lections of Ohio_ (Columbus, 1891).

CHILLINGWORTH, WILLIAM (1602-1644), English divine and controversialist,
was born at Oxford in October 1602. In June 1618 he became a scholar of
Trinity College, Oxford, and was made a fellow of his college in June
1628. He had some reputation as a skilful disputant, excelled in
mathematics, and gained some credit as a writer of verses. The marriage
of Charles I. with Henrietta Maria of France had stimulated the
propaganda of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits made the
universities their special point of attack. One of them, "John Fisher,"
who had his sphere at Oxford, succeeded in making a convert of young
Chillingworth, and prevailed upon him to go to the Jesuit college at
Douai. Influenced, however, by his godfather, Laud, then bishop of
London, he resolved to make an impartial inquiry into the claims of the
two churches. After a short stay he left Douai in 1631 and returned to
Oxford. On grounds of Scripture and reason he at length declared for
Protestantism, and wrote in 1634, but did not publish, a confutation of
the motives which had led him over to Rome. This paper was lost; the
other, on the same subject, was probably written on some other occasion
at the request of his friends. He would not, however, take orders. His
theological sensitiveness appears in his refusal of a preferment offered
to him in 1635 by Sir Thomas Coventry, lord keeper of the great seal. He
was in difficulty about subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles. As he
informed Gilbert Sheldon, then warden of All Souls, in a letter, he was
fully resolved on two points--that to say that the Fourth Commandment is
a law of God appertaining to Christians is false and unlawful, and that
the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed are most false, and in a
high degree presumptuous and schismatical. To subscribe, therefore, he
felt would be to "subscribe his own damnation." At this time his
principal work was far towards completion. It was undertaken in defence
of Dr Christopher Potter, provost of Queen's College in Oxford, who had
for some time been carrying on a controversy with a Jesuit known as
Edward Knott, but whose real name was Matthias Wilson. Potter had
replied in 1633 to Knott's _Charity Mistaken_ (1630), and Knott
retaliated with _Mercy and Truth_. This work Chillingworth engaged to
answer, and Knott, hearing of his intention and hoping to bias the
public mind, hastily brought out a pamphlet tendi