A young man, a Master of Arts, just turned 27, stood up, on the 28th of October, 1695, in the pulpit of St. Mary’s, Oxford, before a large audience of Dons and Gownsmen, to preach from the text--now given up on all hands as an interpolation--“There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one.” The preacher was Joseph Bingham, a scholar of surprising erudition, destined to throw a world of light upon the antiquities of the Christian Church; in the sermon, and preface to it when published, he distinguished between the patristic and the scholastic doctrines of the Trinity, maintaining that Luther, in his theology on that point, followed in the wake of the Fathers, whilst Calvin trod in the steps of the Schoolmen. The Lutheran, the Patristic, and the Scripture doctrine, in Bingham’s estimation, amounted to this--that there are three individual substances in the Godhead, really and numerically distinct from each other, though at the same time they are one in another sense; for they are not of a different nature; they are not divided like men and angels; they are not three parts of one whole; nor are they three Beings, who have Divine natures independently, every one from himself; nor are they three opposite principles, or three providences, clashing with one another. No; they constitute “one harmonious providence, and one undivided principle of all other things.”[257] Sherlock, a citizen of the world, catching the spirit of the age, appealed to reason; Bingham, a recluse, scarcely touched by habits of thought outside his University, appealed to tradition. This piece of hard, dry learning, without the slightest tincture of pathos, or a single practical remark from beginning to end, must have proved a repulsive lesson even to an Oxford audience. Its general drift, running in the same direction as Sherlock’s teaching, though it included no theory of mutual consciousness, alarmed the authorities; they went home from St. Mary’s in great agitation, muttering against the young preacher charges of Tritheism, Arianism, and other heresies. Bingham was simply a student who had missed his way in theological speculation; but Sherlock was personally disliked by Jacobites, who were irritated by his political apostacy, and by the adherents of William, who envied him his church preferments. No hornet’s nest could be worse than the attacks which this unlucky controversialist aroused. Many who, under other circumstances, would have let heterodoxy alone, could not tolerate it when coming from such a quarter; and the most unseemly reflections on the man’s character were mixed up with arguments against his doctrines.[258] [Sidenote: 1693–8.]