Theological science is a growth; and to its growth, as developed in our own day, the labours of a long line of students have contributed. The _genesis_ of doctrinal opinion is a subject worthy of much more careful research than it has yet received. To find out how particular dogmas have been broached and modified, how they have originated and been unfolded, goes far to fix their truth or their falsehood; and any man who would thoroughly understand the theology of this country, must study carefully the chief authors of theological literature in the seventeenth century. Andrewes, Donne, Jackson, Thorndike, Taylor, Pearson, and Bull--More, Smith, Cudworth, and Barrow--Goodwin, Owen, Baxter, Howe, and Charnock--were all eminent Divines of that period--all, in different degrees, erudite scholars--all hard thinkers; and although they belonged to schools of thought differing in important respects, inasmuch as they read each other’s books, and answered each other’s arguments, they could not but influence each other’s minds. To ponder and to compare them is an exercise helpful to a theological thinker in his search after truth. Unless we believe in the infallibility of our own Church, whatever that Church may be--unless we also believe our own Church to have collected every part of theological truth, to have examined it under every possible aspect, and to have secured the best possible point of view--all of us who engage in sacred studies are bound not to confine ourselves to the perusal of authors who belong to the way of thinking which prevails in our own denomination. Rome has her _Index Expurgatorius_, and in this she is perfectly consistent. Protestantism, whilst it condemns the Romanist prohibition of inquiry, is excessively inconsistent, if it encourages similar exclusiveness on the part of its own disciples, or allows a wider circle of reading only for controversial purposes. The narrowness of theological schools, and the bigotry of religious sects, is very much owing to a limited acquaintance with books, and to a prejudiced feeling against what is read when accustomed limits are overstepped. And in reference to the authors of the seventeenth century, it cannot be fairly denied--after all which may justly be said touching the dryness and prolixity of their dissertations--that a depth, thoroughness, and power may be found in some of these men which we miss, with a few exceptions, in Divines of our own day.