possessed with the belief of absolute decrees: he said to me, he adhered to these, because he did not see how the belief of Providence could be maintained upon any other supposition. His indifference as to the forms of Church government, and his being zealous for toleration, together with his cold behaviour towards the Clergy, gave them generally very ill impressions of him.”[364] The effect of frigid manners, felt by the nation at large, was deepened in the case of high Churchmen, by William’s well-known Presbyterian predilections, and his dislike to what is meant by Anglo-Catholicism. As we have seen, during the life of Mary, he left the exercise of his prerogative in reference to ecclesiastical matters in her hands, and after her death meddled with them in the smallest possible degree, so that he never could be said to have exerted any direct influence in the government of the Church.[365] But, indirectly, by the Revolution itself, and by the Act of Toleration which followed, and was promoted by him, he changed the position of the Establishment altogether, and opened up to the Episcopal Church a new career, in which conciliation instead of persecution could alone prove its permanent safeguard, and a secret of prosperity. The first monarch on the throne of these realms who loved a constitutional system of religious liberty, William not only won the affection of Dissenters, as he might be naturally expected to do, but by his wise and equitable policy in this respect, laid the whole kingdom and posterity under obligations which have never yet been fully acknowledged. CHAPTER XIII. The most distinguished divines who sat upon the Episcopal Bench in the reign of William III., were more or less imbued with what were called Latitudinarian sentiments. Tillotson and Tenison who did so much, especially the latter of them, by force of character, as well as prominence of position, towards keeping the Church in subordination to the State, have already occupied a considerable space in this History. Next to them, Burnet was most distinguished, and he also has received repeated notice as an ecclesiastical statesman; it should be added, that he was no less a diligent diocesan and a laborious divine. His treatise on _Pastoral Care_ expresses the spiritual anxieties of a good minister of Jesus Christ: his Histories are pervaded by a spirit of Erastianism, as described by some; by a tone of liberality, as denoted by others; and his _Exposition of the XXXIX Articles_, in like manner, is both condemned as latitudinarian, and commended as comprehensive. [Sidenote: BISHOPS.]