h Taylor
approved of in interpreting the Bible; but the certainty of the
conclusions which reason drew from the Bible varied, as he held, with
the conditions of reason itself. In all but the simplest truths of
natural religion "we are not sure not to be deceived." The deduction of
points of belief from the words of the Scriptures was attended with all
the uncertainty and liability to error which sprang from the infinite
variety of human understandings, the difficulties which hinder the
discovery of truth, and the influences which divert the mind from
accepting or rightly estimating it.

It was plain to a mind like Chillingworth's that this denial of
authority, this perception of the imperfection of reason in the
discovery of absolute truth, struck as directly at the root of
Protestant dogmatism as at the root of Catholic infallibility. "If
Protestants are faulty in this matter [of claiming authority] it is for
doing it too much and not too little. This presumptuous imposing of the
senses of man upon the words of God, of the special senses of man upon
the general words of God, and laying them upon men's consciences
together under the equal penalty of death and damnation, this vain
conceit that we can speak of the things of God better than in the words
of God, this deifying our own interpretations and tyrannous enforcing
them upon others, this restraining of the word of God from that latitude
and generality, and the understandings of men from that liberty wherein
Christ and His apostles left them, is and hath been the only foundation
of all the schisms of the Church, and that which makes them immortal."
In his "Liberty of Prophesying" Jeremy Taylor pleaded the cause of
toleration with a weight of argument which hardly required the triumph
of the Independents and the shock of Naseby to drive it home. But the
freedom of conscience which the Independent founded on the personal
communion of each soul with God, the Latitudinarian founded on the
weakness of authority and the imperfection of human reason. Taylor
pleads even for the Anabaptist and the Romanist. He only gives place to
the action of the civil magistrate in "those religions whose principles
destroy government," and "those religions--if there be any such--which
teach ill life." Hales openly professed that he would quit the Church
to-morrow if it required him to believe that all that dissented from it
must be damned. Chillingworth denounced persecution in words of fir