Passing to Church questions, the same writer expresses a preference for Episcopacy, but does not unchurch unepiscopal societies; he holds Erastian views of the power of the civil magistrate; and strangely denies, that liberty of conscience forms a part of Christian liberty. He would concede to every man liberty of opinion, but not the liberty of persuading others to adopt his opinion; so that this scheme, ecclesiastically considered, runs at last into the doctrine of intolerance. Throughout Fowler’s works an anti-Puritan feeling is predominant; and his allusions to Nonconformists are by no means friendly.[477] Wilkins, the moderate and liberal Bishop of Chester, belonged to the same class with Fowler. Known chiefly by his scientific works, he, nevertheless, deserves notice as one of the early defenders of natural religion against the attacks and the innuendoes of sceptics and infidels. The authors who have been just mentioned passed over the evidences of religion and plunged at once into the discussion of doctrines; but Wilkins saw that there is much outside Christianity which needed defence, for the subsequent preservation of the palladium of the faith. He is to be reckoned amongst the first to expound those more general and fundamental truths which, in the next century, occupied so much attention, and were esteemed bulwarks of revelation. He wrote upon the principles and duties of natural religion; but only twelve chapters of the book on the subject were completed by himself; the rest being prepared from the Bishop’s MSS., by his friend Tillotson. Cumberland’s _De legibus Naturæ Disquisitio Philosophica_ (1672) is scarcely a theological treatise, it being a pioneer in the dangerous region of utilitarian ethics; but Cumberland may properly be reckoned as belonging to the Latitudinarians, for his speculations are more or less intimately related to what is generally regarded as the religion of nature in its alliance with the religion of revelation. [Sidenote: CUDWORTH.]