The times, the need and the men

Let us begin by setting out the threats to Trinitarian Christianity in the eighteenth century that the Hutchinsonian system was designed to answer. Post-revolutionary-period English thought will be our starting point for this. Latitudinarian Whigs who were members ‘of the Church of England anxious to minimise dogmatic and ecclesiological differences with other Protestant communions’1 and who dominated the political scene after the Glorious Revolution were broadly in favour of religious toleration and convinced of its necessity. The years between 1690 and 1760 represented, in part as consequence of this Whig, Latitudinarian supremacy, the high tide of heterodox thinking.