Chillingworth, WILLIAM, one of the greatest of English controversial theologians, was born at Oxford in 1602, the son of a prosperous citizen, who afterwards became mayor. Laud, then Fellow of St John’s College, was his godfather. In 1618 he became a scholar of Trinity College, and in 1628 was elected to a fellowship in his college. Aubrey’s story that he acted here as a kind of spy for Laud rests on Sir William Davenant’s dubious authority alone, and may safely be neglected. His great parts soon secured him the intimacy of Sir Lucius Carey, afterwards Lord Falkland, John Hales of Eton, and Gilbert Sheldon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury; and his restless intellect soon turned to the question of chief interest at that time in his university—the controversy between the Church of England and the mother Church of Rome. The arguments of an able Jesuit, known by the name of John Fisher, at length convincing him of the necessity of an infallible living judge in matters of faith, he embraced the Romish communion ‘with an incredible satisfaction of mind.’ In 1630 he went to Douay, and here being urged to write an account of the motives of his conversion, a fresh examination of the whole questions at issue, and a series of letters from Laud, at length brought him from doubt of the soundness of his recent conclusions to a complete renunciation. But although he had become convinced that the claims of the Church of Rome to an infallible judgment on matters of faith had no real foundation, he adhered alone to Scripture as interpreted by the light of reason, and for a time declined to take orders in the Church of England, regarding her Articles as themselves a needless ‘imposition on men’s consciences.’ Meantime he had become involved in a succession of controversies with John Lewgar, a Catholic convert; Floys, a Jesuit, who went under the name of Daniel; and White, the author of Rushworth’s Dialogues. His papers in answer to these—mere preliminary studies for the great work that was to follow—are contained in his Additional Discourses, published in 1687. Another Jesuit, known as Edward Knott, having published in 1630 his Charity Mistaken, &c., which was answered by Dr Christopher Potter, provost of Queen’s College in Oxford in 1633, rejoined in 1634 with Mercy and Truth, &c. This second book Chillingworth undertook to answer, and with that view retired to the quiet of Lord Falkland’s house and library at Great Tew in Oxfordshire. Meantime, Knott hearing of his intention, hastened to take an unfair advantage of his antagonist, by an attempt to prejudice the public mind beforehand. In 1636 he issued in a forty-two page pamphlet a series of mere scurrilous insinuations, the main drift of which was that Chillingworth was a Socinian, whose opinions tended to the overthrow of all supernatural religion no less than of Catholic doctrine. At length, in 1637, appeared Chillingworth’s famous book, The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation: or an Answer to a Booke entitled Mercy and Truth, &c. This great work suffers from its being necessarily to some extent an answer to a now completely forgotten book, and being thereby weighted with a great mass of extraneous matter. Indeed, it is only after the author has demolished the arguments of his temporary antagonist that he is at liberty to follow the unembarrassed course of his own thought, and it is evident that only a writer of consummate talent could so have surmounted the disadvantages of such a form, as to make a book of enduring interest and value. Yet it is all this and more, for we have here not only a masterly demonstration of the sole authority of the Bible in the essential matters relating to salvation, but an assertion of the free right of the individual conscience to interpret it, laid down once for all with perfect confidence and fullest plainness—the freedom of religious opinion and the right to toleration for honest difference of opinion placed on its true basis, and this two centuries and a half ago. The great question at issue is that of the basis of religious certitude, or ‘the means whereby the truths of revelation are conveyed to our understanding,’ whether this is to rest on the infallible authority of the Church, or ultimately on the authority of the Scriptures alone.
Here Chillingworth’s conclusion is, in his own oft-quoted words: ‘The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.’ The great principles of religion, and everything of faith essential to salvation, are herein clearly revealed patent to the ‘right reason’ and judgment of every man. Religious certitude can thus be reached by every honest mind, from the plain interpretation of the Bible, which is necessarily itself intelligible and sufficient, without need of any medium to transfer it or judge to interpret it. Indeed, the measure of the responsibility of faith is just the measure of the clearness and simplicity of the divine revelation. Scripture and the candid mind acting together, under the quickening grace of God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are thus the sole factors of religious certitude, which is necessarily based on rational personal conviction. The simplest creed is the best creed, and the only possible basis on which to reconstruct the divided church is such a simple, assured, and accepted religious minimum as the apostles’ creed, with full freedom to individual opinion in everything supplementary and unessential. ‘For why,’ he asks, ‘should men be more rigid than God? Why should any error exclude any man from the Church’s communion, which will not deprive him of eternal salvation?’ It may be that Chillingworth’s ideas carried out would have made any kind of church polity or even successive organised religious life impossible, but at least they would have preserved something perhaps quite as precious—an intellectual conception of toleration, that would have saved England years of misery and blood; and which need not necessarily have eliminated also the religious enthusiasm of the individual, together with his confidence in the absolute infallibility of his own opinions.
The reasoning throughout the great work of Chillingworth is marked by strong and clear intellect; singularly simple but direct and straightforward style, warming at times into a suppressed but vehement eloquence, and informed throughout with an honesty, an earnestness, and, above all, a fairness but rare in controversial literature. Locke, in his Thoughts concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman, commends ‘the constant reading of Chillingworth, who, by his example, will teach both perspicuity and the way of right reasoning better than any book I know.’ Chillingworth left little besides his masterpiece—nine sermons, the ‘Additional Discourses’ already referred to, and a brief fragment on the apostolical institution of episcopacy forming the whole. The rest of his life is soon told. At length he found himself able to give a general assent to the Articles, and in July 1638 he was made Chancellor of Salisbury, with the prebend of Brixworth in Notts annexed, and soon after master of Wigstan’s Hospital in Leicester. In 1640 he was elected proctor to convocation by the Chapter of Salisbury. At the outbreak of the Civil War he accompanied the king’s forces, though his heart sank within him to see ‘publicans and sinners on the one side, against scribes and Pharisees on the other.’ He was with the royal army before Gloucester, where, we are told, he devised an engine for purposes of assault after the pattern of the old Roman testudo. At Arundel Castle he was taken ill, and when the garrison surrendered to Waller, being too ill to be carried to London, was lodged in the bishop’s palace at Chichester, where he died, 30th January 1643. His last hours were pestered by the ill-timed and cruel exhortations of one Cheynell, an ignorant and rabid Puritan preacher, who, at his burial in Chichester Cathedral, flung a copy of the noblest theological treatise of the age into the grave, that it might ‘rot with its author and see corruption.’ The Chillingworthi Novissima, &c. (1644), in which this Westminster divine did such dishonour to himself, is one of the most melancholy monuments that exist of fanatical and unchristian bigotry. It was Chillingworth's fate to be assailed with 'great asperity and reproaches' all his life, and throughout to be misunderstood by blind Papist and blind Puritan alike.
See the Life by Des Maizeaux (1725), and that by Rev. Thomas Birch, prefixed to his edition of the works (1742). Of these the best edition is that published at Oxford in 3 vols. in 1838. See chapter v. (vol. i.) of the late Principal Tulloch's Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century (2 vols. 1872).