e school of Latitudinarian theologians
which sprang from the group of thinkers that gathered on the eve of the
Civil War round Lord Falkland at Great Tew. With the Restoration the
Latitudinarians came at once to the front. They were soon distinguished
from both Puritans and High Churchmen by their opposition to dogma, by
their preference of reason to tradition whether of the Bible or the
Church, by their basing religion on a natural theology, by their aiming
at rightness of life rather than at correctness of opinion, by their
advocacy of toleration and comprehension as the grounds of Christian
unity. Chillingworth and Taylor found successors in the restless good
sense of Burnet, the enlightened piety of Tillotson, and the calm
philosophy of Bishop Butler. From this moment indeed the work of English
theologians turned from the bold assertion of the supremacy of revealed
truth over natural reason to a more cautious assertion of the essential
harmony of the one with the other. Boyle varied his philosophical
experiments by demonstrations of the unity of dogmatic and natural
religion. So moderate and philosophical was the temper displayed by
Cudworth in his "Intellectual System of the Universe," that the bigots
of his day charged him with the atheistic principles which he was
endeavouring to refute. But the change of tone in the theologians of the
Reformation was itself an indication of the new difficulties which
theology had to meet. The bold scepticism of Hobbes was adopted by
courtiers and politicians. Charles himself was divided between
superstition and Hobbism. Shaftesbury was a Deist. The bulk of the
leading statesmen of the time looked on religious questions in a purely
political light.

[Sidenote: Political Philosophy.]

The impulse which was carrying religious speculation into regions
hitherto strange to it told equally on political and social inquiry. The
researches of Sir Josiah Child, and still more of Sir William Petty, not
only threw light on the actual state of English trade but pointed
forward to the future science of Political Economy. For the moment
however philosophical speculation on the nature of government eclipsed
the interest of statistical research. Though the Restoration brought
Hobbes a pension his two great works were condemned by Parliament, and
Hobbism became ere he died a popular synonym for political as well as
religious immorality. But in spite of the bitter resistance offered to
it his ass