r
stood exposed to the reproach of inconstancy; and this invidious topic
would have been handled without mercy by my opponents, could they have
separated my cause from that of the university. For my own part, I am
proud of an honest sacrifice of interest to conscience. I can never
blush, if my tender mind was entangled in the sophistry that seduced
the acute and manly understandings of CHILLINGWORTH and BAYLE, who
afterwards emerged from superstition to scepticism.

While Charles the First governed England, and was himself governed by
a catholic queen, it cannot be denied that the missionaries of Rome
laboured with impunity and success in the court, the country, and even
the universities. One of the sheep,

--Whom the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said,

is Mr. William Chillingworth, Master of Arts, and Fellow of Trinity
College, Oxford; who, at the ripe age of twenty-eight years, was
persuaded to elope from Oxford, to the English seminary at Douay in
Flanders. Some disputes with Fisher, a subtle jesuit, might first
awaken him from the prejudices of education; but he yielded to his own
victorious argument, "that there must be somewhere an infallible judge;
and that the church of Rome is the only Christian society which either
does or can pretend to that character." After a short trial of a few
months, Mr. Chillingworth was again tormented by religious scruples:
he returned home, resumed his studies, unravelled his mistakes, and
delivered his mind from the yoke of authority and superstition. His new
creed was built on the principle, that the Bible is our sole judge,
and private reason our sole interpreter: and he ably maintains this
principle in the Religion of a Protestant, a book which, after startling
the doctors of Oxford, is still esteemed the most solid defence of the
Reformation. The learning, the virtue, the recent merits of the author,
entitled him to fair preferment: but the slave had now broken his
fetters; and the more he weighed, the less was he disposed to subscribe
to the thirty-nine articles of the church of England. In a private
letter he declares, with all the energy of language, that he could not
subscribe to them without subscribing to his own damnation; and that if
ever he should depart from this immoveable resolution, he would allow
his friends to think him a madman, or an atheist. As the letter is
without a date, we cannot ascertain the number of w