25. This well-timed and important book met with a good reception from some in England, though it must have been very uncongenial to the ruling party. It was extolled and partly translated by Lord Falkland; and his two distinguished friends, Chillingworth and Hales, found in it the materials of their own bold revolt against church authority. They were both Arminians, and, especially the former, averse in all respects to the Puritan school. But like Episcopius, they scorned to rely, as on these points they might have done, on what they deemed so precarious and inconclusive as the sentiments of the fathers. Chillingworth, as is well known, had been induced to embrace the Romish religion, on the usual ground that a succession of infallible pastors, that is, a collective hierarchy, by adhering to whom alone we could be secure from error, was to be found in that church. He returned again to the protestant religion on being convinced that no such infallible society could be found. And a Jesuit, by name Knott, having written a book to prove that unrepenting protestants could not be saved, Chillingworth published, in 1637, his famous answer: The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation. In this he closely tracks the steps of his adversary, replying to every paragraph and almost every sentence. |Character of this work.| 26. Knott is by no means a despicable writer, he is concise, polished, and places in an advantageous light the great leading arguments of his church. Chillingworth, with a more diffuse and less elegant style, is greatly superior in impetuosity and warmth. In his long parenthetical periods, and in those of other old English writers, in his copiousness, which is never empty or tautological, there is an inartificial eloquence springing from strength of intellect and sincerity of feeling, that cannot fail to impress the reader. But his chief excellence is the close reasoning, which avoids every dangerous admission and yields to no ambiguousness of language. He perceived and maintained with great courage, considering the times in which he wrote and the temper of those he was not unwilling to keep as friends, his favourite tenet, that all things necessary to be believed are clearly laid down in Scripture. Of tradition, which many of his contemporary protestants were becoming as prone to magnify as their opponents, he spoke very slightingly; not denying of course a maxim often quoted from Vincentius Lirinensis, that a tradition strictly universal and aboriginal must be founded in truth, but being assured that no such could be shown; and that what came nearest, both in antiquity and in evidence of catholic reception, to the name of apostolical, were doctrines and usages rejected alike by all denominations of the church in modern times.[76] It will be readily conceived, that his method of dealing with the controversy is very different from that of Laud in his treatise against Fisher; wherein we