Tillotson was of a different temperament from the heroic Lady Russell, and it was perhaps for this very reason that Lady Churchill consulted him. With the soundest judgment and the kindest temper, this revered prelate had a sensitiveness of disposition which tended to render him cautious, perhaps timid, in his measures. “He was,” says his dearest friend, “a faithful and zealous friend, but a gentle and soon conquered enemy.”[144] But he was truly and seriously religious, without affectation, bigotry, or superstition; and it may be supposed that the dauntless thinker, Lady Churchill, whose original mind detested these prevalent defects, delighted in conversing with one of so enlightened a spirit. “His notions of morality were fine and sublime;”[145] and she might well feel that she could not go wrong, with one so scrupulously virtuous to guide her. The influence of Dr. Tillotson as a preacher, his sermons being then accounted the patterns for all such compositions, might also sway her in requesting his counsels; whilst “the perpetual slanders, and other ill usage,” with which, according to his friend, he had been followed, and which gave him “too much trouble, and too great a concern,”[146] might, she may well have thought, have taught him to feel for others, and induced him to double caution in pointing out the right path, to one beginning the weary road of public life, in which she, too, found that vanity and vexation of spirit went along with her on her journey. It is not to persons such as these that we address ourselves, when we intend to follow a crooked line of policy. We may judge favourably of the purity of our motives, when we determine to question the wise and the good, upon the mode and spirit of our actions; and Lady Churchill, when she hastened to disclose her perplexities, and to unfold her intentions, to two persons of undoubted probity and of known piety, may have felt satisfied that she need not blush to confess them to a higher power. The result of her deliberations was a determination to influence the Princess to surrender what she could scarcely deem her rights, in favour of William and Mary, during their separate lives; but with precedence to her, and to her children, to any issue which William might have by a second marriage, in case of the death of his Queen. And it might have been inferred that, for this important decision, the gratitude of the King and Queen would have been effectually secured to Lord and Lady Churchill, who had both shared in the good office. But such was not the result.