LUENCES MAKING FOR 'LATITUDE'

The foregoing sufficiently illustrates the position confronting those
who at that time openly avowed their departure from the Trinitarian
dogma. Those who dared and suffered were no doubt but a few of those who
really shared in the heretical view; the testimony of orthodox writers
is all in support of this surmise. Equally clear is the fact that while
the religious authorities were thus rigorous a steadily deepening
undercurrent of opinion made for 'Latitude.' How far this Latitude might
properly go was a troublesome question, but at any rate some were
willing to advocate what many must have silently desired.

Apart from the extremists in the great struggle between High Church and
Puritans there existed a group of moderate men, often of shrewd
intellect, ripe scholarship, and attractive temper, who sought in a
wider liberty of opinion an escape from the tyrannical alternatives
presented by the two opposing parties. Even in connection with these
very parties there were tendencies peculiar to themselves, which could
not fail in the end to mitigate the force of their own contentions. The
High Church was mostly 'Arminian,' i.e. on the side of the more
'reasonable' theology of that age. The Puritans were wholly committed to
the principle of democratic liberty, as then understood, and in
religious matters set the Bible in the highest place of authority. It
could not be but that these several factors should ultimately tell upon
the solution of the problem of religious liberty. But the immediate
steps toward that solution had to be taken by the advocates of Latitude.
Among them were Lord Falkland, John Hales, and William Chillingworth,
the last of whom is famous for his unflinching protest that 'the Bible,
the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants,' a saying which was as
good as a charter to those who based their so-called heresies on the
explicit words of Scripture. In the second half of that seventeenth
century the work of broadening the religious mind was carried forward by
others of equal or even greater ability; it is sufficient here to name
Jeremy Taylor among Churchmen, and Richard Baxter among Nonconformists.

There was, of course, a good deal of levity, the temper of the Gallio
who cares for none of these things. But this was not the temper of the
men to whom we refer. Their greatest difficulty, indeed, arose from
their intense interest in religious truth. They could not conceive a