dous alternative which he believed God himself
had thought it necessary to proclaim. Probably Tillotson's own mind was
a good deal divided on the subject between two opinions. In many
respects his mind showed a very remarkable combination of old and new
ideas, and perceptibly fluctuated between a timid adherence to tradition
and a sympathy with other notions which had become unhappily and
needlessly mixed up with imputations of Deism. In any case, what he has
said upon this most important subject is a singular and exaggerated
illustration of that prudential teaching which was a marked feature both
in Tillotson's theology and in the prevailing religious thought of his
age.

In spite of what Tillotson might perhaps have wished, the suggestions
hazarded in his thirty-fifth sermon made an infinitely greater
impression than the unqualified warnings contained in the hundreds which
he preached at other times. It seems to have had a great circulation,
and probably many and mixed results. So far as it encouraged that
abominable system, which was already falling like a blight upon
religious faith, of living according to motives of expedience and the
wiser chance, its effects must have been utterly bad. It may also have
exercised an unsettling influence upon some minds. Although Tillotson
was probably entirely mistaken in the conviction, by no means peculiar
to him, that the idea of endless punishment adds any great, or even any
appreciable, force to the thought of divine retribution awaiting
unrepented sin, yet there would be much cause for alarm if (as might
well be the case) the ignorant or misinformed leaped to the conclusion
that the Archbishop had maintained that future, as distinguished from
endless punishments, were doubtful. We are told that 'when this sermon
of hell was first published, it was handed about among the great
debauchees and small atheistical wits more than any new play that ever
came out. He was not a man of fashion who wanted one of them in his
pocket, or could draw it out at the coffee-house.'[278] In certain
drawing-rooms, too, where prudery was not the fault, there were many
fashionable ladies who would pass from the scandal and gossip of the day
to applaud Tillotson's sermon in a sense which would have made him
shudder.[279] Nothing follows from this, unless it be assumed that the
profligates and worldlings of the period would have spent a single hour,
not to say a life, differently, had he never preach