s according to
it, undoubtedly he shall be saved, and that there is no error in it
which may necessitate or warrant any man to disturb the peace or
renounce the communion of it. This, in my opinion, is all intended by
subscription.'[422] Bramhall,[423] Stillingfleet, Sanderson,[424]
Patrick,[425] Fowler, Laud,[426] Tillotson, Chief Justice King, Baxter,
and other eminent men of different schools of thought, were on this
point more or less agreed with Chillingworth. Moreover, the very freedom
of criticism which such great divines as Jeremy Taylor had exercised
without thought of censure, and the earnest vindication, frequent among
all Protestants, of the rights of the individual judgment, were standing
proofs that subscription had not been generally considered the
oppressive bondage which some were fain to make it.

Nevertheless, the position maintained by Waterland, by Whiston, by
Blackburne, and by some of the more ardent Calvinists, was strong, and
felt to be so. In appearance, if not in reality, there was clearly
something equivocal, some appearance of casuistry and reserve, if not of
insincerity, in subscribing to formularies, part of which were no longer
accepted in the spirit in which they had been drawn up, and with the
meaning they had been originally intended to bear. The Deistical and
Arian controversies of the eighteenth century threw these considerations
into more than usual prominence. Since the time of Laud, Arminian had
been so generally substituted for Calvinistical tenets in the Church of
England, that few persons would have challenged the right of subscribing
the Articles with a very different construction from that which they
wore when the influence of Bucer and Peter Martyr was predominant, or
even when Hales and Ward, and their fellow Calvinists, attended in
behalf of England at the Synod of Dort. On this point, at all events, it
was quite unmistakable that the Articles (as Hoadly said)[427] were by
public authority allowed a latitude of interpretation. But it was not
quite easy to see where the bounds of this latitude were to be drawn,
unless they were to be left to the individual conscience. And it was a
latitude which had become open to abuse in a new and formidable way.
Open or suspected Deists and Arians were known to have signed the
Articles on the ground of general conformity to the English Church. No
one knew how far revealed religion might be undermined, or attacked
under a masked battery,