The way is now open for viewing that division of thinkers who distinguished themselves, after the Restoration, by the breadth of their opinions. They followed in the steps of those whom we have now described, but in some particulars they went far beyond them. In a former volume I touched upon the Cambridge school of theologians; it remains for me to trace the subsequent development and progress of their peculiarities. They early received the name of Latitudinarians, and in 1662 their name had passed into everybody’s mouth, although its explicit meaning, it was said, remained as great a mystery as the order of the Rosicrucians. Some spoke of them as holding dangerous opinions, others defended them; but all which people in general knew seemed to be that the new school of thinkers mostly belonged to the University of Cambridge, and that they mostly followed the new philosophy.
A contemporary—one of their number—describes them in the first place as attached to the liturgy of the Church of England; and as admiring its solemnity, gravity, and primitive simplicity, together with its freedom both from affected phrases, and from any mixture of vain and doubtful opinions. They also, he says, believed “that it is the greatest check to devotion which can be, to hear men mix their private opinions with their public prayers,”—and they expressed themselves strongly against extempore devotions. As for rites and ceremonies, they approved what is called “the virtuous mediocrity of the Reformed Episcopal Church,” between the “meretricious gaudiness” of Rome, and “the squalid sluttery” of the fanatics. They contended that “so long as we live in this region of mortality, we must make use of such external helps” as the Church has thought fitted for the ends of worship. According to the same authority, they were averse to Presbyterianism and to Independency; and were decided supporters of Episcopal order. As for the doctrines of the Church, the Latitudinarians cordially adhered to the Thirty-nine Articles, to the three Creeds, and to any doctrine held by the Church, “unless absolute reprobation be one, which they do not think themselves bound to believe.” Great reverence is attributed to them, for the genuine monuments of the ancient Fathers, those especially of the first and purest age; and the writer then meets the charge of their hearkening too much to reason. For reason, he says, “is that faculty, whereby a man must judge of everything; nor can a man believe anything except he have some reason for it, whether that reason be a deduction from the light of nature, and those principles which are the candle of the Lord, set up in the soul of every man that hath not wilfully extinguished it, or a branch of Divine revelation in the oracles of Holy Scripture; or the general interpretation of genuine antiquity, or the proposal of our own Church consentaneous thereto; or lastly, the result of some or all of these: for he that will rightly make use of his reason, must take all that is reasonable into consideration. And it is admirable to consider how the same conclusions do naturally flow from all these several principles; and what in the faithful use of the faculties that God hath given, men have believed for true, doth excellently agree with that revelation that God hath exhibited in the Scripture, and the doctrine of the ancient Church with them both. Thus the freedom of our wills, the universal intent of Christ’s death, and sufficiency of God’s grace, the condition of justification, and many other points of the like nature, which have been almost exploded in these latter degenerate ages of the world, do again begin to obtain, though with different persons upon different accounts: some embrace them for their evidence in Scripture, others for the concurrent testimony of the primitive Church for above four hundred years; others for the reasonableness of the things themselves, and their agreement both with the Divine attributes, and the easy suggestions of their own minds. Nor is there any point in Divinity, where that which is most ancient doth not prove the most rational, and the most rational the ancientest; for there is an eternal consanguinity between all verity; and nothing is true in Divinity, which is false in Philosophy, or on the contrary; and therefore what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”[468]
CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL.
The account is that of a partizan, who evidently wishes to make Latitudinarianism stand well in the estimation of all sorts of Churchmen; and therefore he strives to paint its teachers in colours of orthodoxy, and he charily remarks that they will be “generally suspected to be for liberty of conscience.”
Baxter, in 1665, speaks of the same school, as Platonists, or Cartesians, and of many of them as Arminians, with this addition, that they had more charitable thoughts than others of the salvation of heathens and infidels; and that some of them agreed in the opinions of Origen, about the pre-existence of souls.[469] Burnet says that they “read Episcopius much,”[470] respecting whose works Thorndike affirmed, that in them “the faith of the Holy Trinity is made an indifferent thing,” and the doctrine of original sin is “turned out of doors,”[471]—a sweeping accusation which has been called in question, yet it would be difficult to establish the orthodoxy of Episcopius on the Trinity, in the sense attached to that term by writers like Thorndike. No doubt there were heterodox tendencies in the writings of Episcopius and his school; but in this respect some of the later Remonstrants went beyond their master.
FOWLER.
The writer who most fully expounded the tenets of the Latitudinarians as a whole was Edward Fowler, who hesitated to conform in 1662, but who became afterwards Rector of Allhallows, Bread Street, and finally was elevated to the see of Gloucester. In his work On the Principles and Practices of Certain Moderate Divines of the Church of England, published in 1679, he professes truly to represent and defend them, and every page bears witness to the fact of their having been adopted by this author. He strongly maintains the eternal and immutable grounds of morality, against the pernicious principle which had been urged by some Calvinists, that the entire basis of virtue is to be found in the will of God, and vindicates the prominence given by the new teachers to the reasonableness of Christianity. Though the supernatural origin of the Gospel, and the Divine authority of its doctrines, are implied, and even distinctly acknowledged in the volume, yet the impression given by it altogether is such as to place the duty of accepting Christianity mainly upon the ground of its being a rational system. The production of faith is described as a process of reasoning, with regard to which the inward testimony of the Spirit is resolved “ordinarily” into a blessing on the use of means, i.e., the consideration of the motives He hath given us to believe.[472]
Another passage may be quoted, indicating the view of the writer upon a question which proves a touchstone of theological sentiment.
The Latitudinarians “are very careful so to handle the doctrine of justifying faith, as not only to make obedience to follow it, but likewise to include a hearty willingness to submit to all Christ’s precepts in the nature of it; and to show the falsity and defectiveness of some descriptions of faith, that have had too general an entertainment, and still have. This they look upon themselves as greatly obliged to do, as being well aware, of what dangerous consequence some received notions of that grace are, and that not a few that have imbibed them, have so well understood their true and natural inferences, as to be thereby encouraged to let the reins loose to all ungodliness.”[473]
Fowler affirms that those who are sincerely righteous, and from an inward living principle allow themselves in no known sin, nor in the neglect of any known duty, which is to be truly, evangelically righteous, shall be dealt with and rewarded, in and through Christ, as if they were perfectly and in a strict legal sense so. Entering essentially into Fowler’s notion of faith is the idea of its being the germ of Christian virtue: and, as it regards the connection between faith and justification, he believes that the receiving of Christ as Lord is a prerequisite to the obtaining of Christ as Redeemer. He defines justifying faith in these words:—“A grace of the Holy Spirit, whereby a man being convinced of his sin and miserable estate in regard of it, and an all-sufficiency in Christ to save from both, receives Him as He is tendered in the Gospel, or according to his three offices of Prophet, Priest, and King;” and,—which is important to the understanding of Fowler’s views,—he adds, “That act of receiving Christ as Lord, is to go before that of receiving Him as a Priest; for we may not rely upon Him for salvation, till we are willing to yield obedience to Him.”[474] In all this, and in much more, may be recognized a striving after some way of thoroughly meeting the two sides of that redemption from evil, which in the Gospel is ever represented as one. Whilst some theologians made holiness the result of faith in a Divine salvation, which salvation was treated by them as identical with justification, and others considered holiness as an essential part of it,—Fowler leaned in the direction of making holiness the means of salvation; and the tendency to adopt a via media further appears in his attempt to steer a middle course between Calvinism and Arminianism:—He remarks, “That there is such a thing as distinguishing grace, whereby some persons are absolutely elected, by virtue whereof they shall be (having potent and infallible means prepared for them) irresistibly saved. But that others, that are not in the number of those singular and special favourites, are not at all in a desperate condition, but have sufficient means appointed for them to qualify them for greater or less degrees of happiness, and have sufficient grace offered to them some way or other, and some time or other; and are in a capacity of salvation either greater or less, through the merits of Jesus Christ; and that none of them are damned, but those that wilfully refuse to co-operate with that grace of God, and will not act in some moral suitableness to that power they have received.”[475]