templations in which the human mind quickly finds out its
limits. When religion, in fear lest it should become unpractical,
relaxes its hold upon what may properly be called the mysteries of
faith, it not only loses in elevation and grandeur, but it defeats the
very end it aimed at. It takes a lower ethical tone, and loses in moral
power. To form even what may be in some respects an erroneous conception
of an imperfectly comprehended doctrine, and so to make it bear upon the
life, is far better than timidly, for fear of difficulties or error, to
lay the thought of it aside, and so leave it altogether unfruitful.
Tillotson and many of his successors in the last century had a great
tendency to do this, and no excellences of personal character could
redeem the injurious influence it had upon their writings. His services
in the cause of religious truth were very great: they would have been
far greater, and his influence a far more unmixed good, if as a
representative leader of religious thought, he had been more superior to
what was to be its most characteristic defect.

The Latitudinarian section of the Church of England won its chief fame,
during the years that immediately followed the Revolution of 1688, by
its activity in behalf of ecclesiastical comprehension and religious
liberty. These exertions, so far as they extend to the history of the
eighteenth century, and were continued through that period, will be
considered in the following chapter.

C.J.A.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 195: H.S. Skeats, _History of the Free Churches_, 315.]

[Footnote 196: H. Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, iv, 177.]

[Footnote 197: _Life of Tillotson_, T. Birch, ccxxxv.]

[Footnote 198: Letter to G. Hanger, in Nichols' _Lit. An._, iv. 215.]

[Footnote 199: Birch, ccxxxv.]

[Footnote 200: _Letters_, ed. Berry, ii. 181.]

[Footnote 201: Birch, cccxxxviii.]

[Footnote 202: J. Wesley, _Works_, x. 299.]

[Footnote 203: Nichols, iv. 215.]

[Footnote 204: Sir R. Howard, _History of Religion_, 1694, preface.]

[Footnote 205: Fleetwood's _Works_, 516.]

[Footnote 206: No. 106.]

[Footnote 207: No. 155.]

[Footnote 208: No. 101. In the _Whig Examiner_ (No. 2) it is observed,
as an instance of the singular variety of tastes, that 'Bunyan and
Quarles have passed through several editions, and please as many readers
as Dryden and Tillotson.']

[Footnote 209: _Reflections on the Clergy_, &c., 1798, iv.; J.
Napleton's _Advice to a Stude