misapprehension, or through the disturbing effects upon some minds, quite apart from rational grounds, of any seeming innovation upon accustomed teaching, there may have been here and there real ground for the alarm which some very good people felt at these views having been broached.  It must be acknowledged that Tillotson’s theory of a dispensing power is not only unsatisfactory on other grounds, but possesses a dangerous quality of expansibility.  However much he himself might protest against such a view, there was no particular reason why the easy and careless should not urge that God might perchance dispense with all future punishment of sin, and not only with its threatened endlessness.

Tillotson’s theological faults were of a negative, far rather than of a positive character.  The constant charges of heresy which were brought against him were ungrounded, and often serve to call attention to passages where he has shown himself specially anxious to meet Deistical objections.  But there were deficiencies and omissions in his teaching which might very properly be regarded with distrust and alarm.  In the generality of his sermons he dwells very insufficiently upon distinctive Christian doctrine.  His early parishioners of Keddington, in Suffolk,[280] were more alive to this serious fault than the vast London congregations before whom he afterwards preached.  He has himself, in one of his later sermons, alluded to the objection.  ‘I foresee,’ he observed, ’what will be said, because I have heard it so often said in the like case, that there is not one word of Jesus Christ in all this.  No more is there in the text, and yet I hope that Jesus Christ is truly preached, whenever His will, and the laws, and the duties enjoined by the Christian religion are inculcated upon us.’[281] Tillotson never adequately realised that the noblest treatise on Christian ethics will be found wanting in the spiritual force possessed by sermons far inferior to it in thought and eloquence, in which faith in the Saviour and love of Him are directly appealed to for motives to all virtuous effort.  This very grave deficiency in the preaching of Tillotson and others of his type was in great measure the effect of reaction.  Brought up in the midst of Calvinistic and Puritan associations, he had gained abundant experience of the great evil arising from mistaken ideas on free grace and justification by faith only.  He had seen doctrines ’greedily entertained to the vast prejudice of Christianity, as if in this new covenant of the Gospel, God took all upon Himself and required nothing, or as good as nothing, of us; that it would be a disparagement to the freedom of God’s grace to think that He expects anything from us; that the Gospel is all promises, and our part is only to believe and embrace them, that is, to believe confidently that God will perform them if we can but think so;’[282] ’that, in fact, religion [as he elsewhere puts it] consists only in believing what Christ hath done for us, and