[Footnote:  “Latitudinarian.”  This term is used of a “remarkable class of divines,” who flourished in England about the middle and towards the close of the seventeenth century.  Coleridge, in his Literary Remains, says that they were generally Platonists, and all of them admirers of Grotius.  “They fell into the mistake of finding in the Greek philosophy many anticipations of the Christian faith, which in fact were but its echoes.  The inference is as perilous as inevitable, namely, that even the mysteries of Christianity needed no revelation, having been previously discovered and set forth by unaided reason.”  They are thus characterized by Dr. Wm. R. Williams, ("Miscellanies,” p. 196:) “Against infidelity and popery they did good service in the cause of truth.  Their dread of enthusiasm made them frigid, and their mastery of the ancient philosophy made them profound.  Their doctrines were generally Arrninian.  Their notions of church power were less rigid than those of the rival party, and they were also more tolerant of difference in opinion.  But in their preaching they laid the whole stress, well-nigh, of their efforts upon morals, to the neglect of doctrine; and in their theology, they attributed to human reason a strength and authority which gradually opened the way to the invasion of the gravest heresies.  Of generally purer character than their opponents, they were also abler preachers.  But while valuable as moral treatises, their sermons were most defective; for the peculiar doctrines and spirit of the gospel were evaporated.”  It cannot be doubted, that a class which included such men as Henry More, Cudworth, Tillotson, and Burnet, hardly deserves the wholesale reprobation hurled upon it by Bunyan.  That some of them carried their liberalism to a dangerous extreme, and that all of them allowed too great latitude of sentiment in theology, and, by their philosophical speculations, obscured the simple glory of the gospel, is indeed true; but some who bore this name were men of unquestionable piety, as well as of eminent genius and scholarship.]

It is interesting to contrast the mixture of divine truth and human speculation, and the almost melancholy doubts, exhibited in the writings of so excellent a man as Cudworth, with the strong and certain convictions, and the clear, well-defined views of Christian doctrine of John Bunyan, connected as they were in his case with the almost exclusive study of the word of God.  We learn thereby not to despise learning and philosophy, but to beware of lowering the authority and of no value at all in the Christian religion; for now, even now, you do not stick to say that even the duty of going to God by Christ is one of these, and such a one as, if absolutely considered in itself, is neither good nor evil.