180 



CHILLINGWORTH 



and his restless intellect soon turned to the ques- 

 tion of chief interest at that time in his university 

 the controversy between the Church of England 

 and the mother Church of Rome. The arguments 

 of an able Jesuit, known by the name of John 

 Fisher, at length convincing him of the necessity 

 of an infallible living judge in matters of faith, he 

 embraced the Romish communion ' with an in- 

 credible satisfaction of mind.' In 1630 he went to 

 Douay, and here being urged to write an account 

 of the motives of his conversion, a fresh examina- 

 tion of the whole questions at issue, and a series of 

 letters from Laud, at length brought him from 

 doubt of the soundness of his recent conclusions to 

 a complete renunciation. But although he had 

 become convinced that the claims of the Church of 

 Rome to an infallible judgment on matters of faith 

 had no real foundation, he adhered alone to Scrip- 

 ture as interpreted by the light of reason, and for 

 a time declined to take orders in the Church of 

 England, regarding her Articles as themselves a 

 needless ' imposition on men's consciences. ' Mean- 

 time he had become involved in a succession of 

 controversies with John Lewgar, a Catholic con- 

 vert ; Floys, a Jesuit, who went under the name of 

 Daniel ; and White, the author of Rushivorth* s 

 Dialogues. His papers in answer to these mere 

 preliminary studies for the great work that was to 

 follow are contained in his Additional Dis- 

 courses, published in 1687. Another Jesuit, known 

 as Edward Knott, having published in 1630 his 

 Charity Mistaken, &c. , which was answered by Dr 

 Christopher Potter, provost of Queen's College in 

 Oxford in 1633, rejoined in 1634 with Mercy and 

 Truth, &c. This second book Chillingworth under- 

 took to answer, and with that view retired to the 

 quiet of Lord Falkland's house and library at 

 Great Tew in Oxfordshire. Meantime, Knott 

 hearing of his intention, hastened to take an unfair 

 advantage of his antagonist, by an attempt to pre- 

 judice the public mind beforehand. In 1636 he 

 issued in a forty-two page pamphlet a series of mere 

 scurrilous insinuations, the main drift of which 

 was that Chillingworth was a Socinian, whose 

 opinions tended to the overthrow of all super- 

 natural religion no less than of Catholic doctrine. 

 At length, in 1637, appeared Chillingworth's famous 

 book, The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to 

 Salvation : or an Answer to a Booke entitled Mercy 

 and Truth, tfcc. This great work suffers from its 

 being necessarily to some extent an answer to a 

 now completely forgotten book, and being thereby 

 weighted with a great mass of extraneous matter. 

 Indeed, it is only after the author has demolished 

 the arguments of his temporary antagonist that 

 he is at liberty to follow the unembarrassed 

 course of his own thought, and it is evident that 

 only a writer of consummate talent could so have 

 surmounted the disadvantages of such a form, as 

 to make a book of enduring interest and value. 

 Yet it is all this and more, for we have here not 

 only a masterly demonstration of the sole authority 

 of the Bible in the essential matters relating to 

 salvation, but an assertion of the free -right of the 

 individual conscience to interpret it, laid down 

 once for all with perfect confidence and fullest 

 plainness the freedom of religious opinion and the 

 right to toleration for honest difference of opinion 

 placed on its true basis, and this two centuries 

 and a half ago. The great question at issue is 

 that of the basis of religious certitude, or ' the 

 means whereby the truths of revelation are con- 

 veyed to our understanding,' whether this is to 

 rest on the infallible authority of the Church, 

 or ultimately on the authority of the Scriptures 

 alone. 



Here Chillingworth's conclusion is, in his own 

 oft-quoted words : ' The Bible, I say, the Bible 



only, is the religion of Protestants.' The great 

 principles of religion, and everything of faith 

 essential to salvation, are herein clearly revealed 

 patent to the ' right reason ' and judgment of 

 every man. Religious certitude can thus be 

 reached by every honest mind, from the plain 

 interpretation of the Bible, which is necessarily 

 itself intelligible and sufficient, without need of 

 any medium to transfer it or judge to interpret 

 it. Indeed, the measure of the responsibility oi 

 faith is just the measure of the clearness and sinv 

 plicity of the divine revelation. Scripture and the 

 candfd mind acting together, under the quickening 

 grace of God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, 

 are thus the sole factors of religious certitude, 

 which is necessarily based on rational personal 

 conviction. The simplest creed is the best creed, 

 and the only possible oasis on which to reconstruct 

 the divided church is such a simple, assured, and 

 accepted religious minimum as the apostles' creed, 

 with full freedom to individual opinion in every- 

 thing supplementary and unessential. 'For why,' 

 he asks, ' should men be more rigid than God ? 

 Why should any error exclude any man from the 

 Church's communion, which will not deprive him 

 of eternal salvation ? ' It may be that Chilling- 

 worth's ideas carried out would have made any 

 kind of church polity or even successive organised 

 religious life impossible, but at least they would 

 have preserved something perhaps quite as precious 

 an intellectual conception of toleration, that 

 would have saved England years of misery and 

 blood ; and which need not necessarily have 

 eliminated also the religious enthusiasm of the 

 individual, together with his confidence in the 

 absolute infallibility of his own opinions. 



The reasoning throughout the great work of 

 Chillingworth is marked by strong and clear 

 intellect ; singularly simple but direct and straight- 

 forward style, warming at times into a suppressed 

 but vehement eloquence, and informed throughout 

 with an honesty, an earnestness, and, above all, a 

 fairness but rare in controversial literature. Locke, 

 in his Thoughts concerning Heading and Study for 

 a Gentleman, commends ' the constant reading of 

 Chillingworth, who, by his example, will teach both 

 perspicuity and the way of right reasoning better 

 than any book I know.' Chillingworth left little 

 besides his masterpiece nine sermons, the ' Addi- 

 tional Discourses ' already referred to, and a brief 

 fragment on the apostolical institution of episcopacy 

 forming the whole. The rest of his life is soon 

 told. At length he found himself able to give a 

 general assent to the Articles, and in July 1638 he 

 was made Chancellor of Salisbury, with the pre- 

 bend of Brix worth in Notts annexed, and soon 

 after master of Wigstan's Hospital in Leicester. 

 In 1640 he was elected proctor to convocation by 

 the Chapter of Salisbury. At the outbreak of the 

 Civil War he accompanied the king's forces, 

 though his heart sank within him to see ' publicans 

 and sinners on the one side, against scribes and 

 Pharisees on the other. ' He was with the royal 

 army before Gloucester, where, we are told, he 

 devised an engine for purposes of assault after the 

 pattern of the old Roman testudo. At Arundel 

 Castle he was taken ill, and when the garrison sur- 

 rendered to Waller, being too ill to be carried to 

 London, was lodged in the bishop's palace at 

 Chichester, where he died, 30th January 1643. His 

 last hours were pestered by the ill-timed and cruel 

 exhortations of one Cheynell, an ignorant and 

 rabid Puritan preacher, who, at his burial in 

 Chichester Cathedral, flung a copy of the noblest 

 theological treatise of the age into the grave, that 

 it might 'rot with its author and see corruption.' 

 The Chilling 'worthi Novissima, &c. ( 1644), in which 

 this Westminster divine did such dishonour to 



