A contemporary--one of their number--describes them in the first place as attached to the liturgy of the Church of England; and as admiring its solemnity, gravity, and primitive simplicity, together with its freedom both from affected phrases, and from any mixture of vain and doubtful opinions. They also, he says, believed “that it is the greatest check to devotion which can be, to hear men mix their private opinions with their public prayers,”--and they expressed themselves strongly against extempore devotions. As for rites and ceremonies, they approved what is called “the virtuous mediocrity of the Reformed Episcopal Church,” between the “meretricious gaudiness” of Rome, and “the squalid sluttery” of the fanatics. They contended that “so long as we live in this region of mortality, we must make use of such external helps” as the Church has thought fitted for the ends of worship. According to the same authority, they were averse to Presbyterianism and to Independency; and were decided supporters of Episcopal order. As for the doctrines of the Church, the Latitudinarians cordially adhered to the Thirty-nine Articles, to the three Creeds, and to any doctrine held by the Church, “unless absolute reprobation be one, which they do not think themselves bound to believe.” Great reverence is attributed to them, for the genuine monuments of the ancient Fathers, those especially of the first and purest age; and the writer then meets the charge of their hearkening too much to reason. For reason, he says, “is that faculty, whereby a man must judge of everything; nor can a man believe anything except he have some reason for it, whether that reason be a deduction from the light of nature, and those principles which are the candle of the Lord, set up in the soul of every man that hath not wilfully extinguished it, or a branch of Divine revelation in the oracles of Holy Scripture; or the general interpretation of genuine antiquity, or the proposal of our own Church consentaneous thereto; or lastly, the result of some or all of these: for he that will rightly make use of his reason, must take all that is reasonable into consideration. And it is admirable to consider how the same conclusions do naturally flow from all these several principles; and what in the faithful use of the faculties that God hath given, men have believed for true, doth excellently agree with that revelation that God hath exhibited in the Scripture, and the doctrine of the ancient Church with them both. Thus the freedom of our wills, the universal intent of Christ’s death, and sufficiency of God’s grace, the condition of justification, and many other points of the like nature, which have been almost exploded in these latter degenerate ages of the world, do again begin to obtain, though with different persons upon different accounts: some embrace them for their evidence in Scripture, others for the concurrent testimony of the primitive Church for above four