20. The tenets of some of those who have been called High-church Anglicans may in themselves be little different from those of Grotius and Calixtus. But the spirit in which they have been conceived is altogether opposite. The one is exclusive, intolerant, severe, dogmatical, insisting on uniformity of faith as well as of exterior observances; the other catholic in outward profession, charitable in sentiment, and in fact one mode, though a mode as imprudent as it was oblique, in which the latitudinarian principle was manifested. The language both of Grotius and Calixtus bears this out, and this ought closely to be observed, lest we confound the real laxity of one school with the rigid orthodoxy of the other. One had it in view to reconcile discordant communions by mutual concession, and either by such explication of contrarieties as might make them appear less incompatible with outward unity, or by an avowed tolerance of their profession within the church; the other would permit nothing but submission to its own authority: it loved to multiply rather than to extinguish the risks of dissent, in order to crush it more effectually; the one was a pacific negotiator, the other a conquering tyrant. |Daillé on the right use of the Fathers.| 21. It was justly alarming to sincere protestants, that so many brilliant ornaments of their party should either desert to the hostile side, or do their own so much injury by taking up untenable ground.[75] Nothing, it appeared to reflecting men, could be trusted to the argument from antiquity: whatever was gained in the controversy on a few points was lost upon those of the first importance. It was become the only secure course to overthrow the tribunal. Daillé, himself one of the most learned in this patristic erudition whom the French reformed church possessed, was the first who boldly attacked the new school of historical theology in their own stronghold, not occupying their fortress, but razing it to the ground. The design of his celebrated Treatise concerning the right use of the Fathers, published in 1628, is, in his own words, to show, “that they cannot be the judges of the controversies in religion at this day between the papist and the protestant,” nor, by parity of reasoning, of many others; “1. Because it is, if not an impossible, yet at least a very difficult thing to find out what their sense hath been touching the same. 2. Because that their sense and judgment of these things, supposing it to be certainly and clearly understood, not being infallible, and without all danger of error, cannot carry with it a sufficient authority for the satisfying the understanding.”