’that traitor who sold his Lord.’[214] It is fair to add that later in life Whitefield regretted the use of such terms, and owned that ’his treatment of him had been far too severe.’[215] With many of the Evangelicals Tillotson was in great disfavour.  It is not a little remarkable that a divine who had been constantly extolled as a very pattern of Christian piety and Christian wisdom should by them be systematically decried as little better than a heathen moralist.

The foregoing instances may serve to illustrate the important place which Tillotson held in the religious history of the eighteenth century.  They may suffice to show that while there was an extraordinary diversity of opinion as to the character of the influence he had exercised—­while some loved and admired him and others could scarcely tolerate the mention of him—­all agreed that his life and writings had been a very important element in directing the religious thought of his own and the succeeding age.  His opponents were very willing to acknowledge that he was greatly respected by Nonconformists.  Why not? said they, when he and his party are half Presbyterians, and would ’bring the Church into the Conventicle or the Conventicle into the Church.’[216] They allowed still more readily that he was constantly praised by Rationalists and Deists.  Collins put a formidable weapon into their hands when he called Tillotson ’the head of all freethinkers.’[217] But they also had to own that in authority as well as in station he had been eminently a leader in the English Church.  A majority of the bishops, and many of the most distinguished among them, had followed his lead.  The great bulk of the laity had honoured him in his lifetime, and continued to revere his memory.  Men like Locke, and Somers, and Addison were loud in his praise.  Even those who were accustomed to regard the Low Churchmen of their age as ‘amphibious trimmers’ or ‘Latitudinarian traditors’ were by no means unanimous in dispraise of Tillotson.  Dodwell had spoken of him with esteem; and Robert Nelson, who was keenly alive to ’the infection of Latitudinarian teaching,’ not only maintained a lifelong friendship with him, and watched by him at his death, but also, as was before mentioned, referred to his sermons for sound notions of religion.

A study of Tillotson’s writings ought to throw light upon the general tendency of religious thought which prevailed in England during the half-century or more through which their popularity lasted; for there can be no doubt that his influence was not of a kind which depends on great personal qualities.  He was a man who well deserved to be highly esteemed by all with whom he came in contact.  But in his gentle and moderate disposition there was none of the force and fire which compels thought into new channels, and sways the minds of men even, against their will.  With sound practical sense, with pure, unaffected piety, and in unadorned but persuasive language, he simply gave utterance to religious ideas in a form which to a wide extent satisfied the reason and came home to the conscience of his age.  Those, on the other hand, who most distrusted the direction which such ideas were taking, held in proportionate aversion the primate who had been so eminent a representative of them.