mark the culminating point of the Cambridge school. There remains Henry More (_b._ 1614) the better known name, of Christ’s College, the exponent of Descartes, the ardent follower of Plato, from whom he learnt “that something better and higher than the knowledge of human things constitutes the supreme happiness of man.” His _Enchiridion ethicum_ and _Enchiridion metaphysicum_ were the text books of the school. This academic group forms, as Tulloch points out, not only “one of the most characteristic groups in the history of religious and philosophical thought in England,” but one of the most homogeneous. Whichcote’s aphorism “There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions about it” sums an epoch in religious thought. Questions of Church order and Church policy were left aside, to philosophise; the clash of ecclesiastical parties ceased to trouble, and an academic enquiry into the relation of philosophy to religion takes its place. Neither Puritan nor Presbyterian had brought any such liberating attitude towards theology, for which indeed the early Protestantism cared not one jot, but which has never entirely died out of England since the speculations of the Cambridge Platonists.[417] The Englishman--fed with the crude dogmatism of Luther, the arid ecclesiasticism of Laud, the dull fancy of the Puritan, and the intolerance of all three--now for the first time was called dispassionately to consider the claims of the philosophical reason, the eternal distinction between essential and non-essential--a distinction anathema to the ordinary Protestant--fundamental and non-fundamental, between the reality and the figure; to the claims, in fine, of those ontological verities on which belief in the revealed verities ultimately depends. A “rational Christian eclecticism” was for the first time presented to Protestants, and in so far anticipated the principle upon which the problems of the present day attend for solution. The values to be assigned to the notions of “orthodoxy,” of dogma--who around them had ever thought of such things before! At Oxford it has always been a question of form, of Church order; but at Cambridge a question of substance, an enquiry into the criteria of truth, the credentials of theories.