peak frankly, if not ostentatiously, as men
of learning, and their sermons are overweighted with quotations, showing
familiarity with the classics, and with the whole range of theological
literature. Obviously the hearers are to be passive recipients not
judges of the doctrine. But by the end of the century Tillotson has
become the typical divine, whose authority was to be as marked in
theology as that of Locke in philosophy. Tillotson has entirely
abandoned any ostentatious show of learning. He addresses his hearers in
language on a level with their capabilities, and assumes that they are
not 'passive buckets to be pumped into' but reasonable men who have a
right to be critics as well as disciples. It is taken for granted that
the appeal must be to reason, and to the reason which has not gone
through any special professional training. The audience, that is, to
which the divine must address himself is one composed of the average
laity who are quite competent to judge for themselves. That is the
change that is meant when we are told that this was the period of the
development of English prose. Dryden, one of its great masters,
professed to have learned his style from Tillotson. The writer, that is,
has to suit himself to the new audience which has grown up. He has to
throw aside all the panoply of scholastic logic, the vast apparatus of
professional learning, and the complex Latinised constructions, which,
however admirable some of the effects produced, shows that the writer is
thinking of well-read scholars, not of the ordinary man of the world.
He has learned from Bacon and Descartes, perhaps, that his supposed
science was useless lumber; and he has to speak to men who not only want
plain language but are quite convinced that the pretensions of the old
authority have been thoroughly exploded.

Politically, the change means toleration, for it is assumed that the
vulgar can judge for themselves; intellectually, it means rationalism,
that is, an appeal to the reason common to all men; and, in literature
it means the hatred of pedantry and the acceptance of such literary
forms as are thoroughly congenial and intelligible to the common sense
of the new audience. The hatred of the pedantic is the characteristic
sentiment of the time. When Berkeley looked forward to a new world in
America, he described it as the Utopia

'Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
The pedantry of Courts and Schools.'

When