[77] This must always be understood with the condition, that the reason itself shall be competently enlightened: if Chillingworth meant more than this, he carried his principle too far, as others have done. The case is parallel in jurisprudence, medicine, mechanics, and every human science: any one man, primâ facie, may be a competent judge, but all men are not so. It is hard to prove that there is any different rule for theology; but parties will always contend for extremes; for the rights of bigots to think for others, and the rights of fools to think for themselves.
[78] Chap. 3, § 81.
[79] Chap. 5, § 96.
[80] “This persuasion,” he says in a note, “is no singularity of mine, but the doctrine which I have learned from divines of great learning and judgment. Let the reader be pleased to peruse the 7th book of Acontius de Stratagematibus Satanæ, and Zanchius his last oration delivered by him after the composing of the discord between him and Amerbachius, and he shall confess as much.”
[81] Chap. 4, § 17.
28. It is obvious that in this passage, and indeed throughout the volume, Chillingworth contravenes the prevailing theories of the Anglican church, full as distinctly as those of the Roman. He escaped however unscathed by the censure of that jealous hierarchy; his private friendship with Laud, the lustre of his name, the absence of factious and sectarian connections, and still more perhaps the rapid gathering of the storms that swept both parties away, may be assigned as his protection. In later times his book obtained a high reputation; he was called the immortal Chillingworth; he was the favourite of all the moderate and the latitudinarian writers, of Tillotson, Locke, and Warburton. Those of opposite tenets, when they happen to have read his book, can do nothing else but condemn its tendency.
Hales on Schism. 29. A still more intrepid champion in the same cause was John Hales; for his little tract on Schism, not being in any part directed against the church of Rome, could have nothing to redeem the strong protestations against church authority, “which,” as he bluntly expresses it, “is none;” words that he afterwards slightly qualified. The aim of Hales, as well as of Grotius, Calixtus, and Chillingworth, was to bring about a more comprehensive communion; but he went still farther; his language is rough and audacious;[82] his theology in some of his other writings has a scent of Racow; and though these crept slowly to light, there was enough in the earliest to make us wonder at the high name, the epithet Ever-memorable, which he obtained in the English church.
[82] “I must, for my own part, confess that councils and synods not only may and have erred, but considering the means how they are managed, it were a great marvel if they did not err, for what men are they of whom those great meetings do consist? Are they the best, the most learned, the most virtuous, the most likely to walk uprightly? No, the greatest, the most ambitious, and many times men of neither judgment nor learning; such are they of whom these bodies do consist. Are these men in common equity likely to determine for truth?”—Vol. i., p. 60, edit. 1765.
“Universality is such a proof of truth as truth itself is ashamed of; for universality is but a quainter and a trimmer name to signify the multitude. Now human authority at the strongest is but weak, but the multitude is the weakest part of human authority; it is the great patron of error, most easily abused and most hardly disabused. The beginning of error may be and mostly is from private persons, but the maintainer and continuer of error is the multitude. Private persons first beget errors in the multitude and make them public; and publicness of them begets them again in private persons. It is a thing which our common experience and practice acquaints us with, that when some private persons have gained authority with the multitude, and infused some error into them and made it public, the publicness of the error gains authority to it, and interchangeably prevails with private persons to entertain it. The most singular and strongest part of human authority is properly in the wisest and most virtuous; and those I trow are not the most universal.”—iii. 164.
The treatise on Schism, from which these last passages are not extracted, was printed at Oxford in 1642, with some animadversions by the editor. Wood’s Athenæ, iii. 414.