Philosophy abroad placed itself at the head of these tendencies. Even Descartes, the Christian, in seeking a basis for positive belief, started with a doubt; Spinoza, the Jew, his disciple in some respects, found his goal in pantheism.[493] The Malmesbury philosopher, Hobbes, and, still earlier, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in their free-thinking speculations, long before any great movement took place at Cambridge, not only laid religion open to the inroads of infidelity, but aided and abetted attacks upon its citadel: Herbert, by denying the necessity of a Scripture revelation, Hobbes by representing Christianity as resting on a foundation, which no reasonable man can tolerate for a moment. Thus widely, for good and for evil, free thought was at work in Europe. Some saw in it a rising storm, which would tear every vessel from its moorings; others believed it to be the breaking up of a winter’s frost, and the melting down of icebergs, which had long chilled the whole intellectual atmosphere. For my own part, I am convinced that there was both evil and good in all this activity, of which the effect may be traced in the history of intellectual inquiry ever since. It is felt in the controversies of the present day; and he is the wise man who strives to distinguish between the precious and the vile, to separate the one from the other, and in the noble service of truth to abstain from any alliance with error. [Sidenote: MILTON’S OPINIONS.] In this notice of the progress of free inquiry one great thinker should be mentioned, whose fame as a poet has so eclipsed the reputation of his genius in other respects, that he is rarely remembered in the character of a theologian, although he really was one. In that capacity he combined, perhaps, beyond any man of his age, peculiarities drawn from two schools, with neither of which could he be identified. In the very title of John Milton’s _Treatise on Christian Doctrine, compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone_, there is a Puritan-like renunciation of the Anglican doctrine of patristic authority: his inquiry touches only what the Bible teaches, and he professes, as many others have done, without allowing for educational and constitutional influences, to draw all his conclusions immediately and impartially from Holy Writ. He might free himself from Church trammels of all kinds; nevertheless even he could not deliver his mind from all predilections and prejudgments; and when in his old age he sat down to read the Bible, Milton, no more than other men, could bring to it a _tabula rasa_ ready to receive nothing but unbiassed impressions from the Divine oracles.