coming storm, authority entirely disappears, and the whole fabric of
religion is made to rest upon the way in which the unaided reason of man
shall interpret the decrees of an omnipotent God."

In fact, Chillingworth's great work may well be regarded as the last
word of the Protestant Reformation in England.


FOOTNOTES:

[15:1] According to Beard, _The Hibbert Lectures_, 1883, p. 119, "It was
a mediæval maxim, which no one thought of questioning, that the language
of the Bible had four senses--the literal, the allegorical, the
tropological, and the anagogical, of which the last three were mystical
or spiritual, in contradistinction to the first." The learned Erasmus,
who lived and died a devout Roman Catholic, seems to have accepted this
allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. Of interpreters of the
Holy Scriptures, he recommends those "who depart as far as possible from
the letter." Erasmus, _Opp._ (_Enchiridion_), v. 29, B, C, D. Quoted by
Beard, p. 120.

[16:1] _Church History_, vol. iv. p. 407.

[17:1] When occasion arose, they do not seem to have been averse to
giving publicity to their opinions. In 1656 a London publisher, Giles
Calvert, to whom we shall have occasion to refer again, republished _A
Discourse on the Family of Love, originally presented to the High Court
of Parliament in the time of Queen Elizabeth_. This Giles Calvert was
the printer and publisher of nearly all Winstanley's pamphlets, and also
one of the first authorised printers and publishers for the Children of