The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey. Vol. 2, 1789–1808 by G. M. Ditchfield (review)

J. C. D. Clark, in his classic study English Society, 1660–1830: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien Régime (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2000), summarizes the opinion of the Reverend Gilbert Wakefield (1756–1801) that “Christianity” could only be saved from Deism by Unitarianism, not the established Church of England: “Only an Unitarian . . . could vindicate revealed religion correctly understood” (395). Theophilus Lindsey may have been that last best hope. Lindsey (1723–1808) is an important, albeit too little known, clergyman of the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Possibly the father of Unitarianism, he was just the one to offer such a defense, against not only Deism but also the excesses of the established church itself. His impact was wide ranging; he was friends and correspondents with Joseph Priestly (and Priestly’s publisher), Richard Price, and the increasingly famous Countess of Huntingdon, whose Connexion was the first group to openly break from the Church of England. His dissenting Essex Street congregation in London was visited by the literati of the day, including James Boswell and Benjamin Franklin. G. M. Ditchfield’s completion of his two-volume collection of Lindsey’s letters is an impeccable and important contribution to our understanding of Anglicanism and liberal dissent in the long eighteenth century.

Lindsey’s life and correspondence reveal the remarkable and fungible distinctions between those to the theological right and left of the Anglican Church. Lindsey initially had strong connections with the Countess of Huntingdon and her circle, which included the poet Phillis Wheatley, the Wesley brothers, and George Whitefield. But because of his own disbelief in the worship of the second and third members of the Trinity, worshiping the Father alone, he eventually parted ways with many other more Puritanical dissenters.

Ditchfield provides only Lindsey’s letters, explaining that they in themselves are voluminous and revealing, and that many of those written to Lindsey have not survived. The letters are carefully and meticulously annotated, providing the necessary context for their understanding. Given the nearly eight hundred that do survive (and that Lindsey was never inclined to be short as a correspondent), Ditchfield’s decision not to include any of the surviving letters written to him is the correct one.

Volume one of the letters, published in 2007, covers the years 1747 to 1788, the time when Lindsey was ordained an Anglican priest and started his ministry; they also cover his growing discontent as a priest with his subscription to the Athanasian creed. More than in his published statements, we see throughout the letters Lindsey’s growing ambivalence and eventual rejection of the idea of the Trinity and praying to (or glorifying) either the Son or the Holy Spirit.

Volume two, covering the years 1789 to 1808, provides in an appendix the few remaining letters found by Ditchfield after the completion of his first volume, as well as an index to both books. Volume two traces, in Ditchfield’s words, Lindsey’s “disappointment at the failure of the Feathers’ Tavern petition and . . . his attempts to reform the church from within, compounded by the bitterness which he felt against the attempt to coerce the American colonies and at the British response to the French Revolution” (1: lxxvii), all of which is expressed more fully in the letters than in his published works.

The letters thus provide an intimate look behind the more doctrinaire statements in Lindsey’s published work. For example, his original departure from the Anglican Church occurred because of his doubts over the Athanasian Creed’s statements concerning Trinitarianism, and his own beliefs about the practice of subscription to them—the same doubts that, not incidentally, led to the Feathers’ Tavern Petition of 1772, which Lindsey supported. In his early Apology on Resigning the Vicarage of Catterick (1774) and, even later, in his more definitive work, An Historical View of the State of the Unitarian Doctrine and Worship...