He
wished to have the creed reduced to the most limited proportions by giving
emphasis to what is fundamental, and by the extrusion of all else. It was
his desire to maintain what is essential that caused him to say: "I am
fully assured that God does not, and therefore that man ought not, to
require any more of any man than this--to believe the Scripture to be God's
word, to endeavor to find the true sense of it, and to live according to
it."[7]
He would therefore leave every man free to interpret the Bible for himself,
and he would make no dogmatic test to deprive any man of this right. The
chief fact in the Bible being Christ, he insisted that Christianity is
loyalty to his spirit. "To believe only in Christ" is his definition of
Christianity, and he would add nothing to this standard. He would put no
church or creed or council between the individual soul and God; and he
would direct every believer to the Bible as the free and open way of the
soul's access to divine truth. He found that the religion of Protestants
consisted in the rational use of that book, and not in the teachings of the
Reformers or in the confessions they devised. It is the great merit of
Chillingworth that he vindicated the spirit of toleration in a broad and
noble manner, that he was without sectarian prejudice or narrowness in his
desire for an inclusive church, and that he spoke and wrote in a truly
rational temper.
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