Utilitarianism or eudaemonism has no sort of intrinsic connection with a latitudinarian theology, especially when the word ‘latitudinarian’ is used, as in this chapter, in a general and inoffensive sense.  In this century, and to some extent in the last, many of its warmest opponents have been Broad Churchmen.  But prudential religion, throughout the period which set in with the Revolution of 1688, is closely associated with the name of Tillotson.  It is certainly very prominent in his writings.  His keen perception of the exceeding beauty of goodness might have been supposed sufficient to guard him from dwelling too much upon inferior motives.  Tillotson, however, was very susceptible to the predominant influences of his time.  If he was a leader of thought, he was also much led by the thought of others.  There were three or four considerations which had great weight with him, as they had with almost every other theologian and moralist of his own and the following age.  One, which has been already sufficiently discussed, was that feeling of the need of proving the reasonableness of every argument, which was the first result of the wider field, the increased leisure, the greater freedom of which the reasoning powers had become conscious.  It is evident that no system of morality and practical religion gives so much scope to the exercise of this faculty as that which pre-eminently insists upon the prudence of right action and upon the wisdom of believing.  Then again, the profligate habits and general laxity which undoubtedly prevailed to a more than ordinary extent among all classes of society, seem to have created even among reformers of the highest order a sort of dismayed feeling, that it was useless to set up too high a law, and that self-interest and fear were the two main arguments which could be plied with the best hopes of success.  Thirdly, a very mistaken notion appears to have grown up that infidelity and ‘free-thinking’ might be checked by prudent reflections on the safeness of orthodoxy and the dangers of unbelief.  Thought is not deterred by arguments of safety;[299] and a sceptic is likely to push on into pronounced disbelief, if he commonly hears religion recommended as a matter of policy.

In all these respects Tillotson did but take the line which was characteristic of his age—­of the age, that is, which was beginning, not of that which was passing away.  Something, too, must be attributed to personal temperament.  He carried into the province of religion that same benign but dispassionate calmness of feeling, that subdued sobriety of judgment, wanting in impulse and in warmth, which, in public and in private life, made him more respected as an opponent than beloved as a friend.  To weigh evidence, to balance probabilities, and to act with tranquil confidence in what reason judged to be the wiser course, seemed to him as natural and fit in spiritual as in temporal matters.  This was all sound in its degree, but there was a deficiency in