The other members of this impressive group of Cambridge Platonists, especially Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, Nathaniel Culverwel and John Norris, might well be studied, and they would furnish some additional aspects of religious thought, but the teachings of the two exponents whom I have selected as representative of the school have brought the central ideas and the underlying spirit of this seventeenth century religious movement sufficiently into view. Their intimate connection with the currents of thought which preceded them has also been made adequately clear. This volume does not pretend to be exhaustive, and it cannot follow out all the interesting ramifications of the complicated historical development which I have been tracing. I have been compelled to limit myself to the presentation of typical specimens and examples of this continuously advancing spiritual movement which found one of its noblest figures in John Smith.
[1] Simon Patrick uses this phrase in his funeral sermon on his friend John Smith. Select Discourses (1673), p. 472.
[2] Rational Theology, ii. p. 122.
[3] Patrick's Sermon, Select Discourses, p. 496.
[4] Worthington's Sketch is given in the Preface to the Reader in Select Discourses, pp. iii-xxx, and Patrick's Sermon is given as an Appendix to the same volume, pp. 471-512.
[5] Preface, p. vi.
[6] Patrick, op. cit. p. 498.
[7] Preface, p. xxviii.
[8] Patrick, op. cit. pp. 471 and 472.
[9] Ibid. p. 484.