it, and in the general mode of religious thought represented by it, which cannot fail to be strongly felt.  There is something very chilling in such an appeal as the following:  ’Secondly, it is infinitely most prudent.  In matters of great concernment a prudent man will incline to the safest side of the question.  We have considered which side of these questions is most reasonable:  let us now think which is safest.  For it is certainly most prudent to incline to the safest side of the question.  Supposing the reasons for and against the principles of religion were equal, yet the danger and hazard is so unequal, as would sway a prudent man to the affirmative.’[300] It must not be inferred that nobler and more generous reasonings in relation to life and goodness do not continually occur.  But the passage given illustrates a form of argument which is far too common, both in Tillotson’s writings and throughout the graver literature of the eighteenth century.  Without doubt it did much harm.  So long as moralists dwelt so fondly upon self-interest and expedience, and divines descanted upon, the advantages of the safe side; so long as the ideal of goodness was half supplanted by that of happiness; so long as sin was contemplated mainly in its results of punishment, and redemption was regarded rather as deliverance from the penalties of sin than from the sin itself, Christianity and Christian ethics were inevitably degraded.

Many of the subjects touched upon in this chapter have little or no connection with Latitudinarianism, so far as it is synonymous with what are now more commonly called Broad Church principles.  But in the eighteenth century ‘reasonableness’ in religious matters, although a characteristic watchword of the period in general, was especially the favourite term, the most congenial topic, upon which Latitudinarian Churchmen loved to dwell.  The consistency of the Christian faith with man’s best reason was indeed a great theme, well worthy to engage the thoughts of the most talented and pious men of the age.  And no doubt Tillotson and many of his contemporaries and successors amply earned the gratitude, not only of the English Church, but of all Christian people in England.  Their good service in the controversy with Deism was the first and direct, but still a temporary result of their labours.  They did more than this.  They broadened and deepened the foundations of the English Church and of English Christianity not only for their own day, but for all future time.  They laboured not ineffectually in securing to reason that established position without which no religious system can maintain a lasting hold upon the intellect as well as upon the heart.  On the other hand, their deficiencies were great, and appear the greater, because they were faults not so much of the person as of the age, and were displayed therefore in a wide field, and often in an exaggerated form.  They loved reason not too well, but too exclusively; they acknowledged