of Brownists which eventually set out in two ships for the new world, one of which—the “Mayflower”—reached what is now the State of Massachusetts. The Brownists were the first party of separatists from the newly established Church in England, and the old and new worlds recognise in them the true spiritual forbears of all Independent and Congregational Churches; whose ecclesiastical polity requires that each congregation should suffice to itself, be complete in itself.
The Latitudinarians.
In the next century arose the liberal church movement of Hales, Chillingworth, and Jeremy Taylor. Falkland, the great layman who inspired it, had been educated at Dublin university, but was entered for S. John’s College as early as 1621, and claimed in after life, in a letter to the then Master, to have been a member of that society. Taylor was a Cambridge man who had removed to Oxford; Hales and Chillingworth were both distinguished Oxford scholars. The distinction made by Taylor and Chillingworth between essential and non-essential articles of belief was very far ahead of the theoretical and practical narrowness of the German Protestantism around them. The problem at issue was stated by Stillingfleet,[409] “fresh from the generous intellectual life of Cambridge,” on the eve of the Restoration: Does there exist, in regard to Church government, any such jus divinum as would prevent men, under the stress of circumstances, learning from each other, and arriving at unity? The doctrine of accommodation stated in his Eirenicum, though it was not in advance of the earlier speculation of Ussher, Chillingworth, Taylor, and Hales, anticipated later developments of theological speculation with which we are all familiar.
Deism.
The xvii and xviii centuries saw the rise and progress of Deism. Lord Herbert of Cherbury[410] “the father of deism” was educated at Oxford; the great opponent of his doctrines was the Cambridge philosopher Samuel Clarke. Nevertheless deism was not a university movement. Bolingbroke, Morgan, and Blount (1654-93) were at no university; Shaftesbury (b. 1621) and Tindal had been at Oxford; Woolston and Anthony Collins (b. 1676) had been at Cambridge; and Toland after a residence at three other universities, retired to Oxford. Conyers Middleton, librarian of Trinity, was another opponent of the deists. Like unitarianism, deism undoubtedly responds to a certain temper of English religious speculation and sentiment, but apparently to no very wide-spread temper; and the success of English deism was consummated not here but on the continent.
The Evangelical movement.
The evangelical movement is entirely associated with the names of John and Charles Wesley and Whitfield—with a group of Oxford men. There was no principle of ecclesiastical polity and none of philosophy underlying it: it was a fervent religious revival begun within the Church of England and ending outside it, and as such the great influence it has exerted would appear to have presented few attractions for the Cambridge mind.
The Tractarian movement, and the earlier Cambridge movement.
The ‘Tractarian movement’ which also arose as a renewal of religious life in the Church of England, was, like Wesleyanism, due exclusively to Oxford men. A still earlier ‘High Church’ movement—a ritualistic movement before ‘Tractarianism’—had however found its home in Cambridge under the auspices of Andrewes, Wren, and Cosin. These three men, later bishops of Winchester, Ely, and Durham respectively, established a type of Reformed churchmanship not only more tolerant and scholarly than Laud’s but one which was more genuinely a university movement; for it was indigenous—its patrons were all heads of Cambridge houses—and it did not meet, as did Laud’s efforts at Oxford, with dislike and rejection at the university. Two hundred years passed before the Tractarian movement at Oxford reproduced its likeness and tendered it to Englishmen as the vera effigies of the Church of England.[411] The influence on religion of Charles Simeon and other Cambridge men in ante-Tractarian days should also be remembered; neither should it be forgotten that the liberal anti-Calvinistic churchmanship of Peter Baro and Overall was first taught by Cambridge men.
The age of Elizabeth and the New Learning.