It is curious to find such men in the very heart of a Puritan age. They were founders of a new order of religious thought, new, at least, in reference to the mental habits in general of that period. They did not assail Puritanism, nor, indeed, assume an attitude of opposition to other good men of any class--they preferred to build up rather than to pull down, to heal rather than to wound; but certainly their sympathies did not run in Puritan lines. They appreciated the eminent piety of many contemporaries of that school, and they lived with them upon terms of friendship; but, for their own part, they maintained broader views of theology than did their brethren. Their interest in the study of Plato and Plotinus, and their elevation of what is moral over what is merely intellectual gave to their method of enquiry, and to the conclusions which they reached, a certain cast, which plainly distinguished them from the kind of teaching found in the Westminster Confession, and in the standard works of the Puritan Divines. [Sidenote: _Cambridge Studies._] Differences have always obtained in the mode of contemplating Christianity, according with various types of mind and with various descriptions of culture and circumstances. Aristotelian and Platonic forms of thought, so obvious in theological history, are amongst its common facts; and when we recollect that such forms are the inevitable consequences of original varieties in the intellectual nature of mankind, they appear also to belong to its greatest mysteries. Occasionally overlooked, even by philosophers, and habitually forgotten by controversialists, the remembrance of them is so important, that if forgotten, the changes and collisions which occur in the progress of theological enquiry--whether in primitive, mediæval, or modern times--must remain unintelligible. And the spectacle of the logical dogmatist on the one hand, and the sentimental mystic on the other, deriving different impressions from the same object--and then looking each other in the face, with expressions of marvellous surprise, that they cannot both see one and the same thing in one and the same way--can never be explained by those who do not keep before them the fact just noticed. As there were different ineradicable idiosyncracies in Clement and Tertullian, in Origen and Augustine, in Bernard and Abelard, in Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas, in John Tauler and John Calvin--so there were idiosyncracies equally ineradicable in John Smith and John Owen, in Ralph Cudworth and in Richard Baxter. The influence of circumstances in reference to the Cambridge school coincided with the intellectual character of the members, and contributed to the development of its theological peculiarities. Early education, the stimulus derived from other minds, in some respects very different, and the reactions consequent upon the unfolding of tendencies to their furthest extreme, are all to be reckoned amongst the factors of religious opinion.