Turning to the doctrinal views of the Puritan school, I shall first notice certain points of resemblance between them and the opinions of Anglican Divines. The former, as well as the latter, insisted upon the doctrines of the Trinity, the Deity of our Lord, and the Divinity and personality of the Holy Spirit--nor could any disciple of the Nicene faith more firmly hold the eternal generation of the Son of God than did some of them.[517] Also, they firmly held the doctrine of original sin. At the same time, in common with the Low Church or Latitudinarian writers, they eschewed appeals to the Fathers as invested with any special authority, adopting more or less a spirit of free inquiry which gradually led some of them to relax a little their doctrinal strictness; and they went beyond their last-mentioned contemporaries in anti-sacerdotal and anti-sacramental views. They present marked characteristics of their own. They all appeal to the Scriptures, not only as the supreme, but as the exclusively accessible tribunal to which theological controversy could be brought; yet, it should be noticed in passing, that many of them studied patristic literature with great diligence, especially certain portions in harmony with their own opinions and tastes. There is also this peculiarity attaching to them as a class, that they do not, as Thorndike, work out a covenant of grace founded upon baptism,[518]--although they occasionally allude to that sacrament in a way which is surprising to some of their descendants; nor did they, as Jackson, as Heylyn, as Pearson, or as Barrow, follow the creeds of the Church in their theological inquiries. Baxter especially valued the Apostles’ Creed, but Puritan Divines did not adopt that, or any other of the ancient symbols, as a formula for the order of their own thoughts. Not that they broke away altogether from the habit of beginning with God the Great Cause, and descending to man His creature, subject, and fallen child; not that they adopted an _à posteriori_ method, beginning with man as a degenerate and guilty being, and rising up to God whom man has offended, and who alone can be the Author of his salvation,--a method which is adopted by some theological thinkers of our own time. In commencing their systematic ideas of theology with God, and coming down to man, the Puritans followed the traditional order of studious thoughtfulness upon such high themes. Goodwin resolved all Divine knowledge into the knowledge of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; but still it was not to the Creed as a textual authority, it was not to its clauses, one by one, that he or any of his brethren referred, as direction posts along the sacred way. Their wont was to select some one principle as a centre, and then to cluster round it kindred theological ideas, the various parts being woven into one harmonious whole. In this respect, they differed both from Anglicans and from Latitudinarians, who were