Latitudinarians, a name applied by contemporaries to a school of theologians within the English Church in the latter half of the 17th century. It grew out of the earlier movement in favour of a more liberal constitution for the church, represented by the names of Falkland, Hales, Jeremy Taylor, and Chillingworth. This earlier movement was mainly ecclesiastical, aiming at a wider extension of the Anglican Church system; the later was mainly philosophical, and had still more directly in view the interests of rational religion. The school was represented by a succession of well-known Cambridge divines, of whom the chief were Whitchote, Smith, Cudworth, and More. Starting from the same ground as Hales and Chillingworth, in the disregard for authority and tradition in matters of faith, and the assertion of the supremacy of reason as the test of truth, their liberalism takes a higher flight, and brings us to the discussion of larger questions and principles of a more fundamental and far-reaching character. The Cambridge divines, nurtured on Plato and the later Platonists, sought to wed philosophy to religion, and to confirm the union on an indestructible basis of reason. Theirs was the first attempt to link together philosophy and Christianity ever made by any Protestant school; and, indeed, the first true attempt since the days of the great Alexandrine teachers to construct a philosophy of religion at once free and conservative, in which the rights of faith and the claims of the speculative intellect should each have free scope and blend together for mutual elevation and strength.
See the articles on CHILLINGWORTH, FALKLAND, HALES, SMITH, &c.; and Principal Tulloch's Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century (2 vols. 1872).