focused on the issues that concern us here was Fowler's follow-up in 1671, The design of Christianity – that ‘the making of us holy, as it was the business of our saviour's whole life, so was it also the great end and design of his death’. Christ came to make men good and obedience to him was a condition of justification, but solifidian teaching deluded men that they could be saved through Christ's merit without effort of their own – hence ‘the dangerous error of antinomianism’. Until this was recognised, ‘we may never hope to outlive or to see the least abatement of that gross superstition, fanaticism, and enthusiasm, or those mad enormities and most impious practices which have now for a very long time sullied … the glory of the Church of Christ’. Fowler's aim, he explained later, had been ‘to endeavour the undermining and subversion of those principles which have so fatal an influence and that tend to make those who embrace them extremely troublesome to the Church, ill subjects and ill neighbours, but most of all injurious to their own souls’.Footnote ³³

Again, Baxter leapt into someone else's fight – responding to complaints that Fowler and others ‘greatly obscure or drown the whole doctrine of our justification and adoption and of Christ's satisfaction and imputed righteousness’. His endorsement of Fowler's position was incomplete, but he turned it against the solifidians: ‘[I]t is not to be denied or hid that more than downright antinomians have so ill expounded the points of Christ's suretyship … as hath proved the great occasion of some men running into the contrary error.’Footnote ³⁴ One among these ‘antinomians’ was John Bunyan, who now published a furious attack on Fowler and his ‘cursed, blasphemous book’. ‘You Sir, a pretended minister of the word, so vilely expose to public view the rottenness of your heart in principles diametrically opposite to the simplicity of the gospel of Christ.’ Fowler's ‘Socinian compliances’ and ‘papistical Quakerism’ were contrary to the Thirty-Nine Articles and ‘fundamental truths of the Christian religion’. Fowler's reply, in Dirt wipt off, was abusive and dismissive of Bunyan: ‘he is as rank an antinomian as ever fouled paper’.Footnote ³⁵

Some writers were afraid that these disputes between fellow-Protestants were getting out of hand. The Presbyterian Thomas Jacombe warned ‘my reverend brethren in the ministry’ against the influence of Socinianism, but sought to reconcile justification by faith and by works: ‘[I]f you consider them materially and fundamentally they are one and the same.’Footnote ³⁶ Humfrey tried for The middle way between free grace and conditional justification, though he cautioned that the doctrine of imputed righteousness could lead to ‘the evil and danger of libertinism and antinomianism’. But he soon wondered whether ‘it were better to let pious men alone to such apprehensions as they have imbibed’.Footnote ³⁷ Baxter listed ‘evidences of our real concord’, lest any think ‘that our differences in the point of justification by faith or works are greater than indeed they are’.Footnote ³⁸ On the conformist side the Calvinist Francis Fullwood warned conformists against giving any impression of Socinianism and Nonconformists against using alleged Socinianism as an excuse for separation.Footnote ³⁹ John Sharp argued that ‘those controversies’ between Protestants ‘concerning faith and justification and the necessity of good works to salvation, and imputed righteousness and the difference between virtue and grace, with some other’ were not as serious as some thought.Footnote ⁴⁰ But ‘those controversies’ were about to get a whole lot worse.

William Sherlock's Discourse concerning the knowledge of Jesus Christ (1674) had its origin in a meeting of several conformist London clergy, where it was decided that each should write a short, popular tract on subjects in dispute, ‘as about the knowledge of Christ, faith, justification, repentance, mysteries, temptations, desertions, etc’.Footnote ⁴¹ In the event, the only work to appear was Sherlock's Discourse, with an imprimatur from Samuel Parker, and it was neither short nor, in two senses, popular. It was a frontal, no holds barred assault on Dissenting divinity and devotion. Nonconformist divines had, Sherlock claimed, invented a religion of union with Christ's person which ‘undermines the fundamental design of the gospel’. For by this union Christ's righteousness was imputed to sinners in their justification, a doctrine which ‘destroys the necessary obligations to holiness and obedience for the future, and so thrusts holiness quite out of the Christian religion’. The key text was Owen's 1657 Of communion with God the Father, Sonne and Holy Ghost, which Sherlock dissected (or misrepresented) and ridiculed, accusing Owen of ‘as downright antinomianism as ever Dr Crisp or Saltmarsh vented’.Footnote ⁴²

Owen was furious that a book of ‘popular edification’, written almost twenty years earlier, had been dragged into contention, ‘to cavil at my writings and to load my person with reproaches’. He was equally outraged by Sherlock's ‘doctrinal principles’ – ‘wild, uncouth, extravagant and contrary to the common faith of Christians, being all of them traduced and some of them transcribed from the writings of the Socinians’. The divinity that Sherlock scorns is ‘the avowed doctrine in general of the Church wherein he lives and which hath in the parts of it been asserted and defended by the greatest and most learned prelates thereof’, citing bishops from Jewel to Prideaux. Sherlock and others were ‘reproaching the doctrine of Nonconformists, … when they are all of them the avowed doctrines of all the reformed Churches and of this of England in particular’.Footnote ⁴³ Henry Hickman made the same charges of Socinianism and deviation from the doctrines of the Church of England, as did Edward Polhill, Vincent Alsop, Rolle and Ferguson – ‘Though to do him right’, Ferguson complained, ‘he is so far from being singular in it that he hath not only the Pelagians, Socinians and the writer of the Defence and continuation of the ecclesiastical polity, but the doughty Mr Hobbes for his associates.’Footnote ⁴⁴

Alsop recognised that Patrick, Parker, Sherlock and others had raised the stakes between conformists and Nonconformists:

Their objective was, he thought, to widen the differences between Protestants: ‘Some I perceive are hugely afraid lest differences should be accommodated, … and therefore fearing these smaller bones of contention would not set the world together by the ears long they have thrown more considerable ones before us to entail contentions upon posterity and propagate divisions to eternity.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Ferguson too noted that ‘whilst these new doctrines stand propagated under the countenance and security of an imprimatur, there is little likelihood that the heats and raptures between them and the Dissenting brethren should be extinguished or made up’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Rolle, however, tried to play down differences, and to isolate Sherlock and ‘a new sort of Protestants, to be called (if there were any besides yourself) Socinian-Popish-Protestants’. Sherlock had ‘greatly displeased both friends and foes, orthodox conformists as well as Nonconformists’. And in Justification justified, Rolle set out a moderate position, stressing both ‘free grace’ and ‘sincere obedience’: ‘By taking care of the latter we shall arm ourselves against antinomians and libertines, of the former against papists and Socinians, etc.’Footnote ⁴⁷

Sherlock's Defence and continuation was a pugnacious response to these criticisms: he argued that his views were in line with Article xi of the Thirty-Nine, dismissed accusations of Socinianism, and accused his critics of antinomianism. ‘What a blessed change has my book wrought in the Doctor [Owen]! He is now mightily concerned for the honour and reputation of the bishops and Church … Who could ever have hoped for this, who had known the Doctor in the blessed times of Reformation?’ He rejected the charge of ‘Socinianizing’: ‘I do heartily declare that I am no Socinian, and that I do not know any divine of the Church of England who can reasonably be suspected of that heresy.’ But the antinomianism of his enemies could not be doubted. Their doctrine of imputation ‘is the foundation of antinomianism’; their use of the person of Christ ‘is the great mystery of antinomianism’; those who promise justification without repentance ‘are downright antinomians’; and such errors are held by ‘Dr Owen and Dr Crisp and the rest of the antinomians’.Footnote ⁴⁸ And the merchant William Allen's defence of Sherlock averred that it was from this doctrine of imputation ‘that antinomianism took its first rise among us in this nation, and Ranterism also out of that’.Footnote ⁴⁹

The controversy over Sherlock's views was reanimated by Thomas Danson's mischievous Friendly debate between Satan and Sherlock, in which ‘Sherlock’ uses arguments from his book to convince the gloomily Calvinist ‘Satan’ that he is not damned. ‘Sherlock’ assures Satan ‘Do not trouble your head about reconciling my positions with the Church of England's, as long as I have an imprimatur.’ But Danson comments that ‘The only thing that may seem wanting to brand the Sherlockians with the name of Socinians, and so of more refined Mahometans, is an explicit denial of the godhead of Christ.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Sherlock's Answer protested that ‘I have been assaulted all along with no other weapons but lies and slanders and malicious insinuations, but then it was done with a demure pretence of religion and zeal for God, but Mr Danson has dealt honestly and drawn aside the curtain and showed the world that Satan stood behind to prompt them.’Footnote ⁵¹ An anonymous Vindication of Mr Sherlock and his principles (with an imprimatur from Sheldon's chaplain) also complained of ‘malicious calumnies and reproaches’, with digs against ‘J. O. (two terrifying letters, the like are not to be found in all the ABC)’.Footnote ⁵² Poor Robin's answer adopted a high moral tone, advising Danson ‘Not to suffer blind furious zeal to consume all his charity, nor think every man that dissents from him an atheist, a Mahometan, or subverter of the gospel.’Footnote ⁵³

Meanwhile, in 1674, Owen had picked up other issues touched on by Patrick, Parker, Fowler and Sherlock: the Holy Spirit, grace and moral virtue, and the errors ‘revived among us by a crew of Socinianized Arminians’. Owen derided the clamour for moral preaching as a tactic to discredit Dissenting divinity: ‘I wish it be more out of love to virtue itself and a conviction of its usefulness than out of a design to cast contempt on the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the gospel, as it is declared by the faithful dispensers of it.’Footnote ⁵⁴ William Clagett's response to Owen ‘was written principally for their sake who have been made to believe that the ministers of the Church of England have departed from the scriptures in their doctrine concerning the operations and grace of the holy spirit’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Humfrey, though not one of ‘the Owenists’, defended Owen ‘both as a scholar and civil gentleman’ who deserved respect from his critics.Footnote ⁵⁶ Clagett replied tartly that ‘I think it implies more want of respect and modesty in Dr Owen to treat the bishops and clergy of this Church so unmannerly as he has done, than in a younger man to dispute a point of divinity with him alone and to tax his rudeness by the way.’ For Clagett, as for other conformists, the key issue was grace and morality, for if it was irresistible grace that led to sanctification ‘it leads to the neglect of those means by which good men grow better’.Footnote ⁵⁷

In 1674 the strange reticence of conformist Calvinists was broken by the Oxford theologian Thomas Tully with Justificatio Paulina sine operibus, ex mente Ecclesiae Anglicanae – ‘contra nuperos novatores’, specifically Bull's Harmonia, and dedicated to Bishop Morley. Tully argued that the application of Christ's merit by faith alone was the doctrine of the reformed Churches, the Fathers and the Church of England, and defended it against papists, Socinians and ‘those among us who, treacherously serving the interests of one or other, shamelessly take the name of sons of the Church of England’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Bull's Apologia pro Harmoniae accused Tully of concealing the interpretation of justification given in the Homily, and alleged the age-old doctrine of the Catholic Church against Calvin, the Synod of Dort and Tully. Bull defended himself against Tully's allegation of Socinianism, and charged him in turn with antinomianism: ‘Forsooth, in this controversy all are papists in his eyes who are not antinomians.’Footnote ⁵⁹ In Examen censurae, printed with the Apologia, Bull responded to Charles Gataker's criticisms, especially on the issue of imputed righteousness: ‘Truly you here lay the very foundation of the most pestilent heresy of antinomianism.’ He denied that Gataker's solifidianism was supported by Article xi and the Homily of Justification, and asserted that learned divines would ‘be indignant withal that so gross antinomianism should be thrust on the sons of the Church as her doctrine’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Patrick and others had sought to turn what had been differences over justification within the conformist and Nonconformist communities into a controversy between conformists and Nonconformists – and, in print at least, they had largely succeeded. With the exception of Gataker, solifidianism had been defended only by Dissenters – until Tully stepped in. But Tully had difficulty in getting Justificatio Paulina published: friends (and Bull) had tried to dissuade him for the sake of the Church's peace, his text was (according to Bull) rejected three times, and it was finally published in Oxford simply ‘permissu superiorum’.Footnote ⁶¹ But Bull's Apologia and Examen had the appropriate imprimatur from one of Archbishop Sheldon's chaplains, as the original Harmonia had had. It looks as if there was an effort to keep Calvinists quiet, rather than just keep the issue quiet – though Tully would not be silenced, and was shocked that anyone had tried.Footnote ⁶² But, except for Gataker's contribution, the dispute among conformists had been confined to Latin.

It was Baxter who gave Tully cover to make his case in English. Baxter's Of the imputation of Christ's righteousness was offered for pacification in these ‘theological wars’, published to defuse the quarrel between ‘Socinians’ and ‘libertines’. Nevertheless, Baxter argued that strict imputation ‘introduceth all antinomianism or libertinism and ungodliness, and subverteth the Gospel and all true religion and morality’, and devoted three cantankerous chapters to attacking Tully, ‘whose Justificatio Paulina occasioneth the publication of this’.Footnote ⁶³ It was a somewhat contorted case, that he and Tully only disagreed over words, but Tully's position was next to antinomian. Baxter's dubiously eirenic mission was furthered in Richard Baxter's Catholick theologie, against ‘taking verbal differences for real and … arbitrary notions for necessary sacred truths’. He took as his example the row between Sherlock and Alsop, ‘in my judgement both running into extremes’. But his moderation and restraint turned out to be selective, with Owen's views put into the mouth of ‘Libertine’ and including Tully in a cast that included the antinomian Crisp, Saltmarsh, Paul Hobson and The marrow of modern divinity.Footnote ⁶⁴

Tully, unsurprisingly, struck back, freeing himself from such company: ‘[L]et it be no longer “Dr Tully, Saltmarsh, etc.” But the Church of England with all the rest of the reformed.’ ‘His libertines, antinomians, etc are whomsoever asserts against him the justification of a sinner by faith without works, such as the Church of England with the rest of the reformed Churches.’ However, Tully pointed out, Baxter also wanted his readers to believe that the differences between them were ‘merely verbal, nothing but a strife about words and forms of expression, and that in the main we are agreed’: ‘What, perfect contradictions no more than a difference in words? Faith alone and not faith alone; faith with and without works, one and the same thing?’ Like it or not, said Tully, Baxter agrees with the papists rather than the Protestants.Footnote ⁶⁵ Baxter, in a fine example of pot and kettle, objected to such ‘frightening men out of their charity, peace and communion by bugbear names of this or that heresy or dangerous opinion’. He again set out his views, and noted the irony of an anti-solifidian Dissenter in dispute with a Calvinist conformist: ‘I do friendly desire the author of the Friendly Debate, Mr Sherlock, and all others that would fashion such doctrine on the Nonconformists as a character of the party to observe that this doctor sufficiently confuteth their partiality.’Footnote ⁶⁶

By now, it was open house on justification and everyone joined in: between 1675 and 1680 fifty-three works relating to the justification controversy were published, by thirty-four different authors, including our old friends Baxter (six books), Owen (three), Patrick (two), Alsop (two) and Fowler. The solifidians were in a minority, with fourteen authors (fifteen if the maverick Humfrey is included) and twenty (or twenty-one) books, and only three of them were conformists – Tully and Polhill, whom we have seen, and John Standish. The debate was at its hottest in 1675 and 1676, with eighteen and eleven books respectively, and then things cooled down, with six in 1677, eight in 1678, two in 1679, and a late burst of eight in 1680.Footnote ⁶⁷ Many of these works contested the question of orthodoxy, and continued the name-calling of ‘Socinians’ versus ‘antinomians’: were the solifidians antinomians? were the anti-solifidians Socinians? and how did they all relate to the doctrinal articles of the Church of England? Who are the heretics now?

This question was given an uncompromising reply in two sermons preached in London in September 1675. The first was by the Presbyterian William Jenkyn, at the funeral of his friend Lazarus Seaman, when he contrasted the orthodox Seaman with ‘a company of uncatechized upstarts’ who published ‘their heretical notions in opposition to our famous English divines, as if Jewel, Whitaker, Davenant, Downham, Reynolds, Abbot, Ussher, etc were by them to be degraded to schoolboys’.Footnote ⁶⁸ More significantly, in a sermon before the king two weeks later, John Standish attacked ‘false apostles and deceitful workers’ and their ‘great blasphemies and lesser criticisms’. Standish was a royal chaplain; his sermon was ‘published by his majesty's command’ and reprinted – but, interestingly, his preface or dedication seems to have been suppressed. He preached a personal union with Christ, and condemned those

He pleaded that authority would check their growing influence, and hoped to God ‘That we may never live to see our youth trained up in the [Socinian] Cracovian catechism.’Footnote ⁶⁹

The two published sermons were answered by Robert Grove – who, interestingly, had earlier licensed Charles Gataker's reply to Bull. Grove dealt mainly with the easier target, the Nonconformist Jenkyn, and blamed Dissenters for the accusation that conforming clergy ‘were deeply tainted with the Cracovian divinity’. It was just a polemical trick: ‘had he no other device to make the conformable clergy odious, no other expedient to fright the people from the Church and make them flock to his meeting house, but only by insinuating such unreasonable jealousies into their heads?’ Grove mocked the Nonconformists’ claim to orthodoxy: ‘They will not submit to the discipline, but they tell us they like the doctrine very well, and therefore would persuade us that they are the true sons of the Church.’ Standish was harder to deal with, and Grove could only deny his implied accusation of Socinianism and accuse him of disloyalty: Dissenters criticise, of course, ‘But when those that would be thought its greatest friends shall second these men in their unjust imputations, it is difficult to conceive what honest design they can have.’Footnote ⁷⁰

The accusations of heresy brought Patrick back into the dispute, demanding that Standish should withdraw the charge or name names, ‘for the sake of your brethren of the clergy, who shall never be able to say anything against the enemies of our religion but presently the names of Socinians and Pelagians shall be cast in their teeth and a sermon of Mr J. Standish before the king shall be their voucher’. And if he could not identify the heretics, then he should be dismissed from his royal chaplaincy, ‘which he hath so notoriously abused’. Standish had simply betrayed the Church to the sectarians.Footnote ⁷¹ Patrick also answered Truth unveil'd, which had indeed named names – Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor (‘Do you really intend to charge those great men with the crime of Socinianism?’), Parker, Bull, Sherlock and others. Against such heretics, the anonymous author had set ‘true, genuine Calvinism’ – ‘an Episcopal Calvinist is the rightest son or father of the Church of England, the best Protestant’ – but Patrick insisted ‘that the doctrine of this Church cannot be Calvinian’ (citing Samuel Harsnet, Richard Montagu, and Bull's version of justifying faith). ‘Let us have no more discourses of “innovations” in our doctrine, no more “Truths Unveiled”, though you think yourself never so well acquainted with them, no more “Vindications”, nor mention of Mr Standish.’Footnote ⁷² As it turned out, however, it was the conformists rather than the Nonconformists who fell silent.

From the Dissenters there was much more to come, first from the redoubtable John Owen in 1676 – an exposure of The nature of apostasie. He bewailed the sinister influence of Socinianism in the Church of England, under the disguise of rational religion, and the abandonment of key doctrines of reformed religion: ‘all those deviations from the truth which we have amongst us are emanations from that corrupt fountain’.Footnote ⁷³ In The doctrine of justification by faith through the imputation of the righteousness of Christ (1677), Owen contested the slander that ‘those who assert it must be solifidians, antinomians, and I know not what’ and defended it as the authentic theology of the Church of England against objections that were actually or implicitly Socinian, Pelagian and popish.Footnote ⁷⁴ John Troughton's Luther redivivus pursued much the same argument, aiming ‘to lay open the true meaning of the opinion opposed, and to show it doth necessarily infer all the Arminian and many popish and Socinian points’. In a second volume he showed ‘the artifice wherewith the new doctrine of conditional justification is covered and made plausible, whereas it is indeed the old popish and Arminian doctrine of justification by works’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Vincent Alsop repeated the assertion that Nonconformists held to the doctrine of the Church of England on major issues, and objected energetically that conformists got their imprimatur while Dissenters were silenced.Footnote ⁷⁶ William Jenkyn's weightier Latin Celeusma (1679) replied to Grove's Vindication, meeting the conformist demand that the charge of heresy should be substantiated, and, despite Alsop's complaint, it appeared with an imprimatur from the bishop of London's chaplain. Jenkyn commended the conformists Standish and Tully for standing up for orthodoxy, but indicted many others for ‘Pelagianism, Socinianism and Popery’ – our usual suspects Bull, Patrick, Parker and Sherlock, as well as Herbert Thorndike, Jeremy Taylor and others. On a range of controversial matters, he paralleled ‘dogmata orthodoxa Ecclesiae Anglicanae’ with ‘Heterodoxa novitorum posita’, listing the guilty conformists who held each heresy.Footnote ⁷⁷ Lewis du Moulin made the same case against much the same defendants, but in plain (if clumsy) English, protesting ‘that the prevailing and most numerous party of that Church have been these twenty years endeavouring to make their advances towards Rome and have run themselves into Pelagianism and Socinianism, scoffing at and deriding those who get as far from Rome as they can in their doctrine and practice’.Footnote ⁷⁸

If conformists faced the accusation of Socinianism, Dissenters had to counter that of antinomianism. John Owen had tried, though usually by angry dismissal rather than argument. But it was attempted with some care in 1680 by the Independent minister Stephen Lobb, who was anxious to assert the theological necessity of repentance. He argued, citing Crisp, that antinomians held that in justification the elect become holy by Christ's holiness so they retained no sin to be repented. Lobb agreed that Christ's righteousness removed the guilt of sin, but not the filth of it, so there remained a need for repentance. It was an abuse of the doctrine of free grace to say otherwise. But when his book was published, it was suggested ‘that the truths therein contained are not such as have been embraced by Dr Owen and the generality of the Congregational, these worthy persons, as is said, differing very little from Dr Crisp’. So Lobb got Owen to write a preface for a second edition endorsing its assertions, and, though Owen was rather cautious in doing so, Lobb represented this edition as clearing ‘the Congregational’ from suspicion.Footnote ⁷⁹ But Paulus redivivus, another defence of free grace, may have damaged the cause, since it defended the theology of ‘that most worthy and reverend divine Tobias Crisp’ and to suspicious conformists it surely reeked of antinomianism.Footnote ⁸⁰

The biggest conformist guns were quiet until 1680, when Jenkyn and Du Moulin could not be ignored. In the meantime, lesser figures maintained the case against solifidianism and strict imputation. Thomas Hotchkis, who for forty years had been rector of Stanton Fitzwarren in Wiltshire, published three books against ‘the imputation of Christ's righteousness to us and our sins to him’, declaring that the doctrine was inherently antinomian. In 1675 he had denounced Owen's view as ‘tending towards antinomianism’ or ‘a branch of antinomianism’, and in 1678 he affirmed that Troughton's Luther redivivus should have been entitled ‘Crispus Redivivus’, and denied that his own position was Socinian.Footnote ⁸¹ When Owen haughtily dismissed Hotchkis as ‘of an inferior condition’ and his views as hardly worth disputing, Hotchkis was stung to write another fifty-odd pages in reply – ‘What, though this Hotchkis be a person of an inferior condition, e vulgo cleri, an obscure country minister? Is he therefore in account no person at all?’ – and to recruit Baxter and Sir Charles Wolseley, baronet, to his cause.Footnote ⁸² William Allen also wrote against strict imputation as leading to libertinism. He had seen enough of antinomians in the 1650s, having been one himself. Now he knew that both individual effort and God's grace were necessary to justification: ‘This, I doubt not, is the truth which lies in the middle way between the two contrary extremes of Pelagianism and the opinion of irresistible grace on the other’.Footnote ⁸³

Henry Hesketh, vicar of St Helen's Bishopsgate, published a more wide-ranging response to Nonconformist critics in 1680. He attacked Anti-Sozzo, Melius inquirendum, the Friendly debate between Satan and Sherlock, Celeusma, and Du Moulin: ‘Could that perfidious, doting, exiled Frenchman have ever espied and reported such advances of the Church of England to popery had not himself made greater advances towards frenzy or knavery?’ Such authors twisted the words and meaning of conformists by ‘partiality and prejudice’: ‘Could any honest-hearted man that sincerely read over an excellent book called The Design of Christianity ever have traduced it as a plain undermining the purpose of the gospel?’ Doctrine should be judged, he argued, by its ‘conduciveness to holiness or vice’: ‘And by this may all the antinomian errors, which I take to be but the tenets of the old Gnostics newly revived, and all such wild opinions about faith and justification by it, etc, to be clearly discerned and judged too.’Footnote ⁸⁴

The formal (and rather elegant) Latin answer to Jenkyn's Celeusma came from Robert Grove in 1680. The allegation of deviationism was nonsense, Grove declared. Why did Jenkyn accuse the conformists of Pelagianism, when none of them taught anything on divine grace and original sin contrary to the Articles? Why did he accuse them of Socinianism, when none denied the Trinity or Christ's sacrifice? And why did he accuse them of papistry when all reject papal supremacy, infallibility, transubstantiation and the rest of Rome's errors?Footnote ⁸⁵ In the same year, Fowler returned to the fray. His Libertas evangelica was only obliquely related to justification, but it sat within that polemical context. Fowler said that it was primarily directed against the errors of the papists (‘and not, at this time, without good reason’), but three-quarters of the book dealt with ways in which the idea of Christian liberty was misused by Nonconformists. As in his Design, he was concerned to show that Christianity was about moral living, and Christ's death had not freed men from the obligations of the moral law (‘the doctrine of the antinomians’) or laws regulating religion (the ‘fanatical’ version).Footnote ⁸⁶ Against the Nonconformist barrage on justification, however, these were pretty low-key responses.

The campaign to brand justification by faith as antinomian and fix it on Nonconformists had run out of steam. This may have owed something to divisions within conformist ranks, shown by Tully's attack on Bull, Standish's implied defence of Owen against Sherlock and, perhaps more significantly, the imprimatur for Celeusma issued in January 1678. Later that year, Bishop Barlow of Lincoln was threatening to discipline any of his clergy who taught justification by works, and asserting strict imputation ‘against the contrary doctrine of Racovia and Rome, papists and Socinians’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The accusation of apostasy and heresy mounted by Owen, Jenkyn and Standish had certainly shifted the terms of debate, and Patrick, Hesketh and Grove were on the defensive. But it was surely the political rather than the polemical context that made the difference: the Popish Plot furore, which exploded in the autumn of 1678, and fears of the succession of a Catholic monarch. Now the conformist emphasis shifted from widening the breach with Dissenters to persuading them back into the Church of England. Edward Fowler noted ‘what excellent treatises have of late been published … to persuade our brethren of the separation to ease us in a great measure of our fears of popery or confusion by returning to the communion of that Church wherein most of them were baptised’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Alongside the new claim that Dissenters had a different (and dangerous) divinity (so should not be readmitted to the Church by a comprehension), other (usually more Calvinist) conformists had accepted that there was a shared Protestant identity – but that meant that separation was schism from an orthodox Church. This assertion had particular potency after 1672, when the Declaration of Indulgence had allowed Nonconformists their own meetings. Shared doctrine was not enough: ‘I answer, the question is concerning their schism, and this, none doubt, may be found where true doctrine in other points is maintained. Schism is an error in practice, not in doctrine.’ Footnote ⁸⁹ Thus Francis Fullwood in 1672, and John Sharp, Robert Conold and William Jane agreed: separation was ‘a schism in its own nature and sinful in itself’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The accusation of breach of unity was another stick to beat the Nonconformists, but as the perceived threat from popery mounted in the late 1670s it became the basis of a plea for Protestant union. Allen directed his 1679 Friendly call ‘to those who … through over-nice scruples cause a schism and rent in its seamless garment’: ‘See I beseech you now if it be not your interest to close with those of the Church of England against your common enemy of Rome, and if it be not now most seasonable to effect it.’Footnote ⁹¹

The need for Protestant union was the occasion and theme of Edward Stillingfleet's notorious 1680 sermon The mischief of separation: ‘a matter of so great moment to the peace and preservation of this Church, and consequently of the Protestant religion among us, which I never expect to survive the destruction of the Church of England’.Footnote ⁹² A word in season made the same point:

Why risk separation when there is safety in union? William Hughes and Francis Brokesby both advanced agreement on doctrine as the basis for reunion, and Hughes even advocated concessions to Dissenters to get it.Footnote ⁹⁴ So erstwhile antinomians and libertines were now ‘dissenting brethren’, ‘my brethren of the separation’ and ‘friends’.Footnote ⁹⁵

When Nonconformists in the late 1660s had claimed unity in doctrine with the Church of England as a reason for comprehension and/or toleration, Patrick and Parker and Fowler and Bull had soon denied any such thing – and so had others later. The tactic was to drive Nonconformists away rather than invite them in. But when a group of London clergy got together in 1683 to write a series of short texts directed at Dissenters, there was an emphasis on unity against popery. Grove, Sharp, Clagett, Thomas Tennison and others pleaded for ‘the firm union of the whole Protestant profession’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Fowler argued for the authentic Protestantism of the Church of England, and warned against ‘the advantage that our common enemy is too like to make of our sad divisions’. When a dissenting critic claimed that some clergy were not as Protestant as the Thirty-Nine Articles, he played down differences on justification: ‘Sir, to deal freely with you, I cannot but wonder at your adventuring into the world this other Celeusma.’Footnote ⁹⁷ Patrick and Sherlock now directed their fire against papists rather than fellow-Protestants, and Clagett now wrote against both.Footnote ⁹⁸

Nonconformists beat the drum for unity too, though not for unity by uniformity. Owen once more declared that Dissenters shared the essential doctrines of the Church of England:

But Owen and others distinguished between agreeing with the historic doctrine of the Church of England and agreeing with some of its clergy: ‘The Dissenters generally agree with that book which is commonly called the 39 Articles, … but then they are far from agreement with the leading clergymen of this generation.’ They noted differences in doctrine within the Church of England, and argued that this justified their separation: ‘I do not judge that any man is or can be obliged unto constant total communion with any Church, … wherein there are incurable dissentions about important doctrines of the gospel.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But times and tones had changed: Nonconformists too were stressing ideological alliance, and the ministers of the Church of England were no longer denounced for popery, Pelagianism and Socinianism. ‘This is a time wherein the agreement of all Protestants, so far as they have attained, is made more than ordinarily necessary’, said Dissenters.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The timing and even the content of Richard Baxter's ‘theological wars’ had been determined by the politics of religion, and for the time being the wars were over.