Edward Stillingfleet
Considered an outstanding preacher as well as a strong polemical writer defending Anglicanism, Stillingfleet was known as "the beauty of holiness" for his good looks in the pulpit,[1] and was called by John Hough "the ablest man of his time".
He preached at St Margaret, Westminster on 10 October 1666, the 'day of humiliation and fasting' after the Great Fire of London, with such an attendance that there was standing room only.
[9][10] In 1691, at Stillingfleet's request, Queen Mary II wrote to the magistrates of Middlesex, asking for stronger enforcement of the laws against vice.
Humphrey Henchman, Bishop of London, employed him to write a vindication of William Laud's answer to John Percy (alias Fisher).
[7] According to Jon Parkin, The apparent ease with which younger writers like Stillingfleet squared their allegiance to the restored regime, coupled with their espousal of a naturalistic, erastian and apparently Hobbesian ecclesiology, earned them the description of 'men of latitude'.Stillingfleet was a leader within the Church of England of the "latitudinarians", the group of Anglicans thus defined pejoratively.
Latitudinarism as doctrine was considered to have grown from the teaching of the Cambridge Platonists, but in practical terms conditions at the Restoration did not favour it.
[17] They adopted an Arminian scheme of justification in opposition to the Calvinist's one, and took the stock of core beliefs to be a small set of fundamentals.
They tried to meet what they believed were the greatest intellectual and ethical needs of their generation, and, in so doing, they contributed to the changing character of theology from being dogmatic to being rationalistic.
His first book was The Irenicum[23] (1659) advocating compromise with the Presbyterians; following a Latitudinarian approach, he there shows the influence of John Selden and takes a close interest in the synagogue as a model of church structure.
These attacks on the separatists among non-conformists prompted a large-scale response from dissenters, many of whom were disappointed with the harsher line from an Anglican who had in the past held out an olive branch.
In the ensuing controversy, he issued A Vindication of the Answer to some Late Papers[39] (1687) attacking John Dryden, whom he called a "grim logician".
Dryden retaliated, and incorporated the "grim logician" phrase as self-description in his poem The Hind and the Panther (1687), which alludes to Stillingfleet.
[41][42] It also engaged with the thought of Baruch Spinoza, in Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, though he was named only as a "late author mightily in vogue".
[49] Origines Sacrae (1663) began with a comprehensive analysis of flaws in ancient historians, as a way of defending the account in the Book of Genesis.
