27. Chillingworth was, however, a man versed in patristical learning, by no means less so, probably, than Laud. But he had found so much uncertainty about this course of theological doctrine, seducing as it generally is to the learned, “fathers,” as he expresses it, “being set against fathers, and councils against councils,” that he declares, in a well-known passage, the Bible exclusively to be the religion of protestants; and each man’s own reason to be, as from the general tenor of his volume it appears that he held it, the interpreter of the Bible.[77] It was a natural consequence that he was a strenuous advocate not so much for toleration of separate churches, as for such an “ordering of the public service of God, that all who believe the Scripture and live according to it, might, without scruple or hypocrisy or protestation against any part, join in it;”[78] a scheme when practicable, as it could not possibly be often rendered, far more eligible than the separation of sects, and hence the favourite object of Grotius and Taylor, as well as of Erasmus and Cassander. And in a remarkable and eloquent passage, Chillingworth declares that “protestants are inexcusable, if they did offer violence to other men’s consciences;” which Knott had said to be notorious, as in fact it was, and as Chillingworth ought more explicitly to have admitted.[79] “Certainly,” he observes in another place, “if protestants are faulty in this matter [of claiming authority], it is for doing it too much and not too little. This presumptuous imposing of the senses of men upon the words of God, the special senses of men upon the general words of God, and laying them upon men’s consciences together, under the equal penalty of death and damnation, this vain conceit that we can speak of the things of God better than in the words of God; this deifying our own interpretations and tyrannous enforcing them upon others; this restraining of the word of God from that latitude and generality, and the understandings of men from that liberty wherein Christ and the apostles left them, is and hath been the only fountain of all the schisms of the church, and that which makes them immortal;[80] the common incendiary of Christendom, and that which tears in pieces not the coat but the bowels and members of Christ. Take away these walls of separation and all will quickly be one. Take away this persecuting, burning, cursing, damning of men for not subscribing the words of men as the words of God; require of Christians only to believe Christ, and to call no man master but him only; let those leave claiming infallibility that have no title to it, and let them that in their words disclaim it, disclaim it also in their actions. In a word, take away tyranny,” &c.[81]