sy with Deism was the
first and direct, but still a temporary result of their labours. They
did more than this. They broadened and deepened the foundations of the
English Church and of English Christianity not only for their own day,
but for all future time. They laboured not ineffectually in securing to
reason that established position without which no religious system can
maintain a lasting hold upon the intellect as well as upon the heart. On
the other hand, their deficiencies were great, and appear the greater,
because they were faults not so much of the person as of the age, and
were displayed therefore in a wide field, and often in an exaggerated
form. They loved reason not too well, but too exclusively; they
acknowledged its limits, but did not sufficiently insist upon them. They
accepted the Christian faith without hesitation or reserve; they
believed its doctrines, they reverenced its mysteries, fully convinced
that its truth, if not capable of demonstration, is firmly founded upon
evidence with which every unprejudiced inquirer has ample reason to be
satisfied. But where reason could not boldly tread, they were content to
believe and to be silent. Hence, as they put very little trust in
religious feelings, and utterly disbelieved in any power of spiritual
discernment higher than, or different from reason, the greater part of
their religious teaching was practically confined to those parts of the
Christian creed which are palpable to every understanding. In their wish
to avoid unprofitable disputations, they dwelt but cursorily upon
debated subjects of the last importance; and in their dread of a
correct theology doing duty for a correct life, they were apt grievously
to underestimate the influences of theology upon life. Their moral
teaching was deeply religious, pervaded by a sense of the overruling
Providence of a God infinite in love and holiness, and was enforced
perseveringly and with great earnestness by motives derived from the
rewards and punishments of a future state. If a reader of Tillotson
feels a sense of wonder that the writings of so good a man--of such deep
and unaffected piety, so sympathetic and kindly, so thoroughly
Christian-hearted--should yet be benumbed by the presence of a cold
prudential morality which might seem incompatible with the
self-forgetful impulses of warm religious feeling, he may see, in what
he wonders at, the ill effects of a faith too jealously debarred by
reason from con