Works
Besides his principal work, Chillingworth wrote a number of smaller anti-Jesuit papers published in the posthumous Additional Discourses (1687), and nine of his sermons have been preserved. He was a zealous Royalist, asserting that even the unjust and tyrannous violence of princes may not be resisted, although it might be avoided in terms of the instruction, "when they persecute you in one city, flee into another."
His writings enjoyed a high popularity, particularly towards the end of the seventeenth century, after a popular, condensed edition of The Religion of Protestants appeared in 1687, edited by John Patrick. The Religion of Protestants is acutely argued, and was commended by John Locke. The charge of Socinianism was frequently brought Chillingworth, but, as John Tillotson thought, "for no other cause but his worthy and successful attempts to make the Christian religion reasonable." The gist of his argument is expressed in a single sentence:
- "I am fully assured that God does not, and therefore that men ought not to, require any more of any man than this, to believe the Scripture to be God's word, and to endeavour to find the true sense of it, and to live according to it."
In this way he bypassed the debate on the fundamental articles, a bone of contention between the Catholic and Protestant approaches.
A Life by Thomas Birch was prefixed to the 1742 edition of Chillingworth's Works.
Read more about this topic: William Chillingworth
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