hall be decided by their applicability to the great exigencies
of society, and by the ease with which they adapt themselves to the
general purposes of ordinary life."

The celebrated work by Chillingworth, _The Religion of Protestants, a
Safe Way to Salvation_, published in 1637, and of which two editions
were issued within less than five months, also deserves special mention
here. His fundamental position may be well summarised in one of his own
sentences--"I am fully assured that God does not, and therefore that man
ought not to require any more of any man than this, to believe the
Scriptures to be God's word, to endeavour to find the true sense of it,
and to live according to it." Even more fully than Hooker,
Chillingworth accepts reason as the all-sufficient guide of human
conduct, and admits no reservations that might limit the sacred right of
private judgement. The essential difference between these three eminent
writers is admirably summarised by Buckle in the following
words:[21:2]{2} "These three great men represent the three distinct
epochs of the three successive generations in which they respectively
lived. In Jewel, reason is, if I may so say, the superstructure of the
system; but authority is the basis upon which the superstructure is
built. In Hooker, authority is only the superstructure, and reason is
the basis. But in Chillingworth, whose writings were harbingers of the
coming storm, authority entirely disappears, and the whole fabric of
religion is made to rest upon the way in which the unaided reason of man
shall interpret the decrees of an omnipotent God."

In fact, Chillingworth's great work may well be regarded as the last
word of the Protestant Reformation in England.

FOOTNOTES:

[15:1] According to Beard, _The Hibbert Lectures_, 1883, p. 119, "It was
a mediaeval maxim, which no one thought of questioning, that the language
of the Bible had four senses--the literal, the allegorical, the
tropological, and the anagogical, of which the last three were mystical
or spiritual, in contradistinction to the first." The learned Erasmus,
who lived and died a devout Roman Catholic, seems to have accepted this
allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. Of interpreters of the
Holy Scriptures, he recommends those "who depart as far as possible from
the letter." Erasmus, _Opp._ (_Enchiridion_), v. 29, B, C, D. Quoted by
Beard, p. 120.

[16:1] _Church History_, vol. iv. p. 407.

[17:1] When occasion a