William Chillingworth

[3][4] His major work was an intervention in another controversy, undertaken in defence of Christopher Potter, Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford, against the Jesuit Edward Knott.

Laud, now Archbishop of Canterbury, was anxious about Chillingworth's reply to Knott, and at his request it was examined by Richard Baily, John Prideaux, and Samuel Fell, and published with their approval in 1637, with the title The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation.

"For the Church of England," he there says, "I am persuaded that the constant doctrine of it is so pure and orthodox, that whosoever believes it, and lives according to it, undoubtedly he shall be saved, and that there is no error in it which may necessitate or warrant any man to disturb the peace or renounce the communion of it.

In the First English Civil War, he wrote a criticism of the Scots, and was in the king's army at the siege of Gloucester, suggesting a testudo for assaulting the town.

Shortly afterwards he accompanied Ralph Hopton, general of the king's troops in the west, in his march; and, being taken ill at Arundel Castle, he was captured by the parliamentary forces under Sir William Waller.

[5] 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.

The charge of Socinianism was frequently brought against 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:[1] In this way he bypassed the debate on the fundamental articles, a bone of contention between the Catholic and Protestant approaches.