he preached twice each week until his death in
1683.

He once said in one of his sermons: "Had we a man among us, that we could
produce, that did live an exact Gospel life; had we a man that was really
gospelized; were the Gospel a life, a soul, and a spirit to him . . . he
would be the most lovely and useful person under heaven. Christianity
would be recommended to the world by his spirit and conversation."[8]
Dr. Whichcote himself was, as far as one can judge from the impression
which he made on his contemporaries, such a "gospelized" man. He
"recommended religion," as Dr. Salter says, by his life and writings, and
showed it "in its fairest and truest light as the highest perfection of
human nature."[9] He seemed to be "emancipated" when he came back to
Cambridge as Provost of King's College, and he devoted himself to
"spreading and propagating a more generous sett of opinions" than those
which were generally proclaimed in the sermons of the time, and "the
young Masters of Arts soon cordially embraced" his message.[10]

This "new sett of opinions," proclaimed in Trinity Church with vision and
power, soon disturbed those who were of the older and sterner schools of
thought. "My heart hath bin much exercised about you," his old friend
and tutor, Dr. Tuckney, wrote to him in 1651, "especially since your
being Vice-Chancellour, I have seldom heard you preach, but that
something hath bin delivered {293} by you, and that so authoritatively
and with big words, sometimes of 'divinest reason' and sometimes of 'more
than mathematical demonstration,' that hath much grieved me."[11] The
novelty of Dr. Whichcote's "opinions" comes more clearly into view as the
letter proceeds: "Your Discourse about Reconciliation that 'it doth not
operate on God, but on us' is Divinity [theology] that my heart riseth
against. . . . To say that the ground of God's reconciliation is from
anything in us; and not from His free grace, freely justifying the
ungodly, is to deny one of the fundamental truths of the Gospel that
derives from heaven."[12]

The correspondence which followed this frank letter supplies us with the
clearest light we possess, or can possess, upon Whichcote's inner life
and type of religion. He replied to his old friend, whom he had always
held "in love, reverence and esteem," that he had noticed of late that
"our hearts have not seemed to be together when our persons have
bin,"[13] "but," he adds, "your letter meets with