ng. After describing the arid condition of his time,
the prevailing tendency of ministers to seek pomp and luxury, and the
apparent thinness of the preaching of the day, he adds: "Some {290} few
exceptions are to be made; but so few, that if _a new set of men had not
appeared of another stamp_, the Church had quite lost her esteem over the
nation." He then designates this group of Cambridge scholars. Speaking
particularly of Whichcote, he says: "Being disgusted with the dry
systematical way of those times, he studied to raise those who conversed
with him to a nobler set of thoughts, and to consider religion as _a seed
of a deiform nature_ (to use one of his own phrases). In order to this,
he set young students much on reading the ancient philosophers, chiefly
Plato, Tully and Plotin, and on considering the Christian religion as a
doctrine sent from God, both to elevate and sweeten human nature, in
which he was a great example, as well as a wise and kind instructor.
Cudworth carried this on with a great strength of genius and a vast
compass of learning."[6]

These "Latitude-Men" were Puritan in temper and in intensity of
conviction; they were all trained in the great nursery of Puritan faith,
Emmanuel College, and they were on intimate terms with many of the men
who were the creators of the outer and inner life of the Commonwealth,
but in their intellectual sympathies they went neither with the sectaries
of the time--"the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles," as S. P.
puts it--nor with the prevailing Puritan theology. They read Calvin and
Beza with diligence, at least Whichcote did, but their thought did not
move along the track which the great Genevan had constructed. They
discovered another way of approach which made the old way and the old
battles seem to them futile. Instead of beginning with the eternal
mysteries of the inscrutable divine Will, they began with the fundamental
nature of man, always deep and difficult to fathom, but for ever the
ground and basis of all that can be known in the field of religion.
Their interest was thus psychological rather than theological. It is
their constant assertion that nothing is more intrinsically rational than
religion, and they focus all their energies to make this point clear and
evident.

{291}

They came to their intellectual development in the period when Hobbes was
formulating one of the most powerful and subtle types of materialism that
has ever been pr